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Forte’s internal dictionary had always been… limited.
He could communicate very well, of course. Perfectly, when the occasion called for vulgarity. But he was built to be a killer, and Dr. Wily didn’t want to waste time or memory downloading a whole language into Forte’s head when just some of it would do.
To that end, as pathetically cliched and metaphorical as it sounded, Forte genuinely had no definition of love.
What he felt for Gos was programming and mutual reliance. What he felt for the brothers he actually got along with was tolerance and an ongoing truce. And what he felt for Rock was frustrated jealousy.
–
You know, as many monologues about how terribly superior Forte’s construction is to his prototype’s as Wily spouted in the fighter’s first days, Forte would have thought it would be closer to the truth. But no, there Rock is, having beaten the shit out of yet another of Forte’s siblings on the first damn try, and it didn’t even look like it was hard. It wasn’t like Wily really expected Rock to be defeated by his Robot Masters anymore, but damn, they could at least hit him more than twice.
Well, that was why Forte was there, anyway. He hopped down from his hiding place, boots crunching loudly against the rubble. Rock flinched with his whole body, spinning around with his buster arm raised, eyes hard and weirdly expressionless.
Then he sighed and dropped his arm to his side. His eyes slid closed and he brought his hand up to rub some of the dust and oil from his cheeks, only serving to smudge it even worse. “Forte,” he acknowledged, and he sounded more tired than the Wilybot had ever heard him. “Please leave me alone.”
That hurt, and Forte couldn’t understand why and therefore didn’t try to. “Why should I?”
“I don’t want to do this,” Rock begged. “I never did, okay? Please, I’m tired of fighting you.”
Ow. “What, getting bored with me?” Forte snapped.
Rock opened his eyes solely to give the younger ‘bot a strange look. “I’m tired of fighting anybody,” he clarified, a tinge of confusion entering his voice. “Especially—especially someone I was friends with once.”
Forte frowned. “We weren’t friends.” The word was clumsy on his tongue; the moment it was out, he was incredibly glad it was gone.
“We were kind of friends,” Rock said. “I know you were supposed to infiltrate us, but…” He trailed off. “I think we were friends anyway.”
“That’s stupid.” Right?
Rock gave a tiny smile. “I know.” And then he thought for a moment. “What if we played chess instead?”
Forte had no idea what he was even supposed to think about that. He gave a blank stare instead and Rock chuckled, looking down and rubbing the back of his neck.
“Me and Roll have been playing it a lot,” he said. “It’s still kind of a competition.”
“Except Dr. Wily’s not gonna give a shit if I win,” Forte snorted. “It won’t stop you, anyhow. Asimov’s dumbass rules won’t let you back off unless you have to, right?” He’d wondered, a lot, what it was like to be under those. Wily was a dick, but at least he didn’t pretend to be anything else—the Light numbers were practically slaves to the whole human race and their creator was seen as a good guy?
(He had not wondered at all why that being done specifically to Rock and siblings bothered him so much. It never occurred to him to wonder that.)
Rock actually looked a little chagrined. “That was the last Master this time,” he said, shuffling his left foot in the dust. “I was going to go straight to the fortress, but… I guess it isn’t going anywhere.” The little fighter looked up hopefully. “So you’ll play that instead? You know the rules, right?”
“Of course I know the rules,” Forte grumbled. Some of his brothers liked to play when they were bored, which was most of the time. Forte liked to watch when he was bored, which was absolutely all of the time.
“Great!” Rock’s grin was almost painful to look at. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t go anywhere!” There was a muted bwip and he vanished in a sliver of blueness.
And then there was the horrible, sinking dread that Forte had just allowed himself to be tricked.
And then Rock came back. Without his helmet (his hair looked so soft, all messed up and tangled, and Forte found himself wondering how long Dr. Light had spent hunched over a table somewhere, painstakingly installing every individual strand, and why), but with a smallish, oblong box. “I couldn’t find it,” Rock said apologetically. “Roll put it away and I forgot where.”
