Return
ooc: For Miracles 'verse, but also generally outlining Flynn's return from the Grid.
Light shining in his eyes. First one, then the other.
"Reactive."
Somewhere, from the depths of his mind, there was the information - that it was checking whether his pupils were reacting to the light.
How did he know that?
He tried to hold onto the question, but awareness slipped away from him before he registered that the voice was strange, too.
He hadn't heard a new voice, other than Sam's, for a very, very long time.
***
The next time he came to, there was smell. The word for the smell floated up.
Antiseptics.
That sounded wrong. Odd. Off. He felt off. Old. Too old.
"Sir?" A woman's voice. The address also sounded off. He didn't know why, but it felt like it was something he hadn't heard for a long, time.
"Ye-es?" He tried to answer, and almost choked, coughing. It wasn't easy to make words.
"Sir, can you tell me your name? You are at Brotman Medical Center, brought in last night after you were found unconscious on the street. There were no identification documents on you, can you tell me your name?"
He stared up at her, blankly, while the words slowly started fitting together. He knew where Brotam Medical was, and how to get there from-- from-- Blanked out. But he was at a hospital. Something about that thought made him extremely glad, like something that was right which hadn't been for a while, but he didn't understand what.
Back to her question. Name. Who was he?
"I'm... I don't... I don't know."
His throat still hurt to speak.
What he said hurt even more, somehow. There was too much missing for him to know why.
***
They ran checks on him, of course. In the days that followed, days when he could not remember his name or what he had been doing there or where he lived, anything, they even ran his fingerprints through the records over the last twenty years. No match. Like he had just appeared on the street, out of nowhere (that didn't seem quite right, but he couldn't pinpoint why), somewhat bruised as though he had been in a fight. There were weird words to the effect of that some parts of his body seemed much older and more worn out than his appearance suggested, but nobody understood that and it didn't help, so he let them go.
Letting go. Inaction. Action through inaction. Those fit, somehow, somewhere inside. But the emptiness was much vaster, and though he talked with specialists who tried to settle some things in, somehow, nothing worked.
It was a random passing by a working TV in the hallway, the news talking about a young man called Sam Flynn and his sudden involvement in the top 500 company Encom that flipped the switch, and he had to lean on one of the nurses to get back to his room and curl into bed as memory flooded back to his awareness.
A lot of memory.
Centuries of memories.
Something that no human should be able to have experienced, he had. Time stretched through, on the Grid, and he stretched with it on the strength of his will.
He knew.
And he wished he could wish he didn't.
He couldn't say his name. That would get things complicated. He couldn't even let them know he remembered.
But he could find an unattended computer to access accounts (some of them hadn't changed in all this time, as he suspected they wouldn't have) and transfer to the hospital the expenses for his stay there.
And then he stepped out, not the sneaking that he would have attempted twenty-eight years ago, he wasn't anywhere near as agile as all that... but still in an effort worthy of that night at Encom.
Encom. His company.
Sam Flynn. His son.
Kevin Flynn. His name.
He pulled his records off the hospital's system and transfered them to a temporary free online storage location (bless Sam that he had updated him about how far technology could have progressed duirng those twenty-one years) and left.
***
The Arcade was the first place he looked.
It seemed so wrong to see it dark and empty (locked. He checked), but by the time he reached it, it was only one of the many signs of the time that had passed. The same time that had passed for Sam, turning him from a curly kid into a young man who could act reasonably and well in flat-out life-and-death situations. The same time which had changed the vehicles into streamlined peaces of speed.
A fraction of the time that had passed for him.
No wonder his body was more worn out than he looked.
Flynn stood a long time on the quiet street (it used to be busy, so busy...), looking at the front of the Arcade and thinking how to proceed from there.
He could, of course, show up at Encom and wreak havoc in what people knew, but that was a bad idea. He almost snorted at himself.
Sam... chances were that he couldn't find Sam's current address if he could openly search for it, and he didn't want to go public. Not with what had happened. (And he still wasn't certain what had. But the memories were still too recent, and still seemed to be settling, and he thought he could figure it out. Eventually.)
And he wanted his son back. His boy, who had come for him and hadn't wanted to leave him behind, and he'd stayed anyway. He wanted to let him know, as soon as he could.
So he tried to find Alan. Sam had said that Alan had received a page and had found him, and so Alan would know. Even more so if Sam was taking over Encom with the new year.
Alan Bradley was in the white pages, easy to look up. There was no Lora Bradley listed, and Flynn felt a stab of pain at thinking what it might mean.
