Advent Calendar Day 18
Title: Star Stuff
Rating: G
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Cosmos, Jetfire
Prompt: ‘watching a supernova’
I couldn’t resist tying Cosmos and Cosmos, the Carl Sagan series that ignited in me a passion for cosmology and astronomy as a child. An somehow I made Cosmos angsty. Go me. .__.
“I wish you could be here,” Cosmos murmured, over the comm. “It’s beautiful.” He cycled through his polarizers: UV, radio, visible light. Each lit up the supernova before him in a burst of arc and color and movement.
He could hear Jetfire’s soft laugh. “I’m afraid ‘beautiful’ isn’t something I can really appreciate.”
“You could. This, you could.” He knew it. If they could see what he saw out here, they’d understand. The universe: vast yet never empty, silent and yet full of noise. And then shows like this: the death of a star, a magnificent swansong of light and color and sound and energy.
“I am watching it on your video relay,” Jetfire chided. “It is fascinating to consider.”
“Consider?”
“Supernovae are responsible for all of the metals heavier than oxygen. Without them we-literally-wouldn’t exist.”
Cosmos dropped his gaze to the green enamel of his chassis. It was interesting to think about-right now, this star he was watching explode was giving birth to the metals that may, one day, become Cybertronians.
One day. If they ever made it back. If they ever restored the Matrix. So many ifs. Too many. And so many lives lost pursuing them.
Jetfire seemed to be reading his thoughts. For as much as the shuttle pretended to be incapable of emotions, aesthetics, he was awfully good at it. “Right now,” he said, quietly, “the compression wave can be forcing another star to be born. Life from death. And the metal we’re made of, life from death.”
“Kind of like the war,” Cosmos said. “We die, hoping others can live.”
“Yes,” Jetfire said, sadly. Cosmos could feel him clicking through the feeds. Scanning for metal ions, probably, guessing where they’d accrete. “Only I don’t think the war looks beautiful. From any distance.”
“No.” Cosmos quelled. “Seems pointless sometimes. And ugly.” The beauty around him seemed to sour, as though the harmonics were off, the light a little too cutting.
A quiet sound from Jetfire, some tone of guilt. “What is it like? Out there?” An attempt to make things better.
“It’s…,” Gone, he wanted to say, but that would be too hard. Because it wasn’t gone, really. “It’s sound and light and energy. The colors blend together and you kind of want to study the geometry of it, how the shapes are made, the billows and the radiants. And there’s sound, across the spectrum, a thousand different frequencies singing all at once in different melodies, like a symphony.” He felt a little silly, relaying this to Jetfire, but the shuttle was quiet, patient, waiting. “And you can feel the energy wash over you, ripple and eddy behind and around you, ions and electrons flying out like they’re on an urgent mission, then tangling in a dance too complicated to follow. And it’s all around you and you’re part of it, color and sound and energy. It’s like…belonging.”
“Belonging,” Jetfire echoed, and the word seemed to crackle over the comm line with some heavy longing.
Title: The Heist
Rating: G
Continuity: TFPrime
Characters:Breakdown, Knockout,
Prompt: A city during snowfall
pointless semi-crack. A few years ago I heard a local news anchor report the usual story that takes place this time of year: that someone had stolen the Baby Jesus from some church’s Nativity Scene. The anchorman quipped that “It isn’t officially Christmas until someone kidnaps the baby Jesus.” Poor taste, yes. Yet…somehow true.
It was quiet, but not, the falling snowflakes giving a soft, almost imperceptible hiss to the air. There was no wind, not really anything more than a lick of air that cast the snowflakes like falling sequins under the streetlights. Breakdown hunched on his tires, his engine pinging as it cooled, too aware of the tire tracks leading directly to his spot by the curb.
Everything left trails here, like the fraggin’ weather had it in for stealth. Not that Breakdown would mind, honestly, if it came down to shooting. They’d been hiding for too fraggin’ long on this place. He was a warbot, not a spy.
//Hurry up, Knockout.// Scrap, he could feel ice building up from the road spray on his undercarriage. Why did humans use salt? It stung.
