Title: Escapegoat
Rating: PG
Fandom : Transformers IDW
Author: hellkitty
Prompt: Comfort
Author Note/Warning: Spoilers through MTMTE 17.


The shuttle's door clanged home behind him, ringing through him as a final, impermeable barrier between the life he’d wanted, the life he’d known…and what lay before him now. No going back. Not now, not ever.
It had been...harder and easier than he'd thought, a weird contradiction. He hadn't lied. He thought he might have to, at first, which would have tasted like wet rust in his mouth, but Rodimus had taken his simple statement of responsibility and done the rest.

All Drift had done was to fail to correct him.

It was the smallest and biggest failure of his life, nerve-trembling and fluttery. But someone had to be blamed, someone was wrong, and Chromedome? He'd lost too much in this already. Drift knew only that he didn't know enough how bad it would hurt to lose a conjunx endura--that fleeting glimpse he had, some nights, when he chased recharge, of what he might have had, what had been offered in Crystal City. He'd lost Wing, and all of that, before the flower had even budded. And that was a heavy enough burden, a weight made of shards of regret, gouging him when he moved.

Chromedome needed others. He always had; he’d always found someone to belong to, to need and be needed by. There was hope for him.

There was no hope for Drift, not anymore. And he didn't want hope, didn't deserve it. The fact that Rodimus hadn't questioned the story showed him that in stark, almost optic-scorching relief. He'd seen the hurt and betrayal in Rodimus's gaze, which hurt far worse than tearing off his Autobrand. But under that, he'd seen resentment--how dare you? how dare you do this to me? --rejections far deeper than the faction brand. One was a symbol that was almost hollow of meaning, the other was someone he thought he knew, someone he thought knew him...discarding him.

It hurt worse to leave the Autobots than he'd thought. He thought it would be like leaving Turmoil, that his sense that he'd done something right and good would insulate him. It had been arrogance then, but it had protected him. It wasn't arrogance now, and it protected him from nothing.

They were so quick to turn on him, so quick to find blame. They'd never really accepted him, not truly.
Then again, had he really accepted himself?

He bowed his head, moving through the narrow aisle of the shuttle, the walls stacked with crates of supplies: if nothing else, the Autobots casting him out could not be accused of stinginess. Maybe he’d hidden the truth, because if truth and totality were known, he'd come up short, be found wanting, be revealed to be nothing more than he was all those centuries ago down in the gutters: an addict, a whore, a useless spark.
Everything he'd ever done had been an attempt to stop being that, to cover that up with action. Running, training, killing, fighting. Always moving.

But now, as he settled behind the ship's controls...it felt empty. Here was the impetus to move, the means, and he had......no idea where to go. No direction. Movement for the sake of movement had always been enough before, to be doing, making things happen, going, as though sitting still were corroding.

He had the whole universe before him. He could go anywhere, and find places where they didn't know him, his ignominy, and didn't know Cybertronians and didn't know...anything. He could be what he was--nothing. He could make himself anew. Or try to.

He cycled a vent of air, less to steady than to delay the moment where he'd have to make that choice. He'd thought all the choices would cascade together, gaining momentum, and he'd know what to do, cleanly and surely. And it had worked until it had gotten him here.

Words failed. Ideas failed. Hope failed.

Ratchet's face flashed in his vision, that same--almost entirely identical--look of frustration and concern he'd given him back in Rodion, in the clinic. He'd been a nobody then, unknown. He was a nobody now, but known. And there was no rejection either time, no willingness to accept the surface. There was--there'd always been--that staunch, stubborn faith that there was something underneath, something valuable. He'd seen it. Wing had seen it.

Why couldn't Drift see it himself?

It had been a kind of mute agony, wanting to explain, wanting SOMEONE to believe not-the-absolute-worst of
him, and he'd wavered there, throat thick with pain, tempted to spill everything.

But he'd seen, and been seen, and that hard tangle of words clogging his vocalizer had lost its brutal edges, because Ratchet believed, even without words, even without explanation. He hadn't condoned, but he'd seen and continued to see, not looking away until the shuttle's door had cut between them, bearing the amputating pain of the final separation.

The console before him blinked, in the passive but impatient ways pure machines did, wanting input, direction, a vector. Wanting purpose.

He envied it—the shuttle’s ability to ask, to expect an answer. He’d asked, so many times, in those voids of night, until he’d felt half-mad from isolation and the busy ship seemed hollow and empty, even as it thrummed around him.

Space hummed around him now, vast and cold and the only warmth seemed to be from that touch on his arm, that place Ratchet’s hand had cupped under his spaulder, lifting him up.

It hurt to have someone believe in you when you didn’t believe in yourself, and Drift knew, sitting here, that as tempting as it might be to let himself live up to his name, cut the engines, and just drift into a mote of nothingness, lost in the sea of cosmic ions, that he couldn’t. He couldn’t let himself fade, he couldn’t bear to see that last spark of faith and belief in him gutter out.

He nearly groaned, his entire being protesting as he reached for the astrogation charts, to find what was known, and what was unknown, and maybe, out there, in some distant grid, find himself.