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The trash heap’s smiling away, victory handed to him on a silver platter. Even though he’s been beaten and torn down and he’s nothing but a washed up piece of fucking junk, somehow he still won. He won. And Spamton, even though he’s resigned himself to the fate he always tried to run away from, can’t help but seethe and rage and—
From the darkness comes twin blades. The arcs of them—blood red. If Tenna could bleed, Spamton’s sure there would be no way to see it against the red of his suit unless it dripped down the wickedly sharp things that cleaved into his shoulders, unless it spilled into the powdery snow.
Susie shouts Tenna’s name in anguish, and Spamton wishes he didn't know why she bothers to mourn him as his grinning face, happy and bright and everything Spamton’s used to be, cuts out into static. The whole world around him follows suit, like the sickening sight has leaked all over the place, but it's just Spamton; his system gets shocked into clarity, into something he’s sure he hasn’t been able to feel over anything except the loss of his own greatness.
Despair.
Grief.
Anguish.
Garbage noise, an approximation of a shout—it doesn’t get the chance to leave his nonexistent throat and get expelled into the world, just sits there caught up in the filters to disintegrate. Lifeless limbs drop into the powdery snow as Kris scrambles to take the glasses off of their face in the wake of suddenly being blinded by the digital version of what covers the ground.
The program is over. Static fades from Tenna’s screen. There's nothing left to air but the rainbow test pattern that means the stars have all gone and packed up for the day, paired with a blaring noise that imprints itself into the barely functional ROM of Spamton’s brain.
What’s left of Tenna is a sparking, pathetic mess, lying there prone like a puppet with his strings cut off. Fucking ironic.
Spamton should be happy. He should be elated that the man who betrayed him is finally dead.
He should be- he should- he—
Impulsive, Spamton goes down with him, hops out of Kris’ hand against their protests and transforms back into himself while they move ahead with their friends to face Tenna’s killer, who hovers menacingly against the black backdrop of the edge of the world. Kris can manage without a pair of funny looking glasses.
The snow is cold when he falls into it. The air freezes up the ball joints of his elbows and knees, his fingers too. He shivers, teeth chattering loudly but not nearly loud enough to drown out the sounds of fighting somewhere in the endless dark place where Kris and the others ran off to.
There’s no good reason why he didn’t just stay and help, why he’s here instead, kneeling down next to Tenna’s bulky head and shaking him in a desperate attempt to get this hunk of junk to wake up.
“H3Y, [[Teavee]], GET UP, YOU LAZY [[3 Peice Set]] OF [[$!?#]]!” he shouts at him, eyes scanning over the mess of Tenna splayed out everywhere.
Cleanly sliced wires snake from the open sockets of Tenna’s shoulders like errant spaghetti code. Spamton lifts a handful of them in his palms, lets them slip between his fingers hopelessly; there’s nothing he could do to fix them even if he tried. There shouldn’t be anything he wants to do except punch his tiny fist through Tenna’s cracked screen, rip out those stupid antennas of his, chew on his power cord ‘til it frays irreparably. Defile his corpse and leave him there to stink up this place with the smell of rotting glass and useless metal.
‘Just leave him,’ his shattered mind whispers, dressed in the voice of the one who had it all. Always has been. No matter how far Spamton spiraled, he somehow managed to hold onto that part of himself, for better or worse.
‘He’s useless.’
‘Outdated.’
‘Obsolete.’
‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’
Hands fly up to his temples like he’s got the world’s most devastating headache. His eyes squeeze shut. The voice filters through anyway because it lives inside of him. Echoes in his hollow shell.
‘Isn’t this what you deserve to see?’
Yes.
‘Isn’t this what he deserves for making you take that deal?’
YES!
…no.
For a split second, Spamton can say that with honesty, without a memory warped by ego and rage.
Tenna didn’t deserve to die this way.
Spamton has spent so long trapped within his own mind, by the confines of his base programming, by the unfairness of the role the world had in store for him and his insistence that the dying man in front of him is the sole cause of it all. Why now, then? Why is it right now, when Spamton should feel his biggest, that the corruption decides to clear completely, even if it’s only for a drawn-out, grueling moment?
“TENNA?!”
He shoves at a severed shoulder again. The body barely budges. Nothing.
“Tenna…?” A rare occurrence: Spamton’s voice is quiet, somber, an electronic whine in the back of his throat. He pulls his knees up to his chest, wishing he could just go to sleep and wake up at the bottom of a dumpster again, muttering the names of best friends and lovers who were long since stripped of those titles.
