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fiveais · 3 months

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Unfinished Lethal League Blaze Fic: Unauthorized Maintenance

i started this fic. some time late last year, and i unfortunately ran out of steam while polishing it, but i still would like to share it (it's not written well enough for AO3). it's just about all headcanons despite my best efforts to capture what little there is to their canon personalities, so who knows how well i did there lol. i hope, if u choose to read, u enjoy it nonetheless

Rating: probably something like PG

Warnings: mild self harm mention, oblivious robot friend, fictional programming jargon, and robot body horror(?)

Characters: Raptor&Switch, with a tiny bit of Latch

“So when we do this- could you turn around for a minute when I take it off?”

Switch took a step back and scanned the setup they had made in the communal living space they allocated for this. The couch sat at a slightly lower height than what he was hoping for. He opened up the part of the architecture suite that handled spacial contradictions and disparities- it all came back with a positive return. He slid the chair forward anyway and then turned to face Raptor.

He was talking about his face.

Raptor sighed, hand tentatively posed to itch his arm, but he held back “dude, it’s not a big deal, I’ve seen your insides before”.

“No, man you don’t get it. Like-” He couldn’t explain it. The thoughts snagged and gummed up right as they were coming to a head. Some he could make out and others were harder to find specific words for. He floundered- bits and pieces of half broken syllables and snipped consonants were all that he was able to get out before he gave up entirely on the endeavor with a dejected sigh.

“Please?”

Raptor shifted his weight from one foot to the other and then back. He felt something bubbling under the surface and it burned his throat. Switch looked on at him in that way that he did when he expected a response, but his question had left a hot coal in the pit of his belly. It bothered him that this bothered his best friend. He thought they trusted each other more than this. He thought they were close. He thought they were really close.

“Okay, but can I ask something?”

That took him by surprise, “yeah, man, anything”. He eased into the chair they decided to use for this.

He took that to heart and braced himself, “are you scared what I might think? That I’ll think you’re weird or something?” The questions hung heavy between them.

He took a moment to think- mulling the questions and how he felt. When he melded them together- Raptor brought the malformed thought to light. What he felt was something like that.

“Yeah.”

“Huh? Are you okay?”

He tried again “yeah, dude. I’m scared. I don’t know how to explain it. But I think if you see me without the-“ he made a vague gesture around his face “-piece here, you might- you know. I don’t know.” He kind of did, but mostly he didn’t really want to think about it.

“What? See your robo-skeleton face and freak out?” He gave him a light shove. “C’mon man- it’s just a face. We all have skeletons and it’s not like you have gross stuff like blood or whatever. Just get it over with.” He felt the stress ease out of his shoulders as he turned to sit on the sofa, eying the tools.

Switch flexed his fingers one at a time, releasing them, and then all at once until his joints creaked “can you, like, promise to not freak out. Like, seriously, don’t freak out.”

Raptor raised one of the cleaning tools. Huh, he doesn’t remember this one. “No, I won’t freak out. Can we do this already? I’ve been ready for this since you asked. We kind of need to do this fast-“ or else all the old gunk and dust that built up might just stick to him forever and who knows what that would do weeks or months from now.

There was a series of clicks and a several latches unhooking from the inside- a pneumatic pressure gauge hissed as it retracted. He kept his attention on how everything undid and unlatched and separated away from the rest of his body. There was no turning back now. Next thing he knew Raptor had gently lifted it out of his grip, and held it while just looking at him. A cacophony of uninsulated clicks and whirls were made as he failed to look anywhere else that wasn’t directly at the human that stood over him. He made an attempt to turn his head, but the rollers silently spun uselessly in place. He imagined that this is what a camera on a tripod must feel like. Except he has bare exposed lenses that were out on display in the open along with all the delicate wires and circuits and motherboard; meanwhile Raptor was right there holding his face-

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. He chanted to himself as Raptor sat across from him, setting his now dimly-lit casing aside on the couch cushion next to him, not really taking his gaze off of Switch.

Raptor ran a hand over the tools and slid one of the smaller ones out of its pocket. With a soft microfiber brush tip and squeezable cleaning barrel, it was the first one to use for small sensitive parts. He peered up and beckoned Switch to lean a little further down and forward so he didn’t have to strain to keep his arm still as he worked. Switch inched ever forward in the chair- it groaned and half of his face was now cast in a column of bright warm sunlight, his lens contracting and throwing deep shadows where the light caught on his face.

Raptor’s jaw slackened and his hand got sidetracked. This was his friend, he’s had this face when he was made. It was just under the case that protected it this whole time. When was the last time he took it off? Did he ever get cleaned up like this? Was there anyone to help him then?

