[Fic] Beyond Silence - 02
Notes, warnings and stuff in chapter one.
Thanks again to white_aster for all the beta magic going on =D
First Chapter
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CHAPTER 02
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Solar cycles had gone by, and Bluestreak had the bizarre feeling that time had stopped. He was seriously starting to think he was not going to get out of there alive, and the knowledge filled him with a strange sadness rather than fear. His teammates would be less protected without him covering for them, and the deaths of those who fell because he wasn’t there would be on him and his stupid carelessness. ‘If only’ danced through his mind and he wished he had something to do just to avoid dealing with them. He wouldn’t even have minded forced labor over the dullness of his cycles in the brig.
Just as the realization of how irrational that last thought was hit his processor, he heard the distant chime of the cell block door opening. His containment unit was deep in the mass of corridors so he couldn’t see who had come in yet, but he could hear the distant rhythmic pounding of heavy pedes as they made their way along the cell-lined passages, homing on to his location.
His frame tensed. He still had a way to go before he needed more energon, and the only times mecha came his way were for refueling or anger management sessions, as he preferred to dub them in his processor. But as the thumping approached, he recognized the third rare option that had popped up recently.
And yes, indeed, there was the strange ‘con.
Bluestreak watched, for the eighth time now, as Soundwave came into view. The large mech padded closer, unhurried, until he was exactly in front of the cell -in front of Bluestreak- and stood there, saying nothing. It had been exactly like that the previous visits, and it creeped the Autobot out.
The first time, Bluestreak had figured he was going to get thoroughly hacked. The communications officer’s skills at pounding firewalls into oblivion was legendary, and the notion had become even more solid when one of the data ports in his chassis’ side slid open and a slender probe uncurled itself, angling towards the trembling and noisy bot. Then it stopped moving a few feet away from Bluestreak's face and had hung there in the air.
This had made the Autobot stutter in surprise for an astrosecond, skipping a word of the amazing recounting he had been giving of a small 'bot/'con conflict that had occurred half a vorn ago on Kyron. A couple of kliks went by and then, for some reason beyond the smaller mech’s grasp, the feeler retracted and Soundwave went away without a single word.
The other seven times had been pretty much the same, sans evil looking probe: just the masked face looking at him without twitching a piston for a few moments before disappearing.
It was truly disquieting, but somehow, Bluestreak found he welcomed those moments. They meant
some kind of distraction from the ever present dullness, and at least they didn’t involve large amounts of pain or humiliation.
After the third visit, boredom was threatening to overtake fear again, so Bluestreak decided to do a little experiment: each time Soundwave strolled over, he’d pick an entirely different topic to talk about.
He had gone over war experiences and memorable places in Praxus, his hometown; he had dissertated on human comic books (and he had planned to go into Nebulan comics too, but at that point he'd been alone); and had given his thoughts on the advantages of liquid versus paste car polish. Of course, everything was marinated in insults and offensive comments aimed at his enemy’s faction, but that was just standard procedure.
He wasn’t even completely sure why he did it.
If he had been asked, he would have said that it was boring to talk every time about the same things with the same listener, but, in truth, he had to admit to himself that he was hoping to get something from the stone-faced ‘con. He wasn’t sure what... maybe a reaction, or some kind of answer. Anything, really, would have been fine if it meant the mech in front of him would betray the smallest bit of information. Something that told him why the visits happened and what they meant.
Bluestreak had hoped that he’d be able to irk the mech into doing something: an uncomfortable shift with the nostalgic memories of Cybertron? Maybe a shudder of disgust at the mention of the squishies' culture that Decepticons seemed to hate so much? Perhaps a wistful dim of the optics at the mention of relaxing times?
But none of that happened. The mech seemed made of concrete. Concrete and silence.
And Bluestreak had absolutely no idea of what lay beyond it.
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The cassettes where agitated.
