I hope you take this as an interesting, 16-page filler, until the end. I'm sorry this has taken so long; it's been a rough past week and my motivation has been dwindling, but despite that, go have an awesome day/night!
52. Nothing Left to Lose
Suddenly, Zane's mind didn't feel like his own anymore. His excited, frenzied ways were drowned out by the sound of his own heart drumming against his ears and pushing him down into a crazed glow of opalescent evils, of a past he yet didn't want to don. It wasn't expected, yet he'd felt it creeping up on him, a tidal wave of challenge and perception now coursing upon him and somehow seeping into his veins. He was swallowed by the very torments he'd left behind, past all death he'd grieved, and it was a step backward into the dawn he wanted not to remember.
Every day of his first human life had been harsh, but tolerable if he was able to pleasure his mind with the beautiful things life had to show him, and his father's abuse became something small if he could just let his mind drift. To his unexpected decision, he met Julien by buying his robotic cat, Fang, and taking off with him (after paying a good price), and he dealt with his punishment for that with knowledge that he had saved the creature from being scrapped. He was happy with Fang, who became his new companion even after he'd fled his nest to escape his father's cruelty, so saddening in his heart. His meetings with Julien came not long after, their bond growing stronger every day Julien allowed Zane to help him on a robot he was building, or some other wacky invention that he admired out of the man.
He became Julien's protégée and the son that Julien craved most of his life, despite getting a virtuoso daughter like Carolyne out of his wife, Catherine. (Catherine usually steered clear of Zane whenever he came over.)Their connection was stronger than anything that Zane had ever felt towards a fatherly figure, including old Mr. Walker the veteran, and soon their relationship was not just of teaching but confiding in one another for their life choices and dealings that brought them to hardship. Zane exuded everything about his terrible childhood demons to the old man, acutely listening with open ears to the epitome of all resonant things. To have someone who loved him like a son gave Zane his everything.
He felt almost bad when he felt something more than friendship for Carolyne, but Julien said he didn't mind their courtship, that he approved of what then bloomed between two restless, young souls that craved recognition that they were never given by the outside world.
Zane's death had not been so big. His life was nothing special, he didn't think, but his next one as the robot Julien had been martyring under his nose turned out to fare far better than anything he would've asked for as a child, too young and naïve to see the darkly fundamental things that stood in front of him. He was a robot of many things, a man who learned to love himself for what he was far into the face of the death that came crawling the day the Reckoning came. He was proud to be a droid that had years on his nindroid title later on. Fighting for his right of life was a second nature.
His memory switch had been killed the moment the long battle was over. Julien took out that memory chip and tossed it into the sea so that he may never be a broken boy over the things he had suffered through in that part of his long life, and gave him a new one to burn in the treehouse banned to Birchwood Forest. That was where all happy memories began.
Through all of the soul searching that Zane could do right then, not once did he find the very speck of a face that resembled Seamus's, or the dollop of an eye that could have hidden glass doors to the memories of knowing Zane before. He found nothing of himself inside of the dark eyes challenging the world around him to fight the old man reduced to skin and bones against his pubescent years. The name Seamus Borg did not even call to thought a veiled retention that did not surface.
Neither did a cyborg. He would be the first one to know if his father (Julien) had one day manufactured a cyborg, yet he had not a clue.
He decided he couldn't believe Seamus about this. Not about his rivalry with Julien or this cyborg. They'd be chasing a dream if they went on a lookout for the cyborg.
"We've never heard of any cyborg," Kai was saying, He shook his head. His hair was so different without the hair gel glamming it into fashionable spikes that it was a little on the fun side to see him sitting here, making serious comments without it. "No one's ever said anything about it."
"I'm pretty sure I would know if there was one," Lloyd added. Zane looked at him. He did live with me for several years, he thought, nodding. He would have known. "I hung out with pretty much every nindroid that Julien had around, and not one ever said he was a cyborg." That was not exactly true. There were still droids in the Tomb that he had not yet met, but there wouldn't be a cyborg in there. Cyborgs probably could not be shut down.
Jay placed his hands against the table, looking at Seamus under his straight eyebrows. "I think I'd know, too!"
"The point is, and no disrespect, Mr. Borg—but we've never met a cyborg, or even heard of him," Cole interjected, shaking his head, laying his forearms on the table. "The look on Zane's face can testify to that."
