End of a Life

You could start again, they had told him, everyone deserves a second chance, they had said. His second chance involved standing alone at his post on the battlements of Ocean City, watching the slow circle of birds, kept at arm's length by former foes, assigned the most menial of duties, something to keep him out of the way, a place where they did not have to remember what his presence forced them to recall; the loss, the danger, the threat that once Unicron had posed.

Ironhide did not resent them. His nature was not necessarily cruel, but he was practical. Had the tables been turned, he would not have spared them. There were some days in which he wished that they had been a little more like him, that those Cybertrons who had turned back fate had a little of the Destron cruelty in them. Pain made the world make sense, he had learnt that so long ago that he could no longer recall the initial lesson; kindness was a different kind of suffering, something that lowered both parties.

Everything on this world was a kind of suffering, he reflected, and the beings that existed upon it, that had grown up in the silence before they had brought Seibertron's age-old war to them, were fragile creatures made of organic mass, creatures without sparks, as gentle and tender as the planet their philosophies abused.

You could start again.

He looked down at his hands. Everything about his body had been fashioned for war, so that even his fingers were weapons, jointed digits capable of dispensing high velocity shells, the like of which could annihilate one of these small, fragile Earth creatures in less time than it would take to introduce himself. Earthlings could exist only at one time, in one moment, and once dead, they did not return; on the contrary, he had returned several times over, scrapped in conflict, sometimes by Cybertrons, sometimes by the duplicity of his fellow Destrons, his memories blurring each time he came back from the brink.

In the silence of death, in the moments that followed his awakening, he became less and less sure that he was the person he had once been, less and less certain that his spark had not been interfered with, reshaped to suit the purposes of those he had served.

He turned the fingers inwards, a potentially explosive fist.

"You could start again," he said to himself, repeating the words the Cybertron had first said to him.

He did not know her from the war, although apparently, she had been a companion of the fabled Rodimus Convoy. He used the pronoun 'she,' because that was how she introduced herself, although it had taken him aback somewhat. It seemed as ridiculous to him as adopting any specific gendered language. He had assumed that 'he' was the default state, and used it to refer to himself, but he might just as well have used 'it' or 'they.' The idea of Cybertrons and Destrons using Earthling terms to denote identity struck him as ridiculous, a conceit to the absurdities of a lifeform and culture they did not resemble and could not reproduce within the understandings of their own society. It confused him just to think of it.

Still, she had been the first to offer him a chance for change, a chance to be something other than a Destron guard dog in a city populated by Cybertrons and fragile, flesh creatures.

Arcee, she had introduced herself to him, and it was only once he understood her choice in designating herself along the lines of Earthling gender, that he understood the colour scheme she wore, pink and white, the pattern evocative of the undergarments that Earthling females were revealed as wearing in the broadcasts he occasionally picked up from the young boy's room, Kicker.

The Earthlings, she told him, had conceived of a manner of reproduction they called 'synthoids.' The technology had apparently been developed by a human organisation a decade or so back and suppressed, yet it was functional, and through various means, this Cybertron had acquired it and partaken in testing its viability.

He had looked at her with incredulity when she had told him that. 'A Cybertron partaking in human reproduction?' he asked.

She nodded curtly.

'Not in the traditional sense. The process involves the transfer of the spark into a custom grown organic body.'

The expression on his face must have informed her as to the disgust he felt at such a prospect.

They were looking for participants, she had gone on, Cybertrons or Destrons, she had emphasised, who would be willing to temporarily inhabit organic bodies in order that they might better understand human society and ideas of identity.

Quickly, he had turned away.

'That's not the kind of thing I'd be interested in.'

It had felt demeaning, humiliating. Not only was he valued so low, but he was considered so replaceable that he was an acceptable loss in this kind of experiment.

'I'm just the guard dog,' he added.

She had made some further argument, but he had not budged from his refusal, and once she understood that, she had resorted to small talk, until, at last, mercifully, she had given up and left him alone.

Still, he thought now, fingers clenched into a fist, what would it have been like to have been a thing not designed for war if only for a moment? He tried to imagine it, existence as a thing aside from that which experience had made him, a creature allowed to live for their own pursuits, to be as free as Earthlings like Kicker claimed a right to be.

What might it be like to be small, to be weak, to be beautiful?

Above, the birds continued to wheel amidst the blue skies, alone he remained at his station, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to explain what purpose he still lived for.