Assorted Drabbles for tf-speedwriting

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

(Newsletter compiler: I apologize :) )

Title: Four Facts
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Monstructor, Jhiaxus
Rating: PG
Prompt 13: Monster:

It…hurt. That was its first, its only conscious thought. Its first fact. It hurt: its entire awareness of its body being a map of pain, throbbing and jabbing.

It was aware of sound, then, a ululation of agony, torn from a wretched throat. Its throat, it realized, its own vocalizer giving voice to its existence. It was alive. It was in pain. They were both the same.

It moved, and it became aware of sight, colors and shapes lurching and resolving before its optics, which were studded around its head like a coronet, seeing all around it. Everything seemed…small, even though it had no frame of reference. How can one know smallness when one doesn’t have a scale?

It knew restraint, suddenly, feeling its motion stopped, halted, by hard bindings around what it realized were arms, hobbles on ankles. It was alive, it hurt, it was bound. Three facts.

And a fourth fact, a fourth discovery, the wail of pain changing into something darker, danger-edged: it was angry.

[***]

Jhiaxus nodded, safe from the other side of the ironglass barrier. He called up the research file, labeled 'Monstructor, noting with no small satisfaction: “Success.”

Title: Red Face
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Drift, Gasket, OC (Glitch)
Rating: G
Prompt 7: Urban legend

“I’m telling you!” Glitch said, exasperated. “I saw him!” His hands shook like a junkie’s.

“No one’s saying they don’t believe you,” Gasket said. He glanced over to Drift, who was peering out at the alleyway, from the narrow doorway to this hidey hole, partly to make sure they were safe, now, and partly to chastise Drift before he made some disparaging comment.  Glitch didn’t need scorn right now, he needed help.

Drift met his gaze, giving one of his eloquent lexicon of shrugs. This one meant ‘it wasn’t worth it to say anything’.  Good enough.

“What did you see?”  Gasket dug out a rolled up, nearly empty energon pouch, holding it out. The pouches were ‘emergency rations’, sold to mechs uplevel for storms and trips into the wilderness. He’d had this particular envelope for metacycles, filling it here and there with whatever energon he could.

Glitch took it, careful to take only a small sip: everyone knew about Gasket’s energon ration, no one would dare show greed. Not when they all needed fuel. “I saw him! Red Face! He came after me, out of the shadows. He was gonna…!” His optics were wide and yellow and terrified.

“Relax,” Gasket said, stroking a calming hand down Glitch’s arm. “You saw a red face.”

“Probably Security,” Drift muttered over his shoulder. “Or a really bad prank.”

“Who would prank about Red Face?”

“Someone who wanted to get beaten half to death if he was ever found out.” Drift said, calmly.

True enough: Red Face was nothing to joke about. Glitch nodded agreement.  “It wasn’t a prank, or Security,” he said. “Unless Security can walk through walls now.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Drift grumbled.  “Can hope they get stuck there.”

“You saw Red Face, walk through a wall.” 

Another urgent nod.

“Bad Syk,” Drift said. “Hallucinations.” His tone was flat and knowledgeable. 

“No,” Glitch said. “Been clean for a decacycle. Mostly…cause I can’t get any.”

A look from Drift’s orange optics, then a nod: it was the only excuse mechs in the gutters would believe.

“It’s just a story,” Gasket said, soothingly. He pressed the packet back into Glitch’s hand.

Glitch simply held it, refusing another mouthful. It wasn’t right to take more than one share.

“You’re with us,” Drift said. His voice was a lot less gentle than Gasket’s, but no less comforting in its way. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

“But…Red Face. Once you see him, you only have a cycle left to live!” Glitch moaned. “Everyone knows the story.”

“It’s…a story,” Drift said. “That’s all. Because face it: fraggin’ dangerous enough down here. Any of us could die any cycle.”

For some reason his ruthless pragmatism did more to calm Glitch than Gasket’s kindness. His ventilations steadied, nodding. “You’re right. I just…please don’t leave me alone? Just to make sure?”

Drift grunted, shifting his stance in the doorway. Gasket caught his hand. “We won’t,” Gasket said. “We won’t, and then we’ll all have a good laugh about it, all right?”

Glitch nodded, trying to stop shaking. “Yeah. All right.” He hoped.

 Title: Equality
Continuity: IDW
Character: Drift
Rating: PG
Warning: ref to canon character death
Prompt 6: Danse macabre

The gutters were dangerous. That was about as useful a statement as ‘the sky is overhead’, except, in the gutters, more believable. Most mechs down here had never even seen the sky. They believed in it with the same faith they would use to believe in Primus or the Guiding Hand.

And, Drift thought, he was dangerous, too. You didn’t live down here, you didn’t survive, unless you were as bad as the baddest things down here.  

