The Shadow of Kaon

A Chance for Redemption

Darkwing saw so many times her leader's outbursts toward his soldiers, mostly toward Starscream, but when they searched through the whole engine room without any success to find the missing datapad, Megatron didn't yell at her.

As the femme learned, in the last two days the third in command buried himself in the work, finding four other relics' coordinates. And because of her, those informations fell into the hands of the Autobots too, besides the tons of other reports of their military forces.

Megatron immediately called together the others, only telling them that somehow the Autobots got the coordinates, and to prepare the teams for the relic hunting. He completely ignored the femme until her departure, pulling her to the side further from the others only in the last minute.

He didn't lift his servo to hit her, or warmed up his cannon for a threatening shot. It was so much worse than that.

'Would you stop thinking about this?' Shadow annoyedly asked from the back, yanking her sister out of her thoughts.

Darkwing sighed, tilting her wings just enough to change direction above the icy desert where they flew past, following the signal through the blinding white snowland.

'Lord Megatron said he is disappointed in me. He said if I can't bring back the relic, don't even bother to go back. I have to make everything right Shadow, I can't fail again...'

'I'm sure he just wanted to motivate you, dear. Just think about it, if anybody else would do the same mistake, they would be already dead. A little scolding is not the end of the world.'

The femme's frame stiffened for a moment. Maybe to Shadow it was just a scolding, but to her, it was different.

Megatron trusted her with the datapad. He trusted her to keep it safe, and of course, like always, she became a burden by abandoning her responsibility. She couldn't be a burden. Not again.

'Why didn't you remind me to get the datapad?' She burst out in their mind. 'You were weird all day, weirder than usual. This... thing has an effect on you too?'

The memory of the scorching heat and the panic from the unknown feeling achingly stabbed into her Spark. Darkwing still didn't understand what happened after the crash, but if her body was in this terrible pain, then Shadow definitely felt it in their processor too, even if she had no physical form currently.

'It's...' Unusually, Shadow hesitated with her answer. 'It's not like that, dear.'

'Then what?'

Her sister shook her imaginary helm slowly.

'I can't tell you. Not now. But you have to believe me, it's for your own good.'

Darkwing already knew that there would be no use to ask Shadow for more specific answers. She always kept her secrets to herself, only sharing enough information with her to help their survival chances.

And maybe it was for the better, she already knew too much about her sister's doings.

A small, but flashing pain in the side of her helm made Darkwing's vision blurry for a second, almost making her lose control over her flying.

'Where are you going?' Shadow asked when she suddenly started to descend to the ground. 'The relic is further from there, according to the coordinates.'

'I need a moment, I feel a bit dizzy.'

Darkwing changed form still in the air and jumped into the cold snow.

Her frame was still so much warmer than the weather around her, that the falling snowflakes turned into waterdrops before they even reached her edgily lifted wings, and ran down on her back to turn into ice drips as they fell below. A small, visible exhale left the femme's intake while she touched her helm on the side where the pain was the worst, but it didn't matter how she searched, she didn't find any damage.