Cyborg (4)
Jan. 4th, 2009 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quidamlingTitle: Cyborg: Resurrection
'Verse:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moya_koordinat 's Machine-verse, with warps and reflections.
Characters / Pairings: Ironhide, assorted faceless scientists, techs, handlers... Ratchet. Mentioned Ironhide/Ratchet
Summary: Wandering lost, inside and out.
Rating: R, a fght, swearing rather a lot.
Warnings: Crazy technical ramblings on my part. Angst. Lots. >.> I like angst, ok, Ruu?
AN: Massive credit where credit is due. I do pic fics, apparently. This (is FINALLY where this picture comes in...) was to community.livejournal.com/tf2007fun/8544
Though, kitteh and I are two people separated by an ocean and a common language. So we's got spelling differences. But again, ain't changing her stuff; no way, no how.
Disclaimer: No, I am poor, don't own anything. I just push them around into situations I find amusing. They belong to Hasbro/Dreamworks/rich people.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
How he loathed “the team.”
As time passed, he had started simply referring to them en masse, as they often were. They made a point to rarely, if ever, find themselves singly. On those few occasions, they were simply “teamers.” They were all interchangeable, and were consistently interchanged, in fact. Just enough that Ironhide could never get to know the quirks and habits of one piece of scrap teamer verses the other. The instant he started getting a proverbial lock on someone, they were switched out for another new face. That lack of a decent target somehow managed to irk and provoke the Weapons Specialist.
Time dragged on. Had days become weeks?
Muscles were responding better to his commands, now able to reasonably reproduce most of what he was capable of… capable of in his true form, as a mech. Small consolation when the joints in his arms ached for the shift and feel of his old cannons. This flesh form seemed entirely incompatible with his former weapons.
More acid and salt in any number of gaping wounds.
~~~~~~~~~
“The second one's finally online, sir. Took a while, but we made it."
"Good, good. Ah, put him in together with the other one. Behavioural analysis indicates they do better in pairs. Although, next time, orders are to try a cross-faction pair. Excellent work. Thank you."
------------------------------
Breathe in, breath out. In, out. Slow, steady. Half awake and half in recharge, a gray inbetween state of existence in which there was nothing, in which physical pain skimming under a layer of foreign chemicals had slowly faded to a hollow emptiness.
In, out.
Quick flash images racing across the internal landscape, projected against the endless black into which odd, too-soft orbs stared - unfocused and blurred, fuzzy-edged and with a colour spectrum that was all wrong and far too narrow, lacking the additional information that used to be there. Spike of heat flaring white on infrared, scrolling data on a HUD. Names, diagnoses, the sharp edges of text and filenames.
In, out.
Ironhide and that last day, the stab of pain that raced through a shaking frame and bleeding fuel lines, lines that couldn't be clamped off. So strange... Strange as the little black figures, and the black vehicles. The weapons fire that surrounded them.
In, out, in, out.
Surge of adrenaline, surge of muscle arcing against restraints, muffled sounds that were too thick and choked and completely flat, lacking the subtlety of a Cybertronian's vocalizer, and nothing to see, only feel; the prick and burn of sedatives floating through veins, no longer fuel lines, and a body that was too small, too light, too soft and then hard in awkward places, and consciousness that slipped away on the breath of a designation.
'Hide...
------------------------------
As some simplified internal chronometer told him it was near mealtime, it indicated the precipitating factor in ‘Hide’s mood was most likely the annoying human harping about his diet and his preference for liquids. True, he’d learned his frame, -body- demanded food just under every twelve hours, which still seemed annoyingly often to a mech that barely required a refuel once a day. But despite how long it had been, ‘Hide still couldn’t bear to eat much of anything. Barely used to the sensation from times in his holoform, let alone that his systems Fraggit! -body, refused food while his every conscious thought unceasingly revolved around Ratch. Stress and pent up rage only needed the slightest pretense of provocation.
“Pit-spawned little…” Ironhide growled from the back of his throat and snapped, throwing a swift hook to the hapless man’s cheek.