At one time or another, each of them had managed to hide things from Soundwave for short periods. They had hidden something quite complicated at the best of times, but they had never outright gone behind his back especially not while cooperating with each other. In a way it was reassuring, because if they screwed up they where all going down together, but Laserbeak (who had somewhat initiated the whole thing) kept telling them that as long as they where all monitoring their host properly and blocking the bond tight, he wouldn’t notice his cassettes where gathering without his knowledge.
They had decided to do it in alt-mode inside a maintenance closet. It was hidden from the base’s cameras and Soundwave wouldn’t awake from forced recharge for another half joor or so.
.:So...:.
Rumble broke the silence .:What the slag is going on with boss-bot?:.
.:I don’t get it either, bro. He’s been acting... strange.:.
.:Yeah! Fragging angry an’ twitchy all the time!:.
.:Think he might be infected with a virus?:. Ravage’s words where cold and precise. They where all wary of Ravage, even when he was tape-shaped. .:If his core files are getting corrupted it might infect us as-:.
.:Oh, shut up! Soundwave’s been poking his cables in mainframes since before your model was on beta
testing! How in Unicron’s name would he get a virus now... he’s been crunching data at base for the last couple of quartex.:.
.:Ratbat, you do know we have mecha stupid enough to be virus-ridden inside the base, don’t you?:. Buzzsaw spoke for the first time, and the tone suggested a smirk would be lurking on his face if he'd had one on display.
.:Hmmph, I’m just saying I don’t think it’s a virus.:.
.:I think you are just scared you might get your processor glitched too if it is. It’s called denial:.
Laserbeak interrupted the bickering with a high pitched burst of static.
.:Stop it! Whatever it is, it’s going to come back and bite us in the aft. If the boss is fragged odds are we are all gonna get slagged as well.:.
.:*Sigh* You are right.... Well, let’s get down to the facts: do we know when it started?:.
.:It was definitely after the last seeker frag up. I remember me ’n Frenzy came back and they were all in sick bay, so we painted their optics black while they where recharging. They thought they had all gone blind and flailed everywhere. Soundwave had been royally pissed that we almost got caught, but he had also been... I dunno, amused? I don’t think I’ve felt him right again after that.:.
.:Hahaha, yeah, that was good...:.
.:Focus, for Primus' sake! I’d hardly call that a precise time frame to work with.:.
.:Well, what the frag do you expect?! It’s not like he comes to visit with a cube of high-grade to chat about his Primus-damned issues! And he’s been clamping down on the bond so much it’s fraggin’ hard to tell what he’s been doing half the time!:.
.:Yeah! How long since that... half a quartex? Two thirds? Haven’t you felt like the slag began piling up since then... sorta?:.
Ravage rumbled in thought .:Hmmm, the glitch-brothers might be right...:.
.:Hey!:.
.:Well, that gives us at least something. I was doing recon in that fight but I didn’t see anything weird. Perhaps afterwards?:.
.:Like when, Laserbeak? He hasn’t done much besides the usual surveillance. Also, he’s been isolating himself, so maybe he had been doing it before and we just didn’t notice. The estimate is useless!:.
.:Well, I am not surprised you didn’t notice, you flying piece of organic waste, because while you where half across the mud-ball sniffing fuel, we were here cooped up with him!:.
Ratbat snorted. .:Oh, please! It can’t have been that bad-:.
.:Yeah! That bad! The last few solar cycles it got worse. Primus! I don’t think he’s even noticed how much is seeping through the bond when he’s not actively sitting on it.:.
.:And he’s been more than twenty joors on duty without more than a dozen of breems of recharge...:. Laserbeak sounded tired.
Ratbat realized they all did, and he started to wonder if there might actually be something he had missed. .:Seriously? I thought it was just his attitude going down the exhaust... I mean I did get some weird flashes last solar-cycle, but-:.
.:You didn’t get the freak-outs?:.
.:The WHAT?:.
.:He’s been having defrag sub-routines slagging his recharge cycles. Last one he booted up with battle routines engaged and everything.... Pit, it woke me up, and I thought the base was under attack! HE PUNCHED THE SLAGGIN’ WALL!:.
