#hackingfirestarter

[THREAD WISHLIST]

K’ has had a good run of leaving trashed and torched NESTS bases in his wake; quietly making the world a better, megalomaniac-free, place to live from the shadows. But when you’ve made a track record of that without breaking much of a sweat? You start to get cocky. And cockiness leads to mistakes. Mistakes like getting captured.

The smart thing for whatever NESTS remnant(s) captured him to do would be to kill the cartel’s biggest traitor. Instead, it’s payback time for this particular renegade creation of theirs...

They’re going to completely strip K’ of the freedom and autonomy he fought so hard for.

Activating Program 70599 won’t do; it still has too many kinks to be ironed out, and is still only fit to be used in bursts, besides. Instead he’s relentlessly tortured, drugged, and brainwashed - sometimes all three at once - for months on end. Until eventually, inevitably, he breaks. His memory, so fractured and fragile to begin with, erodes away completely. He remembers nothing; is nothing. Just a freshly blanked slate for NESTS to reprogram as they see fit.

They decide to make him their attack dog, sending him specifically after the very people he’d turned traitor alongside. As well as those he’d unknowingly inspired to rebel from afar, or people otherwise presenting themselves as nuisances to NESTS’ efforts to rebuild.

Speaking to him - pleading - will yield nothing. No response. No change in blank expression... nothing. People once friends are now merely targets to be eliminated. He’s essentially been reduced to little more than an order taking doll. Even outside of those missions he’s a shell of the person he once was. He barely talks unless it’s to acknowledge an order, and won’t do anything unless ordered, sometimes including even the more mundane things like eating.

He even seems to avoid sleeping, but this is probably the only conscious self-made decision he makes outside of making snap judgements in combat. To sleep is to invite nightmares of people and things that inexplicably make his chest tighten and ache to the point he can’t breathe, and his skull to throb so hard and painful it’s threatening to split at the seams. He doesn’t understand why this keeps happening and what it means, but it scares him. So as a result, sleep is eluded for as long as physically possible.

Perhaps this means there’s hope for him yet; that there’s still some tiny fragment of him buried alive under all that subliminal programming?

“I thought that’d be obvious,” K’ growled, scowling up at Isla from his bound position at her feet.

His tied-together feet lashed out at her knee in a vicious kick, aiming to topple her and buy him the precious seconds needed to pull his hands under his legs and up, so he could use them to open doors, if not fight. Or to at least get his right close enough to burn away his ankle restraints so he could put some distance between them. Maybe make a runner or look for backup if he could swing it. Which he was dubious he could actually manage but the possibility, while tiny, was still there.

“Bullshit!” he seethed, shoving more of his body weight down on her to express his displeasure at such an answer.

His grasp of her arm tightened, red-plated digits digging through her sleeve to bruise the flesh beneath. Such force was probably unnecessary, given she was more of a desk jockey than a combatant... but he was feeling emotions rarely felt, and it was driving him to be more rough than normal.

Distress.

Fear.

“There’s no way in hell one of NESTS’ hackers wouldn’t know,” he snapped out, grip unrelenting. She was yanking his goddamn chain — had to be, given what little he knew of her and her penchant for being a cheeky little shithead — and he wasn’t having a bar of it. “So start talking before I break your goddamn arm!”

For added threat, he wrenched her limb straight up and back, making her shoulder bone strain against its socket. All it would take to dislocate it was a single hard yank. Which was exactly what he’d do if she didn’t stop stalling with her lies.

*All you can eat steak dinners

*Driving

*Hugs

*Getting a full night’s worth of sleep with no nightmares

He did know that. All too well. After all, he need only look in the mirror to be reminded of the fact. Cut his hair short and slick it up and back, acquire a matching pair of scars over his eyes, make his wardrobe a little more purple, strapped, and feathered, and he’d look just like a younger Krizalid. Which was to be expected, of course, since he’d been K’s clone.

It was terrifying… the possibility of not just growing up to look like him, but perhaps even become like him… a slavering madman hellbent on world domination. He’d lost count of how many nights’ worth of sleep he’d lost just thinking about how much he looked like Krizalid. And even more over how he was one misstep away from treading in his footsteps.

A wittle birfday drabble for @hackingfirestarter, with (sliiiightly modified) prompt courtesy of @corvidprompts

Happ birth, Sonia~! Hope it’s been a good one! ^v^

-

K’ came to in near darkness, the only light coming from the combined soft glow of a wall of computer monitors. He’d barely indulged in two seconds worth of groggy blinking before trying to get up and away. However, typically, his hands and feet were bound, preventing him from doing such. He couldn’t quite recall how he’d been captured, nor how he’d acquired so many dull but insistent aches and pains all over his body... Much as that worried him, he’d dwell on it later; he needed to get out of... wherever this was... first.

”I gotta say, you look good like this.”

The voice claimed his attention instantly, putting an immediate halt to his escape attempts. His head snapped up to glare into the relative darkness of his surrounds. He couldn’t see the speaker. Not yet. “Confused and pissed off?”