He'd know what the truth was when he found him.
Flynn didn't call. He just showed up.
***
Walking and hitch-hiking is what he got to do, to get there. Mostly walking, thankful that even in January, the weather wasn't too bad.
He could still feel each step in his bones. Deeper, even.
And with each step, it came back some more.
The precious little he had kept from this world, thirty or so precious years crushed under the weight of more than a millennium. Getting trapped. Fighting, seeing what he had worked for torn down to scraps because of what he had believed he'd worked for. By his own hands, in a way. The struggle.
The realization that it was gone, that he was trapped there, away from those he loved, with the children of his mind taken away from him, too, one by his own folly and the rest by him.
Quorra.
The madness, when not just Clu, but all he did was poison, but poison that won him a safe place to rest.
Oh so slowly, acceptance. In its way, peace.
Days turning into weeks. Weeks piling into months. Months falling like sand into years. Years walling him from everything into centuries.
So much peace.
He was pretty certain the human mind was not fit to deal with that. His own felt overstuffed, strange, and he turned to the practices of zen and meditation to cope, the balance so hard-won slip-sliding into place with each step he took.
Peace. Then, Sam, and hope again. Even more than when he had been a child, and then he had meant so much, Sam brought hope, clinging to it, brilliant and painful, for those hours as he blazed back into his life.
And then reintegration, and then... waking up with an EMT flashing lights in his eyes.
It was a wonder he didn't walk stooped under the weight of it.
Maybe it would be a wonder if Alan didn't get a heart attack when showed up... and yet.
Although it was Quorra who answered the door, eyes widening for a moment before she bounced, fingers flying to cover her mouth. "Oh."
"Quorra."
The word was hurting. Except now the pain wasn't in his throat. It was deeper, vile. He didn't know what to do with it.
"Shouldn't you be staying out of sight?"
"No, for one thing, nobody ever comes here, and for another, I go out all right, I'm Sam's PA at Encom, and--"
"Is he here?"
"Everyone's here." She started in, and he could hear her excited, "you'll never guess who that was!" while he carefully took off his shoes, then walked after her to the faces expressing different degree of startlement.
Alan.
Sam, Quorra kneeling by his side.
On his other side, Tron.
Tron. Beside him, a white-haired girl with eyes as widely open as Quorra's.
"Dad?" Sam's voice was choked, fragile almost. Too much loss, too much breakage.
Alan only stared for a moment, half out of his seat, before he finished rising and came forward to meet him.
Somehow, he was home.
***
As far as they could figure out, eventually, it was some sort of an accident. A fluke. What Sam and Quorra had seen, after the reintegration, was an explosion of light spreading out; Xia added that her people (so many miracles, Flynn knew. More ISOs, among the rest... and Tron, not lost. Not lost) had seen the light spread out, fast, and wipe out everything above the surface. Wiped it clean.
But maybe, they thought, the explosion, carrying the reintegrated awareness of Flynn and Clu, to begin with, hit the beam while it was still transporting Sam and Quorra out, and the beam spewed Flynn out, near the Arcade, but on one of the back streets where he only got noticed by strangers. And the reintegration itself caused the memory blank.
At least it hadn't been an identity mix-up. That would have been even worse.
An accident. That was all there was between his son losing him again, for good, and this... third chance? Whatever it was. It didn't clean up the mess he had made of things retroactively, but it gave them all something here and now.
It wasn't an easy thing.
***
The first crack came when he fully figured out, inside, how difficult it was for Sam. It had been a sort of hell; it was difficult now. Doubly so because he had less to show for it, because his family was there. Reason said he should be suddenly well, suddenly happy that it was all well.
But people rarely worked the way people did. Huge changes in life could happen in a blink - but that didn't mean that one's state of mind and heart and soul could be flipped like a switch.
Flynn knew that. He also knew that, while Sam loved him and always had, and even understood him in ways few people ever did, for the young man his father was a frightening stranger. He knew that, because of circumstances rather than choices, but no less thoroughly, he had abandoned his son.
He knew.
Knowing was different from seeing Sam in pain, however. Pain he couldn't just fix, the way he had to adjust to not just being able to control the world around him, now.
Piled up, that was the first time words rained on Alan's head. And his old friend listened, understood, and eased the pain, somewhat.
