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“He really thought we were about to kill him.”
“Weren't you?”
Words spoken just minutes ago lingered in your mind. You've rushed after him with a passing hesitation and doubt, the concerned voice of Cyclonus doing little to stop you from doing what you do the best - jumping head first into danger and risking all for one little chance that it will work.
The paint of your hatred has chipped away by every second passing. His silhouette, of body weak, damaged, unmoving within the raging flames appeared to you.
Saving him was less about him, to you. Your hatred stripped and hollow has left a cavity in your spark chamber, and what to do with him was a future-you problem. The hatred you never felt before for someone so vile; someone who looked you in the eye and told you what you dreaded to hear, vile to dare to do so despite all he's done, someone who's hatred for you was only comparable with his hatred for himself. So you thought,
“I'm not like him.”
Of lives you've lost and lives you'll lose for your whims, it was a win over him - over your hatred. There was truth in his words, you wouldn't deny that. Yet you weren't like that anymore. You weren't going to be like that anymore.
You weren't throwing yourself in front of Cyclonus, you weren't a shield from the sword, you weren't impaling him through his spark with whatever you had close to your hand at the moment.
You were pushing the weapon through the shattered spark, deeper, deeper, seething with fury of betrayal you were far too intimate with, feeling it seeping into each desperate thrust; a rush of sick satisfaction, feeling his energon on your hands, unaware of your own bleeding - bitter taste on your tongue, mind thrown into a fog as you're crushing on him, pain striking through your body with the sword drawing ever deeper into your chest, too,
Yet he grayed fast in front of you; his sword didn't touch your spark - brief wave of relief, stabbed with a look in his optics - the look of
victorious, unapologetic, twisted smugness
- that will forever be imprinted on the core of your processor, a memory you will never erase of him
seeing through you
when your mouth twitched in a grimace of realization.
Devastating, gripping your entire being realization; heaviness you haven't felt for years befell on you in instance his cyan cold optics went offline; you stayed, unmoving, letting purple puddle under the both of you. A memory, words, people, flashing on the back of your mind as fast as your reaction is to throw yourself into the fire.
Cyclonus’ voice was distant, the way it was when you ran after Getaway, even when he dragged you from the dead under you.
Your hands clenched fists of unwavered, boundless anger. The loss of energon and gaping wound seemed to be the least of your concerns, when barely connected words of great disappointment left your lips. There was effort put in to calm you down.
“I'm not like him.” You thought. “My friends' lives were on the line.”
You glared at the gray in purple; his mug was a slap on your face for ever daring to think things could've gone differently. Your features softened only when more of your friends arrived.
The flames were gone, but a wound of disbelief, deep inadequacy squeezed your spark. You couldn't tell who bled more, the blood looked the same on your hands. And you wondered, idly, if he thought, even a moment, when he had to clean his hands off of your crew's, if he had another option.
It was too easy for him to escape. You hated that you didn't have that option.