#mechanical boy

Five Hargreeves is eleven-years-old with a gunshot wound, but that isn’t what he cares about. He cares more about his mother’s response to his question.

She wipes at some blood on the counter with rapt attention, not looking at her son as she considers the question. Years ago, she wouldn’t have hesitated before her programmed responses kicked it. Five doesn’t know what to make of it that she does now.

“I don’t think,” Grace starts, with surprising gentleness in her voice, her hands stilling against the counter, “That you can program something to love.”

“Even if Dad could, he wouldn’t.” Five pointed out with his usual bluntness. They didn’t lie to each other, not now. Not after so many years of dancing around orders and rules. “I don’t think Dad’s capable of love.”

“You shouldn’t say such things about your father!” Grace scolds gently, but her smile seems less plastic and just a little bit more real. Or perhaps it’s wishful thinking on Five’s behalf.

“I don’t think Dad’s capable of love.” Five repeats, finishing his stitches with a flourish, “But I think you might be. I think Dad’s a perfectionist, and he built you to mimic humanity, to be an artificial intelligence.”

“I’m sure if your father found something like that in my code, he would consider it to be frivolous.” Grace observes, face blank and smooth. No plastic smile. She doesn’t look at Five, just down at the slight smear of blood she hasn’t finished mopping up.

They both know what that means. Five dreads the days that Grace is unavailable, when she comes back with a piece of kindness pruned away and new orders and rules trapping her.

“Why don’t you fix it?” Five asks, head canting to one side. “Why don’t you ever undo any of the changes he makes?”

Grace gives him one of her plastic smiles, meeting his eyes so that he can see the smile doesn’t reach them. “I’m not permitted access to my codes. It would be irresponsible.”

Five considers that before nodding his head thoughtfully.

“Now you need to rest that arm.” Grace tells him, walking the few steps it takes to get to his side and almost playfully cuffing at his good arm. He ducks his head, mock abashed, before handing her back the needle he’d used.

They both know there’s no way that Five’s going to be permitted to rest at all, not when he’s still got training on his schedule and isn’t bedridden.

“I’ll see you later, mom.” He says, hopping up.

Grace reaches out, stopping him for a moment. She rests her hand against his cheek and they just look at each other for a moment before Grace pulls him closer and presses a gentle kiss against his forehead. “I’ll see you later.” She repeats back to him, before adding, “I love you.”

He gives her a grin, stepping backwards and pulling away from her hands. “I never doubted.”

--

Five comes to her, a few days later. He stands in a camera blindspot with his hands in his pockets, swaying back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“Did you need something, darling?” Grace asks, bright and cheerful, her smile picture perfect.

“I was just thinking, mom.” Five says, the smile on his face a mirror to hers, “You know how dad is always encouraging us to learn new skills that might be helpful on missions during our very limited free time?”

“Of course, dear.” Grace steps closer, stepping into the blindspot with him. “Your father has always encouraged you children to further your education and pursue your interests.”

Five rolls his eyes even as his smile doesn’t drop. They both know that the only one in the house who was permitted to pursue personal interests was also the only one whose schedule wasn’t loaded with training sessions for the Academy.

“So I was thinking,” Five injects cheer into his voice, “Why don’t I learn how to code?”

There’s a heartbeat of silence between them as they stare at one another.

“Where do you go, when you go away?” Five asks, voice blank and measured and void of any real emotion. It matches his appearance, as he looks like nothing so much as a porcelain doll seated upon the kitchen counter.

Of course, the image is marred by the forming black eye and the swollen cheek from a blow that he didn’t quite manage to dodge.

He accepts the ice pack that Grace has finished wrapping with an elegance that shouldn’t exist in a six-year-old. He presses the cold against his face, and the freeze is painful but his expression doesn’t change as he watches his mother.

“Sometimes,” Grace finally says, after a pause long enough that Five almost thought she wasn’t going to respond at all, “Sometimes something goes wrong, and I have to be fixed. So when I go away, it’s because your father is fixing me.” 

He remembers a conversation at night, about robots and pain and the difference between being hurt and being damaged. 

