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"That's seven."
Taejoon smirked as he strode past Elliott, who was currently lying on the floor while Ajay tried to stitch him back together.
The look Elliott returned was one of mild outrage concealed beneath something else. Wounded pride, Taejoon assumed, and relaoded his gun.
-
"On your six, boys!"
Taejoon picked up his feet to avoid the scatter of bullets being fired at him. Skidding into a building, he ducked behind a counter only to crash into Elliott's shoulder. The trickster was desperately trying to reload his Flatline, a bloody smear at his shoulder as he kept his head down.
"My EMP is charged," he muttered as Elliott popped up above their cover to fire a few warning shots.
"So light them up already!" Elliott shouted back as a frag grenade blew the door to pieces.
Taejoon nodded and sent out his drone. He could still feel Elliott's solid weight beside him even if he could no longer see him.
Engaging the electromagnetic pulse, Taejoon left his drone hovering and collapsed the controls.
"Let's move," he muttered, gesturing with his Eva. Elliott nodded and the two men crawled out from behind the counter just as Anita's furious cry in their ear told them she was down.
"Can you get her?" Elliott demanded, all bravado abandoned as he covered Taejoon so he could grab her banner with his drone.
"I'll try," Taejoon responded calmly, sending Hack out to retrieve their fallen squadmate.
-
In the end, Elliott couldn't stave off the onslaught of bullets and they both went down, waking up in the medbay with sore heads and bad tempers.
Elliott was immediately on the defensive, listing the hundred or so ways why this wasn't his fault.
"Its like we had a homing beacon up our asses, man. Must have been four squads on us at least."
Taejoon turned on his bed to face him. "I know," he said heavily. "I was there. I don't blame you."
"Makes a change," Elliott said with a smirk, but something shifted within him that made him turn away.
-
Taejoon sat at the dinner table, his mind oblivious to the conversation around him as he fiddled with his control cube.
Something was off. Taejoon wasn't exactly sure what it was, but there was a bug somewhere in his gear. He'd run a full diagnostic on the drone after the last match and had found everything to be in working order, so now he turned his attention to his control cube.
"Stuck?"
Taejoon kept his head down, unaware that he was even being addressed.
"You in there, Cryppy?"
Taejoon finally looked up. "Mwo?" he grunted, before finally spotting Elliott. "Oh. It's you. Go away."
Elliott ignored him completely and sat down beside him. "Did you break your favourite toy?"
Taejoon wasn't above a little ignoring himself.
Elliott nudged him with his shoulder. "Come on, don't be like that. Maybe I can help."
Taejoon snorted. "I very much doubt that, Witt."
Undeterred, Elliott leaned back in his chair and flexed his fingers out in front of him. "I don't know, I'm a pretty smart guy," he said smugly.
Taejoon sighed, dropping his cube to the table as he finally turned to look at Elliott. "I'm having a feedback error somewhere in my network, some sort of interference. Could be a janked connection, could be an exterior impulse signal. As such, my intel is being compromised and my efficiency impacted, and until I can find the route of the error, I must carefully diagnose each piece of my equipment at every stage of input and processing."
Elliott blinked at him. "Ok once more, but slower."
Taejoon turned his attention back to his cube.
-
Some years before...
Taejoon was looking between his credit chip and his drone. On the one hand, the data he received routed through the cube wasn't very useful if he were trying to see it while he was on the move, namely running for his life.
On the other, he was fucking starving.
Casting one last, longing look at the cafe beside him, Taejoon pulled up his collar and ducked into the alley beside it.
Almost completely hidden by the shadows, a dark figure waited ominously at the other end. Taejoon didn't slow his approach, knowing he had already been spotted.
"You're late."
"I'm here," he replied darkly.
"You have the credits?"
"I would not be here if I did not."
The figure laughed. "Then step this way."
Taejoon woke up some few hours later. His skin felt as though it were on fire and his head pounded. Carefully, he raised his fingers to his cheekbones, wincing sharply at the rawness there.
"Don't play with it."
