So hi! I’m one of those self-insert blogs, I post art, random things I’m thinking about, and reblog things occasionally. I also take writing requests! But, please be sure to read the rules and check my request status as stated below. Questions about any fics I've written are also welcome!
This blog supports BLM and the LGBTQ+ community.
Writing/Headcannon Requests: Open
Rules:
The au’s I will write for include: undertale, underfell, underswap, horrortale, fellswap, fellswap gold, and swapfell. These are the ones I know the best and am the most comfortable with. Please also stick to my character list
Please specify the characters you want. If remembering names is hard for you, no worries! People have a lot of different names for them. You can just say the au that they’re from like “HT Sans or FS Papyrus”.
You can request more than one character in headcannon asks. If you’re requesting a drabble from a writing prompt game, only one character please.
The limit for headcannon asks is 4 characters.
Please keep requests PG-13. I will not write nsfw content of any kind on this blog. I might write something slightly suggestive, but that’s it.
I will not write gore.
I will not write frans, sanscest, papcest, fontcest, etc. I personally don’t feel comfortable writing them. Please respect that.
I will not write yandere content either.
This is not an rp blog
I have the right to refuse to answer/draw/write anything.
General things to note:
If I’ve posted something that I didn’t tag a tw or cw accordingly, please let me know! I will gladly take note of it and fix my mistake.
The Y/n I write in my headcannons will almost always be gender-neutral
Masterlists
My fics:
Handle with Care
(HT! Sans/reader)
Rated 16+ for certain dark themes in future chapters.
Ongoing
Your Pint-Sized Protector
(FS! Sans/reader)
Rated 18+ for explicit content
Ongoing
View Commission & Tipping Info Here
Signed Anons
🐞 anon
💫 anon
kq/kq🐙/🐙 anon
🌋 anon
🍎 anon
Status:
Sleeping. Napping. Snoring, even.
One thing about me is that I am a sleeper. I will always be slumbering. Any chance I get, I will conk out. You think I can resist the feminine urge to be unconscious? Think again. Currently on my third nap of the day. Fear me.
Summary: Finding yourself stuck in the rather unpredictable company of Miko and her big, green guardian, you struggle to conciliate yourself with how Bulkhead acts, and how you thought he would act.
Bulkhead, for his part, can't entirely work out why his spark speeds up every time you acknowledge him. He only knows that it does.
And in the meantime, Agent Fowler is having one Hell of a night.
There aren’t many phone calls that Special Agent William Fowler would say he ‘looks forward to,’ so to speak.
In his unconventional line of work, calls are seldom made in the benign spirit of enquiry.
He can’t even remember the last time his phone buzzed and the voice on the other line said something to the effect of ‘Hey Bill, how’ve you been?”
Well... admittedly, there is the exception of a certain Autobot leader, of course, though Optimus is so damn mannerly, Fowler doesn’t doubt he’d ask a spider if its day was going well.
Besides, respect where it’s due, Optimus is Work. Capital ‘W.’ Hard to separate the two when Fowler has personally filled out a veritable mountain of paperwork with Prime’s designation printed all over each and every page.
So, no. Calls from Optimus don’t count.
Tonight, Fowler has the pleasure of thumping a palm down on his phone where it’s steadily and loudly vibrating a path across the nightstand beside his bunk.
Eyes burning with the remnants of a broken sleep and far too late-a night watching romantic comedies in the rec-room, he nonetheless pries them apart to squint into the searing brightness of the screen, thumbing the ‘accept’ button and clumsily mushing the phone against his ear.
“Two in the morning, this’d better be good,” he grumbles.
Hardly a beat of silence passes before he’s met with the monotonous drone of an SAC operator.
“Just intercepted a call you might be interested in,” a voice says with the inflection of a roadkill slab.
Figures.
Groggily, Fowler clenches his jaw against a heavy yawn and swings his legs out of his bunk, sitting hunched on the edge of the mattress as he squeezes the thumb and forefinger of one hand around the bridge of his nose.
“Mm… They finally approved my vacation to Fiji?” he grunts, scrubbing the same hand down over his face and pausing to scratch at the prickly stubble growing under his wide expanse of a chin.
When he decided on that coded response with SAC, he really thought he was being funny. None of them found it funny, of course. CIA types are all alike; Roadblocks made of humourless steel.
Now though, with many years under his belt and still no white-sand beaches to be seen on the distant horizon, his little joke seems about as funny as Uncle Sam’s national debt.
Predictably, now that a secure line has been established, the voice matches his sarcasm as it always does. With a wall of total indifference.
“Negative... Civilian named Terrance Buckley. Old conspiracy theorist running a dairy outside Jasper?”
“Dairy farm?” Fowler interrupts with a grimace, “Tell me the Greys didn’t abduct another cow…”
“Negative,” the Operator says again, and Fowler has to wonder when they all got so uppity that a simple ‘no’ stopped sufficing, “He just tried calling the local law to see about a cave-in near his property...” There’s a deliberate pause, some murmurs in the background too faint to make out, then the voice returns. “Seismic readings confirm the activity.”
Fowler’s posture tightens as he sits up straight on the bunk, the fatigue draining off his shoulders like water down a plughole. “Cave-in?” he echoes stiffly.
The mention of a cave at all is cause for alarm. Particularly considering the nature of the Autobots’ latest mission that Optimus briefed him on just seven hours prior and… oh for god’s sake. “Don’t tell me…”
So, that’s precisely what they do.
“Thirty-six point four-two-seven-six-eight-two by negative one-one-four point four-six-zero-four-two-three.”
Fowler has to resist the very childish urge to groan.
Of course…
He knows those coordinates, give or take a few degrees. It’s his job to know. They’re still fresh in his mind, after all. First relayed to him by Prime, then written by Fowler himself on the mission brief he later sent to Director Brennan for a stamp of acknowledgement.
In a matter of seconds, he’s hauled his aching body off the bunk and swiped a white, collared shirt from an open drawer nearby, wrestling his arm into it as he sends a staunch command over the line.
“Give me the rundown,” he orders, feeling the weight of a familiar scowl settle across his forehead, “I’ll head out now, do some damage control… Find out exactly what this Buckley guy thinks he knows…”
Those bots owe him a goddamn month without causing any incidents after this.
The interior of Bulkhead’s alt-mode hasn’t been this quiet since before he met Miko.
On any other day, she’d be chattering away about a new song she’d heard or a film she’s ‘dying’ to see – 'It’s a figure of speech, Bulk, quit freaking out!' – and he in turn, would tell her about what happened on his patrol, boasting of how many Cons he’d pulverized or regaling her with stories of his vorns as a young mech running with the Wreckers.
Those stories are her favourites, he was quick to discover.
If she’s in a mood - typically after suffering through detention - she forgoes talking altogether and just reaches for his radio, whacking the dial up to such a high volume that he frets about damaging her ears.
It isn’t in her nature to be quiet, and Bulkhead has long-since come to the proud, private conclusion that he wouldn't change that for the world.
So, this thick and cloying silence that hangs dead in the air between the two humans sitting in his seats is… stifling.
For your part, you’ve only made one sound since leaving the base; a hushed, trembling exhale that trickled out of your mouth when you saw the night sky open up above you. Relieved, no doubt, not to have a mountain of rock bearing down on you instead. But since then, there hasn’t been a peep, neither from his newest passenger nor his sleepy charge.
To borrow from Miko’s lexicon, Bulkhead is dying to break that silence. Several times, he’s stopped himself just short of asking her if she wants the radio on, if for nothing else than to use the background music as a crutch to start a conversation with you.
If there's one thing he's learned from watching human customs, it's that music can be a powerful, unifying force.
Then again, his younger charge does look like she’s fighting tooth and nail to keep her drooping eyelids from closing. Her head keeps nodding forwards before jerking stubbornly upright again, rinse, repeat.
The kids’ slumber party at the base had very little emphasis on ‘slumber,’ and far too much on ‘party.’
You, on the other hand, couldn’t look more alert if you tried.
Perched as close to the edge of his seat as you possibly can without falling off it entirely, you sit ramrod straight, keeping your back well away from the leather behind you, and your hands clamped firmly between your knees, trapping them there as if you’re afraid to touch anything around you.
You’d taken to staring unblinkingly at the steering wheel in front of you not long after he drove past the false wall and out of the base, your eyes tracking the way it spins and adjusts microscopically as he cruises along the road.
You don’t even seem to notice the rear-view edging around to frame your face at the centre of its reflection, and Bulkhead finds half his processor occupied by the highway, while the other half maps how his dashboard light casts a pretty, blue glow across your features.
It shines brighter on the apples of your cheeks, the tip of your nose and the curve of your chin, softening the harsh and haunted shadows hanging over and under your eyes. He’s seen similar looks on the faceplates of his fellow Cybertronians, back when they all realised, for the first time, that Cybertron was officially at war.
They looked lost…
… You look lost.
He hazards a guess that Optimus must have told you a little of what they’re doing here on Earth then.
