This is what dying feels like.
That's what Rafael calls it. We call it offlining, but maybe I've spent too much time on earth. Enough that offlining doesn't seem to really encompass the true meaning of what's happening to me. "Death" as he calls it, is the end of a living thing. Offlining can be prevented, if the spark is protected, but death is final.
It's not a guess or an assumption, either, I know. I came as close as you can get to a snuffed spark back at Tyger Pax. This, this is further than that.
And that's where the first shot sends me. I leave the platform and the saber and the screech of battle behind, and I'm back in Tyger Pax. Back in Megatron's grip.
I can feel his claws tighten around my throat. The metal crinkles and crumples and the wire pop as his servos crush my audial sensors. I kick desperately and scrabble at his arm, but he just keeps screaming "WHERE ARE THE AUTOBOTS?"
I tell him nothing.
I never thought I would be back here. Cybertron was so dead when I left. So broken and barren and lifeless. I never thought I would see Tyger Pax again, not even burnt out and smoking like it is now.
He just keeps crushing and screaming. I laugh at him- it's weak and broken and I can't control the pitching or tuning anymore, but he can tell it's a laugh and he clenches his hand until finally I hear a snap, and I'm broken. Energon is pouring from the cracked unit, and all around me I can feel shards tinkling down against my shell.
I'd tell him to frag himself, but I can't. My optics are flickering in and out of darkness and I want to tell him that the autobots will always have the honor he abandoned, but I can't. My voicebox just makes these electric whines and bursts of static.
Everything is fading when the second shot hits, and sends me to a concrete canal beneath a bridge. To just outside Jasper, Nevada. To the ground, beneath screeching tires and stomping metal stabilizing servos, while a tiny voice, so much smaller than even the smallest bot I've ever met, screams "Get away from him!"
To a tiny road beside a tiny school in a tiny town in a tiny dusty earth desert, where that same time voice tells me he doesn't quite know why he can understand me, but he does.
To a Decepticon warship where I'm straining desperately against Megatron in my brain. A Cortical Psychic Patch in my servo and the overwhelming desire to plug it into Megatron's body and bring him back. To a tiny, fragile creature that I could crush between my servos who grabs the cable screaming with the kind of reckless bravery evn I still struggle with. The kind that got me into this situation in the first place.
To a stretch of road beneath dark clouds, where that tiny fragile creature lies motionless in my backseat and the stench of dark energon still pours gaseously from my engine. To a missile silo where a tiny fragile creature lies on a cot, still motionless, as the colour drains from his face and his breathing gets shallower and shallower.
And the third shot brings me back the deck of the Omega Lock. To glowing cyber matter and screaming friends and the fire and agony in my spark chamber as the familiar flow dulls and fades. Brings me back to the place I'm going to offline, to the place my team will offline because I was to slow to get the saber to Optimus, to the place the Autobots are wiped out, to the end of the human race I've worked so hard to protect.
My optics flicker and fail and the world goes wet and dark.
But not silent. Never silent. In my failure I'd not earned silence.
My audio sensors are filled with screaming and the dull roar of liquid. I'm back on cybertron, in the energon sea, before the war drained it. Before the war.
It's warm against my shell. I had forgotten how warm liquid energon could be, when there was so much of it. The seas of earth are so cool. I had nearly forgotten how much I have missed my home on Cybertron, before so many millenia of war burned it to a husk of death and despair.
I want to go home.
I look up, and there's Megatron- or Megatronus? I'm not sure when this is, but he's here, and he's standing with his back to me on the rim of the dock.
The water is warm but the memories are hot. The memories of my offlined friends and comrades, my crushed voicebox, my nearly killed human charge. If my mind has taken me back to the beginning of the Great War to end it at least in my own spark before it began, it is a kindness. I had always wondered what it was like for one's spark to extinguish. On the left is the Star Saber, a gift from my own mind.
It is cool in my hand, like the seas on Earth. A world I should have been able to protect.
I scream his name, the name I have known him by. The name of the bot who took my home, my friend, my voice, my new home, my life. He turns, that hate and contempt still bright in his eyes as my sword sheaths itself in his spark chamber, where it belongs.
"You took my voice. You will never rob anyone of anything, again."
There is no energon sea. There is no dock. There is no Cybertron. There is only the Omega Lock, the Cybermatter, and the very real Megatron, the very real Star Saber, the very real energon leaking from his spark chamber.
The very real hole quickly vanishing from my well-lit spark chamber.