peacewithouttyranny | cyberformed Inbox

Hello! My name is Tailgate, and it's nice to meet you Soundwave.

So, now that we're best friends, how do you feel about big blue and purple boats?

[...

What the hell is this? Okay, first off:]

It is nice to meet you, Tailgate, but we are not best friends. I do not believe that is how friendship work, either.

And I have no particular feelings about 'big blue and purple boats' one way or another. Why do you ask?

I'm looking for a blind date for my good friend Riptide! Who is a great person and fun to be around.

[And Tailgate is asking literally anyone with a pulse.]

So how about it?

[He doesn't have enough social skills to know how to react to this offer. Even weirder that he's even considered for a blind date.]

I have no doubt that your friend is a fun person... I am not exactly a fun person to be around, however.

[Soundwave will receive a wrapped gift marked "To Soundwave, From Minimus Ambus - DO NOT OPEN UNTIL THE 25TH".

Inside is a personalized pen with its own padded case.]

[Oh? This is... VERY unexpected. But a pleasant surprise when he opened the gift on the 25th.

On that same day, Minimus will receive a 'thank you' letter from Soundwave, written with the very same pen and... a couple of festive energon cookies with it. He hasn't done something like this before...]

sometimes the silence says far more than words
like the waves breaking down on the shore
like our sparks breaking down in the night
and the memories we have recorded and cannot expunge
because sorrow is less painful than mindlessness,
and in the end,
it is still proof that we survived

I think I must have upset you when we met on the beach, and I didn't mean to.

I would like to tell you a story. It didn't happen to you. It happened to a person who was a great deal like you, and a person who was a great deal like the Ravage you knew, but it didn't happen to you, and it didn't happen to the Ravage whom you loved.

Long ago in Rodion there was a beastformer. She loved her beast form more than she loved her other form, because she didn't know the reason she felt all wrong in her other body was that she was a femme. She didn't know that was even a possibility. She had been sold for a lot of money to a Senator whom she hated, who paid a lot for her, because he knew that she had been designed not only to record and remember, but also to track and to kill and to spy and entrap.

They had told him also that she could dance and seduce, and when he didn't want her for anything else, she was still a beautiful toy, and he could tell himself that she wasn't a person, that she was a cold construct that took the shape of an animal, and all of these things that she did were just programming. Once he heard one of the poems she'd written, and he made her erase and expunge it, but she had the good sense not to let him know there were more.

Because of that she preferred to live in the Dead End, where she could be a cat and write poetry, and curl up in a ball and sleep by herself in a quiet place nobody bigger than her could get into, and nobody bothered her. Two of her creche-sibs, aviforms, ran away with her. They tried to make the slums a better, more beautiful place, although half the time the police destroyed what they made out of salvaged materials because they were opening up old abandoned buildings and letting people who had nothing come live in them.

Another young mech came down to the Dead End that summer and he was clearly outcast from a very wealthy house, because he didn't have the first idea how to survive. At first everyone thought he was killing himself with some kind of drug because he was always wandering, and even he couldn't tell you his name. But he knew this young femme's name and he called out to her, and she came, and he told her that he was lost, that he couldn't tell whose thoughts and dreams and feelings were his or somebody else's, but when she was around, everything became clear.

She understood this a little, because her optics were so sensitive that she didn't go out when the sun was too high in the sky, and because she could smell things that nobody else could smell, and because her sense of smell and taste and proprioception were all muddled up in each other, and when she danced, or fought, or stalked, or jumped, her body and spark became one and she felt like she was made of fire.

She taught him how she learned to tell things apart and she brought him into her home, even though her friends (especially the speedster with the painted face) all said that she was soft and he would get her killed. And after a while she began to love him more than she'd ever thought possible. But she was afraid of it, because she'd been a toy and a tool all her life.

Not long after that the Senator who had owned her found them and took her back. He decided that her friend would be useful as well, and he accused him of having deprived him of his property, and demanded that he work off his debt. The Senator said that if he would go and work on a mining colony far away, he would only have to work off the debt he incurred for the time he had had her, but if he wanted to take her with him, he would have to work off what she cost. And if they ever wanted to see her creche-sibs again, he would have to work off those debts, too.

Once the agreement was made, the Senator gave an order that this young mech be reformatted as a host-mech, and the femme and her sibs cut down into cassettes. Because the Senator resented her preference for her beast form, he mode-locked her in it before she was cut down. He told her that now she had chosen her own master, she would still have to obey him, and she would be coded to respond to his voice of command, because creatures like her were not meant to have choices.

Whatever it was that had been growing between this femme and her friend, it couldn't and didn't survive. He couldn't know, if he asked her for anything, whether she really wanted it, or was compelled to believe that she did. And she couldn't know, either. They had to give up on it.

After Megatron took them into the Conclave she lost her fear and began to take lovers, and she became one of the darlings of the Conclave; but she was never able to have the mech who had been the muse for her poetry.

They got their revenge. They turned her former master into a cassette, instead of letting him die with the other Senators.

But in the end, they parted ways. He gave her an order that she could not bear to fulfil, and she died before she could return to the homeland they had always wanted to build.

I think that you know a story very much like this. But it is not this story, and I would like to hear your story.

I am sorry if any of the things I said to you on the beach were hurtful. I was terrified that you were not him, and then, when my suspicion was confirmed...I was relieved. I am learning who I am when I don't belong to anyone but myself.

