Work Text:
There were several unspoken rules around the compound.
Most of them were relatively simple. No calling Viper 'Sabine', no interrupting Omen's knitting sessions, no bringing up bears in front of Deadlock. Gekko's crew was strictly off-limits (as were Killjoy's beloved bots) when it came to friendly fire or pranks. Things of that nature— usually, things that had been learned the hard way.
And while there wasn't much that could genuinely get under Breach's skin, he did have one rule all to himself:
His sleep was precious, and anyone that interrupted it could suffer the consequences.
Even from the beginning, it wasn't a well-kept secret that he valued his alone time. Growing up in such a large family would do that to anyone, he figured, and he certainly wasn't an exception. For the Torstens, cousins and distant relatives were as closely knit as immediate family, and as a child he couldn't remember ever having a moment to himself.
Hell— all Raze had really needed to do to convince him to join the protocol was to point to the individual room each agent would receive upon initiation.
A big room. A big room with a lock and enough security that the government and Interpol wouldn't come chasing him down. It was almost too good to be true. And just as an added bonus, his room included a massive window that lit up one side of the room, preventing the concrete from taking on the claustrophobic, cell-like walls he still saw in his nightmares.
He would never admit it out loud, but it was more than he could've asked for. It was perfect.
Well, usually perfect, anyway.
Ever since joining, the locks on his bedroom door had exactly two registered bypasses. One went to Raze— because he loved that kid, dammit— and the other went to Brimstone, who had bypasses for every room in the compound with the promise to only use them in life-or-death situations. It hadn't become a problem yet, and Raze, for all her chaotic nature, knew him well enough not to barge in at every available opportunity.
Meaning that for the most part, Breach got his fair share of alone time.
When he wasn't out on missions, the night hours belonged to him and him alone. And the occasional good book that he wouldn't be caught dead reading in front of the others.
It was on one such night, peacefully resting in his bed long past the hour of midnight, that he woke up to the sound of knocking at his door.
Breach opened his eyes.
Initially, he thought he'd misheard it.
He could count on one hand exactly how many visitors he'd received since joining the VP. Between missions and training, sleep was a precious commodity and everyone knew better than to disturb it.
But then the knock came again.
Life-or-death situations, Breach reminded himself, reluctantly rolling onto his feet and pulling on a shirt as he made it to the door. Brimstone better have a damn good reason for this or else I’ll—
The door slid open and Breach froze, because the man staring back at him wasn’t Brimstone.
The first thing he noticed was the long metal rod sticking out of the stranger’s eye. They had the other end clasped in one trembling hand, and there was no telling how deep the metal went. Even stranger was the lack of blood— instead of a skewered eyeball, the puncture wound looked like broken glass, while the other eye glowed a bright blue.
But they were just that: a stranger.
Breach was positive he had never seen them before in his entire life.
But then—
“Sorry to wake you,” they said.
—and the familiar voice cut through his racing thoughts like a cleaver.
Breach couldn’t help it. His jaw dropped wide open.
Because against all odds, sanding in front of his bedroom door without his usual mask or coat, was Cypher, who looked like he was in the process of giving himself a frontal lobotomy.
And suddenly the man’s uncovered face was infinitely more novel than the rod going directly into his eye. Dark freckled skin was lined with scars and pale spots of vitiligo around the temples. Long black curls were tied messily into a bun at the back of his head, although several strands had broken free— but Breach was instantly drawn back into the man’s eyes. The glowing blue was familiar enough, but the implant’s metal fixtures welded into the surrounding skin was captivating.
Breach slowly looked back to the other eye, which still had the orbitoclast sticking out of the center of it like a pincushion, and found himself rendered speechless.
Cypher didn’t seem to mind his lack of reaction in the slightest, and shoved his way inside.
“I really would’ve waited until morning to request your services but I had a bit of an incident in my lab a few hours ago and it’s become rather pressing—”
Breach watched his door slide shut, only half listening while Cypher rambled on and on without pause. He looked the man up and down for the third time, still trying to process the fact that Cypher's unmistakable voice was coming out of an actual face, a face he could see. Although his usual pants and gloves were still neatly in place, the infamous hat and coat were both nowhere to be seen, giving the man a far lankier, slighter appearance.
