Chapter Text
You can’t erase the poet’s fate
Not even if you try…
—Crüxshadows, “Cassandra”
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This place was his secret. It was one of the keys to his power amongst the Autobots. All, save Prime, feared his rages, but rage was not enough to gain rank and power. While rage alone could gain one the Prime’s favor, it could not attract his regard. Ambition, too, was a virtue… but one that could carry a mech only so far, as Smokescreen’s frequent beatings, demotions and punishments could attest. Here was his edge, this secret treasure that he had found in the aftermath of a city’s cleansing and hidden away far from the light of optics and stars, that had elevated him to the first among Prime’s followers.
Footsteps descended the carefully cut stairs into the absolute bowls of Iacon. There were no lifts, no stable ramps that went this deep. Only this tiny sliver of a passage, almost too narrow for the Autobot who now traversed it. The stairs wound back and forth, slick with dirty oil and cloudy acid that dripped from the world above. This far beneath the surface, it did not actually rain, but that made Cybertron’s predictably bad weather into a treacherous game of predicting the next flash flood that would come tearing through like a stampede of vicious zap ponies. And where, at the surface, once the acid had drained from the streets and towers it left them polished or oxidized but acid-free, down here, it dripped. It oozed over the surface of the crystal encrusted walls, pooling into a thick, acidic sludge that crawled over the flat spaces of the cliffs and canyons like some organic thing, biting the metal of any who dared traverse the depths.
Light was scarce. His own optics provided most of the illumination, dull red flickering and refracting back to him like a dying fire. Every so often, however, there would be the bright, clear lights of buildings long abandoned and paved over, their electrical systems still intact enough to create an audible buzz and the occasional firework of ancient lighting as he passed. In the distance there were other lights, steady blue and green and red streaks of bacteria and fungi metabolizing the used oil-sludge, acid, and metal of a Cybertron free of the fastidious decontamination procedures enforced by the mechs above.
Potentially, there was energon here, but it was unlikely. The crystals did not like being exposed to the acid from above, though paradoxically they grew on the edges of pools of it. Proper energon mines formed around ancient pools of acid that were completely encased by the metal around them, safe and protected from the weather of above. This place bore the scars, Ultra Magnus could see, of crystals that had rooted and grown on the edge of a sludgy puddle to the size of a scraplet between storms and exploded during the next fresh influx of drips.
He reached the bottom of the stairs, a vast valley of rubble. There were layers beneath this, the rubbled wedged into crushed support beams that yawed over the chasm connecting haphazard platforms of metal. It shifted dangerously. Ultra Magnus did not know how far one could travel down. All the way to the core of the planet, some said, though the scientific authorities of the Autobots all said that gravity must at some point crush the metals of the planet into a single, solid, intraversable mass and that that same gravity would crush a traveller to his base metals long before he reached that point. He was inclined to believe the scientists, most of the time, but here in the heart of this wild cathedral his ember insisted on hammering belief in those fae tales against his processor. He would have offered a prayer, but there was no gods to pray to and so he simply let out an involuntarily reverent sigh.
It echoed over the steady staccato of the dripping acid and the distant vibrations of rubble shifting, settling or falling. A single note hymn, small and insignificant against oppressive silence of wild subterranean Cybertron.
“Does this place frighten you?”
Instantly, targeting software had the intruder sighted. The dull grey mech blended seamlessly into the metallic rubble, visible now only because sharp doorwings had risen to catch the red firelight of Magnus’ optics. Fearlessly the mech’s gold optics flickered on, taking a moment, as though the wires had to be warmed they were so little used. He recognized the mech. This was no desperately neutral underworld dweller, but the very creature he had come to this misbegotten place to consult. He lowered his cannon.
“Of course not,” he hissed back. Still, the depleted Forge of Solus Prime was a comforting weight against his back. To cover his unease he pulled the energon cube he’d brought with him out of his subspace. The mech’s golden optics locked onto the fuel with a desperate, hungry look. He did not know how the mech survived the intervals between his visits, but he always came for Magnus’ offering. “Come. Kneel,” he commanded.
Optics locked onto the rich blue glow of the cube, the mech did so, crawling like an animal and occasionally leaping from one large piece of rubble to another, doorwings spread like those of a stunted seeker’s. He came close enough that Magnus could see the indulgent amusement painted over the mech’s face around those hungry optics, before he lowered himself to kneel at his feet, doorwings spread enticingly. Magnus allowed himself the pleasure of touching the vulnerable appendages, making the mech tremble. With the gold light of his optics spilling across the floor at Magnus’ feet, he could not tell if the delicate shivering was from fear or desire, but whichever it was hardly mattered to Magnus. The cube in his hand was what brought this deep dweller to him; whatever he felt now, quivering under the larger Autobot’s hand was what made him obey.
Like a cybercat seeking affection, the mech rubbed his dull red chevron against Magnus’ leg, the sharp metal leaving hairline-thick scratches in dark orange paint.
“What brings you to the basilica of the lost, the forgotten, the consigned to oblivion?” Ultra Magnus always expected the mech’s voice to be scratchy and filled with the static of disuse, but instead it was steady and almost musical. It would be pleasant, except that the mech was given to nonsensical ravings that made Magnus’ plating stand on edge. “Did you come to dance in the sound of silence, scream in prayer to the unknown depths? The Core of the Planet is angry, Her lifeblood lashes against the furthest shores, stealing diamonds from the inverted skies… you should go and appease Her with the dying gasp of the enemy stars…”
He cuffed the mech to silence. It was not this mech’s words he came for and so he did not answer. Sometimes they were useful, but more often they were nothing. Instead he placed the cube down on the rubble at his feet and watched the mech hungrily lap at the fuel. He left the mech there. He would have paced, save that the rubble shifted ominously under his bulk and so he simply stood to the side, running his optics over a piece of graffiti, long ago etched into the metal when it was new, and even a thousand vorns of acid had failed to erase its meaning. Yet Magnus was, as he always was when he returned to this place, blind to whatever eloquence it possessed. What a thousand vorns of acid had failed to accomplish, a thousand vorns of lingual drift had. The glyphs were unintelligible, refusing to give up so much as a byte of their secrets no matter how long he stared.
