Title: another life
Fandom: Transformers Prime
Summary: AU Mirroverse/Shattered Glass. Optimus Prime first learned about the lore of Dark Energon when he was an archivist in Iacon.
A/N: After a computer glitch scare and risking losing some drafts, just decided to do a quick polish and finally share this part that's been mostly complete for a while. Thanks for giving this a shot. Feedback is always appreciated, and I hope you enjoy reading. Title references a song by Creature Feature, "Aim for the Head."
Disclaimer: I don't own anything related to Transformers Prime.
part 1
Optimus Prime considered the escape pod, before finally approaching it. He could tell it had been here on this abandoned moon for some time.
All it took was a tap from his gun arm to make its door plop open. And with it fell out a limp claw. It looked familiar, though with different colors, and slightly larger. When Optimus tugged the rest of the body out, and found another entwined with it, he found that they were both seekers. They both deeply resembled who he was reminded of. Starscream. And then he remembered Ratchet's files.
These were the bodies of Starscream's trinemates.
Behind his shield mask, Optimus' mouth curved into a smile.
They'll do.
###
Bumblebee still felt apprehensive looking down at the target.
"Doesn't look like much, does it?" Cliffjumper commed him on their internal line.
"Ratchet's just doing a random selection or something," Bumblebee beeped back to him, trying to keep his tone level, and ignore the size of the target.
"Hey, relax kid, it's a simple extraction," Cliffjumper replied, apparently finding the younger Bot's tone not that level. "It'll be easier than the time I grabbed Scream."
The ease of the operation wasn't what was making Bumblebee feel uneasy, but he really wasn't about to voice his conflicted feelings. Not with Cliffjumper, not with anyone. It would obviously be a sign of weakness...
"So, on three?"
"Fine."
"Three," and Cliffjumper started their plan, riding down to take the target's front, while Bumblebee moved to take its back. Bumblebee could hear and see the older Bot all the while.
Cliffjumper drove over the target's yellow toy automobile. "What the—ah, crap."
Bumblebee was surprised the older Bot even went entirely with Earth lingo for his charade—
"Shit, I'm sorry, kid..."
—and that Cliffjumper sounded completely apologetic.
"Oh, i—it's all right," the target said, its voice small, and even Bumblebee could tell it wasn't all right and that it was really trying to keep its disappointment down...it couldn't keep its tone level either...
Something twisted in Bumblebee's chassis, but he told himself to keep going. The target was distracted, as planned.
And Cliffjumper kept the distraction up. "Look, let me make it up to you—I've got some cash—replace the one I wrecked—"
The target shook its head. "You don't have to worry about it, mister—"
Bumblebee quietly rolled up, opened a door, flicked out his seatbelt to wrap around the target's mouth, then body. He pulled it in, struggling for a moment, until he zapped it unconscious with a small tool. Its glasses fell and clattered down below his glove compartment.
"See, easy," Cliffjumper told him.
"Bumblebee to base 31," the young Bot commed the nearest HQ, his beeps stiff. He felt heavier with the target trapped inside him.
###
"Hey, watch it!" Jack shouted as a biker just barely missed him. He stumbled back, almost falling, but kept his footing, even with his heart pounding like hell. Clenching the straps of his backpack so tight his knuckles turned white, the adolescent scowled at the lady (hot in a skin-tight outfit that left nothing to the imagination) on the motorcycle (blue and gorgeous) that almost ran him over (the overriding factor). "You almost—"
The rider continued racing madly—but couldn't escape the larger green car slamming her into the alley.
Everything jumping into his throat, Jack hurried after her. Then started to panic, remembering his phone, diving into his pocket for it.
"Dude, I got it—!" And Jack whirled around to see a pink-and-dark haired girl jumping down from her perch on the low hanging brick wall bordering the school lawn. She held up her phone. "Go help her!"
Jack continued his run, and he could hear the girl (exchange student, he remembered) follow after him and her voice saying, "Come on, pick up already..."
In the alley, there was the blue motorcycle among the trash cans thrown down and the dumpster tilted sideways. Empty of its rider.
"Holy crap, she was thrown off—!"
"Are they answering?!" Jack snapped as he began to search the trash cans, shoving them aside.
"No, they're—" The girl trailed off, her eyes widening. Jack almost cursed at her, frustrated, but it occurred to him that she could've seen the injured rider. Or even that green car. Except she was looking up, up, with wide eyes...and a shadow suddenly loomed over them...
Turning around and looking up, Jack only saw a blue-and-silver claw before it smothered him. Only his legs were free to kick in the air.
He dimly heard the girl shout something in Japanese. Then, "Put him down!"
"Bulk, grab it—" A woman spoke, voice firm and cold, biting.
