Grounded

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Verse: G1
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Grounded by the Devastator Winds, Thundercracker and Mirage exchange views on the war and why they chose their respective sides.

 

Canon-tweaking: I’ve changed the Devastator Winds to be like the Ghibli in North Africa—a seasonal, vicious, but temporary meteorological phenomenon.

There’s a brief lull in the War. Armed Neutrality is the catchphrase of the day: each mech still wears his faction symbol, but they commingle in an uneasy peace.  The Devastator winds have grounded all fliers temporarily in Polyhex. Which leaves Thundercracker separated from his Trine, and lonely.

Thundercracker hated being grounded.  He was meant for the sky—his sleek tetrajet contours begged to be caressed by the currents of high, thin, rarefied air, to dance with the shimmering rays of the upper atmosphere.  He was not meant to…walk.  Much less surrounded by grounders. Who seemed entirely incapable of NOT bumping into his wings. 

Sure, they mumbled some kind of apology afterwards, but that didn’t exactly balance the scales.  He looked up at the sky, hopefully, but his HUD blared white-line alarms at the windspeed and shear.  It would be suicide to try flying now. 

And he was not suicidal. Yet. 

He needed to go somewhere, anywhere that he couldn’t see the sky. The shriek of the Devastator Winds rang in his ears like a siren’s song, despite the danger, calling him into the skies, shrilling like a termagant.  He ducked into an energon bar, with no thought other than to escape the dangerous temptation of the sky.  TC elbowed up to the service bar, holding out his wrist-code. “High,” he said, curtly, to the service bot, who gave one long, disdainful glance at his Decepticon logo.

“Don’t got high grade here,” the service bot muttered.

“Fine,” TC sighed. “Whatever you do have.”  His wrist hung in the air, waiting for the service bot to scan it.  Just a few kliks too long.  TC’s eyes glittered dangerously.  The service bot shuffled away to the far end of the bar, returning with a code-reader and a dented cube filled with midgrade energon.  TC looked at it, dubiously. His systems really required high grade—this would give him an ache in his energon digestion systems.

All his fault, really.  He’d been the one to want to get away. Just for a little bit to leave the grim militarized Kaon.  Remember what a real city felt like—vibrant, alive, bustling with mechs with other things on their mind than tactics and weaponization. 

Starscream? He’d been too busy, of course.  TC figured if Starscream ever realized the war was truly over, he’d fall apart. He’d built so much of his identity around his role as warrior. TC couldn’t blame him—it was how he got over Skyfire’s death. It just seemed a little inadequate, and Starscream’s blind clutching on to anything he deemed in service of the ‘true Decepticon cause’ was a little frightening.  He could be so blind to sense.  Skywarp always worried too much, and always about Starscream.  Thundercracker remembered a time he had been jealous of that constant attention, Skywarp’s continual fretting over Starscream’s well-being. He remembered shouting once, so loudly the Barracks Lictors had torn into him for cycles afterwards, ‘what about me?!’ Childish envy.  He was above such things now.  So…he’d simply left without them, leaving them messages. (He was not so petty that he’d cause them to worry, no, not even Skywarp).

And so, Thundercracker, here, alone, in Polyhex, grounded.  His comm couldn’t even penetrate the buffeting electrons of the fearsome winds.  Alone, truly. 

He took an overly-large swallow of his energon.  Vile stuff, bound to give him aches, but right now the tingle in his cortex was what he was after, the warmth of slight overcharge.  Anything to dull the pain in his soul of being grounded and isolated.

Something bumped his elbow, sending the energon sloshing out of the cube, down his hand, into his wrist.  TC flared with irritation.  These DAMN grounders!  Fliers knew they’d collide in midair without continual knowledge of their body positions and relative space.  Why was it so hard for grounders, who had so many fewer dimensions and factors to deal with?! 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” a voice said, smoothly.  “Just…cold out today.”

Was it?  TC’s Seeker armor protected him from most temperature fluctuations.  “No you’re not,” he growled. He put the cube down, flicking energon off his wrist, trying to catch the service bot’s attention for a cleaning rag. 

“Sure I am,” the mech said. “Let me buy you another.” 

Something was nigglingly familiar in the mech’s voice.  TC turned and saw a not-unfamiliar blue and white ground frame.  The Autobot symbol clashed bright red, like a splash of low grade energon, on his armor. 

