Come play in the sand box. (Thundercracker would rather fly.)

Title: Clipped Wings

Warnings: Aaaaaangst.

Rating: G

Continuity: G1, Footnotes AU

Characters: Thundercracker

Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

Motivation (Prompt): "Pushed again(Die Toten Hosen)"

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Later, after the requisite screaming matches and ignored orders and people getting stuck in the launch tower(1), the Decepticon base seemed eerily quiet. It might have had something to do with the quiet after a storm, as if the prior cacophony made whatever followed it seem quieter by comparison. It probably had more to do with taking three-fourths of the crew out and shoving them in the space bridge. That took away a good nine-tenths of the normal noise level(2).

It was quiet. Too quiet. There weren't a lot of Decepticons left on Earth get into brawls or – Primus forbid! – actual conversations with. Most of those left behind were covering everyone else's duty-shifts, and even if they were currently fighting the Autobots, that didn't meant they could take a vacation.

Which left the remaining Decepticons with far too much time by themselves. Some took up knitting(3). Others confined their activities to quarters, not necessarily their own. But they were quiet about it, leaving the others in peace.

It was maddening.

Thundercracker had settled himself in one of the more popular common rooms, vaguely hoping in the back of his processor that somebody was around. Even the knitted Thing was alone today, however, its slavish devotee having apparently abandoned it for a duty-shift. Which left the jet sitting in an empty common room with nothing but his thoughts for company. Exactly what he hadn't wanted to happen, thank you very much. He'd had too much time to think, lately.

Decepticons who thought too much got into trouble. He let his head fall back, staring up at the ceiling as if seeking answers from the orderly tiles. His air intakes acted as blinders on either side, and all he could see was square upon square, perfectly measured and cut. Precision only a machine could accomplish, assembled without error. This Earth planet was utter chaos outside, there were crazy 'bots running around inside, but at least he could depend on the rigid structure of the base itself to remind him that things hadn't always been so -

- someone had drawn a caricature of Optimus Prime on the ceiling. Or maybe it was Motormaster. It was hard to tell, what with the way it was, umm…having its way with the highway overpass. The overpass was well-drawn. The semi-truck was rather exaggerated.

He thought, anyway.

Thundercracker sighed air through his systems, pushing stale emissions and thoughts out in one heave, and lifted his head again. There was no escaping this place. Worse, there was no escaping the reality of his situation.

He liked to fool himself into thinking it hadn't always been like this. Before Earth, things hadn't been so disorderly. Okay, yeah, it had been disorderly, but not in that ridiculously over-the-top way humans seemed to infect everything with. But, really, that wasn't true. Maybe it hadn't been so obvious, but that was a matter of scale and confinement. The weird and ridiculous hadn't been crammed into an underwater base to really be unavoidably crazy. Waging war on Cybertron had allowed Thundercracker to…overlook the strangeness.

The Stunticons wouldn't have even been noticeable on Cybertron, where flyers and ground-pounders were compartmentalized. Their special kind of weird would have been kept separate until battle, when everything went to the smelter anyway. A touch of crazy in the mix would have gone unremarked when passing in the halls in Darkmount. Who cared what a ground-pounder was like when a mech saw him once a vorn?

The closest companions a flyer had were fellow flyers. Thundercracker had belonged in those ranks. He hadn't precisely been happy with what was happening, but belonging to the crowd had made it easier to accept orders and the Cause and whatever slag the else got passed through the ranks. It was hard to be politically different in Cybertron's skies. There was no place for deep thought when flying or fighting. Thundercracker had questioned the future, but theoretical questions were nothing when fighting Autobot guerilla strikes over energon stores they all needed to survive.

The dead-end war on Cybertron had been uncomfortable, but orderly. He knew what was going on. There was no pressure to think, only routine in the same rut of guard duty and the occasional shriek as Starscream ordered them into a lightning strike on an Autobot position. Always the company of other flyers gathered around him, fitting into his place among the ranks, had covered his thoughts and fears and doubts with ideology and boredom.

Then came Earth, and this tiny underwater base. Shutting flyers underwater; whose bright idea had that been? Everyone knew it wasn't wise to shut flyers down. It limited their options, tweaked their sensors, and eventually it wore on their minds. Astrotrain and Blitzwing got into violent fights until Megatron sent them up into orbit. Blast Off and Vortex got so bad the Combaticons were able get their own base. Dirge, Thrust, and Ramjet spiraled closer, moving as one and never leaving each other alone. They grew more silent in their depressive phases and more dangerous during their manic ones.

