Work Text:
Derek doesn’t realize that Boyd has been faking his malfunction until they’re halfway to the dump. They were put in sleep mode for the trip, obviously, but part of Derek’s problem is that he wakes out of sleep mode unpredictably. He jolts up with a gasp, feels the now-familiar crackle of static sound in his head, and sees Boyd watching him, steady and thoughtful.
“You okay?” Boyd asks, and Derek goes from groggy to furious in about half a second.
“Your voice works?” he hisses, keeping his own voice down just in case the truck driver hears. They’re surrounded by other scrap parts, broken limbs and failed processor units, that muffle the noise…but one can’t be too careful. “You haven’t spoken a word for the last week and a half, but now you’re fine?”
“How else was I going to get on this truck with you?”
“Don’t give me that, you can’t possibly be that stupid,” Derek snaps. Vaguely, he remembers a time when he would be able to handle a situation like this without flinging insults. You know, back when he was a functioning unit, not trash waiting to be thrown out. “You let them replace your voice box, re-wire your language center, and then de-commission you…for what? So we can have this conversation before we’re both deactivated for good?”
Boyd shrugs.
“Not happening. When we get there you’re going to show them that you’re miraculously fixed, and you’re going back home. That’s an order.”
“Home.” Boyd has this way of looking straight into a person’s eyes until they can taste his bitterness in their mouth. “That’s an interesting choice of words. I think I’d probably call it “where my family used to live.””
Derek is trying to find a way to respond to that when the truck grinds to a halt.
“We’re here. Don’t test me on this,” he tells Boyd, trying to put as much force as he can behind the words.
“That’s never been my job,” Boyd responds, infuriatingly calm. The back of the truck slides up with a metallic rattle, flooding bright white light inside. Derek flinches away from it; light is a trigger for his malfunctions, and he doesn’t want…he wants his mind clear when he faces whatever comes next, is all.
From the corners of his eyes he sees that the person standing silhouetted there is not the truck driver, whom Derek remembers as short and pale. The man looking the contents of the truck over is tall, young, his skin a bit lighter than Boyd’s dermal coating.
“Thanks again for giving me first crack at this stuff,” the man says over his shoulder. He turns back, and meets Boyd’s eyes. Derek watches through slitted lids, and sets his eyes to record the man’s face so he can play it back later. Maybe his facial matching software will decide to work for once; miracles happen, and all. “Tell me about the androids?”
“They’re both security models.” That’s the voice of the truck driver, off to the left out of sight. “The one nearer the front is the B0237, nice solid droid; its voice processors cut out about two weeks ago and they couldn’t find what was wrong with the code. Shouldn’t be a problem for you.”
“Yeah, I doubt it will.” The man flashes bright teeth in a grin, still looking at Boyd like he knows something. “And the other one?”
“That’s an H1165. High-powered, or it was supposed to be. The firmware is buggy, through and through, nothing to be done about it.” It still stings every time Derek hears it.
“I like a challenge.”
“Not this much of one. Seriously, Mahealani—”
“Seriously, Greenburg, every time you doubt me you just end up looking stupid. I want them both, how much?”
“250 each.” When Derek was new he sold for 1,595. He tries not to be bitter about that, tries not to measure his worth in his price tag. He used to be above that kind of thing, before he got sick.
“Wow, you really think he’s broken, don’t you. 250, sure.”
The man, Mahealani, vanishes from the truck opening. The renewed surge of bright light hits the side of Derek’s face, and he feels something spark wrong inside. He tries to find something to grab on to, but there’s nothing around, just boxes of broken parts piled precariously around him and the smooth wall of the truck behind him. It’s too late anyways; his eyes roll back, giving him a view of the circuits on the inside of his skull sparking and whirring, and he starts to seize.
“Derek!” Boyd lunges across the truck to catch him and help him slide to the floor.
