Title: Breaking Down Part 1
Author: Femme4jack
Rating: R
Continuity: G1 AU (Recline the Berthformer)
Characters & Relationships: Recline/First Aid, Recline/Breakdown, Blaster, Hound, Jazz, Motormaster, Optimus Prime, P!Bots, Prowl, Red Alert, Samwise the Great Dane, Sunstreaker
Notes: Part 1 of the long-promised "Recline gets captured by Decepticons fic." I almost gave up on this so many times, and would never have gotten to this point without the poking, urging, editing and encouragement of Fractalserpent *hugs forever*.
Content: Violence, physical abuse, noncon hardline interface (forced recharging, attempts to force gestalt merge), angst, hurt/comfort.
Recline did not spend a great deal of time beyond the immediate vicinity of the Ark, though he did enjoy walks in the nearby wilderness areas, collecting various materials for his amulets and energon additives. He occasionally accompanied Beachcomber or Hound on longer outings; both of them relaxed best outdoors, and he could just as easily 'bed down' (as Chip called it) in a meadow as in his quarters.
Samwise, a Great Dane mix, usually came on his hikes. Even though Hound had been the one to actually adopt the puppy, Samwise could often be found tagging along wherever Recline went, likely because of how much the good-natured creature enjoyed curling up on Recline's berthmode.
But much as Recline enjoyed his longer outings, there was little doubt that he was a homebody. He had no mobile alt, nor the need for speed and movement many of the others had. Even if Earth had a public transportation system for beings his size, the fact was that Recline came from a long lineage of bots coded to be a homebodies. Under a different set of circumstances, he might never have ventured forth from Iridium unless furnishing the cadre's air yacht - there was nothing like bringing your own sparked berth on your own sparked ship to display your status.
No, Recline was perfectly happy to stay home. He knew he had an important purpose, and did not feel shame for his complete inability to be armed and dangerous. He was the one to greet the scratched, dented, and too often amputated troops upon their return, offering the comfort of his platform, cables and generous field to those who needed it most after an engagement. There was always someone who needed it the most, and the Autobots had their own ways of sorting that out before they arrived back on base.
Assisting in medical was especially meaningful to him. His presence had a calming effect on damaged warriors who could not shut down their battle protocols, and he was, without a doubt, the best choice to hold mechs who could not safely be put in stasis. In more than a few cases, he had also been the berth to hold a mech whose spark could not be saved, making sure their final moments were full of love and peace. It was, paradoxically, the most difficult and rewarding part of his function.
Knowing that the Autobots got nervous if he ventured too far, Recline stayed within the security perimeter on his solo walks. The limitation did not bother him in the least. It helped them to know he was safely ensconced away, sure to be there when they needed him. The last thing Recline wished to do was cause his friends further anxiety. When he did actually get out for the periodic visit to Portland or Seattle, the journey was made in the protection of Prime's trailer. Those were quite the memorable occasions. Turn around was always fair play, and Optimus apparently took great pleasure in strapping his favorite recliner down on road trips.
Thinking about fun times in Prime's trailer was helping distract Recline and keep him calm now. The straps of the trailer he was currently in bit deeply into his mesh armor, one of them coming close to crushing the components in his right pede. Whatever Motormaster had in store for him, Recline was more likely to survive if he remained centered. It was a lesson he had learned all too well in the vorns between Iridium and taking up with Sparkwire at the Medical Academy.
Recline wasn't sure if this had just been an opportunity grab, or if the Stunticon leader had been waiting specifically for him. All he knew was that one moment he had been walking along a forest service road toward a copper-laced gypsum deposit he had located within the security perimeter, and the next he was in the dirt, a fusion cannon aimed at his spark and a device shorting out his communications. Thankfully, Motormaster had only flicked Samwise away rather than crushing him in response to the furious barking and efforts to bite. The dog was knocked out, but the quick scan Recline had managed showed the injuries were not life threatening.
