Tare Weight of Emotions

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG
IDW
Perceptor, Blaster, Springer
Spoiler for Spotlight: Blaster and AHM 15.
tf_rare_pairing  weekly request: Blaster, Perceptor change isn't always for the better

The red lights and flat klaxon of docking procedure shook them all out of their cocoons of tension, the Wreckers coming to life, limbs and optics moving, shifting, gathering equipment, loosening stress- and travel-tightened joints.

He’d known the confrontation was coming.  He hadn’t thought of it, though; hadn’t worked it into his calculations, but even so, he’d had a dim awareness, like a louring cloud in the distance, threatening a storm whenever he looked up.

He didn’t look up that often.

 When Perceptor had finally gotten out of regen, all he had figured, all he had thought, was how to make himself better, stronger. Because anything other than cold calculation reminded him….

He’d been left. Abandoned. His own team, his own side, leaving him to bleed out in the cellblock.  They’d left him.  Discarded. Worthless. Only the stranger, the traitor, as Turmoil had called him, had come back. Only the stranger had cared.

Because he doesn’t know…something. There must be something the others know about me that Drift just…doesn’t yet.  Why else would my allies, my friends, just leave me?

Am I that worthless?

Not anymore.  Perceptor’s hands brushed the rifle, its weight solid and serene under his touch.  Not anymore.  If he was worthless as a scientist, he would prove himself this way.  If he was worthless as a friend and companion, he would be silent, self-contained, reaching out to no one.  Just do his job and then lock himself away, like a rifle, like any dumb weapon, until it was needed again. Cold, hard, competent.

He trailed the others down the ramp of the shuttle. The tension of the battle wafted off of them like a smell, almost, eddying over Perceptor as they stepped onto the familiar safety of the ship, his footfalls taking on the rhythm of the words he tried to push out of his mind. You defiled yourself. You defiled yourself.

He had not. 

Springer gave him a gruff nod as he stepped onto the Axion’s shuttle bay deck, magna-clamps locking down.  Combat was Springer’s language and Springer’s nod was one of guarded approval, if not comprehension.  Perceptor fought a wash of relief, the first approbation of his modification, his new mission.  He would not fall into that trap. 

He nodded back, keeping his too-promiscuous words locked behind his still, narrow face, turning toward his quarters.  He needed…he needed to process this.  Everything that happened, everything that it meant. New data for further modifications, first off. And then.  And then, he’d worry about the others.

But Blaster had different priorities. 

He stood in front of Perceptor’s quarters, hips tilted forward, arms folded over his chassis, chin tucked. Aggressive, already.  Perceptor stopped.  Waited. 

“So that’s it,” Blaster said, finally. “Nothing to say for yourself, huh?”

Perceptor felt his mouthplates press together. No. Too much to say, that was the problem. That had always been his problem.  “No,” he said, when he determined that Blaster wanted an answer.

“Can you tell me why at least?” He said it, in that way he had, where his question had the weight of obligation.

“Had to be done.” 

“Had to?  Had to?”  Blaster threw his hands up, frustrated. “Self-mutilation. ‘Had to be done’.”  He stepped closer. “What happened to you, Perceptor?”

The war.  The war happened.  It had been happening around him, for gigacycles, but it had finally, finally, happened to him. “I died,” he managed.  So much under those words: I was left to die.  I wasn’t good enough.  I want to prove myself, be good enough.  But the bleak blue of Blaster’s gaze scorched those words from his vocalizer.

A long moment.  The light glossed over Blaster’s white helm as he shook his head. “You’re not dead.”

I am. In all the ways that matter. In belief, in that burning surety I once had? I am nothing but a cold cinder.  “No.”

Blaster moved, finally, frustration twitching over him.  “You don’t get it, do you?”  Perceptor didn’t move, though part of him wanted nothing more than to dodge past the other mech, into the safe silence of his quarters.  But that…that was the one who had died, always following emotions.  Always susceptible. Always weak. Reacting instead of acting.  Blaster stepped closer, one finger jabbing Perceptor’s chestplate. “You think we don’t have enough idiots with guns around here? You really think that’s all you can do?”

Perceptor’s mouth twitched at the irony, but his optics couldn’t help but graze down Blaster’s side to the pistol magna-stuck to his hip. “You died, too.” 

Blaster’s mouth gaped open, for a klik, a torrent of words colliding against each other in shock, one hand clutching over his chestplate, where the panels still didn’t quite match. “Different,” he said. “And I got over it.  I didn’t do…this.”  He gestured toward Perceptor’s optic. 

Perceptor said nothing.

“Yeah, so.  Stopped being The Voice. That’s what you’re thinking, right?  And sure, I couldn’t—I couldn’t do that anymore. The war had changed too much while I was gone.  They didn’t need me.”

“They needed hope.” They all needed hope, they always had, always would.  He tilted his head. “That’s what you lost.”  Half a question.  You didn’t come back without death’s ragged claws leaving scars on your cortex.  He’d lost…everything.  It was some bitter consolation that Blaster had lost something, too. 

“I didn’t!  We still need to win. We still need to hold onto ourselves, remember what we’re fighting for.  Comrades.  Mech standing with mech. A just cause.”  Blaster stopped, hearing his own formerly swelling rhetoric chopped, telegraphic. 

Hollow.

“More than a voice,” Blaster said, finally.  “I can do more, give more to this war than just…propaganda.  I can fight with my hands, practice what I preached for all those metacycles.” A wan smile, like lightning through fog.  “It’s justice, Perceptor. It's only fair I take the same risks.”

“Revenge,” Perceptor countered, quietly.  He remembered Blaster’s rage at Soundwave’s trick, at the cerebro-shell that had turned Beachcomber into a would-be assassin, permanently shorting part of the mech’s neo-cortex.  He remembered the hard light in Blaster’s optics.  And he knew, now, that that hard light had been the hope and optimism that had been the lifeblood of the Voice curdling and burning away, leaving only that steely resolve.

And this hard judgment.

Perceptor knew it now, because the same had happened within him. Only, Blaster turned his outward ; Perceptor kept his focused on himself, his own flaws, his own failings. Because looking at those, trying to seal those gaps, fill those cracks, was better than the alternative of looking up and seeing…they all judged him, too.

“This isn’t who you are meant to be,” Blaster said, that deep, rich voice soft now, pleading, almost.  Blaster could play his voice like a symphony, could adjust pitch and timbre, could hold a pause, or trip over dactyls with the agility of a hyperjet.  And he deployed those tricks now, as weapons, the words dense with compassion.

And for a moment, Perceptor wavered, tempted by the bond between them.  But his cortex threw at him, inexorable, like a bullet of crystal drilling straight through his helm, ‘you defiled yourself,’ and all the harsh, flat recoiling in those words. 

He felt a flare of anger, and for a moment, was stunned by it.  He…didn’t get angry.  Buried in his lab, he’d gotten frustrated, from time to time, but never angry.  But then again, in the lab, problems had solutions—some elegant, some errant. In life…sometimes there were no answers. There was no neat solution for how to move on after your own friends have left you for dead, none even bothering to check.  There was no neat tare weight to subtract for the ache of emotions. 

“It is,” he said, quietly, but firmly. And he took that step, forward, toward that door that would shut out Blaster and his judgment, lock himself inside alone with…whoever he was now. 

Comments

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Oh it's horrifyingly true. It's all to set up (as spectrumphoenix notes) Drift as Super Nice Guy hero, of course, but it's still awful. It was heartbreaking. ;_;