Author's Note: This is not intended as Decepticon Propaganda; Flatline is just out of his tree.
Reading of the Transformers Movie comics (specifically Foundation #1 and Tales of the Fallen #6) are kind of necessary to knowing who the fuck I am talking about; reading more than that will help bolt down some of the other scenes and incidents mentioned, such as Megatron's home nursery adventure.
I have always loved this character, and nothing saddened me quite so much as most of the parts they intended him to fill getting cut for expediency. That they showed his work, but not him, just really breaks my little fanboy heart.
This drabble doesn't even know what a Beta reader IS.
Desperation
Desperate times called for desperate measures. It was the mantra of the Autobot cause it seemed. They rallied and clung to it, hoisting it up to bookend their choices, their actions, their gross calamities. They hailed it as a war cry, and with that war cry they had doomed the world.
Once he had walked among the glowing egg sacs and murmured lovingly to the forming hatchlings. Someday, he would tell them, you will be Seekers, or Builders, or Medics, or Soldiers. Someday you will be Scientists and Civilians and Protectors. Someday you will be the blood of Primus' body, making this world live and thrive. You are the future and oh, you will all be beautiful. When they were born, he thought that he could see that message flickering in the new lights of their optics. It warmed him. They were children of Primus, of their batch initiators, of their Spark-parents, of their cities—but first of all, most of all, before it all, they were his. He nurtured them from batch initiation to hatching, carefully feeding, carefully monitoring, telling them always of the brightness of their futures. If he ever saw them again after that it was only because they had come, perhaps, to claim a hatchling of their own, and he did not recognize them nor they him, but he knew. More than three generations he had nurtured and raised up from primordial fluid into the first chaotic moments of birth; glorious generations, some bringing the brightness of their new sparks into a dark world in desperate need of life, some reaching for the new sun and destined to outshine it. He had hoped to see many more.
But no. Desperate times had forced desperate measures, and the walks had become grim marches through the dark, his prophesies morbid. Someday you might have become Seekers or Builders or Medics or Soldiers, he told the sacs, their contents dulled; milky and foul. Someday, you might have become Scientists and Civilians and Protectors. But now you lie stagnant and clotted. Now you will only be dead forever, an army of the unborn. This is the future and oh, it is terrible. Primus' body was a dead shell made more gross by its brief renewal, His Immortal Spark set loose to the stars by the rallying cry of 'desperate measures', and so the hatchlings remained dead shells as well. No more were they filled with the new Sparks of proud parents—parents too busy with war and treason to worry about who would come after-or the sacred AllSpark. No more did the energon flow easily into the hatcheries to feed and nourish and grow them. He monitored them as carefully as ever, but saw only more death. Death everlasting. The Dark Cycles had returned, barren, lifeless, dooming. For this time, there would be no Prime and no return to glory. This time, they would have no end.
And so Flatline had made his choice. The military brand glaring on his red medic's paint; the new field medic training, the arts of amputations and limb replacement and battlefield processor extraction glaring on his lifelong role as a peaceful nurturer. Desperate times. Desperate measures.
But the surgery wasn't so bad anymore, even growing on him eventually once he realized it was just manufacture—a primitive and crude method of making new lives, but still a method of making life-on a smaller scale. Not building new lives, just nurturing the ones that already were. Some of the younger Protectors had grown in his hatchery. He did not recognize them and they did not recognize him, but he knew it, knew that it must be true. So he applied the EMP and suppression overrides—gently, so gently, to take away the pain—and he stroked their heads gently with one pair of hands while the other patched their processes and melted or welded their limbs as needed, repaired severed tubes, replaced shredded wires, murmuring to them all the while you are a Seeker or Builder or Soldier. You are a Protector. You are the blood of Primus' body, the last precious lifeblood sustaining this world. You are the future and oh, you are beautiful. They looked up at him with their dulled optics and he thought that maybe then they remembered, if only for a short while; they remembered the egg sac, the hatchery, the time when they were not the Protectors but the Nurtured. That they remembered, and felt safe. That even those he was forced to offline and strip for scrap understood why.
