Dawnsong

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG
IDW DoOP, MTMTE/RID
Perceptor, Red Alert
Spoilers for the series. 
Part of a trade with wicked3659

For a long moment, the only sound Red Alert  heard was the drubbing of his own fuel pump. ‘Conflict avoidant’ had been Rung’s official diagnosis. Well, of this symptom, at any rate.  So when Bumblebee and Rodimus had torn into each other for the fourth time, Bumblebee waving his cane dangerously in Rodimus’s face, Red Alert had had, literally, all he could take. 

He pushed past them, out into the corridors of the downed ship. He just needed to get out. Just for a few moments. The air in there was choking him, thick with animosity and smelling of resentment. Just a few vents of air, just a few kliks of silence. That was all he needed.

He hoped.

“Halt.” The voice was quiet, but with the leaden weight of authority. Red Alert stopped, hands up, his racing fuel pump tipping him almost into panic. He had to force his ventilations calmer as the other red mech slipped out of the shadows, long bore of a sniper rifle raising to the cloud-raked indigo sky. The night itself felt closed in, no stars in the clouded bowl of the night, and only the dim sentry lights of the new settlement glimmered in the distance, like the stars fallen to ground.

“Perceptor,” he said, for his own benefit. Naming things calmed him down, gave him some illusory sense of control, that he knew, at least, what was going on.  Perceptor. Rifle. Wall. Sky. He cycled a vent.

“Were you leaving?”

Red Alert shifted from foot to foot.  He hadn’t really made that much of a plan. “Just…I needed to be out of there.” His optics flicked back inside the half-sunk hull of Kimia. 

Perceptor’s mouth moved, minutely. “Arguing.” A question, but also a highly educated guess. Rodimus and Bumblebee had been arguing pretty much since that day they’d lost Optimus. 

“Yes.”  A shrug. “Should be used to it by now.”  The new normal.  Rung had told  him that phrase was key to his therapy. New normal.  That he couldn’t hold onto things the way they’d been, that that kind of security was thin and unstable.  New normal. 

He hated it, new and normal. “Getting offshift?” He tried to steer conversation off himself—thinking about what Perceptor might be thinking, looking at him, was devouring his composure. 

A wry headshake. “Wasn’t on shift.” A shrug. “Old habits die hard.”

Red Alert nodded.  Too hard. 

Perceptor gestured with his helm, back the way he’d come.  “Come with me.”

Red Alert followed, curious, up the slope and the hastily-installed rungs and railing on the ship’s skin, to a projection, what had once been one of the engine manifolds, and now served as a sort of ersatz sentry lookout.  Perceptor scanned the darkness, his reticle whirring, as though it could penetrate the slow, late hours of the night. 

A streak of color—dirty orange, a smudged, bruisy purple, tinted one part of the horizon.  Day? Night? Red Alert had lost track of time, and the inability to name unsettled him. His chrono was off—they all were—after the magnetic explosion that had ended the war, destroyed the monster of the thing from the Dead Universe. 

That thing had no name.  Red Alert didn’t want it to have one, wanted it to stay unknown.

“Sunrise,” Perceptor said, quietly. His expression was unreadable in the darkness, the smudge of color too dim to cast light on his faceplates. “Last time I was here, never thought I’d see sunrise on Cybertron again.” 

Sunrise.  Red Alert clung to the safety of the name, as a thing that oriented him in time. Pre-dawn. Stand-to.  Cybertron.  His shoulders unhitched.  “Or life,” he said, stepping toward the balustrade, pointing at the neutral settlement.  “Real life. Not the Swarm or Centurion droids.”

A nod, and Perceptor lowered his rifle, resting its butt against the ground. It was a slow move, deliberate, and Red Alert wondered what it meant.  Because all moves had meaning, all gestures, they all added up to something. 

Or he wanted them to, to calm his restless anxiety.

“Surprising to think that so many had survived the war,” Red Alert said. Below them, what Sideswipe had dubbed the Nail camp began to stir to life—more lights blooming, mechs beginning to move to the communal mess tent, the soft, distant clank of an energon converter kicking on.  And somewhere, someone singing, an airframe’s paean to the rising sun.

“Survived,” Perceptor said, “and less damaged.”  

“New,” Red Alert said, and the word tasted sharp and pungent on his glossa.  “A new beginning, a new chance for this place.” 

A nod.  And they listened for a long moment to the singing, even as they could hear an angry thump from somewhere behind them, someone on the ship slamming a fist into a wall in frustration.

“Hope they do better with it than we did.”

“Could hardly do worse.” His optics lowered, from trying to see the notes of the song in the morning air, the light now spreading tentative grey fingers over the world, to his own hands, battered, dented.  Ugly hands, he labeled them. Hands that had killed. Hands that had done wrong, believing it was right. Hands belonging to a spark that could never sing like that.

Perceptor’s, mouth worked for a long moment. “Could always squander a second chance.”

“I don’t think they will,” Red Alert said, his voice barely a whisper.  “But I don’t know if there’s a place for us here.” The ground itself seemed to reject them, tentacles crowding around Metroplex.  And the Nails…didn’t want their laws, their rules.  And Red Alert, as much as he wanted—needed—order…couldn’t blame them.  Look at what their rules had done: the evidence was all around them, in the air they breathed, still thin and new, the tainted ground that blamed them at every footstep.

“It is a home,” Perceptor said.”But I do not know if it is our home, any longer.”  A rise of one shoulder, uncomfortable. “We fought for Cybertron. But we have no right to force her into our image. And our methods…?” His fingers played, idly, over the muzzle of his rifle.  “They are the methods of ending. Not of beginning.”

The song below them swirled to a high note, holding it out, one vocalizer filling the air with the tone. They could feel it resonating in their frames, deep down, through their own grey spark weariness. And Perceptor’s words fell among that sound like wise rain.

Comments

[wicked3659.livejournal.com]

Oh I loved this! Such a bittersweet note to them here, I like that it's Perceptor who has the words of comfort for Red who is clearly still struggling. Thank you for this :) I am going to post mine shortly from my new phone! <3

[kankon.livejournal.com]

This is fantastic- the unstable edge to Red Alert, and bittersweet to Perceptor just weaves into this. Really interesting point about the Nails not wanting their laws and how the Autobots (in Perceptor's opinion) aren't worthy of Cybertron anymore. Love eet!