Be warned: this is a very egoistical piece of writing. Why egoistical? Because I wrote it mainly for personal satisfaction, to "scratch" a fandom hitch that needed to be taken care of. The fanfic does take canon into consideration, and as such is not even AU. But it's just a vignette, with much subplot and past events that couldn't be addressed in such short a piece, even when they are relevant to it – and to the characters, and to me.
Title: The Familiar Stranger.
Author: Nemesi.
Fandom: Rockman Classic Saga (MM)
Genre: General. Action/Adventure. A twinge of angst and maybe some horror at the end?
Word Count: 2565.
Characters: Protoman, ???. (no pairing)
Rating: T.
Disclaimer: Rockman, its characters, places and themes belong to Capcom, Shogakukan, ShoPro, TV Tokio, etc. No copyright infringement is intended.
A/N: Neme is finally having two characters – one very dear to her, one she's never used before, but piques her curiosity – meet.
Warnings: Unbeated. Speed-written.
Summary: The long-overdue meeting of two who've never seen each other, and yet have know each other all their lives.
* * * * *
The fellow fought ingeniously, Protoman had to give him that.
He used his weapon to dig up ground fragments and turn them into projectiles, a deadly shower that wasn't easy to dodge.
A bit of an incongruous tactic, but very effective nonetheless, Protoman mused, raising his shield to block yet another round of shrapnel.
Two hours before, a distress call had blasted through the wireless network, intense but brief like a flash of thunder. The caller ID was difficult to read and unknown to Protoman; but still familiar enough to set him to motion. Triangulation coordinates led him to a warehouse, or rather the abandoned exoskeleton of it: an eerie ghost-place with more wind than windows and more debris than wind.
The distress call hadn't been a ruse per se. But as real as it was, the call had also been involuntary, the last effort of failing systems striving for survival. The unsuspecting broadcaster wasn't happy with his hideout being discovered, and had lashed out angrily at his would-be saviour.
There was another explosion, more shrapnel flying with eerie precision towards Protoman. The red robot evaded all projectiles but one – a jagged fragment of something shiny like metal or glass that got him in the shoulder, knocking him several inches back.
His opponent seemed to gasp, reel back, hesitate. Nothing more than the fraction of a second, but more than enough for Protoman to take cover behind a broken-down conveyor belt.
There followed a lull, the silence so thick that Protoman could hear nothing but the buzzing of his systems, the occasional grind and hiss of his failing reactor.
When he chanced a glance, he saw his opponent with his hands on his hips, an almost-childish gesture that was quite, but not completely familiar. It made him want to smile.
"Mph. The formidable Protoman is reduced to hiding like a wet cat, now?" the strange robot sneered.
He was clad in shades of green, and donned an helmet that didn't just seem modelled after Protoman's own, but could very well pass for his own, though repainted and garnished with a V-shaped bar of gold. During one of the few, occasional close-contacts his opponent had allowed, Protoman had even noticed a particular indentation on it: something that looked disturbingly similar to the moon-shaped legacy of his first fight with Megaman that he still wore to that day.
The green ensemble covered the stranger wholly – head, neck, arms, legs – and there was nothing visible of his face apart from the full, mobile mouth, its shade the same pale pink of a frozen corpse. It was pursed out into a mutinous frown, jaw muscle set stubbornly.
"The proper insult," Protoman called out, sounding amused and much-too relaxed for someone who was wounded and cornered, "would be 'huddling like a wet rat'."
The stranger-in-green stiffened, initializing a retort that was never voiced.
Protoman rolled out from behind the rusted-out conveyor belt, aimed his buster at a long-forgotten crane hanging from the ceiling.
The plasma shot impacted with the hook, sent it hurtling down and towards the stranger-in-green in a shower of sparks and rusty particles.
Upon impact, the hook unseated the stranger-in-green from his unseemly vehicle, sent one smashing against the wall and the other skidding across the floor in the opposite direction.
When the stranger-in-green regained enough control over his whirring systems, Protoman was crouching over him, waving his buster almost casually in his face. There was no wound to speak of anywhere on his person.
"Now," he said colloquially, "why don't we talk it over?"
The corpse-like lips thinned. The muscle in the stranger-in-green's jaw jumped. His whole body stiffened, growing taut, but he made no other move.
Protoman narrowed his eyes.
