☆ Your least favorite part of the job was grading papers. In your personal opinion, art classes didn't need paperwork, but you bosses insisted on a certain amount and you had to comply. But shuffling through a stack of short papers on art pieces made your head hurt every time, to the point that you found your thoughts drifting to the Autobots. In the short time since you'd stumbled upon them, you'd more or less gotten the hang of navigating their base, but none of them were particularly endearing to you. Well, aside from the Minicons.
Even so, you'd begun to enjoy your time there. The base itself was a marvel, a mechanical work of art in its own right, enough that it made your hands twitch. You planned to bring your things and get some sketches done. That sounded much better than grading papers. Following the delicate lines of those walls that seemed almost living at times, the shift of light and color that followed the touch of large grey hands, a rounded face, soft blue eyes-
Your thoughts cut short when the doorbell rang and you found yourself inexplicably embarrassed. Banishing the thought of Hot Shot thoroughly from your mind, you clawed together the papers you haven't gotten to and crammed them into your art bag, slinging it over your shoulder and making a dash for the door.
It was Rad today, grinning at you with his blond hair so wind-touseled that you reached out to fix it on reflex. He allowed it. "Hiya, Teach! I'm here to pick you up!" In the form of an electric bicycle, the minicon High Wire chirruped a hello to you.
"Hey, Rad. Thank you both." One of the kids had come by to help you to the base every day since you'd made your intentions clear and you were grateful for it. You settled carefully behind the boy, always irrationally worried that you could hurt High Wire despite having seen him carry all three of the kids with no issue. And then you were off, High Wire's engine revving excitedly when Carlos and Alexis eventually drew alongside you with Grindor and Sureshock.
The path up the mountain had become familiar quicker than you'd thought it would, the ever-thickening pelt of trees that furred the hills a calming thing. Even if Optimus Prime's rumbling voice sent prickles of anxiety down your spine and you'd gotten into a shouting match with Red Alert more than once and even the thought of Hot Shot made you want to find a stick big enough to hit him good and proper with, the actual journey to that cave of emotional horrors was absolutely lovely.
"Excuse me, ma'am!" Alexis steered close to you and Rad, her sweet face remarkably serious. "Did Rad tell you about Smokescreen yet?"
And ah how quickly the peaceful calm shatters. With Rad leaning comfortably back against you as he was, you felt it when his entire body tensed up just as Alexis sighed, deep and unsurprised. "Yeah, I kinda figured. Sorry, ma'am, but you seemed way too relaxed for him to have told you. So, yesterday when you said you needed to stay home and clean your carpets, we went with the Autobots to get a minicon. We ended up finding another Autobot in the subway tunnel systems, his name is Smokescreen and he's living in the base now. We'll introduce you when we get there."
You slumped forward, resting your chin on Rad's head. "Another one? Is this one at least reasonable?" You doubted it. You doubted it quite a bit.
"We don't know him yet!" Carlos swerves so close that High Wire and Grindor beep nervously at each other. "I'm sure he's cool as the others, though!"
A dreadful thought. It plagued you all the way up the mountainside, until the trees thinned again into red hills. Another soldier. Maybe this one would have more than excuses for how his cohorts treated children like pieces of their politics, but with your luck it'd be another round-faced idiot who'd look at you with big blue eyes and purr when he was confused. But you shook off the thought of a repainted Hot Shot with a sigh as Rad swung himself off High Wire and offered a hand to help you, keeping his fingers entwined with yours as he led the way towards the Autobots' hidden base.
"Hot Shot! Heeeey, Hot Shot, we're here!" Carlos' high greeting was mirrored by the three minicons who bolted past you, Alexis sharp on their heels, already scolding Carlos for yelling. Rad stayed loyally by your side, but the second he'd gotten you safely through the front door and turned to check, you smiled and nodded and then he was off too, shrieking a greeting as the yellow plated terror turned the corner.
You'd only been a part of all this for a few weeks, not even a full month, and though the clumsy, dim-witted collection of robot soldiers had done precious little to impress you, you'd gotten pretty good at reading them. It wasn't that different from overlooking your classes, really. The look on Hot Shot's face when he crouched to let the kids and their bots cling to his hands and thighs was absolutely adoring, the gentle sound of his purr just loud enough for you to hear as you followed the kids at a much slower pace.
"Hey, c'mon kids, be careful! You're too strong, you're gunna knock me on my tail again." His voice thick with amusement, Hot Shot gingerly scooped up Carlos, dropping the boy on his shoulder as if he were little more than a squeaking kitten. Sureshock seemed to have taken this as a declaration of war and was making a decent effort at wrestling one of Hot Shot's hands into submission. You hated to admit it, but it did make something warm flutter to life in your chest, somewhere just under your heart.
Then he looked up and smiled at you, always warm and gentle no matter how often you'd snapped at him or scolded him. "Heya, Teach."
You scoffed, hands on your hips. "I am not your teacher, Goldilocks. You know my name."
"Yeah, I know it. Hey, kids, I don't think Teach likes me too much!" Weaponising your kids, Hot Shot makes that sweet face into an expression of pouting misery and got three calls of reassurance immediately. And then three kids were gently chiding you, repeating your own words back to you on how it's important to be kind. It took a great effort to not join Sureshock's war efforts against the Crayola dandelion crayon of a robot presently purring with pleased self-importance.
Carlos was making his careful way back down Hot Shot's frame, and you did not miss the way he resettled, an almost natural looking shift that always gave Carlos an easier path. You wished he were less good with the kids. It'd be easier to stay mad at him all the time if he weren't so obviously enamored with them.
"Hey, Hot Shot, where'd Smokescreen go? We wanna get to know him!" Rad, clawing his way up to balance on Hot Shot's thigh, getting Carlos around the waist with both arms to help him down the second the other was in reach. And Hot Shot's expression twitched, just long enough for you to catch it.
"Smokes? I dunno, kids. I'm sure he's somewhere around here." Offering a hand to ease both boys back to the ground, where Alexis was waiting to grab them both, a handful of shirt apiece.
"We'll find him," she promises, hauling the other two behind her. "We'll come get you when we find him!"
"Oh, hey, why don't you take a ride with Hot Shot!" Carlos' suggestion is followed by enthusiastic agreement from the other two, and he carried on, bolstered by their support. "Yeah! Yeah!!! He's got an incredible engine, he's a super powerful racing car! And you love racing, don't ya, Teach?" You took a breath to steady yourself, really regretting sharing that little fact with Carlos as he smiles at you, bright and wide, and it is a look you had so dearly missed that you couldn't bear to refuse him.
"... fine. Alright, but just this once. If it's alright with you?" You give Hot Shot a glance, hoping desperately he will take the hint and scratch up an excuse. But he just smiles that stupid, crooked, handsome grin.
"Hey, I'm all for it!" And you want to hit him so badly that your hands twitch. He reaches for you, offering his hand as if you could take it, and you press your lips into a thin line as you finally give in and haul yourself into his grip. To his credit, he cradles you carefully, lifting you up to his chest as the plates slide apart, and you are ushered inside of him, locked in a metal coffin. You can feel him moving, can feel the shift and hum of mechanical parts, the vibrating impact of his steps. It takes a harsh effort on your part to not simply start screaming until he lets you Out.
It doesn't get much better when he starts to transform, parts shifting, splitting, changing, something cradling beneath your legs, forcing you into a sit as metal blooms open, something almost soft pushing through the new gaps. The light comes as a surprise, a blade of sun through glass as piping and plating pulls back from you, settling into a windshield, a dashboard, a console, and you finally find yourself sitting down in a car, more or less, while he gets his hind wheels in order. The road unfurls in front of you as you blink stupidly, the purr of his engine vibrating to your bones as your eyes adjust and you fumble for a seat belt on reflex. There isn't one.
"Jeez, I didn't know human engines could go that hard!" The voice comes from everywhere around you and you jolt, a hand to your chest as you realize he's talking about your pounding heart. There's a heat to the chair you sit in, unsettling as you shift to look around. It's just a car, you tell yourself as his engine rumbles louder, the world flashing by you so fast that you can't even tell where it is he's taken you.
You actually study him in an effort to calm yourself. The dashboard flashes with lights in the vague shape of engine stats, but without any clear labeling, a numberless speedometer blinking randomly, a corona of half-right check engine lights sparking to life in fluttering time with the deep purr that surrouds you. There's a gearshift, but no way to move it, vents that don't blow air, and when you reach forward to brush your fingers between the thick slats that should be plastic but just feel slick and warm, you find that it ends in a flat plane rather than leading to deeper internals. The whole vehicle shudders alarmingly, swerving hard enough that you're knocked against the window. "H-Hey! Watch what you're touching in there!"
"Sorry." You mumble it without thinking, bracing yourself as he kicks up speed again, and you wonder, as you leave the mountains behind to rush through empty streets far away from home, what all this is to him. Is it like marathon running? Or is it more like a cat playing, rushing along as fast as four paws can carry?
The chair beneath you feels wrong, the appearance of the leather dead on, but the touch of it too smooth, too soft. It is warm as all things living are warm.
You tap the roof above you, struggling into a kneel. "Hey! Hey, open up, let me out too!"
"Do I look like a convertible to you?" But even as he says it, he's opening, seams splitting with soft hisses of pressure, plates sliding apart, refolding and resettling, the car's roof disappearing into the body until the wind screams past your ears. You lean forward, brace your hands on the top of the steering wheel, and let the sound of it fill you up, barely able to breathe against the force, unable to hear anything else.
You did, regrettably, really really love fast cars.
By the time he began to slow, your hair was a mess, sand and leaves stuck in it, your skin feeling almost uncomfortably warm without the gale ripping away your body heat. It had taken your instinctual fear with it, nothing left under your skin but a buzzing, wanting excitement as Hot Shot slowed to a stop, his door opening in a clear enough signal to get off of him, and you complied without fuss. He transformed, clear blue eyes locking onto you the moment they flickered to life, and you were buoyant enough that even the sight of his infuriating face wasn't enough to wipe the smile off yours.
He went down on one knee, bracing an arm over it and lowering his head much closer to your level. "Alright, Teach. Let's talk."
Aaaand that did it. He really was the best in the business at souring your attitude. Scoffing, you crossed your arms and looked up at him. "I told you. That's not my name. The kids can call me that, I'm their teacher, you cannot."
And that mouth presses into a thin line, a cloud of steam huffing into indignant life around the bulk of his hips. You narrow your eyes at him, ready for another match of sniping at each other, this time with no kids to beg for peace. But instead, he actually surprises you. "That's- Alright. Yeah, fine, that's as good a place to start as any." While you stand there blinking at him, he sits down properly, legs crossed. He reaches for you and you tense, but he does nothing but pluck idly at your paint-splattered clothes. "Alright, Speckles, listen. We're making the kids upset, more upset than I think they're letting on."
You wanted to protest the nickname- why couldn't he just call you by your actual name?- but his words stopped you up short. Obviously your dislike of the Autobots hadn't gone well with the kids. They'd spent every day trying to find something about them to soften your heart, bringing you all through the base to show you things, chattering your ears off about the things they'd seen and learned. You sighed through your nose and let your arms drop, suddenly feeling very, very tired. "I know." You didn't want them upset. You didn't like how hard they worked to find something for you to love in the things that had become so important to them. You didn't want for your children to be soldiers. But you couldn't get them out of it. There was no separating them now.
Hot Shot's hand nudges at you idly, tracing down your arm, and you fight the urge to slap at him, everything too heavy and too sick in your chest. "Look, I get it. Don't do that thing with your mouth, I mean it." That hand comes closer, curled behind you lightly, blocking you from the wind. It takes an effort to do nothing more than shake your head, furious in a wet, grieving sort of way.
"Do your kind have children?"
It comes out higher-pitched than you mean, accusatory. His engine hums in the warm desert orange cage of his chest. He does not look at your face. "Yeah. We used to. Before the war started, we used to have so many. I get it. I know what war does to kids." He leans down further and you are trapped between the cold glow of those sky-deep eyes and the warmth of grey metal. "I don't want to see any more kids die either."
You hit him without even thinking about it, all the hate and anger and righteous, boiling fury snapping and you slammed your fists uselessly against his cheek. His engine revved hard, but he didn't pull away, just shut that blue eye and let you smack at the smooth plating of his face. Your kids were soldiers. Your kids, the two little boys you'd pulled hot glue out of the hair of, the little girl you'd taught perspective to, they were in a war and they were too proud of it to possibly understand what it was going to do to them. The tears come as something ugly and hot, a thick knot at the base of your throat that only begins to melt when you cough out a sound of misery. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair but it was what you had and you wanted so, so badly for it to be enough for your kids to come out the other side.
"They're going to die." You hit him, again and again, until your knuckles split and smeared the pale silver of his cheek with scarlet. "They are going to die, even if you manage to stop anything from killing them. There isn't going to be anything left, do you understand me? How could you understand?" The blows hurt, sharp bolt of agony ringing through the bones of your hand all the way to your elbow, so you slap at him instead, slamming your palms against your own blood and you cannot stop crying even as it too begins to ache. "They're mine. They were supposed to be mine and you stole them."
When you give up, standing there with your blood painting braille onto the dirt, his eye opens just enough to look at you through the delicate, overlapping guard plates that almost seemed like lashes. He leans closer, just enough to make the offer clear, and you slump against his face with a sound of abject misery, letting his grey hand hold you against him. His voice comes as a low murmur, softer than you'd have expected him to be capable of. "I'll stop picking at you if you stop picking at me? We can at least pretend to be friends, for the kids. Alright?"
For the kids. Why did it sound like you were agreeing to co-parent? Amicably divorced to an alien robot you'd never married. That was certainly one way to live your life.
You pull away without answering, something exhausted in you still managing to drum up a flash of embarrassment for your behavior. Ripping off your sleeve, you scrubbed your blood off of his face and made a nonsense circular kind of motion with your hand. "C'mon. Let's get going." He sighs, deep and long, but complies, opening his door for you when all is said and done. The pace isn't quite as breakneck as you begin the drive back to base. You watch the world flash by, chin propped on your hand as you stare out the window. And when you mutter, "Alright," you're sure you don't imagine the way his engine purrs louder.
☆ You make the decision before you get home. The snow parts around your bare shins as you walk with heavied steps, refusing to part with the freezing powder that clings to your skin and choked your socks. You want to bury yourself in it. Want, so very badly, to surround yourself in white until you can forget that it is not blue. But nothing will ever be cold enough for that.
There are few people wandering the street so late at night, the whole world seemingly painted golden by bulb light over snow. Sliced through in black and brown by the crushed pathways of tires and boots. Sometimes when you close your eyes, it burns against your nonvision, the laced map of trenches. The scars dug so deeply into a moon of ice that the network was visible from space. War, forever. War beyond even the veil of death.
A car drives by, a flash of white against white, filthy slush splashing warmly against your legs. You watch it until it turns out of sight. Stand there with grime-greyed snowmelt running down to your boots until the sound fades and the night is silent again. It only makes you more certain as you begin to walk again, dragging yourself through the darkness.
It had taken so long to get used to this world's night. To a sky that was Emptiness, stars and void instead of the endless swirling redness of bloody, watching Jupiter. Europa glows. Light reflecting endlessly through the ice until the whole of everything is suffused in that incandescent light, a softness that breeds neither shadow nor clarity. There is none of that comforting sameness here. Night comes with blindness, with darkness that does not yield and patches of too-bright light that ruins what little acclimation your body is capable of, only serving to blind you further. You do not like street lamps. You are not fond of the single, wavering moon that could never reflect enough to truly see.
You slink into the safety of your home like a beaten dog. You know this and yet you cannot stop it. Cannot disobey the instinct to crawl up the dark, creaking steps on all fours, turning your head one way and then the other to catch even the suggestion of sound. Somewhere in the floor above, the couple that seems to hate each other so fiercely argue just loud enough to reach you. Something drops, just close enough to hear. The twist of your key sliding open the lock is louder than you like, but you fight down the old, tired instinct to bare your teeth and hiss, just slipping into the comforting nest of your tiny apartment.
You search every room on habit. Checking under furniture, lingering in empty, dark closets, sniffing the air as if you could possibly find any scent strange in this place that reeks of so much. Some days you miss the simplicity of Cold or Blood being the only smells in the world. Your bones ache. Your face burns.
The box is in your bedroom closet, above the two coats you own that are sharp and unwrinkled with disuse, the Europan crest emblazoned on the arms and back unbroken. It is made of worn cardboard, heavy in your grip as you kneel and set it on the floor, removing the lid with a sense of prickling anxiety. Your medals lay beside the gun, useless trinkets they'd given to you only to assuage their own guilt, perhaps, or perhaps simply for the showmanship. There is no ammo in the weapon, you know as you lift it from the box, let it sit heavy in your hand, the memories threatening to drag you under. You cannot pretend that your hands do not shake when you set it aside, paw the medals over, and lift free a folder. The pages inside tremble in time with your grip as you flip through them. Having to pause to let your vision blur with something akin to panic.
You forget that the world does not operate on a broken clock as the ice moon does. That there are times and places to do things, and times when Not to do them. When you find the number, you simply call it, heedless of the midnight hour.
It could be called pleasant, the voice on the other side. "This is the Jupiter Rehabilitation Center, how can I help you?" Your voice is stuck to itself, something physical built out of webbing and knives, sticking to your throat, cutting into the cartilage bands of your trachea. Your hands won't stop shaking. "Hello?" You press the flip phone harder to your good ear as if you will be able to simply force the blurry thoughts through the line and the person somewhere on the other end will simply know. "Hello, can you hear me?"
"He-io." The syllables croak out of you, fighting free, leaving too much of themselves behind. You flip through the papers again, as if it will calm you.
"Hello?"
You never turn the heat on in your home, but warmth leaks in from the walls, your neighbors fighting off your coldness. You wrench open a window, stick yourself out into the bracing warmth of a winter night. "I'm- I think I need-" You sound wrong. You're so sure that this isn't your voice. "I was told I could make an appointment?"
"Oh, are you a veteran?" Don't say it. Don't say it. Please, don't- "Thank you for your service!" Your stomach flips. You cannot stop the bile from leaving you in a burning rush, suddenly grateful to be hanging out over the air. The purge hits the snow and you can only hope that it did not carry over the phone. "When did you return to earth?" You say the date without having to check and there is a very long pause. "That... was quite a while ago."
It was. "Yes." You don't know what else to say and it only occurs to you, as the silence once again grows, that maybe there was a time limit on these things. That maybe time mattered in more ways than you'd thought, because why else would they have said that? It prickles, burning beneath your skin, and you almost hang up with the shame of your own ignorance when they speak again.
"Okay, can I have your soldier ID? I'll have to check if they left your account open. Did the government provide you with our information?"
"Yes." They'd said it would fix you. That they would dig the ice out of you, given time, and you'd be able to work like a real human being. But you hadn't wanted to let the ice go. It was all that you were. All you knew how to be. You were not a real human being. Your bad ear rings, distracting, but you recite the number from memory. "Six two nine seven three three one oh five B."
You can hear their keyboard, you realize. Harsh clacks that barely carry through. They say your name and you say yes even though it is not your name anymore. "That's great! Yes, you were one of the early pardons, so you grandfathered in when they put in the new system a few years ago. I can get you set up with a good doctor, when are you free?"
"Always. Now." You trace the shape of the address with your finger, wondering if it is close enough to walk.
"Oh, um..." The sound of the keyboard. "How about tomorrow afternoon? Doctor Chertov has an opening. He'll call you in the morning to set it up once he wakes up."
It isn't cold enough. It's never cold enough. You are burning alive. "It's too hot."
"What?" You don't know why you said it. Your head hurts. "Oh, do you mean you have tactile hallucinations? I'll mark that down for him."
You want to tell them that they are wrong. That you are not hallucinating anything. That your body was remade in its entirety to exist in a place of frozen tunnels, reborn in a womb of ice. Instead, you slap the phone shut and retreat, leaving the window open as you curl tightly on your little cot of a bed and try for sleep.
◇ The hardest part about dealing with a Prime who had courtship protocols running through his systems was that it meant privacy was fairly scarce and would only become scarcer. It did, however, make it fairly easy for Ratchet to boss Optimus around. Not that he did it often. But it did make it much easier to force Bumblebee to sit still long enough for his checkup, the Prime standing sternly at his shoulder.
"Aww, come on, Doc! If something breaks on me, Sari can just fix it with her key!" Sitting still was, perhaps, a bit generous of an assessment, the slight scout wiggling and kicking and squirming, but he was sitting down. Ratchet had to put a servo to his thigh to stop it from jiggling about, holding the scanner to Bumblebee's hips and waiting for the screen to flood with information on the state of his joints.
It took quite the effort to lessen his instinctive response to only a low growl. He pretended he did not notice Optimus cut off a mirrored sound. "For the last time, Bumblebee, we don't know what that key does and does not do. And until we do, I will remain your primary. Now stop complaining before I really give you something to complain about." And of course the complaints continued, but only in just-inaudible mutters and discontented rumbles of his engine that matched the beat of his pedes against the examination table. It wasn't long after that that Ratchet's job was done, Bumblebee's frame seeming in good enough shape, minus the few dings and scrapes he always seemed to just manifest. "Alright. Spark's last, open up."
Bumblebee hesitated for quite a while and Ratchet let him, used to his team's hangups. He eventually slid back his plates, just enough for yellow-white light to bleed through. Ratchet gave it a scan and Bumblebee locked his spark away the second the small machine gave a flash of confirmation. All good. "Alright, that's enough for-" He was gone before Ratchet finished, rocketing out the door with a backwards shout that was equally likely to have been a curse as a thanks.
The last mech he needed to check took no asking and no cajoling. Optimus levered himself up to the table without a moment's hesitation, looking down on Ratchet with his finials pricked in that way that Ratchet was constantly having to pretend he didn't notice, attentions undivided. He wished his Prime wouldn't look at him like that. Like he were wonderful.
He sits, still and polite, while Ratchet makes sure he isn't hurt. That his code is running clean and his joins and gears aren't beginning to stiffen or stick. He pretends he does not notice, when he clicks into the medical port on Optimus' side, that it is taking all of Optimus' concentration to stop himself from chirrupping like a newspark with a first crush. It wasn't this bad the last time he looked Optimus over. Just a nagging twitch occasionally coloring a line of his code, the suggestion of a wanting, but now it was a challenge to find any part of him that was not colored over with the desire to Be Closer. He didn't know what to say, how to fix it, so he just kept pretending that he didn't notice.
"Alright, you're doing fine." He unplugs himself, and before he can ask for the last step, Optimus is baring his spark. And it is beautiful, a spiralling thing of flaring aqua light that cannot seem to decide if it wants to be blue or white or green, filaments of itself curling outward to the edges of his spark chamber as though it were made of lace or ribbon or something else beautiful and fine. His own spark aches and he ignores it. The readout is fine, of course, nothing wrong with the exception of a little bit too much heat, but that would fade when he left the medbay and his coding calmed down, Ratchet knew.
"There. You're done." He busies himself with putting his medbay back in order, refusing to look back at Optimus until he hears the soft shift of plating and the click of his armor back into place. But even then, it's only a passing glance, the most he can manage. "That means git. Go on."
