Work Text:
He spends months strapped into a variable voltage harness, smoldering away. Tyrest doesn't stoop to operating the device himself, too caught up in ranting about his personal, insane perversion of how justice works, and Star Saber never pushes it quite far enough to outright fry him, leaving Getaway unpleasantly short on options once he's taken stock of what supplies he has on hand. They don't leave him isolated long enough for it to start to affect his processor, but on the other hand, it's not often that he finds himself in a situation he can't escape from, and that. That eats at him like acid. He'd rather be tossed in the smelter outright than not be able to follow through on the one instinct that's kept him alive since Corcapsia.
But what's a couple months to someone born for a war that could last millions of years? He's been through worse. Once he's out (finally, finally) there's no reliable way to contact Prowl from the Lost Light, but Diplomatic Corps agents can operate autonomously for as long as it takes; shadowing Tyrest had been the work of years, with only Skids for company and minimal direction from specops command.
He has a ship full of resources, sentient and non-sentient alike, a new escape kit or three tucked away in various places around his chassis, two hundred basic escape routes plus variations dependent on any number of obstacles or confounding factors he can calculate (he's no Prowl, but this is his one true calling), his wits, his guile, his pretty maskplate, his charm -
And a very particular gun that no one thinks to ask about more than once, if they even think to ask at all.
Well-equipped for anything that comes his way.
-
His new mission falls under the same category as the old - as every mission that the Diplomatic Corps undertakes, really. The Autobots need to find the Knights to salvage what's left of their race, before all that's left is slag and ruin picked over by Decepticon scavengers, like so many of the worlds where old campaigns played out. Anything in the service of the cause; anything to prevent the worst possible alternative. Ethical qualms and phrases like "dubious morality" are something Getaway can understand in the abstract, but his convictions - his dedication to the cause - are stronger than that. He does what's necessary. It's a philosophy he likes to think he shares with Prowl.
From the moment he lays eyes on the enormous, red and yellow embarrassment in the shuttle hanger, he knows Rodimus needs to be dealt with. With a leader like this, who needs enemies? Clearly the Lost Light has somewhere to go, something significant to accomplish, but this mission isn't going to move forward while they're stuck muddling through the swamp-like slag of Rodimus's festering ego.
It'll take some doing. Rodimus is one of those mechs, the kind of hot-headed, reckless, self-absorbed maverick that Prowl would rail against, and that Autobots as a group tend to be...susceptible to. Optimus Prime cultivated that kind of culture without thinking of the consequences, for the sake of boosting morale, and look at where it's got them. Despite the fact that Rodimus's idiocy has led to very public, casualty-heavy screw ups, the crew still goes along with him for lack of any better direction. Worse still, there's a core group of more-than-nominally loyal bots who don't prove receptive to intimations of a regime change when Getaway starts testing the waters. Luckily, from what Getaway gathers in his preliminary sweep, none of them are particularly popular, or even likable in general; they're just a ragtag squad of glitched processors and troublemakers who somehow dominate the conversation when the engex starts flowing.
This'll take subtlety. The nice thing about acknowledging and then sidestepping standard-issue Autobot morality with a shrug is that it doesn't matter to Getaway who he needs to lie to or manipulate or condemn to the scrap heap along the way. Even before he took himself out of the Corps, Skids had too much of a conscience to him, and look at him now. The high rate of disturbing, dangerous, sometimes nonsensical, yet potentially world-ending threats that the Lost Light stumbles across time and again mean that Getaway has to move cautiously, but he's got time.
And he's got a gun.
-
He recruits Atomizer well before the mission's urgency trebles when the sudden, sickening consequences of the trial hit them. Megatron's ascendancy to the Lost Light captain's chair flips Getaway's game board the way Prowl would flip a table. Atomizer's useful, an assassin with a good eye and his own brand of slipperiness that Getaway marks down as an asset - not the best actor, maybe, but good enough to fool Rodimus (as if that's hard). The mech's not afraid to get his hands dirty. But Getaway reassesses the situation once it's clear that Optimus Prime has, as per usual, royally wrecked the hardwon gains of Special Ops, and Atomizer's not enough. He'd've done fine when the only mechs Getaway needed to maneuver around were by and large incompetent at anything but surviving impossible odds and coming out the other side twice as obnoxious as when they set out; Megatron's a different bucket of scrap entirely.
So Getaway starts from the bottom. It's not going to be enough to gently nudge Rodimus out of power, which would have been as simple as binary, as easy as picking a lock. Whirl's a nice, blunt object to swing at Megatron and keep the command team's eyes focused on the most superficial layer of unrest in the wake of the Slagmaker's arrival, and once Getaway's set him off, the helicoptor's fairly self-sufficient when it comes to making a fool of himself. Meanwhile, he and Atomizer start gauging just what it'll take to stage a proper coup.
What Getaway needs is groundswell. There's no point to mutiny if you can't make it stick, and replacing one useless, barely-liked command team with a small group of mutineers won't clinch a lasting transition. The majority of the crew has to think that it was their own idea.
