Chapter Text
Halfway through the walk back to the VLT/R, Neon realizes something is wrong. Her surge protector’s low hum has stopped, and the anxiety mounting in her chest is already sending static crackles to braid themselves around her fingers.
“Oh, shit,” she mutters. “Shit!”
Gekko sees her outside the VLT/R and starts to approach. She holds up both hands and shrinks away, the sparks already jumping around her like fleas on a stray dog.
“MysurgeprotectorbrokeandifyoucomenearmeI’llprobablykillyoubyaccident.”
Gekko’s face falls.
“Oh, shit. What do we do?”
“We leave me here,” Neon says, without hesitation. “I’m not gonna risk frying everyone on the way home.”
“Yeah, we’re not doing that,” Gekko replies, as Skye approaches the two of them. Her smile falls when she sees Neon’s posture.
“Hey, love, what’s going on?”
“Stay back,” Neon says. “Just—everyone stay back until I figure this out.”
There is nothing to figure out. Skye must know that, but she nods anyway. “Sure, mate. Take all the time you need.”
“Do you want me to call Sage?” Gekko asks.
Neon can’t think of anything she wants less, actually, but she nods anyways because it’s probably a good idea.
Gekko and Skye step away to make the phone call, and Neon sits down with her palms pressed to the concrete, dropping her chin to her chest and trying to completely clear her mind.
She focuses so well that she nearly misses it when Breach and Raze finally make it back to the plane. Which is crazy, because the two of them are kind of hard to miss.
“Oh, meu bem, did your surge protector break?” Raze asks, keeping a safe distance as she crouches down to Neon’s level.
“Yes. Don’t tell Jett yet,” Neon replies.
She expects even the mention of Jett to cause her electricity to flare, but to her surprise, it actually helps a little. She follows that and discovers that as long as she thinks about Jett’s soft voice and the gentle lull of her fingertips in her hair, it keeps her from spiraling off into extant dread.
Unfortunately, that train of thought leads her directly to Jett’s biceps (seriously, they have no right to be that sculpted) and her laugh (ough she has such a pretty laugh) and her lips (but in a platonic way, surely) and that causes a bolt of electricity to skitter across the ground.
So maybe no Jett, then.
“Neon, you with us?” Skye asks.
“Barely,” Neon replies, with a nervous laugh. “What’s the verdict? I seriously wouldn’t blame you guys for dropping me off in the middle of the wilderness somewhere.”
“No big adventures today, love. Sage said the best option is to give you a sedative for the flight home. She’s getting the containment room set up for you now,” Skye says, her voice gentle and sympathetic.
“Sounds good,” Neon replies, with a shaky thumbs-up.
Skye comes back out with a needle full of sedatives and carefully hands it over to Neon so she can inject herself.
“It won’t make you fall asleep unless you choose to. It’s just something to calm you down until we make it back to base.”
Neon plunges the needle into the muscle of her left arm, gritting her teeth as she presses down on the syringe. She caps it and returns it to Skye, already feeling all her muscles start to relax against her will.
“I should break my surge protector more often,” Neon mumbles, as Skye herds her into the VLT/R. “This stuff is great. I can’t feel my bones.”
“You shouldn’t be able to feel your bones at all?” Gekko says.
“C’mon, love, let’s get you settled in.” Skye settles her jacket around Neon’s shoulders and sits down in the seat beside her.
“Oh, we’re gonna glaze right past the bones thing? Okay, cool.”
“I’m gonna fry you like an egg,” Neon replies, letting her head drop down onto Skye’s shoulder. “Skye, your shoulder is comfy. It shouldn’t be this comfy.”
She smooshes the side of her face against Skye’s shoulder, letting her eyes flutter shut. She’s got just enough sense left to know that she’ll be less of a danger if she’s asleep.
“Get some rest,” Skye says, tipping her own head over to rest on top of Neon’s. “We’ll be home before ya know it.”
Jett tumbles onto the floor of the studio dramatically, sighing as she wipes the sweat from her face with the back of her arm. When that doesn’t really work, she cranes her arm out to the side, wiggling her fingertips until she manages to find her towel.
“Jett?”
Jett turns her head to the other side, glancing up to see Waylay standing in the doorway. “What’s up?”
“Neon’s surge protector broke on the Fracture mission.”
Jett sits up immediately, half-propelled by the wind. “What? Is she hurt? Where is she? What happened?”
“She’s okay, she’s in the containment room right now. Killjoy’s running diagnostics on her surge protector, but from what I heard, she wasn’t shot. It just gave out at the end of the mission.”
Her and Neon weren’t all that close yet the first time Neon’s surge protector broke. Jett’s able to piece it together from the things Neon gasps when she wakes up from nightmares.
And now she’s back in there, facing her nightmare, and Jett’s just standing here.
“Fuck, I’ve gotta—”
Waylay grabs her by the bicep of her good arm like a mother cat snagging her kitten by the scruff. It’s a grounding gesture Jett is long-familiar with by this point.
“Jett, listen to me. She’s on heavy sedatives, and Skye's with her. You’re in a sports bra, you’re covered in sweat, and I can tell your arm hurts. Go shower and put on your brace. That way you can be fully present for her when the sedative wears off and she actually needs you.”
That sounds sensible, Jett realizes, and Waylay usually has better ideas than her.
“Yeah, okay. Shower, brace, got it.”
Waylay releases her arm with a reminder that Jett can text her if she needs anything, and Jett nods and takes off running towards her room.
A shower and a protein shake later, Jett fastens her brace to her shoulder and takes off towards the containment room.
It’s on its own wing, connected to a different circuit than the rest of HQ. All Skye’s efforts at making it cozy have failed in that endeavor, but she can’t really be blamed for that. There’s not much overlap between “comfortable” and “shock-resistant.”
Skye hasn’t sealed the door to the containment room yet, evidenced by the glowing green of the panel, so Neon must still be sedated. Jett feels a sickly pit in her stomach when she thinks about the door hissing shut, and Neon being trapped in what basically amounts to a fish tank until Killjoy manages to figure this out.
