Fic: The Sea Like the Stars [2/?]
Fandom(s): Tron: Legacy
Characters: Kevin Flynn, Sam Flynn, Tron/Rinzler, Clu, Quorra, Alan Bradley
Rating: T
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Summary:
In one story, a program named Rinzler remembered he was once named Tron for the microseconds necessary to ram his lightjet into Clu's.
In one story, he fell, and Clu went on to harry the users and the Iso upon the I/O port's very threshold.
In one story, he drifted into the deeps of the Sea of Simulation, limp and flickering, as Kevin Flynn drew Clu into himself and Sam and Quorra escaped into the user's world.
This is not that story.
Note: I only watched the movie once. I'm terrible at remembering dialogue or how characters talk. I'm terrible at remembering layouts, details, etc - basically, everything. So, I apologize for any inaccuracies, but whatever I don't remember, I'm just going to be making up whole cloth.
Previous chapters:
[ Chapter 1: Another End, Another Beginning ]
Chapter 2: Forever Young
It was complete and utter chaos.
It was now crawling well past two decades (or 6.48x10^11 milliseconds or x10^14 nanoseconds or - but who really wanted to keep count anymore?) before Kevin Flynn last stepped on this side of the monitor ... and from what he could gather, reality couldn't wait to shove that fact down his throat with every single breath he took.
The hip on which he had landed on ached ferociously.
Dust caught in the back of his windpipe and flew up his nose, making it itch mercilessly.
A hand with someone's full weight behind it mashed unexpectedly against his mouth, and underneath the discomfort, he tasted salt-sweat and the iron tang of a cut lip.
And above all else, the noise of pandemonium.
"What the hell - "
"Ouch! Sam, your elbow - "
"Rinzler!"
It was hard to say at first what chilled him more quickly; if it was an all too familiar voice that had turned against him, or the once familiar whine of a laser's capacitor banks cycling. Or, perhaps, it was the frightening realization that the two sounds were now overlayed as they should never have been, and that the former had lost its peculiar on-Grid resonance, retaining only the heat and snap of a lifetime's worth of anguish and hatred.
"Sam," he groaned, squinting through a blurring haze which refused to disperse no matter how often he blinked or tried to will it away, forgetting all too quickly that real world physics was not as receptive to human suggestion as the system environment. "Sam, what have you done - "
"Wh-what've I done?!" an outraged sputter came from just above his head as too many hands tried to help him up all at once. "Okay, look, Dad, if you hadn't gone all Alamo there and tried to make some crazy last stand - "
Kevin fought the urge to groan again as he finally found his feet. It seemed two decades had made him not only rusty in body, but feeble in his parenting skills as well. "That's not what I meant - "
Quorra's sharp warning came only a split-second before he caught a glimpse of his younger self in the corner of his vision. He barely had enough time to begin lurching backwards out of sheer reflex before a supple, black-clad arm abruptly interceded. There was a blur of motion that his age-clouded eyes could not possibly follow and then a horrible crash, and even as he was being pulled off balance yet again by well-meaning tugs, another misplaced sound was filling the room ... Rinzler's ticking rumble; oddly flat, but wholly unmistakable.
He froze. Quorra, Sam, himself, Clu, and Rinzler? No, Tron. They were all here, in the users' world, the real world? In fact, the latter two had apparently continued their struggle right through the transition with barely a pause for breath - furniture screeching in protest, equipment shattering - and what he had originally thought was an attack directed toward him he only belatedly realized was Clu trying to make a run for it before Tron intercepted him. But the tables turned abruptly as Rinzler's growl stuttered when a blow snapped him backwards into a shelf - discs and books raining down - and Clu followed with a vengeful mask which Kevin had rarely seen turned on anyone but himself. "You dare - !" his doppelganger hissed, pinning the helmeted figure with a forearm across the throat, other arm reaching back for a program's most personal weapon.
