Prompts 1, 2, 4, 5 and 8
Been offline on a business trip. Most of these were written on breaks. See if you can guess which one was written while more than slightly drunk.
Title: Strange Meeting
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Turmoil, Metalhawk
Rating: PG
Prompt 1: graveyard at midnight
The only sound in the darkness was the whine of jet engines, circling in the cloudless ink of the sky. The whine then dropped to a sequential shifting of a transformation and then two soft bumps of footplates landing lightly on the ground.
And then a shadow, slim and lithe, moving over the small steelstone orbs of cenotaphs, slowly, as though searching for something.
A shadow detached itself from the mass of a large crypt, the darkness of the mech's frame looking for a moment like the shadow itself moving. "I'm almost surprised you came," Turmoil said, his voice, despite the grim surroundings, held its customary amusement.
"You wanted to meet," Metalhawk said. He still didn't trust Turmoil. But everything the Decepticon had told him had turned out verifiably true. Even Bumblebee had grudgingly admitted that Turmoil had not lied. If someone here was trying to earn Metalhawk's trust, Turmoil had certainly put more effort into it than any Autobot. Or even Starscream.
"I did," Turmoil said, smoothly, stepping in just at the edge of Metalhawk's comfort zone.
"It seems a strange choice of location."
"Strange." A velvet chuckle. "Is there anything here not strange, Metalhawk?"
Good question. "Point."
"Besides," Turmoil continued, "I like the ambiance."
"Of the dead."
One shoulder hiked in a shrug, the glowing lines on his armor shifting in the darkness. "It's captivating, don't you think? To be alive among so much old death?"
"I'm not sure that's the word I'd use," Metalhawk said. The markers spread away from them in all directions, little blisters on the ground that seemed, for some reason, less churned and broken than the rest of the planet.
"And words have become so very important, haven't they?" Turmoil purred with a sort of sinister agreement.
"They will build our peace. Fists and weapons destroy: words can build."
Another laugh. "If only we could actually agree on anything at all."
Metalhawk bridled, unsure if the comment was supposed to be a rebuke or not. He frowned in the starry darkness, stepping forward to pick a slow, careful path through the many, many dead. Turmoil followed him, moving with a grace uncanny for his size and mass.
"I presume," Metalhawk said, slowly, "This is a metaphor. Each step forward moving us over the remains of the past."
"You flatter me," Turmoil said, mildly, but not denying. "But I am, also, fascinated by so much room, just for death. Once the war began, such things became a wasteful indulgence rather than a mere luxury."
Metalhawk nodded. Scavenging and stripping for parts became protocol for both sides: oftentimes the Autobot's 'noble' retrieval of the dead was merely to be able to use the components. Before the war, that sort of recycling was for the lowest of classes. "And do you think we should go back to this? A sort of democracy of the dead?"
"Democracy." The word seemed silly in Turmoil's vocalizer. Turmoil patted another of the crypts--a larger square edifice in the midst of the humbler bubbles. "This is," he said, as though this were some confession, "all new to me."
It wasn't a secret: Turmoil was a warborn mech. As the war had progressed, both sides had kept creating larger and larger mechs, enormous and lethal. Cybertron before the war was an unknown to Turmoil. Metalhawk himself had only the vaguest memories, that seemed a gouache of light and dark. "And what of you, then?" Metalhawk asked. "Your very size and purpose is an indulgence."
"It is, now," Turmoil agreed. "But our kind, after all, is adaptable. And I maintain I am still more valuable alive than as parts." His orange optics, seeing far better than Metalhawk's daylight blue ever could, found Metalhawk in the dark, unerring. "Would you agree?"
A challenge, Metalhawk realized, throwing Metalhawk's beliefs at him, testing to see if they were real or mere...words. "You are. We all are, if only for what we know of the war."
"Knowledge, yes." Turmoil chuckled as though he'd won a prize. "Speaking of that, consider," he said, ambling around the crypt, "the knowledge this one has. Life before the war, secrets probably lost to both sides." He tilted his head, stumbling despite himself through the inscription in Primal Vernacular. "A senator," Turmoil mused. "Such secrets."
"It is a terrible loss," Metalhawk agreed.
"It is terrible," Turmoil echoed, turning to look down on Metalhawk's lithe frame, "But not necessarily a loss." If he had a face under that mask, Metalhawk knew it would be grinning.
And he hated that he fell into the trick of it, asking the question Turmoil wanted asked. "How so?"
A gratified purr, just as expected. "Think what we might learn," Turmoil said, "If only we had a mnemosurgeon." A hand moved to rest on Metalhawk's narrow shoulder, reinforcing the 'we', as though they were a partnership. It was an offer of one, at any rate, and a trust.
Metalhawk wavered. "I...may know of one," he said. Half a lie: he knew one, fairly well. He just wasn't sure he had it in him to lay this out to him.
"Think of all we could gain," Turmoil said, hand squeezing companionably at Metalhawk's shoulder. "Think of our future. Because all futures, all living things, are built of the parts of the past."
Metalhawk nodded, distracted, feeling the world begin to shift under his feet, as though the dead were coming back to life, and he felt the urge to move, suddenly, before he fell.
