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shadow_vector2012-08-28 07:18 am
The Seams of Trust
IDW Parallax AU
Drift, Perceptor, Wing, Springer
some spoilers for LSOTW, mostly fluff
for
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tf_rare_pairingWing/Springer: Shame is for those who are afraid of what they might see in their reflection. Canon obviously had to be bent to make this work.Wing hovered outside the doorway, head tilted, staring at the metal panel as though he could see through it.
“Wing?” Perceptor lifted a hand, drawing Drift to a stop beside him.
“Sadness,” Wing said, quietly, lifting one of his diaphanous hands, resting it on the door.
“Springer,” Perceptor said, then dropped his voice, the way he translated between Drift and Wing, echoing, “sadness.”
Drift snorted. Springer was not his favorite mech and the feeling seemed very much mutual.
“He hurts,” Wing said, frowning. “Something haunts him.”
“Let me guess,” Drift said. “Wing wants to help.”
A wry smile. Perceptor didn’t have to say anything.
Wing turned, the gold hollows of his transparent optics glowing. “But I have to. We have to.”
“Wing,” Perceptor whispered, moving down the hallway, knowing the ghost-jet would follow, “how?”
“I could…borrow you. Or Drift.” The mouth pulled into a tentative grimace. He didn’t like the consequence, that he had to lose one to be present in this world.
“Tell him no,” Drift said. “They already think you’re crazy and don’t like me.”
“Drift,” Perceptor said, and then faltered. Drift had a point. And he knew Drift was speaking truth.
“No, he’s right,” Wing said. “You shouldn’t sacrifice what you’ve worked for. Not for me.”
Perceptor frowned. “Wing….” It wasn’t fair. There was no way it seemed, for all of them.
Wing shook his head. “No. Drift is right.” He set his shoulders, floating along beside them, but even as he drew up even with them, Perceptor could see the gold optics flit wistfully back to Springer’s door.
[***]
Wing slipped from the sword’s gem, pausing to look at the intimate knot of Drift and Perceptor, deep in recharge, on the berth. It was a blessing as much as a pain, to see their joy in each other, and he was honored to share it. But some things could not be shared, some intimacies that they deserved to have between themselves.
And Wing had this: the ability to pass through the ship unnoticed, metal doors and bulkheads no obstacle for him, as he searched out Springer’s quarters.
They weren’t hard to find: a sort of plaintive, blue-purple pull in the altered phantom landscape Wing inhabited, where emotions had color and form and shape and sound that physical matter lacked. The room was a misty landscape to him, only the jagged color on the berth anything real, ugly and discordant over the green and gold armor. Springer, he said to himself.
It was the way of ghosts, Wing had learned, to live a sort of second plane of life, to be able to make unreality real. He slipped closer to the recharging mech, hesitating just for a klik before dissolving, pouring himself against Springer’s frame.
It could be an intrusion, an invasion: Wing didn’t want that. Forced confidences were no treasures. So he shaped the world around them into something familiar, the way he did with Drift. Though with Drift, he created Crystal City in all its remembered splendor; here, all they had in common was this ship. So he created, from the formless swirling energy only the dead can see, the ship around them, himself inside it. He settled himself, in the space of Springer’s dreams, on the berth next to the larger mech, legs folded.
There was no easy way to do this: Springer had never seen him before. But that was no excuse not to begin.
“Springer,” Wing said, pitching his voice softly, stretching one hand out over the other’s sleeping chassis. The landscape of the dream allowed him substance and timbre.
The gold chassis shifted, the mouth pulling in something like a frown. “Muh.”
Close. Not quite enough. Wing let his hand float down over the armor, trying not to enjoy the dream/illusion of physical contact, the slightly battered finish under his palm sensors. “Springer?”
A reaction this time, one hand flying to grasp his wrist, the optics blazing bluewhite with alarm. Wing found himself tumbled from the berth, catching himself, nimbly, with practice honed from those dream-spars with Drift, rolling to his feet. “I mean no harm,” he said, quickly.
“Right.” A flash of a muzzle, and Wing felt the incorporeal sizzle of laser fire. He stood. “How’d you do that?” Springer was half-standing, the gun square on Wing’s chassis. “How’d you get in here?”
