[Nomz] Ira Tobias Black {Checkmate}

Ira was born in Wichita, Kansas to a plant worker and CNA who both would have done better in life without each other and without him. Until his birth, they believed their worst decision had been staying together. Ira would become his father's worst decision and he would have the scars to prove it. His mother's would be not leaving with her boy, but she wouldn't live with that regret for long.

Once he learned how to walk and talk, Ira was put in a place where he had to take care of himself. His father often worked late shifts at the plant and longer nights at the shitty, rundown pub a few blocks from home. His mother ended up with the nightshifts, trying to sleep through the day while her husband was gone. From the faintest rays of dawn to the long shadows of night, Ira tended to his own needs and sent himself to school.

Uniforms were meant to lessen the lines between the poor and rich at schools. Adults always fail to acknowledge that the wrinkles, yesterday's stains, and duct-taped soles make the distinction impossible to miss. Ira had been labeled 'VICTIM' from his first breath and the others at school did everything in their power to ensure he never fucking forgot his place. Even as an adult, he never forgot the feeling of the gravel digging into his knees as he was forced to kneel and beg.

Lisa tried to convince her son, holding a bag of frozen carrots to his face, that he should never give up. That there was a light in his chest. That he could make his life his own. She wanted to make sure he never gave up even as she spent the walk to the hospital sobbing over her inability to protect the only bright spot in her life.

Ira took a stand, fighting back and letting that fire in his chest take over. Keith had been pissed at first, being called away from work to pick up his son from the principal's office. After the story was explained, Ira was dragged out of the school by the back of his too-big jacket, wincing as he heard his stitch work break from the force. Ira's father walked him home in silence and the dread continued to build and build and build. It would be after his mother left that his father would find him in his room.

For the first time in forever, his father ruffled his short-cropped hair and grinned with enough pride for the boy to drown in. His mother wanted him to keep the light alive. His father was proud of him for letting it ignite into fire. Decades later, Ira would still remember sitting in the dark with his father, watching Fight Club on the screen. It wasn't a happy memory.

There is a reason kids who bully are depicted with bullies for fathers. They jumped Ira and Keith a block from the theaters, two from that shitty pub, and 4 from home. Pushing his little foot over that fence was the last good thing Keith would do for his son, telling him to run even as a bat collided with his knees.

Ira didn't go home or to the bar or even back to the theater. Snot and tears and tiny lungs gasping for breath, he booked it all the way to the hospital. Lisa had looked at her son, heard enough of his story, and kissed his crown. The receptionist's hands had trembled as she held him and his mother's long red hair disappeared into the night.

In the morning, Keith would be just coming out of surgery. His mother would never be seen again.

Disability could cover the rent and utilities of their rundown apartment. It could fund his father's insistence to drink his life away. It couldn't fund food or new clothes. It wasn't enough and so Ira turned to the only source a boy could: he turned to the streets.

Ira was a lookout. He became a courier. The boy became an informant. At some point, the icy sting of a blade pressed to his throat lost its meaning. The heavy weight of a gun to his skin became familiar. This indifference was the unknowing key to his survival as he spiraled further and further down a hole no one came back from. Juvie started feeling like home.

Life doesn't give second chances and, as the cops broke down the doors of the hideout Ira had been paid to help defend, he figured his time was finally up. This would finally be the charge that sent him to the big house, but no amount of apathy could calm the fluttering of his heart or the shrieking of his fight-or-flight response.

Ira tried to run, ducking under warehouse tables and scaling to the second-story walkway as fast as his too-small and too-big limbs let him. His worn shoes beat a pattern to the sounds of shouts and gunshots and fists meeting flesh. Someone cut the lights in a shower of sparks as he slid around a corner, knowing that the exit was right-

Aaron Lucas was middle-aged, far from retirement, and just so fucking tired of being on the force. He'd seen innocent people gunned down. He'd seen good cops take the fall for a corrupt system. He knew enough to know that this whole operation was backed with drug money, that someone was using the Police Department as their own personal militia. When he saw a kid booking it around the corner with nothing more than that animalistic fear and panic in his blue eyes, he hid the kid and protected him from his fellow officers. Life doesn't offer second chances, but Aaron offered one to Ira.








