sunday_reveries: Your absence...
5. "Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color." --W.S. Merwin
A/N: This is introduction of the AU 'Home sweet home' started a while back. Alan is legacyguardian, Sam is hisfathers_son, David is hasabrother, Quorra is quorrathexplora, and Lora doesn't have a journal. VERY definitely AU, where instead of twenty outside years, Flynn gets out after twenty cycles, i.e. almost five months outside time.
It was an accident, really. A completely unexpected, unpredictable opening of chance that let Quorra inside the building with I/O potential. And even more of a chance that they'd talked about what equipment would be needed to send signal out and how to do it, as an experiment.
Quorra's ventures inside the City were still rare and cautious. For many different reasons, Flynn didn't step on the Grid himself. (And he missed it, but that was not relevant. Tiny, compared to missing his home, his family, his son and parents and Alan and Lora and their kid, for twenty cycles.) But she did dare go, and returned sometimes with stories that she told quickly and wide-eyed and excited, and sometimes with silence that she needed to go out and think through, before asking questions about. So many questions, even if she had known the Basics even before the betrayal. What she called the Purge. And since she was the only survivor of it, Flynn was pretty positive she had every right to name it as she saw fit.
This time, he felt the entire grid flicker for a moment, and there was fear, at first. That while the appearance of the ISOs had been unannounced and unfanfared, the deresolution of the last among them wouldn't be made significant in a way like this.
He couldn't know. Much as he might wish, he couldn't go and ascertain.
Instead, he sat, and waited in the silence.
After a while, even the distant thunder of electric discharge hurt. And he had more yet to wait.
And then, distantly, there was a flicker of light. At first, he wasn't certain that he had even seen it or imagined it, but then it flickered again, and again on the uneven terrain, and then it was more than blinks, the little dots jotted joined in longer dashes and he could verify the color of it, and he wept in relief, the tears running down his cheeks, hot and sputtering.
By then, he was trying to stop grieving for what was lost, what was beyond his reach, but tears were still a close acquaintance to the smooth face, to the in-curved corners of his mouth.
The make of the cloak absorbed the unfamiliar moisture all the same.
He was straight and tall and calm, by the time Quorra pulled the light-cycle in into the niche for it, and then barely not bounced up and down in excitement, her words too rapid for Flynn to comprehend at first anything more than, "I did it! I made it! It's out, and it'll not be all sad and trapped and hopeless, you'll see!" He let her babble briefly, taking his hands and spinning around with him, before she tugged him towards the watching spot, the place they could see back towards the Grid, discretely. "You'll see! It'll happen again!"
"What will happen, Quorra?"
His low voice made her try to make herself still and start from the beginning. Mostly. "I got into one of the buildings... Clu was out, working on the plans for the new flagship after the previous one got destroyed," and she had almost gotten derezzed in the event, he knew that, "and part one of the guards got distracted reading a new announcement that somebody else brought him, and I snuck inside, and there was nearly all that was necessary right in the same room, although I had to rummage around through half the building for the information bits to make sure the ... recipient? Is correct, and then when the power went pow! I thought, that's it, they've got me! But nobody seemed to have any idea where that'd come from, it was so complete a power surge. I managed to hop down from one of the second floor windows, my armor got scraped, but otherwise I'm good, and, it's done, it's done!"
"What is...?" By now, he couldn't help being somewhat infected by her enthusiasm.
"I sent it! I sent a me-- what you called a page! Up to the User world!"
"You... what?" He blinked, suddenly understanding her half-babble as his own brain started stringing the causality chain of his own. Calculating times (he'd need to know exactly how much time had passed, man, when was it, out there?), judging possibilities.
"I sent the page! As we talked that can be sent, if there's a possibility!"
Kevin Flynn, aged sixty or so - only about forty in appearance, though, since the last twenty years the aging was different, while he was here in the world of the Grid, the world he had designed and created and which had gone in a direction so very different from what he meant it to have - ran his palm over his face, then up through the curls of his hair. It was longer now, but he couldn't be bothered to cut it often or enough, and Quorra didn't seem to mind. And nobody else saw him.
But now, his mind snapped, that might possibly change.
