[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Run rabbit run [Open]

[Deleted]

Episode 3 | Week 3 | Day 5 |

By the time Placebo made the arduous trek up from the vehicons' quarters to what might generously be called the common room, the blood on his hands was nearly dry.

He had sped the process along by wiping the excess off on his thighs, painting over the white finish with smears of black and electric blue. Blood and oil, mingling together to create a sort of amateur impressionist painting that might actually have been quite lovely to those without Cybertronian sensibilities. As things were, he commanded less the majesty of Van Gogh's Starry Night than he did the morbid allure of a walking crime-scene.

He hovered a moment just outside the open doorway, waiting for a lull in conversation before stepping out from behind the rough-cut stone and plastering on his best disarming smile. Not that he would be disarming much of anyone, looking as he did, but old habits and all that.

“Hey, everybody-”

His voice was a bit louder than he intended, his tone a touch too high and tight for his liking. He cleared his throat and tried again, the decorative finials atop his helm falling falling back by a slight, almost imperceptible degree.

“I've got sot some good news, and some not-so-good news.”

He gestured towards himself, as though everyone's eyes needed to be directed towards the fact he was covered in gore, as if it wasn't painfully obvious.

“The good news is, this isn't my blood.”

There was an artificial cheer in his voice, false and strained as his optics widened behind his visor, which did little to disguise how brightly his optics were burning.

“The bad news is I don't know whose it is, because he's dead and I never got his name.”

Rather than elaborate, Placebo fell silent, allowing a moment for the news to sink in - allowing himself a moment to drag a hand down the lower half of his face, his thumb smearing an ugly streak of blue across the corner of his too-tight smile.

"...If he had one."

[Coldwind]

Yet another joyless day on this wet, squishy planet, Coldwind thought.

Or, at the very least, that is what she thought when she woke up this morning. Of course, at the time, she was (mercifully) not yet acquainted with the walking sugary disaster now infesting Blackridge Hold. Less mercifully, she would get the opportunity to finally meet him in the most unusual of circumstances simply by being in the wrong place at the most terrible of times.

When Placebo walked into the room, covered in blood and gore, FINGERPAINTING with it, Coldwind was certainly caught in the moment. It took her a while to find any words, which was rather fortunate for Placebo, who was still in the middle of explaining himself—and doing a very poor job of it—because otherwise, she would've interrupted him about halfway through.

"...If he had one."

But once all was said and done, the burly Seeker landed a stern question at his feet.

"And do you?"

She inspected the freakish Decepticon from the very tip of his finals to the grime pooled at his pedes and still did not know what to make of him. Quite frankly, she was usually the one walking into rooms covered in blood and guts. To have the script flipped on her like this felt almost offensive.

[Deleted]

Of all the things Placebo could have been asked, he had not anticipated his name being one of them. In different circumstances, yes, it would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to ask, but given he was liberally painted in gore and had just revealed there was a corpse in the basement, he felt there were, perhaps, more pressing concerns in need of addressing at the moment.

Still, he took the question in stride, rocking back on his heels a bit as he forced himself to straighten, adopting a posture that bordered on the rigid side of perky.

"Oh, right, yes, hi, hello -"

He offered up a quick, perfunctory wave, his fingers shuffling back and forth as though drumming a staccato beat against the open air, before dipping his head a bit in a quick bow.

"I'm Dr. Bo."

There was a brief pause, a sudden widening of his optics as some horrifying realization dawned on him.

"-And I swear to God I did not mean for that to rhyme. Any other time, sure, rhymes are fun, I love a good rhyme, just not right after someone's been possibly-probably murdered."

He paused again, just to look Coldwind up and down, searching her face to see if this was something he needed to explain to her, or if she recognized that finding a dead body was something that should be taken with some degree of seriousness. It was one of those things that one would think would be obvious, something that would go without saying and require no elaboration, but Placebo knew better than to make assumptions. He had been with the Decepticons long enough to know that things like common sense and decency were, in fact, not as common as they were purported to be.

[Coldwind]

Common sense and decency...

