Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If there was one thing Lucy despised, it was routine. And yet, that was all her life consisted of – wake up, eat breakfast, work, go home, dinner, television, sleep. Every day, she followed the same set of instructions, living her life exactly as everyone else did. She hated every second of it, not that she would let anyone know that.

However, she understood that it was important to stick to the routine. In a place as organized as Bricksburg, even the tiniest deviation stood out. These deviations could be picked up by any one of the thousands of security cameras in the city. Once someone suspected that she was abnormal, they would watch her more closely, and things would all go downhill from there.

It was important that she avoided capture. She could do things that the average person couldn't ever imagine. If the President got his hands on her, she didn't even want to know what would happen.

So, instead, she flew under the radar. She followed the instructions like all the ordinary folk, even when it gave her the heeby-jeebies. She put on a balancing act at work, doing well enough to keep her job but not doing so well as to give away her powers.

She also watched the news regularly, but instead of blindly believing everything presented to her, she read between the lines. So, everyone who didn't obey the instructions on Taco Tuesday would be "put to sleep"? More like "disappeared without a trace". Though the President always worked hard to put on a kindly, chipper face for his citizens, she knew there had to be a dark side to him. He controlled the entire Lego universe, after all, and one never acquired that level of power and control without a sinister agenda.

So, she kept her head down. Though she couldn't resist the urge to dye her hair dyed black and maintain it that way, she abstained from putting in any color highlights. It would simply stand out too much. At any rate, her usual outfit had all the color she needed. Her "Official Safety Orange" construction suit and bright red hardhat perfectly matched the rest of her coworkers. She fell into step with them as they all surged out of the construction site at the end of the day.

Most of them talked animatedly about their plans for tonight. She didn't try to join in on the conversation. If she had her way, she would just go home, try to decode what Taco Tuesday really was from the evening news, and go to sleep. But, either fortunately or unfortunately, fate had a different plan in store for her.

A nagging sense of worry sent up a red flag in her mind, and she quickly checked her pockets. Oh. She was missing her instructions. Not that she personally cared if the lost that gosh-forsaken book, but most Bricksburg citizens didn't go anywhere without their precious little instruction booklet somewhere on their body.

She must have left it somewhere back at the construction site. So, after carefully checking around her, she quietly slipped out of the ranks of rowdy workers and dashed back into the deeper recesses of the work zone.

She carefully climbed to the top of a small mound of loose bricks and quickly scanned the nearby area. Her instructions were nowhere in sight. She sighed in disappointment and weighed her options. Which was more suspicious – going home without her booklet, or digging around the construction site after work was over for the day?

Before she could come to a concrete decision, a pile of bricks shifted in the corner of her eye, sending a few loose pieces tumbling to the bottom of their heap. Did she hear a 'whoosh' sound?

Not half a moment later, a dark figure slowly crept out from behind one of the nearby support beams. The gray of their clothing did a surprisingly good job of blending in with the other drab colors of the area. If she hadn't been looking almost directly at them, she never would have seen them move. They had a hood up, preventing her from seeing their face or even determining their gender.

They carried a small, handheld device in their grasp, holding it a little ways away from their body as they swept it back and forth. A detector of some kind? What were they looking for?

Then, she finally put the pieces together. This person was clearly doing something illegal. Were they a part of the resistance?

She almost gave a wild laugh of joy right then and there. After an entire lifetime of flying under the radar and keeping her ear to the ground, she'd finally found the resistance. Her days of following the instructions were over at last. All she needed to do was talk with the person in front of her and convince the resistance to take her aboard. It should be incredibly easy – one demonstration of her powers, and they would be begging her to join their ranks.

"Hey, sir!" she called out as she began descending her heap of bricks. Naturally, she was a bit too distracted to watch where she was putting her feet. A single heart-wrenching misstep sent her tumbling head-over-heels down the pile.

The figure looked up from their device. "Miss?"

She gave a yelp and braced for impact with the ground. Fortunately, she didn't do a face-plant on the jagged construction rubble. Unfortunately, she instead plunged into an ominous, gaping hole in the ground.

Fortunately again, she managed to grab onto the edge of the pit before she fell through. Unfortunately again, she only had a moment to catch her breath before her handheld broke off and she began falling once more.

"Miss!" she heard the figure, a man, call out before she lost all sight of the surface world.

