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"Are you sure you want to do this?" It's not that Drift worried about Wing, except, well, he did. And what Wing was proposing was...yeah, there was no way it could be a good thing.
"I need to see it for myself, Drift," Wing said. His voice sounded serene, but Drift could hear a little thread of strain through it. Wing gave a smile. "Besides, we might find something there."
There was nothing to be found in Crystal City except ruins. Drift knew: he'd seen them himself. And it had hurt him enough, all those lost chances, a wasted past colliding with a ruined future. He couldn't imagine--didn't want to--what Wing could find there. Still, he knew he couldn't talk Wing out of it. If anyone had a right to see it, awful as it was, Wing did. He surrendered with a nod. "I'm figuring our ship will be able to get through the blockade." One advantage of having stolen one of the Galactic Council's ships, at least. Drift knew bureaucracy and knew it would take some time for the registry to be noted as stolen. Some time. Hopefully enough to get them there, since Wing was bent on going.
"Thank you, Drift," Wing said, settling into the nav station of the tiny shuttle. "You've already gone through so much for me."
The words were so ridiculous that it took a long moment for them to seep in. Drift? Had gone through so much? for Wing? "I think you have that backwards," he said, finally, with a weak, almost sickly smile. Wing had died for him, Wing had kept him going in K'Gard's holding cell, giving him a reason to keep moving, keep fighting. Even weak, even damaged, Wing had brought meaning and purpose to Drift's life. He owed him everything.
"Let's call it mutual," Wing said, and the smile sat a little easier on his face plates this time, as though he'd needed the deflection of the thing between them, the strange bond Drift didn't want to name, to bolster himself against what he suspected he'd find in Crystal City.
Another nod--all Drift could trust himself to, as he moved to take the seat next to Wing. It felt like everything he'd ever dreamed of, when he'd let himself dream, when he'd let himself fantasize about things he knew could never be, just to reawaken the pain of loss. He and Wing, free from the war, on adventures, together. He'd thought there'd be no pain in that fantasy, it was an escape of pure joy and acceptance, that only hurt when he woke up and realized it wasn't real.
This hurt, but it was all the more real for that, all the more believable, somehow, as though he hadn't deserved a purified happiness like that, but something like this, with a shadow on the edges.
The trip to Theophany was shorter than Drift could have wanted, for that, even knowing there was a ticking clock before the ship was reported stolen and hostile. He wanted to extend this time as long as possible, he and Wing, together, working toward a common cause. And delaying what he knew could only hurt.
Wing sucked in a vent of air as the planet resolved itself on their screens. Even from space it seemed to radiate--somehow--some kind of emptiness, lifelessness, as though the bright light of all the life and energy in the entire planet had been dimmed.
"We don't have to," Drift said, because he wanted to say something, needed to try and lift that sudden shock from Wing, that had flattened the pinions of his nacelles.
"We do," Wing said, but his voice was quiet, this time, soft, "I do."
Drift understood. He'd felt the same way when he'd seen it, a need, somehow, to go and see the worst of it, to witness against a dying hope that it wasn't as bad as it looked.
It had been every bit as bad as it looked, and he thought that only the attack, only the chaos and drama, distracted him from collapsing under the weight of it all.
Wing would have no distractions, merely the dead city. Drift wouldn't leave him alone to face it.
Drift landed the ship, with a little sigh of relief as the ward-satellite accepted their code without hesitation. Part of him worried that maybe it was a trap, but, well, they could deal with that if it happened.
He piloted the small ship down, finding a little cleared area among the ruins, trying not to be too aware of Wing, craning his head at the screen, his face tight and unreadable as he saw the first, distant shots of the wreckage of his beautiful city. It was, Drift thought, the worst thing in the world to love someone and watch them in such pain and be so utterly, completely helpless to lift any of the darkness and weight of it.
Wing rose, as soon as the landing peds settled, moving as though in a trance, on some autopilot, toward the hatch. And Drift followed, the shadow of ghost, falling into step beside the jet as Wing walked, slowly, across the ruined pavements.
Only his optics were alive, it seemed, jumping and leaping from place to place--noticing a truncated skybridge here, the blasted hull of a gazebo there. A breeze stirred the whitish dust around them, slipping through crevices in their armor, whispering around the corners with the sound of hollowness, lifelessness. Nothing stirred beyond the dust, beyond the two pairs of feet making their slow way though the devastation.
Nothing had escaped. A building that looked intact from the front, they'd turned the corner and seen it was solely the facade that still stood, a bland, blank face, masking collapse. Fountains which had tinkled and sang with bright liquids--water, mercury--were silent and motionless now, choked with dust, whatever colorful liquid that had swum through their pipes evaporated even beyond memory.
It was like walking through a giant carcass, Drift thought, as though the city was one big being, not just an amalgamation of people, with its own heart and mind and flavor, even beyond the Titan that had powered it.