Recline's next thought had been concern for Red Alert. The mech would have an omega-sized freak out when he realized his perimeter had failed, and Inferno, who was a source of so much stability for the security director, was currently mopping up the response to an Earthquake in Mexico with the Protectobots.
First Aid would also take it hard (and keep to himself just how hard he was taking it). He and Recline had been edging their way toward something deeper since... well... really since the gestalt had onlined. It had pretty much been love at first brush of fields, and even First Aid's ever-so-protective brothers tended to smoosh the two of them together as often as possible, whenever First Aid's over-clocked responsibility coding allowed. Recline had even been made an honorary Protectobot in a ceremony that had involved a lot of high grade, giggle fits, and a game Carly taught them called 'spin the bottle.'
That memory helped to calm Recline and made him smile a little, there in the darkness of the Decepticon trailer. This was a time to hold on to what made him whole, not to contemplate being severed from First Aid and the 'in-laws' entirely.
"Where are you taking me?" Recline softly tested the waters. He couldn't diffuse the situation until he knew the form the explosion was likely to take.
"Shut the slag up, if you know what's good for you, Autobot!" the voice around him echoed.
The cables bit a little tighter in warning, though Recline noted that they stopped short of further injury to his pede. Motormaster knew he was poorly armored, then, and was taking care, at least for now. It made sense. Why make the effort to capture rather than offline him, if Motormaster did not intend him to serve some purpose? For the short term, anyway.
The raw brutality of the field buzzing against his own did not bode well for the longer term, though. Recline could not sense whether the animosity was directed at him in particular, the universe itself, or perhaps the sigil he wore - but it was violent all the same, and barely contained. The only defense Recline had was his ability to use his field to gently manipulate the one around him. It was hard to reach out to a field pulsing with that much aggressive anger, hard to feel the sort of empathy that would allow for such a connection. It helped that he had plenty of experience with Autobot frontliners. In mechs like Sunstreaker and Sideswipe, he'd learned to find the undercurrents and eddies beneath the obvious fluctuations, and bolster those with the modulations of his own field.
There was real danger in letting his field mingle with the one currently around him, though. Motormaster, he feared, would not hesitate to crush him if he felt himself being 'smoothed'.
Recline called up several centering memory files, his affection for the many he cared for quieting his own buzzing edges. When his own field was modulated to a nearly invisible presence, he gently meshed more fully with the one grating against him, accepting whatever he found there with no reaction or judgment. It was not easy to find the undercurrents, but finally he brushed against something other than brute aggression.
Frustration was the most obvious eddy, with a barely detectable undercurrent of shame. The conflict inherent in those emotions could cause even a strong leader to lash out. Recline considered what he knew of Motormaster's team. They were a group with dangerously unbalanced coding and sparks, led by a mech who was much the same.
Once Recline began to look more deeply into those currents, the truth of the situation became easy to guess. Motormaster was deeply loyal to Megatron, had been given charge of his team, and no matter how much he raged at them, how brutally he punished them, they were not the cohesive, unstoppable force Megatron demanded they be. The unacknowledged shame Motormaster felt made him strike out against his team even more brutally, in a vicious cycle. The frustration in Motormaster's field was the shadow side of the mech's leadership qualities, the true-sparked sense of responsibility and duty, though misguided and twisted.
Recline briefly questioned the integrity of manipulating Motormaster's field without his knowledge - his stringent ethical coding was one of the many reasons his field-reading skills had not been capitalized on by SpecOps for interrogations. But this, at least, was barely within his allowable limits. He had a duty to do whatever he could to survive and get back home, so he visualized etching one of the ancient prayer glyphs, asking for wisdom and guidance, and then carefully modulated his field.
"Fix him!" Motormaster commanded, shoving Recline at the red-faced, blue and white mech, sending both of them staggering to keep their footing. Recline could not help but notice the shove had not been hard enough to damage. The massive mech was following normal patterns, to be sure, but Recline dared to hope that his field-smoothing efforts had not been entirely in vain.
