Work Text:
Metallic
"Gemerl, it's okay. I promise- just leave me here."
"No. That is against my duty. That is against my programming."
That is against me.
Before he knows it, he is carrying her off, and he doesn't know where to.
He scans his memory banks for something familiar, somewhere safe for her. But everywhere safe is destroyed now.
Cream hasn't spoken since they started off, after realizing that her pleas for him to leave her were futile.
Gemerl processes things in the silence. Wonders to himself if he'd do this if he were Mobian- if he felt these emotions that so often tripped up the mortals. Would he be as self-sacrificing as she- coming along with him despite the fact that he alone could have handled it? Would he have stayed if it were the other way around?
He has no way of knowing. Maybe it's just a pointless thought used to complete the silence.
Fear must be a terrible thing, but she had overcome it for him. And he was certain he would do the same if he were in her place. He hoped.
He looks back down to the rabbit in his arms, scanning over her vital signs to monitor her health. The metal virus is slowly taking over her flesh, and he feels a sense of mechanical failure for not completing one of his most basic protocols. He was to protect her at all costs and now-
He supposes he would feel sadness, if he were Mobian. The sorrow that she had been suffering for the past days, weeks. He only knew that it was a heavy burden upon her- upon all of her friends. And that heaviness that changed her- it had felt like a failure to his protocol, too. This unshakeable sense of failure had grown gradually stronger in his system lately, until he was sure it could be classified as an "emotion", according to Mobians.
But who was he to judge what an "emotion" truly was or wasn't? He was only a machine, a product of these superior creatures with senses, with feelings, with knowledge learned and not programmed.
It didn't matter. He wasn't going to fail his protocols again. He wasn't going to fail his Cream.
As he searched the grounds below, bustling with bodies of metal and the shine of their skins against the light, he could find no safe, green area.
And he wondered. Maybe against protocol.
Now that so many mobians had contracted the metal virus- what separated him from them?
Was their mobianity so thin a line that only a drop of a metallic illness caused them to become only machines? Was his non-sentience such a thin line that if only he were to have flesh and emotion- that he would be Mobian?
This thought process came from somewhere in his files, his drive, that he was certain he wasn't meant to access. He kept his sensors sharp on the mission, but he couldn't steer himself away from that curiosity.
How Mobian were the metallic zombots below? And how Machine was the robot that flew over them?
Did their "programming" cause them to lose that Mobian identity? And if that was so, why had Cream and Sonic been so careful with them?
When Sonic turned into a zombot fully, would he still have that courageous, witty, hero inside of him? Or, in taking away his free will to think, to feel, to act, did he lose all that had once made him?
Maybe that's all Mobian life was after all. Freedom. And without that, nothing more than him.
He dreaded the thought of Cream becoming one of them- if dread was the correct word for it. When her mind could no longer make the choice to discern, that sweet rabbit he had once been missioned to protect would be nothing more than he. And he. He only served to protect her- and the Rabbit family- that was his sole purpose in operating. He didn't want a Mobian like her to have limited goals and limited…"dreams" as the Mobians called them. He had never had a "dream" his entire life.
So he wouldn't let that happen.
The rabbit girl in his arms groaned suddenly, reminding him to make haste at it.
He sped up, becoming erratic in his constant swivelling to find safety, to find home, to find-
"Gemerl."
He faced towards her, still flying.
"Cream."
"I-I'm scared that- that-"
Her face was taking on a new sort of expression, one he had not seen on her before. He scanned his memory banks for any information he had on this Mobian expression, and found his only matches did not belong to the Mobians.
"What is it?"
"I might not- I don't want to hurt you, Gemerl. I really don't! But I'm scared that- that- it's going to be soon and I might try to push you away or-or-"
It was a Mobini look. That pale, sharp expression of instinctual panic. Typical of the prey that, if she were born Mobini, she would have taken the shape of.
"Do not worry. You cannot hurt me. I am stronger than you."
"But Gemerl- Gemerl are you sure?"
"Affirmative."
"Ok, ok, it's just-" She was making that noise, in her throat. Those liquid signs of sadness were spilling from her sight receptors. "I'm scared, Gemerl. I'm really trying to be brave. But I'm scared."
"It is ok, Cream. You are still brave, even in the presence of fear. You are doing very well."
She was sobbing, so she didn't speak again.
Gemerl supposed it must have felt to her as they described impending death. The uncertainty and fear of the unmindfulness that follows. He had never felt it before, of course, and he knew he never would. But seeing it displayed in his purpose gave him what could only be described as a pang of metallic panic. That soul-searching mission that all machines "felt" with what they had. It was like having a hard drive pulled. Without it, there was nothing.
No instructions, no will to move, no need to exist.
He could only describe it as "panic"- as that was the only term that the Mobians had given him to define it. He looked at the rabbit girl and watched her cry.
"It is okay. It is okay. It is okay." He kept repeating it, because that was the only way he'd witnessed Mobians giving comfort. The only words he could figure out to say.
She was succumbing quickly, and he felt his engines die down.
He landed in the forest, no signs of Mobian life.
He kept reciting that phrase, until she slipped away from him into that metallic state.
Until she became like him, and he became like her.