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Fanworks: Tron: Fics: All Gone
Summary
The moments after losing Ram and Flynn, and before finding Yori.
Sometimes a life of grief happens in a few nanocycles.
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-All Gone-
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The lightcycle comms are silent.
More silent than any moment before. Quieter than the thrumming, rushing moments between the crack in the game grid and the crack where pure power sprang up into the cavern, cool and fresh for them to drink.
Quieter than all the moments since they leapt, circuits glowing fully charged, back onto their cycles and darted like bright photons into the maze of canyons--
Quieter than any picocycle of silence in all that time-- because this silence has a reason, more deafening than the silence itself.
It's full of what was said-- mundane notifications of turns to the left and right and up ahead, pings warning of a tank or Reco from this side or that-- in the noisy moments between silences.
It's full of what could have been said and now will not be.
It's full of the last things said-- the one from Tron's comm, then the next one picked up by his cycle's reception subroutines, chatter between inter-tank comms on the enemy side.
"Ram! Flynn! Do you read me?"
"Pursuit force reporting. Two escaped units derezzed."
An answer uncaring whether he heard it. But an answer.
His own unheard answer does not count; it was too empty to be a word. It was nothing, a binary zero, the hollowest cry of No.
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Yori would love you.
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He's said it to Ram so many times-- through the hard transparency between cells-- through the lightcycle comms to give Ram the strength to push through a grueling match-- through Ram's hair, face pressed desperately into curls, in one of the rare, rushed, secret moments when they managed to steal the time and opportunity to touch.
More times than he's ever said...
...Has he ever said the other thing? He doesn't think he did. And now he can't.
He knows Ram knew it, of course. He knows Ram said it. And that Ram knew, accepted, that it was hard for Tron to say (and why? Why was it ever so much harder to say the words on behalf of himself, than on behalf of Yori? ...Because Yori is love. Because Yori's love is a fact of the System, guaranteed. And Tron's is... well, Tron will never trust himself, not fully, never as much as he trusts her).
She would have. Tron never felt a moment's guilt promising on her behalf, because he knows it deep as any core programming. She would have loved Ram. Would have welcomed him to their life. Would have known how to make things work between them, as three, that never quite worked as two. Would have been the data transfer, the communication, that Ram deserved so, so much more than Tron ever knew how to offer on his own.
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Yori would love him.
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This one hurts deeper even though it's less true-- sent to Ram in silent data-transfer, more in jest than sincerity, a joke and a laugh pinged three or four times to punctuate the rhythm of the time since Flynn appeared.
Because laughter is the sharpest, deepest thing to miss, once it's gone.
Yori would love him, he's so funny. Did he-- did he just walk into a forcefield? Oh, Yori would laugh so hard-- we have to tell her.
He survived? Really? The Ring-Game match? All right, Ram, I stand corrected. You've backed a winner this time. We'll have to take him home. Yori will love him.
Did he just--
Oh, Users.
We're--
we're free.
He did.
He really did.
Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes yes yes, Yori will--
The Call from Alan-1 reverberates through Tron, charged on the energy from the pool, the bright hot energy glowing and pulsing within him-- perhaps the last thing Tron has left that he shared with them, with those two companions who are now two escaped units derezzed, the ones that Yori could have loved with him.
It aches and burns and he must save it for Alan-1-- to power his transmission, to cry his prayer up into the I/O Tower and receive an answer, instructions, upgrade, anything that may guide him to his purpose.
If he still has one.
And, if Alan-1 decrees that he no longer has any purpose--
--that he has failed his purpose, forfeited himself, by losing Ram, by losing Flynn-- that he will accept, too, as the deserved end of his functionality.
But, for now-- he sets his jaw, does not allow tears-- for now Tron has his directive.
Find the Tower, find Alan-1.
Which he must do by first finding Yori-- if he has not lost her too, and oh, he cannot think of that, because then everything would be lost.
The room is bright.
Bright with the white of too many shells, too many workers uniformed in identical white and running near-identical processes on the line of the Solar Sailer dock.
