binary_runaway | NOVA STORM'S BEST AND GREATEST INBOX

Me? [she's been using that nickname a lot more recently. wonder why.] Where'd you go? I've been calling you. I know you're still here.

[Nova Storm has only just messaged Dippimus Dip, and is startled enough by the immediate response that isn't the prime at all that she hits the button to accept the call before she's ready and she KNOWS Warp heard her sniff]

[Shit]

[She's been managing to hold off crying through sheer stubborn refusal to let Antlers win, but hearing the nickname they'd used for each other from the moment they could speak breaks her. Nova hiccups out a glitchy sob into the comm and aims a kick at the hull of the R2 where she's wedged herself on the outside of it. It doesn't make a noise in vacuum, which for whatever demented reason makes her sniff again]

::Go away. I'm hiding.::

You've never found a hidey-hole we couldn't both fit into.

[skywarp sounds confident in this, tone firm. she's already moving, because of course she is. now that she's had enough of an outlet for all her own rage, she's getting better at pushing everything that upsets her into that same box that she put all her feelings about having to debase themselves by working with mandroid.

it is also very cathartic to throw bricks at megatron and optimus daily.]

You get about five minutes before I've checked all the usual spots or anywhere I think you might be. Make the most of them.

[ The only halfway decent seeker on this ship has lost the thing that's fun about being a seeker! Tragic. Skywarp can't fix that but he can blast a rubber duck with the Nonsense Gun until it becomes something potentially useful.

It's not flight but if she smacks the Anti Grave Duck on the head it'll reduce gravity around it to nothing for a couple minutes. Can't fly but you can float a bit. ]

[This is almost certainly going to end badly, but Monk isn't blind, he's seen what Nova Storm's situation is, and as much as he is on the fence about offering an olive branch (or an olive tree, in this case), he has been told time and again how important flight is to seekers. At least, other seekers.]

Hello Nova Storm,

I am certain I am the last person you want to talk to about this and I may be breaking some sort of taboo, but if you need a pair of wings, you could have mine. I don't fly; I think you would get better use out of them. We're around the same size, so they should work for you.

I don't know what would be involved, but since the medics fixed them before I think they would be able to take them off and put them on your frame?

[He has literally no idea if that is an option but it seems logical. Monk's understanding of Cybertronian anatomy is still very rudimentary.]

...What? [Nova Storm's question is almost soft. Vented out] I can't just- You- What?

[There is a sudden loud bang as Nova Storm jerks upright out of her seat, but her voice is still pitched surprisingly low in her stunned horror as she grasps uselessly at the air]

I won't- I can't mutilate you just because it's convenient!

[She stops, starts, stops again]

Why? I don't get this, I don't get you. Even after all that, you still offer-

[Nova thinks of the aerie back home, of how she knows --has always known-- they would have accepted her and Skywarp back again if they'd just lowered their pride enough to go home, to let themselves be taken care of, and-]

Why aren't you mad?

[Nova doesn't respond verbally or through the bond that's still slammed closed on her end. Instead, she activates her jet boots and moves from her cubby to wedge herself into a functionally identical one except this is a much tighter squeeze. If she'd still had her wings, she would not have fit]

[When she does speak, her voice is still cracked and breaking apart]

Fast forward the instant replay, me. Not in those places.

[That wasn't quite as bad as he was expecting. Monk turns the volume back up a bit on his comm after lowering previously just in case.]

I will admit I'm not...happy...with how things went, but that's not a reason to withhold help from someone who is struggling.

[It wasn't just mad, but whatever the feeling was was muddled and detangling it wasn't a puzzle he wanted to contend with right now.]

Not being able to fully be yourself because of your circumstances, that is something I can relate to.

Mutilating is a strong word since I'm offering and it isn't malicious. I haven't flown in over three hundred years and don't remember what it feels like, so it isn't as if there is anything about it I can miss.

Uh huh. Keep pushing me, me. You think if you couldn't get rid of me after four million years, you'd do it now?

[if nova cares to track skywarp's movement through scanning, she'll see that she's very quickly closing in on her through either sheer luck, tenacity, knowledge or all of the above.]

I'm not losing you to whatever the hell is going on. So don't try it.

[Nova has in fact checked, and wishes she hadn't. She turns her face into the side of her hidey-hole and shudders out hitched vents. When she speaks again, her voice is relatively even except for the part where she sniffs again at the end]

How come nobody ever believes me when I say it's fine, everything is fine. [She sniffed again, and okay maybe she was somewhat less than fine because she admitted to a fear she usually kept smothered deep down in her spark in a locked and buried chest] ...My fault. If you hadn't followed me out of the aerie, you wouldn't be in this mess.

