COM: At My Hands

The routine days had always been X’s favorite.

On routine days, he would clock into HQ and do several things: he’d help train members of his unit that needed some help, do paperwork that he needed to catch up on (and sometimes Zero’s; as much as he liked his friend, the other was bad at paperwork), and general upkeep that needed to be done on a military base. He wouldn’t need to go out and fight, and he especially wouldn’t need to go out and deal with a major crisis like Sigma (or, more recently, the Nightmares).

He’d even recently signed up for navigator training, wanting to not be so specialized that he couldn’t do anything else in an emergency.

Good navigators were extremely hard to find. Alia, bless her, was the only senior navigator left, and she needed a break from all the issues that she had been dealing with, and with her being one of his closer friends – they always teamed up if they had a mission – he was more than happy to try to reduce the workload on her.

However, this was not a routine day by any means.

In fact, today had been one of X’s off days.

He was never completely out of contact with HQ; being who he was, he was often on-call if something came up and he just happened to be the closest Hunter there – or if, Light forbid, Sigma left a message of some sorts.

Today he’d gone out with Zero to a mall in the city with plans of generally just enjoying the sights and the city that they lived in. After getting some lunch, and shopping for some things that they had wanted (there was a bookstore and X was particularly fond of books, while Zero tended to gravitate towards games), they’d teleported their purchases back to HQ and debated getting a snack of some sort.

Unfortunately, it had turned bad just then.

A Maverick had been reported to have holed up in one of the stores, and had taken several hostages with him, and while a unit was on its way, X and Zero had been contacted and asked whether they could try to defuse the situation until the Hunters got there.

While the Hunters had been able to save many of the civilians that had been in the mall, they had failed to save a lot, including the hostages that the Maverick had. The situation had been tragic – this Maverick was Infected, though it was a weak Infection, and was still fully aware of what he was doing despite being unable to stop it.

It haunted X. Every time he closed his eyes, he found himself replaying the memory of the terrified family, or the Maverick’s expression flickering between the viral red haze and a Reploid not wanting to do what he was. Viral Mavericks made his metaphorical heart shatter each time he encountered them, because they didn’t want to be Maverick.

Once the mission report had been delivered, he’d gone back to the mall to help with the cleanup and the recovery of the bodies, his expression falling each time one of the victims had been pulled out. He recognized the young family, of course, but he also recognized the brunet salesman that had sold him a figurine (it was a long green dragon of some kind, but X knew he was never going to throw that figurine or the receipt away now), a group of teenage girls that had been talking about celebrating a birthday party the following weekend, and many, many others.

X was normally self-composed. He had to be, in his line of work, and he rarely fell to pieces until after it was all over and no one was there.

This time, though, he found himself needing to duck away, to enter an empty room that the Hunters had access to while the cleanup process was going on. He pushed the door closed, listening to it click, before he took his helmet off and let out a shaky gasp.

The young family would never grow. The salesman would never sell another figurine. Those teenage girls would never celebrate a birthday party.

He wasn’t sure if he could ever visit the mall again once it had been repaired and additional security measures put in place. X squeezed his eyes shut as a few tears escaped and sat down, only vaguely noticing that it was dripping on his helmet.

Every victory for the Maverick Hunters was just another tragedy for X.

Because no matter what the outcome was whenever a Maverick attacked, there was one universal constant: at least one person died. Whether an innocent by the Maverick’s hands, or the Maverick themselves by a Hunter’s hands.

And more often than not, by X’s hands.

X wasn’t sure how long he remained in that empty room; it probably couldn’t have been too long, as Hunters hadn’t come in to ask him about something, or even contacted him wirelessly with a question. The burden of being the Commander of the 17^th Unit, along with being an international hero, meant that everyone looked up to him and tried to ask him for advice or orders.

After some time, he sighed, and put his helmet back on, just as the door clicked open. He turned around, expecting to see a Hunter that had come to ask him a question, but red armor and blond hair indicated that this was likely not the case.

“Hey, Zero,” he greeted his best friend, putting a smile on.

“Hey, Surf said he saw you come in here,” Zero told him, squinting down at his smaller friend. X tried to keep his face neutral, a few things coming to mind.

First, it figured that Surf Osprey would tell on him; the second-in-command for his unit was thankfully someone that neither worshiped the ground that he walked on nor looked down on him, but someone that could be trusted to counter any possible bad decisions that X made.

Second, with how long he had known Zero, the other was able to read him like a book at this point. “What’d you need?” He paused. “Was I in here longer than I thought I had?”

“Nah, nothing like that,” Zero said, slinging an arm around X’s shoulders. X smiled and didn’t pull away; Zero could be very physical with him sometimes, and he’d gotten comfortable with the casual displays of affection from the taller Hunter. While the rumor that they were an item had existed early on, it had become very clear that they were just best friends.

