Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Rinzler was in the middle of a sleep cycle, a sorely needed one. He hadn’t been running himself quite so ragged now that Beck was in charge of the Grid, but Rinzler always worked hard, he didn’t know how to do anything else, and Beck had taken to actually telling him to his face that he needed to sleep when he’d been up too long. Of course Rinzler always brushed him off, but Beck was forever stubborn, even more stubborn than Rinzler himself, and the annoying program had started pestering him about it whenever he had judged Rinzler was too tired. It actually got to the point of absolutely nothing getting done and Rinzler folding just because at least if he was asleep Beck might get back to doing his job instead of following him around and harassing him. 

So Rinzler was sleeping, but the sound of a series of beeps coming from the door jolted him back to consciousness. The door swished open before he could get up and Beck stood in the doorway, blinking in the dark of the room. He turned his head and spotted Rinzler as Rinzler looked up at him confusedly. There was a long moment of silence, but Beck’s brow furrowed.

“Are you sleeping in here?” he asked, his voice bewildered, “Why?”

Rinzler stared up at him, just as confused. He still kept his helmet on at all hours, even when he was taking a sleep cycle, just because he’d worn it for so long that taking it off made him uncomfortable, so Beck wouldn’t be able to see the look on Rinzler’s face, but the sysadmin still looked down at him with that same bewildered expression.

“I…always sleep here…” Rinzler eventually said when it became clear Beck actually expected an answer to his question.

Somehow Beck’s expression only turned even more confused. “Why? You have your own room don’t you?”

“I had a room on CLU’s throne ship…” Rinzler mumbled, frowning, “why does this matter?”

Beck stared at him like he’d gone insane. “You’ve been sleeping on the floor in a storeroom this entire time?” he asked, his voice suddenly high and upset for reasons beyond Rinzler’s understanding.

“Yes?” Rinzler responded, still not seeing why it was important.

For a moment there was a painful silence before Beck let out a huge gusty sigh and stepped further into the room, letting the door shut behind him. “Rinzler,” he said, sitting down cross-legged on the floor in front of the program in question, “Did CLU have you sleep on the floor?”

“No,” Rinzler replied, “My quarters had a bench, I chose to sleep this way instead because it was more comfortable.”

“A bench,” Beck repeated irritably, “You mean like the holding cells where prisoners go?”

Rinzler did not sigh at this because it wasn’t an unwarranted comparison, given he’d made the same one himself more than once, even if he wouldn’t dare complain about it.

“The lights worked better in the holding cells,” Rinzler noted dryly and Beck pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Why am I surprised?” he asked the world in general more than Rinzler, “Why am I ever surprised?”

“I have no idea,” Rinzler told him in a flat tone, answering his rhetorical question just to point out that Beck was in fact being foolish.

“Get up,” Beck griped, “I’m not letting the User-damned Chief Security Monitor of this system sleep on the fucking floor of a storeroom.” Rinzler had to admit that Beck had definitely been getting an admirable amount of mileage out of the swear words Sam_Flynn had taught him during the period where the Users had been hanging out with the rebels. They certainly illustrated his mood.

Rinzler snorted irritably, but when Beck pulled on his bicep he did stand up. “Why is this important?” Rinzler asked him again as Beck pushed him out the door.

“I have no idea how to explain to you why you shouldn’t be sleeping on the damn floor, Rinzler,” Beck grumbled, “Just take my word for it, it’s not good, and you deserve better.”

With no explanation forthcoming, Rinzler just gave up. Apparently it was important to Beck, so he’d let him do whatever it was that he wanted, even if he didn’t understand why. “What were you looking for?” Rinzler asked him instead as Beck finally let go of him, now that he seemed confident that Rinzler would walk on his own.

“I was trying to find where you guys kept your unused gear,” Beck explained with slightly less patience than he normally had, still clearly perturbed. “Hessa told me to look there.”

“She meant down the hall,” Rinzler huffed, following behind the sysadmin as Beck led him back through the Hub, “at the end, that’s the equipment storage.”

“Noted,” Beck grumbled, “Explains why your door was locked.”

Rinzler had nothing to say to that, so he said nothing and Beck led him out of the Hub entirely and up into Tesler’s ship, which still hung over the Hub because nobody had been able to figure out what to do with it.

“I should have given this stupid thing to you ages ago,” Beck griped as they stood on the lift. Rinzler turned his head to scowl at him.

“I don’t want Tesler’s ship,” he said and Beck just gave him an extremely annoying smile.

“Yeah well I didn’t want Dyson’s ship either and you made me take it, so now I’m the one insisting. I’ll even recode it for you so you have it the way you want it.”

“I don’t want it,” Rinzler bit out.

“Tough,” was Beck’s response as he pushed Rinzler out of the lift and onto the bridge. “You need a room that has a bed and I figure you wouldn’t want a normal residence, so you get the ship, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it anyway, and if you have to make a visit to Argon or Gallium or wherever then this makes it easier.”

Rinzler just let out an annoyed breath through his teeth and Beck smiled at him again with the most obnoxious grin he had in his arsenal. With no recourse, Rinzler again gave up. Beck was too damn stubborn and Rinzler didn’t actually care where he slept so long as it was vaguely secure.

The two of them wound up behind the main console on the bridge, where Beck pulled out his recoding tool that he definitely no longer needed in order to edit things and plugged it into the console, turning the whole thing semi-translucent. “How do you want it?” Beck asked him and Rinzler gave him a scowl he knew Beck could feel even with his face not visible.

“Okay,” Beck sighed dramatically, “I’ll just make it nice, since you obviously don’t care.” 

Rinzler said nothing, just folding his arms over his chest, and Beck smiled at him mischievously before he turned back to the display in front of him and started recoding Tesler’s entire ship. He talked about all the changes he was making as he made them, giving Rinzler the rundown on what he was being given.

“Your room will be here,” Beck told him after several long moments of babbling about the ship’s facilities, pointing it out on the map that he had floating above the console, “I figure you wouldn’t want to sleep in the same room Tesler slept in, I know I wouldn’t, so this auxiliary armory will be your new room and we can make Tesler’s old room into the new axillary armory.”

“I don’t care,” Rinzler said for the tenth time since Beck had started, but Beck just ignored him and kept talking. The sysadmin spent what felt like an age recoding the entire ship before he finally set the changes to initialize and pulled his recoding tool free so he could stow it. Rinzler watched disinterestedly as the room around them shifted, parts of it derezzing and new parts rezzing in their place. Like with Dyson’s ship, Beck disposed of the throne that sat on the bridge and replaced it with an arc of chairs that faced the viewscreen, as well as adding a few more workstations around the edges of the room. He hadn’t changed the color of the lights to blue like his own ship though, probably because Rinzler’s own circuits were still orange and this was ostensibly now his ship. 

“Come on,” Beck said and Rinzler let out an irritable noise, but did actually follow Beck when he started walking. Beck walked him from one end of the ship to the other, showing him everything as if he hadn’t just heard the whole spiel while Beck recoded it. When they got to what was now apparently Rinzler’s own room, Beck punched in a code and the door whooshed open. 

“No,” Rinzler said automatically, his voice coming out wrong, too high and too ragged, and Beck frowned at him.

“Why, what’s wrong with it?” he asked, his tone suddenly kind where before it had been irritatingly flippant.

Rinzler looked around the room without stepping inside, trying to figure out what about it had given him that knee-jerk feeling of revulsion. After a moment he managed to pinpoint it, but rather than looking at Beck, he turned his face away.

“It looks like CLU’s room,” he mumbled.

“Oh, hmm,” Beck huffed, folding his arms over his chest as he thought it over, “Alright, I’ll change it. Tell me what about it is wrong.”

Rinzler turned his head back so he could examine the room again. “Get rid of that,” Rinzler told him first, pointing out the couch that sat in the center of the room. Beck obediently plugged his recoding tool back into the wall and started changing the room again. The couch turned transparent, so Rinzler looked over the room again, “and that,” he said, pointing out the jacuzzi that was irritatingly reminiscent of the one Dyson had had in his room. Rinzler didn’t know why Beck had thought he’d want something like that, as if he ever had the time for it anyway. Beck obliged and the jacuzzi also turned transparent. Rinzler asked him to remove almost everything in the room, all the furniture except the workstation that sat against one wall and Beck obliged him, although he frowned more and more the emptier the room became. “And that,” Rinzler told him, pointing at the bed, and Beck made a frustrated noise.

“Okay, but where are you going to sleep?” Beck asked him irritably, “The whole point of this is you can’t sleep on the floor.”

“I don’t care,” Rinzler told him testily, “I’m not sleeping on that.”

Beck let out a huge gusty sigh, but did as Rinzler told him and the bed also turned transparent. “Okay great, the room is completely empty now. Do you want literally nothing in it or is there something I could add? You have to sleep somewhere other than the floor.”

“Why?” Rinzler demanded again, even though the last time Beck had just said he couldn’t explain it. Beck let out a second frustrated noise and ran his hand over his face.

“It’s wrong,” he repeated, “You deserve better than that, you’re a person, not a pet or an object. You deserve to have some…some dignity!”

Rinzler frowned at him, his hackles lowering. “It’s arrogance,” he grumbled and Beck scowled at him.

“It is not arrogance to have somewhere comfortable to sleep,” he bit back. All Rinzler could do was roll his eyes and fold his arms back over his chest. “You’re impossible, you know that, Rinzler,” Beck griped, “Just utterly impossible.”

“Then put something in,” Rinzler snapped, “Just not the bed.”

“If–If I put a different shaped bed in would it work? Would it remind you less of CLU?” Beck tried, his tone a little desperate.

“No bed,” Rinzler bit out, “I’ve never had one and CLU always did, the shape doesn’t matter.”

“You had one before he rectified you,” Beck huffed as his shoulders dropped in defeat, his frustration easing a little in the face of Rinzler’s honesty.

“That doesn’t count,” Rinzler told him stubbornly.

“Yeah I guess if you don’t remember it then it makes no difference,” Beck sighed, “Okay just…let me think for a nano. You are not sleeping on the floor or on a prison bench. That’s just unacceptable.”

Rinzler rolled his eyes again, but allowed Beck a moment to consider the problem, “Okay I’ve got an idea,” Beck finally said and turned back to coding the room. Another object appeared inside, as transparent as everything else, and Rinzler examined it skeptically. It was a hammock that was slung in the corner, not a bed he had to admit. Rinzler considered how he felt about that before giving up. It didn’t fill him with the gut level revulsion and vibrating anxiety the bed did, so he just nodded and Beck let out a huge relieved sigh.

“Thank the Users,” Beck huffed, “but you really want nothing else in here?”

The look on his face was so downtrodden that Rinzler spent a moment actually considering his question instead of dismissing it. Was there anything he could do with in his own quarters? “Something to hit,” Rinzler finally decided and Beck’s eyebrows went up, but then he let out a chuckle.

“Okay, I’ll take it,” he said and when he coded in the new element a transparent dummy in the shape of Dyson appeared in the empty center of the room. Rinzler couldn’t help but laugh at the stupid look on its equally stupid face. “Can I give you some storage for energy?” Beck asked him a little more cheerfully, “I know Vekt is always giving it to you while you’re working, but if you’re going to be here sometimes then it would be convenient for you to have some.”

Rinzler thought about that before nodding, “Not a bar,” he stipulated, “I’d have no use for it.”

“Yeah I know you don’t do drinks,” Beck hummed as he added a cabinet with a reservoir for energy inside it. “That it?” 

Again Rinzler considered it, but after a moment he nodded. He didn’t need anything else, in fact this was already far more than he actually needed. Beck was giving him a whole fucking ship, what the hell was he supposed to do with it?

“Alright,” Beck allowed, “Better than nothing.” Rinzler said nothing to that so Beck initialized the changes and the new items rezzed in as the old ones dissolved. When it was all done Beck smiled at him, “Take the rest of your sleep cycle…and if I catch you sleeping in that storeroom again I’m going to make your room even fancier.” 

“Yes, Master,” Rinzler bit out and Beck grimaced.

“Okay point taken,” he sighed, putting his hands up in surrender before turning an absolutely pathetic doe-eyed look on Rinzler, “but please don't go back to sleeping on the floor. For me. It’s…it’s upsetting.” Rinzler grumbled under his breath, but after a nano he just nodded and Beck relaxed. “Thanks,” he said, “Let me know if anything turns out to be uncomfortable. I’ll change it.”

Rinzler just waved him away and Beck let out a laugh before obliging him and leaving. The door whooshed shut behind him, leaving Rinzler alone in his new quarters. He still didn’t really know what to do with them, they were much bigger than any room he’d ever had to himself. His quarters on CLU’s throne ship had only been about three paces by four paces in total, with the bench taking up a notable portion of that, but this room was at least twice that size and Rinzler did get some of Beck’s hesitance with taking out all the furniture, it left the large space almost entirely empty, but aside from the unfamiliarity of it, Rinzler didn’t really care. He probably wouldn’t ever end up being in there when he was awake anyway.

The first thing Rinzler did was lock the door, not that it’d stop Beck if he decided he wanted to come in, as the lock on the backroom had proven, then, with a little hesitation, he did go over to the hammock and examine it. He’d never slept in one before…or used one at all, although he’d seen them once or twice and there was an entry on them under the ‘bed’ section of the User encyclopedia Kevin_Flynn had loaded into him. It took him a nano to decide how he wanted to approach getting into it, given it would probably sway when touched, unstable as it was, but once he’d decided on an approach he did climb up into it and sit for a moment. It was too unstable for him to sleep upright, he decided, and it wasn’t close enough to the wall for him to lean his back against it the way he usually did, so after another moment of consideration he gave up and flopped down on his side, facing the door so he could react quickly if need be.

He stayed like that for a while, but when nothing bad happened, he did drop back into his previously interrupted sleep cycle. Hopefully this time he’d manage to complete it.

***

Rinzler woke when a shudder went through the Grid, sitting bolt upright and then throwing his arms out as the sudden movement made the hammock sway dangerously. It wasn’t the first, there had been intermittent tremors passing through the Grid for the past two cycles, but this one was different, was familiar, and Rinzler actually knew what had caused it. Once it seemed like he wasn’t going to fall out of the hammock, he carefully disentangled himself from it and then strode out the door, irritably going all the way back through Tesler’s stupid enormous ship that was apparently now his stupid enormous ship, just to get down to the street, something that would have taken him a third of the time if he’d been in the backroom in the Hub.

Once he was back on the ground he rezzed his cycle and took off, headed for the arcade. Beck was already there when he arrived, waiting outside the front entrance with the Tagalongs standing beside him.

Beck turned his head when Rinzler pulled up and dismounted. There was a frown on his face, something exasperated, “And here I was hoping you might sleep for an actually reasonable amount of time for once.”

Rinzler gave him an unimpressed look that, as always, he seemed to be able to sense even without seeing it, and Beck just held his hands up in surrender. “It would be better if you slept, sir,” Reeve cut in, “We should be able to handle this just fine.”

“It’s Users,” Rinzler grumbled, an argument that they couldn’t really contest, because it was in fact Users and all the trouble they always brought with them. Fortunately both Beck and the Tagalongs let the matter drop as the door to the arcade opened and the whole entourage piled out, Sam_Flynn and Alan-One along with Quorra and Tron, all stepping out onto the street.

“Hey you got the welcoming committee out!” Sam_Flynn crowed and Alan-One merely chuckled.

“Welcome Users!” Beck greeted in a voice that was only a little sarcastic as he grinned at them. Even so, the group laughed.

“How are you guys doing?” Alan-One asked, “It’s been a while in here since we left right? It’s only been a couple weeks for us, but I know the time doesn’t line up right.”

“It’s been a few cycles,” Beck helpfully provided, to which Quorra and Tron both nodded, “and I'd say it's been going alright so far, no wars or coups or anything, although we’ve had some weird tremors.”

“Ah,” Alan-One huffed, “That’s probably because of the reason we’re here.”

“What did you do?” Rinzler bit out and Tron rolled his eyes, although Alan-One merely smiled at him fondly.

“It’s not us,” Alan-One explained, “it’s the computer that hosts the Grid, the thing was advanced for its time when Flynn put it together, but that was over twenty years ago. The fact that it’s still running at all is a miracle.”

“Okay, so what does that actually mean?” Beck asked before Rinzler could bite out something much less polite.

“It means the Grid needs to be moved,” Sam_Flynn cut in, “If we leave it on Dad’s computer any longer it could fail.”

“Move it?” Rinzler repeated darkly, ”What do you mean move it? How do you move an entire system and where are you planning on putting it?”

Sam_Flynn raised his hands as if to quell Rinzler, which only succeeded in making him growl, so Tron stepped between them, as if he thought Rinzler might actually lunge at the younger User…not that it hadn’t crossed his mind.

“Compared to the User world, the Grid is miniscule,” Tron explained, his tone level, if not slightly annoyed in the way it often was when he talked to Rinzler. “All of it is contained on a device about this big.” He held his hands out to demonstrate and all of the Grid programs there, save Quorra, stared at him in bewilderment.

“That can’t be right,” Rinzler protested, but Quorra shook her head solemnly.

“No it is,” she said, “The User world is large beyond comprehension, it’s so big that there are places so far away they can’t even be seen with the most powerful lenses ever built and would take billions of cycles to ever reach. It’s so big they don’t even know how big it actually is.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Beck laughed as Rinzler just stared at her in disbelief, “But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. So what, the little box we live in is breaking so you have to put us in a different little box?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” Sam_Flynn said, “I’d give the computer you’re in another year at most before it craps out, so this is pretty urgent.”

“Alright,” Beck sighed, “How does this work then? How do you move us?”

“We have to download all Grid’s assets into a drive and then upload them into a new computer,” Alan-One explained, “Aside from the fact that Flynn’s computer isn’t going to hold out much longer, the arcade isn’t exactly the safest location. I’d feel better if there was more security between it and the public…given how Sam ended up in here totally by accident, something is bound to go wrong sooner or later.”

“Yeah Lora is real worried about somebody coming in off the street and stealing the laser to sell for a quick Hawaiian vacay,” Sam_Flynn added.

Rinzler let out a sigh and folded his arms over his chest. He could feel the Tagalongs shift unhappily behind him, their discomfort with the idea mirroring his own. “Can the Grid run while you’re transferring it or…or do you have to freeze it?”

“It can’t run on just a drive,” Alan-One told him, “This system takes up a lot of processing power and a drive is really just a storage device, you have to plug it into something else for it to be able to actually do anything with the data it carries.”

Again Rinzler let out a sigh, chewing his lip as he thought it over, “I don’t trust you,” he said and the Tagalongs nodded in approval beside him.

“Great,” Sam_Flynn said, his voice dry, “So you want the system to just die then.”

“No,” Rinzler snapped, the snarl that colored his voice so vicious that Sam_Flynn actually took a step away from him and Tron again put himself between the two of them, “I don’t trust you,” Rinzler repeated, “So I need to supervise to make sure it doesn’t get damaged while you're transferring it…I want to do it myself.”

The Users, along with Tron and Quorra all blinked at him. “You…want to come to our world?” Alan-One asked tentatively.

“I will if I have to,” Rinzler bit out, “to ensure the Grid’s safety.”

Both Users shared a glance and then looked to Quorra and Tron. Tron just grimaced, while Quorra shrugged. “I…see no problem with that, so long as you abide by our laws. First and foremost you can’t hurt anybody. Understand?” Alan-One told him after a moment.

Rinzler scowled at them all, but nodded. If he needed to defend the Grid he would, regardless of what anybody else had to say about it, but provided the Grid wasn’t in danger he’d refrain from hurting anybody.

“Okay cool,” Sam_Flynn huffed, “Aside from that I think most of our rules are similar to your rules, no stealing stuff or vandalism or whatever.”

“I get it,” Rinzler bit out, and Sam_Flynn rolled his eyes. 

“Alright,” Alan-One sighed, “you can come supervise us if you want.”

“Can–can I come too?” Beck spoke up, glancing anxiously between the Users and Rinzler, “I don’t want him to have to be there alone.”

“He would not be alone,” Tron soothed but Beck shook his head.

“Alone with people he doesn’t trust,” the sysadmin elaborated and Tron sighed before turning to Alan-One.

“That’s fine,” the User said, “But just you two, I don’t have enough seats in my car to bring a whole parade.”

The Tagalongs deflated behind Rinzler, obviously having wanted to go too, given they never ever seemed to want to leave his side. Rinzler turned to them and they straightened back up immediately.

“Even if the Grid is offline during transfer, it will be online without us for some time before and after it’s transferred, even if not much. Can I trust you to keep the place from falling apart during that time?” He asked them seriously and somehow, impossibly, the three of them stood even straighter.

“We won’t let any harm come to it, sir!” the three of them barked in unison. Rinzler let out a sigh and nodded, then turned back to the Users and their friends.

“Let’s get this over with, if that’s all you’re here for then there’s no point in wasting time.”

Alan-One let out a breath, but nodded, only to turn to Beck, “I assume you’ll want to let your friends know you’ll be gone for a little while.”

“Yeah but I can do that on our way to the portal,” Beck replied lightly, “I agree with Rinzler, the sooner this is done the better.”

“Alright,” Alan-One relented, “Let’s head out then.”

Unfortunately, neither the Users or their entourage had rezzed in with jet batons, so the lot of them ended up on Beck’s ship. It was an anxious trip, for Rinzler at least. He had never had any desire to leave the Grid, it was where he belonged, not in the User world, but now he was forced to leave it to ensure its safety, and he didn’t like it.

He stood on the bridge of Beck’s ship, watching the pillar of light that was the portal grow steadily closer while Beck and the others sat in the chairs that took up the space and discussed logistics that Rinzler listened to with half an ear.

Finally one of the pilots that occupied the four workstations on the bridge called out that they had arrived, not that that wasn’t obvious just from looking out the viewscreen, and Rinzler turned to follow Beck as they all disembarked, leaving Beck’s ship and its staff to wait for them to return. 

The portal was a blinding pillar of light that took up the whole of the platform at the end of the bridge, but Tron walked confidently towards it with the others following him. Rinzler took up the rear and hesitated for just a nano at the edge of the light.

“It’s alright,” Beck reassured him from where he stood inside it, his hand on Tron’s shoulder like everyone else, “It’ll be alright. You trust me don’t you?”

Rinzler hesitated just another nano longer, but then reached out to put his hand on Beck’s elbow before stepping into the light with the others. It didn’t hurt, all it felt like was wind whipping around him, no sensation of hot or cold, no pain, and Rinzler watched as Tron raised his disc over his head and released it. Something hooked Rinzler under the ribs and the world felt like it twisted suddenly.

All he could hope for was that this was the right decision, that he hadn’t made a mistake. Rinzler had nothing and nobody to pray to; he didn’t believe in the promises offered by the Users, and CLU was dead, but Rinzler still silently begged somebody, anybody, anything, that this wouldn't go horribly wrong like everything in his life always seemed to.

Chapter Text

When Rinzler appeared with the Users in their world he found his initial assessment was one of terror. There was no data feed in the User world. Rinzler couldn’t see the tags of those around him, let alone their status, and when he tried to initiate a scan or pull up files nothing happened. The sensory deprivation was so familiar and terrible that his breath caught and turned into labored wheezing as he tried desperately to tamp down the fear with reason.

CLU was dead. He wasn’t there. Rinzler wasn’t in timeout. 

Somehow it didn’t help.

It was Tron who figured out what was wrong with him as Rinzler huddled in the corner of Kevin_Flynn’s secret office, arms wrapped around himself like that alone would be enough to hold him together. Tron approached him carefully, making slow but obvious movements so as not to startle him. He didn’t try to touch Rinzler, but he came close enough that the others wouldn’t overhear when he spoke in a low, quiet voice. “You’re not being punished,” he said with patience he didn’t usually have for his counterpart, “You still have your other senses, Rinzler. Tell me what you can hear.”

Rinzler continued to shake, but he focused and found he could hear all sorts of odd sounds. “Cr-creaking…a machine humming…birds…” He wasn’t sure how he knew what a bird was enough to identify the tittering sounds coming from out the little window near the ceiling, but he simply chalked it up to Kevin_Flynn’s apparent attempts to teach him about User things back when he was Tron.

“Good,” Tron told him calmly, “What do you feel?” 

“My helmet…against my neck…” Rinzler replied shakily.

Tron nodded and said, “And you can still see, what do you see, Rinzler?”

Rinzler couldn’t help but let out a snort, weak as the sound was, “Kevin_Flynn’s stupid secret hideout and your ugly face.”

Tron rolled his eyes, but the corner of his mouth had quirked up slightly. “We have the same face,” he reminded him.

“I’m prettier,” Rinzler retorted, relieved now that the panic had subsided and annoyed that it had been Tron to solve the problem for him, “Now get out of my face, creep, before I decide to make you even uglier.”

Tron snorted and stepped back, his movements no longer cautious and slow. Now that he wasn’t freaking the hell out, Rinzler turned and found Beck, who seemed a little shell shocked, looking around the cramped room with confusion and dismay.

“You guys…can’t feel your system?” he asked confusedly.

“Nope,” Sam_Flynn said with a huff, “All that stuff with holographic displays and file transfers and all that is Grid stuff, you can’t do that here. Our world is analog.”

“Analog?” Beck mumbled, rubbing his hands through his hair, before looking confusedly over at Rinzler, who shrugged. He didn’t feel good about this at all, but he wasn’t about to let on how unnerved he was more than he already had.

“First thing’s first,” Alan-One spoke up, “Beck, Rinzler, This is Lora Bradley, my wife and the creator of the laser technology.”

The female User, Lora_Bradley, who stood next to Alan-One, raised her hand in greeting, a smile on her face that sent some kind of cascade of familiarity through Rinzler’s code. He knew her face, but only because he had met a program who looked exactly like her once, it must have been a program she had created. That program didn’t matter though, so Rinzler pushed it from his mind.

“Hello,” Beck said, waving back, “I’m Beck, the Grid’s sysadmin, and that’s Rinzler, my partner in crime.”

Rinzler couldn’t help but snort at that, because Beck had managed to say something that was both true, because Rinzler had helped the rebels out significantly near the end of things, and yet also couldn't be farther from the truth, given he and Beck had been on opposite sides of a war for hundreds of cycles.

Lora_Bradley said something polite that Rinzler largely ignored. Instead he cataloged the details of Flynn’s stupid basement, the soft golden light filtering through a window caked with…something…something that also coated the walls and floor and the table that stood against the wall along with the drawings of what Rinzler recognized as the grid and a door at the far side of the room, and then turned his attention to the occupants of said room, cataloging the differences. Gone were the Grid suits of everyone except himself and Beck, even Tron and Quorra were dressed in loose-fitting User clothes. None of the clothes had circuits on them and there was no sign of anybody having discs. In a sudden burst of panic, Rinzler reached back, but when his fingers grazed across his discs, safely there in his dock, he relaxed. They weren’t gone, he still had them. When he looked over at Beck he found that he still had his disc as well, so the lack of discs on the others was likely because they had put them somewhere else.

“Well,” Sam_Flynn said, clapping his hands together, “First we gotta get you changed. Can’t have you walking around looking like LED bikers can we?”

“Changed?” Beck asked him confusedly.

“Grid suits are not suitable attire for the User world,” Quorra explained kindly, “They stand out too much and their properties don’t transfer right, all the functions in them are gone and just getting them off is difficult, let alone modifying them.”

“Oh,” Beck said, looking down at himself, “I mean my circuits do look darker…”

“Yeah,” Sam_Flynn agreed.

Beck pulled his disc off his back, likely to recode his suit, but nothing happened when he tried to pull up the display.

“Oh…” he said after a moment, “My disc doesn’t work either…”

“Nope,” Sam_Flynn hummed, “It’s just a frisbee here. All our discs are sitting in Alan’s garage, not much use for them out here.”

“Um…I’d like to keep mine,” Beck said hesitantly, “If that’s okay, and I’d assume Rinzler would want to as well, right?” Beck turned his eyes on Rinzler, who nodded emphatically.

Alan let out a huff, “You can carry them in a backpack if you want,” he sighed, “but for now, we need to get your clothes changed.”

“Sure,” Beck said, “how exactly do we do that? I can’t recode my suit if my disc doesn’t work…”

A wicked grin appeared on Sam_Flynn’s face and he turned to pull an item off the table, which he held up. It was a massive pair of shears, “Hold real still,” he said lightly and Beck blinked at him in surprise. Tron, who was still standing next to Rinzler, rolled his eyes at Sam_Flynn’s obvious amusement, but said nothing. It took a while for the Users to laboriously cut Beck’s suit off him and both Quorra and Lora_Bradley turned their backs on him politely while Alan-One produced a set of User clothes and then instructed Beck on how to put them on. 

Rinzler watched the whole process impassively, but When Sam_Flynn turned to him and brandished the shears, Rinzler snatched them out of his hand and cut off his suit himself. Both male Users let out a gasp when they saw how Rinzler was absolutely covered in scars, while Beck merely grimaced, but Alan-One offered Rinzler the clothes and he accepted them and mimicked Beck’s actions of pulling them on. He wasn’t sure he liked them…or rather he knew he didn’t like them; they seemed like they’d be easy for somebody to grab in a fight, which was a bad thing. Meanwhile he clutched his discs to his chest until Alan-One held out some sort of bag.

“A backpack,” he explained, “unfortunately I didn’t think to bring an extra one, but if Beck doesn’t mind, you can always carry his disc with yours.”

“I don’t mind,” Beck said, and then turned and held his disc out to Rinzler, who took it after a moment, then turned and took the backpack, examining it confusedly until Quorra reached over and unzipped it for him. He secured the discs inside and then shrugged the bag on over his shoulders, feeling a little better to have them safe.

“Next the helmet,” Alan-One said.

Removing said helmet required power tools and Rinzler spent the entire time waiting for them to accidentally cut his head open with the circular saw and kill him, but fortunately there was at least a passable amount of competence with all of the Users working together and Rinzler was spared from a gruesome and extremely stupid death. When the helmet was finally split in half and pulled away the unfiltered light nearly blinded him and he reeled at the sensation of cool air touching his bare skin and the change in sound quality.

Rinzler, always wearing the helmet as he did, had never actually seen the state of the scars on his face, but just based on the way User Lora_Bradley gasped and covered her mouth and the stricken looks on Sam_Flynn and Alan-One’s faces, he could guess that they were not pleasant to look at, not that they were much worse than the ones they’d already seen on his torso and limbs. Beck, for his part, didn’t seem surprised.

