Work Text:
"I've had worse. I can fix it myself."
"You really haven't. And you can't."
It was a mindless aside as Zach peeled off the misshapen external casing and synced his diagnostic pad up to the hardware monitors. The scent was chemical and acrid; high-grade plasma gunfire had melted part of the insulation layer. But the damage appeared superficial. He hoped.
He reached into Davos's open chest cavity and began trimming away the worst of the damage. Davos flinched, though he hadn't touched anything with sensory feedback yet, then went very still. Zach hesitated and looked up at him.
Davos was staring down at him, unblinking and emotionless. The diagnostic pad in Zach's hand told him he was anything but. He was a solid 65% synthetics, by this point, and the old-fashioned biometric sensors kept him in the loop on the rest.
When he saw Davos's eyes flick at the neural cable hanging loosely by the recliner, Zach realised what the source of his apprehension might be. What part of the patch-up job he was dreading.
Zach found himself smiling sheepishly. "It's nothing we haven't done before," he pointed out. In more ways than one.
Davos breathed out once, sharply, through his nose. Among Zach's myriad diagnostic screens, somewhere buried, his heart rate had picked up.
"Fine," Davos said. Evasive as always. "But make it quick."
"A rush job is the opposite of what you want," Zach retorted reasonably, and Davos sighed.
Zach wrapped up the panel-beating parts quickly enough. Repairing the complex implants and augmentations, each of them with their own software integration with the core system, would be a more... delicate process. The most efficient and precise way to do it was by directly interfacing with the other system.
Davos was not the sort to trust easily. Few in his trade could afford to be, but Zach was the best when it came to DRM cracking and black market repairs, and Davos had needed the best. Keeping himself in peak working condition was more important than boundaries, apparently.
Interfacing with a terminal or a network was one thing. But a cybernetic system connected to someone's still mostly-human brain? Well, Zach couldn't pretend he didn't find it just as embarrassingly intimate, on some level...
"Ready?" he said, when the time came.
The question was wholly unnecessary — Davos had been watching his hands like a hawk and knew exactly what was coming next. He nodded.
Zach connected his neural port to the hub via the specialised cord. Then he used the other end to connect Davos's. After making sure both port-hub connections were secure, he cleared his throat and flipped the switch on the hub.
They'd done it before — not quite countless times, yet — but the odd extrasensory rush of data still took him aback every time. It was one thing seeing the output of his diagnostic tools and crawlers, another thing to feel it, as keenly as he felt the faux leather of the recliner chair under his grip.
Zach breathed slowly through his nose and reoriented himself, taking care not to get distracted or to go wandering. He got to work. Confirm the drivers on the damaged and repaired components were still functional, configure the software on the replacement parts, triple-check that the cracked firmware was deactivated for good and had no nasty surprises... All in a day's work.
"Almost done," he said eventually. His internal monitor told him forty-three minutes had trickled by. Davos had relaxed somewhat, but his metallic grip had left permanent impressions in the recliner arms. "Just one step left so I can finalise the patches."
Davos nodded jerkily. His heart was racing again, and now, when they were interfacing, that blip was harder to filter out.
They both knew what the last step was. Davos had an impressive number of redundant firewalls on his system to prevent tampering or contamination when interfacing with unknown systems. Zach had a fair few himself, you'd have to be an idiot to go without.
And all of them would have to be temporarily disabled for him to run his homebrewed troubleshooting tool, and integrate the dozens of independent systems with each other. Without this step, subtle conflicts in code and implementation, patches upon patches and repurposed obsoleted parts would eventually turn Davos's cybernetic half into a hunk of very expensive, useless scrap.
It was necessary, but that didn't mean they had to like it. However raw interfacing already felt, this was a step further.
No sense putting it off.
He deactivated his firewalls and all the protective barriers on his neural link first.
"You don't have to," Davos murmured.
Zach smiled, caught out. That was right, he didn't have to. With him doing the tinkering, only Davos's firewalls presented a real obstacle.
But it had felt... unbalanced... the first time they'd done that.
It was a mad kind of risk to take, in all truth. But he'd wanted to put Davos at ease. Show him he could be trusted, just as much as Davos was trusting him.
A silly gesture, and unnecessary. Davos's system was packing enough icebreaking power to brute-force its way through the average entry-level corporate security grid. Zach's interface protection wouldn't stand a chance.
A silly gesture, but Davos had appreciated it all the same.
Zach dismantled the shell-like layers around his interfacing system one by one, then waited.