Or maybe brothers. They were the only two androids in a world of humans and Reploids.

“Just worried that you were moping in here,” Zero told him, after a moment. “I know how you sometimes get.”

X sighed. Of course. “Zero, I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me. I just stepped in here because I had to get away from the atmosphere for a few minutes, but I’ll be going back out there.” As if to prove his point, he carefully pushed Zero’s arm off of his shoulders and started to make his way towards the door.

He didn’t get very far before Zero grabbed him by the arm and turned him back around. “X, that’s a load of bullshit, and you know it.”

The blue android frowned; Zero knew him way too well. “…”

“You’re upset over everyone that died… aren’t you?” Zero asked, his voice a little lower so that he didn’t intimidate the smaller android.

“I…” His friend was right. “I just…”

Zero waited patiently for X to continue, slowly releasing his grip on him so that he didn’t appear to be keeping him prisoner. With the number of skirmishes that X had been involved in over the years against intimidating Mavericks, the last thing X needed was to feel threatened by his best friend.

“…It’s just not fair, Zero. Those people didn’t do anything wrong, none of them deserved this,” X said quietly. “We were there. We saw all those people, blissfully thinking that nothing like this could happen – that today would be their last day and that they’d die in such a horrible way.”

“Everyone knows that any day could be their last day, no matter how many plans they might make for the future,” Zero told him, sighing as his friend looked down at his boots. “Yeah, some people are in denial, but the vast majority of civilians know that they could die tomorrow. If not from a Maverick attack, then from a car accident. A medical condition they didn’t know about. Something. It doesn’t even have to be another person that kills them.”

X wasn’t sure that Zero got it. “That’s not what I meant, Zero.”

Oh, X was definitely in one of his moodier phases. “Okay, kid, I’ll bite and assume I have no idea what you’re talking about. Tell me what you mean, then.”

“All this blood is on my hands. Mavericks could have been preventable,” X told him, placing a hand on his hip. Zero had slipped back into his old habit of calling him ‘kid’, back when X had been a rookie Hunter under his command before the First Uprising. He wasn’t sure that he really liked the sign of that. “If I hadn’t been built, or if Dr. Cain hadn’t discovered me, then Mavericks wouldn’t exist at all.”

Wonderful, it was this line of conversation yet again. Zero flicked X on the forehead, not enough to hurt, but enough to get his attention. “You really can be an idiot sometimes, X. Want me to tell you some other things that would have been true if that was the case?”

X didn’t say anything, so Zero continued. “First off, let’s say that you were built and Dr. Cain never found you. World would have continued on like it always had, with the humans going about their business and robotics never getting any advancement. But remember what happened after Reploids started being built?”

“What?” That could have been a number of events, but X wasn’t sure which specific event Zero was referring to.

“Well, let me point it out this way. Some unlucky bastard other than Sigma, and most definitely a human, would have been the one to encounter the ‘Crimson Devil’. Given the state of humanity before Reploids were a thing, I’m sure they would have died, no questions asked, and said ‘Crimson Devil’ would have continued on to slaughter or subjugate humanity. Maybe not completely, because humans are damn resilient when they really want to be, but who would’ve been able to quickly stop him before he wiped out a good chunk of people?”

X was silent. “Zero, you do realize you are talking about yourself, right?” Most modern-day Reploids didn’t know of Zero’s origins as the Crimson Devil; most of the ones that had known about it were dead. Or supposed-to-be-dead-but-kept-reviving (namely, Sigma and Vile).

Zero waved his hand. “Yeah, yeah. Point is, I would’ve done something that I really don’t want to do right now, and there’d have been no convenient Hunter leader to stop me or a blue Light-built android to be my conscience afterwards.”

“But—”

“Am I wrong, X?” Zero asked him, flicking his forehead again.

“…No,” X sighed, conceding defeat for the time being. “That still doesn’t stop me from feeling bad about this whole thing, though.”

A knock came on the door then, and it opened, a green-armored Hunter peeking inside. “Commanders X and Zero?”

“Yes?” Zero said, as X quickly snapped to attention and pulled his helmet back on.

“There was a call from the UN Federation, it seems they want to speak with the two of you about the incident today,” the Hunter reported. “I tried to buy some time since I am sure that you were both busy, but they were insistent on seeing you.”

“Thanks, we’ll be right out,” Zero told him, and after the Hunter vanished, he poked his best friend in the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go see the Feds.”

“I hate the Feds,” X muttered – not enough to wish them harm, of course, but they could be particularly nosy and he got the feeling that it was only his status as the Reploid progenitor that kept them from being too nasty to him or Zero. “Zero, if I ever enter politics for any reason, please come to whatever building I live in at the time and stab me for making such a terrible decision.”

