Work Text:
The work is mind-numbing, naturally, but the really vexing thing about spurious field work is knowing he never needed to leave his lab in the first place.
They’ve been in D.C. for three days, surveilling moles and making a political display against the “Deep State.” (As if there could be a deeper state than him.) He had all the actual threats tagged and bagged by mid-morning on the first day, and has just spent the rest of the time rewriting both his own criminal profile and the academic credentials of the people who dared to profile him in the first place.
He’s absolutely wasted here. And if he’s here, Stone’s here, and Stone… well. Even now, with an immediate and impending threat to Robotnik’s life, his bodyguard’s presence is hardly necessary.
Chin propped on his hand, Robotnik watches the security feed of the office drone strolling down the corridor of the compound. The video is being intercepted by his own systems, encrypted and relayed and safely stored in three of his secret server banks. As far as the official records show, Joel Martucci never showed up for work today.
Joel Martucci, age 37, is a father of two. Now in his third year as a GS-10, he wants that GS-12 so bad he can taste it. He’s allergic to dairy and fond of Indian cooking, Vonnegut, and pornography with brunette women in extremely high heels. Robotnik has two of his credit cards on file, the ones ending in 6976 and 4392. Joel’s last purchase was a Tyco truck for his daughter.
Joel is breathtakingly dull, except for his cameo role as a line item in the payroll of a certain highly-placed Rostec executive who’d heard—from a pair of loose lips now no more than a small pile of ash—that a certain poorly-kept government secret was conducting certain deeply market-destabilizing weapons experiments. And just before the Q3 slump, too.
Robotnik twirls a stylus through his fingers. The cameras, bent to his code, follow Joel as he turns a corner and walks fast down the next hall. Under the jacket of Joel’s hopeless pigeon-colored ready-to-wear suit there’s a pilfered Glock 17 9mm. Maybe it would've made a more obvious bulge if Joel had a decent tailor.
But then the last real fashionista in the FBI was Hoover. And who actually aspired to match that?
Joel’s about three corridors away. Shots in five minutes, tops. The badnik charging in his lap can fry the little pissant the second he sets foot in the room and slice him into cubes before the blood hits the floor.
It’d be very efficient to let his robot work. But damn, he’s bored. His plans for the afternoon come down to either this or staging a screaming fit and receiving the inevitable pearls-clutching emails in his personal inbox. And surely it’s better for everyone if he has some entertainment, and Stone earns some billables, and headquarters only has one screaming man in it today.
Win-win-win. One large MacArthur Genius Grant novelty check, please.
Robotnik leans back in the chair and sets the heels of his shoes on the director’s desk. “Agent Stone.”
The purring keyboard behind him goes quiet. “Yes, doctor?”
“Come here.”
Behind him patient noises rustle, keys struck and passwords set, and then the very soft noise of his very quiet agent’s footsteps crossing the room. He waits until Stone is standing at his left hand to point to the gray suit hustling down the hall.
“See that man?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“He’s going to try to assassinate me in the next two-to-three minutes.”
Stone doesn’t ask him if he’s sure, because Stone would never question him. Robotnik’s generous enough to admit that that’s the correct thing to do. But still, what kind of mad scientist would he be if he didn’t ask a few questions?
(He’s not a scientist. Scientists go about the world wondering, pondering, questioning. That’s why the process is called scientific inquiry. They don’t know.
That’s why he’s a genius. A Renaissance man. An artisan, even.)
“Need some proof?” he offers.
“Not really, sir.”
“You know, Stone, now and then you almost have your moments.”
Robotnik presses several buttons on his gloves. The locks on the office doors loudly click open. On the screen, the laser turret mounted on the hallway ceiling toggles OFF. The badnik powers down and he runs a hand over its smooth white chassis, rubbing with his thumb. It takes less than a second for him to go from armed like a centipede to almost totally undefended.
He doesn’t look at Stone.
“Go kill him for me.”
In the reflection on the screen, he can see Stone grin. The agent straightens his tie.
“Right away, doctor. Any particular requests?”
“Be efficient, agent,” Robotnik replies. “We’re professionals.”
