Hello darlings, I'm so sorry it took so long for me to update. The school year is over, so you can look forward to more steady updates, because you are all such loyal reviewers!! Thank you all so much for the reviews, and prepare for the drama ahead!! Quick warning though, it does get sorta dark in the beginning.
Free Falling
Ch. 7
Pairing: Ryan Wolfe/ Eric Delko
It was like the time he and his sister had gone swimming drunk when they were teenagers. His chest was heaving, and he was gasping for air, then suddenly, his lungs would respond.
Ryan repeatedly tried to draw breath, staring at his reflection in the glass walls of the Miami Dade Crime Lab. His eyes started to widen and water as his vision was interrupted by black blotches across his sight. He slumped forward onto the table, chest heaving and catching with something blocking his airway.
And then there was black.
-oOo-
Stable. That one word was what kept Eric from going to hunt that son of a bitch from the club down; kept him in control enough not to wring the details of Ryan's condition from the doctors. He was going to be here when Ryan woke, and they were going to set things straight, God dammit.
Rubbing his eyes, Eric didn't have to glance at the clock to know what time it was. Instead, he looked over at his unexpected companion. Monica was sitting across from him in a pair of sweatpants and a sweater-vest that had been resurrected from Ryan's newbie days at the lab. Now it was covered in mascara marks from where she'd swiped tiredly at her eyes to keep awake.
It wasn't until two in the morning that the doctor finally came and uttered that sought after word. Ryan was stable- the inflammation of his organs had passed, and the anesthesia would be wearing off in a day or so. Monica, who'd sat up in her chair when the doctor came in, dropped back into it, allowing a sobbing sort of laugh out before she stood up, picking up her purse from the glass table next to her.
"Come on," she said. Eric looked up at her with a raised eyebrow. "You are in some deep shit Delko, and you have some explaining to do... and I'm hungry. You're paying." Eric mumbled a few half-hearted curses at her, but stood up and followed her out the revolving hospital doors.
Monica followed him in her car to a small 24-hour diner on a corner a few blocks from the hospital. As he parked the car, Eric noticed a small thunk every time he turned. Reaching under his seat, he rescued Ryan's phone from the dark space. The screen was lit up- Rico had called three more times. Eric slipped it into his pocket next to his own phone, as he got out and met Monica on the curb. She lead the way to a small table in the corner, and he reluctantly sat down across from her.
"So talk," she commanded, pushing back the sleeves of her sweater impatiently. "What the hell is going on?" Eric rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, kneading the cramped muscles.
"Ryan had an allergic reaction to a drug that had was slipped last night at a bar. He collapsed today during work and our boss called an ambulance." Monica's eyes narrowed as he talked, giving her the same catlike look Ryan got when he was on the clock.
"Do you know who?"
"We think it was one of the bartenders there. They've already sent someone to find him, but since he works at a club, they'd have to wait until about eleven to make sure he was there. In fact, if they haven't found him by now, he's probably not coming back," Eric sighed, as a middle-aged woman with mole on her forehead approached with coffee. Eric downed his as Monica stirred hers with a plastic spoon.
"So what-" Monica was interrupted as Eric's pocket vibrated urgently. Pulling out both phones and dropping them on the table, the two leaned over Ryan's phone to read the name on the front screen.
Rico ;)
"Oh thank god." Monica snatched up the phone and flipped it open.
"Rico! I- no this isn't Ryan, shithead. This is Monica, and- DON'T YOU HANG UP! Yes it's important, why else would I bother talking to you. Listen, Ryan is in the hospital. I'm not explaining it to you now, you need to get your ass to the 24-hour diner on the corner of Vincent and Sunset. Yeah, there's someone you're gonna need to meet- yeah, Eric Delko. Ryan? Yes, he's alive. Unconscious, but alive. No, she's not here. Yeah, yeah, I know. Bye."
She closed the phone with a snap, dropping it back next to Eric's. "He's gonna meet us here, his flight just landed. Now anyways, what to the cops plan to do once they have the bartender?"
"Probably interrogate him, take his prints, check his record. They don't have any hard evidence to hold him, so they're going to need to make him reveal himself. If that doesn't work then... we'll just have to figure something else out."
"Yes," said Monica distantly, running a finger around the rim of her coffee cup. "You probably will have to..." Before Eric could ask what she meant, the door to the shop opened and Rico walked in.
Eric hated him on sight.
Rico was about Eric's height, with shoulder-length black hair and finely arched eyebrows. He was leanly built, but less so then Ryan, who was more feminine looking. Rico had something distinctly masculine about him that set Eric on edge when he thought about Ryan and him spending any amount of time together.
