Bumblebee still wasn't back in the morning.
During the roll call, when the Decepticons read out the serial numbers the prisoners had been assigned, they didn't read the one they'd given Bumblebee, but rather let a conspicuous silence hang in the air for a moment where his number should have been, as if to remind those who remained behind what had happened the day before. A warning, or an unspoken threat, as to what would befall them should any of them shirk off or try to rebel.
They were given their work assignments, and Knock Out was relieved to find that he was on the team hauling debris away from the tunnel entrances, and that he would not be underground today. Relieved, that is, until he took into account the sheer tonnage of rock and dirt he was required to pull behind him in a trailer, at which point he began to worry that it would bend his frame out of shape.
He looked around hopefully for Breakdown, who he felt would understand that the trailers were being loaded too heavy for bots Knock Out's size to pull. But Breakdown was nowhere to be seen, and Knock Out had yet to see signs that any of the other Decepticons were able to be reasonable about things. In fact, he eventually realized that some of them had bets going as to how much weight Knock Out could pull, as each subsequent trailer grew heavier and more overloaded until even the trailers themselves began to sag under the burden.
It was positively barbaric as far as Knock Out was concerned. It didn't occur to him that many of the Decepticons involved were enormous brutes who likely enjoyed testing their strength as much as Knock Out had once been able to enjoy testing his speed. It didn't occur to them that not every bot liked that kind of thing, and they might not have cared if it had.
When there inevitably came a point when Knock Out could not get a trailer to move, Skyquake came down on him. Skyquake did not seem to be aware of what had transpired up to this point, only that one of the prisoners had stopped working. Even if he did know of the bets and overloading of the trailers, he could not punish his subordinates in front of the prisoners without losing face.
"Move!" Skyquake roared, and Knock Out felt the command shudder through him down to the atom.
Terrified, Knock Out sought to obey, but no matter how much he gunned his engine or how hard he tried to accelerate, turning his wheels back and forth in search of better purchase on the ground, the trailer remained completely immobile. It was simply too heavy. He didn't have the strength. But when he tried to say these things, the Decepticons who'd been involved in the betting immediately moved in to shut him up, declaring loudly to Skyquake that, "This one is lazy; he doesn't want to work at all."
When Knock Out tried to object to this, saying it wasn't true, Skyquake struck him so hard he came loose from the trailer, flipped and rolled several times before sliding to a stop on his hood. Feeling helpless, he transformed to robot mode and flipped himself upright.
It was the least smooth or graceful Knock Out had ever been in his whole entire life. Every servo ached, every piston protested, every joint creaked. He was so drained of energy and bent out of shape that he couldn't stand properly, and instead crouched on the ground, feeling wobbly.
"How dare you demean your betters by hurling accusations!?" Skyquake thundered as he stalked over to where Knock Out had landed. "Did you learn nothing from what you witnessed yesterday? Or must you experience punishment yourself to understand?"
"I understand..." Knock Out said, thinking quickly to salvage the situation, and perhaps reduce whatever inevitable punishment was about to befall him. "That I have been treated unfairly. And that, if they were truly my betters, they would not blame me when their decisions caused things to go wrong."
Whether or not that was the wrong thing to say, Knock Out would never be certain, as Skyquake roared and flung him across the pit, where he bounced off some of the heavy mining machinery and landed dazed on the ground, only for Skyquake to land on him and pummel him until his processor overloaded and he lost consciousness. But possibly the alternative would have been death. He would never know.
Knock Out's systems reset themselves one at a time, cautiously, as if every part of him feared waking up to find Skyquake still standing over him, ready to have another go at beating the very Spark out of him. In fact, he wasn't so sure when he first started to come 'round that he hadn't joined the Well of AllSparks because he didn't recognize where he was.
It turned out to be a sleek, well-lit machine shop. There was the reassuring whir of power tools in use, and the feeling that he was lying on a table. Belatedly, Knock Out realized several pieces of his plating had been removed, but he wasn't entirely alarmed by this, as his self-preservation circuits hadn't reset and weren't yet entirely convinced he was still online.
Turning his head, which was a surprisingly monumental effort, Knock Out saw the Decepticon he knew as Breakdown working on a twisted hunk of red metal that Knock Out could barely recognize as the shoulder plate for his own left arm, which Breakdown appeared to be welding back together.
"What…" Knock Out's voice synthesizer squeaked and rattled, and he took a moment to realign it before trying again. "What… happened?"
"You went a round with Skyquake and survived," Breakdown replied.
"And… why am I here?" Knock Out wasn't sure he wanted to know.
He'd heard a lot about Shockwave's lab experiments, but nothing about the machine shop. That made the idea of it a thousand times more terrifying because he didn't know what happened here.
"You were right. The trailer was overloaded," Breakdown said matter-of-factly. "You couldn't have moved it if you wanted to."
"Meaning?" Knock Out felt a twinge of impatience at Breakdown not directly answering his question.
"Meaning you get another chance to stay alive," Breakdown told him. "If I can pound enough dents out of you to make you functional again, that is."
"Lucky me," Knock Out muttered sarcastically.
Breakdown stared at him, his yellow gaze at once piercing and inscrutable. Then he said, "You could simply choose to join the winning team. Save yourself a lot of trouble."
"The same team that tried to break me in half for fun?" Knock Out scoffed. "That winning team?"
