Disclaimer: Wreck-It Ralph is the property of the Disney Company.

Author's note: I wrote this last spring and kind of forgot about it. But since the fandom is doing the #WiRRevival2k14 thing over on tumblr, I was digging around in my (many) unfinished fics and remembered I'd never posted this.

Probably it's natural for King Candy's mind to fall automatically to ranking everything. Racer's mentality, everything is all about placement in order and things can shift around within that frame, jostle each other for their spots but in the end they'll always end up arranged descending from his favorite to his not so favorite. Favorite tracks (this is a more fun list to consider in Sugar Rush than it ever was in TurboTime), favorite food (likewise—this glorious 64-bit world has more variety than he'd ever dreamed possible and the fact that it's all sugar based is a selling point). Favorite rooms in the castle—his castle—favorite lines of code to work with. Favorite racers.

Of course he's at the top of that list. Self-confidence is healthy, right? Of course it is, and he's never lacked it because well obviously, he's the best, the greatest, always has been and always will be, whatever fancy new game comes along it won't matter it will not, because he proved himself here didn't he? He proved that he can code himself up and fit in and thrive in a game in an environment that he was never programmed for and here it is, 2011 and Sugar Rush is still the most popular racing game in the arcade. And he's grounded enough to know that part of that's just Sugar Rush itself, the way the karts handle and its lush world and it's just fun, King Candy has always loved fun and it's one reason he waited forSugar Rush to come along before he made his move.

So anyway if he's going to rank all fifteen racers in Sugar Rush in order of his most favorite to his least favorite he's at the top, obviously, and sometimes his mind skips to the bottom of the list and that's always sort of a fun game to play, who's accumulated the least amount of his favor lately? Usually that's what it is, it's not that they did anything wrong, it's just that they bore him. Occasionally someone will land a particularly egregious hit on him just as he's about to cross the finish line and then he'll hate them for a day, two days, one time the continued expression of smug satisfaction on Gloyd's face had made King Candy despise him for a whole week.

But usually it's just that he doesn't care, and he tries to decide who he doesn't care the most about and he works his way up from there until he gets to the racers he does care about. Jubileena, whose goofy cheerfulness appeals to him, Crumbelina who likes to push boundaries and thinks he doesn't know, when really he just indulgently lets her get away with it. Rancis, who sure, he spends a little too much time preening for his own good but sometimes he spots threats in his mirrors that no one else would. Candlehead, who's so spacey that he's seen her hold a full conversation about the merits of various tire treads with the birthday candle on her hat, but who's brilliant on the track and if you're watching you can sometimes catch sharp intelligence blazing through the happy glaze that's over her eyes most of the time.

And then there's Taffyta. Taffyta whom he should hate, because she's too much like him—smart, ruthless, fast, confident—because in so many ways she is him, he would say like a broken off part of him except that makes it sound like she's damaged (which she's not) or that she's not her own complete entity (which she is). It's just that it's sometimes like they were programmed from the same strand of code that was split to make the two of them. Which is a funny accident, their games were made a decade and a half apart, by different companies, but there's just this look in her eyes that reminds him forcefully of himself. Over the years even the way they both drive has become similar. Not the same, no they've each got their own distinct style, their own ways of winning, but they're like two sides of the same glinting gold coin.

A gold coin stamped with a crown, why not go all the way with the imagery, because if he's carved a niche for himself as king in a game that wasn't meant to have one then she might as well be the queen. She's always acted like one and it's not his tampering with her memories that did it. The glitch was a princess sure, but didn't have the temperament for it. Taffyta, she's meant to rule, and if he wasn't already king he might have gone ahead and elevated her to the station that fits her attitude. He doesn't need a queen though, and anyway that would just be weird.

Come to think of it, it would be weird to be an eternally programmed nine-year-old. Fun in some ways. Not so much fun in others. Of course some of these kids have the bloodlust of much older characters, it's RoadBlasters-esque at times and makes something in him twist darkly, it's like the same physical reaction to nails on a chalkboard and hey, he'd be lying if he didn't admit to sometimes getting a deep and lingering satisfaction to taking another racer out with a sweet seeker, but usually, usually it's not inflicting the hit or the pain that he enjoys, it's blowing by them and knowing they're not going to catch up.

Taffyta's like that too. Even when she picks on the glitch, he can tell it's one small part pleasure in the bullying itself, but otherwise the thing that really makes her happy about it is the fact that she's protecting the game. Or well, protecting him, which she thinks is more or less the same and he's obviously not going to disabuse her of the idea.

Other than that one small detail—and of course all of its interconnected details that make one giant web of lies that most of the time he sits perfectly comfortably at the center of—other than that, he's more honest with Taffyta than he's been in a long time, and maybe than he's ever been with anyone.

She's not his equal. Obviously. But she's closer than anyone else has ever been.

So Taffyta—the racer he should maybe hate most of all, is the one that he likes best, his unwavering favorite who sits glittering at the head of all of her peers because she knows, she knows she's special. Just like him.

And it's funny because he never worries about all of this crashing down around him—why would he, it's been fourteen years and he's played the part of King Candy so convincingly that it's not even a part anymore, he is King Candy and Turbo is a distant memory, or would be except of course in arcade parlance his name is synonymous with betrayal and willful abandonment, worse than that actually, destruction, and so he can't forget, not really. He can try though and Taffyta makes it easier.

Ridiculous. A nine-year-old makes it easier. If he puts that into words he can't do anything but roll his eyes at himself. He can't even put it into words, but just the thought starting to coalesce into words in his racing mind is enough to make him snort derisively at himself. He doesn't need anyone and never has, he's the greatest racer ever and if you're the greatest it means you're alone, you can't share that with anyone else. There's only room for one person to be the best.