On cue, all eyes turned to him, and what that did was erase the look and replace it with an uncomfortable turn from the spotlight. He had never been a fan of having several people stare at him to catch his look unless he was speaking, in which then it was acceptable to dress your eyes upon someone for a period of time.
Jay's flattened hands on the table drew his fingers up into tiny arcs. "Have you heard of a cyborg?" he asked Zane directly.
And what Zane did was answer honestly, as if he could not. "No. I have not." He shook his head.
Jay was as loud and well heard as ever about the matter. "Then the deal is invalid, Mr. Borg. We can't give you what we don't have."
The countenance on Seamus twisted into a mask that cannot be defined by many words, but can be labelled as 'disappointed rage' for lack of a better pair of them. Old men really should not wear that kind of look, because you do, in stereotype, see the image of a happy, friendly old man in your mind when you think of an elderly male. It was almost hurting to see this. "Then there is no deal," he snapped. "You won't have my son's help if I can't have that cyborg."
"Don't I, eh, get a say in this?" Cyrus's spider legs crackled over the floor as he walked around the table to his father. "After all, it is my assistance they want, Dad, and I don't want to be rude, but—"
"NO." Seamus slammed his fist on the table. 'Petty children do not get what they want if they do not deserve it,' Sensei Wu had once told a childish Lloyd who had ragged on an old bully he'd gone to school with once named Finn, but the total memory of why he'd been complaining that pink and orange evening on the Destiny's Bounty is forgotten. "I will not have this if your end of the deal is not put up. Your sensei agreed!"
Why would Sensei agree to this deal if he knew there was no cyborg? Zane's face flattened into an emotionless deliberation. Sensei Wu was many things, but he was not a scam artist or a liar that would manipulate people into doing what he wanted. He would not have agreed to this if he did not know of a true way to uphold the end of the arrangement that he had approved.
What did you have in mind, Sensei? He sighed. I wish you were here to tell us…
The abuse was bad enough, but the kidnapping was just insidious.
The Class 32 droid slammed her fist against the back door of the tallest building that Yuki had ever laid his eyes on, face expressionless. By the hand that she used to crack his arm into two pieces, she yanked on his hair meaningfully, using it as some sort of leash to recommend he wouldn't run away, and by making her statement she laid down a law while breaking one that Yuki already had set up for himself. She was touching his hair.
He didn't like to be so picky, but he knew what he didn't like about people invading his boundaries with their disrespect for his personal space, and this happened to be at the very top of his list. Touching his hair was a violation of several internal properties he had spent much time neatly organizing in his mind in alphabetical order, starting with arbitrary contact and ending with unprotected wounding. By having this barbarian stick her grubby hands onto his thoroughly cleansed hair, she was condemning him to have to feel every alarm in his head going off, thoughts turning into un-computing black holes that sucked every quantifiable gram of intelligence into the garbage.
In other words, you don't touch his hair. Especially not with hands that aren't clean. Dirt itself is too much to handle. And easily, dirt clings to the color white—ohhhh, if there was even a smudge of color on his hair—!
Cradling his broken arm to his side with a cupped hand, Yuki straightened from his bent over position called to by the Class 32's tug on his hair, scowling at the back of her head. The slugging rain immersed by hard thrashes of ice and water had let up since he'd traveled, soggy, steps behind the woman. Now without the fog and clouds to use as her mask, he realized she looked like she was possibly only fourteen, with straight auburn hair and no manners or respect for herself or her environment. Her gait was manly and not very attractive, and her freckled face underneath stormy green eyes made him feel like he'd known her before.
His mind, next to being afraid of what she was going to do with him—although he doubted not a second that she was bringing him to the man who had driven both she and Kol, and possibly Angus, to try and kill him—was racing back and forth, trying to sum together all the images he had seen lately and make them a comprehensible picture. Angus's outmoded body kept making an impression on the back of his eyelids, a child shot down in rivalry, but with his own weapon poised and ready for the very attack that Yuki thought he was going to feel to his chest.
The girl, as he should say, pounded one more time on the door. Yuki peered up at the tall building, dizzied by just trying to calculate how tall it was. "OPEN!" shouted the Class 32, glaring at the door. "I will not stand out here forever."
