#the malware recovery arch

[fiestylittlebeetle]

What if I had Mal relapse just a little bit

Basically Azmuth comes to earth and someone has the brilliant idea to get him and Mal in a room together, cause it's been maybe a year and a half sense Mal started recovery, and he's been doing great actually

And maybe that person thought they could just talk ya know, make amends

Mal isn't having it. The moment he sees Azmuth its on sight. The anger consumes him, that little pilot light ignites a full blaze of rage.

He goes for it, he lunges and raises a fist to smash azmuth where he stands, luckily Ben is around and a couple others, they brought aether too for moral support so he's there

Ben snatches azmuth out of the way and Everyone immediately tries to get between him and Mal, and Mal is right about to split them like the red sea. Practically roaring in fury at them, and at Azmuth, like how DARE he show his face, how DARE they bring him here to see the one thing he hates more then anything in the universe. He felt betrayed by this

Aether grabs him up from behind to get him away, but Mal doesn't really realize who's lifted him and in pure reflex, to defend himself and get away he swings back as hard as he can and knocks Aether HARD in the face and to the floor.

And oh boy, when Mal, blinded by fury looks over at whoever had grabbed him up ready to deal another lethal blow, and sees Aether laying on the ground holding his head in one hand, he freezes

The rage is still there, he is blazing with it. But the cold creep of guilt rises to join it. He didn't mean to strike aether like that, he wouldn't have done it had he known it was him. Would he? He's unsure now

He looks at the faces of everyone there, everyone who helped him, aether on the ground. And he flees.

He runs. He takes his rage and his guilt and he runs. He's furious, he's furious at azmuth, he's furious at them, and he's furious at himself right now.

The worst part is he can feel the old him, rumbling to come out, to lash out at the world around him, to rip it apart and everyone in it. And it starts creeping on him

But it doesn't feel like him anymore. It's a beast inside him. And it doesn't like what he's become either, for different reasons.

The old him thinks he's pathetic. he failed once at peak power, what the hell makes him think he can do anything now. He was weak enough to lean on other people and now he's to pathetic to even face them again. What's the point of even going anymore, he should do both of them (his old self and himself now) the favor of just dying.

And it pisses him off more.

Anyway, he ends up in some salvage yard and is wrecking anything he can get his claws on, trying to think of what to do, where to go. Under the full assumption that he's returned to where he's started and burned it all to the ground.

I think this would be the ideal time to have my "malware gets kidnapped by Khyber as a trophy" idea I had.

Khyber finds him there, been tracking him sense he ended up alone again, and away from others made it the perfect time to approach.

He tries to flirt his way in at first, maybe even offers to help him again. Mal even considers the offer, remember his touch. But he also remembers when Khyber ditched him and left him at Ben's mercy. And he gets angry

Straight up tells Khyber to go fuck himself, that he's just as much of a two faced snake as anyone else. Throws him to the side

Khyber isn't having this. But he also planned what to do in the event Mal rejected his offer, and captures him through more forceful measures.

Meanwhile.

After Malware had taken off naturally everyone is a bit shocked. Pointing fingers. Azmuth snidely remarks that of course malware would behave this way, he can never change. Ben takes this with a more then a grain of salt. He reminds himself that azmuth cant always be trusted when it comes to other people, and he remembers what happened with Kevin too. But he still heirs on the side of caution about the situation

Aether is fine, just rattled by the hit he took, didn't realize Mal had that kind of force in him still. And although he is hurt emotionally from being struck by the person he cares about, he's also worried.

Everyone goes there own way. For a couple days Aether doesn't see Mal he assumes he went back to the tennyson house, and wanted to let him have his space, and his own too.

But Mal isn't there, in fact Ben, Sandra, and Carl assume he may have returned to Aether's home instead.

Aether tries to message Mal, contact him to see if he's at least ready to talk.

Nothing

Asks him to please let him know he's okay

Nothing.

Just say anything

Nothing.

A week passes and Aether can't fucking take it anymore. He's worried beyond belief. He ends up going to the Tennyson house to ask Sandra if she's seen him

Nothing

He asks Ben and rook of they've seen him.

Nothing, and if he really did relapse completely they definitely would have heard something.

Now it's a hunt. What happened to malware. There's been no destruction, no one's seen or heard from him. It's like he vanished into thin air.

They end up going to Gwen and Kevin. One them is bound to have some kind of idea. Gwen gives tracking him a shot, by now she's been learning allot from Bezel, and Spark making it easier to learn how to connect mana and machines

And it kinda works

Anyway after a bit of running around here and there, they do end up tracking him down to Khyber's ship. Finding him contained in an electromagnetic field. Beat the hell out of Khyber, and release Mal.

He's, not doing great. He's been trapped with the two worst people he could be stuck with for the past week. Himself, and Khyber. Thinking he'd lost everything again, failed at life a second time.

He feels guilty about lashing out even though he STILL believes in wanting azmuth to die. He feels guilty for everyone else though

Thinks he can't go back, thinks he doesn't deserve Aether's companionship anymore. He was born a monster, he became a bigger monster, and he's still a monster

Obviously everyone disapproves of this mind set. Especially Aether, Gwen, Kevin, and Sandra.

