Challenge Fic: Echoes (part 1 of 3)
Title: Echoes
Author: zea_taylor
‘Verse: G1, sequel to ‘Fall’
Rating: T/PG-13
Characters: Jazz/Prowl, Bluestreak
Warnings: angst, fluff
Summary:
New discoveries can bring to life echoes of times past. The only choice is whether to fear the memories, or embrace them.
Author’s Note:
Written for the prowlxjazz community’s Anniversary Bingo Challenge. Each chapter is inspired by one prompt, posted by wicked3659.
Thanks, credit and acknowledgement also go to whitefirebird, who suggested this premise in a comment on my earlier fic ‘ Fall,’ and was kind enough to beta it. This sequel is set many vorns later, after the Ark arrives on Earth.
Comments and suggestions for improvement are always very welcome!
Part One
Prompt: remembering times past
“You know, maybe this was a bad idea.”
Bumblebee’s voice echoed off the low rock ceiling. The reverberations ebbed and flowed, scattered by the stalactites plunging down from above and the stalagmites that rose to meet them. They rippled along Bluestreak’s door-wings, the sensation jarring and a little uncomfortable.
Drawing his sensory panels in close to his back-plates, the young sniper tried not to look too relieved at Bee’s realisation.
“Y’know I was just thinking the same. It’s always kind of nice to spend time together, Bumblebee, you know that, and it’s not like there’s anyone else our age on the Ark, not really, so it’s great to talk when we get the chance and it did seem like a really good idea to explore down here for a change, rather than going out in the rain, but it’s cold and it’s dark and it’s kind of quiet down here and… and I really don’t want to be here.”
That last bit escaped before Bluestreak could filter it. Even by his own standards his speech was excessively fast. His door-wings were twitching too, enough so that Prowl would frown if he were here and chide his protégé for not staying in control.
The sidelong look he got from Bumblebee told him that his nervousness hadn’t gone unnoticed. The yellow minibot tilted his helm to one side, one servo coming up to rub a stubby helm-horn.
“Hey, Blue? Are you okay?”
“Fine, I’m fine. Really. I’ll be okay.”
He really wasn’t fine. Exploring the cave network under Mount St Hillary had seemed like a fun idea, but every breem Bluestreak spent underground was making him more unsettled. The climb down through the Ark’s lower decks into the caverns below had been enough to trigger the feeling. There was something about the darkness, the sense of weight above him and the silence down here that was doing bad things to his processor. It was like there was a memory file jamming his recall unit, not quite accessible, but not clearing to let other information past. He felt that there was something he should remember, but at the same time was quite certain he didn’t want to.
He cycled his optics down, trying to tune out his surroundings. Bumblebee was a good friend, but more than anything Bluestreak wanted to talk to Prowl. Or Jazz. Jazz would be good too. The two of them were used to his freak-outs. They’d listen and not judge, and Jazz was always good for a distraction or two. Bluestreak could use one right now.
Neither of his mentors would take him at his word, as Bumblebee was doing now. He could hear his friend strolling across the cavern floor, kicking idly at loose stones as he went.
“We’ll head on up in a klick or two, okay? I just want to take a look over he…arrrgghh!
Blue cycled his optics back online in a hurry. His door-wings flared wide, their tips scraping the rock columns around him as they searched. Bumblebee had been somewhere on the far side of the cave they’d stumbled across. Even if Bluestreak’s optics had been online, his friend would have been hidden from view by twists and turns of the rock.
His own discomfort shoved aside, Bluestreak hurried forward.
“Bee? Bumblebee, are you all right? I hope you’re okay because it wasn’t easy to get down here, and it’ll be real tough to get you out if you can’t walk, or have broken a strut or something. I might have to call Ratchet down here, and I think he’d be pretty annoyed because…”
“Blue! Watch out for - “
For the second time in as many minutes, Bee’s words cut off in a shower of falling pebbles and the sound of a mech hitting the ground.
Bluestreak didn’t hear the echoes of his own fall as they swelled and then faded. The ground had opened beneath his pedes, the sudden sharp drop plunging him into darkness and a deeper cavity below.
Falling. Darkness.
The memory file straining his processor was still hazy, its context unclear, but the emotional resonances it carried broke through the block.
