Title: Mania's Embrace
Continuity: G1 cartoon
Characters: Long Haul, Mixmaster, Scavenger
Rating: R
Genre: Romance
Warnings: Nonconsensual use of mind-altering drugs. Dubcon. Slash.
Word Count: +4,900
Summary: Mixmaster decides to make Long Haul see things his way.
"For the last time, I can't get you a shipment of aqueous aqua regia," Long Haul sighed. He glared at Mixmaster levelly. He had been over this before, and he would be over this again. Mixmaster might be a genius, which he made immensely clear to all around him with unthinking arrogance. A star could sooner keep itself from shining than the chemist could dull his brilliance. It was just that, somewhere in the labyrinthine halls of theory, Mixmaster completely lost contact with reality, thereby making himself the bane of those so firmly and unfortunately bound to the mundane as Long Haul.
"But you can get me nitric acid and hydrochloric acid?" asked Mixmaster. The chemist's head was tilted to one side, and he looked at the supply officer with a keenly questioning gaze, as if he suspected Long Haul was pulling some conjuror's trick here.
"Yeah," Long Haul said. He winced and waited, knowing fully well what would happen. One, two, three...
Mixmaster insisted, "But aqua regia is just the combined form of nitric and hydrochloric acid! Aqua regia is infinitely more useful than either of them, and you're telling me we don't have any in store? Why..."
Long Haul zoned out as Mixmaster went into his rant and waited patiently for the whirlwind to lose energy. Then he reminded his teammate, "Aqua regia's unsafe to transport."
Mixmaster stared blankly for a moment before chirping, "So?"
Long Haul said, "So I can't transport it."
Mixmaster sing-songed, "But isn't that your job? To haul the unhaulable to load, to brave the, uh, perilous aisles of the supply room-"
Having had enough of that nonsense, Long Haul cut him off with, "Why can't you just use nitric and hydrochloric acid?"
The chemist looked mortified at the suggestion, glanced away, shook his head, and explained, "Why, Long Haul, the result of mixing those is dangerous! Don't jest like that."
Long Haul slapped down the datapad on a nearby table. The screen flickered for a moment from the shock, temporarily erasing the requisition form. He demanded, "Y'know what? Slag this. You go back to that lab of yours, and you come up with a list of ingredients that won't get me killed."
"I'll tell Scrapper," Mixmaster said petulantly, looking wounded.
"Ya go 'head and tell him. See if I care," Long Haul growled. What was Scrapper going to do, demote him to Constructicon go-for? Wait...
Mixmaster's mouth worked in silence for a moment, and then he smiled thinly, filling Long Haul with dread. The previous quarrel seemingly forgotten, the chemist asserted, "Well then, I'll just have to work on a different project. Come along."
"I've got stuff ta get done," the supply officer excused himself, feeling terribly uneasy.
The chemist grabbed his recalcitrant teammate by the elbow and hissed, "If you're not getting me my supplies, you can at least do this."
Long Haul was stronger. He could have broken away. He thought about it. Then, he remembered that just about anything, including having nails driven under his fingertip armour, was preferable to hauling, that inglorious but necessary work to which he would be returning. So Long Haul went along, knowing full well that he would regret his choice. It was a bit like that last energon cube, the one that seemed like such a good idea at the time and left him slagged out for a day afterwards.
In any case, Long Haul was utterly unsurprised that once he was over in Mixmaster's section of the laboratory, which was a fantastic study in organised chaos, the chemist offered him a drink. He did not even touch it. Either Mixmaster wanted something out of him and was trying to bribe Long Haul with a drink - and he would be divided by zero before he would risk his life over some stupid chemicals - or that cube was full of some bizarre experimental brew.
"If I didn't know better, I'd say you were afraid," observed Mixmaster, a hand to his chin and a cruelly pleased light in his optics.
"Oh no, you're not going to goad me into this," Long Haul snarled, hands tensing. He was not going to let Mixmaster bait him into a stupid move, although he already knew that he probably would allow Mixmaster to do exactly that. Long Haul was predictable, and Mixmaster delighted in exploiting that weakness to make the supply officer's life exceedingly unpredictable.
"I wouldn't dream of it," Mixmaster sniffed and tilted his head up, a condescending glint in his optics. "You're obviously too scared to even take a little sip, so any effort in that direction would be a wasted motion on my part."
