Chapter Text
“Hey, guys, I found your boy,” Claire says. “Get here like, yesterday, alright?”
Chuck looks different, when they get there—not yesterday, but pretty darn fast. Mike expected him to look different—it’s been two months—but he was thinking more like, beaten, starved, gaunt and terrified in a little white cell, curled up small with terror. Mike was going to break down a door and pull Chuck into his arms and— and—rescue him.
Instead, they find Chuck standing tall, healthy, and smiling up in one of the top floors of the Executive Tower, where Claire had just gotten some kind of data entry job and, apparently, come face to face with the Burner they’ve been going completely nuts trying to find. He’s got a foam tray of KaneCo Stimulus Beverages in one hand, a Stimulus Beverage Infusion Unit tucked under his other arm, and is having by all appearances a perfectly cheerful conversation with Claire, who’s pulled out all the stops to keep him occupied by putting her hand on his elbow.
Claire’s eyes go wide when she sees Mike and Dutch approach, and she makes some kind of complicated facial expression that Mike doesn’t know her well enough to read. She’s still distracting Chuck, for some reason, and pulls his arm against her chest to keep him from turning and looking at them. She makes an even more emphatic facial expression at Mike, this time with grimacing.
“...Chuck?” Mike asks, hesitantly, and Claire drops her face into her free palm.
Chuck glances back over his shoulder, and the smile drops straight off his face when he sees Mike and Dutch. Chuck’s eyes go really wide. Mike can see this because someone at some point gave him a haircut.
“Oh, man, what,” says Dutch.
He screams— that’s familiar, at least— and throws the Stimulant Beverages at them. Mike dodges, but hot blue liquid spatters Dutch and coats the white floor. Chuck spins on his heel, grabs Claire, and takes off running, still screaming. Claire screams too, in outrage, but Chuck’s screaming for help.
“Chuck,” says Mike, completely lost now.
“Well, this is going great,” Dutch says, wiping his face. “C’mon, they must have messed with his head, Claire was trying to tell us! We gotta stop him before he gets Security!”
“Right. Right! Yeah, after him!” Mike activates his staff and races down the corridor. Chuck’s shoved himself against an elevator at the far end, and he jams the call button frantically. It opens just as they reach him, and he makes the mistake of darting inside. Dutch and Mike jump in, too, and grab at him. Claire screams again, struggling to get out of the way.
“Sorry!” Mike yells, dodging a lethal high heel.
“I hate all of you!” Claire yells.
Chuck pushes Claire into the corner of the elevator and puts himself in front of her, nearly crying with terror, then knees Dutch in the gut, breaks the Infusion Unit against the wall of the elevator, and tries to glass Mike in the throat. It’s so startling that he actually gets in a glancing cut across Mike’s jaw, and he yelps. Dutch grabs Chuck’s upper arms, squeezing him tightly, and has to duck his head down against Chuck’s shoulder to keep from getting his nose broken as Chuck rams him hard against the elevator’s wall.
Mike hits first floor on the elevator, and gets kicked in the shin. He has to grab for Chuck’s legs and gets kicked in the chest for it.
“Did we bring any, uh—any rope?” he gasps.
“Where do you think I’d keep rope!” Claire screams.
“Not you! Dutch!”
“Man! No!” Dutch snaps. “This was supposed to be a rescue mission, not a kidnapping!”
Chuck’s screams get a lot more frantic. Mike gets kicked in the gut.
“Man, if he fought like this before—” Dutch wheezes. The elevator dings.
Everyone but Claire piles out, dripping blood and Stimulus Beverage. Chuck twists like an enormous feral cat, makes about the same noise, and nearly tears free. There’s Kane Co. employees wandering around the lobby, and several guards. Mike and Dutch snuck in through the cleanbot vents, instead of trying to pass themselves off as Deluxe citizens, and so they’re wearing their regular Motorcity clothes plus a layer of dust, ash, stimulant beverage, and blood. Everyone stares.
“IT’S THE BURNERS,” Chuck screams. “HELP US!”
A lot of laser guns get drawn. Chuck bites Dutch on his bare arm.
“Man!” says Dutch. “Forget this!”
He draws his omnitool and electrocutes Chuck in the head.
“Dutch!” Mike protests.
“He was crazy!” Dutch yells, and slings a moaning, twitching Chuck over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. “Come on, let’s beat it!”
They make it outside, Dutch leading, Mike holding the rear, and then Stronghorn roars up between them and the pursuing guardsmen. They pile in the passenger side and slam the door. It’s a tight fit: Dutch was supposed to hitch a ride with Julie, but she’s been held up on the other side of town.
“What happened?” Julie demands over the comms. “Are you guys okay?”
“Texas saved the day, Janice!” Texas crows. “I totally did, didn’t I? You ladies were toast.”
Dutch makes an offended noise, but Mike cuts him off with, “Yeah, Texas, good job. Julie, tell Claire we owe her one. A big one.”
Stronghorn goes screaming off, Texas ramming security vehicles gleefully out of the way the whole trip back to the Motorcity access pipe.
Mike holds Chuck tightly to his chest the whole way, just in case he wakes up and tries to kick Texas or something.
*
He doesn’t really come to until they’re back in the hideout, and he’s laid out across the folding cot in the recovery room in a mess of long, randomly twitching limbs. He looks so wrong in Kane Co. colors, even whole and healthy, he looks... erased.
“Where... what happened?” he moans.
“Hey, buddy, how’re you feeling?” Mike asks, trying to be gentle and soothing and not overjoyed. He helps Chuck sit up.
“Am I... what...who’re... ?” Chuck mumbles, looking around like his eyes aren’t focusing. “Th... th’girl...”
“Claire’s fine. She’s safe.”
“Nnh. Where... ‘m I?”
