Trick or Treat! - Taking the Bullet - Red Alert/Megatron - Gen/G?
Title: Taking a Bullet
Rating: G? I think?
Series: G1 with some IDW-ish history thrown in because I loves me some freedom-fighter Megatron
Pairings/Prompt: (G1) Red Alert/Megatron, trick - taking the bullet
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine, but I will put them back where I found them when they're done playing.
The discussion started innocently enough. They were both holding up the wall of the club, the high grade was tolerable, and somehow critiquing the dancers out on the dancefloor turned to philosophy.
Red Alert was not sure how that happened, but given that he had nothing better to do, he didn't question it.
"Ah, so you are a self-determinist, then?"
His conversation partner looked down at him, amused. "You sound so disappointed."
Red Alert shrugged slightly. "Not to be rude, but I always found it a rather self-centered philosophy."
The mech shifted, turning toward him slightly. The sound of his frame's movement was drowned in the clash of music from the dancefloor. "How so?"
"It upsets the natural order. We are built for a purpose, to fulfill a function. For any one mech to decide that they will ignore that function and perform another instead assumes that they know better than Vector Sigma what society needs."
"Vector Sigma? Surely you don't believe that Vector Sigma determines a mech's function."
Red Alert waved a hand. "Of course not. There is an algorithm, I am sure, tended to by...someone with more information than I, that's for sure. Someone must make these decisions, though. Otherwise, how would we fill all the functions needed by society? To make generic frames and wait until everyone CHOSE a function would be ...impractical. Inefficient. It makes sense for those who would best fulfill a function to fill the role. I would make a poor frontliner, and you would make a poor...uh...."
One optical ridge raised at him in arch query, and Red Alert found himself momentarily at a loss. His first instinct, given the mech's frame, was to suggest something intellectual, but then they were having this discussion, were they not? Perhaps the mech was a self-determinist simply because he was more intelligent than his peers and was capable of more than...whatever it was he'd been cast to do. "...streetcleaner."
"Perhaps," the mech said, sipping from his cube. His red optics were fastened to Red Alert's, and Red Alert found himself uncertain and slightly uncomfortable under that scrutiny. "But let me ask you this, then. You are security, an analyst, an administrator, yes? Your job is to be behind the scenes, not on the front line. You said yourself that you would make a poor frontliner. You are more valuable building and executing plans, observing and analyzing, than you are with a gun in your hands, correct?"
Red Alert frowned, not seeing where this line of thought was leading. "Correct."
"Would you, then, protect another, say, a superior you did not know, with your life?" The mech reached out to tap a claw against Red's chestplate. "Would you take a bullet for them?"
Red Alert stepped back, a bit flustered. "Of course I would," he said, optics darting around. Honestly, he'd let Lifeline drag him out here, and what happened? He ended up getting into a ridiculous discussion about functionalism with a...well, Red Alert wasn't sure WHAT this mech was, other than big and opinionated. He was built large-framed and powerful like an industrial or war model, yet he argued like a politician.
"Well, then, security mech: why, then, if you are to be your function, would you not hesitate to put yourself into the line of fire for your superiors? You admit that it is not your function, that it is not where you can do the most good. So why is that instinct there? Was it something you developed yourself? A decision you thought out and deliberately made, to value the lives of your superiors over your own?"
"I...I never thought of it that way. Why would I?"
"Indeed, why would you? When it is something you have always felt and known. Code-deep." The mech's helm lowered, his voice a rumble barely audible under the bass of the music. "They MADE you to be their living shield, as sure as if they asked you to walk out of your office and stand between them and harm."
"There's...there's nothing wrong with choosing to fulfill one's function," Red Alert said, though his voice was not as sure as he'd have liked it to be. There was something wrong with the mech's logic, something that made him uneasy.
"No," the mech said. "Not if it is truly a CHOICE. I wonder, though...do you see the choice now only because I framed it as such?"
Red Alert opened his mouth, an automatic denial queued in his vocal processor before stalling. He had not thought to question his attitudes before. They were, simply put, a part of him. This mech, though, was attempting to cast them in a disturbing light that Red Alert was not entirely certain was justified. "What are you trying to say?" he asked.
The mech, perhaps sensing Red Alert's shift in mood, straightened. "Only that to give up such choices to others, of our own free will, is one thing. To have those choices taken from us...is quite another. Merely...fuel for thought."