Long Haul cursed, knowing that he could not let that stand. He seized the cube, downed it in one go, and tossed the empty box at his devious teammate.
Mock-innocent, Mixmaster chided, "Didn't do anything for your mood, I see."
Long Haul huffed, "So what now? Am I going to have crystals poking out of my fuel tank?"
"No-no-no!" the chemist vehemently denied but added slyly, "That could be arranged, but no. Sit down." He gestured to a nearby stool.
The supply officer did as instructed, watching the chemist closely for any indication of what was going to happen to him.
Mixmaster bustled around, seemingly intent on clearing out some space but going about it in a rather roundabout fashion. He inquired idly, "You remember that one chememo sculptor? Such a delightful creature."
"Mixmaster, the gal tried to kill you," Long Haul noted tiredly. 'Chememo sculptors' were artists who used drugs to alter their victim's alter emotions to produce what could somewhat dubiously be called artwork, the way that Slog's battle sculptures or Scrapper's incorporation of live robots into his structures were art. The drugged artwork generally died in the end of chemical overdose. Long Haul thought chememos were plain weird, but being weird did not make them any less deadly.
The chemist chuckled and duly filed a dish of colloids next to a box of rocks - but that suddenly made sense to Long Haul. They were both mixtures, after all. Mixmaster clucked, "As I said, a delightful creature. As one chemist to another, she showed me a little something."
Long Haul snorted. What Mixmaster probably meant was that he had dumped her in a vat of acid and filled her trailer with truth serum. Decepticons clung to their valuables tightly, be they material, information, or otherwise.
"So we got to chatting about mood disorders. Her interest is professional, mine personal," Mixmaster said and then paused for a moment, looking over his shoulder speculatively.
"Yeah," Long Haul muttered, instantly understanding what his teammate meant and not particularly cheered by Mixmaster's inquisitive gaze.
"Do you have any idea how many variants on mania she can synthesise? No? Me either. She wouldn't say," Mixmaster giggled. Unceremoniously, he plopped himself down on Long Haul's lap.
"Hey!" the supply officer protested. Mixmaster weighed like the cement that he probably contained.
"Now, now, if you won't get me my aqua regia, you can at least console me," Mixmaster scolded. The chemist's haughty tone suggested that Long Haul ought to be honoured to have a big green and purple lump of metal sitting on him.
Perhaps ungraciously and definitely roughly, Long Haul shoved his teammate away. He was, he reflected with a bit of disgust, ridiculously easy to play. Call on his courage or give him a bit of attention, and he was sold. Well, Long Haul vowed to himself, not today. He declared firmly, "I'm not playing your game."
Mixmaster squawked as he was displaced from his perch. His heavy mixer overbalanced him, and he clattered to the floor. Rather than right himself, he grabbed Long Haul by the foot and yanked his teammate down with him.
"Blast it all! You're not making me any more willing," Long Haul snapped. He kicked aside the stool, hoping to get up before Mixmaster could get a better grip on him.
"Stop protesting," the chemist insisted and snaked his arms around Long Haul's waist. "You're going to enjoy this."
"Right, I'll get all worked up, and you'll conk out. Thrilling," Long Haul grumbled and tilted his head to look at the ceiling, derision glinting in his optic band.
Mixmaster poked his teammate in the chest and sighed happily, "That kind of biting comeback would usually take you minutes! Now, a vivincorporator's at a bash, and he meets a fellow vivincorporator."
Long Haul was about to protest, but he was struck and carried away by a bullet-train of thought. Before he even knew what he was saying, he said, "He tracks down the other and welds him alive in the sewer he's been designing, because a vivincorporator at a bash isn't doing anything with his life."
"Exactly!" Mixmaster agreed and nodded enthusiastically, clutching Long Haul tighter.
Thoughts skittered through Long Haul's mind too quickly to follow, but he was quite convinced that out of all of it, he had figured out the perfect solution to the problem that his inglorious role posed. Box-delivery battles over the holonet? It was sheer brilliance! Some part of him protested these tachyonic thoughts, leaping and colliding and dividing. This was not his way, although he felt it was familiar. Someone else thought with this fast-forward, disjointed tempo. The answer was right in front of his face, of course. With sudden clarity, Long Haul demanded, "Mixmaster, what was in that drink?"
