Title: Infinite Gravity
Part: 11/18
Rating: T
Characters/Pairings: Rockman & Blues, Netto & Enzan
Notes: Set a good five years after canon. This is slightly AU in that I've played fast and loose with canon versions and background details - it's mostly based on the anime timeline, but there are some significant game and manga details in here too, as well as some made up stuff like new viruses and attacks. Please be warned that this fic contains shameless fanon cliches, because they are relevant to the plot. The concept of triple-A security is adapted from Xenosaga, for the record.
Infinite Gravity
11.
"Now that everyone is here, I'll run through what we know so far." The Commissioner glanced around the room, gathering everyone's attention, his eyes lingering fractionally on Netto, who hunched his shoulders under the scrutiny. He would have preferred to be almost anywhere else but at another endless meeting, listening to the same scattered, incomplete pieces of information. After five days – five days! - it was hard to hold onto any shred of hope. A nasty, insistent little voice had started to pop up in his mind more and more frequently, whispering that Rockman was probably deleted by now. Netto had never really realised how much he'd come to rely on the solid, reassuring sense of Rockman's presence.
"We've established that the person or persons responsible for the theft of Rockman –"
"Abduction," Enzan interrupted smoothly, turning from the window he'd been staring out of. Netto blinked at him as he elaborated. "Not theft. Rockman is more than just data."
"True, true." The Commissioner visibly regrouped himself, frowning. "As I was saying, those responsible for the abduction, thank you Enzan-kun, were also responsible for the virus attack and hack attempt on Sci-Labs' Dimensional Generator project, and the infective virus attack on the Net Police HQ." He examined his notes. "The most obvious link between the three incidents is the Net Saviours themselves, but all our investigations on that front have been unproductive. None of the known current or former cyber-terrorists who might bear a grudge have the ability for the level of coding that we've seen with these viruses."
"Dr Wily could have done it," Netto's father contributed. Unshaven, he looked as though he hadn't slept in days. He certainly hadn't come home, or indeed set foot out of the lab, as far as Netto was aware. "It's not at all his style, though."
"Dr Wily is no longer a threat," the Commissioner agreed shortly. "There have been no reports of any criminal or black market incidents that could tie to the case, but the Net Police are continuing to investigate. One possible lead we have is that all of the malware programs were created on the same sub-mainframe PC terminal, an obsolete AT-5 system, which suggests that the perpetrator may have limited resources. We have the serial number for definitive identification, in case of a positive match." He cleared his throat, and Netto shifted, picking at the fraying edges of the bandanna still wrapped around his hand.
"We also have information – unverified information – that Rockman is not being held anywhere within the Undernet..."
"Commissioner, Forte had no reason to tell us anything but the truth." Enzan moved away from the window, addressing the room at large as he took the single empty seat next to Netto. "He had nothing to gain by lying or misdirection, and he wouldn't willingly work with humans, right?" He looked to Netto for confirmation.
"Right," Netto agreed, hating the tired and despondent sound of his own voice.
"We have to assume that humans are behind this." Enzan sat back, voice as crisp and efficient as though he was addressing a board meeting. "The idea that Net Saviours are being targeted doesn't ring true. Whoever is orchestrating this has an ultimate aim, and we don't yet know what that is."
"Huh." Absently, Netto wondered how Enzan had managed to escape from his office for most of the week. "I still don't get why they'd want Rockman."
"Rockman is pretty unique, Netto-kun," his father pointed out quietly. Netto shrugged irritably.
"Yeah, I know that. But no one else does, outside Net Saviours, right?"
"True." Dr Hikari frowned, rubbing at the stubble on his chin. "For that matter – is it possible that the attack on HQ was orchestrated purely to distract attention from the infection of Netto's PET? If someone is targeting me or my work, Rockman would probably be high on the list..."
"It's a possibility." Meijin-san looked grave, adjusting his goggles soberly. "In which case, there is a real possibility that Rockman may simply have been deleted."
Netto flinched, squeezing his eyes shut, and beyond grateful when Enzan shifted minutely closer, putting them shoulder to shoulder. The warm, solid offer of support was absurdly comforting, and Netto leant into the contact without thinking about it further than that.
"No." His father stated it categorically; Netto blinked heavy eyes open to see him shaking his head emphatically. "It's part of why I originally blocked Rockman and Netto's potential for connection – Netto would know, if Rockman were permanently damaged or deleted."
"Agreed," Laika spoke up unexpectedly from his corner where he had been listening expressionlessly. "The fact remains that the connection has been blocked, however."
"Blocked..." his father trailed off, the familiar look of intense concentration crossing his face. "The level of security that that would take... if it's not the Undernet.... Commissioner!" He looked up decisively. "Check out disused military locations, anything with triple-A or higher security."