Clearly, though, such techniques would not be so easily applied here. The smaller Decepticon lashed out, striking Recline to the ground before whirling to face Motormaster with an expression both of defiance and terror. He was visibly shaking, anxiety and raw fear radiating vividly from his plating. He ran hot to the touch, so much that this world's thin atmosphere seemed to shimmer around him, and Recline wondered if the heat was related to whatever malfunction was causing his severe tremor.
But... fix him? "I'm not a medic..." Recline started, pushing himself back to his own pedes. He reached out on instinct to touch the blue and white mech, only to be violently thrown aside again, his mesh armor buckling and his arm wrenched hard before he could even register the attack or the pain.
"Keep your slagging digits off me!" the smaller Decepticon screamed, kicking at Recline's prone form. The blow from sharp-edged pede was hard enough to perforate the berthformer's dorsal mesh. Recline moaned, curling into a ball to protect his spark as his optics made several attempts to reset and focus, unable to tell if the smaller Decepticon was shaking even harder or if his own optical stabilizer had been jarred loose.
Motormaster roared and lashed out with a heavy fist, even as the smaller Decepticon drew back his leg for another kick. The frighteningly powerful punch connected with the shaking Decepticon and flung him halfway across the clearing with a terrible rattling clang. "Don't damage him, you slag sucking spawn of a half-clocked fragging-drone!" Motormaster snarled, stalking to stand over the still-shivering tangle of Decepticon limbs and plating. "This is the one that fixed their paranoid glitch of a security director. He's as soft as one of those insect humans and will be completely useless if he's injured!"
Fixed Red Alert? Recline squinted up at Motormaster in confusion. The director of security was certainly on his rotation on a fairly frequent basis, and he'd done couples sessions with him and Inferno when they'd had a rough patch. But there was nothing wrong with Red Alert that Ratchet hadn't repaired. Red was outstanding at his function and had all the right skills to do it well. Like any security-coded mech, he needed others to connect with, who would pull him away from his hard coded isolation and paranoid tendencies. Inferno went a long way in providing that balance. Recline supposed that he did help Red Alert relax his defenses enough to allow his anchor to form a deeper bond.
Then again, it was probably better for Motormaster to believe Recline had some hand in 'fixing' Red Alert, if that was the purpose of his abduction. He flinched as Motormaster reached down with a massive hand, and seized the smaller Decepticon by his cervical cabling... and then *lifted* him, just picked him up by the neck, like the three-mechanoton warframe weighed nothing at all. Only semi-lucid, the smaller mech squirmed, catching at Motormaster's wrist. "I 'dun need any soft-sparked frameless autobot piece of fragging furnit-"
"He need to be online for you to fix him?" Motormaster demanded.
Recline vented, offered up a prayer of forgiveness... and shook his helm. What he needed was time, and charging an offline mech could give that to him. It wasn't that different than the treatments he sometimes gave in Medical while mechs were still in stasis, though at least he knew he had consent agreements on file for the Ark-based Autobots. It would be impossible to recharge an online mech who obviously did not want anyone plugged into his systems.
He was thankful that he'd asked Mirage to transfer his loyalty coding to Optimus rather than deleting it altogether. Prime had given him very clear orders in case of capture, and Recline could, at least in the short term, do what he needed to do in order to survive, even if it was in violation of his berthformer oath.
Even still, Recline flinched when Motormaster lifted his free hand, and brought it down on the smaller mech's already-dented helm with a ferocious bang, knocking him temporarily offline.
"You're a berth. Act like one," Motormaster snarled in his terrible, hollow tones, stalking towards Recline even as he swept the damaged Decepticon up in both arms.
As quickly as his battered frame would allow, Recline shifted into his alt, his berthform settling atop the thick padding of grasses and wildflowers. Recline would try to be as noninvasive as possible, while still offering a short-term result that might be enough to placate the dangerous gestalt leader. Motormaster placed his burden onto the berth's sun-warming surface more gently than Recline would have predicted.
"You have a joor and a half, berth. He'd better be able to combine when the others get here, or I'll crush you like the worthless scrap metal you are," Motormaster growled, before stomping to the other end of the clearing to keep watch.
