Ours?
The first fight ended, as these things always did, in paperwork. Terrorsaur couldn't say that he was surprised. The complete lack of surprise even damped the anger that had started the fight, and the shock of suddenly being buried in paper forms up to his neck certainly stopped him from punching Airazor again.
"Actually, I'd be more surprised if this hadn't happened," he said somewhat ruefully to her as he dug his way out. "If I have time to be irritated by you, they must be certain I have time to fill out another shuttle-load of worthless forms."
She'd offered to help, in that mockingly sweet manner Maximals usually did, and he responded in form-trained shorthand with a series of numbers, letters, and department categorizations. It took her two hours and forty minutes to track down the correct paper form--helpfully provided, out of order of course, with the rest of the slag dumped on the red Predacon--and figure out he'd referred her to a particularly messy way of dying. It took him another twenty minutes of her giggling at him to understand that he hadn't even realized he hadn't told her to go stuff a missile up her intake directly. Slag. Now he even THOUGHT in filing systems.
Oh, well. At least he didn't have to actually see the bureaucrats screwing with his afterlife now. Although he did envy Airazor her lack of annoying superiors. And not being dead. Yeah. He definitely envied that little fact.
"How exactly," he asked as they sat on opposite shoulders and watched Waspinator be bored on monitor duty, "do they decide when you've, er…moved on from being 'not dead'?" He wanted to ask where Tigatron was in the Matrix's grand scheme of making his afterlife miserable--that was the theory, anyway, as he couldn't think of any reason the Pit would have assigned him to work with one of the good guys--but didn't ask for fear of actually being told. The events of the two Maximals' non-death were weird enough. The current events in the Beast Wars were enough to make him wonder if it were possible to have scrambled neurocircuitry when dead, and he had the feeling that talking about Tigatron would only make things worse.
Airazor stopped poking Waspinator's left temple and leaned around the wasp's face to look at her counterpart. "I guess we'll be resurrected. Or whatever is holding us back will stop?" She reached for one of the piles of paper Terrorsaur had impaled on Waspinator's antenna (it kept them in order, sort of) and began paging through it. "You know, I don't think they included a form for resurrection in here…"
"Don't say that!" he hissed desperately, glancing around in justified paranoia as if Pit bureaucrats were lurking behind the monitors waiting for an excuse to make up more 'just in case we'll need this in your file at some point in eternity' paperwork to fling at him. It wasn't paranoia if they were really out to get him. Ye holy office furniture, but he'd developed a lovely twitch-and-flinch routine after the LAST time he'd thoughtlessly mentioned that there wasn't a form in the pile for dying in the past, on Earth, but in an alternate dimension. That had left him mired in filthy organic-pulp sheets for a solid week, and his hands STILL hurt from filling them out.
Airazor had laughed at him, much like she was now. But if he attacked her, he reminded himself for the umpteenth zillionth time, he'd have six reems of "Cause of Conflict" and "Justification of Force" forms to slog through and send back to the Office of Mortal Interactions, who would then complain and send them back because they hated his handwriting. Or just that he existed. That was probably more likely. Even Airazor had said his handwriting was passable, and the Maximal had every reason to dislike him. That whole Good Conscience/Bad Conscience fight, and all. And the fact that they were still from opposite factions, opposite afterlives, and opposite personalities.
Despite all that, they got on surprisingly well. Airazor theorized it was because they were both flyers, high-strung and competitive, but ultimately willing to work together because they disliked Megatron. Terrorsaur took the more realistic approach of, hey, he wasn't burning in the Pit, he wasn't dealing with endless lines and bureaucrats, and it was hard to really get worked up about a fight over somebody like Waspinator. Comparatively, this was a pretty good deal for a dead Predacon. It helped that Waspinator listened him screeching orders of mayhem in his audios a lot more frequently than he listened to Airazor's impassioned but rather repetitive pleas to give up a life of crime and join the Maximals. Honestly, he hoped Dinobot hadn't switched sides because of somebody like Airazor. It was really kind of embarrassing to think that Dinobot betrayed Megatron because of the lamest attempt at persuasion he'd ever had to listen to.
Not that the Predacons were all that great lately. Terrorsaur often couldn't believe that Waspinator considered the stuff that happened to be normal, but then, he hadn't been living in the Beast Wars since he'd died. Death put the kibosh on tolerating the strangeness of the living. "Primus, WHAT is THAT?!" he'd screamed the first day on the job, and Airazor had fallen off Waspinator's head and nearly inhaled Form #41.B15 as she laughed uncontrollably at his expression.
