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It was late on a miserable night, at fourth bell with his next coming shift looming at sixth bell, that Pharma made the life altering and socially precarious decision to become a Primary Conjunx.
In Pharma’s defense, it had been in the drunken aftermath of his third breakup with Ratchet, and the only thing on his mind had been the half-crazed conviction that he would never again subject himself to the idea of being another mech’s Secondary. If Ratchet wouldn’t have him, after he’d swallowed down his ego mouthful after mouthful for so many years, just waiting to become the prize that Ratchet never seemed to want—well, then, to hell with the whole institution, Pharma wouldn’t be anybody’s second.
At that time, Pharma was a rising star among the field of his peers, the top of his class from basic to surgical school, and he certainly had no reason to believe that would change any time soon. So what if he was young? So what if he was only a junior member of a less prestigious surgical college. So what if nearly every mech for the last twenty vorns of his life had told him, one way or the other, that he was a born Secondary, and that whoever snagged him would be a lucky mech indeed?
So what if he was being sudden, and reckless, and possibly vengeful?
He put in his application to the arrangement firm as a Prospective Primary Conjunx, hit send, and then passed out until his work alarm woke him in a haze of sour engex. Between regular work and that research grant application that Ratchet had left for him to finish alone, for the next little while after that he barely had time to dream. But when he did dream, he dreamed of gleaming gentle hands, and of bright, shy smiles, of a mech who would dutifully love him more than anyone ever had.
A month later, he was presented with the saddest little empuratee on Cybertron, all haunting single optic and clumsy tapping talons.
The day had dawned inauspiciously with a sandstorm blown in from the Rust Sea in the east. As usual, Vos went nauseatingly brown beneath the assault. The matchmaker and the prospective bride had been forced to hunker down in the terrace lane that connected Pharma’s spire to the city path system, until the wind cleared enough that they could make the dash to Pharma’s door.
It hadn’t struck Pharma as strange that they used the terrace paths, what with the weather being as abysmal as it was. Even a war plane would have some trouble flying in this. He was quite blandly secure in the assumption that a competent Vosnian matchmaker would bring him another jet as a prospect, or at least some other kind of plane. Flyers and flyers was the way of it, after all. Even if Pharma was technically (just barely technically) medical class, not freight.
But no. The mech hanging about like a bad modernist sculpture in the foyer of his canopy-garden home wasn’t even a rotary. It was a little truck. A handless, faceless, criminal little truck.
Pharma whirled on the matchmaker. “What is the meaning of this!” he demanded. “I asked you for a Secondary and you brought me junk!”
“Doctor,” the matchmaker said, clearly disapproving of the outburst. “Damus is a rare outlier, and has brilliant test scores at Shockwave’s Academy. He’s young, willing, and perfectly healthy despite the unfortunate, ahem, adjustments. He’s also a very talented musician, aren’t you, Damus?”
“Yes,” Damus said, very softly. He had a surprisingly deep voice for such an unassuming creature. “I can still play several instruments, and I sing.”
“Well there you have it,” the matchmaker said. “Everything you asked for. Culture, intelligence, and submissive temperament.”
“He’s a criminal!” Pharma said, throwing his palm wildly in the smaller mech’s direction. “Think of my career! I’ll look like some kind of—of—”
Sighing to himself, the matchmaker said, “We do have other candidates, sir. Give me a moment, I have to speak to my secretary…”
He turned and let himself into the sunroom, taking a turn toward the long window overlooking the garden that Pharma shared with his nearest neighbors. The usually charming web of air plants beyond was obscured in the reddish blizzard of grime.
Pharma grimaced at the would-be conjunx in his living room. It wasn’t that Damus was entirely ugly, if you got past the empurata. The foundations were good. Pharma did like wheeled vehicles, although it wasn’t very traditional of him. And the mech was a good height; not taller than Pharma, but not too small either.
“So what nasty sort of thing did you do, to get that helm,” Pharma asked (very rudely, but he was in a bad temper). “You’re not a murderer, are you?”
It was hard to tell if Damus was offended or not. The lack of a face gave him the edge in that regard.
“No,” Damus said. “It was for sedition. I was caught at a protest.”
“Really,” Pharma said. He considered it. Sedition wasn’t really a crime crime, not as Pharma saw it. Not like murder and organ theft and hoarding energon away from the hungry public.
“Well,” he decided, “That’s alright, then. If that's all.”
Ratchet’s free clinic was borderline seditious anyway, so it wasn’t as if Pharma had it in him to be particularly shocked about the existence of civil unrest. He’d often imagined himself conjunxed to that discontent. In his darkest hours, he’d imagined himself widowed to that discontent.
He added judiciously: “As long as I’m not about to be stabbed in my sleep.”
Damus made a sound somewhere between a buzz and a laugh. From the slump of his body, he seemed tired. “No wonder no one wants me,” he said, “if that’s what you’re all thinking.”
Pharma tried not to cringe at the suggestion that he was being insufficiently rigorous in his assumptions. And the worst thought of all, in the voice of his first Diagnostics professor: basic.
“...I suppose you’ve been given the run around with a few before me,” Pharma said, feeling an unwanted pang of unhappiness, or sympathy, or something.
“Seven,” Damus said, with dark humor.
“Seven,” Pharma said, and then felt annoyed at himself for being surprised. He hadn’t wanted Damus, so why should he be surprised no one else did? But Damus seemed charming enough in his own way, his unblinking single optic aside. Pharma switched tracks. “Why do you even want a conjunx, anyway? It’s not exactly suited to the life of a lone rebel.”
Damus looked at him for a silent moment, and then turned his head to the window. “I don’t know that you’d understand,” he said. “Your home is beautiful, your job is prestigious, you have enough of a career to be worried about it—I’m not sure you could understand what conjunxing would mean for me.”
