Minific: Kinship

[stainless]

Title: Kinship
Characters/Pairing: Megatron (G1)/Megatron (SG)
Verse: Well, it's set in G1-verse, but Shattered Glass Megatron obviously... comes from Shattered Glass-verse.
Wordcount: 600+
Rating: T for torture, angst, and mind games
Warnings: Torture, angst, mind games, me being horrible to the good guys as usual ^_~
Summary: Minific for the comment fic challenge over at crimson_optics (come join us! Yes, you!) The prompt was "Megatron/Megatron, A Hard Whipping, your choice of Megatrons."

Megatron shuddered as the electrowhip crashed, relentless and scorching, against the plating of his back. He made no sound, however. He would not give his captor the satisfaction of a scream, much less a whimper.

The other laughed, behind him, a perversion of Megatron's own voice. If his captor had been anyone else, he would twist his head to look, to stare into crimson optics with his own azure ones, calm and defiant.

Even when he didn't actually feel calm, it unnerved his Autobot enemies. They knew him for what he was: Megatron, avenger, would-be savior of a benighted world.

But this one - this one -

He roared his dismay in spite of himself.

This one wasn't an Autobot.

Agony boiled through his circuits as the whip tore into his back again.

The rift -

He struggled to concentrate on it, to focus, to calculate. Why had it appeared where it did? If he could force his processors to think about that instead of -

Everything stopped.

Energon poured down his back, warm and wet, and now that he had his moment of respite he found he could not use it. His processor grasped for something, anything. The rift that had brought him here. The technology he'd need to go home. Basic equations he'd taught to his students, long ago, in a time of peace that felt like a previous life.

It flew out of his mind as if his memory circuits themselves had been shattered.

"Impressive," the other said, and he pressed his lip plates together, struggling to fight back the nauseating feeling that he himself had spoken.

Then he felt a hand on his back, tracing the welts, sending torment spinning through his sensory relays all over again.

The energon roiled in his tanks, but it wasn't the pain that distressed him. Vorns of war against an insane, sadistic barbarian had taught him how to endure that. It was the familiarity in the touch that set him heaving, the sensory impression that told him the hand on his plating was exactly the size and shape of his own.

He shuttered his optics. He couldn't look. He wouldn't look.

He could handle anything this mech threw at him. He could handle everything this world threw at him, this travesty of his home, this mockery of the universe he knew.

He had, after all, seen faces and frames eerily like those of his comrades when these Decepticons - how could they use that name? he marveled, despairing - had captured him, demons grinning red-opticed like his enemies, twisted ghosts of those he knew.

But he could not look at his tormentor. He could not stare into his own face and see optics the color of molten metal staring back at him. He could not look at his own chest and see his own mark branded there in the same purple as the Imperium he risked spark and servo to topple.

That would destroy him, he knew. Brave as he was, it would splinter what was left of himself.

The laughter came again, filling his audio receptors. He tossed his head to fight it, to refuse it.

Then he heard footsteps as the other slid closer.

A dark hand reached to grab his chin, twisting his head toward it.

"Look at me," his own voice rasped, soft and lethal.