Archive of Our Own ^beta

I seen more places than I can name
And over time they all start to look the same
But it ain't that truth we chase
No, it's the promise of a better place

- Ghost Towns / Radical Face

Bootcamp sneaks up on your unsuspecting self-image, a doe-eyed thing fresh from a failed college career and too confident in the strength of its legs. Bootcamp bides its time, pounces, and sinks home row after row of teeth: military occupational schooling, permanent duty stations, The School of Infantry (SOI), USMC Recruit Training. Tears and plays with it, that poor thing, chews and chews.

Stone is chewed out by so many slightly taller slightly greyer white men throughout his entire military career that they sort of blend into one Seargent Mayor Big Ego. What level of disregard for personal agency and opinions would’ve killed him dead at age 19 is but a mere mosquito buzzing off at age 28. Almost a decade later. He'll have to celebrate his anniversary with Uncle Sam soon, he thinks, smiling to himself, walking to Meeting Room Y5006. They hand him papers and from the looks on their faces, Stone for a second fears it might be active duty again. He sort of doesn’t want to get all jacked up and outfitted and deployed all over. It’d be a bother.

That’s the end of his sentiments.

He flips open the unmarked folder. Skims the pages. The amount of higher-ups holding their breath then, in that room, is enough for Stone to suspect the presence of an odorless nerve agent.

Instead, the top of the page reads: Doctor Ivo Robotnik.

The military loosens its jaw and hacks up a mangled Stone at the lab’s doorstep.

Robotnik’s at least creative with his insults. Blindsides Stone with his string of words for the first time, weaving them together quickly and yet with passion, crafted just for Stone, crafted just to be thrown and lashed at him. Seargent Mayor Big Egos regurgitate the same old dozen phrases in an endless cycle of insults and attempts to break any sort of individualism. Robotnik takes great care with his rants. Like he wants them to hurt personally.

So Stone gives him nothing. Just stands there and knows that his file is rather clean of any personal details. Robotnik writes tragedies about someone’s mommy complex he spots from first glance, about people’s fetishes he somehow guesses spot-on, about how someone is deathly afraid of disappointing their wife and has been lying about their job for seven years now with soul-crushing stress-related consequences. He scans people and then rattles off his readings on them: here’s your biggest flaw- oh wait, that doesn’t even compare to this one. Sharp and smart and fast and so very passionate about the damage he can inflict.

So Stone gives him nothing.

Bears it, flinches sometimes, nods, answers plainly to rhetorical questions, and makes coffee.

Robotnik is like a breath of fresh air.

Seargent Mayor Big Ego exists against a backdrop of barracks, of training fields, of inventory chambers. Camo or uniform.

Robotnik’s lab is ever-evolving. Stone’s assigned to him at 28. Robotnik’s space is a cramped and uncomfortably W-shaped room that’s a mess of tables and papers and monitors that the man drags around on little gurneys.

“They’re… wireless?” Stone remarks one time, watching a large screen get wheeled to a horribly cluttered enclave of the room. Its display is on. Lines and lines of numbers in neat little excel boxes that are probably a hell to navigate.

Robotnik’s shoulders hike up to his ears, perpetually annoyed at being talked-at. Never talked-to. He deposits the monitor and begins stalking back over, fury in his eyes and not a single personal insult to fling at Stone.

Stone gets reassigned at 28 and a half. He joins the long list of agents the Seargent Mayor Big Egos have thrown at Robotnik to try and put some buffer between them and the radioactive engineer. Stone had lasted five months. Commendable. An old buddy from the marines catches him after a conference on updated casualty recovery and asks him: want to celebrate?

If this was a decade ago, maybe they’d hit a vacation island for their off-work swoop. Now they just clump along with five or so other guys and end up at a local bar, dressed casual, bearing IDs with fake names. The date of birth on Stone’s puts him one year older. By this document he’s 29. A decade with Uncle Sammie. He flicks his thumb against the card’s corner and sips his beer. They ask him about Robotnik, don’t really wait for an answer, tell their own horror stories.

None of them are on active warzone duty anymore. His buddy leans over and whispers, they’re looking for an agent- qualified, like you, to take up some deep integration… He pauses to turn away and hiccup from the fizzle of his beer- intelligence gathering gig. He whispers. Quiet spot. Almost like a holiday.

Stone doesn’t really want to go back to office work. He takes the man up on his offer. They’d known each other under their legal names, their troop codes, their platoon numbers, their ID aliases. Robotnik hadn’t learned his name until a week in, when he must’ve realized that it was all he had on Stone. And what’s ‘Stone’? That’s not a last name. Not a first name. It’s barely a name at all.

He’s reassigned, and he turns 29 while living under yet another new title, working his way into the trust of a mafia front. Neat little café. Crooked duct-taped sign. He arrives looking for a job, a bumbling pottery worker whose business fell apart and now he’s in dire need of something, anything. He smiles very sweetly, hollowly, folds his hands, the body language of a different person. His new ID puts him at 26. He’ll take it as a compliment.

Stone flips burgers, makes coffee, flirts with the cashier. This café isn’t the actual front, otherwise they wouldn’t have hired Stone. But the family owns it. They also own the laundromat and an arcade across the street. Stone memorizes who walks in and who walks out, and he’s always had a really good memory. He goes home, weaves his cipher, and sends the reports off. He doesn’t celebrate his 10 year anniversary after all, neither does he celebrate his birthday.

He celebrates the birthday on his ID though. The family brings him a cupcake with a candle. Make a wish. They’re sweet, someone’s hand on his shoulder, smiling faces, the kid that sometimes loiters at the café doing homework and begging Stone to help him with math snaps a polaroid. Stone asks if he can keep it. Because it’s best they don’t.

He helps the kid with math. Idly burns through an engineering textbook he remembered seeing on Robotnik’s shelf: tattered and clearly some form of artifact from his youth. Stone has a good memory. What he doesn’t understand, he memorizes. He watches the news. The TV section at the store is pitiful compared to what he remembers in Robotnik’s lab.

He wonders if he’s the only agent that’s ever wanted to go back.

It wasn’t even a big fight. As much as one-sided berating from Robotnik could be considered 'a fight'. Stone’s weathered worse his first two weeks at the lab, breaking invisible rule after invisible rule, but rarely twice. Good memory. Don’t move that. Don’t touch that. Knock less than four times. Coffee in two paper cups layered. Don’t touch the lights. Don’t touch the thermostat. Change your shoes, these squeak. Stop looking at my stuff. Stop looking at the floor. Stop looking at the ceiling, who are you trying to find? God? He won’t help you against me.

He’d brought the coffee and he’d changed his shoes and he’d politely stood there and radiated a near-violent neutrality. Trampling down the occasional jaw-on-the-floor amazement that attempted to take control every time Robotnik created.

