A Story Already Told

The body was heavy in his arms, and Rattrap didn't think he could carry it all the way.

He still had to try.

::You were too late, anyway,:: he mocked himself as he struggled to reach the top of another hill. From the top, he could see more hills. His arms strained, and in the back of his mind he counted down the time until energon overload forced him back into his beast mode. ::You can only carry him so far. That's all anybody can expect of you.::

True. Nobody could expect the impossible of him, that he save a life already lost or carry the dead home. No matter that Rhinox shouldn't have died in the first place or that his body belonged with the Maximals instead of being left in Tarantulas' lair or in the wasted lands between Maximal and Predacon territory. He'd failed an impossible task, but that didn't mean he didn't blame himself for that failure. The body in his arms was so heavy. His arms cried out for relief, but he couldn't just put the body down. Rhinox deserved better.

He took a step forward, then another. Distantly, he knew he was in shock. He took it one step at a time, stumbling through the dirt and memories and disconnected thoughts. Just one at a time, until he'd reach the point where he simply couldn't go on.

"He triggered a trap. Acid. Burned him up."

Burned? The word wasn't violent enough. Slime coated Rattrap's front, bits and pieces of flesh and skin floating in a dissolved soup threaded through with delicate wires. He'd never have been able to carry Rhinox even this far if he'd still been intact, and Rattrap tried very hard not to think of that. If he did, he'd gag, and he had too much respect for that. Rhinox had died in the line of duty, no matter how, and Rattrap would honor that death by not shrinking from this final task. No matter if all that was left to honor was a jumble of internal structures and fluids.

::Do you remember meeting him for the first time? He was such a snob.:: Of course he remembered, just as he remembered that it was his own back-street accent and mentality that had created the first impression of the 'bot who'd become his friend. Not that he'd accept the blame, then or now. Rhinox had always been a slow-spoken 'bot who didn't respond to his jokes. Rattrap used his crude jests as an ice-breaker and defense in one, and meeting a 'bot who didn't fall for the act or react with more than a slight frown to him had been unsettling. He'd responded to the scientist in a typically antagonistic manner until Optimus had raked him over the coals for trying to start fights. After that he'd been sullen but not aggressive.

::You were wrong. Rhinox didn't not like you. He was just being…Rhinox.:: Slow to laugh, slow to anger, slow to speak, and slow to trust. It had been incredibly frustrating, but they had to work together. It had taken Rattrap weeks to realize that despite the scientist's slow nature and his own wariness, they'd established a weird relationship that actually worked. It took him longer still to know that he really trusted this odd Maximal who didn't react like everyone else. ::You could unravel his behavior until then. All the training the underground had given you, and he had you baffled.::

"He hung on. Had t' tell me what happened." His throat closed on the words. "Accident, he said. Slagging ACCIDENT."

Last act of a civil war, so-called 'friendly fire' explained through agony-laced words while Rattrap hovered in frantic helplessness. And all the suspicious circumstances in the world couldn't dismiss the steady assurance in his friend's voice.

Rattrap had been trained in espionage for the High Council. He knew how to ferret out spies in the ranks and sabotage before it happened, but the one thing they'd never instructed him on were genuine people. Suspicion and a thousand masks were useful in dealing with spies, informants, and those using him for their own ends, but confronted with a honest 'bot who spoke only the truth and said what he meant…Rhinox was quite possibly the antithesis of everything Rattrap had been trained to counter, and that was what had thrown him off. All the clues were there, but he'd assumed they'd been planted instead of sincere.

He'd never felt so sheepish in his LIFE.

"Eight-legged freak couldn't save 'im. Swore he couldn't. Rhinox said he tried."

His arms were tired, very tired, and he just wanted to rest. But all the clues were there.

"Pred's talkin' slag. He didn't try. He's lyin'."

All the clues, sneaking under the radar, and he didn't understand. Conflict came in many forms, but the worst was in the aftermath of a friend's death. Because he had to analyze the facts and compare them to the story he'd been told. And they didn't match up, they didn't match, and he didn't want to think it but did anyway. ::You know what that means.::

"Rhinox was tryin' t' tell me somethin', but it's all gone t' da Pit now."

It had hurt to watch the High Council turn on Rhinox. Himself, yeah, he'd been screwed over on operations before. It was standard operating procedure to sacrifice the operative instead of the operation whenever possible, but he was accustomed to it. He'd been trying to get out of that life, finally fed up with the post-war Predacon infiltration and bureaucratic nonsense, but they manage to stab him in the back one last time. Everywhere the High Council's influence reached was prey to its manipulations, however innocent the occupation. Rhinox had just taken longer than most to fall under their feet.

