The Beginning: Ironhide
Because nothing makes it easier for me to study for exams than to write fanfic. This whole Ironhidecentric one-shot just demanded to be written. It's sort of set in Between and at the same time, it's part of The Beginning (Yes, yet another mini-series. But this is all world building for my main story and some characters might not have a large part in it but that doesn't mean I haven't thought of their backstory)
Also. Armorhide is a genuine TF character...though because this is an AU, he has been completely highjacked for plot related purposes.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not doing this for money.
The Beginning: Ironhide.
Characters: Ironhide, Will Lennox
Summary: In which Ironhide remembers a long forgotten war that he has never lived through and the beginnings of Cybertron itself
“Why do you hate humans?” Optimus Prime had asked.
Ironhide had turned away and stared up into the sky, as if he could discern a single solar system billions of light-years away. “Bad memories,” he had said, “Bad memories.”
Optimus was the youngest of their group, onlined at the end of Zeta Prime’s reign. Even Bumblebee was older than him and Ratchet was several times Bumblebee’s senior. Ironhide wasn’t too sure about Jazz; memories flitted around his data-core of a plain grey mech that Armorhide had served with, back in the beginnings of Cybertronian civilisation. The mannerisms, the spark signature, both were familiar and yet not, it was possible it was the same spark but had passed through the Allspark. Or maybe it was the same person. It was hard to tell with Jazz, he made inscrutability a lifestyle.
Still, with the exception of Jazz, none of the others had had a negative encounter with an organic species. Even him. All he had were memories but they were spark deep and he could not forget them.
He remembers the split.
Awareness had been gradual, a slow drift between nothing and observation, comprehension. His first impressions had been electron fields, electrostatic cohesion and repulsion between atomic forces. This was the default state of their kind before the Uplift. Watching whilst drifting through the fabric of reality, aware of each other through the quantum threads that connected them together but very little more. Through their collective conscious, they had known of others in a vague sense, dense clumps of carbon molecules that would behave erratically, moving and rearranging the atomic world on an infinite scale. They would observe the others with the detachment of a group sentience possessed, curious but limited in their understanding and no motivations to broaden that understanding.
In the first stages of his existence, he was tapped into the ancestral state. His experiences had been limited to the flow of electrons in their orbits, slipping from one phase to another. He spun in a slow rotation around another, aware of his silent source but uninterested in him. They did not communicate; the other had been Uplifted and that always muted ability to convey thought through quantum pulses. Instead, he conversed with the unembodied, those that remained behind after the Uplift, still deeply interconnected to each other. Together, they had sung electron melodies, weaved auroras across electromagnetic fields.
Then, the source had brushed him tentatively. His attention had drifted away from the others, curious to the one who had generated him without any other progenitor. Their frequencies matched, they were exactly the same.
New spark?
He had the general sense that he was being addressed, though the concept of words was entirely unfamiliar to him. Defined thought was not the means of communication the unembodied used, they dreamt and they shared quantum thought together.
From then on, the other engaged with him this foreign means of communication. It was fascinating, it dragged his attention away from the collective and through his source, he learnt of the world beyond. He learnt of colour, of matter, the physical realm was built upon the atomic interactions that he was used to and it was completely different.
Armorhide.
That was the other’s name. A word designated to refer to the spark he orbited around. Through their mutual link, he learnt of the fate of the Uplifted, the sparks that had been enslaved by a vast empire and had finally returned to build their own society. Through nightmarish visions and memories, he learnt of war, of battle, the weight and heat of a plasma rifle, the sounds mechs made as they died.
War, Armorhide’s spark had whispered to him, Death.
Why?
For freedom. Never again…Armorhide’s memories drifted back to a blank existence, of stunted thought and absolute obedience. Of silence and the cold threat of termination for defectiveness. Armorhide denied him nothing, offering every aspect of his existence for inspection. When at last he was done, he fell quiet in thought.
My designation will be Ironhide.
Ironhide, do you understand why I made you?
Yes.
There was no other answer. Their sparks were closely linked and no other mech had imprinted on Ironhide’s spark. Everything that made Armorhide was copied straight onto the new spark. As Armorhide’s frame broke down, reconstructing itself into two and circuits in the new frame began to develop; the growing personality matrix had no choice but to copy Armorhide’s core codes. There had been no opportunity to separate Ironhide from Armorhide, to develop an independent sense of individuality.
