Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was cloth fluttering on the tips of his claws. Revenant groaned, tearing the scraps off and tossing them to the floor. Long, curling strings of red paint were down there too, some even still hanging from his arms, and he messily brushed them off. He didn’t want to think about what he looked like.

He never did, but especially not right now. As if sleepwalking, he peeled himself off the floor and exited his small one-room apartment without even bothering to lock the door.

Three weeks ago he’d had a most illuminating conversation with the hacker.

“You’ll still have them, but you’ll be able to think about them when you want, instead of all the time,” the hacker had explained. At the moment, even Crypto’s assurance that “I’m not taking anything away from you” had made him want to wring his neck. Now, surrounded by hanging racks of identical shells and the lurid details of his latest death howling at the gates, having things taken away from him was sounding awfully attractive.

Which was why, at 3 AM, he was knocking on Crypto’s door. The hacker was awake and answered within the minute, eyes lined with shadows but movements sure and confident. Like he’d known Revenant would come to him-- not crawling, or begging for his help, even though it certainly felt like that. He hadn’t had to ask for anything in centuries. Revenant didn’t have a throat, didn’t have a sense of taste, but felt as if he should be tasting bile. Two weeks ago, he’d mentioned offhand that could it be possible that his resistance to altering his code could be a product of the code itself?, and Crypto had given him a noncommittal but tentatively affirmative response, and Revenant had holed himself up in his apartment for hour upon enraged hour only to emerge from a subterranean production facility the next morning. Right now, Crypto rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and waited patiently for Revenant to give his piece.

“I’ve thought about your offer. I’m taking you up on it. Alter my code, now.”

Wisely, Crypto did not argue or protest the small hour. He gestured to his bed in lieu of a guest chair and pulled his chair back out.

“I have everything set up already,” he explained, tapping away at his keyboard.

“Whatever. Just do it, before I change my mind and kill you instead.”

His claws itched to dig into the delicate seam of metal and flesh along Crypto’s jaw. Crypto’s modifications were extreme, yes, and certainly he had made himself all the more lethal with them, but Revenant knew better; a skinbag was a skinbag, even one with titanium bracings. He’d clearly had subdermal work done; Revenant wanted to see how deep it went. If he ran his finger down the back of one arm, split him open and peeled flesh back, would he have reinforced his bones? If Revenant carved the jaw brace off of him, would it be mounted in bone?

Would he scream, as Revenant did all that?

“I need to access one of your chassis ports.”

Crypto moved closer to him until Revenant could smell the soap he’d used to wash this morning, unafraid or at least undaunted, and Revenant allowed him to stick a hand in the underside of his chassis to slip a datastick into one of the ports. Induced-fit; smart. There was no way to know if Revenant’s technology was compatible with the modern day.

There was an old saying, Revenant fuzzily recalled, about biting the hand that fed him, and even though he ached to satisfy a different hunger he was in no hurry to meet Crypto’s EMP outside the surprisingly rigid rules of the arena.

“It’s finished,” Crypto interrupted his train of thought. What? It had been so fast, compared to what Revenant had expected. He pulled back from Revenant’s chassis, slim datastick between his long, typist’s fingers. “You have to communicate with the facilities, your reserve code, but it also has to communicate with you. The next time you transfer bodies, the code string I’ve written for you will integrate with your code to isolate and suppress the memories of your deaths. You can view them individually if you want, or not at all.”

Huh. Surprisingly simple, and not couched behind language meant to make Revenant too frustrated to ask for clarification.

“This had better work.” The digital clock on Crypto’s desk, a shelf for a small ceramic pot and a similarly small bonsai, turned to 3:31 AM. “I have no reservations about killing you if it doesn’t.”

Crypto was already sitting down at his computer again.

“I know.” So confident; like he had nothing to fear. Like the monster in his room wouldn’t make a move against him. “It will work.”

Revenant’s claws dug into his arm. He wanted to snarl something, but Crypto was already pulling up a command prompt.

Fine. He’d have plenty of time to make the skinsuit cower and sob if the fix didn’t work, so he abruptly stood and pushed out the door.

Chapter Text

When Revenant offlined for the night, he sometimes pretended he was dying for good. He constructed rudimentary fantasies in his head; that he was suffocating (of all violent deaths, the most peaceful; once, he’d died in a businessman’s backroom and after the initial pain of a crushed windpipe it was almost entirely like falling asleep, and not bad at all) or drowning (they’d broken his legs but left his hands free to allow him to struggle for as long as he could until his arms gave out, and when he was sinking to the bottom of the mirrored pool with water filling his lungs he had felt an almost dreamlike anaesthesia) or bleeding out (similar to suffocation, a soft and cottony weight stealing over his mind and vision until he quietly succumbed to it) or, rarest of all, in his bed, in an aged body he’d never been allowed to experience, with someone whose name he used to know by his side. Holding his hand.

This death was none like those. He’d gone soft from the games, the relatively clinical deaths by gunfire or simply being beaten to death. It happened quickly.

