And another random thing, because I have no control over what I write.

This breaks a part of the Wear and Tear paradigm because it's not third person limited from an individuals pov. Of course, Alia's chapter ignores the 'injured Zero' part of the criteria by having a different injured blonde. Not to mention that Lifesaver's chapter has bits that are X's POV and then third person omniscient at the end. X's chapter breaks the pattern by being fundamentally upbeat: this is something that he's focused on solving despite the various signs he's fraying around the edges.

This leaves X 1-3, 8, CM & the Xtremes. That means I could do an Iris POV, actually…

Disclaimer: I don't own Megaman, X or otherwise, in any of its variations. Capcom does. No infringement intended or money made.

Picture a room.

It would seem lab-like, between the white walls and countertops, the parts and devices scattered here and there, if it weren't for the fact that what wall space isn't taken up by doors, cabinets or bookshelves is adorned with various things ranging from a poster of Jimi Hendrix to a framed animation cel from Astroboy. It's clear that there used to be florescent track lighting, before it was ripped out with extreme prejudice and replaced with not just proper, non-headache-inducing incandescent bulbs, but incandescents on futuristic stainless-steel chandeliers, because the person doing the remodeling had felt like it.

The quote-a-day calendar is displaying a quote from Einstein, but it's about what happens when good men do nothing instead of relativity (not to mention the date's wrong), and one of the counters had held not an experiment but a half-completed extraordinarily complicated Gundam model kit until its owner moved it to the top of the minifridge to make room.

Picture a young man, maybe twenty-three. His hair is a light brown: nothing special, although a close examination might note that it's not as thick near the hairline as it is elsewhere. That might explain why he wears it longish and pulled back into a ponytail by a metal clip: he wants to enjoy his hair while he has it.

He's wearing a coat, and it is white, but that's where the resemblance to a doctor's coat ends. This is made of very heavy fabric, and the gloves he's wearing are leather, not rubber. They're not the kind of thing people wear to avoid infection or look impressive, they're the kind of thing people wear when they want something thick enough to protect them from sparks when they use the welder that's already out, lying on the recently-cleared counter, and black and brown are out of the question because they hide dirt and he'd end up tracking oil all over the house before he noticed anything. Something that will protect him from sharp-edged metal. The coat is clearly well-worn, with a few singes and cut threads here and there.

It's still immaculately clean, although that's probably about to change, given the supplies that are joining that welder on the table, pulled from cabinets and off shelves, in drawers and neatly stacked toolboxes, dug for under the sinks, behind the birdcage and out of the minifridge. Finally, he leans back against the counter and uses the edge of it to open the cold beer with practiced ease.

It's very clear that the man has a system, the kind of system that fits its originator like hand in glove , perfectly intuitive, and leaves other people wondering why there are paint samples stuck between the pages of a science fiction novel. The kind where the owner actually knows where everything is and would kill anyone who 'organized' the place, as opposed to the kind of 'system' that people have when they're just messy and don't want to admit it.

There are two worktables in the middle of the room, each with nearby counter space allocated to it. There's nothing on the other counter, in stark contrast to the almost homey clutter that occupies the rest of the room.

The man is looking at that counter as he takes a drink from his beer, not really paying attention to the taste, which is a shame since it looks like something from a microbrewery. He looks at the supplies he'd put on his counter, then at the empty one, and finally shrugs almost violently, putting his beer down on the counter and heading towards the door, muttering something that would have been easier to make out if it had been in one language instead of four. Despite the linguistic cacophony, irritation is conveyed quite well, as is the fact that that at least half of those words are probably profane, even though it's hard to pick out which specific ones to object to. That might be the idea. He checks to make sure that his gloves are on properly before he opens the door, seemingly from force of habit.

When he comes back there's a body slung over his shoulder. Well, half of one. He's carrying the other half in the crook of his other arm. They and the bag of miscellaneous swept-up parts get placed on the table carefully enough, even though it's clear that he'd prefer to throw them down on the table with enough force to make his displeasure clear, even if the cause of it isn't awake and won't remember a thing.

Despite the fact he's fairly skinny, he clearly had no trouble handling all that weight.

He's followed by a black-haired man, taller but maybe a year younger, who is trying to grow a beard. Perhaps he thinks it will make him look distinguished and wise beyond his years, although the fact there's already a few scattered grey hairs near his ears shows that will be taken care of soon enough. Unlike his companion he's large in a way that could be called big-boned. He's not exactly fat, but he's not exactly muscular, either, and it's fairly clear that he's going to be in trouble in a few years, once he's no longer a young man and his metabolism slows down.

He's also carrying a body, although at least this one is in one piece, aside from the scattered pieces he's also carrying in a bag. While the first man was businesslike about it, he puts his burden down slowly, trying to make sure that the boy would be comfortable if he was able to feel anything at all right then.