“It’s a prayer,” Magnus whirled, again targeting the mech who had crept up silently behind him, “to the Devourer From The Stars for ‘victory over His foes, such that He may tear their wings from the skies, cast that cursed cannon to the Earth and grind all who oppose Him beneath his tires’.”
With a snarl of the rage for which he was so well known on the surface, Magnus drew the Forge and struck. Those had been the words of Prime’s most recent tirade, while Magnus himself was subjected to both the words and fists of his Prime. He would not mocked. Not by anyone, and especially by this half-mad feral creature. He struck again, sending the mech careening across the scraps of metal. Oxide dust filled the air in his wake and the mech’s mad laughter soon followed.
The laughter brought Magnus back to himself. Without this mech, madness and all, he would be simply another body to be thrown upon the front lines, cannon fodder destined to expend his rage against the Decepticons until his ember burned out. This feral creature had given him the means to climb the ranks, the leverage with which he held his position. He could not afford to lose that in a fit of rage; he was not that short sighted.
The mech cackled again as the dust settled. “The itsy bitsy scraplet…poison in its gullet to bring down this, the most powerful of Primes, towers and temples falling in his wake…”
He lay there, dull silver against the duller blacks and greys of the rubble, gold optics off. He didn’t twitch as Magnus stomped closer, ignoring the way the rubble groaned in warning. Sparks arced from beneath crushed plating, but the mech gave no sign of pain.
“… it’s a fae tale Magnus. Dungeons and dragons and heroes with flaming swords healed by heather bindings and laying with the Witch, warded against all harm.” With a snarl, Magnus settled, straddling the mech’s chest. He needed this mech to shut up or he would not be able to help but to tear the mad, babbling thing asunder in his fury. “Which are you, Magnus? Dragon, or hero, or just one of the hundreds of random obstacles, no more than a speed bump for the Chosen?” Snarling again he ripped the cover from the mech’s interface jack behind his head and slammed his own cord home.
A scream filled the cavern. It started soft as a scraplet’s footstep and built to a crescendo that echoed off the walls, made the dust still hanging in the air tremble, threatened to vibrate the rubble from beneath them both. It filled Magnus’ audios, his mind, his world. It was a storm of sound that he could do nothing but weather, as he had so many times before.
At least the creature wasn’t talking any longer.
Golden optics spilled light from the creature’s body as it arched and writhed beneath him, something between pain and pleasure, not quite trying to escape but neither was he trying to entice his captor to touch. Still the scream built and Magnus closed the shutters over his optics, trying to protect the delicate glass from the piercing, painful note.
Finally that note faded, the creature’s body stilled, optics dimming to a dull, sullen yellow and Magnus turned his attention to getting what he’d come here for.
The Path to the Core is 7.49 degrees to the polar south, a 4.9972 degree decline for the first 9.2223 mechanomiles … lava sparks and magnetism… Magnus will/has come and he will follow the Herald to the doom of all Cybertron… All this has happened, happened, happened…
The mech had no firewalls. Magnus fell directly into his mad thoughts. They circled like cyberwolves, clawing at his own mind, trying to draw him into the dark madness that clung to the mech like used oil. With a force of will Magnus swept away the nonsensical ramblings — the mech gave a slight whimper of pain — and pushed deeper into his processor.
Here data ticked away with the precision Magnus sought. tick. tick. tick.
Data, pure and unfiltered by thought clicked around him. He knew the exact pressure he was exerting on the mech’s chest, the dual forces of pressure and gravity beneath them, the exact different in their processing power. Magnus’ mind was so much slower than his captive’s. Here, in this unconscious data analysis, he found every method by which the mech could escape his hold, as well as the decision not to. That decision had no reason, made as it had been by the swirling chaos of the conscious mind that Magnus would not analyze, but faced with a computer that knew his every weakness and how to exploit it, he could not deny that this mech chose to submit to him, was not held down by Magnus’ weight.
It was a realization as unwelcome as it was unavoidable, as it always was. With a snarl he continued with his purpose here.
Every scrap of data he had observed, that had been reported to him, he shoved into this computer. This new Decepticon, this brightly colored clone of their fallen comrade Cliffjumper had to be dealt with. The data was placidly accepted. Upload complete, the mech’s thought was for a moment so overpowering that he was drawn into the mech’s thoughts again, I have become the vessel of the data which heralds the end of days… before wrenching himself back down into the advanced tactical analysis computer that made this mech so valuable to him.
The computer hummed with its new data and it wasn’t long before plans started unfolding like the gossamer webs of circuit spiders in the connection between them. They spiraled out, branching, branching, branching until they met their unavoidable ends. This was what he’d come for. He ripped the plans from the mech’s unconscious mind before doing the same to the interface cord that connected them.
He came to himself to the sound of the mech’s giggling.
Magnus snarled in disgust and lifted himself off the ground and its filth. He had what he needed and he stalked away. He ignored the words that followed him — “Circles and cycles… this story has been told and no number of plans will change the steps of the Hero’s Journey…” — and left Prowl in the darkness of Cybertron’s underworld.
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TBC