Monica waved him over, and Rico came over to their table, pulling up a chair with his foot and he walked and dropping into it. He gave Monica a quick once-over and nodded before focusing on Ryan with narrowed eyes.
"So your Ryan's Eric Delko. I must say, you sounded taller when Ryan described you," he said. His voice was deep and had a seductively throaty sound to it that made Eric tense.
"I can't really say the same about you, Ryan doesn't talk about you much," Eric ground out, feeling a small sense of victory when Rico's lip curled.
"Both of you shut up. We have a lot of shit to sort through- Eric, you owe us an explanation, and Rico... we're going to need to tell him about Ryan," said Monica resignedly. Rico turned back to Eric before murmuring,
"¿Habla usted español?"
Eric nodded. "¿Sí, por qué?"
"Monica no. Quiero decir que antes nosotros le decimos algo, si usted va correr a cualquiera con esta información, nosotros no vacilaremos en quitar usted." Rico waited as Eric studied his face before nodding.
"Comprendo."
"WILL YOU BOTH FUCKING STOP THAT!" snapped Monica, pissed at being left out of the conversation, but they both ignored her.
"So who is we?" asked Eric, taking a sip of coffee as the waitress arrived with a cup for Rico. Rico took it and indicated to Monica.
"You start, I don't really come in until later," he said, stretching and glancing at his watch.
"Well, Ryan and my parents had an arranged marriage for the benefit of their parents, so they were never very in love to begin with. Over the years, the became more and more distanced, and in an attempt to bring them back together, my mother threw her husband an extravagant anniversary party, and about a month or two later, she announced to him that she was pregnant. When I was born though, they were disappointed. They had wanted a boy because my dad believed in the male birth line and wanted a son to continue his family's good name." At this, Monica paused, and both she and Rico snorted quietly then glanced at each other.
"Anyways, my father was a very wealthy... businessman, so he set me up with a few nanny's and a cook and he and my mother decided to try once more, and Ryan was born. My father... he wasn't happy, the way you'd think. Instead he was content, glad that he could return his attention to other things now that his son had been born. So for a while we didn't really see him.
"As for my mother, she threw everything she was into raising us to be successful like our father, which was probably why we're such failures as people. Don't even start," she added as Eric opened his mouth to contradict her about Ryan.
"You have to hear the whole story. When I was twelve and Ryan was eleven, my father decided it was time for us, well, Ryan to begin to learn about his business. So Ryan started coming with him to meetings every once in a while, and sometimes I was drug out and propped up to show during parties with our father's associates. Eventually, Ryan was gone as often as our father, and when he came home, he was a different person than the one I remembered. I remember at my sixteenth birthday, Ryan came with my father. He was almost... inhuman. He didn't show any emotion, hardly spoke, and he didn't like people touching him. My father was extremely proud," Monica continued, smiling bitterly.
Eric tried to picture the Ryan Monica described, remembering when Ryan had come to the lab in a snit about being transferred from patrol. How cold his eyes were and his expressionless manner, the way he seemed to glide... to be like that all the time. Eric found it difficult to imagine Ryan as that...
"Then one day, he came home on his own when I was seventeen, hiding from our tutor. After Ryan had left, I found out that the man had been a pedophile who'd been 'sleeping with' Ryan since he'd been hired. After Ryan left, he'd turned to me instead, and I was trying to stay away from him by hiding in the cellar of our house. Ryan had found me there and when I told him about the tutor, he just... lost it," she said quietly.
Eric was frozen with rage and horror, and Rico had sat up and was watching Monica carefully as she stirred her now-cold coffee with a spoon. They sat in silence for a while as the waitress came with more coffee and asked if they'd like to order anything. Rico, without bothering to ask any of the others, ordered the three of them pancakes and bacon. When the waitress left, Monica went on.
"I'd never seen anyone die except on the movies, and just watching Ryan do without even a tinge of sorrow in his expression was scary. He didn't even use any weapons to do it. When I'd told him, he grabbed my had and hauled me upstairs and told me to wait in the reception hall, so I was sitting on the sofa and suddenly I heard two... screams. I jumped and ran into the library. Our tutor was sitting in the middle of the room, and Ryan was standing across from him, observing him as the man cried. Neither of them had noticed me, and I wondered why the tutor wasn't doing anything, then I noticed what had made him cry. Both his arms were completely limp because Ryan had twisted them behind his back and broken them. Then Ryan walked around behind him and pressed his face into the man's neck. It was almost erotic, I remembered thinking. Then he whispered something in his ear and the man screamed, but Ryan grabbed the top of his head and his neck and snapped it. Our tutor was dead before he slumped."
