Title: The Orion Pax Files
Fandom: Transformers Prime
Summary: Nothing but the facts on Orion Pax. Pre-Series.
A/N: My idea of TFP!Orion, perhaps a different look, more gray. Inspired by the fic "Harmonic Progression" by lyricality on the livejournal tf2007fun community, I highly recommend checking that fic out. Hope you enjoy, please remember to read and review, feedback is always appreciated.
one to thirty-five
1. Orion Pax was not born into the archivist caste.
2. Orion never knew his procreator or progenitor. But he was assigned to a guardian of his caste: dock worker.
3. The first team Orion was ever on comprised of fourteen of his peers, each of the sparklings working together to unload their assigned cargo under the guidance of an overseer. But the overseer's attention would slip, speaking of other duties to attend to. He was very difficult to get ahold of when Orion fell in a storage center, once.
4. Orion's arms had ached horribly that day. He had tried to force his pedes faster so that he could be released of his burden soon. The sparkling had even started to run. Orion had slipped from a great height, and it had been a very bad fall. The sparkling had landed at a very awkward angle, the impact snapping his neck. Orion had waited anxiously, trying to be calm as one of his friends screamed they'd get help. Yet his vents had cycled rapidly, his harsh breathing overwhelming his audio receptors. When one of the dockyard medics had finally come, he tried to thank her, but couldn't find his voice.
5. The overseer had not been replaced, but the oldest sparkling of Orion's team, Dion, had them all meet to hear him map out the best paths to take to the dockyard medics and generally draft their own emergency plan. It was all very reassuring to Orion.
6. Orion loved stories. Whether they were from his guardian or other dock workers sharing high grade Energon, he eagerly listened to them all. And not just orally, but recorded too. Orion had done favors and odd jobs and even traded his rations with the dockyard clerks for datapads from the higher levels, contraband difficult to come by in his home. Elita One gave him the best literature. He'd poured over their myths and facts, their knowledge, their vocabulary, their diction. Orion had taken advantage of the pad's art and writing applications, sketching his fellow dock workers and practicing his spelling and vocabulary and grammar in exercises he typed out.
7. Orion watched the gladitorial feed with the rest of the dock workers, Bout Nights were always a big thing. Some images made the sparkling cringe; others made him cheer. Ultimately the bouts were distant, unreal, and always diverse-neatly breaking up the monotony of the day's work and making everyone in the dockyard so much happier, their enthusiasm infectious to Orion. These warriors took action; they seemed to obey no one but glory.
8. Exhaust fumes from loading and unloading machinery and other dockyard chemicals wafting about required that everyone on the docks had to wear some sort of mask. Either full-form, at the very least least half-form, the most important part to cover was the mouth. The first time Orion had seen a Cybertronian unmasked on the upper levels, he'd stared, then looked away, embarassed: more for them than himself, the other maskless Cybertronian seemed naked somehow. That instinctive gaping and getting used to taking off his own mask were difficult habits to break.
9. Once during a particularly bad cut to resources at the dockyard, Orion fell ill. He was not the only sparkling. The dockyard medic that had repaired his neck had simply made a mass anouncement that the sparklings were not getting enough rations. Rumors said the rations were contaminated worse than usual on top of everything. The overseers sent their regrets, but said there was nothing they could do, they simply did not have the budget to provide more Energon. The dockmasters held their own meeting to organize how much of their share to give to the junior dock workers, knowing they still needed the adults nourished enough to meet the greater quota expected of them. Still, once Orion's guardian gave him her entire share. The sparkling had felt a great mix of gratitude and guilt, the Energon going down rich and unbearably heavy in his chassis.
9. When Orion was a little older, bordering on adolescence, he convinced a few of his friends to help liberate some high grade Energon from an overseer's office. Not just dockyard-manufactured high grade, but upper level high grade. Dion-now a first level dockmaster-refused to go and advised against the entire affair. Orion reassured him that the overseer he'd selected was the ideal candidate, one with a reputation for drunkenness and a poor memory afterward, especially of how much he had consumed, always saying he'd drank less than the actual number of empty containers that showed up. Dion had said that was not the point. Orion had scoffed then, and persisted with his plan.
10. It worked perfectly, as Orion had anticipated, and they'd only taken a little. The high grade was stronger than he'd expected. On a completely different level from what was scraped together in the dockyard. Orion had got hung over, along with the rest of his comrades. Dion had been unsympathetic, making them do their work as usual, doubling it actually. Tripling it in Orion's case. Orion bore it silently-he rather doubted he could withstand the sound of his own voice right now, on top of the usual clatter of the dockyard currently amplified by a million.
