Spend all your time waiting
For that second chance
For a break that would make it okay
There’s always one reason
To feel not good enough
And it’s hard at the end of the day
I need some distraction
Oh beautiful release
Memory seeps from my veins
Let me be empty
And weightless and maybe
I’ll find some peace tonight

Tron felt as though he'd been falling forever. The Sea of Simulation was warm and gentle, which was what Tron needed right now. He was only now starting to gather his thoughts after everything that had happened, and how long had it been since he'd splashed into the waves? He wasn't sure, but it had to be a long time, because he remembered his fall, and then an interminable period of merely drifting, a tumultuous storm of thoughts and emotions during a time so dark and dim it almost seemed as though it had been a dream. His mind was beginning to clear now, his consciousness more lucid and coherent, though he wasn't sure if that was a good thing, because with comprehension came pain. And guilt.

He felt as though something was hammering in his chest, about to tear him apart. The things he had done as Rinzler...for so long... OH, CREATOR, WHY??? he screamed inside his head. His body contracted into a tight ball as his anguish manifested into almost physical pain.

To Tron, it wasn't enough to say that he had been rectified... repurposed... brainwashed... whatever you wanted to call it. That was no excuse. The rectification never should have happened in the first place. He should have been stronger.

He was created to protect the Grid, to do so even when others failed. He himself was not meant to fail; this was his User's intent when he created Tron, that was the way it was supposed to be. But Tron had failed. Failed to win in his fight against Clu-- against Clu!-- on the day of the other program's betrayal, failed to fight off Clu's indoctrination, and, most recently, failed to protect his friend Kevin Flynn yet again now. Clu had won once more. And when Tron got out of this...found his way to the surface and crawled onto the shore to begin a new life...how would he ever begin to make it all right?

Shaking with pain and a rollercoaster of emotions, Tron would have screamed except that past attempts had taught him that he'd only get a mouthful of water and insufficient sound to make a difference in eradicating his agony.

When it got to be too much for him to handle-- and Tron could handle a lot, as Clu had found out during the rectification process-- he simply let his mind go. And, welling up through the more recent, terrible recollection, he found one thing that he could grasp and hold onto, a memory he could draw on for strength and peace, at least for a little while.

He closed his eyes tightly now and forced all thoughts out of his mind, just imagining an empty space and a white light, and waited for his deliverer to come. His body relaxed and hung suspended, effortlessly, in the water as he willed himself to forget for just this short time.

........................

In the arms of the angel
Fly away from here
From this dark cold hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You’re in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort here

Just like always, without fail, her face appeared in his mind. It must have been some sort of dream or hallucination, and somewhere in the back of his consciousness Tron knew it, but still, it was as if she were right in front of him. Yori smiled at him, and Tron felt liberated.

He couldn't remember what had happened to her. He was glad of that, because he didn't want to know if he'd had any part in harming her. And so he was free just to keep her in his heart, appearing the way she had always been. Her love had been warm, a safe place where Tron could stop worrying, stop thinking, stop being Tron for a little while. In her arms, all was right with the world.

So now, with her, so familiar, in front of him, Tron could forget for a bit. The hurt always came back in the end, but he could escape for a short time by thinking of her. This memory, apparition, was all he had left of her, and he drew on it again and again when reality pulled him down into a place too dark and deep to see his way out of.

Crashing back into the truth of his situation was always awful, but at least he'd found peace for a while...

....................

So tired of the straight line
And everywhere you turn
There’s vultures and thieves at your back
And the storm keeps on twisting
You keep on building the lie
That you make up for all that you lack
It don’t make no difference
Escaping one last time
It’s easier to believe in this sweet madness oh
This glorious sadness that brings me to my knees

It may have been his programmed purpose, but there had been times when Tron wanted to rail against his peacekeeping duties. How much could one program take? How much corruption, evil, hurt, misery, intolerance, hate, conflict, selfishness... and then the necessary level-headedness, pacification, picking up the pieces, was too much? Day in and day out, this was Tron's job, cycle after cycle, and it never ended. Whenever he felt like he made a difference in one place, something cropped up somewhere else. It was heartbreaking and maddening. It sometimes seemed a losing battle, and that made it hard for Tron to see that he was doing any good.

Sometimes he just wanted to run away. Sometimes he would go somewhere by himself and slam his fist into the nearest wall, over and over, until he thought he might de-rez his hand... and that was something he couldn't allow to happen, because once this moment was over, he still had a job to do, and no matter how much he wanted to scream his frustration to the whole Grid and give up, disappear and leave this whole damn nightmarish calling to someone else....he couldn't. Because he was Tron, and this was what he did, and he was unable to imagine a different life. But he couldn't help feeling disheartened and trapped at times, as much as he hated that he felt that way. Surely if he were a true guardian of the Grid, a program committed to his coding, it wouldn't be like this.