Kevin felt as if he was the one being strangled instead, though it was Rinzler/Tron straining weakly against the hold. This was becoming a sort of private hell, a nightmare scene stuck in an endless loop, helplessly watching one of his best friends fight for his life - for both their lives - against Kevin's own creation.
And losing.
"Dad - Dad! The laser - it's finished charging, what do we do, how do we send them back - "
Send them back?
"Kevin Flynn?" Quorra squeaked when his grip tightened unconsciously on her bracing forearm.
Abandon Tron again?
"Dad!"
"No ... " he husked as, whether it was fully functional in the real world or not, Clu was able to detach something from his back to raise high over his head in a pose which struck ice through his very core. "No!" he cried, moving without thought, unable to bear the thought of that disc falling once more upon his friend and hurling himself straight at the program in a full-body tackle.
"Oh Jesus are you insane - ?!"
Kevin could spare only a nanosecond's - no, split-second, here - thought for chagrin at his son's accusation, and then another one for pride - chip off the ol' block there - when Sam then flung himself into the fray with that crazed warcry of his with nary another thought. Clu folded beneath their combined weights with a surprised grunt, and while Kevin - holding no illusions about his fitness for combat off-Grid - simply tried to sprawl as awkwardly over the program's torso as possible, his son concentrated on trying to wrestle the disc from Clu's grasp.
"Ow - !" Sam squawked, snatching back his hand with eyes wide and incredulous. Kevin's head jerked up, trying to see what was wrong, before Clu took advantage of their inattention to buck with startling strength, nearly unseating the both of them altogether. "Crap - Quorra!" Sam called breathlessly, flinging himself nearly atop Kevin as well in his haste to pin the rogue program again, except he hardly needed to remind the Iso - the program was already standing over them like the proverbial dark angel, her pale face a forbidding mask of deadly focus, weapon of choice raised high over her head ... only, it was no longer a lightblade which extended from the elegant hilt, but a slender dark thing that looked like it had an all too keen edge, and Kevin suddenly realized with stuttering heart that she was about to kill Clu -
"Quorra, no, not here!"
In hindsight, he might rationalize that he was trying to prevent the last example of a digital life form from committing accidental murder. But truthfully, at that moment, all he wanted was for everything to just - to just pause, and give him a chance to think, because he had had twenty-one years of real time and who knows how many trillions of cycles virtual time to consider all the ways that things could conclude on the Grid, but he never once - never once - considered how things might end in the real world instead. Things kept happening, and he was frightfully aware that there was no undo command here -
"User ... "
It seemed little more than a whisper. Yet it was so out of place, so strange, that it unerringly drew all their attentions; four pairs of eyes rising to the dark figure half-slumped against the wrecked shelving, and then an oh-so-subtle tilt of the helmet toward the laser whose cerulean blue light seemed to gather and swell at the mouth ...
"Sam - Quorra - !" Kevin gasped as realization struck, grasping uselessly at words in his desperation as he scrabbled to his feet, all else forgotten in his haste. Why is everything so slow; can't talk, can't move, can't think fast enough ... "Stop it ... the laser! The rest of them - !"
Thank goodness the universe had seen fit to grant him with bright children; brighter than he knew what to do with sometimes. Sam and Quorra did not need further explanations, though their methods of resolution varied dramatically.
Sam raked his gaze over the laser and immediately dove for the power cables leading to the wall.
Quorra raked her gaze over the room and picked up the nearest chair.
Just as Sam braced his foot and put his shoulders behind a yank which sheered brittle cable sheathes and yanked corroded plugs from their sockets, Quorra brought the seat down in a fearsome overhand swing upon the center of the laser's barrel.
Kevin flinched at the ferocious crunch which resulted and Sam stared at the shattered bits of metal which rained down to the ground, cables still dangling from his hands. "Uhm ... " the young man finally ventured before trailing off helplessly, speechless.