“Mirage,” he said, shortly.  “Not interested.”  He snatched the rag the service bot begrudgingly offered and wiped his hand. 

“Not interested? In a friendly round of drinks? Besides, I spilled yours.” 

“It’s swill. I don’t think I could drink anymore.” 

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” Mirage said, coolly. “You get used to it.”

“What if I don’t want to get used to it?”

“Used to better, are you?”

“Yes,” TC said, proudly. “Megatron knows how to treat his valuable mechs.” 

“So…that’s why you do it? For the high-grade?  Isn’t that like prostitution or something?”

Thundercracker snarled.  He did it because his Trine had committed, and loyalty did not allow him to do otherwise.  But what did these grounders know of Trines?  “I’m sure your reason is much better,” he retorted.

Mirage laughed. “No, not at all.  But I at least admit it.”  He held his wrist coder out to the service bot, who produced, with more speed than he had for Thundercracker, two more cubes of the vile stuff.  Mirage raised one cube in a toast, winking at TC over the edge.  “Beau geste, right?”

Thundercracker frowned.  The spy had to be making fun of him.  “Whatever,” he muttered, but he took the other cube and forced a sip. 

“Oh, you know, ‘beau geste’,” Mirage said, “Beautiful gesture.  Normally the same as stupid gesture.  Stupid, tragic, beautiful. They all run together after a while.”  He took another sip. “Want to know why I joined?”

“No.” 

Mirage grinned.  “I’ll tell you anyway, since you’re drinking my energon, right?”  TC hastily put the cube back down.  Mirage snickered.  “I was so dumb at the start of the war. I believed everything. All the propaganda on both sides, you know?  I thought, we ALL thought, the war would be over in decacycles.  Rush to get in, to see a real war, and not just war as it is in holovids.  Be the generation that did something. Changed the world.”  Yeah. Thundercracker remembered those propaganda vids.  “We changed the world all right, didn’t we?”  Mirage looked sadly into his cube. 

TC picked up his cube again.  “We…tried. We both believed we were right.” He knew it was a lie as soon as he said it.  He never believed the Decepticon cause was right. He never believed the Autobots were any better.  “We were all being played.”

“Yes, and I was an instrument waiting to be played.  War poetry. Can you believe? Do you remember?  All the stuff we studied in school? Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori? We believed that stuff?” He frowned. “We believed that stuff,” he repeated, disbelievingly.

“Ideals,” Thundercracker said. “The only things worth holding onto are ideals.”  He frowned inwardly. He was repeating one of Skywarp’s favorite mantras.  He hadn’t thought he believed it.  Did he believe it? 

“Ideals are damn hard to hold onto,” Mirage said.  “Maybe it’s easier for you. Point and shoot and all that.  My job, not so easy.  Have to lie and insinuate and fake out so much every day I forget who I am. Who I was. WHY I am.” 

Thundercracker shifted uncomfortably.  The war was over, wasn’t it?  So why did he feel that Mirage was feeding him a line?  He felt his backstruts stiffen. Tell him nothing,  he told himself.  He’s a spy.  “So, what do you believe in, then?” he asked. 

“Me? Who knows.  It’s not an adventure, like I thought it would be.  All those glorious self-sacrifice scenarios?  I’ve seen enough real life stuff to know that’s just junk too.  I believed in the world before the war.  But that was probably fake, too. I never saw anything like suffering, not real suffering.  Just stuff on holovids that looked dreadfully romantic. Surrounded in a thick cocoon of money.” 

“Do you want to go back to that world? Even knowing it was fake?”  Thundercracker would give anything to go back to any number of times in the past—before Skyfire’s death, before meeting Megatron….  If only instead of Polyhex he were stuck in the past. 

“Yeah,” Mirage said, quietly. “Even knowing it was all a lie, all fake, I’d go back in a heartbeat. Abandon all this,” he waved his hands around to encompass the other mechs, his faction symbol, Thundercracker’s, “and live a nice warm snug lie. Just me. Screw everyone else. Screw politics. You?”  He looked up, his azure optics meeting Thundercracker’s for what felt like the first time. 

“I’d go back. Yes. But only if I could take the others with me.”  Starscream, without his perpetual self-protecting sneer. Skywarp, without that furrow of worry between his supraorbital ridges. Skyfire, if he could.  It wouldn’t be worth it without them. 

Mirage sighed, dropping his eyes with something like humility and envy. 

The energon, or something, burned with a strange warmth near Thundercracker’s spark.