#wei chen x ricardo ortega

[thekrazykeke]

title: just keep breathing

fandom(s): fallen hero rebirth/retribution

pairing(s): wei chen x sidestep. ricardo ortega x sidestep. wei chen x ricardo ortega x sidestep. ricardo ortega x wei chen. 

playlist/song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMkz9JF7teY

rating: t+

summary: maybe it’s not about fixing what’s broken. maybe it’s about starting over and creating something better.

warning(s): pre poly relationship, comfort food, pining, mild spoilers for the alpha build, angst and hurt/comfort.

Listen. 

I played Fallen Hero Rebirth and rated it a solid 9, and the story initially left me crying my eyeballs out but mildly confused, wanting to understand things. So I replayed and replayed and replayed. I picked up things and the clues started fitting together. I paid for the Retribution alpha build and I’m still crying my eyeballs out at night over it but I wanted resolution. I wanted to give (one of) my character(s) a light at the end of the tunnel. 

So this is what it is. Or an attempt at it because FHR is really quite dark and not for the faint hearted. Those warning tags are not for show. 

Sidestep’s name is Tyndall Bowman in this one.

~

It happens on a Sunday. The last weekend before a new month started, technically.

Ortega frequently visits Chen’s apartment and brings food, lightly ribbing the other man for his lackluster kitchen space. Chen’s routine response becoming less and less exasperated each time. 

You think that he not so secretly fears that you’ll both starve or subsist off canned food and cheap takeout. ...Which probably isn’t a far off assumption, considering the implication day one of your temporary living situation.

It could be considered sweet, if it wasn’t so very funny. (You had to get your kicks somewhere).

Your legs are still broken. 

Progress is frustratingly slow. 

You’d tried to move to a schedule of crutches-only by the second week out of sheer boredom and the flat look Chen had leveled in your direction caused you to nix that idea stat. 

There’s a tension between Chen and you now. 

Not to say that there rarely isn’t tension, but that’s usually due to an aftermath of an argument. Now? Now, you’re aware of him. Aware of him in a way that you’d only been aware of Ortega.

Fucking hell.

Someone’s knee brushes lightly against yours, breaking you out of your reverie. You glance to the left and catch sight of Ricardo watching you with soft, worried eyes. Chen also watching, but less obvious in his concern, features more stoic, controlled. The three of you are in the living room, they are siting on the couch, you’re in your wheelchair. 

They probably asked you something and you were zoned out.

The lie is on the tip of your tongue, “I’m fine,” you mumble and grip your bowl which has half melted blueberry swirl ice cream and salted caramel cheesecake. Sweets are your kryptonite but Ricardo has pulled out your top favorites...

“You’re fine?” Ricardo scoffs, his tone skeptic. 

A muscle jumped in your jaw. “Yep, just fine,” you reply, using your spoon to scoop up some ice cream, take a bite and enjoy the flavor. Refusing to give an inch and let him win. 

The two of you had played this game many times, too many actually, and it usually ends with you being the one to fall for the prodding, and then you get angry, lash out. 

Walk away.  Only this time you can’t. 

Another scoff. “Typical. You do this every time, you know.” There’s a surprising amount of bitterness in Ricardo’s voice now. 

“Ricardo,” Chen starts to interject, the strain clear in his voice. “Tyndall. Stop.”

It’s too late though. 

Placing down the bowl on the nearest surface, freeing up your hands, you clench then unclench your fingers, trying to avoid cracking your knuckles. “And what about you, then huh, Saint Ortega?” The sneer on your face is ugly. “You’re always on about me being honest with my feelings and talking, but the truth of it is, you’re just like me, or worse!”

Ortega looks dumbfounded. As if he can’t believe you’d dare to throw the truth in his face like this, so obviously. He recovers quicker than you’d like, much to your annoyance, though. “...Maybe so,” he acknowledges, his voice softer. Enough to lull a more gullible individual into complacency or just anyone not paying attention. You know better. “That’s a topic we can revisit in a moment. I’m more curious about how long the two of you expect me to play the idiot here.”

Unwillingly, your eyes dart to Chen’s, then away. 