He'd had already tried to link to this strange robot, but his attempts had proved fruitless, so far. He'd hoped that a reduced distance, as well as a lull in their fight, would help the process along, but he kept pulling a blank.
It wasn't a matter of firewalls, or missing passwords: the stranger-in-green was keeping his wireless data channel wide open, vulnerable to all kind of intrusions. However, download and upload were equally impossible. There was too much noise – pain, confusion, a chaos like the deepest ditches of Hell – to get a steady connection.
It felt like his hard-drive had been partitioned in two servers that were at war – not just a software conflict, then, but whole sections of the programming interface devastated by bugs. Resources – memory, registry, peripheral devices – were being played over in a tug-of-war game, whipping up a storm of clutter. There were errors within the replicated hierarchical content repository that sent synchronization values jumping all over the place.
Whoever this stranger was, he needed to defrag and debug, badly.
He had to be in as much pain as Protoman himself felt whenever his illness acted up, and the agony burned like acid through his chest. Enough pain for his self-preservation subroutines to go against his main processor and sent an SOS signal without going through the necessary procedures.
"I heard your distress signal."
Protoman's voice still lacked hostility, but it also lacked that distinctive, metallic quality that said he'd initialized the Alpha Priority Program, which allowed him to master all Robot Masters.
"And rushed to my rescue?" The stranger-in-green looked furious with his own treacherous subroutines. He crossed his arms, palms hooked underneath his armpits and shoulders hunched up in another not-quite childish, not-quite familiar gesture. "As if."
Even the emotions he projected were hard to decode: he seemed at the same time aggressive, and completely yielding. Irate, and defensive. Eager for battle, and loathe to start it. Hurtful, pleading. Proud, self-deprecating.
Schizophrenia, Protoman's cognitive interface provided. In its purest, mechanical incarnation.
He gave a one-shoulder shrug.
"I don't see why not."
"I don't see you being so kind-hearted to me."
Implying that they knew each other? Sure, he was a Robot Master. However, he was not a model Protoman was familiar with. He wasn't a Cossackbot for sure, but he felt like a mixture of Wilybot and Lightbot, however impossible.
"Who are you?"
The noise of metal teeth grinding against metal teeth.
"No-one you'd care about."
"Humour me."
"Thanks, but no, thanks."
"Who's your Father, then?"
A slow, bitter grin.
"The same a yours."
"You've got none?"
"Or is that two?"
Touché.
Protoman made an intelligible sound, as he experienced another connection failure with the stranger-in-green.
This robot felt disturbingly familiar, but also totally estranged; the way it happens when something we know we should recognize is reflected by a concave surface, or when we step inside an House of Mirrors, and even our own figure is twisted into something fantastic and awry.
Mirror.
Protoman's AI was built to solve problems, to make connection, find solutions.
A reflection in a mirror.
It had done what it was best at. During the battle, clues had been gathered, studied, organized.
Both Wilybot and Lightbot.
Searches had been conducted, cross-linking through his archive and what cache-data could be collected from the wireless Robot Masters network.
The yielded result was impossible.
Verschränkung.
Protoman ground his teeth together.
It couldn't be. It just couldn't be.
It was his illness that was making him see things. The familiarity, the resemblance… they had to be a delusion of his over-processing mind. He probably just needed to defrag himself, or get into stasis and recharge for a few hours. Maybe he was going crazy.
Like father, like son…
But that body structure, half-boy, half-fighter, musician's fingers attached to thick, gun-wielding wrists, full lips gentling the slopes of a stubborn, set jaw. That digital signature, the base ciphers unadulterated, though distorted by noise. That ID code. That wireless signal.
They were all partial matches, but matches that lead all to the same conclusion, to the same Robot Master, the same, beloved being.
"Who are you?"
The Mastering subroutine had switched on on its own.
For a moment, the stranger-in-green looked like he wanted to reach out, to say something soft and pleading, but the moment was gone quickly, too quickly to properly encode. His whole body shuddered, then tensed, freezing as if dealing with a fatal error.
Corpse-pale lips pulled back around the flash of white teeth. Lines of contempt appeared around the mouth, as defined as brush strokes of ink.
"This self has no name. This self is defined by an acronym."
"Who. Are. You?" Protoman growled out, body tensing.
"You know who I am."
The stranger-in-green surged.
