Fic: The Devil's Dues [8/10]
The Devil's Dues
Fandom(s): Tron: Legacy
Characters: Sam Flynn, Tron/Rinzler
Rating: T
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Summary:
It wasn't so much that hope died, but that Sam realized it had only been wishful thinking all along.
For Winzler, and the prompt (misinterpreted):
The world ends. Nuclear wasteland, Mad Max style, etc. One day Sam comes out of the computer and everything is gone. The power will run out soon/the arcade is in danger/etc so Sam hurriedly brings a recovering Tron(zler) out to save him.
Tron is OK at first but slowly reverts to Rinzler under the stress of survival - and Sam eventually begins to lose it as well. In the end we’re left with 2 bugfuck crazy survivalist murdermachines roaming the wasteland together.
Notes:
Wow, I can't believe it, this is it, the climax! There is still a denoument to tidy up all the loose ends, and then a far more leisurely epilogue, but otherwise, this is pretty much the crux of everything. I've literally had huge chunks of this sitting waiting for me since THREE MONTHS AGO. I can't believe I'm finally kicking it all out the door.
Thank you thank you thank you Winzler, for being relentless and giving me such rapid feedback.
Part 8
There were currently sixty-eight residents at the hotel - "A lucky number," Xiao Yen had declared - six of whom were too infirm to contribute and four who were deemed too young to risk, leaving them fifty-eight defenders of more or less sound mind and body.
Sam would have been happier weeding another good quarter of them out, but when he had asked if there were any others who wished to join the non-combatants in the infirmary, someone had hollered from the back, "We couldn't do anything 'bout the bombs and we couldn't do anything 'bout the plague. It's about time there was somethin' we could actually do!" The lobby had echoed with affirming cheers from the rest; no one had been willing to be left out.
After that, it was a flurry of preparations, excitement and tension filling the narrow corridors as people struggled to block up potential entry points, posted lookouts, and moved equipment. Sam helped catalyze and organize what he could, but was mildly surprised by how few suggestions he had to offer considering the hushed and seemingly cowed state the population had been when Tron and he had first encountered. In the two weeks since he had arrived, he had only gotten to know roughly a third of the permanent residents to any degree of familiarity; none of them had hinted at the thoroughness with which they had considered their home's defensible points.
"Why'd everyone put up with the gang for this long?" Sam grunted as he helped carry a short stack of stock pots up to the second floor. "I think you can take on an army twice your size by this point."
His current guide - a reed-thin man with skin so black Sam almost expected it to shine blue under the moonlight - shrugged beneath his own burden of saucepans. "Dunno, man, I haven't been here that long. I guess it was easier to just ignore them, before? That guy, kinda head honcho of this place - "
"Alec?"
"Yeah, Alec!" he nodded briskly as he dumped the kitchenware near a corridor window, the clatter making Sam wince. "He gave me a spiel about stayin' outta their way. I thought, s'cool, I'm used to keeping my head down. It's worked all right up 'till now."
"Where is Alec?" Sam prompted as he set his share down with a little more care and stretching out his shoulder.
"Dunno. People've been askin' all night." The man's thick brows rose as he peered at Sam. "Hey, what about your friend, the one with the funny name, like from the game? Heard a lot 'bout him. He'd prob'ly be a lotta help in this - where's he at?"
Sam blinked mid-rotation. "Uh, he's out. There's another - he's dealing with some of the gang that's split off."
The man reared back with a whistle. "Like, all by himself? Aren't you worried?"
Sam swallowed. "Yeah," he managed quietly. "Look, I better get going ... there's still a lotta stuff that needs some extra help."
"Sure, man ... glad he's on our side. Tell him thanks for me, will ya? Good to know he's got our backs."
Sam barely choked out an affirmative before he was taking the steps two at a time back downstairs.
Thirty-plus odd men arrived no more than half an hour later, accompanied by two trucks. They were met by a dozen residents armed with everything from brooms and gardening tools to kitchen implements, clustered solidly at the end of the courtyard before the hotel entrance. Sam was not near enough to catch the exchange - as soon as they had heard the vehicles' approach, he had been running through the corridors spreading the word, dousing lamps and candles and alerting the rear lookouts. By the time he had managed to return to his own post just inside the lobby, at least half of the gang had migrated into the inner courtyard ... and as soon as the hotel vanguard appeared to break and flee back inside, luring the gang after them, a score of second floor windows shattered.
Pandemonium rained down upon the would-be attackers. Bricks, pots, pans - in one notable instance, a single blue-edged plate before the thrower's companion scolded him for wasting good dishware and replaced his next missile with a copper vase - anything with heft that could survive a good thirty foot toss was hurled down upon the exposed heads below.
Sam had to stifle a laugh at the startled cries from outside, all but lost amidst the clang and clatter of heavy projectiles smashing into the courtyard's brickwork. By the time those who were still conscious fled out of range, their numbers had been thinned considerably - but of those that were still mobile, a good portion were headed straight toward the hotel's front door.
Which was when Sam waded in. Along with the rest of the hotel's fittest men, they piled onto the gang members that made it through the entrance. What stragglers slipped past them met the second line of defense - a ring of hard-eyed women wielding shovels, pitchforks, broomsticks, and anything else they had scrounged up with a long reach and a stiff end. One particular amazon who Sam vaguely remembered as having been a volleyball player wielded a baseball bat in a perfect arc, literally taking a man right off his feet.
"Knife ... knife ... gun - but no bullets - " one of the residents tallied as the bodies were searched and the weapons handed off.
Sam straightened with a wince, shaking out a fist as he turned to take stock of the room. "Is anyone hurt badly - " he began before an abrupt roar from outside had them all freezing just as a brilliant flash of headlights glared through the half-open doors. "Look out!" he shouted along with a chorus of panicked warnings, looping his arm around the waist of the nearest resident and diving for the edge of the room.
Sam heard startled shrieks and then an awful crash as one of the trucks ran right into the entranceway, skewing sideways with a horrible crunch of metal and concrete when it caught an edge. Coughing in the sudden cloud of dust and exhaust, Sam tried to usher the closest people into the east corridor. "Into the rooms, into the rooms!" he shouted as the engine revved behind them, and the bright beams of the headlights wavered drunkenly before pulling out, leaving behind a gaping hole as the defenders scattered.
They had prepared for the eventuality of invaders, though. Sam could hear the angry shouts of the rest of the attackers catching up, and he slowed just enough to let them spot him as he ran down the narrow hallway. Sparing a quick glance over his shoulder to check just how many were on his tail, he sucked in a sharp breath and dove through an open door just in time to avoid a scatter of shots from the gun that had been pointed at his back. "Milagro, now, now!" he shouted in the direction of the corridor's end.
"Si!"
The fully-loaded cleaning cart piled high with random equipment sounded like a freight train rumbling through the constricted space, the full weight of three people behind it. There were a few more futile shots, bullets pinging harmlessly off a mini-fridge stacked upon its top, before the gang members finally thought to turn back - but not before two at least were all but run over and trampled.
Sam winced at the cries and meaty thumps, cautiously venturing back out to stand next to a rotund woman whose oiled and tidy hairbun barely reached his shoulder as she ambled along at a much more leisurely pace in the cart's path. "Good job."
The hispanic woman braced her fists upon her ample hips and gave a satisfied sniff. "Gracias, Sir. Now go, go - we take care of the rest."