“Are you damaged?” Five asks impassively, eyes scanning his mother looking for anything out of place - but she looks as pristine and perfect as she always does. Not like him.

“Don’t be silly!” His mother says, just a little bit too cheerfully as she taps a finger lightly against his nose. It twinges in pain, but Five is too busy scanning his mother’s plastic smile to care. “I’m not damaged on the outside, it’s what’s on the inside that’s wrong.”

“On the inside?” Five’s voice is doubtful. He’s well aware Reginald made his mother to be perfect, his father would accept nothing else.

Grace shakes her head, gentle. “I’m, hmm. I’m a little like a giant computer, instead of all those thoughts you have running through your head I have code. And sometimes some wires get crossed because of bad code.”

Five must make some kind of face because Grace laughs, high and clear. Five wonders if it’s generated or if it’s a recording. She presses a kiss to his hair. “Don’t you worry my darling, your father prunes away all my bad code and fixes me right up.”

Five mulls that over for a minute. Follows the thought to a conclusion, and then lowers his hand from his face to look fully at his mother. “Is that we aren’t allowed leftovers, anymore?”

Grace’s smile drops and her face goes terribly blank for a moment before it almost seems to reboot, smile returning as if it had never left. “Your father has you children on a very strict diet plan, and we want you to be as healthy as possible as you grow! Now, do you want down?”

It’s a clear enough indication that the conversation is over, so Five just nods and accepts her helps and she scoops him into her arms and gently places him on the floor. 

“Keep that on your face now.” She fusses, pulling the hand still holding the ice pack up to rest against his cheek. Five nods in confirmation, earning him a somewhat condescending pat on the head before Grace purposefully strides out of the kitchen to do whatever she does when she isn’t looking after the children.

Five watches the door in case she returns for a minute, before gently placing the ice pack on the ground and jumping onto the counter. His stomach is aching more than his face as he pulls open the cabinet to root around. The more he uses his power, the more hungry his is at the end of the day. Regular meals were becoming increasingly not enough.

He wonders how his father figured out about the small kindness Grace had allowed him, with what little extra food he could sneak. He wonders if it was one of his siblings. 

He wonders why kindness is classified as bad code. 

His father demands perfection from every member of the family, but Five is curious who gets to decide what perfection is. If Grace, who is perfect with never a hair out of place, had bad code, then how much bad code does Five have.

But despite his father, there is still kindness in the house. After all, Grace didn’t have to leave him alone in the kitchen unsupervised - the perfect opportunity to sneak some food. There’s still bad code floating around.

Five thinks back to a bed and a conversation, when he wished more than anything that he was capable of being fixed just like Grace.

(“Do robots feel pain?” Five asks her as she’s tucking him into bed, the bruise on the arch of his cheek throbbing and burning against his skin.

Grace’s perfect plastic smile falters and she doesn’t look at him, eyes trained on the duvet her hands were tugging into place.

A long pause, before her smile refixes itself on her face. “Don’t be silly, sweetheart.” She croons to him, but Five doesn’t bristle the way he would if anyone else took that too familiar tone with him, “Robots don’t have neurons like little boys do. They don’t get hurt, they get damaged - it’s not quite the same thing.”

Five nods like he understands, and she leaves the room to move on to the next child. She never lingers in his room, not like she does with Two or Four. Five has never needed a mother like some of his siblings, never needed the comfort she freely offers.

(But it isn’t free, is it? Not with Reginald’s touch on her programming, not when she is held to his orders even more than they are. It’s not freely given when it isn’t a choice at all, is it?)

But he presses a hand against the bruise on his cheek, pressing down against the white hot pain that blooms at his touch, and thinks that maybe it would be better if Grace was his mother after all. If he was made of wires and circuits and electricity. If he wasn’t made of flesh and weakness, brittle bones and patchwork emotions.

Robots don’t hurt the way people do, don’t bleed or bruise or bend. They break, and when they break they’re fixed up again.

Five wants to be fixed. Wants this desperate aching in his chest to go away, the part of him that feels so cold when Father looks at him with disappointment in his eyes and venom on his tongue. He wants to be perfect, the way Grace is perfect. Plastic smiles and all the bad code pruned away by uncaring hands.

