fic: We Are Pilots [6/13]
Title: We Are Pilots [6/13]
Fandom: TRON & Legacy
Characters/Pairing: Sam Flynn/Tron; Quorra, OCs
Rating: T
Word Count: 2050
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: There is no one right way to change the world. When Sam and Quorra run into a dead end she suggests returning to the Grid to find the answers. With her monitoring from the outside Sam goes in not knowing what he’ll find or if he’ll succeed. What he discovers is a Grid that needs his help to rebuild…and Tron, who needs his help to be himself again.
Author’s Note: Written for the prompt “Sam/Tron. Post movie. Something dealing with Tron's inevitable guilt. Sam trying to make him see that he can't hold himself responsible for anything he did under the influence of all that corrupted code.” at tronkinkmeme.
FYI - please read the updates as I go; the edits are pretty extensive and I changed a lot of minor details to cover up plot holes and make for a smoother story. You’ve been warned.
Sam double-checks his Light Disc for Flynn's old plans for the Grid before locking it into place on his back. He shuts down the display and turns to leave but hesitates when he sees his reflection on the darkened surface. He looks older than his twenty-eight years, with the eyes of a tired man; he shivers, grabs the leather jacket, and quickly leaves the room.
He stops just past the doorway at the sight of Tron standing by the books again, flipping through a particularly hefty tome mechanically. This time there aren't any cracks in his blank face and the barrier between the program and the rest of the world seems stronger than ever.
"Hey."
Tron's eyes flick up to him. They're guarded and wary, an eerie shade of blue-gray. Sam ends up looking down at his feet, then around the room to the transparent wall. The sky above TRON City is clear, giving him an unobstructed view of the portal. He wonders what his father felt as he watched the portal close, trapping him inside and locking him out of his life on the other side.
"What are you going to do?" Tron asks.
Sam doesn’t have an answer. He feels lost again, drifting in limbo without sail or rudder, at the mercy of the currents. He was so sure he’d find something here. Two hours later he has a head full of his father’s words and memories, and no answer.
How do you change the world when you don’t even know what to look for or where to start?
"Don't know."
He gives Tron a wide berth as he walks to the lift. Tron shuts the book and pushes it back into the shelf, follows him to the platform. The panels dim as Sam steps on it, throwing the house into darkness.
Sam watches Tron out of the corner of his eye as the lift sinks down to the ground level. The program is standing absolutely still, arms hanging stiffly at his side, face tilted down. Like before he’s lost in thought but Sam can see the heavy weight of the newfound knowledge in the furrowed eyebrows, the thin line of his mouth, and the slight slump of his shoulders, Sam wonders if he changed the same way.
The light runner and the long seemingly endless tunnel come into view. Tron steps off the lift before it reaches the floor and makes a beeline for the vehicle but Sam doesn’t move, not yet.
“Hey.”
Tron looks up and the hooded gaze seems to look right through him. Sam takes a deep breath, ignoring the hammering in his chest, and gives Tron a shrug and a smile.
“Guess I’ll do what Users do - make it up as I go.”
He catches a glimpse of Tron’s mouth curving upward as he slides into the light runner. Sam feels something swell up in his chest as he walks to the blue-lit vehicle. However fleeting the few seconds are it feels like for once everything’s going to be okay.
* * *
“I’m sorry. About Yori. I…sorry.”
Tron doesn’t say anything for so long that Sam wonders if he should’ve kept his mouth shut, so he starts when the program quietly says, “Thank you.”
It’s been well over an hour since they left the safe house and that’s all they can say. They came all this way - fought past programs, crashed a stolen light jet, had an embarrassing and difficult heart to heart -only to find the answers they weren’t looking for.
That’s the gist of it, isn’t it? Sam came here looking for something Flynn left behind, some secret file or clues mapping out an idea of what Quorra’s potential could be short of putting her under the microscope. He found none of it in the hundreds of video files that were left behind and it makes him wonder what Flynn talked about that night months ago.
Bio-digital jazz, he said. A gift to the world. But the recordings said differently, the haggard face and weary voice shifting focus from confusion and despair over Clu’s betrayal and the Purge to sadness and acceptance of his situation. His dreams for the Grid and the ISOs were nothing, a later file said. Just dust in the wind. None of it mattered compared to what Flynn lost.
