In Kind

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Title:  In Kind
Fandom:  Transformers, IDW
Characters/Pairings:  Turmoil/Drift
Rating: R/M
Warnings: Graphic physical torture, mindfucking, character death
Prompt: “any fandom any character: I want to hurt you just to hear you screaming my name”
Summary:  It’s time to settle this. 
for dark_fest 18 Mar 2011

 

 

Drift had stolen away. No notice, no warning, even though he knew the Autobots would judge him, hold it against him.  They always had, he thought, philosophically (or as close as he came), they always will. 

But this needed to be settled.

And he despised Turmoil, but the Decepticon commander had never lied, viewed lying with contempt, something for those too weak to handle the consequences of the truth.  So when he’d sent that message on an encrypted, rarely-used Decepticon freq, that they finally settle matters between them…Drift knew Turmoil would come alone.

And if he didn’t?  It made no difference.  Better Drift walk into a trap alone than take any of the Autobots with him to die.

He checked his blades—the short swords in their hip scabbards, the Great Sword rising behind his back, its weight comforting in ways he could never explain. He debated for a moment leaving it here, in the small drop shuttle he’d…borrowed from the Autobots but, no.  It would be witness to this. Wing would be witness to it.  For good or ill.

He stepped down the ramp, his footfalls sounding in the old, abandoned docking bay. The emptiness rang around him.  If Turmoil had brought others, they were well, well hidden.

He walked from the ship, optics keen, taking in the contours of the abandoned station’s large area in the gloom. 

“Deadlock,” the voice cut the darkness, a blunt blade.  “Always good to see you.”

“Drift,” Drift corrected, turning his head to find the source of the voice.  There, to his right.  He drew his swords.

Turmoil laughed, that old, familiar sound. “You can change your name,” he said, agreeably. “It doesn’t change who you are.”  He stepped out of the gloom, optics an orange line well above Drift’s head.  “It doesn’t change what you are.”

Drift had forgotten how big Turmoil was—the Autobots had so many of the smaller troopers that he had gotten used to being…less overwhelmed.  “And what am I?” he challenged.

Turmoil snorted. Right now, he was playing with words.  Other weapons for later. “A killer.”

Drift curled his hands over his short swords. “Aren’t we all?”

Turmoil stepped closer, his EM field prickling over Drift. “Are we?” He reached out one hand, and Drift had to freeze not to react as the large, grey fingers brushed the Autobot insignia on his shoulder panel. 

“It’s a war.”

“And do they accept you?”  Always homing in on weakness.  Uncanny.

“Enough.”  They let me kill for them, he thought. It’s enough.

Turmoil laughed again.  “And you’re a good little Autobot soldier for them, yes?”  He withdrew his hand, but Drift could swear he felt an echo of the touch.

“Yes.”

Turmoil’s head lifted, to take in the small jump shuttle. “I’m surprised they let you come alone. They’re so about…teamwork and togetherness.” He said the two as though they were some unpleasant and fatal affliction, but Drift got the real meaning.  Turmoil divined that he’d not been entirely aboveboard about his departure. 

“My business,” Drift said. “This isn’t about the war. You, and me.”

Turmoil’s head tilted, amused, but he nodded. “Fair enough.”  He settled back a step. “And what about you…and me?”  He drawled the last words. 

Drift’s swords flashed in the dim light. “This ends.”

Turmoil laughed. “Ends? It’s barely begun.” 

Drift closed the gap between them with a back spin, his blades biting into Turmoil’s armor. Too easy, he thought.

And it was.  It was a set up: Turmoil’s right arm, with the pulse cannon, slammed down against him, twisting his torso into the move so that Drift’s blades were wedged, jammed in his armor, and he was defenseless against the offside punch that came for his face. 

He stumbled hard to the side, writhing inwardly as one of the swords was torn from his grasp.

Turmoil straightened, picking the sword from his side and holding it like a toy in his massive fist. “Really, Deadlock.  You think you can kill me with one of these?”

Drift shifted his grip, two hands around the hilt of his remaining sword. “It’ll just take longer.”