“What the hell happened to your face?” Sam_Flynn asked tactfully.

Rinzler gave him a bland look, “I don’t remember,” he replied, “The damage was inflicted before my rectification.” He knew what had happened, that his good beloved friend Dyson had taken it upon himself to make Tron a little prettier, but he didn’t remember the event personally, so it wasn’t technically a lie.

Beck didn’t interject and Tron, deciding not to be an asshole for once, kept their conversation on Dyson’s ship to himself. Instead he said, “And here I thought you were the pretty one.” Which made Sam_Flynn stare at him like he’d never met him before and Alan-One and Lora_Bradley wince. Quorra covered her mouth with her hand, but Rinzler could see she was laughing, while Beck actually laughed outright.

Rinzler just stared back at Tron impassively, “It gives my face character. You look like a brand new alpha program on his first day, all shiny and stupid.” Beck laughed even harder at this and Rinzler felt a small sense of triumph.

“I guess we can’t all look like we let a swarm of grid bugs chew off half our head,” Tron replied in an equally unbothered tone.

“Tron!” Alan-One scolded. 

Tron smiled at his User sheepishly, suddenly all good boy, no snarky bastard in sight. Rinzler snorted and crossed his arms.

Alan-One sighed and then looked back at Rinzler with a grimace, “Does it hurt? I must have missed all that when I was repairing you, so much of your programming looks just plain off that it was hard to tell what was damage and what was just CLU taking a sledgehammer to your original code.”

“Pain levels are currently within normal range,” Rinzler reported blandly, hoping for the unlikely outcome of the Users letting it drop.

“Which I’m guessing isn’t zero,” Sam_Flynn said. Figures.

“What constitutes ‘normal range?’” Alan-One asked him suspiciously.

Rinzler didn’t sigh, but he wanted to. “Functional range is 0-75%, range of optimal function is between 0-43%, average range after falling into the Sea was 57-96%. Average range since repairs is 31-42%.” Beck let out a huff at this and stepped over to put a hand on Rinzler’s shoulder like he had during their talk in the arena. It bothered Rinzler less than anybody else touching him, so he didn’t shrug it off. 

“What happens at 100%?” Sam_Flynn asked, he didn’t look like he really wanted to know.

Rinzler fixed him with that same bland look, “Critical system failure resulting in full system crash.”

“So you’re saying on a 1 to 10 pain scale where 10 is so much pain that you pass out, your average daily pain is a 3 to 4?” Lora_Bradley asked him, frowning.

Now that his helmet was no longer hiding his face, Rinzler shouldn’t roll his eyes at her, but he did it anyway. “That is what I said, yes.”

“Was CLU not able to repair the injury when he rectified you?” Tron asked. He sounded displeased, but then again he always sounded displeased when talking to Rinzler.

“He did, I was barely functional before he repaired it.”

“But he couldn’t fix it all the way,” Alan-One said.

Rinzler carefully avoided making eye-contact when he looked at him, “He chose not to.”

“ Why? ” Alan-One pressed. Rinzler could see the storm of anger building behind his eyes and he turned his face away.

“Because then average pain levels would have been zero percent.” It was all very obvious, but for some reason the Users never seemed to be able to understand CLU, or at least they always underestimated his capacity for sadism.

“Typical,” Quorra huffed.

“Yes,” Rinzler agreed. Yes, it was very typical of CLU.

“Sounds about right,” Beck grumbled.

“Would you like me to repair it? That and all the other scars?” Alan-One asked him, shifting closer to take a look at the injury. At least he had said it in a way that suggested Rinzler had the option to decline.

Which he did. “No,” he said, risking a glance at Alan-One’s face to check for anger, when he didn’t see any he went on. “As I said, the level of pain they cause isn’t high enough to interfere with my functions. I don’t want to endure repairs for such minor injuries.”

Sam_Flynn actually growled at him. “Sure doesn’t look fucking minor.” Rinzler, taking advantage of his now exposed face, raised his eyebrows at Sam_Flynn in challenge. Just because they were ‘allies’ now didn’t mean he wouldn’t whip the User’s little punk ass if he tried to force things Rinzler didn’t want onto him. Sam_Flynn quailed under the look almost immediately and shoved his hands in his pockets with a grumble. 

Alan-One wasn’t afraid of Rinzler’s eyebrows, unfortunately. “Ideally you shouldn’t be in pain at all, Rinzler,” he said, but then sighed, “However I’ll respect your decision even if I don’t agree with it, just promise me you’ll let me know if it gets worse.”

Rinzler still didn’t make eye contact with him, but he did give his User a short nod. Alan-One stepped back with another sigh and ran a hand through his hair.

“You’re still making that weird clicking noise,” Sam_Flynn spoke up again after a moment, “I…I thought it would be gone.”

“Why?” Beck asked him curiously, “We’re not Users, even if we’re in your world, so shouldn’t we be the same?”

“I don’t know…I just…assumed that you’d be turned like, human I guess…” Sam_Flynn said lamely, rubbing the back of his neck almost self-consciously.

“Beck is right,” Quorra said, “Users are still the same in the digital world, and it’s clear we’re still the same here, Rinzler’s scars would look different if we’d been made like you. Flynn showed me a scar he had on the back of his hand and it looked completely different.”

Tron nodded along to this and Sam_Flynn let out a huff, “I guess that…that explains some of what Dad was thinking about the ISOs, that they’d change everything.”

“Frankly,” Lora_Bradley spoke up, “I think if we went and showed Quorra to some scientists they’d subject her to a barrage of tests that would probably be deeply unpleasant. I think it’d be better to avoid that. We might be able to collect our own data in a less invasive way and then present it to the academic community later, but for now I think we should focus on the Grid.”

“I agree,” Alan-One said, “I think Flynn was a little too optimistic about all that, if it becoes known that every computer system is a separate world full of people, all hell will break loose and people are definitely going to abuse that knowledge. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and there’s already plenty of people with god complexes. Frankly I don’t want to see what’ll happen if we give every programmer in the world that knowledge. Maybe we can do something about it, but not now.”

All the programs just nodded along to this, but Rinzler let out a shaky breath. That had been his fear, that the Users were going to take whatever plan for the Grid Kevin_Flynn had had and implement it, but it sounded like they were doing the opposite, keeping the Grid, but not letting it be used.

“Well now that everybody’s dressed,” Sam_Flynn hummed, “We should do something about the Grid.”

The other Users nodded, so Rinzler watched as Sam_Flynn walked back across the room to the table that sat below the window. “Wait,” Beck spoke up as Sam_Flynn pulled a device out of his pocket and plugged it into the table, “That’s the Grid?”

“Sure is,” Sam_Flynn told him lightly as he plugged a small chip into the first device. Both Beck and Rinzler came over to the table, to the device that held their entire world, and examined it. Rinzler found that the table’s surface was some kind of touchscreen and it was displaying text, but that other than that there was no indication of what was inside it. He looked up at the drawings on the wall again, the hand drawn map of the Grid. How could this be where their world was? How could everything he’d ever known be just sitting there trapped in a little box? It didn’t make any sense.

“Hey,” Beck spoke up suddenly and Rinzler jumped when the sysadmin reached out and put a hand on his elbow, like he was steading him, “It’s alright, it doesn’t matter that it’s small, it’s still ours, and all we have to do is make sure it gets transferred safely okay? Then we can go back.”

It was at that point that Rinzler realized his processors were grinding, not from pain, but from distress, and that that must be why Beck was talking to him like that. He took a shaky breath, and then another, trying to get himself back under control, and after a few moments of that the grinding sound ebbed back into clicking, even if it was slightly louder than usual.

“Good,” Beck praised, “You’re okay, we’re all okay.”

Rinzler just nodded, watching the progress bar on the table’s surface move steadily towards 100% as Sam_Flynn downloaded their entire world onto a chip so small it could fit on the palm of his hand. The table let out a beep when it was done and Sam_Flynn unplugged his device, then pulled the chip out of it. He drew a small chain from his pocket and slipped it through the tiny loop on the side of the chip before holding it out to Rinzler.

It was hard not to hesitate, but Rinzler took the chip and chain from him and held it in his hands, the entire Grid in stasis, time frozen, locked up in this tiny thing. After a moment of anxious contemplation, Rinzler hung the tiny thin chain around his neck so the chip rested against his collarbone where he could protect it, where he could keep it safe. 

“Right,” Alan-One said, “Well it’s not just the Grid that’s getting moved, we’re bringing the laser with us too, we rented a pickup for it, so if all you strong young people could help us get that moved to the bed of the truck we’ll take off.”

“Let me disconnect everything first,” Lora_Bradley said as she came forward and started unplugging things from the other device that sat on the opposite side of the room to the table that had contained the Grid. The rest of them waited while she unplugged everything, unfolded some sort of tarp that she draped over the device before she finally gave them the go ahead, at that point Beck, Tron, Sam_Flynn, and Rinzler came forward and worked together to lift the heavy device up, then followed the others up the stairs with it and finally out of a door into Flynn’s arcade. 

Rinzler couldn’t help looking around curiously as they shuffled the laser through the space. It was full of cabinets that all were letting out various beeping or chiming sounds, all competing for the attention of everyone in the room. At the same time music throbbed from somewhere, not incredibly loudly, but reminiscent of some of the clubs Rinzler had been to during his various hunts throughout the Grid. 

Quorra held open the final door for them as they brought the laser outside and Rinzler almost stumbled as the light blinded him. It was bright in the User world, there was none of the sleek dark spires of the Grid, none of the neon lights that cut through that dark, instead it was all brightly lit and rough textured, the buildings all different colors and made of different materials, the street cracked and pitted, and the vehicle that Lora_Bradley asked them to carefully load the laser into was at least vaguely reminiscent of a light runner, and yet even that was fundamentally different. Alan-One had called it a pickup and it had a flat space on the back, behind the passenger compartment, which was where they set down the laser. Once they’d put it down Lora_Bradley climbed up into the bed of the truck and started tying the covered laser down with some sort of stretchy cords that had hooks on either end.

“Alright, she’s secure!” Lora_Bradley chirped as she dropped down to the ground and shut the bed of the pickup so the laser couldn’t just slide out the back. Rinzler looked around now that his hands were empty and found that the pickup wasn’t the only vehicle there. There were also two smaller vehicles that were vaguely similar to light cycles. 

“Hold on just a moment,” Tron said as he approached the pickup, then knelt down beside it and checked the underside.

“I don’t think anybody will have put a bomb on my rental truck, Tron,” Alan-One huffed, but Sam_Flynn just laughed.

“Don’t be a spoilsport, Alan, this is what we’re paying him for, remember? He’s gotta keep us alive while Encom is restructured.”

“Nobody’s tried to kill us yet,” Alan-One grumbled, but Sam_Flynn shook his head.

“There’s always a first time,” he said and Alan-One rolled his eyes. 

Rinzler was watching Tron check the pickup, so he saw the moment Tron tensed and knew immediately that he’d found something bad. Rinzler stuck his arm out and pushed Beck back, just as Tron took an urgent step away from the pickup, but before either of them could say anything, the bomb that really had been placed on the underside of the truck detonated.

The force of it threw all of them against the wall of Flynn’s arcade, the sound so deafening that all Rinzler could hear was a high pitched ringing in his ears. He tried to get to his feet, but somebody stepped out of the cloud of dust and smoke and swung something right at Rinzler’s head. He ducked automatically and the weapon, some sort of bat or club, bounced off the wall behind him. Rinzler stumbled to his feet, disoriented, but when whoever it was swung their weapon at him again he caught it against his chest, immobilizing it. The dust was starting to clear and the ringing in his ears was subsiding enough for him to hear coughing and pained groans, but he saw the face of the attacker, realized they had circuit lights all over their skin, and concluded that they had to be a program. Users didn’t have circuits on their bodies. The program let go of his weapon and grabbed Rinzler by the collar of his shirt, yanking him in and headbutting him. Rinzler stumbled for a split nano, but recovered quickly…only not quickly enough as the program shot their hand out and ripped the data chip off of Rinzler’s neck, breaking the small thin chain, then turned and fled.

Automatically Rinzler dropped the weapon he’d been holding and pursued, but the assailant turned the corner and jumped onto another User light cycle, revving up the engines and shooting out onto the street. Rinzler reached back to pull his discs from his dock, intending to throw them and catch the attacker in the neck from behind, only for his hand to brush the backpack rather than his weapons. To get his discs, he’d have to dig them out of the bag, and the attacker had already sped away.

Rinzler cursed violently and looked around. The pickup was in pieces, the metal twisted and broken, the laser also demolished, and both of the User light cycles that had been parked near it had been tossed across the street, also badly damaged. Rinzler had no way to catch up with the program and he ended up just standing in the middle of the street, trying not to panic. After a nano he pulled the backpack off his shoulders and opened it, ignoring his discs to pull out one of the batons he’d kept from his grid suit, rather than letting the Users leave them in Kevin_Flynn’s office.

He split the light cycle baton…or tried to, but it didn’t work, wouldn’t split, somehow having been turned into a single solid and seamless object. Rinzler swore again and dropped it back into the bag. Instead he just ran, took off down the street in the direction the program had gone. When he came to a crossroads, the streets intersecting to give him three ways he could go, Rinzler hesitated. He didn’t know which direction the program had gone. He knelt down and put his hand against the cracked ground, desperately hoping that somehow this at least would work when everything else seemed to be disabled, but as he’d feared, he couldn’t pull up a data trail to tell him which way the program had gone. He had no idea and he just stood at the crossroads, despairing at his failure. He’d lost the Grid, he’d lost it. Anything could happen to it, it could be destroyed so easily when it was trapped in that tiny little chip and then the whole world, everything he had fought for for the last thousand cycles, everything he’d ever known, every program, every place, everything, would be lost forever.

Rinzler ended up on his hands and knees somehow, his processors grinding as overwhelming panic screamed through his code, he was gasping, barely able to breathe around the fear, and when somebody touched him he lashed out automatically, taking a swing at whoever it was, only for Beck to catch his arm and hold it.

“Are you injured?” Beck asked him anxiously.

“Beck,” Rinzler gasped, “The–the Grid!”

“I know,” Beck said seriously, “We’ll get it back, but right now I need to know if you’re injured.”

Rinzler shook his head, not even bothering with a diagnostic, it didn’t matter, he could still function, so it didn’t matter. Beck gave him a concerned look, but then pulled him to his feet. “Tron is handling the Users, none of them were badly injured, although Tron says he thinks Sam might have a concussion. He told me to come get you and bring you back so Quorra can take us to Alan’s place. Tron doesn’t want us to be seen by the User world’s security officers, he says we’re too hard to explain and that he’d handle it.”

“I don’t care,” Rinzler bit out, but Beck tugged on him anyway.

“Come on,” he said, “We don’t know where that guy went, so for now we have to regroup.”

Rinzler took one last look at the intersection of streets, but Beck was right, he had no idea where the program had gone and had no way to track him, he didn’t know how to operate in the User world where all of his tools and abilities were disabled. Beck pulled on his bicep again and Rinzler finally allowed himself to be moved, following Beck back down the street they had come to meet up with Quorra.

Chapter Text

Tron had been getting used to the User world, he’d completed the training required to get a security license, although they hadn’t had time yet to get him an actual gun the way Sam had suggested would be necessary. Even so, when it became clear that the computer that hosted the Grid was failing, Tron agreed that they needed to act fast.

He hadn’t been even remotely surprised that Rinzler was insisting he had to come to ensure the safety of his system, Tron would have done the same, and he was even less surprised that Beck hadn’t wanted to leave Rinzler on his own, the two of them seemed to have become attached at the hip since Beck had been made sysadmin, although Tron could only approve. Hopefully Beck would continue to be a positive influence on Rinzler as time went on.

That said, when they all returned to the User world, Rinzler had panicked. Tron had been surprised by that for a second, before he remembered what Rinzler had told them about the punishment, the torture, that CLU had inflicted on him. Sensory deprivation that had to be familiar now that he was cut off from the Grid. Tron set aside his misgivings about Rinzler and talked him through it, relieved when the snark came back and Rinzler returned to insulting him instead of falling apart.

And again Tron wasn’t surprised to see the scars that covered Rinzler’s body. He hadn’t known they'd be there, but leaving scars on Rinzler rather than healing them seemed like a very CLU thing to do. Tron noted though that Beck seemed even less surprised, like that had been what he was expecting.

Nonetheless they managed to get everything together, Sam downloaded the Grid and handed it off to Rinzler, whose posture was still distressed even after Beck had tried to comfort him. That said, his expression was blank and emotionless as he looked down at the chip that now contained the only world he’d ever known.

Getting the laser into the rented truck was a tedious effort, but they managed it, and then of course Tron checked the truck as he’d been doing each time they went everywhere. Sam had been partially joking about people at Encom trying to assassinate him, but after talking to Alan-One about it, Tron concluded that it was a very real danger and had taken his new duties extremely seriously. He couldn’t allow Flynn’s only son to be killed, neither him nor Alan-One, let alone what Yori would do to him if she ever found out he let her User be harmed.

So he checked, and he was glad he had, because this time there actually was a device connected to the undercarriage of the truck. Tron stepped back immediately, remembering the training he’d been given for this scenario: remove everyone from the scene and then call the police to send a bombsquad to disarm the bomb. Never try to disarm it yourself. He’d turned to get his friends away from the truck, out of the blast radius, but he’d been expecting the bomb to be linked to the truck’s ignition, or alternately to a pressure sensor under the driver’s seat, only it was neither type, it had a remote detonator and it went off before Tron could clear the area. 

He was slammed into the wall just like everyone else, dizzy and disoriented as his ears wrung. He saw shadows in the dust, two people fighting, and he pushed himself to his feet just as the first person took off and the second, Rinzler, followed. Rinzler wasn’t his priority though, the program was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, so Tron turned his attention to the Users, who were just stirring, pushing themselves off the ground.

“Is everyone okay?” he asked seriously as he reached out to help Alan-One back to his feet and then did the same with Lora.

“I’m fine,” Beck mumbled as he shook his head.

“I’ll probably be feeling this for a while,” Alan-One grumbled while Lora had a coughing fit beside him, probably having inhaled a little too much of the dust and smoke, “but I think it’s just bruises.”

“My head hurts,” Sam slurred and when Tron turned he found the younger User attempting to get up, but finding himself too wobbly and falling back against the wall as Quorra tried to steady him, his head and face covered in blood. His head must have collided with the wall.

“Hold still, Sam,” Tron urged him, moving over to him on still unsteady feet. “Lora, if you would please call an ambulance for Sam?” he requested and Lora coughed another couple times, but nodded and started rifling through her pockets looking for her phone. He spent a moment examining Sam’s face and head, carefully feeling for a skull fracture, but concluded after a moment that he didn’t have one as far as Tron could tell.

“I’d say he’s definitely concussed if nothing else,” Tron told the others, sitting back on his heels. 

“I’d say all three of us need to get checked,” Alan-One mumbled and Tron nodded.

“I’m going after Rinzler,” Beck said and Tron nodded again.

“Don’t let him kill whoever did this if he’s caught them, and if he hasn’t, meet up with Quorra and she’ll take you both to Alan-One’s place, I don’t think explaining Rinzler’s whole everything to the police would be easy, so it’s better if they just don’t see him.”

“Okay,” Beck said with a nod and then spent a second steadying himself before he took off down the street after Rinzler.

“Are you damaged Quorra?” Tron asked and the program in question looked up at him. There was soot streaked on her face and clothes, just like the rest of them, but Tron waited while she ran a diagnostic, running one of his own at the same time. It came up with only minor damage, nothing that was particularly concerning and nothing that couldn’t be fixed later.

“I’m fine,” Quorra told him after a second and Tron just nodded.

“My laser!” Lora cried once she’d gotten off the phone, stumbling to her feet over to the twisted frame of the truck and the demolished remains of her life’s work.

“The laser can be rebuilt,” Alan-One assured her, “I know you can do it.”

Lora dropped to her knees in front of the wreckage and put her head in her hands, taking shaky breaths, but then she nodded, “I kept the blueprints,” she mumbled, more to herself than anybody else, “I’ll…I’ll rebuild it.”

Tron encouraged Alan-One to sit back down while they waited for the police and the ambulance and then Tron sat down next to him. Fortunately it wasn’t long before he heard sirens. By then Quorra had left to meet up with Beck and Rinzler, although whether Rinzler would show up dragging their bomber with him Tron didn’t know, even if he did hope he’d managed to catch them and hadn’t killed them before Beck got there.

As Tron had known they would, it was both the police and the fire department that arrived and Tron told the police what had happened, leaving out the parts having to do with the Grid and programs, as the officer wrote down his statement. 

Once they were done with him, a paramedic called Tron over and when he went the two of them encouraged Tron to let them check him out, but of course he refused. Tron doubted any of his vital signs would match that of a User and he didn’t want to raise any questions, so even when the paramedics tried very hard to convince him that he needed to be checked, he refused and simply asked to accompany the others to the hospital.

Fortunately User laws permitted him to deny medical assistance if he so chose and the paramedics finally gave up, eventually just having him climb into the ambulance with everyone else to be brought to the hospital. At that point they were separated, Sam whisked away while Tron ended up staying with Alan-One and Lora. They had to wait for a long while in a little room with curtains rather than walls for any doctors to be available and when it became apparent that was the case, Alan-One spoke up, although his voice was hushed.

“Tron,” he said quietly and Tron nodded, waiting for Alan-One to tell him what he needed.

“I’ve been thinking and…well you saw Rinzler’s scars, and he said that CLU could have fixed them but didn’t…” the User mumbled. 

Tron nodded again, “He only has them because CLU refused to fully repair any of the injuries,” he explained, “Normally injuries do not leave scars on programs, a scar is a sign that the damage hasn’t been fully repaired.”

“So he has them because CLU wanted him to have them,” Alan-One growled and Tron just nodded. He’d never known CLU, but as Quorra, Beck, and Rinzler had said, this seemed like par for the course for him.

“What a dick,” Lora griped and both Alan-One and Tron chuckled at that, but a second later Alan-One sobered.

“That’s…not my only concern,” he said with a sigh, running his fingers through his white hair unhappily. “The scar on his neck…it’s a bite mark.”

Tron nodded again, he’d seen that as well, while Lora’s expression turned to one of outright concern. Rinzler had been covered head to toe in the dark pixelated scars, slashes across his torso, arms, and legs, and nicks and splotches that could only be from being stabbed with a blade, but that one had stood out as unique and unmistakable.

“Could…could he have possibly gotten that in a fight? Like if he’d been grappling with somebody and they bit him?” Alan-One asked him almost desperately, but Tron couldn’t give him the answer he wanted to hear and he only shook his head.

“Grid suits don’t really protect against bladed weapons like discs or swords, but a bite wouldn’t have made it through his suit, he’d have to have been without it for it to do enough damage to leave a scar.”

“Shit,” Tron’s User swore and then let out a bone-deep sigh, “Goddammit.” Lora made an unhappy sound, but put her hand on her spouse’s shoulder.

“It’s bad,” Tron sighed as well, “but I’m not surprised. We already knew CLU tortured him, this isn’t that much of a leap from the other things we knew he did.”

“You say that,” Alan-One grumbled, pushing his glasses up to rub at his eyes, “but this does change things, Tron.”

“I know,” Tron huffed.

They were quiet after that until the doctor finally appeared and checked Lora and Alan-One out. It didn’t take long and then when it was determined that all they had were some nasty bruises they all ended up waiting for Sam. After another hour all three Users were discharged, although Sam had stitches in his scalp and his head was wrapped in bandages. Tron logged the discharge instructions for all three of them, but especially Sam, into his files and then they called a cab outside the hospital.

To Tron and the Users’ relief, the three programs they had left behind were in fact waiting for them inside Alan-One and Lora’s home, but alarm bells went off in Tron’s head when he saw the way Rinzler was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, his legs pulled up against his chest and his face buried in his arms on top of his knees while Beck sat next to him and talked quietly. Quorra, for her part, was sitting on the couch, giving Rinzler plenty of space, but she looked up when Tron and the Users entered.

“What happened?” Tron asked Beck and Quorra urgently as the Users shuffled into the room.

Rinzler didn’t move, as if he were completely offline, but Tron could hear the way his processors were grinding loudly.

“He got away,” Beck said, his voice sorrowful, “And he snatched the chip from Rinzler while he was disoriented from the explosion.”

“Fuck!” Sam cried, but Tron shook his head to silence him, seeing the way Rinzler had curled into himself even more at Sam’s exclamation. He was taking this badly. Undoubtedly he was blaming himself for having failed to protect the Grid.

Alan-One shared a concerned look with Tron and then hesitantly stepped further into the room before kneeling in front of Rinzler. Tron almost expected him to flinch back, but he didn’t, he didn’t move at all, didn’t acknowledge Alan-One was even there.

“Rinzler?” Alan-One asked, his voice painfully gentle.

Then Rinzler moved, but Lora gasped beside Tron and Sam made a face, because Tron had never seen anybody living have such a dead expression as what was on Rinzler’s face at that moment. Alan-One frowned even more deeply, but didn’t flinch or back away.

“This was not your fault,” Alan-One told him seriously, “Whoever stole that chip had pre-planned this, they knew we’d be there, they knew what we were doing, and all of us were unprepared. You were caught in an explosion, there’s no way anybody could expect you to be at your best in that situation.”

If Rinzler was listening at all, he didn’t show it, he just seemed to look through Alan-One more than at him and beside Tron, Lora bit her lip before leaning over and whispering to Sam, who nodded. Lora then led Sam further into the house, into the kitchen, where the two of them bustled around. Tron stayed where he was, unsure how best to handle this situation. It seemed like Rinzler had, for all intents and purposes, completely shut down, and yet was still conscious. If he were a User, Tron would have said it was shock, but Rinzler wasn’t a User and Tron didn’t know the extent of what CLU had done to him, how exactly he’d conditioned him and how that conditioning told him to react or to think. He was unpredictable and for once Tron wasn’t worried about that unpredictability in a violent context, but instead simply in the context that he had no idea how to help him, what would work.

Rinzler looked blankly at Alan-One, his expression empty of all life, all emotion, everything, like he was just a doll, something that wasn’t alive, wasn’t real, and had no emotions to express in the first place. Tron didn’t know what exactly CLU had done to Rinzler over those thousand cycles, but he was certain they were seeing the direct effects of it now.

Tron was sure of that, which is why he grimaced when Rinzler looked away from Alan-One, averting his eyes submissively, his expression still blank as he uncurled himself from the ball he’d been sitting in to instead be on his knees, his hands palm up on his thighs and his head bowed low, staring unseeing down at the floor. Somehow the loud grinding of Rinzler’s processors got even louder, the sound worse than Tron had ever heard it.

Alan-One looked ill and he shook his head fiercely. “Stop that,” he said, his voice firm, “Whatever it is you’re expecting from me, whatever punishment or discipline or torture, you’re not getting it. It wasn’t your fault, nobody could have succeeded in those circumstances, no matter how good they are, so nobody blames you, nothing is going to happen to you, and we will get the Grid back . ”

Rinzler didn’t respond to this in the slightest and Beck reached out to put a hand on his back, only to snatch it away when Rinzler full-body flinched in response. The sound of Rinzler’s processors stuttered for a moment, like they were on the verge of outright failure, and Beck turned a frightened look on Tron, who shook his head, making Beck’s shoulders slump in despair.

Rinzler wasn’t responding the way anybody expected, but Alan-One didn’t give up, “How about this,” he said, his voice stubborn. “You’re not off the hook, we can’t let the Grid be harmed, can’t let whoever stole it do whatever they want with it, we have to get it back and we need you to help us do that.”

“Can’t…” Rinzler mumbled, finally at least responding, even if his voice was raspy and toneless.

“Why not?” Alan-One asked him patiently. 

Rinzler didn’t look at him, only lowering his head that much more, “I don’t know how…” he said in that same hoarse toneless voice, “None of my equipment works, none of my skills work, I can’t do…anything. I’m good for nothing.”

At that point, Tron saw an opening to intrude, so he stepped forward and settled down on the floor beside Alan-One, in front of Rinzler.

“I thought the same thing at first. Nothing is the same, nothing works the way I expected it to, or at all,” he said, his voice even but patient, “but all that means is you have to adapt. Would CLU have allowed you to be useless, to give up because you don’t know how to proceed?” It was a low blow, but Tron couldn’t think of any better angle to approach this, Rinzler needed to get knocked out of this mentality, knocked out of the crushing sense of failure so he could focus on saving his world, and if it took reminding him of his time with CLU to do it, then so be it.

It worked, at least a little, because while Rinzler didn’t lift his head, Tron saw how he clenched his fists against his knees.

“Would he?” Tron demanded, his voice sharp, authoritative, and to that Rinzler responded.

“No,” he said, his tone low and gravelly, like he’d been gargling rocks.

“What would CLU have you do?” Tron asked him carefully. This was dangerous territory and he truly didn’t know how Rinzler would react, but at least he was responding at all, wasn’t acting like he was dead.

Rinzler sat and processed that for a minute and they all let him, knowing he needed to think it over, before all of a sudden he got up, rolling gracefully to his feet. Alan-One and Tron both got out of his way as Beck stood up beside him, his expression hopeful. Rinzler’s face was still blank, but it was blank in the way that seemed to be his resting expression, no longer dead, just focused.

“I need a map,” he said, his voice less thready, less hoarse than before and all of them let out a sigh of relief.

Lora and Sam returned to the living room and Lora held out a mug to Rinzler, who looked at her blankly, obviously not understanding what she wanted.

“Here,” she said as she offered the mug again, “It’s cocoa, it’ll help.”

Rinzler hesitated for a long time, even longer than usual, looking down at the mug in Lora’s hands and again they all just waited for him to make up his mind. After another long moment they were rewarded and Rinzler did accept the mug, although he didn’t drink from it.

“I need a map,” he repeated and Sam sighed.

“Yeah alright lemme find a tablet so you don't have to look at a little itty bitty phone screen.”

There was no argument from Rinzler over this, he simply stood in the same spot, motionless as he held the mug and watched Sam while the User cast around the house, looking for where he’d left his tablet.

“Try the cocoa,” Alan-One prompted while they all waited on Sam, “Like Lora said, it’ll help. Chocolate is good for you.” Obediently, Rinzler sipped from the mug, but his expression didn’t change, any opinion he might have had on the drink not apparent on his face.

