#Con Hubcap is different yet similar to SG Hubcap | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

limited-practice · 4 years

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Decepticon Hubcap

I’ll write this out as a proper fic at some point, but here's a Braindump of initial thoughts about Hubcap thinking about defecting to the Decepticons.

He’s got little love left for the Autobots now. They either forget he exists, are content to see him suffer when he tries to do the right thing, straight up want to kill him, or go out of their way to do favours for the person who tried to kill him. He’s so tired of them. He’s so tired of so much. He’s tired and sad and enraged and is burning silently and it’s all going to be too much to contain one day.

Imagine him as a weapon that no-one sees coming. Imagine him with a purple badge integrated into his dark yellow chest. A symbol that’s integrated, not stamped on. Imagine him with a somewhat jaded and uncertain but refreshingly confident look upon his face as he excels at what he does.

Over 1000 words on how Hubcap could begin his slide into the Decepticon camp are below the cut.

The correct timeline sets Sins of the Wreckers post war, but for this AU let’s pretend the war is still raging and everyone's still alive.

Let’s also pretend that Hubcap survived Impactor’s shot and his long fall into darkness. Let’s pretend his self-repair protocols finally activated after his life support systems had worked themselves into near exhaustion to keep him alive and finally stablised him. Let’s pretend he spent two months immobile on the ground and in the dark, and another eight months dragging himself back online one component at a time.

Eight months. On the ground. In the dark and alone and in pain.

Again.

His eyes are the last things to flicker back online.

He closes them again immediately. There is nothing and no-one he wants to see. He has nothing and he has no-one. No-one came to look for him. No-one did anything. If he stays where he is then the world will continue working and everyone will continue living and things will go on as normal.

Normal.

This is his normal now.

He cracks his eyes back open.

They glow a dark and tainted blue. They’re a colour that by all rights should not exist but they do. They do.

By all rights he should not exist.

But he does.

He should have died twice over now but he hasn’t. Despite the Autobots’ best efforts to kill him, he’s defied them. He survives. He continues to survive.

And isn’t that something.

He crawls and stumbles and sobs his way back out into the world.

He should return to a steady job as an intelligence analyst or a communications officer.

He should return to a safe job that he could do with his scarred eyes closed.

He should go back to the Autobots and help them. He should tell them the truth of what he did and what the others did to him. That would be the right thing to do. He’ll accept a lengthy prison sentence willingly, because that would be fair. It’s what he deserves.

But the others would never think like that.

They’d never sacrifice themselves like that.

But they will sacrifice others.

They’ll continue to sacrifice little robots in dark spaces where no-one can see them die because that’s the easy thing to do. That’s the safe thing to do and is the right thing to do.

…

He goes back to them.

He’s not sure what else to do. Something internal has shifted in a fundamental way, but he doesn’t know how to put it back in place.

He’s not sure he wants to.

He accepts everyone’s exclamations of exaggerated delight upon seeing him alive and well with a hollow smile and a modest dip of the head. He speaks fewer coherent sentences than usual. He nods and agrees that yes, he’s very glad he’s back and no, he didn’t see who shot him up on the walkway. It was dark and he was busy talking with Prowl and-

Prowl.

His smile dissolves.

He hasn’t seen Prowl since the walkway. He hasn’t received a message or been accosted at night or been dragged off to prison. He’s not sure why Prowl isn’t punishing him.

But.

But maybe this is his punishment.

The waiting. The waiting and the acute anticipation that something is about to drop and he’s going to fall again.

It’s horrible.

No-one notices his suffering.

No-one cares.

No-one’s ever cared.

His (fake) friends and (pretend) colleagues indulge him with fewer and fewer minutes of their company as the days drag into weeks and the weeks seep into months.

He is raging.

He is scared and raging and so absolutely sick of being scared that he’s reaching his saturation level quickly.

He burns silently and fills up and up and up and up and

He tips over the limit of his capacity for mental torment at 2.47pm one afternoon.

He trips the building’s alarm frequencies without meaning to, and they scream and scream and scream out loud for him.

A cacophony of sounds blare and overlap with each other and some people wince and cover their ears and some sigh and look around and some run and some duck for cover and some yell and point and scream and some draw weapons and everyone reacts and the alarms scream and scream and scream.

He sits behind his desk not moving. He sits with eyes closed and with a damp face and with one clenched fist and he stays silent and immobile in the whirling center of it all.

No-one cares.

They never have.

The next day he comes into work as usual.

