Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was the dead of winter on Messatine. The Peaceful Tyranny’s climate control couldn’t keep up with the sudden temperature drop the night prior, so we were stuck with the cold for a good lot of the day. When I could find a break from work that required I be out and about or in the medbay, I took it.

I had patient files to check through and a few reports to update, so I’d hauled my datapad with me. I skated through the halls towards Helex’s room, the cold getting to me in my anticipation. His suite door was cracked open just enough for the smaller of us to squeeze in.

Every time the temperature got bitter like this, we could find solace in cuddling up on top of the cover of Helex’s smelter, his heating element on just enough to keep us content. Kaon was already there, asleep. I clambered up as well, laying down and getting back to work. Helex was in a perfectly happy mood, it always made me feel good to see the boys smile.

Being with Helex on days like those I could pretty easily compare to being bundled up in blankets on frigid winter nights, not overheating or anything, just perfectly comfortable. It was this low heat that made one very content. After I finished my work on the datapad that day, I’m pretty sure I just dozed off.

It was when the big guys weren’t around that heat in the winter became a big issue. Kaon, Vos, and I had been split from the others for some reason or another. A mistake, training, I’m not quite sure. When it got too late in the night and too cold for Vos to continue, we took shelter in one of the mountain caves. A fire going and having to huddle up against each other helped some, but the heat Kaon and I produced was minimal, whereas Vos didn’t produce heat of his own at all. This one’s a lot vaguer, but it makes me feel almost nostalgic.

Only one person, of course, could tolerate Messatine’s winters without even so much as a barely visible shudder. Tarn enjoyed the cold. Whether it reminded him of himself when he was younger in the same way Messatine reminded me of Prion, I’m not sure. I do hope it did that for him though, no matter how sad things like that can get.

Chapter Text

While the rest of the Lost Light crew was content in the end, I never was. Everything had left me traumatized, but not in a way of fear, because now I had nothing to lose. I was traumatized to the point of rage.

I tossed my newly-formed relationships aside after the Lost Light. I could go on without Grimlock, without the Scavengers, without Rung, without Nautica- or could I?

I was among the very few to remember Rung. His words still echoed in my head and not once would I forget them. I refused to.

After the Lost Light, I was Commander Nickel of Prion, one of if not the highest ranking Decepticon still loyal to the original cause. Because I would not abandon Tarn like that, never again. I should have died with them, at least then I’d be at peace with myself. I was, in effect, the new Tarn, but I refused the title. The DJD continued to thrive under me, but with a different goal, and the Big Five was no longer.

It was just me, Nickel, and those who hadn’t bailed.

Our business wasn’t finished in the way the Lost Light’s was. I spent days at a time about the reclaimed Peaceful Tyranny, on the mission to finish what we started. The List needed to be fully cleared of names. Though I subconsciously added names, they were optional, the List formally would gain no others. I found peace in thinking the boys were watching from the Afterspark, differences set aside, and that they were proud that I was still pushing forward. I found peace believing one day, I’d join them. For now, though, there was work to be done.

I pardoned the Scavengers, as much as I cursed myself for it. I struggled to pardon Fulcrum the most, my mind was torn, but finally, I did.

So I set off, armed with a new hatred and a new insignia. All hits now were done at my hands and mine alone. I forget how far I got, but the numbers were significant.

I bonded some with a few of the lesser bots, specific Genericon squad leaders from the Messatine base. I’d trained a number of the lesser medics who worked for us, the two or so left behind I knew from past encounters.

If my work wasn’t gory before, it was now. The most I killed in one hit had to be four or five. Standing in the middle of it, my head was just a hot blur of rage. Pink energon seeped into the ground, and that day I’d cleared another decent amount on the List.