“Fuck you, lab rat!” The teamer rubbed at his jaw and felt with his tongue for the tooth that was most likely a lost cause. He realized a little too late that he was currently the only one in the room with the cyborg. Ironhide stood, longstanding dislike of rodents was not something that needed to be brought into it, but he was more than willing to add fuel to the fire.
The visor slid into place.
When the teamer saw that indication for what it was, and blanched, a cold scowl drew itself across the cyborg’s lips. The Weapons Specialist now moved with the same surprising fluidity as a man that always shocked others as a mech. He circled the increasingly worried white-clad teamer in something approaching a martial arts stance.
“Rodent?” Ironhide snarled and pounced with sharp blows to the man’s chest and neck.
There was a brief, displeasingly one-sided tussle.
Shouting back and forth with the teamers assembled outside followed, and he stood panting and snarling over the prone form. Slowly, the team rallied their own, taking longer than usual. They were working through the learning curve with the latest new blank face. The swap usually decreased the overall efficiency of the team, much to Ironhide’s feral amusement. The soldier had been keeping track of roughly how long they took to sweep in and deal with him, nearly double the normal response time.
But the sea of white coats and blank faces did eventually get themselves in order. A group rushed into the cell.
Flashes of a frantic scrabble, fists flying at anyone in range, his knuckles splitting against jaws, spinning kicks took down a few more figures for a good couple minutes. Then the team surged and responded with brute force. Three of the larger teamers tackled Ironhide at once, slamming him against the wall hard enough that his head whipped back and the breath was knocked from his lungs. He snarled, feeling the old stab-burn in his arm of being stuck by a needle, again with the sedatives, before passing out.
~~~~~~~~~~
There was a spark, still. Somewhere in him. Ratchet stared blindly at a wall, hand over his chest, covered with a thin cotton shirt. The press and scratch of the material against skin was utterly foreign, but it was soft, and bearable. And it did not catch against the mechanical implants, crawling up his spine and back like an intricate metallic design that moved when he did. He harboured a suspicion that his entire spinal structure was now composed of a metallic alloy, as were some of the bones in his frame. No, not frame, he thought bitterly. Body.
Some aspects of the mech remained, in the colour and shape of the armour plating that covered his calves from the knee down. And once those plates retracted, the shape of the underlying structure was an array of parts very like a protoform foot, only smaller, more delicate. Almost like the sparkling protoforms he had fashioned with his own hands... Almost.
He'd taken to pacing his quarters. Testing the movement range of this new form, the resilience, finding the centre of balance. Some of the memory, he still retained. How to move, how to fight, the agile whirling leaps that he employed often, in battle. Now, all he needed were his blades back, or some form of them... Hand rubbing subconsciously at his chest, right over where his spark chamber would have been if he'd been a mech still - wandering desolately in the coldness of an empty bond. It ate at him, the stillness, the knowledge that Ironhide was lost to him. Never to feel the sturdy, unwavering devotion from the weapons specialist, never to hear the comforting hum of his systems as they lay together, recharged together; never the gentleness of those big gray hands that seemed to be for him, and him alone. Never the low rumble of that voice, or the way the weapons specialist smarted off back at him...
He missed Ironhide with a desperation that turned him moody, and prone to lashing out with a viciousness better reserved for a Decepticon, not the former Autobot medic and CMO. For all the times he'd kept the Topkick at arms' length, fearing the loss and unwilling to risk another spark, for all the chances he'd let go, for all the times Ironhide had displayed an infinite patience for the back-and-forth uncertainty of the medic... Ratchet now counted them out with every soft footfall, every cruel smile he turned onto the faces that watched him.
Time, so little time they'd had together. He had no idea what had happened to the mech. He'd gone down before Ironhide did. And in the silence of his sparkbond, he let the aching coldness inform his every move, staring back at the team that sought to pry into his silence with murder in glowing blue eyes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chronos indicated that hours had passed. Ironhide woke feeling groggy and nauseated. Hazy recollections of what had gotten him into the current situation floated through. Already he only vaguely remembered what had prompted the initial lash-out at that sole faceless teamer. He was sure it was over something inane. Yes, not eating, and the teamer bemoaning the issue, that was it. Frag this temperamental little form that trapped his consciousness.
