Work Text:
Title: Unwelcome Guest
Continuity: IDW
Rating: PG
Characters: Fulcrum/Tarn
Warnings: None
Prompt: Character stuck together.
Right. Right. This was bad. No, Fulcrum, stay calm. It could be worse. It could be way worse. …how exactly, he wasn’t quite sure. It was just one of those things you said to try to confuse your cortex into not trying to process the fact that you’d suddenly onlined in a dark, mildew smelly cave next to, well….Tarn.
Frag. Now he had to think it. Tarn.
As if on cue, the optics glowed in the purple mask, focusing on the ceiling for a long moment before moving, as though drawn by magnets, to where Fulcrum was sitting, knees to chest, on the hard stone floor. “Fulcrum,” Tarn said, his voice plummy and rich. “What a distinct…pleasure.”
“Uh.” Great, heroic start, Fulcrum. Way to beg for your life. “Hey, Tarn.” Yeah, that’s it. Just…act casual. Hey good buddy. How’s the ruthless killing thing going, these days?
Tarn sat up, optics narrowing. “’Hhhhey’.” He slightly overaspirated the ‘h’, as though this were a word in a foreign language that he was struggling to pronounce correctly, through dripping contempt.
“I mean, it’s good to see—no, wait, actually, it’s not good to see you. Like, ever. Except maybe from a distance…..out of earshot?” Fulcrum found himself cringing behind his hands.
Tarn folded his arms over his chassis, stirring the air with one indolent hand. “Do go on.”
“Go on?” Wait, what did those hostage manuals say back on B’Lahr 39? Oh right. Personalize the hostage. That would be you, Fulcrum. “Well, uh, sure. My name’s Fulcrum. I went to k-class training at Facility SR-752. I—“
“Believe me, Fulcrum, I know who you are.” A sinister laugh in the voice.
“Not really. I mean, sure you know the facts and everything, but a mech is more than just facts.”
Tarn cocked his head, as though faintly—faintly—amused. “Such as…?” The tone was sweet, like baiting a trap with honey.
“There’s all sorts of things. His personality…uh…his personality….” …frag. Fine time for the gift of gab to grow legs and bolt.
“Personality.” A chuckle this time.
“Well, sure!” Dance for your life, Fulcrum, dance! If a glib and silver tongue could buy time—and Tarn hadn’t started the killinating yet—talk till your mouthplates fall off. “I mean, like, you!”
Tarn gave a vaguely offended blink behind the impassive blankness of his mask.
“I mean, sure you’ve got that whole creepy zealous mask thing going, and it’s a fact about your kill total and all, but does anyone really know the real you?”
“I am, assure you, entirely real.”
“Not real like that,” Fulcrum said. “You’re plenty real.” Trust him. Real enough to lurk the fringes of his nightmares. “But I mean, you know, the inner nice mech who’s in there…somewhere…I hope.” …who doesn’t like to kill innocent bombs, he added silently. “Like, what about your hobbies? Surely you’ve got hobbies!” Everyone had hobbies. Everyone normal at any rate.
Oh. This could go bad…fast.
“I enjoy singing a spark to death,” Tarn said, slowly, leaning forward, his optics spiking with malevolence. “I enjoy coaxing that last thread of life from the frame, feeling it, hearing it…snap.” He whispered the word, optics feeding on the way Fulcrum jumped.
“Well, you know,” Fulcrum gave a nervous laugh. “You know what they say, a mech who enjoys his job never works a day in his life!” Oh Primus, Fulcrum, you are an idiot.
“Do they, now.” Tarn leaned closer, over Fulcrum, so that the smartbomb had to tip his head back to look at him. Wow. He really put some craft into his menacing looming, Fulcrum had to give him that much.
“They, uh, they did? I’m not sure about now, you know. Things might have changed. I’ve been out of the war for a while.”
“Indeed. For quite a long time, Fulcrum. One might wonder about you not doing your part.” Tarn pinged the fuselage kibble on Fulcrum’s shoulder, almost playfully.
“Hey, you know, I mean, maybe I could get a do-over. You know, a fresh start.” Right. Did you just volunteer to blow yourself up so that Tarn wouldn’t kill you? Fulcrum. What. Is. Sanity.
A strange sound and Fulcrum had dashed to the other side of the cave and shoved his head under a rock shelf before he realized that the sound wasn’t, you know, that sound. Tarn’s special deathy sound.
No. It was something way, way creepier.
Tarn was laughing.
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 Mask
Continuity: IDW
Character: Tarn
Rating: PG
Prompt 12: Deformed faces
There were rumors, of course, about Tarn’s face. They fluttered around him like ebony birds, distracting and mysterious. Some rumors said that he was beautiful behind it—that he’d hidden his beauty as a sacrifice to the Decepticon cause. Some said that he was hideous, his face matching his twisted, malign spark, and the mask was a mere material form of the ideology in which he wrapped his sadism.