Not focusing on any particular point in the room. Does Ortega know that you’re Mastermind? Since when, and did Chen tell him? Or is he bluffing right now and he doesn’t know? Is he talking about something totally different than what you’re thinking about?

Quick! Think up an appropriate answer and throw him off the trail!

“....I don’t....know what you mean.”

That’s not what you should say!!

Chen sighs deeply, pinching the bridge of his nose.  He looks pretty much done with the both of you right now, not that you can blame him. “Be clearer, the two of you have a propensity for telling half truths which leads to the majority of these absurd arguments.” 

Ricardo winced and you feel the sting from that particular burn as well. 

“In response to your statement, though, no one is expecting you to play the fool.” He looks a little nervous, guilty. “ I... We’ve kissed.” There’s a pinch to his brow, the tips of his ears turning pink. “That wasn’t an example of being a good friend to you, kissing Tyndall and murkying the waters further when I knew the two of you were...” There’s a pause as he tries to find a word for what you and Ortega shared before you and he tentatively stopped antagonizing each other and bonded over Spoon. 

You snorted, lips twisting into a wry smile, “The phrasing of that sentence makes it sound as if I found it a chore to kiss you or something.” Chen cuts you an admonishing look which you temporarily ignore as you turn to glance at Ortega who’d been watching the byplay between you and Chen with an unreadable expression. For the nth time, you wish you could read his mind, and at the same time, you’re grateful that you can’t. 

“...He’s right though. It was an epically shitty thing to do, kissing your oldest friend, who’s probably had a crush on you since he’s met you, while we were kissing. Totally and unnecessarily complicated.”

He just looked at the two of you for a moment. Then Ricardo sighed heavily, running a hand over his face, wearily. “Esto es un desastre.”

You say nothing, staying quiet because honestly, you agree. This is a mess, and it was poorly handled, on all sides. You’d already spilled the beans about Chen having a crush Ortega before it got to this point because you sincerely thought the conversation should have come up properly over seven years ago, your ‘death’ should have been a nonfactor. 

They likely would’ve been a couple already if they weren’t such obtuse idiots.

“Okay... okay...” Ricardo seems to have come to a conclusion. He nods resolutely, turning all his considerably intense focus onto Chen who seems taken aback by it. Leaning forward into the other man’s space, slow enough that it’d be easy to shove him back, but of course Chen doesn’t. Ricardo’s hand went to the nape of his neck, lightly urging Chen forward, the other man obeying that silent request, and in the span of a breath, they’re kissing.

Your don’t avert your gaze, as much as you want to. 

This is a private thing, you shouldn’t look, shouldn’t stare like a pervert. 

‘Isn’t this what you knew would happen?’ Of course, your brain isn’t nice. 

This is what you wanted right, for them to get their act together. 

Humans falling in love with each other is normal and acceptable. (Although your education depicted of men and women falling in love, primarily). It happens all the time. 

Such emotion is a luxury a Re-Gene cannot afford, nor can they sincerely feel it, that’s what you were taught on the Farm. So resistant to the idea of going back to being treated as an unfeeling thing, your re-education had been particularly brutal.

“Whatever horrible thing your mind is telling you, it isn’t true.”

Once again caught off guard, lost in thought, you’re unprepared for Ricardo to kiss you. He tastes faintly of blueberry swirl ice cream and sweet tea, and maybe it’s your imagination, but maybe even a little bit like Chen. It’s that stray thought that has you jerk your head, trying to turn away from him. “W...what the hell, asshole?”

He snorted. “You know you sound really cute when you curse.” 

Baring your teeth, you snap, “Tomber d'une falaise!” Although the idiot clearly didn’t know what you said in French, basically telling him to fall off a cliff, it didn’t stop him from dramatically clutching at his chest, as if he’d been stabbed in the heart; he could probably guess it was at least an insult.

“Stop teasing him, Ricardo.” Chen admonished. Ricardo mock pouted. “I mean it. Can’t you see that he’s overwhelmed?”

“I am not overwhelmed!”, you vehemently protest.

“Out of your depth then,” Chen countered and before you could complain that it was pretty much the same thing, only with differing meanings, he continued on, “What our resident idiot is clumsily trying to show instead of explain, is that he wants both of us.”

