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Chapter 30
Madness and Peril
She puts her data-pad down on Soundwave's desk, and then she stacks both hands on top of her data-pad and rests her forehelm on her topmost hand. What she really wants to do is scream. The urge has been building up in her over the past few days, pushing stronger and stronger against her will. She wants to scream and rip the walls apart and go… somewhere. She needs to.
She cycles cool air through her system, willing herself to stay calm, but it's hard.
"I am a Praxian," she reminds herself firmly. "We are a strong-"
'But we're not supposed to be inside ships forever!' some part of her screams silently back. Hadn't she known someone who... who got sick from being cooped up away from the sun? A Praxian? She can't remember. So much is muddled or missing. But she knows she needs to get some sunlight.
"I know…" she murmurs. If she had to stab someone (non-lethally, at least) to get into the sunshine and have the warm rays rest upon her wings again, she would. She's unsettled by this thought. She's not a violent bot; at least, she doesn't think she is. She hasn't been. Right?
She picks her helm up and clenches the armrests of the big chair she's sitting in. The indoors is driving her mad. Clinically mad. She has enough things to do to keep her from getting bored. Boredom isn't as issue. She can handle vast amounts of free time. She can find something to do. Or, she could if she were able to focus. She can barely focus anymore these days. Anything she tries to focus on, she gets distracted from by the leering enclosedness of the metal walls. She wants to attack them in self-defense.
"Soundwave…" she murmurs. "Soundwave, hurry up and come back. I'm going mad in here. I'm a Praxian. We don't…" How the frag did her ancestors stand working underground in mines? How? How? They came up and basked in the sunlight, they drank in the starlight, they didn't stay down there for months on end.
"What…?" Rumble asks in a groggy voice. He'd been napping in Soundwave's bed.
"When is Soundwave coming back?" she demands.
"For the millionth time," Rumble half-snaps, half-grumbles, "He doesn't know yet. I told you. He told you."
"He doesn't know anything!" She kicks at the desk and sends the chair, herself still in it, rolling across the room.
"Glitching Unicron," Rumble mutters. He climbs off of Soundwave's bed and looks at her.
She eyes him in return. "I didn't mean that," she grumbles, feeling like it's not entirely true. "I'm just… I'm just…"
"Freaking out again?" Rumble asks.
"Yeah…?" Probably. Everything feels wrong. More wrong than yesterday.
He tilts his helm. "Did you take your medication this morning?"
She feels more aggravated. "It muddles my processor and makes me drowsy," she says, scowling. She hates the feeling.
Rumble holds up both hands, palms skyward, and shifts them up and down as if he is weighing two items against each other.
"But it keeps you from freaking out," he says. "It's a pretty good trade off. You take the meds, you don't freak out."
"I just need to go outdoors, Rumble," she murmurs, slouching, wings digging against the back of Soundwave's chair. "I need sunlight. I need…" She doesn't know exactly what she needs, but she knows it isn't in this room.
"I know," Rumble says gently. His tone is gentle and coaxing as he goes on, "Soundwave will take you outside as soon as he gets back from the asteroids. He promised."
She sighs. He did promise. But she isn't sure if she can wait indefinitely. But she has to. There is no other way. Besides, there are a thousand worse situations she could be in. She reminds herself that. There are a thousand worse situations she could be in.
She gets down from the chair and walks over to the shelf where the energon dispenser and stuff are and where her meds are. She picks up the container, a little timed-release container that automatically dispenses one little medication tab into its secondary compartment each day. The primary compartment stores the meds, and the secondary compartment has a lid that flips open easily. It's a failsafe against a bot taking a second tab if they forget about taking one earlier.
There are two tabs inside the secondary compartment when she opens it, and that means she didn't take one yesterday. Which explains why she's feeling extra bothered today.
She sighs again and puts one of the tabs back into the primary compartment, and then she melts the other in her mouth.
'I shouldn't be doing this,' she thinks. 'I should be in the sunshine, talking to…' someone. She can't place who she wants to talk to. She eyes Rumble. She's fond of the little mech, but it isn't him. Someone taller than herself. Maybe someone with wings.