“You’re safe too, now. You’re back in Motorcity.”
“Oh!” says Chuck. Then he sits up, grabs the nearest tray of scavenged medical supplies and bashes it over Mike’s head. It’s mostly aluminum and plastic, so it doesn’t really hurt, but it startles him into grabbing for Chuck’s bony wrists, and then Chuck thrashes off his cot, kicks it over, knees Mike in the gut, and bites his ear.
“Ow! Chuck, cut it out!”
Chuck does not cut it out. Chuck fights like an insane, desperate whirlwind of elbows and teeth, screaming at the top of his lungs. Jacob rushes into the room and Chuck manages to get an arm free of Mike’s joint lock in order to throw an old bone saw clear across the room and clock Jacob in the face, luckily with the handle. Jacob curses, dives to the side, ducks several more thrown tools and the cot’s pillow before he can grab up a tray and start using it as a shield.
“Well at least we know the part of his brain that aims still works,” he grouses, circling around them.
Mike gets Chuck in a better joint lock, one that works on best friends who are apparently double jointed or something, and jerks his head to the disparate jumble of bottles that might generously be called a medicine cabinet. “Do we have any, I don’t know, any sedative?”
“Third shelf,” Jacob says. “Won’t knock you out, but it’ll slow you down.”
“Sure, great, anything, let’s go!” Mike growls. Chuck bucks viciously underneath him, and Mike thinks he’s going to start tearing muscle if he keeps going like this. It’s not the same red-eyed reckless, fearless mania as the booster, Chuck’s clearly scared out of his mind, but the effect is the nearly the same. Chuck’s not much fun to fight.
Jacob goes and rummages through the shelf before finding a little bottle and a syringe.
“Hold him,” he warns, and approaches cautiously.
Chuck sees Jacob coming with the needle, and his screaming turns into terrified sobbing. He makes a final, horrible effort to throw Mike off of him, his shoulders straining against themselves, before Jacob pins his head down and sinks the needle into the throbbing vein exposed along his neck.
Chuck winds down gradually as the drug takes hold, his wild cries trailing off into a weak, ugly, hopeless whimpering. When Mike cautiously lets him out of the joint lock, Chuck rolls blearily over onto his front and tries to crawl towards the door.
Feeling sick, Mike grabs the back of his pale Deluxe shirt, and Chuck stops being able to make any more forward progress. His big hands squeak as he paws at the old linoleum.
“This is bad,” Mike says to Jacob. “This is... really bad. What happened to him? What did they do?”
“I don’t know, kid. He was up there for awhile. Could have been anything. He didn’t recognize you, did he?”
“He called us Burners,” Mike says. “But he didn’t really know us. I don’t think he really remembers he’s one of us right now.”
“Hmmn, well. Look how short his hair is, back here...” Jacob runs his fingers through the short fuzz of Chuck’s new haircut, and pauses at the base of his skull. “Yeah, there’s some fresh scarring, looks like.”
“They cut up his brain!? ”
“No. Isn’t big enough for that. Plugged something into the base of his skull, maybe. Could have been a shunt, a wire... seems like they must have tried to scramble him up, induce amnesia, something like that. No saying how much damage they did yet, kid. Sorry.”
“Oh, man. Oh, Chuck.”
Jacob heaves the cot back upright, and Mike drags his feebly-struggling best friend back onto it. Jacob rummages around the mess until he finds some spare seatbelts, and comes back to cinch them tightly around Chuck’s wrists and legs. Chuck wheezes with fear as Mike helps, and it makes him feel like a traitor—especially when his eyes keep catching on red impact marks that are already darkening into bruises across Chuck’s skin.
He’s got so many more freckles, now. The fancy full-spectrum lighting and freely available sunlight up in Deluxe has scattered intricate constellations of dark spots all around the old white burn scars on his arms. They’re spread densely across his cheeks, scattered down his throat, even peppered across the stretch of his stomach where his struggling has rucked up his stupid colorless Deluxe shirt.
“Please,” Chuck moans, and Mike’s attention snaps back to his face. His eyes are wide and wet with tears. “Please, lemme... lemme go. Lemme out. Please, I... I don’t...” he blinks, tries to focus. “‘M’not anyone. Not... I don’t, I’m no one, lemme go.”
“You’re Chuck,” Mike says helplessly. “You’re my friend, you’re one of us.”
“Nnn.” Chuck shakes his head, his eyes narrowing into a glare. “You’re. You’re him, you’re that... Chilton, that... guy.”
“Yeah, I’m— yeah, buddy, I’m Mike. I’m your friend.”
“Burner scum,” Chuck snaps, with such intense hatred that Mike recoils. “Lemme go!”
“Okay, okay,” Jacob says. There’s a rising lump on his forehead, but he looks determined. “Everybody calm down!”
Chuck rolls onto his side, eyes wide, bound hands pulled up to his chest. Jacob lowers his voice again, as gentle as his hoarse voice can be.
“Okay, kid,” he says. “Tell us what you remember.”
“What I…?” Chuck sniffs hard, obviously still struggling to focus. “I don’t know anything.”
“Whatever you remember is cool,” Mike says earnestly, and then winces as Chuck shoots him another venomous glare. “Dude, just talk to us. We need to know—”
“I don’t care!” Chuck’s voice cracks. “I don’t care what you need to know, I—I don’t know anything, and even if you torture me I don’t have anything I can tell you, and, and—”
Mike can’t help himself. He reaches out again, but Chuck just flinches back, lip curling, hands trembling.
“Sorry!" he says. "Dude, we’re not gonna torture you! We’re not like that, we don’t hurt people.”
“Yeah right, ” Chuck mumbles, and glances pointedly down at the bruises their hasty rescue/kidnapping left on his skin. Mike opens his mouth to argue, but he can’t find any words. We had to and It was for your own good and You’ll thank us when you’re better all sound fake, even inside his own head.
