"No Escape"
Apr. 1st, 2012 12:16 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
niyazi-a.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
shadow_vectorTitle: No Escape
Fandom: Transformers, IDW
Characters/Pairings: Perceptor, Kup, Drift
Rating: R
Warnings: violence, major character death, psychotic break, suicide
Prompt: for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
dark_fest any/any you can’t escape yourself in the dark
Summary: Perceptor struggles with what he has become.
It was that hour of the night when Perceptor most missed science, the cool consolation of a problem to solve, a chemical to untangle or a theorem to trace over like water wearing over a familiar, soothing stone, when time seemed to defy its confines, stretching into a yawning maw that threatened to swallow all the good he tried to do, leaving him alone with the nothing of what he was.
Defiled. Blaster’s words, the Voice’s first, blunt, uncensored response to his rebuilt frame. That was the first of it, but not the worst—the word that seemed to tumble through his half-conscious cortex like a stone down a well, striking the sides as it fell. Defiled. Defiled. Defiled. An echo that seemed to resonate to his very core, a judgment, a condemnation, a rejection of what he had become.
He lay, staring at the blankness of the ceiling, studying the impassive tiling, the rivets he knew so intimately from so many nights spent like this, feeling pressed down, compressed against the berth, flattened, suspended between a regretted past and a lost future, and achingly, achingly alone.
But it was either this: cold, brutal reality, cobwebbed with the past, or a recharge fraught with dreams: reality wretched and wrenched, unmoored from reason: the Swarm, gibbering and clawing at him, devouring Drift, clawing at Mirage, leaving long bloody gashes on Springer’s armor. Or the shambling horrors on Garrus-9: half insane Decepticons, sanity shredded by sadism and despair, only capable of one thought: killing. Or Kup, raddled with insanity from the Regenesis crystals, killing the rescue team, one by one, that Perceptor sent after him. He could still remember Springer’s look of disappointment, Siren’s contempt. His own ineptitude should have stared him in the face by then.
He had buried himself—hidden, really—in Drift, wrapping the mech and his complicated problems around him like batting, like a shield between himself and reality. And he had plunged into Drift so deeply, so intensely that even Drift had pulled away, his need to hide himself too much for the other mech to endure.
And Drift had left, and these hours became empty again, long stretches even more painful than before, magnified by the loss. Drift hadn’t said anything, no blame, no rejection. But he didn’t need to. The humans had an expression: actions speak louder than words. And his departure spoke…deafening volume, lining the silence with jagged, raw, obsidian edges.
It was all Perceptor could do to stare at the ceiling, willing the chrono to tick over, counting and counting, feeling every decaklik like a weight of stone on a cairn. Time…hurt.
[***]
“You look like Swarm vomit,” Kup said, dropping onto the seat across from Perceptor.
Perceptor shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said, knowing the lie for a lie, not daring to speak louder than a whisper, for fear the lie would shatter the air.
“Slag,” Kup said. “You think you can pull anything over on me?” He reached into his subspace, pulling out one of his cy-gars.
Perceptor shrugged, dropping his gaze to his energon cube. “I’m not trying to.”
Kup chomped on the end of his cy-gar, the corners of his mouth curling into a grin. “Still mooning over that mech, are you?”
“No.” Yes. Perceptor shook his head. Yes, but it wasn’t the whole story.
“Could comm him, you know.” A shrug. “Seems like the type that might need to be hunted down, Drift does.”
Another shake of the head. “It’s not Drift. He has a right to his own life.”
A sharp wink, and he realized too late he’d admitted something. “So, not Drift. Then what is ‘it’?”
“Nothing.” Too quickly, even to his own audio.
“Almost as bad a liar as Drift is,” Kup said, mildly, holding the cy-gar aside, to take a long, savoring sip of his energon.
“I’m not lying.”
“Lying to compound a lie.” Kup tsked. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s one thing, Perceptor. But…frag. We been through too much.”
“You have,” Perceptor said. He’d spent most of the war in the belly of Kimia.