The stinking meat sack was touching his pede again, Sunstreaker noticed. He was tempted to ignore the thing, but he couldn't help but note that the creature was behaving oddly. It would normally pass him by, give him a quick sniff that left an offensive streak of glossa slime, which had to polished off his plating. The frontliner had, obviously, adjusted his subroutines early on to prevent himself from flicking away all things organic, like he wanted to. The dog was, like the other nominally intelligent animals who wandered in and out of the Ark, designated as an ally and non-pest. Debatable, but it wasn't his place to argue that with the officers.
This time, though, the animal was visibly agitated, its loud, woofing vocalizations clearly directed at Sunstreaker. A few barks, and then it would run a few meters up the forest service road and back again, then vocalize some more. The dog was alone, too, though Sunstreaker had a clear memory file of that ridiculously unarmored piece of furniture walking up the road with it at the beginning of his shift.
"The frag is wrong with you? Primus, why can't they upgrade you so you can talk?" he growled at puny creature at his feet. It woofed with even greater agitation, running up the road and then looking over its shoulder as if to see if Sunstreaker was following. "If that berth fell and twisted a cable... why does Prime even let him out without a nannybot? Slagging ridiculous."
Sunstreaker sent a terse message to the mech monitoring comms that he was checking something out, and ignored the inquiries that followed. The animal's woofs became higher pitched, more excited as it ran up the road, then ran back, putting its forepaws on his shin armor and licking him. "Get off, you vile thing. Just show me where the fragging berth went. Slag, Hound's gonna pay if you're just trying to get attention," Sunstreaker muttered, extending his scanners to maximum and grumbling about a certain fragging piece of furniture who was higher on his action hierarchy than made any sort of common sense. Not that he had any choice. Fraggers would scream at him and he'd be toast if anything happened to Recline on his watch.
"It was Motormaster, no doubt about it, Prime," Hound said, scanning the signs left of the brief struggle at the northern border of the security perimeter. He ran a digit along Samwise's back, making him squirm with happiness; without the dog they would likely not have known of Recline's capture until he missed an appointment or check-in. "Happened sometime in the last two to four hours."
::I'm going through the logs now, Prime,:: Red Alert commed from the security office, where he was remotely monitoring the conversation. ::It appears that some sort of dampener must have been used. There is an eight minute outage beginning 3.78 hours ago in that sector that did not activate an alarm. It should have. I will not recharge until I find out why.::
"I know you will do your best, Red Alert, but the last thing Recline would wish is for you to stress your systems with lack of recharge. We will find him."
::There should also be logs of Motormaster coming and going on the remote sensors along whatever access roads he used, but there are none. :: Red Alert continued, as though he had not heard.
"Red Alert, contact that Pentagon liaison who owes you a favor, for access to their satellite feeds and see if we can determine where he went," Optimus replied, forcefully resisting the urge to simply transform and roar down the road in search of the non-combatant. "I'm sure they have at least one pointed in our direction."
"Why the frag are we still standing here?" demanded Sunstreaker. "We need to go find and deactivate that filter sludge, then slag the pieces and do the same to rest of that glitchy 'Con team."
"Find him where?" Hound countered, though clearly twitching to find the berthformer. "Too many logging trucks and semis on the main roads. We'll lose the trail outside of our perimeter, and could end up going in the wrong direction entirely."
"Prime, I'd say the slagger grabbed him because he needed him," Jazz interjected. "And my hunch is that this was outside of the chain of command. Megatron wouldn't have any use for mechs who need a sparked berth. Motormaster acted on his own."
"The probability is high, then, that Motormaster will either let him go or dispose of him before Megatron expects him back on base," Prowl added, holding back from giving the odds of the latter.
::Blaster,:: Optimus commed, ::contact the law enforcement authorities within a six hour radius based on Motormaster's average speeds, as well as the US-Candian customs and border patrol. Have them put out an all points bulletin to be on the lookout for a semi matching Motormaster's description, and for any of the other Stunticons.::
::Right on, Prime. I'm on it,:: Blaster responded.
