Chapter Text
Fenton had noticed something off about Gyro for about a week now.
He didn’t really know exactly what it was, but it was something in his boss’s attitude that made him suspicious. He was a little bit more… lighthearted than usual. There were a few times when Fenton caught Gyro smiling to himself (Gyro usually only ever smiled when he was talking to Boyd, Della, or an invention was going right. He never just smiled), and another time Gyro had actually held a conversation with Fenton without finding some way to insult him. Fenton was used to Gyro’s insults (Gyro had been markedly nicer after their expedition to Tokyolk), and occasionally (when Fenton was in a good mood and could take it) it was entertaining to see just how many Gyro could cram into a sentence. But to go a whole conversation (and this was a long conversation, which made it weirder) without being called at least an idiot once was very strange.
Fenton wasn’t sure if he liked the change or not.
Also Lil’ Bulb was missing. The small robot hadn’t been at the lab four days ago, and at first Fenton hadn’t minded. But on day three Fenton had really started to get suspicious. He had asked Gyro about it yesterday.
“Dr. Gearloose?” he had asked shyly, stepping up behind him.
Gyro glanced up from whatever he’d been working on. “What is it? Oh, Dr. Intern!” his face hardened. “What do you want?”
“I was wondering where Lil’ Bulb is. I haven’t seen him here in three days.”
Gyro looked slightly annoyed. “He fell in the sink at my house a few days ago, completely shorted him out. I haven’t updated the waterproof systems on him yet, that’s why. I have yet to fix him. Now is that all? Away with you.” he flicked a hand dismissively.
Fenton nodded. “Y-Yes Dr. Gearloose.” he scampered away, taking a suspicious glance behind him. That was very strange. He’d interrupted Gyro’s work, and hadn’t been snapped at at all. In addition to that, Fenton knew for a fact that Lil’ Bulb had perfect waterproof systems (he’d found that out when Lil’ Bulb had wanted to go stomping in puddles in the rain, so Gyro made Fenton take him since he was busy), so why did they suddenly not work now? And if Lil’ Bulb really was damaged, Fenton didn’t believe for a second that Gyro would’ve left the robot unfixed for three days now. Gyro always repaired his robots as soon as he could, and even sooner for the ones that were closer to his heart (like Lil’ Bulb very much was).
It was very, very suspicious.
He wasn’t really sure what to do.
Finally, on day four of Gyro’s odd behavior, Fenton pulled out his phone on the way to the Bin in the morning.
7:23 A.M.
FENTON: Hey Gandra, can I ask you something?
GANDRA: what do u want suit its not even 730 yet. y r u even awake.
FENTON: Dr. Gearloose has been acting weird for the past couple days, and I don’t know what’s wrong.
GANDRA: ooo boss mysteries, i’m awake now. Like what?
FENTON: I don’t know, he just seems… happier. And I haven’t seen Lil’ Bulb in a while.
GANDRA: shouldn’t u be happier if hes happier? Then hes not yelling at u all the time? And that weird little robot who was our lamp that one time at our date????
FENTON: I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right. I don’t know why he would just flip like that one day. Yes, that’s the one. He’s basically Dr. Gearloose’s son, it’s weird to not see him without Lil’ Bulb.
GANDRA: maybe he broke and dr. g hasnt fixed him yet.
FENTON: That’s what Dr. Gearloose said, but it doesn’t seem likely that he would leave him broken for four days now. The last time Lil’ Bulb went missing for over six hours we got a call from Mr. McDuck that there was a sentient lightbulb trying to hotwire his limo.
GANDRA: ah, the old ‘steal the boss’s car’ trick. Done that. I guess it is kinda worrisome that you haven't heard from him.
GANDRA: maybe confront dr. g and see what happens. Ask him why hes beign weird.
GANDRA: *being
FENTON: But what if that makes him mad at me again? I don’t want to ruin this.
GANDRA: if you think hes being weird then confront him! Do it for lil bulb!
FENTON: I guess…
GANDRA: may the force be with you, suit.