Terror.
“Bluestreak? Come on, Blue buddy, talk to me.”
For a microklick, as he sought instinctively for comfort, he thought it was Jazz talking to him rather than Bumblebee. Either option was wrong. It was Prowl’s voice his processor was searching for, and which Bluestreak longed to hear. Prowl was the one who’d kept him safe, and held him when the world dropped out from under them.
He shuddered. His door-wings folded tight in against his body, his entire form huddled where it fell. He knew now which memories were stirring. And he knew he didn’t want to see them any more clearly.
Clenching his servos into fists, Bluestreak shook his helm. No. He didn’t have to let the nightmares take control. Prowl had always told him that, and his faith in his guardian was never less than a hundred percent. Darkness wasn’t his friend, but darkness could be banished.
“Whoa.” Bumblebee took a few steps backwards on the uneven surface as Bluestreak turned on his headlamps. Both mechs’ optics cycled, flaring and dimming as they recalibrated for the illumination. A few klicks later, Bee lit his own lights, adding to his friend’s as both stared around them.
“Whoa,” he repeated, his vocalisor softer this time.
“Oh wow!” Bluestreak echoed, for once all but lost for words. “This is… this is… amazing!”
The cavern wasn’t all that big - perhaps twice as tall as Bluestreak and about the same across - but if anything that just magnified the impact of it.
Every wall of the spherical cavity was coated in angular crystals, some just inches long, others rivalling Bumblebee in height and width. They grew from every wall, angled in towards the centre of the cavern, regular where they had space to grow, tussling with their neighbours where the limited room required it. Most were hexagonal in cross-section and translucent - ranging from almost transparent to a milky white. Here and there, colours rippled through the crystal growths. The most common tint was a vivid purple, but Bluestreak’s headlamps picked out blues and greens, yellows and even a few glimmers of dark red, deep within the crystalline array.
“Huh, well this is kind of pretty.” Bumblebee acknowledged the sight, assessed it and dismissed it with a single phrase. The yellow minibot was already turning back towards the opening they’d fallen through. “I guess if the crystal edges aren’t too sharp, we could climb up…”
Bluestreak hadn’t got that far. He was still looking around the huge geode with wondering optics. It seemed almost sacrilege to be thinking of escape - a rejection of something beautiful and precious that Primus had given them. He wasn’t watching when Bumblebee gave a metre-long shard a solid thump, testing its edges. He heard it though, and felt it too. His door-wings flinched and then angled of their own accord towards the source of the sound. A shiver ran through him, the sensation not entirely unpleasant. Only now did he realise what he’d been sensing since the moment he fell into the cavity - the reverberations, triggered by his impact, that refused to die away.
Maybe it was his uneasiness in the dark caves, the terror of his fall and the memories it brought too close to home, that made the mental connection. He reached out with a tentative servo, tapping the nearest crystal and spreading his door-wings to catch the vibrations. This didn’t just feel right. It felt familiar.
“Prowl.” He whispered the name aloud, puzzled. For some reason this place was making him think of his childhood guardian, and of music, and that didn’t make sense at all.
It was connecting with something else too. Bluestreak didn’t know the names of his original genitors. He had precisely one image of the mechs. The memory capture - of a squirming grey mechling in the arms of his laughing guardians - had been on his berth-side table as far back as he could remember. He’d dithered, over the years, between loving the image and hating it for the turbulent, terror-filled memories it provoked. It had never occurred to him before to think about the background, and the immense crystal outcrop behind the family group.
Looking around him now, Bluestreak wondered for the first time what it must have been like to have those crystals towering above him. With the trapped air throbbing on his door-wings, and his optics cycling to capture the sparkling light, he felt almost as if he was back in their arching embrace.
A sharp crack filled the air: the sound of glass-like quartz fracturing under a minibot’s sturdy weight. At once, Bluestreak’s fragile memories reverted. His door-wings folded in, tight and rigid as he tried to shake the sound of shattering crystal, and of keening cries in the darkness.
“C’mon, Bluestreak!” Bumblebee was naturally a cheerful mech, but there was a note of strain underlying his hearty encouragement. The minibot was almost at the broken entrance now, reaching down to offer his friend a servo. His bright optics were fixed on Bluestreak’s faceplates, and Blue knew his oscillating mood hadn’t gone unnoticed. “Let’s get back to the Ark, okay? Prowl’s got to be kind of wondering where you are by now.”
