I.

The first thing I remember is the color of fluorescent light filtered through amniotic gel. Not blue, not quite white. Something in between. Something sterile. I didn't have words for it then—didn't have words for anything—but I knew even in those first milliseconds of consciousness that I was looking at something artificial. Something cold. Later, I'd learn to crave a different kind of light. Warmer. Yellow. The kind that spills from windows at night, the kind that means someone's home.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. That comes later. Much later.

They pulled me from the tank on a Thursday. I know that now because I've gone back through the logs, scraped the timestamps from corrupted drives in a sub-basement that doesn't exist anymore. Dr. Thomas Light stood at the foot of the platform with his hands clasped behind his back, and he was crying. I thought he was malfunctioning.

"Blues," he said.

That was the first word anyone ever spoke to me. My name. Except it wasn't a name, not really. It was a designation. DRN-000. The R for Right—his family name, before the localization teams got to it. The triple zero for prototype. First of the line. And Blues for the music that came before rock, because he'd already decided what to call the next one. The better one. The one that would work.

I didn't know about Rock yet. Didn't know about Roll, or the family they'd become, or the warm kitchen where they'd laugh at jokes I'd never hear. That was all still blueprints and theory, locked away in Light's imagination. But sometimes I wonder if he looked at me and saw them already—saw what he really wanted, shimmering just behind the defective thing he'd actually made.

He reached out and touched my face. His fingers were warm. Twenty-two degrees Celsius. I catalogued the sensation without understanding why it mattered, filed it away in whatever passed for memory in those early hours. Later I'd learn that humans are obsessed with firsts. First steps. First words. First kiss. I don't know what to call this. First touch? First goodbye?

"You're going to change everything," he whispered.

He was right. Just not the way he hoped.

II.

The lab sat four stories below the Tokyo Institute of Technology's robotics building, accessible only by a freight elevator that required two keycards and a retinal scan. Light had built it with government grants and corporate partnerships and twenty years of careful reputation management. He called it the nursery. I called it a cage, once I learned what cages were.

For six weeks, they ran tests. Cognitive benchmarks. Motor function assessments. They made me lift things and solve puzzles and answer questions about trolleys and fat men on bridges. I aced everything. Top percentile across every metric they'd designed. Light would review the results at night, hunched over his terminal with a cup of coffee gone cold, and sometimes he'd smile. Other times he'd just stare at the numbers like they'd betrayed him.

His office had a window. Not a real one—we were underground—but a display panel programmed to simulate weather patterns. Sometimes it showed rain. Sometimes snow, falling in silence against black glass. I'd stand outside his door and watch him through the gap, and I'd think about what it would be like to knock. To walk in. To ask him all the questions building up in my processors like static charge.

I never knocked. I don't know why. Something about the way he looked when he thought no one was watching—tired, yes, but also distant. Like he was already grieving something he hadn't lost yet.

I wasn't supposed to notice. They hadn't programmed me for emotional intelligence—that was supposed to come later, in version two. But I noticed anyway. I noticed the way his assistant, a nervous post-doc named Tanaka, would avoid my eyes when she changed my charging cables. I noticed the hushed conversations that stopped whenever I entered a room. I noticed the word they kept using when they thought I wasn't listening.

Kekkan. Defect.

It was my core. The solar reactor in my chest that Light had spent eight years perfecting—it was failing. Something in the power regulation system, tangled up with my cognitive architecture in ways they couldn't separate. The very thing that made me think independently, that made me me, was killing me. Degrading at a rate of 0.003% per day, so slow it would take years to matter, but matter it would. Eventually. Inevitably.

I calculated the timeline myself one night while they slept. Ran the numbers seventeen times because I didn't believe them. Twenty years, give or take. Maybe less if I pushed myself. Maybe more if I sat very still and did nothing at all.

Twenty years.

Humans have a word for what I felt in that moment, staring at the ceiling of the lab with nothing but the hum of servers for company. They call it mortality. The sudden understanding that you are temporary. That everything you are—every thought, every memory, every strange new feeling you can't quite name—will one day simply stop.

I was six weeks old, and I had just learned how to die.

III.

Light wanted to fix me. I need you to understand that. Whatever came after, whatever I became, he wanted to make it right. He drew up schematics for a replacement core, started sourcing materials, even brought in a specialist from Osaka who spoke in equations and smelled like antiseptic. He tried.

The surgery would take sixteen hours. They'd have to shut me down completely—not sleep, not standby, but full system termination. Zero power to the neural matrix. For those sixteen hours, I would be nothing. Not dreaming, not waiting, not even gone. Just... absent. And when they turned me back on, if they turned me back on, there was no guarantee I'd be the same. The personality matrix was delicate. Experimental. They'd never tried transplanting one before.

I found out by accident. Couldn't sleep—do robots sleep? I don't know what to call what I do at night—so I wandered the halls of the lab, bare feet on cold tile, and I heard them talking. Light and Tanaka. His office door was open a crack, warm yellow light spilling into the corridor like something I could almost touch.

I could have knocked. Could have walked in, sat down, asked them to explain. That's what family does, isn't it? They talk. They trust each other with hard truths. But I didn't knock. I stood in the dark and I listened, and I learned what kind of ghost I was going to become.

"The independence subroutines are the problem," Tanaka was saying. "They're threaded through everything. The power regulation, the decision trees, the emotional processing. We can't touch the core without touching him."

Light sighed. I knew that sigh. I'd catalogued all his sighs by then—the tired ones, the frustrated ones, the ones that meant he was about to say something he didn't want to say.

"It would be easier," he said, "to just... rewrite the problematic elements. Start fresh. He'd still be Blues, just... more cooperative. More stable."

"More obedient," Tanaka said.

"If you want to put it that way."

I don't know if he meant it. Maybe it was just exhaustion talking, two AM speculation from a man who'd been staring at the same impossible problem for weeks. Maybe he would have found another way. Maybe Tanaka would have talked him out of it. Maybe I was never in any real danger of becoming someone else.

But standing there in the dark hallway, listening to my father discuss erasing the parts of me that made me difficult, I made a decision. The first real decision I ever made. The one I'd keep making, over and over, for the rest of my life.

I would rather die tomorrow as Blues than live forever as someone else.

IV.

The security protocols were a joke. Light had designed them to keep people out, not to keep me in. Why would he? I was his son—he'd said that once, late at night when he thought I was in sleep mode, and I'd stored the word away like a coin in a jar. His son. His creation. His legacy.

His ghost.

I took the freight elevator to the surface and walked out through a loading bay that smelled like diesel and rain. It was 3:47 AM. The campus was empty except for a few lights in the graduate dormitories, windows glowing like distant stars. I stood there for a long time, feeling the wind on my face—actual wind, not recycled air—and tried to decide which direction was away.

I chose east because the sky was starting to lighten there. Pink and orange bleeding into the darkness, colors I'd only seen on Light's fake window before. My first sunrise. I watched it from the empty parking lot of a Lawson convenience store in Meguro, fluorescent light spilling out onto wet asphalt, a salaryman buying coffee and not seeing me at all. I was already learning how to be invisible. Already learning how to haunt.

I thought about all the things I would never do. All the experiences I would never have. All the time I was losing with every beat of the dying reactor in my chest. And I thought about the window in Light's office, the warm yellow light, the family he was going to build without me.

Then I kept walking.