FENTON: Live long and prosper.
GANDRA: thats star trek u idiot.
FENTON: I know. ;)
GANDRA: ugh just use a real emoji like a real person. 😒
FENTON: 😏😜😊
GANDRA: may the odds ever be in your favor.
FENTON: And now who’s mixing fandoms?
GANDRA: i do what i want. 😏😏😏😆
Fenton flicked through his text messages, drawing strength from Gandra’s words as he rode the elevator down to the lab. With a sigh of resolve he put his phone in his pocket and faced the opening doors.
Gyro was there, as always. He always got to work before Fenton did, and still hadn’t left when Fenton left, anywhere from six to nine. Fenton had wondered several times if Gyro just slept there.
Gyro was sitting at his desk on the raised platform of the lab, fiddling with some sort of lasso that he’d built. It was a golden color, with a rubbery outside and wires on the inside.
“Dr. Gearloose?” Fenton asked, with a little more resolve than he’d meant to. It had come out sounding angry. “Oh, s-sorry. Dr. Gearloose?”
Gyro looked at him. “What do you need? Is this about Lil’ Bulb again?”
“Yes. No.”
Gyro raised an eyebrow.
“S-sort of.” Fenton stammered out. Gosh this was going terribly. “I wanted to ask you why you’ve been weird lately.”
Gyro eyed him. “...Weird? As in weirder than normal?”
It took Fenton a second to realize what Gyro had said, then he had to hold back a laugh. “You seem a little bit like you’re not yourself lately.”
Gyro stood, and Fenton took a step back. There were times when he forgot how much taller than him the chicken was. “Well, Dr. Intern. That might be for a number of reasons.”
“S-such as?” Fenton took another step back.
“Well, it might be because I’ve lost my dearest Lil’ Bulb, haven’t been able to fix him yet. Maybe it’s because I keep getting interrupted by nosy little interns. Or maybe,” he paused, and something glinted in his eyes. Fenton had never noticed how green they were. “Maybe it’s because I’m not myself.”
“What do you mea-” he was cut off as Gyro whipped a wrench off of the desk and whacked him in the head with it.
The last thing he saw was his coworker's satisfied smirk as he felt the sensation of free-falling, then everything went red for a split second, and faded black.
“Dr. Intern.”
“Dr. Intern, wake up.”
“Cabrera!”
“Fenton, you idiot, wake up!”
“Wha-?”
Fenton woke slowly, his head pounding. His back, shoulders and bottom ached as well. He groaned as the world slowly came into view.
He jolted awake as he realized where he was.
He was in a dark room with a single bright light above his head. He was tied to a folding chair by his wrists, ankles and waist, his chair situated next to another that had Gyro tied to it. Gyro was glaring at him impatiently. “What happened?”
Slowly, Fenton remembered what had happened. He glared at Gyro. “You knocked me out!”
Gyro looked extremely annoyed. “Listen, Dr. Intern, that was not me. That-”
Fenton cut him off. “Yes, it was! Who else could it have been?”
A laugh sounded from the darkness, putting Fenton’s feathers on end.
“Oh, that was me,” said a shockingly familiar voice. It sounded extremely amused.
“What?” Fenton asked, squinting into the darkness.
Gyro looked bored. “You’re so dramatic.” he grumbled. “It’s irritating.”
“And I, Gyro darling, find it irritating that you’re not.” A figure stepped from the shadows. “Would it kill you to act like you’re scared of being tied up and quite possibly tortured by a clone of yourself?”
“Yes. Yes it very much would.” deadpanned Gyro.
Fenton stared at the figure. “What-?” he repeated. “W-who are you?”
It was Gyro.
But… not.
His hair was brushed upward, with a single flop hanging forward. To add to that, it was… purple? He wore large, round tinted glasses, and a long dark very high-collared sleeveless coat. His shirt was pink (the same color as Gyro’s bow tie) and buttoned up the middle with large yellow buttons. He wore gloves the exact shade of his hair, baggy grey-ish pants, a thick black belt and large brown boots with buckles on them. His eyes seemed much greener than Gyro’s, and he had disturbingly large bags beneath them. To top it all off, he had a green bow tie, the color of his eyes and Gyro’s shirt. Fenton also noticed that he was wearing black lipstick on his lower beak.