It took an effort of will for Bluestreak to accept the proffered hand, and start to climb. This place was as intriguing as it was terrifying. He heard Bumblebee’s vents cycle in a sigh of relief when he finally moved. Both mechs climbed with care now, placing their weight to avoid the smaller, more fragile, of the crystals forming the geode. Neither spoke any more than they needed to - Bluestreak exhausted and confused by his turbulent emotions, Bumblebee wary of triggering an outburst he wasn’t equipped to deal with.
It took the better part of five breems to get back to the Ark. Bluestreak managed a quick “that was fun, well, sort-of anyway, and we should see each other again soon, and I don’t just mean on duty, but let’s go outside next time, okay, and I’ve got to go find Prowl now, so I’d better go this way, and I’ll see you later, and bye for now!”. Bumblebee grinned, rubbing his helm-horn just hard enough to betray his concern. Bluestreak would go find him later, when he understood himself, and try to explain. For now though, he hurried through the Ark, heading for the command corridor and knocking on his mentor’s office door with more than his usual urgency.
“Prowl, are you busy? I hope you’re not. I really want to see you, and, well I kind of think I need to see you, because ‘Bee and I found the most wonderful thing and the strangest thing. I… I don’t know what I….”
The office door slid open without further ceremony. Bluestreak tumbled through, the explanation starting almost before his former guardian locked the door behind him.
Prowl’s optics shone with concern; his door-wings flared wider than their accustomed stern angle. He listened to the stream of explanation from Bluestreak with a frown and no more than occasional words of encouragement or comfort.
It was a breem before he rounded his desk to take the youngling he’d raised in a brief but spark-felt embrace.
It was another two before Bluestreak finished talking, perched on the desk with his mentor close beside him. Prowl stood. He reached out a servo towards Bluestreak, drawing the younger mech to his pedes. Bluestreak obeyed the silent command without hesitation. His guardian’s expression was calm but Prowl’s door-wings trembled a little.
“Show me,” was all he said.
... go to part two
Author: zea_taylor
‘Verse: G1, sequel to ‘Fall’
Rating: T/PG-13
Characters: Jazz/Prowl, Bluestreak
Warnings: angst, fluff
Summary:
New discoveries can bring to life echoes of times past. The only choice is whether to fear the memories, or embrace them.
Author’s Note:
Written for the prowlxjazz community’s Anniversary Bingo Challenge. Each chapter is inspired by one prompt, posted by wicked3659.
Thanks, credit and acknowledgement also go to whitefirebird, who suggested this premise in a comment on my earlier fic ‘ Fall,’ and was kind enough to beta it. This sequel is set many vorns later, after the Ark arrives on Earth.
Comments and suggestions for improvement are always very welcome!
Part One
Prompt: remembering times past
“You know, maybe this was a bad idea.”
Bumblebee’s voice echoed off the low rock ceiling. The reverberations ebbed and flowed, scattered by the stalactites plunging down from above and the stalagmites that rose to meet them. They rippled along Bluestreak’s door-wings, the sensation jarring and a little uncomfortable.
Drawing his sensory panels in close to his back-plates, the young sniper tried not to look too relieved at Bee’s realisation.
“Y’know I was just thinking the same. It’s always kind of nice to spend time together, Bumblebee, you know that, and it’s not like there’s anyone else our age on the Ark, not really, so it’s great to talk when we get the chance and it did seem like a really good idea to explore down here for a change, rather than going out in the rain, but it’s cold and it’s dark and it’s kind of quiet down here and… and I really don’t want to be here.”
That last bit escaped before Bluestreak could filter it. Even by his own standards his speech was excessively fast. His door-wings were twitching too, enough so that Prowl would frown if he were here and chide his protégé for not staying in control.
The sidelong look he got from Bumblebee told him that his nervousness hadn’t gone unnoticed. The yellow minibot tilted his helm to one side, one servo coming up to rub a stubby helm-horn.
“Hey, Blue? Are you okay?”
“Fine, I’m fine. Really. I’ll be okay.”