“Try me,” Pharma said, impatiently doubling down.
“I suppose I’d just like to feel…” Damus drifted over to the window. “Safe, again. Like I belong somewhere.”
Pharma stared at his back for a long stretch of silence. Outside, mooring chains rattled and steel beams moaned. Sandstorms like these were the few times that those in the lower levels were better off than those high above—the wind howled through the channels of the overcity, but in the more densely built underlayer the sand only fell from above like gentle rain.
A malcontent who wanted to be cared for. What an odd proposition. And yet for all that Pharma might try to imagine him down in the lower levels, smashing and rioting with some militant cohort, the Damus in front of him was a terribly unassuming personality. Almost gentle.
And it wasn’t as if Pharma was all so hot on every aspect of their planet’s governance, himself. A flight frame, squeaking by into medical classification by sheer dint of some peripheral medical qualifications? If his own hands hadn’t been in the top 5th percentile of sensors-per-centimeter, he’d never have stood a chance. The specter of a life wasted ferrying crates from one dock to the next haunted all his worst dreams.
“Alright,” the matchmaker said, bustling back in with a ‘pad in his hand, unaware of the conversation he’d absented himself from. “If you want to see the other options, or defer—”
“No,” Pharma said, suddenly, “let’s give this a try, I think. You have trial periods?”
He didn’t look at Damus. He didn’t think he could have kept up this feigned casual confidence if he had.
“Oh,” the matchmaker said, and then hurriedly, very enthusiastically, “yes, yes, the handfasting period is already built into your contract with us if you’d like to utilize it—”
Pharma was, as has been said, in his twentieth vorn of function when he contacted the matchmaker’s service. This was considered extremely young to put oneself forward for Primary Conjunx, at least among his own social level. You might take an offer for Secondary at this age, if you felt really confident and precocious (or if you badly needed that grant funding your nice new suitor in the financial department said that he could get for you). But then, less was expected of a Secondary.
Primaries needed to provide—indeed, to be Primary Conjunx was to be the little Prime of one’s own theoretical household, tending to its needs as the Prime, in turn, tended to the planet. If one really must conjunx, here was a way, at least, that one could do so respectably.
Young and untested as he was, Pharma probably would have remained on the matchmaker’s list for an eon, forgotten, as he slowly accumulated more prestige and better connections and perhaps tenure somewhere, if it wasn’t for the seven suitors that Damus of Tarn had already bounced off. It seemed almost destiny that they should end up together.
So Damus moved in. Pharma was irritable and techy about the whole process, about which things were to be placed in what spots, and which things must be (horror of horrors) moved to make room, but Damus didn’t have too many possessions of his own and really it was just a matter of berating the mover bots until they did as Pharma wanted. Which he did judiciously.
Damus’s instruments, two sizes of harpsichord and a complex synth organ, were installed in the sunroom. The room that had been Pharma’s “office” (which he never used for anything but accumulating a chaos of dusty hardcopies and brochures and class notes) was reshuffled and filled out with Damus’s meager boxes. From the ceiling in the dining room, Damus hung a beautiful little caged drone that rearranged and transformed its translucent wings at randomly generated intervals.
They stood in front of the cage for a long time, after the movers had left, just watching it glitter and flex.
The first night was. Strange.
Damus very politely waited in the doorway of the berthroom until Pharma—equally nervous and trying not to show it—snapped at him to come lay down already, the morning alarm wasn’t getting any farther away. Damus came closer, up to the edge of the berth, and then climbed up over the side a bit unsteadily with his unwieldy tri-part claws. Pharma lay still, barely venting air, as Damus lowered himself down into the waiting empty space. The door, on its automatic timer, snapped closed behind him.
In the silvery dark, their frames several inches apart, Pharma watched Damus’s claw lift, and flinch, and fall back silently to the berth.
Pharma could tell that something was expected of him. But Damus didn’t say a word, and Pharma wouldn’t guess unless he was absolutely confident that he was right. There was no guessing in surgery, that was what Ratchet had always said. So they simply lay there, unmoving, until Pharma drifted into sleep.
There were meals. Pharma had his shifts. The days passed in a breathless new brightness, all mundanity rendered exciting and uncertain and, somehow, inexplicably precious.
The novelty of coming home to someone who waited for him, wanting to know about his day, was intoxicating. It never seemed to wear off. Damus had any number of passionate opinions on any number of subjects and, once it became clear that Pharma wouldn’t punish him for having them, he would happily make them known at length over the complicated spread of fuels he’d put together for Pharma’s evening return. They talked of opera. Pharma had never attended, an omission which Damus found criminal, but seemed to regard as a product of societal neglect rather than a personal failing. Pharma promised him they would go. And Damus loved to know what people were doing. He remembered every name Pharma mentioned, even in passing, asking after strangers as if they were actors in a popular serial. He soaked up information like a sponge too—any obscure medical treatise or bit of gossip Pharma brought home was eagerly considered and dismantled between the two of them.
But still… they did not, actually, touch each other.
Pharma thought about it. Most nights. Sometimes during the day. He wondered how far Damus would let him go. He wondered what Damus would look like, pressed down into the pillows, helplessly wriggling on Pharma’s spike. The allure of it spun Pharma’s head around with uneasy confusion—no one fantasized about empuratee frames except the worst kind of fetishists, the lowest of the low. Pharma hated to think he might be one of those, the type that wanted muck and dirt and crying.
Damus went sometimes to meet friends, and was out long late nights, in which Pharma lay curled on the berth that was really only built for one and which felt terribly, horribly hollow now without a second body. He did not actually have friends, he realized. There had only ever been Ratchet.