Jack's heart threatened to punch a hole through his ribs when he heard the girl's strangled cry. Then he heard another stranger, a man's voice, say, "But Ratchet said—"
"It saw us, dumbaft, we're not leaving any damned witnesses around!"
"So you want me to offli—"
"Just take it alive, we'll let our glorious doctor decide what the frag he wants to do with the spare!"
Jack was trying to make as much noise as he could, but the metal surrounding his face and chest and arms seemed to suffocate everything, and his legs still kicked uselessly. He scrambled for his phone—where was it—oh god, please god, don't let him have dropped it—
There was a strange sound, and suddenly his entire body was sent vibrating madly. He gasped when it stopped, and he strained to hear a new voice speaking.
"So how'd the little acting gig go, 'Cee?"
"Worked like a charm," the woman purred, and Jack yelped as the metal around him unfurled, and he was presented to—holyshit a robot.
It was a towering red figure made out of metal with horns and blue eyes and what the hell a robot what
Jack looked up at another robot, thinner and blue (same as the gorgeous bike) with traces of pink, eyeing the large red robot with a pleased smirk. She was the one holding him pinned between her needle sharp fingers. Jack saw more—a huge green robot, and a yellow one, with black markings.
The adolescent struggled, clawing at the blue robot's fingers—he cursed when she tossed him up, and began to bounce him in her palm.
"How 'bout you, Cliff? Actually managed to keep cover?"
"Went off without a hitch; just ask 'Bee."
There was a low beep that somehow that sounded snide. Immediately the blue robot stopped bouncing Jack, claws snapping back around him like a cage.
"Excuse me?" 'Cee sneered.
Cliff laughed. "Really, Bulk? You two picked up a stray?"
Jack scrambled, looking for—there, his phone! He flipped it open. And there were absolutely no bars. No signal. Still he tried to call, text. Nothing was going out, oh god, nothing was going out...
A deep voice grumbled. "It was an accident, the thing stumbled on us—"
"What's this about a stray?" A new voice cut in, and his immediately cut the chatter (and beeping) down. The only sound Jack could still hear was the girl's muffled mix of shrieking, cursing Japanese and English.
'Cee broke the silence, her voice smoothing out. "Doctor, I had Bulkhead pick up another specimen for you."
Jack heard a mutinous beep, but nothing else came of it.
"And you planned this, Arcee?" The doctor said, his voice low, neutral.
"Actually, it crossed our paths pretty randomly—but that was the point, wasn't it? You wanted a 'random selection,' didn't you?"
"Bulkhead, show it to me." Jack heard the girl's screaming grow louder, no longer muffled, and the doctor's low muttering. "All right, yes, it'll do," the doctor absent-mindedly said, and the girl's shouting grew muffled again. "And you and Cliffjumper grabbed your target, Bumblebee?"
Another beep, short and curt.
"Good. Take all three to my lab, then."
Small comfort when Jack vomited in 'Cee's hands and heard her disgusted griping.
(He'd never been so terrified in his life and Mom Mom Mombecame all he could think of.)
###
The two-wheeler hung back a little, watching Ratchet fill his syringes with violet. Her eyes flicked to the three humans laid out side by side on a medical tray.
"I still fail to see the point of this."
"You fail to see many things," Ratchet calmly said.
"You're obsessed with this 'blood of Unicron' bullscrap!" Arcee snapped. Scowling, she said, "It's a fragging waste of time. How are Dark Energon-infected humans gonna win this war for us, huh?" Arcee sneered. "Even if all of them were infected, they'd make for a poor army—"
"We still don't know exactly what Dark Energon will do to a human," Ratchet said. "Perhaps there'll be some...beneficial side effects." The doctor pressed a button on a panel, and the infirmary door slid open, signalling the conversation's end.
"In any case, I don't need you right now. Go, you should prepare for Prime's return. Last message suggested he'd be back soon, and he'll probably want to speak to his esteemed second-in-command as soon as possible."
Arcee bristled, but swiftly turned on her heel, and left Ratchet to his latest experiments with Dark Energon.
###
"I don't feel good..."
"None of us feel good, Point Dexter."
"Not helping," Jack snarled, eyes flashing violet. None of them wanted to talk much about the eye color change they all shared now, or how it matched the shade of the so-called Ratchet's syringes. Miko rolled her own violet eyes, while Raf kept his hand clenched on his stomach.
Another explosion rang out, and they huddled closer in the shadows behind a building that remained standing.
"Who do you think that is?" Raf whispered.
"Probably the military, here to blow up all the psycho robots," Miko said with relish and feeling unbearably hot, feverish.
Raf perked up at that. "You think so?"
"Yeah," Miko eagerly said, baring her fangs. "They'll probably shoot 'em up with bullets and missiles and blast 'em with grenades—"
Raf matched her growing excitement with a grin full of fangs (new eruptions that made his jaw ache). "Maybe even a nucleur strike?" He added, hopeful, and getting carried away with her. Getting carried far, far away (on a purple fog with whispering voices).