“Who am I? Who am I?!” asked the strange Gyro. He leaned against Gyro, resting his elbow on the top of Gyro’s head, knocking the inventor’s hat off. “Gyro darling, you didn’t bother to tell your funny little intern who I was?”
Gyro looked like he would have bitten the newcomer if he could. “No, I did not. And he’s not my intern. Get off of my head.”
“Who are you?” Fenton repeated as the Gyro doppelganger rolled his eyes and removed his elbow from Gyro’s head.
The newcomer walked over to Fenton, and leaned down to his level, eyeing him. “So you really have no idea who I am, do you?” he asked softly.
“No, he doesn’t.” Gyro said. “Leave him alone, he has no part in this!”
The chicken in the dark coat looked back at Gyro. “Oh, but now he does. He knows of my existence. Now he has a part in this.” he turned to Fenton.
“Who are you?” Fenton asked yet again.
He stepped back. “I, my friend, am the Mad Ducktor! I shall be Scrooge’s downfall!”
“You’re still after Scrooge?” Gyro groaned, sounding infinitely bored and unsurprised.
The Mad Ducktor whirled on him. “Yes I’m still after Scrooge. He still hasn’t paid for what he’s done.”
Fenton was still trying to process everything. “W-what?” he asked, trying to form a sentence. “What?” He repeated, it was all he could think to say.
The Mad Ducktor looked at him, then burst out laughing. “Well well well well well. Gyro darling, do you want to explain who I am?”
Fenton looked at Gyro, still not able to form a coherent sentence. Who the duck was this guy? How had he gotten into the Bin? Why had he tied them up? Why did he look and sound so much like Gyro? Was he Gyro? How was that possible?
As he racked his brain for a formable sentence, he suddenly remembered the Gizmoduck armor. How had he forgotten it?
“Blathering blatherskite!” Fenton exclaimed, squeezing his eyes shut and preparing for the impact of the suit.
He slowly opened one eye. Nothing had happened. “Blathering blatherskite!” He tried again.
Still nothing.
“Blathering blatherskite?” He tried one last time, looking around him in confusion. Nothing happened. “What-?”
The Mad Ducktor burst out laughing. “Now that-” he said, reaching behind his glasses to wipe a tear away. Fenton wasn’t sure if it was for show or if he’d actually laughed until he cried, “was funny.” He looked at Fenton. “Did you really think that I didn’t deactivate the suit already? I know exactly how the whole thing works!”
“...You told him how the suit works?” Fenton asked Gyro, aghast.
“What?!” Gyro exclaimed. “No! Of course not! He already knew!”
“What-?” Fenton broke off as his phone rang from within his pocket. He recognized the ringtone, it was Huey.
“Who’s this?” The Mad Ducktor walked over and plucked the phone from Fenton’s pocket, holding it up. “The red one? Hm.” he answered, putting it on speaker. “What do you want?”
“Hey, Fen- Gyro?” came Huey’s voice from the other end of the line. “Why are you answering Fenton’s phone?”
The Mad Ducktor rolled his eyes, seeming to slip easily into the character of Gyro. “Dr. Intern’s in the bathroom. I heard his phone ring and saw it was you. What do you want?”
“Well, Fenton said that he was going to help me earn my advanced Junior Woodchuck robotics badge at four, and that was three hours ago.” Huey paused. “I was wondering where he was.”
Three hours ago…? Fenton figured the math in his head. He’d been unconscious for twelve hours?
“Oh, we must’ve lost track of time again,” the Mad Ducktor leaned against Gyro as before, and Gyro glared up at him. “Happens a lot down here. Ask Dr. Intern to come tomorrow, he’s busy.”
