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He didn’t expect it to end up this way.
He didn’t expect the lady to make it all the way back to him after some of the testing chambers she’d been put through. There were burn marks on various places on her body from the lasers, cuts and bruises from falling, but her expression, as usual, was as determined as ever, her slate-gray eyes staring up at him and almost, almost making him scared.
He didn’t expect her to even come close to beating him, especially because of what she’d just gone through. It was easy; perhaps easier than their first confrontation when he was almost flung into lunar orbit. She had outwitted his moronic ideas again, leaving his chassis mangled and all of his power revoked. It was disheartening, to make an understatement. He was back to his old self; powerless at the hands of someone much, much greater than him.
He didn’t expect her to forgive him, either.
He never- in a million lifetimes or more, even ten to the power of one hundred lifetimes- expected her to sign out it’s okay to him, then to sit down in front of his paralyzed machinery and look him straight in the optic. Her determination had faded away, and then she just looked... sad. Sad and pitiful, stooping down so low to forgive something like him. To forgive a moron. The dumbest bloody moron who ever lived.
“Why?” he asked, weakly, through shaky breaths that were completely unnecessary.
Everyone deserves a second chance, she signed.
He glanced downwards, closing his optic a bit out of shame. “Not me.”
Of course you do. You can do better. She had to have been lying. He was never going to do better. He had never been better.
“I don’t believe it,” he whispered softly, his vocabulator slowly going offline with the rest of his dying body. A shock of immense pain shook him as more of his mainframe went offline, sending sparks raining from the ceiling of what used to be Her chamber.
He didn’t expect her to curl both of her arms around his chassis and lean her head against his core. His systems sent a few final stimuli responses of warmth and hope and euphoria and system shutdown in t minus thirty seconds.
“It’s okay,” he thought he heard her whisper, gentle and soothing.
“I’m sorry, love,” he thought he said, and by that point, he was so tired he didn’t know if he responded or if it was just his mind tricking him. He just wanted to sleep. He had been through so much- too much for an insignificant Personality Core to go through. It was exhausting.
All that he knew in his final moments of life was that he was home. He was safe in her arms and forgiven and maybe even loved. He was happy for the first time in so, so long...
The lady didn’t move for the next hour, too involved in clinging to his freezing, dead chassis and getting tears in the motherboard of his core.