Chapter Text
The public ceremony of dismissal leaves Drift equal parts ill with shame and utterly numb. Rodimus strips him of his rank, nominal as it was, and his status as an Autobot, for all that ever meant. He is booed all the way to the shuttle by grieving people with every right to be angry. He leaves the Lost Light with one bag, a tent, and the first aid kit Ratchet would not let him refuse.
Drift takes the shuttle to the nearest spaceport, and from there it’s just one ozone-tasting trip through its spacebridge before he’s back on Earth. He buys a second-hand car from a salesman who has a gun in his belt and picks a direction at random. He drives without any clear purpose in mind, every moment crawling by at half speed.
He keeps the radio off. No music, no audiocasts. No sound other than the engine and his own carefully measured breaths. He can still feel Ratchet’s touch on the palm of his hand and the sticky soreness of healing stitches beneath the dressings on his legs. He keeps seeing Rodimus’s gaze fixed squarely away from his own, duly committed to the lie.
One job. Drift had one job: see the quest through to the end. Make sure Rodimus was there to face whatever is still waiting at its end. One job, and what happened? He helped smuggle a serial killer onboard. A serial killer who got loose. He drives without seeing the road. It was a colossal, cold-blooded fuck-up, and a crew who trusted them (who trusted Rodimus, at least) paid for it with their lives. Exile’s too good for him. He drives until the car rolls to a graceful stop on a lonely road between two empty fields. He didn’t notice the tank running dry.
It's a half-hour walk to the nearest gravel driveway and another ten to reach the house at the end of it.
“You one of Sandy’s friends?” Asks the man who answers the door. He’s maybe forty or fifty, tanned and wrinkled by the sun.
Drift shakes his head. “Do you have any petrol?”
“Ohh.” The man gives a little laugh. “You been walking far?”
“Not far.”
Dimly Drift is aware he that should be making more of an effort to be nice. Big smile, clear aura, reformed man, at your service! But it doesn’t matter now. His mouth is very dry. He should ask for water, too, but he won't.
The man asks if Drift has any cash. “Cause I only got so much fuel, you know. And it ain’t cheap, since it all went off up north.”
Drift doesn’t know what all went off up north. He didn't think to withdraw any cash, either. “I could trade you something.”
The first aid kit’s a good one. Everything you’d need in an emergency. Eminently barterable. He could pick up a replacement for it as soon as he reached a population centre.
“I have hash in my car,” Drift says.
“…Well then. I’ll go get my keys.”
The man’s name, he says, is Kim, and his pick-up truck is white and dusty. “So what do you do?” he asks as they bump down the driveway.
“I kill people.”
Drift doesn’t know why he says it. He feels numb, disconnected. Like this might all be happening to somebody else. He could say anything at all, do anything, and none of it would matter.
“Must be good money in that,” Kim says.
Correct. Sometimes. Drift says nothing.
“I’m in canola,” Kim volunteers, after a while. “Less money in that.”
They drive in silence. After five minutes or so Kim opens his mouth again and Drift reflects on the best way to escape a moving vehicle.
“Kill anybody I’d know?”
Drift wonders if he’s dreaming.
“Civilians,” he says strengthlessly. He’s doing the dead-eyed monotone thing, he’s not supposed to do that anymore. “They didn’t deserve it.”
“Ah, yeah,” Kim says. “So how good’s this hash?”
“Great,” Drift says, for bartering’s sake, and ignores all further questions.
The trade is daylight robbery. It really is good hash, and Kim hasn’t got much fuel to give. Drift is assured that the top-up should get him to the nearest town, and while he trusts neither Kim nor the rattling car, he finds it hard to worry much. If he can’t drive he will walk. If he can’t walk he will crawl. Wherever he is going, he will get there somehow. If he is in fact going anywhere.
“Listen,” says Kim. “If you ever come back this way…” He lifts his brows and tilts his head, gesturing with a packet containing far too much of Drift’s good stuff.
“I won’t,” says Drift. He doesn’t know how he knows this, but he knows it for sure. “Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”
“Jesus. Alright.” Kim puts his hands into his pockets and steps back from the car. “See you round, then, guy I never saw.”
“Watch the stars while you smoke it. And don’t mix it with tobacco.”
With that, Drift drives off. They are the last words he says to anyone for the next two days.