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Pain. That was the limit of Devastator’s world. Pain, transmuting to a white-hot desire to lash out, to transfer this agony to someone or something else, as if sharing it would lessen its own burden. So great a pain itstaggered under its weight, that thoughts came to it sluggishly, half-formed. It did not help that its thoughts were already shattered into six pieces, each of its component parts striving for leadership. Each one trying to take command. They fought against each other, body and spark, resisted each others’ control, resisted the idea of lowering their firewalls in any sort of unity.
And as a result they all suffered. And, Devastator suffered, exponentially.
But it helped, it thought—as much as it could think—to do SOMETHING. And right now the something it had to do was the Autobot Superion. They battled in the middle of what had once been a vibrant market area: Devastator’s splayed feet crunching in plasglass from former shop-windows, faded banners in once-bright colors flapped dully in the night air. Almost all sound seemed muffled in the acrid smoke that swirled around them, reaching for the night sky, darkness joining to darkness.
Superion’s strikes were swift and targeted, and though they none of them were overwhelming, they were starting to add up, add too much to the tally of pain. Its thoughts became so muddled, so confused among the klaxons and redline alarms of critical system errors that it felt a roil of something like fear. It was going to lose. It could not even see clearly to strike back. Devastator’s audio caught something, over the roar of its own vortex, whipping from behind its left shoulder.
A pitifully small mech—one of the rotaries—flashing pale silver-grey in the fitful light from weapons flashes and through patches of white and black smoke. The copter dashed in between Devastator and Superion, gun blazing at the Autobot’s central piece.
Superion dodged back, which got him out of the copter’s critical-hit range, but also got Devastator a moment to catch itself and get its own range. It lashed out with one of its arms, bracing its other on the ground, staggering Superion several steps to the right. It owed that copter a favor—that sentiment bubbled up in the small space opened by Superion’s aborted attack. Superion came up from below with a forceful uppercut that nearly snapped one of Devastator’s mandibles.
Devastator growled, shambling forward.
“Listen,” The voice, cool and calm, cut across its mission commnet. “Your enemy is weak where its components combine. Here,” the silver copter traced a red lasing line across Superion’s legs, “and here, and here as well. Strike him there and he will fall.”
A lot of words. Almost too many for Devastator to process, but it saw the targeting laser’s lines like afterimages inviting him. And it felt a sure confidence that attacking those points would work. And it felt a surge of something else, raw, primal, almost gratitude, for the copter. Devastator lunged at Superion, blading its shovel-hands into one of the joins the copter had lased. It pried at the join.
Superion shrieked, thrashing, swinging helplessly with his other arm against Devastator’s shoulder.
Devastator turned its huge head toward Superion’s, eyes blazing. You, it thought, hurt me. You are the one responsible for all of my pain. You. Superion saw something in Devastator’s acid-green optics that caused him to tear itself away, twisting the entire frame, struggling against the join of two mechs where Devastator still held it. Superion concentrated all of his energy on Devastator’s one hand.
The Decepticon roared with displeasure and fury, tearing at the mech that made up Superion’s arm with force enough that it could audibly hear cables snapping. Superion shifted his strategy, now grasping the mech Devastator was trying to tear off, pushing back against Devastator with one foot against Devastator’s powerful leg. To no avail: cables snapped again, and Devastator felt the satisfying whining crunch of yielding metal and the smaller mech tore off in its grasp.
Devastator widened its mouth in what passed for a smile: a rictus, always, based on pain, smiling only when some of that got transferred to another. It spun up its vortex, preparing to crush the amputated hand-mech forever, neutralizing the threat of Superion. It was raising the torn-limb to its mouth when everything happened too fast. Another mech leapt out from the battlefield and threw itself at Superion, forming itself into a new hand, that swung straight at Devastator’s head.
The silver copter darted in again, guns blasting at the join of the new mech to Superion’s shoulder stub. Devastator’s vortex began sucking in with force, jerking the copter off course. Catching the copter right in the path of Superion’s upswing.
With a sickening thud, the copter…stopped. The rotors didn’t spin down—they shut off entirely, the mechanism locking. A spray of fluids caught in the feeble light. No. Devastator thought. That was the complexity of its thoughts. The copter had tried to help TWICE. And Superion had done this. Made worse by the fact—though it couldn’t articulate it—that it had probably been his vortex field throwing the rotary off course that had done the fatal damage.
