The Rot (part 2)
Dazed and confused, Orion pax comes online surrounded by rubble. Luckily, he isn't alone. However, that does not mean he's safe.
Part 2 of my 'inspired by MLP infection' AU! I hope y'all enjoy it! Again, big thanks to @lets-try-some-writing for all the help and encouragement!
Part 1 here
The hot, yet soothing tingle of his self-repair system’s nanites tending to the aching wounds of his frame was what finally brought Orion’s processor back online. His awareness floated slowly in and out, only able to sense the slowly ebbing pain signals from his damaged frame. His helm throbbed aggressively if he so much as even attempted a thought. It was reassuring, however, that each time Orion’s awareness floated back to him, he ached a little less and that his thoughts were able to come more freely.
Where was he? Even without his full processing power, he knew that he was not in the safety of his berth. Accessing his memories did little to answer that question. He recalled Megatronus contacting him about a train, and he could remember that he had indeed left his hab, but beyond that, his memories were still too damaged to retrieve. The only option available was to allow himself to float away once more and allow the nanites time to continue their repair.
When he next came to awareness, it lacked the gentle ebb and flow of before. Rapid flashes of his most recent memories assaulted him in waves: coming online to an unexpected call, Megatronus’ unexpected declaration of affection, his walk to the station, boarding the train…
His processor throbbed as if it would burst while the emotions tied to his memories crashed into effect: confusion, worry and then fear. Orion’s optics shuttered online just as the panic hit him. He sat rapidly, causing his helm to spin and his optical input to become distorted.
“Shield your field!” The command was hissed at him with quiet urgency, and Orion clamped down on instinct. He brought his servo to his helm and groaned softly as he rubbed at his closed optics with his palm in a desperate attempt to placate the pain in his processor.
“What happened?” Orion croaked out softly. Behind him came the soft shuffling of small pedes, and before Orion could even process what that meant, his companion was at his side.
“There’s no time to explain, Can you walk? It isn’t safe here.” Orion reset his optics, and slowly opened them once more, relieved that his inputs were no longer spinning. He was surrounded by broken glass and crumpled sheets of metal, dangerously sharp. Strips of soft mesh cabling dangled from above him, some slowly dripping fluids that he couldn’t identify.
Orion’s optics finally found his companion. He ex-vented in relief as he was struck with recognition. Ravage observed him with a raised optical ridge, and the look on his face gave Orion the impression that the cassette hadn’t expected him to come online as suddenly as he had.
“I think so?” Orion whispered through his grimace as he felt the stiffness in his hydraulics as he shifted his weight, to maneuver onto his knees. A flurry of diagnostic pings assaulted his HUD, alerting him to several injuries that were, luckily, non-critical.
“Good. We need to leave. Now.” It was a command, and one Orion thought almost sounded laced with fear. Ravage darted forward, his cyber-feline frame having no issue ducking beneath what appeared to be the mangled remains of a bench that had been partially ripped from the walls in the crash.
It wasn’t especially difficult to maneuver his frame through the small space, but it did ache like the Pits to crawl his way through what was left of the compartment. He was dangerously low on fuel, that much was obvious by how exhausting it was to hold his frame and move at such an angle.
That also explains why my nanites did not complete my self repair. Orion thought as he dragged himself forward through the jagged remains. By the time his helm popped through a crushed window, he was venting heavily, and his arms shook with the strain of holding up his weight.
“Hurry. We don’t have much time.” Ravage paced nervously outside the wreckage, his optics constantly scanning around them. Orion begrudgingly hauled himself free from the shattered window and grimaced as he stood, taking only a klik to allow his optics to adjust to the increased light before following the cyber-feline between two hunks of deformed metal.
Orion almost couldn’t believe the utter devastation around him. Smashed bits of transport compartments lie crumpled as far as he could see. Mutilated remains of Cybertronians were scattered haphazardly about, some obviously crushed by impact alone, while others looked…. Gnawed at, as if something had consumed them.
He’d never seen anything like it before, not even on his long deep-dives into the darkest reaches of the data-net. Orion’s tanks churned, hot and sickly sweet, at the thought of what could have done damage like that. Some of those bodies were completely eviscerated…
Orion focused his optics on Ravage, not wanting to see any more of the surrounding carnage than he had to. This was beyond wrong. His internal chronometer told him that he had been offline for several cycles, which should have been plenty of time for rescue crews to have saved not only him, but everyone else strewn around. Surely, the Transport Commission would have sent a crew to clean the debris off the tracks.
