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[bikerdetective]

 

Hey baby~ It's Gunmax.
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[patokiichi]

Deckerd lay crumpled on the floor like a discarded doll, optics strobing on and off as he twitched and seized. Sounds continued to bubble up from his mouth. Some of sounded human, some didn't, but all of it climbed higher and higher in pitch.

Deckerd was only faintly aware of anything outside of himself. There was noise, movement, but his whole world had narrowed down to scattered, disconnected audio and visual clips flashing through his mind at a frantic pace.

Red and red and snarling gold, "-if you crash around like a damn newbuild? If you break our only damn way of getting-"

Hands reaching out, a glimpse of a visor that scattered sparks through his mind. "-scared and stressed and in a new place, I get it, sugar. But you gotta stop and think, hun. If you hurt yourself tryin' to get back to Yuuta he's gonna be upse-"

"-ou keep that up," red and white and a scratchy voice that he wanted back before it'd even finished, "you are going to injure yours-."

Purple on purple lights that pulsed along to the words, “-you–move forward–with–what you’ve–learned-”

Angles and colors that hurt, that make Deckerd keen a noise that fell apart. "-ve, Deckerd. It's-"

A voice in his audial he no longer recognized as his own or understood, but there, there was a clip accompanying it of Yuuta smiling, Yuuta's mouth moving silently, Yuuta Yuuta Yuuta. Deckerd tried to reach out a hand for him but the video fell apart and all that was left was the great, teetering wall that loomed in his mind like a wave, obliterating everything in its path.

"Live your life with courage."

[bikerdetective]

Robots aren't supposed to seize like that. The only time Gunmax can remember ever seeing something like that before was when one of them got electrocuted. Shocked by a giant cattle prod that some villain had that Drill Boy hadn't dodged fast enough.

Seeing Deckerd writhing on the hallway floor? It made him sick to his core and ice cold. Numb in a way that nothing could touch.

His worst fears realized all over again.

Deckerd was dying in front of him.

It couldn't be anything else. Or at least, that's what his processor told him. Deckerd was seizing and screaming and those weren't words anymore or even recognizable binary it was just sound and—

Gunmax hit his knees at Deckerd's side. Carefully, oh so carefully, he pulled his partner into his lap and cradled the bare endoskull. "I'm right here, Deckerd. I'm right here, I'm not leaving you."

"Just stay with me in the current moment, okay? Don't go running into the future or the past. Just... Stay with me."

"I don't know that I can- I'll try. For you, I'll always try. I don't know that I'll succeed, but... For you."

"Just hold tight, Patokaa. You're gonna— you're gonna be just fine. Just— just stay with me, okay? I'm gonna get you help." Gunmax's voice trembled, wavering with static, and he slammed his emotions onto the backburner. The lowest level of his processor was dedicated to sorting through those now. He needed to be calm and collected for Deckerd.

Deckerd needed him. Gunmax was not going to fail him again.

He reached for the data pad, scanning over the contents quickly. His tanks churned uncomfortably, even empty as they were. Memory files…? Deckerd had been—?

He vented slow and steady. He could panic later. He could yell later. Right now, right now he needed help from someone who understood coding better than he did. He flicked open his internal comms and dialed without questioning the first name he thought of.

::Gunmax?::

::Six.:: Gunmax pinged his location to the medic, ignoring the part of his processor that yelled about how this was Six's fault. That he couldn't trust Six to fix the problem. ::Deckerd is dying. He did something to his memory files.::

::His memory— he what?::

::Can you fix it or not, Six oh Four.::

::I don't know? Why would— is this because—::

::Yeah, I'm pretty fucking sure it's because you told him what happened in my universe. Now either get your ass up here and help me fix this or send me a medic that can.::

Silence stretched between them, broken only by the noise Deckerd made and the harsh whine of Gunmax's systems trying to send him into a panic. He ignored both until Six responded again.

::En route. Two minutes. What is he doing.::

Gunmax slumped over Deckerd, his mouth quivering for a moment. He didn't trust Six as far as he could throw him now, but he trusted Six to be a good medic. So he reported what was going on as accurately as he could, answering every question that Six tossed at him as the tankette drove.

Six unfolded into his root mode as he came around the corner, jogging the last few steps to Deckerd and Gunmax. His mouth was pressed into a thin line and he pulled supplies from his side bag as he moved. "Hold him still. His systems aren't going to like another person getting into them while he's attacking himself like this."

"What is his system doing?" Gunmax asked, looking up at Six. Orange met green through two layers of shades and Six's hands shook for one brief moment before he steadied them.

"In my timeline, my universe, I almost did the same thing he did." Six sank to his knees and took the datapad from Gunmax, carefully scanning through the coding that Deckerd had messed with. "We're lucky he used an external device to do this. I hacked through my internal systems. Memory files are easy to corrupt, and if you try to fix a corrupted file they can spread and corrupt your base processor."

"What do you— you knew this could happen?" Gunmax hissed.