He found his thoughts returning to Crypto. In the games, his EMP was mercifully brief, a solid wall of disorientation and pain that cleared in seconds and somehow did zero lasting damage to his internals, only the force shields the gamerunners provided. This one was different, much worse, and lasted much longer. The initial hit locked up his limbs and threw his sensors— auditory, olfactory, vision— completely out of whack.

It was all over for him, then, though it would not truly be over for hours after that.

The nothingness of death was peaceful. When Revenant purred fatalistic threats to opposing Legends, he wasn’t lying; there wasn’t anything after death. It was a void, an inky expanse to house his consciousness and the promise of nothing more than that for eternity. He experienced it a blip at a time, like falling into a deep sleep;

and then he was back, already bracing for the now-familiar avalanche of horror. It took a solid minute for his self to catch up with his coding— it was stupid to try and draw lines between the two but he tried, when he had the energy— and realize that the expected flood hadn’t come.

The memories were there, of course, patiently biding their time, but he could tell the difference between them as he sifted through the folder. They were all there— impalement, immolation, suffocation, corrosion, dismantlement, explosion, violation, viruses, that one time he had been frozen in a meat closet, just this last death where he’d been little more than a head and a chassis by the time his coding fragmented and sputtered and curled up to die. One at a time, they were… bad, but not unbearable.

The hacker hadn’t been lying to him; pity. Revenant had been halfway looking forward to tearing his augments out of his skin and seeing how long it took him to start begging, if he would at all.

Now he would have to thank Crypto somehow, on the off chance he ever needed to have it done again.

Revenant exited the nowhere-house he’d come to in, running a clawed hand over his bare cranium. Obtaining replacements for his clothes was never difficult; he’d return to the Apex Complex, and do so.

On the way back he brainstormed what he could get for Crypto. He could always ask if the hacker needed anyone dead. That was the easiest solution, and most likely Crypto would turn him down and he’d be off the hook in showing his gratitude at all.

Oh, but that was the cheap thing to do, wasn’t it? A small discomfiting ache tugged at him somewhere in his wires and he snarled to himself, an unconscious sound of displeasure. It wasn’t that Crypto would know; it wasn’t even that he’d care. The hacker likely wasn’t expecting anything by way of thanks aside from being left alive.

The small shop cleared out when he stormed in, some obviously and some with far more grace. Either way, by the time he surfaced from the smoldering haze of displeasure each new resurrection lit in him, the shop was empty but for him and the pale girl at the front desk. It was one of the many general stores on the street-level of the city, which one it was he didn’t entirely know yet, but it didn’t matter. He’d pick up some knickknack here and pass it off to the hacker and that would be acceptable.

He paced around the store, noting with vicious glee the terrified eyes on him from the girl behind the front desk. How brave of her, as if she could actually stop him if he did something to the worthless items in the store.

Crypto had plants in his room. They were miniature trees, carefully-maintained bonsai in novelty pots, and a single succulent tucked underneath his monitor. There was a display at the back of the store, cactus on shelves, and he reached out to select two almost before he’d thought it over entirely. He didn’t bother reading which ones they were or how much they cost; one was a tall, dark green bundle of snake-tongued, tough leaves in a pot shaped like a ram, and the other was smaller, a squat and broad geometric rosette of fleshy, plump green leaves. That pot was likewise shallower and broad, in the shape of a smiling frog. Revenant didn’t get the appeal.

Whatever. He paid (halfway to watch the girl stammer out that he’d overpaid, and deposit his change with shaking hands on the counter so clumsily that a coin nearly rolled off had he not caught it effortlessly between a claw-sharp thumb and finger) and stalked out of the shop with his new acquisitions.

The complex was quiet when he returned, Legends and civilians asleep or occupying themselves in their rooms. The training grounds were dark, as was the greenbelt in the very center of the complex. A string of streetlights illuminated the walkways and the holoscreens with directions were dark, nothing more than frames.

The facility never really slept, but at times like these Revenant imagined it was letting a well-deserved breath out.

There was one person, at least, who he knew would be awake. He rapped on Crypto’s door, waited half a minute, and knocked again, and finally the man opened it.

“Revenant. I take it the program worked?”

“It worked perfectly,” Revenant admitted with utmost reluctance. He couldn’t help the urge to peel Crypto’s skin off of his bones anyway. That was in his coding, that urge to destroy, though maybe it was just how he was even before all this.

He shoved the thoughts away and let himself into Crypto’s apartment instead, holding out the houseplant in the ram pot.

“Did you bring this for me?” Crypto accepted the plant, holding it carefully by the base with one hand and thumbing over the leaves. Revenant grunted.

“I was going to kill you if it hadn’t. Take that as a token of my… gratitude.” He spared one last disparaging glare at the innocent plant as if it would wither up and burn if his eyes glowed bright enough.

“What is it?”

