Hello people, The Prime Writer is here with another story to tickle your fancy. This story is different from the others in that I adopted it from a fellow Fanfiction Writer, Riyappe Paws, who lost his drive for this story and let me take the reigns, for which I am very grateful. I will be using all the chapters he had already published, but with a few grammatical changes and some extra words to make them unique. All chapters published beyond Riyappe Paws had created will be of my creations, but remember that Riyappe Paws deserves plenty of credit for making this fanfic in the first place.
To those who are just reading this now, this story is centered on Jack, but it shows him having a very traumatic past, way different from what was depicted in the show. Now I'm not talking about an abusive father or anything ordinary, but instead it involves terrorist groups, mutations, and all sorts of dangerous experimentation on a young child. This won't have a lot of blood, gore, or violence for a T-rated fanfic, but I still recommend that those prone to emotion take caution when reading this.
Transformers Prime is the property of Hasbro and The Hub, and I do not have any intentions of making a profit from this or any of my fanfics. With all that said and done, allow me to present to you the first chapter or Hidden Beauty.
Chapter 1: Inner Reflections and Conclusions
Jackson Darby, a 17-year-old boy with a lanky 5-foot-7-inch body, raven-black hair, grey-blue eyes, and unknown lineage.
He sat on the rocky mesa that made up the base where the best of his friends resided. His mind occupied with the story that he had known from a very young age.
The boy was an anomaly from day one. He stumped the doctors of Lakeside Women's Hospital in Oklahoma City, the birth place of the only child to be born with a pair of strange bony, fleshy appendages on his back and an extension to his spine that formed a small tail. One would have thought that they were insane if there were no documentation on it. This was a child who was said to look like the devil's spawn, his skin deathly pale and his eyes so dark to almost be considered with no iris, and almost unhealthily thin.
The raven teen absent-mindedly ran his hand over the furry appendage that curled around his middle, safely hidden from view. An angry scowl crossed his face at the next memories, and a very bad taste appeared in his mouth.
The next several months had countless visits form organizations, of government and privately-funded sorts, offering everything the mother and her 'little one' needed to live a comfortable life. The only condition was that they would be given an untold amount of time to 'study' him. The mother politely declined all of them, claiming that they would be fine. Even with the mention of her recently believed-to-be-deceased husband, and the fact that she would never be able to let the child live a normal life due to his appearance and her devastating lack of funds, she refused their 'gracious' offers.
The scowl was replaced with a small smile as he recalled happier times from a long while back.
In this time the boy had developed a form of feathery down on the appendages of his back, and a light strip of black fur grew along his spine, all the way down to the tip of his tail. At six months, he had as much available motion in his extra appendages as he did with his arms and legs. Apart from his extensions, he developed as a perfectly healthy, happy child. All thoughts of him looking as a form of demon had left, and what remained was a tiny, infant angel. His dark eyes were wide and excepting, holding a light of wholehearted joy. His smile seemed to draw any depressing thoughts from the room, and his bubbly laugh would lighten anyone's spirits.
The child was kept from the public, which was perfectly fine in his mother's eyes. That let her live the quiet life she desired. She was born and raised quietly, and that was the way she wanted it to stay. She had her husband who was MIA in Kuwait before he had been found, and they were living peacefully in a small suburbia in Norman. And in most relative means, it stayed that way. Until that fateful day…
The scowl returned full-force as images from his past rolled though his mind.
Jack was about five, maybe six. He had learned how to keep his extra limbs hidden, and he was perfectly fine with that as long as he got the chance to stretch them in privet. He was bright for his age, and understood that if anyone besides his mom and dad knew that he had these strange things on him, that something bad may happen. He didn't want that, so he happily hid them, and took a small amount of pleasure in keeping a pretty big secret.
Then they came. The men in black suits and weird sunglasses swarmed into his house, and said nothing, just held a gun to his mom's head. His dad tackled the man to the ground and screamed for her to 'take Jack, and run!' She did so. The memories after that were very blurred. One minute he was in the living room of his old house, the next he's being placed in the family car.
The scenery flashed by in a swirl of color, and the sound of the engine was the only sound in the air. His mom drove for hours, so long that Jack had fallen asleep despite the adrenaline that was running through his veins.
Jack never saw his dad after that day. He never found out why he was what he was either, but that never seemed to bother the teen. All he cared about was that because of something that he was and still is, he had lost and hurt those closest to him; and that was not something that sat well in his mind.
The raven teen sighed as he got to his feet. The tangerine sun had set half an hour before and the faint opalescent glow had faded into the heavy darkness, setting the infinite array of star aflame. He felt the pull of the wind in his hair, and fantasized just taking off and not returning till morning, but quickly squelched the thought. The last thing he wanted was to throw away everything he and his mom had worked for just for a simple pleasure flight. It was too soon after her abduction by Airachnid to even consider going out at all.
A wave of hate washed over him as he stared into the inky darkness around him. This was the last thing he needed right now. He had finally thrown the previous set of suits off his trail, and set up a fairly stable system for his tiny family to work around his new friends. Now another cocky group had shown themselves, and even though it wasn't him they were after, it was all too easy for them to switch targets or attract one of the many others that still had their sources sniffing for him.
Jack felt the tip of his tail twitch against his stomach, reminding him that he needed to calm down. If he lost his temper, it would get a whole lot harder to keep his wings from trembling, and that would cause some suspicion.
The teen nearly jumped out of his skin when the bark of a fox out in the barren wasteland sounded suddenly. The onyx haired teen took a deep breath to relax him before heading back into the base.
