Fear [Ortega POV] (Patreon)

(Revelations, post crash, post talk with an innocent Sidestep in the hospital.)

Is it a nightmare if I'm not sleeping? Hell if I know, but every time I close my eyes, it comes back.

Black. Then bright.

Turn. Crash. Roll. Instincts taking over, nailing the landing without knowing fully what had happened yet. Hurting. Left skin on the pavement, both synth and real. Head clear. The smell of gasoline.

Looking up turned the world slow, all neural channels open, sound distorting, a figure trapped in the wreck. Still in the seat, the side door smashed, airbag deflating. Switch of perspective. Did I move? I must have. The other door opens. Tearing the airbag like a shroud, look at me Luis, that's one lesson I learned. Always carry a knife. Screaming. No answer.

Stuck.

Wedged within the twisted wreck. Legs mashed under metal, hard to see because of the seat. Can't see breathing. Can't see anything here. Need. Space. The seatbelt unbuckles, but the angle doesn't work. Trapped. Generator is in emergency shutdown mode, must have jostled something in the crash. Push past it. Override. Forced reboot. Shouldn't do this without the proper suit but dammit, can't wait. No time. The burn hurts, but the power runs true, and I brace one leg against the twisted door, trusting my skinsuit to keep me from tearing myself apart.

Tasting blood.

The seat gives away; with it gone, there's enough room to slide the body out. No. Not body. Gotta be a breath. A heartbeat. No. Ignore feelings. Push down. I know the drill. Another crack. Ignore the sounds, I'm doing damage, but ribs heal. Don't look at the legs. The bleeding is not life-threatening. Unless it's internal. Nothing to do about that. Push. Breath. Beg. Repeat. No result. No stirring.

Do it.

Skin. Need skin. Knife again, dammit, too many layers. Cut. What is that? Never mind. Calm down. Breathe. Find the right level. No stress. Even breath. There's a reason they trusted me with this. I can handle it. Easily. Like walking a taut wire. Lick your fingers. Need the fluid for a tight seal. Two fingers below the right clavicle. Two fingers on the left side, under the armpit, right where the pectorals end. Breathe. Release the charge. The body twitches in a semblance of life. Touch the throat, pray, and there's a pulse.

God is merciful today.

I lean in, push more air into the lungs, a pained cough, and there is breathing. I suck in air and cough myself awake.

In bed. Still. Being good. I raise my hands to my face. Everything aches. Bruises, skin, and pulled muscles. What the crash didn't do, I did to myself. Another lecture incoming, but they're wrong, and I'm right. I could handle it. I did. Even if I am paying for it now. I resist the urge to scratch the wire connected to my ports. It can't itch, it's all synthskin there, but my nervous system has never really discriminated between metal and flesh. That's why they put me through this.

A unique specimen.

Shouldn't have read that line, even though I made the joke that they meant my abs. Tastes even worse now after the talk with Sidestep. If they were talking about me like that in my files, what on earth did they do to them? No protection of name. No protection of relatives. No protection of humanity.

That. No.

How. Can't still wrap my head around it. Re-Gene. I feel nauseous, which I pretend is because of the medication. Half of me still thinks it's a lie, and the other half keeps backfilling information, moving facts from one box to the other to make everything make sense once more. And it does. I was so right but for all the wrong reasons. Could I have asked? Should I have asked?

No.

That would have been a bad idea. No matter who they were running from, someone digging into that would have been bad. I'd like to think I would have been trusted, but I'm not really that trustworthy. Too filled with secrets. Prejudice. God, I don't even remember all the shit I spewed. But they did. Because it mattered to them. Did I make stupid jokes too? Might have.

The knock on the door interrupts my self-flagellation, and I wave Wei inside with relief. "Any news?"

"No," he says, pulling over a metal chair to sit beside you. "And right now, no news is good news."