Her nigh-endless fall was confusing, surreal, and in general, quite painful. Who the heck would build this kind of tunnel, anyways? Why not put in a nice stairway, or maybe an elevator? Nothing she encountered, or more accurately, crashed into, made so much as a bit of sense. As she bounced across a forest of sharp and pointy objects, hissing in pain, she cursed the person who thought it was a good idea to bury all these weapons pointing upwards. She lost her hardhat somewhere in the fall, too, which didn't make her rough ride any less painful.

Eventually, as was inevitable, she landed. She wasn't worried about dying – no one ever died by falling. It sure as heck hurt, though, especially when her hardhat decided to punctuate her misfortune by nailing her in the back of the head.

"Ugh," she grumbled as she picked herself off the ground. The blearily wondered how far down she was. She also wondered where her hardhat had rolled off to and how there was somehow enough light to see by at this depth below the surface. Then, all of those trivial wonders were banished from her head when she took the time to see what was directly in front of her.

It was a piece of some kind. However, as soon as she tried to focus her brick-sight on it, she could tell something was wrong. It had no name or serial number, and she couldn't for the life of her figure out how it was supposed to connect with any other pieces. In fact, this object didn't appear to be made of bricks at all. It was also surrounded by a clear, gem-like material that wasn't made out of bricks either. It did glow, though, which was what gave her the light to see by.

All in all, something about this piece was…special.

Was this was that resistance member had been looking for? If so, it was probably very important. It might even be crucial in bringing an end to the President's regime. And she had found it through sheer luck!

No, maybe luck wasn't involved. What were the chances that a person with her rare abilities and talents would stumble across such an important object? This wasn't luck. This was destiny. Her destiny.

She dashed forward, intending on tearing the piece away from its…whatever that clear stuff was. However, as soon as her hand so much as grazed its surface, a sharp jerk yanked her out of consciousness. Her entire world slammed straight into blackness without another thought.

When she came to, she was extremely groggy, like she'd fallen asleep on the couch while watching the evening news. For a moment, that's what she thought had happened. Then, she tried to reach up and rub her eyes, and she realized that both her hands were chained to her seat. Everything came back in a rush after that.

"You're awake?"

Her eyes flew open, but she nearly shut them again against the glare. Someone was shining a flashlight in her face.

"Oh, sorry. Standard procedure."

The man lowered his flashlight, allowing her to get a good look at his face. Not that there was much to look at - his face was incredibly average. Literally, it consisted of only two dots and a line.

The man gestured to a badge on the front of his black jacket. "Officer Brickowski of the Lego Police Department," he began. Unfortunately, the captive refused to let him get any farther than that.

"If you think I'm going to tell you anything," she hissed, "I hope you're ready to be disappointed."

His smile faltered. "You know, it's against the instructions to be rude at police officers."

She rolled her eyes. "Give me a break." As if she even cared about following the instructions anymore. She was clearly in some sort of interrogation situation. The police must have picked her up at the bottom of that pit. "You already know I'm not normal. I'm not one of the President's sheep."

At her harsh tone, he gave a disappointed frown. "I just want to talk."

Her response was to shoot him with a venomous glare. "I'm not going to talk."

He let out a small sigh, turning off his flashlight and setting it on the table. "I wanted to get you up to speed on things. Do you know what happened to you after you touched the Piece of Resistance?"

So, the piece did have a connection to the resistance after all. Still, she pressed her lips into a flat line. "I didn't touch any piece," she asserted. If this man was fishing for information from her, then she was going to make it as inaccurate as possible. "The fall knocked me out cold. Then, you kidnapped me and chained me to this chair."

"Really?" He somehow pulled his simple face into a quizzical expression. "Huh. That's weird. We have camera footage that shows you getting up after you fell."

"Your camera must have malfunctioned," she countered.

He shrugged. "Maybe. There's still a hole in your story, though."

"What?" she asked, narrowing her eyes.

"Um, the Piece is…kind of stuck to your back."

Chapter Text

Emmet was tired. He'd been feeling like that a lot lately. His boss worked him so hard! Justifiably, of course. Someone needed to be out there to uphold the law, and sometimes, the robots just didn't cut it. They weren't very good at dealing with people. Emmet was good with people, or so he liked to think.

Right now, he was starting to doubt how much of a people-person he actually was. Two hours in the interrogation room with the Special had gotten him almost nowhere. He'd started out like he always did, asking a few innocent questions to open up a conversation and get more comfortable. However, his questions were always met with either one of two responses: silence or harsh words.

Lucy O'Hara was her name. Besides her name, though, her file had very little useful information on it. She wasn't involved in much of anything outside of her Bricksburg construction job. No traveling records, no traffic tickets, nothing, which struck him as a little odd. It was like she had purposefully gone out of her way to make her life as clean and boring as possible.