The chemist smiled beatifically, and prompted, "What did I tell you?"
"Uhn. You were on about that chememo sculptor and..." Long Haul started and then trailed off. "You didn't." Skitter-spark-thought. "You did." Mixmaster had drugged Long Haul up to feel as manic as Mixmaster did, that devious son of a steamroller.
Triumph glinting in his optics, Mixmaster touched a hand to Long Haul's faceplate and kissed the featureless metal. He purred, "Get in the game, Long Haul. As Bonecrusher would say, you just missed the first quarter."
Long Haul turned his head away more slowly than he would have liked. Curling up with Mixmaster after the chemist had made ridiculous supply demands and then drugged his energon was just as stupid drinking that cube had been. Still, the touch and kiss resonated more than they should, even as he rolled away from Mixmaster. Long Haul knew that he was not this tactile. He usually took so long to respond to caressing that his partner would get bored of the whole deal.
"World's a little brighter, isn't it?" Mixmaster noted cheerily, unperturbed by his partner's recalcitrance. He also shifted position, swiftly swinging one of his legs over Long Haul's to prevent an easy escape.
"Floor's still uneven," Long Haul grunted, not looking at Mixmaster. There would be an insufferable smirk on Mixmaster's face, Long Haul knew. As unexpectedly good as this felt, he was not ready to concede defeat, so he instead considered his escape options. If he could break off a leg of the stool and shove it down Mixmaster's drum, maybe the processing of the new material would distract the chemist long enough to keep him busy. Long Haul's optics flickered a blink as he remembered that he could simply shove his teammate away just as easily. There was no need for such a convoluted idea, and yet complexity was what came to him as his first thoughts now. While he could not see Mixmaster, Long Haul could still hear him humming thoughtfully. As he made a grab for the stool, the chemist pounced, taking the supply officer's broader hands in his own. Long Haul chuckled, long and low. Hook and Scrapper might go for hand-rubs, but he just was not particularly sensitive there. Grateful for small victories, he shook his head and said, quicker than he meant to, "That ain't gonna work..."
Mixmaster went ahead anyway, and at Long Haul's stifled gasp, snickered wickedly. Self-satisfaction laced his voice as he replied, "Won't it?"
The supply officer rolled back over to face his amatory foe, deciding that compliance did not equal defeat. Acquiescence just called for a different set of tactics. He sighed and nuzzled Mixmaster's chest, pondering Mixmaster's taste sensitivity and how to exploit such weaknesses. Quite charitably, he felt, Long Haul warned, "Dun think I've given up here."
Mixmaster giggled and licked at Long Haul's helmet crest. After a split-second of thought, he noted, "You've been on high-titanium supplements lately." Then, mood mercurial as ever, he shrugged, drawing a hand down Long Haul's cabin window, and confided conspiratorially, "I knew you'd see things my way."
The supply officer shifted his weight. He could not force Mixmaster onto his back due to his mixing drum, but he could at least assume a more dominant position. Before Mixmaster could protest or change the balance of power, Long Haul reached an arm back and traced a hand along the edge of the funnel of chemist's mixing drum. An intelligent, skilled technician practically throwing himself at Long Haul? Yeah, that was more like it. Fairly purring, he corrected, "Nah. You just finally woke up and saw what you've been missing."
Long Haul checked his internal chronometer again. Surely, they had gone longer than fifteen minutes, but the clock insisted. Irritated by how slowly the seconds passed, he keyed up milliseconds and, still unsatisfied, microseconds.
While unsatisfied with his chronometer, Long Haul was surprisingly pleased with his time, however brief, with Mixmaster. His altered mental state had made an experience that normally would have left him let down, disappointed that there was not a proper conclusion or even anything more than a teasing prologue, into something quite mind blowing. Softly, a damage alert chimed, demanding that he stop taxing his processors so. Long Haul put it out of mind, unperturbed.
He was still a little disappointed but by a different matter. Mixmaster was out like a light, slipped off into recharge mode. The chemist never could take it, really. While satiated for the moment, Long Haul easily felt that he could go another round or three.
