fateandfortune

It's far more reaction than thought as he crosses the room in mere steps what it took her several strides to, closing both hands around her. He doesn't need to use both — she wouldn't be able to break his grip even if he'd only used one — but two feels safer. More secure. Less like she might vanish if he's unwise enough to let her continue. His grasp is unyielding, but not unsafe; he knows (has experience) just how fragile humans are and how much their bodies can take.

Later, he'll realize it was probably a poor impulse. That there were other just as effective methods he could have employed. He could have sat in front of the doorway, and made himself an immovable obstacle.

But in the moment, all he thinks is warning, warning and acts accordingly.

"Stop, please... you're not yourself..."

She doesn't see it coming. How could she, when it's been so long since he reminded her of the monstrous machines that still make up her nightmares? But suddenly the two overlap in her mind as his hands close around her, and it's all she can do not to scream. Her body goes still but for the tremors that start and her breath rasps in her throat as her pulse skyrockets from terror-fueled adrenaline. She knows this is her friend and he would never hurt her, but even a lifetime of healing could never fully erase her ingrained fear of the Sentinels.

Knock Out doesn't need an built in sensor suite to recognize the instant change that takes over her. As soon as she goes rigid in his hands, more logical reasoning prevails — medic coding, designed to prioritize critical decision making, to assess risk versus reward. An error made.

Knock Out's fingers unfurl from their protective... but restrictive... grasp on her.

"I'm sorry," he says, distressed. Retreating several meters away, his hands curl uneasily against his thigh plating, but he makes no move to reach for her again. He thinks about her kneeling on the side of the road in Kentucky.

"I won't do that again..."

Breathing becomes easier the second he releases her, but there's no lasting calm. Her hands still tightly grip hold of the tools she's haphazardly selected and, after a few moments, she shakes her head and begins moving toward the door again. Each step wavers between steady and sure but she can't stop now. She has to keep hold of her momentum and resolve or she'll be haunted by the lost opportunity for the rest of her life.

It's what she should explain to him but the words are too hard. The world keeps closing in around her and if she strays from this path, she'll never find it again.

The sound Knock Out makes when Rogue resumes her path toward the door isn't one a human could have made, an upset, electronic warble.

That she still hasn't said anything beyond the dazed statement that she has to continue has him aching with conflict: does he try to stop her again? She's clearly not in her right state of mind. Or does he respect the wishes she made so clear that morning, and disregard the changes between the quiet determination from then to the erratic behavior now?

There are no good, or right, answers.

The holoform materializes in front of Rogue. It's less roadblock than detour — there is enough space for her to step around it to the door. "Please let me help you."

Some part of her registers that sound he makes, one that she instinctively recognizes as being upset, and it gets to her more than anything else has. So when his holoform appears, she stops and thinks, everything in her head a mixed-up emotional jumble of static and pain, but after a few seconds she just nods her approval and then steps around him.

The walk to Cerebro's doors is a blur, each turn taken without thought until she's back in front of that circular door. The panel to the side is still open and exposed, and seeing the source of her anxiety just sends it rocketing up again. She drops the bag of tools and moves forward the last few steps with the crowbar in her hands, resorting to the brute force method of entry. But try as she might to slip the end into the cracks of the X-shaped opening, she just scrapes the metal surface.

The deeper they venture into the subbasement of the mansion, the more the holoform is more apparently just a construction. Ignoring the pounding ache in his processor that it causes, Knock Out sacrifices as many of the topographical management buffers as he can manage: the 'material' of the clothes becomes fixed, and the cool overhead lighting no longer reflects in real time, making the holoform's angles and edges look like they're permanently painted on. But the aesthetic hallmarks aren't what he's after in the moment, when he cares more about solidity for the avatar in case Rogue needs him.

When she attacks the large circular door with the crowbar, he doesn't really have much to offer. But that whatever is behind it means so much for her to act like this, only further spurs his desire to help.

Whatever the metal door is made of, it's clearly resisting her attempts. He uses the holoform to look up speculatively, silently measuring the dimensions of the subbasement hallways. It would be a tight fit — he wouldn't be able to stand up straight — but...

The scraping of the crowbar against the door brings him back to attention. "Rogue... let me come up to this level. I could be a lot more effective than that toolkit."

