Chapter Text
“Get down!”
You throw yourself towards the green-yellow mech in front of you, reaching out to shove him out of the way before- VSHHOOM! You cry out in alarm as viscous neon splatters across your face. The soldier, your comrade, staggering backwards a few steps before falling to the ground, headless.
Too late.
Always too late.
Reeling away, you press your back to the wreckage of a shuttle, grimacing as you bring a servo up to swipe at the splotches of blue dotting your faceplate; only managing to smear it in with the grime already filthying your arm. Anguish gripping you as your optics flit to what remains of Hangcast: a younger bot from a different squadron you’d paired up with a couple of nights prior. He’d been desperately searching for his friend when you’d found him, so you’d dragged him out of the soot and into cover, offering up and allowing him to bawl nonsense into your commlink so long as he kept quiet on the outside.
His voice had been a nice distraction from the screams and boom-shake of heavy artillery.
The shriek of jet engines startles you from your pity-party; you jolt forward, diving and rolling out of strafe range. A hail of fire raining from above, shredding your prior shelter’s lightly armored exterior like wet paper.
You don’t stop to consider what it would’ve done to you.
Pushing up onto your pedes, with nowhere else to go, you sprint into the open, doing your absolute best not to trip on bodies nor hunks of rubble; a big red figurative target raised to your spine as you gun it for the ruins of a factory some hundred or so feet away.
-Fooshh
A rogue shot streaks past your helm, heat felt in its wake.
Swerving, thrown off-balance by the close call, you nearly topple but manage to regain footing at the last possible moment, jerking up-right and continuing to scramble for cover.
Just gotta get—
a little –
Closer!
You hit the ground, limp and heavy, smoke rising from the hole scorched into your back as you lay sprawled face-down in the muck.
….
…
Awake?
You're… awake?
Not.. dead?
Something drips onto your cheek, prompting you to wipe it away, yet, nothing. Your arms don’t budge. Confused, you attempt a manual reset. It works, though it's less than helpful; both sensation and control return to your limbs, however: a restrictive pressure seems to be pinning everything below your elbow joints. You squirm to no avail. Expression scrunching in disgust as your olfactory sensors come online, the air acrid with the stench of rust.
Where are you?
Someplace under all these..
You go rigid, the only moving piece of you being the hand that warily taps and gropes at the bizarre shapes it’d been unwillingly pressed to. You feel metal, once living, pliant metal: metal that stretches and curves at angles. Derma, then lips. Your thumb strays as far as it's able to bend, dipping into a slope, cresting over smooth cheek, then scraping across a fractured, glass texture: optic, eye.
Face.
There’s a face in your hand.
Abruptly hyper-aware of all the chipped ridges and imperfect shapes that touch you. Dead, yes, dead-stiff, but touching: cold lips, broken digits, mangled limbs, frayed wiring, exposed framework, all felt. Quick to assume you’d been mistakenly tossed in with husks meant for smelting, your struggling intensifies.
The hastened splash of liquid striking your panic-stricken faceplate all your efforts earn.
You shake your helm from side to side with zeal, cricking your neck to evade the spatter, leaving it to pitter along your jawline and stream down the length of your cabling. Ick boiling up your intake at the feeling of it seeping between crevices and onto your framework. Then, as if to torment you further, another bloblet, inconsistent compared to the first’s constant, splats onto your temple, racing down to pool between the crest of your lips.
Mouth pressed thin, you try your damndest to avoid getting any foreign fluid in your systems.
You fail.
Energon, it should have been obvious.
Ultra-processed and thick, the blood of another.
You can feel it, taste it: slithering past the lost guard of your notched lips, violating the flavor sensors lining your cowering glossa, oozing through a cracked intake seal and down into your fuel tanks.
For hours, you lay there, suffering.
A third leak, because to the pit with your sanity, even less frequent than its predecessors, falls past you and onto whomever lays below. For hours, all you hear is the faint tink -stop- tap -stop- tap tap of droplets thunking against a metallic surface. Painfully aware of the lack of any other sound.
Maddening.
