Title: Slip
Fandom: Transformers, Last Stand of the Wreckers
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Foreshadowing of canon character death.
Word count:  745
Prompt: Lost Hour
Notes: Ironfist used to work at the science facility, Kimia, where he worshipped the daring exploits of the Wreckers.  He has a chance to join them.  But it's not all it seems.

 

Ironfist heard a sound—his own voice, groaning.  No! Not now. Not here! Not in front of them! He squeezed his blue optic shutters together, rubbing a hand over the divot in his helm, as though reminding himself. 

Like he needed reminding. 

His optics onlined, the world resolving into line and color and shape.  The shape of Perceptor’s face, closest, the reticle of the sniper’s right optic blank and dull.  And over his shoulder Springer stood, mouth twisted, that exact expression of disgust you’d get when you realized you’d been sold the proverbial bill of goods. 

“Sorry,” Ironfist mumbled.

“Sorry?” Springer snapped. “Sorry? You fraggin’ offline on us and you’re sorry?!” 

Ironfist shrank back against the floor.  Springer was larger than life, a hero, leader of the Wreckers.  Springer’s voice had struck terror into countless enemies. Okay, not countless, but 4, 156. To date.  And one Ironfist. The facts rattled over Ironfist’s cortex, a familiar and comforting patter of information. 

“Springer.” Perceptor, barely tilting his head, his tone saying ‘please, that’s not helping.’ 

“He’s no good to us if he blacks out all the time.”

“It’s not all the time,” Ironfist said. “Only when I get excited.” Like meeting the legendary Wreckers, whom he’d been writing about for…ever. He couldn’t look at them without being overwhelmed by the details of their histories: battles, quotes, weapons statistics, names, confirmed kills. His cortex swam, but he pushed himself upright.

“Oh, and combat’s not going to be ‘exciting’?”

“He passed the screening, Springer,” Perceptor said. “And his systems check out.”  A sideways glint in the optic that told Ironfist that Perceptor would be asking him more—much more—later.  Those long years at Kimia together rang between them like an old bell.

“Yeah.  All right.” Springer stepped back, turning his gaze to the other recruits.  “What the frag you starin’ at, anyway? You’re Wreckers, now, not lookie-loos.”

Rotorstorm and Pyro turned away so fast Ironfist could hear the gyros whirl.  He pushed himself to sitting, then to his feet, waving away Perceptor’s hand.  It was offered kindly, maybe, but he could still feel Springer’s judging optics on him.  “Travel thing,” he mumbled. “From the orbital bounce.” Bounce sickness wasn’t unheard of.  Could happen to anyone. “That’s all. Just delayed bounce.”  

Just that, right? And not at all the cerebro-shell eating its slow way into his cortex, gnawing on the storehouse of facts.

Perceptor shot him a dubious look, not mentioning the contradiction, but both of them knew he didn’t have the medical knowledge to contradict him. “Show you your quarters,” Perceptor said, quietly.

Ironfist nodded, slowly, testing the stability of his video feed, before moving after the taller mech, glad that his chunky mass kept him stable.  He followed the taller, red mech down a corridor, to an empty room.

Too empty.  Ironfist could feel the emptiness, like a scream without sound, the hollow space where a real Wrecker used to be.  Who had lived here? Which Wrecker? Broadside? Blocker? 

There was no clue, the room square with military precision, sterile as a lab, stripped of any trace of a tenant.  And one day, one day soon, Ironfist thought, with a cold shudder over his systems, it would be stripped this clean again, no sign of the mech who had lived here, the Wrecker-who-wanted-to-be. The bullet was killing him, more slowly but just as sure as any mission.  It was just a matter of time.

And glory.  

Glory? He wasn’t a mech for glory, as much as he worshipped it in the Wreckers. He knew it wasn’t for him, the way he knew an anode from a cathode.

“I’ll leave you to get settled,” Perceptor said, and even his voice seemed hushed, caught in the net of past and future.  Ironfist nodded, dimly. 

In his lab, he would die just as certainly. They’d find him one day slumped over an unfinished experiment, another of the thousand ways he’d discovered to kill.  It was brutally ironic, a lesson that hadn’t escaped him, that he was being killed by one of his own inventions. How many mechs’ deaths lay at his conscience the same way?

He could die there, or here, trying to make some amends, trying to take the same risks, the same chances, he had submitted too many mechs to, all unknowing.

And maybe, in the short span of time he had left, which seemed like an hour already lost, a thin tissue being pulled through his fingers, he could earn some peace.