He has sustained himself to this moment with the knowledge that he would know Yori if he saw her-- in any uniform-- in any room no matter what else was there-- oh, no, no, if Yori is not here, or if, oh, Users forbid, if Tron himself can no longer trust himself to know her-- or even if--
He freezes, immobile as the realization strikes him.
They are all discless.
It's a sick horror, sinking in.
Each back is marked. Not intricate like the scars of his own back, where the altered battle-disc was branded onto him at conscription, to track and control and make a weapon of him.
Not that, but marked instead with just a simple forked blue shape, where a program's simple, natural disc could attach... if it were there.
But it is not. They are discless, all of them.
Yori! Yori!
He pings his desperation into the void. If she has-- if she has been kept discless, to the point of degrading into a Stray, then she will not hear him-- then she does not, truly, even exist.
The screams within him are as deafening as the silence of the lightcycle comms that will never, never again carry him the voices of Ram and Flynn. Please. Please hear, Yori, you are all that is left to me, please--
He does not hear a reply.
But-- but he sees.
There she is, turning a corner, a curve of a white-clad back and arms, a flash of unique motion and energy and-- And he was right, after all, about himself--- he knows her, instantly, on sight, though he has not seen her before in this uniform or in a room like this. It is Yori. His recognition routines sing like the ground-shaking whirr of Recognizers.
Does she know him? Does she know anything? Is she-- oh, no, no, no-- she is walking past him, showing no sign, and pain stabs into his core, and he--
He should not have seized her so fast, so fiercely. He was desperate, he couldn't let her walk on past and miss the chance, he did not know what else to do, but oh, she must be hurt now and frightened, oh, Yori, why did I do that-- He realizes too late that his whispered warning "Don't scream!" was a terrible idea, too. If she had been frightened enough to scream she would have done it either way. But he has never been the one to make good plans. This plan so far has been failing, falling apart.
Please, Yori, please be yourself, be Yori enough to guide me-- I am lost without you.
The program in his arms does not scream. Nor does she smile. She stares, blank. But she does speak, and her voice, too, he recognizes.
"Thirty, fifty-six, ninety-nine are correct. Limited four and eight..."
Her voice... Yori's voice... and yet, in every quantifiable way the voice of a Stray.
"No."
It's a hollower "no" than even the one he cried unheard into the canyons.
And yet--- and yet less desolate. Because-- because he cannot allow himself to absorb the meaning of this negative. The absence of Yori, of her mind, of her strength-- that is a negative that cannot occur. Cannot.
His hands clasp around her face. His eyes connect to hers as if they could give her strength enough to bring back life.
And her head turns--
left, right--
"Tron!"
Arms wrap around him, clutching their bodies together as if to merge into a single script. The glow of her circuits against his, the life of her, all real, warm, back in his arms--
"Yori."
Pings burst between them before any more spoken words. A torrent of data, both sides at once, tangling and interweaving into each other's starving minds.
Missed you and Ram and love and Flynn and freedom and so many, many microcycles of separation.
And rushing in to meet him: so long here, so long, so lonely, they took me, took me, away from the laser, my purpose, oh, LoraB, oh Users, this place, my disc, my quarters, I can only go home to sync after work and the shifts here are so long, Tron, so very very long and I'm fading away--
But her eyes are bright and sharp and so, so Yori, as she holds him back far enough to look at him again. She's fading but she isn't faded yet, and he'll-- oh, he will tear apart the System itself to save her, if he has to.
If her disc is in her quarters he'll take her there-- bathe her in its energy until she's strong enough to snap it onto her own back or into her own data-storage packet and run away with him, far across the sea--
And she will.
She will know how-- she's already formulating plans inside that brilliant mind, he can sense it-- oh, she will save him. She will save... everything.
Not everything.
A cold reminder stalls his processes for a pico. She cannot save everything. Some things that he loved-- that she would have loved-- are beyond the saving Yori can do.
But she is here. That will have to be enough, for now. It will have to.
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Yori will love... me.
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Fanworks: Tron: Fics: All the Way Home
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