With passion and with individual care, and always low on time or budget or patience.

He serves someone coffee. They shout at him for something or another. The next person in line leaves an extra tip in social embarrassment. The cashier lady sighs and gives him a genuinely apologetic look. Stone, in character, looks like his day’s been ruined.

The insult wasn’t even original.

It’s definitely a front. They reinstall him for another year.

His flat is small and verging on cute in a 90s way. He decorates it in character, scrolls through online honors programs to chip at, out of boredom. Intro to engineering. Physics and their real-life applications. He doesn’t really need a good grade, it’s not going on his official record anyway. He comes back from his work and watches the lectures, types notes one-handed on his clunky laptop. Buys the cashier flowers. He remembers which type she likes. The kid asks if Stone will beat someone up for him and Stone deflates, folds in on himself, and mutters: I'm not that good with my fists, kid.

He doesn’t wake up screaming anymore, but some nights cut sleep short abruptly with bullet fire. It snaps him into reality and he lies there, staring at the ceiling, and it doesn’t matter if he’s in Cover Character Number One Thousand’s room, if he’s back at his civilian flat, if he’s on the couch somewhere in the office, if he’s back at camp, back in college, back in his childhood bedroom, it does not matter. Ceilings blend together.

So do the seasons. He’s left with more polaroids. His real birthday comes and goes. His ‘real’ one finds him on a ‘vacation’. All it is is reporting back to base. A business trip. They give him photoshopped images of him at a national park to show the family later. He flies back.  

They invent new coffee, taste test it together. He’s invited to some relative’s wedding nearing the end of his second year. He works out only sort of. Jogs every morning, conveniently within visibility of the laundromat. Memorizes when there’s a truck parked by there and when there isn’t. His bullet scars whine with bad weather. Sometimes he’s in the café and it’s raining. Sheets of it, plastering the window. He makes the cashier laugh. They try more coffee. He doesn’t let his smile fall even when she’s not looking. Even if he’s getting tired. Holiday my ass.

He wants to turn them in early and be done with it.

They celebrate his birthday again- take him out to a modest yacht. Stone wears a long-sleeve swimshirt due to an ‘allergy’. He doesn’t want to compare bullet scars with the patriarch. They gift him a new laptop and then he’s pulled aside- arm around his shoulders. The boat bobs and waves, there’s the sound of a family party somewhere on the other side of the deck. The patriarch who could be a mafiosi and who could be a normal upper-middleclass father leans in. Tells Stone: you wanna start your own pottery business again? Give it another shot? I can give a helping hand, when it’s a family friend we’re talking. Happy 28. Life ahead of you.

Stone is 31.

He doesn’t let them get under his skin. He knows they genuinely care about him and it aches somewhere in his ribcage with a desire for things to just be plain old different. For the mauling to have never happened. For the beast of the military system to have left him alone, satiated its hunger elsewhere.

But it’d bit. So all he can hope for is that he didn’t taste all that good.

He writes his reports a little rarer. Passes a pioneering coding class with a neat 3.8 GPA. His instructor comments on Stone’s work being near-perfect yet very constrained by the rulebook. No wonder. He’d memorized the rules and built his assignments in perfect accordance. Not a visionary but a trusty worker.

He flips more burgers. Jogs another mile. Goes to the kid’s baseball game.

They start to pay him more. Careful money, quiet money. There’s a strong hint he should take the cashier lady out to the big fancy restaurant owned by that family. Should pay for their bill from his new raise. Stone blushes and smiles sweetly and goes of course, of course, yes.

The food is good. They order the most expensive items, more than they can eat, and ask to pack it home.

It’s a dreadful evening.

He takes a leave again to go see his ill mother. Another business trip to the pentagon. A briefing on further action, now that they have him laundering. Memorize dollar bill serial numbers. He can do that.

He runs into that same buddy in the hallways. They’d known each other under their ID aliases, their platoon numbers, their troop codes, their legal names. He’s asked what he goes by now. He asks where his buddy’s stationed. What he’s doing. Some sort of training supervisor.

Stone remarks it must be grueling. Stressful. Lively. The man laughs and says he envies Stone’s job right now. Practically holiday.

Stone smiles very sweetly, hollowly.

Flies back.

He’s 32.

He keeps delaying on that pottery shop offer, but he can’t zigzag much longer. The space is rented, the sign is printed out, the interior is fixed up. The family celebrates its opening with him, and he’s pulled aside again for a friendly chat about business. He’s wearing a recording device.

In truth, Stone hates pottery. Doesn’t like mud and clay. Too familiar with those. Too familiar with the feeling of them under his nails, fingers not faltering on the assembly of a semi-automatic. The gun’s clean but his hands never are. He smiles and he thanks the family. He hates the military for chewing him into this, of digesting him with the dribbling saliva of that rabid animal and leaving him here, polite and forever locked into obedience.

Neat little pottery studio. Crooked brand-new sign. Run by a bumbling pottery worker whose business is flourishing and he’s not in dire need of anything. He smiles very sweetly. Hollowly. Folds his hands, clay under the nails. The body language, name, life of a different person. His ID puts him at 29.

The cashier bats her eyelashes and asks if Stone can make her something. He shyly shrugs and says yes, of course, only the best for you. Hates every moment of it. They don’t know. They don’t fucking know. He was never angled for long undercover work. He’s just good at it: blank slate, by the book, loveable and excellent with his memory. He wants to flash her his scars. See what she thinks. Wants it all to fall through just so he can get out. His flat is grating in a stale sitcom way.

A week from 33 he’s-

Sorry?

A week from 33 Stone is… reassigned?

He stands in his kitchen, staring at the cipher’s hidden, snappy secret. Reassigned. Fucking reassigned? When he’s at least a year if not two away from getting enough of a foundation here to make any sort of arrest? After- after 3 years? 3 fucking years and they’re sinking their teeth in again and dragging him by the flesh of his neck hell knows where?

Stone sucks in a slow breath and then goes and breaks three plates and a wine glass.

Holiday. Mother’s ill again.

He flies out.

He'll have to celebrate his 33^rd birthday in a hotel at this rate, he thinks, gritting his teeth as the plane makes touchdown. Somehow this feels worse than not celebrating it at all. He changes into a suit. No longer perfectly tailored. That’s it, aging, he thinks to himself with mild wonder. If they’re putting him back in the office, maybe he won’t even bother fixing this. What’s the point

Three and a half fucking years.

They hand him papers and from the looks on their faces, Stone for a second hopes it might be active fucking duty instead. Something where he can lose himself to the physical malaise and escape the mental.

He has a lot more angry, punctuated thoughts to throw like imaginary daggers against the higher ups in the room but he’s already flipping the unmarked folder open.