Jacob lays a hand on Mike's arm and leans back, kneading his knuckles into one temple like the pressure can ease the headache that’s pounding persistently behind his eyes.
“Look, kid,” says Jacob to Chuck. “We ain’t gonna ask you about any Deluxe secrets. We just want to know about you. If you’re as ‘nobody’ as you figure you are, no harm in that. Right?”
Chuck’s eyes flicker from Jacob to Mike. “...I’m not talking to Chilton,” he says, almost testing, like he’s seeing how far he can push. Jacob glances apologetically at Mike, who fists his hands at his sides in helpless frustration.
“Dude, just—” for a second he has to stop, because Chuck is just watching him, hateful and terrified and wrong. “—just stop calling me that, okay?”
“What should I call you?” Chuck manages to pack a lethal amount of contempt into the words. “Mikey ?”
The tone is completely wrong, but the sound of the nickname still pulls Mike upright, eyes widening. “I—yeah! You used to—”
“I didn’t used to anything with you,” Chuck cuts over him, still in that heavy, biting tone of voice. “I do basic fetch jobs for the Kane Co Executive Tower and I don’t know who you think I am but I’m not! I’m telling you, I’m nobody. Especially not this... other guy you think I look like, or whatever. Whoever that poor sucker was.”
“Chuck,” says Mike. “He was— you’re— do you have a different name, now?”
Chuck sneers at him. “No, that’s my name. You kidnapped me because of a coincidence!?”
“No, you’re him! You’re my— you’re our Chuck, we were rescuing you!”
“You’re crazy!” Chuck yells at him, his voice cracking. “You’re crazy, and a traitor, and a criminal, and I won’t give you anything you want!”
Jacob gives a long, heavy sigh. “...he ain’t in a talkin’ mood,” he says, more to Mike than Chuck. Chuck sniffs again, eyes wet, twisting his wrists against the unforgiving edges of the belts. “You should call up that Claire girl, see if she knows anything she—”
“ What?! ” Chuck sits up, distracted from his groggy escape attempts, horrified. “No! Leave her alone!”
“Dude!” Mike cuts over him, alarmed by the sudden fresh surge of fear in Chuck’s voice. “We’re not gonna hurt anybody! She’s still up in Deluxe, she’s fine! ”
Chuck stares at him. “Still…” he blinks, slow and still dizzy with whatever Jacob injected. “But…” and then his expression shifts abruptly from confusion to bitter realization. “Oh. Oh. ”
“Uh...buddy?” Mike hazards, because that’s not an expression Chuck usually wears when he’s thinking about Claire. “You okay?”
“Stop calling me that,” Chuck spits. “She was one of you! How many of you are there?!”
“She’s a friend,” says Mike, startled. “You should know how many of us there are, bro, come on.”
“Like I pay attention to how many criminal pieces of garbage are down in this toxic pit! ” Chuck yells at him, and Mike takes a sharp step back, kind of overwhelmed by the horror of Kane’s propaganda coming out of his best friend’s mouth.
“Mike. Get your head on straight, he doesn’t know us right now,” Jacob tells him, slow and clear like he’s talking to somebody who’s mostly deaf and totally stupid, and Mike just shakes his head because— because yeah, okay, but— but no.
“This is Motorcity,” Mike says, leaning in, taking one of Chuck’s bound hands. “You’re free now and we’re your friends. That’s all you have to know.”
Chuck looks him in the eye for a moment that makes Mike’s breath catch in his throat, his eyes dark, his lips just a little parted.
Then he yanks Mike in by their joined hands and tries to bite his throat out. He gets a mouthful of Mike’s jacket collar and hangs on tightly, scrabbling with his tied hands to get a better grip, and Mike is tangled up and frantic not to hurt Chuck any more and the cot is tipping over again. Jacob piles in, strips Mike out of his jacket, and shoves him forcibly towards the door.
“But—” Mike protests, and Jacob shoves him again. Chuck is screaming.
“Get out, kid!”
“Are you—”
“There’s more sedative. I’ll let you know how it goes. Now scram.”
Mike scrams. Wanders up to the counter outside Jacob’s kitchen and sits on one of the stools, watching the neon flicker over the paintings, his elbows on the counter and his hands linked over the back of his neck, one palm against where Chuck almost got him, and he tries to stop shaking. It’ll be okay. It will all be okay. It has to be okay.
*
When Jacob finally comes and finds Mike, what feels like hours later, his expression is really not okay at all.
“Well, so,” Hh sighs, and sits on the stool next to Mike, looking old and tired. “He doesn’t know much of anything anymore and what he does know, Kane put in. He’s not in any kind of mood to cooperate with us now, so I think we’ll have to keep him in the Holding Cell ‘til he simmers down some.”
“The what?” Mike demands.
“That old storage room towards the back, you know? Used to use it back when I did a lot more direct work with people coming down from Deluxe. Most of them were just good folks tryin’ to get free. Some of them were... Kane’s men.”
“Oh.” Mike feels his shoulders droop. “Did you, uh. What did you do with them?”
“Eh, this and that. It depended. But having an empty room with a steel jacket and locks on the outside of the door sure saved my bacon a time or two! Come on, let’s go see what shape it’s in. Think I’ve been keeping my pickles in there for a couple’a years.”
*
Jacob has been keeping pickles in the room, and the air smells like dust, and vinegar, and something weirder and moldier. There’s a flat light sunk into the ceiling—the switch for it is outside in the hall— a cot built into the wall that's covered in dozens of dusty pickling jars, a toilet, several tattered bags of dirt and fertilizer stacked in a corner, and basically nothing else.
