Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A hand brushes a loose curl behind an ear. Fingers around the shell of the ear, turning sound half-muffled. It lingers. Then, a sly tug at the silver hoop hanging there. Just for good measure. Too quick to be brushed off. The touch smooths into a thumb across her jaw. There’s a huff at that. A shade of exasperation. Or endearment, depending. 

Following bone contours, the hand moves until a nail catches on the trench of scar tissue. A jagged curve that wraps around and into the meat of his chin. The motion repeats, idly. The same way he does when he’s thinking. Gentler.

“How did you get this again?” 

“You know how. I’ve told you before.” 

“I do, I’m just remembering.”

Her nose wrinkles at that. Like Ortega had said something crude. He traces the scar again undeterred. And Dina tries to recall how much of the story he had given him. 

A pick-pocket with a knife meets a flushed out telepath. New and shaking and wide-eyed. No name, no money, track marks just scarred over. This part, likely left out. 

A younger face. Unable to turn a body away once the mind had seen him. And the mental yank given too hard, a neuron leaping to action, that sent the blade point jerking away from a soft throat and into the meat of the mandible. 

“Not much to remember,” Dina mumbles, giving a lazy shrug. “Just my dumb luck.”

The quiet that settles is weighty, not unpleasant. And it makes his mind hum at a steady frequency. Or it could be the live-wire palm flat against her jugular. After a moment, Ricardo laughs at something.

“I looked for it a lot, you know. When you started showing parts of your face.” 

“Hm?”

“Your scar.” The finger there taps it once. “I - - I don’t know, thought I’d find you on the street just by recognizing it.”

“You stalker.” Her whole face scrunches with disbelief. Lips curling into a dry grin. 

“Romantic. Actually.” He corrects. Over-enunciated.

Dina laughs. Conceding. And Ricardo, ever an opportunist, ducks in to kiss the spot soundly. Then again when Dina snaps her tongue. Indignant despite her hand fisting in the back of his shirt. 

“So. Did you ever find me then?”

“No, I don’t think so…” The trailing end of a laugh between them. “You’d be surprised how common it is.” 

“Well, that’s just because you were looking for it. It’s - - it’s the something bias.” 

“Sure.” His tone is unconvinced, placating. Dina bristles. 

“Assuming I’d even tell you if you found me.”
“You wouldn’t?” He bats his lashes and gets a scoff for his efforts.

“No way.” An upturned chin and squinted eyes.

Ricardo hums, watching her expression twist with an immature defensiveness. He thinks about trying his luck with kissing him again. Instead he finds the hoop at her ear again and presses it flat between his forefinger and thumb. 

“Guess I’m lucky you found me then.”

Chapter Text

The crutches give away her hiding spot. Not that I didn’t know he’d be over here; around the porch, the neat little corner with a good sightline of the front door. I knew he was here, but the crutches leaning against the railing are confirmation.  

“Hey.” The approach is careful and heavy-footed. Announce yourself before you round the corner, save yourself a fist to the face. Textbook knowledge really. Especially now. 

She’s hunched over herself, sitting on the crossbeam. Ankles crossed, shoulders sloped. He raises his head, moon eyes behind the hair. That typical weighty stare. A muscle ticks in her neck; a beat later, my lip jumps too. 

I know that look. 

Endearingly frog-mouthed. She purses her lips and discretely shuffles a plate into the trash and disappears until the smell clears. Not something to point out, necessary to note though. File away. The unofficial list of foods she can’t stomach. A heeled boot knocks against the railing. Permission to speak, if any. 

“You okay?”

“Mmh. Yeah.” He rubs a hand over his mouth. Eyes looking off somewhere, unfocused. 

“Can I get you something, anything?” Don’t want to push the topic; he’s gotten enough of that from my mother. Can’t just let it lie either. Not my style. Dina sucks in a breath through her hand. Dry and shaky. 

“No, I’m- - It’ll pass.” A blasé wave of the hand.

“Let me know if anything changes.”

There’s no response to that. Just the audible click of his throat as he swallows and turns away from me. Face towards the blackened countryside. Then she pats down the pockets of her jeans, slides out a cigarette box, and lights up. I settle back onto the porch railing, watching. 

I’m careful enough to leave enough space between us. Considerate. Professional even, to pretend like I haven’t noticed the way he tenses whenever I make a move too fast. Sidestep-reflexes snapping back like a whip. Unable to let that tension go. Like she’s perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop and needs it for a head start which - - I’ll admit, doesn’t feel great. The worst kind of déjà vu. But I can deal with it. I have dealt with it. Twice over already. And this time, the hesitation is justified. So, so, justified; so you better tuck that wounded pride away, Ortega, because you made this bed—whether or not you intended to—lie in it.