If Alan still had the page - and he thought he would. If Alan got the page and recalled where it came from. If he discovered the office under the Arcade and he and Lora figured it out...
"Then... chances are that in a few millicycles, the Portal will open again."
"Yes!" The expression of his young... whatever she could be called. Friend, maybe, although he supposed he taught her things, here and there... whatever. His young friend, was beatific. Like this was the perfect thing that could happen.
And if he didn't make any grave mistakes, it could be.
He took a deep breath. "Q... listen to me. We have to make ready, this isn't going to be easy. Hmmm." His eyes narrowed. "We'll need something to get across the Sea on," his lips pursed, "safely. And then you'll have to wait, I'll tell you when and where. And if somebody... if another User appears, you need to get them safely out of the Grid and back to me." Because if she couldn't, it would make the game that much different. He didn't know that one of his friends up there would be on the path of the laser if and when they activated it, but he'd have to make sure. "It may be a long wait."
"I think I can handle that."
"They may have no idea what to expect and how to behave. Don't think it's easier than it will be."
"No problem!"
He sighed, but let it go. "In the meantime, you'll help me build a flier."
"Yes?"
"Yes. I was considering the idea of another transport, anyway... now it'll just have to be a different one than what I had in mind."
And so it began.
***
Lora blinked awake at the way her husband's body tensed in the middle of the night. "Hmm?"
"Hold on."
Grope grope grope, scrape on the nightstand. The shake of the bed as Alan sat up, then the softer one as he adjusted his glasses, reached to turn on the light. Reached for something else on the nightstand, as far as she could make out, at least in that area of the blur. She repeated the reaching for her own glasses, blinking more at his soft, "huh..."
He was holding his pager, of all things. "Something ENCOM-related?" He could tell if it was one of those numbers, no matter how huge the building was, with how many phones, and how many of the business partners may be calling from elsewhere. She sometimes said it was like a sixth sense - in teasing, of course. He still occasionally blushed when she did it right, and the thought made her smile.
"No... not exactly." He swallowed, then looked up at her. "The page came from Flynn's office at the Arcade."
That wiped the smile right out of her face. "But..."
"But his parents closed it up and disconnected the phone and water lines and gave me the key, I know."
"Disconnected it more than a month ago, how could..."
"I don't know."
"Do you think..."
"I don't know, Lora."
They both sat silent for a little bit.
"We'll have to check it out."
"I think so, too."
"Tomorrow." It was in the middle of the night. While they could find somebody to stay here with David in an emergency, if this turned out to be a fluke...
"After work, I have the meeting with the--"
"Yeah." Pause. "I could..."
"Lora." He didn't even need to make it an exclamation. She sighed and subsided.
"Right. After work. I'll drop David over with Sam for study night and pick you up."
"... that could work, yeah."
---
It took them a long time to find the cuts in the floor, but now that they had an inkling that something was not quite as empty as it seemed there, they turned the Arcade upside down - and did find the back passage.
They looked at each other, a brief, take-that-breath look, and then Alan reached a steady hand to try the door.
Then they both blinked at the small room that was revealed. So. Typically. Flynn. That Lora's breath caught in her throat and Alan sighed beside her. But as he set off towards the mainframe under the street ... almost-window? Her attention remained riveted on the device in the middle of the room and where it was pointed.
"Kevin. Damned. FLYNN! You didn't."
"Wh--"
"Don't stand between this and the seat, Alan."
"Hmm?"
"Remember the orange? From, um, before Flynn came back to ENCOM?"
"Yes." He stepped back and leaned to look at the aperture. "Is that...?"
"The laser? Oh yes."
"Well. There's one easy solution." He took the device and turned it, carefully and inexorably, away from them and from the computer. "Better?"
She couldn't help laughing. "Yeah, I think so."
"Now let's see what he was up to."
Almost an hour later, he looked up, rubbing his eyes under the glasses. "There are some... significant gaps in what I understand. But I do know that the way he had to get out? Closes after a set time and can't be opened from the inside."
"So if he missed it, he got trapped inside."
"Pretty much."
"Idiot man."
Alan gave her a tired smile, then sighed. "Will the laser affect us if we're out of its direct line of focus?"