"I...." Red Alert stared into his cube, then drained it decisively. "I'm sorry. I...should go. I have early shift tomorrow. I should go."
The large gray mech merely tilted his cube in Red Alert's direction in farewell, the red accents of his frame glowing in the sweep of ultraviolet lights from the dance floor. "It was nice to speak with you, Red Alert."
"You as well, Mega-"
[[timejump +24 vorn]]
"--tron, Autobot, armed."
"If you can call it that. Give me a moment, Soundwave."
Red Alert came back online to a slew of errors, the sound of battle not far away, and a vaguely familiar voice.
"Well. We meet again."
Megatron squatted down, picking up Red Alert's gun and turning it over in his hands thoughtfully. "Do you remember our conversation...." He appeared to think for a moment. "...Red Alert? Red Alert. It seems it's not so philosophical a discussion anymore."
He looked at Red Alert expectantly, and Red Alert could do nothing but sit there, his systems still fighting errors and feedback from whatever weapon had thrown him into the building at his back. Where was his team? They had been sent to scout the perimeter and...had they left him?
He was going to die. He was no match for the warbuild Megatron had made of himself, let alone the warbuilds and the seeker that hovered just behind.
"I went back the next night, you know," Megatron said, casually, as if they were still chatting in that club. "I went back on the off chance that you would return. I thought that, perhaps, something I'd said to you had struck a sensor, had made you THINK. Recruitment is more an art than a science, after all. Sometimes all it takes is persistence."
Red Alert's HUD was clogged with errors he could do nothing about. His code screamed at him that he should fight, that he should defend, that he should throw himself at the leader of this uprising and...and what? Tap his plating?
Would you take a bullet for them?
Because there was nothing else he could do. He had no weapons. No manner of hurting this mech. And yet he was assailed by rapid-fire guilt, by a feeling of wrongness, by the certainty that he should--
take a bullet
--give his life to protect (who? protect who? there was no one here, his death would mean nothing....) the public (what public? the public was uprising, the public was rioting, he had spent the better half of a vorn fighting part of the public, part of the public was right here in front of him and would murder him for defying it) from...from what? Harm? Itself?
Red Alert felt a new set of errors start to cascade through his queue. Code-deep. Logical fallacies inserted themselves into his decision-making trees. Or had they always been there? He...he wasn't sure....
"I had some inkling that perhaps you might understand and appreciate what I am trying to do here, Red Alert." Megatron looked down at him. "Was I wrong?"
The question was cruel. Red Alert was distracted as never before, his logic circuits nearly fritzing as it found conflicts (protect the public-fight the public-follow your function-but why why why). It tried to follow the internal arguments back to their roots and came up against nothing but hard-coded function-standards. Cold commands. His entire being was, of course (of COURSE) based on his programming (follow authority), on what he had been designed to do (protect the established order), on what he'd been TOLD TO BE (security analyst second class).
Red Alert struggled with those commands, trying to make sense of them. To reconcile the directives. To understand rather than to simply FOLLOW.
"His processor's glitching," the seeker sniffed from above. "Leave him. He's as good as dead."
"Are you?" Megatron asked Red Alert, those keen optics never straying. "Or are you thinking, still?"
Red Alert's vocalizer spat feedback before clearing. "I...I can't...fulfill my function. It...my directives...conflict."
Megatron smiled, grimly. "Yes. They do."
"How...I can't...." Red Alert slumped. "Kill me."
Megatron spread his hands, Red Alert's gun in one of them. "That is one possibility. But not the only one. Let me ask you, Red Alert....if mecha were to capture you--a law-abiding mech who had done no wrong--and recode you to serve them, to protect them up to and including the loss of your own life...would that be legal?"
Red Alert's processor seized on the distraction of the variables given. "...no."
"No. And yet, someone has done this to you. The system you serve has done this to you. They took your newly-cast frame, innocent of any wrongdoing, and they did. Just. That. Is that just? Is that right?"
Red Alert keened softly. He knew that answer, and it was, suddenly, not the answer that he'd always thought it was.
"How would you label mechs that did that, Red Alert?"
Red Alert's helm ached. His processors were dancing desperately, searching for a way out of a code conflict so deep it could only end in corruption and lock-up. "They...they would be...criminals."
