Rinzler
He ducks at the last second.
Or maybe he just trips.
Diving or falling or twisting away, he comes to rest just to my left, favoring my injured arm, and his disc, still hot from battling the gridbugs, rezzes to life in his hand. He jabs it at at me, aggressive and sudden and sloppy.
I side kick him in the stomach.
He reels backwards, and I am on him before he can right himself, turning hand over foot after him, straightening again only when I am so close that I can feel the fizzle of his circuits.
What I sense in him at this range surprises me. I had expected him to be angry, furious at finding me alive. Appalled, maybe. But he's not. Not below the surface, not deep down in his code where he harbors his deepest thoughts and ugliest memories. Where I used to hide him.
Deep down, he's afraid.
Good.
I fling my own disc at his helmet-hidden face, and he ducks again as he deflects it, only narrowly missing my other disc as I thrust it towards his chest.
You should be.
I know his style too well. But he also knows mine. It's one of the few things that hasn't changed, and fighting him is a game of prediction, of trying to outwit each other when we each know what the other will do. It's unspeakably frustrating, and alarmingly tiring. My left shoulder is aching, pain shooting from the through-and-through puncture the gridbug gave me all the way into my fingers.
I hide my pain as well as he does, and in my own way. I bear it with silence.
I wonder if he knows . . .
I wonder why it matters.
The fight goes on. I jump, spin, almost land on him. He dives aside and hurtles a disc at me as I return to the ground. I duck in the air to avoid it, and I miss my landing . . . but I kick his legs out from under him when I hit the ground, taking him with me. He lands a few feet away on his back, with a solid thud.
Then he kicks me in the head.
You fight like a user, old program.
The thought lags in my head, vision spinning from the impact, tiny explosions clouding my vision, but I ignore it. He's strong. Solid. He puts an excess of force into every move he makes towards me, sacrificing precision for blind, secretly terrified rage.
I need to get off the ground.
I'll have the advantage in the air, where I can turn and twist and move freely, slicing, jabbing, I'll take him apart . . .
Throwing my legs in the air, I flip back to my feet. But before I can take a step closer, before I can plant a foot on his chest, before I can drive him down into the dirt and dust and ruin and fog that coats the ground and put a disc through his neck, he rolls, and leaps to his own feet.
He's slower than I am, but faster than I remember.
The first punch he throws lands on my injured shoulder. The feeling goes out of my arm. Then he kicks me, once, twice, and then bombards me with another blow with something –an elbow or the heel of his hand— to the side of my head. The helmet helps, but not enough.
I see sparks.
Users, I hate him . . .
I'm going to kill you, Tron.
Pain fuels fury.
You slow, basic, inept, ancient . . .
I spin on my heel as I reel away from him, and hurtle myself towards him. It's not something he expects from me, my swelling rage making me as stupid and reckless as he is. But he needs both discs to deflect mine as plow through him. I hand on my feet, turning in the air. He falls to the ground.
Pathetic.
Then something slices through my ankle, and down I go.
Tron
I'd forgotten how much he likes to play with people before he kills them. He should have had me with the second or third blow, but he enjoys the experience of fighting. He likes throwing himself around in the air and cutting programs down bit by bit. He enjoys it too much to let it end quickly. Fighting him is like fighting a… a "nightmare". A bad memory.
I can't read his expression through his helmet as he falls, his ankle giving way beneath him, but the brightness in his circuits, the way he directs his fall to land nearly on top of me . . . he's as angry as he's always been. Maybe worse.
But how is he alive?
. . . On second thought, I don't care. I don't intend on leaving him that way long enough for it to matter. I'm going to cut him down, crush the pixels, and leave them in a heap for any remaining gridbugs to swallow. He's furious enough now that he's getting stupid, and I stand more than a fighting chance of killing him here and now. The fact that I was able to lunge at him from the ground and nearly cut his foot off of his leg without him stopping me is evidence of that.
We're both on the ground, now, me on my back and him on his stomach, practically on top of me and holding himself up as much as he can on one arm and his good ankle as he lunges for my side with one of his discs. I roll my legs up by my stomach, and kick him as hard as I can with both feet.
He tumbles away from me, leaking pixels from his ankle and shoulder, and when he comes to rest he jerks his head up and snarls at me. It isn't his old, broken growl, but it's close.