Optimus turned to face his second and third in command. "I want no effort spared to recover Recline. Time is of the essence. What do you propose?"
Jazz spoke first, bouncing on his pedes and ready to hit the pavement. "Have everyone available head on out in different directions in teams, coordinate with those already on patrol to cover the widest area we can. That way we'll have mechs ready to check out any spotting of ole Motormouth or his team. Keep the Aerials here on standby, and Skyfire to collect the P-bots from Mexico so we'll have both our big guys ready to tear Menasor a new exhaust port."
Optimus nodded. "Prowl?"
It would spread them thin, Prowl wanted to say. If Megatron did know of Recline's capture, and was using it strategically, drawing a large number of mechs in different directions might be exactly what had in mind.
But the strategist could not bring himself to object.
Recline quickly determined that the mech on his platform was designated Breakdown. The glyph was as much threat as designation, embellished with modifiers for enough strength, speed, and firepower to break down any barrier that stood in this mech's way, any defenses his enemies threw before him. But the english translation had a second meaning, and one all too apt. Breakdown himself was broken, his firewalls in tatters from previous efforts to correct his glitch. Absent those walls of code, it was chilling how easily Recline could access the Decepticon's systems, the few walls still left as easy to sweep away as wispy cobwebs.
No wonder the mech did not want anyone close to him. And no wonder he would not, or could not, combine with his team any longer. Gestalts could only combine with the consent of all of their members, and even unconscious resistance to the bond could cause a malfunction in that unique transformation.
Recline tried to stay on the periphery, skirting the edges of those deep-seated wounds - though he did inject a line of code to make sure the broken Decepticon would remain offline for the duration of this defrag cycle. A quick access of the Stunticon's recharge logs was enough to tell him what he needed to know: Breakdown did not just recharge poorly; he did not recharge at all. At least not in a normal fashion. He could not. The only time he shut down was when he was made to, either through forced hardline or Motormaster's preferred method.
Coding rape or battering - that was how Breakdown recharged, or rather, how he entered temporary forced stasis. It only added to the vicious downward spiral.
Recline's cables stirred in discomfort. Doing this for a mech so wounded... it made Recline no better than the Decepticons who had been trying to 'repair' this profoundly suffering mech. Sure, his platform was molded perfectly for Breakdown's comfort, and he longed to tenderly stroke the too-hot frame in compassion and build the kind of charge that would let Breakdown temporarily forget the pain. But the brutal truth of the matter was that Recline was in the Stunticon's systems without his consent, in order to save his own plating.
There was so little he could do to help. Perhaps with dozens of sessions, focussing directly on issues of spark resonance and balancing, as well as the underlying emotional response coding issues, Recline could help Breakdown learn to power down on his own and fully defrag, but only if Breakdown wanted to. But even if Recline did, to where would Breakdown return? The Stunticon team was no haven. Unlike the Aerialbots, who sometimes sniped at one another and had their share of troubles but in the end would do anything for the other members of the gestalt, the Stunticons did not appear to be an anchoring group.
Or maybe they were, but their concept of caring was just so broken. Perhaps beating Breakdown into forced stasis, or demolishing his firewalls to permit the gestalt to merge, was Motormaster's idea of care. In fact, judging by the last three and a half hours spent in Motormaster's trailer, Recline would guess that the brutal leader truly intended to help Breakdown in his own twisted way. Trying something else, something kinder, might not even occur to him. Motormaster was powerful, after all, but he was also little more than a newspark.
It made Recline want to keen. How could he not care for mechs who were so brand new to functioning, and already so broken? And yet, what could he possibly do? One deep defrag was the best he could offer Breakdown at the moment, combined with a couple hours in a peaceful, compassionate field.
It would make little difference in the long term.
But it was what he could give, and he needed to steady himself in order to give it. Breakdown might not have memory logs of his time spent in on Recline's platform, but on some level he would register the field woven with his own. Determined to do his best, Recline accessed memories that could possibly bring the flavor to his field that a gestalt-sparked mech would need the most. While the memories themselves belonged to others and would not be shared, he certainly knew what it felt like for a fragmented gestalt to become whole again.