[Nova Storm makes a soft, involuntary pained noise, and what is left of her wings scrape the inside of the welds on her back again. But he's said he understands. She doesn't know the slightest thing about his history, so she certainly does not understand him. At all]

What do mean you get that? What do you- what hap-

[She shakes her head. No. nope, not interrogating him and making herself look worse, again]

I may not be a good anything anymore, but I won't stoop to taking your wings. I won't. They might not mean anything to you now, but what if they...

And anyway I'd rather stomp around in the ground forever than have to live knowing he'd think I'm selfish enough to- [to take and take and take and give nothing back, like she's always known she has] want to take advantage of you in order to- I don't know! But I won't!

Edited 2024-12-03 13:34 (UTC)

'Cause you're a scrappy liar and you always have been.

[skywarp hasn't located her directly, but she can probably see her flying in a large arc around the ship now, occasionally teleporting around, firing missiles at a couple errant rocks.]

I chose to follow you, you gigantic dumb yellow idiot. Don't you dare take that away from me, not when we had so much else stolen from us by other people.

Monk had made a herculean effort to avoid Nova Storm in person as much as possible, given the animosity brewing between them (despite his efforts to remain ambivalent about it), but conversation wasn't one to be done over comms.

He'd never been to Nova Storm's habsuite before, and now that he found himself standing outside the door he was already feeling tense about how this was going to go; but it had to be done. He knocked twice, taking a deep breath and he waited.

"Nova Storm, there is something I'd like to talk about."

There was a pause before the door opened. Nova Storm stood stiff on the other side, drawing one hand up to hug her other arm before forcing it to drop again. She eyed Monk warily, shifting from pede to pede in lieu of flicking wings that weren't there, then jerked her head back towards the interior of her room. "C'mon in then," she muttered. "Not gonna have some kinda big dramatic hullabaloo out in the hallway."

Her room was very meticulously clean, almost to where you would be forgiven for thinking no one lived there at all save for occasional signs of habitation. There were faint scorch marks along the perimeter of the door that connected her hab to Skywarp's, and a datapad, metal ball, and rubber ducky were clustered together on the counter running along most of the length of one wall. There was no sign of any other personal effects outside of disused polish and oil.

Nova waved vaguely at the table with two chairs, but instead of sitting down she leaned against the wall nearby. "What's picking at your processor?" She asked without really looking at him.

"It doesn't need to be a- what did you call it? Hullabaloo?" The word sounded odd with Monk's accent.

He followed her inside, the state of the room not calling any attention to itself. Monk lived an ascetic lifestyle himself, and his habsuite was not all that different. He also chose to ignore the chair, continuing to stand, his gaze flicking towards Nova Storm's eye with a frown.

"Your trip the Mythos," he began, no point in beating around the bush. "I'm grateful, but you didn't need to do that. Chill said you all lost something: I want to know what it cost you."

Nova narrowed her remaining optic and the silvery inokin eye her second optic had been replaced with. "Yeah, well..." She lifted a foot and stomped it, in a way not unlike an angry rabbit. "It wasn't for you. Not at first. Not even mostly. I was a whole bunch of slagged up garbage going into it and didn't really think about why I really wanted to and then I was all caught up in the horror and guilt and being told some weirdo sadist thinks I'm interesting, but-"

She glanced up at him with her mismatched eyes, then back down again with a scowl. "But at a few points I thought hey, slag it, I might not know what I feel about you half the time, but you ought to at least get-"

Her scowl deepened, and she pushed herself up to begin stalking around the room. Moving felt better but also so, so much worse. Every second made her vents feel too tight and too hot and too fast and they whistled in her audials and she hated.

Nova whipped around at the end of the room and jammed a finger in the direction of her organic eye. "You want to know what it took? This! Right here! Alright? I got this, and it's pathetic that I did cause it's just an optic while everybody else got so much worse! I had to watch my sister-" She peeled her lips away from her teeth and then twisted to slam a pede into the wall. "I had to watch her withering to death right in front of me and I couldn't help and couldn't fix it and everybody else was being sliced apart in weird ways all around me and-"

Slam.

"And now we!" Slam. "Fought about it!" Slam. "Warp left! She left me! I went to steal back your dead idiot and it cost my me leaving me!"

Monk stood silent as he gave her space to vent, tensing up as she mentioned what happened to Skywarp. Maybe the latter was fine now, but Monk had had a feeling she had been omitting something when she told him how she was.

