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Blitzwing awoke to a single, burning ring of light staring him in the face. It irised open and shut, refocusing itself as Blitzwing’s systems slowly came online. Below the ring a long horizontal line split one slab of metal from another, and two smaller optics on either side of it blinked likewise at him.
“You awaken!” the metal boomed, making Blitzwing’s ascendance to conscious jump exponentially.
“I do,” said Blitzwing, staring into what he presumed was the primary optical sensor of what he presumed to be a face.
“Good!”
“Yes.”
The mech hesitated, and then ventured a softer “Good.” Softer was still a few levels about a normal person’s conversation level, unfortunately. He stepped back, revealing himself to indeed be an autonomous body rather than a sentient traffic camera. Huge, as well—it was rare for Blitzwing to find mechs who matched his size outside of Prussarus. And there weren’t many mechs in Prussarus these days.
With conversation options exhausted, Blitzwing sat up. Long beams of yellow light stretched down from the ceiling to the floor, surrounding them in what appeared to be a prison cell. Against the wall a two-wheeled mech had curled up in vehicle mode and appeared to still be passed out. Its paint was scuffed and its headlight bashed in.
“Are we…prisoners?”
“We are all prisoners of hideous Autobot oppression!”
“Also you got overenergized and beat up half a pub,” said a mech standing on the other side of the bars. He was of average Autobot size, which meant he was just shy of Blitzwing’s shoulder. A spoiler flared from behind his back, painted with garish blue streaks reminiscent of lightning. Likely compensating for something.
Blitzwing put a hand to his head, and found paint flecks coming away in his fingers. “I did? I don’t remember.”
“I’m sure you don’t.”
“I…I was in the bar, yes, but I didn’t drink.”
“Then what the heck were you doing in a bar?”
“Sitting down.” Because the street was too fast-moving and noisy, and the alleyways too dirty, and the hotels too expensive, and anywhere else you’d be picked up for loitering. The bar, at the very least, had been clean and contained chairs. It was a slow evening, he recalled, but not so slow that he couldn’t hide in the back without ordering. “I did not drink, and I did not get into any fights.”
“We have five guys and a bouncer who say differently, and so do their dents. They say someone lobbed some kind of nasty words and you flipped out.”
“I…did I?” He had been sitting in the back of the room, keeping to himself, and someone had said…something. Blitzwing recalled the sound of words but not of their meaning. Then he recalled red, like flames behind smoke. Then nothing.
“Autobot propaganda!” shouted the loud one, throwing one fist to the ceiling. “You are innocent, I am sure of it!” His fingers had been replaced by a set of pincers, the hands of a mech who favored a strong punch over delicate, easily broken digits. You didn’t see those on Autobots very much. Even their soldiers liked to maintain the pretense of being simple energon farmers and spaceship craftspeople, a conceit easily exploited by more sensible fighters. Blitzwing wondered if his cellmate was also a former soldier, or just a local lunatic.
“Uh-huh, I’m sure the pub’s security camera has some really strong political preferences.” The guard looked to Blitzwing and jerked his thumb at the loud one. “Ignore the big guy. Every time Megatron gives a speech or does a fight or polishes his feet Wingnut here is out on the street preaching the gospel of glorious Megatron, ranting on his street corner until someone makes a noise complaint. Then we cart him off, he cools his heels for a bit, and his manager shows up to bail him out. Speaking of bail…” The mech rubbed his fingers together. “You did a lot of damage last night. You’ll need to pay for that, and for the trouble we had wrestling you in here.”
“More evidence of corruption in the system! The authorities are easily bribed and criminals are allowed to roam free!”
“Would you rather we not take bribes and lock you up for good?”
The paradox seemed to confuse Wingnut and he fell mercifully silent.
Blitzwing offered a shrug. “I don’t have any money. It was why I wasn’t drinking.”
“Well, then.” The guard leaned in towards the bars, just far enough away that Wingnut couldn’t reach through to grab him. “Then we’re going to have a lot of time to get to know each other, won’t we?”
It was ironic, thought Blitzwing as the guard strutted out of the room. All the bother of surviving a war and dodging Autobot patrols sent to sweep up the survivors, and he was going to be locked away for the crime of being broke.
“Those who preach the truth should not be censored!” roared Wingnut, who had finally found a workaround in the guard’s logic bomb.
“They seem to be less censoring you and more moving your preaching location. Who is Megatron?”
It turned out to be a bad question.
Megatron, apparently, was the leader of the Decepticon political faction, which had split from the Destron faction over a matter of “planetary defense strategy”, which translated to arguing over whether to enable Cybertron to transform into a giant armed robot. Megatron had taken over from the “weak and capitulating” Megazarak and was currently insisting that the Decepticons violently detach themselves from the decadent, oppressive Autobot regime. Blitzwing could see why he wasn’t very popular.
Also Megatron was handsome, charismatic, brilliant, and right about just about everything. Trying to pick apart reality from Wingnut’s overblown rhetoric was difficult, but it gave Blitzwing something to focus on besides his impending imprisonment. He nodded and made a few grunts when Wingnut gave him expectant looks, but those were rare. The loud mech seemed in a world of his own. The motorcycle in the corner eventually woke up, blinked its headlights a few times, and then pretended to fall back asleep to avoid getting pulled into the discussion.
Wingnut's monologue was finally cut off by the return of the guard. Following behind him was a mech who nearly challenged Wingnut for size and outclassed him in brightness, with green and gold highlighting her thick face and wheel wells. Her mouth was a rigid grill lined in red, and her optics blazed with disapproval.
“The Megatron Power Hour is over, loudmouth,” said the guard. “Your smarter half is here.”
The smarter half stepped to the bars, hands behind her back.
“Lugnut.” She stared the large optic and its four smaller brothers down and the huge mech’s gaze slowly lowered in shame. “The money’s been transferred," she said, sounding bored with the situation. Her voice was lower-pitched than most female-identifying mechs, and her pronunciation of consonants more emphatic than that of the locals. "Let the idiot out of his cage.”
Blitzwing raised his hand to wave goodbye to the mech who was not actually called Wingnut (Autobots had foolish names, why shouldn’t it be?), and instead Lugnut grabbed him by the wrist to drag him to his feet.
