The Invictus - Chapter XVI
Chapter Sixteen
~ Age twelve ~
The attack was swift and unexpected; the carnage, brutal and burned into Prowl’s most basic memory core.
One moment, he was taking his test at his desk, chewing on the end of his writing stylus in thought, when the school building was rocked to the foundation. Students were knocked out of their seats, and desks toppled over as if they had been thrown. Someone made the mistake of looking out of the window and seeing a Seeker trine take out a building with extreme prejudice.
More trines, composed of both Seekers and non-Seekers, and whole squadrons of Decepticons swarmed the visible horizon. The ground itself seemed to give birth to them as more and more rushed the village, instilling panic and terror, and destroying or killing all that came in their path. The calm sky was soon filled with the smoke and light bursts of explosions, and with screaming and cried of terror and pleas for mercy, the latter certainly unmet.
Prowl ran from the window through which he was looking, one that overlooked an open field that would soon become a massive graveyard for the offline where they fell, to the window opposite it, the one that looked toward home. The smoke was thick and hard to see through, but he could make out the vaguest outline of his house. Perhaps, if he ran hard enough, fast enough…
His legs made the decision long before his CPU agreed to it-he ran for the door, dodging his panicking classmates and vaulting over spilled desks with ease. A small part of his conscious mind heard the proctor calling out to him to stay put, but Prowl would be fragged if he let Grandfather lie in bed in the middle of a Decepticon attack. He had to help him into the crawlspace beneath the house.
He had to force the door out of the school open; the initial blasts had knocked it off its hinges and it sat in the frame, needing to be shoved out of the way. He ran from the panicked air of his classes into what surely was the Pit. Fire burned any building-or offlined Cybertronian, he was horrified to observe-it could consume, and smoke hung heavily in the air like an undertaker. For all the chaos surrounding him, the air was deadly silent. Dread laid chilling servos on his shoulders, and Fear tugged at his spark, but he dismissed them both and ran. Prowl ran the fastest he had ever run and would ever run. He was terrified, yes, but he didn’t dare stop to cower. There would be plenty of time for cowering once he and Grandfather were hidden in the crawlspace.
He practically tripped over a piece of debris in the road. A very large piece of debris. He stopped to turn and see what it was and reeled back. It wasn’t debris… it was a mech. Prowl edged closer, uncertain if the mech was offline or not. If he wasn’t, it was a miracle-his lower body had been ripped off from the waistline down, and an ever-growing puddle of energon spurted from severed lines in the stump of his spinal support. Circuits crackled as he moaned and gasped to cycle breath.
Prowl’s presence seemed to revive him a little, and he turned his head toward the dark youngling. Prowl felt his intakes leap up into his throat. A whole portion of the mech’s face had been blown off by, judging by the thoroughness of the job, a null ray; his optic was flickering off and on as it hung, by a wire, from its setting. With a shaking arm, the injured mech reached toward Prowl, taking the youngling’s clean, wheat colored fingers in his own. “Please… don’t leave,” he begged in a voice that rasped with static. “Don’t leave me… to die here… alone.”
For all his fear and worry for Grandfather, Prowl couldn’t bring himself to say no. “I’ll stay,” he agreed softly, laying his other hand on the mech’s.
A pained smile touched what remained of the mech’s faceplates. “Th-thank you…” he said with sincerity that tore at Prowl’s spark. “That’s… most kind of you, youngling.” With his other hand, he gently stroked Prowl’s helm in thankful affection. Prowl felt warm energon smearing his chassis with the action, but forced himself to not recoil. “You… you-ngh… Remind me of my son.”
“Ahh… where is he now, sir?” Prowl asked politely.
The mech pointed up at the horror filled sky. Prowl noted that all of the Decepticons had left. The attack truly was swift. “One of them,” the mech rasped. He pulled Prowl close, hissing through his static-laced vocalizer, “Don’t be like him-never… never become one of them.”
“I… I won’t, sir,” Prowl promised, frightened out of his young function. “I won’t defect.”
The mech smiled, calling Prowl a good youngling, before arching what remained of his back and crying out in what seemed to be searing pain of the highest degree and going limp, his grip on Prowl’s hand reducing to nothing and his chassis fading instantly to grey.
Prowl dropped his hand and backed away, optics wide and mouth agape in horror. Death… that was what death looked like? Was that what Grandfather would look like when his spark ceased to pulse? Still, someone would have to see him safely to the Crossroad, where it would be decided if his spark belonged to the Well or to the Pit, and Prowl seemed to fit that bill. With shaking hands, he prayed to the Holy One for the nameless mech, waving an imaginary incense stick over the corpse. Though funeral arrangements were best left to adults, and the lack of holy incense was borderline sacrilegious, given the circumstances Primus would not be too upset, Prowl preferred to think.
Prowl bowed once to the corpse, who had once been a mech he had offered one small comfort to in his final clicks, and turned to run for home once more. He didn’t pause at the temple or wave to the statue of Primus-both were destroyed. Besides that, his few cycles with the mech needed to be regained. His arms and legs ached so badly, but he was so close to home…!
He hurled himself onto the path leading up to home, transforming as he went and gunning his engines as hard as he could. Sand flew from beneath him in a massive cloud, but he didn’t have the time to heed that. He did, however, heed with great concern that the door was thrown open and beating against the wall, just barely on it hinges still. He transformed back into his bipedal form and ran in, regardless of the consequences.
