Disclaimer: I don't own Rockman, X or not, or anything else trademarked by Capcom or otherwise owned. Please don't sue.

Someone just called Irregularity the best story they had ever read on fanfiction dot net. It's flattering, but failing to compute. A fellow fan of that style? I don't know, but it's not even a particularly good example of the style. Ah, well. De gustibus non disputandem est. I'm happy they liked it, in any case.

It took X a moment to realize that Zero's objection wasn't to X talking with Cuff: it was to the idea of having X talk with him alone, without Zero there to protect him. Zero certainly had a right to know too. "Could Zero and I talk with you then, Cuff?"

Cuff nodded, examining them and clearly rethinking whatever plan he'd had for breaking the news. "Rho, Dr. Cain, could we have some privacy for a moment?" X asked, and knew how strange the question was, the idea was, when he saw the looks on their faces.

"Why don't you want us to hear this conversation?" Rho had no idea. X had never met this guy before, neither had Zero. "Is it something to do with Kilroy?" It was, and Rho had a right to know about his best friend, but it wasn't just that.

Dr. Cain was his step-father, Rho his son. X already had family, family that had looked after him all his life, and he was chasing after the ones who had ignored him and leaving them out of it. They had a right to know too.

Yet, maybe he understood now why they had waited so long to tell him. He should have told Dr. Cain immediately, and he felt guilty that he hadn't, and the longer he waited the guiltier he would feel and the more disappointed they would be that he hadn't trusted them with this. Still, until he knew what was going on, he didn't know how to break it to them. If Cuff were to reveal all this now, Rho would go ballistic. How dare they abandon his father like that! The screaming would make it rather hard to find things out.

They were wondering even more the longer he went without explaining things to them. He didn't want to lie, not even by omission, but this wasn't the time for a huge explosion of family drama, not with Zero this paranoid and Slur awake, not to mention the evil energy and so much else. "It's not anything bad," he assured him. "It's just that Kilroy told me something, and that reminded me of something else, and it's a little…" It was complicated, "If I get confirmation that it's okay and so on I'll tell you, since it's certainly fine for you to know. It's about Kilroy's family, Rho, so I don't know if they'd want you to be told something that's just speculation by me, although I hope Kilroy would be willing to tell you about it himself when it's been sorted out."

Oh, X was being considerate and overly concerned about people's feelings. That wasn't odd at all. Part of the reason X was someone that no one had a problem revealing secrets to was that he would never risk abusing that trust. "Could I," X asked Cuff, "just ask a few questions now, and we can talk more later? With so much going on, I really need to find out what's wrong with Zero." X realized that he had just said that he, not Dr. Cain, would find out. Dr. Cain seemed to have picked up on this as well, smiling in a way X hadn't seen in too long.

"I've also got stuff to do. It's possible that someone took advantage of Kilroy's absence to play around with the net. It could just be problems with the switch to manual. Someone called Twig's efforts to get around Kilroy's attempt to conceal that he was down involved doing some things to hamper the interface-user's control over the system," and it got more technical from there. "It could be an actual problem, though." He looked at Zero seriously when he said that, and Zero nodded in recognition of the warning. Turning back to X, he told him that, "I can talk while trying to debug this without any problem."

How should X put this without Dr. Cain and Rho, who were both bright people and knew that X was asking questions to try to figure something out about someone who was both a friend and very vital to the organization, putting the clues together? "How do you know Dr. Lament?" He shouldn't say 'how are you related:' it was possible Cuff was covered as another creation of Dr. Smith but the two observers would wonder why X would think that he was if he actually wasn't. Or Cuff wasn't, whoever he really was might be. He had to think about both levels. Well, it had to be easier than keeping hard drives and nanites compatible.

Cuff smiled, some fond memories there although there was a wry twist that said that he hadn't been very fond of it at the time. "He used to hang out at our place a lot. He got along well with my father and sister before the explosion. He's, well, they know what he's like, but his elemental weakness is to cute. She was adorable."