“What the fuck are you,” Breach started, finally snapping out of his daze. “What the fuck are you doing here, what—”
Cypher, the bastard, had the nerve to look irritated. “If you’d been listening…”
“You woke me up! You have five seconds to explain what the fuck is going on before I—”
The other man laughed, but there was an odd note to his tone that Breach couldn’t quite place. Cypher backed up against the bedroom wall and motioned towards his eye with his free hand.
“Calm down. I’ve just gotten myself into a bit of a situation.”
“Clearly,” Breach snapped. “The hell does that have to do with me?”
A long pause followed his question.
Looking like he wanted to sink through the floor or murder Breach on the spot, Cypher finally said, "I need your help," through gritted teeth.
There was definitely an unspoken threat there, but Breach was far more interested in the request at hand.
See, Cypher had always been a bit of a wildcard.
Within seconds of their first meeting, breach had immediately recognized the signs of a fellow criminal. And while no one ever made it into the VP as a complete saint, it quickly became clear that out of all the agents they were the two with the most red marks staining their ledgers.
In some ways, Breach had always felt an odd kind of kindship with the other man based on that— they both had a darkness the others could never fully understand, a shared experience of life constantly under the radar and on the run. He certainly knew what it felt like to be looked at differently based on where he came from and the mistakes he'd made in the past.
And if Cypher didn’t steal the servos from his arms on a daily basis, maybe that kinship could’ve meant something.
Honestly, the guy was just kind of a dick.
(But then again, so was Breach.)
So Breach stared at Cypher's unmasked face and the metal rod and decided not to kill Cypher on the spot for interrupting his sleep. He jabbed a finger in the direction of his bed.
"Sit down."
He waited until Cypher did so and began rifling through his bedside drawer to find his toolkit, glancing back at the other man every few seconds. The sleep was finally clearing from his mind and the absurdity of the situation was finally setting in as he did, and with every second glance at Cypher's bare face he had to remind himself it wasn't some strange dream.
"The fuck," he muttered underneath his breath, picking up a pair of long-nose pliers and his smallest wrench. He turned back to the man sitting on his bed.
"Explain. Now."
Cypher's grip on the orbitoclast tightened. "I had an issue with the Neon from Earth Two on the mission yesterday."
Ah.
"…Overloaded those eyes of yours."
"Yes." Cypher's left eye narrowed in his direction, as if daring him to comment on the obvious.
Breach shook his head, leaning back on the desk. He knew exactly how sensitive the subject of augments could be. He didn't particularly care, but he could understand it. And he wasn't even entirely surprised to learn Cypher had prosthesis of some kind— the man didn't show an inch of skin and there were rumors that he was a robot, for Christ's sake. Breach had seen the ways tripwires practically floated to Cypher's palms— he knew there was some sort of tech hidden beneath leather. He hadn't suspected the eyes, though.
The metal was surprisingly rudimentary, bending out around the very edges with ragged pieces near the bridge of his nose. There were thin bands of bronze lining the outer shell of the internal blue orbs, but the soldering was shaky and had flecks of black cracking along the edges.
In a horrifying moment of realization Breach suddenly got the impression that Cypher had done the implementation on himself, and given that he was currently watching the man hold a metal rod out of the other eye, it was becoming more and more obvious that that was the case.
"I already fixed the left one," Cypher finally continued. "But the right is giving me a bit of trouble, and our resident Russian informed me you have a knack for metal eyes."
Of course.
He helps fix Sova up once and the man immediately begins handing out his phone number to every other sad broken cyborg he comes across. Why had he expected anything else?
"Why should I?"
Cypher went stiff, as tense as a wire as his eye flicked up to meet Breach's.
He clearly hadn't been expecting the rebuff, and Breach almost felt bad at how wrong-footed the man suddenly looked. Cypher glared at him, curling in on himself defensively. "You helped Sova," he pointed out tersely.
"Sova doesn't steal things from me."
"You want your servos back?" Cypher sneered at him. "I'll give you a thousand. Is that what you want? A price? I'll pay it, just fix me."