“What of this one? They’re going to shut him away simply for flouting their societal norms, for refusing to pay into the graft that strangles this city in its greasy servos! We cannot let this injustice stand!”
The smarter half glared at the both of them, as Blitzwing gave a helpless shrug. “You are on thin enough ice as it is, I am not going to buy off the entire box of whatever grime the authorities scraped out from under the bar table this time.”
Lugnut refused to let Blitzwing’s wrist go and for lack of anywhere else to be in the cell Blitzwing let himself be held. The loud mech’s optics irised smaller and his shoulders stooped, all but whimpering like a hungry bumblepuppy. The smarter half turned her eyes on Blitzwing and looked him over, as if assessing his market value. Finally, she sighed.
“I’ll give you another fifty for the spare.”
“Seventy-five.”
“Fifty, or next time I leave you Lugnut for two weeks.”
“Fine. Not like I was getting anything out of this guy anyway.” The guard opened the door and Blitzwing let Lugnut tow him out of the police station.
It was bright outside, the morning sun beaming down through the smog clouds hovering on the tops of the tallest buildings. Blitzwing’s own haze was starting to lift, and the aching around the shoddy welding on his leg was becoming keener. He would need to clean the injuries out again soon before rust set in or the exposed wires became damaged beyond repair.
“You didn’t pay, or you couldn’t?” asked the smarter half.
“Couldn’t.” Blitzwing looked down the street, trying to get his bearings. He needed to update his GPS, it was hard without access to the usual satellites. Not that it entirely mattered if he didn’t pick a direction at random and start walking.
“I didn’t think so. You’re from Prussarus. Your bank account stopped existing entirely about a week ago, didn’t it? Along with the bank itself?”
“I—”
“You’re hiding your accent and weaponry, and you’ve scraped off your insignia, but there’s not much you can do about your build, or those sloppy field repairs. I’ll guess you did those yourself. Even if you had money to pay a proper medic, you wouldn’t want to explain where you got your wounds in the first place.”
Lugnut was squirming, shifting from foot to foot as if something irritating was crawling around underneath his plating. The green mech must have quite a hold on Lugnut if she could keep him from blurting out whatever notion had gotten into his head. Her optics flicked to him, then back to Blitzwing, again with that reassessing merchant’s gaze.
“Prussarus soldiers have a reputation for being good. You can fight, and you can get back up after taking a few hard hits?”
“Yes. Though it is not a skill in high demand right now.”
“It is for the Kaon Krusher. The idiot starts on the circuit in three weeks. He could use a sparring partner and I could use an assistant. If you can take a punch and fill out travel insurance forms, we can work out a deal.”
Blitzwing, more used to reading mechs without faces than the more expressive Autobots, could see the way Lugnut’s odd optics lit up with joy.
“And who is the Kaon Crusher?"
“Lugnut. I didn’t name him that. His fans are nearly as crazy as he is.” The smarter half transformed, as did her larger counterpart. Both of their altmodes were bulky, wide vehicles. Lugnut had eight wheels with a low-slung drive train and a massive back end, she had a more elegant but still powerful six. “But it’s snappy and looks good on our advertisements.”
Blitzwing followed suit, making sure his missile launchers remained carefully folded inside his chassis. He still wasn’t sure what was happening, or where the mech was going with this, but his options were limited. “Lugnut did not tell me very much about himself. We mostly spoke about Megatron.”
“By which you mean he spoke, you listened.” The smarter half chuckled. “Lugnut is a professional gladiator, currently in the Red Giant Division. I’m his manager. I handle his travel logistics, his training, and our corporate sponsorship. And the occasional jail bribe.”
“Our slavish devotion to selfish corporations is holding us back,” Lugnut mumbled.
“Which is why we don’t let you preach in the arena. It’s my job to think and your job to punch.”
“Yes, sir.”
They began to drive, Lugnut in front and the smarter half nudging Blitzwing from behind. “What’s your name, empty bank account?”
“Blitzwing.”
“I'm Strika. Your first job is to go to Tungsten Carbide on the west side and pick up a flatbed of supplies. It should already be packed, and I will let him know that you will be coming for it.” She transmitted him the coordinates, as well as the coordinates of what Blitzwing presumed to be their base of operations. “Understand? When you’re back we’ll discuss contracts and payment for your services.”
“I—yes, I understand. Thank you.”
“Be worth it.” Strika gave him a final nudge to send him on his way and Blitzwing turned off onto a larger street, merging with traffic as he tried to figure out what exactly had just gone down. She gave orders like a general, and he was used to obeying generals.
“Your generosity towards the needy is staggering,” said Lugnut with pride, before Strika gave him a hard sideswipe that sent him slamming into the guard rail.
“It is not generosity, it is a test. We just gave him access to a high quantity of expensive training gear with no accountability. If he returns, then we may be able to do something. If he does not, then you will have learned a valuable lesson with a reduced allowance.”
“I believe in him," Lugnut pronounced, raising up slightly on his wheels in pride.
“You are a gladiator. You are here to believe you will win at any costs. I am your public relations and legal manager. I believe in the inherent selfishness of Transformer nature.” Another hard nudge forced Lugnut in the direction of home. “We will see who emerges victorious."
()()()()()()
Blitzwing did return, quiet and obedient with the hooks of the flatbed harness digging hard into his plating. Paint was flaking off his already battered sides as he pulled the supplies through the gaping door of the Kaon Krusher's garage.
Strika and Lugnut's home was larger than many of the Autobot residences, likely accommodating for the pair’s bulk. Their first floor was a training room whose walls had more reinforcement than some of the barracks Blitzwing had lived in, and cannons which shot flame and flares to disrupt him during battle. It was a pale shadow of the facilities where Blitzwing used to put his troops through their paces, but for a single mech it felt like overkill.
Flickering holo-posters hung from the walls of the living area just beyond the training room. Some were publicity shots of Lugnut standing triumphant over unnamed enemies, his name and title circling above his head. Others, set on a loop, were of a grey and silver mech gesticulating during a silent speech. The glorious Megatron, Blitzwing presumed.
Lugnut looked smug as Blitzwing entered with the first of the crates, giving Strika a gentle punch as if he’d won some sort of bet. Strika ignored him entirely.