But of course, he doesn't. He stays and Ratchet braces himself for the moment that his Prime, inevitably, speaks. "... Ratchet?" He doesn't respond, just packs his medical scanner into its drawer with exaggerated care. "You know you can talk to me, right? About anything?" Which isn't true, of course. Not that Optimus knows that. He paws around inside a mostly empty drawer, shifting loose papers. He hates that tone in Optimus' quiet voice, pleading and aching and raw. "... I wish you would."
Ratchet wishes he could. Instead, all that comes out, gruffer than he actually intended, is "I'm sure there's something that needs your attention right now. Quit wasting your time." Stop wasting yourself on me. There's nothing left to look for.
Again, a long, long pause, and Ratchet gives up on pretending he is busy. Just waits, looking down at his hands, until Optimus slides to the floor and pads closer. The servo on his shoulder is not a surprise, but he cannot stop himself from flinching. Can feel how badly it hurts Optimus in the place his open EM field reaches for understanding, but what is he supposed to say? Optimus bends down, lays his helm to Ratchet's, and Ratchet knows that he is waiting for something. He's almost sure he knows what it is that Optimus wants, but he is more sure that it does not matter. Because he cannot give it.
Silence. That spot of warmth where Optimus' plating touches his own. And then he's pulling away, finally walking to the door, heavy with disappointment. "... Take care of yourself, Ratchet. I'll bring you your dinner later."
When his medbay was finally empty and he was alone again, he sat down heavily at his desk and pulled up the next of a long line of papers sent to him from Cybertron. Someone else's work, no doubt, that he would be given no credit for. He doesn't care much. It's better than letting his own thoughts fill the silence.
☆ The JRC doesn't look like you were expecting. You'd imagined in your head a low building built of concrete or steel, but the place that is revealed to you when you shuffle up the long driveway that wound through a thick forest of evergreens is a place of wide windows and pale wood. And you almost turn away, as you almost had so often on the long walk here, but you made yourself move forward anyway. The glass doors slide open as you approach, silent and unnerving, but the air that spills out to meet you is comfortably warm and you find yourself drawn in. Escaping the blistering heat of the winter day into a familiar, perfect chill.
The woman behind the desk is wearing a thick coat over a knitted cardigan, face covered in a soft looking scarf, thick winter hat pulled low over her ears, and even with all that she's still shivering when she looks up at you. You stride forward, your breath coming shallow to avoid the misting, and it isn't until a bolt of alarm lights you up at the sight of her breath, pluming pale and foggy from behind the guard of her scarf, that you remember yourself. You shake off the feeling that you needed to teach her anything, that your breathing will be enough to end your life, and just try to remember how to do any of this right.
She smiles, you think, judging by the way her eyes squint a bit, wrinkling at the corners. "Hello there! Do you- Oh!" She goes silent, when her eyes reach your face, widening enough that no amount of facial coverings could have hidden her shock. She makes an effort at hiding it at least, pointedly looking away from your ruined eye and the curled shell of your shattered ear, her voice falsely cheery. "Do you have an appointment?" You don't trust your voice, so you nod. "Name?" You pull the card from your pocket, one of hundreds that sit, largely unused, in the back of your closet, and she squints at your name, your rank, your ID, and your projected danger level. You are polite enough to not react when she gives you a look of uncertain fear. "O-Oh! Okay, um... Alright. I'll just, um. Take a look."
You wish you could tell her that you haven't hurt anyone in years. That you are not going to snap if she cannot give you what you are here for. That your scars had been something to respect, once. But all your words are still sitting low in your throat, refusing the chance at freedom.
Chertov had called you first thing in the morning. You were sure you were expected. But still, it is a kind of shock when the woman gives you a much shakier smile and says, "Yes, I found it! You just go through that- that door there. There's lines painted onto the walls, you're going to want to follow the blue one, alright? Doctor Chertov will meet you there."
It amazes you, as you shuffle through the door and down the hall, that the air does not bite and burn against your skin. That when you walk beneath a softly humming vent, it is comfortably cold. The room you make it to has a spattering of other occupants, making use of the bookshelves or the chairs or the table laid out with plates. There's even a climbing wall, though only one person clings to that, standing side to wall like a goat, and when you meet his eyes, he hisses at you, a clear threat. You give him a wide berth, let him have his wall, and sit on the very edge of the closest chair, hoping that no one will try to speak with you.
You settle, just letting yourself feel something close to comfortable for the first time in a long time. You didn't know there were places on earth cold enough to stop the phantom prickle of sweat from bothering you. Except, perhaps, thr Arctic, but science was the only way you'd found to get there and your brain did not work fast enough for that anymore. So you simply sit and appreciate and listen as others are called in ahead of you. Listen to clicks and calls and hisses that do not match the rhythm that your squad had marched to. Fight to control yourself when the man on the wall lets out a rolling, humming warble that is distinctly The Enemy. You watch the members of the staff occasionally. They are easy to pick out, dressed from top to bottom in thick layers, or clutching mugs and disposable cups that spill steam, profoundly uncomfortable in the low temperatures you'd long since learned to be used to.
It is a bit of a surprise to hear your own name, but you rise anyway. Turn until you catch sight of someone waving you onward, and then you are walking through hallways again. More strangeness. There are so many plants and pictures of far-off places.
When you're nudged through the door, the sound of it clicking shut behind you is final in a way that feels too much like punctuation. You pat your thigh for a weapon that isn't there when the woman turns to face you, black-brown hair shot through with white framing a handsome face. She says your name and you blink at her. She smiles. "I am Doctor Chertov. I believe you said you were pardoned more than a decade ago, yes? May I ask what took you so long?" She pats a cushioned table covered in paper and you sit, folding your hands in your lap as you shrug. "That's alright. I'm going to look you over, alright? I'll tell you everything I'm going to do before I do it and then we can talk." And you nod again, let her test the motion of your arms and legs, let her push on the place where your shoulder is tense, trace fingertips over the wrecked remains of your ear. "Frost damage." Mumured to herself, but you nod once regardless. She checks your breathing, the sound of your heart, your good eye and bad.
Something thick and heavy starts to build in your chest the longer her hands are on you. It froths and writhes until your hands twitch and your breathing comes shallower, faster, the feeling only getting worse when you catch sight of your own breath, giving yourself away. Doctor Chertov backs away when you growl, deep in your chest, and you don't know how to stop it. You don't want to bite.
"That's enough. I am done." Showing you her hands as if you'd been braced for a backstab, but maybe you had been. Can't even be sure as the uncomfortable feeling lessens to manageable, but lingers all the same. She crosses the room, opens a small fridge, and pulls out a cup. Offers it to you and you take it without thinking, looking down at the ice forming thinly over the surface. The ratty goes down easy, cheap and familiar and cold. "You're in remarkably decent condition, all things considered. Which is good news, by the way." You just nod, not bothering to take the cup from your face. It smells just like you remember.
"You are looking for physical therapy though, da? I can see that you're beginning to shiver but show no signs of discomfort. You never reaclimated, then?" It's spoken so kindly, but all you're really focused on is looking at yourself now. You were starting to shake, gentle tremors that, even as you stated, ramped up to a moment of desperate shuddering, but you hadn't even noticed. Even watching it, it felt more like seeing someone else. Watching a body that was not yours.
Your doctor gently took your empty cup away and set it on the counter. "The building is kept at negative seventeen degrees for the ease of new guests." You wondered if they called their patients 'guests' for a reason. Maybe it just sounded nicer. "It takes time to teach your body how to accept life on earth. Temperature therapy is not hard. We give you your own room, you can bring whatever you like, and we simply raise the temperature a little at a time. You will always feel hot, most patients report hot flashes, dizziness, heart palpitations, some experience panic attacks or periods of disassociation. Do you understand?" You nod. "By the end, however long it takes, you will be able to feel at home in the seasons of earth. Even summer."
"Alright in winter will be fine, I think," you manage to mutter, and she smiles at you, her breath huffing visibly into the air with her soft laugh.
"There's that voice! I was beginning to think you'd left it at the door." Her smile is beautiful, pale blue eyes squinted almost shut. "Now, you were one of the first wave pardons. That means everything you need is already paid for. Lucky lucky. I will show you room plans and you pick what you like. You may visit however often you like, or you may move in to the facility." Your head hurt, just a bit, so much spinning through channels used to running only in sluggish, snow-clogged circles. But even so, you lean down to inspect the papers the doctor offers to you.
You think of your little apartment. Of the thuds and shouts of neighbors that had lives worth living and people who bothered to visit. Unadorned white walls and empty white shelves. You think of a white ambulance and a broken chevron. You pick a room, the smallest they have, and you wonder why Doctor Chertov looks almost pitying, but softer. You voice is getting stuck again, coming out low and rough when you murmur, "I'll stay."
There will be Part Next to all, fear not dear citizen of Kingsville. This includes Jazz ofc. The King is very fond of that freak. No one has ever written Jazz to The King's standards to be quite honest, so his will take a little longer just because The King wishes to correctly portray the intended vibes.
Muse apparently released a song called Cryogen, and I thought of you because it's all ice with a Europa mention lmaooo
gg on invading my brain with Europa's foreverwar I guess :p
THE KING LOVES THAT THE ALBUM ART IS EUROPA, THE SONG IS ALSO VERY GOOD
Thank you Beloved Citizen of Kingsville, The King is pleased by this offering.
☆ "Haven't seen you here in a while! Are you writing a paper or something?" You jolt slightly in shock at being spoken to, blinking owlishly up at Melody. The small librarian was smiling and you bared your teeth in something like a response, tail raising in a much better greeting. It wasn't until they started to actually scan out the books you'd gathered that you understood what it was they were asking.
Cybertronian history, anatomy, social structures, prominent artists, pretty much every book your library had on the subject. Which wasn't much, granted, one or two on each broad subject, but not much had been published earthside about Cybertron. Your tail tucked shyly between your legs as Melody began to tuck your stack into a thick plastic bag stamped with the logo for the grocery store down the street. "Oh, uh- No, nothing like that, I just. Well, I've made a friend and they're a liiiiittle bit of a stickler about history, you know? So I figured I'd brush up on some stuff." Absolute nonsense, of course, but what were you supposed to say? That you'd gotten into a fanfiction war with an (assumed) immortal robot the size of a mansion? Hell no!!!
"Well, I hope you two have fun!" Melody smiled again and you managed something respectable this time, waving your tail in farewell as you made a beeline for the door. The books were uncomfortably heavy as you hauled them across the lot and chucked them into the passenger seat. You had trouble focusing as you rocketed down the road, speeding through yellow lights to avoid the wait of a red, close calls be damned.
You thought that 'passably correct' was good enough for the things you made for fun. While you did occasionally do a little bit of searching to make sure things were more or less believable, you didn't think something like a fan work for an obscure play most people didn't like was worth the effort of true, genuine research. But then, after a week of spending more time than was probably wise hunched over your keyboard with your tail tucked around your knees, you'd finally had something you'd deemed long enough to publish.
And within the hour, that techno asshole was tearing it apart. You were pretty much one hundred percent convinced by that, that your distant tormentor was a Cybertronian soldier, because who else would be capable of reading something that quickly? And picking out such tiny nonsense to gripe about? So you decided to do some double checking. If these complaints weren't factual pieces of information and were, instead, just the nonsense lies of a person trying to get a rise out of you, then you'd take that as a win. Clearly, you'd bothered this individual enough to drive them to absolute madness. But if it was correct... Well, the thought of living in one of those giant freaks' heads was honestly rather amusing. But more than that, you wanted to Win.
If this were one of the Cybertronians dragging out their stupid war on your planet, then they were an unfathomably powerful creature, nigh immortal, likely having been brought into existence before your entire species had bothered to drag itself into sentience, and you wanted, very very badly, to beat one in something as petty and personal as hobby art.
Slamming your book stack down by your computer, you pulled up the most recent slew of complaints, pawed open the first book on your stack, and started to hunt through the index for anything close enough to be connected.
♡ Ridiculous. It was absolutely ridiculous, he knew that, and yet... And yet he couldn't stop the part of his processor he usually left running for writing turned to browsing the human's 'Internet' instead. Those comments kept circling in his thoughts, annoyingly persistent, but the worst part wasn't even the meanness in the tone, it was that he suspected they were right. Why would the humans like what he worked so hard to make if he was leaving it riddled with apparent nonsense?
The first thing he looked up was how an oven worked. Seven hundred oven model handbooks later and his wings had been shuddering with shame. But how could he have known? On Cybertron, when you wanted heated energon, you put a cube on the warmer and it simply sensed that heating was necessary and did the work itself. Why would he have assumed humans had it different?
Which, of course, had him pawing through the other comments. Which led to line after line after line of inquiry trails, each one opening a whole host of brand new questions. It aggravated him, for many reasons. He didn't want this one, bitter reader to have any affect on his art, but at the same time... he was a Seeker who strived for perfection. Before the fall of Vos he had been someone important- someone powerful- and for damn good reason. It bothered him more than he wanted to admit, that there was so much he had simply Not Known, so much that had made his work subpar. Spotty with the kind of errors that would make his plates crawl if he were reading something of the same caliber in Cybertronian fiction.
In the moments he wasn't going through handbooks, articles, archives, or image banks, he was pawing through his own old works. And with the new bits of information bumping around in his processor, he found that rereading was an arduous, annoying task. All he could really see were the errors, and it made his wings twitch and shudder with anger and unhappy dislike. Couldn't stop the notes being scrawled in his processor, wondering what else he'd missed, what else was glaringly wrong. It made his oral lubrication run sour.
... and it was scaring the trines he was supposed to lead.
There were no young ones left among their kind, but that did not mean they were all mature. Red Wing and his littermates, Blue Wing and Yellow Wing, had seemed frozen since the start of the war, always needing guidance, always needing a sterner hand to show them how to be. And Misfire's trine would never be functional, not really, Slugslinger too distracted in the processor, too shaky in the hands, while Triggerhappy was utterly beyond help. All the ones like them, mentally locked, physically incapable of properly memorizing flight paths, regressing too frequently from the traumas of the war to be left on their lonesome, somehow they had all been dumped under his wings, and his constant teeking in fury and distaste was making them all give him nervous, frightened glances, tucking their wings to make themselves smaller.
By his pedes, Dawnbreaker was doing just that, pale pink and golden wingspan folded tight to his back strut, looking up at him with wide red optics. He forced himself to resettle, pulling the majority of his attention to his surroundings rather than his processor. He clicked an apology and knelt, gently eased Dawnbreaker back to standing and chirped at him until the mech was beeping softly in response. It was difficult to get more than sparkling beeps from the poor thing most days. He hadn't done well, after the loss of his trine.
He led Dawnbreaker to Misfire and the magenta mistake took the other Seeker willingly, letting him tuck beneath his wings, even though Dawnbreaker was a good deal larger. "Fly with Dawn, today. He's gotten worse recently. If he can't at least follow a leader, then he's going to get shot down."
Misfire's brow furrowed for a second in confusion, but then his expression fell. "Yeah- Yeah, right. Highroll was pink, wasn't she?"
"Yes. I'm hoping it will make him follow after you. And you need a third in your formation, regardless. Your trine is not dependable." Misfire's EM field spiked unpleasantly at that, but he just bowed his head again and turned to take his place, Dawnbreaker shuffling awkwardly behind. At least Red Wing hadn't been causing problems today, Thundercracker thought as he flared his wings for the trines to transform and pull up.
They'd barely started the first of their formations when a sharp crackle of energy bathed Thundercracker's wings. He didn't bother turning around. He'd know Skywarp anywhere. His black and purple trinemate pressed against him, arms winding around his waist. "I'm busy, Skywarp," he scolded even as his servos came to rest over Skywarp's. "And I am quite certain that you have your own duties to attend to today as well."
"Yeah, but I missed you." There's a whine in his voice, a pleading that Thundercracker sighs against. But his annoyance does not change the fact that he resettles his wings specifically to let Skywarp press properly against his back strut. "We should ditch."
"No, we shouldn't." Daybreaker was, if nothing else, following after Misfire. He was a bit wobbly, clearly just literally following the lopsided Seeker rather than understanding the beat of the flight formation, but it was something. "Our darling Star has me on sparksitting duty, and you are supposed to be... About twenty miles north, I believe?"
Skywarp rubbed his cheek against Thundercracker's neck and he allowed it, let the closeness bleed through to his spark until some of the tension in his frame conceded. "I'll go back, I promise. I'm just worried about you, TC." Servos trace inappropriately over the sensitive places along the span of his wings, something too warm to deal with on the clock pooling in his spark chamber, overflowing from where he was mated with Skywarp. "You've been so tense lately. Star's worried too."
"Mn." Daybreaker was too wobbly actually, dipping one way, then the other. "He's welcome to say that to me himself, if he likes." And Slugslinger's frame was shuddering, twitching uncontrollably in the way his frame was wont to do, but he banked to tap his wing to Daybreaker's anyway, trying to ease his back into stability.
"Don't be like that. You know Starscream isn't good at that kinda stuff. Can't you feel it?" Skywarp's claw taps at his cockpit glass, claw tracing over the thick covering. It is an uncomfortable feeling, the realization that he has been neglecting his trinebond in favor of his obsessive need for perfection. In the back of his head, searches are still running, notes being taken, just slower than before. He tries to shake off the feeling. He couldn't think about that on the job.
Daybreak still hasn't evened out, and it isn't until he tips fully into a barrel roll that Thundercracker understands. Misfire and Slugslingner even out their flight path, just gliding in a wide circle, waiting for Thundercracker's orders on what to do next while Daybreaker spins in a corkscrew around them. He puts his face in his hands, just lets it all crush against him, the weight of his responsibility.
"What's he doing?" Skywarp lets him go a bit, arms loose around his waist, and Thundercracker lets out a weak, wet laugh.
He looks up again, at the drifting shape of Daybreaker, the pulse of the Seeker's location broadcast flagged with the unmistakable signal for an unattended sparkling, and Thundercracker is so very tired. "He's playing."
☆ Your head was aching from reading tiny text in too-low lighting, flicking a pen in your hand, the notebook in your lap scrawled over in blue ink. It felt impossible, but somehow it had to be true. Because none of this made sense otherwise. You had stumbled across actual, honest-to-God fanfiction written by an immortal space robot who was in the middle of fighting a war. And now you were, apparently, in a bit of a write-off with the thing. Because the pieces they'd complained at you about that weren't in the books you'd checked out? You'd found at least some of the answers by following convoluted back doors at the instructions of dedicated Redditors that landed you on Cybertronian archives.
Which meant you were dealing with a Redditor... or a robot. And only a robot was going to be able to Read That Fast.
You dropped your head in your hands, rubbing at your temples, tail twitching an unhappy rhythm. You'd honestly been hoping for something to prove your theory wrong. Just your luck. Could you really afford to piss this thing off any more than you already had? Surely it had ways to hunt you down, and how were you supposed to guess at how these things reacted to criticism? The wise thing to do would be to quit while you were ahead.
You looked at the books laid open on your desk. Your notes, penned in whatever ink colors had been closest at hand, scrawls of blue, black, red, and green. The tab for your open writing doc sits idle at the top of your computer screen.
....... Ah, fuck it. What else did you have to live for? It wasn't like your time was particularly precious. Throwing all caution to the wind, you set to drafting a new work of art, making sure to take into account everything you'd made yourself learn, fully prepared to dig out more in the process. You were going to win this thing, even if it killed you.
♡ Starscream was griping at him again, grooming his wings and spending as much time as possible letting him know that he was dirty and unkempt. Thundercracker just hummed listlessly in response to his trineleader's fussing. He'd been Starscream's long enough by now to understand that it was his clumsy attempt at proving he cared enough to notice. So he just laid there and took it.
His processor was drifting lazily through nothing, the threads opening and self-deleting without aim. It was the first time in quite a while he'd actually let his trine try and slow his processor down. And now that he was here... it was a whole lot easier to admit how much he'd needed it. Starscream was gently working the tense ache from his wings while Skywarp worked on his paint, reapplying his stripes with a steadier hand than most would expect from the twitchy teleporter. He wasn't even keeping a space running for his writing.
It didn't stop him from immediately locking onto that damn account when his wandering code pinged a change in the page he had viewed with unfortunate frequency as of late. The plating along his back tensed up and Starscream growled at him, actually nipping at his wingwell cabling, and he made a determined effort to relax. He opened the new work anyway, the words dumped into his head, and it was with no small measure of surprise that he found it drastically changed from the previous. There were glaring errors, yes, and he was already drafting up a comment pointing that out, but... He could not deny that this author had clearly done some measure of research this time. Because of him, obviously. He'd fixed that.
By the time Starscream was done biting at him for daring to still be any kind of tense, Thundercracker was purring. Didn't stop him from commenting something mean, though. But really, why should he stop something that was already showing results?
"Labradors have a great sense of smell, and are very often used for their sense of smell when tracking people. There are tales of labradors being able to find people... even after weeks had passed." -Animal Care Center of Smyrna.
♤ The reconnection of his long-range communication systems snapped through him hard, his whole system getting a harsh shock as broadcasting information from several galaxies ripped through him all at once. His plates bristled against it, gritting his teeth against the pressure building in his processor until the initial surge faded and the data began to be sorted. He hadn't realized how very quiet it had been until his whole frame was ringing with his responsibilities again, an army's worth of begging nonsense filling him up until his horns ached from it. He silenced most of the calls. Nonsense noise from mechs who should have learned how to lead themselves by now.
He sends out a signal to the planet's single moon, waits until a return ping hits from the ship's computer, his signal locked. He could send the ground bridge request now. But he doesn't. Instead, he hesitates. Looks down at the small structure that houses you, lowers his head to look through the window into your bedroom where you sprawl, a mess of thrown-wide limbs and wrenched around bedsheets. You won't know where he went. Why he left without a word. You'll call for him, he's sure, and he will not hear it.
But you are not the first thing he has left behind for the sake of his war and he knows you will not be the last.
He invents deeply regardless, drags the smell of you through the whole of his frame, and wonders idly if he will ever find time to visit. It sound foolish even as the shape of the thought settles in his processor, but he cannot deny the appeal. He cannot stay, and as it stands you would not survive being taken with him, but... He shakes off the thought with a twitch of his horns and a ruffle of his armor, turning to test the thin place in his plating only to have an excuse to look away from you. There is too much to do to risk lingering longer.
By his hip, Leader-1 claws open a port that he knows is sensitive, clips in so harshly that it burns, but Megatron forgets to scold him in the rush of heated power that always follows. Marvelous things, the minicon race, the purest batteries anyone had ever managed to produce. He hauls himself to his pedes, looks towards the softly glowing moon, and does not allow himself a final glance as he pings the ship for transport. It takes only seconds for the request to be accepted.
The feeling of the space bridge is one he has long since gotten used to, the drag on his wires, the pressure in his tanks, the uncomfortable prickling beneath his plates, it was familiar enough that nausea no longer followed. But he would always hate the moment after touchdown when his vision was broken and blurry, his optic sensors two steps behind, because it was a weakness. One that, this time, left him standing defenseless while his creation aimed a wingblade at his throat.
