shadow_vector

Title: Reset
Continuity: IDW/G1
Characters: Jetfire/Sixshot
Rating: PG
Warnings: meh, some violence, bit of angst
Wordcount: 1448
Time: 58 minutes
Prompt: moment of betrayal for tf_speedwriting
A/N: in canon that's the reset code Starscream uses to stop Sixshot. /nerd

It was a mission. Like any other mission. Not his to deny or question, simply to do. Banzaitron, though, had had that look in his red optics that now, Sixshot didn’t wonder was the beginning of suspicion. Of doubt. Well, no doubt anymore, for either of them.

===

“Reset,” Jetfire said, his mouth quivering. He’d known it would come down to this; he’d always known. He’d just…prevented himself from knowing that he knew that. He knew he’d have to choose.

He hadn’t known it would be this hard.

===

Sixshot punched down through the sky, his wing guns blasting at the fragile low-level armor of the outpost. Not even a proper base. Not even rudimentary protection. The walls shredded at the energy bursts, shrapnel flying, little secondary weapons of their own, tearing up the mechs who rushed to the entrances, holding guns clumsily in amateurish hands.

He hated being sent against amateurs. It was…slaughter and never anything but. And he could tell by the way the recoil of the guns flew, uncontrolled, the weapons practically bucking out of their grasp, that these were amateurs.

His form slit the last layer of clouds, and he threw his frame out of his ship mode. His hands found their guns faultlessly, a sleek ballet of planet drop he’d done so many times now that it felt as natural as walking.

Sixshot strode toward the structure, their shots—the few that actually did hit him—pinging almost comically off his armor. He felt a dull stir of anger at Banzaitron sending him on this mission. This was a waste of him, of what he could do. A gestalt team could take this base. Phase Six was hardly necessary.

And then…his target reticle, scanning over the ranged line of civilians, play soldiers, so new to the game that they stood bunched up like slaughter animals, caught a too familiar mass of white and red, and an agonizingly familiar span of wings.

Jetfire.

===

“Pi,” Jetfire said, his hands in fists so tight that he felt an overstrain on his servos.

He…hadn’t wanted the code. He knew it was a gesture of trust, the largest gesture Sixshot could make. The mech no one could kill, no one could stop—and Jetfire had the syllables that could stop him. At a word.

Sixshot had scrawled it down, one night, on top of an old flimsy, his handwriting bold and clear and plain.

Jetfire had looked up, bewildered, unable to make sense of the message. “Reset, pi--?”

He was silenced by a black hand covering his mouth, and the red optics shaking definitively, ‘no.’ “Don’t say it.”

And then he’d known what it was. There’d been rumors, of course, of some reset code. There always was something like that, but he’d written it off as superstition. A magic spell that could stop the nightmare monster that was Sixshot.

That was…before he knew him.

“I-I don’t want this.” He slid the flimsy back across the table.

“Rather you have it than anyone else.” Sixshot’s optics were steady, dark, stopping the flimsy with one hand. He knew what he was offering.

Jetfire’s wings twitched, and slowly, reverently, he drew the flimsy back across the table.

“Use it,” Sixshot said, “if you have to.”

“I don’t want to use it, ever.” He glossed a finger over the writing, tracing it. Magic spell, indeed.

“If you have to,” Sixshot had said.

Almost, Jetfire thought, readying the next word from his memory core, as if he knew this would happen.

===

Sixshot shook the thought from his cortex, rerouting that process array to offensive artillery. He took out their comm tower with one concentrated shot, the sending dish shattering into white deadly rain, the comm pole sparking and then igniting blue from the phosphorous in the transceiver.

It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It doesn’t change anything. Mission’s a mission. Destroy the base.

Deal with that when you have to.

===

“Orion.” Jetfire saw the gun come up, the barrel staring back at him like a viper, steady, primed for attack. He stayed still, waiting, almost hoping, that Sixshot would fire and save him from this terrible thing he was doing.

===

Sixshot swung low, under a barrage of poorly-coordinated fire. They were ramping up their offense, as he got closer, and he saw a few of them falling back inside the building, doubtless to set up some execrable last stand around what they thought was truly valuable in the base.