The top of the page reads: Doctor Robotnik.

Stone waits one beat. Another. Waits for the cameras to appear: you’ve been pranked. It’s all a joke. Take your fucking sorry unfitted suit and drag yourself back to smalltown nowhere and sit your sorry ass down at the pottery wheel.

He looks up, and something on his face must be truly worrying. Maybe an ugly mixture of his cover story’s openhearted sadness and whatever underlying danger that haunts and highlights a longtime marine.

A throat is feebly cleared, and Stone is told: He requested you.

Stone goes to close the file in a state of shock when the sentence continues: To begin today. Effective immediately.

Stone drags himself to the lab’s doorstep. Two hours off a flight. Three and a half years off a fake name and personality.

Robotnik’s at least creative with his insults.

He inhales at the sight of Stone, like a laser canon gearing up for its best beam of devastation. Comes alive with the promise of ruining a self-image like his job hasn’t been done for him.

He never does say anything.

Pauses there, mid-step in his cartoony jagged way, staring with an assessing, meticulous glare. Stone stands in the doorway, having knocked not more than three times.

Robotnik frowns, thins his mouth, and finally points angrily at the lab floor in front of him, “Come here.”

Stone sways to take a step and then pauses, “My shoes squeak.”

Something crosses the other’s face, but it’s quickly enough overturned by fury, “Then SQUEAK your way over you marinic clown.”

Marinic. Stone takes the first step but he’s grinning, trying to duck his chin and hide it- god. Marinic. Moronic, but he’s a marine, and that’s all that Robotnik knows. A marine, name’s Stone. Shoes squeak. What else can he latch on to.

Stone snorts softly and comes to stand in front of him.

Robotnik looks him over, “Who on Earth did they send back…”

His suit doesn’t fit, he’s got clay still under his nails, smells of an airport, no longer clean-shaven but rather keeping a geometric, well-trimmed beard. Perhaps a million other things that belong to his disguise. Robotnik’s looking at what Stone’s had time to chisel into that clean slate. And to make it all worse, Stone couldn’t stop himself from laughing at the pun.

“I don’t doubt my own judgement, Agent Stone, ever, but I am seriously starting to reconsider my obviously polite and kindly request for your reemployment.” Robotnik looks him over again, eyebrows way up, hands on his hips. More amused, somehow, than angry. For once. “Can you manage getting cleaned up in two hours.”

The suit could be a problem- fuck it. Stone’s tired, Stone’s so very tired. He misses the craze of working for Robotnik like a phantom limb.

He grins and answers, “Yes, sir.”

Robotnik waves him off- Stone squeaks away, hyper-aware of the noise. He's called after last-second: “Keep the beard. It fixes what your genes couldn’t manage.”

Stone smiles to himself and disappears.

Reinstated. His contract already signed for fourteen months with a tentative five-year deal that dangles in the air. As long as he doesn’t piss Robotnik off enough to require another layoff. And last time wasn’t even a big fight…

They’re… wireless?
Robotnik had screamed back ‘you’re fired’ as the final punctuation to his longwinded rant that fell short of getting personal. In a state of fury. And Stone had learned by then, that if the doctor said something, even if he didn’t mean it, he’d stick with it. Stone woke up with a notice about his contract termination.

All under the wonderful hospitality of Uncle Sam’s facilities, Stone showers, fixes up his beard, slicks back his hair, and then spends ten minutes hunched at the sink. Scraping clay out from under his nails with the sharp corner of a set of tweezers. Left hand. Right hand. The suit he can’t fix immediately, so Stone rolls the sleeves up and wears a pair of colorful socks. As if the shorter pantlegs were on purpose. Borrows different shoes from the storage department.

With an hour and a half left, Stone hits a local mall to get something close enough to his usual cologne. He pauses at the cusp of an organic grocery store.

On the two-hour mark sharp, Stone knocks thrice on the lab’s threshold. Redundant, considering his entry to the lab pings off notifications on Robotnik’s massive army of screens.

The lab’s changed. In a constant state of evolution. The same old room but expanded, two of the walls taken down, cleared of any scattered mechanical junk, better-lit. Still… cluttered. With new junk and soldering tools. Alive and dynamic and forever like nothing’s Stone previously seen. He can’t stifle a category one gawking event. Robotnik must catch it.

“Don’t forget to breathe, I know it’s hard to process all this beauty and manage that at the same time,” the man gestures, preening and vibrant. He hasn’t slept in a while evidently. 

Stone snaps his mouth shut and steps into the room, “Coffee, sir?”

Routine. Unpredictable, explosive routine. Interesting.

He’d bought some ingredients. Brewed something he’d mastered while inventing new drinks for a café he’ll never see again. Robotnik accepts the cup, calls it twenty adjectives that Stone almost expected and another seven he’s never even heard of. It boils down to: terrible.

Robotnik is like a breath of fresh air.

The cup is shoved back at him, hold it, I don’t want it anywhere near my equipment. Drink it if you want. Count it as a birthday present.

Stone stops dead and realizes that yeah. Yeah it fucking is. Goddamn airplane flights. It’s been one long day for him, but everyone else has since moved on. Happy 33^rd indeed.

“Oh…” He stares at the coffee. Well. It’s not like the coffee’s bad. “Thank you, sir.”

Robotnik cringes at him, “What’s all this heart on our sleeve business now? Did someone forget their steely mask in the car?" He tsk’s and turns away with a flourish, meandering further into his lab, “Knock knock, agent, it’s the FBI here to confiscate illegally obtained emotions.”

And he’s right. Stone’s let a little too much slip. Too elated to be back maybe. Too tired of whatever he’d paraded as for three years. Too out of tune with being anyone but his cover.

“I’ll get a license,” Stone makes the mistake of joking back.

Robotnik bristles, turns around, “And getting smart with me now? Well let me tell you, mister Steely Stone,” and oh if he got fired on the spot again that’d be kind of funny, “The only people allowed to be smart here are those that have earned it. And you and your braindead corps only know left form right when it’s tattooed on the backs of your hands. Get yourself together, agent-” and with absolutely no breath for air, Robotnik’s face melts into utter self-satisfied smugness, “And come look at my lab.”

He’d never invited Stone to look at stuff. But maybe Stone’s never allowed himself to gawk and ‘oo’.

He doesn’t try any more wittiness, just trails after him, looks with interest at everything he’s being directed to. And it is interesting, revolutionary, sleek and new and never before seen. Slimmer screens, faster processing, smaller mechanisms. He tells Stone he’s working on the prototype of a hologram.

