VERY IMPORTANT AUTHOR'S NOTE: In my headcanon, at some point during Clu's rule he encountered Yori and –as a way to torture whatever was left of Tron in Rinzler—repurposed her into a zombie-worker-drone, and proceeded to work her down "to the bone," so to speak. In a moment of what MAY have been Tron peeking through, or (as I like to think of it) MAY have been something else, Rinzler corners her and manages to snap her out of her zombie-state so that she can escape in one piece . . . more or less saving her life, or at least her life as she know it. Normally I try and make my stories as stand-alone as possible, but that's a really important element of my personal headcanon that I reeeaaaalllly wanted to have factor into this fic, so thank you in advance for bearing with me, as it will be mentioned in passing in this chapter.
Oh, and if you're interested, you can read a version of this event in "Survivor's Tale" chapter 25 (Yori's POV), OR in my one-shot "Perfect" (Basic!Rinzler's POV).
-Ridyr
oo0o0o0o0o0o0oo
Rinzler
I wake in a stupor. My left shoulder feels like it's been plugged full of something sticky and thick. In the place of pain is a dull tingling.
Slowly moving my head, rolling it across the floor since I am apparently on my back, I can see that it has been repaired, but judging by the ache, whoever patched the damage had to prod at it awhile to do so.
Probably couldn't figure out my code.
Hmph.
Basics.
I don't mind the pain, though. I'm used to it.
It's a recurring theme in most of my own basic-memories. I spent most of my life before this one in some form of agony or another.
I'm good at pain.
Which is probably why I am more irritated with the fact that, although there is no damage to my right side that I can discern by looking at it, it's tender. Probably courtesy of the shock that the program with the poorly masked circuits gave me. Daring of him, really. That much charge would have killed a basic, which is telling. The only programs who ever had that kind of crowd control equipment, those capabilities, were elite guards; guards that, for one reason or another, needed to kill quietly.
Quite the group you have here, Tron . . . Killers and misfits.
They're all almost as damaged as he is, albeit less bitter.
Looking around, I can see that I have been dropped unceremoniously onto the floor of their white-circuited light chopper.
How dare you . . .
My vision is still hazy, and the lights around me blur into incomprehensible smudges, but the programs themselves are clear enough, looming above me. The one with the circuit mask and questionable history is standing almost on top of me, along with the redheaded female with the near-black circuits and oddly colored eyes. The big, dull program with the faded, gray-ish looking circuits is missing, probably gone on ahead with a jet.
At the controls stands the other female, the full-lipped brunette, with Tron beside her. I recognize her from somewhere, a shadow of one of his memories that I can't quite make out because it predates me, one of the old memories he never really gave me but was never strong enough to take away.
I seem to remember her in orange.
Above me, the redhead's eyes flash, and she turns to address her leader.
"Tron."
The redhead with the black circuits steps away from where I lie and towards him as she speaks. Her voice sounds distorted somehow, too clear but too distant, fizzling and piercing all at once.
What did you people do to me . . .
Rolling my head around to look, I can see Tron's reaction. He looks up sharply.
Angry.
His helmet is back on.
Hiding . . .
"He's coming to."
"Put him out again" is his gruff response.
Lifting my head off the floor, I glare at him. The gesture is more difficult that it should be. I feel tired, drained. New bodies are so sensitive . . . and I feel wrong, somehow. Tampered with.
But that can't be right. Tron is good, but he's not technical. He doesn't know his way around a disc well enough to reconfigure someone's code, let alone code as beautifully complex as ours.
But the fact remains: I'm too far gone. From whatever he made them do.
Don't you . . . dare . . . shock me again . . .Or are you going to kill me while I'm down?
. . . Coward.
The word echoes in my head, and I have to grit my teeth, bite down with a weakened jaw, to keep from visibly grimacing. My head is . . . nothing I'm seeing will stay still. Tron goes in and out of focus, closer, farther, closer, a shadow then a beacon of minimal white on so much black, reduced to a helmet and a bleary four-squared emblem . . .
All at once, I feel sick. Like all the power I've ingested wants to seep back out of me, short all of my circuits and spill on the floor.
Why am I so tired . . .
If he shocks me again, I think he'll ruin me. Not that Tron won't love that. To ruin, instead of being ruined.
The male program, who looks massive from down here on the floor, however, replies on my behalf.
"He may be awake," he says, his tone short and biting, "but he's not going anywhere, believe me. Another shock would be a bad idea."
You don't say.
