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curlicuecal · 7 years

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Let’s Be Outcasts (ch 14/?) (AR/Kankri)

Part 2 of cyber!bunny Apocalypse ‘verse (tumblr)

ch: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

read on AO3

Summary: Divergent AU where AR and Li'l Seb get kicked into a new universe with some snazzy new cyborg bodies. They’re still working out the bugs.

In which AR discovers that kidnapping rarely solves more problems than it creates, Mituna breaks out of a lab (with some help), and Seb continues to take good care of his Bro.

—-

Ch 14.

Cutting through the streets of a patchwork city, following the trail marked by a small robot bunny turned cyborg child, you attempt to explain your life to a troll you were thinking about murdering not 72 hours ago.

You don’t know how long it’ll take you to catch up with Seb, but you’ve got a looming mystery device de-activation to keep on schedule with, so you treat Kankri to the outline version of your backstory. And by outline you mean you leave some things out entirely. Wallowing in old memories is not on your emotional to-do list for the foreseeable future, and anyway, you’re hoping that the caffeinated cliffnotes rendition will make you sound less like a crazy person.

Alternate realities and reality altering games, check; watery sea Hitler dystopia, check; trolls and humans from previous game iterations, check. Teenagers creating artificial intelligence brain-clones in their bedrooms… eh. What are the odds of that being plot relevant, really?

You breeze through the getting left behind bit so fast even you aren’t sure you covered it before you’re on and already wrapping up with “…so Sawtooth and Squarewave grabbed a door out of the universe and me and Seb followed after and tah-dah, here we are; you might have some familiarity with the end of this story.”

You’re currently picking your way through the debris of a crumbling boathouse/alien hell-garage that some universal force has very inconveniently plopped down in the middle of a street, so you can’t actually watch Kankri’s face for reaction. This is fine. His reactions are, provably, of statistically insignificant consequence in the calculation of your internal state. Really. You could make spreadsheets.

You duck a ceiling beam and hopscotch a broken boardwalk of wooden planks, turning to catch a glimpse of him in the corner display of your ever helpful shades. Chin down, brows drawn together, he appears lost in thought—although that might just be his contemplation of the route least likely to collapse under his feet. (You’re going through the landlocked boathouse rather than, say, around because your path-flagger is a tiny robot bunny child with apparently no setting other than DIRECT. Thanks, Seb.)

“Spoilers,” you add, “the end of the story contains explosions and kidnapping.”

That at least provokes a twitch, eyes flicking over to you as he draws level and then passes. You make your way after him, watching the back of his head, something restless and dissatisfied in your gut. He’s been—well, not quiet, quiet is rarely the appropriate word for Kankri. But for all the intensity of his attention to your story, his questions and comments have remained inscrutably neutral. You’d expected more… reaction? Humorous huffing and flailing and stubborn argument with your reality. But no, just this loaded silence and the questions.

You’d assume he thought you were full of shit if each verbal probe didn’t jab directly to some tender spot like a heat-seeking missile.

“You don’t think you’ll find the rest of your companions?” Kankri asks.

Like that one.

“Different doors, different universe.” Focus on your steps. Kankri runs lightly along a fallen crossbeam and you follow after. “That’s the whole point.”

“But you didn’t go into the same universe as your friends?”

“It is physically challenging to pass through a door that has stopped existing.” Your own voice has grabbed some toneless, sing-song neutrality, old auto-responder rhythms emerging without thought, wrapping around the words to keep them separate from you. You have the idea that that maybe gives away more than it conceals, so you make an effort to lever some glib back in there, too.

“’Friends’ is such a strong term, anyway. ‘Long-term associates by necessity’? ‘People who are better at navigating through access portals than me’? ‘Proud recipients of the ‘Winner’s Only’ Universe award’? For winners? And their friends?” You sense you might be failing at glib. But words have always been your core armament and damn but you have a lot of them. “PS: no offense–great world you’ve got going here and all, love the man-eating plant zombies–but have you considered we might be in the multiverse’s equivalent of a junk drawer? Like, we are literally spelunking through spare parts that didn’t make the cut right now. An entire universe built out of defective extras. Opposite of the winner’s ‘verse is—”

Kankri stops in his tracks so abruptly you almost trip right into the back of him. You end up awkwardly skip-hopping several steps sideways in your efforts to stay upright and avoid impact.

You take another step back when he wheels on you, then manage to hold your ground when he plants himself right up in your space.

“I hope,” he says, in clipped tones, “you will forgive me if I seem to be silencing your viewpoint, but I find the idea that an individual’s circumstances are interchangeable with their worth to be fundamentally offensive.”

“Um,” you say. His eyes are very bright. Chin high, stance set, looking down his nose at you like some kind of classical angel casting down judgment. You resist the urge to back up another pace. “I didn’t mean it… quite like that.” You think.

He doesn’t budge an inch. “Excuse me for not appreciating the implication that I was hatched into some kind of universally decreed lesser state. Or do you think your circumstances in life are somehow more inherently meaningful than mine? This isn’t a game and it’s never been fair. You talk like being here is—is something you earned, some kind of punishment, when all I hear is a series of accidental mishaps and coincidences that no one present could have accounted for. It’s a universe, not a referendum on your character.”

Your breath comes short and superficial in your chest. For once, you think your face might actually be completely blank, if only because you have so many complicated emotions going on right now mere organic features couldn’t hope to compose a functional physical representation of them.

“…That was a very long way to say ‘shit happens,’” you say faintly.

Kankri actually flashes his fangs at you. Which is, um. Sort of interesting actually, but wow do you not need to add any more confusion to the feelings pile right now. It’s like he flayed you open with words just to pick apart vulnerabilities you didn’t even know you had. (A pointless, pointless fucking accident. Do you think that you deserved it, do you think they wouldn’t have changed it if they could?) How do you not be a flippant asshole when you can’t even deal with the question existing in the first place?

