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The more devout religious types of Nyon call you the ‘Son of Solus’. They say you have a gift, and you’re inclined to agree most of the time.
Most of the time.
Others call you a freak. A monster. A child from the deepest depths of the Pits. Your reputation as a street racer and troublemaker doesn’t do you any favors in this regard. You have few friends, and most of them are still wary of you, sticking close only for the protection your power and charm brings.
‘Power and charm’… yeah, right. You’re just another street brat like them. You have to race and fight for your energon, too. You have to huddle in corners and abandoned buildings for shelter, too. You have to run from cops, too. The only difference is that you can talk circles around anyone who decides to pick on you. It doesn’t mean it works every time.
Only one other person truly understands. Your best friend. Your ride or die. The one who, whenever you can’t run fast enough and get tossed in a cell for it, is always waiting for you on the outside.
Drift.
As far back as you can remember, he’s always been there—with a cube when you run out, with a new hiding spot, with a hit of syk or circuit boosters when all you need is to get away from everything. Sometimes you wonder what you’d do without him, but you always come to the conclusion that a day where you separate will never come to pass. Not if you can help it. Not on your life.
The war is closing in. It’s been raging since long, long before you were forged. For the longest time, you didn’t even know it was happening; neither side wants Nyon for their own, so they leave it well enough alone. Occasionally, your friends will ask, “Which side would you choose?”
You always scoff and say you’re not stupid enough to get involved. In reality, you don’t even know what they’re fighting over. All you know is that out of everyone you’ve seen join up, you haven’t seen a single one come back.
You’re not going into this war if you can help it. Not unless you’re dragged into it.
And one day, you are.
You shouldn’t have messed with soldiers. In your defense, they were taunting you, calling you and your friends a bunch of addicts and thugs. It was easy to ignore at first, but then they started going after Drift, saying disgusting things until his patience clearly began to wear thin. And you may be able to blast fire from your arms, but you’ve seen what Drift can do when he’s pushed to his limits.
So, because you’re tired and hungry and not in the mood, you stepped in. And that was when you noticed the purple insignia on their chests.
Too late.
You’ve always known that you have the capability for incredible violence. To cause unimaginable harm. People have tried to train you, to teach you to harness the fire inside you and keep it under control, but it gets out sometimes.
As your helm is smashed into the ground, you feel your hold on it slipping. Your main attacker, a tank, is screaming at you, “C’mon, loser, fight back! You wanted to mess with ‘Cons, here’s your chance! Throw a punch, blow us away, do something!” Your servos feel heavy and clumsy as you scrabble at the digits tightening around your throat. Something cracks, and it hurts.
Your friends have abandoned you. Even Drift is gone, hopefully hiding. The grip on your neck cables releases, only for a pede to come down hard on your chassis, forcing the wind from your vents—what little is there. You wheeze, and embers fill the air. One of the tank’s friends, a jet, sneers at the sight. “Tch. Little junkie’s vents’re so full’a slag, he’s coughin’ up ash.” The rest of the gang laughs, and you feel tears slip from your optics.
A third voice joins in, “Look, he’s crying!” and the laughter only gets louder. You’re no stranger to beatdowns like this, from bullies and cops alike. You could always fight back, you always knew their tricks or were stronger than them or had some other advantage on your side. But not this time. There’s too many, and they’re all trained soldiers out for your blood because you looked at them funny.
One of your servos comes up to try and push the pede off your chassis, and the tank jerks away with a shout. “Fragger burned me!” He sounds as surprised as he does outraged, and your panicked mind doesn’t have time to catch up before he’s kicked you straight in the chin.
It doesn’t take long for the whole gang to get in on the fun, five soldiers punching and kicking one lone street brat. Other citizens pass you by, either thinking you deserve it or too afraid to get involved. You don’t blame them—you’ve made a lot of enemies in your short life—but you can’t help but feel betrayed anyway.
The fire is building. You can feel it, and it’s rapidly growing out of control, taking over your mind. You want to hurt these people, but not like this. This isn’t fair, this would be dirty in ways even you wouldn’t stoop to. But it can’t be helped.
You feel something cut into one of your spoiler wings, white-hot thorns sprouting all across your neural net and digging into your internals, and suddenly you are no longer in control.
