You're Familiar Like My Mirror
This fic goes out to TakoSoKiti and the real Jessica who's fighting her own battle against anorexia and winning, so let's give her a round of internet applause! Hope you like it!
TW: talk of anorexia/possible triggers and Megatron being Megatron
She's screaming. She doesn't mean to, but god, these- these things are too terrifying to keep it in.
It's coming toward her, the huge silver one. He's all wrapped in chains and his eyes are the same shade of red as the blood pouring from her arm. They seem to be made of nothing but jagged angles and maliciousness. She knows covering her head won't help but does it anyway because this is one kind of death she doesn't want to see coming. There's a moment of near silence before multiple explosions and the sound of screeching metal assaults her. Debris is falling, covering her in dust and a glowing, sticky blue liquid that burns. Liquid metal drips on her along with a single, tiny, solid piece. It's super-heated and latches onto her wrist, burning and cutting through her skin. She ignores it, too high on adrenaline and terror to feel the pain, looking through her fingers like those stupid girls in horror movies to see the giant metal monster crawling, weak and slow and still growling menacingly, towards a boy her age holding a cube. That's the last thing she sees before the street goes white with the light from the cube and she passes out from pain and blood loss.
Eventually, they dig her out of the rubble. They clean her and bandage her and call her family- at sixteen, she can't legally make decisions for herself. She meets Sam and his girlfriend Mikaela briefly and finds out they went to the same middle school before she moved. The creepy MIBs they have swarming around buy her a psychiatrist and she spends six months convincing the man that there's nothing wrong with her.
She hides her nightmares.
That same day, they tell her that the robot- Megatron- is dead and she feels worse instead of better. Eventually, she finds out the name of his faction, too. They're not as tight-lipped as they'd like to think.
She has a Decepticon symbol on her wrist, burned into layers of fat and muscle. Her scars are permanent.
The physical and the mental.
\0.0/
You left me no choice, bother."
When Optimus pulled the Shard from his brother's chassis, he could feel his spark twisting away from their dead bond and he hated himself (more).
Then he felt it flare back to life and saw the gray chassis spark back to something decidedly more alive. And it was their bond, a true, fully open one and not just the cold imitation that had done nothing to keep Optimus warm over the vorns. The mech couldn't help himself desperately reaching out as he stood, hunched and numb. Megatron? He hated how hesitant his voice sounded, but he tried again, Megatronus?
There was a feeling of surprise mingled with irritation and confusion like Megatron couldn't figure out what he should be feeling. You know, he said, I never much liked that name. It was a tool, singularly ugly, but useful.
You-you were dead.
And now I am not. Why can I not see? he asked and somehow, he sounded younger than Optimus ever had ever heard him.
The question settled Optimus for the moment. Megatron should have known what had happened here. He didn't answer the mech's question. Sleep, brother. I will wake you when it is time.
\0.0/
She's covered in glass. The kind of tiny little shards that come from breaking something really high up or really delicate. There's a man lying on the ground, groaning and systematically rotating parts of his body. Checking for injuries.
She's frozen on the sidewalk a foot away, terrified and unsure if she should speak or run. Three stories up, glass and plastic dangles from the window this man had apparently fallen from. There are men standing there, watching closely. One of them- the lightest, a blond- waves his gun at her in a way that makes it obvious that it's just a wave and not a threat while his two dark-haired friends watch the man on the ground, faces expressionless. As one, they turn and move out of sight.
She decides to run.
"I did not expect that to hurt." The unexpected words makes her move forward instead of back (so much for running) and she ends up standing over the man still sprawled on his back.
She snorts. "What did you expect, the ground to be fluffy?"
He pushes himself into a siting position. "No. I am just unaccustomed to- normally, a fall like that would not hurt much."
"Well, it's not like normal people fall out of three story buildings very often," she says. "I'm Jessica. What were you doing up there, anyway? That building's under construction."
He shrugged, "There wasn't much furniture there. It was a good training ground. When Opt-those men showed up, I figured it was time to... vacate the premises. The window was as good an exit as any." He glanced up at the building and the gaping window, rubbing his neck ruefully. "I underestimated the damage it would cause me."