//Brilliance can’t be rushed, Breakdown.//
A disconsolate grumble of the engines. //Knew I shoulda done this one.//
//You? You lack the right subtlety, Breakdown. Blunt is good for some things,// a bit of a salacious purr, //but not for missions of delicacy.//
//Delicacy. More like theft.//
//So judgmental, Breakdown.//
//Just don’t like scrap to be overcomplicated.// Enemy. Meet hammer time. That’s how Breakdown liked it. Not this sneaking around stuff. Starscream better have a reason for this.
//Overcomplicated’s my middle name.//
//…you have a middle name?// How did that even work? ‘Knock Overcomplicated Out’? Wow. Talk about overcomplicated.
A long pause. //Never mind.//
Yeah, he didn’t want to mind, either. //Come on! My brakepads are contracting.//
//Oh? Have to warm them up for you later.//
That was a warming thought, but warm thoughts were only so effective against the stuff slowly accumulating on his windscreen. //Later better be pretty soon.//
//Fine, fine. I’m on my way.//
Breakdown grumbled, waiting until Knockout appeared at the yard’s gate, holding up a small…something.
//Success!// A little self-satisfied purr. // Of course.//
//What’s that thing supposed to do, anyway?// Breakdown revved up his engine. Finally!
//Frag if I know. Didn’t read anything on my scans but this Christmas holiday is all about this thing, so, it’s got to be important.//
//Kind of dumb for humans to leave it lying around without any security. I mean, no gun turrets or anything.// Breakdown pulled away from the curb, Knockout falling into line behind him, carefully lining up his tires to ride Breakdown’s treadlines.
//No one said humans were smart,// Knockout said. //Now, let’s get back to base and warm up. The fun way.//
Breakdown had a few more complaints to file about this mission, but, yeah. They could wait.
Title: End
Rating: PG-13
Continuity: Bayverse, DOTM
Character: Starscream
Prompt: Crossing over
Warning: canon character death
Agony. Red hot pain, but that was nothing that a warrior of Starscream’s stature hadn’t confronted, toes dug, a thousand times. Worse than that, though, was the bitter, brutal pain of losing. Losing everything.
Millions of years and it was all gone. All of it. All his life, all his memories. All those complicated knots of alliances and enmities. Unraveling around him as he fell, crashing to the reeking pavement.
He was dying. And he knew it and he fought as he had always fought: on reflex alone, the ferocity of a mech who had something to prove to the universe, to himself. He fought beyond the ability to fight; he fought when his actuators and servos depleted of charge and nothing moved. He fought with every filament of his frame, every pulse of his fading spark.
It couldn’t end like this.
But it was.
And it was ending not for him but for everyone. Everything, lost.
A warrior’s death, he could have handled. A sacrifice, he could have borne. But as he lay, his spark screaming in desperation and pain, time seeming to stretch, etiolated in both directions, past and future seeming to dash tauntingly out of his reach, he saw the end of it all. Cybertron, gone, destroyed in an act of ultimate genocide.
Killing a lesser species was one thing: The Autobots were murdering their own, annihilating their kind, their home.
If he could cry out, he would have screamed. As it was he became one living shriek of outrage and horror, his nonvoice echoing the sudden agony of a million sparks snuffed out, a history wiped clean with a harsh swipe.
It was a horror beyond horror, and even the universe seemed to recoil, like a chasm opening up. It was death on a scale enough to shock the deities themselves. And Starscream, caught between life and death, was the only witness, strung between his memories and the blankness of light, that space beyond space. Horror battered his defiance and he staggered beneath its weight, even as part of him could hear, from some future tinnily echoing back at him, cheering humans, exulting Autobots, celebrating the end of a great race.
Starscream was a warrior, obedient even to orders he knew to be foolish, fierce and cunning. Oh, he had killed. He had exulted in victory. But it was…beyond diseased to rejoice in the destruction of an entire planet, the reduction of their kind to a handful-a chosen handful-of Autobots. His kind, their history, would be forgotten, or repainted as some black evil, when all they’d done, when everything they’d done from the start had been to save Cybertron. Save their kind.
It was a final, crushing defeat, and Starscream’s spark gave a final gutter before dropping black, energy releasing to the bitter darkness of death.
