Mind

Scourge had carried him away barely conscious. Cyclonus would not have left otherwise. He would have stayed there huddled at his lord’s feet, the one place made for him in the universe, until the Sharkticon guards arrived and finished destroying him. He had not been deceiving himself with any false hope; he had known Galvatron would not stop them. But what else was there for him to do but die?

Even after Scourge had gotten him back to the moon base, after they had repaired his injuries, Cyclonus had continued to lie quiet in their narrow infirmary, conscious but unmoving, unspeaking. Hook had tried to jolt him into motion with tortures, Soundwave with careful mental prodding, Scourge with pleas for his help. He had not answered any of them. He had been trapped within a vast yawning emptiness, a prison within his own mind. Strange, that it had been Ironhide, of all of them, who had found the key to turn in his door.

Cyclonus had closed the door of that prison behind him after he had left it. With help from Soundwave, he had painstakingly built himself a mental wall around that place, the deepest core of his mind; a wall that had shut out the one thundering imperative of his existence, the great bittersweet joy of his life. It had been the only way to do what had to be done. But now he had done all that had been required of him, and death was coming, swiftly. Seven minutes and twelve astroseconds left, and Cyclonus permitted the wall to collapse; he let the all-devouring love back out, that he might feel the final grief for his lord, the terrible dark quasar at the heart of his galaxy. He had been built to serve Galvatron—and he had destroyed Galvatron. For these last moments, he would mourn, and pay the price for his treason.

He was prepared for soul-destroying pain, for a kind of eradication of his very self; he had never been able to imagine a universe, an existence for himself, that did not contain Galvatron in it. But the agony did not come. Instead, vividly in his mind for a moment he saw Galvatron—Galvatron not in that Quintesson mockery of a throne room, but laughing with savage exultation on a battlefield, jeering at death even as he dealt it with a sweep of his cannon, and Cyclonus felt rising in him suddenly, like a benediction, the absolute certainty that he had not failed after all.