Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The sun cast Ricardo’s apartment in heady honey glow and deep, long shadows as it sank below the horizon. Neither of them particularly noticed. They weren’t exactly paying attention to the room.

Ricardo, being who he was, had invited her back with him as they were leaving the restaurant, like he hadn’t expected her to agree. He was sure the night he’d gotten her to bed was a fluke -- a lapse of judgment on her part, perhaps fueled by the few shots of tequila she’d done with shaking hands.

But Annie was careless. She should have declined, and very well could have, because he suggested it in that overly flirtatious way he did to keep the mood from souring if he got turned down, like he had been joking the whole time anyway, trying to fluster her, never serious. She really, really should have elbowed him and hailed a separate cab and gone home, but he asked her with his hand around her waist, holding her close, and she’d thought of his hands smoothing down the curve of her hip, fingers digging into the soft skin of her thighs, and how nice it had felt. How nice it would feel again. She thought of how just thinking of it made her heart hammer and her face flush. And she was careless, and she’d tilted her head to look up at his horrible, handsome face and agreed.

In the cab, they’d kept their hands to themselves, purely out of respect for the driver. Annie could’ve directed his attention elsewhere, but that would have required taking some focus off everything he made her feel in the back seat, and she was too selfish for that. Better to wait. Better for the pressure to build up like a stopped hose and come out in a torrent rather than a trickle.

What a vulgar notion.

Ricardo had her up against the polished wood paneling of the elevator the second the doors closed. They nearly had the doors close on them again, so reluctant were they to break apart, even for a moment.

She didn’t get a step in the door, didn’t even get her shoes off, before he was on her again, against the front door -- except now they were in private, well and truly, and so his lips migrated, to her jaw, her exposed neck. That was fine -- no, God, that was wonderful, and drew a little involuntary noise from deep in her throat that she thought sure she felt him smirk at against her skin.

Annie reached between them and splayed her hand across his chest, pushing him off. He looked at her in confusion, sudden concern flitting across his face, like he’d done something wrong, he’d upset her -- but she answered that look with a step towards him, arm firm, that forced him to back up, and again, and again, and his worry vanished as his knees his the sofa cushion and he stumbled back onto it.

She wasn’t used to this sort of thing. To taking charge. Sex was new and frightening and made her more vulnerable than she liked, and it was easy to revert to default settings -- to obedience, to following orders -- when faced with foreign situations. Ricardo wasn’t domineering. He’d been more attentive to how she was enjoying it than to his own pleasure. But he had made the decisions. That suited her perfectly.

Only not tonight. Because it had been a very nice restaurant and she was not drowning in layers and layers of fabric like she usually was. One slip up right now and he’d undo too many buttons on her shirt and get a full view of the plethora of little lines on her body that, each and every one of them, screamed “inhuman.” So, no decision making for him tonight, except to say yes or no to what she proposed.

Terra incognita.

Ricardo rested her hands on her hips, warmth seeping through the fabric of her skirt. And the way he looked up at her, the way he gazed with pupils blown wide, dazed and content but still hungry, somehow? She couldn’t stand him sometimes, his stupid dashing smile and how he so earnestly loved her, wanted her. Or at least thought he did.

Annie climbed into his lap, straddled his hips in a way that was entirely indecent. She didn’t settle back on her calves, however. She maintained those precious few inches of height on him, stood up on her knees, and cupped his stubbled jaw, tilted his head back, kissed him. Good. Soundly. He inhaled sharply and his chest expanded against her stomach.

His hands wandered. Up her thighs, first, until he found she was wearing tights and not stockings and he’d find no soft skin to squeeze and palm at on that avenue. So they drifted up, began tugging on the back of her shirt where it was tucked in, presumably in order to skate his hands up her back, maybe undo the clasp on her bra. But the warning sirens already on high alert in her head, which she had up until then been steadily ignoring, jumped in volume. She managed to pull back without it seeming like the tense reaction it was, and sat back a little. He was, it became apparently just then, more excited than she’d imagined.

