"Hello, Letty."
-*-
Letty sat up from bed, softly, so as not to stir the slumbering man next to her and pressed the receiver of the phone hard to her ear. She clenched her jaw, gritting her teeth behind her lips, her knuckles white from gripping the phone so hard.
"Who is this?" she repeated, her tone a harsh whisper.
"You know who this is, senorita Ortiz. Stop acting a fool."
She could hear the smirk in his voice and she wanted to throw the phone across the room. She felt Dom moving next to her and she fell silent, her voice dropping even lower.
"What do you want?" she asked, standing up.
"You, my dear. Only you."
"Well you can get ass-fucked with a crowbar, cabron," she growled in reply.
"I know where you are. And I know that the Torettos and your friends are with you. If you don't come to me, I'll come to you…and there will be hell to pay."
Letty's eyes widened and she looked at Dom. Her sweet, hard-assed Dom who loved her as much as he could. More than anyone else ever had. This is what she had feared most of all. That someone would come for him, for her family in its entirety, and try to destroy them.
She was silent for a long time and then:
"When and where?"
"Tonight. At the parking garage where you used to hang out with your friends and watch the drift races. Come alone."
She looked at Dom again, a feeling of dread and sorrow twisting in her chest. She swallowed down a sob and then whispered, "I'll be there."
The line went dead.
She placed the receiver down and laid down, herself, pressing her body against Dom's. It made her want to cry when his sleeping form turned over and pulled her closer.
Forgive me.
-*-
Dom was deliriously happy. He hadn't been so pleased in a long time. He hadn't been so elated, in fact, since the last time he'd been so close to Letty. She was his entire world. Of course, people around him had always believed he was a womanizer who liked to flirt and drive fast cars.
But Letty was everything to him. She had been by his side through everything. She never gave up on him. She loved him.
She still loved him.
He felt a warm body press against his in the midst of his sleep and he pulled it closer.
She was soft of skin, but hard of personality. 20% Angel, 80% Devil as he'd told that woman who'd helped him bring down Braga. Letty was his perfect woman. His Letty.
He dreamed of her for all of his hours of sleep, pressed close to her soft body, feeling her beauty radiate off of her and onto him, a glorious feeling of closeness and he felt when she shifted from his arms and stood.
He felt her but he did not wake.
Not until much later.
He opened his eyes and sat up, stretching his large, burly form. He blinked sleep from his eyes and looked around. Letty was not in the room.
He stood up, ignoring his own nakedness and went into the bathroom in search of her but she wasn't there either. He pulled on his pants and went back to his own room, but no Letty.
Finally, he returned to Letty's room and a deep frown was creasing his face. Then he saw it. Lying on her pillow.
A note.
He went over and picked the scrap of paper up, gingerly, and held it up so he could read the small, scribbly handwriting.
Dear Dom,
You're gonna hate me. I know you are. But I can't let you get hurt. He threatened you. He threatened Mia and Brian and Vince and Leon. I love you more than I've ever loved anyone in my whole life, Dom and losing you again would kill me. I'm going to face this, face my own shit, and I can't drag you into it. So I understand if you hate me for pulling a "you" but maybe now I understand why you did it a little better.
Don't follow me. Please.
I love you,
Letty
Dom crumpled the note in his large fist and growled, deeply, squeezing his eyes closed. "Dammit, fucking dammit, Letty, what the fuck is wrong with you?!"
He pulled his clothes back on, swiftly, and walked out of the room. Not follow her, his ass. He was going to follow her to the ends of the earth until she stopped being so damned stubborn!
He went to talk to Johnson.
-*-
The team was still down in the bar, laughing and drinking, when they saw Dom stomp by the bar and into the lobby.
Each one of them stood up and paid for the drinks and then rushed out to follow him. Mia caught up to her brother and grabbed his arm. "Dom, what's going on? Where's Letty?"
"Gone! She fucking left to go meet the guy who's hunting her!" He bellowed, anger and fear filling him.
Mia's eyes widened and she stopped as Dom charged forward. Tears welled in her fear-filled eyes and she turned and looked at Brian, who caught up to her. He hugged her as she explained what Dom had just told her and his lips pulled into a deep frown.
Vince and Leon ran to catch Dom, who explained that he was going to see the man that was supposed to be in charge of protecting Letty. Vince and Leon made a decision to go with him, and they refused to take no for an answer.
Mia and Brian followed.
-*-
Johnson and his team were staying in a hotel down the street. That day, for some reason, he had a knot low in his gut that was making him a little nauseated. He had downed two bottles of Pepto Bismol already and was working on a third.
"Ackland, you're going to make yourself even more sick if you keep drinking that stuff like its Kool-Aid," murmured Manson, placing her cheek in her hand and watching him, intently.
"Doesn't matter. Something's off. Can't you feel it? Something's about to go seriously wrong. Something—"
There was a loud, obnoxious knock on the door.
The whole team looked up from their work. Johnson placed down his bottle and took a step toward it.
"Identify yourself," he said loudly toward the door.
"Johnson, let me the fuck in!"
Manson pursed her lips. "That would be Toretto."
Johnson gave her a stale expression. "Good observation, Carolyn."
He moved to the door and wrapped his fingers around the knob before pulling it open and looking dead into the face of a very angry Dominic Toretto. Accompanied by four other worried faces.
"What is it Toret—"
"Letty's gone."
"What?!"
Now Johnson understood the sick feeling in his stomach and he flopped down in a chair, massaging the bridge of his nose. "What do you mean she's gone?"