Title: Midnight Snack
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Cutthroat, Blot, Sinnertwin, Rippersnapper and Hun-Grr
Rating: PG
Warnings: BLOT
Prompt: strange noises at 2 am
"Mrph." Cutthroat grunted at the sudden thump into his chassis. Typical Terrorcon wakeup call, and typical Cutthroat enthusiasm. "Five more kliks."
"Cutthroat!" A hoarse whisper, and a wave of....completely repulsing stench. Blot. Great.
"Shut up and go away. Far away." Cutthroat flopped onto his back, hand pillowing his head.
"But I hear something!" Blot's sticky hand, grabbing at Cutthroat's.
"I can't hear anything over the way you smell!"
"Hnnnngh!" Sinnertwin's one head roared up from the ground next to him. "Doesn't even make any fraggin' sense, Cutthroat."
"Listen!" Blot said, his optics wide and round and fearful.
Sinnertwin dropped the head onto Cutthroat's chassis, optics blinking dully. "Sure. Why not. We're up now." The optics were narrow slits of tired annoyance.
Cutthroat sighed, rolling his optics and letting the silence--slightly sticky and relatively foul-smelling--spread over them.
And there it was: a vague splurch splurch crunch sound, wet and breaking. "The frag?" Cutthroat asked, optics peering around the small hangar bay. No one wanted to quarter with the Terrorcons, thanks to Blot, so they got the unluxurious accommodations of a hose-out-able hangar bay. One in which, apparently, things echoed.
"It's a ghost!" Blot said. "The ghost of the hangar bay!"
"That doesn't even sound scary," Rippersnapper muttered from behind them. "What lame ghost would haunt a fraggin' hangar bay?"
"Point," Sinnertwin said. He surged to his feet, both heads snaking around. "Right. If it makes noise, we can kill it."
"I'm...not sure that's how that goes," Cutthroat said, but shrugged. Whatever. It was clear they weren't getting any more recharge tonight, so might as well go, you know, kill something.
"This way," Sinnertwin said, scampering forward. Why the scrap he slept in his alt mode, Cutthroat had no idea. He'd figured it was one of those 'bound to make you crazy if you thought about it too much' things. And he was crazy enough already. Cutthroat sighed, drawing his gun, moving after Sinnertwin. He paused, as Sinnertwin rounded a corner, looking back. "You coming?"
"I-I'm afraid," Blot said, cowering behind Rippersnapper, who looked ready to murder and vomit simultaneously. Vomurder. Multitasking: Hun-Grr would be proud.
Speaking of Hun-Grr..... "Hey, where's Hun-Grr?"
"It has him! Maybe that's the sound of it eating him right now!" Blot's voice quavered. "He is crunchy."
I do not, Cutthroat thought, want to know how he knows that. I don't even want to know that I don't want to know that.
"You're really sort of putting the 'terror' in Terrorcon," Rippersnapper said, jerking his arm from Blot's sticky grip. "Just the wrong kind of terror."
Right. Cutthroat was developing a feeling about this.
"Yeah? Well, then, where's Sinnertwin?" Blot countered, wringing his hands. "I tell you, that thing is getting them." He quivered. "Don't go around that corner, Cutthroat, or it'll get you, too!"
Frag. The best way--the only way, Hun-Grr had once told him--to get Cutthroat to do something was to tell him not to. Especially if the tell-er was Blot. Cutthroat rolled his optics, and strode around the corner.
"...seriously." Cutthroat dropped the gun on the floor, throwing his hands up in a gesture of 'I give the frag up!'.
In front of him, Hun-Grr sat, ankle resting on a knee, scanning a datapad, while he devoured, handful after greedy handful, a bowl of rust-chips, his other hand reaching down, idly scritching Sinnertwin's exposed belly.
"Noooooodon'ttellmeitgotyoutoooooooo!" Blot came bolting around the corner, sliding on his own goo, slamming into Cutthroat's back.
"...the frag is wrong with all of you idiots?" Hun-Grr said, miffed.
"Blot," Cutthroat said, stooping to pick up and holster his weapon. "Blot's what's wrong."
Blot blinked, peering around Cutthroat. "Snacks," he said, numbly.
"Yeah. What? Reading reports makes me hungry."
"Everything makes you hungry," Rippersnapper muttered, propping himself on the wall on the very edge of the corner.
"Getting woken up in the middle of the night by an idiot makes me cranky," Cutthroat retorted.
"Everything makes you cranky." Rippersnapper shrugged. "What? You set that line up yourself."
"Frag this," Cutthroat said. "I'm going back to recharge."
"I'm not,"Rippersnapper said. "It's about opportunity and right now I see an opportunity for a snack. So I guess that means I'll get your share."
Hun-Grr clutched at the bowl of chips, growling. "My snacks. Mine."
"No way," Cutthroat said, dropping down. Don't tell me whose snacks I can't fraggin' eat, he thought. "Your fault we're awake. You owe us."
Hun-Grr sighed, offering the bowl. "Next time," he said, "I'm going to tranq you first, Blot."
