Broken, chapter 5
“Okay, that’s it! Stop!”
Wildrider looked around desperately for a lid, found none and turned the crate upside down instead. He was half afraid that the scene would spill out somehow, maybe swallowing him up and sending him to some world where Drag Strip’s ego reigned unchecked, but to his relief the crate behaved just like a crate. Sighing, he leveled an accusing look at the kangaroo’s head, which gazed back at him innocently.
“What was that?” he said, gesturing at the crate with his free hand.
The kangaroo blinked. “Life isn’t a straight road with only one possible end. In the future, it could be better than it is now.”
“It could be worse, too!” Wildrider thought the only end he’d really liked had been the one on Cybertron, where they had all gathered for Megatron’s victory, and even that scene had been over before it had begun. Though if there was some future Earth where he had a city to himself, like Drag Strip, it wouldn’t be too bad either. Especially if his city had obstacle courses and ramps and flyovers and plenty of things to crash into, things that looked like Motormaster.
He turned the crate over curiously, but the bottom was solid. He tapped it hard with a finger, but nothing happened. Disappointed, he looked at the kangaroo, which twitched muscles above its eyes as if trying to raise nonexistent optic ridges.
“It distracted you when you needed it. You don’t need it any more.”
I guess not. Wildrider set the kangaroo’s head down carefully. Might as well start cleaning up, he thought and started to fill the crate.
“So none of it was real?” he said as he worked. “I’m fragged in the head, so maybe I just imagined that I saw us starving to death or winning the war. But if it wasn’t my imagination, I want to know. I want to know how it’s going to end for us.”
“You can’t and it doesn’t.” The kangaroo spoke so simply that for a moment Wildrider thought it had gone as crazy as he was - maybe insanity was contagious if you shared a room. “It’s like looking down a highway and knowing one exit ramp will take you north and the other south. Doesn’t mean you know right away which one you’re going to take. Or which one will be better for you, in the long drive. You know now that there could be futures where you fail and worlds where you win, but I’m sure you’d rather be alive and fighting over a cube of energon than dead and remembered only in a few words on the wall of the Autobot ship. Which Megatron would have abandoned anyway when he returned to Cybertron.”
“You mean he wouldn’t even have taken our frames to the Crypt?”
“There was nothing to take.”
Wildrider couldn’t decide whether to be horrified or confused, and settled for both. “How did that even… wait, how do you know?”
The kangaroo’s gaze shifted from side to side. “I’m guessing,” it said, and peeked cautiously at him.
Wildrider didn’t buy the excuse. “C’mon, tell me! Or I’ll… I’ll…” He couldn't think of any way to threaten something that had just been beheaded and shot at, but seemed unconcerned. “Okay, then tell me how can I make sure that we don’t end up dead. Or with me being some humans’ prisoner with wires stuffed up ports I didn’t even know I had.”
The kangaroo tilted its head a little as if deep in thought. “The only sure way to not die is to never stop living.”
Wildrider glared at it. “I think I liked it better when you weren’t talking.”
“Sorry.” The kangaroo glanced down. “Didn’t mean to get all philosophical on you. What I meant was… don’t feel sorry for yourself or be ready to give up too soon. Your team’s already got that, so they don’t need any more of it. They need you instead.”
Wildrider couldn’t help feeling a little better - like the time he had gotten lost in some Arabian desert, had nearly burned his engine out from overheating and had then driven straight into an oasis because he’d taken it for a mirage. He still remembered the glub-glub of water bubbling through his vents and the delicious cool feeling as he’d sunk beneath the surface.
The best part, though, had been jumping out when Motormaster approached the oasis, looked around and demanded to know where he was.
“See?” The corners of the kangaroo’s mouth turned up. “I can talk about living but you do it. And none of what you saw was the end, either. Life has a way of going on, no matter what happens or who’s defeated, so sooner or later you have to go on with it.”
Wildrider had almost finished filling the crate. “So it’s like a film?” he said as he picked up the last few things. “You think it’s over when the credits roll, but it turns out there’s a sequel?”
“Yeah. Except you get to decide whether there is one - and to some extent, what role you’re going to play.”