His boss had suggested that this was probably her cover, and Emmet couldn't find any real reason to disagree. There was no doubt that Lucy was a Master Builder. She acted just like all the other ones he'd arrested over the years – defiant, arrogant, and constantly talking about how they were going to "put an end to the President's tyrannical reign". Her speech was laced with the resentment and subtle condescension he'd come to expect from that particular set of criminals.

He could understand why the Master Builders acted the way they did. When the President had outlawed their kind, a lot of them had been forced from their homes. It made sense that they resented the society that had rejected their way of doing things. They had a right to be angry, even if they sometimes directed that anger at the wrong people.

Lucy, however, should have lived most of her life around the normal people, and yet she yet she still possessed a Master Builder's typical arrogance and self-righteousness. It made him a little sad. Why did she hate him so much? Couldn't she see that he was only following his instructions, just like everybody else? It was depressing to see such a smart, strong, and beautiful woman reduced to this kind of attitude.

He held up a hand, cutting her off in the middle of a stereotypical "you can't fight the forces of freedom" rant. He let out a long, exhausted sigh. "Listen. I know what you are. I know who you're working for."

He expected her to snap back at him with some sort of defiant remark. She never did. In fact, she looked rather stunned. Had she really thought he was so dense that he wouldn't know a Master Builder when he saw one?

He gave a small shrug, deciding to roll with it. "So, you don't want to say anything about them. I'm fine with that. It doesn't matter anyways. I just have one question I need answering: when you found the Piece, were you actively looking for it, or did you come across it by accident?"

She narrowed her eyes. The defiance was back. "Like I'm going to tell you," she muttered darkly.

He rolled his eyes. "Look, it doesn't matter what the answer is. You're not going to delay anything, especially not Taco Tuesday and the whole 'Kragle' thing. The President's schedule is pretty much set in stone at this point. He's punctual like that."

"I'm sure he is," she murmured.

Ignoring her, he continued. "He doesn't care if you've been working against him for twenty minutes or twenty years. He's still going to have you disassembled the moment I leave, so this is the last chance for us to talk."

Lucy snorted. "And you don't care about finding out where the resistance is hiding, or what we're planning, or how we're going to stop Taco Tuesday from happening? All you want to know is how long I've been looking for the Piece of the Resistance?"

"Pretty much, yeah. I'm curious." If she was a long-working undercover agent for the Master Builders, then she had a plausible explanation for her behavior. If she'd found the Piece on accident, never having seen another Master Builder before… Well, at least the answer would satisfy his curiosity.

She suddenly broke her death-glare away from his eyes, glancing at the floor. Was that guilt he saw in her face? Conflict? She spoke softly, "I…"

Suddenly, Emmet's walky-talky gave out a high-pitched ring. "Hold that thought," he interrupted. This call had to be important. Why would anyone call him when they knew he was in the middle of an interrogation? He brought the radio up to his head. "Officer Brickowski."

"Hi. This is the President's assistant," a flat, male voice spoke. "He would like you to come to his office immediately."

Emmet drew his face together in suspicion. He was familiar with how his robots sounded, and though the caller was doing his best impersonation, it didn't even come close. Plus, he was pretty certain that the President's assistant was female, if robots could be said to have a gender.

It would still be in his best interest to go along with the ploy, though, to give whoever it was a false sense of security. "Copy that, thanks!"

"You are welcome, sir," was the stiff response. He swore that voice sounded familiar… Regardless, someone had gotten their hands on a Super Secret Police radio, which they only could have gotten by sneaking into the tower and stealing one. They had also clearly avoided setting off any alarms. Whoever it was, they were pretty clever.

He put his walky-talky back on his belt, drawing his gun instead. Lucy gave him a look of alarm, which he responded to with a reassuring smile. "Don't worry, I'm not going to shoot you. Besides, it's a stun-gun."

She didn't seem particularly calmed by this response, so he continued to speak as he approached the room's exit. "It's nothing to be alarmed about. I have a little criminal activity I need to clean up, is all. Just doing my job, following my instructions."

As he twisted the knob, he looked over his shoulder to give her another gentle smile. "I'll be back for you as soon as I deal with this, okay? I'll make sure the Pres-"

He never got to finish his sentence, for in that moment, something flat and decidedly sticky smashed into his face.

She wasn't exactly sure what to make of the unexpected intruder. On one hand, he looked nothing less than downright sinister. His dark tux and ragged red cape were the least of it. His head sported a particularly evil-looking helmet, its black and red shape accented by two long prongs. A dark visor covered his face, completely shielding any facial expression.

