Title: Cold Comforts
Author: coldthing
Fandom: Beast Wars
Characters: Dinobot, Rattrap OCsx2
Summary: Here it was different, Dinobot relinquishes all alliances
Note: very AU after 'Maximal No More'. Desperately in need of a beta
He awoke from his last dream its contents hovering just out of reach. He was curled up on the cold, damp cave floor, tail flicking just under his nose. The feeling, he tries to grasp at it before it flickers out of existence. A reality of throbbing tingling pain replaces it instead. He closes them again, tightly.
The pathways that conducted pain had ceased to function months ago, or had he shut them off himself; He couldn't remember. He couldn't remember much anymore, what his name what, what he was doing, whose side he was on, but it always all came back in massive waves of regret.
He often enjoyed the brief memory lapses; he didn't have it worry about anything. It was just him hunting his midday meal, or sleeping in the corner of his cave in his nest of chalky bracken. His accumulating collection of animal bones, small and large, most with almost rotted meat still hanging in shreds off them littered the sides of his nest and the uneven cave floor.
In the corner a small fire sputtered in the dim tepid light of sunrise, it did little good warming him, cold drafts still bit into his body from all angels as the arched cave magnified the mourning wind.
He awoke cold and hungry that morning, hunger burnt at the pit of his lined stomach, the cold bit and mauled him with its sharp teeth as he shuffled around the cave.
His ocher coloring had faded to dull bands of pale red and brown, he now walked with a limp in his left hind paw. On the scaly skin of his beast mode, it was an ugly puckered scar, spreading from his upper thigh to just above where his support strut ended in his lower leg.
Getting slowly to his unsteady feet he loped slowly across the hard rocky floor, gravel catching in-between his claws.
Outside that air was chill, a light drizzle made the landscape dull. It left a translucent film over the rocks. In the east, the red orange smear of the sky painted what would have been a gorgeous sunrise if the morning had dawned sunny instead of gray.
The crackle of brush to his left caught his flyty attention. He raised his nose into the air slowly and delibertatly, sniffing the humid air. After a moment, he looked down at the grass in-between his claws and loped off across bracken.
Further, away, a doe grazed in a clearing littered with scraps of metal and uprooted trees. The carcass of a dead bear was rotting slowly behind a tree to the doe's left, flies buzzing lazily in the bloody entrails still left in its ribcage.
The doe paid no heed to its unusual companions, and painfully unaware, it settled it's self down folding its legs under its speckled body and began to chew the cud.
He lurked in the bracken to the right of the doe, both her sent and the repugnant stench of carrion on his nose.
Eyes flickering and half closed in the anticipation of a meal he stalked the doe, half buried feral instincts before used only in combat now utilized to their full as he hunted.
His teeth were yellowed now; it wasn't uncommon to find remnants of his last meal in them.
The doe closed her eyes and overhead a early morning bird warbled.
He could smell her thickly now, blotting out the stench of rotting meat he could hear her heart thumping in her chest, her blood pumping in her arteries, the crackle of her synapses.
The sound of his claws moving through the bracken at the ragged south side of the clearing was barely audible.
Some how she heard it, ears pricking up in the gray light, maybe she sensed a predator, a being higher on the food chain then her, some ingrained sense of danger that perhaps they lost with civilization warned her of his presence ( and intent to kill) as his hunkered below a wilting bush.
Eyes now narrowing, ears now flat back on her long thin skull.
She quickly unfolded herself and staggered to her feet on her long legs.
He could feel his tongue beginning to salivate between his yellow teeth.
The doe had stiffened in fear now; she knew there was something out there in the bracken of the surrounding forest.
Some of the clouds were clearing and the quality of light was improving. He adjusted his eyes to compensate.
He knelt low on his haunches sniffing the crisp early morning air again.
He lowered his head further into the bracken to avoid detection from the doe's senses.
Hunger gnawed at the pit of his stomach, a growling clawing beast within, only his best kept him from striking now.
Stalking was the key, strategy in warfare, it is easier to scare an opponent away then to beat them, though the honor is not there, a victory from an enemy's cowardice is still a victory.
