Ep. 1.5 - "On the Dark Side - Cont." - Open

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<<Thread continued directly from Dusk's landing in Canada land. "On the Dark Side" (part 1)>>

So this was Omega One.

The base was not what he expected. In fact, he wasn't entirely sure what he was expecting, or if he was expecting anything. But the base was certainly like nothing he had seen. It was… small. Small with odd fixtures, some he supposed were part of this planet, mixed together with Cybertronian tech here and there. It seemed such an unlikely place to house a small unit of Cybertronians… and the Prime himself. But here it was, and strangely, Dusk noticed, it seemed to fit. Like it wasn't just occupied, but lived in. 'Home', hadn't Bluestreak said?

Home.

He blinked himself back, the mobile, black plates of his armor shifting and shimmying away the snow and droplets of water. "Steeljaw, was it?" He grinned at the four-pede figure atop the console. "Thanks for the 'bridge."

New faces. New faces were exciting, and seeing them and speaking with them was even better. 'Especially if they're real'- he quashed that thought thread as soon as it began, flushing away the brief memory of red mesh. Because it wasn't here. Just these new faces. New sparks to get to know and mend. Mecha to talk to.

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::...kinda reminds me of you in a way and I think he might know you.::

"...Huh." That was new and not at all expected. Mostly because most of the mecha that Ironhide knew, the ones on the MIA list, where faces that Bluestreak would know as well for all that the bitlet had been young at the time. The list of missing friends from before Bluestreak's advent into their lives was much smaller, and Ironhide didn't think any of them would particularly remind his bitlet of him unless it was under the classification of "large" or "gruff".

Crash landing and rattled processor... well, that was another matter, and seemed to be par for the course of half of their new arrivals. Might be a long shot that it was someone Ironhide knew, but a re-found face taken off the MIA list was always a cause for celebration. The frontliner bestirred himself and bitlet #2 up off the rec room couch and - with Shadow in tow, because like Pit was he letting her out of his sight when duty didn't intervene if he could help it - tromped up towards the control room. "C'mon. Got someone new in, Blue thinks Ah might know 'em."

Bitlet #1 was just coming out of the bridge, along with Fortress Maximus. And there, shaking off wet from the weather out wherever, was...

Ironhide plowed to a halt just inside the doorway, shock crashing so hard through his field that it crackled in sharp snaps of static across his plates. Black plating on the newcomer, black mobile blast plating flicking away fast melting slush, the kind of armor plate that no one wore any more. Stocky, heavy frontline build, a regulation shape that Ironhide knew, painfully, intimately, the way he knew his own mass and his own plates.

Not possible. Not. Possible.

The slow ebb of errors that had continued to filter through his systems, popping up at intervals like effervescent bubbles across his HUD, had never said anything about his memory archives or perceptual filters. He wasn't sure he trusted them to report it accurately if that was the problem. It never had been before but that didn't, necessarily, mean anything.

It meant his processor was a stark raving slag sucking glitch and he wanted no part of it, but the figure standing impossibly before Ironhide's optics was so achingly familiar that he couldn't look away no matter how he wanted to, shape and motion painted from memories of everything he had left behind.

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Meanwhile, at the back of the control room, the open portal shimmered. A looming figure materialized into Fortress Maximus, his footsteps clanging when he trudged from a snowy clearing straight onto the metal gangway that extended into the heart of the ground bridge.

Snow fell from his feet as he strode across the room. More of it clung to his plating. Already it was beginning to thaw. Huh. Interesting stuff. From what he could judge his tall frame seemed well-suited to traversing the great drifts and depths of such a harsh and remorseless terrain. Maximus made a mental note to open a ground bridge to one of the planet's frozen poles and put that theory to the test one day. The challenge, and the isolation, would be... appreciated.

In the back of his mind he became aware that a small crowd was forming. The new Autobot, Dusk, was chatting with Steeljaw now. Ironhide had just entered the room as well. Maximus veered around them with the intent to slip away quietly. His task was complete. Whatever introductions were to follow were none of his business.

Something about Ironhide's silence made him stop with a frown, however.

The former Guardian was staring at the new arrival. He looked stunned.

Strange.

Maximus stood in a puddle of half-melted slush and eyed the two warily. One black, the other red - and yet something about their heavy-plated builds seemed oddly familiar.

Hmm.

Old habits die hard. Decades of prison work rooted Maximus in place. His first instinct was to bluntly ask if there was a problem. But an unwanted new prudence made him stand aside and silently wait to see if his suspicions were confirmed instead.

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No.