The handfasting period dwindled to its appointed end. They were only a few dozen days away from the end of it when the news came, screaming neon light on the billboard in the quarter square which stopped Pharma dead in his tracks, as he made his way home from the hospital: Senator Shockwave, missing for days now, found finally in a garbage dump with his frame mutilated by unknown assailants.
They flashed the picture.
The glaring yellow optic in the expressionless helm, so like Damus’s, made Pharma almost sick in the street. He stumbled back, away from the looming billboard, wings knocking into disgruntled strangers whose complaints fell deaf on Pharma’s audials.
He transformed and blew through the towers towards home, heedless of sky laws. Clouds whipped past; streams of ice bit his nosecone. He let himself into the house without knocking, shoved the door aside, and only when he found himself abruptly face to not-face with Damus, in the metal, did he realize what it was that he had been afraid of. But Damus was fine.
Physically, anyway. If he’d been distraught, it would have been impossible for anyone to tell.
“I,” Pharma said, and then had no idea how to finish. He felt naked, like armor stripped to protoform.
Light flashed on the muted entertainment display, casting the floor between their feet in shades of violet and sharp yellow light.
“So you saw,” Damus said, in a very even, very reasoned voice, and then abruptly spoiled it by making a grizzled, sobbing sound down deep in his throat. The overhead lights flashed and popped, spraying glass over their helms with a sound like hail and wind chimes.
Pharma discarded reservations entirely. He surged forward, cupping the blazing monstrous helm in both hands as gently as he could, and said, “Damus, my darling, you’re safe here. There’s no safer place in the world than here with me.”
“I’d love to believe that,” Damus managed. The voice came out busted and hazed with static. Each syllable was like a horrible little scratch against Pharma’s spark. “But Shockwave, he was our—Shockwave is a senator, if even he—”
Pharma pulled the smaller body against his own, mouth a thin line, the back of Damus’s helm cupped in his palm. His visions, in that moment, were grim and bloody.
He was the Primary. It was his job to make sure that Damus was cared for, safe, that nothing in the world touched him.
“Don’t cry, Damus,” Pharma said, “your conjunx is here.”
His thumb stroked the curve of Damus’s helm, absently tender, as a thousand vicious certainties flashed behind his eyes. In that moment, career and politics were the furthest they had ever been from Pharma’s mind.
“I promise I will protect you to the best of my ability,” he said. “Til death do we part.”
The yellow eye stared at him, expressionless and unblinking, but Pharma was no longer ignorant of the tender sensibility revealed only in his shivering frame and clinging claws. “Really?” Damus said.
“Yes,” Pharma said, fiercely, and then—motivated by something more raw than reason—pressed a kiss to the rust colored helm. The metal was blazing hot under his lips, hard armor rather than protoform, unresponsive. But Damus stiffened as if a live wire ran through him, clutching at Pharma’s shoulders.
“You,” Damus said. “—Me?”
“Yes,” Pharma said again.
“The handfasting…?”
“I’ll make a call,” Pharma said, and started to draw back from the embrace, only to have Damus grip him with surprising strength. Pharma halted, amazed by the feeling of being clutched so tight.
“Please don’t leave me,” Damus said. “I know it’s absurd, I know—I just feel like, if I lose hold of you—”
Pharma’s spark warmed with a savage delight at being so much wanted. So much wanted that Damus couldn’t even part with him for the moment it would take to make his call. He let his comm suite fall silent and swept Damus back into his arms.
“Ask anything of me,” Pharma said, “whatever your spark desires, Damus my darling.”
After a moment, Damus’s vocalize clicked on with a fuzz of uncertain static. Twice he made that sound, and then, hesitantly: “…Conjunx?
“Yes?”
“I know I’m ugly,” Damus said, in his quiet, deep murmur, “and you’re so beautiful, and I know there isn’t much I can do, but would you let me…”
Pharma blinked at him, uncomprehending. Damus (optic fixed firmly downward) gently took Pharma’s wrist and pressed the open palm against his warm modesty panel. Electricity sizzled up the length of Pharma’s spine, so strong and sudden that his sensory suite nearly crashed from the neural load.
“I want to be a conjunx to you,” Damus murmured, “in every way.”
The panel of Damus’ interface array was silky smooth with meticulously reapplied polish, and so, so warm. Head spinning, Pharma’s processor filled with phantoms of every lustful, shamefaced fantasy, all of them clamoring. He thought of Damus again, spread out and wanton, wriggling on his spike. Was it alright to think such things? After all, Damus was his conjunx now, had been from the very moment Pharma had taken off in the city and left his pride in a vapor trail behind him.
Taking the silence as a bad omen, Damus abruptly let his wrist go. “If you feel only pity for me, please, forgive my presumption.”
“No,” Pharma said quickly, “no, I—”
I just don’t know how to be attracted to you, if it isn’t as a voyeur degrading a victim.
He had never, he realized, been attracted to anyone except Ratchet. Not the other trainees at his school, nor his colleagues at the hospital, not mechs on the street or in magazines. His attraction to Damus felt raw, dangerous, incomprehensibly full.
“—I don’t find you pitiful, Damus.” Pharma pulled the little truck closer with one arm, and with the other he stroked lower on the curve of that warm panel, clever fingers seeking out the seam beneath and out of sight. “On the contrary, I find you… entirely charming.”
Damus flushed hot under Pharma’s fingers. Pharma grinned.
“Shall I take you on the floor?” he teased. “Right here, with the window open?”
There was a fizzling noise, and then Damus’s voice, very hoarse, said: “Wh—whatever pleases you, conjunx.”