He never knew what he said any more.
The doe was beginning to relax again, her simple mind telling her that the threat was over, or had never existed in the first place.
999
He wheeled silently and stiffly overhead, as he watched the doe go rigid in fear.
Chill winds buffeted him to the left and he struggled to maintain his hovering position. Wet rain and water buffeted his feathers.
He too could smell the hunter nearby, be it the one he sought, or not, now it didn't matter.
He drifted lower, the wind catching in the opinions of his huge wings.
His keen red eyes scanning the shuddering underbrush surrounding the doe
A chilly, wind beat at his wings, though his thick motley brown feathers kept his body warm, he shivered. If the hunter he sought was the one he now stalked, he knew he was in for such a show of gruesome brutality like the one he had never seen. Cursing silently, he angled down, wings beating the air, down out of the biting winds, and into sensor range of any one nearby.
His would be target was unaware of his presence to his relief as he alighted on a branch a few meters behind his reptilian target who lurked beneath bush
Shrugging his huge wings, now ungainly and useless onto his skewed shoulders he hunched his neck and began to watch the hunter stalk his prey.
The clearing filled in the faint cold light of the early dawn. His keen now onyx black eyes peeking from the burnt scared skin of his bald he and his hooked beak. He watched the utahraptor with feral intelligence.
999
The leaves of the forest talked to her in strange whimsical voices, telling her, them, of the battle that transpiring further on their route.
As she stalked through the thickly leaved branches, drizzle splattering down, wetting the thick black scales on her back, she looked down disdainfully at her unaware rodent companion. He didn't know what the leaves were saying to him. Nor did he know of her presence mere feet above his head.
She arched her back under a low hanging branch, digging her claws into the rough tree bark.
Her rodent companion, with the whine of motorized parts continued noisily through the undergrowth without heed that he could be heard miles away.
She jumped over another branch the supersensitive pads of her paws felling every bump and ridge in the damp bark.
Around her, the wet leaves continued to rustle and sing. The rain continued to patter down on her metal etched back, spikes rising and falling with each step.
999
He charged, snarling, and salivating out of the brush, his ocher head bowed low by his small curled forearms, his powerful hind legs, now in the heat of the kill, without a trace of his earlier limp.
Grinning feral, yellowed teeth bore in his fearsome visage.
The doe started to her feet clumsily, her brown eyes wide in fear as the utahraptor charged from the bushes.
Bolting, her hooves churning the ground. She barely made it four steps before the jaws were around her midsection, biting deep into her spine. Warm blood spilled out, staining his forelimbs and the hazy viridian carpet surrounding him. In-between his teeth the doe struggled, legs and neck muscles convulsing violently, even with her spinal column severed by his sharp yellowed teeth, she lolled uncomfortably to the side, forcing him to drop her quivering body to the ground in front of him. A bright red bloody mess, intestines spilling out onto the grass, inside her bile strained ribcage her heard still beat, pulsing in the cavity in-between her still palpitation yet ruptured lungs and the abraded stomach. It stank of death.
Blood dribbling out of her nose her breaths were uneven and wet, a pool of blood and vomit was gathering under her lolling head.
Thick blood and bile covered his chest and his curled forearms, his calf's were splattered with the same.
He crouched slowly down over the still twitching body, prodded it once with a forepaw. The doe looked back at him blankly as her eyes misted over. He prodded her again, and then with his clumsy forepaws reached into her chest cavity and stopped her heart, his thick sharp claws rupturing it's many chambers, stopping it's pathetic beating, and silencing it.
He looked at the vivisected body, blood and guts spread out across the grass, the light drizzle mumbling on his back. Cooling him.
"Dat is sumthin' I would not call an honorable death, heh!" The voice was all too familiar, thickly accented from some place he didn't know, the sent combined of both rodent and motor fluids.
Rattrap knelt before him on the balls of his feet, transformed, the rat wasn't any more impressive "Hows you bin Chopper face?" He asked grin passed on his sheered face; he regards the bloody carcass, blood still leaking onto the wet grass form severed veins.