She almost forgets he's there in her increasingly frenzied need to just get the damn door open, but then his voice cuts through the focused fog in her mind and she pauses to turn and look at him. His holoform looks different now, less... real. She almost asks about it before her mind catches up to what he's said.

Looking down at the crowbar in her hands, her grip tightens on it but she nods her agreement nonetheless. Going on like this isn't an option, and much as she'd wanted to avoid him seeing her like this, that ship has clearly sailed.

"Please," she says with a glance back at him, "help me."

The holoform nods, and its attention spaces out again in what Rogue has since learned means that Knock Out's pulling back from manipulating it directly to focus attention on his own surroundings. It's several moments before he appears in vehicle mode from the opposite end of the hall, having taken the freight elevator, and the holoform winks out of existence. The corridor is large enough for the sports car, but when he draws near and transforms back to root mode, he has to stay hunched down.

Knock Out runs his hands along the outer rim of the door, his expression set in concentration, searching for any potential weak points. The door was startlingly reinforced, but he understood how it was to open: the center segment would depress, then the two halves would split apart. Tap-tap, tap-tap his claws went on the metal, until he found the invisible parting seam.

Ideally, he'd have applied force by kicking, but there was no room for him to do that when he couldn't stand upright. Instead, he partially transformed one shoulder, tucking thinner planals out of the way, and nodded at Rogue. "Move back," he instructed.

Once she was clear, he drew back and drove his shoulder into the door; the corridor tremored with the force. Another blow followed, then another. The seam, which had been invisible, begins to appear as the metal begins to buckle inward.

There are some things she can't do on her own, Rogue admits to herself, acknowledging something she's fought against for so long. Being dependent upon others for so much in her life and abandoned at every turn has left deep scars, but having Knock Out here, now, and willing to help — a tiny piece of her is healing even as old wounds reopen.

She doesn't let go of the crowbar while she waits for her friend's arrival, nor when he transforms and tests the door. Even when she moves away as instructed, she holds tight to it like it's her anchor to this reality, her knuckles white as she watches him slowly use brute force to open those seemingly impenetrable doors. And with every inch he gains, something loosens in her chest...

Brute force is not normally a tactic Knock Out's employs — he is simply too light a frame type for it to be effective in most cases. He had always left such things to Breakdown, before. His partner's durabyllium hammer would have made short work on this blockage, reinforced or not. Knock Out buries the painful twist of his spark in focus on the task at hand.

By the sixth or seventh blow, the seam has widened to a crack, then into a narrow opening. His shoulder aches. An eighth and a ninth, the red metal plating of his pauldron is beginning to deform under the barrage, and he has to stop for a moment. But the space is almost large enough for Rogue to slip through, so he changes tactics to gripping the two halves of the warped door and strains to push them in opposite directions. The door creaks on its track, fighting every inch; his hydraulics hiss and whine.

Grudgingly the space widens to a foot, then two before he deems it suitable and stops, fans venting loudly. She'll have to slip through sideways, and he hasn't got a hope of being able to follow, but he can watch through the gap.

Some part of her recognizes that this isn't easy for Knock Out, that he might even be hurting from it, but her voice is caught in her throat and she can't tell him to stop. With each inch he gains, she can see more of the dark room beyond and she needs for this to happen.

When he stops, she finally sets down the crowbar, a distant plink of metal on metal beneath the venting of his fans. They're so loud, he'd struggled so much to help her with this one thing he couldn't begin to understand—

Stepping up beside him, she places her hands on his chest and shoulder, a brief pressure as she passes to slip through that space he's made for her. As she enters, the lights begin to automatically turn on, row by row of the platform lights matched by those in the large spherical room. The console usually at the end of the platform is missing, only scuffed metal on the floor indicating where it had been. The room shines brightly as if each curved panel had been recently polished, and everything is just... empty.

She walks halfway across the platform and then stops, just staring at the end for a long moment before finally letting herself drop to her knees. The storm within her has passed now, everything settling as if a great tornado had just dissipated, and she too feels simply empty.

Knock Out crouches outside the door, his face and chassis filling the narrow gap in the door with red and white. His optics automatically adjust to the increasing light level inside the strange spherical room, but his gaze is focused intently on Rogue.

For a moment she's still, staring at something that he can't see, either because it's out of his vantage or it's simply not there. He suspects the latter.

