shadow_vector | Particle of Faith

PG
IDW/MTMTE
Drift/Perceptor, Whirl, Rewind, Cyclonus, Skids, Brainstorm
Spoilers like whaaaaaa for the MTMTE Annual
for

pl2363 's birthday, sorta based on the prompt 'never forget why'.

Perceptor slumped into a seat in the refectory, exhausted. It wasn’t every day that a mech got quantum fused with a warp engine and it wasn’t every day when he just…disappeared, either. And Brainstorm was too busy crowing over how he’d saved the day. So it had fallen to Perceptor to run the diagnostics, on the quantum drive as well as the hull stability.

He didn’t mind, not really. It needed to be done and Perceptor needed to be useful.

He barely tasted the energon he was drinking, his attention fixed on the table in front of him.

“Yeah, well,” Brainstorm was saying, “This is why you should always have a scientist on away teams. It’s not all shoot shoot and stab stab.”

“Funny,” Skids said mildly, “Coming from the mech who designs weapons for fun.”

“Speaking of!” Rewind chirped, “You should have seen the footage I got of that fight! Drift was all like ‘slash slash swish’ and Whirl was all—“

“Yeahno,” Whirl jostled Rewind, “Don’t put me in the same sentence as the Great White Dope.”

“Where is he, anyway?”

“Drift?” Whirl shrugged. “Dying in a fire of emo? Writing a poem about the shimmering drops of dew on a blade of grass? Something stupid.”

“You’d know stupid.” Cyclonus, arms folded over his chassis, looking like he’d been forcibly bolted to the seat by someone intent on making him socialize as some horrible, horrible torture.

“Yeah?” Whirl bristled. “At least I’m not dumb enough to believe all this Guiding Hand scrap.” He clicked his claw, snidely. “You and Drift should go, I don’t know, bang drums together or something.”

“Drift,” Cyclonus said, stiffly, “Is a skillful warrior. You would do well to remember that.”

“I don’t think he can forget,” Rewind said. “I have the footage. That was some punch!”

Whirl slammed his cube down onto the table. “It is officially Change of Subject time.”

Perceptor had heard enough. Drift wasn’t here, and something had happened down there. He stood up, glad, for once, that he was so ignorable. No one noticed him leave.

[***]

Perceptor stood outside the door to Drift’s quarters, up on Command Deck. He remembered the first time he’d come up here, Drift almost abashed to show him the spacious room, all the stuff he’d laughed that he’d never use. Possessions still always dazzled Drift, who’d spent so much time with nothing. Having ‘more than enough’ was almost too much for him.

But now, the door remained resolutely closed. Perceptor sighed, and chimed again, tapping the comm. “Drift. It’s me.”

A long silence, and then the subdued beep of the lock disengaging. It was…something. Perceptor coded the door, and this time it opened, whooshing quietly aside into a gloomy half darkness.

Drift was sitting on the floor, wiping a rag down one of one of his short blades. He tried hard, but it was obvious it was something he’d just snatched up to look busy. The Great Sword was thrown on the floor, almost discarded, instead of hung carefully in its rack and that spoke painful volumes to Perceptor. He moved in, letting the door close behind him, and settled himself gingerly on the berth beside Drift. He could feel Drift’s EM field—scattered, thrashing—against him and he had to resist the urge to stroke a soothing hand over the red spaulder.

And waited. Drift would speak when he was ready.

For a long time, no sound between them other than the regular cycles of their ventilation—and Perceptor could hear Drift struggling to smooth those out himself—and the soft swipe of the rag against the blade. Questions bubbled in his vocalizer, almost painful to restrain, but Drift wasn’t ready. There was always, to Perceptor, something a little untamed about Drift, a wild creature that had to be given his own space.

Drift heaved a sigh, tossing the rag down, as though admitting it had been a feint. “They’re gone,” he said, staring into the darkness. “All of them. And the city…it’s lost to us.”

“The Galactic Council.”

He could feel a flare of something like anger against his legs, the rage Deadlock had fed on. It had never gone away, merely turned down to a warm simmer.

“There were—they were our culture, before the war. How we did things, or should do things. History. Music. Art. Philosophy. Everything! It was all there, in their chrestomaths. And now,” he gave a shrug, the kind of someone in a harness of pain, trying to shake off the traces. “Lost. Forever.”

“Drift. You did everything you could.” His hand hovered over the shoulder, his own frame trembling with shared pain. Knowledge lost, but more than that: hopes dashed brutally, as though falling on stone from a great height.

“It wasn’t enough!” The pained cry of anyone who’s ever lost his spark’s desire. “I don’t know what else I should have done.” His hands twisted in his lap, helpless and agonized. “I just can’t…I can’t see what I did wrong.”

“Sometimes,” Perceptor said, picking his words carefully, because he knew, right now, how much they mattered, and he wanted each word to be a strand in a rope to pull Drift from this darkness, “you can do everything right and it still goes wrong.” Like he and Drift and the distance that had grown between them, unbridgeable and invisible but tangible as a sheet of glass.

A long silence, and the shoulder before him shuddered with something like a sob. “Then how can you make up for what you’ve done? How can you redeem yourself if what you want, what you try to do, means nothing?”

“It doesn’t mean nothing,” Perceptor said, uncomfortably. He’d never been much for faith. Oh, he had his own: anyone who studied quantum science couldn’t help but acknowledge that a universe as vast and complex as theirs, that didn’t crumble apart every instant, was beyond their own minds to comprehend, and it begged the presence of a larger mind, a vaster intelligence. But the ideas of deities and demigods, the Primal Sacrament, those were fables, myths. He had his faith, in the quantum particles that gave things mass. But it was not the faith Drift needed right now.

“Drift,” he asked quietly, reaching into the darkness, and praying with a scientist’s edged faith for the right words. “Why did you want to go back? Truly?”

Drift half-turned his face, and Perceptor could see his optics glitter, mouth work as though chewing some old bitterness. “I wanted to see them again. No,” he shook his head, correcting himself. “I wanted them to see me. I guess,” he shrugged, the red spaulder slicing an arc the color of pain in the darkness, “I guess I wanted them to see me. And tell me I was good.” His voice crackled on the last word, like a fault line giving way.

Perceptor slipped off the berth, to his knees beside Drift, his arms reaching, pulling Drift into an embrace. The white body shivered in his, and he felt the heat of a lost tear on his shoulder. “You are,” he said. And he wasn’t a Knight of Cybertron, or a knight at all, and he was biased as they came, and entirely unscientific, but he knew what his spark told him, and he hoped it would be a tiny spark, enough to warm the darkness. Because sometimes even the tiniest thing, though not enough, can help. “You are.”