"Understood." The Commissioner nodded sharply. "Manabe-kun, please get started on that immediately."
"Yes, sir." Smoothing her skirt neatly, Manabe-san rose quietly, already pulling out her PET as she left the room.
Laika, too, rose. "With your permission, I will assist."
"Excellent." The Commissioner nodded approval, organising his notes. "Dr Hikari, your current priority should be to identify the exact vector for the infection of the PET. Meijin, continue to attempt to isolate a destination address from the exploit program samples." He paused as the two men nodded acquiescence, considering the two teenagers on the couch. "Enzan-kun, take Netto-kun home. He's running on fumes."
Netto, unable to honestly deny this, settled for glaring mutinously as Enzan caught him by the arm, dragging him up onto his feet.
"Come on, Netto." His voice, surprisingly gentle and pitched for Netto's ears alone, held a note that Netto couldn't quite identify. Or maybe, he was forced to admit as a series of yawns viciously attacked him, he was just too tired to make sense of much. He'd tried to sleep last night – or had it been the night before? - but nightmares had driven him out of bed and onto the internet, where he'd searched on everything he could think of, turning up nothing at all. Finding anything online without a Navi to help was always going to be a losing proposition.
"I can walk by myself," Netto protested irritably as Enzan led him out of the room and toward the exit. He didn't pull away, though, glad of the tangible sense of connection that Enzan's hand on his arm provided, however tenuous and temporary.
Not entirely unpredictably, Netto's head began drooping the moment Enzan got him seated in the back of the car. That didn't make it one bit less stunning – and faintly alarming – when Netto sighed and settled against his side, head a dead weight falling onto his shoulder. Enzan froze, and only Blues' soft voice from the PET distracted him into breathing again.
"Enzan-sama, will you need me?" This, in Blues' typical unspoken implications, was a request to be allowed to go and hunt viruses. Enzan considered a moment, calculating Blues' evident tension and frustration against recent reports of virus activity, before acquiescing.
"Call me if you need me." A quick half hour of virus busting would do him a world of good, too, after a week of leads that led nowhere and his father cold-shouldering him.
"Yes, Enzan-sama." Blues pixelated out in a rush, and the only sound in the back of the car was once again the hum of the engine and the soft sigh of Netto's breathing.
"Why is it always you?" Enzan found himself asking after a long moment, not really expecting an answer. Despite himself, he yawned; he was tired himself, and Netto's warmth was a great temptation to rest his own eyes. Setting his jaw, Enzan pulled out his PET, bringing tomorrow's schedule up manually and starting to sort through appointments. Some of what couldn't be cancelled could be rescheduled, but there was at least one meeting he would have to attend.
The driver pulled up smoothly outside the Hikari residence, and Enzan shook Netto gently by the shoulder, succeeding in rousing him to owlish, blinking semi-awareness.
"Home," Enzan explained succinctly as he opened the door, wondering for an awkward moment whether he would actually have to carry the idiot. Netto managed to stumble out of the car, though, just as the door of his house cracked open and his mother slipped out.
"Yuichirou-san called," Hikari-san explained in a whisper, taking deft charge of her stumbling son. "Ah, Netto, wake up a bit," she admonished. "You're not sleeping on the couch again..."
Enzan smiled wearily to himself, watching them enter the house before turning back to his car and the serious business of tracking down Navi-kidnappers. For all of Dr Hikari's confidence in the link, Netto wasn't going to last much longer without cracking. Not without Rockman.
The jellyfish virus exploded into a rapidly dissipating cloud of pixels, and Blues whirled, ripping his blade through another of the minor pests with enough force to fell a Darkloid. As if the entire cyberworld could sense his dangerous irritation, nothing had come out to meet him but small fry, barely worth his time. Scowling, Blues tore through another cluster of them, looking around in the hope that stronger enemies might be attracted by the scent of battle.
The cyberscape was entirely empty, save for a lone Mettool fleeing towards the traffic control systems in the distance. Standing down with reluctance, Blues dismissed his sword, starting to walk towards the distant stacks of more populated systems.
The investigation was proving entirely as unproductive as he'd feared, and after almost six days Rockman had still not been found. Every minute that passed meant the trail grew colder.
"Blues." A viewing window opened overhead, Enzan looking down into the PET as he tugged his tie off one-handed. He looked tired, Blues thought dispassionately, more so than even the board meeting he had doubtless just come from could account for. "I'm heading to Sci-Labs; I'll meet you there."
"Yes, Enzan-sama." Blues nodded crisply as the window closed, turning and heading in the direction of the nearest multiserve router at a much slower speed than he was accustomed to. They had planned to spend the afternoon hunting down – and shaking down – some of Net City's more notorious characters in the search for information. Whether they would have any success at all was debatable, if even Forte didn't know Rockman's whereabouts.
