Title: One Day
Rating: NC-17 for the first part, T or so for the rest
Universe: TF:Prime
Characters/Pairings: Knock Out, Autobot ensemble – Breakdown/Knock Out, some Ratchet/Optimus
Content Advisory: Smut [Sticky/PnP/sparks] explicit and implied; alien biology and a metric butt-ton of angst
Whoops, I didn't continue it before Christmas. Eek...
i will keep getting back up
because there's something precious that i don't want to lose
...
ONE DAY
"I want to know you."
The words brought Knock Out up out of a perfect post-overload haze, their tone if not their meaning penetrating deep into his hazy awareness. He lifted his helm from its comfortable pillow on Breakdown's upper chassis, frowning down at the bigger mech. Light stretched half across Breakdown's dusty orange faceplates, the single remaining optic the strongest point of light in the darkened medbay.
Propping himself up on forearms that didn't seem to want to spare the effort, Knock Out brushed an uncharacteristically gentle kiss along the loop of the cable tracing the link between his and Breakdown's primary connector arrays. "And you've not known me for the vorns we've been doing this?" he said archly, the first response that popped into his processor. Not his smoothest line of the night, but to be fair, that wasn't exactly his fault. An overload like that was bound to have an effect on one's cognitive functions.
Breakdown shifted abortively, and Knock Out felt him loath to dislodge him from his perch, not wanting to withdraw even as he worried he'd offended Knock Out somehow. Knock Out pulsed reassurance down the hardline, ventilations chuffing in a quiet laugh. Breakdown was a mech of action, so rarely giving voice to his thoughts that Knock Out had initially written him off as a brute with barely a link to his processor. But he thought deep thoughts, occasionally; flashes of insight that let him survive whatever life conspired to throw at him with the same indomitable strength.
Knock Out, young and brash, nevertheless knew enough to respect that in a mech. He told Breakdown as much, sent it flooding down their hardline with the weight of a homespun truth pushing it forward. The quick flare of pleasure in the bigger mech's field was his vindication.
"I'm not angry, or hurt," Knock Out chuffed, flicking a hand out in an emphatic banishment of the idea. "Just curious. You know me better than any other mech out there. The sheer amount of times you make me overload in a single night certainly proves that."
Breakdown gently rolled his hips, silent in appreciation of the joke. Amusement flooded through their joined thoughts, pleasure quickly at its heels as Breakdown's spike moved within Knock Out, charge nodes sparking, sending new electric bliss flooding through their circuits. Knock Out very deliberately clenched his valve calipers down in a rippling motion from entrance to roof node, gasping as he rode the harsh thrust it drew from Breakdown.
Breakdown was a throttle to Knock Out's light standard, his frame big and made for sheer leviathan strength. He reached upwards, cupping the back of Knock Out's helm in a hand that could have crushed him with hardly any effort at all. The restraint with which Breakdown held himself back was intoxicating, part of what made nights with him so addictive. Knock Out pressed back against that hand, circuits singing with the thrill of holding power over such a being.
"Just tell me," he said, fans roaring like jet turbines. "Perhaps we can work on it."
Breakdown's massive fingers ghosted over the lateral port at the base of Knock Out's neck, caressing the join where his connector sank into Knock Out's body. "You know I'm not so good at the talking," he half-reminded, half-admitted. "I don't know the words. Let down your firewalls, and I can show you."
He had to have felt Knock Out stiffen then, hydraulics freezing momentarily. Disoriented by the conjunction between desire and faint dread, Knock Out automatically drew back, thought trails coming back to his own processor. Breakdown made no move, knowing trust was no small thing with Knock Out.
He could get up and leave, now, and Breakdown would accept it. He could draw back, chase his own overload and leave it at that, and Breakdown would accept it. He could throw caution to the wind, let down his firewalls and for the first time in a very long stretch of eons, let someone else into his own existence. That too, Breakdown would accept, because it would be a choice coming from Knock Out's own desires and that would be a choice he would always accept.
"I always thought it was a little odd that you chose me of all mechs to… ah, whatever this is," he commented, tapping his claws thoughtfully against Breakdown's chestplates. "I'm perfectly aware that I'm difficult to keep up with even when one does know me well. I never would have anticipated that you would try as well as you have."