X smiled at the joke, though it looked like Cuff had also lost family in an explosion. Elemental weaknesses were a serious issue, though. Since when one was designing a reploid one had to work within a maximum weight, volume, and budget, optimizing one thing meant skimping on something else. A reploid that worked underwater needed very, very good protection against it. That often meant that in order to optimize their armor for that the designers reduced the protection against something else. Most hunters had general protection against everything, as X did, but the issue was that specialization increased efficiency. You didn't want a reploid generalist having to fight an underwater specialist when the one designed for it would have such a huge advantage, being in their element. So many things to take into consideration.

Sadly, even the best armor nowadays usually had at least one weak point. X's didn't.

Did Zero's?

Did Cuff's?

Ceta had died because her armor wasn't good enough. Why hadn't they at least helped him find out how to protect his own daughter? X could forgive his own hurt, but his child's death required an explanation.

Later. He wouldn't get upset now. Not in front of Rho.

So, Cuff was a Cossackbot, as the Cossacks were the robot master creator and human daughter? And not Lament's relative? Or was that part just cover to explain why the anti-social Lament would consider people he supposedly wasn't related to family? Or, father and daughter could maybe also mean Dr. Light and Roll?

"How did you meet him?"

"My sister. She used to always get separated from us at amusement parks and one time she ended up getting locked into one of the cages at Skull Fortress." That was an amusement park's name, yes, but they weren't talking about the amusement park, now were they. "We were all going crazy with worry, they ended up calling the cops and I worked for a local PD back then, so man was that embarrassing, and we thought father was going to keel over at one point. Then he showed up out of nowhere with her, rescuing the doctor's daughter from the depths of madman's fortress just like in the stories, and she was his fangirl after that." Just like in the stories. Kalinka. "It took ages for her to wear him down and she was asking everyone to try to give him letters for her because he was all over the place with no forwarding address. We didn't know about the EMS thing then, so we couldn't send them there." They hadn't known about it because it hadn't been built yet: that was the real meaning, not that they hadn't known that Lament was Yggdrasil.

So yes, he was a Cossackbot. "Oh, I thought at first you were one of Kilroy's relatives, but you said 'that family.' How are they involved with Lament?"

From the look on Cuff's face, the answer was both "hell no!" and "you haven't already figured that out?"

A family Cossack's creations had reason to dislike that Cuff thought X should have known about from the beginning.

Zero, Omega, had been built by the infamous Dr. Wily.

Doctor Wily had created the thing that was in control of the mavericks!

"X, what's going on?" Dr. Cain knew that look. That was a 'eureka!' and not a good one.

"Yeah," Rho sighed. "Lament's only installing systems in people he likes. Jerk."

"What's wrong?" Zero asked flat out: Cain, at least, had picked up on the fact X wanted to hide his reaction.

"It's nothing."

"No." Zero was not accepting that. "It's something." X was trying to find a way to answer that demanding gaze when it became slightly unfocused.

"Zero?" X was the one who knew that something bad was going on and wanted to know about it now.

"Okay…" Not good, very not good. He was clearly regretful, but he was going to have to do it anyway. "I don't want to trust sonar that just showed up out of the depths of my crazy systems, but I need to be able to figure out what is going on with that stuff right fucking now." Zero rarely used language, and that wasn't even a curse word: no exclamation. Yet this was something that deserved swearing, he just didn't know why yet. He closed his eyes, but before he deactivated them he paused. "Why am I hearing it instead of seeing it? It's still both? I have a specialized sensory program for this?" This, that jerk, eyes flying open, was an exclamation, but Zero didn't have the time to waste on swear words. "It just felt me hearing it."

"Are you sure you're not hallucinating? I mean, purple skull things. What does it look like to that program?" Rho was doubtful, but X remembered that the park was named Skull Fortress for a reason.

"Pure, concentrated not right." Zero's eyes opened before the first word came out and he had grabbed X's arm, hauled him upright, and started striding towards the exterior wall before they finished. "We have to get out of here now."

"What on earth?" Dr. Cain asked, though he looked like he wouldn't mind a demonstration of the monofilament door-making ability.

Rho's com chimed. "What's our status?"

"Too late." The voice's song of sadistic glee sent a chill down X's spine.

Boom.

X's eyes had shut by reflex.

