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Dirk watches.
The footage comes in jittery and imperfect, a grainy aperture through which he glimpses another century. Most of it is the usual fare: the smear of green as Brobot lurches through dense jungle, palm fronds slapping noiselessly against the camera. Sometimes, it’s more interesting—Brobot squaring up against Jake, a fight blooming between them like something choreographed, something practiced. Fists flying. Teeth gritted. Jake’s ridiculous, barking laughter as he takes a hit and swings back harder. But these are fleeting moments. Too often, it’s just the quiet work of seeking, hunting, navigating.
And then there are the other nights. The nights when Dirk takes control.
Jake’s room is a fucking disaster.
A jungle of its own kind—pumpkin vines snaking in through the warped glass of the windows, twisting in slow suffocation around the old metal bedframe. Posters paper the walls, garish and sun-faded, curling at the edges, the faces of long-dead actors grinning maniacally through the static fuzz of time. There are guns everywhere. Strewn haphazardly. Propped against furniture. Bullet casings, empty and full alike. The wreckage of a man who lives in perpetual anticipation of a threat.
Brobot picks its way through all of it with mechanical grace. Silent. Unintrusive. Dirk watches from somewhere inside its eyes.
Jake is sitting cross-legged on the bed, bathed in the electric glow of a screen that flickers erratically as it struggles to maintain a coherent image. The film is already old, Dirk can tell by the oversaturated colors, the melodrama in the blocking, the way the leading man gestures wildly and spits out a line that Jake repeats under his breath, something transatlantic and thick, a cadence that belongs entirely to him, frankensteined out of years of nothing but movies and radio dramas.
Dirk settles Brobot beside the bed. Just close enough to watch. To be there.
Jake doesn’t acknowledge it at first. The soft crunch of him chewing, something syrupy, something glistening in the half-light. Peaches from a tin, spooned onto a torn piece of white bread, untoasted. The sickly-sweet excess of it dribbles down his wrist, but he only licks it away absently, still watching the film. His glasses are cracked, skewed on his nose. The start of a mustache casts a vague shadow above his upper lip.
And then he startles—turns, peering at Brobot with narrowed, assessing eyes. His teeth catch his bottom lip.
“You ain’t gonna start swinging, are ya?” He chews thoughtfully, mouth full and words muddy. “’Cause usually when you turn up, I get the livin’ daylights knocked outta me, and I can’t say I’m terribly in the mood at present.”
Brobot doesn’t answer.
Jake exhales through his nose, something half-laugh, half-scoff. “Well, that’s just unsettling, innit? Christ alive.”
He shakes his head but makes no move to drive Brobot away. If anything, he accepts its presence the way he accepts everything—like something inevitable. Like something that just happens to him. He wipes his hands on his shirt, settling deeper into the tangle of his bed. Outside, the jungle hums with the night—cicadas screaming their mechanical shriek, leaves rustling in the restless heat, lusii chittering and flattening brush. Jake lets his head tip back against the headboard. The light from the screen strobes over his face, catching in the sweat on his collarbone.
Dirk watches.
There are centuries between them. Hundreds of years of distance, of dust and decay, of things lost and left behind. He knows, in some marrow-deep part of himself, that he will never stand in that room. That this is the closest he will ever come.
So he watches. And Jake lets him.
Jake brings it up, eventually.
“You ever notice,” he says, chewing a leaf between his teeth—his webcam is laggy, “how your little tin friend’s been acting mighty peculiar as of late?”
Dirk feigns interest, the way he always does, his voice coming tinny and detached through his mic. “Oh?”
“Yeah, oh,” Jake mimics. “Ain’t tryin’ to knock my block off nearly as often. Matter of fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s downright cordial.” He squints. “Well. As cordial as an unholy mechanical facsimile of my best chum can be, anyway.”
Dirk stays quiet.
Jake hums. “It’s weird, is all. Thought maybe you’d have some insight.”
Dirk shrugs even though Jake can’t see it. His webcam stays off. “Must be a malfunction.”
Jake laughs at that, sharp and bright, tossing the leaf away in an exaggerated ‘Pleh’. “Some malfunction. Hell of a thing. He right whoops my caboose and then comes meandering into my abode, threatening as a wet sack of kittens.”