Sam raised his hands in mock surrender. "Yes, ma'am," he declared promptly, grinning after Milagro's rolling, imperious gait as she headed for the cart and its groaning victims. A former housecleaning maid for one of the other establishments in Fisherman's Wharf, she had taken to the task of the hotel's management like a queen to her throne.
With the way into the lobby now blocked by the cart, Sam began jogging in the other direction, following the corridor to a T-intersection where a side hall ran the length of the eastern wing. Glancing either way, he tried to sift out where the ongoing struggle seemed the thickest - before a thin scream of rage whipped Sam's head around to the rear of the hotel.
"Leave them alone you big - !"
"Eric!" Sam called with a wince, wondering when the boy had picked up the expletive that followed and nearly tripping over his own feet as he darted around the corner.
Guest rooms soon gave way to utility closets and other employee areas, the hall taking a few more sharp jogs to make space for rooms with air compressors and other building maintenance machinery. One of these rear sections had been appropriated for their infirmary where Eric along with the other noncombatants had been squirreled away, but Sam could clearly hear the sounds of angry voices and a struggle echoing down the passages, and an extra spurt of panic sent him around a corner so sharply that his arm went numb catching his shoulder against it.
He was just in time to break Danny's fall when the doctor slammed into him, sending them both to the floor. Wheezing, Sam tried to catch his breath while sorting out which limbs were his and whether the old man was all right.
"Go, go!" Danny asserted with gruff impatience through his stammered concerns. "The boy - Eric!"
Trying to see past the doctor's knobby elbow as they struggled to pick themselves off the floor, Sam caught a glimpse of a stocky, square-shouldered brute just a few feet away, incongruously plucking what looked like an empty hypodermic from his lower back. In snatches past the man's measured stalk down the corridor, he could just barely make out flashes of Eric's wild thatch of dark hair and stubborn, determined expression. With a quick apology to the doctor, Sam prepared to simply fling himself over the old man and hoped he didn't accidentally kick something too painfully -
"Hee-yah!"
The attacker all but stumbled over his own feet backpedaling as Xiao Yen abruptly dove through the open infirmary door, landing between him and the boy. Expression fierce, the petite woman - it would be a stretch to say she even measured up to his nose - stood with fists rigid at her sides, chin tilted upwards imperiously. "Go! Do not bother us anymore!"
"Sh'yeah right, who's gonna make me?" the man sneered, and Sam was just about to call a warning that help was on the way, shoving frantically back to his feet, when Xiao Yen brought her hands up - and he could feel the words palpably stick in his throat.
Light flashed off two kitchen knives as she flipped them around in her grip from where they had been hidden behind her forearms, their edges now bared and threatening. The man's eyes popped wide, but he was given no time to properly appreciate the danger - Xiao Yen flowed smoothly into a complicated form that seemed almost more dance than kata, blades weaving a complicated web as she stepped confidently between blocks, punches, and tendon-stretching kicks. The man inched back with a flinch at each near swish of a knife, and jumped visibly at the occasional, odd, "Hai!" that punctuated an air strike. By the time Xiao Yen had finished with a straight forward-kick that must have had her knee brushing her nose and settled into a long archer's stance, one knife tucked low near her hip and the other raised high like a scorpion's sting over her head, he was pressed against the jamb, face white and sweating. "I know kung fu," Xiao Yen stated, eyes narrowed, and somehow sounding not at all ridiculous in spite of her heavy accent. "Now - go!"
Even Sam jumped when the order was nearly drowned by the sudden clash of her blades ringing against each other, and the would-be antagonist let out an honest-to-god yelp as he fled backwards, barely managing to swerve around Sam and Danny on the way out.
Sam was still gaping when there was a much lighter clatter of the knives dropping to the ground, and Xiao Yen babbled a torrent of relieved-sounding Chinese as she gathered Eric into her arms, the boy hiccuping in his fear and excitement as he babbled his appreciation right back in English. Making his way over in a much more leisurely fashion than he had originally planned, Sam cleared his throat and tentatively noted as he nudged one of the discarded knives with his shoe, "Uh, we could've really used you out there, you know. You could've just fought them all off and saved us the trouble."
"What? No," Xiao Yen laughed, and only now could Sam hear the tremble beneath her voice. Looking more closely, he could see her hands shaking where they clutched her adopted son close. "I am no good! I do not know kung fu."
"You've got to be kidding me," Sam blinked. "That was, like, the most convincing performance of not-knowing kung fu I've ever seen."
Xiao Yen discreetly brushed at her eyes with a knuckle, still grinning the crazed grin of near-death survivors. "No, no ... I did some Tai Chi. With my grandmother, when I was very little. I do not know kung fu at all, nothing. I learn from you - yell a lot. Make myself big. They will run, because they are coward." She set her cheek atop Eric's hair. "I almost cut off my hand. I am not used to holding knifes when doing Tai Chi."
Sam dragged a hand slowly over his face. "God."
By the time the doctor and he had reassured themselves that no one else had managed to find their way into the rear corridors, the fight was already nearing its end. Surprised by the organized effort and larger force, only a handful of stragglers had the werewithal to retreat, taking the trucks with them and leaving behind a host of groaning and unconscious compatriots. When Sam finally worked his way back to the courtyard, people were scattered about with a vague air of astonishment and elation, the first disbelieving laughs beginning to transform into impromptu hugs and cheers when he heard someone calling his name.
"Yeah?" he answered, turning, and bodies shifted out of the way to allow Alec to limp into view. Sam could feel his brows rising at the man's battered state; the ex-foreman's arm was flung over a set of helping shoulders - what looked like a good half his face swelling into one big bruise - and they shuffled awkwardly up to him in a sort of three-legged stumble that even a pair of grade-schoolers could have handily beat. "Hey, whoa, maybe you should sit down - what happened to you?"
"Was payin' the devil's dues," Alec grunted, words smeared by a swollen lip, "I'm lucky he didn't decide t'collect all at once. Look, Sam, where's Tron?"
"What're you talking about?" Sam could feel his brow furrow, shoulders tensing automatically. "C'mon, at least sit down, someone get Danny - "
"Danny's already seen t'me, hadta sneak out from under that ornery fossil's nose. Just shut up and answer the question - where's Tron?"
"He's not here," Sam snapped between the twin irritations of having common-sense-help refused and the continuous goad of his conscience. "What's it to you?"
"You mean, what's it t'you," Alec growled, pushing away from his living crutch to fist his hand in Sam's jacket. "Whaddya mean he's not here?"
If the man wasn't so obviously unsteady on his feet, Sam might have felt more offended, but as it was, he had to cling to his pique to resist holding out a helping hand. "Look, I'm not his babysitter, and Tron's more than capable of taking care of himself - "
"Yeah? How 'bout Rinzler?"
Sam stopped and stared. "What're you talking about - " he pushed through numb lips before Alec gave him a little shake.
"Look, I don't know what games you're playing, and I don't know what sorta crazy science experiment all this was, but I'm not the only one who knows, now," the man hissed, voice pitched low against the loose circle of stares that have now fixed upon them. "I ain't proud of what I did but I'm sure as hell going to - "
It was only the strident voices around him that suddenly made Sam realize he had both hands clutched tight in Alec's collar, all but heaving the man off his feet in spite of their height difference. "What did you do - what did you do!" he shouted desperately, barely giving way to the frantic hands trying to pull him back.
