Rinzler


Gridbugs.

There are twenty of them, monstrous and gray-green with jaws wide enough to snap me in two, hurtling in from some black place on the horizon. Crawling over the wreckage of what little they haven't already eaten.

They are looking at me. Staring with glassy, multifaceted eyes. Tiny, beady, barely visible, low on their ugly square heads eyes. I can see my reflection in them as they draw closer, stirring up the mist and fog around their barbed feet, throwing it aside, the swirling light tossing their ugly silhouettes against the few remaining walls.

I draw my disc. And my baton, shifting through its contents. It's equipped with a double bladed staff.

Delightful.

One staff, one disc. One program. Twenty bugs.

In another time, another body, I've seen worse.


Tron


The gridbugs look like twenty little red dots on my jet's radar, harmless on screen, deadly and impossibly destructive on the ground. I doubt that the rogue will be alive when we get there.

. . . Error-

I hate the way that word looks as it flashes across my eyes, the way the warning sounds in my head. It tastes like a bad memory, and I don't like what it suggests. Any normal program would be annihilated by this many bugs in a few nanoseconds, this one should be no different. There is no reason for us to find anything but his half chewed leftovers.

Just as there was no reason for him to be able out-fly me.

As we fly over Arjia, I'm not sure if I'm stunned or satisfied by what we find. Alone on the ground, with a staff and a disc and talent for aerobatics that turns my mouth sour for some reason I can't explain, the rogue is cutting down the bugs . . . even as they close in around him.

Paige and Radi are in a lightchopper far behind me, with Mav and another program –Greshim— flanking us. They follow my dive as I spiral towards the rogue below us, suddenly, incomprehensibly eager, but with alarms ringing in my head. I want to know what it is about this program –who's kicking .spiraling motions, and disturbingly aggressive jabs have felled four of the ugly creatures already—that so intrigues me.

I want to know why he stole a dead man's disc. I want to know why he took the time to tease me when he could have derezzed me.

I want to know why every move he makes reminds me of a darker version of myself.

I switch on the intercom in my helmet as we plunge towards the ground.

"Aim for the bugs. ONLY the bugs."

"Sir?"

"I want the program alive."


Rinzler


They make a sound like screaming, a grating broken data noise from a yawning rectangular mouth between dark, purple-tinged mandibles. They don't look like living creatures. They look hard, like the dull siding on the broken buildings around me, with sharp, hinge jointed legs, like machinery instead of organisms.

And all they do is eat.

They want to eat me. Like they ate our city and the broken pixels of the dead, like they chewed through the wreckage that Clu left behind, like they swallowed up Arjia and the legacy of the ISOs. They feed on destruction and instability.

I must smell delicious.

They travel in a pack, fanning out as they approach with one leader at the head, a wedge of rushing legs and awful noises and a bad, rotten data smell. The leading bug reaches me and rears up, four or five times my size, looming over my head.

It squeals, a piercing, ringing, nasty scream, as I drive the staff through its underside, legs curling underneath it as it falls on the ground, heavy and reeking.

19 to go.

I hurtle my disc at another while severing head from body from a third. They all howl and scream and grumble as they fall, legs kicking frantically, twitching as they die. The mandibles on the severed head, which roles to my feet, are still opening and closing erratically.

I kick the head away with the same motion I use to recapture my disc, and it knocks another bug's knee, sending it to the ground.

The others close in around me.

Get out of my city.

One strikes at my shoulder, sending a sharp foot through armor all the way to skin, and through that to pixels underneath. Leaking data from my arm, I am knocked to the ground.

Staff held above me by my good arm, I wait for them to descend.


Tron


With the first sweep, Greshim and Mav take out most of the bugs on the perimeter. At the epicenter, the rogue flips from his back to his feet, sawing another bugs legs out from under it with his disc as he does. I drop to the ground just outside the circle of remaining bugs, all but two of which are so distracted by his presence that they don't even turn to look.

The rogue is favoring melee weapons.

Surrounded by ravenous creatures several times his size which are apparently intent on him and him alone . . . he has chosen melee.

That glitchy, bit-brained, overdramatic little—

My thought is cut short by a near miss as one of the gridbugs rears up over my head, the pointed ends of its legs driving down towards where I am standing. I hurtle a disc through its underside, duck, and roll away from it as it collapses in a heap. It makes a sort of squealing, shrieking noise as it dies.

Greshim and Mav make another pass overhead, firing the guns of their jets, narrowing the field to nine of the creatures, one of which is dragging itself about with two missing legs, making the most horrible noise I have ever heard. The rogue glances at it, and takes off across the limited open space they left when they encircled him, towards the injured gridbug.

