Title: Aesthetics
Warning: Silliness. Vague sex stuff. People really trying to get laid. Dubcon that isn't, due to the aforementioned attempts to get laid.
Rating: PG-13
Continuity: G1
Characters: Blast Off, Astrotrain, Blitzwing, Skyfire, Vortex
Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.
Motivation (Prompt): An "I think I'm ugly" kinkmeme request ( . ?thread=14906773#t14906773)
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Pt. 2: Claiming. Side effects include Brawl.
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Vortex had a problem.
Most people would disagree. Most people would say he was the problem, especially people like Onslaught or the Constructicons.
Regardless of their opinions on the matter, Vortex's problem didn't go away.
His problem could be summed up in two words: rotor assembly. It was fragging ugly. The post-Detention Centre reformat had done him absolutely no favors in the looks department. He didn't want to go back in the box - Pit no! - but he'd filled out so many reformat requests that Soundwave blocked his incoming attachments out of habit.
What fragging human had thought it a good idea to make an external rotor assembly? He wanted his old form back, but humans had barely started getting into vertical lift technology. He had the sinking feeling that his reformat requests would continue to be turned down even once he located a better looking human rotorcraft. Onslaught refused to sign off on his requests, citing Bruticus. Apparently if Vortex reformatted, the other Combaticons would have to find a new balance against whatever altmode he changed to. They couldn't be bothered to do so, and that stuck Vortex with the altmode of ugly.
Ugly. So ugly. He looked like the skeletal remains of a stripped carcass. Rotor blades stuck out of his back in a gangly splay that just sat there. He could spin them, and that was it. The blades couldn't shift position on the array or even detach, so they stayed in a stiff, bare display of stick-like, useless wings. It would have been better if he could at least collapse them down to lay flat down his back, but no. They stuck out at awkward angles, twirling as if to garner maximum attention to Vortex's ugly altmode. He could take building girders and weld them to his back, and they'd look more attractive.
He'd always been a rotary frame, but he'd never, ever seen or scanned such a terrible altmode. It was like whoever had made the thing called it quits midway through and just superglued the entire array onto the outside wherever it'd fit. He hated it. He hated how he looked. He hated how the hub stuck out from his back. He hated how it hung over him when he was in his altmode. He hated the wobble of the blades every time he moved. He hated how vulnerable they were, how easy they were to grab or shoot, and how he kept bonking them on stuff when he forgot how far they protruded. They weren't sensitive, but they were always, infernally there.
They felt awkward and looked worse. They were a problem. They were his problem, because nobody wanted to interface somebody with stupid thin ugly stick-wings slapped onto his back.
It was bad enough that the whole Earth crew had started out assuming he was a sadist in the bunk. Did nobody separate professional and personal pleasures anymore? Vortex loved his job, took great pleasure in inflicting pain during it, but it wasn't a sexual pleasure. His frag-fun tipped into the masochist side of the spectrum, the area he didn't get to play in during work.
Which was fine, it was okay, he handled it. Correcting the rumors didn't take long. The first time he heard them was the time Reflector refused to take him with Brawl, back when the tank was still letting him tag along on the getting-to-know-the-crew free-for-all frag-quest, and Vortex had put the rumors to rest right quick. He'd stood up in the middle of the common room to announce he didn't like pain-fragging unless he was the one in pain. Cleared up the rumors right away.
Unfortunately, announcing it in public put him directly at odds with the established base masochist. Ramjet didn't, uh, play well with others, and he certainly didn't share. Word got out that Ramjet would make life unpleasant for anybody who took pain away from the Conehead's bunk.
There was a ranking to this sort of thing. First come, first serve, and Ramjet made a point of rubbing Vortex's face in the fact that he was late to the party. Vortex was the one who'd gotten thrown into another masochist's playpen. Manners dictated he behaved.
Anyway, he was under orders from Megatron not to start fights, sabotage, or catch other Decepticons in dark corridors to 'persuade' them of anything. Killing or torture would probably land him a one-way trip back into the Detention Centre box. He glumly conceded the painplay arena to Ramjet. He wanted to get his bolts torqued, but not that badly.
