Title: Shatterpoint: Hate

Author: AotA

Rating: T

Warnings: Angst, Prowl hating that he can hate anything in the first place

Characters: Prowl

Setting: tf-bayverse

Summary: Prowl was never made to feel emotion, but he could overcome his revulsion over being able to feel by loathing those who made him do so.

Notes: This is sort of an homage to Hearts of Eternity's preprogrammed tactician Prowl, but instead of Prowl being the one to decide he wanted to learn emotions, they are forced upon him.

( "I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do so. I do not know, but I feel it, and am in agony." ~Unknown )

Prowl slumped against the wall, head bowed as he blocked out the world. It was not a physical ailment that plagued him but one of the spark that left him feeling as if something had shattered his armor, ripped through his internals, and tore open energon lines.

A pool of regurgitated unprocessed energon glowed dimly on the floor and traces of it dripped down his chin.

He felt raw inside and his spark felt as if a Decepticon had trampled it beneath barbed tank treads, and then backed up to repeat for good measure.

He hated that he felt and he hated that he hated it.

Prowl wiped weakly at the energon that was on his armor. He longed for the early days when he had been not yet had emotions thrust upon him. He shuddered. He was not made to have emotions but while he had come online blessedly pure of such things, the upheaval had seen to it that he received them. Still, the war and his emotions were sparked of the same crèche and there was no being rid of either, short of death or reformatting. Even those harsh measures carried no guarantee of freedom from them.

Prowl shuddered again. He had developed a method that allowed him to sublimate the emotions that he felt, for a time. They were stored in a buffer to be reviewed later. Prowl only wished that there was some way that he could empty the cache without ever having to review it. Reviewing it left him a wreck, sick at spark wishing that emotions had never been inflicted upon him.

He had to feel them eventually and when he was able to feel he almost didn't care that he was a coward for hiding from his emotions, alien and violently disruptive as they always were.

Emotions were insanity and Prowl, on the better days counted himself luckier than his brothers in whom the insanity had taken hold and destroyed them utterly. On worse days, he wished that the madness had rewritten him too so that he would no longer be left in his miserable, tortured existence.

Prowl staggered upright, leaning heavily on the wall for support. He may despise being able to despise something, but if there was one entity that could make him override his instinctive revulsion for emotion, it was the ones who made him what he had become, the ones who had taken everything from him. That entity was made up of Decepticons and among those Decepticons counted his brothers, each and every one of them now driven to insanity driven brutality.

He hated the Decepticons with everything that he was. He would make them feel every bit of rage and anger and fear that they made him feel. He would make them dearly regret having ever made emotion so much as brush him. Prowl would make them feel his every pain.

Tempered against the maelstrom that was his emotions once more, he moved onward, slowly and painstakingly, but forever onward. He was an Autobot now and while they were different than what he was used to, he had responsibilities that needed taking care of.

One day, if he survived to see the outcome of the war, perhaps he would be able to find a medic who could remove them. Until then he could only keep walking forward, no matter what obstacles blocked his path.