They were, indeed, rather uncommon. Quite frankly, it only crossed Coldwind to ask about the incident after the good doctor was done introducing himself. Being covered in another's lifeblood did not seem at all strange to her, and she wouldn't have pursued that line of inquiry further—HAD only Placebo been built like a soldier, and that he was not.

Frankly, it felt like the responsible thing to ask, if just for the sake of getting the mech talking about anything besides rhymes.

"Good, so you do have a name. My name is Coldwind, I'm one of Starscream's lieutenants."

Her optics rolled in a particularly wide arc as she proceeded with the formalities.

"Now, are you going to explain what is going on, doctor? Or should I assume that you just botched a procedure?"

Not quite knowing Placebo, Coldwind only naturally assumed that he was a doctor of medicine. After all, she saw no need to even have any other kind of doctors at the base. Though it did strike her as odd that she hasn't seen him at the medbay with Knock Out or Flatline even once. Perhaps he was a new arrival?

[Deleted]

There was a truly fantastic amount of insight which could be gleaned from the derisive roll of Coldwind's optics, but circumstances being what they were, Placebo was in no mood to speculate on the lieutenant's apparent distaste for her commanding officer. There was an endless number of potentialities – perhaps she and Starscream were incompatible in terms of personality or ideology, perhaps an event (or series of events) diminished her opinion of the mech in any number of ways, or perhaps she was simply capable of basic cognition and was responding appropriately to noxious stimuli.

Whatever the case, it could wait to be thoroughly (over) analyzed at a later, more appropriate time – ie: after the unpleasant business with the gosh diddily ding dang corpse was dealt with.

Not that anyone else seemed to be in any hurry to actually address that particular situation. Which, yes, okay, alright, understandable – perfectly understandable. Being at war for thousands of years tended to desensitize people to things like death and corpses turning up all willy nilly, but still, it was the principle of the thing. Placebo very much would have liked it if anyone in the room could at least pretend the sudden death of one of their fellows was worrisome, or unusual, or really even the slightest bit upsetting or worthy of remark. It would have been nice, to see a little decency. It wouldn't have restored his faith in the theoretical goodness of their species at all – Primus knew that was never coming back - but it would have made him feel a little less foolish to be standing in the middle of room, wearing the evidence of someone else's death, and expecting it to matter to anyone at all.

Looking to Coldwind, Placebo's smile flattened, his teeth disappearing as his mouth pressed itself into a thin, awkward line – the sort of tight, perfunctory smile people offer to strangers as they pass on the street . Typically, when this sort of miscommunication occurred, he would have forced a self-conscious laugh and explain that he's not that kind of doctor, but this was not a typical situation and Placebo genuinely did not think he had it within himself to stick to the script and play the situation up as a cute little misunderstanding while spilled blood was dripping down his thigh and coagulating in his knee joint.

“Oh, no, no no. No, when I botch my job there's usually a much higher body count.” He said instead, before skipping straight ahead as though he hadn't said anything at all.

“I just came up from the Vehicons' quarters – while I was down there I noticed one of our pals in purple had done some interior decorating. With his interiors. All over the walls.”

He paused a moment as the memory knocked on the door of his mind's eye, imploring him to let it in. Placebo very deliberately ignored the knocking, drew his mental curtains closed, and retreated to another room to wait for the knocking to stop.

“Or, more likely, someone did it for him. I really couldn't tell you, I'm a psychiatrist not a crime scene analyst.”

At least not in the traditional sense – Primus knew most of the psyches he examined these days were crime scenes onto themselves.

[Coldwind]

Coldwind gave him an incredulous look.

"So what?" She asked in a voice one would usually reserve for shrugging off minor inconveniences. Perhaps that's what this was to her. She would certainly not be the first Cybertronian who decided fussing over gore and murder wasn't worth the effort. Surely, Placebo has seen his fair share of such patients. However, if only that'd been where Coldwind stopped and walked away, leaving the "doctor" (now in quotation marks within her mind) to his own devices.

But no, being Coldwind, the resident violence & bloodshed aficionado, she had to go the extra mile and open her scarred mouth to let go a few more untoward and dissonant comments.

