Darkened: The ghost of yesterday
Started the first few lines about OP and his move to a tripartite being. And then Prowl came along and beaned me over the head with this. Seriously man, what the frack?
Darkened: The ghost of yesterday
There is death inside him.
Prowl can feel it like a heavy weight loaded down around his spark chamber, clutching and grasping at his spark. He feels slow, unsteady. His mind moves a million times faster than the rest of him, unfettered by the basic programs that would normally occupy a mech’s processor. He has only the slightest filaments of core coding; by all rights he should be no more sentient than a datapad. But sparks are tricky things, Prowl’s is more resilient than most and it had pulsed on despite the genocide that had tried to claim it.
That had claimed it.
There’s a dead mech inside Prowl’s frame. Or perhaps Prowl’s mind is living in a corpse. It is difficult to tell which is true. Prowl has taken his time to familiarize himself with his body and he can feel the imprint of life from another mech in every circuit. He has merely been over-layed above it and it slows his reactions times, makes him sluggish. His mind is moving faster than ever before but the neural circuits weren’t developed to support him and can't keep up.
And it shows. Oh, it shows.
His predecessor had been calm and stoic. Reserved but not without emotions, just not fully open. But now this stranger in a dead mech’s body frightens the mechs that had once been comrades. The enforcer-that-was is gone and they know it. There are no spark alignments connecting them, no resonance at all.
And, perhaps mostly obviously, when they try to ping him, try to establish any sort of wireless processor connection or spread out their fields to share with him, there’s nothing but static.
Prowl is a black spot, a dead sensor blip. They can see him but they can’t feel him. So many basic protocols had been lost when the enforcer had died, wiped completely clean. No matter what Ratchet does, he can’t reinstall them when Prowl’s processor is a disjointed mess and there is no force on Cybertron that can fix that. When Praxus had fallen, all those that were connected to Prowl had screamed their last. A city's death knell forever frozen inside his mind, storing it had shattered his processor, leaving memory fragments embedded deeply in his broken programming. And there had been many, so many -too many- the enforcer had lived there for so long, known so many people and through their sparks had known even more. Such was the way of Cybertronian’s cities; one spark could be connected to a million others. Or so it had been. Praxus is a warning and now the others were tearing apart in fear of a repeat.
Even though Ratchet had repaired Prowl’s receivers, without the necessary programs to activate and use them, Prowl cannot hear his fellow Autobots. Their species communicated at many wavelengths and Prowl had been restricted to a select few. He is, for all intents and purposes, deaf and mute and the Autobots are not quite sure how to deal with this. For all their extensive history as a species, such situations have been rare and few.
It does not help that this new mech’s ability to feel emotions is stunted, muted; there is so much missing inside his processor and he doesn’t have the appropriate connections to sustain emotions for very long. And he’s always too slow on the uptake -even with how fast his processor moves now,- to recognize social cues. If he wants to smile, his faceplates move when it’s far too long for such an expression to be appropriate.
Some of his fellows find it unnerving. Others find it spooky. All of them find it disorientating and disturbing.
It is hard for them to believe there is a living being inside Prowl’s frame when so much about him resembles death and so none of them can even see him.
This does not bother Prowl. It is, after all, hard to hurt the feelings of something that is not quite alive.
There is death inside him.
He has known this since the moment of his onlining and realizing he had a data core full of memories that were timestamped before the dates of his existence. But this is this first time he has truly understood what it is that he has lost and what this means.
The training room had perfectly recreated Yoketron’s dojo. Prowl held himself in a defensive stance, then he went through a beginner’s kata, a basic sequence of moves that Yoketron had taught him in one of the enforcer’s earliest memories. He can recall it as easily and clearly as he could count to five hundred billion.
Every strike is exact, precise, perfect.
The sequence is flawless.
It is all wrong.
Prowl had learnt many martial arts styles from Yoketron, each with their own unique movements and strengths and weaknesses. But central to them all was their focus on the living energies of the body and the connection to other living beings around them.