But even as he listened to her words, he was caught up in his own thoughts. He'd been right. Chill and Skywarp had acted like it was nothing, but he was right. Monk could barely spend time on Ekosi without being in danger, and they went to the heart of council space. He wasn't much for strategizing or making plans but even he could see what a bad idea this was.

"You shouldn't have gone," he muttered eventually, as if this was an immutable fact. He looked up, meeting her gaze. "None of you should have. I'm grateful for the outcome whether it was for me or not, but it wasn't worth the risk."

"I'm sorry about Skywarp, I wouldn't have expected her to run like that, or to push you away. Whenever we have spoken she has always put you above all."

Bitter, sour hate flooded up Nova Storm's throat and choked off the snarl that wanted to come out. Her vents were coming fast and ragged and she slammed her pede into the wall again and again, denting it almost in the shape of-

"Yeah!" She gasped, vents rising to a shriek that wasn't coming out of her mouth for once. "Yeah, I know it was dumb! It was dumb and reckless even with him planning everything out and- and yeah!" Slam, crunching metal and flaring optics, "We were potentially trading living people for some dead afterburner I never even actually met who can't even care anymore or get mad about it, but- but lines in the sand, no more, it-"

She shook her head and jerked it up again, baring her teeth, but it wasn't really at him at all. "I messed up, and she left! I always mess up, and you- you don't! Things are easy for you, it's effortless, cause you're better than me! You've always been better, and-"

She stumbled back as the shriek drowned out the too fast whirl of her twin spark, Skywarp's spark, then lurched forward again, terror and guilt and grief all wrapped up in snapping teeth. "You still aren't good enough! You're better and it isn't enough!"

Nova Storm was repeating the very thoughts Monk had been turning over in his head since Chill showed him their 'prize'. That no matter how much he had cared for Starscream, it wasn't worth losing the five of them to secure him a more honorable death. True, he had faith in Starscream's planning and strategy, but clearly it hadn't been enough. Then Nova Storm turned the conversation on it's head, throwing those same assumptions back in his face

"Stop."

Monk was standing dangerously still, his hands slowly clenching into fists, bristling. He had taken more than enough of her vitriol at this point. The floor began to vibrate with a quiet, rumbling hum so low it was felt more than heard.

"You think it is easy? You think I am faultless because I can I remain calm when I am wronged? For the last 300 years I have performed rites for the dead, and consoled the living. I started with nothing, and I became the person they needed, day by day. I learned how to move past my own thoughts and be a pillar for others, to tap into the part of me that could do that; and it is something I have tried to do on this ship, for you and others. Yet every day I am less and less of myself, and it is harder and harder to do what I have done for so long. Do not act like you know who I am, when I myself do not know in full."

He let out a sharp bark of a laugh, knowing he wasn't following his own words right now, though the part about it being harder was true. Their escapade had shoved his past in his face, and he was keenly aware of how out of balance he was.

"I am tired of you using me as an object to further your own self pity. If you regret your actions, then fix them."

Nova Storm slammed a fist into the wall. "You don't get to tell me to do anything! Not you, not Prime, not anybody! She told me to listen, even Star told me to-"

All of the mess of emotions combined with a furious, fearful drive to make him stop, this was her hab! Her space! He was making it worse, here! Skywarp was gone and he was here in her place, accusing her of the same things everyone always did, and-

Her plating flared wide in a threat display and she snapped her teeth again. "You want me to stop? MAKE ME!"

An instant later, Nova Storm burst into motion. Her jet boots had an unreasonably fast kick, launching her at Monk faster than even she could keep up with, without her wings to stabilize her flight. She'd been practicing day in and day out, but it wasn't enough, it was NEVER-

Just as quickly Monk was moving, keyed in on her attack. He'd fought plenty of flier's who relied on their thrusters in close combat. He snatched her arm out of the air, using her own momentum to turn and slam her into the floor.

"No one can tell you to do anything, can they? Even those you care about! Or you would have listened to them instead of whining about how you didn't!"

He flipped her onto her front, pinning her to the ground, a savage smile on his face. Now this, this was easy. Effortless. Taking down one enemy after another, knowing exactly where to cause them pain, where they're weaknesses were- and Nova Storm had an obvious one.