Forte snorted and sat down on the ravaged ground, crossing his legs and wondering why he was as excited over this as he would have been over shooting the little guy.
—
So it turned out Rock was fucking hopeless at chess.
“You aren’t letting me win, are you?” Forte demanded, scowling at the second queen he has on the board now, thanks to a pawn that Rock apparently didn’t even see.
The little robot gave an embarrassed little giggle, running a hand through his hair. “I’m not, I promise!” he said. “I’m not very good at this yet.”
Thirty seconds later, Forte checkmated him. “No shit,” he snickered. An unfamiliar thrill started twirling slowly in his circuitry, and he realised that this was the first time he had beaten Rock in anything.
He was better than Rock at something. Definitely. Conclusively.
Rock was saying something, putting the pieces away and getting up, clicking the box closed. Almost panicking, Forte bolted to his feet. “Can we do this again?” he blurted. “Later,” he added, internally wincing at his outburst, although he couldn’t figure out why.
Rock never so much smiled as quietly turned into a very small supernova. “I’d like that,” he enthused. “After all of this is over again?”
Forte almost snorted at the fact that everyone but Wily himself figured he was going to lose, to the point that the doctor’s own son (experiment) was making plans around it. “Whatever.”
Rock beamed at him. “Okay!” The Light number advanced on him, too suddenly for Forte to know how to react, and folded his arms around the younger bot’s waist. Tightly—no, not tightly… fuck, Forte didn’t know what to call it, but it was… there, and it wasn’t hard enough to hurt or even begin to feel like an attack, but it made bits of his software glitch just by existing either way, but even that didn’t feel bad, not like the errors and viruses that Forte unfortunately had so much experience with—
His mouth had dropped open at some point, although whether to snap or just to gawk at the walls, he didn’t know. He managed to close it, and then managed to give Rock a tiny pat on the shoulder.
Rock pulled back, apologising, and Forte didn’t know how to talk anymore or he would have said something about it being okay, so he just ended up nodding over and over and trying to understand (or delete) the completely alien feeling of loss that had started up the moment the older robot backed away.
Rock teleported away and Forte was left staring at the empty space he left behind.
(No one had ever hugged him before.)
—
It was tradition. Almost every day, sometimes, they would meet and they would play chess—sometimes for an hour, sometimes two, and once the entire day.
Rock never won, and he never seemed unhappy about it. Not that he didn’t get better—the games got more complicated, went on longer, more thought given between each move—he just… didn’t win. Came close a couple of times. Never quite managed it.
(A part of Forte hoped that he never did. There was still that tight little fear in his chest, that these victories would also be temporary, that he would lose another thing to his rival.)
Even when the old war between their fathers started again, they kept meeting. A little less often, of course—Rock was occupied in beating the shit out of Forte’s latest brothers, Forte in keeping himself out of the way—but they still met. They still played.
And then Rock reached Wily’s fortress.
—
The fatal words. “Go keep him busy,” muttered from inside the belly of a nearly-completed battle mech, as sparks showered down from above.
Wily didn’t even bother telling Forte to defeat Rock anymore. The doctor stopped believing in him even before Forte himself did. And Forte could have, should have, ignored his creator, run off, but that realisation—that he wasn’t just an experiment, he was a failed one, that Wily had less faith in him than he had in his latest batch of Masters…
It hit him. Hard.
So he stood outside the corridor leading to Wily’s innermost room, and he waited, and he tried to understand why he was so… so…
Rock interrupted his attempted introspection by showing up. “Forte?”
He couldn’t do this. (He couldn’t back out. Conveniently being unavailable was different from outright disobedience, and the latter, when Forte was already useless to Wily…)
“…I’m sorry, Rock.” His voicebox malfunctioned and wouldn’t say any more.
A new expression started building over Rock’s face, and every defeat and every criticism and every single look of disappointment came to nothing, because seeing that look on that face was what pain really felt like. “Forte?” Rock hesitated, his body tensing and drawing away, his eyes lost and oddly… expectant. “You don’t have to do this.”
