Chapter Text
Judge if you want.
We are all going to die.
I intend to deserve it.
-A Softer World 421
"Keep moving!"
Genitus swore when the butt of a gun hit him in the back hard enough to dent. He stumbled before he managed to right himself, struggling with the ankle chains binding him to the prisoners before and after himself in line.
He knew that he was going to die here. Genitus may have only been a hundred cycles, but he was old enough to know that no one got out of Grindcore. It was too horrible, too deep within Decepticon territory, too well guarded for Autobot Command to care enough to send troops to liberate them. Even if they did, he was under no delusions that an MTO like himself would be high up on the list of prisoners to rescue.
"Open your mouth," snarled the mech in front of him. He held a spiky disk in one hand and Genitus regarded him for a moment, his plating hot and optics burning, seething with silent hatred. Wordless, he opened his mouth.
Genitus followed the line through the barren courtyard of the prison, the smell of ozone and melting metal clouding his senses. Thick black smoke curled above the building like a promise. The obelisk that was Grindcore swallowed him, blotting out the red-grey sky and thrusting him into darkness.
Inside, the screaming started immediately.
Genitus heard the mech in line behind him start to cry, but he kept his optics up and steady, dentae grit. He'd lived his whole short life with very little choice in how anything played out; not the circumstances of his creation, not his alt-mode, not his job, not his name or his station, but he could decide how he died. He planned to die with dignity, chin up. He wouldn't let them see them get to him. Not now. Not ever.
The line stopped and a guard held a gun to his temple while another unhooked him from the chain. He stared ahead.
"This is your stop," said the guard, leading him down a row of barred cells filled with shrieks and viscera. Somehow beneath the din of chaos and panic that filled the complex, he could still hear the echo of his pedes down the aisle.
"In," the guard growled when he came to a halt and opened a cell door. Genitus stepped inside, and the door was shut behind him.
He took a deep vent cycle, and then looked to his side at his new cellmate.
"What the hell are you?" asked the stranger, eyeing him through a cracked visor, "Some kind of flier?"
"My alt-mode," Genitus snapped, "is an F-15 fighter jet. I'm an engineer."
"Oh, great," his cellmate groaned, "You're one of those. "
Genitus bit his tongue on a retort, seething. "How'd you get captured?" he asked instead.
"I was stationed in K'th Kinsere when it fell," the big green mech, maybe a tank, grumbled. "They took all of us. You?'"
"Shot down during an ambush," Genitus explained, lifting up one of his broken wings to illustrate his words. "My unit retreated without me."
"Must not be a very good engineer," he commented dryly.
"Must not," Genitus concurred, in a way that suggested he meant something more along the lines of 'I want to engineer your demise.' "Have you been here long?"
"Long enough."
Genitus set his mouth in a line and turned away. The conversation was apparently over. He crept instead toward the edge of the cell, leaning against the bars to peer outward and down the corridor. He could see perhaps five or six other cells from this angle, a few with arms reaching out, others he could not see within. The floor of the hall was soaked with dried energon, thick and dark pink. He sat back.
No one ever got out of Grindcore, but just because no one ever had did not mean no one ever would. He wasn't ready to give up yet. Not until they pried his spark from his chest.
He spent the next few hours inspecting every crevice and weld line of his cell for weak points, counting passes by the guards and listening for familiar voices in the screams. Something. Anything. He was picking at a weakly riveted panel when he heard the clatter of a cart down the hall.
"What's that?" he hissed, spinning about in alarm.
"They do feed us," his cellmate said. "Not often, but that's the fuel cart."
Genitus pressed his back flat against the wall as he waited, tense and flighty, until the guard pushing the fuel cart passed by. Without looking, he tossed two cubes into their cell and two into the cell across from them, without slowing down as he continued down the aisle.
Genitus took a hesitant step toward the cube closest to him, and then leapt back when his cellmate dove forward and grabbed both, huddling back in the corner with them, watching Genitus with feral optics.
"You can't be serious," Genitus snapped, flaring his wings. "Give me my share."
