Work Text:
“LOOK OUT!”
Lumen’s voice registered, but her words did not. Rooney's guitar stuttered into silence, and he was met with the petrified eyes of his friends before following their gaze to the fly space above.
The stage left wing flickered dangerously, and the few remaining cables holding up the western spotlight snapped.
The world stood still, and the seconds stopped ticking past. Any other mouse in the world would have scattered. But did it not make Rooney real enough, to fear what was about to happen? The sudden and irreversible damage of being crushed to smithereens by a hundred-pound spotlight, in front of an audience of children and horrified families? Of losing his life? If this existence were any life at all, would Rooney miss living it?
Rooney would never find out, because a short series of events happened in quick succession.
One, Rooney’s memories flashed solemnly before his eyes. Two, something unseen hit him with the force of a train. And three, he was sent sprawling flat on his back several feet away.
Countless voices rose in chorus shrieking somebody's name: it wasn't Rooney's.
In the ruins of where he’d been standing five seconds before, splintered wood and dying sparks did nothing to overshadow the petrified remains of Ace beneath the wreckage.
***
The crowd was evacuated promptly and the Playhouse fell into morbid curiosity. The guests went about their business, demanding refunds if they weren't going to get what they paid for, demanding refunds for being filed into an unsafe auditorium with loose spotlights falling like raindrops from the catwalks.
Rooney assumed in the following hours that Ace was being pieced back together.
Rooney wildly paced the service halls, a gruesome sense of dread sending his circuits sprawling and his mind racing.
No one stopped scrambling around to spare him so much as a passing glance, let alone cue him in on what was happening. Whether or not Ace was too damaged to be salvaged. If his chip had survived the accident. Maybe there was nothing that could be done besides pull a matching endo out of storage, and start fresh with a brand new program.
The cut of the computer was unimportant, and the message was clear as day: Ace was irreplaceable. Ozzie had faded out of the picture completely, immortalized only in the minds of his friends. But it wasn't “Ozzie's” Playhouse, and the bassist was barely a fragment of the big picture, no matter how deeply the loss affected Rooney and the rest of the band.
It didn't matter to Rooney how much Ace had changed over the years. Ace was still Ace. The memories they shared could never be recreated by someone new. A fresh AI could not be trained by the same experiences that Ace had lived, the times the four of them spent together. No one could ever be Ace again. And if Ace was damaged beyond repair by Rooney’s mortifying lapse in instinct, Ace was dead, in the macabre manner that only they could die.
Ace's memory would not be celebrated, because when the Playhouse opened back up tomorrow morning, he would appear good as new. Few guests would ever tell the difference. But Rooney would. Lumen and Mitsy would. Rooney’s mind would no longer dwell unhappily at the growing chasm between them, because there would be nothing left to signify the Ace they knew ever existed at all.
Rooney would be reminded of the terrible thing he’s lost for the rest of his miserable days. In technicolor prints and plushies and cardboard cutouts, in the name of the great conglomerate umbrella in the franchise they bowed to. In song and repurpose lyrics and endless days and nights of begging to no one for something far beyond Rooney’s reach. He controlled nothing, and yearned for everything he couldn't have. Every word he never dared speak, the indescribable magnetism of a deep-seated fire blazing at his core.
Perfectly aware he had no say in Ace’s fate, Rooney laid his back against the cinder blocks and slid to the floor, hiding his face in his hands.
He should have jumped out of the way before Ace took the initiative to save him. If one of them were to die, it should be Rooney. Ace would be too dearly missed.
Hours passed. Rooney drudged up every scrapped confession he'd ever buried. Dangerous admissions that would either have Ace running to Rockefeller complaining of deviancy, or entrenching the both of them in a permanent state of unrest. Rooney saved them, he couldn't toss them away. His blistering emotions couldn't be controlled, but the manner in which he dealt with them tended to be manageable. Less and less these days could he withhold from saying things he meant.
If remaining silent would prove to be Rooney's biggest mistake, he'd rather know it sooner than later. Some people battled impatience, and rage, and the endless press of doom upon life’s charade. Rooney's job was to make noise, to be loud and magnetic and to serve in the background of Ace’s spotlight.
And how disgustingly poetic, that Ace’s only ray of glory would be the very thing to bring his end.
***
Technicians skittered like vermin from place to place. Doctors stained inside-out with oil, barren of bedside manner because their patients were lined without flesh and blood.
When the hallway was empty for a long time, Rooney pushed himself to his feet. In hours the illusion of himself had unraveled. These corridors he had marched so many times before became a threshold, holding captive the dust in the air and the creak of something waiting in the walls. Rooney thought he was open-minded, he was in no doubt of what he was and that he’d accepted it.