Kup’s turn to shake his head. “You oversaw the rebuild, that whole project.” He tapped his chassis, grinning broadly, the wide smile of a war hero. “You made me who I am today.”
Too true, and Perceptor shuddered, glad of the reticle masking one of his optics. It was a horror to him that he had worked on Kup, installing that control protocol for Prowl. It had seemed like the only option, at the time, the only way, but…had it been or was that merely his rationalization?
Or worse, had he enjoyed it? The idea of control, that science could master the war hero, that there could be some restraint, at last, on the juggernaut of Kup. Was that it? Envy of the popularity and charisma he knew he’d never have?
He scrubbed a hand over his face, hard, hoping the pain would drive away those thoughts. “No,” he said, quietly, defying himself as much as denying Kup’s misaimed compliment. Still, the image wouldn’t leave him: the sinister, almost amused silence from the other end of the comm line, Prowl knowing he had won, using silence as the resounding peal of triumph.
“Still got your modesty, I see,” Kup cracked. He poked one finger at Perceptor’s hand. “You gonna drink that, or wait for it to ferment?”
He looked down at the cube without appetite. “Not hungry.”
“Yeah, heard that before.” Kup leaned back, crossing one ankle over the knee in that ‘ain’t getting’ rid of me that easy’ pose. “Letting your cortex override your fuel gauge.” A wink. “Again.”
Perceptor brought it to his mouth, forced a sip—flat and stale—over his glossa, aware he was being studied. And suspecting, beyond that, that Kup was not the only observer. What had Prowl said? When Kup spoke, no one would even see Prowl’s mouth move.
He shuddered, mouth pulling in distaste. Who was speaking now? Who was looking through those blue optics? The smile was Kup’s, easy and confident, but whose was the hardness around the optics? And was there even a way to tell?
He forced his face neutral: the flat mask he had taken since Turmoil’s ship, since he’d…died and been reborn of himself, reforged from the war and his mistakes, tempered by regret. Perceptor took another sip of the energon, ignoring—forcibly—the sour flatness of its taste.
“That’s better,” Kup nodded. “So, you wanna talk about it?”
Perceptor made his tone light. It didn’t matter if it was convincing or not: anything, even a flimsy lie to cover the naked truth from Prowl’s optics. “Simply a bad memory purge.”
“That all?” Was the question friendly curiosity? Was it a leader probing his troop for soundness? Or was it something more, some fishing hook into Perceptor, trying to find a rein to control him?
As though Prowl didn’t already have enough of those. “Of the past. But it’s the past.” The past that made him who he was.
“Yeah?” Kup said.
Honest curiosity, or probing? A call for trust, or a deceit? Perceptor felt the ground seem to shift under his feet, everything skewing off square as the simple question punctured the illusion. It was the past, but it bled seamlessly into his present, and he felt an unfamiliar edge to his voice, something dark and hard rising to the surface. “Turmoil’s ship.”
A flicker of…something. Surprise? Dismay? Whose? But then the war hero smile snapped firmly in place. “What matters is that you’re here now, right?”
No thanks to you. No thanks to you or any of your Wreckers who left me to die. Everyone else was worth saving….but me.
He wanted to be angry. He wanted to feel a surge of righteous rage, wanted that dark, stirring thing inside him to burn into a clear blue flame of anger. But it wouldn’t resolve into anger, and every time he tried to clutch onto it, form it into a shape, it went foggy and strange, slipping through his fingers, to swirl on the edges of his consciousness like some murky mass, heavy and slow.
“Yes,” he said, quietly, bowing his head in something almost like defeat before the compromised optics, the warrior’s mask on the mastermind’s puppet, before the lie of what he had become.
[***]
It continued. Life always does. In the most horrible ways, Perceptor thought.
Day marched inexorably lockstep after day: mission after mission, the violence blurring together into a muddy smear of pain, anticipation, cyberdrenaline, and exhaustion. But it grew, that nasty thought, the dark tendril of suspicion. He was watched: always. Under surveillance. Prowl knew he was weak, fallible. Prowl suspected. He’d been the weak one back on Turmoil’s ship: so weak that he hadn’t been worth rescuing. And he was still the weak—but for the moment necessary—link.