Fix me.
Breach glanced down at his own hands, flexing the metal digits as he recalled the echo of words from another lifetime. He already knew he wouldn't be able to turn Cypher away— not only because Brimstone would break him a new one if he refused— but he also knew he had, for the first time since joining the protocol, leverage over Cypher. And he knew exactly how rare that was.
"Nah," he smirked. "No servos, no cash. I want what you have, Cypher. Information."
That seemed to catch Cypher's attention. "Of what sort?"
"I'll think about it."
"Information at a time of your choosing," Cypher drawled. "How vague. Alright. The quality will depend on how well you do with my eye, of course."
Breach scoffed, genuinely insulted at the idea that his handiwork was anything less than the best.
He slid into a rolling chair tucked into his desk and rolled up to the edge of the bed, scooting in to examine the damage from the puncture. He couldn't hold back a wince as he looked at it closely, noticing how deep it actually went. It looked like Cypher had jammed the metal rod in as deeply as possible, cracking through the makeshift blue lens and puncturing where the central nerve should've been. The fact that he hadn't done real damage to brain matter beneath was a complete mystery.
Cypher eyed him just as closely as he worked, posture rigid. It was clear coming to Breach for help had been a last resort.
Breach was still shocked the man had come by at all.
"Mind if I take the death stick out?"
“Something’s wrong with the sensors at the back,” Cypher explained. “They need to be replaced entirely. I have the parts, but I couldn’t find anything else thin enough to reach the old scrap.”
“So you stabbed yourself? Är du en jävla dumbom? You could’ve died, you idiot—”
“It wasn’t exactly my first choice,” Cypher retorted.
Breach scoffed in disbelief. “How the hell did you put them in in the first place?”
The other man’s expression dropped, going carefully blank, and Breach quickly shook his head by way of apology. He knew better than anyone that those stories weren’t usually pretty, and weren’t meant for casual conversation.
“Whatever. Ready?”
Looking anything but ready, Cypher nodded. The tips of his fingers trembled as he slowly eased his grip off of the metal rod. Finally, he let go.
Knowing that the internal eye would need to be replaced anyway certainly made things easier. There were delicate parts within— the most delicate, when it came to eye implants. Working around any of them would’ve made the process nearly impossible.
He gently took the orbitoclast between his own metal fingers, careful not to bump it too far as Cypher flinched. With the precision of someone who had done it a million times before, Breach began to pull.
And pull.
...And pull.
After a few seconds he gagged.
He couldn’t help it— the metal rod just kept coming and coming like some kind of sick magician’s trick. Finally the end came into sight and he pulled it free with a light tug, sucking in a breath between his teeth at the sight of blood dripping off the point. He lifted it past the shattered shell of the blue lens and hurried to grab a metal tray to toss the damned thing into.
Cypher’s only reaction to the horrifying development was to smile sheepishly. "Not my best idea, I'll admit."
Breach stared at him, sure he was actually going to strangle him.
"Even on their worst day," he said, "even Killjoy and Raze wouldn't do something so completely brainless, you stupid fucking idiot."
Blood was beginning to well up in the empty casing of Cypher's eye, smearing against the lens and dripping steadily down his cheek and nose. Cypher wiped at it pointlessly, still looking far too calm for someone who had nearly skewered their own brain on a whim.
Breach threw a rag in his direction and mentally counted to fifty as he began collecting the parts he thought he might need.
“Do I really need to ask why?”
“I already told you—”
“—Why you didn’t come to me before gouging your own eye out?” Breach clarified. He exchanged the pliers for an even longer, thinner pair. “Don’t think I missed you saying this happened hours ago.”
Despite not having any pupils or iris, the eye-roll in response was unmistakable. Breach grudgingly took the answer for what it was. He knew damn well he didn't exactly project openness and warmth. He certainly wouldn't have gone running to Cypher if their positions had been reversed. Coupled with Cypher's phobia of everyone and everything, the man's willingness to get help at all was a goddamn miracle.
"Right," he muttered. "Tip your head back."