Zero laughed as they went out. “As if you would ever enter politics!”

“Point taken.”

The conversation with the Feds had gone a little smoother than X had thought it would, but it was exactly what they had expected: the Feds challenging the Hunters as to why they couldn’t have done better and saved more people, and what they would do next time. Zero could sense X getting more and more upset, so it was a blessing when they were finally done with the meeting.

Even after all of it was said and done, and they were back in their quarters, X still felt terrible about what had happened. He had felt bad enough as it was back when they were doing the cleanup, and the Feds had only made it worse.

So currently, he was laying on his couch in his quarters, the TV on to some late-night sitcom that he wasn’t paying too much attention to.

His door dinged as someone entered the correct code from the outside and slid open, but he didn’t move; only one person had access to his quarters. “Hey, Zero,” he said, still not glancing up.

“Hey yourself,” Zero said, pushing X’s legs aside so that he could sit down. “…Is that Everybody Loves Raymond?”

X blushed a little, sitting up once Zero had moved his legs. “Well, it was on, and it was better than everything else that was on at the time. Anyways, are you here to steal my cooking tonight or not?” It was no big mystery that Zero loved his cooking.

“Depends. What’d you make?” Zero asked, getting comfortable.

“Spinach and bacon quiche, as well as some broccoli and chicken alfredo pasta,” X told him. “I didn’t feel like making anything too complicated today.”

“…Yeah, I want some, your quiches and pastas are to die for,” Zero said, licking his lips. “But not right now. I actually came to see how you were doing.”

“Oh yeah?”

Well, here went nothing. “You were in a rather cloudy mood for the rest of the day after we got done dealing with the Feds. There were rookies staring at you, and some of them were wondering if you were going to snap at any second.”

“Zero, the rookies always stare at me and wonder that,” he reminded his friend. Younger Hunters tended to be in awe that they were seeing the famous Mega Man X. The newer they were, the more likely they were to be blatantly staring. “Anyways, it’s the Feds. You know how they can be sometimes, especially when it comes to us.”

“X,” the blond Hunter said. “Your mood wasn’t very good throughout, but it dropped drastically after they praised you for killing ‘another bloodthirsty Maverick and getting him off our streets’.”

“I don’t like killing, Zero, you know that,” his friend replied, his voice quiet.

“Yeah, and he probably would have killed more people had you not killed him,” Zero reminded him. “Maybe more civilians. Maybe more Hunters. Even you or me.”

X grimaced. “Can we not talk about you dying?” Zero’s death during the First and Fifth Uprisings at Vile and Sigma’s hands respectively had traumatized him, and he didn’t want to be thinking about them anymore than he absolutely had to.

Zero reached over and ruffled his hair. “Sorry, kid, but you have to remember it’s a possibility.”

“I know you’ll come back, you always do, but I just don’t like thinking about it.” The Lightbot swatted at Zero’s hand before attempting to fix his hair. “Zero, stop that!” It went back to its regular black poof before he even laid a finger on it, grumbling at his friend.

“Anyways,” the blond Hunter said, now that he had lightened the mood a little bit. “You got especially cranky when they praised you. You aren’t happy that a Maverick is off the streets?” He knew the answer to that, of course, but if there was one thing he knew, X tended to keep his feelings bottled up.

“I hate killing, Zero,” X told him, scowling. “Even Mavericks. Most of the time, it’s not even their fault. The Virus warps them into something that they aren’t, and they have no control over what they are doing.”

Zero was silent for a moment. “This is about the Maverick from earlier, isn’t it?”

The smaller android nodded. “…One look at his eyes, Zero, and I could tell that he was still fighting with the Virus. That it hadn’t consumed him completely, yet. I wanted to help him; he was just another victim to the Virus just as much as everyone else that died today. It hurts that I couldn’t do anything for him. He must have been so scared, too…”

“And that’s why you’re a good person, X,” Zero said, his voice quiet. “You love everyone. You don’t love who people think you should love, but both the victims that died and the victim that was consumed by the Virus.”

X bit his lip. “I wonder what his name was. We have names for all the victims… but not one for that poor Reploid. I wish… I wish I could have saved him from it. That we had a cure.”

“We don’t have a cure for the Virus yet, X. Until we are able to find a cure, there’s nothing that we can do about it but kill them.” Zero rubbed the back of his head.

“It’s not fair. We’re treating the symptoms, not the disease,” X grumbled. He and Zero were immune, of course, though they reacted to large quantities of the Virus in very different ways. While he felt sick until his systems killed it, he never found himself thinking in the way that the Virus would make him. And Zero… well, he knew about Zero and how he was supposed to amplify the Virus.

