Balancing the Scale

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Title:  Balancing the Scale
Continuity: Bayverse
Pairing: Bumblebee/Soundwave, Starscream
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: ref to canon character death, mild torture, Soundwave
Prompt: ‘What will I do with you?’
Wordcount: 1740
A/N for tf_rare_pairing  minibot challenge
Summary: Remember how Bumblebee killed Ravage in ROTF? Yeah, so does Soundwave.  

 

 

“Leave us.”  Soundwave’s voice was as cold as the space surrounding him, a velvet blackness against which his silver frame glittered. His shoulder panels rose as he approached the mass of yellow and black dangling from the Seeker’s long silver talons. Pink trails of energon had frozen to crystalline trails from the transit from Earth. 

“You do not command me,” Starscream hissed, curling those talons even more deeply into the Autobot prisoner’s shoulder gyros. He was doing a favor for the satellite, and he would not let Soundwave forget for an instant.

Sensing vulnerability, Soundwave thought.   Soundwave straightened even further, the tips of his panels rising in open threat.  “We shall settle that at another time,” he said, blandly. His optics homed in on the Autobot as Starscream showily released his grip, letting him collapse to the icy metal of the deck.  Ah, Soundwave thought, almost clever.  Starscream had severed the actuator cables in the backs of Bumblebee’s legs.  He did have a certain…low cunning.

“We shall,” Starscream said, glowering. He spun on his heel, spurs striking sparks from the hard metal of the ship’s exterior.  “You’ll find your prize a little…quiet,” he tossed over his shoulder, before launching into the glittering expanse of space, turbines blue-white stars helixing away. 

Soundwave did not care how he ‘found’ his prize.  He turned his attention to Bumblebee, preparing one of his cybernanite tentacles.  Just in case Starscream spoke truth. 

It was a possibility. 

The yellow mech struggled up to his knees, one hand a damaged, twisted stump.  Soundwave had not specified in what condition the mech be brought to him, and Starscream had taken some liberties. His only regret, looking at the stump, was that he had not been there to watch the Autobot suffer. Soundwave would not begrudge that Starscream did have a honed cruelty about his methods.

Was that the hand…? 

The hand.  The hand was immaterial. He had ordered Starscream to bring him the mech who had killed Ravage.  The mech who had injured Soundwave the only way he was vulnerable—killing one of his symbionts.  Two, really. The one the humans had dubbed ‘Reedman’ but that Soundwave knew as Silverflash, had just managed to send a signal before, without a power core to feed off of, it had succumbed to shapelessness, seeping into the silicate desert.

Starscream had scoffed. “War,” he’d said, “is like this.  It is not a matter for petty, personal vengeance.”

Soundwave had glared him down. “It is not petty.”  Personal, yes.  Vengeance…maybe.

The jet had given one of his dismissive shrugs, light glossing over his folded wings. One of the gestures intended to hurt. 

Soundwave did not care. He had been hurt enough—Starscream’s insult simply rolled off his awareness in comparison with the injury of the loss of Ravage. 

This Autobot would learn…not that he would profit much by the lesson.

“Designation.”  Soundwave’s voice was flat, broadcasting over only three harmonic frequencies.  The face, even battered as it was, looked vaguely familiar. He ran it through one of his ident protocols. Ah.  This one.  The former Security Forces.  How far he had come from back then, from quivering helplessly in the Simfur Temple while Megatron and the actual military fought off the alien invaders. 

And it would all end here.  The pod was ready, waiting behind him. 

The Autobot glared at him, trying to flick some sort of battlemask over his optics. The mechanism jammed on a dented cheek plate, with a whine. But he said nothing.

Soundwave shrugged. Quiet?  He had a cure for that.  But first. “Bumblebee,” he said, flatly.  This one, he knew, thought of himself as a warrior.  Pitiful delusion, one Soundwave would happily dismantle.  And the first step was using his code—if he imagined he had a code like the one that Starscream and his Seekers had swathed around themselves—against him. “Are you so ashamed you cannot claim your own name?” 

“Nnnnnnoooooooo,” something like a vocalizer whined.

Soundwave tilted one receptor, analyzing the frequency.  Ah, a workaround for some irremediable damage. He hoped it still hurt. He hoped the shame and inconvenience burned deep.  “Inconvenient,” he said, blandly.  “I shall give you a voice.”  At my will, for as long as I desire.  A taste, could you but reckon it, of your future.

A cybernanite tentacle shot through the thin space between them, glimmering silver with life and motion as it stretched toward the Autobot, curling under the gorget, eating in to the wiring.  Bumblebee’s damaged vocalizer emitted a series of choking, sputtering sounds, sparks flying and squealing into oxygen-starved failure in the thin atmosphere.

“Bumblebee,” Soundwave said, rolling the name in his vocalizer queue like the name of a vile poison.  “You consider yourself a warrior.”  Half a question, half a flat denial.

The Autobot tried to glower, but Soundwave sent a small shock of pain through the nanites, jolting through the yellow mech’s systems.

“Yes.” The voice was sour, discordant—as ugly as Soundwave knew how to make a voice.  The killer of Ravage did not deserve a beautiful voice. Even this gift of words, Soundwave knew, was only temporary.  The optics glared at him, resentful.

Soundwave’s panels fluttered. “Do you know who I am, Autobot?”  A loaded question, begging for insolence. 

“A Decepticon,” the ugly voice blatted. “That’s all I need to know.”