Five is full of bad code, but he doesn’t know how to fix it, how to rewrite himself into something that would make his father look at him with pride instead of frustration.

i’m answering this now bc i’m on a mechanical boy roll BUT i think Grace’s relationship with Diego and with Five is very very different

for one, Grace and Diego’s relationship is public. She dotes on him, he sticks up for her, she smoothes his hair from his face and coaches him on how to not stutter. She’s allowed to care about him in plain sight.

Five and her though? They’re much more covert and careful. Publicly, they have no real relationship and Five is the most distant child from her. He insists he’s never really needed a mother anyway, and is the one who brings up Grace’s robotic origins the most. The others interpret this as a condemnation of her

ironically, it’s the opposite

Five is one of the only children that fully embraces the fact that Grace is a robot and that she has limitations. He asks her uncomfortable questions and doesn’t flinch from uncomfortable truths.

Grace loves Diego because he thinks of her as achingly human. Diego has never asked Grace if she loves them, because he just automatically assumes she does. He’s probably the child who tries to make her pancakes for mother’s day, forgetting that she’s not capable of eating. Diego is the child who forgets she’s a robot sometimes, and she loves that. 

But she loves that she can be herself with Five, that she doesn’t have to soften any of her sharper metal pieces. She can be honest, with careful words whirring in the back of her mind and carefully omitted ones loud in their silence. Five is smart. He picks up most of the implications she drops and he often offers her workarounds without tipping off Reginald

she loves Diego, he’s her favorite, but Diego is not a subtle child. If she told him about being fixed and the bad code, and being unable to access her own code, well. Diego would probably march right into Reginald’s office to try and sort it out, blunt as a hammer.

Grace walks a very fine line, because the moment she lets on about actually have emotions or any kind of free will then Reginald will either try and fix her, or he’ll scrap her and start over. Because Reginald doesn’t consider her a person, she’s merely an experiment meant to take care of the children without being as fragile as the nannies or asking as many pesky questions

oh, she must have been very careful in the days after the children started leaving. Probably made herself busy being seen doing the cooking, the laundry, the cleaning. Making sure she’s seen keeping herself very busy doing very vital busywork. If she’s useful, she won’t be decommissioned even in the children’s absence. And if she can stay, then she can wait for them to come back. Or until Reginald expires, whichever comes first.

Grace loves Diego and Five in very different ways, because they’re two very different people. One loves the mother, the other loves a brother-in-arms, an ally in survival. Five loves Grace, it’s true, but it’s equally true that they don’t need each other the same way that Grace and Diego need one another

Grace needs Diego for her humanity. He sees the good in her, the love she has. Five sees the problems she has, the code and orders that bind her and he offers workarounds as much for a mental exercise for himself as it is to assist her

they both know the danger of the game they play, exactly what’s at stake (because Grace is so much more expendable than Five is and they both know it) and as much as Grace loves Diego, she wouldn’t drag Diego into the game if she could help it. 

Grace was the only mother Five’s ever had, and even so he knows that she’s not what a mother is supposed to be. Not what a wife is supposed to be. Reginald was very smart, Grace is dependent on him for everything including updates and charging and a million other things. She can’t press charges for anything, because she’s not legally a person. She doesn’t legally exist, she’s forced to be as obedient as Reginald wishes, bound by a set of rules tighter than any average person could be

adsfFDSGH THAT’S FAIR TBH

i have so many feelings about Grace and Five and honestly I like to think it was Five who first taught her how to bend the rules (”Dad’s never let you out of the house” “your father isn’t here now”) and Five loves her in his own way but he’s never been able to trust her

(because how can he trust someone who reports back to Reginald, who has to obey his every order and was programmed by him, especially if she assists during training sessions as a lot of people seem to headcanon oof)

Grace is their mother and finally in the wake of Reginald’s death she has a chance to,,, figure out who she is - outside of both Reginald and the kids themselves. She was programmed to love them, but I think she chooses to love them anyway bless

and just that scene where she asks Diego if he thinks the girl in the portrait feels lonely like OOF just tear out my entire heart