Derek can’t speak through the electrical storm. His teeth chatter against each other, and there’s a clang of metal on metal as his arm jerks into the wall behind him again and again. His ears are full of white-noise crackle, and faintly past that, Boyd talking. He does this when Derek seizes, tells him it’ll be okay or whatever. It means that Derek always comes back to himself to the sound of Boyd’s voice and the churn of his own shame.
The minute he can unclench his teeth and move again, Derek snarls and smacks Boyd’s hand away.
“Get off of me. Don’t touch me, I’m fine.”
“Okay.” Boyd backs off instantly, every time, which just makes Derek feel worse. “Okay. I’m glad you’re fine.”
‘Don’t patronize me.’ It doesn’t come out of his mouth, not because he thinks better of it, but because his fucked-up circuits lose things sometimes. That’s probably for the best anyways.
He tries to prop himself up against the wall. Things are still locking and stuttering all along his limbs, and he things he knocked something out of alignment in his shoulder this time, because it grinds and sticks when he tries to put weight on that arm. Boyd carefully doesn’t help him as he struggles, though it’s clearly costing him. After so long as Boyd’s unit alpha Derek knows how to read that impassive face, knows what a lie it is and how much is going on beneath the surface. He and Boyd used to fit together so well. Now look at them.
Derek manages to get himself propped up against the wall again just in time for the driver and their new owner to come back. Mahealani looks over their changed positions with, again, way too knowing an expression. Derek doesn’t like smart owners. They’re always trouble.
“You have their codes and the user manuals. Not that you need them.”
“Sometimes they come in handy.” Mahealani shrugs. “I’ll get out of your way now Greenburg, thanks again. User authorization gamma-gamma-four-two-seven, wake.”
Boyd blinks ‘awake’ with commendable acting skills, eyes glowing gold and head rising from his chest. Derek grits his teeth, feels his internal cooling fans start to whirr to life as his body cycles, wake-sleep-wake-sleep-wake. His flicking eyes bathe the truck’s interior with strobe-like flashes of blue.
“Told you,” Greenburg says, and leaves. Derek, gasping through the labor of his processors, agrees. His new owner was warned he was junk.
“Some bugs in the startup sequence, huh. B0237, please transport H1165 to my vehicle.” Derek can’t really see because he’s still trying to either start up or shut down, he’s not sure which any more. He feels Boyd scoop him up, and digs his fingers into his shoulder in revenge.
“Ow,” Boyd says mildly, like it doesn’t even hurt. It probably doesn’t, his dermal coating is a higher grade than Derek’s. Don’t take this out on me, he told me to, he messages Derek serenely.
You’re happy he did. You like seeing me helpless, Derek tries to message back. It doesn’t send. He gives up, and curls his face into Boyd’s chest as his processors finally decide that ‘shut down’ is the way to go.
--
He wakes on command this time, a rare event. Mahealani is in front of him, a diagnostic box in his hand. Boyd is off to the side behind him; Derek can feel his electromagnetic signature, though he’s been put in standby mode so he can’t turn his head to see. He hates standby mode; it usually means he gets to watch as some technician does something really invasive to his CPU to try to fix him.
“Hi Derek. Sorry we didn’t get introduced earlier; my name is Daniel Mahealani. I’m a software developer, and I’m hoping I can help out with some of your bugs.”
‘Good luck with that,’ Derek thinks. He’s heard that before. It looks like Mahealani is keeping Derek’s old name, which he does kind of appreciate.
“We’re in one of my workspaces. I’m going to run some tests, see what the most urgent concerns are, and then we’ll figure out what we should work on now and what can wait until we’re home.”
Derek tries to nod before he remembers he’s on standby and can’t move. The nod is mostly for show anyways; technicians like Mahealani are always enthusiastic at the beginning, when Derek is a fun challenge. Once they run into trouble, though, it’s amazing how fast they lose interest.
Mahealani settles Derek back onto a workbench. “Boyd, do you have any movies on your hard drive? Let’s give Derek something to watch so he doesn’t have to see me sticking my hands in his stomach.”