“How long’s she been out?” Jett asks, when the silence becomes unbearable.
“About an hour now. She handled it all like a champ, though.”
“ ‘Course she did,” Jett replies. “She always does.”
Jett sits down beside Skye, pressing her right forearm against the glass and tipping her head forward to lean on it.
“Were you here the first time it happened?” Jett asks.
“Me and Sage and Phoenix, yeah,” Skye replies. “It got ugly, but Killjoy works fast. Hopefully it won’t take too long this time.”
“Yeah,” Jett says, watching the rise and fall of Neon’s chest through the glass. “Hopefully.”
Neon wakes up to the sound of the containment room sealing shut. Dim light, still air, and total silence save for the white noise Skye plays through the speaker to keep her from losing it completely.
Her chest is tight with dread, pouring heavy and inky and sickly into the pit of her stomach. She knows, realistically, that this will end. Right now, it feels like it might not. Like she could be stuck in this room forever.
She blinks awake, reaching out blindly for her phone before realizing that they wouldn’t have brought it in here with her. Of course not. Without her surge protector, she’d fry it.
She turns to the other side, squinting through the soft light that pours from the hallway into the containment room.
“Sunwoo,” Neon breathes, relief washing over her at the sight of her face through the window. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Jett can lip-read pretty well, but Neon hasn’t picked up on that skill yet, so the communication only really goes one way. Neon doesn’t mind much. She’s here. That’s all that matters.
Neon taps the top of her wrist with a questioning look, and Jett holds up two fingers. Neon’s not sure if that’s morning or evening until she realizes the room is designed to simulate sunlight. If it’s dark, that means it’s 2am. Which means Jett’s been waiting for her to wake up for nearly eight hours.
She didn’t just come. She stayed.
Neon’s heart clenches. A sharp arc of lightning spills from the metal in her forearm and strikes against the glass, like a snake in a terrarium fighting its own reflection.
Jett curls a hand around her left forearm, as if holding herself back from trying to reach through the glass.
“I’m fine,” Neon says, with an eyeroll and a playful grin. “Seriously, stop worrying. You should sleep.”
Jett mouths something at her, and Neon squints a little as if that will help her figure it out. No luck.
Jett looks over for a second, thinking, and then seems to brighten up a bit when she figures out a solution. She grabs her phone from her pocket, types something, and then turns the screen towards Neon and presses it against the glass.
Wanna see your Twitter feed? Sage gave me ur phone what’s ur PIN?
“011836,” Neon says.
Jett pauses halfway through typing it in, and Neon flushes a little as she remembers why she chose that pin in the first place.
After three full seconds of Jett staring down at her phone slack-jawed, she looks up at Neon with misty eyes. Before Neon can decide if that’s a good thing, she shakes her head like she’s trying to get a strand of hair out of her eyes.
My birthday, huh? That’s cute.
Neon flushes even more, and Jett smirks at her—that stupid little smirk, god—as she enters the PIN and opens Twitter.
At first, she tries pressing it up against the glass, but that’s too slow for Neon’s reading speed. They settle for Neon reading over her shoulder. If it weren’t so cold in here, it could almost feel like she’s in bed, loose-limbed with her chin perched on Jett’s good shoulder as she scrolls through Tiktok.
The illusion is broken when Neon says, “Wait, that was funny, go back,” and Jett can’t read her lips with her back turned.
The loneliness crashes into her all at once, unrelenting in its strangling grip around her ribcage, too-tight vines threading through bone.
Normally, she gets the whirr of her surge protector to warn her before a shock. This time, she rises half a foot into the air when the lightning cascades from her fingertips.
Jett hears the crackling against the glass and whirls around, her eyes locking on Neon’s.
She’s curled in on herself now, her hands pressed to the ground beneath her, knees pulled up to her chin.
“What happened?” Jett asks, her words trailing off when she realizes Neon can’t hear through the glass.
She avoids Jett’s eyes, breathing so hard her shoulders shake as the lightning fizzles out at her fingertips.
When she looks back up, her eyes are wide and scared, but she gives a shaky thumbs-up.
“All good,” Neon says. “It just startled me.”
Jett grabs her phone, types, wanna see a trick?, and turns it around for Neon to read. Neon nods, the ghost of a grin appearing back on her face.
Jett guides the wind to pull her knives from their holsters, and Neon perks up, clearly interested.
“Watch this,” Jett says, even though Neon can’t hear her, and starts to juggle her knives, using her wind to propel them up in dramatic arcs. She hasn’t really mastered this trick, so she can’t look up at Neon or she’ll end up slicing a finger off. In her peripheral, it looks like she might be grinning.
She lowers the intensity of her wind, letting her knives flutter down to the floor, and then looks up.
Mission accomplished. She’s beaming.
“Do another one?” Neon asks.
This one’s even harder, but it’s also more entertaining, so Jett hones her focus.
“Okay, Sunwoo. This is it. Lock in.”
She’s glad Neon can’t read lips.
She calls this trick Popcorn. She has to channel her wind in six different directions at once to make it work, but she manages to send each one flying around in a different direction, holding her hands palm-up and popping her fingertips in different directions.
She usually closes her eyes for this one, since it’s more tactile than visual, but this time she just watches Neon’s eyes dart back and forth, gleefully tracking the motion of each knife.
She gets even more adventurous, causing one of them at a time to flip in the air, before her power starts to ebb and she returns the knives to the floor.
Luckily, her power comes back fast, so she manages to keep Neon entertained with a solid hour of kunai tricks. By the time she has really and truly run out of new ways to spin, flip, or juggle a knife, it’s around 6am, and she gets saved by the bell.
Because in comes Gekko, carrying a projector in his hands.
“Alright, my turn to hang out with my bestie. I made machaca con huevo, your plate’s on the counter in D-Dorm,” Gekko says, jabbing his thumb at the door in a playful you’re dismissed motion.
