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The job goes off without a hitch. It's almost comically easy, muddling the minds of the two toughs doing the handoff. You exploit a blind spot in the security cameras to get close to the dead drop location, then swap the money-stuffed suitcase for one weighted down with paperbacks. Then you weave an illusion when the guy opens it to count the stacks of cash. The whole thing is over in less than ten minutes, and now you're fifteen grand closer to your new life. You slip into the alley a few blocks down. Rosie should be waiting two streets beyond the chain link fence at the end. Suddenly, the Rat King goes into high alert. Someone's coming. The sound of running footsteps slices through the quiet.
You're floored to see Ortega appear at the end of the alleyway. He's silhouetted in the bright streetlights, implants sparking with a sharp snapping sound. He cuts an intimidating figure, and you feel your stomach flip. Ortega always manages to get to you. Even if he has no clue he's doing it.
You don't have time to admire him for long. Ortega streaks down the narrow alley and throws his whole body into a punch directly at your face. No banter, not even a statement. He probably figures Mirror won't answer anyway – you've gained a reputation for being succinct.
You usually focus on your telepathy in a fight, but with Ortega it's all memory. Your eyes dart from his face to his chest to his fists, calculating. Ortega's reckless; he always wants to hit hard and fast no matter how much it exposes him to a counterattack.
You can definitely use that. You move ever so slightly to the side, weaving out of his path to throw him off balance. In one smooth motion you redirect him past you, like a bullfighter dangling a red cape. He lets out a frustrated growl and spins to face you.
"Don't mess with me," he barks. "I know you, Mirror. You don't play games."
It's true, you usually don't. But toying with Ortega has a dual purpose: one, you really don't want to hurt him. It took a chunk out of your heart the last time, seeing him lying bleeding in the street. Knowing that you'd done it to him. Knowing that someday you might have to finish the job.
You mentally shake your head, hard. It won't come to that. You won't let it. Ortega goes for a different tactic, using the brick wall to get a leaping start. He aims a brutal kick at your midsection. It's sloppy, easily read. The second purpose in holding back is to piss him off.
You duck out of the way with ease. The alley is littered with wet leaves and detritus, and he lands badly. His foot slides and he only barely manages to keep upright. "Pendejo-" He bites down on the curse and shakes out his limbs. You don't know if he's saying it to you or to himself. A split second later he's flinging himself towards you again. Your brow furrows as you bat aside his swings, or dodge them entirely. Something's wrong. Ortega's known for being reckless, yes, but this is different. This is... wild.
He isn't the kind of fighter that turns his brain off – not that you could ever confirm it – and his attacks aren't benefiting from the raw anger behind them. They're stronger, yes, but slower and much more predictable. He's not even close to making contact when you – well, sidestep again. His charge is strong enough to blow a chunk out of the brick, leaving a blackened crater. He whirls on you and lunges, but he’s slowed just enough by his limp. You duck down and hoist him up over your head, using his momentum to flip him ass over teakettle. He lands hard on his back with another muffled curse.
"What are you doing? It's like you want to get killed!" You hope the voice modulators make it sound more mocking and sinister than genuinely concerned. What's gotten into him?
Ortega rolls over with painful slowness and gets to his feet. He draws his fists up in a brawler's stance. "That's where you're wrong," he says in a low voice. A fierce smile twitches at the corner of his mouth. "I'm not dying anytime soon. Not while I have somebody to protect."
The thoughts sickens you right to your core. He's doing this out of some misguided attempt to keep you safe. From what? From Mirror? He had no idea what actually made you freeze in the middle of the night at every sound. Every creak that could be a booted foot or the front door easing open. Ortega couldn't protect you from a threat he could never understand. He was being such an idiot! Ridiculous, you think, Shiloh wouldn’t want-
Oh. You hadn't been thinking that. You'd just said it aloud. Ortega's face darkens. You're still reeling from your verbal misstep when he checks you hard in the stomach and slams you into the wall. Your armor rattles around you with the impact. The breath is knocked from your lungs. Obviously the suit stops the worst of it, but you feel bruises welling up along your arms and ribs. Ortega's in your face in an instant, practically nose-to-nose with your reflective mask. Your insides liquefy – this is it. Your secret is out, and you have to face it. You have to face Ortega with no more armor.