Starscream's soft face only really looks like his own when he is angry, Megatron thinks as he stares at the Seeker. As he stands now, expression one of pained shock, he only looks like Optimus Prime. "L-Lord Megatron?" That reedy voice cracks over it, the sheer depth of his disbelief, and Megatron only stares in silence as Starscream's grip on his wing tightens. "No. No, Megatron is dead. I saw him fall. Who are you?"
"You really have to ask?" He watched his creation for a moment, the torn look on that face he could not bear to study more often than not. Starscream surely had lead the Decepticons in his absence. And though his heir had never seemed prepared to force his way to an early leadership, it was entirely possible that this experience had given him a taste for it. It would only make sense. After all, he was Megatron's creation, no matter how disappointing he very often turned out to be. So, he would play it careful.
The silence stretched, Starscream's orange optics flicking down to where Leader-1 was clipped snugly to Megatron's hip. He took in the minicon and the harsh glow of energy slowly faded from the wingblade in his servos until he was gingerly resetting the weapon, twitching his wings until they realigned with one another. "It's... it's really you? How? I- We looked for your signal for days, where have you been?" Megatron stepped down from the bridge platform, closer to Starscream, raising a hand when his creation's wings hiked higher in alarm. "If you are my Lord, then prove it. Now."
"I did raise you to be a bit paranoid," he murmured, studying the aggression in Starscream’s posture and calculating the quickest way to get the jet back in line. "Alright, alright... but come now, Starscream, you haven't seen me in so long and you only call me Lord? We're on our own. It's alright."
Suspicion. Uncertainty. Something acidicly angry. But Megatron did not miss the way those wings twitched higher in wanting. He could see the considering shift of Starscream's tight jaw, the look of calculation on his face. "... Sire." He murmurs the title, helm tilted just slightly lower, and Megatron understands the test. After all, out of every being in the galaxy who knows the truth of their bond, only they know the actual shape of it.
'What is Starscream to Lord Megatron?' A not uncommon question, and one met with two answers. The first, that he had been second in command for most of the war and Megatron was simply too used to him to bother with finding a suitable replacement, or the truth that they were creator and creation. The lie that they were sire and son.
He holds out his hand, watches the way that Starscream fights to hide his flinch, and says, low and gentle, "I said, it's just us, Starscream. Is that any way to greet your carrier?"
The light in those fierce orange optics dulled just in time for Megatron to catch the way all that delicate cogwork spiraled open, those begging eyes on his face, and then Starscream is on him, faceplates pressed to chest in a desperate hug he knows he has to tolerate. Gently petting the shaking line of his wings, Megatron churrs at Starscream, listening to the soft chirps that come from his second in response, and wonders why it is always so very easy to make sure his creation falls into line. Shouldn't a piece of his spark have taken the same shape that he did? Shouldn't it take more that a soft reassurance and a pet to the helm? But there is nothing concealed in the shiver of Starscream's EM field, nothing hidden in his voice when he mutters, "Carrier," just loud enough to hear.
Fighting back the urge to twitch away in distaste, Megatron wraps his arms around his daughter and pretends he does not notice the quickly-concealed bolt of alarm that colors Starscream's code. When he lets go, Starscream looks up at him with something like hope. Something wanting enough that Megatron is sure he can work with it. "Now, tell me how leadership has treated you. I assume you took the throne in my absence?"
"Of course, carrier." His wings lock in a position of respect. "I've acquired seven new minicons in your absence. Six of them have continued work on the spaceship, while the last has remained with me." There's a flicker of movement behind the thick glass of Starscream’s cockpit and for a moment, Megatron's thoughts flicked to sparklings. But that was ridiculous, of course. The Seeker was just storing his minicons in there, though it was a strange choice. He filed the observation away, the beginnings of a thought pricking at the back of his helm.
With a servo low on Starscream’s back, he started to herd his creation from the room, exhausted and aching. Starscream kept chattering and Megatron let him, wondering if he could cajole the Seeker into giving him a new coat of paint while he caught him up to speed.
☆ For the first time in all your life, the forest feels empty. You were pushed from your home only by necessity, the threat of hunger driving you into the trees. But there is a hollowness to the birdsong. Something mournful in the shift of uncountable leaves brushing in the touch of the breeze. There is nothing of the wonder that had always lived just beneath your heart. Nothing of the curiosity. You ache. It hurts so very badly.
You don't notice your path until you are at the end of it. Your body betraying you. And then you were stepping through the last line of trees to stare out over the scarred clearing, the places where her claws had scraped the earth, the harsh divot where the angle of her hips had caught at the ground beneath. The evidence of your giant paints the ground here. And you know there is no room for it as you walk forward, pick up a broken piece of her, but you hold it in your arms anyway. Proof that he was real. That you are not merely a thing driven mad.
But you feel mad, more and more often as the hours drag themselves into wounded days. Sitting down for dinner only to find it eaten, a taste lingering at the back of your tongue, but no memory of having touched it. Blinking away a touch of grit-carrying wind only to find that darkness had fallen in the time it took to clear your eyes. Things move without your mind holding the memory of it and you cannot stand it. Your life cracking to pieces.
This is why you hate people. The reminder comes sharp as a backhand. This is all that people do. Even beautiful ones. Even ones of metal and wire. All people know how to do is leave.
You are standing in the doorway, a coffee mug in your hand, looking out across your backyard. The day dawns again, as it always will, and you can feel it twisting up inside of you, dark and sick and nauseous. You're mostly sure that you hate him. You hate his stupid, beautiful face, hate the timbre of her deep voice, hate the shape of those so intricately articulated hands. How dare she fall into your life and then simply leave without a word? It makes you sick. It makes you so fucking angry. Your grip tightens on the handle of your mug until your entire hand aches and you want to scream.
Maybe you really were nothing to her, you think. Nothing at all. And really, what had she done to prove differently? She spoke with you because you happened to be here. Carried you home because you had helped her first. You knew she was going to leave. She'd already told you she was going to leave.
So why did you feel betrayed? Why did you feel like- like a scorned lover?
Even as you think it, you feel ridiculous for it, but it won't go away. It just gets darker and louder, twisting all through you like thorns. When you throw the mug, it hits an oak tree so hard that it explodes, a mess of porcelain shards, embedded in the earth like bone. And you know you should pick it up. That something innocent will step on those broken, jagged pieces and walk away limping. You want to scream. Instead, you shuffle forward and go down on one knee, picking white shard from dark earth. You cannot stop thinking of the angle of those horns.
♤ They think he's angry, he knows. And perhaps he is, the emotion lingering under every motion he made, but it is not the worst of his problems at the moment. He does not absently dig his claws into Leader-1's plating out of anger. It is mortifying, even contained within the privacy of his own processor, but every time he catches himself dragging claws over tiny, delicate wires it is because his overheating frame is desperate for the sharp snap of charge that jumps from the minicon's wiring to his own.
He's still overcharged, pent up and frustrated, but dealing with running a galactic army left little time for cavorting about. And he wasn't particularly inclined to debase himself with the company of any of the fools he currently found himself surrounded by. Soundwave would have been good for that, Megatron thought ruefully, sunk low in his throne, half listening to Demolishor and Cyclonus argue over nonsense. The beautiful cassette host had always been sweet on him and knew how to keep his mouth shut. But Soundwave was just another thing that the Autobots had stolen from him now.
Leader-1 was slumped, strutless, over his thigh, purring in a low static tone. The thought comes then to just let the minicons deal with it. Give them a break from their job of construction to give them something a bit more... delicate. But nearly as soon as it spawned in his wreck of a processor, he was dismissing it with a twist of revulsion. His claws tapped the ground in a pattern of anxious discomfort as he sits low in his uncomfortable throne.
In the shadows of the chamber, something too green to hide shifts in place, and Megatron considers. The Constructicon that Starscream had allowed into their ranks was a part of Devastator, he was mostly certain, but he couldn’t remember what had happened to the rest. Long Haul was on Cybertron, he thought, but the rest... Well, it wasn't important. The fragment of a gestalt was little more than a glorified bounty hunter now. Even if he had been to Megatron's taste, there was still the matter of his being so beneath him in status as to be sullying. He wasn't so desperate yet.
"Lord Megatron." The background chatter of his soldiers' argument cut off at the sound of Starscream's voice, his creation bowing as he enters the room. "The computer has picked up another minicon signal. It seems to be in a dense woodland. Who would you like to send?"
He can almost smell it, if he lets his mind wander, pine sap and cedar wood. Damp earth and a warm breeze. His spark twists harder than he was expecting, the uncomfortable alarm of it sharp enough that Leader-1 blearily raised his head to look up towards Megatron's face. He doesn't like the way his frame heats with longing at the thought of your soft, limp shape, lying helpless in your bed.
"Take care of it yourself." He was dangerously close to having his fans click on audibly. "You seemed to be capable of doing it with me gone. Let's see you do it under orders." Starscream's wings flicked, a shocked set twitching quickly into something like a stretch, trying to hide his emotions. But he never could hide from his father.
He bowed again, those golden orange eyes lowered respectfully. "Of course, Lord Megatron. Scavenger? With me. Cyclonus, stay on the line. I'll comm if you're needed. Let's try to make this quick." Starscream spun on a heel and stalked back out of the room, the Constructicon slinking after him. There was something remarkably efficient about the Seeker, a tempered control he hadn't had before. Or perhaps Megatron simply hadn't noticed. Maybe his creation would turn out halfway worthwhile after all. If he could only beat a bit more fierceness into him, then he might even make a halfway decent warlord.
As his soldiers make themselves useful, the base begins to quiet down, nothing but the absence space leaves. It annoys him deeply, just how much he misses sound. The rustle of organic leaf was not the soft, crisp tones of his glass garden on Cybertron, but it was something. It was not this absence. And of course, inevitably, his thoughts drag back to you. The warmth in your voice. The way your hands slid into his seams. The fragile brush of your field against his own. His fans finally clicked on and he ran a servo over his faceplates into mortified annoyance.
He needed to take care of this issue before it got any worse. The question was simply how.
☆ You'd taken a piece of her back with you, when you finally left that clearing behind, proof that she had been real. It had sat on your kitchen table for days, a twist of violet metal that you're sure you'd never find a match for. Nothing of this earth. It is cold against your fingertips every time you reach out to touch it.
You don't remember much of the last month. You know it passed, because you remembered to mark your calendar. But it doesn't feel real. Everything is distant from you in a way that you hate, everything one step away. Even you, yourself. A step back from your own skin, watching your life shuffle by in third person. It's miserable. You ache. You thought you had moved past the capacity for loneliness. You're starting to wonder if anyone ever really does.
You love her. You're sure that you do, in a way that had burrowed sick and ugly in your chest. You hate her in equal measure. Hate her so much that it burns, that he simply left you here. Left you behind. When you lower your head to hide against the shelter of your folded arms, leaned over the kitchen table, your own broken sobbing matches your understanding of what loving someone looks like.
You only get up when your stomach twists in hunger. Hauling yourself to your feet, you fumble about your familiar kitchen, making a simple meal more out of habit than wanting. Following the memory of your mother's guiding hands as she'd taught you how to dig, how to climb and take and squirrel away, and finally how to put it all together into something that would keep you alive. Because you had to keep going. You had to carry on, just as you always had.
The knock at the door terrifies you. You nearly choke, fumbling for something close on reflex, only for your eyes to drift to the hunting rifle mounted carefully on the wall. The thudding fills your small home, a heavy, violent slamming absent of any pleasantries. Your thoughts flicker briefly to the police, but no. There was no reason for them to come after you, you reassure yourself as you lift your gun off the wall and shuffle into the hallway, level your weapon at the door. You hadn't left any evidence behind.
There was no identifying call, no shout for entry, just a rhythmic, powerful thudding, like the person on the other side were trying to simply batter their way through the wall. You shift closer, as silent as you can make it on habit, though it likely wouldn't have mattered with the racket they were making. Your rifle is braced against your shoulder. The banging stops. Still, there is no question, no call, no voice from the other side. The handle shudders in its place, the lock refusing a turn, and then it just... kept going. Squealing with the sound of tearing metal, something popping deep inside, dragged open by force alone, and then the door is opening and Megatron is ducking through the doorway.
You freeze. Everything moves in halfspeeds, the world slowed to a molasses crawl. You take in the shape of her face, her beautiful, terrible face, the red of those eyes, the set of that mouth. The edge of a horn scrapes the ceiling, quiet but unmistakable, and you find that your eyes lock themselves on the gouge mark. This physical evidence that she is real. She takes a step closer, forces the door back in its place, hunched awkwardly down in this space that had never meant to hold a thing so large. How is she here? Even so much smaller, she is still a giant compared to you. Those horns angle back, flattened like an irate cat's ears, a soft, mechanical whirring filling the silence before the tire-tread towers on her shoulders lie back, disassemble themselves, buried somewhere in the construction of her back. And even then, she cannot stand straight, but as she settles back on her haunches to look at you, her head does not quite brush the ceiling above.
"H-How...?" It's all you can manage, weak and quiet as the rifle lowers. Megatron reaches forward, takes it from you gently, and you aren't sure what to do. What to say. You want to scream at him. Want to throw things until he goes away for good this time. Want to drag her down, bury your face in her neck, and promise that you will take care of her if she just... stays. That's all you'll ask for. Just stay.
"There is much about my kind you don't know." The humor threaded in that deep voice makes your entire chest ache. The tears come against your will, and when Megatron comes closer, carefully navigating your home on all fours, you do not avoid her. A massive hand cradles your head as her face lowers to nuzzle at your shoulder. "I need your help with something, if I may ask one last thing of you." That voice seems to reverberate straight through your bones, murmured against your neck like love. You aren't sure when it was exactly that you forgot how to speak. "I find it difficult to think as of late. You started up an old need in me and I've little in the way of relief." Teeth testing the fabric of your plain shirt, claws carding through your hair, tracing down the length of your spine, touching so very carefully.
When she raises her head it is to meet your gaze with that fierce, burning red that you lose yourself to so easily. It's warmer than you expect it to be, when she kisses you. Her lips are not soft, there is no give in the pressure that urges your mouth to submit, just a smooth heat, almost textureless, just flawless steel. When his tongue pushes past your teeth, fills your mouth with the taste of warm oil, your own tongue catches on ridges and patches of rounded, rubbery nodes, like something were embedded along the silvery surface. You reach up with shaking hands to touch her face, and Megatron purrs, that familiar, so-missed sound, and your entire chest aches.
You back away, try to shove her back as if you could ever control anything so grand, and she just blinks at you, looking only the slightest bit confused. It's a sick feeling, the thing that lives under your heart, and you hit her before you can think the action through, clenched fists coming down against her shoulders. The impact hurt, ringing up through your bones, but you hit her again anyway, tears fogging your vision. "You left me." Your arms hurt. There was no indication she could even feel the desperate punches you slammed to her metal body. "You left. You didn't even- Why did you do that?"
Hated it. Hated the way you could not seem to breathe in deep enough, hated the tears that wet your face, hated how much you needed her. How everything inside of you felt as though it had simply clicked back into place the moment she walked through that door.
"I told you I would have to leave." His hands hold onto yours, so large and so much more beautiful than your own, layer upon layer of delicate metal.
"You were supposed to say goodbye." And it sounds so stupid, so small and pedantic. You don't know how to say it right. Surely that is the only issue. You do not know the words to explain the wound that had grown in you, the ragged-edged hole where your life was supposed to be.
When he lowers his head to you again, you just accept the kiss he offers. Let his claws test the fabric of your clothes. His mouth brushes your neck, pauses over the shiver of your pulse. "I should have said something," he murmurs, soothing and low. "But I feared I was running out of time." You're touching her face, tracing the line of her jaw as you had so longed to, and when your hand finds the base of her horns, a deep growl starts low in her chest. "I came back," he murrs by your ear, voice rough with something you find yourself desperately wanting.
You don't question it when he starts to herd you through your home, padding through the space, the house creaking in protest of his presence. You stumble dumbly forward with the gentle nudges of his hand, the soft way he brushes his cheek against your shoulder. It is not so surprising when you find yourself in your bedroom.
He turns you around, and you do nothing but raise your arms when he makes to pull your shirt over your head. You had been so numb. So broken to pieces. Every place she touches you comes alive again, feeling and warmth and wanting following every place his claws touch until you feel dizzy with it. Her hands, when they come to rest against your sides, encircle you completely. Thumbs brushing softly over your stomach, fingers interlaced against the plane of your back. She stares at your chest, such a serious expression on that beautiful face, until she finally mutters just loud enough to hear, "Take it off?" And the laugh that comes out of you is thick with tears as you nod, reaching awkwardly behind yourself to unclip your bra and shrug it to the floor.
You're close enough now to see it, through the glow of her eyes, the machinework behind the lens. Hair-thin wiring, overlapping plates that pull open in a spiral, such fragile things. Nothing like the folded muscle of your own iris, but so inarguably beautiful. She leans closer, presses her face to your chest, and the hiss of air that pushes through her vents sounds almost like a sigh. Megatron rubs against you, purring, hands shifting to cup the weight of your breasts, and you wonder suddenly if this thing of sharp metal and claws has ever touched anything soft in his life.
He seems so harmless like this, sitting on your bedroom floor, purring hard enough that you can feel it vibrate through you. Your hands follow the lines of his helm, tracing seaming, until his horns shift, pricking upward like a dog's ears, nearly caging your head. And your thoughts flick to the way she had blushed, looking away from you. Sensitive, she had called them. You drag your hand up one, holding the warm metal firmly, and she goes still against you, the sound of a fan running on high suddenly filling the silence. Rubbing at that horn, letting your fingers dig into seaming, you cannot deny the heat that pools low in your stomach when she groans, frame shivering.
When you step back, intending to lead him properly to your bed, his hands wrap around you again, lift you completely off your feet, and he lays you down on your back, hauling himself above you. There's a massive crack and a sharp jolt as something in the bed gives way, but when he twists to looks, plates raised in alarm, you just reach out, grab him by the jawguard, and drag him down to kiss you. Claws catch in the waistband of your pants and you lift your hips to let her drag your clothes off of you. There's a familiar sound of metal sliding over metal, and it is suddenly, incredibly clear what had embarrassed her so much the first time you'd heard it, because when she pulls away from you, shifts to nudge your legs apart, you look down to see the heavy cock revealed between her thighs.
You reach down to touch it without thinking, and she shifts to accommodate your eagerness, lets your fingers close around the surprising heat of it. It pulses softly against your palm, a gentle swell, red lights flashing in rhythm down the length. You let your thumb trace the lights, the slightly rubbery texture odd in contrast to the smooth metal that made up the bulk of it. There was something that almost reminded you of fabric beneath the metal, something soft and giving, a meshwork that allowed for the plates to shift. Megatron made a soft sound, something between a gasp and a moan, hips rolling against the touch, and you thought you could listen to that forever.
She shifts forward, crawling up your bed until the heft of that impressive member is close enough to kiss, and you lean forward to lick it from head to base before she can ask. There's no mistaking the relief in her groan as she reaches down to cradle your head, supporting your weight as you press a kiss to the lights between the plating. They pulsed slightly against your lips when they flashed. You'd expected the taste of metal, but as you mouth along the length, there's just a faint sweetness. The viscous fluid that leaks from the tip is a bright, unnatural pink.
She shifts her hips, just enough to drag the head of her cock against your cheek, smearing wet against your skin. Your whole body flushes hot and you turn your head to take her in your mouth. It barely fits, bumping uncomfortably against the back of your throat far too soon, your jaw aching dully from how wide it was being forced open, but when your wrap your hand around the length you couldn't fit, his entire body shudders. His hips roll, careful not to hurt you, and even though you couldn't take all of him, it was obvious he was enjoying himself, purring and shivering, soft moans breaking halfway over static. You rubbed your thighs together, trying to ease the impatient ache, but you didn't want to push her away either, the odd sweetness of that thick pink fluid filling your mouth. You almost wanted to finish her like this, just to know what it would feel like.
But as his thrusts got rougher, your jaw began to ache harshly, the pain distracting and getting worse. You pushed at his hip and he growled harshly, stilling for a long moment, before dragging slowly free. Hot air rushed from the vents on his hip, almost pleasant against your naked skin. She moves down again, flushed and panting, and you love her so much that you don't know what will be left of you when she leaves again.
"You're small," she murmurs the words against your throat before kissing at your pulse again, trailing down along your collarbone, presses her face to your breasts with a wobbly purr. "But I'm sure you'll take my spike well." Lower, tongue testing your navel before kisses are being pressed to the meat of your hips, so teasingly close. He doesn't make you beg. When you raise your hips trying to make contact somewhere, she finally presses a kiss right over the soft heat of your pussy, licking an exploratory stripe over the folds before she simply lays her mouth over you, so big that it covers the totality. That broad tongue jabs and prods awkwardly for a moment before finding what he'd been looking for, bullying his way inside of you with a force that bordered on painful. Her purr sends shockwaves through you now, shivering all the way through your body as she works herself deeper, those cherry-bright eyes locked on your face.
Everything prickles oddly, too warm, too much, so turned on your face was going numb. Your back archs without your input, body simply doing as it wished, trying to press harder against Megatron's touch, and you're sure, as his mouth twitches against your skin, eyes narrowed slightly, that he's smirking. Cocky bastard. It doesn't help that he pulls away far, far too soon, leaving you painfully empty, an absolutely mortifying sound ripped from your throat as you reach for her. This time, when she goes to kiss you, the press of that tongue past your teeth is matched by the nudge of her spike between your legs, and your whimpering is choked off by anticipation as you raise your hips, kiss him back with all the force your can muster.
He misses the first time, the blunt head dragging across your clit, the ridges of her spike drawing shivers from you. The second time, she aims a bit better, and with a short thrust, she had pushed past the entrance. The sound of fans whirring somewhere in her chest picked up loud, that powerful frame curled around you. His voice sounds almost strained, laced with static, but he manages, "Your valve can barely take me." A soft bump of the hips, sliding deeper inside of you, only to be stopped up short by the first ridges. Your hips ache, but you reach upward anyway, get ahold of her by the horns just to watch the way her expression falls into listless pleasure.
She's leaning into your touch, letting you do whatever you like to a piece of her that is so delicate. The shallow rutting that bumps those ridges against your entrance over and over gets rougher, more desperate, until Megatron's claws finally just close around your hips and force it, dragging you down until they simply pop inside with a brief bolt of pain that fizzles out into liquid heat as he settles just that little bit deeper. He growls with a furious frustration as the problem repeats itself, stuck on her spike, and you just lie there as he pulls his hips back to shove himself just that little bit harder against the resistance of your body. Determined to break you in.
You never let anyone break you for anything. You were the wild horse, screaming bloody murder, bucking off anything that dared grace the sacred throne of your back. The feral dog just a little bit too clever to be caught, washed, and resold as something pretty. The life you lead was one of solitude by choice. You were alone by choice. And maybe somewhere along the way, it had become a thing of stubborn pride, that none could catch you. That no one had ever owned you.
You wrap your arms around her neck, hold her close with all the strength of your too-fragile body, caught. When his hand slips between the bed and your back, you just let him hold you steady, press kisses to the thin plating of her neck. He is going to leave you. Everyone always leaves, even if in your leaving them behind. He would leave. You're so sure of it.