Wing forced a smile. This was…awkward. Then again, it hadn’t gone much more smoothly with Perceptor. Or Drift. Some awkwardness was perhaps to be expected. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“That wasn’t my question.” A tick of the head. “Either of my questions.”
No point dodging. “I’m…not alive.” He shrugged. “I died, a long time ago.”
The blue optics narrowed, dubious. “So you’re like the Shimmer? Thought you were supposed to be green or something.”
“No, not the Shimmer.” Wing shook his head. “I’m a friend.”
“Right.” A sarcastic snort. “Way to make an entrance.”
“I had to find some way to talk to you.”
“Why—oh right. Because ghost.” But the gun lowered, at least, aiming at the floor, the mouth curved into a sardonic smile.
“Because you need someone to confide in.” Wing pressed a hand to his chassis, earnest. “You ache, here. I want to help.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” Wing insisted. He hated to disagree, but he would speak truth. “Please. Springer. I can feel it. I know you hurt.”
“You don’t…who the frag are you?” A wary waver, the hand clutching over the gun, but less as a weapon and a threat and more as a comfort.
“Wing.” A tentative smile. He felt the blue optics—so different from Drift’s and Perceptor’s—rake over him.
“Wing.” A snort at the name. “And you want to help. Why?”
“Because you’re suffering. Because what mech can sit by knowing another is in pain?” Wing couldn’t. He’d never been able to. His strength and his weakness.
“I can,” Springer said, uncocking his pistol, finally, as though rating Wing as no threat, and stowing it in a storage compartment.
“Can you?” Wing stepped closer. He could feel the emotion, purpleblack and clotty, swirl against him, knowing the answer. And Springer did as well, as much as that flat grin tried to hide it.
“Look. You’re not real. You’re some, what? Imaginary friend.” Springer stepped back, back of his leg bumping against the berth. “Sad that I need friends so bad I imagine them.”
It would be sad, if it were true, Wing thought. “So? Then what is the harm in telling me?” Wing hooked Springer’s wrist, drawing him to sit down on the berth. He could feel, even in the dreamworld, the heat of the other’s nightmare-ridden frame lingering over the metal.
“You can’t be my imagination,” Springer said, but he let himself be drawn down. “You’re way beyond my ability to make up.”
“Perhaps,” Wing said, then chided, “You’re stalling.”
Springer frowned, but there was an edge of gruff humor to it. “I’m not stalling. What do you want to know?”
“What troubles you?” Wing’s hand rested on Springer’s forearm. Springer looked down at the hand, delicate and black against his, yet somehow immovable, as though gentleness, kindness, were so alien to him.
“I can handle it.”
“You can. But why bear it alone? Does it hurt too much to even speak of it?” Wing heard, as ever, the difference between his lilting Cybex and the flat cant of the Autobots.
A flare of something like anger, hurt and stung. “No. Just,” Springer shrugged. “Long story.”
“Start with a word.”
“You’d give Rung a run for the money.” A snort, Springer looking off into the distance. “Impactor.” The word hurt, as though it scraped right over the surface of his vocalizer, as though rising to a dare, rather than sinking to vulnerability.
“A friend.” Wing corrected his guess hastily: “More than.”
“It’s complicated.” That answer was flippant, even to him. “He did…something.” Where was that boundary, anyway? Between where someone else’s story became yours to tell? Could he explain without it? “Pova. He did something… bad. Wrong. I don’t know.” It was wrong. It was bad. But it felt like a betrayal to say it. It had at Garrus-9, it still did. An old, festering wound. The truth was supposed to heal, the truth was supposed to make things right.
“You disagreed with his choice.”
“You could say that.” The horror, those shots ringing through his audio, his own torso blasted through, rank and burnt and agonizing. Disagreed from the very core of his being, horrified and appalled even as a tiny grain of him understood.
“But you still care about him.”
Springer’s mouth worked. “Yeah.” Understatement. Impactor had been…everything. Mentor, leader, comrade, lover. Even now, even after the wrenching agony of the trial, Impactor’s angry, horrified, betrayed glare…he still cared. And he hated the part of him that had spoken out against Impactor, almost as much as Impactor probably did.