She grabs his hand as he moves it, inspecting his hands. "Some underestimation. Your hands are covered in cuts. Face too, looks like."
"They will heal."
She looks him over, taking in his grimy face and threadbare clothes. "Not without some serious infection, friend."
"I will live," he says stubbornly.
She shakes her head. "At least let me clean you up. My apartment's just down the street." He looks skeptical, so she tries to sweeten the deal, "Come on, there's a nice, comfy couch you can spend the night on."
She steps back and crosses her arms, staring at him. There's really no point in holding a hand out to him since he's got at least six inches on her 5'5 and looks to be ridiculously muscled for a homeless dude. He eyes her for a minute, sizing her up and seemingly satisfied with her decision not to touch him again. He heaves himself up and walks in the direction of her apartment and stops, waiting a few feet ahead and looking at her like she's holding him up.
She kind of is. "How do you even know where I live?" Jess asks as they set off again, almost jogging to keep up with his long legs.
"There are only two women that live in the closest apartment building with the desig-name Jessica. If nothing else, the actual building is disgustingly easy to find," he says.
"What the- dude, I don't even think you have a phone on you. You couldn't have found all that in the two minutes since I told you the direction I live in. Unless you're a stalker and already know everything about me. Are you a stalker? You look scary enough for it." And he really does with his scarred face, salt and pepper hair that he seems decades too young for and deep set dark eyes. He looks like the kind of guy that would rob a convenience store for the hell of it.
He shrugs. "Information is just floating around in this world. Finding out things is just a matter of how hard you look."
Jess opts not to say anything to that. Great, she thinks. I managed to pick up some random, hot, homeless thug that works out in half-built skyscrapers at night. No wonder my friends call me crazy.
The walk back to her place is silent, the man just a shadow behind her. It finally hits her when they're standing outside her door that she has no idea what his name is. "You know," Jess says as she takes her keys out, "you never did tell me your name."
"I did not," he agrees. They stare at each other. She blinks. "D-16," he says eventually. She raises her eyebrow at him and he shrugs back. "I didn't choose it."
"Uh huh." Jessica lets him in.
\0.0/
When he woke, it was to his brother standing beside his helm (heavier than he wanted it, too armored) and three more mechs he vaguely recognized with three pairs of cannons trained on him.
"Where am I?" he asked. From the looks on their faces, that was not the reaction they were expecting.
"Our base," said the burly gray one.
"I know that," he spat irritably, "all these Autobot bases always look the same. I meant the planet. The atmospheric composition and heat signatures I'm registering are unfamiliar to me. Starscream only taught me so much."
The bigger yellow mech- a medic, by his heavily armored arms and legs- twitched slightly at the name. "Starscream?" he spluttered.
He got the impression that they did not like Starscream very much. It didn't surprise him; he was one of the few that has ever been able to deal with the mech for very long.
His brother was another, but he that was just one more thing he didn't like to think about.
The smallest mech, a little yellow creature that he couldn't look at for the formless regret churning in his tanks quirked his helm and looked at his brother. He got the feeling that this little one saw more than anyone else.
"What is your designation?" his brother rumbled. His voice was still the same, a low murmur that you felt before you heard, but his frame was so different that it shocked him as he looked up. He was still tall with those overly long and gangly legs, but he was heavily armored and covered in more scars than even Soundwave, the oldest and as of yet undefeated gladiator in the Pits of Kaon.
(A tickle in the back of his processor told him that all of that was wrong.)
"Optimus-" the medic said, but his brother- Optimus- Orion held up a quelling servo.
Now that his brother had asked, he did wonder what the answer was. Logically, he knew he had a designation, one does not get sparked without one, but he did not remember what it was. He had two, he decided. That which was given to him and that which he chose.
He choose to give his brother the one that was not tainted in his mind.
"D-16."
\0.0/
The next morning, he's gone. Jess isn't surprised; maybe a little irritated when she notices that the bottle of orange juice in her refrigerator is significantly lighter than it was last night. It's the only thing she still drinks. Jess looks at the contents of her fridge- a hunk of cheese, a dozen eggs and a bag of leftovers that probably started life as Chinese and has slowly turned green ever time. She thinks of her bathroom and the scale there, the number that's still so much higher than she wants it to be.