It crouched down and lunged at Superion, knocking the gestalt over, tearing at his limbs, his face, his torso. Partly heeding the advice to attack the attachment points, partly merely willing to take out its rage and frustration and pain on the other mech’s frame, willing to claw its way right to five separate spark chambers, if that’s what it took. Superion howled, and, summoning the last of his strength, allowed himself to dissolve into components, which dashed off through the darkened night, the ruined city, leaving Devastator kneeling, alone, by the body of the downed rotary.
My fault. The thought, crisp and clear amidst all the smoke and chaos and pain: my fault.
*****
Grindor rebooted. Slowly, he became aware of his body, feeling hesitantly along his sensor net, half fearing what limb he might find missing, but knowing he had to know the worst. If you know the worst, you can deal with it, he thought. It was his first conscious thought. If you know how bad it is, it can’t get any worse. Yay.
The mesh, the repair cradle. He was in a repair bay or station, somewhere. He onlined his optics. Yes, a field repair station—the bare support beams of a portable field cube cut across his vision. And the supports for the repair cradle, holding his weight without causing pressure or stress ot the joints. And…a mech. Large, grey black. Almost his own height.
“You’re awake.” The mech’s overlong arms fluttered.
“Yes,” Grindor said, cautiously. If he’d had the energy, he’d’ve made some ‘grasp of the obvious’ comment.
“We have begun repairs.”
“I noticed. Thank you.” Grasp of the obvious, take two.
“It is our fault you were badly damaged.” Grindor thought back. Was it? He didn’t think so. He remembered the Autobot gestalt, and its weapon and then tumbling through the air, his sensornet blazing with alarms. He certainly didn’t recognize this mech from the city. He was pretty sure he’d remember those long arms, those convex armor plates on his arms.
“It’s combat.”
“We are…sorry you were injured.” Now, that was the third time he’d used that plural pronoun.
“Who,” Grindor asked, “is we?”
“We. Devastator. I am Mixmaster.” Grindor blinked. He knew Devastator was one of the gestalts. He felt that he should have put that together before now.
He struggled upward. “I’ll be fine.”
“We’ve been taking turns watching over you.” Grindor had to turn his head to the source of this new voice, in the doorway of the field repair cube. A yellow mech, his face was similar in style—beetly, low-browed—enough to be recognizable as another of the gestalt.
“That’s unnecessary.” And a little creepy, really, if he thought about it. He tried not to think about it.
“It was necessary. We are to blame for your injuries,” Mixmaster said.
“You are to blame,” the mech in the doorway said, acidly. “If we had followed my plan….”
“This isn’t the time, Rampage.” Mixmaster cut him off.
“It’s never the time, is it? You can’t take control then, or now. You are not in charge.”
“I am in charge,” Mixmaster said, tightly.
“In your own mind.” Rampage signalled over his shoulder. Another mech, green, approached. “He’s on about that again,” Rampage muttered. His hand shifted to play with his treads, dangling from his wrists.
The green mech frowned. “Really, so he’s gotta be in charge of everything huh? Be right here when he wakes up. Convenient.” The green mech shot Grindor a look that made him feel vaguely guilty. Like it was his fault he’d onlined.
“I-I was unaware—“ They were hurting his head with their yelling. Much less with the effort of trying to make this make any sense. Why, uh…how had he ended up with the gestalt?
“Can it, Long Haul.” Mixmaster cut off Grindor’s admittedly half-cooked apology. “We’ve all taken our turns looking after him.”
“Not Hightower.”
“He has too. Don’t make claims you can’t back up, Long Haul,” Mixmaster retorted.
“This was all his idea, anyway.”
Grindor blinked, cursing inwardly. His processor was just not up—quite yet—to handling this influx of new data. He slumped back on the repair cradle. “I am grateful for the repairs,” he said, weakly, knowing they’d probably just ignore him.
“Oh,” Long Haul said, “We have our reasons.”
“Shut up,” Rampage snapped one of his treads in Long Haul’s face. The green mech cursed, rubbing his stung cheek. “You make it sound so fraggin’ sinister that way.”
“Sinister?” Grindor echoed.
