Pain
Pain. He knew...pain.
It was all he could feel, a feeling so enormous it was without color or sense or sound. Just a huge gaping maw, and emptiness that threatened to devour him, dissolve him into its nothingness.
It had started with a different kind of pain--a hot white phosphorous explosion, bursting under his spark chamber. He remembered the armor tearing out, almost blossoming, away from the blast, the feel of the metal stretched, and hot and wrenched, servos melted into lock. Pain.
And it had flared green, green as his spark, eating into it in a sort of acidic electricity, that had taken him under.
Until the icy coldness of the water slapped him awake. Brutal, uncaring. The water ate into his exposed cables, the damaged circuitry, sparking along the frayed wires, sweeping with an icy hand across his control net. His joints locked at the shock and he felt himself sinking. Into the pain, into the darkness, into the rising pressure as the water enveloped him, swallowed him down, swallowed him whole.
He lay...for how long he had no idea. Silt and organic material and fine sand gritting in his joints, his crackled optic allowing water to seep into the bulb. Not that there was anything worth seeing, but darkness and a cold so powerful you COULD almost see it. And pain.
It didn't go away. It made time itself flee in terror at its presence, as it held Blackout at an endless now of agony, never fading, never ebbing. Just...rising and rising more. And then...more.
There was no word to encompass it. Agony. Misery. Excrutiating. None could contain it, and Blackout found himself incapable of containing the pain that tore at his cortex, tearing like a hurricane into his fragile sanity.
He had to move. It could not hurt any less than not moving.
That was the rationale he used, and it was a good one. Moving...shifted the pain, refusing to let it settle into its usual joints, its usual nesting The pain, like a restless, disturbed flock of birds, moved and resettled and muttered, refusing to leave completely.
He clawed his way along the ocean floor, stirring up clouds of silty dust that would have foxed his optics had the pain and the water and the cold and the pressure not long ago eaten away at them. He was blinded with pain, dragging himself...he didn't know where. Only trusting his onboard nav--the essential systems all airframes had--to keep him going in a straight vector. He couldn't even get a directional reading--north, or west or anything--but just moved in this indeterminate straight line, hand after hand, knee after knee.
There was no point in pausing or resting, save when the pain of movement became too familiar, to unendurable, and the pain of stillness was almost a release--when the pain became so great that his joints teetered on lockdown, his systems bordering on mobility shutdown.
He didn't want to risk it. Not a shutdown. He didn't know if he'd wake up from one, to be honest. He didn't know if the pain was really what was keeping him alive, keeping him moving. He found himself clutching for it, grabbing it, pulling it back to himself, whenever his systems seemed on the verge of dissolution.
No, he seemed to say. He strove to tie himself in pain's bonds, to pull along that rope of agonized sensation, inch by inch, back to life. Back to sunlight. Back to air.
His rotors...ached with the ocean growth, gritted with silt, vents clogged, small sea creatures trying to form little nests, create little lives in and around his cracked armor, his broken body. Life, trying to build on him. Trying to steal his own life, sap his energy, drain his strength. Their life was not his. Their life was foreign, alien. He pushed back against them, dragging himself forward, pulling through the long climb out of the ocean, feeling. with sensation so fine it took an almost-forever to even acknowledge, that the temperature grew warmer and the light brighter and the living things died off, and flaked off, and fell off and he could begin to feel something stronger than light, stronger than the release of pressure, stronger than pain beckoning him onward.
He began to feel hope.