"You'll feel better soon," Rumble says, hoisting himself back onto Soundwave's bed.
"Yeah…" Her agreement is doubtful. She'll feel dull soon, instead of agitated. Dull counts as better, she supposes. But it shouldn't be that way.
She climbs onto the big bed and settles down beside Rumble. He's already halfway dozing. He's slept more and more the longer Soundwave has been gone, and that, he said, is normal.
She waits. The code from the medication tab runs. She feels calmer. The pressure of the walls trapping her eases. Her thoughts slow. She watches the stillness of the ceiling. Everything will be okay and line up tidily like the rivets along the panels. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight…
…
She stares at her data-pad the next day. She will take her meds after she finishes reading this medical article, she tells herself. She wants to focus on the article, and the meds make her sleepy, so she won't take them until after she reads the article. But she will take them. She doesn't want to. But she will. The article says that claustro-neurosis in Seekers and Praxians can be effectively treated only by getting them outdoors or into a larger space. Medications are only partially effective and are suitable only for short-term alleviation of symptoms.
"Soundwave needs to get his aft back here soon," she grumbles, tapping the data-pad on his desk. There are enough med tabs for his to be gone for a long time, so she can survive, but she won't be happy until she gets outdoors. She's not wired for this kind of situation. Literally. She frowns, trying to pin down a vague wisp of a memory. Had some Praxian she'd known developed a sort of malady after being out of sunlight too long? She frowns harder. Sunlight was needed. But too much sunlight…?
She can't remember, and her helm aches. She stops trying to remember. She focuses on the present.
That's troubling.
She focuses on the alternative.
"There are a thousand worse situations I could be in," she reminds herself, powering down the data-pad. She hasn't finished the article, she's only read about half of it, but the long words are so hard to process with the ceiling mutely screaming at her. The walls have been hissing, too, but that's a hallucination, she knows. Knowing doesn't make it stop, but it makes it less scary. They were hissing yesterday, too, a little.
She wanders over and takes the med tab and curls up on the bed with Rumble. The ceiling settles, the walls quiet. "There are a thousand worse situations I could be in," she murmurs. She watches the wall until she dozes off.
"There you are," the bot says, the one she'd been wanting to talk to earlier. The one just a bit taller than herself. The one with wings. His optics are very intense, the sort one might get lost in.
"Here I am," she answers, but she doesn't know where they are. He smiles. Their hands clasp and their finger twine. She can't think of what to say next. She looks around, and the motion wakes her up.
She sighs and stares at the wall again, wonders who the bot in her dream was. He's a recurring character in her dreams, among a few others. But she never catches anybody's names. Or, if she does, she can't remember them when she wakes up.
Shutting her optics, she wills herself to go back to sleep and dream. She'd like a dream about the beach and sunlight. Or a thunderstorm and rain. Anything outdoors, really. She knows she can't force sleep or dreams, though. It's futile to try. Everything feels futile.
'Relax,' she reminds herself. She cycles air and, and with her optics still closed, she counts the panels on the ceiling that she has memorized.
She dozes again.
She dreams again.
"Oh, hi, Prowl…" But she doesn't remember his name when she wakes up later.
…
It's another morning, and Rumble hasn't woken up yet, so she has no one to talk to. That's okay. She used to go extended periods of time without talking to anybody.
She shoves the desk with her pede to make Soundwave's chair spin, and she watches the room circle around her. She used to hide in much smaller places, back when she was transient. She would hide from everyone and then go out and scavenge when it was quiet, usually in the wee hours of the morning. Once she hid up in some air ducts and barely had any room to move, besides crawling forward or backward. That had been okay. She'd spent five hours there and then gotten out and moved on.
She makes the chair spin the other direction.
And there had been the time she'd been scavenging in an old bombed-out building and part of it had fallen on and around her. That had been so scary. She'd lain there a while, trapped, terrified, and conflicted. If she screamed for help, someone or something bad might come. If she tried to get out by herself, more debris might fall on her. She'd eventually decided to take her chances with the debris, wriggling and crawling and petitioning every deity she could think of. She'd eventually made it out into the open part of the building. Her frame had been shaking from the stress of the situation, and she'd collapsed on the floor with relief.