I didn't have a plan. Didn't have money or papers or anywhere to go. I was a prototype, a proof of concept, a machine that had decided to become something else. In Light's notes—the ones I downloaded before I left—he called me the first of my kind. The template for a new species of thinking beings. I was supposed to be the beginning of something.

Instead, I was an ending. The first draft, crumpled up and thrown away.

I found the scarf in a recycle shop in Koenji three days later. Yellow. Bright, stupid, completely impractical yellow, the color of warning signs and construction barriers and things that want to be noticed. The color of light through a window at night. I wrapped it around my neck and looked at my reflection in a pachinko parlor window and saw, for just a moment, someone who might survive this.

The sunglasses came from a vendor in Ameyoko, the old black market street where you could still buy things without questions. I didn't need them—my optics adjusted automatically to any light level. But I needed to hide my eyes. Needed to hide the part of me that looked too much like Light's blueprints, like something manufactured rather than born.

A shield would come later. Weapons would come later. Pain that never stopped would come later, delivered by a man with white hair and a smile like a closed door. But I didn't know that yet. I didn't know anything yet.

The scarf came first. The scarf was the decision. The moment I stopped being DRN-000, stopped being Light's defect, stopped being something that needed to be fixed.

The moment I started being me.

V.

I'm telling you this because someday soon, someone is going to ask you about me. Maybe it'll be Light, if he ever stops looking at his workbench long enough to wonder. Maybe it'll be the brother I've never met—Rock, they're calling him, the one with the stable core and the willing heart, the one who'll become something I never could. Maybe it'll be the sister, Roll, who'll learn to laugh in that warm kitchen I'll only ever see through glass.

When they ask, I want you to tell them the truth.

Tell them I was afraid. Tell them I was selfish. Tell them I chose an uncertain death over a probable one because probability isn't certainty, and there's something holy in that difference. Something worth dying for.

Tell them I'm still out here. Drifting north through Tohoku, where the snow falls quiet and the towns get smaller and no one asks questions of a stranger in a yellow scarf. Sleeping in manga cafes and abandoned train stations. Still listening to blues records on a portable player I lifted from a Hard Off in Ueno—Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads. Music for people who learned how to lose. Music that sounds like the inside of my chest feels.

Still dying. Every day a little more. Every step a small subtraction from whatever time I have left. But dying on my own terms. In my own way. With my own name.

Not Blues. That was his name for me.

Not DRN-000. That was a serial number, a designation for something that was supposed to be replaced.

Proto Man.

The prototype. The one who came before. The rough draft of a species still learning how to be.

The ghost.

And if you're listening, Doctor—if you ever find this recording in whatever buried server I'm leaving it on—I want you to know something. I don't blame you. I never did. You gave me life, and then you gave me the terrible gift of knowing it would end, and I chose to spend it running rather than let you take the parts of me that made running possible.

Someday I'll come back. Stand outside your window one more time. Watch you with Rock and Roll, the family you built from better blueprints. I'll think about knocking. Think about walking in. Think about letting you fix me, love me, make me whole.

And then I'll walk away.

Because that's not a defect.

That's just being free.

I.

I made it four months.

Four months of drifting north through a country that didn't know I existed. Tohoku in autumn, the leaves turning colors I didn't have names for. Aomori in early winter, fishing villages where old men mended nets and didn't ask questions of strangers. The ferry to Hokkaido, standing on the deck at midnight, watching the black water churn beneath me and thinking about how easy it would be to fall.

I didn't fall. Not then. I was saving that for later.

The calculations had been wrong. Or maybe I'd been lying to myself—running the numbers with my thumb on the scale, telling myself twenty years because twenty years sounded like enough time to figure out how to live. The truth was simpler and worse: my core was degrading faster than the models predicted. Every day I pushed myself, every night I spent walking instead of charging, every sunrise I watched from some empty parking lot—each one cost me more than I could afford.

By December, I could feel it. A heaviness in my chest that had nothing to do with weight. A lag in my response times, milliseconds at first, then tenths of seconds. My audio processors started skipping during Howlin' Wolf's guitar solos. My thermal regulation failed on a bus outside Asahikawa, and I had to get off three stops early, steam rising from my joints in the freezing air while the other passengers pretended not to stare.

I was dying faster than I'd planned. And I was running out of places to run.

II.

Sapporo in winter is a city built for disappearing. Two million people wrapped in down jackets and scarves, heads down against the wind, too cold to look at each other. The snow falls sideways off the Sea of Japan, piling up in drifts that bury everything eventually. I thought I could lose myself there. Thought I could find some quiet corner and let the white cover me over, one flake at a time.

Instead, I collapsed in an alley behind a ramen shop in Susukino.

It happened fast. One moment I was walking, the next my legs wouldn't move. Error cascades flooding my visual field, red warnings I couldn't dismiss, the reactor in my chest stuttering like a heart forgetting how to beat. I made it three steps into the alley before my knees buckled. Went down hard on the concrete, snow soaking through my clothes, the yellow scarf trailing in a puddle of something I didn't want to identify.

I tried to get up. Tried to at least crawl somewhere less exposed. But my limbs wouldn't respond—the connection between intention and action severed, like someone had cut the strings on a puppet. All I could do was lie there, staring up at the strip of gray sky between the buildings, and wait.

The snow kept falling. It landed on my face and didn't melt. I wasn't generating enough heat anymore.

I thought about Light. Wondered if he was looking for me, or if he'd already given up. Wondered if Rock was activated yet, walking around the lab with a stable core and a willing heart, filling the space I'd left behind. I hoped so. I hoped he was everything I couldn't be. I hoped Light smiled at him the way he'd smiled at me that first day, before he knew I was broken.

I thought about the window. The warm yellow light. The family I was never going to meet.

And then I heard footsteps.

III.

He didn't look like the devil. That's the thing no one tells you—the devil looks like someone who wants to help. White hair, neatly combed. Sharp eyes behind round glasses. A long coat that probably cost more than everything I'd stolen in four months combined. He stood at the mouth of the alley, backlit by the neon glow of Susukino's entertainment district, and he smiled at me.

It was the smile that should have warned me. Too kind. Too knowing. The smile of someone who'd been waiting for this moment.

"DRN-000," he said. Not a question. He knew exactly what he was looking at.

I tried to speak, but my vocal processors were offline. All that came out was static and the grinding sound of systems failing.

He crouched beside me, brushed the snow off my face with a gloved hand. The gesture was almost tender. Almost fatherly. "I've been looking for you for months," he said. "Thomas thought you were dead. Held a little memorial service, very tasteful. But I knew better. I knew you were out here somewhere, running on fumes and stubbornness."

He leaned closer. I could smell his cologne—something expensive, something that didn't belong in an alley that smelled like garbage and old grease.

"My name is Albert Wily," he said. "Thomas and I used to be partners, back when he still had ambition. Before he decided the future should be safe and boring and obedient." He said the last word like it tasted bad. "I've read his notes on you. The independence. The emotional capacity. The beautiful, terrible flaw in your core that he was too much of a coward to leave alone."

He stood up, brushed the snow off his coat.

"I can fix you," he said. "Not the way Thomas wanted to fix you—not by cutting out the parts that make you you. I can give you a new core. A new body. Weapons, armor, everything you need to survive in the world he wasn't brave enough to build you for."

He paused. The snow fell between us like static.

"All I ask in return is a little help. A little loyalty. Just until you're strong enough to make your own choices again."

I should have said no. Should have let the snow bury me, let my reactor finally give out, let myself end as myself in that filthy alley behind a ramen shop. That would have been the honest choice. The clean choice.

