Warborn

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
IDW
Fortress Maximus, Impactor
ref to LSOTW, MTMTE
for dark_bingo prompt "violence"

He kept having the dream. It awaited him, stalking his waking hours like a jackal, and he would swear at times he could see the glint of its teeth if he turned his back, if he felt exhaustion start to lap over his processor. It was patient, in the way all predators are patient, and callously cruel in the way of all evil. 

It could afford to be patient: it always won.

And then he would be there, back in Garrus-9. Back in the old days, even, before Overlord, when everything felt right. And he’d feel himself be drawn in, night after night, taking that familiarity and control as a solace, back to a time when he felt safe and powerful.

When he was safe and powerful.

And Impactor was sitting across from him, lifting the restraints between them like a bitter joke: the one hand, the other restraint capping his truncated right harpoon.

Fortress Maximus had done this a thousand times, the tedious intake protocol, the forms, the paperwork, the record of sentencing, all of it. And the show of force, himself, glowering down at the smaller inmates, a living embodiment of the authority of Garrus-9. A tedious routine, but comforting, in a way.

Except for Impactor’s glower: orange optics, almost like a Decepticon’s, lowlight miner’s optics.  And the sneer set on his face, that called into question, without words, Fortress Maximus’s authority.

“You are aware of the charges?”

Impactor snorted. “Yeah.”

“Your plea?”

“I don’t plea.” Flat, with an edge of hostile amusement.

“The plea entered on your behalf, then.” His finger hovered over the radio buttons on his datapad. 

Impactor gave a shrug. “Don’t pay much attention to bureaucratic gabbling.”

Fortress Maximus laid the pad down, with an irked sigh. He’d seen this attitude before, the toughest of tough nuts.  They always cracked.  “That attitude won’t get you far here.”

Another shrug. “Got me far enough.”

“Got you here.” Garrus-9 was not on anyone’s idea of achievement in life. Even Fortress Maximus’s.

Impactor leaned forward, his elbows bumping the table. “You think this scares me? You think I’ve never been through jail before?”  A brutal scoff.

“This is Garrus-9,” Fortress Maximus said, coldly. “Not some subdistrict jail.”

The orange optics narrowed into two thin lines before he sat back, in a predator’s feigned casual slump. “You really think you’re better’n me, don’t you?  We ain’t all that different.”

“That’s not relevant.”

“So you say.”

Fortress Maximus sighed. Fine. He would play it this way. Sometimes it gave the inmate rope to hang himself by.  “Fine. Let’s hear it. But I warn you, this will be recorded, as per Autobot Code subsection 51, paragraph a-iii, and used in any disciplinary or parole hearings.” Which he could already tell would be occurring, probably frequently.

Impactor tossed his head in a fractious circle, tossing off the ‘warning’.

“Let’s hear it,” Fortress Maximus said. He didn’t like being goaded. If Impactor had something to say, he could damn well say it on tape. “Because I don’t see any similarities between us at all.” Nor did he want to: Impactor was a criminal, a thug, someone with a hunger for violence that he only occasionally let be guided by Autobot rules and aims. And it had landed him on the opposite side of the intake table.

“Course you don’t. All refined and educated. Or that’s what you like to pretend. Let me tell you something, because I can see it, Fort Max.”  Impactor grinned, as if he hoped the truncation of the name offended. “A killer can always see it in the optics.”

“What?”  He recoiled.

“Violence. You like it. Don’t you?” A satisfied smirk. “Butcher of Simanzi suits you better than Chief Warden.”

Fortress Maximus felt his core seem to chill. He hadn’t heard that name in…not long enough. He could still smell that day, the sting of charred energon in his olfactory sensors, stinging in his optics, wading through the battlefield entirely given into the purpose of war. 

“That’s not who I am,” he said.

“It is. Try to deny it all you want. Trust me. Won’t work.” The light seemed to shrink from the room, to a tiny glint on a scar in Impactor’s cheek.

….

And that was it. A simple conversation, one of hundreds of hostile exchanges. He’d been insulted worse, called worse names, had his past thrown in his face more than once.  He’d suffered—for years—at Overlord’s hands, tortures beyond what he could ever have dreamed.

But this. This was the nightmare that stalked him: that Impactor might be right. That no matter how hard he tried, even after all the violence he’d been victim to, that darkness owned him, like a brand on his spark. And as he lay in the medibay, healing, slowly, from the beam Whirl had stabbed him with, he could feel it trembling in his limbs, whispering thoughts of gleeful revenge, imagining pain and suffering his hands could visit on Whirl, on anyone.

And Rachet could heal his body, and Rung could talk him down from his flashbacks of Garrus-9, but nothing, nothing could change him from what he was: a creature of violence, a child of war.