"They wouldn't have done that if you were a Decepticon. It isn't that complicated. But if you want to go back to the mines and see how long you last now that you've gotten them in trouble, and drawn Skyquake's particular attention..." Breakdown shrugged indifferently.
"Some choice," Knock Out snapped. "What's in it for me?"
"Beyond survival?" Breakdown queried sensibly with a raised eyebrow.
"I had survival when I was a scavenger. And I got to do as I pleased."
"You will never be a scavenger again," Breakdown pointed out. "That is not an option."
Ponderous as he looked and sounded, Breakdown did indeed have many points, and Knock Out was reluctantly coming around to the idea that he might be right. But he also remembered the arguments he and Bumblebee had started to have, about how there was more than mere existence. And too, he knew that Decepticon and Autobot soldiers alike risked life and limb in this war of theirs, and so far Breakdown had not given Knock Out a reason why he should take such risks voluntarily.
However, he didn't want to seem ungrateful. Most of the Decepticons struck you if you so much as looked at them funny, never mind tried to carry on conversations with them. And, more significantly, that was a piece of Knock Out that Breakdown was currently banging on. If provoked, the bulky Decepticon could probably simply choose not to give the plating back. And then Knock Out's vulnerable interior parts would be completely exposed to the dust and grit and brutal pounding of the outside world. And he didn't like to think about how awful he'd look in the meantime.
But he also didn't want to be walked all over just because he didn't have the right insignia emblazoned on his chest. "Well… pardon me if I don't find that a very persuasive argument for joining the Decepticons. I might get a better offer from the Autobots."
"I wouldn't repeat that if I were you," Breakdown warned. "Skyquake will execute anyone who even sounds like they're thinking about joining the Autobots. And I don't blame him."
"Thanks for the warning. I think."
"Barely," Breakdown replied coldly.
Knock Out never saw the Decepticons who'd ordered his trailer to be overloaded again, and could only assume that they had in fact been punished after all, just not in front of the slaves. That made sense, he supposed, though it wasn't nearly as satisfying as seeing them pay for their mistakes in front of him or, ideally, making them pay himself.
The mundane routine of work resumed, only occasionally punctuated by accidents, the expiration of slaves worked beyond their endurance and the periodic infusion of new firebrand Cybertronians who didn't yet understand the severity of their situation, some of whom would not live long enough to do so but would instead serve as the example to others.
And then, one day, two or perhaps three weeks after Bumblebee had been taken away, Knock Out looked up from picking up shoring beams for the tunnels to see his yellow and black friend being returned to the Pit, handed over from one nameless Decepticon to another, to the evident outrage of Skyquake, who stormed and raged impotently that this Cybertronian was in no condition to do the job required, and thus would be a hindrance to Skyquake's own performance of his duties, and therefore lessen the value of his service to Megatron.
The other Decepticon offered to relay this message to Shockwave, at which point Skyquake suddenly became contrite to the point of nearly cringing. Knock Out was surprised by the realization that even the mighty Skyquake feared Shockwave, and that made him wonder just how many of the horrific stories slaves told to scare each other as they passed the time were true.
Skyquake dismissed Bumblebee and the lower level Decepticon who would herd him down into the Pit to join the others, and at first Knock Out wasn't sure what Skyquake had been so upset by.
Bumblebee looked, if anything, in better condition than when Knock Out had last seen him. There was a greater bulk added onto his forearms, suggesting that one of Shockwave's experiments had involved in-built tools or weaponry. Obviously pieces Bumblebee wouldn't get to keep, but he had the capacity installed now. His paint had been redone, though Knock Out couldn't tell if that was also part of an experiment or simply maintenance for everything in Shockwave's lab. He'd heard Shockwave was obsessively neat and tidy, and a dingy, dust-covered miner was the opposite of that.
Then Bumblebee stumbled on a rough part of the pathway, and blundered into the outer wall of the Pit he was descending into, staggered away from that, and fell over the edge of the path. He fell several feet and landed with a heavy crash that attracted a lot of notice as the miners thought something important might be going wrong that they should be worried about.
As Bumblebee awkwardly picked himself up, Knock Out, who had reached him first, got a horrible shock. The two blue spheres that had been Bumblebee's optics had been replaced by some kind of disc, but the discs were dark and inert. Bumblebee was blind.
"Oh," Knock Out listened to himself, torn between horror at this sort of experimentation, and fascinated wonder as to what the intent behind the disc-type optics actually was.
"Knock Out?" Bumblebee queried with what tried to be nervousness but was only weariness.
The strained sound of his voice told Knock Out that Bumblebee was in pain, and trying not to show it. To facilitate that, Knock Out snapped himself out of his thoughts and helped Bumblebee to stand.
"What have they done to you?" Knock Out asked, a hot stab of guilt inflicting itself on him as he found he was more curious than actually appalled, though he knew he should have been the latter.
Or did he know it? Was that merely an expectation he had on himself because he knew it was how Bumblebee would have reacted were their situations reversed? Now there was a hole with no bottom.
"A little of everything, I think," Bumblebee deadpanned.
"It certainly looks like it," Knock Out observed, realizing when he'd helped Bee stand up that the very texture of his metal was different to what it had been before.
"I guess I'll take your word for it," Bumblebee said.
"I guess you'll have to."