"No." She hadn't quite wasted her time, either. "It should be safe, pointed at the couch."
"Well... let's see if he's still... in there."
They shared another look, and then Alan took a breath - and initiated the sequence, and they stood a couple of steps back, waiting.
For a few minutes, nothing happened. Lora could hear her heartbeat in her ears, and Alan was standing very, very still beside her.
Then there was not one, but two figures that materialized in a semi-familiar light display. A girl of twenty-something, her hair black and cropped short, asymmetrical, and in black leather clothes, and the familiar... or almost familiar, how could his hair have grown so much? form of Flynn. While the former stood looking around in veritable wide-eyed wonder, the latter only took a moment to orient himself to where he was and who else was there, before he stumbled in their direction and they caught him and he clung to them for a moment, before rasping out, breathless, "Sam?"
"He's all right. He's home with your parents."
"Take me."
"Kevin Flynn--"
"I'll explain on the way."
"What about her?"
"Quorra? She's my... think of it as a ward."
Lora narrowed her eyes at her former... lover, and he raised his hands. "Nothing like that. I promise. She'll be a little disoriented, though. And a bit tired, and the whole body thing is a bit new to her, so take it easy with her?"
"Sure." She could see by his pursed lips that he read her voice correctly, but just shook her head and stepped closer to the girl. Who had poked her nose close to a cobweb in the corner, frowning at it from way too close.
"Hey," quick glance back at Flynn, and she repeated the name. "Quorra?"
"Yes?" The girl stood up and turned so quickly that Lora almost had to jump back, and then frowned at the blonde's reaction and reached up as though to hold her, "oh, I'm sorry..."
"There's nothing... nothing to be sorry about. I'm Lora, Lora Bradley."
"Oh! I've heard so much about you!" She reached to touch one of the graying golden curls lightly. "I didn't realize it could be this color..."
"Flynn... what have you been telling her?"
"... let's talk on the way home? Please?"
There was something in his tone, an honest pleading that lacked the whimsical quality she remembered from before, that made Lora meet Alan's eyes, and they both nodded about the same time. "Let's."
"But you will explain."
"Don't doubt it, man. Don't you doubt it."
A/N: This is introduction of the AU 'Home sweet home' started a while back. Alan is legacyguardian, Sam is hisfathers_son, David is hasabrother, Quorra is quorrathexplora, and Lora doesn't have a journal. VERY definitely AU, where instead of twenty outside years, Flynn gets out after twenty cycles, i.e. almost five months outside time.
It was an accident, really. A completely unexpected, unpredictable opening of chance that let Quorra inside the building with I/O potential. And even more of a chance that they'd talked about what equipment would be needed to send signal out and how to do it, as an experiment.
Quorra's ventures inside the City were still rare and cautious. For many different reasons, Flynn didn't step on the Grid himself. (And he missed it, but that was not relevant. Tiny, compared to missing his home, his family, his son and parents and Alan and Lora and their kid, for twenty cycles.) But she did dare go, and returned sometimes with stories that she told quickly and wide-eyed and excited, and sometimes with silence that she needed to go out and think through, before asking questions about. So many questions, even if she had known the Basics even before the betrayal. What she called the Purge. And since she was the only survivor of it, Flynn was pretty positive she had every right to name it as she saw fit.
This time, he felt the entire grid flicker for a moment, and there was fear, at first. That while the appearance of the ISOs had been unannounced and unfanfared, the deresolution of the last among them wouldn't be made significant in a way like this.
He couldn't know. Much as he might wish, he couldn't go and ascertain.
Instead, he sat, and waited in the silence.
After a while, even the distant thunder of electric discharge hurt. And he had more yet to wait.
And then, distantly, there was a flicker of light. At first, he wasn't certain that he had even seen it or imagined it, but then it flickered again, and again on the uneven terrain, and then it was more than blinks, the little dots jotted joined in longer dashes and he could verify the color of it, and he wept in relief, the tears running down his cheeks, hot and sputtering.
By then, he was trying to stop grieving for what was lost, what was beyond his reach, but tears were still a close acquaintance to the smooth face, to the in-curved corners of his mouth.
The make of the cloak absorbed the unfamiliar moisture all the same.
