Ep0.5 – “Debrief” – Closed

There was a long list of bots Legion wouldn't have minded nearly mowing down in his haste to escape the Hatchet's ire. The living incarnation of peace, love and turbopups, however, was nowhere near the top of it. In fact, he ranked only a notch or two above Prowl and Megatron himself at the very bottom of it. Perhaps it was unsurprising, then, that it was in fact Optimus fragging Prime he all but tripped over, and just to make everything more irksome the bit bot wanted to chat.

This... this is gonna suck big fokkin' brass bearings.

"Tha's one way o'describin' it," Legion grumbled, jabbing a finger at a trio of fresh dents clustered just above his left optic. And to think, he'd nearly forgotten about the good doctor's legendary throwing arm. "'Got m'aft chewed from 'ere t'Tarn an' back's a lil' closer t'th'truth. Turns out autorepair ain't th'end-all be-all when it comes t'strut fractures an' heat-stress. Th'Hatchet's gotta do some diggin'- dinnit have parts on-servo jes' yet- so 'til 'e finds 'em I'm cleared fer light duty. His 'zact words were," And here Legion dropped his accent, "'Don't do anything that fragging GLITCHED again!'"

For a long, long moment Legion seriously considered spinning a lie for the recordbooks. Ratchet's fondness for beating sense into wayward soldiers' helms the hard way was already the stuff of legend, eclipsed in infamy only by his near-miraculous ability to drag the sameself soldiers back from the Well by the skin of their dente. No amount of playing into the Prime's gloomy expectations could tarnish a record as glowing as the Hatchet's- but Optimus Prime was not Blazewing, Earth was not Teyonu, and there were some mechs you just couldn't fib to without feeling like scum.

"Chucked a few wrenches but nothin' made contact. Don' think his spark was really in it, y'know? Fokker's got more on 'is mind than lil' ole me." Here he paused, optics narrowing a hair's-breadth. "...'magine you do too, Bossmech."

Legion's solution to many things was simply to not think about them. The less he considered the fate of Radia, for example, or the Prime's aft, or the various deviant and cruel things he still wanted to do to Flipswitch, the happier he was. Brooding over things already done couldn't change anything, couldn't right past wrongs, and no amount of moping would make him feel any better. It was safer, then, to simply lock all the things that caused him pain away and go on about living.

This, though... This was different, as much a matter of honor as one of honesty. As much as unarchiving his last memories of Teyonu hurt- and it did, like acid in his lines and a blade in his spark- it had to be done. With any luck the Prime would either ignore or forgive the cold, sick ripple of mingled guilt and fear that blackened his field in the split-klik before he clamped it tight to his plates and affected professionalism.

"We got sold out," Legion began, forcing the jagged edge of anger and helpless fear out of his tone. The accent went with it, and for a brief, disorienting moment its absence made him feel somehow vulnerable. "Our head communications officer, Silvershine- I don't know if he was planted by the 'Cons before I transferred in or defected somewhere along the line. Couldn't find evidence either way. Either way, he turned against us. Bugged the base's comm systems, fragged up everything that went in or out over longwave comms. We got maybe half of what was sent to us, all the useless slag we couldn't or didn't need to act on. I don't know what, if anything, got -out-. Silver was... real fokkin' good at what he did. No one caught on for... fok, orn, and even then no one wanted to think something was really wrong. Just a glitch, right?"

"It's just the storm, Big Mech. Just a glitch. Nothing to worry about. You can get a hold of your loverbot next cycle, honest..."

Blazewing had long made a point of dinning efficiency and economy of speech into those he served alongside. Cutting straight to the chase saved time, resources and, above all else, lives. It was a lesson Legion, a chatterbox since sparking, had always grappled with, but here and now it saved his aft and his sanity. Blazewing's 'big three' descriptives- impersonal, impartial and unbiased- gave him an unbending framework in which to phrase what needed to be said.

"Waited for a storm, planted explosives and got the Pit outta there. Cons hit the barracks first- thermite bomb from low orbit. They..." His voice didn't so much break as shatter, ragged glyphs of hate and bloody reprisal boiling up from some spark-deep well of violence he hadn't known he possessed. "They didn't feel a thing. Didn't have time to. Seekers hit before the smoke cleared, ground troops not long after. They knew where they were going- Silver gave them the base's specs, I imagine. Blew the self-defense systems first, hacked every slagging thing they could get their servos on. Cut the life-support systems and hauled aft out once they'd got what they wanted."

There was more to it than that- there always was- but the rest was the sort of deeply personal information Blazewing had always deemed 'useless fluff fit only for gossip.' The Prime couldn't wring tactical information from yet another description of the twisted delight Decepticons took in slaughter, couldn't make something of the horrific details seared into his memory banks alongside his teammates' last howls of despair. That was his own emotional mess to sort out, and certainly nothing he'd burden a mech already staggering under the weight of the world with.

"I've got lists," He added eventually, whisper-quiet words devoid of glyph or subtonal cue. As much as he would've liked to rail against the universe and every needless cruelty it contained, this was not the time, the place or the audience such a catharsis would have suited. "Everyone who died. Every 'Con I thought I recognized. What they got, what they didn't. Everything I could think of. Ain't much, but it's the best I can do."

Moments had a strange way of slipping through your fingers the moment you loosened your deathgrip on them, vanishing back into the nether that had spawned them as soon as they'd come, and this strange, emotionally-charged sliver of time was no exception to that rule. There was heavy silence and a sense of listening, of presence so weighty he wondered briefly if sensation alone could tear a mech apart, a flash of contact so unexpected it made him flinch back as if scalded and then- gone, just like that, leaving him to reset his optics and wonder.

"Nothing you aren't already doing, sir." Simple words and simple glyphs, all of them, but in the typically paradoxical nature of things they somehow amounted to something greater. Legion was no archivist trained in the usage and preservation of words, had no vast depth of raw intellect or acquired vocabulary upon which to draw. Plain language, then- soldiers' cant and Kaon-rough slang and half-a-dozen other glyph-dialects he hadn't had cause to use for vorn- would have to suffice, impart the meaning and emotion he had no other way of getting across.

Because you're ending this. Because you're making their deaths worth something. Because when you strip away the slag you are this war, more than any of us will ever be, and because that means something.

"Better question is what you need from me."