Optimus… There’s a history there between the two of you, however short it might be. Bulkhead saw it. The others might like to gently tease him for being more brawn than brain, but even he wouldn’t miss the familiarity warming his leader’s EM field when you were speaking. And even when you weren’t, it was clear that Optimus wasn’t willing to take his optics off you.
Which begs the question; how in the Pit do you and Optimus Prime know each other?
It isn’t like the Boss to keep secrets from his team. And you’re a pretty secret.
'Pretty incredible secret,' he corrects himself hastily.
Appearing from nowhere... Out-smarting a wily con like Starscream... Shielding all three of the kids from the missile like a hero from one of Miko’s beloved action movies...
Where has Optimus been hiding you?
The question circulates in his processor as the silence starts to creep under his plating and expands to fill the gaps until he can almost feel an imagined pressure building on top of his circuitry.
Beneath his tyres, the tarmac continues to roll smoothly by, and in the distance, Jasper’s twinkling lights beckon him onwards, reminding him that this drive won’t last forever, and if he wants to know… anything about you at all – beyond the very clear fact that you’d saved Miko and it was both the scariest and the coolest thing he’d ever seen a human do – he has to make the first move.
You called him extraordinary.
Bulkhead lets his spark lift and flutter for the umpteenth time as he replays the audio for nobody but himself to hear.
'Extraordinary.'
Not huge. Not clumsy. Not even a klutz.
That's...a positive sign, isn't it...?
… Well, if you’re not going to talk, and she isn’t going to talk…
“So-“ he begins abruptly.
There’s really no dignified way to admit that at the sound of his voice, you leap out of your skin with a sharp yelp, causing him to jump on his axis so forcefully that it launches both you and Miko a few inches out of your seats.
The girl’s palm slaps against the cool glass of his window as she lands askew, eyes round, teeth clenched , effectively wide-awake.
You land adjacent, hands torn free of your knees to hover rigidly just above his steering wheel as though you meant to grab it for stability, your own eyes bulging with fright.
“Sorry!” Bulkhead exclaims at once, heaving himself back onto the right side of the road with a mortified roar of his engine. Idiot, he rebukes himself harshly, beyond embarrassed.
And yet, seized by some deeply ingrained etiquette, you find yourself squeaking out a strangled response. “I-it’s okay! Don’t be sorry! I’m the one who-…jumped.”
…And just like that, you trail off, jaw still hanging ajar as your forehead crumples into a frown, doubtless contemplating the absurdity of telling a gigantic alien robot not to be sorry for startling you.
Said robot's embarrassment swiftly gives way for elation when he realises you're talking to him, and his spark does an unexpected flip in its chamber.
There’s a second of relative hush as all three of you recover your dignities.
If yours still exists, you’ll probably have to scrape it off the footwell.
“Jeez~.” Eventually, Miko lets her hand fall from his window with a thump as she tosses the dash a bemused glare before turning the same look onto you and adding, “If you two are both gonna be wimps the whole way, I’m gonna get out and walk.”
Something bitter uncurls like a snake in your belly at the comment, but then she tilts her head at you and adds, “How come you’re so jumpy anyway? The bots aren’t that scary.”
It takes you a few seconds to realise that her question – while ludicrous and completely tone-deaf – is nonetheless quite sincere.
The snake lowers its head again, and the bitterness evaporates as soon as it arrived.
Quakily, you exhale, hyper aware of your own weight pressed into the leather seat below.
Can he feel you shifting around?
It has to be unpleasant, right?
Dimly, you can hear Bulkhead admonishing the girl for being nosy, something she adamantly refutes before redirecting her interrogative tactics onto you and huffing, “I mean, you were scared of Optimus!”
This is scoffed as if it’s the most laughable concept in the world.
“Ratchet, I get,” she attests, “But Optimus? Really? That’s like being scared of a labrador.”
If you hadn’t already heard far more outlandish things tonight, you almost wouldn’t believe what you’re hearing now. As if, even at her age, she couldn't hazard a guess as to what has you so rattled.
All of a sudden, Bulkhead’s engine hums as he shifts down a gear, notably slowing his pace along the road.
“Actually… I was… kind of wondering about that too,” he hedges, a gentle prod at your defences, his voice hesitant as though he’s wary of spooking you again, “You and Optimus, I mean. Do you two know each other?”
It’s such an ordinary question. Benign, even. Like an old friend enquiring about a mutual acquaintance over tea and cake…
Miko’s eyes are busy drilling holes into the side of your head, and while you can’t see his eyes, you somehow sense Bulkhead’s gaze even more heavily than hers.
Optimus had said he could see you sitting in his passenger seat, hadn’t he?
'Cameras... both external and internal.'
A subtle shudder crawls up your spine as it hits you that you were being watched the entire time you were inside that cabin. With his eyes…! Or whatever constitutes as eyes on these aliens…
God, you need a drink.
Maybe if you get black-out wasted, you’ll be able to convince yourself that all of this has been nothing more than an alcohol-induced fever dream. Suffer a hangover, knock back a few paracetamol, you’ll be right as rain come tomorrow night!
Ha… If only.
A slight bump on the otherwise smooth road jerks you back to the question you've just been asked. You probably shouldn't even be engaging with these beings, should you? It feels like incriminating yourself in a world in which you don't have any business being involved with. Won't every word you say only drag you deeper and deeper into this predicament?
Then again, you’ll admit, not being forced to 'see' him - the real him - is lulling you into a false sense of security. It’s easier to find your voice when faced with the interior of a car, not a robot as tall and wide as a barn.
“I… um, I wouldn’t say we know each other,” you confess meekly, missing the whir of delight his engine produces when you address him again, “My truck, it – ah – broke down on the road into Jasper… He saw me walking to town and offered me a lift.”
There’s a brief flicker of shock that ripples through the car, then Miko recoils with a shout of, “He what!?”
And at precisely the same time, Bulkhead’s wheel jerks to the left, throwing you right onto the gear-box as he blurts, “He did!?”
Grimacing from the unexpected knock, you right yourself in the seat and resume your stiff-backed poise, listening to the other two descend into rushed – if excitable – conversation.
“But Optimus is like, a total stickler!” Miko whispers loudly enough for it to be classed as a shout.
“I know!” comes Bulkhead’s gushing reply, “And he’s the one who made the rule!”
“I-… The rule?” you croak.
Rather eerily, the pair of them interpose their gossip to rattle off an answer without hesitation, their voices overlapping, entirely in sync.
“Don’t engage with unknown humans unless there’s a perceived or immediate danger to their life or ours.”
The whole thing is quoted without a single stumble or falter, and sounds both rehearsed and bored.
As you said; Eerie.
All of a sudden, Miko lets out a gasp, twisting sideways in her seat and leaning right over the centre console and into your space.
“Were you in danger?” she demands, eyes glittering in the low light, “Were you being chased?!"
Sputtering a little, you start to shake your head when the vehicle around you vibrates with a loud rev as Bulkhead pitches his voice horrifically low and growls, “Were you attacked by a Con?” The word is spat like an ugly, wretched thing into the air between you.
“What!? No, no!” you protest, the hairs on the nape of your neck standing on end at the alien's far darker tone, “I was just… It was late, I was still miles out of Jasper, and Optimus convinced me to get in his truck. I – in – in him, I guess-… Oh god, that’s-…” Pulling a face, you cut yourself off and distractedly lay a hand on Miko’s bony shoulder, pushing the girl back into her seat with a gentle nudge.
She allows it, slumping into the curve like she lives there and giving you a curious hum. “So, hold up,” she starts, “Some truck without a driver stops to offer you a ride… And you just hopped right in?”
… Ah. Probably not your brightest idea in hindsight - one among many - but he was very insistent at the time.
Clearing your throat, you peer out of the windscreen, mapping the road ahead where it’s illuminated by far-reaching headlights. “He said it was fully remote-operated,” you admit, more than a little abashed.
She promptly barks out a laugh before falling silent again, staring at you like she’s waiting for you to deliver the rest of the joke.
When it doesn’t arrive, her brows nearly fly up into her dark hairline.
“Wow,” she deadpans, “And you believed him?”
Okay, well now you’re starting to feel defensive.
“Yeah, I believed him,” you retort, jaw set, “I didn’t just assume he was a giant, alien robot right off the bat.”
She blinks at you then, lips pursing for a second before she gives her head a reasonable nod. “Huh. Touché.”
Inattentively tuned into the road, Bulkhead trundles along in a state of palpable astonishment, struck dumb by what he’s just learned.
“I think the Pit just froze over,” he warbles aloud, drawing the eyes of both humans to his dash, “Optimus... lied?”
The entire frame of his alt mode is rattled by the visceral shudder that overtakes him.
Even Miko sits back and goes uncharacteristically still, her eyes on stalks. Then, she lets out a long, appreciative whistle. "Woah~"
You have no idea why this seems to come as such a shock to either of them but you elect not to mention the funds Optimus transferred into your bank account as well.