The base was flitting with the usual buzz of activity as he stepped into the main room. His mom sat with Ratchet, sharing stories with the old medic. Her gaze darted to Jack during a pause and she smiled. He forced his own and lay back against the railing of the human area before letting it drop.
He let his eyes roam over the base, watching as the bots and two other humans went about their own business. He sighed lightly, feeling a weight settle on his chest. They all seemed so happy. It had been a long time since he had let himself relax and enjoy life; there were too many untrustworthy people were out there, and that meant too much of a chance for undesirables to find him.
In the many years since he escaped with his mom, he had had to grow up and learn to defend himself. No time to be the kid that he still was. He felt a shudder tear through him as he remembered the incident a year before he and his mom had finally managed to secure a home in Jasper, covering all of their tracks and settling down. The two of them had been fleeing yet another temporary haven after a particularly nasty group had found them. They were bedded up in a secluded motel part way between a pair of old mining towns. That was when they had caught up. It must have been a powerful group, because there were at least twenty well trained men swarming the building.
All he remembered apart from the fact that they were genetic testers was their name. GMOFF. The grunts, scientists, anyone he saw displayed it proudly. He never found out what it meant, but in the time that he had been their captive, he never heard anything that could even resemble an explanation for the acronym.
What they did to him there still horrified him. The physical scars had disappeared, but the mental scars that he acquired before he finally managed to escape would haunt him for a very long time to come. He wasn't very confident that they would ever heal.
It wasn't until he had been with them that he had been able to do the things he could. He didn't know all of what they did to him, but whatever it was…It made him smarter. It was like they messed with his brain, and now his world was almost too easy to understand. But the intelligence came at a price.
Obsessions, insomnia, paranoid schizophrenia, all were symptoms that he had obtained after words. When he had finally found his mom again, he had used his new found perception to help secure everything they needed. His new room was littered with plan after plan of what he would do to keep his mother and himself safe, a secret bunker buried a mile from the house full of any weaponry and food supplies he could get his hands on, he had become heavily dependent on household anesthesia to get him any more than a few light hours of sleep a night, and no one was to be trusted. Only his mom had ever been able to see his room, let alone any of his dozens of escape and survival plans, and not even she knew of the bunker.
It had taken much effort, but he had managed to school his features to hide any and all suspicious emotions from public view. That was how managed he got a job. He directed that job with skill and precision, before he squirreled away any and all extra money that was left over just in case.
He was pulled from his inner musings by his mother approaching him. "Honey, you ready to head home now?"
He forced a light smile as he responded. "Yeah mom, let's head back."
As the two of them sat in the little white car, neither saw the worrisome look that Optimus sported. The leader, having watched the boy for quite some time began to piece together that not all was right with their young friend. And as the vehicle exited the base, he set his processors on finding out just what it was.
It didn't take much time in research to recognize that human developments and thought processes were uncannily similar to those of cybertronians.
It had only been about a week since the incident with MECH and the Decepticon femme, and the actions/displays of the eldest teen didn't fit any of the descriptions that he had researched on adolescents who go through such traumatic events. He was too calm. Too, well…Relaxed wasn't really the best term for the boy, but he acted as if this there were a deliberate need to be calm. Countless sites online had mentioned that the child in question would normally be edgy, possibly even openly paranoid. But it was only about a day after words that he was acting as if nothing had happened. No, that wasn't right…He wanted it to seem like nothing had happened. Analyzing the previous reactions of Jack, there were very small changes in his demeanor.
The red and blue mech contemplated for a moment that this might have just been a coping mechanism, that maybe the teen thought that if he didn't give recognition to the memories that they would just go away. But he pushed that aside quickly; Jack had been through several situations where he reacted to the two younger children's peril with similar ferocity and had normal reactions that could be easily compared to the observations on the human internet. What could make this event different than any of the others?
The boy's mother floated into his thoughts. Could that be what made the difference? No, that didn't seem to fit. If it were another person he cared about, he would act the same as with the other children. Something in his spark told him that it was another cause… What was different about this event that differed from the rest? He didn't recall the boy ever trying to cope this way before…Wait, that's not true. His processors brought up a previous memory of a similar concern for Jack. He had been acting akin to how he was now, but to a lesser extent…It was right after the incident with the DNGS.
The realization hit him with the force of Megatron's fusion cannon. It was MECH, or at least some other powerful group. He knew that Jack had never been in contact with the morbid agency before, but that didn't mean that the child had never encountered another like it. But why? Why would Jack have any experience with anything of the sort? Jack was phenomenally intelligent, especially for a young boy, but he'd always been more withdrawn then most others his age, at least from what his soldiers told him. Could it be possible that there was a reason behind both?
The teen had always been highly reluctant to reveal any information relating to his past. Could it be that there was more to him than met the eye?
I hope you all enjoyed this first chapter of Hidden Beauty. Please leave a review if you can, but I will understand if you can't leave one or are unable to, and I also ask once again to give most of your credit to the original creator, Riyappe Paws. If you have any complaints or questions, let me know and I will address them when I get a chance, and any ideas and/or suggestions will be taken into consideration. Any flames will be either doused or used to make smores, but I implore you to not flame at all. If you don't like my story, then just don't read it, simple as that.
To those who haven't read this fanfic before, yes, Jack has wings, a tail, a dead dad, severe mental trauma, and has been captured and experimented on by an evil group of terrorists separate from MECH. To those who are familiar with the story and have read the previously published plot, I ask that you don't spoil any surprised to the new readers. Just so you new readers know, things will only get more intense as the story continues, so beware.
If you want to know what happens next, stay tuned for the next chapter of Hidden Beauty. I will also say this one more time, give at least some of your credit to Riyappe Paws.