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shadow_vector2011-01-30 07:58 am
Song
PG-13
IDW/Bayverse: Sector Seven Issue Two
Jetfire, nameless Seeker
harmonic interfacing, lots of music theory I probably butcher.
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xxsomeoneelsexx , aka eelsex! :D
The Allspark’s power tore through Jetfire’s systems. So close. So close. He hadn’t even had time to try to puzzle out how the Allspark had gotten here, or why, and how it was connected to that mech who resonated like, but wasn’t, the Fallen.
Some evil there, Jetfire knew. Some wrongness he had been too naïve to sense, too trusting to heed. Never again. He had done wrong—great wrong—but he would put it right. As best he could, he would put right his mistakes.
Now. Have to move…NOW. The Allspark’s energy blasted through his teleportation protocols. A signal blinked, furious, insistent, demanding a destination, pulsing, pulsing, pulsing with the beginnings of panic. The energy seemed to fire through his actuators, sparks bursting from overloaded capacitors, blue-white shocks of pain.
Jetfire threw coordinates at the signal prompt, any coordinates. Just. Not. Here.
The world went the familiar, and now welcomed black and cold of warpspace, his heated systems chilling immediately, frost mazing over his armor, crackling, twisting as he moved. And his HUD went…blank.
[***]
Jetfire awoke to singing. An old song, a long ago dead song. It was so far away that the melody only seemed to reach him in snatches, a poor signal, stretched, the tones distorted, thin.
Where?
His astronav pulled up coordinates, trying desperately to collocate with known space. Random: he’d thrown any string of numbers at his panicking protocol. He was…lost. A Seeker, lost. Such a thing was anathema.
Jetfire tested his systems, fighting discouragement. So close to his goal, so close to fixing what he had broken and now…he couldn’t even find his way back. He was floating in vacuum, lost, on a bed of stars, snatches of an old song seeming—seeming—to echo across the radio wave traffic.
Losing it, Jetfire, he told himself. Lost everything, losing the only thing you have left: your mind.
Still, the song was intact enough that he felt his harmonic systems, so long dormant that they crackled and sparked as they onlined, thrumming a sub-audible bass range that vibrated through his systems, down his limbs, through the hundreds of sensitive spines on his frame.
He sent a burst of sound back, the initial measures of the melody, timed to ripple back through the music he was receiving. It was a hopeless gesture, most likely, some echo of an ancient Song cast millions of years ago upon the radio frequencies of the galaxy, echoing, rippling around itself.
His voice was rough, the harmonics awkward, but swiftly warmed into tune.
An echo rebounded to him, then closer. And it was not a faint speckle of scattered radio waves, it was an actual Song—or part of one—sung by an actual Singer. Another Seeker, out here.
The sound hit his sensor spines, in ranges above radio. Microwaves warmed the spines to his left. He turned, blindly, the heavens a mass of darkness, somehow blocking the source. The Allspark was forgotten, the whole disaster his life had…exploded into disappeared, as if washed away by the sonic flow, and all that mattered was now. All that mattered was that after all this time, another Seeker. Another one who knew the old Songs. Broadspectrum radiation tickled his heavy armor, gentle caresses of sound and oscillation, penetrating the metal.
He Sang the next phrase of the melody, letting it ripple from his chassis, resonate out from him, sending it in a circular wave, like an explosion of sound, the harmonics following like eddies.
Another phrase tumbled back to him, dancing off his harmonics like a counterpoint, rhythm simplistic, but solid, strong. And Jetfire heard now the subtle differences in the Song. Not the one he knew, but a variation, the tempo slightly different, the harmonics in fourths and fifths instead of thirds, more plaintive than he remembered, a note of longing that had somehow crept into the Song since Jetfire had heard it.
For some reason, it made him ache, even through the fierce joy of another Seeker, another Singer. How much had he missed? What was behind that mournful chord?
He heard his own song modulate down, the confident major drifting to a minor key, tuning the Song to his loss.
Silence, waiting. Giving him room. So, Jetfire thought: still that much of the old ways remain. When a new Song comes into being, give it space to swell, let it create its own base melody, let it reflect its nature. It was silence, but not absence: it was being heard.
Jetfire hesitated, wondering if, after all this time, his harmonic systems offlined, he had forgotten the way of it.
He began with one note, simple, pure, testing his own power, bringing it from soft to loud, so loud that it folded upon itself in a vibrato. He let the sound die, fading into space, and then began again, the same note, following like a wave upon the ebb of the other, then moving slowly, up a scale, then dipping down, Jetfire closing his optics, trying to capture the feel of flight, then the horror and dismay of his realization that he’d been led astray. You could hold nothing back in a true Song, it was throwing open everything it meant to be, to exist, prides and shames both.
Then he Sang his urgent need to prove himself, to fix what he had broken, to sacrifice himself against the Fallen and his Constructicons. The battle, his agony, the terrible loneliness that had weathered at him as he lay, too weak to move, just alive enough that his cortex raced, playing and replaying the horrors of what he had done—all unknowing—and spinning out black and bitter futures, where his sacrifice went worthless and the universe succumbed to the deadly darkness of the Fallen’s will.
