Chapter Text
The difference between pleather and leather is that pleather peels. It shouldn’t be so unpleasant – it’s on the outside of the gloves – but it bothers him nonetheless. He spends too much time staring at it, when he can definitely be doing something else more productive.
It’s just… Langa sees it. The way the material stretches around the shape of the impact. The way it snaps, the cracks that open small, then connect. The way flakes stick to the sandbag, leaving. Leaving. The stretch of the thread holes that should be barely perceptible, and yet. He can feel the sensation of the thing falling apart under his palms.
“Langa,” his mom’s voice from the other side of the door jolts him out of his thoughts. “Some help with the salad? Please?”
He pushes himself off the old childhood desk his parents still haven’t gotten rid of yet, even though all it does now is taking up space in his bedroom. The gloves get carelessly discarded onto the bed, probably to eventually be pushed to the floor when he needs to sleep.
“I’m coming.”
The way of Langa, he thinks to himself as he taps the heads of lettuce on the kitchen counter – he’s been catching himself doing that a lot recently, reasoning his ways out of his own existence. Must be the getting used to being an adult part of being nineteen – is that he’s really got, at most, two layers. His thing is keeping it simple. It’s a good practice, most people agree with him on the surface of it; the goal is just to be content in the end. And he is that, really. Content. He’s been rolling around on a mat for a decade, and it’s been okay – good, even. It’s a sport that asks simple questions with rote answers, and he’s fast enough at answering those to get ahead of a good number of people. There really only can be so many variations to where you can elbow a body to bring it down to the floor.
And that’s it, really. That’s all there is to Langa Sterling-Hasegawa. He can recall a time when the pieces of him were much more scattered, when things made a lot less sense and he wasn’t there behind his own eyes frequently enough to have even a simple thing, but – thankfully – that’s at least a decade out now. It hovers, sometimes, over him, as he fumbles through anything that doesn’t have a script, but for a decade now the answer to that spectre has been the same: put the gloves on. Remind people what his thing is, and leave experts to do their work. Stay in his lane.
The gloves. It’s simple when the gloves are the right ones. Langa frowns, pulling the core of the lettuce heads out from the slightly crumpled things. The ones he’s using for practice are borrowed from the center; they’re a bit tight, and Langa can deal with it, usually, but he can also just… see how he’s breaking them. His trusty pair – have been with him for two years now, a gift from one of Dad’s contacts – were forgotten in their car a week ago, right before Dad’s business trip. Langa has never felt the distance between two major cities as keenly as he’s feeling it today.
“Don’t put that back in,” Mom tells him, from where she’s trimming the pastry dough laid over the pot. Langa saw the food processor when he got to the kitchen; seems they’re going the extra mile today. He knows Dad doesn’t like the heart of the lettuce (not the reason why, just that he doesn’t). He shrugs, and bites the pale curl of leaves from the stem before gathering the rest into a basket.
He washes the lettuce again. The leaves crunch slightly under the force of the water. Langa gentles his touch – this will be shredded later, but there is a textural difference between carefully cut up and ground into mush, and he knows what everyone including him prefers. He stands at the sink, one hand on the cool resin edge, one hand in the water, the sound of it scattering into the music playing from their TV. A stray lock of hair falls over his eyes – he really should tie it up, if he’s in the kitchen.
In the corner of his eyes, outside the window, the last of the day’s light is dying. It’s already pretty late, then, but they did plan to catch Dad coming back and eat dinner with him today. It’s only been a week, but-- Langa misses him. And the gloves.
Langa knows how he is. Without his dad home, he barely talks to anyone. It’s fine with Mom, they both enjoy the companionable silence and she gets the chance to enjoy her music without Dad singing over it, but another of Dad’s acquaintance dropped by during the week, and keeping up the small talk while Mom went make tea was as close to torture as Langa’s ever got. It’s probably not good, that part, and he probably should start learning how to not kill a conversation the moment he starts speaking, but. If he ever does it’s probably gonna be when Dad’s around too.
Dad taught him how to fall correctly over a decade ago. And then the basics of hand-to-hand. And then found him a teacher with the patience to deal with probably the thickest kid in all of Calgary, until the impacts finally clicked in his brain and he started actually inhabiting his own body for the majority of his time awake. And then, when he got scouted, Dad went in and stood between him and the agencies. He’s still the one reading the contracts now (Langa makes himself do it too, but actually registering any of it is a different matter).