CRACK CRACK

A sound like lightning cutting the air snapped around them, the priming warning of a devastating attack. Monk pressed his hand into the small of Nova's back, between the welding lines of her damaged wing struts. Everything shook like a earthquake was rattling the room as Monk held back the sonic boom that would have followed. The momentos on the counter clattered and bounced, and Monk himself winced at the vibrational force trapped in his arm and chest. He'd forgotten how bad the recoil was when he did this, and all of Starscream's lectures on the matter poured into his mind. Still, there was some value in literally rattling your enemies when intimidating, or threatening, or torturing them for information. He gritted his teeth before speaking, instinct and practice keeping his voice steady despite it all.

"I can't tell you what to do," he said levelly, "so stop and yield of your own accord. Or would you rather I make you?"

The thrumming vibrations were only getting stronger, and it was only then Monk stopped to consider whether or not this was a bluff. It hadn't been, when he started.

Nova Storm didn't answer at first except in the form of shrieks. She didn't consciously feel the fear that made her thrash under Monk's hands and her vents whistle in her audials, but she didn't have to. This was what her and Skywarp had fought about, about refusing to listen to signals her body gave her when something was a threat. Not listening-

Her optics were wide and white with terror at the threat to where her wings had been, at the feel of a weapon charging, aiming for her wings, pinned like a bug.

"Say not a word. Say not a word and you'll see her."

"Let me go let me go let me gogogogogogo-" Built into a rising scream of outage and terror. She bucked again, kicked and howled and attempted to scratch, heaving for vents that weren't coming, but she refused to give in refused to taint her room her safety with the shame of it with the memory of this room no longer being hers.

"You want me to show my throat?" She hissed and spat out static. "Make me!"

Monk didn't budge as she fought against him, scowling down at her. Of course she was being stubborn. This was Nova Storm, and from what he had seen she could never see when she was digging her own grave, even now. Literally in this case, seeing as a fully charged blast would do much more than injure her back.

"That's not what I said," he flatly replied, echoing his own words from when she had last hounded him on the network. The noise began to die down, but he winced as he moved back, holding his arm tight to his chest as he did. He had definitely forgotten this feeling. He was too distracted to notice how far back he was standing.

BAAAM

As Monk stepped against the wall between the two rooms, the energy still built up rang through the structure. He'd suppressed the sound as much as he could and so it didn't bring the wall down, but several of the weakened panels around the door came loose and fell to the floor. He took a deep breath as he stoop up straight and stared her down, his body still trembling.

"Still think I'm so perfect now?"
That spiteful grin crossed his face again, looking both wholly out of place and precisely right for a ruthless seeker. "I said stop using me in order to feel worse about yourself. I won't give you the satisfaction of playing into your hand."

It didn't last long though as he continued to breath deep, trying to calm himself down, fading fast into a pitying frown. Nova Storm was struggling from someone leaving her, and here he was throwing aside everything he had just preached was his job. So much for consoling the suffering. The regret sank in hard, his grip on his arm tightening.

"Isn't it exhausting to live like this, lashing out at everything? at yourself?"

For long moment, Nova Storm wasn't answering, couldn't answer. Until that last part. She froze, optics going if possible even wider and more colorless. Then all of those moments ended.

This, far more than even the threat, made Nova Storm sag and fall out of the tense resistance to anything and everything being said to her. She dug her fingers into the floor and reached out desperately through the bond for reassurance, but Skywarp wasn't just far away, she'd muted her end the same way Nova Storm had her own. Skywarp wasn't going to --couldn't-- send back warmth through the bond in response to Nova's own stubbornness and guilt and hate dragging things up as proof that her own inadequacies justified it all, to all of these things being told to her in the one place that was supposed to always be safe to hide from them in.

There was nowhere left to run from what he'd said, what the prime had said, too, and something brittle cracked in her head with an almost audible sound. She always had needed physical fights with Skywarp to ever admit she'd been wrong.

Nova pressed her helm into the floor and she shuddered and croaked out, "...Yes. Yes, it's exhausting."

Edited 2025-01-20 14:27 (UTC)

[Skywarp gets another hitched vent and a muttered sound that was probably meant to be in the neighborhood of "Am not" right before she gave her hiding spot a kick that would've loudly clanged and alerted Nova's twin to her position if sound traveled through the vacuum of space]

...Okay. Okay, fine. It was your choice. Doesn't mean I can't-

[Another kick and this time, even though it was still silent, it was hard enough that it made the antennae at the top of the plate she'd kicked start to wobble]

Think it stinks. Think we should've had more than other half grown seekers in that stupid, stinky army led by that stupid, stinky idiot.

[KICK, and an even more pronounced wobble]

NOVA STORM'S BEST AND GREATEST INBOX

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