" - made it, Tron!" the foreman gasped, shame obvious even through his pained grimace as he turned his head away. "You said 'we made it, Tron' ... and he - "
Sam staggered, and the hands that had originally tried to hold him back abruptly turned bracing when he felt his knees go weak. "Oh jesus. What've you done ... "
Alec coughed, head hanging, face shadowed, and eventually rasped to the ground, "They beat it outta me. Wanted to know what the hell he was ... I would've come sooner, but I was unconscious when Tron dragged me back, didn't come to till now ... "
"He dragged you ... you told them ... "
"Danny told me it was him. Tron got to me before they - he brought me back. They know ... they know what you said to turn him back to ... to whatever he is when - "
Sam's stomach was rolling over as he shoved his way out of the tight knot of bodies, their confused and concerned faces a pale blur in the background. He was already digging through his pockets with shaking hands for keys before he remembered that he didn't need them, and then it became just a frantic scrabble to kick up the stand and screech out onto the streets, nearly fishtailing at the very first turn when he took it at full throttle.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid ...
It was a constant litany in the back of his mind as he raced across the bridge, eyes watering from the cut of the wind, more afraid of being late than in navigating half-blind. Other half-formed thoughts clawed restlessly through the mental diatribe, such as why Alec had been targeted or how the gang had known to ask the questions they did and why why why now when they were right on the cusp of actually accomplishing something significant -
He was within sight of the radio station when the generators blew.
The initial bloom of fire almost licked the roof's corrugated edge, two stories overhead. Sam nearly skidded out at the wash of warmth across his face and left the motorcycle in a barely-controlled slide, stumbling hard enough to feel an unpleasant twinge in one ankle as he abandoned the still-rumbling bike in order to hit the ground running.
He could make out the bulk of a truck buried amidst the conflagration, drunken silhouettes just beginning to pick themselves up off the ground if he squinted. The flames were reluctantly confined thus far by the sea-damp grounds, but they had plenty of fuel and blazed eagerly atop their metal scaffold. Sam let his fury and desperation carry him to the first body within his fist's reach, and nearly fell over along with his target when the man folded at his blow without so much as a grunt. "Miles! Tron! Where are they!" he shouted over the fire's hungry cackle, and the man shook his head with a dazed noise, eyes rolling. Sam buried both hands in the man's collar, about to give him another shake, when a clamor began to arise near the bonfire - shouts, screams, and above all, a frightened, "We made it, Tron!" - and his head whipped sideways, eyes straining against the contrast of light and shadow.
One slender shape and two heavier forms faced off, so close to the conflagration that their outlines wavered with the heat. There was no need to try and pick out who they were by uncertain profiles alone; Tron - Rinzler - slinked forward like a stalking cat and sprang just as one of the gang members turned to run. By the time Sam had dropped his own catch and sprinted toward them, the prey were already silent and still upon the ground and the program was loping for the station's door.
"Tron! Tron!" Sam called, feeling a different sort of panic begin to lodge uncomfortably beneath his ribs when the dark head didn't so much as turn his way. "Rinzler!" he switched, the name emerging as nearly a croak when he was forced to acknowledge that something might have become irrevocably broken, but then felt confusion slip in amidst the dread when that garnered just as much reaction ... that is, none at all.
It wasn't until Sam finally caught up from behind and nearly had his head taken off for laying a hand upon the program's shoulder that he realized what had happened. Rinzler barely pulled his blow in time, but the honest surprise in the normally flat gaze told him that the program hadn't even heard him coming.
Rinzler must have been practically next to the generators when they blew. Temporarily deafened, he had been immune to commands given by friend and enemies alike.
"Christ," Sam wheezed on half-hysterical laughter, but the reprieve was short-lived. Rinzler might have acknowledged Sam's right to be there simply by dint of letting him remain standing, but the program clearly had other objectives that took priority. Before Sam had even recovered from the dizzying relief of having the catchphrases rendered useless for the moment, Rinzler dove through the station entrance; just a lithe shadow streaking across the dusty floor toward the stairs and then leaping for the bannister, easily vaulting himself over and clearing half the steps in a single bound. Cursing, Sam was forced to round the flight in a more reasonable route, pulling himself up the steps three at a time.
Inside the station, the roar of the fire became a muted background thunder, the moon-striped interior almost cold by comparison; the worst of the bonfire's heat blocked by sheet metal that had yet to warm.
Any questions he might have had about the program's haste was answered when a body was thrown out of the broadcasting room as soon as he cleared the landing. Cracking an elbow painfully upon the jamb as his legs tangled with the feebly groaning man, Sam barely needed a glance to determine that it was not Miles - some of the gang's remnants had apparently fled into the building itself. Spitefully planting a knee into the man's gut as he fought back to his feet, he staggered into the room's proper, squinting, all that had been familiar made strange by the lack of fluorescent lights and the sullen, flickering glow leaking in from outside.
Rinzler stood crouched near the opposite end, oddly expectant, his dancing, spindly shadow like some hellish spider beside him ready to spring. A man lurked near the now-dark servers, one hand held threateningly above the machines with honed metal glinting, eyes wide and clearly white-rimmed even in the imperfect twilight. Sam straightened, stepped to the side of the door, and made sure that the man saw him before he called out boldly, "It's over!"
"Don't think so!" the man rasped, equally bold in his desperation, throwing an unshaven chin in Rinzler's direction as he noted, "He's still over there an' I'm over here, so there's somethin' you need else I'd already be laid out like Jake over there."
"If you do anything stupid, I guarantee you'll be laid out like Jake over there," Sam retorted. "Now come on. If you move away from there, he won't attack - "
"You think I'm dumb enough t' fall for that?" the man sneered. "I've seen him mopping up the others outside. These machines here're the only things keepin' me alive - "
"You wanna be stuck in a mexican stand-off all night?" Sam snapped. "Let's make this easy, all right? He backs up a step, you back off a step."
The man's eyes narrowed, speculative and strained.
Sam dared to hope. "Ready? Rinzler, move," he ordered, raising a hand - but even before he could make a motion for the program to fall back, Rinzler's forward foot was sliding grudgingly away ... and Sam saw the man's eyes gleam with feral satisfaction even as his own breath caught with sudden dread. "Rinzler, don't - !"
"We made it, Tron."
Tron made no sound when the knife slipped beneath his ribs. Instead, the sound came from Sam - as if he had been the one stabbed instead - and then Tron's hands swept out - belatedly, clumsily - and the man reeled back with a pained grunt. Tron staggered, hunched, gasping ...
It seemed as if Sam had merely blinked, and then somewhere, in between, he was standing over the man that had Tron's blood on his hands, and his own knuckles were stinging as he reached down to twist his fingers in the stained, wrinkled collar.
Another blink and his knuckles were throbbing now, and the man was choking and spitting, trying to bring up the knife and Sam let go just long enough to clamp a hand upon that wrist, squeezing and squeezing -
- blink - the man writhed, gurgling as Sam felt heat wash thick and wet over his sleeve -
"Sam ... Flynn ... "
Sam's head jerked up, the whole room seeming to swim around him with the motion, and he suddenly realized he was panting, light-headed, the pins-and-needles of too much oxygen prickling at the tips of his fingers and toes. "Tron - " he croaked, surprised at the hoarse rasp of his voice, and staggered to his feet. "Oh god, Tron, are you - how bad is it?"