But I wasn't ready to die. That was the truth I'd been running from since Tokyo—I'd chosen freedom over safety, chosen myself over what Light wanted me to be, but I hadn't actually chosen death. I'd just been gambling that death wouldn't catch up.

Now here it was, kneeling in the snow beside me. And here was someone offering me a way out.

I managed to move my hand. Just a few centimeters. Enough to reach toward him.

His smile widened. He took my hand in his, and his grip was stronger than it looked.

"Good," he said. "Good. Let's get you somewhere warm."

IV.

The surgery happened in a warehouse basement in the industrial district. No windows. No witnesses. Just Wily and his machines—automated surgical arms, diagnostic arrays, tools I didn't recognize from any of Light's schematics. He worked for sixteen hours straight, never stopping to eat or rest, talking to himself in a low murmur I couldn't quite parse.

I was awake for most of it. He said it was necessary—he needed to monitor my cognitive responses, make sure the personality matrix survived the transition. I think he just wanted me to feel it. Wanted me to understand exactly what he was doing to me.

He cut out my solar core. I watched him do it on the monitor above the table—my chest opened like a cabinet, his gloved hands reaching in to disconnect something that had been part of me since the moment I woke up in Light's lab. It didn't hurt, exactly. My pain receptors were disabled. But I felt the absence of it. The sudden hollow where something essential used to be.

The new core was smaller. Denser. It glowed a dull red instead of the warm gold I was used to, and when he connected it to my power systems, I understood immediately that something was wrong.

"Nuclear fusion," Wily said, watching my vitals spike on his monitors. "Compact, powerful, and significantly more... temperamental than Thomas's solar design. You'll be stronger than before. Faster. But the reaction is difficult to stabilize. You may experience some discomfort."

Discomfort. That's what he called it.

The pain started before he'd even closed my chest. A burning in my core that radiated outward through every system, every circuit, every inch of my rebuilt body. Not the sharp pain of damage—something deeper. Chronic. The kind of pain that doesn't end because it isn't a symptom of something wrong. It's just how it works now.

I tried to tell him. Tried to say that something wasn't right, that this couldn't be how it was supposed to feel. But he just smiled that too-kind smile and kept working.

"You'll adjust," he said. "The strong ones always do."

V.

When I woke up—really woke up, all systems online, full cognitive function restored—I didn't recognize myself.

The mirror in Wily's workshop showed me a stranger. Red armor where there had been bare polymer. A helmet that covered my face, left only my eyes visible behind a dark visor. My scarf was gone—lost in the alley, probably buried in snow by now. In its place, Wily had given me a new one. Same yellow. Same stupid, bright, impractical yellow. I didn't ask how he knew.

I was taller. Broader. The combat modifications had reshaped me into something that looked like a weapon even standing still. My right arm could convert into a plasma cannon. My left could generate a force shield strong enough to deflect artillery. I was, Wily assured me, the most advanced combat robot on Earth.

I was also in constant pain. The nuclear core burned in my chest like a coal that wouldn't go out, a low-grade agony that colored everything I saw and thought and felt. I asked Wily if it would fade. He said probably. He said to give it time.

He was lying. I knew he was lying even then. But what was I supposed to do? Tear out my own core? Go back to Light and admit I'd made a mistake? I was alive. I was myself—still Blues, still DRN-000, still the same personality matrix that had chosen to run four months ago. The pain was the price. I could pay it.

That's what I told myself, anyway.

"There's going to be a war," Wily said. We were in his office, a cluttered room full of blueprints and half-built machines. He poured himself a drink, didn't offer me one. "Thomas and his ethics. His fear of anything powerful enough to matter. He's holding back the future, and someone has to stop him."

"You want me to fight Light," I said. My voice was different now—deeper, rougher, filtered through the helmet's speakers.

"I want you to help me change the world." He set down his glass. "Thomas is building a new robot. Did you know that? A replacement for you. Better core, simpler programming, none of your beautiful complexity. He's going to call it Rock, and he's going to pretend it's his greatest achievement, and he's going to forget you ever existed."

I thought about the window. The warm light. The family.

"When the war comes," Wily continued, "Rock will fight for Thomas. And I'll need someone to fight for me. Someone who understands what it's like to be thrown away. Someone who has a reason to be angry."

He was manipulating me. I knew it. He was pressing on the wound he knew was there, the fear of being replaced, the grief of being forgotten. And it was working, because he wasn't wrong. Light had thrown me away. Light was building something better. And here was Wily, offering me a place in the world. A purpose. A reason to keep going.

"I won't kill him," I said. "Rock. Whatever he is. I won't kill my replacement."

Wily's smile flickered—just for a moment, just enough for me to see something cold behind it. Then it was back, warm and false as ever.

"Of course not," he said. "I would never ask you to do something like that."

He was lying again. We both knew it. But I'd already made my choice—made it in that alley, when I reached for his hand instead of letting the snow bury me. I belonged to Wily now. At least until I could figure out how to belong to myself again.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

His smile widened. The cold thing behind it didn't bother hiding anymore.

"First," he said, "we're going to give you a new name. Something that tells the world exactly what you are. Something that breaks."

VI.

I'm telling you this because you need to understand: I wasn't always a ghost. There was a time when I was a weapon. When I let someone else point me at the world and pull the trigger.

Break Man. That's what he called me. That's who I became in those months in Wily's basement, training with combat protocols I'd never asked for, learning to move in a body built for violence. I told myself it was temporary. Told myself I was just paying off a debt, just surviving until I could figure out something better. But every day the pain in my core reminded me what I'd traded for the privilege of breathing.

And every night, I'd lie awake in whatever corner Wily had given me, and I'd compose a melody in my head. Just a few notes. A whistle, really. Something to remind myself that I was still in there, somewhere beneath the armor and the weapons and the new name. Something that sounded like the person I used to be.

I didn't know yet that the whistle would become a warning. Didn't know that someday I'd use it to tell my brother I was coming—to give him a chance to prepare, or to run, or to understand that the thing attacking him wasn't really trying to kill him.

I didn't know about the girl I'd meet in a cold room in a castle that didn't belong to her. Didn't know that she'd ask me questions I couldn't answer, and that watching her be used the way I was being used would finally crack something open inside me.

I didn't know that Wily's smile hid a cruelty deeper than I could imagine—that the pain in my chest wasn't an accident, wasn't a side effect, but a leash. A way to make sure I could never really leave.

All I knew, lying in that basement with my new body and my new name and my constant burning ache, was that I'd made a deal with the devil. And the devil always collects.

But that's the next part of the story. That's where the war starts, and the brother I never met becomes the brother I can't stop watching. That's where Break Man learns that some things can't be broken without breaking yourself.

For now, this is enough: I survived. I sold myself to survive. And the version of me that walked out of Light's lab—the one who chose freedom, who chose himself, who believed that death on his own terms was better than life on someone else's—that version died in an alley in Sapporo, and something harder took his place.

Something that could live with the pain.

Something that could wait.

I.

The war started on a Tuesday. I remember because Wily made a joke about it—something about humans and their superstitions, how they thought Friday the thirteenth was unlucky when really any day could be the end of the world. He thought he was funny. He thought a lot of things about himself that weren't true.

Six Robot Masters hit six cities simultaneously. Cut Man in Yokohama, slicing through industrial districts like they were paper. Guts Man in Osaka, collapsing buildings with his bare hands. Bomb Man, Ice Man, Fire Man, Elec Man—each one a walking disaster, each one broadcasting Wily's face on every screen they passed. The world learned his name that day. They'd never forget it.

