Yall ever think about how if Rung existed in TFP he’d technically be Optimus’s dad because he’s Primus and Optimus by aligned continuity lore is the reincarnation of the Thirteenth Prime so if Rung was in TFP it would be a father and son reunion except they both don’t remember who they used to be in a past life, no? Just me? Okay
Inspired by @revelboo, whose style I attempted to mimic. I spent the last ten minutes or so going back through and editing because I realized I switched from present to past tense half way through.
Sitting nervously on the bench in the washracks, Rung fiddles with his servos, feeling excitement bubble up amidst the anxiousness. He’d received a notice on his comms that morning that he’d been chosen to receive a human caretaker, and while he’d been enamored of the idea of Cybertronians coupling with humans since he’d first witnessed it upon arrival—couldn’t place it, but it just felt right to see so many bots fawning over their little humans, hearing about it from his patients—but he’d never thought it would be something for him. Didn’t think that a human would choose him of all bots as a conjunx when there are much more impressive bots out there than him. Much younger and more energetic, too. Mechs and femmes who would have time outside of work to care for a little organic conjunx. The sound of creaking wheels and small footsteps reached his audials and he ceased his fidgeting.
You swear they gave you the squeakiest cart in the damn base. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s not like they’ll give you the same cart every damn day, just have to make it through this one but it’s your first on the job and it’s been off since the moment you got out of bed thirty minutes late because you’d forgotten to set your alarm. Must’ve forgotten about it because you’d been so troubled after discovering during on-boarding that there was no easy way out of this job that you now realize had been too easy to get into. That sign on bonus, above minimum wage pay and promise of benefits had been attractive to your dream of getting out of this damn town and out from the shadow of the military base you were now working at, but that was all crushed when you’d been informed just how many of these aliens had started falling in damn love with their handlers and gotten so attached that they’re hard pressed to take a day to sleep off a cold without their bot coming looking for them. Heard one poor soul got fired because their bot no-call-no-showed on them, only to be “rehired” when he’d gotten in a huff about them not being there when he did come looking for them. Job security was one thing, but never being able to leave? You’d felt like you’d just signed up to be paid to become a prisoner. More than you already were, in this town. But maybe things would be okay, a hopeful voice tried to convince you as you approached the designated wash stall where you’d be meeting your assigned bot. Can’t help the smile when you see him sitting there looking so nervous and sweet like a teen boy waiting for his prom date. “Good morning, sir, I’m here to be your caretaker. You’re Rung, right?”
“Actually, it—” he begins but catches himself, realizes you’d gotten his name right and immediately brightening. “Ah! Yes, yes, I am Rung. It’s quite a pleasure to meet you,” he says, moving from the bench to sit kneeling in front of you and extending a servo to you. He tries to move smoothly and not too suddenly or quickly so as not to startle you, and is pleased when you only adjust your footing like you think you haven’t given him enough space to move. He’s a minibot, but is still taller than you, even down on one knee, and he’s seen how skittish some humans can be when a bot moves too suddenly.
Oh, he is too sweet. “Likewise,” you reply, introducing yourself as you take one of his big fingers in a handshake. You’re curious about the way he’d started to react, but maybe his people have multiple ways of pronouncing the ‘u’ sound that written English doesn’t have annotation for. “Would you like your meal first, or your bath?” The squeaky cart isn’t moving and making noise anymore, so your irritation is swiftly ebbing, and your bot’s thoughtful demeanor should make life easier.
“I suppose I’d like some energon, first, thank you,” he says and you move to lift the barrel off the cart—or more like wiggle and rotate it in an attempt to walk it off the thing. Being a minibot with a smaller, slighter frame meant he consumed less energon in a day than most, so he needed smaller rations allotted to him, and yet it was apparently still too great a weight for you to lift properly. You make no complaint of it, but he reaches to take it in a servo to relieve you of the struggle and pulls the lid to in-vent the scent of the fresh fuel, catching your own organic scent with it and it makes his spark whir faster in its casing. “I suppose you and I will be spending quite a bit of time together going forward, won’t we? Perhaps we could share our morning meals together, if you’d like?” It would be nice, he thinks, to have someone to talk with over a drink, someone who was eager to speak with and listen to him in something other than a professional psychological sense. Really, it would just be nice to have someone thinking of him.
“I’ve already eaten this morning, but I think we can do that, going forward.” It would certainly free up some time in your mornings. You’d always been a night owl in a family of morning larks and had gotten used to a more evening-focused lifestyle once you’d started living on your own, but now this job has you waking up early again and every minute you can dedicate to sleeping and, more importantly, not having to rush, would be a blessing. Part of you wonders if your bot is already thinking of having breakfast together as a form of early-morning date, and while he certainly seems sweet, you’re really hoping you’re not being relationship-zoned on first meeting. You distract yourself by turning the water on to get warm, pouring some of the sweet, floral scented soap into the wash bucket.
Rung sips at his energon while watching you prepare the water for his bath, his vents catching the scent of the soap and liking it when it makes him think of the small colorful plants that grow close the ground outside. “I was wondering,” he starts, reaching to adjust his glasses, “about why I was chosen. I mean, surely there must be more eligible mechs available…” He almost doesn’t want an answer, but somehow self-doubt was eating at him. He’s been so used to being overlooked, forgotten even as he worked so hard to help others. “And I’m a relatively recent arrival, as well, while some of the others who’ve been here from the beginning still remain unmatched.” And they certainly were vocal about it when speaking to and around him, even some Decepticons who seemingly had no love for organics were complaining about feeling left out. Perhaps seeing the entirety of their High Command taking human conjunxes helped them start the process of outgrowing their biases.