"You tell me." I let out a sigh of relief. That's the reason I'm staying in bed because I need to know my generator is in the clear. That all the neural connections work perfectly. If this goes bad, I need to be on top of my game, bruises or not. "I talked to Angie. She's running interference, scrubbing any details from the system."

"I'm not comfortable with that," he admits, but he doesn't protest. "She's not supposed to have that kind of system access."

"Nobody will know," I assure. "And I know you don't trust everyone here."

"I don't." He runs a hand over his short hair, sighing heavily. "But I would have liked to be trusted with this. How long have you known?"

"That she was good with computers?" I smile softly, making my words as innocent as possible. "You got shot. Argent and I tried to find out who. We both suspected someone leaking information and decided to keep her skills to ourselves."

"I wish you would have trusted me." He gives you a hard look, and you prepare yourself for an argument, but then he looks down. "But I suppose I can't blame you for keeping secrets."

"That's new." My head might be hurting, but I don't miss the look on his face. "So, what have you been keeping from me?" Secrets within secrets.

"You're too sharp," he admits. "Do you have any idea how frustrating it is that you keep acting like a clown?"

"Not my fault if you can't keep two thoughts in your head at once." I let my smuggest smile settle as I lean back. "So let me have it then, Wei. What have you been doing behind my back?" Always more layers than the surface; been friends for half my life, and I still find more.

"I need you to understand something." He looks down at his hands, unnaturally still. "I care about you. A lot." It is flavored like a confession, but not exactly news to me. "And you spent years trying to destroy yourself after Heartbreak."

"We all did," I protest. "I just choose to be more open about it."

"We all hurt," Wei clarifies. "I know that. But you were ready to die. I don't think you'd be here today if I hadn't forced them to take you back on the team."

"Forced them?" A piece of the puzzle. It had been out of character for them to ask me to return, even if it was just until the team got back to full strength.

"Well, me and Luis. They would have had to remake the team from scratch, and they weren't prepared for that kind of bad press."

"Luis always had too many friends." It warms my heart that they would care. Would do that. Even if the fact that they thought I needed it was annoying. "Wouldn't have been easy finding recruits."

"It's not easy anyway," he admits. "But I need you to remember that time. How you acted."

"I'd rather not." Though I'm falling back into those memories nightly now, car crash mixing with window fall, a loss I couldn't stop turning into a wreck where I could. Safe. Finally. Full circle.

"I tried..." Wei pauses, fights with the words until they find a shape. "I went looking for the bodies. When I was on sick leave, waiting to recover enough for my new legs to be fully installed. I found out there hadn't been any at the funeral, and I didn't like the sound of that."

"Neither did I." Vague memories of pain. How much had I been hurting? Going through the morgue, rolling out the bodies, demanding an answer. Never the right one.

"I was more subtle about it. Cremation never sounded right to me, and Anathema being dissolved was too convenient. Even knowing what sometimes happens to boosts as they die, I couldn't trust it." He chuckles. "Yes, I'll admit it. Part of it was probably still the voices in my head. Whispering."

"Heartbreak?" I can't know what happened to him. Any of them. I didn't hear shit.

"Yeah. I know I was traumatized, but I didn't have anything else to do, so it made sense to keep looking. Couldn't go anywhere, but I know people. And I have access."

"You pretended to hate computers for the longest time." I can't help but chuckle; I'm not the only one playing dumb when it suits me. "How many keyboards did you break filling spreadsheets?"

"Listen to me." Wei sounds deadly serious. "This is important. I found something. Or, well, something found me."

"What?" I pick up on the implications, thinking back. Was this when I was drinking myself to sleep at Owl's place?

"I got sent a file. An autopsy report. With photos. And a short film segment." He swallows, unable to continue in a steady voice. "It was Sidestep."

"What?" My mind goes blank, and even though my generator is in diagnostics mode, I can feel my heart race and time slow. An illusion because he continues unchanged.