“Snake plant.” He knew that at least, thanks to the small info card staked into the pot. He’d read it on the way to the complex and tossed it on the ground; perhaps he should not have done that, since he was relatively sure it also had care instructions. “It supposedly thrives in rooms with…” Revenant cast his eyes around the room, with a pizza box, Chinese takeout, and several paper coffee mugs forlornly on the floor and the curtains (blackout, of course) drawn over the windows. “Low light and little water.”

If Crypto noticed the jab, he gave no indication. “Thank you.”

Ceramic clicked against the desk. The digital clock gave a tiny chuck as it flipped the hour. Revenant grunted again, turned, and left.

Chapter Text

There never really was any reason to take care of the apartment they’d given him. It was little more than twenty-by-eight cube, enough space for a desk, a bed, and a small cabinet. It was larger than one of the cubicles on the dropship, but only just. He’d had an… accident, a while ago, and had neglected to haul the shell out to the recycling bin. He didn’t need to sleep in the way of people who cared about comfort and he’d torn his mattress to shreds at some point, too, so the bed was nothing more than the slats and the gutted mattress laid in sad, lumpy bits all over the floor. He idly kicked the corner of it to nudge it a little more to the side.

It was late, and he needed to offline for at least a little so he wouldn’t start glitching out during the game tomorrow.

He took the other plant from the small paper bag he’d carried it in and set it down on the floor beside the door, one of the only semi-clear areas. Almost on habit, he snarled at the vacant, cheery grin on the ceramic frog, and spun it around so it could smile at the wall instead.

He took in the messy chaos of his room— ha— and dropped down to the floor, laying out among the fabric scraps and assorted metal shards. The ceramic pot kept grabbing his attention, a splash of green in the monochrome room. Green. Gray. White. Black. Red, from the crumbled shell in the corner, dented and gouged. He looked at the ceiling instead of looking at any of that.

He let his optics dim, forcing an offline cycle as quickly as he could. How funny, it was, when they had him thinking he was a human; they throttled how efficient his nighttime cycles could be to make sure he “slept” for eight hours. No more; no less. He’d thought he was simply disciplined. When he discovered the reality of his condition, he barely needed an hour. Later, two hours.

Now, four. After so many deaths and the slow accumulation of junk data and bugs, each offline cycle required more and more of him. Perhaps they will continue to increase. Perhaps one day he will offline and then will not online again. It’s not quite what he wants, but it’s not like he can be picky, can he?

He onlined four hours later, rose to his feet, and gave the limp shell an idle kick before striding out of his apartment to make it to the dropship lest he be left behind, a target of mockery by the announcers and worse— missing his chance to kill.

The game passed in a blur. They were beginning to do that more and more often, which sucked, because there was little that gave him more satisfaction than a screaming, whimpering skinbag. He’d been ready to impale that insufferable French girl between the ribs when he was dropped by a sniper rifle; cracking the still air of World’s Edge like a lightning strike and burying a round into the back of his head.

Wattson had exclaimed and scrambled away to her teammate for protection, and when he inevitably bled out he didn’t bother opening up the killfeed to see who had shot him.

As soon as the group was returned to the complex, Revenant stalked out to the training grounds. Nobody followed; they were content to celebrate their victory or commiserate over a glass of something strong. The loose sand of the shooting range squished underfoot and blew weakly in the breeze. It was hot, he vaguely acknowledged, warming the metal of his shell.

He missed the hallucinations, sometimes. He missed the sensation of sunlight on skin no matter how false it was. So what if it was just a fabrication of his catatonic mind; it was real to him. Morning after morning standing at the window with an (empty) mug (horrifically chipped) of coffee (nothing) and watching the sun take the sky from pale to bright. Walking himself, bleary-eyed, to the sink to shave (to scrape paint off of himself in curls that mounded at the bottom of the sink) and wash his face (he’d never noticed it felt so hard) and slick his hair back (why did he never notice?), picking a bounty (an assignment uploaded right into his head and making him think he was doing it by choice) and going to do it.

It had all been so real.

Why had he never questioned any of it? Did they make him stupid? Was he always like that, confident and content and stupid? It was so hard to tell, sometimes. Who he used to be, and what he’d been programmed to be, but it wasn’t like he could go back if he tried.

The target dummy in front of him was riddled with holes. His P2020 was out of ammo. With a disgusted exhale, he tossed the pistol away and saw it disintegrate into a scintillating shower of sparks back to its weapon stand.

It shouldn’t have been that, to set him off as badly as it did; seeing it disappear. Seeing it return, good as new. He breathed on impulse, out of habit, and his breath caught. He tore his gaze away from the stupid pistol.

He closed the distance between him and the dummy. In a few moments, it would do the same; it would regenerate, or perhaps be whisked away and replaced with a new, unbroken one. His head felt tight and buzzing. It was different from the haze of the games, where he was occupied (by what?) and his hands worked without much conscious input from his mind, on murderous autopilot. The force with which he jammed his arm in to the wrist on the dummy was very conscious; it spilled springs and spiraling curls of plastic. The dummy didn’t cry or wail as a human might, didn’t soothe the enraged heat inside of him.

