Richie Gecko

You know what to do.

Name: Ashley
DW username: fiendishfanfares
E-Mail: ashleylabrasseur@gmail.com
IM: Ashley#9721 @ discord
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Other Characters: Lucifer Morningstar and Caroline Forbes

Character Name: Richard Gecko
Series: From Dusk Till Dawn
Timeline: End of S2
Canon Resource Link: Wikia Link
Character History:

Pre-Series

We’re not given a whole lot on how the Gecko Brothers grew up, but what we do know does manage to paint quite the picture. Their mother left them alone with their alcoholic father, Ray Gecko, who was driven out of Houston by a man named Big Jim Thompson. Ray had the tendency to turn abusive, especially towards Seth, who was older than his brother, Richie. Richie was a brilliant child growing up in an abusive household with a criminal father, which eventually culminated in a plot to get out.

Richard doused his father and the room he slept in with gasoline and set him on fire before waking Seth and saving him from the flames. It was a long time before the truth of this came out, as Seth always spoke of how his father simply fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand, though that was not the case.

After the death of their father, the boys were taken in by Eddie Cruickshank, a friend of their dad’s and fellow criminal. Uncle Eddie would raise them by his code of ethics and teach them to be as successful in the ‘industry’ as he was. The Gecko brothers went on to successfully complete 35 jobs with a team they put together, making them incredibly infamous. That is, until Seth tried to steal from Big Jim without Richie, got busted, and went to jail for five years.

During the time that his brother was in jail, Seth became detached, removing himself from society and living in the woods. Others called him crazy and unhinged, and after he was given a special Aztec knife, things progressively got worse for Richie Gecko. He begins to experience hallucinations, as well some esp and sociopathic instincts. Finally, though, his brother is released in prison and they do another job together with the hope that it’ll be their last and they’ll be able to disappear forever.

Season One

As expected, things don’t go exactly as planned.

Their last job is to rob Abilene Mutual Bank and relieve it money and oil bank bonds valuing over 30 million dollars. Things go fine at first ; they subdue the hostages, take their phones, and Seth asks Richie to take care of busting the back door for their exit. Unfortunately, Richie starts experiencing voices in his head and hallucinations of a beautiful woman telling him to set her free, as well as harm the hostages. This creates some hiccups in the timing of the plan, and by the time they get the safe open, the police have arrived. Richie and Seth end up kidnapping one of the tellers, find that Richie never actually opened the back door, but Richie somehow ‘knows’ that her fingerprint will open the lock. They then throw the teller in the trunk and escape, two bank robbers on the run from the police.

Things continue to go poorly for the brothers. After stopping at a liquor store, Richie and Seth end up having to hold two girls and the clerk hostage after a couple of Texas rangers show up. Richie’s paranoia combined with hallucinations of the two girls becoming terrible demonic and his insistence that the clerk is trying to out them results in him walking up and shooting the Ranger without remorse. This results in an intense shootout between the second Ranger outside, Freddie, the clerk inside, and the two brothers as they try to get back to their car. In the end, the brother’s believe they’ve murdered everyone when they head back down the road, unaware that Freddie’s life was saved by a bullet proof vest. The only injury the brothers sustain is a bullet tearing a hole through Richie’s hand, which he ends up oddly fascinated with as the series progresses. Seth also leaves Richie’s Aztec knife behind, thinking that his brother’s obsession with it strange and disturbing.

After stopping at a hotel, Richie is left alone with the hostage while Seth runs out to grab food. The same woman who spoke to him at the bank starts communicating with him though his mind again, and he also experiences hallucinations of the hostage attempting to seduce him. Richie becomes obviously confused, opens up to this woman, and even goes so far as to lay her head in his lap in an attempt to take some comfort in her. He also comes up with her husband’s pet name for her in bed out of thin air, seemingly through some sort of telepathy or extrasensory perception. Things quickly devolve as his mind spirals, however, and when Seth returns he finds a grisly scene. Richie has killed and mutilated the body of the teller, cut out her eyes, and placed them in her cut open palms.

Needless to say, Seth starts to believe that there is something very, very wrong with Richie, and Richie himself continues to doubt his own sanity.