He’d never killed before, though. Because there was, in the deeper levels of the gutters, a sort of unwritten contract: if a mech attacked you for some resource—food or safety, something tangible and wanted—you didn’t kill. Because tomorrow, or two days from then, it could be you who was so desperate for a scrap of food that you’d attack another. You hurt them just enough to make them stop. That was the rule.

But this was different. He felt it, like a sudden hollowness scooped in his abdomen, like the heaviness of the gun, unfamiliar, in his hand. He could smell the energy blast, sharp and ionic, and the char of innermost energon, bubbling from the wounds of the Security mechs strewn at his feet.

And Gasket.

He moved over, kneeling by Gasket’s frame, staring into the lifeless blue-green optics. They’d been unique among the gutters, a bit like the ocean they liked to dream about. And now they were dark and blank. Drift tilted his head, trying to feel something, anything. Grief, horror, anger…anything. He waited for it to hit, expecting to be felled by it, to buckle over, weeping and howling.

Nothing. He felt…nothing. Only the weight of the gun in his hand.

And he stood, looking over the clotted corridor, at the dead. He’d seen death before, but never killed before. But still, it struck him, as he saw the three scattered Security mechs, their arrogance shattered, and Gasket, for once still and silent, that in this, in death, everyone was equal.

Title: The Mask
Continuity: IDW
Character: Tarn
Rating: PG
Prompt 12: Deformed faces




There were rumors, of course, about Tarn’s face. They fluttered around him like ebony birds, distracting and mysterious. Some rumors said that he was beautiful behind it—that he’d hidden his beauty as a sacrifice to the Decepticon cause. Some said that he was hideous, his face matching his twisted, malign spark, and the mask was a mere material form of the ideology in which he wrapped his sadism.

Some said both: that Tarn had been beautiful, once, but became disfigured early in the war: this version often had variants—he’d lost his looks in defending Megatron, throwing himself in front of a plasma burst or light grenade; he’d disfigured himself as an act of expiation for an unworthy thought; he’d had the mask welded or bolted onto his face by Megatron himself, as one of Megatron’s tormenting, ironic lessons.

Tarn knew these rumors, all of them. He found them…amusing. The larger the mystique around him, the larger the aura, the better he was, the more powerful and effective. It brought the tempo of the spark in his victims up to a higher pitch, so that he could sense it more easily, as though elevating their volume to the point where he could hear.

But what was under the mask? Truth be told, Tarn himself didn’t remember. It had been so long, so fogged with memories, so spattered with death, that even he couldn’t recall what his face had looked at, or even, if there was a face under it at all.
Sometimes it felt like there wasn’t: that under the mask he was simply void, the beyond he called them to. And in those times, he felt a certain, dark, powerful supremacy.




Title: Cold Song
Continuity: IDW
Character: Tarn, nameless OC
Warnings: implied character death
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: 11: 'That cold ain’t the weather, that’s death approaching.



“Do you like the music?” Tarn asked, his voice silky with death. Their victim lolled on Kaon, his hands bunching pitifully under the bindings. Tarn leaned closer, optics seeking out the spiderweb-shattered lenses of the mech. Not quite a former Decepticon, but not worthy of the Decepticon name: he was in some liminal state that in Tarn’s mind, obviated his need for a name.

Oh, Kaon kept track; that was his job. But Tarn had other responsibilities, other predilections. To him, the name didn’t truly matter. The history didn’t truly matter. All that mattered, truly, was the high, jingling note of the spark’s energy, like a wild, whipping thread that he sought to tame, to weave back into the cold tapestry of the universe, an errant note he surrounded with arpeggios and triads, taming it to the melody of death.

“Or shall,” he purred, leaning closely enough to smell the char of circuits from Kaon’s handiwork, “I change the tune? Something slower, perhaps?”

A shuddering moan, another note Tarn could take like a rein to control him, wrap around the mech like a snare of his own making.

“Yes,” Tarn said, tilting his head from side to side in front of the mech’s face, giving a mellifluous dark chortle as the victim, the soon-to-be-dead feebly turned his head, trying to avoid Tarn’s gaze, in an effete, empty denial of reality. They always did, Tarn thought. They always did think, somehow, that it wouldn’t end this way, even when he began whispering to them, his voice cold and distant as space. “Yes,” Tarn said. “I think perhaps it’s time….”







Title: Addictive
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Vos, Tarn
Rating: PG
Warning: ref to canon addiction
Prompt 10: Monstrous transformations





It was the smell. Vos could always tell by the smell. Tarn didn’t try to keep it much of a secret, not from Vos. Possibly because there was no point. There were no secrets from Vos.