"What are you doing here vermin?" Dinobot spits the question out in a manner, he regards is sometimes former comrade with a something that isn't quite contempt and isn't quite irritation, truthfully, he hasn't talked to anyone is more time then he would like to remember.
"Eh, little ah' this, little ah that..." Rattrap shrugs slightly "Actually I'm supposed to be on a border patrol with Carrion, thought I'd drop in" he smiled, sarcastic little rat.
Dinobot smiles back, but not with sarcasm, nor genuine, just a somewhat forced rising of his gum line.
"Indeed!" He says without enthusiasm.
Steam is beginning to raise in-between the two robots as Dinobot's prey begins to cool off, white milky swirls wreath his head.
Dinobot sniffs the air, death, vermin, leaves, and something else, something wholly unfamiliar and yet he knows it right away.
He shifted his back legs on the grass, tingling running through his hind quarters and chest, and surely the breath huffs out of his lungs.
He staggers slightly to the left. Then as the weakness subsides, he straightens himself.
Rattrap too his credit looks surprised, rather then worried.
"I doubt Optimus would mind if you used the CR chamber" Rattrap rolls back on his feet, metal and rubber creaking as he moves. He says casually after his composure is regained.
"Do not mock me vermin! Optimus Primal has no need for the likes of me!" He hisses, indignant, still holding his spine askew, the weakness jutting through his shoulders. He turns away is dragging the doe's bloody corps behind him.
Rattrap shrugs as he watches the utahraptor depart, shortly considering following him
It leaves a red smear behind him in the grass, ideal for following. No predator in this cohort was remotely qualified to fight Dinobot over his kill.
The rain washed his body clean, letting more red blood run to the brown earth. He saw it as poetic, his encounter with his former comrade rapidly fading from his memory, along with his name and designation. All to return on a later date.
999
Rattrap remains standing in the clearing where Dinobot abandoned their conversation, ideally watching the flies buzz.
Finally he shakes his fist at the rapidly disappearing rustle in the branches and stamps his foot on the ground, cursing.
"Damnit!" he yells "Carrion!" He shouts at the sky, shaking his fist at the grey bank sky "Where are you!"
Nearby a vulture sat on a creaking dead tree branch, preening its filthy brown feathers. Clacking its beak derisively at the robot shaking his fist at it, he eyes him with cold distain. Shaking its misshapen wings it hobbles along sideway across the branch to be nearer to the fuming Rattrap.
"Aye comrade, I'm here, no need te' shout" he bobs his ungainly red scared head then taps lightly on Rattrap's skull. "Is that who I think it was?" The vulture cocked his head the side, his beady black eyes inquisitive.
"Yep, that was him" Rattrap brushed drops of water from his head.
"Nasty fellow?" Carrion asked, readjusting his maladroit brown wings around him, his bald head still horizontal in Rattrap's vision.
Rattrap shrugged and beckoning to the vulture, he jerked back into beast mode; Then sat down on his haunches in the wet grass. He began to wash nonexistent hair behind his ears with one hand.
Carrion continued to eye him. "So?" he hissed through his hooked beak. "Who is he?" he jerked his head in the direction that Dinobot had departed dragging his prey.
"A damn fine fighter" Rattrap mused and licked his hand again running it over the chrome layering on the back of his neck. "And a friend" he added quietly as an afterthought.
"A friend, comrade?" Carrion's head bobbed back and forth. The dead branch shook under the maximal, cracking noises coming from its base. "You said he was a Predacon" the vulture shifted his weight.
"No he wasn't a Predacon, may have been once, but not when I knew him" Rattrap continued to wash himself, blissfully aware that it would do no good at all, the stink of garbage would always cling to him the same way the smell of rotting meat would always cling to Carrion's feathers.
The vulture shifted uncomfortably.
"One of the finest Maximal's I ever knew" Rattrap again mused into an after through, and silence reigned except for the creak of Carrion's branch and the dull whisper of the rain wet leaves.
Carrion opened his beak to say something, but then closed it and the branch under him creaked and broke, leaving him flapping, anything but gracefully in the air.
