Chapter Text
And once more they fell apart.
Literally, Ambulon thought with a bitter taste on his glossa. Deluge would order them to stack on top of each other, somebody would begin swaying, and in the end, the entire construction would just come crashing down.
The first time, Ambulon had no chance to prepare himself and he was crushed under the weight of the other Combicons. It took them weeks to remove all the dents and repair his back struts. The Decepticon ranks weren’t exactly well-saturated with medics.
This time, Ambulon himself was the one who made the first mistake. A sliver of instability, just half a moment of uncertainty, turned the ripple in his posture into a wave of imbalance for everybody else.
Abdominus swayed back and forth; his heavy frame was difficult to get under control in this awkward position. In his alt-mode, he had no chance of preventing the imminent collapse; all he could do was to try and stay upright for as long as possible so the limbs could react in time.
Arm-Or and Swing complained loudly, but they made no effort to help him, instead opting to throw insults and curses around. Ambulon internally counted the seconds until—
“CATCH!!”
Ambulon and Kicker barely had time to transform before they each got an armful of… well… arm dropped into their grasp. While Arm-Or had used his processor and stayed in alt-mode to ease Kicker’s load, Swing wasn’t as generous. He transformed mid-fall and cleanly knocked Ambulon down.
Abdominus, much to the relief of everyone involved, was smart enough to catch his own fall. He had jumped forward and rolled over to prevent any injuries. He could be surprisingly swift when it mattered, and his reflexes would have been a lot more useful in places that weren’t this facility.
But Megatron wanted a combiner, and so they were locked in here, forced to try the same thing every single day, forced to fail every single day, forced to watch their supervisor lose a little bit of his mind every single day.
Ambulon had lost track of how long this experiment had been going on for. He groaned and pushed Swing from his lap. Nobody helped him get up, of course, and he was left to awkwardly push himself off the floor. Pain shot through his leg, but he decided to ignore it. Maybe he could fix whatever cable broke this time himself.
His pondering was interrupted by Kicker’s manic cackling as he playfully hit Arm-Or’s still untransformed alt-mode. It was an unpleasant and rough noise; his vocalizer had some kind of issue that caused a metallic rattling. Like someone forgot to properly attach the screws.
Given how much he enjoyed crashing, the screws in his throat weren’t the only ones loose. Ambulon kept that thought to himself. There was no need to pick a fight, and he didn’t want to run the risk of an awkward silence just because he had spoken. He doubted they would catch onto his joke anyways.
The lightheartedness of the moment was harshly eliminated when Deluge groaned in annoyance. The Decepticon scientist rolled his optics and pinched the bridge of his olfactory unit. He was so tired of this experiment, so unbelievably tired, and he had to use all of his ambitions to prevent an outburst.
“Kicker, shut up,” he commanded. “And Arm-Or, stop being dramatic and transform back. Or do you need my help?”
Arm-Or immediately transformed into root mode and stumbled out of Kicker’s lap, even being so generous as to help the leg get up. Kicker was still snickering, but nonetheless let himself be corrected into a more presentable position.
Deluge mustered the group with a displeased expression and scoffed, not muttering curses as he usually would. Instead, he squinted and crossed his arms.
“You are failures, all of you,” he began, with a respectable amount of tension in his voice. He was holding back worse insults. Insults that Ambulon had heard whenever their supervisor was drunk and mumbling to himself in his office. He knew better than to ever interrupt him, but the insults Deluge used still occasionally came to mind.
“With all due respect—”
“No.”
“Yes, sir.”
Well, Ambulon thought, at least Abdominus had tried. And maybe someday, he would succeed. But not today, and not tomorrow, and depending on how long they were stuck in here, not for a good while. He felt a pang of sympathy for their self-declared leader; being dismissed without a thought was a familiar feeling for all of them. But Ambulon’s understanding felt more like a compulsion, rather than genuine compassion. It was hard to feel any true camaraderie with his brethren when they didn’t care about him, either.
“Week after week you make me watch this pathetic display of incompetence,” Deluge ranted on. He was losing his filter the more he talked, his initial discontent evolving into outright anger. Like it was the Combicon’s fault that he was stationed here.
