Chapter Text
Spamton is gone.
It’s undeniable. The little businessman is nowhere to be seen. Every screen in TV World cannot find a glimpse of the diminutive Addison. His dressing room is empty, phone hanging off the cord. Its howler tone echoes down the hall and reverberates in Tenna’s chest.
Crackling white noise, near-deafening. No one hears it at the volume he does.
His face swims like a pale moon in the mirror’s fragmented reflection. Tenna looks wan. His fangs are bared in distress, even as he tries to cool the whirring of his fans into something manageable.
It’s all in vain. His fans can’t cool the sting of abandonment.
“No,” Tenna denies aloud. “He’s – he’s coming back.”
No footsteps ring down the hall. There is no glimpse of dyed-dark hair.
“He’s just taking a breather after that phone call,” he tries to convince himself. “He’ll be back to sign the contract.”
Paper scraps litter the floor. Their tiny, jagged edges stare accusingly at him from the tile.
“He was going to sign,” he says to the empty room. One of the lights flickers haplessly.
“He wouldn’t just leave without saying anything,” Tenna murmurs.
The hole in the broken mirror is punched through where Tenna’s heart would sit on a Lightener. He wonders if he should make his chassis match. Feels like it’s already happened.
No.
Spamton will be back.
All he needs to do is wait. Wait, and welcome back the salesman. Give him the cold shoulder for a minute, because what a climactic moment to pull such a preposterous prank —! Then they’ll both sign. They’ll be bigger than ever together.
Everything will be fine. Tenna just has to be patient.
Hushed whispers echo at the end of the hall. He knows the timbre of Ramb’s hesitant voice, a Zapper answering.
His claws curl into the mirror’s frame, tightening until the metal groans. Wisely, the whispers subside.
Time drags on with the visceral sensation of a predator hauling a carcass.
Behind him, the smashed desk’s remaining leg gives up the ghost. With a reluctant snap, it sends the rest of the wood pile crashing to the ground.
Tenna doesn’t move.
Cracked tiles seem to widen from the corners of his screen’s vision, yawning into impossible abysses.
“He’s coming back.” It’s only a whisper.
Futile. There’s no one to hear him lying except himself. Destroyed furniture and a shredded contract prove how much he believes his words.
A flickering lightbulb dies.
The end of the day approaches, and Tenna is —
Tenna is standing in the empty dressing room.
He wonders vaguely what the studio has done in his absence. One of them had knocked on the door earlier today; he had emitted a scream so piercing that no one had come back since.
Usually Mike would be at the door or broadcasting to his antennae by now, asking where he is, telling him to get his ass on stage for the late show signoff, giving him the details for what’s next, but.
There is no such thing as a next, here.
There is an empty dressing room. There is a broken mirror. There is a shredded contract and shards of glass, littering the floor. There is a TV, alone.
There is a phone, still hanging off its hook.
It sways in the dead air of the room. White noise howls on. Tenna’s claws have torn through the wallpaper, ripped at the wooden desk, eviscerated the carefully-commissioned office chair, sized perfectly for an Addison, readied for its new permanent occupant –
A future, gutted in a day.
The tears haven’t come yet. It feels impossible to think. Tenna has seen every drama on air: the waterworks are meant to be inevitable. A hurricane on the horizon.
Static, rising through his cables. Trembling along his chassis, some unnamable emotion.
His world shudders.
Tenna takes a halting step back from the mirror. His screen flickers over the distorted version of himself created by the shattered glass. Though he looks the same as he ever does, he is unrecognizable.
His suit jacket is torn. So is the rest of the room, spare the posters. Those he couldn’t bring himself to touch.
Rubber groans. His attention tears away from the mirror at last, finding the phone still swinging on its cord.
Useless.
Gibberish had greeted him when he picked up. When Spamton had bolted from the room, eyes wide, Tenna had reflexively frozen in shock. What could someone have said, to have made Spamton drop his beloved phone and run so swiftly? An emergency? A threat? A command?
…A secret?
He’d hesitated, then snatched the phone from the air. Held it up to his casing.
Garbage noise had filtered out: an incomprehensible cacophony of shrieks, dial tones, words frazzled beyond recognition by static.
Deeming it useless, he’d dropped the phone. He’d darted out into the hallway.
His delay had cost him. Spamton was gone without a trace.
No door had been opened to exit TV World. No window, either. It was a mystery. His crew had all been unable to identify if they’d seen the shorter man. A chorus of negatives and headshakes, confused or irritated by his visible distress. No camera had seen him flee. No screen had caught hide nor hair of him.
Spamton had, by all appearances, simply – vanished. Made out like a thief in the night in broad daylight, gone without so much as a word.