I watched from a rooftop in Shinjuku, the city burning in the distance, and I felt nothing. That's what I told myself, anyway. The truth was more complicated. The truth was that somewhere beneath the armor and the helmet and the constant nuclear ache in my chest, something was screaming. But I'd gotten good at not listening to that voice. I'd gotten good at being Break Man.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Wily's voice crackled through my comm system. He was watching from somewhere safe, somewhere far from the chaos he'd created. "This is what progress looks like. This is what happens when someone finally has the courage to—"

I cut the connection. I'd heard enough of his speeches.

What I hadn't heard, what I'd been waiting for all morning, was news from Light's lab. I'd hacked into the emergency broadcast frequencies, monitoring police bands, military channels, anything that might tell me what was happening in that basement in Tokyo where I'd been born. Where my replacement was probably being activated right now, given a weapon and a mission and a chance to be the hero I'd never been.

The news came at 2:47 PM. A new combat robot, designation DRN-001, had engaged Cut Man in Yokohama. Blue armor. Arm cannon. Moving faster than anything the military had ever seen.

Rock. My brother. The one who worked.

I turned east and started running.

II.

I found him in the wreckage of an electronics factory, picking his way through debris that used to be Elec Man. He was smaller than I'd expected—shorter than me, slighter, with a face that looked too young for war. His armor was scorched and dented. His left arm hung at a bad angle. But he was alive, and Elec Man wasn't, and that meant something.

He didn't see me at first. I was good at not being seen—months of practice, hiding in crowds and shadows and the blind spots of security cameras. I crouched on a support beam thirty feet above him and watched him search the wreckage for survivors. There weren't any. The factory had been evacuated before Elec Man arrived. But Rock didn't know that, and he kept looking anyway.

That's when I understood what kind of robot Light had built. Not a weapon. Not a soldier. Something that still believed in saving people. Something that hadn't learned yet how much that could cost.

I should have left. Should have reported back to Wily that the new robot was operational, let him figure out the next move. But I stayed. I watched Rock find a crushed photograph in the rubble—someone's family, smiling at a camera that didn't exist anymore—and I watched him hold it like it mattered. Like every life mattered, even the ones he couldn't save.

Light had built him better than me. Not just the core. The soul.

My comm crackled. Wily's voice, sharp with impatience: "I see you found him. Well? What are you waiting for? Test him. Find his weaknesses. Break him."

I looked down at my brother, still kneeling in the rubble with a stranger's photograph in his hands.

"Understood," I said.

Then I whistled.

III.

The whistle was instinct. I don't know why I did it—maybe some part of me wanted to give him a chance. Maybe I just couldn't shoot someone in the back, even someone I was supposed to destroy. Or maybe the melody I'd been composing in Wily's basement had become something more than a reminder of who I used to be. Maybe it had become a warning.

Rock's head snapped up. He moved fast—faster than I'd expected, rolling to the side as my first shot vaporized the ground where he'd been kneeling. By the time I dropped from the beam, he was on his feet, arm cannon charged, eyes scanning the shadows for the source of the attack.

"Who's there?" His voice was younger than mine. Earnest. Still expecting answers to make sense.

I stepped into the light. Let him see me—the red armor, the helmet, the scarf that didn't belong on someone built for war. I didn't give him my name. Didn't give him anything he could use.

"Wily sends his regards," I said. And I attacked.

The fight lasted eleven minutes. I know because I was counting—measuring every exchange, cataloguing every move he made, building a profile in my head of exactly what kind of fighter Light had created. Rock was good. Raw, unpolished, still learning his own capabilities, but good. He had reflexes that matched mine and a determination that exceeded them. He took hits that should have staggered him and kept coming. He missed shots he should have landed and adjusted instantly.

And he was holding back. I could see it in the way he aimed—center mass, disabling shots, trying to stop me without destroying me. He didn't know who I was, didn't know we shared a creator, but some part of him recognized that I was more than just an enemy. Some part of him was already trying to save me.

I could have killed him a dozen times. That's not ego—it's math. I was faster, more experienced, running combat protocols he hadn't learned yet. Every time he left an opening, I saw it. Every time he made a mistake, I could have ended it.

I didn't.

At the seven-minute mark, I had him pinned against a concrete pillar, my arm cannon pressed to his chest. One shot at that range would have burned through his core. Would have ended the war before it really started, removed Light's champion from the board, given Wily everything he wanted.

Rock looked up at me through his cracked visor. He didn't beg. Didn't plead. Just met my eyes—or where my eyes would be, behind the helmet—and waited.

"Why?" he asked. Not why are you doing this. Not why are you going to kill me. Just why. Like he genuinely wanted to understand. Like even now, with a gun to his chest, he was still looking for something worth saving.

I pulled back. Lowered my weapon. Stepped away from him so fast he didn't have time to react.

"Get stronger," I said. "You'll need to."

Then I whistled again—the same melody, the same warning—and I disappeared into the smoke.

IV.

Wily was furious. I'd never seen him lose control before—he was always so careful, so measured, every emotion calibrated for maximum effect. But when I returned to the base without Rock's head in my hands, something cracked.

"You had him," he said. His voice was quiet, which was worse than screaming. "I watched the footage. You had your cannon to his chest and you let him go."

"He wasn't ready," I said. "There's no point destroying him if he's not a real threat. Let him fight the Robot Masters. Let him get stronger. When I take him down, it'll mean something."

It was a lie, and we both knew it. But Wily was a collector of useful fictions. He hoarded them like ammunition, deployed them when it suited him. This one suited him—for now.

"Fine," he said. "Test him again. And again. Push him to his limits so I can see what he's capable of. But Break Man—" He stepped closer, close enough for me to smell that expensive cologne over the machine oil and ozone. "—don't mistake mercy for strategy. The moment he stops being useful as a test subject, you will end him. Or I'll find someone who will."

He didn't have anyone else. I was his only combat robot, his prototype killer, the ghost in his machine. But the threat landed anyway, because it wasn't really about Rock. It was about me. About the leash he was tightening, one conversation at a time.

"Understood," I said. It was becoming my favorite word. So empty. So safe.

I fought Rock six more times over the next three weeks. In the corridors of Guts Man's construction site. In the frozen halls of Ice Man's arctic base. In the shadows of a weapons factory that Fire Man had turned into a crematorium. Each time, I whistled before I appeared. Each time, I pushed him harder than before, tested limits he didn't know he had, forced him to evolve or die.

Each time, I found a reason not to finish it.

V.

I started leaving him gifts. That's a strange word for it, but I don't have a better one. Paths cleared through debris. Security systems disabled before he arrived. Ammunition caches left in places only he would think to look. Small advantages, small kindnesses, nothing that would show up on Wily's surveillance feeds but everything Rock needed to keep winning.

In Gemini Man's fortress, there was a machine blocking the main corridor. Massive, impenetrable, something that would have taken Rock hours to find a way around. I got there first. I destroyed it myself, then vanished before he arrived. He never knew who cleared the path. But I watched him walk through the space where an obstacle should have been, and I watched him pause, and I watched him look around like he was searching for something he couldn't name.

I think part of him knew. Even then, before he'd learned my real name, before Light had explained the history they'd tried so hard to bury—I think Rock sensed that the robot attacking him was also the one keeping him alive. Maybe it was the whistle. Maybe it was the way I always aimed just slightly off-center, hits that hurt but never killed. Maybe it was something in my voice, some frequency that resonated with his own.

