#firebreak book

mal’s not super described, other than black clothes. same with jessa: other than a jacket covered in pins and patches, and fandom shirts.

I decided to go full neonpastel, which I feel like suits her personality, and is a contrast to mal. (I did make the shirt and shoes black though, because it was looking Too bright considering the tone of the book and also like, they're not exactly rich, mismatched clothes is gonna be a given.

for the game avatars: i know it’s like, more of a hyperrealistic military game but a) i’m already drawing in a cartoon style and b) it’s just more fun to make them cartoony fortnite vibes (note: I barely know any games). so giving them that kind of everyone’s-the-same-height-(tall) body shape

nycorix is basically as described, clothes-wise, (in hindsight, I think she probs has a tie? forgot that lol) & she’s holding the battery or whatever it is they get. (dee mentioned this is like a ghost jar........I’m gonna pretend that was intentional)

He looks strange like this, expression wiped smooth, no trace of his usual scowl. He looks young, vulnerable, as close to fragile as she’s ever seen him. Without consciousness to keep it at bay, the illness is free to taint his features, circling his eyes in charcoal and turning the rest of his skin ashy pale. Only his sharp cheekbones burn, high color painted over them from the fever. His lips, oddly parted, are chapped. 

She hates it. 

Another minute sees her scooping him up, all one-hundred-eighty-something pounds of him like nothing in her arms. One around his shoulders, the other tucked under his knees, her exactitude of force never more precisely calculated than this moment.

His head lolls, and she shifts him so that it rests against her shoulder, his hot slow breath on her collarbone.

A memory washes over her as she takes a step, and for a moment it stalls her, locking her muscles in place as the images bleed through her vision unbidden.

A surveillance video, coercively shown her by the Director, of a scene she has no memory of herself: 22, age twelve, marching down the street with her in his arms like he is in hers now, bleak determination in every line of his posture. The Director trailing beside him in her personal car, snail’s pace.

He’d been sick then, too—only much, much worse, all of his organs in perfectly cascading failure as they rejected four years of treatment in a matter of hours, systemically, cell by cell; and though she’d had no way of knowing this at the time, she’d nonetheless been absolutely useless, falling for the Director’s trap like a fucking idiot.

She sets her jaw, shakes the memory out of her head. Dispels the Director’s commentary—You see, Catherine? 22 exhibits model obedience no matter the circumstances, you’d do well to follow his lead—and grits her teeth, fighting the sting of shame echoing out of that memory. Nothing about that poor sick 22 from the video says obedience to 06; no, she understands him far better than that. Desperation, sure. Necessity, probably. Loyalty, absolutely. He brought her back that day to save them both, nothing more.

Today, she will do the same.

(Obedience, the Director will say, a grudging acknowledgment in passing that would once have earned her a cookie and now simply falls hollow on uncaring ears. But 06 will think of that video shown in secret, of small 22 clinging to his dignity then and the 22 she carries unconscious through the black glass doors who fought her for the same, and she will look that bitch in her cold, soulless eyes and say, loyalty.)

When he pauses to cough, fighting desperately to control his breathing before he damages any internal organs, biting down hard on his tongue to quell the paroxysms, spitting the blood he draws onto the crumbled pavement at his feet. 

Worth—

“Hey, dumbass!”

He barely hears her over the ringing in his ears, but she’s upon him in seconds anyway, hand clamped to his shoulder. He tries to say something—fuck off, probably, or what are you doing here or go back to HQ you idiot but all that comes out is a strained sound that may or may not be “Kit—”.

She ignores it, gripping his shoulder bracingly with one hand while she claps the other to his forehead. 

“She sent you out with this fever?” she says, voice low, careful.

His silence is all the answer she needs.

“I’ll fucking kill her.” Her voice is the calm before a storm neither of them can afford, not now, not this time, not anymore.

“Leave me alone,” he rasps, wincing at the nothing state of his voice. Pushes her, harder than he means to. She stumbles back several yards, arms flailing for balance, too stunned to reply for a moment before the anger comes. 

“Like hell I will.” She plants herself solidly between him and the rubble pile, eyes squinted against the wind that lashes around the corners of the buildings to buffet against them. “What the fuck do you think this is, some misguided half-assed attempt at—”

“This is.” he interrupts, hooking his shoulder into hers and tilting forward, “Me covering.” he pushes, just the barest fraction of his strength, and she staggers, nearly tripping over her feet, “For you.” He bends down, picks up a four-foot chunk of broken concrete, hoists it on his shoulder as he locks eyes with her. “Yesterday was a mistake. I told you she’d know. And she always needs a scapegoat.” He pitches the debris over his shoulder, an involuntary shudder passing through him at the way the clatter grates against his oversensitive ears. “I was the one available. Better to lose one than risk two.” His voice cracks at the end, whittled to nothing by the virus waging war in his throat, but the jab hits home. 

“That's bullshit and you know it,” she mutters, kicking a meter-length of metal pipe toward the pile, but he doesn’t miss the flash of hurt in her eyes before she drops them. 

“Is it.” He scans the ground, frowns as it blurs before his eyes. He stoops, picks up a dormant resonance grenade—gingerly, thumb and forefinger—crushes it down to a marble-sized lump of inert junk metal, winds up, and sends it flying straight through the chassis of a Greenleaf surveillance drone several hundred feet above their heads.

