Work Text:
/tony/
/help/
Tony knew how to put the cyborg back together. They had prepared for this.
Alex Sharp was nothing if not perfectionist, after all. Neurotic, some would even say. He was not one to skip his backups or contingencies, no effort spared and no detail forgotten. He'd had to be, to succeed where others have failed, to replace nearly 90% of his body with hardware and electronics and the occasional perfect, faux-organic part without falling apart, without crumbling to the perfect storm of a debugger's worst nightmare. He'd meant his body to last - not the individual parts, but the synthesis of them, a Ship of Theseus composed of modular components.
So when Tony arrived at the origin point of Sharp's distress signal, a worrying seventy minutes and twelve seconds since Sharp had ceased to respond via their private uplink - he didn't panic. Much. Sharp had designed himself to withstand death, after all.
Granted, this was an earlier proof of concept than either of them had counted on.
The heavy reinforced suitcase in his grip nearly slipped from his hands as he hauled it up the fire escape with a clang. He grunted and kept climbing until the wind whipped around him and through the jagged holes in the half-ruined building.
Not a soul around. He already knew as much from the hijacked drone scan, but it was still a relief.
He reached the right landing, and stopped in his tracks.
One moment. Just one, to take in the horror of it all, and then he would get to work.
Sharp's body was on the floor, broken, like an articulated doll shattered on the pavement. Entire limbs were missing, but there was surprisingly little in the way of signs of struggle. Worst of all was his face, where the synthetic skin had never looked more obvious - eyes open, the blankness of death with none of the subtle changes in tissue. Uncanny Valley to the point where it was nauseating to look at.
And with a gaping bullet hole between the eyes. Edges scorched, not bleeding.
Tony forced himself to inhale, realising he'd stopped breathing. That was bad. That would mean-
No. Despair was unproductive.
He forced himself to take in the damage with a clinical eye, honed in on what it would take to fix, and not what it might mean for his chances of success.
Recoverable, of course. In theory. Sharp would be a poor transhumanist if he had not thought to account for the greatest human weak point - the centralisation of executive processes.
The fact that he had reached out via uplink after taking a headshot was already testament to that.
Even so...
No use dwelling on it. Tony concluded his assessment as he dragged the suitcase into position and began to work the clasps free. One headshot, then rapid scavenging of his more valuable augments, the rest left for dead, discarded like roadkill. He'd seen no trace of the attacker, so they were hopefully long gone. There had likely been multiple, to scavenge this efficiently.
No. Wait. That made no sense. The wound was too well-centered, too neat, and it had gone right through the protective casing that lay beneath the synthetic skin. Tony had seen Sharp practically snatch bullets out of the air. Highly implausible he would have been caught off-guard and not even tried to dodge. Unless he hadn't seen it coming, despite looking right at...
A sniper?
Tony shivered and went still. The wind whistling around the building felt even more hostile, now. He was acutely aware that there were at least two other structures in his vision at comparable height, peeking through the truck-sized holes in the concrete and rebar.
He resumed the setup. The suitcase contained the bare essentials when it came to diagnostics and core repairs, both replacement components and battery-powered power tools. He began to lay them out.
But a part of his mind was still mulling it over.
A sniper for the headshot. Eliminating the competition? Not working alone - a team standing by to strip him down for parts the moment he dropped. To make sure he wouldn't get back up.
They'd been thorough - Sharp's torso had been pried open like a lobster, the abdominal and chest cavities emptied of hardware except for the frizzed wires, hanging out like guts, and the odd disconnected pump that still dripped fluids.
He tried not to look too closely. Not an easy task.
He tried not to look too far, either. If he let his eyes wander, he could feel the menace of the nearby buildings, their half-ruined windows staring at him from afar.
He refused to turn to look. If the sniper was still there and meant to take him out, they could have done so while he was climbing the fire escape, completely exposed. No use dwelling on it now.
Not when Sharp needed his undivided attention.
He brought out his diagnostic pad, secure on its lanyard, and hung it around his neck. Then he reached for one of the last items in the box, a card with a checklist.
Step one: Clear debris and remove obvious broken parts. Step two: Identify and replace damaged key components to oxygenation and power supply systems. Step three: Test cranial drive integrity and do a preliminary boot. Step four: Restore basic mobility. Step five: Relocate to safehouse for advanced repairs.
Together with the substeps, the to-do list was over fifty points long, as well as branching sub-lists that presented contingencies depending on Sharp's ability to assist with the tasks. Tony sighed and rolled up his sleeves.
Minutes crawled by. Step one was the most straightforward of the lot, but hard and frustrating work, done alone, even with the tools he had available. He stopped to wipe sweat off his face with the sleeve of his upper arm, wind-chilled.
It still went quicker than he thought. On some level, it was because he had been dreading step three. Putting it off.
Oxygenation subsystem - only one crucial step remaining. Tony retrieved the pump component from its casing and popped the seals. He installed it into its designated slot in the chest cavity - the model was outdated, a mismatch with Sharp's modular frame, but as an emergency measure, it would make do.
He double-checked the integrity of the connecting tubes and valves and plugged them in, one by one, slow and finnicky. When it was done, he sat back, took a much-needed breather.