"No," Yuki muttered. "You'd most likely start to rust, because I smell rain in the air again."
She responded by yanking on his hair, making him go down, lashing to the side. His broken arm slammed against the side of the building, affecting him enough into wincing; it didn't exactly hurt, but it did not feel very good, either. He glared at her, and he saw her glare right back.
"If anyone here is old, it is you," she told him. "Your hair has gotten white. That is age."
"Do not think I didn't notice your impedimental speech and jerky arm movements," he did his best to growl, but it was limp. "At least I can still function."
"I have received the upgrade your machinery needs." She smirked. "I am currently up-to-date on all of the proper function of the now. You, however, are still as old and immobile as you have always been."
"And yet you still talk like an old man." Yuki tsked his tongue. "Shame on you. I would've bargained for an urban dictionary."
He smiled to himself when that seemed to dig under her skin and prickle those 'upgraded' wires of hers. Finally pounding on the door one more time, the girl just grabbed the handle and twisted it, a loud, metallic snapping coming from the breaking lock. Her fingers laced tighter through his hair the instant she stepped through the door, and Yuki knew it was going to hurt before she even ripped him in after her. For once in his life, he regretted having long hair.
Immediately after pulling him in, the girl stumbled back, almost knocking Yuki backward. "Ah!" It could've been a yelp if she had an urban dictionary, or even a voice that wasn't so monotone it was blah. "Where were you when I was pounding on the door moments ago?"
"I was preoccupied getting Mr. Borg's pills." Oh, joy, another voice that was too robotic for its own good. He looked around the girl's body, and found at the end of his captor's finger was a woman she pointed at that did not resemble your everyday human, or in fact any other droid he'd seen. Her pale white skin decaled with purple power lines and bolts gave her a look unlike any other, uniquely topped with not just metallic silver hair but the perfect impersonation of a woman's body. Everything about her screamed droid, but if she were not to be so overly dusted by the fixtures of an inhuman being, she would pass for a real woman. Yuki raised an eyebrow, having never seen a robot of her stature before—yet it didn't seem to matter, because the way the girl talked to this woman took his mind off it.
"I brought your stupid cyborg; now where is the humanity I was promised by your successor?"
The woman's brilliant green eyes moved onto Yuki, and he curled his lip at her. Surely she was the enemy, working alongside the man who wanted to put him to death permanently this time, and her beauty was supposed to lure those who were weak in so she could snap their necks. He wanted no part of this disgusting agreement between this master and the humanity he promised to people Yuki had congregated with in the past.
The woman's face didn't show any emotion or reaction to him, instead looking at the girl. "Miss Avery," she started, and something snapped into place, a missing memory that made Yuki want to groan with the stupidity he should've felt for forgetting the girl's name. Avery was she. They had had problems in the past, too… "Are you certain this is the Cyborg?"
"Of courseit is. Anyone else would tell you the same thing." Avery tugged Yuki inside and pushed him against a stack of boxes in the obvious storage room they were in, and slammed the broken door shut behind herself, though it didn't fully shut because of the broken lock.
If the woman could've sighed, she would have. Instead, she turned to Avery. "I do not think either Mr. Borg will be pleased to hear you have broken the security door."
"I do not care." Still holding a tuft of Yuki's hair, Avery pulled him near, wearing out his patience with being whipped around. "I never promised to be gentle with your property. Now, where is my humanity?"
"I must scan him first to assure you are not trying to scam us." The woman didn't wait for Avery to annoyedly wave her hand at him, letting go of his hair. Backed against the stack of cardboard boxes with various labels, it's not like he could've run; he had Avery standing there with a gun at her hip, and the white woman watching him closely as she zeroed in on him, stepping into his comfort zone. Yuki wished then more than ever that he could sink into the boxes and dispel as air does.
The woman put her hands together in front of him. "I am Pixal," she introduced, "a primary interactive X-ternal assistant life-form." She blinked. "You are…?"
Yuki cradled his arm closer to him, his hair for once falling over the front of his shoulders from here Avery had let it go. He tried to sink into the wall, but to no avail. "…Yuki." He said awkwardly.
"I apologize for any stress Miss Avery put on you." She blinked. Her eyes seemed to glow brighter after every time she closed them. "Our interest in you is purely scientific."