“Well, it’s been awhile,” Jacob says ruefully, scratching his beard. “Not so bad, though. Go haul the dirt off to the growing floor and come back with a broom and the other boys. I’ll move these jars to the kitchen. We’ll get it all cleaned up in no time.”
The Burners are all conscripted to help, which is good, but all they want to talk about is what’s up with Chuck, which is bad. Mike keeps his head down as much as he can, but he’s the guy who was there when Chuck woke up and he’s the one everybody addresses their questions to.
“He really doesn’t remember us at all?” Dutch asks, sweeping up dirt and desiccated pickles. “But you two are like, the original Burners. How could he just forget?”
“I don’t know,” Mike says, for probably the hundredth time. “It’s something Kane got his scientists to work on, I guess. Maybe they’re going to try and make everyone forget Motorcity. We can get Julie on it, have her try and dig up whatever she can.”
“I know what happened,” Texas says confidently. “It was in Ninja Clown Street Fighter 3. Rex Twelvepack got punched in the head by that guy with the sharks for hands and it like, turned his brain off. When he woke up he thought the sharkpunch guy was his dad. So—HWA-CHAH!” He punches the pillow on the cell’s cot. “He went around fighting the Ninja Clowns all movie, because like, he got told the bad guys were the good guys, and the good guys were the bad guys. You know? Like that. Hwah!” He punches the pillow again, then kicks the toilet.
“Don’t break that, man,” says Dutch. “So is Chuck evil now?”
“No!” Mike snaps.
“Yeah, no, he just thinks he’s a shark, probably,” Texas says. “We gotta get another shark and punch him with it, to like, reset him. Like a computer. That’s how they did it in the movie.”
“We’re not punching Chuck with anything,” Mike says firmly. Texas rolls his eyes, but maybe something in Mike’s expression clues him in on how Mike is feeling because for a long time after that, there’s no conversation at all.
When the cell’s finished, it doesn’t look... so bad. It’s clean, at least, warm and well-lit, with the sheets and pillows from Chuck’s usual bed transferred over to the cot, and a stack of his favorite old fantasy paperbacks waiting in the corner. There was a ventilation fan in the ceiling, so Dutch went ahead and put in a quick mural of blue ghosts and yellow roses that wraps around the four small walls, which maybe makes the room seem smaller and busier but also infinitely different from Deluxe’s sterile living cubes. It’s not homey, but it doesn’t exactly scream torture dungeon.
Except for the thick steel grating that serves as a door, and locks from the outside.
Mike hates it. Chuck’s been kept tied up and sedated the whole time, and Mike hates that, and when he and Texas and Dutch all drag Chuck into the cell and lock the door, Chuck hates them. He leans back against the far wall, still in his stupid white Deluxe shirt, clearly too dizzy to keep his feet but still glaring poisonously.
“You can’t do this to me,” he snarls.
“Uh, chyeah, we just did,” says Texas, folding his arms proudly.
Chuck lurches forward and grabs the grating of the door, rattling it viciously. Mike and Dutch jump back, though Texas doesn’t even flinch.
“This is a mistake, you Burner vermin made a big mistake!” he yells. “You grabbed the wrong guy, and when I get out of here, you’ll be sorry! I’m gonna— I’ll— gut you, and skin you, and put your heads on stakes!” The threat should be funny, it’s so over-the-top, but he’s using the same strange, sure tone as his Lord Vanquisher voice and when he meets Mike’s eyes some small scared part of Mike realizes oh crap, he’s serious. He wants you dead. Mike’s stomach twists, sick and cold.
“You’re not going anywhere until you’re not a bad guy anymore,” says Texas. “Not that I don’t think you’re kind of a lot cooler like this.”
“I’ll kill you!” Chuck screams, and rattles the bars again. “I’ll chop you all into bits and take those bits back to Mr Kane and he’ll throw them off his tower!”
“I’d like to see you try!” Texas laughs. He looks over his shoulder. “No, seriously, Mike, can I have the keys?”
“No!” Mike says. “Chuck, you’re staying in there until we can all figure this out. Texas, stop working him up.”
“It’s like the only workout he’s ever gotten, though. Boom! Texas put-down!”
“Texas!” Mike snaps. “Take a walk!”
Texas scoffs, then makes a big show of strutting off down the hallway.
“You want first watch?” Mike asks Dutch. “I mean. If you don’t, I can...”
“Naw, man, you get out of here, too.” Dutch waves him off.
He turns to go and Chuck screams “ Chilton!” Rattling the bars again, “Chilton, don’t you— don’t leave me here! Don’t you WALK AWAY, BURNER SCUM, LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT OF HERE!”
He doesn’t mean to look back, but he does, at the end of the hall. Dutch has his arms wrapped around himself, his body once big wince, and Chuck’s glaring straight into Mike’s eyes. His hair is short and his face is twisted with fury and his teeth are bared in a horrible snarl. Mike stands frozen for a long second, staring, and Chuck glares back at him with nothing in his expression but pure, unadulterated hate.
Mike doesn’t look back again, all the way to Mutt, all the way to the darkest, emptiest outskirts of Motorcity at a three-hundred miles an hour.
*
When Nine Lives comes roaring into the garage and Julie hops out, everybody is out in the garage working. There’s been a suspicious shortage of bots in the two days since they rescued Chuck, and that by itself would be more than enough to get Mike riled up. But with Chuck locked up in his cell, still railing at anybody who gets close, Mike is already bouncing off the walls. Working on Mutt distracts him at least a little, but not enough. Everybody looks up, eager for any new distraction, as Julie rolls in.
Mike manages to act like he’s focusing on Mutt for all of forty seconds, and then Julie gets out of Nine Lives and starts to head toward him. Mike straightens up immediately, wiping his hands.
“What’s up?”
