Denial

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

G
Bayverse, mid-Defiance
Dreadwing, Megatron, Starscream
no warnings except perhaps spoilers
An edit of something I wrote for tf_speedwriting , prompt, 'in denial'

Dreadwing’s pale wings were pressed flat against his backstrut. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault.  It wasn’t his fault.

Was it?

No.  He’d followed the tactical manuals to the letter.  The warships had approached in a reverse-vee—he’d moved his drones to flank.  That’s what the manuals said. That’s what you were supposed to do.

So…why had half his squadron died?

He’d felt it slipping away from him then.  Felt it go, felt fifty individual lights blink off his control grid, heard fifty individual bleats of formless pain, their primitive drone systems only able to manage one sensor load at a time—suddenly invaded by pure, raw, fatality. 

His logic circuit had wrestled, was still wrestling with it, clogged with speculations how it could have happened, a blank blinking cursor begging mutely for input, for solutions.  Yearning and confusion in every intermittent blankness.

He wrung his hands, the thruster cowlings grating nervously against each other.  The Lord Protector wanted to see him and…he doubted it would go well.  He headed up the corridor in Trypticon, his footsteps echoing along the barren metal of the corridor like ghosts of blame.  Like some distant thing stalking him, shadowing around him, mocking him.

He could feel the optics of other mechs on him, knowing why he was here.  Like they didn’t hate him enough already. Like he hadn’t heard the murmured ‘dronelings’ and ‘hopped up Alpha’ that chased the air behind him like tiny heat-seeking missiles.  But now he’d lost half the drone fleet. In one assault. In one gambit  of one assault. A failure. 

He wished he were a droneling again, without the capacity to remember, finding an eager joy in learning, viewing the world as an amazing spectrum of experiences yet to be sampled, experienced, understood. 

He did not know this experience that awaited him; he did not need, any longer, direct experience to know a thing. He had left his droneling days behind him.  And he knew, and all he needed or wanted to know, was that a meeting with Megatron was…not going to end well. 

He tightened his hands into fists, and then forced them to relax as he confronted the monolithic doors of the High Protector’s audience chamber. Pretending this wasn’t happening wasn’t going to make it not-happen.  He was beyond a droneling’s simple non-logical logic, as well.  There was one way through this—to go straight through.  There were times to retreat, times to cede the battlefield. And there were times to confront one’s failures.

Whatever that might bring.

He entered the chamber, hearing the doors settle behind him with a final-sounding thump. His antennae flicked, nervously, beyond his control. 

“Dreadwing,” Megatron said, his voice oily and dark.  “Approach.”  The Lord Protector sat in his command chair, surrounded by screens, their blue lights casting eerie flickering shadows over his armor, as though he burned with a ghostlike blue flame. 

Beside Dreadwing, jaw tight, Starscream stood.  Some echo of the flickering blue monitor lights danced over his armor, turning its bronze a sickly green, catching in recent dents, blurring over charring. The battle’s progress written across his armor.  A witness, perhaps, to both Dreadwing’s transgression and his punishment. His presence did not soothe Dreadwing.

Dreadwing stepped forward, stopping, obediently.  Waited. He had no idea what to say.  His protocol manuals had let him down before.  Originality? Initiative? They came only crudely to him. “Here,” he said, finally. Offering no defense, because he couldn’t even figure out what he’d done wrong.  What he could promise not to do next time.

“You have lost me half of my drone army.” 

MY drones, Dreadwing thought. You didn’t feel their deaths. You didn’t feel the strange stir that he was beginning to think was…guilt? At having ordered them so confidently, blindly, to their deaths.

And they had followed, just as confidently, just as blindly.

He said nothing.  His optic flicked to Starscream, seeking a clue from his frame, but Starscream held himself immobile, tightly controlled. Dreadwing could sense the rage surging behind it, but couldn’t find its target. Perhaps himself. 

Something else he didn’t know. 

Megatron leaned forward in the chair, the action swift, intimidating.  Dreadwing’s sole white optic dimmed in response, startled, alarmed. “You have no defense?” A question. A challenge.

“No.” 

Megatron’s frown twisted into a sneer. “It was intentional, then.” Goading, openly. 

“No.” His droneling’s blunt honesty. It was the only defense he had.  “I followed the protocols.”  He had to struggle with the pronoun, ‘I’ wanting to come out as a droneling’s ‘this unit’. Regressing, in his fear and frustration.

Megatron made some sort of hard, dark sound. Maybe a laugh, maybe a sneer; possibly something between the two.  “War is not fought by protocols.”  His optics raked down Dreadwing’s frame, as if looking at…a drone.  Dreadwing held himself firm.  He was not.  He was not a drone. He had clawed his way out of his pod, had fought, studying, learning, chasing experience for nothing. It meant something. It meant he was…just as good as any sentient mech.  Just as good as those who claimed to have been sparked from the Well itself. 

He’d always thought so. He’d always thought he could prove it, be a living example.  “I…did not know that.” The admission he hated making, feeling that it reduced him back to that feeble drone, that ignorance marked him, followed him even more than his solitary optic, his primitive thruster system. 

Megatron frowned, severe, his optics threatening violence. He sat back, abruptly, as though relenting was a decision he figured he’d soon regret. 

“Many of you will have to relearn war,” he said, his optics drifting to where the Air Commander, also there for the reprimand, stood, stiffly, frame taut with outrage.

“Yes,” Dreadwing echoed, blankly. It was one thing he could do, one thing his kind could excel in.  He could learn.  He could learn. 

Starscream moved behind him, at some signal from Megatron too fine for Dreadwing to note.  Dreadwing could feel the larger jet’s presence behind him. He forced himself not to turn and look, though his wings twitched.

Megatron pushed out of the chair abruptly, rising to his feet, the blue light glossing over the complicated gnarling of his armor. “You shall begin learning now.” 

Dreadwing felt cool, hard hands seize his paldrons, while, behind him, Starscream made a strangled, unhappy sound. And it occurred to Dreadwing that perhaps not all of the jet’s damage had been done in space.

“You both shall.”

Comments

[gargoule.livejournal.com]

eerie. it's very haunting and visually stunning.