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“Oh, crap…”
Forte is strongly inclined to agree. In slightly less polite terms. Loudly. But he can't speak, can't move anything below his neck--opening his eyes takes more effort than he thought was possible, and when he tries to actually look at anything, his vision fizzles into black and grey blobs with migraine-bright edges.
He can hear okay, and he can definitely feel things okay. Unless touch is malfunctioning too, and that's why everything hurts so much...
"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up!" Rock's voice, squeaking with obvious stress. (Forte would touch him if he could move. He doesn't know how to feel about that.) "I'm not good with major repairs yet, so I tried to get Dad, but Gospel wouldn't let anyone else near you at all, and... I'm really sorry. I'll turn you back off, okay?"
Major repairs? He wasn't that hurt. Was he? He'd had worse, anyway.
A spot of sensation unique from all the pain going on--warm, soft fingers, curling around his palm. "I'll fix it," Rock says as the lights start to go out. "I promise."
--
He still hurts when he wakes up again, but all his senses are back on, at least. He doesn’t move, not wanting to advertise that he’s awake just yet, but the weight on his legs feels more familiar than the legs themselves; when he sends a questioning ping out towards the weight, it instantly responds, hooking itself back into his network.
Gospel’s software isn’t nearly as complex as Forte’s own, but the wolf runs his own diagnostic on the battered robot with a distinct air of fretful tension, and Forte grins a little and reaches down to pet Gos’s ears without even needing to look.
The wolf whines softly and nudges into Forte’s palm. A little ripple of almost-scolding pulses over their link and Forte gives Gospel’s skull a little, apologetic scratch. “I won’t do that again,” he says. “Not on purpose, I mean.”
Judging by how Rock was acting when he showed up, Forte suspects that’s not the last apology he’ll be delivering about all of this… all of this. And, speak of the little, overly-concerned terror…
“Hi,” says Rock, poking his head through the doorway. “Can I come in?” There’s a lock of brown hair that’s flopped into his eyes. It’s annoying.
Forte snorts. “It’s your house.”
Rock grins cheekily, but steps inside. “It’s my dad’s house,” he chirps. “Technically. But he’d ask permission too.”
Gospel gives a very, very small growl. Rock looks a bit worried until Forte nudges the wolf into silence.
“No, Gos,” he mumbles. “Lights good.” And damn, but is that a confusing as fuck thing to say.
Gospel doesn’t look completely convinced, but he lays his head back on his paws, heaving a slow sigh of acceptance.
“I brought you an E-tank,” Rock says, offering it. “And cookies.” He looks worried. “Can you eat cookies? Roll made them,” he adds, as if who made them would affect Forte’s intake compatibilities.
Forte makes some kind of annoyed huffing noise. He’s starting to get concerned about his inability to figure out what the hell he’s saying when he’s around Rock, but there doesn’t seem to be anything bad about it. Just glitchy. “I’m the latest result of our dads’ lifelong pissing contest,” he says—very nearly sneers. “Anything you can do, I can do better. Supposedly.” Unfortunately, he can’t make the bitterness sound like a joke.
Thank robot heaven or whatever that Rock doesn’t pursue the matter this time. He does give Forte a Look of some kind, maybe a sad-ish kind, but he doesn’t try and argue the point. Instead, he just hands Forte the E-tank and produces a bag of cookies out of his hoodie, plonking them unceremoniously on Forte’s lap before plonking himself unceremoniously next to him.
“How are you?” he asks, staring at Forte with a kind of creepy intensity. Rock’s definitely looking at his face, but not in the “hey, I’m listening to what you’re saying” kind of way; more in the “there’s probably something wrong with your face somewhere and I just haven’t found it yet” kind of way. It would be insulting if, well… it wasn’t probably totally true. Forte hadn’t looked at himself for a while.
He shrugs. “Feel okay now.” He never cared enough for mechanics to know what, specifically, Rock would be looking for. “Guess you did all right.”
The way Rock smiles at him, Forte’d almost think that he told the guy that Santa was real or that Wily’d given up on world domination and taken up gardening instead. “Dad walked me through a lot,” Rock chirps. “Your insides are really cool, Forte.”
