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You don’t know how long I’ve spent imagining this moment.
It started while I was chained to the rack, with that monster staring down at me, taking me apart, piece by piece. And do you know what was almost worse than the pain? Even with his knives deep in my guts, with my fuel smeared all over his hands – even with his face an inch from mine and his ventilations hot against my plating, making me squirm, as he ranted – I think he sometimes genuinely forgot I was there. Or at least that I was there, not just a convenient warm body to take his frustrations out on as he got more and more desperate, his goal just barely out of reach of those long, grasping fingers.
Well, eventually I figured, if he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to me…
It’s standard practice under enhanced interrogation, actually. You build a place in your head where nothing can touch you, and when the pain starts, you just sort of… go away. Oh, don’t get me wrong; I stayed keyed in just enough to pick up if he let anything interesting slip while he was raving. I like to think I got a few decent scraps of information. At least it was more than he got out of me, which was nothing at all apart from a new record for how loud I can scream. (I’m of the “scream if it helps” school of being tortured – never understood people who make a big deal out of not “giving them the satisfaction”. My dignity is probably the thing I can most afford to lose.)
So with a small part of my processor, I would listen, and the rest would go to that locked-away place. And mine was here: the moment I was going to see Prowl again.
I spent long hours constructing every detail – the cool stillness of his office, the clean smell of the air. He’d be sitting behind his desk, as always, with datapads in neat stacks along one edge. He’d be reading from one pad, held in front of him, while his fingers moved over another with restless precision.
In my mind, it was always just the second before he looked up and met my optics. He knew I was there, of course; I could feel his attention, vibrating like a string held between us. But just in this moment, there were no orders. There was nothing I needed to do at all but draw that clean, soft air through my vents, no vicious diatribe in my audials, no hot, energon-soaked fingers all over my plating. No pain.
And then the days turned into weeks, turned into months. And the time began to eat at me, in a way the pain couldn’t.
I realised that help wasn’t coming. I mean, that’s kind of par for the course in our line of work. A rescue is a nice bonus, but you can’t count on it; either you pull your own aft out of the fire or… well, you don’t. But Skids – if he were able to, Skids would have come back for me. And when he didn’t, I knew he must have carried out the Boss’s final order. Nudge gun to the temple, and bang – no more incriminating evidence.
And that meant no one in the universe even knew where I was.
It’s the kind of thought that’s like rust; it starts out as just a tiny patch, but by the time you consciously clock that it’s there, it’s already too late. Before you know it, it’s a constant itch, deep in your wiring. It was worst at night (or whatever you’d call those too-brief periods where he would toss me in a cell until he felt like toying with me again), when there was nothing to distract me from that gnawing desperation. I needed to make a way out of here, or I was just going to vanish into this hellhole. They’d never even know where to find my body.
Would they even start looking? Would the Boss realise if I never came back?
You can’t think like that in Spec Ops – you can’t. But those are the rust-thoughts. They find the places where you’ve been cracked open, and they start to trickle inside you.
By the faint orange glow of the corridor lights, I’d find a seam that the torture had loosened, on an arm or a leg, and start to pick at it. It stung, but that was just a pinprick against the raw ache from his tender ministrations – just enough to focus my mind, so that I could start running scenarios while my fingers, slick with my own fuel, pried apart metal and pulled at wiring. I’d go until the warnings flashing up on my HUD warned of debilitating damage (this was going to be no good if I managed to put my own limbs out of commission), and then I’d take the fragments I’d ripped free and get to work, fashioning my own plating into a gruesome kind of lockpick. It took almost a week of working through the night, then hiding the pick under the wiring of my arm when the Legislators came for me. If he ever noticed I was damaged when they brought me in for the next session, in ways I hadn’t been when he saw me last, he never said – and what with the things he liked to do to his own plating, maybe he just figured it was normal.
It got to the point where I almost craved those sessions. Not the pain, but the way they forced me to stop working, stop planning. The first jolt of electricity would hit me, and I’d go away, just me and the Boss in my own private world.
But the rust-thoughts spread, you see. And even that world started to corrode from the inside out.
I would be standing in front of Prowl’s desk as usual, but it didn’t feel peaceful any longer. It felt – urgent.
Do you, Boss? Do you ever wonder what happened to me?
In my mind, he looked up at me, but he didn’t reply.
***
The first time I ran, I was almost to the shuttle bay before that fragger Lockdown caught me. That was when it dawned on them to keep me in cuffs overnight. The second attempt was longer in coming, but I didn’t earn my reputation because I let a pair of measly handcuffs stand in my way. After that one, they dragged me in front of him.
“Typical reprobate behaviour,” he muttered, as the Legislators shackled me. “You spend every moment trying to find a way to weasel out of accepting just punishment for your crimes. This is the cold-constructed mind at work; it has no higher moral reasoning.”
I was half-tuning out the rant already, when he said something new that made my audials prick up… and a cold shiver run down my backstruts.
