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It was a long flight back to Duckburg, and Gyro slept for most of it.
He dreamt as he so often did of fire and pain, panic, betrayal. Kind, bright yellow eyes narrowing to pinpricks of red, his failure staring him full in the face. A child rising into the air, or what he thought was a child , his child, wreathed in smoke and sprays of rubble as it dispassionately dealt destruction and ruin.
Gyro awoke with a start. The memory of 2-BO’s crumpled, sparking body followed him, lying in a crater on a torn-up street after Tezuka’s finishing blow.
He took a deep, shuddering breath, coming to grips with his surroundings and the reality of the waking world. The plane rumbled around them, and outside the circular windows was an enigmatic night sky. Fenton was snoring beside Gyro, slumped against his shoulder over the armrest and Huey was leaning against Fenton, sleeping just as deeply.
A small hand pressed itself against Gyro’s chest, nearly over his heart.
“Are you okay?” came a quiet voice.
He looked down into a pair of familiar yellow eyes. Only, not so familiar, the blue now standing out brightly against the yellow.
Not moments after he’d slumped into one of the plane’s passenger seats, Boyd had climbed into his lap and promptly fallen asleep. And he had slept; his wasn’t the powering down of a simple computer. Gyro, too startled to do anything about the armful of child he found himself with, could feel the rise and fall of Boyd’s chest and see the minute twitches of expression as he slept.
The more cynical part (the majority) of Gyro’s mind told him it was a purposeful mimicry, the study and imitation of living behavior. Boyd was a robot, of course he didn’t need sleep. His energy core was self-sustaining, never needing charge or alteration. He could and should run indefinitely.
But Boyd believed he was a real boy, and so he slept like one. He made friends like one. He sought comfort and handed it out in equal measure like one, despite the cruelties that had been done to him.
“I’m fine,” Gyro said, answering the question that lingered in concerned blue eyes. “Did I wake you?”
“Just a little,” Boyd replied, tucking his head back beneath Gyro’s chin. “This is only my second time on an airplane, so it still feels a little weird.”
Gyro canted an amused look his way. “You learned you could fly today. How’s this any weirder?”
Boyd shrugged cheerfully. “It just is.”
Gyro breathed a quiet laugh, tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling of the Sunchaser, or Cloudslayer or whatever the McDuck family was calling it these days. Their flight had been suspiciously smooth, which probably meant Launchpad had fallen asleep at the controls.
Beside him, Fenton snuffled in his sleep and Gyro started to wonder why he still hadn’t shoved him off. Boyd’s hesitant words drew his attention instead.
“And actually, um...today wasn’t my first time flying.”
Gyro jerked his head back down so quickly that his neck twinged in protest, yet another reminder that he wasn’t as young as he used to be. Boyd was very obviously avoiding his gaze, knotting his fingers together in his lap.
“Do you mean…” Gyro wasn’t able to finish. He remembered 2-BO plowing through the sides of skyscrapers as screams rent the air, the shriek of metal and concrete shredding as easily as paper, glass raining down in glittering fragments like diamonds.
Just as he had two decades ago, Boyd understood him.
“Not...not of the attack,” he said, staring down at his hands. “I still can’t seem to remember the times that Dr. Akita tampered with my programming.”
Gyro was glad of it. It had been a few years since he consciously thought back to his disastrous time in Tokyolk; it would always be in the back of his mind, every time he put pencil to paper, with every invention he touched. Whenever he did revisit those memories, his failure overwrote anything else: 2-BO’s first shaky steps across the lab floor, surprise hugs against the back of his knees when he was off doing some tedious chore for Akita, sneaking out for ice cream to familiarize 2-BO with other people, the people he was meant to protect as the city’s defender.
What Gyro latched onto was the confusion, the horror and the destruction in the aftermath. Alone for hours in a freezing interrogation room, his feathers soot-streaked and body aching, where under Tezuka’s ceaseless barrage 2-BO became an ‘it,’ a malfunctioning piece of tech that Gyro never should have touched. Naive and foolish, he’d treated a weapon like a person and expected not to get burned.