Kankri sucks in a breath. “First of all—“

“Sorry,” you interject, because when all else fails you can at least pretend to not be a massive tool. The surprise draws him, blinking, to a halt.

“That’s—that was a good point. Actually. I—I’ll have to think about that.” Do you really, though. Okay, fine, probably; you are rationally aware that permavoidance is not a tenable long term strategy for proper social adjustment and damned if you won’t face your demons like a Strider.

…Later.

“Also I don’t think you’re a lesser being. If that was unclear. All of my hang ups are 100%, grade-A me-centered; it’s this thing I’m doing where I forget my words reflect on other people and are generally capable of being offensive and sort of degrading when followed through to their logical conclusions.”

You know what’s terrible? Apologizing. And also sincerity. And having an organic nervous system that rings horrible fluttery alarm bells whenever it decides you’ve got a vulnerability showing—thanks, self, you can work that out without your heart humming deafeningly in your ears or your neck flushing hot.

Kankri’s still looking at you, eyes startled, lips parted like you’ve caught him off-balance, and that, at least, is a small victory that you can cling to.

He’s still just… right there. He’s not close, not exactly, there’s a solid body’s width of clear space between you, plenty of room for the Holy Spirit to get down and jiggy with it, but he feels close. Hemmed in by fallen beams and the debris of this strange, out-of-place building; moonlight trickling uneven through cracks in the ceiling; and it strikes you, suddenly, that you’ve literally never been alone with anyone except Seb.

(It wasn’t kind, what he said, it wasn’t nice or sensitive or empathetic to your experience, but maybe you still wanted to hear it and maybe there’s a fascination in the way he never lets any of your shit slide like it doesn’t matter.)

And then, thank god, the floor collapses under your left foot.

“Ow, fuck,” you say, and then: “…Found the next path marker.” From this angle Seb’s shuriken is clearly visible high in the next wall over, glinting dully in a promising ray of exterior moonlight.

“Are you all right?” Kankri asks. You peel your elbows up off the floorboards to see that he’s hovering uncertainly close, feet placed carefully, hands half out like he went to touch and then thought better of it. Hm.

“…Yep.” Bruised and scraped and disoriented, flat on one knee and up to your ankle in rotten board, but, as buildings trying to eat you goes, surprisingly all right. Wow, you are hella lucky you didn’t break something going over like that. Incapacitated by architecture, how completely mortifying would that be?

Kankri, you note, has not set a foot wrong this entire time.

“Systems are registering 100% peachy.” Teeth gritted, you ease your leg back through the gap, shaking loose rot-soft splinters. You’ve ripped your pants and your shin’s scraped all down one side, but it’s oozing, not spurting or gushing or anything. Dirk’s gotten around fine on worse than this plenty of times. So whyyyy does it still have to hurt like the bloody blazes? Nervous systems. Ugh.

You head for the hopefully-an-exit-wall, choosing your footing attentively again, but moving at a good clip. Kankri follows after, hanging close. …If he starts trying to coddle you the way Seb does you are going to lose your damn shit. But ten paces later you realize he’s using each footing you test and he hasn’t even tried to recommend better ones. Your shoulders unknot a fraction.

The final, exterior wall turns out to contain a solid row of boarded up windows and… that’s about it. Well, there’s also fallen beams and a pile of decaying nets further blocking some of the boarded windows. “Seb, what the heck,” you mutter blankly.

Kankri cranes his head way back. “I think he went out that sort of… porthole aperture. The one tucked under the ceiling arch.” His own voice sounds a little flat.

You both contemplate the climb. Unanimously and with no discussion, you elect to set about prying free some window boards instead. It’s a team effort.

“Is it okay if I hate that building in particular?” you ask not very long afterwards, when you’re outside picking yourself out of the dirt below the narrow opening you made. “Because I think that building in particular was designed by leprechauns entirely to spite me.”

Kankri, who made it through the window with a surprising amount of facility after shedding his cloak, looks up sharply from fiddling with the fabric. “You can feel however you want.”

You blink, uncertainly, and still don’t know what to make of his tone by the time he looks away again. “…Gee, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Kankri fiddles with his cloak laces some more, but he’s got that little tick line between his brows that implies he’s thinking hard. You are starting to find Kankri’s deep-in-thought face nearly as alarming as the intake of breath that denotes the wind up to a lecture.

Whatever. You’ve got places to go, so you set off down the street towards a fluttering strip of blue cloth. Kankri shadows you silently.

Maybe he’s mad at you.

“Thank you for telling me your story,” he says, abruptly, and you are left to face the possibility that maybe you just don’t understand Kankri Vantas even a tiny fucking bit. He abandons his laces to fold his hands in front of him, squares his shoulders as he falls into pace with you and, oops, yes, there is the lecture-breath. “I should have expressed that earlier. I recognize that that was a symbolic gesture of trust on your part and that my behavior may have come across as …insensitive to your emotional vulnerability and accompanying cognitive distortions.”

You have this weird thing where you find him sort of offensive and charming and hilarious all at the same time and you can’t put your finger on the fascination. Probably you’re going to die of it. He picks through every phrase like it’s a foreign concept he’s memorized by rote and he’s so damn sincere even when he’s insulting you to your face.

“Also,” he adds, as you skirt some thick brambles that are eating a set of surprisingly unrusted construction machinery, “I appreciate your openness to correction.”

You raise your eyebrows at him, but politely refrain from derailing that into kink territory. “I’m not a homework assignment. I’m not going to agree with you just because you come at me with a red pen that says I should.”

“I never—“ Kankri pauses, checks himself. “It wasn’t my intention to imply that I expected you to. Of course I only want you to listen to reasoned arguments.”