Now that the scene has been set, it would be remiss of the narrator not to tell you that absolutely none of it has anything to do with reality.

Well, except the near-dead bodies. Those are real enough.

"Thank you," the larger one says. "I had a capsule nearby, but it was armor, not life support." He'd switched most of his manufacturing capability over to armor. He would have had to bring the boy back to the capsule he'd woken up in, and he wasn't going to risk teleporting, not from in there. Not something so precious.

Not without the help of an expert, anyway.

"Children." The first man took a swig of his beer. "Fools, all of them. Can't live with them, can't build new ones. Modern parts are garbage and I need my reserves since this idiot keeps getting blown up every five seconds."

"Don't worry, I'll provide my own supplies." He was probably going to have to disassemble part of this capsule. Pity, he was trying to re-use them as much as possible. Precision parts didn't grow on trees, not in this era.

"You'll do no such thing. You built armors for my son, don't think I didn't notice your work and your feeble attempts to examine his systems. I refuse to owe you anything." Especially when, unlike him, the other man didn't have any means of replacing anything. The materials for those armors had come from a dwindling stock and they both knew it. Yet, even knowing that, he looked at him contemptuously over the top of the bottle. Seeing the other man's hesitation, he snorted. "If you don't trust my word, then why are you here?"

The man raised a black eyebrow at him. "I trust you with my own safety." Well, within reasonable limits, anyway. After all, death meant no more opportunities to gloat. "Can you blame me for not trusting you not to tamper with my children?" By, for example, kidnapping and trying to reprogram them. Or providing booby-trapped parts. "Nor do I trust your word." Hell no. "I've known you for too long."

His host laughed. "Maybe you aren't as dumb as you look. Sorry, but I didn't have the time for any elaborate plots. First this idiot boy rams himself into a space station and gets vaporized on re-entry. Fine, fine, I have a back-up body waiting and those idiot knockoffs will believe that he just survived if they know what's good for them."

"Apparently not all of them do." As this drama proved. Not that he resented that this had caused his son to nearly die or anything. "And technically they're not knockoffs. X made the technology public domain." Giving up an unbelievable amount of money for the sake of his children and the world. He was so proud of his boys sometimes that he could cry.

The other man just shrugged, picking up his beer again. Semantics. "And then, just a few hours later, when I haven't even gotten around to starting on another basic frame-"

"That what you get for wasting time calling me up and gloating at me." For hours. Still, he conceded the point and started trying to remember where the parts and tools he needed were.

"-the fool goes and lets himself get vivisected. Look at this mess!" Just when ultimate victory was within their grasp! Idiot kids!

"Oh? Surely the great Dr. Wily won't have trouble with such a little thing?" Thomas hoped not. X would be heartbroken.

"I wouldn't if it weren't for the fact that some of the parts he needs take months to make." In order to cut the time down he was going to have to possess a body and find a decent lab he could take over and that was always frustrating in this era where there was no such thing as a decent lab, not by his standards, anyway. So he had to waste yet more time building equipment from scratch so that he could use it to make the parts, and make sure that it was destroyed instead of falling into the hands of the hunters. He didn't want to be responsible for giving them what they needed to defeat the virus.

Well, not anymore than he already was, anyway.

Goddamn kids.

"Isoc, I think," he mused aloud.

That took what, five seconds to figure out? "Isoc? Isosceles. Acute. Smart. Wily. Slightly more subtle than naming yourself Wisdom in French, but not by much. Why don't you just name yourself Yliw?"

"Oh, be quiet. It's not like they'll figure it out. 'Serges,' for heaven's sake. How could they mishear Sagasse as that?"

"I don't know. Maybe because no one speaks French anymore? And whose fault would that be?"

Albert glanced meaningfully at the body Thomas had carried in. "Oh?" Do you really want to start this again? Right here, right now? "There's plenty of virus here, and all I would have to do is get an arm functional to kill the one thing standing between this world and eternal peace."

Thomas stood over X protectively. "You wouldn't."

Albert raised an eyebrow at him now. They both knew how far he would go.

"You won't." Dr. Light still had one more trick up his sleeve: X would survive even if his body was destroyed. Still, that was a last resort, and not the real reason Wily wouldn't do it. "If he dies now, even if Zero doesn't figure out that you killed him, he'll know that it was the virus' fault. He'll never help you then, and you need him."

Albert groaned, conceding the point. "Cainbots. Less difficult than your brood, but somehow even more stupid. As useful as that is sometimes, why couldn't he figure out that I made those trade-offs between power and endurance for a reason?" Sigma had tried to alter the virus' code in order to win this war because had noticed that it was gradually growing weaker, as all viruses did as they mutated. In order to power it up, Sigma had cut 'unessentials.' Like, for example, half the protections against mutation Dr. Wily had designed it with. The decay was going to go seriously exponential now. Why was he surrounded by idiots?