“Oh, I’m not really going to,” Pharma said, and then thought again of the voyeur’s eyes. Of strangers, neighbors, watching his poor conjunx come undone on the floor, through the windows, as if it were any business of theirs what Damus looked like when Pharma touched him.
A fierce resentment for the world went sizzling down his back like acid rain.
“No,” he said, more sharply, “no, I want you to myself. Go into the berthroom, Damus, I’ll be after you in a moment.”
He let Damus go, and watched him for a moment, admiring what was now irrevocably and completely his. Then he went to the windows and shuttered them completely with vindictive pleasure.
Damus had left the lights of the berthroom off, so that when Pharma strode through the doorway the only illumination was the gentle cascade of grey clouds over the holoceiling, silvery edges against a black night sky. It was very romantic, Pharma thought, and was charmed all over again. Beneath the silvery dim, Damus had mounted up on the berth and sat kneeled, claws rubbing nervously at the tops of his thighs.
For a moment Pharma was struck with the uneasy worry that he would bumble this somehow, and make himself look a fool in front of the adoring mech who had willingly pledged his entire future and function to Pharma. Would Damus be able to tell he had never done this before?
He wished, sharply but fleetingly, that Ratchet had ever asked him to go to berth. Even outside of bonding, even as an affair. At least he would know.
But then Pharma shook it off, and screwed on a confident expression, and reassured himself that he was a genius, after all, and idiots did this every day just fine.
He settled his weight on his hands and leaned forward over the berth, surging just close enough to Damus that his single optic flared with surprise. “Will you show me what you have?” Pharma asked. “Every mech is different, after all.”
“I, um,” Damus said, “yes.” And then his modesty panel transformed back, revealing a precious little valve, already bubbling with lubricant at the top of his slit. Pharma reached between his legs and slid a finger down the cleft, finding it smooth and twitching at the rim.
“No anterior node?” Pharma asked. He crooked his finger and rubbed idly at the twitching rim, where inside the cushion of plush protoform a complex apparatus of sizing mechanisms were eager to take on whatever configuration Pharma required.
“It’s caudal,” Damus said, “feel lo—lower—”
Pharma made a sound of delight when his fingers quested out the hot little bead at the bottom apex of Damus’s lips. When he stroked over it, Damus shivered with his whole body.
“You like that?” Pharma purred. “I’m your conjunx, you have to tell me.”
“I like that,” Damus said, his voice strained.
Pharma rolled the little node between his thumb and forefinger and watched Damus shudder. Forged for this, he thought, with smug delight. Those seven other hopeless morons who’d rejected his darling didn’t know what they’d missed out on.
He pulled his fingers out from the warm wetness of Damus’ valve, trailing a string of glittering lubricant that snapped and then drooled down onto the berth top.
“Spike now,” Pharma said, and pressed his palm gently to the opening of the spike sheath. Damus closed his arms around himself and nodded.
Together they coaxed it out, Damus fighting down his anxiety and Pharma gentling the shaft as it poked free, until the full weight of it lay cupped in Pharma’s palm. Three segments of gold platelet in the demure grey made an arch along its underside, supporting the shape. Appealingly soft protoform, as plush as the lips of his valve, bulged and spread the platelets apart.
“Cute,” Pharma observed, testing the bounce in his palm. “Good girth. Do you ever use it?”
“Sometimes,” Damus answered softly.
“Hm. Have you ever fragged anybody with it?”
Damus hesitated, and then admitted that he had. Pharma smirked, pleased with himself for getting the answer he wanted without asking the question he meant. Damus had experience—if need be, Pharma could give him the reins for a bit to disguise any of his own ignorance.
“Do you want me to retract?” Damus said, his voice thin frayed with something Pharma couldn’t decipher on sound alone. Pharma glanced up. There was no expression to read.
From anatomical study, Pharma knew that one could make a partner tighter by forcing their engorged spike back into the sheath, where the hard pressure of it would prevent the valve from fully expanding. It was exceptionally cruel to do to a small partner, and could result in pressure damage to all the surrounding organs. But of course, Damus was only slightly smaller than Pharma, and if Pharma wanted it that way, clearly he could have it.
“Leave it out,” he decided. “I like it.”
Damus relaxed just a little bit, and Pharma congratulated himself on another good decision. He gave the shaft a little squeeze, liking the way it gave slightly under his fingers. Then, stroking absently at the swollen protoform with his thumb, he said, “One last thing. Your spark?”
Damus pressed his hands to his chest and slowly spread the protective plating there. His frame came open, revealing the burning heart of him, as delicate as a flame within its silver case. Pharma touched the rim of the open casing, the fine thin edge, and followed its shape down until his fingertips met beneath the light. Damus was as tense as a harp string while Pharma touched him, only the jerking and dribbling of his spike to tell that it was pleasure, not torment, that held him so.
“Amazing that something so small lies at the core of us all,” Pharma remarked, “you and I… all of us…”
He withdrew, reluctantly, remembering that it was unwise to have the spark exposed for very long. What a pity, he thought, that he couldn’t take out the bright little star in his hands.
“Ah,” Damus said, and pressed the tips of his talons against Pharma’s chest, “could I see yours?”
“Oh,” Pharma said, surprised but a little pleased at Damus’ initiative, “yes, of course.”
Pharma let him see, and touch its edges, for as long as he could bear it—he felt lightheaded by the end, fuel lines flooded and vision glitching oddly, but every painstaking touch was shivery sweet and so tender he thought he might cease to function. To be fondled at his very spark was—it was—it was almost melancholic, almost painfully good, like the memory of a place he would never return to.
When Damus drew back, Pharma simply sat for a moment gathering himself, while Damus held onto his hands. He had a profound sense of loss, sitting there with his chest cold and closed, as if he would never again know happiness without Damus’s clumsy claws inside of him.