Taejoon turned to see someone by his bed, their face obscured by a surgical mask.
"It hurts."
"That's because I cut into your skin and placed a whole mess of foreign bodies beneath it," the medic replied offhandedly as they tapped at the IV hooked up to Taejoon's hand.
Taejoon pushed himself up in the bed. "But it functions as it should?"
"Hell if I know. You can see for yourself in --" The medic finally turned to eye up Taejoon's incisions. "A day or so, give or take."
Taejoon glared. "Surely there is someone here who can tell me it works? I paid a lot of-"
The medic stopped him with a raised hand. "The guys in tech didn't build the damn thing, just modded it to your requirements."
"So it is untraceable?"
The medic nodded. "Completely closed off from the network, access is one way only. A lot of sleepless nights cracking it, so your credits were well spent."
Taejoon felt hard done by. "It seems as though it would be easier to give me similar tech of their own creation."
The medic laughed. "Sure, if you want substandard implants. What you have now is the best on the market, miles ahead of anything our guys could produce."
Taejoon still felt the crawling sensation of being scammed. "And if it doesn't work? They will be on hand to fix it?"
"Yeah, totally, if they knew how. Look, you're awake, you're talking, so you're gone. Don't get familiar."
Two days later, Taejoon sat still aching in the corner of a darkened warehouse. Feeling trepidation in his soul, he pulled out his control cube and activated the implants.
A green holographic screen projected before him, showing him the view from his drone in crystal clarity. With a relieved sigh, Taejoon sat back against the wall and piloted his drone around the vast, empty expanse, just to be sure the implants held true.
-
And back again...
"Crypto, behind you!"
Taejoon turned at Makoa's frantic shout, managing to down Revenant with a well aimed Peacekeeper blast. With no time to glory in his success, he dived behind a rock just in time to see a frag grenade come rolling to a stop at his feet.
"Oh, fu-"
The snow at his feet erupted in a powdery explosion as Taejoon felt the full force and heat of the blast, dropping to his knees, the side of his face bleeding from scattered shrapnel.
Coughing out phlegm and blood onto the ground, Taejoon was all ready to give up, when the reassuring hum of Mokoa's shield reached his ears.
"Up you get, brother," Makoa said, hefting him to his feet. "Just you and me now, and the last squad."
Taejoon frantically healed himself, but it didn't seem as though their last opponents were looking to press the advantage.
"We have to move. Ring's closin'," Makoa told him.
Holed up in a building in Skyhook, Taejoon pulled his drone out and set it to scan for any signs of life, but there was a problem. The bug that had been bothering him seemed to have intensified. The projected screen was a mess of tearing and static, obscuring his vision and making it all but useless.
"What's the word?" Makoa muttered through the comms, the man himself currently squatting in the adjacent building.
Taejoon huffed in frustration. "My gear has been damaged. I cannot see -- hold on."
He continued to fly his drone around hoping for a peek behind the interference. Growing desperate he tried to scan a nearby banner, when his already compromised holo screen was entirely eclipsed by a gloved hand reaching through and poking him with two fingers.
Too late, Taejoon tried to stow his cube away, only to be met by the grinning figure of Elliott Witt.
"Wakey wakey, Crypto," Elliott said, before drilling a full clip into Taejoon and taking him out.
-
Recovering in the medbay after the match, it was clear now to Taejoon which part of his kit was the problem. The implants, the most delicate part of his whole set up and, typically, the only part he hadn't engineered himself.
"How ya feelin'?" Ajay asked, sauntering over to his bedside.
"Raw," Taejoon replied grumpily.
"To be expected. But ya did ok. Second ain't nothing."
Taejoon shrugged. Winning or losing had never been something that bothered him.
Ajay held her look on him, but soon dismissed it. "Anyway, no lastin' harm done so when you feel up to it, you can go."
She turned to leave, but as she did so Taejoon bit the bullet and held up a hand.
"Wait," he said quietly.
Ajay turned back to face him.