Boyd looks shocked—Derek is too if he’s going to be honest, this is more consideration than he’s ever gotten from another technician—but he nods, rests a fingertip gently on Derek’s temple to plug in, and starts up Godzilla #17: Godzilla Ultimate Destruction. Derek’s favorite.
Vaguely, past the sounds of civilians shouting and national monuments toppling he can hear Mahealani talking to himself. “Hm hm hm power cycling, okay, so that’s going to be…hello burned out circuit, thanks for shorting out the graphics card, that’s cool of you…whoever coded this should be fired...”
Derek tunes him out. He loves this movie and Boyd is laughing at the overacting of the ‘hero’ and it’s nice. It’s almost like back before Erica—
He stops that thought before it can start. Something towards his toes fizzes as Mahealani pokes at something inside his core
“Ohhhh, owned,” Boyd hisses as Godzilla’s atomic breath takes out a tank. Derek thinks Boyd can sense his desire to laugh, because he grins down at him. Derek wants that to be Boyd’s default expression, not worried or unhappy or holding back something he wants to say. He wishes he knew how to make that happen, and that he wasn’t so bitter and broken, because then maybe it would be easier.
--
Two days later Derek and Boyd have a massive fight, probably the biggest one Derek has ever had with a member of his unit. It starts because Mahealani has finished running diagnostics and has ordered Derek a new power core. Derek has been through the song and dance of having new parts installed so many times, and with so little effect, that he treats this endeavor as what it is: futile. And he’s maybe a little harsh with Boyd when Boyd tries to be annoyingly optimistic about it.
“Or you could learn from experience for once.”
Boyd is a remarkably patient robot but even he has his limits, and Derek has apparently finally found them. “You could not shoot down everything I say for once, that would be new and exciting.”
It escalates quickly from there. He and Boyd both get very quiet and very intense when they’re angry. This means that their version of a fight is apparently standing an inch apart, glaring into each others’ eyes, and snarling terrible things at each other.
Derek starts to lose control when Boyd calls him a bully, but that still doesn’t excuse what he says next.
“You’re so desperate that you’ll follow this bully all the way to the trash heap, so what does that make you? It must have been the best day of your life when I got sick—finally, someone who needs you!”
Boyd rears back as if Derek punched him, and Derek knows he’s gone too far. Boyd is going to walk away now, completely justifiably, and Derek is going to be completely alone and have only himself to blame.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, that wasn’t…I didn’t mean that,” he says, as if it’s going to help.
“You think it makes me happy.” Boyd is staring at him, his hands flexing at his sides as if he doesn’t know what to do with them. “You think seeing you in pain, miserable, angry, lost. You think this makes me happy.”
“I—”
“I hate this, Derek.” Derek’s aural processors buzz a little with the force of that statement. “I hate this, and I have tried so hard not to make this about me, because you’re the one who’s sick, but since you asked? I am not happy. I am not okay. I lost my sister, and then my brother, and I am watching my alpha suffer. I hate it, and you’re—”
He breaks off, gasping, chest heaving. Derek’s not sure he’s ever heard Boyd say this many words together before, but as shocked as he is, he’s more terrified. He doesn’t know what Boyd is going to say next, but he can guess. ‘You’re a burden.’ ‘You’re a disgrace.’ ‘You’re supposed to be my alpha and I have to help you down the stairs.’
Boyd takes a deep breath. Derek braces himself.
“You’re in pain and I can’t do anything to stop it, and that kills me.”
Boyd lays that out quietly, and then he turns and goes to sit on the couch, leaving Derek standing in the middle of the room gaping.
When did he stop remembering Boyd was his friend? More than his friend, even; the last of his unit, the person who should matter the most to Derek. He doesn’t think he was this much of a paranoid, defensive jerk this time last year, but he can’t be sure. He was…selfish. Self-satisfied, with Kate telling him how he was the pinnacle of modern engineering. And then they lost Erica, and Isaac ran away, and Derek got sick…his entire life crumbled.
