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2025-10-11
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All We Ever Had Was Time

Summary:

Ares shares his first kiss with the woman he was once directed to kill.

Notes:

Thank you Tron: Ares for kickstarting a drive to write something creative again for the first time in many years. 15 years of waiting since Legacy will do that to you.

Spoilers for Tron: Ares.

For context:
This brief scene extension was prompted by my love for the unspoken relationship between Ares and Eve as well as the haunting but beautiful song “Who Wants to Live Forever?” by Nine Inch Nails (featuring Judeline) for Tron: Ares. Seriously, go listen to it.

Trent’s vocals speak to Ares’ curiosity and yearning. His dreams of permanence lead him to question his programming and reject his orders to save Eve.

Can't remember why
Something in my eye
Something in the way it feels here

Something to believe
What I used to be
I just don't know anymore
I just don't know anymore

Saw it on your face
We all know a place
I don't want to be here anymore

Voices calling
Some place I could never go
All I wish I didn't know
If I could stay here
I could find a way somehow
Think I would know better now

The vocals by Judeline reflect Eve’s personal trauma and fear of loss. She knows the fragility of life too well. Now that Ares has found his way into her life, she won’t let him just disappear. She’ll make the time count.

Please hold on to me
All of us are here to die
Stay here inside me
All we ever had was time

Work Text:

Ares dragged himself to the nearest car and collapsed with a groan, exhausted beyond all measure, beyond what he had ever known possible.

The punch he had taken to his gut only minutes ago had made a sickening sound on impact. He could almost still hear the moment of contact in his ears. Worse, he was still recovering from being winded by it.

Is this how they always feel?

His eyes scanned the ruins of the city block that lay before him. Ares couldn’t help but feel responsible for it all. Heat from surrounding fires fueled by gasoline and discarded paper kissed his skin. Their warm glow looked a little too familiar, intersecting lines of orange-red light alternating, breathing, rising, falling.

Despite his best efforts to contain them, the flames of hell had still followed him. Ares knew the etymology of his namesake. No one, not even a god, can escape Tartarus without consequences.

Everything that posed a threat to his existence moments ago—Athena, her guards, the D.A.R.T.—had been reduced to ashy, charcoal particulate swiftly carried into the night sky.

Eve Kim sat beside him, catching her breath. Goosebumps creeped up her back from a sudden breeze funneled through skyscrapers that passed between the fibers of her white dress shirt. She shivered, her skin chilled by the cool metal of the sedan. The adrenaline dump began to wear off, and fatigue was setting in from the crash.

How close was I? If he had been a minute later, if he had lost the fight… If I had run like he told me to…

They didn’t speak at first. They listened to the sounds of a world returning to the User normal—sirens in the distance, car horns blaring, voices stretching across streets from open windows.

Everything was different now. Flynn was right. There was no going back, not just for Ares but for this world he was now part of. The genie can’t go back inside the lamp, Ares mused to himself. He hadn’t quite grasped the meaning of the texts he downloaded as a program during his research on Eve—at least, not until now.

Ares couldn’t go back. He had met his creator before. He had even met his creator’s creator. But neither of them compared to Kevin Flynn, a hallowed name whispered among programs inhabiting the Dillinger Grid. Before permanence was written into his code, Ares felt as though he had gazed into the eyes of God, or perhaps an echo of him, but now, whatever Ares was, whatever he had become, he was more like Flynn than a program.

Flynn had once been nothing more than a man. He bled like any human, and that meant he had weaknesses. He had blindspots. He couldn’t have possibly foreseen the havoc the world of the Grid posed to the world of the Users, not like this. How could he predict that one day the spawn of his competition would be responsible for bridging the two worlds? Did Flynn ever imagine an invasion? Ares’ thoughts returned to the literature of the Users. Frankenstein, a favorite of Eve’s, had become a recent area of interest for Ares. A man brought life to the dæmon because he could, but even he had to have known once it took its first breath that the world would never be the same again.

What am I?
What have I traded for this?
What have I lost?