"That's Quickstrike," she managed to gasp out after removing pieces of paper from the back of her throat. "He's a fuzor."
He'd sputtered for a moment after that, trying to connect the obviously new word with the mix-mash of scorpion and snake swaggering around the room where Waspinator had reported for duty. "He has a head for a hand. Oh, slag, he's TALKING to the head-hand. It's another Megatron! Does he have the same 'yes/no' speech defect? No, no, he obviously has a new and sparklingly defective speech pattern. I can't understand a word he's blathering. Who programmed him, Tarantulas on a bender during a firefight? You'd think someone would have noticed that someone who talks to a body part isn't going very far in life. Oh, Matrix, shoot me now! He's flirting with Blackarachnia. The guy has a death wish, and it's not going to be a pretty way to go. Waspinator, make sure you set up cameras to catch his imminent demise in all its messy detail. What IS it with Megatron and recruiting anyone who wanders onto the ship?" He blinked as that last sentence came out and directed a narrow-eyed glare at Airazor's mirthful expression. "DON'T say a WORD."
She didn't, but only because she couldn't get any out around the grin splitting her face. Terrorsaur would have done more than sulk at her, but right then Megatron breezed into the room in all his shining, Transmetal glory. "ARGH. There is no justice in the universe. I die, and lumbering oafs take to the sky. I think there's some kind of saying involving rotund, pinkish mammals and feathered appendages that applies here." There was a sound like paperwork getting sucked into a jet engine on Waspinator's other shoulder, and Terrorsaur stared woefully as Megatron rollerskated around the room. "A land-bound dinosaur with a jet pack, who rolls around on silly little skates. The Predacon faction has no dignity left. I took it with me into the afterlife. Yes, that's the only answer to this situation."
Ignoring, of course, Airazor's assertion that the Predacons never had any dignity. Her non-death had obviously deranged her, the poor 'bot. So delicate, these Maximals. The fact that she'd taken to quoting, in a credibly recognizable squawk, his past attempts at saving his own traitorous aft from Megatron's wrath was beside the point. Now that he couldn't get pummeled by anyone but the dead--or not-quite dead--Terrorsaur had all the courage he needed to face wrath, Maximals, or Blackarachnia on a bad day. He cheered on any decision that would lead to entertainment. Being the Bad Conscience was an excellent job!
"You're a horrible, horrible person," Airazor said disapprovingly as Waspinator, once again, ended up in the CR Tank for missing his shift.
"Yes, yes I am." Terrorsaur smirked and folded his arms. "It's not my fault you're as convincing as a cleaning drone. 'Oh no, don't play cards with Quickstrike, Waspy!'" he mimicked in a high falsetto. He refused to admit this was absurd, being that Airazor's voice was often deeper than his own. "'Don't enjoy yourself while you're still alive or anything! Who knows, you may be Maximal enough to NOT DIE when you're supposed to.'"
She glared at him for that. "Touché."
He grinned back. After weeks of bickering back and forth, teasing the Maximal about her not-death had taken the sting out of his own death. He'd never imagined death as a bureaucracy, and he'd certainly never imagined the afterlife as a never-ending verbal fight over Waspinator, but all considered? This wasn't bad. Airazor had even taken a few swings of her own at him and apparently been ashamed of herself for starting the fights. At least, he'd never seen any paperwork or authority figure, so he assumed she guilted herself into apologizing on that one. Terrorsaur got stuck with describing his beast mode in six words or less on eighty thousand forms just for trying to shoot the goodie-goodie's slagging wing off. He really couldn't figure out why it mattered if the dead tried to kill each other, anyway, even if one of them wasn't quite dead yet.
It was probably something to do with the only the nice 'bots returning to the Matrix. Ugh. The Matrix could let them police their inner goodness themselves. The Pit stuck people like him with paperwork. He wondered if that made the inhabitants of the Pit higher maintenance than the Matrix. A barrage of strict rules, constant supervision, and forms describing every moment NOT under a superior's watch…what did the Matrix have?
"Like the best day of your life, every day, except even better," the Maximal answered promptly when he finally broke down and asked her what it was like.
