Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You’re a coward,” They say, staring at him through thick-rimmed glasses. Crazyblox stares back, hands braced on the bathroom sink, heart numbly sending pulses through the rest of him. They’re not glowing per-se – moreso just… iridescent – but light emanates from them as if they were.

They have his face. He doesn’t know what they are but they have his face. They look like him- not now, the other him, once. Or, her. That is, if you’d dipped them into a large vat of rainbow frosting. Doesn’t matter. What the hell?

“Huh? Hey,” They lean closer to the- to him, tapping on their side of it. “What? Something in your eye?”

He deliberates over his next words for a few seconds; he doesn’t even technically have eyes anymore, so he just assumes it’s a jab at… that.

“Who are you?” He says. It’s generic but it works. He lets his hands fall to his side as he straightens, assuming a more serious demeanor.

“Well, I’m you. I’d think you’d know that, but I guess you just don’t know yourself very well!” The thing in the mirror responds. They pull their glasses off and practically press their face to the mirror. Their glow intensifies, rainbow light shimmering onto the bare walls of the room.

Crazyblox sighs. “That doesn’t explain anything.”

They start to twirl their glasses, a finger through the frame where the lenses would go. “Does it? I think it explains plenty. You know me. And you know I’m right.”

“That I’m a coward.”

“Mmmhm.”

“I’m not going to argue with something that looks like the embodiment of bubble solution.” He crosses his arms, stepping back. “Get out of my mirror.”

“What? Me? But this is my mirror too, you know… I’m you! And you’re just proving my point-”

Crazyblox isn’t so emotionally volatile as to punch the mirror. He throws his sword at it instead.

“Wow, woah there-”

It cracks and shatters but they’re still talking, so he wrenches it out of the wall and slashes at the mirror again. The entire middle section shatters, shards flying everywhere.

The room is dim and sharp again, only lit by the cold light from the ceiling lamp. They’re gone. For now. Preferably forever.

Crazy unequips his sword and steps out the bathroom, slamming the door shut. He’ll deal with this mess later.

Chapter Text

He receives a notification in his inbox, one innocuous afternoon, as he’s working on a patch for the game.

It’s from Guide. The subject field reads: Maintenance Concerns .

Crazyblox hovers his finger over the message. It’s from Guide. It’s from Guide. Right, of course, he could send these. He’d left that enabled for himself only. For in case, well-

Guide has never contacted him through here . He reports whatever issues there are with the maps through their memoboard, and reports whatever else (like trespassers) through his informal alerts system. He reads it again. Then he reloads his panel, in case it’ll disappear once he does. It’s still there, text in bold and a little closed envelope icon beside it to indicate it’s unread.

He has an obligation to. He knows. Because he was an idiot almost a decade ago, and accidentally made something alive enough to look at him with hurt in its acrylic eyes. You’re a coward . He knows. He knows. You’re a coward.

Crazyblox hovers his finger over it again, hesitating before tapping briefly on the screen.

To Crazyblox, it starts. Polite, but with a distance more present than in Dear . Understandable. He must- gods, he must despise him-

There have been some issues with my code recently. I think it may be due to Roblox deprecating… 

Crazyblox quickly skims over the paragraph.

…Additionally, some of my mechanical components have began to fail. I am unsure on, and unable in some circumstances…

He wants to finish reading already.

…to fix many of these above issues. I would appreciate your assistance.

Oh.

Sincerely,

Guide

He taps the corner of the panel, tapping harder when it doesn't close.

It fizzles, then blinks out. Is he shaking? No; he must not be. What’s he supposed to do? What is he supposed to do? He hasn’t spoken to Guide- he’s never even seen him in person since the day after the Ruins rescue.  He’d promised himself back then that he would talk to him more. That no matter what or how terrified he felt, he’d explain, because gods did he owe it to him.

It didn’t happen.

At this, he also recalls suddenly that he has his face. Guide has his face. Crazyblox glances briefly around the room for mirrors. There are none; he’d moved them all out since the third incident. It’s obvious; of course he knows, he made him, but the idea now… unnerves him.