It seemed that he and Ravage were the only two living mechs around. But if that were the case, what had Ravage so anxious? It was painfully obvious as Ravage led him through the debris field, zigzagging to stay in the shadows of the rubble, that he was trying to avoid them being seen, but from whom, Orion couldn’t begin to guess.
It seemed like the rubble stretched forever. The closer they came to the front of the train, the worse everything seemed to be. Train compartments were smashed against and piled atop each other in such a disordered way that it almost could have been beautiful. If only the place wasn’t littered with corpses and plastered with splattered energon.
“Hey!” A panicked voice called out to the pair, causing Ravage to startle and Orion’s helm to whip towards the source of the sound. A young mech, pinned at the waist beneath a large scrap of steel, waved frantically at them. “Oh! Thank Primus, you’re not one’a them…” He could see the fear that emanated from his optics and the stains of dried optical lubricants painted down his face.
Orion thought nothing of it. His internal processes immediately flooded him with coding to provide aid. He rushed towards the trapped youngster, ignoring the pings flooding his circuits from his injuries. He wasn’t that far from them.
“Pax! Stop!” Ravage called out to him in a harsh whisper, his frustration evident in the slight growl lacing his command, but Orion could not heed that request. Not when his coding so persistently urged him to help someone so desperately in need.
“You gotta get me outta here! They’re coming!” A wall of hunger assaulted the archivist’s EM receiver, unlike anything he’d ever felt before: thick, desperate, and driving. Something was coming, that was for sure, and Orion had a feeling that whatever it was, was the same thing that had caused all the carnage he’d been trying to avoid looking at. He had to get him out fast, or he’d be torn apart, just like the corpses littering the whole area.
A weight slammed into him from behind, sending Orion careening face-first into the ground. Ravage hunched atop his back and hissed furiously into his audials. “There isn’t time, Pax! They’re here! We have to leave him!”
Orion lifted his helm, anger coursing through his circuits like an inferno. He opened his intake to retort, but was frozen solid in fear when a shambling mech, painted in red and gold, tumbled down from atop the hunk of metal pinning the youngling down, landing with a ground shaking thud. Chunks of his armor were missing from his frame, and Orion immediately recognized the same thick, green goop oozing from his intake and down his front as he saw the drunken mech purge before the crash.
The youngling screamed as the mech shambled towards him. Ravage jumped, and suddenly was in Orion’s line of sight, their faces nearly touching,
“We have to go now! More will come!” Ravage pushed his entire face against Orion’s aggressively, an obviously desperate attempt to push him up onto his pedes. The youngling’s field erupted suddenly in a hot, sickening burst of panic. “There’s no saving him now, Pax!”
Orion couldn’t remember getting to his pedes. Everything happened so fast. The shambling mech grabbed the youngling by the arm and mercilessly tore at the plating. Another mech, covered in the same putrid ooze, shambled forward from the shadows, and Orion’s processor flooded him with a new command: Run!
Ravage was two steps ahead of him on that front, and Orion instinctually followed the cassette as he swiftly led them away, even passing more of the shambling, rotting mechs that were hobbling towards the source of the screams.
The youngling’s field projected his agony and fear of death far beyond the wreckage field, and by the time the screaming stopped, Orion was venting far too heavily to even notice its absence. He ran until the pressure building in his hydraulics overpowered his internal command to flee.
His HUD flashed red. He was overheating, and his hydraulics couldn’t continue at the brutal pace that his survival coding had forced on him. He had to stop. His frame shook from the overexertion. He couldn’t stop the anguished screams of that mech from playing on loop in his processor. If he’d had any fuel in his tanks, he would have purged it all right then.
“Snap out of it, Pax. We can’t stop now. We’re almost there.” Ravage’s annoyed whisper broke through his inner turmoil. Ravage was right. He couldn’t afford to stop. Not when those things were out there, likely to follow them once they were finished with-
No! Orion forced the thought out of his processor and forced his legs forward, despite the stinging pressure and pinging diagnostics. He wasn’t ready to return to the Well just yet. He was grateful that Ravage accepted this slower pace that his frame now demanded.
