A/N: WELP. WELP. HERE WE ARE AGAIN, GUYS.

What a complete idiot I was to think that my Wreck-It Ralph mania had subsided forever. What. An. Idiot.

This story is pretty different for me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's an AU, which I've never actually taken a serious crack at writing before. Secondly, I am making A SEVERE, DELIBERATE ATTEMPT at writing shorter chapters, and not letting it get freakishly long and out of hand. Thirdly . . . and I can't stress this enough . . . this is straight up a strictly-for-funsies fanfiction, which I really wanted to write, but am determined not to let get in the way of more serious projects. To wit, I am not going to impose any kind of update schedule on myself. I'll try to get new chapters written when I can, but I just want to let you know at the outset that I can make no promises about their regularity.

All that being said . . . it's great to be back! I hope you guys like this one, and that the AU isn't too jarring or confusing . . . please let me know what you think! I tried to exposit some of the tenets of the AU as naturally as possible in this chapter ( and there will be more in the coming chapters ), but if you have any questions or confusion, ask away and I'll be happy to answer!

Disclaimer: All copyrighted characters are the property of Disney.

Here's To You

Chapter 1: Prologue

'Nov. 3, 1948.

My name is Ralph O'Rei - '

He paused suddenly, the tip of his pencil hovering over the first line of messy scrawl on the page. He frowned down at the words for a moment, then turned his pencil around - somewhat clumsily - and erased what he had written. He blew away the crumbs, hunched down lower over the yellow legal pad, and began again.

'My real name is Raghnall Clarence O'Reilly . . . but everyone has always called me Ralph.

I am a demolitions man working for the - '

He paused again, scrunching one half of his face in frustration and breathing a sharp exhale through his nostrils. This was already turning out to be more difficult than he'd anticipated. He erased most of the second line, and replaced it with a single word.

'I am a wrecker.'

He found himself unconsciously pressing the tip of the pencil down harder and harder as he went, etching the letters darker and deeper into the paper.

'Matter of fact, I lied. Nobody around here calls me Ralph . . . they call me WRECK-IT Ralph. Cute little nickname for me. Why? Because I wreck things. Professionally. That's really the only honest way I can think of putting it. The company gives me a title and a desk and tries to pretend like my job is important but really it's all just a big LOAD OF '

SNAP!

Ralph flinched as the pencil lead abruptly broke under the increasing pressure of his hand, and he realized he had been gritting his teeth and muttering to himself. He glanced furtively around to see if anyone had noticed.

They had not. In fact, none of his coworkers in the slick, chrome-and-linoleum lunchroom of the Niceland Construction Company were sitting anywhere near him . . . it was as if they had all purposefully chosen seats as far away from him as possible, and were even avoiding direct eye contact. Unsurprised, Ralph lowered his brow in a jaded frown, fished his only spare pencil from the breast pocket of his work jacket, and turned back down to his notepad. He took a few slow breaths and tried to write as calmly as possible.

'I'm a wrecker. I work in the demolitions department of the Niceland Construction Co. in Arcadia City, Pennsylvania.'

He thought for a second, then added;

'. . . but really, I guess you could say I am the demolitions department of the Niceland Construction Co. Would they have given me an office if there was anyone else at all they could have given it to?'

Ralph stopped writing and read the sentence silently back to himself, then frowned. It sounded awfully bitter. He leaned one elbow on the lunchroom table and let his chin rest in his palm for a moment, tapping the pencil eraser absently on the page as he thought.

How did Zangief put it the other day? The truth about himself, but . . . with a positive outlook? Glass-half-full kinda stuff?

'I have a - '

He began a new sentence, then hesitated again, wracking his brain for a way to put a positive spin on anything about himself that was also true.

'I have a . . . passionate temperament, you could say. Yeah, passionate is a nice word for it.

. . . what else?'

He paused. What else? What else indeed. He pondered fruitlessly for a moment, then gave up and aimlessly began writing down whatever popped into his head.

'I live alone in a basement apartment on the east side of town. It's a small place. One window. My sink's been broken for a week. I think the super is avoiding me.