“Thanks, I’m good though. I just ate,” Jett replies, with a dismissive hand-wave.
“Waylay told me you’d say that, and that I should remind you that you ate a protein bar and it was ten hours ago,” he says, as he sets up the projector. “She also says you look like shit and you should take a nap.”
“She hasn’t even seen me! Why are you conspiring with my mentor?” Jett asks.
Loathed as she is to admit it, saying those words still sends a spark of pride through her chest, and it’s been six months since she bestowed that title upon Waylay.
“It’s convenient, and she’s right. You look like hell.”
Jett catches the blurry edges of her reflection in the containment room glass and begrudgingly admits he’s got a good point. Her hair’s fallen out of her ponytail in all directions, and she’s got dark circles under her eyes. Her lips have seen better days, too. She’s got a bad habit of biting at them when she’s worried.
She glances back up at Neon, who’s looking at her with a face so full of affection she can’t even begin to quantify it.
“I’m okay. Go eat,” she says, with a soft smile and a tap of her fingers against the glass.
There’s no way Neon managed to lip-read that entire conversation, so Jett must just be really predictable.
She nods, still half-hesitant.
“I’ll be right back,” she says, and Neon shakes her head, miming sleep with her palms pressed together.
Jett rolls her eyes, playfully flicking at the glass in the direction of Neon’s forehead. She nods at Gekko, a silent thank you, and slinks off towards the kitchen.
Going from the near-silent containment wing to the chaos in the D-Dorm common area is a bit of a hard shock to Jett’s brain, to say the least. She can’t even imagine how quiet Neon’s side must be.
Her chest feels tight, and she tries not to think about Neon for a second. Put on your own oxygen mask first or some other bullshit. As if she’d ever even think about breathing if Neon couldn’t.
“Woah, mate. You look haggard,” Phoenix says.
“That’s a big word for you, pretty boy,” Jett taunts back, shoving at his shoulder as she goes to the fridge to grab a protein shake to drink with her eggs.
“How’s she doing?” he asks, sidling up alongside her at the counter and leaning against it on one forearm.
“She’s, um. Good, I think? How’s it going with Yoru?”
Once she’s had a bite of the eggs, she starts feeling like she’s gonna pass out and die if she doesn’t eat everything in the kitchen right now, so she lets Phoenix rant awhile while she narrows her focus to singlehandedly devouring the food on her plate.
“So like, what do I do, mate? I mean, I’m kind of a rom-com kinda guy, you know?”
In all honesty, she wasn’t listening to half of what he said, but what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.
“Have you tried communicating with him about this at all?”
“Get back at me when your girlfriend knows she’s dating you, yeah?” he asks, with a shit-eating grin.
“Every time you make that face at me I want to hit you in the teeth,” Jett says, bringing her dish to the sink to rinse it out.
“Aht—Give me that. Dishes are on the no list.”
“You read my physical therapy notes? Weirdo,” she says, rolling her eyes and letting him snatch the plate out of her hand.
“They were on your desk! You were sitting right there,” Phoenix protests.
“Excuses, excuses,” Jett says, pushing herself off the counter with her palms, which isn’t on the yes list at all but neither was knife-juggling, so. “I’m gonna go shower. Help me with my ponytail after?”
“Sure thing,” Phoenix replies.
She means to take a quick shower, but she ends up sitting numbly on the shower floor and listening to the water run for a while. Jett’s not much of a coffee person, but she might have to make an exception today. Her brain feels fuzzy, like it’s full of TV static and she can’t quite get to her thoughts.
Finally, she pushes herself off the shower floor and dispenses some shampoo into her palm. When she reaches up to wash her hair, her arm spasms from pain, and the shampoo drips through her hands and bubbles as it goes down the drain
“Shit,” she hisses, reaching up at her shoulder by reflex. She flushes red even though she’s the only one here and tries to figure out how to wedge her shampoo bottle between her chin and the wall so she can maneuver some into her right palm. She succeeds, but the bottle slips out of her grip and lands on her toes before she can catch it.
“Oh, motherfucking shit, ow! Son of a bitch!”
She maintains a stream of hissed curses under her breath as she washes her hair one-handed while her useless arm hangs limply at her left side.
“Ugh! Fucking arm, fucking containment room, fucking hell! Everything sucks!”
She washes out the shampoo and decides she’ll just have to skip conditioner today. After she’s fully clean, she steps from the shower, using her wind to chase away the lingering steam. Being radiant has its perks on occasion.
She wipes at the fog in the mirror so she can assess her reflection. The dark circles are looking a little better. Her hair needs to be brushed, but Phoenix will do that part. He always does.
Once she’s dressed, she tosses her towel in a loose jumble on her head and steps out into her room. Phoenix is already waiting for her with a hairbrush and a ponytail holder.
This is their thing– has been since the week after she moved on-site, when she showed up at his door with a hairbrush, a bandaged gunshot wound on her shoulder, and a downright-hostile scowl. She still can’t believe she somehow ended up with a best friend after that.
She sits in front of him on the bed, and he sprays some leave-in conditioner and brushes through her hair with gentle sweeps.
“Can you do a braid this time?” Jett asks.
She mostly does a ponytail, but occasionally if she needs it to really hold for awhile, she’ll ask for a braid instead. He’s got two moms and a sister, so he’s pretty good at it.
They don’t talk much, but when he finishes the braid, she turns her body a bit and tips her head onto his shoulder with her bad shoulder pressed to his chest. The warmth seeps straight into the muscle immediately, and she sighs her relief. He wraps his arms around her, and she closes her eyes for a second—just a second—and then she’ll get up to go back to Neon.
She wakes up sprawled out in bed on her back, the lights dimmed. Phoenix is on his phone next to her, his left hand pressed to her shoulder, soothing the pain with its warmth.
“You let me sleep for four hours?” she huffs, sitting up and rubbing at her eyes. He passes over her hearing aids, and she slots them into her ears. He doesn’t speak until she’s fully adjusted to having them in.