“I’m not sure what the qualifiers for receiving a caretaker are. For all I know, they just draw names out of a hat,” you explain, hoping he understands the idiom as meaning ‘at random.’ Water now warm and bucket full of suds, you turn the faucet off and look up to him a comfortable half smile. “That said, you seem like an alright guy, so I’ve got no complaints.”
Rung’s spark flutters seeing your smile. Definitely wants to see more of it. Finishing his energon, he realizes that the bath was about to begin, and suddenly remembers some of the other bots who’d already claimed and bonded their humans speaking about how it had felt to have those tiny, soft hands all over them. About the intimacy of having those dainty little digits slip in between plating to touch the mesh beneath while broadcasting every emotion through a completely unguarded EM field. About those hands and the brushes of their bodies against a bot’s frame leaving their scent lingering on them for days and the possessiveness it had inspired even before the bots claimed them. He clears his vents noisily as his cooling fans kick on, feeling scandalized that his frame was reacting to the mere idea of you bathing him. He sets the empty container aside and can’t bring himself to look you in the eye and his spark is racing in his chassis. Was he really so lonely that the thought of simple intimacy could get his frame activated?
He’s got that sheepish look on his face, like he’d had when he first saw you, and as cute as it is, you want him to be able to be comfortable with you. “I heard that being washed like this is very… personal for you guys,” you say as you pull the cart and bucket of warm water closer. ‘Yes, it’s typically the sort of thing conjunxes do for one another.’ And there’s their word that you’d heard about that basically equates to ‘spouse.’ “Most people here in this country are pretty… particular about being touched, and even moreso about who gets to see them vulnerable and exposed like we are when we bathe,” you explain, beginning to literally sponge-bathe him. He’d sat on the floor with you, rather than back up on his bench, so you began at his back, working between his shoulders and his plating fluffs up for a moment when you first touch him. “Which is probably where a lot of the initial misunderstanding came from; what we were doing was probably no more intimate in the minds of our higher-ups than a take-out service that offered back rubs—” and they’d been too cowardly to correct the Cybertronians’ misinterpretation of intent for several months. It took some of the other caretakers spilling the beans to their own bots and word getting out before anything was officially brought to light. “But I guess we can’t blame them too much, between most of you guys transforming into vehicles and the fact that most other ape species use grooming other group members as a form of social bonding, it probably never occurred to anyone that it could be different for people from other planets.” You felt a bit embarrassed about rambling like this. You’d been told by friends and family alike that your ranting and infodumping got annoying at times, but you couldn’t stop once you got started, all that information bouncing around in your brain until you gave it an outlet out loud. That jackass general and the other cowards in his office didn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, either. ‘Apes?’ Rung queries back at you with a curious tilt of his head, inviting you to continue and it feels good to not be told to shut up for once.
Your EM field really is completely unguarded. He thought he’d felt it when you’d touched his digit, but the touch had been brief and the brush of field had been fleeting. Now you’re standing so close at his back that he can feel the warmth radiating off your body and the feel of your field making full contact with his own shocks him to stillness. Almost loses his train of thought in that mercurial swirl of emotional signals, but your voice grounds him and you happily follow his prompting. He listens as you tell him what you know about other organic species that humans evolved from and alongside millions of years ago, and it’s interesting to think that just about every Cybertronian alive today could have feasibly been around to see your species’ early ancestors rising up out of the grass into what they are today. It’s a bit humbling, actually, that your species has risen so far so relatively quickly. The only part he didn’t like is how your EM field began to prickle with nervousness the longer you talked, the tension that crept into your voice.
‘Please, don’t feel self-conscious, my dear,’ Rung says while you’re in between breaths, snapping you back to yourself, having apparently finished washing his back and began down his arms in a haze while you rambled, ‘I quite appreciate the chance to learn new things, and you seem well informed.’ And you feel your face flushing warm at the praise. When was the last time someone had let you speak this long, nevermind thanked you for talking at them? “Ah, uh, thank you, sir…” You want to ask how he knew you were feeling self conscious, but you’d read in the file you’d been given that he was a therapist, and if he’s been in practice for as long as you suspected, he probably knew how to read a person so well that he could name what emotion you were feeling before you’d processed feeling it.
Between that expressive face and your completely open EM field, you’re like an open book. Do you even realize how you're baring yourself to him? Were you not able to suppress your field? You’re knowledgeable, though, and perhaps you would know. “Are humans capable of feeling electromagnetic fields?”
“EMF?” You’d heard that Cybertronians were particularly sensitive towards that sort of thing, and wrack your brain for what you know as you continue down his arms. “Slightly, yes, but not nearly to the degree you guys are. Our sense for it isn’t fine-tuned enough for it to detect what little EMF other humans give off, and when EMF reaches a level that we can detect on our own, it’s usually coming from faulty power lines in and around buildings. Short term exposure to that kind of EMF can cause feelings of dread, and long term exposure can even cause hallucinations, which can cause people who experience it to think they’re being haunted.” You hazard a glance up at his face and flinch inward when you see the severe look he’s sporting, his deep frown cast to the middle distance of the room rather than at you. “I haven’t heard anything about any of the other caretakers or military staff being affected by your guys’ natural EMF, though, and considering how long our people have been hanging around each other for the bulk of every day, I don’t think it should be cause for concern… On the flip-side, I bet you Cybertronians would be great at detecting that kind of EMF,” you say, only half joking. “Just walk or drive by a building and then, tick tock, ‘Yes, hello, were you aware you need to call an electrician?’” You click your tongue while miming knocking on a door, and are rewarded with Rung’s frown vanishing to be replaced by laughter that shakes his frame, and the illumination coming from the large blue light in the center of his chest brightening with his smile. This is good, you decide. You like his laughter, and his smile, how brightly he shines when doing either. You’ve only known him for a brief hour or so so far, but you could see yourself enjoying his company for a good, long while.