11. There was another severe cut to dockyard resources. This time Orion's guardian fell ill. She had never been a young femme when first taking him in. The overseers still gave nothing more, the dockmasters still redistributed the rations, but she did not get better, even when Orion started giving her his own rations three times per week. He was tempted to give them all to her, though he knew how practically unfeasible it was.
12. Orion knew that for all the attempts made by the dockmasters for a fair solution that would serve their entire caste, there had always been thievery among them, scuffles over getting that extra bit of ration. There were rarely casualties, enough sense was retained to know the futility in outright killing each other, as the dockyard still needed their numbers to funciton. Orion had never engaged in it before, not even when tempted by the small ache that had always been in his chassis (the dock workers always subsisted, never thrived) or the fact that when he compared himself to some others, he knew he could take them. Now he had complete incentive.
12. Orion worked with like-minded friends. Some groups formed, and there were short bursts of battle, little wars. Orion's group came away with an extra ration or two. Slowly, his guardian recovered.
13. When Orion had been a small sparkling, after a particularly grueling day or if he had performed particularly well, his guardian would take him to the far pier, where a patch of the night sky could be seen. She taught him how to read the stars, what patterns were particular to Cybertron's location. They would play games, finding new pictures in the sky. Even as he grew into an adolescent, they would still occasionally watch the stars together.
14. When his guardian died due to malfunctioning equipment, Orion did not watch the stars so keenly for the longest time.
15. After the accident-that Orion knew could've been prevented if the overseer caste had invested in better equipment-the young dock worker paid close attention to a peculiar quirk of beaucracy. For he was no longer a juvenile sparkling, but a cycle away from being of legal maturity. There was little point in assigning him a new guardian. To Orion's surprise, the system that had always been so rigid his entire life agreed, and bent ever so slightly to reason. Orion began to wonder how far the system could be pushed.
16. Orion started bartering with the dockyard clerks for more than contraband data pads. He tried not to outright say what he wanted; he showed more of an interest in them, was more polite. Praised them for the work they did, wondered how they could possibly do it every single day-?
17. Orion paid particularly close attention when they showed him hacking. Elita One was the first to do so.
18. Orion worked his way up to a level one dockmaster, then a level two, a level three. One more than Dion, who'd also died in an accident.
19. After Dion's death, Orion settled on a caste he not only wanted, but would attain, or forever strive for until his death: archivist, a respectable caste. A Transition within the caste system was incredibly rare, but there was precedent, even if it was more myth than fact. The only concrete one Orion had heard of was also the most recent, that of a miner becoming a gladiator, and becoming one of the favorites among the dockyard's betting pool. Orion would not strive to be a gladiator though-he wanted to extend his chances of survival, he wanted a high rank, he wanted respectability, and he'd eventually realized that gladiators followed harsher orders than the dock workers. But still, he would add to that precedent in his own way, though it mattered not if it was ever acknowledged by anyone but himself.
20. Orion did his best to continue developing the necessary skills, but knew there was only so much he could do in the dockyard. He needed experience. For that, he needed passable entry-level for skill. To even get within reach, Orion was stumped. Not even physical reach, travel was severely restricted to his caste. Finally Orion concluded he would have to hack into the system and forge documents. He knew he might as well declare himself Prime.
21. Orion observed the politics of the dockyard carefully. There had to be something more here that would get him out of this sector. People he could come to for help, people he could play off, people he could use-Orion ignored the voice in his head. He had to get out, that's all that mattered. This community was filled with nothing but squabbling politicans, others too complacent and weak to protest, more willing to fight each other than the real problem-and he'd been complicit, one of them. But not anymore. He would leave, and that was that.
22. Orion approached Elita One, the dockyard clerk he respected the most, and confessed his goal. She was predictably surprised, but grew considering-a hopeful sign. Elita told him she had a contact at the Iacon Records. When he returned to her again, she told him that her contact might be willing to overlook caste, if Orion had enough skill.
23. Orion took the tests Elita administered to him in place of her Iacon contact. They would work after hours in her station. Orion and Elita confirmed the rumors that they were seeing each other to avoid detection. Better to be seen as fools crossing caste lines than trying for a Transition. The tests were security protocols Orion had to crack, and behind them would be questions on language, government, history, arts, sciences, et cetera.
24. Orion once asked Elita if she had ever wanted to make a Transition, use her contact to enter the archives. She had not told him who her contact was, or explained how she knew him, all questions he had also asked. Elita had silently considered him-but this time she just shrugged, and did not answer.
25. Behind the last test security protocol Orion cracked through was an image of his forged documents, declaring him of the archival caste. Orion could barely breathe.