“Hell yeah I let you sleep. I’m more scared of Neon and Waylay than I am of you.”
“Neon’s in containment, what is she gonna do?”
“I don’t know, but your girl’s kinda scary, Sun.”
“She’s not scary,” Jett snaps, harsher than she meant to.
She forces herself out of bed before she digs this particular hole any deeper.
“Hey.” He catches her hand with his. “You’re right, yeah? I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s not—It’s not you, I’m. I’m just…”
“I know,” he replies, earnestly. “You’re okay.”
His tone is so gentle it’s making her want to cry, so she shakes her head a little like a dog getting out of a bath.
“I’m gonna go back to Neon. Thank you for doing my hair and being my personal space heater.”
“Anytime, mate. If you need anything, you know where to find me.”
He follows her out the door and they part ways. When she gets back to the containment wing, she lingers outside the door for a second and listens.
Clove’s cheery, upbeat lilt floats down the halls. As Jett gets closer, she starts to make out the words. “And this one’s my third-favorite, ah’ reckon. Look at the lettering! Bought it off Etsy, it’s a custom. You should seriously play DND with us sometime, by the way.”
Clove doesn’t do well with quiet, Jett’s noticed. It makes sense they’d be sitting here effectively talking to themself. They’re a lot like Raze and Iso, in that sense. Raze doesn’t do well with quiet because her ears ring (a trait that her and Jett have in common, for different reasons). Iso gets understimulated if he doesn’t have music to listen to or at least a fan in the background.
Her stomach churns when she thinks of how understimulated Neon must be in the eerie silence of the containment room.
When she walks in, Neon looks up at her, grinning. She knocks on the glass a few times in a discordant pattern, and Clove nods and brandishes a handful of their DND dice.
“She wants you to juggle these. We’ve been playing charades for an hour. Sova came by and taught her some morse code, too, which is kind of fitting if you think about it. Like telegraphs? You know, I took this class on communications once—Oh, nevermind, that’s an infodump.”
“No, no, I’m interested. Haven’t heard Neon infodump in a full day, I’m getting antsy.”
It’s supposed to be a joke, but Clove’s face softens and she realizes it was actually kind of pathetic.
“Well, if that’s the case, I have more than a few thoughts about the worldwide impact of the telegraph. But first, I have to put the sports on for Neon.”
They click a button on the remote, aiming the projector at the opposite wall. Within about ten minutes, Neon is tracking the movement on the screen like a cat honed in on a laser pointer, and Jett knows far more about telegraphs than she ever expected to.
She’s been staring at Neon half the time, watching her furrowed brow and half-grin and the way her pigtails bounce when she nods at a particularly good play.
“You’ve got it bad for her, don’t you, lass?”
Jett’s head snaps up at Clove’s words, her mouth dropping half-open in silent protest. When she finally gathers her words, she sputters, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Not that anyone could blame you,” Clove continues, as if Jett never spoke. “She’s absolutely bonnie.”
“Ugh, I know. Like—droolworthy, even. Oh, you know who else is droolworthy?” Jett replies, and relishes in the satisfaction of watching them flush a deep, deep red. “That’s what I thought. But yeah, I—I’ve ‘got it bad’ or whatever.”
It’s not the first time she’s admitted this out loud. Phoenix has been the devoted keeper of this secret for the nearly two years since Neon joined the Protocol, in exchange for her silence about his situationship with Yoru.
Still, it feels a little weird to say it with Neon sitting five feet away, even if she is behind a layer of sealed glass, completely unable to lip-read, and fully locked into the basketball match by this point.
Jett glances over at her, watching as she drums her fingertips on her thighs, and reads her lips as she mutters under her breath at the game. C’mon, that’s bullshit! It didn’t even hit the back of the hoop.
“Have you told her? Or—is this, like a she doesn’t know she’s gay situation? I mean, I just assumed she knew, but—”
“Clove. Look at her,” Jett deadpans. “She knows. Just uh. I don’t think it’s like that for her, with me. I mean, she’s my best friend. I’m not gonna mess that up.”
I’m not gonna mess her up, Jett thinks, but doesn’t say.
“Did you see the look on her face when you walked in? Jett, she’s pure smitten. I don’t think there’s anything to mess up at this point, you’re basically already dating.”
“No we aren’t! It’s just—”
A sharp strike of lightning against the glass startles both of them, and Jett whirls around to find Neon red-faced and pissed-off and stunned.
“Sorry, that play was terrible!” she says. “I’m cool, guys. My bad.”
She’s giggling, so Jett relaxes a little and grins back at her.
“Maybe you could tell her later,” Clove says. “Before she’s out of the Shock Box, I mean. She can’t hear you, but at least you get to get it off your chest. Might do you some good.”
Clove pushes themself off the ground, handing the remote over to Jett.
“You should switch to a nature documentary or something once this game is over. She’s starting to glow a little.”
With that, Clove’s gone, and Jett turns around to look at Neon.
She is glowing, a candlelit white-blue with the beginnings of teal shock-lines running down her wrists. Jett feels a deep, deep fluttering in her chest, in the space just below her ribs.
Still, Clove might’ve had a point, so Jett cuts her off after one game and switches to some BBC nature documentary about cheetahs.
Neon’s glowing fades down to a faint iridescent shimmer, and she curls up on her bed in a nest of blankets.
“Might take a nap,” Neon mouths at her.
Jett nods, types something out on her notes app, and turns it around so Neon can see. Get some sleep. I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.
Neon falls asleep thirty minutes after the documentary starts, and Jett situates herself so she can see her in her peripheral while she scrolls on social media.
“I’m glad we took a vacation, y’know that?” Raze says, looping an arm around her shoulders. Killjoy joins in the hug, from the other side. They both let Neon go after a moment, and her hand half-chases them. She pulls it back, forces her arms down to her sides.
“I’m glad I came. I think I make a good fifth wheel.”