One thing Ares already missed was the ability to read them, the Users. Something happened the first time he looked into her eyes, Eve’s eyes, when he cornered her at the dock. His calculated mission directives suddenly seemed… illogical. He first detected her body signatures, perspiration, elevated heart rate, and increased blood pressure. All points indicated she was frightened, but there was something else there too, an unrecordable value, an indefinable variable his AI couldn’t pinpoint.

She remained steadfast as he approached. It was as though she were ready to fight to the death in spite of her fear. Ares researched User concepts like the spirit or soul after he returned to the Grid, but it still didn’t reconcile with his programming. Whatever it was, Ares knew for certain that she had something he didn’t. Now, having fought to protect Eve, having shed blood for the first time, he realized that he too must have what she had then—a will to survive.

Even though the actual number was far less, Ares felt as though he had died a million times as a program. De-resolution was not what Users might call pleasant, but as far as they went, the only one he cared to remember, the only one he played over in his head, was when he timed out at the dock. The AI in his programming gathered all available references and points of data on Eve before time ran out on his short life of 29 minutes.

“Empathetic response.”

Athena had nearly killed her. Ares had chased her around the city in a high-speed Light Cycle race, but as he felt himself decay, the matrices of printed carbon matter imploding within his structure, she looked upon him with empathy. Eve had shown empathy for her would-be assassin. Where others would have run at the first opportunity that presented, backed away from Ares as he fell to his knees in despair, longing above all else to exist for just one more minute in their world, Eve—only Eve—stepped forward and approached him with an outstretched hand, consoling a stranger, tendering comfort in place of anger or fear.

When Ares looked at Eve now there were no readouts, no lines of code or computer analyses. There was only her. He didn’t know what she was thinking. He couldn’t even begin to guess, and that was new—a feeling. Uncertainty, the unknown.

Athena couldn’t see what he saw.

“What have you done? You gave it all up. For her?”

Athena didn’t understand why Ares would side with Eve, the target of their directive. She couldn’t possibly understand, but Ares couldn’t quite explain his actions either. What began as a yearning for more time, an existence beyond the Grid, took new form when he met her. Something changed, and he couldn’t put it into words. It was, simply, a feeling.

Eve’s breathing slowed to a normal rate. A soft white glow illuminated her peripheral vision. She felt eyes on her and turned her head to see Ares examining her face, her dirtied, bruised face.

Shit. She hoped he couldn’t detect the change in heart rate when his eyes met hers, how her chest heaved with each breath. Something in the way he looked at her made her pulse quicken. At first, she had felt like a curiosity, an object of fascination. He was just a program when they first met, but he was also a program that read her file, that knew everything about her, including things she no longer remembered or wished to forget. In some ways, he knew her better than she knew herself. And now he was looking at her again, only there was something else behind his eyes that wasn’t there before, and that something made Eve self-conscious enough to pull a few strands of hair out of her ponytail and cover a bruise forming above her eyebrow.

“So, are you human now?” She asked, praying his answer would dispel her anxiety.

“More or less,” Ares said.

Strange things have been happening. I disobeyed my directive.

Ares noticed a lightness in his chest, a fluttering not unlike the wings of the fireflies he watched with curiosity outside the Dillinger hangar. Eve’s face had taken on certain aesthetic qualities he had not noticed before. He liked the shape of her face, the color of her eyes, the freckles that dotted across her nose and cheeks. He couldn’t put it into words. It just was, and he wanted to see her again, all of her. Why would she want to conceal herself?

He tentatively reached toward her face.

Eve’s eyes widened, and she fought an instinct to pull her head back.

”May I?”

Eve nodded, unsure of his designs but excited to see all the same.

His fingers slowly grazed against her cheek as he brushed the loose strands of hair from her face and tucked them behind her ear.

Eve ran her fingers behind her ear as he had done and briefly looked down to smile to herself, hoping he didn’t see the red hue coloring her cheeks.

”Thanks,” she said, almost apologetic for being skeptical of his intent. With all that had happened in her life, cynicism became a useful defense mechanism.