The Protectors all understood, of course. They valued life—valued the hatchlings—as Flatline had once thought only he was capable. Before his tragic disappearance the High Protector (Lord High Protector, he still had to remind himself even after so long), surely a greater Prime than Optimus could ever dream of being without the blasphemous hubris toaward himself the title, had even asked Flatline to help him rearrange his quarters in the new base at Kaon as a small hatchery so that he could know the new generation himself. To see them into the world; to share the military's resources and his personal resources that they might not starve and die in the sacs during this bleak new age. Even knowing they would not, could not all grow to be part of the Protectorate or even his noble cause, he had asked for this! Wanting only to know and nourish not only those who would someday serve him, but those he would someday serve. The Lord High Protector's top communications officer also did his part; coming time and again to seek out hatchling protoforms from the decaying stews of their egg sacs and fill them with new sparks—Flatline was always cajoling Soundwave to let him meet the bot's mate, if only to congratulate the both of them for their obviously glorious and fulfilling Spark-Bond, and the strength it must take to maintain it in such trying times-giving them lives they would no longer have been otherwise afforded. It filled Flatline's spark with hope for the future. Perhaps under Lord Megatron's guidance, they could have an age where the sky was dark but their lives still united and their young still free to flourish, despite the best efforts of the Autobot resistance. Perhaps all these desperate times and measures could not truly still the the great Spark of Primus; perhaps it was not in some artifact to be callously thrown away, but glowing within them all.
He wanted to believe this. He believed this. Desperate times. Desperate measures. Desperate faiths. He applied the EMP and suppression overrides gently, so gently, to wounded Decepticon and Autobot alike. He told them they were all Protectors, yes, protectors of life, the last source of life, of the Immortal Spark, taking the pain away while he stripped out their wires and working parts, siphoned their energon and neural fluids to give to the well or growing. While he patched the core processing wires of the crippled defiant against the functioning loyal, rewriting the one as the other. When he wrenched the living sparks from their cores and transplanted them into the tiny, lifeless protoforms in the sacs that they might—even if they only might-live.
For each protoform he could not save, he assured himself, he increased the chances of every other. For each protoform his frantic experiments destroyed, the others were so much more likely to someday light their small optics. Will yours be red when I give you life? He always asked them when they lay dead on his table, flayed and pinned and precious on his instruments. Will they be blue, or green, or purple, or yellow? And will you be a Seeker? Will you be a Builder, or Medic, or Soldier? Will you be a Scientist or Civilian or Protector? It doesn't matter because we are all Protectors now. You will be the new Spark of Primus' body, making our world live and thrive. You will be the future and oh, you will be beautiful. And when they did not live despite his efforts, he asked the next. And the next. And the next. Someday one of them would answer him. Someday one would answer him and then he would know how to save them all. Every Spark and processor he shattered was for that. Every hideous Gestalt monstrosity he grafted together from the dead was for that. Every fallen soldier he sustained by splitting their consciousness into armies of half-sane beasts was for that. For he loved them, the children—the living and the dead, the born and the created-and the Protectorate understood that. They had given him this outpost to work in peace, after all. They had given him so many of his precious children to revive as new soldiers, staring down on his fluid-slick workstation with their sightless infant optics; so many prisoners to build their new bodies from.
Sometimes he walked among the cells and murmured to them lovingly, like his hatchlings; their gazes dull and broken, almost childlike themselves. Sometimes he stroked their heads with one pair of hands while the other pulled them open. To pour the words into their sparks. To let them flow through the energon tubes and infuse them. You Seekers, and Builders, and Medics. You Scientists and Civilians. I will make of you all Protectors; you will restore Primus' body, His lifeblood. You will be our future. I will make you our future and oh, I will make you all beautiful.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. As their warcry, it had doomed the world.
As their sentence, he would find a way to make the words save it.