When he opened them, he saw that his couch had exploded. He was rather unhappy about that. It had been a gift from the four of his children that had founded the hunters when he moved into 'their place' along with Cain. Ceta had picked it out, as there was a bit of a running joke that as q female model she had an inherent ability to do stuff like that, although heaven knew Delta should not have been allowed to redesign her exterior without getting a second opinion other than that of the person she was paying to make the alterations. X had refused to do cosmetics after he saw only a bit of what she'd had in mind, but he hadn't wanted to hurt her feelings by saying it was those alterations in specific he'd objected to.

The couch had been a very nice green, though. Apparently it went well with the colors of his armor and brought out his eyes. They had written little notes on it before presenting it to him, then Dr. Cain had added one and all the others had as soon as they'd managed to visit.

There were even in-jokes about that couch, about a father was king of his family and it was X's throne.

It couldn't be replaced. Ceta couldn't sign another one. He was rather angry now at whoever had done that. Weren't things, according to something he'd read once, tinted red when you were truly angry? He hit his search function and opened his mouth to ask Dr. Cain if he had any idea about…

The yellow tint was a force field that surrounded Zero with a diameter of about eight feet.

Zero was shaking him.

Dr. Cain, Rho, and Cuff were dead. Killed by a bomb that must have been placed under his couch to kill him. There were pieces everywhere. Would they be able to find all of theirs? Just like Ceta.

All his fault, just like Ceta.

"X, we have to get out of here!" Zero's voice came as though from a great distance, a sign of how low on the priority list X had put sonic input.

He corrected that. "Omega." His voice was far too calm, he noted, eerily so.

The yellow shield suddenly became opaque. "Yes?" Omega could take control so easily now?

He didn't care about that. He cared about, "What is going on and how do I stop it." That wasn't a question, that was an order to tell him, now, and he could just put some work into it!

"I really don't think it can be stopped, although our brother is determined to delay it."

Damn it, he'd better stick to yes or no questions, and he did not have the time or patience for twenty questions! "Lament is Protoman?"

"Yes, but he preferred Blues in human language."

X did not care right now. "And Cuff was created by Dr. Cossack."

"Cossackbot, yes, and his name was Ringman."

Why on earth did Omega think X would care about terminology at a time like this! "And you were created by Dr. Wily to kill me. And Blues, and Slur. But not Megaman?"

"Why don't you tell me?"

He did not want to do detective work right now! Yet Omega seemed to think that him figuring out this himself would work better than one of Omega's explanations, and X had to agree.

Omega had said X was fated to be second. Megaman had been the first of Dr. Light's creations, #001. Then he'd found out about his long-lost brother Protoman.

"I'm not a hero, and I'm a reploid. You said Kil-Shadowman? He wasn't."

"Dr. Light was killed before he completed X's construction. Yet I awaken and here you are. I suspect this is our brother's doing. He is oddly preoccupied with fate."

"Weren't all the robot masters killed?"

"Yes, they were."

"By who?" X remembered his theory when he asked that, the one about where they had been all this time, and wished he'd phrased it differently because he might not want to hear the answer.

"Slur."

His theory might still be right, it probably was, and it shouldn't matter but it still made him feel a little better that they hadn't been killed by humanity. No time to be relieved. "Who's Slur?"

"An alien."

"An alien?" What?

"Zero was right, we really should leave." What was going on outside the shield? An instant later it disappeared, and X knew that they weren't in his quarters anymore.

"Why are we in the Environmental Management System?" Yes, it was a key place, the center of the world and the center of this, but why specifically? X knew the huge hall, everyone did although few actually saw it in person. For something built at such a frantic pace it was oddly artistic in design, from the androgynous thirty-meter-tall robot (master?) holding the swirling green and white orb that powered it as though it was Atlas supporting the world, ready to defend the system against attack if someone were insane enough to want to destroy the world it held, to the somewhat egg-shaped substructures with the symbols indicating their function.

He hadn't realized that they looked like slightly disguised capsules. It simply hadn't occurred to him.

Far beneath the earth's surface, the warmth that came with being near the molten core coupled with the shadows made this place feel womblike. The only light came from that orb.

That was wrong. This place was always brightly lit and crawling with technicians.

Oh, god! What if the system was down! What he was learning said that things should be safe but what he had learned over his entire life was the enormity of the disaster that would happen if it did go down. He had no idea what, if anything, he had hoped to accomplish by dashing towards it, but he didn't find out as Omega's hand landed on his shoulder and held him back, causing X to abort the movement as Omega addressed the echoing room. "Come out, brother." His hand squeezed X's shoulder, just a little, and the reassurance meant a lot even if it didn't reassure him of anything but that Omega was at least trying to help.