Even though Ares’ face was covered in ash, compared to their first meeting, his countenance seemed softer, gentler. There was something in his eyes that reminded her of Tess before the cancer, before the cruel imperfection of this world took her away. It was something Eve once possessed long ago but had since lost—the naivety, curiosity, and innocence of youth. The death of her little sister imparted an emptiness she had been unable to shake. Tess did everything right, only to wither and die in what should have been the prime of her life. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. Eve had once wished that, as the older sister, she had been the one to die instead. But now that she had been so close to death herself, Eve resolved to make every minute count of whatever time remained of her own life.

A trickle of blood ran down a cut on Ares’ face, prompting Eve to pull herself up into a crouch, reaching over and drying his wound with her sleeve.

If only the board could see me now, she thought, amused by the image of an ENCOM CEO in tattered, stained clothes.

Ares hissed, teeth clenched. Pressure on an open wound was yet another new sensation for him to experience. His hand made a fist. Without hesitation or her tendency to overthink that might have made her talk herself out of such a bold action, Eve covered his hand with hers, gently coaxing his fingers to relax and link with her own. She gave his hand a firm squeeze, and he returned the gesture, intrigued by the sensation that seemed to distract from the sting on his forehead.

“I’m sorry,” Eve apologized profusely, betraying her desire to nurture and protect, to soothe the pain of the program who saved her in the Grid, the man who saved her in the real world and made her feel alive again after years of loneliness.

“It’s okay. It’s not so bad now,” Ares said, a smirk forming at the corner of his mouth.

“Thank you, Eve,” he said, emulating her expression of gratitude. It seemed like the right usage for the first time thanking anyone.

“I forgot how new pain must be for you,” she said.

Ares furrowed his brow.

“Eve,” he said, raising his eyes to hers, “is this all there is?”

Eve wasn’t certain, but she swore she heard his voice waver.

Ares glanced at the pile of ash that had once been Athena, a program like him, gone forever—gone like Caius. 100 percent expendable. Images flashed through his mind, ones he never wished to see and never wanted to see again—a lifeless body on the asphalt, Athena standing above it, programming followed to its end. The body morphed into different shapes. It could have been him. If she hadn’t stayed behind and slid his Identity Disc within reach, it could have been Eve. The Users live so close to de-resolution, only they don’t get second chances. Now that Ares had become something else, neither would he. One cycle. One life.

I always thought it should be called the Impermanence Code.

What could be more impermanent than life as a User, as a human?

There’s no going back.

No more reconstitutions. No more resurrections. No more redos.

I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

Why was he so afraid now? The battle was over. They were both safe. She was safe.

He thought about the first time he felt fear. It wasn’t so long ago. He remembered the moment he was reconstituted by the particle laser in Flynn’s office. It came like a wave.

Eve. Eve’s in danger. Then it crashed on him again when he lobbed his Identity Disc at the D.A.R.T. Is she okay? Eve could have been hurt.

Why hadn’t he been afraid to die when Athena raised her weapon above his head? He was defenseless, unarmed. He was fearful then, but not for himself—for her. For Eve. Fear of failure, failure to keep his promise and protect her.

What had he told Flynn? It’s not about me anymore.

Eve paused for a moment. She turned his face to look at her, and for the first time, he looked frightened. Ares, the Master Control Program aptly named after the god of war, finally got what he wanted—to become one of us—and he was terrified of what that entailed. Pain, suffering, loss, death.

“No,” Eve said, her voice firm and resolute. “There’s pain, yes, and you will hurt and be hurt, but I promise you that there’s more. There’s so much more.”

She hadn’t intended to do it. She hadn’t given it a moment of thought, surprising not just Ares but herself as well. For the first time in a long while, Eve did what felt right. There were no maths involved, no puzzles or equations. It was the simplest thing in the world to do between two lonely people who had been through hell together. She leaned in and caught his lips with hers, holding his face in her hands as she broke the kiss.

Ares wasn’t the best kisser. He had plenty of learning to do, but Eve was more than content to be his teacher.

”What was that?” Ares asked, equally bewildered and fascinated.

”Connection,” she smiled.