What We Claimed as Ours
Prologue: Renovatio
Dedicated to Mistress Megatron – thank you for inspiring me to come back to him.
Nothing.
There is Nothing.
Blind, space cold, self-aware Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
He could not take a breath in the Nothing.
Cold... Too cold.
Floating in a sea of cold.
Everywhere a sea of cold, squeezing him like a vice.
Viscous, unnaturally cold fluid slithering across his exoskin trailed frail, feathery breaths of frost across the scarred metal. Sliding beneath his broken armor, trickling between frayed wiring and burst gyros, seeping into secret places – a cruel parody of a patient, attentive lover.
His insides twisting, pitching, burning, roiling… and then the liquid cold entwined with them, and he is frozen and still.
Still… Death was so blissfully still.
Silent.
Inside the arresting embrace of the bitter cold, he felt a tremendous, aching, almost overwhelming sense of relief. His painfully hollow spark was finally extinguished. His life forfeit. The Chaos Bringer had claimed him at last.
Blind, deaf, and alone in the Nothing, he was left with only the jarring, peculiar feeling of being tangled and contorted as if warped by a perverse, insidious form of gravity. His twisted back struts arched as fiercely cold fingers bit deep into his empty spark chamber. It was anguish. It was ecstasy. He could not cry out as the cold flooded his burned out husk and filled him with promised death.
The Nothing breathed deep for him.
Yet, within frozen, shorted circuits – something stirred.
A wanton sense of self and consciousness bubbled unwarranted to the surface of his abstract mind. His scattered wits collected out of habit. The emotions he so carefully controlled reflexively sank once again into his dark subconscious. Coherent thought involuntarily began to form. Then…
Sudden, sharp cognizance slamming into his reason like a hot, keen blade.
Anger.
Shame.
Guilt.
Treasonous, friendless, homeless, worthless waste of energon.
Murderer.
Millions of stellar cycles of pain and bitterness rushed back all at once, choking his circuits with vertigo and confusion. He felt hollow again, and something deep within him throbbed unexpectedly.
The cold fled as blown nerve bundles abruptly snapped with hot, stuttering electricity. He was blind. He couldn't breathe. Everything smelled and tasted of rust and bile.
From far below and deep in his skull, a bewildering, inconceivable shriek erupted soundlessly from the Nothing. The cold ruptured with a sound that was at once mute and musical and as razor-sharp as the shattering of glass baubles. Nameless colors sprayed into the air like a gaseous, alien rainbow as the space-time around him twisted wildly. Darkness bled in.
Terror crawled down his gullet and twisted his guts in an icy fist.
The eerie, disembodied howl came again from the shuddering depths.
The Nothing swelled with the sounds of innumerable cries as cavernous maws opened from every impossible direction, intending to swallow him and bash his soul to bits. Countless evil, soulless creatures scrabbled over one another to reach him, to be the first to sink their fangs into his optics and spark chamber and soft spots. To reach their wicked claws into the weak places in his armor, pull him apart and eat him alive.
He couldn't run. He couldn't fight. He was utterly helpless.
They were on him, tearing, biting, thrashing. He writhed in his exoskin as he fought to scream.
Screaming.
Screaming alone in the dark.
Then, without warning, everything was gone.
The overwhelming totality of the Nothing imploded irrationally into a blindingly bright matrix of digits and ciphers like a language gone viral, expanding and subtracting and mutating until nothing but a vast, violent sentience remained.
It rose like ash and dust from a billion universes of burst, dead stars. It flowed from the event horizon of the black holes and crawled from the throat of every depthless wormhole to pool menacingly in the belly of the Nothing.
In the dark, it began to rise.
Unfathomable, primal, utterly in control. A true Heart of Darkness. An infinite, omnipotent being defying legend or myth.
A Godhead.
He trembled under the crushing weight of its baleful presence. There was no word in his or any other language he knew to express the terrible power he felt from this being.
And it was looking at him.
Sickening horror washed over him.
The Godhead was looking at HIM.
…and the Godhead was not pleased.
A low chorus of voices began hissing at him, snapping from all sides, building in intensity until the Nothing howled and shook with the sound of their furious chanting.
Death is easy…
Death is easy…
Death is EASY…
DEATH IS EASY…
DEATH IS EASY…
And it reached for him…
Then…
There is Nothing…
And in the Nothing, something breathed light … and his spark flickered to life.
