APRIL 3 2044

9:32 AM

It's still more than two hours until noon, but Hamegg can't say he's surprised when he hears the soft hum of the top-of-the-line hovercar pulling up outside—he could tell just from the five-minute call first thing this morning that Skunk would show up bright and early, and he'd have to be a grade-A moron to make a big deal out of it when business is already as bad as it is. With the way the wind is blowing right now, he's got to take every job he's lucky enough to land.

Besides, he'd be lying if he said he wasn't pretty damn eager to get a good look at this particular robot—it's got to be one hell of a machine if Skunk is going to all this hassle to get it fixed up when Christ knows it'd be easier to dump it down here and call it a day, let it rust away in the scrap heaps like a dead battery—so he clicks off the TV (it wasn't anything new, anyway—just another broadcast from Metro City with good old Bill Tenma front and center, talking about his poor lost little robot boy, who's apparently still MIA—) and hurries out of the workshop to stand under the bright hot sun, with a hand over his eyes to block out the blinding light, just as the hovercar whirs open and Skunk glides out with his usual ice-cold elegance.

Chin high and shoulders back, his polished black shoes crunching on the metal and gravel and broken glass littered all over the ground, his bone-white face pinched up like he's got a lemon rind between his teeth, Skunk Kusai strides straight for Hamegg with the end of a long glowing blue chain clutched tight in one pale fist—he gives the shackle a single sharp jerk that drags the mystery robot from the car with a clumsy, uneven kind of stagger and a long low (incessant) groan like an old cogwheel in serious need of some oil.

And the thing doesn't even make it two full steps out of the car before it crashes, with a heavy metallic thud, flat on its face in the dirt and garbage, where it twitches and sparks and moans in a tangle of red-and-blue wires pushing up out of its torn skin like climbing vines, and it's—it's small, so much smaller than Hamegg thought it would be when he clicked off the call less than two hours ago. He can hardly see the robot itself through the dozen layers of black grime sticking to it like glue, but he doesn't need more than a single glance to tell him it's about the size of a little kid.

It doesn't look anything like the total powerhouse he had in mind.

It definitely doesn't look like anything worth saving.

It doesn't even look like anything that can be saved.

"So you see why this is an urgent job." It's not a question, but that's just the way Skunk has always been—drop everything you're doing right now because my problem is more important and my problem is the only one that matters and my problem is the only one that's actually a problem—but Hamegg can hardly blame the guy when it's already a small miracle that this pathetic pile of nuts and bolts in front of him survived the long ride out here. "It's too bad off to delay any longer—I don't think it could even last the day without intervention."

"How long has it been like this already?" Even a machine can't run on empty forever—not without some serious damage to the internal systems, at least, and if this one's as busted-up as it looks, it could be irreparable by now. "You know there's only so much I can do for 'em when they've been on the fritz for a good while."

"What, you seriously think I've got the time to keep up with every single one of my bots?" Skunk huffs out a scoff and fusses with the smooth, pressed-to-perfection lapels on his black silk jacket. "I'm a busy man, Hamegg—I just want this piece of junk back on its feet as soon as possible."

"I'm a mechanic," Hamegg mutters—quiet, under his breath, so Skunk won't hear. "Not a freaking miracle worker." But he crouches down to prod the robot lightly in the ribs—with the state it's in, he'll be amazed if its system hasn't forced an emergency shutdown in some desperate, last-ditch effort to save its own life, but apparently it's still conscious (which means it's got some serious grit to it—color him impressed) because it lifts its dark spiky head off the ground, just a fraction of an inch, to squint blearily at him through dull, barely-open, and startlingly human eyes.

And he can't do a damn thing except stare right back, with his mouth hanging open and his brain scraped to a dead halt as sharp bursts of white-hot shock crash over him again and again like ocean swells, his mind locked in this dizzying endless loop of no way no way no way because there is just no freaking way that the broken-down piece of crap sprawled on the ground in front of him is—

"Astro?"

Look, it's pretty much impossible not to know all about how Metro City's friendly neighborhood Astro Boy dropped off the face of the earth last October, what with the kid's face splashed all over the news almost every night, and Tenma's hundred thousand puffy-eyed red-cheeked tear-streaked appeals to please do your part to bring his precious beloved son home—but he never seriously thought that the kid could be in any kind of serious trouble. Astro is just too powerful for that.

