#mutiny's drabbles

[the-nemesis-of-destiny]

[the nature of fear]

Perhaps if he was raised to be a little more entitled, he might have taken pleasure in fear. He wasn't, though. He was raised to be competent. There was a difference. There was a sort of understanding that it was less entitlement that put him in his position, and more he was the most pure extension of Megatron. And that came with a long list of responsibilities and a future he didn't necessarily want.

In any case. He didn't generally take pleasure in fear. If anything, there was a sense of disappointment when faced with it. It was, well, boring. There was the sense of, "that's it? That's all it takes? Really?"

He was disappointed in Autobots and Decepticons alike. The rattle of plates shivering, the fear in their optics, stark, the way he could smell it. It only resulted in a sense of derision.

If you can't handle this, why are you even here?

Maybe he had a sort of skewed perspective on the matter. After all, he was raised at the knee of Megatron, and perhaps he didn't have a normal understanding of what instilled fear. His father was widely regarded as the most feared being in the galaxy. There were times his father terrified him, when he thought, especially when he was learning to fight, that he might lose his helm if he made one misstep.

He'd been very young when he was given his first command. He hadn't even finished growing, was maybe at his father's waist. He couldn't remember how old he was, but he was still very small, still visibly a sparkling. It was a resounding success, and he decimated the Autobot base he had been tasked with destroying, barely lost any of the bots under his command.

One of them had disobeyed his orders, nearly fragged the entire operation, and before he could actually frag it all, he had killed him on the spot. Ripped through his chassis and tore out his spark. It had only taken a second for that mech to crash to the ground, and he remembered the casing pieces shattering in his servo, dripping with energon.

He remembered he was stressed, and it felt like the most direct answer to the problem. It wasn't really about making a statement, he thought. He just had a bot slowing them down, arguing with his orders, and if the mission wasn't completed in a timely fashion, he would have to deal with his father when he got back. And the most effective way to shut someone up was to rip out their spark.

So, that's what he did.

He wasn't trying to instill fear, but things changed after that. Decepticons that previously simply watched themselves around him were deeply subservient, rushing to lick his pedes. Starscream stopped complaining about him. Soundwave... stared at him. Longer than normal. For a while after the event.

Her father's daughter.

He didn't think it would cause such a problem. His father never commented on it, didn't seem to care, but everyone else sure cared.

Is it normal for a sparkling to be like that?

Can we even call her a sparkling at this point? That's no sparkling.

Fear wasn't pleasurable to him unless he felt like he earned it. It wasn't exciting unless he was actively trying to make someone fear him, and it took a while to get it.

Fear was a tool, just as his father taught him. It took very specific circumstances to make it fun for him. Fear for the sake of fear was not fun. If you trembled before him, he was automatically annoyed enough just to off you on the spot so he didn't have to deal with the irritating sound of your shivering plates. Rattle, rattle, rattle.

The vast majority of Cybertronians were cowards. How they had managed such a long war was frankly beyond him. One of the great mysteries of the universe, he supposed.

[the-nemesis-of-destiny]

[when you speak of the cross, do you speak of its weight?]

His birth was somewhere between victory and awe. The sparkling of Megatron, the only one, destined to stand at his side, tall, proud, deadly. A future set in stone, that his father reminded him of with every strike that knocked him to the floor, every spar that nearly ended in him almost losing his head.

His father had learned how to fight like a gladiator. You would think that spoke of lethality. And that was true. But, the lethality was not found in his brutality, but his patience. Gladiators had to put on a show. If every opponent was killed on the spot, there was nothing for the crowd to savor.

His father used that to his advantage. There was an emphasis in patience. Every fight was a study in observation.

For all of Megatron's faults, you could never accuse him of not being methodical. Of being unintelligent. No, his father was a predator, and he was not an impulsive one. A persistence predator, keen on taking his time on understanding an opponent and figuring out every single quirk, every single tell, before he moved in for the kill.

People thought he relied on overwhelming strength. Brute forcing his way through every single problem. That wasn't true, not in the slightest. Not that his dad cared, not really. It benefited him to have that impression carved into the minds of Autobots.

