Work Text:
First out. Thought you would do better than that, someone who always talks about being Spark's… better twin.
Thought you would do better than that.
First out.
First—
"Come on, Ray, one more time." Ark wiggles a tape recorder at them. Who the hell does she think she is, Entrapta? "Project: Gemini v2 update 12-22-25, doing repairs after participation in Amiibrawl 12. Status report?"
Ray rolls their eyes. "Status report: not great," they groan. "Figure Power at, fuckin'… seventy-two percent? Rechargin' from repeated activation of Critical-Health Attack Up." They glance to their side at the shimmering cables running from their open chest to the ball of light sitting on the work table. They were already plenty desensitized to seeing their heart on the outside rather than the inside, so they're more focused on the dim pulse of their energy replenishing. "Heavy damage to left leg and torso, general issues thanks to gettin' hit by so, so many finals— hurt like hell by the way."
"Mhm." Ark drums her fingers on the table. Her eyes drift from scrutinizing Ray's opened-up chest to squinting at their face instead. "And your performance?"
Ray stays silent.
"…and your performance, Ray?" Ark prompts. Ray doesn't look at her. "What did you place? C'mon."
First out.
"Eighth," Ray says in a flat voice.
Ark's eyes narrow behind her sunglasses. "Worse than last time," she muses. "Not that you placed well in your debut either." She sighs in equal parts exasperation and disappointment. "Will record update after repairs. Ending log." The tape recorder clatters as she tosses it aside. Ray scowls as their creator folds her arms on the table and slumps over. She rests her tilted head on her forearm and studies them, nose wrinkled and lips pursed.
"Maybe this project was a mistake," she mutters to herself. Ray bristles. "Too much work for too little."
"Or maybe you're shit at makin' anythin' that doesn't fall apart if we sneeze wrong," Ray snaps. "How good did Pink Drink do, huh? First out 4-0, just like me."
Ark's expression stays a thoughtful frown. "Matcha Latte did well," she says. "Could've made it through losers bracket if it hadn't been single elimination. Fuzzy Peachu performed above expectations as well."
Ray waves their arms around in frustration and just barely avoids unplugging themself. "That's a fucking rat!"
"Don't talk about your brother like that, Melon Burst."
"PEACHU! The literal, actual rat!" Ray tugs at their bandana to avoid pulling on their hair. "Also Matcha isn't my brother, he's some fuckin' dweeb from another of your stupid-ass projects!"
Ark isn't listening (or at least not listening to the part Ray wants her to be). "Maybe I need to put a swear filter on you too," she muses.
They are literally about to lose it. Ray clamps their jaw shut so Ark doesn't have more reason to follow through on that thought. That doesn't stop their fingers from twitching like they want to strangle something. Preferably that gator. Who the hell bases their personality around gatorade? It's not even caffeinated. Also it tastes like ass. At least they can hold onto the small shred of dignity that their two embarrassing losses so far had been to a literal god and a former champion, even if they have no idea how the latter even got that title.
(Also they got knocked into losers bracket by a little fuzzy thing, but it wasn't their fault they were programmed to seek and destroy against an opponent that spent most of his time airborne.)
Ray nearly didn't hear Ark's question, too wrapped up in their frustration to pay attention. They catch the tail end of it, though, and the shock of it makes their fans stall as their processes lock up. It was easy to reconstruct the rest of the sentence: "Why were you in the tournament?"
They pretend the uncomfortable warmth was because of aforementioned fan-stalling and not simulated embarrassment. The seconds tick by as they struggle to find a good enough reply. Ark sits up and furrows her brow. "You weren't ready for another field test. I still haven't been able to piece together why your performance is so inconsistent, let alone figure out a solution—"
"I was sick and tired of sittin' around for three years waitin' for you to give me another shot." Ray's hackles raise and their ears fold back as they glare at her. "You wouldn't fuckin' give me a chance to prove—"
"—because you're not stable," Ark stresses. "Do you seriously think you proved anything by making an idiot of yourself in front of an audience that already had low expectations?" Ray's locked-and-loaded rant dies before it can make it to their voicebox. "The most you've done is shown that you can't back up your stupid boasting because you're so fixated on being better than your prototype."