He could see it now. The figure as fresh as it was, what?, five or six lifetimes ago now, called forth from some spark-imprinted memory.

And it scared him, legitemently scared him, more than anything had in a good long while. Because this had never happened before; a good and true solid hallucination. He was keeping tabs on his systems, updates and maintenance about as regular as he could manage and he couldn't understand how he'd slipped this far. Part of him accepted it, because it was just something that had to be accepted when you were constantly teetering on the Edge. He never fantasized about 'getting better'. That was impossible. But… he did, maybe sometimes, entertain the idea that he was keeping himself stable. And this, this apparition shattered that entire fantasy. That what little he had left was already starting to fade, and what scared him more was that he wasn't sure what he could do to stop it. If he'd have to give up his position as a medic, shift solely to frontline duty…

All of this, the stunned hurt, not comprehending what was happening, the slow, cold fear, it most have shown on his face, because somewhere out of his peripherals part of him registered that the rest of the Control Room had gone quiet, watching while somehow his entire body had rotated to face the last draining dredges of himself.

"Bluestreak… hm?" He didn't bother to wait for confirmation, or even explain himself. Didn't dare take his optics from that red-tinted blast armor. Hell, he wasn't even aware he was speaking until it echoed in his own audials back from the walls of the room. He leaned in close, voice light. "Humor me… could you tell me how many mecha are in this room with us?" He needed fresh optics, functioning optics to clarify what was happening. So he could be sure, confirm his fears. Because it was worse not knowing, the only one inside his head.

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Bluestreak was the last to walk through the bridge. The soft glow fading behind hir and putting the view of the two mechs in contrast. A pair of solid built mechs that could have been brothers standing gob smacked staring at each other. Primus all mighty the crazy was contagious.

"Keep back Max it looks like what ever Dusk has is catching."

Briefly ou spared a glance at Shadow hoping she'd have more of a clue than ou did about what was going on but she looked as clueless as ou was. As a precaution the little sniper sent a short comm to Jazz. Knowing the other as ou did he was probably already on the way but it never hurt to speed him along.
:: Ironhide broke, help?::

Ou glanced up at Dusk before blinking in confusion. He needed a head count? Was there something wrong with his optics?

"Six. You, me, Max, Shadow and Ironhide."

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The mech's voice almost dropped Ironhide, cutting through memory files, rooting around in archived time stamps older than half of the room's occupants. He dimly heard his first bitlet answer the mech, which ruled out processor failure or hallucination.

Which left... reality, and Ironhide's vent systems were locked, processor threads throttled out in unrecoverable error loops. A ghost given shape and form and voice, pulled straight from millennia old memory and dropped, impossibly, incredibly, into the present day.

A ghost he personally knew.

Ironhide dragged his hydraulics through one slow, tentative step forward. The apparition didn't disappear. Another step and he could read every line of that heavy blast armor, entire nuances and unspoken glyph strings of nervous fear in the flick and shift of every plate.

"Guardian." It came out broken, streaked in feedback static from a disbelieving vocalizer that barely dared to form the sound shape. Ironhide didn't dare shift his optics, wide and focused on the phantom in front of him. "Seventh squadron. Medic, second class." He took another step, barely a mecha length between them, knew his own plates were echoing that silent display of something on the ragged edge of fear. "Lieutenant."

His voice broke again, trailing into white noise. "...Dusk?"

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Ironhide… There it was again, that name.

And in that moment he felt as thought he would rip in two; struggling, warring with himself on what would have been logical, what would be real, and if the two were the same. Because all evidence suggested they were the farthest things apart in this universe. He thought maybe that his own desires, his own need for the red mech to be who his spark thought it was, was finally beginning to cloud his audials. Crack him. Because he had just heard Bluestreak say it again…

But then he noticed it; that the red mech was looking at him. The mech that Bluestreak named. Part of this room. A physical being.

Guardian.

Every glyph and subharmonic mixed in with that title, older than what seemed the majority of mecha in this control room; glyphs that held the depth of every lineage that ever carried it all the way back to its very beginnings; all of the history; all of their history. There was no way this couldn't be real. It had to be.

He needed it to be.

"Ironhide…" His vocalizer almost startled him, and surely he would have fallen if he hadn't taken that first heavy step foreword, mimicking the big red mechanoid in front of him. Another step, and as that Primus blessed field washed over into his own, every frequency seeming just how it was, he didn't just hope anymore. He knew. One hand came up to scrub his face, wiping away so much of his doubt and fear that he had the strength to push past the last of it.