His means of raising Mutiny was very similar to how he approached a fight. He would study him, making Mutiny wonder if he saw him with any affection at all sometimes. He nitpicked. Nothing was ever good enough. All of Mutiny's little quirks needed to be smoothed out, polished until he shone, the very image of Megatron, his legacy.

The longer it continued, the more the resentment grew until it was bubbling over.

He was his father's sparkling.

That was undeniable, because he could hate with just as much fervor as his father, and he could be just as cruel as his father.

Perhaps he might have considered hurting him by overthrowing him. But, he really wasn't sure if his father would care about that. It might even please him, and he would surely lose the first few times.

Eventually, though, he realized the best and most dramatic way to hurt him, to carve into his very spark his mark, to leave a lasting wound, was to deny him of what he wanted: his heir.

He didn't want Mutiny.

He wanted an heir.

Stripping away all the marks his father left on him, leaving the bare skeletal frame... Now, that was how he hurt him.

You will never get what you want.

That was the thing that drove Megatron insane. Never getting what he wanted. Locked in eternal war, never winning nor losing, trading blows back and forth in perpetuity.

So, he stripped away the marks his father left. Spite, hatred, scrubbing himself clean of him, leaving him behind, making him insignificant to the one person in the galaxy who should have been loyal to the very end.

Your ideals mean nothing to someone who refuses to care.

That's how he hurt him.

And that's what he did, because he could strip away every single correction made to form him more in his father's image, but the stamp of his father's cruelty would always linger, and he always did love a bit of poetic justice.

[the-nemesis-of-destiny]

[hands that hurt]

If you asked Mutiny why a medic? He'd probably give you some bullslag excuse of how everyone needs a medic, and no one is gonna be mad a medic is there.

Which was categorically untrue, of course. In general, Decepticons and Autobots alike would rather rip out their lines themselves and die than have a medic deal with something as basic as a broken strut.

In reality, he would hate to admit it, but there was some pathological need to do literally anything but what he was meant to do, in a way his dad couldn't outright argue with. The second his mandatory training as heir stopped once he was out of adolescence, he was learning the first thing he could about something that was not what the heir of the Decepticons was meant to be doing.

It wasn't just that, of course.

His circuits were crossed, in a weird, twisted way. The rush of combat just wasn't doing it for him anymore. Living any moment where a frag-up could take him out, and that was something Dad knew he needed to know, never underestimate a single damned bot, never think you're safe, never think your life is secure, be paranoid, always--

Anyways. It wasn't doing it for him, anymore.

He needed a different kind of rush, a different kind of pressure on him that wasn't what his whole life had been up until that point, and, to be fair, they cycled through medics a lot. The good ones that survived were always off doing who fraggin' knew what, and the substitutes were always getting their helms blasted off because they got delusions of grandeur. It was a sickness within the Decepticon cause, really. Delusional bots in excess.

He had a lot of teachers. Most of them he had to track down himself. Knockout barely qualified as a doctor, really, but he learned the most from him, surprisingly. At least, all the useful things for his life currently. Chop shop docs were in high demand. A modder was someone that could drift along the stars, and fit his transient lifestyle better than he'd like to admit. Actual docs generally ended up rooted in one colony or another.

Still. Being a chop shop doc was great and all, but sometimes he missed the rush of it. Battlefield medicine, putting a bot back together that could offline at any second, torn apart on some lone battlefield, missing half their limbs, holes in their chassis, and he would get weirdly giddy about it.

The rush of holding someone's spark in your hands.

The rush of putting something together for once, not taking it apart.

For all Megatron liked to wax about building something, he sure as hell didn't do much building. How many times could one bot possibly blow up the foundation to start fresh before they realized they were just wasting the explosives? He hit rock bottom and just kept going.

Sure, Dad built the Decepticons and all, built the cause, but that didn't mean much, now did it? You didn't call yourself a creator for building a weapon of mass destruction.

But, fixing bots that should have been left for dead?

Now, that was making something. They were never the same after that. It was practically just repurposing what was left of struts and a spark and a processor. Sometimes, the processor didn't even make it, not really. Just because they were 'recycled' didn't mean they weren't something he made with his own two servos.

