Oh help, this thing is becoming full-length. I can feel it. Eiish…okay, more Jetfire angst, more obscure cities and Cybertron-back-then-ness, and no actual development of a plot just yet. It will come, trust me. Just…not yet.
Oh, events are taking place one million years before Jetfire came to Earth…which, for my purposes, is also just a little while before Optimus becomes commander of the Autobot army, and about two million years after Megatron becomes leader of the Decepticons. (Thanks to reviewers and Skins? Jets would like to be let off the spit now. Yes, I know he deserves it, but he's starting to smell like s'mores…)
Rose Tint My World
868.0.05, Cybertronian Standard Time. The night was young, the skies were clear and the world was blue.
This was not only because of the merciless headache busy eating his mainframe alive; towers in the charmingly nicknamed Riff-Raff had been designed to please the optic. Most had been bathed in dyes and compounded with special minerals, mined from nearby planets. The ambitious designer's vision had been for Rapheal's streets to be filled with a heavenly, tourist-attracting ink-glow. Now, with the light of Cybertron's twin moons shining down on them through curtains of war-mist, they glowed a faintly disturbing azure colour that was hard to look at for too long.
The streets, at the moment, were relatively undisturbed. Technically, Raff was a war zone, but then, so was everywhere else.
He landed at Sector Nineteen, duly reporting in to the apathetic officer in charge. Technically, he should have been back with his training platoon five days ago, but who the slag cared? Two or three million years ago, it was an error that might have gotten him tried and executed, or at least put into solitary for a good week. But the war had consumed whole such petty matters as regulations. Now, most recruits showed up out of a simple lack of anything else to do. Officers hung around and hoped that their group would show, and were generally not disappointed. One thing most recruits learned early; the more dependable you were, the more certain you could be of being carried off the battlefield when both your legs got shot off.
Jetfire had a good team, at the moment. Most of them were desperately young, but Spire was tough and focused enough for the whole team, and Patchwork was easy enough to work with…
He found he just couldn't care. His head hurt too much. He should have checked with them five days ago. He hadn't. He'd been…busy.
He left the officer, and the Sector, and headed out into the relative peace of Raff. Flying over Raff was prohibited, both by high command and common sense. Sentries posted in the city's towers had orders to shoot down anything flying outside of curfew. He'd heard rumors (probably set about by bored, restricted-to-ground flyers with nothing better to do, he would admit) of sentries who would spit laser at anything with wings attached to it, Decepticon or otherwise. Whilst these were almost certainly untrue, the fact remained that the majority of the Autobot forces didn't like flyers, and the unconfined joy of soaring above the city limits could be severely tempered by the prospect of having holes blown in your wings as you did.
Nevertheless, he'd disgarded the cloak. There were some things he objected to on moral grounds, and one was being told by Squint that he looked stupid. That, and it made fast movement almost impossible. (Although, admittedly, his current hangover was making even the thought of fast movement an unkind joke anyway.)
Twin racers sped past, almost running him into the ground as he did. He stumbled back, two days without recharge taking their toll. The world spun,
i'm dying primus i'm-
kaleidoscope colours spiralling madly before stabilizing circuitry cut back in. He leant against a wall, grimaced, waited, watched the two cars disappear, oblivious to him. He carefully selected a few choice curses from his extensive vocabulary
lousy, lead-witted, scrap-iron, bargain-bucket pieces of-
and moved on.
He found himself wondering where Optimus was. The young corporal was an irritation more often than not, but he was a friend. He cared. If he were here, he'd shake his head, sigh one of his noisy sighs, then support Jetfire as he made his way to the nearest place of rest, all the while telling him in firm tones how stupid and thoughtless he was being.
A figure bumped into him in the near-darkness, weaving unsteadily.
"Hey!" Token protest. No need to start a fight, if only because he was hardly fit to fly in a straight line right now.
"Sorry", muttered the figure in response, then broke off into a giggle and dissolved into the night.
Jetfire shook his head, and regretted it. The world was full of weirdoes. He walked on.