Which, now that you're thinking about it, only seems even more suspicious, knowing what you do about what he is. It was bad enough when you suspected him to be some sort of dealer trying to hide money in a stranger's account, but even that doesn't come close to the absurdity of an alien doing the same...
As you chew it over, Bulkhead speaks up again, letting out a chuff over the speaker.
“Huh. Guess he must’ve been really worried about you.”
You don’t rightly know what Optimus was feeling but you do find it hard to believe a creature like that would concern itself with the likes of you for any altruistic reasons.
Belatedly, almost as an afterthought, Bulkhead muses, “You’ve certainly made an impression on him, that’s for sure.”
Aghast by the very prospect, your expression screws up and you make a broken sound at the back of your throat, head shaking in tiny motions from side to side. "Why?" you choke out, helplessly reaching for an explanation to a riddle you haven't managed to solve yourself, "I haven't even done anything!"
Why did he have to stop that night? Why couldn't he have just left you alone? You were getting your life back together, you were untangling the complications of adulthood one string at a time and really trying this time to make something useful of yourself.
And now this.
"Uh, were we not in the same cave tonight?" Miko snorts.
Ironically the more delicate of the pair, Bulkhead offers a pacifying reply. "Look, I don't know why," he admits, "But I mean... surely you guys must've talked when he gave you a ride?"
"Of course we-..." You're quick to snap your jaw shut before any more can fall out of it. Yes, you and Optimus talked. Nothing that was especially noteworthy though. And nothing these two need to know about.
Then, of course, comes a fresh creep of horror in realising you'd revealed far too much of yourself to who you thought was just another human.
Suddenly, you're trying to recall what you had said to one another that fateful night. You let him drive you to work, you told him you left your family behind and - oh, god, you've gone and dug yourself into a pit now, haven't you? He knows where to find you, he knows you don't really have anywhere to go back to. Nobody who'll be looking for you...
Reading between your unuttered words, Bulkhead ventures, "Maybe he just likes you." Then, emboldened, he adds, "You seem nice enough to me."
"Yeah," the girl in her seat beside you agrees, shooting you a borderline smug look from the corner of her eye, "You haven't exactly sold the 'nothing but a jerk' angle."
Stunned, you simply let out a weak, incredulous noise that could have been a laugh, could have been your soul trying to escape your body.
"I wasn't... saying I'm a jerk, I was just trying to make a poi-..." Once again however, you let the sentence trail off with an aggrieved sigh, slumping in the seat and only just remembering not to let your back hit the leather behind you. "Never mind..."
Your response does nothing to wipe the smug expression off Miko's face. If anything, her catlike grin only inches wider.
Utterly spent, you can't even muster the willpower to glare back. Besides, what would possibly be the point? For fuck's sake, you're sitting here arguing with a teenage girl and an extra-terrestrial of unbounded proportions.
In your pyjamas.
You let your eyelids droop as you turn to peer drearily out the window, watching the dark, obscure shapes of rocks and plants flit by.
“This is the weirdest night of my life…” you lament.
Quick as a whip, Miko chirps, “But not the worst?”
You can't fathom how she can go from almost-asleep to viscerally-awake in a mere manner of minutes.
Unable to restrain a wry smile at her youthful optimism, you roll your head over to look at her, cheek squashed against your shoulder. “Well, I almost died,” you point out, “So definitely bottom three.”
Her mouth stretches into a wide, toothy smirk.
You smile back for a moment, and then it fades, gone with the reminder that you weren’t the only one who could have been killed tonight.
“Come to think of it,” you murmur, swallowing thickly, “You almost died as well.”
To your surprise, rather than come to the same, sobering realisation, Miko just lets out a jocular snort and waves her hand around her head, wafting your concerns away like cigarette smoke.
“Pssh! Been there, done that, add it to the list. Near-death experiences are, like, an everyday occurrence on Team Prime.”
“Not if we can help it,” Bulkhead’s cast-iron voice butts in from the dash, “Me and the team’d sooner rip out our own sparks before we’d let one of you kids get hurt.”
His earnest declaration thumps at something hard and indifferent in your ribcage.
“… Sparks?” you whisper haltingly.
Miko gives the left side of her chest a deliberate pat, and your eyes widen, lips forming a soft ‘oh.’
Unbeknownst to either of the humans in his cab, Bulkhead has grown stuck on his own conviction, running it through his processor like a looped circuit. Unintentionally, he'd just shone a spotlight on one of his own failings, and it leaves a bad taste on his glossa.
He had almost let the kids get hurt. But there was no 'almost' where you were concerned.
He can’t see your injury from this angle, but he can sure as scrap remember what it looks like. It’s an image that’s burned into his CPU as surely as the heat burned into your own skin.
“Hey, uh.. I’m… sorry, by the way,” he utters falteringly, “For bein’ too slow.”
It's so out of the blue that you give his dashboard a double-take, frowning at the neon, blue lights.
“... Huh?”
“Starscream’s missile,” he clarifies at an awfully grave pitch, “I should’a stopped it before it reached you… I didn’t. M’sorry.”
You let the statement hang in the air for a while, squinting at nothing while the burn on your shoulders continues to sing.
“I… Um…” You swallow roughly, getting tired of uttering useless noises without saying what’s on your mind, “Bulkhead, was it?”
Perking up, he hums at the sound of his name, and the light cast by his dashboard screen glows incrementally brighter.
“That… wasn’t your fault,” you say at last, and it’s probably the most certain you’ve sounded all night.
The pause that follows smacks of genuine surprise on his end, but then his exhaust coughs like he’s clearing an unseen throat, and he stubbornly mutters, “Shouldn’t’ve let you get hurt.”
Perhaps it’s his insistence to take the blame that slows your frantic heartbeat and makes you stop and consider his behaviour, or perhaps it’s the shame laced inextricably into the spaces between each word he says, but whatever the case, you find yourself thinking he might actually mean it.
Which really puts you in a bind.
He’s not… behaving right. Not in the way your body is telling you he should be. You’re scared to death of him, you can feel it in the ache growing around your spine and the way your stomach always feels like it’s a few clenches away from purging last night’s dinner all over his seats.
And yet, nothing he's done, nothing he's said has given you any indication that he's in any way dangerous.
It's a fact that's hard to reconcile.
Even harder though, is hearing the vulnerability in your new acquaintance's voice.
Closing your eyes, you draw in a long lungful of air.
You wouldn't want anyone else to take the blame for something they didn't do. Does that line really become such a blur when it isn't a human doing the apologising?
Rendered contrite, you exhale the breath you'd been holding in, letting the words come to you without putting too much thought into who you're saying them to.
"It wasn't your fault," you tell him for the second time, tongue heavy and awkward like it's grown too big for your mouth, "You didn't know what was going to happen...." Wavering slightly, you ask, "Did you?"
"No!" The appalled shout reverberates around the vehicle, causing you to flinch. In an instant, Bulkhead is apologetic again, softening every piece of code that controls the volume of his vocaliser. "Sorry, it's just - If me or Optimus would'a known what Screamer was gonna do, we'd've taken that missile ourselves."
Chewing on the inside of your cheek, you hesitate before asking, "Really?"
"Every. Time," he stresses.
You know it's foolish. You'd even go so far as to say it's downright naive, but in spite of the somewhat sensible brain sitting between your ears - apparently gathering dust from misuse - you find you can see the truth in what he's telling you.
You still don't want any part of this... But you do feel... marginally better that the kids aren't in as much danger as you thought they were.
A small hand suddenly jostles your knee, and you glance down to see Miko has reached over to give your leg a playful shove.
“I can’t believe you’re scared of this guy,” she teases, leaning forwards and offering the dashboard a hearty pat, “You know, Bulk here screamed like a little girl when he saw the Cybertronian equivalent of a spider.”
All of a sudden, the engine lets out a high-pitched whine that perfectly matches Bulkhead’s protest as he sputters, “Wh-! Miko!”
You’ll admit, there’s something so patently absurd about an alien getting indignant and exclaiming, “Of course it sounds bad out of context!” that you forget yourself for a crucial second, letting one side of your mouth hike up and blowing a wispy little snort through your nostrils.
Miko must have heard it because she stops antagonising her friend for a second to flash you a triumphant grin, and all of Bulkhead's interior lights grow dazzlingly bright, as if that one instance of amusement was the best prize he could have asked for.
"Hey! Wanna listen to some music?" Miko springs on you without warning, barely waiting for you to recover from the whiplash before she steamrolls ahead, "Bulk! Queue up some Slash Monkey!"
"I- wh- Slash Monkey?" you huff in disbelief, flabbergasted by the change of tracks, "Jesus, there's a name I haven't heard in years."
Bulkhead starts to voice his concern, "Uh, Miko? Don't you think that might be a little much for-"
"-Wait, wait, wait, time out," she interrupts, whipping around in the seat until she's facing you head-on and sporting a grin so broad it starts to colour her pale cheeks, "YOU know Slash Monkey!?"