Sometime in the same period, I took my sweet time with the torture of a defector I’d caught. The thing looked so scared; I was thriving in it. I had him awake, chest cracked open. I found what made him tick, made it as painful as possible while keeping the bastard alive and aware. I’d always marveled at the variations in the make of bots, however, I took less consideration here. It wasn’t questions answered that I wanted, it was an apology- one for a crime he didn’t commit himself, though he had committed a crime. Apology or none, I was going to kill him when I was through with it. My promises to him were empty.

“I’ll make it hurt less,” I said, tilting the tool in my hand. The way his voice wavered sent happy sparks up my little sadistic spine.

My operating room had seemed so bright, though it was how I had always set it up, with only my glaringly powerful surgical light on. I’m not sure what it was in the moment that made it feel like it was more than that. Leaning one arm against the table, I realized the sheer amount of energon I was covered in, fingertips to elbow. It’d smudged onto my face, too.

I gave him no time to sigh of relief when I finally killed him, driving a blade into him and slicing straight across vitals.

I didn’t clean myself up right away, mind still buzzing with homicidal bliss, and I spent some time sitting in my office to wear my thoughts out. Afterwards, I harvested what I needed for normal repair procedures, cleaned myself, dumped the body, and went to Tarn’s suite to doze off. Like my office, I spent a lot of my time there, moping and tired, not entirely there mentally. There was concern for me from the lesser commanders, but I brushed it aside to focus on work.

It wasn’t all bad. The Decepticon movement was shattered, but we tried to keep in touch with other sectors still afloat. Everything once solid was suddenly muddled and confusing, our rank system especially, but we didn’t mind it- we would figure it out once we recovered. Those of us on the Tyranny grew closer than we had anticipated, and had it not been for my vehement isolation, I would likely have become very close friends with the lesser commanders. Even without the Five, there was this little sense of family from the movement as a whole.

The boys’ deaths just brought me endless grief. I couldn’t shake that. I wouldn’t be able to.

Chapter Text

I was referred to Rung by First Aid. Fortress Maximus and Ultra Magnus had a problem with me being on the crew, and to keep a fight from breaking out, Rodimus had to step in. It was two talks, one with me and one without me. Having Fort Max glare me down didn’t sway me, but it certainly was intimidating.

I was silent for most of it. I wasn’t going to defend my actions to people who wouldn’t listen.

“We just don’t want you causing trouble,” Rodimus reasoned.

It wasn’t me causing the trouble, it was those who were scared of me. I liked the fear, yes, but there were moments where blame was pinned on me for the bad blood formed from it. I didn’t tell Rodimus that’s what I thought.

The members of the crew who had less hostile interactions with me were called to the second meeting. This was relayed to me by Rung. “It was, as I’d say it, a ‘what to do with Nickel’ talk,” he said. Said it was him, Rodimus, Drift, First Aid, Ratchet, and Nautica. Magnus and Grimlock were almost invited, but with Grimlock’s swaying mental state and Magnus’s bias against me, they decided against them.

So I ended up- against my will, yes, but I had a plan to talk to Rung either way- in Rung’s care. He became one of the only bots on the Lost Light I’d really attached to. In Earth terms, we’d call his psychiatric style with me humanistic: unconditional positive regard. We did dive into my traumas with the Consortia, but my time with the DJD wasn’t part of my trauma. The DJD was healing, they were family to me, they were my recovery.

“I don’t want to talk to you like a therapist,” I told him. “Not entirely. I want to talk to you as a fellow doctor.”

That had come as a surprise to him. He took me up on it, however, and we formed a decent close friendship from it.

There were times he had to pull the therapist card on me. Every time the Consortia came up, I twitched.

“Do you want to return to Prion?” he asked me once.

“Yes,” I responded. “Even if there’s nothing there.”

“What do you expect to find?”

“Everything as it was left. Every building crumbled, smoke on the horizon, bodies in the streets.”

“Would you search for anything?”

“Not in particular. I’d want to return to the wreck of my home, maybe my practice too.”