He sat, stretching the day late into night, his rifle disassembled across his bunk as he checked every component for wear marks, strain, fatigue. There was no need: Perceptor had always been good—the best—at machining. He might not have had Brainstorm’s cunning or Ironfist’s joyful creativity, or even Jetfire’s careful reverse-engineering. But he knew metal, better than anyone on Kimia, and he knew mechanics deeper than a medic. Metal spoke to him, in soothing tones, showing him its strains, offering up its chemical bonds, wedding itself into new alloys.
Perhaps, he thought, grimly, that was what he’d wanted all along: metal’s acquiescence. Which he never got from another mech—their armor and parts inhabited by some animating spark that made them liminal: metal and not, machine and more.
He felt like a machine himself. Or wanted to—mere machines were free of this burden of history, of a past of failure and disappointment. Old metal could be renewed, reforged, and he had tried to do the same to himself.
And. If he were honest, had failed.
He shook himself, realizing that he’d slowed, his hands no longer moving over the bolt’s mechanism, frozen in air as though half-glitched. Prove them right, he thought, tightening his palm over the bolt. Prove what a failure I am. How weak and unworthy.
And he was weak, also, in this: he ached for Drift. Just something about the way the mech would be, as though he exuded some calming influence, could soothe Perceptor with his very presence. Another way you used him, Perceptor thought.
Another reason he left.
He called up Drift’s private comm code: the swordsmech had given it to him, murmuring it in his audio, in that last moment, as he turned to leave. Only the code: no blandishments, or invitation to use it. Perhaps it was invitation enough, but Perceptor had hesitated using it, fearing that it was his clinginess, his need, that had driven Drift away in the first place, afraid to presume the rules.
And now? It became a self-punishment, to see how long he could hold out, to hold the code in front of him, and struggle with the frantic urge to execute the call function.
He needed it this time. He executed the command, his spark swelling as he heard the soft stretching static of the line stretching over relays to connect. And then it hit him: What would he say? How would he even start, much less account for his silence? What pitiful excuse would he use for this sudden comm?
No. He couldn’t.
He sighed, erasing the code from his process queue, glad only that he was alone, unwitnessed in his folly, bending back over the gun, sliding the bolt in its carrier, moving the pieces, lubricating with cold graphite. Simple mechanical repetitive work. All he was good for.
[***]
“--ceptor.” The voice pulled him out of recharge.
No, not a voice, an echo of a voice, like a scream trapped in an empty space, a ghost’s summoning. Nothing more.
He jerked awake. Again, he thought. Again. Another memory purge, but this one foggy and dark and somehow all the more terrifying for not being as vivid and garish and ugly. The ceiling seemed far away, almost heaving at him, the rivets staring down at him like blind eyes. The air seemed thick with some scent he couldn’t trace, acrid and sharp, like rancid energon, burnt insulation.
He pushed up, through the heavy air, each movement an effort, forcing his way to the door.
It opened into a sodden, dense silence, his own footsteps seeming muffled but huge, pounding his audio. He couldn’t shake the strange feeling that something was wrong: his audio had a strange hiss, that seemed to send random static over his video feed.
“Perceptor.”
He froze, whirling, seeking the voice’s source. It seemed almost beside him, right next to him. But there was no one there, just a ringingly empty stretch of corridor.
He hiked a vent of air, slipping down the hallway, straining to hear through the strange, echoing hiss. Some sort of hull breach? Something, something was very, very wrong.
A sound, ahead of him. A scrape of metal that seemed sinister and echoing.
“Where are you?” That voice again.
Another swing around. No one there.
And then he realized. A dream. It was just a dream, a memory purge, horrible as the others, playing the same melody of isolation and violence and despair, just with a different counterpoint. A dream—the empty ship, the strange, ghostly voice taunting him. Just another dream.
A dream he was helpless to leave. And he knew there was no point, knew this from the hundreds of dreams like it he’d endured. He couldn’t leave, would be trapped in this memory loop—and he recognized the memory now, the Xantium—until he finished it out, let the narrative unspool: the Swarm tear at Drift, or Turmoil shoot him, gloating over his falling frame. He knew he’d wake, if only he let the horror play out.