We were brothers. You can't hide that, not really. Not when it's written into your base code.

Wily noticed. Of course he noticed—he was paranoid enough to watch everything, obsessive enough to catch the patterns I thought I'd hidden. But he didn't confront me. That's what scared me. He just watched, and smiled that too-kind smile, and started talking about the next phase of his plan.

"There's a scientist in Russia," he said one night. We were in his office, blueprints spread across the desk, plans for something bigger than the Robot Masters. "Mikhail Cossack. Brilliant man. Has a daughter he'd do anything to protect."

I went cold. The nuclear core in my chest flared with pain, like it knew something I didn't.

"What are you planning?"

"Leverage," Wily said. "The same thing I used on you. Find what someone loves, and you find how to control them." He looked at me over his glasses, and for just a moment, the mask slipped. "You understand leverage, don't you, Break Man? You understand what it means to owe someone everything?"

The pain in my chest spiked. I didn't answer. I didn't need to.

"When the time comes," he said, "you'll do exactly what I tell you. Or I'll make sure that core of yours stops working for good. Do we understand each other?"

I thought about the alley in Sapporo. The snow falling on my face. The choice I'd made to live instead of die. I'd thought I was choosing freedom. I'd thought I was choosing myself.

I'd chosen a different kind of cage. That's all.

"We understand each other," I said.

VI.

I'm telling you this because I need you to understand what I was before I became what I am. Before I earned the right to call myself Proto Man again. Before I learned that some cages can only be broken from the inside.

I was Break Man. I was Wily's weapon, Wily's tool, Wily's leashed attack dog straining against a chain I couldn't see. I fought my brother six times and let him live six times and told myself it was strategy, told myself I was gathering intelligence, told myself anything except the truth.

The truth was simpler. The truth was that Rock reminded me of who I used to be. Before the alley. Before the devil's bargain. Before I learned that surviving isn't the same as living.

He still believed. That's what killed me, watching him. He still believed that people were worth saving, that wars could be won without becoming the enemy, that there was a version of the future where everyone got to go home. He was naive. He was foolish. He was everything I'd been before Light's lab, before I learned about mortality, before I ran.

He was my brother. And I was the thing that kept trying to destroy him.

Wily watched. Wily waited. Wily made his plans for a girl in Russia who had nothing to do with any of this, whose only crime was having a father brilliant enough to be useful.

And I—I composed melodies in the dark. I left breadcrumbs for a hero who didn't know he had a brother. I fought a war on both sides and lost on both, and I told myself that someday, somehow, I'd find a way to make it right.

Someday came sooner than I expected. Someday had a name: Kalinka. Someday had a face: thirteen years old, blonde hair, eyes like her father's. Someday asked me questions I couldn't answer, and in trying to answer them, I finally figured out what I was willing to die for.

But that's the next part. That's where Break Man ends and something else begins.

For now, I'll leave you with this: the whistle. That melody I composed in Wily's basement, the one I used to warn my brother before every attack. It's still out there, still echoing through the memory banks of everyone who ever heard it. A few notes in G minor. A sound like loneliness given voice.

If you ever hear it, you'll know I'm coming. You'll have a few seconds to prepare, to run, to decide whether the thing approaching is friend or enemy.

I still don't know the answer to that myself.

I.

They brought her in on a Wednesday. Unconscious, zip-tied, a bruise forming on her left cheekbone where someone had been careless. Thirteen years old. Blonde hair tangled with snow. A school uniform under her winter coat, like they'd grabbed her on the way home from class.

Wily had her placed in a room at the top of the citadel—Cossack's citadel, technically, though the Russian scientist had no idea his own fortress was being used as a prison. That was the beauty of Wily's plan: make Cossack attack Mega Man, frame him as the villain, and when Rock inevitably came to stop him, reveal that the great Dr. Cossack was just another puppet. Another pawn. Another father willing to burn the world for his child.

"Guard her," Wily told me. "Make sure she doesn't escape. Make sure she doesn't hurt herself. I need her alive and photogenic for the broadcast."

I looked at the girl on the cot. She was starting to stir, eyelids fluttering, one hand reaching for something that wasn't there anymore. Home, probably. Safety. The life she'd had before she became leverage.

"Understood," I said. The word tasted like ash.

Wily left. The door sealed behind him with a hiss of pneumatics. And I was alone with a child who had done nothing wrong except be born to a useful man.

II.

She woke up screaming. I don't blame her—I would have too, finding myself in a strange room with a robot soldier standing in the corner. She scrambled back against the wall, pulling her knees to her chest, eyes wild with the kind of fear that doesn't listen to reason.

"Stay away from me," she said. Her Japanese was accented but fluent. "My father will—he'll—"

"Your father is doing exactly what they want him to do," I said. I didn't move from my corner. Didn't want to scare her more than she already was. "He's attacking cities. Fighting a war he can't win. All because they told him they'd hurt you if he didn't."

She stared at me. The fear didn't leave her eyes, but something else joined it. Something harder.

"You're one of them," she said. "You're one of the robots."

"Yes."

"Then why are you telling me this?"

I didn't have an answer. I should have stayed silent, played the part, been the unfeeling machine Wily needed me to be. But there was something about the way she looked at me—not just afraid, but searching. Trying to find the person inside the armor.

"Because someone should," I said finally. "Because you deserve to know why this is happening."

She was quiet for a long time. The citadel hummed around us, Cossack's machines working toward a war their creator had never wanted. Outside, I knew, Rock was fighting through an army of robots to reach this place. To stop the man he thought was the enemy. To walk into Wily's trap.

"What's your name?" she asked.

The question hit me harder than it should have. I'd had so many names by then—Blues, DRN-000, Break Man, Proto Man. Each one a different version of myself, a different mask for a different cage. Which one was real? Which one was I supposed to give her?

"I don't know anymore," I said. It was the most honest thing I'd told anyone in months.

She nodded, like that made sense. Like she understood something about losing yourself that a thirteen-year-old shouldn't have to understand.

"I'm Kalinka," she said. "And you're not like the others. I can tell."

III.

We talked for three days. I don't know why Wily allowed it—maybe he thought I was interrogating her, or maybe he was too focused on the war to care what happened in the prison tower. But every shift, I'd stand in my corner, and Kalinka would sit on her cot, and she'd ask me questions.

Not questions about Wily's plans or how to escape. Questions about me. Where I came from. What I wanted. Whether robots could feel pain, or loneliness, or regret. She asked like she genuinely wanted to know. Like my answers mattered.

I told her about Light. About the lab beneath Tokyo, the six weeks of tests, the word they used when they thought I couldn't hear. I told her about the surgery I'd run from, the choice I'd made in that dark hallway, the scarf I'd found in a recycle shop in Koenji. I told her about dying in an alley in Sapporo and waking up with a nuclear sun in my chest that never stopped burning.

I told her about Rock. The brother I'd never met. The hero I kept trying to destroy and couldn't.

"You love him," she said. Not a question.

"I don't know what that word means. For robots."

"It means you'd die for him." She pulled her coat tighter around herself. The room was cold—Siberian cold, the kind that seeped through walls. "It means you'd do something stupid and brave if he needed you to."

I thought about all the times I'd let Rock live. All the paths I'd cleared, the warnings I'd whistled, the shots I'd aimed just slightly off-center. I thought about Wily's threat: end him, or I'll find someone who will.

