Chapter Text
“Visitor for you!” The guard barked, glancing up from his data-pad.
He pressed his servo against the door’s access panel; the hydraulics shuddered, whooshing open with a rush of stirring air. The visitor on the other side stepped through.
Shockwave looked up at the prompting, antlers twitching wearily. The last visitor he’d had was Sentinel Prime some orbital cycles ago. He’d blustered hot air, spouting a barrage of repetitious and vile speech to the effect of you Decepticon scum make me sick, after which Shockwave had simply tuned him out. He had probably continued the tirade with escalating threats and demands for information, whereupon his colleague, Jazz, had cooled him off and made him walk away. They hadn’t been back since; perhaps they had (correctly) figured that Shockwave would be impossible to crack, or they had an easier method to extract information.
At any rate, this new visitor was smaller than those two. And alone. And familiar.
Hauntingly familiar. Shockwave’s head lifted further, optic shuttering small and flicking wide, trying to ensure it wasn’t some sort of illusion or hallucination.
It was Blurr coming through the door, framed by the brighter light from the hallway. His figure was unmistakable; narrow, sharp shoulders, distinct tear-drop helm and head crest, long and svelte waist, wheeled feet, light blue armor popping brightly against his dark and soft proto-metal. He was the very same picture that Shockwave recalled the last time they had met— or, rather, the last time he’d seen him alive.
Blurr paced in, sparing only a brief glance at the guard when he droned “thirty minutes, Blurr.” His attention was rigidly, raptly fixed on Shockwave; his pale face was expressionless, besides a hint of perturbation. There was an unhealthy pallor about his person. Something about the way he conducted himself was off; maybe it was the darkness in the hollows of his faceplate from dimmed optics, or the way he held himself like he wasn’t yet used to having such a broad range of motion.
Shockwave stared back at him, hardly daring to believe the apparition was real. The last time he saw that pale blue paint was in a crushed little cube, inert in his claws; those last precious moments had all been a fevered rush, the desperate scurrying of a rat trying not to be trapped.
Shockwave had been caught anyway.
“It was inevitable, I suppose,” Shockwave did not rise from the bench he was sitting on, no longer feeling the need to meet Blurr’s optics. “You coming here, to me. You want revenge.”
“No,” Blurr said, with uncharacteristic brevity. That, more so than anything, made Shockwave’s head tilt, drawing his attention back to the speedster. He drummed his claws against his thigh, trying to conjure a new reason why Blurr would decide to see him.
Agent Blurr, in his experience, had generally been a bitter and spiteful sort of creature. He was fast, and he knew it, and it frustrated him to the point of aggravation that everyone else was slow— too slow to think, too slow to act. He was vain, arrogant, and inconsiderate of others— rather like a lot of the Autobot high command, to be honest. Playacting at Longarm Prime hadn’t even been all that unfamiliar in terms of the company he was surrounded with; it was the same bitter politicking and egotistical sniping as the Decepticons.
“If it’s not revenge, then what is it that you want? Certainly it’s not a friendly chat.” His antlers twitched. “I would’ve thought you’d yet be… too fragile to see me. Physically, or…”
Blurr glanced at the guard, who seemed the steel sentry he was supposed to be. He hadn’t moved from his post when Blurr entered; Shockwave had only ever seen him shuffle along when his shift was over. He scarcely even blinked during his working joors. In truth, he was the most taciturn, imperturbable lump of proto-metal that Shockwave had ever seen. Only the occasional mumble and hateful glare had reassured Shockwave he was still alive during his daily vigil keeping watch.
Blurr opened his mouth, and he certainly wasn’t going for laconicism this time: “You can leave me alone with him, I’ve been cleared by Autobot High Command to view all prisoners at and below Alarm Five level, the classification which Shockwave is as I’m sure you very well know, and I have dealt with him before, and I’m not only fully qualified to handle this alone but also have the explicit permission of the acting Magnus and the acting Intelligence Director to do so, so if you would just be off—”
The guard drawled, “Not s’posed t’leave Shockwave unguarded. F’your safety.”
“My safety is perfectly assured, so though I thank you for your concern, I am a member of the Elite Guard regardless of my previous termination at Shockwave’s servos, and I am insisting that you leave, as a matter of fact I’m pulling my rank over you and I am ordering you to get lost!” Blurr sharply jerked down his chin to punctuate his command, folding his arms to further emphasize his point. When the guard didn’t immediately start moving, the tip of his pede began to sharply tap against the floor in a show of fluttering impatience.
