Soundwave is a mysterious creep. "Slenderbot" they call him behind his back, both because he is actually slender and because he earned well this designation. He sneaks about everywhere and knows close to everything and he is next to impossible to smart out. He has loyal minions who are his eyes and ears. And he has no face wearing a black glass screen-mask instead. Contrary to his name he hardly ever talks at all - of choice as they say - not because he cannot, but why exactly - nobody really knows for sure. In fact nobody really knows too much about Soundwave. Gossip has it that in order to be more effective, he erased his emotions long time ago using an ancient secret script, not to lag his processor with unnecessary burdens and distractions. Those who know him and his level of pragmatism strongly believe it is true. That freaks everybot out even more than anything else about Soundwave.
Arcee is secretly after a mysterious legendary substance that was reported to be found on some organic planets, including Earth. She finds a trace of its radiation in a cave system Autobots explored on another occasion some time ago. She decides to secretly come back and look it up. She believes it will take just a few clicks and then she can be safely back to base. The substance is known under a variety of names, the most popular "organicon" reference points to its alleged capability to make bots to develop some organic-developed features alien to mechanical beings such as Transformers. They say only femmes have the capability to detect it and she is the (almost) only femme around, so she prefers to grab it while Arachnid is still captive is their base or until anyone else finds out.
Under suspicious circumstances the cave collapses on Arcee's head and under her feet, right about when the search starts to look promising. It is just a miracle that Arcee survives. Or not really a miracle?
The third explosion was fatal. It blasted the rest of what remained of the collapsed corridor of the abandoned mine into pieces, tearing the underground passage apart and ripping a sufficient hole in the ground to swallow a multi-tonne monster. The stapling trashed like matchsticks under the crumbling stone weight. The fast moving rubble was tumbling down loudly smashing rocks against one another into a dark deep pit, dragging a violet-blue metal bundle to the freshly opened mouthpiece of the underworld. The curled up living creature was falling together with the rocks, her body hurt, torn, leaking, tumbling down with the stones, about to get smashed to the ground in a few seconds. Clutching at the moving walls in the whirlwind of chaos, her fingers failed her defeated by the overwhelming force of gravity that dragged everything else down with her. Still, with the last of her life instinct, she tried to free herself before the final slash of pain and effort streamed through her receptors and everything went black.
He saw it all. Not from a safe distance, but from a lower corridor, a footstep away from being smashed himself by the falling rocks tumbling down to the abyss beyond his feet. He was looking at her demise, registered the life-or-death struggle. It all lasted maybe a nanosecond but was sufficient for his system to generate proper calculations assuming probabilities, determining how much there was left till death would became apparent down in the well under his feet. He was observing. Putting just the right effort and only as much interest as was needed to achieve the optimum efficiency in getting one more Autobot out of the online world.
He had always been very economic. Not interested in glory or fame, as a matter of fact not interested in feedback at all. What mattered was the effect. Calm perfection. Precision. His own standards subject to his own assessment. The rest could well not exist. He was an optimization machine. An achiever. A calculated machine reaching objectives most efficiently, encased in a slender, elegant, strong and economic body that had exactly what he needed: strength, intellect, perception and endurance. No more and no less.
A technocrat.
Now he was standing there, hidden in the dark corner of an abandoned mine corridor watching in that very click as the rocks were tumbling down to crush her - a member of an enemy fraction, one that should disappear. Someone inferior...
And then it happened.
His system crashed.
An electric surge in the capacitors appeared out of nowhere. It felt like an innocent short-circuit, accompanied with a smell of overcharge and burned insulation. A nano-second of static flashed through his vision registering it as a moment of slowdown and profound silence, even though the world went further around him in the same speed. It was followed by a brief overload alert from his RAM suddenly flooded by his backup systems feeding him with an abrupt unexpected memory loop. Something glitched and he found himself inside the middle of a deja-vu, from which he could not get out.
It all went really slow as he was now watching, as if from the distance but still from inside his own eyes, a surreal scene with himself in the main role, one that he would never expect in his wildest dreams.