That’s… either creepy or sexy. Forte quirks an eyebrow at him and isn’t 100% sure why his mouth decides to come out with, “Is that supposed to be flirting?”
Rock opens his mouth, closes it. He’s got a little bit of a blush, just at the tip of his nose and a couple of uneven splotches across both cheeks. He visibly thinks for a second and Forte waits for him to put the pieces together.
The Lightbot tilts his head. “I don’t get it,” he admits, finally. And then Forte guesses it hits him, because that blush just flashboils all over Rock’s face just half a second later.
Okay, that. That was definitely cute.
Gospel gives Forte a Look. Forte pretends not to notice.
There’s a long, weird silence after that. It’s tense, but not from any kind of nervousness that the next words would break something; more that... the next words, whatever they were, would fix it, or create something new altogether, and neither one of them knew which.
Forte hates it, as he hates most scenarios that make him contemplate complex emotions. But before he can break the quiet with something trivial enough to make the tension go away, Rock opens his mouth again.
"What happened to you?" he asks. He’s very quiet, and he won't look at Forte, fixing his eyes instead on a point two inches inside his own left knee. "Did Dr. Wily...?"
Forte snorts a laugh at the very concept even as something uncomfortable begins to stir in his guts. He stands behind what he did, even if he still has no fucking clue why he did it, and even if it didn't even work. But. Something about it seems... shameful, somehow. Private. Something to be hidden, especially from Rock and his stupid, innocent, concerned eyes.
"Please, like that old fuck ever does his own dirty work," he says. "No, he just didn't fix me afterwards." Some father, right? The words float to the tip of his tongue, but he clamps his jaws shut before they can escape. He'd mean it as a joke, but Rock would take it as yet another reason to pity him. Probably.
Rock pulls a face. "So what did happen?" he presses. He flicks his eyes up to meet Forte's. Fuck.
Forte tries to smile but ends up just baring his teeth. "Why do you care?" he asks. "I don't need your vengeance, if that's what you're trying to do."
"That's not it!" Rock objects, eyebrows furrowing in what somehow manages to be a worried glare. "I care about what happened because I care about you."
The Wilybot's eyes widen. He can't quite piece together anything intelligent in the wake of that sentence, so his mouth just sort of says the thing his eyes are the most focussed on instead. "Are you blushing? Again?"
Rock curls in on himself, sitting with one knee up to his chest, crossing one of his arms atop it and pretending not to hide his face in his elbow. It wouldn’t help even if Forte bought it for a second; the flush goes all the way up to his hairline. “No,” Rock mumbles.
Forte laughs at him.
Before he can begin to feel bad about it—you’re not supposed to laugh at your friends, right? Or… not-enemies?—Rock’s eyes crinkle in a soft, happy kind of way, and damn if it doesn’t make up for this entire week.
And that’s just… too weird to think about, so he lets his mouth do what it wants to for a second, and for a second what his mouth wants to do is say, “What, you want to fuck me or something?”
Rock squeaks, turns about three different colours all at the same time, and buries his entire face in the crook of his elbow.
(Someday, he’s going to kick Dr. Light for modelling Rock after a teenager. Because if he hadn’t modelled Rock after a teenager, Wily wouldn’t have modelled Forte after one too, and then Forte wouldn’t have to deal with the dumbass things that his mouth thinks are good ideas anymore.)
“I don’t,” Rock assures him, but then he apparently decides that the logical (if strangely disappointing for reasons Forte is not going to think about) response isn’t good enough. “I mean!” He stretches an arm out a little bit, wiggling it in what seems to be some sort of placating gesture. “I don’t not, I—ugh,” he finishes. He folds his arm back, rests his forehead on it, defeated.
“What’s wrong?” Forte says, grinning even though bits of his software are buzzing. There’s this… excited… tension that he just knows isn’t going to go away until he can dissect what Rock’s been saying, but Rock isn’t showing any signs of going away so Forte can do that, and… “Think you’ll break me?”
Rock’s giggle is more than a little deranged. “Re-break you, maybe,” he corrects. “I don’t know if your repairs are good enough yet.”