And ya know, none of them are therapists, but relapsing is normal. Even Kevin admits to his own relapsing and look where he is now.

It's a hard pill to swallow. Mal apologizes to Aether for striking him, he genuinely did not want to hurt Aether, never thought of hurting him on purpose.

Aether forgives him cause he believes what he says. (And Mal is telling the truth)

No one is gonna try and bring Azmuth around in Mal's presence again for sure. Lessons learned all around.

[dalishthunder]

WIP Wednesday Thursday

Tagged by the wonderful @totally-not-deacon

I tag... um... hmmm fuck.... I genuinely cannot think of anyone who would really want to do this, the only one I can think of is currently on a sabbatical

I have finally gotten off my ass and begun writing again! What a wonderful thing! Have some All Around the Mulberry Bush teasers

__________________________________________

The lock clicked ominously as you dead-bolted it; Shades already shut, router turned off, unplugged and covered in foil for good measure, phone powered down in the other room. The wireless card removed from your test laptop. You were not taking any chances tonight.

You put the tupperware lid down on the table, pulling your gloves over your wrists with a snap.

“Safety first,” You muttered as you adjusted the straps of your goggles so they were snug against your face.

You’d already gone ahead and installed SystemRescue as your OS on your test laptop just for the occasion. Sure, you may not have been as familiar with Arch Linux systems as you were with Debian or Ubuntu based distros, but nothing else came with such a robust lineup of repair tools preinstalled. And the likelihood that something would infect this PC with malware was incredibly small.

You could do this.

There was nothing to be afraid of.

In fact, Fazbear should be afraid of you.

You adjusted your mask so that it wasn’t fogging up your goggles, and turned your test computer on. You’d already learned your lesson when you’d extracted the drive from the crusty old laptop… there was no way in hell you were letting that thing touch your crappy little coffee table again. Gingerly you placed it on the tupperware lid, plugging it into the cable.

Of course your computer didn’t detect it….

You sighed, pulling up the command terminal.

Well, it was showing up in lsusb….

That was something at least.

Nothing in fdisk or lsblk….

Diligently you tapped away at your keyboard, trying out a few commands.

You reseated the cable a few times, leaving it unplugged as you typed in the command to load the usb storage before you plugged it back in.

“C’mon babygirl….”

You licked your lips as you heard the hard drive whir to life.

You were a goddamn wizard.

It still wasn’t loading, but there was no doubt that the disk was corrupted. So you pulled up TestDisk and began the slow process of recovery.

You created a log, documenting everything you were doing.

Someone had to.

You opened up the drive. Multiple partitions…. More things to go wrong.

No.

More things to go right.

[fiestylittlebeetle]

Malware for 16 and 18 on the headcanons list?

I did say I was gonna do them for GC/recovery Malware so

16: anger headcanon

Malware is generally just an agitated person at any given time. Relaxing is not his forte.

At his peak his anger was the raging fire that kept him going, not being angry was like taking away his will to live. He is a rage chaser too, if he's pissed he'll look for more things that keep him pissed and stoke the flames. He was living for the rage

Post series (GC) as of waking up from being petrified he's still angry most of the time, but being in basically a coma for 6 years and having most of his body destroyed, and his only goal in life set back to square 2, he is exhausted. He's burnt out. Where once was a raging wildfire desolating anything in its path, is now a pilot light trying to boil a pot of water.

18: Favorite possession headcanon

Hmmmm I never came up with one. Honestly In my recovery arch for him he's probably have something, maybe from Sandra, or from Aether. But I never thought about it before so I don't really have anything.

I should definitely come up with something. I'm always into coming up with new stuff to spark joy and a will to live not just be alive in him

[Send me a character and a number for a headcanon]

[fiestylittlebeetle]

Had a tiny idea for the malware recovery arch based on my Mechamorph sleep patterns headcanon

Basically: Sandra unintentionally deprives Malware of sleep because she keeps waking him up by human time standards (thinking she's helping cause having a regular sleep pattern does help with mental health) but what she's basically subjected Mal too is the equivalent of taking periodic 2hr naps instead of getting a solid sleep

She and others definitely notice he's not doing great, maybe even falling asleep standing up cause he hasn't gotten a full 20 in a couple weeks. He hasn't said anything cause he's withholding as shit about his health and also in general ever since he's been in this rock bottom low of his life, and he's trying to follow his strict instructions of behaving himself or get petrified again.

He does inevitably just snap after the third week of it cause it's like going to long without sleep. He can't process information anymore, and he is starting to think about just hurting them. So he somewhat aggressively is like "stop waking me up. I need sleep. I need more sleep then humans, let me SLEEP for fucks sake. I'll wake up when I wake up. I need to S L E E P"

Thankfully someone else also breaks it to Sandra that he needs a fat 20hrs of sleep and he'll be fine for a few days.

[fiestylittlebeetle]

So I unironically put Exogenesis Symphony parts 1 and 2 on Malware's (1) and Ben's (2) playlists

Now I LEGALLY have to make a playlist for Recovery arch with part 3