But right now, with his mechanical body cracking open and falling apart like an overcooked eggshell, all his cables and coils dangling out like writhing snakes, his left shoulder just barely hanging on by a clump of worn-out wires that probably won't even last the night, and his face so caked with filth that Hamegg can hardly see anything except his eyes, big and brown and too human, while his tiny body flares and flashes with blue-white sparks, he doesn't look powerful at all.

He doesn't look anything like the famous superhero / golden child / darling of Metro City right now.

He just looks like a lost little kid.

But that's—that's all thanks to the ridiculously small and unsettlingly human (and annoyingly adorable) form that Tenma stuck his superpowered robot in, because Astro is obviously not a little kid, not even close, and sure, yeah, all right, he looks all sweet and nice and innocent, with his big dark puppy eyes and all his pretty words about peace and love and friendship and all that crap, but he's a real preachy and self-righteous piece of work when you get to know him, and odds are, he's even more of a stuck-up holier-than-thou brat now that he's got the whole world wrapped around his little metallic finger, and anyway, even if he wasn't a massive pain in the backside, it's still all his fault that the Robot Games ever went down the toilet in the first place. It's all his fault that Hamegg can barely hold his own head above the water right now. It's his fault that the kids down here ditched to go and live the high life up in Metro City without a second thought or even a single glance back at the world they left behind. It's his fault that Hamegg is still crawling around down here like a cockroach, with nothing to his name but a handful of coppers and a whole lot of useless rusted metal.

It's all his fault that Hamegg is still here.

Astro ruined his life.

(But—but it's thanks to Astro that he even still has a life at all.

If he hadn't swooped in and put a stop to the whole thing, Hamegg would just be a stain on the stone ground or a smear on the bottom of ZOG's massive foot right about now, his soft human body crushed painfully under a thousand pounds of pure metal, wiped out in front of a million people who wouldn't have lifted a finger or lost a second of sleep or given so much as half a damn about anything except the fantastic show they just got—except Astro.

Astro gave a damn—he saved Hamegg right when it looked like the end of the line for sure, and he saved Hamegg when he didn't have to, when he could have just stepped back and let ZOG do the dirty work, when he could have left that arena with clean hands and clear conscience, when he could have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear and said I didn't hurt him and I didn't kill him and it wasn't my fault and it wouldn't have been a lie.

Astro saved his life.

For no reason at all.

What kind of robot does that? What kind of robot is he?)

"Oh, yeah, I thought you might recognize this one." Skunk yanks harshly on the chain to pull Astro back to his feet—the kid drags himself up out of the dirt with a string of shrill creaks and low groans, awkward and unsteady on his feet. He looks almost lopsided—off-kilter in a way Hamegg can't exactly explain—and he seems to blink his too-big eyes a lot more than he really needs to. "It was pretty famous up in Metro City for a while."

"Yeah, I—" Hamegg swallows, "—I remember."

Even if he hadn't come face-to-face with Astro for himself, he'd know the little guy at a glance—the kid has been all over his TV screen since the day he blew up that massive Peacekeeper robot in Metro City last year. Usually, it's just a whole lot of blurry clips shot with shaky PCD cameras and clumsily spliced together—here's the famous hero rocketing around in the sky, here he is saving the day, here he is waving to all his billion fans, here he is hugging his dad, here he is going rollerblading and drinking soda with his friends, here he is on his first day of seventh grade—but every now and then, his face would pop up in stark startling clarity, all lit up with blinding silver flashes as a hundred thousand different reporters snapped photos and a hundred thousand more shoved mics in his face and fired off questions like bullets. The kid would stare blankly around at the crowd with wide eyes like he had no idea what to do (and seriously, where the hell was Tenma when that kind of thing happened and why the hell hadn't he prepped his robot on how to handle the press?) before he'd finally paste on a plastic smile and stammer out some bland, noncommittal remark that meant next to nothing.

Except that one time when they had asked him about his days on the Surface—and Hamegg had rolled his eyes and scoffed out loud and turned pointedly back to the week-old pizza on his plate because he knew exactly what a Metro City kid would think about the Surface, and he knew exactly what that particular Metro City kid would think about the Surface, and he knew exactly what Astro thought about him, and he didn't need to hear some high-and-mighty spiel from the arrogant little hunk of junk again, and—

we should be doing more to help the Surface, Astro said, and it was so all of a sudden and so completely out of the blue that Hamegg had glanced sharply back up at the cracked screen with his mouth gaping open. We should be doing more to help the Surface. They deserve a better life down there. All of them.