Kevin could feel a little knot of dread replacing the panic in his bemusement. True, there would now be no realistic equivalent of a hovering dreadnought trying to manifest in the real world, but the laser itself ...
"Flynn ... "
The whisper was even weaker than before. Kevin turned - so slow, too slow - and registered only an all-black silhouette slipping clumsily between him and the enraged visage of Clu before -
Crack!
Rinzler's black helmet snapped back with the force of the program's blow, bits of shattered plastic flying away.
"Tron!" Kevin choked, barely putting his arms out in time to catch the slumping figure, taking it in a controlled fall to the ground as his balance failed.
" ... should have derezzed you from the beginning! Don't think this is over, Flynn!" Clu snarled, expression wild, and this time, there was no one close enough to stop him as he dashed for the stairs, though Quorra did not hesitate to tear after him. Then, with a frustrated, "Hey!" Sam was pelting after her in turn.
Kevin ... Kevin only had eyes for the body sprawled awkwardly against him, transfixed by the glimpse of a face beneath the cracked and broken helmet.
A single dark brown eye stared back blindly, half-lidded and blank with shock. A small cut over the visible brow was beaded with crimson droplets, gathering into a thin line which began wending down over the temple. Though anything below one angular cheek was still hidden in shadow and tinted polymer, he could hear the desperate gasps for air from within and feel the shuddering breaths in the chest leaning against him.
"Tron ... Tron, buddy ... " he whispered helplessly, his hands - the Creator's hands no longer - hovering uselessly over the fractured helmet, wondering what in the world he was supposed to do ...
"Wait - just, just hold on a moment, give me a moment to explain - don't go down there - !" Sam's voice abruptly drifted back, accompanied by a clumsy slew of footfalls coming down the stairs. Kevin lifted his head with dazed relief, mouth opening on some vague notion of asking for his son's help, his son who knew far more about the real world than he did now ...
"What the devil is going on here?!"
... and felt his voice stick in his throat as his gaze met, instead, the face of Tron's, aged twenty-one years - that of Alan Bradley.
Characters: Kevin Flynn, Sam Flynn, Tron/Rinzler, Clu, Quorra, Alan Bradley
Rating: T
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Summary:
In one story, a program named Rinzler remembered he was once named Tron for the microseconds necessary to ram his lightjet into Clu's.
In one story, he fell, and Clu went on to harry the users and the Iso upon the I/O port's very threshold.
In one story, he drifted into the deeps of the Sea of Simulation, limp and flickering, as Kevin Flynn drew Clu into himself and Sam and Quorra escaped into the user's world.
This is not that story.
Note: I only watched the movie once. I'm terrible at remembering dialogue or how characters talk. I'm terrible at remembering layouts, details, etc - basically, everything. So, I apologize for any inaccuracies, but whatever I don't remember, I'm just going to be making up whole cloth.
Previous chapters:
[ Chapter 1: Another End, Another Beginning ]
Chapter 2: Forever Young
It was complete and utter chaos.
It was now crawling well past two decades (or 6.48x10^11 milliseconds or x10^14 nanoseconds or - but who really wanted to keep count anymore?) before Kevin Flynn last stepped on this side of the monitor ... and from what he could gather, reality couldn't wait to shove that fact down his throat with every single breath he took.
The hip on which he had landed on ached ferociously.
Dust caught in the back of his windpipe and flew up his nose, making it itch mercilessly.
A hand with someone's full weight behind it mashed unexpectedly against his mouth, and underneath the discomfort, he tasted salt-sweat and the iron tang of a cut lip.
And above all else, the noise of pandemonium.
"What the hell - "
"Ouch! Sam, your elbow - "
"Rinzler!"
It was hard to say at first what chilled him more quickly; if it was an all too familiar voice that had turned against him, or the once familiar whine of a laser's capacitor banks cycling. Or, perhaps, it was the frightening realization that the two sounds were now overlayed as they should never have been, and that the former had lost its peculiar on-Grid resonance, retaining only the heat and snap of a lifetime's worth of anguish and hatred.