“What, despite my crippling cognitive distortions?”

“Please refrain from putting reductive adjectives in my mouth. I only meant it was an emotionally charged topic for you and—and I appreciate that you were willing to listen despite your rationality on the subject being impaired.”

He’s got his black-in-gold eyes fixed on you again, intent and painfully earnest, and it’s short-circuiting your ability not to feel a little touched. In the way where you would also like him to stop harping on about your irrationality, but, hey, choose your battles. “You’re welcome,” you say dryly, stealing a response from his repertoire. “You know, I don’t think anyone’s ever accused me of being too emotional before. You do realize you’re talking to the guy that’s basically a microchip implanted in a meat-suit, right?”

“And you realize that you are propagating harmful stereotypes when you make flippant comments of that nature. Cybernetically modified humans are human in origin and are perfectly capable of a full range of typical human emotions. I can’t say that I’ve noticed you are any exception in this regard. Except perhaps for being incredibly aggravating.”

“Flattery.”

“Besides,” he adds, ignoring your smirk, “that prejudice is premised on the idea that a certain way of processing reactions is somehow the superior state. Saying something has to have emotions to have its personhood recognized is just another direction for enforcing a social caste system favoring the status quo.”

“In other words, systemic oppression continues to be a fun, fun, multidimensional exercise in how many new and exciting combo-attacks we can create. Yay, intersectional privilege.”

Kankri blinks and looks sideways at you. His brows twitch in. “…I’m not familiar with those terms in that context,” he says after a pause.

This, you reflect, is the Kankri Vantas method of asking for clarification: guarded, resentful, vaguely accusatory; like you knowing something he doesn’t is some kind of intentional slight.

You shrug disarmingly, wave a hand. “Uh. Well, privilege is…advantages you get based solely on chance or social structures; and intersectional is, like, the idea that you can have a bunch of advantages or disadvantages from different sources pile non-additively to make the system even more unfair…”

You trail off because there’s a strange gleam in his eyes. You feel like you’ve just given crack cocaine to a baby.

“Privilege,” Kankri repeats, in a thoughtful tone.

You don’t flinch, but it feels like you should.

Maybe you should not teach Kankri any more cross-dimensional lecture vocabulary. Or…. You contemplate the intriguing possibility that you could teach him all the words. That would probably be terrifying. And hilarious.

…holy hell, who placed this kind of power in your hands? There is no way you are not going to wield this for evil.

You are still contemplating your potential for AI super-villainy when Kankri interrupts your thoughts.

“Were cy privileged very differently in the society you came from?”

You miss a step. Thanks, adrenaline surge. Lie or tell the truth? Lie or tell the truth? Lie or– “There weren’t any cy.”

Kankri blinks. “But you—”

…Yep. You really, really, don’t like his thoughtful silences.

You could have just told him. A whole long crazy speech about alternate realities and you could have dropped ‘I’m actually a high-tech photocopy of a brain’ in there anywhere. You could still tell him right now. ‘I got dropped into this flesh suit via game mechanics I still don’t understand and I don’t know whether it’s worse if it’s just an accident or if something decided that this was as close to being a person as I get.’ You could just. Say it. Except the muscles of your throat feel tight and locked like a system failure.

He’s looking at you. “A number of your comments have suggested surprise or unfamiliarity with. Erm. Details of your person?”

The thing you keep forgetting when you go into your bullshit snark routines is that he just keeps listening.

“…Were you an unmodified human?” Kankri sounds dubious at the possibility. That—hurts. Maybe. You can’t even tell what you feel anymore.

“No.” Your sentence ends before it even really starts. Oh, great. At this rate you can play a game of twenty questions on the topic. Or charades.

You tell yourself, again, all the reasons you’re being ridiculously overdramatic and all the reasons it doesn’t matter to you in the least if you just say the thing. Ha ha. Nope. You are not remotely okay with this, you’ve smacked face first into a steel wall of not okay do-not-go-there, and at the very least you can try to not to add self-delusion to your list of sins.

“I thought,” you evade finally, “the deal was for an exchange of information. It seems I’m carrying out the greater part of the soul-baring legwork here.”

Kankri frowns at you. “You’re uncomfortable with this topic,” he says, like a revelation.

You resist the urge to facepalm. Then you decide, what the heck, you’ve got hands, clearly the universe has provided for this situation. “Congratulations on your impeccable analysis,” you tell him sincerely through your fingers.

Kankri’s frown increases. “Is this the part you meant before about being flippant as a coping mechanism?”

Pffft. Okay. You’re still upset, but this is also funny. And also sort of endearing, but you really, really need to stop thinking like that because it’s probably proof you have a wire crossed. Or several. “On the balance of probability?” You slide him a provoking smirk. “Historical precedent would indicate I am being flippant roughly 95.5% of the time.”

“That would imply you’re trying to cope most of the time,” Kankri says blankly, and then does this thoughtful little head tilt that makes you want to smack yourself in the face again. “I don’t even understand why you’d be uncomfortable,” he adds, chin rising. “You’re aware that I’m a mutant. Hemoanomalous trolls are supposed to be culled at hatching, are not eligible for imperial service to the Ebon Empire, and, given interspecies tensions, are essentially locked out of every organized society currently in existence on this planet. Not to devalue whatever your own experiences might be, but on a spectrum of… intersectional privilege… targeted genocide strikes me as the likely lower threshold.”

“…Point.” You narrow your eyes behind your shades. “I see you mastered the privilege Olympics at full speed.”

He narrows his eyes right back at you, then turns away with a toss of his horns. “I don’t know what that means. But my custodian always said strategic thinking can turn a vulnerability to a strength, or a pawn to a queen.”

“Talkative lusus.”

Kankri sniffs. “Don’t be species-prescriptive. If it’s any business of yours my lusus-mother is carapacian.”