Wildrider liked the sound of that. He propped his elbows on the crate and leaned forward. “Okay, but you’ve got to tell me how you know all this. How ‘bout if I give you a… a…” What could a disembodied head use? “A hat?”
Before the kangaroo could reply, there was a knock on the door.
Wildrider jerked, turning sharply before he realized it couldn’t be Motormaster, who wouldn’t have knocked. When he gave the order to open, the door slid aside and Breakdown looked around and behind him before stepping in.
“We’re halfway through the film, so I thought you might need some help,” he said.
Wildrider grinned, gesturing at the full crate. “Nah. I cleaned it all up.”
The tentative, concerned expression drained off Breakdown’s face, leaving it curiously blank. His gaze slid across the room and when it returned to Wildrider, he looked skeptical instead.
“What?” Wildrider said.
“Wildrider,” Breakdown said carefully, “you’ve boxed up everything that isn’t broken.”
Wildrider felt his mouth open and close. He stared around and saw for the first time what he had done. “Slag.” Shaking his head, he began to empty the crate. “I must’ve gotten distracted talking to it.”
“To what?” Breakdown knelt beside the crate and took the collection of model cars out.
“The kangaroo. Well, its head anyway.”
Breakdown stopped. “Its head?”
Wildrider pointed at the kangaroo’s head, waiting for it to confirm what he had just said. There was no reply. The black glass eyes looked flat as a stone floor, and less revealing.
“Well, it was talking,” he said, turning to Breakdown. “It told me things would be better in the future - no, no, there was more than that, it showed me what might happen to us! In the crate. It was like watching different clips of shows on TV, ‘cause there was one where we were all on Cybertron and there was another where Prowl was so fragging--”
Breakdown slapped him.
Wildrider’s head snapped to one side. For a moment he thought he was in some kind of bizarre scenario all over again, but there hadn’t been any sound previously. Now the sharp clank of metal on metal still rang in his audials, and the numbness of the impact gave way to a hot sting.
Not that that would have bothered him at all, normally - thanks to Motormaster, his pain threshold was almost as high as a Seeker’s cruising altitude. But what left him shocked was being hit by Breakdown. That had never happened before. Breakdown swung back when they fought or grappled playfully, but he never threw the first punch.
“Wildrider?” Breakdown said.
Still unable to process what had just happened, Wildrider turned his head, half-expecting to see some crazy Prowl-like version of Breakdown with molten optics and spiked armor. There was no such change, though, and Breakdown looked just as taken aback. I can’t believe he hit me. He’s so quiet and nervous and scared--
He still is.
The gestalt link showed him that. He did what he always did when something couldn’t be understood with his conscious mind - he sank into the subconscious side of it instead, the bond that would exist as long as they lived. And he felt Breakdown’s fear clearly. Not fear of him, but of his continuing to slide off the edge, of Motormaster’s reaction but worse, of what would happen if they couldn’t bring him back.
Since he knew exactly what Breakdown did under such circumstances, he tapped into the Stunticon channel.
“It’s Wildrider,” he heard Breakdown say. “He’s having another epitaph.”
“Episode,” Dead End corrected.
Drag Strip made a contemptuous sound. “Wildrider doesn’t have episodes - he has an entire fragging series.”
“You watch it or I’ll flatten your faceplate,” Wildrider snapped. Just because he was crazy didn’t mean he had to take slag from Drag Strip. “And I won’t tell you about your city either. I’ll bet those humans spit in your energon when you aren’t looking.”
The silence that followed ended only when Breakdown said, “See what I mean?” and cut the transmission. He looked at Wildrider, then spoke quietly and openly. “Wildrider… whatever you think you saw, it wasn’t real. None of it.”
“But…” Wildrider didn’t mind not being able to see the scenes in the bottom of the crate, but he felt as if Breakdown was taking away their afterimages in his memory as well. He looked at the kangaroo for help but the severed head just lay on the ground, dead and silent.
“You were imagining things,” Breakdown said, “and we don’t blame you. That’s… well, that’s just a conditioner you have.”
In other words, I’m insane, Wildrider thought. So it hadn’t been something special that had happened to make up for what Motormaster had done. It hadn’t been a secret revealed to him and him alone. It had just been his fragged-up, broken, stupid stupid stupid mind.