Stone always thought that letting himself eye up and down the inventions, remark on their mastery, was… Untoward. Unprofessional and surely an invitation for disastrous interactions. He blames himself now, for not trying earlier to pepper in amazement. Chronically holed up in his lab, Robotnik only talks to other officials and they already hate him too much to shower him in praise. It’s well-earned though. Both the hatred and the praise. Stone genuinely forgets to snap his mouth shut when looking at a tiny, shakily hovering prototype.

“It can’t do much of anything yet, useless stupid thing,” Robotnik sighs, “So you should find that rather relatable. But I’ve got big plans. Very big plans.” Something in his intonation is sinfully evil. Riveting. Stone wonders if the metaphor of being rather alike to this brainless prototype extends to Robotnik’s last remark. On big plans. Space to grow.

His engineering courses fall short trying to even conceptualize how this stuff runs, but at least he understands maybe every third word.

The tour done, Robotnik sends him home.

Waves him off, something about go and celebrate.

Stone makes it just outside the lab, where the offices start, and crumples onto a couch.

He hasn’t slept better in years. It swallows him into pitch black lakewater, the kind of sleep that takes a bat to your head and doesn’t even bother with dreams. Swallows him whole and doesn’t even leave ripples along the surface.

Stone gasps awake quietly. Not from a nightmare, just surprised about having fallen asleep.

It’s dark. The ceiling is tiled like every office. A few things ache but he genuinely feels rested. What a wonder.

His watch tells him its well past midnight. Into 4a.m. He doesn’t really want to drive right now. Doesn’t really want to face his dusty civilian flat or the depressing interior of a hotelroom.

Stone gets up with a quiet groan. Somewhere distant, music blares.

He traverses the dark, locked-down office space quietly. The new shoes chafe and he toes them off, leaves them standing guard by the break room kitchenette's fridge. Makes two cups of coffee, one with an extra shot of espresso. A different drink he’d invented, pumpkin spice and apple flavoring, even if out of season. It makes the thing taste like neither, but rather something unidentifiable in between.

He knocks on the lab door three times. Robotnik doesn’t catch it under the music, curled over and soldering a circuit board, the lights down and dim but certainly still grating.

Stone knows better than to startle a man with a soldering iron – especially if that man is Robotnik – and so he gets to stand and wait. Coffees warming both palms. He gets to watch Robotnik work.

He’s changed, gotten thinner somehow, two fingers slapped-over with a bandaid. But he’s dressed better. Sharper and probably custom-tailored. Shoe tapping away to the beat of an old synth rock song. His haircut’s not very well-kept. Moustache perfect as ever. Bent over another creation, bopping to the music, concentrated beyond belief, how many nights awake? He’s not superhuman, Stone remembers the crashes, remembers walking in on the doctor missing, only to find him knocked cold on the floor, sleeping with his head cushioned on a motor rag. Maybe one night of missed sleep then. Or two or three of bad sleep. Or longer. Weeks.

He doesn’t know why he got brought back. But while Robotnik may be excellent at latching onto people’s insecurities and flaws, Stone’s simply a trained profiler. If Stone’s coding is efficient but unimaginative, Robotnik’s work is in a whole new language, breaking every convention and building its own pathways, work arounds.

But Stone works well by the rules. His code still runs. Best in the class, far from imaginative, but his program had been functional. Unlike the plethora of other students who tried to get creative and found their programs dead on the ground.

While it may come as a talent for Robotnik, Stone is simply trained in reading people and analyzing variables.

The soldering iron sparks and sizzles and the room stinks of undoubtedly toxic smoke. Stone waits and mellowly watches.

Robotnik didn’t often fire people unless it was their first day. That was the trend, Stone founds out: because he’d get consistently assigned babysitters after the incident of 2006 that resulted in a three-room fire and 4 people hospitalized. And then he’d fire them on their first day. Often before they could get a word in.

A new policy got written-in because of that. No first-day fires.

Robotnik took it and ran. Fired them on the second instead. Stone smiles to himself. Take that. Fucking take that. The amount of gotcha’s that Robotnik’s managed to land on Uncle Sam in his years of work is addicting. A vicarious revenge for that jaw and those teeth and that mauling. It's left Stone like this. Robotnik doesn't look too well off with it either. Stone wonders if he ever had to serve.

Eventually, a policy was instilled, that Robotnik had to write up reports in order for a layoff to go through. Robotnik did not like reports for useless human interactions. Stone used to do most of them for him, in his period of employment. Never got to write his own layoff letter. That would’ve been funny.

Robotnik stopped firing people. Shortlived victory. He started torturing them.

Rules and shouting and making them step out into the hallway so he could throw coffee at them (as long as it didn’t get on anything in his lab). Background checks and targeting them for their utmost personal details. Living hell. Apparently Stone was the first person he fired in three years.

Also the first person he ever requested.

The soldering iron is set down.

The doctor is… undoubtedly incredible. A genius of his own making, someone self-forged to be the perfect tool of invention. Always pressured by everyone, always rushed to work faster, harder, better. Always either hated or admired. Or admired and then hated. Stone wonders what his blank slate approach accomplished. A case to crack? A wall to break in so he could actually hurt Stone? A cipher of a person? Maybe that’s giving himself too much credit. Maybe the answer is: someone a smidge better than someone who actively resented him.

The doctor exhales and slumps in his chair.

Turns around to grab something.

Stone’s right there, cranking up his smile to only about a 40% and gesturing with the coffee. He doesn’t bother saying anything. The music is too loud.

The doctor manages to scream louder anyway, kicking away and accidentally launching his chair backward, on its rickety rolling wheels- back, back, until it knocks into another table. Stone doesn’t really care to drop his smile.

There’s angry fumbling for the remote, the music turns down. After a moment of contemplation, Robotnik stops it completely. Hair out of sorts. Eyes bloodshot. “WHAT do you think you’re doing here.”

“I brought you coffee,” Stone replies. Knows Robotnik hates obvious answers.

“What time is it-” Robotnik mutters in frazzled confusion- spots some digital clock at a solid 05:03. The confusion just gets stronger when he looks back to Stone, “Did they lobotomize you with dry spaghetti out there. What are you doing here.”

Stone sighs, gives a half shrug, stretches out the double-shot coffee, “Extra espresso, dark roast latte. Mystery flavor.”

Robotnik accepts it, still out of his element. Perhaps this is cruel, making a deeply unrested man interact with him in any capacity. Sniffs it through the hole in the plastic lid.

“Coconut.”

“Mm, no,” Stone smiles a little more genuinely. If he was a cipher to crack, he can’t disappoint and get boring now. Even with his heart allegedly on his sleeve, he’ll pepper in little secrets.

“How close am I?” Robotnik asks, intense but not angry at being wrong. Yet another problem for him to rotate. This one lower-stakes. A bit of a break. “A fruit?”