The air was thick with smoke, and everything in the house was torn to pieces and strewn across the floor and smoldering. The thick smoke irritated his intakes, and he coughed violently as he tried to properly cycle air. “Gr-Grandfather?” he cried into the house, praying to hear Grandfather’s voice calling back to him. “Grandfather, where are you?”
A sound somewhere between a groan and a cry of anguish met Prowl’s audios from its source in Positron’s quarters, and he ran toward the sound. He skidded to a stop in front of the open door, and feel to his knees, unable to even cycle a breath to scream.
Positron was pinned to the wall, his berth broken in half and thrown against the opposite wall, by a grey and purple Decepticon twice his height and three times his overall size. Energon streaked both of their chassis, more of it flowing down Grandfather’s writhing legs. Fear and pain were etched in his eyes as his sparkchamber hissed and shuddered opened, under lighting his faceplates with the glowing triple-pulse of his spark’s white-blue light.
The Decepticon eyed his spark hungrily as he willed his own chestplates open, baring his spark. “Beg me,” he growled. “Beg me to spare you.”
“Not on your function,” Positron hissed, rage peeking through his fear. If he was to go offline like this, he would do so with a frag of a fight.
The Decepticon shoved his knee into Positron’s abdominals, and the elderly Autobot coughed and choked violently, a thin stream of energon trickling from the corner of his mouth. Any fear he felt was gone now, and his optics glinted with pure hatred as he spit a mouthful of energon on the soldier’s Decepticon crest.
Rage and utter loathing etched in the mercenary’s crimson optics, he slammed his crackling spark into Positron’s. Positron’s own optics widened to an unnaturally large size before he arched and screamed in pain. He was writhing like a fish on a line, desperately trying to wrench his spark free from the Decepticon’s, kicking his legs and trying to push his assailant away. He screamed again as the Decepticon slammed their chestplating together.
Keeping him pinned against the wall with one hand, the Decepticon reached down to fondle the vein of wires, running from the seam of Positron’s lowermost abdominal plating and his inner right thigh to another small seam near his knee. The touched each wire with surprisingly delicate fingers and, with neither warning nor mercy, seized one and jerked his hand back, ripping the wire and tearing it from its setting on Positron’s leg.
The elder mech screamed again, louder than ever before, as searing agony tore into his neural relays. Pleased with this response, the mercenary did the same to another wire, and Positron screamed again. Again and again and again, he pulled out the pained wires, one by one, very much enjoying Positron screaming-and eventually coughing and purging-under his hands.
It didn’t take long before Positron’s legs were deadweight, his whole frame was covered with energon and the contents of his fuel intakes and his spark pulsing unnaturally hard. Satisfied with the results and the series of minor overloads he’d forced from the elderly Autobot, he released his grip; Positron fell to the floor like a ton of stone, screaming in pain upon impact. The Decepticon turned him onto his back with his pede and braced him into place by the shoulder. With a calmness that belayed his aggression earlier, he casually picked up Positron’s cane and considered it-more specifically, the end of it, as well as Positron’s spark.
The next few moments lasted several eternities. Wielding the cane like a katana or a seismic staff, he plunged it deep into Positron’s chest hull, directly through the spark. The Decpeticon stepped back and watched with satisfaction as Positron arched and shook as his chassis greyed, his spark violently overloading with the trau-
Prowl sat up in bed, gasping for breath an aware of a strangled scream in his throat. He looked wildly around the room. Everything was as it should have been, with not even the first sign of damage or attack. His internal chronometer indicated it was very early in the morning.
Shuffling footsteps outside the door caught Prowl’s attention, and he looked toward his door with a primal glint in his optics. The door opened, and Positron stepped inside with the aid of his cane. The sight of the titanium rod made Prowl sick as his grandfather turned up the lights. “Grandson, what’s the matter?” he questioned, gentle but very urgent. “You screamed.”
Prowl hugged his knees to his chest hull. “N-nothing, Grandfather,” he denied. “You should go back to bed so you don’t wear yourself out.”
Positron continued to advance toward Prowl’s berth, and sat down on the edge of it. “I cannot-I worry for you so,” he said simply, turning the youngling’s face toward his. “What happened to frighten you so, Grandson?”
“N… Nightmare,” Prowl confessed.
“It must have been quite the nightmare,” Positron gently observed, stroking his grandson’s helm.
Prowl’s lower lip trembled before he cried, “Grandfather, it was horrible! There was an attack and everyone was dying and I tried to get to you in time, but a Decepticon at-a-a-a-attacked y-“
Positron laid a finger on his grandson’s lips. “Shhh… let it go, Grandson,” he whispered. “It was only a nightmare. See? I am unharmed.”
Lower lip still trembling, Prowl crawled over to sit next to Positron, wrapping his arms around him and leaning into him. “I don’t want you to die, Grandfather,” he mumbled.
“I will not, Grandson,” Positron replied gently. “I won’t leave you.”
For the first time since he was very small, Prowl allowed his grandfather to see him cry.
** Rated for a REASON. It's... It's not purdy. -_-;;; **
Based very heavily on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima in WWII. Provides a little closure for me because I was able to do some general research and not freak out.