Meridian ch 5

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

R
IDW Meridian AU
Deadlock, Wing, Megatron
mindfucking and angst.

Deadlock woke, too early, long training jerking him awake.  Wing still lay over him, like a warm shield, wings flopped open over him, the helm nestled against his shoulder, cheek on his chassis. The jet’s spike had slipped from his valve, transfluid slicked and sticky down his thighs in a drying silvery smear. 

Deadlock fought the softness welling up around his spark. No. Wing was his, Wing’s desire served his. Nothing more.  He’d wanted last night, wanted to taste some of that sweetness, wanting to soothe the ache and rage left from Megatron.  Old memories, stirred up like silt, clouding his view. And Wing’s gentle movements had rocked him, soothed him. The release, to him, was just that: a letting off of tension, a delicious, delirious gentleness, a removal of pressure and pain.

Wing shifted atop him, a soft whimper wringing from his vocalizer, and his face flickered into an expression of something like pain.  Deadlock reached up, carefully, stroking down the cool cheek.  The gold optics flared to life, and for a klik—half a klik—they were the warm, open optics he remembered.

They clouded, abruptly, the gold going brassy and dark, the lower mouthplate pushing up in worry. The pang of regret was bittersweet.

“Dri-Deadlock.”  Wing shifted back, almost scrambling off Deadlock’s body.  Deadlock caught him under the upper arms, hauling him back for a  kiss that started hard, an intrusion, a possession, and ended, gentling against the other’s mouth.  Deadlock pulled away, drawing the worried lip-plate out between his dentae, his own mouth curled into a smile as though stabilized by Wing’s hesitation. 

“Wing,” he whispered, his lips touching Wing’s at the first consonant.

The silence between them was pregnant with the dead past, an unspawned future.

[***]

“Do you remember…,” Megatron tapped the mapboard in front of him, calling up archival data.  An old battle, so long that it took almost two kliks before Deadlock’s memory made the match. 

He nodded, mouth tight.  How sure he had been back then.  But no.  Wing had rattled him, but not shaken the foundation. That foundation had been laid millennia ago, in the gutters of Cybertron.  Nothing could shake that: a lifetime of pain and humiliation, deprivation and contempt. A few short weeks among pacifists barely sloughed the accreted surface.

“Turmoil.” 

Deadlock felt his shoulders shift, the Great Sword’s weight moving against its attachment points.  The challenge he knew was coming, had known since he disabled Turmoil’s ship, commandeered the escape pod.  The question that called everything into question.

“Turmoil,” he echoed.  A space in time, Megatron giving him time to speak before he pressured. “Coward. Cautious.” 

“He was winning.”

“I was winning,” Deadlock snapped. “I was.”

A tilt of the optic under Megatron’s heavy helm and some of the hardness on his face fell away.  “Insisting on credit, Deadlock?”

“No.” His fists balled—the same fists, he’d swear it, just under white armor now.  His back struts stiffened at the slight. “Just don’t want to give credit to someone who hasn’t earned it.”  An important distinction, one Deadlock would notice. 

Megatron sighed. “I sent you out there to win.”

“I did.”

“Strategy, Deadlock.  There’s a larger picture.”

“Victory. All that matters.” The blue optics blazed, fervid, intense.

“Not if we stretch supply too far. Not if we expose our flanks in the process.”  Megatron’s voice had the tone of one gathering up the threads of long-frayed patience. “It’s not like on Cybertron.”

Deadlock’s mouth took a petulant set. “War is war.”  

“No.” Megatron leaned forward. “Combat. That’s what you know.  You do not know war.”

The mouth flattened. “I do my job.”

A smile flirted with the corners of Megatron’s mouth. “You do.”  He let slip a small compliment. “Very few better.”

Deadlock bridled, as though the compliment almost burned.  “What do you want?”

Megatron smiled. “Same thing I always have, Deadlock. Everything.”

[***]

“Wing.” Megatron said the name slowly, almost intoning it, as though a bit perplexed and tasting  the name like some old vintage, some wine of Cybertron he wasn’t quite sure hadn’t vinegared.

The jet stood, silent, head unbowed. Not arrogant, not insolent, merely…curious.  Megatron hadn’t been looked at like that in a long time.

He wasn’t sure he cared for the experience. 

Megatron leaned forward, optics blazing the same malevolent red that had illuminated the churned up ground of the arena, all those aeons ago.  “Do you remember me, little jet?”

“Yes. From Cybertron. I remember.”  The voice was leaden with some dense untangleable emotion.

A flat smile, refusing to be gratified. He sat back.  “One of the Knights of Cybertron,” he said, amused. “I should be honored.” 

“We no longer call ourselves that.” Wing’s voice was quiet, almost reverently hushed, as though talking of sacred things.

“You no longer call yourselves anything.” Megatron’s smile grew barbs.  “Or have you forgotten. You are the very last of your kind.”

A tremor passed through Wing’s frame, a head-to-footplate movement, as though Megatron’s words were the sharp shock of the wrong current.

Megatron laughed.  “The last of the Knights.” He let his optics roam down the white frame, clearly measuring, clearly finding Wing lacking.

“Yes.” The word was barely audible, a sound wrung from despair’s pith. Wing sagged as though the admission had exhausted him.

“And look at where your ideals have gotten you, Wing.”  Megatron skimmed his hand, palm up, in a gesture to take in the entirety of the flagship. 

For a long moment, Wing wavered in silence, his mouthplates working with emotion. “And you,” he whispered, finally. “Where have yours gotten you?”

A panoply of emotions on the battle-burnished face, before settling into a smirk. Megatron leaned back, crossing one ankle on the opposite knee, one fingertip idly drumming the arm of the command chair.  “You tell me.”

[***]

Wing staggered back to Deadlock’s quarters. There was no comfort there, and only the very thinnest veneer of familiarity. Though even that, he knew, was illusion. 

The last of the Knights.  The last.  Betrayed, although unknowing, lost by your hand.

What have I done?  The deepest, most agonizing wrench of despair: What have I done?  What have I wrought through my arrogance and blindness?

The answer was too enormous to put into words, simply a huge, formless presence, flashing like lightning with images once-familiar, once so well loved: fellow Knights, whose faces he’d never see again.  His quarters, and all the fond detritus of peace.  The beautiful parks, the library—things he had helped make, things he had saved, now lost, shattered, broken, gone.

He collapsed to the ground, the door whooshing shut with an impassive modesty behind him. One hand moved to cover the seemingly aching void of his spark. What had he done? A question whose answer required more courage than he had to face, much less answer.

Failure, at last.  Weak, as Deadlock had always suspected. Wing curled around the hard hot knot of agony, sobs wringing from some place deep in his body. 

He had never felt so lost, not even in the flaming wreckage of Altihex. He had done this. His trust, his judgment had damned them all.

It was perhaps only justice that he alone survived.  He did not deserve the companionship of the Knights in death, and his life, every cycle, was a constant reminder, an earned torment, a repudiation that he had richly earned. 

He bowed before the rightness of it, that his punishment was to live.

Comments

[playswithworms.livejournal.com]

;_; *wibble*

(also, love the phrase "fond detritus of peace" ^^)

[birdiebot.livejournal.com]

So much angst! :3

[silaphet.livejournal.com]

poor Wing. Pain, penance, despair. Serenity buckling under the assault. How to keep fighting? ... Why to keep fighting? ... such a compelling storyline

[mmouse15.livejournal.com]

I love how you write this story.