Of Broken Things

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
IDW/MTMTE
Whirl, Rung,  Ultra Magnus
SPOILERS for MTMTE 6, canon character death
for hc_bingo prompt 'counseling'

“You know this isn’t going to work,” Whirl said, flopping down on the berth.

“I know this?”  Rung was already seated in his chair, keeping his datapad between them. It was not that he was afraid of Whirl, but, well, their acquaintance had been made under some unpleasant circumstances and their re-acquaintance hadn’t been much better. 

He still had a dent in one of his gorget plates from the copter’s claw.

“Look. You’re not going to fix me.”  Whirl wriggled on to the berth. At least it was comfortable. And the lighting in here was better than that LET’S BLIND EVERYTHING ON ITS BACK Medibay style lighting. Apparently Ratchet thought that being blinded by glare helped the healing process.

“Is that a challenge?”

“Is that a challenge? You asking if that’s a challenge?”

“Are you threatened by challenges?”

“Me? Threatened?” Whirl snorted, kicking his feet out along the berth.

“I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere until we either answer questions or stop asking them.”

“Hey, you started it.”  He turned his face to the porthole. Stars. Boring. Great.  Maybe if he watched long enough one of them would explode.

A pause.  Then Rung, again. “Perhaps we should start again.  I’m Rung. I’m here to listen, and maybe help you.”

“Help me. Right.” Whirl’s shoulder gimbal shifted on the berth. “I’m here because Ultra Magnus made it a condition of, you know, not becoming intimately familiar with his fist and/or a brig cell.”  

“You resent that.”

 “I resent everything.” Whirl shrugged. “It’s how the world works.  Leverage.” 

“I see.”

“Besides,” Whirl said, revolving his head to look at Rung. “I can bet you’re just thrilled to death to be locked in a room alone with me again.” He clicked one of his clawed hands, sarcastically.

“Do you want me to be afraid of you?”

“Thought you were the one who was down on questions,” Whirl said. 

“I’m just curious.”

Whirl snorted. “Doesn’t matter to me. Just be more fun if we both hate the hell out of this whole thing.” At least he wouldn’t be the only one. Misery loves company and all that scrap.

“I don’t.”

“What?”

“I don’t hate it.”  Rung scooted forward on his chair. “This is what I do. What I chose to do, even before the war.”

“Listen to idiots and their stupid problems.” Right. Whirl had been pretty bored in his life, but he couldn’t imagine listening to Red Alert cycle after cycle spill on about how everyone was after him.  Fate worse than death.

“Helping mechs make sense of things,” Rung corrected, gently.

“Heh. To do that, first, your mech’s gotta believe things are supposed to make sense.”

“You don’t see any connection in your own life? Cause, effect, action, consequence?”

Yeah, a bit too much, honestly. Bad causes, worse effects. “That doesn’t mean I want to wallow in them.”

“We don’t have to. We can talk about anything you want. It’s your time.”

Anything he wanted, huh?  Whirl snerked.  “What if I wanted to talk about strangling you?”

A pause. “I’d ask you why you enjoyed the idea so much.”

Whirl glowered. Hey, you don’t know me. “Who said I enjoyed it?” Though he was beginning to get the urge.

“Then I’d ask why you wanted to talk about it.”  Rung’s voice was stable, flat, calm.  For a little runt, he certainly had diodes. 

“Maybe I’d just wanna freak you out.” He rolled to one shoulder, flexing his hands.

“Then I’d ask why you cared what I thought of you.”

Whirl laughed. “This is one hell of a hypothetical visit.” He flopped down onto his back, hooking his hands together.  

“Are you ready to start the real one, now?”

[***]

Whirl stood over the sleek bullet of an internment pod.  On a shelf, someone had placed a holo of Rung and one of his model spaceships, and some flickering stupid ‘eternal flame’ or something. Eternal. Right.  Only eternal thing about the universe was that everything sucked.

Everyone else had left, after Rodimus had ended his speech (that Whirl had mostly tuned out, as he’d learned to do with anything coming from the mouth of anyone with rank) and everyone had sniffled, and shuffled out, doubtless to drown their schmaltz in Swerve’s moonshine engex.

Whatever.  Not his problem.

Ultra Magnus had merely paused in the doorway, giving a stern look over his white pauldron, as though silently threatening Whirl not to desecrate the body.  And even Cyclonus had merely glowered, as though their little bloodfeud was second fiddle to this.

Until it was just Whirl, and Rung. Because even Ultra Magnus got the hint.

