Reassignment
Pairing: 2D Perryshmirtz
I always promised myself I'd write something besides A New Suit, and now I can finally say I have
Perryborg—the boys still call him that sometimes, a sign of their limitless capacity to love him for what he, even now, is—considers the rubble in the gulch just outside of town. From this high off the ground, looking down, he can still see the shape of what had once been a multi-ton stone portrait of egotism. The statues that Doofenshmirtz had left behind inside town proper had all been blasted to rubble and hauled off for gravel, but this one they had simply pushed off the edge of the cliff, content enough that it was lying broken at the bottom of a river like it had never been.
But from up here, on top of the ranger station, there was no fooling anyone.
They let him come here alone without too much questioning. It is a forgiving city, in the face of all fear and hardship, and that had been the problem at the heart of it all. That had been why they needed to be protected, and why without that protection they had been so devastated. Perry looks down at the broken statue and feels his one human eye narrow.
The statue lost most of its nose, and the hemisphere of the face that had been carved with an eyepatch is cracked loose from the rest of the stone, giving the monstrosity a skeletal emptiness. It's an uneasy observation.
Perryborg—or Perry, or agent P– thinks about his nature. It's very Mary Shelly, this contemplation of the self. He isn't certain which name is his now. He was an agent, but there is a point at which no amount of forgiveness can undo a loss. He is Perryborg, that is, his physical form is a patented creation named by its architect. He wonders if he can still be Perry, too.
Doofenshmirtz had named him Perryborg right off the slab—it had been the first thing he heard after the procedure, the first sounds processed by his augmented body and fuzzy empty mind. Say hello to a brave new world, Perryborg. Unfortunately an unlimited capacity for violation of human rights does not in any way hinder a natural inclination to whimsy. The emperor had liked his snappy nicknames, that was for certain.
The memory of those first few moments post reassignment always make his head hurt.
He thinks that he can only remember his nemesis calling him Perry—just Perry—once, out of all the time they knew each other. It had been after the takeover. They had been hosting a dinner.
It happened in the hall outside of the ostentatious dining room where their guests were waiting. Doofenshmirtz pulled him aside, just a few feet from the high steel doors, to check him over with a critical eye. He was going for aloof and hospitable, with just a hint of maniacal jenuh say quah, he had explained earlier on in the night, as he pawed through his wardrobe full of nearly identical black lab coats. And dashing. Definitely dashing. Dashingly maniacal but aloof and also hospitable. He liked the idea of being escorted by one lone but massive bodyguard, a testament to his own devastating ingenuity.
They were ten minutes late to dinner in their own palace.
Doofenshmirtz reached for Perry's tie. Some part of Perry's hindbrain, the part that had never understood names or allegiances or anything more complex than survival, snapped to attention. Perry started backward. It was just a step, hardly much of a flinch, because some hot flaring of circuitry stopped the movement half way done and aborted it, leaving Perry's huge unwieldy body to sway uncertainly, until his elbow hit the corridor wall. It was the mechanical arm. It relayed no sensation.
Doofenshmirtz paused, a sharp glint of interest in his surviving eye, while Perry righted himself.
"Interesting," he hummed, glancing down at his soft gray gloves. Thoughtfully, he wound one arm back.
The punch caught Perry underneath his cheekbone with a blunt explosion of discomfort verging on pain. The emperor had never been much good in a fight. Perry thinks he may have once mentioned failing tryouts to the Drusselsteinian boxing team during the backstory of a long-ago scheme, but then, they were awfully long ago.
Perry did not flinch, regardless. Some trick of circuitry had already turned itself on, and his reflexes were a morgue of failed neural impulses. Now the animal instinct to flinch or defend itself was only a faint blue dizziness in the matter between his ears. He could feel a bruise blossoming under his skin as Doofenshmirtz eyed him, flexing his hand. Maybe he had hurt himself. He hoped—he—
That thought made Perry even dizzier than before.
When a moment passed and Perry failed to react—not even move his eye, really—the emperor grinned and reached out again, settling his gloved hands on the collar of Perry's Frankenstein suit.
He had designed it himself, the night that he first sent the president of the (mostly) United States his formal invitation to state dinner. It was a black suit, elegant in its way, with panels cut and hemmed to make way for robotic enhancements. If the emperor had a weakness, it was probably that he spent time fiddling with style and fashion that he could have spent monitoring and improving the efficacy of his regime. Perry can't count the number of shivering interior decorators he had escorted across the compound during his years as right hand and head of security.
Doofenshmirtz's hands shifted from the tie—now pulled tight enough to remind even Perryborg's eternally straining mind of a hangman's noose—to grasp the folds of the collar. They were the same height now, almost, with the adjustments the emperor had made during reassignment, and when he tugged at the neck of the suit, Perry's chest pressed into his.
Perry did not move. He couldn't have, even if he knew which direction he ought to move in.
"Remember what you are, Perry," Doofenshmirtz said, evenly. "I'll give you a hint. It's a possessive pronoun."
And then he had let go, thrown open the high steel doors, and proceeded to have a diplomatically portentous meal with the most powerful man in the world. Perry followed.
In the present, on top of the ranger station overlooking the gulch, dressed in flannel and Teflon paneling, Perry finds himself straying back to that first night, after the memory repressor circuitry and the additions and the "improvements". The memory of that hallway always brings him back, for some reason, to the night of the reassignment.
The lab had been full of red light and buzzing wires, and metal restraints. Perry remembers the confusion, the aimlessness and emptiness of a head full of nearly nothing. He remembers Doofenshmirtz, stalking through the room like a—well, Perry hadn't had any metaphors at the time. He only remembers wariness, mistrust that he couldn't identify the source of.
He'd been unstrapped from the slab.
Doofenshmirtz had held him by the chin, inspecting the cybertronic eye. The inspection went on long past the point where the scientist's eye ceased to actually examine his machinery, long past the point of Perry's vague bewilderment.
The scientist rested a hand on Perry's metallic shoulder, and Perry felt nothing. There were no nerves. Somehow, he knew instinctively that this was wrong.
Doofenshmirtz's gloved thumb brushed over the curve of lips, just a flicker of motion, and there was an overload of incalculable sensation.
"You and me, huh," he had said, at last. "Two of a kind, us."
And he had tapped Perry's red glass eye, somewhere between a child tapping a fishtank and a man patting his wife's hand.
Perry looked at his scarred eyepatch, then, washed empty of all but the vaguest memories of self or past, and he understood. He was to be the scientist's missing eye.
The thought had filled him with loathing, and with devotion.