Happiness

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG
Bayverse
Blackout, Scorponok
Angst, a bit
wordcount 593
time: 48 minutes

Written for tf_speedwriting  prompt ‘happiness is…’

 

It was such a small moment, really.  The kind you so often lose in the flow of time (especially for a mech as old as Blackout), and the cortical load, dismissed as unimportant, tactically insignificant. And it was both of those things, but it was…strangely precious.  All the more rare, and probably all the more remembered, because it was one of the last memories Blackout had of Scorponok. 

The symbiont droneling had been getting restless.  Blackout enjoyed flying, and had sent ripples of pleasure along their bond, but that had only entertained Scorponok for so long.  Blackout guessed it was like that: secondhand happiness only sustains one for so long.  Sooner or later you want your own.

So he’d stopped, in that wild, mountainous region, almost no EMF even at the low scales that signaled human habitation.  His landing scared some goats, and a few lizards that had been trying to catch the last feeble spatters of heat from the dying day as the sun sank into the jagged teeth of the horizon.  Scorponok rattled in his compartment, eager to get out, his excitement spinning up as Blackout’s rotors spun down. 

He bounded out of the compartment as Blackout released it, flying over the ground in sinuous leaps, his pincers spinning with delight, optics whirring.  Freemovementyes! sang over the bond, and Blackout felt the ground under multiple legs he didn’t have, sand spraying against his slithering underbelly. Every new experience brought the symbiont closer to full sentience, every day, every thought, in a strange way marching them closer to the inevitable moment when the bond would have to be broken, and Scorponok would be free, fully sentient, competent, and, Blackout hoped, tough.

He was certainly trying his best.

Scorponok tore in a large, mad circuit around Blackout, sending pulses of bright color and exhilaration.  Pure joy in movement, pure confidence in one’s limbs as they levered against the ground.  Diveeagerdive?  

“Yeah,” Blackout said.  This was something he had no experience of, something he knew only from Scorponok. Something he’d remember forever as a new experience, in a life full of repetition—death and injury, the tedious waiting between the racing explosions of battles, too fast to be afraid, then too numb to even try to feel anything. 

Scorponok knew none of those things. Knowing so little of life, he had no concept of death: literally had not evolved to the capacity to imagine. All he knew was the present: all he knew was sensation and emotion.  And all Scorponok knew right now was the desire to dig, to plunge his rotary pincers into the ground, swimming through soil and stone the way Blackout sailed through the air.  Except Blackout’s world was dark and light—Scorponok’s was entirely darkness, heavy, pressing in. Comfort, Scorponok sent.  

Yeah, if you say so, Blackout thought.  Stifling, he thought. Smothering.  Nocrashnofall Scorponok shot back, and a sensory blast of one time they’d been together and Blackout had taken a bad round, and plummeted down to the ground below.  He felt the whistling air, the blaze of pain, the lurch as gravity reached up and snatched him out of the sky.  Yes, he sent back, and then tightened his end of the bond. This wasn’t the time. This was time for Scorponok to feel.  To gather sensations, new experiences. He wants the comfort of carving through the soil? Let him.  Few enough joys in the world, fewer and fewer the older one got.  Let him have his happiness while he can.  And let me share it.  While I can.

 

Comments

[ithilgwath.livejournal.com]

that was utterly adorable.