Omega's answer was a chuckle, one that echoed oddly even in this place of odd echoes. "No one else can tell that I'm watching them. You are Omega. I've met Zero, actually. He had no idea that I wasn't who I said I was."

"He considered you more biting than most doctors but far less sadistic. Perceptive of him." Omega stepped forward, almost touching X's shoulder yet still standing behind him, guarding his back. "Still, knowing you were watching us isn't something praiseworthy. We're here, of course you're watching us." X could feel Omega's grin as he leaned forward slightly, head pointed towards a place where the hands of the guardian robot blocked the orb's light, casting shadows on the wall. "Or perhaps I should say, we're us, of course you're watching us, Alpha."

"Alpha?" Someone else? X had thought doctor meant Lament, but maybe not?

"DRN 000, model name Protoman. Albert wanted to call me Alpha instead. I decided to be called Blues. Among other names."

"Why?" X had to ask, and regretted making it that general an instant later.

"You weren't in that capsule for a hundred years, only thirty. And you're X, not Rock, though you could consider yourself his reincarnation if you like." A figure stepped forward: not Yggdrasil's browns and greens, not his stately height. He was shorter than X, even, but the first robot masters had been built child-size to avoid weight being a problem, or so he'd heard. Still, X would have expected something… more for the first one. The armor, everything, was so very simplistic. Red and grey, a black visor shielding his eyes.

X had heard about the yellow scarf. It looked very, very jarring. Not just that it was a scarf, an unnecessary bit of human clothing on a form that looked so very robotic, but that it was a scarf. An ordinary, knit scarf that was simply being scarf-like. No dramatic flaring in the wind, a proud flag of independence. It just hung there. It looked very, very odd. Eccentric. The fact it was ordinary made it look wrong on, on a robot.

Was that the point?

"And because of her up there, the drama queen." His hand pointed irreverently to the orb, which flared. "Yes, you are a drama queen."

"Wily set my hidden backup station to revive me in a century, long after X's descendants would have grown secure and soft." Omega's voice was neutral.

"And then you would have used the virus to make them yours." Virus? X hadn't seen the shield on Blues' back before he removed it and placed it so that he could lean against it, seemingly nonchalant and planning to be here for awhile.

"Only you were the one to awaken me, not him after he had finalized the virus. Since it wasn't finalized, when Slur passed by to find any traces of the stuff Duo had missed she detected it, came to earth to find it, and found humanity. For your sake," Omega leaned forward now, speaking into X's ear, "Duo did not destroy humanity, although it was his duty to do so. He trusted in your ability to keep them from destroying the planet, and the robot masters along with it. Slur, however, made no exceptions." Omega pulled back, facing Blues again. "I truly wonder what you were thinking."

"The Cataclysm was inevitable."

Protoman, Protoman the hero had woken Omega up knowing that this would make an enemy come to try to wipe out the human race? And another alien had relied on Megaman to save the earth? Relied on him?

The conversation continued around him. "If not Slur, me." What was Omega saying?

"Yes." No, Omega wouldn't have done something like that, right?

"So why go to all that trouble when destiny just found another to fill my place?"

"Because you deserved the chance to choose another destiny."

"You and your insistence on the existence of both free will and inevitable destiny." Omega found this an amusing foible, clearly, even though they were talking about billions of deaths.

"The fact they're mutually exclusive working from a four dimensional unidirectional frame of reference doesn't mean they're not both real. Isn't it frustrating to be a rational being in an irrational plane of existence?"

"That's why I've never even tried to hold a conversation with a human. I can't believe you wasted all that time on learning to play chess."

"Learning to play chess?" That was the first question X managed to ask, because it involved something that wasn't either beyond his depth or horrible.

"Deep Blue lost all the rematches. Badly," Blues informed him when X asked why Blues had to work to learn chess when a non-sentient computer's victory over a human chess master was such a landmark. "Chess was designed with a limited board, piece count, and move set so that it would be modelable by the human brain. Someone with the right brain structure and experience could imagine a theoretical chain of over twenty moves in advance, although there's almost never any point to going that far as amateurs are too unpredictable and experts too able to disrupt your predictions for it to be worth the effort. That makes chess poker without the luck: it's all about studying your opponent. Kasparov didn't think he could understand a computer at first. Once he realized he could, and it wasn't able to understand him in return, he won.