Tron had slumped down, half-propped against the makeshift server rack, breaths coming in shallow, fractured sips. As Sam dropped to his knees beside him, the program's eyes lifted, focusing with alarming sluggishness. "... don't ... user stats ... "
Sam choked down a bubble of laughter, afraid of what it would emerge as instead, taking only a single glance down - oh, christ - before he pressed the heel of his hand - ignore the red already on it - against the seeping wound. "Shhh," he murmured as Tron made a small, pained sound, and reached up to stroke back sweat-soaked hair before trying to undo his shirt one-handed. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know it hurts, but we have to slow the bleeding - " Frustrated by his own trembling, he simply yanked at the fabric when a button proved stubborn, ripping the entire row of them off.
Tron said nothing, merely filled the space between them with those too-fragile gasps, barely wincing this time when Sam finally wadded fabric over the tear and tied it tight with the shirt's sleeves. So Sam talked for them both as he worked, babbled mindlessly about how Danny will fix him up and Xiao Yen will spoil him with her cooking, and Eric will tell him all about his adventures that day and Sam will wait on him hand and foot though he'll probably draw the line at sponge baths -
He stuttered to a halt when there was a pressure upon his wrist, then froze as he glanced down and saw the USB key, caught between the program's thumb and the vulnerable skin above Sam's palm. "Save Quorra," Tron breathed, barely audible. "Save the Grid."
It might have been less painful if someone had simply reached into Sam's chest and wrenched the still-beating heart from it.
"They can wait," he babbled, "they'll wait - we'd all wait for you, Tron. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I should've seen it sooner and sto - Tron? Tron, are you listening? Tron, answer me!"
Sam's throat was so dry he couldn't swallow as he tried to find the pulse with blood-tacky fingers, and when Tron's head lolled limply and there was no response, he called desperately, "Rinzler! Release Rinzler, release Rinzler, release - answer me, you son-of-a - !"
He sobbed with relief when there was the faintest jerk of the head - "Tron?" - then slipped into hysterical laughter as he realized it was the ghost of the alter ego's signature headtilt. "Rinzler, oh god, Rinzler ... stay breathing," he begged with breaking voice as he pressed their foreheads together. "Stay alive, stay breathing; acknowledge, acknowledge - god, please, acknowledge ... "
Tron's fingers stretched open and the disc dropped from his grasp. Its lights flickered, went out, and though it bit edgewise at the ground, it did not rebound. The ID rolled waveringly past a puddle of loose voxels - equally dim and lifeless - before hitting the windows' low sill and finally tipping over ... and Sam released a shaking breath, wondering fleetingly if programs experienced shock as he stepped gingerly across the room, everything over almost before he had made any sense of it at all. "Jesus. Tron? Are you all right?"
The dull look upon the program's face did not waver, but at least his head rose in acknowledgment of sorts. Sam took the opportunity to slide around the remains of what had once been a load balancing operator - a winsome female with slanted, sloe eyes - and pushed tentatively upon Tron's shoulder. "C'mon, snap out of it. Give me a status update."
Tron moved stiffly to the seat Sam directed him to, inelegant only in part due to the livid cut gleaming upon his hip. He did not respond at first, gaze sliding back to the crumbled program remnants, and only spoke when Sam rested a hand upon the empty port between his shoulderblades. "Why did you bring me back."
With both of Tron's discs sequestered in quarantine while he assessed the extent of Clu's rectification code, Sam could only put in a patch job for now. Temporary as it may be, he still laid down each line of stop-gap coding with more attention than was strictly necessary, rationalizing that it was care rather than avoidance that prompted his sudden thoroughness. "Why shouldn't I have? You saved us - the entire Grid - at the moment when it really counted."
"It appears that some would disagree with you."
Sam's mouth tightened, straining to keep his eyes upon the flickering interfaces and their angry damage reports rather than stray to the evidence at which Tron was currently staring. "There's always going to be someone who complains, it's the same as in the user world, believe me. But someone trying to commit - to do what she tried to do ... " To approach under false pretenses, to draw her disc on an unarmed Tron with the intent to murder ... Sam wondered if he might not be experiencing a little shock himself. "That's an anomaly. A minority. The extreme. I never thought someone would ... I'll need to put some safeguards in until we sort out your discs and give one back to you ... "
"And is the only reason you restored me because you felt you owed me for that moment?"
The patch came online. Tron shifted as a less-glaring seam stitched itself across the damage in a brocade of hexagonal pixels. Sam threw an extraneous test at it to buy himself some time, still too off-center to navigate the verbal minefield he suddenly found himself in. "What's the matter with you? Dad told me stories, about how you fought in the MCP's games. Assuming that's all true, you played the MCP's pet gladiator and never stopped trying to find a way out of there - "
"That was different."
"Yeah?" Sam finally rounded the chair, deliberately interposing himself between Tron's distant gaze and the would-be assassin's remnants. "You were forced to do whatever an evil overlord wanted and fought in games where you derezzed a lot of innocent programs. You looked for the first chance to break free and when it came, you took it - "
Tron's eyes snapped upwards, expression wavering oddly between pained and nettled. "That is the determining variable. I was forced - "
"Just like Clu forced you to do all that again with his reprogramming - "
"Under the MCP I didn't want it, not like I had under Clu - "
"Users call that brainwashing. You didn't really want it, you were just made to think that way - "
Tron abruptly surged out of the chair, stance off-kilter when he was forced to favor his right hip, hunched enough by memories that their slight differences in height were leveled and they were now matched perfectly eye-to-eye. "How far does it go, then? When do I start bearing responsibility for myself? Am I to forever be little more than a mere script, without will or autonomy, shuffled between the users and Clu or the next system uprising?"
When are you going to start taking some responsibility for your own life, Sam? Are you going to forever lay the blame on your father and Encom?
Sam swallowed at the reminder of all too similar words spoken by an all too similar voice, and lashed back through gritted teeth, "Well what do you want, then?"
Doubt and suspicion flickered across the eternally youthful version of his godfather's face. "What do I want? I fight for the - "
"That's what the users directed you to do," Sam cut him off, squaring his shoulders as he stabbed a finger at a point just below the trademark 'T' and emphasized, "What do you want?"
"My directive is my desire, to do the users' bidding - "
"That's not a desire, that's propaganda for your latest master - "
"There is no logic behind your queries! You're asking for something I cannot give you - "
"I want you to stop thinking like a program and tell me what you really want - "
"I am a program! What am I supposed to be if not - "
"You just told me you're no script - no puppet for either the users or Clu! Now you're saying you don't even want anything outside of their will - ?!"
"What I want is for you to leave me alone!"
They both jumped at the declaration, even Tron looking surprised. A storm of emotions chased each other across the program's face - chagrin, anger, embarrassment, indignation - while Sam struggled to find something to say that was a little less awkward than the silence that followed, but managing nothing more intelligent in the end than a sullen, "Wow, it took some button-mashing to finally make you lose your cool."
Tron's brow furrowed before his gaze dropped to his open hands. "My ... my apologies. I did not understand ... what was that supposed to accomplish?"
Sam waved the apology away with an uncomfortable shrug. "Hell if I know. But your user's the one who keeps ragging on me about it, so if you get a clue, drop me a note." When he noticed the glazed look at all the user jargon, he grimaced and relented, "Look, you're not alone, all right? We all have to do this - users, isos ... I guess basics too. It's not something you have to figure out right away - "
- you don't have to make decisions about your entire life right this second, Sam, but -
" - but I'm told that it's something we need to do eventually if we want to move on. To not make the same mistakes over and over again."
Tron frowned pensively down upon the deceased program's dormant ID. "These are Alan-One's words?" he asked as he leaned down to scoop up the disc. "I will meditate upon them."
As the program left, the disc borne as carefully upon his hands as if it were a user relic, Sam wondered if Tron might not beat him to the answer.
