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Carcer was cold. Carcer was always cold.
But that wasn’t what bothered Elita. Nor was the consuming midnight silence that hung in the air like a sticky film.
The throne room was empty, save for her. The throne was empty, too. But the throne was never empty. Still, that was not what bothered her.
Elita was standing at one of the helm level, circular windows, arms crossed over her chassis, gazing out at the stars. Occasionally her optics would blur, the pin pricks of white fading into the dark abyss and her gaunt, translucent reflection would stare back at her.
Tired blue optics looked into her spark and then said nothing, lips growing gradually paler as they were pressed into an even thinner line. The stars moved behind her helm, a slow trek of ancient, far away celestial bodies.
The knowledge that many of these stars were already dead, the light she saw just a remnant of who they once were made their shimmering glow almost melancholic. They too, were just an echo of a past time.
Just…
…
She closed her optics, leaning forward to brace her frame against the wall and pressed her helm against the cool glass. It was a biting kiss. She willed herself to imagine. Imagine she was out there, in the stars. A weightless, worriless void.
A sense of acute wrongness had enveloped her a while ago, crawled under her armor and refused to leave. It was more than an infestation, it was corruption. The feeling wasn’t instantaneous like a flood, it was more like invisible smoke, slithering under the door and rising higher into the air. All the while choking anyone who stayed too long. But Elita had more than choked, she was dead husk, she had been for a very long time.
Something scuffed the ground.
Her optics opened slowly and she turned her helm towards the doorway. A gaping black maw started back at her. Hungry darkness swirled just beyond its threshold. There was nothing and no one she could see.
She considered. She was supposed to be sleeping. That was the case for many. That thought had never escaped her when she left her quarters and slipped into the throne room. Flinching at every creak and shift of the metal. Perhaps Obsidian was not as deep in recharge as first presumed and had come to confront her for her midnight activities.
But no shape molded from the darkness, humming forward on the whirling of propellers and she realized she had made the sound with the shifting of her own pedes. She felt silly, looked down, staring blankly at the perpetrator.
She scuffed her pede again, dragging it a short distance against the floor. The low grind of metal ripped through the air like a scream, cutting it like a knife.
What little tension had built, melted away, trickling back down into the recesses of her mind.
No one heard. No one was coming.
She exhaled, her hot breath condensing on the window pane with fog. It faded quickly, revealing the slow churning stars on the other side once more. But she wasn’t focusing on the little spots of white that glittered like gems in dirt. She was focusing on her face.
For once taking in the shallow visage before her.
Dark smudges under her optics, hidden by the shadows cast by her helm. Optics sunken and dull.
Her face contorted into a warped mask of pain when fire shot up her back strut and dispersed across her arms and legs, fading into a low sizzle that reached the tips of her digits and toe-pedes. The reason for her lack of rest.
She was momentarily reminded of before , before the throne and title of first. Of smoke filled air, the feeling of wind passing over her armor, and a single stray shot of friendly fire that changed her for the rest of her life cycle. The proceeding descent, the bliss of darkness when she hit the ground and rolled.
The medics had warned her there would be pain, even if they weren’t all there anymore.
She inhaled slowly through her olfactory vents, the must of rust roiled, and she closed her optics again. But not to feel the cold touch of glass against her forehead, instead it was to calm her raging spark and give the signal to let them transform. The creak of metal unused groaned into the silence. It felt like more than a scream, like a hollow bellow.
She wished they had taken the rest of them off of her. To not let them hang off of her back as useless extensions of herself. They were ragged, shards of wings that twitched and spasmed. Nerve ending long dead, seared shut by heat.
She hated the knowledge that she carried the shattered remains of her wing, like glorified baggage. But they had hoped she would have been able to fly again. After all, she had been their best.
She was granted no such luck. Their frames had been too bent, the delicate metal too warped and ragged and she was missing half of each.