“Don’t get too excited,” Julie says. “Kane’s been, uh... He’s got a lot of his people on short leashes. He’s pretty freaked out about how you guys can just pop up and abduct someone from a really high-level Executive Tower, you know?”
“You did all the work of getting us in,” Mike says, wanting to give credit where it’s due. She just rolls her eyes at him, though.
“Yeah, sure, but I can’t exactly tell him why I’m not the next kid on the kidnap list, right?”
“Oh. Right.” Mike feels kind of dumb. “If you ever need us to get you out, though—”
“You’ll be the first filthy gang of criminal lowlifes I call, sure.” She smiles, and Mike smiles back, even though her Kane impression is always kind of unnerving. It doesn’t feel great on top of what Chuck’s been yelling at them for days, either.
“So, what did you find on Chuck?” Dutch asks. “I mean, did you get anything?”
“A little bit. I’ve been trying to infiltrate R&D as best I can in what free time I’ve got left, but I’m not really supposed to be there, it’s kind of a boy’s club and it’s really really classified. It’s not like I can just ask some guy, ‘so, hey, which way to the brainwashing lab!’ And trying to get in digitally is even harder...”
She hops up and sits on Mutt’s hood. “...Is Chuck getting any better?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” Mike runs his hands through his hair. “He just yells stuff at us. Sometimes he kind of sounds like Lord Vanquisher.”
“Who?”
“You know, his— his LARP character. He would put on this voice to sound, I don’t know, regal. Commanding. This Chuck does it too, when he isn’t, uh, screaming. He makes demands. It’s kind of funny.”
Julie frowns. “It doesn’t sound very funny.”
“Yeah, it... okay, it isn’t, actually.”
They sit in silence for a little while after that. Texas goes back to working on Stronghorn, and Dutch buries his arms in Whiptail’s engine block, murmuring quietly to ROTH.
“We are gonna fix this,” Julie says finally. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah.” Mike smiles, but it feels weird and fake. “Yeah, course I do.”
“Well you’re not gettin’ anywhere until he’ll talk to us,” Dutch says pragmatically, and holds out a hand. ROTH slaps a wrench down into it. “Thanks, bud. He’s not exactly in a listening mood, dunno if you noticed.”
“He’ll come around,” says Mike.
*
Four days later, Chuck has not come around.
He’s mostly worn out his voice, which is...good? Kind of good, because he can’t really scream at them anymore. He still makes dramatic, overblown death-threats when anyone gets too close, with increasingly impressive variety and creativity, but now he does it in an exhausted, raspy half-yell instead. Mike tries not to get him worked up, and waits eagerly for his buddy to stop being so freaking ticked off so they can just talk already.
What comes after the screaming, violent rage turns out to be even worse. Chuck just... shuts off. He stops coming up with gory B-movie threats and goes all quiet and despairing and doesn’t respond to anything. Just sits all curled up in his blankets in the corner to the left side of the door, the one that's hardest to see. Sometimes, and worst of all, Mike edges up to the grating door and hears the soft, broken sound of his best friend crying, on the other side of the door but miles away.
“I don’t like it,” Texas tells him when Mike comes to relieve him on guard duty, the third day of the Crying Phase. “It’s weird, and he’s gotta stop.”
Which, translated from Texas-speak, means he’s just as worried and upset about this as Mike is. Mike claps him on the shoulder in mute commiseration and takes up his position by the door.
There’s silence for a long time—ten minutes, maybe fifteen—and Mike is just starting to zone out into that twitchy, mindless state he gets into when he’s bored when there’s a faint noise from inside.
“... Mike? ” says Chuck, very, very softly.
It’s the first time since they brought him back he’s said Mike’s name without any sign of fear or anger. Mike whips around, staring through the bars, but he can’t see Chuck; he must still be huddled by the door.
“Mikey ?”
It’s such a relief to hear him say that again, even thick and soft and choked with tears. Mike opens his mouth and makes a pointless kind of huh noise, then clears his throat and manages, “—yeah! Yeah, I’m right here. You okay?”
It’s a dumb question, really. He’s locked in an old storage closet with road grating for a door. But Chuck makes a weak kind of half-laughing sound.
“... no,” he says. “Mike, I...what did they do to me?”
“You—” holy crap, he totally remembers. Mike reaches down, trying to find the key to the door but reluctant to to look away to find it in case he misses something. “You remember me?”
“How am I supposed to forget you?” He makes that pitiful little sobbing, laughing sound again, and Mike stops fumbling for a second and just rests his forehead against the door, eyes squeezed shut, letting relief bloom in his chest. “I don’t know what they did to me, I...there’s a lot of blank spots, but…” he sniffs hard, takes a breath that audibly shudders. “... you’re really there, right? Nobody’s messing with me, or… ”
Mike is going to find Kane and kick him right in the teeth.
“Just a sec,” he mutters, distracted, and finally snags the key. “Gimme a minute, buddy, I’ll be right there.”
Chuck is right where Mike thought he might be; curled up in the corner, knees pulled up to his chest. He jumps when the door opens, and then looks up at Mike with wide, bloodshot, teary eyes and says “...Mikey?” again in that wobbly tone of voice, and Mike drops down on his knees and throws his arms around Chuck’s hunched-up shoulders, pulling him into a tight hug.
“I missed you,” he says, and feels Chuck shift hesitantly, trying to push himself to his feet without letting go. Mike helps him up, but doesn’t let go yet— can’t let go yet, not yet. Chuck still smells like Deluxe, somehow, which is distracting and makes his chest hurt abruptly, but the way he fits into Mike’s arms is so familiar it’s hard to care.
“I missed you too.” Chuck swallows, soft but audible, like he’s nervous. “I missed...this.”