They were following the tracks. Orion hadn’t noticed when they were running. All he was able to focus on was Ravage and trying to keep up with the far nimbler cyber-feline. He wasn’t even entirely certain how far they ran before he stopped, and he absolutely was not about to turn around and find out.
When they finally stopped, it was at what appeared to be an empty Emergency Depot. They were scattered relatively regularly along the various strings of transport lines around the planet. Ravage led him inside, and as soon as the door snapped shut behind them, he let out a furious hiss.
“Don’t you ever do something that slagging stupid again! You almost got the both of us killed!” Orion jumped away from his smaller companion and opened his intake to respond, but Ravage gave him no time to do so.
“I will not die for you, Orion Pax. Do you understand me? If you pull something like that again, I will leave you behind! I don’t care if you’re Megatronus’ favorite upper cast plaything. You ain’t worth dying for!”
It was like the very air was sucked from his vents. Orion deflated, his gaze falling to the floor and his finials lowering. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know”
Ravage sighed dismissively and flicked his tail. He said nothing for a few kliks, but Orion didn’t want to think about why. He had too many other concerns vying for his attention. His tanks ached with their emptiness, and his frame felt heavier than he’d ever remembered it being. He ached deeply, down to the protoform, and he still had no clue what was going on. Overshadowing all of that was the fear that clawed at his spark and made him wish he’d just slipped into stasis instead of coming online to this nightmare.
“Frag… you’re a real piece of work, aren’t you, Pax?” Ravage said, but his tone was gentler than before. It made Orion think of when he was a sparkling, annoying his caretakers for attention, which, unfortunately, didn’t make him feel any better in the moment.
“Megatronus just told me to get on the train. Ravage… is he alright?” The cyber-feline rolled his optics and turned to slink deeper into the building. Orion had no choice but to follow, making sure to close and lock every door they came through, just in case.
“I don’t know. Comms are down all over. I can’t even contact Soundwave.” Ravage huffed softly at that. “I found this place about 2 cycles ago. There’s some energon rations stashed in the back, and some mediberths if you need to recharge. They, uh… they haven’t come back. They tend to hang around the crash.”
“The rations taste like scrap, but the packaging says it's nutritionally complete,’ whatever that means.” Ravage shrugged, and hopped up onto a sofa in the dimly lit space that Orion could now see was a lounge of sorts, probably for the mechs who normally were stationed here.
Orion couldn't care less how the rations tasted. His tanks demanded refueling, and his coding told him that he would feel better all over if only he could get something into his him. He tore into them, devouring one after the other. He hadn’t even realized how hungry he was, or how much his systems had been starving for the power to simply function. It took four entire ration cubes to satiate him.
The effect struck almost immediately once he lowered his last cube to the floor. His self-repair routines rebooted, and he suddenly felt the overwhelming urge for recharge. He didn’t even try to make it to the mediberths. The lounge sofa was much closer, and right now, it looked like the most comfortable thing on the entire planet.
Ravage only huffed softly as he hopped down from the sofa, and up onto the adjacent chair, where he curled up in the way that cyber-felines did; curled in a ball with his helm tucked under his tail.
“We can’t stay here.” Orion said, his voice just above a whisper. His processor was fighting against the wave of recharge that was crashing over him, forcing him to think about how close those things really were to them, and mixing those thoughts with how much he wished Megatronus was here…
“Not for long, no.” Ravage glanced up at him, with a raised optical ridge, his tone dry and tired. Orion tried to keep his optics focused on him.
“I promised him I would get there.” Orion’s vocalizer started to slur his glyphs, and Ravage tilted his helm and scrunched his optics in confusion.
“Promised who?” Ravage’s tone said that he really didn’t care.
“Mega…” Orion’s optics shuttered closed, and he in-vented deeply to quell the anxiety that still bubbled behind the coding trying to force him into recharge.
The cyber-feline snorted at that and laid his helm back down.
Orion frowned and forced his optics back open. There was still too much data he needed to understand what was happening around him.
“What happened to everyone?”
Ravage sighed at that question, and lifted his helm to meet Orion’s optics once more.
“Shut up, Pax, and recharge. I’ll tell you all I know when we come online.”