I'm nine feet tall. I weigh six hundred and forty-three pounds. I have to have my shoes custom made at the leather mill. I had to provide my own jacket for work because the biggest size the company carries is an 18. I'm not allowed to ride city buses unless I can sit over the axles. I had to have the face of my wrist watch reattached to a belt just so I could fit it around my - '

Ralph stopped suddenly, realizing with an exasperated sigh that he was slipping back into another stream of complaints. He rubbed his face once with his hand and tried to start over on a different topic.

'Anyway . . . my pal Zangief suggested I start keeping a journal, said it helped him sort through some of his problems, thought it might help me with mine . . . not so sure about it myself, but guess I'm almost willing to try anything at this point, so . . . here I am.

What else?

. . . I was born in Dalkey, near Dublin, 1917 . . . dad died when I was four, ma brought us over here to the States when I was seven . . . died when I was fifteen . . . was about that time I started getting mixed up with the B - '

Before he realized what he was writing, the tip of his pencil had formed the first letter of the name he hadn't been willing to utter aloud - even to himself - for the past seven years. Ralph stopped suddenly, his heart giving a stiff thump against his chest as if to remind himself to be more careful. He erased the last few words of the sentence and kept going, his mouth a bit drier than it had been before.

' . . . was about that time I started getting around on my own. Got the demolitions job from old Merrycab Sr. about the time I was twenty-four . . . little old nut said he saw "potential" in me . . . still think he was just trying to save money on staff and equipment. With me on the job, he didn't need anybody else, didn't even need updated machinery. Have to admit, though . . . much as I hate it, it's probably the only kind of work I'll ever be able to get in this town. Suppose I should be grateful.'

Ralph paused, glancing down again at the insubstantial pencil gripped clumsily in his enormous fingers. It - like almost everything else he owned, everything else in the world - had not been made with someone of his unusual proportions in mind. He let out a heavy, melancholic sigh, but forced himself to keep writing.

'When I was born, Dalkey was so small that I was the only Character in the whole village. Ma always said that once we got to America, things would be different, especially in a big city like Arcadia. Said there would be so many Characters here, nobody would think twice about me, even if I was bigger than everybody else. Well . . . she was right, and wrong. There may be a heck of a lot of Characters in this city . . . people with every crazy kind of looks and powers you can think of . . . but I still manage to stick out in a crowd like a nine-foot sore thumb. Kinda glad she didn't live long enough to see me when I'd finished growing . . . she was sure by the time I hit seven and nine inches in high school I had to be finished. Heh. What wouldn't I trade to be seven nine again now, Ma . . . '

"Heeeyy . . . look who it is, boys! Our fearless leader!" a loud voice - which Ralph immediately recognized as belonging to one of his most ardent nemeses, Gene Reynolds from accounting - suddenly called out a few tables away, and was buttressed by a responding chorus of laughter and gaiety from the others. Ralph reflexively glanced up from his writing, but his expression darkened instantly into a flat scowl when he saw who was causing the commotion.

Wishing bitterly that he'd gone out to lunch that day, rainstorm or no rainstorm, Ralph hunched back down over his notepad and tried to look as if he wasn't interested in the social goings-on of the other.

'Felix Merrycab Jr.', he wrote plainly at the top of the next page, intentionally keeping his eyes averted as the short, tidy figure of his boss, dressed in casual business attire, strolled into the cafeteria and was greeted enthusiastically by his coworkers. 'Old Merrycab Sr.'s kid. "Fix-It Felix," they all call him. Guarantee you he never eats lunch alone. Everybody thinks he's such a swell guy, eating down here in the galley with the rest of us poor working slobs, even though he's President of the company . . . sure, I'd come down here every day too, if all everybody did was pat me on the back and laugh at my rotten jokes and sucker up to me like a bunch of - '

"Well, well . . . if this isn't a dandy surprise!"

SNAP!