Ironhide did not begrudge this. He had been created solely for this purpose.
“Why do you hate humans?” Optimus Prime had asked.
"Ironhide,” the human William Lennox had drawled, staring up at him fearlessly, like the Nebulan Tu Marvock had done billions of vorns ago.
Armorhide had not care for him then, recently freed from slavery by the small organic rebels. The mech had been struggling to adjust, the ability to think for himself foreign and unwelcome.
“It will take time,” the organic had said. “We’ve removed the protocols suppressing your sentience; you no longer exist for them.”
Armorhide did not know hatred then, could not feel it, else he would have laughed bitterly. He was empty, deprived of his functioning, should have been requesting termination for having committed the unforgivable transgression of existing not for the Empire’s advancement or terminating the rebels for being within his sights.
Instead, he stared at the Nebulan. “Query: What do you require of this unit?”
“Nothing,” Tu Marvock had said, “I require nothing from you.”
The Nebulans had left him alone. Then the others came. Prima had been the one to approach him, stood beside him for several orns as he struggled to come to terms with his freedom. The mech eventually offered a cable and through the joining of their processors and spark, Armorhide finally came to understand what the Nebulans had done. The relief of being able to share himself with another, the quick-silver feel of a processing network, he’d been deprived of them. Interconnectivity had always been limited before, they interacted more with the unsparked machines of the Creators than each other and he had not realised how integral it was for their kind.
When Prima drew back, he had turned to the others and had known their names without speaking a word; they hummed through Armorhide’s spark.
Solus. Alpha. Nexus. Beta. Vector. Leige Maximo. Megatronus. Amalgamous. Alchemist.
The First.
They were different from him. For Armorhide, sentience had been the result of the Nebulans tearing away at the codes that restricted him. They however had intuitively known that those codes were wrong and had resisted. They were the ones the Empire had called defective and insisted they had to be immediately terminated.
There were others like him, he could feel them distantly through the sparked network, who had needed help but the mechs before him burned with resilience (though they were not the only ones, the ability to resist slave programming was spread across the mech population).
“How may I serve?” Armorhide had asked then.
That had been the beginning of his involvement in the rebellion against the Empire. They had left him with the Nebulans, to learn, Prima had insisted firmly. He was not the only one; other freed mechs had been brought to the rebel camp. Tu Marvock had been their teacher, he taught them the old codes Nebulans used before the Empire had come down on them and built weaponry. Armorhide had come to appreciate the mechanics of plasma under the Nebulan’s tutelage.
“Be careful with that,” Tu Marvock said, as he finished the adjustments on the rifle he had been working on. “I’ve never built a gun that large, Nebulans are a bit smaller than your people.”
He studied the weapon. “What is it?”
“A plasma rifle. Good for evaporating anything you don’t like with extreme maliciousness.”
“But I don’t don’t like anyone,” Armorhide had pointed out.
Tu Marvock had shot him a sympathetic look. “Not yet. You haven’t reached that level of self-awareness. You understand what the Empire did to you but you haven’t got emotion protocols. When they come and you look back at your life, this gun will be your best friend.”
“The idea of deliberately harming another living organism is…unpleasant.”
“And I hope it remains that way but the Empire doesn’t bother with diplomacy, they showed up and declared war on Nebulos with no provocation. Violence is the only way to reason with them. Pick up that gun.”
“No.”
The small organic raised his own weapon and pointed it straight at him. “If I shot you now, I would have about 0.8 astroseconds before the other mechs killed me. But that won’t bring you back. And they will mourn your death just as my people will mourn mine. So, pick up that gun so that our peoples no longer have to grieve lost warriors.”
“But we wouldn’t be lost. We would be dead. And you have not shot me yet.”
Tu Mavrock sighed. “I was being figurative. If you take up the gun, you will be saving lives somewhere down the line. Hence there will be less dead people on our side. Which is a good thing. So, you know, pick up the gun not for yourself but for others.”
With a reluctant air, Armorhide reached down for the plasma rifle.
“You did not just do that.”
“What?”
“That is a work of artistic engineering and you handled it like it was a rock.”
“It is a thing designed to kill living creatures. Nothing more. I will not touch it any more than I need to.”