He never shared those thoughts with his dad. It wasn't like the two of them could have a normal conversation, anyway. It was either a fight or Mutiny listening to a monologue, there towards the end. Nothing of substance. Just Dad with his ideas, Mutiny with his own, and...

Well. Sometimes, Mutiny felt like he was just lying to himself about his place in the galaxy.

Like all this chop shop doc slag was a joke. A great big joke, trying at being something he was never gonna be.

Whatever. Didn't matter how he felt about it. What mattered was he was doing it. If he said he wasn't something, he wasn't, and if he said he was, he was. That fraggin' simple.

He was never a philosopher.

Maybe that's why he couldn't be what his dad wanted him to be. Dad could plan all he wanted for a life after the war, but Mutiny knew better.

You could take a sparkling out of the war, but you were never going to take the war out of the sparkling.

He was always going to be a failure for an architect of a new dawn.

What did he tell you? The Decepticons all needed to be a little delusional as a requirement.

[the-nemesis-of-destiny]

More dreams.....📿

💤 Peek into my Character's Dreams 💤 📿 - A dream your character believes is prophetic

She was as if the pits opened and something that shouldn't exist crawled out of their depths. Beautiful, terrifying, a fell warning on the galaxy that even if Megatron died, his mark would never leave.

To see her on the battlefield was as if you were seeing a walking nightmare. Ripping mechs and femmes alike to shreds, drenched in energon, optics burning with an icy detachment as she wielded any weapon she could get her servos on like an extension of her body. Energon spilt from the piling corpses was soaking the ground, and still, she persisted, unwilling to stop, not until she was done, and then--

She spun around, and suddenly Mutiny was her, and the vibrosword in his hand was shoved through Megatron's chassis, impaling his spark at the root. His father stared down at him, and he stared back, and for, just a moment, his father's red optics flickered purple.

"So, this is your gratitude," Megatron said, and Mutiny woke with a start.

The ship was humming faintly, in orbit over the planet, and he blinked up at the ceiling.

... There was no sense in believing in prophecies. Prophecies were just what someone else told you to do with your life, told you you didn't have a choice. If he was going to let someone else make choices for him, he wouldn't be here now.

Time to head down planet side and get to work.

[the-nemesis-of-destiny]

🌈 - A dream from their childhood

💤 Peek into my Character's Dreams 💤

Mutiny climbed to his feet, wiping the energon off his derma with the back of his servo and spitting out a scrap piece of metal. Father stared down at him, red eyes glowing dangerously, and Mutiny's whole frame was aching from being thrown into the wall.

Was this how it went?

The thought spiraled up and dissipated, dismissed as unimportant, as Mutiny circled Father, spinning his short sword in a lazy circle.

"You're too old to still be biting," Father growled, and swung on Mutiny, the sword coming down, stopping millimeters from his head just as the ship's alarms began to blare. The ship shuddered, and Father's helm whipped around.

"Soundwave!" he thundered, and the training room flickered as Soundwave came up on the screen from the bridge. "What's happening?"

"Autobot surprise attack," Soundwave said as the feed sputtered, and Father picked up Mutiny, the ship shuddering again, and turned to him. "We are severely outnumbered and surrounded. Requesting backup, but it will take time."

"Meet me on this deck and prepare for possible evacuation with ---"

There was a buzzing, crackling sound, and Mutiny knew that was his name, so why did it sound so--

The image flickered again, and suddenly, Mutiny was in Soundwave's arms as the tall, terrifying mech sat down in the personal starfighter, the cockpit crammed with Mutiny in his lap. He fired up the engines in a detached, cool manner, and Mutiny said something, he couldn't hear his own voice, and Soundwave looked down at him in silence before he lifted off, the bay doors opening.

"Provide cover and draw fire," Soundwave ordered over the mic, and ten Seekers fired off, and the starfighter shot into the void of space. "We will return shortly, ---"

His voice crackled again, the name sounding off, unfamiliar to Mutiny, and Mutiny stared out into the vast expanse before him as Soundwave shot through the blockade, spinning and sending Mutiny's helm spinning with the conflicting G-forces. Flight frames swept down at them, firing, and Soundwave smoothly evaded each hit, blasting them out of the air and sending them spiraling to crash into their own ships. The nimble starfighter was shaking, making Mutiny feel sick, and Soundwave shot directly under the underbelly of a warship, effortlessly evading the battery cannons, and--

The scene shifted again, and Mutiny was falling, falling, falling, and wait, this didn't happen, they got out, made their escape, and rendezvoused a few weeks later, he's not supposed to be loose in space--

Mutiny woke with a gasp, optics powering on, and stared up at the ceiling of his berth.

