Sixshot, survival, and his unsung heroes.
Title: Wolfsong
Warning: Injuries and a Decepticon outlook on being in debt.
Rating: PG-13
Continuity: IDW, post-squishing by Metroplex in Spotlight: Sixshot, post-trial in RiD/MTMTE.
Characters: Sixshot, Terrorcons.
Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.
Motivation (Prompt): Eabevella's Sixshot fanning.
[* * * * * ]
Evidence
His hand flexed once, twice. It went still, eventually. Evidence suggested that continuing to move his hand wouldn't make the rest of his broken body any more inclined to move.
I'm here
He wasn't going anywhere. He rather distantly thought that he should be concerned about that, but his mind had a tendency to dwell on the aches of burst seams and split welds. An ununtrium coating protected armor plating from breaking or melting, but it seemed that it did nothing to stop bolts from sheering through under sufficient pressure.
Funeral
Time hazed. The radiation from his exposed dark fission core hurt his body how it didn't when properly contained. Smashed joints and torn wires that would have mended as his aggressive self-repair systems went into overdrive simply didn't. The nanites mutated, died, or lost contact with his repair center. The massive mech who'd stomped on him hadn't killed him directly, but under the load of pain pulling his mind apart, he realized it was only a matter of time.
Puppy love
Whispers reached him through the pain. It was agony by now, but he was too tired to make distinctions. Like sound. The whispers were distant shouts, then not-so-distant shouts. They quieted abruptly, their sources coming to stand on the lip of the footprint he lay crushed in. He should know them. Of course they were here, whoever they were.
Gloves
He knew the feel of their hands before they touched him. It was unfamiliar, all the same. The way they touched him was all wrong, and he didn't like it. He flexed his hand, protesting, and a hand laced hesitant fingers between his own. The labored howl of his damaged ventilation system hitched, surprised, and he wondered who would dare hold his hand.
Blackboard
They pulled him out of the imprint in the ground, a perfectly drawn impression of pain he'd never before experienced in his whole long life and the war he'd fought in. Voices yammered at him. He didn't try very hard to listen. Everything felt both too real and entirely distant, current events written before his optics in a language he couldn't read.
Muse
The ununtrium had kept his armor from cracking, but raw metal now stood wherever the seams of two plates meeting had been. Familiar/unfamiliar clawed hands pulled him from the ground, and his neck, unsupported and snapped almost through, rolled back at an unnatural angle. From the burst seams of his head, circuit boards fell, sheets gliding from their slots.
Magic
His concerns, already distant, dropped away. Sixshot dimly, vacantly wondered what all the yelling was about. After a few seconds, he wondered what he'd been wondering about.
Clean
The universe was a blank slate. He woke to an endless darkness in the back of his head, an ache that he knew was somehow wrong, but he couldn't move his head out of the clamps to look for what was missing.
Secret
Exhaustion ate his curiosity. It didn't stop him from shifting restlessly in the clamps, but pain chained him down as much as the hold on his helm. When he stared up at the faces looking down at them, the words he wanted to ask them slipped out of his mind like water from a sieve, and only static poured from his damaged vocalizer. What they said in reply fizzled through the upper registers of his thoughts, there and gone again before he could grasp the meaning of the noise. It was a code, some kind of puzzle he lacked the key to, but the faces disappeared after a while, taking their secret sounds with them.
Superstition
He didn't remember what had happened, how he'd been damaged, or why they'd brought him here. The way they touched him, he thought he might be a relic, a sacred memento of a time before this strange, blank entombment. The clamps kept his head still, but it wasn't like the rest of him could move. This repair berth and quiet room were the resting place of holy memory he didn't have, a shrine to a broken war machine.
Fantasy
Sometimes, he flexed his hand. They got very excited when he did. He thought they thought it was a sign he was getting better. That might have interested him if he knew what 'better' even meant.
Test
The pain was blinding. The slots in his opened helm burned, slices of rust-edged fire carving right into the center of his head and twisting. A terrible grating sound came from his broken vocalizer, a sob of utter agony beyond the mere bodily pain he'd adjusted to. Color and thought crackled as circuitboards connected and sparked, half-healed-over jacks and ports torn open to force completion. It felt like his optics popped and ran down the sides of his helm, glass boiling and mind spitting out the back of his head while he writhed and kicked inside a paralyzed body that didn't respond, couldn't respond, he knew it should but it wasn't, it never would again, and it was the most terrifying thing he'd ever known, to be aware and awake inside a body that just wouldn't function -
Tease
"Almost got it that time," someone said past the nauseous swirl of liquid thought and pain, but then everything stopped, and he no longer understood why those words filled him with triumph and fear in equal amounts.