“No, no, no, put that down. You will be using rocks until you can differentiate the difference between a tool and a ‘thing.’ If you don’t respect that weapon and its capabilities, you won’t be using one. And respect has nothing to do with liking the gun or not, I hate the Empire and everything that they’ve done but that doesn’t mean I underestimate their capabilities.”
A different group of mechs had taken their studies of coding within the Nebulan further (one of them the maybe Jazz) and they had developed the basis for what would become the Cybertronian language and their core codes. It had influences of Nebulan codes and nothing from the Empire (in the immediate vorns after the rebellion all efforts had been directed to removing even the Nebulan codes, so that it was a completely unique code and unhackable).
The rebel cell had just finished their training when the call for duty came. It was around then that Armorhide’s emotional protocols fully developed with the integration of the new coding, just as he was grasping the meanings of friendship, the comfort he could derive from others. Then he was thrust into combat against drones and enslaved mechs and he learnt hatred, both for himself and the Empire that had stolen freedom from all of his kind and made rebellion necessary.
Battle against drones was fine; they were merely machines with limited programming. But against sparked mechs, that was different. It was unnerving, staring at the decapitated frames; the helms were identical to his own. The Nebulans did not have to resources to change their frames and so the free mechs looked exactly the same as the enslaved.
It could be him, lying here on a battlefield, spark gradually fading for the glory of the Empire. They tried to avoid fatal blows against sparked mechs, so they could be taken away and freed from the slave programming but their opponents unfortunately did not have the same qualms. Their brethren came onto the battlefield with the rebels’ complete destruction as their sole intent.
“Armorhide?”
And sometimes…sometimes they succeeded.
“Armorhide,” Tu Marvock coughed weakly and pushed at the frame curled protectively around him, “You have to leave now, before the Empire comes back to this mess. The others have already retreated.”
“No.”
“We don’t have the medical technology to fix this,” the Nebulan said softly. “But you can still make it and get repaired.”
Unspoken was the thought that the Empire’s invasion of Nebulos had deprived them of advanced Nebulan medicine that could fix this, could save Tu Marvock’s life. The mech slowly pulled back and stared at the shrapnel embedding Tu Marvock’s body, Armorhide hadn’t seen the first grenade and had reacted far too late.
“What about the others, Armorhide? Getting yourself deactivated here will not help them.”
He wanted to protest. But Tu Marvock knew that the one thing that mattered to him was not himself but the other free mechs. He would not abandon them, no matter how much he wanted to remain here, waiting for his termination by the Empire's war machines.
And so he left.
When the war came to an end, brought on by disabling the slave programming globally, it hadn’t come soon enough. Returning to a homeplanet that none of them had ever seen, but the First had always known of, was the beginning of peace and Cybertronian civilisation. He should have been content, eager to join in on the revelry of freedom.
But he didn’t.
How may I serve?
Armorhide could not adapt well to a free life despite his best efforts. Servitude had been engrained into his spark and when he’d seen the First, now called Primes, it was to them he’d transferred his service. He would guard and protect the liberated mech society that they had built upon their return. He watched as it grew and flourished, as mechs became more advanced and their arts and sciences progressed.
He watched it all and kept it safe from the automated but unsparked troops the Empire sent against them, back in the first vorns of freedom. He served the second generation of Primes and then the next, watched as mechs created new sparks and split their frames to create new mechs. The population grew, slowly spreading across Cybertron. Then came the building of the Allspark, a culmination of science and communion with the ancestral Primus collective. Splitting and budding became an outdated method of reproduction as building new frames and sparking them was much faster and efficient method. Colonization of the rest of the planet was far more rapid.
How may I serve?
He was tired by then. After Megatronus’ madness and fall, the appearance of darkness in mechs, so reminiscent of the Empire, exhausted him. He had fought for Cybertronian kind; and the war that Megatronus had wrought within their people was not what he wanted. But he had sworn an oath of servitude and Armorhide was not the type to break one.
So, he gathered his spark and activated the long dormant splitting protocols. He collected the necessary supplies, took himself off the local constabularies and retreated to his apartment. For the next vorns, he waited as his frame reformed and rebuilt itself into two, using accumulated liquid metal as the base material for metamorphosis.
And then the split came. And Armorhide deliberately rejected his frame and returned to the unembodied, leaving Ironhide his memories, a cloned spark and personality matrix.
