shadow_vector | Culpability

NC-17
IDW
Drift/Wing
sticky
based on a kink meme req someone forwarded to me but it's not really a complete match so, yeah, I won't inflict it on the kink meme. ALSO, super thanks to

ravynfyre for reading this over and making it seem like I actually knew what I was doing when I wrote this. XD

“Get him out of here.” Dai Atlas’s voice seemed to fill the comm room, like indoor thunder. The screens shook in their mountings.

Drift glowered up at the large blue jet, defiant in front of the assembled Knights, who formed a wall of hostility before him. Only Wing looked hurt, stricken, the light in his optics guttering, sorrowful.

The Knight behind him tightened his grip on Drift’s bound upper arm, jerking him to one side. “Where to?”

“He’s my responsibility,” Wing said, voice chalky with tension. “I’ll take him.”

“He was your responsibility and we found him here, Wing.” Dai Atlas rounded on the smaller jet.

“I-I understand,” Wing said. “It was a lapse. It won’t happen again.”

“A lapse.” Fury licked off of Dai Atlas’s frame. “We don’t know what he did. He could have endangered all of us.”

“No,” Cloudburst murmured, still bent over the console. “The transmission got caught in our encryption protocols.”

“Transmission.” Dai Atlas spared a look over his shoulder, his hand reaching as though to keep Wing from leaving.

Wing wasn’t going anywhere, his worried optics darting over to Drift, looking hurt, betrayed. Drift snarled. He didn’t need the jet’s concern. He needed to leave.

“He was signaling his coordinates. For pick up.”

Hot locks spattered against Drift’s dark armor. He twisted in the Knight’s grip, defiant. “Keeping me prisoner. I have an obligation—“

Dai Atlas lashed out, the back of his hand striking hard against Drift’s helm. “Do not speak of obligation, Decepticon!” he roared.

Drift growled from pain, jerking his head to one side, energon dripping dully from his chinplate. “Silence me, then,” he said, the sibilants bubbling through the energon, the cracked mouthplate. “Or kill me.”

“Drift.” Wing stepped between them, arm raised as though to block another blow. “Dai Atlas. The lapse was mine, not Drift’s.”

“You heard him,” Dai Atlas said. “He admits his wrongdoing.”

“Wrongdoing,” Drift snarled. “I’m not ashamed.” A spray of energon at the ‘sh’.

“Drift,” Wing importuned. “Please.”

Drift glared at the folded flightpanels facing him, as Wing returned to Dai Atlas.

“If you find him worthy of punishment,” Wing said, “then you must also find me culpable.”

A pained look in Dai Atlas’s optics. “Wing.”

“I have also done wrong. I have erred. I should be punished, commensurate with Drift.”

“Commensurate,” Drift spat. “We’re not the same. Stop linking us.”

The wingpanels flinched, but the jet stood firm, helm tilted up, fearless.

A stormcloud seemed to roll over Dai Atlas’s face. “Fine.” The blue optics loured. “One more mistake—one more step out of line, Wing, and we shall take him from you.” He straightened, forcibly lowering his arm down by his side. “And that, I am aware, will be punishment enough.”

Wing twitched, as if struck. “Yes,” he said, and the helm bowed, audial flares slicing hurt arcs in the blinking lights of the comm room. He turned, optics flickering between hurt and hard, like water over stone, as he reached for Drift’s bindings. “Let’s go.”

[***]

“How could you?” Wing rounded on Drift as the doors to his quarters closed, the manacles falling free from Drift’s wrists.

“Wing.” Bald, rude disbelief. “How could I not?” He rolled his shoulder, loosening the tightened joint. “Soldier. There’s a war on. I have to get back there.”

“Drift. You can’t.”

“Why not?” He rubbed at the crusted energon on his jaw.

“For the very reason you’ve just proven!” Wing’s mouth quivered, almost hurt. “And besides, how could you not want to stay?”

“Because,” Drift sneered, “this is a city of cowards. You haven’t earned this, any of this. You’re like rats that have run away with something you know you don’t deserve.”

Wing went rigid, as if Drift had struck him. Worse, because they both knew that if Drift had actually tried to swing at him, the blow would never have landed. His mouth tightened, face hardening into something steely and brittle. “You are entitled to your thoughts, Drift.”

“Oh, finally,” Drift tossed his head. “Something that I’m allowed to have.”

Wing looked on the verge of striking him, before he spun on his heel, stepping to the balcony. He tapped a code and a heavy stormshutter rolled down, shutting out the ambient light. “You want,” he said, his voice a struggle with emotion. The stormshutter rang against the floor, locking into position, casting the room into shadow. “To be treated as a prisoner. I shall oblige.”