The line crackles between them. The jungle is loud somewhere beyond Jake, thick with the breath of the living world.
Dirk doesn’t say anything. Jake doesn’t push.
Dirk watches.
Watches as Jake sprawls out on the jungle floor after a good spar with Brobot, arms flung wide, sweat dampening the collar of his already ruined shirt, soil scrubbed into his skinned knees. Watches as he exhales slow and deep, looking up through the fractured canopy with something close to reverence. Watches as he dozes, one hand resting on the gun strapped to his thigh.
Jake is so alive.
Dirk’s world is stark, sharp-edged, made of metal and floodwater and cold white light. There is no greenery. No dirt under his nails.
But Jake—Jake is bronzed and thick and breathing. The jungle moves around him, and he moves with it, all instinct, all presence. He is a thing shaped by the world he inhabits, and that world is so far away from Dirk that he may as well be watching through a telescope, staring at a planet already long burned out.
He doesn’t speak on nights like these. Doesn’t take control. Just watches, lets the footage flicker in and out, lets the time slip away, just another thing lost to the current.
It should be enough.
It never is.
Jake keeps talking about the Brobot. Keeps making offhand remarks about its new, uncharacteristic civility. Keeps squinting at it, trying to suss out the anomaly, the crack in the code.
Dirk keeps up the lie, keeps pretending he isn’t spending long, quiet nights in Jake’s room, watching him lick marmalade from his fingers, watching him mouth along to ancient films, watching him exist.
Jake doesn’t push. Maybe because, on some level, he already knows.
Dirk doesn’t let himself dwell on that thought.
Jake doesn’t push. But he does look.
Dirk can see it in the way he glances at Brobot now—no longer wary, no longer with the immediate tension of a man prepared to defend himself, but something else. Something edged with consideration. A measuring weight in his gaze.
Dirk wonders if Jake has always been this perceptive, or if the distance between them makes him seem sharper, clearer.
Brobot stands at the threshold of Jake’s bedroom, the dim jungle air curling in behind it, thick with night and heat. Dirk, safely in his own time, watches through its fractured vision, the static-laced grain of reality rendering Jake in softened blurs.
Jake, who is sitting on the bed, rubbing a towel against his sweat-damp hair, bare-chested and wild-eyed in the dim glow of his shitty television screen.
“Well, if it ain’t my dear mechanical friend,” Jake drawls, voice syrup-thick, tired. “Come to keep me company again, ay?”
Brobot doesn’t answer. Dirk doesn’t either.
Jake huffs out something like a laugh, shaking his head. “Y’know, it’d be a whole sight less unnervin’ if you weren’t so darned quiet about it. Normally you come in, guns blazing, fists flyin’—is my room some kind of… Er, friendly zone?.” He scratches at the wet nape of his neck, clearly searching for the words and coming up short.
That aside, Jake leans forward, elbows to his knees, peering at Brobot with the sharp attentiveness of a man who smells something off in the wind.
“Can’t quite put my finger on it,” he continues, tapping at his chin, darkened with patchy stubble, “but somethin’s changed. Somethin’s gone all peculiar with you.”
Dirk stays silent, fingers hovering over the keyboard, cursor blinking in the console, resisting the impulse to do something. He doesn’t know what. Acknowledge it? Lie? Make Brobot swing for him just to maintain the illusion?
He doesn’t move.
Jake does.
Slowly, cautiously, he extends a hand. An open palm, an offering. It stops just short of touching the metal plating of Brobot’s chest. His fingers curl, hesitate.
“Y’ever get lonely?”
Dirk’s breath stops in his throat.
Jake is still looking at the robot, but it doesn’t feel like he is. It feels like he’s looking at him. Like somehow, across centuries, across time and space, he knows.
Dirk swallows hard, staring at the monitor, at the way Jake’s calloused fingers hover inches from Brobot’s lifeless shell.
“‘Cause I sure do,” Jake murmurs, voice quieter now, the bravado slipping like water through his fingers. “S’pose anyone would, stranded on a bloody evil island.”
Dirk closes his eyes.