26. Orion hugged Elita farewell, and for a wild moment wished the rumors had been true. She was intelligent, resourceful, ultimately kind and utterly vital to him in the end. Elita was desirable, even to sparkbond with. But still, Orion did not turn back when he left under secrecy, the cover story being that he had actually been transferred to another dockyard. It had been easy, as Orion had anticipated, to make that drunk overseer sign the necessary records, and leave him to assume it was a transfer he had fully sanctioned, but then forgot while intoxicated again.
27. Orion worked under Elita's contact and his test proctor, Alpha Trion. The old Cybertronian continued to tutor him not only in archival skills, but the politics and etiquette of the Iacon Records. Orion absorbed the information eagerly, gleefully shedding more and more of his dock worker caste day by day.
28. Still Orion struggled to feel comfortable without his mask. The mask would surely indicate his low origin. Alpha Trion always advised him to go without it. Patrons felt more at ease when they could see the archivists' mouths, he said. Orion would please others to secure his new position, no matter what he himself felt. Such concerns and irritations were pointless in the bigger picture.
29. Orion had been anxious about being asked too many questions upon his arrival, but none came his way from other archive workers or the patrons. It dawned on Orion how it never occurred to them that he wasn't born to this caste, that they took his position for granted, that they assumed he had always been one of them.
30. Orion was not one of them either, he realized. He had quickly grown adept at pretending to be one of them, but he could not match what was ingrained in them. No matter. He had not desired another community, but more freedom, a chance at individuality. Orion had wanted the archives, their knowledge, their lore. He had wanted to escape the death and grueling grind of the dockyard, its ultimately docile workers and unfeeling overseers. And he had done so. He should be satisfied.
31. Orion was not satisfied. He was not sleeping either. Kept having dreams of the wire cracking and the load crushing his guardian, broken beyond repair, no point in wasting the resources on her, or so he'd overheard an overseer tell a dockyard medic, and Orion had just...swallowed it, did nothing. Orion woke up with phantom pains in his entire body, as if he'd carried crates instead of files and data pads the day before. He wondered if he was going mad.
32. Instead of sleep, Orion threw himself even more into his work. He could afford to work all hours. If he dozed off, it wasn't like he'd slip and snap his neck in the archives (which had the luxury of railing) or risk the lives of his fellow workers by falling asleep at the controls of a large hauler. His current task was Editorial, a high-ranking responsibility, though one Alpha Trion grumbled about, but Alpha Trion was no longer the only one Orion answered to. Truth be told, Orion did not feel exactly comfortable with Editorial either, but he could not refuse an order in a caste he'd worked toward and actually chosen for himself. So Orion viewed the newsvid files before encrypting or deleting them, depending on the instruction attached. Orion wasn't even really supposed to watch the files, but it was a rule slightly bent at the Iacon Records' particular system, where it was understood that those in Editorial would sneak a peek out of sheer curiousity. (Another crack in bureaucracy the lowborn noticed keenly.) But Orion did more than peek. He actively, critically watched the vid files seized from news offices. Orion exasperatedly wondered why they were even taking them, surely they knew it would all be confiscated by the higher castes and sent to the Iacon Records for sanitization from someone like him, such seditious footage of revolt on the planet and its territories would never be tolerated by the ruling government, so why bother?...
33. Still Orion watched, and knew that what little footage they managed to take paled in comparison to the true extent of what was happening on Cybertron. How many places were there that were truly like his dockyard, even worse off?
34. Orion took to watching the gladiatorial feed again. It was a surreal experience without the noise of the dockyard, the exuberant cries and groans of the other dockworkers, the racuous betting pool going around and the dockyard high grade flowing-inferior, but all they had, and treasured as such. In their absence, in that silence, Orion watched the gladitorial feed as critically as he had watched the newsvid files he'd censored. There was no longer ultimate pleasure; he could see more keenly the death, the death everyone cheered for, only groaning over lost bets; the hesitation in new gladiators before delivering the final blow, the cold mask on veterans as they obeyed the crowd's bloodlust. The gladiators obeyed, too; they took what action was demanded of them. Admittedly it didn't all end in death, some bouts were specialized toward certain objectives, meant to get certain thrills from the audience-but they seemed to deman the finality of death, more often than not.
35. Orion almost turned off the feed, but paused when another gladiator's sword hesitated. Then lowered. It was not a newcomer, but a veteran, the infamous Megatronus. Orion listened, enthralled by the gladiator's loudly vocal and violent refusal as he shouted it to the crowd, to the arena's bosses, the crowd going crazy-Orion stayed transfixed even after the feed was cut off. This Megatronus just censored as well, on the spot. Orion shook himself when he realized that Megatronus was the other precedent of Transition-the miner-turned-gladiator.
to be continued