Finally from the spare guest room upstairs, the one that was left after Tron had taken up residence in the other one, Sam crowed, “Aha!” The User came rushing back down the stairs and then came to stand in front of Rinzler, navigating the apps on the tablet until he’d pulled up a map of Center City and held the device out to Rinzler, who took it. Again he moved, walking across the room to set his mug down on the coffee table, likely forgotten the moment it was no longer in his hand, and then stood beside the couch where Quorra was perched, looking over the map.

“Where is Kevin_Flynn’s arcade?” Rinzler asked after a moment and Tron stepped over to him to point it out on the map.

“Care to share with the class?” Sam asked and Beck nodded.

“What are you thinking, Rinzler?” he added, “You’ve got an idea right?”

Rinzler glanced up, examining Beck’s face for a moment before he looked back at the map.

“Is there a way to project this?” he asked and Alan-One let out a breath.

“Yeah,” he said, “We’ve got a little projector we use for DVDs on movie night, hang on just a second.”

Rinzler complied with that, examining the map while he waited. His processors still didn’t sound great, were still grinding rather than clicking quietly, but they sounded better, less loud and less like they were on the verge of failing. While Alan-One was busy, Rinzler turned to the rest of them, his expression still blank, but his tone serious. “It was a program,” he said, “Not a User. Were you aware a program had escaped the Grid?”

“Yes,” Tron replied, “He showed up right before we left the Grid that first time and hit Lora in the head before running off.”

“And yet you didn’t tell us,” Rinzler bit out, his tone suddenly much more hostile, his posture coiling slightly and his fist clenched at his side…yet he was still eerily expressionless, as if somehow there was a disconnect between his face and how he felt, like emoting was something he didn’t actually know how to do properly. Tron made a note of that for consideration later, but nodded anyway.

“We have been trying to track him down,” Tron explained “but without luck. We didn’t anticipate him having any interest in us other than simply avoiding us so he wouldn’t be sent back to the Grid, which is why we didn’t mention it. We thought this endeavor would take a few hours maximum.”

“But it didn’t,” Rinzler snapped and Tron was almost relieved to see the familiar anger come back, it was so much better than the emotionless submission from earlier.

“Obviously we made an error,” Tron allowed, “but there’s nothing to be gained from pointing fingers.”

Rinzler actually ducked his head at that and Tron frowned, he hadn’t meant it as a jab, but Rinzler had clearly taken it as Tron pointing out that he’d failed to stop this situation just as much as they had failed to prevent it. “It’s okay,” Beck spoke up, “We’re going to fix it, we’ll catch this guy and get the Grid back.” Rinzler gave him an unreadable look, but then nodded shortly and Beck let out a relieved breath. “How’d you know he was a program? Did you damage him?”

“No,” Rinzler said with a shake of his head, “He had circuits on his face, Users don’t have circuits.”

“That’s definitely the same guy,” Lora added, “The guy who hit me in Kevin’s office had those on his face too and just looking at all of you, that seems uncommon.”

Something in Beck’s expression turned dark, turned to one of dread. “I need to see your memory files of him, Rinzler,” he said urgently, “I think I know who this guy is…and if I’m right this situation is way worse than we thought.”

“My discs don’t work,” Rinzler told him, a scowl on his face, finally some emotion visible.

“May I see one of them?” Lora asked all of a sudden and Rinzler went tense all at once, but Beck put a hand on his shoulder and Rinzler glanced at him.

“You can see mine, Lora,” Beck said and then asked Rinzler to turn around so he could reach into the backpack and pull his disc out to hold out to her. The fact that Rinzler actually allowed Beck to come so close to his own discs was nothing if not an extreme sign of trust in Tron’s opinion, given how protective of them he seemed to be…not for no reason of course.

Lora accepted Beck’s disc and examined it more closely, frowning, but then she moved over to put the disc under the light of the lamp next to the couch, obviously looking for something. “What is it?” Quorra and Sam asked in unison, only to grin at each other over it.

“Well I saw Quorra and Tron’s discs and thought there was something a little odd about the blue ring in the middle of them…but I couldn’t put my finger on why that was,” Lora said, flipping the disc over in her hands to examine the back of it as well.

“So what’s the verdict?” Sam asked her.

Lora let out a thoughtful hum, “I was thinking the inner circle kind of reminded me of the surface of an optical disc…and I think I might be right, it really does look like that.”

“What is an optical disc?” Rinzler asked her seriously and Lora looked up at him.

“It’s a type of device used for data storage,” she explained as she stepped away from the lamp and held the disc back out to Beck, “Alan mentioned we have a DVD player, well a DVD is a type of optical disc. If your discs work the same way as a DVD here in our world, then they’re not functionless, they're just a lot more analog than they were in your world…which makes sense.”

“Does that mean you can view the files recorded on it?” Tron asked her and she grinned at him mischievously.

“Well, a DVD player obviously is only designed to read DVDs…but I could probably yank out its laser assembly and jerry-rig it to read the data off your discs. Lasers are my specialty.”

“That’s awesome!” Sam crowed, “You can really do that?”

“I don’t see why not,” Lora hummed, “And if I’m wrong I can always just put the DVD player back together. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

“So we really can check if it’s Cyrus who’s gotten loose,” Beck sighed in relief.

“Who is Cyrus?” Rinzler asked Beck, his voice low and serious.

Beck sighed heavily and turned back to his former mentor, “He was my predecessor, the original Renegade, your original protege before you were rectified, but he was psycho and you trapped him in some kind of code prison. I found it by accident and he almost used me to detonate an EMP that would have wiped almost every program off the Grid. He’s majorly crazy…and dangerous.”

“Why would he want to destroy the Grid?” Quorra asked, a deep worried frown on her face.

“He didn’t want to destroy it, or at least he didn’t think that was what he was doing. He said…” Beck told them, trailing off with a frown, “He said he was trying to save it from CLU and that the loss of life was just the cost of that. I don’t think he’d just break the chip, I think he probably stole it because he doesn’t like that the occupation is still technically around… he’s probably not a fan of the fact that I’m running things now either…he doesn’t like me.”

“So he’s going to try and purge both mine and your people from the Grid,” Rinzler concluded.

“If it really is him,” Beck agreed, “I can’t be sure without seeing your memories…or you seeing mine.”

“Well good news is that I password protected and encrypted the shit out of that data, he’s not going to be able to just plug it into any random computer and start editing things,” Sam put in and Rinzler gave him a considering look.

“Good,” Tron sighed, “that buys us time…if it really is who you think it is, Beck.”

“One way to find out,” Beck hummed, then turned back to Lora, “How long do you think it’d take you to alter the DVD player to read our discs?”

Lora let out a huff and pushed her hair back out of her face, “A day or two, maybe less.”

Rinzler had largely been standing motionless, waiting for Alan-One to return, but something seemed to occur to him and he moved, walking around the room, searching all the nooks and crannies. “What’re you looking for?” Sam asked him and Rinzler answered without pausing.

“Like Alan-One said, this program knew you’d be there, knew you were moving the Grid and at what time and planned this whole attack…and unless you’ve told everybody you know about your plans, that means he’s got a bug or a camera,” Rinzler explainted testily.

“Shit,” Sam swore, “I hadn’t thought of that…”

“That is a very good point,” Tron said, promptly joining Rinzler in searching the house, although his moves were surer than his counterpart, given he was more familiar with both User technology and what belonged in the house than Rinzler. The rest of the room’s occupants joined in the search while they waited for Alan-One, but it was Beck who found what they were looking for.

“Is this supposed to be here?” he spoke up suddenly and the others all paused, looking up at him. Beck stood near the far wall, standing on tip-toe and peering into a vent. 

“Nothing should be in the vents,” Lora said, frowning unhappily as the rest of them came over to look at what Beck had found. Contrary to this however, was the reality that there was in fact a device sitting there in the vent. Tron removed the cover and pulled it out, revealing a small camera, just like Rinzler had predicted. Both Sam and Lora swore violently as Tron turned the device over in his hands and then shut it off once he’d figured out how. With it off he pried the casing out of the bottom and removed the batteries which he set down on the coffee table next to the camera.

“It should be disabled now, without the batteries,” Tron sighed, “Any way for this to tell us where our bomber is?”

“It might have been piggybacking off our wifi to send its footage, since it’s clearly wireless,” Lora noted, “But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be able to trace it. It’s probably sending its recordings to a cloud storage account and those are usually attached to a public endpoint, not a private one, so even if we pulled an IP address out of it, it probably wouldn’t lead us to wherever our guy is hiding.”

“Worth a shot anyway though, right?” Sam said and Lora smiled at him, but nodded.

“I’ll take a look,” she said, sitting back down in her recliner and pulling her laptop over to rest on her lap, which she opened and started typing on.

At that moment Alan-One reappeared with a device in his hands and said, “I found it, and I was listening to all this talk about discs and cameras and crazy programs. I say the rest of us figure out what to do while Lora looks into the spy camera and then builds us our device, any objections?”

The lot of them shook their heads, so Alan-One held his hand out for the tablet Rinzler was still holding, then once it had been handed over he plugged the little projector into it and set it down on the coffee table next to Rinzler’s mug, facing the far wall.

“Alright,” he said as he switched it on and the map of Center City appeared on the wall, “Tell us your idea Rinzler.”

Chapter Text

Rinzler could feel himself spiraling, glitching, as Beck led him to meet up with Quorra. His vision was full of static and black spots and he had to force himself to keep moving, to follow Beck when his system was on the verge of failure, on the verge of crashing. 

His system was failing, he was failing, because he had failed, he’d failed the Grid, the one reason he was there, his only remaining purpose now that CLU was gone. He had never failed anything as badly as he just had…and the only saving grace was that CLU wasn’t around to have seen him do it. Rinzler clutched at his head for a moment, shaking it back and forth, as if in denial, and beside him Beck said something in a gentle voice that Rinzler didn’t catch, tugging on Rinzler’s elbow to get him moving again. If CLU had been there, if CLU had seen this…Rinzler didn’t know what he’d have done, what punishment he’d felt would be appropriate for having lost their entire world, the system CLU had overthrown their creator for, the system that had been all they'd ever known, but Rinzler knew it would have been…bad.

In fact CLU might have just concluded that Rinzler really was a waste of space, that he really was too broken to be worth anything, and then he’d dispose of him, not even worth the trouble of further rectification.

The idea just sent him spiraling even further, because CLU was gone, but Alan-One was still around and the Grid was the life’s work of his best friend, was valuable enough to Alan-One that he’d risked his own life to save it from crumbling apart in the wake of CLU’s demise. Rinzler might have been safe from CLU but he wasn’t safe from Alan-One and while Rinzler knew CLU well enough to take a guess at how he’d have reacted (badly), he had no idea with Alan-One. So far the User had been mild-mannered, had been temperate, but Rinzler didn’t know if there was a threshold he might be pushed over by this, if there was a point at which he would turn brutal…after all, CLU had been mild-mannered and temperate when he was in a good mood and that could be flipped on and off like a switch, the change in mood so sudden the only way to see it coming was to know exactly what sort of things made him angry.

“You’re okay,” Beck said suddenly and Rinzler stiffened, having been so lost in his panicked thoughts that he’d forgotten who was with him, where he was. Beck must have reacted to something Rinzler was doing, some way it was obvious that he was freaking out, and at that point he noticed the awful way his processors were stuttering, the way they gave away that he was glitching with fear. When he looked up he found they’d rejoined Quorra and that she was holding some sort of small rectangular device in her hand. 

“What do we do now?” Beck asked her.

“I’m calling a cab,” she said, “It’ll take us to Alan’s place, better than taking a bus…and I think a lot safer for Rinzler. I think the bus would be…stressful. Given the truck is pretty much slag and Sam’s going to have to do a whole lot to repair the Ducati and Tron’s Aprilia, for now that’s all we can do.”

Beck clearly didn’t know what any of that meant any more than Rinzler did, but he nodded anyway.

They ended up waiting in silence and Rinzler sunk back into the turmoil in his code, unable to tune it out, to shut it down the way he had used to. It was too powerful, and he’d become weaker after CLU died, his thresholds for pain, for panic, had lowered…maybe because he wasn’t experiencing those things constantly anymore, and he zoned out, only present enough to vaguely note that another User light runner had appeared, a yellow one, and Quorra and Beck had ushered him into the back seat. He didn’t notice any of the trip, didn’t feel any of the time pass, and only caught snippets of Beck and Quorra and the User driving the light runner talking.

“What’s th– noise?”

“Oh–t’s noth—his phon–brok–n,”

“That–ounds like a–ain,”

Rinzler didn’t pay attention to any of it, his system logging it automatically, but without comprehension. At most he processed that they weren’t currently being attacked, probably weren’t in immediate danger that he would need to fight his way out of, but that was all. His processors ground and stuttered, his system filled up with more and more and more error messages, and at some point he crashed, although he could only have been offline for a little while, as when he woke up they were still in the cab, still driving. Rinzler didn’t feel any better after waking back up, although he noted distantly that Beck had a hand on his shoulder, a stressed look on his face.

At some point he spaced out even more and when he resurfaced he was in a building, some sort of living quarters, judging by the furniture. They must have made it to Alan-One’s home. All he could do was curl up as small as he could possibly get, like if he made himself small enough then he’d disappear and Alan-One couldn’t punish him, couldn’t hurt him. It was worthless of course, futile, useless, and Rinzler only looked up again when somebody said his name, at which point he found Alan-One sitting in front of him. He was talking, but Rinzler really didn’t catch anything he said. Automatically, he shifted so he was on his knees, his hands open and empty, his head bowed, waiting for the punishment he knew he deserved. He flinched when somebody touched him, and it took a long moment for him to process that no pain had followed the touch. It was only when Alan-One’s voice turned forceful, turned stern, that Rinzler was able to make himself tune back in enough to catch what he was saying.

Alan-One told him they needed him to save the Grid, and Rinzler told him the truth, that he was useless, that nothing he had tried had worked, that he didn’t know what to do…but Alan-One didn’t punish him for that either. Tron sat down in front of Rinzler a moment later and posed a question that sent Rinzler’s thought’s spiraling again. Would CLU have allowed this?

No, he wouldn’t have. 

If CLU hadn’t decided that Rinzler was worthless then and there, if he had been kind enough to decide Rinzler could still be useful, he’d have demanded Rinzler function, that he do as he was told, that he rectify his mistakes. The thought of it drove him to his feet, focused him, and some of the static cleared out of his vision, his glitching subsiding a little. Focus, he told himself. CLU would never have allowed this behavior, CLU would have ordered him to fix this mistake at all costs, even if Rinzler was destroyed in the process, because what was he compared to the Grid? What was his value, his functionality, his well-being in the face of the Grid? It was nothing, it didn’t matter, so Rinzler pushed through it, forced himself to finally focus, because Tron was right, he had to get the Grid back, had to save it, or all was lost, and if he had to destroy himself to do it then he would. Just like CLU would have wanted, would have demanded.

Rinzler listened to Lora_Bradley talk about their discs while he waited for Alan-One to find the projector and he was filled with relief at the assertion that his discs weren’t fully functionless, that their functionality had simply been altered to match the User world. It would still be useful, a vital tool that wasn’t actually broken, if they could just figure out how it worked. Maybe the same was true of the rest of him, the rest of his equipment, maybe he just needed to figure out how it was meant to function in the User world. 

He considered that while they talked for a moment before something else occurred to him, which led him to searching the place for a recording device. When it was Beck who found it, Rinzler let out a breath. That was one thing taken care of at least and maybe Lora_Bradley really would get something out of it.

Alan-One reappeared a moment later and set the projector to display the map on the wall behind Rinzler, so he turned and examined it again. Beck had asked him what his idea was, although at this point it was more of an inkling, an instinct, than a full-fledged idea. Cyrus, if it really was Cyrus, was a program, which meant he’d think like a program, would react to his environment like a program, and Rinzler could use that.

“What is necessary to secure a residence in the User world?” Rinzler asked the room in general.

“You have to have documents confirming your identity, a good credit score, or somebody who has a good credit score to sign for you, and enough money to pay a down payment along with rent or a mortgage,” Alan-One explained. The majority of his answer meant nothing to Rinzler, but what he got out of it is that the requirements to get a place of residence were far more stringent than they were on the Grid and if this rogue program had only appeared what for the User world had been a month before, he likely wouldn’t have been able to meet those requirements.

“You think he’s squatting,” Tron concluded, following Rinzler’s train of thought easily and Rinzler nodded.

“I doubt he’d be able to secure any of those things, if he even knew what they were,” Rinzler agreed, “Which means he has to be staying in a location without the permission of the authorities.”

“Somewhere abandoned,” Quorra said and again Rinzler nodded. 

“Can you mark abandoned sites on this map?” he asked the Users. Rinzler could get an idea of the general layout of this city from the map, but data like that wasn’t included.

“Yeah,” Sam_Flyn said, “but it might take a minute. I’m gonna have to do a search for that info.”

Rinzler simply nodded at this and waited, tracing the possible routes the program might have taken from the intersection where Rinzler had lost him. There were three streets that headed away from that intersection other than the one that led back to the arcade, many of them branching off again at more and more intersections the further down each one went. There would be no way to check every possible route, at least not in a reasonable time frame with only six people to do it. Rinzler might have been able to on the Grid, but he was sorely lacking in resources and personnel here. Which meant they were going to have to use predictive searching, they’d have to pinpoint the locations that made sense for the program to go and search those areas instead. It was a lot more of a crapshoot than a grid-search, but it was the only method they had available to them.

“Do you have access to recording devices?” Rinzler asked out of the blue as everyone waited for Sam_Flynn to find the data Rinzler had requested.

“Depends on what you need,” Lora_Bradley answered distractedly, “What are you meaning to use them for?”

“Even if we clear a location, there is a possibility that he will not be there when we check, but will return later once we are no longer present,” Rinzler explained, “but if we leave a recording device at each location we have a way of clearing it for the duration of the hunt, provided we check the recordings frequently enough to catch any appearance he makes.”

“Motion sensitive home security cameras might be the best option for that,” Alan-One said, “They’re not hideously expensive if you don’t really care about picture quality and frankly I think this guy should be easy enough to identify even with a shitty camera.”

Rinzler nodded at this, “Provided the device can capture the image of his circuits, he should be easy to identify.”

“Alright, well there’s a RadioShack downtown that should have something along those lines.”

Rinzler nodded as Sam_Flynn spoke up, “Got it!” he crowed and then stood up to mess with the map, dropping red colored pins at various locations on it.

“Those are all the abandoned places in town,” Sam_Flynn explained and again Rinzler considered the map. He’d been concerned about there being too many locations for the six of them to clear, but Sam_Flynn had only marked five locations on their side of the harbor and another ten on the opposite side; that was doable.

“We’ll start with the closest locations and spread outwards,” Rinzler said and everyone nodded, so Rinzler turned to Alan-One, “Do you have transportation?”

“Yeah,” Tron’s User said, “But only enough for four of us, my car only has four seats and we sold Lora’s car when she started working from home, we'll have to rent an extra one.”

“This is going to dip into our savings isn't it?” Lora_Bradley sighed heavily and Alan-One gave her a wry look.

“Maybe they won’t charge us for wrecking the rental truck because it was destroyed in an assassination attempt,” he joked and Lora_Bradley smiled.

“I don’t think car bombs are covered by the rental insurance,” she huffed, although the sound was amused.

“Well we can at least use getting blown up as an excuse to take some paid leave,” Sam_Flynn spoke up cheerfully and all three Users laughed.

“Yeah I was thinking we’d have to,” Alan-One agreed, “We can’t spend time at Encom in budget meetings when the Grid needs saving.”

“We need to go as soon as possible,” Rinzler urged them, trying to make them focus, but Alan-One turned his head to look at the wall and when Rinzler followed his gaze he found there was a clock hanging up over the fireplace just above what appeared to be a metal cross-guarded sword mounted on some sort of wood plaque with the image of a tree and an arc of stars on it.

“It’s past five, neither the car rental place or the RadioShack will be open,” Alan-One said, “and frankly I’m tired as hell, we’re going to have to wait until tomorrow morning to start working on it.”

Rinzler stood frozen in place for a long time, his processors grinding loudly, trying to calculate how much a headstart like that would disadvantage them before he concluded he didn’t have enough information. “How much time until we can go?” he asked and the Users looked back at the clock.

“Most places open between nine and ten o’clock and it’s seven right now, so fourteen hours at least,” Alan-One explained and Rinzler had to forcefully shut down the surge of panic that ripped through him, killing the process that allowed it and making himself feel numb as a result. He’d done that sort of thing when CLU was still around, but sparingly because forcefully killing those processes didn’t actually stop the panic, it just set it aside for later when he’d feel the the full force of everything that had built up, hopefully at a time where he wasn’t trying to perform tasks that it would interfere with.

“You’ve had harder jobs,” Beck spoke up and Rinzler turned a blank look on him. Beck’s expression pinched a little, likely reacting to something he perceived in Rinzler’s expression or posture, but he went on talking anyway, “Tracking down a guy with a headstart isn’t nearly as difficult as keeping the Grid from collapsing when you’ve got no permissions. You can do it, and we’ll do it together, so for now just take the time to rest so we can go full force in the morning.”

Rinzler stood there, feeling nothing, but then nodded and Beck smiled at him in relief. “You get anything from the camera, Lora?” Alan-One asked.

“Nothing I wasn’t expecting,” Lora_Bradley sighed, “It was in fact plugged into our wifi and I traced it to the cloud storage account it was using and hacked into that, but it's set to a public endpoint, like I thought, so the IP address isn’t connected to a private device and I can’t trace it anywhere.”

“Fuck,” Sam_Flynn sighed and there was an unhappy moment of silence before the younger User asked, “Right, well what’re we doing for dinner?”

Rinzler declined dinner, although it caused a great deal of arguing, all of which he completely ignored. Beck seemed on the fence about it, unsure whether it was truly necessary, although he eventually acquiesced when Quorra explained that the User world did not have energy in the same way as the Grid. Rinzler excused himself from the totality of that, instead going outside and walking around Alan-One’s house, dried leaves crunching under his feet, examining the house and logging its features, unable to sit still when all he wanted to do was hunt. Beck had given him a worried glance, one that matched Alan-One’s expression, but had let him do as he pleased while the rest of them ate. 

It was dark outside and that settled some of Rinzler’s nerves just a little, the darkness was familiar, even if it was a different sort of darkness without the shining blue lights of the Grid, without its sleek spotless surfaces. There was a persistent rhythmic buzzing in the background when Rinzler stepped outside and for once it had nothing to do with him, although he couldn’t identify the cause of it. Further down was a tall lamp that overhung the street and shone orange light onto it. Rinzler stood under it for a long time, just staring up into it and trying not to think.

There was something else he had to save, not just the Grid itself, but his personnel, his Tagalongs. They were in danger and if Beck’s guess of exactly who had taken the Grid and for what purpose was right, that danger was targeted at them especially, at his people. He had to save them before harm could come to them. Rinzler stood under the streetlight and stared blankly up into its orange glow for so long that when his attention was drawn away from it it was by another yellow light runner rolling to a stop outside the house. Rinzler heard Sam_Flynn and Quorra wish Alan-One and Lora_Bradley goodnight as they stepped away and got into the cab, which pulled out onto the street and disappeared into the night. At that point, Alan-One, still standing in the doorway of his home, called for Rinzler to come back inside. Rinzler complied, leaving the orange light behind and returning to the others. When he stepped inside he found that everyone but Beck had already gone to bed, Tron included. Alan-One shut and locked the front door behind them once Rinzler was back inside, then turned to the two remaining programs.

“We do have an extra guest room,” Alan-One said as he gestured for Rinzler and Beck to follow him up the stairs. “Tron is staying in the other one, so one of you two has to sleep on the couch, but I’ll let you figure out who.” Alan-One opened the door to the guest bedroom and Rinzler grimaced, only looking it over for a nano before he turned and walked back down the stairs, although he heard Beck let out a massive sigh.

Rinzler ended up back in the living room, standing in the middle of the room trying to make up his mind. He wasn’t going to stay in the guest bedroom, but he didn’t want to sleep on the couch either. Would Beck relent now when he wouldn’t before? He’d been so unhappy about Rinzler’s original sleeping arrangements.

Beck and Alan-One reappeared a moment later and Alan-One said, “I take it this is a sign of disapproval.”

“Yeah,” Beck sighed, “He doesn’t like sleeping in a bed, he refused to let me put one in his room in the Grid.”

Alan-One let out a huff, “Alright, the couch it is.”

Beck turned to Rinzler, “You can do the couch right?” Rinzler considered that, examining the couch with a grimace. 

“That face looks an awful lot like a ‘no’ to me,” Alan-One said and Beck made an intensely frustrated noise.

“You cannot sleep on the floor, Rinzler, I swear you’re gonna make me glitch,” Beck moaned and Rinzler turned an unimpressed look on him.

“He was sleeping on the floor?” Alan-One asked with a heavy frown.

Beck nodded, "Yeah and getting him to do anything else was a fight.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rinzler told him, but both Alan-One and Beck shook their heads.

“You’re not a dog, Rinzler,” Alan-One told him, “You can’t sleep on the floor. I’ll make the couch nice, it won't be bad to sleep on.”

“Thank you,” Beck sighed, “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

Rinzler rolled his eyes and, just like he had the last time he and Beck had had this argument, he gave up. Beck read the surrender off his face, even if Alan-One couldn’t, and let out a relieved breath. “Good,” he said, “Thanks for being at least vaguely reasonable about this.”

“Whatever,” Rinzler told him flatly. With that Rinzler and Beck watched from out of Alan-One’s way as he ‘made up the couch’ for him to sleep on. Rinzler gave the couch another critical look when he was done. It was…puffy. The User had covered it in blankets and pillows, which only added to that puffiness. 

“It’ll be fine,” Beck reassured him and Rinzler dropped down to sit on the couch just to shut them both up. Unfortunately, the sound of his processor’s clicking sped up audibly as well as getting louder. He tried to make it stop, but he felt like he had a weight on him, like somebody was sitting on his chest, as he stared blankly at the opposite wall.

“Alan, can I sleep down here too?” Beck asked out of the blue, making Rinzler start, he’d been so busy trying to settle his shivering anxious nerves that he’d forgotten Beck and Alan-One were there.

“If you want,” Alan-One told him placidly, although Rinzler heard the edge of worry in his voice.

“Yeah I would prefer that, just, you know,” the sysadmin finished lamely, but Alan-One nodded his head with a serious expression, like he understood what Beck had meant by that, and Rinzler watched blankly as Alan-One went and pulled out even more linens and pillows to make up the second couch perpendicular to the one where Rinzler sat. Beck helped him and then once they were done he wished Alan-One goodnight and the two programs watched the User retreat to where Lora_Bradley had gone.

“You alright?” Beck asked suddenly and Rinzler turned his head to look at him, although he knew his face was expressionless. A worried crease appeared between Beck’s eyebrows, like something about that was concerning.

“I’m fine,” Rinzler told him tonelessly, “Go to sleep.”

Beck let out a huff, but laid down on the couch obediently. Rinzler stayed upright, his posture stiff and unhappy, and after a moment Beck opened his eyes again and said, “I'll be right here if you need anything.”

Rinzler just nodded, so Beck closed his eyes again. For a long time Rinzler just sat there stiffly, trying to calm himself enough that he might actually be able to stand sleeping. It took, according to the clock above the fireplace, three hours before he’d managed to get his rapid clicking under control and even out his breathing, the panic he’d killed earlier having returned with a vengeance. He was still uncomfortable even once he’d quit glitching, still unhappy, and he really would rather just sit in the corner of the room and sleep that way; it'd be so much better than this, but both Beck and Alan-One had forbidden it, so he was stuck with the couch.

Eventually Rinzler gave up. He didn’t want to sleep, not like this. He could force himself, could technically initiate a sleep cycle no matter how he felt and he had done so out of necessity while working under CLU, but…he didn’t want to. How could he sleep when the Grid was in danger? How could he rest? CLU would never have allowed it and…he didn’t want to, he didn’t want to.

But when had it ever mattered what he wanted?

Beck would say it mattered, that it mattered now. Rinzler looked over at Beck, who was definitely asleep, and then let out a breath. He didn’t want to sleep, so he wouldn't, and he knew that they'd all disapprove if they found out so…so they wouldn’t find out. Rinzler stood up from the couch and stalked silently through the house, careful not to make a sound and grateful that as soon as he’d left his sleeping arrangements, the clicking had turned quieter.

He’d noted earlier that the door creaked when opened, so he went out the window instead, out into the cool night air once again, and let out another breath of relief. It was better outside, no couch, no bed, no ghost of CLU in his code…or at least for now the ghost of CLU was quiet, his skin no longer prickling with CLU’s handprints. He ended up scaling the side of the house without any trouble, moving on light silent feet, until he was on the roof over the empty guest room. Tron would likely hear him if he walked over the portion of the roof that sat above his room and he wasn’t sure how light of a sleeper Alan-One was, let alone Lora_Bradley, but if he stayed over the empty guest room it should be fine.

He ended up sitting up there all night, unbothered by the cold and watching the way the lights moved in the strange User city across the harbor, the way they reflected off the mirror black surface of the water so similarly and yet differently to the Sea of Simulation.

He watched the sunrise too, that thing Sam_Flynn had shown Quorra and Tron, and found that he really had never seen anything like it, although he wasn’t sure what he actually thought about it. It was totally alien, and something about that disquieted him. At that point though, he dropped off the side of the roof and rolled when he hit the ground, dispersing the force of his fall and coming up on his feet. He had to go back to the couch, but if he was there when everyone woke up, they might just conclude he’d woken before they did.

Back through the window he went, closing it behind him without a sound, and then again he stalked through the living room, where he sat back down on the dreaded couch. It was soft, like it had been before, and he hated it, hated the way it sent a shiver through his code, hated the way it made old memory files scrabble for his attention, but for now all he had to do was wait for somebody else to wake up so he could get up and do something else, something more productive. The need to chase after the Grid was all-powerful, but Alan-One had said they had to wait and Rinzler knew that even with all his skills, he couldn’t do it by himself, because as the sunrise had illustrated, Rinzler didn’t belong in this world and fundamentally didn’t know how it worked. He couldn’t operate by himself this time.

Chapter Text

Cyrus laughed victoriously as he left Rinzler in the dust. He hadn’t meant to destroy the laser, hadn’t realized that was the thing under the tarp that they’d all loaded into the truck, and that was definitely going to be a problem, but he’d deal with it, he had a friend who could probably rebuild it for him. 

So Cyrus cruised down the various streets of the User city, giggling to himself as he held the chip that contained the Grid by the chain in his left hand. 