Fandom(s): Tron: Legacy
Characters: Sam Flynn, Tron/Rinzler
Rating: T
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Summary:
It wasn't so much that hope died, but that Sam realized it had only been wishful thinking all along.
For Winzler, and the prompt (misinterpreted):
The world ends. Nuclear wasteland, Mad Max style, etc. One day Sam comes out of the computer and everything is gone. The power will run out soon/the arcade is in danger/etc so Sam hurriedly brings a recovering Tron(zler) out to save him.
Tron is OK at first but slowly reverts to Rinzler under the stress of survival - and Sam eventually begins to lose it as well. In the end we’re left with 2 bugfuck crazy survivalist murdermachines roaming the wasteland together.
Notes:
Wow, I can't believe it, this is it, the climax! There is still a denoument to tidy up all the loose ends, and then a far more leisurely epilogue, but otherwise, this is pretty much the crux of everything. I've literally had huge chunks of this sitting waiting for me since THREE MONTHS AGO. I can't believe I'm finally kicking it all out the door.
Thank you thank you thank you Winzler, for being relentless and giving me such rapid feedback.
Part 8
There were currently sixty-eight residents at the hotel - "A lucky number," Xiao Yen had declared - six of whom were too infirm to contribute and four who were deemed too young to risk, leaving them fifty-eight defenders of more or less sound mind and body.
Sam would have been happier weeding another good quarter of them out, but when he had asked if there were any others who wished to join the non-combatants in the infirmary, someone had hollered from the back, "We couldn't do anything 'bout the bombs and we couldn't do anything 'bout the plague. It's about time there was somethin' we could actually do!" The lobby had echoed with affirming cheers from the rest; no one had been willing to be left out.
After that, it was a flurry of preparations, excitement and tension filling the narrow corridors as people struggled to block up potential entry points, posted lookouts, and moved equipment. Sam helped catalyze and organize what he could, but was mildly surprised by how few suggestions he had to offer considering the hushed and seemingly cowed state the population had been when Tron and he had first encountered. In the two weeks since he had arrived, he had only gotten to know roughly a third of the permanent residents to any degree of familiarity; none of them had hinted at the thoroughness with which they had considered their home's defensible points.
"Why'd everyone put up with the gang for this long?" Sam grunted as he helped carry a short stack of stock pots up to the second floor. "I think you can take on an army twice your size by this point."
His current guide - a reed-thin man with skin so black Sam almost expected it to shine blue under the moonlight - shrugged beneath his own burden of saucepans. "Dunno, man, I haven't been here that long. I guess it was easier to just ignore them, before? That guy, kinda head honcho of this place - "
"Alec?"
"Yeah, Alec!" he nodded briskly as he dumped the kitchenware near a corridor window, the clatter making Sam wince. "He gave me a spiel about stayin' outta their way. I thought, s'cool, I'm used to keeping my head down. It's worked all right up 'till now."
"Where is Alec?" Sam prompted as he set his share down with a little more care and stretching out his shoulder.
"Dunno. People've been askin' all night." The man's thick brows rose as he peered at Sam. "Hey, what about your friend, the one with the funny name, like from the game? Heard a lot 'bout him. He'd prob'ly be a lotta help in this - where's he at?"
Sam blinked mid-rotation. "Uh, he's out. There's another - he's dealing with some of the gang that's split off."
The man reared back with a whistle. "Like, all by himself? Aren't you worried?"
Sam swallowed. "Yeah," he managed quietly. "Look, I better get going ... there's still a lotta stuff that needs some extra help."
"Sure, man ... glad he's on our side. Tell him thanks for me, will ya? Good to know he's got our backs."
Sam barely choked out an affirmative before he was taking the steps two at a time back downstairs.
Thirty-plus odd men arrived no more than half an hour later, accompanied by two trucks. They were met by a dozen residents armed with everything from brooms and gardening tools to kitchen implements, clustered solidly at the end of the courtyard before the hotel entrance. Sam was not near enough to catch the exchange - as soon as they had heard the vehicles' approach, he had been running through the corridors spreading the word, dousing lamps and candles and alerting the rear lookouts. By the time he had managed to return to his own post just inside the lobby, at least half of the gang had migrated into the inner courtyard ... and as soon as the hotel vanguard appeared to break and flee back inside, luring the gang after them, a score of second floor windows shattered.
Pandemonium rained down upon the would-be attackers. Bricks, pots, pans - in one notable instance, a single blue-edged plate before the thrower's companion scolded him for wasting good dishware and replaced his next missile with a copper vase - anything with heft that could survive a good thirty foot toss was hurled down upon the exposed heads below.
Sam had to stifle a laugh at the startled cries from outside, all but lost amidst the clang and clatter of heavy projectiles smashing into the courtyard's brickwork. By the time those who were still conscious fled out of range, their numbers had been thinned considerably - but of those that were still mobile, a good portion were headed straight toward the hotel's front door.
Which was when Sam waded in. Along with the rest of the hotel's fittest men, they piled onto the gang members that made it through the entrance. What stragglers slipped past them met the second line of defense - a ring of hard-eyed women wielding shovels, pitchforks, broomsticks, and anything else they had scrounged up with a long reach and a stiff end. One particular amazon who Sam vaguely remembered as having been a volleyball player wielded a baseball bat in a perfect arc, literally taking a man right off his feet.
"Knife ... knife ... gun - but no bullets - " one of the residents tallied as the bodies were searched and the weapons handed off.
Sam straightened with a wince, shaking out a fist as he turned to take stock of the room. "Is anyone hurt badly - " he began before an abrupt roar from outside had them all freezing just as a brilliant flash of headlights glared through the half-open doors. "Look out!" he shouted along with a chorus of panicked warnings, looping his arm around the waist of the nearest resident and diving for the edge of the room.
Sam heard startled shrieks and then an awful crash as one of the trucks ran right into the entranceway, skewing sideways with a horrible crunch of metal and concrete when it caught an edge. Coughing in the sudden cloud of dust and exhaust, Sam tried to usher the closest people into the east corridor. "Into the rooms, into the rooms!" he shouted as the engine revved behind them, and the bright beams of the headlights wavered drunkenly before pulling out, leaving behind a gaping hole as the defenders scattered.
They had prepared for the eventuality of invaders, though. Sam could hear the angry shouts of the rest of the attackers catching up, and he slowed just enough to let them spot him as he ran down the narrow hallway. Sparing a quick glance over his shoulder to check just how many were on his tail, he sucked in a sharp breath and dove through an open door just in time to avoid a scatter of shots from the gun that had been pointed at his back. "Milagro, now, now!" he shouted in the direction of the corridor's end.
"Si!"
The fully-loaded cleaning cart piled high with random equipment sounded like a freight train rumbling through the constricted space, the full weight of three people behind it. There were a few more futile shots, bullets pinging harmlessly off a mini-fridge stacked upon its top, before the gang members finally thought to turn back - but not before two at least were all but run over and trampled.
Sam winced at the cries and meaty thumps, cautiously venturing back out to stand next to a rotund woman whose oiled and tidy hairbun barely reached his shoulder as she ambled along at a much more leisurely pace in the cart's path. "Good job."
The hispanic woman braced her fists upon her ample hips and gave a satisfied sniff. "Gracias, Sir. Now go, go - we take care of the rest."