"I don't see the problem. If the trooper was weak enough to get himself killed, he deserved no better."

She crossed her massive arms as though this was a poignant and wise thing to say, even going as far as offering the good "doctor" a sage nod. In more ways than one, what she'd just blurted out fit perfectly with a lot of bad stereotypes and assumptions people liked to make about the Decepticons, but as the rule of three would have it, she was not quite done being a larger-than-life caricature of her faction on this particular evening, and decided to spit another vile comment.

"I recommend you clean it up. Don't even know why we have a psychiatrist, so you might as well start doing something useful."

Harsh, classic abuse, though perhaps a form of projection as well if Placebo's mind was astute enough to catch it in the moment. Maybe Coldwind had some dreadful past experiences with the mech's fellow professionals, seeing as she clearly had more than one issue at any given time. Maybe she simply despised everyone and everything that ever tried to make her better, which coincidentally included a platoon psycho-analyst at one point who threatened to have her discharged after she seriously mangled one insolent gnat or the other.

His ribcage made a nice snapping sound, she remembered. Maybe this one's did too?

She let her mind wander, thinking about the sounds and textures of his innards, even as he stood there bloodied with those of another bot.

[Deleted]

Ah. So she was one of those.

Placebo would not go so far as to give Coldwind a specific diagnosis – he would never make such a judgment without a formal assessment – but he could acknowledge that her cold and callous disregard for the lives of her own comrades was characteristic of certain diagnostic criteria. Her callous-unemotional traits and explicit anti-social views strongly implied that she likely had a persistent pattern of anti-social behaviors reflecting her lack of regard for others, which -

No, no – none of that. He could speculate and develop a theoretical framework later on, at a more appropriate time, once he had a sufficient amount of data to work with. The last thing he needed to be doing was armchair diagnosing someone who was quite obviously suffering from malignant narcissism and – Oh, there he was, doing the thing he said he wasn't going to do. Heckity darn.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, Placebo did his best to re-focus, find his center, and smooth down his own ruffled feathers. He wasn't offended by Coldwind's assessment of him, nor her casual dismissal of his worth and utility (he would have had to value her opinion in order for it to carry any weight) but he was very much peeved by how proud she seemed to be of her own callous disregard – as though being cruel was some sort of achievement.

“I'm sorry.” He began, touching his fingertips together so that he could gesture towards Coldwind with his steepled hands.

“I'd like for us to have a more productive conversation, so going forward, please keep this in mind-”

Tilting his head to the side, Placebo looked up at Coldwind and flashed her a broad, winning smile that didn't meet his optics.

“I don't have feelings that you can hurt.”

One of the decorative finials on top of his head twitched, flicking back for the briefest of moments before returning to its rigid, upright posture.

“I don't have fears that you can exploit, or investments you can threaten. There is nothing you can say or do that will force me feel or react the way you want. You're welcome to try, of course, but I'm afraid it wouldn't be a very profitable use of your time."

[Coldwind]

Coldwind kept her feet steady, her optics open. She listened for what felt like ages. Words kept coming out of that twiggy little thing, more than she cared to remember. The moment they passed through the processor, they were gone from the memory. Frankly, she already felt the entire situation was too trivial to care about or memorize. Deaths happened, especially among Decepticons, ESPECIALLY among Decepticons when there were reasons to feud—things being what they were on Earth.

The incoherent ramblings of some half-mad psychoanalyst did not deter her. And yet—then, there was something; a small opportunity to turn this situation around and put Placebo's statement to the test.

Any normal, well-adjusted Decepticon bully (presuming such people existed) would take this as an opportunity to exit the conversation and go menace an easier, less bloody target for rations or some other form of compensation. Not Coldwind. Cruelty was the point. She did not care about anything but plain violence.

In absence of Autobots to mangle, that violence could be pointed damn near anywhere.

Here.

“I don't have feelings that you can hurt.”

"But you have a beating Spark. A pair of arms and legs, and two good optics," she grinned back on instinct in response to Placebo's smile, "My recommendation still stands. Do something useful. Clean up the blood."

She stepped closer, one heavy foot after another.