Title: Other Ways of Seeing
Continuity: IDW
Character: Kaon
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: unimportant OC death
Prompt: the other side
Kaon couldn't see. Not the way normal mechs could. He'd surrendered his optics, long ago, to become what the Decepticon Justice Division required. And the message had always been a mirror image of their mission, to punish each infraction with death: with each surrender came a gift. While others could see only visible light, Kaon saw the world through emanations, stirs of electrons and an energy that defied science, a complex tapestry of color and sensation and sound combining together, sometimes beautifully, sometimes in an othersensely cacophony.
It was how he tracked so well, how he guided his current, and the end was almost ordained: he'd sense his target, get a read of its colorsmellfeelingsound, and the current from his coils would simply bridge the gap, like jumping a synapse.
This mech, now, for example: he'd begun as a bright green, almost liquid velvet, with a thread of a red trill, a line of sour crimson stitched through it. Now it was sodden, muddied and grey-green with pain, the red line a flood of wailing blood. He would be done soon, over, and they'd have to seek further amusements, further justices.
But right now, he was hanging on, and Kaon could sense, in the rancid green, his despair, clinging to a life he knew was being prised from him, finger by finger. Kaon could feel death, like an abyss, yawn beneath the mech, bored and hungry and patient all in one. Death was blackness to Kaon's senses, the utter essence of nothing, void and untraceable.
Who knew, he thought, what was courage, what was foolishness: to cling when it merely extended agony seemed pointless, unnecessary self-torment. Unless a mech believed in redemption, unless he thought suffering could somehow purge him of his sins.
Redemption only mattered if there was something beyond death, beyond that bottomless gulf.
The mech screamed: Kaon heard it through his audio. And his spark screamed, as well, the harrowing, appalling, terrible sound of despair turned into one's whole being. It was a swansong, in a way, dark and beautiful in its rawness, in its pure self-ness. There was nothing here: a shamed past, a future torn from its roots. There was nothing, nothing else but pain beyond the rational mind, pain beyond all the trappings of right and wrong, self and side.
In this moment of death, as he slipped to the other side, the grey green mottling dissolved, rending like cloth, there was that one moment Kaon anticipated, always, this flare of light and sense, different for all, but a note, single and solitary and pure, of a spark yielding its essence back into the universe, of it slipping, in an auroral glow, the most potent ugly vital beauty that no one would ever see.
Title: The Horrible Monstrosity
Continuity: SG
Characters: Drift, Perceptor
Rating: PG
Warnings: petro-rabbit
Prompt: creepy critters
"You just keep telling yourself that, Perceptor," Drift snickered, staggering down the corridor to his quarters. "You just keep that up. One day? One day, I'm gonna get ya."
He paused, lurchingly, outside his quarters, taking half a klik to get his optics to focus. Perceptor was an aft, but he could mix some pretty fan-fraggin'-tastic high grade energon drinks. Mind-blowing, really. "S'why I keep him around," Drift said, nodding sagely at the keypad. Well, that and weapons modding. Perceptor was pretty handy with that sort of thing.
Yeah, Perceptor was really all right, all things considered, Drift thought, as he stabbed his code into the door. 1. 1. 1. It was, he always thought, the cleverest code. Because no one would ever guess it. That was his style: so obvious you tripped over yourself trying to figure out how complex it was.
"Heh," Drift gave a self-congratulatory snort as he crossed the threshold, the lights auto-blinking on, casting glossy highlights on his red armor.
And then froze, blue optics flying wide.
There.
On his berth.
It was.
It was.
A monstrosity. A horror beyond mortal comprehension. An unutterable hideosity, a dark and horrible creature from the dread reaches of the bowels of Alpha 9.
A...petro-rabbit.
It looked up at him, its evil nose twitching in some obviously malign delight, the long, floppy mesh ears trailing on the berth.
Tentacles, Drift had no doubt. Some sort of horrible prehensile auditory appendage.
"G-G-G-GET IT OUT!!!" he howled, feeling his ember pound in his chest. He reached for his guns, and his swords, his hands fouling themselves. He wanted to run, but he knew the instant he turned his back, the instant!! the evil creature would leap on him, vile and evil and a whole pile of adjectives he was too drunk and terrified to come up with.
He managed one step backwards, just one, before he bumped into something.
Something in black armor. "You need help with something?" A supercilious smirk in his voice that Drift didn't have to turn around to see.
"F-fraggin' petro-rabbit!" He extended one quivering finger toward the berth.
"What, this?" Perceptor pushed around him, bending over to run a finger over the vile creature's misshapen malformed hideous unholy head.
"Don't touch it! It'll--!"
"It will what, Drift?" Perceptor turned, his optics amused, as he lifted the creature up by its ears. "It is a harmless little creature."
"It is a fraggin' abomination, is what it is! What's it fraggin' doing in my fraggin' quarters!?"
A glint of the yellow optics. "Perhaps it likes you, Drift."
"Yeah? Yeah? Well I don't like it. At all." Drift squealed, ducking, as Perceptor held it out toward him. "Getitawayfromme!"
"Really, Drift. You're such an emberling."
"I don't care! Get it away! Thing gives me the creeps." Uber-creeps. Creeps like he could already feel the eggs it would probably lay under his armor cracking and hatching.
Oh, gross.