“Yes and no, depending on who you ask,” Stone answer amiably and sips his own.

Robotnik frowns, spinning slowly in his chair, sipping once more, “What sort of an answer is that… Okay, asking me.”

“Then yes, a fruit,” Stone nods. The tiles are cold under his socked feet. He squints a little in the dim yet still fluorescent white light. There are shadows under the doctor’s eyes.

“Aha…” Robotnik muses, “So something that the common populace considers a vegetable, but I know better…” Sips again. “Agent, this wouldn’t be cucumber, would it?”

Stone grins. “No, sir.”

“Hm.” Robotnik taps his index against the cup, then seems to snap out of it, “You’re distracting me. Go…” he waves his free hand, rolling over to his workstation, “What were you even doing.”

“Sleeping, sir.”

Robotnik looks over at him again, soldering iron already powering back on, “Where?”

“The couch.”

“Miserable and pathetic,” Robotnik allows and turns back to his work, unpausing the music. He cranks it to block all hopes of conversation. Stone can accept that.

He sighs without malice and relaxes his stance. Not tired enough to go home. Not motivated enough to either. Home is just the same bedroom, the same kitchen, the same shower, across different states and different apartments, always the same thing. The lab is unique. The doctor is even more so. Stone watches him work.

Every few sips, the music will be paused, and Robotnik will guess at the flavor. Grapes. Watermelon- that’s a berry… Squash? Avocado?

He watches the doctor rub his eyes, his temples, fighting a headache. Stone departs, gets him painkillers from his own supply. Waits until the soldering iron is down and the music is paused for another guess before he offers the bottle.

Robotnik just scowls at him, bares his teeth. Forever difficult and unpredictable. “Go home, Agent Stone. Your new boss says so. Wouldn’t want to anger him.”

“With all due respect, I’m not on shift right now.” Stone sips his drink, sets the bottle of pills down within reach, and prepares to leave anyway. Best not play with fire or poke a tiger with a stick.

“Then you are trespassing,” Robotnik grumbles. “All the more grounds to fire you.”

Stone leaves just in case, goes to boot up one of the office computers to try and begin getting his life back in order. Emails the elderly shoprunner he gets his suits from. Shuffles through his inbox.

A figure appears in his well-trained periphery. Stone freezes, slowly looks over-

It’s Robotnik. Shambling, tired. He doesn’t see Stone tucked away in the far corner of the office with his screen brightness on low. Just shuffles through the space until he spots the couch, muttering something to himself. Stone can take an educated guess, and say that Robotnik didn’t know this couch existed.

He folds onto the broken-in piece of furniture, out of Stone’s sight. Stone doesn’t dare breathe until he hears the distant, quiet snores.

He scours furniture catalogs looking for something black, red, and white. As an afterthought, he orders colored bulbs.

Eventually he shuts everything down, sneaks past the couch, into the lab. The coffee’s empty and he trashes the cup, doesn’t dare do much else. If Robotnik wrote a report on him once already, he could probably go through the trouble of firing Stone again.

Things start falling into place.

Stone is a day into being 33.

He gets a new suit, new shoes, keeps the beard. The layout of the place hasn’t changed much. A few things rearranged, the lab made better. It’s on the same floor as office stations, the breakroom coffee station, and the couch. Stone buys more coffee ingredients and labels them all as ‘contaminated with influenza’ in Robotnik’s handwriting. Not only do people leave them alone in the shared fridge, but all of the other things in that fridge migrate to opposite corners. People’s lunches and drinks. Stone smiles.

The lights arrive before the couch does. He’s been pushing his luck here and there with Robotnik, still polite, still quiet, still standing for long periods of time doing nothing or off somewhere dealing with Robotnik’s emails on his laptop. He’s banned from doing it in the lab because Robotnik can’t stand the sight of that thing. But he’s been pushing his luck. Maybe a little. Here and there.

Robotnik has gone on rants. Long and violent and beginning to flesh out with more details that Stone’s allowed to bleed through. But he hasn’t actually snapped. Hasn’t thrown anything at him. Has barely thrown him out of the lab if you discount the whole laptop situation.

So Stone pitches the lights carefully after having already offered a passable coffee.

Robotnik’s out of the lab for the evening anyway, off doing field testing Stone isn’t invited to.

“If you break anything.” Robotnik violently taps his finger against Stone’s sternum, “I am going to hack into your archives and delete your twelve gigabytes of carefully sorted orchestral music. And then I’ll break your hand.”

“Understood.”

He installs blue lights along the office ceiling. Attempts to integrate their controls into the already existing remote and gives up two minutes in.

Robotnik comes back wired and miserable. Stone makes him mystery coffee as a distraction. Robotnik’s guessed apple, and is still stalling on the pumpkin part of it. Stone can’t tell if it’s intentional.

“You are making this an aquarium.” Robotnik mutters with venom, watching Stone turn the brights off and keep only the blue. “Typical of a goldfish but clearly beneath me.”

“You can be a shark,” Stone offers, watching Robotnik walk around, looking at the ceiling. “Or a dolphin, they’re smarter.”

“A-plus on your third-grade biology quiz,” Robotnik claps sardonically, “Next you’ll push to install a fountain right in the middle.”

“So I should cancel the garden fountain order?” Stone deadpans.

Robotnik snaps to look at him, annoyed, “I’m so used to standard grade stupidity, you wouldn’t know the utter lack of decision-making and logic that I expect from assistants.” He sips his coffee, mystery still uncracked, “Keep joking like that and you won’t last here very long.”

Stone lasts until the couch gets there. Sleek and red and perfectly in-tune with the lab. Robotnik stares at him with searing hatred and makes Stone leave it in the hallway against a wall. Two days later, Stone helps him drag the couch into the lab anyway, where it finds a permanent spot furthest from the door, tucked away and near invisible. Robotnik argues that it’s huge and ugly. Stone bought it with the doctor’s height in mind.

Stone lasts until Robotnik guesses that it’s pumpkin by sheer elimination. This is how it’s uncovered that Robotnik generally doesn’t know what pumpkin tastes like. Never had the time or never tried. Stone doesn’t ask, just gets him pumpkin pie from a good local bakery and pumpkin spice latte. This is how they also find out that Robotnik doesn’t like pumpkin. It gets the doctor mad at him for insisting he try at all. Waste of time.

Robotnik sleeps on the couch. Keeps the lights blue when he’s up late working.

Stone lasts until it’s announced the lab move that Robotnik’s been requesting for years is finally approved. The doctor literally hops in place once Stone brings him the email, clapping his hands. Somehow managing to do all this with a vaguely unsettling aura. Stone grins.