With their hostage dead, Richie and Seth have to find a new way to cross the border and meet up with Carlos, the man Seth made a deal with to provide them with a safe haven in a place called ‘El Rey.’ They brothers come upon a small family of three traveling in a camper and decide to use them as both hostages and passage to Mexico. Richie is sent down to the pool to collect the daughter, Kate, so that they can continue their journey. Richie is immediately drawn to Kate, and seemingly she is drawn to him as well, though he experiences further hallucinations in which Kate asks him to take her swimsuit off, as well as seeing her in the pool surrounded by a giant pool of blood. He also tells Kate details about her mother and circumstances surrounding her death, despite having no reason to have any knowledge about that at all.

After another shootout with the seemingly alive Ranger Freddie Gonzalez (and his backup), during with the brothers well protect the family they’re holding hostage on their way to the camper, and escape with them.

Kate’s father seems intent on following through with the hostage situation in order to end it with his family safe. Her brother, Seth, on the other hand wants to try and gain the upper hand and free themselves from their kidnappers. Kate, however, takes a different approach and continually seems to try to connect with them emotionally, especially Richie who, in his fragile mental state, almost seems to latch onto her as a sort of grounding mechanism outside of his brother. She seems to care, and as someone who has difficulty making human connections, not to mention few people who care about him, he gravitates toward it, ending up feeling like their meeting happened for a reason. He also begins to accept that what’s happening to him is real, and gets angry when Seth doubts him and the things he knows.

Eventually, the Gecko Brothers and the Fuller family make it across the border and arrive at the Titty Twister, a strip club where Carlos is supposed to meet up with them and take them to El Rey. Seth and Richie fight about the situation; Richie wants to stay and feels like he belongs there, whereas Seth doesn’t like the place at all and wants to leave. They settle the dispute with a knife fight, which Kate assists by holding Richie’s last target, and he wins. Kate and Richie also have a moment in a back room where they kiss, and Richie gives her what she wants despite making her aware that he doesn’t want her to leave.

Then, Santanico Pandemonium makes her first true appearance, and Richie finally gets confirmation that the woman he’s been following, seeing, and hearing all this time is real. Not surprisingly, he is enamoured with her. At least, until hell breaks loose when Freddie comes in to exact his revenge and Santanico comes to Richie’s defense by turning into a horrible monstrous snake creature and attacking him.

Santanico runs off, all the doors lock, and the workers all turn into the same kind of creature. A bloodbath ensues. Nearly every human is murdered and grinded up in gears below the floor except for the Gecko brothers, the Fuller family, Freddie, and a man named Professor Tanner (better known as Sex Machine. Yep.) and the vampires momentarily retreat, though many of them end up separated.

Regardless, it turns out Professor Tanner is super into these crazy monsters and fills everyone in on the fact that they’re culebras, they are a weird blood cult that worships something called the Vision Serpent, and they use the Titty Twister as a feeding ground for their higher ups. Santanico eventually returns to plead with Richie to help her, as she’s apparently a prisoner at the strip club and can never leave unless he sets her free. Freddie, one of those separated from the group, returns and shoots Richard in the back, causing Santanico to freak out and drag Richie away to her chambers where no one can reach them.

It’s clear to both Richie and Santanico that he’s dying of his wounds. She pleads with him to help her, to trust her, though initially he is horrified by her. After all, it was her that caused him to start to lose his mind and to hurt that teller, who he admits he never wanted to kill. However, considering his imminent death and her charisma, Richie chooses life, giving Santanico permission to drain him and turn him into a culebra vampire. It becomes quickly apparent that, while still not entirely right in the head, Richie’s mental stability improves greatly after his transformation.

After his life is saved, so to speak, Richie learns that in order to free Santanico, he and Seth must defeat something called the Labyrinth, a series of tests that they must survive in order to reach a snake containing Santanico’s blood. They work it exactly like a job, though they run into hiccups along the way in the form of people from their past. It’s here that Seth learns Richie killed their father, which immediately puts a wedge in their relationship, which has been deteriorating over the course of the season between Richie’s debilitating psychosis and now him seemingly choosing the woman that did this to him, a monster, over his own brother. Richie, meanwhile, wants to be a power in his own right instead of just second fiddle to his older brother.