The restaurant had been nice. Tie-nice, in Ricardo’s case. Slightly loosened tie. Annie hooked a finger under it and tugged it looser, made like she was going to pull it off over his head before stopping it just over his eyes and tightening it again.

She leaned close to his ear and said, low, barely a whisper, “No peaking.”

“Is this really necessary?”

She didn’t answer straight away, but dropped her lips from his ear to the soft spot just below it, behind his jaw, and she kissed there, and then down, down, down his neck, soft, wet. She stopped at the collar of his shirt. “We could always wait until it gets dark. Are you feeling patient?”

Not that she was feeling particularly patient either. And she didn’t think he’d ever actually choose stopping over being blindfolded, but to dissuade him further, and maybe a bit out of curiosity, she pressed her lips to his neck again, sucked at it, drew a little blood blooming under his skin. Let go with a soft pop. She knew about hickies in theory, and had never seen much appeal in them -- but drawing back now, seeing a mark dark and wet there on his neck? She understood.

“Jesus, no,” he breathed.

Annie hummed an ‘I didn’t think so’ and then set about unbuttoning his dress shirt. It wasn’t as satisfying as it ought to have been, because rather than each button exposing more deeply tanned, muscled chest, it simply revealed the ever-sexy white t-shirt.

She tugged at the neckline of it in a fit of foggy annoyance and muttered, “Undershirt...”

Ricardo laughed. “Now you know how it feels trying to undress you!”

“You’re nowhere close to my level.” Dress shirt undone, she slid it off his shoulders and tossed it onto the floor behind them.

And then... well, fair was fair, and careless was careless. When his hands came groping again, pulling at her blouse, she let him. Helped him, even, untying the bow around her neck and undoing enough of the buttons that he could pull it over her head and toss it behind them. She guided his hands to her rib cage and he ran his thumbs over her skin, skin he could not see, while she unclasped her bra and slung it over the back of the couch.

She would’ve liked to look. Would’ve liked to see his hands smooth across the planes and curves of her body, to see his thumbs trace every scar they found, to see him surge forward and close his mouth around a nipple. But she couldn’t. Couldn’t bring herself to look down. She shut her eyes and tilted her head back and let the moans and whimpers out as they knocked at the back of her throat, and she earned noises of approval from him in return.

And she wanted to pull off the damn undershirt. Wanted to admire him like he did her, because God knew he was more deserving. But doing so meant possibly dislodging the blindfold, and here she was, naked from the waist up. She really hadn’t thought this through. But it was fine. It was fine. She would manage. She’d figure it out. She always did.

They fell chest-to-chest, Ricardo’s arms wrapped tight around her, one hand at her hip and the other at her shoulder, hers around his neck, nimble fingers buried in the thick hair at the nape of his neck, a thin layer of cotton all that separated their bodies. Her face was flushed, body warm, and she so mindlessly rutted against him, reveled in his gasps and groans at every bit of friction her movements provided.

So mindlessly that she did not register the doorman’s thoughts, too close for comfort. Didn’t notice a thing wrong until he knocked.

Fucking careless. 

Chapter Text

They both jumped at the sound. Annie scrambled away from him at the very same instant Ricardo pushed the tie up onto his forehead. She hit the floor hard, barely avoiding the corner of the coffee table. He only glanced at the door; he was more concerned with her reaction. Her face, and her wide, terrified eyes... and then his eyes drifted down. Bare shoulders. Bare breasts. Bare stomach. Concern. Confusion.

He took a single step towards her, and Annie bolted. Dead sprint, into the bathroom at the very end of the hall, where she locked the door and threw herself against it.

(He hadn’t even chased her. The look on her face, that she was afraid of him, so afraid that she would run from him -- it was all enough to freeze him to the spot.

He stood in the middle of the living room, slightly disheveled, and stared after her until the doorman knocked again.

“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Ortega,” the doorman said, sheepishly, when Ricardo pulled open the door. Sheepish, sure -- he’d gone upstairs with a woman and answered the door only after several minutes in a state of undress, after all; it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. “A man brought this to the desk -- a cab driver. He said he found it in his back seat and that he remembered having dropped this woman off here?” He held up Ricardo’s insulated phone and pressed the home button. Annie’s face smiled back out at him, under the time and an unread text message.

