Make-Do

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

NC-17
IDW
Prowl, Kup/Perceptor
sticky of an incredibly dysfunctional sort, and Prowl being....IDW Prowl
After Infestation.
for tf_rare_pairing: Perceptor/Kup last betrayal

The news was a shock to Perceptor, who’d thought himself immune to shock by now.  After Garrus-9, he’d thought nothing could touch him again, every horror, every brutality marking him until he was nothing more than a mass of scar tissue.

He was wrong. Once again.

“I’d think you’d be relieved,” Prowl was saying, his voice, as ever, cool and bland.  “You didn’t seem to enjoy the responsibility, after all.”

Perceptor was glad he’d mastered a stony face long before this.  “I was unaware you factored my enjoyment, or anyone’s, into your machinations.”

“’Machinations’.”  Prowl’s smile quirked, as though he found the term delightful.  “Is that what you consider them?”

“Apparently,” Perceptor stonewalled, his mismatched optics boring down on Prowl.  “What word would you prefer?”

“Strategic allocation of assets.” A moue.  None of his expressions seemed real, everything seemed staged, a front. In a way, almost the opposite of Perceptor, who tried to flatten his expressions to stony blankness.

“Ah.” That was cold enough, Perceptor presumed.  “And Kup.”

“An asset. You’ve known that, though, Perceptor. For a long time.” Under the red chevron, the blue optics met his, steadily.

“An easily discarded one, then,” Perceptor countered. He thought back to what Drift had told him, optics shellshocked and wide.  Kup, torn through whatever rift Britt had used, sent back before time to the Dead Universe with no way out.

“It was not…ideal,” Prowl frowned. “But sometimes we must bow to expedience.” He looked up, his mouth curling into a blade-sharp grin. “As you know.”

[***]

Kup panted over him, spike thrusting into his valve, body straining with need.  Perceptor felt his ventilations pick up: mechanical response only. It was all he could offer Kup, all he had left since Drift had left him. Desire was just…dead in him, withered and gone. But Kup wanted him, and who was he to say no?  He let Kup use him, and that was all it was to him: use, when no one else wanted him. 

Drift’s departure had ripped something open in him, a raw wound he thought had healed, and interfacing with Kup kept that wound open, tearing it open again and again, keeping that pain sharp and fresh and raw. 

He wanted it to keep hurting, wanted the pain new and abysmal, something he could bury himself in, hide in it instead of having to feel anything else.

Kup deserved better. That was the only hitch. Kup deserved better, someone who could feel something, someone who could look at him and not see all the mechs who’d died on that planet rescuing him, not see the programming chip he’d installed at Prowl’s order.  Someone like Springer who could see Kup the hero.

But Springer wasn’t here, out on Debris, in a state he might never come out of. 

It was only Perceptor, and when Kup had broached the topic, with a crass joke, as Perceptor’d bent over his exposed interface equipment, Perceptor hadn’t wasted much time in thought. He’d looked up, and simply said, “If you want.” 

It had never been perfect. But nothing in Perceptor’s life ever would be. This was just something that spooned pebbles into the void of his abandonment.  But it brought Kup something: stability, pleasure, some form of intimacy and he owed him that, for all he’d taken from him.

He felt the overload distantly, like hearing waves crash against a shore, only the barest froth of it touching him, a pleasure he didn’t want to feel.

Not that he didn’t want this. He merely…accepted, his arms clinging to Kup’s overload-trembling frame, feeling the heat from exertion roil off him, optics blank and inward in ecstasy. 

All he’d wanted was to be useful, and to stain himself in the memory of what he’d lost.

[***]

“I know,” Perceptor said, steadily, the memory sharp and strong as gun oil.

Prowl’s supercilious smile flattened. “I’d imagined a bit more gratitude, honestly.”

“For removing a burden,” Perceptor said, coolly. The air felt thick and dry, like a crypt, like a place of dead things. It seemed fitting. 

Prowl leaned back in his chair, the chevron obscuring part of his optics. “I let him die a hero, Perceptor. He saved all of Cybertron, in a way.” One tapered hand tapped the desk’s surface, idly. Utterly at easy, a contrast to the tension that nearly sang through Perceptor’s frame.

“You let him die.” The words seemed caught in the thick air, like cobwebs. 

“Now,” Prowl said, with a patronizing tilt of his helm. “He’d always been on borrowed time, Perceptor. It was time to call it in.”

As though he were a god. As though he had the right. He had the ability, surely. Any of them did—with a flip of a trigger, a thrust of a blade, any of them could decide to kill any other of them. They were all lords of death, but Prowl had set himself higher, because his hands were clean and his decisions cold.

"Besides," Prowl continued. "You can't exactly argue he was happy."

He couldn't. And that was the worst knowledge, the hardest stonel--that everything he'd tried, everything he'd given, still hadn't mattered. Nothing could matter. “I understand.” Perceptor shifted on his feet, turning to go.

“If it helps,” Prowl said, “I had bigger plans for him. I regret that this had to be the end.”

Perceptor stopped in the doorway. Plans. They were all part of Prowl’s plans: Prowl who looked at the world as a network of calculations, a complex calculus of what he thought would be victory. “I am glad he was spared your plans, then,” he said, over his shoulder.

Almost a hit, that one.  He could tell by the minute crease that appeared between the optics, before Prowl rejoindered, a sharp smile curling over his mouth, “I can authorize leave for you. For mourning, of course.”  Oblique and ugly, like a jagged blade: that he knew what had gone on between them, knew how passionless it was, and now, in this last moment, mocking it. Giving no one a chance, no one a choice, and deriding their pitiful attempts to claw some dust of pleasure from their lot.

“That,” Perceptor said, feeling his spark almost crackle with hardness, one last betrayal for a mech he'd sold out long ago to Prowl's plans. He had no right to mourn. He had...nothing. “won’t be necessary.”

Comments

[wicked3659.livejournal.com]

Ooohhhh, your Prowl makes me shudder. You write him so well. But poor Perceptor, he really has nothing left at this point, my heart breaks for him :(

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

The thing is I really DO love IDW Prowl. He's simply doing what needs to be done, in his mind. Any general on any battlefield makes the same sorts of thought processes as he has. He's just...not hiding it behind fluffy rhetoric.

And this just means...more Percy cuddlefic in the future, probably. :)

And now I really AM going to the grocery store. x_x

[renegadewriter8.livejournal.com]

Wow Prowl is scary here. Poor Percy! *hugs him*

[ravynfyre.livejournal.com]

Perceptor totally needs to have a weapon's malfunction that regretfully results in the untimely demise of a certain tactician. >_>


This was delightfully twisted and awesome, and I want to cuddle Percy so hard.

[pl2363.livejournal.com]

D: I never read Infestation? I'm totally lost... *will have to read that and come back to this* But as always I live the way you write...

[eerian_sadow]

T__T this was so sad! but so good! i really ached for Perceptor here.

[tainry.livejournal.com]

Like a rifle-stock to the bridge of the nose. Which I mean in the most complementary sense. XD
PERCEPTOR NEEDS ALL THE HUGS!!!