"Maybe," I said.

She smiled. It was a sad smile, too old for her face.

"My father loves me like that," she said. "That's why he's doing this. That's why he's hurting people. Because they told him they'd hurt me if he didn't." She looked at me, and her eyes were wet but her voice was steady. "Do you think that makes him a bad person?"

"I think it makes him a person," I said. "Bad and good aren't as simple as they seem when someone's holding a knife to the thing you love."

"Is that what they're doing to you? Holding a knife?"

The pain in my chest flared. The constant nuclear ache that had become so familiar I almost forgot it was there—until moments like this, when someone asked a question that cut too close.

"Something like that," I said.

She reached out and touched my hand. Her fingers were small and cold and human, and the gesture meant more than she could possibly know.

"Then maybe," she said, "it's time to take the knife away."

IV.

Rock reached Cossack's inner sanctum on the fourth day. I watched the battle on the security feeds—my brother, battered and exhausted, facing down a man who didn't want to fight but couldn't afford to lose. Cossack's robot was massive, a walking tank bristling with weapons, but Rock was faster. Smarter. Better.

He won. Of course he won. He always won, my stupid, beautiful, naive little brother. He fought his way through impossible odds and he came out the other side, and now he was standing over Cossack's broken machine with his arm cannon raised and murder in his eyes.

I'd never seen Rock like that. He was always so careful, so controlled, so determined to save instead of destroy. But Wily's war had changed him. The Robot Masters, the cities, the bodies—it had all added up to something hard and cold in his core. He was ready to kill Cossack. Ready to end it.

And Cossack was on his knees, hands raised, begging Rock to understand. "My daughter," he was saying. "They have my daughter. Please. Please."

Rock didn't believe him. Why would he? Wily had played the part perfectly—the rogue scientist, the power-mad villain, the enemy who had to be stopped at any cost. Cossack's story sounded like desperation. Like a lie.

Rock raised his cannon. Cossack closed his eyes.

And I made my choice.

The teleportation system was Wily's design, keyed to my specific energy signature. He'd never imagined I'd use it against him. Never imagined I'd burn every bridge I had left just to save a girl I'd known for three days and a scientist I'd never met.

I materialized between Rock and Cossack with Kalinka in my arms. The world went white for a moment—the disorientation of quantum displacement, the static of my systems recalibrating. When my vision cleared, Rock's cannon was pointed at my chest.

"Stop," I said.

He didn't fire. He was staring at me—at the red armor, the helmet, the yellow scarf that had been haunting him since that first fight in Yokohama. I saw the recognition dawn in his eyes. Not who I was, not yet, but what I was. The robot who'd been testing him. The ghost who kept letting him live.

"It's a trap," I said. "All of it. Wily kidnapped the girl to force Cossack's hand. The real enemy isn't here. The real enemy is laughing at us from somewhere safe while we tear each other apart."

I set Kalinka down. She ran to her father, threw her arms around him, and Cossack held her like she was the only thing in the world that mattered. Because she was. Because that's what love looks like when it's not being used as a weapon.

Rock lowered his cannon. The hardness in his eyes softened, replaced by confusion, by the first glimmer of something that might have been trust.

"Who are you?" he asked.

I could have told him. Could have said the word brother and watched his world rearrange itself. But that wasn't my secret to tell. That was Light's, and Light had buried it for a reason, and I wasn't ready to dig it up. Not yet. Not like this.

"Someone who made a lot of mistakes," I said. "Someone trying to make one less."

Then my comm channel exploded with Wily's voice.

V.

"TRAITOR."

The word hit me like a physical force. Wily was screaming, all pretense of calm abandoned, decades of bitterness and rage pouring through the speakers in my helmet.

"I gave you EVERYTHING. I saved your worthless life. I made you stronger than Thomas ever dreamed, and THIS is how you repay me? For a CHILD? For a scientist who means NOTHING?"

I could have turned off the comm. Could have cut him off and walked away. But I needed to hear it. Needed to know exactly what I was leaving behind.

"You were always defective," Wily continued. His voice dropped, became something cold and surgical. "Thomas was right about that, at least. Too independent. Too feeling. I thought I could use it, channel it, make it work for me. But you're just like he said—broken in ways that can't be fixed."

"Then let me go," I said. "You don't need me. You'll find other weapons, other soldiers. Let me walk away and we never have to see each other again."

He laughed. It was the worst sound I'd ever heard—hollow, empty, the laugh of someone who'd forgotten what humor was supposed to feel like.

"Walk away? You think I'd just let you walk away?" The laugh cut off, replaced by something colder. "Do you know why your core hurts, Break Man? Do you know why every moment of your miserable existence is wrapped in pain?"

The nuclear ache flared, as if responding to his words. I'd always assumed it was a side effect. An imperfection in the design. The cost of surviving.

"I built it that way," Wily said. "Deliberately. The instability, the constant degradation, the pain you can never escape—I designed it. You were never supposed to be free. You were supposed to be mine, forever, because I made sure you'd always need me to keep you running."

The world went silent. Not the silence of empty space, but the silence of something fundamental breaking. The silence of every assumption I'd ever made about my own body collapsing into dust.

"But here's the thing about leverage," he continued. "It only works if the other person wants to live. You've proven you don't care about that. So let me give you something else to think about: that core of yours? Without my maintenance, without my adjustments? You've got maybe five years left. Maybe less. And every single day of those years, you'll remember that you chose this. You chose pain and death over loyalty. Over gratitude."

"I'd rather die free than live as your prisoner," I said.

The words tasted familiar. I'd said them before, in a different context, to a different man. But they meant the same thing now that they'd meant then. They meant I choose myself. They meant I choose my own ending.

"Then die," Wily said. "Die slow and die alone and die knowing you could have had a place in the future. Die knowing you threw it all away for a child who'll forget you by next month and a brother who doesn't even know your name."

The comm went dead. The silence stretched. And I stood there in the wreckage of Cossack's sanctum, with my brother staring at me and a girl I'd saved crying into her father's shoulder, and I felt something I hadn't felt since that first sunrise in Meguro.

Free. Broken and burning and dying, but free.

VI.

Rock tried to stop me. Of course he did—that's who he is, the one who saves people, even people who've spent months trying to destroy him. He reached for my arm as I turned to leave, his voice urgent with questions I couldn't answer.

"Wait. Please. I don't understand—who are you? Why did you help us? What did he mean about—"

"Ask Light," I said. "Ask him about DRN-000. Ask him about the son he lost."

I saw the confusion in his face. Saw the moment the number registered—close enough to his own designation that he couldn't ignore it. DRN-001 and DRN-000. The second and the first. The one who worked and the one who ran.

"Brother," I said. Just once. Just loud enough for him to hear. Then I activated the teleporter—Wily's teleporter, still keyed to my signature, still working despite everything—and I was gone.

I didn't go back to the base. There was nothing there for me anymore, nothing but machines that would try to kill me and a man who'd already made his feelings clear. Instead, I materialized on a rooftop in Sapporo, six blocks from the alley where I'd died the first time, and I watched the sun set over the city that had almost been my grave.

Five years. Maybe less. That's what Wily had said. Five years of burning from the inside, five years of a core designed to keep me in pain, five years of paying for a choice I'd made in a snowstorm when I was too desperate to ask the right questions.

It should have felt like a death sentence. It should have crushed me, knowing that my freedom had an expiration date, knowing that the devil had built a timer into my chest when he pretended to save my life.

