Work Text:
D-16 had been so proud to show Orion that because of their excellent work output (mostly thanks to him, and his making it to the leaderboard in his sector), they had been approved when he had registered their CNA for fusion into a new protoform.
Despite the challenging life that was that of a miner, there were many reasons Orion had come up with to explain why registering for CNA fusion was a good idea. Spinning D-16 around by the shoulder that day, he had read from news articles, nose deep in them as he worked himself up over this new idea (while D-16 shook off the last of his drowsiness to get to actual work)
“... work safety standards are expected to be raised higher within the current decacycle- It’s a good time to be born, Dee! Change is just around the corner.”
“Those are the conspiracy articles, Pax. Our Prime is trying his best. And hey, did you spend all night reading? I’m not gonna let you lean on me if you start falling into recharge.” Orion shrugged his red shoulders and smiled, that maddening smile as he took out his tools for the day’s shift.
“Worth it for the sake of knowledge,” crowed Orion, leaning against D-16, who shoved him off, not cruelly.
Throughout the work day, Orion continued to try and sway him with hopeful stories. And the holograms. Pics of these little unborn things in pods in the Incubation Building. Still nothing more than soft alloy. They were formed from the Well of Sparks, true, raised up from the forge of their planet, their spark brought to a body by the joining of two bots who would become their mentors. The little things were a tad creepy but also a tad cute. D-16 shook his helm but underneath that skeptical look, he was more excited than Orion at the idea. On one hand, he sort of wished Orion would just go through with his own plan to register with someone else, rather than have to worry about someone running around who should be under his mentorship. On another hand…another bot, who would be another miner who would follow the glorious leadership system of Sentinel and the Primes, joining him and Orion on their work and life once they came of age and training, which he of course would provide with discipline.
Maybe this would be the thing that would link Orion back down to the ground, linking the two of them together, a bonded pair.
Not long after, after a couple long talks (that seemed to go one ear and out the other with Orion) D16 was called off to go to the Incubation Registry. He had been approved! He found his way to the train station, gaining curious looks from the other cogless bots as he ran to fetch Orion.
The Incubation Registry was something that Sentinel had generously set up in order for cogless bots to have a future, and a pragmatic way for more miners to come into being with less metal resources. Two miners or other lower-caste bots would, on their off duty, have a chance to mail a registry form offered by their mining supervisors to the Incubation Registry Office, where they would be examined by the higher-ups as to whether they were good examples of mining bots and their model was a good line to continue, and if approved, CNA from each bot - mech and mech, mech and femme, femme on femme, they all had the same reproductive capabilities, though limited as they were cogless- would be fused.
Since they were cogless, they lacked the incubation abilities of T-cogs, and so it took place in a carefully thermal-controlled pod, where such tiny little protoforms such as the ones Pax had been shoving in his face over the past few weeks. “The one advantage of being a no-cog,” D16 muttered wryly.
“What’s that?” Orion said, barely listening.
“Internal incubation of a spark. Rather uncomfortable, don’t you think?”
“I could deal,” Orion shrugged.
“Hey, so could I!” D-16 fired right back. “Just prefer… external work that doesn’t leave me …i dunno… so vulnerable.”
D-16 kept walking confidently, Orion running ahead, as he got off the train, and found himself in the office. He shifted on his pedes, feeling a bit out of place, a miner amongst all these T-cogs who were eyeing him doubtfully from behind desks or stacks of documents. Some sneered, and D-16 clenched his fists. He knew the word they were thinking. He recognized the security guard barring entrance to the office.
Before D-16 could get too involved in seething, he was called by a small light green bot, with probably a small helicopter for an alt mode, judging by their . “Miner D-16, Rank 6, of the 14th Sector, Iacon?” They stated in a bored tone, pale teal optics never leaving their clipboard.
“Correct.”
“Right this way,” D-16’s spark jogged at the secretive, imperative nature of it all. Orion was clearly enjoying it too, wandering off to discreetly peek at the document titles that were stacked on the desks.
He followed the consultant into the room, where what happened was mainly just a long and tedious recital of the form that both D-16 had agreed to. Orion was bouncing off his seat, practically.
“You both consent to a fusion?” drawled the green bot. Both said yes. “We both have already, let’s get to it!” exclaimed Orion. From the office door, a familiar bot poked his head in. “Oneblade? What’s all this commotion?”
“Ratchet!” exclaimed both miners, much to the annoyance of the green secretary-bot. Ratchet, the old white and red medic, did a double take. “Dee? And Pax? You two- a protoform running around?” He shook his head.
-
“Now what’s that all about?” challenged Orion. D16 grinned. “Don’t you trust us, Ratchet?”
“You, maybe. Make sure you keep an eye on this one,” the medic jabbed a servo at Orion as he drew the red and blue bot’s code. D16 flinched at the unfamiliar touch-he wasn’t big on any sort of person touching his body, but he could deal. Ratchet raised an eyebrow and wisely got through with the extraction quickly; he knew Dee could be more than a bit temperamental when he was uncomfortable. “Should be it,” Ratchet said, then took the opportunity while the two mechs were happily looking at each other to just watch them.
Both so young, barely more than protoforms themselves. Well okay, they were more than experienced in the ways of the world, but Orion in particular was the worst when it came to naivety and Ratchet hoped for the mentee-to-be’s sake that D-16 would do more of the mentoring. Now there was a bot who knew his job and kept it!
As the protoform developed in its own little pod in the Incubation Center, after it was forged from the core of Cybertron with their spark’s code breathing life into it. They would not be allowed to see the little creature, of course, not until it was fully developed in a little under a cycle, and when it was out of the Nursery and fully ready to mine.