He moved forward, down the corridor, knowing the scrape of metal as a clue he had to follow. There was no need for stealth, but even so, he moved in silence, his hand pulling one of his pistols.
Why do I have my pistol?
Prepared, he thought. So I can be prepared. It’s a dream, that’s how these work. Never going to fail again. Never unprepared. Never left behind.
Left behind.
You have been left. That’s the kernel of this dream: left behind again. Listen: nothing beyond that whining scrape, luring you forward, nothing but the thick sinister silence of abandonment. First Drift, now the rest of them, gone.
He felt something almost like relief, as though he’d been handed the key to the dream, and the terror wasn’t so terrible after all.
Dead?
No. Not dead. Left. Moved on. Left you here. Alone.
No, not alone. Something’s here, something the rules of the dream insist he find. Something else. Hostile.
He was hostile, too.
“You all right?”
He shook his head, clearing his audio. The voice was part of it, taunting and familiar, trying to push him to the edge. No, he was not ‘all right’. He had possibly never been. Every step of his life had led him into this shadow: his work at Kimia in the name of war, even though he’d never directly made weapons; squandering all those mechs to rescue Kup; the abomination of the protocol he’d inserted. Everything, every decision a step further into the darkness.
“No,” he said, vaguely. There was no harm answering the voice. It wasn’t real. None of this was real. But it felt good to speak the truth for once, freeing, even trapped in the tendrils of the dream: no. He was not ‘all right’.
A sliver of light, ahead, a stiletto of the ship’s high-key phosphorous light stabbing the floor from a half-closed door.
He hefted the pistol in his hand, finger curling over the trigger. His dreams so rarely made it this easy, he thought, slipping up to the gap, resting his shoulders against the wall, next to the white beam. The spin into the room would dazzle him, he knew, his optics taking 2.4 microkliks to compensate. He had to be ready for that, to find and shoot on instinct.
“What’s wrong?”
Everything. “Me.”
Time to get this over with, complete the horror, and cut the ties of the memory purge, so he could wake up and begin the agonizing stretch of crushing stillness.
He spun on one toeplate, kicking the door open with his other long leg, his video field catching a snatch of movement to his right, before the light dazzled him gold-white.
But he had practiced for this, prepared for it, and the gun flew up of its own accord and a burst of fuschia tainted the white, the pulse tearing through the air.
A strange cry, and a clattering fall. Finally, noise, he thought. Finally, sound, the thick, dense, swathing silence crackling to the real. And it would resolve to his world, to some innocuous sound in his quarters, merely magnified by his twisted psyche to something deafening and horrifying.
His optical feed cleared.
Kup. Kup, with a round squarely between his optics, still dimming, staring wide, his mouth agape, cy-gar tumbled to his lap as he fell, head swinging in an arc.
A nightmare, and Perceptor accepted it, took it, and waited. There, he thought. I have done your horror. Let me go. Release me from your clutches, turn me over to the empty real that lies before me, barren and hollow, battle after battle.
A rustle of noise, far away, and voices.
And one voice in particular, in his audio, soft, insistent. “Perceptor? You’re not making any sense. Perceptor. It’s Drift.”
Drift. And the hiss of sound clicked into sense, and he heard the running footsteps, and Topspin’s voice, call out, “Gunfire. Kup’s room!”
And he knew, then, and only then, that it was no dream, no nightmare of his memory, some twisted phantasm, but truth, reality, the waking world. Kup was dead, by his hand, Drift was a witness of sound, and the others were coming.
“Perceptor.” A note, almost pleading. “Tell me. What’s happened? Why did you call?”
“…I was wrong,” Perceptor said, each word heavy, knells of death. He closed the feed, and looked at the gun in his hand. I was wrong. I was. Wrong. His finger curled around the trigger, one last time.
I was.