The mention of Spark doesn't do wonders for Ray's mood. The power core on the table flares brighter as their emotions do; Ark hastily moves to unplug it before something catastrophic happens, but Ray grabs her wrists and bares their teeth. "I wouldn't give so much of a shit," they hiss, "if I wasn't bein' constantly reminded of how I'm basically garbage."
Ark's glare has no sympathy. "Then stop being garbage."
They tighten their grip. God, they wish they had their sword right now. They wish they could lash out, show her she was making a mistake, march back to the stadium and break into that goddamn commentators' booth and—
Ark rolls her shoulder, then yanks. The motion pulls Ray forward, but most importantly it causes her arm to disconnect with a click. It's like a lizard shedding its tail. Ray's grip goes slack as one of Ark's arms comes loose from her sleeve, and that distraction is enough for her to shake her other arm free without any need for spontaneous limb detachment. She rolls her eyes, shrugs her labcoat off one shoulder, picks her arm back up, and clicks it back into place. "Cool it," she says. "An overload is something I can't fix."
Boiling rage simmers down into shame and discomfort. The too-bright star flashing warnings in their periphery dims back down to an idle cycle through a blue-yellow gradient. They remember the shaky and awkward voice reading out their biography: a volatile, experimental power source, emphasis on the… "volatile" and… "experimental".
Their expression darkens. They hadn't expected one of the first voices they'd hear stepping out on the field to be their own.
("Tell me, is- is your hair… orange?"
Ray blinked at him. They kept their expression carefully neutral, although they weren't able to mask the grimace in their voice. "Ah… Sure, let's go with that." It's not. It's red. Kinda hard to miss. This tournament was already full of weirdos, though, and honestly they were just itching to get the fight underway. Easier to play along than deal with whatever nonse—
"Okay. Got it." The gator still looked thoughtful and uncertain. "So, the orange one… is Spark." He brightened and snapped his fingers. "So you're Spark!"
Ray's carefully neutral expression crumpled in on itself like they'd eaten a lemon.)
They know they should say something. Even just a casual tease of hey, you'll never guess who I found. Kir schematics are still pinned up to the wall covered in sticky notes and corrections and questions - all the theorizing that led to the construction of the robot staring down the bones of their own design. It makes sense, really. Of course a prototype combat robot would end up in the beating heart of Space Florida, the biggest tournament the pocket dimension has ever seen. Really, you'd think that'd be the first place she'd check. She's already field testing her other robots there, after all. Hell, she'd been there herself with Ray at her side and still has no idea.
The corner of Ray's mouth tugs up in a small, hard-to-see smirk. Ark doesn't need to know where Spark is, not while kir improvement is sitting here waiting for her to get her tools together to begin repairs. Not when they're better than kie'll ever be. It doesn't matter how much Ark whinges about how much trouble she's having replicating whatever fluke caused Spark to "wake up" - whatever that means - because Ray's just a little bit of refinement away from being more than Spark ever was.
"Alright, I need you to power down." Ark twirls a screwdriver. "A reset should fix most of your damage, but I don't want to tamper with your power core while you're active." (Nevermind her being about to do that while Ray was ramping up into a tantrum. Desperate times call for desperate measures, like disarming a bomb by yanking out wires.) "I also need to reinforce some of your casing and frame to avoid future structural damage, check your wiring to see if your difficulties with spatial reasoning and positioning is a hardware or software issue, might as well scan your combat programming while I'm at it to figure out what's causing your lapses in judgment…" She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose, tail lashing. "And I don't want to hear you complaining while I do it."
"Yeah, yeah." Ray leans back in the steel folding chair and begins their shutdown sequence. The last thing that goes through their head before everything stops is an echo of a disguised voice from a dimly-lit alley behind the stadium.
Thought you would do better than that.