All of them.

And he sounded so firm about it, too—so unapologetically blunt and unflinchingly confident in a way Hamegg had never heard from him before, and he couldn't tear his eyes away from the kid's face and he forgot all about the pizza on his plate until it had gone too cold to eat anyway.

All of them.

But.

But that's a stupid thing to think about, and it's a stupid thing to hang onto, because it's not like he really meant it or anything (no one ever really wants to help the Surface—no one ever really cares—) and besides, this job could be the key to that better life the kid seemed so keen to hand out while he was sucking on his silver spoon up in the big city—he thought he'd make his fortune off Astro last year when he put him in the Games, but maybe this is that ticket straight to easy street he's been waiting for. If he can do this job—if he fix Astro up and get him back on his feet, then he can name any price he wants, and what else can Skunk do except pay it? No man in his right mind would ever let a robot like this one slip through his fingers.

And Astro—look, the kid did him a serious favor back there in the arena with ZOG, no way around that, and he's obviously got some unnatural (inhuman) levels of altruism hardwired into him, and he can be pretty eerily close to a real human kid sometimes, but at the end of the day, he's not a real human kid—he's a machine, to be bought and sold and traded just like every other robot on the market, and sure, yeah, it sucks to be him, but that's just the way it goes for robots, and if he hasn't figured that out yet, then that's on him.

"Yeah, this is—" Hamegg clears his throat and powers up the sliding door with a firm stamp on the creaking, half-rotted wood before he steps into the workshop and heads straight for his table, where he sweeps ten thousand different tools off onto the bench with a brush of his arm, "—this is the one who screwed the pooch with the Games last year, actually."

"Oh, yeah, I remember hearing something about that. Bad luck." Skunk tugs on the chain again to pull Astro along behind him, so hard that all the links rattle and clang, and the kid lurches into the shop like Frankenstein's monster. "In that case, you'll be happy to know that obedience won't be a problem here. This one has learned the consequences of defiance very well. You can be sure of that."

"Glad to hear it," Hamegg says firmly, and he pats the warped worktable with the open palm of his empty hand. "Let's get him—let's get it up here, and I'll take a look at it."

Astro doesn't move an inch—he just goes on staring at the far wall with his brown eyes blank and empty, before Skunk jerks on the shackle (so sharply that the kid almost goes flying into the back of the bench, and it's only with a stroke of sheer dumb luck that he catches himself, about half an inch from the floor) and rattles the chain so all the links clack and clang again, and he shouts—so loud that it echoes around the room and bounces off all the walls— "Robot! Get up on the table!"

Which—Skunk should know better than to toss a whole lot of commands at a machine when it's already got major lag like this (it's rule number one, for crying out loud—if its system gets overloaded with orders, it could blow a circuit or freeze up or shut down) but Hamegg knows better than to think Skunk would listen to him if he pointed that out.

Astro doesn't actually look at Skunk, but he tilts his spiky head half an inch to the left before he finally limps away from the bench with slow, shaky steps—tentative, uncertain, almost experimental, with his hands held up and out in front of him like he's trying to feel his way across the room, and he's still staring straight at the wall over Hamegg's shoulder when he runs into the table, and the splintered corner digs into a thick cluster of exposed wires just above his dirty kneecap. The kid pulls to a stop, gazing blankly down at his own glitching, sparking leg.

Which is—not normal robot behavior—and he just can't seem to stay on his feet, and he won't look at Skunk when he talks and he only barely half-glances at Hamegg when he talks, and he's been tripping and stumbling over his own boots and walking around all lopsided and off-kilter since the second he stepped out of that hovercar, and—

"Can he—?" Hamegg throws a doubtful glance over at Skunk. "Can it see?"

"Nah, I don't think so," Skunk pulls his CET out of his pocket and clicks it open, the blue glow flooding his face with a sickly aqua light as he punches a string of buttons on the keypad. He doesn't even look at Hamegg. "Its optics were functioning at seven-point-three percent yesterday. Number's probably dropped since then."