Then he reached into his partner's ruined chest cavity, felt around the new pump, and flipped the kickstart button.
It surged to life, picking up a slow rhythm. Tony watched. Despite himself, he found his eyes flicking to Sharp's face, which was pointless. At least for now.
Nothing else for it. He'd run out of other steps to do.
The power and oxygen supply to Sharp's cranial drive was restored, which meant it was time to boot it up from emergency hibernation mode.
And hope for the best.
Tony swallowed around a lump in his throat and shook out the soreness in his arms and fingers, repositioning himself. He held up the diagnostic pad, synced it up to Sharp's internal drive, and input the sequence of emergency overrides. Then he reached to the side of that lifeless face, found the small, concealed plate he had already stripped the synthetic skin from, and pressed down on a barely noticeable button.
And held.
And counted under his breath.
The wind picked up again, whipping at his back.
His shirt was caked to it with sweat, and his fingers had been growing numb from the nippy air and hard work, but right now, it was not even a tertiary concern.
There was a thrum. He felt it and withdrew his hand and turned quickly to the face. The enhanced cybernetic eye had lit up, the circular red panels within it were twitching. Unfocused, at first - and then they snapped into concordance, aligned, and reoriented to hone in on him.
Many would have flinched. Tony didn't. He sagged with likely premature relief and brought up the diagnostic pad again, swiping through the feed of diagnostic data that had started up.
"It's me," he said. "I'm enacting the contingency plan. Someone took you out with a headshot, you reached out to me before the emergency shutdown. I don't know if you remember. It looks like some of your memory blocks are fragmented, but your auxiliary cores should have enough of a backup image to restore over the corrupted data. I need you to confirm that you can hear and understand me, and then we'll go from there."
No response. He looked up again. The face was a lifeless mask much like five minutes ago, but both eyes were alert and fixed on him, the red scleratic panels slowly spinning. A pang of worry stabbed at him.
"Alex?" he whispered.
help
That had been the last word he'd heard, staticky through the uplink. He needed to hear something else, or it would echo in his head forever.
He leaned in.
"Alright, communications first," he said, fighting to keep his voice low and controlled. "Our private uplink channel, do you still have access-"
He didn't get to finish.
Sharp's right arm had been lying placidly by his side for the duration of the patch job. It had been stripped bare, the expensive carbon myomers sloppily removed. But the titanium skeletal core was still intact, and so was the rudimentary pulley-based muscle chord system attached to it. Sharp had scoffed at the design, which was too reminiscent of biological musculoskeletal systems and complete with all the same weaknesses. But he'd grumbled and ultimately let it be - it was never intended to serve as more than the absolute backup, after all.
Tony didn't get to finish because the skeletal arm twitched to life by his side and a set of bare metallic fingers closed around his throat.
He sputtered and tried to jerk away, found out he couldn't; froze. Sharp had him in a vice grip. But he was still alive. He'd seen Sharp crush a windpipe in the fraction of a second, neural chord severed, instant death. He was still alive because Sharp currently lacked 99% of the contractile power with which to do so. He couldn't really breathe, but he was still alive. Think, Tony, think.
With his fingers reflexively scrambling at the metallic grip, he already knew he had as much chance of forcing that hand to open as he had of manually straightening out a bent steel beam.
A vertebrate-analogue musculoskeletal pulley-based system, complete with all the same weaknesses. The rudimentary muscles that contracted the 'bones' in Sharp's hand continued all the way into his forearm, and the control impulses for it were firing off further still. The second, major weakness, was that the grip still required active effort to maintain.
He had power tools in reach, but it was not a guarantee he would be able to sever the muscles in Sharp's forearm before Sharp caught on and adapted. But the equivalent of a pinched nerve...
He was running out of time, dark spots gathering in his vision. He had to act.
Tony swallowed against those unyielding titanium fingers and slid the safety off his own prosthetic arm, exposing the EMP generator's conductor chord. He fired it up, braced himself, and jabbed the prong into a spot in Sharp's partially exposed shoulder socket where a mass of nerve chords bundled together.
He had often wondered what it would be like, to use his in-built EMP against Sharp. He had never imagined it would be like this.
There was a little thwummm and Sharp's arm twitched, and the metal fingers went slack, the current interrupted. Tony scrambled his way free.
Breathe - he could breathe again. Trying not to cough, he staggered upright and backed away, not taking his eyes off Sharp. The cyborg couldn't lift his head, but kept watching him placidly, the spinning panels in that red eye realigning to follow him. The fingers of his arm curled and uncurled slowly, like a crustacean testing its range of motion.
Tony stared back, trembling, and this time it had nothing to do with the wind.
Of course, with imminent death out of the way, he could briefly stop and process the fact that his cyborg boyfriend had just tried to kill him.
He swallowed and kept backing away. He really should go back for the tools, but closing the distance again felt impossible right now. Not when he'd seen what Sharp could do, in his prime.
He was weakened now, but he was inventive. And stubborn.
At least Tony still had the diagnostic pad, secure around his neck. That was good. It was something. Something had gone horribly, desperately wrong, and he needed information to find out what it was.
And how to get him back.