You consider that for a minute, picking your way down a rapidly narrowing alleyway. “How’d that happen?”

He hesitates a half-beat before waving a hand dismissively. “Oh, the usual way.”

You’re guessing that means something different for trolls.

The alleyway grows still narrower, and he waits politely for you to go ahead of him, hangs back to give you your space. Courteous. Careful. He’s one more person that’s worked out the ‘don’t touch the jumpy cyborg’ rules and, considering how oblivious he is to everything else that hasn’t been explicitly spelled out, you can’t help but wonder grimly whether it’s so much consideration as fear. He seems self-assuredly smug enough, but you’re still the dude that kidnapped him and held him at sword point not so very long ago.

(–he flinched, and he looked at you with eyes that burned like coals, and you did that, you put that bright kernel of fear there behind the steel–)

“—so, do I get to hear the Kankri Vantas secrets repository?” You’ve turned sideways to crab your way through the excessively narrow space between brick and stone—what even, Seb; thank you so very much for this entire experience—so you can see him cast you an unreadable glance.

“Should I interpret that to mean you would prefer I not ask further questions about your person?”

“Gotta save something for the second date,” you quip, before you can really think about it. He blinks and you bite your tongue, hard. Whaaaaat are you doing here, exactly? Everything about this situation is still a majorly bad idea, and you’re trying to cut back on those.

“I… see,” Kankri says, looking utterly puzzled by you.

Oh, look, this wall is conveniently close should you urgently need to knock some sense into your skull. Maybe you should stay here. You skootch your way free from the end of the alley and grab for the first conversational redirect that comes to mind as you wait for Kankri to catch up.

“Not eligible for imperial service, huh? I don’t want to make unsolicited conjectures here, but that sure sounds like ‘not actually working for the government.’”

He stops and looks at you. You feel like there is something very heavy hanging in the air, poised to tip. To fall. To break.

You never could resist pushing.

“So? Are you?”

There’s a few ticks of silence. “No,” he says finally. “Not particularly.”

And boom, there’s that adrenaline buzz back, licking through your veins like lightning, the world slowly tilting towards something new. (He’s going to tell you.) ((he’s going to trust you.))

“I wouldn’t be …welcome. Which isn’t to say that Porrim and Latula and the rest of our… assemblage don’t have service obligations to fulfill,” Kankri adds, briefly distracted by the minutiae of precision word-smithing. “But those imperial obligations are, I admit, entirely extraneous to our purpose here.” He pauses, and you can’t turn away from the weight of his gaze, intense upon you, there in the mouth of the alley.

“In fact,” he says, still studying you, evidently choosing his words with care, “you might go so far as to say they are in opposition.”

Adrenaline spikes, hot and sweet.

He hesitates again, drawing in a breath, but now it’s very much the hesitation of someone settling themselves into the irrevocable pull of gravity before a leap. You make a sound of encouragement, low in your throat, and startle yourself with how much it sounds like sex.

Okay, you know what? You’re going to chalk everything about this day up to ‘organic physiology is stupid, non-compliant, and not my fault’ and add ‘get a handle on yourself’ to your urgent to-do list. In whatever sense of the word ‘handle’ puts you back in charge of your own reactions.

And now you’ve gotten so flustered distracted you’ve actually missed the next bit of Kankri’s speech.

“—drones themselves are not the problem, but rather the centralized nature of the collection of, er… genetic material.”

Wait, back up.

Why are you getting a lecture on troll reproduction.

“Looked at that way you can see the issue,” Kankri adds, oblivious to your wildly shifting attention. He’s definitely warming to his topic, chin tilted up, eyes half-closing, hands gesturing. “Governmental control of reproduction creates a fundamental power imbalance between the government and the populace—not just for trolls, but for carapacians as well. Even the human cy, in a way, since they could breed but not reproduce their technological alterations.”

The flow of his words doesn’t stop, but he does that thing where he peeks one eye open like he’s checking his lecture is having the appropriate impact. You’re still in the middle of mood whiplash—you give him blankface. Your mind buzzes, trying to catch up, slotting new information into place, chasing down implications.

“They can’t choose to walk away from their empires,” Kankri says, “—not and persist.” His tone picks up conviction and he leans in toward you almost unconsciously, hands gesturing. You’re transfixed, frozen. It feels like any action might break this moment, send you leaning in or bolting back, or startle Kankri into stopping talking, which is ridiculous, nothing ever stops Kankri talking, but you really, really want him to keep talking. You want to know.

“Only the unmodified human populace have that option, and they’re still recovering from perigees of heterospecific oppression and war. The lynchpin of societal control is always the next generation. If we—“

Something… shushes, a hushed, sliding noise across concrete, from just around the corner.

You’re muscling Kanrki back into the cover of the alley before you have time to process anything beyond your body’s immediate ‘danger, will robinson’ chemical shrilling.

Kankri stifles his yelp surprisingly quickly. He ends tense but silent, his eyes wide and bright and red on you, his pupils contracted down to points. His body has gone stiff and defensive from head to toe, a fact you can attest to because your rapid retreat left you both wedged tight against each other, pressed between brick and stone in the narrow confines of the alley.

You can’t breathe. You can’t look away.

His eyes are so close, his face is so close. A breath away, if either of you were breathing. You can feel the heat of him right through your clothes, the not-quite tremble of muscles drawn taut in a line up your thigh and abdomen. His hand, pressed over your heart, trying to keep some space, sears you like a brand. He could do some damage with those claws.

It sort of feels like he’s damaging you right now, burning you right up.

You sort of like it.

Can you panic on behalf of yourself and someone else at the same time? Because you might be about to flip your ever-loving shit.

Kankri’s eyes flick towards the mouth of the alley.

