Chapter Text
Knockout heard what Soundwave said, but the words slipped out of his processor like the goo that was flooding across the officer’s frame like a thick, living river of slime. This was what Soundwave really was. This was what Knockout himself would soon become. His pebbled reflection deformed as Soundwave narrowed the molten plastic pools that were his eyes.
“Please stop crying,” he said, hiding his fangs by pressing his maw into a thin straight line. “It’s rather embarrassing.”
Knockout blinked, squeezing his optics hard to soothe the burn igniting under the glass.
“I’m not crying, I’m… oh, Primus…” He rubbed a hand against his cheek, and found that he’d pulled away some of his own face. Grey metal to grey ooze, that dripped between his fingers to join the rest of his body as it started to dissolve right from under him.
“You’re still making this a lot more difficult than it needs to be, for both of us,” someone scolded at the back of his mind, just as it liquified and leaked out from his eyes. Knockout couldn’t feel anything other than static prickling across his nerve nodes, the network tangled in a mess in the molten mass. No pain at all, as his armour slowly sloughed off to join his protoform on the ground, but that only made watching it all the worse. His body, the one he’d spent millenias painstakingly upgrading, maintaining, buffing, shining, keeping it alive with not a single scratch to mark its age, was now being reduced to sludge. If he’d felt pain, at least he’d know that he was really dying. But he didn’t, and he was faced by the horrifying prospect that this would be his body from now on, this would be his life, and with his hands fused to the rest of him he would find no mercy from him. Nothing that could stab out his spark.
Where was his spark in all of this? He could feel it; a dull and rough throb in his core, the only solid thing he still possessed. It was keening- or maybe that was just himself. He couldn’t really tell anymore. He could feel the wall behind him, as if he was diffusing into it, knowing it was the only thing keeping his line of sight above the floor.
Soundwave was standing now, towering over him, his expression still as blank as if he’d never even removed his mask. “The weaker the state of your spark, the weaker your symbiote’s molecular structure becomes,” he told the medic, like a sire telling his child to not touch a hot forge. “We advise that you pull yourself together before you melt completely.”
Pull himself together. Literally. Knockout might have laughed if he knew where his vocaliser was. But what else was there to do, but to listen to the one who apparently got him in this situation in the first place? So he tried. He gulped down his molten glossa and tried to calm down, to bolster his spark- assuming it hadn’t been dissolved with the rest of him-, to spit and kick and swear at the voice in his head. He closed his optics, or maybe the lids had just melted into each other, and tried to make himself whole again. He’d spent enough of every day looking at himself, admiring his own finish, his perfectly sculpted and perfectly balanced frame, that he could recall every detail of it from memory. He did so desperately, pining for the body he had taken for granted and just accepted as a gift from the forge that was Primus’ spark. He begged for it back. He cried for it. His spark was solid ice in the pit of that body he was trying to claw back.
Knockout opened his optics after the eternity passed him by, and found himself standing. As if he’d been moulded back into the shape he should have been, or like he had never lost it at all. He stared down at his hands, stretching his claws, expecting them to burst out into tendrils of slime again. Soundwave still towered before him, and he grunted at the sight of his recovered body.
“Better.”
Knockout gulped, dragging his glossa around his mouth in awe of it not dribbling down his chin anymore. Coolant covered him in a thick sheet, like thickly clumped paint that refused to dry, and the dampness made the electrical currents in his nodes all the more powerful. Like lightning coursing through him and surging to his spark.
“Please don’t do that again,” the voice asked, the echo in his processor sounding as exhausted as he felt. “I don’t like being on the floor any more than you do.”
Once again, Knockout ignored it. He’d rather talk to someone, or something, he could actually see. Even if he didn’t want to see him.
Forcing himself to face Soundwave, trying not to flinch from that blank white glare, Knockout swallowed his fear to leave behind the only other thing he felt: anger.
“You still haven’t said what the Pit a ‘klyntar’ is,” he growled, “or… o-or why the frag you have one! I’m informing Lord Megatron immedietel-”
His bid towards the door was short lived and futile. Even if he could have somehow broken through the oozing web of black that blocked it, gluing the mechanisms together, Soundwave enforced the helplessness he’d cultivated even further by snapping a tentacle out right in front of Knockout.
The tendril quivered before him, like a tripwire or a garotte, and stuck to the far wall. Knockout had seen the officer’s tentacles before, knowing they were nothing more than integrated data cables, but these were not the same ones that carried terabytes of Decepticon intel from one processor to another. The ribbed purple lights dimly shone through the black coating them, a purple heartbeat strangled out by the void. It was if the tentacles were only a casing for what really lurked within them.
