Disclaimer: Don't own; wish I did.
A/N: G1, after Transformers: The Movie. Just a one-shot.
Not really sure where this came from, but the inspiration hit me and I had to get it down. There's a bunch of character death mentioned, but nothing is graphic.
They'd lost...everyone. Everyone who'd mattered to them. Only a handful of the original Ark crew remained.
Jazz surveyed the damage Autobot City had sustained during the attack. The damage actually wasn't too bad. But the casualties...there'd been too many.
He grimaced as he felt his spark clench in his chassis. It wasn't right. None of it. So many of his friends had died that day and yet he was still standing. Pit, he was completely undamaged.
Why? Why was he still alive?
He didn't have the answer.
He felt his fists clench in the anger he felt for so many lives lost, but it didn't last long. The anger was quickly replaced with guilt and with spark-wrenching uncertainty.
Primus, who was left?
He looked off to one side and felt his spark clench anew as he watched Bumblebee and Cliffjumper carry Mirage's body into an empty building where others had already been placed. They'd all returned to Earth together, after Unicron's destruction, and were helping with the clean-up.
Jazz looked at the building where the bodies of his friends were being housed. He couldn't go in there. He'd known most of those bots for countless millenia and now they were gone. How could they be gone? He couldn't comprehend that he wasn't going to see them anymore.
He just couldn't process that his comrades, no his friends, were never coming back. It was unusual, someone so used to death should have been able to come to terms with it. He'd lost friends before, but this. This was different. He'd never lost so many in one battle. The only one who had any idea what it was like was Blu-
Primus, Bluestreak was gone, too. The one thing driving the bot all those years was getting justice for everyone he'd lost and making sure it could never happen again. But now he was dead and he'd never see those who'd destroyed his life brought to justice. It just wasn't right.
What was left to fight for? Optimus Prime was gone and some new bot had taken his place, someone Jazz really had no connection to. He just didn't feel the same kind of loyalty like he'd felt for Optimus.
He turned away from the building of death, his shoulders hunched and his optics staring sullenly at the ground. He made his way over to another area where the dead had thankfully all been carried off. There he found the twins, looking lost, as they sat huddled together on a pile of scrap, as if they were anchoring each other. They looked up as he approached them.
"I can't believe this." Sideswipe said as he motioned around them. "I just...can't believe this. We've been fighting the Decepticons on this planet for years and nothing like this has ever happened. What changed? After all these years of a stalemate between our two sides...I...I just don't understand."
Sunstreaker said nothing, just leaned in almost imperceptibly closer to the bot beside him. His optics were hard, but Jazz could see the pain behind them. He could see that Sunstreaker, despite all his aggressions towards his fellow Autobots, was just as lost as the rest of them. No doubt the only thing currently keeping him grounded was his twin.
Jazz had no answer for Sideswipe. He didn't understand it, either. Nothing made much sense anymore. From what he could tell, of the original 18 members of the Ark crew, only 5 of them remained.
He glanced off to the side as Bumblebee and Cliffjumper made their way over to their small group, looking just as confused as Jazz felt. They took seats on the scrap pile, simply seeking comfort by being near the only comrades they had left.
Jazz watched them all for a moment, before finally taking a seat beside the red twin, who looked up at him as he did so.
"What now?"
"We bury our dead. Give 'em all the ceremony they deserve." The answer was the obvious one, but Jazz knew that that's not what Sideswipe had really been looking to hear. He wanted to know where they went from there, but Jazz didn't have that answer. He wasn't wise like Optimus, or steadfast in his beliefs like Ironhide. He couldn't come up with brilliant strategies like Prowl, or fix even the most unfixable like Ratchet. He was just one bot from a broken command element.
"And after that?" Sideswipe asked him. "What do we do after that?"
Jazz didn't have the answer.
A/N: The only characters from the original Ark crew to survive the movie were Jazz, Bumblebee, and Cliffjumper. We never find out what happened to the twins (or a few other bots for that matter), but I like to believe that they survived.
I ended it the way I did because we never really see these characters again. The twins never reappear and neither does Cliffjumper. Jazz shows up in the background of later episodes and Bumblebee is the only one really present in the series after this point. So I ended the story the way I did to leave the choices these characters make open.