It was his. 

Finally.

Admittedly, he hadn't had a lot of wins over the last thousand cycles. Even Tron being dragged off his high horse wasn’t a win, because it hadn’t been Cyrus who’d done it. He’d already known Tron was broken, that he was inferior, that Cyrus was better, but CLU rectifying Tron didn’t prove that. It didn’t prove it to anybody and now Cyrus couldn’t even prove it himself because Tron didn’t even remember him. As if everything else he’d done wasn’t enough of an insult, now he’d forgotten Cyrus had ever existed. As if Cyrus hadn’t already hated CLU’s guts, that would have done it. CLU stole Cyrus’s revenge from him, just like he ruined everything else he touched…and admittedly he’d made Tron a lot more dangerous when he’d rectified him.

Tron had always been hampered by his ‘kindness’, by his unwillingness to do what needed to be done, to succeed at all costs. That was the thing that made Cyrus so much better than him, that made him worthy to take on the mantle, but CLU had ripped that out of Tron along with the rest of his personality. Rinzler, because CLU really could claim Tron was dead now, was a killing machine, and Cyrus would have been impressed to find he had that capacity if not for the fact that it had never been Tron’s choice to become like that. 

Cyrus’s mentor, his predecessor, the program he needed to prove he could beat, was just a murderous shadow of his former self…but Cyrus had still thought that maybe if he could just put the poor sod out of his misery, that would be some proof at least. That if he could kill the thing that had killed Tron, if he could destroy the monster he’d become, then that would be proving Cyrus really could best him, that he was the superior Tron.

He’d tried it. He’d waited and watched and cataloged everything he could about how Rinzler operated over tens of cycles, because Cyrus was nothing if not patient, and once he felt he had the new state of his mentor figured out, he set a trap. Rinzler had sprung it just as planned, although unfortunately when his light cycle hit Cyrus’s explosive and got blown into a million pieces, Rinzler was perfectly fine. He flipped in the air and landed gracefully on his feet without a scratch on him, perfectly able to pull his discs out and engage Cyrus in combat…not that Cyrus had ever expected anything less. They’d fought. It seemed like it was going to work. Cyrus had talked to him while dodging and striking out in equal amounts, but keeping up with Rinzler had turned out to be way way harder than keeping up with Tron ever had been and Cyrus only barely managed it, because apparently Tron’s injuries had been hampering him a lot more than Cyrus had thought…but even so, he found the magic words and said them.

“Did CLU tell you your real name?” Cyrus teased as he just barely dodged one of Rinzler’s discs, avoiding the worst of the damage, but still getting some voxels sheared off the side of his head in the process, “Tron? Sound familiar?”

Rinzler hesitated, he hesitated, freezing up for a nano, his posture confused, the clicking noise his body constantly made increasing in speed and volume, and Cyrus grinned at him.

“What?” he asked the program turned mindless monster sweetly, “Don’t remember?”

That seemed to hit a nerve, because Rinzler’s posture hunched slightly, his shoulders raising just a little. He shook his head, but Cyrus could tell it wasn’t Rinzler answering his question, that it was Rinzler trying to clear something out of his code. Obviously CLU’s reprogramming wasn’t as flawless as he liked to believe. Cyrus had only grinned wider.

“We’re buddies,” he went on lightly, “Well, we were, before CLU drove you totally wacko, but I was your protege. I saved your life and you taught me everything you knew so I could take up your mantle. We’re on the same side, I’m trying to save the system and so are you, no need to fight.”

Rinzler had stood there, still hesitating, like he was confused, like he’d never had somebody actually try to talk him down before and didn’t know how he was supposed to handle that situation. Cyrus could only laugh, poor broken thing suddenly had to think for himself, he probably didn’t even know how anymore.

“You know I can save you too,” Cyrus crooned, “Your head’s all messed up, you’re confused. CLU’s orders don’t make any sense do they? We don’t have to fight, I can fix you so you're what you should be, not this broken thing that you are. Sounds good doesn’t it? Having a friend instead of a master?” It was a bluff of course, Cyrus didn’t have the ability to rewrite programs, only CLU could do that, but all he needed was for Rinzler to drop his guard enough for Cyrus to derezz him, then the matter would be settled.

For a moment it seemed like it would work, because Rinzler stood frozen, his clicking loud and rapid, and Cyrus edged closer, just a little closer, a little bit more, then he could sever his head from his neck. Rinzler let him get close, watching him in his obviously confused state, his limbs twitching, but the nano Cyrus dropped the act and made for the killing blow, Rinzler reacted way faster than Cyrus had expected. He unfroze and moved with speed that was startling, deflecting Cyrus’s disc and then slashing one of his own across Cyrus’s chest and face. It wasn’t enough to derezz him…barely… and at that point Cyrus had to retreat, because otherwise he’d lose the fight. 

Rinzler had come after him, of course he had, all hesitation forgotten, back in murder mode, but even badly injured, Cyrus was sly and he made it out. He survived. He repaired himself, but avoided Rinzler after that, still watching him. That angle hadn’t worked out, but it hadn’t been totally ineffective either. Cyrus reworked his plan, watched and waited for cycles upon cycles…only before he could try again, a new User came to the system and ripped everything apart.

Cyrus had thought it was over after that, with Rinzler and CLU both dead…except Rinzler wasn’t dead and without CLU around he’d actually grown some sentience. He took over CLU’s role, a pale shadow of the tyrant. If anything this just made it simpler though, because now if Cyrus took out his mentor he’d free the Grid of tyranny and Tron both, but then like he always did, Beck rained on Cyrus’s parade. He came in and ruined everything, united the Grid, protected the Users, and somehow got Rinzler to step down as Beck stepped up to take CLU’s spot, Rinzler once again relegated to attack dog status like he hadn’t been the one to make Beck anything more than some nobody mechanic in the first place. 

It was all wrong! Beck wasn’t supposed to win! He was the inferior version of Cyrus, the laughable pretender, and yet he’d gotten everything he’d ever wanted! Cyrus stalked around the edges of the Grid and seethed, reworking his plans yet again, until the light of the portal called to him. Overthrowing Beck when he had Rinzler there to fight for him would be a hassle…but if Cyrus went to the User world it’d be easier. Maybe he could erase Beck and Rinzler and all their little friends in one fell swoop. He’d made for the portal and had escaped the Grid, he did what CLU never managed to do and made it out into the User world. 

Cyrus was disoriented at first, but he adapted quickly. He’d always been flexible, but when he returned to the Grid’s vessel after the Users - and the new fake copy of Tron they’d conjured from somewhere - had left, he found he didn’t understand how it worked at all. He didn’t know how to use it, how to do what he wanted, and he couldn’t even access the thing. It just asked him for a password that Cyrus didn’t know how to subvert from the outside. He cursed and retreated. He needed a User, but Tron’s creator wasn’t an option, he and his little friends had been buddy-buddy with Rinzler, with Beck, as if that didn’t already show how stupid and blind they were, so Cyrus needed somebody else.

And then he met silly boy Edward Dillinger Jr. and decided he was perfect; just greedy enough, just short-sighted enough, just morally loose enough, to be perfect. Cyrus had followed him home and made his proposal. He had used the User knife he’d taken off a mugger dumb enough to try and steal from him and slashed open his own palm, showing the User what he was, and then had offered Dillinger a little deal. Dillinger had said he’d consider it if Cyrus could prove that the laser worked, if he could prove that Dillinger could get what he wanted out of the Grid, out of Flynn’s precious system.

It didn’t really matter what Dilligner wanted, because Cyrus would just kill him once he was done with him, so he’d made his offer. He had proven his words were legit too, that his promises could come true, only Dillinger was still hesitant. He had still taken weeks to make up his mind and even once he had, Beck and Tron’s Users had decided to move the Grid before Dillinger had gotten the chance to fulfill his end of the bargain. They even brought Beck and crazy broken Rinzler out with them, the idiots.

No matter, though, because Cyrus had the Grid now! He had the whole thing wrapped up in a neat little box with a ribbon and a bow, all his for the taking. He sped away victorious to meet Dilinger at his office, parking his borrowed cycle in an alley near Encom Tower and then easily bypassing the building’s security, dropping in on his User buddy in the idiot’s office. Dillinger let out a high pitched little yelp when he looked up to see Cyrus suddenly in the room with him, a big grin on his face.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Dillinger hissed at him as he stood up from his desk, strode across the room, and then peeked out the door anxiously before shutting it and turning back to Cyrus, his arms folded across his chest.

“I’ve got the Grid,” Cyrus chirped at him happily, holding out the chip that contained his world, “Figured there was no point waiting right?”

“Yeah,” Dillinger told him dryly, “And what about my end of the bargain? I want the laser.”

“Ah sorry buddy,” Cyrus huffed, “Laser’s busted, but don’t worry, I’ve got a friend who’ll rebuild it…with a little patience and encouragement.”

“Yeah well, sorry buddy,” Dillinger sneered, repeating Cyrus’s own words back at him, his tone mocking, “No laser no deal. You think I’m stupid? I want the laser first before I give you what you want. If you can have it rebuilt and hand it over then I’ll fix your system or whatever, but if you can’t repair that laser then you’ve got nothing worth anything.”

Cyrus grabbed him by the front of his shirt and slammed him against the wall, scowling, and Dillinger’s eyes went wild for a second, the expression enough for Cyrus to regain control of his temper. He laughed lightly and let Dillinger go, dusting him off and stepping back. “Sorry, lost my temper, you know how it goes. No hard feelings. Don’t worry about it though, I’ll get the laser fixed up lickety split and drop it right off. Just sit tight.”

“S-sure,” Dillinger stuttered, so Cyrus just smiled at him, palmed the chip, and then promptly excused himself. This was a setback to be sure, but nothing worse than he had already come out of before. Time to visit his other friend instead, she might need some convincing, she’d been terribly uncooperative ever since they’d first met, but Cyrus was good at being convincing and he knew he could change her mind with a little bit of patience. He could be patient, he had been patient for a thousand cycles. Anything to save the Grid.

Chapter Text

Rinzler stayed where he was on the couch until Alan-One appeared, wandering through the house into the kitchen where he clattered around, then fiddling with some sort of machine that held a glass pot underneath it. Rinzler watched this disinterestedly, given it was either that or stare at the clock, which is what he had been doing for the past three hours. It was almost eight. That meant they had only a little over an hour left before they could finally start hunting and every passing second was agony, just because they took so long.

Alan-One turned to pull a mug out of the cupboard above the sink, the same one that had held the cocoa Rinzler hadn’t drank, which had since been emptied and cleaned. That mug didn’t last long though, because Alan-One’s eyes drifted sideways, like he was going to check the clock, only for him to let out a startled yelp when he saw Rinzler watching him disinterestedly and dropped the mug, which shattered on the floor.

“I’m up!” Beck yelped in turn, sitting bolt upright, his hair sticking up in every direction. Rinzler snorted at both of them and turned his eyes back to the clock.

“God, how long have you been up?” Alan-One gasped as he knelt down and started carefully picking up the shattered remains of the mug.

“Since five,” Rinzler lied, choosing the point at which he’d come back inside as his arbitrary number.

“And you’ve just been what, sitting there this whole time staring at the wall?” Alan-One asked him, his voice exasperated. Rinzler gave him a bland look that made the User roll his eyes dramatically.

“You said we had to wait until nine,” Rinzler replied flatly and Alan-One let out a sigh. On the couch opposite Rinzler, Beck yawned and stood up, disentangling himself from the mass of blankets he’d been buried in.

“You can read a book or something, watch TV, so long as it’s quiet. You don’t have to sit there and do nothing,” Alan-One scolded. Rinzler forced himself not to duck his head in response to the admonishment in the User’s tone. If Alan-One decided to punish him he’d just suck it up. Rinzler said nothing in response to the statement and Alan-One let out a huge sigh.

“Book? TV?” Beck asked confusedly. He’d run his fingers through his messy hair until it had returned to a semi-normal state - which was to say that it still stuck up, just in the way he wanted it to - and then he went about folding up all the blankets he’d slept on so he could stack them on one end of the couch. After a second of deliberation, Rinzler did the same with the blankets he had been given, but hadn’t used.

“Books are User text files and a TV is a file viewing device,” Rinzler explained, recalling the definitions in the partially corrupted encyclopedia he had in his files.

“Oh hmm,” Beck hummed.

Alan-One dumped the shards of his shattered mug into the trash before bringing down two more and setting them on the counter, then turning to the glass pot, which was now full of liquid so dark it was almost black and that smelled extremely bitter, and poured some of it into each mug. 

“My point is you can do something to entertain yourself, you don’t have to sit and do nothing,” Alan-One scolded as he pulled a jug of something out of the refrigerator and poured some into each mug. This time Rinzler did duck his head, unable to stop himself, which only served to make Alan-One sigh. Rinzler still said nothing and the User gave up and took his two mugs back to his and Lora_Bradley’s room.

“You get any sleep?” Beck asked him quietly and Rinzler looked up at him, at the honesty in his face.

“No,” he said, unsure why he was telling the truth when he knew it would only cause him trouble later.

As predicted, Beck frowned, but didn’t scold him either for defying orders or for lying to Alan-One, instead he asked, “Why not?”

“I didn’t want to,” Rinzler again told the truth, although he left out how the idea made his nerves shiver with anxiety, how CLU would have ripped him to shreds for it had he still been around, and this time Beck let out a sigh.

“Well I won’t say that’s good,” Beck huffed, “But I do appreciate that you decided to defy Alan-One, even if it was to your own detriment. I don’t like seeing you be mindlessly obedient.”

Rinzler dipped his chin and Beck smiled at him, although the smile fell a moment later, “Was it the couch? You seemed unhappy about it.”

That took a nano for Rinzler to consider, and as always Beck let him, waiting patiently for an answer instead of rushing him. The couch was part of it, like the bed, like CLU’s room, CLU’s bed, CLU’s couch, CLU’s... “I didn’t want to sleep,” Rinzler repeated and Beck let out a huff.

“Not because of the couch then? For some other reason?” he asked.

Rinzler’s eyes drifted back to the clock, only one minute and eleven seconds had passed since he’d last looked at it. “The Grid is in danger…” he said after a long moment of processing.

Beck let out a breath, but nodded. “Hard to sleep when you’re worried, I get that.” 

That had been part of it too, but the majority was simply that Rinzler couldn’t justify sleeping, not when the Grid was in danger. CLU wouldn’t have let him rest for a nano until it was safe. The only thing that had kept him from going out on his own and spending the night scouting the locations Sam_Flynn had highlighted was the fact that he didn’t know how to operate in the User world…but the couch was also unpleasant, so there was that.

It took another half hour for the other residents of Alan-One and Lora_Bradley’s home to appear. Tron was first and also poured himself some of the black drink in the glass pot before offering some of it to Beck and Rinzler. Rinzler denied it automatically, but Beck hesitated for a moment. Tron smiled at him encouragingly, and eventually Beck nodded and said, “Sure, why not?”

“It’s coffee,” Tron explained as he poured a mug for Beck, “It’s a drink that contains a chemical called caffeine, which provides an energy boost. Lora informed me on my first morning here that drinking it without additives is called ‘taking it black’ and that few people do this because black coffee is very bitter. Most people add cream or sugar or both. When they introduced me to it they just said to try it, and then add things until I decided I liked it.”

Beck nodded along to all this with interest and then took the mug when Tron slid it across the counter along with the jug Alan-One had pulled from the fridge, a different colored jug of the same shape and size, and a glass container of white powder along with a spoon.

“Sugar,” Tron explained, pointing at the container of white powder, “Regular creamer,” he went on, pointing to the blue jug, “And this is the caramel flavored creamer that Sam likes,” he said, pointing to the orange jug, “The caramel creamer is very sweet, so I wouldn't recommend including a lot of sugar with it.”

“This is complicated,” Beck huffed and Tron laughed lightly.

“It is,” he agreed, nodding his head with a smile, “Everything about the User world is complicated. I think CLU would have hated it.”

That sent something spiraling in Rinzler’s code, the memories of CLU’s plot. Watching over the rectification units as they built CLU’s army to ensure that any rebels who attacked them wouldn’t be able to disable them, something they had tried multiple times. Standing still in a room with CLU while he practiced his victory speech, proposing ideas and then acting like Rinzler had given an opinion on them even as he stood perfectly still and said nothing. Toying with Sam_Flynn in the arena, only to realize what he really was, that CLU’s plan had actually worked…and then everything that had come afterwards: his failure, his ‘timeout’, Sam_Flynn and Quorra getting the drop on him and then the dogfight where Rinzler had betrayed every single line of code in his body for somebody he couldn’t remember and didn't care about.

No. CLU would not have liked the User world.

Rinzler could say that with certainty, and just given how their equipment had been altered so drastically when they’d arrived, his invasion probably wouldn’t have gone well even if Rinzler had obeyed and shot Kevin_Flynn out of the sky. Even if he hadn’t ruined everything.

“You okay?” Beck asked all of a sudden and Rinzler started, only to realize his clicking had turned into an unhappy scraping sound, not quite the painful grind that gave away when he was in distress, but something close to it.

“Yes,” Rinzler told him, “CLU would not have liked the User world,” he added, although he didn’t know why he felt the need to say so. “If he’d had the opportunity to, he’d have leveled it.”

“Well I guess that means you saved both worlds,” Beck told him lightly as he poured a small amount of creamer from the blue jug into his coffee, tasted it, made a face, and then added more.

Rinzler blinked, not understanding that statement, but Beck just smiled at him, “You saved the Grid by preventing CLU from killing Flynn, which gave him the opportunity to reintegrate and destroy CLU, and by keeping it from crumbling long enough for it to be repaired. You saved the User world by stopping CLU from killing Flynn and using his disc to unlock the portal so he could invade it,” he explained patiently.

“Neither of those statements is accurate,” Rinzler told him and Beck just rolled his eyes.

“And why not?” Beck demanded, a stubborn edge slipping into his tone, even if he was still smiling. He took another sip of his drink and made a face, but added sugar instead of cream this time.

“Allowing CLU to be killed nearly resulted in the destruction of the Grid,” Rinzler corrected, “And even if CLU had escaped the Grid with his forces, none of his weapons or vehicles would have been operational. In fact in all likelihood his throne ship would have been destroyed, or at least severely damaged, when it rezzed inside of Flynn’s arcade…not to mention what would have happened to everyone inside. Either way he wouldn’t have succeeded in conquering or destroying the User world.”

“Two things can be true at once,” Tron said, mediating, “Even if less was at stake than anybody thought, you did do the right thing and protected both worlds. That’s not nothing.”

“I malfunctioned,” Rinzler corrected again and this time it was Tron who rolled his eyes.

“Good,” Beck said shortly, “It was about time.”

Beck ended up putting so much cream and sugar into his coffee that the drink had gone from black to white by the time the two Users appeared. “Sam and Quorra should turn up any minute,” Alan-One told them all as he ushered Tron out of the kitchen so he could start pulling ingredients and cooking tools out of the cupboards and begin preparing food. Lora-Bradley, in the meantime, set her empty mug down on the coffee table and then moved to disconnect the DVD player from the TV so she could start disassembling it.

As had been stated, there was a rattling sound from the front door about ten minutes later when Sam_Flynn unlocked it, then he and Quorra reentered the house, shutting the door behind them. “Hey,” Sam_Flynn greeted as he came and dropped down onto the couch where Beck had slept, “I smell coffee and pancakes.”

“You smell correctly,” Alan-One told him, “I figured pancakes were a good gateway breakfast for Rinzler and Beck. They're inoffensive.”

“I do not want any,” Rinzler informed him and everyone there grimaced, Beck included.

“You didn’t have dinner last night,” Alan-One told him sharply, only to tone the irritability in his voice down when he saw how Rinzler flinched at it. “What I mean,” he said after he took a breath, his tone much more patient, “Is that it’s not healthy to not eat. There’s no energy in our world like there is in the Grid, you need something and food has seemed to sustain Tron and Quorra just fine.”

“I do not want any,” Rinzler just repeated and Alan-One let out an exasperated noise.

“And here I thought Sam being grown up meant I wouldn’t have to deal with another ‘only ice cream and cheddar cheese’ phase,” the User griped.

“Hey man, at least ice cream and cheddar cheese is food, I was eating something,” Sam_Flynn replied defensively, “Don’t compare me to him.”

Frankly, Rinzler didn’t want to be compared to Sam_Flynn either, so he nodded at this. “You can’t force him,” Beck spoke up. “If he doesn’t want it right now then he doesn’t have to have it. He has the right to make his own choices, even if nobody else agrees with them.”

“The right to make stupid choices you mean,” Tron huffed and Rinzler shot him an unimpressed look.

“I’m not the redundant one here,” Rinzler told him blandly and Tron rolled his eyes.

“And I’m not the one that murders people, so you know, maybe there’s something to be said for redundancy when the original isn’t functioning properly,” was his caustic reply. It was a low blow and Rinzler growled at him dangerously, at which point Alan-One shot them both an annoyed look.

“No fighting,” he snapped, “Both of you are too old to be acting like children.”

“Yeah, aren't you both like over a thousand years old…just in relative time?” Sam_Flynn asked them dryly.

“That might get hairy fast, Sam,” Lora_Bradley put in, “Given technically neither of them is the original Tron, it’d depend on when you started counting.”

“And Rinzler doesn’t remember most of his runtime anyway, even if you include the parts before he was ported,” Beck defended. Sam_Flynn just put his hands up in surrender.

“I rescind my statement,” he said as Quorra laughed and dropped down onto the couch beside him, pulling a big book out of the backpack she’d been carrying and resting it on her lap to flip through its pages.

“My statement stands,” Alan-One griped, “You’re too damn old. I’ll allow you to skip breakfast this time, Rinzler, but if your blood sugar gets fucked up and you pass out, then I’m pulling rank.”

Rinzler wasn’t sure what Alan-One meant by that, because Rinzler didn’t have blood, ergo no blood sugar, and it disquieted him. Alan-One was threatening to give him actual orders, but Rinzler didn’t understand the circumstances he was outlining that would result in that outcome.

“Blood sugar?” Beck asked confusedly.

“We don’t have blood,” Quorra said, her voice light, “So technically no blood sugar, not that he couldn’t crash from lack of energy.”

“Don’t worry about it, Beck,” Lora_Bradley reassured, “it’s complicated.”

At that point Alan-One started distributing plates of pancakes, although he left one on the counter, ostensibly for Rinzler, who didn’t move to retrieve it and instead stayed exactly where he was, staring up at the clock.

“Has nobody ever told you a watched pot never boils?” Alan-One sighed as he sat down next to Rinzler on the couch. Rinzler promptly got up and sat down on the floor instead, which had Alan-One sigh even more heavily. 

“No,” Rinzler told him flatly, turning his attention back to the clock.

“By the time we finish breakfast everything should be open and we can get started,” Alan-One relented, his tone softening. Rinzler just nodded and went back to waiting. 

It was just as agonizing as the last fourteen hours had been, made worse by how soon it should be, which seemed to only make the time move even slower. Rinzler was practically vibrating with anxiety by the time breakfast was finally over. Once the last plate had been put in the dishwasher, Rinzler turned to stare at Alan-One…or at least at a point slightly to the right of his actual face, unwilling to make eye contact.

“Alright alright,” Alan-One sighed, “Sam, go ahead and call the rental place and see if you can get a car, I’ll take Rinzler, Beck, and Tron to the RadioShack and if the car is ready by the time we’re done, Tron can swing by with it and pick you and Quorra up so we can all start checking out the places we’ve got marked on the map, alright?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Sam_Flynn agreed as Quorra nodded along.

“I’ll just be here then,” Lora_Bradley huffed, having fully disassembled the DVD player by then and now busy looking over all the parts that she had laid out on the coffee table, “Although, Tron, if you could lend me your disc so I can figure out exactly how to do this, it’d be helpful.”

“Of course,” Tron told her, standing to go get it from where it had been left in the garage. Rinzler stood up as well, slung his backpack with his and Beck’s discs inside over his back, and stood by the door, waiting in agony as Alan-One went about searching for where he’d left his keys and for Tron to reappear while Beck came to stand beside him. 

Finally, finally, Alan-One succeeded and Tron returned to the room, depositing his disc on the coffee table and then following Alan-One, Rinzler, and Beck out the door.

Rinzler ended up in the backseat of the User light runner along with Beck, while Tron sat in the passenger’s seat and Alan-One took the driver’s seat, finally taking them out of the driveway and down the street. The last time Rinzler had been in one of these User vehicles he’d been falling apart and hadn’t been able to pay attention to the scenery they passed, but now that he was more focussed, no longer on the verge of crashing from panic, he watched the landscape whizz by, logging again how different it was from the Grid.

The area Alan-One categorized as ‘downtown’ was full of towering buildings that were again so similar and yet so different from those in the Grid. The same general shape, but made of glass that turned them into mirrored silver rather than the sleek dark structures Rinzler was familiar with. Also missing were the bright light lines that stood out so powerfully in the darkness of the Grid. Lining the streets were trees, their leaves a myriad of oranges, golds, and reds.

Finally they pulled into a parking lot and Alan-One turned off the runner, exiting the vehicle as the rest of them followed suit. None of the devices inside the RadioShack were familiar to Rinzler, although there was a bank of televisions playing a big fight scene full of dramatic explosions with no sound all in unison along one wall, each one with a slightly different picture quality and color balance. Beck seemed to be just as lost as Rinzler, if not more so, looking around them with curiosity as they walked.

Alan-One asked the User behind the counter about motion activated security cameras and the User came and walked them through the store until he stopped and pointed out a section. As Alan-One looked over the shelves the User clerk turned to Rinzler, grinning. “Cool tattoos, but I guess it’s as good a way to tell identical twins apart as any,” he said lightly, glancing at Tron before returning his attention to Rinzler, “I heard getting them on your face is pretty painful though, did it hurt a lot?”

Rinzler stared at him blankly, trying to figure out what the fuck he was talking about until it occurred to him that Quorra had said User scars looked nothing at all like program scars. The clerk was clearly waiting for him to answer, so he did, “It was agonizing,” he said flatly, truthfully. Well he assumed it had been, based on how much it still hurt…technically he couldn’t say how much the initial injury had hurt, given he had no memory of it. That said, he felt he could safely assume that the answer would be ‘a whole lot.’

The clerk let out a huff, “I was thinking of getting something, but if it hurts that bad maybe I shouldn't. I'm a total wimp about pain.”

There wasn’t any earthly thing Rinzler could think to say to that, but fortunately he didn’t have to, because the clerk changed the subject. “Hey man, is that clicking noise your phone? If it’s busted we have some deals on phones right now, I could set you up with a new one.”

“No thanks,” Alan-One interjected as he foisted off an armful of cameras in boxes to Beck, who’d been watching the clerk talk to Rinzler with a worried expression, and Tron, who looked like he was trying very hard not to laugh at seeing Rinzler trapped in a weird awkward conversation with some random User. Rinzler couldn’t remember ever having a conversation that pointless, even with Beck, although admittedly for a majority of his runtime he had been totally silent anyway. Not a lot of conversation to be had really. “We’re waiting for the new IPhone to come out before we replace it. No point getting a new one just to trade up a few months later,” Alan-One went on.

“Oh that’s fair,” the clerk hummed, “Well if that’s all you’re getting I’ll ring you up.” Alan-One thanked him then Rinzler, Tron, and Beck followed the two Users back to the counter where the clerk swiped each box across the big device that sat on the counter before telling Alan-One the total price and accepting a card from him, which he swiped through a second smaller device then handed it back.

They came out of the store victorious, laden with bags of small cameras, at which point a dinging sound came from somewhere on Alan-One’s person and he pulled out a device similar to the one Rinzler had seen Quorra use to call the cab. Alan-One spent a moment typing with his thumbs on the device’s tiny keyboard before he stowed it.

“Sam says the car’s ready,” Alan-One told them as they all piled back into the light runner, “So we’ll swing by and drop you off, Tron, I told Sam to text you the receipt with the reservation code.”

“Thank you,” Tron said, his tone mild as Alan-One started the runner back up. They did what Alan-One had said, swinging by a different location to drop off Tron with five of the cameras, and then Alan-One took them to the first place that Sam_Flynn had marked on the map. It was an old dilapidated red brick building with boarded up windows, the whole thing overgrown with some type of climbing plant.

“Hopefully this won’t fall down on top of us, “Alan-One sighed.

“Stay here,” Rinzler told him then turned to Beck, “You too, in case this program is here and he makes a run for it.”

Beck nodded and leaned his back against the side of the User light runner while Alan-One just sighed again, handing off one of the boxes that contained a camera. Rinzler found the door of the building locked, but he kicked it full force, aiming his heel for the spot just below the lock, and the wood splintered enough for him to shoulder the door open and enter the building. The fact that he’d had to break the door down made him suspect that the bomber wouldn’t be in this location, but Rinzler was never sloppy and he wouldn’t leave any of the locations unsearched just because they seemed like an unlikely haunt.

The inside of the building was dark, with only the light from the open door illuminating any of it, casting a beam of morning light across the dusty debris-covered floor. Rinzler investigated the inside, canvassing it from top to bottom as broken glass crunched under his feet and he moved away from the light of the door. The place was empty and Rinzler found no evidence that anybody had been staying there, but even so, he identified the best position to place the camera and followed the instructions in the little booklet inside the box to set it up.

Once that was done, Rinzler did one last sweep of the place before returning to Beck and Alan-One outside. “I followed the instructions to sync the camera feed to your phone,” Rinzler told the User, “but it says you need to download an app.”

“What’s the name of it?” Alan-One asked, but rather than answering his question Rinzler simply handed over the booklet. The two of them waited in silence while Alan-One followed the instructions in the little packet, then let out a triumphant noise and turned his phone around so Rinzler and Beck could see that it was in fact displaying the camera feed.

Over the next six hours, Rinzler, Beck, and Alan-One checked out each of the ten locations on that side of the harbor - or rather Rinzler checked them and then set up each camera while the other two waited outside. During that time, Alan-One kept them updated on the other group’s progress, with Sam texting him each time they cleared an area.

Rinzler only found evidence of somebody squatting in one of the buildings, but without access to a data trail he couldn’t confirm how recent the signs of habitation were so he just made a mental note and set up the camera. With that done everyone rendezvoused back at Alan-One and Lora_Bradley’s house, with Alan-One claiming it was time for a late lunch.

When they met up with Tron, Quorra and Sam_Flynn and all headed back inside, they found that Lora_Bradley’s array of mechanical parts had increased from only covering the coffee table to covering the surrounding floor as well and Alan-One blinked at her in surprise as the rest of them came inside.