The smaller mech’s quick fingers coded the doorlock: Tarn locked away everyone but Vos in these indulgences. Vos always, always had the codes. It was an honor and a duty, a dark bond between them, that he held Tarn’s life in his hands.

Tarn lay on the floor, rolling sultry optics at Vos as the smaller mech entered, his EM field buzzing and sated. “Vos,” Tarn said, his voice rich and full of vibrato. One hand moved, as if to grab Vos, or stroke his shoulder. It didn’t matter: the hand shook, feebly, before falling to the ground.

“Tarn,” Vos acknowledged. The city names, at least, had stayed the same from Primal Vernacular to NeoCybex.

“Another,” Tarn said, and greed twisted his voice into a croak. “I must have another.”

Vos shook his head, leaning over the larger chassis, fingers nimble and familiar on the armor locks. He said nothing, the flat mask of his face blank of emotion as he cracked open the chassis. His optics twitched, involuntary response, from the acrid sting of the reek of a transformation cog, worked to the point of breakdown. It wasn’t mere metal, the transformation cog: it was responsive, alive. And each one that Tarn used was unique, redolent with another’s life. Sometimes Vos wondered if that were the addiction: savoring the different subtleties of another mech’s essence, or if it were the joy of using another’s part for his own pleasure.

It was more than simple transformation. Mechs who wrote it off as a simple addiction, a base, vulgar need, didn’t understand Tarn the way Vos did. There was always something subtle and deep in Tarn’s motives, which saved him from being a brute, an elegance of design, a sensuality of motive. Always.

Vos’s hands, burned from this procedure so many times that they’d lost the ability to sense heat, plucked the brittle cog out, feeling the semi-metal flake in his fingertips, and Tarn arched under the sudden absence, as though the lack were the only thing that hurt. And Vos wondered, not for the first time, if this too, cracked open, surrendered, was not also part of the addiction.





Title: Crank Call
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Fulcrum, Misfire, Krok
Rating: G
Prompt 3: Practical joke




“Shhhh, no way,” Misfire said. “This’ll be hilarious.”

“I really don’t see how.” Fulcrum frowned, folding his arms over his chassis. “I think this is like the opposite of hilarious.”
“Yeah well, you don’t know how to have fun,” Misfire retorted, then leaned over, bumping him with an elbow. “Don’t worry, though, pinhead: I’ll show you the ropes.”

“I’m not a big fan of ropes,” Fulcrum said, sourly. “I’m more concerned about what Krok’s going to do.”

“Flip his gears,” Misfire said, with a grin. “It’s pretty impressive to watch. Like a geyser or something.” He made a broad gesture with his hands, like something exploding. “Whoooosh!”

It still didn’t seem quite cool to do to Krok, who was still in the W.A.P’s medbay, but Fulcrum had already figured out that there were times when saying no to Misfire was a bad, bad idea. He shrugged, surrendering. “All right. So how does this work again?”

“We’re gonna, check this out.” Misfire dug into a storage compartment, pulling out a small component, “use Flywheels’s comm to call Spinister. Spooky voice, like this. ‘Spinister! Spiiiiinisterrrrrrr I am calling you from beyoooond the graaaaave.” Misfire burst into chortles. “Spinister’ll go fraggin’ nuts. Probably shoot through the hull.” He rubbed his palms together gleefully. “Wait. Just wait.”

“I’m, uh, waiting,” Fulcrum said Because, well, what else could he say?

“Right! That’s the spirit, pinhead. Now.” He tinkered with the comm, tugging out a relay cable. “Here goes.” He paused, clearing his vocalizer. “OoooooooOOOOOOOoooo,” he said, in a spooky voice. Or maybe a spooky voice. An attempt at a spooky voice, at any rate. A worthy Decepticon attempt. “Spinister…this is Flywheels….” A blink. “Uh. What?”

Even Fulcrum could hear the irate gabble of syllables blasting back over the comm.

“Krok! Frag. Eheheh, just a little joke, right? You’re not mad, are you? Okay, you’re not really—okay, that’s pretty mad. Uh, well…Fulcrumputmeuptoit!” Misfire blurted, thrusting the comm into Fulcrum’s hands.

“Wow, Fulcrum,” Misfire said, shaking his head. “You really blew it: Krok? Is torqued.”


Title: What matters
Continuity: IDW, pre-Megatron Origin
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Frenzy, Megatron
Warning: dead OC?
Prompt: dead bodies

The door to the gravlift shut before Megatron even realized he wasn’t alone.  

“Heh,” a voice came, from about his knees, “you must be new.”

He was new, but he wasn’t sure how it was obvious. Maybe because he didn’t recognize the smaller mech? “Yes,” he said, with a shrug. Every new mine had a hazing ritual for new mechs. He’d been through a half dozen already, with each new mine assignment. They were things to be endured, he’d thought at first, but he’d come to learn that they were important, rituals that created community, a bar to entry that made a mech earn his place. 

