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shadow_vector2011-10-22 01:40 am
Burning at both ends
IDW, early LSOTW
Perceptor, Ironfist
angst
for
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tf_rare_pairing weekly request "Perceptor/Ironfist--Once upon a time, when we could be who we were"Perceptor wasn’t prepared for the hug, the solid thump against his chestplate, the stocky arms around his chassis. He wasn’t ready, in short, for Ironfist. He'd had doubts about meeting the new Wreckers, but had come, out of some numb curiosity. Not expecting this.
“It’s good to see you again!” Ironfist burbled, voice buzzing into the blue chestplate. His spark swelled. He’d always wanted to be a Wrecker, and this made it even better.
“It is,” Perceptor murmured, hands awkward on the other mech’s shoulders. Ironfist was about the last mech he expected to see here. The obvious question hung between them: he dared not utter it for the return question that would inevitably follow.
Another squeeze—Ironfist might be small, but he was strong. He stepped back, tilting his head up. “Got some mods?” No judgment, just a scientist’s curiosity.
A nod. Then the admission. “Did them myself.” Remaking himself from the scientist he was to the warrior he needed to be. And Ironfist was here, Kimia far behind him, too. It was the right decision. It was the only decision, the choice that came to both of them in time.
A brief hesitation, the instinct to lecture flaring and fading. Ironfist didn’t have much of a leg to stand on—his own lab practices were brilliant, but not exactly SOP. It was part of what made him a brilliant scientist. And part of what was killing him. Ironfist picked up the change, the sudden tension. “You do good work,” he managed, after a long moment.
Perceptor gave a watered-down smile. “I’ve always been a mere technician.” Ironfist, on the other hand, had the imagination, the creativity, to think wildly, to invent. Perceptor’s skill lay more in refining, the slow, tedious work of improving that which already exists, instead of creating ex nihilo.
“A good one,” Ironfist insisted, with the ebullience Perceptor remembered.
Perceptor tilted his head, hand indicating, but not quite touching, the strange dent—almost a hole—in the helm. “This?”
The warm glow faded from the optics. “Accident.”
“You’re recovered?”
“Yes.” But the luster didn’t return to the optics. “….no.” Ironfist stepped back. “An accident,” he repeated.
“I see.” The thin mouth pursed, waiting.
“The cerebroshells.” One of Ironfist's inventions, not as controversial as the Gideon's Glue. The product of an untamed imagination. Bitter irony that it was eating into the mind that had created it.
“Oh.” Hard comprehension and sharp sympathy in the syllable. And this time the hand did make contact, the sensitive thumb reading into the wound. “Why are you here?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
The shoulders sagged, as though something in Ironfist deflated. “Because.” From anyone else, it might have sounded petulant. But this was Ironfist. He simply, sometimes, lacked the ability to put his fast, whirling mind into words.
Perceptor nodded. “Too many reasons. Yes.”
Ironfist looked behind them, for once at a loss for words, to where the gabble of the Wreckers had dissipated, the new arrivals moving off to their new quarters. New quarters that had had previous occupants, that still had, in corners, in cabinets, mementoes of lives once lived. Ironfist knew it was only a matter of time before he would be the same, and gone, and some new mech, someone he’d perhaps never met, would stand inside a room with the small detritus of the personal life of a mech who had once been Ironfist. Ironfist, the mech who wanted more than his allotted life’s span, creating Fisitron as though that could give him more time, more adventure, more life.
And it was all slipping through his hands: Ironfist’s, Fisitron’s. He was losing the battle every mortal being lost. But it felt like he was losing it twice as fast.
He turned back, aware of the sharp light cutting shadows between them.“And this?” A gentle brush of the reticle.
Perceptor smiled, but it was the gentle sad curve that tried to catch the last droplets of happiness. “I can only live one life at a time.”
“Sometimes,” and there was a burst of energy in Ironfist’s tone, the cortex that was always on, always working, firing bright sparks. “Sometimes, that’s enough.”
They both knew neither believed that.
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I absolutely love your take on Perceptor.
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Excellent piece. *sniffle*
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