Sam raised his hands in mock surrender. "Yes, ma'am," he declared promptly, grinning after Milagro's rolling, imperious gait as she headed for the cart and its groaning victims. A former housecleaning maid for one of the other establishments in Fisherman's Wharf, she had taken to the task of the hotel's management like a queen to her throne.
With the way into the lobby now blocked by the cart, Sam began jogging in the other direction, following the corridor to a T-intersection where a side hall ran the length of the eastern wing. Glancing either way, he tried to sift out where the ongoing struggle seemed the thickest - before a thin scream of rage whipped Sam's head around to the rear of the hotel.
"Leave them alone you big - !"
"Eric!" Sam called with a wince, wondering when the boy had picked up the expletive that followed and nearly tripping over his own feet as he darted around the corner.
Guest rooms soon gave way to utility closets and other employee areas, the hall taking a few more sharp jogs to make space for rooms with air compressors and other building maintenance machinery. One of these rear sections had been appropriated for their infirmary where Eric along with the other noncombatants had been squirreled away, but Sam could clearly hear the sounds of angry voices and a struggle echoing down the passages, and an extra spurt of panic sent him around a corner so sharply that his arm went numb catching his shoulder against it.
He was just in time to break Danny's fall when the doctor slammed into him, sending them both to the floor. Wheezing, Sam tried to catch his breath while sorting out which limbs were his and whether the old man was all right.
"Go, go!" Danny asserted with gruff impatience through his stammered concerns. "The boy - Eric!"
Trying to see past the doctor's knobby elbow as they struggled to pick themselves off the floor, Sam caught a glimpse of a stocky, square-shouldered brute just a few feet away, incongruously plucking what looked like an empty hypodermic from his lower back. In snatches past the man's measured stalk down the corridor, he could just barely make out flashes of Eric's wild thatch of dark hair and stubborn, determined expression. With a quick apology to the doctor, Sam prepared to simply fling himself over the old man and hoped he didn't accidentally kick something too painfully -
"Hee-yah!"
The attacker all but stumbled over his own feet backpedaling as Xiao Yen abruptly dove through the open infirmary door, landing between him and the boy. Expression fierce, the petite woman - it would be a stretch to say she even measured up to his nose - stood with fists rigid at her sides, chin tilted upwards imperiously. "Go! Do not bother us anymore!"
"Sh'yeah right, who's gonna make me?" the man sneered, and Sam was just about to call a warning that help was on the way, shoving frantically back to his feet, when Xiao Yen brought her hands up - and he could feel the words palpably stick in his throat.
Light flashed off two kitchen knives as she flipped them around in her grip from where they had been hidden behind her forearms, their edges now bared and threatening. The man's eyes popped wide, but he was given no time to properly appreciate the danger - Xiao Yen flowed smoothly into a complicated form that seemed almost more dance than kata, blades weaving a complicated web as she stepped confidently between blocks, punches, and tendon-stretching kicks. The man inched back with a flinch at each near swish of a knife, and jumped visibly at the occasional, odd, "Hai!" that punctuated an air strike. By the time Xiao Yen had finished with a straight forward-kick that must have had her knee brushing her nose and settled into a long archer's stance, one knife tucked low near her hip and the other raised high like a scorpion's sting over her head, he was pressed against the jamb, face white and sweating. "I know kung fu," Xiao Yen stated, eyes narrowed, and somehow sounding not at all ridiculous in spite of her heavy accent. "Now - go!"
Even Sam jumped when the order was nearly drowned by the sudden clash of her blades ringing against each other, and the would-be antagonist let out an honest-to-god yelp as he fled backwards, barely managing to swerve around Sam and Danny on the way out.
Sam was still gaping when there was a much lighter clatter of the knives dropping to the ground, and Xiao Yen babbled a torrent of relieved-sounding Chinese as she gathered Eric into her arms, the boy hiccuping in his fear and excitement as he babbled his appreciation right back in English. Making his way over in a much more leisurely fashion than he had originally planned, Sam cleared his throat and tentatively noted as he nudged one of the discarded knives with his shoe, "Uh, we could've really used you out there, you know. You could've just fought them all off and saved us the trouble."
"What? No," Xiao Yen laughed, and only now could Sam hear the tremble beneath her voice. Looking more closely, he could see her hands shaking where they clutched her adopted son close. "I am no good! I do not know kung fu."
"You've got to be kidding me," Sam blinked. "That was, like, the most convincing performance of not-knowing kung fu I've ever seen."
Xiao Yen discreetly brushed at her eyes with a knuckle, still grinning the crazed grin of near-death survivors. "No, no ... I did some Tai Chi. With my grandmother, when I was very little. I do not know kung fu at all, nothing. I learn from you - yell a lot. Make myself big. They will run, because they are coward." She set her cheek atop Eric's hair. "I almost cut off my hand. I am not used to holding knifes when doing Tai Chi."
Sam dragged a hand slowly over his face. "God."
By the time the doctor and he had reassured themselves that no one else had managed to find their way into the rear corridors, the fight was already nearing its end. Surprised by the organized effort and larger force, only a handful of stragglers had the werewithal to retreat, taking the trucks with them and leaving behind a host of groaning and unconscious compatriots. When Sam finally worked his way back to the courtyard, people were scattered about with a vague air of astonishment and elation, the first disbelieving laughs beginning to transform into impromptu hugs and cheers when he heard someone calling his name.
"Yeah?" he answered, turning, and bodies shifted out of the way to allow Alec to limp into view. Sam could feel his brows rising at the man's battered state; the ex-foreman's arm was flung over a set of helping shoulders - what looked like a good half his face swelling into one big bruise - and they shuffled awkwardly up to him in a sort of three-legged stumble that even a pair of grade-schoolers could have handily beat. "Hey, whoa, maybe you should sit down - what happened to you?"
"Was payin' the devil's dues," Alec grunted, words smeared by a swollen lip, "I'm lucky he didn't decide t'collect all at once. Look, Sam, where's Tron?"
"What're you talking about?" Sam could feel his brow furrow, shoulders tensing automatically. "C'mon, at least sit down, someone get Danny - "
"Danny's already seen t'me, hadta sneak out from under that ornery fossil's nose. Just shut up and answer the question - where's Tron?"
"He's not here," Sam snapped between the twin irritations of having common-sense-help refused and the continuous goad of his conscience. "What's it to you?"
"You mean, what's it t'you," Alec growled, pushing away from his living crutch to fist his hand in Sam's jacket. "Whaddya mean he's not here?"
If the man wasn't so obviously unsteady on his feet, Sam might have felt more offended, but as it was, he had to cling to his pique to resist holding out a helping hand. "Look, I'm not his babysitter, and Tron's more than capable of taking care of himself - "
"Yeah? How 'bout Rinzler?"
Sam stopped and stared. "What're you talking about - " he pushed through numb lips before Alec gave him a little shake.
"Look, I don't know what games you're playing, and I don't know what sorta crazy science experiment all this was, but I'm not the only one who knows, now," the man hissed, voice pitched low against the loose circle of stares that have now fixed upon them. "I ain't proud of what I did but I'm sure as hell going to - "
It was only the strident voices around him that suddenly made Sam realize he had both hands clutched tight in Alec's collar, all but heaving the man off his feet in spite of their height difference. "What did you do - what did you do!" he shouted desperately, barely giving way to the frantic hands trying to pull him back.
