1
Don't worry, the action will pick up very quickly, but I thought this story needed a little back-story to hold up the long plot that I have planned for this fic. Please excuse grammatical and spelling errors- I was writing this during "The State of The Union" address.
Also, forgive my ignorance of G1 history, as I have never seen the show myself. I may slip at times.
NOTE: Cross over (sort of) with G1
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Slightly more than about seven feet tall, the light coming from a patch on its shoulder gleamed off its burnished silver armor that had been dented and streaked in places with mud. It's angular face was set in an expression of worry (if it were even possible to show emotion at all) as the robot looked at her. Slowly it approached her.
Seized by fear, she scrambled backwards, fighting to get out from under the tangle of blankets. It stepped forward, reaching out to her.
"Please, I mean you no harm! You have nothing to fear from me." Neera scampered back against the wall of the cave, still facing the approaching robot.
"What are you! What do you want with me?" Her voice trembled with built up fear and exhaustion as she continued to back away from the robot.
"My name is Axel. I'm a minicon from the planet Cybertron. I brought you here to keep you safe from Cyclonus when he came after you, though I know not for what purpose."
"What about Jonas? What happened to him?" Axel stopped in his approach.
"I... don't know. By the time I had come fully out of Hibernation, Cyclous was already leaving. I haven't seen anything of your companion."
Neera's mind froze, her heart contracting painfully within her chest. She sobbed with fear for him, stumbling backwards through the darkened cave. She felt cold again, so cold, and began to shiver violently, her wet clothes dripping onto the cave floor. Millions of questions crowded out all rational thought in her mind, but at the same time, she couldn't find the will to ask a single one.
Stepping back again, Neera's foot caught on a rock, and she stumbled, falling backwards into a puddle of water. Great, she thought, pushing herself to her knees, add insult to injury.
Neera...
The single word reverberated through her mind, and she clapped her hands to her temples, trying to force it out.
"No..." she hissed. "Get out of my head!" The presence retreated to the edges of her mind, but didn't leave entirely. Axel approached her again, kneeling by her side and gently taking her by the upper arm, helping her to her feet. By the dim light coming from its shoulder she could see the volumes of untold emotions etched onto its face (pity?) that were punctured by a fleeting grin.
"You know, you're awfully wet." Neera looked down at herself, at her clothes streaked with grime that dripped onto her bare feet, and had to agree. She gave a small sob punctured by a mirthless laugh at how pathetic she must have looked. All the same though, her looks didn't exactly take precedence in her thoughts.
"Yeah, what was your first clue?" She snorted back, trying to pull away from Axel's gentle, yet almost possessive, grip on her arm. Jonas was in trouble, that was certain, and she had to find him before... she couldn't (wouldn't?) Fill in the blank. This 'Cyclous' thing sounded maniacal in the worst possible way.
Axel looked at her for a moment when Neera tried to reclaim her arm, then a sudden understanding frown creased his face.
"I know you care about Jonas and want to find him, but it's simply far too dangerous. We have no idea where Cyclonus has taken him..."
Neera sensed the hidden meaning hanging in the air, but she refused to yield her hope to it. Jonas was still alive.
He had to be.
She pulled at her arm again and this time he let her have it. Turning away, shivering slightly, she said;
"I'm going to find him." It was an honest statement. And it was final. A feeling of purpose came over Neera, though tears still trailed down her cheeks. She would find him. Somehow.
Turning away against the protests of her own fatigued body racked by trembling cold, Neera resolutely stalked away from the robot in the direction that she somehow knew to be the way outside, unheeding of the boundless darkness around her.
She hadn't gone two steps though when the presence returned to her.
"I can't let you." The word reverberated both within her head and around the cave, tinged with a note of earnest desperation. Neera froze in place, her breath lodged in her throat.
The robot. Oh God, the robot. It was behind her.
-No, it was inside of her mind.
It was both.
Neera whirled around to face its shadowed form, pointing a trembling finger at it as though to strike it down with the might of heaven.
"What have you done to me? How come I can hear you inside my head!" She yelled, her voice shrill and cracking. She could tell by its body language that it wanted to approach her, but decided against it, lowering its head in a shameful manner. Slowly, unsurely, Axel's presence withdrew from her mind, leaving her with the shreds of a throbbing headache.
"I-I am sorry." He intoned after a while. "I suppose that I should have explained myself more thoroughly." She waited for more, but Axel seemed to be lost in thought. After a long while he looked up at her.