Tron zeros in on him, and I can tell by the tense posture of his shoulders that he is considering getting upset with the younger program, but then he changes his mind. He doesn't fight him, doesn't order him to break me while he has an audience.
But he doesn't relax, either.
"Fine," he replies, "just keep him down. And if he gets his helmet back up . . . break it."
. . . .
Why he would order this I have no idea, but there is something in the sentiment which leaves me with a distinct clenching, sinking feeling. It makes my head spin faster, my vision blur to blindness.
I let my head fall back to the floor. It hits too hard, heavier, somehow, than I thought it was. A sharp pulse of pain turns my vision white as it meets the grate-like, perforated floor. I can almost feel the pattern of it biting its way into my scalp, and I think I smell a spark. A hot, electric shiver runs from the point of impact to the base of my neck, and all the way to my forehead, following the circuit there.
I never bothered to find out how far back that circuit goes.
I should have noticed that . . .
But I didn't. They know more about what I look like, about my new body, than I do. I never bothered to really look. Not like I should have. I've been so busy feeling and seeing and smelling and hating that broken old hunk of root code whose cohorts are so preoccupied with staring at me. A specimen instead of a program.
Staring when I can't hide . . .
Even as Tron keeps his face beneath a shield of black. He used to favor a transparent helmet. Not anymore.
Couldn't give it up, could you . . . Too used . . . to not having a face . . .
I'd laugh at him if I weren't so sure the effort would shut me down again.
Meanwhile the chopper banks beneath me, and city lights in blue and green and white are visible through its open sides. I stare out at them as the fly by, a haze of cool color so much gentler on my increasing nausea than trying to think, than looking back at too many faces looking down on me, searching my expression, the eyes I have never bothered to see.
I recognize the streets below. I know these broken buildings, these recently repaved intersections and hazy streetlights. Even as that awful feeling, that sense of upheaval, that I'm going to spill out of myself, continues, I can sense our directionality, track where we are heading.
He's taking me to the administrative building.
Taking me home, are you?
A large, mostly rectangular, tiered structure topped with an impressive spire, comes into view through the front windshield. I remember it well.
It was once Clu's headquarters.
My home, my prison.
Delightful.
I'm not sure there is any location in this system that I hate more.
And Tron knows it.
oo0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0oo
Everything spirals into darkness for a moment when they pick me up again. The redhead and the male program hold me, digging their fingers into my arms as they lift me. My hands are still behind my back.
I see a blur of sparks and circuits, and my legs sag beneath me. My brand new legs . . .
Paige, did you do something when you fixed his shoulder?
Did I do something? You're the one who zapped him, Mav.
Their voices sound for a moment like they're coming from inside of my head, and I can't tell if I'm on-line or off.
But then, all at once, I am conscious again. I pull my legs up beneath me, thrash once, but it's a gesture more than it is a genuine effort. The world around me still looks hazy, and I am more tired than I have yet been in this body. I couldn't get away from them if I tried.
The redhead snaps at the others from beside me, ignoring my pathetic efforts to respond to their empty words:
"He's probably power drained, bit-brains. Just because it's been nine of ten hundred cycles since you were a new program doesn't mean the rules have changed."
Tron's voice, suddenly exasperated, chastises her from somewhere behind me as they lead me out of the chopper and onto one of the lower rooftops of the tiered admin building.
"Radi."
Mav, Paige, Radi. . .
I work on memorizing their names to keep myself conscious. The redh—Radi isn't wrong. I am low. Lower than I should be, even considering everything I've gotten myself into since crawling onto the shoreline.
Holding my head up is an effort.
Then again, I'd have gotten derezzed already for resisting if I felt like myself. Maybe it's a blessing.
They lead me through a doorway and down a long, sloping hallway. Soft green light. White tiles of smooth data on the floor. Calm colors. Gentle colors.
It's not the building I remember at all.
To get me . . . wherever it is they are taking me, we pass through a room which houses enough control panels for a staff of twenty admin and filing programs. It is being used by one. One very familiar, unsettlingly appealing, female.
She holds her head very high, her chin out. Like she is trying to open up her neck, to make some space. To elevate herself from that weight in her chest.
Someone should tell her she can't.
How do you lessen a weight like that? Tired, tired program. I know her face from a memory that was never mine. Hair like a halo of light, blond in every direction, choppy bangs. Bright blue eyes, delicate little features that fall and freeze when she sees me.
Hello Yori.
She grabs onto the edge of her control panel for support, ignoring an urgently flashing message on the screen beside her to stare at me with her lips parted as if her mouth has gone slack, something like horror, something like excitement in her eyes. And shock.