"How do you know that name?" Electricity crackles over your suit, yellow warning signs flashing in your HUD. "What did you do to them?"
What did you… You can't help it – you let out a positively wicked laugh. His wild assumption has given you the perfect escape route.
"Are you with Hollow Ground?" His tone is rough, barely restrained. He hits you with another barrage of volts. "Answer me!"
You let him keep pinning you and smile behind the helmet. You feel an overwhelming urge to do the pettiest, most selfish thing you could imagine. Ortega punched a reporter in the face at your funeral, probably for the mildest disrespect to his partner. You wonder what you could make him do.
"You think I don't keep an eye on my enemies? You never hid who you are. You don't think twice when you visit your little sidekick, where they sleep at night." A meaningful pause. "I paid them a visit myself yesterday evening."
He cocks back to deck you with a fistful of lightning, and you shove off the wall. It's time to make use of the extra strength imbued in your armor. You spin Ortega like a dancer and twist his arm behind his back. Your other arm locks around his throat. He scrabbles at you uselessly, his nails unable to gain purchase on the smooth plates. You'd taken care to add some height with the suit – a villain as short as you are would be notable, not to mention a bit silly looking. You still have to forcibly hunch him over to murmur in his ear.
"Not that I'm surprised you’d worry," you say, "over a half-rate telepath who nearly got themselves killed. They never even sensed me coming. I can't imagine what possessed you to make them your sidekick, much less still care about them. Or are you angling for the next notch in your bedpost?" You want him to say it, say what makes you different. You want to wring it out of him.
"Chinga tu madré," he spits. He's straining against you, still sparking despite how futile it is. A muscle jerks in his jaw.
"They screamed for you. They begged in their mind, for you to rescue them."
Sudden anger lances into your gut. You did. A thousand times. When the knife went in and the machine breathing for you ached in your throat. You try to deny it, but you can't – in those first hours, you really believed he might save you. You waited second after second for him to appear. To pull you out of the rubble like he had with Psychopathor. To run the ambulance carrying your broken body off the road. Even for him to burst into the operating room, break the bonds around your wrists, and carry you in his strong arms out of the ruined Farm like an action movie hero.
And then the hope died for good.
"They never stopped thinking about you. Visualizing your face over and over..." Another bitter laugh. "That's the only thing that kept them sane. But their fear was so overwhelming. They tried so hard to hide, for so long, because they were afraid. They were so vulnerable, so fragile. They'd been through enough for a dozen lifetimes. And now their worst nightmare has come true." The fight goes out of Ortega in a rush, his body slackening. "Because of you. Because you waltzed into their life again and put them right back in danger."
He says nothing. His silence is brittle and intoxicating. It seeps into your mind, the thought that now he’s on the back foot, forced to confront the same kind of cancer buried deep inside you. The knot of pain and shame and guilt and fear that you know will never leave, the one he keeps prodding at whether he means to or not. You can finally hit back.
"I enjoyed it, you know. They fought, of course, but it was so easy to overpower them. I wrapped their weak mind in a cozy cocoon, and then their body was mine." A strange sensation darts through you, a little like when you slip into Claude. This is Mirror speaking. Maybe their words are truer than you'd like to admit. But you can't stop. "I wonder what I'll do with them... How best I can hold them over you... Unless you save them, of course." Your mask is very nearly touching his cheek. "Oh, Ortega. You will save them this time, won't you?"
"Please." Ortega's body hitches. Fuck, you think. He isn't – he isn't crying, is he? "Please, just don't hurt them. I'll do anything you want. You can kill me, even. But please. Let Shiloh go."
A wave of ice-cold guilt floods over you, your heart aching. This is demented, a hundred times worse than inflicting physical damage. You're psychologically torturing the man you loved – love, dammit – for your own sick satisfaction. You're acting like the inhuman freak that you are.