There is death inside him.
Prowl is deaf and mute.
The Autobots cannot hear him nor can he hear them.
He is alone.
He works his way through every routine Yoketron had ever taught him and he knows that the arts are lost to him. There is a rhythm, a life beat that every creature has and it flows and ebbs in battle and Prowl cannot feel it. He doesn’t move to it anymore, death clutches at his spark and keeps a tentative hold on it with icy cold fingers and he is out of sync. He knows that he cannot rely on his knowledge of Metallikato or Circuit-Su in the war; that if he does it will only lead to an early deactivation.
For the first time since coming online in this strange new world where he has a lifetime worth of memories and friendships and yet no real, personal attachments to them, Prowl feels lost.
Like his other emotions, this feeling does not last very long. It comes and it goes almost without notice, a mere drop of water on the deep seas that consists of Prowl’s ravaged mind.
Prowl stopped his kata mid strike and evaluated his frame. It was thin and light, all in accordance with his predecessor’s aptitude for martial arts. However, with his own loss in proficiency such a frame was superfluous, if not dangerous to his own existence. It has been a long time since this body had undergone an upgrade.
Perhaps it was time.
He would need to be bigger and more heavily armored if he could no longer be quick enough to avoid enemy fire. A full frame reformat would take time to adapt to but it was time he had, as he no longer held the position of Autobot CTO. And maybe it would help the Autobots adjust, so that they no longer saw their dead comrade in the corner of their optics when it was only him.
Besides, Prowl decided, as he changed the simulation to a firing range. He unsubspaced an acid rifle and took aim at a moving target set several kliks away. His processor spun, faster than any mechs, unfettered by the usual programming that made up a Cybertronian mind. It calculated eighty million variables in less than an astrosecond and he squeezed the trigger, vaporizing the target almost instantly.
When he recovered and was cleared for active duty, someone would need to give Bluestreak a challenge after all.
END
A/N: I caaan't seem to find a reference for Cybertronian unit of distance. Anyone help me out here?
Timeline
Table of Contents
Darkened: The ghost of yesterday
There is death inside him.
Prowl can feel it like a heavy weight loaded down around his spark chamber, clutching and grasping at his spark. He feels slow, unsteady. His mind moves a million times faster than the rest of him, unfettered by the basic programs that would normally occupy a mech’s processor. He has only the slightest filaments of core coding; by all rights he should be no more sentient than a datapad. But sparks are tricky things, Prowl’s is more resilient than most and it had pulsed on despite the genocide that had tried to claim it.
That had claimed it.
There’s a dead mech inside Prowl’s frame. Or perhaps Prowl’s mind is living in a corpse. It is difficult to tell which is true. Prowl has taken his time to familiarize himself with his body and he can feel the imprint of life from another mech in every circuit. He has merely been over-layed above it and it slows his reactions times, makes him sluggish. His mind is moving faster than ever before but the neural circuits weren’t developed to support him and can't keep up.
And it shows. Oh, it shows.
His predecessor had been calm and stoic. Reserved but not without emotions, just not fully open. But now this stranger in a dead mech’s body frightens the mechs that had once been comrades. The enforcer-that-was is gone and they know it. There are no spark alignments connecting them, no resonance at all.
And, perhaps mostly obviously, when they try to ping him, try to establish any sort of wireless processor connection or spread out their fields to share with him, there’s nothing but static.
Prowl is a black spot, a dead sensor blip. They can see him but they can’t feel him. So many basic protocols had been lost when the enforcer had died, wiped completely clean. No matter what Ratchet does, he can’t reinstall them when Prowl’s processor is a disjointed mess and there is no force on Cybertron that can fix that. When Praxus had fallen, all those that were connected to Prowl had screamed their last. A city's death knell forever frozen inside his mind, storing it had shattered his processor, leaving memory fragments embedded deeply in his broken programming. And there had been many, so many -too many- the enforcer had lived there for so long, known so many people and through their sparks had known even more. Such was the way of Cybertronian’s cities; one spark could be connected to a million others. Or so it had been. Praxus is a warning and now the others were tearing apart in fear of a repeat.