Long Haul shrugged. “Well, I’m not a real tactful mech, but you look like you’re maybe not up to flowery language. Way we kinda think of it, we feel bad about your injuries. So we kinda owe you. And we repair you, so… you kinda owe us. Best way to make that balance,” he shrugged, “you know, we interface.”
“What?!” Grindor tried to push himself upright again, his rotors tangling in the repair cradle mesh. Whoa. No way. He was a nice mech. He didn’t just do it. Well, okay, he hadn’t really ever had that many offers. And certainly none so…blunt as this. It sounded a little uncomfortably businesslike.
“Makes perfect sense to me,” Rampage said. “You feel good, we feel good, we all feel good.”
“The only damn thing we’ve agreed on in vorns,” Mixmaster muttered.
“That’s ludicrous!” Grindor blurted, only after the words left, aware that maybe it wasn’t the wisest choice to accuse them of anything. They did outnumber him, and his legs weren’t up to running. Nor were his blades flight ready. “I mean, it’s prostitution.”
“Prosti-what now?” Rampage laughed. “It’s simply another equals sign. You helped us, we helped you. Soooo.”
“It’s not equal at all,” Grindor protested, trying to sound reasonable. He didn’t like the frown on Mixmaster’s face. “There are six of you. You’d be asking me to put out six times the effort.”
“Naaaaaah,” Mixmaster said. “That wouldn’t be fair at all. I mean, then you’d get SIX times the happy. We have a better way.”
“A better wa---oh.”
Mixmaster smirked. “We’ve never done it, but we want to.”
“I’m, uhhh, not even sure that that’s physically possible,” Grindor said, feeling helpless. And more than a little weirded out. And…a little intrigued. How the Pit WOULD that work?
“Neither are we. But there’s one way to find out.”
Grindor did a little math. “I’m afraid I’ll have to decline. You could kill me. You’re…not really…” he paused again, searching for a less accusatory word, “good with decision making in your gestalt.”
Rampage laughed. “You mean we’re stupider than rusted slag.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that….” Well, not to their faces.
“I would,” Mixmaster retorted. “Don’t be nicey-nice with us, copter. We don’t need punches pulled.”
“All right: it’s a legitimate concern.”
“Don’t think so,” Long Haul said. “We all want the same thing this time. That, like…never happens.”
A hell of a risk. But the idea had somehow taken hold in Grindor’s mind. What would it be like? Primus, he’d have to be huge. What would it feel like when it overloaded? Still, curiosity could very easily crush the mech, here.
“Before I can say one way or the other, I’m, uhhh, going to want a better idea of what I’d be getting into.”
Long Haul snickered, ‘You mean, what’d be getting into YOU.”
Grindor felt his facial plates heat. “Yeah, well. I mean…”
“Not sure you can handle it,” Rampage smirked.
“Would you be?” Grindor retorted.
“PIT no.” Rampage’s smirk turned into a friendlier grin. “You’re one brave glitch to even think about it.”
“Or stupid,” Grindor said.
“Hey,” Long Haul joked, “We’re all about stupid.”
*****
Oh dear blazing sparks of my progenitors, Grindor thought as he watched the gestalt combine. They’d carefully set up his repair cradle outside—no way they could fit in the cube—the fresh air and daylight suddenly making this seem like a worse-than-stupid idea. Was there anything worse than stupid? Grindor figured he was about to find out.
“Remember,” Grindor said, “this is just to get a look. NOTHING is happening this time.”
“Kay.” He’d made each of them promise this individually, hoping that when they combined, the unity of that oath wouldhelp Devastator stop. “Here. Look.”
The gestalt retracted its pelvic armor, revealing a spike that at once terrified and…kind of aroused the copter. It was, as he’d feared, more or less in proportion with the rest of Devastator. HUGE.
Well, Grindor thought, oral sex is out of the question. He looked up at Devastator’s chin, looming over him. Uhhhh, both ways.
But whoa: A thick blunt instrument of a spike. More like a club. The cables gnarled around a center core, stippled with sensor nodes. LOTS of them. It had to be…very sensitive.
He couldn’t help himself—damn curiosity—he reached out and touched it.
A huge hand slammed down next to his repair cradle, as the gestalt groaned.