.:Primus...:.
They all became silent after that.
.:I think... I think it has something to do with the 'bot in the brig.:.
They all shifted their attention to Frenzy.
.:It’s been driving him mad with the talking, and-:.
.:Frenzy, think for once in your slagged life. If every damn Autobot we captured made Soundwave freak out we would be covered in-:.
.:IT’S NOT THE FRAGGING SAME AND STOP INSULTING ME YOU PIECE OF SCRAP OR I’LL GRAB YOUR WINGS AND STICK THEM UP YOUR EXHAUST PIPE WITHOUT CUTTING THEM OFF FIRST:.
.:Come on guys, don’t start now. Frenzy, Ratbat has a point. Boss has been monitoring Autoslag for vorns, and I don’t see how the scrap-heap could be doing anything to him from his cell.:.
Frenzy grumbled, chewing the words. .:But he's never been that angry at a 'bot before! I mean, he never cared about them! This one, I think he truly hates him...:.
.:There isn’t a single mech in the base that has listened to his jabbering for five minutes and doesn’t hate him:.
.:Fine!... it was just an idea, after all...:.
They all sagged in their places, bouncing the uneasiness and worry between them. Whatever was happening to their host was in turn getting to them as well.
No one could think of a logical explanation for what was going on.
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Soundwave felt he was an astrosecond away from losing his mind.
It wasn’t the fits of terror that woke him from recharge or the occasional loss of control over his battle routines. It wasn’t even the irrational urges to tear at things with his servos, nor the self-imposed isolation from his symbionts.
It was the fact that he couldn’t figure out what it was that the Autobot was doing to him.
And he knew it was the slagged ‘bot.
At first he thought it had started too long after the mech’s capure to be related, but, on reflection, he could see the early signs: the mild irritation that escalated quickly, the steadily shorter recharge periods, the ill feelings out of nowhere.... They had all began practically at the same time the Autobot had reached the
base.
He wondered if it wasn’t some kind of new weapon. Yes, perhaps the damned mech had been ordered to get himself captured to test it out. Maybe- maybe something the early scanners hadn’t detected... some kind of device, too small to be detected or even integrated to his internals...frag! It could be ANYTHING!
His fans kicked in for the third time that morning as anger-coated paranoia overwhelmed him. He cycled air hard through his vents to cool down.
No, that would have been hardly an Autobot thing to do, he thought, as he tried to relax.
He was alone in his room at the moment. He had been trying for some forced recharge time on his berth but it hadn’t even lasted enough to have half his core defragmented.
Misery and fear washed over him in dark waves, and he tried frantically to keep it from oozing into the bond. He assumed his cassettes hadn’t detected yet his unbalanced mental state, but holding back was getting harder each time, and the fact that his survival depended on his ability to hold the facade didn’t help much. He was the third-in-command, and any hint of weakness would be seized upon as an opportunity to get him demoted (or worse, deactivated) by those who aimed to rise to the top brass themselves. And by Starscream, too, who was technically his superior, but was still one resentful, pit-spawned fragger.
As an added stress factor, Soundwave was pretty sure that once the damned Autobot went through Vortex’s tender mercies it would be much harder to get any intelligible information from him. If what Soundwave was going through was being caused by the slagging mech, then any way to reverse it would be gone with the 'bot’s sanity. In only a few more solar cycles Vortex would be on Earth and that would be it for his source of information.
Soundwave was trying to investigate the matter, but it was terribly difficult this time, even for him. He had entertained the thought of hacking the ‘bot to the Pit and back, but he couldn’t risk the traces it would leave. As much as he knew he had the technicalities covered, Vortex got annoyed when his toys’ minds were tampered with before he got to play with them, so there was an implicit ‘no fragging with the processors’ rule in effect whenever a captured mech had an appointment with the copter. Soundwave had no doubt the interrogator wouldn’t be able to trace it back to him code-wise, but he’d know someone had hacked his victim, and the slag-for-brains Autobot would spill in a blink who had done it if Vortex
decided he wanted to know. As much as he hated to admit it, the Combaticon was pretty close to the top of Soundwave's not-to-be-fragged-with list.