Everyone involved was getting more desperate. Blues had seen it in Enzan's eyes, in the tightness of Netto's face and the exhaustion of the scientists. The possibility that Rockman really had been deleted refused to stop plaguing him, and had now begun to haunt him even in sleep mode. While Navis didn't precisely dream, it wasn't unknown for the defragmentation processes that occurred during recharge to fling up random images and pieces of memory to be re-processed. Lately, Blues had found his sleep filled with images of Rockman – most particularly and persistently the way his face had lit up when they'd faced each other across the battle stage at HQ.
The whole thing made no sense. Reaching the edge of the more travelled zones that bordered the freeway, Blues dodged between bustling Navis, crossing the faintly glowing panels of the path and tagging into the router. They still had no satisfactory answer – or even a theory – as to why anyone would want to abduct Rockman. There was a reason for everything, and until they found the reason they were unlikely to find Rockman.
Speeding through the swift currents of near-instantaneous transmission, Blues transferred easily between nodes, flashing onto the blue-green grid of the public wireless network that bordered Net City. For all they knew, Rockman could have been transferred out to another country by now. Although a watch had been set on all the main information ports as soon as the scale of the situation had emerged, the Net Police were only too fallible.
"Blues." The sound of his name made him whirl, halfway to summoning his sword despite the evident safety of the area. Searchman's impassive face looked back at him, and Blues swallowed the hard knot of tangled emotions in his throat, forcing irrelevancies aside.
"Searchman. Any luck?" He already knew the answer; Searchman would not be here if any more secure databases remained to be searched.
"No signs of tampering in any of Densan City's Triple-A systems," Searchman reported shortly. Blues nodded, unsurprised. Triple-A security was rare and expensive enough that anyone using it would be monitoring their systems very closely. He'd checked IPC's servers himself. Dr Hikari had been right, though, that only that level of security could imprison Rockman for long, let alone block his bond with Netto-san. Blues frowned, absently sorting through bits of information like data blocks in a vain effort to make the puzzle make sense. It remained frustratingly elusive.
"Heading to Sci-Labs?" Searchman asked; Blues nodded.
"Enzan-sama was delayed by a board meeting at IPC."
"Ah." Searchman frowned as they crossed the grid, skirting a patch of sparking panels that were being worked on by a Navi technician. "It must be problematic juggling Net Saviours with a high-level career."
Blues shrugged. "No more so than with the army, I imagine. Your superiors can't have been pleased with this emergency."
"Is anyone?" Searchman turned to regard Blues. "You seem to be taking this harder than I would have predicted," he observed neutrally, reminding Blues of just how keen his eyes were.
"Oh?" Blues fell silent, considering that. Unwillingly, he had to admit that Searchman was as usual correct. Rockman's absence was affecting him more than he was entirely comfortable admitting. "It's – awkward to run a case without him," was all he said, eventually – the truth, as far as it went. Searchman nodded soberly, accepting this.
"You do work together a lot." Blues nodded shortly, heading towards the network node that would connect them to Sci-Labs. He and Rockman worked well together, and there was no point in denying it. Years of comradeship and shared battles had left them able to predict one another's moves, just as Enzan and Netto could.
Blues narrowed his eyes behind his visor. That they made a good team – the best team – did nothing to alter the fact that he'd come to rely on Rockman's presence in his life. That was the troubling thing; Blues was a Navi and a warrior, and by rights his allegiance should be to Enzan-sama alone. Anything else was an open vulnerability waiting to be exploited.
"Blues! There you are!" Arms outstretched like a gymnast, Roll made a dainty landing ahead of them, forcing Blues to halt. She waved a greeting to Searchman, dimpling in obvious amusement as he just blinked at her.
"What is it?" Blues asked shortly. "We're in the middle of a Class One emergency."
"Well, I know that." Roll pouted at him, setting her hands on her hips. "I came to tell you that Glyde found a Navi who was at the mall when Rockman disappeared, and might have seen something. Here." She offered a file, and Blues took it as calmly as he was able, grateful for the blank impassivity of his visor as hope clenched like a vise around his core. Scanning the file quickly, he absorbed what the unknown Navi had seen – not much, all told, bar a temporarily overloaded node that had forced him to reroute his delivery run, but it was the first tenuous thread of a trail they'd had.
"Searchman." He handed the file over reluctantly, aware that even as good as he knew he was, he wasn't the tracker here. "Take it from here – I'll notify Enzan-sama and the Commissioner."
"Understood." Searchman examined the file briefly, then blurred into motion, heading off into the public zones. Blues watched Roll watch him go, before she turned back to him.