They pack, seal and reseal sensitive machinery, sift through heaps of parts and screws and tools. Stone's left to smooth out all the papers, the inventorizing, converting Robotnik's handwriting into documents. Labels each box with an itemized list of what's inside. Meticulous and time-taking yet infinitely more welcome than wasting hours- wasting three and a half years parading as someone who's well-meaning and considerate and kind.

Stone lasts, and lasts, and lasts, and doesn’t wear. Doesn’t grow tired of it. Baby steps lead to a marathon.

They move into the new lab around his next birthday, first two on the scene before the trucks get there. Robotnik breathes in the smell of fresh paint and setting military-grade glue, surveying the empty room, then the adjacent hangar. Spacious and all his. Stone beams, trailing him, getting distracted checking all the side rooms, getting called back over to come see, this is where I'm putting my 3D printers- no, this is where I'm putting a line of conveyor belts- isn't it fantastic?

The trucks arrive, so do a dozen or so agents to help. Stone carefully directs them for most of the day, checks boxes off his list, and tries to make sure no one interacts with the doctor in any way. Public safety measures. They really start listening to him after Robotnik manages to talk an agent into tears and everyone realizes Stone's the better option, with his quiet orders and polite smile. Leagues from being any sort of authority figure - after all, another agent, another soldier. Blank slate, by the clipboard, loveable and excellent Stone with his soft-spoken directions, put that there, careful with the trolley. 

Once the moving crew is banished, the two remaining inhabitants of this unfurnished, cold space spend a good two hours dragging cabinets around, setting up and rearranging tables, and then dragging the cabinets back because something or another doesn't fit Robotnik's particular tastes. Stone does most of the dragging. Robotnik only joins when he gets frustrated at that it's not working out. 

“Doctor, do you want to go check on the-”

“I am leaving to check on my stereo system,” Robotnik proclaims, as if it was his idea. Anything to get him out of the room.

“Box C-20,” Stone calls after him.

Robotnik shouts from somewhere in the hangar where most of their items were dropped: “I know, agent.”

Stone has a few minutes to fix the layout before Robotnik's back to rearrange everything and complain. The last lab was cramped and a hand-me-down from some other department. Uncomfortable and cramped, no space for the doctor to unfurl. The last two hours, he's been shuffling the tables into elaborate zigzags through the main space, finding it inconvenient to traverse, reshuffling. Momentarily left as the ship's captain, Stone pushes the tables against the walls. Leaves a few perpendicular to allow access from both sides, but leaves the center mostly free. If he can allow a guess, the doctor's never worked somewhere that didn't resemble a storage closet.

Robotnik comes back with his wireless travel stereo. Pauses and scans the room, his distaste toward it in plain view.

“What a waste of space,” he finally tells Stone. The tables remain where they are. They will remain virtually forever. Filtered out for sturdier furniture or - eventually - hovering pads... but the lab's new spacious look locks into place right then and there. Freedom. Forever changing, a constant state of evolution.

For now though Robotnik's mad at it for one reason or another, and sends Stone off to get food. An easy out to avoid getting shouted at. Unfamiliar roads, Stone isn't allowed to keep google maps on his phone, so he has to find a place manually. Wraps seem like a good idea. Nutritional and easy to eat without chairs. He also gets coffee.

Robotnik plays music at a nice background volume, dragging boxes around. Some of the tables are already overrun by power tools. Before Stone can even say anything about the food, Robotnik tells him he’s got a surprise.

“Watch and be astonished.”

He blindly lands his hand on a wall-switch, right under an exposed panel of wiring he must've been working on-

The lab’s lights go out. Instead replaced with red and blue. Dimming options already installed, now with a new color. It's calming, like being in a blanket fort as a kid. Safe and not-dark. Hidden. Robotnik spreads his arms and slowly spins in the spacious middle of the lab, clicking his heels, smiling with a head tilt. For once stress-free. Lively. Too in a constant state of evolution.

Even in the blue light, he does not look on death's doorstep. No longer gaunt like a skeleton in Uncle Sam's closet. Haircut immaculate. Coat slowly billowing out as he gives another twirl. 

“I'll take the five-star reviews now,” Robotnik prompts, waggling his hand impatiently.

The integration of these lights means too much. Stone doesn't know where to begin.

He's always been good with his lines, had them memorized and ready. Robotnik runs off-script like a mad car on the serpentine. Stone swallows and fumbles to express it. Maybe his expression's enough, and Robotnik cheers with a hearty 'HAHA!' switches the lights to red.

“Ah, aquarium and hell,” Stone says quietly. All of his jokes are straight-faced and left as timid comments. It’s Robotnik’s choice to snort or get angry.

“You think dolphins go to hell if they do bad things?” Robotnik muses, beginning to shimmy over in his spinning half-dance when he spots Stone beginning to retrieve the wraps. "You think they're capable of that?"

Stone hands the chicken veggie warp to the doctor, “Of going to hell?”

“Of doing bad things.”

Neither of them are religious. Boxes need sorting, emails need checking, lists need to be gone over, make sure everything is accounted for. 

Robotnik sits on an empty table, Stone stands nearby. They eat and discuss dolphins. As much as you can discuss anything with Robotnik. He'll hear a sentence from Stone and go off on a paragraph, elaborating, correcting, musing. He likes to talk in meaningless theoretics, contemplate, and have someone to contemplate at. He likes the talk at Stone. Likes having someone to talk at that he at least feels is listening. Stone does more than that, gives him everything, attentive gaze, occasional smiles, nods when he actually understands.

Talks back too, never at Robotnik, always to him. At least he tries. Tries his hardest to not betray. 

Robotnik watlzes off again. Cafe-bought coffee untouched, now that he's been spoiled by Stone's blends. 

The lab will look busy soon, maybe better organized. The doctor's been trying at it recently. Difficult to, when you're stuck in an ancient room that's seen all of your projects since a decade ago. Seen you sleep on the floor, punch tables, punch officials, punch agents. Seen you grab your new agent by the collar, rattle him around, and all he does is stare back blankly, answer curtly and professionally. Sees you shout at him, fumble for personal insults. Fire him. Rehire him. Mysterious reasons. Sees you guess the pumpkin flavor, jump out of your chair, screaming really? really? Stone, really? Sees the other laugh quietly, ducking his chin, sees you groan and slump back into your chair, work momentarily abandoned, weight momentarily lifted off hunched, sharply dressed shoulders. Sees you begin to pack years of clutter and research into boxes, sees you let another soul to do the itemizing, the repackaging. Sees you sleeping one final time there, sprawled on the oddly comfortable couch while the rest of the room sits empty. 

Stone shakes himself out of the stupor, finishes his wrap, wipes his beard. Medium price, mediocrely okay taste. Every day that he gets to make sure Robotnik's eating at least two meals in 24 hours the food always tastes better.