“Alright,” he said, at last, trying to sound more steady than he felt. “Do you still want—?”
“Yes,” Damus said, immediately, and scooted forward as if afraid of being forgotten.
“Why don’t you lie back,” Pharma said. And when Damus had gone back on his elbows and forearms, Pharma said, “Spread your legs.”
At the junction of thighs, Damus’s valve came open as his legs spread, a dark little sliver of his channel just visible between the plush lips. Pharma pushed the jut of Damus' spike out of the way and dove in with greedy fingers.
The channel was so slick and smooth, the protoform clenching and rippling silkily, and Pharma passed his fingertips over the raised dots of sensor nodes. Pharma could never get this deep inside himself, there was too much of his frame in the way, and the novelty delighted him as much as anything. Free hand on Damus’s shoulder to hold him in place, he crooked his fingers and shoved in deeper with a squelch of lubricant-
A ripple of tensors, and a full-bodied flinch from Damus.
Pharma snatched back his hand.
Damus didn’t kick him off or recoil across the berth top—his elbows stayed planted in the cushion, holding him up, and his thighs remained invitingly splayed, slick glimmering in the channel between them. Aside from the flinch, he kept obediently still in Pharma's grip.
Pharma shook out his hand. “You know what?” he said, with that diamond-hard confidence under pressure that made him such a maestro in the operating theater, “I’m having a thought. Your spike is so charming, and so swollen, the poor thing—look at it, it’s straining, that must be awful. There,” he said, and gave it a squeeze, “see? You’ve gotten all sore with it.”
Damus made a sharp, startled noise. Transfluid bubbled up obligingly at the tip.
“Why don’t you spike me instead?” Pharma said. “Just to start with.”
Damus looked down at the spike with his one optic. He looked up. “You don’t mind?”
Pharma waved him off. “I don’t have a preference,” he said, which was technically true. “And you’ll show me a good time, won’t you, Damus?”
“Yes,” Damus said, breathlessly, “yes, of course I will. Here, let me—”
Damus guided him back swiftly until he was on his back, and then set himself between the open knees. With the smooth outside of one talon, he stroked through the lips of Pharma’s own valve—fluttery and warm beneath the careful touch—and parted the white protoform. Pharma was slicker than he’d realized; he hadn’t felt it until Damus spread him that little ways open. He bit down hard on his lip and tried not to moan so shamelessly.
“Do you think you’re wet enough?” Damus asked, rubbing the back of his talon tenderly at the pert node.
“Yes,” Pharma said, aiming for confidence. Surely he was wet enough. How wet did you have to be?
Damus’s lights all flared, as if a terrible surge of arousal had shaken him. He pulled himself flush against Pharma, the golden curve of his spike sitting heavy on Pharma’s node, and said, “I’ll make you feel so good, Conjunx. You won’t regret this.”
“Oh Damus,” Pharma said, and touched his expressionless helm, “I don’t see how I could ever regret you.”
The single yellow optic flashed bright, and then Damus pushed into Pharma with an inexorable, slow thrust.
Pharma gasped, helm dropping back against the berth at the everything of it. There was a sting, not so bad that he really thought something had torn, but sharp enough that he briefly regretted being so gung-ho about lubrication. And then all around that, swallowing it, there was stretch and ache and thick, oh Primus, as every helpless squeeze of his tensors flooded his sensors with pleasure.
Damus rocked into him, slowly at first, and then faster. When Pharma could gather himself enough to lift his head up to see it, Damus’s optic was a pinprick of yellow light.
“You’re so soft,” Damus muttered, his beautiful voice thin and cloudy with static. “Pharma, you’re so, you’re so good…”
The next stroke felt twice as intense, a starburst of heat, as Pharma’s frame flared with smug satisfaction.
“You can go faster,” Pharma said. He squeezed his legs around Damus’s hips imperiously.
“Yes, Conjunx,” Damus said, breathless again, and bent forward over Pharma for a better angle.
Between the cage of straining arms, Pharma stared up at Damus as he surged and relented endlessly—vents rattling, machinery grinding—working so hard to please.
“You can overload if you want,” said Pharma, pulling himself up so he could gasp it against Damus’ audial sensors . He’d always been curious what it felt like to be full of conductive fluid. Nasty bar talk could only paint so much of a picture.
“I really can’t,” Damus managed. “I shouldn’t be touching you when I—I could short you.”
“Oh,” Pharma said, disappointed. “I wanted to feel your transfluid.”
Damus shuddered hard, rhythm stuttering, and the next thrust was so sharp Pharma half thought it had thrown up sparks.
“I can’t,” Damus whined. “I’ll hurt you.”
Pharma let himself fall back again, palms open, and rippled his valve absently. (Damus groaned.) Maybe the glitch was something he could fix, eventually. He was a genius. How difficult could it be.
“I can still overload you,” Damus promised, as he recovered his pace again.
“Mmm,” Pharma said, processor busy with the problem of Damus’ glitch and frame half-overwhelmed by everything that was being done to it. “Alright.”
And Damus did as good as his word too—with those hard, deep strokes, as carefully paced as a metronome, he slid into Pharma’s wet hole as if he wanted nothing more in the world than to make it squeeze and sparkle with charge.
When overload burst in Pharma’s circuits like confetti, Damus kept going through it, slowing down so that Pharma’s frantic valve could clench and work the girth of him. Pharma shoved his hand down and rubbed his node through the last wave of it, all of it fizzle-popping sharp and bright until it was finally too much.
“Gggh,” he said, very intelligently, and then made a series of distressed noises until Damus realized what he meant and abruptly pulled out.