She skips breakfast.
It's summer in the city and hot, so Jess decides that hiding out in the air-conditioned library is her best bet. She doesn't really plan on doing anything and honestly it's just too hot to think, but she's only eighteen and her parents let her move out on the condition that she get a job. It's only the end of June, so she figures she can claim job hunting and cry about the economy for a few weeks yet before they really start riding her.
She wiles away her day lounging in the library, reading bits of things here and there, napping in an out of the way armchair because the heat made her drowsy (but only for a few minutes at a time because she couldn't bare to dream of Mission City and-), and jogging with some particularly masochistic midday runners.
She skips lunch (again).
She slips into her apartment around seven after the librarian kicks her out and drops her keys in the entryway. She's exhausted, more than usual, though she's only done the usual today. Being an adult is hard and Jessica is nowhere near equipped for it. Her parents are paying for her apartment, her college tuition in a few months, even carrying her phone bill, but they keep wanting her to get a job, telling her to be a grown up.
Jessica leans against her door and breathes heavy, thinking of the weeks she spent alternately snot crying and catatonic after-
The scar on the inside of her wrist twinges and Jess pushes off the door, heading for her room. It ridiculously early, but she's tired and that scar- it never bodes well.
She (purposefully) forgets about dinner.
\0.0/
The morning after that, there isn't any orange juice at all and a person shaped lump on her couch. Jess ignores it, leaves the house, repeats yesterday and the day before and the day before. Jessica is a routine.
When she gets back home that night, he's there. She can tell he's been gone- he's as soaked to the bone as she is and bloody to boot. Jess bandages him again and feeds him omelets, claiming to have eaten before coming home. He doesn't really believe her and she can't blame him because there are dust bunnies in her wallet older than the Chinese leftover in her fridge- a friend had bought it for her.
Jessica doesn't forget about dinner or pretend to do so, but she does ignore her sick stomach and goes to bed once D-16 is settled on her couch for the night, scar aching and her government-appointed psychiatrist's words from two years ago echoing in her head.
\0.0/
"Aren't humans supposed to eat?"
Jessica doesn't look at him. "I eat," she says.
He raises an eyebrow. "I have been with you for three days. I have not seen you eat once."
"You see these thighs?" she says, pointing at the offending anatomy. "Trust me, loosing a few pounds won't hurt me."
"You seem to be several pounds underweight for your height and age. You could stand to gain some."
Jessica goes to roll her eyes but he can see that the damage is done. Her face is paler than normal and she seems to have started to sweat in the middle of the over air conditioned store. "You shouldn't lie, D-16. It's getting late. We should go," she says quietly. D doesn't argue even though it's only four in the afternoon and they didn't get the shoes she had come here for.
As he follows her home, he puts her weight in the file marked 'Sore Subject' in his mind.
\0.0/
Eventually, they get around to the subject of his name. He has had many names in his lifetime and never found a preference for any of them. Sure, he had chosen the name Megatronus, but power had drawn him to it, not a true fondness. He agreed to the shortening to Megatron because it meant that the spectators in the Pit wanted to keep him around. That name was his lifeline. D-16 was his- innocence, he supposed. When he was D-16, the world was either very clear cut, or too shrouded in darkness for it to matter.
He's not really sure what made him leave the mines. He had never been happy there, a rare few ever truly were, but he had also never been discontent. It was just that one shift he was fine, singing his miner's song along with all the rest, and the next he was chomping at the bit to leave. Whatever it was, it had left a lasting mark on him and his name.
"What are you?" Jessica asks one morning. It's been four days and she's picking at a bagel, ripping it to pieces.
He shrugs, goes back to poking at his oatmeal- he doesn't think he likes it much.
"Because, I mean, no one names their kid D-16. No one willing takes that name. It's not even a name- it sounds like a test subject or a piece off an assembly line."
"You're right," he says, still looking at the food. "I am a piece off an assembly line." In the ensuing silence, he reaches for the syrup their waitress had placed on the table in an attempt to give it some flavor.