He’s always liked the crisp noises of an arms check. Stone chambers a bullet and crosses the room with his quiet steps, weapon pointing at the floor.
“And Stone?”
Stone pauses at the door, posture perfect, smile warm. “Yes, doctor?”
“I've heard it’s frowned upon to leave a mess in someone else’s office. Bring back the spent cartridge.”
Stone gives him a broad grin and puffs a laughing breath out through his nose. “Right you are, sir. Back in a tick.”
Robotnik shimmies his shoulders back into the chair and plays with the edge of his moustache as the security cameras catch sight of Stone casually slipping into the hall.
Finally. A little levity.
They assign him a bodyguard for protection. Ultimately it’s just another tally in the long, long list of exhaustingly stupid things the military brass has decided about how to handle him, but even still it’s a titan among tallies. Practically a road marking.
Dr. Ivo Robotnik is the single best-protected being on the planet. At any moment there are nine homemade weapons, three collapsible drones, two stilettos, and two cyanide capsules secreted about his frame. That everyday carry does not count his belt nor his shoelaces, nor the biometric chips he’s inserted beneath every ninth of his skin. (Go ahead. Dispose of his corpse by dismembering him. Just try it, punk.)
If he’s in his mobile lab, the number of weapons in finger’s reach leaps exponentially higher. And in his home lab, well. It’s really not worth the effort to describe. Four miles of laser-lined hallway is worth a thousand words.
He’s got two false residences rigged to self-immolate in the event of unauthorized entry. His mobile lab has withstood a nuclear blast test. The dweebs over at NASA keep trying to flatter their way into studying his car.
Frankly, anyone who manages to get close enough to him to injure him deserves some kind of commendation. If only posthumously awarded.
So, since his body is already 95% guard, naturally his first question upon meeting Agent Stone is precisely what this squishy little Black Ops pretty boy with two SIG Sauer M17s and a significant (if not wholly impressive) amount of Brazilian jiu jitsu and krav maga experience is expected to do for Robotnik that his machines can’t.
The answer is obvious: nothing.
He doesn’t play games with the government. Raised by the state, recruited to serve the state, kept with the choke-chain of the state’s collar around his neck—if they were even a little clever his code name would be Caliban. Every day he and they take a step nearer the crisis: the day when either he must be digested or chew his way out.
They can’t simply imprison him, not without retaliation and the declaration of outright hostilities. (And the PR nightmare of their cities and their constituents burning and wailing to the smoking skies… no, it wouldn’t do.)
Equally, they can’t disappear him. His paper trail is too long. (Five PhDs means a lot of alumni magazines for the shredder to chew through.)
Until then, stalemate. They’ll feed him and clothe him and fund him lavishly, and yoke his brain to the wheel. He’ll rage and tear and roar, and submit to their tortures.
Their favorite is to fill his walls with rats.
Every state is as small as the men of whom it is composed. The most powerful people in the world have puny little terrors that can only be soothed by holding folders full of his flayed skin and examining with beady little eyes the scribbled reports of their slavish vermin. Even then, he can smell their horror on the wind. He’s getting faster. Every month the busywork is easier to burn through. When they wake up one day to find the weathervane of his genius pointing against them at last, how are they going to stop him from grinding them beneath his wheels?
Even mindless viruses have more decency than human beings. They're comprachicos, every last one of them, and they’ll sew a tumor to his skin and make a conjoined twin of him, force humanity into him, because Big Brother must be sure there’s not an instant he has to himself.
There was a time when electricity was a god, and when it tore the sky it drove apes to gibbering obeisance. That’s why he likes electronics and explosions: he knows what it is to be bound in wires and suffocated into shape. There is no freedom to be found in the touch of human hands or the weight of human eyes. Electricity took the prisoner’s pap, staging meager rebellion in simple contradiction. And it still conforms to behavior like a wave or like a particle, depending on the lighting choices of the mind that saw it. What was it, when it was alone?
The only freedom is in solitude: as deep and as pure and as complete as he can make it, for both mechanism and mind. He needs the solitude of an empty bed, in a room no one else knows. The solitude of night, when rain blots the peering stars and even God must sleep, and behind His back the Devil could very well remake the world.
