Work Text:
“Let me talk to them.” Drift rose to his feet, stepping into the light from the vidscreens, from where he had been watching on the margins.
“I like our plan,” countered Twin Twist, glaring at the white-armored mech. “We hit’em with hi-ex, collapse the cave on ‘em. Do it fast enough and they won’t have a chance to hit that switch.” The Decepticon kill-team cornered in the cave had threatened to detonate a bomb it had planted in the colony settlement.
“We hope,” Springer said, measured. He didn’t like the plan, particularly, but he didn’t see any other way. It was a gamble–act hard and fast, and count on speed and surprise over luck.
Springer didn’t put a lot of stock in luck.
He turned to the swordsmech. “I’m listening.”
“Let me talk to them,” Drift repeated. “I might convince them.”
“To do what?” Topspin’s mouth pulled into a moue of doubt. “Surrender?”
“Passage,” Drift said. “Without blowing up the settlement.” It was a compromise, but it was the safest option for the civilians. It was hard to believe they’d found anything or anyone who could still be called innocent civilians in the war, but they had, an outflung colony, lost to history, but quietly forcing life on the harsh planet they had crashed on. They hadn’t even known there was a war and had welcomed the Decepticon team as long-lost cousins.
“Passage,” Twin Twist spat. “This is our chance. If we let them go, they’re going to kill more mechs. Maybe one of us.”
“And we have no guarantee they’d leave and not blow the settlement anyway.” Topspin always had his spark-twin’s back.
“You sound like Impactor on Pova,” Springer’s voice was angry, not at them, but at the memory, running a hand over the patched armor on his chassis.
“Maybe,” Twin Twist snarled, “Impactor had a point.” The comparison had bruised him nonetheless. Impactor’s arrest was a raw wound that Springer had just poured a caustic on. Ultra Magnus would not tell them what happened to Impactor, or where he was, or even if he was alive or not. And that was…dire enough.
More than one Wrecker agreed with Impactor’s call with Squadron X, but his arrest had chilled them. Their own kind, other Autobots, peeking in at what they did and deciding they didn’t like the fact that war was fraggin’ ugly.
“All right.” Springer stepped into his command voice. “Here’s what we’ll do. Worst of both worlds. Drift will go…try to talk to them. While he’s doing that, we prep the charges to blow the entrance tunnel--’Spin and ‘Twist, that’s you.” He’d like to say there was no harm in letting Drift try. If nothing else, it would buy them time and bleed attention from the cliff face. But…
Springer looked around, his Matrix-blue optics catching each pair in the room, pounding down doubt and disagreement. That was the plan. Success or failure, it would be on his shoulders.
This was what leadership was, after all.
[***]
“What if he betrays us,” Twin Twist asked on a private comm to Springer. He had kept quiet in the command room, but he couldn't help but express this misgiving. Drift was still, in his mind–in most of their minds–at least partly a Decepticon: the enamel on his Autobrand still not fully set. Twin Twist wasn’t asking something Springer hadn’t thought of already.
“If he betrays us, he’s in the cave, and we blow it and take them all out.” He sounded grim enough over comm, but in his spark he prayed he wouldn’t be forced to make that decision.
[***]
Drift stood by the jagged, slumped-triangle entrance to the cave. He had to try. Someone had to try. To save the colonists. To save honor. After all, Wing had tried, and fought, and died, for honor. He cycled a vent of air, before switching his comm channels to the still-remembered close-prox frequencies.
Which still worked: he heard the beep that signalled his request to join the channel, and then, a few seconds later, he was in.
The comm line was eerily quiet, everyone on the channel breathless, waiting.
+It’s me. Deadlock.+ The name felt strange, though it hadn’t been that long. He had been Deadlock for millions of years. Drift, only a few.
+What do you want. Traitor.+
At least they were talking. At least they were listening. +To talk, face-to-face.+
A buzz of discontent, and then what he was sure was some backchannel chatter, as they decided. +Yeah.+
Drift stepped into the dark maw of the cave and it felt a little like stepping back through time, the sudden rusty dampness around him smelling too much like the Gutters. He had been Drift, then, too, aimless and angry. He was neither now, but the scent seemed to try to pull him back down.
He followed the passageway, advancing with a confidence he didn’t feel, just knowing that he would not face what lay ahead like a coward. Deadlock, Drift: it did not matter. He would not show fear.
“Stop.” The voice came from his right, and it took everything he had not to whip around, drawing one of his short blades.
He stopped.
He heard the scuffling of metal on stone and grit around him, surrounding him, and then the sudden flare of a lumen behind the shape that resolved into Backfire, searing into his blue optics.
“You look…different.” Backfire’s head cocked, red eyes raking over the white armor, that looked almost luminous in the darkness.
“You look the same,” Drift replied. Because he did. He and Backfire went back hundreds of years, fighting side by side, pauldron by pauldron.
“Because I am the same.” Accusation in the words. He was the same; Drift had changed.
Had he, though? “I am also the same. We both fight for the same thing, Backfire. Freedom from oppression. Fairness. Justice. All the things we never had in the gutters.”
