DISCLAIMER: Read before you move on.

This fic was written in a world different from each movie-verse, while still remaining within that category. Where Arbeit Macht Frei comes from is a universe some friends and I have created and roleplay in called Autobot Supremacy – as it may sound, it is a world in which the Autobots won the war with finality on Earth by way of a sound military defeat. Senator Ratbat ascended in the Autobot Council and secretly enslaved the Decepticons in work and death camps for the safety of all Autobots, as in his view, the Decepticons will never be tamed and can never be trusted. To ensure his plans kept secret, his "Loyalists" worked diligently to keep Prime and the other Autobot Elites blind to what he was doing, and for a long time, he was successful. Unfortunately for him, there was a Decepticon Elite he was never able to catch, and with the help of Blue Morpho and other assorted mechs, Barricade was able to breach the fortress Peace Tower and alert Prime to the crimes being done to his people. The camps were dispersed after that and a new Lord Protector rose to power in a new time of true peace, uneasy as it may be.

That should cover it, in a nutshell. The entire RP which spawned this fic is 400+ pages in Microsoft and I can't accurately compile it all into a single paragraph. Feel free to note or email me any questions. Also, SECOND DISCLAIMER, I mean no disrespect or insult to those who were in any of the Holocaust camps, particularly the one after which this fic is named: Auschwitz-Birkenau. "Arbeit Macht Frei" is the sign that stands at the gates of that now dormant hell, a silent testimony to the horrors that went on in the Holocausts deadliest camp. It is said that up to three million people died there, by natural or other means, and as such, by naming this fic after it I assure you I pretend no illusion of the severity of Auschwitz. Again, if you are offended, I invite you to please email me with your concerns.

PS: Also, it was asked in a review, and the "silver Seeker" is not Starscream. It's a fan character named Galeforce. On that note, Blue Morpho belongs to MoonMadKitty with all rights to her, Barricade and Blackout belong to Hasbro, and Galeforce belongs to Samma, all rights to her. I claim ownership only to the story.

Arbeit Macht Frei

Work will make you free

By: The Feesh

He remembered the day the camp had been dispersed.

Time in there was irrelevant; days flowed and ebbed like a red tide of constant misery, blurring the senses. The sun came up, and then went down, countless times over the course of his stay at Arbeit Macht Frei. He didn't even know how long he was there.

Ratbat's men were smart about where they set up their little work camp. The Autobots had deemed Earth as the Cybertronian's new home and had set up Peace Tower somewhere in Washington or Oregon, or so he had heard. Ironically, the largest and most infamous Decepticon death camp had been constructed right under their noses, and they didn't even know it.

He remembered pausing periodically in his heavy work, looking out across the flat expanse of sand and scraggly brush at the mountains sitting demurely, obscured in the distance by heat distortion. But they were there, and they were real, he decided, because he saw them day after day without fail. He remembered longing for them, even for the vast spread of empty desert that lay before him, inviting.

Sometimes he saw his drone out there. Playing in the sand, rolling around like some sort of dignity-less canid, the creature would stop every now and then and look at him, waiting for him. He wondered periodically if he was actually back in Qatar, but the sharp sting of the pain whips would snap him out of his hallucination driven reverie and he would simply go back to work. He missed his drone.

Blackout jerked his head up at the sound of a particular order. Ah, one of Ratbat's loyalists from the higher echelon had decided to descend from on high to check on them. He couldn't honestly be bothered to care. He just kept working as the rest of the camp did, until said officer came near and he was ordered to kneel. Without much thought, the Sikorsky did, throwing down the load of sand he had been carrying and receiving a lash across his shoulder for it. Blackout didn't make a sound; too much effort for something that happened so often.

The mud was deep, he realized. Slowly, processes sluggish from the lack of fuel running through his systems, the helicopter remembered it had rained that morning. The cool wet of the muck against his armor and exposed wiring felt good in contrast with the white hot burning of the open whip wounds cross hatched across his form, accenting the ever-presenting backdrop of throbbing agony of starvation through his very veins. His metabolism was fast and needy, and in his dog days in the military Blackout had been known to consume ten or more fuel rations a day when under heavy work conditions. Now, he was under those same conditions, and received four.

