Archive of Our Own

Jaybot Hotdogfingers stands in a golden niche in a golden wall. Jaybot has always been standing in a golden niche in a golden wall. Any memory of a life before slips away from her, distant like what she has been told dreams are upon waking.

And then, abruptly, Jaybot finds herself in an office, a stack of crates behind one side of a desk, Jaylen Hotdogfingers sitting on the other side.

"Yes, she's the one you took by mistake," Jaylen says, presumably mid-conversation. "She's the one I want you to unvault."

"The legend has already been preserved."

Jaylen sits straight, staring the crates down. "She's not the legend. I am. Take me."

"Unprecedented."

"I am offering you the Jaylen Hotdogfingers of the Discipline Era. The star player. The murderer. The POD, the Hall Star, the flickering pitcher, twice-dead and twice-resurrected. You do not need an unrelated batter who wears my name."

"The Historian asks questions of motive."

"I may have made her, but she is a person of her own. She doesn't deserve this. Let her go home. Let her return to the garden she was made of."

Jaybot finds herself unable to make a strangled noise of protest, let alone say anything to dissuade Jaylen. She desperately combs through her memory banks, trying to figure out why anyone would do this -

(Jaylen places a hand on the trunk of a young sapling in the Garden. "Is this one okay?" she asks, with what Jaybot later learns is an uncharacteristically somber tone.)

(Jaylen sits next to her, tinkering inside her with a screwdriver, and says "Sorry!" when Jaybot's buzzer protests that she's put it somewhere sensitive.)

(Jaylen carefully places her blaseball cap on Jaybot's head, tilting it just so, saying "You're going to do great" with a nod of encouragement as Jaybot goes out to her first game.)

("She doesn't need to pitch if she doesn't want to," Jaylen says, once the stats make it clear that Jaybot is not nearly as good at pitching as either of them would've liked her to be. "We'll figure something out.")

("Gloria told me you wanted to talk," Jaylen says. "I'll figure out how to get you a voicebox. Hopefully you don't forget what you wanted to say by then.")

(Jaylen is surprised that Jaybot has a different taste in videogames. "I didn't know -" Jaylen starts, before stopping. "Well, what do you want to play instead?")

(Jaybot asks why she exists, at which Jaylen closes her eyes, an unrecognizable expression passing over her face. "Nobody else could help me," Jaylen says, and then mutters almost too low for Jaybot to hear: "I shouldn't have done this.")

Meanwhile, Jaylen taps her fingers impatiently. "...So?"

"Investiture."

Jaybot recognizes the gold that slowly creeps up Jaylen's form, toe to tip, and cannot tear her eyes away.