Crosses To Bear, Part 5
Title: Crosses To Bear
Status: IN PROGRESS
Rating: T/PG-13
Warnings: A bit of language, some scenes of peril
Main Characters: Swoop, Optimus Prime, Hound, Trailbreaker, Ratchet, Slag, Blaster, Tracks
Genre: Introspection, mostly. A bit of Action. As action-y as Nightwind gets, anyway.
Summary: Swoop and a few other crazy Autobots vs. A Really Big Chunk of Rock, with Tracks's life hanging in the balance.
Chapter Links: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Ratchet wasn't certain which was worse: Seeing that he was up way too high or knowing that he was up way too high and not being able to see that he was up way too high, even if he shined his shoulder-mounted light in the direction of the drop-off that he knew was looming somewhere off to his left.
He knew, intellectually, that he was sufficiently far from the drop-off. He knew, intellectually, that Hound and Slag had scouted ahead while they'd still had some light and had accurately mapped the steeply-inclined ridge they were currently traversing as it spiraled dizzyingly above the distressingly wide path of the recent avalanche. They'd even blazed a quick initial trail, utilizing Slag's expert flame-throwing abilities, something they'd consider extreme cheating if they were doing this for recreation.
Ratchet shuddered at the very notion; why anyone would do this for recreation was multiple parsecs beyond his comprehension. But he knew that Hound and Slag knew what they were doing, and that they had laid down ropes to guide all of them in the darkness, to keep them all safely away from the drop-off as Hound and Trailbreaker, now up in the lead, plowed and hacked through the snow and ice that had accumulated in just the few of hours that had passed since the initial survey. The globs of snow that they knocked aside skipped down the 70-degree incline that they were climbing, occasionally whacking Ratchet in the head and making him sigh exasperatedly. It was, he was convinced, the icing on the cake.
They had all collectively decided to keep moving through the night. They had a lot of ground to cover and time was limited in a disturbingly unknown sort of way. They were heading slowly and laboriously, every step hard-won, towards Swoop's now-stationary - So Silverbolt, at base camp, had informed them - location. He'd apparently decided to hunker down for the night. Either that…or he was stuck, in which case they had even less reason to bivouac for the night. They were relying on Ratchet's firm assertion that Swoop knew where Tracks was, so they were obliged to find him or at the very least to follow him. And in either case, they needed to keep moving, because Swoop was still three-quarters of a kilometer higher up than they were. It seemed a ridiculously short distance, a distance that would take them mere seconds to travel on a wide-open highway, but in these conditions, traversing a single kilometer took an hour of hard and heavy work.
And so here they were, climbing a near-vertical wall of mostly-ice in the middle of the night on one of the tallest mountains on the planet. Had someone a week ago told Ratchet that he'd be doing this, he would have had them carted off to the nearest loony bin. And yet, here he was.
Ratchet knew with a fair degree of confidence that he was not going to fall. He also knew that he was secured by a series of complexly-knotted ropes - and a few chains, just for good measure - to Slag below him, who, even if Ratchet did manage to fall somehow, wouldn't be very likely to budge as a result, being much larger and heavier than Ratchet was, and being further stabilized by the fact that he was now staying in his much-sturdier, quadrupedal, lower-to-the-ground dinosaur form. Ratchet knew all of this and more, all of it information that should have helped keep him calm and reassured.
Still, Ratchet felt like he was going to fall. Phobias were by definition irrational fears, and the irrational whispering in his processors seemed to be gaining in volume as he gained in altitude. They kept insisting that falling was nothing less than an inevitability. And now that utter darkness had descended upon them, Ratchet couldn't help feeling that he had somehow managed to stray completely off-course - even though he knew that he hadn't - and that he was now millimeters away from the precipice that he couldn't see, that there was nothing between him and falling for kilometers in pitch-blackness to his doom. He shuddered deeply at the thought.
But then he shook himself as he felt rising panic begin to eat at him again, sternly telling himself not to go there. It was embarrassing enough that he'd succumbed to panic earlier and, worse, that everyone had seen or at least heard him panicking. He would never, he knew, live it down. And he insisted to himself that he wasn't going to add more fuel to the story-telling fire, even if he had to drug himself until he was comatose and Slag had to drag him the rest of the way up the mountain. He just wasn't going to go there.