[***]

The first night, Drift shrugged, curling in a hard lump on the floor. Wing and his stupid tantrum, hurt prissy little feeling. Fine. He’d take the floor. He’d recharged in worse places. If this was the extent of the jet’s punishment? He was hardly afraid.

The comm room had been his only idea, though, when it became apparent, even to him, that he wouldn’t be able to ‘win’ his freedom on Wing’s terms. Megatron had always said that the dispossessed, the downtrodden, had a right to subvert the law, to utilize deception. “Laws can merely be reins by which our puppet masters control us,” Megatron had said. And of course, the only way to freedom was to cut those strings.

Another plan. He needed another plan.

Drift rolled to his back, staring up at the ceiling, the complicated, decorative plates of the ceiling tiles. Everything here was needlessly pretty: the ceiling presented an ornate collage of textures and lines, as though functionality had simply burst its boundaries in a paroxysm of joy.

No, don’t get distracted. A plan. A way out of this place. It was nothing but a prison, a pretty crystal cage.

The commroom was off limits. They’d have taken even more countermeasures this time.

No ships that he’d seen, except at the slaver’s base. No, there had to be something. There had to be…his pod? Comm in his pod, perhaps. All right. He could salvage something. He just needed to get out…of…here.

[***]

“Online,” Wing’s voice was sharp, cutting through his recharge. Drift onlined quickly—a force of habit. Mechs who were slow to wake often woke to find their lines cut. Still, he blinked blearily at the sudden light.

“What?” he muttered.

A cube was thrust onto his chassis. “Fuel.”

Drift struggled to sit up, confused. “Yeah, know what it is.”

“Drink it.”

Drift felt his mouth curl. “Going to keep this act up, huh?”

“Act?” the gold optics glittered, cold and hard. “This is what you wanted, right?”

“What I want is my freedom.”

The optics narrowed. The effect was striking, almost marring his beautiful face. “You cannot have it. Therefore prisoner, yes?”

“Fine.” Drift’s optics narrowed in return, snapping the seal on the cube with one practiced flick of a finger. “You’ll get bored of this sooner than I will.”

Wing’s mouth twitched. “And if I do? You will still be a prisoner.” Hammering the word at him, like a thorn he pulled from his own flesh turned against Drift.

Drift felt his smirk crumple into a glower, the energon almost sour on his glossa. Fine. If that’s how Wing wanted it?

[***]

It hurt, Wing thought. It hurt that Drift resisted everything. How could he not see Crystal City as the apotheosis of everything he’d professed to wanting? How could he want to leave?

Was…I not enough?

That was at the heart of the green-fire heat of his anger. That Drift would reject the city, reject him. It was…

…Wing had never wanted anything before, hadn’t allowed himself to covet, feeling that he deserved nothing beyond what was freely given. But Drift, there, on the cliffs—it was as if Prima had opened his hand, laying this blessing before Wing, telling him it was all right to want, so long as he earned.

And he had tried to earn Drift’s affections.

And.

Failed.

He willed himself to suffer, to try and accept it. Drift wanted a jailer; he would try to become that.

And so he spoke only in short phrases, only when necessary, though his throat burned with words. And he continued sparring with Drift, only as something to do, to pass the time. The matches, which had once brought him such pleasure, skill matching against skill, watching Drift’s improvements, steady and incremental, now only seemed to lay more of a wall between them.

Had Drift resented, all along, these matches? Had he really viewed them as punishments, humiliations?

The idea shocked Wing: he was no torturer. He was trying to help Drift, to save him.

Days went by, wrapped in darkness, smothered in discontent, while they spoke only in short barks, moving only to swipe at each other, recharging in a sort of sullen unhappiness. Wing hated it, with a depth of hate he had hoped he had moved beyond. And more than that, he hated that he couldn’t seem to break it, that every day the wall seemed higher and higher between them.

He gave a disconsolate sigh, lying on his berth, swathed in nightcycle. He missed, idly, the freedom of his balcony, which brought him wafted light and sound and busy-ness of the City outside, at all hours. With the stormshutter down, his quarters seemed like a tomb, the air unwholesome and unpleasant.

A whimper, almost an answer, from the floor to his left. He stiffened at the sound, even as his spark seemed…plucked by the naked emotion. He moved silently, rolling to his elbow, forearm blade flat on the berth’s cool surface.