“You can’t really help it, but you’re okay now,” Breakdown said. “Doesn’t matter what you were saying before. You’re fine now.”
“I guess I am,” Wildrider said slowly. He didn’t feel fine, but that was better than Breakdown agreeing with him and telling him what a mess he was. The magic was gone, anyway, long gone. The kangaroo’s head was just that - a stuffed animal’s head that would be incinerated soon - the crate was a crate, and a room half full of broken things was a room half full of broken things.
The tense line of Breakdown’s shoulders relaxed, and he smiled hesitantly. “I’ll help clean up, okay?” Wildrider nodded, and he glanced around. “We can get another kite. But he broke your cookie clock too.”
“Uh, no, I opened that up. I’m gonna paint the cuckoo to look like Laserbeak.”
Breakdown stared at him, shook his head and continued to work. Wildrider joined him, and within minutes it was done - everything ruined was in the crate. Except me, Wildrider thought as Breakdown put the kangaroo’s head inside, on top of the rest of the trash. He looked from the broken things in the box to the whole ones on their shelves - half of his belongings in one place and half in the other.
And he realized that while part of him was broken too, and had been since the moment of his creation, the other part wasn’t. Maybe it never would be, no matter what happened in the future. Or even in the present. He’d managed to struggle back after what Motormaster had done - and had made him do - to his belongings, and he hadn’t given in to despair or hopelessness. He would live.
We all will.
“I’ll take that,” he said as Breakdown got up with the crate in his arms. Breakdown relinquished it, but the skeptical look appeared again.
Wildrider sighed. “I’m going down to the incinerators, Breakdown. You can come with me if you think I’m going to put all this in my subspace compartments instead.”
“I guess it’s your call if you are.” Breakdown opened the door.
“Slag, I’m not that crazy.” Wildrider did keep a lot of what the other Stunticons considered junk in his subspace pockets, but none of it was smashed or nonfunctioning. “I’m not even broken.” Just cracked… and sometimes the cracks let the light in.
“Or out,” the kangaroo whispered as he walked away down the corridor.
THE END
Wildrider looked around desperately for a lid, found none and turned the crate upside down instead. He was half afraid that the scene would spill out somehow, maybe swallowing him up and sending him to some world where Drag Strip’s ego reigned unchecked, but to his relief the crate behaved just like a crate. Sighing, he leveled an accusing look at the kangaroo’s head, which gazed back at him innocently.
“What was that?” he said, gesturing at the crate with his free hand.
The kangaroo blinked. “Life isn’t a straight road with only one possible end. In the future, it could be better than it is now.”
“It could be worse, too!” Wildrider thought the only end he’d really liked had been the one on Cybertron, where they had all gathered for Megatron’s victory, and even that scene had been over before it had begun. Though if there was some future Earth where he had a city to himself, like Drag Strip, it wouldn’t be too bad either. Especially if his city had obstacle courses and ramps and flyovers and plenty of things to crash into, things that looked like Motormaster.
He turned the crate over curiously, but the bottom was solid. He tapped it hard with a finger, but nothing happened. Disappointed, he looked at the kangaroo, which twitched muscles above its eyes as if trying to raise nonexistent optic ridges.
“It distracted you when you needed it. You don’t need it any more.”
I guess not. Wildrider set the kangaroo’s head down carefully. Might as well start cleaning up, he thought and started to fill the crate.
“So none of it was real?” he said as he worked. “I’m fragged in the head, so maybe I just imagined that I saw us starving to death or winning the war. But if it wasn’t my imagination, I want to know. I want to know how it’s going to end for us.”
“You can’t and it doesn’t.” The kangaroo spoke so simply that for a moment Wildrider thought it had gone as crazy as he was - maybe insanity was contagious if you shared a room. “It’s like looking down a highway and knowing one exit ramp will take you north and the other south. Doesn’t mean you know right away which one you’re going to take. Or which one will be better for you, in the long drive. You know now that there could be futures where you fail and worlds where you win, but I’m sure you’d rather be alive and fighting over a cube of energon than dead and remembered only in a few words on the wall of the Autobot ship. Which Megatron would have abandoned anyway when he returned to Cybertron.”