Wing rose, the movement fluid, graceful. He did love, greedily, the dreamscape for the feeling—the illusion—of solidity and form. He spread his hands, knowing the rules of creation here, a reflective surface forming between his hands. He held it, letting it float in space, the power of dream logic, the control of a long-dead mech, used to manipulating the energies and emotions of the incorporeal plane.
He came around behind Springer, resting his hands on the broad shoulders. “Look.”
Springer snorted, and Wing could feel the resistance in his neck servos. He knelt down, sliding his hands around Springer’s collar armor. “Look.”
Springer looked, his optics catching sight of themselves in the mirror, the raw, exhausted lines of the facial plating. “What,” he said, trying to look away. Wing’s hands held him there, the white forearms under his jaw, firm but somehow kind.
“What you are. Look. You can look, and only see shadows,” Wing said, his voice vibrating through Springer’s helm, a soft fuzz of music. And the light changed, the image shifting to the hard contours of shadow—pools of darkness under his cheekstruts, the pits of his optics, his chin. “Or,” Wing said, bending closer, and Springer could feel the warmth of a mouth against his helm. “You can see only light.” The image shifted again, in the mirror, the highlights blinding, blurring white.
Springer blinked against the brightness, hands coming up to touch the red bracers on Wing’s forearms.
“But,” Wing continued, giving a lesson, planting syllables in gentle brushes over the helm, “Neither are complete. Both are true, but neither is the truth.” Springer could feel the mouth stretch into a smile over his audio. “I learned this lesson myself,” Wing said, his voice a soft whisper of history, carrying the pain the lesson had come with.
And Springer understood: that good and bad were intertwined, inseparable. And it didn’t fix a thing, but the hard knot in his chassis seemed to lose its barbs, as though they melted from the contact with the white jet, his soft words.
Wing chirred, shifting his weight, laying down on his side, drawing Springer down with him, the white limbs wrapping around him like a cradle. Springer felt recharge reaching for him, not the dangerous ragged claws of nightmares lunging from the gulfs for him, but an almost gentle floating darkness, promising a blessed forgetfulness.
[***]
“What put you in such a good mood?” Guzzle squinted at Springer suspiciously. “Get laid or something?”
“Yeah that’s real smart,” Topspin said, pinging the top of the small mech’s cannon as he passed, “antagonize Springer the first time he’s cracked open anything other than a glower.”
“No one said Guzzle was smart,” Springer said, feeling a smile stretch over his mouthplates, creaky from disuse. He carried his ration through the small refectory, looking over the Wreckers with a sort of proprietary pride. The ‘dregs’ of the Autobots, to some, amoral and directionless, ruthless and hardened. But he looked around, this time, and he saw the little knots they arranged themselves in: Topspin and Twin Twist clowning, Roadbuster playing a game of holding Whirl’s ration out of the copter’s reach, little groups, awkward gestures, but there seemed to be a kindness behind them, a playfulness, a way of reaching out.
He passed by another table, where Drift and Perceptor crowded together. Even they had found some bond, something that held them together, that released the pressure of combat, violence and death. He thought of saying something, stepping closer.
“You can’t help everyone,” Perceptor was saying, quietly, at some bare spot across the table.
A soft laugh from Drift, the deliberately subdued sound of a mech who tried to be as small as possible in moments outside of combat. “He’ll try anyway.” A rise and fall of one white spaulder in a shrug. “It’s Wing.”
Wing. The name stopped Springer. Wing. It was too much to be a coincidence, even if Springer did believe in coincidences. No. He looked at where Perceptor was looking, following his gaze. It wasn’t some unfocused look. Perceptor was looking at something. Someone.
Drift seemed to sense Springer behind him, turning. “Something wrong?”
And instead of flat challenge, Springer could hear a softness of an actual question under the surface: awkward and strained, but Drift reaching out.
He shook his head. “Yeah, no. Just…kind of lost in thought.”
Perceptor shifted aside, making room. “You could join us, if you wanted.” Another offer, another reaching out, a gesture from wounded to wounded. He looked at the spot Perceptor offered, next to the empty space he’d been looking at. Would he feel anything? Would he know and did he want to know if there was something—someone—in that space?
He gave a nod, as though bracing himself. “Yeah. Don’t mind if I do.”
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Aaaw, I love Wing, he's just so sweet and caring.
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Little gestures, yes. <3
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