Title: The Rig
Continuity: IDW
Rating: PG
Character: Shockwave
Warnings: spoilers for MTMTE11
Notes: It's early canon (Last Stand of the Wreckers) that Shockwave spent time in the Autobot prison of Garrus-9 where he was in the Rig, his spark extracted from his body

 

He relearned suffering in the Rig. Perhaps he’d never really known it before, save as an intellectual abstraction.  So many things had been mere abstractions to him back then. 

But in the Rig, spark removed from his brain module and body, he felt it as though it were a dark, living abyss that surrounded at him, licking over his awareness with a slavering hunger.

He supposed it made a certain sense, a cold logic that his brain module would appreciate, even approve, even while he acknowledged a bitter irony in it all. He suffered, he was supposed to suffer, but he doubted, sincerely, that they knew the depths of agony they’d flung him in, detaching him from his body.

Because, without his brain module’s altered filtration, his spark’s memory, its awareness of who he was, and more importantly, who he had been, surfaced.

It.

Hurt.

It hurt as he could not remember hurting for millennia: stark terror and loss and helplessness and despair, knitted together, like a net of razors, slicing in from any vector in which he sought escape. Emotions he had forgotten the flavor of. Emotions he’d nearly forgotten the names of.

It was horror, really. Horror beyond horror, and while part of him could appreciate the cold, almost starkly beautiful logic of it all: punishment, humiliation, and the ultimate joke, that he couldn’t feel any of it, another part of him could only recoil before what seemed to him true evil.

Lobe. He remembered the name. He remembered the sneer, half-boastful, half-greedy, exulting in his panic and fear as they strapped him down.  He remembered feeling his brave words to Orion scorch away, blowing into an ash of the real, mere bluster, false courage. It had seemed so distant, then, and courage easy—noble and stoic, accepting the risks he’d taken all along. Self-sacrifice in an all too literal sense.

But something broke, as it became real.  Something about a mnemosurgeon’s fingers, uncanny and wicked, that brought the menace alive, glittering on the bevel of his needles. He’d felt it snap, tearing him up inside like a thrown gear.

He remembered those last moments with a sort of obsidian-sharp clarity, every color, every line, every smell and sound.  He’d thought to himself—he remembered this, endlessly, suspended in the Autobot’s prison—that this must be what death felt like, the last moments of desperate clinging, afraid to slide into the vast emptiness, afraid to feel one’s spark evaporate, one’s history unravel, revealing a core of tenuous, tremulous faith, too raw to be tested. 

It hadn’t been death. It was something worse, because death, at least, was final. Death, at least, was your own, your end, and at the last, you succumbed to death, surrendered to it, granting it its dark supremacy. 

He hadn’t had the honor of that surrender, forced to live on, stripped of everything that he’d loved: color, light, sound, emotion. He couldn’t kiss. He couldn’t touch. He couldn’t smile, or laugh, or wink. His voice wouldn’t modulate, delivering every word in a flat, encyclopedic monotone.

If he believed in Primus anymore, he’d find it a fitting divine punishment. For his arrogance. For his narcissism. Because he had loved his looks, his intelligence, his wit. He’d loved his smile, the lines of his armor, the graceful movements of his hands. He had loved himself beyond humility. 

And then they’d mutilated his body.  And they’d butchered his brain module. And now, they’d taken his freedom.

He’d been beautiful. He’d been powerful. He’d been brilliant and respected. And now he was...a disembodied orb of energy and memory and pain. A prisoner of something far more awful than a mere jail.  He was…nothing but the memory of a beautiful thing.