They'd been working in the shipyards with Optimus, waiting for his captaincy to clear. That hadn't been bad. All three of them occasionally went out on inter-system ships, usually assigned to the same one, and between missions they did what they could around the shipyards. Rattrap had worked security as a low-cover inspector for smuggled goods; Rhinox generally stayed in the interior of the 'yards in the labs; Optimus had pushed paper or assisted his current captain while waiting for his own rank to go through. They'd already had a reputation as a close team, not necessarily because of their personal closeness--Rattrap never fit into more than a casual friendship with either one, although Optimus and Rhinox were long-time friends--but because they just worked well together. Rattrap had always had problems with authority. Optimus was the first officer he'd worked under who not only tolerated his insubordination but gave as good as he got. Rhinox just didn't respond.

::You thought you were doing it. You thought you were out,:: he thought bitterly, acid in his mouth and dripping down his front. The joints in his arms were burnt, and small whines from over-stressed metal came from the affected areas.

"Spider killed 'im."

Murder in the first degree, premeditated and most definitely purposeful. Mechfluid on Tarantulas' hands like the lives lost to the prisoner their whole job was a cover for. The typical delays for a captain on his first mission had suddenly disappeared when the High Council needed transport for their prize mutated spark, and Rhinox's optics had filled with sorrow for the deceit. Rattrap didn't know what the deal was with the huge 'bot they'd forced into a stasis pod, or why Optimus had seared a giant 'X' on the pod before isolating it in the hold away from the area where the rest of the crew would be stored. To be perfectly frank, he didn't want to know. What he knew sickened him enough.

One day, there had been a massacre on Colony Omicron, the next there hadn't even been a colony. There had once been a Starbase Rugby, too, and then there wasn't. Rattrap, Rhinox, and Optimus had forced a monster into a stasis pod, then stored the pod in a ship that hadn't even been cleared for a mission. Soon after, there was no pod. No monster. And of course the ship was approved for an immediate opening in the exploration schedule. The crew had assembled almost overnight, and they three had known it would all go great as long as the unwritten rules were obeyed. The silence had to be unbroken.

Nobody said a word. Optimus had looked so weary, crushed under the orders that didn't exist, and Rhinox had known more than an honest 'bot should and been scarred by the knowledge.

::You weren't even surprised,:: he thought viciously in the sanctity of his own mind, private and uncensored. Unedited, where the government couldn't touch the truth.

His arms trembled, weighed down by what he carried.

"Dat rusted scrapheap KILLED 'im."

Rattrap didn't need to know details to know what had happened. What WOULD happen. Death and politics; one disappeared at the convenience of the other. The official story could be read in Agent Ravage's optics and the mission statement for a rescue operation—more like a political sterilization--in the High Council's hands.

He'd killed people who didn't exist, too.

Energon overload shocked him to his knees, and Rattrap hissed. His robot mode had been exposed too long, but he couldn't stop now. He had a body to bring back, leaden with all the words he'd been emptied of. Somewhere up ahead lay the Maximal base, and it didn't matter what he told the others. A death in a war far, far away could lead to panic, maybe even a full-scale war back on Cybertron. Better that it all just…never happen. Somewhere beyond the Maximals in the Beast Wars, behind Agent Ravage and Tarantulas' smooth lies, perhaps in the subtext Rattrap had heard under Rhinox's pained last breath, a story had already been told. Not this one. Not the real one, but truth could be rewritten by the right hands. A different story without murder, or war, or honor for a death in the line of duty.

"Won't forget, Rhinox. I won't."

Rattrap held his friend's body in his arms. He took another step forward, then another after that, but no one--not even him--could carry Rhinox home again.

And his words erased clean away.

.

.

It's not easy to stay silent. This was meant to be an incredibly disjointed look into Rattrap's head after "First Do No Harm" as the past and present collide. See, I really think there's a lot more to Rattrap's past, but he doesn't talk about it. He knows about staying silent. He also knows how things he stays silent about are silenced.

He's letting it all out now, because nobody's going to hear his story over the one already told on Cybertron. It's not fair, but, well, governments usually can't afford to be.

These two ficlets are really setting up as the prequel for "This Is How the War Ends."