So, removing plugging from the equation, he had tried to gather what he could through observation.
Soundwave's sensory net was patched to the surveillance network so he could see and hear the Autobot perfectly from the cameras in the brig.
He had also used a relay node for his telepathic mods when they had brought him in, which he had to always monitor personally since there wasn’t any other mech who could decode the information.
The relay acted as a secondary receptor unit, simple but extremely sensitive, attached to the interior of the Autobot’s helm base that recorded the electric patterns generated by the main processor and bounced them back to Soundwave’s HUD.
The constant telepathic surveillance had shown peculiar- if not useful- data regarding his current prisoner.
In Soundwave’s experiece, when a captive talked constantly their thought patterns worked always in the same way: Most babbling happened when mecha tried to avoid thinking of their situation or to mask their reactions in some way.
This usually meant they were purposefully focusing hard on what they were saying in an attempt to ignore what was going on around them.
For example, when Soundwave heard from a prisoner “You sick fragger! When I get out of here I swear I will shove your thrusters up your exhaust pipe” his telepathy mod registered that same thought, and also a chain of adjacent information: ‘When-I-get-out-of-here-I-swear-I-will-shove-your-thrusters-up-your-exhaust-pipe / I-hate-you / feeling:anger / need-to-inflict-pain / Prime-probably-would-disapprove / feeling:shame’ etc.
The way Soundwave perceived it, Bluestreak’s speech didn’t work like that. The younger mech didn’t really think about what he was saying, or more accurately, about each part of what he was saying.
Bluestreak had a constant stream of thoughts that did match what he was saying, but the analysis of the information was pretty much non-existent. He retrieved information to cross-reference it and retrieve more data easily, not because he actually thought about it. Even emotional data attached to the files seemed to act as just another set of coordinates that linked to more data, instead of clashing with his current state of mind.
His thought pattern for the same speech example would have looked like this: ‘When-I-get-out-of-here-I-swear-I-will-shove-your-thrusters-up-your-exhaust-pipe / Ironide-did-this-once-to-Swindle / feeling:amusement / Red-Alert-chasing-Laserbeak-with-a-fly-swatter-was-amusing / Flies-are-so-small / Hound-doesn’t-seem-to-mind-flies ’
To Soundwave disappointment, though, this difference only applied to speech-related processes.
The carrier mech had hoped that Bluestreak would eventually turn his mind to something that would throw some light on what he was doing to Soundwave, but besides his bizarre way of feeding his vocalizer, the sniper’s mind was pretty much the same as the average prisoner’s: fleeting thoughts and feelings of loneliness, fear and worry.
His observation from the workstation had provided nothing to his investigation, and there was no logical reason why he would be able to obtain more information by being in the presence of the 'bot, but still....
When he stood before the battered Autobot... there was something.
He could tell that that thing -that byte-sized piece of knowledge- lay just beyond his mind’s reach, hovering so close but still incomprehensible.
Whatever it was, it came into focus when he was in front of the containment field, listening to the endless prattle. During those precious minutes when he managed to cloak his presence to the security of the base, he could almost understand the hell he was living in.
When he left, he lost it. He became terrified and completely sure that he would go insane way before he’d manage to make sense of the maelstrom he had been thrown into. And then fear morphed into anger.
It was an all-consuming wrath stemming from the pride he held in his analytical mind and the outrage of knowing that someone was tampering with it. The precious, effective, and destructive weapon that was his psyche was all he had, and knowing it was being dulled was enough to make him want to tear at his own plating in rage.
Still, that left him with one pure and clear thought, in the coldness of his berth: when it was over -when he found out what it was, and he got rid of it- he’d make the babbling mech suffer so much that by the time he was done the ‘bot would open his chest plates and beg him to snuff his spark.
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Chapter 03 >
Cheers 0w0