She normally did not allow photographs to be taken of her. She’d used to, back when she was Sidestep. He’d snap candid photos of her when they were out and she would roll her eyes, certainly, but never minded enough to tell him to stop. He’d tried it again a month or so after her reappearance, and she’d all but panicked. Snatched the phone from him and seen it deleted with her own eyes. This one, this one photograph he had, was because he’d so happened to catch her in a good mood, and he’d prefaced it with how beautiful she looked, and she’d let him take it and keep it. And now his heart stuttered a little every time he went to make a phone call, and he liked it like that.

“I would’ve just called and let you know I had it, but -- ah.” He gestured with the phone again, then offered it out to him.

Ricardo shook himself out of his daze. “Hey, don’t worry about it. Thank you for bringing it up to me.”

“I apologize for -- ah -- interrupting.” He glanced past Ricardo, into the apartment, at the polka-dot blouse Annie had been wearing that had landed quite conspicuously on the floor, the pink lace bra across the back of the sofa. “Have a... pleasant evening, Mr. Ortega.”)

Annie sat against the door, quiet and shaking, the sweat on her naked back sticking to the smooth finished wood. It was as though the floor had fallen from under her feet, and she was in that split second before she registered the impending plummet.

And then it registered. Panic was no foreign feeling to her, but this was panic on a level she had never felt. Panic, and then anger, and then grief, crashing over her, stormy seas. She dragged herself to the toilet not a moment too soon, emptied dinner into the basin. The vomit brought the tears on, and then the dam was chipped, and out came everything.

She let go of the toilet and curled up on the bath mat, just big enough to keep her shoulders off the tiles while letting her press her cheeks to them. And she cried, and she listened to the little thoughts of the doorman.

Cab driver. Cab driver. She’d been so fucking careless. So eager to crawl into bed with Ortega again that she hadn’t even remembered to do something so fucking routine as scramble a cab driver’s memories of her.

She wanted to rinse her mouth. The taste of vomit was growing quickly unbearable in her mouth. But that would mean facing the sink, and facing her reflection. She stared up at the mirror from her position on the floor, where it reflected nothing but the door across from it, until the taste truly became too much. She pulled herself up to the counter. Turned on the tap. Braced herself, white-knuckled, against the stone.

She bent down to scoop water into her mouth and came face-to-face with Ricardo’s razor. He shaved there in the morning. Could she pull the blades out? Dig them deep and cut the tattoos off? Wouldn’t anything be better than this, even disfiguration? She could take the pain, couldn’t she? If it meant keeping him?

Because now he knew. He’d gotten a good look. And... he would know, if she tried. What part of her body had his blind hands not touched, that he would not notice a hundred new scars, ragged, deep?

It wouldn’t heal in time anyway. She’d kill herself from blood loss trying.

She felt out for stray thoughts and found none, only the white noise static of Ortega’s head, walking slowly down the hall. Loud enough so she would hear him coming and not spook, but not forcefully, no storming or stomping. He tended to forget that she could feel him there, if not read his thoughts.

She didn’t often wish that she could -- read his mind, that is. Part of the reason she liked spending time with him was the impassable static of his thoughts. She could relax around him like she could no one else. But she needed to know now how much he knew. Had he made the connection? Did he know what she was? Was he angry? Disgusted?

Was he looking up a number to call?_ Hello, ma’am, I’ve got a rogue machine here? _Would they be here within the hour?

Ricardo knocked. “Annie? Please -- please, talk to me,” his voice came, muffled, from the other side. He sounded worried. He wasn’t the sort to fake that, but her paranoid mind refused to believe it, and she pressed herself to the wall opposite the door. Inches from the window sill.

Was it worth it to jump?

The bathroom dripped caramel in the low sun that seeped through the blinds. The air was heavy. Sticky. She first noticed the window because it spelled escape, until she remembered that this was not a second story but a skyscraping penthouse, and now amount of acrobatic finesse would make a topple from that window survivable.