He didn't realize the officer had stopped in front of him and was saying something. The sound itself was murky and thick in his audios, like boiling water, like gargling blood. He was too busy thinking about the mud that he realized was all over him to notice or care. This time, though, the massive rotor-flyer took note, and did cry out once when the whip connected and flayed his cheek open, sending his literally frayed nerves into a frenzy of pain.

"What is your name?" the officer was snarling at him.

To which, Blackout's reply was simple: "I have no name."

The loyalist smirked, and said, "Good dog," and was on his way.

And that, he knew, was how he was destined to die. To be worked to death in this concentration camp, nameless, faceless, and utterly unremarkable. He would expire like his brothers, usually in the middle of a work shift, and be discarded.

Blackout hoped it would be soon.

Life went back to normal levels of misery once the loyalist left. Suicide crossed his mind more than once, but he had never been a creature of that level of cowardice. He was a coward, yes, in the way that Blackout preferred to stay out of direct combat with a foe that was equal to him. The gigantic mech was heavily armored where he actually had armor, but unfortunately, heavy armor meant excess weight, which was not good for a flier. He was designed with minimal cover, and only had said body armor over approximately thirty-eight percent of his body. The rest was exposed wiring, nerves, internals and soft rubbery tissues, none of which held up to assault well. However, the weight not carried in protective shell contributed to Blackout's surprisingly agile patterns of flight, with him being just heavy enough to be able to fly in horrid weather conditions.

Not that it mattered here. They took his flight away. The Pave Low's rotors were in tatters, numb and unfeeling for the fact that they had cut out all of the necessary motor relays and fuel lines to his engines; the scars criss-crossing his rotor mount served as proof of the brutal way in which he had been grounded. They had tied him down like a dog, shackled and collared and they didn't even bother with a surface agent when they docked his wings like a pitbull's ears.

Worse yet, it was routine. The wounds would slowly heal, and the guards, they had this way of checking to see if he could feel his rotors. They thought it was fun to pull on them to throw Blackout's balance off, and periodically, they would smack the normally sensitive blades with the pain prods they always carried. If he winced, he was docked again. Each time it happened, he fought a little less, until a derelict growl was all he could muster for the most recent cutting.

Night didn't afford them much relief. When the sun set, the camp's lights were turned on and the work continued well after midnight. Only then were they allowed a few hours of rest before the dawn of a new day would signal the beginning of another cycle of work, desolation and death. To Blackout, those few hours to himself, crammed into a stable with a hundred other mechs, they were what he lived for. The small amount of time he had in which he could curl up and disappear and be somewhere else for a while. Sometimes it was the Nemesis, searching for his long lost leader. Other times it was before the war, when he taught battle and weaponry classes at the Academy for Guardians; just him and his drone, forever the looming, silent bachelor. He'd been a top weapons specialist, then, being the first to design a cannon that could do as much damage with sound as any energy rifle.

With dawns arrival came their daily wakeup call: the guards would come in, shouting and hollering about them being lazy beasts, kicking them and whipping them until even the weakest sufferers found their feet enough to flee outside. Blackout found it harder and harder to get himself off the floor each morning, his body in a constant state of slow, torturous starvation, dying system by system. But every morning he somehow managed to lumber outside to see what they wanted him to do.

The camp was actually exceptionally productive. The mechs inside were involved in the creation of many things, including but not limited to cement, bricks, wooden beams, metal for scaffolding, and smaller things such as screws and nails. Blackout had heard in passing once that the Autobots took the materials their prisoners mass produced and gave them to the humans in a gesture of good will and partnership. Again, the irony.

The Sikorsky MH-53 was large, and he was strong. As such, he was normally saddled with the job of carrying heavy loads of building materials to and fro wherever he was directed. It would have been easy enough work under normal conditions, but these were hardly normal.

