The Open Door

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

R/M
IDW
Drift, Ultra Magnus
h/c, semi graphic torture stuff?
for hc_bingo prompt 'torture'

It was dark, and Ultra Magnus had learned to welcome the darkness. It meant he was alone.  It meant they were bored with his agony.

He was fine being boring.  He was fine nursing his pain in private, in the dark. He was fine losing himself in the long hours of nothing, swathing himself in the pain, time stretching around him like a cradle.

He’d become fine with not being fine.

A line of light, sharp as a blade. The door, he thought, dully. There was the door. He thrashed around, sometimes, his ruined legs, bound arms scrabbling on the part-strewn, energon slicked floor.  He lost the door sometimes, until it opened, the way he’d lost himself, become formless, painful nothingness. In the dark, his boundaries faded, and he was just a ball—the entire universe—of pain.  When the door opened, light, lines, contour and reality struck against him. The first blow in another round of torture.

“In here.”  A voice that rippled his memory.  He knew that voice.  He looked up dully, at the jagged shape in the doorway, and…a blade.  Drift.

The door shoved open, Drift having to pause to jam it free from some obstruction with his knee. “Ultra Magnus,” he said, dropping to one knee.  The light hurt, casting Ultra Magnus’s battered face into sharp lines of light and dark.  Drift turned, calling out over his shoulder, “Gonna need a medic! Now!”

“No,” Ultra Magnus said, the word crackling in his vocalizer. He felt his split lipplate re-open, a sudden sting of pain. “No medic.”

Drift frowned down at him. “I’m not really sure you’re in the position to make that call?”

He stared at Drift for a long moment, trying to pull words from the churning pain of his sensor net. “Rodimus,” he said, finally. No verb. Just the name.

“On his way,” Drift said.  He shifted forward, his other knee moving to the ground, as his hands traced the cables that bound Ultra Magnus’s hands.  “We came as fast as we could,” he said, dropping his gaze, though from embarrassment or to preserve some dim modesty of Ultra Magnus’s, the larger mech couldn’t tell.

“How long?” 

“A week. I’m sorry.”

A week.  It felt strange, almost impossible. Weeks had passed in Ultra Magnus’s life like opticblinks before. But all that torment, all that agony—a week?  It felt like forever, a vast, black, gaping chasm of suffering.

“Can you--?” Drift tugged on the near hip.  Ultra Magnus groaned, rolling onto his other side, wincing as his weight compressed his upper arm.  The tension actuators had shorted long ago, but the passive receptors were still all too active.

He was aware—dimly—of the irony.

“Thought so,” Drift murmured, and Ultra Magnus felt him scooting into a ball behind him. “Standard restraint manacles. Old model.  I wonder if they still use the same release code.”  A prodding and then a snap, and then the sudden clunk as the restraints fell from Magnus’s wrists. And for the first time in days, his hands weren’t bound.  But the servos had locked, so it took Drift manually raising one of the arms, helping him roll back over.

His back, flat, on the floor. It felt like a miracle. “Thank you.”

Drift held his hand clumsily, as though unsure what to do.  He released it, eventually, gently, laying it down on the ground as though it were fragile.

It wasn’t, but it felt that way to Ultra Magnus, too. Ultra Magnus, once one of the more powerful mechs in the Autobot forces, and…he couldn’t even lower his own hand.

“Don’t thank me yet.  When your sensory feeds come back online it’s going to burn like nothing else.”  Drift pushed up to his feet, holding the manacles. Ultra Magnus could see them dangling from his hand, and even in silhouette, in the still-darkened room, they looked malevolent, like some hideous, alien arachnid.  Drift stopped in the doorway, flinging the restraints down the hall. They both seemed to pause, listening to the clattering sound as the restraints bounced down the decking, and finally came to a rest.

Symbolic gesture, merely.  But Ultra Magnus found he appreciated the symbolism, however simplistic it was.  He hissed: Drift was right. Fuel moved for the first time in days down his arms and it burned like etching acid.  He found himself, not for the first time, writhing on the floor, batting his hands against the cool metal.  