If the Farm was coming to collect her, such a suicidal drop was far more appealing. They weren’t waiting below to scrape her off the pavement. Not yet.

It would be poetic, certainly.

“Please open the door. I’m not -- you’re -- you’re safe. Come out, talk to me.”

Her hands itched against the wall. He really did sound worried. She hadn’t had any composure to begin with, so there was nothing to crack. What she had been unwilling to believe ten seconds ago now broke her heart to hear. She wouldn’t jump. How could she put him through that again? How could she, when the only reason she was holed up here, sobbing into her hands, was because she didn’t want to lose him, she didn’t want him to stop -- to stop --

He’d made so many steadfast proclamations over these last few months. He’d never let anything happen to her. Never let anything get between them. Never again. And the word he used now, the word her mouth wouldn’t even make the sounds for, the word she couldn’t think without sobbing.

And she thought about it. She could practically hear how he’d murmured that he loved her, could practically feel his breath, hot and damp, against her collarbone in the dark. She didn’t want him to stop loving her. She didn’t want to lose him.

She’d thought of this moment when he’d said it.

When she’d woken up sore and broken and full of needles under a too-tall whitewash ceiling after Heartbreak, she’d met a faceless face, one of the Farm’s scientists, in charge of fixing her. Reprogramming her. She thought about what he told her when she proclaimed she was not “thing” because she was in love: so you think.

He loved her, so he thought. But now he knew.

Any sobs she’d held back broke, at that. She slid down the wall again, eye shut, shaking, shaking, heart pounding so that it rocked her body with every beat, and she wept.

Ricardo must have heard. He knocked more insistently, turned the handle like he could will it open. “Please, Annie, please. Open the door -- I -- we” Panic colored his words. She couldn’t feel it, but she could. He hesitated a beat, and then raised his voice. “I’ll break down this door if I have to.”

Annie flinched, pressed herself more firmly into the wall and stared at the wood grain. “Would you really do that?” she said softly, voice thick with tears.

(Jesus, she sounded so small, so afraid. Afraid of him. What had he done? Why had he said that? A knife in the chest would’ve felt better than this. He pressed his forehead against the wood and shut his eyes tight.)

“No, Jesus, of course, I wouldn’t.”

He stopped knocking. She would’ve thought he’d left if she had not heart the soft void crackle of his presence just on the other side of the door. They stayed in silence for a while, neither of them talking, until she ran out of tears and then some, until the sun set fully and the room grew dark enough for the little night light plugged in beside the sink to blink on.

There was no use in her staying there all night. If he had stopped loving her, he would not love her more the longer she hid. He would not know any less. She pulled herself up the wall and lingered there for a moment. Facing him would hurt. But there were only two exits from this room, and one was marginally less survivable than the other. 

She turned the lock deliberately. It clicked and jolted the door a little. She would walk past him and gather her clothes and dress herself in the elevator and go home and throw her stupid phone into the stupid ocean and disappear and stop thinking about him and stop thinking about him and stop thinking about him.

Not so.

He caught her arm when she tried to push past him, not even two steps out of the bathroom. Not rough, but still firm. She tried to keep walking and he held on, and he held when she tugged harder, until she had to turn to look at him, pry his hand off hers, and good God this had all been so much easier in theory, on the other side of the door, when she didn’t have to look at his worried face and tearful eyes.

And then he pulled her to his chest, wrapped his arms fully around her. Still in his undershirt. Still smelling like cologne. And warm, and solid, and comforting. Embraces like this had made her, stupid and careless, believe him when he said he would never let anything happen to her again. He buried his face in the crook of her neck and his cheeks were wet.

Her skin would rend or tear or turn to dust. Her brain was a bubble that would pop and set everything to silence, but it hadn’t popped yet. It was all pressure, about to explode. She was being torn apart. It was too much. He should hate her. He did? He would. Even if he didn’t know it yet. She wriggled in his grasp, worked her hands up between them so she could get enough leverage to shove him off.