“You’ll be taking the attic,” she said, pointing upward. “Fuel is in the first floor tank, but don’t drink anything in the green barrels. It’ll turn your spark into a temporary white dwarf, and besides that it’s expensive. When you have finished stacking the crates in the gym you will come to my study and fill out your contract.” She gave out quick and efficient, with no expectation that Blitzwing would refuse.
“I am not sure it will be legally binding, given my current status,” Blitzwing said, looking around at the garish room with a measure of caution. His strategy thus far was to pretend that he didn't exist in the first place, and it had been a lie slowly slipping into truth.
“Legal or not, I like to have terms of an agreement where I can see them.”
She slipped the contract in front of him the moment after she handed him a large barrel of energon. It was the largest and freshest barrel he’d had since Prussarus and Blitzwing mentally commended her on her bargaining skills. He overrode his training’s urge to ration it for later, assuming that Strika would see it as rudeness, and guzzled the entire container in moments.
“I do like to see a healthy appetite,” Strika noted. Blitzwing drained the last dregs and picked up the datapad, eyes skimming over the fine print. He had no idea if the terms were fair or not, or had any expectation that he would be able to bargain for better ones.
But this meant not only food and shelter, but a job that gave him an excuse to be in the city. Blitzwing's systems, flush with the first full tank of fuel they'd had since he'd started pillaging nearly-empty cubes from dumpsters, were beginning to tingle.
Strika's finger tapped on the top of the document. “Twenty thousand credits a month to start with, minus the cost of fuel and board. We will cover 50% of all repairs incurred directly from working with Lugnut, the rest will be your own damned fault.” She'd filled in his name in the relevant places, with “N/A” in the blanks designated for his registration numbers and her own address for his place of residence.
“I accept.” Blitzwing pressed his finger to the bottom of the contract, his energy signature leaving a bright residue upon the touchpad. Lugnut clapped him on the shoulder, nearly sending him flying out of this chair.
“Welcome to Team Kaon!”
()()()()()()
“He’s too calm. It isn’t natural.” Strika said later in the evening, when Blitzwing had gone upstairs to settle into the narrow-walled attic. She was going through a catalogue, comparing prices on paint that came in Lugnut’s signature colors of gold and grey but wouldn’t chip under pressure. Usually Strika would consider silence a virtue in a contractor, given that she had to put up with Lugnut all day, but Blitzwing had barely said anything unless he was directly spoken to. No questions, no concerns, just moving boxes from A to B to C until he was told to stop.
Lugnut was mopping the garage floor as penance for his latest arrest. “He has the composure of a true warrior,” he said, head still in the clouds. “I’m sure he was a great tactician.”
“He was a great tactician, if he was anything of note. Someone that cold doesn’t get into bar fights over a few slurs. Someone that cold shouldn’t be a soldier in the first place. There’s some glitched lines of code going on in that mech’s head.” Strika swirled her finger over the catalogue's holographic displays, altering the ratios of color on their model body and evaluating the change in cost.
“He fought the Autobots,” said Lugnut, his thick voice almost a whine as he clutched the mop between his pincers. “He stood up to cruel oppression.”
Strika looked up from the catalogue. “Who said we were kicking him to the curb? He puts up with you, and he isn’t the sort of gold-plated weakling who can only handle violence when he’s got a proxy doing it for him. It’s refreshing. The dead-opticed thousand yard stare we can work on.”
It just made her uneasy about what would happen when the other servo dropped.
()()()()()()
Blitzwing awoke to the sound of loud music and crashing metal that made the floor below him vibrate. Whatever the pair were playing over the downstairs speakers made tinkling crystals into a pounding roar and the hiss of steam through flutes into the sound of a rainstorm.
After refueling, and tucking a second cube under his berth, he went downstairs to receive the day's orders. Lugnut was in the gym, dodging the swift missiles launched from a cannon on the ceiling. Strika was watching with her arms folded, occasionally calling out suggestions or insults. All were answered with a resounding “Yes, sir!” as Lugnut sped up his footwork.
Blitzwing had never seen an official gladiatorial match. Prussarus was a city of warriors, one hardly needed to pay a high fee to see people fight. There been sparring, of course, and theatrical productions, but those were far more choreographed. Lugnut’s movements seemed crude, expending far too much energy on any given strike.
He watched, hands behind his back until Lugnut took a blow that left him flat on his back. “You are leaving your face unguarded," he said quietly.
Lugnut threw his arms up in the air triumphantly. “My face can handle all the power my feeble opponents can deal out!”
“You have been on the circuit for some time, yes? Wearing the same chassis?”
“Yes!” The thick arms wiggled above Lugnut's prone body, reminding Blitzwing of a titanium moosebot flipped onto his back.
“Then they will know what to expect. In hand to hand combat optics and throats are frequent targets, due to the increased pain sensitivity in that area. They will probably be trained to attack them no matter who they are actually up against. Guard your face more thoroughly and you will encourage that instinct, despite what they know of your personal style. Then you may use that expectation against them.”
“You have a warrior’s spark!” cried Lugnut in the jubilation of stating the obvious. He heaved himself upward and landed on his feet with a hard thump that was muted by the padded floor.
“And more importantly, a warrior's training.” Strika pushed himself away from the wall and approached Blitzwing, her arms still folded. “We have recordings of last year’s battles, and of the mechs who will be participating in the coming season. If you watch them, can you make tactical suggestions?”
“It is possible.”
“Then you have a new duty. Lugnut's victories are my business, and in turn they are your business. An alternate viewpoint might give us an edge over last year's failures."
()()()()()()
Strika kept Blitzwing busy but she was not a cruel taskmaster to him. It was a different story with Lugnut, who she drove to the limits of his systems’ endurance and left for Blitzwing to scrape off the floor. Lugnut never complained and Blitzwing occasionally caught him staring up from the floor at his manager with dizzy adoration. Their arrangement was not one he could entirely get his head around.
Contrary to Lugnut’s expectations Blitzwing was no lofty tactician, but he did know how to evaluate a soldier. He watched not only Lugnut’s older battles but those of his foes-to-be, taking into account that their management teams would be watching even more obsessively.
Two days before they left the city Strika stopped Blitzwing as he prepping the training room for the day’s activity.