He pulls back just a little bit, and Mike loosens his grip reluctantly enough to let him shift his weight back and lean down to—
Oh.
It takes Mike approximately six seconds to wrap his brain around every aspect of what’s going on and process it in its entirety, and by that time Chuck is making what seems to be an attempt to get his tongue into Mike’s mouth and holy crap this is...new. Mike has never been kissed before but it feels right, it feels great.
“Uh?” he says when Chuck pulls back to gasp in a breath. This is. Okay. Chuck. Kissing. Awesome.
“Told you I missed this, ” Chuck mumbles, and kisses him again. Of all the things Mike has considered about Chuck, and there have been kind of a lot over the years, he hadn’t quite gotten around to thinking about what it would feel like to have one of Chuck’s hands tangled in his hair. If he had, he considers, vague and kind of dizzy, he probably wouldn’t have thought it would feel this good.
“Okay,” he says, next time Chuck lets him catch a breath, “—okay. I’m... really confused right now, buddy.”
“Mm?” Chuck starts to lean in again, not waiting for an answer—Mike plants a hand on his shoulder, just to keep him there for a second. Definitely not to push him away, which would—wow, that would suck right now, that would not be a good thing.
“I mean, I’m not complaining,” he clarifies, before Chuck can take any of this the wrong way. “I’m totally not, dude, just...uh...this is a new one. I didn’t know you wanted...this. Hah—wow.”
Chuck goes still for a second, staring at him.
“New?”
“Yeah?”
They stare at each other for just a second, and then Chuck blinks and leans in again to kiss him, slower this time. Well, if he’s not worried, Mike is totally not worried. That’s been his metric for a pretty long time now, if Chuck isn’t worried then Mike can be sure there’s nothing to worry about and now Chuck is back and even better he’s apparently interested in kissing now.
“Here—” Chuck reaches out, pulling back. “Here, gimme your arm.”
The next thing Mike is really aware of is the wall. Namely, the fact that the wall just hit him in the face. That his face just hit a wall. His face hit the wall, because he was in the air and he was in the air because Chuck spun in close to him, holding on tight to his arm, and threw him.
It’s the exact same move he used when he was on the booster, and Mike slides down the wall with a weird feeling of deja vu and doesn’t move for a beat or two. Just breathes, and stares straight ahead.
Nothing feels broken, and Chuck kissed him. His cheek feels like it’s going to be bruised pretty bad, and Chuck threw him across the room. His arm got twisted during the throw but it doesn’t feel like anything permanent, and Chuck was lying.
All of it was a lie.
It’s on that thought that Mike hears the door slam shut.
Chuck’s already gone down the hall by the time Mike staggers to the grating, and of course it’s locked. He has to hang there, his face pounding, his chest aching, and strain to hear anything.
“Chuck,” he calls, but of course Chuck doesn’t come back. Instead there’s a distant crash, and a lot of yelling, and some more crashing. Something splinters. Chuck starts screaming and doesn’t stop, though an alarm comes on and drowns out his voice. Mike’s eyes feel hot and his heart feels stomped flat.
He doesn’t know how long it takes, but eventually his friends come back, Julie and Texas carrying Chuck’s dead—no, no, limp weight between them.
“Aww, little guy!” Texas grins when he sees Mike. “Did he kick your butt? He totally kicked your butt. Don’t worry, daddy Texas cleaned the whole thing up for you.”
“Mike,” Julie says. “How’d you end up in there? Why did you end up in there?”
“Uh.” Mike can feel his face start to burn. “Uhhhhh, well. He’s, uh. He’s a smart guy.”
“What, like, he made you do a math problem, and if you lost, you had to go in the cell,” Texas says, skeptically.
“He tricked you, right?” Julie asks. “Did he hide or something?”
She unlocks the door and he stumbles out, rubbing his twisted arm.
“He pretended like he remembered everything,” Mike says. “He was, uh, really convincing.”
“So you let him out,” Julie concludes, exasperated. “Mike, really?” She and Texas carry Chuck over to his cot and dump him on it. Chuck’s got a black eye, now, and a lump rising up on his forehead. Julie has abrasions all up her arms and bloody knuckles.
“Well, he kinda... got the drop on me,” Mike says. He doesn’t want to tell them about the kiss. He doesn’t even want to think about the kiss. Texas has a split lip and a vicious, bleeding bite on his wrist. Mike feels at least six different kinds of awful.
He reaches down, and runs his hand gently over the too-short blond fuzz of Chuck’s hair. Julie coughs uncomfortably, and catches his arm.
“Come on, cowboy,” she says gently. “Let’s get you fixed up.”
*
Julie’s kind enough not to comment on Mike’s burning face or rumpled hair when she patches him up, which is one of the nice things about Julie. She knows when people aren’t in the mood to talk, and when to let them sit and deal with stuff on their own. Chuck would probably try to make Mike talk about it if...
...well, he’s not going to now, anyway.
What Julie does say is: “I’m going to finish your shift on guard duty. You can go lie down after this.”
For a second that sounds really, really nice. But… “Nah. Thanks, Jules.”
“Mike.” She gives him a look, dark-eyed and sharp and a little too familiar. Mike resists the urge to sit to attention. “He did a pretty good job of messing you up. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go right back in there.”
“I’m not gonna fall for the same trick twice in a row,” Mike protests, even though some part of his heart is completely aware of exactly how much he would want to do just that. Of how he would probably be willing to trade another shoulder-throw into the wall for another one of those kisses with Chuck’s hands in his hair.
“You can not fall for it tomorrow, cowboy. Okay?”
Mike groans in exasperation. “Okay. ”
She ruffles his hair. “Also from now on we’re gonna be leaving the keys with Jacob.”
He jolts back. “What? The keys? Why?”