Ortega chooses this moment to surge powerfully up into your chest, knocking you completely off balance. He thrusts his hands into the opening at your neck, channeling a vicious current right into the thinnest part of your suit. Your HUD goes into crisis mode, and every hair on your body stands on end. He knees you in the stomach, then follows up with two quick punches that send you staggering.
"Steel was right," he says, baring gritted teeth. Triumph glitters in his voice like broken glass. "You are soft." Ortega drops his elbow onto your shoulder, sending a bolt into the blow. You're nearly sent sprawling with the force.
This is going bad, fast. You have to get out of here. You'd almost forgotten your prize, stashed behind the dumpster. Ortega tries to grapple you into a headlock, but you narrowly slither away and make for the case. One hand grips the handle while the other unclips two smoke bombs from your cape. The alley fills with impenetrable mist. Lightning licks at your heels as Ortega electrifies the soaked ground – but it isn't enough.
You're over the chain-link fence, across two streets, and into Rosie's waiting car. The case clatters into the backseat as Rosie leadfoots it towards the main road. You’re silent for the duration of the ride. Your mind is spinning, replaying the fight again and again. Ortega had all but said how much he cared about you. But it was a trick, right? A bird faking a broken wing to out-gambit a gullible predator.
Then why did it have to sound so real?
By the time she drops you at the storefront, Ortega's called you six times. You catch him on the second ring of the seventh call.
"Ortega...?" You make your voice thick with sleep as you pull the helmet off. "What the fuck is wrong? It's like two in the morning."
"Dios mio. Fuck." He's breathing hard into the receiver. "Where are you? Why weren't you answering? Are you okay?"
"I was sleeping, in my bed," you answer. You do your best annoyed grumble.
His tone sharpens. "What did I get you for your 25th birthday?"
"... What?" Huh. It's not the worst impulse, when dealing with a powerful telepath. A birthday isn't a key memory, something necessary for a successful impersonation. You allow yourself a chuckle. "Nothing. You completely forgot until Themmy brought it up a week later. I thought you were going to throw yourself off a bridge in shame."
“Cabrón astuto…” You can barely make the words out as he holds the phone away, but you catch that particular phrase. You've earned it. He puts his mouth to the receiver again and sighs, clearly relieved. "I should have. But I threw a hell of a rager that weekend instead, huh?"
"I can still taste that industrial-strength sangria you made.” You can. Your eyes flutter closed with the happy memory. “Are you okay? You sound like you just ran a marathon."
"... Yeah. I'm fine." He hesitates, fumbling for a lie. "Steel said – somebody saw Mirror, at your apartment complex. So I just thought..." He trails off.
"I don't see why Mirror would care that I existed." You could tease him for thinking like a comic-book superhero, anxious over his damsel in distress. But you'd just finished indulging in that particular fantasy yourself. "Maybe he just can't resist the state-of-the-art laundry facilities."
He laughs, the shakiness leaving his voice at last. "He's planning the biggest laundry heist in Los Diablos history."
"He touches my good jeans, he's dead."
This gets a real belly laugh. The sound warms your cheeks even as it churns in your stomach. "Okay. Glad to hear you're good, and sorry I woke you. Just – if you see anything... Even if you just feel-"
"I will." Your lie is much easier than his. "The next time I scare myself shitless watching a horror movie, I'll call you first. I..." You stop short. It's true, of course, the thing you almost say. You think of how hard he fought, convinced you were in danger. How hard he fought trying to protect you from yourself.
It gives you the tiniest sliver of hope again.
"I'll see you around, Ortega," you finish.
"See you 'round, Shy." The line goes quiet for a long second. "Sleep tight." It still takes him another second to actually hang up the phone. Fuck, you think. If he ever finds out you're Mirror, you are going to look seriously unhinged. But that would also be the least of your problems.
At least there's one less worry on your mind when you finally drift off to sleep. Ricardo Ortega loves you. Of that you have no doubt.