It had taken Flynn so long to realize how blessed he was for knowing Alan, even back then. He'd only clung to the thought of Sam, through the time with his own thoughts, but there were still trickles of memories with Alan that remained. Alan and his mind's creation. Tron. Who'd been the brightest and the darkest in the Grid world, and was now getting used to the world outside.
But mostly, Alan. He was there. The way he had been for Sam, the way he still was for Sam. How his friend did it, Flynn didn't know.
He knew that when the huge great wall around him cracked first, the wall he'd spent a millennium to build, Alan was there to ease the pain from that.
***
The second time he broke was at the cemetery.
They went to Lora's grave first. Cancer, Alan said, and little more. Flynn stood over the tiny parcel and thought of loving her, having loved her. Of times when she was warm enough to have both him and Alan healing under her wings. He looked at his friend, at his son, too, the loss so clear on their faces, and he was sorry. So sorry. Another hole in their lives, and he hadn't been there. Still was barely there.
Then he went to his wife's grave, and tears came again. Sam hadn't even known her. Alan... had, but she had blazed so bright for Flynn, and he had almost no memories of her. Almost.
After that, he asked Sam to take him to his parents' resting place. And there he wept. With his son, he had the chance to heal what his absence had done. With his parents, he couldn't. They'd died hurting because of him, and by God, now he knew what that meant.
It was the first time that Sam stepped and gave him a hug, tight and steady. He'd be afraid he was frightening the boy, no, young man, but he was too lost in pain and in relief. Yes, some ways were healing. It may take time, but he was here now.
He knew they would have been glad to see this.
***
When Sam ended up yelling at both him and Alan, neither of them even thought to hold it against him. They both knew. Sam was pushed further than most people broke; all in all, he held himself amazingly.
But it was then when Flynn told Alan some little part of what that time had done to him. And even as he did, he thought his friend would be horrified. He'd lost so much of himself to survive, and that, he knew.
Instead of turning away, though, Alan made sure they were both where their backs would not end up screaming in pain. Then awkwardly held him when Flynn unbent enough to lean against it, the abyss of all those days a danger for what he wanted to be now. It was not easy.
Until Sam came in and asked Alan if he was going to make an honest man out of his father.
It must have looked strange, to Sam.
Flynn wouldn't change what he was doing for the world. Any world.
Not when what he was lit up his son's eyes with mirth.
That was right in front of him. Just as all his meditations said.
Just better.
Light shining in his eyes. First one, then the other.
"Reactive."
Somewhere, from the depths of his mind, there was the information - that it was checking whether his pupils were reacting to the light.
How did he know that?
He tried to hold onto the question, but awareness slipped away from him before he registered that the voice was strange, too.
He hadn't heard a new voice, other than Sam's, for a very, very long time.
***
The next time he came to, there was smell. The word for the smell floated up.
Antiseptics.
That sounded wrong. Odd. Off. He felt off. Old. Too old.
"Sir?" A woman's voice. The address also sounded off. He didn't know why, but it felt like it was something he hadn't heard for a long, time.
"Ye-es?" He tried to answer, and almost choked, coughing. It wasn't easy to make words.
"Sir, can you tell me your name? You are at Brotman Medical Center, brought in last night after you were found unconscious on the street. There were no identification documents on you, can you tell me your name?"
He stared up at her, blankly, while the words slowly started fitting together. He knew where Brotam Medical was, and how to get there from-- from-- Blanked out. But he was at a hospital. Something about that thought made him extremely glad, like something that was right which hadn't been for a while, but he didn't understand what.
Back to her question. Name. Who was he?
"I'm... I don't... I don't know."
His throat still hurt to speak.
What he said hurt even more, somehow. There was too much missing for him to know why.
***
They ran checks on him, of course. In the days that followed, days when he could not remember his name or what he had been doing there or where he lived, anything, they even ran his fingerprints through the records over the last twenty years. No match. Like he had just appeared on the street, out of nowhere (that didn't seem quite right, but he couldn't pinpoint why), somewhat bruised as though he had been in a fight. There were weird words to the effect of that some parts of his body seemed much older and more worn out than his appearance suggested, but nobody understood that and it didn't help, so he let them go.
Letting go. Inaction. Action through inaction. Those fit, somehow, somewhere inside. But the emptiness was much vaster, and though he talked with specialists who tried to settle some things in, somehow, nothing worked.
It was a random passing by a working TV in the hallway, the news talking about a young man called Sam Flynn and his sudden involvement in the top 500 company Encom that flipped the switch, and he had to lean on one of the nurses to get back to his room and curl into bed as memory flooded back to his awareness.