"Maybe it would be easier to show you."
The robot turned, and walked father into the cavern, and Neera, sheerly out of curiously, followed hesitantly along. It seemed to take ages to reach where they were going, but looking back she supposed that it had only been about two minutes. Her mind was worn, making thinking clearly difficult.
At first, Neera didn't know what to make of it.
Axel brightened the light coming from the patch on his shoulder so that she could see the outline of an enormous cavern. And right at her feet was a twisted, descending staircase that had to be at least eight feet wide. Farther out she could see immense columns spiraling up into the darkness that were laced with rusted circuitry. Wires as thick as her wrist looped down from above like knotted vines. The walls of the cave were really sheets of smooth metal that had had punctures torn through them as long as a sofa with the apparent ease of silk being rent in two.
"What is this place?" She asked, entranced by the destruction around her that had been frozen in place as though turned to stone by a Gorgon's glare.
"This," Axel started solemnly, stepping up beside her with a grim look about him, "Is the Ark."
"What's the Ark?" She asked again, bluntly.
"It is- was- our only means of escape from our home planet, Cyberton." Neera looked over at him curiously, but he didn't meet her gaze.
"About two million years ago, civil war broke out on our planet. At the time, our government was controlled by the military. There was an official name for the army, but everyone called them the Decepticons."
He drew a rattling breath.
"Up until that time, the system had been working relatively well. The Decepticons kept order under the Council's decisions, and- for the most part- our planet was peaceful. For a long time the Decepticons were known for their incredible acts of bravery, self discipline and sense of honor."
"But..." Neera urged him softly.
"But," Axel resumed, "Then there was a General named Megatron. Loyal, brave, strong, he lived hanging off of the council's every word. It was widely known that he aspired to a position on the council. And by all appearances, he deserved it to. But one of the Elders- Alpha Trion- saw through Megatron. Though he never directly voiced it, he never trusted Megatron and surreptiously kept him from being on the council. Somehow, Megatron found out. He became enraged at everyone on the council- especially Alpha Trion."
"But I thought you said that Megatron was loyal, brave and strong?" Neera asked softly.
Axel nodded grimly.
"Yes, but he also had a streak of vicious ruthlessness that went all the way to his spark core. He would go off on his troops for the simplest little things. Though there was no evidence to directly link him with it, one of his soldiers was crushed to death between some parts of moving machinery just after insulting him."
Neera had gone very pale.
"So what happened?"
"After he was denied a position on the council, the Megatron every one had known vanished. He started endorsing radical ideas of anarchy, inveighing against the council and everything they stood for. Eventually, he was relieved of duty from his position of general for mental instability. For a long time afterwards he simply vanished, and many thought he had died. Then suddenly he just reappeared, and all of his old supporters flocked to him, forming a tangent group who called themselves 'The True Decepticons'. They began attacking everyone who didn't jump to support them, using the whole 'either-you're-with-us-or-against-us' theology."
"Did they win?"
"Not exactly, since they weren't fighting against anyone per say. But after a time everything on the planet fell under their control. Life was...terrible. Then, to everyone's surprise, another faction arose who called themselves the Autobots, lead by Optimus Prime."
"Who's he?"
"No one's really sure, he just appeared, caring an artifact from legend called the Matrix. And don't ask, because I don't know what it is." He continued, answering her questioning look.
"To make a long story short, a massive civil war broke out between the Autobots and the Decepticons. The Autobots represented something we hadn't seen in so long."
"What?"
"Hope. They gave us hope that we would one day be free again. But such is the nature of warfare that the stalemate between the two factions grew to an arms race. If one invented armor, the other would invent armor piercing rounds. It escalated until out entire planet was in ruins. Then, a new variable was added to the equation; us. We could link with them, giving them unbridled new power. If the war had been bad before, it was worse now. We- the minicons- knew that we had to leave to avoid being used by either side and thus escalate the destruction. So we secretly built the Ark to slip away undetected. But there must have been a spy who ratted us out, because a Decepticon ambush was waiting for us on the edge of space. Somehow we still managed to get away by engaging the warp drive just in the nick of time, escaping light-years away from Cybertron. But despite our good fortune, we had been hit by a stray shot, taking out our navigation systems. So we ended up having to make the jump blind."
