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“We have to get rid of him somehow, he's simply too soft to do what needs to be done,” Prowl’s voice echoed around the corner.
“We can't just get rid of him! He's a good mech!” Jazz argued back. “I mean he's kinda a weak leader but he saved me from a cave-in so I feel like I owe him more than anything.”
“If only Elita One had gotten the matrix, this would've been over the day it began,” Ironhide chimed in, “Primus knows she doesn't hold anything back.”
They were right of course, he was a failure. This meeting only confirmed it.
He had found it odd that almost every mech in high command's schedule had a random time blocked off, now he understood it wasn't random at all.
They were trying to figure out how to work around him, his ineptitude, his weakness, his hesitation to raise arms against a mech that had been his brother.
Why would Primus choose him of all mechs? His god only saw a good spark, not all the strings that came attached to that spark.
His god was a selfish one.
One who allowed his planet, his creations to slave away and die for nothing because one of them killed his favorites.
Primus just wanted a quick weld to fix itself when he found him, but so rarely do quick welds hold under extreme pressure.
The chatter in the room had cut completely.
The meeting had ended, the door was open right in front of him, they knew he knew what they really thought of him.
“Prime…” Jazz began.
He ran, like the coward they knew he was. Like how Orion Pax used to.
He ran all the way back to his room, locking the door behind him, waiting for someone to show up and try to smooth things over.
No one showed.
Of course, the more unstable he was, the better for them and their cause.
He needed to not feel, he uncorked the energex he had never touched before that had been given by Bee as a gift, Bee didn't know he couldn't drink with all the pills he was on.
The pills that would get him up in the mornings, though his public appearances, through shooting at D-no Megatron.
He chugged the drink, feeling the buzz settle in his cables. He needed even more distance from himself, he uncapped a bottle of pills and threw them all into his intake, washing it down with more energex.
More.
A second bottle went down.
The world tilted.
Just one more.
A third bottle gone.
He needed some air.
Stumbling down the halls, he was suddenly very thankful no one cared enough to find him.
He arrived at the top of the tower, in the exact room he had crashed a train into what could’ve been a lifetime ago. Nothing was making any sense now, processor scrambling for anything to hold on to, and only finding one thought.
The Matrix took so much from him, his cog, his friend, his life.
But he could take something from the Matrix,
Himself.
He let the small blaster he kept in his arm transform out, and brought it to the bottom of his helm.
This was what everyone wanted, and he hadn’t done what he had wanted to in a long time, so who was he to stop now.
He barely registered pulling the trigger, there was just a sudden nothing.
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He never heard the anguished scream of B-127.
He never saw Eilta One punching Prowl into a pulp, taking out one of his optics.
He never saw Megatron’s face when the news reached the Decepticon base.
He ignored Primus’s anger.
But Orion Pax finally felt free.