If it weren’t for Refraction, he would have forgotten his own face by now. What a wonderful thing it would be. Why did he have to go and make it look like him? What made him think it was anything remotely close to a good idea? He can’t look at another mirror of himself. He can’t. Is he shaking right now? Would he look sad? Angry? Would he look like nothing, and perhaps Crazyblox needs to stop projecting human emotions onto something that’s not?

Yes. That’s a good idea, isn’t it? Just forget about the Guide entirely. What differentiates him from the dozen he’d scrapped before? Nothing, really. He’d skimmed through his code and found nothing that could comprehensibly lead to- that. Maybe there was something in the jumble of unreadable spaghetti code that made him imitate life so closely. His chest feels tight even though he doesn’t even need to breathe, he hasn’t needed to breathe in years. Why would he? He’s practically a god now.

Crazy stumbles, dress shoes caught on a tile. He feels the sudden, exhilarating jolt in his stomach as he falls for a moment--

...

His wings whirr, and gracefully hover him to the ground.

So now Crazyblox is sitting anticlimatically on his tripping hazard floor. It doesn’t even have the decency to be cold, because the tiles are vinyl. He wants to fall. For once. He wants to slip and break something and have to spawn in a medkit with a shitty amateur Studio panel to fix it. He’s not shaking. He’s not shaking—

He feels pathetic, he feels childish, overcome by sentiment. This needs to stop. He needs to stop. What is he supposed to do?

—

“We knew it was coming.” Refraction says as soon as he pulls the tarp off the mirror.

“I didn’t-“

“I’m just saying! We totally did. You got the emails from Roblox, and all. Unless you actually didn’t learn your lesson about the concept of like, metal rusting.”

“I just didn’t think-“

“Aww. You didn’t think it would happen? Or did you conveniently decide to forget about it?”

Crazyblox shoots his eyesear color vomit copy a glare. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Well, then, what were you going to say?” They sit down on air, wings flexing before folding again. “I’m listening. Go on. Talk.”

“I can’t do it.” He says instead. “I can’t do it.”

“You can’t do it? Do what? Answer my question? Talk to him face to face?”

“ It. And you already know. You’re me, aren’t you?”

“Ahahah, so now he admits it.” Refraction says, exaggeratedly rolling their pinstripe eyes. “Come on, Crazy. Are you really putting your petty issues over-“

“That’s not what I’m doing, I just, I can’t -“

A small panel pops up beside him, buzzing. Navola is calling.

He tries to meet Refraction's stare, really. He tries.

“...It could be something important.” Crazyblox says, taking a step back, hand moving to hover over it.

Refraction's still staring at him. He can see them smiling in his peripheral.

“I know.” They say, as laughs begin to spill out. “I know.”

They say nothing else as Crazy takes another step back, then another out of the room, then slams the door and runs until he can’t hear him. Maybe he’s too far gone. Too far gone that not even the thing in the mirror believes he can change.

He really is a coward. He takes the call.

Chapter Text

It’s a nice evening. The facility’s closed for the day. Crazyblox combs a brush through her hair, turning her head in the mirror and glancing at it from a different angle. She likes how it looks; it’s shiny even in the bad lighting down here. She combs it through again; this time, it gets caught in the back.

“...Crazy? Is that you?” Guide says, from the doorway of the small workshop. His expression is polite and friendly, as always, though he certainly sounds confused. Huh. Since when was he able to do that? No, wait, he’s definitely been able to for a while. She should really stop questioning things like this by now. Probably something from the total mess of spaghetti (which makes up like, half of his unsurprisingly storage-intensive) code she still hasn’t touched.

Crazyblox turns, softly smiling. “Oh, hi Guide, yeah! I thought I’d… try out something new.” She still feels a little silly talking to an NPC like he’s a person, but it’s whatever. “You can come in.”

He walks over and stands beside her, bending over a bit to peer at the tiny mirror she’s propped on a toolbox. She brings the brush up again, running it from the top of her head all the way to the end of her hair in a satisfyingly smooth motion. Her head feels a lot heavier now, but she’ll probably get used to it soon. It really wasn’t too hard to modify herself; thank god for whoever made that beautiful tutorial.

Guide turns to look at her with his big ol’ beady camera eyes. “You look different. May I ask why?”

Okay. Well. How was she going to explain this?

