Work Text:
Shockwave was not dead. He was supposed to be dead, twice, by now, but instead he stand in his laboratory, staring at the blurry apparatus lined up against the walls to leave decent walking space for someone of his proportion. His... New proportion. It was nothing, though. Nothing he hadn't come to deserve, anyhow.
The way one treats a drone tells you a lot about their morals. He might have, in his lack of emotion at the time, decided that none of this was real. That none of this mattered.
But the world around him consistently changed because of his actions. Even if the people here somehow were merely perfect simulations of people, they still looked like living mechs.
And he had decided that it didn't matter if any of them lived or died anyway.
It would be easy to just brush it all off. After all, one's feelings and emotions composed a very significant portion of one's character and morals, it would follow that one's morality would degrade in their absence. It would be incredibly easy to brush it off, if only it were someone else and Shockwave didn't remember doing it. To think that, with no feelings, that is what he turned into...
To think that he ruined so many lives in so little time. Any amount of time he could have spent doing so would have been too little, in comparison to how long it would take to rectify it. To how much of it cannot be rectified.
Orion probably hates him now. The realisation is almost an afterthought, even if it makes his spark feel like it's been put in a hydraulic press. Orion probably hates him, even if he hesitated so awfully much before trying to kill him. That is just how Orion is, forgiving and kind by his very nature.
He finds himself absently picking up something or other that he began working on before... Before. It is, truly, fascinating how this world's logic- or, rather, its inconsistent nature -could be used against the very fabric of its reality.
Shockwave really wishes he had better applications for it.
Emotions really are inconvenient. He can't be breaking down in tears while on the clock and under video surveillance, after all.
The half-assembled thing goes in a box with eighteen others.