Storm
There was a storm of activity around him, and he was the eye, the focus. He didn't understand. He flexed his hand, hoping in an open-ended way, and two hands filled his palm. For a minute, the storm calmed, and he held on to that stillness, inexplicably soothed.
Strawberries
The second time they ran the test, his scattered mind connected a brief memory to a fragment of chemical his olfactory sensors combed out of the air. It was a secondary system attached to his ventilation system, relatively undamaged amidst the huge amount of crushing damage he'd suffered. It had been feeding him data constantly. This was the first time he could use that data for anything, if only to eliminate strawberries from the list of what the one mech smelled like.
Weapon
Systems kept pinging at him. He didn't know what they were for, and he didn't know how to access them. An absurd amount of them seemed to have to do with weapons systems. He'd have preferred a user's guide to his nervous system. That, he dreamed of deactivating entirely.
Beach
He heard the ocean constantly. Waves washed in and out, in and out. It comforted him. It wasn't until they shoved the circuitboards back in his head and closed his helm that he realized he'd been hearing his own fuelpump beating in the hollow of his head.
Lost
"Can you understand us?" one of the mechs standing over him asked, and he reeled, flooded out of nowhere by a torrent of knowledge that had been missing for too long, and he was lost, lost, lost.
Cry
They stood around him, and his shaking, keening cry filled their audios. Understanding delayed for months on end drowned him. Flickering optics conveyed belated horror, and his single functioning hand desperately opened and closed. After a couple minutes of hesitation, five hands gripped it.
Open
It hurt more now that he was aware. His body was a wreck. The pain and injury were open to anyone. Worse was the intense awareness of vulnerability. It was one thing to be laid up, to be damaged to the point of immobility, but knowing that anyone could do whatever they wanted to him left him tender to the core.
Tactile
They still touched him. All of them, any time they could. He tolerated it because he couldn't move, because he couldn't communicate in more than static and grunts, because he owed them more than they'd ever owed him, because when one or more of them curled up in their altmodes and idly groomed his battered plating, it was the most life-affirming thing he'd ever experienced.
Journey
"Megatron turned Autobot," they tell him as part of their story for how they finally found him. No one ever came looking for him. No one cared that his mission went unfinished. The war ended without him there, and they'd been caught up in the aftermath for a long time, unaware that he'd been taken out of it until they just...left. To go looking for him. Starscream and Cybertron and Megatron and Optimus Prime were only peripheral concerns for them. Their journey ended only when they found him.
Scowl
He didn't know what he thought about what they said, and especially about what stayed unsaid.
Hero
Mumu-Obscura came up a lot, in muttered comments and excuses. He's their hero. It burned slow under his powercore, irritation that could fuel enough anger to kill them all. Immobilized by the injuries done to his body, it squirmed through his systems in heat that squinted the corners of his optics. Embarrassment. What he felt was embarrassment. Anger would have been easier to deal with.
Morals
He's paralyzed and at their mercy, a broken pile of armor that only communicated through little sounds and uncoordinated movements of one hand. They clearly didn't know what he'd do to stay alive, but he knew better than to assume that their help was freely given. That wouldn't be the Decepticon way.
Engage
He squeezed the hand in his when it would have slipped loose and the mech continued repairing him. The repairs were a slow-going torture, the pain more than he'd ever endured but easing in incremental amounts as time passed. He would not forget this agony, nor their part in ending it. The hand in his paused, surprised, and he squeezed again. His hand had a bit more strength in it than before. Soon. Paying down this debt would be a long process, but he'd be able to begin soon.
Voice
Static snapped through the room. He coughed and reset his vocalizer. This time, what came out of the mess of wires and fried circuits was a weak, hoarse, "...thank you."
Awkward
"Oh, uh, yeah." They hadn't expected that. "You're, uh. Welcome."
Lower
With his helm and throat patched, however crudely, they moved down his body. Anticipation hurt almost as much as his seared nervous system did.
Cleansed
Now that he could speak, the weird grooming sessions stopped dead. Even with his mind and throat intact again, he couldn't find the words to object to that. The sense of inclusion, of living while dead, weren't his to have. He wasn't one of them. Instead, he had the impassive scour of cleanser dumped over his armor, and hands that lingered in their work inside him. Neither left him feeling particularly clean.
Go
A motor relay connected, jolting sensation and live current up his backstrut, and the sound that came from his vocalizer shocked the whole room. They still weren't used to hearing him scream, much less hear the shrill, brittle sounds he couldn't control. He rasped, "Go!" and they fled, glancing back as if they wanted to stay.
