#anyway herein lies my imagining of how the director would have spilled 22's 'secret'

[nycorix]

Consequences [10/11]

[fic post]

|part 1| |part 2| |part 3| |part 4| |part 5| |part 6| |part 7| |part 8| |part 9|

Aaaand we're almost done!! This part is short and (I hope) sweet, so I really don't have much to say about it except that it contains one of my favorite paragraphs I've ever written for this fandom (the "obedience" paranthetical). Also: have I mentioned how much I love Catherine Foster <3

[The part in which 22 is still out cold and Kit is overwhelmingly Kit about it]

_______

10. 

06 faces down this unique predicament the same way she always does. One arm akimbo, head tilted, worrying the nails of her dominant hand through her glove with her teeth.

She’d expected 22 to be in bad shape, but this—this is new. She can count on two hands the number of times she’s seen him pass out in the years they’ve been paired, and most of them have involved head trauma from training incidents, or else been on the operating table so they don’t even really count.

She crouches by his head, checks his pulse. Heat roils off his skin, soaking through her glove while she counts. A minute passes and she pulls her hand away, chewing her lip—forty-six beats, much too low. She brings up a chat box, hesitates, closes it. Finds his arm, heals the broken finger and the torn skin beneath his glove, fully expecting the pain to jolt him awake.

He does not stir.

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.)

It starts to snow as she starts to walk again, fat icy flakes brushing her face and melting where they kiss her skin, and she throws her head back and grins, determination flowing back into her with every careful step.