Turmoil threw his head back, roaring with laughter. Another setup—as Drift leapt for the throat, his other blade swinging, the laugh cut off abruptly, the face snapping down, his arms clamping around Drift, jamming his frame against Turmoil’s chassis. “There’s a reason,” Turmoil purred, “I don’t kill you. Want to guess?”

“Inept,” Drift spat back, struggling to unpin one of his elbows from the tight clench. 

“Not…quite,” Turmoil said.  He let his hands travel lasciviously down Drift’s frame as he lowered him back to the ground.  A reminder of former times. “And, there’s a reason you didn’t kill me.”  He waited a beat. “Inept?”

Drift seethed. He didn’t want to think about it. “Ran out of time,” he said. 

Turmoil spread his hands to encompass the hangar. “All the time you need, now, Deadlock.”

Turmoil had to be kidding.  But Drift wasn’t one to let opportunity pass.”Drift,” he corrected, flatly, pricklingly aware that he had let it go uncorrected moments ago.  He struck, low, into an ankle, gritting his jaw in a grin as Turmoil grunted in pain.  Turmoil swung at his head, but Drift was faster, and all those weeks in New Crystal City had taught him a few things, including how to dodge.  He went low, under the swing, coming up inside the circle of Turmoil’s arms, using the hilt of his one sword as a hard core to his fist, striking into Turmoil’s midsection, just above the damaged plates. His fist collided with a satisfying crunch, and Turmoil gave, his torso buckling over Drift.  

He gave a laughing snarl, stepping in to drive one knee behind Turmoil’s, feeling the greave jam into a gap in the armor.  Turmoil fell heavily on top of him, giving in, using his weight against Drift.  Drift managed barely to push himself away from the centerpoint of Turmoil’s mass, but his armor still compressed under the falling weight.

Turmoil laughed, pushing up, snatching at Drift’s ankle, hauling him back as he tried to scramble away. “Deadlock,” he insisted.  “You may have gotten some pretty armor, but you and I know that it’s what’s underneath that matters.” Underscoring his point, Turmoil’s fingers curled around one of the white scabbards, stripping it off with a wrenching metallic lament. 

Drift thrashed, retaliating with his sword, the blade biting this time into Turmoil’s facemask. Sparks and energon flew in a fine spray that reeked of ions and charred sweetness. He felt a familiar joyous snarl grow across his face. “Always did talk too much,” he said.

“You want fewer words, Deadlock?”  Turmoil twitched his face to the side, droplets of energon spattering. “Fine.”

Turmoil’s right hand came across in a tight hook. Drift spent so much attention blocking that that he didn’t catch Turmoil’s knee rise up, jamming into his own midsection, the spikes biting into the black armor.  The blow lifted Drift off his feet, his tight guard shattering as his entire balance was rattled.  Turmoil followed with a left-hand cross, striking Drift on the edge of his chassis’s ventral plate. 

Drift landed heavily on the ground, managing, barely, to cling to his one sword, brandishing it between them like a barrier, pushing down the pain that throbbed, hard and round, over his sensornet.  Turmoil laughed—that dark, oily sound that once had thrilled Deadlock to hear—wrapping his hand around the blade, squeezing it, wrenching it from Drift’s grasp by his greater leverage.  Turmoil flung the sword away in a shower of energon from the line cut into his palm, stepping forward, pinning Drift by one massive foot on the white pelvic span. 

Turmoil enabled his magnetic deck grapplers, the force driving Drift’s armor against his foot, locking them together.  Turmoil tilted his head down, his face, as always, masked, unreadable, but Drift could read the triumph in his posture, in the hitch of his shoulders, in the way he flexed and flattened his cut hand, casually, as if he had all the time in the world.  Studying, memorizing, reveling in having Drift, literally, under his heel.

In his other hand, Drift’s other short sword, ludicrously undersized, like a toy.

He lifted Drift up by the magnetic link, and then stomped back down.  A howl forced itself from Drift’s vocalizer, metal crunching, seams squealing open, one hip gyro denting beyond use, connectors and actuators spitting vile sparks into the dimness of the bay. 