After a moment of hesitation, Cypher did, good eye warily watching the pliers between his fingers. One of his hands still hovered nearby, as if waiting to intervene at any moment. Breach didn't bother trying to stop him. Forcing himself to use a tinge of sensitivity, Breach gently placed one hand on Cypher's forehead for balance and began inserting the pliers into the broken shell. The pair of glasses he'd grabbed included a flashlight on one temple and he clicked it on with his shoulder as he peered inside.
The internal mechanics were no cleaner than the external, full of dented thin plating and a patchwork of miniscule radianite gems. It was fascinating. The work looked masterfully homemade, simultaneously genius and improvised in its making. There were tiny scratches around the makeshift retina, long grooves where the orbitoclast had undoubtedly been tearing apart prior to being stabbed directly into the optic nerve. Breach winced at the clear aftermath of violence and tipped Cypher's head to drain the ever growing pool of blood.
"How bad is it?" Cypher asked.
"Looks like you put it through a meat grinder," Breach replied honestly. "Part of me wants to tell you to remake them in silver and save us both the trouble."
"They'll do."
"Of course they will," he grumbled. "Why bother fixing an integral part of yourself?"
Cypher's good eye thinned. "Who do you think made the ones I have now? It's not a process I'd particularly like to go through again."
"Yeah, and I'm making an offer to help, asshole," Breach rolled his eyes. "Only you would give yourself double-eye surgery. Jävlar."
Painstakingly, he began peeling away stray pieces of aluminum and placing the thin sheets into the metal pan. He could see the main problem; a large chunk of wiring had fried into itself and melted together at the back of the eye, undoubtedly a result of Neon's powers. The entire bunch would need to be removed and replaced.
He hesitated before yanking it out. "Any pain receptors still working back here?"
Cypher laughed, sounding strained. "A few. It's fine. I don't think it can be worse than what I did earlier."
"This is going to hurt," he warned seriously. Breach preemptively winced, sympathy spiking at the idea of tearing out the back wiring and ripping whatever poor nerves they were connected to. But Cypher huffed impatiently and before he could second guess himself, Breach clipped the wires with the pliers and began pulling.
Even if it wasn't worse than earlier, it clearly wasn't pleasant, and Cypher's brow immediately scrunched in pain.
"Sorry," Breach said. He yanked.
The melted wires came off in one pull, as did several burned nerves. Blood immediately began welling once more and Cypher clutched the rag to his eye as he bit down on his lower lip, gritting out curses in Arabic. Breach let him gather himself for a few minutes, switching out the pliers for a tiny flare.
"There's no fixing it now," Breach told him, "so I hope you'll be alright on one eye for a few days. But the blockage is gone."
"It's fine. I'll fix it myself."
"Just make new ones and let me install them for you," he retorted. "None of this makeshift bullshit. Even if you hadn't gotten blasted, these eyes wouldn't have lasted another year before giving out. Seriously."
Cypher shrugged his hand away and continued mopping up the stream of blood. Despite the scowl on his face, Breach could tell the man was actually considering it. He ran a hand over his own eyes, holding back a yawn, when he suddenly caught sight of the heavy metal splint holding Cypher's wrist in place.
"You need me to rewire your arm, too?" He joked.
Cypher followed his gaze. He snorted. "Actually, now that you mention it..."
He lifted the sleeve of his coat and tugged off his glove and Breach could only sit and stare as he revealed yet another metal limb waiting beneath.
"You're kidding."
Cypher grinned back at him and raised his other hand as well. "Both of them," he confirmed.
Breach couldn't help it. He burst out laughing. "Christ, you're just full of surprises, aren't you?"
"I'm going my best to give KAY/O a run for his position here."
Breach leaned back in his chair, flummoxed. His gaze strayed from one of Cypher's arms to the other. It was the first time he'd ever met another double-amputee. The strange sense of kinship he had with Cypher flared in his chest at the realization that there was yet another shared experience between the two of them. Breach didn't care much to form friendships, but— it was something.
He cleared his throat.
"So, what, did Neon fry that one, too?"
Cypher shook his head. "Rebar went straight through the wrist. Bent the frame out of shape and I haven't been able to fix it properly with my eyes gone."
