The best lies that Flashsteel could tell were always half-truths. He had no talent for masking his feelings, especially his desire to be honest. He had struggled to keep a straight face for all the years of his professional career and never mastered it. The best he could do was to evoke the earnest face of a mech who cared passionately, the gently pursed lips of one under too much pressure to do so less. He always carried the desperate mark of an optimist between his brows, the pinches and creases of one who squinted at rusted gears to find the bright, weathered edges at their teeth.
There was nothing dishonest about the practice— the simplest statement of a fact covered up for all the difficulty of a situation.
“What is the greatest challenge to policing in Rodion?” Flashsteel remembered that a reporter had once asked him at a press conference.
“It’s simple, and I can answer you in one word: trust,” Flashsteel had said. Rodion’s citizens had no trust in their police to fulfil the mission to protect and serve. “That’s why our project here in 78th is so vital; we are here to restore that trust.”
He carried himself with the gentle, prophetic confidence that assured all listeners that, indeed, they had nothing to worry about. He had seen to the depths of the Great Rust Sea. There was nothing more complicated about Cybertron’s city-state best known for its brutal, unforgiving underground than a lack of trust between individuals and state authorities.
Simple problems have simple solutions, according to the common logic, and the full burden of truth was far beyond the ability of many to bear. It was a responsibility of those in charge to make things simple. Uncomplicated fact never choked anyone he had ever met. Sometimes he wondered it was for this demonstration of Flashsteel’s belief in the rallying power of simplicity that Rictus had never discouraged him, never cut the strings that bound them.
“Flashsteel,” Ready once said to him, bearing a recognisably concerned expression. “Who is the Captain to you?”
By this ocassion that Flashsteel had been sitting in the medbay, Ready had already saved his spark fourteen times and stood at his side against their Captain dozens more. Flashsteel had been upset, when he came in— Rictus had berated him once again over the latest morale issue, and Flashsteel had been finding it difficult to cope. He was calm now, but had let on more than he had intended to Ready.
He folded his hands in his lap, looking down as if he could find some consolation there for the lie he knew he would have to give. He knew he shouldn’t wait too long to answer.
“It’s really not that complicated,” he would begin with well-practiced casualness, accompanied with a laugh— the kind of laugh that came from a can as opposed from the spark. “He’s my superior officer.”
But in his mind’s eye, all Flashsteel could see was Rictus, standing beside him at the podium during that press conference so long ago. His optics twinkled with the dark amusement of one who knew better, as if to haunt him with a lofty, elegiac whisper— Oh, if only.
titsay
theartofmadeline
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