A lot of memory.
Centuries of memories.
Something that no human should be able to have experienced, he had. Time stretched through, on the Grid, and he stretched with it on the strength of his will.
He knew.
And he wished he could wish he didn't.
He couldn't say his name. That would get things complicated. He couldn't even let them know he remembered.
But he could find an unattended computer to access accounts (some of them hadn't changed in all this time, as he suspected they wouldn't have) and transfer to the hospital the expenses for his stay there.
And then he stepped out, not the sneaking that he would have attempted twenty-eight years ago, he wasn't anywhere near as agile as all that... but still in an effort worthy of that night at Encom.
Encom. His company.
Sam Flynn. His son.
Kevin Flynn. His name.
He pulled his records off the hospital's system and transfered them to a temporary free online storage location (bless Sam that he had updated him about how far technology could have progressed duirng those twenty-one years) and left.
***
The Arcade was the first place he looked.
It seemed so wrong to see it dark and empty (locked. He checked), but by the time he reached it, it was only one of the many signs of the time that had passed. The same time that had passed for Sam, turning him from a curly kid into a young man who could act reasonably and well in flat-out life-and-death situations. The same time which had changed the vehicles into streamlined peaces of speed.
A fraction of the time that had passed for him.
No wonder his body was more worn out than he looked.
Flynn stood a long time on the quiet street (it used to be busy, so busy...), looking at the front of the Arcade and thinking how to proceed from there.
He could, of course, show up at Encom and wreak havoc in what people knew, but that was a bad idea. He almost snorted at himself.
Sam... chances were that he couldn't find Sam's current address if he could openly search for it, and he didn't want to go public. Not with what had happened. (And he still wasn't certain what had. But the memories were still too recent, and still seemed to be settling, and he thought he could figure it out. Eventually.)
And he wanted his son back. His boy, who had come for him and hadn't wanted to leave him behind, and he'd stayed anyway. He wanted to let him know, as soon as he could.
So he tried to find Alan. Sam had said that Alan had received a page and had found him, and so Alan would know. Even more so if Sam was taking over Encom with the new year.
Alan Bradley was in the white pages, easy to look up. There was no Lora Bradley listed, and Flynn felt a stab of pain at thinking what it might mean.
He'd know what the truth was when he found him.
Flynn didn't call. He just showed up.
***
Walking and hitch-hiking is what he got to do, to get there. Mostly walking, thankful that even in January, the weather wasn't too bad.
He could still feel each step in his bones. Deeper, even.
And with each step, it came back some more.
The precious little he had kept from this world, thirty or so precious years crushed under the weight of more than a millennium. Getting trapped. Fighting, seeing what he had worked for torn down to scraps because of what he had believed he'd worked for. By his own hands, in a way. The struggle.
The realization that it was gone, that he was trapped there, away from those he loved, with the children of his mind taken away from him, too, one by his own folly and the rest by him.
Quorra.
The madness, when not just Clu, but all he did was poison, but poison that won him a safe place to rest.
Oh so slowly, acceptance. In its way, peace.
Days turning into weeks. Weeks piling into months. Months falling like sand into years. Years walling him from everything into centuries.
So much peace.
He was pretty certain the human mind was not fit to deal with that. His own felt overstuffed, strange, and he turned to the practices of zen and meditation to cope, the balance so hard-won slip-sliding into place with each step he took.
Peace. Then, Sam, and hope again. Even more than when he had been a child, and then he had meant so much, Sam brought hope, clinging to it, brilliant and painful, for those hours as he blazed back into his life.
And then reintegration, and then... waking up with an EMT flashing lights in his eyes.
It was a wonder he didn't walk stooped under the weight of it.
Maybe it would be a wonder if Alan didn't get a heart attack when showed up... and yet.
Although it was Quorra who answered the door, eyes widening for a moment before she bounced, fingers flying to cover her mouth. "Oh."
"Quorra."
The word was hurting. Except now the pain wasn't in his throat. It was deeper, vile. He didn't know what to do with it.
"Shouldn't you be staying out of sight?"
"No, for one thing, nobody ever comes here, and for another, I go out all right, I'm Sam's PA at Encom, and--"
"Is he here?"
"Everyone's here." She started in, and he could hear her excited, "you'll never guess who that was!" while he carefully took off his shoes, then walked after her to the faces expressing different degree of startlement.
Alan.
Sam, Quorra kneeling by his side.
On his other side, Tron.