A smirk. "Say 'please'."
"Perceptor." Drift snarled, blue optics narrowed. Even so, his chassis was heaving with unadulterated fear. "Fine. All right. Please. Just...get it away from me."
The smirk turned into a triumphant, cocky grin. "By all means, Drift." He moved past Drift, unable to resist one last chance to waggle it in Drift's face, just to watch the red mech, the Autobot scourge who even Optimus Prime didn't order around, cringe back in fear.
"Thank you!" Drift gabbled, at Perceptor's back. "Thank you. Fraggin' horror. Infestation. We should scour the ship, you know, exterminate them. Or-or--or maybe we need to bail on the ship. Yeah. That's it. Leave the ship and remote detonate it. It's the only way to be sure."
"We're not blowing up the ship," Perceptor said, flatly. "Especially not for such a stupid reason."
"It's not stupid! I mean, look at that thing! Look at those vicious puncturing teeth and those jaws that could bite through anything--obvious how it got in here: it ate its way through the fraggin' hull!"
Perceptor sighed, shaking his head. "Drift. It is a low-level vermin, hardly worth the energon to shoot it."
"Then stab it! Or set it on fire. Or snap its hideous neck, or something! I don't fraggin' care."
"Honestly, Drift." Exasperated now. "I'll deal with it."
"Good!" Drift said, clinging to the doorframe. "Kill it deader than dead then throw its charred remains in a Dimensional Rift. Or--"
"I don't need suggestions, Drift." A snort, Perceptor turning in the corridor. "In fact, perhaps we ought to keep it, as a pet." He held the thing up to his optic level, considering. It reached forward, one tiny paw tapping his nose.
Drift flinched back. "Cooties! You're not coming near me till you've decon-fraggin-taminated!"
"Really." Perceptor turned, coming back to Drift, who clung to the doorway like gravity wasn't working right. He reached out one hand and *poink* touched Drift on the shoulder.
Drift burst into a sound, halfway between anger and terror. "I'm going to fraggin' kill you for that!"
Perceptor smirked, jiggling the petro-rabbit in his other hand. "Are you really?"
Drift scowled, subsiding, muttering, "One of these fraggin' days."
Title: Private Dancer
Continuity: TFA Inamorato AU
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Drift, Wing
Prompt: sexy costume
"So," Wing said, turning his head around to catch Drift's optics. "What do you think?"
What did Drift think was a less important question than 'could Drift actually string together a coherent thought in the first place'. "It's, uh....wow." Yeah. He'd go with 'wow'. An intricate netting of glowlights covered Wing's pelvic frame and chassis, long, fiberoptic fringes floated from his hips and arms and bunched silkily over his furled wings.
Wing gave a happy wiggle, which set all the fringe swinging, a susurrus, sensuous whisper of movement and sound that drew Drift's gaze like a laser tractor. "Do you like it? Miss Chromia said it was just the thing and that I'd get all sorts of attention at the costume party like this."
Yeah, all sorts of attention. Drift's sexiness-shorted cortex came back online with a gear grinding crunch. That was the last thing he wanted to think about: Wing getting attention. He scowled.
"Oh!" Wing own face shifted into a mask of distress. "The party! I'm so thoughtless! You're upset because you can't come." He stepped off the dais, dropping down to throw his arms around Drift. "I promise. I'll tell you everything. Everything. I'll wake you up at dawn the next day and tell you every single detail. It'll be just like being there."
Drift wavered, because that sounded more than enticing: Wing, warm and alive, outside his window. But that wasn't why he was upset. It wasn't the party he was upset about, it was the fact that Wing would be surrounded by rich, powerful, beautiful mechs, any of whom had a lot more to offer than Drift. He had no power, no money. All he had was devotion and his spark. And right now, those didn't feel like very much.
"I-I'd like that," he stammered, forcing it around the hot knot of jealousy in his throat. He wished he had those things, any of them, all of them, but only so he could give them to Wing.
"Then I'll do that," Wing whispered, fiercely, into his audio. "It'll make the party more fun for me knowing I am going to share it with you." And Drift's envy felt like a petty thing, all of a sudden, brittle and stupid: Wing had never done anything to earn his suspicion, had never shown any interest in anyone but Drift. He wrapped his own arms around the jet, burying his face, in a gesture of apology, in the other's neck, breathing the close, exquisite scent of him.
Wing gave a laugh, the sort of sound that only Wing did: a pure sound of happiness, planting a kiss that promised everything on Drift's crest before pulling away. "I was wondering, Drift," he purred, gold optics smoldering, "If you'd like a little show." He rolled his hips in an intricate figure-8 against Drift, the fringe slapping lightly, like little feathers, over their thighs.
Drift sucked in a vent of air. "...yes, please," he squeaked, his hands suddenly nervous with desire, over Wing's body.
"Good," Wing said, with a quick, teasing peck to Drift's mouth, before he pushed him backward onto a stool. "Now this," he said, hands gliding down Drift's body, "is just for you." And the intensity of the moment, which had Drift trembling, burst into a laugh along with Wing, warm and teasing. "Because after all, half the fun of putting on a costume is...," He flicked a hip against Drift, the fringe brushing his cheek, "...taking it off, don't you think?"
