I promised a-the-shade of tumblr a Flash Man fic quite awhile ago at this point. Hope they like, whatever their tumblr username is now.
"Did you see that?" Flash Man demanded angrily, raising the weapon arm that was still missing its weapon.
When Flash Man interfered in Quick Man's battle with Mega Man, Quick Man had sliced off Flash Man's arm before he could use his weapon – not only that, but separated his legs from his torso. Flash Man had repaired himself enough to get back to base, so he was standing on his own two feet again, but he was still carrying the removed arm in case any of them had missed the footage of what happened.
"Quick Man." Metal Man sighed, frustrated.
The robot in question left the group and walked out the hanger door. He just left. The other robot master just left without a word to explain or try to justify attacking a fellow Wily Number.
Typical.
"He might just have been excited, wanted to fight Mega Man and then when you got in the middle of their duel?" Heat Man suggested.
"Quick Man?" Flash Man stared at him. Quick Man, get excited?
Metal Man sighed again, feeling his earpieces jangle as he shook his head. No, that wasn't the explanataion.
"What do we do about it though?" Bubble Man wondered. "I mean, it's Quick Man."
He'd never cared what any of them thought, and he wouldn't care any more than that if they tried to punish him. Punish him how, for that matter? They'd never needed to discipline one of their own.
"Take his support unit away!" Flash Man demanded.
All of them stared at him. Take someone's robot away? That was harsh, wasn't it? But Quick Man had bisected Flash…
"You can keep it," Crash Man told him. "I'm not getting my base ruined when Quick Man calls the Mecha Dragon to him and it goes out through the nearest wall."
"Come on, are we just going to let him get away with this?" Flash glared at them.
"We're letting the Lightbots get away with it."
Everyone went silent, considering it when Air Man spoke up.
"It did happen during a battle." Metal Man didn't look at Heat Man when he said, "The Evil Chip made some of us a little erratic."
"The LIghtbots were either our enemy or attacked us to help their brother," was how Bubble Man explained the robots they'd saved turning on them. "They didn't attack fellow Light Numbers."
"They didn't have the Evil Chip anymore," Metal Man reminded him. "Shouldn't we forgive a fellow Wily Number more easily than we would forgive an enemy?"
"He could at least apologize!" Flash Man stamped a blue-armored foot on the hanger floor.
"Quick Man?" Heat Man stared at him.
Flash grumbled, but didn't argue the point.
Quick Man could be regretting it, or it might have happened because of the Evil Chip, and he might just not be speaking up to try to excuse his actions. He might have left out of shame, and wasn't a (temporary) exile a kind of punishment? Metal Man wondered if the others were thinking thoughts along his lines.
"I was looking forward to my rematch with Mega Man!" Flash Man went to fold his arms, but it took Metal Man a moment to recognize the gesture when a forearm was missing, held in the other hand. "After he beat me like that, Quick Man would have just ended the fight with one blow…"
Except he hadn't, Mega Man had won.
"You could attack him on your own." The first time he'd attacked with Air Man, the second time Flash had intended to join in Quick Man's battle. Not that he would attack Mega Man now, Metal Man knew. Attack a fellow robot master without a reason like aiding Dr. Wily or rescuing Mega Man's brothers from the human facility that was going to destroy them?
"If the humans order Mega Man to attack us again you'll have your chance for a rematch, Flash," Wood Man spoke up. "We should be working on fortifying new bases for rescuing other robot masters, not fighting amongst ourselves."
Metal Man nodded: that was his opinion, but he was glad not to be the one to say it for once. Being the oldest was an irritating amount of extra work at times – it wasn't as though Dr. Wily had organized them, when he was busy building them and designing the base and satellites. Now he was in that jail, and until they had the spare time, energy and resources to break him out instead of focusing on their own survival as ordered, the eight of them were on their own. They couldn't afford a fight with Quick Man, of all things. They needed to be united. As united as they were going to get when Quick Man just walked off instead of answering to the rest of them, true, but he'd left his support unit in the hanger, so he must intend to come back to go along with whatever the rest of them had decided the next move was, at least.
"Next time I'll take Mega Man apart piece by piece with my own two hands," Flash Man said, and licked his weapon with…
Why had Dr. Wily given him a tongue that could stretch out that long? That many points of articulation seemed excessive. It must require a lot of lubrication to function at all.
"What?" Flash Man said, looking at them. "Humans lick their weapons sometimes in TV shows."
Oh. Well, that explained the licking. It raised the question of why Flash Man was emulating human behavior in works of fiction, but most of the time weapons were used, they were used by humans, so they might know something about it, although Metal Man would pass on damaging his tongue on his own master weapon to see if there was any positive effect on their airspeed or some other aspect of their performance.
Still didn't explain Dr. Wily's sometimes questionable engineering choices, but Metal Man had given up on understanding his builder's mentality (other than the fact that he was a human) a long time ago.