#aoh49

As it is, there isn’t a thought in your head except for ‘run.’ There isn’t a sound in your ears beyond your own ragged, desperate gasps for breath and the tinnitus screaming to a staggering crescendo between them. Everything else is muffled, deemed unimportant by the rest of your biological functions that are urging you to focus on nothing except for keeping one foot flying out ahead of the other.

A muddled cacophony of noise is buzzing against your eardrums like furious wasps. Voices, indiscernible in your confusion, all clamouring over each other. You think one of them must be Miko’s, high and startled, but with her skinny wrist still trapped in your vice-like grip, she has no choice but to hurtle along in your footsteps.

You haven’t even noticed that she’s trying to put up a feeble resistance, scuffing her boots in the dust in an attempt to slow you down. But her effort pales beneath the strength you’ve been lent by your own adrenaline.

In your other hand, you’re towing Rafael behind you like a very disheartened kite, his sneakers flying over the ground as his vastly shorter legs pump furiously just to stay upright.

And finally, from the corner of your eye, you can see Jack’s mop of jet-black hair bobbing along on your right flank, barely keeping pace. His gaze is fixed forwards, jaw set nervously as you charge hell-for-leather at the entrance to the tunnel you’d come in by.

What had once seemed so reminiscent of a hungry, gaping maw stretched open to swallow you whole is now a shining beacon of hope, a pathway to salvation, even if that salvation leads to a crotchety old farmer on the other end of a shotgun.

Deep in the back of your head, there’s a mantra echoing over and over again, repeating its broken notion as your boots stir up clouds of dust from the cavern floor.

If you can just make it to the tunnel… If you can just clear that corner, it’ll be okay. You only have to keep going.

Keep running. Keep running. Running. Run. 

You don’t comprehend, at first, why the air is so suddenly rent asunder by a startling ‘hsssss!’ as of some, immense snake breaking through your muffled hearing and alerting you to a danger you haven’t yet seen.

It’s all the warning you get before a streak of silver screams over your head.

Eyes bulging, you sweep your gaze up just in time to spot the slender object as it hurtles towards the tunnel ahead, a fire blazing hotly under its tail.

You’d know the look of that missile anywhere. It’s the same one that had, until mere seconds ago, been sitting on the arm of the sleek, silvery giant.

There’s no time to think. There's barely enough to act.

Like a pair of lead weights, your heels suddenly come down on the path hard, burying themselves into the dust to fight back against your forward momentum.

Somewhere far behind you, yet not far enough at all, thunders a voice with enough power at its back to bring a mountain to its knees.

“NO!”

Fuelled by a concoction of privily untapped terror and the most baseline instinct to turn your back on impending doom, you let go of the children’s wrists in favour of whirling towards them instead, while at the same time throwing out an arm to catch Jack around his scrawny waist.

He hits your outstretched limb just as Miko and Rafael crash into your torso with two sickening crunches.

But any indignation they might have voiced about the rough treatment is forgotten the moment you wrench Jack in front of you, throw your arms around the trio and duck your head so violently that your chin knocks against someone’s-

B O O M !

You don’t even get the chance to scream.

As soundly as a slug to your gut, all the air is torn from your lungs in the time it takes to blink an eye. The world around you, above you, below you, and beside you is rocked violently on its axis as the missile makes contact with the wall just inside the tunnel entrance.

Agony punches out your eardrums as you’re launched forwards off your feet.

The explosion sends you crashing to the ground over the children, and a blast of suffocating heat sweeps across your body from toe to skull, singeing the fine hairs on the base of your neck and licking at your bare shoulders. Along with the wave of hot air comes a hailstorm of tiny, hard projectiles, rock that’s been blasted apart by the impact and drums at your body like a thousand stinging insects.

For a split second, you couldn’t say with any confidence whether you’re dead or alive. Then the hot, burning pain on your shoulder registers, and your wonderings are put to rest.

If you’d been any closer, you might’ve…

You think you scream then, though most of the sound beyond your own head is muffled and suppressed, and your vision swims as if you’ve been plunged underwater, making it very hard to keep your eyes open. But somebody certainly shouts, in a low yet booming voice that’s almost loud enough to cut straight above the discordant rumbling of a mine’s structure falling to pieces around you,

“-BRIDGE!” it hollers, “RIGHT NOW, DOC!”

You didn’t catch the preceding words.

Things have started to move, like you’re sitting right above the epicentre of an earthquake, but it’s the bodies squirming below you that coax you from your daze.