Rating: G
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Cosmos, Jetfire
Prompt: ‘watching a supernova’
I couldn’t resist tying Cosmos and Cosmos, the Carl Sagan series that ignited in me a passion for cosmology and astronomy as a child. An somehow I made Cosmos angsty. Go me. .__.
“I wish you could be here,” Cosmos murmured, over the comm. “It’s beautiful.” He cycled through his polarizers: UV, radio, visible light. Each lit up the supernova before him in a burst of arc and color and movement.
He could hear Jetfire’s soft laugh. “I’m afraid ‘beautiful’ isn’t something I can really appreciate.”
“You could. This, you could.” He knew it. If they could see what he saw out here, they’d understand. The universe: vast yet never empty, silent and yet full of noise. And then shows like this: the death of a star, a magnificent swansong of light and color and sound and energy.
“I am watching it on your video relay,” Jetfire chided. “It is fascinating to consider.”
“Consider?”
“Supernovae are responsible for all of the metals heavier than oxygen. Without them we-literally-wouldn’t exist.”
Cosmos dropped his gaze to the green enamel of his chassis. It was interesting to think about-right now, this star he was watching explode was giving birth to the metals that may, one day, become Cybertronians.
One day. If they ever made it back. If they ever restored the Matrix. So many ifs. Too many. And so many lives lost pursuing them.
Jetfire seemed to be reading his thoughts. For as much as the shuttle pretended to be incapable of emotions, aesthetics, he was awfully good at it. “Right now,” he said, quietly, “the compression wave can be forcing another star to be born. Life from death. And the metal we’re made of, life from death.”
“Kind of like the war,” Cosmos said. “We die, hoping others can live.”
“Yes,” Jetfire said, sadly. Cosmos could feel him clicking through the feeds. Scanning for metal ions, probably, guessing where they’d accrete. “Only I don’t think the war looks beautiful. From any distance.”
“No.” Cosmos quelled. “Seems pointless sometimes. And ugly.” The beauty around him seemed to sour, as though the harmonics were off, the light a little too cutting.
A quiet sound from Jetfire, some tone of guilt. “What is it like? Out there?” An attempt to make things better.
“It’s…,” Gone, he wanted to say, but that would be too hard. Because it wasn’t gone, really. “It’s sound and light and energy. The colors blend together and you kind of want to study the geometry of it, how the shapes are made, the billows and the radiants. And there’s sound, across the spectrum, a thousand different frequencies singing all at once in different melodies, like a symphony.” He felt a little silly, relaying this to Jetfire, but the shuttle was quiet, patient, waiting. “And you can feel the energy wash over you, ripple and eddy behind and around you, ions and electrons flying out like they’re on an urgent mission, then tangling in a dance too complicated to follow. And it’s all around you and you’re part of it, color and sound and energy. It’s like…belonging.”
“Belonging,” Jetfire echoed, and the word seemed to crackle over the comm line with some heavy longing.
Title: The Heist
Rating: G
Continuity: TFPrime
Characters:Breakdown, Knockout,
Prompt: A city during snowfall
pointless semi-crack. A few years ago I heard a local news anchor report the usual story that takes place this time of year: that someone had stolen the Baby Jesus from some church’s Nativity Scene. The anchorman quipped that “It isn’t officially Christmas until someone kidnaps the baby Jesus.” Poor taste, yes. Yet…somehow true.
It was quiet, but not, the falling snowflakes giving a soft, almost imperceptible hiss to the air. There was no wind, not really anything more than a lick of air that cast the snowflakes like falling sequins under the streetlights. Breakdown hunched on his tires, his engine pinging as it cooled, too aware of the tire tracks leading directly to his spot by the curb.
Everything left trails here, like the fraggin’ weather had it in for stealth. Not that Breakdown would mind, honestly, if it came down to shooting. They’d been hiding for too fraggin’ long on this place. He was a warbot, not a spy.
//Hurry up, Knockout.// Scrap, he could feel ice building up from the road spray on his undercarriage. Why did humans use salt? It stung.