"Primus save me…" Push past it, and grin as he crashed foreword and submerged himself in that field until he could feel solid, strong armor beneath him just like his own. He couldn't speak, his vocalizer fritzing between something bordering a laugh and a sob; but his field exploded: relief/joy/brother, my brother.

<<Posting to get Ironhide and Dusk's fangirling out of the way <3 Posting order will be established soon!>>

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<< I'm happy to wait on posting to allow Dusk and Ironhide to reunite, awwww...! >>

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The glyphs were so old that it felt like an entirely different lifetime, ancient and as familiar as his own spark. Ironhide fell into it, memory as old as his own frame, as old as the Founding, taking hold of his mass and sensors when autonomic hydraulics would have failed.

It was like falling into an event horizon, into something so familiar and natural that it ached, throwing into sharp relief the lack that had been a part of him for so long that he had almost forgotten it was there. A frame that was not just as heavy and solid as his own but was exactly his own, variation of the same model, their plates fitting together like two halves of a whole. That impossible helm was pressed to his own and Ironhide’s ventilations stuttered and seized, his glyphs a helpless tangle of jumbled cant that was older than either of their current frames, the incredulous relief reverberating between them in waves - joy-impossibility-surprise-brother.

Dusk. It was really, truly, impossibly Dusk, not just a familiar frame or a shared legacy but a mechanoid that he had known, served with. Ironhide’s vocalizer was sheer static but his field burst and clutched at the one pressed to his own, need and relief and countless things he couldn’t even name rolling between them. Relief-incredulous-euphoria-to live and fight and die for-brother!


<<the floor is open for reactions - assume those two aren't moving for a bit!>>

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Jazz leaned against the entrance to Control and smiled.

The comms about new arrivals had brought him out of his workshop, and Blue's comm had made him hurry just a little bit faster. Primus knew that the last thing they needed was a more broken Ironhide.

As he'd approached the main atrium, he'd hurried just a little bit more, as the cluster of engines and systems in the Control Room had sounded...odd. Loud, as he could pick out everything from Fortress Maximus' resonant rumble to Bluestreak's higher-tuned engine, but...odd. Especially in the frequencies that were quintessentially Ironhide's: his old Guardian-standard systems sounded subtly unlike any other that Jazz had come in contact with. And they sounded, Jazz thought, as he'd rounded the corner, oddly discordant and...

...doubled.

Aaha... Jazz thought as he got his first good look at the situation JUST as Ironhide and their new arrival (their new arrival who looked very, very familiar in that "different kibble on the same baseframe" way) clinched up like...well, just like Ironhide had with him when he'd arrived. Right in the middle of the Control Room, too. Jazz was going to have to rib Ironhide thoroughly about this.

Later. When they were done.


<<Just a one-off from Jazz. Don't bother putting him in the rotation. I'll still watch this thread, though, so if someone wants to interact with him, just telegraph it or let me know. >>

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He let himself be consumed, completely and totally, by all evidence of Ironhide's presence. Engulfed in every layer of the field that pulsed with a spark energy he could recognize crystal clear, even over millions of vorn. Olfactory and audio sensors registering the gunmetal and grease that came with his trade and the deep thrumming hum of his engine, feeling that familiar shape that was the closest thing he had to his own cohort in too long. Any other entities in the room had melted away, only his back processor scans being vaguely aware of other spark signatures in the area. But they all were put in some back corner of the buzzing that now took over his processor; combing through and soaking up everything his sensors were taking in, understanding every emotion shared through Field on basic, instinctual levels.

It took some time before he got control of himself; could actually think through all of this instead of just feel his way through. He wasn't sure how long they'd been standing there, and didn't much care to check, but the vice-like (probably left some dents..) they had on each other had eased.

So afraid…, flashed briefly, didn't dare hope followed a little more quietly-- afterthoughts. Some strange reality that had been was now fading into a bad nightmare, and he was happy to let it go.

The time finally came that he pulled himself away, no quite holding Ironhide at arm's length, but not quite chassis to chassis either. The awe still lingered briefly on his face, before all at once it split with a familiar full-fledged Dusk-sized grin. "I see y'got some mesh wound on that face o'yours. Coul'n't keep it pretty forever, could you?"

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Well this was one big hot mess of crazy. It was obvious Dusk and Ironhide knew each other and new each other WELL. Not that that really cleared up much of the confusion for the rest of the mechs present. Ou approached a little carefully, not that ou thought Ironhide would hurt hir but Crazy mech is Crazy.

Ou saw them pull away a small bit and took hir chance to ask some very important questions.

"Ironhide, How do you know Dusk? Not that I'm not happy you've found an old friend again. We're all just a bit confused is all. Why didn't either of you think the other was REAL?"