Fandom: Transformers, IDW
Characters/Pairings: Perceptor, Kup, Drift
Rating: R
Warnings: violence, major character death, psychotic break, suicide
Prompt: for
dark_fest any/any you can’t escape yourself in the darkSummary: Perceptor struggles with what he has become.
It was that hour of the night when Perceptor most missed science, the cool consolation of a problem to solve, a chemical to untangle or a theorem to trace over like water wearing over a familiar, soothing stone, when time seemed to defy its confines, stretching into a yawning maw that threatened to swallow all the good he tried to do, leaving him alone with the nothing of what he was.
Defiled. Blaster’s words, the Voice’s first, blunt, uncensored response to his rebuilt frame. That was the first of it, but not the worst—the word that seemed to tumble through his half-conscious cortex like a stone down a well, striking the sides as it fell. Defiled. Defiled. Defiled. An echo that seemed to resonate to his very core, a judgment, a condemnation, a rejection of what he had become.
He lay, staring at the blankness of the ceiling, studying the impassive tiling, the rivets he knew so intimately from so many nights spent like this, feeling pressed down, compressed against the berth, flattened, suspended between a regretted past and a lost future, and achingly, achingly alone.
But it was either this: cold, brutal reality, cobwebbed with the past, or a recharge fraught with dreams: reality wretched and wrenched, unmoored from reason: the Swarm, gibbering and clawing at him, devouring Drift, clawing at Mirage, leaving long bloody gashes on Springer’s armor. Or the shambling horrors on Garrus-9: half insane Decepticons, sanity shredded by sadism and despair, only capable of one thought: killing. Or Kup, raddled with insanity from the Regenesis crystals, killing the rescue team, one by one, that Perceptor sent after him. He could still remember Springer’s look of disappointment, Siren’s contempt. His own ineptitude should have stared him in the face by then.
He had buried himself—hidden, really—in Drift, wrapping the mech and his complicated problems around him like batting, like a shield between himself and reality. And he had plunged into Drift so deeply, so intensely that even Drift had pulled away, his need to hide himself too much for the other mech to endure.
And Drift had left, and these hours became empty again, long stretches even more painful than before, magnified by the loss. Drift hadn’t said anything, no blame, no rejection. But he didn’t need to. The humans had an expression: actions speak louder than words. And his departure spoke…deafening volume, lining the silence with jagged, raw, obsidian edges.
It was all Perceptor could do to stare at the ceiling, willing the chrono to tick over, counting and counting, feeling every decaklik like a weight of stone on a cairn. Time…hurt.
[***]
“You look like Swarm vomit,” Kup said, dropping onto the seat across from Perceptor.
Perceptor shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said, knowing the lie for a lie, not daring to speak louder than a whisper, for fear the lie would shatter the air.
“Slag,” Kup said. “You think you can pull anything over on me?” He reached into his subspace, pulling out one of his cy-gars.
Perceptor shrugged, dropping his gaze to his energon cube. “I’m not trying to.”
Kup chomped on the end of his cy-gar, the corners of his mouth curling into a grin. “Still mooning over that mech, are you?”
“No.” Yes. Perceptor shook his head. Yes, but it wasn’t the whole story.
“Could comm him, you know.” A shrug. “Seems like the type that might need to be hunted down, Drift does.”
Another shake of the head. “It’s not Drift. He has a right to his own life.”
A sharp wink, and he realized too late he’d admitted something. “So, not Drift. Then what is ‘it’?”
“Nothing.” Too quickly, even to his own audio.
“Almost as bad a liar as Drift is,” Kup said, mildly, holding the cy-gar aside, to take a long, savoring sip of his energon.
“I’m not lying.”
“Lying to compound a lie.” Kup tsked. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s one thing, Perceptor. But…frag. We been through too much.”
“You have,” Perceptor said. He’d spent most of the war in the belly of Kimia.
Kup’s turn to shake his head. “You oversaw the rebuild, that whole project.” He tapped his chassis, grinning broadly, the wide smile of a war hero. “You made me who I am today.”