Gyro’s first fantastic failure was turning a savior into a worldbreaker, only to learn it was never his fault to begin with. How much had Boyd suffered in the interim?
He swallowed thickly, painfully, against the barbarous emotions lodged in his throat. “What-what do you remember?” he asked.
Boyd smiled tentatively, glancing up at him. “You. I remember you coaching me through my first flight tests.” He giggled, lifting a hand to his beak to muffle the sound. “We started out with too much vertical thrust and I crashed straight into the wall.”
Despite himself, Gyro let out a brief huff of laughter because wonder of wonders, he did remember that. It was one of many moments he’d tried to forget, in the wake of it all.
Watching 2-BO slam into the back wall, overwhelmed by fifteen percent thrust, might have been alarming for Gyro, but it had been downright terrifying for 2-BO. In a trend Gyro had noted with increasing amazement, the more time he spent with 2-BO the less he acted like a robot and the more he acted like a child. Though he was nigh on indestructible and knew that, the accident frightened him and like a frightened child he didn’t want to try again.
“What if I hold onto you the whole time?” Gyro had suggested, extending his hands to 2-BO. “That way, you know for sure you won’t fly away.”
That had done it. No reprogramming or tinkering required, as Gyro watched 2-BO come to the decision himself.
“Okay, Dr. Gearloose,” he said, smiling in relief. 2-BO reached out, his hands diminutive within Gyro’s. Though he had the power to crush steel, 2-BO’s grip, while tight, never became painful.
“Let’s try point five percent thrust,” Gyro instructed, taking a step back so their clasped hands hung between them.
2-BO’s rockets engaged, and he rose about a half a meter into the air. He laughed with the bright infectious joy of a child. “I’m doing it! Look, Dr. Gearloose, I’m doing it!”
“I’m looking!” Gyro assured him, fighting laughter himself. Even as he gained confidence, 2-BO didn’t let go of his hands for a moment.
With a start, Gyro returned to the suddenly juddering, shaking plane in the present. Launchpad had clearly woken up or made an effort to focus on his flying, since they were still hours from crash landing in Duckburg.
Fenton began to stir beside him, stiffening in alarm. His brow furrowed and beak pulled into a scowl, making the bruising around his temples more pronounced. After their harrowing ordeal in Tokyolk, Gyro couldn’t blame him for his instinctive panic. It would be some time before he got the image of Fenton lying in the street, helmetless and vulnerable, out of his head.
“Go back to sleep, Cabrera,” Gyro muttered, nudging Fenton’s shoulder with his own. “We’re safe.”
While he didn’t think most would find reassurance coming from him particularly comforting, apparently it was enough to get Fenton to settle again. When Gyro looked back down at Boyd, he was watching Fenton with a sorrowful expression.
“I hurt Dr. Crackshell-Cabrera,” he said quietly. “I almost hurt you a-and Huey. I know I-I’ve hurt a lot of people in the past, even if I can’t remember.” He met Gyro’s gaze imploringly. “Can you make sure that I never hurt anyone ever again?”
A cold wash of shame settled in Gyro’s chest, because hadn’t he meant to do exactly that, but in the most permanent way possible? Setting out for Tokyolk under the false pretense of ‘fixing’ 2-BO’s glitches, when he actually intended to shut him down for good? Why Boyd would want anything to do with Gyro, much less want him near his delicate hardware, was beyond him.
He glanced over at Fenton to avoid the trust in Boyd’s gaze, but that was almost worse. Was he any better than Akita, treating his former-intern the way he did?
“Everyone hurts people, even if they don’t mean to,” Gyro said stiffly. “And sometimes when they do.” He forced himself to look back at Boyd. “In your case, I can remove all of Beaks’ corroded garbage and any other hidden surprises Akita might’ve left, now that I know to look for them. I’ll make it so it’s impossible for your hardware to be tampered with remotely.”