No. Way.
Instead, he deliberately focused his attention up and ahead of him, to Trailbreaker, who he knew was a dozen meters in front of him even if all he could see of him was the bobbing light that he was carrying. Hound was a few dozen meters ahead of Trailbreaker, in the lead. They were forging slowly ahead, leading the way, armed with bright halogen lights mounted on their shoulders that at least allowed them to see a few meters in front of themselves before the light was completely swallowed by driving snow that only drove harder and faster as they slowly ascended into the cold embrace of the storm that was more severely buffeting the higher elevations.
Exertion was at least keeping the effects of the extreme cold at bay. The only problem was that dissipated internal heat caused internal and external condensation, which almost immediately froze if one stilled for a even a few seconds. Chunks of ice grinding in joints and gears was not necessarily comfortable and did not make for optimum efficiency. But it was manageable, certainly so if Ratchet kept his focus on the overriding purpose of this entire ordeal. So, he fixed his sights on the two Autobots in front of him, clenched his jaw, and continued to plow ahead, higher and higher inch by inch, doing his best to leave acrophobic panic and raging worry for both Tracks and Swoop behind him.
* * * *
Swoop had gone rock-climbing with Slag before. Exactly once. In Yosemite. In May of the previous year. He hadn't found the experience very enjoyable. As a flier, the danger of climbing, at least in that far less extreme situation, had been completely nullified and, therefore, the thrill was similarly nullified. In truth, Swoop had gotten bored. Quickly.
And so, Swoop had cheated, using flight to easily skip between narrow ledges and outcroppings in the cliff face that Slag had had to labor mightily to reach. Swoop had almost literally bounced up the cliff face. Mostly, he had done this because he'd known that it would piss off Slag and therefore give him some entertainment. He clearly recalled perching on the lip of the cliff, leaning precariously over it and staring down in vast amusement at Slag. He'd lobbed mostly-good-natured critique and taunts down at him. Slag had scowled up at him while he'd clung to the rocks, slinging not-very-good-natured imprecations right back up at Swoop. Which, of course, had only served to increase Swoop's level of overall amusement.
This situation…was different. Very different. His head craned far backwards, Swoop stared, half in dismay and half in determined challenge, up at the huge and almost sheer face of snow-and-ice-encrusted rock in front of him. California in early May had been pleasant. Sunshine had agreeably warmed him while he'd sat up on lip of the bluff, watching Slag climb. The breeze had been light and cool, just cool enough to soothe Slag in his exertions.
But here, the storm winds still howled, and it was truly frigid. Swoop's forced inactivity of the night before had had its deleterious effects, too, even though he'd burrowed as deeply as he could manage into the snow for protection from the wind and for meager insulation against the dry and deeply biting cold. He'd drifted off into a doze and had awoken a few hours later to frozen relays and heavy ice accumulation in pretty much all of his joints, which had taken him a while to remove. And now, there were reports coming in from his diagnostics here and there, telling him tales of internal damage as frozen condensation that had accumulated in his internals started to melt once he'd started moving again, frying a number of unprotected and uninsulated circuit pathways. The latter most certainly made his thinking somewhat fuzzy; the effect was not that much different, he reflected, than what a human was supposed to experience in the early stages of hypothermia. It was an effort to focus and then to maintain his focus, but Swoop was managing. For now, at least.
Swoop had, he realized, few options open to him. During the previous night, once he'd reached the rock face currently looming over him, he had determined that there was no way around it. To one side, there was a long and near-vertical drop-off. To the other side, there was another drop-off, but between that drop-off and Swoop there was a crevasse. He'd discovered the crevasse the previous night by the simple expedient of falling into it. He hadn't fallen too far; he'd transformed, painfully, directly reversed course, and had then flown blindly back out of it, his damaged wing screaming in protest the entire time. Once he'd crested the lip of the crevasse, emerging out into the raging elements from which the crevasse had shielded him, the hurricane-force winds had latched onto him with a death grip and had threatened to carry him off to who-knew-where. It had been difficult, not to mention energy-draining, to bring himself back safely down to the mountainside without colliding in an out-of-control fashion with the mountain.