"Find Rockman soon, all right? Everyone misses him."
Blues dipped his head in acknowledgement as she logged out, and turned to head in towards Sci-Labs. That was Rockman, making everyone care without ever meaning to or doing anything but being himself. Blues, too; he winced as another memory chipped away at the core of his resolve. Rockman had looked so very stunned when Blues had pinned him, eyes wide enough that Blues had seen himself reflected whole. The prospect of a lead, even a tenuous one, had reawakened the breathless, anticipatory feeling that he'd pushed aside at that time.
Privately, in the deep and aching heart of his core, Blues resigned himself at last to the fact that he was already vulnerable. He'd known it since Dr Hikari had asked the leading question, back at the re-certification tests, and the certainty had only grown as he'd tried to deny it. Despite every misgiving he had, he cared for Rockman – loved him, in truth – and his loss left a gaping hole in Blues' existence that no amount of Net Battling could fill. And – Blues froze mid-step, the cyberscape around him coming into sharp focus as his mind finally put the obvious pieces together, making the connection that they'd all been missing. The tendril of hope blossomed until it all but choked him; Blues clenched his fists, hardly daring to believe that it could actually be that simple.
He knew where Rockman was.
Rockman had been forced to admit, after the panic over awakening in an unfamiliar place and vulnerable state had subsided, that the inadvertent recharge had actually done him a lot of good. It was easier to face things with a clear head and sharp processors.
Sadly, neither the time spent offline nor his increased alertness had resulted in any change to his situation, which remained dire. He'd been alone when he'd come back online, thankfully, the doll-like Navi – which he was beginning to doubt was actually a Navi at all – nowhere in evidence. At first, it had been a relief to be spared its dry commentary, not to mention the prying discomfort of the tests, but the cramped conditions and constant sensation of being watched had quickly begun to wear.
Halfway convinced that this was another test of some kind – it had been twelve hours and seven minutes since his awakening, by his internal clock, and well over five days of captivity – Rockman had resorted to pacing the boundaries of the cage again, staring out at the flat and featureless plain surrounding his prison. Although no partitions or boundaries were visible, he nevertheless had the impression of a closed space, far smaller than it appeared. Wherever he was being held, the cage prevented him from tapping into the local network in search ID codes or a way out. The block on the link, however, implied that security was tighter than he'd ever imagined. His abductors had been well prepared, indeed.
"Awake at last, are you?" Rockman whirled; the Navi was back. It seemed to make a habit of transferring in behind him, which only added to his suspicions. Its words made him frown, wondering whether it was trying to be ironic, or to confuse him – or whether it actually had no access to whatever utility was monitoring him.
"More tests?" he challenged, clenching his fists stubbornly and refusing to back down even in the face of its eyeless stare. It tilted its head, seeming to regard him from an angle.
"Correct. The data from your recharge cycle has provided another angle of investigation."
Paling, Rockman shivered despite himself at the thought that this thing had been observing his sleeping thoughts – his dreams.
"Relax," his jailer instructed emotionlessly, making a puppet-like gesture. The lights overhead brightened, and the humming started up again, much deeper than usual. Rockman was sure he could feel the cage vibrating faintly around him. Holding himself reluctantly still in anticipation of the intrusive, uncomfortable probing, Rockman set his jaw, trying to gather all the depths of his anger in his eyes as though looks could actually kill.
Only seconds into the test, though, a sharp cracking noise split the air, and the entire cage actually did tremble around him. The lights and humming cut off abruptly as the doll-like Navi turned to stare into the distance. Worried and confused, half of him certain that things were about to get worse – what if viruses attacked? – Rockman took a step backwards as the system trembled again, the red flash of warning signs popping up in the distance. To his shock, the Navi turned to regard him as blankly as ever, even as it began to pixelate out, chunks of its program dissipating and streaming away.
"Lucky you," it observed as tonelessly as ever, and with a start Rockman realised that the cage itself was also dissolving, streaming out of the system to a destination unknown.
Hardly daring to believe it, Rockman took a step, and then another, and broke into a run as the last remnants of his prison vanished. A heady thrill of freedom rushed through him even as he narrowed his eyes grimly. Whatever had forced his captors to flee was destabilising the system; he had to get out of there, and fast.
A flash of red light arcing across the cyber-sky brought him up short. Rockman stumbled to a halt, gaping, as Blues flashed into solid form before him, sword out and hair whipping with the speed of his upload.
"Rockman?" His voice was tight, his shoulders tense, and he looked on the verge of maiming something. He looked wonderful. Rockman didn't even think; the surge of emotion – freedom, relief, hope, love – it was too strong. With an incoherent, wordless cry, he launched himself into Blues' arms.