There’s a big commotion going on. A Decepticon was caught trying to take advantage of the malfunctioning electronic defences and had tried to break into their facility.

This Decepticon must be stupid or desperate or both to try and infiltrate this building when it’s fully staffed.

He finds that he cares about this.

He hears that the Con has been taken to a secure room in the basement.

He hears things on a frequency that hasn’t been discovered yet.

He hears more things on frequencies he helped re-name as impenetrable.

He hears someone call his name.

His spark pulses and he ignores them.

He ignores their calls for the rest of the day.

And it’s not because he’s scared.

Near the end of the day someone is sent in to tell him that the Decepticon they caught has been asking for him. They are visibly unnerved.

He already knew this.

It’s such a lot of effort to pretend to be even mildly surprised, but he does it. He’s good at pretending to be who others feel comfortable with him being.

His colleague hesitates. The Con won’t give us anything until they’ve met with you, they say. All the Con says is that they want to meet with you, so. Will you come down? We can guarantee your safety.

He laughs loudly. His laugh is hollow and off balance and lasts longer than any normal laugh has any right to. He takes an uncomfortable degree of satisfaction from the look on his colleague’s face.

Tell them to wait, he says.

His colleague’s eyes widen. But-

You heard me.

His voice escapes in a mechanical hiss.

We’re not going anywhere.

He closes his eyes and offlines his hearing and takes up the thread of the mystery frequency again.

His spark pulses harder and hotter than it has for a very long time.

Someone knows who he is. Someone considers him important. Someone thinks he’s worth seeking out. Someone thinks he’s worth paying the price of undergoing the Autobots’ ‘interrogation’ procedures.

He should see them immediately, and put an end to whatever is going on down there.

But.

But they’re not dead. They’re surviving.

He’s survived so much worse, and whatever they're going through can’t possibly be compared to what he’s endured and so that means they can wait. They’ll be fine and they can wait, and it’s a viscous glob of something sweet and poisonous that slides through his lines when he reminds himself that it isn’t him this time.

He should jump to attention. He should work hard and fast to please those in charge and prove himself and do the Right Thing.

But the problem is he’s done these things before. They’re the only things he’s ever done, and look where they’ve taken him.

Look at what they’ve made him become.

So he’ll wait.

It’s nice to be wanted, and he deserves to bask in it for a little while longer.

He’ll wait, and then he’ll see his new Decepticon friend. Because they must be a friend to him. They’ve noticed him and asked for him specifically. They’re enduring who knows what at the hands of the noble Autobots and they’re asking for him and only him.

He should put them out of their misery. He should rush down and put an end to it.

He should do so many things.

The ghost frequency curls around his circuits and whispers to him. It strokes him and sinks into him and he allows it to become absorbed.

And then he vents it.

He expels it and destroys it.

He will never be taken advantage of ever again.

He’s had to wait so long for so little, so it’s only fair that others take their turn waiting as well, right?

Right.

He’ll wait a little while longer.

And then he’ll speak with the Decepticon and see what they have to say.

He hopes it’s something interesting.

He hopes it’s something promising.

He’s tired of waiting for something positive to happen to him, so now he’s going to have to take it for himself.

He’s been left with no choice. Not really.

Not in any ways that count.

He’ll take something for himself and give back to those who deserve it.

And if he has to amend his personality to achieve this, then so be it.

And if he has to adapt to working with others he’s been led to believe he shouldn’t interact with to achieve this, then so be it.

He doesn’t like who he’s ended up as, so maybe it’s time for a change.

Change is in everyone’s nature, and it’s time he helped his evolve.

It’s time that he upgraded.

He stares ahead and thinks. And as he does so, he works at the corner of his red Autobot badge with the flat of his thumb. It’s always sat loosely on his frame. Always. He’s never liked how loosely it’s sat on his chest, and he’s never liked the material it’s made out of. So maybe it’s time for a new sigil.

Maybe it’s time for a new him.

It’s time for a new him and a new future for those like him who deserve it.

It’s time to talk with the Decepticons.

It’s time to listen to what they have to say.

#hubcap #transformers #decepticons #autobots #I imagine all of this a lot #Con Hubcap is different yet similar to SG Hubcap #all three versions are Good #I'll take them all #further parts to come later #eventually in a fic but maybe first just in a format like this #braindump of thoughts that were initially in bullet points but tumblr ate them so there's just words #first draft #sometimes you just have to get your thoughts out #decepticon hubcap

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