Some said both: that Tarn had been beautiful, once, but became disfigured early in the war: this version often had variants—he’d lost his looks in defending Megatron, throwing himself in front of a plasma burst or light grenade; he’d disfigured himself as an act of expiation for an unworthy thought; he’d had the mask welded or bolted onto his face by Megatron himself, as one of Megatron’s tormenting, ironic lessons.
Tarn knew these rumors, all of them. He found them…amusing. The larger the mystique around him, the larger the aura, the better he was, the more powerful and effective. It brought the tempo of the spark in his victims up to a higher pitch, so that he could sense it more easily, as though elevating their volume to the point where he could hear.
But what was under the mask? Truth be told, Tarn himself didn’t remember. It had been so long, so fogged with memories, so spattered with death, that even he couldn’t recall what his face had looked at, or even, if there was a face under it at all.
Sometimes it felt like there wasn’t: that under the mask he was simply void, the beyond he called them to. And in those times, he felt a certain, dark, powerful supremacy.
Title: Cold Song
Continuity: IDW
Character: Tarn, nameless OC
Warnings: implied character death
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: 11: 'That cold ain’t the weather, that’s death approaching.
“Do you like the music?” Tarn asked, his voice silky with death. Their victim lolled on Kaon, his hands bunching pitifully under the bindings. Tarn leaned closer, optics seeking out the spiderweb-shattered lenses of the mech. Not quite a former Decepticon, but not worthy of the Decepticon name: he was in some liminal state that in Tarn’s mind, obviated his need for a name.
Oh, Kaon kept track; that was his job. But Tarn had other responsibilities, other predilections. To him, the name didn’t truly matter. The history didn’t truly matter. All that mattered, truly, was the high, jingling note of the spark’s energy, like a wild, whipping thread that he sought to tame, to weave back into the cold tapestry of the universe, an errant note he surrounded with arpeggios and triads, taming it to the melody of death.
“Or shall,” he purred, leaning closely enough to smell the char of circuits from Kaon’s handiwork, “I change the tune? Something slower, perhaps?”
A shuddering moan, another note Tarn could take like a rein to control him, wrap around the mech like a snare of his own making.
“Yes,” Tarn said, tilting his head from side to side in front of the mech’s face, giving a mellifluous dark chortle as the victim, the soon-to-be-dead feebly turned his head, trying to avoid Tarn’s gaze, in an effete, empty denial of reality. They always did, Tarn thought. They always did think, somehow, that it wouldn’t end this way, even when he began whispering to them, his voice cold and distant as space. “Yes,” Tarn said. “I think perhaps it’s time….”
Title: Addictive
Continuity: IDW
Characters: Vos, Tarn
Rating: PG
Warning: ref to canon addiction
Prompt 10: Monstrous transformations
It was the smell. Vos could always tell by the smell. Tarn didn’t try to keep it much of a secret, not from Vos. Possibly because there was no point. There were no secrets from Vos.
The smaller mech’s quick fingers coded the doorlock: Tarn locked away everyone but Vos in these indulgences. Vos always, always had the codes. It was an honor and a duty, a dark bond between them, that he held Tarn’s life in his hands.
Tarn lay on the floor, rolling sultry optics at Vos as the smaller mech entered, his EM field buzzing and sated. “Vos,” Tarn said, his voice rich and full of vibrato. One hand moved, as if to grab Vos, or stroke his shoulder. It didn’t matter: the hand shook, feebly, before falling to the ground.
“Tarn,” Vos acknowledged. The city names, at least, had stayed the same from Primal Vernacular to NeoCybex.
“Another,” Tarn said, and greed twisted his voice into a croak. “I must have another.”
Vos shook his head, leaning over the larger chassis, fingers nimble and familiar on the armor locks. He said nothing, the flat mask of his face blank of emotion as he cracked open the chassis. His optics twitched, involuntary response, from the acrid sting of the reek of a transformation cog, worked to the point of breakdown. It wasn’t mere metal, the transformation cog: it was responsive, alive. And each one that Tarn used was unique, redolent with another’s life. Sometimes Vos wondered if that were the addiction: savoring the different subtleties of another mech’s essence, or if it were the joy of using another’s part for his own pleasure.
It was more than simple transformation. Mechs who wrote it off as a simple addiction, a base, vulgar need, didn’t understand Tarn the way Vos did. There was always something subtle and deep in Tarn’s motives, which saved him from being a brute, an elegance of design, a sensuality of motive. Always.
Vos’s hands, burned from this procedure so many times that they’d lost the ability to sense heat, plucked the brittle cog out, feeling the semi-metal flake in his fingertips, and Tarn arched under the sudden absence, as though the lack were the only thing that hurt. And Vos wondered, not for the first time, if this too, cracked open, surrendered, was not also part of the addiction.