“None of it matters anymore. The Grid, the ISOs, expanding the digital frontier? It means nothing. It was you all along, Sam. You’re what matters. I kept chasing that impossible dream and I left you behind. I’m so sorry.”
Sam runs his hand over the leather jacket in his lap; his heart pounds in his chest every time he hears his father’s voice in his head. He kept talking like Sam’ll find his way here one day and watch them. A fool’s dream, Flynn had said, because he didn’t want Sam to come here and lose touch with the real world.
Too late now, Dad, Sam thinks as he stares out the window at the barren Outlands. Too late for everything.
He wishes they had more time, wishes they met under different circumstances. Hell, finding him in Costa Rica would’ve been better; they could’ve had more than stilted conversations about Sam dropping out of CalTech and fixing up the old Ducati.
It’ll be nice if he didn’t have to wish so much.
One clear thing does emerge from the juxtaposition of emptiness and a chaotic whirlwind in his head. If he and Quorra are going to change the world they’re doing it on their own terms. He’s not trapping her in a lab, to be poked and prodded by researchers trying to understand her bio-digital makeup.
A rare bird. The last ISO. Fresh-faced and so jubilant about life. There’s just no way Sam can do that to her.
So they make their own way. Make it up as they go. They can do that.
The tension starts falling away as he repeats his thoughts to himself. Sam leans against the back of his seat and sighs, tilting his head to look at the Outlands. He has no idea where they are in relation to Flynn’s house and TRON City; he just knows this isn’t the same route they took. He can’t blame Tron for wanting to avoid coming across more ghost colonies.
Tron. What about him?
“How are you…” Sam hesitates, not sure what to say. Now that he thinks about it the longer he’s around Tron the less sure he is about his words, how he should behave, how to approach the program about, well, everything. He’d really like to not sound tongue-tied and stupid when talking to him but that keeps not being an option.
Even now Tron’s giving him a curious look. Sam presses his lips together for a moment and then tries again.
“How are you holding up? You didn’t look so-you left pretty quick after the sixth video.”
“I thought it was better if you watched the videos by yourself,” Tron says. He’s staring straight ahead, hands gripping the light runner’s controls tightly.
Sam knows what he saw, what he heard. In almost every video his father said something about Tron, something about how he should’ve done something at that moment of betrayal.
”I shouldn’t have run. I shouldn’t have left you behind. If I stopped him right there I could’ve ended all of this before it even began. But I ran. I left you to die. What kind of friend am I?”
“But how are you holding up?”
He flicks his eyes to Tron again and this time the program is smiling. It’s always a small one, a slight bittersweet curve that keeps leaving Sam even more lightheaded and confused than before. Tron’s looking at him, too, and there’s a warm cast in his gray eyes.
“I’m okay,” he says and it’s the first time Sam truly believes him. “I just need to…process the information. It was more than I expected.”
Sam huffs a laugh and sits back, wonders if there’s enough room for him to prop his feet up on the dashboard. “Yeah, I know. Wasn’t at all what I was looking for, but…”
He pauses as his gaze drops down to the leather jacket and then up to the distant flickering star in the sky.
His dreams about that night six months ago, the nightmares and wishes about the way things could’ve turned out, are explainable. Excusable. The restlessness, the feeling that he doesn’t feel quite right in his own skin, the reason why Dillinger and senior members of ENCOM said those things about him, and the near-obsessive drive to see his father’s decades-old dream come true are gone or fading away.
Maybe his father just got so caught up in the dizzying shock of their reunion that he started talking about all the things he had planned for this place like they were tangible again and within reach. Maybe Sam had been so blinded by his lifelong search that he forgot it wasn’t up to him to change the world the way Flynn saw it, that seeing those dreams become reality wouldn’t bring him closer to a father who wasn’t here anymore.
Flynn’s visions of a digital future were almost as unreachable as perfection. Changing the world the way his father saw it was never in Sam’s cards. By the last video Flynn had finally surrendered the dreams that took him from what really mattered and Sam is just now realizing that what mattered was in front of him all along - Quorra and ENCOM, and the Grid.
The vice grip around his mind isn’t there anymore. Sam can finally let go.