Tron. Beside him, a white-haired girl with eyes as widely open as Quorra's.
"Dad?" Sam's voice was choked, fragile almost. Too much loss, too much breakage.
Alan only stared for a moment, half out of his seat, before he finished rising and came forward to meet him.
Somehow, he was home.
***
As far as they could figure out, eventually, it was some sort of an accident. A fluke. What Sam and Quorra had seen, after the reintegration, was an explosion of light spreading out; Xia added that her people (so many miracles, Flynn knew. More ISOs, among the rest... and Tron, not lost. Not lost) had seen the light spread out, fast, and wipe out everything above the surface. Wiped it clean.
But maybe, they thought, the explosion, carrying the reintegrated awareness of Flynn and Clu, to begin with, hit the beam while it was still transporting Sam and Quorra out, and the beam spewed Flynn out, near the Arcade, but on one of the back streets where he only got noticed by strangers. And the reintegration itself caused the memory blank.
At least it hadn't been an identity mix-up. That would have been even worse.
An accident. That was all there was between his son losing him again, for good, and this... third chance? Whatever it was. It didn't clean up the mess he had made of things retroactively, but it gave them all something here and now.
It wasn't an easy thing.
***
The first crack came when he fully figured out, inside, how difficult it was for Sam. It had been a sort of hell; it was difficult now. Doubly so because he had less to show for it, because his family was there. Reason said he should be suddenly well, suddenly happy that it was all well.
But people rarely worked the way people did. Huge changes in life could happen in a blink - but that didn't mean that one's state of mind and heart and soul could be flipped like a switch.
Flynn knew that. He also knew that, while Sam loved him and always had, and even understood him in ways few people ever did, for the young man his father was a frightening stranger. He knew that, because of circumstances rather than choices, but no less thoroughly, he had abandoned his son.
He knew.
Knowing was different from seeing Sam in pain, however. Pain he couldn't just fix, the way he had to adjust to not just being able to control the world around him, now.
Piled up, that was the first time words rained on Alan's head. And his old friend listened, understood, and eased the pain, somewhat.
It had taken Flynn so long to realize how blessed he was for knowing Alan, even back then. He'd only clung to the thought of Sam, through the time with his own thoughts, but there were still trickles of memories with Alan that remained. Alan and his mind's creation. Tron. Who'd been the brightest and the darkest in the Grid world, and was now getting used to the world outside.
But mostly, Alan. He was there. The way he had been for Sam, the way he still was for Sam. How his friend did it, Flynn didn't know.
He knew that when the huge great wall around him cracked first, the wall he'd spent a millennium to build, Alan was there to ease the pain from that.
***
The second time he broke was at the cemetery.
They went to Lora's grave first. Cancer, Alan said, and little more. Flynn stood over the tiny parcel and thought of loving her, having loved her. Of times when she was warm enough to have both him and Alan healing under her wings. He looked at his friend, at his son, too, the loss so clear on their faces, and he was sorry. So sorry. Another hole in their lives, and he hadn't been there. Still was barely there.
Then he went to his wife's grave, and tears came again. Sam hadn't even known her. Alan... had, but she had blazed so bright for Flynn, and he had almost no memories of her. Almost.
After that, he asked Sam to take him to his parents' resting place. And there he wept. With his son, he had the chance to heal what his absence had done. With his parents, he couldn't. They'd died hurting because of him, and by God, now he knew what that meant.
It was the first time that Sam stepped and gave him a hug, tight and steady. He'd be afraid he was frightening the boy, no, young man, but he was too lost in pain and in relief. Yes, some ways were healing. It may take time, but he was here now.
He knew they would have been glad to see this.
***
When Sam ended up yelling at both him and Alan, neither of them even thought to hold it against him. They both knew. Sam was pushed further than most people broke; all in all, he held himself amazingly.
But it was then when Flynn told Alan some little part of what that time had done to him. And even as he did, he thought his friend would be horrified. He'd lost so much of himself to survive, and that, he knew.
Instead of turning away, though, Alan made sure they were both where their backs would not end up screaming in pain. Then awkwardly held him when Flynn unbent enough to lean against it, the abyss of all those days a danger for what he wanted to be now. It was not easy.
Until Sam came in and asked Alan if he was going to make an honest man out of his father.
It must have looked strange, to Sam.
Flynn wouldn't change what he was doing for the world. Any world.
Not when what he was lit up his son's eyes with mirth.
That was right in front of him. Just as all his meditations said.
Just better.