Agony shot through his bio-circuits.
His air intakes seized with the intensity of the pain as hot battery acid tore through his energon channels. The abrasive, raw hurt scattered the bizarre terror still clinging to his circuits, shrieking bloody murder as it was driven to the dark corners of his CPU and silenced. He felt as if his exostructure must be tearing itself to scrap bit by bit.
The pain abruptly vanished, leaving him trembling and disoriented as waves of weakness and exhaustion swept over him. He hissed as his spark convulsed again, driving another bolt of pain through his sensors. Mercilessly clamping control on the waves of pain and weakness wracking his taut frame, he waited for the arrhythmia in his spark to subside to its normal – albeit weak – pulse cycle.
As the pain reduced to a dull throb, he registered a vague sting of disappointment and resentment as he realized death had not claimed him. He shoved it aside.
Position… position…
He was groggy. He couldn't think straight. His navigation system whirred uselessly over the ringing in his auditory sensors. Static hissed over his com channels. His memory sectors spluttered half-answers and garbled unprocessed data.
What is my slagging position…
His CPU throbbed and his battle computer crackled tiredly.
Cosmic Sector RB942.
Milky Way Galaxy, Quadrant six…Sol system.
Earth.
United States. Mission City, Arizona.
Under a slagging bridge.
Navigation puttered to a lurching halt. It didn't make sense. There wasn't a damn thing worth visiting in this entire sector, let alone on this obscure, backwards little planet. Muddled impressions of small, barely sentient fleshling life forms confused him. Who in the universe ever gave a frag about an organic?
He instinctively initialized the strings of code linked with his optics to escape the crushing blackness of severed sensory input. To his annoyance, his left optics failed to boot.
As his functioning pair of optics activated, he winced in renewed pain and shuttered them from the shockingly blue alien sun. The brightness and contrast of his optical sensors were turned up so sickeningly high it was intolerable. Something – only Primus knew what – must have whanged him hard enough to scramble his circuits.
He quashed the nausea rising in his tanks and glared suspiciously into the warm hued Earthen sunset with violently red optics.
Around him abandoned and decrepit cars piled together and against concrete barriers, shadowed by the massive spans of freeway above. From the streets came the distant sounds of sirens and humans gaping into the darkness below them. The broken edges of the bridge above suggested that he had not driven into the lot.
Transformed into a vehicle form he did not recognize, he lay coated with debris and fine dust in the shadow of a shattered and toppled concrete pillar. Mech fluid had streamed down his scarred hide in ugly veins of orange and brown and dried like scabs under the heat of the sun. His air intakes wheezed asthmatically as the dirt filtered into his exostructure and jammed his gears. He still didn't know why or how he got like this, but he knew he was alone
The industrial district surrounding the vehicle graveyard was empty but for the occasional big rig glimmering in the fading sun.
Despite of the relative quiet, something violent had happened in the shadows. Deep gouges in the dirt, shattered concrete, and the deactivated form of Bonecrusher laying some ways away were silent testaments to a battle so recently lost.
Uugh.
To his disgust, Bonecrusher's severed head was gawking at him with blank optics from a few feet away.
His memory circuits throbbed painfully. They were damaged, and trying to remember aggravated the shrill ringing in his auditory sensors. Everything hurt. He wanted nothing more than to find the nearest berth and recharge until Armageddon.
Blinking away the grim in his optics, he studied the curious marks on Bonecrusher's faceplate. Streaks of black encircling a puncture wound through his jaw. Wires and hoses cauterized at the neck, almost like…
Energon burns... Prime's sword.
A pursuit. Jumping from a bridge. Too late to help Bonecrusher, too late to save himself from those angry blue optics.
His memory felt fluid and jumbled, like a mismatched account of another mech's life lived a long time past. He cursed himself for being so careless. Prime had defeated and left him for deactivated because he couldn't hold his own in a one-on-one fight.
He wondered why in the Pit Prime was on this 'Earth' as well.
His sluggish battle computer ground out an explanation he did not expect.
Primary directive: Obtain All Spark. Coordinates are as follows.
He gave a surprised jolt.
The Well of All Souls has been found?
The world contracted violently around him. Even as he warily checked and then rechecked the coordinates, he quashed the flicker of hope that flared in his chassis. He had to be sure. His spark couldn't bear believing in any more false hope…
The results were the same. It was here. Elation flooded his circuits. Rich energon pumped viscous and fast through tentatively repaired fuel lines. He could have laughed his vocal processor sore he felt so good. It was all over. He could go home.
