Double Edged Blade

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG
IDW/G1 Spoilers like whoa for Drift miniseries. Like, seriously. I don't think I left a single thing unspoilered. o_O
Wing/Drift
Spoilers (as noted above), canon character death, wee bit of angst and one teensy kiss.
For tf_rare_pairing  : Wing/Drift "do you trust me?"

 

 

1.

“Do you trust me?”  Wing’s voice came from the darkness. Deadlock had felt the strange texture of Wing’s heavy robe dragging over him in the close quarters of the alley. Alien.  He’d held himself back, withdrawing from the touch.  But this was his life, now.  Running unknown filthy alleys, again.  Surrounded by strangers, surrounded by a large, menacing unknown.

“I don’t trust anyone,” Deadlock answered. And you’d be a fool to trust me, he added, silently at the hooded head that turned to peer around the corner.  But he wanted, needed Wing to be a fool.  The last thing he needed was to be saddled with slaves. No. He was not going to slow himself down with a bunch of useless civilians. Turmoil would not stop short of tearing through them. They were nothing to hide behind.  They would just slow him down. He needed to be fast, light, unencumbered. 

“That’s no way to live, Drift,” Wing said, turning back. 

“Done well enough so far with it,” Deadlock shrugged. Don’t question me, stranger.  The false name  he’d given resonated with memories he’d rather stay dead.

The hood shifted, raking up and down Deadlock’s muddied, dented frame.  “I see,” he said, and as hard as Deadlock listened, he heard no sarcasm in the voice.

 

2. 

“Drift?”  A golden glow filled the field of Deadlock’s vision. “Drift?  Are you there?” 

Who?  Deadlock blinked, his visual field strange.  Everything was bright—too bright, the lighting high-key and harsh.  He made some noise, his voice sounding strange. Familiar and yet…new.  His vision resolved down, the bright golden glow resolving down to optics—amber optics, like he’d never seen before, glowing like suns. And around them, a face.

“Wing?”

The face split into a smile. “Drift,” he repeated. “Can you sit up?” 

‘Deadlock’, he wanted to correct, but then remembered, vaguely, that he’d given Wing a pseudonym.  A not-so-pseudonym—the name he’d known, and held, and then discarded along with the squalor of Lower City. Instead, he moved, slowly sitting up, his joints feeling stiff and tight. 

He froze.  This…wasn’t him.  The angles and sweeps of the armor were all wrong.  Someone else.  Something else.  His optics spiraled in, accusing. “What…?”  Then his gaze seemed to catch on the wide columnar room around him.  Cybertronian, and yet…nothing like he’d ever seen.  “Where are we?”

Wing had sat back as Drift struggled up, gesturing with a hand. “This,” he said, the smile on his lips taking the edge off the grandiosity of his words, “is New Crystal City.”  He added, quietly, “You’re safe here, Drift.”

Drift frowned, the name still uncomfortable and raw.  He wasn’t safe, and they weren’t safe. ‘Safe’ was a foreign word, a useless word.  No place that he stayed at was safe. He’d known it when he left, when he fought his way off Turmoil’s ship.  There was no going back, there was no peace.  He had chosen war, perpetual war, war enough to finally fill his emptiness, fill the hollow that had hungered in him since his youth.  The last thing he’d ever wanted was to be ‘safe’. 

“Nowhere’s safe,” he said.  “They’ll come for me.” Then, no more.  He would give that much warning.  He pushed his legs—these new, alien legs at the end of this body that responded to his command—swinging them over the berth’s edge, toward the floor.

“We’ll handle that when they do.”  Not doubting his assertion, just, Drift thought sourly, underestimating the threat. 

He snorted.  “You can’t handle them.” Not the entire Decepticon army. And when the Autobots found that the dreaded, infamous Deadlock was vulnerable?  The fury that had torn at each other for centuries, like a two headed serpent trying to devour itself would turn on…whatever this New Crystal City was.  

 “We can,” Wing asserted, with a confident nod.  “You have to trust me.”

Drift turned his head away.

 

3.

“Ridiculous!” Drift spat, wiping one hand across his bruised mouth, his other stinging hard from where it had caught his weight against the ground.  He was tired of being sent sprawling like this by Wing, who had promised him his freedom, promised to help him leave if only he defeated Wing.  Some sort of stupid game or contest…a humiliating one.