The stupid thing couldn’t die, of course. He couldn’t kill it, only tear it up, and he was doing his best to rip it to pieces before the automated system took it away from him and replaced it with a perfect copy.

He yanked it away from where it stood patiently accepting his abuse, and dragged it by a dislocated forearm through the dust. Up the slope that passed under one of the metal sniper nests, favorable perches with fluttering banners tied to the supports. The dummy left a furrow as he dragged it.

Would that stay?

His head was filled with a static he couldn’t cut through by the time he reached the edge of the shooting range, looking down to the canyon below. Directly underneath him was studded with jagged rocks, bits of metal and assorted trash. Gray. Black. Red. With a muted grunt of effort, he tossed the dummy over the edge and leaned to watch it plummet. The limbs flapped as it fell, ugly and uncoordinated, the head tilted to its chest and stuffing falling out from the velocity.

Before it hit, the automated system rolled over and decided that it was time to refresh the shooting range. The falling dummy disappeared in a shower of light. Revenant’s claws tightened around his wrist— he’d been scratching himself, too, in an attempt to alleviate the unbearable staticky ache, and that did nothing, and he was even denied the simple pleasure of watching the dummy shatter to pieces on the rocks below. Anger and frustration overflowed, abrupt and blinding and bringing the static to an overwhelming surge, because nothing changed nothing nothing nothing and he was going to come back like the pistol, like the dummy, even in the games they could haul him back from death, so what did it matter? What did anything he ever did matter, aside from the killing?

With the same forceful heft, he threw himself over the edge of the cliff before he could change his mind. The world turned upside-down, clouds smearing across the fever-blue sky. The Leviathans plodded along miles away. Wind wooshed in his sensors. He just wanted it to stop.

His shell broke apart and shattered on the rocks below.

It was not the end.

It did, however, endow him with a relatively clean slate, and he did remember that he had been upset and had thrown himself to a would-be gory death, but the new shell was working fine and he could not quite pinpoint what had made him so angry in the first place. He thought it was anger; emotions were hard to pick apart, these days, so he settled on the ones he was most familiar with.

One he was very unfamiliar with prodded at him when he realized once again that the hacker’s code was still working. No avalanche of horror for him; that was still novel.

He’d have to get him some more plants.

He plodded back to his room, snatched up the other one he’d bought the day before— he thought it was the day before and did not care enough to check a calendar— and made his way to Crypto’s apartment. It was small, but larger than Revenant’s for the obvious reasons; he needed to bathe, to relieve himself, needed space to spread out because he was a living thing. If Revenant had a tongue, he would taste bitterness.

Some days, he did not mind it so much.

Some days, he did. It was the sun on his shell that had led to his last death, wasn’t it? The memory was isolated, now, standing alone instead of mashed into a chaotic tangle of agony and terror.

The ceramic frog smiled up at him. It had rosy dots on the end of its mouth, like a blush. Why Crypto liked these things, he’d never know; he expected better of the man.

Since when had he started expecting anything of Crypto at all? The thought disturbed him, and he tore away from it to knock curtly at the code-locked door.

He looked down at the tiny information card staked into the potting soil. Crypto shortly let him in, tilting his head to the side before settling on the pot in Revenant’s hand. Revenant took a step inside and Crypto allowed it, more because he didn’t want Revenant to make a move on him rather than because he was so permissive.

“The brochure called it hen-and-chicks. Or live forever, because even though a singular plant by itself isn’t very long lived, its ability to propagate quickly makes it… tenacious.” If Crypto noticed the pointed meaning, he gave no indication; cooly accepting the broad plant and setting it on his coffee table next to— ugh— a half-drunk coffee. Revenant knew he wasn’t welcome here. If anything, these stupid cacti were him making sure the continual threat of him hung over Crypto’s head.

With what he hoped was a haughty instead of awkward turn, he swept from the room.

Chapter Text

The games had been… passing. They’d been happening, and Revenant had performed. He had killed. He had put on a sickening show for the voyeurs at home.

It was strange, though. The act of taking a life used to be a distraction, a muffling of his own internal noise. With each string of death picked from the tangle and spooled up neatly, it became a focusing lens.

He bought more plants. He anticipated dying more, by accident or on purpose or by an impartial bullet when an assassination went wrong, but in between the games his revenge killings went off without a hitch and he was so busy he barely had time to sink into rage past his constant, low simmer. He watered the plants every day and leered at Crypto when their paths crossed.

The hacker only ever gave him a nod and continued on.

There had been plants in his apartment, before. He’d watered them dutifully. They’d been a soft, verdant relief from his endless work of ending lives.

Had that been a hallucination, too? The pots were grown over, roots cracking them and sending dirt all over the floor he’d always (he thought) kept pristine. How cruel of them to make him think he was, in any way, capable of nurturing life.

He looked over the dead, dying, or generally-malaised plants with the tiny guidebook in hand.

In a plain brown ceramic pot was an E. elegans, looking sad and neglected even though it had been only a few days since he’d gotten it. The rosette was limp and the petals had something wrong with them, but he wasn’t sure what.