It had been difficult, those first vorns of existence. Armorhide had shaped the new spark’s processors completely; there had been no other inputs from any other mechs, thus biasing his perspective immensely. There had been no other imprints on his spark, his frequencies were exactly the same.
He was Armorhide. His spark and his thoughts and his memories all were cloned from the old mech.
Except he was new.
Except he was Ironhide now.
The distinction had not been easy to make, the paradox that he was, in some ways, two people at once. He had not lived before and yet he had. Eventually, when he had sorted himself and come to an understanding, he had signed up with the military and with his exemplary results (Armorhide’s experience gave him an unfair advantage), conferred himself the responsibility of Guardian Prime’s honour guard.
Not that it had existed then.
“Wait, you’re here to do what?” The Prime stared in confusion at the bulky mech in his office.
“I’m here to serve you,” Ironhide folded his arms and stared down Guardian.
He remembered Megatronus, so bright and full of defiance during the rebellion, turned bitter and resentful. Though it had been vorns since the last sighting of an Empire drone and their society was stable, Primes still needed protection. Sometimes from themselves.
He would be that barrier.
“There is plenty of demand for material extractors, if you’re looking for a job,” Guardian had said cautiously.
Ironhide took a step forward, deliberately flaring his spark. The unique energies of Guardian’s matrix reached out in recognition and the Prime locked optics with him, studying him intently.
“I see,” he said at last, “The Matrix is curious, what happened to Armorhide?”
“Passed on,” Ironhide answered shortly, “Couldn’t stand what Megatronus did.”
“And you?”
“I will serve the Primes whether they want me to or not.”
“And perhaps that is something that Primes need.”
It was a position he was determined to keep. Armorhide may have been content to serve the Primes best out on whatever duty they would give him but Ironhide would see to their safety personally. It became part of Cybertronian mythos, an acceptance that the foul mouthed, bizarrely gruff even-though-he-was-way-too-young-to-be-that-grouchy mech would serve one of the Primes.
By the time he reached Orion Pax, he had been in service to at least twelve different Primes and firmly believed he’d seen the best of their species.
Optimus Prime had proven him wrong.
“Ironhide, Ironhide!” the human William Lennox called, staring up at him fearlessly, “Getting senile in your old age, there?”
The mech grunted, refusing to think how correct Will was about his age, how long the human had been standing there waiting for a response, and calmly blasted the last target. He remembered the videos he had seen on the internet, their history. The continent they had landed on had a history of slavery for their own people and even in their supposed modern day, they held a capacity for racism.
“Why do you hate humans?” Optimus Prime had asked.
Ironhide had turned away and stared up into the sky, as if he could discern a single solar system billions of light-years away. “Bad memories,” he had said, “Bad memories.”
He could recall the blankness, the vorns of supressed sentience, of solitude and isolation and the single cold protocol to serve the Empire. Despite all that Armorhide had done, it had never left him. The Empire had been organics and had taken their sparks from Cybertron and enslaved them and the humans were organics and they had enslaved each other.
“Why do you hate humans?”
William Lennox calmly settled into a firing stance and withdrew his rifle as the human sized targets came up. He fired with practiced ease and for a short moment, Armorhide’s memory of Tu Marvock rose up; the small organic lecturing them about the usage of plasma, calculating trajectories, and, the Nebulans had never built weapons for mechs before so be careful with those guns!
It would be unfair to judge them on the basis of one civilisation billions of vorns, especially if he didn’t take into account the actions of Nebulans. Whether he was willing to admit it or not, they would not have gotten anywhere without their help. The Nebulans had been worthy of respect and similarly, until humans proved themselves otherwise, there was no reason to dismiss them entirely.
He watched the human beside him for several moments. Lennox had never shown any sign of fear of the mech he had been assigned to. With an annoyed ex-vent (dear Primus, he was picking up human mannerisms), Ironhide came to a decision and quickly accessed the internet for the specs of the gun in the human’s hands.
“Come on,” he grunted when the human was done.
“What?”
“I absolutely refuse to fight with allies using such ridiculously underpowered guns. There must be some modifications that we can make that won’t violate the Cybertronian technology treaty.”
A wicked grin lit up Will’s face. “That so? Our guns were bothering you that much, big guy?”
“Yes.”