And for the most part, it is. Getaway almost laughs out loud in the middle of Swerve's when he realizes that Megatron has done half of their work for them just by walking around, venting, living, without having suffered any consequences for his actions. Now Getaway's starting to see why the war felt like it would never end, why Prowl had to create the Diplomatic Corps in the first place. Whatever's glitched in Optimus Prime's processor, it's clearly been undermining the Autobot cause for longer than Getaway's been alive. Crew-wide dissatisfaction is at an all time high, the discontent growing with each passing cycle as it becomes clear that no, high command isn't going to call the Lost Light back to Cybertron and renege on its tortuously stupid decision to let Megatron off the hook. Not all of them have as strong of beliefs as Getaway does, but those few who are caught on the tipping point of going along with status quo prove persuadable. All it takes for them to see reason is a quiet nudge in the right direction.
As the group of freaks and glitches coalesces around Rodimus and Megatron in some kind of bizarre fan club, Getaway sows more dissension where it really counts - among everyone else on board. It's almost sad, how easy it is. Except not. He'd feel sorrier about how far Skids has strayed, and the fact that it's becoming increasingly necessary to remove him along with the rest of the obstacles between the Lost Light and the quest for the Knights, but Getaway finds it easier to rationalize that away than he would have thought. Skids doesn't think of him as a friend, or even a partner, anymore, so Getaway offers him one last bomp of solidarity before wiping away the memories of that one last attempt to pull Skids back onto his side. Now he's just somebody that he used to know, and honestly? Good riddance.
(If he says that often enough, it becomes true. Lots of practice with that one.)
All the pieces are coming together perfectly; when Getaway can't make a legal move on the board, he cheats with ruthless abandon, and nudges the memory out of whoever's just been outmaneuvered. It's a lucky thing he knows about the Ultra Magnus armor, or he'd've had real trouble shooting the right processor every time Ambus gets suspicious. Rodimus is as oblivious as ever, and Megatron is busy putting on a show for the few members of the crew who actually buy into his scrap. If Getaway had less self-control, he would gag every time one of them walked into the room. They don't even notice that he's primed the pump for mutiny; most of the crew's just waiting on his word once he and Atomizer finish working them over.
Just in case, though, he needs another gambit running concurrent with the real plan. You can never have too many irons in the fire. If it's possible to pry Megatron out of his entourage's good graces and avoid outright disposing of Skids and the few other useful, if processor-bogglingly gullible, mechs that have been problematic, Getaway's perfectly willing to try another angle.
Atomizer's the closest approximation to a partner he has in masterminding this conspiracy, and Whirl's - well, Whirl's an ex-Wrecker, enough said. Neither've got the right temperament or reputation for what Getaway has in mind. He just needs a patsy.
-
Calling Tailgate an easy mark would be...a massive understatement. Like. For Primus's sake, Getaway hardly has to try.
He does, though. Taking only half measures, even on a gambit that's technically superfluous, would be sloppy work. Tailgate's riddled with soft spots, with the kind of aching desperation for validation that Getaway zeroes in on the moment he lays eyes on him, and once Getaway makes a move, he gives it his all.
On one level, there's something honestly entertaining about the way the not-a-Decepticon (pfft) Cyclonus gets his ancient old wires in a twist about it all; as Getaway wears a crooked smile behind his maskplate, coaxing Tailgate ever closer, either some bizarre warrior stoicism or something wired odd in Cyclonus's processor keeps him from opening his mouth to interfere, which suits Getaway just fine. Any other mech would have gotten over the emotional constipation and tried to make a move by now, but whatever. He turns the smile into an inviting crinkle of the eyes just for Tailgate, the kind of sincerely sweet look that mechs with masks like them use, and drinks down Tailgate's flustered giggles while red-tinted eyes do their best to glare holes in his back.
On another level, though, an unfortunate twinge starts to pinch at Getaway's cold spark when he contemplates how best to maneuver Tailgate onto the wrong end of Megatron's fists. It's the same kind of niggling, twitching vulnerability he has to pinch off at the code level whenever he plans how to circumvent Skids's ability to learn his way out of a tight spot in the coming coup, but even when he thinks he's got it smoothed out, Getaway still finds himself letting more slip out than he should be. Honesty is highly overrated, except when it's useful, and as long as Getaway shares just barely enough of himself to build a false sense of companionship with Tailgate - enough to get Tailgate to reveal more weak spots where Getaway can press and prod and push - it won't matter what he exposes about himself, because nothing in his personal life is a weakness.
Regret's a strong word for it, but he still catches his smile going halfway wistful in the periods of time where he lets Tailgate's overcompensating, insecure chatter wash over him. As long as he doesn't let the regret matter, it's fine. He steps right into Tailgate's personal space and then softens the abruptness of the invasion with forward, jovial friendliness until it turns into intimacy. It's doesn't matter that the intimacy's artificial, as long as Tailgate thinks Getaway's openness is genuine. It takes a deft hand to keep undercutting Tailgate's self-esteem without the poison beneath the compliments getting too obvious, but Getaway's always been charismatic.