“No work today, Blitzwing. Today we are going to the salon.”
Blitzwing looked up from scrubbing oil off the floor. Strika had developed a strange habit of looking uncomfortable when he did not comment on an unusual situation, so he added in a “Why are we going to a salon?”.
“Because every aspect of the gladiatorial matches will be crawling with camera bots. You are a member of our team now, and we cannot have our team looking like it lives in the bottom of a scrap heap next to a toxic waste dump.
“Our presentation must be regal!” came a loud proclamation from the next room.
“Thank you, Lugnut.”
()()()()()()
“Welcome to Antilla Spa! Do you have an appointment?”
Blitzwing let Strika check them in. She loomed even more impressively than usual over mechs designed for the lithe, delicate beauty that was the current ideal among the Autobot populace. Lugnut was led off to a side area by an entire team of mechs with slim faces and arms that were deceptively strong. He imagined a lot of pressure washers were going to be invoked in the next few hours.
“Hi, I’m Seascape and I’ll be making you beautiful today!” said a chipper mech somewhere in the vicinity of Blitzwing’s knee. She was painted with swirls of soft green and delicate blue, curling in spirals around her tiny wheel wells. “Are there any—”
Strika interrupted Seascape with a list of requirements that she claimed as “his preferences.” Blitzwing’s colors would match Lugnut’s, his face would be dark but his helm bright, the rough patch welds will be removed and his plating returned to perfect smoothness. She was advised that repairs would cost slightly more, and agreed upon payment for a package deal. The bright smiles never ceased until Seascape led him away to a private booth.
“Do you…need any help?” she whispered, looking around for eavesdroppers.
“Help with what?”
She gestured at the patch welds with a look of unclear concern. Strika had done what she could to repair Blitzwing’s field repairs with the house medical kit, but it was still far from a professional job. “Is someone hurting you? There are places you can go for that. You don’t have to be alone.”
“I—no. I work with a gladiator. It is hazardous.” Technically someone was hurting him, but Lugnut knew the difference between sparring and slaughtering. “I do not require help.”
“Of course, sir.” The smile returned as she began disabling his pain sensors below the knee before lifting a scalpel to cut away the damaged circuitry. There were no further commentaries on his condition, just a line of cheerful prattle as an attempt to cover her earlier overstepping of boundaries.
Her work indicated previous medic training, which brought up the question of what she was doing as a beautician. Blitzwing monitored her every move as she realigned misplaced wires and reinforced scorched plating. When she finished with his scraped and battered calf he could feel new sensitivity creeping into sensors previously demolished beyond the capabilities of his self-repair. With her fingers so deep into him a false move could disable an entire portion of his body but she did not make a single error.
“You have such a unique hydraulic system, it’s very efficient!” she said with perky glee, finally sealing his leg shut so carefully that he could barely see the seams.
“It is a specialized system.”
“For a very special mech!” Ego buffing seemed to be included as part of the package deal. She rubbed his shoulders (having to get up on a stepladder to do so) and fetched the paint sprayer, carefully swirling it to make sure the paint wouldn’t congeal around the nozzle. Once the topcoat was finished she filled in the details with increasingly tiny sprayers and brushes. Blitzwing barely recognized himself when she finally rolled over a full length mirror. Even his guns had been decorated, making them pass for cosmetic augmentations that only resembled artillery via strange coincidence.
When he emerged from his cleansing ritual Lugnut was still undergoing operations, an entire team of beauticians crawling over him like antdroids on a pile of cubes. Every speck of dust had been cleaned out from Lugnut's joints, every glob of dried oil scrubbed from his knees and pincers. For once in his career he seemed utterly relaxed. Or possibly asleep. He resembled the decadent Primes he so often spoke out against, though Blitzwing was sure he’d find some justification for his pampering if it were mentioned to him. Strika was beside him reading a trade magazine on her datapad, matching Lugnut in gleaming metallic grey and smelting-pit gold.
“I do not entirely understand this,” Blitzwing said as he sat down beside her, watching thick bands of black and yellow be painted around Lugnut’s bulging wrists.
“Combat is Lugnut’s profession but advertising pays the rent.” Strika flicked to another page. “The more popular he gets, the more cleaning companies want the Kaon Crusher to say how hard their products can punch tough stains. His political stances put some people off, but others find the controversy a selling point. As the manager I must also appear camera-friendly, to talk him up and convince the advertisers that they should favor us over Buzzclaw or Hydraulex.”
“Do his fans know about these machinations?”
“They pretend they don’t. It is a massive act, just as they can be so passionate about the violence while letting their leaders indoctrinate them into thinking that only they are the enlightened machines that have risen above base selfishness and aggression.” Strika laughed. “Look at me, I’m talking like Lugnut now. He is a bad influence.”
“But he is not wrong, is he? About the Autobots?”
“It doesn’t matter.” The spa related relaxation was beginning to wear off, and Strika's shoulders were tensing again. “What Megatron is doing, it will not last. He will fall, someone else will rise, and it is all idle talk. People do not spontaneously rise up when they can be comfortable in their oppression.”
“But they do.”
Strika looked at him, up and down, the gleaming warrior with his guns turned to ornaments and his war scars scraped away. Blitzwing waited for her to tell him ‘but you failed’. He felt a heat bubbling up in his throat, untouchable and undefined, a strange impulse to lash out with no anger behind the desire.
“They do, at that,” said Strika, and she returned to her magazine as the heat inside him fizzled out. Blitzwing flexed the hand that wished to strike her, looking at it in silent contemplation, and then let the matter slip from his mind.
()()()()()()
The first stop on the gladiator circuit was the Jekka Amphitheatre. It was the size of a small fortress, and about as strongly reinforced. The seats lining the sides rose up as high as the inner walls of Prussarus, and were so close together that a mech of Lugnut's size would have to hunch with his legs in vehicle mode in order to fit. The walls of the arena below flickered with advertisement banners, while the floor was scattered with traps and hazards. Certain panels were electrified, carved into sharp spikes, or lined with liquid nitrogen pumps to line the floor in slick ice. Flamethrowers stood hunched like gargoyles at the rim. At one end was a large missile launcher, the big brother of what Lugnut had been dueling with back at the garage. Hollow commercialism and false hype, surrounding very real danger for no meaningful gain. One could see why Lugnut complained.