But that never stopped Orion.
“Well, aren't you a tiny little miner?” Orion Pax said softly in the Incubation Building, gently grasping a pod and clasping it to his lower chest plate, the pod in which floated a tiny protoform. “Dont worry, I’m here. You’ll be the best mentee in all of cybertron..even if your other mentor’s a bit of a glitch.” It blinked. “Don’t tell him I said that.” chuckled Orion. He then looked over his shoulder. “Oop- Darkwing will have my helm if he finds out I snuck out. But.. develop well, okay? Dee’s counting on it.” Giving the pod a little salute, he slipped back to his job.
It was less than a month before everything changed forever.
The golden residence of Sentinel Prime disgusted D-16.
Sitting there, on his knees, arms bound behind his back, in a line with the High Guard and B127- who he still couldn’t believe had survived this long- the opulent gold palace of the False Prime seemed ever more decadent, wasteful. Those doorframes alone could feed a mining unit of a hundred mechs and femmes for a week.
Desperate to look at anything other than the evidence of Sentinel’s greed, and desperate to distract himself from the growing realization that Orion too, was likely killed in the battle at the High Guard’s base, D-16 looked over at his fellow prisoners. Starscream was looking dejected, and D-16 was suspicious as to whether this grief was for him and his High Guard’s own impending death or the fact that it would come at the hand of their shared enemy, the False Prime they had spent fifty cycles evading.
B-127 was not as dejected, though he looked genuinely terrified, the young bot that he was. D-16 couldn’t help but feel sort of a small pang for thinking ill of him earlier on in their adventure. Bee was a young mech, that adventure was probably the happiest time in his short life.
Thinking this more paternally-minded stream of thoughts in his mind, D-16 let his mind wander to what had taken place just a little while before he had been thrown in this grandiose room with the other prisoners. Sentinel had taken him aside and told him, in no uncertain terms, what he had sent Airachnid to do to his protoform, still fragile and growing in its pod. “Like a young flower from the ground.” Sentinel had whispered smiling, that slagging half-moon smile on his wicked, cursed face.
“I don’t understand,” muttered B-127 urgently to him as he saw D-16 looking at him, too terrified to notice the glazed look in the bigger mech’s eyes. “Why are we still alive?”
Before D-16 could clear the burning in his throat to respond, Sentinel, the betrayer strode in from behind him. “Look at this rowdy bunch!” he crowed triumphantly. “The High Guard! Y’know you guys have been tough to find. Every trip to the surface,” he continued, pedes hitting the floor in time with his victory speech, “- I was searching for you…”
“Tracking the bots in the cave led me right to them,” came a smug voice, Airachnid, Sentinel’s equally violent lieutenant, said smugly.
“Oh ho-ho- you captured Starscream!” exclaimed Sentinel, his voice becoming pleased, as if Airachnid had brought him a particularly nice piece of furniture.
“I’m going to rip you apart piece by piece so that your death is painful and you’ll regret the day you were-” Starscream’s oddly high pitched voice was cut off by Sentinel’s laugh. Everyone in the room cringed at the High Guard Commander’s voice reduced to this, except Sentinel. “You sound ridiculous. It’s weird.” Starscream hung his head in defeat.
“Ohh, D-16, what a tragic story you’ll be,” Sentinel started with him next, and the silver mech went rigid in his rage and hate. “Atop the leaderboard in your sector-” the False Prime smirked “-secretly a traitor,”
“I’m not a traitor, you’re the traitor-” hissed D-16 lowly, his optics blazing. Starscream would have to move over if they ever got free- Sentinel would be his.
“Nuh-uh,” teased Sentinel, stepping to the front of the room to address the entire group. “You- all of you- are traitors. You’ve been working with the Quintessons to sabotage my expeditions. You’re the reason i haven’t found the matrix of leadership yet.”
“None of that is true!” exclaimed B-127, finding his voice. Sentinel turned. “Oh trust me, it’ll be very true when I'm executing you in front of all of Iacon. He leaned closer and closer to B, who pulled back further and further in his terror, looking smaller and smaller underneath Sentinel. “Because down here,” Sentinel snarled through his teeth, “The truth is what I make it.”
That was the last straw. D-16 got to his feet, loudly to get the False Prime’s attention away from B and onto him. It worked.
“Well well. What’s this about?” sneered the False Prime, as D-16 stared past him and straight ahead.
“I’m not kneeling in front of you,” he groused out.
“Feeling…confident, are we?”
“You don’t scare me,” D-16 almost chuckled, darkly as he remembered those words to Orion. A mentee of theirs growing up in the leadership of Sentinel Prime. “You wanna know why?”
“Please!”
“I don’t have anything left to lose,” D-16 grated, leaning into the False Prime’s face. He knew and here he was playing these slagging games. The image of him, Orion, and a young mentee between them flashed across his eyes, sending them ablaze.
“You took it all.”
“He will be lonely- even with the guidance of his new Commander Elita- and the young B-127,” Prima had stated. There, in the hold between life and death in the core of Cybertron, the spirits of the Primes remained. And rarely spoke unless it was something vital to the continuation of their legacy.
“No,” Megatronus rumbled- and even rarer occurrence, as he looked through the space between, into where the spirits of all fallen Cybertronians- born and unborn- lingered. That little protoform was not amongst them- not anymore. Megatronus had made certain of that.
“Roll out,” he spoke to the tiny spark orbiting the Matrix, unbeknownst to the Prime yet hoped for in the core of his grief. “And roll on, little Roller.”