Various Speedwriting ficlets

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

(It's my week for the newsletter so I figured I'd dump these now so I'd know they've already been in the newsletter so I can skip 'em!)

Title: Caged
Continuity: IDW, post Stormbringer, pre LSOTW
Rating: PG
Characters: Bludgeon, Ultra Magnus, Jetfire
warnings: prompt is 'horror', so...purple prose of the pulp horror variety
wordcount: ~400

Bludgeon…dreamed. It was all he had left to him and that, even, snatches that seemed increasingly unreal. The only thing that seemed real was pain—the hot, scorching pain of the grafts, a fire that consumed nothing but his sanity.

Sometimes, he remembered who he was. Sometimes he remembered a name, a face. He remembered words, a voice, snatches of conversation, emotion. Regenesis, Ore-13.  Polydermal grafting. Thunderwing. Benzene rings, elegant chains of chemicals, looping like garlands, intricate nets.

Webs.  Traps that ensnared him, molecules becoming cages, tesseracts that tracked his every movement, optics in the joints, every angle a malign observer. A silicate matrix:  a crystalline cage of lattice and light that he tumbled through endlessly. 

Sound was his enemy—either silence stretched so yawning wide it seemed to roar, hollowness given voice, or else a rabble, too busy and frantic, everything chattering at once—every circuit, every relay speaking, querulous, insistent.  He could barely hear above them, much less to separate them out, hear their individual complaints. Their torrent of words eroded his own, drowning them in a white froth foam of formless sound.

And the worst of all was the instability of time itself: Day and night, light and dark, flickering fast.  Then, slow, an ancient, dusty crawl that stretched a cycle out endlessly till time seemed to fill the universe to the very margins, a screaming, shrieking void, endless non-death.

Because he knew, more surely than he knew anything, when knowledge itself was ripped from his grasp like a rag in a maelstrom, that he wouldn’t die.  Too many lives, too much power, to do anything other than live, and suffer, falling, like a meteorite blazing across the sky, some dark harbinger that never felt the sanctity of land.

[***]

“Any progress?” Ultra Magnus walked around the barrier of Bludgeon’s containment field.  Since when had Garrus-9 become a museum of horrors instead of a prison?

“None.” Jetfire’s lower wings drooped in disappointment. “We’re still hoping Monstructor holds the key.”

“Key,” Ultra Magnus muttered, looking up and down the rigid frame.  “Problem is, when you open the door, will there be anything capable of stepping out?”

Title: Dataloss
Continuity: Bayverse
Rating: PG
Characters: Barricade, Starscream
warnings: post DOTM and obviously AU
wordcount: ~400

“What are you looking at?”  Starscream sat up, repairbots scuttling off his broad, gleaming chassis, disappearing in the shadows of the Repair Bay.

“You tell me.” Barricade stood, his face in its usual, familiar scowl, which Starscream somehow found suddenly comforting.

“We do not have time for games, Barricade,” Starscream said, his long, taloned hands clutching around the berth’s netting, as the room seemed to lurch and spin around him. 

“Yeah, we do; and not much of a game.” The electrum-plated mouth pinched, irritably. “Might notice you’re a bit…new.”  The chin jutted at Starscream’s chassis.

Starscream frowned, the calipers of his mouth pinching in.  His armor was…unsettingly pristine, missing even the satin burnishing of daily use.  And it explained—too well—the vertigo, the way his toes clutched, stiff and new, on the empty air.  An indelicate curse tore from his vocalizer. 

“Yeah. Pretty much my reaction,” Barricade muttered, shifting his weight to one side. 

“You as well.”  A question embedded in a statement of distaste.

“Yeah.  When Megatron frags up, he frags up good.”

Starscream’s mouthplates ground together, and the taste of metal shavings was sharp and too new on his glossa. “I…do not remember.”

“Yeah.  Total rebuild. Only up to your latest memory storage.”

Starscream pushed to his feet, feeling the new toe-sensors spread, hyper-reactive, on the floor.  A repairbot roll-scuttled around his shoulders, extending one spindly arm to swing down the jet’s back, to make some final adjustments to the thrusters.  “Since you are here, I presume I am in command.”

“You’d presume that anyway,” Barricade groused.  “Always think you’re in charge.”