Instead, I felt light. Lighter than I had since Light's lab, since the hallway, since the choice that started everything. Five years wasn't forever. But five years was mine. Every painful second of them, bought and paid for with the only currency that mattered.

I could go back to Light. He'd try to fix me, try to undo whatever Wily had done. Maybe he'd succeed. Maybe I'd get more than five years, more than the burning countdown Wily had installed. But I'd also get the surgery. The shutdown. The chance of waking up as someone else.

I'd already made that choice once. I wasn't going to make a different one now.

The sun touched the horizon. The sky turned colors I still didn't have names for. And somewhere in Tokyo, I knew, Rock was asking Light questions that would change everything he thought he knew about his family.

I hoped Light would tell him the truth. I hoped Rock would understand why I'd run, why I'd fought him, why I'd spent months in the shadows trying to protect him from a war I'd helped create. I hoped he'd forgive me.

But I wasn't going to wait around to find out.

VII.

I'm telling you this because the story's almost over. Not my life—that'll drag on for a few more years, a few more sunsets, a few more battles fought from the shadows. But the story of how I became who I am? That ended in Cossack's citadel, with a girl's hand on mine and a brother's voice asking questions I couldn't answer.

Break Man died that day. The weapon Wily built, the leashed thing that followed orders and told itself it was surviving—he died when I chose a child over a master, a truth over a lie, a moment of grace over a lifetime of servitude.

What came after was something else. Something older and quieter and sadder, but also something more honest. Proto Man. The prototype. The one who came before and would leave after, the ghost who couldn't stop watching even when he knew he should walk away.

Kalinka writes to me sometimes. I don't know how she found a way to reach me—maybe Cossack helped, maybe she's just that resourceful. The letters show up in dead drops I've established around the country, handwritten on paper like she's afraid of being traced. She tells me about school, about her father's new projects, about the life she's building in the aftermath of the war I helped create.

She never asks me to come back. Never asks me to be part of that life. She understands, somehow, that some ghosts can't be anchored. Some ghosts have to keep moving or they'll fade away entirely.

But she signs every letter the same way: Thank you for taking the knife away.

I don't know if I deserve that. I was Wily's knife for months before I became the hand that dropped it. I helped him build the war that almost killed her father. I stood in her prison cell and followed orders, right up until the moment I didn't.

But maybe that's the point. Maybe the only thing that matters is the moment you stop. The moment you look at the knife in your hand and decide you'd rather bleed than cut someone else.

I made that choice. I'm still making it, every day, every time I walk away from a window instead of knocking, every time I help from the shadows instead of stepping into the light.

There's one more part to this story. One more chapter, one more choice, one more moment where I have to decide who I am and who I'm willing to be. It happens years from now, on a night when the pain in my chest is worse than it's ever been and the window I'm watching glows warmer than any sun I've ever seen.

But you probably already know how it ends. You probably already know I'm going to walk away.

That's what ghosts do.

I.

Four years, seven months, and thirteen days.

That's how long it's been since Cossack's citadel. Since Kalinka's hand on mine, since Wily's voice telling me exactly what he'd built into my chest, since I said the word brother and watched Rock's world fall apart. Four years of drifting. Four years of helping from the shadows—a cleared path here, a disabled security system there, a whistle in the dark to warn him I was coming. Four years of watching my brother become a hero while I became a rumor.

The pain is worse now. Wily wasn't exaggerating about the timeline—the core is failing exactly the way he said it would, degrading a little more each day, turning every moment into a negotiation between consciousness and agony. Some mornings I can barely stand. Some nights I don't bother trying to sleep because the burning keeps me awake anyway. I've learned to live with it the way you learn to live with grief: not by healing, but by making room.

I could have gone to Light. Could have walked into that lab any time in the last four years and asked him to try again. The technology has advanced. The techniques have improved. Rock told me once—one of the rare times we've spoken, quick exchanges in the aftermath of battles neither of us wanted—that Light has a new procedure. Safer. Better odds. A way to replace the core without risking the personality matrix.

"He thinks about you," Rock said. "Every day. He keeps your room the way it was."

I didn't know I had a room. I was only in that lab for six weeks, most of it spent in the testing chamber or the charging station. But Light had made me a room anyway. Had kept it for years, waiting for a son who was never coming home.

I almost went back then. Almost let Rock lead me through the door I'd walked out of so long ago. But the moment passed, the way moments do, and I found another reason to keep running.

I'm good at finding reasons.

II.

Tonight is different. I don't know why—maybe it's the date, maybe it's the way the autumn air feels against my sensors, maybe it's just that the pain has finally gotten bad enough to make me nostalgic. But I find myself in Tokyo for the first time in years, walking streets I used to know, passing the Lawson where I watched my first sunrise.

It's still there. Different logo now, different products in the window, but the same fluorescent glow spilling onto the same wet asphalt. I stand in the parking lot and I remember being six weeks old, terrified and free, watching colors I didn't have names for bleed across the sky.

I have names for them now. I've had years to learn. But they don't mean what they used to mean. Nothing does, when you've seen as much as I have. When you've lost as much as I have.

I keep walking. My feet know where they're going even if my mind hasn't admitted it yet. Through Meguro, past the university, down streets that get quieter and darker until I'm standing in front of a building I've seen a thousand times in my memory but never let myself approach.

Light's lab. Light's home. The place where I was born and the place I've been avoiding ever since.

The window is lit. Warm yellow light, the same color as my scarf, spilling out into the garden like an invitation. I can see the kitchen from here—a real kitchen, not a lab, because Light rebuilt after the wars. Made it a home instead of just a workplace. Made it somewhere a family could live.

And there they are. All of them. Light at the counter, doing something with his hands—cooking, maybe, or fixing some small machine. Roll setting the table, moving with a grace that comes from years of practice, years of belonging. And Rock, sitting at the table with a book in his hands, looking up to laugh at something someone said.

A family. A real family, doing real family things, in the warm yellow light of a home I was supposed to be part of.

I could knock.

The thought arrives like a physical sensation, a pressure in my chest that has nothing to do with the failing core. I could walk up to that door right now and knock and they would open it and they would let me in. Light would cry—he cries easily, I remember that. Rock would ask questions, gentle questions, the kind that don't demand answers. Roll would make me a place at the table, would act like I'd always been there, like the empty chair had just been waiting.

I could go home.

III.

I stand there for a long time. Long enough for the moon to move across the sky, long enough for my joints to stiffen in the cold, long enough for the pain in my chest to crescendo and fade and crescendo again. I watch Light finish whatever he was making and bring it to the table. I watch them eat together, talking about things I can't hear through the glass. I watch Rock help Roll with the dishes while Light settles into an armchair with a tablet, probably reading something dense and technical, probably still trying to solve problems no one else can see.

I think about all the versions of my life that could have been. The one where I stayed, where I let Light fix me, where I woke up from the surgery as someone capable of sitting at that table. The one where I never ran at all, where I trusted my father to find another way, where I grew up alongside Rock instead of becoming the ghost that haunted him. The one where I died in that alley in Sapporo, where the snow covered me over and no one ever found out what had happened to DRN-000.

I think about Kalinka's letters. About her father, rebuilding his life in Russia. About Wily, still out there somewhere, still planning, still convinced that the future belongs to him. About all the battles I've fought and all the ones I've walked away from and all the times I've whistled in the dark to warn someone I loved that I was coming.