Even though Ratchet had repaired Prowl’s receivers, without the necessary programs to activate and use them, Prowl cannot hear his fellow Autobots. Their species communicated at many wavelengths and Prowl had been restricted to a select few. He is, for all intents and purposes, deaf and mute and the Autobots are not quite sure how to deal with this. For all their extensive history as a species, such situations have been rare and few.
It does not help that this new mech’s ability to feel emotions is stunted, muted; there is so much missing inside his processor and he doesn’t have the appropriate connections to sustain emotions for very long. And he’s always too slow on the uptake -even with how fast his processor moves now,- to recognize social cues. If he wants to smile, his faceplates move when it’s far too long for such an expression to be appropriate.
Some of his fellows find it unnerving. Others find it spooky. All of them find it disorientating and disturbing.
It is hard for them to believe there is a living being inside Prowl’s frame when so much about him resembles death and so none of them can even see him.
This does not bother Prowl. It is, after all, hard to hurt the feelings of something that is not quite alive.
There is death inside him.
He has known this since the moment of his onlining and realizing he had a data core full of memories that were timestamped before the dates of his existence. But this is this first time he has truly understood what it is that he has lost and what this means.
The training room had perfectly recreated Yoketron’s dojo. Prowl held himself in a defensive stance, then he went through a beginner’s kata, a basic sequence of moves that Yoketron had taught him in one of the enforcer’s earliest memories. He can recall it as easily and clearly as he could count to five hundred billion.
Every strike is exact, precise, perfect.
The sequence is flawless.
It is all wrong.
Prowl had learnt many martial arts styles from Yoketron, each with their own unique movements and strengths and weaknesses. But central to them all was their focus on the living energies of the body and the connection to other living beings around them.
There is death inside him.
Prowl is deaf and mute.
The Autobots cannot hear him nor can he hear them.
He is alone.
He works his way through every routine Yoketron had ever taught him and he knows that the arts are lost to him. There is a rhythm, a life beat that every creature has and it flows and ebbs in battle and Prowl cannot feel it. He doesn’t move to it anymore, death clutches at his spark and keeps a tentative hold on it with icy cold fingers and he is out of sync. He knows that he cannot rely on his knowledge of Metallikato or Circuit-Su in the war; that if he does it will only lead to an early deactivation.
For the first time since coming online in this strange new world where he has a lifetime worth of memories and friendships and yet no real, personal attachments to them, Prowl feels lost.
Like his other emotions, this feeling does not last very long. It comes and it goes almost without notice, a mere drop of water on the deep seas that consists of Prowl’s ravaged mind.
Prowl stopped his kata mid strike and evaluated his frame. It was thin and light, all in accordance with his predecessor’s aptitude for martial arts. However, with his own loss in proficiency such a frame was superfluous, if not dangerous to his own existence. It has been a long time since this body had undergone an upgrade.
Perhaps it was time.
He would need to be bigger and more heavily armored if he could no longer be quick enough to avoid enemy fire. A full frame reformat would take time to adapt to but it was time he had, as he no longer held the position of Autobot CTO. And maybe it would help the Autobots adjust, so that they no longer saw their dead comrade in the corner of their optics when it was only him.
Besides, Prowl decided, as he changed the simulation to a firing range. He unsubspaced an acid rifle and took aim at a moving target set several kliks away. His processor spun, faster than any mechs, unfettered by the usual programming that made up a Cybertronian mind. It calculated eighty million variables in less than an astrosecond and he squeezed the trigger, vaporizing the target almost instantly.
When he recovered and was cleared for active duty, someone would need to give Bluestreak a challenge after all.
END
A/N: I caaan't seem to find a reference for Cybertronian unit of distance. Anyone help me out here?
Timeline
Table of Contents