//Brilliance can’t be rushed, Breakdown.//
A disconsolate grumble of the engines. //Knew I shoulda done this one.//
//You? You lack the right subtlety, Breakdown. Blunt is good for some things,// a bit of a salacious purr, //but not for missions of delicacy.//
//Delicacy. More like theft.//
//So judgmental, Breakdown.//
//Just don’t like scrap to be overcomplicated.// Enemy. Meet hammer time. That’s how Breakdown liked it. Not this sneaking around stuff. Starscream better have a reason for this.
//Overcomplicated’s my middle name.//
//…you have a middle name?// How did that even work? ‘Knock Overcomplicated Out’? Wow. Talk about overcomplicated.
A long pause. //Never mind.//
Yeah, he didn’t want to mind, either. //Come on! My brakepads are contracting.//
//Oh? Have to warm them up for you later.//
That was a warming thought, but warm thoughts were only so effective against the stuff slowly accumulating on his windscreen. //Later better be pretty soon.//
//Fine, fine. I’m on my way.//
Breakdown grumbled, waiting until Knockout appeared at the yard’s gate, holding up a small…something.
//Success!// A little self-satisfied purr. // Of course.//
//What’s that thing supposed to do, anyway?// Breakdown revved up his engine. Finally!
//Frag if I know. Didn’t read anything on my scans but this Christmas holiday is all about this thing, so, it’s got to be important.//
//Kind of dumb for humans to leave it lying around without any security. I mean, no gun turrets or anything.// Breakdown pulled away from the curb, Knockout falling into line behind him, carefully lining up his tires to ride Breakdown’s treadlines.
//No one said humans were smart,// Knockout said. //Now, let’s get back to base and warm up. The fun way.//
Breakdown had a few more complaints to file about this mission, but, yeah. They could wait.
Title: End
Rating: PG-13
Continuity: Bayverse, DOTM
Character: Starscream
Prompt: Crossing over
Warning: canon character death
Agony. Red hot pain, but that was nothing that a warrior of Starscream’s stature hadn’t confronted, toes dug, a thousand times. Worse than that, though, was the bitter, brutal pain of losing. Losing everything.
Millions of years and it was all gone. All of it. All his life, all his memories. All those complicated knots of alliances and enmities. Unraveling around him as he fell, crashing to the reeking pavement.
He was dying. And he knew it and he fought as he had always fought: on reflex alone, the ferocity of a mech who had something to prove to the universe, to himself. He fought beyond the ability to fight; he fought when his actuators and servos depleted of charge and nothing moved. He fought with every filament of his frame, every pulse of his fading spark.
It couldn’t end like this.
But it was.
And it was ending not for him but for everyone. Everything, lost.
A warrior’s death, he could have handled. A sacrifice, he could have borne. But as he lay, his spark screaming in desperation and pain, time seeming to stretch, etiolated in both directions, past and future seeming to dash tauntingly out of his reach, he saw the end of it all. Cybertron, gone, destroyed in an act of ultimate genocide.
Killing a lesser species was one thing: The Autobots were murdering their own, annihilating their kind, their home.
If he could cry out, he would have screamed. As it was he became one living shriek of outrage and horror, his nonvoice echoing the sudden agony of a million sparks snuffed out, a history wiped clean with a harsh swipe.
It was a horror beyond horror, and even the universe seemed to recoil, like a chasm opening up. It was death on a scale enough to shock the deities themselves. And Starscream, caught between life and death, was the only witness, strung between his memories and the blankness of light, that space beyond space. Horror battered his defiance and he staggered beneath its weight, even as part of him could hear, from some future tinnily echoing back at him, cheering humans, exulting Autobots, celebrating the end of a great race.
Starscream was a warrior, obedient even to orders he knew to be foolish, fierce and cunning. Oh, he had killed. He had exulted in victory. But it was…beyond diseased to rejoice in the destruction of an entire planet, the reduction of their kind to a handful-a chosen handful-of Autobots. His kind, their history, would be forgotten, or repainted as some black evil, when all they’d done, when everything they’d done from the start had been to save Cybertron. Save their kind.
It was a final, crushing defeat, and Starscream’s spark gave a final gutter before dropping black, energy releasing to the bitter darkness of death.