Ira knew his dad wasn't proud. He would never know if his mom would have been. He knew that Aaron was proud he graduated high school, hanging a picture of him in his cap and gown in the living room. His record, they knew, would prevent him from getting a white-collar job. Aaron pulled strings to get his boy's foot in the door of a security job. It was shit pay and shittier hours. Ira found that suited him just fine.

There was freedom in having a job and a home and something dangerously close to family. Ira came to love his security job and took up bounty hunting on his off days. His previous experience as a street rat seemed to shine, to finally apply to his adult life and he tapped old connections and traveled familiar footpaths. Some days, he knew, his life ventured too close to the lines of vigilantism.

But Ira wasn't the hooded figure on the west coast or the caped cryptid on the east. He was just a guy who loved his job a little too much. Who cared if he stopped the occasional mugging? Who fucking cared if he hit back as hard as they dared? The cops sure as fuck didn't care and neither did the people he was helping. It never became a problem until he ran into a real vigilante.

He didn't know the guy. Neither the outfit nor the name rang any bells. All he knew was that no amount of pressure seemed to keep the red inside, and no amount of shouting was resulting in help coming. Gloved hands had patted his, and the dying man offered Ira a soft look, like a parent reassuring his kid. He could be doing more. He could let that spark in his chest burst into flames. Why wasn't he doing more when people needed him?

Ira didn't know.

He decided to try and found surprising success despite hiding behind a mask and name that was not his own: Nightfall. He took up the last cases the dead vigilante had been working on, putting his own mind and experience to the test. It was satisfying in a way nothing else he had done had been. Important in a way his life had never been.

Aaron loved his boy and noticed when he came home more injured than he had previously. He regretted not moving them out of Wichita as soon as Ira was 18 and an adult. The old man pulled together his meager funds, offering his boy a trip out of town. Just to explore. To leave and come back. Round trip to New York City.

Ira had been over the moon and struggled to tell Aaron how much it meant to him. How the man had been a father to him. How his life changed for the better the day he tucked him behind those crates. Ira hadn't been able to say any of it, but the wet chuckle from his dad assured him that he knew. Some things didn't need to be said.

New York City was so much bigger than expected—so much louder, as screams of terror filled the streets. Ira looked up only to watch as an invasion started. Later, this seemingly endless battle would be dubbed The Battle of New York. It takes a certain type of person to stand against aliens who want to conquer your home, and it takes an extra special person to understand that your place is not on the front lines.

Debris choked the air, coating panicking civilians in concrete and ashes. Screams faded into a steady background noise as explosions erupted all around and metal groaned under the weight of top-heavy buildings. Trembling hands lifted a respirator from an EMT who would never need to worry about breathing again and Ira set to work. He touched more people that day than he had in his life, leading and carrying people from the wreckage of their lives.

The man hanging off his shoulders cried out in surprise and Ira half turned, spotting one of the aliens approaching them. Blue eyes cast about, praying that Spider-Man was still around as he had been brutalizing the Kree in the area, but the sky was empty. Life doesn't offer chances, but Ira could. He draped the injured civilian over the shoulders of a young woman and ushered them along before stepping forward.

Ira would remember that sneer the Kree wore as the tiny human stepped forward, fists raised in preparation for battle. Iron filled his mouth. Bruises blossomed over his skin. He'll never be certain if he heard the alien laugh at him or not, but he'll remember the feeling of broken concrete biting into his palms. He'll remember the pounding of his heart in his throat and the sight of his hands trying to catch the death blow as it came...the sight of his catching the blow.

Some people wake up the next day with their powers. Other people have them from the day they are born. Others still only earn them when their life is on the line and it becomes do or die. Ira fell in the last group; barely old enough to drink and he punched an alien into the building across the street.

