Chapter Text
Again, water. Peace. This time, the silent darkness was pierced by dull light and muffled voices, voices that came from too far away for Avery to make out. There was a splitting headache, a sensation of heaviness rather than the weightless peace.
There was something wrong.
Struggling from the haze, Avery took a gasp of air and nearly coughed. The air was frigid, more than twenty degrees cooler than the warm borderline hot morning they were in before, and the light was bright and piercing rather than warm and sunny.
Where were they before? Avery slowly blinked their eyes open, already squinting against the harsh light, and was met with a dramatic gasp and a worried grumble, the same muffled voices from in their dream. The dream itself was fading, and fast, but the splitting headache was not.
Avery couldn't think straight from the pain, and the harsh white lighting and the near-freezing temperature weren't helping. They hadn't even looked around yet- their eyes were still blurry, and all they could see was white and grey and one really big lump of red and silver.
So they sat up, eliciting more gasps from the mysterious person(Avery had painfully deducted that they must be sitting on the colourful lump) and rubbed their eyes and blinked until the room resolved itself. That headache was horrible.
When their vision finally cleared, Avery looked up and nearly passed out again(dramatic, I know). The colourful lumps weren't lumps with people on them at all- they were a massive, vaguely humanoid mechanical thing, staring in apparent shock and mild terror. It had to be a hallucination, right? They pinched themself, to no avail.
Just to check, Avery poked the back of their head, and their hand came away sticky with a minuscule amount of blood. Worried at the concerning result, and determined not to show fear to the robot, they felt for the injury again and determined that it was, in fact, a very small, probably shallow cut covered by fabric, and leaking a lot of blood and a lot of pain. Well, this was less than ideal.
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Knockout was panicked. After not a lot of discussion, they had decided to take the human with them, for a missing person was surely less likely to imply two racecars than a person with blunt force trauma. And anyway, surely Knockout could patch them up, humans weren't that different to cybertronians.
At least, that's what he told Breakdown and himself. Breakdown had transported the human back to the Nemesis without letting anyone else know, because it was leaking fluids and Knockout didn't want that on his plating, but now it lay unconscious on a makeshift berth made of stacked datapads and fabric, and the decepticon medic was getting worried. What if it didn't wake up? He would have to ask Shockwave for advice on how to treat it, and Shockwave would surely report it to Megatron!
Breakdown was out of the room, getting the mission paperwork done, so he didn't have to see Knockout's weakness. Unfortunately, that also meant that Knockout was panicking alone, with no company save a human in whatever their version of emergency stasis was.
He had looked at the wound, and covered it with fabric, but it was very close to where the processor would be on a bot and Knockout was concerned he'd hurt something vital if he tried to fix it. So instead, he had laid out some things for the human to do its own repairs.
After a couple of hours, he was finally starting to calm down. He had polished his paintjob, been glad that there were no decepticon injuries today, and waited for the small squishy creature to wake up.
He wasn't calm when the small squishy thing actually did begin to wake up, of course. But he put on his best 'cool, confident decepticon, I'm superior to you' face and waited even more for it to notice him in silence.
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Avery was a little bit confused at why the person hadn't talked more, but they eventually managed to clear their vision by blinking a lot until the migraine somewhat subsided. It was still a thrashing, stabbing pain in the back of their head, but they could see now.
They raised their eyes from the suspiciously hard bed to see several oversized... mechanical? Tools lying in a neat row on front of them, briefly puzzling over the strange pieces before raising their gaze to the person sitting on top of the coloured lump they could only just make out now.
They flinched, nearly jumping out of their skin and causing another wave of pain to ripple through their head as they realised that it was not in fact a person on a tall thing, but a very large, very shiny humanoid robot. With an infuriatingly patronising expression.
"Hello, small one-" the robot began, in an infuriatingly oily voice that made Avery wasn't to punch him right in the-nose? Whatever the robot called it, but the human cut him off with a hiss.
"What are you doing! Where the hell am I, you- you- what are you!?"
It was rude, and frustrated, but it seemed to take the shining red person off guard. He flinched back a teensy bit, hands raising in surrender, genuine confusion entering his voice as he answered a lot more carefully.
"Whoa, whoa, calm down there little human. I'm Knockout, and I'm a cybertronian. You can call me a 'con or a mech, though."
Avery's eyes narrowed at the words, but they placed a hand on the cut in mild assent and sank back down to a slightly more relaxed position on the hard, screen-shaped bed. Their words were rough, and annoyed, and quieter to prevent the migraine getting worse.
"... D'you have any bandages or antiseptic, 'Knockout'?"
The red mech tilts his head(or what looked like a head) in mild confusion, gesturing to the various oversized tools in front of Avery. His face did that infuriatingly smug thing again, only this time it was interrupted by the arrival of a somewhat larger blue and silver robot.