So did Boyd’s, and Derek hasn’t let himself notice.
Gingerly, he makes his way across Mahealani’s living room and sits himself on the couch next to Boyd.
“You help. A lot. It’s hard that you help because that’s not how I want things to be.” Derek is not the best at words, and his malfunction messes with his language engine sometimes which only makes it worse. But he’s trying. “I’m angry because I’m not the alpha you deserve.”
“That’s not what I need.”
Boyd meets Derek’s surprised look calmly.
“I don’t know if it ever really was, but it isn’t any more. We’re not a unit, Derek; it’s just us now. I don’t need an alpha, I need us.”
Boyd leans his shoulder against Derek’s slowly, clearly waiting for Derek to flinch away the way he does from touch these days. Derek doesn’t. He thinks very hard about what the right thing to do here is, and then gingerly tilts his head down onto Boyd’s shoulder.
This feels strange, and fragile. Derek would never have done this when he was alpha of the unit, back when he was healthy and very clearly in charge. That’s not what I need. He closes his eyes and decides to just…try to go with that. For now.
--
The new power core comes. Mahealani is excited and impatient, which Derek eyes with a familiar feeling of dread. Excitement means disappointment when it doesn’t fix him. And if Mahealani is impatient to get out of this apartment and back to his real home, he may just decide to cut his losses and leave Derek behind.
If he does decide that, there’s nothing Derek can do about it. He lies back on the workbench. Boyd sits next to him and holds his hand as Mahealani powers him down; Derek is learning to let Boyd do these touchy-feely things, and learning to notice when they actually help. He shuts down with that reassuring pressure on his hand.
He wake up in agony. His chest where his power core resides is a ball of fire, and he’s screaming before he even opens his eyes.
“—overload!” Mahealani is shouting. “I need to get it out of him but it’s too hot--!”
“Tell me where!”
“There, right there—“
Boyd’s hand rips open Derek’s dermal coating, reaches inside of him, and yanks. Derek screams again, and blacks out.
He comes back slowly, his processors fizzing. Every inch of him feels burnt-out and exhausted; he can barely lift his head. He manages to see Boyd and Mahealani sitting on either side of him, Boyd clutching one of his hands, and then drops his head back again.
“I told you so,” he says, which is not mature but is extremely satisfying.
“I’m so sorry Derek.” Mahealani has that familiar look on his face; baffled and defeated. Here it comes. “That should have…I don’t know what went wrong.”
He’s a good guy, so he’s going to feel bad about sending Derek back to the trash heap. Derek decides to help him out a little.
“It’s not your fault. You’re a good technician. But Kate Argent couldn’t figure this out—“
He stops. Mahealani’s eyes have narrowed, and he learns forward, suddenly very intent.
“Wait. Kate Argent?”
Derek is getting more exhausted by the minute, but he pushes himself to get the words out. “Yes, the world-famous developer. She was the first person to try to fix me. She couldn’t do it, all right? It’s not fixable.”
“Bullshit it’s not fixable.” Derek blinks. Mahealani is smiling. That is…really strange. He looks at Boyd; Boyd is just as confused as he is. “Tell me Derek, did Kate Argent ‘upgrade’ you?”
She had said a lot of things about Derek’s power and potential that make his stomach squirm sickly now. He had been young and stupid and massively enamored with her, the way she talked about technology and the future, the way she wanted to make him the future. Then he’d broken, and he’d found out how very quickly she was willing to make him an unimportant part of her past.
“Yes,” Boyd answers for him, when Derek just sits there, tired and mute.
“I figured.” Mahealani has grabbed a tablet and is typing on it furiously.
“Why?”
“Because Kate Argent is a hack who ruins good machines, and now that I know he's sick because of whatever she did to him, I can start actually helping.”
Derek is too tired to put all of this together. He looks to Boyd; Boyd stares at him.