She opens and closes her mouth a few times, then, finally, "-People don't just come off assembly lines."
He flashes red eyes up at her, an old, faded sneer on his face, like a painted mask that's been chipping. "Who said I'm people?"
"Then what are you?" she asks, very still and white around her lips. The bagel is completely forgotten now. "A vampire? I mean, they're in style and all, but that's a really crappy cliché. No?" she sighs at his blank face. "Something more fantastic then. No, wait-you're one of those robot aliens from a couple years ago!" The laugh building up at her own ridiculousness dies before it even escapes her throat. His face has changed, going hard and angry and just a little sad and regretful.
Jessica doesn't have to ask to know she's right.
She doesn't think, just gets up and walks calmly out of the diner, out of the nightmare her life has suddenly become.
The look in D-16's red eyes was one that has been haunting her dreams for two years.
Her scar throbs.
\0.0/
Eventually, they believed him. Or, they believed Optimus, who believed Meg- D-16.
His story was ridiculous, flimsy at best, and Optimus had never heard truer words out of the mech he had once known so well, nor had he seen any so passionately spoken.
In the end, that was what convinced him. The mech had always been passionate but it had dimmed and twisted in on itself over time. He had never sounded so raw and honest and intense as he had before he had made the Pits his platform and began to bury the best of himself under the guise of a rebel leader. The way Me-D-16 had spoken rang true in a way Optimus knew couldn't happen without a resurgence of that mech.
Or maybe Optimus was just desperate for an end. That desperation might get them all killed.
He couldn't think of that at the moment, couldn't, because he had to find a place for M-D-16 to live- it was the closest they could come to rehabilitation on this planet and, let's face it, a safe place to hide.
"Have you ever hated yourself, Orion?"
Optimus jumped. He had forgotten that- D-16 was still there. Optimus is far too used to being completely alone.
"Yes," he answered lowly, honesty making his voice raw. "And every nanosecond I find new reasons."
D-16 nodded. "I remember some of what I've done. No one can punish me for all of it but me."
\0.0/
He ends up climbing into her window sometime around midnight. Jessica is sitting on her beat up couch, wide eyed and shaky. She looks like she's seen something horrific. This is the first time he's seen her without sleeves and he suddenly understands why the sight of her sometimes makes his skin crawl.
Megatron knew this girl.
"What are you?" She whispers through white lips, shoulders tense as she rubs at the ugly scar on her wrist.
He thinks of the Well, of everything he has been and everything he could be. He shrugs, "I am D-16. I am a shell. I am what happens when you stare into the grave you dug for yourself."
D never would have hung around Jessica and all her humanity so long if she hadn't been bright, though. "What were you?"
He sighs. "Rebel, revolutionary, kin-killer. I was Megatron."
Her face stills and ices over in that determined way she has. "I am-"
-Megatron.
-D-16.
-what I choose.
"-yours," which is the easy answer. The true one, these days. D isn't sure if he loves things anymore, but he certainly gets- attached, deeply. He will do what he always did when inspired with such emotion- follow the orders of those who cause them in him, even when they aren't really orders.
Jess stands, a strange light in her eyes as she digs her thumb into her scar.
His scar, his mark. Eyes wandering over the deeply ingrained lines he wonders silently, are you mine?
She whispers, "Get. Out."
Then she passes out.
\0.0/
"Have you ever been to the Well, Orion? It's beautiful."
They were on a highway, some long desolate stretch between cities, and hadn't talked since they left base. Optimus wondered why he would ask such a thing. "No," he answers. "I am not- only true Primes can make such a journey and survive."
"You are a true Prime," D-16 with all the certainty of the ignorant and the fervor of the reverent.
Optimus doesn't deserve to be revered. "I was not Chosen by the Matrix."
"You don't need to be Chosen to be accepted. Those who have gone before us gave you their blessing with their whole spark," he said, calm and sure. Optimus wanted so badly to believe him. Then, "They knew better than to trust me, though."
Suddenly, Optimus wondered about the wisdom of their predecessors.
"Don't do it, Optimus," and it brought him up short because this new D-16 had yet to use his proper designation. "Don't get indignant over me. They were right not to trust me. The things I've done... Megatron deserved to be put down."