Drift stood, back to him, in the doorway, quiet and unmoving. 

Ultra Magnus realized, slowly, as the acid burn began to fade, that that was mercy, too; even the small consideration to give him privacy in his pain. 

“Drift.”

The mech turned, his blue optics glowing in the shadows of his silhouette, fixing on Ultra Magnus’s face, stony and still, refusing now to look lower.  His face was probably bad enough, Ultra Magnus thought, his helm’s audial’s caved in, one finial snapped off and driven into his jaw, parts of his buccal plating peeled back, revealing the fine mechanisms—clotted with energon—beneath.

“Rodimus will be here, soon,” Drift said. 

“I didn’t tell them anything.”

“Don’t worry about that right now.” 

Ultra Magnus shook his head, the movement sparking stripped wires in his throat. “You have to know. I didn’t tell them anything.” It was important. More important than getting a medic. More important than anything.

“I believe you,” Drift said.  He waited for Drift to say that he knew Ultra Magnus wouldn’t. Which would tip this into a lie, because Ultra Magnus wasn’t so sure of that himself.  They’d been wearing him down, cycle after cycle, pain after pain. They’d been unraveling his resistance, slowly, almost methodically. He wasn’t sure he could have held out much longer.

A week. It had only been a week.

He waited. Waited to have it all crash down around him, waited for his resistance to be exposed, Drift’s confidence either misplaced or too cheap.

It didn’t come. Just…he believed Ultra Magnus. 

“Light?”

“What?”

“Are you ready for me to turn on the light?”   Drift’s hand hovered over what must be the light panel.  Waiting for Ultra Magnus to assent.

No. No. He wasn’t ready to be seen yet. Not in full. His whole body, mangled and bent as it was, was too much. He feared for his own sanity, already frayed to tenuous threads. “Yes,” he forced himself to say. 

“Ultra Magnus.” Drift waited until their gazes met. “Stay with me.”

Ultra Magnus blinked, confused, as Drift rheo’d the lights up. 

“Stay with me,” Drift said, quiet, insistent, refusing to let go of Ultra Magnus’s gaze.  He moved closer, dropping down on one knee again.  “Ratchet’s got a MARB,” he said.  “He’s inbound.  Are you ready?”

Was he ready?  “You think I want to stay like this?” He moved one hand, the very edge of its mangled armor skimming his visual field. 

Drift flicked a hand, drawing his attention away. Another small touch, another minute consideration.  “When we ventilate, there’s always a pause. It’s so small most mechs never notice it, but it’s there. That tiny pause, between intake and exvent.” 

This sounded like another of Drift’s mystical theories, each more ludicrous than the last.  But the words were like a chain, pulling him out of this place, syllable by syllable.

“Because we don’t pay attention to it, we don’t feel how important that is, that moment, when it crests, and stops, and then shifts into readiness for the next stage.”  He gave one of those smiles, a quirk meant to lighten the mood and nothing more.  “Are you ready?”

Ultra Magnus tried to speak, but all that came out was a shapeless grunt.  He thought, his raw-jagged sensornet pulling him in deep, feeling and thinking. He frowned, struggling to push himself to his elbows. He had to see. He wanted—needed—to see himself, to rate the damage, to know what he had been reduced to. He didn’t want to, and he had a feeling this would hurt worse than any of the torments his Decepticon captors had visited on him.  But he had to see. He had to know.

Drift sensed the movement, his hands also moving, to support his shoulders, assisting, not preventing him.  And it struck him, as he sat up, his optics taking in the horror of the ruin of his body, that Drift knew, had known all along, the way you know things from the inside.

Drift had been through this. Or similar. How else would he know the small kindnesses, the tiny mercies, the shifting ability to tolerate the one thing worse than pain—the promise of healing that made one confront the reality of the present.  And he felt that shift Drift had spoken of, tectonic and unstable, shuddering through him.

He looked up, scratched optic lenses seeking Drift’s. “I’m ready.”

Comments

[white_aster]

<3 This was really awesome. Very insightful into Magnus' state of mind after something to terrible.