Darkened: The hermit in the wilds (Part 1/7)
At taunicon’s prodding, I’ve decided that I’m going to write and post scenes as they come to me. This here is set in story arc two, Darkened and is the Prowl meet Jazz scene for the first time. For the second time.
I said they are complicated.
It’s even more complicated, given that the first chronological Prowl meets Jazz scene for the first time is in the third arc.
>_<
See? Complicated.
Let me put it this way, arc 3 is set chronologically before arc 1 and 2. They’re nice and sensible and follow each other. Three was a bitch and said, screw order!
And now even Jazz has been whining at me and says he wants his own arc that would sorta bridge arc 3, Rebellious, and arc 1, Coherent, and explain what he’s been doing in the meantime.
This is a part one of two parts. Hopefully. Possibly three, maybe. I may finish it off this week…or I may leave it for another six months. I’m slack and irregular like that. Especially because everyone seems to be falling over themselves with little door-wing mechs and now there's an entire crack-verse brewing inside my brain.
Title: The hermit in the wilds
Rating: T for violence
Verse: pre 2007, AU, but meshes TF:A, G1 and a bunch of different concepts I've absorbed through fanon
Genre: angst, action, adventure
Disclaimer: Not mine. As usual.
Warnings: torture, hacking, slavery, uh, lots of confusion and reincarnation craziness?
Characters: Prowl, Jazz, a bunch of OC Decepticons, Yoketron, one adorable mystery mech
Summary: In the aftermath of a devastating battle, Jazz finds himself wishing that he’d never interfered with one group of Decepticons.
Get up.
You need to get up.
They will kill you.
The words echoed through Prowl’s processor and he spent a few astroseconds idly contemplating them. Was he telling himself to get up? Or was it just the voice of one of the many ghosts inside his mind, leftover fragments of memory from the enforcer-who-came-before?
Get up now!
“On your feet Autobot or I’ll shoot.”
Prowl had had a lot of time to become familiar with the voices inside his own processor. That…wasn’t one of them.
His optics flickered on and he stared up into death. There was a plasma cannon pressed against one optic and it was attached to a massive blue Decepticon. His systems began to activate, his vocaliser clicked on with a burst of static. This…this was not good.
“He’s online,” the war build grunted, then reached down with one enormous hand and dragged Prowl up onto his pedes. The Autobot stumbled unsteadily, he’d taken damage to his legs and he could barely keep himself stabilized.
“Come on,” another Decepticon grabbed him and pulled him forward. “You are coming with us.”
Prowl took a moment to take stock of his situation. There were six Decepticons surrounding him, two of them aiming their guns at his spark. They stood on the edge of the battlefield, deactivated frames of both Autobot and Deception forces scattered across the ground. Aside from his captors, there were no other living mechs in sight.
So. The bomb had gone off. And he’d survived by the looks of things…though he was not sure if his current situation was any better.
A gun nudged his back and he took an unsteady step forward. “Move it Autoscum,” the big mech growled. “You slow us down anymore and you can join the rest of your comrades.”
A normal mech would have felt fear and would have probably co-operated completely. Inside Prowl’s emotionally detached mind, he instead felt slight annoyance that they were expecting him to manoeuvrer his way through the rugged terrain when his support struts were half melted to the pit and back. He was physically incapable of moving at any great speed and therefore could not comply with their demands.
He stepped forward and almost fell flat on his face. Slowly he inched himself forward, listening to the impatient huffs of his captors. “Slag this Quickcharge, we should just kill him,” a small red front-liner spoke up. “It’s not worth trying to drag his aft back to base and risk getting slagged by the bots.”
“No, Soundwave will be interested in this one,” the massive blue con, Quickcharge, replied. “He’s a field commander…and not only that-” Quickcharge reached out and easily pulled one of Prowl’s sensor panels from his frame, “-matches the description of the Autobot’s former second in command. Shooting him out here would be a waste.”
The loss of an appendage didn’t bother Prowl; it was just one more error report flashing across his systems. Once he acknowledged that it was gone, his frame stopped protesting about it and he was given a small measure of relief from the multitude of pain his entire frame had become.
Given the amount of damage he had taken and that he was outnumbered, his chances of escape were next to nothing. And whilst he didn’t doubt his ability to withstand torture -having a fractured processor and a damaged consciousness that even Ratchet had difficulty accessing had to come in handy somehow- he very much doubted he would survive prolonged capture.
Or even the journey there.