"Seven-point-three?" Hamegg doesn't actually mean to say it out loud, but it slips off his tongue like slick oil, and he's seen so much worse than a robot that can't see, but what the hell made Skunk think it'd be okay to just stand back and let it get this bad? What the hell made him think it'd be okay to brush it off and let the kid go blind? What the hell made him hold off for so long? Doesn't he know that this kind of crap has consequences? Astro could already be too far gone to be fixed up all the way! The kid might never work exactly right ever again! What kind of complete moron would do that to a cutting-edge machine like this? "Jesus, Kusai, can it even hear anything?!"

"Hmm?" Skunk flicks a bored glance over the top of his CET screen. "A little, but you'll have to speak pretty loud and clear if you're trying to talk to it. Obviously, there's not much point in that."

Jesus Christ, no wonder the kid didn't bat an eye when he looked at Hamegg—he probably doesn't even know where he is.

Astro finally pulls himself up onto the table, with a light thump and another long groan from his stiff metal joints, and the second he's settled, he collapses back against the wall with his face scrunched up and his eyes screwed shut, like it's taking every ounce of energy he's got left just to not pass out right here—which it probably is.

"How long would you say you'll need for repairs?" Skunk goes on, all business as usual, as he pounds away on his CET keypad with a few soft clicks and clacks.

Hamegg glances down at the kid on his table—all busted up and barely awake, perfect pearly-white robot teeth biting hard into his bottom lip and tiny hands clenched into shaking fists—and he swallows so loud that he's sure Skunk can hear it. No matter what way he tries to slice it, Astro is in seriously bad shape—but the quicker he gets the job done, the higher he can drive the price.

"A week," he says finally. "Maybe two."

Even that's pushing it a little—he can already tell he'll need to rewire the kid from the ground up, with his cables all tangled and twisted and hacked half to pieces, hanging out of him like broken bones bursting through the skin, not to mention that he's blind and pretty damn near deaf right now, and that will definitely take a good long while to patch up—and he's got a sinking feeling this isn't even the worst of it, but Astro is just so covered in crud that he can't see anything except the glaringly obvious.

Where the hell has the kid been?

"Right, that works out pretty well." Skunk taps out one final command on the CET before he spins the gizmo around in his palm so Hamegg can reach over and take it. "You can find all the necessary documentation on here, and I'll have Otis or Venus drop by to pick it up when it's ready."

Hamegg dips his chin down in a quick nod and leaves the CET open on his cluttered workbench to clasp Skunk's hand in his own for a firm, steady shake. "You'll have it back as good as new—and that's a promise." A promise he's not completely sure he can keep, but even if Astro really is too bad off to be saved, he knows he'll figure something else out—he's always got a good con or two up his sleeve, and if he can drag it out long enough to get his hands on the money and get the hell out of dodge, who cares if he held up his end of the deal or not?

"Glad to hear it." Skunk pulls his long spidery fingers back to pluck pointlessly at his lapels again—probably just itching to scrub the stink of Poor Person off as fast as humanly possible. "Give me a call when you've got it ready for me." With one last nod, he glides back through the door and out to his car, which slides open at the barest touch, the engine purring like a contented cat as it comes to life and carries him away into the clear blue sky.

Just like that, the workshop is empty again, dead quiet except for the click and whir and hum of a hundred thousand spinning cybernetic gears.

Hamegg flicks a glance over his shoulder at Astro, but the kid hasn't so much as wiggled a wire since he crashed onto the table ten minutes ago—he's just staring straight up at the low, sloping ceiling overhead with his battered body held completely still on the splintered wood and his little face perfectly blank—so he turns to the CET instead, where miles on miles of tiny black text glares out at him from the glowing blue-white screen.

It's just the usual brass tacks that come with the robots from the rings, and it all looks pretty standard at a glance—active since April 7 2043, collected* from Metro City on October 23 2043, unusable upon collection, rewiring and reprogramming required immediately and, right under that, on the next line, rewiring and reprogramming complete, all systems updated, UKS installed and activated, internal tracker installed and activated, external KURI PIR activated, LOR installed and activated, 18+ SAI installed and activated—

Hamegg stops dead, right there in the middle, and he rereads the whole line again, slower now to be sure he's got it right.

Rewiring and reprogramming complete. All systems updated. UKS installed and activated. Internal tracker installed and activated. External KURI PIR activated. LOR installed and activated. 18+ SAI installed and activated.

The back of his throat feels all blocked up again, and he's got this crazy urge to rub at his eyes and look over that last sentence just one more time, but he already knows what it says, and another read-through isn't going to change that.