Besides me, Dina just sniffs. Arms crossed over her chest before she brings the cigarette to her mouth. It’s too easy to watch. The inhale, the drag. Pinched mouth and held breath. He’s already waiting for me when I look back at his eyes with that usual half-lucid, half-piercing stare. Here and somewhere else entirely. Frozen in place until- -

A twitching raise of her eyebrows. A wordless goad. Quick as a strike saying, we’re way past giving flighty looks when we think the other isn’t looking.

I laugh just as quickly. Twice as easy. She’s right.

I motion carefully for the cigarette just to have something to do with my hands. She concedes. Easily. Like before.  

Still, there is that-- strain underneath it all. Like trying to stretch something over a larger surface. Tension underhand. For once I don't consider rushing in.

Her fingers brush mine at the changeover. There's a snap of built up static between them at the touch, electricity finding the shortest path to the ground. Dina doesn’t react to either. It’s hard to gauge if that’s a good sign. It’s harder to ignore how close he’s standing. 

The smoke burns dry, pulling something tight between my ribs. It takes a roll of the shoulders before it loosens, and by then Dina’s attention has already jumped away, head turning towards the countryside. A slow motion, methodical. Not mechanical. The same way he always moved, I know it. Hand the cigarette back before I can impulsively take another drag. She lifts a hand to take it. Easy.

It’s a slow movement from the corner of my eye and I sense, I can see it, when he changes direction. When her wrist twists and instead of finding the cigarette, her hand finds my wrist. The grip is cold, solid. A second later, quicker, the other hand finds the cigarette and disappears with it along the lines of his body. 

Track the movements then; the tucked chin, tense the legs and change the grip, she shifts her weight against the support of the porch and pulls. A part of me expects, braces, for a hit. He tries to pull me off-balance, unsteadied, and thinks better of it halfway through the motion. Lets herself be pulled in instead. Her head following the momentum through the top of her skull and into my chin. 

There’s no hit this time, no teeth slamming together, and the energy I felt evaporates into nothing. Dina pulls my arm slowly, turning it until her thumb rests in the center of my palm. It’s going too slow. My teeth ache anyways. She looks at my hand, at the rough lip of metal embedded in it.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Her finger circles the emitter.

“Is something wrong with it?” I ask. A finger twitches, brushing the inner part of her wrist. The soft skin there.

“Your mods? No, I don’t think so.” Distant voice. Thinking.

“What are you doing then?”

Dina hums, noncommittal, with a half-shrug. “Just feeling something.”

Frustratingly vague, how could I forget? I huff, willing at least to humor him. To do the poking around he wants. The prodding, the prying, the usual.

“Right, well, doubt I can get you any mod schematics if that’s what you’re going to ask.” I flex my fingers under her grip again. Feeling her skin, muted and fuzzied, through the implants. Nerve endings that never quite reconnected. “They barely let me see them.”

He just hums again in a way that feels like she’s not following that line of thought, like I threw a rope and missed her. Completely. Left watching her drift, fall farther away. And that makes me want to say something, anything to fill her silence. Grab onto some bits and make sure he doesn’t get any farther. Doesn’t matter if he flinches because at least he’ll still be here and I can apologize later.

Her grip tightens like she’d heard that thought. It jumps—her hand, her thumb pressing into the inside of my wrist. Dina keeps his eyes down, doesn’t look up, his face blank except for the way his nostrils give away the quick breaths she’s taking. The pulse in my wrist matches each inhale.

Then after a moment, a long moment, his eyebrows pinch, and he laughs. Her eyes raise to meet mine. It’s a quiet relief when I see two pupils, even and equal in the pits of those brown eyes. I don’t know if it shows on my face, Dina is too preoccupied by what she’s read in my veins to mimic- no, to react to it. My pulse throbs tighter against the pressure.

“Seventy-eight,” she says, with the same cadence you’d use to tell someone their fly is down. I resist the urge to check. “That’s fast."

Here, my expression must match my thoughts because Dina’s face twitches with a sharp look. “Your heartbeat.”

“What about it?”

“It’s fast.” He repeats, stretching each letter in her mouth. Her grip has eased up a bit, enough to let my pulse settle back into the background. The position she’s got me in is putting a strain through my bicep, I can feel it nagging, but it’s an easy pain to ignore when he’s dragging a nail over my pulse point. 

“Maybe I just get nervous with you this close,” I say ducking a shoulder with an easy smile, brushing against him. Testing, tension. Dina scoffs under her breath.
“As if.” He sounds like he doesn't believe it, pulls his lips back into a flash of a cruel smile. Doesn’t move away though and doesn’t let go of my wrist where it hangs between us. Just thumbs over the same spot, again and again, catching a groove of the mods there. I give her my own smile before turning back to look into the black night. Cricket and frog song and a crush of other noises. I can feel Dina’s eyes on me. 