He was straight and tall and calm, by the time Quorra pulled the light-cycle in into the niche for it, and then barely not bounced up and down in excitement, her words too rapid for Flynn to comprehend at first anything more than, "I did it! I made it! It's out, and it'll not be all sad and trapped and hopeless, you'll see!" He let her babble briefly, taking his hands and spinning around with him, before she tugged him towards the watching spot, the place they could see back towards the Grid, discretely. "You'll see! It'll happen again!"
"What will happen, Quorra?"
His low voice made her try to make herself still and start from the beginning. Mostly. "I got into one of the buildings... Clu was out, working on the plans for the new flagship after the previous one got destroyed," and she had almost gotten derezzed in the event, he knew that, "and part one of the guards got distracted reading a new announcement that somebody else brought him, and I snuck inside, and there was nearly all that was necessary right in the same room, although I had to rummage around through half the building for the information bits to make sure the ... recipient? Is correct, and then when the power went pow! I thought, that's it, they've got me! But nobody seemed to have any idea where that'd come from, it was so complete a power surge. I managed to hop down from one of the second floor windows, my armor got scraped, but otherwise I'm good, and, it's done, it's done!"
"What is...?" By now, he couldn't help being somewhat infected by her enthusiasm.
"I sent it! I sent a me-- what you called a page! Up to the User world!"
"You... what?" He blinked, suddenly understanding her half-babble as his own brain started stringing the causality chain of his own. Calculating times (he'd need to know exactly how much time had passed, man, when was it, out there?), judging possibilities.
"I sent the page! As we talked that can be sent, if there's a possibility!"
Kevin Flynn, aged sixty or so - only about forty in appearance, though, since the last twenty years the aging was different, while he was here in the world of the Grid, the world he had designed and created and which had gone in a direction so very different from what he meant it to have - ran his palm over his face, then up through the curls of his hair. It was longer now, but he couldn't be bothered to cut it often or enough, and Quorra didn't seem to mind. And nobody else saw him.
But now, his mind snapped, that might possibly change.
If Alan still had the page - and he thought he would. If Alan got the page and recalled where it came from. If he discovered the office under the Arcade and he and Lora figured it out...
"Then... chances are that in a few millicycles, the Portal will open again."
"Yes!" The expression of his young... whatever she could be called. Friend, maybe, although he supposed he taught her things, here and there... whatever. His young friend, was beatific. Like this was the perfect thing that could happen.
And if he didn't make any grave mistakes, it could be.
He took a deep breath. "Q... listen to me. We have to make ready, this isn't going to be easy. Hmmm." His eyes narrowed. "We'll need something to get across the Sea on," his lips pursed, "safely. And then you'll have to wait, I'll tell you when and where. And if somebody... if another User appears, you need to get them safely out of the Grid and back to me." Because if she couldn't, it would make the game that much different. He didn't know that one of his friends up there would be on the path of the laser if and when they activated it, but he'd have to make sure. "It may be a long wait."
"I think I can handle that."
"They may have no idea what to expect and how to behave. Don't think it's easier than it will be."
"No problem!"
He sighed, but let it go. "In the meantime, you'll help me build a flier."
"Yes?"
"Yes. I was considering the idea of another transport, anyway... now it'll just have to be a different one than what I had in mind."
And so it began.
***
Lora blinked awake at the way her husband's body tensed in the middle of the night. "Hmm?"
"Hold on."
Grope grope grope, scrape on the nightstand. The shake of the bed as Alan sat up, then the softer one as he adjusted his glasses, reached to turn on the light. Reached for something else on the nightstand, as far as she could make out, at least in that area of the blur. She repeated the reaching for her own glasses, blinking more at his soft, "huh..."
He was holding his pager, of all things. "Something ENCOM-related?" He could tell if it was one of those numbers, no matter how huge the building was, with how many phones, and how many of the business partners may be calling from elsewhere. She sometimes said it was like a sixth sense - in teasing, of course. He still occasionally blushed when she did it right, and the thought made her smile.
"No... not exactly." He swallowed, then looked up at her. "The page came from Flynn's office at the Arcade."
That wiped the smile right out of her face. "But..."