“Whoa, watch it!” 06 yelps, peering up into the clouds with a hand shading her eyes. She tilts her head, tracking the trajectory of the falling drone by the sound, then springs into motion. In just seconds, she sprints across the street and leaps into the air, snatching the smoking hulk of machinery before it can slam sideways into a Stellaxis info board. She folds it in half, then half again, chucking it onto the rubble pile and dusting her hands off with a bemused twist of her lips. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Move.” He brushes past her hard enough for her to grunt in pain, stalks up the side of the pile, and shoves his hand through the crumpled layers of metal into the drone’s transmitter module, extracting a small plastic chip and crushing it into powder. “Don’t be sloppy.”

“Come back with me, idiot.”

“I have one more street to go.” A wave of dizziness washes over him as he starts to descend the pile, and he pauses, half-closing his eyes. “My orders are to do this alone, you shouldn’t be here. Go back.”

“I won’t.”

Frustration bubbles up despite his every effort to keep it down, and he’s beside her in a single roughly calculated leap. “06,” he starts warningly, but she only rolls her eyes. 

“‘22’.” Light, mocking. Then, after a breath, his name. No trace of the kickback in her eyes. “You’re being a stubborn ass and you know it.”

This doesn’t dignify a response. They stare at each other, at a standoff. 

She looks like she’s cooking up some juicier insult, or worse, maybe something compassionate. 

“Hey—”

Before she can get any actual words out, he sneezes, which feels approximately like getting all of his ribs kicked in at once (a sensation with which he is, in fact, intimately familiar). His expression after must be a sight, because when he looks up she is staring harder, that deep furrow creasing her brow that he hates. 

“What,” he tries to say, but he sneezes again—this time bottling it up with every last inch of his willpower, ignoring the detonation of pain behind his eyes—and this expression must be even worse, because now she is glaring at him. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” she says, face undergoing a series of contortions—concerned to alarmed to sympathetic to incredulous—that would have been funny if he wasn’t so strung-out-pissed. 

“Shut up,” he grinds out, meant as a snap but lacking about eighty percent of the energy required for that. 

She sighs, raking both hands up through her cropped hair. “Fine,” she mutters. “At least let me help you.” She picks up a piece of metal, which he snatches out of her hands faster than she can gear up to toss it. 

“No.” He’s tired—so fucking tired—and he’s not sure if he’s angry at her or just himself. 

He chucks the piece of metal toward the pile, skews wide by several feet, and watches it careen off course and smash through a third story window, greeted by a smattering of screams. Every molecule of him cringes away from the thought of the message the Director will absolutely be sending him about this, fear and subsequent fury at the fear pooling like poison in his stomach.

He fists his hands so tightly, a bone in his left index finger snaps. 

06 flinches, shooting him a look that he steadily ignores. When the moment wears thin, silence stretching taut between them, 06 tsks, catching up his wrist with a rough little tug.

“Idiot,” she says softly, digging in a pocket. “Don’t just leave it like that.”

Her warm fingers brush against his frigid skin through the barest gap between glove and sleeve, featherlight, and it is too much.

His sword is out before his thoughts catch up with his absolutely misdirected blind rage, the point grazing her throat. A glance down reveals hers at his heart, a hairline tear in the fabric of his jacket as she leans casually into the onehanded counterstrike. Her stance is open, healing device tucked behind the thumb on her free hand where he can see it. Her face is a question, a new glimmer of hurt kept guarded just beneath the surface.

“Touch me again,” he breathes, drawing a tiny bead of blood from her skin, "and I will kill you."

Incredulity and amusement tick her eyebrows up, but her eyes themselves are very, very serious. “I’d like to see you try.”

Six minutes later, he’s still not sure why they’re fighting but he is sure that he has to keep moving, has to keep striking, has to keep control at all costs. 06 is going easy on him, he knows that she is, yet somehow this has no power to dissuade him from the nonsensical match he’s thrown himself into. They’re a tangle of swords and limbs, boots and fists, and it’s both so much better and so very much worse than his previous ill-fated match with 08.

Sparring with 06 is like fighting an extension of himself. They are a single fluidity, a collective force, two jagged halves of a whole. Their pivots and lunges, strikes and blocks weave together in a seamless flow, easy as breathing, every potential move the other could make etched irrevocably into the folds of their brains. He could do this in his sleep.

Several more minutes pass, indeterminate. The incandescent edges of his anger abruptly cool, releasing his mind and dropping him unceremoniously back into his body just in time for him to realize that he is fading. Rapidly. With 08, he’d still had the greater part of his faculties; now, he’s running on autopilot, the fever like a fire raging in his veins. Black spots shimmer across his field of vision in time with his pulse, which thunders in his ears. His awareness of his body is reduced to points of pain—head, throat, finger, chest—and all of it is screaming at him to sit the fuck down.

He needs to finish this, and quickly.

With the last dregs of his strength, he surges forward, sheathing his sword. As he strides into range, he catches her sword at the base, gripping it in one gloved hand and ignoring the bite of the blade through his fingers as he yanks it from her grasp and casts it aside. In one swift, lethal motion he corrals her by the throat, one handed, and pins her up against the nearest wall. 

He’s prepared for the way her hands circle his wrist, a vice-grip that she will tighten further and further until his arm breaks or he lets go. He’s unprepared for the way all of his muscles start trembling, shuddering with the effort of holding her up that’s normally no effort at all.

“Match.” The word falls from his parched throat, unrecognizably blunted in his own ears. He’s shaking all over now, and he has to let her down a moment before she properly concedes, teeth chattering in his head as the heat generated from the exertion dissipates and he’s wracked with full-body chills.

He thinks 06 replies, but he isn’t sure. Suddenly, everything is fuzzy and wrong, his vision splintering into fractals of white and black as a wave of dizziness swallows him whole. The street spins out from beneath him, 06’s face a blur against the sickly too-bright-ness, and then there is nothing, and he is falling, and it stops.