He really wasn’t fine. Exploring the cave network under Mount St Hillary had seemed like a fun idea, but every breem Bluestreak spent underground was making him more unsettled. The climb down through the Ark’s lower decks into the caverns below had been enough to trigger the feeling. There was something about the darkness, the sense of weight above him and the silence down here that was doing bad things to his processor. It was like there was a memory file jamming his recall unit, not quite accessible, but not clearing to let other information past. He felt that there was something he should remember, but at the same time was quite certain he didn’t want to.
He cycled his optics down, trying to tune out his surroundings. Bumblebee was a good friend, but more than anything Bluestreak wanted to talk to Prowl. Or Jazz. Jazz would be good too. The two of them were used to his freak-outs. They’d listen and not judge, and Jazz was always good for a distraction or two. Bluestreak could use one right now.
Neither of his mentors would take him at his word, as Bumblebee was doing now. He could hear his friend strolling across the cavern floor, kicking idly at loose stones as he went.
“We’ll head on up in a klick or two, okay? I just want to take a look over he…arrrgghh!
Blue cycled his optics back online in a hurry. His door-wings flared wide, their tips scraping the rock columns around him as they searched. Bumblebee had been somewhere on the far side of the cave they’d stumbled across. Even if Bluestreak’s optics had been online, his friend would have been hidden from view by twists and turns of the rock.
His own discomfort shoved aside, Bluestreak hurried forward.
“Bee? Bumblebee, are you all right? I hope you’re okay because it wasn’t easy to get down here, and it’ll be real tough to get you out if you can’t walk, or have broken a strut or something. I might have to call Ratchet down here, and I think he’d be pretty annoyed because…”
“Blue! Watch out for - “
For the second time in as many minutes, Bee’s words cut off in a shower of falling pebbles and the sound of a mech hitting the ground.
Bluestreak didn’t hear the echoes of his own fall as they swelled and then faded. The ground had opened beneath his pedes, the sudden sharp drop plunging him into darkness and a deeper cavity below.
Falling. Darkness.
The memory file straining his processor was still hazy, its context unclear, but the emotional resonances it carried broke through the block.
Terror.
“Bluestreak? Come on, Blue buddy, talk to me.”
For a microklick, as he sought instinctively for comfort, he thought it was Jazz talking to him rather than Bumblebee. Either option was wrong. It was Prowl’s voice his processor was searching for, and which Bluestreak longed to hear. Prowl was the one who’d kept him safe, and held him when the world dropped out from under them.
He shuddered. His door-wings folded tight in against his body, his entire form huddled where it fell. He knew now which memories were stirring. And he knew he didn’t want to see them any more clearly.
Clenching his servos into fists, Bluestreak shook his helm. No. He didn’t have to let the nightmares take control. Prowl had always told him that, and his faith in his guardian was never less than a hundred percent. Darkness wasn’t his friend, but darkness could be banished.
“Whoa.” Bumblebee took a few steps backwards on the uneven surface as Bluestreak turned on his headlamps. Both mechs’ optics cycled, flaring and dimming as they recalibrated for the illumination. A few klicks later, Bee lit his own lights, adding to his friend’s as both stared around them.
“Whoa,” he repeated, his vocalisor softer this time.
“Oh wow!” Bluestreak echoed, for once all but lost for words. “This is… this is… amazing!”
The cavern wasn’t all that big - perhaps twice as tall as Bluestreak and about the same across - but if anything that just magnified the impact of it.
Every wall of the spherical cavity was coated in angular crystals, some just inches long, others rivalling Bumblebee in height and width. They grew from every wall, angled in towards the centre of the cavern, regular where they had space to grow, tussling with their neighbours where the limited room required it. Most were hexagonal in cross-section and translucent - ranging from almost transparent to a milky white. Here and there, colours rippled through the crystal growths. The most common tint was a vivid purple, but Bluestreak’s headlamps picked out blues and greens, yellows and even a few glimmers of dark red, deep within the crystalline array.