"Stress is an understatement."
Pixal's hands fell down to her sides. "Permission to scan?"
"Permission to what?"
"I must scan for any traces of cyborg material within you to determine if you truly are the cyborg that we have been looking for. May I have permission?"
"If I didn't give you my permission, would you still do it?" And what on Earth is 'cyborg material'?
"Under direct orders, I am not allowed to walk away from such an opportunity. Asking for permission seemed cordial."
Yuki sighed. "Then I have no choice." He turned his face away to avoid having to look at her, hoping it would reverse time and take him back to yesterday morning, when he felt comfortably numb and insouciant, not knowing the first thing about his true identity. With all the trouble being a cyborg was spontaneously scrounging up, he'd rather just live the rest of his life not knowing who he really was…
Flat beams preyed from Pixal's green eyes and descried on his form, taking on every inch of him and winning. Her head slowly tilted down. Yuki closed his eyes. I'm going to die today, aren't I…
The whirring beams stopped espying, making him open his eyes at the cease of all sound. Pixal was staring at him with a rather transfixed eye. Suddenly she was all business, her shoulders straightening, back erecting more perpendicular than before. "It appears this is not fraud," she said, and Yuki sighed. "I must bring you to Mr. Borg for further assessment."
"Oh, and what does he plan to do with me? Don't I get a say-so? After all, it's me you're trying to…kill." Yuki couldn't believe it when he looked at his shaking hands, misunderstanding just how frightened he was to follow her to this Mr. Borg's office, possibly to face the final countdown of the seconds he may take unneeded breaths, see with his eyes, hear with his ears. Just the thought of death, though he'd welcomed it so many times before, terrified him.
"That is up to Mr. Borg to decide," Pixal told him. "Please come with me to his office."
"And if I don't?"
"I am sure that is not the path you wish to take, Yuki, if you want to live."
"Look, I'm telling you, this agreement isn't fair!" Jay howled for the last time, palms flat to the surface of the metallic table. Outraged, he followed the footsteps of everyone else sitting there that wasn't reserving himself the way that Zane was. Jay's plangent personality often made most of his points clear with whoever was around him or happened to be at the end of his reaming attention. But Seamus wasn't letting up. He was a stone sitting in that chair, unmovable. Nothing anyone was saying made any difference to him.
"It was the deal I was given. I'm not changing it because you know nothing about this—your sensei did. Fill the deal with your lot, or there's no help for you." Flat out, Zane would finally admit that Seamus was a cranky old geezer he was not in the pleasure of seeing.
"Don't you want to help us in the sake of the world?" Lloyd shook his head, upset.
"Father, I think you're being a little selfish with this," Cyrus said, trying to reason with Seamus. "You need to think about this in the light of the world," he gestured greatly with his hands into the air, "and also in the effort that it was my help that Mr. Garmadon asked for—not yours."
"I'm your father, Cyrus," growled Seamus. "I say you can't help unless their end of the bargain is—"
"Look, Vader," Jay snapped. "Our sensei isn't around anymore to tell us who this cyborg is. So either you think of something else for us to do, or we don't take the deal."
"Get me the blueprints for the cyborg, then."
"There are none," Zane interjected, turning Seamus's cold stare on him. "My father's workshop held no trace of a blueprint for a cyborg. The ones at his monastery did not have much else to offer, either, and all of his blueprints are there."
Seamus fisted his hands, clenching his jaw tightly. His dentures might pop out if he gritted his teeth together any tighter. "So he destroyed them, then. Clever."
Zane rationally held his hands up. He needed to reason as best he could with this man, although there was no telling how he would listen to Zane any more than he'd listened to his own son. "As you can see, we are not well equipped to—" He wanted to finish, but a second later, the elevator door across the room sprung open with a hiss of air, and he stopped, eyes drawn to the white woman entering the room. Pixal looked at them all, but her eyes rebelled from his face in allegiance to Seamus, turning her whole body to look at him. Something in her eyes had changed their stolid behavior and molded her into an excited, almost jumpy being, unlike the composed, straightforward woman she was when he'd goggled at her earlier. Immediately, Zane could not stop himself from being concerned as to what made her dark eyebrows quiver fervidly—perhaps there was danger lurking nearby?
