Chapter Text
• Sleepily moving through the massive, labyrinthine interior of your keeper, you can’t help but wonder why he keeps you alive. Boredom? It’s hard to imagine he’s lonely, but maybe it’s as simple as that. Raking a hand through your hair, you stop short, seeing one of his awful, shambling drones swaying slightly. Head turning to stare at you as it lingers by your bathing pool, your eyes narrow. “Good morning, Lord Unicron,” you murmur, knowing he’s listening through the creepy thing. A lot of them are massive, much bigger than you, but lately? He’s been making some a bit closer to your size. They still tower over you, but you choose to see it as a very unsettling olive branch.
• Watching you strip out of the loose, soft material he’d had his Terrorcons salvage from the last world he’d devoured, he tries to figure out why he tolerates you. A little, weak, organic insect. You do nothing to further his goals. If anything, you’re impeding him. Making him deviate off course to find things to keep you alive. “Master,” he corrects and you smile as you bare soft skin, echoing the word back to him. And there’s something different about you. A subtle shift in your scent and it irritates him that he notices these things. That he’s that intimately aware of you. What is that? “Come here, little herald,” he croons, lifting the Terrorcon’s arm to crook a servo and you hesitate like you don’t want to. “Come.”
• Resisting the urge to cringe, it’s never good when he takes an interest in you. Been having you play his herald lately, sending you down under guard with his creepy drones to go tell the aliens of the worlds he’s about to commit his special brand of genocide on that they should be honored to be chosen. He’s only made you do it a handful of times and you’ve bawled every time you’d stuttered through the speech he’d demanded you give. Shivering when he grips your chin, tipping your face up, the eerie purple light animating the broken body of the Terrorcon flares as it vents.
• Abruptly releasing you as the scent finally registers, he growls, the noise rumbling through his whole body and you stumble back a step, eyes wide. You’re needing? That scent and the hunger it stirs inside him is the antithesis of everything he stands for. A rallying cry to create life. Or try. Repeatedly. Snarling in disgust, his drone’s servos close around your upper arm when you try to back away. Unable to let go. Maybe it wasn’t chance that brought you to him. You’re his, your species created by an aspect of him, but now he wonders if Primus had a hand in bringing you to him. Even with that infuriating thought, this is something new. A new hunger. A distraction from the hollow, near madness of that other hunger that drives him.
• What did you even do to piss him off? Trembling as your heart hammers, you hear a scuff and turn. Staring as more of his Terrorcons shamble out of tunnels and crevices. Swarming as your skin crawls. And the one holding you lowers its head, venting. Brushing its cheek and jaw against yours, you feel it leaving a smear of damp energon on your skin as Unicron growls louder, the sound rumbling like thunder through and around you. “Lord Unicron?” Voice shaky, you feel another Terrorcon’s clawed servos running up your sides. ‘Master,’ he insists, that deep voice an insistent growl, a reprimand as more of them surround you and you feel one’s mouth open to press against the curve of your bare shoulder, hands sliding against you. ‘Tell me how much you love me, little herald,’ he growls, the words too loud, almost deafening as he speaks without tempering the sound through his drones. And you don’t understand this new game, but you understand survival. That you live by his whims. That for as awful as he is, as cruel, he takes care of you. Maybe it’s Stockholm’s, but he’s all you have. He’s your whole world and your cage.