"I mean that psycho bastard somehow musta contacted her because she left me this." He thrust the note into Johnson's hand. "And she's fucking gone."
Johnson's eyes scanned the words on the paper and the ill feeling grew before he placed the paper down and looked up.
"Is there any way to find out where she might be meeting him?" Dom asked, trying to calm himself a little bit.
Johnson looked at Dom before he chugged down the third bottle of Pepto and sighed. "I don't know, Toretto. Possibly. If we ask around a little bit. I mean, we don't even know how she's getting there—"
"She's still got the Mustang," Dom replied. He remembered seeing it out front after Mia had called him. Of course, that memory was a little bit of a blur. When it came to last night, his brain was definitely—and for once—not focused on cars.
"That's Boswell's car, right?"
Dom nodded. "Yeah."
Johnson looked at a member of his team. "Find that kid's number."
Dom blinked.
Johnson murmured, "I have an idea."
-*-
Anything, Twinkie?
"Nah, man, I ain't seen nothin' yet," murmured the other man into a communicator that had been given to him by those suits. He, Sean and Neela were checking all of their usual hangouts. Restaurants, car shows, clubs. No Letty.
At this point in time, Twinkie was driving to the drift garage and his eyes narrowed when he found that each entrance into the parking garage was blocked off by big, clunky sedans.
He pulled up. "Yo, what's goin' on? Ain't this a drift garage?"
An obviously Latino man turned to him and said: "Closed for renovation, hombre."
"Oh, really? Well, damn. Ain't that a shame," Twinkie murmured. "Guess I'll just go home."
He turned his truck around and murmured, "Think I found it, Sean. The drift garage is being guarded by a couple of Ricky Martin wannabes blocking the entrances."
Thanks, Twinkie. Good job. I'll call Toretto back.
Twinkie frowned. Hope you're all right, Letty.
-*-
"Uh huh? Yeah. Thanks, Sean," murmured Dom and then handed the phone to Johnson. He talked with Sean for a moment and also thanked him before hanging up the phone. Then he turned his eyes to Dom and frowned. "We go in on this together, Toretto, you hear me?"
"Fuck you, Johnson," Dom replied. "I'm going to get her back."
He turned to leave.
"Dammit, Toretto, stop! You won't help Letty if you go charging in and get yourself killed. We need a plan!" Johnson barked.
"Dom, please listen to him," Mia called from the corner of the room. "Please…no more death. Please, Dom."
Dom clenched his jaw and balled his fists at his sides. He didn't want to just wait around while that madman was possibly murdering the only woman he'd ever loved. But he calmed himself and shook his head. "Fine."
"Good." Johnson stood up. "Now let's get started."
-*-
Teiichi came into his friend's hotel and asked the man at the desk to fetch him.
Teguchi walked out.
"Teguchi, how are you?" asked Teiichi, smiling a little at his good friend. "That girl I sent…is she all right?"
Teguchi frowned. "She's gone, my friend. One of my staff went up to her room and she's gone. She has not returned. And we assume she's been gone since early in the day."
Teguchi's eyes widened. "No…she was supposed to stay here! Do you know where she went?"
"No."
Teiichi's eyes darted back and forth as he thought of where she might've gone.
"A man stomped through here later in the day, though and I heard him telling his friends that she had gone to meet someone," Teguchi added.
"I heard something!" the man at the desk said. They both turned to him. "When she left. She was mumbling and she looked a little scared. She said something about races. Drift…something. And parking. I couldn't hear everything."
Races. Drift. Parking.
The parking garage where the drift races were held!
"Thanks!" Teiichi replied and then he rushed out of the hotel. He couldn't let her be lost. Not like Retsu.
It was then Teiichi realized that he had fallen in love with Leticia Ortiz. He loved her as he had Retsu—perhaps he saw her as Retsu, or perhaps a part of her as Retsu but something inside of him had drawn him to her and he loved her.
He would not let her die.
-*-
Ortega was smoking a cigarette when he heard the heavy footfalls of platform boots. He smirked. "Glad you could make it, senorita."
He flicked his cigarette away and turned, raising an eyebrow. She was quite the looker. The pinnacle of perfection in a Hispanic woman. He was half-tempted to force himself upon her before he killed her. But she looked like a fighter. And he wanted to get out of this clean and unharmed.
He leaned against his car and glanced behind her at the Mustang parked a few feet away and then plucked another cigarette from the pack and placed it between his lips. He lit it up.
"You know, chain smoking's bad for you," Letty grumbled. She was glaring, darkly, at him.
"You shouldn't be worrying about my lifespan, chica. You should be worrying about your own," he murmured.
"Fuck you," she spat. "What the hell do you want with me?"
Ortega laughed outright, a chilling sound, as he crossed one ankle over the other and pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, blowing the smoke out. "What I've always wanted from you, senorita. What Braga wanted from you after he was done with you…"
Letty narrowed her eyes at him and then froze when he pulled a gun faster than she could blink and pointed it at her.
"…I want you dead."
-*-
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
AN: Fellow Dotty fans, our voices are being heard! I found this on Wikipedia today: "Letty Ortiz, Michelle Rodriguez's character who was killed off in the 4th film, has developed a cult following to the point where a "Bring Back Letty" campaign has been created on the popular networking site, Myspace. Universal recently responded to the outcry of support for the character, stating that they are overwhelmed by the response the character has gotten and indicated that they are considering bringing her back for the 5th movie."
But don't stop fighting! Sign those petitions! Contact Universal! (I'd post links but I dunno what fanfiction(dot) net would do with them) And we'll have a chance to BRING BACK LETTY!