Musical Meme
Chapter V
Song:
'Wisdom' – Lisa Gerrard
Lyrical inspiration:
No lyrics. This song is instrumental and vocalization. The story was inspired by the title and by the sound of the song itself (it's despairing and reminded me of what one might hear in their minds while looking at the smoldering, war-brought wreckage of a once-great city.)
To Ratchet, wisdom meant being around a long time and understanding things as they were. It meant being able to comprehend events… but it also, to him, meant seeing a multitude of things to comprehend.
As he looked out over the burned out flats of Cybertron, he beheld the crumbling buildings, the smoldering ruins of houses and Cybertronian schools, office buildings, communication centers… In the distance he saw the ruins of the Medical Academy and the hospital where he had worked and earned his education in Cybertronian medicine. He saw the winding paths where he and Ironhide would once walk and talk about things completely irrelevant to anything else. He enjoyed those walks… The paths were crushed now, crumbling stone pinned under fallen statues and wreckage. There were bodies littering the streets- mech, sparkling and femme alike. Ratchet shuttered his optics and turned his back on what he saw. He comprehended war, and Primus knows he'd seen the extent of it with his own optics time and time again, whether it be in first-hand combat, the despair of having to take another life or in his own medbay, in the optics of mechs dying before him. Ratchet had been told often that he was among the oldest and wisest of what remained of the Cybertronian race.
Ratchet reflected on the meaning of wisdom as he walked back to the Ark, framed by black smoke that rose steadily behind him on the horizon of a once-beautiful city he had called home.
Yes he had seen war.
But if this was wisdom, then he did not want to be counted amongst the wise.