The wind must change directions then because the smell of smoke reaches me, and I remember the cigarette that must still be moldering somewhere. I shift, turning back towards her and finding her eyes. His eyebrows raise expectantly, mine follow. 

“Mind if I…” 

“Yeah, here,” she mumbles, eyes not leaving mine. From the dark comes her arm. Thin wrist leading to the hand. He doesn’t wait for my own hand, and I don’t try to catch it. Her fingers press against my lips as they part for the cigarette filter.

The thumb at my wrist presses in again. A different kind of closeness.

Chapter Text

“You knew.” 

Dina stares. Pupils nothing more than pinholes despite the low lighting in the room. His head lolls with a mechanical abruptness against the morphine, keeping her gaze on Chen through hot anger alone.

He almost looks guilty.

He should.

He doesn’t hold his nerves like Ortega; in bouncing knees and directionless energy. For once, Chen seems to be in a considerate enough mood to make his feelings obvious without Dina having to pick at his brain. He is guilty, and he nods, and Dina hopes the Marshal has faith in the strength of the dampeners to protect his mind because he knew, he knew. 

Dina grits his teeth, through the pain in his body and the oppressive weight around her mind, and lurches. Twists his bruised spine to face Chen fully and grabs the cold plastic bedside rail, holding herself off the mattress. Her hair falls heavy with sweat onto his face as he does, heaving through bared teeth from the exertion. 

Chen is barely out of his seat at this, hand lifted and mouth pulled down. “Dina. You shouldn’t strain yourself.”

Dina’s nostrils flare with a sharp breath out. Once, twice.

And then he laughs. A small, closed-mouth huff as he keeps looking at the Marshal. Eyes jittering around his face. “You both knew. You and Ortega both knew this whole time.” It hadn’t quite clicked earlier, under the pressure of the painkillers and the dampeners and Ortega’s unrelenting gaze. But they had known the truth about both Fault Line and Dina, to some degree. And they hadn’t said a fucking word.

“Was it funny?” His voice is reedy, but Chen holds his eye. “Getting to watch me think I had everything figured out? Think I was- That I had a choice?” Her shoulders hunch, knuckles white against the rail. 

“You do have a choice.”

“Bull shit. You think waiting until everything blows up in my face so you can both walk in and play hero with my life is a choice?” He laughs again and finally releases the bed frame. Falling back heavy on the mattress. The vertigo that pushes into her brain brings a hard wave of nausea with it, and she swallows against it.

“‘Are you okay, Dina?’ ‘What’s wrong, Dina?’” she starts, feeling a droning hum settle over her mind. Pressing cold fingertips against closed eyelids. “‘You can talk to me, Dina.’ ‘You can trust me, Dina.’ You’re sick, you know that? If I had known I-” He stops, anger and bitterness settling like cold ash across her diaphragm. Letting out another hot breath as his hands drop to the sheets. 

Chen says nothing, looking down at his hands. And something turns slowly in Dina’s stomach. Crudely left to address the Ortega-shaped elephant in his brain and feeling a wash of fever-heat settle over it. A decade’s old amalgamation of hunger and jealousy and need and suspicion. All proved true in one fell swoop. 

She should have never trusted him.

She never should have trusted him. 

Because despite all Ortega’s insistence that he is truthful, honest, and forthcoming about what he thinks, he can never prove it concretely. Will he? Will he? Until the day comes that Dina can worm his into Ortega’s brain and sink aching teeth into his every ugly thought and feeling and memory, she can’t trust him at his word. Not when he can always say one thing while believing another, intentions wrapped securely behind maddening static. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. She wants to scream it. Rip at the bedsheets, at his hair, at anything within reach. 

It’s not fair. Not fair of Ortega to deny him this. To deny him what he’s owed.

“What would you have done?” Chen asks, “If you had known?” And the question is genuine, albeit unexpected enough that it pulls a hard press of lips that might’ve once been a smile from Dina. He turns his neck back to where he is sitting and considers the man for a moment. 

“Stayed away. Maybe. Left town.” He catches Chen’s eye when he looks up again. “I’ve had enough of you people leaving me to rot in the sun. Everyone’s got a fucking agenda for me to further.” 

“And you don’t?” 

Dina barks a short laugh. “So it’s not a problem when everyone uses me as nothing more than a tool for some grander scheme. But God forbid I take some things from rich people, right I get it.” 

She holds eye contact until Chen breaks it again. Revels in the insignificant victory. Then decides he’s done with the topic for now. At least until he is somewhat more lucid, more mobile, and more in the mood to punch Ortega in his bad arm. 

Chen stands and, despite the awful callbacks his tall form over her makes, Dina makes herself watch. 

“I really am sorry about this, Dina.” 

He looks like he means him. And for a moment, Dina almost believes it.