It turned out not to be a big deal. As soon as Swindle got his little side-business up and running again, Vortex negotiated in on it. No Autobot would trust a Decepticon to inflict pain, but take it? The kind of mech he tended to attract as a masochist didn't give a slag what he looked like or what faction he belonged to. It was his pleasure in the pain that they wanted, not somebody with shiny plating or the right color emblem. They'd pay out the manifold for a real masochist to take what they wanted to dish out.
Didn't mean they were any good at walking the walk. The red and gold Lamborghini twins talked it up, but then they wouldn't shut up. It ruined the fun, for him, and he refused to take appointments with them again. It'd been obvious they were in it to trash talk a Decepticon and beat him up out of vengeance, not because they honestly enjoyed the infliction of pain. Vortex could tell the difference. They could get their jollies during combat, if that's what they wanted.
Ironhide thought he knew what he wanted, but Vortex pulled out the safeword half an hour into the session. The blasted Autobot was so torn between pounding on a Decepticreep and a natural inclination not to hurt people that Vortex couldn't get lost in the pain. He wanted the high, the flying-while-grounded sensation of pain sensors maxed out, and Ironhide was both too brutal and not hard enough. Moral conundrums were fine during an interrogation, but they were an irritating distraction out of it. Instead of being fun, it just hurt, and not in a good way. There was a difference.
The Autobot CMO, ah, now that one…that one knew what he wanted. He knew how to get it. He knew exactly what he'd hired Vortex for, and how to make the masochistic helicopter fly. He knew his way around a body, and all the suppressed frustration of a war came out when he had Vortex under his hands. Vortex had resigned himself to taking what he could out of another Autobot beat-down, but Ratchet didn't go that route. It seemed the one who healed wanted to hurt as well.
Vortex couldn't have been happier with that. Those clever hands peeled back plating, severed lines, and rewired nerve points. He pulled Vortex apart, dissembled him cold and clinical while the Combaticon screamed until he laughed, laughed until he sobbed, and slipped into a trance sometime in the midst of the shuddering, suffering, undiluted sensation turning him inside-out. Ratchet took him to the edge where further damage sang through his spark, and his deft touch kept him there to writhe in exquisite agony every session.
The medic rarely spoke, and when he did, it was in snapped orders early on before Vortex went beyond hearing anything but the high, anguished ringing of feedback. Nothing distracted Vortex from the push and pull of parts of his body being rearranged when Ratchet got ahold of him. Each snapped wire fired a burst of pure feeling through him, followed by the blissful throb of resetting pain sensors. Ratchet twisted fingers deep inside him, maximum pain with minimum real damage, and Vortex arched further into the medic's hold.
Only once the CMO finally worked out his pent-up emotions and lust did he finish the job. Two out of three times, Vortex was well past the ability to scream by the time Ratchet jammed his port so full the rim distended. The medic interfaced his scrambled, tortured mess of a body through the system hitches and hiccups no sane person would hook up to. He always waited until Vortex was so glitched he was on the border of shutting down into emergency statis lock. The overloads were hissing, spitting, smoking power-outages that blew out Vortex's circuit breakers and knocked him cold.
It was wonderful.
The first time Swindle cleaned up after the Autobot medic was through, it took him an hour and a half to coax Vortex down out of the buzzing happy place Ratchet sent him to. He spent the rest of the week drifting in a tingly cloud of afterglow. Swindle eyed him like he'd explode.
Ramjet could keep the Decepticons. Vortex was thrilled with his Autobot.
Happy masochist or not, the real problem was that nobody outside of the occasional Autobot sadist would frag him. Pain was great and all, but Vortex wanted variety. Agony was too rich for a steady diet. He'd burn up if that was what he fueled with every time. Besides, nobody else was restricted to just one kind of interfacing. Why should he be? He liked painless interfacing between special occasions, and the need for a hard, bouncing, clanging, banging frag was an itch he wasn't getting scratched.