Too true, and Perceptor shuddered, glad of the reticle masking one of his optics. It was a horror to him that he had worked on Kup, installing that control protocol for Prowl. It had seemed like the only option, at the time, the only way, but…had it been or was that merely his rationalization?
Or worse, had he enjoyed it? The idea of control, that science could master the war hero, that there could be some restraint, at last, on the juggernaut of Kup. Was that it? Envy of the popularity and charisma he knew he’d never have?
He scrubbed a hand over his face, hard, hoping the pain would drive away those thoughts. “No,” he said, quietly, defying himself as much as denying Kup’s misaimed compliment. Still, the image wouldn’t leave him: the sinister, almost amused silence from the other end of the comm line, Prowl knowing he had won, using silence as the resounding peal of triumph.
“Still got your modesty, I see,” Kup cracked. He poked one finger at Perceptor’s hand. “You gonna drink that, or wait for it to ferment?”
He looked down at the cube without appetite. “Not hungry.”
“Yeah, heard that before.” Kup leaned back, crossing one ankle over the knee in that ‘ain’t getting’ rid of me that easy’ pose. “Letting your cortex override your fuel gauge.” A wink. “Again.”
Perceptor brought it to his mouth, forced a sip—flat and stale—over his glossa, aware he was being studied. And suspecting, beyond that, that Kup was not the only observer. What had Prowl said? When Kup spoke, no one would even see Prowl’s mouth move.
He shuddered, mouth pulling in distaste. Who was speaking now? Who was looking through those blue optics? The smile was Kup’s, easy and confident, but whose was the hardness around the optics? And was there even a way to tell?
He forced his face neutral: the flat mask he had taken since Turmoil’s ship, since he’d…died and been reborn of himself, reforged from the war and his mistakes, tempered by regret. Perceptor took another sip of the energon, ignoring—forcibly—the sour flatness of its taste.
“That’s better,” Kup nodded. “So, you wanna talk about it?”
Perceptor made his tone light. It didn’t matter if it was convincing or not: anything, even a flimsy lie to cover the naked truth from Prowl’s optics. “Simply a bad memory purge.”
“That all?” Was the question friendly curiosity? Was it a leader probing his troop for soundness? Or was it something more, some fishing hook into Perceptor, trying to find a rein to control him?
As though Prowl didn’t already have enough of those. “Of the past. But it’s the past.” The past that made him who he was.
“Yeah?” Kup said.
Honest curiosity, or probing? A call for trust, or a deceit? Perceptor felt the ground seem to shift under his feet, everything skewing off square as the simple question punctured the illusion. It was the past, but it bled seamlessly into his present, and he felt an unfamiliar edge to his voice, something dark and hard rising to the surface. “Turmoil’s ship.”
A flicker of…something. Surprise? Dismay? Whose? But then the war hero smile snapped firmly in place. “What matters is that you’re here now, right?”
No thanks to you. No thanks to you or any of your Wreckers who left me to die. Everyone else was worth saving….but me.
He wanted to be angry. He wanted to feel a surge of righteous rage, wanted that dark, stirring thing inside him to burn into a clear blue flame of anger. But it wouldn’t resolve into anger, and every time he tried to clutch onto it, form it into a shape, it went foggy and strange, slipping through his fingers, to swirl on the edges of his consciousness like some murky mass, heavy and slow.
“Yes,” he said, quietly, bowing his head in something almost like defeat before the compromised optics, the warrior’s mask on the mastermind’s puppet, before the lie of what he had become.
[***]
It continued. Life always does. In the most horrible ways, Perceptor thought.
Day marched inexorably lockstep after day: mission after mission, the violence blurring together into a muddy smear of pain, anticipation, cyberdrenaline, and exhaustion. But it grew, that nasty thought, the dark tendril of suspicion. He was watched: always. Under surveillance. Prowl knew he was weak, fallible. Prowl suspected. He’d been the weak one back on Turmoil’s ship: so weak that he hadn’t been worth rescuing. And he was still the weak—but for the moment necessary—link.