“Well,” she says, “I guess I just wanted to.” Which isn’t a very good explanation at all.

A brief pause. She watches him back, slightly wary for… something.

“That makes sense.” He says, and she lets out an internal sigh of relief, turning back to her mirror. He, apparently, does too. 

She combs the brush through the back, where it again gets caught on the same knot of hair closer to her neck. Darn.

“There’s a lot more players recently, huh?” She says.

There’s a longer-than-human silence before he responds.

“Yes. Much more than last week.” A pause. “They’re nice.”

“Phew, awesome.” She says, “Remember, if-“

“…If I see any exploiters, rule-breakers, people being overly disruptive, or stuff ya know, I send you a message, and you’ll be right on over to take care of it with your awesome sword.”

That was word for word what she’d told him the last time! Well, she supposed he is a robot, but still. She didn’t know he was capable of sass like that! “Woah. That’s pretty impressive.”

He just stares at her like she’s asked him to find the meaning of life. Maybe not sass, per se. She stares back.

“…So, what did you think of the map I’m working on?”

“I liked it,” He says, “The music was nice. It was fun.”

Crazyblox can’t stop herself from smiling a bit, combing the side of her hair again. “Do you wanna sit down?”

Silence. She glances over at him; he’s frozen in place and looking confused again. Ah. This happened every so often. “Guide?”

“I don’t… know.”

“You can do whatever you want, you know.” Bad idea to encourage dubiously sentient AI to be more sentient, maybe, but she doesn’t really care.

“Would you like help brushing your hair?”

She pauses. That was unexpected.

“Sure,” Crazyblox says, handing the brush over to him. “Do you know how?”

“I saw you do it.” He says, taking it, then hesitating.

“You just, like, comb it through I’m pretty sure.”

He does. She lets out a small ow as it’s tugged through the clump at the back of her head.

“Sorry.” He says, pausing. Oh. Aw. That made sense, of course the NPC designed to be helpful and caring would care about that, but still. Aww.

“All good. Sometimes you just gotta power through it. Ya know?”

He doesn’t respond to that, but he makes the weird combination of the staticky buzz and a sudden expulsion of air from his vents that she’s come to recognize as a laugh.

He combs her hair, and they talk a bit.

WIP maps, some player who tried stealing his hat. Her recent frustrations on syntax errors, how his new arm joint is doing. Bits and pieces of everything going on. It’s… nice.

When they’re done, she props the small mirror up again. Guide crouches, tilting his body so his head’s in view too, just over her shoulder.

She grins at the mirror, baring a sliver of her front teeth. 

A few moments later Guide starts scrunching his face up too with a visible amount of effort. What the hell is he- Crazyblox can’t help but start laughing, almost knocking the mirror and a mug and her hat all off the table with how hard she slaps it. 

“I don’t get how you do it.” He says, leaning even closer to the mirror, shifting between his default smile and a blank expression several times.

Crazy chokes back another cackle. She loops one arm around his neck, reaching out and stretching his face into a smile with her fingers. He looks like some poor soul at the evil dentist. He looks like her. The silicon skin peels back to reveal the bits of the frame of his skull she didn’t bother to properly cover, oh gods.

Guide stares incredulously at himself for two whole seconds, before he bursts into laughter too. Crackles of loud static start to blare from his throat. His shoulders begin to shake so hard Crazy almost falls off her chair; that only renews her laughter, and she throws her head back as she starts full-on wheezing.

They quiet down after a good half a minute of giggling over stupid faces.

“You look happier,” Guide abruptly says.

Crazyblox nearly chokes on her breath. She looks up, back at him, through the mirror.

There’s tears in the corners of her eyes from laughing too hard, and her hair’s already a bit messy again. She’s not sure if he even fully gets it. She’s not sure if he’s even… alive.

Does it matter? No, she decides. No. It doesn’t. Not right now. She’s laughing with a coworker- a friend about dumb things that aren’t even that funny, and she feels happy.

Her eyes start to sting due to completely unrelated reasons. She gives the mirror another smile.

“Thank you, Guide.”

—

“Do you think I could have long hair too?” Guide asks one day, right before the facility is set to open.

Crazy glances over at him from her new monitor setup, letting out a soft huff of laughter. “Well, I don’t see why not.”