“So that if any of us—” and the way she says any of us clearly means you, “—want to open the door again, we get the guy who’s used to keeping prisoners to sign off on it.”
“But—what if there’s an emergency or something— like what if stuff is on fire, or—and we— we can’t reach him, what if we can’t get to him —”
“MIKE,” she snaps, and he sits at attention without thought this time. “We are leaving the keys with Jacob. Is that clear? ”
“Yes, s—Julie. Jules.” Mike feels terrible. “You can—you can trust me.”
Julie gives a long sigh and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Sorry. Sorry, Mike, I know. You’re doing your best, this whole situation is just... so...”
“Temporary,” Mike supplies, hopefully. She gives him a shaky little smile.
“Yeah,” she says, and leans forward until her head rests against his shoulder. He rests the non-smashed half of his face against her hair, feeling strong and grateful and worried all at once, like he always does when they lean on each other and she lets him see her be scared.
She says, “You can trust me too, Mike. I’m doing everything I can to get all of this figured out. You know that, right?”
“Of course,” Mike says immediately, forcefully. “We’re all in this together.”
Except Chuck isn’t, anymore. He’s still gone, even though they’ve got his body right here, locked up safe, his big warm hands and the angry, expressive curl of his lips and the way his tongue had felt, sliding into Mike’s mouth, how tall and solid he’d been when he’d pulled Mike close...
Temporary, Mike repeats to himself. This is temporary. Chuck’ll be back, the real Chuck, all of him, and until he is, Mike will wait for him.
*
Dutch is filling in as guard when Mike comes in the next morning, even though he should probably be catching some sleep at this hour. Mike is suddenly, intensely glad Dutch didn’t have a chance to get a good look at him after Chuck broke out, because he knows for sure that his jacket was crooked and his hair was rumpled and his face was red. Dutch isn’t nearly as nice as Julie is, or as clueless as Texas, when it comes to things people don’t want to talk about. Especially when he’s tired and cranky.
He smiles when Mike comes in, though, which is a good sign. Even if he looks kind of worried at the same time.
“You sure you want to do this?”
“I’m fine now, dude!” Mike smiles. “Good as new.” He taps the biopatch Julie stuck on his face. Dutch raises his eyebrows and then sighs like well I’m not gonna tell you what to do and steps away from the door.
“He’s awake,” he says. “Don’t let him pull one over on you again, okay?”
There’s silence for a long time after he’s gone. Mike sits outside the door and stares at the opposite wall, and doesn’t think about how last night he was a few feet away inside the cell, finding out what it felt like to kiss his best friend.
He’s just in the process of guiltily, painfully reviewing exactly how Chuck’s breath felt against his lips, when Chuck’s voice filters quietly through the metal grating beside him.
“...I’m sorry I kissed you,” he says, and he almost sounds normal. Subdued, but familiar enough it hurts to hear. There’s a stretch of silence, then he adds, “...I’ve gotta get out of here though. You can’t keep me in here forever.”
“I don’t want to keep you in here at all, dude.”
“So let me go.” Chuck’s voice breaks just a little bit on the word, like he knows it’s hopeless to even ask, and Mike feels that sharp pang shoot through his chest again, sick and awful. “Just let me go home. I miss my room, and—and my view of the city and having a job and—I miss the sun…” he trails off on a longing, quiet noise, almost a groan. “... I don’t want to die down here, ” he finishes finally, too quiet. “I’m not gonna stop trying to escape. I can’t. You can hurt me all you want—”
“I don’t want to hurt you!”
“—but I’m gonna get out of here and I’m gonna go home.”
“You are home.”
“Yeah, tell it to Security,” says Chuck bitterly. At any other time, under any other circumstances, the Deluxe-ism would make Mike laugh. Not right now though, not when Chuck says it like he’s not even thinking about the words. There are so many tiny things about him that are just...wrong, now. Deluxian where Mike is used to Motorcity.
“So, uh, why did you kiss me?” Mike finally asks. He can’t help it. He can’t stop thinking about it.
He doesn’t expect Chuck to look at him flatly and go, “Seriously?”
“...yeah?”
“Seriously, man? You think I’m your dead boyfriend. That’s a huge tactical advantage for me.”
“You’re not!” Mike can feel his face heating up. “I mean, you’re not my dead boyfriend. You’re not dead or my boyfriend.”
“Yeah, thanks for clearing that up, can I go now?” Chuck says acidly.
“You’re Chuck,” Mike says, for probably the millionth time. “You’re our Chuck, and you’re a Burner, and my best friend, but that was, uh. That was it.”
“So your dead could-totally-have-been-your-boyfriend was blind and crazy in addition to being degenerate Murdercity vermin, I guess. Seriously, you guys weren’t—?”
“No.”
“Oh. Huh.” Chuck looks doubtful. “Really you weren’t together?”
“No! ” Mike can tell he’s still not convinced. “Look, you were never into me like that, okay? I didn’t think you even—we were just friends.”
“Nobody with half a brain is ‘just friends’ with hot ex-military jocks who look at them like you won’t stop looking at me,” says Chuck, and crosses his arms. “I don’t know if you think lying to me about him will make me feel better about—”
“Hot?”
Chuck pauses, tirade momentarily interrupted. “What?”
“You just called me ‘hot’,” says Mike dumbly.
“Oh, shut up,” says Chuck, but he sounds more tired than actually angry. “Don’t give me that crap, you know you’re hot. Guys like you always do.”
That—is not what Mike figured he was going to say. It actually does a way better job of shutting him up than just about anything else Chuck could have said to him, not that Chuck probably meant it to have that effect. In fact he seems to take Mike’s sort of poleaxed gape as willful ignorance, because he rolls his eyes and keeps talking.