So the supply officer's mind got to wandering in directions it had never travelled prior, carving out uncharted paths through the air and paving the skyways. He deserved some revenge, he idly decided. His enjoyment was only a side effect of Mixmaster desiring a matched playmate. Vector Sigma forbid that the chemist actually care what his partner wanted. Mixmaster simply seized what he wanted, as any good Decepticon would. Long Haul would do the same in an instant, if he thought he could get away with it, but he certainly could not let his teammate's victory stand.
Long Haul pried himself out of the chemist's embrace and stood, leaving Mixmaster on the floor for the time being. He debated his options aloud, unworried that anyone might hear, "Paint's obvious, too obvious. Could make a good cover for something else, just like paint covers lime green and purple..."
Long Haul rifled through cabinets and datafiles, searching out his tools of righteous revenge. Eventually, he trotted off the medical ward for a few more supplies... and Hook's technical manual.
As he applied the primer coat to Mixmaster, Long Haul mused that he could not use his own tools for this task. They were both too crude for the job and incriminating. Even now, he still got stuck hauling everyone else's junk. Long Haul pondered dropping a few of the pilfered tools after he was done with them but found that idea far too simple, petty, and brutal. Dipping them in liquid nitrogen to make them brittle enough to shatter at a touch was obviously a better idea, because Hook would assume Mixmaster was the one to booby trap his tools like that and would take his wrath out on Mixmaster, not Long Haul.
As he finished up with the primer coat, Long Haul was fairly smirking, unimpeded by his featureless visage. After this makeover, Mixmaster would be so busy fixing his looks that he would completely miss what else Long Haul had done to him, not that he would ever suspect it in the first place. Long Haul, do this repetitive welding that a miss-clock drone could do. Long Haul, jury-rig this air-headed Seeker. Those were the good days, when no one needed him to move a heaping pile of scrap from point A to point B. The other Constructions never expected anything more technical of him, although perhaps they should have. Well, even if the wording of Hook's technical manual went over Long Haul's head, there were still pictures, lots of nice, shiny pictures. On no, Mixmaster would never sense his lovingly crafted ignominious fate coming until it grabbed him by the drum. Long Haul giggled.
As a rule, Long Haul had a resigned patience that could outlast eons. He usually invoked his ability to wait without thought, because why he had to wait did not bear thinking: the shipment was not ready, the battle was over, Scavenger was going to do the wiring instead, or any of a thousand reasons that submerged him in ennui. Such ironclad patience curiously escaped him now. He was done here, and he wanted to see the results of his work immediately. Later simply was not good enough. Long Haul might wait for later some other time, as he always did before when Scrapper promised to give him a real project later, when Bonecrusher said that they would go beat the bolts out of those brats the cassettes later, or even when the supply depot insisted they would have the parts later. He was not going to wait for later now.
Long Haul leaned over Mixmaster and roughly initiated a cold boot. Sure, the chemist probably needed the downtime. Long Haul had worn him right out, but the early wakeup call was not going to kill him. Beggars could not be choosers, but even Long Haul would not have a second glance for anyone so horrendously fragile. Besides, the groggier Mixmaster was when he came to, the better.
The chemist stirred and curled outward because an inward curl would expose his drum. Then, he promptly fell off the table. Long Haul winced. Only awake a few seconds, several thousand milliseconds, and a handful of microseconds, Mixmaster had already scuffed up his new decos. Huh, was that why Hook liked using the built-in table restraints?
Mixmaster pawed at the floor as if expecting it to give out from under him. Apparently satisfied that it would not, he hauled himself into a sitting position and stared up at Long Haul, his slanted optics unfocused. He said, with over-exaggerated clarity to compensate for his befuddled state, "I don't smell right."
"Don't expect that you do," Long Haul snorted, amused at how the mighty had fallen and annoyed that the mighty had not noticed the fall yet. He leaned back, waiting impatiently for the whirlwind to arise. Full seconds passed.
"Kyaa! Oh, I bet you think you're so c-clever and that this is all so c-cute," Mixmaster seethed. He checked over his body, now kitted out in titanium white and cinnabar red and resculpted to resemble a different mechanism. The chemist twitched as he espied his alternate form windows, the regal purple replaced with sulphur yellow. In short, Mixmaster had been transformed into the spitting image of the Autobot chemist Quickmix, right down to the frowning red symbol, which Mixmaster clawed at with furious indignation.