Getting a closer look, it reminded him of the old guts of a computer tower with the anatomy of one of those electronic skeletons found in toys. There were several tiny circuit boards- wires that were bundled with electric tape- some in neat tidy strips and others in a haphazard mess, a couple little fans that sputtered in frequent bursts, a couple little speaker-looking parts, a large mess where his mouth would be- it didn’t even look like a speaker, and to his surprise, two lens that were locked onto him.

In a smooth and methodical motion he looked for a place to start, circling around his eye area. The cleaning solution that would clear any dust off and polish his eyes gleamed in the mid-day sun as he closed in on Switch’s face.

He heard the soft clicking and whirling of camera lenses as Switch focused on him and tried to distract himself “is it bad?”

Wow, that brush was getting close to his eye.

He leaned away slightly.

Raptor stopped and hummed “not as bad as we thought it was gonna be.” He raised a brow “can you feel this?” The brush met the outer rim of his eye- tiny raised text caught the cleaning mixture which condensed into a crystalline droplet that slid into his view. Switch flinched back before realizing what it was. He really needed to chill, he could trust Raptor with this- it was difficult to fight off his fraying nerves when a slew of different hardcoded self-preservation functions poked him every few nano-seconds- one after another. In succession.

He leaned back forward, hands resting on his lap in loose fists “no- but-” something in his hindcode itched. He took a glance at it. It was a loop of the company variety. Again. “Just be gentle?”

Raptor seemed only a little annoyed, brush held in the air, “trust me, dude, I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you” he slowly returned with gentle contact- Switch heard a series of soft scrapping sounds coming from seemingly right inside his audio input receptors. Everything in him screamed that this was unauthorized, that it was potentially damaging, that he might just explode and die a fiery death (which wasn’t going to happening, but the company maintenance made vague threats like it would). He decided to authorize Raptor as a technician right then and there- he just hadn’t thought about how he had never done this before. He opened a system option and accessed the manual bypass for personnel intel and security. It was so broken and frail it didn’t care that he was the one talking to it. Only the thing had completely ignored him when he reached for the input prompt list.

Wait.

He went after it, but it didn’t even go near the route programs he usually had corralled them to.

>> System: return address; null function; else return “error”;

> error; return data type; void int;

What.

Then he heard it.

“REGISTERING TECHNICAL CLIENT FOR AUTHORIZATION. PROCEED?” Oh that was loud. It lacked all the inflection of what he usually sounded like, too. Actually, exploding right about now didn’t seem so bad. Maybe even an astroid hitting him where he sat.

Raptor froze and went pale, he was stopped whatever he was saying and doing. That was never good. He went straight for a backdoor, deciding not to waste time confronting it.

“Switch?” He said in a small brave voice.

“PROCEED?” The voice asked again. Piece of shit was scaring Raptor, he needed back in right now. But just as the system didn’t care that he accessed it, it didn’t care that he needed a fast way to find the lead to where this program was coming from. Terminate. Terminate you stupid piece of shit software.

Raptor looked lost and terrified like his best friend was taken over by some kind of virus and was about to eat him.

A moment passed. Then another. He slowly took his hand away after realizing nothing was going to happen, and regarded him carefully, ready to launch off the couch if he needed to. He swallowed thickly and then followed the body-snatcher’s lead.

“Proceed?”

“TECHNICIAN DESIGNATION” the voice prompted in its flat buzzy voice.

“Raptor” it didn’t have any of the charm of when they first met, but he found some small sense of bemusement in this second first meeting.

“REGISTERING “RAPTOR”. BYPASSING CONFIRMATION CODE 405.” Almost there. He had a feeling the lack of company server was what even let Raptor interact with the program like this.

Raptor seemed less scared and more confused and concerned “Hey, Switch, are you in there?” For all he knew this thing was now Switch and that the friend he knew was gone.

He wrestled the voice command away “hey, yeah, I’m here- sorry” he would have crawled behind the couch and manually erase all of this if he could.

Raptor gave him a pointed look “dude, that was not cool.” He paused. Oh, his hand was shaking now. Shit.

Switch slowly reached up to try to reassure him.

“I’m okay, don’t worry about it” he didn’t look or sound okay.

“I’m sorry” he elaborated “I was… it was…” he made a learned frustrated sound “I just authorized you as my main technician. You can access everything now” he continued “I didn’t know that was gonna happen. I thought it was all boring internal company stuff and you could work while I deal with it” it was easier to tell when he looked off and away to the side “I know that was loud.”

Oh. This was a Citynetics thing. Switch didn’t ever really talk about them.

“It’s cool, we’re cool… What do you mean by everything?” Getting back to the task at hand, Raptor took one deep breath and then another. He shook his hands out and took a drink. He felt a little better. Everything was okay, it’s alright, Switch was still Switch.

“Everything as in everything” he made a motion with his hand “you know, coding and parts and all that.”