End
A/N: Er yeah. Complicated plot is complicated. My muse was quite insistent that I needed to write this thing down when I had an exam the next morning. >.> Now, if only my muse would get its act together with chapter two which is on it's third re-write. Or any other chapter actually.
Table of contents
Also. Armorhide is a genuine TF character...though because this is an AU, he has been completely highjacked for plot related purposes.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not doing this for money.
The Beginning: Ironhide.
Characters: Ironhide, Will Lennox
Summary: In which Ironhide remembers a long forgotten war that he has never lived through and the beginnings of Cybertron itself
“Why do you hate humans?” Optimus Prime had asked.
Ironhide had turned away and stared up into the sky, as if he could discern a single solar system billions of light-years away. “Bad memories,” he had said, “Bad memories.”
Optimus was the youngest of their group, onlined at the end of Zeta Prime’s reign. Even Bumblebee was older than him and Ratchet was several times Bumblebee’s senior. Ironhide wasn’t too sure about Jazz; memories flitted around his data-core of a plain grey mech that Armorhide had served with, back in the beginnings of Cybertronian civilisation. The mannerisms, the spark signature, both were familiar and yet not, it was possible it was the same spark but had passed through the Allspark. Or maybe it was the same person. It was hard to tell with Jazz, he made inscrutability a lifestyle.
Still, with the exception of Jazz, none of the others had had a negative encounter with an organic species. Even him. All he had were memories but they were spark deep and he could not forget them.
He remembers the split.
Awareness had been gradual, a slow drift between nothing and observation, comprehension. His first impressions had been electron fields, electrostatic cohesion and repulsion between atomic forces. This was the default state of their kind before the Uplift. Watching whilst drifting through the fabric of reality, aware of each other through the quantum threads that connected them together but very little more. Through their collective conscious, they had known of others in a vague sense, dense clumps of carbon molecules that would behave erratically, moving and rearranging the atomic world on an infinite scale. They would observe the others with the detachment of a group sentience possessed, curious but limited in their understanding and no motivations to broaden that understanding.
In the first stages of his existence, he was tapped into the ancestral state. His experiences had been limited to the flow of electrons in their orbits, slipping from one phase to another. He spun in a slow rotation around another, aware of his silent source but uninterested in him. They did not communicate; the other had been Uplifted and that always muted ability to convey thought through quantum pulses. Instead, he conversed with the unembodied, those that remained behind after the Uplift, still deeply interconnected to each other. Together, they had sung electron melodies, weaved auroras across electromagnetic fields.
Then, the source had brushed him tentatively. His attention had drifted away from the others, curious to the one who had generated him without any other progenitor. Their frequencies matched, they were exactly the same.
New spark?
He had the general sense that he was being addressed, though the concept of words was entirely unfamiliar to him. Defined thought was not the means of communication the unembodied used, they dreamt and they shared quantum thought together.
From then on, the other engaged with him this foreign means of communication. It was fascinating, it dragged his attention away from the collective and through his source, he learnt of the world beyond. He learnt of colour, of matter, the physical realm was built upon the atomic interactions that he was used to and it was completely different.
Armorhide.
That was the other’s name. A word designated to refer to the spark he orbited around. Through their mutual link, he learnt of the fate of the Uplifted, the sparks that had been enslaved by a vast empire and had finally returned to build their own society. Through nightmarish visions and memories, he learnt of war, of battle, the weight and heat of a plasma rifle, the sounds mechs made as they died.
War, Armorhide’s spark had whispered to him, Death.
Why?
For freedom. Never again…Armorhide’s memories drifted back to a blank existence, of stunted thought and absolute obedience. Of silence and the cold threat of termination for defectiveness. Armorhide denied him nothing, offering every aspect of his existence for inspection. When at last he was done, he fell quiet in thought.
My designation will be Ironhide.
Ironhide, do you understand why I made you?
Yes.
There was no other answer. Their sparks were closely linked and no other mech had imprinted on Ironhide’s spark. Everything that made Armorhide was copied straight onto the new spark. As Armorhide’s frame broke down, reconstructing itself into two and circuits in the new frame began to develop; the growing personality matrix had no choice but to copy Armorhide’s core codes. There had been no opportunity to separate Ironhide from Armorhide, to develop an independent sense of individuality.
Ironhide did not begrudge this. He had been created solely for this purpose.
“Why do you hate humans?” Optimus Prime had asked.