“The best, even,” Phoenix says, and Jett and Yoru trail behind him. Neon squints at Jett for a moment, trying to piece together how she ended up on this trip. Jett wasn’t supposed to be here. There was a reason she wasn’t supposed to be here. Neon can’t remember what it was.
“C’mon, come swim with me,” Jett says, grinning wide and grabbing her hand.
Neon looks down at her swimsuit, frowning. She feels naked, exposed, without her surge protector. She can’t figure out why she doesn’t have it on.
She follows Jett out past the shores. Jett doesn’t let go of her hand, and once they’re shoulder-deep in the water, she grabs her other one too. Their joined hands float together. Neon wants to kiss her.
And then the shocks start. Jett flinches, and Neon panics and tries to scramble to the shore, but her limbs won’t cooperate.
“No, shit, no,” Neon gasps, reaching towards the sand. “Phoenix! Help!”
She can see him through her salt-soaked eyes. He’s talking to Yoru, gesturing with exaggerated motions and laughing. He can’t hear her.
The next time she tries to scream, her lungs fill with water.
Neon gasps herself awake, flinging an arm in either direction as if to—what? Orient herself, maybe?
Her voltage clings to her skin like sweat, humming around her in charged pulses of static.
Jett is asleep on the other side of the window, curled up on the ground facing Neon. Raze’s Spongebob blanket is tucked around her, half-unfurled by Jett’s restlessness in her sleep. Neon stands there with suspended breath and doesn’t exhale until she sees Jett’s chest rise and fall a few times in a row.
If none of this had happened, they’d be in bed right now, curled up together, and Jett would’ve felt her flinch and started shushing and rocking her before she could even wake up all the way.
The thought of that is enough to make Neon’s usual, quiet longing for physical affection turn to something visceral, something that rips through her muscles like barbed wire.
She knows this feeling, this hunger in her skin, and how to contain it. She’s done it a million times—wedged herself into the tiniest space she could find, a shelf of a closet or a gap between the walls in the range—but her face burns at the thought of Jett ever seeing that.
The humiliation of this hypothetical is enough to send a round of sparks careening from her plates, and she struggles to reel in her thoughts to keep it from happening again.
She takes in a shaky breath that barely feels like it reaches her lungs and tries to clear her mind, to think about nothing. It doesn’t work. They race without her conscious decision, snippets of half-formed nonsense and flashes of that dream, of Jett spasming in the water, of screaming and screaming for no one to hear.
She wonders if anyone would hear her now. She could die in here and they’d never even know, right? No, no, there’s—sensors, or something, that they’ve stuck on her skin. They’d know.
How long has she been in here? She’s not even sure how long she slept.
She wants out. She wants her surge protector back. She wants Jett to hold her so tight it hurts and whisper at her, shh, shh, Tala. Shh. You’re okay. I’ve got you.
Jett turns onto her stomach, the side of her face smushed up against her pillow, and Neon can tell by the movement of her lips that she’s grumbling something in her sleep.
It’s enough to bring her back to reality a little. She runs shaky hands over her arms, letting the bursts of static bring up the hairs there and focusing on the slight sting instead of her surmounting panic.
“I’m okay. I’m okay. I’ll be out of here soon.” she says aloud, just so some sound other than the whirr of the white noise machine fills the room.
She presses her back against the wall and tips her face over so that the side of her head rests against the glass. It’s not quite the same as a small space, but it’s enough to keep her from turning headlong into a tailspin.
The projector is still playing, she realizes. Shitty reality TV, the kind of stuff her and Jett and Phoenix will watch just to complain the entire time. Jett has a habit of accidentally getting too invested in the outcome, though she’d never admit it.
This is one from the Philippines that she showed Jett awhile back, in the long stretches of boring weeks right after she tore her rotator cuff. A silly game show with a predictable romance that Jett said was fanon jeonix coded. Neon told her she’d been hanging out with Killjoy and Clove too much, and Phoenix said that she had to come up with a better ship name than jeonix if she was gonna keep making that joke.
She tries not to think about how much she misses hearing people talk. Maybe when this is over, she’ll tell Skye to add some podcasts or something to the white noise machine.
She glances back down at Jett. She didn’t take off her hearing aids, Neon realizes. She wishes she could reach through the glass and slip them out of her ears, set them on the charging dock.
She settles for stroking her thumb along the glass, right over the arch of Jett’s jaw, and eventually, the motion lulls her back into a restless sleep.
When she wakes up, Jett’s not there, but Raze is sitting in front of the glass painting something on a tiny canvas. She’s a welcome flash of brilliance in the silence of the last twenty-something hours.
She’s wearing a lime-green tanktop and black cargo pants, one of Killjoy’s grey-checker flannels tied around her waist. Neon doesn’t think she could pull off that outfit, but she supposes when you’re as pretty as Raze, you can basically wear whatever you want.
Raze sees Neon out of the corner of her eye and slips one side of her headphones off her left ear. A flash of orange glitter catches Neon’s eye, and she grins.
“New skins?” Neon asks.
Raze isn’t quite as adept at lip-reading as Jett is, by her own admission, but she catches the context and nods, beaming like sunshine incarnate.
“Killjoy is a lucky, lucky woman,” Neon mouths, enunciating a little more. Raze looks puzzled for a second, but when she gets it, she rolls her eyes and flicks her paintbrush at the glass.
Neon watches the paint droplets roll down, realizing that she’s been in this stupid room for too long if she’s reached the point of watching paint dry with genuine interest.
Neon fingerspells Jett’s name with an eyebrow raised in question.
She learned the ASL alphabet from Selkie a bit ago in a nerve-wracking attempt at finding something to bond with her about, and they haven’t made any efforts at interacting since. Not even so much as a flash of eye contact.
Neon’s never been great at making friends. The alphabet did come in handy, though, since it’s similar enough to the Libras alphabet for Raze to understand through the glass.