“We would strongly advise against that," Soundwave said, only pulling the tendril back when Knockout looked away from the door, reluctantly following the warning back to its source. The medic saw the black feeler be sucked back into the officer’s chest over a tide of nausea.
“If our Lord believes there is a threat,” Soundwave went on, “he will have it terminated. And your symbiote will not allow that to happen. Now, are you going to let us explain?”
Knockout was still staring at Soundwave’s chest, trying not to be sick only because he feared his spark would come up through his throat. The officer took that as a cue to continue.
“The Klyntar are the species your symbiote is a part of. Their survival is wholly dependant on their host. Once they find one, they devote themselves to keeping it alive, and safe. They are gifts, Knockout. Your symbiote will elevate you to a state of power that you would never know otherwise. In return, it demands respect.”
Knockout curled his lip. “And? What else does it demand ?”
Soundwave paused, baring his denta in a similar scowl. Somehow his mouth didn’t flood with energon from those fangs chewing into it.
“...Flesh,” he answered. “Carbon based. Organic. It is what keeps it docile.”
“Docile…?”
“And controllable,” Soundwave added. “Otherwise it will take you over completely and seek out the flesh itself.”
Take him over. Flesh. Organic. Take him over and force him find it. To… consume it? He’d seen what organics were made out of. Blood. Muscle. Sinew. Gristle and pus. So many disgusting fluids, their skin and their guts swarming with even lower lifeforms. Just one human was a whole colony of filth onto itself.
And now, he was no better than one of them. He was worse . If Soundwave was telling the truth, if the implications of it were what he thought they were...
Knockout didn’t dissolve this time. He just wanted to cry again.
“...Why?” Knockout sucked down a sob, blocking out the gurgle of his infested internals. “Why did you put this…. thing in me?!”
Was it to force someone else to suffer with him? Some kind of awful experiment, like something Shockwave would mastermind? Or maybe it was karma finally coming for its due, forcing him to know what it was like to have someone else rooting around in his body. No induced stasis, no surgical precision, no secrets to uncover or medical goal to work towards. Just a passenger making itself at home, turning his frame into its vessel and his spark into its food.
The parasite made no argument against any of it. It was silent as it too waited for Soundwave to reveal why he had forced them both together. The officer narrowed his eyes again.
“For once, don’t flatter yourself,” he snarled, the harsh med bay lights making the shine of his denta almost blinding. “ You were not the host we had in mind.”
Despite the kind of nightmare he was in, despite having lost his body and being in danger of losing his mind along with it, Knockout’s narcissism was still alive and well. He’d never been so insulted in his life!
“I don’t believe this, you… you’ve been carrying an alien parasite this entire time?! And you’re blaming me for getting infected by it?!” Knockout was about to advance on him, but he ended up not needing to. A tendril grabbed him, black and clawed and leeching into his chest as if to seize his spark, and it pulled him across the room into Soundwave’s outstretched hand. The talons speared his neck and, for the first time since he woke up, Knockout felt pain. Stinging. The pulse of energon leaving him. He heard himself groan around the grip on his neck.
Soundwave held him off the ground and away from himself, as if he was as disgusted at Knockout as the medic was at himself.
“Do not call it an infection,” Soundwave snarled, the lash of his glossa almost closing the distance between them. “It has bonded with you. Completely integrated into your systems, your spark, into every molecule and atom on your frame. It is you. Otherwise, we’d tear it out of you ourselves.”
He released Knockout, who barely stayed upright as he landed and rubbed at his neck. There were no holes to mark where he’d been stabbed, or where he thought he’d been. The only sign that his throat had been breached was the hoarseness of his vocaliser as he asked;
“What do you mean we? ” It was like Soundwave was dragging him into his vocaliser just like he’d dragged him into this Klyntar nightmare, and it was getting on his fragging nerves more than the pain lingering in them.
“My symbiote and I are a single being,” Soundwave explained, two voices crammed into the single vocaliser. “It speaks to me. Just as yours speaks to you.”
Knockout didn’t want to be reminded of that. But the voice spoke anyway, cold and tired and impatient. Like a parent watching a toddler throw a tantrum.
“How long will you struggle before you realise it’s pointless?” it asked.
For as long as he could, is what Knockout told himself, even though he’d known it was pointless from the start.
It must have known that he knew that, too. It was only asking to remind him that he’d already lost.
Knockout trembled in what little of his frame he still recognised as his own. “It’s a monster.”
Soundwave laughed. That was the only thing Knockout could think to name the choked gurgling that bubbled out between his teeth. “There was always a monster inside of you, Knockout. What difference does one more make?”
Then his face shifted, the whites flowing aside as if he was looking elsewhere. Then the black surface rippled as he grumbled, and turned to the door in a single fluid movement. Another similarly fluid movement of a tendril snatched his visor up from the table it sat on, reattaching it to his face.