Still, they manage to escape the Labyrinth, collect the snake (which Richie swallows whole), and deliver it to Santanico. They are almost immediately betrayed by Carlos (who turned out to be Santanico’s ‘ex’), and Richie is kidnapped by him and his boss, one of the Culebra Lords named Malvado, who happens to the be man who enslaved and abused Santanico for numerous centuries. Seth shows up with the 30 million in bonds to trade for his brother since Santanico still can’t leave the club, and through some sneaky coded communication, the brothers escape, though Seth ends up having to leave the bonds behind.

When they arrive back at the Titty Twister, Freddie tries one more attempt on Richie’s life, but ends up deciding that returning to his wife and daughter is more important than his revenge. Richie then finally delivers the snake carrying Santanico’s blood to her, releasing her from her prison, and exposing the giant Aztec temple hidden beneath the club. Richie tries to explain to Seth that he’s been saved by him and that Seth needs to let him go, so that he can follow Santanico and help her with her revenge against the Vampire Lord Malvado. He suggests that he might join Seth on a beach somewhere later on, but Seth bitterly tells him not to bother and leaves. Afterward, Richie leaves the club behind with Santanico and they drive back towards the border to the United States.

Season Two

Having split up from his brother, Richie embarks on a revenge mission with Santanico, who wants to destroy the empire the Nine Lords built, though most importantly she wants to kill Lord Amancio Malvado for all of the things he did to her in the centuries he held her as his slave. However, in order to get to him, they have to find his hideout first, and that will take some digging.

Three months pass between the first season and the second, and Richie and Santanico stage a heist in order to start tracking Malvado down through his shipments, before which Richie makes sure that Santanico is going to play by the rules; she’s not allowed to eat any civilians. Richie and Santanico are then shown to be lovers, during which Santanico begins to feed on Richie in the middle of the act. Though he seems weirded out at first, Richie reciprocates and ends up enjoying it. He also buys her a diamond bracelet, implying that buying her gifts is a thing he’s supposed to do now (and had been wanting to do for awhile), insinuating that he believes they’re in some kind of romantic relationship and the bracelet represents an eternity bracelet. Santanico seems to find the gesture almost naive in a way, but is also somewhat moved and surprised by it, and though she originally accepts it, she returns it to him later, explaining that she can’t be what he needs so long as Malvado is alive.

As they move forward, the duo realize that they have to get rid of their identities (esp Richie as a Gecko brother) and so they stage his and Seth’s deaths by rigging up two bodies and driving them off a cliff to a fiery explosion.

Richie then turns to his Uncle Eddie to try and continue with his and Santanico’s plan. He has a contact with a human trafficker, Nathan Blanchard, which they want to use to get to Malvado. They plan to traffick a group of beautiful human women, knowing exactly the kind of product Malvado would be interested in. After he makes the purchase, they plan to ‘follow the flesh’ back to his hideout.

However, Richie is captured by Blanchard, and while Nathan is telling Richie about how he’s going to kill him, Santanico telepathically reaches out to him for help, as she’s been kidnapped by Carlos and strung up in a freezer. Nathan is about to kill Richie when Seth busts in out of nowhere and shoots him. Richie murders the other two men in the room before getting angry at Seth for killing Nathan because he was about to tell him where the truck carrying the girls was headed. They being to argue fiercely, and Richie admits that not everything has been all that great with Santanico, who seems completely absorbed with killing Malvado, while Richie has other plans he wants to enact involving becoming some kind of top dog with what Malvado owns. He doesn’t want to just take him out, he wants his power for himself.

They end up making a deal with the nearby Sheriff, who calls them with info on where the truck with the girls is heading. They find the truck, and when the driver (a culebra) attacks them, Seth stakes and kills him, pissing Richie off again for complicating matters since they can’t exactly drive the truck the rest of the way since they still don’t know where it’s destination is. The Sheriff then shows up, declares that he made a deal with Malvado in the first place, and leaves them handcuffed, and steals the truck to make the delivery himself. Richie breaks them free of the cuffs and the follow him to Jacknife Jed’s with the girls the rescued from the truck before it was stolen by the Sheriff.

