Chapter Text
“Hey, um… Sora,” Jay kept his hands carefully at his sides, empty and open. No weapons, no clenched fists just waiting for attack. Sora straightened up from her workbench, the spaces between her vertebrae audibly popping from across the hangar as she turned to Jay, her brows tucked suspiciously under bright pink bangs. Jay replayed Nya’s words in his head as he took a cautious step into the sweeping room.
As long as you two can talk over tech, Sora’ll be your friend for life.
He seriously doubted that. Rogue-asshole-Jay had paid no mind to Sora’s best friend’s life in his pursuit of Ras and the pile of gold he would receive for capturing him, and it was clear that she wasn’t quick to forget that, not even when Jay moved back into the monastery permanently with his memories rattled back into his mind. Still, Nya had faith in him (for some reason) when it came to bridging the gap to the newbies. He had to at least try, for her.
“I was hopin’ you could give me a hand with my wing upgrade?”
“Why? So you can fly around smacking people into trees again?” Sora asked, her tone biting as Jay stepped further into the echoing garage. He winced, kicking himself for settling on his wings to get the technological ball rolling. Stupid Walker.
“Uh… no. I just… I figured they could help,” Jay muttered, chancing even more steps into the room. Sora didn’t throw a screwdriver or a wrench at him as he slowly walked in, so Jay kept going. “They could be a lotta help when we’re too zapped to dragon up, y’know? And I figured, uh… Master of Technology was a great go-to mechanic. I mean, you made a big batch on prototypes alone, y’know? You’ve got some serious skills, even if you didn’t have the freakin’ elemental power to back it up.” And then, before Jay recognized it or could stop it, he was rambling. “Nya told me about your hologram pets in Imperium, man I would’ve wanted one of those when I was a kid! I had a pet turtle for a while, Mr Slowthers, but he ran away when I was a kid and I looked and looked for him but I couldn’t-”
“Oh my First Master, you do talk a lot.”
“Yeah, uh… sorry. I can leave, if you wanna work alone. I won’t be offended,” Jay mumbled, about to turn on his heel and retreat when Sora’s voice, echoing even though it was quiet, caught up to him.
“Nah, you’re good,” she said, already turning back to the bench, only acknowledging Jay when he didn’t join her in enough time. She turned, her head cocked. “I think it’s hard to work when you’re nowhere near the bench, Rogue.”
Jay’s heart plummeted into his stomach at the nickname and he walked toward the pink-haired ninja, who was fiddling around in the drawers of the bench, searching through loose-leaf blueprints. “Jay is fine. I don’t…” he sighed. “I did bad stuff as Rogue. Stuff I’m really sorry for.”
Sora glanced at Jay as he ran his fingertips along the blueprints she’d pulled out. They weren’t drawn by him, but somewhere in the woods, when he was all alone as a masked mercenary, Jay’s hand had sketched the plans hers were based on. The plans to get into the air, away from the ground and all that didn’t make sense about it, into the air where he could be free, if only fleetingly.
Jay inhaled deeply, forcing himself to be brave without falling back into dangerous, Rogue-ish habits that built walls instead of bridges. “I’m sorry, Sora. For what I did to Arin, for what I did to you in the World Forest. I understand that you don’t trust me, because trust is something that’s earned and I really haven’t earned it… but I hope one day I can show you I’m at least alright to live with.”
“I doubt that,” Sora muttered, and Jay’s stomach curled in on itself in defeat before she added, “Kai and Lloyd said you have a habit for blowing stuff up and starting electrical fires.”
A chuckle bubbled through Jay’s stomach twisting. “Guilty.”
“But Nya likes you, and I trust her judgement. So I won’t use my powers to build a cage that’ll get tighter and zap you every hour,” Sora said, grabbing her screwdriver and gesturing at Jay with it. “Just know that I can if you mess with me and my friends again.”
Jay lifted his hands in surrender and nodded. “I wouldn’t dare.”
“Good.” Sora lowered her screwdriver and used the tip to point at the prints. Jay followed her gesture. “This is impressive for someone who had, like, three years of memories of mechanics.”
Jay chuckled in spite of his fear of the younger ninja, and she peeked over at him as if she was shocked by the sound. Her lips quirked up, even though it was obvious she was trying not to smile in his company. Jay could see why she and Nya got along so well, they were both too stubborn for their own good. His mind drew the obvious conclusion between the two, dwelling on it. If Nya somehow reproduced all on her own, Jay was sure she’d create someone like Sora. It made sense why the pair of them had clicked so easily into place following the Merge, and he was sad to have missed the beginning of it.
But Jay was trying - more often than not these days - not to dwell on the past he’d been absent for. All he could do was focus on the future now that he was back.
“I guess some things stick, even through memory wiping,” he noted with a shrug, like it was a daily occurrence that happened to everyone. Like it wasn’t a completely earth-shattering, soul-crushing, life-changing thing that he mentioned with such casualty.
“Is that what happened?” Sora asked, pulling back and rooting through more drawers, pulling out notebooks and tools on her way, smacking them on the desktop. It wasn’t as threatening as it would have been mere moments before, and Jay was glad for the subtle change.
Jay nodded. “Yeah, in the Administration… it was like one of those old hairdressing machines. When I was a kid, my Dad and I put together one for my Ma, but she wouldn’t use it, ‘figured it was gonna explode on her head, ‘cause most of my stuff does,” he chuckled, shaking his head and fondly remembering the scent of singed hair, both his Dad’s and his own. They’d had matching missing eyebrows for the first few years of Jay’s preteen hood. “And I guess she was pretty on point with that, ‘cause that thing in the Administration just…” he gestured at his hair, cut back to what it’d been like before he’d gone rogue, springing up in a crown around his head, “Sucked the thoughts right out of my head.”
“It must not’ve been a lot of work,” Sora remarked, and for a moment Jay missed the teasing in her voice. When he caught it, he snorted, then let out a sarcastic two-syllable laugh, playing along.
“Ha ha, very funny, cat ears.” Sora shot him a half-glare and Jay thought he’d crossed a line in the name of banter, then she shook her head with another whisper of a smile.
“Whatever. Use that sucked-up mind to help me, okay? I can’t figure out how you got the sockets-” she pointed at the spot where the wings met the pack, “-to swing out like that.”
Jay leaned in, peering at the sketches, studying them for a long moment. They looked picture perfect, but something was missing from his original plan. “Okay, yeah, you added a nut here,” he muttered, pointing right at the spot that his version had left empty. It was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flaw, but one that didn’t completely stop the mech from getting off the ground. He glanced at Sora, whose brow was furrowed in concentration. “It just kinda limits the movement, y’know?”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” she said, reaching for a white-inked pen and making a note, then turning to Jay. He was shocked (but pleasantly surprised) that she wasn’t glaring at him. Her eyes glittered with something hopeful that Jay latched onto, letting the first round of success bloom warm in his heart, stretching out to the shattered edges. From that point on, when he worried that he’d shattered himself beyond repair (and he worried about it a lot, his tearful expression of fear leading Nya to gently hand him his assignment with the new kids), Jay would remember the tingly feeling that showed him he was moving in the right direction. He’d remember Sora’s willingness to accept his olive branch, a gesture the rogue version of him wouldn’t have trusted or believed possible. “Wanna help me fix the fleet?”
Jay chuckled, grinning as he nodded. “Yeah, I’d be happy to.”