Oh Primus, it itched. It itched around his wrists where he liked to be held down, pinned under his partner. He liked to be taken control of, even when it wasn't under a sadist. He craved attention. He wanted someone to dominate him, pay attention to him and him alone, and he wouldn't struggle. Honest, he wouldn't! He'd submit if it'd earn him a strong, warm body over him, greedy hands petting and stroking, touching him everywhere until he tingled and squirmed for more.
Easy, right? Frag requests didn't get much more harmless than 'hold me down and feel me up.' Once people got over their fear of him as a sadist in the bunk, he usually didn't have any trouble finding someone to trade surges with.
Except that 'usually' was four million years and a Detention Centre away, and now he was the ugliest mech on the planet. Shame didn't come naturally to him, but Vortex couldn't look in a mirror without cringing. The rotor blades were just so - spindly. They quivered if he shrugged. They spun if he was surprised. People ran into walls because they couldn't stop gaping at the slagging things.
He swore that nobody could look at him without staring. They jolted if he turned his back, metal clattering behind him as mechs dropped their scrap or banged their heads together leaning closer to stare, and then there were undignified scrambles to act like they hadn't been ogling his rotor array like spectators at a trainwreck. He couldn't count the number of bright, totally fake "So! Nice weather we're having!" conversations that started up if he whirled around at random in the common room. Entire tables of jets fixated on his ugly, thin, not-wing blade-thing-whatevers whenever he walked by.
He got it, okay? The rotor blades looked like his real array had been dissected and attached to him by an ungainly lump of exposed machinery in the middle of his back. He knew weird, ugly things were oddly compelling. He just wished something more than revolted fascination would come of it. He couldn't even go in the common room anymore without ducking his helm to avoid seeing everyone pretend not to stare at him.
Fragging stupid ugly awful rotor array and its lumpy back-mounted hub and the blades. Ugh.
It was a problem. It was a horrible problem.
He'd thought it was his reputation as a sadist, at first. He'd fixed that, only to find that his bunk remained as empty as ever.
Then he'd assumed Ramjet had warned everyone off as a jealous, suspicious precaution, the possessive pain-mech. Ramject would be that much of a glitch. He'd delicately ventured some overtures toward the Conehead, hinting that he'd found himself a decent source of what he needed elsewhere. He wasn't competition. Look at him not be a threat. Why couldn't they just be friends? Mildly antagonistic coworkers, at the very least?
After a while, Vortex had come to the realization that it wasn't a fear of sadism or Ramject that was keeping mechs from propositioning him. None of the Decepticons would approach somebody who looked like him, no matter how often he sat alone. Sitting at an open table in the Decepticon common room was a slightly desperate plea for company; anybody who actually wanted to be by himself wouldn't be in the common room at all. Vortex sat by himself all the time, ready to throw himself into the lap of the first mech who made a move.
Nobody ever sat down.
Trying to do the propositioning himself failed even worse. He had zilch self-confidence - hey, he knew what he looked like - and he had difficulty even getting his vocalizer to activate off-duty these days. Mechs looked scandalized or flummoxed if he dared sit at an already occupied table, and conversation limped along until he left again.
It hadn't been so bad the first year after reactivation. Brawl had been okay with him tagging along and taking his leftovers in the berth. Vortex had worked hard to make sure none of Brawl's many, many bunk-buddies walked away unsatisfied. He'd thought he'd done a pretty decent job at it, too. Nobody had complained, anyway. Most of them came back for a second shot at the tank, at least, and they evidently told their friends, because it seemed like everybody wanted a turn fragging Brawl. Vortex wanted some of those mechs for himself, but he'd kept his helm down and stayed behind his gestaltmate, letting Brawl arrange whatever happened. He wouldn't have guessed a grunt soldier with a tank altmode was that desirable, but the Decepticons practically lined up to hop in the Brawl's berth.
Word got around fast that interfacing Brawl meant including him. He really hadn't wanted his ugly altmode to get in the way of Brawl's bizarre sexual magnetism, however, so he pretended disinterest in the people chatting Brawl up. He only joined in once Brawl beckoned him in. He counted himself lucky Brawl thought threesomes were the definition of a teambuilding exercise.