It still doesn't make it any easier to watch Rogue fall to her knees like her strings have been cut, and his spark flip-flops in trepidation. The door groans as he tries to force it further open, but the give has hit its limit (and honestly, so has he) and it refuses to budge further. The opening is far too small for either of his forms to even attempt. Reflexively he reaches for the holoform program, but he just dismissed it and it's already entered its debugging stage, and it doesn't re-materialize.

"Rogue, come back," he calls instead, low but urgent, as if afraid of startling her. "Please."

Her knees hurt but she barely feels it. The ache is nothing compared to what she'd endured in this room... not this room. The two spaces war for dominance in her mind, one superseding the other on repeat as she struggles against the fear that threatens to creep in again, tendrils of it trying to wind their way into that emptiness. Knowing her friend is behind her helps, as does the sound of his voice, but she needs more than that.

She needs to speak.

"This is Cerebro." Her voice doesn't echo in the room, it's too quiet for that, but somehow it almost seems to fill it regardless. "It was designed for the most telepath in the world... to amplify his powers and keep out interference. Nothing could penetrate these walls."

She can't bring herself to look back at Knock Out, her eyes unfocused on the space before her, but she knows he's there.

"This is where they kept me during the war."

That tracked — as far as his sensors are concerned, the interior of the room is one giant void, even with his current proximity. It was why he hadn't 'seen' the room on his passes through the various levels of the subbasement and the rest of the mansion, too.

His fans stall at her words. He'd known that she was imprisoned in her world, captured by enemies and held hostage. She had trusted him with that information back in the imPort world. It was so obviously a heavy subject that he had never pressed for any further detail, not because he was not willing to know more about that aspect of her, but because it was not meant for casual conversation.

Knock Out did the same to a degree, with the Autobot-Decepticon war. She knew about it, of course, but only within the framework of what he relayed about specific people, or certain incidents, or how it tracked into a habit or predilection of his.

But he'd not known the location of where she was held. Her reluctance to commit to coming to Xavier's is suddenly thrown into a new light, and he detests it. He had thought it was related to her teammates, to the potential differences between this world and the one she'd helped erase. He hadn't known any better.

But in the end, did that make any real difference? They were here now. She had whatever answers she'd felt she so desperately needed.

Knock Out only hoped it had not broken something in the process.

In some ways, it feels like she's talking about someone else. The horrible things she'd endured here... perhaps they happened to someone else. They were someone else's nightmares come to life, someone else's home turned into hell. But when she looks down at her arm, tugging back her left sleeve, the tattoo is still there, ink still marring her skin with the symbol of so much suffering.

"I was here for three years," she continues, the words flowing out of her in a way they never had during any of the support group sessions she'd held back on their shared Porter Earth. "They turned this into a lab. They built another platform under this and that's where I slept when they weren't cutting me open. They brought in healers for me to absorb... They wouldn't give me blankets because they didn't want me to kill myself."

She turns then to finally look back at the door, at the slim opening he'd made for her that he filled with a view of red and white metal. Her jaw trembles and her voice wavers slightly as she says, "This was my home, Knock Out. Why did they have to take away the only home I had left?"

It is a long moment before Knock Out speaks in response to that, though he knows there's no actual answer that will make her feel better. He knows this pain, knows that it hurts no less the second time than the first. Yet for all the universal dialects that he knows, none of them have any kind of reassurance or platitude to lessen that particular grief.

"I don't know," he finally answers, just as quiet as she'd been. "Loss... doesn't always come with reasons. It doesn't get balanced out. That doesn't mean you deserved it or that you did something wrong. Sometimes it just... takes, and we get left behind."

And we get left behind. That's the story of her life, isn't it? Everyone and everything leaves her behind, again and again, no matter what she does or whether or not she deserves it.

Slowly standing, she walks back to the door, her legs feeling like lead as she squeezes through the small opening. The air feels different in the hall, or maybe it's just that she can finally breathe again. Reaching up to touch him again, she carefully asks, "Are you okay?"

She feels responsible for any pain he's suffered, though she knows he won't want to hear it.

It's an unspeakable relief when she exits the Cerebro room, when she seems calm again... not frantic, not distant, not lost.

His chassis is warmer than typical, a sign of exertion. She's almost level with it, in his crouched position. Knock Out touches the distorted shape of his shoulder plating, the normally smooth curve of his pauldron that held his wheel well buckled inward.