“The... heavy metal band?” you reply, bemused, “Sure. I went to see them in Bulgaria when I was a teen. Couldn’t talk for days afterwards though.”
The girl just stares at you, her mouth gaping wider and wider. “I knew it…”
Nervous, you ask, “Knew wha-?”
Only to find yourself bowled over by the force of her ensuing shout.
“I knew you were cool!” she declares like it’s an absolute, irrefutable fact, bouncing in her seat and thrusting a fist into your bicep.
“O-oh, thanks?” you stammer, absentmindedly rubbing at the spot she’d thwacked, “That’s… definitely a new one.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I wasn’t cool either until I met Miko,” Bulkhead offers.
“You were always cool, Bulk,” the girl sniffs matter-of-factly, “Not your fault the other bots couldn’t see it.”
“Aw,” he chuckles, and even an untrained ear like yours can hear the grateful embarrassment radiating out of his speakers.
Spinning towards you again and curling her hand into a fist, Miko raises the appendage and holds it out in front of you, letting it hover over the gearbox as she gives you an encouraging nod, one eyebrow quirked expectantly.
“Welcome to the Cool Club, Newbie.”
Fatigued, you entertain the notion that she might be joking… yet after giving her a thorough once-over, you come to the conclusion that she’s not.
So, you squeeze an eye shut, squinting at her fist for a while and wondering what sort of strange induction you’ve just inadvertently made yourself a part of. She’s still waiting, her grin never once showing signs of dropping.
Another few heartbeats thud by in your ear, until at last, you decide there can’t be any harm in indulging her.
Just this once…
“Tell me there’s matching jackets at least,” you sigh, raising your fist and gently bumping your knuckles against hers.
Beaming from ear to ear, she drops her arm and throws herself back against the truck’s seat with a satisfied sigh, boots once again finding their spot on top of his dashboard.
“Only if we can find one that’ll fit me too,” Bulkhead chimes in.
Miko’s lips twist into a smirk, and far too innocently, she suggests, “We can always give you a new paintjob instead.”
Perhaps sensing that he’s just opened himself up to a reaping he wasn’t prepared to sow, the bot immediately tries to backtrack. “Wait-.”
This time when you laugh, it's a much more solid noise, sending Bulkhead's spark soaring.
Exhaling the tightness from your chest, you content yourself to just lean a shoulder against the window and observe in silence as the girl tries to convince her big, green guardian that green is, in fact, a fantastic colour to pair with purple.
In truth, you’re glad she’s too swept up in the excitement of having another Slash Monkey fan in her vicinity to remind him to turn on his radio.
You aren’t confident that you can handle a full blast of Bulgarian shriek metal to the cranium tonight.
Fowler doesn’t think he’s lowered his eyebrows once since he arrived at this rinky-dink dairy farm sprawled out over the barren stretch of desert just beyond Jasper’s border.
“-no goddamn use fucken’ standin’ around here all slack-jawed n’ starin’-! Where the Hell’s the goddamn rescue squad!? You could’a been diggin’ ‘em out hours ago! ‘Stead, you’re wastin’ time askin’ me all’a these goddamn questions-!”
Terrance Buckley, from what Fowler has gathered during his brief but painful introduction, is just a little more than the ‘crazy old conspiracy theorist’ the SAC Operator had described.
Suspicious son-of-a-bitch might have been more apt.
Blinking very slowly, Officer Fowler stands beneath the crushed velvet sky, waiting for ‘That’s-Terrance-to-You’ to run out of breath after a solid minute spent venting hot air like he’s trying to start a fire.
When he inevitably does, wheezing slightly as he chases oxygen back into faltering lungs, Fowler doesn’t hesitate to cut in.
“As I said, Sir. We had teams scrambled the moment we got your call. They’re working as fast as they can to access the mine’s northern entrance.”
A theoretical entrance on the other side of these towering buttes.
“-And why not here!?” Terry hollers, flinging an entire arm at the wall of rubble and rock that spills out of the cave’s maw, illuminated by the headlights on Fowler’s requisitioned patrol car.
Trying not to give the collapsed shaft too obvious-a look, Fowler simply replies, “Well… I just figured this entrance might be compromised…”
The farmer’s haggard face goes through several expressions in rapid succession, beginning with outrage, shifting to realisation before finally settling on a blistering sort of indignation that comes with knowing he’s just been proved wrong.
“This is where my workhand went in!” he tries to clumsily get back on the front leg, taking an aggressive step towards ‘Officer Fowler,' who doesn’t so much as blink in response, merely allows Terry's chest to bump against his own. He can smell the man’s hot, musty breath in the air between them.
“This is where you ought’a be diggin’! Not askin’ me these pointless questions-!”
“Just trying to do my job while the rest of our units conduct rescue operations elsewhere,” Fowler interrupts with an arrogant air of boredom, “Chances are your employee escaped the cave-in well before the quake hit.”
Of course, by now he knows for a certifiable fact that all lives who were in that mine are accounted for, which makes his job a Hell of a lot easier.
He’d been in the patrol car, foot to the floor, and still a good fifteen minutes out from the dairy when he received the anticipated phone call from the Big Man himself.
While Fowler was – is – rightfully pissed that Optimus has somehow managed to adopt yet another wayward stray into his aggravating band of misfits, at least it isn’t a kid this time.
That opens up a lot of options for how he can go about handling this global security breach, options that won’t violate some facet of the Geneva Convention. He hasn't conducted a good old-fashioned interrogation in years.
For reasons far beyond the scope of Fowler’s comprehension, Prime seems to trust you. ‘Implicitly’ was the word he’d used. But Optimus always has been too quick to pass his trust out like a salesman passes out business cards. Hell, him trusting the wrong sort is half the reason why Earth is in the peril it is right now.
Luckily for Prime – and more importantly, the US Government – Special Agent Fowler doesn’t trust so easily.
Still, at least Optimus had the common courtesy to give him a concise yet glowing recap of the situation so he could be better prepared by the time you inevitably arrive back at the dairy.
The Bot spoke so highly of you...
If you’re anything like you’re employer however… God help him.
Speaking of whom-
Harsh shadows are shifting across the old farmer’s face as he draws his lips apart into a sneer, something fierce and thunderous building under his tongue.
“Don’t you try to bullshit me!” he seethes, bristling, “I don’t care what you say with that fancy federal jargon you use. That weren’t no damn quake.”
Fowler merely stares flatly at him as he stews, chest heaving, until eventually, Terry folds his arms across his bare chest and declares, “I heard the explosion.”
Whether it’s serendipity or divine intervention, Fowler doesn’t give a shit, but he’s nonetheless grateful when the glare of distant headlights turns onto the farm track, and Terry whips his head towards them like a blood hound that’s caught the scent of its quarry.
“Another Fed?” he snips, eyeballing the headlights as they grow brighter, then disappear around the front of his house, “Think this one’ll be of any help?”
Nostrils flaring, lips curled into a nasty snarl, it’s clear he isn’t best pleased by the prospect of more authorities setting foot on his land, regardless of how he’d been baying for their arrival not an hour ago.
Lifting one shoulder in a shrug, Fowler sighs, “Couldn’t tell you from here. Maybe it’s someone with an update.”
Terry shoots him a suspicious glare.
“Ain’t you got radios for that?”
Hm. Old boy’s sharper than he looks.
… and sounds.
Rather than feed into his – ironically, rather founded – paranoia, Fowler just sweep a hand in the direction of the yard, “After you.”
Sparing just enough time to let out one last grumble, Terry takes off at a brisk march, heading back towards the house, arms swinging violently to propel himself faster, muttering all the way.
“… Kid’s stuck under a mountain, n’ I’m stuck dealin’ with bureaucrats… Hmph! Rather be crushed…”
Letting his eyes roll naturally to the star-flecked Heavens above, Fowler exhales a thin sigh through his nose, muses on his decision to study law and history like his mother wanted, then at last falls into step behind the crotchety farmer, the soles of his dress shoes treading flat the indents that Terry’s boots have left in the sand.
Bulkhead’s wheels crunch to a halt on the driveway in front of the old farm-house, his headlights throwing their glare far across the yard and illuminating a barn full of sleepy cattle, most of whom turn their heads lazily towards the unexpected intrusion.
From beyond the glass, you hear a disgruntled ‘moo,’ lowed by one of the heifers near the gate.
“Oops. Sorry,” Bulkhead exclaims softly, and in the next second, the lights are extinguished with a ‘click.’
The breath in your throat catches at the downright considerate gesture as you spare his dash a brief, conflicted frown.
“Well, this is your stop,” Miko announces, stretching her arms high over her head until they thud against the roof of the truck.
You hadn’t even noticed that your fingers are on the door handle, braced to hurl it open and make your escape like an animal fleeing from its cage. A few hours ago, you never thought you’d see the light of day again, let alone Terry’s farm.