"Yes, they would. And if it was a government that did this, an organization of mechs that agreed that this should be done to you, to every member of your batch, to billions of other mecha, solely to protect their own interests...is this a legal system?"
"It..."
"Is the government itself above the law?"
"No...."
"Then tell me, Red Alert, is this system which has stripped you of your choices to protect its own a lawful system, worthy of your protection?"
Red Alert's spinal struts locked, his entire frame locking up as his processors struggled, his code a mass of errors cascading into chaos.
A crucial categorization--so deep in his code that it HURT--trembled, indecisive...and then changed. The decision trees that categorization governed struggled to recompile, to account for the altered data, and slowly, slowly, painfully, errors cleared, threads resolved and terminated.
Inside Red Alert's helm, the world transformed.
Slowly, his frame unlocked. His optics came back online. Megatron was still there, watching him, Red Alert's gun in his hands.
"No," Red Alert said, tiredly. "It is not."
"Well, then. Let me offer you more than your masters ever did: let me give you a choice."
Red Alert frowned at him. "You're going to let me choose whether or not you kill me? That seems inefficient."
Megatron threw back his helm and barked a laugh. "No, I'm afraid you've already lost that choice. No, I'm offering you a different one."
He looked back at Red Alert, his red optics sharp, triumphant. "Am I your enemy, Red Alert?" Megatron asked.
He extended his hand. "Or are we allies?"
Red Alert looked at that hand skeptically. "How do I know that your cause is any more just than theirs? Perhaps BOTH sides are wrong."
Megatron smiled. "Perhaps. But we must always strive for the greater good, Red Alert. And right now...who is the greater good? The system which seeks to enslave us all, or the rebellion which seeks to free us?"
Red Alert narrowed his optics at the false dichotomy. "I know what you are trying to do." And yet, his life was still on the line here. These mecha could still kill him.
I will do what I have always done. Watch. And plan.
"I am not your enemy." Red Alert took Megatron's hand. The Decepticon leader's claws closed over his forearm and lifted him to his feet effortlessly. "But I will be watching you."
"I would be disappointed if you did not," Megatron said, his optics satisfied before turning to the battle at hand. "Come. We have much to do, while you decide."
~~~
Rating: G? I think?
Series: G1 with some IDW-ish history thrown in because I loves me some freedom-fighter Megatron
Pairings/Prompt: (G1) Red Alert/Megatron, trick - taking the bullet
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine, but I will put them back where I found them when they're done playing.
The discussion started innocently enough. They were both holding up the wall of the club, the high grade was tolerable, and somehow critiquing the dancers out on the dancefloor turned to philosophy.
Red Alert was not sure how that happened, but given that he had nothing better to do, he didn't question it.
"Ah, so you are a self-determinist, then?"
His conversation partner looked down at him, amused. "You sound so disappointed."
Red Alert shrugged slightly. "Not to be rude, but I always found it a rather self-centered philosophy."
The mech shifted, turning toward him slightly. The sound of his frame's movement was drowned in the clash of music from the dancefloor. "How so?"
"It upsets the natural order. We are built for a purpose, to fulfill a function. For any one mech to decide that they will ignore that function and perform another instead assumes that they know better than Vector Sigma what society needs."
"Vector Sigma? Surely you don't believe that Vector Sigma determines a mech's function."
Red Alert waved a hand. "Of course not. There is an algorithm, I am sure, tended to by...someone with more information than I, that's for sure. Someone must make these decisions, though. Otherwise, how would we fill all the functions needed by society? To make generic frames and wait until everyone CHOSE a function would be ...impractical. Inefficient. It makes sense for those who would best fulfill a function to fill the role. I would make a poor frontliner, and you would make a poor...uh...."
One optical ridge raised at him in arch query, and Red Alert found himself momentarily at a loss. His first instinct, given the mech's frame, was to suggest something intellectual, but then they were having this discussion, were they not? Perhaps the mech was a self-determinist simply because he was more intelligent than his peers and was capable of more than...whatever it was he'd been cast to do. "...streetcleaner."
"Perhaps," the mech said, sipping from his cube. His red optics were fastened to Red Alert's, and Red Alert found himself uncertain and slightly uncomfortable under that scrutiny. "But let me ask you this, then. You are security, an analyst, an administrator, yes? Your job is to be behind the scenes, not on the front line. You said yourself that you would make a poor frontliner. You are more valuable building and executing plans, observing and analyzing, than you are with a gun in your hands, correct?"