“You disappoint me. How hard can it be for five mechs to stand still? Did the Cold Construction damage your stabilization systems as much as your processors?”
There was a silence, the accused mechs each looking to the other. Kicker’s snickering had died down, Arm-Or and Swing tried very hard not to look at each other, and Abdominus gave an awkward sidelong glance to Ambulon. Ambulon himself refused to react. He closed his optics and just accepted what he knew was coming.
“Sir, Ambulon lost balance; I had little chance to circumvent the impeding crash.”
As eloquent as ever, but also as accusatory as ever. At least this time, he hadn’t just blamed Ambulon for no reason; he was honest. Ambulon had been at fault in this specific incident. But not all the other times, even if Abdominus apparently enjoyed putting as much blame as he could on one single leg.
And unfortunately for Ambulon, Abdominus was soft on Kicker. He always had been.
Deluge snorted in disdain and waved his hand dismissively. He shook his head and glared at them again, before he stepped closer and began pacing. He circled around them and eventually, came to a halt behind Ambulon to place his servos on Ambulon’s shoulders. His fingers were blunt, but they still dug into the plating and caused an uncomfortable sensation.
“Get out of my sight,” Deluge hissed and leaned down to speak directly into Ambulon’s audial, “and get a hold of yourselves.”
The Combicons rushed out of the room. The arm twins dashed forward to be the first ones and briefly got stuck in the door as a result. After some bickering, Abdominus pushed them out, ignoring the complaints about mechhandling. Kicker followed behind like a startled cyberhare; he had to jump to keep up with the large frame in front of him.
Ambulon was still on edge from Deluge’s disquieting presence, but he tried to shake off the unease and made his way towards the door. He considered turning around, considered apologizing for today. He considered telling Deluge about how he wasn’t usually at fault, even if the others insisted that he was the weak link.
There were many things he could’ve said, but his voice refused. His mind refused. His body refused.
Ambulon left after the others, walking behind them in the dim lights of the facility. He listened in on their conversations, but they blended together into a mush of chatter that wasn’t really interesting enough to pick through.
He felt the injury in his leg with every step, flinched whenever the stabbing pain ran from pede to knee joint, and up into his hip and shoulder. He tried not to limp, but it was hard for him to walk properly. Slowing his pace, he watched the others get smaller in the distance.
Once Ambulon had reached the fuel station, he found it empty. His face warped with mild anger, and he had to take a deep invent. He knew energon was scarce, knew that they were the lowest of the low, just the bottom feeders of the entire Decepticon army. The leftovers that they were served, a slop of low-quality energon stretched with oil and shards of metal scraps, were barely enough to sate any of them.
But this was ridiculous.
Ambulon was used to being the last in line. He was commonly seen to be scraping at the bottom of the container in a desperate search for sustenance. It was a frequent occurrence, and apparently this time, his dear brethren decided that if he was so content with little fuel, he could live another week without refueling at all.
Slowly, he turned his head to the table where the others were sitting. Kicker was babbling about something that somehow earned him the attention of the other three, and all their trays were full enough to be considered hedonistic in their situation. They had neatly split Ambulon’s portion among themselves.
Ambulon grit his teeth. He wanted to shout at them, he wanted to cry and scream, but he held back. He knew he wouldn’t get anywhere. He felt the near-overwhelming urge to just take one of their trays and slam it to the ground. Would they scrape their meal off the floor? Or would they accept joining Ambulon in his forced fasting?
Neither, he figured, because the others were stronger than him and Ambulon would probably regret ever standing up for himself. His optics met Kicker’s. Kicker looked away as if he hadn’t seen anything.
Ambulon turned away, too, and left the room. At least he could get a peaceful recharge, with nobody else to bother him. A good recharge was almost as good as a proper meal, he told himself, knowing well enough that it was a lie.
Ambulon had barely shut off his optics to give his dizzy processor a rest before Kicker barged into the room with the energy of an untrained turbofox on nuke. His voice wasn’t any less energetic, and Ambulon struggled to catch up with what was being said to him.
In all honesty, he wasn’t actually trying to pay attention. Delusional as he was, Ambulon hoped that if he ignored Kicker hard enough, it would make him leave.
