Work Text:
Garbage rained down on B-127 in timed, heaving breaths. He sat listlessly beneath the downpour, stabilizing poleyn braced against the sides of the conveyor—an alter of indecision. Trash scattered across his pauldrons as it fell down from above, meeting resistance against his curvature and his crumbling façade. Some of it landed on the belt as intended and routinely met their end at the incinerator behind him. The rest tumbled to the floor from B's intrusion on their landing zone, a blockade in the form of a stout bot.
And he'd been sitting for so long that little piles started to form around him in a halo arc. None of the build-up appeared valuable or worth saving, merely clutter that he'd have to clean eventually.
If nothing else, B learned long ago the importance of keeping his workspace free of FOD no matter the size thereof. And all it took for that lesson to sink in was one memorable moment where he tripped on a tangle of gnawed-on wires. He had been holding on to the pile for far too long and wound up chipping a corner of his denta for his efforts.
It put his situation into perspective for him. B-127 didn't let the furnace devour the wires sooner because at the time, he totally thought he would use them for some sort of project—either a private art installation to admire on his lonesome or for sprucing up the place to feel less like a prison cell and more like a home.
But peace of processor wasn't worth harming his frame over it.
Miners got injured all the time, no biggie—simply a part of the trade after all. But… B never spent that much time in the mining sector or any other job prior to becoming the shift lead of Sublevel-50. So to lose a part of his denta that had been the first time he ever sustained an injury he couldn't wait out or fix.
He spent endless shifts freaking out over the chip, running his tongue over the indent repeatedly. B wondered if he could fix it somehow before his next inspection. Or if he shouldn't even bother because his supervisor would get far more frustrated and irate to learn that he wasted time doing so, losing out on potential material that got swallowed up by the flames.
B-127 was certain that no matter what he did, his supervisor would find nothing but disappointment in his actions—because if he had just gotten rid of the useless scrap in the first place, B wouldn't have fallen and hurt himself. He did end up getting a note to file about the incident, even though he tried so hard to hide it and prevent them from finding out.
Shame on B for thinking that his supervisor wouldn't notice so long as he kept his mouth shut the whole time. He felt seen and scrutinized all in one, an amalgamation of emotions that he didn't exactly know where to start parsing through them.
Anyhow… See what he meant? Keeping a tidy workplace was the key to efficiency.
Unlike way back when, however, B didn't jump right into his work. He couldn't. All the strength in his frame went toward waiting at the foot of the chute for salvation.
Or guidance.
Or for a foreman to tell him what to do.
B-127 received nothing but silence.
A silence only broken by the abandoned and unwanted remnants of the upper, cogged society who lorded over him levels far above. Their wastefulness battered against his helm, even as his spark sputtered in his chest the longer he stalled.
Tilting his helm up, B stared into oblivion. This far down, the light from the surface couldn't reach him. The only thing that could was more garbage. It tumbled down now, into his beseeching face. His welding mask protected his optics from the debris of the trash chute, but nothing else.
Not even from the truth.
He looked away quickly, his fans whirling inside his frame in humiliation at his… cowardice.
It wouldn't have been hard. Climbing up the trash chute, he meant. He'd done it once or twice before, never really exiting to the topside per se, but lingering in the maintenance corridors. Perhaps he should have felt some form of shame from listening in on the other cogless going about their duties whilst he engaged in truancy from his own, but his craving for community triumphed. So he knew how to traverse upward but…
What made now so different? When it mattered most?
Rubbing at his scuffed knuckles, B worried over the dented metal of his digits. They were broad but flat with odd swirl patterns pressed into the metal from last-minute salvaging an object from the furnace, precious pieces of friends soon to come into existence. Honestly, he could hardly pick up anything beyond superficial data from the busted sensors at the tip. Not to mention B was certain that the joints were fused nearly together at this point, making it harder to keep them steady.
But they were his hands, though, at the end of the cycle. And letting them caress one another in comfort, as he second-thought whether to keep them in his lap or bring them up to his chassis where his missing cog stood as a reminder of what he lacked.
It didn't exactly stop the tremors that shook through his plating, all the way down to where he cradled a projection disc that anyone else but him should have discovered.
"I… I should go, right?" he asked aloud, turning slightly at the paralyzed figures to his left. Aatron and EP-508 stared at him without speaking a word. "A braver mech would, like the High Guard or…" A Prime.
They didn't answer him. B-127 didn't expect them to.
"But…" He continued, "It's… It would be dangerous. To go alone, you know…" And neither of you will join me. "So I don't…" Know what to do.
Pulling his hands away from his cog-hole, B stared at… Well, at Alpha Trion's distress call—his final words unspoken to all but him.
Finding the disc it… It sobered him up. B-127 hadn't meant to find it, especially not whilst he was digging through his latest rejected quota-haul for a fitting helm for a new friend. Management didn't find use in any of it, so B would. That was a skill he could call all his own, sculpting.
Only… he found the projection disc instead. It tumbled out of the busted-up projector—illuminating his small, cramped world with the desperate call of a Prime long since passed.
And with it, an ultimatum hanging right out of reach. B-127 shifted through trash. Not relics or distress messages meant for elite warriors with cogs or anything else! This shouldn't have fallen to him, not in a million of cycles. The magnitude of potential mismanagement, of abject laziness, of bots not doing their jobs right and leaving the task of saving their entire species to B.
How could something so… so important wind up down here in Sublevel-50? It should've been discovered on one of Sentinel Prime's excursions to the surface or– Or maybe some archivist could have found it buried among the shelves of recovered media from the derelict buildings outside of Iacon.
But it had been found, by him of all mechanisms. The screw-up. The no-good, errant cog in an otherwise functional machine.
"What do I do, guys?" B-127 felt on the verge of tears. Sparks flickered at the corners of his optics, his vision pixelating slightly.
Staying in Sublevel-50 and ignoring its existence… to do so meant casting his people in darkness forever. Never to see the light of the Matrix shine once again, never to allow his fellow cogless to rest, to not have to mine energon ever again because the Well would run free and there would be no point, no need.
But leaving… B-127 could very well die. He didn't know what laid in wait for him on the surface—the chance that the Quintessons never left… There was a reason why Sentinel never left without his armed guard and if a Prime couldn't feel safe wandering the surface alone what hope did B have?
But wasn't the peace of Cybertron more important than his own self-preservation?
"I…" He looked down at the disc. "I can't…"
The trash chute gargled and spat out the waste of Primus over his helm. Sloughed off meat from the tendons of their creator. All material from the mines.
B-127 flinched and with shaky hands—the disc curled toward his protective palm—he dragged his frame toward the side of the conveyor. Sliding off of it, B trembled and nearly buckled under himself. His pedes tripped over the dump his workplace had transformed into in his deliberations and it took all of his focus to hobble over to his alcove where his friends waited for his decision.
With a stumble right into the edge of the break table, B-127 deposited the disc and…
Backed away.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. To EP-508 and Aatron. To all his fellow cogless in the levels above. And…
And to Alpha Trion.
"I'm not…" Brave enough for this on my own.