Limp, tingling, Pharma rolled his head to the side and peered up at his conjunx. Damus was pouring heat, engine roaring, his spike slick and shiny and bobbing heavy as he sat back. Damus wrapped his talons around it.
It was pitiful, Pharma thought; those slim digits would barely be able to do more than scrape the finish off the platelets. He would have a miserable task, trying to get off like that. How terribly pent-up Damus must be; how terribly long he must have waited.
“Come here,” Pharma ordered.
Damus went still.
Pharma lifted a hand (more difficult than it ought to be) and pointed meaningfully at himself. “I’ll get it,” he more slurred than said. “Come here. Let your conjunx take care of that poor needy spike.”
Damus came forward on his knees, and Pharma coaxed him to throw one leg over and shuffle up until his spike was at just the right place for Pharma to lazily wrap it up in his fist.
“That’s better,” Pharma said, watching the furiously dribbling head poke through his fingers. “Isn’t that better?”
Damus moaned in agreement, his useless claws digging into his thighs again.
“I thought so. You’re no good on your own like that. But you’ll never have to go without again,” Pharma told him. “I’m here now. I’ll take care of you.”
Damus thrust forward into his fist, with a strangled “Please.”
Pharma smirked up at him, at Damus: devoted and darling and Pharma’s forever, needy and shameless and so clever, and beautiful—beautiful in that moment, every hacked off bit of him, because he belonged to Pharma. The silver shapes of clouds lit him silver and dark, like a vision from a dream.
“Please,” Damus chanted, “Please, please, please.”
They sealed the paperwork the next morning and filed it at the archive, and that evening at the hospital Pharma was banned from speaking at the floor meeting on the grounds that if he said one more word about his conjunx, Flatline would be obligated to kill him.
Pharma kissed Damus in the streets, all former shame transmuted into a fierce and arrogant joy, pressing his lips against helm and optic and throat. When he dipped Damus, the bot made adorably startled noises and, for a moment, all the lights of the thoroughfare flashed pink and red around them.
Shockwave rejoined the senate. One horrifying live interview proved that the progressive-minded senator had been as good as killed; rumors went around of cortex transplants and body doubles, but Damus—shaking with his claws clutching Pharma tightly—said that it was definitely still Shockwave, somewhere in there, you could hear it in the turns of phrase and in the twisted remains of the personality. Something had been done to him, more than what had been done to Damus. Something revolting. They slept fitfully, after that.
For a while, things were quiet at home. Long dinners, lingering mornings in the window seat when the skies were clear, kissing sometimes frantic and sometimes tender. And then Damus’s friend, that Pax character, started calling again, so from then on Damus was gone occasionally for a stretch at a time, more than just an evening, out doing who knew what. Pharma didn’t like to ask questions. He remembered where that had ended with Ratchet.
Vos had never been a particularly happy city, but in the time after Shockwave’s disappearance and subsequent reinstatement, the lower levels rapidly descended into vicious pandemonium while even the upper levels struggled to feed themselves. Energon was scarce. A day’s wages barely covered the cost of a day’s fuel. Pharma wracked up overtime while Damus was gone, up to his elbows in grease and fluids, so that when his conjunx came home again there would be creature comforts and pleasant evenings for him still.
At the end of his shift, on such occasions, Pharma might look up at the heavy hanging clouds and long for Damus. But he was tired, and tomorrow he had a double, and Damus would be back soon, and he was the Primary after all—he had a duty, there was no time for moping.
It was on one of those lonely periods, in Damus’s absence, that the topless towers of Vos fell.
Here is what it feels like to watch the world burn
You have no body. You are full of smoke. Your mouth spits soot, the rubble of the world is inside your leaking filthy eyes and you have never seen the clouds from so far down, you think; it is as if they have become strangers to you, all black and red with fire.
Your hand, which should be blue, is too pockmarked and filthy to be called any color at this point. It is the color of nothing. You are nothing. You are thirsty. You are nothing.
You crawl across the windows of a shattered building, and you begin to drag bodies from the rubble. You hope that you find the one you’re looking for, and you pray that you won’t.
Vos was a dead zone for a long time after the bombs.
Comms went down and never came back up. The broadcasting infrastructure, mangled in the collapse, couldn’t be fixed or even dug out fully. A few of the seekers organized a search sweep to dig out coolant and energon from known storehouses, which was difficult work, with half the buildings obliterated and the other half laying sideways in heaps where they smashed into each other on the way down.
Pharma and a number of other survivors with medical experience pulled together a field hospital, although they couldn’t do much about the injured who came with missing and broken parts, other than to seal the wound and tie off the lines. The work was endless. Those who could still fly took off for help, but rarely came back.
There wasn’t any word of Damus. He’d been out of the city—hadn’t he? If he’d come back early, if he’d—
Pharma turned off his imagination cortex and kept working.
Eventually a military contingent came rolling across the plain and down into what remained of Vos, and a dour mech with a red stamped chest plate informed them that they were with the Autobot army, and they were here to help. Pharma, always wise to which way the wind was blowing, enlisted the next day.
When he finally received the news, it wasn’t through an official letter or a solemn-faced officer. It was the Prime himself, come to hold Pharma’s hand and speak the quiet, horrible, final words.
Pharma did not carry himself with the dignity of a Primary. He screamed, and cried, and blamed the Prime for ripping his conjunx away. The Prime stood there through it all, holding Pharma’s hand and murmuring soft platitudes, never flinching from the weak beating of Pharma’s fist against his chest.
Once Pharma quieted, the Prime left. What else was there for him to do? What else was there for Pharma to do, but sit and drink his daily ration because he had another shift soon and he needed the energon?
It wasn’t the Prime’s fault, not really. The blame lay at another mech’s feet.