“— game— referee— listening?”
Kicker groaned and jumped onto the berth to kick Ambulon’s leg. In line with his name, he did it with force, and unfortunately chose the exact leg that Ambulon had injured during their previous accident.
Ambulon yelped and jolted up, only to immediately slump forward again and hold his head. Somehow, it buzzed worse now than it did before, and Kicker’s rattling vocalizer did him no favor either. Neither did the return of the pain in his leg or his empty tank.
“I said we’re playing a game and need a referee! Did you hit your head?”
Incredibly helpful to the situation, Kicker knocked on Ambulon’s helm. Ambulon swatted his hand away and gave him an exasperated look.
“I didn’t hit—”
“Great!”
And with that, Kicker dragged Ambulon out of the berth, out of the room. Ambulon didn’t enjoy being taken from the comfort of their comparatively silent quarters. He would take the constant mechanical whirring and humming within the walls, over the painful noise of four over-energized mechs playing some stupid game with questionable rules and makeshift props any day.
Nonetheless, Ambulon followed Kicker, who deliberately ignored how much Ambulon was stumbling and flinching. Kicker didn’t think much of it. Quite frankly, he didn’t think much in general in the first place.
Ambulon had a hard time believing that the other leg was being a misfiring tailpipe on purpose, but that still didn’t calm his frustration. Kicker was just going with the flow of the others, and much to Ambulon’s personal suffering, that flow didn’t involve looking left and right.
Once they arrived in the ‘lounge’, which was pretty much just an abandoned lab that Swing and Arm-Or decided to break into someday, Abdominus hauled Ambulon from the ground and threw him onto a bar that was dangling from the ceiling. It was one of the few remains that the arms hadn’t been able to reach and therefore, was pardoned from their rampage when they had tasked themselves with making this room as spacious as they could.
Ambulon’s processor was aching even worse now, but he had little say in this situation and decided to just try his best for now. Still, Abdominus had to explain the rules three times before Ambulon vaguely got the idea. His vision was fading in and out by now, and the longer the others played, the more Ambulon’s judgments were spoken by him like he was just an automaton.
He didn’t feel like much more than that, anyways.
When the others finally decided to stop tormenting him — they really only stopped playing because Abdominus was getting tired of Arm-Or and Swing tussling on the ground instead of playing properly — they cleared up the room and left.
Abdominus didn’t forget about Ambulon, although he would be lying if he claimed that it hadn't happened before. He gently lifted him down from the ceiling and even thanked him for playing referee. Ambulon wondered for a moment just how badly his own processor was worn out for him to hallucinate such a thing.
When he finally dropped into berth and was allowed to recharge, Ambulon stared at the bunk above him. For how long would the Deceptions continue to waste their resources on this experiment? He didn’t want to think about it, not at all. Because the next thought would be, ‘What happens to us after this experiment is finally declared a failure?’ and that made the future look pretty gray to him.
Deluge’s expression had been steadily darkening with each time the combiner tower came tumbling down, so Ambulon feared that it wouldn’t take long for him to find out what came after. What Deluge saw for himself was obvious. He saw success: he saw himself replacing the missing Shockwave, but he wouldn’t do so with this team.
No, the Combicons were just a pile of untalented MTOs. They were useless, the entire lot, not worth his time. Because he was Deluge. The new big name at the horizon of science. MTOs just weren’t meant for this, to be the trailblazers of a new era.
Ambulon, with each passing cycle, really started to believe that this was a sacrosanct truth. He wasn’t made for anything more, he had no higher calling. He was just a tool of war, and he wasn’t even good at what they had built him for. Operation Split Infinitives had been a failure back in the day, and that had just been the beginning of his miserable existence.
Ambulon crossed his arms behind his head and shut off his optics. He listened to the noise of the other recharging mechs, of his brethren that he never wanted to have. The uneven clatter of Abdominus’s malfunctioning vents was louder than anything else in the room, but oddly enough, it helped him drift into recharge.
How long could a mech even survive sounding like that?
Ambulon’s leg stung again, and he thought about Kicker’s rattling vocalizer.
How long could any of them survive with this creeping decay?