I dive for him.
Touching him is repulsive, his circuits seeming to resonate with mine in a way that no circuit should, but as I tackle him, I manage to dislodge one of his discs by doing so- and it's worth it. He fights back, tries to drive the other disc through my neck from behind, throwing his arms around my shoulders and kicking my stomach from underneath me in an effort to either throw me off of damage me, apparently immune to the pain in his ankle. I drive an elbow into the wound on his shoulder.
He stiffens.
It's eerie, how silent he is. He throws his head back and rolls –taking both of us with him—to relive he pressure, but he doesn't scream. He doesn't even groan. The circuits in his arm flicker, and his hand goes limp around his remaining disc, but he doesn't make a sound.
Instead, he rolls again.
We tumble through the dirt, each desperately stabbing at the other, and he knocks one of my discs away, too.
But he's not used to such dirty fighting. Users, I'm not sure he's used to fighting at all. What he's running around in is a new body, a more compact, lither form and not an exact replica of me; and as well as he moves it it's injured and new and he's probably struggling with it more than he's willing to admit even to himself.
He's not at his worst, yet.
I'm not going to let him live to get there.
Driving a hand through the hole in his shoulder, I pin him between my knees, and lift my remaining disc over my head.
Rinzler
"Get out of my system."
Tron's voice is dark, twisted almost beyond recognition. I could almost laugh, even as he straddles me, pinning me on my back on the cold ground with his disc raised over his head.
Look at yourself, Tron.
It's almost sad, I don't know which is winning: his fear of me or his hatred of himself. Whichever it is, he thinks he's going to kill me now.
But that isn't going to happen. If I have to punch a hole in him with my bare hand, I am not dying. Not yet.
Not for you.
I manage to grab him around his throat with my good hand. I squeeze, dig into him until I can feel pixels shattering, cutting off the cycling of air to his breakable old basic body. I also kick a knee into his back for good measure. Something cracks, and a shudder runs through his circuits. I like the sound he makes when he's in pain.
I'd like to hear it again.
Looming over me, but slightly doubled over now, his helmet collapses. I'll never forget his face in this moment so long as I live.
He looks tired. Tired and angry and terrified, fear hiding behind a mask of rage so twisted, so warped he doesn't look real, blue eyes flashing, hair a mess. The scar on his face is gone, but the ones inside him are tearing him apart—ripping, shredding, breaking and crushing him from the inside, hollowing him out to nothing but a few pixels and a wire-frame. A projection. A shadow. He's already lost.
He brings down his disc.
Tron
He moves so quickly. Somehow, he gets a hand around my throat, lifting one leg to knee me squarely in the back with more force than any normal program should possibly be able to inflict. It's surprisingly painful, in addition to the fact that he's cutting off my ability to breathe.
Come on Tron, do it.
There's a small part of me that wants to know what he looks like under that helmet. On the other hand, however, most of me wants to put a disc through his face. I throw my arm down, so close to getting rid of him, forever this time, and then a black blur with red hair dives headlong into my body.
Radi and I tumble away from Rinzler, coming to a stop in a heap amidst swirling dust and fog a little ways away. Lifting me head, I can see Rinzler trying to rise before Paige rushes in and traps him with a light cable. She has him contained before I can even throw Radi off and send a disc at him.
I cannot even begin to fathom what is happening anymore.
I jump to my feet, and drag Radi with me, screaming at her without realizing at first that I've even opened my mouth.
"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING, PROGRAM?"
She steps closer to me, my hand still locked around her wrist, far tighter than it ought to be. The next thing I know, she's so close I can feel her breath on my face.
"You can't kill him," she snarls. I'm actually taken aback. This is the most furious I have ever seen her, but it's not even anger, so much as desperation, that I can see in her eyes.
"Look," she says, and she shakes my hand away from her wrist to grab me by the shoulder, forcing my body around to look at Rinzler where he is tied up on the ground. He doesn't have to speak for me to know that he is fuming.
Paige, with a nod from Radi, grabs him and yanks him to a sitting position, shoving him so that his left arm is facing us. It take me a moment to see what Radi sees, and when I do, I feel for a moment as if I might black out and collapse into standby right there in the ruins of Arjia.
Pulsing white against one of the red bands of circuitry that encircles his arm, is an ISO emblem.