“Oh. Cool.” Raptor didn’t grasp that Switch had just handed him, but that was okay, he would figure it out later.

He picked up the brush once more, gestured for Switch to return to his position, and then started on the other side of his face. He rested his left hand across on the collar of Switch’s neck and used his right forearm to prop up his hand up just below his wrist. Barely squeezing the plastic barrel for more cleaning solution and being as careful as to avoid exposed wire and metal and glass, he went to work. His hand still held a slight tremor- then he noticed Switch clench his fist just a fraction “do you have, like, popups that yell at you or something?”

“Well. Yeah, I guess. Most of the time I can ignore it.”

“That sounds like it would suck.” Raptor snapped the cap back on the brush- saving solution from drying, and reached for the little blue can of electronic air duster. There was a ton of light grey dust built up in little mounds around the fans and boards. He gingerly started working on the tiny metal fans as he held the brush with the attachment up to them.

Switch tried to relax. In the undercode that ran behind his awareness there was a constant stream of now approved movements that Raptor was making. It was weird. There was now something that tracked every move Raptor made and a new library of statements that revolved around ID’ing him. Was this always there and he just now noticed it? He doubted it. Suddenly it disappeared and Switch made a startled noise as Raptor came back from opening a window to air out the room.

“What’s up?”

When he looked at Raptor something popped up in the undercurrent and he went to check it out.

He didn’t need another full-body possession twice in one day “hold on… when I authorized you something weird happened and it’s trying to track you”.

“Wow, creepy, but okay” Raptor said lightly, the ice cubes clinking together as he took a refreshing sip.

Switch sounded distracted “it’s trying to do something here… oh.”

“Oh?” Raptor casually turned over their small can of all-purpose 3-in-1 oil.

What exactly did he open up when he went to authorize him.

“It’s trying to give you some kind of title… you’re my… handler? Creation buddy? Another ex-worker? I don’t get what this is trying to tell me, it’s written in another language from everything else.”

“Dude, you’re bilingual?”

“Something like that, yeah. It’s a computer language that I don’t know” he focused on the oil can, it was new. Where did he get that from? “I should know all of them, so I’m not gonna lie, I’m kinda worried about what’s going on.”

Raptor tried to wrap his head around what he was saying “so the thing that talked to me is speaking to you in a language you don’t know even though it’s your mind- and It’s trying to give me a label even though you just said I’m you ‘technician’”? He grabbed a microfiber cloth and tipped a dollop of oil onto it. It would protect the raw steel from rust “why would it try to call me anything other than ‘technician’?”

Switch wondered why, too. It was broken and twitchy and when he gave it his attention it pinged him. Or it moved. He only understood a fraction of it even when he looked into the transistor part of his code (which almost overwhelmed him to even make the call for in a terminal screen). It kept updating and changing and when he moved it moved with him. Weird.

Then he tried something- bypassing the input-output he spewed a line of code right at it.

Mid-questioning everything up until now, just like that, he was gone.

When he came to- his system already went through the on-off system check. This is not where he was expecting his day to go. Maybe Raptor accidentally snapping off a fan or a bundle of wires coming loose and disconnecting something vaguely important? Well yeah, but not this. Last thing he remembers was sending a line of code that would have crashed that thing that was hanging out with him in his head- oh.

Raptor stood at his side, hovering over him. It took a minute for his vision to clear up entirely. He knew that look.

Now that he got the chance, he noticed that he was on the floor on his side- he tried to get up, but a hand pressured him to stay. What happened?

Raptor’s face was weird and puffy. It left him feeling uneasy- it was off and looked uncomfortable and almost sad? Angry? There wasn’t a lot of red in his face, it was mostly wet like he was crying. Something bad must have happened while he was out. He checked his history bank. It wasn’t there, actually looking for it now- it was out of his reach. He felt like he should be more worried, but Raptor had to come first, he could worry about his system later. How could he make this better? Raptor probably thought he had off-lined him. More than anything he felt guilty- he really messed up this time.

He stammered out a “sup”

Seriously. That was the best he could think of? Try again- what does Raptor need right now.

“I really fucked up, this time, I’m sorry” his voice sounded tinny and crackled. Was his face still on the couch?

Raptor’s voice sounded mildly stuffed up “Latch’s here”

Oh.

He heard someone adjust on the couch, clacking away at a keyboard out of his view “hey” it was cool and impartial. That was Latch, alright.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“You terminating your own code mid-process is what’s up- do you see this?”

Something gave him a jolt and forced itself into his view. It took up his whole vision “yeah, but now I can’t see you”

“Good. Just follow it.”

“So following your responses from that program it looks like your sentience stems from somewhere in the system options and augmenting area of your code. To make this short: you were talking to yourself, but because it was a fraction of an already broken code you fractured more of it and made a kind of mirror of code. It probably acted strange- does that sound right?”