Rattrap normally would have laughed at the other Maximal's embarrassing situation, but only raised an eye brow, amused. "Funny" he said without humor.
Carrion alighted on the ground next the rat. "You must tell me more of your friend comrade," he hissed and pecked Rattrap sharply on the back of the head. "Optimus will want to know how the patrol went" and then he took to the air again, his huge wing span pumping the air and again leaving Rattrap abandoned and alone in the clearing.
"You just go and report back without me..." he trailed off again brushing his tiny pink hands behind his ears again. Then stood up and loped off following the blood trail.
999
Dinobot felt sick when he returned to his cave. He vomited gray chunky matter on to the grass outside, leaves, mixed with bones, blood, and fluids.
The doe now looked less appealing then it had on the trek back to the cave.
He vomited again, this time a runny brown and collapsed on to his haunches, fuel pump pounding in his chest. Coolant hammering through his system.
His stomach churned again, but he swallowed the vomit back down and continued to drag the doe to the cave.
His senses were fuzzy, as if wrapped in a veil of smoke or gas, and spots pirouetted and danced before his eyes.
Inside his cave, the floor was damp, for the wind had blown rain water inside, and his fire had gone out. A faint curl of grey smoke still wavered away to invisibility in the semi-darkness of the cave. The wood still cracked and popped as it cooled.
He nosed through it, not minding the fumes and the smoke, the clouds of ashes he disturbed. Hoping to find a still living coal, but to no avail, all were dead and cooling.
He turned away and dragged the doe the rest of the way into the cave, propping her body up against the wall.
His body complained of its exhaustion, skin groaning and bones popping. Stasis lock was setting in for him, and a little red sign blinking 'recharge recharge' in his HUD.
He shook his head and staggered briefly. He seemed to need more and more sleep, spending hours even days curled up in his nest.
His stomach rumbled and he took a deep breath skin pushing out against his emancipated ribcage.
The doe's liver and intestines were spilling out onto the floor and a small pool of blood was forming around her body.
He nosed through the entrails, picking the meat off her ribcage with small deft nips of his yellowed teeth.
He finally selected a leg from the cavern and dragged it out and across the floor to his broken bed, where he lay to rest until his stomach calmed.
He idly pulled meat off the leg, hoping to keep himself awake; blood bubbled and out across the floor. Soon his recharge cycle overcame any will power he had left.
He dreamed in disjointed blurry images, never staying in one place to long.
Then he was gone again. Only a child standing in the middle of a crowd, hugging himself in fear and crying out.
Again reality fluttered. He was curled up with Rattrap in his quarters on the Axalon, halfheartedly trading insults and snide remarks about one another's creators as the smaller maximal's fingers worked their way under his armor.
Time flickers again. He's watching himself sleep from outside, how his sides rise and fall against his fiercely visible ribs, how his body is covered in puckered scars, his coloring fading. How he slept so restlessly, tail slashing back and forth behind him how he constantly shifted his back and forelegs.
Again, images nagged at his brain as he awoke. HIs joints were stiff and creaked as he moved.
There was no daylight in the cave, but he guessed he had slept for most of the day. The sky outside was gray and overcast. The rain hadn't let up, instead it had only worsened.
Some one had relit his fire; it smelled like Rattrap.
His stomach clenched again, and then gurgled as it asked for food. Without energon he had to digest whatever he could catch, hence the dead deer. It was harder for systems, having been designed as a last resort for energon.
The deer was missing; there was only a dark red smear on the wall where it had rested, but no deer.
Growling and tail lashing violently from side to side he stalked out of the cave. He had had to endure the reminder of better times that was Rattrap to catch that deer. He did not relish the idea of losing it; perhaps whatever unlucky soul had stolen it was still around.
He could still smell the blood smearing on the rocks.
It was pouring outside, the clouds were whipping across the sky, and the trees raged around him, the rain sliced into his skin.
Animals scuttled for cover here and there, leaves screamed in time with the rain.
The smell of the meat was almost impossible to pick up, if it hadn't been for that other scent, he would have lost it completely.
