((bows to reviewers))

Slightly longer this time, again, more angst, plus the first etchings of a plot. Do enjoy.

Don't Need The Sun

Everyone has a weakness. Scorpinok had two.

The first was his laboratory, and his endless, mostly futile experiments. The second was ships.

Which was why, on a cold to frigid morning, he loitered near the Sector's laughable excuse for a port and watched the ship come in.

It was a Maximal ship, he was quite certain. Maximal design, certainly, although what actual Maximals would be doing in Sector 19 was beyond him. They were certainly allowed to visit the sector, just as Predacons were certainly allowed to leave the planet, could they find sufficient funding (which, in most cases, they couldn't). But to find any making the effort was a rarity. Both of the devastated sides tended to leave each other alone as much as possible.

There was some sense behind this, Scorpinok would have had to admit. Watching the crew depart from their ship, Maximal law enforcers from the look of them, made a violently strong urge to leap across the landing bay and start wantonly slitting throats rise within him. Restraining himself, he ignored the officials and watched the ship instead.

It was a lovely thing, if a little bit outdated. Shaped like a hexagon, with one side missing. Sharp, pointy design, built for speed rather than endurance. The only thing marring its appearance, other than a little singeing on the lower hull, was the large, sharp, bright red sigil painted on its side. Scorpinok spent a few moments imagining another in its place, even sharper than the Maximal emblem and purple…

He was not the only one watching. Several other spectators stood a little way away, not there to appreciate the ship so much as for the novelty of something to relieve the tedium. The air smelt thickly of the Sector's distinguishing scents; oil, dust, the smell of clouds but never of rain. That didn't matter. In his mind, it smelt of gunfire and explosions in the background.

Scratcher held him, one arm supporting his back, the other busy fiddling with the tangled mess that was his mid-torso circuitry.

"Hey, Scalder? You okay?"

It was a rhetorical question, but nice to hear his voice. It succeeded in dragging him from the dark, muffled pit he'd been lost in. Staring up, he saw the other's optics, bright red, just like his own. He tried to reach up and touch, but nothing happened. A quick swiveling sideways of his head made clear the reason; his arm had been torn off.

Ouchies, he thought, wincing.

"Think I've had…better days", he muttered, and Scratcher flashed him a grin.

The sky glowed red behind him, enflamed by the steady current of exchanged laserfire, the twin moons of Soldaris gleaming a sharp, furious white. They made the ochre on his lover's face stand out, caught and ennobled the arching lines of his face. How wrong it was to feel happy at such a time, how unfaithful, as the battle was slowly lost behind them and the screams of the dying-theirs, almost certainly- ripped at the air. The battle had gone awry, turned into a massacre. He knew they'd give him nightmares later on. (When, after three days in the med-bay, he was declared fit to leave, they had.)

"Slaggin' idiot," the shorter warrior announced cheerfully, and Scalder really had to agree.

Three weeks later, Scratcher was killed by a piece of debris. Scalder-or Scorpinok, as he would later re-dub himself-hadn't gotten there in time. He'd been busy vaping the legs off a huge enemy rocket when the link had, very simply, gone out. It hadn't hurt, felt more like a rubber band popping at the back of his head.

They were covering the ship with a protective shield, barring it from the smoggy atmosphere of the Sector rather than thieves. The penalty of thieving from Maximal officials was high enough to deter anyone, and there would be no use in stealing anything as large as a ship these days. Maximal officials, he suspected, wouldn't understand why anyone would try and lay hands on their property. After all, weren't the citizens given sufficient rations?

The other spectators had wandered off. The crew had dispersed, either to recharge or to get whatever they had come to do over and done with, so as to depart as quickly as possible. One thing you could say for the far northern sectors, they never had tourist problems.

He stood for a while, staring. There was an odd, inconspicuous ache in his spark, similar to listening to something throwing itself against a door ten rooms away. He thought about the illicit blaster under his recharge berth, sighed, and spent a good few minutes thinking to himself practically. Practicality was hard with his jaw clenched and his hand squeezed tight enough to leave dents but eventually he managed it. He found himself wishing, irrationally, powerfully, that Scope was there. The larger warrior couldn't indulge and wouldn't offer reassurance- what reassurance was there to be given?- but he could stroke his back, awkwardly, and he could mutter quiet words that contained all the comfort he knew how to give.

Decepticons, as a whole, were less prone to craving company than Autobots. That didn't change the fact that Scorpinok suddenly felt as painfully alone as he ever had.

He left.

They'd been able to fly. It wasn't something he'd thought about much. You didn't think about something that came as naturally as walking. You did, he found out later, thnnk about it a lot more when the option was no longer available.

He was flying now. Below was a small, inadequate base that had been patched together in two days. Below was also a large amount of rocky ground. Unless he was very, very careful, both he and his cargo were going to smack into it. It was difficult topull offa graceful landing with a badly depleted energon supply, and even worse when gale-force winds were threatening to blow you off course.