“You mean he wouldn’t even have taken our frames to the Crypt?”
“There was nothing to take.”
Wildrider couldn’t decide whether to be horrified or confused, and settled for both. “How did that even… wait, how do you know?”
The kangaroo’s gaze shifted from side to side. “I’m guessing,” it said, and peeked cautiously at him.
Wildrider didn’t buy the excuse. “C’mon, tell me! Or I’ll… I’ll…” He couldn't think of any way to threaten something that had just been beheaded and shot at, but seemed unconcerned. “Okay, then tell me how can I make sure that we don’t end up dead. Or with me being some humans’ prisoner with wires stuffed up ports I didn’t even know I had.”
The kangaroo tilted its head a little as if deep in thought. “The only sure way to not die is to never stop living.”
Wildrider glared at it. “I think I liked it better when you weren’t talking.”
“Sorry.” The kangaroo glanced down. “Didn’t mean to get all philosophical on you. What I meant was… don’t feel sorry for yourself or be ready to give up too soon. Your team’s already got that, so they don’t need any more of it. They need you instead.”
Wildrider couldn’t help feeling a little better - like the time he had gotten lost in some Arabian desert, had nearly burned his engine out from overheating and had then driven straight into an oasis because he’d taken it for a mirage. He still remembered the glub-glub of water bubbling through his vents and the delicious cool feeling as he’d sunk beneath the surface.
The best part, though, had been jumping out when Motormaster approached the oasis, looked around and demanded to know where he was.
“See?” The corners of the kangaroo’s mouth turned up. “I can talk about living but you do it. And none of what you saw was the end, either. Life has a way of going on, no matter what happens or who’s defeated, so sooner or later you have to go on with it.”
Wildrider had almost finished filling the crate. “So it’s like a film?” he said as he picked up the last few things. “You think it’s over when the credits roll, but it turns out there’s a sequel?”
“Yeah. Except you get to decide whether there is one - and to some extent, what role you’re going to play.”
Wildrider liked the sound of that. He propped his elbows on the crate and leaned forward. “Okay, but you’ve got to tell me how you know all this. How ‘bout if I give you a… a…” What could a disembodied head use? “A hat?”
Before the kangaroo could reply, there was a knock on the door.
Wildrider jerked, turning sharply before he realized it couldn’t be Motormaster, who wouldn’t have knocked. When he gave the order to open, the door slid aside and Breakdown looked around and behind him before stepping in.
“We’re halfway through the film, so I thought you might need some help,” he said.
Wildrider grinned, gesturing at the full crate. “Nah. I cleaned it all up.”
The tentative, concerned expression drained off Breakdown’s face, leaving it curiously blank. His gaze slid across the room and when it returned to Wildrider, he looked skeptical instead.
“What?” Wildrider said.
“Wildrider,” Breakdown said carefully, “you’ve boxed up everything that isn’t broken.”
Wildrider felt his mouth open and close. He stared around and saw for the first time what he had done. “Slag.” Shaking his head, he began to empty the crate. “I must’ve gotten distracted talking to it.”
“To what?” Breakdown knelt beside the crate and took the collection of model cars out.
“The kangaroo. Well, its head anyway.”
Breakdown stopped. “Its head?”
Wildrider pointed at the kangaroo’s head, waiting for it to confirm what he had just said. There was no reply. The black glass eyes looked flat as a stone floor, and less revealing.
“Well, it was talking,” he said, turning to Breakdown. “It told me things would be better in the future - no, no, there was more than that, it showed me what might happen to us! In the crate. It was like watching different clips of shows on TV, ‘cause there was one where we were all on Cybertron and there was another where Prowl was so fragging--”
Breakdown slapped him.
Wildrider’s head snapped to one side. For a moment he thought he was in some kind of bizarre scenario all over again, but there hadn’t been any sound previously. Now the sharp clank of metal on metal still rang in his audials, and the numbness of the impact gave way to a hot sting.
Not that that would have bothered him at all, normally - thanks to Motormaster, his pain threshold was almost as high as a Seeker’s cruising altitude. But what left him shocked was being hit by Breakdown. That had never happened before. Breakdown swung back when they fought or grappled playfully, but he never threw the first punch.
