shadow_vector | The Golden Limit

R
Dreamwave
Jetfire/Sunstorm
spoilers for the series, canon character death
for

springkink18 May (fic)Transformers Dreamwave, Jetfire/Sunstorm; mutual - pain and heaven

It began with dreams. Jetfire didn’t speak of them simply because…whom would he tell? The other Autobots distrusted him already. He wondered, sometimes, what they had heard, and from whom. He wondered why it would distract them from the war. And then he wondered why he wondered: He and Omega Supreme had split from the others: who knew what that could be twisted into? And they all knew of his rivalry, back in the Academy, with Starscream. They knew of his conversations with Shockwave. They knew, also, though, of his encounter with the Fallen, the mad scientist's insane attempt to summon forth some arcane power beneath the surface of Cybertron, something deep that fought for release. It was war, and even to himself, 'things happen' didn't seem to suffice.

His every move, every motive, was suspect.

He daren’t mention to them his dreams, then.

They began after the first encounter with Sunstorm, with the other’s electrum scorching through his armor. They began with the memory of pain, blazing hot and infernal.

It was the shock of that, Jetfire thought, the psychological impact of something, after all these millennia, outmatching his armor’s tolerances. It was shock and memory purges and anxiety that gave him the dreams of the small voice, enshrouded in a light so bright it read as darkness, pitiful and small, begging for help.

It was a metaphor, not a message. It was a tangled knot of images and sensations, classic waking repressions; not an omen. It happened. Things happened. War damaged in more ways than merely physical, and Jetfire knew he had endured enough to give his subconscious systems plenty of fodder. But now, as he sat across from Bumblebee, Starscream at his left, the other Autobots ranged with dubious expressions around him, he couldn’t shake the feeling, almost like a shadow behind his optics, that despite his logic….something had gotten through.

[***]

Sunstorm seethed, energy, high and hot, blazing through his systems.

He hurt. He always hurt.

Hurt was the price of faith, he told himself. Pain was a test of his worthiness, his devotion. Because if there was anyone aware of the fact that there was something, some sentience, some intelligence, larger than he in the world, it was Sunstorm. He could feel its magnificence straining at him, pulling outward on his armor, pressing all his systems to their maximum.

He could feel, if he tried, the hand of God upon him, lifting his hand, directing his will, placing words in his vocalizer: arrogant and magnificent.

It was sublimity.

It was horror.

“Suffering.” He said the word aloud, tasting it, feeling the timbre of his augmented voice vibrate through him, redolent and rich with power. It made everything seem…right somehow, as though meant to be, as though real and noble and beautiful. “It is a purging fire, burning away the dross of unbelief.”

He let the words take over, a flood of noble sentiment, the wash of something larger than himself that must be divinity. He surrendered, willingly, to its control. He was nothing without it. It had always been with him, from his first memory, and all Sunstorm knew was agony and surrender. And his words, the words of the greatness swelling within him, didn’t quell the furnace of his torment, but it gave him a threat, a direction, and he pulled his way along the stentorian tone like a lifeline, even knowing he was unworthy and doomed to fail.

[***]

Jetfire seized Sunstorm, their bodies colliding in midair. Whatever had happened to the other mech in the molten pit was tearing him apart, rendering him unstable—or as unstable physically as he was mentally.

Jetfire didn’t want to think about it, but he had no choice at this point. Whatever Sunstorm was—whatever it was about him that kept him moving, alive—was beyond the reach of Jetfire’s science. And maybe he’d been arrogant: it hurt to think that Starscream was right, but he had clung to science and his principles for so long that he had grown rigid, inflexible. Science was not about forcing data to your hypothesis.

That didn't matter. And sometimes, in war, science had to yield to mere brute force.

“This ends,” he said, fiercely, boosting his thrusters. Sunstorm was powerful, but even he couldn’t match the force of the shuttle’s massive engines, rocketing him off course. Wherever Sunstorm had been going, whatever annihilation he’d thought to visit on the planet, was a subject for another time. What mattered now, Jetfire thought, was getting Sunstorm away.

He felt his systems burn, scorching at the contact. Sunstorm’s electrum had stripped away his armor’s coating, and he felt the other’s presence etch into his plating like acid.

“It all ends,” Sunstorm said, his gold optics pits of flame, like the broken seal deep under Cybertron, when the Fallen had sought his summoning. “Everything. Final destruction, terminal judgment.”

Ends, or comes round again, Jetfire wondered.

Sunstorm struggled in Jetfire’s grasp, but the shuttle held fast, fingers digging into the golden armor like hooks, even as the thin armor of his fingers creaked and crackled from the heat that was more than physical. “Everything ends, but not at your hands.”

“My hands,” Sunstorm said, writhing, his vocalizer crackling as his own heat began bubbling at the circuitry, “are the hands of destiny.”

Destiny. Jetfire didn’t believe in destiny. Or the Fallen's mystical geometry. He didn't believe unless he could see, understand, touch.

But the things he did believe in had failed him.

“What are you?” He stared into the burning optics, trying to see, to know, to pry some answer from this mystery. Jetfire could feel it burning against him, in him, as their trajectory sliced the troposphere. It felt symbolic: they were above weather, above change, in the cool, silent, unchanging motionlessness of space. The air thinned around them, darkening, the planet spreading below them like a distant glow against which Sunstorm seemed incandescent.

“Beyond you,” Sunstorm said, before his vocalizer failed in a crackle of sparks. Fluid, already charring, scorched between them, spattering on Jetfire’s armor. The mouth curled into an expression half of pain, half of mockery, before light and heat seemed to wash over Jetfire, blocking his systems, lining his temperature and RAD alarms.

Without his armor he was helpless, vulnerable. Without his armor he was naked and alone and being…devoured: Sunstorm’s heat spread over him, dissolving him. Jetfire looked down, his optic lenses shattering into mazes of lines, to see his armor begin to ripple and melt, wavering like a roadshimmer, before yielding to liquid. It was a binary reaction, and he was a third, a tertiary element, another chemical destabilization.

It was…agony. Pain beyond imagining, dissolution of his body, and even worse, his programming. He could feel Sunstorm begin to fray at his memories, tangling them into a mess of color and sound and emotion, pushing him past reason, sanity, the strong, sure, golden limits of his understanding, of himself.

End, or circle, he thought again, and the memory of the Fallen seemed to surge to him, through him, like a face of flames, raging and devouring.

And suddenly they did all seem to fall into place, collapse into some sort of order that formed a straight line to…here. Now. The cold of space, caught between the bustling life below and the spangle of stars above, right at the point where gravity uncurled its fingers. Here he was, tangled with this creature beyond his understanding, his body breaking, mind giving way, falling into an endless whiteness.

Maybe it was destiny.

The Golden Limit

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