"Nobody cares about the trooper."

And again.

"Nobody cares about you."

Now, she was most definitely too close for comfort.

"Fade back into the background and counsel some sobbing coward or whatever it is you are good for—else I'll make you eat those words along with your optics."

Even if the threat of physical violence was not enough to phase someone oh-so-well-initiated into the art of mind and language as Placebo, he could at least very coherently understand from the tone of her gnarly voice that these were no idle words. He was face-to-face—perhaps not for the first time—with someone who has done those things and far worse before, and would do it again.

Right here, right now, given enough incentive.

[Deleted]

Oh, but this wasn't going to be a productive conversation at all, was it?

It wasn't surprising, nor was it particularly disappointing – Placebo would have first had to have some semblance of hope that Coldwind would conduct herself in a favorable way, and he wasn't so much of an optimist as to give her that much undeserved credit.

If anything, he was mildly impressed that she was demonstrating restraint by threatening him with her words and proximity, as opposed to doing away with the pleasantries entirely and simply jumping straight to the point. Perhaps there was hope for her yet – or perhaps she simply enjoyed the thrill of dressing someone down before beating them down, to literally add insult to injury. Judging by her body language, facial cues, and the blatant mockery in her voice, Placebo was inclined to believe the latter.

But that was still not a good enough reason for him to lose his smile.

Sure, Coldwind might have been looming over him like a dark omen, promises of harm spilling from her mouth -dark and grievous, like blood from a wound- but it was hardly the first time he found himself in such dire straights. He had found himself opposite countless dangerous mecha throughout his career, even before the war made it so that dangerous mecha were the only kind he ever treated. He would never have survived as long as he had, both in his profession and within the Decepticon ranks, if he were easily cowed by the threat of harm.

Still, there was a time in his life that Coldwind's intimidation tactics might have made him feel a bit worried for his safety. That time was long gone, but Placebo could still recognize Coldwind's talent for saying truly heinous things, even if they did not have their intended effect. They were all good lines, really – it was just poor luck that Coldwind happened to use them on someone who cared not a wink about his own wellbeing.

Tilting his head back so he could still maintain eye-contact with Coldwind despite her uncomfortably close distance, Placebo decided he really ought to make that little fact about himself more apparent, before she wasted any more of her material on him.

“I'm sorry, I should have been more clear. When I said I have no investments you can threaten, that includes bodily integrity.”

His voice was as chipper as could be, his smile bright and winning as he raised his hand with a little flourish. The plating along the top of his forearm shifted slightly, allowing a small nozzle to emerge from its housing at the base of his wrist. He did not look away from Coldwind as the nozzle hissed, releasing a thin but steady trickle of foam that burned its way down his raised arm. Pristine white plating bubbled and blistered, then crumbled and flaked, giving way to the horrible color of rust as the foam sloughed off at his elbow, leaving a puddle of acid fuming on the floor. Charred bits of mesh slowly dripped down the fissures that the foam left behind, creating small ripples in the puddle below.

All the while, his smile did not waver. He didn't flinch, or grit his teeth, or even blink. He simply stood there and stared, steadfast and steady, as though the agony in his arm was -at most- a mild inconvenience.

“I hope that clears things up.”

[Coldwind]

She called his bluff—even if he wasn't, in fact, bluffing. Everybody has a breaking point. Everybody. Especially fragile wise guys who test her patience. He smiled and nodded, and spoke in a chipper tone, and it was all so infuriating. The anger within swelled and bubbled to the surface. She didn't seem simply annoyed, she was downright fuming. Her posture changed, too, settling into a more aggressive display, shoulders rising, hands clenched into fists.

Cold, hard fists.

...that includes bodily integrity.

"Then I'll hold you to it, you little mind swab," she growled something fierce, and in the next moment, set upon Placebo. With a mighty left hook, she swung at the target directly ahead, seeing red. It did not matter who he was or what anybody above her in the pecking order thought of him. Not at the moment. Right now, he was just a weak, brittle insect. Something to squash, to tide her over until the next Autobot.

