Shall I be the Last to be Crucified
By: Lady Virgo

He had long since stopped counting how many years he'd been alone. After the first 20, anyway. He still kept track, but it wasn't something he kept a conscious track of. If consciousness had anything to do with it.

If he could be considered alive, he would've died long ago. Mentally, if not physically. Were he alive, he probably would've killed himself after the first five years if he would've survived that long as a common human. Were he alive, he might even be a real he, but that was a given.

And if he were alive, he might never had been dead inside. Or maybe he still would be, the cross he was forced to carry because he could never purge himself of his sin of selfishness.

Shadow scowled to himself. Were Quick still around, he'd berate him until his ears fell off.

If he were alive.

If he could've been alive to begin with.

He needed to stop thinking about it. He just needed to stop, period.

Quick was a creature of metal, as much as Shadow. He- /they/ were never really alive, just animated. So why should he keep being considered 'dead' in his mind?

Because he couldn't run anymore. And how he loved to run.

But now, buried under all that dirt, he has no room to move, no place to go. Where he is, he can't breathe, let alone run. It was the last place someone like Quick should be, but it was all Shadow could do for him.

Why?

He wasn't human, so why give him that ritual burial? He was never alive, could never be alive. But Shadow, some where deep down, believed no one could be more alive than Quick. With a ready smile and personality, exuberant, easily excitable and just as easily annoyable, he was the one that brought out the aliveness in them all.

And now he's not 'not alive' and it made Shadow feel even deader to the world and to himself. Those emotions Quick evoked out of him, all the little things within that could make Shadow almost fooled himself into believing he might possibly /be/ alive went away just as suddenly as Quick. Just dimmed out, cracked and got locked away in a little, itty bitty box somewhere deep within that Shadow had forgotten that he had forgotten about it.

All these years, decades of being alone and all he did was just wander. He found some familiar faces, ripped to pieces and metallic bone by angry and frightened mobs, burnt, crushed, smashed. Others having just shut themselves off permanently, locking their consciousness away somewhere even they wouldn't be able to find should they want to have found themselves again. And others lying about in the open, in junk piles, leaning against bulkheads, internal systems decayed and unpowered.

From the count he had developed, analyzing the Robot Masters' positions during several key points in these so many years, they were all gone.

In the first years, the more viscous and easily influenced of the Robot Masters killed each other and several others off. Then came the humans, finally finding some artificial courage to battle with the weakened terrors. And then, over time, natural disasters caught several Robot Masters off guard. What, with Dynamo setting off bomb after bomb high into the troposphere and Napalm sending off warheads one dozen after another at the moon in an uncontrolled rage, the earth's weather and polarization changed. Many people died more from the affects of the acid rain and thick sulfuric clouds while the sudden earthquakes would swallow the Robot Masters like metallic candy and hurricanes tearing them apart with the ease of a child and straw dolls.

Shadow had finally come to the count, after so many, too many years of isolation, that he was the only Robot Masters left.

All he had done for years, keeping up with the forever shifting world around, was try to find the only other that had to be alive. After all, Shadow was. So the original had to be still.

...right?

So then where was he? It never took so long to find him before, no matter what the problem or the distance. He always knew where he was, but not this time. This time, he couldn't imagine. Just what could've happened to Blues?

Shadow began to get anxious. The first time in too long. Where could Blues have gone?

Blues had to be alive. Shadow was, Blues needed to be as well. Quick no longer was, taking away Shadow's own life. So once again, Shadow had to define himself through the one he was copied off of. Because it was the only way to define 'being alive'.

Feet crackling on rusted beams echoed his own in the abandoned flat of once was a warehouse district. He stopped and the feet stopped. He strained to listen and something, far, far within, hummed. He could feel it, a faint kin-ness. He could feel he and the other connect.

They moved forward slowly, mirroring each other in a way Shadow hadn't done since shortly after Wily's death.

From behind a tilted rafter, he caught the gleam of red armor, shinning like blood.

He stopped. They stopped. And they watched.

Shadow saw the blue-green eyes peering at him, thrumming the familiar strands faintly, deep within.

But it clouded over, and Shadow felt the emptiness return. He clenched. So... that happened.

Zero narrowed his eyes at the short robot, a tickling in the back of his mind almost making him wince. A sorrowful, amused attachment, a possessive, hateful anger. It pulled apart at him in a means never before felt.

"Do I... know you?" Zero asked carefully.

The little robot just shook his head, turning to walk off. "No."

"Wait!" He called. "Who are you?"

Shadow turned back, all life and thought of life filtering out of his body. There was no place for him here, no one for him to exist through.

"Dead."