"Ironhide,” the human William Lennox had drawled, staring up at him fearlessly, like the Nebulan Tu Marvock had done billions of vorns ago.
Armorhide had not care for him then, recently freed from slavery by the small organic rebels. The mech had been struggling to adjust, the ability to think for himself foreign and unwelcome.
“It will take time,” the organic had said. “We’ve removed the protocols suppressing your sentience; you no longer exist for them.”
Armorhide did not know hatred then, could not feel it, else he would have laughed bitterly. He was empty, deprived of his functioning, should have been requesting termination for having committed the unforgivable transgression of existing not for the Empire’s advancement or terminating the rebels for being within his sights.
Instead, he stared at the Nebulan. “Query: What do you require of this unit?”
“Nothing,” Tu Marvock had said, “I require nothing from you.”
The Nebulans had left him alone. Then the others came. Prima had been the one to approach him, stood beside him for several orns as he struggled to come to terms with his freedom. The mech eventually offered a cable and through the joining of their processors and spark, Armorhide finally came to understand what the Nebulans had done. The relief of being able to share himself with another, the quick-silver feel of a processing network, he’d been deprived of them. Interconnectivity had always been limited before, they interacted more with the unsparked machines of the Creators than each other and he had not realised how integral it was for their kind.
When Prima drew back, he had turned to the others and had known their names without speaking a word; they hummed through Armorhide’s spark.
Solus. Alpha. Nexus. Beta. Vector. Leige Maximo. Megatronus. Amalgamous. Alchemist.
The First.
They were different from him. For Armorhide, sentience had been the result of the Nebulans tearing away at the codes that restricted him. They however had intuitively known that those codes were wrong and had resisted. They were the ones the Empire had called defective and insisted they had to be immediately terminated.
There were others like him, he could feel them distantly through the sparked network, who had needed help but the mechs before him burned with resilience (though they were not the only ones, the ability to resist slave programming was spread across the mech population).
“How may I serve?” Armorhide had asked then.
That had been the beginning of his involvement in the rebellion against the Empire. They had left him with the Nebulans, to learn, Prima had insisted firmly. He was not the only one; other freed mechs had been brought to the rebel camp. Tu Marvock had been their teacher, he taught them the old codes Nebulans used before the Empire had come down on them and built weaponry. Armorhide had come to appreciate the mechanics of plasma under the Nebulan’s tutelage.
“Be careful with that,” Tu Marvock said, as he finished the adjustments on the rifle he had been working on. “I’ve never built a gun that large, Nebulans are a bit smaller than your people.”
He studied the weapon. “What is it?”
“A plasma rifle. Good for evaporating anything you don’t like with extreme maliciousness.”
“But I don’t don’t like anyone,” Armorhide had pointed out.
Tu Marvock had shot him a sympathetic look. “Not yet. You haven’t reached that level of self-awareness. You understand what the Empire did to you but you haven’t got emotion protocols. When they come and you look back at your life, this gun will be your best friend.”
“The idea of deliberately harming another living organism is…unpleasant.”
“And I hope it remains that way but the Empire doesn’t bother with diplomacy, they showed up and declared war on Nebulos with no provocation. Violence is the only way to reason with them. Pick up that gun.”
“No.”
The small organic raised his own weapon and pointed it straight at him. “If I shot you now, I would have about 0.8 astroseconds before the other mechs killed me. But that won’t bring you back. And they will mourn your death just as my people will mourn mine. So, pick up that gun so that our peoples no longer have to grieve lost warriors.”
“But we wouldn’t be lost. We would be dead. And you have not shot me yet.”
Tu Mavrock sighed. “I was being figurative. If you take up the gun, you will be saving lives somewhere down the line. Hence there will be less dead people on our side. Which is a good thing. So, you know, pick up the gun not for yourself but for others.”
With a reluctant air, Armorhide reached down for the plasma rifle.
“You did not just do that.”
“What?”
“That is a work of artistic engineering and you handled it like it was a rock.”
“It is a thing designed to kill living creatures. Nothing more. I will not touch it any more than I need to.”
“No, no, no, put that down. You will be using rocks until you can differentiate the difference between a tool and a ‘thing.’ If you don’t respect that weapon and its capabilities, you won’t be using one. And respect has nothing to do with liking the gun or not, I hate the Empire and everything that they’ve done but that doesn’t mean I underestimate their capabilities.”
