Missive

[stainless]

Title: Missive
Characters: Nightbird, mention of Megatron
Verse: G1
Wordcount: 1,000
Rating: T for gore
Warnings: Some gore, character death
Summary: Sequel to Awakenings and prequel to Reverence. Nightbird, banished after her unsuccessful mission, wants to regain favor with Megatron... so she devises a unique way to send him a message.

Thanks to meaisin_caoin for beta.

Nightbird cradled the enemy head in her hands. It stared sightlessly up at her, its optics cracked and dark in their diamond-shaped sockets, the cables at its neck dripping still-glowing energon onto the floor of her cave. If she had had a mouth under her battlemask, she would have grinned.

This particular enemy hadn't been anyone important. They had several others who specialized in construction, and from what she gathered, most of those others worked harder and complained less. If she hadn't heard so much about how much Autobots valued group cohesion, she would have guessed that even some of them wanted him dead.

Killing him had been no challenge. The combat programming the Decepticon scientists had installed still raced fierce and eager through her circuitry, as though she hadn't fought anyone at all.

It had been embarrassingly simple to pierce his spark chamber and drive her blade deep into his spark itself. She suspected the fool hadn't had time to process that he was dying before he'd expired. He certainly hadn't had time to gripe about it.

She hadn't wanted this, this easy slaughter of the weakest of her enemies. She'd wanted a real battle, her cleverness and stealth pitted against the brawn and might of one of the strongest of the Autobots.

Still, his ignoble death made him useful to her, and that was all that mattered.

His headless body lay on the floor of her cave, the orange and blue plating of his body pristine save for the marks of her energon sword on his chest and the energon dripping from those scars.

She turned the head around with one hand and taking up one of her wrist-daggers in the other, as unsatisfying as this victory and this enemy had been, both would suffice for her purpose. She pressed the blade to the metal and began to carve.

Power to the Decepticons forever, she thought, scraping the words into the dead Autobot's helm. She did not even know those words in Cybertronian, unfortunately. She had not spent enough time among the Decepticons to learn it.

So she had to use an inferior language. It bothered her, praising Lord Megatron and his army in a human language. Her awakener deserved to be lauded at least in the language of fellow machines.

But human languages were the only ones she knew. And it would give a clue to who she was, once she took the enemy head and left it where her awakener and her army could find it. No machine would write such a message in a human language.

Unless that machine itself had been built by humans.

She was the only human-built robot to ever have awakened, so far as she knew. Humans built lifeless slaves to do their bidding, not warriors who knew themselves and knew their purpose.

She herself was only self-aware because the Decepticons had made her so.

She still was not sure whether they had intended it. They had stolen her away because she was a war machine, designed to fight. They'd altered her code, refining her combat programming. But she did not know if they'd intended for her to wake up, restless and eager and yearning for a fight.

But wake she had. They had saved her from slavery, from the endless sleep of unconsciousness, the living death of serving, unaware and so unable even to protest the injustice of it.

She scraped harder at the metal under her hand, scoring deep, watching silver words rise to echo her will.

All hail Megatron.

Soon she would finish her carving, and dump this grisly head where those who had awakened her would find it: a testament to their might and to her devotion to their war.

She had failed once before. Megatron himself had given her a mission. He had looked past her ignoble origins and her strange language and the confusion she had, being newly born. He had promised her that if she succeeded in her mission, he would grant her a place in the exalted ranks of his army. That, human-built or not, she would have earned it.

But she had not, and she had reaped the consequences of her failure. She had feared he might have her deactivated - might even grant those who had loathed her from her waking the honor of destroying her.

But he had favored her, even then, and simply sent her away instead.

Adrift and purposeless, she'd set herself up in this cave. She'd passed on information when she could: locations of rich energy sources the Decepticons could raid, information about the Autobots' plans and weaknesses.

She had been built for stealth. For infiltration. It was only fitting, somehow.

But it wasn't much. It certainly wasn't nearly enough to justify her revealing herself. Not after her lord had banished her. Not now that all the Decepticons had proof that a human-made machine would only fail them.

But now, one of the Autobots was dead by her hand. And now, she would make a present of the dead one, service and tribute and promise all in one.

And Megatron would know who had done it. She had no doubt of that.

Slipping her dagger back into its place at her wrist, she turned the head around in her hands again, admiring her handiwork.

The letters were well-formed, considering. Her inscriptions were as pleasing to the optic sensors as something scrawled in one of the foul languages of the humans could be.

It was uncouth, but it was something.

What it would earn her, she did not know. She did not dare dream it might grant her what she'd failed to earn before.

But he would be pleased.

And that was a beginning.

Comments

[eaten-by-bears.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear more from your Nightbird. You've done a lot to give life to a character that canon leaves pretty completely under-explored.

Her killing Huffer took me out of it a little bit. I always got the impression that the only reason she was as successful against the Autobots as she was was that they were unwilling to harm her.

On the whole, though, great story. I'm getting more and more interested in Nightbird, and you do an excellent job of showing her devotion and her hunger for acceptance. I kind of ache for her, even if she is carving words in a severed head.

[stainless]

I'm very glad you like her!

I had planned for a long time for her to kill Huffer, though. I don't think her competence is an accident. I think she's frighteningly deadly... but very childlike and naive.