Chapter Text
Sentinel woke up with the expected grogginess weighing heavy upon him (as the blanket should have, except it was absent, but he didn’t notice that yet). There was an undisturbed silence, which bore tranquility, and due to that he allotted himself an additional few moments of loitering there, in his berth, reclaiming what rest he could before he had to rise to relive for the umpteenth time the infinite tribulations of being the Primes’ advisor.
He shifted to his other side, where the position was met with the utmost comfortability, and, wondering the time, opened his optics and sought to find his techpad—
But he found himself met with the jarring sight of Megatronus’ dislocated helm.
He gave a frightened (and un-manly shrill) scream and reeled backwards, scrambling to his pedes, hasty to lengthen distance between himself and…the helm.
Which was Megatronus’. Affixed to no body. Right there.
“What…in Primus’... name …” Sentinel gasped, fighting for air in spite of the fright that overtook him. He took another step back, and another, until he could not do so any longer, until his wings met the wall that prohibited the furtherance of backtrack, and he could do no more but stare in utter fear as the entirety of his frame was suddenly overcome by immobility.
Megatronus’ helm was fairly large. Sentinel knew not why that aspect was the foremost thing to reach his notice, which was losing its keenness with each second that he regarded the horrid sight, but that is what he first acknowledged, the size. It was slightly larger than himself. There were no optics, merely hollows wherein purple once resided. The overgrowth of moss on the metal alluded to decay, albeit the body, were it present, might have better expressed the decomposition, but there was no body—
Oh ever fucking Primus there was.
It was a scatter of corpses across the floor of the cavern, and they, too, were in the gradual process of beyond consumed by moss, but not yet in totality, for he could glimpse the certain color schemes of frames, and each one he recognized in a millisecond, each one his mind knew to whom it belonged—Alchemist, Alpha Trion, Amalgamous, Liege Maximo, and before him, the quintessence of grotesque carnage, the bodiless helm of Megatronus himself—
Surmounted by a daze that began to swamp his senses, Sentinel staggered to the side, falling to greet the ground, and there he lay without a single attempt to rise; a blur expanded in his vision, swallowed his thoughts so they ambled about in its membrane in absolute disarray, whilst his optics stayed on the helm, at the blur of purple it had now become. Ringing pierced his audials but it sounded as if originating from a significant distance. For a moment Sentinel descended far into lethe.
This has to be a dream, he thought, desperately, but it was but a wish that it were so.
When he recalled how to move, he rose and slowly advanced toward the helm. The close proximity confirmed the horror: It was Megatronus. And clearly he had been dead for a long time. They all had been, hadn’t they?
The mech placed tentatively his servo on the perished Prime’s helm. Pressed, as if sorrow could be said in the vernacular of pressure. I’m sorry, came the thought in his head, and he realized with increased acedia that he was, indeed, apologetic, horrified beyond what utterance can reiterate, to extents immeasurable.
Megatronus was dead. And obviously, not naturally.
Who did this to him? To all of them?
Sentinel surveyed around in search for the answer, hints, anything in this wake. Halting frequently to gaze solemnly at a body, at another decapitated helm, another fear and horror frozen on a face he knew all too well, and every sight pierced something in him. Perhaps it was most sagacious to mourn and marinate in a wallow, but every part of himself contradicted, urging to seek the perpetrator, and therefore he wouldn’t do anything otherwise. He had to find something.
He didn’t find anything. Sentinel spent thirty minutes circling the cavern, upturning rock and parts of body, but he found not a sliver of a clue, merely ruptures of ground whose cause he could not determine and bodily wounds that either a Quintesson weapon or that of a Cybertronian could have inflicted. A scatter of aidless maybe s and possibilities.
Frustrated, Sentinel hissed a curse and sat on the ground, beside Megatronus, helm in hands. Too much, this was far too much. Only a day prior he was attending to his duties whilst the Primes tackled theirs, wrapped up in things that were, in the face of this absurd day, simple trivialities. What happened? What the hell happened?
He looked at Megatronus. Megatronus’ eye sockets looked at him. Void and emotionless. Lifeless.
“I’ll find who did this to you,” Sentinel said, with a rising anger. “I will.”
The promise felt no more than a string of words expelled into the empty space wherein death tinkered with bodies, but the mech would see to it that it was undertaken. He stood up and walked outside the cavern, into the dark Surface.
—
The first thing one was to do in a jarring event such as this was to attempt connection with Iacon.
Unfortunately, that was not going smoothly for Sentinel.
As he walked the expanse of the Surface’s organic land, not towards any specific destination but a great enough space for his commlinks to be within some sort of range, Sentinel turned his comms on and off repeatedly, forcing them into functionality, but they vehemently refused with a blast of static and fragments of voices and words that he could not decipher. This reoccurrence spanned for about half an hour before he relented and frowned in the Surface silence.
Malfunctioning commlinks and connection, no nearby transportation to return him to Iacon. With these barriers there could be no exiting this expanse. He considered the prospect of someone realizing his absence and scrambling to send a search team, but clearly he had been in oblivion for as long as the Primes were dead, which was quite a while. Which meant that no one had taken notice of his lack of presence since then. Which meant that he was stranded here.
Wholly weaponless too. And he with no defense against a Quintesson was already dead.
“Fuck. Fucking Primus.” Sentinel paced around, fighting not to panic. “Okay, I can do this; no need to panic. No working commlinks, which means renders rescue impossible, but I have…places to hide, and…”
Dear Primus, air was escaping him faster than it entered.
“A plan, I need a plan. First thing I need to do is…”
I’m fucking trapped here. Doomed. Daresay condemned. So fucked.
Forget retribution, how can I be rescued?!
You’re being dramatic. Calm yourself, you fool. He paused in place and took in a deep breath, withheld it until ten. Exhaled. Emotions returned to equilibrium and his thoughts better flowed. A miniscule hope formed in the death of the swarm and he looked around again, this time without a frenzy of his optic.
There’s always a way. Like Megatronus said, there is always a way…
An undercurrent beneath the Surface’s quietude was the rumble of engines high in the ether. Sentinel looked skyward. Three jets were gliding across the leaden expanse. Toward him.
Sentinel could have thanked Primus then, in an elated announcement. In lieu, he waved his arms to further draw their attention, until it became clear that he was in their sights.
In their completed descent they transformed, all three of them. In the front was a red-and-black Seeker that Sentinel recognized quickly as Starscream. They all had weapons aimed at him, whirring in charge.
“Holy shit,” one of the Seekers said, “is that…”
“ Sentinel ?!” Starscream hissed. His optics were wide with disbelief.
Huh. Did he think he had perished along with the Primes?
“Yes,” Sentinel said, and words toppled from his intake, “it’s me. I don’t know if you know this, but—I just found myself in the cavern, and the Primes, well, they—”
“Impossible.”
“What?”
“He killed you,” Starscream said, voice unusually rough. Heavy. Seething? “He
killed
you.”
Sentinel blinked and blanked. “...Who did? W-what?”
“I knew this Surface was cursed,” one of the other seekers muttered.
Meanwhile, Starscream stared, but not just in disbelief but rage also. A rage Sentinel did not understand. What the hell was happening?
“What do you mean he killed me? Who’s ‘he’?” His voice rose in anger at the continuance of answer’s absence. “If one of you would please explain to me what the hell is going on—”
Suddenly, Starscream turned to the others. “Detain him. Now .”
Sentinel took a step back. “Wait, what—”
A second later he was hit with a very rude laser beam that sent him tumbling. The last thing he saw were pedes advancing toward, then darkness entirely.