He tripped and fell this time, much the Decepticons annoyance. A powerful hand clenched his helm then smashed his face into the ground. Pain exploded across his neural net as he struggled weakly in the Deception’s grasp.
“Drop him Spinturn,” Quickcharge ordered. “He’s damaged enough as it is.”
“He’s not going to make it,” Spinturn protested but he let go of Prowl’s helm.
Quickcharge exvented roughly. “So carry him, you moron!”
The small Decepticon scowled but heaved Prowl easily over his shoulder. With his lower centre of gravity and stocky build, he was the con best suited for the job. Prowl allowed his frame to collapse strutlessly against his captor in an attempt to ease the pain of existing in general.
It would be a long trip back to Koan.
Or perhaps it would not.
Two orns after leaving the battlefield and wandering into the desolate wastelands that lay between Cybertron’s cities, they made camp. Spinturn dumped Prowl roughly on the ground, then turned and glared at Quickcharge.
“I am not hauling him any further,” the front-liner refused.
Quickcharge was quick to punch the soldier in his faceplates. “The frag you are. He’s a valuable source of intel. The moment we found him, we had to bring him back. You think Soundwave would overlook us offlining him?”
Spinturn flinched. “He-he wouldn’t know,” he denied weakly.
“I recognised him as soon as I saw him,” Quickcharge gave a rough laugh. “You ever tried hiding anything from Soundwave, punk?”
The front-liner quailed at an obviously unpleasant memory. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Quickcharge sneered as the other four soldiers laughed.
Spinturn glanced back down at his unwelcome charge and gave Prowl a considering stare. “But…we don’t need to bring him back, right?”
“Spinturn, just shut up,” one of the other Decepticons groaned.
The red mech crossed his arms stubbornly. “He’s slowing us down,” he argued. “And the Autobots are tracking us; we all felt the flyers passing close twenty joors ago.”
“Leaving him is not an option,” Quickcharge reiterated slowly as though he was speaking to someone of inferior processing.
“Well, what if we hacked him?” Spinturn suggested. “Take all his intel or as much as we can get. Kill him and return to Koan. If we try to bring him, we get deactivated by the Autobots. At least this way Soundwave gets something.”
Quickcharge gave Spinturn a considering look that he then slowly turned on Prowl. The Autobot did not move, merely returned a baleful glare as best as he was able. “Alright,” he said slowly, with the reluctant tone of someone who was convinced that this was a bad idea but could also see the logic of the argument. “You have this rest period, one joor to get it done. If you can’t, you’re still hauling his aft to Kaon.”
With a considerably brighter disposition, Spinturn dropped himself next to Prowl’s damaged frame. The Autobot was already shoring up mental defences, building additional firewalls and booby-trapping his processor with viral code. Spinturn reached out and casually ripped the cover off Prowl’s shoulder port, and then he unravelled a wrist cable and plugged himself in.
The Decepticon surged into Prowl’s processor and did not slam into a solid wall. He slammed instead into a processor that had been dislocated and fractured and was composed of hard juts and angles and split-layers. Of which, each edge was protected by a solid wall.
Spinturn gave an uneven vent. “Frag,” he muttered outloud. “His processor…his processor is a mess. I don’t even…he can’t be sane.”
“Spinturn?” Quickcharge prompted. “Get on with it.”
“No, you don’t understand!” the front-liner protested. “Everything is corrupted in here. It’s like someone stuck his mind through a turbine, it’s been shredded.”
“He was linked into to Praxus’s city spark network and grid when it was bombed to non-existance. Just about every mech died,” Quickcharge reminded him. "He shouldn't even be alive." The war-build huffed in annoyance. “Keep an optic open,” he said to the other soldiers, then he pried Prowl’s other shoulder port off and logged in.
Prowl watched the two Decepticons circle his outer defences. Or rather, Prowl and his multitude of processor ghosts watched the intruders. Yoketron wandered up to him and settled into a meditative position. Immobilizer and Blockade took a half step forward and then checked the setting of their enforcer’s shock sticks. Solder peered out over the firewalls then sighed and vanished into a wisp. All the mechs that the enforcer-who-had-lived had ever known, had shared his life, his processor and his spark with, existed in fragments somewhere within the damaged mind of the tactician-that-is. Most of it was a chunk of a dead city’s population that sighed and talked and interacted with itself and his mind was never, ever quiet. But even amongst it, he caught glimpses of the living, of mechs that he worked with now and had worked with the enforcer-who-was, Optimus, Ratchet, Ironhide.