And it's—it's fine.

It's fine.

Astro can look like a human kid all he likes, but he's not a human kid, and he never will be, and it's the right of whatever human he winds up with to use him however the hell they want because he's just a machine to be bought and sold and traded off, and it's not like he's got real emotions or anything, and if he was stupid enough to get himself collected then he deserved whatever the hell he got, but 18+ SAI installed and activated—and it's not like Astro would be the first robot in the world who got loaned out to the Hotel or dumped on a red-light doorstep, and it's fine and Hamegg knows it's fine and it's normal and it's just the kind of crap that happens to the robots in the rings, and it's a whole hell of a lot better that it's Astro and not a real human kid, but the problem is that Astro looks like a real human kid, that he's pretty much identical to a real human kid, and the other robots in the rings don't look like that, and it says 18+ SAI installed and activated, which means somebody has already used it.

Jesus freakin' Christ, Hamegg is going to be sick.

He steals another quick glance at Astro—the kid's sprawled out flat on his back, calm and quiet as a robot can be with wires bursting from every crack and crevice, staring blankly up at the ceiling with his useless eyes—before he turns back to the screen and skips to the next line.

Requires standard maintenance and upkeep. Requires regular oil refills. Requires regular IS-13 refills. Requires regular IX-91 refills. Does not require any recharges – subsists on renewable energy. Power source is removable and easily accessible.

But Hamegg already knows all of that—he poked around pretty deep in Astro's system before he put him in the Games, while he was still passed out like a light from the Stunner, and he found the kid's power source in seconds, that small blue orb spinning and spinning in the tiny robotic chest, pulsing and pounding like a real human heart, humming out a slow and steady song that surged and swelled to fill the whole room, and his own body eased up to match the smooth flowing rhythm and he'd never seen anything like it before, and his breath had snagged in the back of his throat and he'd wanted to take that tiny glowing globe in his hands and just hold it for the rest of his life.

He'd wanted to take that tiny glowing globe in his mouth and swallow it—he'd wanted it inside him, he'd wanted it in a feverish, frantic, frenzied way that he had never wanted anything before, and it had scared the absolute hell out of him.

Yeah.

Hamegg knows all about Astro's power source.

He shuts the CET with a sharp snap and heads back over to the table.

He'd like to wipe Astro down with some soap and water before he gets to work—he can barely see what he's doing with that thick film of mud and muck clinging to the kid like barnacles on an old ship's hull—but he's not about to add all of that to the equation with so much delicate circuitry exposed, so he's just going to have to do the best he can. He fumbles blindly for the hem of a shirt or the edge of a jacket, but the only thing his fingers find is a whole lot of too-warm too-human skin—the kid is naked.

Or, practically naked, Hamegg should say—he's still got his little red rocket boots just like always, a pair of black underwear melded seamlessly to his metal body like it's fused onto him, and the KURI locked tight around his tiny throat, silver spikes still glistening faintly under all the dirt as it blocks his powers up inside him like a dam on a rushing river, but besides all that, he's bare as the day he was built.

It's a lot harder to forget about the SAI when the kid hasn't even got any clothes on.

Astro blinks his too-human eyes. He looks slowly away from the ceiling to stare at Hamegg instead—or, a spot about two inches to the left of Hamegg. His skull creaks and groans just like the rest of him, and the noise is enough to make even an old hat like Hamegg wince—sounds like the kid is completely out of oil, and usually, a refill would be top priority here, but these repairs need to come first, or all that oil will just spill right back out again.

Hamegg rubs a hand lightly down the bare chest, his fingers cutting clean tracks through the heavy layers of black filth as he searches for the hatch that hides the spinning sphere.

All of a sudden, the kid lifts a tiny, trembling hand, groping and grabbing blindly in the empty air for a long minute before his floundering fingers finally latch onto Hamegg's wrist—like he knows what's going on and he knows what's about to happen here and he's trying his hardest to stop it, to stall his own shutdown as long as he can. Like he's afraid he might not wake up again.

And Hamegg can't even blame him—God knows he'd be scared out of his mind if it was him up there on that table, deaf and blind and dying—but this is Astro, who never does anything normal and never does anything that anybody would ever expect, and of course he sticks to that trend here, too.

"Thank you."