The spike moved like a living thing in Grindor’s hand, the oversized sensor nodes prickling at his hand. He could barely get one hand around it. He probed the nodes, curious. Above him, around him, the gestalt trembled, the spike’s charge sending an ozoney scent into the air, lubricant oozing out, coating his hand, dripping onto his lap. The mouth tried to shape a word, but all that came out was a roaring collection of syllables. Well, what was he going to do?
The gestalt pushed the spike gently—more gently than Grindor would have credited—into the tight circle of his fingers. The combiner’s control calmed him down a bit, and he hated to admit it, but this was really kind of turning him on. He was the only one who had ever done this. And he couldn’t help the thought—couldn’t STOP the thought—of what it would feel like to have a spike this big, this overcharged, in his valve. He found himself rubbing the spike, glossing the undernodes with one hand, while the other continued to smear the lubricant down the device, fingers delving into the crevices between cables.
Devastator’s shovel hands gouged huge bites out of the ground, concrete crackling as it roared into an overload. Transfluid shot against Grindor’s legs, his belly, hard enough to sting, hot and sticky and…Grindor closed his eyes, really trying to deny to himself how turned on he was. Oh, PRIMUS. This was an entire redefinition of ‘too much.’ And he WANTED it.
The gestalt tumbled into its component mechs. Grindor lay, coated, dripping in its silvery transfluid, listening to the buzz of six simultaneous overheated cooling fans. One of them, Mixmaster, crawled up to the cradle, dragging himself up to peer over the top. His breath was still ragged. He took in the spectacle of Grindor, his silvery paint spattered with the lighter silver of the overload. “So…. What do you think?” Grindor quivered as he heard himself answer, “I think we need those repair bots for some modifications.”
*****
The repair bots, Primus bless them, did not ask inconvenient questions. NOR did they question Grindor’s sanity. They took their orders simply, and dragged a portable jigsaw over, a team already scurrying to the machining room to make parts to the new specs. In a solar, they were done: Grindor’s valve aperture had been widened. They had installed a new ring and lining, resetting his nodes in their new locations with a completely unerotic neutrality. By means of the mental pictures with which they communicated, they’d explained the mechanism and code alterations he could make to decrease valve aperture—just in case he ever wanted to get spiked by a normal mech. You know, if this whole experiment didn’t just outright kill him.
He’d had to try very hard NOT to think of the spike during the installation of his new valve. The repair bots had also not been slacking on his other repairs: his arms were fully operational, and his legs were almost at 100% again. He felt well enough to have second thoughts. And well enough to run away if he didn’t feel brave enough to say anything.
He could sense the excitement from the gestalt team. They’d talked about the overload for the full solar, asking him if it had hurt him and describing how amazing it felt. Apparently, it had helped break down some of their resistance, some of their pain and hesitation at combining.
At first he thought that was just the prospect of the experience, but they’d said differently. And who was he to know better than they how their team worked? He found himself quivering in anticipation, even while telling himself how very very wrong this was.
He couldn’t imagine how he’d ever explain this to anyone. They’d think he was a weirdo. A freak. Again, if he lived to tell. He began to wonder if this was some repressed latent suicide urge. He must be glitching. He probably was, but he wanted to at least go all the way. No half-freak. Not Grindor.
The repair bots signalled completion. He turned to Mixmaster, whose turn it was to sit with him. “No time like the present?” he asked. For once, a genuine smile crossed the truck’s face. “Brave little slagger.”
He moved to signal the others. Paused. “We’ll stop if it hurts. Promise.”
“Yeah, I know,” Grindor said. But he was relieved to hear Mixmaster say it anyway.
Fear and desire danced together in his central processor, making him almost dizzy. He watched the combination sequence with less apprehension this time, feeling his valve nodes prime themselves as Hightower’s body shifted to form the pelvic plate again. He still lay in the repair cradle, the best compromise of height and mobility, they’d decided.
Devastator loomed over him, looking down at him for a long moment. “Pretty,” it said, reaching one hand to stroke, clumsily, at Grindor’s engine mount. “So pretty.”
Grindor squirmed in flattered embarrassment. He retracted his valve cover, letting the gestalt bend lower, looking, examining. And sniffing loudly at it. “NEW,” it said. Well, yes. New valve smell.