He runs in the strangest way.

He's fast, incredibly fast, and light on his feet. He runs low to the ground, pitched forward, rendering the motion at once elegant and strange, and he pulls up more quickly than it looks like he should be able to. He levels with the bug, and it gnashes its jaws at him and quakes on its remaining legs, snapping at his ankles as he leaps into the air and uses it as a springboard. He flips in the air above it, landing on its back and then jumping again in the next nanosecond, driving his staff into it as he does.

The bug writhes as he flies over it, clearing the circle they had formed around him. But in dying, it takes his staff with it; snapping it in half, clattering to the ground in a glimmer of broken data, leaving only a short stick in his hand. The remaining blade fizzles, and goes dark.

He hits the ground and whirls around on the balls of his feet to face the bugs again, head held low, body strung tight, ready to spring, ready to kill. He drops the broken staff to the dusty, foggy ground, and draws his second disc, dividing it from the first.

Something about that gesture sends a shiver through my circuits.

It's familiar, so much so that I'd rather not know why.


Rinzler


Tron is here.

Get out.

He is here for me, of course.

I'd rather be eaten.

I glance at him as he narrowly dodges one of the bugs. There is age in his movements that didn't used to be there. I wonder when the body we shared started to feel the ache of dull pixels in its joints, how much power he needs now to sustain that legendary strength.

I wonder how weary his face looks under that mask. If he still has the scars they gave us, the ones I was never allowed to see, but which haunted my memory files as I slept. I knew they were there, knew what they had done, even when I didn't.

I remembered everything they did to me.

I just wasn't allowed to access the files.

In that helmet, he looks like the only reflection I ever knew. It confounds me to think that underneath it there is a face. That it used to be my face. That I had a face all along, before this body gave me a new one.

Another bug interrupts my thoughts, and I drive a disc first through its leg, and then through its head when it collapses. My shoulder hurts, and parts of me are aching from impact. .. but all things considered, this is easy.

This is FUN.

Two of Tron's cohorts are battling a group of five bugs a little ways away. It's taking them forever.

. . . Basics.

Overhead, a lightchopper's blades are beating the air as it sweeps in above us, hovers over the scene while its occupants examine the scene below them.

I toss a disc and ignore them, sawing through another bug. Tron, somewhere off to my left, is nearly halved by the jaws of another, and it shrieks when it bites down on his disc instead, losing half its face –such faces that they have—to its own stupidity. I'm glad it failed.

I want to kill Tron myself.

When the bugs are gone, I'll disappear in this wreckage, and when he comes for me, I'll tear him open from chin to groin and watch the pixels spill out of him as he collapses into smoking, glittering cubes; and I will leave him there in pieces, dead, dead dead on the ground . . .

But I must wait. For now, there is one bug left to deal with.

ISO killing monsters. I can hear their –our—victims screaming in my head. Suddenly I want to destroy it more than I want to destroy Tron. More than I want anything. Rage boils up in my circuits and everything looks red, and I can hear screaming, screaming, screaming . . .

It runs at me, and I brace myself, furious and vindicated, to meet it.


Tron


I look up in time to see the rogue turn on one final insect. There is a long gash in its side that seems to mirror a gaping hole –probably inflicted by one of their legs— in his shoulder. He holds that arm negligibly lower than the other, but still carries a disc in both hands, and his arms are flung wide as if to embrace the thing barreling towards him.

He lets it charge him.

He lets it bear down on him and open its jaws to remove his head from its body, and then he suddenly throws both arms forward, into its mouth, discs in hand, and splits its head in two. It dies with its jaws still twitching, grasping for his body, and he does not pull his hands away, but lets it collapse over his discs, lets them saw through the top if its head as it crumples to the ground.

And then he freezes, seething, pixels falling from the wound in his shoulder as his chest heaves, caught up in some phenomenon that only exists inside of his own head, his own systems, and I take my chance.

It's over, program.

That's what I tell myself.

ooo0o0o0o0o0o0o0ooo

In the brief moment in which the rogue's own thoughts have transfixed him, I approach him silently, disc drawn, pressing it against the back of his neck as I draw up behind him. I can feel fury coming off of him in waves, and the air where he is standing now smells like decaying power-sludge; courtesy of the dead gridbug on the ground at his feet.

I can tell, I can feel, that he re-emerges from his infuriated reverie the instant my disc touches him, and it makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck even as I try to take control:

"To your knees, program. You're under arrest."

His response is slow and chilling. He turns his head unhurriedly to look at me over his shoulder, and says two words in the most horrifying voice that I have ever heard.