Oh. Wow.
Yes.
Title: Strange Meeting
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Turmoil, Metalhawk
Rating: PG
Prompt 1: graveyard at midnight
The only sound in the darkness was the whine of jet engines, circling in the cloudless ink of the sky. The whine then dropped to a sequential shifting of a transformation and then two soft bumps of footplates landing lightly on the ground.
And then a shadow, slim and lithe, moving over the small steelstone orbs of cenotaphs, slowly, as though searching for something.
A shadow detached itself from the mass of a large crypt, the darkness of the mech's frame looking for a moment like the shadow itself moving. "I'm almost surprised you came," Turmoil said, his voice, despite the grim surroundings, held its customary amusement.
"You wanted to meet," Metalhawk said. He still didn't trust Turmoil. But everything the Decepticon had told him had turned out verifiably true. Even Bumblebee had grudgingly admitted that Turmoil had not lied. If someone here was trying to earn Metalhawk's trust, Turmoil had certainly put more effort into it than any Autobot. Or even Starscream.
"I did," Turmoil said, smoothly, stepping in just at the edge of Metalhawk's comfort zone.
"It seems a strange choice of location."
"Strange." A velvet chuckle. "Is there anything here not strange, Metalhawk?"
Good question. "Point."
"Besides," Turmoil continued, "I like the ambiance."
"Of the dead."
One shoulder hiked in a shrug, the glowing lines on his armor shifting in the darkness. "It's captivating, don't you think? To be alive among so much old death?"
"I'm not sure that's the word I'd use," Metalhawk said. The markers spread away from them in all directions, little blisters on the ground that seemed, for some reason, less churned and broken than the rest of the planet.
"And words have become so very important, haven't they?" Turmoil purred with a sort of sinister agreement.
"They will build our peace. Fists and weapons destroy: words can build."
Another laugh. "If only we could actually agree on anything at all."
Metalhawk bridled, unsure if the comment was supposed to be a rebuke or not. He frowned in the starry darkness, stepping forward to pick a slow, careful path through the many, many dead. Turmoil followed him, moving with a grace uncanny for his size and mass.
"I presume," Metalhawk said, slowly, "This is a metaphor. Each step forward moving us over the remains of the past."
"You flatter me," Turmoil said, mildly, but not denying. "But I am, also, fascinated by so much room, just for death. Once the war began, such things became a wasteful indulgence rather than a mere luxury."
Metalhawk nodded. Scavenging and stripping for parts became protocol for both sides: oftentimes the Autobot's 'noble' retrieval of the dead was merely to be able to use the components. Before the war, that sort of recycling was for the lowest of classes. "And do you think we should go back to this? A sort of democracy of the dead?"
"Democracy." The word seemed silly in Turmoil's vocalizer. Turmoil patted another of the crypts--a larger square edifice in the midst of the humbler bubbles. "This is," he said, as though this were some confession, "all new to me."
It wasn't a secret: Turmoil was a warborn mech. As the war had progressed, both sides had kept creating larger and larger mechs, enormous and lethal. Cybertron before the war was an unknown to Turmoil. Metalhawk himself had only the vaguest memories, that seemed a gouache of light and dark. "And what of you, then?" Metalhawk asked. "Your very size and purpose is an indulgence."
"It is, now," Turmoil agreed. "But our kind, after all, is adaptable. And I maintain I am still more valuable alive than as parts." His orange optics, seeing far better than Metalhawk's daylight blue ever could, found Metalhawk in the dark, unerring. "Would you agree?"
A challenge, Metalhawk realized, throwing Metalhawk's beliefs at him, testing to see if they were real or mere...words. "You are. We all are, if only for what we know of the war."
"Knowledge, yes." Turmoil chuckled as though he'd won a prize. "Speaking of that, consider," he said, ambling around the crypt, "the knowledge this one has. Life before the war, secrets probably lost to both sides." He tilted his head, stumbling despite himself through the inscription in Primal Vernacular. "A senator," Turmoil mused. "Such secrets."
"It is a terrible loss," Metalhawk agreed.
"It is terrible," Turmoil echoed, turning to look down on Metalhawk's lithe frame, "But not necessarily a loss." If he had a face under that mask, Metalhawk knew it would be grinning.
And he hated that he fell into the trick of it, asking the question Turmoil wanted asked. "How so?"
A gratified purr, just as expected. "Think what we might learn," Turmoil said, "If only we had a mnemosurgeon." A hand moved to rest on Metalhawk's narrow shoulder, reinforcing the 'we', as though they were a partnership. It was an offer of one, at any rate, and a trust.
Metalhawk wavered. "I...may know of one," he said. Half a lie: he knew one, fairly well. He just wasn't sure he had it in him to lay this out to him.
"Think of all we could gain," Turmoil said, hand squeezing companionably at Metalhawk's shoulder. "Think of our future. Because all futures, all living things, are built of the parts of the past."
Metalhawk nodded, distracted, feeling the world begin to shift under his feet, as though the dead were coming back to life, and he felt the urge to move, suddenly, before he fell.