“Is that the vacuum cleaner?” he asked her, sounding a little astonished. 

Lora_Bradley looked up at him sheepishly, “Well it was. Don’t worry I’ll put it back together when this whole thing is sorted out. I just needed a more powerful motor to spin the disc than the one the DVD player has, these discs are a lot bigger and heavier than a DVD.”

“Ah,” Alan-One said, a fond smile on his lips, “Carry on then.”

“Will do, captain!” Lora_Bradley replied with a laugh and a teasing salute. 

Rinzler turned his head, considering what he could possibly do with himself now that they had to wait for something to activate one of the cameras to have any leads to go on, only to catch sight of a split second look of pain and longing on Tron’s face as he watched Alan-One and Lora_Bradley chatter. Rinzler made a note of that too, but turned his attention away. He ended up on the floor, his back pressed into the corner of the room like he was about to take a sleep cycle…only he wouldn’t, couldn’t until the Grid was safe. Beck came and sat down next to him, smiling at Rinzler with compassion Rinzler didn’t understand.

“I know waiting sucks,” Beck told him quietly , “I’ve got plenty of experience with it, and it used to drive me totally crazy when I first started out.”

Rinzler had nothing to say to that, but he still dipped his chin in the smallest of nods. “Well,” Sam_Flynn spoke up suddenly, drawing everyone’s attention. “Tron figured that since Rinzler found that spy-camera here, we ought to check the arcade too, just in case he had that place bugged too.”

“And did he?” Beck asked.

“No,” Quorra said, “But we checked the computer’s system logs, just to be sure, and the laser was activated three weeks ago, only a week after our bomber escaped the Grid. None of us used it, which means it had to be him.”

“You think he went back into the Grid at some point?” Alan-One guessed, but Tron and Quorra both shook their heads.

“No,” Sam_Flynn said, “The laser was only used once, so it couldn't have been him making a quick trip there and back, and on top of that the logs specify which direction the digitization is going. Our bomber didn’t go back to the Grid, he brought somebody else here.”

“Could you tell who?” Beck asked with a frown, “Cyrus didn’t exactly have friends.”  

“It wasn’t from the Grid proper,” Sam_Flynn went ahead and explained, “Something was loaded into the computer’s staging environment and then digitized from there, so he imported a program from elsewhere and then brought them here, but the logs were dumped and we couldn't find the name of the program. It could be anybody from anywhere designed to do anything.”

“I thought you password protected the system the last time we were down there?” Lora_Bradley said, frowning.

“I did,” Sam_Flynn agreed, “but the staging environment and laser are kinda outside the rest of the system and I think the bomber might actually have two friends instead of one, because whoever was messing with the computer knew how to get around the password enough to access some of its functions, even if they couldn’t subvert it completely. They got just enough control over it to upload a program and then bring them here.”

“He’s got a User,” Rinzler spoke up and Sam_Flynn nodded at him.

“Yeah, that’s what we were thinking.”

“So if he’s got a User, why didn’t he steal the Grid weeks ago?” Beck asked confusedly, “Couldn’t he have had his User do it whenever he wanted?”

“They’d have needed access to the whole system to download it all, maybe the guy didn’t know how,” Sam_Flynn huffed.

“Or alternatively, the bomber has made some sort of deal with them and had yet to hold up his end of the bargain,” Tron added.

“This means we’re looking for three people,” Quorra summarized, “Our bomber, an unknown program, and a User.”

“Do you think Cyrus could be staying at the User’s place and not any of the places we searched?” Beck asked unhappily and Tron let out a sigh.

“It’s possible, but frankly he hasn’t been here all that long. I can’t imagine that whoever he’s working with knows him well enough to want to share a residence with him…but we can’t rule it out either,” he said.

Beck nodded, “He’s a loony, anybody who’s with him for more than five nanos can tell you that, I definitely wouldn’t want to bunk with him.”

“Either way,” Tron said, “We have no leads on either the second program or the User, for now we have to rule out what possibilities we can and if we turn up nothing then we’ll rethink our approach.”

The others all agreed, but Rinzler sat on the floor and tried not to think too much about the possibility that this was a completely erroneous approach, that it’d lead them nowhere and waste precious time. They had no way of knowing who the User was, had no way of knowing where they lived, and Rinzler wouldn’t be able to function if he let himself get tangled up by the possibility of them being wildly off mark. He had to take this one step at a time and as much as he hated to say it, Tron was right. The first step was to clear the abandoned locations, then go from there. He could do this, he wouldn’t fail a second time, the Grid wasn’t lost just yet.

Beck reached over and clasped his hand on Rinzler’s shoulder, “We’ll pull it off,” he assured Rinzler quietly, and Rinzler just nodded, because he couldn't do anything else. He had no other choice, he had to succeed, no matter what.

After that Sam_Flynn declared he was going to be the one to make lunch and Quorra followed him into the kitchen. It took the two of them half an hour to make the meal, although when Sam_Flynn announced what it was it meant nothing to Rinzler. Beck offered him one of the two plates that had been handed to him as everyone else sat down with their own, even Lora_Bradley taking a break from her project to eat, but Rinzler just shook his head. Beck’s expression fell, but after a nano he set the plate aside rather than arguing.

“Rinzler this is a terrible thing to be doing to yourself,” Alan-One scolded, but all Rinzler could do was turn his face away, even though he still heard the way Alan-One sighed heavily.

“What stupid idea’s gotten into your head now?” Tron griped from where he’d sat down on the couch beside Sam_Flynn and Quorra, “What, did CLU tell you if you ever left the Grid that you weren’t allowed to eat?”

The fact that the guess was so close to the truth cut into Rinzler like the bite of a disc and he hunched his shoulders, still looking away from them all. It wasn’t about the fact that it was food, it was about the fact that CLU wouldn’t have allowed Rinzler anything, any sort of relief, not sleep, not energy, not a single moment’s peace, until he’d found the Grid, until he’d saved it. The fact that he wasn’t tearing this User city apart every second was already really pushing it. CLU wouldn’t have allowed him to sit and wait like this, he’d have him following other leads, working other angles, but Rinzler didn’t have any other angles here, not when he didn’t know how to do anything, how to use any of the abilities that had made him so deadly on the Grid.

“Back off,” Beck bit out, startling Rinzler with the anger in his voice, “You’re out of line.”

Rinzler looked up and saw Tron blink in surprise, only to turn to Alan-One, who sighed and kneaded his brow. “I don’t approve of this any more than you do, Tron, but that was a cheap shot.”

Tron’s shoulders slumped at the censure, but he let out a huff. “Maybe it was,” he allowed, “but there’s a reason for this, right? You’re not just starving yourself for kicks,” Tron accused, frowning down at Rinzler, who scowled back at him.

“I don’t want it,” Rinzler snapped.

Tron sighed massively and rolled his eyes, “Suit yourself. We’ll see how long you can keep it up before you crash.”

Beck shot Tron a glare before turning a worried frown on Rinzler, “You’re sure you don’t want any of it? Even just a little bit?” he asked gently.

“No,” Rinzler said with total finality that Beck clearly heard, as he summarily gave up.

“Alright,” he sighed, “But I don’t think this is a good idea either.”

Rinzler just turned his face away again, ending the conversation, although Beck let out a small sigh.

Everyone ate their lunch, although the longer he waited with nothing to do, with no way to pursue the Grid, the louder his processor sound got until Alan-One let out a sigh and held out his phone to Rinzler. 

“Would being able to check the camera feeds help?” he asked and Rinzler answered him by taking the phone and hurriedly pulling up the app whose symbol he recognized from the logo on the cameras’ boxes. Immediately an arrangement of fifteen rectangles appeared on the screen, each one showing a grayscale picture of one of the locations where they had been planted. Rinzler fiddled around with the app until he’d figured out how to view the entirety of each camera’s recording, although all of them were of course less than eight hours of footage. 

It took him about twenty minutes to both figure out how to work the app and then scan through the totality of the recordings, but instead of giving the phone back when he was done, he just went back to the first of the fifteen rectangles and reviewed the footage again, looking for anything he might have missed.

“I don’t think you’re getting your phone back, Alan,” Sam_Flynn said with a huff of laughter.

“That’s fine, at least it's something for him to do other than stare at the clock,” Alan-One sighed.

“Maybe we can introduce him to the concept of memes,” Sam_Flynn suggested lightly, “We’d have to start at piano cat and then go year by year.”

“Somehow I suspect he might find memes frivolous, Sam,” Quorra told him, her tone just as light, but her expression compassionate as she glanced at Rinzler.

“At least the click of death sounds better,” Lora_Bradley hummed, having long since set her empty plate aside and gotten back to her project. “I say let him play with Alan’s phone for a while.”

“Click of death?” Beck and Tron asked in unison.

“When a computer’s hard drive is really fucked up it makes this repetitive clicking noise as it tries and fails to function over and over,” Sam_Flynn obligingly explained, “It’s called the click of death because it means the thing’s pretty much ruined.”

Tron snorted, “How apt,” he said, but Beck just frowned, glancing at Rinzler while Rinzler simply ignored the lot of them, busy reviewing the camera footage all over again. He sat in his corner and reviewed the footage over and over and over, obsessively, doing the only thing that reduced his clawing anxiety even a little for nearly four hours while everyone else moved and talked around him. Sam_Flynn and Tron discussed the repairs that would need to be made to their cycles after the explosion, Alan-One discussed Lora_Bradley’s progress with her, and Quorra introduced Beck to some collection of User text files she called ‘Lord of the Rings’, claiming that it was Lora_Bradley’s favorite. Rinzler ignored all of them, unable to do anything else with himself than check the cameras. Now that he had that little tiny thing he could do to try and find the Grid instead of sitting and doing nothing until he felt like he was going to lose his mind, he couldn’t let go of it, not without the anxiety ripping through him like he was about to fall apart at the seams.

He kept at it until night had fallen and Lora_Bradley suddenly announced, “Got it!” That got Rinzler to actually look up and he found she’d combined some of the parts she’d had strewn around the space into some sort of contraption attached to Tron’s disc. 

“Let’s take her for a spin then!” Sam_Flynn crowed, looking up from the images he’d been showing Tron on his phone, “You’ve already got Tron’s disc in there anyway.”

“Here goes nothing,”  Lora_Bradley huffed as she activated her disc-reading device. Once she had, Tron’s disc, which was mounted in the center of the device, began to spin, the motor she had taken from the vacuum cleaner humming loudly, then a second smaller motor activated and moved some sort of apparatus that shone a tiny beam of red light onto the blue ring in the middle of the spinning disc. Next to Lora_Bradley, the television’s screen lit up and showed a list of directories, with the string ‘DeviceName == L “Tron”’ in the top left-hand corner.

“Whoo!” Lora_Bradley whooped, along with Sam_Flynn and Alan-One.

“Looks like you’ve got a directory for his memory files there at the bottom,” Alan-One hummed, “But I wonder, were we to need to edit him, say for repairs, if we’d have to change the code written on the disc and then figure out how to sync it to him…”

“A question for another time maybe,” Tron hummed, “but with this up and running now we can at least see if we can confirm the identity of our bomber.”

Everyone turned to Beck, who blinked back, but accepted the disc Rinzler had retrieved from his backpack and held out to him. This was good, was something to do aside from obsessively reviewing the camera feeds, if only to give Rinzler a short break from it, just long enough for them to get what information they could about who they were hunting. That was important, was something that actually furthered the hunt rather than just sitting there spinning his wheels so he didn’t fall apart. This was useful, was something CLU would have approved of Rinzler working on, so he handed off Beck’s disc and then moved to sit down on the floor in front of the television instead of in the corner, with Beck following suit.

“Well,” Quorra said lightly, “Let’s see if it really is an old friend of Beck’s that tried to blow us up.”

“Oh yeah,” Beck snorted, “We’re friends…if you define ‘friend’ as a guy who tried to kill me multiple times.”

Quorra gave him a crooked smile, but Rinzler turned away from her, fixing Beck with a bland look that had him raising his hands in surrender.

“Alright alright,” he huffed, surrendering to the fact that Rinzler had in fact spent almost a thousand cycles trying to kill him yet was still somehow categorized as ‘friend,’ and then held out his disc to Lora_Bradley, “I guess lets get on with it.”

Chapter Text

Tron had to admit he was even more exasperated with Rinzler than usual, his corrupted counterpart was being bullheaded and for no discernable reason, refusing to eat. Tron wasn’t sure if it would really cause him to crash if it went on, they’d never tested the consequences of not eating on a program in the User world, but Tron suspected that was what would happen…which begged the question: why was Rinzler refusing to eat? What was his hang up about it?

He didn’t know, and it bothered him, but Tron forced himself to focus as Lora carefully removed his disc from her device, tossing it back to Tron where he sat on the couch, and then put Beck’s disc in its place. 

Again when the thing spun up the list of directories appeared, but this time Lora handed the DVD player’s remote to Beck and explained how it worked. Beck listened intently to her instructions and then used the remote to scroll through the directories until he reached the bottom and selected the directory of memory files.

The screen filled up with thumbnails with a file name below each one and Beck let out a huff, but started scrolling again. There was a huge number of files, over a thousand cycles worth for him to scroll through, but fortunately they were sorted into blocks by cycle number in reverse chronological order, so it wasn’t hard for him to find what he was looking for, even if it took a considerable amount of scrolling. 

Tron and everyone else, all gathered in the living room on the furniture or in Beck and Rinzler’s case, on the floor, watched the memory of Beck taking a shortcut in a storm, only to fall into Cyrus’s mysterious prison. Tron frowned and glanced at Rinzler when Cyrus talked about the Grid’s Tron, but if any of this was familiar to him he didn’t show it, even though he was watching intently.

Beck had said Cyrus was crazy, but somehow Tron hadn’t realized exactly what Beck meant by that, that he really did think that destroying half the Grid and erasing the majority of its programs was saving it, he really meant to do that, he…he was deranged, and it was just fortunate that Beck had stopped him, had seemingly trapped him back in the prison Grid Tron had made for him.

The file ended, but Beck rewound it, then froze it so Cyrus’s face was clearly visible. With that done, he looked to Rinzler, “Is he the guy who took the Grid?” he asked.

That was the million dollar question right there and all eyes in the room turned to Rinzler, who looked over Cyrus’s face consideringly, his processors clicking rapidly, probably comparing the image of Cyrus to his own memory files, but then he nodded and Beck let out a breath.

“Shit,” he sighed, ruffling his hair unhappily, “Well I mean at least we know who it is…but Cyrus isn’t exactly a great guy to have to deal with.”

“Yeah I’ll say, what a fucking psycho,” Sam scoffed, Quorra nodding along beside him.

“Definitely not an ideal situation,” Alan-One sighed

“Was this your only encounter with him, Beck?” Tron asked and Beck looked up before grumbling and shaking his head.

“There’s one other,” he said. 

“Please show us,” Tron requested, “If you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” Beck sighed and picked the remote back up, exiting the memory file he’d paused and going back to scrolling, although the next file he was looking for was in the same block in the directory, meaning it couldn’t have been too long after the original encounter.

The next memory file was much longer and Tron watched it with rising dread as Beck learned somebody had been pretending to be him and had been smearing his name, only to spot Cyrus in the crowd. Cyrus walked down the streets, across buildings and up stairs, as Beck chased after him, as he taunted Beck, only to vanish like he’d never been there at all. Tron watched all of it unhappily, because he could tell Cyrus was a lot more dangerous than he’d thought even after the previous memory, because he wasn’t just crazy, he was clever, and that made this whole thing a lot worse. Tron watched, only to be surprised by the appearance of Tron, of Grid Tron. Tron had seen him in the memory Beck had shown him when they’d first met, but that had mostly been Grid Tron testing Beck, rather than the focus being on himself, and not much of his personality had been on display.

Tron watched Beck and Grid Tron argue, measuring this Tron, now that he was actually seeing him, against himself and against Rinzler too. He could see that Grid Tron was already a lot darker than he himself was, a lot angrier, a lot more jaded, a lot more goal-oriented to the detriment of other concerns…like Rinzler. It seemed that even before Rinzler was rectified, he’d already been scarred by his experiences, that he was already bitter and angry even before CLU ever got his hands on him. And yet it was so strange to see Beck and Grid Tron at each other’s throats when all he’d ever seen was Beck chasing after Rinzler, after his old mentor, like losing him would be catastrophic, and then once he’d caught up to him he did nothing but advocate for him, nothing but treat him with kindness and understanding even when nobody else agreed with him. It would have been hard to picture the two of them genuinely at odds like this, and yet Tron watched that very thing play out. Beck in the memory snapped at him, accused him of lying, of allowing this to happen, and Grid Tron replied with the same infuriating stubbornness Rinzler had been showing them this whole time, adding even more support to Tron’s observation that Grid Tron had already been part-way there when CLU rectified him, was already emotionally damaged. 

He had to wonder if that had made Grid Tron fragile, if that bitterness and anger and hurt had made him more susceptible to what CLU wanted to do to him, if it made him easier to break…after all, Rinzler was like a natural extension of all the traits Grid Tron was displaying. 

Grid Tron had been angry and Rinzler lived in a constant state of barely controlled fury. 

Grid Tron was a pessimist and Rinzler seemed to always jump to the worst possible conclusion in every situation.

Grid Tron was unresponsive to Beck’s worries and Rinzler had a complete all-encompassing lack of empathy. 

And lastly, most importantly…Grid Tron had a scrabbling vicious desperation about him which gave Tron the sense that he would resort to violence far too easily, far sooner than Tron would, and what was Rinzler if not desperate, if not vicious, if not the most violent program Tron had ever encountered?

It seemed like CLU hadn't put any of that in him, he’d merely amplified those qualities to the point that the things that had made Grid Tron who he was outside of those negative traits were simply gone. The only thing Tron could say for certain that CLU had put in him that hadn’t already been in Grid Tron was the fear. The terror that made him so stand-offish, that had caused him to panic multiple times, that had caused him to shut down entirely at least once. That was new, that was the one thing CLU had instilled in him from scratch rather than just heightening what already existed.

Tron watched in silence as Beck in the memory stormed out, as he said he was done with Grid Tron, done with his rebellion, because he felt Grid Tron didn’t care about the fate of Beck’s friends and Beck wanted to protect them…and Grid Tron had let him.

Then Cyrus reappeared, only he’d set up a situation in which Beck couldn’t fight him, in which he had to let Cyrus talk or risk his identity being blown, risk putting his friends in the very danger he’d been trying to protect them from. 

The thing about talking, about banter though, was it could be telling, and what Tron read from that discussion was that Cyrus had a serious obsession with Grid Tron, that he felt resentment towards him and jealousy towards Beck, which only made sense. Grid Tron had rejected him, had imprisoned him, then pretended like he never existed while he went and found a replacement. That'd be enough to make anybody angry…let alone a psychopath like Cyrus.

Tron watched with concern as Beck hurried back to Able’s garage, trying to stop the bomb from going off…only to bring it to the garage himself. It went off, but thankfully nobody was hurt, even if it did do some pretty serious damage to the floor and surrounding vehicles.

Beck in the memory talked to Able in the aftermath, only for Able to point out that Beck was angry at Grid Tron for doing the same thing he had done with Able, for the exact same reasons, but more interesting than that was Able’s analysis of Cyrus, that he operated by getting in your head, by predicting what you’d do and working off of that to create the outcome he wanted. As if he weren’t already dangerous enough without that.

And of course he just did it again, got past even Grid Tron’s defenses, because when Beck and Able made it to Grid Tron’s hideout he was already gone and Cyrus had left an ultimatum in his place. Tron was surprised Grid Tron had been so sloppy honestly, Rinzler certainly wasn’t sloppy ever. Maybe it was because Grid Tron was injured, was weaker than he would normally be that Cyrus had been able to subdue him…and maybe Rinzler had learned from that experience, even if he couldn’t remember it.

Beck sent Able after his friends and went to save Tron himself, another thing that showed how close they were, even when they’d been fighting not long before. Tron watched Beck free Grid Tron and the two of them fight with Cyrus only for Beck to have to take off again to save both his friends and Able.

The young program tore through the streets of Argon city like CLU himself was on his tail and made it with only nanos to spare, reaching the place where his friends were trapped just in time to free Able from the bombs and for them all to take a leap out of the crane into the harbor below, protected from the massive explosion by the water just as Rinzler had been when Flynn reintegrated with CLU.

Real Beck fast-forwarded through some of the memory until he played it back at normal speed once he’d rendezvoused with Grid Tron at his hideout.

“Cyrus got away,” Grid Tron told Beck darkly.

“I’m sure he’ll pop back up at some point,” Beck in the memory huffed, his voice tired. Grid Tron had simply nodded at this and turned away while Beck let out a sigh that sounded more amused or fond than annoyed.

Beck, the real Beck, stopped the memory at that point and turned to the others. “He never showed back up,” he said gravely, “I’d assumed he’d been derezzed, given a thousand cycles of silence, but obviously I was wrong.”

“He did show up,” Rinzler spoke up suddenly and Beck turned to him in surprise as he explained, “I have a memory file of that program.” Tron examined Rinzler’s face as he spoke, but if anything about seeing Beck interacting with his old self had disturbed him, Tron couldn’t tell.

 “You do?” Beck asked, “You mean like…before he attacked us here?”

Rinzler nodded and Beck glanced back at Tron, who shrugged, so the younger program turned back to Rinzler. “Can we see that?” 

There was a long moment where Rinzler seemed to consider that, before he eventually nodded and reached for the gutted DVD player. Lora came forward and helped Rinzler detach the apparatus from Beck’s disc, but wisely backed off and allowed Rinzler to connect his own fused discs to it by himself. Again the laser engaged and the discs started to spin rapidly, the motor humming as they did. The screen lit up with a new bank of directories that Rinzler scrolled through to reach his memory files once he’d taken the remote from Beck. When they popped up, immediately Tron noted that the number of them listed at the top wasn’t right. There were far fewer than there should be, far far fewer, less than half what had been on Beck’s disc. Even so he said nothing and watched as Rinzler scrolled through the files, not really pausing long enough to check their names, as if he already knew where the one he was looking for would be located.

It only took him a few seconds to rapidly scroll down and then select a file. Tron watched anxiously as the image on the screen turned to static for a second, blurring and glitching around the edges. He could just barely see through the data corruption that Rinzler was fighting somebody in the street, the both of them surrounded by wreckage that looked like at least one light cycle or runner had exploded, and for a split second Rinzler in the memory stopped moving, pausing mid-motion, as if he were confused, as a program - unmistakably Cyrus - stood still only a few feet away. The program’s face was cracked and damaged, voxels sheared off of the side of his head, but he had a half-crazed smile on his face. He spoke and Tron recognized the voice as being the same from Beck’s memories as well, but he only got two words out before the file skipped, like the rest of it was too damaged to play. When the image cleared Rinzler was standing in a room lit with yellow lights as CLU paced calmly around in front of him.

“A new little friend huh?” CLU hummed. Tron glanced at Rinzler, who didn’t stop the memory from playing, which suggested that CLU was talking about the fight with Cyrus and that Rinzler considered this relevant, “He really does talk a lot doesn’t he?” CLU scoffed, “And he’s slippery, managing to avoid getting caught this long…” Rinzler in the memory said nothing, didn’t move, didn’t react at all, but then again the way CLU was speaking was more like he was thinking aloud than having a real conversation. CLU turned on his heel suddenly and came over to Rinzler, a smile on his face, “He claims to know Tron,” Flynn’s creation hummed as he reached out and put a hand on Rinzler’s neck, running his thumb across one of the helmet’s seams, “But I’d say if he were important…you’d remember him wouldn’t you?”

Again Rinzler said nothing, but CLU laughed as if Rinzler had just told him a joke, “Man I really did a great job with you didn’t I?” he crooned, “You might be one of my best accomplishments, you know that? Even if I do have to delete some files occasionally to keep the corruption out. That said, I’ve left you a little bit of that fight, enough so you’ll know the guy if you see him again…but don’t let him talk to you like that the next time you hunt him down, just kill him. His words are poison and I wouldn’t want it to hurt you. I’d never let anything hurt you.”

Rinzler in the memory dipped his chin ever so slightly and CLU’s smile widened, his hand still cradling the helmet, like he was cupping Rinzler’s cheek. Something about it was uncomfortably affectionate and made Tron’s insides turn over as he recalled the bite scar on Rinzler’s neck. “You’re great, man,” CLU huffed, “Just perfect, you saw that guy, a guy claiming to be Tron’s protege, and you went straight for the kill…I’m not even upset he got away, I know you’ll get him next time.” 

Tron’s frown deepened as he watched the memory file play in front of him. He wanted to look away from the way CLU smiled at Rinzler, a look so familiar, so similar to the way Flynn had always smiled, and yet somehow so much more cruel, but he didn’t look away. CLU chuckled, but then derezzed Rinzler’s helmet and watched his face as the hand he’d been using to cup Rinzler’s cheek drifted down to Rinzler’s bicep, where he derezzed the sleeve of his gid suit, showing some of the scars Tron had already seen. CLU let out a pleasant hum but seemed to zero in on one scar in particular, he dug his thumb into it and even in the memory Tron could hear how Rinzler’s processors started to grind, even though Rinzler didn’t make a sound, didn’t move an inch, despite how he was obviously in pain. 

CLU had gone from praise, from promising he’d never let anything hurt Rinzler, to violence, to hurting him himself, so suddenly that Tron felt like he had whiplash…and yet CLU was still smiling as he searched Rinzler’s face for something, like he wasn’t in the middle of tormenting somebody he had just claimed to care for, like they were just having a casual chat. 

“You’ve been good…and you were good then too, which is why this one is my favorite,” CLU said, his tone cheerful and friendly as he dug his nail even deeper into the dark mark on Rinzler’s bicep, “I know she was your favorite.” CLU laughed lightly, like he’d just told an exceedingly funny joke, but then something in his smile turned dark, even more cruel, and he clenched his fist around Rinzler’s bicep, digging not just his thumb, but his index and middle fingers into the scar as well, at which point Rinzler in the memory finally let out a tiny sound, the smallest of gasps, barely audible, and CLU smiled triumphantly, like that had been what he’d been waiting for this whole time. He opened his mouth to speak…and Rinzler, the real Rinzler, hit the button on the remote to stop it, freezing CLU with that look of victory on his face. Tron looked at Rinzler where he sat beside Beck with an impassive expression on his face, like he felt nothing at all at seeing CLU go from praising him and claiming to care about him to hurting him in the blink of an eye, like seeing himself be tortured meant nothing to him.

Beck let out a sigh, “So you did fight him and he talked to you about Tron…then CLU deleted most of the data in that file so it wouldn't contradict anything he’d told you about yourself, right?”

Rinzler nodded, but Tron was more worried about the last part of what CLU had said than the earlier parts of it. “What did he mean by that?” Tron asked seriously. He had a suspicion, a horrible one, and he really hoped it wasn’t true. “What did he mean when he said ‘she’ was your favorite?”

Rinzler blinked slowly, like he was dazed, and then his impassive gaze slid over to Tron’s face, “I have no idea,” he said, his voice also empty of emotion, almost eerily robotic, “There was a memory file he liked, he used to have me replay it over and over, and he’d laugh when he saw it. It was with the program he was talking about, the one who gave me that injury. He meant her, but I don’t know why he thought she was my favorite, she was just some rebel, I didn’t know her.”

“Can you show us that memory too?” Tron asked him as gently as he could manage. Beside  Rinzler, Beck stiffened subtly, the change in posture easy to miss, but enough that Tron saw the sudden tension in him, as if he already knew what they were going to see. 

“Only if it doesn’t hurt too much,” Beck added onto Tron’s request.

When he looked at Beck, some of the deadness cleared from Rinzler’s expression, but he nodded. “It doesn't hurt, it wasn’t an important memory,” he said, sounding more like himself there as well. The image of CLU disappeared as Rinzler exited the file and went back to scrolling, only for a new memory to pop up on the screen once he'd found what he was looking for. Immediately Tron’s stomach dropped, because he’d been right, his guess had been right on the money.

Rinzler stood at the mouth of an alley and a program was backed into a dead-end in front of him, her back to the wall, cornered. She was snarling, her disc activated in her hand and held in front of her like a threat, but even though he’d never seen Yori make that sort of face before, Tron recognized her. From around him he heard all three Users gasp, and Beck and Quorra both had a look of dread on their faces, but Tron couldn’t take his eyes off of Yori. He knew already what was about to happen, but when Rinzler in the memory lunged, he couldn’t make himself turn away like he so desperately wanted to.

Yori didn’t recognize Rinzler, that much was obvious. She died with a curse on her lips, with hatred in her eyes, never knowing that the one who killed her was her own greatest love…and Rinzler didn’t recognize her either, she meant nothing to him. CLU had turned them on each other and neither of them had ever known. Seeing Yori’s beautiful furious face get smashed to pieces and collapse into nothing but shimmering blue voxels made Tron’s stomach turn, but even then he was proud of her, of how fierce she was, how strong, because she didn’t go down without a fight. She was just a technician, not a security monitor like Tron, not any kind of fighter, but even faced with the single deadliest program on the Grid, she fought like hell and she managed to slice a big chunk out of Rinzler’s arm in her last moments. 

The memory ended and Tron sat and seethed. He’d known, he’d known Rinzler had probably killed her, but seeing that? Seeing her die? It hurt, it hurt so much more than he’d thought possible and Tron was so angry; angry at CLU for orchestrating this, angry at Rinzler for doing it, for not knowing, and then when he looked away, looked over at Rinzler and saw an almost wistful look on his face, the ghost of a smile on his lips, the anger boiled over into rage and Tron lunged forward and grabbed Rinzler by the front of his shirt, hauling him to his feet. Of course, Rinzler responded automatically with violence and he clocked Tron so hard in the face that it caused him to stumble, but that only made him even angrier and he whipped back around, however instead of hitting him back he grabbed his arm and dug his fingers in with as much force as he possibly could, digging his nails into the scar on Rinzler’s arm that Yori had left. 

Rinzler didn’t yell, didn’t show any sign of pain other than a low rumbling growl that rolled out of the back of his throat as he grabbed Tron’s wrist and jerked it away. He’d have broken Tron’s wrist and hand if Tron hadn’t let go just when he did, but before either of them could lunge at each other again, Beck came between them, putting his back against Rinzler’s chest and pushing Tron back with his hands on his chest in turn.

