Sinking slowly to his knees, Nihlus ignores the pain that arced up from his ankle. He can barely feel it anymore anyways. It didn't matter.
Rinzler steps back from him and he forces himself not to try and reach out, hand hanging in the space between them as the seconds ticked by. Eventually, he places it against his lap, claws curling into a fist hard enough that they would've cut through his palm had the glove not been there.
Would he have eventually given Rinzler death, anyways? Once the Voice had eaten through everything, burnt the last traces of his doubts away, would he finally have realized that the enforcer was too dangerous to keep around?
Or perhaps a fate worse than that? What would he have done if he'd succeeded a week ago? Kept Rinzler some kind of facsimile of alive, deprived of limbs, caged and chained down- just for the sake of keeping him 'safe'?
He remembers that panicked whorl of thoughts, staring down at dimmed circuitry then- just before he'd started cutting. Before he'd taken the disk.
The disk.
"I'm sorry," Nihlus whispers again, softly, voice shaking with self loathing and a quiet, bone-deep horror. He doesn't know what else to say. Doesn't trust himself to say anything else.
There's a wretched, monstrous little part of him that knows exactly what he'd have done to Rinzler, given enough time to crack the program's admin code.
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Rinzler steps back from him and he forces himself not to try and reach out, hand hanging in the space between them as the seconds ticked by. Eventually, he places it against his lap, claws curling into a fist hard enough that they would've cut through his palm had the glove not been there.
Would he have eventually given Rinzler death, anyways? Once the Voice had eaten through everything, burnt the last traces of his doubts away, would he finally have realized that the enforcer was too dangerous to keep around?
Or perhaps a fate worse than that? What would he have done if he'd succeeded a week ago? Kept Rinzler some kind of facsimile of alive, deprived of limbs, caged and chained down- just for the sake of keeping him 'safe'?
He remembers that panicked whorl of thoughts, staring down at dimmed circuitry then- just before he'd started cutting. Before he'd taken the disk.
The disk.
"I'm sorry," Nihlus whispers again, softly, voice shaking with self loathing and a quiet, bone-deep horror. He doesn't know what else to say. Doesn't trust himself to say anything else.
There's a wretched, monstrous little part of him that knows exactly what he'd have done to Rinzler, given enough time to crack the program's admin code.