and with you came the whole of the world's tears
And once we step out of our skin [...] we can come back into our own and maybe enjoy our own plan a little better and maybe be kinder and gentler or... less psychotic... than we were before.
-Dan Shor, Outpost preview
.
"Give up, Flynn! Let's make this easy!"
Tron's dead. It had been the second time Flynn ever heard him scream. He can still hear it now, in the wind and Clu's voice and the screams of all the ISOs the repurposed guards have been hunting down, and he's given up trying to drown it out.
He reaches into the earth to crack it under Clu's feet, staggers as his own codes lash back to crack the earth beneath him. Ends the script, accomplishing nothing. Hides.
Clu is a tiny yellow flare on the other side of the canyon. The distant figure throws an arm up, as though he can reach over the broken ground between them and grasp Flynn's neck; the User feels the motion as though the arm, the hand, were his own. "Show yourself, Flynn!" the program roars. "Cowering in the rocks like a gridbug - what are you trying to tell me, that you've become a threat to the system? This was our Grid, Flynn! You had every chance! It's going to be mine now!"
Flynn waits.
He's chosen carefully this time.
The Outlands rear around them. Out of the whole domain, they alone are familiar now. Clu's changed everything else - streamlined, diverted, repurposed, mined and trapped and seeded the it with whatever corruption took him while Flynn's back was turned, while his attention was elsewhere, while he'd trusted his program to keep his dream alive. And Clu wants this too, but he won't have it.
Flynn's done nothing here, built nothing for him to tear down.
"I know you're here," calls Clu. "Are you thinking about that? Are you wondering why I know? Maybe how I know? Maybe you should've wondered a little sooner, huh?"
There's a lot of things I should have wondered sooner, thinks Flynn, but he doesn't say it. He tries to wonder when his creativity became his curse, but can't quite fool himself that badly. It's just like in Star Wars; you bring your own temptation with you into the abyss. He brought Clu with him in the parameters he'd compiled him from; he let the genie out of the bottle; he wasn't careful enough... it's such an old story. And Clu has been overcalculating everything connected with this for uncounted cycles, while Flynn... has not.
He can feel the army Clu's assembled on the precipice: sentry programs, so many of them, individuals repurposed into technical redundancies. Flawless. Nameless. Irrecoverable. It would take too long, take access to the Grid and resources he no longer has, to create an army of his own, and something in him flinches away from raising troops to fight for him instead of living for themselves. To fight and to die for him, like Tron.
"You know, the thing about us," says Clu conversationally, "is how we're so very much alike."
Flynn thinks: You're better at killing.
"Except I'm better at everything," muses Clu, the words carrying easily across the gap. "Stronger. Smarter. Focused, Flynn. I kept my eye on the ball while you lost your way."
Changed my mind, Clu. Flynn lets out a breath, keeping his eyes closed. You were supposed to trust me.
"I'm going to finish what you started, Flynn!" Clu is pacing now, conviction in every step. Flynn holds still with an effort. It's so hard to disconnect. "I'm going to perfect the system; I'm going to create a Grid where every program has a place. How does it feel to know I'm the one who's going to save them all from the chaos you left us with?"
"Like you saved Tron?" It slips out unbidden, the User's voice carrying as well as Clu's.
There's a long silence, almost a startled one. Flynn waits. Breathes. Trembles with the effort of holding himself in. They're at an impasse, he and Clu, one that has cost thousands of programs their lives already. Equal and opposite. If he takes no action, perhaps they won't have to do this after all.
They've done enough already.
"Oh," says Clu, and there's an ugly tightness in his voice. "There's that, isn't there. Tell me, Flynn, would you have done it? If Tron had turned on you or stood in your way, if he'd dared to stand up to you and tell you what was right or wrong for the system? Would you have had the guts to do more than yap about everything being fine?"
"I would have listened." The words sound hollow, even to Flynn. He'd meant to listen, eventually, meant to sort out Tron's concerns, if they'd only had more time-
"You should have listened to me."
"I wrote you!" yells Flynn. "That's all you should have needed to know!"
Clu laughs; a long, echoing sound.
"You wrote me, Flynn my man." His smile, his expansiveness, are audible, his hands dancing outwards in welcome and command. "Every circuit. Every line. Look." The words grate, sink, and still there's that terrible mirth. "What. You. Did."
Flynn's knees give way and he doesn't feel his back slide down the rough stone behind him. His heels are digging into the earth, his hands (their hands) curled like claws at his chest. His disc catches sharply between his shoulders. He can't breathe-
(Clu killed Tron.)
(Flynn would never have hurt Tron.)
(Would I? I killed the MCP because he was in my way. I thought I was in the right. I thought I thought I thought-
He was just a program. Like Tron was just a program. Like Clu. Is just. A program.
Tron is dead. He fought for me. I couldn't save him.)
The User's eyes burn. Recklessly he stands up, his coat snapping behind him in the wind sweeping up from the canyon floor, facing Clu over almost a cubic sector of emptiness.
"You can still change your mind, Clu!"
"Can I?" Clu's voice echoes, his forces stilling around him as they wait, and it's as though he and the User are all that's alive in this place, white light and yellow light spitting at one another.
"Yes," says Flynn, and he tries as hard as he can to actually mean it. To tell himself that the killing could stop, the hating could stop, and it'd be worth it if they could just take what was left of themselves and rebuild.
"No." The mirrored word is calculated, inevitable, and there's evil in the smile that carries all the way across the canyon to sear into Flynn's heart. "No changes. No indecision. That's for Users. That's why you need me. Or haven't you learned your lesson by now? What will you do, Kevin Flynn? Who's standing in the way of your perfect world?"
.o0o.
"They're all gone," he says, easing his aching body down onto the floor beside the couch. "The underground hasn't heard anything since I found you. Q, I'm so sorry."
He hears a strangled sob from above him, but can't bring himself to raise his eyes.
After a few moments Quorra crouches in front of him, a few strands of her wispy hair brushing his forehead. "I didn't ask you before because I didn't want to know," she says, her voice all but inaudible. "I want to know now. You're the Creator. You could end him." Fierce, helpless, frightened by her own intensity. "Why haven't you just...?"
Flynn looks up at her, the ISO, his miracle, shaking in her rage and grief, and whispers, "I wouldn't survive it."
It's all he can tell her. She'd never understand.