They stood a foot or so apart in the hallway, in a standoff, until Annie took a step back, and then another. He didn’t try to close the distance or touch her again, and so she turned her back on him and made straight for the main room.

He followed at a safe distance, reappearing at the mouth of the hall and lingering there, balling and relaxing his fists in an anxious tic, not pressing further into the room. She clasped her bra and adjusted herself in it. And she could feel him looking. Staring. Eyes tracing the orange geometry on her skin.

“This is stupid to ask because I know you’re not, but are you alright, Annie?”

“You’re right. That is a stupid thing to ask.” She walked around the room, searching for her discarded shirt, and then swiped it up and began undoing the rest of the buttons, straightening out the sleeves.

“You know I’d never hurt you, don’t you? Why’d you run from me?”

She shrugged the shirt back on her shoulders only just in time to hear him, and her fingers fumbled on the buttons when she tried to do them up. Why’d he have to catch her in the hallway? Ruin all her momentum? She hadn’t spent any time thinking of what she’d say to him when he asked. She hadn’t thought he’d ask at all. And she cast around for a retort, a way to shut him up, stun him so she could run, and she found nothing. Instead, bubbling out came, soft and small and creaking, “You weren’t supposed to find out.”

“Find out --? Were you just going to hide from me forever?”

She knew the accusatory tone she’d heard in that question wasn’t actually there. It sparked a little anger in her, nevertheless. Hadn’t she tried to stay away from him? Hadn’t she always? Hadn’t she pushed him away and had him push and push and push right back, and ruin so many things because he just couldn’t, wouldn’t leave her alone? And now he was chiding her for not having planned for the reveal of something he’d practically ripped from her? She tried to swallow it down, but it came out biting anyway. “You don’t get it.”

“Then make me get it. Make me understand. I want you to trust me, Annie, and I don’t --”

She rounded on him, cut him off sharply. “I’m a fake, Ricardo. A thing. A tool, meant to look human until you look too close. I’m empty, nothing, I’m nothing and you convinced yourself you were in --” The word caught in her throat. She tried to swallow it down, too. She tucked her shirt in. Different tactic. She was barely thinking clearly enough to come up with tactics. If he were anyone else she would’ve made him understand, would’ve shown him, broadcast her memories right to him, punish him, watch him crumple and ask “Now do you get it?”

But he was not anyone else. He was Ricardo. She had to say it if she wanted him to hear her.

“Can you imagine watching your heart beat in your chest, under your peeled back skin and muscle, under your broken ribs? Faceless men in lab coats observing how your organs work as you lie on a table they had to strap you to because they cut you open without anything to numb the pain -- because you’re a useful tool to them and not much else, and they open you up with as much gentleness as you would a broken clock? Can you imagine? I don’t fucking have to.”

Had there been anything left in her stomach, she might’ve been on the verge of vomiting again. But the words came up like vomit anyhow. She’d undone the kink in the hose and the water was coming out full-force now.

“And do you know how it feels to be told every day that no one ever saw you as anything but a thing? They pull off your fingernails when you argue. They choke you when you say it isn’t true. Starve you when you insist that he’s coming for you, he cared about you, he loved you, he wouldn’t leave you here to suffer like this, wouldn’t let them do this to you?”

She didn’t think she had anything left to cry. Surely, by now, her tear ducts should have been empty like her stomach, all dry. But tears came, despite herself, and Ricardo surged forward, protective, like he always was. Like he wasn’t hearing any of what she was saying. She swatted him away before he could touch her.

“Fingers and toes broken? Teeth pulled? Electrocuted? Drugged? Raped? Poisoned? Something, something, every fucking day, for four years?” Her hands stayed at her side, balled into fists, fingernails cutting crescents into her palms. She tried to keep the edge in her voice, but it broke. Shattered. “And you wanted me to tell you? To trust you, even more than I did before Heartbreak, when last time I trusted you, you let them take me? Forgot about me while they broke me a thousand times into a thousand shards until all I was was broken? Until you couldn’t touch me without getting cut? You wanted me to tell you? Give you the power to hand me back to them?”