Thank you. Like Hamegg just held the door open for him or let him cut in line at the grocery checkout. Like he thinks Hamegg is doing this for him. Like he thinks Hamegg is doing this just to be nice. Like he thinks this is some sort of good turn—some random act of kindness given to him just because he needs it. Like he thinks anybody ever does anything like that. Like he thinks anybody ever does anything just because it's a nice thing to do.

The problem is that he doesn't even know it's Hamegg he's talking to—he's got no real way to figure out where he is, or who he's with, so he's probably got it in his head that he's stumbled across some wide-eyed bleeding-heart kindred spirit or something, but that's a bridge Hamegg is just going to have to cross when he comes to it.

(No doubt it'll be a bad scene.)

"F-For what?" he says finally, before he catches himself, and clears his throat to try again—louder and slower now, so the kid can actually hear him. "For what?"

"You—you called me Astro," he doesn't say it so much as he chokes it out, hoarse and scratchy and rough—rasping and grinding and painful, like broken gears stuck on their own metallic teeth—but he stretches his mouth in a small and sad and strained little smile. "No one—no one's done that for a while."

Oh. Yeah, he—he did do that, didn't he? Pretty much shouted it right in the kid's ear, so no way he didn't catch it, even half-deaf as he is.

And Hamegg wants to tell him don't get used to it because that's not happening again and he wants to tell him don't get used to it because you're going right back to Skunk in a week or two and he wants to tell him it was a stupid slip-up and he wants to tell him machines shouldn't have names and he wants to call him robot in his harshest meanest voice just to see the kid flinch, just to know he's hammered the point home, but his throat pulls tight and the quiet drags on and on and in the end he can't do it.

So he just opens the kid's chest and yanks out the sphere.

Astro goes completely limp on the beat-up table, his brown eyes flashing bright blue before finally drifting shut with one last flutter of his lashes.

Just like that, he's gone.

If it wasn't for all the wires still sticking out of him and the dirt caked all over him, he could be sleeping.

"Jesus," Hamegg whispers in the dark and quiet of the workshop, staring down at the mangled and mutilated body sprawled out on his table, "how the hell did this happen?"


OCTOBER 23 2043

8:42 PM

The smell of smoke still sticks to his artificial skin like glue when he finally leaves the bank, and the sun's already gone down, the sky black as night and choked with clouds, and the light drizzle has picked up into a steady beating rain sometime in the last hour, but Astro just stuffs his hands in his jacket pockets and heads slowly down the long empty sidewalk, his head tossed back to feel the cold water running down the sides of his face. It's nowhere near as good as flying, but he'd probably sink like a stone if he tried to blast off right now—he's worn so thin from all the disasters this past week that he's just not sure his powers will hold up without a break.

It's not like he really needs to rush straight back home, anyway—it's a nice night to be out, with the dark empty road ahead of him and the soft golden glow of the streetlights every ten feet and the faint rumbles of traffic on the other side of the city, dull and distant even in his superpowered ears, and besides, he'd just rinsed off and dried that last plate from dinner when he got the call, so Orrin won't need a hand in the kitchen when he gets back (not that Orrin ever really needs a hand with the chores around the house, but it's not fair that he has to do everything on his own, so Astro pitches in whenever he gets the chance—which hasn't been all that often lately, what with the thirty-eight different distress calls he's gotten in the last three days—) and he can just swing by the Ministry, report the whole scene at the bank directly to his dad, and go to sleep when he gets back home.

It's probably about nine o'clock when the hovercar pulls up right next to him, buzzing and whirring just half an inch away from the sidewalk—close enough that he could reach out and touch the cold chrome if he wanted to—and he slows to a stop while the window rolls down far enough for the driver to stick his head out.

"Hey—it's Astro, right?" the man in the car taps his black-gloved fingers on the wheel and tugs lightly at the brim of his big dark hat—when it tips up in the front, Astro catches a flash of platinum blond hair, slicked down smooth, hidden beneath the dark cloth. "Dr. Tenma's boy?"

Astro has never seen this man before in his life (and he's sure of it, because his electronic brain logs everything—he can't forget even when he wants to, even when he tries—) but that doesn't necessarily mean this man hasn't ever seen him—since that fight with the Peacekeeper back in April, everybody in Metro City seems to know him at a glance, which would actually be kind of cool if only it wasn't so weird.

"Yeah, guilty as charged," he plasters on a polite smile and eases over to the edge of the sidewalk, closer to the car. "What can I do for you, sir?"