Title: Midnight Snack
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Cutthroat, Blot, Sinnertwin, Rippersnapper and Hun-Grr
Rating: PG
Warnings: BLOT
Prompt: strange noises at 2 am
"Mrph." Cutthroat grunted at the sudden thump into his chassis. Typical Terrorcon wakeup call, and typical Cutthroat enthusiasm. "Five more kliks."
"Cutthroat!" A hoarse whisper, and a wave of....completely repulsing stench. Blot. Great.
"Shut up and go away. Far away." Cutthroat flopped onto his back, hand pillowing his head.
"But I hear something!" Blot's sticky hand, grabbing at Cutthroat's.
"I can't hear anything over the way you smell!"
"Hnnnngh!" Sinnertwin's one head roared up from the ground next to him. "Doesn't even make any fraggin' sense, Cutthroat."
"Listen!" Blot said, his optics wide and round and fearful.
Sinnertwin dropped the head onto Cutthroat's chassis, optics blinking dully. "Sure. Why not. We're up now." The optics were narrow slits of tired annoyance.
Cutthroat sighed, rolling his optics and letting the silence--slightly sticky and relatively foul-smelling--spread over them.
And there it was: a vague splurch splurch crunch sound, wet and breaking. "The frag?" Cutthroat asked, optics peering around the small hangar bay. No one wanted to quarter with the Terrorcons, thanks to Blot, so they got the unluxurious accommodations of a hose-out-able hangar bay. One in which, apparently, things echoed.
"It's a ghost!" Blot said. "The ghost of the hangar bay!"
"That doesn't even sound scary," Rippersnapper muttered from behind them. "What lame ghost would haunt a fraggin' hangar bay?"
"Point," Sinnertwin said. He surged to his feet, both heads snaking around. "Right. If it makes noise, we can kill it."
"I'm...not sure that's how that goes," Cutthroat said, but shrugged. Whatever. It was clear they weren't getting any more recharge tonight, so might as well go, you know, kill something.
"This way," Sinnertwin said, scampering forward. Why the scrap he slept in his alt mode, Cutthroat had no idea. He'd figured it was one of those 'bound to make you crazy if you thought about it too much' things. And he was crazy enough already. Cutthroat sighed, drawing his gun, moving after Sinnertwin. He paused, as Sinnertwin rounded a corner, looking back. "You coming?"
"I-I'm afraid," Blot said, cowering behind Rippersnapper, who looked ready to murder and vomit simultaneously. Vomurder. Multitasking: Hun-Grr would be proud.
Speaking of Hun-Grr..... "Hey, where's Hun-Grr?"
"It has him! Maybe that's the sound of it eating him right now!" Blot's voice quavered. "He is crunchy."
I do not, Cutthroat thought, want to know how he knows that. I don't even want to know that I don't want to know that.
"You're really sort of putting the 'terror' in Terrorcon," Rippersnapper said, jerking his arm from Blot's sticky grip. "Just the wrong kind of terror."
Right. Cutthroat was developing a feeling about this.
"Yeah? Well, then, where's Sinnertwin?" Blot countered, wringing his hands. "I tell you, that thing is getting them." He quivered. "Don't go around that corner, Cutthroat, or it'll get you, too!"
Frag. The best way--the only way, Hun-Grr had once told him--to get Cutthroat to do something was to tell him not to. Especially if the tell-er was Blot. Cutthroat rolled his optics, and strode around the corner.
"...seriously." Cutthroat dropped the gun on the floor, throwing his hands up in a gesture of 'I give the frag up!'.
In front of him, Hun-Grr sat, ankle resting on a knee, scanning a datapad, while he devoured, handful after greedy handful, a bowl of rust-chips, his other hand reaching down, idly scritching Sinnertwin's exposed belly.
"Noooooodon'ttellmeitgotyoutoooooooo!" Blot came bolting around the corner, sliding on his own goo, slamming into Cutthroat's back.
"...the frag is wrong with all of you idiots?" Hun-Grr said, miffed.
"Blot," Cutthroat said, stooping to pick up and holster his weapon. "Blot's what's wrong."
Blot blinked, peering around Cutthroat. "Snacks," he said, numbly.
"Yeah. What? Reading reports makes me hungry."
"Everything makes you hungry," Rippersnapper muttered, propping himself on the wall on the very edge of the corner.
"Getting woken up in the middle of the night by an idiot makes me cranky," Cutthroat retorted.
"Everything makes you cranky." Rippersnapper shrugged. "What? You set that line up yourself."
"Frag this," Cutthroat said. "I'm going back to recharge."
"I'm not,"Rippersnapper said. "It's about opportunity and right now I see an opportunity for a snack. So I guess that means I'll get your share."
Hun-Grr clutched at the bowl of chips, growling. "My snacks. Mine."
"No way," Cutthroat said, dropping down. Don't tell me whose snacks I can't fraggin' eat, he thought. "Your fault we're awake. You owe us."
Hun-Grr sighed, offering the bowl. "Next time," he said, "I'm going to tranq you first, Blot."
