Ten Little Soldiers
AN: The poem prefacing this fic is taken from Tryin' to Get to Heaven (www. fanfiction. net/s/2378745/1/), which was partially the inspiration for this fic.
Ten little soldiers,
All dressed in black,
Tryin' to get to heaven
In a flying sack.
1) Tourniquet has hit the peak of his potential and both he and his superiors know that his best is and will always be unimpressive. He is unsurprised when he is assigned as part of a decoy squadron to lure Autobot attention away from the actions of a spymaster seeking vital information. He smiles wryly before he charges down the hill, hoping that the Autobot rookies are better shots than those of the Decepticons. They aren't. His legs are shot out from under him and he bleeds out slow and painfully.
2) Thunderstrike is on his first mission as a courier. He has to get vital coordinates to the third wing of the air force before the strike tomorrow, information that simply can't be trusted to the easily hacked airwaves. He runs into a trine of Seekers when he emerges from the clouds and curses as he darts frantically about the sky. He knows that his skill is limited: he's built for speed, not maneuverability. When the missiles hit, his optics are blown off-line by the blast. His last moments are spent in freefall, ripping his own wings off in a desperate attempt to get rid of the burning pain of napalm.
3) Endlight is returning back to base after a long patrol. He's relaxed and looking forward to tomorrow, when he'll inevitably be promoted to a higher rank for his performance in today's battle. The sentry mistakes his shape for that of an Autobot's. His partner is promoted in his stead moments after Endlight's impromptu funeral rites. Money secretly changes hands the next day.
4) Timpani hurts more than she could have ever imagined. The little cassette writhes under the minstrations of the Decepticon's cooing torturer. Her armour has been stripped, her wiring and circuitry exposed to the air, and he tickles it with an arc welder in a repulsive parody of interface. He wants the plans she carries in her drives, plans for weapons, plans for war. It has been a week now and she has finally lost hope that she will be saved. When he is distracted, she runs a fatal loop through her main processors, sparking and jerking in a short flash of agony before the light in her optics dies. Her torturer shrugs and rips the processor from her cooling corpse. Intelligence should be able to harvest what they need from her shell.
5) Insight is young, barely out of sparkling-hood, but he has enlisted under the Decepticons. Megatron will restore glory to Cybertron and defeat the stupid Optimus Prime and his Autobots. At least, that's what he believed. It's hard to be naively hopeful when you're lying in a ditch on an alien planet with your wings and comm links shot out. Insight's engine rumbles uncomfortably; he's hungry, but there's no fuel to be found. He can feel the painfully sore rust patches in his cockpit growing as the alien atmosphere eats away at his internals. No one ever finds his body.
6) Tidebreaker has returned from fighting a hard battle. She and her fellow soldiers drink, sing, and are merry. The next morning, her bunk mate wakes to Tidebreaker's screaming. She dies writhing on her bed, foaming at the mouth and seizing. The rest of the squadron dies in a similar manner within the week. The virus seeded in her corpse had spread through comm-link conversation.
7) Redwind is blown to pieces when he trips and accidentally spills his energon onto Lord Megatron's foot. His trainer mutters about the loss of good scrap as they sweep the palm-sized fragments of his body into a pile. They will be melted down and re-cast into blasters. Waste not, want not.
8) Dynamic was eager when her superior offered her a position that could 'only be filled by a femme'. She didn't realize the truth of her assignment until she found herself trapped in a bar in the slums of Kaon, being pawed at by the highest ranking officers of the ground corps of the Decepticon army. Months later, she stumbles back to base, having finally attained the necessary information for her superiors. She has completed her mission, but feels filthy and dirty and used. After searching desperately for a solution, Dynamic purifies herself the only way she knows how: by setting the end of her blaster against her laser core and pulling the trigger.
9) Calypso is on leave when he returns home to visit his bonded and their sparkling. Tsunami smiles when he greets his lover and they interface passionately, sharing energy with wild abandon. Calypso isn't surprised when the afterglow fades and he is greeted by the end of a blaster. He simply wonders why Tsunami had taken so long to betray him as he pulls his own blaster from subspace. They die together in each other's arms.
10) Optimus Prime doesn't want to die. He is a relic from the past, he knows, and not connected to these soldiers anymore. He has a duty to do right by them and so the old must be replaced by the new. Still, there is a part of Optimus that screams and rebels, which has never hated his people so much more than it has now. Doubts whir through his head as he plugs himself into Vector Sigma, sealing his fate even as he gives new hope to the rest of Cybertron.
Well the sack, it broke,
And swiftly down they fell,
So instead of goin' to heaven-
In war, the living believe that dying for a country, a cause, a grand purpose, is honourable and glorious. The dead have no voices which with to argue.