Arm tensed, eyes wet with the relief that you’re actually here and not stuck at the bottom of a mine – that they’d kept their promise and let you go – you pull the handle and gasp when it gives a definitive ‘clunk,’ proving that it hadn’t been locked. The door itself however proves to be exceptionally heavy when you attempt to shove it open, the hinges resisting your efforts as if there’s someone on the other side pushing back.
You try not to think about that too hard.
Besides, it’s already wide enough for you to swing your leg out and lean forwards, gulping in that first breath of dry, desert air… only to be stopped by a small voice calling your name.
Clenching your jaw, you swallow, reluctantly swivelling your neck over a shoulder and peering back at the girl behind you, one boot on the ground, one still in the footwell, tilted halfway out of your seat.
Miko isn’t meeting your eye, frowning instead at your bare shoulders. “Hey,” she utters after a moment, finally letting her gaze trail up to find yours in the darkness, “We’ll see you around… right?”
It’s not a rhetorical question, you realise, it’s a search for confirmation that this isn’t going to be something so permanent as a ‘goodbye.’
But a goodbye is exactly what you need her to hear.
This is over, you wish you could say without having to say it.
So, steeling yourself against the very hopeful look she’s subjecting you to, you press your lips together tightly and let your expression go hard as steel. “Goodbye, Miko,” you say grimly.
She blinks, struck dumb by the deliberate edge in your tone, and even the vehicle you’re still halfway inside sags noticeably on its tyres.
“But-…” she starts, wetting her lips, “But I thought-…”
The words fizzle out on her tongue, fading into obscurity once she catches sight of the look on your face, and whatever she sees there must have robbed her of any argument she was about to hit you with.
You have to wonder what she did think. That just because you both like the same band, you’d be willing to jump feet-first into the middle of an alien war? That you’d abandon Terry when he’d been good enough to give you a job, just to go galivanting off with some kids and their extra-terrestrial buddies who could crush you as soon as look at you were you to step a foot out of line?
You’re not about to pretend that the only reason she got you talking wasn't because you were no longer being loomed over by living monoliths of metal.
You won’t… let… anyone else down. You came here to be of use to someone, and that someone is an old farmer with no children of his own and a dairy that won’t stop running just because his arthritis is acting up or his back is killing him.
But you can’t say all of that out loud to Miko, it wouldn’t be fair on the girl. It’s not her fault Optimus got you wrapped up in all of this because he couldn’t leave well enough alone…
Instead, you shrug the now-dry towel from your shoulders and fold it in half, your mouth dipping down at the corners.
“Here,” you whisper, holding it out for her to take.
Her gaze darts to the towel, then back up to your face as she works her mouth open and closed for a moment as if deciding on what to say. Eventually, she lands on, “You don’t wanna keep it?”
You don’t want to keep anything that they might use as an excuse to come and find you again, even if that excuse is something so simple and silly as wanting their towel back.
Something flinty and hard that looks so much like betrayal darkens her features, aging her by several years in the blink of an eye. She lowers her gaze then, refusing to spare you so much as a second glance as she leans out and snatches the towel from your grasp and all but tosses it into Bulkhead’s rear seats, folding her arms over her chest and turning away from you with her shoulders hiked up around her ears.
“Let’s just go, Bulk,” she snips.
Without another word, you grab the edge of the seat and haul yourself out of the truck proper, staggering a few feet away from it and nearly doubling over when the cold, night air hits your exposed back. It feels wonderful. It feels horrendous.
The door thumps closed behind you, and you pivot on the spot to watch Bulkhead reverse, his wheels churning up the loose layer of sand beneath his tyres as he manoeuvres himself around until you’re standing just in front of his bonnet, close enough to feel a wave of heat rolling off the metal.
Every muscle in your body tenses, sinews snapping taut with anticipation.
But all he does is let out a sound that comes close to the low hiss of a steam train. A sigh, you register.
“You know,” he ventures cautiously, “You’ll be safe with us…”
Your stomach sinks.
“If Starscream finds out where you live, he won’t hesitate. You know that, right?”
Exhausted beyond measure, you merely stare at the spot between his headlights, eyeing the strange insignia sitting in silver on the hood.
Persistent in the face of your unresponsiveness, he tries to press, “O-Optimus could assign you a guardian! Like I am to Miko. And you could come to the base after you finish work. The kids still go to school, a-and they’re always over at-“
“- Bulkhead,” you interject.
He shuts himself up at once, sheepishly bowing back onto his rear tyres, hood dipped low.
Pinching your lips together at the odd display of deference – from a truck, no less - you lift an arm and scratch awkwardly at the side of your head. “Listen, thank you for… y’know, bringing me back here.”
Just like that, the vehicle in front of you bounces right back up with a purring rev, and over the roof, you catch the tip of his radio antenna swaying back and forth, squeaking as it moves rapidly from left to right in quick, jerky movements. “N-no problem!” he stammers.
The wind picks up across the yard, scattering particles of sand against your boots and raising the hairs on your arms, prompting you to clutch at your elbows as you suppress a shudder. “But… And I swear I’m not trying to be a bitch, but I’m really none of your concern…”
Gradually, the antenna falls still.
For several seconds, he doesn’t respond, and the low thrum of his engine is the only sound that punctures the soft, whistling wind. But you can feel his gaze on you. Somehow. That age-old prickle on the juncture where your neck meets your back tells you you’re being watched by unseen eyes.
When he does finally speak, it’s with a surety that brooks no argument. “Well… Optimus might beg to differ,” he tells you, voice absolute.
Taken aback, your brows tilt up at the centre of your forehead as you wordlessly watch him back up, circling around you until the truck’s nose is pointed away from the farmhouse, back in the direction of the open road.
“And for the record,” he murmurs, just loud enough for you to hear, “So do I.”
You’re unable to provide any sort of answer, partly because your tongue has velcroed itself to the roof of your mouth, but mostly because he’s pulling away, slowly chugging back up the driveway towards the metal gates where a sign swings from a rusty post.
Plagued by irresolution, you watch dismally as he turns right – indicator flashing orange and all - back onto the highway, picking up speed as he peels away from the dairy and into the early hours of a Saturday morning.
As his guttural engine fades, the rapid crunch of boots on sandy concrete twitches your ear.
Before you can even make a move to turn around and see who's approaching however, you’re promptly - and rudely - tackled from behind.
Transformers Prime. Optimus & Reader. Bulkhead x Reader.
??? x Reader
Summary: Ignorance is bliss, right? The less you want to know, the more you seem to discover, until plausible deniability is no longer a defence you can use.
Bulkhead is obvious. Optimus is worried, Ratchet is wonderfully himself. And you're not nearly as keen to join this ragtag group as they are to welcome you into their fold.
Don't get carried away, no,
I'll only let you down.
Certain circumstances got me feeling low.
Don't take it personally.
-nothing,nowhere. - I'm sorry, I'm trying
--------
Although he’s not so gauche as to assume he’s in any kind of position to say as much out loud, Optimus longs to tell you just how wonderful it is to see you again.
Circumstances notwithstanding, of course.
As it is, he doesn’t imagine a statement of sentimentality nor fondness will be well-received, not while you’re quaking on the gurney before him, staring up at his faceplate through unblinking, bloodshot eyes.
This... is decidedly not how he'd wanted to ease you into the fold.
Despite what Agent Fowler would prefer to believe, Optimus is far from a passive observer of the human species. Ever since his first introduction to Earth, he’s had plenty of time to learn how staggeringly similar a Human’s expressions are to a Cybertronian’s, as a general rule.
He knows what terror looks like. He’d know the sight of it whether it was worn by a face of metal or of flesh.
It’s the same look that seems stitched to yours, sunk into the shadowy skin beneath your eyes and buried in the crease between your brows with the permanence of a scar.
It weighs heavily on his spark that he’s the reason for your anguish.
Blinking his optics, he cants his helm towards you as soundlessly as his pistons will allow, silently coaxing you to ask the questions that must be burning at your mind.
He's already elected not to speak until you do.
He wants you to know that you have a voice here, if you could only find the courage to use it.
-------------------------------------------
It seems so unfair that you can have so many words and thoughts zipping around your head, yet not a single one will make the short trip down onto your tongue.
The air is earthy and metallic when you breathe it in, incongruous on your tastebuds. You almost want to spit just to see if you still can, but your mouth is as dry as the Nevada desert, and even breathing is an insurmountable challenge.
But he’s still waiting, looming above you with unwavering focus. You get the impression that he’d wait forever if he needed to, like a teacher refusing to speak until their unruly students catch on and quieten down. It feels like he’s trying to prove a point…
You don’t care to find out what that point might be.
“You’re not a remote driver…” you finally croak, only to recoil like you’ve been hit when the finials on his head prick up at the sound of your voice.
Something like an exhale whistles out through the slat of his mouth as Optimus merely dips his silver chin in acknowledgement, shoulders sagging like he’s just relieved to hear you speak again. “No,” he utters plainly.
Sniffling, you let out a compunctious little laugh, shaking your head at yourself. “And I guess you’re not a drug dealer either.”