Long Haul radiated smugness and scratched at the back of his helmet lazily. The damage alerts from his overtaxed processors were more insistent now, and still, he paid them no heed. Instead, he jibed, "And you haven't even seen your pretty blue optics yet!"
Mixmaster stood, wrathful cobalt blue optics lit like twin alchemical furnaces, and lunged. Long Haul easily caught his arms and laughed at the futility of the action. A smattering of milliseconds later, he realised that he should have shoved his teammate away, as Mixmaster bit into his torso.
"The slag?" Long Haul cursed, now belatedly pushing the chemist away. His chest burned as of acid, and looking down, he saw that not only was there an irregular hole etched there but that he was dissolved down to the tank and leaking.
Mixmaster smirked and circled around Long Haul. With a false air of tragedy, he intoned, "All I wanted was a proper playmate, but you had to be so difficult about it. So..."
Long Haul clamped a hand over his wound. If it stung his fingers, echoing the chemical in Mixmaster's optics, it at least stopped the leaking. He interjected, "So?"
Mixmaster replied, oddly calm like the centre of the whirlwind, "So I just administered the antidote. I was going to let you down gently and let the alteration wear off naturally. Now, I expect that the induced emotional crash will be quite painful."
Long Haul had already gotten out his toolkit and was taping up his leak. Microseconds whirled by, blurring into milliseconds. Plans fell apart like satellites torn from their orbits. He was going to take on a Seeker ennead so long as they were spaced out at a radius of seven kilometres around him? Long Haul's hands curled into fists, eager to strike out at his helplessness. His fingers uncurled as he succumbed to hopelessness. No, the box delivery battles would never work. What was he thinking? All these lofty schemes and dreams seemed more the work of some alien mind. Hollowly, Long Haul croaked, "I still ain't getting you that aqua regia."
Mixmaster chuckled darkly, finished setting up some device, licked the energon off his lips, and skipped over to his teammate, too cheerfully considering his new resemblance to an Autobot. As he leaned over and kissed Long Haul, a recording device flashed, immortalising the affair of a Constructicon and Quickmix-né-Mixmaster. Without a trace of irony, Mixmaster whispered, "And I love you too."
Days went by or maybe weeks. It was hard to tell when all his work blended into itself. As an advanced machine, Long Haul could call up the exact span of time down to a quite absurd amount of significant digits, although never enough to satisfy Hook, but as a disgruntled construction worker, he really did not feel like it. Mixmaster had been restored to his usual Constructicon looks, but now he had some problem or other and was gracing a medical table with his presence. Long Haul did not pay much attention as Scavenger ran a checkup on Mixmaster. There were spares to sort, and they were not going to sort themselves. He still had a good deal of unused processor space leftover because sorting spares was drone's work. So Long Haul did pay a little attention, as their minor drama was better than nothing, and if this was what he thought it was, he might have a personal stake in the proceedings.
Scavenger backed away from Mixmaster slowly, nervousness plain in his demeanour. He said, cringing, "You're not going to like this."
Mixmaster snapped, "You think I like having my drum offline?"
Tail askew with thought, Scavenger stuttered, "Of course not, but, well..."
"Well?" the chemist echoed, poking the miner.
Scavenger looked defeated and mumbled, "I ... you're lousy with alkaloids." Alkaloids were Mixmaster's main weakness and could completely disable his drum if he was not careful.
Off in the corner of the med bay, Long Haul paused in his sorting.
"What? You must be malfunctioning. You know I always handle those with the utmost care," Mixmaster said incredulously.
"Look, I'll go get a spectrometer," Scavenger offered, eager to please. He found the device as unerringly as he found useless junk, ran a sample through the machine, and showed Mixmaster the results. "See?"
"That's impossible," Mixmaster groaned. He poked at the readout as if willing it away. "That would imply the alkaloids are worked into my very structure."
"I guess they are," Scavenger suggested meekly.
"They can't be. I'd have noticed them before they got there," Mixmaster insisted and hopped down from the medical table and paced up and down the medical bay.
Scavenger followed him at a pace, wringing his hands and twitching his tail with anxiety. He proposed with some trepidation, "I could test your sensors. Maybe your baselines are off."
"Are you suggesting that I'm miscalibrated?" demanded Mixmaster, drum spinning erratically and perhaps ironically.