" - made it, Tron!" the foreman gasped, shame obvious even through his pained grimace as he turned his head away. "You said 'we made it, Tron' ... and he - "
Sam staggered, and the hands that had originally tried to hold him back abruptly turned bracing when he felt his knees go weak. "Oh jesus. What've you done ... "
Alec coughed, head hanging, face shadowed, and eventually rasped to the ground, "They beat it outta me. Wanted to know what the hell he was ... I would've come sooner, but I was unconscious when Tron dragged me back, didn't come to till now ... "
"He dragged you ... you told them ... "
"Danny told me it was him. Tron got to me before they - he brought me back. They know ... they know what you said to turn him back to ... to whatever he is when - "
Sam's stomach was rolling over as he shoved his way out of the tight knot of bodies, their confused and concerned faces a pale blur in the background. He was already digging through his pockets with shaking hands for keys before he remembered that he didn't need them, and then it became just a frantic scrabble to kick up the stand and screech out onto the streets, nearly fishtailing at the very first turn when he took it at full throttle.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid ...
It was a constant litany in the back of his mind as he raced across the bridge, eyes watering from the cut of the wind, more afraid of being late than in navigating half-blind. Other half-formed thoughts clawed restlessly through the mental diatribe, such as why Alec had been targeted or how the gang had known to ask the questions they did and why why why now when they were right on the cusp of actually accomplishing something significant -
He was within sight of the radio station when the generators blew.
The initial bloom of fire almost licked the roof's corrugated edge, two stories overhead. Sam nearly skidded out at the wash of warmth across his face and left the motorcycle in a barely-controlled slide, stumbling hard enough to feel an unpleasant twinge in one ankle as he abandoned the still-rumbling bike in order to hit the ground running.
He could make out the bulk of a truck buried amidst the conflagration, drunken silhouettes just beginning to pick themselves up off the ground if he squinted. The flames were reluctantly confined thus far by the sea-damp grounds, but they had plenty of fuel and blazed eagerly atop their metal scaffold. Sam let his fury and desperation carry him to the first body within his fist's reach, and nearly fell over along with his target when the man folded at his blow without so much as a grunt. "Miles! Tron! Where are they!" he shouted over the fire's hungry cackle, and the man shook his head with a dazed noise, eyes rolling. Sam buried both hands in the man's collar, about to give him another shake, when a clamor began to arise near the bonfire - shouts, screams, and above all, a frightened, "We made it, Tron!" - and his head whipped sideways, eyes straining against the contrast of light and shadow.
One slender shape and two heavier forms faced off, so close to the conflagration that their outlines wavered with the heat. There was no need to try and pick out who they were by uncertain profiles alone; Tron - Rinzler - slinked forward like a stalking cat and sprang just as one of the gang members turned to run. By the time Sam had dropped his own catch and sprinted toward them, the prey were already silent and still upon the ground and the program was loping for the station's door.
"Tron! Tron!" Sam called, feeling a different sort of panic begin to lodge uncomfortably beneath his ribs when the dark head didn't so much as turn his way. "Rinzler!" he switched, the name emerging as nearly a croak when he was forced to acknowledge that something might have become irrevocably broken, but then felt confusion slip in amidst the dread when that garnered just as much reaction ... that is, none at all.
It wasn't until Sam finally caught up from behind and nearly had his head taken off for laying a hand upon the program's shoulder that he realized what had happened. Rinzler barely pulled his blow in time, but the honest surprise in the normally flat gaze told him that the program hadn't even heard him coming.
Rinzler must have been practically next to the generators when they blew. Temporarily deafened, he had been immune to commands given by friend and enemies alike.
"Christ," Sam wheezed on half-hysterical laughter, but the reprieve was short-lived. Rinzler might have acknowledged Sam's right to be there simply by dint of letting him remain standing, but the program clearly had other objectives that took priority. Before Sam had even recovered from the dizzying relief of having the catchphrases rendered useless for the moment, Rinzler dove through the station entrance; just a lithe shadow streaking across the dusty floor toward the stairs and then leaping for the bannister, easily vaulting himself over and clearing half the steps in a single bound. Cursing, Sam was forced to round the flight in a more reasonable route, pulling himself up the steps three at a time.
Inside the station, the roar of the fire became a muted background thunder, the moon-striped interior almost cold by comparison; the worst of the bonfire's heat blocked by sheet metal that had yet to warm.
Any questions he might have had about the program's haste was answered when a body was thrown out of the broadcasting room as soon as he cleared the landing. Cracking an elbow painfully upon the jamb as his legs tangled with the feebly groaning man, Sam barely needed a glance to determine that it was not Miles - some of the gang's remnants had apparently fled into the building itself. Spitefully planting a knee into the man's gut as he fought back to his feet, he staggered into the room's proper, squinting, all that had been familiar made strange by the lack of fluorescent lights and the sullen, flickering glow leaking in from outside.
Rinzler stood crouched near the opposite end, oddly expectant, his dancing, spindly shadow like some hellish spider beside him ready to spring. A man lurked near the now-dark servers, one hand held threateningly above the machines with honed metal glinting, eyes wide and clearly white-rimmed even in the imperfect twilight. Sam straightened, stepped to the side of the door, and made sure that the man saw him before he called out boldly, "It's over!"
"Don't think so!" the man rasped, equally bold in his desperation, throwing an unshaven chin in Rinzler's direction as he noted, "He's still over there an' I'm over here, so there's somethin' you need else I'd already be laid out like Jake over there."
"If you do anything stupid, I guarantee you'll be laid out like Jake over there," Sam retorted. "Now come on. If you move away from there, he won't attack - "
"You think I'm dumb enough t' fall for that?" the man sneered. "I've seen him mopping up the others outside. These machines here're the only things keepin' me alive - "
"You wanna be stuck in a mexican stand-off all night?" Sam snapped. "Let's make this easy, all right? He backs up a step, you back off a step."
The man's eyes narrowed, speculative and strained.
Sam dared to hope. "Ready? Rinzler, move," he ordered, raising a hand - but even before he could make a motion for the program to fall back, Rinzler's forward foot was sliding grudgingly away ... and Sam saw the man's eyes gleam with feral satisfaction even as his own breath caught with sudden dread. "Rinzler, don't - !"
"We made it, Tron."
Tron made no sound when the knife slipped beneath his ribs. Instead, the sound came from Sam - as if he had been the one stabbed instead - and then Tron's hands swept out - belatedly, clumsily - and the man reeled back with a pained grunt. Tron staggered, hunched, gasping ...
It seemed as if Sam had merely blinked, and then somewhere, in between, he was standing over the man that had Tron's blood on his hands, and his own knuckles were stinging as he reached down to twist his fingers in the stained, wrinkled collar.
Another blink and his knuckles were throbbing now, and the man was choking and spitting, trying to bring up the knife and Sam let go just long enough to clamp a hand upon that wrist, squeezing and squeezing -
- blink - the man writhed, gurgling as Sam felt heat wash thick and wet over his sleeve -
"Sam ... Flynn ... "
Sam's head jerked up, the whole room seeming to swim around him with the motion, and he suddenly realized he was panting, light-headed, the pins-and-needles of too much oxygen prickling at the tips of his fingers and toes. "Tron - " he croaked, surprised at the hoarse rasp of his voice, and staggered to his feet. "Oh god, Tron, are you - how bad is it?"
Tron had slumped down, half-propped against the makeshift server rack, breaths coming in shallow, fractured sips. As Sam dropped to his knees beside him, the program's eyes lifted, focusing with alarming sluggishness. "... don't ... user stats ... "
Sam choked down a bubble of laughter, afraid of what it would emerge as instead, taking only a single glance down - oh, christ - before he pressed the heel of his hand - ignore the red already on it - against the seeping wound. "Shhh," he murmured as Tron made a small, pained sound, and reached up to stroke back sweat-soaked hair before trying to undo his shirt one-handed. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know it hurts, but we have to slow the bleeding - " Frustrated by his own trembling, he simply yanked at the fabric when a button proved stubborn, ripping the entire row of them off.
