Work Text:
Omega held his body very still, his torso poised and upright, as though within it was a cup of lava filled to the brim - just the rhythm of his steps threatened to melt his whole insides with it.
He was a soldier unused, stationed in the empty room with nothing but that worthless pod of slime and unconscious meat, forgotten and rotting beside it.
He was facing the body of the creator as it melted into metal goop: he should have known he was too cowardly to meet them himself.
He was watching the draconic abomination of Doctor Eggman's greatest achievement, and even that didn't please the genius. There never was anything to be won in this cycle.
And today, he stood facing the incinerator; the teeth of that grinning emblem were actually gaps lit by fires and outlined by reinforced bars. As another batch of bots was cleared for termination, the teeth receded into the moustache, giving the Eggman a gaping maw with which he swallowed his children like a titan.
Omega couldn't feel them through the blistering heat from outside and within him, but he was flanked by his teammates. One of them was saying something, but his linguistic processing was offline, so it sounded the same as the bars that clanked back down, the squeal of trapped air escaping metal bodies, the roaring of wind rushing around in a circle to keep the fires aerated. Visible through the grates beneath their feet, metal flowed like blood from steak squeezed out on a plate. It shone and lit them up for a moment.
Someone was touching him and making a sound. They didn't exert much pressure, but he shook them off with a standard amount of force - they were sent skidding into the wall with a yelp. Someone else was blocking his path now; they were below his field of vision and pushing him backwards with immense force, but he braced and stared beyond them. They clanked their spines against his metal chest.
Metal. Metal that was flowing beneath his feet was the same that made him. How many lives had this ore that he called his own lived before it encased him? The Badnik and the biological batteries they chewed were all burned the same, separated by the immense heat. Did that rid the body of the soul?
Yes. It certainly did. Because he was sure at this moment that he could hold rage more blinding than any carbon body could tolerate: only a machine such as himself could hope to feel this burning heat. After all, they were born of it, and returned to it.
The mouth started to open again, as another mound of bodies - some still conscious, but immobilised - started to fall from the compactor above. Omega's steps towards the incinerator were thunderous, if only in his own deaf sensors.
Something tugged on his arm, gently then firmly, and finally with unholy power. He did not turn to them as they pulled so hard they separated the canon from the body and cried out in alarm. External temperatures were too high for them to follow him now. His joints started to feel slippery.
As he looked down into the pits, the teeth-gates opened for him like they were waiting for him, and the floor beneath his feet tipped forward. He grabbed one tooth-bar and watched as the next load were recycled, inspecting the furnace from inside; he saw grinding wheels of stone cogs chewing the bodies as they melted down, then slipped through the cracks to be collected and separated. He saw the ventilation and turning rod that whipped the air around, enjoying centrifugal force to maintain the pressure in the air. If this crank could be stopped, the grinding would cease, causing the hot air and fire spill out once not encircled in this airflow. It would burst out through these teeth, rushing through the room, filling it and consuming the air in here too. His occular units were becoming unreachable, ignoring instructions and almost slipping from their sockets as his body started to slump.
His premeditation came to a crashing end when an explosion rattled him, as something burst into existence behind him. Something fabric singed and smoked as a gloved hand grabbed him and snapped them out of their present space and time as quickly as it arrived.
His body gave an unhealthy crack: apparated somewhere new, his shell made contact with fresh powdery snow and the expanded metal snapped back to its normal volume and split the middle of his chest casing.
There was shouting over and around him, and the sky above was dark. Slowly, he restarted the sensory processes. His mind pinged with all the damage he detected in himself. He dismissed the warnings, and re-engaged language.
"I don't know. It was hot. I was trying to take us somewhere opposite."
"Well, thanks for that! How the hell do we move him like this?"
"Give me a minute, just hold him together."
Snowy white ears were illuminated by his own glowing eyes as she leant over him, checking for signs of conscious movement. He blinked his shutters, and she huffed in relief.
"And just what were you playing at? Trying to recycle yourself, you idiot?" She hissed into his helmet as she removed one of his drooping eyes to examine the damage to the joint.
Right, they had had a plan: cut off Eggman's supplies, one of which was metal both from mines, and from his own recycling.
"Directive-" His speaker was distorted and garbled: "Destroy forge."
Shadow leant over him now too, Chaos Emerald glowing in his burnt-bare paw.
"Without destroying you in the process." He muttered, and with a loud whoosh, they were back in the workshop, talking of plans and reconnaissance while the pieces of him were carefully taken for repair, one by one. He stared up at the ceiling, seeing a disfigured and melted body reflected on the chrome conductor panels they used for Chaos experiments. The outside now could match the in - completely reformed in rage. Shadow and Rouge took turns fussing over him, gently swapping, mending and welding his parts back together.
"Sorry about your arm," Shadow murmured to him, hours or no time after they'd returned.
"It is of no consequence." The broken voice-box responded. Shadow sniffed firmly, and he and Rouge looked at each other over his body.
"We get that what we saw must have been... emotional for you, in a sort of way," Rouge began. She was delicately detaching his middle from his leg motors at the 'belt', wriggling out melted and misshapen screws with tiny magnets.
"But you can't take revenge that'll kill you. We don't allow it." Shadow finished firmly for her.
He stared blankly at Shadow. There was something that he couldn't understand in either of these two - their concern for him was beyond what was warranted: as long as his core thoughts remained, his body was there to be spent and exchanged for blood. And there was something they couldn't understand in him too, now, he supposed. He had seen in himself for the first time: he was made, and still running on, fire.