"But his parents closed it up and disconnected the phone and water lines and gave me the key, I know."
"Disconnected it more than a month ago, how could..."
"I don't know."
"Do you think..."
"I don't know, Lora."
They both sat silent for a little bit.
"We'll have to check it out."
"I think so, too."
"Tomorrow." It was in the middle of the night. While they could find somebody to stay here with David in an emergency, if this turned out to be a fluke...
"After work, I have the meeting with the--"
"Yeah." Pause. "I could..."
"Lora." He didn't even need to make it an exclamation. She sighed and subsided.
"Right. After work. I'll drop David over with Sam for study night and pick you up."
"... that could work, yeah."
---
It took them a long time to find the cuts in the floor, but now that they had an inkling that something was not quite as empty as it seemed there, they turned the Arcade upside down - and did find the back passage.
They looked at each other, a brief, take-that-breath look, and then Alan reached a steady hand to try the door.
Then they both blinked at the small room that was revealed. So. Typically. Flynn. That Lora's breath caught in her throat and Alan sighed beside her. But as he set off towards the mainframe under the street ... almost-window? Her attention remained riveted on the device in the middle of the room and where it was pointed.
"Kevin. Damned. FLYNN! You didn't."
"Wh--"
"Don't stand between this and the seat, Alan."
"Hmm?"
"Remember the orange? From, um, before Flynn came back to ENCOM?"
"Yes." He stepped back and leaned to look at the aperture. "Is that...?"
"The laser? Oh yes."
"Well. There's one easy solution." He took the device and turned it, carefully and inexorably, away from them and from the computer. "Better?"
She couldn't help laughing. "Yeah, I think so."
"Now let's see what he was up to."
Almost an hour later, he looked up, rubbing his eyes under the glasses. "There are some... significant gaps in what I understand. But I do know that the way he had to get out? Closes after a set time and can't be opened from the inside."
"So if he missed it, he got trapped inside."
"Pretty much."
"Idiot man."
Alan gave her a tired smile, then sighed. "Will the laser affect us if we're out of its direct line of focus?"
"No." She hadn't quite wasted her time, either. "It should be safe, pointed at the couch."
"Well... let's see if he's still... in there."
They shared another look, and then Alan took a breath - and initiated the sequence, and they stood a couple of steps back, waiting.
For a few minutes, nothing happened. Lora could hear her heartbeat in her ears, and Alan was standing very, very still beside her.
Then there was not one, but two figures that materialized in a semi-familiar light display. A girl of twenty-something, her hair black and cropped short, asymmetrical, and in black leather clothes, and the familiar... or almost familiar, how could his hair have grown so much? form of Flynn. While the former stood looking around in veritable wide-eyed wonder, the latter only took a moment to orient himself to where he was and who else was there, before he stumbled in their direction and they caught him and he clung to them for a moment, before rasping out, breathless, "Sam?"
"He's all right. He's home with your parents."
"Take me."
"Kevin Flynn--"
"I'll explain on the way."
"What about her?"
"Quorra? She's my... think of it as a ward."
Lora narrowed her eyes at her former... lover, and he raised his hands. "Nothing like that. I promise. She'll be a little disoriented, though. And a bit tired, and the whole body thing is a bit new to her, so take it easy with her?"
"Sure." She could see by his pursed lips that he read her voice correctly, but just shook her head and stepped closer to the girl. Who had poked her nose close to a cobweb in the corner, frowning at it from way too close.
"Hey," quick glance back at Flynn, and she repeated the name. "Quorra?"
"Yes?" The girl stood up and turned so quickly that Lora almost had to jump back, and then frowned at the blonde's reaction and reached up as though to hold her, "oh, I'm sorry..."
"There's nothing... nothing to be sorry about. I'm Lora, Lora Bradley."
"Oh! I've heard so much about you!" She reached to touch one of the graying golden curls lightly. "I didn't realize it could be this color..."
"Flynn... what have you been telling her?"
"... let's talk on the way home? Please?"
There was something in his tone, an honest pleading that lacked the whimsical quality she remembered from before, that made Lora meet Alan's eyes, and they both nodded about the same time. "Let's."
"But you will explain."
"Don't doubt it, man. Don't you doubt it."