“Huh, well this is kind of pretty.” Bumblebee acknowledged the sight, assessed it and dismissed it with a single phrase. The yellow minibot was already turning back towards the opening they’d fallen through. “I guess if the crystal edges aren’t too sharp, we could climb up…”
Bluestreak hadn’t got that far. He was still looking around the huge geode with wondering optics. It seemed almost sacrilege to be thinking of escape - a rejection of something beautiful and precious that Primus had given them. He wasn’t watching when Bumblebee gave a metre-long shard a solid thump, testing its edges. He heard it though, and felt it too. His door-wings flinched and then angled of their own accord towards the source of the sound. A shiver ran through him, the sensation not entirely unpleasant. Only now did he realise what he’d been sensing since the moment he fell into the cavity - the reverberations, triggered by his impact, that refused to die away.
Maybe it was his uneasiness in the dark caves, the terror of his fall and the memories it brought too close to home, that made the mental connection. He reached out with a tentative servo, tapping the nearest crystal and spreading his door-wings to catch the vibrations. This didn’t just feel right. It felt familiar.
“Prowl.” He whispered the name aloud, puzzled. For some reason this place was making him think of his childhood guardian, and of music, and that didn’t make sense at all.
It was connecting with something else too. Bluestreak didn’t know the names of his original genitors. He had precisely one image of the mechs. The memory capture - of a squirming grey mechling in the arms of his laughing guardians - had been on his berth-side table as far back as he could remember. He’d dithered, over the years, between loving the image and hating it for the turbulent, terror-filled memories it provoked. It had never occurred to him before to think about the background, and the immense crystal outcrop behind the family group.
Looking around him now, Bluestreak wondered for the first time what it must have been like to have those crystals towering above him. With the trapped air throbbing on his door-wings, and his optics cycling to capture the sparkling light, he felt almost as if he was back in their arching embrace.
A sharp crack filled the air: the sound of glass-like quartz fracturing under a minibot’s sturdy weight. At once, Bluestreak’s fragile memories reverted. His door-wings folded in, tight and rigid as he tried to shake the sound of shattering crystal, and of keening cries in the darkness.
“C’mon, Bluestreak!” Bumblebee was naturally a cheerful mech, but there was a note of strain underlying his hearty encouragement. The minibot was almost at the broken entrance now, reaching down to offer his friend a servo. His bright optics were fixed on Bluestreak’s faceplates, and Blue knew his oscillating mood hadn’t gone unnoticed. “Let’s get back to the Ark, okay? Prowl’s got to be kind of wondering where you are by now.”
It took an effort of will for Bluestreak to accept the proffered hand, and start to climb. This place was as intriguing as it was terrifying. He heard Bumblebee’s vents cycle in a sigh of relief when he finally moved. Both mechs climbed with care now, placing their weight to avoid the smaller, more fragile, of the crystals forming the geode. Neither spoke any more than they needed to - Bluestreak exhausted and confused by his turbulent emotions, Bumblebee wary of triggering an outburst he wasn’t equipped to deal with.
It took the better part of five breems to get back to the Ark. Bluestreak managed a quick “that was fun, well, sort-of anyway, and we should see each other again soon, and I don’t just mean on duty, but let’s go outside next time, okay, and I’ve got to go find Prowl now, so I’d better go this way, and I’ll see you later, and bye for now!”. Bumblebee grinned, rubbing his helm-horn just hard enough to betray his concern. Bluestreak would go find him later, when he understood himself, and try to explain. For now though, he hurried through the Ark, heading for the command corridor and knocking on his mentor’s office door with more than his usual urgency.
“Prowl, are you busy? I hope you’re not. I really want to see you, and, well I kind of think I need to see you, because ‘Bee and I found the most wonderful thing and the strangest thing. I… I don’t know what I….”
The office door slid open without further ceremony. Bluestreak tumbled through, the explanation starting almost before his former guardian locked the door behind him.
Prowl’s optics shone with concern; his door-wings flared wider than their accustomed stern angle. He listened to the stream of explanation from Bluestreak with a frown and no more than occasional words of encouragement or comfort.
It was a breem before he rounded his desk to take the youngling he’d raised in a brief but spark-felt embrace.
It was another two before Bluestreak finished talking, perched on the desk with his mentor close beside him. Prowl stood. He reached out a servo towards Bluestreak, drawing the younger mech to his pedes. Bluestreak obeyed the silent command without hesitation. His guardian’s expression was calm but Prowl’s door-wings trembled a little.
“Show me,” was all he said.
... go to part two