There was a soft set of footsteps steadily coming closer. “Injured, bound, helpless.” Their owner eventually came into view, bathed in the glow of the monitors, tucking a lock of bright red fringe behind her ear to smirk at him better. She shoved her hand into the pocket of her coat once her hair was out of the way, casual as you please, and strode a little closer. That coat... He knew the high collar and feathered shoulders... That particular shade of purple... Even something about the girl wearing it seemed vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place the feeling. But her face, at least, he could say with some certainty he hadn’t ever seen before. “Mine. How many people get to see you like this?”

“One too many, now.”

The girl rolled her eyes. “Cute.”

She crouched to his level in one fluid motion, coat whispering as it flared and pooled around her ankles. K’ got a massive whiff of charred fabric; his own handiwork from so many years ago. With no prior warning, her hand shot out, yanking his head back painfully by a fistful of snowy hair, drawing a hiss and a grimace. Yellow-gold eyes stared at his face intently, taking it all in with unblinking scrutiny.

Up close he really did look just like...

“So. You some sort of rabid Krizalid fangirl, or what? Can’t think of any other reason you’d be wearing that dead prick’s coat, otherwise.”

Annnd the illusion was shattered. If only he’d stayed quiet.

A furious fist to his stomach had him whuffing out a pained breath of air. “Shut. Up,” Isla growled. How could her beloved older brother be a clone of this complete, easily hatable, asshole? She gave his head another jerk, forcing him to sit further upright to catch her eye, or else risk having his hair torn right out of his scalp. The frigid blue eyes that scowled back defiantly were so familiar, yet so utterly detestable. It was confusing, seeing him in them but not, but she channeled that confusion into further fuelling her rage. And, boy, did she had a lot of rage... “Don’t you dare say his name, you absolute monster! You’ve got no right. Not after you... you killed him... Killed all of them! Do have any idea how completely and utterly you ruined my life because of that? Huh?!” A third, even harder, yank brought him closer. All the better to spit hate-tinged words at him; to let him feel her utter loathing and contempt. “NESTS - the people in it - they meant everything to me. They were my family and you fucking killed them all!”

“Oh I know exactly what I did,” K’ hissed back, his own vast wells of hatred and anger bubbling to the surface now that he knew this girl was one of the few remaining NESTS loyalists. “Your so-called ‘family’ were the real monsters. They screwed me and who knows how many other people over, and killed even more. And you know what?” He shifted even closer forward to her face, lips peeling back into a sneer. “They all deserved to burn. And I’m glad I had a hand in it.”

“Enough!” The grip on his hair finally relented. A hard smack of her palm against his chest sent him toppling backwards before he could try anything. She rose swiftly, slamming a foot on his torso to keep him down. Her heel ground against his breastbone, and she only grew more irritated when he didn’t squirm under the treatment, just grit his teeth. “I was considering being halfway nice about this, but now that you’ve opened your big yap, I’ve changed my mind.” Isla lifted her foot. Then slammed it back down with all the strength she could muster. She felt the bone beneath break more than she heard it.

Despite his best efforts, K’ couldn’t quite bite back his scream.

K’ came to in near darkness. Slowly. And in fits and starts. Whatever tranquilliser he’d been shot with was still lingering in his system, keeping him too groggy to do more than struggle valiantly to keep heavy lids from slipping and staying shut. His flames were banked low, their familiar shifting under his skin as sluggish and confused as he was thanks to the drugs in his system, and his entire body felt too heavy to move even an inch. But he was aware of his arms being bound at the wrist uncomfortably behind him. His feet were stuck together in much the same way. He was also aware of the ground beneath him being cold, metallic, and… rumbling? Car. No, truck, his foggy mind supplied helpfully, as his eyes adjusted enough to make out two large metal doors. That meant he was being transported somewhere.

Letting his eyes roam left revealed that he wasn’t alone in here. His blood chilled and his body tensed at the sight of red hair and the feathered shoulders of an all too familiar burnt and beaten up purple coat.

Isla.

Being strapped to a table helplessly while she poked, and prodded, and stole his DNA to grow a brand new Krizalid from a vat was a memory still fresh on his mind. One that still had him waking up in a cold sweat, paranoid that she was in his apartment, poised to give him the same treatment again. So his immediate thought was that this was her doing; that she wanted to use him for some new half-baked scheme to revive some other long-dead NESTS asshole, or some such. … Or maybe make more Krizalids. Closer scrutiny, however, revealed that this was not at all the case. She was bound just like he was, and still unconscious by the looks of it, since she wasn’t reacting to the bits of hair splayed over her face.

He blinked his astonishment, mind reeling. So that meant this was the doing of some unknown player… Who, though? And for what purpose?

The first question he came up empty, but the second he had a bit of an idea… Even after all these years, anything – anyone – related to NESTS was still considered incalculably valuable, and thus highly sought after by numerous less than reputable groups. All of which were looking to make it as the next big power by studying the Cartel’s work to create and/or peddle more living weapons to the highest bigger.

Which meant she was in just as much danger as he was.

K’ hesitated, gnawing the inside of a cheek uncertainly. Maybe it was the drugs talking, making him loopy… but trying to work together with her to escape seemed like a better idea than doing so by himself. Which was why he found himself slowly inchworming his way closer until he could poke at her leg with his boots to try and rouse her. He was pretty sure he’d regret this later, figuring she’d turn on him the first chance she got. But it wasn’t as though he had many available options.