One mech distracted him with a bright magnesium flash, blinding his optics for a handful of kliks, while another got close enough to dowse him with some pungent fluid.

Flammable. He could smell the chemicals.

No matter. Sixshot tugged one of his incendiary grenades from his panniers and jerked the pin out by the thumb loop. He waited a beat, striding closer to the mechs who were readying some sort of flamethrower, before he pitched the grenade between his feet.

A sheet of blue fire roared over him, limning his armor, peeling away some of the white paint of lesser-done repairs. Pain lanced through him, but that was…nothing. Mere fire could not stop him. He was unstoppable, after all.

And that was all.

Aflame, he continued his approach.

===

“Actual,” Jetfire said, looking beyond the barrel at the orange red optics, burning with emotions he wished frantically that he couldn’t read so well. Pain from the fire trumped entirely by the agony of this betrayal. Jetfire’s mouth worked, fighting back an apology, fighting back tears.

He’d always feared it would come to this. Sixshot or the Autobots. His heart or…he couldn’t even figure out what to put there, and yet he had chosen them, Over Sixshot. And he knew Sixshot could see the struggle and the choice.

He knew there’d be no forgiveness.

And he didn’t want any.

===

Sixshot bashed the last of the resistance aside, feeling the spark chamber crack against the corner of the wall. He grabbed one of his guns, advancing down the corridor to where they hid…whatever it was Banzaitron wanted.

He hadn’t seen Jetfire, and the tiny part of him that he allowed such a stupid, useless thing as hope hoped that Jetfire had fled, or hidden.

That hope died an agonizing death as he rounded the corner, a death that hurt worse than the flames of the grenade. Another self-inflicted wound.

Jetfire, standing, blocking a door with his body. Unarmed.

===

“Orbit.” How had it come to this? Jetfire reached with one empty hand, entreating something from Sixshot, from the mech he was about to kill. As if he had any right. His wings trembled with horror at what he was doing, half of his cortex, all of his frame, screaming at him in something worse than pain.

Say no, he thought, desperately. Say no. Ask me to stop. Order me to stop. Something to stop this horrible momentum.

Take the shot, he begged, inwardly. Please. Kill me before I have to kill you. I…can’t survive this. I don’t want to. But this…I have to do. I have to. Please understand.

===

Sixshot lowered his weapons. “Move,” he said, quietly, giving Jetfire a chance he gave none of the others. Because he had no choice. The hard ‘no-kill’ order he had filed, irrevocable, permanent, rose to haunt him, and when it laughed, it was in Banzaitron’s voice.

“I can’t.”

“Not your fight,” Sixshot said. “I will kill you,” he lied, knowing Jetfire would not know it to be a lie.

“I know.” Jetfire’s face quirked in a wan, exhausted smile.

“Principles aren’t worth dying for.”

“I…know.” Jetfire wrung his hands. “Turn back. There’s nothing here you want.”

“I can’t.” He knew before Jetfire did. And in a way, he'd wanted it to end like this all along. Whose better hands to die at?

A jolt ran through Jetfire’s frame, as though electricity surged through his feet, turning him into a vile circuit. He swallowed around a knot of what he knew he had to do.

===

“Enable.”

Jetfire forced himself to watch, forced his optics to study every moment, memorize every spasm.

As he’d suspected, the shutdown was…not gentle. Sixshot rarely made noise, but he screamed, a sound that shook something in the back of Jetfire’s auditory receptors, deafening in the enclosed space, that rang right through to his core as the animal sound of pure despair. The guns fell, almost in slow motion, tumbling through the air, clattering and bouncing off the deck from trembling, spasming hands, before Sixshot seized, his body going shock-hard and still, and he toppled over, a fading mass that shook the floor, dented the deck plates, as he fell, shaking Jetfire’s whole world.

“I’m sorry,” he sobbed, falling to his knees beside the too stiff, too still frame. “I’m sorry.” He clutched at the rigid black hands, as if he could offer some comfort, extract some forgiveness he did not deserve.

END

And because I suck like this: Revive