Drift lay in a heap on the floor, a twist of limbs, one leg servo twitching, his ventilation systems shuddering under an increased load. Some old nightmare, he thought, watching the groundframe, as he shifted on the floor, snared in some memory purge of a hateful past.

Wing could almost trace the vision, in the microfired motions—a hand twitch here, the finger jumping against an imaginary trigger, a twitch of the waist as he ducked something.

As he watched, the body bucked up, as though seized by an enormous hand, the optics flying open, at first blank and wild, the mouth stretched in a cry of terror.

“Drift, are you--?” Wing leaned over, reaching one hand, unsure of its welcome, to the other mech. He could feel the stress-heat roiling off the dark frame.

The optics snapped to, the mouth forcing itself from the worried ‘o’ to a flat line of control. “I’m fine.”

…I’m not.

[***]

“Really necessary?” The question was a blunt weapon, meant to hurt, as Wing tightened the restraints over his wrists.

“Drift. You cannot be trusted. You do not want to be trusted.” The head bowed, briefly, clicking the last lock shut. For all that, Drift didn’t doubt the twitch of pain over Wing’s face as the words hit home. “It is what you wanted.”

“Don’t tell me what I want,” Drift snarled. He wanted Wing back—the old Wing. Frustrating, optimistic, smiling Wing. He wanted that complexity, the paradox of his captor/lover, his savior/temptation. But every day that seemed to slip further and further away, receding like a murderer running from justice.

A sigh. “Let’s go.”

Drift gave a noncommittal grunt, but fell into step with the jet, out of his quarters, onto the streetway. After the isolation, the color and noise seemed to dazzle his sensors, as though peace had become high volume, overwhelming.

Drift’s optics darted, as though ashamed of their curiosity, to the vendors, the colorful paint jobs of a group of small biwheel frames, the noise and bustle of a celebration procession.

Not for him: none of this was for him. Peace, stability, wealth laid out like a carpet they didn’t even know they were stepping on. Drift, who had spent millenia with his footplates touching only either the magna-grids of warships or the scorched ground of battlefields could feel the silky burnish of the pavements under each step, ringing out that he didn’t belong, didn’t belong.

As if he needed a reminder: the curious, distancing, hostile optics on him, taking in the Decepticon insignia, the heavy manacles on his wrists.

He followed the jet up to the Knight’s Hall, a perpendicular building—pillars elongated, outstretched, fluted with detail, before bursting into lattices over the vaulted ceilings. “What are we doing?” he asked.

“No questions,” Wing barked, tilting his shoulders, back toward Drift. But his voice was thin, strained, and for the first time it struck Drift how much of an effort it was for Wing to keep up the hostility.

A flare of hope. He followed, keeping silent, into one of the practice halls, standing, wrists bound in front of him, as Wing crossed to the wall, jerking down two practice blades, affixing them to his hips by small magnets.

Wing’s hands were warm and steady on Drift’s as he reached to release the manacles. Drift leaned in, just rocking forward on his toes, enough that his EM field lapped against the jet’s. Wing started, stepping back, but not before Drift felt the encouraging flare of the jet’s own field against his, tangling in the far edges, not wanting to let go.

“Sword,” Wing said, holding one out.

“I see.” Drift lingered before taking it, enough to test Wing’s patience. “Bad idea to train your prisoner in combat, Wing.” A quick smirk, a spark of a smile.

“No questions,” Wing snapped.

The smirk flared to life again. “Wasn’t a question, Wing.”

A coruscating look from the golden optics, before Wing stepped back, his mouth shifting, uncertain. Drift felt a surge of desire at the quiver of the mouthplate, and it took all his self-control not to lean forward just then, to meet that mouth in a kiss. Instead, he took the sword, rolling his wrist, testing the weight and balance.

Wing stepped to the side, and suddenly his hand was on Drift’s, adjusting its placement on the hilt, the curl of his fingers, the lie of his thumb. “Like this.”

Drift allowed himself another lean, brushing his shoulder against Wing’s. “This.”

“Y-yes.” Wing moved back, taking the other blade in his hands. He held it up. “Every sword has different properties. Some are made for thrusting. Some for slashing. This,” he held up the machete-like blade, “is better for cut strikes. But the pointed tip—it can be used to thrust, as well.” He moved to hold the blade, balanced, on the back of one finger. “Balance point tells you how to strike. This is mid-weight. A true slashing blade would have weight away from the hilt, to bring more power to the strike.”

Drift nodded, and for a moment they were both lulled by it, the simple exchange of information. He looked down at his, a match to the one Wing held. “So this is mid-purpose.”