Skywarp, Starscream, and Thundercracker were a placed trine, not a made one, and they pulled apart instead of gluing together. Their personalities grated on each other, too different to tolerate outside of combat. Confining them underwater was enough to make Hook twitch nervously(4). It made Starscream lash out like a cornered turbofox: desperation and wily cunning in one. Skywarp twisted in on himself, picking on his victims' minds and bodies until even those who hadn't gotten caught in a malicious prank were walkingwounded afterward. Thundercracker…

Thundercracker learned. Exposure and confinement forced him into the company of different viewpoints, and he found himself unexpectedly interested. He was surrounded by wildly-varied Decepticon minds wandering the halls and striking out against one another. Grounders brushed shoulders with him, leered at his wings, and sneered at his fighting style. They fed his fears and doubts in a situation where every what-if question he'd ever about the Decepticon Cause was starting to come into play. The old ways of fighting this war were no longer valid, and there were other races in the mix. Where was the honor in killing the humans? What was the point of destroying Earth? Mental exercises became real life, and Thundercracker didn't have the security of the ranks to hide in any more. The company was as uncertain as his questions: crazy Stunticons and the morality of the Decepticon cause; Soundwave's midgets and the honor in fighting a dead-end war; the Combaticons' past political views and conquest on other worlds.

He learned, and it smothered him as surely as the tons of ocean water surrounding him.

Starscream had banished him here, leaving him behind on Earth instead of taking him to Cybertron. It was punishment for an impudent question. Impudent or merely impulsively asking out loud what Starscream didn't want to hear? The unspoken rules dictate that Thundercracker conform or be punished, and the punishments edged harsher each time he refused to be pushed along by old momentum. Skywarp liked to pick apart his behavior, nudging at doubts and ridiculing him until even Thundercracker's notoriously mild temper snapped. Starscream just smacked him with rank and doubled his duty shifts until Thundercracker stopped asking difficult questions. Or trapped him on a dirtball planet instead of taking him back home, where things made sense.

Although that was a fantasy, like blinding himself to everything but the ceiling tiles. There were contradictions and stupid caricatures on Cybertron, too. The quandaries surrounding the war didn't disappear because he didn't want to see them. The other Decepticons didn't go away because he wasn't isolated among them anymore. Life wasn't that easy.

He'd almost tried, anyway. Thundercracker had almost broken, almost apologized to Starscream and humbly requested to be included on the mission(5). He hadn't, however. He'd held onto dignity like a lifeline, and stayed, and now he was one of the very few Decepticons rattling around on Earth like metal beads in a tin can: bouncing off each other sometimes, but mostly just passing without touching in the halls.

Without the others there staring at him, the situation shifted. Trapped in with him, trapping him, the other Decepticons had applied pressure on his fears. They'd snapped the heads off sprouting doubts and weeded out his questions. Without their crowding, watching pressure, Thundercracker became a hothouse of repressed thought suddenly bursting at the seams. The chaos was still there. Cybertron had an underpinning of madness that wasn't as visible as Earth's writhing surface, but was there nevertheless. He didn't want to see it, but once revealed, there was nowhere to turn his optics where it didn't grin back at him. Earth pushed them all, but only more obviously than before. They thought, and reacted, as they always had. It just brought out the worst, confining them in such a small, horrid location. This planet didn't allow them the freedom to not see the results.

Some Decepticons twined together. Skywarp twisted. Starscream pulled. Megatron…destroyed.

No escaping this place, these doubts, and the Decepticons. He'd be one more headcase among the flyers, only noticeable in close quarters, to hide in the sky and let loose on battlefield. Thundercracker just had to learn to live with it.

Live with badly-drawn Autobots-maybe-Decepticons doing obscene things to road structures, and lousy bases where the only company was thought and silent questions. And the pink knitted Thing, of course.

Cybertron's sky seemed very far away.

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Footnotes

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(1) Megatron and Prime, Starscream, and the Insecticons, respectively. The solution to each problem, oddly enough, involved hitting a wall really hard with someone's head.

(2)Starscream hadn't stayed behind, duh. That was 50% of the noise level right there.

(3)Brawl. He had read somewhere about something called a 'tank cozy,' and, well, yeah. The…Thing…was turning out suspiciously frilly. Also – pink. But nobody was going to say anything. Possibly because they couldn't stop laughing long enough, but still.

(4)Some days, he hated his job. Being responsible for the mental health of a bunch of flyers stuck in an underwater base? He was good, but he wasn't that good!

(5)Even if the mission had been more of that insanity he expected as a matter of course here on Earth. Seriously, a cease-fire between the factions in order to repel an invasion of hostile sand?