AN: Be warned: I'm not planning on fleshing these out. Also, angst and canon typical violence.
Chapter 1 Offline some other cycle
Prowl onlined. Barely. It felt so much easier to rest...
Shaking off the delirious thought, Prowl felt a moment of confusion as his processor and battle computer sluggishly came online.
Prowl turned on one bleary optic - the other spat back error messages - and took in his surroundings. Prowl huffed a vent. Even without his memory core completely online, Prowl knew what he was looking at.
I'm on a strange planet with a dusty orange sky, and it's always the same.
Carnage. As far as his single functioning optic could see, there were mangled buildings mixed with the occasional mangled Cybertronian frame. Most of the frames were not moving. The blaster fire, at least, had temporarily ceased, but the scent of burnt rubber, dust from crumbling concrete, and the unique sickly sweet smell of burnt sentio metallico clung to the air like the smell of an open sewer.
Prowl looked at the bleak scene with a mixture of weariness and resignation, feeling his olfactory sensors start to ache from the stench. He would never forget that all-too-familiar smell, even if he turned the sensors off.
Perhaps it would have been better not to have awakened. Again.
Prowl shook off the thought with another, as he struggled to get up: This madness must end. I can offline some other cycle.
With a grunt that spat static through his vocaliser, he stood and began making his way through the dead and nearly dead, and checked for life.