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Reunion; the signs were utterly unmistakeable, even without the similarity between the base frames of the two mechs. Shadow had, when she agreed to trail Ironhide to the control room, expected the reflexive wariness; time with the Autobots had not lessened her ingrained mistrust of outsiders. She had not expected the sharp surge through her spark - not quite as bitter as resentment, not quite as potent as anger - at this unexpected reminder not everyone's ghosts remained ghosts.

Still, she halted her withdrawal from the room to arch an optic ridge at Bluestreak's questions, particularly in light of what she'd heard about the smaller mechanism's greeting for Legion. "If you'd brought Viper through that bridge," she said, only a little of the bitterness lingering in her tone, "I doubt I'd think he was real, either. Given how it's a fragging miracle for anyone we know to make it here in one piece."

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Ironhide lifted his hand up automatically at Dusk's words, fingers going with a touch of self-consciousness to the familiar grooves of cracked scars that traced the edges of one optic and down his faceplates. Shaking his head, he grinned back, the familiar sound of the other mech's sector accent - the Seventh had had a few technobiologic races in their patrol area, easier to parse and smoothing out some of the rougher sounds of Guard cant - washing over him like an auditory balm. "Yeah, well - ran without a medic f'r awhile. Yeh know how it goes, get somethin' up in a new weld, cracks on yeh." He reached up, cupping the other mech's helm between his hands. "An' yer one t' talk - still can't fly f'r scrap, bitlet said yeh landed on yer head."

The words were right but all wrong at the same time, his glyphs hopelessly jumbled - 'bitlet' wreathed in layers of mine-ours-cohort-eldest, typical signifiers that they once would have used, but 'eldest' had been twisted to mean 'found' and not onlined, Bluestreak's designation appended, and 'cohort' had an entirely different structure then it once had, nearly incomprehensible kin glyphs supplanting the Guardian clusters. It made him ache, plates twitching with the sudden juxtaposition of new and old, and Ironhide had to shake it off with a brisk flick. They weren't the same. They couldn't be.

Except Dusk was standing there, like a slice out of the distant past, and it made him ache clean through, joy and sorrow all at once, glad for the mech before him but reminded, all to clearly, of all the ghosts that stood at either of their sides.

The exchange between his younglings pulled him out once more, focusing on more than just the steady harmonic of an engine tuned to the same levels as his own, a sound and feel that had once been as familiar to him as his own frame. "Nah," he said heavily, vocalizer rough on the lowest notes. A ping - open ended, querying - went out to his cohort, inviting them closer. "Shadow's got about th' right o' it. Wasn't expectin'..." He shook his head and reached out to keep a hand on Dusk's shoulder pauldron, the feel of the metal real and solid beneath his sensors. "Hadn't heard nothin' in so long... Startin' t' think Ah might be th' last o' th' old Guard left," he explained, glyphs of humor and apology to Dusk's very real presence underlining the words.

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"Landed, mind you, landed. …might've hit my head, though…" He chuckled, the sound bordering a real laugh, but not quite getting there. Instead focused on the curious, almost indecipherable, combination of glyphs pulling together to form something so familiar. A bunch of different strings and supports all looped around in odd ways so they could encircle the thing that mattered. It almost made him laugh at first… not that it was funny, only caught him by surprise so that it left him a little dizzy.

He left it for now; there would be time to sit down and catch up on the past few million years with Ironhide later. As they both were suddenly reminded, they were in the middle of Control with surrounding mecha. …One of which, apparently, was Ironhide's wee li'l biltlet.

He added it to the list of million year things to talk about later.

Instead, he turned his attention to the immediate questions and the faces right in front of him. Seeing them. One hand returning the gesture on Ironhide's shoulder, he took the time to note the black femme and the silver gray mech to the side, and then the bitlet just opposite. Gave Ironhide's shoulder a reassuring squeeze, a lopsided grin. "'S pretty much it, righ' there." He chimed, free hand rubbing at his jaw, the lazy grin never quite leaving even if he did look distant. "We, ah… used t'serve together. Long time ago." He said to Bluestreak, but the glyphs encircling long seemed to imply something about as deep and multi-layered as Guardian itself.

He tapped the fingers of his free hand lightly on the dents of his chassis, thoughtfully, grin broadening a bit. "Sorry if I gave you bit of a start." He said, not missing the hesitance in Blue's steps. He reached up to tap fingers on his helm. "Crazy ol' mech, hittin' my head on th'steerin' an' all." A light chuckle and a wink followed the joke. …If it was a joke.