((Sometimes you just have to break up with your nemesis.))
Magnus-Mun: “You're right. This again,” he snarled. “And again, and again, and again.”
Magnus was a mecha of habit and patterns, driven by his compulsive need for order, but of late he had come to realize how truly trapped he was by them. Ironic, then, that someone he had always considered so lawless was also trapped in a repeating pattern. He had just never really seen it until this moment, truly /seen/ it, as more than just a pattern of misbehavior that prefaced future crimes.
“Don't you ever get tired of it? /Ever./”
Whirl-Mun: "Yes," Whirl snapped back, "I do." He continued to dig his heels in, and unless Magnus lifted him bodily off the floor, the larger mech would have to fight for every inch. "I didn't do anything wrong , and here I am, being dragged off to the brig again. Why the frag " he yanked at his arms, his rotors whirring briefly in a bid for freedom, "I thought you'd actually take my side this time, I don't know."
The thought of going to the brig had filled him with genuine distress, but he was masking it well with his fury. "Why me, Magnus? Why am I taking the heat for this? He shot me , remember?"
Magnus-Mun: The titan's frame sagged as if under a great weight; he felt suddenly exhausted, even though he had recharged just a day before. For a moment his grip loosened as if he was genuinely considering letting Whirl go. “You could have walked away,” he whispered, more to himself than Whirl. He knew Whirl wouldn't listen.
The titan's helm lifted, looking beyond Whirl into the hallway that stretched deep into the bowels of the ship. His /home./ “Instead, you chose to put the crew and our guests at risk. Something you never learned, Whirl, and never will, but being an Autobot is as much about surrender as /killing Decepticons/ as you so graciously put it.”
Whirl-Mun: "Surrender never works out real well for the person who's gotta do it, Magnus," Whirl snapped back. "Don't know if you noticed." In Whirl's case, of course, he had every reason to believe this was true. There was once a time when he'd tried to walk away from violence, or to hide from trouble. It always came back, and it always hit harder than before.
"You've lived long enough to know the only way to get rid of a problem is to get rid of a problem. But if you wanna pretend otherwise, fine. Be my guest. So I guess in the future, some 'Con comes into the ship, starts insulting me, in my own damn home , I just walk away? Is that it?"
Magnus-Mun: “Yes, that's it,” Magnus replied, his voice gruff.
'We all have to do things we don't want to do,' he thought to himself. The titan's optics roved the limp form hanging from his hand like some sort of perverse puppet. While Magnus usually had a good grip on his emotions, he couldn't hold back a little shudder of revulsion.
'Just like I wouldn't want to die for the likes of you, and yet I would have. If I had to do it over again, I would step between Starscream and you again.'
Things he would have liked to say, but they would have been useless. There were times where the best thing was to give up and walk away. For all these years, some part of him had vainly hoped that there was something redeemable in Whirl, but the moment had come. He had to admit there was such a thing as a lost cause.
“And that's what you're going to do right now. I'm going to release you, and you're going to /walk away/,” he hissed.
Whirl-Mun: "What do you think I'm gonna do?" he asked with a snort at Magnus's ultimatum. "Attack you ? Is that what you think? I'd like to remind you that I didn't start this. But--ugh. Whatever." He just shook his head. "You didn't listen then. You won't listen now."
He fell silent, waiting for Magnus to set him down and undo the cuffs. Whirl wasn't certain, but he had assumed the "walk away" part meant he wasn't getting dragged to the brig.
Magnus-Mun: In one swift, practiced movement, the helicopter was back on his own two pedes. Click. The titan unlocked the cuffs and freed his burden. Magnus stepped back. At the moment, he wanted as much space between him and Whirl as possible.
There was nothing and everything left to say. None of it mattered. He could only do one thing. Reaching out, the titan pointed down the distant hallways with a digit. “Go,” he barked.
Where? Magnus didn't care. Off ship, back to his quarters, back to the Wreckers. This would be the last time the titan would bestir himself to care anything for Whirl; it was a time for walking away.
Whirl-Mun: Whirl stepped smartly back as soon as he was freed, his optic flicking from Magnus's hands to his face a few times, as if he didn't trust the other mech to suddenly change his mind and cuff him again.
He didn't, though, and so Whirl did just as he was told. He slunk off, dull frustration ringing in his spark, a sensation that was not in any way new to him.
