Work Text:
Confidence in you
Is confidence in me....
--High Speed, Coldplay
“That’s it,” called Yori from the upper deck, her clear voice carrying over the strange rending sound of the last gridbug falling apart. “We’re past the mountains.”
Alan gripped the handrail, pulling in a labored breath, and nearly missed catching his disc as he looked down. It was true. They’d passed the last high peak and the rest of the gridbugs had been shaken from the ship; a few still raced far below along the surface of the Game Sea, but the attack was over -- for now.
Beyond him, Tron docked his own disc, casting a fierce, assessing look over the contours of the Sailer. With no gridbugs in sight, the program's keen eyes fixed on the User, analyzing the scratch in Alan's shoulder-plate where a bug-swipe had nearly knocked him off the ship, and then lifting to search his face.
Being in a computer system was unsettling enough without having people fuss for no reason. Alan grinned back just as fiercely, an answering flicker of power rippling through the rings of his disc.
Satisfied, Tron started for the stairs at top speed. Alan followed, lagging. He still hadn’t gotten the hang of replacing the disc on his back. Maybe Lora, meeting them on the steps with her tall pike still shining in her hand, had the right idea.
“Yori?” asked Tron, stopping just short of her as Alan crowded up behind: not an error, as much as Yori and her User resembled one another in their light-suits, but a question. Lora had been on the upper deck guarding their pilot. Though as combat-ready as anyone else in a thriving, open system, Yori knew the Sailer’s controls better than anyone, and someone had to fly the ship while the rest of them kept the bugs from swarming up all over it.
“She’s safe,” said Lora, with an understanding smile. “They didn’t get near her.”
Tron smiled gratefully, and bounded past her to the upper level.
Alan, finding himself able to move again, reached for Lora as she leaned her pike against the rail, and she caught his hands, pulling him close to examine the dent in his armor. She didn't even look winded. How many bugs had slipped past him and Tron -- two? Three, maybe, if they hadn't seen every one? How many had dropped onto the bridge from above--?
“I’m all right," she assured him. "Are you? Let me look--”
“It’s nothing. It didn’t go through.” His blood -- energy? processes? who knew, here? -- still raced from the skirmish. Why she would bother with a crack in his armor when she’d been up there killing gridbugs alone--
Her hand had slid up to his shoulder, probing the dark scar where the armor had split, and he shivered suddenly and leaned his head against hers.
“No more skipping tai chi,” she said, and touched his jaw lightly. Alan let his breathing slow, cradling her hand like a precious thing, and didn’t hear Tron coming down the steps again until the program touched his back; the sharp tones of the too-familiar voice pricked at his spine. “Alan-One, how’s your arm?”
“I’m fine, Tron.” He looked up again, drawing Lora closer, her arm looping around him. Tron was hovering, looming over them both as though to shield them from everything in the entire system, the proximity triggering tingling status messages that Alan barely knew how to read. “Stop looking so worried. I’d like to think I’m a little tougher than a gridbug.”
“You're lucky that gridbug was a little one,” said Tron sternly, and the light caught dimples around Lora’s mouth as she looked from one of them to the other. See? her eyes said, as clear as speech; that’s what you look like when you’re fussing at me for no reason. And there was no right answer for that, or at least none that wouldn’t cede the point.
Tron was still eyeing the scratch, but finally appeared satisfied that his User was in one piece. His hand closed over Alan’s shoulder, resting where Lora’s had been. “They tend to jump like that when you're distracted. I’ll show you how to meet those jumps next time we spar. In the meantime,” he added apologetically, “Yori says we nicked one of the wings. It’s not bad, but it could get worse. Normally we’d have to dock and strip it down to wireframe to take care of it, but since you two are with us...?”
Lora nodded, leading them over to the rail -- she’d probably heard about it from Yori already. “Let’s take a look.”
The wings were still in their fragile, gossamer-like slow-state, unfit for the stresses of higher speeds. The Users had to lean over the rail to see the damage, keeping a wary eye out for power surges and the weird floating blobs of accrued code that were a common hazard of sailing above the Sea, but there it was: one sharp wingtip had taken a hit, leaving the translucent panel webbed with spidering cracks.
If Alan thought about it, he could feel lines of energy and definition flowing from rail to deck to wing, access points for powers nobody on this side of the screen fully understood, heady and limitless. Lora, her arm curling around his, regarded the damage thoughtfully and said, “I think I can rewrite that from the helm."
"You won't need to go into the code?" Alan's voice was just a shade sharper than he'd meant it to be, but there was Tron looking at Lora too; see, Alan thought, he also -- it's not just me, it's a real hazard, even if the both of us are Users. But Lora's eyes were on him, full of some meaning he wished with all his heart he'd ever learn to interpret.
"I'm not going to pull a Flynn," she said, half lightly, half impossible. "Don't worry, Alan. I'll make sure I know what I'm doing. How far are we from the junction?”
“Half a microcycle," Tron answered. "We’ll need the wing to get it down to less.”
"Give me fifty nanoseconds." She pulled Alan's head down and kissed his cheek. "And fix your shoulder."
Alan didn't dare check Tron’s expression. Instead, he watched Lora jog along the deck, up the stairs, out of sight, and kept watching for another minute just to make sure, but still looked back too soon and caught his program watching him, with a revelatory look as though he'd just solved a puzzle.
Their eyes darted away from each other at once, Tron’s attention snapping to the fractured wing and Alan discovering a sudden urgent need to check for rising code-blobs in the Sailer’s path.
Spooked cats, the both of them.
Lora would have laughed.