It disappointed him that the tank favored the sporty sleek type. The four sportscar Stunticons liked treads. That harem had almost assembled itself, and that put an end to the pity-frags. Oh, Vortex liked that he could take advantage of their numbers to get some from a straggler while Brawl was busy with the main herd. He liked that just fine, but the way Motormaster insisted on supervising the orgies had disturbed him too much. The Stunticon leader regarded him with utmost suspicion. He seemed to think the interrogator was a danger to the team. The mech stood there and glared at Vortex and Vortex alone.
Even though Brawl said the other Stunticons were fine with Vortex joining in, all the helicopter could think of was the night Motormaster had lunged in out of nowhere and grabbed him by a rotor blade. He hadn't done anything else. He'd just grabbed the rotor blade and stood there, venting heavily and working his hand over it as if he wanted nothing more than to crush it. Vortex had frozen for a long minute, tensed for a fight while Breakdown hid against his chest from the red optics glaring down at them both.
Motormaster had let go eventually. The only reason Vortex had finished up was because he couldn't afford a reputation for leaving his partners hanging. He'd done Breakdown as fast as physically possible and gotten out of there before things got violent.
He'd told Brawl later that he had too much pride to cram himself into the middle of a relationship. He hadn't told the tank that he wouldn't go back to Stunticon territory because he thought Motormaster was going to nail his rotors to the wall if he touched a Stunticon again. The loyalty program insisted he couldn't start fights. He didn't want to test if that meant he couldn't defend himself if someone else started the fight.
So much for sloppy seconds. It'd been nice while it'd lasted.
He'd had Blast Off for a while longer, but that dried up eventually. The shuttle stopped coming down from orbit ready to throw him down and ravish through the bunk. He didn't know what had changed, but his best guess was that Astrotrain and Blitzwing had decided to open up to a threesome. Frag his luck.
That left the other two Combaticons, and there wasn't a chance in the Pit, there. Onslaught might as well have 'Don't Touch Me, Minion' stapled to his backstruts. Swindle didn't play without pay. Neither of them had any sympathy for his plight. They just looked at him like he was crazy whenever he complained about never getting laid.
Leaving Vortex to deal with his problem alone.
He didn't know what to do about it. All his solutions boiled down to a reformat, and Soundwave and Onslaught had him stonewalled on that.
He hated his altmode. He hated how he couldn't meet anyone's optics without hunching his shoulders and feeling the rotor blades on his back shake from the motion, which only made him feel more disgusted by his appearance, which became a vague shame that he had to look like this and people had to look at him. Conversations petered out the minute he stepped in the common room. Everyone kept stealing glances at him and looking apprehensive if he started in their direction.
He was getting his masochism button pounded but good by Ratchet, but that didn't solve the problem. He was still so ugly nobody would clang him. He was going out his head craving a decent interface. His equipment ached. His plating rattled every once and a while, longing for contact. He was this close to begging Swindle to advertise him to the Autobots as bargain-basement shareware, just so someone, anyone would touch him.
He trudged down the hallway after retrieving his ration, fed up with his miserable life. Maybe he should go spar with Brawl. Maybe he should go fill out another reformat request. Maybe he should sit down in the bunkroom and polish up, pretending it was somebody else's hands on his body.
…yeah, he was pathetic. This was rock bottom.
Loud footsteps stomped up behind him fast, and Vortex had just enough time to half-turn before the wall smashed a flat spot on his mask. "What - ? Hey! Hey, leggo!"
"I will not," growled too close and low for comfort, "be teased any longer."
The loyalty program clamped down on the urge to fight back - loyal Decepticons don't fight other Decepticons, he could not start a fight- and Vortex's raised fist stopped, hovering midair. Panic and rage swamped him in equal amounts. No, no, no, he had to be able to defend himself. A loyal Decepticon had to be able to save his own life!
