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shadow_vector2012-01-01 06:36 am
Cracking Inside
Fandom: Transformers IDW
Characters: Sideswipe
Rating: PG-13
Medium/Word Count:fic, 1201
Prompt: Sunstreaker, Hunter, redemption
Spoilers: for AHM
Notes/Warnings: for Gen in January ref to canon character deaths
Sideswipe watched as the vital signs on the monitor went flat, ending Hunter’s paltry example of life. He wanted to care. He tried to care. He was watching a life expire, a history end, and he…couldn’t bring himself to care.
Maybe you’re numb, he told himself. As though that were a consolation.
Maybe you’re just numb and it will hit you later. Maybe it’s just too big to take in right now, too monumental.
Or maybe.
Maybe you hate him for what he did to Sunstreaker. Maybe you blame him for it all. Maybe the war sank its claws into you so deep that it will never scar over, staying this dead, scabby numbness forever.
Hunter hadn’t done it, really. Hunter hadn’t started it. But he’d kept pushing into it, kept trying to make it work. Taking a violation, an abomination, and trying to turn it into something like a blasphemy of a partnership.
He found himself envying Sunstreaker who at least was dead. Out of the suffering. Beyond pain, beyond everything. Figures, he thought, bitterly, Sunstreaker beat me there, too.
And what does it mean when you envy the dead?
He looked at the machinery, numb, passive, watching the lights fade from the monitors, hearing the sounds of hydraulic hoses and liquid pumps that had done the work of keeping the wreck that had once been Hunter alive. The machines were dead, too, and still he felt nothing.
Sideswipe hesitated, one last moment, questioning what he’d thought he would feel. Had he expected joy? No. Grim satisfaction, perhaps. That closure the Earth media always talked about. Resolution. The ability to move on.
He felt none of it. And he tried. Because he wanted to move on. He wanted to grieve and move this grieving place inside him off center. Like a shrine he could visit, and mourn, and remember, but not like now, where it loomed all around him like an immense prison, with tenebrous bars and a choking atmosphere of unshed tears.
Maybe Hunter deserved a better death than this. Sunstreaker had at least chosen. “Yeah well,” he said, almost startled by the sound of his own voice, how it seemed to skitter around the cluttered room like a terrified rodent, “sometimes you don’t get to choose.” The words seemed as much for himself as for Hunter who…couldn’t hear them anyway.
He turned to go. Nothing here for him. Probably never had been. Certainly not what he was hoping for. Just a dead human. Just the last living link to his brother.
I hope it hurt, he thought and then hated himself for the thought. Hated that he was so damaged that he wanted to hurt, wanted pain. He knew that Hunter could feel all the pain in the universe—maybe deserved to—but it wouldn’t lessen his one iota.
Nothing would. He was hard and numb and dead.
He retraced his steps down the corridor, stony-faced and silent, feeling something roil behind him as he walked, some darkness of sound, some shadow echo stretching after him, as if reluctant to let him go.
Something caught his gaze, some glimmer of too-familiar long-lost gold. He stopped. Everything stopped—his stride, his blink, his thoughts. Sunstreaker.
No. Of course not. You know better, Sideswipe. You know he’s dead. You saw it. You saw what he did. You knew why he did it. And you hated him for it and yet loved him for it at the same time: the error, the redemption. Sunstreaker never had been one for subtlety or half-measures.
But there: A frame, like Sunstreaker’s, tall and gold and perfect. More perfect than he’d ever seen Sunstreaker—the armor highly polished, undented. The way Sunstreaker had been before the war. Before taking up the Arena games. The way Sunstreaker probably saw himself. Sideswipe was blindsided by memory, staring at the high gloss, the deep gold and crisp angles. Beautiful.
Only…without a head.
He couldn’t imagine how he hadn’t noticed that right off—the great emptiness above the broad shoulders, a blankness where there should be a mouth, curled into a smirk; optics bold and confident. This was an abomination. A travesty. A dececration. Sideswipe…lacked words strong enough to give the sudden swollen pain in his chassis voice. It was wrong. Wrong beyond wrongness.
His mouth pulled down, as though crushed by a sudden onslaught of emotion and a fist balled, hard as his spark, hammering into the golden frame, once, twice, then over and over again, following the frame as it fell, falling onto it, raining blows onto it, sobbing with fury. Sunstreaker was gone. And the humans had done this to him. To their own kind. It was worse than what Jhiaxus had done with Monstructor. It was…evil. And humans were evil and their evil had contaminated Sunstreaker, blackened his golden shine.
And Sunstreaker had left him, and part of the rage that burst like something molten through his cortex was aimed at his brother. For leaving. For holding back. For not being the golden idol Sideswipe had chased his whole life.
His blows slowed, the metal beneath him dented, chipped battered, and his hands balled into shapes no longer full of violence but clutching against despair as his head tilted upward, his vocalizer giving birth to a sobbing, shapeless cry. All he could do was destroy, even in his grief. All he could ever do is damage, hurt and be hurt, spilling his pain across a ruined world.
And it was awful.
He looked down at his hands, their black enamel chipped and dented. Hands that were ugly, that could only make ugliness. He stood up, suddenly ashamed by his own emotion, wanting to turn his back on the destruction, the mangled wreck that had drawn his rage, his violence, simply for looking too much like Sunstreaker.
But, he thought, stepping out into the thin light of winter sunlight, the sun doing precious little to warm his armor, his spark seemed to burn with an inward fire, something like ice cracking under the strain of hot, suppressed tears.
He was no longer numb. No longer frozen. And Hunter had been as much a victim as Sunstreaker, and Sunstreaker had been more of a victim than he would ever admit. And Sideswipe himself was also a victim. And the event rippled out beyond all of them, hurting everyone it touched.
And joining everyone it touched: the same loss, the same pain. His. Hunter’s. Sunstreaker’s. They were dead: he lived. And life burned with a defiant fury in his chassis, racing through his fuel lines.
The anger ebbed, leaving him feeling scoured out and enervated, trembling with long-pent emotion. He looked up into the wan eye of Earth’s sun, his optic filters automatically activating. This was a distant place from Cybertron, a distant place from where Sunstreaker had died, had given his life to repair the wrong he’d done. It was a circle being closed, a drawstring tightening around a sack of loss and pain, that Sideswipe was here, the survivor, the one who would hold the memory, the pain, who would turn their loss into a lesson, their mistakes into redemption.
The one who would never forget.
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