“I found what I need. What I needed. Have to change a lot of things but that’s fine, I can deal with that. Q and I can deal with that.”
“Quorra.” Tron says her name slowly and in a way that reminds Sam of the baffled kids she threw their Frisbee back to at Griffith Park last week. “How is she?”
Sam can’t remember him ever asking about her. “She’s fine. Took her a while to get used to my world, though.” He shakes his head and laughs at the memories. “She’s doing great, actually. Really loves it there. Picked things up so fast it’s almost…inhuman. She’s working for ENCOM now, writing software, one-upping Dillinger, helping relaunch Dad’s old games.”
“Does she miss the Grid?”
He looks at Tron, surprised by the blunt question. Even then he can hear the reluctance in the program’s voice, the guilt still leaking in. We need to work on that. “She-she does, but not enough to come back. Not yet. She said there’s nothing for her here.”
Nothing but a broken Grid that desperately needs the guidance of a User. That’s one weight that’s moved from Flynn’s shoulders to Sam’s, one that he’s willing to take up.
“I see,” Tron says in a careful, neutral tone.
Silence settles back into the light runner as they head towards a network of canyons. Sam can’t see the city but the faint glow of its lights are unmistakable. Clouds have drifted into the sky, obscuring the portal’s light. Then they plunge into the canyons and all he sees are the vehicle's blue circuits lighting up their path.
“When we rebuild the Grid,” Tron suddenly says, “there should be something she can come back to.”
Sam looks at him in surprise. Tron smiles back, then looks up, frowns, and abruptly changes course. The light runner scrapes by the steep rock wall on its right as it emerges at a fork and careens to the left. The passageway narrows considerably, the sides of the canyon curving towards each other and obscuring the sky.
“What the hell was that?” Sam demands as he scrambles back into his seat.
The light runner’s lights go out as it speeds along the curving path; they’re now traveling in near darkness, the blurring canyon walls dimly lit by their circuitry. Sam curls his fingers around the edge of his seat and barely manages not to slide forward or bang his head against the hatch as Tron makes a sharp turn and the vehicle’s wheels bump against stone. All the while the program keeps looking up like there’s something overhead.
“We’re being followed.”
5 || 7
Fandom: TRON & Legacy
Characters/Pairing: Sam Flynn/Tron; Quorra, OCs
Rating: T
Word Count: 2050
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: There is no one right way to change the world. When Sam and Quorra run into a dead end she suggests returning to the Grid to find the answers. With her monitoring from the outside Sam goes in not knowing what he’ll find or if he’ll succeed. What he discovers is a Grid that needs his help to rebuild…and Tron, who needs his help to be himself again.
Author’s Note: Written for the prompt “Sam/Tron. Post movie. Something dealing with Tron's inevitable guilt. Sam trying to make him see that he can't hold himself responsible for anything he did under the influence of all that corrupted code.” at tronkinkmeme.
FYI - please read the updates as I go; the edits are pretty extensive and I changed a lot of minor details to cover up plot holes and make for a smoother story. You’ve been warned.
Sam double-checks his Light Disc for Flynn's old plans for the Grid before locking it into place on his back. He shuts down the display and turns to leave but hesitates when he sees his reflection on the darkened surface. He looks older than his twenty-eight years, with the eyes of a tired man; he shivers, grabs the leather jacket, and quickly leaves the room.
He stops just past the doorway at the sight of Tron standing by the books again, flipping through a particularly hefty tome mechanically. This time there aren't any cracks in his blank face and the barrier between the program and the rest of the world seems stronger than ever.
"Hey."
Tron's eyes flick up to him. They're guarded and wary, an eerie shade of blue-gray. Sam ends up looking down at his feet, then around the room to the transparent wall. The sky above TRON City is clear, giving him an unobstructed view of the portal. He wonders what his father felt as he watched the portal close, trapping him inside and locking him out of his life on the other side.
"What are you going to do?" Tron asks.
Sam doesn’t have an answer. He feels lost again, drifting in limbo without sail or rudder, at the mercy of the currents. He was so sure he’d find something here. Two hours later he has a head full of his father’s words and memories, and no answer.
How do you change the world when you don’t even know what to look for or where to start?
"Don't know."