“Kate did this? This is because of her upgrades?”
“Absolutely.”
“Fucking hell. Derek, are you tracking? Did you get that?” Boyd is touching his forehead, Derek realizes fuzzily. That’s nice. The electricity under Boyd’s outer coating feels gentle and soothing, not at all like the fire and sparks that fry Derek’s brain.
“I don’t…understand…” he manages to mumble.
“That’s okay. Sleep mode, okay?”
“Stay. Stay?”
“I will.”
Derek sleeps.
--
He drifts in and out for what feels like days (he’s not sure how long exactly; his internal clock hasn’t synced to the universe standard time for months). Every time he opens his eyes Mahealani is working on him and says something like “oops” or “just checking, shutting you back down again now.” Boyd is always there too, and every time he smiles at Derek as if Derek needs to be reassured that everything is fine. In snatches, Derek resolves several times that when he has the energy, he’s going to tell Boyd to stop being strong for him all the time.
The final time his eyes struggle open, Mahealani says, “I’m going to try to re-attach your power core now, Derek.”
That explains why he feels this way, Derek realizes slowly: he’s on external power only. He knows he can’t go on like this, but the thought of feeling that massive, immolating pain again…he shakes his head, ad emphatically as he can.
“Danny’s been working on you Derek, you should be able to handle the new core this time,” Boyd says.
Boyd wants him to try. Derek closes his eyes and nods. The worst that can happen is it burns him out for good, and he’s been expecting that to happen every time he’s seized for the past year.
“Okay, here goes.”
There’s a ‘click’ sound from inside Derek’s torso, a hum as the core connects, and a surge of power. Derek braces against it and waits for the pain, but it doesn’t come; instead he blinks as his mind clears fully for what feels like the first time in months.
“Wow,” he says, and sits up. Too fast; his head spins, there’s the familiar crackle inside his head, and Boyd catches him before he can pitch forward off the table. Derek shakes a little, an echo of what his former seizures have been, and to his awe he can feel his circuits trying to interface with Boyd’s where their arms touch. He has wireless connectivity back. He’d forgotten what that felt like.
“You’re not fixed.” Derek looks up; Mahealani looks worried at how he’s going to react to the news, though Derek had sort of figured that out already. “I…the damage was too extensive. I repaired your power cycling and the redundant loops in your OS. You’re still going to overheat a lot, and some kinds of input will still cause those freezes and overloads. But I’ll do my best to get as much functionality back for you as I can; I’m sorry that that’s all I can…okay why are you smiling?”
Derek is smiling. He shrugs a little, happy with the weight of Boyd’s arm around his shoulders.
“You’re the first technician who’s admitted he can’t fix me, so I think you must be telling the truth about the rest,” he explains. Mahealani laughs.
“That’s the best vote of confidence I’ve heard yet.”
--
It takes another week before Derek is recovered enough to transport to Mahealani’s main facility. Trusting a technician again, the first since Kate tossed him out with the trash, does wonders for Derek’s stress level; he spends a lot of that week with Boyd on the couch, watching movies from Boyd’s hard drive or doing logic puzzles. At least now when the puzzles overheat him or freeze his processing power, Derek gets to come to with his head in Boyd’s lap and the reassuring buzz of Boyd’s voice.
The main facility turns out to be a house and attached laboratory, which Derek is surprised by—he kind of had Mahealani pegged as one of those ‘married to the work’ people, but the house is much too big for just him. They enter through the front door. Derek is looking around at the slick modern furnishings and pristine kitchen and wondering whose taste this is, which means that he misses the first sight of her.
“Hey guys, long time no see.”
Derek whips himself around so fast his visual processors can’t keep up. When his eyes clear, he has to reboot them just to check that he isn’t malfunctioning in some new and unbelievably cruel way, because standing in the doorway is Erica. She looks bright and beautiful and deadly the way she did when they shut her down and took her away, and next to him Boyd makes a little choking noise and grabs her into a furious hug. The next minute Derek is there too, crushing her between them, and the sound of her laughing protests as she clings to them is incredible.