Scraplet, it’s a habit ingrained for millions of years…
Ironhide shook his head, attempting to clear away the last of the chemical residue clouding his thoughts and crawling through his empty gut. Muscles quivered of their own accord; waking up after being sedated was becoming worse and worse, the ill feeling lasting longer and often affecting his thermals and balance. Ratchet. Ratchet would understand what was going on…. Ratch… Quivers escalated to become full on thrashing, but it didn’t matter. He was back on the restraint board, bound torso, wrists and ankles. The cyborg roared and arched against the holds for all he was worth, collapsing back when another round of tremors raced through his body. The cyborg banged his head against the padding behind him until a teamer wrenched at the fin at his temple to force him to stillness. Deep blue eyes rolled back in his head while his mouth gaped in a silent scream.
“The boss men say you get a roomy. But only if you behave,” came the vindictively smug information.
Damn a roommate, he wanted his bonded! Could these fraggers manage that? Could they? Drowning waves of grief and disorientation. He simply panted, eyes twitching back and forth while he tried to comprehend the teamer’s tone. He quieted enough to earn a final spiteful yank, then he was let go. A face loomed into view, and more white coats. He could almost focus on them, and slumped against his bonds in silent assent. All knew the drill by now. They undid the restraints, none too gently and with a fair amount of snickering. After a few minutes they dumped him unceremoniously to the ground. Ironhide was left in the center of the floor, rubbing at wrists that had been ground raw while the team gathered up that damned board and herded themselves out.
What the frag were the Primus-forsaken scraplets on about? Roomate? Fraggers. More games.
He curled in at another round of tremors and rubbed at the tightness in his chest. That was a new development… it ached. Ironhide drifted a while in his own thoughts until the door engaged and he snapped his head up.
~~~~~~~~~~
Ratchet snarled at the person belonging to the hand clamped on his elbow. The pair had suddenly swept in and dragged him from his little world. True, that world was his cramped little cell, three walls and one that was largely observation glass, but part of the coping mechanism was claiming it as his.
“New quarters.” The staff commented brusquely.
The medic hissed fury and whirled as much as the hand on him allowed when the other staff member encouraged him along by pressing his palm against Ratchet’s back. Finding the implants along his spine were still both very sensitive and a sensitive issue, he bristled, shoulders shooting up and the visor threatening to slip into place.
“I am capable of propelling my own forward motion,” he snapped and suddenly wrenched at his arm, deftly pulling it from the other’s grip. An askance sneer over his shoulder and he strode forward. The two hovered at either hip in that mistrustful way guards so often employed with their prisoners. Reaching a branch in the hallway, the CMO turned condescendingly cooperative blue eyes on his two escorts and dripped snappish sarcasm. “Now which direction, gentlemen?”
One of them gestured down the option with fewer doors along the way. And "fewer" meant “two.” One, an armored door fairly similar to the one that Ratchet had just crossed through, and the other nearby less armored and less heavily coded and locked. Another cell and observation room, the medic surmised.
“An upgrade or downgrade in my accommodations?”
“Hey, the guys that get the big bucks said you’re here. So you are.”
A sneer. “Thank Primus I am in such competent care.”
The man laughed a demeaning snicker while they stopped at the armored door and he swiped a keycard. “Get off your high horse, professor. No more single apartment. And this guy’s an asshole. Fuck load of luck you’re going to need dealing with him.” There was a flicker of pleased malice in those eyes. “But we were nice enough that he’s still doped up for your first meeting.”
Returning to his habitual rubbing at his chest through the cotton shirt, Ratchet huffed and turned away with a slight blink. He had been used to dealing with his very own pain-in-the-aft, it hurt and he missed every nanosecond of it. Biting back a noise at the reminder, he barely registered the sound of the door engaging. The medic surrendered to the shove at his shoulder and walked through, fight drained from his body and numb everywhere but his aching spark.