Title: Other Ways of Seeing
Continuity: IDW
Character: Kaon
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: unimportant OC death
Prompt: the other side
Kaon couldn't see. Not the way normal mechs could. He'd surrendered his optics, long ago, to become what the Decepticon Justice Division required. And the message had always been a mirror image of their mission, to punish each infraction with death: with each surrender came a gift. While others could see only visible light, Kaon saw the world through emanations, stirs of electrons and an energy that defied science, a complex tapestry of color and sensation and sound combining together, sometimes beautifully, sometimes in an othersensely cacophony.
It was how he tracked so well, how he guided his current, and the end was almost ordained: he'd sense his target, get a read of its colorsmellfeelingsound, and the current from his coils would simply bridge the gap, like jumping a synapse.
This mech, now, for example: he'd begun as a bright green, almost liquid velvet, with a thread of a red trill, a line of sour crimson stitched through it. Now it was sodden, muddied and grey-green with pain, the red line a flood of wailing blood. He would be done soon, over, and they'd have to seek further amusements, further justices.
But right now, he was hanging on, and Kaon could sense, in the rancid green, his despair, clinging to a life he knew was being prised from him, finger by finger. Kaon could feel death, like an abyss, yawn beneath the mech, bored and hungry and patient all in one. Death was blackness to Kaon's senses, the utter essence of nothing, void and untraceable.
Who knew, he thought, what was courage, what was foolishness: to cling when it merely extended agony seemed pointless, unnecessary self-torment. Unless a mech believed in redemption, unless he thought suffering could somehow purge him of his sins.
Redemption only mattered if there was something beyond death, beyond that bottomless gulf.
The mech screamed: Kaon heard it through his audio. And his spark screamed, as well, the harrowing, appalling, terrible sound of despair turned into one's whole being. It was a swansong, in a way, dark and beautiful in its rawness, in its pure self-ness. There was nothing here: a shamed past, a future torn from its roots. There was nothing, nothing else but pain beyond the rational mind, pain beyond all the trappings of right and wrong, self and side.
In this moment of death, as he slipped to the other side, the grey green mottling dissolved, rending like cloth, there was that one moment Kaon anticipated, always, this flare of light and sense, different for all, but a note, single and solitary and pure, of a spark yielding its essence back into the universe, of it slipping, in an auroral glow, the most potent ugly vital beauty that no one would ever see.
Title: The Horrible Monstrosity
Continuity: SG
Characters: Drift, Perceptor
Rating: PG
Warnings: petro-rabbit
Prompt: creepy critters
"You just keep telling yourself that, Perceptor," Drift snickered, staggering down the corridor to his quarters. "You just keep that up. One day? One day, I'm gonna get ya."
He paused, lurchingly, outside his quarters, taking half a klik to get his optics to focus. Perceptor was an aft, but he could mix some pretty fan-fraggin'-tastic high grade energon drinks. Mind-blowing, really. "S'why I keep him around," Drift said, nodding sagely at the keypad. Well, that and weapons modding. Perceptor was pretty handy with that sort of thing.
Yeah, Perceptor was really all right, all things considered, Drift thought, as he stabbed his code into the door. 1. 1. 1. It was, he always thought, the cleverest code. Because no one would ever guess it. That was his style: so obvious you tripped over yourself trying to figure out how complex it was.
"Heh," Drift gave a self-congratulatory snort as he crossed the threshold, the lights auto-blinking on, casting glossy highlights on his red armor.
And then froze, blue optics flying wide.
There.
On his berth.
It was.
It was.
A monstrosity. A horror beyond mortal comprehension. An unutterable hideosity, a dark and horrible creature from the dread reaches of the bowels of Alpha 9.
A...petro-rabbit.
It looked up at him, its evil nose twitching in some obviously malign delight, the long, floppy mesh ears trailing on the berth.
Tentacles, Drift had no doubt. Some sort of horrible prehensile auditory appendage.
"G-G-G-GET IT OUT!!!" he howled, feeling his ember pound in his chest. He reached for his guns, and his swords, his hands fouling themselves. He wanted to run, but he knew the instant he turned his back, the instant!! the evil creature would leap on him, vile and evil and a whole pile of adjectives he was too drunk and terrified to come up with.
He managed one step backwards, just one, before he bumped into something.
Something in black armor. "You need help with something?" A supercilious smirk in his voice that Drift didn't have to turn around to see.
"F-fraggin' petro-rabbit!" He extended one quivering finger toward the berth.
"What, this?" Perceptor pushed around him, bending over to run a finger over the vile creature's misshapen malformed hideous unholy head.
"Don't touch it! It'll--!"
"It will what, Drift?" Perceptor turned, his optics amused, as he lifted the creature up by its ears. "It is a harmless little creature."
"It is a fraggin' abomination, is what it is! What's it fraggin' doing in my fraggin' quarters!?"
A glint of the yellow optics. "Perhaps it likes you, Drift."
"Yeah? Yeah? Well I don't like it. At all." Drift squealed, ducking, as Perceptor held it out toward him. "Getitawayfromme!"
"Really, Drift. You're such an emberling."
"I don't care! Get it away! Thing gives me the creeps." Uber-creeps. Creeps like he could already feel the eggs it would probably lay under his armor cracking and hatching.
Oh, gross.
A smirk. "Say 'please'."