Again.

Again, again, again.

He pounded the side of his helm, loud clanking filling the silence of the humming ship, and flipped over in his berth.

If he fell back into recharge again, surely he would get a normal dream, right?

[the-nemesis-of-destiny]

[i'll see you in your dreams]

Mutiny was... somewhere on the Nemesis, wandering through the halls, and there was a persistent scratching in the back of his processor, telling him something was wrong. Was he late for a lesson? He seemed small enough that he still had lessons... Dad was going to be upset...

Dad?

Who was Dad? It was only Father around here... Sire, maybe...

"You are late," came Soundwave's voice behind him, and he turned, looking up at the tall ex-gladiator, who was staring at him with that faceless mask. The TIC picked him up, but he didn't, at the same time. It felt wrong. "Your sire will be displeased."

"Well, he's always displeased," came the voice of a childish sparkling that didn't feel like him, and Soundwave turned his visor to stare at him, a long, judgmental silence spilling out between them. "Don't look at me like that."

"Soundwave: is not looking at you any particular way," Soundwave replied, and shifted him in his arms as he walked down the hall.

"He's so angry lately," Mutiny murmured, his digits curving a little more tightly around Soundwave's arm.

"You: should not add to his anger, then," Soundwave said, and Mutiny looked up at him.

"That's not how you talk," he accused. "Why aren't you saying my name?"

Soundwave looked back down at Mutiny, and the room felt... stifling, all of a sudden.

"You: have denied Soundwave the right to know your designation," Soundwave replied, cold, callused. "Soundwave: does not know the heir's name anymore."

Mutiny woke up with a painful ex-vent, nearly falling out of the berth, optics wide and panicked, and caught himself just in time before he pitched out all over the floor.

His paneling was rattling. He fumbled, grabbing a bottle of energon, and swallowed it down to moisten his dry intake, draining the whole thing in one go, before he swung out his pedes and placed them on the floor. His helm was buried in shaky servos, and he closed his optics.

The ship was humming, autopilot taking them to some backwoods colony, and he could feel a tremble all over his panels. His spark was pulsing, hop-skipping through cycles, and he took a moment to calm himself.

He always hated these dreams the most. Not nightmares, not exactly, just... pointed in a way that made him deeply uncomfortable, guilt worming into his circuits and making his spark act up. He could handle the dreams of battlefields and Dad's violence and anger, could handle the memories of Autobots trying to offline him, could handle all of it, but...

He couldn't handle dreams like this.

"Frag!" he screamed and threw the bottle across the room. It crashed against the wall and hit the floor, spinning around, and he got up. Cockpit time; he needed to figure out how long it would take to get to his destination. He couldn't even remember the damn colony's name.

He couldn't be alone with this fragged processor for this long.

Why did it have to be those dreams that triggered his fight or flight and not any of the others?

Frag.

He needed a drink to stop the tremors.

[the-nemesis-of-destiny]

"You know, sire," he spat out, as if the word 'sire' wasn't a title, a noun, but a slur of the most vile, debased, horrific nature, "you're going to die wondering if I ever loved you." Red optics in the dim of the cell lifted to bore into purple, purple, purple, they hadn't been purple last time. "Because fathers are supposed to say it first," he said, his voice changing to the utter softness only a blade under your chassis, jammed right in your spark casing, from someone you trusted could be. It was a dual accusation: you have never told me you love me. And you never will, will you?

[the-nemesis-of-destiny]

[the way we hurt each other]

It wasn't always terrible between Mutiny and his father, though he supposed that in and itself should have been the first sign there was something deeply, innately wrong with both of them.

He had never particularly longed for his father's affection. Memories as a sparkling were more muddled the younger the sparkling was, but he didn't recall a single moment he looked at his father's back and wished he'd look back at him. There wasn't a moment he wished for a gentle servo, a gentle word.