“Guh! Sh-… unf!” Sluggish and senseless, you brace your forearms against the ground and use what little strength you still have to shove yourself awkwardly onto your side, rolling your weight off the kids and wrenching your eyes open.

It’s darker than it was. Much darker. Dust chokes the air around you, blotting out the light cast by those strange crystals. It’s sucked into your lungs when you take a shallow breath only to near-enough suffocate on the fine particles of grit that try to come down with it.

Sputtering, you feel your stomach clench. Each hacking cough jolts your diaphragm, but at least the noise of your own struggle grows clearer and clearer as the ringing in your ears begins to recede, leaving an uncomfortable ache between them.

As if in a drunken stupor, you blink one eye first, then the other, squinting through the mire to see that Jack, Miko and Rafael are already helping one another to their feet, their motions blurred surreally, but even as addled as you are, you know that if they’re moving, they’re still alive.

Good.

If there is relief to be found however, it doesn’t last nearly as long as it should, because from out of the gloom, a pair of dazzling lights sear into existence, and a monstrous shape moves through the murk towards the kids like a shark through silt, swelling larger as it nears.

And then, the lights turn, veering sharply to the left and out of your eyes as the hair-raising squeal of rubber tyres brings the silhouette to a halt just beside Miko, flinging up dust and stones in its wake.

You have to blink several times to dispel the negative blots seared in your retinas.  

It’s… a truck. A juggernaut on four, heavy-duty wheels. Painted a shade of familiar… military-green.

A pair of neurons connect in your brain with a ‘zap’ and -“No way,” you croak.

Helplessly, you watch the vehicle’s back door pop open, and as you peer inside to catch the hand that must have pushed it open, your blood freezes solid, like hoarfrost forming along your veins.

Empty.

The truck houses no visible person, no face that might debunk the impossible conclusion you’re beginning to draw. Nothing but leather seats and a dark interior that sits devoid of another human being.

‘Would it reassure you to know that this vehicle is operated remotely?’

You clench your teeth, shrinking away from Optimus’s voice as it rises uninvited in the back of your mind.

The residual heat from the explosion is forgotten entirely to make room for the chill that sweeps up your spine instead.

And yet, with a fearlessness you’ll come to envy, Miko is already leaping through the open door and into the truck proper before twisting about to grab Rafael’s shirt, yanking the boy inside after her. They fall in a tangle of limbs across the back seats just as a rock the size of your fist comes crashing to the ground where they’d stood.

“W-wai-“ Reedy, weak, you can’t be heard over a resounding ‘crack’ that splits the cavern’s atmosphere in two.

Jack though, you soon surmise, had either heard you, or spotted you because he’s suddenly crouched down in front of your face, his pupils shrunk tiny in palpable alarm.

“C’mon! We gotta move!” he urges as he grabs at your arm and heaves your torso off the ground in a way that strains the bruise on your shoulder and leaves you gasping deliriously, “Get up! This whole place is coming down!”

And as if to punctuate his point, another rock, this one larger than your head, slams into the dirt just inches to your left. The suddenness plucks at your red-raw nerves and propels you up onto your feet with a shriek, finding clarity in panic.

“You two! Get in! NOW!” a raucous voice urges, belonging neither to the children, nor to yourself, and originating entirely from the grill of the vast, green truck.

Your tongue sticks fast to your palette. Every muscle in your body solidifies when Jack’s grasp on your forearm goes taut and, to your absolute horror, he begins trying to drag you towards the still open door of the vehicle, his trainers skidding awkwardly over the ground.

He may as well be trying to move a brick wall.

So potent is the ice in your blood and the terror dulling your senses that something deep inside you has weighed up the risk of approaching these titans against the risk of staying in a collapsing mine, and whatever it is finds that you’d rather face the latter.

Better the Devil you know, and all that…

“Jack! Hurry!” Miko urges him from the open door, slapping her palm on the headrest in front of her.

Grunting with effort, he screws up his face and promptly throws his weight backwards, nearly yanking your arm out of its socket.

The sudden jolt is enough to give you a start.

It’s safe to say you aren’t exactly thinking clearly, perhaps that’s why you wrench your arm from Jack’s sweaty palms so viciously, his blunted nails leave long, angry stripes down the length of your skin.

But the scuffs are barely a blip on your radar.

You’re too busy staggering backwards with your eyes fixed blearily on the massive truck, as if it’s a predator poised to pounce on you should you find the nerve to blink. It’s wrong, that truck. You just can’t fathom why the children have jumped inside it so readily, despite the cavern collapsing to ruin all around you.