"Perceptor." Drift snarled, blue optics narrowed. Even so, his chassis was heaving with unadulterated fear. "Fine. All right. Please. Just...get it away from me."
The smirk turned into a triumphant, cocky grin. "By all means, Drift." He moved past Drift, unable to resist one last chance to waggle it in Drift's face, just to watch the red mech, the Autobot scourge who even Optimus Prime didn't order around, cringe back in fear.
"Thank you!" Drift gabbled, at Perceptor's back. "Thank you. Fraggin' horror. Infestation. We should scour the ship, you know, exterminate them. Or-or--or maybe we need to bail on the ship. Yeah. That's it. Leave the ship and remote detonate it. It's the only way to be sure."
"We're not blowing up the ship," Perceptor said, flatly. "Especially not for such a stupid reason."
"It's not stupid! I mean, look at that thing! Look at those vicious puncturing teeth and those jaws that could bite through anything--obvious how it got in here: it ate its way through the fraggin' hull!"
Perceptor sighed, shaking his head. "Drift. It is a low-level vermin, hardly worth the energon to shoot it."
"Then stab it! Or set it on fire. Or snap its hideous neck, or something! I don't fraggin' care."
"Honestly, Drift." Exasperated now. "I'll deal with it."
"Good!" Drift said, clinging to the doorframe. "Kill it deader than dead then throw its charred remains in a Dimensional Rift. Or--"
"I don't need suggestions, Drift." A snort, Perceptor turning in the corridor. "In fact, perhaps we ought to keep it, as a pet." He held the thing up to his optic level, considering. It reached forward, one tiny paw tapping his nose.
Drift flinched back. "Cooties! You're not coming near me till you've decon-fraggin-taminated!"
"Really." Perceptor turned, coming back to Drift, who clung to the doorway like gravity wasn't working right. He reached out one hand and *poink* touched Drift on the shoulder.
Drift burst into a sound, halfway between anger and terror. "I'm going to fraggin' kill you for that!"
Perceptor smirked, jiggling the petro-rabbit in his other hand. "Are you really?"
Drift scowled, subsiding, muttering, "One of these fraggin' days."
Title: Private Dancer
Continuity: TFA Inamorato AU
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Drift, Wing
Prompt: sexy costume
"So," Wing said, turning his head around to catch Drift's optics. "What do you think?"
What did Drift think was a less important question than 'could Drift actually string together a coherent thought in the first place'. "It's, uh....wow." Yeah. He'd go with 'wow'. An intricate netting of glowlights covered Wing's pelvic frame and chassis, long, fiberoptic fringes floated from his hips and arms and bunched silkily over his furled wings.
Wing gave a happy wiggle, which set all the fringe swinging, a susurrus, sensuous whisper of movement and sound that drew Drift's gaze like a laser tractor. "Do you like it? Miss Chromia said it was just the thing and that I'd get all sorts of attention at the costume party like this."
Yeah, all sorts of attention. Drift's sexiness-shorted cortex came back online with a gear grinding crunch. That was the last thing he wanted to think about: Wing getting attention. He scowled.
"Oh!" Wing own face shifted into a mask of distress. "The party! I'm so thoughtless! You're upset because you can't come." He stepped off the dais, dropping down to throw his arms around Drift. "I promise. I'll tell you everything. Everything. I'll wake you up at dawn the next day and tell you every single detail. It'll be just like being there."
Drift wavered, because that sounded more than enticing: Wing, warm and alive, outside his window. But that wasn't why he was upset. It wasn't the party he was upset about, it was the fact that Wing would be surrounded by rich, powerful, beautiful mechs, any of whom had a lot more to offer than Drift. He had no power, no money. All he had was devotion and his spark. And right now, those didn't feel like very much.
"I-I'd like that," he stammered, forcing it around the hot knot of jealousy in his throat. He wished he had those things, any of them, all of them, but only so he could give them to Wing.
"Then I'll do that," Wing whispered, fiercely, into his audio. "It'll make the party more fun for me knowing I am going to share it with you." And Drift's envy felt like a petty thing, all of a sudden, brittle and stupid: Wing had never done anything to earn his suspicion, had never shown any interest in anyone but Drift. He wrapped his own arms around the jet, burying his face, in a gesture of apology, in the other's neck, breathing the close, exquisite scent of him.
Wing gave a laugh, the sort of sound that only Wing did: a pure sound of happiness, planting a kiss that promised everything on Drift's crest before pulling away. "I was wondering, Drift," he purred, gold optics smoldering, "If you'd like a little show." He rolled his hips in an intricate figure-8 against Drift, the fringe slapping lightly, like little feathers, over their thighs.
Drift sucked in a vent of air. "...yes, please," he squeaked, his hands suddenly nervous with desire, over Wing's body.
"Good," Wing said, with a quick, teasing peck to Drift's mouth, before he pushed him backward onto a stool. "Now this," he said, hands gliding down Drift's body, "is just for you." And the intensity of the moment, which had Drift trembling, burst into a laugh along with Wing, warm and teasing. "Because after all, half the fun of putting on a costume is...," He flicked a hip against Drift, the fringe brushing his cheek, "...taking it off, don't you think?"
Oh. Wow.
Yes.