Empty Inside

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

R
IDW
Drift, OC (Shifter)
warnings: drug abuse, ref to noncon and spoilers for mtmte 9
for tf_speedwriting prompt 'empty inside'

“Must need it really bad, huh?” Shifter grinned, the smile uneven on his scarred face.

Drift shot the black and blue mech a dark look. “Not your business.” He was already edgy, anticipating. He needed it, bad.  He just knew better than admit it to Shifter.

Shifter smirked. “But, yeah, it kind of is, Drift.” He dangled the small cylinder, tantalizingly. “Pay up.” He loved this part, the hollow optics, fixated by the circuit booster.  Their fix, his supply.  Drift was no exception.

Drift pulled out a handful of dented plastic chits. “Don’t tell me they’re not good.”

“You know,” Shifter said, fingering the small bits of plastic, “If you’re ever short, you could always….” He let his mismatched optics rake over Drift’s frame lasciviously. 

“Yeah.” Drift’s mouth twitched, snatching at the booster. “Not that desperate.”

“Yet,” Shifter said, with an air of patience.  He knew how this went. He’d been doing it for years.  Sooner or later Drift would sell everything just to get one of these, just to buy a cycle or two’s forgetfulness. 

“Rather die,” Drift said, pocketing his prize.

“The way you’re going?” Shifter shrugged, philosophically. “Be a shame not to give me a little ride first.”

Drift snorted. “Yeah. We’re done here.”

“For now.”

[***]

It was almost unbearable to have a booster in your storage and not be able to use it. But you had to do it right. Drift had learned this from long experience. And even then, he didn’t always get it right. Still, you had to take precautions: an isolated area, dark, preferably with a bottleneck.  Something to prevent the predators from getting in while you were gone, out there, in that place beyond thought and feeling. 

A few too many times he’d woken up from a boost battered, minus some innermost energon thanks to the siphoners, or with a sharp ache in his interface array the only clues that anything had happened. Not that waking up after a boost was pleasant anyway: felt like you were scraped raw, everything jangling and sore, every circuit complaining from the excess load.

And the smell: acrid and hot and rancid.  You could always tell a booster by the smell. Well, as much as you could smell anything in the gutters.

He couldn’t stand it any longer. This place? Good enough. An old side conduit down XF322, the hatch half-blocked by a chunk of plascrete.  He slipped inside, into the darkness, feeling the rumble and hum of the city above him: all those lives, all that weight and luxury, crushing down on him, close and claustrophobic.

It didn’t matter. He’d be out of it in a few moments. 

He cycled a vent, pulling the booster from his storage as he settled his weight.  The cylinder was heavy in his hand, solid. A real 500, this time, he bet.  He trembled with anticipation, his mind too crowded with thoughts, jumble-tangled together, to even think straight, think anything beyond the black flashing rush of the boost. 

Most boosters had a ritual: a little thing to make it a ceremony, a little prayer that this one wouldn’t fry your systems, wipe your cortex to a shambling Empty.

Not Drift. Because even that would be a blessing, a silence from the grinding misery of life: no hope, no promise, no future except more of the same: predator and prey, violence and fear.  Even death would be an escape. Maybe, he thought sometimes, he wanted to die, just to get out of it, and boosting was a coward’s suicide gesture, hoping a mislabeled cylinder or a shorting breaker would do the job. 

No such luck, he thought, with a snort.  He gave one last scan—hey, no telling if it would be the last, a goodbye to a world that would miss him even less than he’d miss it—and raised the booster, thumbing the attachment spike, bracing to drive it through a chink in his helm, spilling charge through him in an agony-ecstasy of foaming blackness, blinding him, dumbing him, heightening every receptor’s charge cap, turning his whole frame into nothing but a racing current, and, at least for a cycle, buying him the blankness of emptiness.

For now.

Comments

[acidgreenflames.livejournal.com]

Oh Drift. I loved this! So dark and well written!