Even his one peer had proven himself one, in the end. And the worst kind.

The stupid screwed up all the time, but it took someone smart to really screw up. No one would trust someone who was clearly an idiot with anything important.

"It makes me wonder, that he could alter its code and you can't. Not even the code of the new, less secure versions? Is there really something the great Dr. Wily can't crack? Even if you did make it yourself." As bad an idea as it was to taunt Albert right now, he did need to know. If it was possible for him to crack the virus, that meant that it was possible to crack it, period. And until this war, until Sigma had altered it, Thomas had been fairly convinced that it wasn't. If there was a crack in its defenses that Wily knew about, then he had a chance to find it. AI was his specialty, after all.

Albert smirked. "I am the greatest genius humanity will ever produce. No human could possibly create anything that I can't crack."

"So you can crack it?" And restore the virus' endurance so that it didn't just all die and drop out of the sky within a year? Not good in the short term, even if it meant that it would be possible to eventually find a way to destroy it.

"Of course not. I merely created the potential for Zero and the virus, just as you created the potential for Blues and X. Zero created the virus, and no human could possibly crack the power of a god."

"Not this again." Now Albert was going to start cackling unless Thomas headed him off. "What kind of god goes and gets himself killed twice in under twenty-four hours…" He shook his head and started working on removing the damaged parts and clearing the debris out of X's systems.

"I told you to take that comparative religion course with me instead of waiting until the last minute to fill the requirement and getting stuck with…"

"Don't remind me."

"Or perhaps the university should have required more ethnic studies courses." You could have used them. "Either way, only Zero, his chosen or another god could weild the virus, and since he keeps me busy like this I don't have the time to try to initialize another god. He'd just kill them while they were weak, anyway," he said with some trace of pride. Zero was certainly the strongest, idiot or not. "If it were possible for me to make another virus instead of waiting on Zero, I'd have done it myself and humanity would be extinct already, so give up. Neither you nor these primitive modern idiots are going to be able to crack it."

Thomas grimaced, then glanced up at him. "You're not getting to work on Zero?" It was a little hard to work with Albert just standing there looking at him.

Albert waved him off. "I'm thinking." Since he was going to have to build a new frame anyway, how much of this body did he want to salvage? Then there was the issue of authenticity. He shouldn't have let Sigma use one of Zero's spare bodies just to attack X with, but that had been back when it seemed like this would be over soon instead of dragging on ridiculously like this.

Like last time, too.

The really frustrating thing was that Zero could end it any time that he wanted to… Oh, for crying out loud, even he was thinking of his creation as Zero now. Well, the crimson hunter who ran from his power had little in common with the warrior who had used it with a ruthless efficiency Wily's robot masters should have had, would have had if Dr. Light had ever been right about them at all. The closest he'd come was during the second war, and yet…

Actually, that had been the second war this time. Ironic that the first war last time had been Megaman trying to reclaim his brothers and this time the second had been X trying to reclaim Zero, who had never been his in the first place. Except they hadn't known that at the time and even after Zero discovered who he was he was still being difficult about it.

"After all the work I've done for him," and on him, "he won't take five minutes to create a couple improved viruses and create world peace." Well, one for world peace, one so that he could keep X if he cared that much. "Where did I go wrong?"

"Where did you go right, you mean," Thomas corrected him, wincing at the amount of damage to X's protective foam 'skin' under the armor. He wasn't going to have to replace that, thankfully. No, the nanites would take care of that now that he'd gotten X hooked up to a power source, but it didn't bode well for the amount of damage the components it was cushioning had taken.

"I can't take credit for him being inherently ethical any more than you can take credit for Blues being inherently too logical to be unethical. Especially when, like you, I was basically trying to make him be evil." Even in the books Asimov's three laws hadn't kept robots from hurting humans, they had just caused them to drop dead in an instant if they violated them. After the fact. And not only had even Dr. Light's working version been buggy and the work of a few minutes to remove, but the fact that Dr. Light had given Blues some incredibly stupid orders meant that it had kept trying to trigger his generator to blow up every time he had an independent thought.

Albert knew he would have killed anyone who did that to him.

Let alone one of his creations.

Actually, he basically had. Even if it turned out it hadn't been quite enough overkill.

Although soon enough it would be. "You're both on borrowed time. You know that."

Thomas didn't even bother to look up so Albert could see him roll his eyes. They both knew how he'd respond to that. "We both are." Him and Albert. They'd both already died, after all.

"Not that. I can replace my infrastructure."

"Until the virus is destroyed." By Zero or by some miracle.