He saw rather than felt Breakdown take down his own primary firewalls. It was a silent invitation; Breakdown had made sure Knock Out was watching, could feel how open and unguarded he was… and then sat there, unmoving, a strong crystal spire in the landscape of their minds. But he was riddled with impurities, lines of weakness without his firewalls. Knock Out had a thousand ways at his disposal to ruin him—and Breakdown knew it.
Knock Out exvented heavily, grinding down on Breakdown's spike, using the rush of physical pleasure to center himself. His own firewalls came tumbling down, and immediately Breakdown's being engulfed him, thoughts running through and around his own, a thousand calculations and theories down at the subconscious level buoyed them up like antigrav clouds.
He saw himself through Breakdown's optics: small, fragile and strong, made cold by a lifetime of war and yet beautiful underneath it. I know what you are, Breakdown thought/said, but not why. And that used to be enough, but Pit, I don't know anymore.
You want a sparkmerge, Knock Out surmised. The thought made him apprehensive, was frightening and yet exciting at the same time. He felt Breakdown's acceptance of this, the big mech's own trepidation/desire of it of course a mirror of his own. He felt what it had cost Breakdown to bring it up, the fear of rejection warring with desire to once again belong, to be part and parcel of a bigger entity than himself alone. He'd been part of a gestalt once, had had a cadre of his own before that. It was a stark contrast to Knock Out, who had had no-one, nothing, right up until the day he had joined the Decepticons.
Perhaps, this was his opportunity to gain someone.
Telescoping his intent hard through the connection, he split his chest open. Outer plating, core armor slid aside, parts unfurling neatly to reveal the translucent glow of his spark chamber. Give me an incentive to go further, he sang, giddy with purpose. Breakdown stared up at him, and Knock Out heard the telltale click of his own chestplates dividing.
Breakdown's spark was vibrant blue, burning bright as a newborn star. Knock Out's was yellow-white and violent, tiny flares reaching for Breakdown even before their outer coronas met. They burned hot with anticipation, charring even the resilient not-metal of their chambers as they irised open and sank into each other. Knock Out's awareness drew back and reached out at the same time, the world around them slowing as their divided natures blurred, becoming one.
Even so, it wasn't enough. Knock Out reached deeper, taking and being taken, afraid but loath to let it define their union. Breakdown was a calming presence all around, reaching for and in him, existing as him at the same time as he was himself. He saw, felt, experienced what it was like to be Breakdown—the surety and the strength, the quickness of the world passing by around him, the terrible loneliness that threatened to eat away at his spark if he would just let it.
They spiralled deeper, beyond words, into reality. The vision broke; light shattered; together, they hit their peak. For the barest moment, something came between them, Breakdown eclipsed by this smaller, weaker soul.
Knock Out didn't—couldn't—notice. Circuits tripped, crackling with the force of his overload. He slumped down over Breakdown's chest, offline.
Breakdown chuckled tiredly, and wrapped strong arms around him before surrendering to the blackness himself.
He'd used any excuse to skip missions on the planet's surface before. Too many insects, too organic, too many chances to ruin his gorgeous paintjob. Knock Out could tolerate all that for the sake of a good race, but anything else was pushing it.
Not now. Too many ghosts crawled around the Nemesis, Breakdown's shade in their—his, now—quarters, and that thing the fleshy insects had cobbled together from Breakdown's remains and one of their own in the medbay. It had hardly even been human, there at the end; just a writhing crying thing lacking arms and legs, squirming and bleeding all over the space that had once contained Breakdown's life. Knock Out had made itsuffer—he'd finally put all those slasher movies he'd found floating around on the Internet to good use, finding it obscenely ironic that he was borrowing from human imagination to make a real, living human scream for death.
He'd given it death, after a while. Had felt like a god, for the first time in a long, distinguished career of medicine and murder.
His finish was suffering. There was no-one left to buff him. Scratches gleamed in the sunlight as he twisted and dodged, hardly caring about the burn of a laser carving deep grooves across the outside of his thigh.
It was the Autobots again, all five of them after Knock Out's current assignation. Energon, desperately needed by both sides. It lay in the dirt now, leaking out of the refinery-containers, going to waste. What was the point? Knock Out thought lazily, of fighting when all it meant was the ruin of your objective?
A barrage of cannonfire blasted past him, so close he felt the pressure of its passage. If it had hit, it would have torn right through his outer plating, possibly right into his processor core. Several Decepticons had that level of firepower. Only one Autobot shared it.