He saw how his tentacles extended in a millisecond to the full length tightly wrapping around her as she was falling through the pit right in front of him. In slow motion, he felt her weight dragging him down but his powerful stabilisers balanced it pushing him instinctively to the corridor behind, bringing the weight centre back. He locked himself with his wings against the walls beside him with full strength. Something cracked badly beside him but he ignored it. Immune to the hits of the falling stones, his tentacles dragged the blue-violet fainted creature to the corridor pulling her out of the tumbling rock cataclysm in the last moment before it would have smashed her and drag her to death in the underworld. In a brilliantly calculated way, as if prepared in advance. As if strategically deliberated, to choose just the optimum, fastest and least harmful option available.
As if he *planned* it.
The speed of the sudden movement and the power of the reversed thrust pushed them both back to the cave kicking him out of balance. Before he knew it, her unconscious body was lying over him entangled in the embrace of his tentacles - tightly wrapped around her slim but strong posture, now in ruin, bleeding energon on him, drop by drop.
Only then he noticed that his left wing was strangely twisted and he felt it burning with pain. But he was too shocked to understand fully what had just happened.
*Impossible*.
His mind choked, before he got the notion that it was *him* who had done this *himself* just now, against all his embedded policies, against any reason. How on Cybertron could he have done this *himself*? Save an Autobot?
The feeling of deja-vu persisted now only slightly, but still flickering somewhere in the subconsciousness, as if he saw all this happening before already, but he just could not place it.
Panic was not exactly what he knew well and the sensation took him as a shock. He physically felt the energon veins narrowing down for a moment and a powerful wave of tension and heat ran through his whole system up to the fingertips. At the same time he shivered with cold. He felt how his processor froze for a moment overwhelmed by the sudden emotion. As if, after the outburst of irrational action, he numbed into a trembling state of self-disgust wanting suddenly to get rid of it as soon as possible. This was fairly too much.
He needed to focus. It must have been a *glitch*. He scrolled back across the fresh memory, but the record only confirmed what he knew already. The picture was crystal clear and now he was lying with her, tied up together, thrust in a cavern that used to be a mine corridor now blocked by rocks released by the explosion. Trapped. And with it, one more thing came to light, something he almost forgot he could ever do.
He felt a *feeling*.
Not clear what it was exactly.
Rewind.
A set of feelings.
He panicked again for a nanoclick realizing that panic was also a feeling. A sudden reflex pressed his energon to a jump tension, speeding the system up beyond the safety levels for a second.
No way this was happening...
He registered her numb weight thrown over him by the thrust. She was somehow lighter than him, as slim and sleek, and also as strong... And he held her tight. Forcing himself to focus he pushed the tentacles' release protocol and they gave way loosing the grip. Set free, she rumbled to the side with an unpleasant grind of aching metal. He caught her in the last second with his wing and carefully placed on the ground next to him. She was unconscious.
A wave of stress pulled through him again. The cooling system sped up increasing ventilation capacity to stabilize the temperature. He looked at the his own wing and realized that it was strangely twisted and blotted in energon. Hastily he ran a scan registering his body status:
****hardware status report****
function: spark: 100% operational; no damage detected
function: main processor network: 100% operational; no damage detected
function: enegon circulation: 100% operational; no damage detected
function: memory systems: 100% operational; no damage detected
function: locomotor system: 100% operational; no damage detected
function: cooling systems: 100% operational; no damage detected
function: electricity circuits and sensory networks: 100% operational; no damage detected
function: protoflesh: 100% operational; no damage detected
function: transformation cog : 100% operational; no damage detected
function: groundbride: access denied
function: external communications: access denied
function: geolocation: access denied
function: datacables connectivity: 100% operational; no damage detected
function: self repair: deactivated
function: symbiont docking systems: 100% operational, undocked
[...]
***no major damage detected***
What?
Nonsense. No sign of the injured wing in the readings. No energon spill or jump tension recorded. No cooling systems surges recorded. No nothing, but access denied to geolocation, groundbridge and comms. Were they too deep underground to run the geocomm functions? Unlikely. It worked perfectly down in many caves and mines before. Something must have been damaged but it was not clear what exactly.