He felt it the second Davos disabled his, a crackle on his skin, on his mind, an electric itch he couldn't scratch. The feeling seemed to duplicate — he could feel his own skin, but also a strange ache, like a phantom limb, for every part of Davos that had been replaced with metal and synthetics. It was disorienting. He couldn't quite tell where each of them ended and begin.
But it was unprofessional to sit there gawking at it all, so he shook his head and got back to work. If adjusting code through interfacing felt faster-than-thought, then this extra layer of ease made him feel as though he didn't have to think about it at all.
He took in the totality of Davos's modular components, the threadbare matrix between them, the seams that were showing, and began to carefully patch it up by hand.
It was painstaking work, even through the odd airy ease of interfacing. It still required attention to detail, and he was distantly aware of the crick in his neck, the mounting tension in his shoulders. He felt his hands on his shoulder blades — no, they were Davos's hands, but the difference felt negligible right now — massaging the tension out of them, and sighed. Moments later, he found himself scratching his head idly, then marvelling in the strange feeling of a metallic hand — not quite his own — running through his hair.
Almost done, he started saying, though he wasn't entirely sure if he was saying it out loud. Now let's run through the checklist and we can call it a day—
Something went wrong. They flinched, and both their hearts were pounding. There was a constant, droning noise, but it was hard to tell for sure where it originated with two sets of ears.
Davos gathered his wits first.
"Raid," he said firmly, simply.
Something clicked. Zach recalled the countermeasures on his workshop; installing them all had felt like a fit of paranoia, once upon a time. The alarm hooked up to his site security systems was going off, but that was good news, in a sense. It was an advance warning. It meant they still had time.
But not enough time. Not to do this the proper way.
He didn't need to warn Davos, not when they were on the same wavelength to this extent. He simply gritted his teeth and flipped the switch back on the neural cord connector hub.
He'd known by word of mouth that it would hurt; would feel not unlike having a whole other body ripped away from him. He doubled over and let out a muffled keen into his elbow. Beside him, Davos was convulsing in the chair, twisting free of the diagnostic machinery.
They had no time to indulge their vulnerabilities. Zach was still seeing double, but he managed to wrap up in record speed, help Davos disconnect the diagnostic cords, and seal up his external casing.
Which way? Davos seemed to hiss, when they could both stand.
Zach pointed at the door to the basement, not quite able to speak. His nausea was getting worse.
Davos picked him up and slung him over the shoulder unceremoniously, like a sack of potatoes, and grabbed the bulky toolbox in the other. It didn't help the nausea much, but at least it saved him the trouble of walking.
Zach must have pointed out the escape tunnel concealed behind a thick pile of scrap, because Davos wasted no time squeezing into there, and replaced the boards behind them as they went. It would only buy them precious seconds, but Zach had something better up his sleeve.
It took him a moment to find the trigger command in the disjointed mess that was currently his neural interface.
He pressed it.
He'd expected to feel a shockwave, which was silly. Of course, the remote-triggered booby trap built into the flooring of his workshop would do nothing that dramatic. But even a slow chemical fire would slow down pursuit and destroy evidence.
This stung. He had liked that workshop. But the most valuable, heavily-customised tools were in the toolbox Davos carried, or on the data chip in his own neural port.
Things could be replaced, but you couldn't rebuild if you were dead or behind bars.
Their pace grew steadier as Davos slowed down. His nausea was subsiding. As they exited the emergency tunnel into the decrepit elevator shaft it was connected to, Zach even found that he could walk again. Davos put him down without being asked.
How did they find us? Zach found himself wondering.
Davos shook his head. His face was grim. Doubtless he was picking through the diagnostic logs as Zach was, trying to find if there had been a tracking worm they'd missed.
It was only an hour later, as they both watched the corp police raid on the burning remains of the workshop through a hacked drone hovering in the area, that it dawned on Zach. The nausea had subsided into a less discomforting and yet uncanny feeling of being in two places at the same time. The tingle of phantom limbs and modular components that weren't quite his.
The way he and Davos had not said a word to each other in at least two hours, as his internal log now confirmed, and yet had somehow understood each other perfectly.
He stole a glance at Davos and knew immediately that the cyborg had already reached the same conclusion. The man was taller than him by a solid foot, a looming menace, but he was averting his eyes like an embarrassed school boy.
Zach found himself grinning in disbelief. Not the worst of all possible interfacing malfunctions, but rather surreal. This safehouse was barely more than a bolthole, and had all the minimal necessary equipment to watch his old workshop burn, crawling with cops. And now this little mishap? Well. Could have gone worse, for sure. Likely undesirable and riddled with side effects, not all of them immediately apparent. It would be interesting to fix.
If you insist, Davos muttered. His lips didn't move.
Zach coughed and hid his dizzy smile behind his hand.