“Because I always am. Now. Situation report.”  Starscream strode to the door,

“You. And me.”  And the repairbots.  That…was about it.  “Saw how it was going to go, with Sentinel. Managed to send a quickburst.”  Barricade hadn’t survived as long as he had, as one of the smaller Decepticons, without some almost preternatural survival skills.

The confident stride stopped, one foot in mid air, one toe talon twitching.  “That’s…it?”

“….yeah.”  The room seemed to chill, as the realization sank in—the magnitude of what they had lost.  Barricade felt his own talons bunch together. 

“I…do not recall anything,” Starscream said, his voice thin and almost afraid.

Barricade had reviewed the Nemesis’s datacapture.  His own death.  Starscream’s.  And then…Cybertron itself.  “Trust me,” he said, his gruff voice crackling with emotion, “better that way.”

Title: Prism
Rating: PG
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Ultra Magnus, Jetfire, Perceptor, Ironfist, Lightspeed
Warnings: spoilers for most of IDW canon, refs Spotlight Kup, the 'tions, and LSOTW

“There has to be a way.” Jetfire’s palms were flat on the console, as if bracing himself for resistance. “Everything can be replicated.  We simply have to figure out how.”

“Simply,” Perceptor tilted his head. He didn’t know why he was here. This wasn’t his job anymore.

Jetfire frowned, stung. 

“If we had Shockwave’s notes, maybe.” Lightspeed tipped his head at the specimen behind the protective barrier.

Perceptor shook his head. “Shockwave’s notes are uncertain at best. Misleading at worst.” His voice was heavy with some unspoken experience.  Shooting was clean.  Science, by contrast, had all this messiness about it. He never thought he’d prefer a weapon until he realized—really—how lethal his science had been all along.

Ultra Magnus tapped one frustrated hand on his other arm. “There is also a matter of his ethics. Also…unsound.”

“Everyone’s ethics are unsound at this point in the war,” Jetfire said, pointedly.  “We’re not trying to destroy. We’re trying to prevent our own extinction and undo Shockwave’s damage.” 

“I’m not here to quibble ethics,” Perceptor said. Quiet, but insistent.  The targeting reticle glinted off his right optic, a reminder of the very question of ethics, who he had rebuilt himself to be. He didn’t want to be there at all. The sickly yellow crystals in the containment field reminded him too much of Kup. Too much of his failure as a commander, his failure as a friend.  Ethics. No. He didn’t want to talk about ethics.

“The problem is,” Ironfist piped up, from where he squatted on the floor, surrounded by  pile of datapads, “that this is bad science. None of his Regenesis planet seedings actually worked.”

Jetfire dropped down beside him. “That’s a good point. None of the planets produced a stable energon. Only Ore-13 and these.”  The canister, with the yellow crystals Trailbreaker had taken from the planet Kup had been stranded on, glowed malevolently even through the field. Lightspeed kept his distance.

“So,” Perceptor said. “We know standard energon. And we have these two—different—mutations.”  Ore-13, seductively powerful. This stuff…dangerous. Addictive.  Corrupting core processes. 

Jetfire nodded. “What we don’t have, though—“

“Is how Shockwave treated the seed energon.”

“Or adequate data on the environments. We don’t even know what factors to eliminate.”  Lightspeed turned to call up the geological properties. 

“Shockwave was not reckless. Not back then,” Ultra Magnus said. “If he seeded the planets, he must have had the process work, on Cybertron.”

“Yes,” Perceptor said, and his voice had taken on its old, musing tone.  “So the process worked on Cybertron. So it must be environmental.”

“Or transit.” Ironfist chirped. “Some cosmic radiation or anomaly.”

“Or that,” Jetfire said.  His science was slow, methodical—Ironfist always had been better at these greater leaps. 

“Well,” Lightspeed said. “Reverse engineering’s your deal, Jetfire.” 

Jetfire nodded.  “Perceptor. You’re going to work on possible applications.”

Perceptor’s mouth tightened. “Haven’t done this in a long time.”  But it wasn’t a no.  If they could solve what had warped Shockwave’s seed, they might be able to seed Cybertron, or Gorlam Prime. Bring them back to life, life they had had no right to take in the first place.

“Explored a vital and unstable and dangerous energon derivative?” Ironfist said. “New to most of us, too, Perceptor.” A hint of the old teasing tone, but under that, Perceptor could see the tension, as though his reticle gave him greater sight, a sight that homed in on the dent in Ironfist’s chunky blue helm. 