Self repair inactive? Another glitch. His wing ached as hell, but the self-repair would not launch in line with the scan, even on a push. He tried to move it and he almost moaned in pain. He took a closer look to realise that it was probably broken in the joint. Energon was leaking and staining the ground below.
He leaned back for a moment and closed his optics. He repeated the scan, which returned the same "normal" results. Something was seriously wrong. What had exactly happened? He remembered clearly the strange smell and the feeling of the memory loop but nothing in him now showed any of this happened. Only his actions got recorded and they spoke for themselves.
He tried to stand up and look around. It did not look good. Although night vision worked fine, it did not clarify the situation, only confirmed what he already suspected. They were trapped by stones and rocks everywhere, the corridor was cut off from both sides. The place they were locked in was really small. He tried to scan the walls for a possible way out, but due to loss of the energon, he felt weak and had to sit down for a moment.
Then his optics slipped at her unconscious body again. He looked closer and realized the extent of injury caused by the avalanche. The multiple wounds and leaks were visible with plain eye. There was a big but not too deep cut on her chest and head, the armour was bent and twisted in many locations. It was quite serious but not terminal. Some welding would do the job.
Leaning a little closer, he touched the verges of the injured surface and assessed the damage. Surprisingly his own health repair systems returned functional readiness when it came to her wounds. Experimentally he welded a little keeping the torn verges of the armour together. It worked. He looked thoughtfully at the result of his experiment, and shrugged a bit in hesitation. They were trapped and there was no groundbride to make his way out, he rationalised. He will have to figure something out, and a spare pair of hands would be useful in case a more delicate job needed to be done. With no better answer than this and no other good reason he continued welding her major injuries and leaks.
It did not go too well, but she was still offline so he slowly fixed the leaks and cracks in her plating taking his time to analyse her structure. He looked closely at a large cut across her face, running over the cheek and mouth. He lifted his finger and stroke along it very gently, feeling the warmth of inflammation coming from her malfunctioning self repair. Delicately he applied his own repair kit along the cut sealing it up into a scar. Pausing for a while he looked at the effect.
::Beautiful...:: The thought was striking.
It came along with the realisation of the feeling how energon kept on throbbing somewhere under his chassis, as if the pulse of her body got registered in him and kept replaying in a continuous loop. It was both pleasant and scary. It felt like a glitch but he did *not* want it to stop.
He moved even closer and suddenly he felt the urge to lift his mask up and rub his sensory wiring against this warm scar. He shook the thought off as soon as it appeared. He did not ever show his face to anyone. He was always covered with the black glass mask which hid his fragile construction of multiple sensors and which made him what he was in the eyes of the world. Soundwave, the slenderbot. One with no eyes, but who saw and heard everything. One who never spoke, but who was able to convey more than a thousand words with one picture or record. One that knew. One that could decipher intentions and thoughts of others but who never revealed his own. One from whom you could not hide. One that freaked the toughest Decepticons out by just standing there. Silently. Unexpectedly. Deadly.
He took some moderate pride in this image which was close to his technocrat truth. The face didn't really matter anyway, why would he bother. It was a tool, a pretty damn good tool with some good deadly destructive bits to it. It was rational to hide this masterpiece of ancient technology which was so easy to hurt, so risky to look at, the strangest and most powerful bit of his body.
Sometimes it itched a little to open up and get rid of the limitation, show the world what he was really capable of, but he also found comfort in hiding it, having something of his own. In fact hardly anyone realized what he was like behind the black mask which they treated it as his normal look. He did not show his face expression and he didn't even have to make an effort to hide it. What was his, belonged to him only, and he liked that the other mecha feared his faceless look. Noone, maybe apart from Shockwave, had any idea about him. Of course Laserbeak and Ravage had. But Ravage was gone and Laserbeak was his symbiont, almost a part of him, and symbionts were simply out of scope.
He calmed the thoughts a little and pulled back slightly limiting himself to enjoying the heat on his finger by stroking her freshly welded scar gently for a moment longer. Just to feel her energon running just below the tips of his claws...
At the same moment the so far offlined eyes opened suddenly looking straight at him.