But Optimus Prime had miscalculated. The edge of the volley strayed onto energon-soaked dirt. Energon, no matter how contaminated it was with organic material and trace minerals, did not react well with laserfire.
The energon ignited. Breakdown was dead, and now Knock Out was going to die too.
He turned, leaping for shelter he knew he wasn't going to find. The shockwave caught him midstride, lifting him off his pedes; the detonation drowned out the world. Pain tore into him, plating torn away, hydraulics crushed and lines ripped away from their moorings; the blue blaze of energon the last thing he saw before the deluge of warnings cascading into his HUD dragged him into emergency shutdown.
Knock Out came back online slowly, expecting to see damage reports and system failure warnings crowding his HUD, to feel the agony of full-strength pain signals crashing through his neural lace. He was the only qualified medic currently on the Nemesis; CMO by default rather than merit, he'd had to train his own assistants from scratch. With him offline, there would be no-one capable of repairing the wounds he knew he'd taken.
So it was with surprise and a growing panic that he registered his vital systems pinging back in better condition than he'd been for vorns. His energon tanks were low, much lower than normal, but his processor, sensor network and self-repair system all levelled out at around 87% operational. New welds and fresh patches covered large parts of his frame; upper dorsal plating and shoulder struts, most of his left leg, lateral chassis armor… Significant scarring on processor core armor! The list was far longer than he'd ever thought to experience surviving.
His left arm wasn't responding. Scratch that, or rather don't—it wasn't there at all.
Knock Out onlined his external sensory network so fast it crackled, his optics sending back a pixelated blur of the world. Proximity sensors pinged on ghostly figures that dissolved into nothing a fraction of a nanoklik later. The world took on a more concrete shape as he reset the network settings, thinking to limit himself to a basic spectrum and work upwards from there.
Infrared heat signatures built up into the solid form of the Autobots' old medic. What was his name—Ratchet. Behind him, the shallower, faintly glowing outline of the Prime.
Ah. He was a prisoner.
He said as much, or tried to. His vocaliser spat static, only devolving into intelligible speech at the end of the sentence. The medic, Ratchet, shook his head.
"Don't try to speak yet. Your vocaliser has been through significant stress; your self-repair systems haven't quite finished the job. I would expect you can guess why, being a medic yourself."
"Ratchet," the Prime rumbled warningly, his voice flooding like liquid thunder through the little makeshift medbay. Ratchet sighed and fell silent, fiddling with the settings on one of his (handmade, they looked) monitors.
You tore my door off, Knock Out thought, warily watching the Prime as he forced his higher thought processes online. He felt neater, somehow, than he had in a long time. His code was running things as it should, his libraries were packed away neatly, his programs running without a hitch. Somehow, he'd run a full defrag while he'd been offline.
Medics could do that. He turned a suspicious optic onto Ratchet, wondering why the Autobot medic would have bothered. Why the Autobots would have bothered to save a mostly-dead Decepticon, and a fairly high-ranking one at that. Did they intend to interrogate him? Or did they have something more sinister in mind? Knock Out had been complicit in many interrogations of Autobot prisoners; he knew exactly what damage a medic could inflict.
Ratchet, they'd said once, was as old as the stars, and never lost a patient once he'd gotten his servos on them. Who knew what a medic like him could be capable of?
Scowling darkly, Ratchet made his way around to the head of the med-berth, deftly popping open Knock Out's main connector port and plugging in his own cable. Panic flared in Knock Out's spark as he felt the first faint touch of an invading presence. He threw up the strongest firewalls he had, writing support code at lightspeed rates so that when the medic tried to break them down, he'd at least have a Pit of a time getting through.
But, he didn't. His field simply flared with a momentary irritation—and then, backed off, a note of something strange playing around the edges. A polite file was sent down the hardline, and then Ratchet disconnected, his field heavy with silent apology.
"If I was going to hack you, I would have done it already, while you were in stasis," Ratchet said, his tone of voice mostly but not completely a grumble. It seemed to be his ground-state of expression. "That file is your treatment plan—being a medic yourself, you'll know what to do with it, so I won't bother to explain."
"Much obliged," Knock Out said dryly, and this time his vocaliser behaved itself. Ratchet gave him a Look—Knock Out recognised it, the patented 'I'm-a-medic-so-listen-to-me-Primus-be-damned' expression medics the galaxy over seemed to share. Knock Out smirked back. He knew exactly how to play that game.
