Absolute Zero

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

R
Bayverse, post DOTM
Soundwave/Carly
dark, implied noncon xeno
for sp4z01d's request. It's..a bit grim, sorry. :(

Bumblebee was a fool. Then again, the scout had always been a fool, even back on Cybertron: Simfur. Tyger Pax.  The yellow mech had always, always been out of his element.  And just like always, Soundwave worked it to his advantage. 

The yellow mech had shot his head. As though Soundwave’s intelligence were in his helm, and not in the dense, fractalized network.  Even the humans had learned better, their ‘internet’ spread over a myriad of hubs. Taking down one node did not take down the entire network.

So with Soundwave. He was infinitely replicable, and in his way, closer to immortal than even the Fallen. Until the last of his networks was eradicated, he would survive.

A small victory, but an important one. 

And in a war of attrition, one that was eminently useful.

He’d waited, until the battle had drifted away from him, until Bumblebee and the others had turned their attentions to the drones.  Drones. What the grand future of Megatron's Cybertron had been reduced to: flung, half-trained, into battle. It would be a tragedy, if Soundwave could spare the process load for that sort of sentiment.

Then he had moved, slowly at first, picking and crawling his way. Because he lived, but he hurt, and even his mind could not replace the missing limb. 

But pain was the body, and Soundwave had always figured himself as a being of the mind. He would not be quelled by something so common as redline alarms. He would persist. It was who he was. Like his namesake, Soundwave persisted. Until the universe ground to Absolute Zero, and waves had no heat to travel, he would survive.

He rounded a corner, sweeping into motion, using the satellites above him for his optics, showing his body, flopping and stumbling forward, and around the corner…her.

[***]

Carly screamed as the charred wreck of metal seemed to fall on her, like dead weight.  “SAM!” 

Sam didn’t hear her. He couldn’t.  She was trapped, suddenly, not in a pile of wreckage, but in the battered interior of the car Dylan had given her. A ripped leather seat scooped up under her thighs, her feet jarring against the charred carpet of the floorboards that formed under her. And the engine fought a choke to rev, loud and angry, tires biting into the pavement. 

She turned, her thin fists pounding on the window, bracelets rattling on her wrists. “Help! Help! Sam!”

The car cornered hard, dodging falling glass that shattered on the hood like hard tears, flinging Carly to the side. She kicked her legs up, trying to break the windshield, her skirt sliding up her silky thighs.  “Let me go! I’ll tell Dylan!”

“Dylan,” the voice came, cold and numb, “is dead.”

One window flickered, spiderwebbed with cracks, but lighting like a projection screen, and she saw Dylan fall, pushed by Sam, impaled on a spire. It was…horrible, blood and shock and horror. Dylan had held her captive, kidnapped her, but instead of justice she felt simply nauseous. There was hate and then there was brutality.  “No,” she mouthed.  This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. "This isn't happening!" she screamed, kicking at the windscreen again.

But she’d been saying that for days and it was still happening.

“What do you want with me?” she said, kicking again, this time at the dashboard. One heel, a spindly stiletto from her Jimmy Choo's, snapped off, like reality asserting itself.

Darkness swallowed the car, slamming into a garage, and racing up the spiral ramp.  A long moment of nothing but the screech of tires, the roar of the engine, and then a sudden explosion of movement, as the car seemed to vomit her out, spitting her onto the floor. She yelped, the hard concrete skinning her knees.  

She scrambled over, the skirt hiking over her hips, the filthy ground leaving rust brown smears on her thighs.  Cinders blown in from the battle outside crunched under her shoes, scorching the thin leather soles.  The ground shook, the garage itself shuddering as though with horror, and the thin glimmer of sunlight from the ramp seemed to flash and blot.

Had they won? Had they lost?

It didn’t matter: only this, the car reforming above her, dripping grease on her clavicle, hot and rustbrown. She teetered on her uneven shoes, the missing heel threatening to tumble her off balance.

He was headless—mostly—a monstrous fragment of quivering jaw, one optic listing to the side, flickering a baleful malignant red. But his hands were intact, his tentacles snaking from his spinal compartments, as his vocalizer hissed, in a shower of sparks that burned against her skin, “revenge.”

Comments

[sp4z01d.livejournal.com]

Really loved the concept of Soundwave being able to survive solely using his networks. Very interesting indeed.

I agree with ravynfyre.. is it wrong of me to be curious as to how this plays out? The image of a charred Soundwave missing most of his head is actually rather terrifying.. Carly must be shitting herself. Never really liked her and didn't feel a connection with her in the movie, honestly, so whatever fate SW has planned, I feel okay with it.

Well done!

[sp4z01d.livejournal.com]

Oh, and THANK YOU!! I was EXTREMELY pleased to open your Journal today and to see that you had fulfilled my request.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

I might come back to it, because Soundwave is a creepy mofo and kind of fun to write. Also kind of scary. :D Glad you liked it!