Blackout shouldered an armful of heavy beams and peered owlishly at a group of Autoslag guards as they watched him, unmoved with their whispering and grinning. Pride was a thing of the past that he vaguely remembered. He remembered getting it beaten out of him better. As he passed, the guard who was most of the time responsible for Blackout's torment stepped forward and told his friends to "watch this". At that point, he decided to grab onto one of the behemoth's rotor blades and pull on it as hard as he could. Now, the Sikorsky was plenty top-heavy enough without the added weight of some twenty-foot mech yanking on him in addition to the slippery mud he was walking in, and so, it wasn't much of a surprise when he staggered to keep his balance, forced to drop the beams in order to do so. One of the beams broke on impact, and the guards laughed.

"Now look what you did, stupid dog," one laughed, and unsheathed his whip.

Another piped up. "Wasted work. Unacceptable."

They surrounded him, threatening him with electric prods that were designed specifically to send pain signals into a mech's circuitry on contact. Blackout didn't much care. Perhaps they would finally beat him to death and he wouldn't have to do this anymore. He made efforts to move out of the way whenever they jabbed at him, listening distantly to their laughing as they hounded him, sticking him with the prods and lashing burning wounds across open wiring with the whips of similar design. The one who pulled his rotor did it again, forcing him off balance so that he couldn't run, or defend himself against the assault.

It had been a long time since he had felt angry. His usual constant emotion was simply despair, and the fire that erupted was soothing as much as it was engaging. Blackout was angry. He was tired. Tired of the pain, of the torment, of the fact that he was something for these Autobots to play with and laugh at.

They made him mad. The helicopter lurched forward suddenly, yanking his rotor out of the guards grasp as he bent down and picked up one of the wooden beams he had been carrying. With the utmost simplicity, he caught the guards utterly flatfooted when he turned and swung as hard as he could, taking the rotor-puller's head right off of his shoulders.

The entire camp stopped, and Blackout immediately regretted his decision.

He'd barely walked away from his punishment. They dealt him pain all day until the stars shone, the temperatures plummeted and the work shift ended. Steaming in the cold desert night air, the massive mech stumbled back to the prison where they were kept, to find a spot and lay down for a while in a dazed, agonized stupor. Once inside, he paused. Everyone was awake, and everyone was looking at him. Perhaps it was a hallucination, though he was sure it wasn't, the other victims in the room were staring at him and their faces said but one thing:

Good for you.

They shuffled and scooted and made just enough room on the floor for him to curl up and wish he were dead for the rest of the night.

The next four days were brutal. They doubled his workload and halved his rations in prolonged punishment for killing a guard, using him as an example for the rest of the camp. It rained, and when it wasn't raining it was blisteringly hot, drying the mud just enough for it to become a sticky soup easy to slip in. Blackout did his best but it always came up short of their expectations.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, he collapsed, and couldn't get back up again.

The world was a spinning kaleidoscope of pain, sounds and images. Blackout was vaguely aware of the guards shouting at him to get up, kicking him and poking him to try and rouse him back to his feet, and he did try. The mud-colored Sikorsky threw himself to his hands and knees and tried to stand, failing once, twice, three times and each time he did not succeed, they hit him. Why didn't they understand? He'd be able to work if they just fed him more. That's all.

He never spoke to them. There was no point. They laughed and talked at him and said things in his general direction, but Blackout never responded to the guards. If spoken to directly by one of the loyalists, he would reply as curtly and simply as possible. The former Elite had said perhaps forty words total in the unfathomable amount of time he had spent in Arbeit Macht Frei. Of course, the Autobots didn't call the camp that on paper, or even outside of the fenceline. No, to the rest of the world, concealed by camera tricks and radar dampeners, it was a volunteer facility worked by 'Cons that were trading honest work for repentance and good faith. To everyone else, it was known simply as Turnaround.

To the ones inside, it was Birkenau.

Someone was shouting up at the North entrance. The guards paused and listened, and so did Blackout, concentrating past the whitewash of static in his audios to try and hear what was being said. If it made the guards stop, surely it was something big. Perhaps they would leave him be.

His tormentors growled and stood straight on order from some superior in the distance, and the prisoners that were still working were told to cease and kneel. It must have been another loyalist coming to check on them again, and Blackout sighed through his clogged vents. The chopper couldn't breathe and it was maddening to be unable to do something so simple as dispel heat and draw in fresh air.