Megatron and I are going to be amicae, and he knows he cannot command me either; I have sworn never again to give my conscience into the keeping of another.

At the Constellation Ball, when I danced with my date--I didn't see Cybertron. I saw Sanctuary, as we intended it to be. I saw our people mining the asteroid belts, skimming the gas giants, building a home that was free and open in which nobody ever knew want or starvation or died of curable illness or treatable injuries. I saw Laserbeak flying between ships. I miss her so much. She always made me laugh. I saw Howlback walking free on the surface of the Station, and she looked as if she'd never been to Garrus-9.

I think it was an illusion. But it made me miss him so much. I would like to know if these were your dreams, too, and if they were, I hope that some of them, at least, came true.

I think I would like to be your friend. But to be your friend, I will need to get to know you. You are not the Soundwave I met when neither of us was yet a vorn old.

~Ravage

Edited 2022-01-07 10:45 (UTC)

[It's really a good thing this was in text. He read the whole thing, but once he reached the part where Ravage saw Sanctuary, bitterness and hurt filled his spark at the reminder of what happend to his dream.]

Your story is similar to my own history with Ravage.

I am not opposed to being your friend. You may be a different Ravage than the one I know, but that should not prevent that.

[As for Megatron, he choose to ignore that part also. It's Ravage's choice to be Megatron amicae, she will find that Soundwave won't stop her. He just want nothing to do with his or any other Megatrons here.]

Believe me...I understand.

I had wanted to be his conjunx endura, someday, when it was all over. I think he wanted the same but we did not speak of it. Telepathy and empathy are hard to live with sometimes, but if you do not say the words, you can pretend to live a lie when speaking the truth is too painful. I have no idea if that part was the same for you, and I'm not going to pry. I rather hope it wasn't. I wouldn't wish that pain on anyone, especially not someone who is as much like him as you are.

But after we met on the beach I realised that it would be better for both of us for me to write down the truth, and you to read it. I felt the weight of your emotions, and I'm sure you felt the weight of mine, and that was why I made that stupid speech. The thing is too big for us to talk about, or read in each other's minds, and neither of us is the person the other was able to be so intimate mentally with.

At first it hurt me to look at you. But you're not him and I'm not..him.

I remember some of the things we liked to do when we were just young, just friends, two people who still had the luxury of believing that we were disposable now and the people who'd known us before we were Ravage and Soundwave had forgot we existed.

Unfortunately stealing energon, salvaging materials, and breaking down locked doors and reconnecting the buildings to power and information and heat without getting caught, and painting the walls, and making forbidden music with secret messages in it, and dancing in four dimensions, aren't things we can really do on the R-2, and most of them don't need to be done. But maybe we could go for a walk, sometime.

[Conjunx Endura...? That's surprising to learn, but perhaps that explained why there was so much weight in her words in their brief interaction back on the beach. While they are undoubtedly close, he can't say he ever felt that way with his own Ravage, nor he to him... Unfortunately, he doesn't know what to do or say to ease her hurt.]

No, they do not need to be done. A walk is preferable.

I would find that agreeable.

My apologies if this was...unsettling. I have been told in the days since we last communicated that in some universes you are thought of as my mentor!

And a lot of things fell completely apart when he sent me away with instructions to kill my best friend if the worst thing turned out to be true.

But before they slaved my system to his, which made such thoughts impossible, we were two lost people in the Dead End who found one another, and taught each other how to survive.

Some would say I taught him more than he taught me, but...having once lived among the wealthy, he taught me a lot of things that others don't see. Like how to expect something better.

I appreciate your understanding of my perhaps excessive caution. It would be so easy to trust you with everything. You are so much like him. But you are not him. And I am still learning how to be just one person again.

Just yesterday I was doing security work and giving someone a good deal of hell for refusing to cooperate with my instructions on how to get out of the mess they were in, and it reminded me of all the times I had to yell at Rumble and Frenzy.

Did he--did your Ravage have to do that? =^^=

After we had been on Earth for a little while, they took to calling me Mom when they were irritated with me. I suppose they found something else to call your Ravage.

A walk would be very nice. We could go to the observation deck. Also, if you want to see what I saw on the dance floor, I'll share it, but...it also might upset you. Needlenose told me what happened since I wrote you before.

Needlenose is here. You probably know that.

You probably also know that he hates you.

It was an operational necessity, but he will never understand that.

Unless it didn't happen in your world, in which case you should tell him at once.

@)--`--,--

Did he love flowers?

I want to plant a garden here.

And now I'm going to stop rambling. I hope to hear from you sooner, but I understand if this is a lot to deal with, because it is, for me, too.

I mean. I'm happy for Ratchet and Drift. But I couldn't, at least not so soon and so easily. So dangerous, for a stranger to be given the keys that belonged to another.

But maybe it's easier for people who aren't used to the touch and texture of another mind against theirs.

Tailgate said I should get high with you. I told him you weren't the same person and he told me that shouldn't matter.

I hugged him and laughed, because.

Tailgate.

have u ever thought about how every time a character dies on a holo-series that u just feel bad for the actor who pretty much just got fired in front of u?

[... Fuck it. He'll humor this.]

No, I cannot say that I have, Misfire. And killing off a character doesn't necessarily mean they are fired.

In some holo-series, it is possible the actor may still play a role via flashbacks or prequels.

Edited (change some wordings) 2022-01-11 11:12 (UTC)

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