~Ezra~

"Needles can just fuck off."

"You're supposed to be a drug lord."

"Still don't get why they shouldn't fuck off."

"It's just a teeny tiny prick-"

"Like you?"

"I will deadass stab you in the face."

Leo was a good three inches shorter than he was.

And Ezra made it his life's mission to never let him forget.

"Toddlers get vaccines." Leo was exasperated. "My pet hamster got shots."

"Did your hamster also feel like manually ripping his blood vessels out after? No? Then no comparison to your fur ball."

"Come on. It can't be that bad."

"You're right." Ezra thought about it. "It's worse."

Leo finally lost it.

"Stop throwing a hissy fit before I bitchslap you."

"Try that and you'll be six feet under the ground."

"Big talk coming from a guy flinching away from five inches of metal."

It wasn't so much the needle that Ezra was worried about. He'd been shot once, had several scrapes and scars on his body, had even broken his bones a couple of times.

It was what came after.

Considering how he needed these injections every month, he should've gotten used to it by now.

Sometimes living simply wasn't worth the hype.

It was as the thought crossed his mind that Artemis entered his study, her stride purposeful. Leo got up, placed the syringe back in the box on the table, and left with the words "I tried. He's a wimp."

"He's only human."

Ezra's respect for the woman had never been greater.

"Can we please do this some other time, Arty?" He gave her his best puppy dog eyes.

"Nope."

Heart of stone.

"Darling," she told him now firmly, her green eyes on his, "Hold out your hand."

And God help him, he did.

He hated everything about this. How her hands felt foreign on him, how she held his arm down with superhuman strength, how her rings felt cold.

She swiped a small circle with the cotton dipped in spirit over the crook of his elbow. She then took the syringe and angled it over his skin.

"Artemis, I-"

Before he could get another word out, he felt a sharp prick.

There was moment of stillness.

Then all hell broke lose.

At first, there was a slow burn where she'd pricked him. The heat then raged through his arteries like wildfire, the pain white hot as it coursed through his body.

It was all he could do to close his eyes and grip the desk, willing himself not to collapse.

And in the midst of the storm, he heard her voice.

"Ezra, be brave."

He thought, with distinct clarity, that he hated her voice.

***

"We come bearing good tidings and the address of the man who fucked us over."

It was later in the evening, with the sunset behind them, when Ezra found the energy to step out of his penthouse to meet Leo and Anton. They decided to meet at a warehouse in the Eastside, Artemis on his arm.

She'd spent the entire evening sitting on his lap, stroking circles over his open palm, whispering meaningless nothings.

He so loved her warmth.

"An apartment two blocks away from here. I pulled some strings with our friends in the S3PD and that's where they traced the phone number too." Leo said.

"Good boy." Ezra smiled, feeling better than he had in weeks.

"You talk to me like I'm your dog."

"And you pretend you're not my bitch."

Leo literally growled. Proving his point.

Anton put his hand on the blond's shoulder. "If you two are done with your pissing contest - and I hope, for the love of all that is holy, that you are - we've got business to do."

Artemis shook her head, smiling, as they headed to the cars parked outside.

Ezra wondered sometimes what she thought of them.

"Idiots." Leo clarified. "That's what she thinks of us 90% of the time."

"If you get in my head again, I'll have to give you a personal demonstration of what I can do too." Artemis called out sweetly behind her back.

The woman was terrifying sometimes.

"Finally something we can agree on." Leo muttered to Ezra, solemnly.

The Eastside was one of the poorer parts of sector 3, the buildings crowded together and the alleyways unlit. The building they'd located was dilapidated, the windows boarded up and the walls painted with grime and dust.

"First floor." Leo said, as they got out of the car. "Be prepared for some action. I doubt this is going to go down well."

There was a shadow moving through the window of where Leo pointed. Ezra doubted the man lived here, most likely he'd moved here just to get that one job done.

They moved stealthily up the stairs, Ezra's hand on the gun in his jacket, as Leo kicked open the door. The dark haired man within the apartment instantly made a run for it, sprinting across the hall and into the kitchen to the fire escape.

Luckily for them, everything was rusted.

In the time it took for the man to wedge the door open, Leo had grabbed him by the collar and hauled him onto the counter.

Anton's hazel eyes were on him in a moment and the man almost immediately slipped into a happy daze.

This was going to be easy, after all. Ezra thought, still having his gun pointed at the man for good measure.

"You'll never get anything out of this one." The man smiled.

This dissociation between words and the emotion behind them was common with Anton's influence.

However, when this man spoke there was an unsettling undertone to the words. The way he'd referred to himself in third person.

Ezra realised too late that the man's dark eyes had slits for pupils.

The man grabbed the gun from him in an instant and before anyone could react, he shot himself in the head.

"Damn."

Ezra winced as the blood splattered over them all, and the man's body collapsed to the floor, lifeless and unrecognisable.

"Our influences don't work on them?" Artemis asked, unflinching, moving onto the next order of business.

"I guess not." Anton murmured, checking the dead guy's pockets. "He has a wallet."

As the other three rifled through the thing and found nothing useful except a string on numbers scrawled hastily on a piece of paper, Ezra was deep in thought.

The influences were his own accidental creation. And with the Trinity, the only people he knew who'd been exposed to the drug, their powers could be used together.

Somebody had reverse engineered the core government formula.

And the list of people who could do that were so few and so powerful.

Ezra wondered what he'd gotten himself into.

"Hell." Leo answered for him now. "That's what we've gotten ourselves into."

***
Leo: "Vote because needles suck."