With The Brakes Off
Life, reflected Fireflight, was amazing. You could stare at what was around you for ages and pay attention to as much as you could, and yet you always seemed to miss something. Like the spire of an office building where, previously, there was only thin air. Or the fact that there was a Stunticon standing over you, laughing, but he wasn't trying to kill you, or even hurt you yet.
"Right through a hunk of concrete! Hah! Moron! I've never seen anything funnier in my whole life!" That insane sniggering, perpetual chatter, as if he couldn't stand a moment or two of peace...
"I didn't mean to," Fireflight defended lamely, and then wondered why he was justifying himself to someone whose idea of entertainment was crashing through brick walls at 260 mph. "It was an accident!"
"Accident?" The sniggering stopped, reduced to an odd grin on Wildrider's face. "Yeah, right...you wanted to."
"I didn't! I might have hurt someone..." Fireflight trailed off in horror. Oh, Primus, the building was only half-finished, so no workers inside, but what if one of the construction crew...?
"Who CARES?" The odd grin was still there. "Guys like you and me...why should we? Why should someone else's big, grand scheme get in our way of doin' things, huh?"
"You're nothing like me," Fireflight said quickly. "Nothing. You're a terrorist."
"That's cheap Autobot talk," the Stunticon snickered. "But if that's the way you want it..." He finished by kicking the fallen Aerialbot savagely in the flank. Fireflight gasped in pain, then stared through fogged optics as Wildrider drove away.
"Hey, flyboy! Kill any more squishies yet?"
Fireflight, starting up from the rock he'd been sitting on, stared in disbelief as Wildrider approached him from the woods on the right, nonchalant.
"I...I didn't kill anyone! Silverbolt said..."
"Oh yeah, him," Wildrider said dismissively. "Gestalt heads...pah! Think they're special, bunch of puffed-up..." His face darkened in a way Fireflight had never seen before, and the Aerialbot noticed a dent in the car's left side. And he was fairly certain that the only person who could put a dent in Wildrider was another Stunticon..."Ah, forget it. What're you doing out here, anyways? Spying? I'm supposed to blow your head off if you're spying. Might be fun." The mad grin was back again.
"I'm enjoying the scenery." Well, it was true. The canyon was beautiful just after rainfall, with fragile desert flowers in rare bloom. Beachcomber had dragged him out here the other day, and since then he'd come back twice to see the colours of the place before they retreated into dormancy with the heat.
"Just looking at it? Why? What's the point of just looking at something without having any effect on it?"
Fireflight noticed the Stunticon beginning to fidget. "I guess it's because, sometimes, you need to treasure these things, because they're remarkable."
"What, by staring at them? I'm telling you, there's no point! Where's the challenge? Where's the experience? It's too unreal for me. I wanna know if I can do something to change things, even if it's just to destroy...Slaggit!" To Fireflight's horror, Wildrider transformed and went bombing over the edge into the canyon. "Enough talk! Come get me, ya puny plane!"
With a shocked cry, Fireflight went over after him, watching his foe crash down the nearly 90-degree-inclined canyon wall. Fragile blossoms were torn to shreds under unheeding wheels, and suddenly, Fireflight felt an overwhelming fury consume his soul, a sudden lust to exhert his own will onto a force he had no control over, to dominate the indomitable...
He fired two missiles in front of Wildrider, forcing the Stunticon to stop in front of the resulting crater, and then bore down on his opponent, smashing his shoulder into Wildrider's chest just as the other transformed, sending them both into the still-smoking crater, the Aerialbot landing on top of the Stunticon. Not surprisingly, Wildrider was laughing like a kid on Christmas morning who's just unwrapped an atom bomb. Very surprisingly, at least to Fireflight, he was saying something coherent.
"You see, you see? That's a little bit what it's like! Isn't it great, to know that you can hurt back? Isn't it great to be able to wreck stuff just because you CAN?"
Fireflight had to argue with himself there for a moment. That rush had been surprisingly good, yes, but...but then he looked around himself, at the shredded reddish earth, and the fear barely visible behind Wildrider's eyes of a life and death that were not his own and the torn flowers around him were all he needed to see to say "No, no it isn't...it's not that great. There are better things."
The expression on Wildrider's face almost made Fireflight wish he hadn't said that; the terrorist was unable to disguise the flash of hurt across his face, a reminder to the Aerialbot that his enemy was also young, and not the maker or master of his own destiny. But then the sneer came back up like a drawbridge raised.
"Oh, slag you, then," hissed the Stunticon, then, almost as an afterthought, he grabbed the back of Fireflight's head and bit his lower lip in what he apparently thought was a kiss. It was inexpert and crackled with aura static that a more experienced Transformer would control better, a gesture of dominance, aggression, and despair rather than one of affection, but...the Aerialbot flailed, and when he was released, could only say, "Guh?"
The grin was back. "See what I mean? It's all about that, the only kind of power that you and me have got. The only way we can make it real is to make it hurt." As an afterthought, Wildrider elbowed Fireflight to the side of the head, knocking the Autobot off himself. He transformed and drove off into the night, heavy metal blazing from his speakers.
Fireflight sat up and touched his fingers to his lips. The static was gone, but the confusion was still there, left by Wildrider as an aurora follows solar flares.
Two days later, Silverbolt took Fireflight aside to have a word with him.
"I know you've been talking to Wildrider."
"Who told you...?"
"No one needed to. Let's just say I have incontrovertible evidence. Fireflight, stay away from him. That fixation you--okay, all of us--had on the Seeker triad was bad enough. He's insane, and he's dangerous."
"And sometimes he's right," Fireflight muttered, then clapped his hands over his mouth when he realized he'd said it out loud. Silverbolt's expression saddened.
"I need to show you something."
Blaster's cassettes had taken the footage while spyingthe day before. It was of the Decepticon Undersea Base's secondary hangar, and it showed the Stunticons returning from a mission of some sort...but something was wrong. Drag Strip and Breakdown were screaming at Wildrider, who was shouting back, except the other two were angry and he just seemed afraid. Dead End shook his head, said something, and left the bay. Breakdown snarled something final at Wildrider, then turned and followed Dead End. Drag Strip seemed to want to stay, and continued to berate his gestaltmate, finally moving forwards as if to strike him; he was stopped and apparently ordered out of the room by Motormaster, who had said and done nothing throughout the exchange. As soon as they were alone, the behemoth truck turned on the smaller, grey car, who shouted something up at him...and then Wildrider was picked up by the throat and slammed against the wall of the hangar, and Motormaster began to methodically-
"Turn it off! Please!"
Silverbolt did so, and looked with sympathy at his own gestaltmate. Fireflight was shaking, one hand covering his face, the other against the wall for support. "Fireflight, it's not your fault, he had to have known what would happen when Motormaster found out..."
"It is my fault. Mine! Oh, Primus, he's right, that is the only kind of power I have!" Silverbolt moved to stop the other jet, but Fireflight was already gone, out of the room, down the corridor, scattering indignant Minibots, out of the Arc, and far, far away, where the only things he could hurt were the clouds.
Fireflight found it unbearably ironic that the nearest landing spot available to him when he ran out of fuel was the canyon. The flowers had vanished now, cactus plants showing only merciless thorns, but there were still shrivelled petals here and there, and that missile crater. Perhaps this was the way things were meant to be, but even so, when Fireflight fell into a stasis so deep that he did not stir when Skydive and Air Raid came to take him home, he dreamed of a jet skimming low over the road, close to a grey car, and endless horizons of nothing that needed to be destroyed to be felt.
end