"Fuck," Rico muttered, and Eric knew that he, like Eric, had never picture Ryan capable of something like murder, let alone doing it so unfeelingly. Monica brushed away a stray tear, and Eric realized that he couldn't bring himself to dislike her as much anymore. Rico rubbed that back of his neck, and Monica blearily glanced at the clock above the counter, while Eric contemplated everything.
Ryan Wolfe was not who Eric thought he was, that was certain. There was a deeper, darker side of him, and only a small part of it had been revealed by Monica yet. Ryan Wolfe was the victim of a pedophile. Ryan Wolfe was a murderer. Ryan Wolfe... was a mystery. How much more was there that Eric didn't know? He had a feeling that there was something much bigger that Monica wasn't telling him yet.
"Rico," Monica finally said, gesturing to him and pouring herself another cup of coffee. "You can probably pick up from here." Rico nodded and turned slightly in his chair to face Eric.
"Ryan's father called my dad and a few others a few days after. He said that Ryan had gotten into some trouble and that they wanted us to take him somewhere for a while so that he could smooth things over. So, that night, my father drove over to Ryan's house and I came with him. I still remember him standing there in that big room. He looked... creepy. He was pale and skinny, his clothes were hanging off of him, and there were bruises up and down his back and sides. I saw them when the seatbelt caught them. He didn't talk the whole ride, just stared at the back of one of the seats. He was with us a few months, but we never really warmed up to each other. I thought he was weird and didn't want to be around him, and Ryan seemed to prefer being by himself. After a while his father called him back and I didn't see him again until his grandfather's funeral."
"In that time," Monica continued, "my father had declared him the heir of his business, so Ryan was like his shadow, never leaving his side. When he turned eighteen, my father send him to college. However, it was there he met Ryan's first attempt at rebellion against him. Ryan switched all his college courses, and when my father found out, he stopped paying tuition and demanded Ryan come home. When he refused, my father stopped talking to him, deciding that being cut off from the family accounts would bring him back. But, Ryan didn't, so they didn't speak until after he had finished college.
By then my father was desperate, and he took Ryan back. For a while, it was like it had been before, even Ryan's empty expression. Then our grandfather was shot. I think he was the one person Ryan had ever opened up to. I know he was the only one that had taken Ryan's side when he killed our tutor. My father was enraged that Ryan had caused the family so much publicity."
Here Monica stopped. Both she and Rico were watching Eric intently, who refused to give anything away. Then Monica sighed.
"Eric, I can tell that you haven't figured out who Ryan is yet. Who our father is yet. But he's going to need to tell you sometime, and it could be the death of him if we don't do it now. Our father is James Wolfe, the leader of the Vice Lords." She smiled a cold, cruel smile as Eric froze. "I can see that you remember us. Of course, we don't have too much of a reach into Miami, but there's enough..." she trailed off.
This was what Mrs. Wolfe meant by betraying the family. This was why Ryan hadn't wanted them in Miami. Was it because he didn't want them to put him in danger by coming, or he didn't want them to give him away. Ryan had said his father's business was 'a little' bigger when Eric had guessed a diamond store. Eric suddenly laughed to himself. Yes, a drug lord was definitely a little bigger than that.
So Ryan was to be taking over his father's business, Eric knew that much, but-
"You came to bring him back?" he clarified. Monica nodded, seemingly surprised by his reaction. "Why didn't he want you here?"
"Ryan hasn't lied to you Eric. No, listen, when our grandfather died, he was shot on my father's orders because he felt that he was halting Ryan's progress. It was all Ryan could take, and he left after the funeral, taking our grandfather's fortune with him. My father was... well, it's hard to explain. He declared Ryan a traitor the the gang and sent people after him. But Ryan was safe in Miami. Our father couldn't reach him here, and when the other gangs heard about him, they took him in, I guess you could say. He didn't join them, but since he lived in Miami, it gave them a good excuse to attack the Vice Lord's gang."
"I saw the scene that he caused at his grandpa's funeral," Rico continued, "And I agreed with him. A month or so later, I left the gang and followed Ryan to Miami. When I found him, Ryan damn near blew my head off." Rico said with a small smile. "I came to the apartment where he was living and knocked. He opened the door with a gun and almost put a bullet through my forehead. I ran for it, and the next day he was gone, hadn't left a trace. The landlord had a false ID, and the police are probably still looking for Viktor Lensly to this day." He laughed this time, enjoying the idea.