Your mouth wrenches open in an otherworldly shriek, cut with static and only partially due to the pain, as your whole frame erupts into flames. Your attackers jerk back, but they can’t escape the burning wave that radiates from you. The fire almost clings to them, any attempts to extinguish themselves futile. A few of them transform and try to run, but they soon burn to death.
And you watch. As their paint bubbles and peels, as their protoform melts, as their internals leak from the holes. The whole time, their faces are contorted in expressions of shock and agony.
But you’re not done. Well, you would be, but you’re just a passenger in your frame right now, watching from behind a pane of glass. Something else is piloting you, wielding your flames with too much ease. With stilted movements, as if the experience of using a body is unfamiliar, it stands you up and starts moving down the street.
Something, someone, suddenly grabs your arm despite the flames circling you. The pilot’s view snaps to them, and your spark drops.
It’s Drift. You know he’s shouting at you, but you can’t hear the words. Even worse, he doesn’t look disturbed.
He looks scared. Not of you; for you.
You’re helpless to do anything when the pilot wraps your digits around Drift’s arm and throws him. He hits a nearby wall and falls to the ground in a heap. The impact of his frame leaves a shallow crater, and you can do nothing but writhe and scream in vain.
You are no longer in control.
The pilot rotates your helm to look around in disgust at a city that has given you nothing but grief. It wants to raze it to the ground. You don’t want that, but it does not care.
Hours go by—they must, the idea that you’re trapped there in the back of your own mind for only a few minutes is too much to bear. Your view fades in and out, and every time it comes back, all you see is devastation. Buildings burning, people burning, familiar faces melting into slag. You don’t see Drift again. You can only assume he’s among those you’ve killed.
It simply continues. You know you’re crying, you can feel it, but the coolant evaporates off your cheeks before it can fall too far. You want this to end, you want it to be over now, but it just keeps going.
Until everything is gone. And, in one hazy instant, you’re back in the pilot’s seat. Left to process what you’ve done.
You fall to your knees right there in the middle of the street, choking up more cinders as your frame cools and your vision swims. You feel hollow, carved out. Broken into a million tiny pieces. Your HUD flashes with warnings that you can’t read, but you can feel them. Your entire frame aches, and you suspect it’ll become less distant over time as you settle back into the front of your mind.
Nyon is no more. It’s beyond saving. Any building made of metal has been smelted, and all others either turned to ash or rubble. Corpses litter the streets, and you recognize so many of them despite the blackened plating and frozen expressions. You’re shaking so hard that you can barely pick out individual features, and it isn’t helped by the smoke and embers filling the air, so thick that you can’t see a mile in front of you.
The fire still rages, but all of it has left you. For the first time in your entire life, you’re cold inside.
At some point, you manage to pull yourself to your pedes, the threat of starvation-led shutdown looming over your helm. You’re so tired, but you need to find survivors, you need to find Drift.
Most importantly, you need to get the hell out of here.
You wander what you think is the main road, nearly tripping over your own pedes every few steps. Every breath comes out a wheeze. You can no longer pinpoint any individual injuries, just a stabbing pain all over your entire frame. You know you’d be crying if you could. You don’t know why you can’t; maybe it’s shock, or maybe all the fluid in your body has burned away, more fuel for the fire when it ran out of energon. It certainly feels that way.
Eventually, after the hundredth empty frame, it dawns on you: there are no survivors. You killed them all. Paired with your empty tank, the smoke in your vents, and the pain of your frame, it’s enough to send you into emergency stasis.
You hope no one finds you in time to revive you.
…
“…nd a live one! Primus, kid, that’s some insane luck you’ve got, huh?”
There’s a needle in your neck, stuck directly into your main energon line. You choke on the shock of fresh air, and are promptly shifted onto your side in case you purge while you cough. The servos responsible aren’t very gentle, but they’re warm and steadying.
When most of the soot is expelled from your vents, you find yourself rasping, “M-my fault… Did this…” It hurts to admit, but then, it hurts to exist right now.
Your rescuer shushes you and smooths a servo over your helm, carefully tweaking a few bent pieces back into place. “You’re alright, kid,” he says. “Just breathe.”