There’s no humour in your voice, and to his credit, Optimus doesn’t seem inclined to poke fun at you for your mistake either.
“No,” he says again, then adds, “I am certainly not, I can assure you.”
Oh, well thank God for that, you nearly scoff, swallowing the words and letting them slide down the back of your throat like acid. At this moment in time, you think you’d prefer to take on the Cartel than this unknowable behemoth.
Opening your mouth, you're about to ask perhaps the most pressing question, but the words get lodged under your tongue before they can see the light of day, sitting there weightily as you work your jaw around them.
‘Then what the hell are you?’
It feels like the right question to ask. He’s unknowable. So, you should endeavour to know him, shouldn’t you?
But, a hushed voice speaks up from a dusty corner of your head, perhaps the better question you ought to be asking yourself is, do I want to know?
Knowledge is power. But there isn’t enough knowledge in the world to give you power over something like this. And what if the only reason you’re here at all is because you already know too much….?
Or at least, he thinks you know too much.
Maybe then, not knowing… is the safer option.
Gradually, the erratic rise and fall of your chest starts to slow as you catch the faintest whiff of an idea.
Whatever these things are, they - or someone - is clearly trying to keep their existence a secret.
So, plead ignorance, and swear to maintain it. That's how it usually goes, right? In matters of secrets that boast this kind of magnitude, it's the suspected rats who are the first to be taken out.
You just have to convince them you aren't a loose end that needs tying up.
Sadly, it seems that in your indecisive silence, Optimus elects to try and fill it with the precise words you’re suddenly hoping to avoid.
Moving at a pace that suggests he’s trying not to spook you, the titanic automaton raises one of his arms towards what constitutes for a chest, splaying dark, mechanical digits across the blackened expanse of his windscreen.
“My name is Optimus Prime,” he begins with a soft rumble of his engine, as if he’s just been waiting to introduce himself to you properly for days now, “And I have come to Earth from-“
“-A! Ah-da-da! Stop!” you rush to yelp nonsensically over his thrumming cadence, throwing your hands about wildly and halting his explanation dead in its tracks. “I don’t want to know! I-I don't want to know who you are! Or where you’re from!”
Trailing off, he just blinks those strange, glowing eyes at you, evidently surprised, if the hike of his brow-plates is anything to go by.
“I…” He hesitates, closes his mouth, then opens it again and politely asks, “Pardon?”
You drop a hand to squeeze at your opposite wrist like you’re trying to wring water out of it, blundering on, “I don’t want to know, a-and I don’t need to know. The less you tell me, the better, right? I won't say a word!”
You… think you’re only imagining the way his tentative smile fades, and the plates above his eyes slide inwards, furling like a human’s brow when your insinuation registers with him.
“Y/n,” he utters in a tone suggesting he’s crestfallen as he lets his arm sink back below the gurney where it lands with a ‘clang’ over his bent knee, “I’m afraid you misunderstand me-“
“-You can just let me go!” you declare, frantic and breathless, grimacing so widely you begin to wonder if it must look like an awful, desperate smile, “I-I won’t tell anyone about… any of this, I swear! I mean…“
Here, you bark out a sharp laugh and throw your arms up, raking your fingernails through sweat-greased strands of hair. “Who the Hell would even believe me!? They’ll start calling me a conspiracy nut, just like crazy, old-!”
“Please, Youngling,” the soft-spoken robot interjects, putting your back up with the odd term, “You must try and calm yourself. I want you to listen to-“
“-Well, I want to leave!” you counter in a burst of hot, angry terror that lends volume to your voice.
You listen to it echo out before a thick, charged silence moves into the room, falling like a dead thing between you.
A troubled hum squeezes out of Optimus’s mouth, and for just a moment, he forgets himself, lifting a servo up to the gurney and reaching towards you with every intention of bridging the gap he seems to be driving perpetually wider and wider with every word.
But you see it coming from the corner of an eye, and the memory of being trapped by that same hand whilst a fire rages furiously between your shoulder blades spurs you into violent motion.
Whirling bodily towards the alien appendage, you shriek so loudly that your voice cracks in fear.
“DON’T TOUCH ME!”
Optimus withdraws his hand as if you’d tried to strike it, even whilst you curl away from him once more and place a few, trembling fingers over your mouth, evidently just as taken aback by your own outburst as he is.
Still, even when you rein in your volume, the force of your words strikes him just as jarringly.
“Haven’t you hurt me enough?!”
A rush of coolant flushes into the Prime's systems, pre-emptively anticipating the sudden spike of alarm that sends heat roiling beneath his neck plates.
"Hurt you?" he ex-vents, burdened by his own brand of horror, subjecting you to yet another onceover to try and pinpoint the place he'd unwittingly added to your injuries alongside the burn on your-
...Ah.
Optimus lowers his optics to the arm you've bent backwards, angled awkwardly to hover just behind your spine without touching it, a protective motion meant to cover what little you can of raw skin.
His processor briefly flickers back to the jarring glimpse he'd caught earlier when he put you down on the gurney, of dark discolouration bleeding tendrils over an inflamed expanse of flesh.
You think he did that to you...
The Prime's vocaliser seizes for a moment before he clears his intake and tries to set the record straight. “You were burned…” he murmurs solemnly.
All at once, your lips twist up in abject horror as you stumble away from him. “You burned me?"
And with that one, panicked utterance, an ominous change comes over the titan.
Brow-plates snap inwards, the finials on his helm tilt back, and a throaty rumble chugs out of the silver smokestacks that vibrate and rattle around the force of the sound as he opens his mouth and recites a word so steeped in rich conviction, you can almost feel it behind your eyelids.
"Never."
Of its own accord, you find your head dipping to avoid his gaze, struck by the sense that you’ve just crossed some sort of line. Implied something you shouldn’t have.
“There is not a force in this Universe that could compel me to harm one of your kind,” he tells you, and the weight packed behind every word presses down on top of your head.
More and more, you have to wonder if you’re standing in front of a force of nature rather than anything manmade. Like gravity, ready to put you in your place if you try to act against it.
But then, his gaze wanders to the uncomfortable curve of your spine, where you’ve shifted to try and keep the straps of your clothing from pressing against the searing skin.
You think the look of pity that softens his inhuman features is somehow far worse than the prior severity.
Venting softly, Optimus lets his optics click shut for a moment, opening them again slowly to give you a far gentler look. “It was the missile…" he explains, his tone back to its usual, mellow inflection, "The explosion… You spared the children from its heat, but used yourself to do so.”
The missile...
You blink unsteadily down at your wobbling hands...
You remember... the streak of silver screaming over your head. A blast of suffocating heat singeing the hairs on the base of your neck, licking at your bare shoulders.
It hurt, you recall. It more than hurt, but you hadn't paid any attention to it at the time, numbed from the worst of the pain by adrenaline and terror.
A burn. From a goddamn explosion.
Despite yourself, you can already feel your resolve start to waver in the face of his reasoning. When you were little, you got sunburnt so badly, you couldn't sleep on your back for a week, and even having a single bedsheet press against your skin was nearly too much to bear.
Now that you've actually stopped to acknowledge the tightness between your shoulders, this does feels astoundingly similar.
Bottom line? Optimus hadn't - hasn't - hurt you. Not in the way you thought he had.
Still, the sceptic in you is quick to plant a seed of doubt, that isn't to say he won't.
Unbeknownst to you, Optimus has seen the comprehension dawning over your face like light washing away a fog of unease, and he knows you've at least begun to contradict your own assumption that he's a threat.
He doesn't expect you to trust him blindly, yet it would mean a great deal to him if he could earn it. Now that you're here, perhaps he finally has that chance.
Although he regrets that your life had ever been caught in the crossfire, there still exists a selfish part of him - one Ratchet insists does not exist - that's immeasurably relieved you were down there in that mine tonight.
You saved the children. You're under his protection, whether he's made that much clear yet or not. The moments of dishonesty that still plague him can finally be put to rest because he can at last tell you the truth. You said you didn't want anything to do with him, and he suspects that was because you didn't know his intentions. Now though, as he vows to lay a foundation of honesty at your feet, Optimus is hopeful that you'll start to see him not as a stranger or a threat, but as an ally.
Shoving the imaginary 'tut' that sounds suspiciously like Arcee to the back of his processor, he lets his dermas smooth into a consoling smile.
"What you did for the children," he continues as a tender node in his chassis squirms with proud admiration, "What you did for this team... I doubt I could ever express the depths of my gratitude for that... But what I can give you, what I think you deserve, is to know the truth."
“Why?!" you protest in an instant, your guard all the way up, much to his dismay "Why do I need to know? What do you care if all I want to do is leave and forget I ever saw you!?”
His response is subdued but blunt, and each of his fingers unfurl to lay flat on the gurney, the tips stretching across the space between you. His smile has vanished, and you hadn't noticed how much softer it made him look until it's gone.
“Because I fear I have put you in grave danger…”
For just a second, you falter, but then the bile starts to climb up the inner wall of your throat, sour and bitter tasting. It even sounds bitter when you curl your lip and spit, “Obviously.”