The solitude of those bolts of insight and brilliance that come upon him out of nowhere, when he pours his entire attention into an idea and becomes deliciously lost, even to himself.
He was fully grown before he knew what it was he’d been clawing for. In the orphanage there was no solitude. Three to a bed, open showers, enough children to make sure the cramped quarters were always full and everything—everything—was communal. He spent the hours perennially underfed and understimulated and overseen, rocking like a naked Bridgewater Bedlamite and independently discovering calculus out of sheer inescapable thought.
And it carried him through the awful exposedness of college, with its poking and prodding evaluations and examinations. Dons and masters and sirs to answer to—he bore it with gritted fucking teeth, waiting for the day he’d cut them all down. He couldn’t even get a dormitory room to himself, not on his budget, and when he was sexiled and had to hide out in school facilities, he’d still find himself sharing the library or the laboratory with some snot-nosed undergraduate.
At 22 he got his own apartment. The sleep of that first night, hidden from the world, with locks on the doors and a bed to himself, was so deep he’d tasted death.
Gone, now. If he were an imbecile he might be allowed his independence, because they always seem to underestimate how dangerous an imbecile can be. Governments can’t leave him alone, not when they imagine they know how dangerous he is. But if he suffers them, so too must they suffer him. He takes it out of their hides and makes them work to justify the costs and the collateral damage. They can have their in-house savant with the perfect operations record, at the price of humiliation and homage and the suffocating fear in their eyes as they see, every day, just how far ahead of them he is.
He makes them pay for the way they infest his house, his work, his very air.
Even as they tell him it’s for protection. Senseless. Stupid. Formally and informally illogical.
Who says the government doesn’t like arms control? He’s as registered and tracked as any deadly weapon. If he were quite as sadistic as them, he’d admit it was rather funny.
The whole picture comes together, as these things often do, when he wasn’t paying the subject any deliberate attention. It’s so staggeringly obvious that the shallow ping from his brain’s Stygian under-archive jolts him out of a shallow rest mode, sleep like blown lint opening a way for incandescent rage to electrify him through his quarters, snatching housecoat and shoes and his favorite cordless drill in a flying streak of polylinguistic obscenity.
His whistles high and wee for two of his babies to follow him. The drones’ warm red eyes light the way, not that he needs the help, and they obediently hover over his shoulder as he storms across the moving walkway through the sub-sub-basement.
He keeps a very clean home, architecturally inspired by a minka he stayed in for a month in the early part of his career. It was built in a cozy spot, serenely concealed in the woods and perched on the side of a hill overlooking a stream. Sometimes he even eats dinner in it.
Tonight, he seethes across the main floor and down again into the sub-basement tunnel that connects his home with Stone’s quarters. He steps into the bullet pod, waits for the drones to join him, and steps out beneath Stone’s home 20 seconds later.
While the home is of his design and construction, technically speaking the six hundred square foot spit of land on which Robotnik’s “guest house” sits is a federal reserve. He expects the federal government to maintain it. Generally, they do. But they let Stone put in a window box as well.
One drone waits in the basement. The other dims its eye and stays with him. He sleeps in his watch. In 12 seconds he’s got CCTV down, the bugs disabled, the internet cut, and Stone’s phone bricked. Another second, and he places an order with Sherwin Williams for a fresh coat over the living room and hallway. He abominates pastels.
Stone’s really quite a good agent, as far as these things go. He wakes up before Robotnik can slap him—but not before the badnik draws a bead over his heart.
Stone’s eyes are black in his moonlit bedroom, pupils blown from the dark and from fear. He stays very still, flat on his back in bed. He looks as helpless and as stupid as a new lamb, staring up at Robotnik above him, and it’s such a colossal lie Robotnik wants to have the very teeth out of him.
“Doctor?”
“Take your shirt off,” Robotnik growls, pressing the sharp tip of the drill against Stone’s left kneecap. “Now.”
'Protection.' He doesn’t need protection. There is nothing better protected on this planet, because he can only rely on himself to do the job.