"I don't see why Cyclonus would ever call you weak, when I think you've accomplished so much. You even managed to save my life!" he sighs, shaking his head with the air of someone baffled by the blindness of others. "I really do feel like I owe you so much more than I can say. Ha. Cyclonus probably just thinks that because you did it with smarts instead of stabbing the computer with a giant sword, it's somehow less heroic-"
"Oh, Scout, don't worry. You know I'm here if you need anything," he says, repressing the urge to laugh again the next time Cyclonus stalks out of the room like a wordless, one-mech thundercloud, and Tailgate's shoulders slump. Another soft spot, another hollow for Getaway to fill with soft, backhanded compliments, like an open wound packed with low-quality steel wool. "C'mon, we can hang out back at my hab-suite, if he's going to be in a mood - you shouldn't have to put up with that all the time -"
"I wish I could be as confident as you, with a frame like that," he starts over at table at Mirage's place, skimming his hand over Tailgate's to lace the servos together, layering more compliments over the initial, subtle jab. And later, "No, no no, just one more drink? Please? You're so much fun when we're out like this-"
He has to hold Tailgate's hand and walk him through it, towards the end, but by then the groundwork's already been laid out, and he just has to apply a little more pressure. Getaway's whittled away at the mech's self-image inch by inch, closing him off into a mindset where it's the two of them against a ship full of people who barely acknowledge Tailgate's value, if they think about him at all. Getaway hasn't stripped someone this raw and groomed them in - ages. Isolation does things to a mech, even if the isolation is all in his head, carefully constructed with words and off-handed touches and just enough sour-sweet compliments to pull it all together.
("There are people on this ship I love," he says, with the same shy duck of the head he's been using all night to feign being overwhelmed with emotion. "I'm just as terrified as you!" It might be overplaying his hand a little, but they're so close - even if gaining a legitimate reason for the mechs in Security to finally nail Megatron to the wall without high command throwing a fit means throwing Tailgate into the smelter, the ends will justify the means. They always do. "If you really don't feel brave enough to do this...we'll forget this whole conversation." All it would take is a nudge. Chain enough nudges together, one after another, and here they find themselves at a precipice, and all it should take is one nudge more to elbow Tailgate over the cliff -)
He scoops Tailgate's servos up one last time, the very picture of someone in an old vid reluctant to see his conjunx off into danger, and can't quite look the mech in the eye as he drops a kiss on the knuckles. "Oh, Tailgate. I just know you’re going to make me so happy," he says, allowing himself a single moment of genuine remorse, before squashing that not-quite-regret for the very last time. He's had plenty of practice. There's no room for second thoughts in his line of work.
-
For fuck's sake, Whirl. Really?
-
They put a trembler cage around his spark. Electricity again, but nothing he hasn't endured before. Getaway feels sorrier for Tailgate by a narrow margin. He winds up comatose and gets a processor-full of mnemosurgical needles while he's under, in the worst case of situational irony Getaway has seen in a while.
But then they take his hands, and his feet, and his t-cog, and by the time they get around to his mouthplate, Getaway's already far past the point of reassuring himself that the real trap - not clumsy, sweet, inexperienced Tailgate, but an entire ship full of disaffected mechs who know what to do in the event Getaway's cover is blown - has been sprung already. No matter how smart Rodimus and Magnus and the Slagmaker are about thoroughly ensuring Getaway can't get away, it won't matter. In fact, he almost wants to applaud them! They're finally thinking logically about how to deal with a threat, instead of getting sidetracked by the kind of Autobot sentimentality and egotism and 'ethical qualms' about dismemberment that Getaway has taken advantage of in his escapes thousands of times before. And hey, they carve out his vocalizer so he can't smoothtalk anyone into freeing him, when he has already won that round a hundred times over, two hundred times over.
Indignity? Violation? He'd've laughed his own vocalizer out and saved them the trouble if they hadn't been in such a rush to lock him down. But laughing would give the game away. With immense effort, he marshals what's left of his face into an agony-wracked grimace, and allows Megatron's fanbots to walk away thinking they've won, as he settles in to wait.
He's changed his mind, though. He has multiple options for who to sic on them, but there was one group he discarded just because the logistics of luring Megatron and the (ugh) Rod Squad out and stranding them where the Decepticon Justice Division could find them would require some tightly plotted connections and favor finagling. Worse, it would do no good for Getaway to convince the entire crew to join him in mutiny, only to lose their support by openly making use of some of the most horrific torturers in the entire war as a means to an end. Observing Prowl's struggle to have his less-than-virtuous strategies be accepted by the oh-so-scrupulous, noble-minded high command over the years taught Getaway many things, not the least of which is that it's important to keep up at least the appearance of having the moral high ground.
The moral high ground is, as always, overrated, so, uh, to hell with that. It may not be Getaway personally who does the deed, but that's never been a priority for this mission. Justice will be served, the obstacles between the Lost Light and her mission will be removed, and if he has to slather on the charm and nudge a few mechs to keep them from noticing the fact that Megatron's about to be handed some incredibly fitting justice on a platter of the finest irony? Well.
He'll make it work.