“If you want a threesome, fine. It’ll have to wait, as I’m a bit physically impaired at the moment.” You’re almost surprised by the bitterness in your voice. 

Chen stared at you for a brief moment and then he braced both hands on either side of your wheelchair. Heart slowly turning over in your chest, oddly feeling as if you’re caught in the gaze of a hunter, you stubbornly keep eye contact for a second or two, but can’t maintain it for long. That doesn’t stop him from murmuring in your right ear, “Stop being so stubborn. Stop lying. You want this. To be in a relationship with both of us.”  A brief pause. “Correct?”

Fucking hell... 

Swallowing thickly, wondering the logistics of how that would work out. Wondering if you were about to once again make a horrible mistake. Then again, since you’d come back to Los Diablos, since Ortega found you again, that’s all you’ve been doing so far, haven’t you. Making mistake after mistake after mistake. 

“Yes.” 

As Chen’s left hand buried itself in your curls, taking control, tilting your head back, idly you wondered if the next time you hit the ground, if it’d hurt less. This is after a freefall into madness, it feels like, and twice as foolish. Yet you surrender, and you stop thinking, enjoy the kiss. 

[thee-morrigan]

good grief

characters/pairing: ricardo ortega x allegra peretti (nb!sidestep, she/they), plus a brief appearance by Chen rating: T (language) wc: ~1.4k notes: still on my soft!chargestep bullshit, y’all, this time with None Sidestep, Left Grief (aka snippets from step and ortega post-heartbreak) warnings: nothing atypical of canon - e.g., the angst/death-mentions/mild dissociation one would expect. [also on ao3]

Darkness. So much darkness. More than the first time? Or had she just forgotten how it felt?

Perhaps that was the problem: she was never meant to feel.

Later — much later, after a myriad of lifetimes — she would think back to this second, darkest captivity and wonder if it had been all those eons in that darkness that taught her how to leave herself, her own battered wreck of a body, and go into another’s. Not literally, of course; at least, not at first. Not until she’d left the dark behind, that void as silent and lightless as space. As a tomb.

(As herself?)

No, not as herself; she had spent too much of her life learning how deep and dark a void she could tunnel into herself, the hinterlands of her own mind capable of holding her far more securely than any grave. She knew this better than most.

After all, she hadn’t managed to stay dead yet.

No matter how much she might wish she were. Or how often.

No, the most Allegra could hope for was the kind of living death she’d carved out for herself, dark earth scraped out with her bare hands, cracked earth a shadow of the cracks that ravaged her raw and aching fingers, even as she kept tunneling down, down, down.

-

“It’s been three months,” Wei had said, no censure in his voice: only the grave concern, bone-weary and brusque, of a man unused to sharing his feelings, or having them shared with him in return.

Or maybe just the fatigue that seems to settle its full weight on those who survive and endure as long as he has. As long as they both have.

When so many others around them have not.

Three months. Too long to spend at the bottom of a bottle, according to Chen.

Has it been three months?

No way. That’s— too long? Not nearly long enough?

Has it even been three weeks?

(Has it only been three lifetimes?)

What the fuck did Chen know, anyway.

And what the fuck did Ortega himself know, either, when it came down to it?

She was dead. He knew that.

Sidestep — Allegra — Legs was dead.

Just like Anathema.

Just like his career, after he lost it on that prick of a reporter.

(He’d lost it well before that day.)

Not that he wanted it, anymore.

Not that he deserved it.

What he deserved was to have died alongside them, instead of them, to have been there for the one quick-turn pivot Legs couldn’t manage on her own, to have saved the one person who’d saved his ass time and again, the one time she’d been unable to save her own.

She’d thrown herself into absurd, unnecessary danger on his behalf (on the city’s behalf, he tried to tell himself sometimes, in service of the greater good, the obvious untruth ash on his tongue against the taste of the truth: it was, he knew, for him that she did — had done most of the truly dangerous shit she’d pulled alongside him). Taken absurd risks just as he did, keeping him from falling victim to his own reckless abandon.