He should've known the minute they met. It’s so disgustingly obvious. He knows they’ve been laughing behind his back the whole time, pea-brained little worms that they are, less than worms— Laughing that they'd fooled him, because he thought they just couldn’t get their heads around his skill, because they can’t. And because he’s so used to their pitiful attempts at lying to him that he didn’t even bother to wonder if they were telling the truth.
But it was always right there.
They never said it was for his protection.
“Two options, Stone,” Robotnik says, a little later. Stone’s made tea. It’s not bad. His agent watches him from the cushion on the hiroma. “You remain in your post on the condition that I take everything—and I mean everything—else out. Yes, the bullets. Yes, the intramedullary rod. Yes, whatever piercings you may or may not have and any chips you don’t know you have. And yes, you can kiss that adorable little tattoo goodbye—they have tracking chemicals in ink, you realize. If you want it redone so badly I’ll hire someone. You say the surgeon was executed?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Robotnik stops pacing and chugs his tea. The air of the house, just stale enough to be convincingly lived-in, is cool on his bare legs. Might’ve been a job for pants. Oh well. Too late now.
“And the second option?”
Robotnik hits a button. His babies each produce a boring drill honed to a razor point and rev them, beads gliding up and down and all around Stone’s bare chest.
“I had a feeling that was the second option,” Stone sighs.
“There's always a pig farm somewhere nearby."
“Always. I accept the first option, sir, obviously. Will you... use anesthesia?"
Robotnik flexes his best eyebrow. “Oh, so you think you can make demands, now. Funny! I think I'll make a game-day decision. I'd planned on doing a little ancillary damage once I'm in there. It's the least I'm owed. You’ve been under my wing, enjoying unexamined protection for six months, you lying, skulking, duplicitous little roach.”
Stone cringes. “I know. I’m sorry, doctor. But they were really strict about—”
“Hey!” Robotnik chirps, smiling broadly. He lifts his drill and holds the trigger. “Y’know what I’d particularly resent right now? Your pathetic excuses! So keep your mouth shut unless you’re in the mood for a bit of 2 a.m. experimental dentistry.”
Stone closes his mouth and sheepishly mimes a zip across his lips.
Robotnik has another cup of tea and resumes his pacing. He waves the gals to standby, listening to them put away their drills, and gazes out at the dark woods around the house. He’s never in here, really. No one is. No one ever has been. Until he can get his aeronautical flotilla launched, he lives in the warren of rooms that comprise the subterranean earthship half a mile under this house. It had taken quite a few days for his robots to carve out the space. It’s extravagant, but it’s home.
If Stone had ever gotten it into his head to check up on him at night, he would have found the bedclothes upstairs warmed by sensors in the mattress to slightly less than Robotnik’s surface temperature. The sheets would be rumpled and contain traces of Robotnik’s hair and skin. The kettle in the kitchen would’ve just finished boiling, and Robotnik himself would have been out on the back porch, musing in the night air.
But Stone never did, so he never did. Now, however...
“You’ll move your residence here,” he says slowly. “The guest house is visible on Google Fucking Earth, of all the lethally stupid ideas. It’ll take considerably more than a loose-lipped nurse and a VPN to find you in this house.”
Stone looks at him carefully.
“And if your handlers have anything to say about the move,” Robotnik adds, “or about the sudden cessation of third-party surveillance, or literally anything at all, I order you, Stone, to tell them to blow me.”
“Yes, sir,” Stone says. Almost without smiling.
“Don’t you dare look so pleased with yourself.” Robotnik whirls around and stalks up to him, looming down at him where he sits on the floor. “I’m still determining whether you’ve insulted my intelligence enough to justify turning Langley into a smoking radioactive crater, but ooooh, Agent Stone, I’m a swing voter, and your advocacy will help me make up my mind right here and now.”
Stone composes himself. “Understood, doctor. You’ve made it inescapably clear.”
“Good. Because there’s still a very good chance I’ll wake up tomorrow and decide that I’ve always wanted to play with the nuclear football. I’d like to believe they didn’t choose to implant your heart with the launch codes only because of your doe eyes and general attitude of dispassionate irreproachability.”
Stone looks up at him, silent and guileless. It’s wretched.