Raze spells back, slowly for Neon’s benefit, food. Once Neon nods her understanding, Raze points two fingertips up and jitters them a few times in a motion that Neon has learned means same (or, in this context, you too).
Raze, unlike Jett, tends to incorporate her sign into her speech pretty often. Neon’s picked up a bit of Libras just from watching her.
Neon shakes her head, and Raze gives her a sympathetic look.
During Neon’s first round of containment, Killjoy had engineered a little robot contraption that shuffles food into the room a few times a day. Neon’s got a little horde of snacks awaiting her when her appetite comes back, but right now, it’s shot.
For the next couple hours or so, they play a game where Raze leaves the containment wing and comes back with progressively-funnier objects from around the Protocol.
The first round is just three toasters and one of Chamber’s monogrammed cufflinks. She giggles as Raze sets them in a pile in the corner of the room.
She comes back next time with Phoenix’s shoes—only the right shoe of four different pairs— and another of Chamber’s cufflinks.
When she returns yet again with Yoru’s hair gel and motorcycle keys, one of Arcana’s tarot decks, and three of Clove’s rings, Neon realizes that these are actually items Raze has managed to steal without anyone noticing, and the game becomes a lot funnier after that. Before Raze leaves for her next round of literal felonies, she turns around and procures another cufflink, setting it gingerly in the growing pile with a shit-eating grin.
Sometime between “Viper’s labcoat” and “literally Wingman,” Phoenix comes looking for his shoes, and Neon gets the entertainment of watching everyone come collect their things for a while.
When Chamber comes to retrieve his cufflinks with an apologetic nod in her direction and no further acknowledgement otherwise, she has a staring contest with Wingman, and wonders if the containment room is like a human zoo of sorts.
“I have got to get out of here,” she mutters. “I think I might be losing it.”
She’s not sure, but she swears Wingman nods his agreement.
Battery low.
When Jett returns, Neon’s watching Gekko shine a laser pointer at the wall for Wingman to chase around. It’s kinda cute, but also a little sad because he keeps running into the glass trying to get to Neon.
“He sounds like a raw chicken when he does that,” Jett says, which makes Gekko laugh, and that causes Neon to notice she’s arrived.
Clove was right. Neon does brighten up every time Jett walks in a room. This time, Jett gets to watch it happen in real time, and it’s certainly a sight for sore eyes.
Her shoulders lift, iris-hued incandescence shadowing the arcs of her features like the gauzy halo around a neon sign.
Battery low.
Neon gives her the same exact feeling as when an elevator starts moving; sinking and rising in tandem, like she’s being pulled into the gravity of something beyond her wildest comprehension.
“Alright, Wings, let’s let Neon rest,” Gekko says, scooping him up with one arm.
“You could leave him in here, if you want. I’ll babysit,” Jett says.
“Not a chance. He’s already been stolen once today.”
Gekko waves goodbye, and Jett responds in kind, turning back to Neon.
This time, it’s Neon who raises her hand to the glass, and Jett flattens her own up against it. Their hands align, tiny arcs of lightning popping against the glass in a staccato rhythm. It reminds her of popcorn being cooked in a pan.
Power off.
Jett huffs, ripping out her hearing aids probably rougher than she should have and shoving them in the pocket of her jacket
“Jett? If you her anything I just had?”
Jett tears her eyes away from Neon, realizing that Sage has probably been trying to speak to her for a while. She forgot to charge her hearing aids last night, but who could blame her? It just wasn’t super high on her list of priorities. “Huh? Uh, yeah! Wait, what?”
It’s easier to hear her now that Jett can see her face, but she still has to really think about it to piece together what’s being said.
“Killjoy esahthee surge protector. It’ll be done tomorrow evening.”
“Tomorrow evening?” Jett asks, and Sage nods. “No, that’s not gonna work. She can’t stay in there for another day.”
“Killjoy asentheftuhrab since it happened. She’s doing everything she can. There’s a bunch of eye knee ... Her hands are —om trying to piece it all together.”
“Forgive me for not caring about Killjoy’s hands while Neon’s sitting here in a fish tank trying not to shock herself,” Jett huffs, gripping at her wrist to conceal the trembling in her hands.
Sage looks startled, so Jett assumes she was talking too loudly to make up for the reduction in her hearing.
“I wasn’t trying to yell,” Jett manages to muster up, and then glances away and lets Sage’s voice fade to droning for a moment so she can get herself together before she actually gets pissed off enough to cause Seoul, the sequel.
She’s running on broken intervals of sleep, her shoulder hurts, she doesn’t have her hearing aids, and Neon’s stuck in the containment room for at least another day. Possibly more if Jett misheard something, which is a distinct possibility.
By the time Jett looks back up, Sage is gone, and Neon’s sitting on the other side of the glass with her fingertips pressed to it, her brows furrowed with concern.
Jett sets her hand against the glass, holds it there lined up with Neon’s.
“I’m sorry, Tals. I hate that you’re stuck in there.”
Neon’s eyes lock in on Jett’s lips like she’s trying to solve a puzzle, like her hand is hovering above a chess piece.
“God, ha, I suck at this. Real glad you can’t hear me right now,” she admits, tapping her fingertips against the outline of Neon’s hand. “I’m like, super in love with you, okay? I just needed to say it to your face at least once. That’s all.”
Neon, oblivious to Jett’s confessions, reaches forward and starts to trace her palm lines with her fingertip. That action, so familiar even if she can’t feel it this time, makes her feel like her heart just swelled in size so she could love Neon even more. And worse, the confession seems to have the opposite effect to what she was anticipating, because now that she’s said it once, she doesn’t want to stop.
She says it three times when they’re watching nature documentaries, and again when they’re laying side-by-side making a game of tapping the glass in alternating rhythms. She says it again when Neon shoves the pillows off the bed and turns onto her stomach, craning her head at that awful angle that makes Jett cringe every time, and another time when her breathing evens out.
She tries not to think about when this is all over and she has to shove her feelings back inside and try to forget. None of that matters. She just wants Neon to be safe.
