Title: Directionally Challenged, Pt. 2
Warnings: Random prompts create random ficlets.
Rating: PG
Continuity: Brave Police J-Decker
Characters: All of 'em
Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.
Motivation (Prompt): An open post where I asked for people to please drop prompts for me, and I attempted to write them as fast they appeared. This is something I intend to continue with the Brave Police, as tiny cute ficlets are so easy and fun!
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Duke - "extrapolation of love"
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After Regina went home to Great Britain, Duke floundered.
Not badly. He could have done worse by a long shot. In terms of adjusting to Japan, he was really doing quite well. He'd gotten through the hardest initial blast of culture shock by downloading everything he could find on Japan. His Lady took him to task for having a closed mind a couple times as well, which was all the motivation he needed to try acceptance instead of rejection. Nothing could motivate Duke more than the threat of the tremulous happiness in Regina closing off again, and, dear moving parts, he'd cut off whatever piece of himself disappointed her.
After living in the country for a few weeks, she stopped giving him frowns during their drives together and instead unbent enough to give him a fond pat on the steering wheel while they talked about the mechanics of living in Japan versus Britain. Life here was different, but not necessarily in a bad way. She admitted to enjoying the food, something that he'd thought he'd never be able to share with her until he discovered that both Shadowmaru and Deckerd had taste sensors.
That was, the BP units all had chemical receptors for analyzing air and liquid and even solid matter, but Shadowmaru and Deckerd had the prototypes for human parallels. They were the test version meant to change merely sensing chemicals into tasting or smelling them as a human would. The applications to their casework seemed interesting enough, but then he'd witnessed Deckerd carefully chewing on a tiny, human-sized portion of katsudon while Chief Toudou monitored the sensor spikes and Regina peered at the readings in a display of enthusiasm Duke hadn't seen since he himself had first combined with Fire Roader. Shadowmaru's preference for kitsune soba actually led to her engaging the Ninja Detective in long, speculative conversations about why he'd formed the preference: the chemical data, the textural feel, or that immeasurable human 'taste' the Chief had been trying to reach with the prototype sensor installation?
Duke had warily asked Deckerd about the experience of eating food, and the blue mecha had been almost disturbingly happy about it. Cleaning out their 'food traps' was a task the technicians didn't enjoy in the least, but the slop of masticated food didn't bother Deckerd. It was one more thing he could hold in common with humankind in general and Yuuta in particular, and he felt closer to his boy as a result.
The Knight Detective had quietly submitted a request for beta testing to Chief Toudou after hearing that. Regina seemed to so enjoy the food the Boss' eldest sister made. It might have been an evil emotion to desire for whatever closeness he could have with his creator, but he found that he could deny himself. If he could have a real, person-to-person conversation with her about the kinds of things they both liked, it would be worth any evil. Food was a huge common ground for humans. He wanted to share that with her.
He guiltily decided not to tell his Lady about the test request, just in case.
There were other things that he wished he could either ask her about or screw up the courage to bring up with the other Braves. Duke was, cautiously, coming to enjoy the differences between Japan and England, but sometimes he saw things and just didn't get them. He muddled through on his own via observation, research, and guesswork, but it wasn't easy.
Seeing policemen pressed, ah, rather intimately together on a scooter no longer reduced him to embarrassed sputtering, at least. Asia in general simply had different standards for just how close two men were physically allowed to be before it became uncomfortably homoerotic. Which ultimately explained a lot of what he'd originally thought to be open lewdness on the street and frank molestation in the teahouses.
It also explained why the other BP units thought it acceptable to be so…touchy. Duke had thought he'd crawl out of his armor in shock the first time Drill Boy hugged him, much less the first time Gunmax plunked down on his desk and casually draped those long legs across the Knight's lap. Shadowmaru had seemed so stand-offish and proper at first, only to transform to his dog form and go around the office getting scritches from everyone. Deckerd always had his hand on someone's arm or was nudging someone with his shoulder, open and caring and invading Duke's very strict British personal space bubble without even seeming to notice how the Knight went stiff and surprised every single time. The entire Build Team, McCrane's dignity be damned, dissolved into wrestling matches and brotherly tussles the second they were off-shift. Or, hell, when they were on-shift, too. Heaven help a mecha who stood too close to a Power Joe-Drill Boy Super Huggle Attack Team-up, too, because it was like a martial arts embrace merged with a soccer game. Duke's first experience with that had resulted in him fleeing back to his desk and taking shaken refuge in petting Shadowmaru.
It was like the world's most benign assault on Duke's very British social zoning rules. The Japanese BP units didn't even acknowledge when he tried to hold them at an arm's length. They cheerfully plowed through his -admittedly feeble - defenses and dragged him out for adventures in physical proximity.
He'd thought maybe it was some sort of result of the close-knit nature of the Brave Police department, or even a reaction to Deckerd's near-death. Then he realized the Commissioner and the Chief were far more physically interactive than their counterparts back in Great Britain ever would have been, and the police force here really did see nothing strange about piling two full-grown men onto a tiny scooter. It didn't take much thought at all to link his innate distaste for Vice-Commissioner Azuma to his observation that the man never once stooped to putting a hand on the Boss' shoulder or standing within arm's reach of anyone. The more Duke adjusted to Japan, the more he thought of the correct British social spaces as cold, and the nonstop closeness of the Japanese Braves as just friendliness.