Backfire sneered. “And you think that,” he jutted his chin at the Autobrand, “gives you that?”
“No.” Drift shook his head. He couldn’t lie. But he had earned--or at least not yet burned off--the suspicions of his new allies. “But Decepticons have strayed from that. Look at you. All of you.” He gestured behind him toward the mouth of the cave and the world beyond. “You’re willing to kill innocents. Civilians. Mechs like you and I were once. For what?”
Backfire narrowed his eyes. “There are no innocents in this war.”
“But they’re not in our war,” he countered.
“Everyone is. This planet, if not the people.” Backfire was saying the right things, things Drift himself--Deadlock--would have said. Who cared about people? War was about terrain, air- or land-supremacy.
Drift could almost hear Backfire turning the thoughts in his mind and not liking what came up. It was time to press an attack. “Backfire. What are you trying to achieve here? I mean here.” He gestured at the cave.
“We hurt the Autobot cause. The place blows? They’ll blame you.” Possible. Too possible.
“But you’ll die. They’re planning on blowing this cave entrance, trapping you--all of us--inside.” Because Drift had no illusions that they would risk loss to save him. He knew the risk when he made the offer. “And you take out the settlement. Will that make dying here, slow-starving or crushed, trapped, feel better?” Hard words. Hard thoughts. He was no longer Deadlock, but he had not forgotten how to see, to think, to speak like his former self, praying it would get through.
A shuffle from the darkness: the other mechs on Backfire’s kill-team. His words were hitting marks beyond his target.
“And what are you suggesting instead?” Backfire threw hostility into his voice, scorn, but he was asking. More than that, he was listening.
“Honor,” Drift said. “On both sides. You leave, back to your ships, and we don’t pursue or shoot you out of the sky. All you have to do is hand over the detonator.”
“And we should trust these Autobots?”
“You should trust me,” Drift said. “When. In all our time. Have I ever lied to you?” Deadlock had been many things: violent, irrational, hyperfocused. But he’d never been a liar. Lies were distractions. Better, always, a brutal truth than a lie, however self-serving.
A few seconds of silence that he knew were not silent at all, but filled with chatter on a private comm channel, before Backfire came back with, “You’re asking a lot.”
Drift inclined his head. “I am. But you have never turned back from challenges, Backfire.”
“You’re putting your life on the line for these Autobots,” Backfire said.
“No. I am putting my life on the line for those civilians. Mechs like you and me, who never had a chance to be something other than weapons in someone else’s hands.” The red optics glaring back at his shot off to one side. He remembered what it had been like, desperate for a chance. And watching his friends die…for nothing.
Drift leaned closer, close enough that his vents reached Backfire’s chassis. “Die for something,” he said, “If you must. But make it better than this. Make it worthy of where you came from, and what you wanted back then.” That was what he was doing, after all.
He clicked on a private comm channel. +I am not asking you to change sides. This is a hard path I would wish on no one. All I am asking is that you remember why we started fighting.+ He didn’t wait for a response, clicking the channel closed. It was an intimacy he had pushed and maybe didn’t deserve.
“Get the frag out,” Backfire snapped. His hand came out, shoving Drift’s spaulder, turning him around, pistol drawn, against Drift’s waist.
Drift let himself be marched out, feeling the muzzle of the gun bump against his spinal actuators with every step, Backfire’s hand hard on his shoulder, and then a hard shove, at the cave’s entrance. He turned, just in time to see Backfire’s glance, taking in, in an instant, the newly placed charges. While he’d been talking, Topspin and Twin Twist had been rigging the entrance. Drift had not lied. And over Drift’s shoulder, a glow on the horizon from the colony, hundreds of thousands of Cybertronians, who knew nothing of war or violence, who had been so trusting that they let a Decepticon assault team into their midst. Stupid. Foolish. Naive.
But.
Backfire gave one more hard shove at Drift, at his chassis now, as though he could push away the thoughts that the former Decepticon had been stirring up in his mind. Something crunched with the push, and Drift looked down just in time to see the bits of the detonator, broken into pieces, falling at his feet.
“If chances are we die anyway,” Backfire said, “might as well give this honor slag a try.”
[***]
“That’s it?” Springer couldn’t hide the disbelief. “They’re leaving?”
Drift nodded.
“What did you say to them?”
Drift shrugged. Either Springer would know, or he would never be able to figure it out. “About old times.”
“Well, it worked.” And even more disgruntled Topspin, watching the small Decepticon ship launch, like a falling star in reverse.
“I hope so,” Drift said, mostly to himself. He hoped that the words he had said, the seeds he had planted, would take root in Backfire’s mind. And maybe he wouldn’t walk away from the Decepticons, as Drift had, and maybe he wouldn’t rebel, but change could happen from the inside. If Lockdown hadn’t been sent after him….
That was a future he’d never be able to scry. There was only now, and the guiding light of the past, and the choices made shining into the future. The Autobots didn’t understand Theophany’s honor, and Drift sometimes doubted that he did, either, so it was not his place to tell a Decepticon what their honor was.
As long as there was honor, there was hope.