He didn't know.

Trial and error. Victory and defeat. Ira learned quickly that the powers were and were not his. Spider-Man's strength only lasted him for a few minutes at a time. Superman's speed was only a few seconds. It was only after he instinctively used a girl's intangibility to phase through a truck that sped through him that he began to piece together what his power was.

He stuck with and around groups of heroes and villains where he could, abusing his and their powers to protect and defeat in equal measure. Lost in the adrenaline and bursts of superhuman durability, Ira pushed himself until he crashed, rolling onto his back in exhaustion. He remembers a hand shaking him awake, asking for his name and Ira's mouth wouldn't open. He held up his fingers instead.

"Six? Odd name. Alright, kiddo. We're gonna get you to the medics."

The only thing he could see through his cracked and filthy mask was sunlight reflecting off red metal. All he could hear over his staggered breathing was soft mechanical whirling.

Ira stayed in the city long beyond that bus ticket back home. There was comradery to be found in cleaning up the city and rounding up any civilians that still needed help. His powers were only useful as long as he was exposed to others. It made sense to stay longer, to make a name for himself and enjoy the company of others like him. He could always return to Wichita.







Ira never would.

Word about Six spread like wildfire among certain individuals; people who wanted the one could mimic other abilities. He was told he could make a change, that he could better the world. Someone like him had that spark that only the greatest of heroes possessed, that ability to do what needed to be done. Young and stupid, Ira bought into their propaganda.

The trick with being a survivor is that you keep going even when your body trembles under the weight of living. You keep moving forward as your will to live crumbles. You never stop despite the fact that you barely recall anything beyond the primal instinct to survive. Training. They called it training when it was torture. They told him they were building up his tolerances so he could work under any circumstances.

All Ira had was that flickering light in his heart.

M (regrettably short for 'Mysterious' [which the legal team said was copyrighted]) got his tasks done. He didn't make friends in Vought, preferring to keep everyone at arm's length. More so when he had no plans of staying past the length of his contract. His heart longed for the days when he chased petty criminals through the streets and abandoned buildings of Wichita. His soul needed that sense of community that he'd lost twice over. Ira couldn't let it happen a third time. He was going to make it out.

He dodged attempts to be recruited further by both his company and others like it. Ira didn't want to keep adding to the blood that already stained his hands and arms like a second skin of sin only he could see. His only saving grace was that they kept the lower half of his face covered for the mystery of it all. It made him more marketable like a prized bull at the county fair.

Ira had never felt more uncomfortable in his skin than he did during the meet and greet with his fans. He learned to retreat into himself, to distance himself from the things he had to do for the sake of his own sanity. Ira never figured out which part of his life with Vought was worse: the fanservice or the murders.







He succeeded.
He failed.

Fists pounded on the school bus doors fruitlessly. M knew he couldn't get in, not without the help of the super strength he had run through already. Nitro starved through the windows with a sick, twisted grin curling his chapped lips. Dirty white hair clung to his sweat-covered skin and his eyes burned. Ira knew what would come next, Vought had given him all the information he needed. Nitro was going to explode, killing countless in the process.

Ira had to make a choice. There was only one way to interrupt and stop Nitro. That choice would come with the price of the neighborhood and his team. Ira tapped into that flame in his chest, feeling it spark and burst into flames. There is only so much pain the human mind is capable of handling before it finally breaks. There is only so much soul-crushing guilt it can push through.

All lights are meant to be extinguished.

They would find his body in the disaster zone, skin knitting itself back together despite the flames licking at his clothes. Vought wouldn't protect M. His work as Six wouldn't save him. No one knew he had been Nightfall. As far as anyone was concerned, the hero was dead.

All that remained was Ira Tobias Black, prisoner of Belle Reve. He would wake up weeks later with no memory of anything outside his hospital bed. A perfect opportunity for Waller and her squad.