[FICLET] Drowning

[redcosmedic]

Knock Out finished the text conversation with Jane, but it was several more moments before he could summon the willpower to rise from the chair he'd sunk into hours ago. His habsuite was quiet, most of the lighting dimmed, and this far outside Iacon's city center, only the barest trace of construction sounds filtered through the vents. The hour was late, well into the night cycle, only a few hours off of sunrise.

His spark throbbed, painful and arrhythmic, like a wounded thing trying to escape his body. Alerts and indicators, some critical, peppered his HUD. Damaged orbit, the clinical part of his mind supplied, medic protocols running hot. A severed bond is a type of spark trauma.

But the academic knowledge didn't lessen the sensation of it. Had Cybertronians needed to breathe, Knock Out was not sure he'd have been able to through the burn of it. With unsteady steps he pushed himself toward the entryway where his field kit waited, rifling through it until he pulled out a now-familiar green vial and an injection mechanism.

Medic coding was woven into his very fabric, overlaying his finer motor control with additional buffers and supports, and that was the only reason his hands did not shake as he carefully withdrew the correct dosage from the vial. Too little and his spark would overcompensate and spin up hotter... too much, and it could break orbit completely. Knock Out slipped two digits under his forearm plating, exposing one of his auxiliary ports there, and injected the contents.

Almost immediately, the dissonance began to recede. His spark orbit began to settle and the pain tapered off. Knock Out ex-vented shakily, leaning his head against the wall, letting the serum flood his systems. One by one the critical alerts stopped, then blinked off.

A spark stabilizer was a triage tool, intended to artificially restrict a spark's behaviour so a patient could be transported to a safer location for proper treatment. Used too frequently, it compromised the spark's core structure, weakened it. But Knock Out had developed an addiction to its analgesic properties in the last few years.

The first time he'd used it was pure desperation. Back on the Nemesis, not long after Silas had been disposed of, a vivid memory flux had gripped him and shaken him from recharge with such force that he'd staggered to the medbay. His spark had felt like it was melting its way out of his chassis, and he'd reacted on instinct, afraid that he was literally having a fatal disruption. The stabilizer had done its job, but the desensitizing haze it left him in afterward... it had been the first time since Breakdown's death that his spark hadn't hurt.

That blissful numbness had lessened with each subsequent usage, and he barely felt it now. But the stabilizer still worked on the spark itself, taming its variance, forcing it to calm. One problem, solved... though another one was taking its place.

Even though he tried to avoid relying on it except when the pain was unbearable, and limiting the dosage to a minimum, prolonged use was already having an effect on him. Every few months, after hours in the Iacon hospital, Knock Out had taken to doing his own diagnostics on himself, and the results were unequivocal: his spark casing was showing microfractures, and its orbit was degrading by tiny degrees. If he continued to use the stabilizers... it was only a matter of time before the damage would become perilous.

And that wasn't enough to stop him. Some nights, it was the only way he thought he could keep going.

When he felt like he could move without the world reeling around him, Knock Out slowly repacked the items into his field kit and subspaced it. But in the absence of physical pain as a distraction, his emotions surged, stronger and sharper than ever. Grief swelled, deep as an ocean chasm, threatening to swallow him entirely. He reflexively reached for his comm channel, ready to call Jane back and cancel their proposed meetup. He was miserable and aching with mourning, and though he'd warned her that he wouldn't be good company, that was definitely understating things.

But perhaps a thorough high grade dousing would help — nothing else seemed likely to, tonight. Knock Out hesitated, then closed the comm channel. He may as well go... sitting alone in his empty habsuite wasn't going to help. He locked his door and transformed to vehicle mode, speeding through the night.