Hurting was easy. Ricardo took every sentence like a blow to the gut, deflated, shoulders slumped. It wasn’t often that he was at a loss for words, and yet he stood there, mouth parted, eyes watering, managing only, “Annie...” soft and plaintive. His eyes swept over all the scars he could see, on her hands and wrists, on her chest and neck, like he was seeing them new. He didn’t reach out to touch her again, but she could see that he wanted to.

Annie took a steadying breath, wiped the back of her hand across her cheeks. “It sounds like I blame you. I don’t, not anymore. I didn’t want to lie to you, Ricardo. But I couldn’t tell you, either.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Jesus, fuck, I’m sorry. I should’ve -- I --”

“I need to go.” She buttoned up her shirt the rest of the way, fingers still clumsy, but mostly functional.

“Annie, I need you to know -- I -- this doesn’t change how I feel about you.” He said it with such panic. Quickly, like if he didn’t get it out, she’d turn to smoke.

“It should.”

“It doesn’t. You’re Annie. You’ve always been. Always will be. And I love her. You. I love you, no matter what.”

He did touch her, then. Closed most of the distance between them and took her hand, so softly, before it could tie the neat bow around her neck. She didn’t look up at him, but managed to restrain her instinct to flinch away.

This was getting too hard. Her head hurt, her muscles felt weak. “I -- I need to go,” she repeated.

“Please stay.”

Annie shook her head, too forcefully. Too much. Too much.

“We’re being honest tonight, so here’s my secret: I’m afraid, every minute, that I’m one wrong move away from losing you again. And tonight has felt like one big wrong move.”

“I’m not going to disappear.”

“Would you tell me if you were?”

She glanced up at him and swallowed thickly, but said nothing.

“And the thought of you being alone tonight... I can’t stand it.”

Silence settled over them for a moment. She neither assented nor refused, and so he tested the waters with a step back, back towards his bedroom, still holding her hands. And Annie followed him.

(He’d never felt so at peace, so right, as holding Annie while she drifted to sleep. He’d come close to this, those nights they yawned together on his sofa, and closer still when he’d breathed into her in the dark, but not like this. Not like this, with her head propped on his bicep and one hand buried in her curly hair, cupping the base of her skull, the other splayed between her shoulder blades, and the moonlight across his bedspread, casting it all in pale glow, and across her shoulder and arm, curled against his chest, illuminated the same. Feeling the steady ebb and flow of her breathing, and her face serene, without the usual creases of concern.

“Annie?” he whispered, tilting his head to look at her.

She didn’t answer for a moment, and then mumbled a, “Hm?”

“I should have said earlier. I’d die before I let anyone hurt you again.”

She didn’t acknowledge that she’d heard him immediately, and he thought she might’ve been fully asleep. But then she pulled herself closer, tucked her head between his neck and shoulder. And that was enough for him. Maybe he didn’t care if she’d heard or understood. He had to say it for himself, like speaking it aloud would hold him to it. He couldn’t think about what happened to her. He knew himself well enough for that. Knew better than to let his brain wrap around it, because dwelling on it might incite him to do something stupid, and that wouldn’t help her pain. It was enough to say it would never happen again. It would have to be.)

It was funny how these things went. How she’d left the Farm so full of hatred for him. How she wanted to see him suffer. And how she had seen him suffer, at her own hands. She hadn’t reveled in it then, hurting him. And now the thought of him getting hurt protecting her made her stomach turn, heart shutter.

She buried her face in his neck again, listened to his steady breathing, smelled the cologne and lingering dryer sheet cotton smell on the pillow cases.

“Ricardo?” she said finally, worrying all the same that he’d fallen asleep, too. She didn’t move from her comfortable crook, didn’t even open her eyes. Looking at him, she might chicken out. She couldn’t.

“Yeah?”

“I should’ve said earlier that I love you, too.”

It didn’t catch in her throat this time, but rolled out, soft, kind. She did. She did. He rubbed a hand down her back, warm and firm and protective. She didn’t look up at him. She would’ve had to wipe whatever smug look he was wearing off his face if she had.