As promised, here is the Pitfighter! Timebomb AU I brought up a few weeks back. It took me a while, but chapter 1 is out at last. Hope you all enjoy this one, as I had tons of fun writing it. <3 The full chapter is linked in the title!
Excerpt:
Jinx stepped out into the ring, stance firm, nails digging into her palms and creating red crescents.
Coming to the forefront of the opposite dark chamber, a white owl mask.
Yeah, that one.
Sauntering forward until his entire stature had been illuminated, her opponent shrugged off his thick camo jacket and tossed it aside, probably to prove he had nothing on him.
Jinx rolled her eyes into her skull.
What a show-off.
Same long white locs, same broad frame, same stupid charm. This was definitely the guy Sevika had been going on about earlier.
But there was undoubtedly something about him that she knew way too well, not related to this morning. And yet, there was everything about him that she couldn’t place.
An old snippet I wrote for the Pitfighter AU I think last year? It’s almost certainly outdated, but here have it anyway :>
Cw: blood, death, injury, shock
To The Victor Goes Tomorrow
Orion’s first victory and the toll it took on him.
Orion's back hit the dusty arena floor, leaving him in a graceless sprawl, eyes suddenly squinting up against too-bright stadium lights and the grey sky just beyond them- and then he was scrambling unright- every second not on your feet is a death sentence- fear driving him to stand up again on unsteady legs. Quickly cooling energon- not all his, too much to be all his- dripped off his frame to spatter and soak into the dirt underfoot.
His frame all but trembled with exhaustion as nervous electricity and pain signals pinged off his circuits in-time, it was an effort to move at all- keep going! keep going! keep going!
He whipped around to face his opponent again- stupid, stupid why’d you give him your back- surprised the other mech wasn’t on him again already-
The big red hauler sat hardly holding himself up on one arm, armor involuntarily flared and quivering in shock, yellow optics wide and panicked, staring into the sky at nothing. The blunt end of a pike stuck out from a gap in his collar flaring that otherwise protected his neck, just under his jaw, the weapon speared down, down, deep as Orion could drive it into him, forcing the mech’s head into an awkward, upward angle.
Red paint was streaked in wide bands of blue as energon seeped out of him in a steady flow, from his intake, from around the pike, from the sputtering, drowning vents in his abdomen, his whole frame hitching as it tried to inhale and found that it couldn’t.
The roar of the crowd seemed to cave in on Orion, the deafening cacophony burying him alive, dread nailing him to the spot and heavy enough to nearly make his wobbling knees buckle. He stared blankly forward, gaze locked on the mech as his optics dimmed to black and the one arm holding him up gave out, the quickly graying body slumping fully onto the floor in slow motion.
A voice boomed, louder than anything, stinging his frying audio sensors, and drowning out the roaring static of the crowd, “LAZARUS TAKES THE WIN AND LIVES ANOTHER DAY!”
The crowd screamed,“LAZ-UR-US!” several times over in response, cheering for him, congratulating him, shaking the arena as they stomped their feet in unison in time with the syllables of the name that wasn't his.
The medics filed out onto the floor shortly after the chant faded, two other gladiators in tow to scrape the large corpse off the ground. One of the fighters pulled the pike from the dead mech’s neck in one last spill of energon and heaved him onto a slab to be carried off. The medics watched and did not bother to put their hands on him, they were here for little more than formality and would be busy picking the mech apart the moment they got him into the medbay. Orion was gestured by one of them to follow as they made their exit, not waiting to see if he actually could- but he’s numbly limping behind them regardless as they descended down into the tunnels below and out of sight.
The darkness of the entrance gave way to the pale yellow of artificial lights, the noise of the arena muffled and the sound of metal footsteps on stone suddenly hurt his adjusting audials. He was still fixed on the dead mech, an arm hung off the slab just visible around the bulk of one of the gladiators and it bounced with the pair’s every step, blue dripping off of red fingers and leaving a sporadic trail behind them.
A medic, he doesn't look to see which one, complains about the mess he’s made.
Something he couldn’t name hit him and suddenly he wasn’t following any of them anymore, unsure when he turned off into a side-tunnel, alone and far from himself as his body moved purposelessly forward.
He walked until the noise of the arena and the sound of another fight starting above was only a dull roar barely heard through the stone, until his systems wound down more and more and he could properly feel the toll the fight had taken on his frame, pain creeping up his struts as his injuries made themselves known. In a shiver, his knees gave out, the hydrologics in his legs finally giving up and depressurizing in a long hiss. His shoulder hit the wall as his frame pivoted to lean on it, shaking as he fought to stay upright, to keep standing, but his body had no fight left and quickly gave into gravity, slowly sliding down the wall and leaving a streak of paint and dried energon behind until his aft hit the floor.
He curled into himself there in the silence under the dim lighting of the hardly-used passageway, anchoring himself in the pain clawing through his neuralnet and the even cycling of his vents, He tried hard not to see the image of the dying mech branded into his permanent memory. His crest had been ripped almost clean off and the exposed circuitry stung as he rested his forehead on his filthy knees when he pulled them in close to his chest. The sound of tiny shards of glass hitting his armor and then the floor as the busted glass of his chestplate shed more of itself as he tried to ball himself up tightly.
He was shaking enough to hear his armor rattle as he stared into the dark pocket of his body- the biolights that should be there having been long-since destroyed and never replaced- his optics being the only thing to cast its dim light into the space. The ghost of the hand that had gripped him around the waist and squeezed lingered, the ache of bent armor fresh as every other injury. Then he was away from himself again, hardly registering his frame sinking just that much further to lay on the floor as his recent memory replayed itself over and over again, one moment overlaying the next in near perfect clarity. He felt the sting of the calpularies behind his optics bursting and the fresh energon streaking down his dirty face as he laid there, unable to stand and curled up like a sparkling.
A new cold crept up his frame and he started to fade, unable to fight the coming emergency shutdown, he fell offline.
Do Orion and Megatron still lead a rebellion in your AU?
(tf blog: macadam)
They do!
When Orion meets him, what would become the rebellion is still in its infancy. The first arc of the plot takes place as the first major act of rebellion is formulated and set into motion.
Their relationship doesn't start off great to put it mildly, but over the course of this first arc Megatron manages to pull his head some millimeters out of his own ass and they do eventually become the close friends we usually know them as. ("Close friends" in this case meaning they are absolutely and undeniably boning) And Orion ends up playing an important part in the initial act and proving his worth several times over.
From the second arc onward to the very end Orion is officially spearheading the rebellion shoulder-to-shoulder with Megatron (not as his SIC but a leader on the same footing as he is), also ending up working closely with Soundwave, Jazz, and other assorted allies with a specialty in intelligence.