She lives in her memories for a while, getting an energon cube at some point and then returning to the chair to drink. She remembers her data-pad after a little while and thinks about trying to read more of the article she's been reading for the past couple days. Tilting her helm, she looks up and checks on the ceiling. The effects of the med tab she took yesterday will be wearing off soon, if not already. The ceiling will tell her if they have.
The lights flicker slightly, but ceiling says nothing.
Good.
She has a little time to read before the madness starts back in.
She reads, starting several pages before her last bookmark. Everything makes sense at first, but then words start to jumble as she gets close to the bookmark.
"Come on," she whispers. She wants to get through this article. She wants to know everything it says. She wants to find some answer to her problem, the claustro-neurosis. Placing the data-pad on the desk, she leans over it and places her finger below each word as she reads it, keeping her place with her finger like a sparkling just learning to read, like she did when she was little, like…
When she was little…
A thought bothers in a corner of her processor and distracts her. A vague thought. Something about… deception? False… falsehood? False memories. It was something about false memories. She drums her fingers and stares at the desk, trying to pull the thought out if its vague obscurity and into something more comprehensible.
"Soundwave… Soundwave…" she murmurs. He'd told her something? Maybe? The memory won't…
She sighs, trying to think of the word she's looking for. The memory is only a faint wisp, like a fragment of a dream when one remembers having dreamed but not what the dream was about.
Frustrating.
The walls grumble in agreement, and she nods.
Soundwave really needs to hurry up and get back here because, not only does she need him to take her into the sunshine, but she also has questions for him.
Also, doesn't someone need to sign a consent form in order to get memories blocked? And why doesn't she have a copy of it anywhere? Sure, the Autobots blocked out her subspace access when they captured her, so she doesn't have that storage anymore, but Soundwave gave her a subspace pocket where she keeps all her new things, including her new data-pad, and it should have a consent form, but it doesn't.
That's a tangent, and she doesn't know how she got on it. The ceiling doesn't know either, and it sulks. She hasn't been paying enough attention to it. She hasn't counted the rivets in it recently. It could have added some, and she wouldn't have noticed.
She stares up at it, knowing that the number of rivets shouldn't have changed.
Furtively, she looks over at the medication tabs. She doesn't want to take one yet. She has one more page to read if she wants to meet her goal for the day, and she wants to meet her goal.
Focus. Focus.
She goes back to reading. Finger pointing under each word, like a sparkling just learning how to read. Word by word, words connecting into phrases and clauses and…
The ceiling hisses. The walls pout, cranky.
She growls back at both of them and starts reading aloud, using her voice to silence them.
Finally, she finishes her page. She taps a bookmark into place and then powers down her data-pad. Time to start counting the rivets.
"No," she says. She doesn't want to, but she does want to. It's very irritating. "What if I throw stuff at your instead?" she asks. The ceiling is game. It's very high and possibly she won't be able to hit it. "We'll see."
Tucking her data-pad into her subspace pocket, she looks around for things to throw. Energon cubes. Some full, some empty, some halfway full, some less than halfway full. She keeps starting a cube and then forgetting to finish it before getting another one. They are everywhere.
She tosses one experimentally, just testing it, not aiming for the ceiling yet. It will do.
Eyeing the ceiling, she throws the cube up at it. The cube doesn't quite make contact, but it comes close.
"Ha!" she says to the ceiling. It won't be smug in a moment, she knows.
She makes a few more throws, and the third one hits the ceiling. She nods in satisfaction as the cube hits the floor.
She throws another cube and another and another. They hit the ceiling and drop to the floor. One hits the ceiling, flies into the wall, and then hits the floor. It's satisfying in a way. An odd way. She throws several more cubes, one at a time. Then she starts trying out different ways of throwing them. She starts trying to toss them in such a way that the hit the ceiling on with one of their flat sides, rather than an edge or corner. This is trickier. But she likes the challenge. It's nice to have a challenge that she can work at. Reading was too hard, but she can do this.
Some of the cubes bounce off the wall, some of them hit on their corners or at angles. She gets on to land squarely on the ceiling once, and drops so nicely from there that she grins. She tries again. Again. Some more.
