The scent of blood and a familiar zing! and Gabriel’s already turning. A blur of gold ricochets at him: he looks down at the coin turning circles in his chestpiece. His heart stops for a moment. The velocity of the realization leaves him dizzy.
“Machine,” he starts, with no plan for how that sentence might end. The phone provided to him by the Stars buzzes, and he taps it open cautiously, slowly, half his attention still on the machine’s multicolored arms.
The machine can speak? He’ll think about the implications of that later, when he’s had time, but now he’s only a rush of cold adrenaline. Its presence changes everything—
He turns to the question posed to him. Did what hurt? His humiliation before the Council; being cast out; his pride, ever-burning; the horror of looking back and seeing what suffering he had wrought, and having to live with it. Of course it hurt. He can’t bring himself to say it aloud, the old shame of defeat—and twofold, of who he once fought for—cutting through him.
“You know my answer full-well, machine,” he says, quiet. He isn’t in the mood for whining. His helmeted gaze stays fixed on the machine’s optic as he pulls the coin out of his armor and flicks it back toward the deep-blue metal.
Trying to shove the conversation elsewhere, voice slipping back to its usual haughty resonance, he demands, “How come you get a gun?” That was just unfair.
Surprising no one, the machine is quick to react. The spear glints, but its business-end strike is intentionally without any target, straying off-course.
Instead, Whiplash's cord wraps itself around the coin and pulls it back, the arcade token glittering as it is rolled back and forth across its metal green knuckles. Tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick. Then, like a magician, the coin appears to vanish with a finger-splayed flourish. Not that it expects applause.
Ah, there it was, that uncommon pensive response the Archangel was lesser-known for delivering. Wow, he could get so serious. V1 reasons, then, that it'll probably get away with discussing updog with him later. What's a matter baby?
The question is responded to with body language mocking surprise, as though it's retrieving its holstered weapon for the first time ever: oh, you mean this?
The gun is spun around one-handed, the fun showcase of a routine learned through its own will to succor its boredom. Then abruptly, its hand snaps forward to grip it in a peculiar way: the handle is being offered outward, the rest of the firearm being held such that it would be easy for Gabriel to simply fire Piercer toward the war machine's chestplate point-blank.
But there’s a bit of distance between the two of them. It’s partially a test to see if the Stars had given Gabriel his teleportation back, and to generally gauge his threat level. Also, it’d be funny if Gabriel truly thought he could just walk up and take it, especially out of a machine’s hold.
Knuckleblaster relinquishes its phone to Whiplash's grip, beckoning with two of its three claws to the angel: come and get it, choir boy.