When she shifts the angle of her hips, you brace yourself against the bed, push yourself up to meet his effort, and it is with a bone-deep ache that your body finally concedes, the sharp angles of her hip pressed to the soft lines of your own. She sighs as she leans back, sitting up and getting ahold of you by the waist again. Her thumb traces idle shapes over your stomach before pushing down, the feeling of being too full getting worse for a heartbeat. "I can feel myself, just here," he speaks so quietly, almost to himself, but there's something soft in the lines of her face. Something you don't dare hope for in the way those hands trace up your sides, your chest, your arms, just looking at you. He guides your hands, makes you feel for yourself, the way your body manages to take her, but only barely. You'd be lucky to get out of this with little more than bruising.
♤ There was nothing soft on Cybertron, not really. He'd thought there was. But he knew the truth now. Your body was truly soft. The berth he's sure he's destroyed with the weight of himself is soft, in a way he never would have been able to even conceive of. When he squeezes your hips just to feel the meaty give of them, flesh submitting to the pressure of his hold, it is with the foolish awe of a mech much younger.
He barely fits, but barely fitting is still fitting. You have difficulty with the ridges, but when he holds you still, drags himself back from the warmth of your valve and then shoves himself back in, nothing breaks. You just make a little sound that he's mostly sure is your replacement for purring, a quiet half gasp. The charge that had been tormenting him for so long now finally had a place to spill and it was licking through his wires with enough force that it was difficult to control himself. He wanted to hold you down properly, take what he was owed, but what he wanted would break you completely, he's sure. And he wants you alive more than he wants a quicker overload.
Your body is strange to him, but he finds he likes it. There was little to taste when he'd forced you open on his glossa, a few odd textures, and an absence of internal calipers that had made him wonder how you were supposed to work, if he'd misunderstood something about your biology. But when he began to roll his hips in earnest, an easy rhythm of short thrusts he was sure wouldn't harm you too badly, something clearly started to work in you, because your valve was working around his spike in a way that made him purr harder than he had in a long time. It rumbled deep in his chest as he grabbed the small servo you reached towards him, let his derma brush over the delicate working of your digits. The sensors around his mouth pinged his processor with information about the structure, parts that were not cable or strut or wire, but worked much the same. He wondered how much of you was an inefficient simulacra of his own kind, an organic picture remade from a blurry image.
The relief that colors his code lines his thoughts in pale lilac. The warnings for overcharge that had been periodically annoying him flickering out in favor of an overload indicator and a running chart of his frame's internal heat, everything warming up. He pulls back almost completely, watches the way you stare at his wet spike, then forces himself back in to the hilt, hard enough that your whole, soft little body jolts with the impact. You spit something he's sure is a curse, but you don't try to wriggle free, don't smell like pain or fear. He can't stop the way his plates ruffle in unconcealed excitement.
You're panting, the motion making your chest rise and fall. He touches one of the soft paddings there again, rolls it against his palm. He almost wants to ask what it's for, but it's hardly the time for talking he thinks as he lowers himself over you again, presses his face to your enthrallingly soft chest. Your hands find his horns again, slipping into every tender spot with the ease of a long-held lover. He knows you feel it when his thrusts get knocked out of rhythm over it because you do the same thing again, trying to make him feel good, and he wonders what it says about him, that his spark actually twists in its chamber at the thought of you caring. But then, why wouldn't you? What truth of himself had he offered?
Almost easy, to block out the distant roar of an endless life and an endless war, almost easy to just lay her head to your chest and feel the pulse of your beating heart.
☆ She's purring, her weight an uncomfortable press, but you can ignore it as the bumps and ridges on that spike drag a heat through your body you're sure you'll never find with anything else. She's ruined you for anyone else, if nothing else. And in a weird way, as she rubs her face against you again, one hand coming up to support your right boob solely for the purpose of better mashing her face against it, you almost feel... maybe not pretty, but wanted. Worth holding like that. You brush your finger down the bridge of her nose and one cherry eye cracks open to look at you. "You act like you've never seen a boob before."
"Mn." She just grunts at you, pressing your hips together, grinding slowly in a way that sends your vision flashing white for a moment, some ridge at the base of that spike ground against your clit. It didn't help that her purring was vibrating her entire frame now. You have the instinct to wrap your legs around him, hold him close, but you're certain that you wouldn't even be able to encircle his waist. He's pulling back sooner than you'd like, that tight knot of aching tension denied the release of the snap, and a moan slipped between your gritted teeth. "H-Here, you- this is where you touch." You put your hand to his, gently showed her how to touch you right, desperate to tip over that threshold. And the fondness you're sure you will never pull from your chest turns corkscrews through your heart when that heavy, handsome brow furrows in a moment of concentrarion, smooth metal fingers drifting curiously over your nipple.
You want to tell her you love her. It is stupid and fleeting, but you want it so badly that you cannot breathe around it. Luckily, she chooses that exact moment to redouble her efforts, hips knocking yours in a way just shy of painful, and your breath is stolen for an entirely different reason.
Your back archs into the climax, whole body shaking with tension. Her claws test your skin, teeth graze your breast, the spike in you throbbing hard enough that you can feel the swell of it, a pressure against your guts that drags everything out longer. He does not ease you through it. The pleasure rolls over into some close cousin to pain with her desperate pounding never slowing down. You couldn't find the words to stop her even if you wanted her to stop, your thoughts cracking to fragile pieces against the force of the sensation. Your entire body twitched and shuddered, unable to twist away from the assault from the sheer weight of her frame.
Something choked and nonsensical escapes from your throat just when she raised herself up above you and her chest split. She presses into you, as deep as she can make herself fit, while the broad, grey expanse simply separated, panels pulling back, folding away, shifting clear until the purest light you'd ever seen was bathing your face. You reach for it, without thinking, watching as lavender light curls around your fingers, pressing into your skin. The further your hand breaches, the less of yourself you find you can feel, until the warmth of it sits, something just shy of solid, against your palm. She is bleeding through you and you can feel it so sharply, the depth of her need, the fierce tide of her pleasure, and you follow the half-memory that is flickering through her thoughts, brush your fingers through her light until everything explodes again.
Flickers pass from her to you in the place you hold her soul, the soft ache of the intrusion buried under the pleasured relief that pulsed through her entire frame with every pump of transfluid from that heavy spike. It was far too much for you, her tank emptying itself in your willing body, overflowing around the base to run down your skin and stain the sheets. That pink is never coming out, you think dully.
It feels like you're missing something, when she pulls away, your hand slipping free of her chest. The plates fold back into place, her vents hissing out steam like a sigh. You want her back. Want that light against your skin again. Want to shove your head inside to swallow her whole.
She doesn't bother pulling out, grinding against you slowly with drowsy purrs, licking absently at your hair. "Primus, I needed that." You're not sure who Primus is, but you make some noise anyway that you intend to be an agreement. Everything in you feels loose, warm and slow, the burn of overstimulation faded to a low heat by her gentle movement. You tilt your head up. You want to see her, want to say something, but she licks into your mouth, hand fumbling yet again to take the weight of your breast, and you simply forget.
Loved the new chapter of Labrador! Megatron trying to navigate having to leave and not wanting too is so good ughhhh. Poor mountain hermit being in love with prettygirl n talking to her about her kids. Goddamn they are down bad for the milf. makes it even sadder when he leaves :(
Megatron is the single most powerful milf in the galaxy, no other milf has the same raw appeal or strength of aura. Unfortunately she is also a stranger to being touched in ways that are not intended to cause pain. The same is true for The Hermit. Neither of them really want to let it go now that they have it.
This work is intended for 18+ audience and will include explicit sexual content.
The player character is physically augmented to have a tail.
●●●
☆ You glared at the screen, every line you finished reading punctuated by an aggravated lash of your tail. Everything this author made pissed you off. Absolutely everything. Their word choices made the line of fur up your spine prickle with annoyance, the contrived plotholes you're sure were supposed to be twists made you hiss out loud into the empty silence of your home, and the overly-flowery, dramatic way the characters spoke to each other made you want to tear your hair out. It had gone from a mild gripe to a full-blown fury over the months you'd been perusing their works to the point that your coworkers had begun to worry for your health, assuming stress issues from the way your tail would randomly set to coiling itself into furious corkscrews.
Normally, you wouldn't be so harsh. You could have some grace for a clear amateur. The issue was manifold. One, this being had written dozens of works- dozens!- all over one hundred thousand words at the minimum. Literally millions of words dedicated to this, but they couldn't be arsed to just Google things? Which was your second issue. They got the most simple things wrong. Who doesn't know how driving a car works? Or that ovens have to be turned on to be hot? And the greatest grievance of all was, perhaps, that aside from you, yourself, there seemed to be no one else on the planet writing for this stupid old play.
Europa's Lady was, by all accounts, a Bad Play. The plot was a bit contrived, it had been heavily criticized for downplaying the Ice War, it made zero logistical sense, and yet... and yet it had lived rent fucking free in your thoughts for twenty six years now. And this- this JOKE of an author was throwing out material somehow More contrived and disrespectful than the source material. Which you wouldn't mind if they just did it well.
It was late at night, you'd tell yourself later as an excuse. But the fact remained that, for the first time, you actually wrote up a comment laying out your messy thoughts and actually hit send. And then you went and made public your own work that you'd more or less sworn to keep as a private hobby.
When you woke up the next morning, you checked your email first thing out of habit. Your tail slapped against the bed hard enough to almost sting at the sight of a familiar username attached to a fairly scathing comment left in return.
Fair was fair. Fair. Was fair. FAIR WAS FAIR. You kept repeating it to yourself, but it wasn't stopping you from sitting down hard in front of your computer, pulling up a work you'd found particularly appalling in quality, and smacking out all your long-withheld criticisms in one go.
♡ Thundercracker couldn't stop his wings from canting fury over and over, no matter how often he resettled them. The feeling was itching under his plates too strongly for that. Pulsing through his systems with enough strength that even Starscream had poked at him through their bond, a quiet Are you okay? that he wasn't sure how to answer. Because of course he was fine. It didn't mean anything. Just some organic with bad taste. But still.
It is genuinely appalling to me that this is, allegedly, your thirteenth published work, none of which have considered brevity something of worthy attention might I add. It reads more like that of a child's first attempt at big girl writing that was, for reasons unfathomable, put upon the general public. I can only imagine that it is with a general hatred of the people around you that you published this. I can see no reason outside of an attempt at creating words hazardous to the health of all who stumble across them to have created this. If nothing else, I suppose I can say that I am impressed by your depiction of Soldierboy. I don't think anyone has ever gotten it as wrong as you.
His wings hiked up again and he forced them to resettle into normal when Red Wing gave him a nervous look. He was fine. This was FINE. It was just one comment.
........ but it WAS the only comment that chapter had ever gotten.
It hurt more than he wanted to admit and every time his thoughts drifted towards it, he got the nervous feeling that his trinemates would pick up on what precisely had so hurt his feelings. They'd mock him for it relentlessly, he was sure. They already poked at him for his writing about humans at all. If they learned that the humans he wrote so much about didn't even like what he'd made? The only joke out of their mouths for the next seven centuries would be about this.
"Um... was that okay? Sir?" Poor Red Wing was giving him that miserable look again, something close to terrified, and Thundercracker realized that he'd been so distracted that he hadn't even noticed what the younger Seeker was even doing. His trinemates were huddled close to his side, practically under his wings, giving him that same wide-eyed stare.
"That..." He twitched his wings to the right position for a Seeker of his breeding, raising his chin to look down at them better. "Do it again. Perfectly this time, if you please." They bowed at him immediately, accepting his word and transforming to take to the skies again, red, blue, and yellow flying in formation. He was lucky the sibling trine wasn't terribly good at anything they did. It made faking attentiveness fairly easy. His attention slid back to the section of his processor still dedicated to the writing forum, looking over that damnable comment again. And it went on and on, paragraph after paragraph insulting him on everything, from his prose to his dialogue.
Well, what did they know? On a whim, he opened the link to the commenter's profile to find- a single published work. Dated the same day as the comment itself.
True, burning fury lit up his wires so fiercely that he felt Skywarp try to wrap around his spark, a soothing, worried presence. In the skies, Blue Wing canted hard away from his brother, resettling in the proper position rather than the cowardly one he'd taken beneath Red Wing, evidently in response to the way Thundercracker's wings had flared. He wrestled himself back under control, took a moment to push calm reassurance at Skywarp until he felt his trinemate's attention ease back. But really, he could hardly be blamed. This was clearly a slap to the face! A deliberate, calculated effort at mocking him.
He opened the work with no small measure of distaste, crossing his arms and splitting his attention between the flight display taking place in front of him and the words of the story unrolling in his processor. It seemed almost fine, right at the start, and he had the worry that he would have to admit defeat, or at least not find anything to leave a suitably scathing response about, but then, to his mingled repulsion and delight, the actual main cast were the Cybertronian characters featured in the play. The author had even taken perfectly fine human characters and made them cons, for no reason that was immediately apparent to him. And worse than that, they simply got things laughably wrong. Not even a sentence spared for what parts went where during a transformation? What was he supposed to imagine, parts simply teleporting into place after a moment of lag? And why the hell were they shivering? Cybertronians didn't shiver. The author was human, without a shadow of a doubt, and Thundercracker was about to make that into a problem.
He drafted up an appropriately dismissive response, actually having the focus to direct Red Wing's trine here and there. And there was a harsh kind of satisfaction in hitting that comment button, giving back precisely what had been dealt. Only, his criticisms were actually worth the time it took to read them. Obviously.
When the trine landed again, he was in a good enough mood to let them get to the washracks, even if their form was still a bit wobbly. And as he left to pick up his ration of energon, feeling in his spark for the pull of Starscream to join him wherever he was taking his, the next chapter of his own tale started the writing process in the back of his thoughts.
☆ You definitely weren't writing out of spite, you told yourself as you rushed through editing, taking a sip from the drink held in the tight coil of your tail. No, this was just because you wanted to. Had absolutely nothing to do with the freak commenting nonsense about your quote unquote 'accuracy issues.' And what did they know anyway! Nothing!! They didn't even know how a fucking oven worked!!!
You were halfway through editing the start of a whole new work of art when your thoughts stalled for a moment, pieces you hadn't even realized you had falling into place. The sheer quantity of words produced, the frequency of upload, the odd, almost impossible knowledge gaps, the weird insistence in the comment left on yours, there was no way in hell this author was a human being. Which meant that you'd pissed off a really big robot. A really big robot who wrote shitty, inaccurate bullshit about your favorite play while clocked in at their job at the warfare factory. You had to take your drink in hand to avoid making another mess as your aggravation sent ripples down your spine that culminated in a sharp whip of your tail. Just your luck.
... maybe literally.
You paused then to actually read what the author had written, pawing your notebook over to make a list of every correction they'd left. If you were going to have to put up with the snarky judgement of some old warbot, then you were going to get something out of it. Sticking your pen in your mouth, scrolling up to the start of your document, you made a few rapid edits, more than your mystery bot would bother to do, you're sure.
"Let's see you complain about this," you muttered around the intrusion. Your tail curled upward, pleased, and you didn't bother with checking the clock before leaning forward and locking in.
Part Six <3 (maybe slight 🌶? Megatron does weird stuff to his minicon that could be taken as raunchy maybe)
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Elegy For A Dead Labrador, Lars Gustafsson
¤ It was almost easy, Starscream mused, to sneak around the Autobots' small force. The whole lot of them were locked onto where Destructor and Cyclonus were putting on quite the show, loudly fighting each other. Even if the two weren't throwing insults as loud as their punches, Starscream still doubted that the gaggle of fools would notice him. He could hear Hot Shot's amused purr through the trees, loud and rumbling, perfect cover for the shuffle of his movement as he crept forward, close to the ground.
The minicon was buried under a layer of peat, the thick, organic detrius uncomfortable and damp on his clawed digits. But he successfully pried the little thing free, cradled it in his palm and let the warmth from his exvent brush green paneling.
The containment chip glowed softly in response, the glyphs that marked the minicon's name shining with much more fervor before the prison evaporated into particles, leaving a little con sitting dazzedly in his grasp. It beeped at him, rapid and nervous, and he spared a moment to swipe a careful, grooming lick over its small helm. "Hello to you too, Wedge Shape." Another soft series of beeps followed by a chirp and then the pale minicon curled up tightly against his palm. He closed his servo over the precious thing and commed the ship directly, activating the warp drive that would rip them all back to the lunar base.
He heard a surprised shout from Hot Shot and then everything blurred, twisted, his tanks flipping in his chassis as he was rocketed through space, the feeling barely fading when he was standing firmly on his pedes. He could feel Swindle shifting about in his cockpit, the one in his servo doing the same. Rumbling his engine in idle comfort, he'd just unfurled his digit to scratch under Wedge Shape's little chin when the other two fools came prancing around the corner, holding onto each other in their eagerness.
"Starscream! Starscream, did you get it?" Destructor's crooked grin is marred by a gap in his denta where Cyclonus evidently got too enthusiastic in his role in their little play fight.
He held up the minicon, watched as she spread her little wings. He wanted to shove her into his cockpit next to Swindle, something he didn't quite understand making his plates prickle when both of his underlings ogled the minicon with undisguised hunger. She turned her little dusky orange head to look at him and he did his best to cant his wings in something reassuring. "That's another for the Decepticon forces. Well done, you two. I almost believed you myself." They both purred at the praise, clearly surprised. "Now, go get that tooth fixed."
Taking the dismissal for what it was, they both took off together, Cyclonus dragging Destructor along by the hand. They'd barely turned out of sight when Starscream let his wings droop, wearily lifting Wedge Shape to his cockpit and letting the glass slide aside. Swindle's tiny red hand poked free, an offering Wedge Shape accepted, and he listened to their soft beeps for a moment before sliding the glass back into place. He could feel them settle together, curled up to rest in the place sparklings were supposed to be. His servo ghosted over the glass, his thoughts drifting once again to Megatron against his will. He'd looked for his father's signal over and over for days now. Maybe it was time to accept that he really wasn't ever coming back. He wasn't ever going to get an apology for-
"Where's Lord Megatron?"
The voice cuts him off, his wings flaring in furious aggression. Whirling around, he glares at one of the many holes in the wall of this place they'd never have the hope of repairing. The shape is outlined by the distant flare of the sun, but when he steps into the base Starscream could not possibly miss the vibrant green of a Constructicon. "Well? Speak up, whelp." Scavenger is glaring at him, a single piece of a gestalt, and Starscream barely fights off the instinct to fold his hands over his occupied cockpit.
"Lord Megatron is dead." He lets the certainty of it settle in him. Layer through his voice like silt. "I am reigning commander of the Decepticon army now."
Scavenger stares at him for a very long time. Starscream isn't sure how he feels when the bulky Constructicon bows.
☆ She was still there, every time you woke up. It always surprised you a bit, even by the end of the week when she was well enough to start grooming the mess from his plating and stretching out his underused joints. Making your coffee, watching as she twisted to lick at the shiny new metal covering what once was a gaping wound, you wonder how your simple, loner's life managed to get so profoundly strange. But eventually you tire of just watching and, mug in hand, make your way to the backdoor to greet her.
Megatron made a noise at you, something low and rumbling, almost chattered at the back of his mouth. You thought he was growling at you, when she'd first done it, but now you figured it was just some kind of greeting. "Good morning to you, too, beautiful." And that damned fondness flooded your chest far too strongly when he tossed his head at the compliment. So self-assured, so proud, so damn noble and powerful. It was insane, you were sure. Insane and stupid and probably somehow wrong, but it was getting so much harder to pretend you did not feel it, this desperate, aching longing to look outside your window every day for the rest of your life and see her lying there.
He rests his head on the ground when you come near, let's you lean against the warmth of her face to stave off the cold. "So," you start, taking a sip of your steaming coffee. "You're leader of theeee..... Decepticons?" A hum of agreement. "You used to be slaves, mostly, and your enemy are called the Autobots. You chased them here because of these little guys." You point at Beeps- who is apparently named Leader-1? Beeps was a better name- and the white bot raises a hand in greeting. "And he's not your baby."
"That's the jist of it, yes. You took all this remarkably well."
"Well, to be fair, I've been watching after you for like... ages now." You shrug. "It would have been weirder if I was skeptical about there being more of you. Or like. Freaked out." It had been nice, incredibly nice, to just listen to her the past week. The rumble of that deep voice, the cadence of his accent. She probably could have told you damn near anything, you think, and you would have simply accepted it, too enamored with him to do much else. "Tell me something else," you say just to fill the silence, letting the warmth of his body and your coffee stave off the cold. "Tell me about something other than war."
There is a long pause, quiet enough that you can hear the shift of gears beneath the softer metal of his face when his jaw tenses. Then, soft in a way that spoke of how deep in his own thoughts he really was, he said, "Alright."
And she tells you a story. A story of an archivist and a miner. Of lessons taught in hidden places. Of quiet, private celebration at the first story that miner had ever managed to read. The way the light seemed to catch differently over the metal of that archivist's hands, somehow more beautiful, lingering as though even something as immaterial as light could not bear to simply slip through those fingers, could not bear to be in absence of him after but a glancing moment of his touch.
You pretend that you do not understand the wrenching sickness in your chest at the sound of grieving longing in her voice. That distant, aching sound of wanting.
It's hard to make yourself leave your place pressed to her, but you do it, placing your empty mug on your little backyard table, talking louder as you make your way around to check the spot of her wound on habit. "How many of yours are on Earth, anyway?" You ask the question only because it is the first one that crosses your mind.
He goes still as you haul yourself up her stomach, a soft rumble coming from her throat as she shakes herself from memories. "Including me, four. Two underlings and my creation. Who also happens to be my second in command. He will have been leading during my absence, unfortunately." Her voice is dripping with something like anxiety, maybe, some unpleasant emotion that is difficult to parse in the inhuman cadence of her deep tones. It is almost a relief to you, after the thrum of that grief, anything else to cling to. Anything but the quietly murmured past of a love felt in all the places the public eye could not see.
"You mentioned that one before, right? Your creation." You tested the paler plating gingerly, then with a small bit of force, both hands braced to warm metal. She just watched you, unhurt. "Did you like uh... build him by hand? Do your kind do that?"
He actually laughed at you for that. You think you might have felt embarrassed if you weren't so enthralled, the deep sound coming straight from his chest, rolling and full. If she were just smaller, you think in a rush you don't have time to defend against, you'd really have liked to lick that sound right out of her mouth. "Yes," she finally calms herself down enough to purr, "it is possible to build my kind, we call it cold construction, but that would not be my creation. Starscream came right from my spark, regrettably. He is my, ah- my baby, as you called Leader-1."
It is enough of a revelation to distract you from your wandering, inappropriate thoughts, your hurting, burning jealousy against an archavist you'd never meet. Or at least, that's what you tell yourself as you take it and run, sliding down his stomach to get back to solid ground. "So you do have a kid! What do you mean regrettably though? Don't you love him?" You ask the question, but you're already sure she does, whatever he might say in answer.