Had it not been for your chronometer, you’re sure in such a state of distress you could’ve been convinced days, perhaps weeks, had passed. But then something, primus be, SOMETHING, breaks the otherwise silence. You feel it before you hear it: vibrations shake the mass atop you rhythmically, bodies scraping against bodies with clattering friction. Footsteps, you realize, booming footsteps that rock the world with the weight put into each step. They come to a halt somewhere short of your predicament, complete stillness settling in their absence.
Straining to listen, astir with a myriad of cautious thoughts: were you about to be rescued; has someone picked up on your life signal among the dead and come to free you from your morbid enclosure? Were more parts to be dumped? Did an end by something other than smelting near? Preferring the ladder options, you boot your vocalizer just in case, adjoined vocoder coming online with a click-shift, ready to call out to who or what you hope to be an ally and soon salvation.
crrrre-CRUNCH
You flinch at the sound of metal being compacted.
CRASH
The impact of something heavy.
crreee-CRUNCH
The same horrid racket followed by the same tumble of something striking the ground with force.
The loop repeats: crunch, crash, crunch
The subtlest shift in pressure felt just before each crunch. Someone or.. Something’s crushing the bodies, that much is obvious, but why? Would it crush you? Reluctant to find out, you start writhing once more, waggling your servos to very little give, but give no less. Restrained, damaged, and slick with a glaze of someone else’s blood sheening your face, your resolve is one of blind determination.
With no small amount of scraping, you manage to rip an arm free, inadvertently causing a shift to occur. Displaced, the husks encasing you slide and creak, the one suspended just above slamming down onto your unsuspecting self.
Apparently,
It hadn’t been the primary source of the trinkle that’d slowly soaked you. No, it’d merely been serving as some grotesque, belated reservoir collecting seepage from above over time as- “Agh!” a slurry of electric-blue poured down onto you, entirely coating your upper-half in gore. The mock wash spilling over your frame for half a minute, at least, before diminishing. Excess color dribbling from your exterior components.
Silence.
Flailing, you shove at the dismantled bot who’d fallen atop of you, pushing them to the side just far enough to get your hand on your face. Scrubbing away violently at the somewhat congealed slush menacing your features, spitting and ‘gagging’ up the substance. Not taking notice in your distracted flurry to the sudden lack of crunching and crashing.
Until, of course, something hummed low: guttural and vicious. A leery hiss underlined by some sort of hellish baritone.
A major commotion ensues, dismembered parts clanging against one another as they’re sent piling anew, the mass quaking.
On instinct, your hand retracts and reforms, blaster pointed skyward in the dark. Thin strokes of light gradually shining down from above; reflecting off brutalized frames and gifting you with the ability to acknowledge the tarnished gray of your servo, paint muted and sickly. This discoloration puzzles and draws your attention for not even a second before the meager beams of light expand to envelope you entirely.
Optics and blaster alike racing to point in the same direction.
A draconic figure looms, silhouetted by the sun. Shadow cast over you as he leans closer, monstrous peculiarities beheld by your widened gaze.
The image is comical: you lay half-buried, eroded and damaged, aiming up at something perhaps twenty times your size. Immediately aware of the fact that you’re at the complete mercy of this thing.
With keen eyes his maw draws near. Mandibles clicking and chittering as they flex outwards at the sides; a threat to grab and pull what they can into the rows of teeth that lay between them.
Click
…..
Click
"Slag."
It seems your arm has suffered sufficient internal damage, rendering your blast converter useless.
So basically, you’re fucked.
With a hiss, his jaw peels apart, serrated tongue tittering over the jagged tops of his lower denta. The beast offended, aware of what you’d just tried and failed to pull. He coils, then lunges, mouth agape. You’re unable to do little but watch helplessly as he closes in on your captive frame.
Mandibles scrape across your front, pulling away just as quickly as they make contact with your torso.
crr-CRUNCH
The leaking body once atop you now absent.
He chews, crushing the deceased between his teeth and tilting his helm back, draining what liquids remain. Blood-drinker: the creature not only tears and grinds with ease but also sustains himself off the energon of others.
Predator.
In a rush, you shimmy the rest of your limbs loose, able to kick and push out from your prison now that there isn’t a mountain of dead entombing you. A loud crash, his meal finished, shredded remnants thrown to the wayside. He moves to encroach upon your personal space once more, neck snaking his horned mantle into the shallow crevice you occupied. Sending a prayer to the wind, you transform your opposing servo into blaster shape, aim unsteady.