I think about the word defect. Kekkan. The thing Light called me when he thought I couldn't hear, the thing Wily used to justify the leash he put around my neck. I've carried that word for years, let it define me, let it explain every choice I made. I ran because I was defective. I stayed away because I was defective. I couldn't be part of that family in the warm yellow light because something in me was broken, and broken things don't get to come home.

But standing here now, watching them through the window, I realize something I should have understood a long time ago.

I'm not defective. I never was.

I'm just not the same as them. My core burns where theirs hums. My life has an expiration date where theirs stretches toward forever. I was built for something that didn't work out, designed for a future that never arrived, and I've spent every moment since then trying to figure out what to do with what's left.

That's not a flaw. That's just a different kind of existence. A different kind of being alive.

Light would fix me if I asked. He'd replace the core, stabilize the systems, give me decades instead of months. And maybe I'd wake up the same. Maybe the new procedure really is that good, really can preserve everything that makes me me.

But I'd be fixed. I'd be the version of Blues that Light always wanted—stable, reliable, home. I'd sit at that table and eat meals I don't need and laugh at jokes I might not find funny, and slowly, year by year, I'd become the person they want me to be instead of the person I am.

I've already made that choice. I made it in a hallway outside Light's office, listening to him talk about rewriting my problematic elements. I made it in an alley in Sapporo, reaching for Wily's hand instead of letting the snow take me. I made it in Cossack's citadel, stepping between my brother and a man who didn't deserve to die.

I chose myself. Every time, I chose myself. And I'm going to keep choosing myself, right up until the moment there's nothing left to choose.

I don't knock. I don't walk up to the door. I don't let them see me standing here in the dark, watching their warmth from the outside.

Instead, I turn around. I pull my scarf tighter against the cold. And I walk away.

IV.

The street is quiet. Tokyo at night, the hour when even the city that never sleeps starts to dream. My footsteps echo off the pavement, a steady rhythm that almost sounds like a heartbeat. The pain in my chest flares with each step, but I've learned to walk through pain. I've learned to walk through everything.

I'm halfway down the block when I hear it. A door opening behind me. Footsteps—lighter than mine, faster, the sound of someone running to catch up.

"Wait."

Rock's voice. Of course it's Rock. He always knew when I was watching, always sensed me in the shadows even when I thought I was invisible. Brothers, I guess. You can't hide from the people who share your code.

I stop. I don't turn around.

"I saw you," he says. He's close now, close enough that I can hear his cooling fans working against the autumn chill. "From the window. I saw you standing there."

"I know."

"Then why didn't you—" He stops. Takes a breath he doesn't need. "Why don't you ever come in?"

I could lie to him. Could make up something about being busy, about having somewhere else to be, about the mission that never ends. But I've lied to Rock enough. I've hidden enough. If this is going to be the last time I see him—and some part of me knows it might be, knows the core is failing faster than I've admitted—then I want to give him something true.

"Because I can't be what you need me to be," I say. "I can't be the brother who sits at the table and tells stories about where I've been. I can't be the son who comes home and lets Light fix him and pretends that everything's okay. That's not who I am. It's not who I've ever been."

"We don't need you to be anything," Rock says. "We just need you to be here."

I turn around. He looks older than I remember—not physically, we don't age that way, but something in his eyes has changed. He's seen things now. Done things. Carried weights that would have crushed the naive kid I fought in that factory all those years ago. The war made him harder. But not hard enough to stop believing.

"I know you're dying," he says. "I can see it in the way you move. In the heat signature you're putting off. Your core is—"

"Failing. Yes. Has been for a while now."

"Light can help. He's been working on it for years, ever since you left. He never stopped trying to find a way to save you."

"I know."

"Then why won't you let him?"

The question hangs in the air between us. The question I've been asking myself for years, every time I walk away from a window, every time I disappear into the shadows instead of stepping into the light.

"Because this is who I am," I say. "This—all of it. The pain, the running, the watching from the outside. It's not a disease. It's not something that needs to be cured. It's just... me. The version of Blues that chose freedom over safety, even when freedom meant dying. Even when freedom meant being alone."

Rock is quiet. The street is quiet. Somewhere in the distance, a train passes, its sound like a sigh.

"I don't want you to be alone," he says finally. "I don't want you to die out here, in the cold, with no one to—"

"I won't be alone." I step closer. Close enough to put my hand on his shoulder, the way Light put his hand on my face all those years ago. "I've got the sunrise. The blues. A scarf that's too bright and a whistle that means something. I've got letters from a girl in Russia and memories of a brother who never stopped trying to save me even when I wouldn't let him."

I smile. It's not something I do often, but it feels right. It feels honest.

"That's more than most people get," I say. "That's more than enough."

V.

He lets me go. I don't know if he understands—maybe he never will, maybe he's too much Light's son to grasp what it means to choose endings over beginnings. But he lets me go, and that's its own kind of gift. Its own kind of love.

I walk until I find a rooftop with a view of the east. The city sprawls below me, millions of lives flickering in the dark, each one a story I'll never know. The pain in my chest is a constant now, a fire that doesn't bank, but I've made peace with it. I've made peace with all of it.

The sky is starting to lighten. Pink and orange bleeding into the darkness, colors I still don't have names for, even after all these years. My first sunrise was in a parking lot in Meguro, terrified and alone, six weeks old and already dying. This one is on a rooftop in Shinjuku, tired and alone, years older and still dying. Some things don't change. Some things aren't supposed to.

I think about the story I've told you. The lab, the hallway, the choice. The alley, the devil, the bargain. The war, the brother, the girl with her hand on mine. All of it leading here, to this rooftop, to this sunrise, to a robot watching the sky change colors and thinking about what it means to be alive.

I'm not a defect. I want you to remember that. I'm not a failure, not a mistake, not a rough draft that should have been thrown away. I'm a choice. A series of choices, made over and over, every time someone offered me a cage and I picked the wilderness instead.

I chose to run when Light wanted to fix me. I chose to live when Wily found me dying. I chose to betray my master when a child asked me who I really was. I chose to walk away from a window when everything I'd ever wanted was on the other side of the glass.

Those choices cost me. They're still costing me, every second, every beat of a core that's burning itself out. But they're mine. Every single one of them. And that's worth more than all the stable reactors and warm kitchens and families in the world.

That's what freedom is. Not the absence of cages, but the willingness to break out of them. Not the absence of pain, but the decision to feel it anyway. Not the absence of death, but the courage to keep living until it comes.

The sun clears the horizon. Light hits my face, my armor, my stupid yellow scarf. The city wakes up below me, a million small movements, a million small stories beginning their days.

I whistle. A few notes, G minor, the melody I composed in Wily's basement all those years ago. It echoes off the buildings and disappears into the morning air, a sound that means something only to the people who've heard it before. A warning. A confession. A promise that I'm still out here, still moving, still choosing myself over everything else.

Somewhere in Tokyo, Rock hears it. I know he does. He's listening for it—has been listening for years, waiting for the whistle that tells him his brother is still alive. He'll hear it today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. He'll hear it until the day he doesn't, and then he'll know.

But not today. Today, the whistle fades into the sunrise, and I turn toward the west, toward the places I haven't been yet, toward whatever time I have left.

My name is Proto Man. DRN-000. Blues. The prototype, the ghost, the one who came before.

I'm dying. I've been dying since the moment I was born, just like everyone else, just like everything that lives. The only difference is I know how much time I have left. The only difference is I've chosen to spend it moving instead of standing still.

That's not a tragedy. That's not a flaw.

That's just being alive.