Corpus Vile

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
IDW
Arcee, D-Void (Look I didn't make up his stupid name, okay?), Jhiaxus
warning: violence, body hatred, gender hatred which might be triggering to some
for dark_fest prompt any/any tell me you deepest secret and I will help you make it a reality
In canon, she goes from being monomaniacally focused on killing Jhiaxus to suddenly being helpful to the Autobots (rescuing survivors of Kimia, and, well, she's not *nice* per se in RID (murderess) she does seem a bit lower on the Frothing Cray-Cray scale. So this is my attempt to bridge that change.

Garrus-9 had been a haven, she thought, with a bitter laugh that seemed the only sound she could make anymore. She had been free there, despite, or perhaps because of, the paradox: free from the horrible reminder of her abhorrent body, that swimming, surging mess of emotion and sensation. It had been release, unsnared by the body, simply mind, simply being.

Until she’d been ‘useful’, and they’d rammed her back in this hideous frame, this abhorrent matrix.  They’d set her free in her body’s own prison, because they needed her. It did not escape her how swiftly they flung away their own supposed morality.  It did not escape her that her pain meant nothing to them.

 She’d learned hate, for the first time, on Jhiaxus’s table, a substance more corrosive than anything he’d injected into her systems.  She’d learned hate, outward and inward, there.  He had changed her, corrupted her into this…she.  Into this thing of difference, exiled from her own kind, permanently marked, permanently marred. 

And then, summarily discarded, a failure, a waste, not even worth the black mercy of death. Just…thrown out, thrown away, the hatred distilling inside her into some malignant ichor, restless and vile.

She’d sworn to kill him, and thought she’d find comfort in it. But here she was, in the caverns under Gorlam Prime, and Jhiaxus had died again and again in front of her. Over and over, at her hand, he had suffered in extremis. Over and over he had begged, wailed, wept, shrieked, as she’d wrung every possible iota of pain from him, every possible grim satisfaction of agony.  Infinite, or nearly so, creativity in torment: she’d torn him limb from limb.  She’d stripped his plating, bit by bit, scraping the insulation from his wiring, in a million short circuits of pain; she’d crushed his head, the metal protesting and yielding with a sudden, ghastly pop; burned him with phosphorus, till the very metal pitted and shrieked. She had done every possible permutation of death to him.

And it hadn’t been enough.

“Such a waste.” 

It took her a long time, standing over the twisted metal that had been Jhiaxus’s latest death, to realize the voice, the thought, was not her own, but a silky susurrus whisper from the air around her. 

She looked up, snarling, to white wisps of some dense fog, swirling around her, as though exhaled from the ground.  “Back off.” The muzzle of the gun she’d used to shoot Jhiaxus dead this time, each finger, each joint, individually punctured, now searched the fog.

A ripple in the air, like a laugh, throaty and huge.  “What now?” the voice said, sound traveling through her, resonating in her joints, the long struts of her limbs. “What now?”

“Kill him again.”  Her voice seemed muffled in the thick fog. It smelled like corrosion and ozone, damp and leaden as it brushed against her.

“Waste.”  It swirled around her, this voice, the fog creeping under her armor, obscene caresses. “And does it soothe you?” The air thickened around her, knowing the answer, pressing closer, until she felt her hateful body’s contours impinged upon. 

“It will.” But her words thudded in the fetid air. 

“What,” and the voice twined around her, like a serpent, mouth rich with temptation, “do you want from this?”

“Revenge.”  She felt her lips curl into a hungry sneer.  Below her, Jhiaxus stirred, limbs twitching feebly, systems reknitting themselves.  It might be a miracle, she supposed, if she had any spark left for wonder. If she hadn’t seen in a thousand-thousand times.

“You have drained that cup, and still you thirst.”  It pressed closer, like some vile exhalation of a great, ancient beast.  “What do you want?”

The damp and cold seemed to eat into her, the fog swirling around her feet, blurring the shape of Jhiaxus, mangled and groveling. Arcee felt something stir within her, as though the cold fog from the Dead Universe reached through her, and plucked the words from her deepest being, through the mayhem and tempest of her cortex. “I want to end them all.”

Hatred, distilled, pure and potent. Jhiaxus was not enough. She had proved that over millennia.  She hated all of them: Ultra Magnus who had brought her down, Fortress Maximus who had condemned her, even Jetfire who had professed to wanting to help her. ‘Help’ her.  She snarled into the thick whiteness.  Help her with the spark compression, the device that would allow them to end her life at a whim.  No. Jhiaxus was not enough.

A swimming warmth, something wriggling and unpleasant against her.  “Yet you don’t.”  

“Yet.” She took the word, wresting it to her own meaning, as she hefted the gun again, even though she knew it was useless. There was no target, no center mass, just this great, tenebrous whiteness around her, the harbinger of the Dead Universe. 

“What stops you?”  Words skittered over her, unspoken by either of them, like ghosts, pawing at her with phantom fingers: cowardice, fear, ineptitude, weakness. Weakness.

What stops you, Arcee?

She had no answer.

Beneath her, Jhiaxus groaned, like the soul of the planet, writhing under the death that was forcing its way through it, the Dead Universe rending its way into their world. And it snuffled around her, this whiteness, this absorption of all color, all light, all sound, sensing her pain, sensing the agony of her every moment, every thought. So much pain and hatred that she could spill it over the universe and it would still—still—not be enough. She was a creature of rage, a cauldron of fury that boiled over endlessly, never boiling away.

The voice whispered, coyly, almost teasingly. “I know that which you are.”  The stilted syntax spoke everything: what she had been, what had been made, and what she had become. Three agencies, three facets.   “Tell me that darkest truth, and I shall help it become a reality.”

“Why?” She had lived too long, seen too much in the bodied world, when she’d been torn from her dream of peace in Garrus-9, to trust anyone or anything. She didn’t even trust herself, her whole body an enemy, an other, a difference she had to endure.

“Your ends are mine.” A swirl, the voice wrapping around a riddle, shifting and unsteady, like the mass of sensation she could still feel twisting inside her.

“You don’t know that.”

“You hold no secrets from me. Only from yourself.”  The whiteness coalesced into a face—and Arcee recognized her face—his face—from before Jhiaxus’s experiment. And the pain she felt—like her spark being twisted inside its shell—was worse than any torment of her new body. There was no healing the loss of the past. Ever.

“Speak,” the whiteness commanded.

And she did, her words garbled and indistinct, frothing with loathing and despair. But as she spoke, the mist seemed to devour her words, tasting the pain on them in delicate licks, gross jawing, and it lifted, that hateful confusion, that agony of not fitting what she was, that indescribably discomfort of not being whole. 

What was left was coolness—the coolness of the Expanse. And purpose, her rage solidified, and hardened, like obsidian, black and dangerously sharp. She would go among them, then, her captors, her jailers, those who snared her in the web of difference. She would walk among them, and sow their destruction with a razor’s smile.

Comments

[wicked3659.livejournal.com]

This was eerie and gave me shudders. The hatred and anger she feels is almost tangible and that last bit at the end, was positively menacing! I loved how you portrayed her in this, bridged that gap.