"Sam," he groaned, squinting through a blurring haze which refused to disperse no matter how often he blinked or tried to will it away, forgetting all too quickly that real world physics was not as receptive to human suggestion as the system environment. "Sam, what have you done - "
"Wh-what've I done?!" an outraged sputter came from just above his head as too many hands tried to help him up all at once. "Okay, look, Dad, if you hadn't gone all Alamo there and tried to make some crazy last stand - "
Kevin fought the urge to groan again as he finally found his feet. It seemed two decades had made him not only rusty in body, but feeble in his parenting skills as well. "That's not what I meant - "
Quorra's sharp warning came only a split-second before he caught a glimpse of his younger self in the corner of his vision. He barely had enough time to begin lurching backwards out of sheer reflex before a supple, black-clad arm abruptly interceded. There was a blur of motion that his age-clouded eyes could not possibly follow and then a horrible crash, and even as he was being pulled off balance yet again by well-meaning tugs, another misplaced sound was filling the room ... Rinzler's ticking rumble; oddly flat, but wholly unmistakable.
He froze. Quorra, Sam, himself, Clu, and Rinzler? No, Tron. They were all here, in the users' world, the real world? In fact, the latter two had apparently continued their struggle right through the transition with barely a pause for breath - furniture screeching in protest, equipment shattering - and what he had originally thought was an attack directed toward him he only belatedly realized was Clu trying to make a run for it before Tron intercepted him. But the tables turned abruptly as Rinzler's growl stuttered when a blow snapped him backwards into a shelf - discs and books raining down - and Clu followed with a vengeful mask which Kevin had rarely seen turned on anyone but himself. "You dare - !" his doppelganger hissed, pinning the helmeted figure with a forearm across the throat, other arm reaching back for a program's most personal weapon.
Kevin felt as if he was the one being strangled instead, though it was Rinzler/Tron straining weakly against the hold. This was becoming a sort of private hell, a nightmare scene stuck in an endless loop, helplessly watching one of his best friends fight for his life - for both their lives - against Kevin's own creation.
And losing.
"Dad - Dad! The laser - it's finished charging, what do we do, how do we send them back - "
Send them back?
"Kevin Flynn?" Quorra squeaked when his grip tightened unconsciously on her bracing forearm.
Abandon Tron again?
"Dad!"
"No ... " he husked as, whether it was fully functional in the real world or not, Clu was able to detach something from his back to raise high over his head in a pose which struck ice through his very core. "No!" he cried, moving without thought, unable to bear the thought of that disc falling once more upon his friend and hurling himself straight at the program in a full-body tackle.
"Oh Jesus are you insane - ?!"
Kevin could spare only a nanosecond's - no, split-second, here - thought for chagrin at his son's accusation, and then another one for pride - chip off the ol' block there - when Sam then flung himself into the fray with that crazed warcry of his with nary another thought. Clu folded beneath their combined weights with a surprised grunt, and while Kevin - holding no illusions about his fitness for combat off-Grid - simply tried to sprawl as awkwardly over the program's torso as possible, his son concentrated on trying to wrestle the disc from Clu's grasp.
"Ow - !" Sam squawked, snatching back his hand with eyes wide and incredulous. Kevin's head jerked up, trying to see what was wrong, before Clu took advantage of their inattention to buck with startling strength, nearly unseating the both of them altogether. "Crap - Quorra!" Sam called breathlessly, flinging himself nearly atop Kevin as well in his haste to pin the rogue program again, except he hardly needed to remind the Iso - the program was already standing over them like the proverbial dark angel, her pale face a forbidding mask of deadly focus, weapon of choice raised high over her head ... only, it was no longer a lightblade which extended from the elegant hilt, but a slender dark thing that looked like it had an all too keen edge, and Kevin suddenly realized with stuttering heart that she was about to kill Clu -
"Quorra, no, not here!"