Still. If he was going to share it with someone. If he was, it would be the only person he's been able to call a friend in the past twenty-four years.

King Candy doesn't like to psychoanalyze himself but the fact that he feels like he and Taffyta are cut from the same cloth probably says something about him. Probably says a lot about him actually. And there have been moments, he could call them clarity but more often he calls them weakness, where he knows that he's childish, petty, cruel. But those moments pass because hey nice guys finish last, don't they? You don't win any gold medals holding back on power-ups, you don't get ahead, you don't get anything, if you don't seize opportunities as you see them. Opportunities aren't like power-ups, they're not there next time you come around for another lap. You have to grab it the first time and you can't think about the best way to use it you just have to do it, you just have to have the right instinct and act.

And the thing is Taffyta has always seemed to instinctively understand all of that. And in understanding all of that she understands him, more deeply than anyone else ever has. He doesn't think she knows it. Some days he'd rather not know it, and won't admit it to himself. Okay so maybe most days he won't admit it to himself.

But when the nights get long and his mind settles into oval laps around the same memories that he doesn't want to relive, he'll sometimes get in his kart and drive aimlessly around Sugar Rush. And it's the strangest thing but Taffyta's often in that spot that's become theirs, that overlook in the mountains swirling with snow and the promise of things endlessly hidden. Layers of snow falling over and over and accumulating but not showing their accumulation. Like him.

She'll be there more often than she's not, like some kind of invisible thread connects them, unsettles one of them when the other is unsettled, and King Candy doesn't even believe in stuff like that, doesn't want to believe in it and has never seen any proof that it's true but once in every great while a flash of certainty hits him that he really does have that kind of unexplainable connection with Taffyta.

She's his favorite, and his friend. And she's the only person he's ever felt bad about lying to.

Years later he remembers this in detail.

Well, of course he remembers everything in detail, part of what makes him such a great racer, the better you remember each track's hairpin turns and pitfalls and traps, the better you do in the rankings. But this particular line of thought comes back to him as he lies in the dark, with Taffyta, all grown-up now, beside him. She's not asleep and he knows it but she hasn't spoken, so he doesn't speak either.

He could. He could say, "I know you're awake," but she knows that he knows, it's a little thing but it's indicative of this larger thing that's always been between them, even when they were simply friends, when a chasm of years and lies yawned between them—this thing that he's always known, or always almost known. They're each a piece of the other, they each need the other because they're just not whole on their own.

It's not the same as being damaged. Which he is, but she never was until he damaged her himself. But then she picked up the pieces and fixed herself and then she fixed him too, which he'll never admit but it's true.

Taffyta shifts slightly and he slips an arm around her shoulders, feels her breathe in and out, and then again. And then she asks, "Do you ever regret any of it?"

"What?" he asks, knowing full well what she means.

"Everything. I don't know. Anything."

"I never regret anything, my dear," he says, a smile twitching at his mouth, which he knows even in the dark and not looking at him she'll hear in his voice.

"Uh huh." Her fingers trail across his stomach and she tucks them under his side, her arm pleasantly tight around his midsection. What it says is that his answer doesn't matter. What it says is that she's asking out of curiosity but it won't affect anything, because that thread between them isn't defined by actions or personality or words it's just there and in so many ways it's what's defining them instead of the other way around.

He could answer. Tell her the truth, which is complicated, when he was never meant to be complicated—he was never meant to be anything more than an 8-bit glob of pixels, race and win race and win and the rest isn't important. Does he regret it? Some of it, sure. Yeah. To this day he doesn't think of himself as a murderer but that's…there isn't it, it's what he tried to do. Twice. He can justify it, and he can and does live with it because he's always done what he's had to do. But he guesses that yes, he regrets it. Everything though?

"Here's the thing, Taff," he says. But then he pauses, considers what he wants to say, and Taffyta tucks her nose into the space between his shoulder and his chin, her warm nose and lips pressing into his neck. And then he just says, "The thing is…you already know the answer to that, don't you?"

Because the thing is he's not sure he can say out loud that she makes everything that he's ever done worth it. That he'd do everything all over again, make every bad decision, because he knows now that in the end it all leads him here. To her. Maybe he was never meant to be complicated but his world didn't care, and his bad choices sit alongside his good ones. Comfortably in some cases but not always. Bad things lead to more bad things, that's a truism that everyone gets drilled into them from the beginning, don't fail don't go Turbo because the more bad you do the worse you become and there will come a point when you can't turn it around, can't find any good anywhere in you because you've destroyed it all.

And maybe that's the case, maybe he just wasn't quite at the inescapable darkness yet, merely at the brink of it, because there's something so good in his life that he feels its light bleeding around the edges of him.

He feels her breath of laughter on his neck, and then her lips as she kisses him softly. "Yeah," she replies. "I kinda always did."

Which—well that sums it up. He kind of always did too. And now when he looks at her, or just feels her at his side or in the room or even near him on the track, and he does know. He can't regret anything because maybe him and Taffyta would have happened no matter what, but they happened because of every action both of them took.

And the other thing is—he's happy. He knows that the really important parts of him are intact, that his capacity to feel the most deep, profoundly good emotion hasn't been destroyed, because he's never stopped ranking people. And Taffyta is his number one, above everyone else, even him, and he'd never thought that he could care about, love, anyone more than he loves himself but…there she was, here she is, and he does.

King Candy kisses her hair and doesn't say anything else. He already knows that she knows.