His father was as greedy as he was stingy. If Mutiny did well, it was simply to be expected, and not deserving of praise. Mutiny had to work to earn his regard, make his performance beyond any reasonable expectations to see those red optics gleam with approval. He heard 'well done' perhaps a handful of times in his entire existence.

He never criticized unnecessarily, but he clearly lined out where and how Mutiny went wrong, and never told him what he did well.

Mutiny always had thick plating.

He was born to entitlement. Entitlement to his father's legacy and all that entailed. And he was raised that way, but Mutiny couldn't outright say he was spoiled. Entitled, but not spoiled. It was a strange contradiction, but everything about their relationship was contradictory.

In any case, perhaps because Mutiny never felt the need to chase approval, to gain his father's love, never bothered to even ask about such futile concepts, he made his father greedy.

The resentment started to build when his father went from harsh and domineering to simply demanding, asking Mutiny to outdo every bot in the galaxy, living or dead. If Soundwave could get a mission completed in a cycle, he had to get it done in half a cycle. If Starscream needed ten Seekers to complete a raid, he needed five. Everything everyone delivered, he had to do it better. Because he was not just any bot. He was Megatron's sparkling.

When Mutiny started to form a personality that had just the slightest deviation from his father's, that's when things really went to the pits.

Mutiny liked a little flair, a bit of the theatrics. He liked to talk. Liked to needle and push back. He liked to run circles around other bots. His adolescence started, and he started to kick back. His father never had an issue with coming out of recharge. Well, he wanted to lay in his berth. His father was strong and silent most of the time, a deep thinker that only spoke once he was sure of something, prone to grandiose speeches, while Mutiny had not a shred of reverence for anything.

Other bots muttered that it was just a normal adolescent behavior. When you were moving from a sparkling to an adult Cybertronian.

To Megatron, it was all a flaw.

Things escalated. Dramatically.

The 'adolescent stage' didn't wear off. As he finished growing, came to an age where he was really an adult, it only got worse.

It came to a head when Mutiny and Megatron got into a knock-down drag-out on the bridge in front of the whole damned crew. Broke half the panels and controls on the Nemesis. That's about when Dad figured out that training Mutiny with such harsh conditions for a passing mark had an unwanted side effect: Mutiny, in a fight with the Megatron, could give as good as he got. Sure, he couldn't win, but oh, could he make Megatron regret ever bringing an heir into the equation at all.

Dad ordered him on a suicide mission the second the medbay cleared Mutiny for duty.

He was like that. His anger would smoulder, burn, reach a boiling point, and not calm down, and time wouldn't clear his mind, only muddy it more.

Mutiny didn't know if he actually wanted him dead or not. Maybe he was just looking to knock Mutiny down a peg, come in and save him and make it clear that Mutiny couldn't afford to piss him off, Mutiny still needed him.

Well, Mutiny was still his father's son. Even if he was his daughter back then.

So, he decided to do some real damage.

He met the challenge and said he wouldn't take a team. He was doing it solo. He upped the ante, and oh, he fraggin' delivered, because for all of Dad's expectations, he was still under estimating what Mutiny was capable of when he was mad.

Dad let him, and he probably regretted that now. No team, no one to stop Mutiny.

Mutiny blew that Autobot stronghold to smithereens. Not a single survivor. They had been caught in an off-and-on siege for years at that point, to the point Dad had to come to clean up the mess, and Mutiny razed it to the ground overnight. It didn't have a lot of bots guarding it, but it was constructed so strategically, with such an impressive stockpile, that they could hold out for as long as it took.

That stronghold was the key to breaking into the entire sector, and he wiped it out in a matter of hours.

And then he left. He toyed with the idea of leaving behind a fake body, but dismissed it, because he didn't have time. He just ripped off his Decepticon emblem himself, tore it right off his chassis, and left it behind as the final 'frag you'.

He heard Dad searched for him relentlessly for the first two hundred years or so.

Dad wasn't gonna fraggin' find him.

The price of raising your sparkling to be just like you is when you spend too much time in front of a mirror, the mirror starts to look back.

If his dad ever caught up to him, he was gonna laugh in his face, probably.

Do you hate me as much as Optimus Prime yet, Dad?

I hope you do.