Chapter Text
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"Spooky scary skeletons..." Jazz hummed the song to himself quietly, careful not to disturb even the dust with the sound. It was a fairly simple song, but it really stuck into one's processor.
It was strange how acclimating to another planet could change a mech. He’d walked through the piles of dead that littered Cybertron’s battlefields before and the only fear he’d felt was the fear of unexploded ordnance. Of discovery. The fears cultivated by war.
Now he stepped lightly, touching the corpses as little as possible. He was afraid of disturbing them. Empties and sparkeaters and the other terrors of Cybertronian myth were sometimes dead, but other times not, and either way were not associated with places of the dead. They stalked the edges of the living places. Cybertronians didn’t fear dead bodies. They were just materials to be recycled.
Human bodies decayed.
There were all sorts and myths and legends and stories revolving around decay. Monsters that had been once-living, and now stalked the night still rotting away. Creatures that had to return to their graves. Ghosts and spirits still bound to their bones. And graveyards were nexuses of these stories. The places the dead rotted were places of deep seated fear and respect.
There were no graveyards on Cybertron. No mausoleums. Sometimes there were monuments, but the smelters left nothing of the actual dead behind.
Even these battlefields did not rot as he’d come to understand decay on Earth. Millions of years since these mechs had fallen and been left behind. Too many dead to collect. Too many dead to melt. And even after millions of years had passed, and they were pristine grey, only covered in a thick layer of dust.
It was eerie. It was creepy.
Unnatural.
And though he knew that there was no rot, no decay, no stories of monsters here… Jazz was afraid to disturb the dead.
“Spooky scary skeletons…”
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