His body, his mind. He linked himself with Protoman, overcame the systems effortlessly, firewalls recognizing and granting him access, responding to passwords and codes Protoman had given no one – no one – but that this familiar stranger knew.
Protoman stumbled backwards, the familiar stranger's body pushing against his own, hands on his shoulders, ramming him backwards and into a metal beam. The shield went flying, the buster circuitry was cut off, weapon de-morphing into standard arm-shape.
They were face to face now, visor to visor, the familiar stranger desperate, through all that anger; pleading, under all those layers of menace.
"I'm the one you discarded! The one you've forsaken!"
Pleading, threatening, accusing, begging, hope, rage. Everything was one in the same.
Protoman put up a secondary (emergency) firewall, regain enough control of his system to grab the familiar stranger by the shoulders, push them apart, but not before their own, private pains had come into touch, each getting a mind-numbing taste of the exquisite agony coursing through the other's circuitries.
There was a stalemate, iron hands crushing iron shoulders, arms pulled so taut that the rotors in both their shoulders and elbows whined with the strain.
The stasis was broken by an external sound, a retroactive variable they hadn't taken into account.
The metal beam.
Base metal, not adamantium.
Rusty, lightweight.
Unable – unfit – to support the weight of two Robot Masters locked in combat.
Both Protoman and the familiar stranger looked up.
A tremor had started from the metal beam that was being transferred to the whole structure.
The precarious, rusty structure.
First came the dust. A fine, blood-coloured cloud that swallowed them.
Bigger debris followed, jagged fragments of concrete, wires, old cables, what remained of the failing electrical system.
Beams and joints came last. An avalanche of metal that brought more dust on its wake, more rubble, as the building collapsed on itself like a castle of cards.
The familiar stranger pushed Protoman from him one second before the impact.
Protoman rolled away, systems pinpointing the best course of action and guiding him through the moves on autopilot, limbs poised to better absorb the shock, exposing the less important parts of his body to damage, while providing cover for the central units.
When the dust settled, Protoman lay in the relative cover provided by a upturned vehicle, undamaged if not for a long gash on his back. He looked up.
The familiar stranger stood on top of the pile of rubble that had once been his hideout, dark figure silhouetted against the moon. The visor had cracked upon impact, revealing a familiar, if too-pale face, cheeks marred with random scars and port-openings, eyes narrowed and cat-slitted in a way that defied all that Protoman knew – appreciated – about that face, that boy, that Robot.
An equivalent of blinking later, he was gone.
Protoman was left alone – alone with the desolation, the debris, the hollow ache spreading through his brain, his core, his chest-cavity, that echoed like an empty grotto. The stench of his own burnt flesh made him ill.
In the bottom corner of his vision, the result of his early search kept flashing, an angry red dot that bawled for attention.
Protoman minimized the window, archived the result for when he'd feel less heartbroken, and tapped on his comm., instead.
"…hello?"
Protoman felt the equivalent of a sleepy blink through the link, then something slow and inundating like a smile.
It should have comforted him.
It didn't.
"Mega--"
"Proto! It is you! I thought it was your caller ID, but I wasn't sure, because you never call, so I thought it was a what-if scenario played by my…" excited rambling gave way to a sheepish, but suitably worried tone. "Uhm, did something happen?"
"Is Dr Light home?"
"Dad? No, he's…"
"I'm coming in."
"Do you need repairs?"
Protoman paused. Ground through his teeth: "No."
A worried noise from the other end.
"But, your stats are all over the place, and there's noise in the--"
"I just had a disagreement."
"Who with?"
The words hanged heavily in the silence.
"Proto?" Alertness now. Pleading. Concern. "Who with?"
Protoman couldn't help a glance over to where he'd last seen the other Robot.
"…you."
* * * * *
Somewhere dark and chilly, the Robot Master known as Quint – model number DLNWA-001, where WA meant Wily-Adapted – was removing his battle gear.
The secondary hideout was the petty copy of the previous one – scattered metal bars, layers of dust like a blanket over the broken, upturned machinery, the comforting smell of oil lingering in the air like the promise of rain.
There was a glass panel, in the abandoned facility/warehouse/something he'd picked. Layered with dust, though not enough to cover his reflection as he moved, methodically, like a puppet on strings.
He hated Wily.
Removing his gloves yielded metal hands, the skin gone or flanking, gears exposed and shiny with grease.
