Prompt 6 Response
Title: Hope Once Lost
Characters/Pairings: Elita-One, with a bit of Elita/Optimus, mentions of Chromia, Firestar, Moonracer, and some added Shockwave and Megatron for flavour.
'Verse: G1, pre-war through to post-movie.
Rating: PG for angst.
Warnings: Mentions of canon character death, some minor possibly disturbing imagery, and an awful lot of 'what-if-ing'.
Disclaimer: Transformers - not owned by me, not profited from by me.
Prompt: 'For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.' John Greenleaf Whittier
It might have been.
She vaguely remembers someone saying, vorns and vorns ago, that the most hopeless and miserable phrase ever uttered by a sentient being was such a string of four monosyllabic words. At the time she was young and carefree; who of Ariel’s age ever worried beyond the immediate and the concrete? Not her, that was for sure. And not Orion Pax or Dion either. Even watching Firestar and Moonracer now, still so vibrant and hopeful; and even after everything they have seen and done, they are still somehow youthfully naive in a way that wrenches at Elita’s emotions and her war-born cynicism. She was that young once, that alive and genuinely happy.
But no more, and she finds it hard to believe she ever will be again. It isn’t even in the things she has done to keep the Autobot resistance alive; it isn’t in the people she has killed or the lives she has sacrificed for the greater good that she finds she has lost her hope for a better and happier time. No, what has destroyed her hope is the fact that she doesn’t even know when she lost it. One orn she shot at Shockwave and found that somewhere along the line she had stopped wondering when she would be standing beside him as Megatron and Optimus Prime signed a peace treaty.
She has stopped believing there ever will be an end to this, and it horrifies her. And it seems even worse when she looks at those around her. Even bitter, war-hardened old Chromia still believes that one day she’ll put the gun down in favour of taking up Ironhide’s hand and dancing circles around younglings as they tell war stories for all the world to hear. Yet Elita doesn’t. For the life of her she cannot conjure up a scene where she and Optimus will go back to what they were, sitting, chatting and laughing the night away. All she can see is death and destruction, and her love’s vital fluids splattered over the body of his antithesis.
It might have been.
When the word comes not even a vorn after the last time she saw Optimus that he is dead, Elita cannot even break down. She cannot grieve, she cannot mourn; she cannot live. She is frozen inside; frozen outside, for that matter. Frozen all over, and the only thing moving is that last image of her love’s death; a dream that was not perhaps a dream at all. The scene replays inside her head, over and over until she cannot even remember Optimus but she sees the same violent tableau, overlaid with the words ‘Freedom is the right of all sentient beings’.
Time passes, how much she does not know. They keep her somewhere she cannot do harm, to herself or to others. Outside the war rages on, and she remains in the fragile cocoon they have spun for her. She is peripherally aware that Chromia is often with her, and that Moonracer and Firestar come and go quite frequently. Sometimes she thinks she even manages to speak with them, to assure them that she is aware and functioning, but that she is very much not all right. Most of this however passes hazily; she is too busy being lost in memories of more pleasant times to pay attention to the present.
She remembers a time at the beginning of the war, when she was still young and so very new to being Elita. It was the first time she ever had cause to use her ability to manipulate time, and it was her very first time battling Shockwave. And while she could recall every moment of that battle in perfect clarity, she does not focus on the furore and the fighting. No, what she remembers is a single moment when she looked at him and said, ‘It might have been.’
Elita remembers someone, vorns and vorns ago, saying that the most hopeless and miserable phrase ever uttered by a sentient being was a string of four monosyllabic words. But ‘It might have been’ does not even begin to compare to ‘It is no more’.