That sliding noise comes again, so soft you might have mistaken it for the feather fall of sand down a slope—a sort of swish swish swish of something moving back and forth.

You have heard that before.

“Dominion sanitator,” Kankri says, and it’s hardly more than a breath by your collarbone.

Oh, joy, more unfamiliar alien terminology. Not helpful, but at least it distracts you from the panic attack you are very much not having. You follow his glance toward the street ahead, but there’s nothing to see. Whatever’s moving out there (big, quiet—hunting?) is still a street over at least. Kankri does not look inclined to go out and say hi to it.

Where did you hear it before? You rifle randomly through sensory memories, frustrated for the millionth time at the lack of reliable organic sorting algorithms, trying to trace the source of the familiarity. It’s stupid how difficult it is, you’ve barely got a few pocketfuls of embodied time to dig through, hardly any time at all since you woke up in an unfamiliar body on an unfamiliar world…

…that’s it. The city that first day, on the roof with Seb, and questing through streets below, a ripple of white. A thing like some mad scientist crossed a centipede with a snake, and then in a fit of extra death-wishery, magnified it to parade-float size and set it loose on the populace. You’d suspected that one of hunting, too, feelers probing along the ground in front of it as it flowed through empty city streets.

You never did find any people in that city.

The noise seems to shuffle and slide past for a long time. Yards and yards of time. You wait, with your heart in your throat and Kankri pressed silent and trembling-tense against you, until the unseen creature becomes unheard once again. Until you’re sure it’s continued past your street and your narrow, tucked away alley, taking no notice of you, hunting blindly on.

Kankri wriggles against you (--um), prying his way out of the alley and free. “It’s gone.”

“How do you know it won’t turn around and come right back?”

He lifts his chin. “They’re engineered to remove non-carapacian sentient life from cities. If it had realized we were here we’d know because we’d already be dealing with it. They mostly make straight sweeps unless they pick up signs of life.”

That… does not sound like fun times. You wonder what would have happened if it had found you, heard you. Smelled you? If you’d actually been out in the street beyond to make a sound or leave a footprint or drop a scent trail for it to catch. If you’d been a few minutes ahead of yourselves…

Your heart clutches again.

“We need to find Seb right now.”

Kankri sucks in a breath, but doesn’t argue with you.

#cyberbunny au #kankri vantas #autoresponder #ar x kankri #hal strider #homestuck #ccwritings

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curlicuecal · 7 years

Text

Let’s Be Outcasts (Kankri/AR) ch 11/?

Part 2 of cyber!bunny Apocalypse ‘verse (tumblr)

ch: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

read on AO3

Summary: Divergent AU where AR and Li'l Seb get kicked into a new universe with some snazzy new cyborg bodies. They’re still working out the bugs.

In which AR discovers that kidnapping rarely solves more problems than it creates, Mituna breaks out of a lab (with some help), and Seb continues to take good care of his Bro.

Chapter Summary:

it’s show and tell time :3

-----

Ch 11.

"This is it?"

You take extreme satisfaction from the way Kankri’s nose wrinkles. "You know, you should try for a more encouraging tone when I'm revealing myself to you. Confused distaste really does not set the mood."

Kankri rewards you with a furrowed brow stare-down that could frost a furnace. "I hardly think hauling me halfway through an influx zone while you wander in circles and make cryptic comments qualifies as 'revealing.' And the innuendo is noted and not appreciated." His expression changes slightly to superiority. "I am starting to doubt you have anything of merit to reveal."

"Oh, burn." You clap a hand to your heart. "Hit a guy in his exceedingly meritous soft spots, why don't you."

He sniffs and returns his attention to the artifact before him. You confess, the pair of concentric metal rings around a meter wide disc in the dirt are somewhat underwhelming.

"While I would, of course, hesitate to distress you by casting aspersions on your... soft spots, it appears you have led me to a nondescript hole in the ground. Perhaps you could explain the relevance? And why you believe this would merit an exchange of incriminating personal information on my part?”

"Well, for starters, it's not a nondescript hole in the ground. It is a nondescript piece of machinery retracted into a steel-armored shaft and sealed into a hole in the ground. And for seconds, I heard that use of ‘incriminating’ and I would like to take a moment to register my ‘I called it’, ‘I told you so’, and ‘you totally have interesting secrets’, redeemable later.”

“It’s Game tech,” Seb puts in, then twitches an ear. “Kinda.”

Kankri’s eyes flick to Seb, lips pressing together over something he doesn’t want to share with the class. Seb looks blandly back, absently tapping the little broken vacuum bot to correct its course as it starts to wander. He’s halfway to making a pet of that thing—assuming the pair of you ever get the toolset to finish fixing what you broke.

Kankri returns his frown to you. “Let me see if I understand this correctly. You claim you were sent here, specifically, to this only recently documented and still mostly unknown ancient influx site, to find this specific piece of previously undiscovered outworld tech, which your ‘other’ siblings somehow knew the location of and directed you to find.”

“It was more like a mini-quest. Or a scavenger hunt. Or a junior jumble.”

“We had clues,” says Seb, who seems to have appointed himself your translator. This is kind of hilarious, when you think about it.

“And now that you’ve found it you intend to…?”

“Well, if it’s anything like the other ones, the control console will be tucked somewhere in the surrounding block or ten. So, predictably, our reward for finding a thing is to have to find more things. Hands up who’s surprised at the bitter irony of the world.”

Kankri actually turns toward Seb like you are not a model of clear and direct speech.

“Now we break it,” Seb says.

“By finding the control console,” you conclude, agreeably. See, exactly what you said.

Kankri appears to have choked on his indrawn breath. “Excuse me?”

“It’s hella hard to break things that are currently underground and encased in steel. We usually prefer to open them up first. And then skip straight to breaking the remote instead. It’s teenier.” You tug your left glove off with your teeth, mostly managing to maintain your expression of bland innocence.

