Thunderhead

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Title: Thunderhead
Continuity: IDW, Stormbringer
Rating: PG
Character: Jetfire, refs to Technobots
Warnings: Spoilers for Stormbringer, mild attempts to out-purple-prose Furman
Prompt: no future for tf_speedwriting .
A/N: first line of dialogue is from the comic

 

“Damn.”   As much self-recrimination packed into that one syllable as was possible.  All the time he had—that one word—before the cloaked raiders swept in again. They’d saved him for last. Of course.  What more punishment did he deserve than to watch his team fall before him, one by one?  He’d already been blaming his curiosity for exposing them so long to Thunderhead Pass’s toxic radiation, for the scalding their shielding had taken simply from the journey to set up the probe, every micro-unit of pain his fault, his to pay, but then…this. 

He was not a leader: what more proof did he need than this? His own team, destroyed, in front of him. And he…helpless. All the firepower he carried and he’d not been able to find a place to aim.  To defend his own mechs. 

The power-lance’s shock against his systems whited out his systems in a sparking cascade of pain, overloading his capacitors, throwing his physical systems into useless numbness.  He could only watch, helpless, as Scattorshot fell to the ground, his own body swinging in a heavy, dead arc to slam into the brittle soil of the broken ground. 

And another. And another shock against him, blanking his systems with more force, more violence, than needed.  He heard a high keen—himself sobbing, in pain and desperation, as they began dragging the bodies away, their contours still only fitfully visible when lit by the particle-storm’s ionic charge.  One by one: Scattorshot—who’d kept an optic on the storm. Lightspeed.  Strafe, who’d hesitated just at the radiation. He’d had no right to drag them here, force them to this risk. But he had, and they were going to pay for it in some…horrible fashion. 

And him. What of himself?  

Another jolt, another energy weapon blasting into his systems.  It felt…familiar. Not the pain, but the technology. It had the stamp of…old things. Old science. The brutal, crude weapons of the war before Cybertron had died.  The rim-lit figure moved away, scooping up Strafe, dragging him toward a cleft in the jagged outcrop.

He tried to distill a clue from it, from the location as well: Thunderhead Pass, where Thunderwing’s horrific grafting experiment had first gone…awry.  That word didn’t begin to cover the magnitude of the disaster: Thunderwing insane, beyond sanity, the combined tissues in his new ‘armor’ grafts like a maelstrom, overriding his own cortex, his own direction, reducing him to a creature of seething violence, wanting to inflict his pain upon…everything.  

And now this: an odd energon trace, an old clue, a thread leading them back home, back here, to this sinister place. It could not be a coincidence. The statistics were…astronomical.

Jetfire cut his weapons systems.  They were shorted out, useless now, anyway. He diverted that energy into movement. If he could rise, if he could get to that promontory, he could comm the Calabi Yau and Afterburner and Nosecone could do…something.   The cannons thudded onto the ground behind him, little puffs of dust getting sucked into the storm.

He pushed to his knees, awkwardly, his servos and actuators misfiring, blasted out of synch, the unstable gravity making every motion clumsy. He crawled, wings wobbling to balance.  They’d be back for him, soon. He hadn’t much time.  But if he could just contact the ship, they could rescue the others.  He didn’t matter.  The others did.  As their leader he had to do something, anything within his power.

Right now, all his ‘power’ could do was drag himself, length by length, across the barren landscape, feeling the grit scrape over his knee plates, his palms scored and raw, his entire frame battered by the particle storm, gusting and buffeting against him.  He barely dared to look up, to gauge how far the promontory was, concentrating on progress. Every bit. 

He’d need to boost his comm to maximum.  He occupied his agonized crawl with listing the systems he could shut down when he made it. When he made it. Not if.  He would, because he had to.  Mobility, he wouldn’t need any more.  Cut audio. Visual.  All external sensors.  He could take his entire system core and reroute it into comm. Maybe it would be enough.

It would be enough.  It had to.  Because if it didn’t, if his worst fears that were whipping at the back of his cortex with the same maelstrom intensity as the ions strafing his armor, were true? 

The end.  Of everything. 

He didn’t hear them approach until too late, the wind screaming over his audio masking their footfalls, the blinding lightning of the particle storm blanking his vision.  He didn’t sense them until they struck, stabbing into him with their spears, three or four or he couldn’t even count how many at once, stabbing into him.  His joint servos gave, elbows collapsing, hips falling forward, chin armor slamming into the grey ground, too stunned, too in pain, to even make a sound. 

And the ground gave beneath his falling mass, heaving and groaning as it splintered into a raw, gap-edged grin, obscene, ever-hungry, like the specter of war itself, insatiable and dark, as he tumbled over the edge and into the depths of Thunderhead Pass. Into the jaws of oblivion. Away from hope. Away from redemption.  Away from everything.

Jetfire fell into blackness.