It felt like a formative lesson.

“Figured,” the small mech said, “’Cause it’s normally new guys who get shafted with this job.” He jabbed the gravlift control panel, entering the mine core’s lowest level.

“You’re new, too?”  

The smaller mech burst out laughing. “Frag no. I been here since this mine opened.” A cheeky sort of grin. “I just get a lot of disciplinary gigs.”

“I see.”

“Hey, you ain’t one of those, are you? Gonna be a gearstick ‘cuz a mech like me likes to have a little fun?”  The mech thrust his chest out, combative. It was so ludicrous, Megatron almost laughed. He could hurt the mech by turning around too fast.

“No.” Not his business. Not his problem. The mines taught you to think like that. Sometimes he hated it, sometimes it was the only thing that made sense.

“Good. Y’ever done this before?”

A shake of the head. “I’ve always been on asteroid mines before.”

“Yeah, they do their own recycling,” the mech said. “Not part of the big seamless government contracted machine.” He thrust a hand out. “Frenzy.”

“Megatron.”

“Yeah, everyone knows who you are, big guy.”  Frenzy gave a smirk as the door to the lift opened behind him. “Come on. Sooner we start this, sooner we’re out for our shiftcycle off.” He rubbed his hands, almost gleefully: the perk—such as it was—for this overnight duty was getting the following day off.  Not that he’d had a choice: he was up on the roster.

He followed Frenzy down the corridor, the lights above them blinking fitfully, as though threatening, dully, at any klik to die, plunging them into darkness.  His footfalls echoed, heavy and clanging, compared to Frenzy’s smaller, faster strides. He always felt big in the mines, but only rarely had he felt confined: it was some trick of the shadows, he thought, or the knowledge that the entire administrative core of the mine pressing down above him that made it seem so close and claustrophobic down here. 

“Here we are,” Frenzy said with a  gleeful sort of melodrama, letting the door open into darkness. “The mooooooorgue.”

It wasn’t much of a morgue, Megatron thought: more like a closet with a few shelves. On one shelf, a lumpy shape and across the room a door to the outside where, in the morning, the civil recycling unit would show up for the body.

Megatron gave an unimpressed shrug. Not much around this terrestrial mine impressed him. It was mostly just…unusual compared to what he was used to: in space where his mass was less of a liability, where the rules were all about survival and not about, well, this.

“Drillchuck,” he said, reading the holotag on the tarp.  The name was distantly, vaguely familiar. 

“He was an all right mech,” Frenzy said, rummaging in the corner for a chair. “Not a brain trust, but hey, who of us are, right?”

“Do you know what happened?”

Frenzy shrugged. “Shaft collapse, probably. The one yesterday in Sector Epsilon.” 

Megatron remembered, at least distantly. He remembered the way the mine shook—walls, floor, ceiling shuddering as though succumbing to fear, the sound of muffled thunder. “I hadn’t realized there were any casualties.”

Frenzy shrugged. “Yeah, company policy.  ‘Bad for morale’,” he said, making wry squiggles in the air with his fingers.  “Cause they don’t keep us in the dark enough with the, you know, keeping us in the dark.”

Megatron smirked at the turn of phrase. This Frenzy might seem frivolous, but he was astute, he thought.  “That’s the same wherever I’ve been,” he said.

“Don’t make it more right.”

“No. It doesn’t.” He felt a vague dissatisfaction stirring in his chassis. His fingers pinched at the tarp, half wanting to pull it aside. Would that change anything? Would that make him better or worse? Would it be giving in to a ghoulish curiosity, or doing a sort of honor to this Drillchuck, that someone would see, someone would remember.

Frenzy caught the motion. “Y’ever seen one before? A dead mech?”

Not an easy question to answer, for a handful of reasons. “Not up close.”

“You scared?” A little goad in the voice, calling him out: the old hand to the newbie.

“No.”  He pulled the tarp back, almost ashamed that he was falling for the pressure. And then took in a sudden vent of air.  Drillchuck’s face—what was left of it—was a jagged pulp of metal and clotted fluids.  Red splinters of optical glass were embedded in the cheek, the jaw twisted off to one side and flattened, giving the face a hideous expression, like a blasphemy of a laugh.  This was death, up close. This was death, hideous and empty.

He felt his mouth curl, in a nauseated distaste.

“Pretty gross, huh?” Frenzy had hopped off the chair, standing, his fingers curled on the edge of the shelf to peer at Drillchuck’s body.

“Why are we here?” It seemed a non sequitur. Maybe it was. But it was the first thing that came to his mind. 

“Keep an optic on the body. Make sure no one sneaks in and steals it.”

“A vigil,” Megatron said.