The man pulls at the brim of his hat again. "Actually, Dr. Tenma sent me out here for you—I'm his new intern, I don't know if we've met yet?" he sticks his hand out through the window for a shake. "Name's Kusai. Skunk Kusai."

New intern? Oh, jeez, he's definitely had his head up in the clouds way too much lately if he's missed this—he's just been so tired all week—but he quickly leans over to grab the man's hand in his own. "Well, it's nice to meet you, Mr. Kusai. Why did Dad send you? Is everything okay down at the Ministry?"

But he'd probably be the first to know if it wasn't, since he's the one the city always calls up in a serious crisis—and for all the late nights and early mornings (and exhaustion and panic and fear and school absences and missed exams and make-up tests and skipped meals and weekends out in the field instead of out with his friends and constant knots of nervous tension in his stomach and all the what-ifs that run through his head at night when he can't sleep—) that come with that, he knows he wouldn't trade it for anything.

Nothing else in the universe will ever come close to the warm glowing light he gets in his chest when he has the chance to make someone else's day even a tiny bit better or brighter than it was before.

He gets to help people, and it's the best job in the whole world.

"Oh, yeah, yeah, everything is fine, no need to worry about that," the man waves him off with a flick of the hand. "Dr. Tenma just wanted you to go ahead and drop in to discuss the fiasco down at the bank—I hear there was a bad fire?"

"Yeah—everybody made it out okay, though." Astro gives a quick nod. "No one got seriously hurt or anything like that—mostly just a lot of minor burns and some smoke inhalation here and there, so it looks like everyone's in the clear."

"Damn," the man lets out a low whistle and shakes his head. "Thank Christ for that, at least. Any idea what caused it?"

"We can't really be sure yet—it was so random." Just like the attack at the museum, and the stick-up at the corner store, and the shoot-out at the cinema, and pretty much everything else in the last few days—crime in the city is definitely at an all-time high this week. "Anyway—thanks for letting me know. I'm actually headed down there right now."

But the man doesn't just drive off like he should—he frowns at Astro for a second, with a wrinkle in his brow and his head cocked to the side, before he says, all of a sudden and completely out of the blue, "Hey, you know, why don't I give you a lift? It's such a long way, and it's raining pretty hard—and, I'll be honest, you look dead on your feet right now."

Oh.

No one has ever given him a ride before—no one has ever even asked if they could give him a ride before, and he's never really cared one way or the other (he's never really even noticed) because why would they give him a ride when he could just fly wherever he wants to go, and anyway, everybody knows that robots don't ride in cars because people ride in cars, and robots drive the cars.

But it—it is kind of nice to be asked.

Like he's a real human person.

"Seriously, come on," Mr. Kusai waves him on with a warm smile, pressing the green button on his dashboard so the passenger door pops open to show off the empty leather seat inside. "It's not like I'm going out of my way or anything, if that's what you're worried about—I've got to get back to the Ministry myself and help Dr. Tenma get this sorted, anyway."

Astro hesitates for half a second longer—he should probably say no, shouldn't he? And it'd probably be all kinds of rude to say yes, wouldn't it? And it's probably not even a serious offer, it's probably just a joke or something (robots don't ride in cars, remember? people ride in cars and robots drive the cars—) and it's not like a walk down to the Ministry is going to kill him, but he's just so tired, and it's really nice of Mr. Kusai to ask him like he's a real human person, and he finally slides into the passenger seat with a small, uncertain smile. He tucks his hands in his lap and presses his knees tightly together so he doesn't hit or break anything—he hasn't messed up with his powers in months, but better safe than sorry. "Thank you. This is—this is really nice of you."

Mr. Kusai laughs out loud—sudden and startled, like he didn't expect that, but what kind of person doesn't say thank you when somebody does a nice thing?—as he rolls the window back up and hits the green button again, so the passenger-side door snaps shut with a quiet click of the lock. "You're the one who stopped that fire. You probably saved more than a dozen lives tonight. Thank you."

"Oh." What on earth is he supposed to say to that? What on earth is he supposed to say when somebody thanks him for just doing his job? "No, it's—it's the firefighters who deserve all the thanks, really. They were amazing out there." He tugs at a loose thread on the torn-up knee of his scuffed jeans before he glances up at Mr. Kusai again. "So, you—you work in the Ministry with my dad? That must be really cool..."