With a sigh, Taejoon pointed to his face. "I'm having a problem with my implants. Is that something you could look into?"
Ajay studied him for a moment before sighing and shaking her head. "Best I can do is take 'em out," she said softly.
Taejoon closed his eyes. "No, that won't be -- thank you, anyway."
-
Once he left the medbay, the next obvious port of call for help with his particular problem was Natalie. She was in her room, and when she granted Taejoon access he saw she was surrounded by blueprints of the ring.
"Oh, I'm sorry," he began at once. "I can come back later if you are busy."
Natalie smiled and got to her feet. "Not at all," she said. "I'm always happy to see you."
Taejoon smiled in response, but the truth was he was so worked up about his malfunctioning implants he couldn't bear to make small talk. After explaining the problem, he was met with a stern frown.
"I understand why you would come to me, but I cannot help you with this."
Taejoon balked. "But you're an engineer," he insisted.
"An electrical engineer," she told him pointedly. "I do now know how your implants work. Just because I have skill in once science does not mean it extends to all sciences. Can you imagine?"
Taejoon sagged, but she was right.
Natalie cocked her head curiously. "However, as far as I am to understand it, your implants are holo projectors, non?"
Taejoon shook his head. "Please. Don't even say it."
Natalie giggled. "I think Monsieur Witt is your only option here."
"But-"
"Good luck, mon ami."
-
Elliott was in the lounge, eyes fixed to the screen showing a rerun of his latest victory. He looked up as Taejoon walked in, his smug smile growing at the sight of him.
"Hey man, you look pretty good for a guy I totally owned earlier."
"Shut up," Taejoon responded automatically. Then he clenched his jaw together. Probably not the best start.
"Sorry," Elliott replied sarcastically, raising his eyebrow.
Taejoon relented. "I... apologise," he grunted out. "It has been a difficult few days."
Elliott looked him up and down. "Tech still not behaving?" he asked shrewdly.
Taejoon sighed. It was things like this, these unexpected little insights that had been endearing him to Elliott of late, and he didn't care for it at all.
Nonetheless, he swallowed his pride and approached Elliott where he sat on the sprawling sofa.
"My implants have been damaged," he said levelly.
To his surprise, Elliott turned away from him with a derisive snort of laughter. "Yeah, well, that's what you get for buying knock-off tech."
Taejoon faltered. "How..?"
Eyes still fixed once again to the screen Elliott shrugged. "I know you think I'm an idiot, but I recognise my own tech when I see it."
Still dumbfounded, Taejoon stepped closer. "Your..?"
Elliott turned to him again. "Yes. Mine. Might have the serial numbers filed off but you've been waking around with patented Witt holographic technology lodged in your eyesockets." He let out a small laugh. "Truth be told, haven't seen it since I was, what, seventeen? Quite an eye opener that day back in World's Edge when I saw it coming out of your face."
Taejoon tilted his head to remember. "Our first match? You knew then?"
Elliott smirked. "Course I did."
"But you didn't say anything."
Elliott waved a hand. "Don't think one credit payment for one piece of my tech was gonna get me out of the red. Seemed pointless." He looked back towards the screen.
The silence infuriated Taejoon. "Can you fix it or not?"
With a much put upon sigh, Elliott stood up so he was a foot away from Taejoon.
"Maybe. But why would I?"
"Because I'm asking nicely."
"Not yet you haven't."
Taejoon sighed. "Please," he said quietly.
Elliott grinned. "Come by the workshop in an hour. I just wanna watch this again. Your face..."
Irritated, but not stupid enough to push it any further, Taejoon turned on his heel and stalked from the room.
-
Elliott was already there when Taejoon arrived, tools already laid out and an old, reclining chair he seemed to have procured from somewhere in front of his station.
"Come on then," he said, clearly enjoying himself.
Taejoon shrugged off his coat and sat down without a word.
Elliott turned to him with a pair of needlenose pliers in his hand. "Tell Doctor Witt where it hurts," he said.
Taejoon rolled his eyes. "It does not hurt. The screen is not projecting properly."