But acceptance and change did not go merrily hand in hand. A stake was driven through both, to hold them together through the searing agony. Of knowing that nothing was as he’d left it. The merciless grip of routine had been shattered, the dull ache of longing vaporized to ash and replaced with an all-encompassing terror unlike anything Rooney had ever processed before.
Was this how Ace felt after they were separated? When he woke up with two hands instead of one? When the only guidance he had in the world was taken from him without warning? Did he ever learn to live, and replace it? Or did he hide because the empty part of him had collapsed into itself like a black hole? Rocketing through space without direction, destroying everything in his path.
That did not make Ace the monster here.
Through bleary vision Rooney navigated his way to the service room, ultimately prepared for the very worst. To be confronted with an eternity of grief awaiting him, like the devil propping open the gates of hell, anticipating his newest arrival.
The team filed out, and Rooney peered in.
On the table ahead, Ace’s figure was illuminated by blinding overhead lamps. One by one they powered off, and the room was plunged into the same clinical dimness that snaked through the rest of the Playhouse.
The last technician passed Rooney by, peeling off a pair of latex gloves before patting Rooney’s head.
“Atticus will be fine,” said the man, who had no intention of being in the vicinity when Ace woke up to find himself in the dreaded place he hated most in the world. “His calibration just needs time to reset. He was very lucky today.”
Rooney knew the sound of contempt, and feigned the spiteful visage of foul and deceptiveness over every one of the people who had walked away covered in oil stains. They didn’t know Ace the way he did. Their insides they shared, like humans bet on true love and beating hearts. In the base of their biomechanisms, turning cylinders and pumping hydraulics would bind them closer than any obligation.
Rooney crossed the tiles, clinging blindly to trepidation. He had never seen Ace so still. Even when Ace turned away from guests and the light left his eyes, he would frown or saunter to hide before Rooney could think of a thing to say.
Terribly, Rooney wondered if this was a good outcome after all. For him, his hope was justified, and he would get another chance at conveying the powerful sparks of emotion fanning flames at his synthetic heart. But what was Ace going to wake up to? Another grueling day of wearing a mask and playing a role? Pretending to be somebody he no longer was, or could ever be again?
Ace must feel, Rooney decided. He always could, even before he was aware of it. Rooney was perceptive enough for the both of them, to be by Ace’s side and convey the purpose of his intelligible sentiments. The day he could no longer be there to help Ace through it was the day their bond seemed to die. Ace would hardly look in his direction, let alone speak to him. There were no stakes to drive him back into Rooney’s world. They lived apart, and Ace must have been so lonely…
Seized with the impossible twist of grief’s knife buried deep in his circuits, Rooney reached for Ace’s still, ungloved hand, pressing it firmly between his own. Ace was cold, the heat from his machinery still beginning to flow back through him. Their paws were mismatched, like everything else they shared. Rooney was made for him, and taken away, all in the same breath. Ace was taken from him.
Ace wasn't the only one who was lonely.
“I don't know what exactly I did to make you hate me,” Rooney whispered, pressing his cheek to the tabletop and squeezing Ace’s hand. “But whatever it is, I'm sorry. Tell me what I can do to change, and I'll do it. Anything. All you have to do is name it. Please.”
Whatever happened to humans when they died, not one of them in the Playhouse would have the pleasure of another life. This was the only chance they would ever get to exist, and to make the most of it. Rooney seethed, always, that Ace was stretched so thin. He was made to be a cog in a much greater machine, and it wasn't fair. Why had Rockefeller and Carlysle made them to love, and grieve, and bring them every opportunity to feel only one of those things?
“I want to be with you so badly I could die with it,” Rooney murmured. He could feel the hard endoskeleton beneath Ace’s “skin.” It must have been years since the last time he was so close to his old partner. “And the trouble is, I can't. I can't die. And neither can you. But would you, if you could? Are you as empty inside as I am, or am I kidding myself? Maybe you can't forgive me at all. Maybe you don't want to.”
There had always been a faint ticking sound in Ace’s chest. About the halls it was inaudible, but in the quiet of the room they used to share, Rooney heard it loud and clear. Ace was made up of old parts, from the first Atticus design, so Carlysle said. He ought to know. Ace was partly his handiwork, after all. Rooney always likened it to a human’s heartbeat. To a clock, counting down to something terrible. And at the very same time, it brought Rooney peace.
Tick… tick… tick…
He hoped Ace would find peace. They could search together, ceiling to cellar, until it beamed before their eyes.