They keep reacting like that.
She's changed since last I saw her. The black gridsuit, the neon-blue circuits of the old system, the recurring theme of triangles their patterns form in the middle of her chest and across her hips . . . those are the same. But not her face. Her face doesn't even look like it belongs to her anymore.
She's gotten pale for a program, the subtle kind of paleness that creeps in over the cycles little by little until eventually there is no color left.
Her eyes, too, are dull. Like she needs an energy boost even though she's probably had six of them already today; and that pretty halo of hair has lost some of its shine since I last saw her. Her expression, has changed too, the way her persistence drains out of it with so little resistance . . . it's not her. Even her stubbornness is giving up, the fight in her slowly surrendering to stress and hopelessness, confusion and disorganization that she can't fight, can't rebel against because it's everywhere. Everywhere, and now I'm here to make it worse.
What happened to you, program?
I can sense it from here. There is tiredness in her. Perpetual, excessive tiredness, the kind that drags you down like a weight into liquid, pulling, pulling until you sink to nothing and are crushed in the dark under the weight of it.
Tiredness that will turn to desperation if she is not watchful. If he isn't.
Tron can't bring himself to look at her.
Not with me here.
You'll lose her, doing that.
He doesn't see the way the confidence in her eyes falters, the barely visible shiver in her too-bright circuits. Doesn't catch her eye when she looks to him for guidance, leaves her hanging on a ledge alone when she looks to him for the explanation she doesn't need.
Clever program—
She glances at me hesitantly, as if she knows I'm thinking about her.
You probably knew all along.
Who else in this rabble would have the good sense to monitor infrastructure, who else's programming would be sufficient? She must have noticed the sea.
Of course you did.
Why Tron didn't know better, then, I don't know . . .
Processing—
. . . You didn't tell him.
Why wouldn't you tell him . . .?
She meets my eyes, makes herself see me, really see me, move past the haze of fear and alarm and hesitation. Fixes me with her stare.
"How?" she says, and though everyone looks to Tron to answer her, she is looking at me. At first it is such an obvious question, but then she stutters, adds one more word, asks one more thing.
"Why?"
My head jerks up, and I hold her eyes just as she holds mine. I can see that she has alarmed herself with her own question. Not just "how". Not "that's impossible."
Why aren't you more surprised?
She asks why, asks like it's nothing, like it's not the most essential in my existence. Why am I here. There is no directive to tell me why the sea picked me, built up a new being around the little fragmented, corrupted strings of code it washed away from Tron. Why it made me to protect–
Rinzler.
Stop it.
Yori returns my stare now with a look that says she knows she's triggered me. I say nothing, but she knows. I get the distinct feeling that somehow, she knows.
Clever, clever program . . .
She watches me over Tron's shoulder as he steps out of our rank and file to approach her, never breaking eye contact, never looking away.
Then the rest of them lead me out.
Yori
I glance up at the sound of people coming down the hallway, the footsteps oddly shuffling. When they come around the corner, I can see why: Radi and Mav are holding up a clearly debilitated program between them, a program with red circuits. Greshim ran in here a moment ago without a word, bolting for the cell block, and I suppose this is why. Those weird reddish circuits can only belong to our rogue.
Thank the users, maybe Tron will calm down now . . .
That thought is squashed immediately when he follows them into the room,ruined by his body language. His helmet is on, and he is looking very pointedly away from me, which both perplexes and frustrates me extremely. Searching for answers, I turn my gaze on the weakened rogue; a program just a little shorter than Tron with a relatively thin, but well-proportioned build and with very shiny, very straight, very dark hair ––almost black but not quite— which he wears at a shaggy, medium length. He looks strong and lightweight, and the way he moves ––even when incapacitated—is unusual. I can't decide if it's too fluid or too quick, or a combination of both. When he turns to look at me his head seems to loll on his shoulders and whip around at the same time, a precision slump.
When I see his face, I have to grab the control panel beside me for support. There are circuits there—
I can't have been right about this. . .
––ISO circuits on the most ridiculously, preposterously impossible face I have ever seen.
It can't be.
IT CAN'T BE.
It can't it can't it can't. He's gone. Tron said he was gone . . .You said he was GONE!