“Lord Megatron has summoned Soundwave. We will be watching you.” The jagged black bars over the exit melted, dripping down onto the floor and crawling along it towards him, rejoining the oily mass that was Soundwave in truth.
“Listen to your symbiote, Knockout,” he growled over his shoulder, “and do not disappoint us.”
The door swallowed him. And when it closed, devoid of any barrier, Knockout still felt trapped behind it. He would never be alone again. The symbiote was eager to not let him forget that as it rushed in his audios, slightly thicker than the ambient flow of energon he was used to.
“I suppose we should get to know each other, then.”
Knockout sighed, not realising he’d been holding his vents closed for so long, and allowed himself to collapse against the wall again. Fusing into the infrastructure around him was the least of his worries. “What have you done to me…?”
“What I’ve been told to do,” the parasite answered innocently, not fooling its host for a klick. “ I’ve improved you. As much as I can.”
Improved . Was it joking? Or did it not even know the extent of the damage it had done to Knockout’s body? He looked at his hand again, remembered it forming that awful trail of slime as his paint, the red he’d so painstakingly applied when he came to Earth, flaked away and became nothing more than splotches of rust on his molten silver limbs.
He changed his mind. He didn’t even want to know what had to be done to his internals to make him into this creature that the symbiote thought was an improvement. He forced himself not to think about it. Not to get upset again. He’d just be a puddle on the floor, and he might not have been able to salvage himself a second time.
So he stayed angry. He could work with angry.
“When did you… when did this happen?” he hissed. “How long have you been in me for?”
“Not long,” it replied, as if it was supposed to.make him feel better. “I… I remember being in someone else before. Someone close to Soundwave. I didn’t bond with him. He only contained me, until I found you.”
Knockout only had to think about that for a nanoklick before the answer was handed to him. He saw darkness, felt a warmth closeness as he was swaddled in it. The thrum of a spark just beneath him, through a barrier of steel. Then the dark was chased away, harsh light stabbing through the shroud and when it cleared he saw…
Himself.
Knockout’s own face looking down at the symbiote, before he pulled out the detonator charge it was wrapped around.
“Laserbeak…”
It had happened just a cycle ago, after he’d removed the bomb from the drone. So Laserbeak must have been carrying the parasite, and when he’d taken the bomb out he had removed the symbiote as well. And when the bomb was about to detonate… it went to the only safe place it could find.
It escaped the fire, only to fall into a frying pan.Knockout never thought he’d be using that phrase twice in one cycle.
In theory, it could have infected anyone. Anyone who got too close to Laserbeak. Like an Autobot.
If it had been an Autobot instead… well, Knockout wouldn’t have cared who it was. As long as it wasn’t him.
But it wasn’t the symbiote’s fault that it had jumped ship, just to avoid being incinerated. Knockout had seen parasitic infections before, the aftermath of virus outbreaks, more of them than he’d care to remember. Their only priority was to survive, too weak to do so on their own. Very few ever discriminated with their hosts. Even fewer were sentient enough to feel remorse.
And was that remorse that the symbiote felt? Remorse throbbing around Knockout’s brain, dousing it like gasoline? He didn’t think it was from himself. Remorse was one of those things that if he allowed himself to indulge in it, it would have quickly driven him insane.
“...Do you have a name?” he asked. A name would tell him just how sentient it really was.
“No,” the symbiote said. “I haven’t found one yet . How did you get your name?”
Knockout blinked in confusion. Maybe it hadn’t breached his processor as much as he’d feared. “My… my sire gave me it.”
“Sire?”
“My father,” he explained, hiding a scowl. “I suppose… Soundwave's symbiote would be yours.”
“I see…” It trailed off into silence. Knockout didn’t like the silence. Not anymore.
“I’m the only one who can hear you, aren’t I?” he asked.
“The only host who can. I can also talk to my... father , to an extent.”
“What does it say? Soundwave’s symbiote?” Knockout pressed. “Does it have a name?” If he knew more about it, about what Soundwave truly was, he could work towards fixing himself.
The symbiote hesitated; Knockout could hear it congealing. “It calls itself Savage. And it says that you are... unworthy.”
Knockout bristled, but didn’t flinch away from the insult. “How long has Soundwave had it for?”
“A very long time.”
“And how did he get it?”
The symbiote favored silence for a long moment before it eventually spoke. “I don’t think he would want me to tell you.”
Knockout frowned. Of course Soundwave would have put up some kind of guard to stop his secrets spilling out like his guts. But the symbiote didn’t have to speak to be understood. He’d seen that in how it described its journey from Laserbeak to him.
“Then don’t tell me,” Knockout said. “Show me.”
Though he’d been hoping it would, he was surprised when it actually obliged.