Title: The Room
Fandom: Transformers (IDW)
Characters: Dai Atlas, Axe
Rating: PG-13
Length: 700
Content notes: Spoilers for RID 17
Summary: Dai Atlas has too much time to think after his injury
Prompt: Old friends



Dai Atlas was so far gone on sensor blocks that it didn't hit him for far too long how quiet it was. A Senator, attacked in his own quarters: his medibay suite should have been crawling with Triorian Guard, investigators hassling him with questions he had to strain his memory processors to answer.

But there was only the sole guard, a hazy silhouette through the entry suite's door, silent and still. He was still protected, at least: the world hadn't gone so far beyond his understanding. Time seemed to stretch, warp around Dai Atlas, slow, eddying pools of being, and the unmoving guard didn't seem to help, his very stillness making time appear dead.

His own chronometer was offline; there was no chrono in the room, only the steady, slow beep of some monitor he was attached to, whose regular tone began to work like a kind of torture, a regular executioner’s step going nowhere.

The place smelled, too, the acrid reek of sterility, and the strange mustiness of old pain, something trying too hard. It seemed to fill him, with its germless, too-clean smell, until he seemed to float, unsteadily, on it, like a leaf in an unsteady drain, never quite being pulled under.

He couldn't abide not knowing. He couldn't bear the gulf of information between him and what seemed like the real world. He felt like part of a cyst, closed off, hard, and unhealthy, and his mind, with nothing new to process, no news to chew on, began devouring itself instead, until he felt himself start to unravel, break apart.

Memory was his enemy, it seemed, diaphanous and taunting. Except that last, brutally vivid moment, the purple shape, the raised gun, all the horror of betrayal, the realization of danger too late.

Dai Atlas groaned, a sound less of physical pain than spiritual, a lament of solitude, of isolation. He wasn't in so much pain--the sensor block took care of that--but it was a groan of distress, of protest wrung from his vocalizer by too much time and thought.

The silhouette turned, the door whispering aside a moment later. "Senator?" The voice was pitched low and cautious, half guilty, as though expecting reprimand.

"What's happened?" His own voice sounded thick and rusty to him, as though the shapes of the words were rough-hewn.

The guard neared, and Dai Atlas could recognize the trefoil insignia of the Triorian Guard on his chassis. "I--it's....I'll get the duty captain." Something like a surrender to circumstance, something he didn't want to say himself. It was hardly comforting, and Dai Atlas nearly writhed in a kind of intellectual agony as the guard hustled off, all speed and duty, but Dai Atlas couldn't help but wish he'd stayed, he was simply that starved for contact that merely looking at another mech, something beyond the five sterile walls of unenameled metal, was a welcome relief.

It seemed like another small eternity before he heard movement, again, the heavy step of a large mech. Dai Atlas struggled to sit up, gathering strength, trying to project an air of command and dignity, despite the bare, exposed systems on his chassis.

"Captain Axe," the mech said, introducing himself, a bit of manners that Dai Atlas found strangely comforting. Dai Atlas had seen him before--he knew most of the Guard by sight. Almost every Senator did. The Guard were a sort of invisible presence, always there, always competent and never drawing attention to themselves. And he'd seen this Axe before, knew his name, but the Captain knew that many of the Senators didn't bother. "We regret that--"

"Just...what happened? What's going on?" He hated the urgency in his voice, clawing after facts.

"There was an attack on the Senate itself. The Grand Imperium. We've been trying to clean up after that." And 'clean up' sounded fairly literal, Dai Atlas thought. The Triorian Guard, hauling rubble. It seemed almost beyond thought. What was the world becoming?

"When." He felt a seed of worry in him, stirring to life.

"The, uh, the day after your assault," he said, after a check on his chrono. "Which we are working on solving, Senator."

No need, Dai Atlas almost said. There was no mystery there, who attacked him. Shockwave, his old friend. Or the thing that now called itself Shockwave. “This...attack seems more significant.”

“Any attempt on a Senator’s life is significant, sir,” Axe said. “We’ve just been, well, the Grand Imperium is in ruins.”

“And I was safe enough here. I understand.” He did. And he knew well enough how distressed he’d have been to know what was going on and be unable to help. It was bad enough in retrospect: hero of the Great War, laid up when he was needed. He could have done something.

Or could he have? He wouldn’t have known it was going to happen, and chances were, if he were honest, he’d just have ended up as another casualty.

And it struck him, suddenly, harder and hotter than the energon blast which had ripped through his body: that’s what Shockwave had intended--that he be out of the entire event, that he be safe.

Shockwave was gone, the one he knew, dead under the shadowplay, crippled under the empurata's mutilations. But still.

But still.

He sighed, and Axe moved forward, anxiously, as though he'd caused him pain. He hadn't: he'd merely brought it to the surface.

"Anyway," Axe said, almost gently. "if you're up to it, we could take a statement and get your investigation underway."

He nodded, weakly. What could he say? What was justice and truth? Shockwave had hurt him, but carefully, strategically, to protect him. He should have figured out by now that if the other mech had wanted him dead, h would be. He'd been kept alive for a reason, and even Shockwave wasn't far gone enough to think Dai Atlas would owe him a favor. No, it was a vestige of the Shockwave he'd know, trying to protect him, trying to save him, reaching out from his dark place to keep Dai Atlas in the light.

He could feel Axe waiting, with all the competent patience of a Triorian Guard captain. He had to say something. Something true, but just, something that would repay the strange favor.

Dai Atlas's hands fussed together, and he knew Axe would read it as discomfort, pain from his injury. It wasn't a lie: he simply didn't bother to correct it. "I'm sorry," he said, finally, slowly, the words true but twisting, shying from light. "I didn't recognize him."