Yes, he wants to say. Yes, I do. More than you could possibly understand. More than I can put words to. More than I should.
But Dirk is a coward, so he doesn’t say anything at all.
Instead, he releases control, lets Brobot return to its programming, lets it turn and leave the way it came.
Jake doesn’t stop it.
But as it steps back into the jungle, the last thing Dirk sees through its grainy, flickering feed,
is the way Jake watches it go.
Dirk tells himself he should stop.
He doesn’t.
It’s easy, the act of watching. Passive. Noncommittal. Something he can pretend is incidental, just a byproduct of Brobot’s presence, the same way security cameras aren’t inherently voyeuristic—just functional. Just there. But it never feels passive. Every time he reroutes Brobot’s course, has it stalk slow and silent up the side of Jake’s ravine, slipping in past the warped metal of the window frame, he feels it: that twinge in his gut, something hot and guilty and uncomfortably intimate.
It’s getting bad, he knows. A sickness curling in the corners of his mind, an indulgence he keeps telling himself he’ll stop, one of these nights. Just shut down the feed. Set Brobot to autopilot. Let it run its original programming—spar with Jake, keep him sharp, beat the shit out of him when necessary.
But he never does.
He keeps coming back to this—this window, this little stolen glimpse through time, because it is the closest he will ever be. Because even if it’s a performance—and isn’t that the truth of all human interaction? A series of masks?—it is still more real than anything Dirk has.
And Jake makes it easy. Jake, who doesn’t guard himself at all in the presence of the Brobot, who assumes it is just another piece of machinery in his lonely, makeshift world. Not left by his grandmother, sure, but machinery nonetheless.
Dirk sees things he knows he shouldn’t.
Jake, stripped down to his boxers in the heat, fanning himself lazily with a magazine. Jake, sprawled on his bed, belly down, absently swinging his feet in the air as he thumbs through a comic book like a teenager. Jake, shirtless, running a rag up and down the barrel of a rifle with the slow, idle efficiency of someone used to cleaning his weapons with the same thoughtless rhythm as brushing his teeth.
Jake, utterly without shame.
It makes Dirk feel like a voyeur in the worst way. It makes him shift in his seat, rub his eyes like he can scrub the image away, because this is not what he intended. It was never about this.
And yet, it doesn’t stop him from watching.
Jake talks a lot about adventure. But he doesn’t actually seek it.
He talks about what he’ll do when he finally, finally leaves the island, how he’ll see the world, how he’ll take on brigands and scoundrels, how he’ll meet the most marvelous dames and drink himself under the table in all manner of exotic locales. He talks about it so much Dirk almost starts to believe him—until he watches the footage and sees the truth.
Dirk had known, of course—he’s the one who built the Brobot, programmed it to track Jake, to keep tabs on him, to engage when necessary. The bot’s tracking data always had the same rough parameters, a circuitous pattern of movement that never strayed too far from base camp.
But knowing something in theory and witnessing it in practice are different things entirely.
Dirk watches as Jake spends days inside his little jungle shack, lazing about in various states of disarray. Watches him cycle through the same collection of movies, the same reels of grainy, overacted drama, the same absurd one-liners muttered under his breath. Watches him make the same food—peaches on bread, baked beans dumped unceremoniously onto a tin plate, eggs cooked over a fire. Watches him talk to himself, voice pitched in mock debate as he narrates his daily routine like he’s a goddamn radio host.
“A man such as myself,” Jake declares one evening, half-serious, half-sardonic, “ought to be out in the wilds, seeking adventure and treasure and all manner of thrilling escapades. Instead, here I am, dear listeners, engaging in the daring and oft-perilous task of organizing my sock drawer.”
He tosses a balled-up sock at the wall for emphasis. It misses and lands somewhere under his bed. He stares at it mournfully for a long moment.
Dirk resists the urge to roll his eyes. Jesus, Jake.
It isn’t what Jake wants people to think of him. He talks big. Acts like a swashbuckling explorer, an intrepid adventurer, always on the move, always hunting for something bigger, something better. But the truth is, he stays here.