Strika was lighthearted in front of the cameras and a drill sergeant in the moments when they could get away from them. Lugnut mugged for the public, his booming voice finally an asset rather than an annoyance as he proclaimed his inevitable victory. When Lugnut encountered one of his rivals, a hulking horned brute going by Deathmask, in the hallway outside the arena there was a great deal of posturing but no physical attacks—it was theater, and the tiny manager behind his huge moneymaker seemed to be far more malevolent towards Team Kaon than the gladiator himself. All for the fans. It was war for television, war for the fun of a race who had never known what it was to truly fight.
Blitzwing kept to his role as obedient worker drone, rubbing off Lugnut’s smudges and hauling around crates full of weaponry and projectiles. He welded up signs along the edges by the door that featured Lugnut's enthusiastic fist punching through a slab of metal, adjusting them edge to edge with the promotional shots of the other competitors.
It was not until after Lugnut was sent out onto the arena floor to preen and shout before the crowd that Blitzwing caught the slight flicker of worry in Strika's optics. It was not common for mechs to die in the arena, she'd told him, no one wanted to waste endless time and money on something that might be snuffed out in a single evening. But the risks were there.
As they took the lower seats accorded to staff and special guests, offering more leg room and brackets for oil barrels, Strika switched on the small camera she'd attached to her shoulder. It was programmed to focus completely on Lugnut, providing a more useful analysis of Lugnut's triumphs and flaws than the media's fickle insistence on showing both participants in the match with occasional cuts to the crowd itself.
“Welcome, welcome! Welcome to the oil bath you've been waiting for, welcome to the slaughter!” Strika drummed her fingers in impatience as the booming announcer went through his long spiel to pump up the crowd. Blitzwing sat politely in place, hands folded over his knees while mechs screamed their vocalizers out.
“Are. You. Ready?”
The crowd roared like the shrieks of collapsing buildings, engines revving.
“Then get your servos clenched for Lugnut versuuuuus Headcannon!”
Lugnut burst out of his gate on the south side of the arena, arms raised. Across the field from him charged a blue-gray mech with massive missile launchers balanced on each shoulder, shifting quickly from an agile four-wheeler to scampering on his thick hands and feet around the edges of the arena rim. Strika rose to her feet and shook her fists, adding her deep voice to the chaos that screamed for oil and death and brutality. Blitzwing stayed passively in his seat with his hands folded until she hauled him up to stand beside him.
“Are you at the license registration office? Get your voice going! You are Team Kaon!”
“Get him, Lugnut. Ruin him,” said Blitzwing, his voice flat and inaudible beneath the cacophony. Below them Lugnut slammed into his enemy, pincers trying to grapple as a buzzsaw scraped at the edges of his face. Headcannon struggled to angle one of his cannons against Lugnut's torso. Lugnut twisted and threw him just at the moment that one of them went off and sent a massive missile exploding against one of the flamethrowers, scattering explosive fluid across the floor. A cheer went up as Lugnut swung Headcannon into the flames, his own shouts lost to everyone but the camera.
Strika hit Blitzwing in the shoulder. “More passion! He is your champion, put your spark into it! Kill, kill!”
Blitzwing raised his voice, struggling to fake enthusiasm for this pointless carnage. “Kill. Kill! Kill—” There was heat in the back of his throat, sending his voice fiercer. “Kill him, Lugnut! Tear him apart!” The sound of the crowd filled his mind, loud and hot, screams of anger mixed with screams of joy and horror. He saw red, like flares behind smoke. Then there was nothing.
()()()()()()
Blitzwing came to on the bench inside Lugnut’s locker room. Hard fingers were holding him down by the wrists and one knee was across his legs. The speaker on the ceiling was announcing the next match (Rock-and-Rule vs Shadowbolt) as Strika loomed over him.
“Blitzwing? Are you back?” Her voice was terse, quiet like orders in the morning before a battle.
Blitzwing's monocle irised open and closed, fingers curling slowly. “I…I’m sorry, I must have gotten disoriented by the noise…is everything all right? Is Lugnut all right?” Parts of him were sore that had not been sore previously. Had he fallen?
“He is fine. You are not. Listen, say nothing to him when he comes out. Nothing must distract him. You will be happy for him, and you will congratulate him upon his victory, and then you will sit quietly down here until he is finished with his second fight. Understand?” She released Blitzwing's arms and allowed him to sit up.
“Yes, of course. Distract him with what?”
Strika released him and yanked him upright moments before Lugnut came stumbling into the room. The gladiator was dented and oil stained his knees, but he was glowing with pride. Strika switched from irate to joyful with such speed that one could nearly smell the burning rubber.
“Our champion!” she declared, throwing one arm around his shoulder.
“I am your champion!” His voice was weary as his head fell against her.
“Our champion,” said Blitzwing with a slow nod, once Strika had directed a glare in his direction. Yes, he was behaving. Whatever not-behaving had meant.
Strika didn’t let Lugnut out of her sight the entire time he was in front of the public, likely out of concern that he would start howling the gospel of Megatron or accidentally deck someone who had the money to sue them for it.
Blitzwing, as ordered, stayed silent and inconspicuous while Strika paraded Lugnut in front of the cameras. It wasn’t until she’d stuffed him in the competitor’s garage for the evening that she dragged Blitzwing off to another room and shoved him into a chair, dragging a rolling monitor behind them.
“You really don’t know what you did, did you?”
“I can confirm that this is entirely true.”
Strika initiated the wireless uplink between it and her portable camera, just barely restraining herself from crushing the camera as she did so. Stress? Worry? Anger? It was hard to read her when her face was so set against unleashing her own copious strength upon a deserving world.
She skipped forward until she found the place in the match where Blitzwing’s memories began to fade. Flames streaked across the arena Strika yelled to Blitzwing to put his spark into his cheering. His own voice began to raise, as ordered, and then began to raise even further. Blitzwing heard his voice take on a tone of mad fury, shouting epithets and obscenities that he could not remember uttering.