Fragments of memories played in his mind, shards as solid and sharp as pieces of a broken mirror, reflecting a supercut reel of the past too-few years. He didn’t bother trying to block out the thoughts, let them wash over him, saltwater on open wounds.

He may have survived that day, but there were other ways to die.

-

It was so much easier to leave the second time.

Not logistically — they’d strengthened their defenses against people (notpeople) like her in the years since her first escape. Cottoned on to her sly tricks, senses sharpened to detect her subtle probing, the antithesis of the full-frontal offensive tack most of the scientists seemed to prefer.

But that was all right. She could find their blind spots again. Hadn’t she been designed to excel at lying in wait? Hadn’t they made her to be an adder, sleek and quiet and coiled tight in the weeds, waiting for the right opening to strike?

No, logistically it was harder to escape the second time.

Just perhaps not as impossible as they’d expected.

Hubris was such a reliable blind spot.

But the leaving — the real leaving, the kind that begins to unfold the exact second you make the decision that you don’t want to (can’t)  be there anymore — was so, so much easier the second time. Because that decision had been made long before she even set broken foot once more on that unholiest ground, that land whose fields were sown with (un)human suffering, watered with blood and unshed tears.

The first time had been, to Allegra’s eternal shame, so much harder. That first time had required a lifetime of unlearned behaviors, ingrained expectations and conditioned responses. Much, much later, it occurred to her that making the decision to go (run RUN don’t look back keep moving) had, ironically, cost her the one piece of humanity the Farm didn’t want them to lose.

Want. Social desirability. A sense of attachment manufactured through volatility, the inherently social, inherently human desire to please, to perform, and to be rewarded for it. A broken, terrible loyalty that had been bred and brutalized into them from the moment they were decanted. A vestigial familial impulse, that wanting, and so utterly human.

They might have called them dogs, but what they were really was lab rats. Cages empty except for one button, one button that provided both pain and sustenance at random intervals. Forever pressing it in search of that reward, conditioned compulsion driving them to keep trying, keep pressing through the pain responses because maybe this time, pushpushpush, comes the reward.

The only reward she wanted that second time was the one thing they wouldn’t let her have: to be left alone to finish dying.

So she had to take the next best thing and get the hell out.

Coiled and still in the weeds, lying in wait, as still as she’d been on the city streets all those months-years-lifetimes ago.

As still as the death promised in those adder’s eyes:

watching

waiting

calculating.

Unnoticed and overlooked, after a time. Allegra would not acknowledge how long a time. Could not consider quantifying the waiting. She waited, would wait, until she did not need to any longer. Until that moment of distraction, that blind spot, appeared, when the scientists displayed their own utterly human weakness and forgot she was a threat.

She waited, tunneling down, down, down into that darkness, curling herself sleek and taut as a bowstring, as a viper, in that cracked, blighted earth.

Watched and listened.

Listened.

Watched.

Listened—

“-Oh good grief,” an irritated mumble, the soft tick of something small and hard, a plastic pen cap or a button or perhaps an oblong blue tablet, clicking against the concrete of the lab floor as it hit, little plink no louder than the drip of a faucet. Softer, even, than the unspoken, continued litany of curses, grown now a bit less work-friendly as they continued in the confines of the lab tech’s own head.

A frustrated exhale sounded, the backing track to the pop of an ankle.

Someone bending down, easing stiff joints back up.

She had never understood that phrase.

Good grief.

Maybe because she wasn’t supposed to know how grief felt?

(oh but she did, oh but god she did)

She wasn’t sure there was any such thing.

Good grief.

Maybe she’d look it up, find a library or something, once she was clear of Nevada.

She could ask the lab tech

(field mouse)

she supposed, might have a minute to spare her curiosity, though she doubted they would have any idea.

Doubted it was knowledge considered critical to the mission of the institute, this unimportant trivium.

She’d find out later, then. Might even make a point to sate her curiosity in this matter— you never knew which bits of unimportant information could bloom into critical details, if you watched for them.

Waited.

Listened.

Nudged them into place, touch gentle as a light breeze, shaft of sunlight warming your cheek.

(When had she last felt sun on her face, or outside air? Soon, she would feel both so very soon.)

Allegra stopped waiting, uncoiled, and struck.