“Get…” you start, croaking on the first syllable and swallowing dryly to try again, “Get out of there!”

Shaking his head in bewilderment, Jack takes a hurried step towards you.

“Jack.”

A monstrous rumble fills the mine, almost as deep as the reverberations themselves as the walls begin to split and the ceiling bows ever inwards.

“Go with the others, through the Ground bridge. Now.”

Urgent without being loud. Authoritative.

Horribly, awfully familiar…

Without warning, a monumental leg comes sweeping over the truck and lands next to the boy, nearly staggering him when it comes crashing to the ground at his side.

For a split second, you’re convinced that a particularly strange stalactite has fallen from the roof.

Tossing a rapid glance between you and the green truck, Jack shouts to be heard over the cacophony of noise, “But, what about-!?”

“Go.”

The boy’s jaw snaps shut as though he’s been scolded, and he spares you one last look, his mouth little more than a tight, reluctant line. Then at last, he blurts out a sound of frustration and spins on his heel, diving straight into the truck and almost landing squarely on Miko.

The heavy, green door has barely slammed shut behind the soles of his trainers before its tyres start to spin, madly gaining traction and peeling away from you as another half-dozen rocks plummet down to bounce off the metal roof with a series of ‘dings’ and ‘clangs.’

Grit and dust and stone is churned up into an even thicker cloud when the truck hares off across the disintegrating cavern, leaving you to face what’s to come by yourself, without even the children here to display your backbone for.

Paralysed, you stare through your tears after the blood-red lights as they fade away into the vapour, distantly aware that one of your arms is reaching out, whether to call them back or beg to be taken with them, you couldn’t rightly say.

The tunnel behind you that had promised escape is now choked with rock, the first route to fail after the missile’s impact.

And ahead of you stands a titanic leg – two legs, now that you look again - obscuring half of your vision, and you don’t dare raise your head to meet the very gaze you can feel boring into your skull like a drill.

There’s nowhere to run.

There’s nowhere to hide.

You’re out of ideas, options, and hope.

Trapped.

It’s a sickening feeling.

Evidently, the giant isn’t content to wait for you to look up.

The infinite pillars of metal bend outwards like knees, two towers of grey and black metal, interspaced by panels of cobalt blue that gleam too brightly in the darkness.

All around you, the Earth heaves a thunderous groan which is followed closely by another ‘crack!’ that rattles the teeth in your gums.

But through it all, through the roar of a cave-in and the shifting of several thousand tonnes of rock, you can still hear a voice from on high as it speaks to you, enveloping your chest in the force of its timbre.

“Do not be afraid…”

A spectacular idea in theory. In practice however…

For one insane, petrifying moment, you wonder if you’re about to see the face of God.

Stumbling another few steps away, you let out a sudden yelp when the heel of your boot catches on a large rock and you’re sent toppling over onto your backside, catching yourself on your palms and inadvertently looking up.

But it couldn't be God. Because you know that voice, the gentle resonance that hums through you from the tips of your fingers to the soles of your feet, as powerful as it is contrastingly placid, not unlike a tranquil brook that hides the most turbulent, treacherous vortexes under its surface.

Bent in half like the joint of a human’s leg, the metal limb hits the ground just a few feet away from where you fell, yet the shudder that rolls through the earth goes unnoticed. You’re too transfixed by the cerulean lights hovering over you in the darkness, twin stars standing side by side in a silver sky.

Your tongue tears itself from the roof of your mouth like stripped Velcro, and a single breath sneaks in past your quivering lips, filling each lung with just enough air that you can utter one, pivotal word.

“…. Optimus?”

The name leaves you in a strained whisper, but it couldn’t ring more loudly in the space between you and the metallic titan, whose strange, blue lights seem to grow inexplicably brighter at your utterance.

No sooner has the word left your mouth however than your brain immediately and vehemently tries to reject the very idea, deeming it far too absurd to possibly be true. It can’t be true. Optimus is just a disembodied voice who drives a truck, which is far more plausible than… whatever this thing is.

The cavern above you suddenly lets out another furious roar as the crack in the ceiling lances several metres straight across its width.

And still you remain stuck fast, gaping uselessly up into the lights that have you pinned like a wolf pins a lamb by its neck.

Leaden arms tremble and threaten to buckle under your own weight, yet they stay locked in place, even when you give them an unenthusiastic twitch. Belatedly, you start to wonder what’ll kill you first; The cave-in, the robot, or a goddamn heart-attack.