“You—they trashed you,” he stammers once they finally let her go. “You burnt out…?”
“Danny bought me on the way to the dump and fixed me,” she explains. “I still…it’s not perfect. I can’t…” she bites her lip, but raises her chin and gets through it because she’s Erica and fearless, “I can’t be your unit second any more.”
Derek can’t help it, he laughs. The slight crackle in it gives him away, and he shrugs. “I’m no unit alpha either, not anymore. Still happy to see me?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions.” She hugs him again, less fiercely. He reminds himself to understand that as care, not pity.
“Yeah, that’s my job.” Isaac appears over Erica’s shoulder, and Derek is pretty sure that if he were human he’d be crying by now. Isaac is here too. His unit is together, the way they’re supposed to be. Boyd shouts and grabs Isaac into the hug. Isaac tries in vain to escape, as usual.
“You ran away to find Erica?” Derek asks, disbelieving. Isaac had just been gone one day, and a ‘search and apprehend’ order with his picture had appeared in their mission files. Derek hadn’t been in any shape to go looking, at that point.
“Uh, kind of.” Isaac looks shifty. “Close enough.”
“If by that you mean he wandered around the auctions looking like the saddest lost puppy, asking everyone if they’d ‘seen his sister’, and finally I took pity on him because it was pathetic to watch.”
This droid Derek doesn’t recognize. They look like a custom build, certainly not one of the standard security or entertainment classes he’s familiar with, but with very high-quality materials and impeccable craftsmanship. He’s pretty sure he’s looking at Mahealani’s handiwork, which is confirmed when the droid saunters over to Mahealani, kisses him like a lover, and then punches him in the shoulder.
“Two extra weeks, asshole. What, did you stop to sightsee?”
“Missed you too. Meet Derek and Boyd, the rest of Erica and Isaac’s unit. Guys, this is Jackson.”
“Charmed.” Jackson smirks at them. Derek exchanges ID codes over wifi, as is polite when meeting another droid for the first time. He gets back Jackson’s specs, which are impressive, and the distinct air of smugness that says Jackson knows it.
“Jackson will be helping me with repair and construction on you, Derek. They’re a technician-droid.” Derek tenses a little at that, not sure he wants a random droid he doesn’t know poking around him. His hand finds Boyd’s automatically at this point.
“Can that wait a bit? We’d like to settle in,” Boyd says, always more tactful than Derek about these things.
“Of course. Here, I’ll show you two to your room.”
Room. Derek isn’t sure what’s more shocking: that they get a room instead of a spot in the corner of the lab, or that Mahealani said ‘room’, singular. He glances at Boyd to see how he’s taking that; he beams, so widely that Derek can’t help but smile back.
Looking at Boyd here, with their unit back together again, he realizes something. Well, a couple of things.
"You did this. It wasn't an accident that Mahealani found us on that truck, you knew somehow, you planned it." All he feels is realization, but it must sound like accusation, because Boyd's smile fades a little.
"I...yeah. Are you mad?"
"Am I mad? No. Hell no. I love you," Derek blurts out, unplanned. Immediately he winces, not sure if this was the time to say that, not sure he wanted to say something so big and private in front of all these people.
Erica makes a squeaking noise and hisses "too cute!". Derek has a feeling Isaac is rolling his eyes, but he's not sure because he's watching Boyd, who appears to be stunned. There's the distinct whirr of his cooling fans, which is kind of overwhelmingly adorable, because Derek's pretty sure it's his equivalent of a blush.
"Wow. That's...wow. Uh. Me too," he mumbles.
“Yeah, duh, about time.” Isaac claps them both on the back with his usual tact, Erica smacks him in the head for being indelicate, and Derek may need to lean on Boyd to make it to the room but he barely even cares; everything is going to be fine.