A/N: Dammit MTMTE. A comic should not make me lose most of my bodily fluids via my eyeballs, but apparently, that's now a thing that happens.
Disclaimer: I really, really own nothing here. The title is taken shamelessly from 'In Flanders Fields' by John McCrae, and two lines from 'Base Details' by Siegfried Sassoon has been borrowed, mostly to ram a slightly nasty point home.
Warnings: Spoilers for MTMTE #44 onwards.
Between the Crosses, Row on Row
It could be an hour, it could be only a few minutes, but when he allows himself to think again, all that swirls through his processor and tanks is a cold sickness.
A sensation that for once, he can't blame on Prime's chemicals.
A quarter of a mile behind him, Ravage sits silently beside the MARB, red optics observing him without judgement.
He's grateful to the felinoid for that kindness. It's not one he deserves.
He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nasal plates between his thumb and forefinger.
His intakes stutter.
The pistons in his knees feel like they've turned to lead.
He wants to collapse, to fall to his hand and knees and feel the dirt beneath his digits.
But that would crush the flowers.
He cracks open his optics and blinks a few times for good measure.
Surrounding his pedes, there are at least thirty flowers.
Thirty lives he had snuffed out...
No.
A dozen sparks to light a single flower. That was what the Necrobot had said.
Thirty multiplied by a dozen...
The remains of three hundred and sixty sparks surround his pedes, the electric blue heads of the flowers swaying gently in the early evening breeze.
Was it worth it?
He bends down, carefully plucks one flower from beside his right pede, and studies it.
The remains of twelve souls are contained within the petals. Twelve souls who had been brought online, worked, revelled, fought, perhaps had the great fortune to love and be loved, and then, one day, through war or torture or cruelty or murder, had had their sparks snuffed out.
On his orders. By his hand.
A particularly masochistic thought forces its way to the front of his processor – which souls make up the petals of this particular bloom?
Decimus? Cy-kill? Bumper? Fastback? Ramjet?
...Sentinel? Zeta?
He shakes his head. Nothing on Cybertron or beyond it would ever make him regret terminating either of those particular Primes.
But that leads his mind forward four million years beyond the corrupt Prime's death, to the end of the invasion by D-Void and the near destruction of his homeworld not even a year ago now.
...Where is Shockwave's flower?
He gently places the flower back on the ground and stares off to the edge of the horizon.
Shockwave had begged for the release of death by the end, when his true personality had surfaced in spite of all the cruelties inflicted on him by the New Institute. Would his old comrade have died by his hand, by Optimus' hand, or by his own?
None of the options his mind presents brings him any enlightenment. Or comfort.
Not that he deserves any.
This field...no, this valley...filled with the undying remains of the dead, stretching off into a sky turning every colour of the visible spectrum, this is his true legacy.
Not the overthrow of the Functionist order, not the abortive overthrow of the lineage of the Primes. Not even his Decepticons.
This unspeaking, unfeeling mass of spark remnants in such seemingly delicate forms...
This is all that stands as testament to what he has achieved in four million years.
Was it worth it?
He can now feel the presence within his subspace, of the one remaining time-case Ravage had managed to salvage from the purge of Brainstorm's labs.
Even one day prior, it had felt like a soothing presence, a balm, something to assuage his troubled thoughts as the possibility of his trial and judgement by the Circle loomed somewhat closer.
He reaches behind him, digs in his subspace pocket, and hauls the yellow briefcase into the light.
He had felt so proud, so smug when Ravage had bought him the spoils of the mad scientist's most incredible invention. Here was his guarantee, his failsafe against whatever judgement the Circle could eventually bestow upon him, that whatever the outcome, he could change his fate with the flick of a switch. Whatever tempered thoughts, ideas, anything that had come from his regular doses of Fool's Energon, they could be overridden with a gesture.
Now...
Now the case burns with all the fires of the Pit.
The Necrobot's words reverberate around his cranium.
...You may think that you can postpone indefinitely that day of reckoning – that terrible moment of when you must make sense of who you are and what you did, but you're wrong...
He turns, optics burning with a pain he didn't know he was still capable of feeling, and picks his way through the flowers until he is standing at the foot of his statue.
He scoops a handful of soil and flowers out of the ground and places it carefully on a bare patch of earth. Digging down further with one hand, he removes enough soil to make a suitable burial plot for the seemingly harmless case he clutches to his chestplates.
The urge overtakes his vocaliser before he can recall it. The words of an Earth poet, one whom Ultra Magnus had brought to his attention a few months ago, fill the air.
"And when the war is done, and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die – in bed. "
Because isn't that what he had wanted? In the darkest, cruellest depths of his mind, didn't he kindle the flicker of hope that, once the Great War was done, and the Decepticons ruled over a free Cybertron, he would have the freedom to end his life as he had planned?
And his troops...what did he care, as long as he achieved what he desired?
He closes his optics as he kneels over the grave.
Tightens his fingers on the shell of the time-case.
Feels the metal buckle beneath his digits.
The sickness threatens to overwhelm him.
He slams the case into the hole before he can think one more thought.
He scoops up the mound of dirt with shaking hands and presses it down over the yellow-gold metal.
He plucks each azure blossom from the sad remnants of grass with a deliberation he has rarely shown, and places each of them over the new grave beneath his statue.
It's the most pathetic, self-serving gesture he could ever make.
But it's the only one he knows how to make, here, in this monument that has peeled back every trait from his personality that he had once considered a positive; every action he had once claimed was for the overall good of his race, for the betterment of his people; every gesture that had galvanised the underclasses into rebelling against the so-called natural order on Cybertron.
Was it worth it?
He can't face walking back across the silent fields, knowing what he now knows.
He summons the MARB with the remote control in his right wrist, where his fusion cannon used to sit.
A juddering black shape rises and floats towards him. Sitting atop the platform, he can clearly make out Ravage's lithe form, red optics scanning the endless swathe of blue, tail twitching in the wind.
He turns away from the approaching transport, and stares towards the horizon one last time.
He has heard of the phrase, 'a million is just a statistic', but he had never appreciated the cruel detachment of the phrase until now.
The fields of flowers will haunt his dreams until the day he offlines, that he is sure of.
Whether his offlining will be at the choice of the Circle, or of his own free will, he does not know.
But now...now he must grant them the freedom to choose that he refused to grant to so many millions upon millions of others.
He hauls himself onto the platform of the MARB, Ravage quietly positioning himself to lean against his former commander's leg, and bows his head.
Whatever fate awaits Megatron of Tarn, miner, author, poet, revolutionary, Decepticon Leader, murderer, tyrant, Emperor of Destruction, prisoner, co-captain of the Lost Light, the fate must be decreed by those who do not have the blood and energon of billions of innocents on their hands.
By those who, he quietly prays as the MARB takes off in the direction of the Necrobot's Citadel, are better than he could ever hope to be.
END