The gestalt bond had never been good for much, but right now he was cramming an S.O.S. into it as hard as he could. Onslaught pinged back immediately, and Vortex flung 'help-alert-under attack!' at him in a flurry of alarmed data packets ripped out of his scanners.
That was the best he could manage, since his upper thought processes had just gone a bit wibbly. Hot metal pressed him into the wall, full body contact from knee to shoulder, and the hand on the back of his helm yanked it to the side to expose his neck. A mouth assaulted the side, and the hand not forcing his face into the wall was -
It was fondling his rotor blades. Fingers stroked the tip of one of the upper set, thumbing the thin metal and petting the backs of knuckles down the length. Vortex twitched and whimpered as his neck cables were licked. The hand on his helm came down to curl around his throat from behind, pulling him back, closer to the heavy weight keeping him against the wall. The blade was petted once more, all the way down to the rotor hub, where the hand molesting him palmed it, groping vigorously.
Chills shot up and down his wires as words panted against the wet bitemarks now decorating the side of his neck. "Think you can flutter these at me, huh? Think you can flaunt your pretty blades without consequence. Think you can get us charged up and licking your heels from a spin or two. Ha!"
The hand on his throat left, and Vortex felt the mech fumbling behind him. The action came through a haze of confused pleasure stamping out his thoughts. Starved for contact as he was, even the weight keeping him pinned felt glorious. The thrum of his rotor blades being toyed with connected straight to his spark chamber, and he made a small whining sound pleading for more.
"You're nothing, Combaticon," snarled into his neck, and his knees melted. That weight on him felt absolutely wonderful, just perfect. He was pinned by sheer body weight alone, and it was even better than being tossed on a berth and kept down by hands around his wrists!
He slumped against the wall and made a few more urgent 'frag me hard and often' noises. Onslaught's repeated pings were shunted into a queue to be looked some time other than now, when his interface array wasn't climbing up into the driver's seat to run his body. The fumbling behind him intensified, and the mouth sucking on a fuel tube left his neck. Vortex moaned as teeth dented a rotor blade next.
The harsh snarling didn't stop, getting louder as a powerful engine shook them both. "You're a criminal. A nobody. Anybody could have you. You think you're so special, you and your precious pretties. Untouchable, huh? You think you're untouchable? You think you're above us?! You think nobody's gonna dare take what you're putting in our faces?!" The hand on his hub reached out and grabbed his tail rotors, yanking his arm back and spinning the smaller hub back and forth faster and faster while the strain in his attacker's voice mounted to a yell. "We should all start uggnh taking ah, ah haaa, ahh. You."
The last words came out in great gulping sighs between clenched teeth and rotor blade, and Vortex suddenly realized what the fumbling had been.
"You're easy. These are easy." A slow lick, and Vortex hadn't even known his rotor blade had sensors on that edge. "You didn't even put up a fight. I knew it. I knew you wanted it. Nobody flirts like that and teases everybody without wanting us to snap and take what we want."
"Um." Vortex's legs shook as his knees wobbled, and his interface array burned in a steady, pulsing beat that would drive him mad. He had no idea what was going on. Had he just been rutted against in a public hallway? Did this count as sexual assault or did he have to pay for this service?
He…he had money..?
Cold air rushed in to fill where armor had covered him in heat a second earlier. He whimpered protest.
"Maybe I'll tell everybody how easy you are. We can take turns winding you up." A big hand gave his tail rotors a last spin.
He reset his visor rapidly but couldn't muster an objection to that mental image. He didn't want to object to that mental image. "I, um." He should probably tip extra for that mental image.
"Keep flirting your pretty blades," a sneer dared him. "See what happens. Nobody'll believe I had the bearings to take you, but they'll believe it when I do this in front of them." Something tweaked in the naked mechanism of Vortex's rotor hub, and the Combaticon squealed in shock as an unexpected overload took his legs right out from underneath him.
Heavy footsteps stomped away, somehow sounding self-satisfied the whole way.
Vortex slid down the wall and stared after Motormaster, wondering what had just happened and how he could get it to happen again.
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