He hated Protoman.
From under the helmet, memento of an older brother he couldn't claim as his own anymore, Megaman's own face emerged, skin several shades paler than it should be, eyes several shades darker, tinged red by upgrades he'd never asked for.
He hated himself, what they'd done to him.
His palm touched the cold surface.
Hated that he didn't know who he was, what he was, anymore.
He was a killer, but he'd been shutting off fellow robots even before he was force-recruited by the evil side. He was a thief – repairs such as what his reactors needed were hardly cheap, his OS was too bugged to trust it with self-repairs, and money didn't grown on trees. However, it was hard to develop any guilt over something that kept him alive, especially when life was the only thing that hadn't been stolen from him.
His finger curled, hand contracting into a fist.
A long, long time ago, he'd been Megaman, but being Megaman hadn't been enough for the humans, who'd forgotten him. Hadn't been enough for Protoman, who'd discarded him. Hadn't been enough for the madman he'd been handed over to, who'd sloppily reprogrammed him.
Being Megaman hadn't even been enough for his own father, his sibling, his most beloved ones, to recognize him in this alternate dimension he'd been tossed into – and so he'd been used, fought, belittled, discarded, all over again.
His fist moved away from the mirror.
In the end, he was barely even real – just the patched-up reflection of someone he could never be again.
The glass shattered easily under his fist. It didn't even hurt.
Fragments hurtled everywhere, a shower of glitter. Scattered through several, jagged pieces, Megaman's distorted reflection remained, watching Quint watch himself.
He hated them.
…a long, long time ago, he'd been Megaman…
Hated Wily, hated Protoman, hated himself, what they'd done to him.
…being Megaman hadn't been enough…
He hated that he didn't know who he was, what he was, anymore.
…he was a killer…
~*~おわり~*~
Uhm, hello. This is the author speaking.
I… realize that this fic doesn't make much of a sense unless you know who Quint is, so… it's Quint-time.
In canon, Quint is Megaman from the future, kidnapped and reprogrammed by Wily as one of his own. He appears first in MM2, where he narrowly escapes alive after a fight with Megaman-from-this-reality. He appears again in MM5, but it's unclear whether that's the real Quint, or a copy, since several inoperative copies of him can be seen in the last stages of the game.
The Mega Man and Bass CD Data says that Quint [dislikes himself (because he's Mega Man)], but that's just about all the info we have on him.
I "resisted" englobing him in my continuity for years, but, uhm, all of a sudden it sort of happened. *shrug* I can't explain how or why, but a couple of days ago (it's Friday 16th of April 2010, now) I got this tentative plotline for how and why Quint was kidnapped from his timeline, how he feels now that he's in our dimension, etc.
Of course, with me being me, "my" Quint is much more tortured and dark than you'd expect. I go by the pre-concept that, whatever timeline he's been picked up from, it's not the same as the one we're used to, and never will be (think Mirai Trunks and the dystopian future he had to face, VS Normal—timeline Trunks, who grew up in a rich family, wanting for nothing). So what for us is canon, might have not happened for him. But the opposite is true as well - what happened to him, might have not happened in canon.
In his own timeline, Quint has been betrayed horribly by Protoman, who was sort of his guide and mentor. And this betrayal resulted in him being reprogrammed against his will – and act that equals torture, for robots. Also, the reprogramming was sloppy, which made him instable. And the fact that Wily lost interest in him after his first fiasco only adds to his torment.
Quint is obviously self-depreciative, self-hating. I'm not sure whether he's self-hurting too; but that's only because it's hard to believe he'd hurt himself when he's been hurt enough already by others. He's malfunctioning, instable; his systems are failing and he isn't "quite-right" in the head – but who would be, in his place?
Also, Quint is often mistaken for one of Megaman-Killers, and that's from whence the final, recurring line of "he's a killer" comes from – I cut off the fic like that to give a sense of how his thoughts keep running in his circles, like a broken record, sinking him deeper and deeper into despair.
I find that I can't explain my view of Quint much too clearly, so I'm closing off this ramble with a small note: the epiphany I had the other day wasn't about Quint meeting Proto – that was just a fancy way to introduce him in my canonverse. My epiphany was about how things were in his timeline, prior to his kidnapping.
So a short fic/summary about AU!Mega, AU!Proto, the betrayal and the kidnapping *might* pop up out here sometime.