Ralph let out a startled yelp, jumping three inches into the air and breaking the lead on his pencil again as a bright, cheerful voice unexpectedly piped up beside him. He looked up, and nearly had to pick his jaw back up when he saw none other than Felix himself, standing next to his chair and smiling straight at him. Even when Ralph was sitting down, the President and chief foreman of the Niceland Construction company barely came up to his shoulders. Even in a city that was full of people born with unusual, sometimes downright bizarre physiognomies - like himself - he was one of the most diminutive men Ralph had ever seen. It made the rare, already stilted interactions between them even more uncomfortable.

Evidently unfazed by his alarmed countenance, Felix's friendly smile didn't so much as flicker as he rapped his knuckles once on the tabletop next to Ralph's lunch plate and let out a good-natured chuckle.

"Don't remember the last time we saw you eating down here, Ralph! Ha, guess it's no wonder you're here today, though . . . how about this lousy weather! I had to cancel a lunch meeting over at Sonic Transportation just because I forgot my umbrella this morning!"

Gene, Lucy, Mary, and a handful of other secretaries from accounting seated at their nearby table laughed uproariously at the joke.

"You sure are a gas, boss!" Gene cackled delightedly, then instantly shifted gears and shot a nasty, sidelong glance toward Ralph.

Felix shook his head and waved them off. "But listen to me, going on! . . . how have you been, Ralph? You're doing great work this quarter, buddy . . . and with all the building tear-downs we had this summer! I'm amazed you've been able to keep up with it all . . . and that you've still got any skin left on your knuckles!"

The peanut gallery squawked with hilarity again, but Ralph scarcely heard them. His mouth was hovering open, his stomach knotting awkwardly as he struggled to come up with a response.

"Oh . . . ah . . . y-yeah, lot of . . . lot of big jobs this season . . . lot of . . . knuckle skin . . . yeah."

Ralph cleared his throat with embarrassment, wishing his chair could fall through a hole in the floor. It was so seldom that anyone at work even attempted to engage him in social conversation, he had all but forgotten how to even go about it.

Either oblivious to, or politely ignoring his flustered stupefaction, Felix just stood there smiling and nodding as if they were old friends and Ralph had said something profoundly interesting. After an agonizingly long pause, he finally slapped the table with his palm to signify the end of the exchange, and to Ralph's relief, began inching away from the table.

"Heh, ah . . . sure enough, brother, sure enough . . . well, let's just hope we can keep it up through the off-season, eh?" he grinned pleasantly. "You take it easy there, Ralph! Don't work yourself too . . . hard?"

Then . . . to Ralph's horror . . . Felix paused suddenly in mid-sentence, leaning over curiously as the yellow notepad sitting on the table caught his eye. A look of pleasant intrigue crossed his face, and - perhaps unconsciously - he half reached out his arm toward the paper.

"Say . . . what's that you're workin' on, there, brother?"

Ralph's eyes bugged. Panic seized him.

"NOTHING!" Ralph all but shouted, frantically slamming his forearms down around the notepad with such gusto that his elbow slammed into the mug sitting beside his untouched lunch, knocking it over and sending a splash of lukewarm black coffee all over the front of Felix's white, button-down shirt.

The President of the Niceland corporation let out a perfunctory yelp of alarm and staggered back from the table, holding his arms out and looking with dismay down at his ruined shirt-front, coffee dripping onto his polished shoes from the end of his royal blue necktie. Ralph sat frozen in place, a mortified pulse of heat rising up around his jaw. The entire lunchroom had suddenly gone quiet, an audience of startled and amused eyes staring at them from every surrounding table.

After a few awful, humiliating seconds, the first voice to break the silence was Gene.

"Slick move, you big lummox!" he sneered, hurrying toward Felix with a fistful of paper napkins. "Why don't watch where you're swinging those things? This isn't one of your demolition sites, you know!"

"Now, now . . . it was just an accident!" Felix insisted, dabbing uncomfortably at his shirt as no fewer than three of the women from accounting all flocked emphatically to his side, chattering invariably about club soda.