Elliott put the pliers down. "Show me," he said.
Taejoon touched his finger to the implant and the screen blossomed in front of him. With no input from the drone, it showed a static message, but it was clearly fritzing and wouldn't hold true.
Elliott looked at it for a moment. "Ok, I know what's wrong."
Taejoon cancelled the screen and looked at Elliott. "Just from that?"
"Just from that. Damn, Cryppy, once you get it into your head that someone's an idiot you don't change your mind, do you?"
Taejoon felt suitably ashamed. "But you can fix it?" he pressed.
Elliott nodded. "No problem. See, the projectors have a disrupting casing on to prevent outside interference. Radio signals and shit. The ones you have, however, have clearly had that casing removed to allow unregistered input. It's supposed to be a failsafe to stop unauthorised use of the tech by the user, but it's also a shock absorber. Surprised they lasted this long, to be honest."
Taejoon felt his heart plummet. "So they need to be replaced?"
Elliott nodded. "Yeah. I have extras lying around somewhere."
"You do?"
"Sure. Can't promise they won't be a little dusty though. Don't worry, I'll run them under the faucet."
Taejoon was already panicking from the mounting questions in his head. "It sounds like surgery," he said warily.
Elliott nodded. "That's because it is. You won't feel it. Not my first rodeo."
"You've done this procedure before?"
Elliott shrugged. "Yeah... back in the day," he said quietly, but he seemed unwilling to elaborate.
"Perhaps we should get Ajay to -"
"It won't hurt," Elliott assured him.
Taejoon rolled his shoulders. Pain wasn't a stranger. "And the tracing protocols?" he began nervously. He really didn't want to enlighten Elliott as to why he couldn't have that kind of trace on the implants.
Elliott looked down at him, eyes shrewd, but then he smiled. "Look, you only try to kill me on camera," he said seriously. "I'm not here to expose anyone. I can fudge the program. Legit protocols that are closed in the system. The implants are registered to you, but only you. They'll be separate from any network."
Taejoon looked at him in surprise. "You can do that?"
Elliott laughed. "So could you, probably. Actually, definitely, I'd say, it's kind of your whole deal. If it was anyone else's tech, I'd be coming to you to crack it first. But it's not, it's mine. I got this."
Despite everything, Taejoon felt himself burn under the compliment.
"I didn't think you'd been paying such close attention."
Now it seemed it was Elliott's turn to be a little flustered. "I'm not stupid," he muttered.
Like the tide crashing over jagged rocks, like electricity bursting forth from a prison, the air shifted. Elliott and Taejoon held each other's gaze for a moment, before Elliott broke the moment by clearing his throat.
"Anyway, we should get started," he mumbled.
"Right, yes," Taejoon agreed, his head spinning.
Elliott pulled a heavy looking box from beneath his table and flicked the clasps. After rooting around for a moment, he pulled out a smaller container and a loaded injector.
"What's that for?" Taejoon asked nervously, looking at the syringe.
"I figured I'm gonna be rooting around in your facial structure. Up to you if you want to feel it?"
Taejoon paled. "No thank you," he said quickly.
"Right. Ok. Hold still. This will just numb the area around the implants. You should still be able to talk and call me names."
"Elliott, I--"
"I'm joking," Elliott said quickly. With a faint nod at Taejoon, he administered the anaesthetic and stood back. "Let's just give that a moment to work," he said, turning back to his bench and pulling on a pair of latex gloves.
Taejoon's stomach was in knots as Elliott, fresh tools in hand, turned back to face him. He ripped open the sterile pack of a scalpel before prodding Taejoon's cheekbone with his finger.
"You feel that?"
Taejoon shook his head.
"Alright, let's get started."
Elliott dragged over a large, angled lamp, pulling up a stool as he leaned over. "You can close your eyes if you want," he said gently.
The feel of Elliott's breath against his lips made Taejoon's own breathing hitch in his chest. "I'm ok," he replied in a whisper.
Elliott nodded. "Tell me if you aren't."
