There were times when all he can do is remember. Picture perfect moments, plucked out of thin air and pinned down, like butterflies against boards, each labeled and categorized and organized; a perfection that came with computation. The feeble freedom of emotions and the perfect burden of wires, circuits, processors. There were times when all he can do is wonder.
Moments of perfect, terrible clarity.
It was never a question of what went wrong. Cybertron had been on a collision course with catastrophe since before time had been time. He doesn't believe in destiny, not really, but he does believe in futility. The two, he's learned, aren't exactly mutually exclusive. Cybertronians (it was so easy to forget that that's what they really were, despite badge or faction or lack there of) liked to fancy themselves 'different', advanced, above, beyond, evolved; but the hard truth of the matter was that when the war came, it brought with it bullets and carnage and chaos and despair as war is wont to do. For all their difference; their desperate need to separate themselves from the rest of the universe, they still betrayed and died and murdered, just like the rest.
It's difficult to understand just how thin the veneer of civilization really is until it begins to flake away.
They've all lost. Are losing. Will lose.
Shift, crack, crumble.
They mend themselves, welding their fractured pieces back together upside down and backwards until they're only vague approximations of what once was. Monsters, maybe; ghosts of living things. There are times when all he can do is rage on and on and on. It hurts. Wrong shaped joints grind against wrong shaped sockets and it hurts.
There are times when he can't remember at all.
Those are violent times, when he onlines to find his hands sticky with energon or worse; when he finds himself aching and more often than not, in some kind of cell.
He doesn't like those times.
There are times when all he can do is watch.
Astrotrain always has a sadness about him. He can read it no matter what color the world is; no matter which way it turns. He likes the consistency (even though he hates it). He watches him: the tired tilt of his shoulders, the dim, faraway glow of his optics. He watches, but he doesn't speak.
Astro does, though not to him. Whispers. Hushed words he can't make out to the smaller bot beside him. Words that aren't really words at all, just apologies. Sorry, didn't mean it, you know how he is, he didn't know, doesn't know. Angry sounds.
The little one's face plates are crumbled on one side, one optic cracked in tiny spiderweb patters. Astrotrain ushers him out of the room. The sadness gets worse; black and white and gloomy. He doesn't like it. Not at all, not at all, not at all.
"Blitz, you could have killed him." Astrotrain's voice is barely a whisper and so far away. And then it's quiet for a very long time, measured by the soft hum of electricity and wires and nodes and circuits that keep them alive. Keep them moving.
"I..." Astro starts and stops and starts again, even quieter than before, "Sometimes I don't know what to do with you. I don't know how to help," for a second it looks like he might laugh, but his lip plates quiver and twitch and his frown gets a little stronger than it was before, "I just want the old Blitzwing back. That's it. That's all I want."
He wants to say 'that's all I want, too', but he can't find his voice to speak at all.
There are times all he can do is remember.