Pharma swallowed the dregs of his ration. He forced his backstrut as stiff and straight as steel. He swore to himself that he’d see the annihilation of the ones who’d killed his Damus, someday.
The square tiled ceiling of the Partha Station medical bay was meant to be white. Just about everything in medical was meant to be white, because unfortunate spots and stains showed up most clearly to a cleaning drone’s sensors.
The ceiling now was pink, and that pink dripped in a slow, sluggish rainfall across the sullied medbay floor. At Pharma’s feet there was a crumpled chassis, the red autobot badge almost indistinguishable from the blackened rest. He had been trying to roll it closer to him with the tip of his foot for several minutes, which was difficult given that he’d been chained to this chair.
He thought he almost had it, when one of the slagging ‘cons came waltzing back into the medbay with what was left of Captain Trudge dragging behind him.
Pharma slumped back in his chair and gave up. If even the captain was in pieces, then the rest of the team was long dead. This base was a lost cause. From this point on, he could look forward to an interminable future of forced labor until either a stray bombing run or a prisoner exchange eventually liberated him from Decepticon captivity.
“Hey,” said the slagger holding his former captain’s helm, “docbot. Can you get these finials off him and onto me? I kinda like the look of ‘em.”
“Get slagged in a car crusher,” Pharma said. “I’m not doing anything for you.”
The ‘con scowled at him, and then—the absolute thug—kicked Pharma over onto the floor, chains and all.
“You oughta be nicer to me,” he said.
“You had better be nicer to me,” Pharma said, grimacing against the sludge-covered floor. “Or my hand is liable to slip.”
“Damn,” the ‘con said, and then tapped his comm. suite. “Sir, we got a mouthy one here. Yeah, some kinda medic. Yeah, I was saving him for a prisoner exchange but—”
“My name is Doctor Pharma of Vos, first rank surgical, you son of a garbage scow!” Pharma snapped at him. “And I’m worth ten of whatever the hell you are!”
The ‘con kicked him again, directly in the cockpit, and Pharma’s HUD lit up with glass pressure warnings. The slagger was reeling back for another kick when his face screwed up, and then an ugly shudder went pouring down his frame like crude oil. He nearly overbalanced, pede stuck in mid-air, but then caught himself clumsily at the last moment on the back of Pharma’s empty chair.
“Yessir,” he said. His voice sounded like he'd had glass poured down his throat. “Understood. I’ll wait.”
Pharma smirked up at him, smeared in energon, optics narrowed. “I told you I was more valuable.”
The ‘con grabbed him by the collar and tossed him into the battered chair. It rocked queasily on its legs for a moment before settling. “Watch it,” he said. “The DJD doesn’t take prisoners, so it’s gonna be me you’re dealing with once they leave.”
“The DJD,” Pharma echoed. He scowled at the crusty tip of Decepticon pede. “What are they doing here?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know?” The ‘con laughed. “That little scag you put the wheels back on was one of ours.”
Slag, Pharma thought. He didn’t think anyone would have cared about the deserter who’d stumbled through their doors just the day before. The poor sob could hardly have been better than a janitor. More importantly—
“That's good care you take of yours, then,” Pharma said. “Who the hell called my patient in to the DJD?”
“Oh, Finials here, probably,” the ‘con said. He lifted the bisected helm and examined its cracked optical glass. “It’s usually the ones who just got passed over for a promotion. Probably thought we’d be his ticket off this piece of floating junk.”
He tossed the helm away, where it bounced once and then rolled to a stop against the corpse of Pharma’s CO.
“You oughta think about joining up,” he went on. “It’s that or press gang service either way. Always need fresh doctors in the corps. We got a good benefits package for new converts.”
“Go frag yourself,” Pharma spat. “Your piece of scrap movement killed my conjunx! You should all be hung up by the lifecords and left out for scraplets to chew on! Every fragging one of you!”
“Primus,” the con said. “Changed my mind. Tarn can have you, actually.”
And then he went back out into the hallway, and left Pharma dripping half-congealed life fluid onto his chair.
He knew he ought to be calming down, but he only seemed to get angrier the longer he was left alone. How dare these rustbitten slagspawn glitches try to convert him. After they took everything from him—his life, his city, his Damus! How dare they—
The door slid open. Through it stepped one of the biggest Decepticons Pharma had ever seen—violet-edged, endless with treads and firing turrets, whose ember red optics seared behind his mask of a face plate.
He stepped through in one great confident stride, and then froze still, staring at Pharma.
Pharma hacked up a throat full of clotted engex and spat it directly at the monster. It splattered pink against his thigh, but he didn’t even seem to notice. He was just staring.
“You leave me the frag alone,” Pharma snapped. “I’m not doing your dirty work, and I’m not joining your murder circus gang of freaks either."
And still the tank just stared. His face was an enigma behind that mask—there were only the red pricks of light behind the eyeslits, boring into Pharma as he sat restrained and helpless and scum-soaked—
In the softest, smallest voice Pharma has ever heard from a mech so big, the tank said, “Pharma?”
Pharma’s head snapped back. His spark gave a wrenching in his chest, as if grabbed by a hand and ripped forward until it nearly burst through the metal.
“Pharma,” the tank said, and his hands came out open before him, as if he were reaching for Pharma, “It is you. I didn’t believe it when I heard—I didn’t believe it was possible—”
Pharma sniffed, forcing himself to remain superior, disinterested. “Do I know you?”
Tarn paused, and then took a step closer. “It’s me,” he said, “you don’t—of course you don’t recognize me. Oh, of course…”
He reached up and pulled his mask off, the mask that Pharma had definitely heard was never supposed to come off, and tossed it aside. The face underneath was scarred and unfamiliar. And Pharma was certain he had never known any tanks before the war, not in Vos, and definitely not in medical school.