“‘M not s’posed to—” The dullard began to repeat.
“GetoutofherebeforeIrunoutofpatienceandgotoyoursuperiorofficerandmakeittheirproblemtoo!” Blurr snapped, articulation gone just as his temper, and the guard threw him a little scowl.
“Thirty minutes,” he repeated, then turned and shuffled off. The door closed with a final-sounding rush of air, and Blurr turned back to Shockwave.
The Decepticon was anticipating accusatory shouting, but that was not what he received. Blurr paced up close, mere feet from the crackling barrier of energy between them.
“So this is what you really look like,” he said, as if that fact was not patently obvious to everyone in the room. His next words were considerably heavier. “Well, I’ll get the electrophant out of the room first, that seems like a good place to start: was there ever a Longarm?”
“Never one that you knew,” Shockwave answered. He was feeling charitable. Perhaps it was seeing an old ghost, or maybe it was that Blurr was something relatively familiar and somehow, despite his timing glitch, he was still less annoying than the other Autobots who deigned to visit. It may have even been simply that he had not spoken to anyone in decacycles. “He was a perfect amalgamate of old historical files: frame type, history, paint job, all sewn together piecemeal into a perfect harmony… with insider assistance from the former Elita-1 to generate an innocuous, perfect new Autobot.” His helm tilted, a generous pause lingering. “I note that question is irrelevant to the interests of Decepticon intelligence, Agent. Am I being too forward to assume it’s a sentimental query? The Autobot mind does tend toward them.”
Blurr’s hollow optics hardened, growing colder, more flinty. He did not answer, but Shockwave could see the wobble of one of his heel-struts, the desire to start tapping in place to express his boundless wellspring of energy.
“You are here for closure.” Shockwave tapped his claws against his thighs, feeling the damp pleasure of a puzzle solved. “Ah.”
“Yes, I suppose you could say that, in a manner of speaking,” Blurr conceded, helm shifting side to side, as though he’s precariously trying to keep it balanced on his neck. “It took me a very long time to get back my clearance to speak to you, do you have any idea how long you’ve been in here, any idea how long I’ve been online?”
Shockwave’s chronometers told him approximately one stellar cycle of confinement; the anniversary was due anytime now. The length of Blurr’s recovery time was likely similar. “Are these rhetorical questions?”
“My spark transplant into this new protoform shell after you crushed me was agonizing orbital cycles of physical and mental therapy, grueling pain as uncooperative protoform bonded to newly seeded spark,” Blurr’s anger was refreshing, almost. It was a light, pleasant thing, almost like a hot breeze on a cold day, compared to Sentinel Prime’s gritty, unpleasant blast furnace screaming. “I had to undergo manual memory recovery for almost every thought I’d ever had, except for one memory, do you know what that memory was, do you want to GUESS, Shockwave, do you—” he had gotten close enough to slam his hand on the wall adjacent to the force barrier. A lesser ‘bot might’ve jumped.
“You’re boring me, Autobot.” Shockwave waved a claw, dismissive, just to watch the agent’s face contort in further rage. “Did you have a point?”
“I remembered you crushing me to death over and over and over and over again, that was the only fragmentary engram I had for solar cycles until more deeply nested memories were recovered from my spark, I still can’t go in elevators or tight corridors anymore, I still attend therapy to try to get over my phobia of tight spaces, I still wake up in the middle of the recharge cycle cycling my fans and screaming because the walls are pressing in.”
It had been a rather traumatic end, Shockwave supposed, drily.
Really, he was mildly surprised he was being told all this. Blurr was freely giving him every single one of his needling weaknesses, fears that drove him from the berth at night and made him bound up a hundred flights of stairs instead of simply stepping aboard a simple pulley-lever system.
Somewhat wearily, he wondered if this tantrum would precede a beating after all.
“And?” Shockwave persisted. “Do you want my guilt? Do you want me to tell you I regret it? Do you want me to apologize?”
Blurr snarled at him. The questioning seemed to have crossed some sort of arbitrary line.
“I’m not here for you,” he spat. “The only reason anyone would be here for you is for information, and I don’t want your information, if anyone is going to get anything out of you, it’s going to be ripped directly from your hard drives, not through stupid, barbaric, trivial pain or circuitous and quite frankly tasteless interlocution . I never would’ve come here, jumped all those hoops, gone through therapy, continued living, just for— for a thing like you.”