'Verse:
moya_koordinat 's Machine-verse, with warps and reflections.Characters / Pairings: Ironhide, assorted faceless scientists, techs, handlers... Ratchet. Mentioned Ironhide/Ratchet
Summary: Wandering lost, inside and out.
Rating: R, a fght, swearing rather a lot.
Warnings: Crazy technical ramblings on my part. Angst. Lots. >.> I like angst, ok, Ruu?
AN: Massive credit where credit is due. I do pic fics, apparently. This (is FINALLY where this picture comes in...) was to community.livejournal.com/tf2007fun/8544
Though, kitteh and I are two people separated by an ocean and a common language. So we's got spelling differences. But again, ain't changing her stuff; no way, no how.
Disclaimer: No, I am poor, don't own anything. I just push them around into situations I find amusing. They belong to Hasbro/Dreamworks/rich people.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
How he loathed “the team.”
As time passed, he had started simply referring to them en masse, as they often were. They made a point to rarely, if ever, find themselves singly. On those few occasions, they were simply “teamers.” They were all interchangeable, and were consistently interchanged, in fact. Just enough that Ironhide could never get to know the quirks and habits of one piece of scrap teamer verses the other. The instant he started getting a proverbial lock on someone, they were switched out for another new face. That lack of a decent target somehow managed to irk and provoke the Weapons Specialist.
Time dragged on. Had days become weeks?
Muscles were responding better to his commands, now able to reasonably reproduce most of what he was capable of… capable of in his true form, as a mech. Small consolation when the joints in his arms ached for the shift and feel of his old cannons. This flesh form seemed entirely incompatible with his former weapons.
More acid and salt in any number of gaping wounds.
~~~~~~~~~
“The second one's finally online, sir. Took a while, but we made it."
"Good, good. Ah, put him in together with the other one. Behavioural analysis indicates they do better in pairs. Although, next time, orders are to try a cross-faction pair. Excellent work. Thank you."
------------------------------
Breathe in, breath out. In, out. Slow, steady. Half awake and half in recharge, a gray inbetween state of existence in which there was nothing, in which physical pain skimming under a layer of foreign chemicals had slowly faded to a hollow emptiness.
In, out.
Quick flash images racing across the internal landscape, projected against the endless black into which odd, too-soft orbs stared - unfocused and blurred, fuzzy-edged and with a colour spectrum that was all wrong and far too narrow, lacking the additional information that used to be there. Spike of heat flaring white on infrared, scrolling data on a HUD. Names, diagnoses, the sharp edges of text and filenames.
In, out.
Ironhide and that last day, the stab of pain that raced through a shaking frame and bleeding fuel lines, lines that couldn't be clamped off. So strange... Strange as the little black figures, and the black vehicles. The weapons fire that surrounded them.
In, out, in, out.
Surge of adrenaline, surge of muscle arcing against restraints, muffled sounds that were too thick and choked and completely flat, lacking the subtlety of a Cybertronian's vocalizer, and nothing to see, only feel; the prick and burn of sedatives floating through veins, no longer fuel lines, and a body that was too small, too light, too soft and then hard in awkward places, and consciousness that slipped away on the breath of a designation.
'Hide...
------------------------------
As some simplified internal chronometer told him it was near mealtime, it indicated the precipitating factor in ‘Hide’s mood was most likely the annoying human harping about his diet and his preference for liquids. True, he’d learned his frame, -body- demanded food just under every twelve hours, which still seemed annoyingly often to a mech that barely required a refuel once a day. But despite how long it had been, ‘Hide still couldn’t bear to eat much of anything. Barely used to the sensation from times in his holoform, let alone that his systems Fraggit! -body, refused food while his every conscious thought unceasingly revolved around Ratch. Stress and pent up rage only needed the slightest pretense of provocation.
“Pit-spawned little…” Ironhide growled from the back of his throat and snapped, throwing a swift hook to the hapless man’s cheek.