Shame
He fell. He stood, he fell, he stood, and when he fell this time, he crawled. His joints sparked, half-connected wiring protesting. His limbs shook violently. Grim and silent, he crawled back to the repair berth and climbed slowly back to his feet. He snarled at the tentative knock at the door. No one would see him like this.
Objective
Walk. He could walk. If he could walk to the end of the room and back, then he would rest. Only then.
Strength
It didn't matter how overpowered his core or strong his armor; his body was too injured. Dizzy spells knocked him to his knees, then to hands and knees, and finally to the floor. It was cool against his heated body, popped tubes gushing coolant across the floor under him. He'd never felt weaker or more pathetic.
Life
He was still alive when they forced the door open and rushed in, but he didn't particularly want to be. Humiliation flamed hotter than his overworked body.
Contempt
He waited for their contempt.
Wrong
"You idiot. You absolute idiot! We're not medics! Do you get that? We're doing the best we can with the scrap we pulled out of the medicenter before we took off, and - you undid half the welds in one go! We don't have the supplies to replace everything you busted, and you just spilled your pump system across the floor trying to prove you're the toughest Phase Sixer ever, like, okay, we get it. You can outfight an army, yeah, whatever, but you're a fragging idiot. A fragging idiot!"
Sweeten
They had no experience in holding a grudge against him. Their anger had an edge of nerves, as if they had to keep assuring themselves that it was okay to be mad at him. They'd always been so frantic for his attention and approval. The reversal was kind of alarming. He was bewildered by their anger at first, then fumed silently for a while, but he finally came to accept that he really had been a moron.
Hands
Mostly, he just couldn't stand their refusal to touch him. They would shove a cane at him, tools into him, glares in his direction, but their hands, so familiar with and to his plating, now never graced him with their touch.
Oppression
"Don't even think about it," snapped at him from every direction any time he stretched his stiff, gradually repairing joints. He meekly settled back on the repair berth every time. His nurses, the tyrants.
Agony
Transformation was agony. Something cracked deep inside, and he was afraid it was his transformation cog. It probably didn't matter. He wasn't sure he could muster the will to attempt to transform again, anyway.
Return
The shouting impressed him when they came back and discovered what he'd done while they'd been out raiding, or trading, or whatever it was they did to get the supplies to keep repairing him. He did what he hadn't been able to do in his bipedal rootmode: he submit to them as visibly as possible, whining low in his throat as he belly-crawled to their feet and licked their hands before he rolled, throat exposed. It was the Decepticon way. The strong ruled. He'd disobeyed, but he was tired of the careful, odd way they kept treating him. He wanted the security of knowing his place. He wanted, as much as possible, to return to normal.
Protection
There was a long pause. His damaged fuelpump fluttered in his chest. His back hurt, pressed into the floor in this position. He had little experience submitting to others. He supposed he'd have to get used to it. Repairs were brutally slow, and he would be under their protection until he could at least walk a straight line.
Boxes
They transformed around him. None of them had altmodes as large as his, but there were five of them to one of him. They boxed him in, nudged him into place, and laid on, around, and over him. He was buried at the bottom of the heap. It hurt. He didn't care.
Animal
They were animals, far more bestial than him. His altmode was a beastmode, not his mind. They didn't seem to make such a distinction. He grew used to it.
Jagged
Each of his six modes was different, but apparently it didn't matter much which mode he healed in. The jagged pieces of armor were still painfully obvious in this transformation. He felt better curling up in this form, and four legs were easier to balance on than two. He kept a sliver of his dignity crawling about on all fours if he was meant to be on all fours to begin with.
Strange
They acted weird to begin with, but they got positively strange once he transformed. He didn't like it, but he accepted that the position at the base of the pack hierarchy belonged to him, now. It'd be easier to act the part if they would stop acting like he led the pack.
Measure
"Can you walk?" He looked down at his paws, then up at the mech who'd asked. "I meant, can we move without you collapsing on us? We've found a better place." He nodded, but the optics on him doubted how truthful his answer was. It disturbed him that they knew him well enough to take his measure.
Ashes
What they couldn't take with them, they burned to the ground. He smelled the scent of his own charred fluids for days afterward. It wasn't until they spontaneously decided to groom him to within an inch of his life that he realized he'd been carrying the smell with them. He still smelled half-dead and dying. For all he knew, he looked it, too. They didn't seem to notice or care. They just groomed and groomed, flattening him to his belly on the ground with heavy paws on his forequarters and head when, flustered, he would have called a halt to the oddly intimate cleaning. They didn't let him up until they'd finished and the reek of ash was gone for good.