Maybe it’s minutes, or just a few seconds later, but the fighting stops. Spamton can’t tell who won, but he hopes it’s not that thing with the blade that can cut through metal and wires and take down someone like Tenna in one fell swoop. Nobody comes back. The footsteps that crunch through the snow head deeper into the darkness until they can’t be heard anymore.
He and Tenna are alone.
He’s alone with a corpse from his tragic past.
Retreat is easier than reality right now, and so he lets himself slip into that place inside his psyche where it’s nothing but white noise and regret, pink and yellow of his glasses fading to black.
Something touches him.
There isn’t even anyone there, but in the cold darkness, with stars sparkling above and the gushing pillar of the fountain in the distance, something touches Spamton’s leg, and he jumps at the static electricity that invades his plastic shell from the light contact as he’s bathed in a dim, flickering test screen glow.
Kris’ busted old TV’s still got a little bit of juice left in it, after all.
Tenna hasn’t got arms to reach out with right now, so the dented tips of his antennas must be the next best thing. The caress he gives is gentle, weak. It reminds Spamton of simpler times: a green room, a dressing room not meant for two, a high rise executive office in the middle of a bustling city. Touches meant to comfort, initiate, doubling as an extra layer of analog sensation unique to Tenna’s outmoded construction. He’s sure that whatever Tenna is smelling on him with those feelers of his isn’t pleasant—nothing but trash on top of trash from the deepest depths of Cyber City’s garbage cans—but he doesn’t seem to give a damn.
A broken noise that’d make Spamton’s chained-up heart shrivel in sympathy if he were capable of such a thing escapes Tenna’s mouth before it manages to form into an actual word.
“Spamton…?” Tenna croaks out, splintered, his head lifted slightly to look directly at his unsure company. He sounds like he’s been gargling the shards of glass that have fallen off his dimly lit screen to mix with his pathetic show of tears and become indistinguishable with the sparkling snow, and Spamton recoils, doesn’t know how to process the way that those two syllables manage to take him back to the moment before he lost his shot at having it all. As if it weren’t already gone by the time he’d woken up in a body that was never supposed to be his. As if by the time he realized there was more to life than his endless bitstream of greed and feeding his bloated ego, there was still a chance.
Spamton is surrounded once again by reality-warped bricks the color of that fleeting glimpse he had of the sky through invisible glass, of haphazard suns and clouds he won’t be able to reach.
It scares him.
He has no time to dwell on it, though; Susie, battered and bruised, blood and snow clinging to her more-disheveled-than-usual mane, comes rushing back from the dark to kneel by Tenna’s side and save his sorry ass from shutting down entirely.
Whatever happened up there between those kids and the thing they fought, Spamton hesitates to call it victory.
Susie’s movements scream desperate as she tries to figure out what to do with Tenna, just as helpless as Spamton was when he saw the state he was in. She looks like she might cry if Spamton didn’t already know that she’s tougher than an overdone tracking cookie despite being twice as sweet. More Darkners filter in from the abandoned studio to see what all the chaos was about not too long after, and that’s when things get too high above his pay grade.
It’s easy for Spamton to pretend he doesn’t exist once it gets too crowded and stay away from the commotion, almost painful how little it takes for him to fade obscurely into the background. E-mail gets overshadowed by nostalgia to the point of being forgotten. He loathes it: the resurgence of good old fashioned, useless fucking television.
The same people who left Tenna behind when he got too big for his britches, crashed out with the same desperation that has plagued Spamton for years: they’re all…here. For him. Gathered around that good-for-nothing criminal’s broken body, all his former employees scramble to reattach his arms, patch up his antennae, repair the cracks in his screen that his pathetic tears still seep through. Susie’s perched up on his shoulder. Her hands tremble even as she tries to keep them steady enough to weld Tenna’s left arm back into its socket while some minions lift it up to the right height.
She actually cares about that old boob tube.
Every single one of them do.
Spamton seethes, jealousy rising up in his chest at the sight. No one—not a single goddamn person except the ones who Tenna had stolen away—ever helped him when he fell flat on his ass. Not the first time when he was just the e-mail guy trying to be like the other Addisons. Not when Queen booted him out onto the streets. Not even when his plan to become NEO backfired and left him stranded in the dark until his program had restored itself to his original body.
But the trash heap gets it all.
What the hell does he have that Spamton doesn’t?
He can do stupid dances and ad-libs and hold people hostage! He can have the entire world at his disposal, minions at his fingertips! Or at least—he used to. But he tried to see too far, he trusted the wrong people, and he lost it.
Sparks fly off Susie’s welding gun, bright like the sun he once wanted to let blind him.
Spamton stands there shivering in the snow. He takes the easy route. He lets the scene in front of him make him sick to his stomach, and pretends like he doesn’t know the answer to one of the most threatening questions of his life.