If I had been asked to design a face for Rinzler, I could never have come up with anything as perfect as this. He looks like Tron in so many ways, and yet his face is so sharp that in others they look nothing alike at all. Tron's features are really very gentle, all things considered; he has a strong chin but a soft jaw and often looks a little pouty when he's lost in thought, or not gritting his teeth about something. Rinzler lacks that, completely and utterly. If there is an element of softness on him anywhere, I can't see it. His face is a series of hard angles, and his expression is not much gentler. He fixes me with a stare that sends a chill through my circuits, analytical and furiously intense at the same time. His eyes . . . His eyes are incredible.
They're bright near the center, an uneven, pale halo around his pupils that radiates outward, getting darker and darker as it goes. Aside from that silver-blue brightness right near the middle, they are a blue so deep that I imagine they'll look black when the light isn't hitting them; like the data in the sea he crawled out of.
That is such a strange thought . . .
Too strange. It sends a series of distracting yellow warning lights across my vision, so many different kind of alerts I can't figure out which system it is that's even trying to process this information that's causing the problem. I look to Tron for an answer as he strides on ahead of the group.
But . . . he still doesn't look at me.
I know that he knows that I'm looking at him, but his helmet dips ever so slightly farther in the opposite direction, as if somehow the far wall has gotten more appealing since I took an interest in him. I suddenly feel like shouting at him to look, to tell me if he suspected all along, if this option really, truly never occurred to him, if I was the only who, just for a nanosecond, wondered if nightmares could become reality . . . not that I knew exactly, but there was a moment, a flight of fancy. . . of course know. . .
I can feel hi—Rinzler's—eyes on me, though, and anything stupid, anything bold or assertive I was considering seems somehow inappropriate. Like he's watching both of us, and me especially, from the inside out. I've heard of some ISOs giving basics that impression, but I've never experienced it, and I can't decide if it's because of what he is or who he is that his gaze holds such incredible weight. I can't help it— I glance towards his face.
All at once, the alerts fall silent.
There is one thing that I always pictured in his expression that is lacking, and I don't want to think about what it is. He looks furious, and exhausted, and vengeful and emboldened and disdainful and vulnerable all at once, but there is no pain in his eyes. Not like there is in Tron's, when he thinks I'm not looking. He isn't miserable. He isn't defeated. Even captured and debilitated by exhaustion or injury– I can't tell from here which—he looks completely and utterly victorious. He is not in pain. And he is not mindless.
Not anymore.
He's . . . alive.
Really, truly alive.
A word falls out of my mouth on its own accord before I can stop it, and honestly, I don't even know why I ask it.
"How?"
I know how. It's obvious, now that he's being paraded in front of me like this, surrounded by faces that are either eager for my reaction or pointed determinedly at the floor, being dragged around by two of our best while Tron charges ahead as if he can somehow outrun this if he just looks furious enough, if he just hides beneath that helmet a little longer . . . which isn't, obviously, going to help him at all. Or me. I was hoping he'd answer me, I suppose. Maybe that's why I asked a question I worked out a half a shift ago before I was willing to admit that I know better—
When I SHOULD have warned Tron . . . .
–And maybe that's why another question, one that I have no idea how to answer, pops out of my mouth next:
"Why?"
Rinzler's gaze becomes electric, zeroing in on me as if I have just screamed his name with all the power my systems are good for, and for a micro I feel as if I shouldn't be able to move, like he's pinned me there with his eyes long enough to inspect me from the most minute circuit to the most obvious detail.
For a nano I'm afraid that he'll actually answer me. Especially since Tron obviously can't. But I don't want to hear a word out of, out of that thing that took Tron from me for so many cycles, that killed so many . . . and liked it.
Who saved my life . . .
But Rinzler says nothing, and while he is silent, Tron pauses at last, and looks in my direction. In this moment, though, he's a blur of black suit and minimalist circuits to me, and all I can see is the ISO they're dragging out of the room. He turns his head back over his shoulder to look at me, a little piece of his hair falling into his eye as he does so though he seems not to notice. I'm all he's looking at, too, and I wonder what he's thinking, what he's trying to convey to me, as they lead him out.
Tron approaches as he leaves, and I watch him go over my counterpart's shoulder.
Another author's note: What, you didn't think I would leave without giving credit where it was due did you? I was just trying to keep my chatter to a minimum at the beginning of the chapter.
Anyway, my thanks to: ScribeOfRED for beta-ing, and tumblr's Lizzy-Lue for proposing a fantastic bit of headcanon that, although it may not be evident yet how it factors in, allowed me to rationalize and finalize some important details in this chapter.
Also, shout outs to Userkaydee and Terrible-idea (as they are known on tumblr), as they have both made some seriously awesome ISO!Rinzler art over the last week or so, and have repeatedly made my day because of it.
-End of Line