“Enough,” he said and his voice was quiet but forceful, at which point Tron realized that the room was loud, because Sam, Quorra, Alan, and Lora had all been shouting for him to stop, but he’d tuned it out, was too angry to hear it.

He was still angry, he was still incandescent with rage, but Tron turned and stormed out instead of trying to take it out on Rinzler. Beck let him, and Tron stormed up the stairs into the guest bedroom, jerked open the window, and then climbed out and onto the roof above it where he really would be alone.

Once he was there, once he was no longer looking into Rinzler’s dark eyes, into the scarred version of his own face, the fury turned over into something else, something much worse, and Tron had to stifle the sob that crawled up the back of his throat like bile. He’d been right. Yori was dead, Rinzler had killed her, Tron had killed her. 

For a long time Tron just sat up there in the cool night air and choked back tears, but as he came down from it, as the anger bled away into cold pain that sat in his gut like a stone, he realized what he’d just done. Rinzler hadn’t known Yori, he hadn’t known she was important to him, and he’d probably only killed her because he’d been told to…but Tron’s first instinct had been to hurt him. He hadn’t hit him though, he'd dug his nails into Rinzler’s scars just like CLU had. 

This whole time he’d been afraid of what Rinzler represented, had been afraid of how Rinzler was a symbol of his own faults, his own failures, but when Tron was angry he hadn’t acted like Rinzler, who growled and snapped like a dog when he was in a bad temper, but rarely actually lashed out. No, when Tron was angry he hadn't acted like Rinzler at all, he’d acted like CLU. He’d done the exact same thing he’d seen CLU do to Rinzler less than a minute before. Exactly the same. 

The horror of it made him go suddenly numb and Tron stared out across the rooftops surrounding them listlessly. 

What was wrong with him? 

How could he have done that? 

He stayed that way for a long time, just empty of everything but dread and horror, until he heard the window being pushed up again and somebody cursing behind him.

“If I fall off this damn roof and break my legs you’re paying my medical bills, Tron,” Alan-One griped as he carefully picked his way up the slope of the roof and then came to sit next to the program he had created. Tron hurriedly rubbed at his face with the back of his hand, not wanting Alan-One to see the tears, but even if he saw, there was no judgment in his face when he looked at Tron.

“I’m sorry, kid,” he said quietly and then held out a steaming mug. “That was…rough. I could have done without seeing that, so I know you probably could have too.”

“I hurt him, Alan-One,” Tron told him hoarsely, because he couldn’t think of anything else, although he accepted the mug and found it was full of hot chocolate. “I hurt him just like CLU did. What’s wrong with me?”

“Nasty little thing called love,” Alan-One told him with a big heavy sigh, “It brings out the best in us and the worst in us, Tron. You shouldn’t have done that, but I…I get it. You love her and you just saw him kill her brutally without caring at all.”

“He was…was smiling…” Tron breathed shakily and Alan-One nodded.

“Not because he enjoyed killing her,” his User assured him, “I asked. He said that it had been an unpleasant fight, not one he’d had fun with. Beck talked to him about it a little and the reason he looked like that was because CLU used to praise him over that memory whenever he had him play it. Really praise him and not just praise him as a pretext for hurting him. He said CLU would call him perfect and that when CLU asked him to play it he knew he wasn’t about to be hurt, so it seems like he likes playing it, because it makes him feel safe…” Alan-One let out another sigh and then said, “I didn’t tell him who she was.”

“Fuck,” Tron swore quietly, “fuck…”

“Yeah,” Alan-One grumbled, running his fingers through his silver hair.

“I…” Tron mumbled, “I’ve been thinking about this all wrong…even after everything.”

“How so?” Alan-One asked him kindly and all Tron could do was sigh and look out across the roofs that surrounded them.

“It’s so easy…to think of him as a monster, as–as myself, but all wrong, myself but broken, myself but…but evil… but that’s wrong, it’s wrong. I already knew that, but I still haven’t been treating him the right way. Maybe he is broken, but it was never through any failing of his own was it? It’s always been CLU. CLU broke him, CLU sent him hunting like an animal and he just did it without thinking, because CLU made him that way, made it so he never thought about what he was doing. He made it so he couldn’t resist, so he would only ever want to do what he was told. Seeing Yori…die…I…it made me so angry, but Rinzler…is just as much a victim as she was…isn’t he? CLU liked that memory because it was the payoff to everything he’d ever done to destroy the Grid’s Tron, he turned him against the one person he’d never have hurt if he had any of his own will left, but CLU took it away and that was the proof of it. And then he went and conditioned Rinzler to like that memory, to associate it with safety…as if he wanted to make the whole thing even more twisted than it already was. “

“Admittedly, it’s a snarl,” Alan-One agreed solemnly, “He makes it easy to forget sometimes, just because he doesn’t seem to really care about any of what he’s done. You want him to feel remorse, like a normal person would, like you would, but the fact that he doesn’t still isn’t his fault, Tron. Even that’s just more proof.” Alan-One sighed and took his glasses off to clean them with his shirt while he talked, “CLU took away Tron’s empathy, he took away something that integral to who he was. I know he had compassion once because you have it, but now he just…well he clearly cares about Beck, but it’s hard to tell if Beck is the only one. He never really talks about how he feels about anything, or about himself in general. He’s all business.”

“Maybe it’s worth asking him about it,” Tron suggested a little hesitantly, “Just to see what the limits are, where CLU put up barriers. Beck is convinced that there's something of Tron left in there.”

“Maybe,” Alan-One huffed as he slipped his glasses back on, “If nothing else he’s painfully honest.”

“Right,” Tron said, squaring his shoulders and scrubbing one last time at his face, although what few tears he hadn’t been able to suppress had long since dried. “Maybe we can get him to do a little self-reflection if nothing else.”

Alan-One snorted, “Drink your cocoa first,” he chided lightly.

Tron couldn’t help but smile at him, but obediently took a sip of the drink that he’d been using to warm his hands.

Chapter Text

They sat on the roof for a while longer, but eventually Tron saw Alan-One shiver subtly, at which point he realized that it was actually starting to get cold, so he downed the remainder of the cocoa, scorching his throat a little in the process, and then got up.

His User followed suit, only to look unhappily down at where he’d initially climbed up. “I’ll help you,” Tron assured him as he held out the hand that wasn’t holding the empty mug.

“Yeah I’d rather not fall off a roof today, so I’ll take you up on that,” Alan-One huffed as he took Tron’s hand and Tron started carefully guiding him down off the roof and back through the window, which admittedly did take some maneuvering.

When they came back down the stairs into the kitchen and found Sam and Quorra helping Lora make dinner for everybody, Alan-One stopped to give her a kiss, and suddenly the ache was back in Tron’s chest. It wasn’t the first time he’d missed Yori since he was ported to the Grid and then brought to the User world, but after having seen her die…the ache was much stronger than before. Tron took a shaky breath, but then left Alan-One to talk to Lora and the others so he could walk back into the living room where Beck and Rinzler still sat. 

Beck had reattached Lora’s device to his own disc, giving Rinzler a break probably, and was showing the corrupted program memories of his time as the Renegade, although Rinzler had probably seen the memories in passing at least when Beck had tried to prove to him that they were friends during that first talk. Even so, Rinzler was watching the memory of Beck sparring with Grid Tron with a placid expression, his clicking sound quieter than it had been before. 

He didn’t look up when Tron stepped back into the room, in fact to somebody who didn’t know any better, he didn’t appear to have even noticed Tron was there at all, but Tron saw the minute way the set of his shoulders tensed and then immediately loosened. He was expecting Tron to pick another fight was what that movement told Tron. Rinzler was waiting for Tron to attack him again, to hurt him again, and it made something in Tron’s insides clench. He really had fucked up.

“I’m sorry,” Tron told him with utmost sincerity. He was sorry, because the way he’d acted was totally unacceptable. He was supposed to be the good guy, and yet he’d acted worse than Rinzler had ever done towards any of them by far.

Rinzler didn’t even acknowledge that he’d spoken and if he were anybody else, Tron might have assumed he was angry, but when Rinzler was angry it was obvious. He was probably just not interested in Tron's apology. They’d already seen during their time in the Grid that Rinzler didn’t understand the purpose or value of apologies.

After a moment Beck paused the memory that was playing and Rinzler finally moved, turning his head to look up at Tron, fixing him with a look that was, if anything, deeply disinterested. The lack of concern over what had happened made Tron’s code feel like it was squirming in his chest. It was easy to think that Rinzler was just cold, it would have been easy to dismiss that as just him being rude, but now that Tron was actually thinking about it instead of just relying on his knee-jerk reaction, that was just more of an indication of just how used to people hurting him he was. Tron hurting him hadn’t phased him in the slightest. It meant nothing to him. He didn’t care.

“I’m sorry for acting the way I did,” Tron said, repeating the apology for emphasis, “It was completely uncalled for.” Rinzler just rolled his eyes, which made Tron want to bristle, but he forced the annoyance down, because it was just that same trap. Rinzler’s bad attitude made him hard to pity, hard to empathize with, but that just meant Tron needed to try harder to see past it. Rinzler clearly didn’t care about what had happened in the slightest, but that didn’t mean he didn’t deserve an apology. It just meant it was Tron’s duty to care about it for him.

“Thanks for apologizing,” Beck said when Rinzler didn’t give him anything to work with, “I know seeing that was hard.”

“It was,” Tron sighed as he hesitated for just a second but then sat down on Beck’s other side, keeping the younger program between him and Rinzler, not for his own sake, but so that Rinzler might relax a little. The corrupted program had made it beyond clear that he trusted Beck, so Tron hoped that making it so he’d have to go through Beck to get to him would make him feel safer.

“I was just showing him some of the stuff from when he was training me,” Beck said conversationally as Rinzler turned his eyes back to the still image of his old self caught mid roundhouse kick on the screen. 

“If it’s alright…” Tron tried cautiously, “I’d like to show Rinzler…some of my memories.”

Beck blinked at him in surprise, but then gave him a wave of acceptance. Tron glanced at Rinzler, but he’d turned his head to watch the Users and Quorra cook in the kitchen, totally ignoring both Beck and Tron’s interaction. This might be more difficult than Tron had thought, but hopefully he could redirect him.

“Rinzler,” he said as he carefully detached Beck’s disc from the DVD player and attached his own, “You said you didn’t know her and I doubt it’ll mean much to you for me to show you who she was, but I do think you deserve to know.”

“I don’t see why it matters, she’s dead,” Rinzler finally spoke, his voice dry, and again Tron had to push down his temper as it flared. He doesn’t know any better, he reminded himself as he exhaled slowly.

“It matters,” Tron told him as patiently as he could.

Rinzler didn’t argue with him and thankfully he did actually pay attention as Tron used the DVD player’s remote to scroll through his memory files until he found what he was looking for.

“Her name was Yori. She was a technician who worked with Lora on the portal technology,” Tron told him as he hit play on the remote. The memory he had selected was of the two of them sitting high up on the top of one of the I/O towers. Tron had helped her get up there because he’d wanted her to see the view, and they’d sat together, sharing bad jokes and laughing together while they looked out across the system that was spread out before them, or rather while she looked out at it and he watched her, unable to look away from her.

Rinzler watched the memory with an impassive expression that gave away none of his thoughts or feelings. Somehow Tron had thought that with the helmet off he'd be easier to read, but if anything he was just as difficult, because his expression was so often flat and emotionless. Had CLU caused that too? He must have, because Tron certainly wasn’t like that.

When the memory ended, Tron scrolled through again, searching for another, and ended up showing Rinzler a memory of when Tron had taken Yori to an energy spring and she’d spent the whole time jubilantly splashing him while they both laughed. Watching the old memories made that ache in his chest so much more acute, but he wanted Rinzler to understand, even if maybe it was futile, even if Rinzler really just wasn’t capable of understanding. 

“You were together,” Rinzler concluded after that memory finished playing. If he had an opinion on that, it wasn’t evident in either his face or voice, he still seemed totally disinterested.

“So were you,” Tron reminded him. Alan-One had been worried that telling Rinzler this would cause him guilt, that it would hurt him, but Tron felt that was unlikely. He didn’t think Rinzler was designed to feel guilt. “All of this was from when we were the same person, before either you or I were taken off the Encom Servers.”

If that meant anything at all to Rinzler, he still didn’t show it, but he did turn a flat look on Tron rather than continuing to look at the frozen image of Yori’s face on the screen, “What is the purpose of this?” he asked, “I’m obviously not going to remember any of that, and like I said, she’s dead. She doesn’t matter.”

Tron’s fist clenched around the remote and he had to set it down lest he break it, but again he took a shaky breath in and then let it out slowly, trying to control his temper, however before he could respond, Beck spoke up.

“She matters to him, even if she means nothing to you, Rinzler, and he’s trying to show you why he got angry at you, so you understand,” Beck explained.

“Thank you, Beck,” Tron sighed.

“I understand,” Rinzler said, something in his expression turning slightly less flat when he spoke to Beck rather than Tron. He really did have a soft spot for him. “I killed his partner, so he’s angry. It’s simple.”

“And yet you don’t care,” Tron snapped before he could stop himself.

Rinzler’s eyes went back to Tron’s face and that small amount of personality he’d had while talking to Beck disappeared without a trace, “No,” he agreed.

Tron sighed heavily and rubbed at his eyes. How the hell was he supposed to handle this? He understood that Rinzler was this way because CLU had made him like that on purpose, that Rinzler having no sense of empathy served CLU’s purposes, but it just so happened to also make him really hard to be around. Maybe that had been part of CLU’s design too, maybe he’d made Rinzler difficult on purpose as a way to isolate him. Users, how had Beck managed to get through to him the way he had? He was fucking impossible.

“Rinzler,” Alan-One spoke up as he stepped into the room and took a place on the couch. He'd put on a sweater while Tron had been in the living room with Beck and Rinzler and Tron felt bad for having caused him to get chilled up on the roof. 

Rinzler turned his head in Alan-One’s direction when he was addressed, but he didn’t look directly at him, and suddenly Tron was struck with the realization that he never looked directly at Alan-One, never made eye-contact. Tron examined his counterpart more carefully and realized how much his posture had changed. The set of his shoulders had gone tense again, and his head was almost bowed, his face tilted away from his User even though he was still facing in his general direction. In total it was easy to miss, Rinzler’s body language was often so subtle that it was hard to pick out, but now that Tron was looking for it it couldn’t be more obvious. Even his eyes were lowered respectfully, submissively. Somehow that realization sent rage shooting through Tron’s body like an electric charge. Users, how he wished he could just throttle CLU.

“Tron and I wanted to ask you a couple questions, if that’s okay?” Alan-One went on. Tron wasn’t sure he’d noticed how Rinzler’s behavior changed around him, but if not Tron was going to have to point it out to him later.

Rinzler said nothing and Alan-One sighed, but went on anyway, taking it as permission. “Did you ever have anybody who was important to you?”

“CLU,” Rinzler replied instantly and all three other occupants of the room, Beck, Tron, and Alan-One, winced in unison.

“No,” Alan-One said a little too quickly, “I mean–not like that, somebody other than CLU.”

For a moment Rinzler hesitated, but he did eventually answer, his tone cautious when he spoke, like he was unsure how Alan-One would react and was worried about a negative outcome, “...Beck…” he said, his voice much quieter and less certain than it had been when he gave his first answer.

Beck smiled brightly at this and patted Rinzler on the back, “You’re important to me too, Rinzler,” he assured him, “I’m happy we were able to work things out so we could be friends again.”

Rinzler’s eyes skittered over to Beck momentarily, just long enough for him to catch a glance at Beck’s expression, before his gaze drifted away again, turning back to look at nothing in particular off to Alan-One’s left. He was waiting for a follow up question and after a moment Alan-One gave one.

“You’ve done a lot to protect Beck,” he observed, “You went against CLU’s directives to protect him. Why?”

If Tron had thought Rinzler’s expression before was hard to read, this was something else. His face went completely blank, as if he were totally incapable of emotion, incapable of free will, incapable of even having his own thoughts. Tron saw the way Beck went tense beside him, his lips pursed with open worry.

“Unknown,” Rinzler said, and it was unmistakably a report and not a real response.

“You’re not in trouble,” Tron told him urgently, unnerved by the lifelessness of Rinzler’s expression, of his posture. Again Rinzler’s eyes drifted away from the nothing he’d been looking at, although they only went to Tron’s face for a moment before skittering away again. He couldn’t tell if Rinzler believed him or not.

“You’re not in trouble,” Alan-One repeated, his tone clearly marking it as a promise, his voice gentle and kind, “I’m just…I just am trying to figure out how much of your original personality CLU locked down. You obviously are capable of some level of compassion, because you have gone very far out of your way to protect Beck, I’m just trying to figure out where the boundaries are.”

“What about your Black Guards?” Beck spoke up suddenly, “You care a whole lot about them, you were furious when Paige hurt them.”

“I would not have been able to replace system assets if they were lost,” Rinzler said and while it was clearly a rote response, clearly meaningless, there was more life in it than any response he’d given to Alan-One or Tron.

Beck sighed, “Nobody is going to punish you for getting attached, Rinzler,” he said kindly, “I know you care about them and nobody is going to hurt you or take them away from you or do anything to them. You’re allowed to have emotions, you’re allowed to have friends.”

“I…” Rinzler said, hesitating, and again he seemed less lifeless than before, “I don’t…understand them,” he admitted after a moment, “They are far too concerned with me, they follow me around constantly, even when I don’t need them there. I’m fully capable of independent function, but they act like if they don’t keep me in sight at all times I’ll get derezzed.”

“They were probably worried because you were pushing yourself too hard,” Beck told him, “I mean I was worried, you were falling apart and nobody could do anything about it but Alan and you were way too scared of him to let him fix you. I’d have probably been following you around all the time too if I’d been able to.”

To Tron’s surprise, Rinzler actually let out a snort, as if he’d momentarily forgotten Alan-One was there, “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” he said dismissively, and this time it was Beck who rolled their eyes.

“Oh yeah, for sure, mister works himself into the ground with less than thirty percent functionality because of pain here doesn’t need help,” Beck griped, “Knock it off, Rinzler, you were pushing yourself too hard when you were already falling apart and I’m not surprised your Black Guards were hanging off you all the time.”

“So you did have friends,” Alan-One noted, and Tron grimaced at the way Rinzler’s posture instantly tightened back up now that he’d been reminded his User was there, “Other than Beck I mean. Good. And if you were that upset about them getting injured you do clearly care about them in return.”

Rinzler said nothing, again looking off to the side at nothing in particular, “One last question okay?” Alan-One asked him, but of course Rinzler didn’t respond and simply waited. “At what point do you start to care if people get hurt?” the User asked him, “I get that might not be an easy question to answer, but…we know you’d be upset if Beck was hurt, what about…Tron let's say. If he was hurt would you be upset?”

To Tron’s surprise an incredibly exasperated look crossed Rinzler’s face, as if he found the mere insinuation that he might care what happened to Tron deeply insulting.

“I will derez him if he gives me a reason to,” Rinzler answered flatly. Tron just rolled his eyes, but Beck laughed outright. 

“He’s not that bad,” Beck told him lightly, “And I think you’re lying frankly. You’ve had plenty of opportunities to take things out on him and you haven’t. I mean, hell, you kept him captive for micros and never did one single thing to hurt him.”

“Damaging him would have made Alan-One less likely to cooperate,” Rinzler replied, sounding irritable, obviously annoyed at the accusation that he gave a rat’s ass about Tron in the slightest.

“Sure, Sure,” Beck hummed lightly, “Say it however you want, but I see through you.”

A second, far more potent, look of exasperation took over Rinzler’s face, “You’re the worst,” he bit out and Beck laughed. At that moment Sam, Quorra, and Lora all walked into the room, each carrying plates of food for everyone, which they set down on the coffee table in front of Alan, but as soon as Quorra had set hers down, she stepped over to where Beck had left his disc, picked it up, and unceremoniously swung it full force at Tron’s head.

Tron ducked automatically, only to realize he needn’t have, because Rinzler had already caught her by the wrist, stopping the attack short. Tron blinked at him in confusion and Rinzler blinked back at him, looking equally perplexed, but Quorra just smiled and pulled back, handing back Beck’s disc once Rinzler had let go of her arm.

“There,” she said lightly, “That answers that question I think.”

Sam snorted as he sat down beside Alan-One on the couch and set his plate of food in his lap. For his part Alan-One just sighed, “Well that’s one way to do it I guess.”

Rinzler shot Quorra a glare, but she merely smiled back at him as she picked up a plate for herself and sat down in one of the two recliners. 

“Does that answer your questions, Alan?” Beck asked him as Rinzler handed him one of the plates that had been left on the coffee table. Tron had to get up to get his own, because Rinzler made no move to pass him one. Petty as always.

Alan-One smiled, “I’d say it does.”

“What’s the verdict then?” Sam asked. Lora had taken the second to last plate and sat down in the second recliner, crossing her legs under her and she nodded with interest.

“Not as bad as I feared,” Alan-One declared. “CLU took away a good portion of your empathy, I’d say, Rinzler, but not all of it, which is good.”

Tron suspected that if it had been anybody else making such a declaration Rinzler would have rolled his eyes, but since it was Alan-One speaking he merely bobbed his chin in acknowledgement, still looking away.

This begged the question though, if Rinzler did actually give a shit about him. If this was proof that he was capable of compassion, of care, of empathy, did that mean he’d done other things to show that that they’d simply missed, simply hadn’t recognized? Tron considered it while he ate the stir fry Lora and her assistants had made.

Maybe…maybe it just looked different for Rinzler than it did for most people. Rinzler was admittedly a very reserved program, he didn’t make much of a show of how he felt about most things, other than expressing displeasure, much of which Beck seemed to think was entirely for show. So did that mean he’d cared this whole time and they just hadn’t noticed?

Tron ran over all of the interactions he’d had with Rinzler thus far, and then all of the interactions he’d seen him have with Beck, with his Black Guards, and with Alan-One. With Beck it was the most obvious, but even then the affection wasn’t expressed in a strictly normal fashion, there was no smiling or praise or physical touch. He never asked Beck if he was alright, never asked him for his opinion on anything, never acted like he was interested in spending time with him. 

From what Tron had seen, Beck had done all the reaching out and Rinzler had just not pushed him away when he did, which Beck had simply taken as even more of an invitation. That said, Rinzler had protected Beck from his own forces, had helped him and his own enemies by extension, had come to his aid even when it was putting himself at risk. So maybe that was it. Maybe that was how Rinzler expressed it, with protection, with aid, with making himself available to help, with not pushing Beck away no matter how annoyed by it he acted. Tron was certain that if Rinzler had truly wanted Beck to leave him alone, he’d have made it extremely clear, most likely in a violent fashion, so…that had to be it. Tolerance of things he found annoying, protection, patience, assistance. 

Those were the tells.

So how did that relate to the rest of the interactions he’d had? Admittedly, Rinzler was snippy at best with Tron, and often outright hostile, and yet he’d only ever hurt Tron when his hand was forced, even though he certainly hadn’t held back at all and Tron knew he’d have killed him if Alan-One hadn’t intervened…but then again that had been when Rinzler had only interacted with him a total of one time and it had not been in a good manner.

Since then though? He’d never taken any action that would hurt Tron, he had made sure Dyson couldn’t torture him, had shot down the idea of rectifying him, had left the Black Guards with him, had allowed Alan-One first to stabilize his damaged code and then to repair it entirely. For the most part their interactions since then had been neutral at best, but the open hostility had ebbed a bit. So did all of that count?

Tron wasn’t sure, because Rinzler admittedly did have a motive that explained most of those actions, as he himself had pointed out. Tron had been leverage he was using against Alan-One, but even then that didn’t explain the action he’d just taken, didn’t explain the fact that Rinzler had obviously and undeniably protected Tron from what he had interpreted as an attack, and that he’d done it without thinking about it. The confusion Tron had seen on his face was illustrative, he’d been just as surprised by his actions as Tron was…so he’d probably meant every jab and threat of violence he’d made towards Tron, or at least he thought he meant it, only for his actions to prove it all false. 

Then again, Tron himself had pointed out that Rinzler did exactly zero self-reflection, which Rinzler had claimed was simply because he was too busy for it. It seemed his self-awareness was lacking, it seemed like he did things but rarely actually understood why he was doing them, it seemed that he acted on instinct more than analyzing his own motivations, and when he did, he was often in denial. That was…troublesome, but at the same time, it showed Tron the conclusion Beck had obviously already come to, which was that while Rinzler was hostile and rude, he was compassionate, he did care, he just expressed it in an unemotional way.

Was that CLU’s fault too? Tron had a feeling it was, that it was tied to Rinzler’s general lack of feeling, his dispassionate expressions, the flatness of his tone, his composure that had surprised Tron so much, because Tron had assumed the helmet was hiding all of that when in reality he’d never had any of it in the first place. That had to be CLU’s doing and if Tron really thought about it, it made sense. The interaction between CLU and Rinzler that he’d shown them was illustrative. CLU had removed Rinzler's helmet, had watched his face when he hurt him, like he was looking for the moment when Rinzler’s composure cracked, like he was pushing and pushing and pushing with that goal in mind, trying to make Rinzler show weakness…and he had, he had cracked, he had shown weakness, even if it was so minuscule most people wouldn’t have even noticed. CLU’s expression in that moment had been one of triumph and Rinzler had turned the memory off there. Had that been because the rest of it was irrelevant to what they’d been discussing, or because he couldn’t stand to remember whatever CLU had done to him after that point? If that had been praise, then what did a punishment look like?

There was the other insidious thing that had been on display in that memory too. CLU had claimed he was protecting Rinzler, that he wouldn’t let him be hurt, that he cared…and he’d done it only nanos before hurting him himself. Tron couldn’t help but worry what sort of impression that had given Rinzler of what caring about somebody really meant, whether he understood that CLU hadn’t really cared about him, because if he had he wouldn’t have hurt him, or whether Rinzler had fallen into that trap and bought the lie wholesale. So far his behavior, his total lack of boundaries, his subpar social skills, suggested that he had bought it, that he had believed what CLU told him…which meant that even while believing that caring for somebody didn’t mean you shouldn’t hurt them…he had never harmed Beck, had never harmed any of them but Tron and even then only when forced.

So maybe it was all tied together, maybe his flat expressions and tone, his general disinterest, his unfeeling behavior, and his lack of empathy was all a product of him being forced to be like that in order to survive around CLU, to avoid being punished, being tortured, or being rectified, all while being conditioned to believe that CLU hurting him was kindness.

Knowing that made Tron angry all over again, because CLU had in fact made Rinzler hard to be around by doing that, he had made it so Rinzler couldn’t express himself emotionally, he had made it so Rinzler didn’t even know how anymore. How isolating had that been, for it to be so hard for people to understand him when his actions at face value were so hostile or unfeeling, even when he did care? Even Tron hadn’t understood until it had been undeniably proven right in front of his face.

Then again, the Black Guards had, like Rinzler mentioned, practically been hanging off him the times Tron had seen them interact with him. They were protective towards him, they closed ranks around him even in a room where there was nothing that was obviously a threat, and of course Beck had seen straight through all of Rinzler’s hostility like it didn’t even exist.

He needed to talk to Alan-One about this, maybe Rinzler wasn’t as far gone as he had thought. 

Tron had just decided that he would when Rinzler rolled up to his feet. “Going somewhere?” Beck asked him and Rinzler glanced down at him before turning his attention away.

“Outside,” was all he said as he scooped up his backpack and then crossed the room.

“You’re not going to eat this time either?” Alan-One asked him with a deeply concerned frown.

Rinzler just shook his head and opened the front door, then closed it behind him. 

“Whatcha wanna bet he’s staring up at that streetlamp again when you go get him, Alan?” Sam joked, although it sounded forced and stressed.

“That is weird,” Lora huffed, “What's so interesting about it?”

“It’s orange,” Quorra noted placidly as she picked up a forkful of noodles and veggies, “Like CLU’s programs are, like Rinzler’s allies are, like his homebase is.”

Alan-One frowned even deeper at that and looked back at the remaining plate of stir fry that sat untouched on the coffee table. “He’s not handling this well,” he said quietly and Quorra looked up at him, a bitter smile on her face.

“Did you expect him to?” she asked and pretty much everyone there sighed.

“I guess I shouldn’t have…in hindsight…” Alan-One muttered.

“What happens if he keeps refusing to eat?” Beck spoke up, twisting his fork over and over in the center of his plate without actually trying to pick anything up.

“I have no idea,” Alan-One huffed, “We’ve sort of been assuming food is a substitute for the energy programs require on the Grid, at the very least neither Quorra nor Tron have had any negative effects from it…but we’ve never experimented to figure out if they actually need that to function. It could be totally unnecessary.”

“Or Rinzler could run out of energy and crash,” Quorra added.

Alan-One sighed, “Or that.”

“We could ask him?” Beck suggested.

“Why would he know the answer to that?” Sam asked dryly, but Beck shook his head.

“Not ask him if he needs to eat, I meant we could ask him to run an internal diagnostic and tell us what his power reserves are at.”

“That might work,” Tron said and Beck nodded emphatically.

“I’ll ask him later…when he’s less stressed out,” the Grid’s sysadmin declared.

“And if he is running out of power?” Lora pointed out, “What do we do? He clearly has no interest in eating.”

“I saw an ad for these protein shakes that're s’posed to be like some kind of meal replacement,” Sam proposed, “Maybe we could give him something like that? Programs drink energy, not eat it, so a drink might be easier for him to stomach if real food puts him off.”

“Worth a shot,” Alan-One declared, “but for now we’ll just put his portion in the fridge, maybe if he gets hungry enough he’ll eat it. We can talk about next steps after Beck discusses it with him.”

“I’ll let you know how it goes,” Beck assured them. 

The conversation turned away from Rinzler then as Lora asked Sam what he thought it would cost to repair Flynn’s Ducati and Sam dove into a whole spiel about it. Tron stood to put his empty plate and cutlery in the dishwasher once he’d finished eating, but glanced out the window as he passed and found that there was in fact the dark silhouette of Rinzler sitting cross-legged beneath the streetlamp, his head tilted back as if he was mesmerized by its light.

Tron shook his head. Rinzler was so tangled up he didn’t even know where to start, what should be addressed first, but maybe Beck had the right idea. They couldn’t help him recover if he simply ran out of energy and crashed, so perhaps that should be the first item on the un-fuck Rinzler list. 