Motion. Too close for comfort.

Your eyes wrench themselves from the silvery face and snap down to a massive object near your left flank...

You almost swallow your tongue when you let out a sharp gasp, realising what it is.

A hand. A hulking, obsidian hand – half obscured by the dust – had been inching towards you, still is in fact. Five segments of welded metal stretch from a solid palm, each almost as long as you are tall. ‘Fingers!’ you realise with an awful lurch in your stomach.

It means to grab you.

That thought alone is enough to unlock each of your limbs, and you lurch away from the reaching appendage, belting out a howl of terror -

Which lasts for all of a second before the giant opens its ‘mouth’ and speaks.

“Y/n.”

It hits you like a punch to the chest, far rougher than the knock you received after taking a tumble from Tom’s back. In an instant, you stop trying to get your legs underneath you, falling completely, deathly still, staring hard at the hand that hovers just in front of you, its fingers outstretched imploringly.

With the simple call of your name, your proclivity for rationalising away the coincidences flies straight out of the proverbial window.

There’s no pretending anymore. You’ve heard your name enough times now, spoken in that deep, dulcet voice that you doubt you’ll ever scrub it out of your head.

And then, as if it couldn’t get any worse….

“It’s me.”

The robot’s mouth moulds eerily around the words in its borrowed voice. Two ‘eyes’ like dazzling headlights remain adhered to you, azure burning so brightly through the gloom that they’re growing ever more difficult to look at, yet to turn away feels so much like presenting your spine to a loaded gun.

Your world tilts sideways as something in your brain is thrown off-kilter. A faint spell.

Thankfully, it only lasts for a second before your head snaps upright again and your surroundings find their anchor once more.

Perhaps, you think, it would have been better if you had fainted.

“Forgive me,” the robot continues, hushed but quick and orotund, “I am afraid that explanations will have to wait.”

He – ‘It, it, it,’ you chant – doesn’t give you another second to catch your breath.

In the next blink, the hands surge forwards. One cascades past you at breakneck speed, curving behind your back to keep you from retreating whereas the other moves to cover you like a suffocating roof.

You don’t see the stalactite crash into its knuckles just in the nick of time, glancing harmlessly off the metal instead of your own head.

“No, no! NO!” you bleat, maddened with terror, scrabbling at the ground to drag yourself backwards, but there’s a hand hitting your spine before you can make it a couple of feet, slipping easily under your backside and scooping you off the ground whilst its twin closes in on top of you.

A memory springs up, jarring and unbidden, of the cattle you put through the crush a few days ago, their bulging eyes and helpless lows, how frantically they fought against the metal keeping their heaving heads pinned so Terry could vaccinate them.

They looked scared to death.

You wish you never left that fateful day with your tail between your legs, cowed out by a family who were better off seeing the back of you than they were to live around all of your failures and inertia.

One last broken howl shakes out of your chest as the appendages come together, sealing you in a dark, cramped space between a pair of solid palms.

You just hope that when death comes, it'll be over so quickly, you don't even realise it's happening. 

-------------------------------

Safety.

Optimus’s EM field sings with that one, crucial note, pulsing outwards in steady beats as it tries in vain to seek out and soothe your own.

He can feel you struggling, limbs fluttering against the insides of his palms as of some small avian creature beating its wings to try and take flight, and his spark creaks mournfully at the understanding that his servos are the cage you’re trying so desperately to escape.  

And yet in spite of his contrition, a wave of unabashed relief still floods the Prime’s circuitry like a balm to overheated plating, and something gentle clicks into place the very moment he has you secured in his hold, something that’s been niggling at his protocols since the night he found you alone on the road into Jasper.

If he had even a nano-second to spare, he might be inclined to selfishly savour the solace of having you close after almost losing you to Starscream’s malice.

The seeker fled before his missile even impacted the tunnel walls, leaping into a seamless transformation and vanishing with the blast of a jet engine, all while the Autobots were distracted by the sudden and horrifying sight of death barrelling towards their charges.

… Optimus hopes the Con realises how lucky he is to have turned tail rather than stick around to see the destruction unfurl. Prime isn’t sure he could have convinced Bulkhead not to rip the spark from Starscream’s chest if the seeker hadn’t removed himself from the equation in such a timely manner.

Primus, Optimus isn’t entirely sure he could have convinced himself either.

