Chapter Text
If they’d been counting on just Dade to be paying attention, they would’ve missed the first attack.
Not that it would’ve been his fault. If anyone on the planet could’ve genuinely kept an ear out for their surroundings with Kate Libby in their bed and moaning in their ear, then they and they alone could give him shit for it.
Luckily, even when riding on top of Dade, grinding her hips back to take him in deeper, Kate’s mind never fully left the digital world. When notifications began echoing out from his monitor, she pulled back from where she’d been leaned over, sucking hickies into his neck, immediately.
“Hm?” Dade hummed.
His whole brain was hazy, but his disappointment at her stopping was more than eased by the incredible, incredible view. With her leaning back he could see everything. Her skin. Her breasts. Her hair. Her waist. His hands where they were splayed on thighs. All framed by the darkness of his room.
God, he’d never get tired of it.
She pressed a finger to his lips, eyes narrowed as she glanced back. “Shush.”
Dade smiled happily as his eyes fall shut. Flickering images danced across his imagination as he waited: an interrogation scene in a movie that had him embarrassingly hot under the collar at the theater, a print he’d seen in the back of an art shop of The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife in all its wild glory.
Whatever she was planning on doing to him, he was down for.
His enthusiasm was significantly dimmed when she lifted off of him, swinging a leg over his body to climb off the bed and rush to his desk.
Dade pushed himself onto his elbows to watch. His eyes traced over the outline her body, lit by the dim glow of his display. It was only when Kate reached over, throwing a t-shirt on his chair to sit down, that he saw the look of confusion on her face.
“What is it?” He kicked the blankets tangled in his feet to the side. Truthfully, it was only then that he noticed the beeping: one of their warning systems calling out for them.
“Someone’s coming for our turf again.”
“So?” He leaned across her back, arms wrapped around her front so he could nuzzle against her neck while getting a good look at the screen himself. “People have been trying for months now, but nobody’s been good enough to make it in.”
“This guy might be.”
That sobered Dade up. He leaned forward, squinting to make out Kate’s rapidly typed lines of code. “Wait, how are they already—”
“I don’t know, ok?” Kate hissed. “Shut up and just give me a second, I’ll—”
The screen went black. Kate cursed under her breath, pushing the keyboard away.
White text appeared slowly across the screen, each letter taking excruciatingly long to fade in
No need to fear!
Killa/Byte is here!
Dade watched Kate’s eyes widen in her reflection, her anger softening with the shock he felt too.
“A fusion,” she whispered.
“I still don’t get it,” Joey sighed, taking another drag off his blunt. “We fuse and hack all the time, why’s it matter that someone else did?”
Nikron’s apartment smelled like pizza and tacos. The remnants of the group’s feast, boxes and foil and napkins, was scattered across the living room. They’d have to clean it later. But, everyone was too full to start just yet, so now was the time for talking with feet kicked back and bellies full.
And it was the time for smoking, but it was always time for that.
Dade was lying across the couch, his head in Kate’s lap. Her face was just the lightest bit fuzzy with how room was starting to get smoky with the others’ joints. He looked up to gauge her reaction to Joey’s question, but she was gazing into the distance, biting at the nail of her thumb.
Phreak rolled his eyes. “We do, but we’re smart enough to follow hacker code.”
“Yeah, I remember. A challenge has to be fair, but I don’t get why this wasn’t. They had two people, but so did Crash and Burn.”
Dade reached a hand up, tapping the side of Kate’s hand to pull her out of her thoughts. She startled slightly, glancing down before catching herself and dropping her hand from where she’d been biting at it.
She reached down to card it through Dade’s hair, but it didn’t feel like it normally did. With no affection or teasing to it, he knew her mind still wasn’t fully in the moment and felt a prick of frustration at himself for not knowing how to bring her back down to somewhere calmer.
“Because it’s not fair when you fuse.” Phreak explained. “When you’re a team hacking together, the extra brainpower gets balanced out by the complications of dealing with each other. You’ve got to handle communication. Coordination. Typos so random you don’t even know to look out for them.”
“Hey!” Cereal perked up from where he’d been slouched across the arm of the couch. “That was one time, man. I’d been trying to get into that UK site for eons and their messed-up spellings had me twisted.”
“Fusing gets rid of all that,” Phreak plowed on. “You’re a machine. One body, one mind, one train of thought hurling towards its destination. So fusing with a friend in a 2v2 gives you an extra kick, but nobody would respect the win. Plus, you’d have to live with yourself knowing you weren’t a good enough team to do it vanilla.”
“Why doesn’t everyone fuse then? It’d be a fair fight for a fused duo to go against a fused duo, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure,” Nikron said, “but under that much pressure you’d need to find someone who hacks as well as you, thinks like you, and gets along with you to fuse with. Then you’d have to find another pair of lucky souls who managed to find the same thing.”
“And after all that, you’d still need to convince them to battle,” Phreak added. “At a certain point it’s easier to just stick it out unfused or even solo if you’re looking to start something.”
Joey pushed back in his chair, folding his arms with a sigh. “I still think it’d rock to battle fused with you guys.”
Kate laughed at that, the sound sending relief through Dade like a reset. He felt a tap at the very top of his head, and sat up so she can stand, before letting his head drop down onto the now-warm cushion as she walked over to the fridge.
“It does sound fun, doesn’t it” she said, scanning the shelves.
“That’s it!” Cereal sprang up, turning to lean over the back of the couch so he could face the kitchen. His smile was wide, looking back and forth between Dade beside him and Kate. “You two should fuse!”