He gives Tron a wide berth as he walks to the lift. Tron shuts the book and pushes it back into the shelf, follows him to the platform. The panels dim as Sam steps on it, throwing the house into darkness.
Sam watches Tron out of the corner of his eye as the lift sinks down to the ground level. The program is standing absolutely still, arms hanging stiffly at his side, face tilted down. Like before he’s lost in thought but Sam can see the heavy weight of the newfound knowledge in the furrowed eyebrows, the thin line of his mouth, and the slight slump of his shoulders, Sam wonders if he changed the same way.
The light runner and the long seemingly endless tunnel come into view. Tron steps off the lift before it reaches the floor and makes a beeline for the vehicle but Sam doesn’t move, not yet.
“Hey.”
Tron looks up and the hooded gaze seems to look right through him. Sam takes a deep breath, ignoring the hammering in his chest, and gives Tron a shrug and a smile.
“Guess I’ll do what Users do - make it up as I go.”
He catches a glimpse of Tron’s mouth curving upward as he slides into the light runner. Sam feels something swell up in his chest as he walks to the blue-lit vehicle. However fleeting the few seconds are it feels like for once everything’s going to be okay.
* * *
“I’m sorry. About Yori. I…sorry.”
Tron doesn’t say anything for so long that Sam wonders if he should’ve kept his mouth shut, so he starts when the program quietly says, “Thank you.”
It’s been well over an hour since they left the safe house and that’s all they can say. They came all this way - fought past programs, crashed a stolen light jet, had an embarrassing and difficult heart to heart -only to find the answers they weren’t looking for.
That’s the gist of it, isn’t it? Sam came here looking for something Flynn left behind, some secret file or clues mapping out an idea of what Quorra’s potential could be short of putting her under the microscope. He found none of it in the hundreds of video files that were left behind and it makes him wonder what Flynn talked about that night months ago.
Bio-digital jazz, he said. A gift to the world. But the recordings said differently, the haggard face and weary voice shifting focus from confusion and despair over Clu’s betrayal and the Purge to sadness and acceptance of his situation. His dreams for the Grid and the ISOs were nothing, a later file said. Just dust in the wind. None of it mattered compared to what Flynn lost.
“None of it matters anymore. The Grid, the ISOs, expanding the digital frontier? It means nothing. It was you all along, Sam. You’re what matters. I kept chasing that impossible dream and I left you behind. I’m so sorry.”
Sam runs his hand over the leather jacket in his lap; his heart pounds in his chest every time he hears his father’s voice in his head. He kept talking like Sam’ll find his way here one day and watch them. A fool’s dream, Flynn had said, because he didn’t want Sam to come here and lose touch with the real world.
Too late now, Dad, Sam thinks as he stares out the window at the barren Outlands. Too late for everything.
He wishes they had more time, wishes they met under different circumstances. Hell, finding him in Costa Rica would’ve been better; they could’ve had more than stilted conversations about Sam dropping out of CalTech and fixing up the old Ducati.
It’ll be nice if he didn’t have to wish so much.
One clear thing does emerge from the juxtaposition of emptiness and a chaotic whirlwind in his head. If he and Quorra are going to change the world they’re doing it on their own terms. He’s not trapping her in a lab, to be poked and prodded by researchers trying to understand her bio-digital makeup.
A rare bird. The last ISO. Fresh-faced and so jubilant about life. There’s just no way Sam can do that to her.
So they make their own way. Make it up as they go. They can do that.
The tension starts falling away as he repeats his thoughts to himself. Sam leans against the back of his seat and sighs, tilting his head to look at the Outlands. He has no idea where they are in relation to Flynn’s house and TRON City; he just knows this isn’t the same route they took. He can’t blame Tron for wanting to avoid coming across more ghost colonies.
Tron. What about him?
“How are you…” Sam hesitates, not sure what to say. Now that he thinks about it the longer he’s around Tron the less sure he is about his words, how he should behave, how to approach the program about, well, everything. He’d really like to not sound tongue-tied and stupid when talking to him but that keeps not being an option.
Even now Tron’s giving him a curious look. Sam presses his lips together for a moment and then tries again.
“How are you holding up? You didn’t look so-you left pretty quick after the sixth video.”
“I thought it was better if you watched the videos by yourself,” Tron says. He’s staring straight ahead, hands gripping the light runner’s controls tightly.
