Title: Before and After
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Transformers IDW
Prompt: Monsters
NB: I don’t recall that canonically Rung was on the Ethics Committee, but I can’t imagine why someone of his specialty wouldn’t be.


The Last Resort, Garrus 9
"And this," Fortress Maximus said, with a wave of an open palm, "is the Rig."  He caught sight of himself in the steelglass separating them from the ultracool environment the Rig required. He looked calm, confident, stern: exactly how a prison warden should look, he thought.

"I see," said the smaller mech, a tiny orange guy with owly optics. Ringer, Fortress Maximus thought his name was? Something like that.  It didn't matter. And he wasn't going to let a visit from the Ethics Committee fluster him. Why? Because only the guilty should be nervous, and he had nothing to hide. He was the best warden in the Autobot prison system.  And yeah, he was proud of that, because it was something worth being proud of: fewer outbreaks of violence, no riots, his prison operate like zero-friction lubricant, sliding on the clean rails of his rules and oversight. 

The orange guy didn't look impressed. Well, maybe that's because he didn't really grasp what he was looking at.  "The Rig," Fortress Maximus picked up the threat again, "is the safest, cleanest, most high-tech detention facility in the universe."  No understatement there.

"How does it work?" The orange mech squinted at the triple-paned window at the racks of burnished silver-colored cylinders, each with a small readout screen toward the bottom. 

Finally, a flicker of something. Right.  Fortress Maximus went into docent mode. "The criminal's spark is extracted from his body--not the spark chamber itself. That's kept nominally charged back with the body. Which we keep intact, of course, in storage."  He nodded at the cylinders. "Each cylinder is three layers of special alloys, designed to survive anything other than a thermonuclear explosion--we don't want the baddies getting out becomes someone dropped a cylinder, after all." Fortress Maximus always figured if there ever was an atomic incident, Garrus-9 would be mostly glass, nonconductive, and Jetfire had informed him a spark would be trapped in that was well.  He gave a chuckle. See? This place was safe.

"Does that happen very often, then? Dropped cylinders?"  Ringer...or maybe it was Rang? seemed to have a knack for pulling the strangest angle from a conversation. 

His chuckle faded. "No, of course not. We're very careful with the cylinders."  He shrugged. "Even though, well, they wouldn't know if we weren't.  The white noise vacuum--they don't hear or feel anything." 

"Anything?"

"Anything." He gave a firm nod, clambering back onto surer footing. "I underwent the process myself."

"You did...?"  The Ethics Committee observer peered up at him, curious. "Why would you do a thing like that?"

It had been part a dare, part curiosity, honestly.  It certainly gave him a measure of cachet--the warden himself had undergone the procedure. 

It had hurt like hell, both ways, and he'd only been vac'd for a handful of kliks, just enough for the noise that was worse than silence to fill him, breaking down something inside him like a foaming wall of water, filling him with somethng like a swirling, nervous panic. 

It had been the most terrifying experience of his life.

But, he'd told himself, then, and a hundred times since then, nobody made it to the Rig unless they were high level felons--such powerful and dangerous criminals that 'felony' was almost an insulting understatement.  Whoever was fated to end up in a cylinder? Was not a nice mech. A little suffering was only a small measure of the fear and pain and terror the mech had probably inflicted on others.

He was aware of the blue optics staring up at him, magnified through lenses, waiting. "It seemed fair," he said, finally.

“Ah,” the orange mech said. “So you believe in fairness.” 

Fortress Maximus felt his supraorbital ridges knit together. “It seems like a reasonable quality in a prison warden.” He was fair—he prided himself on it. Impartial, administering the law with an even hand. 

“It is, I imagine.” 

“What?” He frowned. “Why else you think I would have done it?”  Because he couldn’t shake the feeling that the question was a test and he still didn’t know the ‘right’ answer.

“Oh. I was wondering, honestly, if perhaps you…felt some bond with them? A guilty conscience, perhaps?”