Seth and his new ‘girlfriend’, Sonja, invite Richie and Santanico on a sort of date to eat and try to work through their recent issues and hopefully work together to take down Malvado now that they know his location. With Seth’s help, they can get Uncle Eddie to give them the intel they need on Malvado and his hideout. They have something of a conflict of interest, since Seth and Sonja just want his money, while Santanico wants his life, which complicates things. The girls head off after a short conflict, and while they wait, the brothers start to eat and begin to work together almost like everything is back to normal. Apparently, this working it out over a meal seems to be a sort of ritual of theres. Unfortunately, it all comes to a halt as they realize the girls have been gone too long and find Santanico trying to choke out Sonja. Santanico is convinced that Sonja is hiding something, Seth tells her she’s a freak, and Richie simply states he’s going to go back and finish his steak to Santanico’s chagrin.

Back at their hideout, Richie gets into a big argument with Santanico, who has basically ruined their chances of getting that intel by her making Seth angry. He insults her and tells her she’s ruining things by being a freak about killing her target, insisting that they need those plans. Santanico tells him that he should just steal them, which Richie is initially offended by. After all, this is Uncle Eddie, the man who basically raised him after his father’s death. They have a moral code that he doesn’t want to break. Santanico then manipulates him by insinuating that the code is a way for Seth to have kept Richard under his thumb all these years. This is enough for Richie to decide to steal the plans from Eddie, only to find out that Seth already did it first.

Richie tracks Seth down to where he’s trying to put together his own team for the heist. They guy he’s making a deal with shoots Richard several times, and he responds by eating him. He and Seth then proceed to get into a fist fight; Richard accuses Seth of stealing Uncle Eddie’s dreams while Seth accuses Richie of just using Eddie to keep his bitch happy. Richie calls Seth out, saying that he’s not afraid of culebras, he just has an issue with them because of Santanico, which Seth confirms. Richie then knocks him out and tosses him in the back of a truck.

Richie and Eddie then start to plan the heist by disguising themselves as patrons of Jacknife Jed’s. Afterward, Richie and Eddie come back to find Seth and Santanico about to try to kill each other, causing the brothers to fight again. Eddie has to break them up and knock some sense into them and asks why Seth is so riled up. They’re then confronted by one of Malvado’s stronger underlings, an extremely powerful culebra known as The Regulator. They manage to kill him, but he fatally wounds Eddie in the course of the fight. Richie offers to turn him to save him, but having seen what he’s become and calling the world too fucked up to keep living in, he essentially becomes yet another person to reject him. The brothers weep as he passes, and then vow to do the job he dreamt about in honor of his memory. Santanico then apologizes for Eddie’s death, to which Richard assures her it’s not her fault. However, she admits that since she’s closer to Malvado, he might be able to sense her, considering he made her and can get into her head the way she’s done to Richie, which is something they’ll need to take into account during the heist. Richie and Seth then concoct a plan in which Seth gains Malvado’s trust by promising to turn Santanico over to him due to his feud with his brother. Richie proves that Malvado can’t sense him by infiltrating Jacknife Jed’s during their talk

They then begin the heist with Santanico in a chilled box to keep her unconscious until she can do her thing so that Malvado can’t sense her presence. Despite a hiccup or two and Sonja’s apparent betrayal via a deal with Malvado (which is who Santanico sensed her lying about), Richie makes it to Malvado’s office. Malvado then proceeds to simply offer Richie his job in exchange for him being able to give his payment to his superiors and taking Santanico with him to the real ‘El Rey,’ aka the culebra version of Heaven. Seeing as this is what Richie’s ultimate dream goal was in the first place, it is, needless to say, incredibly tempting, and Richie accepts by sitting down in Malvado’s chair, though his expression remains conflicted.

Malvado then fills Richie in on what he has to do to get what he wants; retrieve a tanker filled with blood from an ancient blood well that is currently being drained by Carlos. Allowing the blood well to be drained provides Malvado’s superiors with the payment he needs to get to El Rey with Santanico, and then Richie can use that blood to control the other culebras and assume power.

