Today, I muse about Bad Ending Drift/Nemesis
Thinking about a dramatic scene of all the autobots captured and about to be taken away for individual processing, and Optimus grabs Drift from the line up. Got his hole servo wrapped around his arm as he drags him off in the direction of Quintessa's grand atrium. He's without his swords or any weapons, so he can only uselessly pull and hit him in an effort to free himself, but Optimus doesn't even look back at him. Not even when Drift starts to plead with him that it needn't be this way. Just keeps walking and forcing Drift along.
"This one?" She doesn't look like she approves. The way she hovers down to his level, seized by both of his arms in Optimus's servos and forced to stand still, she looks like she's examining a specimen, not a mech. She draws a single hand across his cheek in contemplation, and Drift can feel her powers fizzling at his metal.
Drift tries to lean his head back and escape her touch, but he only bumps into Optimus' chest, knelt down behind him, holding him for what's about to happen.
"Yes." Optimus' voice rumbles, and Drift shakes his head.
"No. No no no, don't do this!" But she's already taking his face, forcing him to look back at her with her powers, and burning her red brand across his optics. She slowly rewrites everything he's known. Whatever he'd felt before, whatever thoughts that were his own, she takes and warps it into something of much more use to her. A loyal lapdog to her Prime, something to keep Nemesis occupied while not cleaving heretics in two.
And thus Drift is erased, and Deadlock is created to fill his empty shell.
(Because unless there was an obscure bit of material I somehow have not read, Drift never actually had the name of Deadlock in the movie verse, even as a Decepticon. He was still referred to as Drift in his background story with Lockdown and Knucklehead.)