The view from the camera turned away from the match to the mech waving beside her and her lens focused on him just as Blitzing face began to…twitch. If it weren’t for the crowd moving smoothly behind him Blitzwing would have assumed the recording was skipping. His face jerked across the front of his head, back and forth, until it finally slid all the way around underneath his helm and revealed an entirely new face in garish red with a visor instead of his mismatched optics. The face was screaming in mindless rage, showing a gap between his teeth.
“I don’t understand...” said the current Blitzwing.
“Makes two of us,” muttered Strika as she sat down beside him.
The mech who couldn’t be Blitzwing tried to leap from the stand to join the fight himself until Strika wrestled him to the ground, hissing that he would behave or she would snap his neck. The struggle went unnoticed in the chaos, except by the flimsier mechs behind them who complained that people needed to stop getting so cuddly in public. The distorted Blitzwing wasn’t the only one unable to contain himself in the stands, and no one else had recognized the change. Blitzwing saw himself gnash his malformed teeth before being lifted up and thrown over Strika’s shoulder, his legs kicking against Strika's face as he howled in protest.
Put me down, you oaf! I will kill them! Kill, kill, I will destroy them!
Away from the crowds Blitzwing resistance began to fade, and by the time they made it to the locker hallway he had gone limp. When Strika laid him out on the bench his face had returned to its usual form, optics darkened. Strika stopped the recording just as her past self let out a string of curses, echoed softer by her present self.
“This is what happened at the bar, isn’t it?” she said, one hand touching Blitzwing's shoulder. “You got angry and then this happened.”
“I don’t remember. I really don’t.” Blitzwing ran his fingers over his face, the rounded optic and the slitted one, the angle of his cheek. All still there, nothing like the warped face on the screen.
“I have never seen you get mad, in the time that I have known you. Not even annoyed, which around Lugnut is either a miracle of virtue or a severe glitch. When was the last time you remember getting angry?”
“I…” Blitzwing poured through his memory banks, scrolling backwards from the previous evening to the chaos and flame of his city’s final stand. There was no anger. Not at the Autobots, not at Lugnut, not at the pushy journalist and publicists who had been hounding their feet ever since they arrived at the arena.
“Not since the war ended. Yes?”
“Yes. Not since the final battle.”
“Sadness, then?”
Another quiet moment as Blitzwing perused his memory. “No. There is nothing at all.” His voice was flat, as it had always been for the time that Strika had known him. Even the knowledge that his emotions had been so carefully excised from his mind brought him no fear. There was nothing.
“All right.” Strika nodded to him, her hand still at his shoulder. “Tell me what happened at Prussarus.”
()()()()()()
The last time he had been angry he’d been on the ramparts above the Prussarus outer gate. He was not the master tactician Lugnut had assumed him to be, nor the powerful paladin of justice brought low through tragedy and betrayal, just a sergeant with a mission to hold the walls as long as possible. Blitzwing saw the advancing troops, so small, so many, and turning around he saw the huddled remainders of his people carefully parceling out the remaining supplies to the strongest in their number. Those wounded who could still walk were working the energon generators as hard as possible, though it strained their machinery to the breaking point. It was a constant race against time to build up their stores again before the constant barrage of attacks from the Autobots unbalanced the balance.
Prussarus had not been a large city even before the Autobots brought the hammer down upon them, only about 15,000 people. It was not beautiful, or prosperous, practically ignorable but for their skill at weapons manufacturing. The Autobots had attempted to pressure them into marketing exclusively to the side of red, and when Prussarus proved recalcitrant to being conquered peacefully they had brought in their own weaponry. The war decimated Blitzwing's city, forcing them deeper and deeper into the inner city as the civilians left their homes and factories to burn.
They would starve, or they would be destroyed, but Prussarus would not fall until the last of them were dead. This was what Blitzwing's troops had sworn when the war was at its hottest, when the Autobots proved they had no intention of going away until Prussarus knelt to their empire.
Blitzwing remembered anger at the Autobots, at the deficiencies in the barricades. Anger at one of his men, yellow and grey with huge optics that seemed to be looking in every direction at once, milliseconds slow in getting his job done due to a battered leg. It was a petty matter but petty matters were so much easier to comprehend than the slow, encroaching destruction of their entire people. The firing of laser cannons turned his attention back to the troops on his wall.
(If he'd known about the tunnels dug carefully beneath the city, the bombs planted as expertly as the propaganda about unstable Prussarian fuel cells, he'd have more rage to deal out.)
The world exploded, as if Primus himself had lifted the crust and turned the entire city upside down on top of them. Cannons and bodies flew into the air, glass exploding from the shockwaves, and the final wall between Prussarus and the outside world slammed down onto Blitzwing's body. Sensory overload made him black out.
When Blitzwing recovered his senses he found he was pinned on all sides, his feet crushed, his hands twisted. Something wet dripped onto his face. Oil. Blitzwing turned his head and found the back of the yellow and grey mech with the huge optics, head half-severed from his body and leaking oil in slow drips onto the corpses below him. They were crushed against each other, blocking out the sky. Blitzwing tried to raise his commanders on his commlink, then tried to raise anyone else. When the commlink didn’t work he screamed instead, his own voice echoing in the tiny space that his headlights lit up. No heat signatures either, no signs of life.
After an eternity of twitching Blitzwing managed to get his fingers moving. He curled them in and out, digging tiny little furrows until his wrists could move, wiggling those until his forearm could move, fragment by fragment making space for himself and resisting the urge to give up when small cave-ins made him start the work all over again. In the darkness he could hear creaks and shifting, but no voices.
If there had been someone waiting for him at the top, perhaps he would have felt anger again. Perhaps it would have been mere nightly terrors and flinching from the sound of guns. Perhaps. When one hand breached the surface he felt cool wind across his fingertips, when he’d carved a hole large enough for his head he still heard nothing. When he finally dragged himself outward, flopping helplessly on top of corpses and the twisted remains of buildings, there was smoke and the slightest hints of what had once been foundations or walls, but the city had been wiped off the face of the map.
Reaching back through memories he’d tried to repress, looking at them frame by frame to analyze what had been there in that moment when he realized he was alone, that was where he found the cold. He had no fear. He had no sadness. The ice had taken him by the throat and there was nothing left.