"It was Sidestep on the autopsy table. Mask off. The suit mostly peeled off. They were cutting into them." A look of nausea on his face. "No mask for anesthetics. Can't remember any IV. They looked dead. The doctors talked like..." he presses a hand against his mouth, and I can see how he swallows down bile.

"Faked." I toss out the word like a grenade. "They knew you were looking and wanted you gone." Think logical. About what it meant then. Not what it means now.

"Yes," he admits. "But what I couldn't make sense of were the tattoos. Everywhere. And why it said Re-Gene reclamation on the autopsy report."

"It..." I let out a hiss, letting the words land in my gut. Ice cold. Control.

"I don't know if my source found the correct footage and it was intended for internal consumption or if they assumed we knew and didn't bother redacting the Re-Gene parts." Wei's voice has gone soft.

"Why didn't you tell me?" The pained sob is unintentional.

"Because you would have gone looking." He leans closer but doesn't reach out. "You would have had a thread to start pulling on, and you would have destroyed yourself unraveling this story. I know you. You would never have stopped."

"You're right about that." If I had known. If I had suspected. Even if there had only been a corpse, there would have been a creator. The place Sidestep had fled from. That had stolen them back. Even if it had only been a corpse, I wouldn't have stopped. And it wasn't a corpse. "They were there," I hiss. "For years. Trapped. Tortured."

"I didn't know." He's the one pleading now.

"I would have gone looking." I raise my voice, if not my hand. "I would have gone looking, and I could have fucking saved them!"

"You would have gotten yourself killed in the state you were in!" He matches my tone. Good.

"So what?" I laugh, teeth bared, swinging both feet over the side of the bed. He rises from the chair, taking a step back in return. "If I had got myself killed, maybe that would have gotten someone to react? Someone that might care?" I'm on my feet, anchored by a thin cable to the monitoring unit. Not enough to stop me.

"Stop." He puts his hands on me. Bad idea.

"Not this time," I growl, shifting my weight so he stumbles back, tripping over the chair. Out of balance. Good. I shove him into the wall behind him, one arm against his throat. "Do they know?"

"Yes," he hisses, throat constricted by my arm. His hands are infuriatingly gentle on my shoulders. "I told them."

"Good." I hadn't expected that, but I don't loosen my grip. It's a strange feeling to want to hurt someone I care about. I don't like how it sits in my stomach. "This is your fault."

"Don't you think I don't know what?"

"Is that why you've been so nice to them since they returned?" I lean close enough to hiss in his ear. "Guilty conscience?"

"What do you think?" This time he pushes you back, braced by the wall, modded strength. I don't resist.

"I think you should be going now." Because I don't know what I will do if he stays. The diagnostic machine is beeping erratically, the cord dislodged in your scuffle. Someone will come. I don't have long.

"I will give you time to calm down."

"Going to need a few years for that." I sit back down, fully in control though I want to scream. Wei knew. All this time. While I was making a fool of myself. While Sidestep was captive. After they returned. Wei KNEW. "You should go."

"I'm sorry," he says, and I believe him. "But when you calm down and think about it, you will know I was right." And that's where I lose it.

"Get the hell out," I snap, on my feet again, lightning arcing out, bulbs exploding, machines screaming.

The moment holds, and then the sprinklers start, and the door slams shut behind Wei. I stand there alone, letting the blue light lick my limbs, my Faraday skin keeping me safe from harm. Control. I shut down the generator, pleased to feel no pressure from doing so. Who needs diagnostics? Not me.

I sink down on the bed regardless, scorched patterns on the blankets, an exploded vase in splinters over the floor. Going to need an explanation for this; I know I'm not supposed to be able to run this hot in emergency shutdown mode. Could fake ignorance again, I suppose. Promise to submit to a full scan to see what is going on. Need to have another chat with Angie. She can fix this.

Fix.

I look at the door, trying to forget the look on Wei's face as he exited. Guilt. Fear. Is there any fixing that? I rub my face as I hear steps quickly approaching in the corridor.

Would I even want to?