Besides, he talked back. Nobody talks back to Coldwind. They do as she says. Whatever happened next, he had it coming. But truthfully? She did not even need the justification. Coldwind was always looking for something new to punch or kick or butcher. Placebo was just in the way of the surging fist, the anger, right now, and would suffer dearly for it.

She wasn't going to kill him, of course. Starscream would be none too pleased, Coldwind reasoned. She just wanted to see Placebo hurt a little, make him understand that the best way to stay alive is to follow her "recommendations" and "suggestions." A few rounds with her was usually all it took to convince most Decepticons to grovel. Surely, that is how things worked here on Earth as well, yes? Surely, she had not encountered some sort of impossibly stoic outlier to the rules.

This is how the world worked. Before, now, always—forever. To think that there would be someone she couldn't make to beg was unthinkable—unconscionable.

[Deleted]

Oh, but things had gone rather spectacularly pear-shaped, hadn't they?

Placebo straighted a bit, his head tilting to the side in an owl-like fashion as he observed the shift in Coldwind's mood, as indicated by her adopting an aggressive, threatening posture. With her shoulders raised and hands balled into fists, she adopted a tone to match her violent mood, dark and derisive – mean, in layman's terms. Placebo could tell at a glance that things were going to quickly escalate towards violence - all the warning signs were there, flashing neon signs warning him to dodge out of the way before one of those powerful fists took his head off his shoulders.

Not that Placebo payed the warnings any mind. If he dodged out of the way, he would be robbing himself of the opportunity to test himself – to see if the real and present threat of death or egregious bodily harm might stir some sort of feeling within him, be it dread or relief or some other emotion. Any emotion.

Besides, he had just established his lack of concern for his own safety and well-being, and by dodging out of the way he would be making a liar of himself – and Placebo was rather fond of telling the truth, whenever possible. True, at times the truth was best omitted or softened, framed in a way more palatable to the mind and ego, but as a general rule, Placebo quite liked to be honest with other people. A person had to have their principles, after all, and honesty was one of the few Placebo could actively practice.

So no, dodging out of the way was out of the question. He didn't want to mislead Coldwind, lead her to the false conclusion that he could be swayed by the threat of harm – or that the threat of harm meant anything to him at all. Instead he would stand his ground, brows raising behind his visor in silent question, as though asking Coldwind if she truly felt this was the best course of action for her to take in the moment. It was a rather hasty decision, one that prompted Placebo to add Disinhibition to her tentative personality inventory, alongside Meanness and Boldness. He could only hope he remembered that mental note after Coldwind's fist caved his helm in, provided he survived.

Which he did, somehow.

For a few hopeful moments it didn't seem as though he would – there was a thunderous crash against the side of his helm, the sound deafening and the impact devastating. He could feel it rattle his teeth, send his head snapping to hard to the side that the cables in his neck were wrenched tight, creaking under the strain of keeping his head anchored to his body. It was quite something, that hit – the fact that she was still able to send him crashing to the floor even while holding back spoke to her impressive strength.

Not that Placebo had much appreciation for her kind of strength – especially not while he was laid out on the floor resetting his optics over and over, trying to blink away the static from his vision. It took him a moment to orient himself, what with his brain being a touch rattled and the pain in his head throbbing a distracting staccato beat, but after a few moments he was able to push himself up into an unsteady sitting position, one hand braced against the floor for balance while the other reached up to inspect the damage to his helm.

His fingers brushed over the scraped, dented metal, checking for leaks or cracks that might indicate a more serious problem than what his internal diagnostics were able to discern.

“....Oh, Big oof.” He said mildly, distractedly, his words slightly disjointed.

He reached further, tracing his fingers along one of his finials – it was bent slightly out of shape, though if that was from the initial blow or his fall, he couldn't be sure. Not that it really mattered to him either way.

Lifting his head, Placebo turned his gaze back to Coldwind. His heart-shaped visor was cracked, his right optic bloodshot. Two wide, too-bright optics stared up at her, one a soft pink, the other growing increasingly more purple as the lens filled with energon. He flashed his signature smile, a small little thing that grew gradually until it could scarcely fit on his face.

“You really shouldn't have done that.”