Chapter Text

Rinzler played the requested, the offered, memory, watching it impassively. Seeing CLU hurt him again made him feel tired more than anything, it dragged on him like hooks, old barbs in his code that he couldn’t pull out, so it was a relief when he was asked to play the good memory. It wasn’t good because of anything actually in the memory, but because of how happy it had always made CLU. Happy CLU was a CLU that wasn’t hurting him, happy CLU was all smiles and jokes and playful ribbing, so the memory was a relief to play after everything else, up until Tron suddenly lost his shit over it for no discernible reason.

Tron hurt him, not badly and not in any special way, and while Rinzler hadn’t been expecting it, he wasn’t terribly surprised by it either. Tron was him and Rinzler was violent, so it only made sense that Tron would also be violent. He just hid it better than Rinzler did. What did surprise him was that he hadn’t had to beat Tron into cubes, because before he could truly retaliate for the pathetic mimicry of the tiniest of CLU tortures, Beck had pushed Tron off him, a scowl on his face that wasn’t meant for Rinzler. Tron was in trouble, but Rinzler wasn’t.  

The Users’ champion stormed off and Beck turned to Rinzler, his eyes full of concern that Rinzler didn’t understand as he carefully clasped Rinzler’s shoulder like he had when they’d talked both in the Grid and here. It didn’t hurt, Beck simply held Rinzler by the shoulder with a grip that was firm but still gentle, not holding him still, not forcing him to do anything, not trapping him, just…there. Rinzler didn’t understand it, but the place where Tron had dug into his arm was still burning and having something else to focus on was a relief if nothing else. “Are you alright?” Beck asked him worriedly, “Can I see? Just to check. If you’re damaged we’ll figure out a way to fix it.”

“I’m fine,” Rinzler assured him a little listlessly, still unsure what to do with Beck’s clear concern, but when that didn’t seem to be enough, Rinzler let out a huff and pushed his sleeve up to show the scar in question. It looked the same, a dark mark with pixelated edges, the same size and shape and color as before. Beck frowned at it, but then let out a breath, his shoulders slumping.

“That was wrong,” Beck told him sternly when Rinzler said nothing.

“I defended myself,” Rinzler replied, unapologetic, “And he wasn’t injured.”

An exasperated look flashed across Beck’s face, “Not you, Rinzler, Tron was wrong. He shouldn’t have done that. Nobody should ever do that to you.”

Rinzler blinked at him in confusion. “Do what?” he asked after a moment and Beck’s face fell.

“Hurt you,” he insisted, “Nobody should be hurting you, especially not on purpose.”

“What did I do?” Rinzler asked him after a slight second of hesitation, looking first at Beck’s scowl and then past his shoulder to see the faces of the Users and Quorra. They all looked unhappy, solemn, but not angry the way Beck was. Rinzler was reeling a little to be perfectly honest. Tron was the good twin, the perfect one, the beloved one, and yet when there’d been a fight, Beck had sided with Rinzler, not Tron. He…hadn't been expecting it. “He was angry, I must have done something…”

“You didn’t do anything,” Beck insisted. “Nothing of your own free will at least. It’s just…that memory was upsetting for Tron, the program in it was his…friend, but still, that’s no excuse for him to hurt you like that.”

Rinzler let out a huff. That explained it, Tron was upset he’d killed the girl, even if now was cycles upon cycles too late for his feelings to make any difference at all. Rinzler pulled his sleeve back down to cover his arm, smoothed the ever-annoying wrinkles out of his shirt, and then sat back down on the floor, his legs crossed.

Beck sat down beside him, finally releasing Rinzler’s shoulder, and Alan-One hesitantly came over and sat down on the couch behind them. There was a frown on his face and after a moment of Rinzler waiting for him to get whatever he wanted to say out of his mouth already, he finally spoke. 

“Did you enjoy killing her?” he asked, and the words were careful, like he was trying to step around something invisible, some trap that would snap shut on him if he didn’t avoid it properly. 

“It wasn’t a good fight,” Rinzler told him truthfully, although he still averted his eyes, “I was exhausted, I hadn’t taken a sleep cycle in almost a micro because I’d been trying to track her and her friends down, and she was the last one left at that point. I just wanted to kill her already so I could finally rest.”

Alan-One looked, if anything, relieved, and he nodded and sat back against the couch, leaning his head back against the backrest and closing his eyes. Lora_Bradley went into the kitchen and started clattering around with Sam_Flynn and Quorra following her.

“You were smiling,” Beck spoke up after a moment, “But you said it was an unpleasant fight. Not a good one.”

Rinzler let out a second huff, unsure how to explain the complex snarl of emotions watching memories like that made him feel. “It’s…not about her, or the fight. It’s about…about CLU.”

Beck grimaced, but nodded and waited for Rinzler to continue, so he did once he’d worked out what to say, “He liked that memory,” Rinzler mumbled, looking down at his discs where they were hooked into Lora_Bradley’s device, “Like I said, he’d have me play it over and over…and he’d laugh. When he watched it he’d praise me, really praise me, he’d say I was perfect and…and if I was perfect that meant he didn’t need to rectify me. If that memory made him think I was perfect, then…it was safe.” 

“I get that,” Beck said with a sigh, leaning back on his hands. “Don’t worry about Tron, he’ll…well ‘get over it’ isn’t the right term, but he’ll cool off.”

Rinzler shrugged a shoulder, “If he comes back in here and picks another fight with me I’d be perfectly happy to smash his perfect face to pieces.”

Beck just laughed while Alan-One let out a huge sigh, “No fighting in the house,” he grumbled, “Lord knows we don’t need to add broken furniture and smashed windows to our list of troubles.”

Rinzler ducked his head automatically at the admonishment, but Alan-One didn’t follow it with anything, instead he stood up and went to go clatter around in the kitchen with all the others. “So,” Beck said, his voice light, “You saw them before, just condensed, but since we’ve got all this stuff out I’d like to show you some of my old memories of you.”

“Of Tron,” Rinzler corrected automatically, but Beck just shook his head.

“Of you,” he argued and Rinzler just gave up, unwilling to get into a real debate over something that didn’t actually matter, “That okay?” he asked when Rinzler didn’t reply, but Rinzler just shrugged a shoulder. Like Beck had said, he’d already seen it, in passing at least, if not in detail, and he didn’t have anything better to do anyway.

Beck let out a huff that sounded half annoyed and half fond, but followed Lora_Bradley’s method of detaching Rinzler’s combined discs from her device and then handed them back to him before hooking his own up to it. Rinzler slipped them back into the backpack at his side and watched as Beck navigated through his memory files using the remote. When he finally chose one to play, Rinzler watched impassively as Tron, old Tron, damaged Tron, spoke to Beck about why he’d chosen him as Beck tried to argue that he wasn’t good enough to be his protege, tried to argue that his act of rebellion had been a one time thing. It was a joke honestly, there was no way Beck could have ever gotten out of it at that point, he had disobedience written in his code down to the ones and zeros, he’d never have backed out, not for long. It wasn’t in his nature to sit idly by while people got hurt.

Rinzler would have said it was eerie to watch the program that he had once been talk and move and act like he was a bastion of good, but Rinzler honestly couldn't see enough of a continuity, couldn’t see enough of himself, for it to mean anything to him. He watched the memory, and then the next, and the next, cataloging them, but paying more attention to Beck in the memories than Tron, observing how attached Beck quickly became and noting if nothing else why Beck had never given up on him. He’d always been stubborn, that much was clear.

After a while, real Tron reappeared and Rinzler went tense for a nano, but made himself relax. If Tron attacked him again, he’d do as he’d said and smash him into voxels all over again, even if Alan-One had said no fighting in the house. He wasn’t about to let Tron damage him, even if it meant disobeying their User, but Tron didn’t attack him, instead he asked if he could show Rinzler some of his own memories and when Rinzler said nothing he and Beck went about switching out the discs in the DVD player.

The memory Tron seemed determined for Rinzler to see meant even less to him than the ones Beck had shown him, because Beck’s memories had at least included Beck, but Rinzler had no interest in Tron or in the program he had derezzed. Even so he watched the two of them sitting up on some sort of tall building, telling each other extremely bad jokes and laughing in delight. It was obvious that Tron loved her, that they were together, not just in that memory, but the next that Tron showed him. Rinzler made note of it and Tron immediately tried to do the Beck thing and relate it back to Rinzler, as if Rinzler had ever been capable of such a thing, but the girl meant nothing to him and he said so.

That made Tron angry, Rinzler saw the way he clenched his jaw, heard the remote creak in his hand before he set it down, but he made no move to get in a fight about it, which was honestly more than Rinzler expected from him after how he’d behaved earlier. Rinzler was just telling the truth, because Tron wasn’t worth censoring himself over, but there was a certain amount of fun to be derived from goading him, just to see him less than perfect, to see him struggle to control his anger like Rinzler so often did.

Then of course, Alan-One reappeared and Rinzler went rigid, turning his face carefully away and waiting for him to tell Rinzler what he wanted. All he did was ask questions. Rinzler didn’t understand the purpose of them until Alan-One said it outright, but even then he didn’t get why it mattered how much of Tron’s personality was left in him, whether he was capable of compassion. Beck had been trying to draw parallels for ages and that was just as meaningless as anybody else doing it. Rinzler wasn’t Tron, he didn’t share any of Tron’s supposed kindness or compassion, or at least he felt he didn’t. Beck seemed to disagree with that.

Of course Beck immediately brought up the Tagalongs and Rinzler had a new thing to fend off. They were assets, he needed them to keep things running smoothly, Reeve was his second-in-command for crying out loud…but admittedly he had acknowledged previously that they matched Vekt’s definition of ‘friendship’ so maybe his argument was a little weak. 

Alan-One seemed to be pleased by Beck’s statement about the Tagalongs and he pressed further. It took every ounce of self control Rinzler had to keep from rolling his eyes when Alan-One asked if he cared for Tron. He’d smashed Tron’s face in once and frankly it was a blast, he’d be perfectly willing to do it again and he said as much, which only made Beck laugh, obviously thinking that it wasn’t a statement he truly meant. Of course he had meant it, Tron was a hassle and if he gave Rinzler a reason to do it, he’d be perfectly willing to smash him to pieces.

He’d thought that, but then the other Users and Quorra walked back into the room and Quorra unceremoniously swung Beck’s disc at Tron’s head. It wouldn’t have killed him, not when the blade of the weapon wasn’t activated, wasn’t functional in the User world, so at most it would have broken his face, not to mention Tron was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, and yet…Rinzler had lunged forward to catch her arm before he’d fully processed any of that. Tron blinked at him and Rinzler blinked back, confused at himself. He had meant what he’d said, he was perfectly happy to damage Tron…so why had he intervened? 

He didn’t understand.

Rinzler released Quorra’s arm when she pulled it back, a knowing smile on her face that made his nerves buzz unpleasantly, like she understood why Rinzler had done that when he himself didn’t.

Alan-One drew a conclusion from it as well, obviously taking it as confirmation of his point and Beck seemed just as pleased, as if the action had somehow settled an argument in his favor. Rinzler puzzled over his actions while everyone else ate, but found no answers. 

Tron was a nuisance, Rinzler disliked him, he was a constant reminder that Rinzler was broken, that he had failed in the eyes of everyone around him. Tron was the strong one and Rinzler was the weak one, the one that folded, the one that shattered under CLU’s careful ministrations and now they were all trying to put him back together in different shape, a shape he didn’t understand and didn’t want to be.

And yet.

And yet he’d protected Tron before he’d had time to even consider his actions. It had been on instinct, and Rinzler didn’t know what that meant. Eventually he gave up and rolled to his feet, slinging the pack back over his shoulders and heading outside. As he’d known he would, he felt better out in the dark, sitting under the orange light of the solitary streetlamp. It was quiet outside, other than that same rhythmic buzzing sound, and he didn’t have to feel like he was under scrutiny every moment, didn’t have to feel quite so much like a failure, like he was broken…even if he was. 

Rinzler still didn’t know what he was without CLU, without the Grid, without all the things that had defined him his entire runtime, and yet Tron and Beck and Alan-One all seemed to be searching for the answer to that as much as Rinzler himself was…only they didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand, not without knowing what CLU was, what CLU had made Rinzler into.

Maybe that was why Rinzler had shown them. It was true that CLU’s discussion of the program Rinzler just barely had in his memories, of Cyrus, was vaguely relevant…but Rinzler had let the memory play because he was tired. He was tired of being broken, of being a failure, of being the evil twin, the ruined twin, and he’d thought maybe if they knew CLU, if they saw behind the smiles and jokes and charisma of the Grid’s supreme leader, behind the carefully constructed image of the merciless unstoppable force that was Rinzler, that maybe they’d…understand.

And yet…it had only led to another fight, another argument, another round of questions where they compared him to Tron, where they tried to draw a line back to what he had been rather than seeing what he was. They still didn’t understand what CLU was, what Rinzler was. Maybe he shouldn’t have stopped the memory where he did, maybe he should have let the whole thing play, let them see all the pain, all of CLU’s enjoyment, all his laughter as he ripped Rinzler apart like he had hundreds of times over the cycles since Rinzler had first been rectified, just so he could stitch him back together in the shape he wanted. If they had seen the twisted rotten core of Rinzler would they have realized he really couldn’t be Tron?

But then again, maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. Maybe Rinzler would never be anything but a broken, bleeding shadow of the Users’ champion. 

He looked up into the orange streetlight and ached to return to the Grid, to the Hub, where people understood him and didn’t look at him and only see Tron. Even Beck had only latched onto him because of that, because of what Beck had thought was still in him, because he’d looked at Rinzler and seen his old mentor…and Rinzler hated that. Why couldn’t he be enough? Why did he have to be somebody else entirely for him to be worth anything? Was it because it was CLU who had shaped him? Was it because Rinzler really was just a shadow of Tron, really was just a tool with no will of its own, really was just something that served a purpose instead of being alive?

It was better out in the night, in the dark, where nobody could see the cracks in him that were so glaring in the light of the Users’ world. Rinzler desperately just wanted to find the Grid, to move it to the new computer and then to go home, to go back to his function and let Beck be the hero instead of trying to be one himself. 

“Rinzler!” Alan-One called and Rinzler turned, only to find the rental runner just pulling out of the driveway as Alan-One stood in the doorway. It must be time to go to bed. Rinzler rolled up to his feet, automatically checking that the backpack was still slung over his shoulders, that he still had his discs, and then paced across the street and back inside. Alan-One stepped out of his way, then wished him and Beck a goodnight before heading down the hall to his and Lora_Bradley’s room. Just like the night before, Tron and Lora_Bradley had already retired.

“Hey,” Beck said once they were alone as the sysadmin sat down on his couch, which had once again been dressed up for sleeping now that night had fallen, while Rinzler stood in the middle of the room and thought of nothing, the low sound of his clicking melding with the buzzing sound from outside. “Can I talk to you?” Beck went on and Rinzler turned a blank expression on him, the type of expression that seemed to unnerve everyone so much. Rinzler regretted letting them cut his helmet apart, at least when he’d had it nobody looked at him like they were disturbed by the absence of something they expected to see in him…only Beck didn’t flinch or frown or show any sign of disapproval. 

Rinzler said nothing, which Beck just took as an invitation to keep talking, as Rinzler had known he would. “First off…I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” Beck sighed, ruffling his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry you had to show us that memory, that you felt like it was necessary. I could tell that was hard.”

“I wanted you to see it,” Rinzler replied, his voice coming out more tired than he’d intended it to, “I wanted you to see CLU.”

Beck looked back up at Rinzler, examining him for a moment, before he nodded. “It’s different,” Beck mumbled, “Actually seeing him instead of just hearing stories about him. I never knew CLU, I never even met him, but you knew him. I don’t think anybody knew him like you did.”

Rinzler turned his eyes away, looking over at the empty black screen of the television that only a little while ago had been showing the images and words that were carved so deep into his code. “I wanted you to know him,” Rinzler agreed.

“To know CLU is to know you, right?” Beck asked him, crossing his legs where he sat among the pile of blankets and pillows that covered the couch, “Nobody can really see what you are without seeing how you were made.” Again Rinzler agreed, nodding his head just a little. “That wasn’t a big deal to you, was it?” Beck asked after a moment. “Him hurting you like that?”

“He did that sort of thing pretty much every milli,” Rinzler confirmed and Beck let out a sigh.

“You shut it off when it got to the point where he’d gotten what he was looking for,” he noted, “Why? What did he do after that?”

“He punished me,” Rinzler told him matter-of-factly.

“And you didn’t want us to see that,” Beck said, but Rinzler shook his head.

“I didn’t want to see it,” he corrected. Something in Beck’s expression turned solemn, but Rinzler kept talking before he could say anything. “Maybe I should have let it play,” he said, repeating the thought he’d had outside, “Maybe then they’d understand.” 

Beck gave him a sad look, not pitying or disappointed, but compassionate, then he let out a sigh and flopped over sideways on his couch, while Rinzler remained standing motionless in the center of the room. “It was hard,” Beck said suddenly after a long pause, looking at the blank television screen just like Rinzler had, “I knew you were him, I knew that they'd rectified you after you went missing, after Dyson captured you…and I knew you couldn’t remember anything…because they’d never have been able to make you kill innocent programs the way you did if you remembered any of who you were as Tron.”

“I’m not Tron,” Rinzler reminded him tiredly and Beck looked up at him, only to give him the warmest smile.

“I know,” he said, “I’m just telling you how I felt at the time, I know better now. Anyway, I’d seen rectified programs fight it before…so I thought that…that there had to be some way to reverse it, that there must be a way to remove it. I was determined to rescue you from CLU…even without knowing how he hurt you. I tried everything I could think of, exhausted every lead all while you tore through us, through our ranks, like we were nothing and we were totally helpless to stop you. I…I hated seeing all these people I knew die because of what CLU had done to you. I hated the thought of how much pain you had to be in…because I saw footage of you fighting and…Tron never fought like that.”

Beck let out a sigh and ruffled his hand through his hair, “Tron was really controlled, really patient, but seeing you fight was different…you seemed so desperate, like any failure, no matter how small, how insignificant, would be the end of you. I knew there had to be something going on, that CLU had to be doing something to you to make you that desperate, even when you couldn’t remember anything.”

“If I failed he’d rectify me,” Rinzler told him emotionlessly. He didn’t elaborate on that, but Rinzler could see he didn’t need to, because Beck gave him a look that was full of understanding rather than pity.

“I know,” Beck said, his voice quiet, gentle, “Yori’s cell went dark suddenly. I’d only met her once, but I could tell there was some sort of thing going on between the two of you. The way you smiled at her was so different from any other time I’d seen you, it was obvious how much you loved her. She was keeping in contact with you through Able, trying to keep some separation so her messages would be harder to trace. She was focused on Tron City, the very heart of the occupation, while you focused on Argon, on me. She assumed you’d been killed when you went missing…and I didn’t tell her it was you when you reappeared as you are now, I just…I didn’t want to see how it’d crush her.”

“And then I killed her,” Rinzler said, his tone flat, remorseless. The fact that Tron had had a lover meant nothing to him. He didn’t know her, she was just another of hundreds of programs he’d killed for CLU, no more special than any of them.

“Yeah,” Beck sighed again, looking back at Rinzler sadly, “Her cell went dark out of nowhere, all of the programs just gone in a blink of an eye. We couldn’t reach any of them, but when I went to their base to see if I could find some sort of trace of them…it was just full of voxels, so many you could barely see the floor. I knew it had to be you, because it’d take an army to do that, to derezz that many programs all at once…an army or you, and you’d been tearing through us for a while at that point, I recognized how you operated.”

“No matter how many of you I derezzed, there were always more,” Rinzler grumbled, “CLU ran me ragged trying to root you all out.”

Beck huffed, “Yeah you said that you hadn't slept in a micro by the time you got to her. Was that sort of thing common for you?”

Rinzler just nodded and Beck sighed for a third time, “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Even after that though, after you killed her…I never gave up on saving you. I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving you to CLU, of leaving you in pain, and I spent a thousand cycles trying to find a way…but there wasn’t one. The only way to change it was to have somebody who had the power to reprogram you from the ground up…and CLU was the only one who could.”

“Until the Users,” Rinzler said and Beck nodded, but the look he gave Rinzler was lighter than he had been up until that point.

“Yeah, but after CLU died, you changed so suddenly and I thought maybe there was a chance after all. I never gave up hope, but I didn’t dare put myself in a room with you before his death, because I knew you wouldn’t know who I was. If you derezzed Yori then you’d derezz me in an instant.”

“But you did put yourself in a room with me,” Rinzler pointed out testily and Beck laughed.

“Yeah I did,” he said, his voice light, “it was a real gamble, but I had to do it if it meant there might be a chance, any chance, no matter how small. You were my friend, my mentor, and I knew if it had been me, you’d never have given up on saving me, so how could I give up on you?”

“You didn’t succeed,” Rinzler told him, after all Rinzler was still there, was still rectified, while Tron was dead and buried, but Beck shook his head.

“You saved yourself,” he corrected, “You turned on CLU all by yourself, when none of us managed to do anything to hurt him for a thousand cycles of trying, and then you came back and set things right, even if it took some nudging here and there to help you make good choices when you were stuck and confused. I couldn’t be prouder of you, Rinzler. I thought that you were a twisted wrong version of Tron, of my friend, but you’ve always been my friend, even when you didn’t know it.”

“You said yourself I’d have killed you in a heartbeat,” Rinzler griped, but Beck just smiled.

“Maybe, but you recognized me in the garage, even if you didn’t know who I was in relation to you, so maybe you’d have thought about it later, if you did kill me, maybe it would have bothered you…which means we really were friends, even with you as you were. We never stopped being friends, you just didn’t remember that until I reminded you.”

Rinzler had nothing to say to that, but Beck didn’t seem to need him to say anything. “All of this is to say that I was wrong, I thought I needed to fix you to get my friend back, but you were there the whole time and I just didn’t recognize you, so I just want you to know,” he told Rinzler, his voice gentle, “That neither CLU nor Tron define you, even if they are fragments of you, even if they are the parts that you were made out of. You don’t have to be Tron and you don’t have to be CLU’s perfect weapon either. You can just be Rinzler…and you’re my friend regardless.”

Rinzler blinked at Beck slowly, still standing motionless in the center of the room. He didn’t know how Beck’s words were aimed so well, as if he’d read Rinzler’s ever spiraling thoughts, as if he’d read the pain in him like it was written on his skin. “That said,” Beck huffed, “I’m worried. Why haven’t you been eating anything?”

“Don’t want to,” Rinzler told him honestly, allowing the subject change.

Beck nodded at this, as if Rinzler having an opinion like that was perfectly valid, as if he had the right to do whatever he wanted instead of only doing what he was told, what was expected of him. “Okay,” Beck said, “well can you run a diagnostic for me and check your power reserves against what they were at when we first came here?”

Rinzler did as he’d been asked, staring off into space for a moment as he ran the application. “Thirty-five percent decrease,” he reported when it was done and Beck frowned.

“Okay,” the sysadmin sighed, “Well mine has stayed at a ninety percent charge over the same period of time…so it seems like User food is analogous to energy on the Grid. If you don’t do anything to recharge yourself you’ll eventually crash.”

He’d thought as much, but the idea of eating anything the Users had put in front of him over the last two days was just as unappealing, just as unpleasant.

“Would a drink be better?” Beck asked him curiously, still frowning, but not in a disapproving way, rather just looking like he had been given a puzzle and was asked to solve it. Rinzler considered that question for a moment and Beck let him, but eventually Rinzler nodded. 

Beck let out a breath and smiled, “Cool. Sam said there’s some kind of User drink that can be a substitute for food, so as long as you can put up with that, I think we’ll be alright.”

The phrasing of that caught Rinzler slightly off guard. Beck had said ‘we’ll be alright’, as if Rinzler crashing from low power would have an adverse effect on Beck’s well-being. 

“Okay,” Beck huffed, “Well we’ve confirmed that it was Cyrus who stole the Grid, that isn’t great, since he’s both really crazy and really dangerous, but more information is always better than less.”

Rinzler considered that for a moment before he spoke up, “Sam_Flynn said the data was encrypted. Cyrus isn’t a User and even if he is good at recycling code, he’s not a programmer like Alan-One or CLU.”

“So what are you thinking?” Beck asked him curiously, still slumped over sideways on his couch, although he was paying attention.

“He needs somebody to decrypt it before he can access anything…” Rinzler explained and Beck let out a huff.

“You think between that and using the laser, that his User has got to be a programmer?” Beck asked and Rinzler nodded.

“That would be my guess,” he agreed.

Beck let out a huff, but shook his head. “We should discuss this with the others in the morning. Can you sleep?”

“No,” Rinzler told him truthfully, watching the worried look return to Beck’s face.

“You must be tired…” Beck pressed, but Rinzler shook his head.

“I’ve stayed up for micros without crashing,” he said, “this is negligible.”

A crease appeared between Beck’s eyebrows as he frowned, “That doesn’t make it good for you.”

“It doesn't matter,” Rinzler growled, his tone final, and Beck let out a breath, but surrendered and closed his eyes. 

“Okay,” the younger program mumbled, “well I’m guessing you’re going to keep watching the cameras, so wake me if anything happens.”

“Sure,” was all Rinzler said. He could tell Beck had initiated his sleep cycle a moment later from the way his breathing slowed. Rinzler stood in the center of the living room for a minute, then turned, picked up Alan-One’s phone, and removed it from the charger before repeating his actions of the night before and going up to the roof. Outside was better, less stifling, and Rinzler watched the cameras until the sun came up.

Chapter Text

Yori had been working, busy busy while she waited for Tron to come home from his latest mission, she’d been engrossed in the readouts she was inspecting, only for everything to suddenly go completely black. She blinked and looked around in confusion, only there was nothing around her, just a dark empty plane stretching in all directions, but then green lights appeared in front of her eyes, forming words that hung in the air. 

Copy successfully uploaded.

Initializing laser sequence, countdown 5…4…3…2…1. 

When the numbers reached one, something invisible hooked her under the ribs. Yori let out a startled gasp as the world seemed to twist around her into a confusing swirl and when it stopped spinning she dropped to her knees. 

Wherever she was now, it was bright, harsh golden light illuminated a strange room, one that contained a dark black table with drawings pinned to the wall above it, something in the background humming loudly, the whole room coated in powder of some sort.

“I told you it would work,” said a man’s voice and Yori looked up in surprise to see two people standing in front of her. One looked like a program, he had circuits all over his face and wore a dark suit covered with more circuits and a jacket over top it, but the other man was shorter and had no circuits at all, not even on his clothes, which were multicolored and fitted, but not in the seamless manner of a program’s suit. He had some sort of clear split visor on his face, but he was frowning deeply.

“Okay I’ll admit that it’s weird how identical she looks to Alan’s wife, but you’re telling me she’s a program too?” asked the second man, his tone skeptical.

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” the program said and turned to Yori, grabbing her by the wrist and roughly dragging her to her feet.

“Hey!” she cried, trying to wrench her wrist out of the program’s grip, only to find he was much stronger than her and she couldn’t get free. He pulled something out of the jacket he wore, a blade, and slashed it across her forearm, revealing the shining code that composed her body. Yori let out a yelp of pain and the second man’s expression cleared.

He smiled back at the program, “Well I’ll be damned,” he huffed, “Alright, I guess you’re not lying, but give me a while to think your offer over, this is kind of a big deal and you’re asking for a lot.”

“Sure,” the program hummed pleasantly, stowing the blade, but not letting go of Yori’s arm even as she still tried to wrench herself free. She had no idea who these people were or what they wanted with her and she had even less of an idea where she was.

The second man nodded his head and then turned and walked out a nearby door, climbing the stairs behind it. The program turned a disarming smile on her. “Hey Yori,” he said lightly.

“I don’t know you,” she snapped, trying to twist her arm out of his grip, but he didn’t let go and in fact just clenched his first around her wrist that much tighter until pain from her slashed open code shot through her.

“Maybe,” the program told her, his tone still light, “but I know you, I’m an old friend of Tron’s, my name’s Cyrus.”

“You are not a friend of Tron’s,” Yori snapped at the obvious lie, but if anything Cyrus just smiled at her wider.

“Not the one you know, but Tron. Kevin Flynn made a copy of him to protect a system he created, called the Grid, the system I’m from. I was Tron’s protege, he taught me everything he knew.” As if to prove it to her, he tucked his arms against each other without letting go of her and his circuits lit up, forming the familiar T.

Yori blinked at him confusedly. That explanation sounded really unlikely, but it was plausible, Flynn was a User, he’d be perfectly capable of doing those things and it would make sense that he’d want his friend to protect his new system. The T symbol also suggested Cyrus had some connection to Tron, but no friend of Tron’s would ever have hurt her.

“You were there too,” Cyrus told her lightly, “I met you a number of times, we were friends…before you died.”

That brought Yori up short, “I…I died?” she asked him, unnerved.

A solemn look came across Cyrus’s face, but he nodded, “Yeah, something bad happened on the Grid, a program Flynn created went rogue, went crazy, and seized control of the system. He trapped Flynn inside, drove him into hiding, and badly damaged Tron. That was why Tron needed me, I saved his life and together we tried to stand against the renegade program, CLU.”

“How…how did I die…?” Yori couldn’t help but ask, it sounded like an absolutely insane story, like a lie, but she didn’t know where she was or what was happening, so she had no way of confirming or debunking what he was saying.

“Tron killed you,” Cyrus told her somberly.

“Liar!” Yori hissed at him, again yanking on her arm, even if it did nothing to loosen his grip on her and in fact only made her damaged code hurt worse.

“It’s not a lie,” Cyrus denied unhappily, “Tron was injured and CLU captured him and used his sysadmin abilities to recode him, to break him apart and make him into a mindless weapon. He didn’t remember you or me and when CLU told him to kill you, he did it without a second thought. That’s why I need you, Yori, I’m trying to rescue Tron, to save him from CLU, to save him and the Grid both. This is the User world and Dillinger, the guy who was just here, is a User. I’m hoping he’s going to help me, help us, save everybody.”

“You’re full of it,” Yori snapped, even as her voice wavered with uncertainty. This…it didn’t look like any place she’d ever seen, so it was just as likely the User world as not, she had no way of knowing. The only explanation she had was Cyrus’s, which sounded like a load of nonsense. Tron would never hurt her, could never be broken apart and made into a weapon, he was too strong for that, too kind for that.

“Well,” Cyrus huffed, looking a little crestfallen, “you’ll believe me eventually, once I figure out how to prove it all to you, but for now we’ve gotta get out of here, this is sort of in enemy territory and it's not safe here.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Yori hissed, but Cyrus just smiled at her.

