![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
niyazi-a.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
shadow_vector2010-12-28 09:29 am
Disconsolate
IDW/G1
Drift/Perceptor, hints of Deadlock/Turmoil and Drift/Wing
angst, mais oui.
Only the Strong (Perceptor, Drift, Turmoil)
In Darkness (Turmoil, Drift/Deadlock)
Caught (Turmoil, Perceptor)
Coming to Light (Perceptor, Drift)
I have like the WORST insomnia in the known universe so you've probably noticed that sleep, lack of sleep, bad dreams, waking up before the other person, etc, happens a LOT in my stories. Art, she does imitate life sometimes.
Deadlock—he refused to grant himself the name Drift, he was no longer Drift and everything he did and thought was a betrayal to the one who had been Drift—onlined, his body in a tangle of limbs, his processor still clogged and fuddled from some sort of memory purge.
Memory. Wing had taught Drift not to dread memory. Deadlock had lost that lesson somewhere along the way.
He let his red optics online last, slowly, feeling the heat differentials from the red lenses, so different from the blue. Another bitter gift of memory—that he remembered the difference.
A system hummed underneath him, metal warm and responsive beneath his cheek lamellar. Deadlock pushed his hand against the cool floor of the cell, leveraging himself slowly up from that, curling his injured arm against him.
Perceptor, sprawled beneath him, still in the heavy recharge of one whose auto-repair systems were near overclocking. It explained, Deadlock thought, the extra heat from the frame, heat which had felt so strangely comforting against Deadlock's own body, though his systems had long ago given up on repairing his damage. Auto-repair could do a lot—it could not regrow lost limbs, missing systems.
Sick, Deadlock thought, and so very, very you: to find yourself comforted by another's pain.
He let his hated crimson optics roam over Perceptor's frame. Turmoil had been....worse than usual. But, as always, meticulous. One thing Turmoil knew was precise control. He had always, always been after Deadlock about Deadlock's lack of it, and he knew that Perceptor's damaged frame—not crippled, not injured beyond the point of auto-repair—was a message for him. This is what control can do.
It was staggeringly unfair. The thought formed even as Deadlock rejected it as useless. One of those 'true, but so what?' statements that served no purpose, could serve no purpose other than to torment him. He had never had any use for that category of thought, first because it clouded performance. A proper Decepticon (and oh, how he had fancied himself one, once, been proud to think of himself as the best of them), had no use for moral morasses.
And Drift, or he who had deluded himself into thinking he was Drift, half-formed under Wing, would have tried to ape Wing, and nod sagely, and say, yes, that's true, and give an enigmatic smile and move on. Because Wing had told him, a half a hundred times, laughing, sober, quiet, in all moods that Wing did, that what was true and what was real were sometimes two very different things, and in that battle, when it came to it, reality always wins.
Drift had not liked that. What was true should win, but then, he had seen the reality of New Crystal City before he had seen its truth, or, what reality had done, how it had warped, truth. A beautiful idea, an ideal almost too pure for the world.
As had Wing been.
Deadlock pushed the thought away. All of them, hastily, like an angered child. He had no time for this. And Wing was dead. And Drift was dead, if he had ever truly been alive and not some phantom Wing had been trying to summon into life.
But Perceptor was real, and here. That was both a truth and reality. And a problem.
Perceptor shouldn't be here. For...so many reasons. Turmoil should have killed him immediately—why had he not? There was a reality Deadlock hadn't mastered yet.
Perceptor should never have come. Deadlock couldn't imagine—another failing of his—why he had risked himself. For Deadlock, surely not. For Drift? All the more reason to bid Drift good riddance—all Drift was capable of doing was killing off those who thought he was redeemed. Wing. And eventually Perceptor. It was just a matter of time.
He was better off as Deadlock. Also lethal, but at least as Deadlock, it wasn't his friends whose deaths he caused.
A taut, writhing restlessness overcame him. He wanted to get up, to move. He could feel it try to boil into rage, and, as he hung, propped over the loosened servos of Perceptor, he fought to keep still.
In recharge, the Autobot looked....like he didn't belong here. A gruff snort at his own inadequacy with words, ideas. Never good at them, Deadlock. Not even as Drift. Better with your swords even then. In recharge, the tense lines around the mouth had fallen away, and the optics didn't burn with that almost icy intensity.
But the face, even behind the shattered reticle, even with the optics shuttered and dim, looked peaceful, tranquil. No. That wasn't quite right. Wrong words.
...innocent. That was it.
And Deadlock had lain on that body, his face nestled against the red armor of Perceptor's lower chassis, as though feeding on his innocence. Vile, Deadlock.
He checked his chrono. Too early, still, for anything to happen. He wondered, vaguely, if Turmoil had the cell monitored. When he had served here, the brig cells had not been. Waste of resources, Turmoil had said. Why watch the dead mechs squirm?
What Turmoil had meant was why watch them hope, why watch them despair, when he himself was not there to be the cause of despair, he was not crushing their hopes between his massive palms. Prisoners were some sort of dark toy for Turmoil and part of the game was letting them have their time to plot and plan. Giving them rope to hang themselves on, Turmoil had called it. Probably, Deadlock thought, what he'd called it when he'd put Deadlock in charge of that strike team.
Deadlock wanted to lie back down, to burrow his face into the warm comfort of Perceptor's healing armor. But that would be an avoidance, trying to deny reality's insistent, approaching footsteps, try to bury his pain against Perceptor's body, as if the red Autobot had come simply to be a vessel for Deadlock's failure.
And part of him wanted to get up and try to cool himself, soothe himself, practice the control that Turmoil had mocked him for lacking. Part of him longed for his swords, not to fight but to run through the liquid, flowing practice forms.
He'd found he'd loved them, once he'd stopped fighting them. He'd fallen in love with, at first, the silver light glinting off the blade, as though carving words into the air, the movements so supple the metal seemed like water. But then he had learned the effort, and learned to love the effort, the smooth sweep and flow of his body, the precise firing of actuators, shifting of weight, of motion, of momentum. Wing would have him practice a simple, single move a hundred times, at different speeds. He'd thought it was punsihment, but had come to realize that that was what Wing had been teaching him—the exquisite interplay of body and space and time.
But here, in the dark, cramped cell, he couldn't. No room. No sword. No hand. Turmoil knew what he was doing. He always had.
A dim sound, half a whine, slithered like betrayal from Deadlock's vocalizer, and beneath him, the red frame shifted, black fingers coming up almost instantly to touch his cheek, his shoulder. And the placid innocence was gone from Perceptor's face, the optics spiraled in with worry, a small line of pain, like a needle, in the brow.
The gesture, the touch, asked a question as much as it tried to offer comfort.
“Go back to recharge,” Deadlock said, his voice a gravelly croak. He winced, and then tried to force one of his old smiles, the shy, cheeky smiles he had begun learning under Wing. Perceptor's own mouth quirked, as if trying to think of words and then giving up, letting his hands speak for him, tugging Deadlock back down against him, pressing his face against the warm armor. The red arms wrapped over his shoulders, one palm skimming down over the now/forever empty scabbard, and then tightening against him.
Deadlock did not deserve to be comforted. Did not deserve Perceptor's concern. But, he thought, suddenly, as Perceptor gave a soft sigh, Perceptor deserved any comfort, any solace he could get, even mutely, awkwardly, through Deadlock's damaged frame. He let the thighs curl around him like a cage within the cage of the cell. Deadlock...confined, trapped. And no longer fighting.
no subject
no subject
no subject
<3
no subject
no subject