"Mind if I take a look?"
The other man smiled mirthlessly. "That eager to continue playing doctor?"
"Doctor?" Breach scoffed. "No. I'm not a doctor. I'm an engineer. And you're a machine."
Fix me.
Cypher watched him curiously for a few moments. It was jarring, being able to see the man's face— Breach felt strangely undone before him, transparent. Even with all the cameras and wires, those bright blue eyes still seemed to see the most. Even with one dull and broken.
Without saying anything, Cypher slowly offered out his wrapped arm.
The digits were shaking ever so slightly. Breach stared at them, caught off guard by the so very human way the metal seemed to move, giving away small tics that prosthetics rarely replicated. Before Cypher could retract his hand, he rolled back towards the bed and took it in both of his own.
Unlike Breach's, Cypher's prosthetics had no protective external plating, and all of the internal wiring was open to see between the framing of the chassis. Just as he had described, there was a thick wedge separating bars of metal where the rebar had cut through. Several wires were clipped, copper strands flying out of the plastic casing, although none had been split cleanly in two. Dents and scratches covered the external frame, and just like Cypher's eyes, the mechanisms looked more like a hodge-podge of repairs rather than a single proper design.
"Could use some silver here, too," Breach commented. "Or maybe some of Raze's titanium alloy."
"I prefer my own designs," Cypher replied smoothly.
"Of course you do."
The upside of having his own metal arms was that there was no need for any other tools; Breach simply bent the chassis back as he saw fit, smoothing out any major dents or bends he could find. Partway through the examination, he tried to sneak one of the loose servos out from the bottom of the limb— payback for all the servos Breach had lost over the years— but Cypher's other hand came up to stop him as soon as he began moving it, raising an eyebrow.
"Stealth isn't your style, my friend."
Unfortunately, he wasn't wrong.
He continued working in silence for several long minutes. He took his time scoping out the limbs, mostly because he knew he probably wouldn't get another chance after morning came. The others would never believe him if he tried to tell them, he knew, although he had no plans to— this felt personal, like something the others didn't need to know about, and he was fine to keep it that way.
Plus, Cypher still owed him information, and that alone was worth more than any kind of reaction the others could ever give him.
Eventually he had run out of excuses to continue the examination and reluctantly handed the arm back. Cypher twisted his wrist in his other palm, feeling the damage. He didn't comment, but gave a short hum of approval, and Breach tipped his head, pleased.
He was used to destroying shit— it had been a while since he'd had the opportunity to properly fix something.
"Alright. That all?" He started wiping the grease of his hands onto his sweatpants. "Any more busted metal I need to look at? Teeth? Toes?"
"Hilarious."
"Yeah. A simple 'thanks' wouldn't go unnoticed, by the way."
"For what?"
"For wha— for fixing your damn eye, rövhål!"
Cypher gave him an unimpressed look. "Seeing as you didn't actually fix my eye—"
"I already told you, build the damn thing properly and I'll install it!" Breach flipped him off as he got up and began putting his tools back into their case. "I don't know how you expected me to fix a handful of melted wires on some shitty craftsmanship."
His delight skyrocketed as Cypher let out an indignant huff, finally seeming genuinely offended. Before the other man could walk out on him, Breach held out a repentant hand.
"Just think about it. You don't have to like me, but you and I both know I'm a damn good mechanic. I'll do right by those eyes of yours."
Cypher stood up, wringing his newly-fixed wrist. "My designs."
"Your designs," Breach confirmed.
"No payment," Cypher continued, raising an eyebrow. "Not even information."
Breach threw his hands up. "Not counting the information you already owe me, sure."
After a moment, Cypher reached down to the metal tray and pulled the orbitoclast out, flicking some of the remaining blood off before sticking it into one of the pockets in his pants. "Fine. Tomorrow night, then."
He left without another word, disappearing into the dark hallway outside. Breach rubbed his eyes as soon as the door slid shut, wondering what the hell he'd gotten himself into. It wasn't enough to quell the growing excitement in his stomach, though, and he made a mental note to gather more supplies the following morning.
For this, he could sacrifice one more night's sleep.