Some where, a tree crashed to the ground sending shock waves rumbling through the air. The rain bit into his back like acid when he ventured out of his cave.
The reek of sulfur and metal shavings and oil all mixed with the stench of carrion, (shortly his mind conjured a rat, but it was gone in the next intent) the sent was faint, like a whisper that brushed his cheek. He followed it, plowing against the rain. Keeping everything but the scent shut out of his body. He absently wondered how he could do that, but it was no matter, it drove on.
He was cold and wet, but triumphant. The scent would lead him to who ever had stolen his meal. If it didn't disappear in the storm first.
He struggled to push his body mass against the pounding sub-tropical winds and made a quick leaping dash behind a small out cropping of trees. The wind was less there, thought the rain was heavier.
He inclined his nose in to the air again, taking several deep breaths. A strong gust of wind brought the sent ever stronger to him. Mechanical fluids and wet scales, Dead flesh.
He shivered and pressed on.
At moment's notice, he vomited again, stomach growling with hunger and unrest.
All around him, the groves of trees were painted dark and wet by the storm.
He found he prey under one of the dark tree groves.
The black carnosaur, had all but picked the deer's carcass clean, a few strings of the less desirable meat were hanging off the rib cage. The lizard was now gnawing at the skull, the fragile bone held tightly in-between it' two huge front paws.
It looked up, eyes vermillion, and hissed at him, spitting, the hair, and the spikes on its back raising as it protected its meal. It wrapped its huge paws around the cracked and gorged at skull. Lips rose away from a mouth filled with tiny triangular teeth
His tail slashed at the underbrush and he sat back on his haunches to watch the postosuchus eat; competing in a mental staring match the lizard pretended to ignore the utahraptor sitting a few feet away, staring at it with cold eyes and continue gnawing at the skull.
This went on for perhaps hours, until the lizard pushed the skull away, letting it clatter against a tree trunk, and stumbled to its feet.
Dinobot did the same. Jaws snapping open and closed. Tail slashing
"Do you really want to fight me for that carcass Dinobot?" The postosuchus's barbed tail cracked through the air as she got to her feet severing several branches. Her voices was singsong and effeminate
He could not understand her; he only crouched lower on his haunches, ready to spring. Ready to pull her lithe body limb from limb.
"Either you've regressed again," she observed in an amused voice they began to circle jaws snapping, barbed tail flashing. "Or our friendship is over" the postosuchus was low on her powerful legs, huge paws grinding in the mud. "Hmmmm? What is it Maximal?" she taunts him, and he understands the word 'Maximal' though it holds no meaning. Just another piece in the puzzle he is yet to understand.
The postosuchus femme snarl again at him, saliva dripping off her fangs in long white strings. "Yessss, does that make you angry Maxsssimal?" Each word was an angry hiss. Her vermillion eyes silted.
Dinobot snarled and lunged at her, jaws snapping, and tail lashing.
She dodged to the left, slapping the flat of her barb on his nose as she moved. Gigantic paws skidding to halt in the wet mud a few feet away and she spun around. Screaming, high loud and harsh.
Dinobot again lowered his body into an attack position, anger boiling through his body. The lizard mocked him.
Lighting crashed and thunder rumbled in the distance. Both animals flinched and began to circle each other in the mud again.
"You've regressed again Dinobot," the postosuchus was taunting him. "It's me, Prowl, your friend," she continued "friend" was somehow soothing, though it had been meant as a taunt.
He snarled again. She almost shrank back. The words meant so little to him.
"Dinobot remember you're not an animal, you're a Maximal, I'm a Predacon" still a hint of feral anger in her voice. Dinobot launched himself at her again, jaws wide open and dripping hungrily. Prowl let out a hysterical giggle and tried to dodge to the left.
If he couldn't have his deer, he would have this Predacon lizard.
The scene was lit suddenly by a bright flash of lightning and somewhere another tree fell.
Feral hatred made him fast and he caught Prowl around the midsection as she was in med leap. Wrenching his sawing lower jaw through her abdomen and chest.
