## Preface

Shape()
Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/1833922.

Rating:
  General Audiences
Archive Warning:
  Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Category:
  Gen
Fandom:
  Transistor (Video Game)
Characters:
  Royce Bracket, Grant Kendrell, Asher Kendrell
Language:
  English
Series:
  Part 3 of Become()
Stats:
  Published: 2014-06-23 Words: 1,883 Chapters: 1/1

# Shape()

by _digital cairn (Schemilix)

Summary

> Just my interpretation of how he grew up, how that might have shaped him - that sort of thing, I mean, nobody’s the same in their late teens as they are as an adult.

## Shape()

Born at no years old, like anyone. Did he have much in common with them even then? Surely he did, just another pink child. Of such quiet men they would often say that he did not cry as a young thing but cry he did, one might even have called the boy sensitive. A child who hopped into the grave dug for the family dog and insisted on going with him, wherever it was that dogs and boys went together. When his father hoisted him out under his arms and said stern words he watched them cover his only friend’s gold-black fur with dirt - and wondered.

Taking no interest in the toys fashioned after animals or men he would, instead, build himself skylines from blocks, count their sides, clenching his fists against the carpet whenever he must put them away, disassemble what he, so painstakingly had made. When he practiced his writing using his bedroom wall instead of more transient paper, he would come home to find his mother sighing with a paintbrush in hand, and no words.

He learned to count early.
One - a black-haired toddler like any other. A Cell of a grown man, nameless and formless and -
Two - bigger, but the same. Some difficulties with learning to talk but just a boy, just a boy.
Three - point one four - one five — endless and unchanging, creating everything, bound to nothing. In it somewhere containing the sequence 19 -

Nineteen.
“Grant Kendrell.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s me, of course. I’m Grant Kendrell.”
“G-good for you?”
A laugh. Royce stares at the distinguished man’s extended hand but does not take it. He raps his fingers on the glass between his palms with a perplexed frown.
“You don’t need to shake it, if you don’t want,” Grant says with a smile, and drops his hand back to his side. “You must be Royce. Our budding engineer.”
“Yes, Mr. Kendrell. I - ah, I suppose I must be. Unless that changed without my… notice as well.”
Royce stares into the half-empty measure of whiskey. That was what his father conceded to, on social gatherings, what few his family cared to celebrate at least. Might as well follow his example, he’d thought, and got quietly and unintentionally drunk in the background without speaking to a soul.
Why this Grant? Always being pulled out of his shell, why not leave him where he belongs? Despite his misgivings Royce looks Grant in the eye for a split second. Something he sees there makes him relax the muscles he didn’t realise he was tensing. Brown was always a warmer colour than green.
“You know, I met your father just the other day. He said much about you, in fact, on account of your recent success.”
Royce bites through an ice cube with an expression of distaste, looking away again.
“He’s proud. You have his eyes but, not to insult the man but you must have a /very/ pretty mother.”
That has Royce look up and, quietly at first, start to laugh. He laughs long enough that others glance over at him, before he says in his half-whisper,
“He was ah, I doubt he found my mother by his - his looks. Smart, capable man he is, a driven man.”
“Is that how you’d describe yourself as well?” Grant asks, as he pours himself a measure.
“What? I’m - just - I’m Royce.”

Twenty? Or fourteen - or twenty-five - or -
“For crying out loud, will you spit it out?”
“I met a - y - I think uh… Can - I write, it, down?” Royce steps back, blinking furiously with a hand tangled in his thick black hair. Does he look at people in that way, with that intensity? That seeking flaws, finding them, thinking how to fix them.
“Don’t be stupid, just finish what you were going to say.”
“I…” Royce’s hands pluck at his buttons. The words are there but instead he says, “…forgot.”
Bracket sighs and drops into the chair. “You didn’t. You never forget. Got that from your father. Look - don’t worry yourself about it. Royce?”
With a frown of concern he leans forward to touch his son’s shoulder, but the youth leans bodily away.
“Still not keen on touching, eh. Just - go. It’s fine, you don’t have to stay.”
Maybe Royce hears him ask where he went wrong. Or maybe not.

They buried the dog when people asked for that sort of thing - the gardens. By the time her bones would have been long empty, Royce was staring through the window and wondering what happened to corpses when they reassembled the skyline. The same as everything else? Then what did that make people?
Yes, what made people? If people shaped the city then, too, they must create one another. Royce folded his hands over each other and stared at the purple sky. Shaped by others - if he could avoid them, would he be free to carve his own destiny, or remain formless and irresolute? Was it not his place to decide his own purpose?
The night lengthens, stretching out with a nerve on one end and - it - is going to snap. Royce tears up five sheets of paper and paces the room - he counts - some thirty or so times before he picks up the phone and dials the number he overheard at yesterday’s function. All out of step, all out of step.
At the noise of the connection he says,
“Sir?”
“Hm, is that Royce? What is it?”
“How does a man go about - meeting for, well, coffee, that’s the usual is that -? Do you drink coffee? Sorry if I, ah, I’m bothering you I just - well…”
He stops mid-sentence, waiting for Grant to cut him off. Instead Royce hears a noise through the phone, realising that it’s a restrained laugh.
“Just like that, young Mr. Bracket. You can tell me all about your project, if you’d like. It’s the sort of thing I aught to know.”
“I suppose that sounds mutually…” Royce grits his teeth and picks strands from the cushion on his lap as if combing for the word. A simple word! Finally he breathes, “…agreeable.”
“Good. And Royce?”
“Sir?”
“Do call me Grant.”

