Third Kill Closes the Circle

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

R
IDW/Megatron Origin
Megatron
Spoilers for MO, issue 2-3.  Canon character death.
for tf_speedwriting  prompt "initiation"

 

It was the lesson you taught me, Megatron thought, kicking the fallen form of Clench.  I have had my use of your lessons, have outgrown them. The faded metal crunched, as if death had rendered it brittle and dry.  More likely, Megatron thought, sucked hollow by greed.

The victor, always, is he who does not fear to strike.

I do not fear.  Not to strike, not to be struck.  I fear nothing anymore, as though the capacity has been beaten out of me.

 I remember fear, though. I remember when fear controlled me, when it forced me to act, to strike, back at the mine, when they announced its shutdown. It was fear that whispered in my cortex that I was as good as dead, fear that fed my anger and told me that a fast death was preferable to the slow humiliating starvation that confronted me.

I did not expect to survive. 

That was the first kill. To kill in fear, and rage; to lash out, helpless in a maelstrom of emotion.  To not even think of survival, throwing everything aside in blind need, so ridden by emotions that it must come out, that one’s pain must be thrust outward, onto another frame. In a sense, pure, though brutal.  To be blind to the future, because the future was too horrible to bear.

It was new to me, as though blazing new pathways through my systems.

The second kill.  I hestitated, balked.  Because the death seemed needless to me.  Pain? Pain was one thing. All life, to an extent, is pain, and when one signs to be an Arena fighter, pain is one’s daily wage—it was like that in the mines. The mines were merely factories in which our pain was transmuted into energon ore.  Our pain fed the machines of the rich.  And the same in your Arena, Clench.

That’s what you paid us for. We sold ourselves cheap. To you, Clench. We no longer fed the machines of the wealthy.  We simply glutted your coffers, happy enough for our daily rations, for the momentary exhilaration of victory—the closest I had ever come to the light.  Buried in the mines, I was naïve.

My second kill, I learned.  Do not hesitate. Do not let anything hold you back. Self-restraint is a weapon that can be turned against you.  Hold yourself back and you merely hobble yourself before your enemies.  Hold nothing back. Nothing. Hold on to no illusions save that of one’s omnipotence.

I shed my vestiges of civility, and gave in to savagery. 

And I was but a savage.  Used; my pain the profit and entertainment of others.

And now…you.  The third kill. Not the third I have ever killed, only the third that actually matters. Between Cy-Kill and you…a sea of nameless death, purpled in energon, crying out wordless words of pain and damaged systems, sparking and guttering in flickers like shooting stars. 

With your death, with this kill, I reclaim myself. A savage no longer. I will kill no longer for entertainment, for sport, for a channel to shape the formless violence that roiled within me.  I shall become a weapon. I shall choose my own targets, my own challenges, my own reasons.  Your kill matters, because your kill ends your hold, ends your control over me.  And more than that, your death has ended the waste. You allowed us to maim and kill for money.  Prostituting our agonies. Before the future was unbearable. I claim that now, as well, and find it a greater strength than any I have seen before.  The future feeds me more than money ever did, more than the temporal thrill of combat.  

 That ends with you. An initiation rite performed on the bodies of the fallen.  And we can take what we have learned, the lessons from all these deaths before. We can make those deaths matter, as we turn our violence into the flames that shall heat the crucible in which we will purify our future.

 

Comments

[crimsonseastorm.livejournal.com]

Oooh excellent 8D I love seeing the growth from one kill to the next, the change in what it means to him; it's very interesting. I'm a sucker for Origin fics XD

[okkkkay.livejournal.com]

((Does LJ have a "Favorite" button? Seriously.))


Come here, Tarn. Read this piece for me. The whole "Third kill", not just a quote. Read it for me, Tarn. And I will die happily.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

I also changed tags since this posted. Check continuity: idw also :)