Judgment

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG
IDW/G1
Ironfist
spoilers for LSOTW

written for tf_speedwriting  prompt 'judgment'

 

Ironfist didn’t hate the pain as much as he’d thought he would.  The cerebro-bullet worming its way further into his cortex, firing off, burning out, random traces of memory as it moved: his lab, sterile yet somehow comfortingly familiar; his first meeting with Prowl.  Random flashes of sensory input: a red-gold sunrise over Cybertron, the smell of oil, scorched energon, and something that Verity called ‘perfume.’  Sounds or echoes of sounds, too quickly fired and faded to be identified.

They weren’t hallucinations, just memories fired by the bullet’s passage. Random, disruptive.  Bits and pieces of the life he was slowly leaving behind.  Fragments, shards of sensation he was losing.  Losing himself, piecemeal.

He wondered if he was still…himself.  How much he had to lose before he’d no longer recognize himself.  Who was he without these flashes of memory, flaring up before burning away?  He wondered if he was even himself when so much of his cortex was filled with Aequitas, a pressure like wet lead in his processing. Slow, grey, lumbering.  Judging…everything.

He couldn’t bring himself to be with them, the few survivors. He’d mumbled some clumsy excuse, and they’d believed it. They’d taken it to mean it was too painful to see those who had survived, still scarred, crippled, half-reassembled at best.  They’d presumed it mean that their damaged presences reminded him too sharply of the lost.  That he, the novice, the armchair warrior, had had his first taste of real combat and had been surfeited with its horrors.

He let them believe that, let them think him a coward, weak.  Perhaps he was.  But the bitter truth, the one he would pay anything rather  than have them know, was that he couldn’t look at any of them anymore without that hateful wet heavy voice of Aequitas  murmuring judgments at him.  This one had murdered; that one had stolen; this one had… on and on, an endless, endless litany of crimes and transgressions.  Painting them as evil, needing to be punished.

It even ruined the memories of the dead.

He’d hear their names, or think them, and Aequitas would extract from his own cortex their biographies, their histories he knew so very well.  It…miscolored them, cast the Wreckers as criminals, dissidents, undesirables.  Thugs and nothing more.  Judging solely by deed, not motive.  It was…hateful.  It was a pain worse than the slow acid crawl of the bullet in his helm.

He…had agreed to it, though.  Of course. His grand adventure.  Blaze of glory. A chance to be useful, to do something.  To be part of history instead of merely its archivist. 

He didn’t mind that he was dying.  He didn’t mind the pain. Others he’d seen die worse, uglier deaths.  What he minded was that his death wasn’t a hero’s death.  It was an accident combined with an overstress to his cortex bringing Aequitas back with him for…whatever purpose Prowl intended. He’d believed when he’d agreed to the mission, that Prowl would do something grand, something vital, with Aequitas.  But now, he had lost even that. And losing that faith, that belief, made his suffering the squirming of a beast instead of the noble endurance of a hero. 

History would judge him a stooge or an incompetent.  And that judgment, to the historian, was even worse than the weight of Aequitas.