Sam knows what he saw, what he heard. In almost every video his father said something about Tron, something about how he should’ve done something at that moment of betrayal.
”I shouldn’t have run. I shouldn’t have left you behind. If I stopped him right there I could’ve ended all of this before it even began. But I ran. I left you to die. What kind of friend am I?”
“But how are you holding up?”
He flicks his eyes to Tron again and this time the program is smiling. It’s always a small one, a slight bittersweet curve that keeps leaving Sam even more lightheaded and confused than before. Tron’s looking at him, too, and there’s a warm cast in his gray eyes.
“I’m okay,” he says and it’s the first time Sam truly believes him. “I just need to…process the information. It was more than I expected.”
Sam huffs a laugh and sits back, wonders if there’s enough room for him to prop his feet up on the dashboard. “Yeah, I know. Wasn’t at all what I was looking for, but…”
He pauses as his gaze drops down to the leather jacket and then up to the distant flickering star in the sky.
His dreams about that night six months ago, the nightmares and wishes about the way things could’ve turned out, are explainable. Excusable. The restlessness, the feeling that he doesn’t feel quite right in his own skin, the reason why Dillinger and senior members of ENCOM said those things about him, and the near-obsessive drive to see his father’s decades-old dream come true are gone or fading away.
Maybe his father just got so caught up in the dizzying shock of their reunion that he started talking about all the things he had planned for this place like they were tangible again and within reach. Maybe Sam had been so blinded by his lifelong search that he forgot it wasn’t up to him to change the world the way Flynn saw it, that seeing those dreams become reality wouldn’t bring him closer to a father who wasn’t here anymore.
Flynn’s visions of a digital future were almost as unreachable as perfection. Changing the world the way his father saw it was never in Sam’s cards. By the last video Flynn had finally surrendered the dreams that took him from what really mattered and Sam is just now realizing that what mattered was in front of him all along - Quorra and ENCOM, and the Grid.
The vice grip around his mind isn’t there anymore. Sam can finally let go.
“I found what I need. What I needed. Have to change a lot of things but that’s fine, I can deal with that. Q and I can deal with that.”
“Quorra.” Tron says her name slowly and in a way that reminds Sam of the baffled kids she threw their Frisbee back to at Griffith Park last week. “How is she?”
Sam can’t remember him ever asking about her. “She’s fine. Took her a while to get used to my world, though.” He shakes his head and laughs at the memories. “She’s doing great, actually. Really loves it there. Picked things up so fast it’s almost…inhuman. She’s working for ENCOM now, writing software, one-upping Dillinger, helping relaunch Dad’s old games.”
“Does she miss the Grid?”
He looks at Tron, surprised by the blunt question. Even then he can hear the reluctance in the program’s voice, the guilt still leaking in. We need to work on that. “She-she does, but not enough to come back. Not yet. She said there’s nothing for her here.”
Nothing but a broken Grid that desperately needs the guidance of a User. That’s one weight that’s moved from Flynn’s shoulders to Sam’s, one that he’s willing to take up.
“I see,” Tron says in a careful, neutral tone.
Silence settles back into the light runner as they head towards a network of canyons. Sam can’t see the city but the faint glow of its lights are unmistakable. Clouds have drifted into the sky, obscuring the portal’s light. Then they plunge into the canyons and all he sees are the vehicle's blue circuits lighting up their path.
“When we rebuild the Grid,” Tron suddenly says, “there should be something she can come back to.”
Sam looks at him in surprise. Tron smiles back, then looks up, frowns, and abruptly changes course. The light runner scrapes by the steep rock wall on its right as it emerges at a fork and careens to the left. The passageway narrows considerably, the sides of the canyon curving towards each other and obscuring the sky.
“What the hell was that?” Sam demands as he scrambles back into his seat.
The light runner’s lights go out as it speeds along the curving path; they’re now traveling in near darkness, the blurring canyon walls dimly lit by their circuitry. Sam curls his fingers around the edge of his seat and barely manages not to slide forward or bang his head against the hatch as Tron makes a sharp turn and the vehicle’s wheels bump against stone. All the while the program keeps looking up like there’s something overhead.
“We’re being followed.”
5 || 7