Megacorp Headquarters, Yeedil.
Ratchet had dodged speeding bullets his way, he'd done thousands, millions, of times before and knew how to dodge and duck and shoot. But, just this once, he didn't want to, he literally wanted to die for what he had done.
The mutant Protopet had been killed and Captain Quark 'revealed' to be Abercrombie Fizzwidget, the mastermind behind the scheme to have the blue fur balls destroy the universe, just like that animated show from thousands of years before he'd loved to watch as a child. It was a momentous occasion, a happy occasion, a time to be shared, to be celebrated but Ratchet was in no mood to celebrate, to be cheerful, he had a secret, a dark secret which was eating him inside.
He thought back to Todano not days before, when he'd passed through one of the factory buildings, fighting the robotic guards at every turn, killing sheep, completing tractor beam puzzles. It all seemed pretty normal he thought, just another 'dash through the building' campaign until he reached the final goal.
It took what seemed forever to reach the final room of the factory, but there, seemingly waiting for him on top of a teleporter pad stood the Sheepinator, one of Megacorp's more recent additions to their arsenal.
And that's when he realized that all those sheep he had killed had been innocent people who had been tested on & he was a murderer, a cold-hearted murderer.
Yes he had 'claimed' the lives of many throughout his relatively short life, but those had been different, he was saving numerous worlds from irrepable damage, trying all he could to save them, he was doing good. But with 'them' it was different, they had done nothing 'wrong' to him, they had just been testing the Sheepinator and something had gone wrong, they were just going about their day-to-day business when, in a flash of _ light, their lives were changed forever, going from poor innocent humanoids to 'mindless' sheep, and their deaths were .fault, and there was nothing he could do to think otherwise, he was the one responsible for robbing families of fathers mothers, aunts uncles, sons and daughters – He was a murderer, a cold-hearted murderer. He had no 'right' to live any more. He deserved to die for what he did to them.
As much as he wanted to end his life he couldn't bring himself to do it, to pull the trigger of his Lancer and end his misery, he just couldn't, it would solve nothing – He needed to continue on living, to 'fight the good fight', so continue saving the universe for them, in their memory, so that their deaths wouldn't have been for nothing and that the universe would be safe for their families, so he could sleep a little 'quieter' each night. From there on he promised never to claim the life of an 'innocent' again, and to only fight if the circumstances forced it upon him.
As an individual Ratchet was dead, just a shell of the Lombax he formally was. There would be a time, perhaps, when his wounds would heal but for now he lived for them, the ten innocents he killed without reason.
He remembered them.