“Well, never mind. The day is rapidly approaching when we’ll finally be free of your ilk.”
My ventilations froze as he explained the killswitch for the first time. It wasn’t even the idea of it, as sick as that made me feel – it was the fact that, apart from him and his little clutch of maniacs, I was the only one who knew about it.
And no one else in the universe knew where I was.
Tyrest spread his gore-covered fingers over my forehead and cheek, forcing me to look up at him. “We’re fortunate to have such a… deserving test subject.”
The electrodes charged up again. I shuttered my optics, tried to sink down.
Just find that space… find that space and go away…
The office was wrong; it wavered like I was looking at it through water, and the air was still sticky and stank of my own spilt energon. I forced Prowl’s desk into focus. It was empty.
The first rush of electricity ripped through me, and I screamed.
***
You don’t know how long I’ve spent imagining this moment.
But I didn’t expect it to happen like this.
In a way, I’m glad I was off Cybertron for the whole rebirth thing. I gather the shiny new version of Iacon got pretty trashed by Megatron and his gang, then trashed again during the whole business with Shockwave and the Necrotitan, but I never saw it restored in the first place. To me, this just looks like the latter days of the war – bombed-out buildings, people living in lean-tos and illegally siphoning energy off the grid. Only difference now is that there’s more pro-Decepticon graffiti around. Because that’s what happens when the good guys win, right?
Yeah. Right.
My wheels start to glide of their own accord towards what used to be Autobot HQ, but I swerve my steering column hard. There’s no safety there, not anymore – not with Starscream perched in the top of the place like a bird of prey, lording over the city he’s taken from us. Bad enough finding out that Cybertron fell to the Decepticons while Skids and I were off hunting Tall, Gold, and Genocidal, but the part that makes my fuel curdle in my tanks is that everyone seems to be pretending it didn’t happen.
A wild rush of anger goes through me, and I tear through the turn so roughly I leave tracks. Boss, why didn’t you stop all this?
It isn’t long before I run out of road. That’s okay; if my information is right, I’m almost where I need to be.
When I see the figure on top of the hill, I transform and close the rest of the distance on foot. I can tell something is wrong right away, but it takes me a moment to put my finger on it. It’s not just the way he looks, though that’s bad enough to make me suck in a hissing ventilation. Prowl’s plating is filthy, and his back is a mess of dents and scrapes and cracked window glass. It’s as if someone threw him off a cliff. And even underneath the damage, there are signs of long-term strain. His paint is dull and sickly, like it hasn’t seen a tin of polish in months.
And then it hits me what’s wrong, and my tanks roil like I’m going to purge.
See, you can’t sneak up on Prowl. Take it from someone who must have tried it a thousand times in training, and got put on my aft every time. The same mix of keen senses and absurd processing power that lets him track eight hundred moving objects makes it pretty much impossible to get the jump on him. And yet, everything about the way he’s holding himself, slumped, doors drooping, lost in thought, says that he’s unaware he’s got company. I’m close enough to touch him, and he doesn’t even know I’m here.
I hesitate, and then lift my foot and bring it down hard, making sure the crunch of the rocks underneath it is audible. I can see Prowl startle. His back struts tense, doors lifting to bring their own sensors to bear. But when he turns, it’s slow, almost reluctant.
And then he sees me, and his ventilations catch.
“Getaway.”
My mouth goes dry. “Boss.”
Prowl shutters his optics and takes in a huge, ragged gulp of air, then another. I can see now that he’s nursing a split lip and a bloodied nose, and there are deep scratches under one optic. Whatever anger I felt at him on the drive over abruptly shifts into an urge to find whoever did that to him and feed them their own spark casing. Then Prowl’s optics are open, and his gaze rakes over me greedily. I spread my arms, turn very slightly side to side, showing that I’m not hurt.
Prowl’s ventilations slow. Then he straightens and snaps, “Report.”
***
It takes some time to get it all out: how we found Tyrest, the mission going pear-shaped, the interrogations, the killswitch, and how Captain Chest-flames McSpaceship-Shaped-Like-My-Head rocked up with my missing partner in tow. I can only imagine Prowl’s heard a lot of it already, from Rodimus or Magnus, but he listens gravely to every word; and then he tells me everything I’ve missed.
My expression must give something away when he describes being under Megatron’s mind control, because he pauses there, his optics glowing softly as he raises them to mine. “I was powerless to act – or to stop myself from doing… what he made me do. But I was conscious the entire time. It was as if I were locked in a cell in the back of my own mind, watching. I never, for a moment, forgot…” He trails off, dropping his gaze; a smile, thin as a knife blade, flashes across his bruised lips, and is gone almost before I can clock it. “Eight hundred moving objects at once, falling away, and I couldn’t raise my hand to save them – but I didn’t lose track of a single one.”