None of them were what they had been, what they wanted to be, and like the crystals, it hit him, they too had been changed by circumstances unknown and beyond their control.

 

Title: Star Stuff
Rating: G
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Cosmos, Jetfire
Prompt: ‘watching a supernova’
I couldn’t resist tying Cosmos and Cosmos, the Carl Sagan series that ignited in me a passion for cosmology and astronomy as a child.  An somehow I made Cosmos angsty. Go me. .__.

“I wish you could be here,” Cosmos murmured, over the comm. “It’s beautiful.” He cycled through his polarizers: UV, radio, visible light.  Each lit up the supernova before him in a burst of arc and color and movement.

He could hear Jetfire’s soft laugh. “I’m afraid ‘beautiful’ isn’t something I can really appreciate.”

“You could.  This, you could.”  He knew it. If they could see what he saw out here, they’d understand.  The universe: vast yet never empty, silent and yet full of noise.  And then shows like this: the death of a star, a magnificent swansong of light and color and sound and energy. 

“I am watching it on your video relay,” Jetfire chided.  “It is fascinating to consider.”

“Consider?”

“Supernovae are responsible for all of the metals heavier than oxygen. Without them we—literally—wouldn’t exist.”

Cosmos dropped his gaze to the green enamel of his chassis.  It was interesting to think about—right now, this star he was watching explode was giving birth to the metals that may, one day, become Cybertronians. 

One day. If they ever made it back. If they ever restored the Matrix.  So many ifs.  Too many. And so many lives lost pursuing them.

Jetfire seemed to be reading his thoughts. For as much as the shuttle pretended to be incapable of emotions, aesthetics, he was awfully good at it.  “Right now,” he said, quietly, “the compression wave can be forcing another star to be born. Life from death. And the metal we’re made of, life from death.” 

“Kind of like the war,” Cosmos said. “We die, hoping others can live.”

“Yes,” Jetfire said, sadly.  Cosmos could feel him clicking through the feeds.  Scanning for metal ions, probably, guessing where they’d accrete. “Only I don’t think the war looks beautiful. From any distance.”

“No.”  Cosmos quelled.  “Seems pointless sometimes. And ugly.” The beauty around him seemed to sour, as though the harmonics were off, the light a little too cutting.

A quiet sound from Jetfire, some tone of guilt.  “What is it like? Out there?”  An attempt to make things better.

“It’s…,” Gone, he wanted to say, but that would be too hard.  Because it wasn’t gone, really. “It’s sound and light and energy. The colors blend together and you kind of want to study the geometry of it, how the shapes are made, the billows and the radiants. And there’s sound, across the spectrum, a thousand different frequencies singing all at once in different melodies, like a symphony.” He felt a little silly, relaying this to Jetfire, but the shuttle was quiet, patient, waiting. “And you can feel the energy wash over you, ripple and eddy behind and around you, ions and electrons flying out like they’re on an urgent mission, then tangling in a dance too complicated to follow. And it’s all around you and you’re part of it, color and sound and energy. It’s like…belonging.” 

“Belonging,” Jetfire echoed, and the word seemed to crackle over the comm line with some heavy longing.

                                                                                                                     

Title: The Heist
Rating: G
Continuity: TFPrime
Characters:Breakdown, Knockout,
Prompt: A city during snowfall
pointless semi-crack.  A few years ago I heard a local news anchor report the usual story that takes place this time of year: that someone had stolen the Baby Jesus from some church’s Nativity Scene.  The anchorman quipped that “It isn’t officially Christmas until someone kidnaps the baby Jesus.”  Poor taste, yes.  Yet…somehow true.

It was quiet, but not, the falling snowflakes giving a soft, almost imperceptible hiss to the air.  There was no wind, not really anything more than a lick of air that cast the snowflakes like falling sequins under the streetlights.  Breakdown hunched on his tires, his engine pinging as it cooled, too aware of the tire tracks leading directly to his spot by the curb.

Everything left trails here, like the fraggin’ weather had it in for stealth. Not that Breakdown would mind, honestly, if it came down to shooting. They’d been hiding for too fraggin’ long on this place. He was a warbot, not a spy.

//Hurry up, Knockout.// Scrap, he could feel ice building up from the road spray on his undercarriage. Why did humans use salt? It stung.