It could hardly have been called graceful but it sufficed, although he touched down hard enough to almost rip half the joints in his knee. Grumbling to himself, he rose, and limped over to where the hangar's other four occupants stood.

All were larger than he, and all looked impatient to get their allotted task over and done with. They had received warning of an attack in the next hour, and would be scrambling to get off-planet the second this was finished. Back at his base, the others would already be doing so. So should he, except for the fact that someone had needed a delivery made and had judged him to be the smallest, fastest and most expendable.

He saluted, optics meeting those of the most superior officer in respect. The officer in question- a seeker- grunted.

"Hurry up, we haven't got all vorn."

Scalder chose not to speak as he bent down and placed the cracked, still-leaking head at their feet.

It was a simple trial. All knew what had been done and none of them cared. The mech in question (his name had been Silverrain, or something equally fatuous) had gotten himself over-energized for the third time in a month. Unforetunately, he had made the mistake of picking a fight with a higher-ranking officer, which had developed into an outright attack. As a result, he had lost most of his upper body, along with both arms and half a leg. There hadn't been a Decepticon ranked high enough at Base 12 to try him, so he'd been sent over.

Technically, the leg-and-a-half should have also been present, but Silverrain had been bigger than Scorpinok, and he wouldn't have arrived soon enough.

"Crime?"

"Treachery."

The case was open and shut. All witnesses had declared him a traitor. In attacking a superior officer and losing, hehad threatened the life and strength of his group by electing someone unfit to lead. Of course, execution had already taken place, but a trial was still required. Attention to details had to be paid, preached Shockwave, Third In Command of the Decepticon Army, or everything would descend into chaos.

(Scalder, who had been under the impression that chaos was what Decepticons were about, and that maybe Shockwave had missed the point somewhere, kept his vocalizer silent.)

"Decepticon Siverrain, you are found to be a traitor, and are declared unfit to live. But I'm sure you're already aware of that," said the seeker grimly, speaking to the head. Dull optics and a half-open mouth did not offer an opinion on the matter.

"So, are we done?" queried another, already beginning to move towards the departure zone.

"Yes. You, shrimp. Bring the traitor along. We'll smelt him properly at the next station."

Hefollowed, stopping only to pick up the head of his dead comrade, before moving after them.

It is painful to remain constant. It is painful not to change when the world around demands it of you, neither willing or able to slip into something else. Different ideas, different propaganda, different, ever-changing ideology that glowed like neon signs and tasted cheap, like acid in his mouth. It isn't hard to be something you're not. It's hard being what you are when the rest of the universe is something else entirely. One thing it did breed was faith. Scorpinok had learned that early.

He'd managed by trusting very little, rebelling infrequently and closing off entirely, so that the rest of the world would be too preoccupied with other, more important things to notice and start demanding change from him. He clung to the other constants, small as they were. War, battle, defeat, pain, repair, the repeating cycle that left him alone with his thoughts. It was painful, but dependable.

And then, later on, he'd learned that consistency, whilst an almighty, mother of all slag-pits, was nothing compared to despair. Nothing was worse than despair.

It wasn't that Predacons weren't allowed to leave the Sectors. Theoretically, they were allowed to leave the planet, if they desired. But after the murder of both Emperor Galvatron and the Autobot leader, slowly leading down into the crashing, hideous end of the war, Cybertron had found itself lacking in even the most basic of materials. To prevent widespread starvation among the newly workless, leaderless masses, a large percentage of both faction's ships and weaponry had been sold to distant systems, systems that were still, even now, prepared to do business.

What ships remained were usually small, capable of jumping from planet to planet at most. Few were equipped for deep space travel, fewer still capable of traversing galaxies in the ways of the old factions. Those who were rich enough could but their way off. Strangely enough, even those who had the means for leaving Cybertron had, as of yet, done so. Possibly because the whole planet, every member of every faction, was still in shock. Wars have momentum. Stopping a four billion year war in seven years was like hitting a fly with a windshield.

As it was, neither factions had an eighth of the population they had had four hundred and seven years ago.

Scorpinok hadn't considered suicide. It wasn't what Decepticons did. Then he'd found himself living in one of the planet's less stimulating Sectors, and he'd begun thinking about it, idly, every day.

Sunsets were infrequent up in Cybertron's Sectors, but not unheard of. When they appeared, they were golden. They sky would become too bright to look at, and garish streaks would cover buildings like whip marks. Scorpinok would stare at them and long for the dim sky of a battle field at night, softly lit by incoming and outgoing fire.

He trailed like a wisp of smoke through the streets. The grey sky hung lightly above, consistent itself in its agonizing plainness. He passed street vendors, selling almost-certainly ill-gotten spare parts, scratched disks and energon weak enough to have you collapsed on the floor after ten minutes. He saw others like him, all moving to wherever their destinations may have been with the same heavy, heartless tread. He wandered if this was what death was like.

"'For all the gods have left me standing…'"

It was a war hymn, he believed. He couldn't remember which planet he'd heard it on.