“Come on. The hair and the face and the… T-shirt…” his eyes flick up and down. Mike looks down too: it’s just his T-shirt, the same kind he wears every day. This is a clean one, Jacob just bullied everybody into doing their laundry, but it’s not like his others look any different.
“...this is the only kind of T-shirt I own,” he says, a little bit dumbly. When he looks up, Chuck is still glaring at Mike’s chest like it wronged him somehow. “Dude, what’s wrong with my shirt?”
“Could you wear it any tighter?”
“Huh?”
“It’s, like… painted on.”
“Wh—no it’s not.” Mike looks down at his own chest again—his shirt fits, and maybe he’s had a bit of a growth spurt lately, but that’s not really—it’s not— “No, dude, seriously—you’re being weird about this, okay? My shirts are fine.”
“You didn’t wear your cadet uniform that tight,” Chuck says, more than a little bit snippily, and folds his arms over his chest. “I’m just saying— ”
“Wait.” Mike holds up a hand, heart suddenly pounding. “Hold up, hold up. Say that again.”
“Huh?” Chuck scowls. “What? ‘You didn’t wear your Kane Co. uniform’—”
“How do you know how I wore my uniform?”
Chuck stares at him for a long second. “I,” he says, and the color is rapidly draining from his cheeks. “I must’ve—I saw a picture—”
“No you didn’t.” Mike leans in, talking louder as Chuck backs away from him, more eager as Chuck’s hand rises sharply to press against his skull. “You saw me in uniform, Chuckles listen to me, you were there the day I was accepted into the Junior Cadets, you gotta remember—”
“No, nonononono.” Chuck sinks down onto the cot, head in his hands, eyes squeezed shut. “No! Stop— messing with me, why are you doing this?!”
“I’m not!”
“You are! You’re putting things in my head!”
“No I’m not!”
“Yes you are! There’s a— there’s a— a— a chair, and you put me in it, and you’re making me remember things that aren’t true, you’re making me one of you!”
“Dude, Deluxe did this to you! Motorcity’s what’s real, who you are here is real! It’s Deluxe that got you and made you think you belonged there!”
“I was born in Deluxe,” Chuck moans. “I do belong there!”
“Yeah—yes, okay, you were.” Which doesn’t exactly make Mike’s case any stronger, but the last thing he’s going to do right now is lie. Chuck’s got enough lies inside his head as is. “That part’s true, your parents were in research. They helped make the pods float. You liked to tell me about them, remember?”
“Shut up,” says Chuck, a sudden snap. “They’re dead. Stop pretending you know—”
“I do know!” Mike presses his palms to the grill and wishes he could open the door. Wishes he could trust Chuck not to try to hurt him if he did. “They died when you were six, right? And Kane Co. kicked you into the system, and everybody in the foster pods had somebody to room with. Chuck, tell me I’m wrong. You were in a pod with another kid your age.”
“Sure! So?!”
“What did he look like?” Mike lets his head thump against the grating, feels the cold metal bite into his skin. “What was his name ?”
“I don’t know! I was a kid, it’s normal not to remember much from when you were a kid!”
God, he really doesn’t remember. Mike knew that, but it still hurts to hear. “What classes did you take for your education courses?” he presses, "What did you take for electives?" and Chuck makes a noise like the words are actually painful, still holding his head, curling in on himself like burning paper, crumpling.
“When did you start at that job we found you in? That— that— you're so smart, Chuck, how were you okay with just fetching people stuff? When did you start wearing your hair shorter, dude, you never liked having it short—”
“SHUT UP! ”
There’s no way for Chuck to hit him, but Mike still jumps back from the door as Chuck slams a fist into it, shaking all over, sickly-pale. He sways a second later, leaning on the door like it’s the only thing holding him up.
“Leave me alone.”
“Your hand—dude, you’re bleeding—”
“LEAVE ME ALONE!”
*
Julie just cleaned up the mess from Mike’s scrapes and Texas’s bite mark last night, and in the end she’s the one who ends up fixing Chuck’s torn-up knuckles. Mike tries to say that he should go in and do it, but Julie fixes him with a tight, hard look and says “You’ll make it worse,” unflinching in the face of Mike’s startled hurt. So he has to content himself with lurking at the end of the hall. She doesn’t shy away when Chuck gives her that sullen, calculating look like he’s working out the best way to take her down: she meets his eyes the whole time.
“...Deluxe,” says Chuck, when she’s well into the process. Julie’s hands twitch, but she doesn’t flinch away from the way he watches her. “You’re from Deluxe too.”
“You remember that?” Julie finishes snipping off the last of the torn skin. “Anything else?”
“So that part’s true.”
“Yes.” She pockets the tiny scissors.
“What are you doing down here?” Chuck winces as she smoothes on antiseptic sealing gel. “You have to know how much better it is up there.”
“I know a lot of things about how it is up there,” says Julie evenly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I work in high management.” She picks up a roll of old-fashioned fabric bandages. “And the things I see there make me think Kane needs to be stopped.”
“Like what.”
“Like the people that disappear for being out after curfew,” says Julie, and carefully knots the bandages around his knuckles. “Like the conditions in the factories. Like all the times elites ‘escorted’ some poor kid out of Kane’s office with blood all over his face. You ever saw the R&D people in your new job? Or what happened to Executives whose departments weren't up to quota?”
“It’s not a new job,” says Chuck doggedly. “I’m a—”
“Did you ever see them? ”
Chuck closes his mouth sharply, meets her eyes for just a second and then looks away. Julie nods and lets go of his hand. “Try not to punch any more doors,” she says, “we’re not exactly swimming in medical supplies down here,” and turns her back on him. Chuck makes an aborted movement like he wants to try to grab her: Julie pauses, half-turning her head, and he freezes and then slowly retreats, watching her, brows furrowed.
He’s quiet for the rest of the day, but no one likes it.