Cyrus turned his head, smiling nervously. "Hello, Pixal," he said. "Can I do something for—"
"Mr. Borg," Pixal interrupted, a feat that Zane hardly recognized in a robot. She was speaking to Seamus. "One of the Clockworks has returned with the Cyborg. He is here now."
"WHAT?!"
Jay couldn't believe his ears. One second they were sitting there telling Seamus what an idiot he was (well, doing that mentally, their mouths trying to persuade him to drop the charges altogether), and the next second, Pixal was nodding her head at the old geezer and verifying what they were just trying to prove wrong. He stared at her.
"A Clockwork?" Zane asked, and Jay could feel where he was coming from. A Clockwork is one of Dr. Julien's robots, he thought, turning to the old man who stated he was Julien's BFF up until a certain point, but Seamus was already standing up, eyes turning orgulous. The hunger writing onto his face, a script forming in the process right in front of them, was ghastly and greedy, and his hands, curled into fists, released their bloody hold on themselves, falling to his sides in his rise to a full stand. Behind his rectangular glasses, Jay could see every thought dashing over his worn face, but they were too fast to make into sentences or feelings.
"And, how in the crap did you find the Cyborg?!" Jay cried. "There isn't one!"
Pixal turned her eyes on him. "That is incorrect," she said. "I have scanned the possible candidate brought to me by a Clockwork dispatched to retrieve the Cyborg, and his body composition suggests and decides that he is a cyborg. His bodily composition was fifty-four percent human and forty-six percent robotic."
Jay didn't even know how to take this. For once in his life, he was speechless beyond words, thoughts, and feelings; he had no clue what to say, or how he was supposed to react to this. The faces of his friends around him explained just enough: they were feeling as lost for words as he was, Kai's eyes locking with his and packing with a doubt stronger than his insistence that there wasn't a cyborg to give up.
Zane had to be the one who took this harder. He shook his head, classically open mouthed for every reason other than lust for the suave purple robot chick he was ogling earlier. "But…that is not possible…"
A cyborg…it can't be true. There's no way. And with that, I don't even know who it is, or how—I'd expect Zane, of all people, to know about the cyborg, especially if his father created it!
Cyrus Borg seemed to have nothing to say about this. He was in the astounded waste pile, just like the ninja, and was duly ignored by the one robot person in this room who could possibly answer any of the unspoken questions that were aligning in rows of military-level exactitude inside of everyone's head.
"Where is it?" Seamus was demanding almost breathlessly, scratching his chest, anticipating a heart attack from delight that probably wouldn't come. His eyes had gone wide. "Where is the cyborg?" And just like that, adding to all the other ironies that this day could possibly make Jay want to rip out his hair more, the second elevator door popped open, sending a rush of exceedingly-pumped air into the room. Standing in the hauling box, an auburn-haired girl in her early teens held a tuft of white hair in her hand. Jay swore that he'd seen her before, but it had to have been long ago, otherwise he would've remembered her on the spot.
And then, the mental picture of her eyes rimmed in blue eyeshadow made him remember: she was one of the robots that was on the Bounty 2, who was manish and scary enough to put even Cole to his shame. He remembered that she'd belched so loud he was traumatized by it.
"Avery," whispered Zane. Of course he knew who she was. The name clicked into place with how much Jay remembered, only she'd gotten a wardrobe change since her brightly-colored short-shorts that he'd last seen her in.
Avery was the cyborg? Hardly that impressive, Jay wanted to grumble, but then Avery sidestepped into the room, her face working into the most anomalous looking glower that could ever be put on a face, ever. He saw that the white hair in her hand was not a tuft, rather a handful of a long, silken river that was still attached to the miserable-looking man standing in the elevator behind her, cradling his arm to his side, and Jay remembered then with a sudden pang of guilt: "Not very talkative, I see."
"Oh, shit," Cole whispered next to him.
"Yuki!" Zane couldn't have sprung up from his chair faster, shoving past Seamus in quick agility the minute Avery tugged hard on Yuki's hair, throwing him into the room with a very shocking strength. He tumbled onto the floor in a heap, and because this threw Zane into action, the other four ninja jumped to their feet in his lead, always there to back him up if there was any sign of distress. Zane darted over toward the discarded man, trying to support himself with just one arm as the other dangled limply (and very grossly, mind you) against the floor, falling to his knees at Yuki's side supportively.