WWWH-SCHOO
The giant shrieks, left optic sparking as he withdraws.
Seizing opportunity, you scale your way to freedom and jump, tripping and tumbling down the remaining mound of corpses. Scuttling to your feet once you collide with land, barely dodging a swiping foreclaw. Sprinting forth, the terrain ahead cracked and protruding with crashed transports and war-born craters. A graveyard of rot that stretches beyond your comprehension; the dirt you trod in dire haste.
A roar, petrifying in all its fury, rattles your struts. The beast’s tail, whip-like and pronged with many, many nasty barbs, clubs you hard in the back, sending you somersaulting with the force of its impact. You skid and roll several meters, crashing into a twisted mess of shrapnel with a thud. Strident footsteps fast approaching, the short distance gained between the two of you intended to be closed. The ground trembling in his wake. You struggle for footing, darting up and to the side once you find it. Though you don’t make it far before a ginormous claw bats you backwards, flipping you sideways.
Landing in an awkward sprawl of limbs against one of many decrepit warships, having rammed it headfirst, a neon splotch trailing down from where you’d struck it and to your battered shell. Blood pooling at your front, gushing from the gruesome rend he’d carved into your body.
You attempt to lift yourself, joints threatening to buckle beneath you, arms shaking from the mere effort. Vision spinning, you blurrily search for a route of escape.
The predator stalks nearby, waiting on your next move so he may cut you short.
You catch sight of an opening torn into the very craft you’d dented.
His eye tracks yours.
A pause, tension, the both of registering this development. Then, without further warning, you muster what strength remains within you and burst into action: kicking off dust, debris sent flying, clawing the ground in your spontaneous half-crawl, bounding forward with dubious grace. An irate screech bruising your audial receptors. Tucking and diving towards the burrow of ripped edges and exposed, dangling wires, with less than micro-cycles to spare.
A horribly loud scraping noise follows you in, deep marks hacked into the already marred ship’s surface.
Hooked claws slamming down and blocking your entry point.
With a quick look to evaluate your surroundings, you realize that though you’ve presumably evaded his reach, you’ve also effectively trapped yourself. Cornered into a caved-in and compressed tunnel. Grasping at your lacerations, you drag yourself as far back as possible until the passage becomes too tight to proceed further. The beast digs at your new hiding spot all the while, attempting to widen the trench so he can reach in and drag you out. His lashes at solid rock and tugs on the armored vessel proving to be time-consuming and frustrating. Anger and impatience evident in his rolling growl.
Tch-ch-ou-too-ch
You jerk at the unexpected sound of a transformation.
“Coward!” seethes an unfamiliar voice, “You dare halve my vision then seek shelter from the consequences?!” The speaker’s hulking frame comes into view as he kneels, having to bend until his chest nearly kisses the ground to peer into the ditch with an enraged look. His singular sunset optic burning with malice.
“Who.. are you?” you pry meekly, clinging to the waking world by strands of life.
“ I am Predaking, the first and the last of the great predacon race you will ever bear witness to! ” a promise, not a threat.
“Oh..” you mouth dumbly, the effects of blood loss setting in at a rapid pace “Nice to meet you.” You’d also hit your head very hard on a solid surface just recently.
Taken aback by the sudden pleasantry, ‘nice to meet you’ rings through his processor once, twice; surely, he’d heard wrong “..What?!”
Your optics flicker offline, systems shutting down one by one. Currently unable to grasp the absurdity of greeting your assailant as though he were a pleasant fellow you’d just met on a daily jaunt.
“S’nice to meet you.” you slur.
His angular face pinches with confusion and ire “Come out at once!”
“M, can’t.”
“And why’s that?!”
“Can’t feel my.. Legs.” your left stabilizer twitches, the most you can manage, a chill dulling your senses “Think i’m dying,,” you squint as if it would help with choosing your words “Again.”
“As deserved!”
“Probably.” you concede without protest. An admission one would normally elaborate on, though as the astro-cycles tick by it becomes clear you are, in-fact, not going to be spilling any deathbed confession. This only seems to irritate him more, somehow.