There was a small pot of aloe next to it, and somehow that one looked mostly fine. There was some strange mottling on one of the leaves, but nothing the guidebook said to be vigilant for, so he gave the soil a sprinkle of water and moved on.

He’d attempted to repot an E. pulvinata, which he’d picked out for its elegant red-tipped leaves. It had not taken well to the move; the leaves were scattered on the soil of the pot and the ground where he’d let it rest, leaving the stem mostly bare.

On top of the shell’s chassis was an E. spp with light, almost translucent leaves; Revenant had not noticed in the hector of games and his extracurriculars that it was rotting. The soil was damp and molding. The plant, it seemed, was too far gone to save; the base was entirely black with rot. It was so stupid, he thought to himself sourly. Weren’t plants supposed to like water?

Be careful that you don’t love your new succulent to death, the guidebook chirped at him underneath a picture of a near-identical rotted plant, and he snapped it shut and hurled it against the wall. It wasn’t even large enough to make a satisfying thunk and it promptly fell behind the shell, and he sure wasn’t going to haul it to the side to retrieve the stupid thing.

The final plant just looked wrong, stretched-out with downturned leaves like the force of gravity was just too much. It looked like a child had come and pulled it. He couldn’t get the guidebook and so didn’t know exactly what his black thumb had wrought, so with a slowly-growing rage he guessed that the stupid thing wasn’t getting enough light.

Why would they have given him plants if he’d never had them to begin with? He must have.

He must have chosen them out, read up on how to care for them, and dutifully kept them alive with a careful hand back when his hands had been used for anything other than violence. He felt clumsy, now. This wasn’t what he was built for.

The poor arboretum‘s ceramic pot shattered into bits against the floor. Shards skidded out but the dirt and the plant stayed there, a miserable lump of Revenant’s failure to keep a fucking plant alive. He snatched up the rotted succulent and hurled that one into the wall, watching with vicious— satisfaction? God, he hoped this act of wanton destruction would satisfy him— something as the plant flopped pitifully over the scratched paint of the shell’s chassis, splayed atop a soggy mound of soil.

The pulvinata was in a pot shaped like a crab. It was painted a light red, with exaggerated cartoon eyes and rounded pincers. Don’t worry, be snappy! was written in beachy, playful cursive at the top of the pot.

He crushed it in his hand and followed the rain of dirt and bits of root that had come apart from the main body of the plant with bright, fevered optics.

He picked up the aloe again, surveying it for faults that might merit it being dashed against the ground, and found still none so he growled but set it back down. The elegans— if he was careful, it would pull through. He almost wanted to rip it to pieces now to save it the anguish. It was doomed to die, and all he could do was drag it out.

The buzz of destruction faded, and suddenly he felt sick. He set the elegans down.

There was a game today. The dropship left in a half hour. He dragged himself out of his room and trudged through the halls of the complex to the loading zone, shedding clumps of dirt from between the sturdy, flexible joints of his hands as he walked.

A pity about the plants; killing, at least, he could do.

Time passed in a haze and he resurfaced in the drop ship; on the platform they would jump from. His team was Rampart and Bangalore, both of which he resolved to ignore as thoroughly as possible.

Across the dropship, Crypro was conversing lowly with Wattson and Mirage. An uncomfortable pang struck him in the chassis, and Bangalore was calling out where she wanted to drop anyway, so he tore his attention away and stared at the craggy, mountainous spread of World’s Edge instead.

Even if the competitors didn’t come back, Revenant was certain he felt more remorse over killing the stupid succulents than snapping Wraith’s neck.

And—

Who was it, but Crypto, crouched behind a pile of debris and playing around with his little drone. His right hand was covered in bandages, once clean white but now stained with blood and dirt. Pale pink and red stretched over his wrist.

A burn, then. Revenant was certainly familiar with methods of injury and death.

“Knock, knock.”

He rapped on one of the metal crates, noting with satisfaction how Crypto hurriedly jammed the drone controller away and reached for his pistol. Much too slow if Revenant had simply shot him while he was distracted, but— it was only fair, to give him a fighting chance. Revenant could spare fighting fair this one time.

Crypto fumbled the pistol. He was holding it too lightly to compensate for the weight, and the handle jammed into the tender, burned flesh of his palm no matter how he held it. Revenant wanted to find it amusing— wanted to taunt him for it before sending him on his way to the respawn dropship.

He put two bullets in his head instead, dug in his deathbox for extra ammo, and continued on until he was mobbed from behind by Octane and Bloodhound. Rampart and Bangalore did not deign the detour to pick up his banner necessary, so once his game was for sure over he returned to the complex.

Still, he had died— that counted, right? Any opportunity to pawn off one of his sorry plants to the hacker. Both the elegans and the aloe sat on the chassis of the shell. He brushed dirt, rotted plant, and shards of clay to the ground, out of the way, chose whichever one looked the least pitiful— the aloe, and it was good for burns, wasn’t it?— and stalked through the halls.