"I completely forgot we were supposed to go get him," Cole shamed himself, clapping a hand down on his forehead. He wouldn't be the only one, either. Distracted by Zane and his falcon-following, Jay couldn't have had anyone less to think about running through the rain, and being overwhelmed by Borg Industries had only put the pickup further back in his mind.
Lloyd swerved around his chair and ran over to Yuki as well. Zane whirled on Avery, glaring hard at her and saying loudly, "What did you do to him?!"
Avery's hands rested on her hips, moving back her jacket to reveal a gun packed into a holster just at the top of her thigh. Jay saw it as a threat to Zane to silence him if he made any kind of trouble for her, and got himself out of the chairs just as Lloyd had, going over to Lloyd and putting himself between Avery and his friend, not surprised to find Cole and Kai already doing the same.
Avery smirked. "Cute. It appears you have more friends than you did when I last knew you, Zane."
"Friends who don't like it when you beat up on the friends of our friends," Kai snapped.
There was a pause. "You said friends way too many times there," Cole said.
"I couldn't think of anything else to say!"
Zane had helped Yuki into a kneeling position now, and after looking at his clearly broken arm, he turned on Avery, eyes tough with the strength and ardor of the good ol' Zane determined to fight for integrity. "Who do you think you are, hurting my friend like that?" He demanded, putting his foot down metaphorically, although it wouldn't surprise Jay if he physically did it. "What gives you the right to do such a thing?"
"My desperation for humanity does cause me to do desperate things." Avery glared at Zane. Of all the people to turn out to be the bad guy, Jay would least expect it to be someone who couldn't even be classified as a supporting character. "The last thing in the world I would care about is having to hurt him to get what I want."
"You've got to work out your tangled priorities," Cole retorted, and right now would've been the perfect time to whip out a golden weapon to stick in her face to make the heroic point more known, since it wasn't seeming to go through her head.
"My priorities are already straight." Avery lifted her chin. "My humanity is important to me."
"What do you mean, humanity?" Lloyd asked. He stood up from Yuki's side and took a foothold at Kai's, keeping the space between them cavernous enough to show he hadn't forgiven the fire ninja just yet—for whatever reason it was that had driven a wedge between them in the first place.
Observing, Seamus shambled forward, his old bones making him advance slowly and not at all threateningly, one foot scrapping over the other in a chase to make it closer to the ninja, hand outstretched. Cyrus clacked over to him, a metal spider creeping across the floor to his father's side, and Jay couldn't believe that this whole time he'd had a closed mouth, maintaining his half-frown equivocally. Didn't he have anything more to say?
"Avery, I do not understand," Zane said as he stood. Yuki still knelt on the floor behind him. "What has caused you to do this? I was not aware that you were still—"
"I was not switched on, foolish thing." The elevator door had shut behind Avery, but no one doubted that she could punch a hole through the closed, gray-blue door if she needed to make a quick escape. "I have lain dormant for nearly fifty years inside of that black box of hell, my coffin of which I still would pertain to if it were not for the kind generosity of another." She gestured to Seamus.
"Two things," Jay said, holding up a finger, his stun still trying to form in his head. "First, there's no way you could've been in a coffin because I wouldn't know you if you were still in it. Second," he held up another finger, "why do you keep talking about humanity, and what does that have to do with him?" He gestured to Yuki.
"That was three things," Zane corrected.
"Oh, who cares?"
"You're the Cyborg?" Cole asked Avery, turning to Seamus and Cyrus. "She's the Cyborg, so there you go. You've got your bargain. Now, can we please move on?"
"She isn't the Cyborg," snapped Seamus, one wrinkled hand reaching out to grasp something on Cyrus's stand-in wheelchair to help him stand. His crabby level was still in check, but he had taken a turn for the worse into Cuckoo-Crazy Land and wore fixed eyes more starved than a lion who had watched several pieces of prey dance in front of his cage, never able to touch one for days. "I checked. I checked every damn thing in that Tomb, and there was no Cyborg in it. But they knew. They all knew who the Cyborg was, and they became my key to finding it. After a little upgrading, they were all ready enough to hunt that damn thing down and bring it back to me, with a little motivation: a promised humanity once I figured out how the Cyborg worked. I've sent so many of them out, but none of them have ever returned with it—until now." Jay didn't think it was possible for Seamus's black eyes to get any darker, but boy, they sure did. Cole's face soon became little a memory when he looked down to the floor, to a place hidden behind them all under Zane's protective, motherly guard, kneeling and broken enough to let out a small whimper:
Yuki.