Biltzwing repaired himself only out of adherence to procedure. Nerve wire disconnections eased the pain enough for him to walk, patch repairs took care of protruding circuit boards and shards of unreachable metal dug into his insides as he transformed and rolled away from what had once been proud Prussarus.
He would later make it to a reporting billboard and find out the Autobots’ end of the story. The last stand of the fanatics had been to destroy themselves in a burst of flame and hatred. Survivors had been captured and relocated for reeducation, to help rehabilitate them from their ways of terrorism. Prussarus would be rebuilt as a facility of peace, perhaps a crystal garden, in order to completely wipe away the horrible things that had occurred in that place. (To wipe away the last traces of his home from Cybertron itself, from memory.)
The news did not make him angry.
()()()()()()
Lugnut lost his second battle the next morning. It wasn't a complete erasure from the competition--a dent in his chances, surely, but one could suffer one savage hit in the groin and still keep making one's way up the chain towards the semifinals. Strika yelled at him with even greater venom than usual, even striking him across the back of the head as she corralled her apologetic employee out of the critical eyes of the camerabots.
He should feel guilty here, Blitzwing noted. Perhaps anger at Strika for her unkind treatment of the mostly innocent Lugnut, or at himself for causing the disruption. But when he dug for emotions he found nothing there. Having recognize the effect it was impossible to avoid thinking about it. (The emptiness should have scared him, but there was no fear left in him either.)
“You seem troubled,” Lugnut said to Blitzwing when they were finally packed up.
“I am as I always am.”
“You are troubled.”
“I will trouble your head off if you do not move your aft!” Strika delivered a swift kick to Lugnut's back and he reluctantly shuffled into his trailer. She pointed at Blitzwing as soon as the doors closed behind him.
“Get to the front, keep my mouth shut, and don’t stop pulling until I get home?”
“Truly you are a mind reader.” She cuffed him on the side of the head. “Let’s get out of here before anything else goes wrong.”
()()()()()()
“You are troubled.”
“You have been saying that for three straight days.” They’d made it back to the garage without incident but Strika’s mood hadn’t improved. Lugnut’s loss hadn’t been his fault but she was a perfectionist when it came to training regimens, and uncontrollable factors stressed her out.
“You have been troubled for four straight days.” Lugnut lifted his arm half-heartedly to block Blitzwing's punch. It was difficult to read emotion in a face as blank as Lugnut's, how fortunate for the rest of them that he carried his spark on his shoulder armor. “And Strika is rarely as irritable as she is. We are a team! We should be united in purpose, in power!”
“I live under your roof, how more united can we be?”
Another punch, and this time Lugnut merely let it bounce off his armor. His secondary optics went shut, and his primary one dimmed. “Do not be in such strife. You struggle against yourself, against your true emotions! Open yourself to us, we shall accept you as you are!”
The heat was building. Not rage, merely annoyance, but a fire behind his eyes. Blitzwing took a step back to compose himself, picturing sheets of smooth, clear ice stretching out to the horizon. “We are done for the day. Go drink your high-octane.”
“You will never be at peace while your passions remain in chains!” Lugnut shouted back as he headed for his room. Blitzwing went to meet Strika in the living room, where she was aggressively not paying attention to either of them.
"He knows, I think."
“What gave it away, the way you move like a rusty drone without lubrication? You may have no emotions but you also don’t know how to be subtle.”
“I do not think he will stop. He is quoting Megatron at me as inspiration for emotional liberation.”
“He doesn’t realize that your version of emotional liberation is a riot.” Strika flicked to another broadcast channel, watching a clip of the Magnus touring an energon farm to shake hands with the excited rural bumpkins. “Perhaps we should show him the footage. At least it might shut him up.”
()()()()()()
Lugnut watched Blitzwing’s grotesque transformation play out on the house widescreen monitor, his angular head occasionally tilting to the side and then realigning itself again. He was abnormally quiet. Huge pincers opened and then closed with the faintest 'ting'. Strika sat beside him on the couch, scowl deeper than usual as she scrutinized her delicate little one-mech-army for signs of combat-endangering mental distress. They'd told him about Prussarus, in Blitzwing's deadpan tones while Strika threw in grunts of displeasure, but even that hadn't stirred Lugnut to rousing speeches. Usually one could get him on a rant by wiggling a single wheel in a manner derisive of Autobots.
“You see the problem," Blitzwing said, arms folded behind his back as he stood beside the monitor with his back to the images. Even the sight of his rage was making him burn. "I am attempting to constrain myself, so the incident does not happen again, but I am unsure how to avoid another trigger without losing control.”
Lugnut leapt to his feet. “Control?" he roared, in the tone he usually reserved for Megatron and consumerism. "No! Release it! Your righteous rage must burn like fire! Align that part of yourself which calls for the oil of your enemies with the sharp edges of your keen intellect! To the training room!”
“What—“
Lugnut lifted Blitzwing bodily, threw him over his shoulder, and charged out to the training room. Strika ran after them, bellowing a demand to know what idiocy her employee was planning this time.
“Liberation!” Lugnut bellowed back.
In the training room Lugnut sealed the doors and then planted the unsteady Blitzwing back on his feet. “Rage is healthy!" he said with glee, grabbing Blitzwing by the shoulders. "Your suffering must be your sword, your fury your shield!”
“What does that even mean?”
“You must reveal your face of pain and anger upon my metal!”
“The abrupt poet has a point,” Strika mused. “You are in a reinforced gym with a professional gladiator and his trainer. There is literally no safer space for you to lose control.”
Lugnut stood back and gestured for Blitzwing to step forward. “I will take your blows gladly! We are here to support your emotional health and recovery!” He punched one blunted fist against another and opened his arms wide. “Feed me your rage!”
Blitzwing raised a hesitant fist. “I don’t think I like this idea.”
“Do you like anything, Blitzwing?" Lugnut demanded. "Genuinely? Do you feel any of the passion that befits hot-fueled mechs such as we?”
Blitzwing went silent as Lugnut continued to posture in front of him, the inviting peacock dance of a gladiator encouraging his opponent to land the first move. No, that wasn’t right. He didn’t like anything. He barely wanted anything. This was not, logically speaking, how a mech’s mind was supposed to work.
“Should I provoke him?” Lugnut asked, glancing sidelong to Strika while waving his arms.