Miko nodded her head, almost bouncing out of her crouch. "Yeah, that'll totally—"
"Enough!" Jack hissed, snapping his fangs at the two. "You're distracting from the mission—"
"What...mission?" Raf asked, seizing his head, and starting to sway.
Miko enthusiastically took his shoulder, shaking the younger boy, and waving with her other hand, nails starting to sharpen. "The directive! Unicron wants—"
"You have fangs," Raf squeaked. He pointed with his free hand at Miko's mouth. "And claws."
Rolling her eyes again, Miko pulled at Raf's lips, showing off his own fangs. "So do you, dum-dum." She shrieked in delight when Raf tried to bite her claws off. Then she knocked the back of his head with the backs of her knuckles, and chuckled when Raf began to claw at her.
Jack ripped the two apart, his own claws biting into their arms.
"And me too," snarled Jack. "We all have claws and fangs and violet eyes, now can we get back to Unicron...Unicron..." Jack growled, pressing the bottom of his palm to his eyes. "Have any of us heard of Unicron before?"
Raf shook his head, while Miko wiped the sweat from her eyes, laughing. "Nope. 'Unicorn,' but not Unicron, how could we not have heard of Unicron, Unicron is everything—"
"What did those robots do to us?" Raf's voice was a small flat thing. "We're...hearing things, all of us, aren't we?"
The ground shook and another explosion burst, too close. Miko grabbed Raf, and Jack took her wrist, and the three ran.
"We need to help—"
"With what—?"
"The chaos, we need to help it—"
"I thought we were escaping—"
"To where—?"
Neither of them saw the next explosion. When the ringing stopped, Miko saw Jack at Raf's side, the younger boy bleeding purple from where his arm used to be.
Before Miko could run to them, she was distracted by tearing wheels, and twisted to see a red car race toward them. Her feverish mind jumped to—
"Help!" She shouted, running in front of the car. It barely screeched to a halt before entirely hitting Miko. "Help, he's missing a—"
And when Miko turned around to point at Raf, she found that his stump of an arm had something purple and electric crackle over it before the arm grew back in its entirety.
"—never mind." Miko laughed, the voices in her head screaming. "Unicron prevails."
She jumped back when the red car transformed like the others, his face white and with elfish ears and wide piercing red-and-black eyes.
"What did you just say, skinjob?"
Miko swore. "Jack, it's one of them!"
"Didn't the blue motorcycle and green car kidnapping us clue you in on the fact that they're all robots!?" Jack shouted at her, while Raf stood back up (with both arms) to hide behind the older boy.
"All vehicles can't be robots—" Miko called back, then squeaked when the new transformer snatched her up. The action gave her enough time to reconsider, so looking up at his white face, she asked, "Are you all robots?"
"Damn it Miko, you did not just let yourself get caught again—oh come on!" Jack snarled when the red transformer scooped him and Raf up with his free claw, and staining it in purple.
Miko cackled, peering at Jack and Raf through the transformer's towering clawtips. "Who got caught again?"
"Shut up," Jack snapped.
"We're not going back to Ratchet!" Raf shouted up at their brand new captor, baring his fangs.
It was then the three realized this new transformer's eyes were wide with horror, and they grew even larger, and something seemed to freeze in his face.
And then in a low voice, firmly and coldly, he said, "No, you're not."
Another explosion sounded, though not right on top of them this time, but still pretty close.
"Knock Out to base," the new transformer said to thin air, though by now the three had figured out that all the transforming robots had radios in their heads. "Please tell me someone's taken down that jamming tower and we can now speak and flee like civilized cybs—"
A glowing portal of light and color opened before them.
"Thank you, Soundwave," purred the so-called Knock Out. Then he hailed others on his radio. "Knock Out to squad, in case you haven't already noticed, jamming tower's down." His voice turned lyrical. "I suggest we all run for our lives now."
And Knock Out put them all in one claw, and moved toward the swirling light. Miko immediately grabbed the—her—boys and tried to pull them away, recoiling.
"Okay, how about no, last time we went with robots, another red robot slightly taller than you went all hatchet job on us!"
"Trust me, it'll be different," Knock Out said, his voice softening despite its quickness.
"Whatever," Jack muttered, shoving off Miko's hand and even pushing Raf away, leaning back against Knock Out's palm as they entered the light.
A/N: I recently realized that in my TFP Shattered Glass brainstorming, I have the human kids still essentially meeting the Autobots first. This time, it just doesn't go well at all. Hope the last section came across as the human kids' POV being very messed up, confused, distorted and fractured—something that should be explained later, along with their physical changes, and the introductory part with Optimus at the top.