A different group of mechs had taken their studies of coding within the Nebulan further (one of them the maybe Jazz) and they had developed the basis for what would become the Cybertronian language and their core codes. It had influences of Nebulan codes and nothing from the Empire (in the immediate vorns after the rebellion all efforts had been directed to removing even the Nebulan codes, so that it was a completely unique code and unhackable).
The rebel cell had just finished their training when the call for duty came. It was around then that Armorhide’s emotional protocols fully developed with the integration of the new coding, just as he was grasping the meanings of friendship, the comfort he could derive from others. Then he was thrust into combat against drones and enslaved mechs and he learnt hatred, both for himself and the Empire that had stolen freedom from all of his kind and made rebellion necessary.
Battle against drones was fine; they were merely machines with limited programming. But against sparked mechs, that was different. It was unnerving, staring at the decapitated frames; the helms were identical to his own. The Nebulans did not have to resources to change their frames and so the free mechs looked exactly the same as the enslaved.
It could be him, lying here on a battlefield, spark gradually fading for the glory of the Empire. They tried to avoid fatal blows against sparked mechs, so they could be taken away and freed from the slave programming but their opponents unfortunately did not have the same qualms. Their brethren came onto the battlefield with the rebels’ complete destruction as their sole intent.
“Armorhide?”
And sometimes…sometimes they succeeded.
“Armorhide,” Tu Marvock coughed weakly and pushed at the frame curled protectively around him, “You have to leave now, before the Empire comes back to this mess. The others have already retreated.”
“No.”
“We don’t have the medical technology to fix this,” the Nebulan said softly. “But you can still make it and get repaired.”
Unspoken was the thought that the Empire’s invasion of Nebulos had deprived them of advanced Nebulan medicine that could fix this, could save Tu Marvock’s life. The mech slowly pulled back and stared at the shrapnel embedding Tu Marvock’s body, Armorhide hadn’t seen the first grenade and had reacted far too late.
“What about the others, Armorhide? Getting yourself deactivated here will not help them.”
He wanted to protest. But Tu Marvock knew that the one thing that mattered to him was not himself but the other free mechs. He would not abandon them, no matter how much he wanted to remain here, waiting for his termination by the Empire's war machines.
And so he left.
When the war came to an end, brought on by disabling the slave programming globally, it hadn’t come soon enough. Returning to a homeplanet that none of them had ever seen, but the First had always known of, was the beginning of peace and Cybertronian civilisation. He should have been content, eager to join in on the revelry of freedom.
But he didn’t.
How may I serve?
Armorhide could not adapt well to a free life despite his best efforts. Servitude had been engrained into his spark and when he’d seen the First, now called Primes, it was to them he’d transferred his service. He would guard and protect the liberated mech society that they had built upon their return. He watched as it grew and flourished, as mechs became more advanced and their arts and sciences progressed.
He watched it all and kept it safe from the automated but unsparked troops the Empire sent against them, back in the first vorns of freedom. He served the second generation of Primes and then the next, watched as mechs created new sparks and split their frames to create new mechs. The population grew, slowly spreading across Cybertron. Then came the building of the Allspark, a culmination of science and communion with the ancestral Primus collective. Splitting and budding became an outdated method of reproduction as building new frames and sparking them was much faster and efficient method. Colonization of the rest of the planet was far more rapid.
How may I serve?
He was tired by then. After Megatronus’ madness and fall, the appearance of darkness in mechs, so reminiscent of the Empire, exhausted him. He had fought for Cybertronian kind; and the war that Megatronus had wrought within their people was not what he wanted. But he had sworn an oath of servitude and Armorhide was not the type to break one.
So, he gathered his spark and activated the long dormant splitting protocols. He collected the necessary supplies, took himself off the local constabularies and retreated to his apartment. For the next vorns, he waited as his frame reformed and rebuilt itself into two, using accumulated liquid metal as the base material for metamorphosis.
And then the split came. And Armorhide deliberately rejected his frame and returned to the unembodied, leaving Ironhide his memories, a cloned spark and personality matrix.
It had been difficult, those first vorns of existence. Armorhide had shaped the new spark’s processors completely; there had been no other inputs from any other mechs, thus biasing his perspective immensely. There had been no other imprints on his spark, his frequencies were exactly the same.