I close my optics, my spark whirring dizzily. When I open them, he’s looking at me, and that’s somehow worse.
We stay like that for a long moment, my hands clasped behind my back in a kind of parade rest to hide the fact that they’re actually shaking. Then Prowl shifts, looks away and out over Iacon.
“What the ‘Cons did to you, Boss…” I bite down on the first five or six ways I could finish that sentence. I want to say, they’ll pay for that. I want to say, wasn’t your fault. “Is there a chance they could pull that off again?”
“No. We finally managed to dispose of Bombshell, and it would take far more time and resources than they’ve got to make something like him again. Besides, it turns out even Bombshell’s methods wouldn’t have worked as they did, if the ‘Cons hadn’t had an unwitting secret weapon.”
“What’s that?”
Prowl’s voice is staticky with contempt, and something else I don’t quite recognise. “Chromedome.”
“Whoa, really? I thought he was on the good list.” Chromedome, Brainstorm, Percpetor – sure, they’re not Spec Ops, and that means something, but they’re skilled experts who are good at keeping their mouths shut. I can’t count the number of times we’ve gone to them over the years, whether for tech or something a little more specialised.
“So did I, until he ripped a piece out of my memories.” Prowl rubs at the back of his neck. “I’m still not sure what he took, though knowing him, I can guess it had something to do with that scrawny little new conjunx of his. Chromedome’s irrational about the people he cares for at the best of times, and when he feels desperate…” The hand on his neck moves to his face, carefully dabbing at the energon still staining his plating. I put two and two together, and feel a little sick.
“Boss – you should know. Skids. The memory wipe took a deep hold, this time, and it seems like he’s… changed, since I saw him last. I’ve been trying everything, but none of the usual tricks have gotten even a fragment of his memory moving again. And… well, he’s been spending a lot of time with your – with Chromedome. Even told me he asked the guy to inject him.”
Prowl’s optics narrow. “If Chromedome’s been interfering with Skids’s brain, too…”
I blurt out the thing I haven’t even let myself think, until now. “What if he’s permanently compromised?”
He stares, wide-opticked, at me, and then –
The only way I can describe it is a slow-motion implosion. Prowl crumples, folding in on himself as if he’s been hit. His broken doors sag. One arm wraps around his midsection, as if he’s trying to forcibly keep himself from fracturing at the seams; the other hand comes up to hide his face, but not before I catch a glimpse of the light brimming and spilling out of his optics.
My arm reaches out automatically, but I catch myself when my fingers are still inches from his plating. Fighting the urge to touch suddenly feels like the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Biting the inside of my cheek, micron by micron, I force my hand back down to my side. And I make my voice as sharp as I can.
“Boss. Sir. What. Are. Your. Orders?”
He raises his head, and there’s a moment of total bewilderment, his ventilations heaving and his optics as wide and vividly blue as a newspark’s – then his mouth snaps shut, lips pressed to a thin line, and I can practically see the gears of his processor start to pick up speed. And something deep inside my chest finally loosens for the first time since before Luna-1.
“Watch Skids. Report back any changes, anything you observe – and keep him away from Chromedome, if you can. Unless we find out for certain that he’s compromised, he’s still one of us. We will bring him back,” the Boss says.
“Yes, sir. Do you want me to bring him to see you?”
“Not yet. You’re his partner; you’re best placed to get through to him. From what you’ve said, he still retains at least a skeletal memory of your existence, whereas –” if his voice falters at all, I pretend not to hear it – “he doesn’t remember anything about me, except whatever Chromedome and Rodimus may have filled his head with in the meantime.”
“You got it, Boss.”
The Boss starts to pace. “Now, Megatron’s turned himself in, and the trial’s starting shortly. I need you close by for whatever trick that piece of filth is planning. After he’s finally been executed, we’ll reassess. Just in case – do you still have a spot on the Lost Light if I need you there?”
“Better than.” I tell him about the scheme Atomizer and I cooked up to make sure we’ve got leverage over Rodimus, and the Boss grins.
“Perfect.” His optics soften as he looks at me, and there’s an odd, throaty note to his voice. “Thank you, Getaway. You’ve always been m–”
“Am I dismissed now, sir?”
My spark twists as he breaks off. I feel cruel. And it’s not like I don’t want to hear what he was going to say – Primus, I want it more than anything. But we’re, both of us, far too close to the edge now. And I can’t let us break.
Something flickers in the depths of Prowl’s optics, too fast to make sense of; it’s there and gone, and he’s drawing himself up, ice-blue optics regarding me as coolly. “Yes. Report back once you’ve presented Rodimus with this list of yours. Dismissed.”
I give him a cheeky salute that I hope looks at least passably like the ones I used to perform. “See you around, Boss.”
As I drive away, I catch a last glimpse of him atop the hill, staring down at a compromised city, a compromised world. His back is straight now, doors held high and alert, and his fingers are moving restlessly, sketching plans in thin air.