When Richie points out that Malvado has no idea where the blood well is, after which Malvado reveals that Kate Fuller is in his possession, and that all they have to do is read her soul to discover its location. Richie and Kate are reunited and Richie then demands that he be the one to exchange blood with her since he needs to head to the location himself anyway. Malvado assists him in this, and Richie proceeds to trade blood with her through cuts on their hands, gaining information about their time apart and discovering an entire mess with her and Seth in Mexico. He then saves Kate from Malvado’s venom by declaring he’s been waiting to give her his for longer than Malvado himself has waited and then heads off with her without waiting for another word.

On the way to the blood well, Richie pulls over and tries to leave Kate behind, who loses her cool and blatantly refuses because her brother Scott, who she’s been trying to save, is also there. Kate accuses him of betraying everyone for his own good, then realizes that that’s not exactly correct. She questions Richie, suggesting that he’s got something bigger planned that gets everyone what they want, to which Richie confirms, as if it should have been obvious.

They arrive at the blood well, finding Scott, Carlos and Professor Tanner there. Richie wants to wait for the well to finish draining but Kate realizes that Richie intended on letting Scott die in order to finish his plan. She runs away from him, alerting their presence to the others. Kate informs Carlos that if he doesn’t stop the pump, Malvado gets what he wants. Richard then begins his attack, not having much of a choice since he needs the well drained completely, and Carlos takes Kate hostage. When Kate elbows him and breaks free of his grasp, Carlos mercilessly shoots her twice in the back. Richie begs Scott to change her to save her life, saying that she wasn’t even supposed to be here, and proclaiming that he’ll do it himself if Scott doesn’t. Kate proceeds to use her last words to tell Richie she hopes he burns in Hell and then dies of her wounds.

After Kate’s death, Carlos goes to take the tanker for himself and drive it back to Jacknife Jed’s and take-over the place for himself, and tells Professor Tanner to chain Richie to the front of the truck to drag him back. In his grief, Richie manifests his special culebra ability, an eye in his hand which he presses against Tanner’s head and dominates his mind, telling him to kill Carlos. A fight ensues, and though Carlos gets away with the tanker, Richie escapes on a motorcycle.

Back at Jacknife Jed’s, Richie reunites with Seth and Santanico. Seth has killed Sonja for her betrayal, and despite Richie’s attempts to get her to El Rey, Santanico has successfully murdered Malvado instead. Understandably, they’re pissed about Richie’s little stunt which clearly looks like a betrayal. He insists that everyone got what they wanted; he tried to set Santanico free by send her to El Rey, and Seth got the cash he wanted. As for himself, his ascension to his position was ‘ordained,’ which continues to piss Seth off. They accuse Richie of possibly making a deal with Carlos as well, and he says that’s impossible because he killed Kate, which immediately sobers everyone. Seth tries to take out his grief over Kate’s death on Richie, accusing him of using her, but Freddie steps in to break it up, saying that they need to deal with Carlos, who is on his way with the tanker.

Carlos arrives early, instigating a fight, but when Scott arrives driving the tanker, he tries to redeem himself for Kate’s sake, crashing the tanker and letting all the blood drain from it. The vampires at Jacknife’s feed from the spray and then proceed to murder the humans inside, though the Gecko brothers, Freddie and Scott fight them off to regain control. They also defeat Carlos, though after defeating the labyrinth earlier in the series and gaining power from the ordeal, he needs to be cut into pieces and scattered to finish him off.

In the end, Richie takes over, but is nearly immediately forced by Seth, via threat of sunlight death, to name The Gecko Brothers in charge of the place together, considering every time they split up things seem to get more and more fucked up. Richie agrees and they’re accepted as the bosses of Malvado’s empire. Having finished what she set out to do, Santanico leaves them behind to figure out what she’s going to do next, and though Richie tells her not to be a stranger and even offers her a place with them, it doesn’t seem as if she’ll be back any time soon, though they part on somewhat good but bittersweet terms.


Abilities/Special Powers:

Richie is a culebra, a supernatural creature of myth from mexico, which has several similarities to your typical vampires, with a few differences. His abilities are as follows:

Immortality: Unless killed via sunlight, a stake to the heart or other complete destruction of the organ, or decapitation, a culebra will live forever and never age.