“Is it.”  Soundwave’s mandibles chittered. “We’re not all the same, Autobot.”

“Neither are we.”

No. You’re the one who killed Ravage. Who let Silverflash die.  You, who claim your cause is freedom and life.  You who claim to protect the innocent, the weak.  Difference,  Soundwave could understand.  Hypocrisy, he could not.

Soundwave stilled himself.  “Which is why I asked your designation.”

A long moment, before the Autobot spat, “Coward.” 

Soundwave laughed. He had no use for such labels.  Warrior insults, words meant to wound those whose function it was to be wounded, killed.  Weapons for those who lived and died by weapons.  Still, he would fight on this one’s battlefield for a moment.  “Fool,” he retorted.

Bumblebee drove his one hand up, trying to tear the tentacle from his throat.  Trying to fight, in the only way the Autobot knew. 

Soundwave smirked, pushing more nanites down the line, strengthening it, tangling over Bumblebee’s hand, sticking, sinking into seams in the yellow armor, giving Soundwave more access, this time to motor systems.  Fool indeed.  He sent pain signals lancing up the hand, as though the wrist itself were on fire.  He tripped a series  of sensor codes that convinced the Autobot’s systems that his wrist servos were on fire, molten, capacitors blowing from an overcharge of current, digital armor yielding to slag.  Bumblebee struggled, thrashing, trying to tear his hand free, optics glued to it, trying to make sense of the discordant stimuli, not fully believing that his hand was not, in fact, burning.  His other hand, the hideous stump, traced a blunt arc through the darkness.

Soundwave cut the signal. “You do not raise your hand against me.” You do not raise that hand that killed Ravage against me. Against anyone. Never again.  You do not damage what is mine.  Not without paying a price.

“Wasting your time,” Bumblebee said, failing abjectly to inject bluster into his voice.  “I won’t tell you anything.”

Soundwave gave a shrug, his panels floating, the high-key light from the distant sun catching in his blue receptor nodes like living jewels.  Immaterial.  “You were not brought here for that.”

The bravado seemed to melt from the shoulders, the yellow door wings dipping, fractionally. “Then…what?”

Uncertainty.  Soundwave fed on it. Soundwave was not playing to his warrior’s script. He was not following what the Autobots taught about capture.  So limited, after all these ages.  Their vision for the war, and even their understandings were so pathetically rote, their ‘freedoms’ only opening to a small circle of behaviors.

“You broke something of mine.” Of me. I felt his death as though it were my own.  If Soundwave allowed his memory to drift, he could feel the popping of struts from Ravage’s spinal core as if it were his own, feel the hot spurt of energon from ruptured cables and hoses, feel the agony of pressure tearing up his body.  Could feel Ravage’s primitive alarm, the proto-fear of the not-quite-sentient.

The mouthplate worked, as if chewing up courage, before the blue optics sought out Soundwave’s, blazing with intensity. “Kill me, then.  Get it over with.”

Not yours to dictate, Autobot. You have no control here.  You ceded any right to control, to anything, when you laid hands on Ravage. “Kill you?”  Soundwave leaned in. “And what would that solve, Autobot? A loss for a loss?”

“Th-that’s how you work. That’s how war works.”  The brassy voice crackled, uncertain. The hand tugged feebly against his control.

“I am not a warrior.”  I am beyond your pitiful comprehension. He gestured with one languid hand. “And this is not a battlefield.”

“Then…what are you going to do with me? I told you, I’ll never tell you anything.” The last spark of defiance.  “You going to bring Starscream back here, have him do it?  While you watch?” 

A pitiful attempt at an insult. 

“You took something from me,” Soundwave repeated, as if Bumblebee were slightly dull. Which he was, but that shortly wouldn’t matter.   He sent a half-dozen more tentacles across the distance between them, sending them into Bumblebee’s systems, prying off the armor,  burning through motor connections, paralyzing the damaged frame. “You owe me.”  He stepped aside, revealing the capture pod. 

Bumblebee’s optics widened, and Soundwave could feel the horrified shudder of recognition as the Autobot recognized the capture pod, and next to it, the inert frame of a felid symbiont, waiting for a new spark.  Bumblebee’s spark. Yes.  “You owe me,” Soundwave repeated, simply.  The primitive processors in the symbiont frame would degrade Bumblebee’s higher-functioning processes, in time. But not before he knew, slowly, excruciatingly, that he was literally losing his mind, and becoming that which he had destroyed.  He would know, and maybe, maybe that suffering would make up for what Ravage had suffered. 

“You can’t--!”the Autobot started protesting, disconnected servos clicking hollowly as he tried to thrash limbs no longer under his control. And it was time, Soundwave decided, for Bumblebee to lose his voice,  once more, forever. 

 

Comments

[evvj.livejournal.com]

Wow. As much as I love Bayverse Bumblebee, and that's a lot, trust me, and as much as I feel truly sorry for what's happening to him in this... I love it. And I can't help but think that Soundwave is justified in it. And I can't help but feel sorry for Soundwave, too, because Bumblebee killed ravage. So I feel sorry for Bumblebee and what's happening is just awful, but some sick little part of me is saying "He deserves it."
-feels conflicted-

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

I saw that Ravage clip at Botcon--we got a bit of a peek and that's the bit Bay thought we'd love. Everyone else I swear was cheering--I literally burst into tears. Thankfully, nobody knows me there so no blackmail! :D

It was a difficult thing to do to him, but Soundwave's a mean guy. Thank you for reading!