A soft scoff comes from between his sharp fangs. "He's always getting into scrapes he can't afford. Dragging his trinemates with him, too. I thought getting him off Cybertron would help, get him away from those two fools for a while, but he still just throws himself around without any thought at all! He's a Primus-damned fool, that's what he is. Thinks being mine is enough to get him what he wants, or keep him safe. He's going to learn the hard way that that isn't true at all." Her horns twitched, angled slightly back, just enough that you noticed. Granted, you probably wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't been staring, but the image of a cat angling its ears popped up in your head and wouldn't leave.
"So you're worried about him, basically." She scoffed again at that, harder, and you raised your hands in surrender, walking over to lean against her arm. Far enough away to see her whole face. You did notice though that she never denied loving her dumb robot baby guy. "I don't have kids, probably never will, so I don't really get it."
"You don't want your own creation?"
You actually paused to consider at his question. Hadn't ever really thought about it. Getting a baby in you would require the assistance of another person and you didn't want to deal with any part of that, so babies were also, naturally, off the table. Because you didn't want people. But... But that really wasn't the same question at all. If it didn't require dealing with people, would you want to make your own little person? Someone to show the mountain to? To teach how to hunt, how to forage, how to keep the garden clear? To leave your mountain to when you passed, like your father had done for you? It wasn't a terrible thought.
"I don't know," you answered truthfully. "There's... there's a lot of work involved? With making a- a creation for humans. You can't really do it on your own, other people always get involved and get in the way. And I'd need someone else to even get pregnant at all, if I wanted that, and I just- I don't want to deal with people. Ever. At all." He rumbles at you, a soft almost-purr. You wonder if it's real or if it's just a product of your bias-inducing fondness, the feeling in your chest just under your heart of being so very understood. "I think it might be kind of nice. To raise a kid. I just also know it's never gunna happen, so I don't really think about it. Did you plan for yours?"
"Oh, stars no." His purr is deep and true this time, a heavy vibration of sound that you can feel between your ribs like bass. "I didn't want him at all. He simply was there and by the time I realized it, it was far enough that it would have been more of a hassle to get rid of him. Hard to find proper doctors in war when your kind is considered inherently lesser, you know. He always finds a way to hang on, that Starscream, from the moment he pulled off of my spark." And it's probably irrational, the want that settles in your chest. You want to meet her son. Want him to like you. But you brush the feeling aside, ignore it for its implications, and instead simply move on. Ask her about war stories to watch the way those cherry red eyes light up, feel the deep timbre of her purring.
It's easier than you'd like it to be, to sit by her and listen to her speak. Megatron's voice reminds you of honey, or pine sap, something rich and sticky, holding you down. And there is work to be done, you know. Food to gather, fish nets to check, weeds to pull, and trails to walk. But for the first time in your long life, there was nothing in those trees that called to you louder than the person purring soft laughter in your ear, the warmth of him a comforting thing. And just like the day before, the sun slid easy across the sky without your noticing, time slipping through your fingers like water.
You could spend your life here, leaning against his arm, listening to him tell you about a world beyond the stars.
It catches you off guard, the golden touch of sunset on his plating. The fading blue of the light as dusk settled in properly. Another day simply gone and all you'd really done was paw together a few paltry meals for yourself and chatter Megatron's ear off when he wasn't waxing poetic about a far-flung battle fought between mountains of steel on a world where the only sea was one of rust. But even so, you couldn't make yourself feel as though the day had been wasted. Not really. Not when the thought of waking up in the morning with another long list of questions to ask her made you excited enough for your stomach to feel weak and fluttery.
♤ There was something almost calming about this place. The wind wound around his horns pleasantly, a constant stream of tactile data, and his armor had begun to build in a waxy resistance to the planet's natural moisture. The ground simply molded to his shape the longer he laid on it, his shuffling and settling having carved a divot into the earth. And, of course, the whole of everything smelled like you. His processor kept flagging it as a marker for safety and he'd given up changing that after the first attempt, just letting his systems do as it would.
And it wasn't as if it were far off the mark. He'd healed twice as quickly as he would have otherwise because of your assistance. You checked him over, every morning, afternoon, and night. You'd even taken the time to scrub down Leader-1. Every time you touched him, it was gentle. Careful. Awed and exploratory. You found him beautiful. He shifted, propping his head up on one hand, knuckles pressed to his derma in thought as his eyes tracked the line of the trees that hid the horizon. It was becoming... difficult to deny that he enjoyed you.
When was the last time anyone had spoken to him for the pleasure of it? Had sought him out solely to get to know him, without a thought for personal gain? When was the last time anyone had touched him kindly? They were questions too obvious to bother with answering. Blue and red paint transfers on his frame, white servos so careful against old wounds. That face that haunted him. That voice that would never stop whispering in his audials. And what had that gotten him? A splitting spark, an empty berth, and a war over weapons and toys.
He growled deep in his chest, horns angling forward as if there were a threat. By his servo, Leader-1 shifted, the chittering blare of the minician tongue just as aggravating as his own memories. "Lord? Are you unwell?"
Unwell. Not the right word, he didn't think, but maybe something close. There was certainly something wrong with him, he thought as he slid a claw into Leader-1's seaming, plucked at wires to shut him up. It wasn't normal, for him to pine after anything. A few millions years of the only mech he'd ever trusted fighting to take his head had thoroughly stamped out any remnants of the pining, soft-sparked mech he might have once been. And yet. Even so.
Leader-1 was purring brokenly, leaning into the touch even though Megatron knew it hurt him. Had been enough to make him beep and cry, once upon a time, but at some point it seemed that both of them had simply forgotten the purpose of pain. Maybe that's why you felt so damnably sweet. Why his whole frame warmed when you stumbled out to lean against his faceplate, smelling soft and good like nothing on Cybertron ever had. He wanted, he realized uncomfortably, to keep you. To take you away with him, to Cybertron. Rule with you in a glass cage, the prize of his conquest of Earth. He wants to come home to you forever. Wants this one little spot of warmth to stay his for as long as his body carried on with the burden of survival.
His servo twitches, digits clawing harder than he intended, something snapping, and Leader-1's quiet sounds pitched on a static-laced squeal, tiny frame shuddering. At least this thing wasn't going to betray him, he thought wryly as the minicon patched his broken pipe with shaking servos and began to dutifully lick his own energon from Megatron's claw. Leader-1 wouldn't know what to do with himself outside of his reach.
He turned to look down at the dark shape of your small home. The shape of you, lying in your berth, curtains drawn back as if you wanted him to see. The fabrics you covered yourself in had slipped, soft roundness bared, and he wondered what it would feel like to press his face there, to your chest.
The alert lit up in the corner of his vision again, for the third time. His frame letting him know that it was all done with repairs. That he just needed to flip the switch and his signal would be online again, his long-range comms with it. He'd be alive again. A warlord again. The longer he waited, the more work there would be, more cleaning up to do after his useless creation. And yet. He hesitated again. Dismissed the alert for later reminder. Looked down at the suggestion of your softness carved in shadows. He considered.
Leader-1 would nag him in the morning again, he knew. Would push him to get back to where he belonged, to settle the betrayal that so long been poisoning his spark, and he would, in time. He would. He just wanted to finish talking to you. He just needed two more days, he reasoned with himself. Two more days and then he would be gone, back to keeping Starscream from ruining everything he got his servos around, back to herding his useless underlings and making sure a universe's worth of outposts and colonies and defensive fronts were still holding strong despite his absence and get in contact with Cybertron and more and more until he felt utterly exhausted. He just hadn't recovered yet, he thought as he laid his head down, at eye level with your bedroom window. He'd feel fine again soon. This exhaustion would fade.
Ignoring, of course, that he has been telling himself it will fade for the last two million years.
☆ Something felt off, but you couldn't really put your finger on it. But it was bothersome, a nagging, uncomfortable thing that followed you as you got up and took your morning shower. Something wasn't right. It only hit you when you went to make your coffee and froze, looking out at the scene before you over and over as if it would change. But it didn't.
Megatron had been strange in the last few days, always looking off at nothing and keeping his hands on you nearly all the time, distracted, but reluctant to ever let you leave. And now... she was just gone. The yard was empty.
Your mug slipped from your fingers, clattering hard against the counter, spinning erratically, the thunk of its settling matched to the slam of your door as you ran outside, looking about you as if she could ever possibly hide. "Megatron?! MEGATRON?" Birds spiraled upward from the trees, cawing a complaint, and it finally hit you what had felt so wrong.
The birds were singing again. All around, the trees were alive again with animal life, the creature that had startled your home into silence well and truly absent.
Megatron was gone. There was no shift of metal over metal, no low rush of air through venting, no chattered beeps from Leader-1, no ground-shaking purrs. Your mountain was well and truly yours again. Standing in the once-flat mess of your empty back yard, the cheerful calls of birds starting up again in the absence of your screaming, all you really wanted was to have her instead.
Really, you should have expected this. Haven't you learned your lesson? Everything always leaves. Nothing is ever going to stay for you.
《》 It almost wasn't worth it, he thought as the last finally fell free. Almost. But as Starscream forced his wings to hold in their position of authority, watching as Acid Storm tended to the clutch with shaking hands, he knew that it would serve him, in the end. The myriad of colors gleamed faintly in the low lighting, the darkness in the shells reflecting their sire as Wavewalk nudged the eggs carefully with his many, many bladed limbs, almost obsessively counting and resettling the nest of monsters. Starscream didn't begrudge the beast that, simply allowed it without comment, watching as Acid Storm sat the last down amongst its siblings, shining pale blue.
The centipedal body of the massive Insecticon completely encircled the nest, the nervous sound of his tapping limbs an unsettling percussion. Starscream gestured to the mess he'd made. "There. Exactly as promised. All twenty two of them, perfectly fine." He ached down to the struts, the totality of his internals raw and hurting. "They'll hatch soon, yes? Perhaps now would be a good time to fetch the others." For a heartbeat, his keeper debated, wicked mandibles working in thought. But then that broad head nodded and Wavewalk was gone, the shivering sound of his departure sending a ripple of repulsed discomfort through Starscream's worn-out body as the Insecticon's mass vanished into the ventwork.
The second he was gone, Starscream breathed a sigh of relief, leaning against Acid Storm when the Rainmaker offered his hold. The silence lasted longer than he expected it to, but eventually Acid Storm broke it, as Starscream knew he would. "Are you... okay?"
What an odd question, Starscream thought, exhausted. He hadn't meant for this to happen with Acid Storm in the room. Had never intended for any of his Seekers to know what it was he had been willing to do for the sake of their people. But when it comes to matters of the frame, there really is only so much a mech can plan for. He assumed Acid Storm would pester him about that. Judge him. See him as something dirty. But no more questions followed and as Starscream clumsily brushed his field over Acid Storm's he found only concern. So he paused to actually consider the question.
Everything hurt. His spark ached to a degree that was alarming, as though it were willing to give out if he just allowed it. His valve felt like it had been beaten for hours by a blunt object, his forge was in bad enough shape that he was acutely aware of where it sat in his chassis, and his wings were on the verge of falling completely limp. So, all in all, he was doing very very badly. "Of course I'm okay." He spoke it easily, dismissed the alerts for damage, ignored the pain that wracked his bruised frame, pretended he did not find it so very difficult to look at the eggs he had carried that even now were starting to shift about. He had to make himself believe it just as much as he needed Acid Storm to. He had to believe it were true until reality conformed to match. "I'm perfectly fine."
Acid Storm's hold on him was warmer than he thought he'd get, arms and wings wrapped around him tightly. He was even nuzzling at Starscream's neck, purring soft and comforting. And he allowed himself to accept it. That, if nothing else would be given to him, he would get to keep the steady affection of one stupid, neon fool with a spark bigger than his processing power.
The first grub broke free of its shell with a sharp crack that reminded Starscream uncomfortably of snapping bones. Golden mandibles were followed by a lemon yellow head, sharp claws dragging more and more body from the egg's confinement. So many tiny, delicate limbs, a segmented body balanced on cream knives. It flicked red-striped wings experimentally, several sets that lined its long form, similar to Wavewalk, testing out the functions of its body, peering around itself with those tiny red optics. That gaze stopped on Starscream, intense and searching, and then the grub transformed. And it almost looked like a sparkling, this tiny thing with such small servos and clumsy pedes and thin, fragile wings it didn't seem to know how to properly control. It shrieked at him, a high-pitched sound of childish demanding that he did not know how to answer, just watching dispassionately as it got upset enough to topple over onto its side, the impact enough to make its nestmates fight harder to free themselves.
A nest of monsters. Cannibals. They would claw their way to adulthood, into a life of eating garbage or one another. Would hiss and spit and fight their way to an existence that would be lived only as servants. Only as slaves. Starscream found that he could hardly be arsed to care.
By the time the nest was filled with broken eggs, shrieking newborns, and grasping claws, Insecticons had begun to file into the room. Watching with gleaming red eyes, shivering feelers, twitching mandibles. Acid Storm growled low in his chest, half crouched over Starscream, and he was almost grateful that the Rainmaker was still so very determined to keep him safe. But even that was a weakness he could ill afford. As the space began to crowd, choked with hard plating and shivering wings, Starscream shrugged Acid Storm off of him and fought to sit up properly. Forced his wings into the broad spread of an Insecticon Queen rather than the cant of a Seeker Winglord and raised his head even as his neck ached with the strain of it.
Silence. Complete in a way that felt somehow threatening, all of them staring at him. Watching him. He had one shot.
He took a breath. For one moment, he allowed himself to think of home.
"Insecticons." He greeted them, made an effort to let his focus roam, make them all feel addressed. "I know it is inaccurate to refer to you so simply. Unlike the majority of my people, I understand that you are not one. That Wavewalk is no brother to Sharpshot, and that he sees no kinship to Flit or Mouthpiece or Hardshell. You are as far apart from each other as I am to you. As the earth is from the sky." Behind him, one of the last lingering eggs gave with a sharp snap, like punctuation. He did not let his plates ruffle at the unbroken attention of his audience. "However, I believe that that is simply... a matter of perspective. Tell me, where does the sky begin?"
Mandibles worked silently, sharp limbs twitching, antenna curling in the air. Starscream pretended he did not feel it when Acid Storm's EM field brushed his own, trying for supportive. "I believe that you and I and my Seekers and your Hives, we are not truly so far apart. For there is one thing that will always link us." He waits, just a moment. Lets it sit. Lets the anger shiver through their plating. He nods. "Megatron. Megatron, who promised you freedom, only to clap chains around your necks. Megatron, who promised you food, only to throw you little more than scraps and waste. Megatron, who promised you the right to your children." The grubs under the shade of his wings squealed, writhing, wet with newness.
"You have been given promises before. So I have made none to you. You have been tricked, disrespected, belittled, beaten, starved, and denied, and I have made no effort to mirror the mistakes of your torturer." He turns, finally, to the little yellow thing that has not stopped trying to crawl to him. The false limbs of her centipedal form twitch against the pudgy shapelessness of her sides, mandibles locked open as if preparing to strike. When he picks her up, it comes with a wave of nausea and a flood of warnings he dismisses in stride, holding her gently, carefully, in his servos. Holds her out to his crowd, the first new Insecticon in millenia. "Instead, I give you proof. I give my frame to gift to you what you were long promised by another. Twenty two newhatches, to be divided amongst the largest of your surviving Hives. You will raise your children again." Finally, responses. Finally, the nods he needed, the chitters and chirps of a pleased Insecticon as they studied the shape of the thing he cradled in his hands. When she transformed, there was the gentle buzz of purrs. Starscream barely fought to urge to flinch from the feel of those hundred tiny limbs digging into his seaming.
"Megatron refused you your children. And she-" His voice broke into static, red warnings blinding him as though he were injuried, every part of him fighting to take the defensive, to protect himself as though he were a thing hunted. He resisted it. Fought through. Forced the words free. "And she stole mine from me. We are owed a great debt, and I believe it is finally time to collect. She owes me a life. And the Insecticons have far too long been promised a meal."
Low hisses, excited and furious at once. Twitching wings, twitching plates. He followed the shifts of the crowd, watched which wings brushed where, how each touch landed on whom. He placed the writhing grub in his hands into Wavewalk's grasp, turned to scoop up another bundle of delicate metalwork. Passing them around, deliberately aiming for the ones he was mostly sure were the ones standing as leaders in the absence of Queens. "I ask again, where does the sky begin?"
"Up, up?" The confused answer came from the mantis he passed a grub to, those bladed arms cradling the sparkling so very gently.
Starscream forced himself to purr, gentle and low. "If you are so far from me as the earth is to the sky, then let me be the one to answer. There is no distance at all between them. They meet, like clasped hands. The sky is any place the wind blows, my brothers." He let his wings brush the strange, fragile make of the Insecticons', let his shoulders touch theirs in a way no true Seeker would ever allow, let them believe themselves to truly be his equal. "I will not command you. I will not ask you to obey. I merely ask you to listen. I and my Seekers will be aiming to take Megatron's life. It is a reckoning long overdue. Who will you stand beside when the final battle comes?" He takes the yellow thing from Wavewalk's grasp, holds her out like an idol. "The one who refused you your children, or the one who was willing to bear them?"
They do not answer in words. But then, he didn't expect them to. Slowly at first, one by one, and then in a spreading wave of motion, the Insecticon forces bow. And Starscream finally allows himself to feel it, that thick, furious, twisting thing that had taken up residence in his spark. Megatron was going to die. The truth of it was bowed, helm to floor, all around him. He wanted to feel triumphant. Victorious. He hurt so very badly.
"The Windlord needs rest." Acid Storm, so close at his side, and he almost wants to snap at him. Holds his tongue for the sake of appearances. "You will know when the time comes. For now, let him and the little ones recover." Neon green wings shielding him as though he were fragile. Starscream didn't bother to brush him away, just watched as the little grubs were gently placed back in their nest, immediately taking to chomping through their own eggshells, and then the crowd simply began to file out. Nothing else to say, nothing else to be done, he had done it. He'd won.
The moment the room was silent, even Wavewalk having left at Acid Storm's insistence, Starscream let his wings fold against his back, aching with overuse. "I was handling it. I didn't need you to do that."
"I know." He bumped him gently, herded him into lying down.
"I mean it, Acid Storm. I'm fine." His whole frame creaked as he obliged with the Rainmaker's fussing, limbs half collapsing as he made to lie back down.
"I know." And he touched him so gently, that broad green servo laid warm to his side. He didn't know what to do with it, the persistence of the Seeker's affection. Just let it happen as Acid Storm nuzzled his neck and pressed kisses to the tense cabling there. Didn't want to admit how much relief that came with the touch. "I'll leave you alone too. I'll be just outside, alright? No one will get past me." Starscream didn't bother turning to watch as Acid Storm left, locking the door behind him. He was alone in a nest of squealing newborns.
He looked down at them. The pile of writhing, chirping things that had come out of his body. Reaching out, he tipped one over, watching its short limbs wave in the air as it fought to roll back over, squealing in distress. He watched. Watched its little face contort in confused misery as its body betrayed it, trapped. It wriggled, flailed stubby legs, snapped its blunt mandibles. A few of its siblings chirped back at it, waddled closer, pushed and shoved together until it was back on its belly, beeping softly in relief. Starscream looked away.
One hadn't hatched. He didn't even notice until he heard the sound, a soft, scratching. The egg was buried under shell fragment and soft grub body, a much duller color than the rest. He was almost tempted to simply... do nothing. But he had promised twenty two, so he gingerly shifted the grubs, set his claws into the cracks fighting to form in the egg's surface, and pried it in two. Laid in the damp mess of egg internals, blinking up at him with the palest blue eyes he'd ever seen, the half Seeker stared at him in silence, the only one of the brood who did not appear as full Insecticon. The only one marked by his half of the carrying. He stared at her. She stared back.
Her thrusters weren't fully formed yet, and the tiny triangles of her sparkling wings twitched occasionally, looking stout and strong compared to the impossibly thin fixtures her Insecticon siblings bore, but when she reached for him, it was with claws that could never be mistaken for anything other than a monster's. He couldn't look away from her. Just watched as she rolled over, hauled herself shakily to all fours and crawled to him. He wanted to run. Wanted to throw her against the wall so hard that her fragile, newmade plating simply exploded from force of impact, wanted to crush her back into the halves of her egg, trap her back inside forever. When her tiny little servos tapped gently to the glass of his cockpit, he could not stop the code to open it. It slid easily aside and she simply tumbled in, the glass shutting just as smoothly, trapping her right next to his spark.
He wanted his trine. He wanted Skywarp to hold him, wanted Thundercracker to wrap them both in his broad wings and purr in his deep way, wanted to listen to them talk about nothing, anything else to focus on but the new weight in his chest. But he couldn't let them see this. He would not survive it, if they stepped in this room and saw what he had made of himself and looked at him as though he were something dirty. He wanted, bizarrely, to call Acid Storm back into the room. Wanted to listen to someone- anyone- tell him that he were still beautiful. Still good enough. That this hole in him was not all that was left.
The grubs were purring, settled down to sleep, and he let his wing fall over them as he curled in on himself. Around the soft shape warm in his chest, where something small and soft and new was always meant to be. All at once, Starscream began to cry.
☆ You were entirely certain that you'd never seen anything more wonderful than your three big babies, curled up together in a pile. It was a heavy sort of almost-contentment that had taken up residence in you recently, a hesitant step away from the grey nothingness you'd so long inhabited. They were just so incredible to you. You loved just watching them. The way they sought each other out, nuzzling close for warmth and comfort, their small hands linked together, laying their mandibles against one another's. The way they chirped and warbled to one another, even in sleep.
Gently, you ran your hand over each of their helms, listening to the way their purrs strengthened at your touch. You almost couldn't believe it, really. You were going to get to watch them grow up.
Across the chamber, Shrapnel ambled from the nursery tunnel, his mandibles still lined with amber, pausing to stretch, his wings flaring out, trembling just enough to see. You're absolutely sure that he's showing off, warmth and affection pulsing through your hivebond as he shakes himself, immediately turning to make sure you're looking at him. You try your best to make it clear that you find him beautiful, hoping that it is enough even if it cannot be the love that pours from him in a flood. His spark pulses next to your heart, a gentle reassurance that you are enough. He understands.
You pause to kiss each of your grubs on the head, smiling at Highrise when he raises his head to blink at you, all wobbly with exhaustion. He yawns, showing a forked violet tongue and sharp little fangs, before shoving his head under Singer's and falling back asleep. Tucking the blankets closer around them feels like some kind of catharsis, though even as the thought occurs to you, you feel almost embarrassed at yourself for it. You pull more to them anyway, determined that they would be warm and safe before you left them, finally hauling yourself to your feet to join Shrapnel where he still waited for you.
His servos curl around you so carefully, warm and familiar as he raises you up to his face, chirruping as he presses you to his cheek. Running your hand down the bridge of his nose, you did your best to rub your cheek against him. He was too big to hug like this, but you would do your best. "Hey, big guy. Work hard today?"
"Yes, yes." His voice is high with excitement, his pride taking up residence in your chest. "Almost done with lining the tunnel, tunnels. Kickback and Bombshell make good work, work. Nursery will be ready for next batch of grubs, grubs."