Accelerated Healing: More intense wounds take longer to heal, but a culebra can even survive a bullet to the brain (though they’ll be out cold for awhile). Wounds inflicted with Xibalban weapons also take much longer to heal, though feeding rapidly improved all healing time, regardless of injury.

Enhanced Strength, though not superhuman. Newly made culebras do not seem much more powerful than a very strong human, though it’s possible that they gain strength with age.

Shapeshifting: Feeding on a human results in the culebra devouring their soul. For a short time afterward, Richie can assume the recently killed person’s form to perfection.

Soul-Reading: Feeding on or exchanging blood with others also provides the culbera with information. Richie enjoys collecting the knowledge of others by draining them, such as fighting ability or other more intellectual skills. He can also inherit people’s thoughts and memories, gaining insight into their experiences and learning information without getting them to talk about it.

Venom: Culebras can release venom into their victim, which will result in them changing into a culebra as well after their death. Doing this is intentional and can be suppressed.

Mind Control: Each culebra has their own special ability to discover. In Richie’s case, he possesses a third eye in the palm of left hand. By pressing it against the head of another living creature, he can command them to do anything he wants, including killing themself or their allies.

Extra-Sensory Perception: Though not necessarily a culebra ability, Richie in particular seems to have some kind of ESP. He is extremely good at reading people, to the point where some might think he’s reading their minds. He also simply knows things for no discernible reason at all, like pet names between spouses or the reason for other character deaths that he would have no way of having knowledge about. He also has strange hallucinations that often allude to future events, though interpreting them accurately is virtually impossible. Some of the more intense features of this, such as the hallucinations, die down greatly after his transformation from human to culebra, but his ability to look at someone and simply know things is consistently apparent.

Third-Person Sample:

At first, he thought he was back in the Labyrinth. Or maybe, he never left, and the events of the past few months had simply been a continuation of the trials, that everything was an illusion, and now he’d moved on to the next freakshow and might never actually escape.

That thought was fleeting, but not in a good way. Because his next option was that he was going crazy again, seeing things, or someone was in his head in an attempt to fuck up his life all over again, because clearly he hadn’t had enough of that going on already, despite the small victories he’d had.

But no, as he continued to experience the things around him, he realized his mind wasn’t playing tricks on him. This was very real, not to mention completely unexpected. The sun still burned and his bloodlust still hungered, and he was trapped in the middle of a fucking fairytale. He’d read it, of course, seen plenty of movies surrounding the story, but none of that really prepared him for this. After all, it wasn’t supposed to be fucking real, and it sure wasn’t supposed to pick him. He hadn’t chased after any white rabbits and falled down any holes. Instead, he’d woken up floating on his back in a pool, in the exact position he’d first seen Kate with a red cloud drifting languidly around her body. Of course, that blood hadn’t been real, had been a fucked up hallucination, but it had sure been real when Carlos put two bullets in her back.

He breathes a shaky breath at the memory before he forcibly moves onto the next stage of his acceptance of Wonderland. He treats it the way he’d treat anything else like this; he treats it like a job.

First things first, getting to know the place inside and out. That means combing through every hallway and unlocked door he can find. It also means he gets lost more than a time or two, wandering hallways, caves and even drifting through the gardens and forest once the sun goes down and it can’t burn him anymore.

Someone or something runs this place, and he has to figure it out, dismantle it and either make it his own or find a way home to where he’s already done all this bullshit once before. In the back of his mind, though, he realizes that Seth was absolutely correct.

The second he and his brother are separated, everything goes to shit. And he definitely considered this place complete and utter shit.

First-Person Sample:

[Richie’s presence in Wonderland presents him with one very big and glaring problem very quickly.

He’s a culebra, culebras have to eat, and his dietary needs are….special.

There’s not a lot he would ask the network about that he can’t find out for himself or would want to say publicly but this, in particular, he needs help with. Now to talk about it as vaguely as possible…]

So, I already figured out how the whole food situation works. You check the tables and the cupboards and food just appears, like some sort of Vegas magic show. Shit like that also pops up in horror movies, so I’ve got one question.

[He purses his lips, clearly annoyed by this whole situation.]

If I eat this stuff, what are the chances that I’m going to end up vomiting blood for the next week? Dying of food poisoning isn’t exactly on my bucket list.