Failure, insufficiency, wasn't something that had ever left a good taste in Tron's mouth. He wasn't created that way. He constantly strove to be the best that he could be, to do his job with the utmost of skill. This was the Grid he loved, programs he cared about, that he was sworn to protect. And when he couldn’t, or when he could have done better, his heart ached. He couldn’t let harm come to the inhabitants of his Grid…and that was how he thought of it sometimes. His Grid. Not in a possessive sense (yet another difference between him and Clu), but in the sense that this was where he belonged, completely. He was a part of this system, and it was part of him, and every program here was a part of a bigger whole, and therefore part of Tron too. No wonder he couldn’t take the fact that he’d had a hand in bringing harm to the Grid and its inhabitants for so long. He felt as though he had destroyed a part of himself. Clu wasn't the only one with a hangup about perfection...the only difference was that Clu demanded it of everyone else and of his environment. Tron expected it of himself.

“Tron, you're too hard on yourself,” seemed like Flynn's mantra. But even Flynn had no idea how deep it went...Tron's anger and disappointment when he felt he could have done better, or his dread that one day he would fail horribly. Well—Tron cracked a sardonic smile; he may be guilt-ridden and anguished but he'd always had a sense of humor, however dark it might be at times—as it turned out, that fear wasn't unfounded, now was it?

Tron had always been pretty good at covering up any anxiety about inadequacy or incompetence that may have cropped up in his mind. He could hide it even from one of his best friends, for the most part. No, Flynn had no idea. But perhaps Clu found out.

One thing was certain—there was some weakness that Clu had found to exploit. That was how the rectification process worked: find one crack in the armor, one moral failing, one insecurity, one bit of shaky coding, and use it to pry open everything in a program's consciousness so you could go in and change it around to suit you like a game. So somewhere, Clu had found some flaw, some shortcoming, in Tron, no matter how narrow, and slowly wedged it wider. What possibilities were there within Tron for darkness to take over? He knew they existed in everyone—wasn't Clu himself just Kevin Flynn's deepest, blackest tendencies, epitomized?

Tron could think of no other weakness besides his exasperation with his job and his fear of failure.

“There is nothing to fear except fear itself,” Flynn had quoted to him once. Some famous outside-world person had said it. Tron had rolled that around in his mind for a long time...but now he fully understood it. He had failed because he had been afraid he would fail. He had failed, perhaps, because some deep part of him that he hadn't even known existed had wanted to fail, to get away from the awful responsibility of fighting what seemed at times a losing battle—protecting the Grid.

He knew he had to act. To get to the surface of the Sea, and find any programs who had survived this ordeal, and help them fight in whatever way they had to, to try to get the Grid back. But...in the back of his mind, calling him....Yori's voice, her smile, her warmth, this the only way he could get her back. Dimly he knew this was something he'd told himself a dozen times, but he told himself again anyway. Just one more time. Then I'll go back and be Tron again. And the Grid will be better than before. But for now...I'll call her back. She'll make me strong enough to do what I need to do. Just once more...



In the arms of the angel
Fly away from here
From this dark cold hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You’re in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort here

Oh, thanks. Part of the reason this sat unposted for so long was because I knew it was a hard position to take, to suggest that:

1. Programs may become disillusioned with their directives, to the point that it really gets them down, just like people

2 Tron has any sort of weakness, least of all a weakness in his dedication-- but I think if anything, his weakness is because he's TOO strong and dedicated. He's so committed to protecting the Grid that it pains him when he's not able to do so, to the point that it wears him down sometimes; and he's so good at what he does that he's a perfectionist.

3. Programs-- least of all Tron-- may suffer from forms of addiction and avoidance.


I didn't think any of those ideas would be very popular. So I was hoping everybody wouldn't hate this.


(For anyone reading who isn't aware: McLachlan's song Angel was written after the keyboardist for the Smashing Pumpkins died of a drug overdose. So it is, indeed, specifically referring to turning to some sort of escapism to stave off a bleak reality-- in the song it's drugs; in my story it's Tron's memories of Yori [and: for Kevin Flynn it may well be meditation, as implied in other stuff I've written]. Plenty of people [whether aware of the real meaning, or not] also associate the song with depression [and possibly self-harm or suicide]-- which, of course, can be what leads a person to seek the escapism in the first place-- and this meaning resonates very strongly with me as well. So take whatever interpretation you want; I think I hint at both of them here, as well as adding a few of my own in Tron's feelings of hopelessness and impotence when it comes to eradicating evil, evoked by the second verse.)