Title: The Last and Alone
Rating: K+
Characters: Perceptor
Warnings: None
Universe: G1-ish
Disclaimer: I, in no way, shape, or form, own the Transformers© franchise or the characters it contains. They belong to Has/Tak, No infringement intended. Any OC's are to my knowledge mine.

Summary: One-shot short. Perceptor was once part of a gestalt, but the others were destroyed. This prompt from kirinsaga at the LJ TF Bunny Farm

A/N: This did not exactly go in the direction I had originally thought it would. In fact, it's not even close.

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Perceptor sat in a lounge chair in the Rec room, nursing a cube of energon. Arrayed around him, his friends , Ratchet, Wheeljack, Trailbreaker, Hound and Beachcomber chatted about the outdoor crowd's most recent leave. Across the room though, Perceptor watched the Autobots young gestalt team laugh, joke and play as they took in their own rations. It had been somewhat of a shock some time back, upon seeing the Constructicons to realize that gestalt technology had resurfaced. Or maybe it had never been hidden. He wasn't sure. And now the Autobots had their own team as well. He envied the Aerialbots for what they had and prayed to Primus they would never know the emptiness that was his.

The gestalt was both blessing and curse. Even now he could sometimes, for a couple of astroseconds still view it evenly in those terms. Within his CPU he had the memories of six mechs. One set was his, but the rest, were holes in his spark. He had five separate memories of meeting himself for the first time. As well as five sets of memories of meeting the other eventual team members. Actually he had the memories of seven if you counted Monolith. But Monolith's memories were vague and dreamy having mostly belonged to the whole. It was part of being a group mind. A merging of thoughts. Being all of the others and yourself at the same time. And Monolith had been them.

Even as his companions chatted around him, Perceptor's thoughts led him down the familiar path to the past. Memories and emptiness were all he had left. Back then, so very long ago, they had volunteered for an experiment. Him and five other mechs. All young, all needing the credits. And it had been everything they had been promised right up to the point that the lab controllers had moved from the CPU formatting studies, to the structure changes. Then they had lost their freedom and become the property of the study. The bindings to create the gestalt were not just physical, but mental as well. He looked once again at the young gestalt across the room.

The gestalt was, in a sense, a blessing for the wholeness it had offered. As well as the knowledge gained in a wide range of fields, from his teammates. Strengths were enhanced and weaknesses, while not eliminated, had been smoothed over. Yet each mech was still an individual with their own feelings and quirks. That his team as well as the other two gestalts in the experiment had been spark bonded as well as gestalt had given them near telepathic powers. A near mystical, almost ability; to know what each was doing and where each of the other members of the team were at any given moment. They had never thought that one might survive the rest. Single bondmates rarely outlived their partners. With their unheard of till then six-way bonds, it was suppose to be an all or nothing deal. They lived and died together.

The second gestalt team certainly had reacted as expected when their time of destruction was upon them. In fact, of the six team members who had once formed Totality, only two had actually off-lined permanently from battle damage. The other four had screamed in audio piercing agony, dropped into stasis, then had permanently off-lined, their sparks guttering out. His team as well as the final team of first gestalts had expected the same fate. But that had not happened for him.

No, his team had gone into battle, in defense of a colony planet. He remembered that. And he remembered Slider's death. Well he remembered the sudden agonizing pain of ripping and tearing in his mind and spark. Then he had on lined thousands of vorns later in the Medical Bay of the Autobots main Headquarters. He had woken to learn that the Cybertron he knew was no more. That Cybertron was in fact embroiled in a massive civil war. He had been found in a collapsed building by search teams after a battle still hooked to some kind of life support machine, and brought in for aid.

Ratchet had said it had been relatively simple to bring him out of the emergency stasis they had found him in. And later, amongst the haze in his CPU he had found an encrypted file which when opened had explained what had happened to his team and what had happened to him. Ultimately it had offered no real answers. Offering only that the techs in charge of the program had had no understanding of why he alone had survived the destruction of his team. Why, when 5 of his team were destroyed, one somehow survived. It didn't even explain why he had been placed on life support rather that just being allowed to slowly off line from lack of fuel. Though he could theorize that reason. They had surely wanted to learn from him to improve the next models. He had obviously been lost or forgotten at some point though. Too much time had passed.

Perceptor never mentioned to the Autobots what he had been, merely offering his talents as a scientist, cross trained as a medical tech, thanks to Tonic's skill set. He quickly earned his place as a quiet, reserved, yet brilliant scientist. He had kept his skills as a warrior hidden for the most part. Though some more observant mechs had occasionally noticed his skill during the rare times he had ended up in battle. Yes even now the gestalt is blessing and curse.

The Aerialbots had been created as a gestalt right from the start, so very different from the first gestalt teams. From his team. The Aerialbots only knew the pleasures of the gestalt. The knowledge of never being alone, of always being supported and loved no matter your faults. The addiction that was the dissolution of self and melting of identity with the blending of minds. The pleasure of mind sharing. The The gestalt rapport was a heady thing, the feeling of being something more than yourself, intoxicating.

"Perceptor? You alright?" It was Wheeljack.

Perceptor shook his head slightly, and looked at his friend and fought the desperate need to stand and flee back to the science level and his lab. "Fine." Wheeljack nodded thoughtfully and the others in the group smiled and the conversation continued.

Perceptor sighed mentally to himself and looked once more at the young gestalt team. May you never know the pain and emptiness of being torn apart. May you never have holes in your spark that never fill, never get warm, never close, and never heal. May none of you ever learn, that worse than all that, what it is like to be the last. May you never sit in a room full of comrades and friends and still be truly, totally, utterly and eternally alone.