So now, for Swoop, it was either figure out a way up and around the forbidding rock face in front of him, or backtrack and attempt to find another way around. If he chose the latter option, he'd be wasting all of his harrowing efforts of the previous night, hours upon hours spent plowing through waist-deep loose snow, slipping and sliding up a very steep and treacherously slick incline, not to mention the whole crevasse affair. Swoop stubbornly did not want to do that; he was very aware of time ticking inexorably by. So that left…
He eyed the rock face again with renewed interest and determination, eyes narrowed against the pallid light that managed to pierce the otherwise thick layer of storm clouds that roiled above and around him. The wind was still raging but for the moment, the snow had stopped, and he had something of a better view than he might have had the day before. So he could see that some fifty meters above his head there was a tiny outcropping of ice, maybe wide enough for him to stand on if he otherwise flattened himself against the rock face, although he had no idea if it would actually support his weight. Squinting, he saw another similar outcropping somewhat higher up. The wall of rock was, apparently, not quite as sheer as he'd first thought, and Swoop found his thoughts suddenly flashing back to Yosemite. He recalled himself laughing at Slag as he'd skipped easily from ledge to ledge up the face of the cliff they'd climbed…
But surely he couldn't just skip up this cliff face in short hops of flight…could he? He thought about it. His position was actually somewhat sheltered from the wind at the moment. It wasn't sheltered enough that he could truly fly to his destination, but at least for the moment it mostly seemed to be slamming into the other side of the mountain. He wasn't sure that the same would be true higher up, but he figured that he'd cross that bridge if and when he came to it. He also had light now, thin and pale though it was, to see his way. Another advantage, another positive. The unknown variable was his damaged wing. It had worked marginally, albeit very painfully, the previous night on a short, straight-shot hop of flight, but to accomplish the kind of precisely-controlled flight that would be needed to land safely on those tiny outcroppings that loomed far above him…? That was an entirely different thing.
In the end, Swoop decided that the only way to know whether or not his sudden and perhaps crazy plan would work was to try it. He realized that he had little to lose and perhaps everything to gain.
Status: IN PROGRESS
Rating: T/PG-13
Warnings: A bit of language, some scenes of peril
Main Characters: Swoop, Optimus Prime, Hound, Trailbreaker, Ratchet, Slag, Blaster, Tracks
Genre: Introspection, mostly. A bit of Action. As action-y as Nightwind gets, anyway.
Summary: Swoop and a few other crazy Autobots vs. A Really Big Chunk of Rock, with Tracks's life hanging in the balance.
Chapter Links: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Ratchet wasn't certain which was worse: Seeing that he was up way too high or knowing that he was up way too high and not being able to see that he was up way too high, even if he shined his shoulder-mounted light in the direction of the drop-off that he knew was looming somewhere off to his left.
He knew, intellectually, that he was sufficiently far from the drop-off. He knew, intellectually, that Hound and Slag had scouted ahead while they'd still had some light and had accurately mapped the steeply-inclined ridge they were currently traversing as it spiraled dizzyingly above the distressingly wide path of the recent avalanche. They'd even blazed a quick initial trail, utilizing Slag's expert flame-throwing abilities, something they'd consider extreme cheating if they were doing this for recreation.
Ratchet shuddered at the very notion; why anyone would do this for recreation was multiple parsecs beyond his comprehension. But he knew that Hound and Slag knew what they were doing, and that they had laid down ropes to guide all of them in the darkness, to keep them all safely away from the drop-off as Hound and Trailbreaker, now up in the lead, plowed and hacked through the snow and ice that had accumulated in just the few of hours that had passed since the initial survey. The globs of snow that they knocked aside skipped down the 70-degree incline that they were climbing, occasionally whacking Ratchet in the head and making him sigh exasperatedly. It was, he was convinced, the icing on the cake.