Robotnik's taken the music with him. The lights are still all color, muted, calming. What a strange feature to associate with the barebones of a usually hostile environment. "Calming". Prone to giving you burns and pinches and licks of motor oil, acid, electricity. 

Don’t move that. Don’t touch that. Don’t touch the thermostat. Come look at this though. Hold it for me, actually. No, you're doing it wrong- just- (an annoying growl, shoving Stone's hands around with the prototype that could definitely just go on a stand) There. Don't move. Unless you're keen on losing a finger. 

Bandaids, cleaning solution. Stone upgrades the medkit. Organizes it out of its previous bloodied clutter- god, had the doctor been shoving through it while sporting a cut? Stone had frowned at the kit then, weeks ago, angry that whichever agent's been assigned to him then wasn't around to help. Stone makes up for it. Stays late, shows up early. He doesn't fancy being home, doesn't fancy losing another minute to the monotony of identical rooms. He's seen more than enough of that. More places like his civilian flat and government hallways than he can name. They blend into one: Seargent Ego, Cashier Lady, Ill Mother, Business Officials with their folder that bears Robotnik's name. Reassignment. 

Stone's carrying yet another box of the utmost immediate items like tablets, charging wires, and battery ports into the new lab. Robotnik's manifested there, music off. Waiting for him. An utterly petrifying sight. 

He's sitting on yet another table, lights blue now. Beckons Stone over with a wave and a pat on the table's surface. Sit here.

Steeling himself for whatever he's about to survive, Stone sets the box down and walks over, rolling his sleeves back over his wrists. Somewhere there is a watch that reads 8p.m. People usually go home around now. They both know this. 

"Sir?"

"Cut it out with the 'sir', agent." Robotnik cringes, rolling his eyes, and his neck along with them. "You make me out to be like those babies in uniform that run the country, sucking on their chest candy like it's worth anything at all. Sir, sir, sir, what am I, another general?"

"Doctor," Stone concedes, shaking off the loose bite of military-trained instinct, tripping in his practiced march of being someone who's well-meaning and considerate and kind- "You are nothing like those faceless, conceited mannequins."

Robotnik stares at him. Stone looks away, having said too much even if it was all in that calm, quiet delivery. 

And then the doctor snorts, "C minus for originality, but F for effort. Take a seat."

Stone nods and hops onto the table, respectable distance. 

Robotnik produces a somehow perfectly wrinkle-free paper from inside his coat. After it, a pen. 

Stone knows a contract when he sees it. Must be the five year deal. Oh god. It must be the five year deal. It can't be but it must be. Stone holds his breath.

Robotnik sets it in the space between them and pointedly slides it across the table with a gloved pointer in its dead middle.

"Doctor..."

"Better than 'sir' but don't wear it out," Robotnik dismisses, removes his hand. Leaves the pen in its wake. "Half a decade, Stone. Longer than your little Sopranos spinoff." It's phrased as a challenge, as a dare. He's wielding the undercover assignment like a smug scalpel, baiting Stone to say something untoward, or maybe baiting Stone to decline. Someone used to staying up alone, someone used to being in labs at 8p.m. alone, someone used to rejection after rejection: budget, new lab room, ethics project approval, request to stop fucking sending him new agents. 

Stone's chest hurts where usually the only aches are from old scars. Now he hurts with something foreign, someone else's petty strife. Someone else's scars. A year into working for Robotnik a second time, Stone knows he never served. Lasted three days in the army by mandate and then pissed everyone off so much they almost kicked him out. He got reenlisted for their weapons design sector almost immediately. And there unrolled his highway to the Pentagon. Stone knows this now. Much like Robotnik knows about the two bullet wounds, the hatred of mud. They don't come from better places. Stone knows. Stone knows about the orphanages, foster families, always the same, agent Stone, every time they promise a better place, it's always the exact same, Foster Mother Dearest and Grand Marshall Counselor. It blends together. An ugly cauldron of bunk beds and peeling wallpaper. Jaws and teeth.

Stone picks up the pen. 

Five years, and he will certainly spend far more that the 8a.m. to 6p.m. hours listed under his name. Will spends nights, weekends, holidays. Cleaning grease oil off the doctor's goggles, keeping his inbox in check, picking lunch and dinner, holding prototypes, memorizing part names and index numbers so he can go fetch them from storage, good memory and all. Having the other taste test coffee. Having him catch at least 5 hours a night. Watching him work, dance, work again, building towards a better future, crafting it right before Stone's eyes.

He pauses, pentip hovering over the line. For a moment unsure if he even remembers his own signature. It's been another man's for three and a half years, after all. He remembers that of his ID alias, remembers his, their troop code, his platoon number, off the top of his head, easy and ready to be penned down.

"You know no one's forcing your hand," Robotnik snides, "Just threatening it with the prospect of losing its fingers..."

Stone hears it: I'm not letting you go. Ink makes contact with paper, leaves a fast, cursive trail. Heart in his ears, in his throat. Stone remembers to inhale, blink. The pen detaches with reluctance, leaving a fading final stroke. 

He sets it down with a clink. Breathes out. Slides the paper back over. Dark blue light. 

"Happy birthday," Robotnik picks the contract up. Places it back into his coat. "I won't bother with this much fanfare for the next five."

"That's fair," Stone nods and swallows with a click. "Thank you, doctor."

"Your standards are in the grave," Robotnik sighs, twirling the pen once before putting it away too. "But I love a little unethical experiment," He comes alive, grinning over at Stone, "Let us embark on a resurrection journey of far less tragic proportions than Frankenstein's Mistake. Bring me box HB-34."

Stone pauses, knocked out of his earlier floundering sentimentality: "We don't have a box under that code."

Robotnik grabs his ear and yanks, "WRONG! Who are you-" he yanks it again, "To DOUBT me, Agent Stone? Got a little too complacent? Haven't been told to drop down and give twenty in too long? Haven't been sent to a country with free oil in over seven years? Hm?" He lets go of Stone's ear, flicks it, Stone just sucks in a breath and rights his posture. "Off with it, get the box, and pray I don't burn this waste of paper while you're out of the room." Robotnik pats his coat where the contract sits and sends Stone off.

There is in fact a box. Stone hasn't seen it before. Rectangular and heavy. He takes a small breather in the break he's granted, turns around, and walks back into the lab.

Robotnik has the contract indeed out. No lighter in sight, but he's wearing the testing-stage prototype of his remote gloves. Not powered yet, just breaking them in and testing design and durability. They could hide a lighter, Stone things. Or a soldering iron.

"Ah..." Robotnik pauses, then rereads something on the paper- oh god he's examining Stone's signature, "Aban."