Turmoil brought his other fist down like a hammer. And Drift had a sudden, terrible flashback to that planet, the alien bulk slamming into him, massive fists crushing into him. Agony lanced his systems, a lightning bolt of black and red, howling like a furious wind.

And no Wing to save him this time.

Turmoil disengaged the magnets, ripping his foot from Drift’s body, broad toes flexing to free themselves from the metal that had warped and bent around them.  The free hand clamped down around Drift’s throat, hauling him upward, thick fingers closing around Drift’s neck, the grip slick and slippery from the energon from Turmoil’s scored palm. Drift felt his feet clear the floor, Turmoil’s optics on a level with his own, his hands clawing at the forearm, prying at the broad fingers.  “Better?” Turmoil asked.

Drift kicked, but held aloft, without ground, he had no real leverage or force behind it, especially not with his damaged gyros.  He could feel the tight, hard compression of the lines under Turmoil’s grip, “End it,” he snarled.  His cortex raced back over his past, his life. Gutters to Megatron to Turmoil, to Wing.  Wing….  Then the Autobots and their glares and hostilities.  What had he been to any of them?  A trained killer, a mech whose only value was in dealing death without conscience, without remorse.  Of that list only Wing stood out.  Someone who had tried, resolutely, determinedly, to see something in Drift other than that. 

And Wing had died before he failed. Some small mercy.

No mercies, large or small, awaited Drift.  This was the life he had chosen. This was how it ended. 

“You don’t get to decide that,” Turmoil chuckled. He carried Drift over to the small shuttle he’d stolen, bracing the white shoulders there. “You don’t decide what happens, or when it happens, Deadlock.”  He took the sword, bracing it for a moment in a shoulder joint, before ramming it in, the blade singing against metal as it sank through Drift’s shoulder assembly and into the hard cerametal of the hull. Drift flung his head back, helpless with agony. 

Turmoil nodded, delighted, pleased with himself, releasing the sword to slide that hand down Drift’s damaged frame, as though the mauled metal was erotic to him.

It was Turmoil; it was probable.

“Besides,” Turmoil said, conversationally. “I’m not done with you.”  He twisted the sword in the wound, laughing as Drift gurgled in pain, hands batting uselessly at Turmoil’s.  The grey mask leaned in. “I want to hurt you, Deadlock.  Hurt you as you deserve to be hurt.” His mask clicked aside, and Drift felt the repugnant weight and slide of Turmoil’s mouth on his shoulder, sucking and lapping at the spilling energon, feeding almost ferally, on Drift’s pain as much as his energon.

“Not…afraid,” Drift choked out, striking weakly at Turmoil’s gripping fingers, his hand unable to get a good grip on the energon-slicked armor.

 Turmoil looked up, optics clouded with desire, and when he leaned in again, his EM had the ragged harshness of lust.  “Fear is not essential, Deadlock. Just your pain.”  

“Wasting time,” Drift said, more strongly, determined to deny Turmoil what he wanted.

“Mine to waste.” Turmoil ducked in again, optics dimming with pleasure as he licked over the gaping wound again.  “As are you.”

“Don’t have the spark for it.”

“Don’t I?”  Turmoil’s voice dropped into a growl, anger flaring. “Do you want to test that?”

“Bring your worst.”

Turmoil chuckled, the grin looking bizarre, obscene, on his unmasked face.  His glossa flicked a circuit around his mouth plates.  “Only my best for you, Deadlock.”

“Drift,” Drift gasped, feeling his vision start to ebb, the feed going white and red and staticky.

Turmoil laughed. “By the end,” he said, “You’ll know your right name.” He dropped his grip, the impaled shoulder taking Drift’s full weight. 

Drift.  He would die as Drift.  He could do, at least, that much. Close the circle, end as he began, alone, unmourned, shattered and ruined. 

…Wing….

He shuttered his optics, bracing against the pain, clinging to the only bright pure light his life had ever known, until his whole world exploded into white, cold and hot as the stars themselves.