The look Ratchet gave him in return was plainly dismissive—I've been around much longer than you have, little scraplet, and there's no way in the Pit I am going to lose to you. "You're not going to be fully mobile for another week or so," he said, "so forget escaping right here and now. Your communication suite has been disconnected, and that includes receiving as well as sending signals. Your arm I've had to essentially rebuild from the struts up; it won't be ready to be reattached for at least a couple of days. I've installed a limiter in your motor functions to prevent any attempt at damaging either us, our equipment or our liaisons. By a happy coincidence it serves a medical function as well, preventing you from overexerting yourself while you heal from what were almost fatal levels of damage."
He glanced back at Optimus, and sighed. "You've also successfully kindled. Congratulations."
Knock Out shuttered his optics, reset his vocaliser once, twice.
"Excuse me?"
"You've kindled," Ratchet repeated steadily. "You are carrying a newspark, approximately six weeks—three orns, that is—advanced."
"Impossible," Knock Out said flatly. "I have an inhibitor installed. You must have misread the scanner."
"I don't misread things," the Autobot medic refuted, picking up a datapad from the pile near the main monitor and giving it a cursory once-over before he passed it to Knock Out. "How long ago did you last have your inhibitor checked? It's not unheard of for them to malfunction."
The readings on the datapad didn't make any sense to Knock Out. He knew enough to recognise spark output readings when he saw them, but this pattern wasn't one he recognised. The rate kept spiking, triple and quadruple the baseline readout, and each spike came in groups of three, followed by a single smaller jump that broke up what was otherwise a fairly standard increased-stress reaction.
Underneath the first reading, Ratchet had isolated the frequency producing the smaller spikes. It was cycling faster, on a different tempo to the main reading—to Knock Out's own spark.
He shook his head slowly. "I'm not a spark support specialist; I'm primarily a surgeon," he said, glaring up at Ratchet. "Whatever you're going to do with me, get it over with so we can all get back to our cosy little war."
"I'm afraid it is not that simple," Optimus Prime interrupted. Knock Out cursed whichever trick of fate had granted the Prime such a bewitchingly dignified voice—you couldn't help but listen when he spoke. "Megatron knows you are in our custody. Soundwave flew over the mine site as we recovered your body. However, he hasn't yet attempted to negotiate—or demand—your release."
Knock Out's optics narrowed. Megatron had plenty to bargain with if he truly wanted his only trained medic back—the safety of millions of humans planet-wide sprang to mind. "Which means absolutely nothing," he said aloud, examining the Prime's EM field for any sign of falsehood. "I truly doubt you have the resources to indefinitely support me as a prisoner."
Ratchet huffed; Optimus merely nodded. "The presence of your newspark complicates matters further. Do you believe it would be welcome among the Decepticons?"
"I don't believe it truly exists," Knock Out snapped, dropping the datapad onto the floor in the most overt fit of rebellion he could muster. "I've never seen that pattern of spark activity before, but that means nothing, simply that I'm currently more stressed than I have ever been thanks to a variety of factors—" He forcibly offlined his vocaliser before he could say something he'd really regret later on. As a rule, mouthing off to one's captors tended to net one large helpings of pain. The Prime might be soft, but there was solid steel in that medic's optics.
"Do you have any better explanation for the fact that your spark is suddenly giving off a wholly discrete radiation signature to your own? Because I don't." Ratchet's voice was softer than the snappish words should have suggested.
–Irritation Knock out could deal with; but sympathy that made him want to get up and turn his carbon saw on the other medic. He kept his vocaliser offline, refusing to dignify Ratchet with an answer.
It… wasn't completely impossible, his archives reminded him. Once or twice in the early days of the war he'd heard of inhibitors malfunctioning, leaving cadres with sparklings whose lives were then endangered from the moment they emerged. Sometimes before they emerged—he'd had a frontliner who got himself sparked once. One cadre-wide orgy, that was all it took.
Or apparently, one single slagging spark merge. He had been fairly sure it was impossible to kindle from just one merge, let alone unbonded. It was one of those things everyone knew. Thought they knew, anyway.
"I'm going to put you back into stasis for now," Ratchet announced, remotely triggering the sequence in Knock Out's coding that would put him under for the foreseeable future. He didn't want to know how long that would be.
The Prime's enormous EM field covered his like a blanket, and it was surprisingly comforting, like waking up in the factory for the first time. Knock Out's sensory suite offlined all at once, and then he was gone.