Tron said nothing, merely filled the space between them with those too-fragile gasps, barely wincing this time when Sam finally wadded fabric over the tear and tied it tight with the shirt's sleeves. So Sam talked for them both as he worked, babbled mindlessly about how Danny will fix him up and Xiao Yen will spoil him with her cooking, and Eric will tell him all about his adventures that day and Sam will wait on him hand and foot though he'll probably draw the line at sponge baths -
He stuttered to a halt when there was a pressure upon his wrist, then froze as he glanced down and saw the USB key, caught between the program's thumb and the vulnerable skin above Sam's palm. "Save Quorra," Tron breathed, barely audible. "Save the Grid."
It might have been less painful if someone had simply reached into Sam's chest and wrenched the still-beating heart from it.
"They can wait," he babbled, "they'll wait - we'd all wait for you, Tron. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I should've seen it sooner and sto - Tron? Tron, are you listening? Tron, answer me!"
Sam's throat was so dry he couldn't swallow as he tried to find the pulse with blood-tacky fingers, and when Tron's head lolled limply and there was no response, he called desperately, "Rinzler! Release Rinzler, release Rinzler, release - answer me, you son-of-a - !"
He sobbed with relief when there was the faintest jerk of the head - "Tron?" - then slipped into hysterical laughter as he realized it was the ghost of the alter ego's signature headtilt. "Rinzler, oh god, Rinzler ... stay breathing," he begged with breaking voice as he pressed their foreheads together. "Stay alive, stay breathing; acknowledge, acknowledge - god, please, acknowledge ... "
Tron's fingers stretched open and the disc dropped from his grasp. Its lights flickered, went out, and though it bit edgewise at the ground, it did not rebound. The ID rolled waveringly past a puddle of loose voxels - equally dim and lifeless - before hitting the windows' low sill and finally tipping over ... and Sam released a shaking breath, wondering fleetingly if programs experienced shock as he stepped gingerly across the room, everything over almost before he had made any sense of it at all. "Jesus. Tron? Are you all right?"
The dull look upon the program's face did not waver, but at least his head rose in acknowledgment of sorts. Sam took the opportunity to slide around the remains of what had once been a load balancing operator - a winsome female with slanted, sloe eyes - and pushed tentatively upon Tron's shoulder. "C'mon, snap out of it. Give me a status update."
Tron moved stiffly to the seat Sam directed him to, inelegant only in part due to the livid cut gleaming upon his hip. He did not respond at first, gaze sliding back to the crumbled program remnants, and only spoke when Sam rested a hand upon the empty port between his shoulderblades. "Why did you bring me back."
With both of Tron's discs sequestered in quarantine while he assessed the extent of Clu's rectification code, Sam could only put in a patch job for now. Temporary as it may be, he still laid down each line of stop-gap coding with more attention than was strictly necessary, rationalizing that it was care rather than avoidance that prompted his sudden thoroughness. "Why shouldn't I have? You saved us - the entire Grid - at the moment when it really counted."
"It appears that some would disagree with you."
Sam's mouth tightened, straining to keep his eyes upon the flickering interfaces and their angry damage reports rather than stray to the evidence at which Tron was currently staring. "There's always going to be someone who complains, it's the same as in the user world, believe me. But someone trying to commit - to do what she tried to do ... " To approach under false pretenses, to draw her disc on an unarmed Tron with the intent to murder ... Sam wondered if he might not be experiencing a little shock himself. "That's an anomaly. A minority. The extreme. I never thought someone would ... I'll need to put some safeguards in until we sort out your discs and give one back to you ... "
"And is the only reason you restored me because you felt you owed me for that moment?"
The patch came online. Tron shifted as a less-glaring seam stitched itself across the damage in a brocade of hexagonal pixels. Sam threw an extraneous test at it to buy himself some time, still too off-center to navigate the verbal minefield he suddenly found himself in. "What's the matter with you? Dad told me stories, about how you fought in the MCP's games. Assuming that's all true, you played the MCP's pet gladiator and never stopped trying to find a way out of there - "
"That was different."
"Yeah?" Sam finally rounded the chair, deliberately interposing himself between Tron's distant gaze and the would-be assassin's remnants. "You were forced to do whatever an evil overlord wanted and fought in games where you derezzed a lot of innocent programs. You looked for the first chance to break free and when it came, you took it - "
Tron's eyes snapped upwards, expression wavering oddly between pained and nettled. "That is the determining variable. I was forced - "
"Just like Clu forced you to do all that again with his reprogramming - "
"Under the MCP I didn't want it, not like I had under Clu - "
"Users call that brainwashing. You didn't really want it, you were just made to think that way - "
Tron abruptly surged out of the chair, stance off-kilter when he was forced to favor his right hip, hunched enough by memories that their slight differences in height were leveled and they were now matched perfectly eye-to-eye. "How far does it go, then? When do I start bearing responsibility for myself? Am I to forever be little more than a mere script, without will or autonomy, shuffled between the users and Clu or the next system uprising?"
When are you going to start taking some responsibility for your own life, Sam? Are you going to forever lay the blame on your father and Encom?
Sam swallowed at the reminder of all too similar words spoken by an all too similar voice, and lashed back through gritted teeth, "Well what do you want, then?"
Doubt and suspicion flickered across the eternally youthful version of his godfather's face. "What do I want? I fight for the - "
"That's what the users directed you to do," Sam cut him off, squaring his shoulders as he stabbed a finger at a point just below the trademark 'T' and emphasized, "What do you want?"
"My directive is my desire, to do the users' bidding - "
"That's not a desire, that's propaganda for your latest master - "
"There is no logic behind your queries! You're asking for something I cannot give you - "
"I want you to stop thinking like a program and tell me what you really want - "
"I am a program! What am I supposed to be if not - "
"You just told me you're no script - no puppet for either the users or Clu! Now you're saying you don't even want anything outside of their will - ?!"
"What I want is for you to leave me alone!"
They both jumped at the declaration, even Tron looking surprised. A storm of emotions chased each other across the program's face - chagrin, anger, embarrassment, indignation - while Sam struggled to find something to say that was a little less awkward than the silence that followed, but managing nothing more intelligent in the end than a sullen, "Wow, it took some button-mashing to finally make you lose your cool."
Tron's brow furrowed before his gaze dropped to his open hands. "My ... my apologies. I did not understand ... what was that supposed to accomplish?"
Sam waved the apology away with an uncomfortable shrug. "Hell if I know. But your user's the one who keeps ragging on me about it, so if you get a clue, drop me a note." When he noticed the glazed look at all the user jargon, he grimaced and relented, "Look, you're not alone, all right? We all have to do this - users, isos ... I guess basics too. It's not something you have to figure out right away - "
- you don't have to make decisions about your entire life right this second, Sam, but -
" - but I'm told that it's something we need to do eventually if we want to move on. To not make the same mistakes over and over again."
Tron frowned pensively down upon the deceased program's dormant ID. "These are Alan-One's words?" he asked as he leaned down to scoop up the disc. "I will meditate upon them."
As the program left, the disc borne as carefully upon his hands as if it were a user relic, Sam wondered if Tron might not beat him to the answer.