And then there was the Boss. Yuuta Tomonaga was a ballistic missile in the Japanese cultural arsenal.
Duke really wished there was some form of download for dealing with normal human children. Well, not normal, per se. Yuuta probably didn't qualify as normal any more than Regina did, but Yuuta had far less of a tragic past driving him. Instead of standing out as one of the most brilliant engineering minds of his generation or setting himself apart as a fanatically strict taskmaster, the little boy looked normal, acted normal, and yet was somehow…special. The Knight Detective had no way to explain the instant need he'd had for Yuuta Tomonaga's approval the moment he set optics on the boy. His need to please his new Boss and somehow mend the boy's broken heart by replacing Deckerd had led Duke down a convoluted path of compromise between obeying his beloved Lady's laws and learning how to bend before a heart that could encompass the world.
Regina had been right when she'd asked Yuuta to stop crying in front of Duke, however. At the time, the onslaught of worry, concern, hate, and grief over BP-110's presumed death and Duke's assumption of command had nearly scrambled the Knight Detective's Super A.I. He'd literally had no way to process the sheer difference between the emotional detachment every engineer and technician had shown him in Scotland Yard and the immediate connection that'd flooded him when he'd met Yuuta. The boy had burst into tears and pounded on his hood, and Duke had only been able to stare in dumb incomprehension.
It only occurred to him later that part of the inter-personal problems that sprang up between him and the Japanese Braves might have come from the fact that he hadn't even tried to comfort Yuuta. Only after observing the way the other BP units almost unconsciously centered their emotional well-being around their Boss did Duke realize the boy was the key to acceptance into the department.
So he turned to watching Yuuta. And therein started the confusion, because Yuuta was so Yuuta. The cultural things were just tacked on afterward, because Duke was already reeling mentally trying to deal with everything being thrown at him. It was very important that he adapted to Japan and learned to be part of the Japanese Brave Police, but for some reason, the most difficult part for the Knight was feeling out how to be part of a young boy's life.
To be fair, it wasn't every day that an ambulance rolled into battle and fell headlights-over-tires in love with a human.
Duke's sole emotional connection before meeting Yuuta had been his creator. Sure, he'd had his colleagues in England, but he'd been around them for two weeks before transferring to Japan. Coming online with them had been easy; he'd known who they were, what they were like, and where they stood with him. The other Scotland Yard Brave Police had deferred to Duke, but they'd all looked to King as their leader. It'd been automatic. Regina had programmed them that way. Personal connections were discouraged, as she'd made it very plain that they might be damaged, held hostage, or even killed in the line of duty, and a perfect policeman would do his duty anyway.
It was harder adjusting to his new colleagues. Duke had come here, clicking over to a new slot in his mental hierarchy of how the Japanese Brave Police were set up, and it was like a 180 degrees-opposite universe.
Nobody had obeyed him, for one thing. He'd been stronger, higher ranking, and their dead leader's replacement - and they'd completely disregarded him. Yuuta had hated him, but that at least could be explained as human weakness. He hadn't understood. He'd assumed that he wasn't strong enough, but his Lady had shot down that idea. After that, he'd thought there was some kind of internal conflict where the Japanese BP unit's Super A.I.s refused to slot Duke into the leader position until Deckerd was conclusively proven as deceased. That was problematic, as J-Decker's corpse had been flying around causing havoc.
In the battles against the Chieftains and Victim, Duke finally realized that he couldn't just take the position. It was a fiction, based off of studying footage from Japan and assuming erroneous things from that watching. He'd watched the BP units follow Deckerd into battle without hesitation, listening to his orders and obeying like a single well-oiled battle machine instead of separate mecha. That fiction fell apart when Duke stepped confidently into Deckerd's place only to discover that no one took his orders.
Deckerd's position was one of common agreement. Without the agreement in place, there was no position.
The agreement was based in one thing that all his programming and downloads couldn't help him with: emotion. Specifically, love. For the first time in Duke's life, he's seen Regina be utterly wrong about something. The emotions she so disdained were why the Japanese BP department functioned. The two Brits had approached the entire situation wrong, assuming that plugging a new leader into place would fix a gaping hole in the department's collective heart.
Regina had hardened herself to soft emotions, telling herself and her creations that anything beyond computer logic was evil. Yet Duke had witnessed the power of friendship and the unrivaled strength of love was something he himself had felt when saving his Lady.
Deckerd's return had been a relief, of course, but it was the other Braves that Duke had watched in fascination. The scattered Brave Police department knitted neatly back into a cohesive unit, full of touchy-feeliness and Yuuta and bizarre habits like parking Gun Bike on top of J-Roader when Gunmax wasn't looking. They drew back together, into a department underpinned so heavily with love and support for each other that they were more family than colleagues.
And Duke was on the outside, looking in. Deckerd tried to include him, but his clumsy attempts to join the department were too logical. Too stiff.
When Regina left, it deprived Duke of his last bastion of logical arguments. When she'd been here, he could comfort himself with her company and calm assertion that it was the other BP units' chaotic emotions that left him apart. Now he was on his own, and if there was a place for Duke in Japan, he was going to have to find it. Not take it; find it.
So he floundered. In Japan, in emotions, and in all the things he couldn't be programmed for.
It was probably the most human he'd ever been.
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