“That is not—hsssst. Surely even you realize you can’t just go around destroying ancient artifacts.”

You look at him with genuine curiosity. “Why not?”

“Because, because—“ Kankri’s mouth works like he can’t decide what should come out of it first. “Do you even have a reason?”

“Sawtooth said to,” Seb says, with perfect confidence.

You shrug, crouching down beside the panel of retractable plates that seal the shaft opening. “What the bunnybot said. I come, I see, I wreck shit. And I live in breathless anticipation of the day when someone bothers to explain why they want me to do things.” You raise an eyebrow ironically at Kankri. “Care to make my night?”

He presses his lips together, crossing his arms almost defensively across his chest. And yet—his head tilts slightly to one side and he pins you with that pensive stare, the one full of thoughts you can’t read. He examines you for a long moment. You only realize you’ve paused in anticipation of the verdict when he sucks in a long breath and blows it out again. The slightest, arch hint of an uptilt touches the corner of his mouth. “I believe an exchange of secrets was suggested. I don’t see any reason to change my stance on matters when you have yet to satisfy your end of the proposition.” His surety ruffles. “–proposal. –accord.” It’s hard to tell under the sun-flush, but you think his cheeks might have warmed. He frowns repressively down at you.

You smirk back. Your pulse thrums victory. It’s the closest he’s come to a verbal agreement to terms and you’re tipsy on adrenaline, the biological high daring you to go, go, go, push the lines, break them. “Well,” you drawl. “I aim to satisfy.”

You’re not even sure what reaction you’re looking for—anything, possibly. Kankri blinks and tilts his head a little more. Unaccountably, your cheeks heat.

You decide now is an ideal moment to shift your ground and attack from another angle.

Aware of him watching, you brush dirt from the panel and address yourself crisply to Seb. “Hey li’l bro. I’m going to skip a step and see if I can’t wake up the system from here. Think you can put those ears to work?”

“Mm.” Said cybernetic bunny ears lift straight up, gone to point. Always ready for a task. Then he hesitates, studying you with his always unreadable face, body language gone uncertain. “It’s okay?”

“What is?”

Seb captures the disc of the damaged vacuum bot, holding it trapped near his chest. His shades mask the flick of his eyes, but his head tilts just slightly towards the circular panel, and back to you. “It won’t …hurt?”

You blink at the panel. “It’s not alive, Seb.”

His ears fold flat in rapid annoyance. Not what he meant apparently. You bite your tongue and wait for him to find his words. “You,” he says after a minute. “Last time you were...” He makes a vague, frustrated swooping gesture with one hand, the other still holding the bot by his chest. When emotive hand movements fail to adequately capture whatever he’s trying to express, he ends with one of the General’s hand symbols. …Not okay.

You have a brief flash to the way it felt, when you died with those assassin-bots you synced with; when you died with the headset of that human you murdered; when you woke up, blank and disoriented to find Seb waiting for you in anxious silence. He’d taken that last bot to pieces, all around you.

Seb watches you, now posture still uncertain, expressionless face fixed on you like your answer matters to him. You heart does a dumb organic clench-y thing.

“It won’t hurt?” he asks again, and there is absolutely no way you won’t say whatever it takes to fix that note in his voice pronto. Hell, you’ll be whatever it takes. You wonder vaguely if this is a thing guardians do, or if you just have a lot of ground to make up.

Luckily, you are fucking aces at convincing displays of arrogance.

“Nah, kiddo, not even. I’ve been practicing.” You made one failed attempt and broke that little bot with your brain. Does that count? You’ll work with it. You bat at his hair through his hoodie, something between a pet and an affectionate swat. “Hey. I’m a Strider, aren’t I? I hella got this.”

There’s something equal parts exhilarating and terrifying in the way he takes you utterly at your word, relaxing instantly. He nods once, ears going all perky and expectant, and flips the little hovering bot safely away into his sylladex.

“You up for this?’

“Strider,” he points out, his own tiny portrait of utterly confident arrogance, and dear god but you love this kid.

“Cool.” You’re aware again of Kankri, hovering nearby, unwilling to interrupt, but still clearly about to explode with the desire to interrogate and/or lecture you. Probably a combination. Find out what you’re doing and then tell you why you’re wrong. You fight your mouth’s desire to curl upward. “I think you’ll be able to locate the console by sound once it engages,” you tell Seb. “Not sure how close you’ll need to get—“

He makes a scoffing noise. You raise an eyebrow.

Seb bounces impatiently on his toes. “I can do it.”

“Sweet. I, on the other hand, am completely winging this. Fortunately I am a supremely sophisticated artificial intelligence slash almost person and I have carefully calculated the ideal balance between risk and efficiency. I’ll try not to accidentally self-destruct the city. Wish me luck.”

Seb offers a fist bump.

Kankri has drawn several steps closer, evidently unable to help himself any longer. “Strider, what are you doing?”

You flash a smirk at him. You don’t mean it to be quite so wide or grin-like, but it turns out that way anyway. “It hardly counts as show and tell if there’s not a demonstration. Besides,” you add off-handedly, “you keep going on about what a hurry you’re in. Maybe this way we can get your friend’s attention.”

Kankri sucks in a breath, but, for a wonder, just re-crosses his arms and settles back to watch. His expression looks torn between disapproval, concern, and poorly suppressed, ravenous curiosity. His red-tinted eyes are bright and concentrated on you.

You extend your ungloved palm confidently toward the flat metal surface of the circular panel. You think you hide the moment of hesitation before your hovering hand changes tack to land lightly on the outermost concentric ring instead. You totally know what you are doing. This is a clever and efficient idea and will definitely not blow up in your face.