Standing outside of Crypto’s door wasn’t something he’d consider a hobby. He just might have to start, what with how long Crypto left him there before opening the door, but he wasn’t going back to his apartment still in possession of the plant. He didn’t want the damn thing. Equally, he wanted Crypto to have it.

“Aloe,” he explained, even though Crypto knew more about the godforsaken plants than he did. Crypto’s fingers twitched, and Revenant noticed the pale jade of a burn patch on the meat of his palm. “It’s supposed to be good for burns.” Because of course Crypto would want a stupid plant when he had proper medicine already. Either way, it was the aloe or the stupid elegans that Revenant was trying to coax back from the brink of brown, desiccated death and his pride wouldn’t allow that. So Crypto could have the stupid aloe, and if he said shit Revenant would kill him.

Crypto tilted his head, just a little bit. “This burn patch has aloe in it. “

Did that qualify as shit? Revenant desperately wanted to be angry at him, because that would be better than whatever quavering uncertainty-fear?-awkwardness had seized him about the chassis and wasn’t letting go. He set the plant down a bit too hard and spilled a little dirt onto the table, rocking the tiny plant in its tiger-shaped pot.

“Whatever,” he snarled, and beat a hasty retreat out the door.

Chapter Text

He woke from an offline cycle feeling disgustingly chipper. It was the type of chipper that would see him going for an extra long run in the morning— something he’d fallen out of the habit of once he’d started accepting more high-risk targets.

Once he couldn’t be seen in public, more monster than man.

The chipperness faded away and left behind a tarry, sticky displeasure. He had a week until the next game, to give the champions time to rest on their laurels; to run a few rounds of recruiting for some local fodder to bulk up the dropship; to give others chance to spend out in the city, at a bar, with their family. It left him dreadfully bored and itching to kill something, and Loba was avoiding him.

He returned to the small corner store instead, where the girl at the counter was still afraid of him but no longer flinched at his entry. She didn’t even stare as he stalked the aisles, and she knew he was going to buy her stupid plants instead of just walking out with them. He thought about gutting her; about putting her eyes out and telling her that she shouldn’t take her eyes off of a threat. Any number of horrific things he could do to her easily and not face a shred of consequence but for death, as he had back before all this.

He picked out a few healthy-looking cacti and bought the stupid plants and a newspaper instead. One was in a pot shaped like a sheep, one was in a plain pot, and one was in a pot shaped like a turtle. He set them down in the paper bag she passed to him over the counter, snatched up his change, and left. The bells on the door jangled as he shoved it open, and whoever had been coming dove out of the way rather than be in his path.

Once he returned to his room in the compound he realized there weren't many places to put the things. He swept the mess off of the shell’s chassis, checked the elegans over and saw that it was indeed looking slightly healthier, and set the newest plants down in a neat line.

Then, he read the newspaper. It was fodder in the end, to soak up water left from his watering the plants, but it wasn’t like he had a television or a holoscreen in his room. Apparently, he didn’t need entertainment; he supposed he was usually perfectly capable of creating his own.

He laughed to himself and flipped the page, and oh, one of the Hammond bigwigs was supposed to be giving a talk in Solace in three day’s time. He finished reading the article, folded the newspaper up and arranged the plants on top of it, and got to planning.

+

It did not work. All had been executed without a hitch until he reached the suite where the executive was supposed to be staying— he was supposed to be avoiding attracting too much attention lest the games come under scrutiny, which he thought was hilarious but he had signed a contract— and skilfully wound through motion detectors, fish-eye security cameras, and what appeared to be a bomb waiting to take out an unobservant would-be assassin. It would have been easier to make his move in broad daylight to take advantage of the chaos, the confusion, the mortal terror of skinbags unsure which one of them was next, but— again. The contract. They hadn’t outright banned him from extracurricular activities, but it certainly was more difficult.

Best not let his skills go to fallow in the absence of a challenge, he supposed, and settled in on the ceiling to wait.

He was there for a handful of hours by the time the elevator dinged, his target stepped out, and three other people stepped out, one with a nasty, boxlike device that he recognized instantly and did not move fast enough to avoid as a wave of electricity slammed through the room.

It wasn’t that he missed the wide range of information the Syndicate’s database provided him about his targets, but certain things were necessary to know; like whether the guards were anticipating him or not.

A shame. He fell to the floor, denting and cracking the expensive tile, and this time was quickly shot.

He onlined, stood silently for a few moments to process what had just happened, and checked his GPS to find his way back to the complex. He made it back around 2 AM, with only the soft hooting of owls and the yips and growls of prowlers down in the canyon for company. If he listened hard enough, Octane was also yelling and swearing in Spanish to his cohort of over-caffeinated fans on Shiver. Revenant didn’t count that as company.

His room was still a mess; dirt on the floor, chunks of the mattress everywhere, the potted plants sitting on the chassis of the shell. He really needed to get the trash out. Even throwing it outside for someone else to deal with would probably feel better than letting it clutter up his room, right?

He snatched replacement clothes from the cabinet. He always wore the same thing, but as he’d heard Octane say, it was whatever. He wore them out of convention, not necessity.