Long Haul snorted. If ever there was a loaded question, that was it. He resumed sorting. The job had to be done, and the good part of the unfolding drama was not going to be for a while yet. Now, Long Haul could wait, and the spares were not going anywhere on their own.
"Maybe you took some battle damage or something. I don't know!" Scavenger cried out, either too guileless or flustered for the obvious repartee. He threw his hands into the air, tail raising sympathetically. Then he dove into a cabinet and rummaged through it noisily, tossing out various odds and ends: a severed hand, a set of callipers, and a piece of schist, before seizing and withdrawing a bottle. Scavenger waved it in front of Mixmaster's face.
The chemist frowned. Fear flickered in his once again red optics for a moment before being swiftly replaced by his usual confidence. He grabbed the bottle and read the label aloud, "Codeine? This isn't some kind of trick?" Codeine was a common alkaloid.
Scavenger shook his head and said, "It is what it says it is." His shovel, so loaded with sensors, bobbed to confirm his statement.
Mixmaster looked stricken and voiced in a small, plaintive tone, "I can't smell it." He turned the bottle over in his hands, optics unfocused. "I can tell you what the bottle's made of. I can tell you the composition of the ink. I can pick out the very impurities in the ... codeine." He fairly spat the last word, shaking slightly. "I just can't sense the codeine itself."
Scavenger's spirits seemed to simultaneously raise and deflate. He pried the bottle out of Mixmaster's clenched hands before Mixmaster could crush the little container and stashed it away. The miner jotted a note in the running medical file and turned back to Mixmaster. He said, "Then it sounds like your sensors are working, just your baseline has been adjusted so that you can't detect alkaloids. If your baselines are off, I don't think that there's much I can do about that-"
"No, there's not," the chemist grumbled, cutting off his teammate. "Ugh, if my baselines are off ... flash-oxidised scrap! That explains everything." Mixmaster seized up his own medical case file and started appending a few paragraphs. "Someone - and I bet it was Hook - must have tinkered with my baselines and then laced my self-repair stores with alkaloids. That would have led to them being incorporated into my very structure and would wreak havoc on my drum."
Long Haul turned away from the spare parts now. He could have left well enough alone and left the situation as it was. It would have been ages before something so trivial came up through their combiner link, and by then, they would have found other reasons to bicker. However, Long Haul could hardly let Hook take all the credit, even if meant taking all the blame, too, any more than he could have refused that last energon cube. He drawled, invading the others' conversation, "What makes you say it was Hook?"
"Eh?" was all that Scavenger could say, startled by Long Haul's sudden comment.
Mixmaster, however, was quick with a coherent reply, ticking off on his hands his rationales, "Scrapper's been busy," little left finger, "and he'd just take off an arm for art supplies if he was in such a mood," right index, "and I wouldn't do it to myself," right thumb, yanked back towards his drum, "Scavenger couldn't have done it, given how much trouble he had figuring out what was wrong in the first place," whole left hand, "and admittedly, it isn't much like Hook's style, too creative," wavering third left finger, "but you and Bonecrusher couldn't have done it."
Long Haul nodded agreeably, "Yeah, it was pretty hard to lace the," he paused, thinking intently. He knew this name, slagging long and hard to say as it was, and he was going to say it correctly, " into the alloy mix without degradation."
Mixmaster stared at Long Haul for a long moment by anyone's standards while Scavenger continued to look puzzled.
"What?" The thoughts behind his actions were unfathomable to him. He was a serviceable technician, when he got the chance to practise his skills, but teaching himself with Hook's manual how to toy around with sensory baselines and self-repair system operation was something he never would have contemplated, especially when just punching Mixmaster was so much easier and more straightforward. Yet, plain as day, Long Haul had done all that technical garbage, and slag it all to the smelter, he was going to get everything out of it that he could.
Mixmaster raised a hand to his a chin. He looked thoughtful, and Long Haul did not like that look on him one bit. The chemist thinking often led to strange and wonderful things that made Long Haul's life difficult. His face twisted into a smile, and Mixmaster said slyly, "How terribly interesting. You are quite full of surprises. Now, how about surprising me by figuring out a way to get my aqua regia?"
Long Haul could have kicked himself.
The End
Author's Note: This is a very old fanfic of mine, mostly just tossed up here to collect my fanfics in one place.