But even with Starscream gone, even with all of his focus honing in on you and the children, Optimus still hadn’t been fast enough, nor strong enough to stop harm from befalling you. Despite what his fellow Autobots and the children might think, he isn't omnipotent. He's lost far too many good mechs to ever consider calling himself as such. 

Primes shouldn’t dwell… but this latest failing will haunt him, of that he has no doubt.

He will not soon forget, however, the sight of you turning and shielding the children with your own body at the last possible moment before impact. He makes a note to thank you for that just as soon as he gets you out of here. But for as grateful and proud as he is, he only wishes you didn't have to be in that position at all. He should have been the one bearing the brunt of that explosion. Not you. Never you. 

He can almost hear Ratchet now, scolding him for trying to be a martyr. 

However, Optimus doesn’t have the luxury of penitence, certainly not now, when he has yet to ensure your safety in full.

He’s only traded one danger for another, but even without a Decepticon looming over you, you’re not much safer now than you were when Starscream’s weapon was drawn on you.

So long as you remain in this collapsing mine, your life still hangs in the balance.

And he will not have that.

Sending a wordless, apologetic thrum through the airwaves, Optimus heaves himself to his feet and whirls about, hurtling right into a steady charge across the cavern, following Bulkhead’s quickly fading tyre tracks.

Ahead of him, almost invisible through the tumbling ceiling, shines a vast, verdant swirl of familiar light.

Thank Primus the Wrecker had thought to call in a Ground bridge so hastily. He and the children are long-gone, safe on the other side where they should have been all this time. 

Now, Optimus just has to do the same.

Apertures narrowed to pinpricks, mouth set firmly behind his battle-mask, he launches his actuators into ferocious overdrive and storms towards the Ground Bridge, tucking his servos low against his chassis to further shield his precious cargo.

All of a sudden, a voice crackles to life in his audial. Ratchet’s.

“Optimu-!” But whatever his old friend might have said is cut promptly off with a squeal of static when a sizeable boulder strikes the Prime on his finial, knocking his head sharply to one side.

He shakes off the impact seamlessly, pushing his frame to the limit and never once letting his stride falter. He can hear the cavern swallowing itself behind him, thousands of tonnes of rock plummeting to the ground just where his pedes had last trodden, chasing him across what remains of the space and closing in fast.

Lower and lower, he has to duck as his shoulders are buffeted by the weight of an entire mountain hellbent on making him yield.

The Ground bridge’s light envelopes him like an outstretched hand as he hurdles a collapsed stalactite and reaches the edge of that empyreal glow. He can’t take his optics off it, not even when something whallops him on the back of his neck struts with the force of a thunderclap, not even when his legs buckle and his knees start to dip, and the tiny being in his palms lets out a muffled scream.

Out of time, straddling the precarious ledge between salvation and destruction, Optimus calls upon every vestige of strength he has left in his motors and funnels all power to his legs for one final, critical push.

With a tremendous kick, he hurls himself forwards through the bridge, twisting in the air as he flies over the threshold of the portal. For just a moment, he’s floating on his back, optics wide open to watch the writhing colours dance and spark over his head.

Then, not a moment too soon, the ceiling of light is replaced by a ceiling of familiar, rust-red rock.

When Optimus hits the ground, he hits it hard, nearly jarring his tanks up into his spark-chamber from the colossal force of the collision. Metal screams shrilly over concrete as he slides across the base’s floor for several metres on his back, scraping up his paint and leaving dark scuffs along the ground in his wake.

Yet throughout it all, by the will of Primus or his own self-regulated strength, Optimus’s hands remain steady, neither flexing closed not springing open, rigid and unmoving around your body in a way he prays will cushion you from the worst of the impact.

And finally, everything - the noise, the peril, the spark-stopping alarm he’s been warding off since the start of this whole, horrible affair – it all comes skidding to an abrupt halt when he does.

The momentum of his leap wears off at last, and leaves the mighty Prime laying supine in the middle of the Autobot base, blinking in stunned silence at the fluorescent lights hanging far overhead and listening to the wheels on his pedes spin slower and slower until they come to a stop.

There’s blessed movement in his servos, minute and delicate, and even with the ache in his shoulder struts and the frantic roar of his spark, he can’t resist taking a moment to twitch his thumb inwards with an infinite gentleness, eager to reassure himself of the presence of the human held inside.

Even when he registers the very clear jolt of you pulling away from his encroaching appendage, his relief doesn't waver.

He’s got you.

Of course, as it is so often wont to do, Optimus’s brief second of respite doesn’t last for very long at all.