“It’s me,” Tarn said, “Damus. Your conjunx.”
“What.” A chill raced up Pharma’s spine, and then fury roared in its wake. “How dare you! You sick fragger! How dare you even say his name! Your pitspawn of a leader had him killed before he even had a chance to fight, killed like an animal, just for following Prime, and you think you can say his name to me now?”
Tarn wasn’t deterred. He sank down to his knees in front of Pharma’s chair, all the great glowering bulk of him, even still as tall on his knees as Pharma was sitting in his chair. He smelled like spilled fluid, like stale charge from a fusion cannon.
“Pharma,” he said, “my beloved, my conjunx… still as beautiful as the day I was given to you…”
He reached up, and in both of his huge hands he nearly held Pharma’s face, but at the last moment he pulled back as if afraid to truly touch.
“—I thought I had lost you forever—”
Pharma stared at him. The longer Tarn spoke, the more the voice came back to him. The familiar pauses, the familiar tones…
Pharma swallowed. “If you really expect me to believe that,” he said, putting as much hard confidence into his voice as he could muster, “tell me something only my Damus would know.”
This mech—this strange mech, this terror, this nightmare given metal and mesh—smiled at him, with eyes too bright and earnest for his twisted face.
“The night you first made love to me,” he said, “you let me please you with my spike, and even though I was only an ugly little thing, you called me beautiful.”
He did touch Pharma now, running his hands along the outsides of Pharma’s thighs, as if trying to sooth him. It was a familiar motion. Pharma had done it to Damus countless times, as Damus sat in his lap, arms around Pharma’s neck.
“You gave me the privilege of servicing your valve…” he said, “…so soft and tight, the tightest I had ever felt… I knew then that you’d never been taken in that way before, and that you chose me—I thought my spark would burst…”
“Damus,” Pharma rasped. “Damus, how? I don’t understand.”
How was this possible? Pharma's adorable, helpless little conjunx, reforged into this... monster, this machine of vengeance and evil, feared more even by his own people than his enemies. What had happened to him? What had he become?
“I wasn’t killed,” the mech said. “I was found by Megatron, and he told me how the Autobots had razed our home—how you had surely died there, in the rubble, forgotten by Prime and all his smug, shining mechs—even while I was away, while I was helping him, he had you killed and everyone we knew.”
“No,” Pharma said. “But—Optimus told me that you—he said the Decepticons—”
“He lied,” Damus said, “of course he wouldn’t want anyone to know that his friend had turned on him. He wouldn’t want you to know…”
Great bubbles of washer fluid startled to spill out of Pharma’s optics.
“Oh, Conjunx, don’t cry,” Damus said, and with one thick finger, wiped away the tear from Pharma’s cheek. “It’s alright. Look, I have a face now.”
And indeed, he did have a face. A rugged, ruined face, perhaps handsome underneath the scarring. He smiled, tenderly, and wiped Pharma’s other cheek. His fingers came away streaked with watery gore.
“And hands,” he said. “See? It’ll all be alright. I can finally touch you like you deserve…”
And then he closed his big hands around Pharma’s back, as easily as if Pharma were a gun in his grip, and pulled him forward. The chains clinked. Damus bent and pressed a chaste kiss to Pharma’s lips.
Pharma threw himself into the kiss, straining against his restraints, opening his mouth against Damus as if he could suck him down and drink him away. The unfamiliar warm glossa brushed shyly against his, and he ravaged everything he could reach.
It was exactly the kiss he would have imagined, from his conjunx, in all their pretty, gentle days before Vos fell.
“Damus,” he said, "my beloved-" feeling wild with it, unhinged, as if he would grow too large for this room and this world the moment he was unmoored from his chains. “Let me out of this. I want to touch you. I have to touch you.”
Damus hesitated. He looked down at the places where Pharma was fixed to the chair. “Oh, my conjunx,” he sighed, “I would do anything for you, but you’re still a prisoner. I can’t let you free.”
“Damus,” Pharma said.
“Shhh,” Damus said, petting him earnestly, “I’ll take care of you. Don’t be afraid.”
He lifted himself to his feet, every statuesque and violet inch of him, and curled his fingers underneath his own modesty panel. The heavy shape of it transformed away, revealing the mound of a deep purple valve, entirely unlike the cute little thing Pharma remembered.
Damus smoothed his hand down his side, showing off how nicely his broad new hips complimented his new equipment. It was sinfully plush, with puffy lips, an instrument of pleasure as surely as the rest of his frame was built an instrument of punishment.
“See?” he said. “Just like you always took care of me, Pharma, just the same. Now I’ll be the one to take care of you.”
Transfixed, Pharma watched as Damus parted his valve to reveal a barbell punched through his glowing anterior node, the harsh thrust of it forbidding and seductive all at once.
“I’ll be so much better for you now,” he said, his voice gone breathy with anticipation. “Let me take your spike. Let me show you—let me show you—”
And there in that blood-stained hospital room, haloed in pink, he laid Pharma out on the tile in his chains and his stained metal and rode him, valve searing hot and insistent, cooing and coaxing him into an overload that seemed like it would never end.
He was so tender, and so terrible, and so full of love that Pharma thought surely they would both burst. It spilled out and filled them up, in every black and soiled place, in every wretched longing corner of their awful, yearning sparks.
“I’ll never let you go again,” Damus promised. His hips rolled; his dark weight covered Pharma like a storm. “You’ll be with me—my conjunx, forever. Until death do us part.”
His devotion bubbled over like tar, or like gold, filling every crack in Pharma with horror and with love.