They had all collectively decided to keep moving through the night. They had a lot of ground to cover and time was limited in a disturbingly unknown sort of way. They were heading slowly and laboriously, every step hard-won, towards Swoop's now-stationary - So Silverbolt, at base camp, had informed them - location. He'd apparently decided to hunker down for the night. Either that…or he was stuck, in which case they had even less reason to bivouac for the night. They were relying on Ratchet's firm assertion that Swoop knew where Tracks was, so they were obliged to find him or at the very least to follow him. And in either case, they needed to keep moving, because Swoop was still three-quarters of a kilometer higher up than they were. It seemed a ridiculously short distance, a distance that would take them mere seconds to travel on a wide-open highway, but in these conditions, traversing a single kilometer took an hour of hard and heavy work.
And so here they were, climbing a near-vertical wall of mostly-ice in the middle of the night on one of the tallest mountains on the planet. Had someone a week ago told Ratchet that he'd be doing this, he would have had them carted off to the nearest loony bin. And yet, here he was.
Ratchet knew with a fair degree of confidence that he was not going to fall. He also knew that he was secured by a series of complexly-knotted ropes - and a few chains, just for good measure - to Slag below him, who, even if Ratchet did manage to fall somehow, wouldn't be very likely to budge as a result, being much larger and heavier than Ratchet was, and being further stabilized by the fact that he was now staying in his much-sturdier, quadrupedal, lower-to-the-ground dinosaur form. Ratchet knew all of this and more, all of it information that should have helped keep him calm and reassured.
Still, Ratchet felt like he was going to fall. Phobias were by definition irrational fears, and the irrational whispering in his processors seemed to be gaining in volume as he gained in altitude. They kept insisting that falling was nothing less than an inevitability. And now that utter darkness had descended upon them, Ratchet couldn't help feeling that he had somehow managed to stray completely off-course - even though he knew that he hadn't - and that he was now millimeters away from the precipice that he couldn't see, that there was nothing between him and falling for kilometers in pitch-blackness to his doom. He shuddered deeply at the thought.
But then he shook himself as he felt rising panic begin to eat at him again, sternly telling himself not to go there. It was embarrassing enough that he'd succumbed to panic earlier and, worse, that everyone had seen or at least heard him panicking. He would never, he knew, live it down. And he insisted to himself that he wasn't going to add more fuel to the story-telling fire, even if he had to drug himself until he was comatose and Slag had to drag him the rest of the way up the mountain. He just wasn't going to go there.
No. Way.
Instead, he deliberately focused his attention up and ahead of him, to Trailbreaker, who he knew was a dozen meters in front of him even if all he could see of him was the bobbing light that he was carrying. Hound was a few dozen meters ahead of Trailbreaker, in the lead. They were forging slowly ahead, leading the way, armed with bright halogen lights mounted on their shoulders that at least allowed them to see a few meters in front of themselves before the light was completely swallowed by driving snow that only drove harder and faster as they slowly ascended into the cold embrace of the storm that was more severely buffeting the higher elevations.
Exertion was at least keeping the effects of the extreme cold at bay. The only problem was that dissipated internal heat caused internal and external condensation, which almost immediately froze if one stilled for a even a few seconds. Chunks of ice grinding in joints and gears was not necessarily comfortable and did not make for optimum efficiency. But it was manageable, certainly so if Ratchet kept his focus on the overriding purpose of this entire ordeal. So, he fixed his sights on the two Autobots in front of him, clenched his jaw, and continued to plow ahead, higher and higher inch by inch, doing his best to leave acrophobic panic and raging worry for both Tracks and Swoop behind him.
* * * *
Swoop had gone rock-climbing with Slag before. Exactly once. In Yosemite. In May of the previous year. He hadn't found the experience very enjoyable. As a flier, the danger of climbing, at least in that far less extreme situation, had been completely nullified and, therefore, the thrill was similarly nullified. In truth, Swoop had gotten bored. Quickly.
And so, Swoop had cheated, using flight to easily skip between narrow ledges and outcroppings in the cliff face that Slag had had to labor mightily to reach. Swoop had almost literally bounced up the cliff face. Mostly, he had done this because he'd known that it would piss off Slag and therefore give him some entertainment. He clearly recalled perching on the lip of the cliff, leaning precariously over it and staring down in vast amusement at Slag. He'd lobbed mostly-good-natured critique and taunts down at him. Slag had scowled up at him while he'd clung to the rocks, slinging not-very-good-natured imprecations right back up at Swoop. Which, of course, had only served to increase Swoop's level of overall amusement.
