After the huge disappointment that the ending of Transformers Prime is proving to be, I decided to try a little bit of realism.

This story is set after 'Deadlock'. Also please take in consideration that this fic is not beta read, so please try to ignore my grammatical mistakes.

Dedicated to Starfire201, who challenged me to write a TFP Shockwave one-shot.

The Order Theory

Written by Taipan Kiryu

The Autobot scout was on his knees.

Shockwave didn't laugh at the scene at the monitor, and not because he didn't have a mouth component. It would have been simply illogical.

It was Starscream who came up with the idea of writing excerpts of the Autobot Honor Code on the walls of the abandoned warehouse. Some of the Cybertronian characters were deformed after fourteen breems of slowly slipping down to the floor, but they were still readable.

Practical as he was, Shockwave had thought that the idea was redundant. It wasn't like the Autobots were not aware that war made them violate every one of their ideals again and again, but Starscream had been so dominated by his emotions that Shockwave had thought that it would be better if he allowed the Seeker to vent a little. Besides, the writing on the walls wasn't entirely unjustified; it had indeed been a living contradiction how the Autobot scout had broken one of his most sacred rules by killing Lord Megatron via a treacherous attack. It was only logical that he was reminded of such fact, as ignoring contradictions was the highest manifestation of hypocrisy.

Which was why Shockwave had felt compelled to answer the Autobot's action with an according reaction; his inner, perfect Universe wouldn't have been able to claim balance had he remained motionless. The Autobot had to learn and, as it happened with everyone dominated by emotions, he was susceptible to be educated through pain.

As Shockwave's optical sensor remained focused on the big monitor that occupied most of his temporal base of operations, his analytical processor was computing both the scene currently happening at the warehouse and the apparent incongruities of his most recent behavior.

He wasn't stranger to emotions. He had studied and exploited them since the beginnings of civilization. Countless Cybertronian and alien forms had been opened up on his table in order to find the reasons behind the things they called passions, the bare stimulus that made them behave so defectively.

The memory of mutilated bodies at his laboratory was nothing but a number. He had acquired a label because of that, the label of a monster. But, unlike sadists like Knock Out, Shockwave acted guided by science. What was suffering and death, but means to the end that was knowledge?

So revenge hadn't been his motive when he had given a purpose to Starscream's lament. Order had many ways to manifest itself, and some of those ways involved violence. It wasn't a contradiction. Logic was cruel and often it was made over skulls and ashes.

Satisfaction was not in his mind when he saw the Autobot scout tearing out his vocalizer with his bare hands. His had been a harmonic voice, one that wouldn't be heard anymore. But it wasn't the thought of that voice that was circling Shockwave's mind; he would have loved to have that Autobot on his table and extract his processor, because only there he would find a physical manifestation of the anxiety that had leaded the scout to mutilate himself out of pure desperation.

Such an extreme emotional reaction, Shockwave thought as he saw the torn vocalizer hitting the ground, one that he wouldn't be able to understand until he had the Autobot's cranial unit perfectly dissected and classified. It was only there, under his meticulous examination, where the Universe made sense. Yes, even emotions.

Starscream had said that it would be better to allow the Autobot to live, to deny him the blessing of having his suffering interrupted. Childish, weak Starscream. Only because his own suffering would be endless didn't mean that inflicting the same treatment to the one who had killed his master would restore his own balance. If anything, love was illogical.

Shockwave had rejected the idea, of course. The Autobot had proved to be a dangerous foe and he had to be dealt as such. His terminal shutdown would happen eventually, whether by Shockwave's hand or by any other of the forces that the scout had unleashed when he had terminated Megatron. Shockwave had tried to avoid chaos between the Decepticon ranks with his most recent action, but he was sure that there would be others like Starscream that would act guided by their emotions and thus jeopardize the survival of their kind.

Satisfaction, even in its slightest form, was a flaw that Shockwave wouldn't find himself struggling against. It would be a lie to say that he felt absolutely nothing as he currently watched the yellow Autobot on his knees and trying to howl in defeat as his shredded throat struggled to emit the sounds that his destroyed vocalizer would emit no more. His suffering, however, was unimportant to Shockwave. A response to Lord Megatron's assassination had been given in the exact moment and in the exact place; whatever happened after that didn't affect the current result.

The Autobot's pain had been predicted but, Shockwave insisted, not satisfactory. All that the Decepticon scientist had done was returning order after a fractured action, one born from an extreme display of emotions. Logic dictated that the same amount of emotions had to be unleashed in order to solve the rupture that the Autobot had opened when killing Megatron.

But more than the pain, Shockwave computed the knowledge that the Autobot would obtain from the experience. The scout certainly had been intelligent enough to realize that he never stood on a black and white Universe as his naïve code of honor had tried to teach him. After today, he would know that life was not gray, but red, viscous red.

Starscream had laughed, but Shockwave remained indifferent when he stabbed the small human on the heart and pinned him to the wall. The terrestrial creature had died instantly, the amount of blood escaping from the mortal wound enough for Starscream to write his message, but insufficient to cover the Seeker's need for revenge. Shockwave ignored Starscream when he claimed that the Autobot's human charge had died too quickly. Starscream had been looking forward to torture it, to dismember it slowly until termination. But Shockwave had refused; vengeance was highly emotional, and thus, defective.

So he had paid no attention to Starscream's rant, occupied in analyzing the dots of vital fuel splattered on the human's optical glasses. After a short but thorough analysis through his advanced lenses, he had decided that human blood had no interest to him.

Not even now, when the former yellow armor had turned red. The Autobot scout was lowering his terminated human charge from the wall, cuddling it delicately as if life still ran through its fuel lines.

Illogical.

As Shockwave himself had been, when he himself had soiled his finger with blood and mimicked Starscream writing on the wall. Shockwave was yet to analyze the lack of reasoning of such action.

It was a fortunate coincidence when the Autobot collapsed right beneath the three words that Shockwave had written, creating an image that the Decepticon could only appoint as beautiful.

'Are all dead'… Curt and yet so effective, so prophetical. Shockwave had walked over the debris on the ground, stopping beneath the three words and the lonely light bulb that was illuminating the warehouse when he realized that Starscream was looking at him, horrified.

The Seeker feared him.

Fear, a necessary asset to inflict upon both friend and foe. But pride was another emotion that was not meant to trouble Shockwave's perfectly measured processor. His superiority was only another given thing. Gloating about it would have been an attempt against coldly controlled reasoning.

It was also very fortunate that he had allowed Starscream to install the camera inside the warehouse. The Seeker had done it on order to satisfy his fetishist need of seeing the results firsthand when the Autobot found his terminated human partner, but if he hadn't done it, a picture of such beauty would have never come to enrich Shockwave's infinite data banks.

He watched it for exactly two seconds more before turning the monitor off, leaving the leftovers for Starscream or whoever else needed their share of useless satisfaction.

Shockwave made a last military salute to his absent, fallen leader and moved on. Just as revenge would never be his thing, neither would be the act of mourning. The fate of the Decepticon cause was resting solely on his hands now and he had many, many things to do if he still wanted to have a cause that he could still call logical.

The end

Sorry for killing Raf. I felt bad for him because he's the only human I like of the show – not to mention the fact that we two have the same surname – but when it comes to what I consider the best endings to my stories, I never touch my heart.

As for 'Are all dead', those are the words that Shockwave wrote in the most famous Transformers comic book cover. I thought it would be fair to pay it a humble homage here.

I usually post on Sundays, but I wanted to get this out of my system as soon as possible in order to move on, as Shockwave did.