"Eventually I caught up with him again. This time I was smarter though, so hid in his closet when he wasn't home, and when he came into his bedroom, I knocked him out with a lamp and tied him to a bedpost. He still almost took my head off when he woke up though, withering like he was possessed. So I gagged him and explained why I was there, and I showed him the scar where I'd gotten my tattoo removed. That convinced him." Rico finished, stretching. "He went back to college for a while and joined patrol with his actual identity in order to give his father a slap in the face, and I joined one of the Miami gangs," he said with a yawn before fixing Eric with a glare.
"We're both putting a lot on the line telling you this because we think that you can help. But if you give us a reason not to trust you, I will have my people take care of it."
Eric didn't bother to react to the threat.
"I'll help you. I will do whatever it takes, but I'm not doing it for you," he said to Monica, "And I'm sure as hell not doing it for you," Eric shot at Rico. "I'll help because it's Ryan."
"Your turn to talk then, Delko," said Monica, and Rico nodded."
"I took Ryan clubbing last night, and we went to a place called Miami Heat. We went to the bar to get a drink, and the bartender gave Ryan this weird purple drink that he only drank half of before asking for vodka," he said, and he saw Rico's lips twitch. "Afterwards though, he started getting a little, well affectionate, and I thought he was finally getting the nerve to flirt, so I took advantage of it, and eventually I brought him back to the house. In the morning though... he ran. He didn't want me touching him, and then you called," he said to Monica, "And I decided that if he was going to be a coward about it, then I wasn't going to have anything to do with it, so I went to work. That's when I was told that he was in the hospital."
"So you think it was the bartender who drugged him?" asked Rico, and Eric nodded.
"He was the only one to have contact with his drink, and Ryan didn't have anything else at the club, he was with me the whole time." Monica looked thoughtful.
"Okay then, assuming that he did drug Ryan's drink. Why bother? I mean, he was with you, the bartender wasn't going to get anything out of it..." Eric shrugged.
"I think he heard us joking about not being attracted to each other and thought he'd have a chance and gave up when he saw that he didn't." Rico frowned.
"I dunno, it's an expensive drug to buy, and it would have been difficult to find it. Unless he's a gang member, I don't see how he could have had access to it."
"So you think someone gave it to him? Who would though, I mean, what are the chances that the person you're targeting just happens into the right place while you're on shift?" ask Monica.
"It had to be more organized than that, so someone who had control of informatives. That eliminates a lot of minor people. Which means that it's a higher-up who planned this," said Eric. They all fell silent as the waitress came with three plates of pancakes and a large platter of bacon. Rico grabbed his plate and stuffed an entire pancake into his mouth, then yelped when Monica stopped his foot with her heels and shot him a look of disgust.
It made Eric realize the true irony of the moment. The three of them working together- two members of enemy gangs and a CSI trying to help a cop.
Suddenly, Eric's phone rang. They all froze and stared at the cell vibrating on the center of the table. Eric slowly picked it up and flipped it open.
"Delko."
"Eric? This is Horatio. Frank found the bartender a few miles away from the club. He's in the station."
"You're sure it's him?" ask Eric, not daring to breathe in case he couldn't hear Horatio's answer.
"Yeah, it's him. Scott Barlow, the only problem is he's higher than a kite right now. We're going to have to wait an hour or so for him to become intelligible."
"Alright, thanks H. I'll be there in twenty." Shutting the phone, he looked at the other two. "They found the bartender. I'm going over to the lab." Monica reached out and snatched a napkin out of the dispenser and produced a pen.
"This is my cell phone number," she said, writing on it then passing it to Rico, who wrote his. "Call us when you have something. We're going to do a little digging. Eric nodded and put the napkin in his pocket. They all stood up and got their stuff together while Eric payed the check, then walked out to their separate cars.
By Eric's watch, it was almost six in the morning. He waited for Monica and Rico to pull out, then started his car and went in the opposite direction, heading for the Lab.
-oOo-
translation:
Do you speak spanish?
Yes, why?
Monica doesn't. I want to say that before we tell you anything, if you go running to anyone with this information, we won't hesitate to take you out.
I understand.
-oOo-
yaaaay, end of chapter 7! omg, i'm sorry if it got too heavy or if something wasn't explain thouroughly enough. Pls review and tell me if something needs fixed or you want to tell me how I did ;) let me know what you guys think of the plot, and once again, i'm sorry it took me so long to get this up!!
love you guys! Ciao