The gestalt released its spike, already slick with lubricant, and braced its arms on either side of the repair cradle. Looking up, all Grindor could see was the mass of the gestalt’s chest, and the oversized chin.
Looking down, the spike, hovering closer and closer to his valve. He arched his hips up, touching the valve’s ring to the spike. With a groan, Devastator thrust forward, sinking the spike deep in the valve. Grindor cried out. Not in pain. It didn’t hurt. Not…really. It was just…full. He felt full. More than full. Overstretched. Just on the verge of too much to take. The spike’s girth pushed the valve lining taut, contacting all of the nodes
simultaneously, pushing his secondary systems out of the way. Looking down, Grindor could see the shift in his leg cabling and servos, pushed aside to accommodate the spike.
“Stop?”
“Just…just for a klik,” he gasped. Oh, Primus, this was intense. He couldn’t even imagine what it would feel like when Devastator started moving, raising a charge in his nodes.
“Hurt?”
“N-no. Just…getting used to it.”
A weird grating-metal rumble that he recognized eventually as a laugh. “Us too.” Right. He kept forgetting. This was the gestalt’s first time, too. Grindor ex-vented, sharply, trying to bring his racing capacitor under control.
“Okay,” he said, finally. “SLOW.”
“Slow,” the gestalt echoed, and withdrew.
Grindor could feel the valve’s lining shrink back as the spike pulled away. Devastator pulled back until only the tip of the spike remained in the ring of the valve, and then slowly pushed back in, stretching the valve’s lining, rubbing the sensor node, not stopping until the tip was lodged firmly against the valve’s topmost node. “Again?”
“Primus yes!” Grindor breathed. He reached his hands out to grab…something, but the gestalt was just too big. He settled for clawing wildly at the repair cradle’s mesh, as Devastator repeated the whole sequence again, then again, then again.
One hand—Scrapper—moved to brace the back of the repair cradle as the thrusts picked up speed, and the cradle swung Grindor unevenly against the spike. He lay cupped in the giant hand, writhing against it, as Devastator thrust faster. Never too hard, bent over, always keeping a close watch to Grindor’s face for any signals of pain. The oversized nodes carried a huge charge, and Grindor overloaded, hard, his valve’s new mechanisms squeezing at the spike, a cry ripping from his vocalizer. He…couldn’t even make words. Just… a rush of sensation, powerful and fluttering, through his sensor net, through his body.
Devastator paused for a klik, watching, enjoying the spectacle. Pretty copter, it thought. Good. Then a rush of its own combined desires swept over it again, renewed by the arousing spectacle of the thrashing, entranced rotary mech. It grunted, pushing into the valve, the valve made just for it. Just for it. Special. Devastator’s. The pretty copter. It was a struggle keeping this much coherence in its processor, but for once, the struggle wasn’t that of being torn in six different directions. The struggle was against a rising tide of pleasure—not pain—in its sensor net.
Where had the pain gone? It couldn’t remember. It didn’t want to remember. It roared, its vortex cycling on as it overloaded deep in the valve. Its valve. Made just for it.
Against the spike’s wash of fluid, it felt the valve cascade into another series of motions, the copter arching back against its palm, face a mask of ecstasy. The gestalt’s overload was like a pressure hose, hot, scalding fluid washing against his topmost node, kicking his gestational chamber cycler on, making Grindor howl in rapture.
He could feel the hot liquid gush agains the valve lining, pushing its way out around the spike, coating his thighs, the repair cradle, Devastator’s own pelvic armor. Grindor struggled to get his body under control, but shudders—pure, delicious shudders—kept wracking through it. He slitted his optics: Devastator was looking down at him. The face was difficult to read, but it seemed…curious and anxious by turns. When it saw him looking, it asked, “Good?”
“Yes!” he said. No hesitation. Oh Primus how was he ever going to go back to normal interfacing again? “You?”
“Yes,” it said.
“No pain.”
For a moment Grindor thought it was asking him a question. Then he realized it was reporting on itself. “No pain?”
“Not anymore. No pain.” The hand squeezed Grindor across his shoulders. “Rotary. Us. Good team.”
Yeah, Grindor thought. Good team. Oh, Primus.
Next: Grindor's Problem
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Date: 2010-02-27 05:19 pm (UTC)