He was Armorhide. His spark and his thoughts and his memories all were cloned from the old mech.
Except he was new.
Except he was Ironhide now.
The distinction had not been easy to make, the paradox that he was, in some ways, two people at once. He had not lived before and yet he had. Eventually, when he had sorted himself and come to an understanding, he had signed up with the military and with his exemplary results (Armorhide’s experience gave him an unfair advantage), conferred himself the responsibility of Guardian Prime’s honour guard.
Not that it had existed then.
“Wait, you’re here to do what?” The Prime stared in confusion at the bulky mech in his office.
“I’m here to serve you,” Ironhide folded his arms and stared down Guardian.
He remembered Megatronus, so bright and full of defiance during the rebellion, turned bitter and resentful. Though it had been vorns since the last sighting of an Empire drone and their society was stable, Primes still needed protection. Sometimes from themselves.
He would be that barrier.
“There is plenty of demand for material extractors, if you’re looking for a job,” Guardian had said cautiously.
Ironhide took a step forward, deliberately flaring his spark. The unique energies of Guardian’s matrix reached out in recognition and the Prime locked optics with him, studying him intently.
“I see,” he said at last, “The Matrix is curious, what happened to Armorhide?”
“Passed on,” Ironhide answered shortly, “Couldn’t stand what Megatronus did.”
“And you?”
“I will serve the Primes whether they want me to or not.”
“And perhaps that is something that Primes need.”
It was a position he was determined to keep. Armorhide may have been content to serve the Primes best out on whatever duty they would give him but Ironhide would see to their safety personally. It became part of Cybertronian mythos, an acceptance that the foul mouthed, bizarrely gruff even-though-he-was-way-too-young-to-be-that-grouchy mech would serve one of the Primes.
By the time he reached Orion Pax, he had been in service to at least twelve different Primes and firmly believed he’d seen the best of their species.
Optimus Prime had proven him wrong.
“Ironhide, Ironhide!” the human William Lennox called, staring up at him fearlessly, “Getting senile in your old age, there?”
The mech grunted, refusing to think how correct Will was about his age, how long the human had been standing there waiting for a response, and calmly blasted the last target. He remembered the videos he had seen on the internet, their history. The continent they had landed on had a history of slavery for their own people and even in their supposed modern day, they held a capacity for racism.
“Why do you hate humans?” Optimus Prime had asked.
Ironhide had turned away and stared up into the sky, as if he could discern a single solar system billions of light-years away. “Bad memories,” he had said, “Bad memories.”
He could recall the blankness, the vorns of supressed sentience, of solitude and isolation and the single cold protocol to serve the Empire. Despite all that Armorhide had done, it had never left him. The Empire had been organics and had taken their sparks from Cybertron and enslaved them and the humans were organics and they had enslaved each other.
“Why do you hate humans?”
William Lennox calmly settled into a firing stance and withdrew his rifle as the human sized targets came up. He fired with practiced ease and for a short moment, Armorhide’s memory of Tu Marvock rose up; the small organic lecturing them about the usage of plasma, calculating trajectories, and, the Nebulans had never built weapons for mechs before so be careful with those guns!
It would be unfair to judge them on the basis of one civilisation billions of vorns, especially if he didn’t take into account the actions of Nebulans. Whether he was willing to admit it or not, they would not have gotten anywhere without their help. The Nebulans had been worthy of respect and similarly, until humans proved themselves otherwise, there was no reason to dismiss them entirely.
He watched the human beside him for several moments. Lennox had never shown any sign of fear of the mech he had been assigned to. With an annoyed ex-vent (dear Primus, he was picking up human mannerisms), Ironhide came to a decision and quickly accessed the internet for the specs of the gun in the human’s hands.
“Come on,” he grunted when the human was done.
“What?”
“I absolutely refuse to fight with allies using such ridiculously underpowered guns. There must be some modifications that we can make that won’t violate the Cybertronian technology treaty.”
A wicked grin lit up Will’s face. “That so? Our guns were bothering you that much, big guy?”
“Yes.”
End
A/N: Er yeah. Complicated plot is complicated. My muse was quite insistent that I needed to write this thing down when I had an exam the next morning. >.> Now, if only my muse would get its act together with chapter two which is on it's third re-write. Or any other chapter actually.
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