Mabaya ch 23 Bottoming Out.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
IDW Mabaya AU
Perceptro, Drift, Turmoil
Turmoil--so, mindfucking

Nothing left.  Perceptor had nothing left.  Drift was gone: hopelessly, irredeemably. He’d seen the red optics and this time, there had been nothing left: flat and dead and empty, as though the light didn’t go all the way down to the filaments.

And he? He was lost.  At the end. Another kind of nothing left.  He felt empty, hollow, scraped out and raw.  And he’d thought, for cycles, as he hunched mechanically over a pile of broken parts, hands finding some comfort in the tedium. And for a long time despair had beckoned him with its long fingers.  There seemed no point.  He couldn’t escape.  They’d never let him leave. It was only a matter of time before Turmoil remembered he existed and he’d serve his part—all unwilling—in another of Turmoil’s violent schemes.

Live, and be used against Drift.  Or die and kill all hope. Something had made Drift run away.  There was something there that felt how far he was falling, that couldn’t bear to be seen.  Something that might be brought to hope. 

But what else was there?

Revenge. 

The word came to him as though it had crawled down the walls, a sinister lizard, unblinking, intense, alien. 

Revenge. 

It seemed to slither before him, in the periphery of his vision. 

Revenge.

He looked up, and it seemed to him that the room around him burned, shimmering with hot tongues of flames.  He could almost feel the heat, like a wall slamming against him, heating his armor, penetrating to the coldness of his desolated spark. 

Perceptor looked down, missing his targeting reticle for the first time, staring at the timer component in his repair tray, hands stilled over its repairs.  A broken timer. It seemed like a symbol, but also, a possibility.

He looked around the small workshop, as if seeing it for the first time. Yes. 

 

[***]

 

“Deadlock.”  Deadlock groaned, in some pain beyond physical.  He felt a weight of an arm over his chassis, pinning him to the present, to reality.  He had a sudden distressing thought: this was what flyers felt when grounded—the dream of flight cut short.

“Turmoil,” he muttered, feeling the familiar cool weight of the commander’s EM field.   Bad enough Turmoil stalked his waking states.  Now…his recharge. 

It made sense: it was Turmoil’s way.  Slow erosion rather than all-out decisive battle. It was exhausting, had always been exhausting, even in the battlefield.  And Deadlock felt that he was finally, finally succumbing.  Not because Turmoil was wearing him down as much as…he had nothing left.  The ideals that had kept him going—though blinded, twisted, corrupted—lay shattered around him.  He could not fight alone.  The echo of the dream, Wing’s dream, the jet’s gentle touches, soft, accepting words seemed to sour as it faded.

“Tell me about the sword, Deadlock.”  The hand sleeked down his hip, possessive. Not lustful, merely reminding Deadlock of his place: as a thing to be used.

“A sword.” Deadlock tried a noncommittal shrug. 

“Not a…common weapon, Deadlock.  Nor,” Turmoil’s hand moved, tweaking an attachment point, “a very useful one.”

Deadlock flinched from the hard pinch. “No,” he agreed.  It was useless.  It could kill him if he used it.  It was a useless weight, a memento of a mech he no longer was, didn’t deserve to even want to pretend to be.   

“I hadn’t figured you for sentimentality,” Turmoil said.  He pulled back on the shoulder, pushing Deadlock’s back flat on the berth, his visor warm and orange, oozing false sympathy.

“Lot you don’t know about me,” Deadlock muttered, some awful fusion of his former recalcitrance and the mech he’d wanted to become. 

“Of course,” Turmoil purred. “And I am looking forward to…reacquaintance.”

Deadlock shuddered at the thought, hating how his pelvic frame surged up against Turmoil’s roving hand, his body betraying itself to some self-punishing need, as if hoping Turmoil would finish him off, end him, their rough joining culminating in eradication. As if overload was only too ephemeral a taste of the nothingness he wanted to embrace forever. 

The hand stilled over his interface hatch. “Why won’t you fight me, Deadlock?”  A question, more honest than Turmoil’s usual. As though his very acquiescence were getting to the larger mech, penetrating where all his resistance had failed.

Deadlock shrugged. “Maybe you win.” Perceptor had seen him, seen how…empty he was. And he had fled from his own failure. He’d stupidly trusted Turmoil. Knowing better.  He barely had energy to be angry at the tank, after all the anger that he thrust at himself.  Stupid, Deadlock. Know better. You of all mechs.

Turmoil loomed over him, his dark mass blotting out the light, like an omen.  “You’re no good to me broken, Deadlock,” he said, half gentle, half in threat. 

“It’s what you wanted,” Deadlock muttered, tiredly.  Exhausted, already, an only moments out of recharge.  “No more insubordination.” It was all the attack he could muster—throwing in Turmoil’s face that he was giving him what the larger mech had always claimed to have wanted from him, and Turmoil still, somehow, finding it unsatisfactory. 

“Not…yet,” Turmoil said.  He pushed away, sitting up from the berth, a rush of cool air where his systems had pressed against Deadlock. “You bore me.”

Deadlock felt a bitter ember flare at the words, as though Turmoil’s worst insult were the first, thin notes of hope. 

Comments

[kamiraptor.livejournal.com]

XD This chapter makes me all excited!

Go Percy! Go! Make that room into a bomb or something even awesomer than that!!!

Also, oh ho! Turmoil, bored? Oh my!


Totally worth the wait. *puurrrrrs* Totally. :D

[eerian_sadow]

Turmoil is like a child here--broke his favorite toy(s), so now it's no fun anymore. Problem is, he doesn't have the kind of toys that break neatly...