Eons of searching… Ages of war…
The heady rush abruptly vanished as the sudden emotional let-down of all the anticipation crashed over him. He had been fighting for this moment since before he had grown into his spark. Since the revolt on Cybertron – the end of the Third Golden Age so many millennia ago. He had watched in horror with the rest of his regiment as the Autobots jettisoned the All Spark into space and it plunged into a wormhole leading only Primus knew where. Finding it had been the primary objective of every Cybertronian, and the Decepticons had searched all the harder when Lord Megatron had followed the All Spark and both were lost to the depths of space.
But they had been found. Here, on this small, unremarkable little mudball of a planet.
He dimly recalled Frenzy's unexpected discovery of their leader on this planet and the harsh, potent presence of the awakened Lord Megatron flaring on his sensors. That traitorous Pit spawn Starscream must have been livid to see his commander alive and well. He unabashedly took pleasure in his comrade's misfortune.
It seemed that much of what was lost was rushing back again all at once.
He was almost content to lie where he was and wait for his comrades to retrieve him in all due haste. He indulged himself in such wishful thinking for a moment before grudgingly admitting that the Decepticon idea of rescuing him in "all due haste" would most likely mean leaving him to rot. He would have to drag himself back to base or raise the unholy Pit until they returned if he wanted any assistance.
His proximity sensors spluttered hesitantly to life as he searched for other Cybertronian energy signals.
Almost instantly, his tanks lurched sickeningly as he reached out and fell through the place where his comrades should have been. Not a single Decepticon marker had responded, and the All Spark's familiar tang of life-giving energy had simply vanished.
A cold prickle of fear slithered through his circuits
Everything with a living spark should have registered. Pit, even humans had their own manner of sparks he could sense.
Now he could sense only spark static.
The brief, effervescent snap of electrical charge left clinging desperately to the spark chamber once life is extinguished. The hissing in his auditory sensors was almost unbearable. His alarm grew as he tasted each of the sources of bitter spark static.
Devastator. Blackout. Bonecrusher. Frenzy.
Megatron.
Megatron…
Megatron was gone.
No, Megatron wasn't just gone… he was dead.
His CPU stammered through basic programming in disbelief. Megatron couldn't be dead. He alone had instigated the rebellion on Cybertron and established the Decepticons as a faction not to be taken lightly. Even in his long absence, Lord Megatron's name retained enough residual power to hold the faction together. Some, like Starscream, would try to take his place, but without Megatron, the Decepticons would never stand united under one leader. They would always be divided. Tribes warring amongst themselves over nothing. The Decepticons would never rise again.
He was so stunned by this appalling discovery that he almost missed something far more important.
A luminous hue of sad, pale violet – the faint, tired remnants of an enormous outpouring of energy. Something had erupted a handful of kliks away with the energy akin to a small supernova. The only thing on the planet powerful enough to simulate the death of a star was…
His spark wrenched and his tanks turned over.
Primus… They destroyed it. Those fools destroyed the All Spark!
Despair settled in his stunned circuits. The All Spark was gone. Despite all the nefarious plans the Decepticons had for the All Spark, they had always remembered that they depended on it not only for conquest, but life itself. Whyin the name of Primus had it been destroyed – what fool had doomed them? Without the All Spark, there was no future for Cybertron. No future for their race. The single most important object to their survival as a species… and it was simply gone.
Never again would a Cybertronian sparkling be birthed from the Grace of Primus. They were now irreversibly spiraling toward extinction.
A sickening, burning feeling squeezed his spark like a vice. He had been so eager to die. So eager to take for granted the gift of Primus. For most of his life he had craved the silence and peace the end of the war or his own death would bring him. He had never really cared which came first. He had long ago grown weary of the constant ebb and flow of war.
That pointless war…
The creator must be appalled that the gift of life so selflessly bestowed upon all his Cybertronian children was spat so venomously back at him. For eons they had killed and destroyed the life he gave. Cybertronians had long ago begun thoughtlessly slaughtering the weak and helpless in their greedy pursuit of conquest.
Life is not precious.