One cube bounces and hits the door-release panel.
She gasps, startled, shocked, staring as the door slides open. The opening is as wide has her hand and as unsettling as the vacuum of outer space.
No!
She bolts from the chair and trips over a cube and falls to the floor. Frantically, she scrambles to regain her pedes.
She has to get that door closed immediately.
Why are there so many energon cubes in her way?!
She trips again, halfway to the door.
The door slides open farther, and she looks up, up, up.
Silver armor. Red optics. Bad vibe.
Panic and horror seize her, and her claustro-neurosis takes backseat. She has to survive, and she can't do that with claustro-neurosis driving.
"Well," says a deep voice, its owner moving into better view. He is so huge and has an arm-mounted cannon pointed nonchalantly in her general direction. "This is… a surprise."
"It really is," she says, picking herself up and willing herself to show no panic. There is something predatory about the curiosity glittering in his expression, and when he smiles, every visible tooth is a fang.
She smiles back inanely. "I was just working on my art project and accidentally hit the door release with one of my energon cubes," she explains, waving at the mess she has created on the floor. "I had no idea the door opened so easily." Play small and dumb; it's a trick she knows well.
"Art… project?" He shifts to lean in the doorway just slightly, blocking the door's path to the lock; he is still eyeing her, though his optics take the briefest detour around the room. Assessing, measuring.
"Yes," she says, looking around. There is really nowhere she can escape to if she needs. "It's hard to actually create a truly random design if you're making it with your own hand," she explains. "But, if you throw a bunch of stuff up into the air, it will come down … just wherever, and that will give you a more true random scattering of points to draw from."
The mech chuckles. "Oh, will it?" He sounds amused and intrigued. And a bit patronizing. Another red flag.
"Yep," she says. She has no idea how she'd come up with her explanation, but it seems true. "So that's what I was doing. I should get back to it." She looks at the cubes like she's really going to do something with them.
"I think you're bored out of your little processor," he says.
"No, I-"
"Of course you are," he says. "How did you get here, anyway?"
"Oh-" Somehow, she hadn't been expecting that question. But she has the answer. "Some of the mechs went on a secret mission and rescued me from the Autobots and brought me back to Soundwave."
"Rescued?" He seems partially skeptical and partially intrigued. She just wants him to leave.
She nods. "That's what I was told at least. Soundwave blocked my memories of it all because I was having nightmares."
He considers this for several excruciatingly long moments and then seems to accept it. "And how long has Soundwave been gone?" he asks after another moment.
She shrugs. "I dunno. Not that long." She rubs the back of her helm as if trying to remember. "He did tell me not to open the door while he was gone, though, so-"
"What excuse are you going to give him?"
She shrugs again. "No excuses. I'm just gonna tell him what happened."
"Right. The art project."
She nods and then looks contemplatively at the energon cubes, hoping that if she doesn't say anything he'll get bored and wander off. Predators do that sometimes. If there's better prey. She tilts her helm and then nudges one of the closer cubes with a pede. She rubs her chin and gives the cube a long look before nudging it a different direction.
"Are you artistically stuck?" the mech asks. She isn't watching him, but she hears a smirk in his tone.
"Nope." She nudges a different cube. "This is part of the process."
"It looks like nonsense, scrapling. Come get some fresh energon from the mess hall. It'll clear your senses," the mech says, and there's that patronizing undertone again.
"Oh, no," she says, shaking her helm. "I couldn't possibly. Soundwave said I wasn't to leave this room for any reason."
"Not even if the ship was going down?" the mech asks, seemingly curious. She thinks he is trying to toy with her, muddle her processor, which already doesn't need help getting muddled.
"It would really depend on the exact situation," she says. "I'd have to use my best judgment if that scenario were to arise."
"Aah, it would depend," the mech echoes. "He particularly doesn't want you roaming around, but why is that?"
"It just wouldn't be safe, you know," she says, shrugging. "I have blue optics, and that's what most Autobots have."
"You just need someone to go with you to look after you," the mech says, smiling knowingly.