He was sure the Virus was no longer in Zero in any shape or fashion. If it was, then he would be feeling sick constantly from his sheer proximity to Zero, and Hunters would be going Maverick left and right, and there was no way that Zero would have even gone near them if that had been the case. If Zero ever had had the Virus, it was with Sigma now, transferred when Sigma had defeated the ‘Crimson Devil’ in battle.

At the moment, the only Reploids that were affected in the traditional Maverick way were just that: Reploids. X and Zero, not being Reploids, reacted differently to it.

The ‘New Gen Reploid’ design that the Jakob Corporation was supposed to be working on were supposed to be immune, but only time would tell. Everyone thought that Sigma had been immune, and look where they were now. X didn’t have much faith that they actually would be immune, but it would sure be nice if they were.

“What can we do, though?” Zero said, shifting so that he was looking at his best friend’s face; X wasn’t looking directly at him or the TV, instead staring down at his lap while toying with the hem of his T-shirt. “We can’t let the Mavericks wander loose; that’s a disaster. We can’t imprison them; humans aren’t strong enough to guard them and Reploid guards would inevitably end up infected if they weren’t careful. The only thing we can do is kill them until some genius comes up with a cure for the Virus.”

His expression softened as he looked at X’s face. “Besides. You really think any of those Mavericks want to be Mavericks? Like you said, a lot of them didn’t want it, they were just infected. They know what is wrong with them, they know that once they are Maverick, there is no chance at a cure right now. Killing them is relieving their suffering and letting them rest.”

He smiled, and poked X. “You used to do Reploid research back before you joined the Hunters. Why don’t you go and make a cure?”

X looked thoughtful. “That’s an idea. I don’t even know where to start; I’m probably going to need a live sample of the Virus and you know how dangerous that is to keep around.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something, eventually,” Zero assured him, pulling the other against him. X obliged him, dropping his head into Zero’s lap. “But right now, you know what I want from you?”

“What?”

“For you to stop moping; there isn’t anything we can do right now, X, and until we know how to treat the disease, we have to keep treating the symptoms. Or would you rather we not treat the symptoms?”

“You know that I just want peace; otherwise when Sigma—when the Virus made Sigma turn on us, I wouldn’t have joined the Maverick Hunters,” X said, frowning.

“And you know what I’m worried about right now, and what’s preventing me from leaving you alone and minding my own business?”

“What?” X noted that he’d been repeating that word a lot tonight when it came to his conversation with Zero.

“You, X. I worry about you. Every time something like this happens, you hold your head up high, you pretend that you’re okay, but when it comes down to it, you’re not. I know you just want me to go do my thing and be a Maverick Hunter and not fret about you… but you’re my best friend. I can’t not worry about you when you’re not happy.” Zero ruffled X’s hair. “Try to keep your chin up, kid.”

“I’m no more a kid than you,” X pointed out with a smile.

“You look like one, though,” Zero teased him. “I bet you look like the kind of teenage human that old ladies like to pinch on the cheeks.” As if to prove his point, Zero did just that.

X blushed, his troubles temporarily forgotten – which was exactly Zero’s intention. “Zero!” he laughed, smacking at the other’s hand again. “Stop that!”

Relenting, Zero smirked and stretched. “Fine, fine, I’ll stop pointing out just how utterly adorable some people find you if go get me some of your delicious food that you cooked earlier.”

“Are you already hungry?” X asked wryly, amused.

“For your cooking? Always.”

X climbed off of Zero’s lap and the couch, not bothering to pause the TV that was still airing reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond. “Fine, I’ll let you have some. It’s the least I can do after you tried to help me out, despite how frustrating I am.”

“The most frustrating android,” Zero smirked, stretching his arms and getting up to follow X to the kitchen.

“You’re aware that your father is likely rolling in his grave, right?” X asked, pulling the quiche and the pasta out of the fridge and scooping out a portion for Zero… as well as another generous portion for himself. “You’re best friends with me.”

“Black hole,” Zero muttered, watching the amount that went onto X’s plate. “But yeah. Fuck the old man, I don’t care what he thinks of you and me. He might have made me to spread the Virus, but I’m going to do all I can to get rid of it for you.”

X put the plates of food in the microwave to heat them up, silent for a bit. “…Thanks, Zee.”

“Hey, what are best friends for?” Zero grinned.

“Apparently from the looks of things, best friends are there to make delicious food so that you can steal it from them.”

“I can’t help that your cooking is delicious!”

X smiled as he ate his pasta and spinach. Zero was right, he wasn’t the one responsible for any of this, and there wasn’t much that they could do about it, but he wasn’t sure that he could handle fighting Mavericks on a daily basis anymore.

He wasn’t going to tell Zero yet…

But with the Nightmare crisis resolved and his sanity at stake, he was going to, at least temporarily, step down as a combatant.