Title: Invisible Walls
Summary: They walked out of one prison and into another.
Prompt: #3 Characters stuck somewhere – maybe trapped in a sticky substance or wedged into a narrow space. (Or whatever!)
Rating: T
Continuity: G1
Characters: Combaticons.
Notes/Warnings: None. Notice how the sections slowly start dipping in word count as I go on. Written for tf_speedwriting.
If Onslaught were honest he'd prefer having the loyalty programming stuck straight in after the detention center rather than after their brief interlude of freedom. The almost takeover had given him a taste of something that was yet again yanked away, so quick that it had never really existed to begin with, but Onslaught ignores this. His teammates think he is a pillar, but primus knows even he needs his illusions.
He deals with it. Takes it, because he has taken Shockwave, the detention center, Starscream, and he can fragging take Megatron and the programming, because he has to and he is a strategist and this is what he does. Work with what you get, because getting what you want is a luxury you never know when you'll have.
(The box had no walls, just a blank expansion of white and nothing beneath him, around him, or in him and when he wakes up sometimes he is still surprised that he can feel his fingers and flexes them for good measure.)
Onslaught sits in his office, and lets himself have a moment of peace.
He bends as much as he can. The rules. He bends as far as he can go without them snapping, and he knows his team hates it, but they have to deal with it because he says so and because he can't do anything otherwise.
His team. His gestalt. This was a thing none of them ever wanted, much less Onslaught wanted to lead. A team, yes, a gestalt, no.
But like so much in his life, he has no choice.
So Onslaught bends. Bends and works in confinement until the day comes when he can break, and everything will be the way it should.
At this rate he doesn't think it ever will.
-u-
It is spoken amongst the Decepticon Army that when Vector Sigma makes the crazy ones he has a bet with Primus to decide their sanity. Vortex is still waiting on his outcome, though he figures that the box has tipped the scales just a bit.
He is used to prisons, but he has never liked them. Whatever form they may take, they were still just that and while Vortex can scour the sky as far as his reserves can take him, he is still bound to a mech and a cause he has no care for, and four teammates he has no need for.
On the bad days, he feels the walls closing in on him like a compactor and he just has to go. No one knows this and he will kill to keep it that way.
Vortex takes release in his job, his prisoners, because they know what it's like and they can't do a thing because he's in control, he's on the other side, he's the one holding all the cards and their life in the palm of his hand and once where he had just taken simple pleasure, he now also takes satisfaction from a need for a freedom so foreign he can't remember what it feels like.
They beg, he takes, and he savours every moment of it.
-u-
Swindle does not wake up when he should've. He wakes up after it happens and by the time he realizes that he should have just up and left all those vorns ago, it's too late and he's saddled with something that he can never leave.
Never, is long and final. He doesn't want it to be never, and sometimes he almost wishes this were all a dream and he were still in the box, because then he could deal and hope that something else could greet him when he got out. Because he has never done well with teams or partners, or staying on the same side and the need for him to roam is almost as great as the need for him to con.
They have their own base, as well as their own quarters on the Victory. Swindle refuses to call either of them his, because he has never settled down long enough to have a home. He is not that type. It is the one thing that he can do, that he can take solace in other than schmooze and wheedle his way out of everything, because he's always done that and at first he figures it should be enough but—
(The last con he tried before the box was on the slab of the containment room. To an unwavering mech with an eye colder than red should have allowed, and it hadn't took.)
He indulges himself in what little he can, while still doing what has always come as naturally to him as breathing to humans, because while that has failed him once he can still take pleasure in the little things.
-u-
Vortex needs the sky, but Blast Off needs space. He needs the breaking of atmosphere, of the nothingness of sound, and of the stars burning bright and close enough for him to see the flames licking off them in deadly tendrils.
Space is endless, it has no limit. Blast Off was built for it and some part of him wants to believe that because of that fact it means the same for him and then the box, the loyalty program, and the gestalt wouldn't matter.
That's a lie, however, so he doesn't. Blast Off knows that even Onslaught lies to himself, but he is better than all of them and he won't stoop to that level.
Astrotrain is the only other shuttle in the army, and he hates ferrying his fellow soldiers around. Blast Off, in turn, accepts it because that means space and the thing he needs more than he needs energon and he relishes it from the moment he leaves Earth to the moment he gets back. For then he is not part of an army or another prison, he is part of something huge, grand, innumerable and escaping all understanding, and while he can't be it he can at least be in it.
He won't allow himself an illusion, he won't.
But he will allow himself a temporary break from reality.
There is no difference, but Blast Off doesn't care.
-u-
Brawl is stupid, but he is not so stupid that he doesn't see. He sees how Onslaught fights as much as he can, how Vortex gets whenever he walks through small corridors some days and how he likes causing pain in a way that is just a little off from how he did it before, how Swindle doesn't like to stay in either of their bases very long and just creates a never-ending chain of cons, and how there is a change in Blast Off whenever a transport trip comes up that just leaves him a bit happier than before. He sees, and thinks about how he doesn't have any of these problems.
He doesn't, because nothing has really changed. He has always, always, been a soldier. Hit and run, smash and kill, you do your job and get your energon. This is your lot in life; it's how it's always going to be.
He knows he should care and feels that his okay with this is so fragging wrong, but he's never been all that complicated and some mechs would sneer and laugh at him for this, but he's seen his team and if this was what not being simple got him, then thank primus he was.
The detention center was bad, yes, and so was the whole taking over Cybertron and failing thing, and the loyalty programming's even worse, but through everything he's still a soldier, and it is the only constant he has throughout it all and he wants it to stay, because Brawl doesn't now what'd he'd do if it went.
Brawl is stupid, but he sees enough to know that Megatron would have no further use for them if they couldn't give. Fighting is the only thing he can give, so that is what he clings to.
Because while imprisonment is bad, he thinks that the finality of death might just be a bit worse.
-u-
Bruticus woke to enslavement. First to Starscream then Megatron after him, but the result has always been the same. He is okay with this, because it hurts when he tries to think otherwise and he likes the orders he gets most of the time.
His components are not and he doesn't understand this, but he feels it inside him, whenever he wakes, and it stings like acid and he just wants it to stop, but he doesn't know how and his master never tells him.
It hurts and he tries to understand, but he doesn't. He never will.