"Already thinkin' about more kids, huh?" Something like amusement briefly fluttered in your chest as you leaned back to look at him better, only for the effort to be rendered moot when he turned his head to press kisses to your body. He cradled you gently, both hands supporting you as he pressed you against his mouth, something almost desperate starting to bleed through your bond. A searing question made all the more obvious when his glossa dragged up your entire torso.
"Please, please?" He felt through you for anything matching the heat of his wanting, nuzzling firmly between your legs. And it had been quite a while since you'd actually gotten to lay with any of your husbands, your body too weak, too hurt, but as he pressed his tongue determinedly against you, purred at your taste, there was no stinging ache through the cradle of your hips, no sharp pain through your organs. Just a low warmth, the echo of his desperation.
"Alright," you let him closer, give him a moment of trying to fit his too-large tongue inside before tugging at your bond, urging him somewhere more private. A soft sense of mocking laughter came through, amused at your sense of modesty, but he followed your orders anyway. Hauling himself through a short tunnel into a little side room, the walls close enough that the gentle blue light reflected off his dark plating, outlined the sharp points of his mandibles in silver. When he finally mass shifted, lowered you carefully to the ground so that your back rested to cool amber, you found yourself wanting- actually wanting with a strength that was nearly frightening.
Grabbing on to the jawguard that hid his battle mask, you dragged him close enough to kiss, let him tug away the blanket that was your only covering. He pressed close to you, frame curled protectively over your smaller body, purring hard enough that it was a vibration against your skin, a shiver that you felt in your bones. You almost expected him to mount you the moment you'd given the okay, but he didn't. Instead, he pressed kisses along your jaw, brushing carefully over the sore spot by the joint, trailed down your neck, pricked your shoulder with his teeth. You could feel it, how badly he wanted to bite, but he made do with dragging his lips over your scars, tracing the ridges with a devotion that almost felt like prayer.
His spike pressurizes to rut between your legs, an easy, pleasant drag. "Missed having you, pretty pretty." The soft ache of need between you is so blurred by your closeness that you aren't even sure if it's his or yours, if you're even capable of feeling like that anymore. His voice shudders with throaty clicks and chirps of pleasure he cannot hold back. "Want you so much, much. Need you, need you, been too long, long." You let him in in his entirety, let yourself drown in the totality of his presence. Your body puts up no protest when he finally pushes in, sliding in easy till his hip plates press indents into your skin and the sound he makes, soft and breathless and relieved, is so sweet that you pull him closer to lick it off his tongue.
He makes himself be gentle, rocking steadily against you, pleasure running thick as honey through your bond, filling up your chest. You don't want to stop kissing him. He's so warm, so close, solid and real and yours. And somehow, this powerful, beautiful, brilliant thing holding you with such careful claws was thinking the exact same thing about you. It never made sense to you, no matter how long it lived in you, how a mech that burned so very brightly could look at the dullness of your ruined life, the hesitation to so much as allow yourself contentment, and find something wonderful in it. Something to love.
He pulled away almost completely before easing back into you, rolling his hips in gentle, shallow thrusts as though full motion simply put too much distance between you. He was trying to kiss you back, trying to pet your sides with all the affection he could muster, but he was managing precious little beyond drooling in your mouth, chittering low in his throat as he ground himself in you as deep as he could fit. His claws pressed against your skin, almost threatening. And you almost wanted him to do it, to hold onto you so hard, so desperate, that you would be left branded by clawmarks.
He snarls against your lips, the sound of his wings shivering against themselves barely audible over his low hiss, and you can feel it when his spark burns brighter in his chest, threads of light licking through the seams of his body, reaching for you. Shrapnel's claws press harder as he bows his head to your shoulder, half hiding against you, and you can feel it. How badly he wants to carve himself into you. How badly he wants you to claw matching wounds into him.
His spike twitches and he whimpers, rubbing his face against your neck, desperate to mark you in some way, pressing the scent of himself to your skin. "Want, want," he manages, and you dig your fingers into the gaps of his chest armor, letting his light wind around your hands.
You're so focused on him that it is almost surprising, when the sound of Kickback's ringing chirp echoes down to you just as he appears, mass shifting just in time to kiss you roughly and you open up your attention, let the bond blow wide to take in all three of them. Kickback is smiling against your lips, almost too giddy to kiss you properly. "Leaving us out?" He's purring too hard for his words to sound properly scolding, but you kiss him hard anyway, reach up to rub against a biolight nearly hidden in the softer, delicate paneling of his throat until his thread of your bond hums with heat.
Shrapnel bucks clumsily against you, hissing lowly, and when you look it is to find that Bombshell is holding him by the hips, forcing him to pump into you, his own spike leaking bright pink against Shrapnel's thigh, impatient. He blinks at you, deliberately forces a rush of warm lust all wrapped up in honeygold adoration until all of you are clicking at him. You can't really begrudge him his shudder of pride at his mastery over your bond when it makes Shrapnel finally rut into you properly, such pretty noises escaping from between his teeth. Memory, fantasy, desire, you could feel the echo of it as Bombshell egged Shrapnel on, letting go of him to shift to your side. He nudged Kickback away, gently turned your head, and you looked at him for a moment, the haze of warm pleasure making you think of him as something almost glowing.
He chittered at you, leaned slightly closer, and you tipped your head up to make it easier for him to kiss you, wanting desperately for him to kiss you, but he just grinned. Got a claw under Shrapnel's chin instead and made you watch as he kissed his leader, something messy and mismatched, Shrapnel's pleasure-slack mouth sending drool down Bombshell's chin as he forced his glossa down the ambermaker's throat. It was an obscenity that didn't match the careful way your Shrapnel made love to you, Bombshell practically fucking the other mech's mouth with his tongue until his optics flickered offline, one claw coming up to cling desperately to Bombshell's chest. You wanted him to kiss you like that, shove himself down your throat until it bulged from the intrusion.
The second the thought occurred to you, it pushed Sharpnel over the edge, crying out against Bombshell's rough kiss as his entire frame shuddered. His hips shifted against you as his spike pumped transfluid as deep as he could get it, rutting gently as if he could force it right into your womb. Your entire body felt warm, pleasant wanting shivering through you at the feeling of his overload. He groaned when Bombshell let him go, leaning back to study the look on his face. You turned your head when Bombshell's attention flicked over Shrapnel's helm, looking just in time to watch as Kickback took ahold of Shrapnel's hips and forced him to fuck against you, the harsh jump in stimulation making him yelp.
He tried to snap at Kickback, mandibles locking shut on nothing, but then he rolled with the pressure, panting and whimpering out half-sobs as his spike was overworked. Kickback only let him go when he started to coo, elytra raising to let his wings drop free, limp with relaxed pleasure. You basked in it, the shifting tide of their matched wanting, the feedback from their bodies, everything warmed to liquid light in your pliant body. They pulled Shrapnel away from you together, nipped and bumped and nudged until he laid down next to you, purring dumbly, and you reached out to touch his face just as Kickback settled between your legs.
You felt him halfway ask, a gentle nudge in your mind trying to tell if you were done, before he let his spike pressurize with a deep purr of satisfied relief. He took Shrapnel's place easily, his writhing spike coiling corkscrew just to fit, a comforting fullness. Settling your legs around his waist, you looked at his face, amazed at the sheer amount of adoration there, matched by the beat of his spark matched to your heart. He asked properly this time, a gentle question, before wrapping you up in himself, let you feel the same pleasure he did as he started to roll his hips, short and sharp.
Bombshell settled beside him, let their wings brush in an affectionate touch you felt as though it were to your own back before he took hold of Shrapnel's thighs, forced him to mimic your pose, and carefully pried open his valve cover. He pressed his hips hard to Shrapnel, and you turned to watch Shrapnel's face, catching the moment Bombshell's spike pressurized inside. He was beautiful. He was so, so beautiful, and when the force of your thought hit him, he turned to look at you, fumbling for your hand. You knit your fingers with his, pulled it close to kiss the back, and he purred, giving you a crooked, half-drunk sort of smile, more relaxed than you'd ever seen him let himself be.
Your thoughts for so long had always come in circles. Maybe that's why all this felt so natural, you mused, the flow of your bond traveling through each of you in a closed circuit, every touch, every push, every pull, ringing through four bodies all at once. So easy to lose yourself in it. So easy to forget that you are not simply another piece of them, the whole of yourself absorbed into the tapestry of their colorful existence.
It never really seems to matter how long it's been when they get like this, even Shrapnel's eventual grumbles that there was work being smothered by a tide of wanting and belonging. You aren't even entirely sure yourself, everything a blur of warm pleasure, your stomach and thighs coated in bright pink just as much as theirs was. At some point Kickback laid beside you, Shrapnel mounting him with great enthusiasm, while Bombshell had gathered you up in his arms and took you carefully, as gentle as he could be with so much burning in his wires. The whole of your body felt like it was crackling with stardust and static when he finally laid you down, all four of you twitching and shivering with systems overdone. But even when Shrapnel's spike refused to repressurize, his frame trying to simply put a lock on the day's festivities, he simply whined in annoyed upset and tilted Kickback's hips up, grinding against him valve to valve, while the grasshopper let out bleats of static-broken moans.
Bombshell was tiredly grooming himself, purring at the phantom echo of Shrapnel's efforts, while you dragged yourself shakily upward, getting close enough to kiss Kickback, let him try to return the favor while Shrapnel dragged gasps from him. "You're going to go too far again," you pause to chide Shrapnel gently, but he only slows rather than stops, blinking at you with such a raw sense of begging coming from his corner of the bond that you laughed, sudden and warm, something that ripped up straight from your chest. It surprised you into silence relatively quickly, Kickback nuzzling at your sore jaw, a soft again? again?? coming from him. You didn't really know how to explain that you couldn't do it again. Hadn't thought you'd ever do it again at all, for the rest of your life. When had you remembered how to laugh...?
Kickback yelped then, dragging you from your thoughts. With his Queen's attention elsewhere, Shrapnel had simply thrown himself back into his self-appointed task of fragging himself unconscious. Sure enough, he was overloading within moments, wings shivering, making a mess of Kickback's valve, just to stagger a few steps away, collapse facedown, and take to snoring. Bombshell, purring indulgently, nuzzled the exhausted Insecticon's helm and started to clean him up.
Panting, legs akimbo, Kickback raised his head only enough to chirp at you beggingly when you laid a hand on his heated thigh. "You're going to overdo it, too," you murmured, just watching for a moment as his vents fluttered, hot air hissing free, his overworked frame creaking softly as it resettled into rest. You could see it, when his valve calipers cycled down on nothing, smeared in magenta, and you took pity on him, letting his grateful pleasure hum through your chest when you leaned down to kiss him on the anterior node. You licked at him, pressing your tongue flat to the smooth bulb that flashed violet at your dedicated attentions, brushed your fingers into his seaming to touch the wires you'd learned were sensitive. It didn't take much to get the whole of his frame to arch into you, his purr cranking up so loud and so fast that it shattered into nonsense static. The charge was enough to zap you on the tongue, a crack of blue electricity that surprised more than hurt.
He went completely limp when the overload passed, optics shuddered, his fans running shaky. You kissed him one more time anyway, just to feel the way it made his spark jolt, before dragging yourself up to slump against him, arm thrown over his neck. His digits brushed against your back, traced the line of your spine in a lazy rhythm. Eventually, his fans quieted and the raw feeling in your bond softened into familiar warmth. Bombshell joined you then, giving you a careful nuzzle before starting to gingerly lick away the magenta that streaked Kickback's thighs and pooled in his joints. You wished you could help. It didn't feel right, just laying here against warm silver metal while they actually took care of each other.
Bombshell's spark nipped at you, a harsh poke in the heart that stopped the shift of your thoughts. Made you focus on Kickback instead, the grasshopper fumbling through his subspace before producing a pack of baby wipes with a blazing grin. "Clean up?" You had no idea where the hell he'd gotten that, but he looked so damn proud that you couldn't really bring yourself to do anything more but allow him to fumble a wet cloth free and start to wipe you down.
"Where the hell did you get those?" You ask as he carefully cleans away the dirt and transfluid splashed and smeared across your hips and sides. It's... unfamiliar, but not in an unpleasant way. They do their best to take care of you, your odd husbands, but while the almost-roughness of their metal tongues did manage to scrape the sweat and dirt off your skin, you never really felt truly clean. The cool dampness of a wet wipe dried to a slight tackiness, but even so, as Kickback gently tugged you around, his servos touching everywhere, it was the cleanest you'd felt in years. In decades, probably. It made something heavy and painful wrench in your chest, sharp enough that, even in his sleep, Shrapnel started to purr, his spark reaching out, trying to comfort you.
Kickback paused only long enough to tap his claw to your jaw, make you look at him so he could kiss you. "Perfect," he chirped, his nose tapping yours before he leaned back again to carry on with his task. He was shoving the dirty rags in his mouth every time one was too soiled to work with and you found yourself actually fighting a smile at the sight of him, brow furrowed in concentration, the end of a pink-stained wet wipe sticking out from the corner of his mouth.
A single, high note echoed through the tunnels, a ringing chirp of request that made your focus snap to the exit of your little chamber. Singer was awake, was asking for you, and the chittered answer shuddered from your throat on instinct, a sound that made you pause for a second, unsure of how you'd even managed it. You rubbed at your throat, a soft pain making you want to cough. Kickback mirrored the sound, his optics bright again as he hauled himself up and wrapped you up in your blanket. Bombshell nuzzled your head, warbling a questioning note, but then Singer called again, louder, and all you could really think of was getting to him. You hauled yourself up into the tunnel that lead to the main chamber, managing something between a stumble and a run, the sound of Kickback shuffling after you filling the short space. You ignored the few branching pathways, made a beeline for your kids, and before long, you were scrambling down into the vaulted space, clicking sharp in the back of your mouth.
Singer tried to stand, wobbling on his stout little legs before toppling back onto his side with a cheep of surprise. He was reaching for you, little claws held out, and you picked him up the moment you were close enough. He squealed, hands going to your face, squeezing your cheeks as you settled down, holding him in your lap and clicking your tongue at him until he repeated the sound at you. A harsh slam to your thigh sent a bolt of pain through your entire hip bone, bad enough that you gasped, but you couldn't bring yourself to scold Headshot when you looked down at him. You did put a hand against his helm to stop the next headbutt though, holding him back until Kickback joined you and scooped up the little troublemaker.
Singer patted at you, repeated his questioning chirrup, and you muttered soothing nothings while Kickback settled beside you, his wing brushing your back as he fumbled a baby bottle from his subspace. Pale blue ran from his mouth, much less saturated than what you'd seen him offer to Bombshell and Shrapnel, and when the bottle was full, he offered it to you. Resettling Singer, making sure his back was properly supported, you bottle fed him while Kickback took care of the other two, a routine that had become a comforting familiarity in the passing days as your grubs grew stronger. It felt real, properly, truly real, when you held one of your grubs like this, listening to their food-drunk purring, solid in your arms.
He was half turned against you, little legs tucked close like he were curled up for sleeping. His chubby hand was sort of supporting his own bottle, but it was mostly just leaning against your chest, his eyes half shut and dull with contentment. You rubbed his cheek gently with the back of your hand, like you always did, watching every twitch of his mouth, every shift of his throat, every reshuffling of his perfect, crooked wings. You could hear the others purring, Kickback ringing out a soft song, and as you curled yourself closer around your precious son, held him warm against you, his optics reopened, just a tad. Just enough to focus on your face as he almost smiled around the nipple of his bottle, clumsily raising a servo to pet your cheek in return.
And you were absolutely certain that you had never been so at peace in your life.
☆ Bumblebee's gentle grooming felt strange and familiar at once, his glossa idly dragging over your scar-marked skin. You could make some kind of joke that would get him to ruffle his plates and bare his denta at you, you're sure, but you couldn't bring yourself to. Leaning back against his warm chassis, sitting on the floor with his massive form curled protectively around you, you just traced the seaming of his armor, even as he gingerly licked at the decades-old scratches set into the meat of your thighs.
He really did make it too easy, but you controlled yourself for once. You knew he couldn't help it. It was a scout thing, grooming instinct for a thing born to live in pairs. You remembered the smooth warmth that had shuddered into frozen discomfort, the half-wet drag of Cliffjumper's glossa on your skin, tracing up the length of your spine, the disdain in his scoff when you'd told him he didn't have to get all sweet with it, only had to ask.
"It's instinct," he'd muttered in that tone you knew came with bared teeth and curled claws. "Base coding. I can't control it. Now hold still and let me get it out of my system."
Bumblebee really did look precisely like Cliffjumper. You reached out to touch his cheek, gently turned him to face you so you could watch the way those layers of hair-thin cogwork spiraled open in those blue eyes, focusing on what was different. On the softness in that rounded patch of sky, so different from burning, furious amber. He rumbles at you, calm and low, and you let him get back to his self-given task. And there is no following chill, no bone-deep freeze to set the path he follows in stone, just a gentle, affectionate exploration. The acceptance of you as his second half, just as Cliffjumper had once accepted you, only this does not dig into you like claws, does not hook beneath your skin like suicide pact. It blooms, warmer than you could have possibly imagined, in the center of your chest and it is so lovely a distraction that you let yourself fall for it. Pretend that there simply is not a world outside the confines of these ramshackle walls. That forever can be granted to you here, safe in the heat of his hold.
He licks up your side, lingering over a ridged line of scarring, nearly an open-mouthed kiss. He touches it so carefully, as he has done all the rest of you, a gentility your body still does not entirely expect. The heat of his frame is grounding, but even so. When you close your eyes and think, you can almost still feel it, the slick weight of your own guts in your hand, fighting to slip free of you, to seal you to the ice of Europa for as long as that moon still hung. "What made this one?" The shape of the words soft where they brush your skin, the warmth of his glossa dragging like punctuation. It is a fight to answer.
"There's uh... there's these things, on Io. S'another of Jupiter's moons. These like.... wolf bears. Or something. Plate scales, big teeth, big claws, live in those sulphur pits naturally, but every once in a while they throw one onto Europa just to... I don't know. Keep things interesting?" You'd suspected, while you were a soldier, that Europa was one big stage. That there were cameras wedged all through the ice, your directionless war little more than late night entertainment. The truth, you'd learned when you'd gotten down, was not so far off. "They don't survive long, the cold breaks their bodies down completely, melts into this rancid yellow sludge. One caught me in the side, ripped me open bad. Had to hold my pieces in. Just... Just held myself together until he could get to me, jam ice against it until it sealed and I could move."
"He?"
Soft and questioning. You flicked his horn, chided him, "Greedy." They swivel back in displeasure, but quickly resettle as he licks over your stomach, giving your navel a look of bafflement before deliberately moving upward, to the scars on your chest. You wonder what you could possibly ask him that would not cause him pain, but all the questions that crowd you are ones you're sure he will not want to answer. But one slips out anyway, eventually. "What was Optimus to you? Before he sent you away."
He pauses in his ministrations, plates ruffling, and you wished desperately that you could read the field you can feel prickling through you, getting nothing more than the sense of its existence. "He..." A long consideration, a furrow to his brow. His hand holds you steady as he licks over your hair, thinking. "I don't know. He was a dad, I think. Maybe. I think I wanted him to be." You wonder how old Bee was, when he'd joined their war. So long a life. So long to be wanting someone so desperately. "I'd lost so much and... and he was so strong, you know? Our leader. God loved him so much, so everyone else did too, and it felt like he saw me. Like something grand and holy and good saw little, fragile me and actually saw something worth bothering with. I followed him anywhere. I did anything for him."
You'd never liked Optimus Prime. Never could quite agree with the ease that he could label a whole swathe of his own people as Evil and Expendable. Never could quite forgive him for every time he'd put Dorothy in danger for the sake of the war he'd started. He avoided things he didn't want to deal with, waited for Primus to spirit it all away while he buried his head in the sand. Bumblebee's expression twists into a grief you recognize. You pull him closer, hug his golden helm as best as you small body is able, and you know that this is another thing you will never forgive the Prime for.
"I ditched the kids once, I didn't wanna deal with- I just couldn't handle it anymore. I can't stand being around kids, Optimus knows that, but he- and I just wanted to spend time with him. I'd missed him, I thought he'd missed me, but... He couldn't even look at me." He accepts your touch for the comfort it is intended to be, stayed pressed close. "Wouldn't speak to me. Even when I tried. And Megatron looked like she was pitying me. Like she felt bad for me and I keep wondering what he's said to her. How does he talk about me? Because it feels like he's glad every second he doesn't have to put up with me. I don't know what I did wrong."
"You didn't do anything wrong, Bee." The words come quiet, but not easy. You know it won't really help. That there's nothing in him that could possibly be willing to believe it, but surely someone had to tell him. "You didn't do anything. It wasn't your fault. I think... I don't know if Optimus really understands how to love people. Not in a real way, it's all just- it's this surface level fondness. Like a God looking at disciples, I suppose. The only person I've ever seen him actually smile at is Megatron. Guess that's why he married her. Which, for the record, I don't agree with. You and Megatron both deserve better." He purred at you. You knew it wasn't real, but you would take it.
"Who's the 'he' you keep mentioning?"
His question was muttered against your skin, not bothering to shift his tight hold, and you rested your chin on his helm with a sigh. Fair was fair, you supposed. Your question hadn't exactly been easy either. "He's... Okay, this takes a little explaining." He shifted slightly, as though settling down. "So, when you're. On Europa. You don't really have friends or lovers or enemies or- even the idea of a buddy is sort of nonexistent. There's just the Enemy, capital E, the side you're supposed to be killing as fast as fucking possible, and then there's You. Capital Y. Your team is You, you are them, you're just... you're not a person, you're a piece of something that happens to be made up of parts that sort of resemble people." So hard to explain. How to describe the truth of that? The feeling of being so fundamentally inhuman that you forget? "The Commander is sort of like the brain, you all listen to them because they are the ones sending the commands. An arm doesn't question the signal that tells it to move, it just obeys. Now, in that, sometimes there will be situations where some people just work together better. And keeping those people together, in the right order, is like making sure the uh- the body that you all make together is in one piece. Does that make any sense?"
Bumblebee rumbled, his engine a pleasant sound, before muttering, "Like keeping your arm in its socket so it'll move?"
"Exactamundo, Goldilocks." You pat his helm and the purr he gave you this time was real. "Now, my fella was a scout frame, like you. Looked almost exactly like you, actually." His plates prickled, just a bit. "Fuck, we did everything together. I don't think we were apart for genuinely decades. Being taken from there without him... I almost didn't survive it. It was like losing all my limbs at once. Like suddenly being blind and deaf but still being expected to walk through a maze of razor wire. And before you ask, no, I don't like you for your doppelganger face. I like you for your shining personality." He actually laughs at that, the press of his grin to your skin just sharp enough to make the scar there prickle with memory. "Now, most people get renamed when they come to Europa. The person you'd been born as was dead, after all. Once you're up there, you're hers. Usually it's some aspect of you, or something you do early on. Sometimes you'd get renamed further down the line. Commanders get new names too, always something relating to Europa herself. Super rarely though, someone gets to keep their name. That's what happened here, see- His name sounded like a suicide joke, ya know? So, well of course we kept it. I mean, what kind of a name is Cliffjumper?"
