ARE YOU RATIONAL OR ARE YOU RATIONALIZING? Attempting to justify your choices, your actions, yourself with logic & reason inapplicable to your case? Here you are, with your rhetoric: this is for the greater good. Here you are, with your excuses: this is necessary. Here you are, this black/white/red/gray entity — your hands so full of things you say someone must carry, & no one wants to, so you do it. You do it all, don’t you? All the things that other’s don’t, as to keep themselves different from your enemies. & when someone tells you, shows you how clean your hands should be, you cry out, but this is for the greater good! This is for … this is for … — for what?
Don’t speak about intentions. Megatron’s intentions were this: free the people from the shackles of a systemic oppression. Where did it lead him? & Optimus’ intentions are this: keep the people of Earth safe from further harm. Where is it leading him? & your intentions are this: secure the greater good, secure the greater good, secure the greater —
What are your intentions, Prowl? What are they, really? When you open yourself up like you are now, when you unpeel the opaque film over the surface of a gift of darkness, what can you tell yourself? My intentions are pure! My intentions are noble! My intentions are to secure the greater good, to let us prosper, to curb the power of the wrongful hands, to —
& what are wrongful hands? Hands with too much on them? & then, if so, what of yours? How are you so sure that your hands are not wrongful?
❛ Intention doesn’t always translate into action. ❜
& then, unsaid, but action will always contaminate intention, coil into a place they don’t belong. Ends justify means become means justify means because I am the one who does it.
Again, the war is over. Had the war still waged, had the war still ravaged — perhaps this intention could be heralded, preserved, & all cruel actions by you overlooked, pardoned, explained. After all, a thing such as war demands crude & vile things. Yet, it is over, drawn away, put into a box & sent off into memory for everyone but you. Everyone.
❛ … — & Not politics, but you & … ❜
No, not politics. Small things, instead. Morals, guilt, pain, anger, betrayal. The things you set aside to make yourself intangible, incorporeal: more ideology than individual, more routine, more stigma, more process than person. The impersonality is safer, comforting.
It’s an awful process, the examination of oneself.
❛ — What’s the point of this? ❜
Of this mad, obsessive struggle for a greater good no one wants you to sacrifice integrity for?
❛ Everything that you’ve done. What has it changed? ❜
The war: still a four million year event. The victory: still pyrrhic. The efforts: still futile, still unfruitful: your secrets so loathsome, so un-confessable. Your successes have only contributed to the war, contributed to the pain, contributed to the loss.
❛ I don’t know if I can answer with anything that lasts. ❜
❛ you know the POINT. ❜ his voice is vehement now, suddenly. he’s speaking aloud. voice clear and not crackled by the static of his throat and missing eye. he’s crazy, isn’t he? hallucinating his own conscience, talking, talking. he’s chattering like absentminded politicians, their hands laying languid on their armrests of gold and their laws of something of equal worth, something of unbecoming sterility. he is much like those he opposed, but different. different, he tells himself. and maybe even he’s right. his movements are inspired, lovingly, by senators and representatives and congress, and lobbyists and esteemed doctors and everything in between. but did they dedicate? dedicate to a cause (THE RED ON HIS CHEST the only thing keeping him colored, keeping him something besides cold cold blue and grey and whitesnow). no-one else is setting off bombs. no-one else is so calculative. no-one else has survived long enough to gain the infamous reputation he possesses. it’s hidden in plain sight, a floating halo around his head and hands and everything he touches. ❛ whatever everyone else won’t do. that’s what we do.❜
himself is such a POINTLESS thing. pleading and wise in its supposed context, its supposed knowledge but he says to himself that if morality is to prevail over success then it would have done it years ago. it would have done it four millions years ago, when he was an enforcer and needles slipped into his head and optimus said (optimus said optimus said oh well it doesn’t matter what words he uses because prowl’s writing his own poetry now, writing his own speeches and running his own campaign) and he was lighting bombs, and mesotholas was GIFTING him things. splendid, violent things that came back and bit him in a loving way that was barely discernible from bleeding, bruised, and sensual touch. he’s LATE. late things aren’t valid in the scheme of things. they’re just what they’re titled, and they’ll go away, go away. drift off elsewhere as he slowly continues his goal of productivity and computer speed and his own campaign. he has to get back to his own campaign. he has to do what’s RIGHT. ❛ i hurt people,❜ the admittance is corrosive. he feels metaltongue start melting, grotesquely, away. but like always, prowl remedies the means with the end. ❛ but weigh the numbers, and it’s objectively for the better.❜