"Didn't look like an accident to me," Gene muttered provokingly under his breath, shooting Ralph a venomous look that snapped him out of his humiliated trance. His face darkening into a scowl, Ralph angrily opened his mouth and shoved his seat back from the table, preparing to bolt menacingly to his feet and snap back with a cutting remark of his own . . . only to bug his eyes out wordlessly instead as the air was rent by a sharp, violent CRACK. Both of the chair's back legs broke suddenly under his weight, and he went toppling backwards onto the floor with a heavy, clattering THUD.

The lunchroom exploded into raucous laughter.

Ralph blinked up at the ceiling for a few seconds, paralyzed with embarrassment. His face reddening, he sheepishly clambered to his feet amidst a chorus of whooping catcalls from every corner of the cafeteria.

"Hey, Wreck-It . . . Gibraltar called! They say their rock is missing!"

"That the same accident that kept you outta the war, Wreck-It?"

"Remind me never to get in the elevator with that guy!"

"No wonder you're so good at your job, Wreck-It . . . all you need to do to make a building collapse is sit down on the top floor!"

Ralph didn't so much as glance up at any of the hecklers. His brow narrowed into a hard, dark line - a line already hardened and darkened long before by years of learned, calloused indifference - he seized his notepad, grabbed his hat from the other side of the table, and jammed it down over his brow as he stormed angrily away.

"Ralph, wait . . ."

He thought, for a brief moment, that he heard Felix's placating voice struggling to reach him over the din of laughter echoing off the walls . . . but it was too late. He had already lumbered out of the room without looking back, the continuous jeering of his coworkers fading gradually out of reach of his hearing . . . but not out of reach of his heart.

- 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 -

"Man alive, boss! What nerve on that oversized ape, huh?" Gene Reynolds from accounting muttered sanctimoniously. He voraciously continued to apply paper napkins to the front of Felix's shirt as the laughing uproar in the lunchroom had died back down to normal.

Felix rolled his eyes discretely and eased his self-appointed sympathizer's hands away as politely as possible - the shirt was long past saving, anyway.

"Now, Gene . . . come on, you know it was just an accident. Why does everybody have to give that poor guy such a hard time?"

"'Poor guy!?'" the round, dark-haired, mustachioed accountant sputtered incredulously in reply. "Wreck-It Ralph O'Reilly, a poor guy? Listen, boss . . . maybe you just don't see as much of him as we do, working on the top floor and all . . . but believe me, if anybody in this place deserves a hard time now and again, it's O'Reilly! You never saw such an uncouth, inconsiderate grouch around the office . . . and a bully, to boot! A no-good, hot-headed, humorless Mick, boss, that's all he is!"

Felix flattened his brow in Gene's direction, silencing him with a disapproving stare.

"Reynolds . . . I don't tolerate that kind of language in this institution. I will not hear you referring to Mr. O'Reilly by that name again . . . understood?"

Gene's face blanched, his scowling expression quickly blanking.

"I . . . well, I just . . . I only meant that he - "

"Understood, Reynolds?"

"Un . . . understood." He fidgeted sheepishly for a moment, then looked down at his shoes and shuffled back toward his table. "Uh . . . s-see you around, boss."

Felix watched him go, then breathed a long sigh and moved to sit down at the empty table his demolitions man had just vacated. With a worn, weary look, he turned to stare through the lunchroom windows at the cloudy midday sky and torrential downpour outside . . . but in his mind's eye, he was still seeing Ralph O'Reilly's angry, red face.

It had been a little over seven years since his father, Felix Merrycab the First, had hired Ralph as head of the demolitions department for Niceland Construction . . . and almost six years since his father had passed away, leaving sole ownership and control of the business to him, and forcing Felix to abandon most of his hands-on work as chief of construction - which he had loved - in exchange for the executive role of company President - which he had never wanted.

Seven years, he had known and worked with Ralph O'Reilly . . . and in all that time, he felt as if he had never once been able to really get through to him.

Ralph was excellent at what he did, there was no question about that . . . he managed his virtually one-man department with total reliability, and his incredible Character skills made him more uniquely talented in demolitions work than anyone else Felix had ever met. He had saved the company untold operating expenses by being able to demolish entire buildings in days, using nothing more than his bare hands . . . If anyone in Arcadia City was a true Character through and through, it was him.

