Chapter Text
The ceiling was, as ever, grey. It was a very particular shade of grey, as selected by Autobot High Command, designed by a team of scientists to be calming; gently soothing the processor and promoting quiet reflection on all your life’s wrongs. Supposedly it stimulated a certain line of code in your motivator. Flame had met Prowl once, entirely by chance, and formed an opinion of the mech that he’d carried with him through every suicide run, seemingly pointless mission and rejected research proposal, and that was that he was a smug glitch who’d clearly deleted any line of empathy code he’d ever had years ago, and as such he highly doubted whether the colour of the ceiling was meant to promote anything other than the urge to stick his head against one of Fortress Maximus’s famed leg guns and tell him that what he did at Simanzi wasn’t really that impressive.
Apparently blue had been one of the other options. Primus, Flame would love to be looking at the colour blue right now. He fantasized about Fort Max ordering the decorators in, at night, when he was supposed to be recharging. It wasn’t what you might call a valuable use of his time, but it had been so long since he’d done anything worthwhile that he’d forgotten what it felt like.
There were three scuffs on the ceiling, right at the end next to the door. They were accompanied by a medium sized gauge the approximate size and shape of someone’s claw, if that someone had flown into a sudden frenzy and tried to rip the cell door off, before being felled by a sharp shock from the electrified defenses on the door. Flame’s followed the action down, and he noted the matching scuffs on the floor where the would-be escapee had landed. He felt he could sympathise. Lying on this sub-par berth musing on the colour of the ceiling could drive even the staunchest of mechs mad, and in fact had . Flame himself had found himself touching the electrified field and giving himself a shock just to stave off boredom a, uh, non-zero number of times.
In the distance, a door swung open. Huh. This was sort of interesting, as they weren’t due any kind of inspection for another few weeks. Flame briefly considered sitting up for this unprecedented turn of events and then thought better of it. This ceiling wouldn’t study itself. He hoped that if he spent enough time staring at it without pause he might be able to scare it into being blue.
He heard a muted crash and somebody hissing ‘frag!’ in a very poor attempt at an indoor voice.
Anyway.
He’d considered making his own mark on his little grey box, but that just seemed so… cliché. A lot of mechs would be keeping some kind of countdown of their time inside, scratched into the walls with their fingertip, or clawtip if they were lucky enough to have one, but Flame had considered it when he arrived and decided against it. For one, it would play havoc on the paintjob - he was not spending his time inside with an unpainted finger like some sort of scruffy… well, criminal, and it was unlikely that Fort Max would be running a touch-up service. For the other, those kinds of marks usually functioned as a countdown, and that only worked if you knew when you were getting out. Flame fully expected to be in here until Optimus Prime won and moved him to some secure facility on Cybertron to invent boring nonsense to aid in the resettling of the planet, or Megatron won and had him shot.
“Primus, he’s fragging heavy,” a guard hissed, from almost right outside his cell.
“Shut up,” snapped another.
“Maybe he wouldn’t be so heavy if you’d actually fixed the suspension like you were supposed to, Hitch!” said a third.
“Look at the size of him!” That was presumably Hitch protesting.
A wheel squeaked in protest. Flame sat up. The door of a cell creaked open at an audial-splitting pitch, and Flame’s head snapped around. It was not his cell. Why had he bothered sitting up again?
Some guards-slash-repairmechs (they seemed to be multi-purpose) were busy unloading someone into the cell next-door to him. By unloading, Flame meant undoing the restraints on the trolley and letting him fall face-first onto the floor with a resounding crash. He got up to investigate but could only make out a couple of the guards - one of them was bright red - and the empty trolley from his door, and he certainly wasn’t shoving his face against it to try and get a better look.
“Shut the frag up!” Came an incredible bellow from in the distance somewhere.
“Shouldn’t we… you know… put him on the berth?” One of the guards said hesitantly.
“ You want to try lifting him?” Hitch asked.
“He’s got a point.”
“What’ve you got in there, mechs?” Flame asked. Hitch shrieked.
“Calm down, you moron, it’s just Flame.” Another guard whacked him on the shoulder. Flame did his best not to remember their names. He’d have to put some work into forgetting Hitch later, in between threatening the ceiling in the hopes of it producing some blue.
“What do you want, traitor?”
“I don’t want a neighbour,” Flame said. He tried not to sound petulant but suspected he might have failed.
“Well, that’s a real shame,” said Hitch, “because you’re getting one.” He really needed to stop talking soon if Flame was going to have any chance of scrubbing him from his mind.
“You could have asked.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, are you not happy with how the prison is being run?” The other guard demanded. “I’m sorry we’re not meeting your lofty standards. You want a suggestion box or something? A little union of prisoners so you can fight for your rights together? Guess what, traitor ?” He jabbed a savage finger in Flame’s direction, stopping scant inches from the bars. Flame glanced down at it, unimpressed, and then back up. The guard hesitated at the lack of reaction, clearly expecting a flinch.
“You don’t have any rights!” Jab, jab, jab. “Because you’re a filthy traitor!” Jab!
“Are you done?” Flame sighed. “Look, it’s not my fault that the Autobots don’t want to win. I was trying to help. They were being ungrateful. Can’t you put him upstairs somewhere? I know for a fact there’s no-one next to Flywheels.”
“Flywheels discovered Primus, I’m not going up there,” said Hitch. “You’re stuck with him.”
“Wonderful,” Flame said. It was not wonderful. “That’s such a professional attitude. Thank you for inflicting a huge decepticon on me because you’re too lazy to walk up stairs.”
“Hey!” Barked one of the guards, the red one this time. “Less chat from you, prisoner!” He brandished his shock stick. Flame briefly considered getting himself zapped just so he didn’t have to process this situation, then put his palms up in surrender and backed away from the cell door.
The Primus-damned neighbour’s cell door squeaked shut horrifically again, and was locked in due course by a group of guards now tired of Flame’s drab little corner of the prison and excited to get back to what probably should have been their usual posts but what was almost definitely the break room. Nobody would be crazy enough to try and break someone out of Garrus-9. Flame retreated back to his berth and sat down slowly, gingerly, half-convinced that any noise he made would wake his new neighbour up from his presumably heavily drugged stupor. Why this was so terrible, he couldn’t have explained. In the back of his mind he thought he’d probably gone a little bit strange after all the time by himself but he ignored that voice in favour of the louder voice screaming about how the neighbour was going to DISTURB HIM, in horrifying and undefinable ways.
He’d planned to count the imperfections in the surface of the left-hand (when facing the door) wall tomorrow. How was he to do that now?