The postosuchus shrieked, spikes standing up along her back and haunches forced him to let go, and back up to nurse broken teeth.
Prowl backed up limping badly on her hind quarters, energon dripping down her sides and mingling with the rain water in the mud. She took a few shuddering breaths, recuperating.
" Remember me?" she demanded, vermillion eyes flickering. "I'm Megatron's new you!"
The utahraptor cocked his head to the side, as if thinking. Fluid, both his and hers was running down his lower jaw, staining his chest as well. His tail swishing out behind him. Sharp claws pawing the mud as the two stood at a stand off again.
"Dinobot!" Prowl demanded, she limped towards him, barbed tail held close to her limping hind legs. "Answer me!"
The utahraptor snarled at her, and jabbed forward a few times with his equine jaw.
She only managed to dodge a few times; he caught her in the hindquarters and on the side of the face. Her left ear was bleeding. Half of the thin skin shell was torn off and bloody.
Animal energy made him stronger and faster than the transmetal postosuchus. Again, he sunk his teeth into her side, drawing long crackling gashes along her patch work black and silver sides.
"Dinobot!" She yelped the anger and the playful taunting completely gone "Wake up!" and she swiped the side of his head with one of her monstrous paws. "PROWL TERRORISE!" Again, the high pitched puma scream as the Predacon femme jerked transformation
"DINOBOT TRANSFORM" he had deleted his activation codes months ago, rarely remembering the skill that he had above all other utahraptors. He jerked maladroit into his robot mode, drawing his sword from it's sheath, Prowl had only moments to spin her long handled axe up to take the brunt of his blow.
The two robots looked eye to eye with each other, their medieval weapons locked together; sparks flew as Dinobot's eight rotating sword blades struggled to grind through the steel shell of Prowl's axe handle. Both their boots carved grooves in the mud as they pushed against each other's weight.
The cold hard water rain pummeled their bodies. Dinobot snorted a cloud of steam out of his nose. Prowl's body was wreathed in what water vapor as her body heated up. Every drop of water that splattered on her sizzled up into white steam.
Some where, lightning struck a tree, the forest screamed and mourned in the rain as the behemoth crashed to the forest floor.
Dinobot snorted steam into the air once again. Hours, perhaps days they had stood there locked in combat, neither warrior relenting. His damaged limbs were beginning to tremble. Joints rattling against one another.
In the end it was Prowl who won the battle of the minds, forcing Dinobot's sword down and too the side, it's tip in the mud. Her better form over his damaged body.
Her puma scream shattered through his audio system again. Though she had him blind in water, the Predacon backed up, lowering her axe to her waist.
"Lets talk" she said "Friend." Thunder drowned out her final after thought.
Dinobot did not hear her, he was still consumed in an animal rage, and even sword gone, and he lunched at the Predacon femme. Taking her off her feet.
She screamed at him again, shattering though his audios again.
She would have swiped at him with her huge hand had he not pinned her arms by her side, he sat astride her chest, pinning any spikes down, her axe, useless by her feet. She struggled back and forth her masked black and silver face bobbing furiously back and forth, as she dodged jabs from his one still functioning eye laser. It sizzled led the mud only inches from where head had been minutes before.
She screamed, three times, only inches from his face. He had already taken the sonic blast twice in the face, the three consecutive blasts caused him to sit back shaking his head and letting his vision clear. Prowl strained upwards to throw him off. They were the same size and mass, but he was vastly better balanced in his position.
"Come on friend" she sounded worried, fretting over a meaningless brawl," you remember me don't you Dinobot?" she asked him for the umtempth time, her voice was wheedling and high pitched.
Dinobot blinked fluid bleeding into his eyes, but now it all made sense, and he clawed at his head to get it out. I didn't want to remember.
He sat back off Prowl, who sat up holding her neck and coughing through her face mask.
She got to her knees, retrieving her axe and spinning it around replaced it on her back.
The silver and black femme kneeled by his side. He reached up towards her with one curled forepaw
"Hello my friend" Dinobot managed to croak" I didn't hurt you did I?"