He held First Aid with arms as well as his cables; the shaking medic half pulled away and then sank fully into the embrace. Sometimes Recline's mechform was the one most needed; his body could shape itself to embrace sharp angles just as his field could accept the rougher emotional edges. There was always a moment when First Aid would finally let go, field surging with all of the pain, worries and anger he held so close. Recline met those turbulent waves, even the scathing self-loathing, with pulses of acceptance. He knew better than to offer sympathy or to protest with the truth of First Aid's nobility and goodness. First Aid could not deal with that, not yet. He needed to be hard on himself before he could forgive himself.
It was just how he was wired.
First Aid did so much both to anchor and shield his team. It cost him - and it cost them. While they needed him to be strong, they also needed him, at the end of the day, to let go, to give them his pain as well as his solace. Sometimes, when First Aid was hurting the most, sharing first with Recline helped him to share with his team in turn and renew their bond.
This time, the pain was deep. No medic was perfect. But this was the first time First Aid had come close to losing a mech due to making the wrong call rather than circumstances beyond his control. It did not seem to help that Ratchet and Hoist both assured him they would have made the same decision. First Aid held himself to a standard no mech could meet. He had lost trust in himself.
'You'll find your confidence again,' Recline wanted to say, but did not. It was still too soon. 'Not yet, but you will. Everyone makes mistakes. Prime makes them, Ratchet makes them, I've made many, you will make them. And you will be furious with yourself, you will hate yourself, but in the end, you learn from them, and you'll be a better mech and medic from the lessons you've learned.'
Recline knew better than to say it was okay. It wasn't. Not right now. A mech's spark hung in the balance within the stasis tank. There was nothing more to done until the breach in Huffer's laser core either self-repaired from the inside or his spark lost containment altogether.
First Aid muffled his quiet keens in the plating just above Recline's spark, even now aware of his brothers waiting just outside, trying not to upset them. Soon he would reluctantly lower his blocks and let them in. Their love was just too much at the moment.
Recline felt the moment when First Aid finally lowered the block, that distinct shift in his field that showed he was no longer alone in his spark. The door to the Protectobots' quarters opened and four mechs rushed in, arms and cables entangling where their sparks already had joined, combining in a way that was just as profound as becoming Defensor. Recline began to unravel himself to leave when a pale blue hand wrapped around his arm.
"Stay," Hot Spot urged him. "He wants you to."
"I..." There were so many reasons not to stay. The resentment that briefly surged in Blades' field was definitely one.
"Stay," Blades growled. ::I don't like it,:: he commed privately, though Recline was certain the others already knew. ::I don't like that he has to show you this slag first. He shouldn't need a mediator. But he does, and better you than someone else. Stay.::
Recline flashed a grateful glyph, accepting the invitation, his field modulating to weave itself within the complex web around him, extending four more cables. "Let me charge all of you, then, when you're ready."
He kept his own presence as unobtrusive as possible as the gestalt took in First Aid's reluctantly shared memory, enveloping him with their worry and love. They, in turn, shared their frustration that he shut them out and acceptance of just why he did. Now he was where he belonged, and they soothed his anger at himself within the broader context of their love for him and the honest assessment of just how much he had accomplished and learned in such a short time.
First Aid pulled Recline more deeply into the link, unwilling for him to simply be a passive observer, sharing as much as he could of the gestalt bond, of being many yet one as he finally allowed himself to sink into the love he had been blocking, letting himself be subsumed into the fierce care and protectiveness that was Defensor...
Without violating the sanctity of the memory, Recline created a file of the feelings First Aid had shared as his gestalt became one. As he pulled Breakdown into a deep defrag, he cycled the memory of those feelings over and over again. On one level it was cruel because Breakdown never experienced that in functioning. But it was all Recline could give him, along with the care and compassion of his own field.
It would not be enough for Breakdown. But it might be enough to ensure that Recline would continue to function a while longer.