“Yeah, I guess. If you want to be all romantical about it,” Frenzy shrugged.

“You’re not.” It seemed fitting, at least, that after his death, Drillchuck be mourned, at least, by his own kind. Not romantic at all. More like the least they could do.

“You won’t be either, if you’re smart,” Frenzy said. “We’re here to make sure the Company gets paid for the scrap. That’s all.”

Oh. “Oh.” There it was: even in death, the Company squeezing them for profit.

“There ya go,” Frenzy said, with a satisfied smile. “Smart mech. Keep in mind. Here, whatever you do, you’re shanix. Life or death, they’ll bleed money out of you.”

In the dim light, Megatron frowned. Not doubting Frenzy, but believing him all too much. He tugged the tarp back over Drillchuck’s face, turning away. Death, he thought, should mean something. The loss of an individual should matter. Death should matter.  Matter more than money.

One day, he thought, it would.

Title: Strange Meeting
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Turmoil, Metalhawk
Rating: PG
Prompt 1: graveyard at midnight

 


The only sound in the darkness was the whine of jet engines, circling in the cloudless ink of the sky.  The whine then dropped to a sequential shifting of a transformation and then two soft bumps of footplates landing lightly on the ground.

And then a shadow, slim and lithe, moving over the small steelstone orbs of cenotaphs, slowly, as though searching for something.

A shadow detached itself from the mass of a large crypt, the darkness of the mech's frame looking for a moment like the shadow itself moving.  "I'm almost surprised you came," Turmoil said, his voice, despite the grim surroundings, held its customary amusement.

"You wanted to meet," Metalhawk said. He still didn't trust Turmoil. But everything the Decepticon had told him had turned out verifiably true. Even Bumblebee had grudgingly admitted that Turmoil had not lied.  If someone here was trying to earn Metalhawk's trust, Turmoil had certainly put more effort into it than any Autobot. Or even Starscream.

"I did," Turmoil said, smoothly, stepping in just at the edge of Metalhawk's comfort zone.

"It seems a strange choice of location."

"Strange." A velvet chuckle. "Is there anything here not strange, Metalhawk?"

Good question. "Point."

"Besides," Turmoil continued, "I like the ambiance."

"Of the dead."

One shoulder hiked in a shrug, the glowing lines on his armor shifting in the darkness. "It's captivating, don't you think? To be alive among so much old death?"

"I'm not sure that's the word I'd use," Metalhawk said. The markers spread away from them in all directions, little blisters on the ground that seemed, for some reason, less churned and broken than the rest of the planet.

"And words have become so very important, haven't they?"  Turmoil purred with a sort of sinister agreement.

"They will build our peace.  Fists and weapons destroy: words can build."

Another laugh. "If only we could actually agree on anything at all."

Metalhawk bridled, unsure if the comment was supposed to be a rebuke or not.  He frowned in the starry darkness, stepping forward to pick a slow, careful path through the many, many dead.  Turmoil followed him, moving with a grace uncanny for his size and mass.

"I presume," Metalhawk said, slowly, "This is a metaphor.  Each step forward moving us over the remains of the past."

"You flatter me," Turmoil said, mildly, but not denying.  "But I am, also, fascinated by so much room, just for death.  Once the war began, such things became a wasteful indulgence rather than a mere luxury."

Metalhawk nodded. Scavenging and stripping for parts became protocol for both sides: oftentimes the Autobot's 'noble' retrieval of the dead was merely to be able to use the components.  Before the war, that sort of recycling was for the lowest of classes.  "And do you think we should go back to this? A sort of democracy of the dead?"

"Democracy." The word seemed silly in Turmoil's vocalizer.  Turmoil patted another of the crypts--a larger square edifice in the midst of the humbler bubbles.  "This is," he said, as though this were some confession, "all new to me."

It wasn't a secret: Turmoil was a warborn mech. As the war had progressed, both sides had kept creating larger and larger mechs, enormous and lethal.  Cybertron before the war was an unknown to Turmoil. Metalhawk himself had only the vaguest memories, that seemed a gouache of light and dark.  "And what of you, then?" Metalhawk asked. "Your very size and purpose is an indulgence."

"It is, now," Turmoil agreed. "But our kind, after all, is adaptable. And I maintain I am still more valuable alive than as parts." His orange optics, seeing far better than Metalhawk's daylight blue ever could, found Metalhawk in the dark, unerring. "Would you agree?"

A challenge, Metalhawk realized, throwing Metalhawk's beliefs at him, testing to see if they were real or mere...words.  "You are. We all are, if only for what we know of the war."

"Knowledge, yes."  Turmoil chuckled as though he'd won a prize.  "Speaking of that, consider," he said, ambling around the crypt, "the knowledge this one has. Life before the war, secrets probably lost to both sides." He tilted his head, stumbling despite himself through the inscription in Primal Vernacular. "A senator," Turmoil mused. "Such secrets."