And now…it was just Whirl and Rung.

Awkward. 

He snorted. “You always were about me talking about my fraggin’ feelings, right?  Yeah well, honestly?  You wanna know how I’m feeling?” He stalked around the bullet-shaped pod. “Pretty fraggin’ angry.”  His claws bunched.  Make that ‘really angry’.  He hadn’t been this angry since Roadbuster hit him with the veto.  And Roadbuster did everything literally—he’d taken a full cycle to pull himself out of the wall.  “Because I had it handled. Because it’s a stupid way to go.  Because I wasn’t done messing with you yet.  Because….because….” He spun, slamming a hand into the bulkhead.  The fake flame flickered, and Rung’s face, slightly nervous looking even in the picture Red Alert had blown up from a security feed, seemed to flinch. 

 “Because,” he said, his voice fading and small, “this isn’t peace.”  If it is? Yeah, count him out.

 “Because it should have been me!”  He was ready for it. He’d been ready for it. He’d done everything he could to get it.

But, yeah, well, guess what? Whirl never gets what he wants, right?

Whirl stared at the pod for a few, long moments. He was a chronosmith: not much that mechanical devices could do he couldn’t figure out. It took less time than to say ‘frag this with a glitching laser saw’ for him to have opened the pod, tossing the heavy lid aside with angry negligence.  

Rung lay in the compartment, the pod made for much larger mechs. He seemed…dwarfed. Fraggin’ tinier than usual, even. His mouth was frozen in that pull of concern of his, the one that was all like ‘let’s talk about this’, or ‘we can work through this, Whirl’.  Above it the left half of his face was missing, metal dissolving into charred fragments, burnt wiring.

It didn’t bother him. Death didn’t bother Whirl: he’d been around it too long for it to be anything other than just another ugliness in a world made of ugly.  And all he could see was Fortress  Maximus, on his knees, Rung’s spindly little arms cradling his massive head. 

Frag.  That should have been me, too, Whirl thought.  I threatened to kill you, too.

He scooped up one of the little arms, ducking in, tossing it over his shoulder.  Then the other, dipping his head down to rest his facial armor on the narrow, orange chest.  It was like this.  Kind of. Except, you know, Rung still had half his face and all.  And wasn’t dead.

Whirl dimmed his optic, imagining:  the gentle pulse of a spark beneath the flimsy dermal plating—barely rating as armor it was so light. And the whirr and tick of a timing chain, and the soft buzz-push of coolant and fluid and all the gentle sounds of a living being, that synchrony, like clockwork.

Clockwork.

Whirl felt something breaking inside him, like an ice floe creaking and shattering.

And then the world swung in a fast, hard arc, and Rung’s skinny little arms whipped away, and Ultra Magnus’s huge hand was pinning him to the wall, his face sporting a thermonuclear frown.  On the shelf above, the eternal flame blinked out, the little model ship crashing to the floor, scattering in pieces. “I suspected as much,” Ultra Magnus said. 

“You suspect everything,” Whirl snapped, his claw closing over the heavy wrist. The breaking thing stopped, half-broken.

“I wanted to remind you,” Ultra Magnus said, with a  bonus shake that clanged Whirl’s head against the wall, causing his optical feed to blink out, “You don’t go after Swerve or Fortress Maximus about this.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. That whole ultimatum thing.”  Thanks for the reminder, Ultra Aftimus.  “Really, and everyone says I have no fraggin’ manners.”

“No,” Ultra Magnus countered, letting him go, Whirl’s heels scoring two straight lines down the wall as he dropped, “Because it’s not what Rung would have wanted.”

“You don’t even—you know what? I’m not having this conversation,” Whirl said. Everything tasted bitter right now, everything in his vid field blackened around the edges, shimmering with hate and hurt like a heat mirage. “I am not even talking to you.”

“I will feel the loss acutely,” Ultra Magnus said, wiping his hand on his thigh as though contaminated. He turned to the door. “Clean up in here.”

Clean up. Right. Like he was the one who broke any of it. Then again, cleaning up other people’s messes had always sort of been his job, since Rodion, since Empurata.  He squatted, seething, picking up the little ship model. The forward warp node had snapped off, and the comm array was…over there.  He dropped to his aft on the floor, back against the pod legs spraddling the bits of the model, hands, large but deft, fitting the pieces back together.  This…he could fix.

Not that it mattered.

Comments

[kamiraptor.livejournal.com]

T_T

My tears, they do not end.

Lovely fic, though.