He doesn’t even sit properly. He sprawls. Slouches. Shifts constantly, rolling onto his stomach, his back, his side. He watches movies like he’s trying to physically absorb them, propping himself up on his elbows, squinting at the screen like he’s analyzing the cinematography, then flopping back onto his mattress with a dramatic groan when something particularly stupid happens.
In his little house, in his little room, surrounded by his posters and his pumpkin vines and his well-worn movies. Jake is… so human.
So visceral, so painfully present in the world he inhabits. He sweats and he laughs and he stubs his toe on the bedpost and yelps and flaps his hands like an idiot, hopping in place, cursing the furniture like it’s personally wronged him. He scratches his stomach absently under his shirt, licks his thumb and swipes it across the lens of his skewed glasses to clean it, spits into the corner of the room when he gets something in his mouth.
Dirk watches all of it.
And it does something strange to him.
Some nights, Jake can’t sleep.
Dirk watches from the far corner of the room as Jake tosses and turns, flinging himself from one side of the bed to the other like a restless animal. He swears under his breath, kicks the sheets off entirely, sits up with a heavy sigh.
“God damn this jungle heat,” he mutters.
He presses his palms into his face, rubbing at his eyes. He’s still wearing his glasses, and they sit skewed on his nose, one lens cracked straight through. He’s needed new ones for years.
Dirk watches as Jake drags himself out of bed, trudges over to the rickety shelf beside the door, pulls down a tin of god-knows-what. He cracks the lid, sniffs, grimaces, and drinks it anyway. Alcohol, probably. Jake’s not particular.
He flops back onto the bed, throwing one arm over his face. He doesn’t seem to mind Brobot watching him from the corner. Doesn’t even consider it.
Dirk exhales, rubbing his hands over his own face. The screen flickers in front of him, casting his dimly lit workshop in a bluish glow.
This is stupid.
This is so, so fucking stupid.
He could stop.
He could shut it down, leave Jake to his restless nights and his lazy days and his goddamn peaches-on-bread breakfasts. Could pretend like he’s never seen the way Jake scratches idly at his stomach in the mornings, eyes still half-lidded with sleep. Could pretend he’s never heard the way Jake hums, low and tuneless, while organizing his guns. Could pretend this entire thing isn’t some pathetic excuse for proximity.
Dirk stares at the feed.
Jake has fallen asleep, one arm flung over his head, his face relaxed in the dim, flickering light of the old movie still playing on his TV.
Dirk doesn’t stop.
The worst part is how unguarded Jake is.
There’s nothing performative about it. He’s not talking to anyone, not acting out some exaggerated version of himself for an audience. He just is.
He laughs at things Dirk wouldn’t expect him to laugh at—dumb slapstick, bad special effects, a particularly enthusiastic delivery of a ridiculous one-liner. When he gets invested, he gets loud, talking to the characters like they can hear him, gasping theatrically, clutching his chest when something dramatic happens.
And he cries.
Not often. But enough that Dirk sees it.
The first time, it’s just a single tear streaking down his sunburnt cheek, the light from the screen throwing a pale glow over his face. He wipes it away like he doesn’t even notice, eyes still fixed on whatever’s playing. But the second time, he feels it.
A war film. Some black-and-white relic where the hero doesn’t make it home. The kind of story Jake loves, where sacrifice means something, where things matter.
He cries harder. Quietly. One arm thrown over his eyes like he doesn’t want to see himself doing it.
Dirk doesn’t look away.
Can’t.
It gets easier, the more he watches. Or maybe harder.
At first, it was just about seeing. Proof of existence. The knowledge that somewhere, centuries away, Jake was real. That he breathed and ate and lived.
Now, it’s about something else.
Jake isn’t an idea anymore. He isn’t a concept, an artifact of time. He’s a person. A deeply tactile person, too—one Dirk feels he shouldn’t be allowed to witness this way.
Jake touches everything. He stretches and runs his hands over the vines creeping into his room, fingers idly curling around the stems. He rubs at his own arms absently, scratches at the back of his head, palms dragging through his thick, sweat-damp hair. When he eats, he eats messy, scooping things up with his hands, licking his fingers clean without a second thought.
Dirk has never seen someone so comfortable in their own space.
He feels like an intruder in it.