“All life is,” Wing said, from somewhere behind Drift’s sprawled body. “Wisdom embraces the ludicrous.”

“I don’t need your riddles,” Drift said, pushing to his feet. His new, blue optics blazed, energon stinging in his mouth.

Wing tilted his head, the rest of his body in a loose, deceptively casual pose. “Oh? And what do you need?” 

“The truth,” Drift said.  He knew they hated him here—even though the goodly citizens of New Crystal City professed to abjure hate. And he knew why:  even with the new frame, they could smell the violence that was in his basic programming.  He lunged at Wing, with one fast feint and then a cross-body blow. 

“You must give truth to be able to receive it,” Wing said.  He dodged effortlessly, twisting like water, or quicksilver, something faster than light and more graceful than the wind, as if Drift’s punches literally pushed him aside, safely out of the way. 

Drift snarled. “Hypocrites!” he said.

Wing caught his hand, easily, snatching it from the air in motion.  His gaze locked with Drift’s.  “Are you?”

Drift jerked his wrist free. “Accuse me, if you’re going to accuse me,” he snapped. “I’m sick of disguises.”

“Are you wearing a disguise, Drift?” 

“You know that’s not my name.” Drift swung his hand—Wing’s forearm just…appeared in time to block it. 

“It is your name.  It’s who you are.”  He smiled.  “Besides, everyone speaks the truth to me.” 

“Fool.”

“We are all many things,” Wing said, ducking low under a wild punch, rolling to one side, coming up to Drift’s right. “And one of those, for you, is Drift.”

Drift whirled, optics white with fury. “You don’t know me!” He had a flash of his life back on Cybertron, the underbelly of Kaon.  The starving, scrounging, piecemeal, vicious existence.  That was where he came from.  That was what he knew.  This pretty white city was no place for him

 “You don’t know you,” Wing said, easily, dancing back under Drift’s next assault.  “But I am doing my best to introduce you.” He dropped low, hooking one of Drift’s ankles with a leg sweep, tumbling Drift down on top of him, then rolling, swiftly, until he straddled Drift’s frame, the white arms pinned by Wing’s hands.  Drift’s systems blazed in outrage, summoning anger against Wing’s easy mastery of his body.  “Is it so hard,” he asked, his golden optics soft and warm like the sunlight that Crystal City was too afraid to own, “to trust me?”

Drift snarled, bucking his hips.  Wing rode the movement as easily as he did everything else, letting the motion bow his head lower over Drift’s supine form.

“I see,” Wing whispered, almost sadly,  “It’s hard for you to trust yourself.”

4.

Drift channeled his anger—that he knew Wing would frown at anyway—into punching the wall. Useless gesture, but then again, so was everything else in New Crystal City.  Useless. Just for show.  Too good to be true, this whole place: pretending to be a vision of everything Drift had dreamed—when he had been Drift, when he’d dared to dream, in the rotting slums of Kaon. In truth it was filled with self-deluded hypocrites who buried themselves in the ground and self-righteousness.

“You’re…upset.” 

Drift whirled, to see Wing with his usual smile, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “Just a guess,” Wing added. 

“It’s not a joke. You’re all going to die.”  They’d found him.  They’d come for him.  The fragile wall of hope he’d been stupid enough to build shattered, dropping razor-sharp shards.  He’d had no choice.  No choice. They deserved to die, for their hypocrisy, for running, for hiding.  The more he repeated it, the less he believed.

And the more he repeated it, the more he realized his anger at Dai Atlas was his anger at himself.

“Everybody dies,” Wing said, cocking his head.  “How many truly live?”

Drift’s fist came up, faster than he could even think of it, and collided, hard, with Wing’s cheekplate.  Metal crunched and gave under his knuckles, sparks licking from broken circuits against his fine digital armor. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to punch that enigmatic, mocking smile from Wing’s face, to silence the endless, endless riddles, but…once done, he stood, numb, dumb, hands hanging like heavy weights at his sides.

His rage had evaporated, but the words forced themselves from his vocalizer, dully. “You don’t know what you’re up against. You,” he made a limp gesture indicating the whole city, “play at war.  You play at freedom, while you hide under the dirt.  You play at liberty, when you’re slaves to an idea.”