The voice is mine.

There is a biting undercurrent in his tone that is alien to me, dark and bitter and merciless, but it's my voice.

ERROR—PROCESSING—

IDENTIFYING AUDIO/VISUAL I/O- circuitry (color: dark orange)(pattern: minimal, geometric),age (probable age) ERROR, gender (male) programming (unknown error)-

IDENTIFICATION (rogue program) PROCESSING—

I know who he is before my systems do. Somewhere deep in my code, in the darkest recesses of my programming where I never dare to look, I've known from the start.

There was a blackout in Argon.

By the sea.

ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERR—

. . .

Rinzler.

The rogue program is Rinzler.

I don't understand this. I don't understand how he's alive, just that he is. And it is him. I know it deep, deep in my code. I know him. I don't have to see his face through the helmet. I know. It is impossible, but it's him. I know it's him.

I also know what he'll do next.

And yet, I can't move to prevent him. I'm frozen. Absolutely and completely frozen, every system glitching, lines of neat code rendered into useless static that doesn't mean anything, completely and utterly stunned. I can't move, can't think. I just stand there as he whirls out from under my disc to face me, draws his own weapon, and brings it down over my head.


Rinzler


I'd forgotten that Tron could be so subtle. I'm surrounded before I have the chance to run, his minions ahead of me to either side, him behind me, having taken advantage of the moment in which I faltered, when the gore of the bug at my feet transfixed me. For a few nanoseconds, I was consumed by the sight of it. By my victory over it. By vindication.

By the broken fragments of a memory, or a prediction . . .

And now Tron is here.

I can feel the crackle of his circuits, am nauseated by the proximity of such a familiar frequency coming from outside of me. It seems wrong, like we're two signals trying to share the same wavelength. I can sense my own my former body behind me, so acute I can almost imagine the his disc feels in our hand, can almost feel the ground under two sets of feet, feel the accelerated cycling of two bodies, not one, me and not me all at once.

Discomfort bubbles up from deep in my code. Then it turns immediately to an irrational, insatiable rage that takes up where my hate for the gridbugs left off. It tastes like burnt circuits and power sludge on my tongue.

He speaks. It's not a familiar voice. After all, I was never allowed to use it.

"On your knees, program," he says, pressing the white-hot blade of his disc against the back of my neck, "you're under arrest."

. . . No.

I can feel his energy, so rudimentary and yet so disconcertingly like my own, in the blade of the disc. It sends a shiver through my circuits, a bolt of electricity down my back all the way to my feet. I have never been so uncomfortable. So angry. So disconcerted.

And I thought I hated him before.

Slowly, I turn to look at the program whose body I once owned, whose code I shared, whose systems rejected me and left me as nothing, nothing in the still water. He is wearing a helmet as opaque as mine, but I know where to look to meet his eyes.

That was my face once, too, even if I was never allowed to take my helmet off to look at it.

I don't have to see his expression to know what it is.

He's appalled. He's disgusted. I am the monster than haunts his memories, his uglier reflection, and he looks at me with my eyes that he took from me, and has the audacity to hate what he sees almost as much as I hate what I see. Looking at him feels like a painful shock or a bitter taste or a shallow wound and I can't stop myself: I don't mean to waste my first words on him, but all at once, I am speaking, lashing out and throwing his own voice back at him just for spite.

"Make me."

Because I've never used my voice before, and the words are slow in coming, crawling from my throat, slow, like dying. They are halting words, and the voice is rougher, lower than I would have expected.

Like his voice.

His voice, but with a biting undercurrent to the words which I suspect is natural to me. There is a cutting edge to my tone, a heaviness he lacks that has its origins in cycle after cycle of loneliness oppression and pain.

. . . It sounds like the inside of my head.

And inside of my head, I am still furious. Reeling, twisting on the balls of my feet, I spin out from under Tron's disc. Turning to face him, I can see that I have stunned him.

He knows.

. . .

Processing—

Processing—

. . . I think I'll kill him now.


Author's note: Hey guys! So, I realize that the POV changes pretty frequently in this chapter. Unless you really like that, I'm going to try and keep the switching to the minimum as the story goes on... this is just what worked for THIS chapter especially. Any feedback you have on that, or ANYTHING else, is welcome as always!

Also, I modeled my gridbugs off of Betrayal, but since I don't have the comic in front of me right now, please forgive me any errors on the detail work. I did my best with the images I had, and hopefully, that was enough. If not though, by all, means critique away of you want to. XD

That said, my thanks to Cyberbutterfly for beta-ing, and to all of you, as always, for reading!

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