They had been merciful to her failure. She assumed it was out of convenience, more than anything, nothing was done out of the kindness of someone’s spark, not in a place like this. What was the point of having parts of her that would get in the way that had no purpose? So they granted her a transformation to fold them into her frame. Allow them to become a part of her kibble. It hid her cock pit, made it look as if she was just any other grounder biformer.
The mecha who took away her flight wound up dead. Everyone knew why, but no one said a word.
“—she’s grief stricken” She had heard someone whisper when they thought she was out of audial range. When they thought they were safe.
She hated that word. Grief. A term given to hysterics.
But it was the most accurate description of the mourning she felt for her lost abilities. She still had urges, to leap into the sky, to climb to high points, she still lacked her fear of heights.
Once when she was still adjusting, she tried to fly, but was ripped back into reality when gravity threw her back down and held her there as the wind was knocked from her vents and she struggled to inhale. No one laughed, no one helped her either. There were a few pitying stares that quickly looked away when she glared at them.
Her urge to fly never left. It was a thirst that could never be satisfied. And she learned to live with that incompleteness. That denial of what should be natural to her, held dangling, out of her grasp.
Elita stepped away from the window, walking to the middle of the room and standing directly in front of the throne. It was elevated by a short flight of stares, sitting open and vacant and cold.
The memory of a shadow sitting on the throne instead of her. Chin resting on his fist. A smugness that would soon be replaced by mounting fear as she overpowered what he thought was superior strength. His goading words were but a distant memory, muffled by time and building emotions. But she remembered his relaxed smirk. Sitting back on the throne, words falling like babbling water from his mouth. Incoherent and unprocessed.
A fight like this one, had everything to gain and everything to lose. The story was always told by the victor, right? If she lost she would have been the deranged, washed up, crippled war veteran too caught up in the past to ever move on and become adjusted. And if she won.
Well.
She was the hero who vanquished a tyrant, on par with the beast below and within.
He had been afraid in his last moments, weaving into the titan’s spark chamber to escape her. A futile attempt. His words, still a babble of an incoherent mess in the memory file, pleading and attempting to reason. She would have none of it. He would not win. He could not win.
Her shots left cracks that bled radiation and light, a fatal flaw, a death sentence for all. His last attempt to save himself cost her another portion of her relics as a flier. Bating denta and scratching digits digging into the freshly closed wounds. Energon flowed, congealed and hot. The pain had been blinding, not not blinding as her rage.
He almost won. Almost. Being the key word.
Her wings, sharp and jagged from their breaks, cut into the spark chamber and were seared black and steaming.
The titan roared, a muted expression of anger from deep inside. The heat from the radiation burned holes into her wings, the delicate metal dripping down the framework. She pushed away, the break was larger than it had been before. Luckily, he would become the glue that resealed the break. From a failed attempt to charge her.
His voice shattered into static as his resolve broke down and he became a liquid, pooling into the cracks and onto the floor. She held him there, for as long as it took. Ignoring the pain in her hands, ignoring the burn that licked down her digits. She waited until he was less than a memory, less than the echo his scream created. She waited until he was nothing but gray metal and a bad smell.
No one warned her how horrendous the stench of burning mesh and splitting wires was until she stumbled out of the spark chamber room retching.
But there was nothing in her tanks to expel.
So she stood, doubled over, heaving nothing until she had the wherewithal to drag herself away.
Her wings, what remained, twitched. Another bout of burning pain shooting through them. Some nights were worse than others. She looked behind her, and glared hatefully at what was left of them. There was no honor if a scar left one incapacitated.
She turned on her heel and walked out of the throne room entering the grated hallway that let her see the guns and glowing lights below her pedes. An aquamarine shimmer rose from the grate and danced along the wall. The titan no longer felt as if it was floating through space, for a moment, felt like it was swaying on the ocean.
She headed for the tiny door at the end of the hallway. It almost blended in with the wall. It led to the space bridge platform.
Her pedes clattered against the woven metal and she peered over the railing unsurprised by the sight below. Nothing had changed. Because nothing ever does.