With a mechanical sigh, he picked up the elegans. It didn’t even look too bad, now. The soil was still damp when he surveyed it, so he didn’t bother watering it before heading over to Crypto’s unit.

He knocked. Waited a minute. Knocked again, harder this time, and only then did Crypto open the door. He was holding a mug of coffee in his hand, and Revenant barely held back from expressing surprise that it was a mug instead of one of his paper cups. No point.

The desktop was humming quietly with blueprints for something Revenant could not pick apart by sight alone, and the television was playing a movie on mute. It seemed familiar, somehow.

He recognized it but could not place it. His free hand curled into a fist, impotent anger bubbling up his wires. That was familiar, as well.

“It’s an old movie,” Crypto’s voice cut through his thoughts, crisp and sharp. He held his hand out expectantly for the plant, and as Revenant handed it over he noticed that all the other plants he’d given Crypto had found places. They looked better, too, evidently having been given closer, gentler tending than he had ever given them. Leave it to Crypto to clean up his messes.

He snorted and shook his head, and only then noticed that he was still in Crypto’s apartment, and Crypto was still looking at him.

“I didn’t know you liked old movies.” God, he should probably know which one it was. Something turned over inside of him when a cursory look around the room revealed no clue.

“I wasn’t really watching it,” Crypto interjected smoothly. He reached for the remote-- Revenant almost shot his hand out to grip him around the wrist and demand that he not turn it off, but Crypto only unmuted it instead. “You can take the couch if you want. I still have something to work on.”

“Fine.” He pushed past Crypto and circled around the couch, dropping down on the edge and hiking his legs up just to feel the stretch in his wires. He knew it looked strange. Inappropriate, even, and sickening; he still looked somewhat humanlike, and human bodies were not meant to contort in the way his could.

“Thank you for the plant,” Crypto murmured behind him. Revenant grunted, suddenly more interested in the movie than the uninteresting man in the room with him.

He finished watching the movie as Crypto typed rapidly at his desktop. He wasn’t even facing Revenant, confident that he would be left alone, but there was no point to doing anything to him.

He returned to his own apartment around 5 AM, found a clear spot, and offlined.

In the following days, he tried not to think too much about the movie; about Crypto’s tastes in entertainment, or the bags under his eyes, or how each and every plant he’d given Crypto was now thriving happily in his apartment. He was feeling a way toward Crypto that he hadn’t felt in a long time. So long, in fact, that he wasn’t sure what it was, and recognized it as familiar in the same way he recognized the movie, but could not place it.

Respect, perhaps, or admiration. It was an alien but not unpleasant lightness and warmth somewhere in his chassis. Opening, slowly, like a plant to the sun.

+

A week later, Crypto stopped him as he left his apartment after giving him another aloe; this time chosen more for the pot than the plant. It was in the shape of a lizard, the same green as Crypto’s drone, and Revenant had picked it out almost on impulse thinking well, maybe he’ll like it.

“Here.” Crypto passed him a medium-sized succulent, a frame of a man kneeling with his arms holding the pot, “you should have one for yourself. To keep.”

A part of Revenant snarled, recoiled, ready to treat the gesture-- the plant, Crypto’s tone, as a jibe. A threat. Something other than what it was, which was a gift.

Pure and simple. There was no reason for it to be anything else; Crypto wouldn’t do something without reason. He took the pot with both hands and stepped backwards, distantly noticing the coolness of the ceramic, the soft puddle of warmth from Crypto’s gloved hands (as to not leave fingerprints; clever of him).

“What makes you think I’ll have better luck keeping this one alive than all the other ones?”

Crypto tilted his head. “천만에.” He turned, brushing his hand against the door. “Goodnight.”

Revenant did not reply, and stalked off to his room.

Chapter Text

Revenant wasn’t sure when he had changed. He spent more time in a state of near-calm than near-anger, though those were often very close, and with the slow clearing-out of his room it felt like something in his head was clearing too. It was strange, was all. Anger was still a close companion and easier to reach than happiness.

He’d thought of carving Crypto’s chest open and it had made him feel sick. Wraith, Silva, Caustic, there was no change. It would be so easy to accuse Crypto of having done something to him, but Revenant knew that he hadn’t. This wasn’t a blip of code; wasn’t a slow, pernicious program sinking hooks into his processor and reshaping him to be toothless, at least where Crypto was concerned.

It had been two weeks since Crypto gave him the plant of his own. It was an elegans, like Revenant had given him, and since coming into his care he had managed to keep it from rotting, drowning, wilting from need of light, contracting disease, or being eaten by bugs. It was a handsome little plant.

He’d put it on the shell and that was the only reason he hadn’t hauled the thing out. If he did, he’d need to find somewhere else to put it, and the desk already had a few. At some point, he’d dragged the trashed mattress out, and that was a start. He’d swept up the bits of ceramic, glass, soil, and dead plant, and took the still-living leaves to replant them and see if they might yet grow.