Forte’s grin widens. “Damn shame.”
“Heh,” says Rock uncomfortably. “Heheheh,” says Rock uncomfortably. “Oh, I have the chessboard in here.”
Subtle.
—
Three games in, Rock finally figures out how to look Forte in the eye again.
“I want you to be happy,” he says softly. “And I don’t… think you’ve had enough chances to be happy. And I just… want to make up for that, I guess.”
Fuck, he’s perfect, Forte thinks suddenly. He can’t come up with a counterargument.
“So if you want to be—uh—” Rock frowns, visibly trying to come up with a word— “whatever you want to be, then I’d… like that.”
Forte’s mouth feels dry. He tells himself that that makes no sense, that of course his mouth is dry, he’s a robot, but it doesn’t help. “That’s… kinkier than I thought you’d be,” he says oh for fuck’s sake why did he say that. “I thought you’d want something… you know. Yourself.”
“I do,” Rock says easily. He finally remembers the game in Forte’s lap, moves his pawn.
Forte stares at the pieces instead of at his… his… friend thing. “So? What is it?” He snorts. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a doormat after you kicked Wily’s ass… what, eleven times?”
“Twelve times.”
“I helped with King. Doesn’t count.”
Rock grins at him, totally happy. “Okay,” he agrees. “Eleven times.”
Forte’s thrown off-balance by Rock’s total lack of argument and even more so by what he says next.
The Lightbot curls up a little, rests his chin on the heel of his hand, regards Forte with a quiet and unreadable contentment. “Why would that make me a doormat?” he asks. “I never said I didn’t want any of that.”
Forte swallows. “You never said you did, either,” he says a bit crossly.
“Well. I do.” Rock frowns after that. “I just didn’t want it to be my idea that you just went along with or anything, I mean, I still don’t know if you even really like chess—”
Before Rock can keep rambling, Forte tips his own king over, scoots forward, and grabs Rock by the hoodie to pull him forward and kiss him.
(It doesn’t occur to him until much later that it’s the first chess game he’s ever lost.)
—
Forte’s repairs go a lot faster once he calls Gospel off the other Lights, and as a result he has less than a week to figure out his own mind before he’s completely functional again. He thinks, for a time, about just staying at Light Labs, but something in him… rebels at it. Perhaps it’s a holdover from his programming, some shred of ingrained loyalty to Wily that never quite got overwritten, but he prefers to think of it as independence.
He’s started to have little bursts of optimism. He blames Rock entirely.
At first, there’s the question: if he isn’t at Wily’s nth castle, and he isn’t at Light Labs, and he isn’t dying in the shell of a bombed-out building, where can he go? But…
Robots are everywhere now. Between his (perfected) version of Rock’s internal generator, his symbiosis with Gospel, and the fact that he could get E-tanks from shops instead of labs now, maintenance would be almost comically easy. He’s not going to break down in the middle of nowhere unless he runs into something strong enough to take him down. (So, either Rock or himself, and he can’t do that to Gos again.)
Forte’s worried when he tells Rock of his plans—or, rather, intentional lack thereof—but, bless him, the little blue idiot just nods a bit and gives Forte his own damn teleport codes.
It’s the stupidest thing he’s ever done, and Forte tells him so, and the only thing Rock does is look up at him and go “it’s stupid?” like it isn’t obvious.
“Yeah,” Forte says. “I could be tricking you again. Taking the opportunity to get back into Wily’s good graces, or something.”
Rock smiles. “I guess I’ll just have to trust you,” he replies.
Forte is still working on regular physical affection, so instead of kissing the Lightbot (like he wants to) he just messes up his hair (like he also wants to, to be honest). “I’ll see you in a few days,” he promises. “Or when Wily tries something again. Whichever comes first.”
Rock snorts, catching Forte’s hand in his own and pulling it away from his head. Damn. “Okay,” he says cheerfully, and leans up to kiss Forte, because he’s a fucking mind reader or something.
Forte can still feel Rock’s warmth on his lips hours after he teleports away.
“I’m screwed,” he tells Gospel. Gospel huffs in agreement.