Apologia pro Gloriis Belli

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG
IDW/ RID
Metalhawk
spoilers? might be triggering for PTSD.
for hc_bingo prompt 'homesickness' and tf_speedwriting 'a deserted public place at midnight'

Metalhawk  felt the uneven updrafts bump over his wingpanels like a map of the ground below—churned, charred, uneven. A planet nearly dead, clinging to life.

They all were, every one of them.  Autobots, Decepticons, unaligned. All just wanting to live, but no one knowing how.

Over the smooth pulse of his engines, he heard the rustle of the fastnesses below, the steel-limbed cilia the planet had sprouted rustling, restless in the darkness.

In the camps, everyone slept, except the Autobot patrols. And the counterpatrols the camps had generated, to keep an optic on the Autobots. Armed neutrality.  Metalhawk understood it, the mistrust, but that didn’t mean he liked it or condoned it. The Autobots, his former faction, had proved they could not be trusted with power: random searches, bullying, beatings for missing some ‘curfew’. As though they were the law, the only law. As though justice bore an Autobrand.

On nights like tonight, he needed to get away, free of the narrowness and suspicion.  He’d left the Autobots—fled, some would say, and he would not waste his energy arguing—to find his own way.  And it had brought him home.

Home. Or what had been home, once.

The wilderness gave way to the regular bumps of a settlement: a city, it seemed, or what was left of one. He could feel the sharp grid of updrafts, the last of the day’s heat rising from the streets, funneled up the ragged height of buildings.

He circled, idly.  It was nearly time to head back, if he wanted any rest at all before morning and this was as good a place as any to turn back.  Metalhawk spiraled lower, letting the smooth sheets of his wingpanels ride the bumpy air, smooth it out, lower him groundward.

There, a plaza or square, or what was left of one: a rubble-strewn geometric opening. He dropped lower swinging his legs down, unfolding into an easy upright landing. 

A square.  He felt the Ardurian marble beneath his feet, still cool and fine grained after all that had happened. And a dry fountain, rising to hold a statue in a pose of frozen power.  A rich plaza, a display, not some small, local market, then. 

Metalhawk turned, his feet crunching cinders and plascrete into the marble, surveying the square.  There, a corner of shops.  And over there, a dais from which a crowd could be addressed, or, in less official times, a musician might play, a religious zealot preach, perhaps a Cyberutopian. Perhaps a Militant Monoformer displaying his removed cog.

He moved to the dais, stepping up the low risers.   And you, Metalhawk? If you were to address a crowd now?  What would you say? What would you have said back then?

Back then.

He shook his head.  Back then, he was an idealistic fool, who had rushed headlong into battle, believing Megatron to be a rank terrorist, believing the Autobots to be all that was virtuous and noble and good.  And believing, above those, that he, Metalhawk, was destined for great things, that combat would ennoble him, enshrine him as a hero.

Perhaps he’d been a hero. He didn’t know. He didn’t know then, and he knew even less, now. He fought with all the reckless ardor of youth and faith, and felt it squandered. He’d seen, slowly, so slowly he was embarrassed to admit it, that fighting did not enoble: it brutalized, it numbed. Combat made violence the only answer to every question.

He could see it in the Autobots now, in Bumblebee’s oppression, in whatever dark game Prowl was up to—the same impulse, the same reflex. Because it was ever so much more conclusive to kill than to compromise, after all.

Oh, he knew that all too well, had to fight his own centuries of that belief every day.  But that? That was a battle worth fighting. While the battle that had taken this beautiful plaza and turned it to this grey ruin…was not. Nothing was worth this: the staring, vacant windows, the battered foundations, the walls, once bright with murals and mosaics, reduced to grimy heaps, smoke-scored and ugly.  And there, a fountain flowing from under the feet of some bronze cast ancient Prime, the water long evaporated into some yellow-black stain on the white basin. 

That, he thought. That was the only thing with any truth to it left: a Prime, an autocrat, flush with power, standing amid the ruin of his city, everything turned to stain and ruin.

Metalhawk felt a knot of pain in his throat, looking around, forcing himself to see. This is war.  Not honor. Not glory.  Not ‘right’. This is war: destruction, mechs forcing their will onto other mechs until…nothing is left. This is what you have done. 

And the best this forsaken place could hope for now was to be razed, turned under and rebuilt, all the stories lost, all the history, the truth, the lesson, buried, lying in the darkness underfoot.

Metalhawk lowered himself to sit, on the dais, not trusting his shaking limbs to hold his weight, nor the ground to tolerate his presence: he was, after all, one of the ones who had done this.  Oh, not this city. Not this square, perhaps, but that hardly mattered. He’d been in hundreds of battles.  If not this city, another one bore the mark of his false-righteous wrath. 

And the city might by buried, the history concealed, but Metalhawk would know it, would have to walk every day of his life with that knowledge of what he’d done.  The city could be built anew, new frescoes on the walls, new water glittering and splashing in the fountain, the marble clear and polished, reflecting up the happy faces of bustling mechs going about the business of living, but there would always be that gulf, that distance between the past and the present and the knowledge of his part in ruining it all. The sun would always shadow him for his past.  Or worse, shine on him in bland forgiveness, tempting him to forget.

He felt a clutch at his spark, like a giant hand, squeezing, imagining the city as it must have once been.  They could build it again, repopulate it, reanimate the scene, but it would not, could not, be the same. Not for him. 

The worst kind of homesickness is being home and realizing that you are the one that is out of place.

If he had to speak right now, from the dais of that ruined square, in the middle of the dead city, all he would say, all he could say, with all the force of his being, and thrust through tears, would be, “I’m sorry.”

Comments

[mmouse15.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was a really interesting character study.