“Fuck you, lab rat!” The teamer rubbed at his jaw and felt with his tongue for the tooth that was most likely a lost cause. He realized a little too late that he was currently the only one in the room with the cyborg. Ironhide stood, longstanding dislike of rodents was not something that needed to be brought into it, but he was more than willing to add fuel to the fire.
The visor slid into place.
When the teamer saw that indication for what it was, and blanched, a cold scowl drew itself across the cyborg’s lips. The Weapons Specialist now moved with the same surprising fluidity as a man that always shocked others as a mech. He circled the increasingly worried white-clad teamer in something approaching a martial arts stance.
“Rodent?” Ironhide snarled and pounced with sharp blows to the man’s chest and neck.
There was a brief, displeasingly one-sided tussle.
Shouting back and forth with the teamers assembled outside followed, and he stood panting and snarling over the prone form. Slowly, the team rallied their own, taking longer than usual. They were working through the learning curve with the latest new blank face. The swap usually decreased the overall efficiency of the team, much to Ironhide’s feral amusement. The soldier had been keeping track of roughly how long they took to sweep in and deal with him, nearly double the normal response time.
But the sea of white coats and blank faces did eventually get themselves in order. A group rushed into the cell.
Flashes of a frantic scrabble, fists flying at anyone in range, his knuckles splitting against jaws, spinning kicks took down a few more figures for a good couple minutes. Then the team surged and responded with brute force. Three of the larger teamers tackled Ironhide at once, slamming him against the wall hard enough that his head whipped back and the breath was knocked from his lungs. He snarled, feeling the old stab-burn in his arm of being stuck by a needle, again with the sedatives, before passing out.
~~~~~~~~~~
There was a spark, still. Somewhere in him. Ratchet stared blindly at a wall, hand over his chest, covered with a thin cotton shirt. The press and scratch of the material against skin was utterly foreign, but it was soft, and bearable. And it did not catch against the mechanical implants, crawling up his spine and back like an intricate metallic design that moved when he did. He harboured a suspicion that his entire spinal structure was now composed of a metallic alloy, as were some of the bones in his frame. No, not frame, he thought bitterly. Body.
Some aspects of the mech remained, in the colour and shape of the armour plating that covered his calves from the knee down. And once those plates retracted, the shape of the underlying structure was an array of parts very like a protoform foot, only smaller, more delicate. Almost like the sparkling protoforms he had fashioned with his own hands... Almost.
He'd taken to pacing his quarters. Testing the movement range of this new form, the resilience, finding the centre of balance. Some of the memory, he still retained. How to move, how to fight, the agile whirling leaps that he employed often, in battle. Now, all he needed were his blades back, or some form of them... Hand rubbing subconsciously at his chest, right over where his spark chamber would have been if he'd been a mech still - wandering desolately in the coldness of an empty bond. It ate at him, the stillness, the knowledge that Ironhide was lost to him. Never to feel the sturdy, unwavering devotion from the weapons specialist, never to hear the comforting hum of his systems as they lay together, recharged together; never the gentleness of those big gray hands that seemed to be for him, and him alone. Never the low rumble of that voice, or the way the weapons specialist smarted off back at him...
He missed Ironhide with a desperation that turned him moody, and prone to lashing out with a viciousness better reserved for a Decepticon, not the former Autobot medic and CMO. For all the times he'd kept the Topkick at arms' length, fearing the loss and unwilling to risk another spark, for all the chances he'd let go, for all the times Ironhide had displayed an infinite patience for the back-and-forth uncertainty of the medic... Ratchet now counted them out with every soft footfall, every cruel smile he turned onto the faces that watched him.
Time, so little time they'd had together. He had no idea what had happened to the mech. He'd gone down before Ironhide did. And in the silence of his sparkbond, he let the aching coldness inform his every move, staring back at the team that sought to pry into his silence with murder in glowing blue eyes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chronos indicated that hours had passed. Ironhide woke feeling groggy and nauseated. Hazy recollections of what had gotten him into the current situation floated through. Already he only vaguely remembered what had prompted the initial lash-out at that sole faceless teamer. He was sure it was over something inane. Yes, not eating, and the teamer bemoaning the issue, that was it. Frag this temperamental little form that trapped his consciousness.