//Brilliance can’t be rushed, Breakdown.//

A disconsolate grumble of the engines. //Knew I shoulda done this one.//

//You? You lack the right subtlety, Breakdown.  Blunt is good for some things,// a bit of a salacious purr, //but not for missions of delicacy.//

//Delicacy. More like theft.//

//So judgmental, Breakdown.//

//Just don’t like scrap to be overcomplicated.// Enemy. Meet hammer time.  That’s how Breakdown liked it. Not this sneaking around stuff. Starscream better have a reason for this.

//Overcomplicated’s my middle name.//

//…you have a middle name?// How did that even work? ‘Knock Overcomplicated Out’?  Wow. Talk about overcomplicated.

A long pause. //Never mind.//

Yeah, he didn’t want to mind, either.  //Come on! My brakepads are contracting.//

//Oh? Have to warm them up for you later.//

That was a warming thought, but warm thoughts were only so effective against the stuff slowly accumulating on his windscreen.  //Later better be pretty soon.//

//Fine, fine. I’m on my way.// 

Breakdown grumbled, waiting until Knockout appeared at the yard’s gate, holding up a small…something.

//Success!// A little self-satisfied purr. // Of course.//

//What’s that thing supposed to do, anyway?// Breakdown revved up his engine.  Finally! 

//Frag if I know.  Didn’t read anything on my scans but this Christmas holiday is all about this thing, so, it’s got to be important.//

//Kind of dumb for humans to leave it lying around without any security. I mean, no gun turrets or anything.//  Breakdown pulled away from the curb, Knockout falling into line behind him, carefully lining up his tires to ride Breakdown’s treadlines.  

//No one said humans were smart,// Knockout said.  //Now, let’s get back to base and warm up. The fun way.//

Breakdown had a few more complaints to file about this mission, but, yeah. They could wait. 

 

Title: End
Rating: PG-13
Continuity: Bayverse, DOTM
Character: Starscream
Prompt: Crossing over
Warning: canon character death

Agony. Red hot pain, but that was nothing that a warrior of Starscream’s stature hadn’t confronted, toes dug, a thousand times. Worse than that, though, was the bitter, brutal pain of losing. Losing everything.

Millions of years and it was all gone.  All of it. All his life, all his memories.  All those complicated knots of alliances and enmities. Unraveling around him as he fell, crashing to the reeking pavement. 

He was dying.  And he knew it and he fought as he had always fought: on reflex alone, the ferocity of a mech who had something to prove to the universe, to himself.  He fought beyond the ability to fight; he fought when his actuators and servos depleted of charge and nothing moved.  He fought with every filament of his frame, every pulse of his fading spark.

It couldn’t end like this.

But it was. 

And it was ending not for him but for everyone.  Everything, lost. 

A warrior’s death, he could have handled. A sacrifice, he could have borne.  But as he lay, his spark screaming in desperation and pain, time seeming to stretch, etiolated in both directions, past and future seeming to dash tauntingly out of his reach, he saw the end of it all. Cybertron, gone, destroyed in an act of ultimate genocide. 

Killing a lesser species was one thing: The Autobots were murdering their own, annihilating their kind, their home.

If he could cry out, he would have screamed. As it was he became one living shriek of outrage and horror, his nonvoice echoing the sudden agony of a million sparks snuffed out, a history wiped clean with a harsh swipe. 

It was a horror beyond horror, and even the universe seemed to recoil, like a chasm opening up.  It was death on a scale enough to shock the deities themselves.  And Starscream, caught between life and death, was the only witness, strung between his memories and the blankness of light, that space beyond space.  Horror battered his defiance and he staggered beneath its weight, even as part of him could hear, from some future tinnily echoing back at him, cheering humans, exulting Autobots, celebrating the end of a great race. 

Starscream was a warrior, obedient even to orders he knew to be foolish, fierce and cunning. Oh, he had killed.  He had exulted in victory.  But it was…beyond diseased to rejoice in the destruction of an entire planet, the reduction of their kind to a handful—a chosen handful—of Autobots. His kind, their history, would be forgotten, or repainted as some black evil, when all they’d done, when everything they’d done from the start had been to save Cybertron. Save their kind. 

It was a final, crushing defeat, and Starscream’s spark gave a final gutter before dropping black, energy releasing to the bitter darkness of death. 

Comments

[arirashkae.livejournal.com]

Re: The Heist

I love how 5-10 minutes of research (assuming they didn't get sucked into wiki-walking) would clear all these misunderstandings up, but because they're so locked into "It's important, so it must be a weapon," after eons of war..... XD