Dumbly, Blackout lay there, venting sharply to try and clear his airways. He felt like he was stuffed to the gills with mud and partially, that was true. Some was muck, yet more was a murky, thick substance that oozed out of the vent slats and clung to his armor. Confused, he touched a string of the jelly-like liquid and looked at it. He hadn't realized he was sick. Amidst everything else, he imagined he just didn't notice.

Movement caught his eye and the behemoth looked. Unfamiliar mechs were pouring in the North gate, not so far from where he was on the ground. But what were they doing?

Word spread through Arbeit Macht Frei like wildfire once they knew. The strange mechs were coming in from all four gates, armed and prepared, surrounding the guards of the camp swiftly and efficiently. Words on the wind whispered fervently of freedom, and Blackout listened as the camp slowly grew more and more excited. Freedom? It couldn't be. He didn't believe it and was content to rest in the mud and labor to keep living.

"The Lord Protector is here," someone said.

Lord Protector?

"Right there. See him? The silver mech coming this way."

Megatron is dead.

And if he wasn't, and he was here, the camp would have already been blown to bits. Lord Megatron would have rather seen his people dead than enslaved and suffering at the hands of an Autobot. The chopper struggled to his hands and knees to see this Lord Protector, watching the unfamiliar mechs shackling the camp guards. Shackles. Arrested. Freedom? It seemed too good to be true after so long.

The massive mech wasn't aware that he was reaching desperately, arm outstretched towards that silver Seeker. He didn't realize how hard he was trying to get up, and how badly he was failing until he gained the attention of the lithe, pretty mech, who came over to him.

"Lie. Be still and rest," he said. "It is over."

The words rang like a gong in the depths of Blackout's processor, and with that simple utterance came a flood of relief, the rising tide of hope drowning out the estuary of despair, and he sank down to the mud and finally gave up. He stopped fighting, listening to the bustling activity around him as transports flowed in to take those who couldn't make it out alone. It is over.

The weeks that followed were a blur. He didn't remember being taken from the camp to an outdoor emergency care setup outside of Peace Plaza. He didn't remember being repaired, treated for his many illnesses and fed until he couldn't choke down any more. He didn't remember slowly growing stronger under the some strangers care. Blearily, the big chopper faded in and out of fevered consciousness for six weeks and didn't wake fully until autumn had turned the late summer's leaves to gold and red.

The massive mech was silent in his distress, getting up and leaving without anyone being able to tell him otherwise. The hospital director, wisely, told his staff to just let him leave, that it wasn't worth trying to keep a mech that size down against his will, especially when there was fear involved. It was better for the chopper's health to let him go without a fuss. The documentation of Blackout's recovery was filed without a name and stored away to collect dust with hundreds of other similar files, all nameless victims rehabilitated and released to recover on their own. The director did not hear of the enigmatic helicopter again until several years later, when it became known to a small town in the mountains that he had died. The humans in the town did not know his name, as he never spoke to them, but they spoke fondly of him, as much as they could. He came, traded physical work, such as unloading dock shipments, for fuel, and he left. A boy that was closer to him supplied the director with a name:

Blackout.

Digging a bit, the head medic unearthed the file of the choppers recovery and labeled it with the proper designation, and re-filed it with the other "known" victims. He died with a name and a face, not of starvation and agony, but of age, known at least to one mech, who knew just who he saved and never once regretted it. From what the townspeople said, he'd died peacefully where he lived on the coast in the Cascade Mountains, after taking one last flight with some obscure friend that they didn't know.

The director figured it was as good a death as any for a mech that old who had been through that much. Years later, he submitted the file to the historians, who added Blackout's name to the list of victims and endeavored to tell his story from the views of the other mechs who had seen him in the death camp. The history books already had him in them, but until then, the ending was obscure and open, musing that his fate was unknown. Now they understood what had become of him, and revised their paragraphs in the history texts to include the date and place of Blackout's death, so that everyone who read them knew about the mech with no name in Arbeit Macht Frei.

PS: Accursed typos. *grumble*

Come visit the collaborators of this Transformers movieverse AU over at http:/ survivalearth. yuku. com/ .. just take out the spaces.