“Huey!” Fenton shouted. “Don’t listen to hi-”
The Mad Ducktor looked panicked, he started across the room and forced Fenton’s beak shut with a gloved hand.
“Fenton?” Huey asked. “What? What’s going on?”
“Nothing, we’re just testing the mimicry mic on Lil’ Bulb!” The Mad Ducktor glared daggers down at Fenton as he spoke. “ Seems to be working.”
“Mimicry mic… what?” asked Huey.
The Mad Ducktor scoffed, like he was annoyed that he had to explain it. “To make it so Lil’ Bulb can perfectly mimic anyone’s voice. We tried Dr. Intern’s voice first. Now, we’re busy, good-bye.”
“Wait! But-” Huey started. His voice cut off as the Mad Ducktor hung up.
He let go of Fenton’s beak and glared at him. “You nearly ruined everything,” he snarled. “How bold of you. Do you know who you’re dealing with?”
“N-no, I don’t, actually.” Fenton looked back at him. “No one has told me who you are yet.”
“Oh that’s right, Gyro darling, you were about to explain to him who I am!” The Mad Ducktor walked back over to Gyro, leaning on his head again. “Gyro, you have the floor.”
Gyro glared up at him. “Get. Off. Of. My. Head.”
The Mad Ducktor gave a slight apologetic grin and stepped back.
Fenton looked at Gyro. “Dr. Gearloose… what?”
Gyro sighed, and didn’t meet Fenton’s gaze. He opened his beak to begin, then hesitated, and closed it. He turned and glowered at the Mad Ducktor. “Why don’t you do it?”
“Aw, but I love your stories!” The Mad Ducktor walked over to Fenton, looking at Gyro with rapt attention. “Tell us! Tell us! Tell us!”
Gyro turned away from them, or, as much as he could while he was tied to a chair. “No.” he said at last. “I- no.”
“Why?” Fenton asked. Gyro didn’t usually open up about stuff on his own, but when prompted he did. “You told us about Boyd, why is this different?”
“Oh this story is so much different,” smirked the Mad Ducktor. “Because in this one, he’s the villain. Not Akita.”
“...What?” Fenton said the word for what seemed the millionth time in the last five minutes. He knew Gyro could be… antagonistic sometimes, but never an outright villain. “How? Why?”
Gyro glanced up suddenly at that. “I wasn’t the villain. He was.”
The Mad Ducktor’s smirk grew as he swanned over to Gyro. “Oh, but where did I come from?” he asked.
“You… created him?” Fenton asked, shocked.
“No!” Gyro exclaimed immediately. He paused. “Well, yes. But not intentionally.”
Fenton’s brain whirred, trying to fit all of the pieces together. “But… why?”
The Mad Ducktor laughed. “Well, you have to tell him now,” he said to Gyro. “You can’t hold this back now that we’re here.”
Gyro leaned back defiantly in his chair. “Not until you tell us why you’re here now. The ego machine was over a decade ago. How are you here?”
The Mad Ducktor frowned at him. “You’re depriving me of a perfectly good story time.”
Gyro shook his head, cool and unconcerned. “No, I’m not. I’m just delaying it. First we want to hear your story. Right, Fenton?”
Fenton didn’t answer, he was trying to process Gyro’s last sentence. ‘The ego machine was over a decade ago.’ Was that the name of whatever had created the Mad Ducktor? What sort of a name was that? What exactly did it do? Why over a decade ago? What had happened?
Gyro cleared his throat, snapping Fenton back to reality. “Right, Fenton?” he repeated, nodding his head meaningfully at the Mad Ducktor with a cough.
“Oh, sure, right!” Fenton went along with it. At least he was getting part of the story. It took him another second to realize Gyro had called him by his actual name.
The Mad Ducktor eyed them both suspiciously, before turning away and walking to the edge of the light’s reach. He stood there for a moment before speaking. “I was one of the clones from the Moonvasion battle.”
His tone had changed abruptly, drastically, in an instant all of the excitement had been sucked out of him. He sounded… dejected, sad.