Red Alert frowned, not seeing where this line of thought was leading. "Correct."
"Would you, then, protect another, say, a superior you did not know, with your life?" The mech reached out to tap a claw against Red's chestplate. "Would you take a bullet for them?"
Red Alert stepped back, a bit flustered. "Of course I would," he said, optics darting around. Honestly, he'd let Lifeline drag him out here, and what happened? He ended up getting into a ridiculous discussion about functionalism with a...well, Red Alert wasn't sure WHAT this mech was, other than big and opinionated. He was built large-framed and powerful like an industrial or war model, yet he argued like a politician.
"Well, then, security mech: why, then, if you are to be your function, would you not hesitate to put yourself into the line of fire for your superiors? You admit that it is not your function, that it is not where you can do the most good. So why is that instinct there? Was it something you developed yourself? A decision you thought out and deliberately made, to value the lives of your superiors over your own?"
"I...I never thought of it that way. Why would I?"
"Indeed, why would you? When it is something you have always felt and known. Code-deep." The mech's helm lowered, his voice a rumble barely audible under the bass of the music. "They MADE you to be their living shield, as sure as if they asked you to walk out of your office and stand between them and harm."
"There's...there's nothing wrong with choosing to fulfill one's function," Red Alert said, though his voice was not as sure as he'd have liked it to be. There was something wrong with the mech's logic, something that made him uneasy.
"No," the mech said. "Not if it is truly a CHOICE. I wonder, though...do you see the choice now only because I framed it as such?"
Red Alert opened his mouth, an automatic denial queued in his vocal processor before stalling. He had not thought to question his attitudes before. They were, simply put, a part of him. This mech, though, was attempting to cast them in a disturbing light that Red Alert was not entirely certain was justified. "What are you trying to say?" he asked.
The mech, perhaps sensing Red Alert's shift in mood, straightened. "Only that to give up such choices to others, of our own free will, is one thing. To have those choices taken from us...is quite another. Merely...fuel for thought."
"I...." Red Alert stared into his cube, then drained it decisively. "I'm sorry. I...should go. I have early shift tomorrow. I should go."
The large gray mech merely tilted his cube in Red Alert's direction in farewell, the red accents of his frame glowing in the sweep of ultraviolet lights from the dance floor. "It was nice to speak with you, Red Alert."
"You as well, Mega-"
[[timejump +24 vorn]]
"--tron, Autobot, armed."
"If you can call it that. Give me a moment, Soundwave."
Red Alert came back online to a slew of errors, the sound of battle not far away, and a vaguely familiar voice.
"Well. We meet again."
Megatron squatted down, picking up Red Alert's gun and turning it over in his hands thoughtfully. "Do you remember our conversation...." He appeared to think for a moment. "...Red Alert? Red Alert. It seems it's not so philosophical a discussion anymore."
He looked at Red Alert expectantly, and Red Alert could do nothing but sit there, his systems still fighting errors and feedback from whatever weapon had thrown him into the building at his back. Where was his team? They had been sent to scout the perimeter and...had they left him?
He was going to die. He was no match for the warbuild Megatron had made of himself, let alone the warbuilds and the seeker that hovered just behind.
"I went back the next night, you know," Megatron said, casually, as if they were still chatting in that club. "I went back on the off chance that you would return. I thought that, perhaps, something I'd said to you had struck a sensor, had made you THINK. Recruitment is more an art than a science, after all. Sometimes all it takes is persistence."
Red Alert's HUD was clogged with errors he could do nothing about. His code screamed at him that he should fight, that he should defend, that he should throw himself at the leader of this uprising and...and what? Tap his plating?
Would you take a bullet for them?
Because there was nothing else he could do. He had no weapons. No manner of hurting this mech. And yet he was assailed by rapid-fire guilt, by a feeling of wrongness, by the certainty that he should--
take a bullet
--give his life to protect (who? protect who? there was no one here, his death would mean nothing....) the public (what public? the public was uprising, the public was rioting, he had spent the better half of a vorn fighting part of the public, part of the public was right here in front of him and would murder him for defying it) from...from what? Harm? Itself?
