Ep0 - "Talking To Yourself" - Closed

“‘It’s going to stop’?” he repeated, tilting his head fractionally. He did not move from where he stood across from her. The long stretch of her shadow was laid out from her pedes to his, throwing Barricade up like her own silohette against the wall. He flickered like a bad television signal as he shifted, flickered when he blinked and the fractional moment where the fired red glass glow of his optics vanished so did he. His EM field was a miasmic seethe, coiling around her and settling into her plates. “Femme, I was designed to kill your kind. My function for the past several millennia has been, specifically, the killing of little intell bots like you… but in the case of the Lucky Thirteen I hardly had to lift a finger to slaughter you all.”

He shrugged, blinked out, was there again but sitting against the wall, casual as he’d been in the brig. He mimicked her hostile stance, sitting back to the wall, legs apart, arms draped over her knees but where she was tense he was slack. Where she was wound tight, he was lazy. Smiling where she scowled.

“He let me kill you all… He let me. You were his team of toy soldiers and he spent your lives like cheap credits for his own benefit.” He smiled. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

“And after that?” asked Barricade, his face obliterating in static then flickering back again to wholeness. His dark red optics didn’t waver from her, staring with unblinking fixation now on the Impala bot. He didn’t move unless she did now, cycled his vents in sync with hers as he addressed the more pressing question that was, to him, the core of Shadowrunner’s problems. His smile was lopsided, his tone that of someone asking an obvious question.

“Say you do it. Say you catch me, split me open, and I beg you to kill me before the end and then you make me regret every eon I’ve lived and you get your revenge in the name of the Bot that sold out the lives of everything you ever fragging loved…”

He sat there, staring at her, smiling a little. “What do you do after that?”

Barricade was gone.

“’No after.’” He murmured this against her right audio, crouched now directly next to her, one arm braced against the wall directly over her head. He leaned against the cool solidarity of the concrete at her back, EMF curled into hers, finding and syncing easily with the ragged jag and flux of her field. He was near enough the heat off his frame could be felt, the soft click and hum of his engines clear as the words he dropped against the side of her helm.

"Okay. Then do it.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice as he closed proximity, until he was whispering. “Kill me and then you can stop, Shadow. Clear both our records.” He placed a claw at his own belly, dragged it from dark abdominal plates to his throat. “Split me open.” He laughed. “Then make it thirteen for thirteen.”