“Tell me you’re not really brainlessly patriotic enough to go without a fight, were the president to summon you to the slaughter?”
“I wasn’t, previously,” Stone says. His brow furrows. “Although, actually... I think that was the representative of a foreign government, that time. That might only prove your point, sir.”
“Which foreign government?”
“Hard to tell, sir. It seemed more expedient to shoot him than to ask questions. But he was speaking French, up until that point. If I can observe it… speaking more of it than I’d anticipated.”
“Ahh. Beak, beak, beak, would you say?”
Stone’s face opens in one of those heartbreaker smiles. If Robotnik had a heart, he might’ve worried. “Yes, I would, doctor. Thinking back, he might’ve been a diplomat, talking quite so much and quite so fast. They always make things unnecessarily difficult.”
Robotnik's exceptionally agile brain presents him with the inconvenient but rapidly-retrieved recollection of Stone returning to the FBI director’s office, suit and hands and face splattered with fresh blood, precise fingers placing the spent cartridge right beside Robotnik’s feet on the blotter. He archives it, with extreme prejudice.
“Irrelevant. I’m not talking about diplomats, Stone. I’m talking about your supposed commander in chief. Mom and apple pie and bomb bomb bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran.”
Stone’s smile goes slantwise. “If I were summoned by the president of the United States with the express purpose of laying down my life for a nuclear war, I like to think I’d illustrate my sentiments on the matter pretty vividly, doctor. Mostly in red.”
“Don’t get chummy with me, agent. You are under my protection by dint of being a valuable enough object that I will not stand to see you in any other hands—but what does that make you?”
Stone is mid-sip, so Robotnik magnanimously waits. “Still an object, sir.”
“Correct. Very good.”
He’s bluffing, a little. Stone will find his orbit to be the safest and best protected space in the universe—even if that’s mostly because in a world with young half-wits and old half-wits and Indonesia and Israel and Alabama, Robotnik’s orbit is only the second most dangerous place he could possibly be.
It’s an unexpectedly clever move. Even a stopped clock and all that; one of those profilers must've hit a lucky break. Robotnik will adopt this permanent mole and let Stone tell all manner of tales about him out of school, because it would be unendurable to know information like that which Stone carries is out there somewhere, prey for someone else. They’ve sent him as an offering to the minotaur and left them alone to keep eyes on each other—Robotnik guarding him as a prize to be devoured, Stone guarding himself against the monster that protects him.
Robotnik consults his watch. 03:00. He issues a few terse commands and his drones leave his side to hover around Stone.
“Pack your things. Yours is the first bedroom upstairs and on the right. Shower and fast and meet me in the operating room downstairs at 10:00.”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Don’t dawdle. I’ll be watching.”
“Yes, doctor.”
Robotnik presses his tongue between his teeth and holds it tight, watching Stone’s back. Even now, with two badniks metaphorically breathing down his neck and another waiting in Stone’s basement, he doesn’t like watching him go. All that power, hidden away in one little red heart… He’s always thought Roger Fisher was a funny sumbitch, whatever sentimental faults he might have—the butcher knife and the constantly accompanying the president was a glaring flaw in the plan. Familiarity bred contempt. Robotnik himself has suffered plenty of fools he’d run through with a butcher knife for the sake of dampening it for the whetstone, much less gaining access to the most powerful nuclear arsenal on the planet.
Although Agent Stone, with his record-breaking six-month tenure and his streamlined office management and that irrepressible quirk of his lips when he’s sent out to kill someone, might indeed give one a moment’s pause...
Atoms collide, elecricity fizzes, and his synapses snap up an ancient file from the bin of World Literature, shake off three decades of mental dust, and present it in the broad light of 03:02.
Mais fidèle, mais fier, et même un peu farouche,
Charmant, jeune, traînant tous les coeurs après soi.
His intake spashes; he coughs up his tea. IGNORE/OKAY.
Never mind. Never mind. Let Theseus descend if he dares.
Robotnik may be the monster, but he’s the artificer, too. And his labyrinth is a far more formidable trap than any Cretan's.
It's not for him to hand Stone the ball of twine.