Neera's head spun with the amount of information she was receiving, and she lifted a shaking hand to brush her hair out of her eyes.
"Let me guess; you crash-landed here, right?"
Axel gestured at the destruction.
"What was your first clue?" He asked with a rueful smile, throwing her own rib right back at her.
"To protect us from the inevitably violent landing, we went into hibernation in panels like the one you found, and when the ship crashed, I can only assume that they were all scattered."
Neera gasped.
"You mean... there's more of you all over the planet?"
"Yes." He nodded.
"Good God..." Neera muttered. "So... what happened when I..."
"Touched the panel?" Axel finished for her. Neera nodded mutely. He sighed.
"I-I acted on instinct. I am truly sorry for the pain the binary linking process causing you, but it was not designed with the frailties of human neural pathways in mind. Until now, I would not have even thought it possible for it to happen with an organic.
Neera drew a deep rattling breath, running both of her hands through her short, tousled hair and staring around at the inside of the Ark. She wondered why it was built so large considering that Axel wasn't much larger than she was.
"What's- what's the 'binary linking process'? What... did it do to me?"
Axel bowed his head, and for a moment Neera wondered if he was going to answer her.
Then, she felt the presence- Axel's presence- snaking into her mind and gently wrapping itself around her consciousness like a warm embrace, and she shrank away from the unfamiliar mental contact.
There's nothing to be afraid of. He whispered softly. She shuddered against the alien feeling of something being inside her mind, the pressure behind her eyes returning.
Then, a thought came to her.
CAN YOU HEAR ME? She shouted within her own mind.
Yes, but you don't need to yell, I can hear you just fine.
How? How can I be hearing you at all?
Normally to be reanimated, sections of code from the minicon's partner are used like a password to 'unlock' the panel. I can only assume that my programing sought out the code from your mind, rewriting parts of your neural pathways in the process when it found something that it could use awaken me. It was never intended to happen that way...
So... I guess I'm your partner now?
"Yes." Axel answered out loud. Neera sighed, then shrugged her shoulders helplessly.
"Can't say that I'm thrilled with the idea of having my mind tampered with, but there's not really anything I can do about it now."
"I never meant to-" Axel began.
"I know! It's... oaky, I'm not blaming you. I guess I should actually be thanking you for saving me, though," She hugged herself, suddenly acutely aware again of how cold she was. And unbidden, her thoughts went strait back to Jonas.
Axel stepped forward to her, so very happy that she didn't flinch away from him.
"We'll find him- I'm not trying to say that we won't ever go looking for him- but just not right now. I told you about Megatron. Well, Cyclonus is one of his lackeys, and there's simply no way that we'll be able to get Jonas back from him even if we knew where he was. You're soaked to the bone and might be unknowingly injured- no matter how much you may want to deny it. Let's just get through tonight and then try to find re-enforcements. Ok?"
Neera immediately wanted to protest, but she had to see the logic of his argument.
"And," He added more softly, "Because you are my partner I am bound by my programming to protect you- even if it means going against your wishes."
Neera opened her mouth, then closed it again, nodding in defeat. She was cold, she was tired, and her body ached as though she had been beaten. Even more disturbing though was the pain that had been steadily building behind her eyes. She assumed it was because of the recent modifications her mind had been forced to undergo. The mere thought made her shake and the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
Axel saw this, and touched her shoulder gently, radiating concern.
"I'm ok..." She said weakly, hugging herself tighter. No sooner had she uttered the words then they seemed to jinx her. A strange dizziness overcame her, and she teetered dangerously. Axel caught her in his strong grip, and lifted her effortlessly from the ground despite her weak protests. Fog crowded in on her mind, covering the distant feeling of being carried somewhere nestled safely in strong steel arms.
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Neera awoke later- make later- gasping and struggling with the demons that had haunted her in nightmares. She reached out blindly, tears of overwhelming fear streaming down her face, her heart screaming with a pain whose source she could not quite remember.
As if answering her cries for help, warmth encircled her terrified mind, dulling the blade edge of the nightmare. Strong arms came around her, gently pulling her into a secure embrace. Neera turned and buried her head against Axel's strangely warm shoulder, openly sobbing. She felt him wrap and blanket around her.
Softly, ever so softly, he began to sing to her in words that she could not quite understand. Slowly the nightmare began to depart from her mind, leaving only the slow, comforting song. He wrapped his mind around her, and for the first time, Neera welcomed his presence.