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The more Cyborg learned about being human, the less it made sense. When he was a boy, American society had tried to distance him from his humanity. His father worked in a predominantly white field and sent him to white schools and urged him to make white friends. People who looked like him were side characters in TV shows, they were killed off, or they were only seen from the outside. Cyborg started to see himself from the outside. Because of the color of his skin, his body and self became an alien to him. His father tested out new neurological advancements on him. His father wanted his son to focus on his mind. His father wanted him to be more and do more and prove to the world that a black boy could be a genius by making the fact head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest indisputable. Even his mind wasn’t his- it had to be a sacrifice on the altar of progress. It had to be a sacrifice for other black geniuses who were beaten down before they could get a seat at the table.
His mind and body didn’t belong to him.
Then he discovered football. And there were people who looked like him on the team; people who didn’t see his blackness before they saw Victor. There was a coach who told him that his body was his, and that he could push it to achieve his own goals. There were friends who told him his mind and comfort didn’t have to be a sacrifice, he could use it for things he enjoyed like tinkering with cars and inventing new plays in football. His humanity by right to contentedness became indisputable for the first time in the eyes of the people around him. And no matter what his father said about wasting his potential, Vic could eventually push down the anxieties and inflicted-shame, because doing what he loved was more important. Being himself was more important. He loved the feeling of the pull of his legs on the turf. The sensation of being arms-deep in a home-brew electrical car engine- an advanced engineering project his father would never approve of. The feeling when the wind whistled through his helmet, or over his fingers out the car window. The small, golden moments where his mind and body were one whole and his thoughts were quiet enough. Here, there was finally space for Victor Stone to exist.
And then the wagon tipped.
The accident.
The day his body became alien again.
His limbs were cold metal, and his new organs made strange sounds. It was as if Victor had walked up to his street address one day to find a different house, and when he peered through the window, all the furniture was someone else’s. A quiet horror that his father claimed was normal. Every new moment, he discovered another thing wrong.
When he went outside, searching for his real house, his father told him it was gone. It had been demolished overnight. He would never get it back.
The finality hit like a brick to his stomach. Except it wasn’t even his stomach. That had been killed off in the accident too. It was now a synthetic food liquidation and processing system.
The ship of Theseus problem played over and over again in his mind- “if, over time, you replace every part of the ship as it gets damaged… is it still the same ship?”
With a full third of his mind electronic, he poured through old journal entries like sacred texts, searching for the old Victor like looking for signs of divine intelligent design. But there were some memories, memories that he felt should be vital, that just never came back in more than shadow.
His girlfriend broke up with him; he was solemnly removed from the team for his “enhancements,” and all the while, his father kept telling him how lucky he was to be alive. Even as the people who had first seen his humanity called him a monster. A monster. They didn’t say it to his face. Never to his face. But, he suspected, behind his back, and often in the small implications of their words and actions. It stung. He worried that he was imagining it, going paranoid, that this over-analysis was just another quirk of his new mind.
He didn’t sleep, he shut down. He didn’t wiggle his toes, he stomped his permanent boots. He didn’t shit, he expelled waste packets. He didn’t think, he processed. He didn’t hear as normal, see as normal, breathe as normal. And some days he was in so much pain, and so distorted, it was all he could do to lie still while his father made adjustments or repairs.
He desperately wondered: What of him was Vic, and what was the Cyborg?
After a few more months, he had to conclude that Victor had died in that accident.
With nothing of Victor left, Cyborg left home.
Cyborg picked an apartment and waited. He went out at night in a hoodie to get food. Some stores asked him to leave, some simply called the cops. So Cyborg moved to a new city to get away from it all. Jump City had stranger people in it, maybe he could get away with pretending to be a cosplayer.
But strangely, some of the strange people there were as strange as him. They didn’t look just like him, but their piecemeal pasts did. At first, desperate to be allowed to exist somewhere without persecution, Cyborg did everything to prove he could be useful. He had to prove he was worth keeping around or become obsolete. People threw away obsolete machines.
Over time, he realized the others were all trying to prove the same thing. Robin wanted to prove he was a leader, that he belonged among people as powerful as demigods. Raven wanted to prove that, despite her darkness, she belonged among those who would do good. Beast boy wanted to prove he could be as competent as the older heroes, and Starfire wanted to prove she wasn’t an alien threat- that she could belong on earth.
And of all of them, strangely, they saw Cyborg as the most human. Even Robin, (despite his unenhanced humanity) the other Titans approached with some caution and enigma. But Cyborg was the person they could turn to, he was the one who understood every angle of the problem and could laugh or fight away his friend’s fears. And his friends made him feel valuable for more than what he could offer them. They told him to rest when he was having a painful day. They consoled him and teased him in equal measure. They believed him and went to war with him when he said that something was racist or ableist.
Over time, as he worked on his own parts, and added his own enhancements to his mechanical additions, Cyborg belonged more and more to himself. The furniture in the house became familiar with use, as it must have when he was first born and then growing.
He knew every inch of his own schematics, and his memories began to make more sense with time.
One day, while playing football with his friends, with the wind whistling through his fingers and the scent of BBQ on his breath, he felt the pull and compression of his second pair of legs. He realized that this was his body. Victor’s body. And every inch of it was human.