Prompt 1 (29 September Loss)
His engine roared, expressing emotion he couldn’t bring himself to express any other way. He felt his rotors bite the air, lifting him off the ground. A primitive system, this rotary mode, but effective. Both for combat and for moments like this-as something through which to channel his fury.
He was…beyond fury, actually. Dismissed, sent away like some sparkling, some…civilian. As if he couldn’t be trusted. He had done nothing to deserve this, nothing. He felt his mouth-wedge grind against itself, even tucked into his alt mode.
I can do more than die for you, he thought, bitterly, as he set his nav system to the assigned route. I can do more than courier your messages. Run this recon. Petty errands, beneath his abilities, beneath his status. Beneath the trust he thought he had.
He shoved forward, tilting his rotor front-down, pushing into the unstable updrafts over the canyon system that surrounded the temporary base. He surged into the tumult of air, feeling it almost abrade his metal skin, the heat from the overhead sun sliced into hot ribbons by the blasts of warm air from below. His tail rotor fought to keep him stable, dicing the updrafts.
He needed this, needed something physical to wrestle against, something to fight, vent rage against rage.
The updrafts cut as he angled over a flat butte. He reveled in the sudden lurching drop, feeling his tailboom swing down in a wobbling arc, struggling for stability.
A metaphor. Of course.
Stability, that’s what he needed. And he felt he had been pushed off a cliff. No, that was inaccurate. He felt as if someone had shot off his tailrotor and he was spinning, spinning out of control, a horrible, nauseating spiraling freefall. Out of control.
No, stable now. Hold your course.
He made a minute correction to his flight path, forging on ahead over the tree-spotted plain, his rotors shoving air down over the branches, causing them to wave and toss like an ocean just before a storm.
I can do this again, Blackout thought, with a bitter, grainy panic. I can regain his trust, even though I don’t know how I lost it. I can prove myself again. I can.
He thought, briefly, before the moment flared too brightly with pain, as though staring into a quasar’s blinding pulse, of Scorponok. Was he the reason? Was losing him what this was about?
He had been…a gift. A trophy, a sign of esteem as well as a companion, a fellow servant. Megatron had joked that Scorponok was an analogic drone-he was to Blackout as Blackout was to Megatron himself. That Scorponok was a living reminder of his role. His loss had been devastating enough but now…it felt like an omen, a vague, discomforting foreshadowing.
And now, the symbiont was lost, and Blackout was…able to find himself on a navigation grid, but, in his own way, as lost as Scorponok.