The low whine of an engine reminds you too much of the Peterbilt trundling along behind you on the road, and you have to wrench your eyes off the drooping smokestacks, staring instead at his wide, prodigious shoulder. There, bright red paint has been scraped away in thin lines across the width of the panel, revealing silver stripes that look like scars, and as he shifts, the shadow of a dent highlights the spot where metal has been pressed concave…
You’re not so dense as to ignore that it’s the same damage he’d sustained when he shielded you from that charging Aston.
'Oh, Optimus... Your lovely truck..."
If you weren’t so itchy to get out of here, there might have been more room for remorse in your churning stomach.
“I will… try to be succinct,” Optimus utters much more mellowly, “If you would allow me just a moment to explain…?”
That much, at least, you can acknowledge, biting down on your lip and chewing at in pensively.
“And then I can leave?” you hedge.
Something flickers across his otherworldly face, but eventually, he inclines his head in a nod and pledges, “I will take you back the Dairy myself.”
Your eyebrows shoot up your forehead, not because you've just remembered the very temperamental farmer likely waiting to see if you've survived the 'cave-in,' but because Optimus seems to be under the impression that you’d be willing to go anywhere with him ever again.
But that aside... if listening to him brings you any closer to getting out of here, you don’t see how you have much of a choice except to sit tight and just go along with it.
Reluctant, restless, you draw a deep breath through your nose, trapping it in your lungs for several moments before you blow it all out in a loud rush. "... Alright..."
That simple, begrudging acquiescence is still enough to entice the smile back onto his face, and with a resonant hum, he begins.
“My name is Optimus Prime." If nothing else, he's glad he hadn’t deceived you about that. “And I am a member of a race of autonomous robotic organisms, hailing from the planet Cybertron.”
You barely register the meaning behind the words he's telling you, save for the fact that the whole thing sounds very rehearsed. You have to wonder how many times he's repeated this same speech... Have the kids heard it?
There is one word, however, that stands out above the others.
Planet?
"But you may call us Autobots, for simplicity's sake," Optimus is carrying on, regarding you with a watchful optic as you bring a hand up to your face and scrub it harshly down your nose and over your chin where it comes to rest, digging a thumb into the hollow of your cheek. Hard.
"So. Aliens...?" you murmur, half to yourself, half to the titan peering back at you, and entirely dreading what you're about to hear.
His answer slugs you with the force of a sucker punch.
"... Yes. To your species, we would be considered extra-terrestrials."
Which is... so very far from what you'd been expecting.
A superweapon built by the military? Yes.
The robotic experiment of some mad scientist with too much funding? Not implausible.
But really? Aliens?
Arduously, you pry each fingernail off your chin and let your arm flop back down to your side, winded.
You completely miss the troubled frown Optimus aims at the moon-shaped welts you've left behind along your jawline.
"Aliens..." you repeat, struggling to catch your breath as you let out a reedy, "Ffff~huuuck..."
Son of a bitch...
Looks like crazy old Terry isn't so crazy after all...
"Aliens exist." A shocked bark of laughter jumps out of you, utterly devoid of humour. "Aliens exist, and they're in Jasper Nevada! Area Fifty~fucking-One!"
The strained smile drops off your face as abruptly as it appeared, leaving you to just stare blankly at the rocky wall around Optimus's bulk, the weight of realisation sinking down on top of your bones.
"Oh my god," you croak, "The conspiracies were right."
Your legs give out with no warning.
Heavily, you slump to your knees, landing on the gurney with an aching thud.
Acting almost with a will of its own, Optimus's hand flinches towards you, though it soon slows to a halt once you rear away from it, hunching your shoulders around your ears.
The titan's mouth hangs open for a moment whilst he blinks at you, the plates over his eyes upturned as if he's worried.
You blanch at the very idea of it.
Still, though you don't want to know, there is a question burning on your tongue like an iron brand, growing hotter and hotter until you're compelled to spit it off. "What are you doing here?"
You don't think you need to specify that 'here' and Earth are one in the same.
Optimus doesn't even hesitate in his response. "To protect your planet," he tells you with a seriousness that puts your teeth on edge.
"From what?" you croak out, lifting a finger of meagre warning and trying to ignore how your whole arm quivers with the effort of keeping it raised, "And if you say from humans..."
He appears caught off guard by that. "From Decepticons," he presses, "You recall the... individual that attacked you in the mines?"
Blood red eyes, a voice like nails on a chalkboard, cruelty defined in every sharp angle and sneer on its face...
You clutch at your elbows, squeezing with chilly fingers. "Mm. Not ringing any bells."
Optimus, well-accustomed to Agent Fowler's particular proclivity for 'sarcasm,' recognises the same pattern in your tone, and simply forges on. "That was a Decepticon," he says, "He goes by the name of Starscream. A notorious figure in the Decepticon Army."
He pauses to appraise you for a moment, then flashes you a smile bleeding warmth. "You did well to outwit him."
But you don't care for the praise, too fixated on what came before it.
"Army...?" you whisper thinly, eyes now trained on Optimus's face, "There's an... army of you guys? Here? On Earth?"
The Prime's expression falters.
Already, this conversation is starting to echo the very same one he had with Agent Fowler when he was first approached by the Liaison on behalf of the US Government. This time, however, he's relieved to be explaining things without the sights of a dozen vehicle gunners trained on his chest-plates.
That doesn't make this conversation any easier though.
He'd hoped it would progress differently, that you might be assuaged by the knowledge that he's only here in the interest of keeping you and your planet safe.
But your concerns are certainly founded, and he won't belittle you by soft-pedalling the facts.
"I am afraid so," he hums solemnly, "We believe they are here to plunder the natural deposits of Energon that grow within the crust of your planet."
When you don't respond further than shaking your head at him helplessly, he elaborates.
"Energon. It is a fuel. An... ichor. A compendious source of power and energy for my species, not unlike water is for yours... In short, we need it to survive."
You're trying to control your breathing, he notices, your eyes flickering sporadically about the room as your expression opens up in a glimmer of comprehension. "That's why you were in the cave," you venture hoarsely, picturing those strange spurs of crystal that lit up the pitch-dark passageways.
Quartz... Pah! Sure.
"The Decepticons were drilling for Energon," Optimus replies, "We Autobots were there to secure what we could through stealth, without resorting to a confrontation."
"You make it sound like you're two sides at war."
There's the softest clink of metal when his mouth seals shut into a thin line.
His silence is as damning as the confirmation it stands for.
You release your elbows in favour of clutching at your head, fingers curling roughly through your hair and gripping it fiercely. "Oh, Jesus Christ..."
"I would call it a miracle that we found you and children down there and got you out in time," Optimus remarks, keen to distract you from the endless spiral of terror whose edge you keep teetering back and forth on. His EM field pulses calm, his gaze troubled, yet fond. "But it was not a miracle. It was all thanks to you, my friend."
You can't help it.
Perhaps it's the idea of being associated with something so irrevocably beyond your scope of understanding. Perhaps it's because of the incessance of the pain spanning the width of your back. Hell. Perhaps you've just learned that aliens are real, and they've brought yet another war into Earth's stratosphere. As if she needed another.
But whatever the reason, you can't stop yourself from prickling at the word 'friend,' prying your lips back and raising your head - and voice - to let out a serrated shout.
"I am NOT your FRIEND!"
Something mechanical gives a whir as Optimus's helm jerks back on his neck struts, but you're already deflating like a burst balloon, wilting in on yourself as if you aren't quite sure why you'd just raised your voice again.
Your declaration is both a reminder and a blow. His spark feels the impact, even if he goes untouched.
He didn't mean to insinuate... He only hoped that-
"Why did I ask?" you groan, presumably to yourself as you stagger up onto unsteady feet and begin to pace, head tipped down to stare through unseeing eyes at the ground. "Why the Hell did I ask!? I didn't want to know! I said I didn't want to know!"
It's increasingly obvious that you aren't addressing him, but Optimus responds all the same.
"Forgive me," he utters, closing the distance between you at last by sliding his servo forwards again and turning it over behind you, a gesture he hopes you'll see for what it is. An olive branch. A motion of support. He's often observed how humans will offer one another their hands in recognition, in familiarity and in greeting.
But when you spin on your heel and find it lurking behind you, closer than it was before, you flinch, skirting around the appendage as you turn to face its owner, keeping one, mistrustful eye trained in its direction.
"Okay," you rush out, "Okay, okay..." And when nothing more eloquent springs to mind... "Shit."
There's a cocktail of anxious energy surging like a fever to your every extremity. It even escapes into your voice, tightening your vocal chords and pushing everything out an octave too high.
"Okay, but what does any of this have to do with me?" you plead, hands slapping frantically at your chest, "What am I doing here? You haven't said why I'm here? Is it because I've seen too much?!"
"On the contrary," Optimus is quick to assuage, leaving his servo where it rests and urging your rejection to roll off his shoulders, "You are here, in part, because someone has seen too much of you."