Red Alert felt a new set of errors start to cascade through his queue. Code-deep. Logical fallacies inserted themselves into his decision-making trees. Or had they always been there? He...he wasn't sure....
"I had some inkling that perhaps you might understand and appreciate what I am trying to do here, Red Alert." Megatron looked down at him. "Was I wrong?"
The question was cruel. Red Alert was distracted as never before, his logic circuits nearly fritzing as it found conflicts (protect the public-fight the public-follow your function-but why why why). It tried to follow the internal arguments back to their roots and came up against nothing but hard-coded function-standards. Cold commands. His entire being was, of course (of COURSE) based on his programming (follow authority), on what he had been designed to do (protect the established order), on what he'd been TOLD TO BE (security analyst second class).
Red Alert struggled with those commands, trying to make sense of them. To reconcile the directives. To understand rather than to simply FOLLOW.
"His processor's glitching," the seeker sniffed from above. "Leave him. He's as good as dead."
"Are you?" Megatron asked Red Alert, those keen optics never straying. "Or are you thinking, still?"
Red Alert's vocalizer spat feedback before clearing. "I...I can't...fulfill my function. It...my directives...conflict."
Megatron smiled, grimly. "Yes. They do."
"How...I can't...." Red Alert slumped. "Kill me."
Megatron spread his hands, Red Alert's gun in one of them. "That is one possibility. But not the only one. Let me ask you, Red Alert....if mecha were to capture you--a law-abiding mech who had done no wrong--and recode you to serve them, to protect them up to and including the loss of your own life...would that be legal?"
Red Alert's processor seized on the distraction of the variables given. "...no."
"No. And yet, someone has done this to you. The system you serve has done this to you. They took your newly-cast frame, innocent of any wrongdoing, and they did. Just. That. Is that just? Is that right?"
Red Alert keened softly. He knew that answer, and it was, suddenly, not the answer that he'd always thought it was.
"How would you label mechs that did that, Red Alert?"
Red Alert's helm ached. His processors were dancing desperately, searching for a way out of a code conflict so deep it could only end in corruption and lock-up. "They...they would be...criminals."
"Yes, they would. And if it was a government that did this, an organization of mechs that agreed that this should be done to you, to every member of your batch, to billions of other mecha, solely to protect their own interests...is this a legal system?"
"It..."
"Is the government itself above the law?"
"No...."
"Then tell me, Red Alert, is this system which has stripped you of your choices to protect its own a lawful system, worthy of your protection?"
Red Alert's spinal struts locked, his entire frame locking up as his processors struggled, his code a mass of errors cascading into chaos.
A crucial categorization--so deep in his code that it HURT--trembled, indecisive...and then changed. The decision trees that categorization governed struggled to recompile, to account for the altered data, and slowly, slowly, painfully, errors cleared, threads resolved and terminated.
Inside Red Alert's helm, the world transformed.
Slowly, his frame unlocked. His optics came back online. Megatron was still there, watching him, Red Alert's gun in his hands.
"No," Red Alert said, tiredly. "It is not."
"Well, then. Let me offer you more than your masters ever did: let me give you a choice."
Red Alert frowned at him. "You're going to let me choose whether or not you kill me? That seems inefficient."
Megatron threw back his helm and barked a laugh. "No, I'm afraid you've already lost that choice. No, I'm offering you a different one."
He looked back at Red Alert, his red optics sharp, triumphant. "Am I your enemy, Red Alert?" Megatron asked.
He extended his hand. "Or are we allies?"
Red Alert looked at that hand skeptically. "How do I know that your cause is any more just than theirs? Perhaps BOTH sides are wrong."
Megatron smiled. "Perhaps. But we must always strive for the greater good, Red Alert. And right now...who is the greater good? The system which seeks to enslave us all, or the rebellion which seeks to free us?"
Red Alert narrowed his optics at the false dichotomy. "I know what you are trying to do." And yet, his life was still on the line here. These mecha could still kill him.
I will do what I have always done. Watch. And plan.
"I am not your enemy." Red Alert took Megatron's hand. The Decepticon leader's claws closed over his forearm and lifted him to his feet effortlessly. "But I will be watching you."
"I would be disappointed if you did not," Megatron said, his optics satisfied before turning to the battle at hand. "Come. We have much to do, while you decide."
~~~