Something about the sudden change put Fenton more on edge than the excited version of the Mad Ducktor.
The purple-haired chicken continued, still not facing them. “We were created to be assistants to Gyro's genius, defend the lab, and later, fight the aliens. We all knew that. We had only two goals. The first was to get rid of the invaders, the second was to keep at least one of us alive, since we were all basically the same person. The name I was given was ‘Gyro-Clone-11’.” he spat the name out, like it was something vile.
Gyro gasped. “I knew it,” he said quietly.
The Mad Ducktor ignored him. “We were all fighting, and winning, and I had hope that we would all get out alive, when I was hit in the arm. Usually, when any of us got hit, we were vaporized instantly.” His voice turned harder, more steely and bitter. “But not me.”
“What happened?” Fenton couldn’t help but ask.
“Well, to save you all of the gory details, it hit my arm hard and sent me flying backwards off the side of the hill. I basically rolled all of the way down, through the woods. At the bottom I hit my head on a rock… and I don’t remember much of that.”
He turned slightly, so that Fenton could just see one of his eyes. It was closed, and much of his face was still in the shadows. “After coming to, I was somehow able to get myself to some sort of safe… place. Like I said, I don’t remember much. I spent a lot of time there, healing, going over what had happened in my head, and-” he held up his left hand. “Rebuilding.”
With that he pulled the purple glove off, revealing a slim silver robot hand, with wires running up and down it. He curled it into a fist.
Fenton and Gyro both gasped.
Putting his glove back on, the Mad Ducktor turned back to the shadows. “When I was finally strong enough to reveal myself to the world, I realized that our efforts had been for nothing. The Moonlanders were living on earth, with no consequences for what they had done to us. Though there were more people in his army against the invasion, Scrooge had forgotten about them as soon as they had no use to him. And no one-” he choked slightly, and paused.
“No one had thought to look for me.”
There was a moment of silence, Fenton and Gyro taking in the information in shock. Fenton opened his mouth to say something consoling.
Say what?
What could he say to make this Gyro clone feel better? He hadn’t thought to look for him either. ‘Sorry I forgot about your existence, and the fact that you willingly put your life on the line for us, then we totally didn’t remember you’?
That’s when the Mad Ducktor’s switch flipped again.
He was angry now.
He whirled on Fenton and Gyro, pointing an accusatory finger at them. “None of you did!” he snarled. “There were twenty one of us, Gyro, twenty one! How could you not think that a single of us survived?! That we had all been destroyed by a couple aliens who couldn’t hold a blaster straight?!”
Gyro opened his mouth to defend himself, but the Mad Ducktor cut him off. “But of course it’s not your fault.” he said. His fingers curled into another fist. “It’s Scrooge’s .”
“H-how did you figure that?” Gyro asked.
“You’re not stupid enough to think that all of us were destroyed.” the Mad Ducktor turned back to the shadows, a scheming air about him. “No, of course not. You’re me, the greatest mind of our time. You wanted to go looking for any survivors, but you couldn’t. Scrooge had you too busy.”
Gyro looked at Fenton then back at the Mad Ducktor, his face saying ‘what the heck do I do?’. “Well, I-”
The Mad Ducktor cut him off again, as he turned back to them. “Of course, once I realized that I had to make Scrooge pay. But I couldn’t do it as ‘Gyro-Clone-11.’” he again said the name with distaste. “But then I remembered back to before Della left, to the ego machine. I couldn’t be just another Gyro. I decided to become him. The Mad Ducktor! ” he grinned up at them. “And here I am now!”
His voice had brightened, he had swung back to his cheerful aspect. It was unnerving how easily he changed.
Fenton opened his mouth. “Um, Mad Ducktor, look. I know-” he broke off as something beeped on his right.
They all looked over, a computer monitor had appeared from the darkness, a few feet outside the light’s reach. It showed several grainy black-and-white images of the lab, Fenton realized these were the security image feeds. The largest screen showed the elevator doors opening, and two familiar ducks stepping out.