He hasn't heard it aloud in... Over a decade? He's been 'Stone' for longer, and people have slowly weaned off first-naming him. He forces himself to keep walking, walking through the shockwaves of hearing it at all, having forgotten he had a private identity to speak of. Stone is his work and Stone is his place at the lab and Stone is his hours poured into training, war, undercover missions, supervising Robotnik, learning Robotnik, working with Robotnik.

Aban likes Baroque-era orchestral music, flying a helicopter, making coffee as long as it's on his own terms, or maybe for Robotnik- and there goes Robotnik again, work inseparable from private life. Private life that he's got very little left of.

Robotnik is like a breath of fresh air. Stone sighs, sets the HB box down, and nods, "Nice to meet you. Aban Stone reporting for duty."

"That's not your real last name," Robotnik mutters, leaning in to puzzle at the signature some more. "This is not letters."

"Doctor, with all due respect, that is confidential." Stone says it politely, standing there with his hands resting on the box. Robotnik's puzzled the pumpkin spice out. Time to give him a new mystery to chip at. Give him a side-project with no stakes. No deadline. 

"You are the gum condemning my shoe," Robotnik sighs, puts the contract away, and gesture at the box, "On with it, I don't have all day. What I have even less of is patience."

Stone nods and takes his exacto knife out, underhand after a whole day of cardboard. Splits the black duct tape.

It's a new laptop.

Instead of a familiar logo, its lid is decorated with a stylized IR. Robotnik's own work, then. Initials they ban him from putting on commissioned creations, yet ones he still sneaks into the code or the circuit boards. Black and red, sleeker than anything on the market now. 

"Now you can stop making my eyes bleed with that atrocity you call a twentieth-century machine," Robotnik breaks the silence. Always hateful always ready to take the first jab, just so it's not taken at him. 

Stone almost 'sir's him again. Trips over it, mouth agape. He doesn't need benefits to stay at Robotnik's side, doesn't really care for a raise, doesn't demand gifts of longer holidays in compensation for being 'forced to deal with this guy'. 

"Thank you. That's more than enough for the next five too."

"Too quick to trust, Aban Stone," Robotnik wags his finger, "Tis but a case to hide your monstrosity."

He's lying because it's a whole different size from his own. Stone carefully lifts the lid, revealing a keyboard that undoubtedly glows when powered on. "Wow..."

"Type those emails with a little more malice for me," Robotnik pats his shoulder heavily. Plus it'd be inconvenient to have you in the hangar if I want to keep that wretched beast out of my sight. This on the other hand is not a misstep of technological evolution, but rather a prime quadruple-encrypted marvel of the future. This is like entrusting a baby with a Porsche,"  he adds at the end, hopping off the table, "A throw-away model of course, otherwise I would have kept it for myself. I don't need defective copies, so I thought I'd submit it as a charity case."

Backtracking. Saving face. Stone grins and tries to save face too, drag himself back into professionalism. It sort of works and sort of doesn't. He twists to Robotnik and beams at him, "Thank you, Dr. Robotnik."

"Robotnik is fine." A gloved hand waves him off, "Keep it to a minimum though, my tolerance for familiarity isn't that high. Aban, Aban, Aban." It's like he's taste-testing it.

"Noted," Stone closes the box, heart going a mile a minute, warmth coiling around each individual rib. "Will you kill me if I arrange anything for your birthday?"

"Stone, this is barely arranging anything," Robotnik spins around to him again, middle of the freeing labspace. Stone can't wait to see how he utilizes it as a dance floor. He doesn't yet know that the hangar will eventually sport the scaffolding of a truck, that Robotnik will gut it, utterly enamored by the open space in the middle of his lab, rushing to replicate it in the portable version as well. "But the answer is yes, I'd kill you. If you even knew the date. Ha! Your record might be scraped clean, but mine doesn't even exist."

"I'm sure there are higher-ups I can bribe." Stone follows him mellowly, box hugged to his chest. "Or I can narrow it down through personality assessments, cross-referenced with the twelve zodiacs."

"That would be an insult in every way possible," Robotnik wanders onto the main floor. Pulls out his phone and restarts the music, skips a few songs.

"Maybe if you told me I wouldn't have to start guessing."

Robotnik suddenly cranks the volume, turning to Stone and mouthing something back, inaudible on purpose- then screams 'SORRY I CAN'T HEAR YOU' and turns away, beginning to bop over to a table of boxes. Intent to ignore Stone. Patience truly having run out- or maybe having lost every other easy out from the conversation's spotlight on him. Stone grins. 

There isn't a clear order to go home. Work day's over. There hasn't been one in ages. Eventually Robotnik stopped insisting Stone leave. Resignation, acceptance, what have you. Started to banish Stone less too. Baby steps. Marathon. It's dark outside, late. Stone dances over to the room of unsorted boxes, dances back with two of them, begins to arrange them along the tables by contents. He stays. Stays and dances along a little, Robotnik fully jamming out somewhere in his periphery. 

Stone sweeps, fixes the exposed panelling on the wall, drags over the trolley with the red couch- pauses. There isn't really a nook left in the lab to hide the thing in. And he doubts Robotnik would sleep on it unless the thing was as out of sight as possible. Tucked away somewhere. Stone remembers one of the side rooms.

He can outfit this for something cozier. The couch, a water cooler. The coffee station, probably. A shelf with extra clothes. Oh, yes, perfect, a new pet project. Something he'll probably have to bear with Robotnik about, once the other realizes what Stone's building and decides to chew him out.

A carpet would go nicely here. 

Cresting into midnight, they begin setting up the holograms. Something that'd only recently been brought to existence. With the occasional flicker and a bit dull at the controls, but intoxicatingly real. The future brought to life. Eventually they will get better, cleaner, faster. Be able to cast off further, handle more moving pixels. Robotnik will install them into his truck, all eventually. They'll be blue and red, like hiding at the bottom of the pool or behind closed eyelids. Later. Later, but there are for once things to look forward to, Stone thinks, holding the power cord. 

Robotnik's hand in the air drops: detonate. 

Stone connects the cords, feels a minor electric tickle run through him, starting and ending at the palms-

The lab flickers to life, loading screens and passive interfaces. Robotnik laughs, arms spread, and Stone grins too. They've only been here how long? A day? Less? And yet it's already their lab, carved to Robotnik's liking (and with Stone's quiet suggestions) from a blank slate. This is it. Somewhere that can be kept neat and actually conductive of work, a place far better than Stone's ever been. The wild glint in Robotnik's eye betrays the same. This is it. A better place. No tooth marks to speak of. They toast to it with energy drinks. 

"To innovation," Robotnik proclaims, giddy, knocking back half of the electrolyte cocktail.

Stone raises his own can, its metal reflecting blues and reds.

"To the future."