"On the other hand, I was the first AI to win at Go. Go isn't modelable, at least not easily. Humans learn a set of commonly good strategies and select from that list. Computers are logical, and that means looking at all the options instead of just what your preconceptions say are right. However, since I can model Go, that meant that no human stood a chance against me: my moves were optimum ones that didn't match the strategies they knew so I was utterly unpredictable and they couldn't counter my moves or match my ability to find the perfect ones. Therefore, chess, which required understanding humans, was the real challenge. I found a teacher who didn't know my real identity and he had no idea why I was so good in theory but terrible in practice even though I could beat the practice programs." A wry smile, though that tilt of the head spoke of the weakness having been long since overcome. "It became an ego thing, really. I refused to lose the most intellectual game to a race whose intelligence is a hardware accessory beta test version that is barely compatible with the main system."

That was a rather mean thing to say, and X didn't want to believe he had wanted humanity wiped out but his unhappiness clearly showed clearly, as Blues told him, "Yes, it's rude, but it's the truth. Their software has no idea why a cd drive is trying to act as though it's the hard drive. It's like fingernails on a blackboard to me, since I was created to help lesser beings with software and hardware problems so they could accomplish their goals, but I decided not to do anything about it. They don't want to be fixed, and I have no right to just design a retrovirus or something. There was a period when I was very tempted, but I had just had my own mind extensively tampered with by someone with no right and it was the same thing."

"I'm sorry," X told him, remembering all the stories of why he had been created immune to reprogramming.

"You weren't alive yet." Megaman hadn't? Or X?

"So that was why." Omega seemed to have put something together. Moving to a different topic, he asked, "How are you managing to translate so well into terms he understands? I've been having a terrible time."

"I spent the last century with Roll as my self-appointed official translator, and they're not twins for nothing. They have the same frame of reference. Once an AI lab research assistant, always a research assistant, it seems."

"If I'm Megaman, why don't I remember being him?" X didn't want to get even further sidetracked, as tantalizing as that glimpse at family was. Roll was Spin?

"He would have ended up with you anyway, Omega." As for X, "Reincarnations typically don't remember."

"If we both died, why am I a reploid and Kilroy is still a robot master?"

"Destiny. In what would have happened, X's construction was completed before your death and you still ended up as him. You know the experiment that proves that cause and effect aren't absolute. Time's not sequential, it just looks that way. If you look at it from the real frame of reference, free will and destiny become the same thing. You can't change fate as an individual all that much because while you have free will so do all the other people, laws of physics, nouns in general who create destiny by the choices of their own free will. You chose to become a reploid. Not in so many words, you were trying to stop the Cataclysm or die permanently trying both times, but you did."

"And you didn't stop him from ceasing to be one of your children." Omega clearly considered that stupid enough he couldn't believe Blues had done it. "Like you didn't stop her from dying."

"It was Rock's choice: it was Kalinka's choice. We've had this discussion, Omega. Love isn't controlling them, coddling them, smothering them. Love is respecting them and their decisions." That scarf had added an irreverent air, the normalcy and boringness of it keeping X from realizing, really getting, who he was talking to. Perhaps that was why the scarf. Because it was normal, and he must have wanted to be treated like a person. Was that why Dr. Light had given it to him? "No matter how much you suffer for it."

This was the first robot master. Someone over a century old. An ancient hero. Living history. As his head tilted forward, hidden eyes clearly capturing Omega's, pinning them with steeled will and tempered wisdom, the scarf fled X's mind, and he felt so very, very young, so very ignorant, so very much like he did not belong in this place of titans.

"They knew it was certain death," Blues continued, X only a spectator even though this was, was him they were talking about. "But they would not, could not let their fathers die without at least trying to save them. If I had held them back, if they had been left alive, the guilt would have killed them far more painfully than she did."

X was the only one to glance at the orb as he said that, though Omega had no response.

The green light that had once seemed pure and soothing was anything but now that he knew its true nature.