![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
niyazi-a.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
shadow_vector2011-12-13 08:31 pm
Night and Splendor
PG
IDW including Spotlight: Mirage
Mirage/Hound
spoilers? Also, I've never written either of them, so...expect fail?
for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
houndxmirage December challenge. Here is the nice art ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
vejirazieldid for the collaboration part of this challenge!
The moonlight sliced hard and cold through the frigid air, cast from a silvery coin that hung in the starshot sky, glistering on the still white drifts of snow. The moonlight picked out crystals of ice in the snow, like stars brought to ground, like an inverse mirror of night on white.
A mirror. Mirage shivered at the thought, brought out here in a feeble attempt to escape the dream that taunted him every recharge.
His footplates crunched in the snow, the only sound in the world, it seemed, the only movement in a white devastation, leaving a trail too easily followed, leading inexorably to where he didn’t want to be.
“Beautiful night.” Hound’s voice was quiet, behind him, to the left. Trust Hound to be out on a night like this, sitting against a black-boughed pine, as though the whole world was a feast to the senses.
“Yes,” Mirage said, blandly. He’d been so good, all these years, at benign conversation, small talk, insincere pleasantries. For his own, he found nothing beautiful about the night. It was stark and naked and alone, everything stripped and barren. No place to hide.
Hound shifted, rising to his feet, one palm flat on the snow. “You don’t believe that.”
Mirage gave a phantom smile, as flickering and bright as the moonlit snow. “No. I don’t.”
Hound sighed. “I wish you could see what I see, Mirage.”
“So do I.” Not insincere, not this time. In fact, the words were so crammed with vehement longing that for a moment, Hound seemed startled.
“What do you see?” Hound asked, gently, stepping closer, snow falling from one hand in soft clumps, ploofing into the glacis of snow that piled up around Hound’s footsteps. “We’ll start there.”
Mirage shrugged, one hand brushing over his chassis, as the moonlight glittered along still-raw edges where his Autobot insignia had once been. “Too much,” he said, his mouth curving into an enigmatic smile. “All the framework of the world, all lifeless.”
“Like Cybertron,” Hound murmured, his blue optics discreetly avoiding the mangled insignia. “When you were back there, with the Swarm.”
“Yes.”
“But this is a cycle,” Hound said. “Things are dead here to come back to life.” He tipped his head back toward the tree he had been leaning against. “And not all things die, even in the darkest time.”
Mirage’s mouthplates pushed together in something that wasn’t quite a frown, nor a pout, but some uncomfortable place in between. Just like himself, he thought: trapped in the uncomfortable place between. “We don’t,” he said, quietly, his voice, always a finer timbre, more silkily tuned than Hound’s rasp, almost honey smooth. “We don’t do either. We die. We don’t come back.”
“Optimus has.”
A snort that sent fine ice crystals floating from his ventilation grille. “He’s Optimus.” The rules didn’t apply to Optimus. None of them.
Hound made an unhappy gesture, unable to refute, but discontent. And Mirage felt smaller for it: that he had ruined the night and its stark beauty for the other. Hound deserved so much better.
And that was an alien thought, Mirage realized, feeling it swell like some hard seed within him, like some drop of water expanding into ice, crystalline, hard and radiant with cold. That he was not good enough for another.
“Mirage,” Hound said, turning an open palm to him, importuning, helpless, knowing only the rough words of the lower classes. But the bridge he was trying to build between them extended halfway, reaching for support Mirage wasn’t sure he could match. The dream haunted him—those optics wide with shock and horror, the mouth a shape of pain and betrayal. Had he done that? Could he? What did it say that his memory purge could even conjure such a thing?
And the words trembled in his vocalizer, needing only the sonic pulse to shape them from impulses to words. He wanted to tell Hound of his dream, to try to close the bridge, but the horror was too great. How could you tell the one mech you cared about more than anything that you dreamed—regularly—of killing him, of laughing at his pain? Of exulting in the downfall of the very cause he believed in so much?
Especially when...you were already marked as a traitor. The marred insignia was only a visible sign of what seemed to shimmer around Mirage like some malign aura, one he didn’t control.
How can you ask to be trusted if you can’t even trust your dreams?
“You’re so loyal,” he said, almost marveling, awed. Before the war, he had had everything and he had not valued any of it as much as Hound valued, it seemed, anything: beauty, friendship, loyalty. And even now, Mirage could see, could feel…almost none of it. He felt crippled, lacking, before the strength and purity of Hound’s devotion. He felt small and mean compared to the trust, and filthy and tangled compared to Hound’s simple, straightforward faith.
Hound gave a self-conscious shrug. “It’s worth everything,” he said, quietly, stepping in. “No sense doing things by halves when the war can kill you any minute, right?”
Was that it? Was that the secret? Mirage had held back, aloof, for so long it was reflex. He didn’t know, only that the silver light of moon on snow, the glittering crystals that eddied by in a stray breeze, cut through his armor seams like a knife through illusion. He’d kept himself apart and it hadn’t saved anyone.
“I have this dream…,” he began, quiet, uncertain. And Hound turned, his fingers twining in Mirage’s, closing the distance between them. And the cup of the night turned, rolling tonight into tomorrow.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Veji's pic is gorgeous!!
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Amazing work here.
no subject
no subject
no subject