Leave
"We'll be back," they told him, and he didn't know if they were telling the truth or not. It's a cold comfort, those words. Whether or not they came back, he couldn't stop them from leaving.
Fit
He wasn't strong enough to do more than walk. It exhausted him, left him panting in the dust and dragging for hours. He couldn't fuel without leaks dribbling it out from under his armor where repairs hadn't reached yet. Humiliating as it was, he'd adjusted to refueling with an oilpan under him. The Terrorcons weren't well-mannered enough to even pretend not to watch as he leaked, but he bore their half-fascinated, half-disgusted gazes stoically. They were the ones fixing him, after all. They were used to the repulsive way he gooshed and dripped if he did more than lie there. The occasional muted giggle escaped when his tubes burped excess air, but it wasn't like he was fit for anything but the junkyard. He was in rather laughable shape. He counted himself lucky they didn't laugh more often.
Elusive
Gratitude was as elusive as pride.
Painstaking
He waited until they powered down before he moved. He wouldn't ask for this. He refused. Limping, sore, and aching inside where repairs wouldn't help, he inched out of the makeshift medibay and found their bunkroom by scent. It was, uh, a powerful scent. He couldn't find it in himself to mind it, anymore. He picked the closest mech and clumsily nuzzled up against his side. The jerk of the mech waking would have been obvious enough to alert anyone, but he painstakingly ignored it as he pressed in closer, seeking warmth and a closeness he hadn't known he craved until it'd been given him. They hadn't denied him it, just stopped offering it. They let him have it again without comment.
Unfold
They were on and around him when he woke up, a long and blurry process of waking pain sensors and a mind that cringed from the data. Five heavy bodies snoring in his audios should have sent his head throbbing, one more overwhelming sensation among the flood. He sighed and relaxed, a tension inside his core unfolding, and powered down again.
Guess
There weren't many reasons Decepticons would help each other. Admiration of hus destructive capabilities aside, his best guess for why they were assisting him was unpleasant if only for his powerlessness. He didn't object morally to pandering to their evident attraction to him. It did hurt his pride, the poor remnants that lingered. He swallowed it down. He wasn't in any position to object.
Quarrel
"Isn't this what you want?" His voice was rough with disuse, poisoned by how helpless he felt. "I'm well enough for this. I'm in your debt. Take what you want." He raised his hindquarters, curling his lip to show a fang at the crude gesture, but it was the waiting that twisted in his gut, not the act itself. "Get it over with!"
Brood
"If that's why you think we're doing this - " The strained growl cut off, and he stared after the back turned on him. None of them came near him for days after that. His thoughts weren't kind, as much to himself as them.
Effort
He had to force himself out of the medibay to go looking for them.
Now
Their optics were cold, unreadable flat beast optics gleaming in the night. His legs shook, and he'd left a trail of fluids from the medibay to here. He sat down with as much quiet dignity as he could muster despite that. They judged him, judged the stagger in his walk, and swarmed down from the rocky outcropping they'd been sulking on. He steeled himself as they approached, not because of the offended anger in their bared teeth and narrowed optics, but because now he had to apologize.
Stumble
He fell on the way back to the medibay. Hard teeth locked onto the back of his neck. Smaller they might be, but he'd pushed his barely-functioning body too hard to fight back as he was half-dragged, half-carried back inside by the scruff of his neck. He went limp and let it happen. When he angled his head back, however, his rescuer dropped him like a rock and strode away, and he knew he wasn't forgiven.
Fighting
He had never launched such a backward campaign. Words were weapons; the weaker they were, the stronger their effects. Apologies devastated defenses. Groveling on his belly, wriggling and laying his head between his forelegs, stopped the angriest attack. Licking under their altmode chins, wet puppy kisses accompanied by repentant whines, softened even hardened Decepticon warriors. It was the most bizarre fight he'd ever been in. He had no idea who won, in the end. He didn't lose.
Closing In
He started out sleeping in the medibay. He recharged outside in the hall a day later. He laid across the door to their bunks two days into the fight that wasn't a fight. It was a cold-sparked strategy meant to corner them where he had easy access. Honest.
Involved
His body slowly healed. Tucked between two of them, snuggled under a wing on this side and two heads laid over the back of his neck from that side, he doubted much would change.
Destiny
None of them knew where this was heading. The war was over. It would be a long, long time before he was fully recovered, and there wasn't a war for him to fight in once he was. The others busied themselves repairing him, scavenging for parts and fuel to get by. It wasn't the kind of lifestyle that would last for very long, but maybe it'd last them long enough.