At their wedding Royce, again, gets quietly drunk in one corner, from which he does not move. Asher’s eyes are a different sort of blue entirely when he sits by him with a glass of wine. Eyes untouched by the smile the man gives him in greeting.
“He said you’d be here.”
“The wedding or this - exact corner?” Royce asks, pushing a strand of hair from one obstrusive part of his face to another equally unflattering part of his face, and frowning.
“The corner,” Asher says. “But the wedding, too.”
Royce looks at him for a while. By now Asher shows no discomfort in being scrutinised so, and says nothing while Royce formulates the thought, drawing it together from strands into a rope, enough to say,
“When I first saw you I - ah, I don’t know how to explain it. I felt a sense of - of destiny, perhaps? Maybe I wanted to believe in, you know, absolute determinism that… somewhere in the - stars or, the way you were put together that… something, whatever it is that makes us how we are wanted us - the three of us - to complete something. Something… I don’t know what, of course, but. It’s not done with us. Oh - uh. Long life to you both. Congratulations are… very much in order.”“
His fingers are restless, as if he could pull the thought out of the air, before he meets Asher’s eyes for a short moment to show that he is finished. Asher finishes his glass.
“Thanks. But I like that. Ever thought of becoming a poet?” he asks.
“No disrespect, Mr. Kendrell - ” and here Asher chuckles at the name “but words are - not my friends. Not my friends.”
“They’re not mine either, and I’m a writer,” Asher confesses, making Royce snort gracelessly with amusement.

When cheerful he makes great progress - when the darker thoughts encroach, he throws himself into his work. As a result, Royce finds most of his hours spend tinkering with the Transistor, with the Process. On a day where he would have asked the sky-painter (may she rest in the Country) for thunderclouds and rain, the Process give him a monster. The first to bite the hand that feeds.
Royce reacts before he he can recognise its shape, bringing the Transistor down with a burst of blue energy. As he picks up the Cell with his wounded hand, Royce recalls its form. A dog, just like… Oh.
“You’ve all got in my head, have you? Well, well. It isn’t easy to do that, you have my congratulations, I suppose.”
He sits, cross-legged in the middle of the room, eschewing the desk. His hands run across the surface of the Cell, watching him as he watches it. Yes, yes, not so different. Did he ever have this level of understanding with someone? He smiles wryly. Speaking to the Cell as if it were a friend he says,
“Luna wouldn’t have hurt me, you see, that’s not right. You’ve got a lot to learn yet. You and I both.”

And then where are they, his sculptors? Royce’s eyes ache from the green glow of the terminal, leading the proxy through a wasteland of his own making.
And yet he understands, now, more than he ever did. Must she drag the Transistor on the floor like that? She - Red, wasn’t it? - cuts through Process like she was born to it. In better times, they could have spoken about that. Surely, out there, she has learned more of his terrible gift to Cloudbank than anyone but him.
Not more than him, of course, but… that will have to wait.
She hugs the blade before she surrenders him. Royce watches that little display with undisguised interest. The man in blue? Is that who she thinks she’s talking to?
Three names are in that blade, like as not. That blue-sky place is home to all his friends now, all but one. The last he needs to send away.
The pulse from the Cradle stops his heart. It’s an odd feeling.
—— and then it’s back to flutter-skip-knocking against his ribs unpleasantly. The sky is cornflower blue, stretching over fields of - a brown thing. Some plant or other.

Ah, well, this wasn’t what Royce would have chosen for either of them. That’s a mighty big Transistor back there, the size of a mountain. The Red woman is getting to her feet. Really, he should have put the Transistor through her back before she could get up but - that’s just not how he would like to see her go - or stay, as the case may be. Royce must pack his emotions down like cotton into the bottom of his mind - worry, much worry, despite himself, and - frustration. Sadness? Perhaps… perhaps sadness. Sorrow never won a man a fight. Calm did.

Three-point-one-four-one-five-nine-two-they’re-not-dead-six-five-wait-for-me-three-five-nine… Since when did the numbers fail him? He tries a different tactic. Grant Kendrell. Asher Kendrell. Sybil Reisz - Grant - With a long sigh, Royce braces the Transistor against his shoulder.

It chose him. As the the first to find it, the very first trace to come to life, he cannot, rationally, lose.
”Let’s get this over with.”

## Afterword

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