"Shadowmaru stopped me! I thought Deckerd would have been smarter than to try something like this if a member of his own team had warned me off of it before. Everyone knows that Deckerd was wiped before and it didn't take because Yuuta's influence on him was too strong. Deckerd's memories are practically tamper proof. He's a fucking case study in the states. My creator constantly praised how well he was built and how strong his mental walls had to be to withstand what he did with the Mother attack and dying and coming back and—"

"Shut up. This Deckerd isn't that Deckerd. You should know better than anyone that not every universe is the same."

"Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Twenty points for you." Six snorted and grabbed his own medical tablet, unspooling a cable and plugging it into Deckerd. "Keep him still. If he thrashes too much before I can turn off the pain receptors he can rupture a line. We need to keep his systems cool so he doesn't melt his sAI."

Gunmax gritted his teeth but did as Six said, reaching to steady Deckerd's shoulders and upper arms.

Six bit his tongue between his teeth and worked as fast as he dared. The damage was… extensive to say the least. The corruption had spread to multiple core memories, and it was as though the basic programming wasn't there at all. He swore under his breath and dug through the files, then dug through the deleted files.

Why wasn't it there?

"Deckerd what did you do?" he muttered. He pulled up the base coding of Deckerd's sAI and froze. "Oh. Oh shit." That might not be something he could fix after all.

"What 'oh shit', Six?" Gunmax asked lowly.

Six forced himself to vent slow and steady, not letting the spike of panic get the best of him. He could fix it. He would fix it. Deckerd just… Deckerd just needed a fresh sAI code. Not his, or Gunmax's. They wouldn't be compatible since their base coding was so thoroughly entrenched in their personality matrix but… where was he going to get a back up sAI? They didn't have back up sAIs on the R2.

The partially melted chip in his hip pocket burned in reminder.

If he reformatted it—

He'd lose Trip forever.

If he didn't then they'd lose Deckerd.

Trip was already dead.

Deckerd was dying.

The choice should have been easy. It should have been. And yet still Six hesitated. He hadn't even told anyone that he was carrying Trip. He had kept it a secret tucked close to his chest. His failure and burden to bear, the last thing he had of his brother. Could he give that up?

And then he looked at Deckerd, looked at Gunmax hunched over his head, and felt his chest squeeze tight until he couldn't breathe around it.

I'm sorry, Trip.

He didn't answer Gunmax, choosing instead to pull the sAI out of his pocket and carefully connect it to his tablet. He numbed himself to it as he clicked through the menus, reformatting the chip. The tablet chimed a cheerful tune when it finished. Six felt it like a knife in the gut.

"This may not fix everything. He'll probably still need to do some form of therapy, physical too, but it should at least get him back online." His voice sounded distant to even himself. That was fine.

He'd killed Trip a second time. What kind of older brother was he?

At least the coding was easy. Six had been messing with code longer than he'd been on the R2 at this point. He copied the clean files into Deckerd, restored the files, and ran a scan to make sure everything came up clear. Only then did he disconnect everything.

"Deckerd?" he asked, leaning over his patient. "Hey, sugar, can you hear us? Give us a sign that you're back with us."

Gunmax stroked his fingers over Deckerd's cheeks. "Come on, patokaa."

[patokiichi]

Deckerd's optics flickered as his systems turned over and started to gently hum. The slack, pained fall of his mouth twitched along with his fingers, and he made a small noise as his optics flickered again before catching and brightening to life.

Deckerd looked up at Gunmax and Six, and for a long moment that lasted a thousand years and three seconds, he did nothing more than look. Then his mouth moved, but all that came out was noises. Parts of words that didn't make sense mixed with static.

Everything was coming to him through a fog, but he was becoming increasingly aware that he was confused, and that he was unhappy. Something was wrong, something was-

"He told me, you know. He told me about you in his universe. How he lost you. How you lost Yuuta. He has nightmares and hallucinations about you. And you know the worst part, Deckerd? He told m-"

Deckerd's vents whined as he started to vent fast and harshly. He didn't know why he was here, why he was on his back on the floor with his head in Gunmax's lap with Six bent over him, why he couldn't talk or why his limbs weren't responding properly when he tried to move, but he'd hurt Yuuta he'd killed Yuuta, he'd-

Deckerd reached up a shaking hand for Gunmax, but the first words he managed to say over the comms weren't about him at all the way he'd intended. Instead, he slurred in a faint, stumbling voice, ::I'm still charging, I need more time.::

[bikerdetective]

Gunmax caught Deckerd's hand, pressing the back of it to his mouth. He might have sobbed, but it was trapped behind his teeth and swallowed down so he didn't distress Deckerd further. "Hey, patokaa. Hey there." He squeezed his hand and kissed Deckerd's knuckles gently. "Yeah I bet you need more time. You gave me quite the scare there."

He flicked his gaze up to Six as Six wound up the cables. "Well?"

"Scans are coming back as clean as they could be. He needs rest, and probably some therapy. He'll be confused for a bit, probably a bit slower than normal. His systems are going to be rebooting for a while," Six said softly. He slipped the chip back into his pocket and tucked the tablets back into his bag. "He's going to be okay, Gunmax."

Gunmax bent over Deckerd and pressed his mouth against Deckerd's knuckles again, whispering a thankful prayer to a God he wasn't sure he totally believed in. "Let's... Let's go get you to a berth, yeah, Deckerd? That way you can rest."