Wing’s smile was lopsided, dented. “Yes.  Yes to all of it.  Which is why I leave.” He reached out a hand to brush Drift’s wrist. “Which was why I found you.” 

Drift jerked his hand away.  “I brought them here,” he said, the flavor of confession making him sick, nearly gagging him. “I led them here.  To you.”

“Not to me,” Wing shook his head. “You led them here for you to confront them.  They came because you are ready.”

Drift wanted to damage Wing, to stop the flood of hopeful, hoping words, stop trying to recast everything into some…grand plan. There was no plan. There was no destiny.  Only mistakes. Only a neverending chain of errors and miscalculations, punctuated, stained with violence. He wanted to rage against Wing’s calm stolidity, scream until he was finally convinced.  And then…and then what?  He hadn’t thought this far ahead.  He hadn’t considered he’d care.

Wing’s optics warmed, spiraling open. “Yes,” Wing said, softly.  He reached one hand to stroke Drift’s cheek.  He leaned forward, his EM field brushing against Drift’s.  Drift tried to pull away.  “You’re ready,” he murmured.

“You’re not,” Drift replied, his optics whirring to focus on Wing’s damaged face.  Wing smiled his enigmatic smile, optics golden and warm and somehow the most beautiful things Drift had ever seen.

“Drift,” Wing said, his voice gentle and husky. “I trust you.” And he bent, simply, and covered Drift’s hot mouth with his own, and there was no more use for words.
 

5. (epilogue)

Drift sat in the night-cooling sand.  The bodies around him didn’t matter, except one.  The living—unworthy, he thought, himself included—had returned to the business of living, while the dead were busy with the business of the dead. 

And he was somewhere in the middle. Alive, yet not alive. Dead, and yet not at peace.  He looked at Wing’s body, forcing himself to look, to see, to memorize every damage, every injury. Every bit your fault, he told himself. Every dent, every scratch, every broken line, yours.  Just visited on Wing instead of you. 

It was…impossible. It seemed impossible. Wing, dead.  The two words didn’t seem to belong together, seemed to repulse each other like similar magnetic fields. “Wing.”  The name seemed to float in the night air, the world turned to violets and greys, dimming, darkening Wing’s brightness. 

His hands tightened around the Great Sword lying across his white thighs. Wing’s sword, given to him as though either of them had any right to it, by Dai Atlas.  It was a sword, like Drift, like Wing, that wanted to wander, that could not stay still.  He could still see it, like an overlay on the darkness of the night, the silver flashes and swirls of light glinting off it in Wing’s hands as he ran through the practice forms—swift, fluid, beautiful. 

And now it was his. 

And it wanted a name.  It needed a name, something to anchor it to Drift, while they learned each other’s contours, each other’s edges.  It wanted him, he who nobody wanted except as a bounty, as revenge. It wanted to lead him to the real ideals of the Circle of Light, uncorrupted by their years of hiding underground.  It wanted to lead him to purity, and honor, and life. 

A Great Sword  held, they said, a resonant trace of the owner’s own spark energy, a sort of totem, his own metal in the alloy that formed the blade. The sword was part of him the way no integrated gun could ever be, resonating with his own frequency.  His greatest weapon and his greatest vulnerability. 

“Trust,” he said, finally.  And the night air and the sword and the whole world trembled at the name. 

 

Comments

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you liked it! I've been (not so secretly) shipping them since the series came out and it was fun to try to write that down. :D

[femme4jack.livejournal.com]

Wow...just...wow. Now I have to follow the whole story.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

It's only a four issue miniseries and the ending (the coda) is so lame you'll...want to stab something. The wiki has a great entry about it. :P

[ravynfyre.livejournal.com]

Very awesome. I agree with Kalaryx: you captured them both so nicely. You do such justice to my favorite little weeaboo. I don't care what anyone else think; I love him.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

It's not Drift's fault they wrote him that way! ;_;

Thanks, he's an adorable (and hot) little angst sponge. (And he and Wing are so...pretty....together...../shallow.

[sasuke-emosauce.livejournal.com]

Primus, this is perfect. ilu so hard.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I saw the prompt go up yesterday and the idea more or less hijacked my brain. I'm glad you liked it! :D

[runyasan08.livejournal.com]

buh.. ;~; ♥

[tainry.livejournal.com]

Gorgeous! <333