My suite on the Tyranny had a specific shelf I dedicated to Prion. I’d taken about a fourth of my total innermost energon for the sake of Prion, and the little bottles of it covered a lot of the shelf. Photos I’d taken of the place, of my friends there, data slugs and other trinkets I had scavenged from the ruins of the city after the massacres.

“Do you have those images on you?” Rung asked.

“Of course.” I always kept a backup of it all on my datapad. I pulled them up, and Rung sat in stunned silence as I went through what images I had. The five happy Mini-Cons all crowded into a group selfie with each other, my girlfriend at the time playing around on a short trip we took to the mountains just northwest of the city, the moon on the horizon, the city skyline, the interior streets lit up with all its neons. Rung commented on how strange he found it that it was so similar to Cybertron, visually. “Maybe we all have the same taste,” I responded.

“Do you have photos from after the massacres?” he asked me.

“Not a lot,” I said. I flipped through to one of the city wreckage, energon still fresh on the street.

“Good.” He looked back up at me. “Focusing on the positives is better than focusing on the negatives.” He switched my datapad back to an image from before the massacres.

I didn’t have the heart to say I was wrapped up in the negatives, not just of Prion. I was livid, focused on getting revenge against the Consortia and against Megatron. I was wrapped in my own remorse and guilt that I could have done more for the DJD- more for Tarn, more for Kaon.

I owed a lot to Rung. His loss only added to my pain, but at least there was some part of him left in the Lunarians.

Chapter Text

Dominus was a predicament.

Our early days were simple enough. I’d met him on some planet I forgot the name of, where the DJD had dropped me off after they fetched me from Prion. We only spent a few days there, but we had been well on our way into a plan for survival in a place with a horrible energy crisis. 

Dominus and I were the underdogs. The Functionists left a sour taste for beastformers in a lot of bots’ heads, loyal to them or not, and Mini-Cons had always been regarded by the larger members of the public as lesser, to be used as tools- it was no wonder many of us didn’t leave Prion or that those of us on Cybertron huddled together in cities built by our own hands. My subspecies was a tad isolationist and it had this 50/50 effect on the population: either it made one much more empathetic to those outside our own (especially if they faced the same prejudices), or it made one shut off and have bad regard towards outsiders, especially larger bots. I was lucky to be the former. I had empathized with Dominus, who had made this huge downfall from Functionist society (I’m not sure how he built it, to begin with), because I felt that the same had happened to me. Bots hated him for his altmode, and bots hated me for my size. We were the perfect team.

Three days into having met each other, we established a base of operations in the basement of some wartorn building. Four days, we were low on energon and needed to scavenge for more to keep going. It didn’t help that he’d lost his former status, nor that it was believed I consumed less energon compared to a normal-sized bot (I did, but the difference was very little, and it allowed me to work long hours into the night like I tended to do- energy efficiency over lower energy consumption ). Five days, the DJD had returned for me.

The DJD was always a band of misfits, the Decepticons were as a whole. One an outlier formerly empurata’d, two with altmodes that would only really allow them to work in very specific industries (if they were from pre-War, which I do believe they were, but I could be remembering wrong), one blind, one a linguist purist, then us, a beastformer and a Mini-Con.

There was reason for them to come back for me; they needed a medic. Dominus had just been part of the package, but he carried his weight.

He proved his use early on. Shuttling messages, discovering information, and locating targets was a breeze for him. Dominus also helped in executing hits, having a more delicate touch in the field, like me. Accuracy, speed, and effectiveness were important. I didn’t know he was a mole, nor how he even knew of my connection to the DJD prior to joining (if he did at all), but even then, not all of his work was illegitimate. All of his background work of spying on the Senate and aggressing them worked for us in regards to the Autobots and our targets. Shame it backfired on us.

The day his cover was blown, he tried to flee. The ship had been settled on Messatine and before he could escape (presumably to Delphi), Tarn knocked him out. I wasn’t startled at all when I came out into the main halls, Tarn pulling a limp Dominus from the floor. “What happened,” I’d flatly asked. It was explained to me, and I was not forgiving.

