Ep0.5 - Jasper - Darby Residence - 'Tradeoff'

Fairwinds had narrowed her optics with a sigh when June had, inevitably, followed her and then, immediately, started talking. It had occurred to the tiny Decepticon that she could have killed the human with little effort at any point over the last week - since her systems had healed enough that the backlash from using her weaponry wouldn't short out her primaries. But she was still healing, and June wasn't doing her any real harm. Just being a pain in the aft, really, and living on the Nemesis was living with pains in the afts.

It was why she liked the awakened Eradicons so much. They liked movies and comics and Pokemon and trivial things that weren't The War, and currently June was her only source of that enjoyable stimulus. Blockbuster was the supplier of bribery as much as fuel and sancutary whilst she was stuck here...

At the direct question after the summary dismissal of everything she'd helpfully told the human so far, Fairwinds swivelled her helm back to meet eye-balls with optics. She cocked her head, clucking her glossa within the confines of her beak. No one had ever asked for anything like personal information about Megatron before - even if they were curious about the mech behind the warlord, they never outright said it.

She wasn't entirely sure how to answer that question. However, June had stipulated that she wanted details that the Autobots wouldn't be able to supply. And she could certainly do that.

"Master likes High Grade that hasn't gone through the last filter 'cause it tastes more like the stuff in Kaon," she finally replied, large optics blinking slowly as her processor worked. "He recharges on his back and gets up early. Um, he mostly paces when he's doing requisitions and reports, unless I'm watching a movie or playing a game or something, then he sits at his desk."

Her beak curled a little into a smile, and her spark throbbed with a beat of physical pain. "And Master always gives me the last bit of his High Grade cube, 'cause the dregs have settled and I like that bit the best."

And he had a sparkling the Tower murdered and I'll never be Nos but he keeps me in his quarters because I sort of remind him, and he waited two hundred years for a mech who'd never be pinned down into anything more than a frag until he was, and now they're alligned and your friends fragging tortured him and my Master both and now he's really alone and I wanna go home.

Helm dipped, Fairwinds shrugged at June and returned her optics to the television, though she wasn't watching the cartoon at this point. "There. Stuff about Lord Megatron that the Autoscrap don't know."

Fairwinds made a sound halfway between a snort and a whirr, still facing the television. "Bumblebee's one of the Last Sparked. Everyone knows that. Course I'm older. My manufacturing stamp's, like, way before his."

She flicked her wing mounts in a shrug, loudly draining the last of the jerry can before shivering from beak to tail as the last cloying chemicals slid over her olifactory sensors. "Probably can't date-stamp me because my processor's throttled. Confuses some, and it's not really common."

The cassette was going to leave it at that, but the cartoon had abruptly gone into an ad break, and Fairwinds hated adverts. Weird image sequences of dead machinery with fleshies smiling insipidly, and lots of repetitive slogans like propaganda thrust at the screen. On the Nemesis she'd have skipped it, but this was on now, so she'd have to wait with her human captor.

Shuffling around to sit facing June, Fairwinds read the arrangement of the human's face-meat as indicating she was perplexed. She cocked her head, wondering how to word a description when 'throttled' should have been enough. Just whilst the ads were on, anyway.

"Um, throttling's like locking your personality matrix to a certain developmental point. So, I should be all old and surly and boring by now, but instead I'm still like me." Her chassis plating flared out a little, her helm held a little higher with pride. "I did it on Cybertron, when the uprising was happening and Master took me on as his cassette."

Of the two questions asked, one of them was easy to answer. Fairwinds shuttered her optics and shook her helm rapidly, the thin plates of her helm crest flaring in a wave. "Master didn't tell me, nope. I did it all on my own. He found out doing mods for me and was a bit weird at first, but he said it was my right. to choose if that's what I wanted." His exact words had been closer to 'it's your right to be stupid if you want, I suppose', but that was neither here nor there in Fairwind's mind.

The second query, the why, was much harder to respond to. Throttling was a highly personal choice to make, and the motivations behind it even more so. It was considered rude to ask someone not of your cohort why, and Megatron himself had never asked the reason from her. She assumed that on some level, through the cassette-carrier link perhaps, that he simply understood.

Fairwinds wove her helm down to scratch at the underside of her jaw with a clawtip, dragging out the silence. When June contiinued to stare at her, waiting for an answer with phenomenal patience, she huffed with a wing-sag. "I liked me how I was, and he liked me how I was, and everyone was starting to get so depressed and angry with things. I didn't want to end up like that. I could still be the very best cassette in the universe ever for Master and keep my personality matrix more like a sparkling. I did it for both of us."

"Yeah. Not like the Autosaps, but Decepticons have cohorts too," Fairwinds muttered, gaze sliding to one side and wings tightening to her frame.

It bothered the cassette that June was surprised by all of this, and her plates curled with a rasp. Optics narrowed, she dropped her helm to glower petulently at the tarp. " See, you only listen to the Autobots, your friends, and you don't get anything other than how we're all the spawn of Unicron, and we don't care about anything or anyone, and that we're only fighting this war because we like obliterating our race. We're all mindless killers, and Master's just pointing us in the same direction. If that's right, I should have burned down your house with you and Jackson Darby in it by now."

A hot cycle of air and the tiny Cybertronian met June's wary stare once again. Tension bled out of her wing mounts, plates flattening in a show of wearied defeat. "But there's no reason and I don't want to. You're nice to me, and you're helping me, and I just want to get fixed enough to go home back to Master and my friends."

"Because Prime's still fighting - the war isn't over until that mech's greyed out. Not just because the Autobots will die off without their figurehead, but because it was Optimus who betrayed Master in the first place. And after all this time, after everything, he cant just let him walk away alive." Quietly, as if just conceiving the idea were an act of treachery, let alone vocalising it to a human, Fairwinds added: "Just like Prime wouldn't let Master live if, somehow, the Autobots got one over on us."

The cassette didn't allow any kind of silence to settle following that truth, lest her imagination formulate the image and, somehow, invite the reality. It wasn't a thought she could bear, and it was an ease and a comfort to pull her field back in with a huff and flashing optics.

"And it's pretty obvious why we're here," Fairwinds scoffed, wickedly sharp beak curling at the fleshling's apparent stupidity. Her vocaliser wasn't quite in it. "There're energon veins all over this planet. Master left orders to find a world we could colonise before he went looking for Dark Energon, and this was the best place that got scouted. None of your kind knew we were here until the Autobots showed up and started trying to kick us out."

Fairwinds bobbed her folded wings in a shrug, genuinely uncertain about the answer to that. "I dunno. Master thinks your species isn't worth bothering with, mostly. Like, it'd be like you going into a jungle and killing all the animals before you cut down all the trees. There's no point. It's a waste of time and ammo to pay attention to you."

She twisted and bent to get a talon into the underside of her beak, scratching at an itching weld with a shivering squint. "There are orders to stay under your radar, though, and not get noticed by the human populus if we can at all help it. Some of your weapons can do some real damage to us, and if we can take what we want without getting shot at, then yay for us."

The cassette pulled her foot away from her beak with a strip of duct-tape attached to her claws. Fairwinds batted it on the tarp a few times with a frown, trying to get it off her pede. "I dunno if Master ever plans to colonise by wiping out your weapon stocks, or just move on when we have all the energon and Prime's helm on a spike to somewhere else with fuel." The tape really wasn't coming off, even when Fairwinds began tugging at it with the tip of her beak, which tore it but nothing else. "What we're gonna do when the war's over is kinda - fraggit - fuzzy."