This is why I can’t tell her. I’m too selfish. I can’t get out of my feelings for ten seconds and focus on what she needs. She deserves the world, and I’m the one who helped destroy it.
That wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. I can’t—it wasn’t me.
See? Selfish. Freaking out about Venice three years after it happened—
Jett propels herself to her feet and starts pacing, digging her nails into the sides of her arms as she does. Okay, that’s enough. No more.
No, I deserve it. This is my fault for being so weak.
Jett hears a muffled voice at the doorway and glances up.
“—from the Range,” Fade says, half-peering into the room like she isn’t sure if she’s allowed to enter or not. “You ee … thing?”
Rather than admit that she didn’t catch most of what Fade said, she just shrugs. She’s not in the mood for conversation right now, especially not with Fade, who she’s only recently even begun to tolerate.
She tracks her out of the corner of her eye, watches Fade hover for a second before nodding and taking her leave.
Jett huffs, letting her head fall into her hands. Great. Now she’s even managed to fuck up her and Fade’s tentative alliance, and probably made her feel like shit in the process.
She feels like crying, and then, all at once, the tears are soaking through her fingers and running down her face. She chokes back her sobs and tries to breathe through them.
She smells Waylay’s cologne and then her shadow is looming above her. Jett looks at her with pleading eyes. Please, not you. I can’t handle failing you too.
Waylay eases herself to the ground with a muttered fuck, I’m getting old that Jett knows she said without even being able to make out the words, and then sits down at Jett’s left side and wraps her in a hug that smells like aftershave and menthol.
She can’t hear all that well at lower frequencies without her hearing aids, but she can feel the thrum of Waylay’s voice resonating through her chest. It’s enough to soothe. It doesn’t sound like disappointment.
Jett feels Waylay hook one hearing aid, and then another, over each of her ears. Jett jabs each earpiece in and holds down the buttons until sound comes back into relieving focus around her and Waylay’s voice becomes mostly-clear again.
“You charged my backups?” Jett asks, sniffling and wiping at her eyes with the side of each wrist.
“I meant to drop by with them earlier, but I spent a couple hours mediating an argument between three grown adults instead. I think I might’ve killed Brimstone with my bare hands if Fade hadn’t shown up when she did.”
“What’d Brim do?” Jett asks, leaning over into Waylay’s side.
“Nothing I’m allowed to tell you about, but don’t worry about it. If I don’t get the chance to tear him a new one today, I’m certain Sage and Reyna have it covered. They’re pretty pissed off about this entire situation with Neon.”
“Wait, the meeting was about Neon? Are they gonna let her out of here?”
“No, but he is gonna force Killjoy to accept help from Deadlock and Cypher to get the surge protector done sooner. It’s probably for the best. Her hands looked gnarly when I saw her earlier.”
Jett’s words from earlier come back to haunt her. Forgive me for not caring about Killjoy’s hands, as if she hasn’t seen that woman push through pain until she crashed before. As if she hasn’t brushed her hair back and soothed her through flare-ups when Raze was on missions.
“I think I might be really fucked up,” Jett says, and has to force back a sob with the words.
“Probably so, yeah, just like everyone else here. What made you decide you’re uniquely damaged?”
It’s Waylay’s trademark type of sarcasm, so dry and sardonic it doesn’t land well with most audiences. Jett is not most audiences.
“I said something really mean about Killjoy earlier, and I ignored Fade, and—”
“Stop. You didn’t ignore Fade, you just couldn’t hear her. There’s a difference.”
“Can you please be less social worker and more career criminal right now?” Jett asks, fighting a grin as she wipes at the sticky sludge of tears that have pooled in the divots of her cheeks.
“I think you should mass-murder everyone who ever wronged you or anyone you love,” Waylay replies, in such a flat tone that anyone else would believe she was being serious. “Basic human needs are for the weak.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Jett scoffs, jabbing Waylay’s ribs with her elbow.
“So, just to summarize: You’re uniquely evil for saying a mean thing when you were upset?”
Jett rolls her eyes at her, puffing her lower lip into an exaggerated pout. “No! It’s not just that! There’s also…This thing with Neon.”
“The thing where you’ve been in love with her for almost two years and it’s very clear she reciprocates your feelings but both of you refuse to acknowledge it?”
“Okay, maybe a little less career criminal, actually. Yeah, fine, that thing, but it’s not just that. She’s—she’s good. Really good. I’m not scared that she doesn’t feel the same way. I’m scared that she does. That I’ve—given her this idea of me that isn’t true.”
Waylay presses her lips together in a motion Jett has learned means I’m finding it, give me a second. “Wow. There’s a lot to unpack there. Do you not think you’re good?”
“Not really? I mean, not the way other people are good, you know? Not the way Neon is.”
“That’s bullshit,” Waylay says, reeling back with a sudden ferocity to her tone. “Jett—Sunwoo. Listen to me. You are just as good as everyone you love. You cannot spend your whole life talking about yourself like you’re garbage.”
“So what am I supposed to do instead? Just go around letting people believe I’m a good person?”
Waylay’s eyes nearly bug out of her head, and Jett watches her buffer in real-time. Finally, she takes a deep breath, pinches at the bridge of her nose, and sighs.
“I think you’re good, but you know what else? I think there are things about you that matter more than what you have to give, and you miss those things, constantly. Things that are clear as day to everyone else. Even if you can’t see that you’re good, you know you’re brave, and stubborn, and relentless, and full of love. I promise you, Jett, you can’t heal the person you wish you were. You’ll just spend the rest of your life running from yourself. The sooner you stop running, the sooner she’ll catch up, and you’ll realize she’s actually pretty great.”
That hurts in a way Jett isn’t ready to face, so she just knocks her temple against Waylay’s shoulder a little and says, “Damn, mentor. That was cheesy as shit.”
“You know what? I take back everything I said. You’re insufferable.”
“Thanks for suffering me, then,” Jett replies, and she finds that she actually means it.