I know. I don’t want to. Fuck, I don’t want to—
But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t speak. His throat hurt, a tight, swollen kind of ache like he’d swallowed a paint bucket whole.
He could still get around this. If he just disappointed again, tried and then failed, maybe, maybe they could both get out, and they could both be the same as they were before. So he raised his buster and tried to miss, and his opponent—used to the patterns learned in all their other fights—dodged the wrong way.
In the silence of the wide-open room, the impact of blast on armour was almost deafening.
(Rock’s tiny cry of pain was worse, as he reeled back and clutched his shoulder and just looked at him, and the worst part, the very worst part, was that there was no anger in his eyes.)
“Sorry,” Forte choked out at last.
He could see Rock shaking, and then he could see liquid trailing down Rock’s face, and then he could see Rock turning and running away.
Forte didn’t—couldn’t—think. He chased after him. He followed through the ruins of the entire fortress and out into the open night, but he didn’t catch him.
He shivered. Rock’s boots would have crushed the grass. Forte could track him, easily, until the teleport picked him up. But… Rock didn’t want him to.
Rock didn’t want him.
(Forte had nowhere else to go but back.)
—
Returning to Wily unscathed and without Rock’s head wasn’t exactly an option. Rock wasn’t the sort to be chased off like that, and Forte wouldn’t explain it even if he knew how. Turning his buster on himself was the only option he could see.
The first blast seared through his belly to his side, severing half the connections to his leg. The second was pure atonement, an angry gash burnt across his face, welding his jaw and taking his cheek off entirely.
(He had always been… not good, but he’d never felt evil before. Inhuman—that was a word for it, although not the best in his case; he was “inhuman”, and he shouldn’t look like one. So.)
“If that’s the best you can do,” Wily said, dubiously, and words like “mistake” and “beta test” and “failed” didn’t need to be used. Forte almost didn’t go to the repair ward, but he did, and he waited for hours, and Wily never showed. Not for him, anyway. He could hear him putting his newest brothers back together not two rooms off.
(Forget back. Forte just had nowhere else to go at all.)
—
This time, the last time, he took Gos to the clearing where he and Rock used to play. He wasn’t sure what the plan was. Wasn’t sure he had one.
Sit there until something happened, he guessed. Or his power just ran out. Or it rained in the hole in his stomach and took out something vital. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do.
Gos didn’t sleep, instead opting to growl at anything—be it human or animal or stray piece of paper—that got too close to Forte. Forte, well… he slept a lot. Almost all the time. His side hurt, and his… his… himself hurt, and he didn’t want to deal with it.
A day passed. A week. Maybe Wily’s fortress blew up again. Maybe important things happened somewhere. Caution tape was put up around Forte’s spot like party streamers, construction signs littering the place, but no one ever came to construct anything. He wasn’t even sure if anyone knew he was there.
On the tenth day, there were footsteps, and Gos didn’t bark.
—
“Forte?” Scrambling sounds, the skittering of gravel under stumbling feet, a tiny squeak of surprise. And then—hands, not gloved but not human, taking hold of his face, pulling his helmet away. “Forte—”
He opened his eyes, and oh. Oh.
Rock’s fingers just grazed the wound in Forte’s cheek, his expression—worried. Worried? “Forte, what happened to you?”
Forte’s breath hitched. His hands found their way to Rock’s shoulders and held on, as tight as he could. Behind them both, Gospel gave a nervous whine.
“Are you okay?” Rock’s face was so, so close to his.
Forte thought, and… and… yes. Yes, he was, now, because Rock was here, specifically. He nodded, and he didn’t understand but he knew. Yes.
Rock stroked his hair with both hands. “Come on,” he said softly. “Let’s get you home, okay?”
Forte nodded again, sitting up to bury his face in Rock’s shoulder, squeezing him, and fuck it hurt his side but fuck he didn’t care. He was having a revelation of some kind. There wasn’t time for pain.
Rock hugged him back as the teleport enveloped them all.