An answering nod, a small peek of a smile. “It does everything fairly well, but none exceptionally. Still, we use them as starter blades, because they are forgiving of technique.”

“We.”

“Knights,” Wing said, automatically, then stopped, as though bracing for a retort.

“I’m not a Knight,” Drift voice was quiet, a tottery bridge over their hostilities.

“I know,” Wing said, the bow of his mouth heavy with regret.

Drift lowered the blade, stepping forward, catching Wing in a kiss that startled both of them, crackling over their mouthplates with electric tension.

“Drift,” Wing murmured, but his hand released the sword as Drift snatched it from him, tossing them both to the ground, his other hand around Wing’s back, tugging the jet against him. “What are…?”

“No questions,” Drift broke the kiss to respond, dropping to Wing’s throat. He didn’t want to answer, or ask. He just wanted Wing.

Wing’s hands glossed, tentatively, over Drift’s arms, thumbs sliding down the depth of the spaulders. Drift stepped closer, tangling his ankle in Wing’s legs, unbalancing the jet, so that they both fell, slowly, controlled, to the floor. Drift snatched at the wrists, pulling them between them, as he laid his weight on the jet’s chassis, locking his dentae into a throat cable, letting his mass press into Wing’s body, thrilling at the EM field that lashed against his. He could feel the insistent throb of the fuel pump under his mouth, the silky slide of the armor against his, and above both of those, the awareness of how he’d missed them, how their lack had sharpened his senses, the same way the city itself seemed brighter, noisier for the isolation.

He slithered down the jet’s body, clutching the wrists in his hands, his mouth blazing a hot trail over the chassis, into the complicated mechanism of the waist, over the pelvic span, where it stopped, coy, over the sudden heat of the interface panel.

Drift released one hand, long enough to open the panel, then letting it slide down Wing’s thigh, pushing it apart with a silky caress as his mouth lowered to circle the valve cover.

A whimper from the jet, a quiver in the systems, as the cover released. Drift growled, fueled by hunger and lack, glossa teasing around the rim, dipping into the warmth, tasting the sweet lubricant in little almost-sips. Hot air skirled over him, uneven, unsteady ventilations, like the breath of fire from days of repressed desire. He wanted Wing; Wing wanted him.

Sometimes, it really was that simple.

He purred against Wing, bumping his brow against the spike cover, glossa searching for a sensor node, sliding over it, smiling at the sharp, sudden cry Wing gave, arching up against his mouth. The captive hand clutched at Wing’s own thigh. Drift tipped his head up, glossa curling out to draw one of the fingers into his mouth.

Another tremble, and he could taste the fine oil of Wing’s finger plating, his glossa searching up the joints, flicking against the knuckles, to the sensitive gap where the fingers joined the palm armor.

Wing’s free hand found his shoulder, the jet curling up, tugging at him to move forward.

Drift pushed forward on his knees, unhousing his spike, sheathing it in the eager, willing valve, like sliding something home. They both hung, for a moment, mouths parted, gasping at the contact, the joining of their bodies, Drift’s weight propped, straightarmed, the one hand still pinning a wrist, pressing it into the ground.

“Drift,” Wing sighed, his gold optics shining over Drift’s taut, aroused frame.

Drift said nothing, rocking his weight, distant, so that only their pelvic spans touched, his spinal struts curling to sink the spike deep in the valve. His expression was unreadable, optics fixed on Wing’s face, as though drinking in the play of longing and desire on the jet’s face. Beautiful and open, the hard lines smoothing at last, washed away in the surge of their bodies.

Drift’s mouth echoed the quivering movement of Wing’s, as though their systems were interlinked, hardline connected, shaping a cry that he had yet to give voice to, as the overload built between them. Drift wanted to grind his body against Wing’s, but this limited contact—his hand pressing the slim wrist onto the paved floor, his pelvic arch against Wing’s….was all he could bear.

Wing bucked up, suddenly, long thighs wrapping around Drift’s waist, jerking him closer, the overload cresting over them and Drift locked his neck servos, optics fixing on capturing the bliss washing over Wing’s face, even as the body under his shuddered in ecstasy.

He loosened his grip, self-conscious, thumb stroking along the vambrace, any speech drowning in the whir of cooling systems. Words had been used by the two as weapons for so long: Drift didn’t even reach for them this time. The distance had been his doing, all along, and closing the gap, bridging the chasm between them, his doing as well; perhaps a first step on a new road.

All he knew was that he didn’t want to escape. Not this place, not Wing. Prisoner?

Yes, and no, in all the powerful complexity of paradox.