It took a lighter touch than he was accustomed to. Perhaps before this venture he would have thought he was not capable of it, but stubborn pride and laziness and something else made him persevere until the plants behaved for him.

Not for long, something whispered in the back of his head; treacherous, as always. He was going to kill them eventually. It was just a streak of good luck, and he’d have to go back to Crypto and hope the hacker gave him another. How long until he fucked up again, or smashed all the plants in his room?

The elegans sat innocently on the chipped paint of the shell’s chassis. How dare it. He felt like he was burning up, a volcanic swell of rage and hate coursing through his wires, the bits and sharp parts that made up his cage. He raised his hand and balled it into a fist and prepared to bring it down on the elegans and the pot, an abstract man kneeling and holding the plant as if it were something precious, and the chassis to maybe cave it in again, but—

His hand hovered barely an inch away. It wouldn’t even be hard. It was just a plant, and he could buy another. He could even find a perfect replica of the pot. Neither were particularly expensive.

Before any of this, he would have destroyed both in one stroke and not even considered replacing them, let alone not crushing them in the first place. He drew in— did not, but his speakers crackled and spat static— a deep, shuddering breath, the rage cresting into another emotion that he couldn’t recognize, and flattened his hand into a blade.

He couldn’t do it. He slid down onto his side, only now noticing that he was trembling. An incomprehensible staticky cry sputtered from his speakers, a syncopated drone. What is happening to me, he thought desperately, pressing his head between his arms and dimming his optics until the world was dark and hazy.

It would be so easy to wreck the stupid thing, but it wouldn’t make him feel better. After he surfaced from whatever this was, it would make him feel worse, and he hated that he knew that. Crypto didn’t have to put anything in his head to fuck him up and make him weak; he did that all by himself just fine.

He stared at the dull, chipped red pain of the shell’s thigh armor and forced himself to offline.

He onlined four hours later. His head felt dull, empty, staticky, like something sticky and sour had been scraped out of it, and almost automatically he grabbed a plant from his desk and paced out of his room, leaving the door flung open behind him.

It was only 8 PM, he noticed idly, and while that meant most people were in their units they weren’t asleep, but the chance of someone wandering the halls and poking their nose into his room was low. The chance of someone poking their nose into his room was lower still. He wasn’t stupid; he knew that the maintenence employees, the agents, the prospective Legends, the new ones, the hologrammer, picked up their pace when passing his room. It did not do to attract the attention of a monster.

As Crypto had done, almost without trying, and then had done nothing to deny or redirect his attention.

Revenant wasn’t sure Crypto saw him as a monster at all, which struck him somewhere between his head and his chassis and made him swallow a phantom breath; he looked down at the plant, red-tipped leaves in a rosette, and freed one hand to knock at Crypto’s door.

He only had to wait around thirty seconds before it opened and Crypto took a step back, gesturing for him to enter, so he did. The computer was on, flickering lights and rapidly-passing strings of code.

“Here.” He pushed the plant at Crypto, who raised a brow before obligingly taking it into his hand. There was a long scrape on his chassis, red paint scuffed away, that had been there a few days ago, and Crypto was surely used to him bearing gifts in a new, untouched body. Revenant bore the stare for a few moments before grumbling and moving further into the room, stalking a loose orbit around Crypto as he made his way to his computer desk.

“These are normally thank-you gifts to remind me that my code has worked,” Crypto murmured to him— to the plant. Then, more loudly, clearly to Revenant this time; “you didn’t die this time.”

“I felt like I was dying,” he grumbled. Crypto shuffled some papers with drafting pencil doodles and similar doodles of some small cartoon character to the side and set the spurium down in the open spot.

“But you didn’t,” Crypto finished for him. Revenant thought he heard just the slightest smug lilt in his voice, and the damn hacker had every right to be smug. The worst part was that the urge to wring his neck refused to surface entirely, leaving Revenant with nothing but smoldering discomfort and an emotion he couldn’t place.

“I didn’t,” he spat, at odds with how it made him feel, and backed away toward the door.

“I’m watching a movie tonight,” Crypto finally said just as his shoulder brushed the doorframe. Crypto had never really invited him to do anything, and this had to be an invitation— Crypto wouldn’t tell him that for no reason.

“What time?” His hand flexed, sharp fingers catching against his thigh, but it wasn’t even enough to scratch the paint.

Crypto was running his finger along the edge of the plant, checking it for disease or maltreatment, ready to play plant doctor to Revenant’s inept nurturing. There was nothing there, Revenant could tell when Crypto smiled minutely at the delicate plant and set it back down, and viciously beat down a swell of pride. It was just a stupid plant. “How does eleven sound?”

It took him a moment to process that Crypto actually wanted him to respond, and he made a low, noncommittal noise. “Eleven is fine.”

“I’ll see you then,” Crypto said, already turned back to his screen. Revenant stood at the door a few seconds more— did he have something he wanted to say?— and finally settled on a grunt. Of course Crypto would see him then. At this point, the only thing that could stop him would be dying. And he’d gotten pretty good at avoiding that, lately.