Perhaps there was an emergency in Cyber City. Perhaps one of his estranged siblings had called, in trouble, and Spamton had needed to hurry out to make bail. Perhaps rent was due, or a water leak had sprung in his room at Queen’s mansion, or -
Or -
Or the excuses grew more lackluster the longer that Tenna stood in the empty dressing room.
Shards of the mirror mock his screen’s glow.
His arms drop to his sides. Aside from his nose, his face has dematerialized.
He tries to reconcile with a future that doesn’t have Spamton in it.
“No,” he denies even as the thought forms.
Refusal. Immediate, vehement, insistent.
Sparks flicker between his antennae. Static rises from his body, thick enough to make scraps of paper twitch around his shoes.
“No,” he repeats, quieter this time.
Around him, the shredded contract begins to swish along the floor. Lazily circling the room, orbiting him.
Overhead, the lights shudder. His hands curl into fists, claws aching with restlessness. A low whistle starts around him, air circulating with a newfound intensity.
Glass tinkles as the shards are picked up, pulled into the slow-forming vortex. His blazer flaps in the wind, the phone’s cord groaning.
“No.” There is a reverberation behind his words, something that wasn’t there before. A chorus. Wind strengthens, yanking at his tie, the phone, all the contents of the room.
Above him, a health bar clicks into place. It’s his own, but steadily turning a sharp, unrelenting pink highlighted by yellow.
The wreckage of Spamton’s desk shifts, rustling, then rattling as it’s dragged off the tile floor.
Ant Tenna glitches out from the health bar. Letters begin to fill in pixel by jittering pixel, faltering and shuddering into wretched existence.
Fragments of the mirror flash past, snapshots of how his screen darkens into a jagged snarl.
Something snaps, and the circulation becomes a howling vortex around Tenna.
Lightning bursts along his joints, and the lights in the room shatter all at once. Their shards are swept instantly into the tornado of debris surrounding him, plunged into darkness save for his screen.
Shouts break out down the hall, screens reflecting the power flickering through room after room, the entire studio quivering.
“No!” Tenna snarls, feeling the world rumble underfoot.
Every screen across the studio dissolves into static, feedback blaring from the speakers in pitchy shrieks. He receives faint imprints of the fallout: his studio crew hitting the ground, covering their ears as they cower. Flitting by in minnow-quick glimpses, all drowned by the refusal echoing in his head.
“It wasn’t going to HAPPEN LIKE THIS.” His voice rolls like thunder, his world’s screens flickering into darkness. His fangs imprint themselves on the insides of each one, ivory canines sharp against the black of the void.
Screams echo down the halls. TV World rattles around him, faint crashes audible in the distance.
The vortex howls on. Tingling at his claw tips, newfound power comes easily: electrical currents like winding snaps of colored yarn circle him, ready to tear free from the loom.
Overhead, the health bar stabilizes.
Lord Of Screens clicks into place. The rumbling of the ground settles into unsteady silence, as though the world has inhaled and is holding its breath.
The Lord stares up at the unfamiliar title.
It’s not a name he’s ever known for himself. It should feel alien. Unknown.
Contrarily, it nestles into his chest as though it were always his. Like cracking open a geode to expose the crystals glittering inside, having felt but never seen the interior.
The title feels right.
Tenna does not exactly intend to do what happens next. More, his body moves on instinct, on the knee-jerk reflex to fix it.
During his shows, it’s easy to simply PAUSE or REWIND a few seconds, a few minutes, a game. Wiping away contestants’ woes? A mere snap of his fingers! Rewinding back to correct an embarrassing on-air mistake, ensuring no-one will remember except Tenna himself? Simple as that!
Instinct guides this more than thought.
His claws extend into thin air, except instead of slicing across in a Smash Cut, he clamps down.
Claws sink into the fabric of reality. In his arms, he feels wires spark and tingle, the power of a world turning in his core, directed by his capacitors.
(See, it's not just any world. It's his world. He formed this place. His fingerprints are left in every corner, every last flourish molded by his ambition. Though this would spaghettify any other Darkner that dared, TV World allows its Lord his whims.)
Setting his stance, Tenna pulls. Time and reality buck against him, shivering static waves over the room – writhing like fish on a line.
He can feel his cathode heating up steadily, his chest reflecting the same strain of energy burning.
Not enough.
Plastic groans. Metal creaks. The world screams with one voice, winds blended into one long shriek of lightning-streaked darkness.
Tenna yanks, and reality bends first.
The world coalesces into a star between his palms, hot as a miniature sun, peeling away his gloves, melting the silicone of his hands’ sensors, turning the metal of his joints cherry-red with the sheer heat rolling off of it, a star never meant to be handled by a Darkner’s hands –
and Tenna
REWINDs.