Tarn took me and Kaon aside as we weighed our options with Dominus. Vos, though not called Vos at the time, was there as well. We sat at the meeting room table, I had my chin rested against my folded hands as my brain stirred for ideas.

Outright killing him was the first option. 

“Betrayal is too high a crime,” Tarn said, voice low.

“Right…” I responded, leaning back in my seat. “But what are our other options? Just torture him and kill him afterwards?”

“I don’t know,” Tarn huffed. “I want something more than that…”

“Kaon?” I asked, sitting up.

“Hold on,” he said, raising a hand. “I’m thinking.”

We obliged him, sitting for a little bit more in silence, turning over equally gory ideas in my head.

“I’ve got an idea ,” Kaon spoke up. His amusement was audible- god I loved when he did that, it made me so happy. “Domestication. Have either of you heard of it?”

“Vaguely,” I responded. The Senate had reportedly used the method previously, though it certainly wasn’t as common as empurata or even shadowplay. It wouldn’t be pioneered for some time, so the procedure was a make-or-break exact science. It was best done with a mnemosurgeon, but we didn’t have one.

We had close enough, though.

Tarn and Kaon had assisted me with the operation. Four bots crammed into an operating room normally only meant for two and a half made things complicated. I had to lift the back of the table up for the sake of Tarn, though this came at the cost of me needing a stool to get to the operating site. I had to effectively shove myself between Kaon and Tarn, performing the more delicate physical work of it while also keeping an eye on vitals. I had my overhead lights on too, for their sakes.

Kaon knew how to set it up and the instructions for the procedure, Tarn was capable of using his outlier ability to perform the bulk of the lobotomy procedure (the rest was me having to tinker with Dominus’s module), while everything having to be physically done was me.

I can’t speak for Kaon’s background with it, but he seemed to know a bit about psychology. I’d like to believe, judging off his altmode, that was his purpose under the Functionists, but I honestly don’t know. Alternatively, he could’ve gotten into my medical texts, or maybe just had a thing for it.

I had to keep Dominus sedated for a number of the following days, allowing him to physically recover from the procedure. Once updating my patient notes, I’d looked up at Dominus momentarily- unconscious, eyes shut, curled somewhat around himself, looking as if he had really just been sleeping. The regret sunk in on me in that moment, knowing this was my friend, a person who had helped me literally stay alive for some time. Dominus had put me before himself through our years of knowing each other, and he was one of my closest friends, if not, in fact, the closest. I shook my head and tossed the thought out; he had betrayed us, given valuable information to the Autobots. He was the very thing we had no mercy for.

Any pangs of regret I had following this were short-lived. Dominus became the Pet. He was no more than an animal now, commanded by Kaon, a vicious and violent beast with no regard for life or emotion. He was feral, both a great tool for instilling fear and one for providing a painful death.

His domestication was slightly botched, at least, compared to the work of the Senate and later on of Demus. One of the points of domestication was to make it so the domesticated beastformer in question wouldn’t be able to understand their situation. But I swear, there were moments where Dominus did.

In these moments of clarity, as short as they were, he sat alone. His eyes returned to their old green and he gave me this gaze that shook me to my core. It was this gaze of half hatred, half ‘why would you do this to me, I was loyal to you’. The hurt it caused me ran deep. In one moment, after I’d realized, I spent a moment sitting with him and petting his head. He’d leaned in somewhat, resigned.

Even in his moments of clarity, he was loyal to us, especially on the battlefield. He couldn’t communicate and no one would know it was him, so my theory is that he was accepting of his fate and pressed on for the sake of us. He still saw us as his friends, even then, I believe. He did appear to hold a grudge, seeming angry or frustrated from time to time, but even then, he would fight for us.

I don’t know how aware he was, but my hope is that the answer was not as much as I thought him to be.