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Zero is dying.
Zero knows that he’s dying because it’s logical that he is. It doesn’t feel like anything but in general falling never feels like anything unless there's resistance.
And he's not making any effort to do so. It's pointless. Ultrasonic sonar modules in the aural cones wrecked. His faux-nerves are so shot that his pain sensors fell along with them long time ago. The world beyond the world is on fire and his photoresistors have given up. Hygrometers, barometric pressure sensors, communications network channels – every part of him peaking at critical damage before shutting down one by one, valiantly fighting the inevitable to the bitter end because that man designed him to be a juggernaut.
But there’s no surviving this. He’s falling apart along with the rest of the sky.
Zero believes in his abilities, not miracles. He doesn’t need to run any calculations to know that he won’t make the fall. Ragnarok was 36,000 kilometers high and he’s falling at approximately 1,358 kilometers an hour. It’s a testament to his determination and his design that he manages to will his body to twist around, wrangling his protesting gyros in the process, so his back is no longer facing the Earth. The Crimson Hero has never looked away from death and now is no different.
It’s at that very second in the center of the roaring noise and screaming debris, of fire and metal and pure destruction tugged down by the brutal force of the velocity, that Zero never felt so still.
The world…is blue.
It’s so blue it almost doesn’t make sense. Ever since he reactivated he’s barely seen that color. He’s spend so much time on it: traversing brown, barren wastelands, walking in grey steel corridors, and everywhere he goes there’s always black smoke choking red skies – the same palette of death and drudgery that Zero never thought twice of.
And yet somehow. Despite everything. The earth is still blue. It always has been.
What he always fought for…it never really changed.
“Zero…”
Zero can see his skin melting away before his eyes. He’s honestly impressed that his optics are holding up so well, but he’s not sure if they’re connected to his processor properly because there’s no way X is here. There’s no way the cyber elf is here with him, staying in place in his vision at the speed of his descent. X can't be talking to him because even if he is, there’s no way for Zero to hear him when he's more of a metal husk than an android now.
X is humming a lullaby. He’s stretching out a hand.
Impossible, Zero thinks.
Zero reaches back anyway.
His vision is finally gone but he can still see X’s ghostly blue form overlaid with the world in his mind's eye. It’s the last thing model DWN.Infinity sees before he shuts down for good.
Falling back to the world and falling back to X has always been the same.