Snorting inwardly, Alan leaned against the rail and tried to let himself unfocus. The charge from the battle was ebbing away, leaving too much room for reason and unease; Lora knew how he hated waiting. Tron, when the User snuck another glance, was staring at the wing, which hadn't done anything yet. The ship still hummed with power, still sang on its beam of light, and Alan wondered if there'd be a sign, some surge of energy from the bridge, if he'd feel it....
"Look," Tron breathed.
Slow, small packets of voltage were tracing their way down the veins of the wing, running like drops of water into the smallest of the hairline cracks. Power or analytics, Alan thought, grasping for some word that would fit what Lora was doing. As the finest cracks disappeared, a thin, straight line of pale light moved through the panel, scanning it from root to wingtip and back again.
"She's probably generating a report," Alan mused out loud, startling himself with his own voice. Tron was listening; maybe he knew that the words were only a guess, a bone the User flung at the part of himself that paced and fretted and demanded answers it wasn't going to get. "Something to tell her what's wrong with it....."
The power droplets slowed and stopped. Some of the smaller fractures were gone, but the larger ones were still there, flecked with the light of the Sea streaming far below.
Alan twisted to look up at the bridge, catching a glimpse of blue: Yori, appearing briefly and then slipping out of sight again. Probably making a visual check, a verbal report for Lora. Everything was fine up there. No gridbugs could skin along the power streams to drop on them from above, and nothing was stopping him from going up there just to check; he could anytime he wanted to, but she'd think he was worried, and that wasn't the problem at all--
Tron shifted, and Alan could feel him gathering himself to speak.
Not yet, Tron. Not yet.
Did the thought leap between them, some spark of himself finding its way to another home? He couldn't tell.
Gingerly he unclipped his damaged shoulderpad, grimacing at the scar. Beneath it, the smooth white armor was uniform all the way through, dense and simple. It would take so little energy or creativity to slip in under the surface and will it perfect again, as Lora wanted him to. He could see past its borders; it was light in his hand.
A treacherous thought whispered: throw it into the Sea, as if that would make it all unreal, wake him up at home with her beside him and the sun shining on his face.
He looked over at Tron, wondering how many conversations they would be having if either one of them were to speak.
Maybe they were having one now.
The Sailer hummed, and Tron waited, and Alan set his fingers to the edges of the scratch and breathed out as it came into focus: because it was easy; everything was right there, licking a bright line into his mind, so that he only had to think, to imagine, and it would be so. And it still felt strange and wrong and shudderingly right, and of course he worried about Lora in this world where matter was energy and energy was life and the things you poured your soul into looked back at you with minds of their own.
When the armor was as flawless as it had first rezzed, Alan groped his way back out into the half-light and saw a flick of blue run through its circuits before they went dark again, waiting for input. Tron was beside him, eyes bent on the miracle, and Alan let him take the piece and gravely affix it where it belonged.
They turned back to the wing just in time to see another scan slide down its surface, this time stopping just past the end of the topmost crack. The thin white fracture flared and healed, and the light ran through the smooth pane once more and then moved lower to deal, line by line, with the rest of it.
"What do you do when--" The words were out before Alan knew it, and he clenched his hands on the rail and searched for something else to say, anything but a show of whatever fractures Tron had already seen in him. "Don't take this the wrong way, but why are you still down here?"
The program was silent for a long moment. But he didn't look troubled, and his voice was tranquil when he spoke. "I thought Yori might want to spend some time with her User. And I'm spending time with mine."
But I'm not doing anything.
The words wouldn't come. Once, Alan wouldn't have heard them past the rush of well-worn thoughts smothering anything he didn’t want to hear: would have just known there was nothing to say, without knowing why. Not for nothing had Lora spent so many years teaching him to listen. And Tron--
"There's something on your mind, though," Tron mused. "Has been all along."
"You can tell," murmured Alan, staring at the wing, letting the flowing light blur. You're more dangerous when you know how to listen.
“You were thinking about it when that gridbug almost took a chunk out of you. It’s that bad?”
“Worse.” Alan pulled in a breath, discarded it. It was nothing, a temporary inconvenience until the new defense contracts were negotiated, they’d talked it over, it was going to be fine, but Lora’s going to Washington and I -- “Worse, because it’s probably just me--”
“Don’t take this the wrong way….” Tron laughed quietly, and after a moment Alan chuckled too. There was no caution, no reservation in the quiet humor. Alan wasn’t sure what to do with the lack of it.
Tron let the thought stretch, waiting till Lora’s patch had percolated down to the wingtip and the pale surface solidified. The ship hummed, whipped onward at breakneck speed, and Alan tried not to tense as the program finally turned away from the Sea.
“You wrote me to run independently." Tron smiled faintly, glancing toward the upper deck before looking back at Alan again. “I’m good at it. But even if that’s how it is where you come from, it’s never just you.”
He held Alan with his eyes as time and virtual space slipped by, waiting for him to struggle through to an answer -- but his gaze shifted again before the answer could come, everything about him lighting like a flame. Alan belatedly heard light footsteps jogging along the deck, and then Yori was past him and Tron had swept her into one of his all-engulfing bear hugs.
And Alan couldn’t turn away.
He knew the look on Tron’s face, just visible over Yori’s shoulder. It was the look he’d seen in his own photographs once in a while, the one that always surprised him, that had to be a trick of the light because how could the face that scowled at him in the mirror every morning wear an expression like that?
But there it was. Alive with welcome; blinding in its fearlessness.
Maybe they -- maybe he -- didn’t need another answer.
Lora’s hands settled on his arms from behind, and he drew her in. She and Yori shared that, as he shared things with Tron: never holding out for imaginary signals, leaving no room for doubt, as real here and now as on the other side of the screen, or the continent, or the world.
They look good, his smile told her as she leaned her head into his shoulder, and her own sun-sweet smile answered, I know.
_____