Gyro owed him that, if nothing else. Free will; no longer a puppet waiting for his next puppeteer, be it Akita or Beaks or anyone else.
“Thank you, Dr. Gearloose,” Boyd said, hugging him again , as if he was in any way deserving of gratitude. Gyro couldn’t even remember the last time he’d willingly embraced another person. It very well might have been 2-BO, nearly twenty years ago. Despite that, his arms rose seemingly of their own accord, hugging Boyd in return. A large part of him almost never wanted to let him go again.
With more reluctance than he would ever willingly admit to, he loosened his embrace. “What else do you remember?” he asked.
“What else?” Boyd replied, tilting his head to the side.
“I haven’t seen you in twenty years,” Gyro reminded him. “I thought you were...gone all this time. I had no idea you were with Beaks or even in Duckburg to begin with.”
“I don’t remember much before Mark Beaks found me,” Boyd admitted. His voice grew quieter. “He found me in the garbage right?” At Gyro’s halting nod, he continued, “All I remember before that is looking up at the stars. I remember thinking how pretty they were.” He ducked his head. “Sorry. That isn’t very helpful.”
“N-no,” Gyro said, a strange flutter of alarm beneath his sternum spurring him on. “No, it’s fine. I suppose Beaks was enough of a nuisance to reactivate your sensors.”
He was painfully, breathlessly grateful that Boyd didn’t seem to recollect the decades he spent in utter isolation, buried amongst refuse. Though whether the gratitude was for Boyd’s sake or to assuage his own guilt was not something Gyro wished to examine very closely.
“I didn’t like Mr. Beaks very much,” Boyd admitted in a whisper, as though the egomaniacal knock-off might somehow be listening.
Gyro snorted. “Believe me, nobody does.”
Boyd looked relieved. “He programmed me to think he was my dad,” he said thoughtfully, seemingly obvious to the way Gyro stiffened at this information. “It was to win the gift bags at Doofus’ birthday party, but for two whole days before that we did all sorts of fun stuff like go to the aquarium and a concert; we even flew kites! It was the best two days of my whole life.” As if the pit that had replaced Gyro’s stomach couldn’t get any deeper, Boyd smiled at him. “Until today, of course.”
“Today,” Gyro repeated, ice dripping into his tone, “a day where I admitted to planning on shutting you down, your programming was overwritten, and you almost destroyed Tokyolk again .”
“A day where I explored Tokyolk with my first real friend,” Boyd retorted, startlingly resolute, “I flew again, and I learned where I came from. And best of all, I found you again, Dr. Gearloose.”
And that, well. That was going too far, wasn’t it?
“Boyd,” Gyro said seriously. “However you remember me, naive and idiotic,” and good, he didn’t say. “That’s not who I am anymore.”
“Hm.” Boyd tilted his head back as though considering Gyro for the first time. “I guess you do look different. You’re older than I remember.”
“Hey.”
“And you do yell a lot more.”
“I do not—”
Boyd wrapped his arms around the back of Gyro’s neck, tugging him down in his surprise. Instinctively, his arms rose once more to cradle Boyd against him.
“But you still give good hugs,” Boyd murmured. “That hasn’t changed.”
Behind his glasses, Gyro’s eyes burned and he clenched them shut to alleviate the pain. He wasn’t the same man who built 2-BO, who upon meeting him realized he had created more than a mindless protector. Gyro had been young, idealistic, and without a family for most of his life; if he’d imagined that might change because of 2-BO, well, that was twenty years ago. And Gyro Gearloose was no one’s idea of a parent.
He cleared his throat, leaning away from Boyd’s embrace. The boy released him at once, his smile never dimming. It reminded Gyro of the expression he’d been greeted with at his lab, before he ruined it by screaming and climbing onto a desk.
“Beaks aside, tell me about your new family. I saw that disturbing child in your digital memories.”
Boyd blinked. “Oh, that’s my brother, Doofus. He’s still learning how not to make people’s lives miserable.”
“Do they treat you well?” Gyro demanded, almost startling himself with how badly he needed to know the answer. “Are you happy there?”