"Yuki is not a cyborg," Zane protested, clenching his fists. "He never has been. He is a perfectly normal robot and I do not think it is very nice to be treating him in such a way to break his arm and throw him to the floor like this!"
Zane was frustrated, but Jay wasn't so sure that his frustration was well placed. He and Kai had arrived to Cole's property in the nick of time to hear the news that the guy in question had been beaten severely—and was in great physical pain, despite being a robot. He was bruised. Robots just don't bruise—they don't have the blood or the physicality to support the bruising of an unreal layer of skin blanketing their expensive metal innards. Jay had thought it was weird, but didn't really think any of it at the time. Stuff is stuff, and if it ain't his business, it ain't his business. He lived by that motto to best his mother's slightly nosy lifestyle.
But now…
"…so it is unfair of you to make such accusations on a man who has had enough of this tyranny!" Zane was saying very unconquerably, not really yelling. It was probably as close to yelling as he'd ever get (and this was before he knew that Zane had yelled at Kai for living his life while he made everyone else worry about him for six years.) "Shame on you for doing this to him!"
No matter what, that guy will always be there for you. We're pretty lucky guys to have a friend like him. But even if he felt lightened that Zane was standing up for his friend, he had a heavy feeling that just wouldn't go away, making him exchange glances with Cole and Kai. They were thinking it too: Yuki isn't a total robot, is he?
Pixal stepped to Seamus's side, fingertips pressed together. Her presence didn't settle Zane the way Jay was kinda expecting it to. "I have scanned your friend to distinguish his inner makeup," she explained. "His bodily composition is fifty-four percent human and forty-six percent robotic. It appears he is indeed a cyborg."
"He's not!" In a flash of the moment, whatever Zane was about to say was cut off at the breath, and at the sudden bank of nothin' Jay was scared he might've gotten hurt or something seriously serious that could've caused him to shut up like a finger snap. All four of them turned around and looked at the wispy blonde-haired man interestedly and found nothing short of Zane shutting up—but it was because there was a white hand clutching his pants leg as if it was the lifeline of he who held it. Yuki faced the floor, unable to look at Zane; the darkness underneath his brow bones hid his eyes and thoughts from the rest of the world.
At that moment, no one could've looked guiltier.
"Yuki?" Zane murmured apprehensively.
"Please stop fighting," Yuki whispered. Oh, boy, here comes the big reveal. Both Jay and Cole had tensed, bracing themselves for the probably-not-gonna-happen 'meltdown' that Zane was going to vent into any second now. "You don't need to fight for me."
"I cannot allow them to accuse you of this. It is not true." Zane started to turn, but Yuki's hold on his pants tightened enough to tug him back again.
"No, Zane…" He took a deep breath. "It is true. I am the Cyborg."
"How can we agree to this?" Jay hissed, putting his palms on either forearm. In their huddled circle distanced from the two inventors standing feet away, the ninja all stared at one another, their faces all saying exactly the same thing that Jay had repeated four times since they called a private meeting on themselves to exude from Seamus's secret-crazy obsession and Cyrus's fear of talking over his father. The problem? Cyrus was more than willing to help out the ninja without cost, and they wanted that option more than anything. Seamus, however, was being a butt.
"He's not going to let us leave without getting what he wants, Cole," Kai susurrated, turning to the leader. "And Sensei must've thought that Cyrus's help would be seriously beneficial if he came here to him."
"I'd feel like an idiot if we turned this down." Cole rubbed his hands across his face, wishing it were easier than saying thank you to Cyrus and moving on to the blueprints that he had already set up for them. "But…"
"But he wants to dissect Yuki," Zane finished, downcast. Ever since he'd learned the truth about Yuki, he'd had a thing about him that Cole could only say was dejected astonishment and wasn't easily pushed into thinking straight, at least not for an upfront reason. Cole wasn't too concerned about it. He'd get over the news soon enough, and everything would be gravy.