Fortress Maximus spluttered. “B-bond?”  The word seemed obscene. “And I assure you, I recharge perfectly well at night.”  So, guilty? Not even close.

“A sociopath could say the same,” the orange mech said, blandly, the observation almost too offhand.  A hand scratched at the chin.  “I would like to speak to one of them.”

“One of—one of them? Are you serious?” No, really. Was he seriously asking that?

“Well, yes. I mean, this is an ethics inspection, after all.”

Fortress Maximus laughed again, but it was darker, almost a snort. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with in there. Trust me.”

“I have spoken to prisoners before,” he countered.

“Not to these. And these aren’t ‘prisoners’.  These are hardcore psychopaths, manipulators, mass-murderers. Do you know what you have to do in this war to get labeled any of those?” Trust him, a lot. No one of the Autobots had clean hands, and so they’d raised the bar on criminal behavior, and raised it again. Fortress Maximus wasn’t even sure they’d have had a word for the type of criminals he had in the Rig back before the war. 

“I’ve read some of their files,” the other said evenly.

“Yeah, well there’s a big difference between reading their file and looking them in the optics.” Big difference.  “And, pardon me for saying, but you look a little, you know, fragile.”  And tiny.  And did he already say breakable? Because half the mechs he had in the Rig could snap this guy in half with their optic shutters.  “Look, I’m pretty sure it would look really bad if the Ethics Committee investigator got returned to Kimia in tiny little pieces.” He had faith in Jetfire, but he was a scientist, not a medic. 

The other mech had no answer to that, looking through the glass at the Rig again, this time speculatively.

“What exactly are you investigating here, anyway?” Fortress Maximus finally asked. It had been the question boiling in the back of his mind since he got the initial comm setting this little pony show up.  He didn’t mind giving the grand tour or anything, and Primus knew he didn’t have anything to hide, but he did have a job to do. 

“You mean, was there a complaint or something?” Ringer, Rang, whoever, shook his head.  “No. We’re just, you know, trying to keep it that way. Especially after the recent, erm, attack.” 

“When they came after Monstructor.”

He nodded. 

“Look. Arcee was Jetfire’s idea.” Not his. He thought it was too dangerous to let her out.  The fact they hadn’t heard from her since was all the proof he needed. 

“Arcee was…an unusual case. I wish I’d had a chance to interview her. Well, before, at any rate.”

Fortress Maximus bent lower, jabbing one finger at the narrow orange chest.  “What is with you, mech? Because I can tell you, no, no you wouldn’t have.” Arcee had been a violent prisoner, fighting every klik.  There was a reason it had taken so Ultra Magnus to bring her in.  “Mechs don’t get brought here because they’re ‘interesting’, but because they are violent, psychopathic, sadistic and irredeemable.”

He could feel his anger roiling off him. He was the line between law and crime, he and the work he did made the world a little less dangerous, a little more safe.  Perhaps it was a tiny thing to say in war time, but it mattered. It mattered.  “These are monsters, Rung.” Rung, that was it, the name snapping into his memory like a puzzle piece.  “They aren’t like you and me, and thank Primus for that.  I’m here to make sure it stays that way.”

The Lost Light

Fortress Maximus caught sight of his reflection—the lines rippling and wavery in the bubbling surface of the warmed energon.  He looked…haggard, paint chipped and eyes glassy.  Not at all like a warden should look. He looked up at Ultra Magnus, whose frown would have frozen concrete, trying to ignore the soft tinkle and clash of the restraints on his wrists. 
“He said he’ll see you,” Ultra Magnus said, every syllable ringing with the collision of disapproval and duty.  “Though you’ll understand why I will keep you restrained."

He nodded, hands clutching around the ration, his own chest sore with weldscar from where Whirl had plunged the pipe through his chassis, just after he'd seen the round sizzle and pop through Rung's head.  “Good,” Fortress Maximus said softly. “Rung always did have a fascination for monsters.”