Bumblebee jerked away from you like you'd hurt him, stumbling up onto all fours only for his pedes to smack together and send his hip knocking hard against the ground. His expression was horrified- no, Terrified- and you were laying awkwardly on your back without him to support you, propped up on your elbows, feeling cold and left behind. "Cliff- You said Cliffjumper. Cliffjumper? Scarlet plates? Amber eyes?" His armor is puffing up like he's waiting to be hit, horns angled forward in threat. You hold a hand out to him, placatingly.
The shock of his response makes you numb. Some prickling discomfort underneath your ribs all that comes through as you just stare at each other in silence. And you really take him in, then. The pain on his face. On that face that is so exactly his, remade in summer yellow. Scouts are forged in twos. You remember the way your Cliffjumper had said it, low and broken and bloody.
"It's you," you mutter, your voice so much weaker than you'd like. "You're his second." And Bumblebee actually chirps at you, something so fragile that it sounds like a wound. He comes closer, presses his cheek to your outstretched hand, and you pull him closer by the jawguard, get your arms around his neck. Let the numbness leave you with every beat of your heart until you're clutching him desperately, face hidden in the familiar curves of his armor.
He's too big for this, you think as he sinks fully to the floor, his arms around you again. But then, you had been too big too when Dorothy had held you as you'd sobbed in her arms on the floor of the apartment you'd been forced to intrude upon. You wonder if you were good enough, to sit in her place like this, to be the one running a soothing hand over a broken soldier's head. He holds you tighter and you figure it doesn't really matter in the end, curling yourself around his helm to the best of your ability. His voice is muffled by your body. "Is he alive?"
"... I don't know." You want to tell him yes just as much as you want the answer to be no. The Ice War is not something you ever come back from and if Cliffjumper- angry, cruel, violent Cliffjumper- still lived, then he would be worse than your memories. "He was alive when I left. Fuck, he was furious. I thought he'd fight just to keep me there, but... And it's been a very long time anyway, Bee. I can't imagine he's still-" You cut off. Unwilling to speak it into real. Just hold him tighter as he shakes.
"He just disappeared," Bumblebee chokes out and you can hear that he is crying even before it spills over, wet against your bare skin. "He was just gone and we- we all just as-assumed- just assumed he'd been killed in battle somewhere. Europa? He's been- all this time he was just figh-fighting another war?" Even you can feel the agony in his unrestrained EM field, pulsing through you like bruising. "We have to get him back." He tries to pull away and you drag him back, grab his horn to try and wrestle him still. "We have to get him out, we- I have to- I can't just leave him."
"He's already been left." He freezes at the sound of your voice. "He's already been left, Bee. If he's even still alive at all. There's no life for him here, not after Europa."
Gently, Bumblebee shakes himself free of you, but he doesn't pull away. Just raises his head to look at you for a long, long time, the tension in his silence winding through your blood like flakes of ice. His voice is warmer than you expect, with the tears running quiet down his cheeks, even as it creaks over the burden of grief. "Is that what you think? That your life is over?"
The cold is familiar to you. Familiar as red claws and blue ice. It bleeds from your heart, spreads like mycelium, webbing you. Your hands twitch. You can still feel it. The weight of the gun.
Derma brushes light over your lips, the request of a kiss more than the action itself, and you let it in. Let him in, lean forward to kiss the too-broad expanse of his mouth with your fragile human effort, let his digits brush down your bare back, the heat of his plates snapping you free of your memories. It doesn't last. Neither of you could handle it if it did. But when you move away from him it is only to let him touch his forehead to yours. Too much to say. Too much of a life lived wrongly, writhing under the too-thin armor of your skin. You are full to bursting, every part of you waiting for an excuse. The pressure of his touch holds you together, just barely. And you want to talk to him. Want it to come easy and matter-of-fact, for it to be out and gone and over, but the maze cut from ice that lives inside of your head will never let anything be so simple.
Instead, you talk about Him. "Cliffjumper was worse than me, Bee. He took to Europa like he'd been forged there, like she really was his mother, not Primus. It's- You're not a person there. I can't just describe it to you, its not a thing that can be just said out loud. Could I ever possibly explain to you how it feels to be human in a way that would make you feel human yourself? As if you'd lived it? It's not just- it isn't trauma and memories and scars. I don't know who I am anymore." Your mouth goes sour, your jaw locking painfully as if to stave off vomit. "I'm- I was better than him. But I'm still barely functioning. I don't feel human most days at all, people look at me and they see a man, but I look at me and I see a gun with the clip removed. If- If- he is alive, he won't be the Cliffjumper you loved, Bee. He won't even be the Cliffjumper I trusted."
"Doesn't he deserve the chance to try? Doesn't everyone deserve the chance to try?" His eyes are so blue. You could look at him forever.
It's a mistake. You can feel it even as you commit to it. It is a mistake that will ruin your life. But you say it anyway. "... okay. Okay, I'll try, Bee. I'll do what I can to see if he's even still functioning up there." And you try to strangle the fear that bubbles up from under that certainty, focus only on the relief that makes his wings shake, the easing of that bruise-pain field through your body, as he moves to set his teeth to the scars in your shoulder, his fangs a perfect match.
☆ You'd tried religion, once upon a time. Partly because you didn't know what else to try, partly because you didn't want to feel so very alone anymore, and perhaps mostly because of the gaping wound in your chest that was never going to stop bleeding. You'd stepped from one belief to another like trying on scarves, looking for anything to keep you warm enough, but nothing fit right. Nothing seemed to slot neatly into the gaps of yourself like you'd assumed it should. The hole in you simply stayed. Unimpressed. Unaffected. Unaltered. Lingering more like a bruise than a cut as time went on, something deep beneath the skin, violence-purple, weeping blood out of reach. Something you can't really stop your fingers from digging into. Making it hurt.
Religion itself had not helped, not in the way you'd so desperately needed it to, but as time went on you began to wonder if there was a reason that you'd tried it in the first place. If it was the same thing that drove others to church, to synagogue, to mosque, and beyond that to alcohol, to drug, to marriage and children and a house with a whitewashed picketboard fence. That maybe everyone had it, this hole in the shape of God somewhere between their ribs, jammed so that no breath comes deep enough.
You'd simply been... worse at handling yours. Or maybe it was deeper than most others, or more broken, or louder, or a thousand other maybes that really just end in the same sense of hollow isolation. That no one else would ever come close. Would ever dig their hands into the shape of your injuries, claw blood from your ragged edges and declare 'Yes, I know this! Whatever your wrongness was carved from, mine was made with the same knife!'
Against your chest, Singer whimpers, soft and quiet, and you reach down to gently smooth his twisted wing back under his elytra. The motion wakes Kickback, curled around you both, and as he yawns, showing all those deadly, jagged teeth, you allow yourself to feel it. The soft beginnings of something warm that kept flickering to life in your chest as he turned his head to brush those fangs against your skin, gently showing that he could hurt you. Showing love in the simple fact that he wouldn't. You raise one hand off of Headshot's back to trace Kickback's golden antenna, feel the pulsing glow of his presence spread through you with every beat of your heart.
If you were simply made wrong, made worse, then perhaps it is only right and proper that your empty places could only be made full by these things that were so much larger than your own fragile little life. Perhaps it was only natural that it was becoming so much easier to feel your own existence without shuddering with pain, yourself seen in fractals through their thoughts. Something hollow beginning to fill in the way Kickback found so much pleasure in the soft, giving curve of your rounded body, the comfortable appreciation with which Bombshell thought of your warmth, the steady care in the rhythm of Shrapnel's thoughts, always turning, inevitably now, to you.
It will never stop being a wound. You are certain of this. But as Kickback nuzzles your side, raises his head only to lick gently at the place on your jaw that had begun to ache when you'd woken grinding your teeth, you are just as certain that it doesn't have to. It's alright if you cannot stop your soul from bleeding. There is nothing you could ever possibly make that could scare your husbands away from you. They do not mind having blood on their hands.
Somewhere outside of your home, Bombshell is stretching his wings wide to feel the sun, the shape of him in the bond something lonely and grieving. You let yourself live in it. In him. Feel the sense of his purring at the comfort of your attention and it strikes you, all at once, that you are somehow more than a broodmare. And it genuinely feels like a shock, a bolt of emotion you were no longer used to holding, you are not just here because they need something to bear their children, not anymore. And of course, as soon as the thought actually crosses your mind, you feel ridiculous. Of course you are more than an object to them, you feel it every time they touch you, but still. Still, the nervous surprise sits in your chest, uncertain and unsure if you even deserve it.
Shrapnel's nudging thoughts snap you from your own, his fear-tinged insistence intruding upon your mind, and you answer him with as much emotion as you can. Pulsing the feeling of safety through your bond until you can practically see it, the way he resettles his wings and tosses his head as if to say Well, I wasn't that worried anyway.
Maybe it doesn't actually matter if you deserve it. The consideration comes hesitatant, fragile with hope as you look down at your triplets, curled on top of you. At the pretty scarlet stripes on Headshot's tiny arms, the blue eyes that flicker before focusing on your face when Singer raises his head, the flash of deep violet when Highrise rolls over and stretches his wings high, till they trembled with the tension. Maybe it really does have nothing to do with deservances at all. As you take in the picture of your healthy little grubs, package up the feeling of it and drop it into Shrapnel's aching spark to ease the terror of his loneliness, you wonder if the only thing that actually matters is that you don't mind getting blood on your hands either.
《》 Acid Storm was starting to annoy him. Starscream was genuinely considering finding a way to off the mech, imagining increasingly inventive ways to maim, destroy, ruin, and otherwise murder the Seeker currently pressed warm against his spinal strut. He'd have to drag the brute back to base, of course, and then he'd throw himself on the nearest flat surface and whine and cry until everyone was feeling sufficiently sorry for him. Poor dear Winglord and his sad dead consort. Pity him! Bring him nice food in berth!
He was purring at the thought, though judging by the patterns pulsing through Acid Storm's consistently green EM field, the dullard assumed the purr was for him. Starscream let him think it, only moving to bare his neck when the Rainmaker bowed his head to lick over the cabling. And as nice as the thought of destroying his annoying presence was, Starscream knew he wouldn't actually do it. Acid Storm was too useful. Nice enough that he could get mechs to do what he wanted, utterly unambitious to a frankly appalling degree, powerful beyond belief and, most importantly, utterly devoted to Starscream. Which all together did, regrettably, make him one of the most important pawns in Starscream's game.
Green claws traced the transformation seams in Starscream's side, following the new paneling that had set in when his waist had thickened a tad. "You're so beautiful, Star." And Starscream did have to admit to himself that he would miss the sheer depth of adoration Acid Storm poured on him if the repulsively neon bore did happen to get offed. No one else got the tone right, that soft, shaking sort of emotion that hummed under Acid Storm's every word as he kissed down Starscream's neck, his wandering servos painting love over every plate, seam, joint, and cable that he could reach. "Perfect. Absolutely perfect. I love you. Love you so much."
He'd gotten in the habit of saying it back. A thoughtless toss of words he did not mean, but when Acid Storm gently touches his claws to Starscream's jaw, turns his head to kiss him on the mouth, he finds that the words, for once, are stuck somewhere halfway up his throat. Acid Storm's field is still wound around him, a gentle haze of happy-green contact that had once felt searing and annoying, overwhelming in its misflagged sameness. The shifting pattern of his code was all too easy to read now, the gentle taps of his questioning pings, asking if it were okay to touch, to hold, to kiss, the rolling, consistent waves of his worshipful love. He cannot admit just how quickly that field calms his spark now.
"I love you." Again, murmured against his mouth as though Acid Storm is determined to paint the words to the inside of his intake, the sharp tang of diluted acid following the warm brush of Acid Storm's glossa to his own. "Love you, Star. My Star."
He should say it back. He knows he should. That that is how the game is played. It's how the script is written. But all that forces past the wall of his fangs is a quiet, static-laced, "I know."
When the pain hits, it is all at once worse than anything else he has ever experienced, terrifying in its strangeness, his frame pulling at itself from the inside. It rips through his field, scarlet as danger, white-hot with frantic fear, and he forgets that he does not want to want Acid Storm. Agony pulses through his entire chassis in a wave and all he can remember to feel is a profound relief that when he tries to stand and succeeds only in falling, that Acid Storm's arms are there to catch him.
"Star? What's wrong? What's happening?" So worried. Wings shaking with it. His sweet idiot, cradling him as though he were fragile, and Starscream does not have the focus to explain. Just holds on to those neon-plated arms and waits for the worst of it to pass. It's going to be a very long night.
○ The Insecticons had been abandoning the Decepticons for well over a year now, not just the past few months, not just their new harassment of human eateries. Jazz kept finding new pictures, new snapshots, new suggestions of violet and silver through aggravatingly evergreen trees. They'd built a nest. That much was clear. He almost knew where.
On the wall sprawled a massive map, a perfect overhead recreation of the area, pocked with pins marking every sighting. He'd finally had it narrowed to a single acre, was flipping though thousands upon thousands of images for even the slightest suggestion of the next hint. Needed to find it. Needed to find it and claw his way inside. Needed to see for himself what it was that had changed these Insecticons from the inside out.
Not a Seeker, definitely not a Seeker. He'd watched the Decepticons too, seen the way Starscream's winged brood behaved, they were not searching for one of their own. None of them missing that Jazz could see (and he saw all), which left so little that he could understand as possibility. A Queen surviving was an option, he'd considered, but there was too much gentility in these three outliers to be explained by a true Queen. Could be trying a grounder frame, he'd supposed more than once, but a grounder frame that could successfully take an Insecticons eggs was beyond rare. Maybe they'd tried anyway? Pulled pieces off, removed armor and plating and cogwork until the mech was broken but alive, enough hollowed out that their own internals couldn't crush the eggs forced inside. Possible, absolutely technically possible, but then lies the following issue: An Insecticon did not possess the forethought to figure out such a method under their own power.
His plating twitched, claws tapping dents into his thighs from hours of restless fidgeting. His tanks were nearly empty, the blinking alert in his visual feed an annoyance he couldn't tolerate, wings shivering with aggravation.
Again, through everything he'd already amassed, searching for anything he'd missed, anything he'd overlooked, finding nothing and hissing into the empty silence. Had to be something. Had to have missed something. The answer was here, he was so certain that the answer was right here, in claw's reach, but the shape eluded him, slipped through his grasp like sand. He was missing something. He couldn't figure out what he was missing.
Pulled up live feeds, dug through file after file, satellite after camera after photo, over and over, searching desperately until he paused on a change. A flash of deep blue and gleaming red. Optimus was in the woods. Jazz's processor stalled for just a moment, optics flashing, before he dismissed the oddity. It didn't particularly matter what his Prime was doing, he could take care of himself. Jazz had other things to do. Kept looking, kept searching, kept clawing through filework.
Bombshell was out, in clear view, lazing in a clearing with no trees in the way of Jazz's spying, thin wings spread fully out to take in the warmth of the sun. Insecticons did not sunbathe, not for millennia, there were no Hives left which meant there was no safety and no space for rest. And yet. And yet, here Bombshell was. As if he had no tasks left to complete. As if he had direct contact with a Queen who's needs he'd already handled. It didn't make sense. It didn't fit together right. He didn't have all the pieces. He was missing something-
"Hey, uh. Jazz?"
The voice cuts through his focus so sharply that his vision washes red, a pulse of pain through his overrun processor. He shuts his optics down, resettles his wings, surprised at how badly his back strut ached. "What? What is it?" Cliffjumper has the decency to look somewhat apologetic at least, though the expression looks wrong on the brash scout's pierced faceplate.
"You're looking after the Insecticons, right?" One way to put it. Jazz nods and Cliffjumper twists to show a nasty bite barely welded back together in his side. "What the fuck is going on with them? They don't act like they used to. They're way too fucking coordinated recently. One of the nasty eight limbed ones took a chunk out of me, Jazz!"
Everything stopped. His priorities went through a scan, a reassessment, and something clicked. He had missed something. He'd been so obsessed with the three that had, evidently, gotten away that he'd neglected to think of the actions of the rest. An image popped up in the corner of his visual feed, a memory he hadn't given near enough credit. The massive form of Wavewalk, that Insecticon with far too many legs to count, curled around Starscream mid-battle. Spitting acid at any who came close. Starscream, on the ground, fighting in the coil of an Insecticon. An Insecticon that had been protecting him.
His plates rose in a horrified wave, clawing a cabel out of his hip, ignoring Cliffjumper's embarrassed yelp, jammed in into one of the few ports on Teletraan-1 he hadn't already taken, ripping through the Decepticon's files faster than was likely wise. Months of snapshots flickered through his processor, the steady sharpening of the blade that was the Insecticon forces, the loss of their unlead uncoordination, Starscream grounded, over and over and over, always guarded, always shadowed. He pulled up the live feeds, risked Soundwave's detection in his desperation, and froze. For the first time in months, everything in his processor was stock still.
"Uh... Jazz?" A servo on his shoulder, gently pulling him back to himself, and he looked up at Cliffjumper's scrutinizing face. "You good, buddy?"
The words fell out of his mouth before he could think to catch them. "Starscream just gave birth."
》《 As he made his way as carefully through the trees as his massive frame would allow, the only thing really on Optimus Prime's mind was guilt. The Matrix weighed heavy in his chest, a shackle he could not escape, though that thought too was marbled with the Guilt like fat through meat. He was a tool. He understood that he was a tool. He was not meant to be a person, not anymore, Primus had made that quite clear when He had ripped apart the frame of Orion Pax, molded him into the Prime their people needed.
He was not good enough. He would never be good enough. The energon he is sure clogs the spaces beneath the claws he did not ask for never washes free, no matter how often he washes his servos, no matter how often he scrubs and scratches and claws at the seams. It doesn't matter. Never enough. Even now, as he steps gingerly over a fallen tree, his ship and his soldiers left further and further behind, he knows that what he is doing is Wrong. It is weakness and foolishness and a danger he cannot afford. And it is a certainty that makes him sick, the knowledge that he will carry forward anyway.
The sound of running water is gentle and soothing as he settles himself by a little river, letting his optics focus on the shift of water tumbling down in miniature waterfalls. Beautiful. This planet was so incredibly beautiful and it ate him alive that he had dragged his war to it. To a place and a people who had nothing to do with his wrongs, his mistakes, his grievous, unforgivable sins. But they kept being made to pay for it. Buildings destroyed, lives lost, nature torn up at the roots, and now they had Insecticons acting out of order so severely that Jazz had fully isolated himself in the task of solving the puzzle. His fault too, he's sure. It has to be.
The shift of branches snaps him free of his thoughts, raising his head to look for a certain, familiar color. It makes his spark shiver in a way that is weak and wanting and achingly selfish, as that mech steps into view through the trees. And the beauty of the forest fades away to something bland and forgettable as the Seeker steps closer, that crooked grin on his face, and it takes more strength than Optimus thinks he has to stop himself from rising, getting his arms around the Decepticon coming towards him, and hide his faceplate against his neck until the world simply moved on without them.
When he is close enough, Optimus reaches out and takes Misfire's hands just to watch the way it makes his wings flare, so much of his view blocked in that wonderful shade of magenta he had come to love so dearly. He hopes that Primus can forgive him this trespass. He prays, every moment he can, that this one mistake be allowed to him, that this one selfish thing be granted. Because even though he knows that it is wrong, he is just as certain that he wouldn't know how to live without Misfire in his life anymore, this one, singular Cybertronian who did not look at him as though he were God. Who looked at him and saw only a mech.
When Misfire kisses him, Optimus can almost forget that it is a kindness he can never hope to deserve.
It's with the ease of expectation that the Seeker falls into his arms, purring and warm and solid. Nuzzling against his neck just to be closer. And he knows that he should not be here. Knows with a certainty that settles like premonition in the aching altar of his chest that this is not his. He should leave. Push that magenta wonder off of his lap, run back to his soldiers, his duties, and pray. Pray until his voice came broken and static. Pray until he bled enough to believe that Primus could forgive him.
He should. But he doesn't. Instead, he holds Misfire tighter, takes in the smell of warm air and the pine needles stuck in his plating and the sharp, metallic tang of Decepticon until he thinks that maybe it could live in him in the place of breathing. His knows his voice is not as steady as a Prime's should be. "I missed you." Misfire purrs deeper, until it shudders through him, those gorgeous wings shivering with the vibrations. The most perfect sound in the world, he is certain.
"Missed you too, big guy." He never tires of it, the easy warmth in Misfire's voice that is utterly absent reverence. Wishes there was some way to tell him, but he never manages to scrape up the right words, and then Misfire is pulling away, the moment over. Optimus allows himself to be led by the servo, trailing after the Seeker like the fool he was. His optics follow the set of Misfire's wings, the malformation of his right wingwell that his people renamed him for. The worst of the Seekers, he knew they called him. Let them think it, Optimus muses as Misfire finally stops walking and gives him the chance to raise his free servo, brush his digits over delicate, twisted metal. Let them think whatever they wished. Optimus knew the truth. Misfire was absolutely perfect.
He's still purring when he kneels, pats his pink thighs, and Optimus does as he knows Misfire wants. He lowers himself carefully, terrified of causing harm, until his head is in Misfire's lap, those black claws tracing the seams of his helm. Just enough room for his massive frame to sprawl without nicking a pine tree, the blue of the sky half blocked by Misfire's adoring face. He doesn't mind. He could look at Misfire forever.
Misfire grins at him. "Hey, Oppy."
He blinks, tries to hide the fact that his processor was taking pictures. "Hello, Missy."
It was always so easy, to settle into him. To hold back, just for a few moments, the breaking weight of the world. The purr that rumbles softly in his too-broad chest does not hurt. Misfire chirps and clicks at him, soft Vosnian he cannot understand, and Optimus let's his optics relax, the world narrowed to the fuzzy suggestion of pine-framed sky and the soft image of his perfect Seeker looking down at him with such fondness that he does not know how to hold it. Not new anymore, but always strange, to be loved without worship, seen without the weight of haloed expectation. Misfire traces the edge of his battlemask and Optimus lets it snap back, allowed that gentle touch to brush the edges of his ruined face. His ruined, damaged, scarred mess of a face that Primus surely could not love. Surely had been a punishment for his failures.
Almost possible to forget it, though, when Misfire's EM field brushes over his own with the same loving care as those digits over his face, such raw adoration in it, such genuine appreciation for the healed-wrong opening that bared his teeth. Misfire loved him so much that he could almost believe it was alright for him to have it.
These stolen moments with a mech that should have been his enemy were the only times he felt truly at peace. He would go home, eventually, and it would eat him alive, the guilt of it. But while Misfire held him, it was all far enough away that he could just breathe. The silence was comfortable, Misfire's claws softly tracing the lines of his face, the sound of the trees and the running water a balm to Optimus' so oft troubled spark. Misfire's field unspooled to wrap around him completely, soft reassurances of safety and care, so tightly bound to his own that when the flickers of grief and fear started prickling through the shape of Misfire's code, Optimus felt it immediately.
