24/7 mortumstep agenda

"Tegan, don't." Ortega's voice was a warning, low and dangerous.

"Am I wrong? From what you've told me he loved his precious status quo too. And you can get away with just about anything if you dress it up with the words like law and order." He flicked the ashes of his cigarette over the side of the bar. "Well, it's real fucking nice to finally meet you Mr. Garcia." A mock salute. "Here I thought you were de-"

The rest of Tegan's words were spat out across the floor in a spray of blood, world tilted sideways as the stool he had been sitting on clattered to the ground with him. The shock stung more than anything else, nothing had telegraphed Ortega's movement despite all the little signs he knew to look for in order to compensate for that infuriating static. Since when could Ortega move that fast? Injured and half way to drunk, but then again Ortega always was a good actor.

Tegan pressed the back of his gauntlet to his mouth and it came away wet with blood, lip split upon impact. He craned his neck to look up at his assailant, backlight against the single light, a fuzzy yellow halo formed around his black curls, though he sure didn't look like an angel. Or maybe he did, wrath and righteousness worn as easily on his face as his bruises.

^Tegan's well deserved punch was the initial spark of this whole thing and I think chatting with Wednesday was the first time the "Mr Garcia" bit was brought up and its so juicyyyy to me. That and the image of a furious back lit Ortega was so clear in my head.

"You know, things would go a lot easier for you if you just dumped him." Jake called out over his shoulder. "And I mean in the harbor not whatever weird thing you two have going on." Charge was bad news, better to just cut him out of the picture completely. Offing a Ranger might garner a lot of heat but better to let that fall on Retribution's shoulders than Hollow Ground's.

^Jakes oh so helpful "advice" from ch 2 still makes me laugh.

Ortega couldn't help the laugh that bubbled up from within him. Russian roulette, one of the oldest intimidation techniques in the book, a deadly game of odds. It wasn't the first time he'd seen its use, it was a classic for a reason, most people cracked before a single shot was even fired. That Tegan would try an use it against him now was ridiculous.

"You're not going to shoot me." Of that he was confident. All that talk of his supposed immunity against Hollow Ground meant he wasn't doomed to die here today. This was just to scare him, and Ricardo Ortega was not a man to scare easily.

"You're right."

Two words, a statement of a fact that seemed to slow down time in order to capture it in perfect clarity. Memory is funny like that, what it will choose to preserve to be visited later in nightmares both waking and asleep. Ortega could feel it burned into his psyche like a brand before it even happened. Could feel his stomach plummet like a fall out of a fourth story window and straight through the center of the earth as Tegan put the barrel of the gun in his mouth. Ortega was sure he screamed, a name, a curse, but the only sound he heard was the metallic snap of the trigger mechanism firing.

^All of ch 3 is my darling but my sincerest hope is in how this lands with readers. I want those two little words to be as chilling as possible. To feel Ortega's bravado shattering the instant Tegan moves the gun to his mouth.

Tegan placed both hands on the back of the chair, straddling Ortega's legs until he was sitting in his lap, though Ortega couldn't feel his weight they were eye level now and far too close.

"You asked me what I wanted." Direct eye contact was such a rare thing, Ortega had almost forgotten how pale gray Tegan's eyes were, like an overcast sky but there was something else he hoped was just a product of his imagination - a speck of bright green in his pupil, like a stuck pixel against a black screen. "I want you to trust me."

"You've got to be kidding me." Ortega wished he could, more than anything but there were too many still smouldering bridges for that.

"You called me a monster once but I'm not Hollow Ground or some wannabe warlord like Psychopathor or a ticking time bomb like H-heartbreak." Ortega couldn't help but notice Void was absent from that line up, delusional, dangerous and dead or that Tegan had never referred to Heartbreak as anything other than it before. "I don't kill, I steal from criminals and corporations, no one innocent and you should trust by now that I'm not going to hurt anyone who doesn't deserve it." Tegan didn't so much as blink.

"And me? Do I deserve it?" Ortega had a feeling he already knew the answer but searched Tegan's face for a lie anyway.

"Ric," Tegan put his arms around his shoulders, pulling him into an awkward embrace. "you deserve the world."

Ortega pressed his forehead into Tegan's shoulder, the soft material of his coat and the warmth of the body underneath strangely comforting in this waking nightmare, too exhausted to even wonder what Tegan meant. Sincerity or a threat? Would it matter? Probably not with the way the scent of Tegan's sweat and faint cigarette smoke seemed to sucker punch his heart with familiarity. He squeezed his eyes shut.

"Tegan, you can't keep me here." He could feel Tegan's hands slid down he back of his arms to his hands, fingers entangled in his own and the wires embedded in his mods. He grasped his hands tightly. "You need to let me go."

^And their super weird sorta cuddle despite the horrors. The intimacy is still there, it won't save either of them.