Scraplet, it’s a habit ingrained for millions of years…
Ironhide shook his head, attempting to clear away the last of the chemical residue clouding his thoughts and crawling through his empty gut. Muscles quivered of their own accord; waking up after being sedated was becoming worse and worse, the ill feeling lasting longer and often affecting his thermals and balance. Ratchet. Ratchet would understand what was going on…. Ratch… Quivers escalated to become full on thrashing, but it didn’t matter. He was back on the restraint board, bound torso, wrists and ankles. The cyborg roared and arched against the holds for all he was worth, collapsing back when another round of tremors raced through his body. The cyborg banged his head against the padding behind him until a teamer wrenched at the fin at his temple to force him to stillness. Deep blue eyes rolled back in his head while his mouth gaped in a silent scream.
“The boss men say you get a roomy. But only if you behave,” came the vindictively smug information.
Damn a roommate, he wanted his bonded! Could these fraggers manage that? Could they? Drowning waves of grief and disorientation. He simply panted, eyes twitching back and forth while he tried to comprehend the teamer’s tone. He quieted enough to earn a final spiteful yank, then he was let go. A face loomed into view, and more white coats. He could almost focus on them, and slumped against his bonds in silent assent. All knew the drill by now. They undid the restraints, none too gently and with a fair amount of snickering. After a few minutes they dumped him unceremoniously to the ground. Ironhide was left in the center of the floor, rubbing at wrists that had been ground raw while the team gathered up that damned board and herded themselves out.
What the frag were the Primus-forsaken scraplets on about? Roomate? Fraggers. More games.
He curled in at another round of tremors and rubbed at the tightness in his chest. That was a new development… it ached. Ironhide drifted a while in his own thoughts until the door engaged and he snapped his head up.
~~~~~~~~~~
Ratchet snarled at the person belonging to the hand clamped on his elbow. The pair had suddenly swept in and dragged him from his little world. True, that world was his cramped little cell, three walls and one that was largely observation glass, but part of the coping mechanism was claiming it as his.
“New quarters.” The staff commented brusquely.
The medic hissed fury and whirled as much as the hand on him allowed when the other staff member encouraged him along by pressing his palm against Ratchet’s back. Finding the implants along his spine were still both very sensitive and a sensitive issue, he bristled, shoulders shooting up and the visor threatening to slip into place.
“I am capable of propelling my own forward motion,” he snapped and suddenly wrenched at his arm, deftly pulling it from the other’s grip. An askance sneer over his shoulder and he strode forward. The two hovered at either hip in that mistrustful way guards so often employed with their prisoners. Reaching a branch in the hallway, the CMO turned condescendingly cooperative blue eyes on his two escorts and dripped snappish sarcasm. “Now which direction, gentlemen?”
One of them gestured down the option with fewer doors along the way. And "fewer" meant “two.” One, an armored door fairly similar to the one that Ratchet had just crossed through, and the other nearby less armored and less heavily coded and locked. Another cell and observation room, the medic surmised.
“An upgrade or downgrade in my accommodations?”
“Hey, the guys that get the big bucks said you’re here. So you are.”
A sneer. “Thank Primus I am in such competent care.”
The man laughed a demeaning snicker while they stopped at the armored door and he swiped a keycard. “Get off your high horse, professor. No more single apartment. And this guy’s an asshole. Fuck load of luck you’re going to need dealing with him.” There was a flicker of pleased malice in those eyes. “But we were nice enough that he’s still doped up for your first meeting.”
Returning to his habitual rubbing at his chest through the cotton shirt, Ratchet huffed and turned away with a slight blink. He had been used to dealing with his very own pain-in-the-aft, it hurt and he missed every nanosecond of it. Biting back a noise at the reminder, he barely registered the sound of the door engaging. The medic surrendered to the shove at his shoulder and walked through, fight drained from his body and numb everywhere but his aching spark.