The door opened with a soft hiss as she pressed the small pad of buttons, hidden by a slitting panel and the door opened. The film of blue prevented rocks from passing into the ship while the door was open, as well as kept the air inside.
When she stepped out of the elevated doorway, her pede caught the door, in a rare moment of clumsiness, and she stumbled forward. But she righted herself.
The sudden flash of cold felt like a punch to the chest. The suddenness of the cold was so great that the air from her vents momentarily was sucked out. But the shift in pressure was acknowledged by her frame and she was able to vent properly in a few kliks.
Artificial gravity was the only thing keeping her against the platform. Otherwise she would just float away. The space bridge stood, a giant ring of metal at the end of the platform, an imposing inanimate figure that seemed to watch her with great judgment.
The door closed behind her, silently, when she absently pressed the outer panel’s buttons in and she walked into the center of the platform, staring up and out into the abyss of space without the obstruction of four walls to block her view.
All sound had stopped. And she was actually aware of her inner workings. The thumb of her spark in her chassis, the rumble of her engine rattling inside of her, and the whir of machinery. All of it, internal.
There was something horrifically beautiful about the endless expanse of void. Nothing but far away stars and the gray marble of cybertron lurking underneath with his two moons to keep him company.
She closed her optics, opened her arms to the universe and tilted her helm back. Breathing in the cold, nothingness of space. The shattered remains of her wings expanded as well and she imagined the feeling of air against her armor.
Artificial gravity kept her grounded but muted steps let her imagine. Even if just for a second, she was whole again.
But the illusion faded away. Morphing into a swatch of nothing and darkness, more empty and vast than even space itself. She opened her optics, the ghost of sensation still slipping past her armor, but fading. She refolded. Her arms falling limp to her sides, wings dropping. Optics looking down.
She walked to the edge. Pedes still muted against the metal and stared out at Cybertron below.
Much of the world was far. Like rivers of black were spreading across its surface. Dark ravines had been cut, perhaps already there, perhaps caused by war, the grief their creator had felt as his creations fought and died.
Only a small patch lip up, a spot of light against the black. Iacon, their newly revamped city. It looked so tiny from her perch above. So insignificant. So much like insects to be crushed under her unforgiving pede.
They passed Luna-1, eclipsing Cybertron entirely, as if forcing Elita to see the moon, and only the moon. The surface was just as segmented as Cybertron. But the moon was paler, smaller, an air of delicacy seemed to surround it, and yet it was covered from top to bottom in craters. Deep gashes ripped carelessly into the mesh. She wondered if a thing like that could bleed. Did Luna-1 bleed when she was cut and beaten?
If she still had her wings she could fly down and walk the surface without so much as a spark knowing her whereabouts. She still mourned that loss of freedom. Her digits still burned with the knowledge it had been ripped away from her.
Elita huffed, walking away from the edge and back to the door.
It opened easily.
She slipped inside, the minimal warmth inside felt almost burning as she made her path back to her quarter, ignoring the throne room entirely.
Her quarters were dark and empty save for a desk and a berth and a curious crate under her berth. She never had many possessions. She sat down on her berth, wings still out and flicking on her back plates and reached down into the crate below.
The liquid inside the bottle was a toxic green and seemed to glow. The light transferred onto the delicate, scarred plating of her servos and lit up every elevated section and darkened every crack. It cast onto the shimmering walls and danced with the uneven movements of her frame.
She unsealed the bottle. It cracked loudly, but she no longer feared discovering now she was alone. She peered at the fluid inside of the tapered end of the bottle. She contemplated taking a cube from the crate as well. But she decided against it. What would be the point?
Her servos shifted the drink into a circle and the motions caused the liquid to slosh around. Drops of green rose from the lip and splattered onto her thumb and digits. She blinked once, twice. The sent finally hitting her olfactory.
A strong acrid smell that burned even entering her vents.
With one last glance at the drink, regarding it like she was holding a vile of poison, she sighed heavily, tilted back her helm.
And drank.