“I disagree,” he said and then started dragging her bodily out of the room and up the stairs. With no recourse, Yori reeled back and punched him in the face, using all the strength she had in her body, but if it hurt him at all, he didn’t show it. 

“Rude,” Cyrus said, his tone still disarmingly light as he turned and backhanded her, making her stumble. Yori scowled at him, trying not to show how much it hurt, trying not to cry, trying to be tough, like Tron was tough. “We’re friends,” Cyrus scolded her, “This isn’t how you treat your friends, Yori, if you try to hurt me then I have to hurt you back, I can’t be nice if you’re not nice.”

“You’re not nice anyway,” she spat, but he just shrugged.

“You haven't seen me mean, trust me.”

Yori forced herself not to shrink back from the threat, but Cyrus saw the fear in her, whether on her face or in her posture, because he let out a huff, “We’re friends,” he repeated, “You be nice and I’ll be nice, like it should be. I don't want to have to hurt you. I need your help, remember?”

She had nothing to say to that and Cyrus seemed to be satisfied with her silence, so he turned and clasped his free hand around the back of her neck, his grip just short of painful, dragging her along up the stairs, through the strange building, and outside.

A gasp came out of her despite her best efforts to stifle it. It was so bright outside, the sky was blue and there was a ball of light suspended up high, so bright she couldn’t stand to look directly at it. The street was cracked and pitted and the buildings surrounding them had strange colors and textures, nothing like the Encom servers, nothing like anything she’d ever seen before.

“Welcome to the User world!” Cyrus crowed happily without letting go of Yori. She was so dumbstruck by it, because what else could it be but the User world, that she didn’t resist when Cyrus pulled her over to a strange looking light cycle that was parked beside the building. When Yori looked up at the building they'd just left she sucked in a breath. Hanging above the door was a sign that read ‘Flynn’s’.

“Oh yeah,” Cyrus huffed as he followed her gaze to the sign, “That’s Flynn’s old place, where he was keeping the Grid, unfortunately CLU killed him, he’s gone, but we can’t let his life’s work die with him can we?”

“Flynn’s dead?” Yori gasped in horror and Cyrus gave her a sad look, nodding.

“Yeah,” he sighed as he pushed her onto the cycle to sit in front of him and then got on behind her, “It was a tragedy, but Tron’s still alive, we can save him at least, him and the system.”

“I…I don’t believe you…” Yori told him shakily as he hemmed her in with his arms, gripping the cycle’s handlebars and revving it up.

“You will,” Cyrus told her calmly and then shot them out into the street. Yori didn’t know what to do, fighting him hadn’t worked, but she didn’t know where he was taking her and she was scared, she was scared but she didn’t know what to do.

Eventually he slowed them down, turning up a short paved path to stop in front of a smaller single story building with a peaked roof. “Home sweet home,” Cyrus hummed as he pulled her off the cycle, his iron grip on her returning, and then dragged her to the door, which he unlocked and then pushed her inside, shutting the door behind them both.

“Hey there, Beck!” Cyrus chirped, turning to smile at…somebody. They sat slumped in a seat at a table, their expression blank and empty, looking ahead at nothing, their face slack. The entirety of their face and chest as well as a good amount of the table in front of them was covered in dry and flaking red so dark it was almost brown.

“B-Beck?” Yori asked unhappily. Something was really wrong with them, she’d never seen anybody look like that before.

“Oh his name’s not really Beck,” Cyrus huffed as he pulled Yori over to the table where the person sat motionless, “Call it wishful thinking.”

“What’s wrong with him…?” Yori asked him, her voice wavering as a horrible smell hit her the closer they got.

“Hmm? Oh, he’s dead,” Cyrus told her cheerfully, “Yeah he’s been dead for a couple weeks, I needed to borrow some of his stuff, like his house and his cycle, and he wasn’t…amenable…”

“He’s not dead,” Yori protested, “He’d have derezzed…”

“No,” Cyrus told her, his tone amiable and patient as he pulled her over to some sort of white waist height metal contraption attached to the wall beside ‘Beck’ and then clapped one half of a pair of cuffs around her wrist before attaching the other half to the metal device, chaining her to it. Yori yanked again on her arm, but the cuffs merely rattled, too strong for her to break. “Users don’t derezz when they die, they just sit there and get squishy and smell bad. You’ll get used to it,” Cyrus told her, putting his hands on his hips and admiring both Yori and the dead User.

“You’re…you’re crazy…” Yori breathed, her voice trembling as she looked at the dead User, saw the way a small flying creature landed on the body’s open unblinking eye and crawled around unimpeded.

Cyrus just laughed, “Believe me I’ve heard that before,” he told her, unoffended, “but you’ll see it my way. Until then just hang tight, I’ve got some stuff to work out.” Cyrus turned and left her there without further ado and all Yori could do was curl up in a ball, unable to pull her chained arm into her body, and sob silently. If she could just tell Tron she was here, if he just knew…he’d come find her, come save her, but she had no way of telling him. He’d come home from his mission and she’d be gone without a trace.

But maybe he’d still find her…he was smart, maybe he’d figure it out and come after her, maybe he’d save her. She…she had to believe in him, could only believe in him…and in the meantime maybe she could try to wiggle out of the cuffs. Cyrus had gone, so if she got out maybe she could run away and hide until Tron found her.

She’d thought that…but she didn’t manage it. Yori sat for ages, yanking and rattling the cuffs while trying desperately to avoid looking at the dead, the rotting, User, trying to block out the buzzing sound of the tiny flying creatures that swarmed around the body and the horrible disgusting smell. Every now and then Cyrus would reappear, tell her how much time had passed, not that the terms ‘days’ or ‘weeks’ meant anything to her, and then give her a drink of some kind, which she drank because she’d always be low on energy by the time he’d come back to give it to her. She didn’t want to die there, couldn’t die and leave Tron all alone, so she drank what she was given, waited, and tried to get out of the cuffs while pretending she was somewhere else.

After what Cyrus claimed was three weeks, he reappeared with a grin on his face and came to sit down cross-legged in front of her. “Well I’ve got good news and bad news,” he told her cheerfully as he handed over another drink.

Yori didn’t ask him what he meant, didn’t say anything to him at all, just stared dully ahead of her and resolutely ignored him, the only defiance she could give. He didn’t seem put out by it, simply talking as if she had responded appropriately. “I’ve got the Grid!” he cheered, holding up a small chip attached to a thin broken chain, “Bad news though, I accidentally wrecked the laser and Tron got out, he’s running around here too, could be a problem.”

She couldn’t help it, Yori looked up at him at those words. Tron was here! Tron really had come to find her! “Ah,” Cyrus huffed, “Not your Tron, my Tron, the crazy broken one, he’s dangerous. He’ll kill you if he finds you…so I won’t let him find you, won’t let him find either of us.”

Yori didn’t believe him, she’d known Tron would come, that he’d rescue her, so she just turned her face resolutely away from Cyrus, ignoring him with new resolve. Tron would be there soon to rescue her. She just knew it.

“Alright,” Cyrus harrumphed, getting back to his feet and giving ‘Beck’ a pat on the shoulder as if he were a friend and not a rotting corpse, “suit yourself, maybe with him here now, I can prove it to you.”

She ignored that too and Cyrus just grumbled under his breath and walked away, so Yori went back to determinedly trying to jerk her wrist out of the cuffs, even if she’d been trying it so futily for so long that there were hairline fractures all along her wrist. Soon it'd be okay, soon she’d be back with Tron and everything would be alright, they’d be able to figure out what to do together. It was going to be alright, if she just hung on a little longer.

Chapter Text

The next morning was similar to the previous one, Rinzler sat motionless on the couch - although rather than staring at the clock, he was watching the cameras - Alan-One came out, asked him how long he’d been awake, and Rinzler lied, then Alan-One made himself and Lora_Bradley coffee and retreated. Tron appeared about twenty minutes later and nudged Beck awake before offering him some of the coffee as well, which Beck accepted with a sleepy yawn, and then finally Sam_Flynn and Quorra arrived as Alan-One made breakfast, which was promptly served, and yet again Rinzler declined to eat any of it.

“Did Beck talk to you about this?” Alan-One asked him with a sigh. Rinzler didn’t look away from the cameras, but he nodded.

“He said a drink would be better,” Beck spoke up as he tasted one of the slices of fruit that topped his oatmeal.

“Alright,” Alan-One said, letting out a relieved breath, “At least that’s something taken care of.”

“Quorra and I can go pick up some of those meal replacement drinks from the store after breakfast,” Sam_Flynn said, “Think you can wait that long?” he asked Rinzler, who actually did look up from the cameras long enough to give the User an unimpressed look. Sam_Flynn huffed, “Yeah yeah if I bug you you’re gonna murder me, stab me, rip my eyes out, I get it man.”

Quorra laughed lightly, but then turned a smile on Sam_Flynn, “He won’t, CLU’s not here to order him to.”

“I would,” Rinzler disagreed and Beck and Sam_Flynn both laughed, although Tron just rolled his eyes.

“So long as you quit depriving yourself like this,” Tron told him, although there was less heat in his voice than there had been when he talked about it the day before, “Is it really just because it’s unfamiliar?”

Rinzler looked up again, examining the patient look on Tron’s face, one that was in stark contrast to the exasperation from the day and night before. Rinzler dropped his eyes back to the camera feed. “Don’t want it,” was all he said, at which point the exasperation came back as Tron made an irritated noise before taking a slow breath and letting it out, like he was praying for patience.

Breakfast was uneventful after that and Sam_Flynn dragged Quorra away from her book and out the door while Alan-One stood and put his hands on his hips. “Well it’s been two days and you two were in an explosion among other things, I’d say we ought to have you shower and change clothes.”

“Shower?” Beck asked him curiously and Alan-One just nodded. 

“The User world has a lot of loose dirt in the air, even when it’s not disturbed like it was in the explosion,” Tron explained, “Users also sweat, which can smell bad if not cleaned off, although that’s not a concern for us, but regardless to clean it all off Users shower.”

“Okay, but what is that?” Beck pressed and Alan-One just gave him a patient look, although it was Lora Bradley who spoke up to explain without looking away from the blueprints she’d spread out all over the coffee table, ones that showed the construction of the laser.

“It’s basically just standing under a stream of water and scrubbing with soap,” she said distractedly, before pausing, looking up at Beck’s still confused expression, and then turning back to her blueprints, “Soap is a cleaning agent that removes dirt and infectious organisms like bacteria.”

“Oh,” Beck said, “Okay.”

“Tron if you could show them?” Alan-One requested, “I’m going to grab some spare clothes and towels for them.

“You can use some of my clothes for Rinzler,” Tron said, his tone once again back to being mild, “We’re the same size.”

“Thanks,” Alan-One agreed, “I’ll use some of Sam’s spares for Beck, they should fit okay.”

Tron nodded at this and then gestured for Rinzler and Beck to follow him. They did, although Rinzler’s attention remained focused on the cameras. Tron took them down the hall into a small room Rinzler had yet to go in. There was a sink like the one in the kitchen, but smaller, as well as a mirror, some sort of white chair, and a stall built into the wall.

“This is the shower,” Tron explained, opening the door to the stall, “You turn the water on by pulling this handle out and adjust the temperature by turning it left or right. Left is hot, right is cold.” Beck nodded along to this, while Rinzler only paid partial attention to it, but Tron wasn’t done, “this is the soap,” he said, pointing out one of several bottles that sat on a little shelf that hung down from the showerhead, “and both of you have short hair, so you can use Alan-One’s shampoo and probably don’t need conditioner. Shampoo is applied the same way as the soap, but just for your hair. Don’t use soap in your hair or shampoo for your body. Dry yourself off with the towels, they’re designed for that purpose and are especially absorbent.”

Beck volunteered to go first as Alan-One appeared and dropped off two stacks of clothes and two fluffy towels, pointing out whose was whose, although he also turned to Rinzler and said, “Don’t take my phone in the shower, it’s not waterproof and it’ll break.”

Rinzler let out a huff at that, annoyed by the prospect of being separated from the camera feed, but eventually nodded. At that point Tron shepherded everyone but Beck out of the bathroom and closed the door behind them.

When Beck was done he reappeared in the fresh clothes Alan-One had provided, his hair wet, but not drenched. “Your turn,” Tron said from where he’d been sitting on the couch opposite where Rinzler sat, “I’ll watch the cameras for you.”

A little surprised by the offer, Rinzler looked up and examined Tron’s face. He didn’t especially like or trust Tron, but he didn’t think Tron would actively sabotage them either, so he nodded and handed over the phone. Once Tron had accepted it and propped his elbow against the arm of the couch, watching the camera feed as he’d said he would, Rinzler stood up and headed back to the bathroom. 

He considered the room in more detail than he had before, now that he was no longer distracted, and had to quickly check the memory file from earlier to recall Tron’s instructions, but once he had, he followed them, stripping the used clothes off, then stepping into the shower and turning the device on. This was a mistake, because Rinzler had been expecting the water to be a reasonable temperature, but it wasn’t, it was cold as shit, icy in fact, and he let out a yelp and quickly shut it off. 

Apparently one was supposed to stand outside the shower while they adjusted the temperature. Rinzler cursed Tron under his breath, but stepped back out of the stall, dripping all over the tile floor, before again turning the water on and adjusting it. With that mishap out of the way, showering went fine, he read the instructions on the back of the soap and shampoo bottles, since Tron hadn’t provided information on their actual use other than just what went where, and then Rinzler went and got the floor even more wet as he stepped out and searched for where Alan-One had left the towel. 

He jolted when he looked up and caught his reflection in the mirror, before hesitating and looking back at himself. He’d never seen his own face, he’d only ever seen himself with the helmet on. Of course he’d known he’d be identical to Tron, and he was, but he finally understood why the Users had reacted so badly to his face. The scars were gruesome, the dark mark curling up from his jaw across his face, past his eye and nose all the way to the opposite side of his forehead, taking up almost half of his face in total. Rinzler touched the edges of it experimentally, but the twinge of pain he felt from it was warning enough not to touch it further.

After a second he let out a huff and dried himself off, using the towel on his drenched hair as well, although the towel ruffled it all up and left it sticking up everywhere. He’d left two large puddles of water on the floor, and after a second of consideration, Rinzler dropped the towel on the floor and let it soak up the water before hanging the wet towel on the bar beside where Beck’s now hung. He dressed, still very much not liking the User clothes. If he’d been in his grid suit in the aftermath of the explosion Cyrus wouldn’t have been able to stun him like he had, headbutting him like that would be much harder with nothing to grab onto, let alone the protection of the helmet. Even so, the grid suit was gone and the only thing left were Tron’s spare clothes. 

Rinzler scowled at his reflection in the mirror one last time, hating the clothes, before he turned and left the room. It seemed that Alan-One and Lora_Bradley had stepped out, probably checking the garage for parts that could be used in the laser, just from the way they’d been talking earlier and because the blueprints for said laser were still laid out on the coffee table. Beck clapped his hand over his mouth to stifle the bark of laughter that took him over when Rinzler reappeared in the living room and when Tron looked up at the sound and saw Rinzler, he also had to suppress laughter. Rinzler gave both of them a deeply unimpressed look, but Beck stood up and came over to him, then reached out to comb his fingers through Rinzler’s damp hair, fixing it when Rinzler hadn't thought to.

“There,” Beck huffed, “Better.”

Tron still had an amused look on his face, but he held Alan-One’s phone out to Rinzler, “Nothing on the cameras. You know they’re motion sensitive, they’ll send an alert if they catch anything.” Rinzler just scowled at him and snatched the phone out of his hand. He was perfectly aware of that, he’d read the user manual after all, but he was watching them because then he felt like he was actually doing something to find Cyrus, to find the Grid, rather than sitting on his hands and being useless. Watching the cameras gave him some tiny sense of control when he had no other avenues to pursue his goals.

It only took Sam_Flynn and Quorra half an hour to get the drinks they'd talked about and return to Alan-One’s residence. The two of them walked in, at which point Quorra sat down on the couch beside Tron and returned to her book, but Sam_Flynn set down a box on the coffee table in the small free space that wasn’t covered with blueprints.

“Your sustenance,” the User told him lightly, waving to the box. Rinzler looked up from the cameras and eyed it, but made no move to interact with it. Sam_Flynn just dropped down beside Quorra and turned on the television to something or rather, it was Beck who sighed and stood up, opening the box and pulling out a plastic bottle with words written all over it much like the jugs of creamer, but significantly smaller. Beck fiddled with it for a moment before he figured out that the cap twisted off, then returned to sitting on the couch beside Rinzler and offered him the drink.

Rinzler examined the drink without touching it, but Beck simply waited, ever patient with him. After a moment Rinzler accepted it, holding the drink and looking down at it, trying to decide what to do. CLU wouldn’t have wanted him to drink it, not when he’d failed the Grid, when he’d failed in his only purpose. CLU wouldn’t have allowed Rinzler anything until he’d corrected his mistakes. Those would be CLU’s orders, CLU’s intentions, CLU’s desires…and something in Rinzler’s code dug into him, his prime directive reasserting itself for the first time since CLU had died.

Obey CLU.

Rinzler set the open drink back down on the coffee table and returned his attention to the cameras. “You’re fucking kidding me!” Sam_Flynn cried.

“Rinzler you said it would be better!” Beck pleaded, visibly upset when Rinzler looked up at his face.

“It’s not,” was all Rinzler said and not just Sam_Flynn, but Tron as well, let out frustrated sounds.

Beck looked between Rinzler and the drink before he reached out and picked it up again. After a second he drank from it experimentally and then turned back to Rinzler, “It tastes good, you’ll like it, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Can’t,” Rinzler told him truthfully and Beck’s face fell.

“Why?” Tron spoke up, his tone suddenly sharp. “Why can’t you?”

Rinzler looked up at him, considering that question, whether he wanted to answer it. “You can tell us,” Beck spoke up, his voice pleading, his expression distressed. Something about that was unpleasant, he didn’t like seeing Beck make that face or sound like that when he talked, so Rinzler just let out a sigh.

“It’s in conflict with my directives,” he finally folded and explained, “I can’t do it.”

“What directives?” Tron pressed, his expression having gone from exasperated to concerned now that he knew Rinzler wasn’t just being arbitrarily difficult.

Again Rinzler looked up, considering Tron, before deciding to ignore him and return his attention to the cameras. Tron made a second, louder, frustrated sound, but Beck reached out and put his hand on Rinzler’s shoulder like he had done the previous night.

“Which directive is it in conflict with?” Beck asked him gently, “Maybe you can perform an override?”

“Prime directive,” Rinzler told him, caving again in the face of Beck’s kindness.

“How could drinking something be in conflict with protecting the Grid?” Sam_Flynn asked him.

“That’s not his prime directive,” Quorra answered for him, giving Rinzler a calm knowing look.

“Alan-One never changed that, did he?” Tron said, following Quorra’s logic, “So protecting the Grid is a secondary directive that you’ve defaulted to, your prime directive is to obey CLU isn’t it?”

Rinzler nodded his head shortly and everyone there let out a myriad of unhappy noises. “What about sleeping?” Beck asked him suddenly, “you haven’t been doing that either.”

“He hasn’t been sleeping?” Tron asked sharply and Beck shook his head, the rat.

“Is that also against CLU’s orders?” Sam_Flynn asked, “I don’t get it, why would he order you not to sleep or eat? Why is this happening now when he’s been dead for ages? You were fine before.”

Rinzler just let out a tired breath, but he didn’t answer either question, instead he stood up and left the room, taking Alan-One’s phone with him as he returned to the roof where nobody would try and interrogate him about something as painful as CLU’s orders. He stayed up there for the rest of the day, not even coming down when Alan-One called up to him at twilight. Beck appeared once dark had fallen, climbing the house as easily as Rinzler had and settling down on the roof beside him. 

“What do we do about this?” Beck asked him seriously, “What do we have to do for you to be able to eat or sleep?”

Rinzler let out a sigh and looked up at the moon rather than at Beck, “We have to save the Grid,” he replied, being honest with Beck when he’d have brushed anybody else off, “I can’t until we do.”

“Shoot,” Beck grumbled, “And we’re stuck waiting for him to trip one of the cameras…what if he never does? What if we were wrong and he’s not staying in any of those places afterall?”

Rinzler looked up at the night sky and listened to how his processors had started grinding at the thought, “I don’t know,” he admitted, “If this were the Grid I’d have options; I have personnel, I have contacts, I can do memory sweeps, I have access to street cameras and data trails and I have enough people to canvas the city, but I don’t have anything here, any of that, not even my weapons or vehicles work. I don’t know what else to do.”

Beck let out a breath and brought his knees up a little so he could rest his elbows on them, “Okay, well…I guess we’ll have to brainstorm tomorrow.” Rinzler just nodded, and Beck sat in silence with him for a while, keeping him company while he watched the cameras, but eventually he spoke up again, “I have to sleep, will you be alright up here? If it gets cold will you come back inside?”

“Sure,” Rinzler agreed without looking away from Alan-One’s phone. It would need to be charged soon anyway, the battery meter had turned red. 

“Okay,” Beck sighed and gave Rinzler’s shoulder a squeeze, “goodnight,” he said and dropped down from the roof to retreat back indoors.

Nobody came up with any ideas. There was a lot of arguing the next day and Beck stressed repeatedly how urgent this was, how Rinzler had had a significant percent decrease in power since coming to their world, how he didn’t have a lot of time left before he crashed, but even then they were out of ideas. Sam_Flynn and Quorra checked the arcade again, thinking maybe Cyrus had gone back in the hopes that he could bypass the encryption by putting the Grid back into its original home, but all the doors were still locked, the arcade undisturbed. Alan-One suggested they check and see if any programmers in the city had disappeared recently, but none had. No computer stores had been broken into, nothing stolen, nobody hurt, nobody gone, no trail, no trace of Cyrus or the Grid anywhere. Another day passed with no progress made and Rinzler could tell Beck was stressed, that everyone was stressed, but all Rinzler could do was watch the cameras, that was the only thing.

Things got worse as Rinzler still refused to eat or sleep. He’d told Beck that it didn’t matter after the second day, but at that point he was definitely feeling it. His processors were grinding constantly, every hour of every day, as he forced himself to function through exhaustion and low power, but he simply pretended he couldn’t hear it, even as everyone else became more and more panicked.

It was on day five that things really started to go downhill. Rinzler had been watching the cameras as obsessively as he had the entire time, this time on the couch while everyone else scoured news stations and online papers for any hint of Cyrus, only for Rinzler to see a flicker of gold cross one of the screens. He blinked and it was gone, but he brought that particular feed up and rewound it, searching for that split second flash of color, somehow a bright color in a camera feed that should have been completely grayscale. After going back over the entire remainder of the footage three times Rinzler couldn’t find it, he must have imagined it…although that unsettled him, because the fact that he might be seeing things was a very bad sign about the level of functionality he was at.

That had been the start. On day six Alan-One had taken Beck and Rinzler (and Tron) to a facility Alan-One had called ‘shopping mall’, claiming that if this was going to go on much longer they needed new clothes instead of borrowing all of Tron and Sam’s. Rinzler followed the User and Tron listlessly, exhaustion weighing his whole body down, slowing him, ripping apart his focus, while Beck walked beside him. Rinzler hadn’t lied when he’d said he’d stayed up for micros before, that he’d functioned without a sleep cycle for that long…but he’d had energy during that period, CLU had denied him both energy and sleep on more than one occasion, but never for more than a few millies, because Rinzler never let it go on that long, he’d always completed his goal and earned those privileges back before it became critical, before he started to malfunction…but now without both after so long, he could feel himself on the verge of malfunction, on the verge of failure.

He didn’t care about clothes, he cared about the Grid and this was time he could have spent watching the cameras. They passed an open area full of tables that was flanked by shops displaying pictures of User food, the space occupied by lots of Users all eating or talking. Rinzler tuned it out…only somebody laughed and the sound of it sent a shock of terror up his spine. Rinzler whirled around, looking for the source of the horrible familiar laugh, the laugh he’d heard a million times over his runtime, the laugh he could never mistake…but CLU was dead, he wasn’t there. Beck’s hand came down on Rinzler’s shoulder and the sound of his already grinding processors turned into a momentary screech of one surface being violently shredded against another. 

Rinzler didn’t move, didn’t react even to the sound of his own terror, because he was frozen, staring out across the crowd that didn’t contain CLU, that couldn’t contain CLU, because CLU was dead.

“Rinzler!” Beck shouted in his ear, causing Rinzler to start and turn to look at his friend, only to find Beck’s expression to be one of anxiety that was close to panic. Tron and Alan-One stood only a few feet away, their expressions also worried. “Are you okay?” Beck asked him urgently and Rinzler turned his head to look one last time for CLU, but he wasn’t there, so Rinzler just nodded and turned away.

“I’m fine,” he lied…and somehow he knew that Beck didn’t believe him.

Day seven came and Rinzler found himself tuning out the way the others talked, staring off into space and thinking of nothing. “ —you think, Rinzler?” somebody asked him, the sound of his name momentarily breaking through the fog that had consumed his thoughts. Rinzler looked up, expecting Beck or one of the others, but it was CLU standing in front of him, looking down at Rinzler placidly. Again there was a screeching noise from his processors and Rinzler found himself suddenly on the totally opposite side of the room, breathing hard, but when he looked, CLU was gone.

Somebody touched him and Rinzler jerked himself away, retreating, wrapping his arms around himself as if it would be enough to hold him together while he shook violently, but when his blurry vision focused, it was Beck who was there, his hands out like he was trying to calm Rinzler down.

“You’re okay,” Beck soothed, his voice even, despite how pinched his expression was.

“You need to sleep, you need energy,” Tron bit out from where he stood beside Beck, everyone suddenly on their feet when they'd all been sitting before, “You’re a wreck, you’re malfunctioning, and you’re low on power. At this rate you’re going to crash and soon. We have to find a way around this.”

Rinzler just shook his head violently. He couldn’t, he couldn’t! CLU would never have allowed it!

“What about removing that directive?” Sam_Flynn proposed, “We thought maybe it would be possible to edit the code on a disc, so we’d only have to figure out a way to sync it right?”

“No!” Rinzler cried, his voice cracking with panic. Alan-One had repaired him once, had changed his permissions, but changing his directives was entirely different. He couldn’t let it happen, he couldn’t.

Alan-One opened his mouth to say something, but Rinzler was afraid it would be an order, so he shouldered his way past both Beck and Tron and went out the door, retreating to the roof, where he stayed for the rest of the day and night even when Beck tried to coax him back down.

Rinzler didn’t remember any of day eight, all of it was just a blur of grinding processors, people talking over each other, and snatches of familiar gold that left him suddenly again on the roof at night. He stayed there anyway, unable to do anything else.

Day nine was even worse, at least with the previous day he’d had some sort of sense that something was happening around him, but he started out day nine on the roof at sunrise only to blink and find himself sitting under the streetlight in the dead of night, the sound of CLU laughing ringing in his ears.

The breaking point turned out to be day ten. Rinzler didn’t remember any of that either, but again he found himself outside in the dark, standing under the streetlight. He turned his head, trying to orient himself, to figure out how much time had passed with systems that were in the process of failing…but CLU was there, standing at the end of the street, a smile on his face. Rinzler shook his head, hoping to clear the ghost away. CLU’s dead, he reminded himself, and when he looked back, CLU was gone. Rinzler let out a breath, but when he turned, he froze, because CLU hadn’t gone, he’d just moved. He stood leaning against the side of Alan-One and Lora_Bradley’s house, his arms folded over his chest. When Rinzler said nothing, couldn’t say anything, CLU chuckled and pushed himself off the house, strolling over to Rinzler and reaching out to take him by the chin. Rinzler wanted to flinch, his body wanted to flinch, but he didn’t dare, he knew better, and so CLU held Rinzler by the chin, with not even Rinzler’s helmet there to protect him…not that it ever had in the past.

“I can’t say I approve of what you did, of your failure,” CLU said, a dangerous tone creeping into his voice in the last word, his smile dropping for a moment, and it was all Rinzler could do not to shiver in fear, however the smile reappeared after a moment and CLU went on, “but I gotta admit, buddy, you’ve been pretty good about following my rules…you know what you are, what I want…even when everyone else is trying to lead you astray.”

Rinzler said nothing, didn’t nod, didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, even as his processors shrieked like the inside of him was shredding apart, even if it felt like it was. “My question,” CLU hummed and slid the hand he’d been using to hold Rinzler’s chin further back. stroking the side of Rinzler’s face, barely ghosting his fingertips across the scar, only to take hold of his jaw and use his new grip to shake him a little, “is why you aren’t pushing harder, why you’re taking all these breaks, why you’re sitting around like this? So what if this is the User world? So what if you’re at a disadvantage? Are you going to just let the Grid go?” CLU’s expression darkened more and more with each question he asked until he was scowling and Rinzler had to lock all his joints to keep from quaking.

“Find the Grid,” CLU told him sharply, “You don’t get to give up, you don’t get to take breaks, you don’t get to rest, not until you’ve fixed your mistake.”

Rinzler said nothing, knew better than to speak, and CLU shook him again, “Unless you really are broken,” he hummed, a disarming, dangerous smile on his face, “Unless you really can’t be perfect. What do we do with ruined things, Rinzler?”

Again Rinzler said nothing, but CLU hadn’t been expecting him to, “We discard them,” CLU told him in a voice that was suddenly light, “I’d hate for you to really be broken, not when I can’t fix you anymore, not when I worked so hard to perfect you. Do you understand what I’m getting at here?”

This time Rinzler knew that CLU was expecting a response, so even as CLU held him by the jaw, he nodded minutely and CLU’s smile turned from dangerous to self-satisfied, “Good,” he crooned, “I knew I made the right choice with you, I knew you could be perfect, could be what I made you to be. Now go fix your mistake, hunt this program down and smash him to voxels, like he deserves, and don’t let anything get in your way.”

Rinzler dipped his chin again, lowering his eyes submissively, but when he looked back up, CLU was gone and he was standing alone in the middle of the nighttime street. Rinzler took a shaky breath, but nodded to himself. CLU was right, he’d waited too long, hadn’t been chasing this down come hell or high water the way he should have, the way CLU would have wanted. He was running critically low on power, he didn’t have much time left before he could no longer function, so CLU was right, he had to act now, while he still could. Rinzler took another shuddering breath, then turned and walked away from Alan-One and Lora_Bradley’s house down the street, looking for a vehicle he could use.