"It is a terrible loss," Metalhawk agreed.

"It is terrible," Turmoil echoed, turning to look down on Metalhawk's lithe frame, "But not necessarily a loss."  If he had a face under that mask, Metalhawk knew it would be grinning.

And he hated that he fell into the trick of it, asking the question Turmoil wanted asked. "How so?"

A gratified purr, just as expected. "Think what we might learn," Turmoil said, "If only we had a mnemosurgeon."  A hand moved to rest on Metalhawk's narrow shoulder, reinforcing the 'we', as though they were a partnership.  It was an offer of one, at any rate, and a trust.

Metalhawk wavered. "I...may know of one," he said. Half a lie: he knew one, fairly well. He just wasn't sure he had it in him to lay this out to him.

"Think of all we could gain," Turmoil said, hand squeezing companionably at Metalhawk's shoulder. "Think of our future.  Because all futures, all living things, are built of the parts of the past."

Metalhawk nodded, distracted, feeling the world begin to shift under his feet, as though the dead were coming back to life, and he felt the urge to move, suddenly, before he fell.

Title: Midnight Snack
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Cutthroat, Blot, Sinnertwin, Rippersnapper and Hun-Grr
Rating: PG
Warnings: BLOT
Prompt: strange noises at 2 am



"Mrph." Cutthroat grunted at the sudden thump into his chassis.  Typical Terrorcon wakeup call, and typical Cutthroat enthusiasm. "Five more kliks."

"Cutthroat!"  A hoarse whisper, and a wave of....completely repulsing stench. Blot. Great.

"Shut up and go away. Far away." Cutthroat flopped onto his back, hand pillowing his head.

"But I hear something!" Blot's sticky hand, grabbing at Cutthroat's.

"I can't hear anything over the way you smell!"

"Hnnnngh!" Sinnertwin's one head roared up from the ground next to him.  "Doesn't even make any fraggin' sense, Cutthroat."

"Listen!" Blot said, his optics wide and round and fearful.

Sinnertwin dropped the head onto Cutthroat's chassis, optics blinking dully. "Sure. Why not. We're up now." The optics were narrow slits of tired annoyance.

Cutthroat sighed, rolling his optics and letting the silence--slightly sticky and relatively foul-smelling--spread over them.

And there it was: a vague splurch splurch crunch sound, wet and breaking.  "The frag?" Cutthroat asked, optics peering around the small hangar bay.  No one wanted to quarter with the Terrorcons, thanks to Blot, so they got the unluxurious accommodations of a hose-out-able hangar bay.  One in which, apparently, things echoed.

"It's a ghost!" Blot said. "The ghost of the hangar bay!"

"That doesn't even sound scary," Rippersnapper muttered from behind them.  "What lame ghost would haunt a fraggin' hangar bay?"

"Point," Sinnertwin said. He surged to his feet, both heads snaking around. "Right. If it makes noise, we can kill it."

"I'm...not sure that's how that goes," Cutthroat said, but shrugged. Whatever. It was clear they weren't getting any more recharge tonight, so might as well go, you know, kill something.

"This way," Sinnertwin said, scampering forward.  Why the scrap he slept in his alt mode, Cutthroat had no idea. He'd figured it was one of those 'bound to make you crazy if you thought about it too much' things. And he was crazy enough already.  Cutthroat sighed, drawing his gun, moving after Sinnertwin. He paused, as Sinnertwin rounded a corner, looking back. "You coming?"

"I-I'm afraid," Blot said, cowering behind Rippersnapper, who looked ready to murder and vomit simultaneously. Vomurder. Multitasking: Hun-Grr would be proud.

Speaking of Hun-Grr..... "Hey, where's Hun-Grr?"

"It has him! Maybe that's the sound of it eating him right now!" Blot's voice quavered.  "He is crunchy."

I do not, Cutthroat thought, want to know how he knows that. I don't even want to know that I don't want to know that.

"You're really sort of putting the 'terror' in Terrorcon," Rippersnapper said, jerking his arm from Blot's sticky grip.  "Just the wrong kind of terror."

Right. Cutthroat was developing a feeling about this.

"Yeah? Well, then, where's Sinnertwin?" Blot countered, wringing his hands. "I tell you, that thing is getting them."  He quivered. "Don't go around that corner, Cutthroat, or it'll get you, too!"

Frag. The best way--the only way, Hun-Grr had once told him--to get Cutthroat to do something was to tell him not to. Especially if the tell-er was Blot.  Cutthroat rolled his optics, and strode around the corner.

"...seriously." Cutthroat dropped the gun on the floor, throwing his hands up in a gesture of 'I give the frag up!'.