And behind it all…sometimes the tactician would get a glimpse of the enforcer-that-had-been as well, a ghost of himself inside his own helm.
Spinturn made a cautious attempt to cut into one of Prowl’s edges under Quickcharge’s supervision.
The murmurs inside his head rose in volume and the fragments turned to him. They could take the cons inside his mind but that still left the other four guarding him.
You will be fine, new spark. Help is coming. They will be taken care of, old one.
Yoketron stood up and strode over to Prowl. It’s insane to even think his fragments know what they are talking about; they’re only memories of mechs after all. But Prowl hasn’t been sane since his onlining and the enforcer-that-was had always trusted his master.
He nodded.
The ghosts of Praxus surged over his firewalls and up the hardlink connection, bringing with them the memories of Praxus’s fall. Of fear and pain and everlasting horror. The simultaneously loss of the spark links that kept mechs connected, the silencing of the city cloud mind. The feeling of complete and total system failure.
The feeling of death.
Spinturn and Quickcharge screamed.
He was living though Praxus’s death again.
No. No, it wasn’t living.
It was dying.
Everyone he knew, everyone he had built the slightest connection was dying and it was killing him. Bolts of agony wracked his frame from the onslaught of a city screaming inside his mind. His core codes are-are-
Corruption surged and Prowl’s spark almost guttered but Prowl channeled it all into the Decepticons linked into his system, pushing every detail into them until it’s them living through it. This was the insanity that he survived. No. Incorrect. This was the insanity that killed the enforcer-that-was. In the very last moments of his existence, the enforcer’s only choice was to program him into an empty processor that was still connected to a half-dead frame.
The Decepticons linked to him shrieked and flailed and someone has the presence of mind to yank their connections out. The maelstrom inside Prowl’s processors was immediately silenced, his ghosts calming and returning to mere vague whispers and wisps inside his mind.
Prowl’s optics flicked on and he watched in triumph as Spinturn and Quickcharge convulsed on the hard ground. There was only one mech that had survived the fall of Praxus and that was only because the enforcer-that-was had shielded Bluestreak’s mind from the fallout. He sincerely doubted that they would get through the memory playback intact.
“What slag have you done?” one of the other Decepticon snarled and he slammed Prowl into the ground. Then he pulled the Autobot up and drove his claws through his armour, starting up near his neck then he pulled downwards across his spark chamber. Prowl exvented roughly then stiffened as his frame damage levels went critical.
“You are going to kill him Lowride!” another one said distractedly as he attended to his comrades.
“Well I think he might have killed them!” and now the Decepticon was tightening his grasp around Prowl’s chamber.
“Just do not deactivate him!” another snapped and Lowride released his grasp, gouging out the armour protecting Prowl’s chamber as he removed his hands from his chest. The Autobot sagged onto the ground, halfway to stasis lock.
Then the Decepticons paused at the sight of Prowl’s spark. “The slag,” Lowride muttered, staring at the black necrosis that rippled amongst the pure energy. He began to back away uncomfortably.
“That’s…not normal,” one of his comrades muttered.
Lowride glanced down at the claws that had been around that very spark mere moments before. “I don’t like this,” he hissed fearfully. “This, what the slag is he?”
Before the others could stop him, he had transformed into his alt and sped off into the wasteland. “Lowride, get back here you slagger!” one of the remaining cons hollered. “That scum sucking coward, I don’t believe him!”
The other two attended to their comatose comrades. “Well, this is just fragging fantastic,” one, a maroon scout frame, intoned bitterly. He gave Quickcharge’s frame an annoyed poke. “He fried both their circuits.”
“It’s more than that,” the one handling Spinturn said, slightly worried. “Spinturn’s spark is failing.”
Prowl could not hear any more of the conversation. His awareness had gradually receded, his audios had shut down and now even his optics was failing. His sight flickered in and out and it was at a great distance that he witnessed the sudden appearance of two small mechs, one silver and one red, who swiftly terminated the remaining Decepticons.
But surely his processor was glitching.
Then the silver one stomped over to him and punched him.
Everything went dark after that.
Part 2
A/N: To be continued...whenever. I'm pretty sure no one will ever guess who the mystery red mech is...except possibly taunicon. I've got a habit of highjacking obscure TFs that I find on TF-wiki. But I'm excited about him. His backstory is shaping up for something rather interesting.
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