Shockwave momentarily wasn’t certain what he was getting at, but it clicked into place.
“You’re here for Longarm,” he said. Once again, his neural net tingled with the pleasant comprehension of a tricky riddle. Blurr’s expression twitched, though to what particular meaning he could not say. The movement corroborated Shockwave’s suspicions, at least, and that gave him a placid feeling of satisfaction. “You are, aren’t you. And in what capacity? What closure do you need? To complain I didn’t give you enough holidays? To whine about your workload? I don’t see the point. It’s all so trivial, now, when Longarm is long gone. With the uncovery of the masquerade, he is dead, and worse, he never existed.”
Shockwave was surprised to see the genuine hurt in Blurr’s expression. For a moment, he thought he was misunderstanding the Autobot’s emotions. The look he wore was sharp, genuinely pained, and it did not enmesh with his expectations of how Blurr should be acting.
Shockwave liked to think that his predictions of the behaviors of others were always foundationally solid, highly accurate. There were minor variables that were subject to random change, to be sure, but when some great erratic unknown- entire motivations, actions, behaviors- presented itself to him it made him uncomfortable. He was a task manager, someone who positioned the pieces on the board and played with them properly, someone who clerked files for the pleasure of having them organized the way he liked, and also occasionally someone who squashed any rogue proteus variables with a bloody fervor so his carefully, meticulously planned predictions proceeded as he had designed.
More edgy, more goading, he continued, plumbing this unknown in a desire for relieving, sensical data: “What do you want, Autobot?”
“I want to see him again,” Blurr answered, optics flicking away. “Longarm.”
“And what do you get from that?” Shockwave pressed. It was not answered.
The Decepticon vented loudly from his heat exchangers, and rose from the bench. His form twisted, compressed, compacting; he tried to get everything exactly right, though it had been an age since he had taken this body. His limbs crunched down, every bit of him flattening and tightening to the absolutely smallest it could manage while still remaining physically operational. As an Autobot he was slow, clunky, dense, with a mild spirit, anemic constitution, dull colors evocative of a corpse, and a body perfectly suited to droll administrative tasks. Longarm was a good disguise, phlegmatic and plain in demeanor with only the barest glimpses of emotion shown to indicate that he was not completely dead, inside and out. This shell had worked flawlessly for his task.
Again, a bad variable was the response: Blurr was looking at him with an indescribable expression, one that could only be described as emotion. Positive or negative was hard to discern. Shockwave’s antlers could taste the scent of optic lubricant welling in the air, the herald of it watering against the agent’s optics.
He did not know the progenitor of this response, what had caused it. That annoyed Shockwave, and that annoyance set him on edge. His calculations did not say Blurr should be crying in anything but sheer unbridled rage, but he was not angry.
“Hello, Agent Blurr,” Shockwave ventured, in the soft undertone of Longarm, just to see what it would do to the agent.
Blurr’s faceplate blanched, optics winching wide as if he had seen a frightening revenant. He tripped over himself, wheels knocking against wheels, in an effort to get away and gain distance between them. Clear, oily tears escaped his optics, agitated by the sudden motion, and ran in tracks down his faceplate. He remained frozen in horror where he’d fallen on the floor.
“Agent, please,” Shockwave knelt to be closer to his level, tone soft and entreating. He held out his servos, trying not to forget the motions of the face- the face was always the hardest part, as Shockwave tended to either be completely stiff or entirely too emotive- as he gently pleaded: “Let me out of here, they torture me, they hurt me, they—”
Blurr scrambled to his pedes and fled with only a sharp, distressed whimper from his vocalizer, hammering his fisted servos against the door until the stolid guard opened it and galumphed his way back in. Shockwave languidly shifted his shape back to the Decepticon war frame, stretching out his compressed struts with a lovely crackle. He flexed his claws, slowly drawing the iris of his optic open and closed.
Blurr did not look back.
Too soon, perhaps, to have tried the begging boss routine. But there was a weakness there, one that could be picked at, exploited, used for personal gain. Escape seemed improbable, but a vulnerability was something. Any weak link might snap the whole chain.
He had not worked out the third presented puzzle, the nature of Blurr’s closure. He contented himself with the notion that he would. If that desire had been strong enough to call him from the grave, it would be strong enough to call him back here, too.