In front of him, Hun-Grr sat, ankle resting on a knee, scanning a datapad, while he devoured, handful after greedy handful, a bowl of rust-chips, his other hand reaching down, idly scritching Sinnertwin's exposed belly.

"Noooooodon'ttellmeitgotyoutoooooooo!

"  Blot came bolting around the corner, sliding on his own goo, slamming into Cutthroat's back.

"...the frag is wrong with all of you idiots?" Hun-Grr said, miffed.

"Blot," Cutthroat said, stooping to pick up and holster his weapon.  "Blot's what's wrong."

Blot blinked, peering around Cutthroat.  "Snacks," he said, numbly.

"Yeah. What? Reading reports makes me hungry."

"Everything makes you hungry," Rippersnapper muttered, propping himself on the wall on the very edge of the corner.

"Getting woken up in the middle of the night by an idiot makes me cranky," Cutthroat retorted.

"Everything makes  you cranky." Rippersnapper shrugged. "What? You set that line up yourself."

"Frag this," Cutthroat said. "I'm going back to recharge."

"I'm not,"Rippersnapper said. "It's about opportunity and right now I see an opportunity for a snack. So I guess that means I'll get your share."

Hun-Grr clutched at the bowl of chips, growling. "My snacks. Mine."

"No way," Cutthroat said, dropping down. Don't tell me whose snacks I can't fraggin' eat, he thought. "Your fault we're awake. You owe us."

Hun-Grr sighed, offering the bowl.  "Next time," he said, "I'm going to tranq you first, Blot."

Title: Other Ways of Seeing
Continuity: IDW
Character: Kaon
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: unimportant OC death
Prompt: the other side



Kaon couldn't see. Not the way normal mechs could. He'd surrendered his optics, long ago, to become what the Decepticon Justice Division required.  And the message had always been a mirror image of their mission, to punish each infraction with death: with each surrender came a gift.  While others could see only visible light, Kaon saw the world through emanations, stirs of electrons and an energy that defied science, a complex tapestry of color and sensation and sound combining together, sometimes beautifully, sometimes in an othersensely cacophony.

It was how he tracked so well, how he guided his current, and the end was almost ordained: he'd sense his target, get a read of its colorsmellfeelingsound, and the current from his coils would simply bridge the gap, like jumping a synapse.

This mech, now, for example: he'd begun as a bright green, almost liquid velvet, with a thread of a  red trill, a line of sour crimson stitched through it.  Now it was sodden, muddied and grey-green with pain, the red line a flood of wailing blood.  He would be done soon, over, and they'd have to seek further amusements, further justices.

But right now, he was hanging on, and Kaon could sense, in the rancid green, his despair, clinging to a life he knew was being prised from him, finger by finger.  Kaon could feel death, like an abyss, yawn beneath the mech, bored and hungry and patient all  in one. Death was blackness to Kaon's senses, the utter essence of nothing, void and untraceable.

Who knew, he thought, what was courage, what was foolishness: to cling when it merely extended agony seemed pointless, unnecessary self-torment. Unless a mech believed in redemption, unless he thought suffering could somehow purge him of his sins.

Redemption only mattered if there was something beyond death, beyond that bottomless gulf.

The mech screamed: Kaon heard it through his audio. And his spark screamed, as well, the harrowing, appalling, terrible sound of despair turned into one's whole being. It was a swansong, in a way, dark and beautiful in its rawness, in its pure self-ness.  There was nothing here: a shamed past, a future torn from its roots. There was nothing, nothing else but pain beyond the rational mind, pain beyond all the trappings of right and wrong, self and side.

In this moment of death, as he slipped to the other side, the grey green mottling dissolved, rending like cloth, there was that one moment Kaon anticipated, always, this flare of light and sense, different for all, but a note, single and solitary and pure, of a spark yielding its essence back into the universe, of it slipping, in an auroral glow, the most potent ugly vital beauty that no one would ever see.



Title: The Horrible Monstrosity
Continuity: SG
Characters: Drift, Perceptor
Rating: PG
Warnings: petro-rabbit
Prompt: creepy critters




"You just keep telling yourself that, Perceptor," Drift snickered, staggering down the corridor to his quarters. "You just keep that up. One day? One day, I'm gonna get ya."

He paused, lurchingly, outside his quarters, taking half a klik to get his optics to focus.  Perceptor was an aft, but he could mix some pretty fan-fraggin'-tastic high grade energon drinks. Mind-blowing, really.  "S'why I keep him around," Drift said, nodding sagely at the keypad.  Well, that and weapons modding. Perceptor was pretty handy with that sort of thing.

