#westwind

Ok. This is Westwind. It is, in fact, Westwinding time. Westwind Origins specifically, won’t go much past his early days

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Westwind, originally designated simply as Unit W-05 of the Western Wing Air Squadron, was cold constructed as a well oiled machine for calculated destruction. He was also cold constructed bored. He stood with his shoulders slanted and weight skewed and relaxed to one side in a line of faces identical to his own, except where theirs ranged towards contemplative, calculating, confused, or complacent in the lessons that the MTOs were shoved through, his was bored. Bored, bored, bored— the prospect of all of it was remarkably, horrendously understimulating. From lesson to lesson, even the beginnings of hand to hand combat were, ironically, mechanical. Sanitized. Uninteresting, unsatisfying. Their commanders didn’t want their manufactured soldiers beaten in before they could do the same to any Autobots after all. W-05 tilted his head, bored, at projections on a screen, and slid his gaze slowly to W-11’s identical face.

Maybe it was time for something a bit more organic.

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“What the frag is wrong with you?!” W-11’s high voice shrieks, audial piercing, as they stumble back from the blow to their olfactory. Their voice should’ve been practically the same as his own— it wasn’t, turned stuffed and nasal as bright energon dripped down their faceplates from the crumpled mess of their nose. He watched it drip slowly down off their chin to the floor, a steady patter, and flexed his digits to look down at them. The leading joints between the primary makeup of his servo and each clawed digit were smeared with energon, but barely dented. W-11 bristled at him, rotors clattering, squaring their shoulders that looked just like his— but where they snarled, he smiled, all sharp teeth.

When he hit them again, the force of the impact was hard enough to crumple his own plating, and the shriek that tore out of them paired with the rattling pain up his construct-dull sensor net lit up bright endings in his made-cheap processor that he didn’t even know he had. He swings again, crushing more thick double layer armor under vicious force, delighting in the bright ringing chime of metal on crumpled metal.

When they ripped at the cabling of his wrists to get him off them, he just cackled, delighted and bright.

///

“What the frag is wrong with you?!” His foreman screams in his face in the aftermath, pacing wildly and gesturing wilder. Funny, he’s heard that one before— he’s also heard that W-11 was a lost cause, unsalvageable. They’ll join a pile of spare parts meant to fix the Western Wing after their first actual battle. The thought only strikes mild amusement— he’s sure he would’ve preferred they lived, just so he could see if they flinched whenever he raised a hand near them afterwards. He sits bored and in cuffs in front of a large group of arguing commanders and officers rallying to decide what they were going to do with the ‘clearly defective’ MTO in front of them. His battle processor ticks away sluggishly, cataloguing, bored in a situation where everyone is talking about his decommissioning without talking to him about it.

It’s come up with 14 different ways he could kill his way out of his room when they turn to him, and tell him that he, in fact, is not being decommissioned, but will instead become the lead of the Western Wing. He cocks a brow, fully aware W-01 would be pissed beyond compare, and doesn’t question it with anything but a blasé smirk. They begrudgingly inform him anyways—as they take him out of the cuffs and cautiously ward him at a distance back to the Western Wing’s barracks as though he were a bomb rigged to explode— that his ‘vicious mindset’ and ‘clearly high aptitude for combat’ would be a massive attribute to the Cause in the long run, though it was said with an edge of ‘as long as you stay in line.’

Funny. He was born on a factory line. Should be no problem.

He bites down the sarcastic comment about his existence being against the Cause’s core— Towards Peace was something he only snagged out of the databases after he hacked into them, bored— and smiles wide and sharp toothed, not missing the way his foreman twitches backwards and away, optics flaring bright in alarm. “Of course. Nothing but the best from me…. from now on.”

The stares he gets from all 22 other remaining W units as he enters the barracks range from terrified, to cautious, to offput, to enraged. Not a single one of their faces look like his, in that moment— especially not with his still-split upper lip, a fresh weld that pulls and threatens to break again as he saunters by. The others shift back when he does. He’d be delighted to give them a demonstration on how well that worked for W-11.

He doesn’t. He just waves, cheerily, with an amused greeting, and sways his merry way to his berth.

The unit who recharges in the bunk above him murmured a fearful request to a further away unit to charge with them, that night, just to get away. He smiled, and carved a single line into the underneath of the slab above him with the shriek of a claw into metal.

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On the day of his Squadron’s very first battle, the wind blew viciously to the west. It nearly stung his plating, throwing up debris from endless wreckage as it did— flying into it in alt mode felt distinctly unsafe. It was delightful— it paled in comparison to the fight that ensued. He did as commanded, leading his fleet as air support to a raging battle below, remaining high in the air. He did as commanded, watching carnage he ensued far from a distance, progressively more bored. He did as commanded, until one of his units was clumsy in an attempted dodge of a massive, piercing shot from below— and he watched out of his rear optical feed as they fell in pieces to the ground below. There was no sense of loss. There was this itch of an excuse, though.

Ignoring the shouts of his unit, he turned his nose down, cut his rotors, and he fell too.

The Autobot’s terrified shout as he twisted into root mode alone was enough to make it worth it. He deflected each comm that pinged against his network, firing back a quick designation of W-01 as the fleet head until he returned to the skies, and then detached one of his rotors and grinned wide and delighted as the Autobot tried to flip them over. It was almost too easy, ripping into them with sharp claws and a sharper blade— their own blaster singed his plating and their fists punched dents into his armor, and it sang with the rending shriek of him peeling off a section of their facial plating like a discordant version of one of the symphonies he had heard some of his unit listening to in supposed secret, in the dead of night. The Autobot shouts wildly for help, futile in the face of him weaving his fingers into their throat cabling and ripping— and then he severs the main cables of their stabilizers, and leaves them to bleed out puddles of bright blue upon the grimy ground.

A shot singes violently by his helm, missing by a hair, and he tips his helm slowly. The next shot that fires off as he turns hits— and the agony of it rings in jittering waves through his sensory net. He twists his sword out of the offlining Autobot, energon flecking, and sways into the pain like a tangible dance partner with a grin. Expressions twist from disgruntled to horrified, and then to agonized when he flings himself at the next Autobot, and the next, laughing. It feels like living, for the first time since he had one of his own unit’s internals sliding slippery-hot through the gaps between his digits . It is nothing but vicious base sensation— it is honest, lacking sanitization. This is the realest something as artificial as him has ever felt, and he grins manically wide as he skewers another Autobot through the shoulder and to a mostly-fallen wall.

“Who the— who—“ they stutter, coughing up purged energon and scrabbling to fight back, and he considers. Considers the unit he has no love for, the air high above where missile fire still rains down from, the sharp veering breeze cut through by his rotors, his rotors that cut through metal with a shriek like the wind, and he answers a different answer to that question than ever before.

“Hey, sweetspark. I’m Westwind.”

It’s an introduction to a corpse— their spark chamber feels like fireworks in his palm when he crushes it in his claws.

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When he gets back, he is splattered with filtered energon, spiced on his tongue, and earns both a reprimand and a commendation from downturned mouths that stare at him as if in shock .

He lost count of the sparks that guttered due to his intervention, so in the night, alone, instead of adding tallies to the underside of a bunk, he just carves a newfound designation.

Westwind.

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Westwind~🪶

Las Vegas Blvd S, April 25, 1974

The West  Wind

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