But you can’t. Not when you just killed everyone you know, destroyed the only home you’ve ever had, and came out of it alive. Not when you’re being touched and cared for like you’re not the last survivor of Nyon, and the one responsible for it being wiped off the map. Before you know it, your face is wet, already-overtaxed vents aching with the force of the sobs torn from your throat.
You don’t want to be alright. You don’t want to be lucky. You want to go back, to stop yourself from ever messing with those soldiers. You want to curl up in the pile of mesh and blankets you’ve hoarded over the years. You want to go home. You want your friends.
You want Drift. But you killed him.
It’s all you can say as you’re pulled upright and against a frame as warm and steady as the servos it belongs to. Nearly incoherent, smothered in static, over and over and over; “I killed Drift, I killed him, I killed my best friend, he’s gone, I’m a monster, don’t save me, please don’t save me, I’ll do it again, I don’t deserve it–” You just keep going and going and going, digging deeper and deeper and deeper, until your vocalizer finally fritzes out from the strain. Your bawling doesn’t stop with it.
Either your rescuer couldn’t understand you through the static and tears, or he just didn’t know how to go about comforting someone confessing to a massacre, because he doesn’t say anything until you’re too tired to keep going. It’s then, when you slump against his frame, that he quietly asks, “Do you know chiro?” You’d be surprised if you had it in you, but as it stands you can only nod and offer up a shaking servo. He takes it gently. “You said you killed someone?”
Your lip trembles, threatening more tears, but you manage to sign, [My best friend. Everyone.] You’re not sure he’ll believe you, and judging by the frown and furrow of his brow, he doesn’t.
Which is insane to you, because their energon is caked and burnt into your paint. If all of it was yours, you wouldn’t be alive. You’re sure there’s no way anyone would’ve gotten to you in time, emergency stasis or no.
“Well, I’m not sure how reassuring this is, but one of my teammates found a trail of energon and pedesteps leading out of the city.” His visor retracts, revealing soft yellow optics. For some reason, it ignites the smallest, most fragile bit of hope in your spark. “No one was at the end of it, so whoever it belonged to must’ve been picked up by someone.” So close, you can see his expression tighten just a bit. Odd. “Maybe it’s your friend.”
You hope. You hope more than anything that Drift made it out, that someone with good intentions found him and took him in. He’s already been through so much—you know he lived in Rodion before it was bombed out, and you know it was way worse than Nyon. You hope, wherever he ended up, that it’s peaceful.
But you hope he’s alive first and foremost.
Eventually, whatever device was pumping energon into your lines runs out, and your rescuer detaches it from your neck. You still feel cold, but it’s tempered somewhat by the fuel and the warm frame that seems to insist upon holding you close. Part of you wants to protest, to push away and insist that you’re not a sparkling. Most of you is too tired and scared to even try.
Now that you’ve calmed down a fraction, you don’t actually want to be left behind. You’ve always been terrible about being left alone, working yourself up into a panic after only a few hours. It’s going to be so much worse if you’re left to wander the remains of the only home you’ve ever known, with only empty frames for company. Before you realize what you’re doing, you’ve grabbed your rescuer’s servo and are signing, [Please don’t leave me.] You may not deserve shelter, but it’s not going to stop you from begging anyway.
To your immense relief, he gives you a reassuring smile and says, “That was never even an option, kid. You’re coming back to base with me.”
Base… For a split second, your instinct is to panic; this is another soldier, this is someone who could hurt you, would hurt you without hesitation. But then you spot the insignia on his pauldrons—different from that of your attackers. Blocky and red rather than sharp and purple. This is still a soldier, but for the other side. Evidently, this side is much, much kinder. [Where?]
“Iacon,” your rescuer says as he helps you stand. Your legs wobble under you and you almost topple over again at his answer. “My name’s Blurr, by the way.” If the fact that you’re being taken to the capitol city wasn’t enough of a blow to your psyche, then that additional tidbit nearly takes you out entirely. You may not have been around for his heyday, but you’d be an idiot to not know who Blurr is.
…He seems different from the stories you’ve been told. In a good way. And he’s the one who pulled you from the ashes of your city. This has to be some kind of nightmare-turned-dream. The tight hold on your servos indicates otherwise.
“Hot Rod,” you manage to reply, your voice a rasp from smoke and static. “My name is Hot Rod.”