Yeah, Perceptor was really all right, all things considered, Drift thought, as he stabbed his code into the door. 1. 1. 1. It was, he always thought, the cleverest code. Because no one would ever guess it.  That was his style: so obvious you tripped over yourself trying to figure out how complex it was.

"Heh," Drift gave a self-congratulatory snort as he crossed the threshold, the lights auto-blinking on, casting glossy highlights on his red armor.

And then froze, blue optics flying wide.

There.

On his berth.

It was.

It was.

A monstrosity. A horror beyond mortal comprehension. An unutterable hideosity, a dark and horrible creature from the dread reaches of the bowels of Alpha 9.

A...petro-rabbit.

It looked up at him, its evil nose twitching in some obviously malign delight, the long, floppy mesh ears trailing on the berth.

Tentacles, Drift had no doubt.  Some sort of horrible prehensile auditory appendage.

"G-G-G-GET IT OUT!!!" he howled, feeling his ember pound in his chest.  He reached for his guns, and his swords, his hands fouling themselves. He wanted to run, but he knew the instant he turned his back, the instant!! the evil creature would leap on him, vile and evil and a whole pile of adjectives he was too drunk and terrified to come up with.

He managed one step backwards, just one, before he bumped into something.

Something in black armor. "You need help with something?" A supercilious smirk in his voice that Drift didn't have to turn around to see.

"F-fraggin' petro-rabbit!"  He extended one quivering finger toward the berth.

"What, this?" Perceptor pushed around him, bending over to run a finger over the vile creature's misshapen malformed hideous unholy head.

"Don't touch it! It'll--!"

"It will what, Drift?"  Perceptor turned, his optics amused, as he lifted the creature up by its ears.  "It is a harmless little creature."

"It is a fraggin' abomination, is what it is! What's it fraggin' doing in my fraggin' quarters!?"

A glint of the yellow optics.  "Perhaps it likes you, Drift."

"Yeah? Yeah? Well I don't like it. At all."  Drift squealed, ducking, as Perceptor held it out toward him.  "Getitawayfromme!"

"Really, Drift. You're such an emberling."

"I don't care! Get it away!  Thing gives me the creeps."  Uber-creeps.  Creeps like he could already feel the eggs it would probably lay under his armor cracking and hatching.

Oh, gross.

A smirk.  "Say 'please'."

"Perceptor." Drift snarled, blue optics narrowed. Even so, his chassis was heaving with unadulterated fear.  "Fine. All right. Please. Just...get it away from me."

The smirk turned into a triumphant, cocky grin. "By all means, Drift." He moved past Drift, unable to resist one last chance to waggle it in Drift's face, just to watch the red mech, the Autobot scourge who even Optimus Prime didn't order around, cringe back in fear.

"Thank you!" Drift gabbled, at Perceptor's back. "Thank you. Fraggin' horror. Infestation. We should scour the ship, you know, exterminate them. Or-or--or maybe we need to bail on the ship. Yeah. That's it. Leave the ship and remote detonate it. It's the only way to be sure."

"We're not blowing up the ship," Perceptor said, flatly. "Especially not for such a stupid reason."

"It's not stupid! I mean, look at that thing! Look at those vicious puncturing teeth and those jaws that could bite through anything--obvious how it got in here: it ate its way through the fraggin' hull!"

Perceptor sighed, shaking his head.  "Drift. It is a low-level vermin, hardly worth the energon to shoot it."

"Then stab it! Or set it on fire. Or snap its hideous neck, or something! I don't fraggin' care."

"Honestly, Drift." Exasperated now. "I'll deal with it."

"Good!" Drift said, clinging to the doorframe.  "Kill it deader than dead then throw its charred remains in a Dimensional Rift. Or--"

"I don't need suggestions, Drift." A snort, Perceptor turning in the corridor. "In fact, perhaps we ought to keep it, as a pet."  He held the thing up to his optic level, considering. It reached forward, one tiny paw tapping his nose.

Drift flinched back. "Cooties! You're not coming near me till you've decon-fraggin-taminated!"

"Really."  Perceptor turned, coming back to Drift, who clung to the doorway like gravity wasn't working right.  He reached out one hand and *poink* touched Drift on the shoulder.

Drift burst into a sound, halfway between anger and terror. "I'm going to fraggin' kill you for that!"

Perceptor smirked, jiggling the petro-rabbit in his other hand. "Are you really?"

Drift scowled, subsiding, muttering, "One of these fraggin' days."

Comments

[wicked3659.livejournal.com]

Loved these, especially the Perceptor and Drift one with the petro-rabbit XD that had me chortling <3

[tainry.livejournal.com]

Cooties! \o/

[playswithworms.livejournal.com]

Horrible prehensile auditory appendages, eeeeeeeeek! XD

[cmdrtekk.livejournal.com]

Enjoyed these.