The Titan was gone, now, too, back to Cybertron, back to home and hope. Only he and Wing were here, in this place that life and hope had both fled.
Wing's footsteps slowed, eventually, and Drift could make out in a pile of rubble the broad rise of steps that led into the Council Hall. He'd sat...there, right there, now buried in a hillock of chunks of fallen arch, when he'd first arrived, arms folded, scowlng at Wing as they'd told him he was a prisoner.
He'd been a fool, not to see this place, and his place in it, for what was offered. He hadn't seen the city then, either, blinded by his hatreds, his ignorance. He'd never gotten to see the city, not as Wing did, and trying to make up for it in dreams didn't work.
Wing gave a long sigh, thin and slow, as though afraid if he sighed too deeply he would shatter apart. "I was so happy here," he said, and they seemed like the saddest words Drift had ever heard, so final, so over. He wanted to offer, to say Wing could be happy again, but it felt like a betrayal to this loss, and who was Drift to offer that anyway? He was no fair trade for a city teeming with life and joy and safety and knowledge. He was none of those things, and all the wishing in the world couldn't change that.
"Yes," he said, slowly. It was all he could think to say. He tried not to feel guilty, complicit in this city's destruction. There'd been a time when he had dreamed of it, when he was kept here, and he felt a withered shame for it now, for who he had been, for being the kind of mech who wanted to see others unhappy just because he couldn't bear to be happy himself.
Wing climbed the steps, with the same sort of loose-limbed, half-hypnotized tread as before, picking his way through the chunks of plascrete, the twisted metal and splinters of glass. Drift followed him, as aimless and lost as the dust that blew around his ankles, as Wing entered, pushing aside the heavy door, knocked half off its hinge, just enough to slip inside.
It was almost intact. Almost, except for the spidering of metal beams overhead where some object had collapsed the stained glass of the arched ceiling, littering the ground with pieces of colored glass. Before, back then, the light streaming through them had danced, like miracles, turning a mech merely walking through the tunnel of light they created into a spectacle of color and shape. Now they danced no longer, crusted and heat warped fragments of color like a shattered rainbow.
Wing fell--not a stumble, but a drop, his knees buckling under him, and Drift knew that it was the burden of grief that had done it, taken Wing's feet out from under him. Still, he rushed forward, dropping to one knee, hand touching the jet's arm. He couldn't help. He couldn't fix this. All he knew how to do was destroy, and fight, and kill.
Wing clutched at his hand, and turned, and suddenly they were clinging to each other, each on their knees, humbled and mourning, bereft. He felt Wing's face against his shoulder, the deceptively sturdy flightpanels trembling under his war-battered hands. "It's gone," Wing said, the words choking in his vocalizer. And he meant the dream of this place, the hope it had kept alive, like a fragile flame, all these years.
"You're not." It was a terrible thing to say, on one hand--everything you love is dead, but you. You outlived your purpose, your meaning, your joy. But he didn't mean it that way. He meant that Wing, at least, was alive, perhaps a small gem from the great treasure of Crystal City, but all the more valuable now.
Wing sobbed, his hands tight around Drift's shoulders. Drift...shut up. He had no words to fix this, he had nothing he could even pretend to say. It was all he could do not to burst into tears, incoherent apologies himself. But Wing didn't need Drift's regrets on top of his own grief. Wing had been strong for him for so long: he could be strong for Wing. He owed him...so much more than that much.
The sobs subsided, eventually, sorrow wearing itself out, wringing the jet's body. Wing hung, for a moment longer, in Drift's arms, and Drift could feel the pulse of the jet's spark fluttering against his armor, and he knew his own swelled to a throb in response, life calling to life, with the promise of better, or, at the least, the solemn vow of not being alone.
Wing lifted his head, his gold optics dimmed and dust streaked, and Drift wanted to kiss him but held off, because it didn't seem right, just yet, it didn't feel right, that kind of touch. "Thank you, Drift," Wing said.
"For what?" He was the cause of all of this, in all sorts of ways.
"For being here, with me. For understanding why I had to."
He wasn't sure he understood, not entirely. Wing had lost a city full of light and love: all Deadlock had left behind on Cybertron was the slums of Rodion. But he knew the need to honor and mourn, and to feel, fully, the depth of pain to make a loss sacred and whole. He had done it with Wing, night after night, with the Great Sword Dai Atlas had given him, the one that had returned Wing to life. He didn't know everything. He knew war, though, and pain and loss and sacrifice, and all he knew, all that mattered, was that loss never healed, it never went away, that life went on, whether you wanted it to or not, dragging its slow weight through dark days, that felt sometimes like a long, floundering struggle upward to the light.
And he kissed Wing then, a touch gentle and sacred, selfless and reverent, in hopes that he could, somehow, make the path a little easier and the way just a little brighter.