Optimus pulled up short, glad the road they were on was so empty as he swerved in surprise. "And you?" he asked delicately.
"D-16 is a new mech. I am what I choose," he replied, sounding old and tired already, heavily burdened with a wisdom hard won.
Optimus drove on.
\0.0/
Hospitals, D decides, are very strange places. The patient rooms are falsely cheery tombs and the waiting rooms are a sort of brightly lit limbo where you wait to hear if death has decided to claim you or a loved one. He liked the surly, hateful medics that had volunteered in the mines better than these oddly stoic human doctors.
Jessica is asleep now. She hadn't been at first and it had taken D all of two minutes to look up every reason a human would simply fall asleep with no warning, rule out sleeping disorders and move onto more serious possibilities. He had carried her to the nearest hospital- his alt form, while faster, was far too conspicuous for him to even consider making use of it. The doctors hadn't let him see her while they ran their tests and he wasn't sure why that made him so angry. There was one time, near the end of his time in the Pits when Starscream had managed to break Orion's axel during an intense round of- D had been furious with the young prince, but far too worried about Orion to leave him long enough to beat Starscream into a pulp like he wanted. This is that same feeling, a suffocating anger and restlessness he can't do anything about. He feels caged.
D doesn't do well with being caged.
\0.0/
"Hey, beautiful," he says, leaning on the door frame of her hospital room. He can tell he's startled her and that she's suspicious, but he doesn't really care. D may not be human but beauty has always been something he could easily appreciate. He appreciated it in Starscream's wings, in Orion's long legs, even in Soundwave's slender frame and silence. Jessica is another diamond in the rough for him, the kind of soft, curvy frame that he didn't normally go for and a strength that he was only beginning to imagine. He realizes they took out her studded septum and nostril piercings and that he had actually liked them.
Jessica turns her head away from the door.
That's all right. She doesn't have to look at him. "The doctor said you're anorexic."
"Don't feel sorry for me," her voice is harsh as a bullwhip and dry.
"I'm not. I'm trying something my- something a friend of mine told me about. I'm being sympathetic. I know how you feel. I've been there before-"
"Don't patronize me, Megatron."
He pulls up short, blinks and sighs. "I tried."
Jessica is still stubbornly facing the window, but her hands betray her, one wrapping around the opposite wrist. There's a seat in front of the window on the other side of the bed, directly in front of the window Jess is resolutely staring out of. D slides into it and gives her irritated face a wolfish grin. "I'm not leaving," he says.
She closes her eyes, "You don't have to."
"I'm sorry," he says suddenly. Her eyebrow twitches. "-For marking you." Jess opens her eyes fully at that. "Such a weakling does not deserve such an honor." He sneers at her, ignoring the way his voice hasn't sounded like this since he was yelling at Optimus on a destroyed street in Colorado.
Jessica sits up, her heart monitor dutifully keeping track of her rising heart rate as her face reddens. Her brown hair falls over her face as she bares her teeth at him savagely. This, he imagines, is what he looks like when provoked. It's kind of awe-inspiring. "Weak?" she hisses. "Weak after everything I've gone through? After Mission City? I'll get through this like everything else and show you better."
D just nods, watches her heavy breathing and fiery blue eyes and thinks that he isn't very sorry at all because this is the strongest human he's ever met with only Sam Witwicky matching her in sheer stubbornness.
Jessica stops rubbing her mark and her wrist lays bare on the bed, Decepticon symbol staring back at him.
\0.0/
They stopped on the edge of the city. Optimus parked in some abandoned lot and D-16 followed suit. They were quiet for a moment before Optimus said, "You have changed. For the better, I think."
"They called my kind the Legion in the Well, we few who could survive the mines. I do not do well with being one of many," he said to his brother's unspoken question of why.
It's the easy answer. Even now, he doesn't know the how.
Optimus was far away for a moment, considering that. "Will you come back from this?" he asked, displaying that talent for asking every relevant question in the simplest way possible.
D-16 threw himself into reverse, backing out of the lot and purposefully contradicting his words as he says, "Who says I'm leaving?"
\0.0/