He sat, stretching the day late into night, his rifle disassembled across his bunk as he checked every component for wear marks, strain, fatigue. There was no need: Perceptor had always been good—the best—at machining. He might not have had Brainstorm’s cunning or Ironfist’s joyful creativity, or even Jetfire’s careful reverse-engineering. But he knew metal, better than anyone on Kimia, and he knew mechanics deeper than a medic. Metal spoke to him, in soothing tones, showing him its strains, offering up its chemical bonds, wedding itself into new alloys.
Perhaps, he thought, grimly, that was what he’d wanted all along: metal’s acquiescence. Which he never got from another mech—their armor and parts inhabited by some animating spark that made them liminal: metal and not, machine and more.
He felt like a machine himself. Or wanted to—mere machines were free of this burden of history, of a past of failure and disappointment. Old metal could be renewed, reforged, and he had tried to do the same to himself.
And. If he were honest, had failed.
He shook himself, realizing that he’d slowed, his hands no longer moving over the bolt’s mechanism, frozen in air as though half-glitched. Prove them right, he thought, tightening his palm over the bolt. Prove what a failure I am. How weak and unworthy.
And he was weak, also, in this: he ached for Drift. Just something about the way the mech would be, as though he exuded some calming influence, could soothe Perceptor with his very presence. Another way you used him, Perceptor thought.
Another reason he left.
He called up Drift’s private comm code: the swordsmech had given it to him, murmuring it in his audio, in that last moment, as he turned to leave. Only the code: no blandishments, or invitation to use it. Perhaps it was invitation enough, but Perceptor had hesitated using it, fearing that it was his clinginess, his need, that had driven Drift away in the first place, afraid to presume the rules.
And now? It became a self-punishment, to see how long he could hold out, to hold the code in front of him, and struggle with the frantic urge to execute the call function.
He needed it this time. He executed the command, his spark swelling as he heard the soft stretching static of the line stretching over relays to connect. And then it hit him: What would he say? How would he even start, much less account for his silence? What pitiful excuse would he use for this sudden comm?
No. He couldn’t.
He sighed, erasing the code from his process queue, glad only that he was alone, unwitnessed in his folly, bending back over the gun, sliding the bolt in its carrier, moving the pieces, lubricating with cold graphite. Simple mechanical repetitive work. All he was good for.
[***]
“--ceptor.” The voice pulled him out of recharge.
No, not a voice, an echo of a voice, like a scream trapped in an empty space, a ghost’s summoning. Nothing more.
He jerked awake. Again, he thought. Again. Another memory purge, but this one foggy and dark and somehow all the more terrifying for not being as vivid and garish and ugly. The ceiling seemed far away, almost heaving at him, the rivets staring down at him like blind eyes. The air seemed thick with some scent he couldn’t trace, acrid and sharp, like rancid energon, burnt insulation.
He pushed up, through the heavy air, each movement an effort, forcing his way to the door.
It opened into a sodden, dense silence, his own footsteps seeming muffled but huge, pounding his audio. He couldn’t shake the strange feeling that something was wrong: his audio had a strange hiss, that seemed to send random static over his video feed.
“Perceptor.”
He froze, whirling, seeking the voice’s source. It seemed almost beside him, right next to him. But there was no one there, just a ringingly empty stretch of corridor.
He hiked a vent of air, slipping down the hallway, straining to hear through the strange, echoing hiss. Some sort of hull breach? Something, something was very, very wrong.
A sound, ahead of him. A scrape of metal that seemed sinister and echoing.
“Where are you?” That voice again.
Another swing around. No one there.
And then he realized. A dream. It was just a dream, a memory purge, horrible as the others, playing the same melody of isolation and violence and despair, just with a different counterpoint. A dream—the empty ship, the strange, ghostly voice taunting him. Just another dream.
A dream he was helpless to leave. And he knew there was no point, knew this from the hundreds of dreams like it he’d endured. He couldn’t leave, would be trapped in this memory loop—and he recognized the memory now, the Xantium—until he finished it out, let the narrative unspool: the Swarm tear at Drift, or Turmoil shoot him, gloating over his falling frame. He knew he’d wake, if only he let the horror play out.
