Hopefully you're piecing the story together now. Sorry it's taking me so long to update! :C

This installment brought to you by a prompt ultharkitty gave me (go read her combaticons stuff: she's awesome!)

Onslaught hated these rare occasions when he found himself actually having to feel something. It eroded his edge, clogged his processor with difficult code. Anger he could use: rage, white hot, fueled him, focused him, kept him moving. This, though, seemed to bog him down, gum his gears.

And he hated that so many of these rare and agonizing moments had the name Vortex at the bottom of them.

"This time," he said, quietly, so that he could possibly trust his voice not to crackle, "you have gone too far."

He waited for Vortex to protest. Waited to hear the copter's excuses, shifts of responsibility, claims that it was someone else's fault. He steeled himself for the hard contempt he'd have to throw up as a wall between them.

"I know," Vortex said, simply. The visor tilted down, studying his hands. Hands still blackened with charred energon. What could he say more? He had. He had done the unthinkable.

Onslaught faltered, unsettled more by Vortex's simple reply than the barrage of excuses he'd been expecting.

"I…lost it." Vortex ached, less from the physical overstrain of his damaged servos than from his own horror. This was why he'd needed Onslaught. All these megacycles, without someone to act as his rein, his safety release. Without him, he'd gone too far. Overstepped enough when Onslaught HAD been there to keep him in check. And he'd just proved that for all that, he had learned...nothing. Shame bit at him with sharp fangs.

"That's it? No excuse? You 'lost it'?" Onslaught felt an almost welcome ripple of anger. Yes. Yes, come. Please. Fill me. Let me feel what I know how to feel. Push aside all this…other. I can resolve anger. I can let it pass through my system. This, though, I cannot handle.

"Blast Off," Vortex breathed. He cut himself off with a brisk shake of the head. As if he dared not even allow himself to think any further. Blast Off, bursting suddenly into orange-red fragments as he approached the landing pad, a sudden jarring wrench over the gestalt bond, a howl that Vortex still could not tell if was his or Blast Off's. And then Swindle. Fraggin' Swindle muttering something about lost profit and volatile chemicals.

And then the piece of charred purple armor had clanged on the launch pad deck between them, and it had been like a signal flare. Vortex had moved without thinking. Purely on instinct, purely on feeling.

Oh, Vortex had put it together right. Swindle had sold them out collectively—it was no surprise he'd sold Blast Off out the same way, tricking him into moving some illegal goods. Just as it was really—in retrospect (and Vortex was furious with himself that he hadn't seen it beforehand, in time)—no surprise he'd needlessly involved Vortex. Dangling fanciful notions of the gestalt reuniting, despite the Crisis Intervention Accords. Vortex had missed it all…so much. So much that he'd been ripe fruit for Swindle to pluck and then slice up into a fraggin' fruit salad.

There was no way Onslaught's rage could match the fury he felt against himself. But even that, he realized, didn't help Blast Off.

Nor did it bring Swindle back.

"Yes," Onslaught said. "Blast Off is in hard CR."

Vortex jolted. The news that should have comforted him—Blast Off wasn't terminated—instead filled him with an acidic burning horror.

Onslaught watched, trying to keep impassive as the news struck Vortex, the implications seeping in, like water, crackling frayed circuits in a series of agonizing little shocks. Yes. You'd killed Swindle. What you'd thought was revenge—life for a life—was imbalance. And worse. He had to say it. It was burning in his vocalizer, searing at his spark. Still, even so, he tried to find ways to soften the blow, to mitigate the damage. Vortex knew, but he needed to hear it. "This," he said, carefully, as if the words themselves were larger than galaxies and had to force themselves out against gravity, "ends the gestalt. We can never be complete."

Onslaught clutched desperately after rage. Trying to get furious, trying to summon the hot comfort of anger. In his rages, he could see everything so clearly. In his furies, he was safe, insulated from feeling anything. No pain, no distress, everything burned away but his next target, his next objective.

His rage eluded him, flames slipping through his fingers.

Vortex's rotors sagged as though they were suddenly immensely heavy. "My fault," he said. His processor raced, desperate to try and find some way to…fix it. Some way that he could stop the words that he knew were coming next.

Too late, and he knew it. He'd braced himself for Onslaught's searing rage. He was unprepared for the brittle cold in the gestalt commander's voice. "We will never be together again. And it is your doing. I hope you remember that."

Words and hope died tangled together. And they looked at each other for a long, agonized moment, feeling, for the last time, the same emotion.