My first awakening comes in a lab. I am aware of little: only that it is small and grimy, its walls rusted. Familiar, silent forms move around me, and I know that I can recognize them if I choose.
But far more pressing is another awareness: my spark burns strong and bright, but the frame encasing it is new. I am painted black - a fitting color after too long on a world with days and nights. Once I was the gray of deactivation. Now I am the dark that descends on the world I nearly conquered.
Streaks of purple light zigzag across my frame, as though it cannot hold the fierce whirl of my spark. I grin, feeling the tantalizing hum of new systems flaring to life in me, promising capabilities I can only guess at.
A nova of heat crackles just above my arm, a maelstrom curling in on itself, and I smile. Good. They have taken a weapon that devastated cities, and found a way to improve on it.
It seems I owe them my thanks.
But just as I turn my attention to the task of recalling who they are and why I am here, I catch sight of something angling outward from my back. Still smiling, I twitch joints I did not know I had - and feel my own wing move in perfect accord with my will.
Wings.
With this revelation comes a flood of memory: pain flaring all through my systems, the fiery heat of it and then the spark-deep chill of imminent shutdown. Static flaring through my vision and errors spooling through my awareness as someone lifts me up, light-alloyed arms buckling under my weight, pressing me to a chest warm with the spark-light I am losing.
He says something. I understand nothing; my language parser has shut down. But I hear in his voice the fury of the cornered and the defiance of those who do not consent to losing, and as I slip away I know that I am pleased
Remembering him sends a surge of heat through me. My new fists clench. I remember the thin alloy of his plating buckling under blows, twisting and denting under my hands.
I do not remember why. I remember only the snarling voice, mocking me and itself together, laughing.
It is a rare gift: to go down, but never fall.
It saved me then - I am sure of it. It saved him, as well.
But for what destiny? I awaken renewed, pristine, and terrible - yet I awaken in a room of rust and pitted metal, my sentinels silent as they watch.
What has become of us?
What has become of him?
I catch sight of him some time later: a flash of red and white in a sea of hopeless faces, their optics dim as though their sparks are guttering out inside them. They move like mechs afflicted by a virus, shuffling through a world half-real, half spun from the illusions spawned by endless looping errors.
Seeing them fills me with contempt. I nearly purge the new tanks that have just, for the first time, been filled. They were my warriors once, driven by rage and tempered by battle. Now - they are empty.
But they are still mine, and I am still the one who awakens them: to pride, to defiance, to war. I speak to them. I promise them revenge. I show them the lightning gathering in my weapon, in my spark, in themselves.
It works on all of them save one.
His wings, once fanned out from his back with pride even my strongest blows could not dent out of them, hang drooping from rusted joints. My mark branded on his wings is smeared and smudged with dust. He holds his head high - there is that, at least - but the optics staring blankly ahead are no brighter than his comrades'.
A bauble hangs around his neck: a trinket I ripped with my own hands from the chassis of our enemy. It burned bright, held by its former owner. Now, clouded mists swirl over its glowing surface.
He does not look me in the face. His hands clutch at his toy, fidgeting. They rise to its surface, touch the cloud of light around it, and draw back again as if burned.
Only then does rage rise in me.
This is not the mech who defied even me.
This is not the mech who knew he was not ready to rule, but fought for it with everything he had anyway, because he did not know defeat.
This is no one I know.
I turn away and finish my speech, the words spitting from my vocalizer in time with the rage rising in my systems at the thought of what I have seen. I speak of dismantling enemies, of ripping them apart piece by piece, of the pleasure and the vindication of vengeance.
The half-dead ones raise their fists and cry my name, their optics flickering with light as they fight the torpor within themselves.
I should be pleased. They are mine, and they will become what I make of them.
But all I can see in my mind are those drooping wings under my hands. That useless trinket wrenched from his neck.
This resignation, this despair, this little death -
- is it his doing?
Did it spread from him to them, his own doubt taking root in the sparks of those I could not lead while I slumbered?
Or perhaps it was their own shame and despair that poisoned him. Perhaps looking out among them, as I am now, and seeing only numbness staring back proved too much, and he succumbed.
In that moment I loathe him. In that moment I want nothing more than to destroy him utterly. To watch the thing that has claimed them all disintegrate as he turns to ash in the fire of my new weapon.
It is necessary, I think, to clear away the corrosion and build anew.
But I had never thought I would need to do it on his body.
He was not ready when I fell. I did not know that I would fall so soon.
But I had never expected he would come to this.
I hear laughter echo in my audio receptors, a sharp and cutting sound. A sound the thing he has become could never make.
I hear him as he was, as he might have been. A high, loud voice mocks this crumbling fortress, these drones shambling through it.
I think of the things he would say to himself if he could see himself right now.
And I know what I must do.
I think, again, of seizing him. I think of the new wings at my back. The chase he would have led me on in the days before this - affliction. The new engines, straining to keep up with one who was built for flight and who has done it for as long as he has functioned.
I think of the sting of laser fire. Of my weapon's lighting, searing him to bright awakening. Of this new black plating, holding the heat of his rekindled spark as he does what he always has done and fights me to find himself again.
Perhaps he will loathe me for what I am about to do. Perhaps he will never forgive me for shocking into blistering awareness nerves that he'd shut down.
Perhaps this game we have played for millions of years will end with him standing at my side again - but twisted by bitterness. Waiting for the moment to bury the knife in my back, as always. But not so that he may rise when I have fallen. Maybe all he will want when I am done is revenge for forcing him to face the truth.
As the door to his chamber opens, I realize that it no longer matters. That I will do it, either way.
That I did not choose him simply to watch his own weakness corrode him into living death.
But as I walk into the room, watching him crouch like a wounded beast, I see him raise his head. His optics, in the gloom, are bright.
Perhaps he will understand what I am about to do.
Perhaps, even in the grip of his despair, he always has.