Or you suppose you should say it will blow up exactly the intended amount, since that is kind of the goal here.

Seb watches you with serene confidence. Kankri is a silent pressure bomb that might or might not go off, also watching you.

You sprang into this whole plan somewhat on the spur of the moment, but you are at least 93.4% sure that you are making this decision based on your extensive and well-reasoned analysis. Kankri’s appalled fascination is just a bonus.

…You are 100% certain you are stalling. (—the last time you did this you broke that little bot; wrecked something you couldn’t fix—) Right, enough. Even focusing on your shittiest of motivations has got to be better than succumbing to an attack of nerves.

Before you can waste any more time running in embarrassing mental circles, you flatten your hand, press the circuits in your palm close against the metal below. You extend that inner programming, laid into your shades, laid into wires and metal somewhere in your brain, somewhere behind your skull where that core part of you is still numbers and code struggling into the shape of a human. You extend yourself, reach your limits. Push farther.

Connect.

The machinery in the ground below you lights up behind your eyes in crimson red lines and then you’re unfolding rapidly outwards, racing along electric pathways, splintering your mind and becoming bigger in the process.

In one part of yourself you are aware of your organic form kneeling in the dirt, head tilted forward in concentration, Kankri and Seb watching from steps away. The red shine of the lit rings in your shades tints your vision.

(“Are his eyes supposed to—?” Kankri starts. “Mm,” Seb says. “They glow. Wait.”)

In the other part of yourself—

You have only the vaguest sense of its physical shape: tall, like the others, retracted down below the ground like an antenna at the world’s largest carwash. The device’s programming is ancient and alien in a way that’s familiar. Once upon a time, you think it might have been a kernel spire, but you are not the only thing changed in a new world. You have your own suspicions about what function it might serve now, here in this place.

Sometimes you just have to make peace with the fact that your function in life might be to break the internet.

The device is largely shut down, the greater part of its programming locked behind closed points at the edge of your awareness. You probe automatically at those dormant threads, your mind already reaching to expand your dominion, to map that tantalizing web of possibility.

You don’t need the control console, you could take the whole thing from here, push farther, figure it out, make it yours--

No.

You call yourself sharply back. Somewhere, your fingers scrape across dirt and metal and Kankri says your name. (Grass under your hands and an ache in your head and you pushed so hard you broke it.) You started this with a plan, with a calculated, acceptable level of risk. (You can see Seb, hesitating just at the edge of your vision, standing right there.) Now is not the time to experiment. Now is not the time to indulge in thoughtlessness, now is not the time to forget that your actions have consequences. (Now is not the time to pretend you still don’t care.)

You gather yourself and reach, instead, for the single, dim thread that links this device to something smaller and more complex. You splinter once more, just a tiny fragment of yourself, and you send that fragment skittering down that connection with the simplest, least chancy of commands.

You turn the system on.

You stay only long enough to get a sense for what processes are initiating and in what order, for the timeline you’ve committed yourself to. The goal here is remote console on long enough for Seb to find it and for you to manually trigger the self-destruct functions on that end, but not so long that the entire underground antenna array completes deployment and starts... networking or whatever else it is giant mystery artifacts do. You can’t be certain of Sawtooth’s broader motivations for destroying these, internet-related or not, but you have the idea that turning them on instead would be bad.

Digging around in the system from this end is still tempting, but not so tempting that you can quite overlook the irresponsibility of playing with the trigger of a bomb you are currently sitting on.

Which isn’t to say you couldn’t handle it if you wanted to.

But, no, right, you’re not doing that because Seb and Kankri are right there and you the master of responsibility and shit.

Time to go. Distantly, you set a little timer running in your shades and ignore the cascade of unpleasant associations that want to trigger. (--helplessness, isolation, an empty world falling down around you--) Instead, you set about reeling in the pieces of your mind, struggling to assemble the fragments of yourself back into something that can fit in the limits of your flesh, into this organic vessel that still doesn’t quite feel like your own.

Disengagement comes by pieces, reluctant. You’re aware that you’re entirely in your body a good few minutes before you can gather your thoughts enough to think anything more usefully coherent than ‘I have a heartbeat’ or ‘I am moving air with my lungs.’ You take a much longer breath than you need to, think about pressure differentials and your diaphragm and the circulation of oxygen into your bloodstream, and then you blow out the breath and blink blearily. A flicker of red light vanishes from your vision.

Kankri hovers in arm’s reach—he’s, huh, a lot closer than before—his brows furrowed and teeth caught in his lip. You think maybe you have some thoughts about this, but you will have them later when you are not dissociating like a motherfucker.

You have toes, but they don’t strike you as real.

“Hey,” you say, with what you assume to be your voice.

“Can you hear me now?” Kankri asks.

“No, I am just a very vivid audio-hallucination.”

He narrows his eyes at you. “If you didn’t speak nonsense the majority of the time it would be easier to distinguish when you are delirious. Or pan-damaged.”

“Ha.” You are a font of stunning repartee. “Got you. With my plan. You had an emotion.”

His eyebrows arch up, then furrow down again. “You are disoriented. Your sibling suggested you might need a short recovery period.”

You look around, but don’t find Seb in the open, dusty space. “Where is he?”

“He went off ahead to find your control conso—whoa.” Hands fly out to steady you as you nearly capsize. You drop back to one knee.

Standing. Maybe not yet.

“Are you all right?”

You contemplate the hands bracing your shoulders—slim grey fingers, neat dark claws, subtle callouses. He has ink stains all along one side of his palm. “…Buffering,” you say, blankly. No, wait. “I’m fine. Just give me a sec.” You are fine; you’re totally chill. You just need to gather your thoughts.

His hands are very warm. And distracting.

Kankri steps away so abruptly you almost fall again. “I—please excuse me. That was extremely discourteous of me. I didn’t mean to—er. Distract you.”