In hindsight, he might rationalize that he was trying to prevent the last example of a digital life form from committing accidental murder. But truthfully, at that moment, all he wanted was for everything to just - to just pause, and give him a chance to think, because he had had twenty-one years of real time and who knows how many trillions of cycles virtual time to consider all the ways that things could conclude on the Grid, but he never once - never once - considered how things might end in the real world instead. Things kept happening, and he was frightfully aware that there was no undo command here -
"User ... "
It seemed little more than a whisper. Yet it was so out of place, so strange, that it unerringly drew all their attentions; four pairs of eyes rising to the dark figure half-slumped against the wrecked shelving, and then an oh-so-subtle tilt of the helmet toward the laser whose cerulean blue light seemed to gather and swell at the mouth ...
"Sam - Quorra - !" Kevin gasped as realization struck, grasping uselessly at words in his desperation as he scrabbled to his feet, all else forgotten in his haste. Why is everything so slow; can't talk, can't move, can't think fast enough ... "Stop it ... the laser! The rest of them - !"
Thank goodness the universe had seen fit to grant him with bright children; brighter than he knew what to do with sometimes. Sam and Quorra did not need further explanations, though their methods of resolution varied dramatically.
Sam raked his gaze over the laser and immediately dove for the power cables leading to the wall.
Quorra raked her gaze over the room and picked up the nearest chair.
Just as Sam braced his foot and put his shoulders behind a yank which sheered brittle cable sheathes and yanked corroded plugs from their sockets, Quorra brought the seat down in a fearsome overhand swing upon the center of the laser's barrel.
Kevin flinched at the ferocious crunch which resulted and Sam stared at the shattered bits of metal which rained down to the ground, cables still dangling from his hands. "Uhm ... " the young man finally ventured before trailing off helplessly, speechless.
Kevin could feel a little knot of dread replacing the panic in his bemusement. True, there would now be no realistic equivalent of a hovering dreadnought trying to manifest in the real world, but the laser itself ...
"Flynn ... "
The whisper was even weaker than before. Kevin turned - so slow, too slow - and registered only an all-black silhouette slipping clumsily between him and the enraged visage of Clu before -
Crack!
Rinzler's black helmet snapped back with the force of the program's blow, bits of shattered plastic flying away.
"Tron!" Kevin choked, barely putting his arms out in time to catch the slumping figure, taking it in a controlled fall to the ground as his balance failed.
" ... should have derezzed you from the beginning! Don't think this is over, Flynn!" Clu snarled, expression wild, and this time, there was no one close enough to stop him as he dashed for the stairs, though Quorra did not hesitate to tear after him. Then, with a frustrated, "Hey!" Sam was pelting after her in turn.
Kevin ... Kevin only had eyes for the body sprawled awkwardly against him, transfixed by the glimpse of a face beneath the cracked and broken helmet.
A single dark brown eye stared back blindly, half-lidded and blank with shock. A small cut over the visible brow was beaded with crimson droplets, gathering into a thin line which began wending down over the temple. Though anything below one angular cheek was still hidden in shadow and tinted polymer, he could hear the desperate gasps for air from within and feel the shuddering breaths in the chest leaning against him.
"Tron ... Tron, buddy ... " he whispered helplessly, his hands - the Creator's hands no longer - hovering uselessly over the fractured helmet, wondering what in the world he was supposed to do ...
"Wait - just, just hold on a moment, give me a moment to explain - don't go down there - !" Sam's voice abruptly drifted back, accompanied by a clumsy slew of footfalls coming down the stairs. Kevin lifted his head with dazed relief, mouth opening on some vague notion of asking for his son's help, his son who knew far more about the real world than he did now ...
"What the devil is going on here?!"
... and felt his voice stick in his throat as his gaze met, instead, the face of Tron's, aged twenty-one years - that of Alan Bradley.