'Glitch you and go away,' she thinks.
"Come with me," the mech says.
"I really can't," she says firmly.
He tilts his helm slightly, his optics contemplative. "You really don't know who I am, do you?" he says after several long moments.
She shakes her helm. "I don't know anybody beside Soundwave and the cassettes."
"You… don't know any Autobots?" He's watching her so closely. Does he think she should?
She shakes her helm again. "Soundwave blocked my memories of being captured and detained by them," she says. "So I suppose I wouldn't remember any of them."
"No, I suppose you wouldn't," the mech says after another contemplative moment. He seems pleased, a smirk revealing the fangs again. "Well. Allow me to introduce myself," he says next. "I am Lord Megatron." He bows. "Supreme leader of the Decepticons."
She bows in return, using the movement to conceal her expression as she wrestles down the new wave of panic that tries to sweep over her. Any other Decepticon could probably be intimidated or warned off by her using her connection to Soundwave, given Soundwave's status. But Megatron is above Soundwave. And a new edge of unease starts to press into her. Megatron seems so… not good, like a stalking predator rather than a great leader. It's something that doesn't seem right, on top of all the other things that seem off.
"I am honored to meet you," she manages to say.
"Now, come along."
"I really can't-"
"No one's going to harm you," Megatron says. She hears impatience edging into his tone. "Not while you're in my company, anyway. Stop being silly, and come along."
"But I don't know the key-code for the door to get back in," she says, focusing hard on sounding innocent and helpless rather than panicked, frantic, or stubborn.
Megatron's optics leave her for a second to flick toward the panel. "We can get it from Rumble."
Yikes, was he persistent.
"Or I can hack the panel from this side and retrieve it for you."
Oh, glitching frag. Then he would know the key-code, too.
She shrugs and moves toward where Rumble is sleeping on the bed. "Probably easiest to get it from Rumble, I guess," she says, keeping her tone carefree. She keeps the screaming completely internal. The walls are screeching silently, having been ignored for too long, and she wills herself to keep from looking up at the ominous leer of the ceiling. How many rivets-? No!
Focus.
She prods at Rumble and finally shakes him awake. He swears a little at being woken up.
"Hush it," she tells him, clamping at hand over his mouth as a precaution to his response when she tells him of the new development. "Megatron's here. He taking me to get some energon, and I need the key-code so I can get back in once we're done."
Rumble pushes her hand away and looks at the waiting Megatron.
"Soundwave don't want her roaming about the ship," he tells the giant mech.
"So I've heard," Megatron answers, his tone indulgent. "A prudent precaution, given her blue optics. But nobody will dare lay a finger on her in my presence. And she's needs a change of scene. She's a winger. They need more space than this, you know. Bound to go mad sooner or later. Sooner in this case, it appears."
Rumble's optics shift toward her, and, as her back is toward Megatron, she mouths, "he won't accept 'no.'"
Rumble pauses, weighing the problems to figure out which is going to be the smallest, and then he passes the digital code over to her. "…so fragged," he hisses so quietly that she almost doesn't catch the words.
"Thank you," she says, tone cheerful. She feels sick inside as she makes her way toward Megatron and the open door. She doesn't know if she'll be able to drink any energon once Megatron takes her to the mess hall. She doesn't know if the rivets in the ceiling will hold if she leaves. Everything might explode, rip into shreds. Everything feels wrong.
She falters.
"Now what?" Megatron wants to know.
"I guess these will still be here when I get back," she says, looking at all the energon cubes on the floor.
"Of course." Megatron is sounding indulgent again.
"Yeah," Rumble chimes in. "I'm not cleaning them up."
That's it. She has no more arguments left. She steps around and over cubes, and then she looks into the hallway. Megatron moves, and now he is so close that she can feel the heat that radiates from his massive frame.
"Here we go," he says. The talons of his fingers barely graze her wings as she moves into the hallway. There are so many more seams and rivets on the ceiling. Everything looms.
This, she thinks slowly, is one of those thousand situations that is worse than going mad in a confining room. Being loosed into an open hallway with a bad-vibe mech called Megatron is infinitely worse than hallucinating in a safely enclosed space.