Neon wakes up from a dream she can hardly remember. The only remnant it leaves is the deep, unsettled ringing in her bones.
She’s woken up feeling like this before, and normally, she’s able to get to her surge protector immediately. This time, she just has to pace her way through the shocks, gritting her teeth as they wrack, uncontrolled, through her muscles. Her pulse is like a live-wire, spewing golden sparks from her metal plates with every heartbeat.
When it finally ends, she remembers her live studio audience and turns back to Jett with what she hopes is a reassuring smile.
Jett’s already on her feet, and Neon can tell she’d nearly managed to fall asleep by the puffiness to her eyes and the way her braid is partially undone.
Neon walks up to the glass and playfully shoots a shower of sparks at Jett’s hand, as if to tell her, see? It’s fine. I’m fine. Jett responds by dashing back dramatically, and then it turns into a game of sorts where Neon strikes the glass with her lightning and Jett tries to dash away before it hits.
It’s not enough to relieve the choke of static in her muscles, but it at least takes some of the edge off, makes everything less sharp and urgent.
She eases herself to the floor, panting lightly and grinning at Jett as thin arcs of lightning leap out from her plates in alternating patterns. Jett says something, glancing away from Neon as she does only to flicker her gaze back to her eyes.
In moments like these, where Jett’s staring at her with that half-dazed grin, Neon starts to feel this desperate, soaring hope in her chest. The kind that makes her start daydreaming of kisses that will never happen and a love that will never exist.
There have been times, with Jett, that she almost thought otherwise. Nights spent side-by-side with clasped hands, sharing dreams and fears and absurdities that never see the light of day. A few almost-kisses before Jett pulled away with a mumbled excuse and changed the subject like nothing ever happened. Three months where she basically lived in Neon’s room followed by two weeks of radio silence.
It’s confirmation bias, Neon supposes. You find what you look for, and Neon has been desperately searching for any sign that she shares her feelings for longer than she’s willing to admit. The reality is, Jett is just one of those people who’s a little in love with all her friends.
Neon’s lucky to be on that list at all. The way Jett loves is once in a lifetime. Like the air in a greenhouse, fresh and alive and real.
She expects the lightning to die down a little, like it always does after high exertion. When it’s still going after ten minutes, she frowns, glancing up at Jett to see if she’s noticed.
She has. She’s watching Neon with furrowed eyebrows.
Killjoy’s voice echoes in her head. The glass can tolerate up to 43,000°C, which is really remarkable if you think about it. After that, though, you’re on your own! As long as you don’t go into overdrive, you’ll be fine.
The first time she was in containment, she cut it pretty close, and that was for sixteen hours. It’s been almost double that now. Even with the steady arcs spilling out from her plates, it still feels like the electricity is building inside her, coiled tight and painful in her muscles despite her best efforts at dispelling it.
She stands up and tries another round of pacing, flexing her hands at her sides as she does. She tries to think about anything but the high hum of static in the room, the pressure in the air, the way Jett’s watching her from behind the glass.
A high spike of lightning arcs from the plate on her left arm and strikes the wall, and Neon whips around and meets Jett’s eyes, shaking her head. “Go. You have to go.”
She should’ve never let anyone in here, especially not Jett. It was a liability. Neon’s a liability.
Jett’s eyes flicker between Neon and the door as if she’s calculating something, and then she shakes her head.
“What? Jett, no, if this glass breaks, you die.” Holding the lightning in is starting to hurt. Her whole body is trembling. She wants to strangle Jett for being so fucking stubborn.
A bolt breaks from her fingertips and strikes the glass. Her hair starts to stand up on end. The glow from her eyes illuminates the containment room in a shimmer of ultraviolet that makes everything feel dreamlike.
“I can’t—Agh!” Another bolt, this one from the plate on her nose. “Jett—”
Viper shows up in the nick of time, grabs Jett by the back of her shirt, and forces her towards the door with a half-apologetic glance in Neon’s direction.
It’ll take them ten seconds to leave the containment wing. She squeezes her hands into fists, willing herself to hold back. She can see the flash of the alarm blaring outside the room.
She counts down the seconds, squeezing her fists tight. I’m gonna kill her, she’s gonna die, I’m gonna kill her, she’s—
Neon sobs as the lightning spills from her fingertips, her chest, her legs. Her muscles go rigid, her jaw clenched tight, her eyes forced shut as the light splits the air and the glass of the containment room shatters.
After that, it’s a blur. She lands, at some point, on the ground, and then Jett and Killjoy are sitting her up against the wall.
“Lean into me,” Jett says, cradling a hand around the back of Neon’s neck and pulling her forward. She feels Killjoy’s hands, fast and reassuringly confident in their action, fastening her surge protector.
“You gotta go,” Neon slurs.
“It’s okay, Tala. It’s okay. You did so good. It’s over.”
Her breathing’s ragged. She can’t put thoughts together. She gives up on thinking entirely and slumps over into Jett.
“All done, there we are. You did well,” Killjoy says, sweeping a hand over Neon’s hair, before pressing a kiss to the top of her head. It’s such a trademark Killjoy comfort gesture that it makes her grin a little. “Let’s get her to my lab, she needs a glass wash. After that, infirmary, ja?”
“She’s not gonna be able to walk, let’s get her on my back.”
Killjoy helps her to her feet, wrapping an arm around her waist and lifting her onto Jett’s back. Neon has just enough sense left to wrap her arms around Jett’s shoulders.
After two days of monotony and silence, everything feels too loud, too bright. Jett’s safe, and soft, and relievingly cold. Neon nudges her face into the crook of her neck and lets the world go dark a little.
“Nuh uh, gotta hold on, Tals. We’re almost there. Don’t pass out on me just yet.”
“I love you,” Neon murmurs. “I love you a lot.”
She feels Jett momentarily stumble, holds a little tighter to her shoulders.
“Okay, Tala,” Jett says softly, and resumes walking.
“Okay,” Neon replies, and the world fades out around her.