He was halfway to their rather shabby block when the thought that would change his life appeared. Utterly unbidden, it came upon him quite suddenly, stopping his footsteps in their tracks, Like most life-altering thoughts, it was extremely complicated, formed, like diamond, from a vast compression of disregarded emotion and built-up negativity. And, like most life-alerting thoughts, when boiled down to the last molecule, it was irrevocably simple.

I need a drink.

And the thing about despair is this; it taints everything. Like a super-virus, even the tiniest trace of despair sours perception. Everything is flat and empty and unenjoyable. Love depletes to a cold, infrequent ache when despair sets in. Despite what Scope's beloved poets were so fond of saying, despair was worse than hope. For one thing, hope was easier to get rid of.

And hope has so many nasty qualities. As a stimulant, it can be the emotional equivalent of nitroglycerine. And, like all explosive substances, what it leaves behind is a big, inglorious mess.

That was something Scorpinok had never learned. And that was why events from that point on happened as they did. As a result of entering that particular bar that particular evening, Scorpinok was going to die. Had he known this as he'd entered the bar, the future would not have changed, but it would have been a bit less disappointing.

The first thing he saw upon entering the bar was the barman. The first thing anyone noticed upon entering Cybertronian bars was the barman.

It had been discovered some time ago that both Autobots and Decepticons made lousy barman. Which was why the majority of the planet's drinking houses were manned by creatures from other worlds. The one here was small, equipped with gills and a single, luminous eye in his/her neck.

He sat, ordered (slag, but Scope was going to be ticked at him for this), and sat for the next five minutes in total silence. A dimly glowing cube was placed before him, a splotch of colour in the far dimmer world of one of the sector's more depressing bars.

"This is really quite dreadful."

The voice was smooth, articulated and ever-so-slightly scholarly. It took Scorpinok a moment to realize that it was addressing him.

This was not his fault. Few people over the last few hundred years had bothered saying anything to him, beyond demanding payment for some part or other used in one of his little toys, and the occasional grunt from his living companion.

Slowly, because old habits die hard and you can't tell Maximal/Autobot from Predacon/Decepticon by voice alone, he turned. To his left sat his addresser, reclining lazily upon the inadequate bar stool. He sat as Scorpinok imagined royalty would sit in a place as morbidly depressing as a Sector 19 bar; as though the entire place was not worth his notice.

"Ah, so you are alive. Good, good", commented his new arrival, and flashed him a smile. It was just a little bit odd, the lips shifting upwards to reveal a line of perfectly flat, perfectly white taste detectors. Off-set by the energon cube, dark purple gleamed along side them. Scorpinok had never seen anyone smile like that in his life.

"Uh…yeah", he muttered.

The apparition smirked, in such a way that dispelled all fears as to his faction. If he was a Maximal, Scorpinok was a sock.

"As I was saying", it continued, "something really must be done. I know the Sectors f tend to rank alongside the Maximals' less, shall we stay, carefully attended efforts, but even for their standards, it's shocking. I don't believe I've seen a single decent information hub since arriving. No, no, it simply won't do. Something must be done."

Scorpinok stared. This was, in a Predacon-infested Sector, suicide talk. The mech turned to him and smiled again.

"Don't you hate it when people say that?" he went on, vocals now toned down with an odd-sounding bitter amusement. "'Something must be done', and then nobody does anything."

"Yeah, well. 's because they're too stupid, I guess. Too…too weak. And it's not like it can be done, anyway."

He did hate it when people said that. He'd never said it, mainly because he'd known that others wouldn't do anything, and he couldn't. He found himself wandering why that hadn't been the reason he'd given.

As his mind struggled top keep up, his optic band took in the details. They were difficult to make out in the gloom, but the apparition's body seemed to pick up every inch of light there was to be had. What Scorpinok could make out was; tall. Wide at the top, but nowhere else. Slender, almost. Oddly few defining structural anomalies, four limbs, wingless, purely functional armour. Primus only knew what his alt-mode was, some kind of sleek hover-jet thing, maybe. Red optics, purple shell. Nothing in itself remarkable, but that smile…

"'Not like it can be done anyway'", repeated the apparition. Something in his voice (low, smooth, reflective) made an ember of something uncomfortably like shame flicker in the dead furnace of the smaller Predacon's inner mainframe.

"Hmm. Well. Your name, if I might ask?"

This time Scorpinok did start. The last time someone had actually bothered to ask for his name in casual conversation was…was…

Krell, has anyone ever done that?

He was sure they had. But the distracting presence next to him was making things difficult to recall. Odd, considering the untouched low-grade before him…

He noticed that the other hadn't downed his cube either. He noticed that the other didn't even have a cube.

"Scorpinok", he said, raising his head to formally greet his apparent guest with a small nod. How long had it been since he'd last done that, he wondered.

He actually managed a chuckle (again, the first in ages) at the blink. "Robbed the dead. Y'know, Commander Scorpinok? Decepticon war hero? I named myself after him."

Because his old name just hadn't fit anymore. The new one didn't, either, but he hated the thought of it just being forgotten, so horribly easily. The apparition smiled again.

"Ah", he purred, "what a coincidence."