This situation…was different. Very different. His head craned far backwards, Swoop stared, half in dismay and half in determined challenge, up at the huge and almost sheer face of snow-and-ice-encrusted rock in front of him. California in early May had been pleasant. Sunshine had agreeably warmed him while he'd sat up on lip of the bluff, watching Slag climb. The breeze had been light and cool, just cool enough to soothe Slag in his exertions.
But here, the storm winds still howled, and it was truly frigid. Swoop's forced inactivity of the night before had had its deleterious effects, too, even though he'd burrowed as deeply as he could manage into the snow for protection from the wind and for meager insulation against the dry and deeply biting cold. He'd drifted off into a doze and had awoken a few hours later to frozen relays and heavy ice accumulation in pretty much all of his joints, which had taken him a while to remove. And now, there were reports coming in from his diagnostics here and there, telling him tales of internal damage as frozen condensation that had accumulated in his internals started to melt once he'd started moving again, frying a number of unprotected and uninsulated circuit pathways. The latter most certainly made his thinking somewhat fuzzy; the effect was not that much different, he reflected, than what a human was supposed to experience in the early stages of hypothermia. It was an effort to focus and then to maintain his focus, but Swoop was managing. For now, at least.
Swoop had, he realized, few options open to him. During the previous night, once he'd reached the rock face currently looming over him, he had determined that there was no way around it. To one side, there was a long and near-vertical drop-off. To the other side, there was another drop-off, but between that drop-off and Swoop there was a crevasse. He'd discovered the crevasse the previous night by the simple expedient of falling into it. He hadn't fallen too far; he'd transformed, painfully, directly reversed course, and had then flown blindly back out of it, his damaged wing screaming in protest the entire time. Once he'd crested the lip of the crevasse, emerging out into the raging elements from which the crevasse had shielded him, the hurricane-force winds had latched onto him with a death grip and had threatened to carry him off to who-knew-where. It had been difficult, not to mention energy-draining, to bring himself back safely down to the mountainside without colliding in an out-of-control fashion with the mountain.
So now, for Swoop, it was either figure out a way up and around the forbidding rock face in front of him, or backtrack and attempt to find another way around. If he chose the latter option, he'd be wasting all of his harrowing efforts of the previous night, hours upon hours spent plowing through waist-deep loose snow, slipping and sliding up a very steep and treacherously slick incline, not to mention the whole crevasse affair. Swoop stubbornly did not want to do that; he was very aware of time ticking inexorably by. So that left…
He eyed the rock face again with renewed interest and determination, eyes narrowed against the pallid light that managed to pierce the otherwise thick layer of storm clouds that roiled above and around him. The wind was still raging but for the moment, the snow had stopped, and he had something of a better view than he might have had the day before. So he could see that some fifty meters above his head there was a tiny outcropping of ice, maybe wide enough for him to stand on if he otherwise flattened himself against the rock face, although he had no idea if it would actually support his weight. Squinting, he saw another similar outcropping somewhat higher up. The wall of rock was, apparently, not quite as sheer as he'd first thought, and Swoop found his thoughts suddenly flashing back to Yosemite. He recalled himself laughing at Slag as he'd skipped easily from ledge to ledge up the face of the cliff they'd climbed…
But surely he couldn't just skip up this cliff face in short hops of flight…could he? He thought about it. His position was actually somewhat sheltered from the wind at the moment. It wasn't sheltered enough that he could truly fly to his destination, but at least for the moment it mostly seemed to be slamming into the other side of the mountain. He wasn't sure that the same would be true higher up, but he figured that he'd cross that bridge if and when he came to it. He also had light now, thin and pale though it was, to see his way. Another advantage, another positive. The unknown variable was his damaged wing. It had worked marginally, albeit very painfully, the previous night on a short, straight-shot hop of flight, but to accomplish the kind of precisely-controlled flight that would be needed to land safely on those tiny outcroppings that loomed far above him…? That was an entirely different thing.
In the end, Swoop decided that the only way to know whether or not his sudden and perhaps crazy plan would work was to try it. He realized that he had little to lose and perhaps everything to gain.