"Dissection," said Seamus, turning everyone's attention back to him, "is not essentially just that. I only want to run a few tests and see what I can learn from him."
"It won't be painful at all," reassured Cyrus, walking over to them. His hand waved through the air, gesturing toward Yuki, who stood among them, sunken into himself dolefully. "You have my word that it won't."
Glad to see he's trying to stand up, for a change, Cole thought. Cyrus didn't seem to pomp or overexert himself on this one, either. He looked pretty dependable for the eye's taste—but what did they know about the antisocial genius who'd lined Ninjago City's streets with gold and wire?
Cyrus crawled over to Yuki, reaching out a hand that would never even reach the top of Yuki's head, for he was so elevated on those pointy pencil legs of his. His smile belonged to an honest man with nothing to hide, not a conundrum to keep except for his personal insecurities that he'd blame for his high school pariah. "You, eh, you have nothing to worry about, really." His smile boldened. "The tests would be pleasant, mostly like what you'd see happening with a CAT scan and such, MRI—I mean you really have nothing to worry about. My father may be desperate, but he's a good man. Not to mention this might help you learn more about yourself and your fullest capabilities. I promise this will be totally beneficial for everyone."
Mmhmm, seemed like Seamus was a good man, for sure, Cole thought sarcastically. Yuki's shoulders slumped, and like earlier this morning, he was starting to see how truly old Yuki was underneath his faux twenty-and-glorious skin. If it was even faux at all.
Sitting here and debating about what the best option for their plan was, Cole suddenly realized something, an error they'd all made, and one that had shamedly slipped underneath their highfalutin noses. They could come up with any deal they wanted, standing against Seamus's inventerous dreams with an iron fist and several witty quips they'd slam in his face, but in the end, what they were forgetting made them jerks larger than Seamus ever could've been.
Cole's feet moved him forward, approaching Yuki's morose damage with an outstretched hand. He laid it on his shoulder and caught the other man's sandy eyes. "Whether we want to go through with this deal or not, it's not our choice to make," he said loudly.
"It's not?" Jay asked from behind him, floored.
Cole shook his head, giving Yuki a tiny smile. "No, it's not," he said. He nodded once, absolutely. "'To take away a man's choice is to take away his hope,'" he recited sagaciously, thinking back to a time where Sensei Wu would shamble the halls with his divinatory maxims. His fingers flexed gently into Yuki's shoulder and found what was underneath as hard as bone. "Yuki, do you want to do this?"
Yuki looked down. Cole could almost see the wheels of fortune turning in his head. When he looked back up again, there was something in his face that made his perpetual life seem not so bad in the face of finally understanding who he was. "I don't have anything more to lose," he said serenely. "And if you all say this is going to help you do whatever it is that you people do…" He shrugged, but it was flaccid.
"Are you positive?" Cyrus asked. The way he asked it set Cole closer to the edge, because he sounded a lot more like he was trying to get Yuki to rethink his choice rather than to pick the best decision for himself. A minor frown surfaced on Cyrus's lips. What's he hiding?
"Yes." Yuki squared his shoulders, trying hard. Cole let go of him with a careful smile. "I…I'm ready to figure out who I am."
"Then I suppose…my father and Pixal will be taking you now…" He turned away too quickly. Suddenly, something about this was making Cole want to doubt Cyrus's claimed narrow familiarity with his father's deal with Sensei Wu, like he knew more than he was letting on, or that they had withheld information from the ninja just to get what they wanted.
Yuki smiled very, very weakly at them. It made Cole feel a little bad. "Thank you." It didn't sound like a thanks. It sounded like a 'I think I'm going to die today, so this is kind of like a last-shit goodbye. Thanks for not coming to pick me up and avoiding this extremely terrible situation that you put me into' type of adieu. He's given up, Cole realized.
Then Yuki turned his head, and followed Pixal when she directed him toward the elevators, Seamus laggard on their heels, adding a parting word of empty gratitude to the ninja. Zane grabbed onto the back of Cole's shirt and tugged. "Why do I feel like I will never see him again?" he whispered in Cole's ear.
"You will," Cole told him. The elevator door swooshed open long enough for Pixal to instruct everyone in, and closed with just as much terseness. But he didn't even believe that himself.