“And?!”
“..And..?” you echo.
“And, is that IT?! You’ve arisen from the dead, ruined my sight, managed to evade me, and now you’ve resigned yourself to perishing without further comment?! Without an explanation as to WHY?!”
"What do you.. uh, expect me to-"
"I expect you to tell me WHY," he points at his face "Corpse, why you've done this! Is this some cruel, otherworldly joke I fail to comprehend?!"
A sharp pang slices through your aching helm "Can.. Can you stop shouting? it-"
"EXPLAIN YOURSELF."
You cringe at his volume “Ah.. kay- just,” you wrestle for thought, falling short on an explanation. You lose yourself within your mind, incoherent threads of code failing to warn you of impending stasis lock.
“Well?”
“I don’ know..”
He sneers, though his anger begins to ebb into exasperation. It’s evident you’re teetering on your last 'breath’. Aggressor or not, he knows it to be pointless to continue wasting his energy riled up over your indiscretion when it’d soon be paid for in full. That doesn't mean he forgives you.
“I donn’t.. Know why I’m.. M.. Alive right now. But, you.. Werre going to eat.. Me..?”
The sigh he heaves is a hearty gust from his vents.
“You look as appetizing as a rusted cog.” he snarks, “If I had the intent to do such, I wouldn’t have freed you. I’d have chewed the path to you and those below you at my leisure as I would’ve hadn’t I heard your sputtering.”
“Ah.. well, your jusst gonna’ hav.. To.. understand.. Tend to react.. Poor..ly when con-front-ed with.. Huge, bloodd, gnash, fangs in face….” your vocoder has begun to warble the pitch of your words “but.. Am.. I’m.. M, ssorry forr miss-un-underrsstanding.”
He grinds his jaw, sitting up and looking away “Your apology does nothing to mend my injury.”
“I kno..wW.. Juss, fig-urred we… werre even.. Sin..ce i’M not gonna’ bee ali..ve forr longer.. Hope nott.. Hu-urrts.. Still.. Don’ wannaa di.. Slow..ly.”
This discussion is beneath him, he should leave.
“...”
“...”
“Sti..lll… th-errre?”
“ ...yes.”
“...”
“Tha-nnn-k… you.”
"..."
“Th.. wrrrsst thhh-inng isss to.. Die.. al-o-nne.. You.. knnn..o?”
"I... yes, I suppose."
“...”
“...”
He finds himself waiting for you to continue, beginning to dread the familiarity of silence.
Putting aside his pride, if only for a moment, he asks: “Are you… awake, Corpse?”
"..."
He leans in and spies your frame warily. The excitement and reactionary emotions brought about by confrontation die away, allowing rationale and contemplation to settle in. Thinking back, switching the perspective, replaying events in his head, he can see how the way things had gone were perhaps, partially, his fault. He growls in response to the notion, stubborn to take the blame, but the longer he stares, taking in the details of your frame, the more reasoning eats at him. Reasoning then shame. He had dug you out with the initial intent to set you free, shocked to have heard a voice after so long, especially one that had seemed to come from a heap of the dead.
The moment he'd taken note of your petrified and defensive stance he should've backed off and given you the space to calm down, to realize he wasn't- well, he didn't like considering himself not a threat, but to realize he wasn't an active threat. However, his pride had blinded him, having wanted to assert that your little gun wouldn't be nearly enough to scare him away. He'd plucked the cadaver draped over you as a demonstration as such, only for the display to backfire on him when instead of disarming yourself and surrendering to his dominance, you'd shot him in the face. The audacity and disrespect of the act having enraged him far beyond what any speck of pain ever could.
And then you'd ran.
Much smaller than he and- diseased-? He scrutinizes the lifeless gray of your plating flecked with ghosts of paled coloration; unmoving, if not for the blood that drenched your top half, he could easily mistake you for any of the long-since perished lying about. Was it camouflage-? Regardless, you'd not stood a chance, amendments were due. He sighs, irritated once more. Pressing his shoulder to the wrecked craft with no miniscule amount of begrudging, reaching for you blindly, he feels about until his claws tap at the heel of a pede.
...
..