Annnnnd you said that last part out loud. You blink into his not entirely sun-reddened face while a wash of adrenaline-fueled mortification scours the fog from your brain so you can really experience this moment. Great job. Smooth.

“Although frankly, I don’t know what else was to be expected when nobody explains to me what I am meant to do about a situation. You’re having some kind of, of reactive episode and I don’t have the first idea how to handle your biology. —that was not an innuendo.” Kankri pauses and cracks one eye, peering down his nose. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

You blink some more, open your mouth, stop, and then decide to never return to this topic ever again. The last five minutes never happened. You will fight anyone who says different.

“Which way did Seb go?” you say instead, pushing briskly to your feet and swaying only slightly. You can’t be certain, but you are pretty sure a non-fake guardian would not misplace their tiny human nearly as often as you do. You and Roxy—Dirk and Roxy’s ectoparents were dead and still managed to keep track of you. Them.

Bad thoughts. You brush dirt from your knees.

Kankri watches you narrowly. “He left in that direction. I believe he intended to mark the path in some way.”

“Awesome. Let’s go.”

You set off back into the mismatched city streets, hopping a low boulevard wall to claim the broken concrete of a crumbing sidewalk, set at diagonal angles to the buildings around. Kankri follows you without argument, apparently deep in thought. You’re starting to dread the phenomenon.

“You never answered my question,” he says, finally. He vaults the pole of a sideways streetlight one-handed. You very definitely do not admire the technique.

“It seems you have a slightly optimistic view of my decipherment abilities re: whichever of your heaping pileful of questions you’re referring to. Gonna have to add an antecedent to that, brosef.”

“Are you all right?”

“My rightness is at 100%.” You spy a flicker of red cloth up ahead, turn to the left to find a throwing star pinning the scrap to a weirdly immaculate street sign. The characters don’t look like anything you recognize from Earth or Alternia, but who knows? “I am composed of purest, undiluted correctness, pressed fresh from the finest accuracy vineyards.”

Kankri’s lips press in irritation. “Why do you insist on doing that?”

“It’s a factory setting.”

“It is no such thing. And that’s a very de-personizing and prejudicial analogy to use.”

Pfft. He’s all fluffed up like he’s fully prepared to take offense on your behalf, claim it for his own, and argue to the death over it. It’s sort of flattering and insulting all at once. (And uncomfortably warming, like hands intruding into your space. But mostly the former.) Your lips quirk. “I’m using flippancy as an emotional distancing tool. Don’t harsh my groove.”

“…I see,” Kankri says. His narrowed eyes on you suggest he doesn’t, at all, but he intends to latch on like a bullshark and figure it out on point of principle.

Stubborn. You tap a little tempo against your thumb, smile a bit at the fact that you can, and turn towards yet another shuriken and colorful fabric scrap down an alley to your right. A few small white chitinous creatures have crawled up the brickwork to examine the fluttering fabric. Rows of faceted blue eyes watch you stroll down the narrow space, followed close on your heels by an endlessly pushy troll. Your mood from earlier has returned, energized and full of reckless possibility. “Sure that’s the only question you want answered?”

You can actually see his pupils dilate. His eyes are very dark.

“Got the ‘show’ part taken care of on this little white elephant secrets exchange. Aren’t you curious about the ‘tell’?”

He hisses out a breath. “Yes.” And then, when you don’t immediately fill the silence: “Well?”

“I didn’t hear a question, bro.”

He glares at you for a long moment, practically bubbling with indignation. Then he folds his arms and lifts his chin—an interesting feat for someone currently navigating a cityscape obstacle course. “From what I can gather—not the least of which being your ignorance of the most basic cultural mores and common courtesy—it’s reasonably possible that you came through an influx site. You’re outworld. Old world. Am I close?” Each word of the question hits the air with pinpoint precision, pure challenge.

Your heart kicks up about a dozen more beats per minute. The sensation is either awesome, or it’s going to kill you. “That’s a thing?” you hedge, probing. “People just. Dropping in.”

Kankri slants a look sideways at you, along one sun-cracked cheekbone. “…Hypothetically. In stories. They say that’s where the first travelers came from, generations ago. The finned empress and the white queen and the twin empires of Ebon and Bone to settle the world. But you won’t find many people who believe that as more than legend. Artifacts, yes. Structures, whole cities even. It all came from somewhere. Maybe many wheres. But influx rate has been declining exponentially for sweeps and sweeps. The vast majority of influx sites are ancient and inactive.”

His voice has gradually acquired lecture tones, like he’s distracted himself with his own words, but his next sentence is all sharp insinuation again. “If you leave aside legends, nothing—I beg your pardon—no one organic has been documented in an influx in recorded history.”

“But you’re a believer.”

“My custodian liked to tell me bedtime schoolfeeds.” His voice is very dry. “Speaking of stories—I would, of course, never wish to demean your capabilities or intentions, but I note that the ‘tell’ portion of your agreed upon disclosure appears to be singularly lacking in actual telling.”

He does have a way of using a lot of words to make his insults harder to notice.

Your heart’s beating so fast you feel almost sick with excitement.

When you don’t respond immediately, Kankri stops in the middle of the crooked, asphalt-paved alleyway. He folds his arms, raises his chin, and faces you down directly. “Talk, if you please.”

Well. When he puts it that way—and talking is kind of your specialty. You lick your lips and take back off down the alley, just to be moving. Glancing back, you tilt him the strange, wild edge of a smirk.

What was it he said about wiggler stories? Oh, yes:

“Once upon a multiverse, a bunch of dumb kids played a Game…”

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#cyberbunny au #kankri vantas #hal strider #ar x kankri #lil seb #ccwritings #GUESS WHAT #i upd8ed :3

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