"Misfire?" Reaching up, he touched the Seeker's cheek and Misfire leaned into the hold with a wobbly chirrup. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Said immediately, in a quiet, reassuring sort of way, but Optimus didn't believe him. Misfire's wings had canted in nervous upset. Optimus didn't pry, just let Misfire nuzzle into his touch until his plates stopped prickling and his wings relaxed. "It's... Optimus if I- if I tell you something, can you promise me you won't ever use it? I don't want to say this to the Prime, I just want to- I need to talk about it, I think." His wings were shivering now, his optics held shut. "I know- I know you have a duty, I know that, but- please just promise me."
"I promise." He meant it as he said it. He hoped it was not another promise he would end up breaking.
Misfire took his large servo in both of his own, started to fiddle with his digits. The silence stretched and Optimus simply waited, watching the expression that flickered across Misfire's sweet face until, voice shaking and shot through with static, "Starscream was carrying."
Was. A wave of cold horror washed through Optimus' frame as the words settled in, processor flicking to all the battles he'd seen Starscream in. He'd never been absent. Not once. He started to sit up, some sick feeling urging him to rise and pace. "Did- Did we-"
"No! No, no it wasn't you, Optimus, it- It wasn't an Autobot." Misfire's arms wrapped around him, legs shifting to cradle Optimus's massive frame against his chest as best he could. He buried his face against Optimus' neck and Optimus allowed it, tried to keep his field calm, give Misfire something to hold on to. "It... Megatron found out. She... she didn't take it well." His invent was ragged with emotion, his vocalizer audibly resetting in an effort to clear the static. "She's been so unstable recently, and she just- she was so angry. They were screaming at each other for so long. I was- I was in the room, it's- I kinda keep stuff clean, ya know? Since I can't really- really fly straight or shoot, so um. So, Lord Megatron calmed down a bit and Starscream, he started to leave. He didn't do anything, he just- he was just walking away."
Misfire's entire frame shuddered and Optimus gingerly pulled himself from the Seeker's grasp. He carefully got Misfire in his lap instead, held him close, tried to keep the sick dread building under his spark from bleeding into his field. "She just- She hit him, Oppy. She wouldn't stop. He tried to fight back, but- but she just wouldn't stop. And he was screaming so loudly and it kept going on and on, Knock Out had to piece him back together, Optimus, he was- and he just kept screaming. It won't get out of my head. I can still hear it every time I recharge and I just-" He was properly crying then, shaking so badly that his plates knocked audibly against Optimus' own. "I'm sorry- I'm- fuck, I didn't mean to do this today, I just-"
"You're alright." He ran his servo down Misfire's spinal strut, rubbed his digits over that warped wingwell until the wing shivered against his touch. "It's okay, Misfire." He understood what Misfire had meant now. It would be far too easy to throw Starscream off balance with this information, send the deadly flier into an emotional tailspin, but even if he hadn't promised, Optimus still knew he would never had crossed that line.
Misfire was rubbing his cheek against the glass of Optimus' chest, purring softly to comfort himself, and Optimus tried to match the sound. "Ever since then, Starscream has been... Optimus, I think he's planning something."
"Starscream is always planning something," he murmured against Misfire's helm, trying for comforting.
The Seeker just shook his head. "No, Oppy, I mean- Before, even when Starscream was going after Lord Megatron, what he wanted was for the Decepticons to have a good leader. So that we could win the war and make sure that our people would never be enslaved again. That's what he wanted. But now, it's... he doesn't care, Op. He's just angry. He's so fucking angry and I think he's going to do something bad."
"You think he's going to hurt himself?"
"He's going to kill Megatron. And this time he's going to make sure he does it right." There was a grim certainty to Misfire's voice that would not be refuted. "It's all he wants. And as it stands, Megatron doesn't have a single Seeker on her side anymore. Not a one. With all of us behind the Winglord, Starscream could probably take her out, but-" Misfire's voice choked off, jaw snapping shut. Something like guilt shuddered through his field. Betrayal to the cause he'd spent his life standing for. Then he invented deep, pushed back to study Optimus' face, and continued. "Somehow, Starscream has gotten the Insecticons to follow him. There's always at least one near him, they surround him every battle, they bring him things- they follow his orders, Optimus. Insecticons don't follow Seeker orders, ever. But now suddenly they are and I'm- I'm scared. I'm so fucking scared of what he's going to do."
Optimus didn't know what to do. What to say. He wanted to hold on to him forever. To hold him until the prickling terror faded from his field, until there was nothing left to be afraid of at all. He kissed him on the brow and hoped, as he had so often before, that Misfire would simply understand what he could never possibly put into the right words.
Misfire chirped softly to himself for a moment before his wings resettled on his back. "Optimus, I-" Cut himself off, fear lacing the color of his code. "... can I ask something of you?"
"Anything." Anything. He had always been too weak to say no to him. Too weak to say no when Misfire had asked for his comm frequency, too weak to deny the Decepticon's request to text, then to call, then to meet somewhere where neither side would stop them.
Misfire took a breath, visibly braced himself. "When... When Starscream finally makes his move, can I bring my trine to you. They won't survive it, Op, and I- I can't live without them, I can't do it."
For just a moment, Optimus' spark froze in his chest. Misfire, in the Autobots. With his trine. He'd meet Misfire's trine. It didn't feel real. It didn't feel like something he would ever be allowed to have, but he wanted it so badly. "Yes. Yes, of course, yes."
He'd interrupted Missy on accident, the magenta flier rapidly spitting out promises to work, explanations for how his trine could not defend themselves, would cause no harm, begging desperation spilling into his voice as though he believed this something difficult. Something burdensome. His voice cut off on a bleat of nonsense when Optimus spoke, blinking stupidly for a moment. "Wh- Yes? Just like that?"
How to say it. How to show him, how very easy it was to want to take care of him. He took Misfire's hands in his, kissed his digits. "Misfire, I... You are everything."
A shuddering ripple of disbelief in the places their emotions were tied together, pure shock coloring Misfire's systems in sparks of white. He tries to make his voice sound light, but it shakes. "Heh, and- and here I had a whole speech prepared." Optimus is sure that he will never get tired of it, the soft look of love on Misfire's face. "I didn't want you to think that... Like, that this was about me getting something. That I've been, I dunno, using you to save them, or something. I'm not, Optimus, I- Even before this stupid fucking war, I-"
His wings beat and it took effort for Optimus to stop himself from running his servos along the sensitive span of magenta, settling his hands against Misfire's sides instead. He remembered before the war. He remembered being a mech named Orion Pax, remembered the calm peace of the archives, the pleasure of his simple job. Remembered the softly pleasant expectation as he wondered if a pink-plated flight frame would step through those doors today.
"May I kiss you?"
And Misfire laughed, a beautiful sound shot through with static, wiping the tears off his face even as he was nodding. "You don't have to ask, you big sap."
"I like when you say yes." And finally the last of that fear faded from Misfire's field as Optimus lowered his head to kiss him, slow and gentle. Focused wholly on the softness of him, the shape of his mouth, the way his next invent came uneven. He hoped Misfire was right. A sharp stab of guilt speared his spark clean through at the thought. He was Primus' mouthpiece, the Voice of God, how could he carry something so holy and yet wish for anyone's demise, even Megatron's? How could he be good and yet sit back, wishing with all that he was, for another living being to be torn to pieces just so he could have what his spark so desperately craved? Could he ever really be clean? Could he ever deserve the way that Misfire leaned into his touch?
Then Misfire licked into his mouth, kissed him back, deep and warm, and for one moment, shining bright as the sun, he was okay with it. He could live as something beneath the expectations of a Prime. He could take it. All he ever needed to be was someone that this beautiful, gentle Seeker could love.
Misfire was purring, a low vibration that made Optimus' spark ache with longing. He didn't pull away fully, so close that Optimus wanted to lean forward and kiss him again. "Hey, Op?"
"Hi, Missy." Even he could hear that he sounded sappy and love-struck, like a newbuild rather than the tired old general that he was.
"You remember what I told you? First time I got you out on a date?" Misfire brushed kisses along his jaw, followed the line of his scarring up his cheek. "When you asked me about my name."
Of course he did. Fighting to find something to talk about, he'd stumbled into badly asking about Misfire's odd name. And Misfire had laughed at him, chirping and warbling, wings waving. "Tell you what, big guy," he'd purred through his laughter. "When I decide you're it- that you're forever? I'll tell you what my actual designation is. Hell, we'll call it the act of devotion, why not?"
Optimus had spluttered some nonsense he couldn't quite remember, face burning with embarrassment. Now, he just purred a confirmation and tried to act like his hands weren't shaking as Misfire kissed his neck. Dark servos traced transformation seams, gentle, loving, following the lines of his frame with the ease of familiarity. "Hey, Optimus?"
"Hi, Missy." The words barely making it past his vocalizer.
"My designation isn't Misfire. It's Flyhigh."
Oh. Oh, that was beautiful. Flyhigh was still kissing him, following the line of his major energon tubing, and he could not stop the way his purr came shaky and weak. He couldn't remember ever feeling so wanted. When Flyhigh raised his head, something almost uncertain in his eyes, Optimus forgot to ask before he kissed him, arms around him in a grip so desperate that it was a wonder that Flyhigh was not simply mashed into Optimus' frame completely, clicked together into one mech. And there was that smile, that beautiful laugh, the shape of joy in his field. "Flyhigh," Optimus managed, voice choking over love. "Flyhigh."
This war would end. For the first time in five million years, Optimus was absolutely sure of it. This war would be done with and over and gone and Flyhigh would be with him. When he kissed his Seeker a second time, his spark burned bright enough that he could forget the weight of the Matrix buried in his chest.
☆ The warm pressure of lingering kisses against the line of your jaw to your shoulder is an unusual thing to wake to. Your plating prickles, a soft invent dragging in the scent of your berthmate, and the sharp familiarity of Jazz's presence sends a sleep drunk purr through your chest. It's so rare that you wake up next to him. His hand is rubbing circles on the curve of your hip, claws tracing seaming, plucking at delicate wiring. You couldn't move even if you tried with the way his careful touch makes your leg struts tingle with an almost pleasant numbness.
"Mornin', baby." He murmurs the words against your throat, teeth testing cording, and you let your purr come deeper in answer. Where were you...? You couldn't quite remember. But you supposed it didn't really matter if Jazz was still here, warm against your back. He was too good at his job to linger if there was even the slightest chance of getting caught.
He's remarkably good with his hands. You'd had the thought more times than you could probably count. First, the fleeting, annoying musings of an enemy once again thwarted by the careful plans of a flawless tactician, then the cautious appreciation of the ease with which he found the soft places on your frame, and now with the heated expectation of a lover well-tended. His digits follow the lines of your transformation seams, grazing wires and slipping gently through overlapping plating to ghost over your fragile internals, making a careful journey to your array. "G'mornin, to you too," you manage to say, reaching a hand back to brush against his cheek. He nips at you, and your laugh shivers into static when his touch finally slips warm between your thighs. You chirp an encouragement when he hesitates, sending the order to open your modesty paneling, relaxing with soft, clicking purrs as his digits rub deliberately over your valve.
You'd laughed at him, the first time you'd let him in under your plates, how thorough he had been in learning how to touch you. Testing the map of your body like guitar strings, getting a feel for your sound, teaching himself how to make you sing one chord at a time. You'd made fun of him, a bit, but you could not deny the effectiveness of his careful exploration.
His claws tease the lines of your biolights until they flash against the dark of his digits. He's leaned over your shoulder to watch and you turn slightly to try and catch his attention, brushing his jaw gently until he turns to meet your gaze, leans down to give you the kiss you so desperately want just as two digits push past the outer caliper of your valve port. The soft gasp that parts your derma is met with the wet of his glossa, shoved past your fangs to lick the chittered purrs from your mouth.
"You want me?" He barely pulls away to ask permission, lips brushing yours so sweetly that you kiss him again instead of answering. He laughs at you for it, lowering his head to kiss at the cabling of your neck instead. "Use your words, baby, let me hear it." And this time your refusal is tinged with humor, winding your EM field to his, the humming warmth of your desire prickling through you both. He growls at you for it, half playful, his claws scraping against the sensitive nodes on your inner valve mesh in a way that was just shy of painful.
"Alright, alright." You concede only when his digits stop their careful, pleasant pressure, rocking your hips against his hand and getting the prick of claws for your effort. "Yes, I want you, you hateful old Autobot." The vibration of his heavy purr makes his frame sing, the mods in his limbs and chest ringing in a melody of victory as his servo gets to work. He keeps his claws away this time, his digits carefully tracing the network of pleasure points he'd long since memorized, thumb rubbing circles over your anterior node until your whole frame warmed. A kiss to your audial is the only warning before he slides his hand free, hooks a thigh to pull it upward, and lets his spike pressurize between your legs.
He hesitates for a sparkpulse, like he always does, despite the way you tilt your hips to help and purr encouragement. The familiar pressure of him is warm and welcome, soft pleasure heating your wires, golden wanting flooding the color of your coding until you're sure it threads your field like lacework. His face is buried against your neck, his claws digging into your hip to hold you still as he rocks against you, careful and deliberate. Your frame is so used to him that he pushes in easy to the base, grinding against your ceiling node just to hear the way it makes your purr stutter over static.
Jazz is remarkably easy to read, you sometimes think. It's easy to tell when he starts to feel good, because he starts to sing, every time, the soft roll of his silver hips matched to the wordless rhythm that chirrups and rings through his soft lips, paused only in the moments he lays kisses to your plating. The servo on your hip eases its harsh grip, slips around to grind sweet pressure against your spike housing until you oblige him, the gentle pleasure tipping into something threatening overload. He really is very good with his hands, you manage to think as that pretty servo wraps around your spike, works it over from head to base in a way that makes your hips jolt, trying to buck into him even as his fangs test your neck in warning. "I've got you," he murmurs, letting his claws test the soft seaming of your spike's delicate meshwork, tracing over the line of biolights that lead down to your valve. "I've got you, baby."
It's so very rare that you get to wake up with him. You don't even mind that he's taking his sweet time, willing to let him take the lead so long as it means he's here. Better than waking up alone, or sneaking off before dawn. You shift against him on the berth, changing the angle of your hips so he can push just that little bit deeper, letting your optics go back offline as he starts to purr for a moment, the sound interrupting his directionless singing. But it is still, you think with a smile, harmonized to the hum of your own engine. Show-off.
... why were you on a berth?
The thought sparks through you almost like alarm. You couldn't fathom how you'd ended up here. You'd been... You'd been on the ground, right? He'd made a nest. You shift your legs a bit again, feel nothing tangling your pedes, where were you? When had you fallen asleep? He'd been holding you. He'd- The credits were rolling and he- You'd been-
His EM field wraps around yours like a blanket, heavy and warm, and you forget yourself when he rocks into you a little harder, his servo pumping a little faster, wrist twisting in that way he knows you like. Hard to think from the prickling feedback humming through your entire array, so very hard to think with his field winding pleasure through yours, buried in you like roots. You want to ask him something, you're almost sure, the thread coming fragile in the loop of your processor, code spotty with the pull of your attention. He's so warm against you, so very familiar. He knows you so well.
Your overload hits hard, your joints locking up, a static-laced whine escaping your vocalizer. He doesn't slow down, working your spike over for all you were worth until it twitches in his grip, the plates over your hips bristling without your input. Your valve all but locked over his spike, the harsh drag of his thrusts sending waves of sunset golds and pinks through your coding until you were limp and purring in his arms, your fans humming loud in a noble effort to cool you down. Buried in you, grinding soft and careful now, he still hasn't overloaded. You manage to chirp at him, halfway to words, trying to ask him how much more he needed, but he pretends he doesn't understand. Just turns your head and kisses you, keeping that same gentle pressure that makes your thoughts come slow and fuzzy with adoring heat.
He kisses you, long and deep, and when he pulls away he murmurs against your mouth, "How do you get into the Nemesis, baby? Tell me."
Your processor stalls, even the feedback from your valve momentarily halted as your frame washes cold then hot, everything prickling and itching and wrong. "What?"
He bumps your hips together just a little bit harder, enough that your vision starbursts into white and he is kissing your neck, his digits locking with yours. It almost feels like you heard wrong. Surely you had. But then he keeps talking, his tone low and affectionate, as if he were telling you that he loved you. "You get out all the time to see me, don't you, handsome? Could I get in the same way? Come on, baby, I know you know. How would I get in without anyone seein' me."
"Jazz, you-" You're starting to wake up. Your voice hisses with static and you reset the delicate machinery of your throat, let your frame reset, resettle, as if it were something simple that choked you. "You can't ask me that, Jazzy, that's- What are you doing?" You try to twist, look at him properly, and it hits you then, the sheer wrongness of everything. The light is too uniform, the room is too quiet, and the place you lay is still not where you should be, you're sure that you aren't supposed to be here.
He sighs, sounding almost disappointed. "Sweetspark, please. It's a simple question." And he makes it sound like you're the one being unreasonable. But you have rules, there are rules to all of what you are to each other, and he is breaking them. Your spark hurts. You don't want to be here. You aren't supposed to be here.
"Jazz? Where are we?" You try to look around, but there is so little in this space you find yourself in that it is hard to wrap your processor around. Some part of you insists that you are safe- of course you're safe- because Jazz is here. His arm is still over you, your hips pressed together, but when you fumble for the feel of his EM field where it meets your own, you find... nothing. The warm touch you were so used to just wasn't there. You couldn't even pick up the pricking heat of interface. Just the vaguest sense that he was there. "Jazz?" You slap at his hip, something sick and twisting pooling in your spark chamber as you look desperately for a window, for a marker, for anything at all. He pulls away from you obediently, the sound of his spike snapping back into its housing oddly loud in the small space. Like he wasn't even turned on. Nothing at all stopping the command from executing.
You try to get up, the claws tracing the lines of your hip plates nicking far too sensitive places, but your legs stop hard, like they'd been pinned. You can't stop the half-pained yip that escapes you, finally looking down to the clamps over your pedes. You were chained to the berth. Chained. Reaching for the restraints on instinct, you barely got your arm raised before it was stopped. Staring at the chain on your wrist as if it were something incomprehensible. "... Jazz?" You didn't like how small you sounded. You didn't know how to clear the shake from your words.
Jazz's grip on you curls, black claws sliding neatly between jointing and wires. You froze. He's so close that his derma brush your audial when he speaks. "I just need to know how to get in, baby. That's all. Just tell me that, okay?"
Chained. He'd chained you. Taken you, locked you up, so close to completely severing your frame's connection to your leg. It was too hot in here. Too cold. Your spark hurt. "I- I can't- Jazz, you know that. I can't tell you that, you- we promised we wouldn't talk like that." Weak, quiet, words that fall like rot from bone.
He clicks his tongue, just once. His voice is still loving. "Okay, baby. Just remember I tried to do it gentle, yeah?"
Everything explodes into light pain fire burning agony, rushes through your wires, through your struts, base threads frozen completely at the overwhelm, everything screaming, all of you breaking, can't move think breathe see live, your vision shattering into fractal red, everything one massive warning for damage and wound and dying.
By the time he pulls his claws away from the old wound that had never quite healed, your throat is raw but you cannot remember screaming. Everything twitches in ways you cannot control, your fans running shakily. Damage pings flicker across your visual feed again and again, waves of agony washing through your frame. There is a flag somewhere in your system telling you that you are crying, but your faceplate is numb. Your memories flicker past you, shuttered by blocks of incomprehension, the shape of Jazz's smile as he'd pressed a kiss to that scar, holding your side plating aside so very carefully. He wouldn't. Surely. Even now, as your awareness begins to settle back in you, he is rubbing soothing circles over the spot, his voice a comforting murmur you cannot focus on well enough to understand. You don't know how long it takes for your thoughts to clear, for your fans to calm and your plates to settle, but you are given not a moment to rest.
"That didn't feel good, did it, baby?" Patient. Gentle. Like he were explaining some lesson that needed to be taught slowly. "I don't have to do it again. You just gotta tell me one tiny thing, that's all. Not hard. And then I won't have to do it ever again, okay?" The pain settles in you as a throbbing ache, persistent and nagging. His claws test the seaming and your system locks with expectation. It can't be right. He wouldn't hurt you. He had kissed you there. His digits test the resistance of your shivering armor. "Just tell me how to get in, sweetspark."
Your optics come online. Follow the line of the walls, wandering, searching for anything to distract you from him. The camera hangs in the corner of the ceiling like an overfed spider, malice-bloated and horrifying. The red light blinks a promise and you wonder, nausea flooding your system, who was on the other side of that glass eye.
Jazz's servo slips across the overlapping plates of your torso, settles just under your chest, and part of you, shaking and terrified, understands the threat. Your crying stops being an easy drain of tears, sobs starting to choke up your throat, everything shuddering, jerking, fighting with the emotion that rode in on the lingering pain. "Why are you doing this? I thought-" You can't finish the sentence. Jazz's hand slips claws-first into the cavity of your chest, bullying his way into that chink in your armor, the gap between chestplating and torso. He'd purred at you when he'd found it the first time, joked about stealing your spark. He digs into the outside workings of your spark chamber now, digging and pressing and breaking until your entire frame shrieks with warnings, everything that you are howling with the expectation of death.
Even when he pulls away, the warnings don't stop. You are blind from them, the world a patchwork of red and orange and pain.
You're sure you must have fought back to some degree, jerked or thrashed or pulled, because amongst the litany of desperate warnings about the hole leading right to the core of yourself, there are alerts about the damage to your wrists where you'd dug the chains into your plating. You try to force your digits to move, but they won't open all the way, just twitching with a bolt of pain. Your exvent rattles through you, one of your fans damaged by his forceful entry. When you manage to run the internal scan, your frame tells you that you're missing two blades. You wonder if he pulled them out of you or if they're just lying in your chest somewhere. You try desperately to think of the state of your rattling, guttering fan system instead of the gentle way that Jazz's digits are tracing the lines of your face.
"Can you hear me, baby? Can you answer me?" You're so certain that he is going to hurt you again that your vocalizer throws up static, a bleated, static pleading, broken and begging. The cadence of his rumbling engine is so familiar to you that it still calms your terror, just slightly. "I know. I know, baby, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I had to do that to you, baby, I'm so sorry. But I had to make sure you understood, okay? The rules are different here, sweetspark, I had to make sure you knew the new rules. Can you hear me? Can you hear me, baby?" And you try to nod. Try to respond like you're sure he wants you to. Anything to stop those claws following the path of your transformation seams.
Nothing is working in you. Everything sparks and shudders with pain. Nowhere to run. Nothing to hide behind. His hand on your face is gentle when he makes you turn to press his mouth to yours.
You can feel the berth shift as he moves over you, steps to the floor. Terror and relief twine in your chest. His voice is so calm, so gentle. "We'll talk more later, yeah? This is new and scary, I know. I know that, baby, I'm not mad at you. I promise I'm not mad. You just gotta learn the new rules. I'll be back soon. You get some rest. Think about how you wanna answer next time, yeah?" Your vision pulses red warnings for danger and fear and hurt as the sound of his pedes move away. "See you in a little while, beautiful."
And then he is gone and you are alone. The pain doesn't fade, even as your vision slowly clears, your frame accepting that there is no new horror coming just yet. You cannot move. The room is cold. The camera light blinks.
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