Langa’s been a fighter for a decade. Oliver Sterling-Hasegawa’s been a fixer for much longer. Langa turns off the water and starts sorting through the leaves in the sink. Mom still brings up how Dad figured out her chemical burns months before a doctor did when they were still in college. He gathers a handful to drop back into the basket. He makes sure to be gentle when he pushes the pile down, for safe transport to where the cutting boards are.
A phone – probably Mom’s, given that his is still in his sweats’ pocket – vibrates on the dinner table’s glass top, followed by Mom’s “Oof-- that’s probably your dad--”
Langa pulls out the vegetable cutting board.
“Oh, yeah that’s him. Lemme just-- Oliver? You better not be calling and driving--”
Langa opens the knife drawer to get a chopping knife.
“Yes, that’s me.”
Langa starts cutting up the lettuce.
He hears no more from the call. When he turns around with the salad bowl full of carefully shredded green, Mom’s still as a statue in her seat. Her hand’s fallen onto the table, the phone silent between limp fingers, the call already gone from the still lit screen. They haven’t turned on the light over her head; in the shades of the kitchen, her figure’s backlit by the picture on her lock screen, of their family of three on a road trip last year. Langa can see their smiles, minuscule, over her shoulder.
Nine-and-a-half thousand kilometers away, a truck pulls over hastily next to the scrap beach.
“Why must you do it like that,” Oka complains, but Reki’s not hearing it anymore. He’s already out of his seat and halfway to the almost rusted through wire fence. With enough distance between here and the truck, vaulting himself over the flimsy thing is no problem.
Hauling this beauty out, however, will be another matter. If he’s alone. “Oka! Hurry!”
“Definitely not gonna be worth half my prescription, so no,” Oka replies, loud enough for Reki to hear, but Reki’s too excited to even banter. He climbs up the pile, keeping barely enough of his mind to step around the sharp metal shards – wouldn’t be good to shred his shoes right when he needs to bring this one home. This is it. This is the one.
He has to crouch way down to get his hands on the faceplate of the robot laying crumpled at the top, but he’s not far gone enough yet to kneel down on this bed of debris. He wants to, though. This feels-- well, he wouldn’t go so far as to say ceremonial or spiritual or something like that, but it does feel important. Things haven’t been going too well at the shop, with the shiny new research center opening up in Nago, and the drive home from their scrap deal was glum, but their headlight’s reflected just right off the display lens of this-- monument, to catch Reki’s eyes, and suddenly everything’s alright. Everything will be fine.
There hasn’t been an Atom model around for at least three years. Most of them were recycled – these plates are no jokes. They’ll fetch a decent price. A fucking fortune, to Reki and Oka. And, another part of Reki’s overexcited brain whispers way too loudly, if this guy can still boot up somehow, he’ll get the original code for the echo function.
Everything will be fine. Everything will be fine.
Oka finally makes it up to where Reki and the Atom model are. Reki barely notices – he’s too busy admiring the reinforcement on the head and the plating design on the arms. This marvel would really withstand a rocket launcher. It’s so perfect. “Huh. It really is an Atom… I thought--” Oka breaks to take a breather. “I thought you were just too hopeful.”
“I can spot one of these with three layers of fabric over my eyes,” Reki whispers. “Grail. Absolute grail.” He grins and looks over to Oka. “Can you even lift the fist off the ground, or do you need a minute?”
Oka kicks him lightly on the back of the shin. “Wait ‘til you’re my age, asshole. And we’re not hauling anything. Be smart.”
He drops the reinforced tarp he’s been holding onto the whole time at Reki’s feet.
Reki really can’t grin any bigger. It’s like there are bubbles in his chest; he can float up into the air right now, were it not for the reality of gravity. “You got that covered already,” he says, and crouches down again to open the tarp up.
“Now you sweettalk me.”
Reki pushes the Atom model onto the tarp once it’s laid out, and between them they manage to pull it down from the pile and out of the scrap beach intact. And with minimal effort, is probably the important part here; an Atom would really survive most things if it’s not disassembled and recycled. Reki wonders, the whole time they spend figuring out a way to bring their new companion up to the truck bed, how this guy ended up here. Not too hard, though – no looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Reki ends up leaning the head onto the lowered back gate, and then Oka pulls the bundle the rest of the way up while he pushes from the legs. They tie it down securely – Reki triple-checks the harnesses, which he never does, but it’s a special occasion – and then cover it with another tarp, and only then does Reki let himself return to the driver seat.
He hums some tunes the whole way back to the shop. He only stops once, when Oka asks, “You got any plans for that guy yet?”, to answer with a cheery “Oh yeah.” When he hooks the Atom model up to their multifunction charger and the display lens light up, he can feel his heart soar.