What worried her most, however, were the items attached to the helmet - strange objects and devices that made her brick-sight skip and scatter. Most of the objects dangled from his horns on huge, metal rings, and these didn't agree well with her brick-sight either.

Despite appearances, this guy clearly wasn't a villain. The tan, cloth-like…thingy wrapped around Brickowski's face and shoulders was enough to prove that. The officer scrambled to peel it off, but for the moment, it looked like it wasn't going anywhere.

The man rushed into the room, struggling to lift a rather large object off of one of his horns as he approached her. "The Cloak of Ban-Daeed won't hold him forever," he spoke, his voice deepened and warped by what must have been a speech-transformer.

He finally freed his object from the helmet and let it drop onto the table in front of her. She jumped on reflex. The device was a strange, oblong, metallic shape, but the back of it was attached to a chain which, in turn, was attached to its metal ring. No matter how hard she tried to focus her brick-sight, she couldn't figure out what any of it was supposed to do.

"Are you hurt?" he asked.

Before her eyes, the insurgent peeled up part of the oblong shape up and flipped it around some sort of pivot point. This had the strange effect of transforming the device into a small set of gleaming pincers with a huge, flat pair of handles.

"I'm alright," she said shakily.

"Good. Hold still, unless you want the Fin-Jerr Clipper of Naeel to take your arm off." The man lifted the set pincers, brought it near the chain attaching her right hand to the chair, and crunched them shut. The chain links easily snapped it two between the razor-sharp edges. He quickly repeated the action with her left hand, completely freeing her from her bonds.

She jumped out of the seat as he maneuvered the tool back into its original shape. "Are you part of the resistance?" she asked, her voice hardened by determination.

After a few moments of watching him hang the ring-part of the device on one of his helmet's prongs, it became clear that he was flat-out ignoring her question. He took a second to check through the remaining objects hanging from his helmet, and then he finally spoke. "Do you know where they took the Piece of Resistance?"

She frowned at his blatant disrespect, but she saw no reason not to comply with him. She turned sideways, giving him a good view of her back and the object fused to it.

His arms felt to his sides and his body went slack with disbelief. "Well isn't that convenient," he muttered. "Alright ,let's get out of here before Brickowski-"

"I need all units in the interrogation room!" the man in question yelled. She glanced over to see that he'd not only peeled the cloth-thing off of his face, but he had also shed enough of it off his shoulders to bring the walky-talky up to his mouth. "Special is escaping, assisted by the Black Falcon!"

She raised an eyebrow at her rescuer. Black Falcon?

Whatever his name actually was, he wasn't threatened by Brickowki calling the cavalry. Instead, he simply grabbed at one of the items hanging from his helmet – a black, cannon-shaped object with a button near the back – and pointed it straight at the officer's face.

"Do you really want to take a Pointed Laser to the eyes, Brickowski?" he asked.

The cop's mouth froze in the middle of starting a word. Lucy saw his eyes flick over to an object laying on the floor a few bricks away, his gun. He must have dropped it when that…thing wrapped around him. Still, he kept a shaky grip on his walky-talky, and he refused to move from his position blocking the doorway.

She looked over the device in the insurgent's hands. Once more, she had no way of telling what it was supposed to do. This appeared to be a running theme for her life as of late. "What are you doing?" she hissed.

"Threatening to blind him if he doesn't drop his radio, what's it look like I'm doing?" the 'Black Falcon' hissed back.

Brickowski, seeming to get the message, let his walky-talky fall to the floor.

"Now get out of the way," the rescuer continued.

The police officer stood still, maintaining his position in the doorway. After a moment, he heaved a heavy sigh. "I can't. It's against the instructions."

Lucy rolled her eyes. "You can drop your radio, but you can't stand aside?"

Brickowski shrugged. "That's how the instructions are written. Rule Fifteen: Never let yourself come to harm if you can avoid it. I'm allowed to drop my radio if it means keeping my eyesight. So, um, if you could put the relic down now…"

"How about no?" the Black Falcon answered, adjusting his grip on the cannon-like object. "Either you move, or I get to play with my laser. Your choice."

Brickowski gave a tense pause, taking a nervous step backwards, but still remaining in the doorway. "I can't," Brickowski finally answered. "I'd be breaking Rule One. You can't just break Rule One! That's, like, the most important rule of them all!"

She clenched her teeth. This whole process was taking too long. Any minute now, other police officers would respond to Brickowski's call and begin swarming the area. "And what," she asked the officer. "Exactly, is Rule One?"