“I—yes,” he said, looking surprised. “The Drakes are very nice to me. They never cared that I was a robot. But now that I remember you, I won’t be going back, will I?”
A chill started creeping outward from under Gyro’s skin. He felt penned in by Fenton’s head on his shoulder and Boyd’s gaze, all of them so trusting and without any reason for it. He wanted to stand, he wanted to put distance between these feelings and himself, but that would mean waking Fenton and disrupting Boyd and when did he become the sort of man to care about things like that again?
“What do you mean?” he asked instead.
“Oh,” Boyd said. He looked scared, not unlike when Gyro had shown him a terrible memory and told him that he was evil down to his core. “I-I’m sorry. I just...I thought you might want things to go back to the way they were since we finally found each other. I...” When Gyro only continued to stare, tears welled up in his yellow eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Boyd, I’m not taking you away from your family,” Gyro said, his heart thudding painfully in his chest.
He shook his head. “That’s-that’s not what I mean. I want to go with you,” Boyd insisted. “I’ve never had a choice before, Dr. Gearloose. Mr. Beaks programmed me with a list of settings and after I lost control at Doofus’ party, I was assigned to be his little brother. I-I love the Drakes, I do, but I didn’t have a choice when I joined their family. And I...I was so happy to see you, even before I remembered you.” He wiped his cheeks free of tears and sniffed, making a valiant effort to contain the rest.
“But I know you thought I was evil all this time, so I understand if you don’t want me to be part of your family. Just know that you’ll always be part of mine.”
Guilt was a suffocating, burning thing, Gyro found, and he was feeling enough for two lifetimes in this moment. Making up for lost time, he could only guess.
“That’s not it,” he said, grasping for words. “Kid, you...you don’t want me as your family.”
Gyro was self aware enough to know that he wasn’t suitable for children; caustic, short-tempered and thoughtless, failure had made him defensive and thus made him cruel. He was idealistic once, he was hopeful once, but the man he used to be was long lost. Until now, Gyro had never thought to mourn him.
As though Boyd could see through to the heart of him, despite never being equipped with X-Ray vision, he smiled and said, “Of course I do.” He twined his arms around Gyro’s middle in his gentlest hug yet, as though he were the one deserving of comfort. What could Gyro do but hug him back?
Still, it wasn’t long before Gyro was the one putting an end to their embrace.
“Get some rest,” he said, opting for the coward’s way out. “You’ve had a long few days.” A long few years, really. “We’ll discuss this more at length when we’re back in Duckburg.”
“But, Dr. Gearloose,” Boyd tried to protest.
Gyro smoothed down the feathers on Boyd’s head, made unruly by sleep. His fingers trembled. “Get some rest, Boyd. I’m not going anywhere. Not this time.”
He looked at Gyro for a long moment, and whatever he saw was apparently enough to reassure him. “Okay,” he replied, curling up close. One of Boyd’s small hands gripped a fistful of his shirt.
Several minutes passed before Gyro was confident that whatever subroutine that allowed Boyd to sleep had been activated, and he heaved a shaky sigh. He almost felt more exhausted now that he had when they boarded the plane, bruised and sleepless after reliving the worst period of his life.
Looking down at Boyd, asleep in his arms, he was able to admit that at least some good had come of the ordeal. He was also terrified. Not only terrified of the fact that he was actually considering taking Boyd in, but also terrified of the way Fenton smiled at him, challenged him and reminded him far too much of the good man he used to be.
But they were still several hours away from Duckburg. As they existed in this liminal space, crossing from night into day and back again, perhaps he could rest, too, and worry about how everything in his life was changing when they landed.
Fenton was still sleeping close, his cheek just shy of resting on Gyro’s shoulder. Slowly, so as to not even entertain the risk of waking him, Gyro leaned back against his seat so that his head was propped up just above Fenton’s. He gathered Boyd just the slightest bit closer, and with his son back in his arms and more real than he could have ever imagined, the twenty year old scar over his heart finally began to fade.