And yet . . . as much as it stung him to admit it, even to himself . . . Felix couldn't deny the truth.

In some ways, Gene Reynolds was right.

O'Reilly was a bully. He was hot-headed. He got into scuffles, arguments, and even physical fights with the other employees, almost on a regular basis. He incessantly broke things . . . most often by accident, but sometimes on purpose during one of his fits of temper. If his particular job didn't keep him as isolated from the work of the others as much as it did, there was no way Felix would have been able to keep Ralph on at the company as long as he had . . . no matter how much Felix's father had believed in him . . .

. . . or why . . .

Felix sighed again, consciously having to reel his thoughts back from unproductive territory. He was beginning to fear, after all these years, that he had no other conclusion at which to arrive . . . no matter how kind he tried to be, no matter how many times he tried to get to know him or to make him open up, Ralph O'Reilly was simply one employee whom he would never be able to befriend.

And the more he thought about it, the more Felix found himself thinking . . . more often than he cared to admit . . . that in spite of all his talent and ability, even in spite of his tremendous value to the company . . . it was nothing short of an incredible mystery that his father had ever been so insistent about hiring Ralph at all.

- 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 -

As he was reaching for the knob of his office door, something white on the fogged window plate caught Ralph's eye. He paused with his fingers on the handle, his bristling anger stilled for a split-second with curiosity . . . but only for a split-second.

The black letters painted on the glass plate of his door read Ralph C. O'Reilly, Head of Demolitions. In front of his name, someone had taped a piece of paper with WRECK-IT written across it in red ink.

As he looked at the paper, Ralph felt his hand squeezing slowly tighter and tighter around the doorknob until it let out a dangerous, metal krick. The anger searing behind his eyes so hotly that he almost couldn't see for a moment, he ripped the paper off the window and crumpled it into a ball, tossing it on the hallway floor as he wrenched open his door, stormed inside, and slammed it shut behind him so hard the frame trembled.

Once inside his office - his tiny, dingy, dimly-lit first-floor office with the single window that peeked out into the brick alleyway behind the Niceland building - Ralph looked down at the yellow pad of paper in his hand, twisted his face into a furious glare, and threw it as hard as he could against the wall. He tore off his hat and jacket and threw them as well, muttering obscenities to himself as he shuffled sideways around the perimeter of his desk - it filled nearly two-thirds of the room, leaving him just barely enough space to squeeze by on either side with his gut sucked in and his back to the wall - and finally collapsed into his chair.

All at once, the accumulated anger and impotence of the past seven years of his life seemed to come pressing down on his shoulders like a tangible burden. Ralph let out a long, frustrated exhale of weariness and suppressed rage as he shrugged out of his suspenders, rolled up the white sleeves of his work shirt and leaned forward on the desk, slumping down further and further until his forehead was resting on his blotter.

For a long, long moment, he stayed there . . . his eyes squeezed shut and his ears closed, but the dimness and silence of his shabby little office still not enough to drown out the sounds of laughter and mocking.

Seven years . . . seven long years, sitting in the same little dump of an office, the same little dump of a job . . . the same little dump of a home . . . the same lonely, boring little dump of a life.

When Ralph finally dragged himself up onto his elbows and stared unseeingly forward, his head was bleary with memories and contemplation. His insides felt empty.

The next moment, almost without realizing what he was doing, he found himself suddenly opening a side drawer of his desk and rummaging inside it until he found a scrap of paper and a pencil . . . and the next moment, he found himself hunched over with the pencil in his hand, writing again . . . and the next moment after that, he found himself leaning back and holding the paper up to the dim light streaming through the window behind him to read what he had written.

'Nov. 3, 1948.

My name is Wreck-It Ralph. I'm a wrecker. I wreck things.

My friend Zangief says he thinks keeping a journal will help me sort out my problems, so I'm giving it a try . . . and so far as I can see, I only have one problem I need to sort out.

Me.

I'm the problem.

I don't want to be the problem anymore.'