He moved forward, down the corridor, knowing the scrape of metal as a clue he had to follow. There was no need for stealth, but even so, he moved in silence, his hand pulling one of his pistols.
Why do I have my pistol?
Prepared, he thought. So I can be prepared. It’s a dream, that’s how these work. Never going to fail again. Never unprepared. Never left behind.
Left behind.
You have been left. That’s the kernel of this dream: left behind again. Listen: nothing beyond that whining scrape, luring you forward, nothing but the thick sinister silence of abandonment. First Drift, now the rest of them, gone.
He felt something almost like relief, as though he’d been handed the key to the dream, and the terror wasn’t so terrible after all.
Dead?
No. Not dead. Left. Moved on. Left you here. Alone.
No, not alone. Something’s here, something the rules of the dream insist he find. Something else. Hostile.
He was hostile, too.
“You all right?”
He shook his head, clearing his audio. The voice was part of it, taunting and familiar, trying to push him to the edge. No, he was not ‘all right’. He had possibly never been. Every step of his life had led him into this shadow: his work at Kimia in the name of war, even though he’d never directly made weapons; squandering all those mechs to rescue Kup; the abomination of the protocol he’d inserted. Everything, every decision a step further into the darkness.
“No,” he said, vaguely. There was no harm answering the voice. It wasn’t real. None of this was real. But it felt good to speak the truth for once, freeing, even trapped in the tendrils of the dream: no. He was not ‘all right’.
A sliver of light, ahead, a stiletto of the ship’s high-key phosphorous light stabbing the floor from a half-closed door.
He hefted the pistol in his hand, finger curling over the trigger. His dreams so rarely made it this easy, he thought, slipping up to the gap, resting his shoulders against the wall, next to the white beam. The spin into the room would dazzle him, he knew, his optics taking 2.4 microkliks to compensate. He had to be ready for that, to find and shoot on instinct.
“What’s wrong?”
Everything. “Me.”
Time to get this over with, complete the horror, and cut the ties of the memory purge, so he could wake up and begin the agonizing stretch of crushing stillness.
He spun on one toeplate, kicking the door open with his other long leg, his video field catching a snatch of movement to his right, before the light dazzled him gold-white.
But he had practiced for this, prepared for it, and the gun flew up of its own accord and a burst of fuschia tainted the white, the pulse tearing through the air.
A strange cry, and a clattering fall. Finally, noise, he thought. Finally, sound, the thick, dense, swathing silence crackling to the real. And it would resolve to his world, to some innocuous sound in his quarters, merely magnified by his twisted psyche to something deafening and horrifying.
His optical feed cleared.
Kup. Kup, with a round squarely between his optics, still dimming, staring wide, his mouth agape, cy-gar tumbled to his lap as he fell, head swinging in an arc.
A nightmare, and Perceptor accepted it, took it, and waited. There, he thought. I have done your horror. Let me go. Release me from your clutches, turn me over to the empty real that lies before me, barren and hollow, battle after battle.
A rustle of noise, far away, and voices.
And one voice in particular, in his audio, soft, insistent. “Perceptor? You’re not making any sense. Perceptor. It’s Drift.”
Drift. And the hiss of sound clicked into sense, and he heard the running footsteps, and Topspin’s voice, call out, “Gunfire. Kup’s room!”
And he knew, then, and only then, that it was no dream, no nightmare of his memory, some twisted phantasm, but truth, reality, the waking world. Kup was dead, by his hand, Drift was a witness of sound, and the others were coming.
“Perceptor.” A note, almost pleading. “Tell me. What’s happened? Why did you call?”
“…I was wrong,” Perceptor said, each word heavy, knells of death. He closed the feed, and looked at the gun in his hand. I was wrong. I was. Wrong. His finger curled around the trigger, one last time.
I was.
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Date: 2012-04-01 05:03 am (UTC)... tears ... soul stunned shock. so perfect
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Date: 2012-04-01 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-01 01:56 pm (UTC)There was so much pain and sorrow in this. It is intense and beautifully done. Excellent work!
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Date: 2012-04-07 08:40 am (UTC)