"Nothing I can't fix," he replies. "But I think, all things considered, that really should have been my line. Are you...?"

Edited 2020-07-06 07:02 (UTC)

How is she? After everything she's put him through, he's still asking that question? He still cares enough to be concerned after all of this?

"I don't know," she admits, giving him the truthful answer he deserves. Her demons had been faced and found... not so scary anymore. But that doesn't erase the memories of this place, how she knows it will continue to haunt her dreams. Leaning carefully against him, she sighs as his warmth radiates against her. "I feel... empty. When I think of this place, all there is... is pain and loss. I don't want that to be the last thing I remember from here. I don't want to feel empty anymore."

Edited 2020-07-07 03:15 (UTC)

Uncertainty, if it's honest, he can work with. It's better than closing off to him, than putting up a front where he was left guessing.

Listening to her confess her wish, Knock Out makes a wordless understanding sound in the back of his vocalizer. He doesn't know how to offer that kind of peace to Rogue, but he can be here and steady for her. Without moving, he sinks deep in his systems, and the wavelength thrum he'd used before to get her to calm shivers through the hallway.

"We can go any time you want," he says. Yes, the mansion was proving an advantageous way station, but it wasn't worth tormenting her with. "We don't have to stay here."

Edited 2020-07-07 03:34 (UTC)

It's a sweet offer full of understanding and kindness. Her heart aches for it, even as she feels a sensation emanating from him that settles into her like a warm blanket. It soothes her aches, emotionally and physically, and she wonders if he would be willing...

"I'd rather make new memories," she begins hesitantly, reaching up to rest her hand over where she can feel that thrumming coming from. Not his engine, it's different than that, and it feels more... intimate, somehow. Now that the idea is in her head, she can't keep the subtle hint of pleading from her voice, though she does try. The last thing she wants is to guilt him into doing something he doesn't want. "Knock Out, will you help me? Like you did before? I want to remember feeling something good here, the opposite of all that pain."

Her eyes are firmly on her hand on his chest, some part of her too frightened to see rejection in that beautiful alien gaze, but only a few seconds pass before she has to nervously look up. She has to see him when he decides.

For a split second he thinks she needs another door broken down, some other hidden away space in the mansion revealed. But then the tone she's using fully registers, and he realizes that she's talking about a very different kind of help. Like you did before.

This is... unexpected. He doesn't object, but he would not have anticipated that kind of request. The other night on the side of the road, that had been a straightforward thing. Physical. Cause and effect. A social favour.

Her bio readings are still elevated by stress and fear, but the indicators from the other night aren't there yet, so--

She's looking up at him, and his processor stalls. "Rogue... that's what you want?"

It's not a refusal. She repeats that to herself. He's not refusing, he's not mocking, he's simply asking. Of course, he'd want to confirm her intention, look at the state she'd been in not even half an hour ago. She keeps reminding herself of these things as she bites her lower lip and nods, wanting that to be answer enough but knowing it might not.

"It's a very human response," she tries to explain, nerves now coming out in her tone. "In times of stress, we want to be close to someone, to feel alive and safe and cared for."

She's never had the luxury of experiencing that before. For just a little while, she wants to lose herself in how safe she feels with him. But... But. "But I understand if you don't want to. It's okay. I'll be okay."

Watchful caution softens into something less definable in his expression when she tries to put it to more words. But she feels entirely more Rogue than she has most of the morning, or at least since they'd woken up curled together in their nest of mattresses, and that soothes him. He shakes his head when she offers him an out.

She's so near to him, pressed against his chassis, that he only needs to drop his head a little to be even closer, until his face plates nearly brush her skin. He uses the tips of two fingers to slide the material of her shirt down, baring one shoulder, and leans in to close his mouth over her bare flesh there. It no doubt feels strange: Knock Out's mouth is warm, moreso than the rest of him, but dry. She can feel the shape of his denta plate, though it never applies any force.

A human response, she says, and his optics gleam. "No," he replies slyly, mouthing the word into her skin and raising goosebumps with tiny tingles of current that emanate from the site. "No, not only a human response. I understand it."

His mouth moves from her shoulder to the side of her neck and collarbone. It's a little awkward given how large he is, but there's never anything more than a gentle pressure.

"Mm," he hums when he finally draws back, looking down at her. "Not the ideal place for this, is it..."

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