The Decepticons had drilled that phrase into his and every other recruit's CPU. Life is not precious. A soothing mantra for the young, frightened soldiers killing in the name of a cause that was not their own. He had murdered those femmes and sparklings without a second thought because he had been indoctrinated to believe life was an obstacle to be overcome in war. Megatron had promised that new life would be brought to Cybertron once it was over. He had told them that the All Spark would give them a new beginning, and Primus would forgive them for their war-crimes.
But Megatron had been wrong. For countless stellar cycles he had known Megatron was wrong. Primus would not forgive them… he would punish them. He just never imagined that this would be the way Primus would choose to deliver his justice – by taking his final and most precious gift back from his foolish children. The All Spark – the power of creation and renewal, freely given to their ancestors before the god slipped into his eternal slumber, had just as easily been stripped away.
With the All Spark gone… there would be no more of his race. There were so few of them left. It was his obligation to survive, to find another way. He had to. Otherwise… what was the point? What was the point of his life and every other Cybertronian's – all the hatred and pain that had consumed them… if they were destined to simply die out? What was the point if they fell one by one and let Cybertron fade into history?
By failing to protect the All Spark, he had failed his species and his god.
Wounded and alone, the broken flag bearer of a lost cause. For a time Barricade could do nothing but lay on the alien ground and grieve.
The sun sank below the horizon and the cool breeze had leached the warmth from his exoskin long before he roused himself.
Sirens wailed in the distance. The freeway spans above again rumbled with the sound of passing traffic, oblivious to the stricken creature below them. A whistling, thrumming reminder that this primitive human civilization thrived. A reminder that the universe wouldn't mourn Cybertron. Barricade numbly stared into the darkened sky, studying the unfamiliar constellations as if they held the answers to his future.
He had to get away from here. The human military would soon come to remove the evidence of the Cybertronian battle in a meager attempt to keep the truth of their existence from the public. If he stayed here, he would either be disposed of with the rest of his comrades, or become subject to their hideous military experiments. Neither sounded particularly appealing.
His circuits and gyros started to itch. His body had begun repairing itself, but he still throbbed all over. Against his better judgment, he flexed his frame to test his mobility and instantly regretted it. His exostructure let out a hideous screech as the pain flared up unbearably and he fought to remain conscious.
Primus, but he hurt.
A brief diagnostic unhelpfully advised him to seek a medic. His entire left side was essentially dead and his energon levels critical. Communications, navigation, and weapons systems all status unknown and presumed inoperable. He was a sitting Glork.
He was so tired.
If he fell into recharge again he would wind up in a stasis lock for Primus knew how long. He had to move now. He had to change.
His transformation cog knocked half-heartedly as he futilely tried to shift from a police cruiser into a less conspicuous model vehicle. Rigid with determination, he tried again. This time he was rewarded as the light bar melted lazily into his dented roof. Black paint crept slowly over his stripes and police decals, oozing over the white doors until he looked like nothing more than a beat up, blacked-out Mustang. It was a rough patch job, but it would do.
Small, barbed probes sluggishly unfolded from his body and bent to experimentally dig at the ground. Focusing on a distant cluster of broken human vehicles, he began to crawl out of the incriminating rubble toward the camouflage the other cars offered. Scrabbling for purchase in the dirt, the probes pulled his unwieldy weight on tires that wouldn't quite turn true. His damaged vocals let out weak, garbled snarls of frustration and pain as his injured components were wrenched painfully and his energy levels steadily fell.
He willed himself on.
With shrieks of twisting metal and the heady scent of ozone, the probes began to give out one by one as his progress slowed and his strength dwindled. Tenacity could only get a mech so far.
He finally lurched to a halt, half hidden by the shadow of a column far enough away from the battle to make him an unlikely suspect. With any luck, the humans would pass right by him and fruitlessly search the rubble for a police cruiser that wasn't there. The Autobots would know he had survived, but it might give him the time he needed to hide himself.
Might.
Spent, Barricade surrendered to his battle computer's insistent chatter that a stasis lock was imminent. His systems slowed and shut down one by one, his last few precious drops of energon pooling in their lines. He would survive this. He always survived.
As he settled into forced recharge, a curious noise pricked his auditory sensors. The harsh, guttural sound of a motor some ways away echoing off the concrete of the freeway above.
His optics and auditory sensors deactivated and the world went quiet and dark.
He wasn't worried.
What did anyone care about a banged up Mustang.
A/N: Renovatio - Latin: renewal, renovation, restoration, total rebirth.