"The virus makes things easier, but it's not the only thing keeping me around. You, on the other hand, only have those capsules. And they're wearing out. If I hadn't loaned you my resources, you would have had to hook X up to that capsule and basically completely disassemble it in order to keep him stable and repair him well enough that he could be taken back to their headquarters to recover." As for what would have happened if a maverick had stumbled upon them? "You wouldn't have been able to salvage any of it. If you keep on like this we both know what will happen." Just as both of them could run calculations on the virus' decay over time.

"I know." And I know you know. He kept working.

"Once you're dead, he's dead. It's only a matter of time."

"Technology is improving. They might be able to make replacement parts he can use soon." Instead of disassembling the armors Dr. Light made him, trying to compensate for the injuries he took during wartime. He had to hide the capsules where mavericks wouldn't find them but X could, he had to… He had to.

This was his son.

"I doubt it." The virus kept all research crippled: Sigma wasn't that stupid. Of course, the virus was decaying, and with it would go Sigma's intelligence. "And are you really going to take that chance?"

"What choice do I have?" When Albert opened his mouth, Thomas added, "Besides no longer helping X fight the virus."

"You're just helping him kill both of you," Albert warned him. "If you just surrendered…"

"I would say over my dead body, except that would be redundant." He'd already proved everything he needed to, after all.

"You may be…" No. "Zero will miss X, if he died."

What? "Haven't you been trying to get him to kill X all this time?"

"I'm not brain-damaged anymore: I can take a hint." Doing the same thing over and over again and thinking the result would be different was not only a definition of insanity, but bad science. "If X is the reason Zero is being so difficult, I suppose I'll let him live." The virus would be an even better fate for the last Lightbot than death, really.

"That was why I helped him." With those armors and their precious materials. The closest thing to lifeblood he had left. So, Dr. Wily really had finally figured out that if X died because of all this, he lost. That was a good thing, for X's sake, but not for the world. "He's a good man, your Zero."

"Too good." Weren't they all. And it killed them all. "Maybe I should just try to initialize a new god while the virus has some strength left." Having Zero out of commission for awhile might let him get a decent start. There was the parts problem, but there would soon be all this decaying virus around to try to influence.

"And they'll refuse to help you as well, most likely. The way both Blues and Zero did. Albert… you're not doing the right thing."

"Of course I'm not. I'm doing the necessary thing. I don't expect you to understand."

"Albert, you're proving me right." Thomas shook his head. "Robots destroying humanity was what I was afraid of. That was what started all this, that's why the governments ordered the destruction, that's why… I was wrong, they were wrong, and now you're making those nightmares come true." Making the fear, the racism valid.

"And you already proved me right first." That humans would do terrible things, like the ones Dr. Light had listed.

Dr. Light closed his eyes and bowed his head, shaking it. No, he knew this wouldn't work. It was too late for that.

Even if that was his old Jimi Hendrix poster, up on the wall that didn't exist. Even if that, if all of this, was proof his friend still remembered, was still in there, it was too late to reach him. All he could do was entrust his hope for the future to X, and Zero, because it was too late to fix things long-dead and still not buried.

This incorporates quite a bit of not only my Classicverse but the Megaman Megamix manga. The three laws installed into Blues are buggy and that's what's responsible for his power source problem, the MMC2 Wilybots were scarier than any other set, the government ordered the recovered lightbots destroyed and they were basically saved thanks to Wilybot intervention (and innocent rms being killed got raised to game canon by a later game, like a lot of Megamix stuff), etc.

Things being worn down, objects and people (or technology, in Alia's case: she's a product of the fact so much has been lost since X and Zero were built) is the main ongoing theme. X's chapter shows why he can keep functioning despite the games saying that he really shouldn't be able to (no replacement parts). However, that's not manna from heaven.

I thought that the next fic I'd do for this would probably be post X-8 and focus on Axl, or at the most post-CM instead, but I had the lab scene appear in my head when I needed a distraction, so I started writing. What's awesome is that I have a new theory because of this.

Wily drinking beer (Wily Beer) is a Bob and George reference. I wanted to have Dr. Light drink one and comment on that, but sadly the level of détente between them wasn't enough for Dr. Light to be tossed a beer or allowed to raid the fridge. There's also a lot of German!Wily fanon, with him knowing the language or programming Zero with knowledge of it. Add in that they live in Japan and Wily was an otaku, so that's at least three languages that he knows. Sagasse is French (Sagasse is Serges' name in Japan), so that's reasonable. Latin and Greek get used for a lot of terminology. It's easy to justify him growing up in a house with a German parent or grandmother, learning French and Latin at school (if he was from the Eastern seaboard: in my experience French is what people tend to learn there, like Spanish here, and my middle school required two languages), Japanese for fun and to deal with tech companies and so on. Let's not even start on how many programming languages he knows.

The term for him would really be polymath… Look at Zero, and his RMs. No wonder it's Megamix canon he's smarter than Dr. Light.