It was amazing how much emotion the cop could display with such a simple face. As his gaze shifted to her, his wide eyes radiated overwhelming dread and terror. "Rule One: Never disobey the President," he said, strain evident in his voice. "He…he told me, to my face, to not let you escape. It's too important."

A groan of exasperation escaped her throat. "And that's exactly what's wrong with everything in this world!"

She stormed towards Brickowski, eliciting a noise of protest from her rescuer about how she was ruining his shot. She made a point to ignore it, seeing as the Pointed Laser threat still hadn't gotten them anywhere with the officer.

She got right up in Brickowski's face, ensuring that her words would have some sort of impact. "All you do is follow the instructions. Follow the rules. Blindly do whatever the President tells you to."

"But, uh…" He averted eye contact with her, clearly uncomfortable with her proximity. Well, good. He didn't deserve to be comfortable.

"I bet you like following the instructions, don't you?" she hissed at him. "You're too simple and stupid to figure out for yourself what you want to do. So, when the President comes onscreen and feeds you a bunch of lies about how the instructions give you a special place in the world, you gobble them right up."

Brickowski didn't even say anything back at her. His gaze simply dropped to the floor.

"I'm the only one who's brave enough and innovative enough to stand up to him," she continued, her voice rising in volume. "I'm the only one who can stop him, and I'll get rid of anything you put in my way. So, for the last time, get out of my way!"

"Master Builders…" he grumbled under his breath. He didn't move an inch, though. "Why are all the Master Builders so…" He trailed off, as if looking for the right word to finish his sentence.

She hesitated at the unfamiliar term. "What did you just call me?" she asked with accusation in her voice.

He quickly raised his eyes to hers, and his expression took a turn for the thoughtful. "Wait…"

A faraway sound caught her attention – a door being thrown open with a bang. The cavalry would be here any second now. She officially had no more time for this. Luckily, the officer was now sufficiently distracted.

Before he could say another word, she clocked him across the face. His entire head-piece spun around, almost lazily coming to a stop the right way forward, and then he collapsed like a sack of potatoes.

She shot a glance back at the Black Falcon. While he she still couldn't see any of his face beyond that visor, his sagging posture told her that he was clearly shocked from the most recent turn of events. "We don't have much time," she announced at him. "Let's get going. Put away your toy."

The Black Falcon grumbled and let go of his weapon, allowing it to swing freely from his helmet once more. He took a few steps toward the now-unblocked doorway. "It's not a toy..."

Emmet just barely clung to consciousness. He dimly registered the sounds of robotic voices around him, but he was mostly preoccupied with the dull pain on the side of his head. He groaned and fluttered his eyelids. What had happened?

He tried to retrace his steps down memory lane. He'd been talking with the Special, trying to stall her so the Super Secret Police could arrive and stop her escape. The Black Falcon had been there, making some very pointed threats with a laser. Lucy had walked up and said some pretty terrible things about people who always followed the instructions, and then…

Oh. That's why his head hurt so much.

Why had he even let her throw that punch? He was a police officer for a reason. He had some pretty good reflexes after all these years. Even impeded by that sticky-fabric-thingy, he should have been able to duck, or dodge, or trip her, or something…

But, no, he'd let himself get distracted. He would admit it – Lucy was a very pretty girl, and he was a very lonely guy. He didn't have a lot of friends these days. All of his coworkers were robots. He couldn't talk about his career with anyone outside of work, not that he had the time to really visit people anymore. He worked very long hours.

So, maybe finding himself attracted to a Master Builder had left him conflicted, especially considering how much she seemed to hate average, everyday, instruction-following folks. He was never going to stand a chance with her. He was supposed to arrest her, and she was the largest singular threat to the President's plans.

There'd been one other thing, another distraction besides the obvious romantic conflict. He'd had a realization of sorts. Lucy honestly didn't know what a Master Builder was. She wasn't part of some long-undercover mission after all. Those thoughts had left him so stunned that he hadn't noticed her taking a swing at him until long after the fact.

He felt someone shaking him, and the motion jerked the world back into focus. Some of the nearby voices started making sense. "Chief? Are you alright?" said the loudest, nearest, voice.

"'M fine," he mumbled as he pushed himself off the ground. His eyes flickered open, bringing the sight of an interrogation room filled with robots. Some distant alarm blared in the background, reminding him of the current situation.

The Black Falcon was gone, and so was the Special.

"Oh man," he said. "The President isn't going to like this."