Disclaimer: I don't own the picture or Cyberpunk 2077
Observe and Protect
She watched him. She always watched him. And she knew he was aware of it.
Her eyes were transfixed on him. He, in response, slightly turned his head towards her, his stoic, masked face regarded neutrally for a brief moment, then looked away again.
She didn't even know his name. All she knew was that he was the one who had brought her down.
She never remembered slaughtering the people in that street. She didn't remember what motivate her to do it. She disdained meatbags, humans with no robotic augmentations, as much as the next psycho, humans with lots of robotic augmentations, but she had never felt a hatred to kill them. She also didn't remember what she had done before that night, or anything at all for that matter. Her memory was blank.
She had no past.
Her memory started with her kneeling in the rain, in river of blood unleashed by her own hands, which wear caressing her own arms that hid the blades beneath that did the deed. She remembered Night City's finest standing firm, firing wave after wave of bullets at her to no affect.
She lifted a hand and felt the rough scrape where one round had done little but scrape away a small piece of what passed for synthetic skin, breaking the facade of a human revealing the monster that hid beneath.
She looked up at him once more. He had been standing behind her, wearing that same expression. The tactical googles he wore gave his face an inhuman green-eyed look to it while his mouth, the only human part he revealed, seemed chiseled in stone to forever that small, serious frown.
What had shocked her more than anything was his audacity to stand right by the monster that had slaughtered fourteen other humans like him in the street and show no fear as he held a gun to her head.
His actions had won him no praise but rather frustration from his superiors. While in the holding cells at the police station, she had smirked as she listened in on their conversation of the Lieutenant shredding the cop over his reckless actions and how he had endangered himself and showed disregard for his orders to be cautious against a psycho.
The officer's calm retort of "taking control of the situation" and pointing out how she had easily slaughtered people who were had a distance as demonstrated by the bodies in the street and the SWAT officers she intended to add to her count. Not to mention his point-blank range shot would assure a kill, unlike the useless rounds his colleagues had shot at her.
Despite all the points he made, his superior had calmed little. His next declaration resulted in the one time she had seen him show any emotion. The Lieutenant ordered that with her, the very android that could have killed him, was reprogramed to assist the police and would be assigned to his unit, and as his new partner no less.
He immediately protested with measured emotion. How could she be trusted all of a sudden? The superior officer assured that she was now safe, and that despite her crimes, she was the perfect match to him. Who else besides a psycho would be more suited to combating other psychos alongside him.
The "Psycho Squad" as they were evidently known, we tasked bringing down those like her. Her own induction was her way out of forced decommissioning. Now she was his protector. A protector whose charge didn't trust her. It bothered her little. She simply went along with it.
One thing she had learned about him was that he was different from most. He seemed to defy the world around him, hold it at bay. While most meatbags indulged in the tech-savvy modernity of Night City, he seemed to resist it. His mistrust must not have ended with her, although she had nothing to prove this. Sometimes she made up fantasies about what he was like under that mask, like she was now.
Her fixation on him could be best described as fascination, she supposed. Perhaps she found him even... appealing? To feel something like that for a meatbag...
As the vehicle they now sat in rumbled on, she glanced at him once more. Above them, a song from his playlist echoed around the metal car. Bullets, was it called? An appropriate song for their dance.
He investigated, searched, and resisted, and she protected... and watched him.
Behind her, she felt a machine place a set of googles like the ones her charge wore atop her head. They 'binged' to life, and now she saw the world through his eyes.
End.