“No, let him bring it up himself.” Though she was bracing against the wall, just in case things went further south.
Blitzwing shut down his optics. He clenched his fingers and, with delicacy and control, punched Lugnut in the face. Nothing. Numb. The cold which had gone past pain into burnt-out wiring and broken sensors. He focused on the memory of the sound of the stadium around him, the crowd screaming for carnage, and wondered if he’d be able to turn back afterward.
“Again!” Lugnut shouted. “Again, for the Autobots! For the evils of the Prime, for the fallen walls of Prussarus!”
For the bright marketplaces, for the fragrant factory smoke that hovered across the sky in the bright red mornings. For the constant booming of the cannons that kept them from rest in the final days. He noticed the heat now. When the smoke rose up, red flares muted by shadow, he let it come. Another blow.
“Harder! You are a champion! Let your rage flow through your wiring, let it bring you to glorious--"
“Shut your stupid mouth!” There was the red sliding across his field of view, and the rage, but he was riding along this time. His blows cut Lugnut off balance, nearly throwing him to the ground.
“Yes! Hit him harder, he wants it!”
“Shower me with your hatred!”
“SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!” He left scratches on Lugnut’s paint, then dents, punching and kicking the unresisting gladiator as the red embraced him, clawing at Lugnut's optics, biting at his wrists. His wiring felt as if it was made of lighting, sizzling under his plating as he gloried in long-denied violence.
“How do you feel?” Strika called out over the din.
“Angry!” Blitzwing snarled back. “I feel angry!” His elbow slammed into Lugnut's neck.
“Good! Anger is good, keeps you strong!” said Lugnut in a dizzied voice. A few more kicks left him a supportively groaning lump on the ground. Blitzwing raised his fists in exaltation, the heat slipping from him as he gloried in his newfound emotion. He put his hand to his face and felt the metal slide beneath his fingertips. The visor gave way to two optics, one larger than the other, and a pointed chin where a broad one had previously sat.
Strika approached him slowly, one arm up in preparation for attack. Her thick face was softening into the barest whisp of a smile.“And now how do you feel?”
Blitzwing drew in a breath of dusty air, letting it run a full cycle through his air filters and out again. “Calm,” he said. “Not numb. Just calm. It feels…it feels good.”
()()()()()()
The tinkling of the crystals was pounding through the floor again when Blitzwing woke up the next day. He went downstairs to find Lugnut passed out on the front room sofa and Strika pouring herself a cube of fuel. She looked up to him, and then pulled another cube out of the locker.
“I have heard you playing this quite often,” Blitzwing said as he took a seat at the counter. “Or variants upon this. What is it?”
“This particular piece is “Raise the Tide”, from Copper Filigree’s Kalis’s Lament. It’s one of their most famous operas.”
“What is it about?”
“Kalis. It was a beautiful city that was reduced to rubble and ashes during the last war. Now it’s a ghost town—literally, according to some people, there's a number of urban legends about walking corpses or howling spirits on the wind. It was never rebuilt, and I do not believe the Autobots plan to resurrect such an example of pre-war decadence. The opera describes its glory and its fall, though I’m grossly underselling the metaphors and multiple plot lines. The entire production takes over a day and a half to perform. I would like to show it to you sometime, if you are enjoying this.”
Blitzwing shrugged. “I do not know very much about music. It may be good or bad.”
“What does your spark say about it?”
“Well. My spark says...well.” He consulted his mind for preferences and found them, as if he’d discovered a cache of treasures previously hidden room in a house he thought he’d known top to bottom. “My spark says it's a bit heavy on the bass. I don't dislike it, exactly. But it is not to my taste.”
If anything Strika seemed pleased by his response. “Did you not-dislike it before?”
“I don’t think I felt anything about it before.”
Strika patted him on the shoulder. “Then that’s progress. Your taste in music, that we can work on later."
“Could we leave Lugnut at home?”
“Lugnut is very pleased with your emotional development but I don’t think he’s getting off the couch anytime soon. Let’s leave him be.”
()()()()()()
Lugnut dubbed the alternate face as “Hothead”, and Strika referred to the other one as “Icy”. Cold and hot, merging together into something more manageable than either. Life proceeded as it had before, in training and movement of boxes, but the world felt brighter.
It felt. The sensation of any sensation at all was so amazing that Blitzwing nearly fell over watching the sun come up over the skyscrapers, and got very close to an actual fistfight with his employers/roommates over snack flavors. Strika warned him that she would only tolerate it so far. Lugnut found it healthy and was often punched for his exuberance.
The next incident happened when Lugnut was in the middle of yet another Megatron rant, this time at an unsuspecting hovercraft who’d just wanted to sell them an anti-violence organization membership. The hovercraft was getting smaller and smaller as Lugnut loomed larger and larger, eventually popping into vehicle mode for protection as Blitzwing got in on the yelling to tell Lugnut to calm himself the frag down.
“How can you not feel the walls close in upon us? How the skies themselves shall fall, hard and oppressive, if we should--"
A rusty shingle tumbled from the tower above, delicate as it twirled in the air before landing on Lugnut’s head with a loud clang. His optics went dark as he tottered, falling forward onto the squeaky hovercraft.
There was a loud 'heh' from Blitzwing. And another. The heat subsided, replaced with something newer and undefinable. A bubbling like fizzing chemicals under glass, a lightness like the burst after an explosion. Blitzwing began to laugh, voice raising into a wavering screech. Orange spread across his vision, like the dancing lights of fireworks over the spires of the city, and then nothing.
When he woke up again he was sprawled out on the floor of the garage, Strika and Lugnut standing over him. His vocalizer felt sore. When he swiped his hand across his face his optics felt the same, one circle and one rectangle, but there was a smear of oil across the side of his cheek as if his face had slid against something. The smear ended at the edge of his helm.
“Did the other face...I didn't feel angry. I don't remember anything.”
“No, you weren't angry. You were laughing, actually. No Hothead.” Blitzwing could hear the lingering ‘but’ in Strika’s voice.
“Very healthy,” Lugnut put in. His nodding was stiff but perky.
“So what happened?”
Strika put a hand to his shoulder, guiding him to stand and then walking him over to sit on the couch.
"Well."