AN: Sometime between G1 and Bayverse the name Scorponok was reassigned from a Decepticon headmaster cityformer to the scorpion symbiote we all know and love. I was reading the wiki and this oneshot came out of the ether. The lack of commas is intentional.
Can't Remember the Descent
There were rare occasions when Scorponok took the time to parse the heavily coded and firewalled script of his archived memories. Most of the time they lay buried and ignored as the situation at hand held no use for them. Only ever occasionally as his current master lay in recharge or stasis or in pieces under the domain of vicious Decepticon medics would Scorponok pry open his tattered memories and review them alone in the dark. The files came away in tatters as code threatened to shred unrecognisably under the opening process. Each memory was now carefully treated and preserved as his only record of Before.
He had his favourites among them. The moments when he was large or strong or clever enough to be invaluable. The times when he had had a glut of energon. Those points where he was remarked upon as significant. Periods of peace and of plenty and of a gold haze hanging in the sky over his roofs. These he went to first when he went to them at all. But always as these treasures drew to a close would his mind be drawn to pore over his mind's greatest flaw. The error frightened him as nothing else in this forsaken galaxy could.
Between the two memories was no gap in timestamp. One segued into the other without pause or flicker in the feed despite the way that After everything was different. In the Before he was one of the most invaluable resources the Decepticon cause possessed. In the After he wore the frame and coding of a base indentured drone taking orders and energon from a master of dubious reliability.
Scorponok did not remember how he had become this. He did not know how this had become him.