"No," the other mech snarled warningly.
"Give me my share!" Genitus repeated.
"Make me!"
Genitus waited only a moment more before he threw himself at his enemy, scrabbling against the ground over two cubes of energon like rabid turbofoxes. Genitus dug his fingers under a shoulder panel and pulled until it came loose, but the other mech jammed an elbow into his gut, shattering his windshield. Genitus went stumbling backward, gripping at broken glass with a gasp. He retreated to the other corner at a limp, watching his cellmate finish off both cubes by himself.
Genitus was certain that he wouldn't be able to recharge in a place like this, but somehow he did, curled against himself on the floor as the screaming faded into background noise and finally let him rest.
When he woke it was to metallic sounds, clinking and clanking. By the time he was lucid enough to comprehend what was happening, a guard was opening his cell door. Genitus leapt to his feet as if from a springboard, flattening himself against the wall as a second guard with a tazer rod stepped inside the threshold. It was as if all the world had boiled to a pinprick, tinted black and white and red, all his plating flared and vents working over time as he prepared for flight or fight.
The guard jabbed the rod into his sleeping cellmate.
For a moment Genitus didn't understand what had happened or why the guard didn't seem interested in him at all, but his cellmate started screaming. Once he became aware of what was happening, the guard looming over him, his scream changed from one of startled pain to an animalistic cry of fear, feral and unreal. Genitus wanted to shut down his audials and forget that otherworldly shrieking, but the guard reached down to grab his terrified cellmate and Genitus threw himself on him, clawing at plating with his bare servos.
The guard reared back, grabbing for him, but Genitus was yelling, a wild animal now too, trapped in a cage and ready to fight to the death. He bit down on the guard's neck struts, and when the guard finally slammed him back first into the wall and knocked him off, Genitus managed to take a shoulder pauldron with him. He hit the ground and saw stars, optics resetting. Genitus struggled back to his elbows, energon smeared across his face and oozing out through his open cheeks, wild-eyed and trembling.
The guard dragged his cellmate away, out the door and down the hall, gone forever. Genitus had never learned his name.
"Lucky day for you, Autobrat," the guard holding the door open chuckled. "You're moving cells. Stand up."
Genitus pushed himself up and to his pedes, wobbling, tired, hungry, hurt. The guard waved him out and he stepped hesitantly forward once, twice, and then followed the guard down the hall the opposite way that his cellmate had been dragged. He was led down turns in the corridors and to a darker hall. The guard stopped at a cell. He unlocked the door. He opened it and gestured within.
Genitus stared at him for a moment, and then stepped inside. The door shut behind him. The guard walked away.
"Welcome to my humble abode," said a grimly sardonic voice, and Genitus turned to see an oversized microscope sitting in the corner, a mech sitting in his alt-mode. "By all means, make yourself at home. Have some tea."
Genitus stared at him for a moment, chest still heaving, brain processing slowly, before he spoke. "Any earl grey?" he asked finally.
"Oh, obviously, only the freshest energon brew," the stranger answered.
"Did they lock you in your alt-mode?" Genitus asked, his spark sinking in sympathy. What a horrible thing to do in this horrible place.
"Unfortunately. It would be less miserable if I could move in my alt-mode," groaned his cellmate. "How did they get you?"
"Shot down on the front lines," Genitus replied. After a moment he sat down beside him. "Pushed into Decepticon territory and didn't make it back."
"Terrible," the microscope murmured.
"You?"
"Taken prisoner during the fall of K'th Kinsere. I was stationed there for weapons research and development."
"Heh," said Genitus, "I'm an engineer. I've been trying to get into weapons R and D for years."
"Ever developed any designs in your free time?"
"Plenty," Genitus nodded. "But no one looks at my work."
"Terrifically unfair," the other sighed. "Do you have a name, engineer?"
"Genitus," said Genitus. "You?"
"Quark," said Quark. "It's nice to meet you, Genitus, even in a place like this."
"It's nice to meet you too, Quark," Genitus smiled weakly, wiping energon from his chin.