He would have nodded “yeah! It tried to get my attention and kept saying weird half-gibberish to me”

Latch motioned with one hand “think of it as your subconscious- it wasn’t you per se, but rather, like a more complex low level thought process. You have the memory for it.” He paused “I had wrote a user-based function that should keep that from happening.”

He turned to Raptor “it was like a snake eating its own tail, but I made it so he knows not to do that again, right?”

Latch gave him a look that could freeze summer over

“Right”

Was he the system options? Is that where he came from? It was a lot to think about.

Raptor cleared his throat “I owe you one, Latch”

Latch huffed as he hopped down from the couch and brushed himself off

“I know who to bill, you bums don’t have a penny to your name”

“Heh, got us there”

“Thanks, Latch”

“No problem, kid. Next time he does something stupid like that, you can plug him into your laptop, he can figure it from there.”

Raptor saw him out, Switch watched from his position on the floor- Raptor then closed and locked the door behind him and turned and came back “I thought I killed you- you know”

“I’m sorry-“

Raptor exhaled with a shuddered breath “I tried everything, nothing worked-” he started to pace, not really looking at Switch. Words barely tapering off above a hoarse whisper- grabbing at his hair with one hand and positioning his other near his mouth “-I thought you forgot to charge, but plugging you in didn’t work. I thought-“ his eyes were getting shiny and his words started to choke up and all thought was devoured by a wall of emotion that he had holed up in his the entire time that Latch getting Switch to just turn on. He held onto hours of storming thoughts when Latch managed the first time he boot up where Switch wasn’t really Switch. Then they tried again. The second time looked promising, but it still wasn’t clicking in place. By the third he was starting to lose grip with his nerve, hands turning numb as he tried to keep his cool. He had obviously mostly failed on that front from the looks of it.

He never told Switch, but sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night with this specific dream- one that when he sat up he felt as though the wind was knocked out of his body and the floor was pulled from right under his feet. Like a waking nightmare coming true. Like Switch never turning on from a crash.

“I thought you were dead- you. You weren’t coming back. That-“ That he was gone and the only person who had given half a damn about him had left him alone in a world where no one cared what happened to some kid who played ball and had nothing else to his name but a bat and a helmet.

“Raptor-” he faltered, thinking on the best words he knew. The ones that’ll balm Raptor’s hurt- he kneaded and mulled over the words in his mind that would reassure that he would never leave Raptor like that, but his own stupid mistake and shallow foresight had almost lead him to his end. Again. He would be the master of his unmaking and he felt helpless to the knowledge. It made for some choice alerts in his under-code that paid attention to every little thought that crossed his mind. Nonetheless, even if the logical pathways left errors- he chose to ignore them for the one good solid truth he knew.

“Raptor, I’m still here.” It was all that he could afford.

He propped himself against the couch with his arm outstretched as an open invitation for Raptor- a small plea to close the gap. Raptor haphazardly collapsed in the familiar angles of Switch’s embrace. He melted into his side and pressed himself as close he could as he was wracked with a quiet upset.

“I’m here” his voice had tempered into something soft and warm and solid and repeated it until Raptor lulled himself into a stupor. Limp as he was held Switch noticed the little wells that his teeth left on his arm and the red angry skin around his sutures.

What was he thinking doing that to some part of himself he didn’t have a clue about. He should have ran a diagnostics to see what that even was. At the very most they would have called Latch together ofr him to have to section off that part of his system options. It would have been annoying, but nothing compared to this. He gently scooped Raptor up with very little effort- reaching behind himself to unplug some wires he was still hooked up to. Raptor only stirred a little, but some light coaxing got him to settle down. He eased him onto the couch, working off his helmet that he then laid on the coffee table next to their mess.

When that was done he closed the couple laptops Latch was using earlier, wrapped up the cords in a neat little bundle, and made space for himself on the floor by the couch. If there was anything left from cleaning his electronic components- they were quickly forgotten about. There would always be another time for that. Settling down Switch let his arm rest on the cushion next to Raptor. He took comfort in the sensor that gauged the mild influx of psi as it rested well, a nudge had let him know that there was the tiniest bit of resistance against it. Raptor was pressing himself up against his arm.. After a few more minutes he then picked up on the gentle slow snoring. It was late afternoon- almost time for dinner if he had to be frank, so it would probably be next to impossible for Raptor to go to bed on time, but after this, he figures one personal day wouldn’t hurt. He’d help Raptor catch up on any of his homework if it came to that.

With the dying light and the sulfur lamps blinking on one by one he let himself sink into the thought of tomorrow and the day after and the day after.

#my writing #asper writes #lethal league blaze #llb switch #llb raptor

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