“Wildrider?” Breakdown said.
Still unable to process what had just happened, Wildrider turned his head, half-expecting to see some crazy Prowl-like version of Breakdown with molten optics and spiked armor. There was no such change, though, and Breakdown looked just as taken aback. I can’t believe he hit me. He’s so quiet and nervous and scared--
He still is.
The gestalt link showed him that. He did what he always did when something couldn’t be understood with his conscious mind - he sank into the subconscious side of it instead, the bond that would exist as long as they lived. And he felt Breakdown’s fear clearly. Not fear of him, but of his continuing to slide off the edge, of Motormaster’s reaction but worse, of what would happen if they couldn’t bring him back.
Since he knew exactly what Breakdown did under such circumstances, he tapped into the Stunticon channel.
“It’s Wildrider,” he heard Breakdown say. “He’s having another epitaph.”
“Episode,” Dead End corrected.
Drag Strip made a contemptuous sound. “Wildrider doesn’t have episodes - he has an entire fragging series.”
“You watch it or I’ll flatten your faceplate,” Wildrider snapped. Just because he was crazy didn’t mean he had to take slag from Drag Strip. “And I won’t tell you about your city either. I’ll bet those humans spit in your energon when you aren’t looking.”
The silence that followed ended only when Breakdown said, “See what I mean?” and cut the transmission. He looked at Wildrider, then spoke quietly and openly. “Wildrider… whatever you think you saw, it wasn’t real. None of it.”
“But…” Wildrider didn’t mind not being able to see the scenes in the bottom of the crate, but he felt as if Breakdown was taking away their afterimages in his memory as well. He looked at the kangaroo for help but the severed head just lay on the ground, dead and silent.
“You were imagining things,” Breakdown said, “and we don’t blame you. That’s… well, that’s just a conditioner you have.”
In other words, I’m insane, Wildrider thought. So it hadn’t been something special that had happened to make up for what Motormaster had done. It hadn’t been a secret revealed to him and him alone. It had just been his fragged-up, broken, stupid stupid stupid mind.
“You can’t really help it, but you’re okay now,” Breakdown said. “Doesn’t matter what you were saying before. You’re fine now.”
“I guess I am,” Wildrider said slowly. He didn’t feel fine, but that was better than Breakdown agreeing with him and telling him what a mess he was. The magic was gone, anyway, long gone. The kangaroo’s head was just that - a stuffed animal’s head that would be incinerated soon - the crate was a crate, and a room half full of broken things was a room half full of broken things.
The tense line of Breakdown’s shoulders relaxed, and he smiled hesitantly. “I’ll help clean up, okay?” Wildrider nodded, and he glanced around. “We can get another kite. But he broke your cookie clock too.”
“Uh, no, I opened that up. I’m gonna paint the cuckoo to look like Laserbeak.”
Breakdown stared at him, shook his head and continued to work. Wildrider joined him, and within minutes it was done - everything ruined was in the crate. Except me, Wildrider thought as Breakdown put the kangaroo’s head inside, on top of the rest of the trash. He looked from the broken things in the box to the whole ones on their shelves - half of his belongings in one place and half in the other.
And he realized that while part of him was broken too, and had been since the moment of his creation, the other part wasn’t. Maybe it never would be, no matter what happened in the future. Or even in the present. He’d managed to struggle back after what Motormaster had done - and had made him do - to his belongings, and he hadn’t given in to despair or hopelessness. He would live.
We all will.
“I’ll take that,” he said as Breakdown got up with the crate in his arms. Breakdown relinquished it, but the skeptical look appeared again.
Wildrider sighed. “I’m going down to the incinerators, Breakdown. You can come with me if you think I’m going to put all this in my subspace compartments instead.”
“I guess it’s your call if you are.” Breakdown opened the door.
“Slag, I’m not that crazy.” Wildrider did keep a lot of what the other Stunticons considered junk in his subspace pockets, but none of it was smashed or nonfunctioning. “I’m not even broken.” Just cracked… and sometimes the cracks let the light in.
“Or out,” the kangaroo whispered as he walked away down the corridor.
THE END