With that, Elliott got to work. Taejoon tried to focus on other things but found himself drawn back over and over to the deep brown warmth of Elliott's eyes. When Elliott drew back to discard the old implants, Taejoon felt suddenly exposed.
Elliott grabbed a wad of gauze and wiped the blood from Taejoon's skin, so gently and delicately, his demeanour completely focused.
"Just need to let you settle," Elliott said.
Taejoon was startled by the sudden feeling of fingers against his wrist.
"Relax. Just keeping an eye on your pulse." Elliott frowned. "A little elevated. But I guess that's to be expected."
All Taejoon could do was nod and swallow thickly in response.
Once satisfied that Taejoon wasn't about to bleed out on him, Elliott grabbed the new implants and carefully applied them, before taking up a can of surgical spray and instructing Taejoon to close his eyes.
The smell of the adhesive was strong, but Taejoon kept his eyes closed until Elliott had wiped away the excess. "All done," he said, touching Taejoon gently on the arm before leaning back and snapping off his gloves.
Taejoon opened his eyes. "Should I go?"
Elliott chuckled. "Give yourself a minute to breathe, yeah? Plus we should probably wait until the numbing agent wears off, make sure I haven't broken your face."
Taejoon smiled. "Wouldn't be the first time."
Elliott leaned back to grab some more gauze. "And it's always such a shame."
His head snapped back around, his eyes wide in panic. "Uh, I mean -"
Taejoon's heart began to flutter in his chest. "I don't-" he fumbled, but Elliott clearly made the decision to gloss over it.
"Let me just check how your nerves are doing. The agent also acts as an anagelsic, so it shouldn't hurt to much unless I poke it."
"Please don't poke it," Taejoon said quickly.
"It's purely scientific," Elliott assured him.
He leaned back over, tracing his fingers over the edge of the new implants. Taejoon could feel the pressure, but there was no pain.
"How does that feel?" Elliott asked softly, his other hand coming up to touch the implants on the other side.
"Good," Taejoon breathed, aware of Elliott's proximity, the effect his feather light touches were having on the rest of him. "Feels good."
Elliott didn't smile in response. His breath seemed short as he leaned closer, swallowing hard as slowly moved a hand towards Taejoon's temple, fingers brushing the short hairs. There were no implants there.
"We'll need to configure the settings on them later," Elliott continued, his fingers now abandoning all pretence and travelling down to the synthetic skin of Taejoon's jaw.
"Elliott," Taejoon breathed, his thoughts a maelstrom. "Kiss me."
Elliott's lips parted slightly before he leaned all the way in, pressing them to Taejoon's own. Taejoon arched his back to meet him, returning the kiss with equal need, his fingers reaching up to clutch at the material of Elliott's shirt.
Taejoon felt as though his heart were swelling, ready to burst forth at any moment. Elliott deepened the kiss, getting to his feet to straddle Taejoon, not breaking contact as his hands continued their exploration of Taejoon's face, his neck, his hair.
Taejoon's own hands moved, pressing against Elliott's broad shoulders as a small whimper escaped from the back of his throat. He was on fire, his body craving more and more as Elliott kissed him as though the world were ending.
They parted slowly, Elliott remaining above Taejoon, supporting his weight with his thighs as he pressed his forehead to Taejoon's.
Taejoon felt shame begin to creep in as Elliott panted softly above him, but Elliott it seemed didn't share the feeling.
He kissed Taejoon again, moving his mouth from his lips to his jaw, the pulse point beneath his ear as Taejoon bucked his hips up to meet him.
"Yes," Elliott whispered at the first touch of friction. "Please."
Taejoon moaned, a low, base sound he couldn't control as Elliott began to move. The chair groaned in protest but they paid it no mind, kissing and moving against one another in bliss.
-
"Bonjour," Natalie said happily as she ran into Taejoon a few hours later. "Oh my. Your skin looks very sore. Was Elliott able to help you with your little problem?"
Taejoon blushed. "You could say that, yes."