Terrrorsaur eyed her askance. The best day of his life had been when he'd sabotaged his biggest rival's engines and sent him crashing sixty stories down into a group of surly menial workers back on Cybertron. While that had been great, he just couldn't forsee an eternity of that. Huh. Maybe that's why he hadn't gone to the Matrix. He decided not to ask anymore questions about what the Matrix was like. It seemed far more depressing than it was worth. Not that he wanted to go there, of course! He was Terrorsaur, evil Predacon! Evil Predacons went to the Pit. They didn't even WANT to go to the Matrix!
Well…
Maybe a little bit.
…sometimes.
"Poor Predacon," Airazor said as he sulked against the side of Waspinator's head. She reached down from her perch on the wasp's antenna and patted him on the top of his head affectionately. "Poor, lost spark."
"I have no idea," he gritted out, "what you're talking about." But he didn't pull away from the hand she left on his shoulder. It was just a stupid, empty gesture, he told himself. Typical Maximal gesture. She didn't mean it anymore than he needed it. She had no idea what it was like to just be starting an eternity in the Pit, and he wouldn't accept sympathy at all, much less from HER.
Fortunately, a distraction entered the room right then that prevented him from blowing up at her (and being buried in more penalty forms) just to regain some of his nonexistent dignity. Rampage gave them a thoroughly unnerved look while Waspinator's back was turned, but his expression turned to his more customary snarl when the wasp turned. "The tyrant bellowed?" the crab sneered.
Waspinator cringed. He wished Megatron would stop assigning him this. Sometimes he was really tempted to do what that tiny voice in his head urged and skip duty for the day. "Wazzpinator and crab-bot have patrol," he said weakly, and something like a cornered animal flashed in the immortal's emerald optics.
Terrorsaur and Airazor leaned forward to give Rampage identical, sweet smiles. The pterodactyl spoke in a friendly tone directly into the wasp's right audio, since he was conveniently next to it already. "Hey, Waspinator, what's the rush? Offer the 'bot a seat!"
"Patrol hazz not zztarted. Crab-bot zzit down?" Waspinator seemed terrified, but anyone watching would have thought him strangely, if foolishly, brave to offer the psychopath a seat.
On the same note, an observer would have found the crab's usual life-threatening scowl to clash with his behavior. Instead of looming over the wasp as he did with the other Predacons, Rampage stood as far away from him as the room allowed and glared at him from a distance. "NO." An observer might have also noticed the odd way Rampage's optics tracked the air over Waspinator's shoulders. Almost as if he saw something nobody else did. "Let's get this over with. You fly, and make sure you stay FAR above me. Or I'll crush you to a paste," he added, but a careful listener would have heard something in his voice. A bit desperate, perhaps?
"I don't think he likes us," Airazor pouted to Terrorsaur.
"That's okay. We'll be REALLY NICE to him when Waspinator's in the CR Tank today." The red Predacon smiled and smiled. "As I'm sure he will be. He's yet to get through a patrol with you intact, has he, 'crab-bot'?"
A very careful observer would have seen how Rampage disgusted expression covered a quick retreat from the room. The two ghostly sparks on Waspinator's shoulders did so observe, and laughed long and loudly at his retreating back. Waspinator, oblivious to such byplay, reluctantly trudged after his patrol partner, knowing only that Rampage tended to explode into rage around him for reasons unknown. He didn't know what it was about him, but the wasp could already predict that no matter how far above or behind he flew on this patrol, he'd spend time in the CR Tank recovering. He didn't think today would be any different.
Sure enough, not even halfway around the circuit of the base, a rousing rendition of 'Three Million Cubes of Energon on the Wall' as sung by Terrorsaur sent a missile speeding toward the unfortunate wasp. "Why doezz univerzze hate Wazzpinator?" Waspinator sighed right before it blew him apart.
And two freelance consciences turned Rampage into a twitchy paranoid for the rest of the day.
Later, much later, the hawk asked the pterodactyl, "Better than fighting?"
"Better than paperwork," he said back.
She couldn't say she was surprised.
.
.
This was going to be longer, but I decided this would be another trilogy of ficlets. Terrorsaur amuses me immensely, and I like the bureaucratic version of the afterlife. Rampage being able to see the dead was just a whim, but the thought of him having to deal with visible "voices in your head" was too good to pass up. Nobody else can see them, but he can't get rid of them...