Potentia

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG
IDW
Drift/Wing
for tformers100 table weather prompt sun  little vignette

Drift settled on the night-cool sand, next to Wing. The open air seemed to beckon him, the pre-dawn darkness stretch around him, erasing the distance between himself and the stars.

Stars. Where he needed to be.  This was a false peace, a respite he hadn’t earned.  But Wing was becoming more than a temptation to him, more than an obstacle. He was beginning to want the jet, not just for the sleek body, but for things like this:  these quiet moments, somehow redolent with mystery.  He had no idea what Wing wanted from him, bringing him out here, out of the City. Was it to taunt him with freedom he couldn’t exploit? Was it a test?  A test of what?

Wing shifted his feet, toe plates pushing up mounds of the soft, powdery sand, white limbs almost luminous in the darkness.  His engine pinged in the cool air, and the City’s gateway lay some distance behind them, like a past they were both wanting—at least for the moment—to forget.  “Comfortable?”

Drift shrugged, his spaulder grating on the sandstone behind him.  “Fine.” Compared to the gutters, anything was luxury. And luxury softened. So he found himself almost welcoming the roughness of the stone behind him.  “Why are we here?”

A chuckle. “Philosophy, Drift?”

Drift bridled.  No. And he didn’t know if Wing meant it to sting as much as it did. “Don’t do philosophy.” The thought crossed his cortex again: to attack Wing, take him down, make his escape. One mech, standing between himself and freedom. How Turmoil would mock him.

He felt his mouth shrivel and harden at the thought of Turmoil.  He had been so clear of purpose there, in that ship: escape, fight the war, but on his terms. His terms and no one else’s.  It had burned hot against his chassis, this need to do, to move.

And yet here he was, quiet, almost obedient, sitting on cool, wind-smoothed sand, next to one captor.

A hand brushed against his, sending sand skimming over the backplate.  “I know.”  As if he knew Drift’s thoughts, all of them, as though Drift were made of crystal, easily read. One finger slipped between his two farther fingers. “I like this time the best,” Wing said, his voice soothing in the dimness, and Drift was glad that his face couldn’t be seen, the hard set of his mouth was shrouded in indigo. “It’s not day. It’s not night. It’s this…liminal place and time where anything could happen.” 

“Danger.” Drift remembered this darkness, this unknown span of time.  Stand-to in the Decepticons, where the chances for assault spiked, and before that, in the gutters, it was always this impenetrable formless darkness, this potential that never promised anything good.

“Or,” Wing said, “Something else. Something good. Potential is neutral.”

“Nothing’s ever neutral,” Drift muttered, but he didn’t move his hand away.  He wondered again why Wing brought him here.  To see?  To understand? No, he realized, to feel; he was brought here because Wing wanted him to feel. He rebelled against it for a klik, clutching at resistance with rote-calloused fingers.

“The universe,” Wing said, and Drift could tell by the sound Wing had tilted his head up, taking in the canopy of stars.  “The universe is neutral.”

“And you,” Drift retorted. “You’re neutral.”

A tilt of the golden line of optics glowing in the darkness,  gilding a curve of a cheekplate. “There’s a difference between refusing to take sides among two equal wrongs and being ‘neutral’.”

Drift half-understood, realizing that this was something he couldn’t understand all at once, couldn’t take in as easily as fact. Wing operated under some strange non-factual logic that, like some different grade of energon, required time to break down.

“What do you do, then?” Arguing for the sake of throwing resistance, a habit he couldn’t break. And one that Wing indulged. 

“I do what’s right, Drift.”

“Right.”  Scoffing sarcasm in his voice. “If it were that fraggin’ easy….”

“Yes.” A sound of shifting metal beside him. “There would be no war.”  A pause, and the voice seemed sadder, as if somehow the lack of vision made Drift’s hearing more acute, more sensitized.  “But ‘right’ is almost never ‘easy’.” 

Drift subsided into silence, unable to counter that.  Nothing was ever easy.  He sagged back against the stone, watching as the sky before them lightened, almost imperceptibly, things becoming visible in grayscale—the contours of stones, the undulating waves of sand, shadowless and blur-edged, the darkness lifting from indigo into an ashen black.  And the world seemed to resolve itself around them from the formlessness: sky, ground, horizon, the tissue of clouds, the rounded texture of sand, the hard clean edges of Wing’s legs.    

Light seemed to fill the silence between them, slowly licking color back into Wing’s frame, even as it dimmed the gold glow of his optics. And Drift caught himself looking, not at the sky, streaked coral and purple,  or the ground, sprouting shadows, but at Wing, who seemed the only solid thing in this world, the only presence truly at peace.

Wing’s head tilted, a minute movement, the gold optics finding Drift’s blue like the sun finding its place in the sky.  “And you,” he said, moving his hand, finally, to curl over Drift’s, “are also potential, on the cusp of becoming.” 

The sun seemed to halo around Wing, like an immanence of truth, the optics kindling with trust and hope and faith, and Drift felt the light a thin shell on his armor, yes, but igniting a greater light, a greater heat, within.

Comments

[neverminetohold.livejournal.com]

You write those two like no one else.... Pity that 'right' and 'wrong' are so often determined by the POV of someone or up for interpretation, contrary to what we were taught or want to believe...
Thanks for sharing!

[eerian_sadow]

oh that was beautiful.

[silaphet.livejournal.com]

Your sensuous, psychological, yingyang, WingDrift dance is as always, sublimely symbolic. Anticipating change for the new year, ideally to see this world of death, hatred, ignorance, & apathy give birth to collaboration, tolerance, rationality, & forgiveness. Though faintly futile it feels, Drift inspires a regenerative hope. Love is the greatest agent of change.