It hurt to Sing this intensely, the sounds tearing themselves from his very systems. His hands ached, his thrusters seemed hollowed out, his sensorspines a rippling agony as they magnified this thing he was spinning, turning himself and who he was and what he had done into music, adding it to the great sweeping polyphonic symphony of the stars, emptying himself. As the Seekers did, vessels of their masters’ wills.
And he ceased, the notes trailing off at a loss, the melody slipping, erring.
And he waited in the silence.
And slowly, so slowly he thought it was only an echo of his Song bouncing off a gas cloud, he heard notes float back to him, felt the different waves skitter over his armor, warm, gentle caresses at first, feather touches, but growing firmer, more soothing, gaining more substance if not more volume, until it seemed the waves buoyed him up, the sounds skimming, dancing through his systems, swirls of electrons sweeping over him, powerful and mild. The Seeker Sang his Song back to him, the highest honor, running through it once, faultlessly, honoring the original notes, before singing it again, his voice splitting, as only the Seekers’ voices could, into the separate harmonics, weaving sound and light and sensation around the loneliness and remorse of Jetfire’s Song.
And his sorrow became a beautiful thing, and his sacrifice noble and a thread of all that is good tying the universe together. And the honor and the music carried him beyond himself, to some release deeper than the physical gush of electrons through overloaded capacitors, lifting, holding him in a kind of musical light that could never, ever be described.
Mere physical spectrum sensors could never capture this—a special privilege, sacred to the Seekers.
He took the Song’s descant that the distant Seeker had sung to him, and sang it back, pulling it out, elongating it into a melody itself, drawing out the arpeggios into a tune of longing, all the years he had spent alone and empty, all he had sacrificed, thinking it good service, only to realize, too late, too late, that he had denied himself every trace of pleasure…for not good reason, had spilled his service and his honor before the unworthy.
A strange ripple—it felt strange because it had been so long since Jetfire had felt another incoming Seeker’s teleportation—in the thin vacuum, that seemed to wash over him like a tide of ions, and then arms folded around him, pulling him forward, stroking over the curves of his spinal struts, finger trailing down his sensor spines, adding the exquisite layer of physical touch to the wash of electromagnetic waves.
Jetfire’s voice faded into a raw sound of craving, his own hands reaching for the space-cold frame before him, wanting, needing to touch, as if needing to prove to himself that this was real.
A rumble, too deep for music, but folding itself into the Song, nonetheless, and the hands slid in uniform up his back, playing the plates of his spine like an instrument, Jetfire arching up, lifting his face at last to see the newcomer.
Who was not so new, but old, very old, older than Jetfire himself, but one who had not lost so much time in stasis. His sensor spines were massive, the largest sprouting spines of their own, that rippled against the darkness like music itself. The optics gleamed out of space like a twin star system, ancient and wise and kind.
And the Seeker picked up the Song where Jetfire had dropped the thread, pulling it around them like some fine veil of sound.
The echoes of space were nothing to the direct contact of another Seeker. Music could travel through the almost-void of the galaxies, but then, attenuated, thin as tissue. A real Seeker’s touch turned the music into something else—not just sound, but light and pressure and color itself, the notes turning into bright jewels that glittered and spun, feathery touches over Jetfire’s armor.
And the Seeker split the melody for a few measures, his optics earnest, intense, the rules of Singing preventing any other communication than the pure power of song itself. And then, he dropped the high melody line: an invitation, an offer such as which Jetfire had begun to imagine he’d never have again, and found himself unworthy of.
Slowly, his hands shaking as he brought them up to caress the sensor spines like the fragile magic they were, he laid his palms against the Seeker’s shoulders, bracing himself, before joining the Song, picking up the melody in a volume so soft that at first it only traveled as the finest vibration between them.
The other Seeker trilled an encouraging embellishment, and Jetfire pushed his voice stronger, letting his hands roam, feeling the vibration of the music he was making vibrate against the music from the other Seeker’s frame. Their melodies twisted in the air between them, spun and danced through their systems. It was more than simply music, but the very vibrations that tied their kind to the fabric of the universe itself.
Jetfire wanted to know this Seeker, his name, his history, but the rules forbade it. Instead, he Sang, and their melodies stood in for words, rising and surging through them, connecting them intimately, the way nothing else could.
And the Seeker led the Song upward, trilling it higher and more powerful, and Jetfire joined him, casting notes like stars across the heavens, their bodies vessels of song, strange and intimate.
The melody raced, dizzying, challenging them both as if they no longer controlled it, but it controlled them, pushing them to the edge of their abilities, locking each in the moment where nothing existed but this note and the next and the exquisite space between tones, and the impossible sensuality of contact, their bodies twining around each other, unified through harmony, rising up to an inexorable, achingly powerful conclusion.
And when Jetfire woke from this paroxysm, he was alone, only the faintest echo of notes skimming his sensor spines, his body sated and yet aching, from the inside out. The other Seeker was gone, but his presence still enveloped Jetfire—ancient and wise and giving. He had survived: so could Jetfire. He could give, he could remember: so could Jetfire.
His navcomp clicked on, showing him the coordinates home. Home. Cybertron. One last intimate gift from the Seeker, one that brought pricks of bittersweet pain on his spark.
No, he said, quietly, hating to refuse the gift. I can’t go back. Not yet. Not until…I’ve finished it. Until the Song has its own ending.
Wearily, he called up his ancient coordinates, and found the warp protocol for Earth.
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