Pinned
Flowers from a Sidewalk Crack & Two Cents from a Dead End Skiv [addendum: Obituary for the Poet Miner]
Drift thought he'd seen everything down in the Dead End. What he hadn't seen as a skiv he'd seen as a streetmech, and what he hadn't seen as a streetmech, he'd seen as a gun-for-hire. Then he receives a job offer with a bounty too large to ignore. The mark? Megatron, as in "electron", as in the bomb. A miner, from Tarn. The crime? Poetry. Or: Four and a half million years ago, a bounty hunter from the Dead End met a miner who fancied himself a poet, and that alone changed everything.
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence
Fandom: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Relationships: Drift | Deadlock & Megatron, Drift | Deadlock/Ratchet, Drift | Deadlock & Ravage, Impactor & Megatron, Drift | Deadlock + Original Character(s)
Characters: Drift | Deadlock, Megatron, Ratchet, Ravage, Impactor, Orion Pax, Missit (OC), Chromantic (OC), Fuse (OC)
Additional Tags: Character Study, Pre-War, Alternate Origin Story, The Dead End, Poetry, The Origins of the Decepticons, Implied/Referenced Drug Use and Addiction, Implied/Referenced Prostitution, Bounty Hunters, Platonic Sex, Queerplatonic Relationships, Hurt/Comfort, Neo-Noir, This is set before Megatron met Terminus so it's very early on
Note: Two Cents was the accumulation of my pandemic-project of re-examining Drift's character arc. It's an alternative depiction of how Drift and Megatron first met and an intimate look at life in the Dead End pre-war. The fic takes place in the span of three panels from Drift's standalone mini-series, and follows Drift as he endures the events that lead him to decide to join the Decepticons.
(Pretty much me asking the question "if Drift was a bounty hunter while Megatron was still hiding under tables during bar fights, shouldn't it have been Drift to inspire Megatron to violence instead of the other way around?" and running with that idea. Its also where Missit, Chromantic, and Fuse first came into existence. Please heed the mature rating -- this fic is a heavy read, given where and when it's set).