Twenty minutes later he was situated on the outskirts of a makeshift bar. It is a fact of life that, no matter where you find yourself in the multiplex, somewhere, somehow, someone will have set up a place to become cheerfully dead to the world.
Even if the city was, technically, a war zone, some enterprising soul had still thought to stick a few chairs and tables, and secure a few cubes of high-grade, all beneath a large overhang. That the overhang was formed by two toppled buildings supported only by scrap, prayer and each other did not seem to bother any of those busy flooding out their systems beneath. The entire arrangement was centered around a large piece of curved steel, fallen from one of the towers and used as a crude bar counter. Behind it, a large, magenta individual-the only silent one, save for Jetfire-handed out energon without asking questions.
Jetfire curled up on an abandoned chair at the corner, nearest to the street. Looking left, he could see one of Raff's eerily-lit highways expanding into the night. He could hear chatter and laughter and the telling of the loud, unrefined jokes that are common to bars the universe over.
His head still hurt.
A warning siren blared, and those behind him put down their drinks with varying degrees of groaning and annoyance. Some raised their optics to the sky, anxiously waiting to see if a handful of dark-colored triangles appeared against it. Jetfire sipped morbidly from his cube, staring straight ahead. The alarms sounded frequently; from a distance, with surveillance equipment broken as it so often was in Raff, it was usually difficult for a sentry to tell the difference between a Decepticon seeker or an Autobot returning to base. He didn't move.
Besides, if there is a raid, there's always the chance that something heavy will fall on my head and make it stop hurting me.
A rather unpleasant laugh escaped his lips.
Technically, the sirens were redundant technology. It was far simpler and far safer to send out a simple com-link alert to all those off-duty. In Iacon or Nexus, that would have happened. But the officers on sort-of-pretty, sort-of-backwater Rapheal made the mistake of taking into consideration the number of off-duty soldiers who would turn their radios off the moment they slunk off in search of the nearest bar; a frequent occurrence, mostly due to the fact that Raff was too unimportant to suffer any large-scale attacks, and most off-duties enjoyed the freedom enough to take the added risk.
Decepticon officers, Jetfire was sure, would not have made the mistake. (And it was a mistake; letting the incoming enemy know that you knew about him tended to remove whatever sad, sorry element of surprise you had.) They would have sent the signal out on a private wave and let anyone stupid enough to leave headquarters without their radios on fend for themselves.
The nasty little thought occurred that maybe this was why Decepticon soldiers were that much harder to kill than Autobots. It was a depressing thought, until the slightly more sensible and decidedly more sober part of Jetfire's mind pointed out that, whilst it may be true, Autobot forces still outnumbered Decepticon forces two to one any day of the vorn. Closely tailing that came the gloomy acknowledgement that this had been so for the last two million years.
A minute later, the siren stopped. His buzzing mainframe weakly offered up its gratitude. A minute after that, a lower-pitched all-clear signal sounded. Those who had not already done so returned to their chatter and their drinks, their optics sometimes flitting to the sky to search for a trace of an unwanted wing or a glimpse of suspicious colour.
Once again, Jetfire found himself wondering about Optimus.
Wonder what he's up to right now?
He realized he was waiting to do something. Surprised, he wondered what it was, then understanding beckoned. His fingers slipped into his sub-space pocket, and he withdrew the off-pink canister he had been handed a day ago.
Squint's face and quiet smile flashed over the interior of his optics, and he glowered behind the mask.
Lousy little slagfest.
He glanced around furtively, to ensure that no one was watching. Not that it mattered, really. Autobot protocol oversaw a lot of things, but one thing it hadn't been able to restrain was the over-consummation of ridiculous amounts of high-grade in bars. If this was Iacon, or another of the high-command outposts, he would have thought twice. As it was-…who, really, gave a slag?
Attaching the canister to his arm, he pressed down on a button, wincing slightly as its contents were delivered into his fuel lines via three slender, diamond-tipped tubes. The sound of chatter and chaos rose behind him, and he looked left down the darkened street with bright, briefly-desperate optics. Then his thoughts accelerated and his energy levels soared and he gave up on desperation and went down into colour.
As he did, he found himself wondering, again, what Optimus was doing.