Owlishly, you blink at him for a second before your face screws up and you blurt, "What!?"
"Starscream," he thrums, kicking a throaty growl out of the engine buried somewhere deep inside his torso. "He is why I wanted to speak with you so urgently. He is why you are still here, why I've been hesitant to let you leave... If Starscream finds you alone, now that he believes we are associated..."
He lets his voice fade into silence, and your imagination readily jumps in to finish the thought.
It isn't a pleasant one at all...
You press a hand against your throat.
"I thought, after Knock Out, it would be enough to watch over you from afar, but Starscream is-"
"Knock Out!?" you squawk, heart-rate leaping, "Who the Hell is Knock Out!?"
Optimus only has to look at you for a moment while he thinks of a response before it hits you.
"The DBS..." you breathe.
"The Decepticon Medic," Optimus says by way of confirmation, "Your encounter was, I hope, a mere coincidence. But another close call that I do not care to repeat..."
You have to sit down. No, wait, you have to stay upright and alert. One of these things was hidden inside the beautiful frame of that Aston Martin? Suddenly, you can't stop wondering about every vehicle that's ever driven past you. Terry's tractor? Is that an alien? Your truck? God, you hope not. But then, how would you know?
"Oh. My god," you swallow roughly, sinking to a crouch, "They're everywhere..."
"Which is precisely why-" Optimus starts, raising his chin, "- I am proposing the same arrangement for you that we have in place for Jack, Miko, and Rafael. They too were exposed to the Decepticon threat, and subsequently became potential targets that our adversaries would seek to harm... I will not allow that to happen to them."
Steadfast, his spark gives a resounding throb as he lays a servo over it, holding your gaze, "I will not allow that to happen to you."
He longs to know what's going through your head, whether you're reassured by his words or abhorred by their necessity. Without an electro-magnetic field, it's difficult to gauge, and you aren't helping matters by turning your face down again, hands balled into fists at your sides. Hiding from him.
"The children have their respective guardians." Belatedly, he attempts to inject some semblance of optimism into his vocaliser. "Bulkhead, Arcee, and Bumblebee. The latter two, you've yet to meet, but I hope you will have the opportunity soon."
Your shoulders hike up, stall, then slowly lower once more, like you're constantly battling the tremor in your limbs.
"For your safety," he continues to muse, "I propose that either myself or Ratchet watch over you for-"
"-No..."
The Prime's audials twitch, whirring softly as they spin forwards.
"No?" He watches on in rising despondence as you shake your head roughly and sweep your arms out from side to side in front of you for added measure.
"No," you repeat, recover a breath, then firmly announce, "No! I - We're not-...! I'm not doing this." Huffing out a ragged breath, you toss your head up, and he's granted a glimpse of your face.
Worn. Weary. Frightened. Lined by anguish that pulls at your jowls and sits visibly beneath your red-tinged eyes.
"I-I listened to what you had to say, and now I want to leave!" you stutter, "You said I could go if I listened!"
"Y/n...." He murmurs your name like it hurts him.
"You said!" It's childish and it's cowardly but you don't care. You're clinging with a desperate fervour to the one and only thing he's told you tonight that makes any kind of sense. "That was the deal! I listened! I can go! Please!"
Optimus, not for the first time, is torn. Yes, he assured you he'd take you back after he'd said his piece, yet he hadn't anticipated that you'd refuse to heed the things he's told you.
This isn't how his introductions usually go. His track-record so far has been nigh-on pristine.
What's gone wrong?
He won't have you going out into Jasper without protection, not with your face likely seared into a vengeful Starscream's processor. But equally, he won't keep you here against your will...
Safety, or freedom? Two concepts he values immensely, each balanced on the same tightrope that he seems to walk on a daily basis.
Perhaps, he wonders, opening his mouth to speak, on the drive back, he might have more opportunity to sway your-
"-You aren't going anywhere."
You almost trip over your own feet at the speed you whirl around, inadvertently back-peddling towards Optimus's chassis as a colossal figure stomps from the shadows of the adjacent corridor and into the cavernous room.
"Ratchet..." Optimus vents a stoic noise, his tone a warning to those who know what to listen for.
The medic, however, knows precisely what to listen for, just as much as he knows Optimus well enough to simply bulldoze straight through the Prime's overprotective field and stalk towards the gurney.
"The others filled me in. You are not leaving this base until that burn has been properly addressed," he announces sharply, adhering you to the spot with a weaponised glare.
Piercing, blue optics shift to meet Optimus's, then narrow in a challenge. "I've given you ample time to explain the situation. If this human hasn't come to terms with matters yet, that's none of my concern. What is my concern, however, is the damage dealt to the epidermis."
The servo he thrusts out at you in gesture is met with an admonishing nudge against his own field.
'Gently...' Optimus doesn't say it aloud, though Ratchet rolls his optics and scoffs as though he had.
"As it stands, I still have no idea how bad it is. Primus forbid it's extended down to the subcutaneous tissue."
It's hard to believe that once again, you've found yourself caught between a threat to your back and to your front.
Whilst you're busy eyeing the ornery giant for any signs of sudden movement towards you, another voice calls from the darkened corridor he'd come striding out of.
"Jeez, Ratch, what's got your bolts in a twist? Calm down."
Your ears perk up at once.
Miko.
Thundering footsteps precede the appearance of the green juggernaut. He melds into the light, the girl perched high on one of his shoulders without a care in the world. A rapid glance down reveals that Jack and Raf are cradled in each of the robot's hands, apparently content to be carried into the room by something infinitely larger than themselves.
It makes you dizzy just looking at them.
"I am perfectly calm!" Ratchet harrumphs perfectly calmly, throwing a molten glare at the girl as Bulkhead traipses up to the gurney's edge and lowers the boys onto its surface.
"Sorry Boss," the largest of the three rumbles sheepishly at Optimus, "We tried to distract 'im, but..."
"But after he saw that we were fine, he started getting worried about Y/n," Raf pipes up helpfully - much to the Medic's indignation - as he hops down from Bulkhead's servo.
Sputtering something incomprehensible, Ratchet throws several objections about at once, but you've already drowned out his voice to focus on Jack, who has left Rafael's side in favour of approaching you with the caution of a well-meaning child who wants to help an injured, snarling dog.
He has his face downturned, peering up at you through his black, flyaway bangs. Over his arm hangs a towel. A wet towel, you deduce, eyeing the droplets of water that trail a glistening path in the boy's wake.
Despite the circumstances, a coil of apprehension untangles itself from your ribs.
They're all... okay?
"Um, hi," Jack greets as he comes to a stop several feet away, offering a crooked grin and bouncing the towel on his arm invitingly, "Thought you might wanna use this... for your back? It’s cold. There's a bathroom down one the hallways..."
Blinking unevenly, you tear your eyes off him and toss a furtive look up at the medical bot, only partially relieved to find him locked in a heated discussion with Miko, while Bulkhead - an unfortunate bystander caught in the crossfire - is trying to surreptitiously angle his shoulder away from Ratchet, maintaining at least some distance between the bickering parties.
Soft, drooping optics flit down to you several times until Bulkhead notices you’ve caught him sneaking glances, and when he does, his entire hulking body stiffens like a metal wash-board, and he wrenches his gaze down to stare at the floor instead.
You still don’t reach out to take the towel.
“Don’t worry about Ratchet,” a timid voice pipes up.
Trying, and failing, to suppress a jump, you pivot your head around to find Raf has also ventured forwards, sticking close to Jack’s side.
“He’s all bark, no bite,” the boy continues, apparently inclined to overlook your jumpiness, “I think he just wants to make sure you’re okay.”
… Now, you don’t like to think ill of people. Especially not children. But you find yourself gawping down at Raf as if he’s grown an extra head.
The alien just wants to make sure you're okay.
Now you've heard everything.
“I… How?” you croak, gesturing helplessly at them with your palms tilting towards the ceiling, “How are you guys… okay with this?” Shaking your head, you let out a breathless sound too dour to be a laugh, and whisper, “How are you not afraid?”
To his credit, Jack actually seems to give your question some thought, sharing a glance with Raf before lifting his eyes to something over your head. Then, dropping his focus back to you, he shrugs a shoulder and replies, “Cause there’s nothing to be afraid of here.”
“Yeah,” Raf attests, “The Autobots are our friends.”
“Even Ratchet!” comes Miko’s chipper input, sending the Medic into another tirade of stark denial.
Raf just sighs tiredly whilst Jack steps closer once again and offers you the dripping towel. “You’ll get used to it,” he says with an awkward smile.
Truth be told, you don’t want the chance to get used to any of it.
Least of all the blue beam of light that suddenly bursts to life behind you and washes over you from head to toe, throwing your shadow across the gurney.
"HEY!" you yelp, spinning around clumsily and almost staggering into Jack.
Ratchet, nonplussed, retrieves his arm as the light dies and scowls at something on his wrist for a moment.
"It's okay!" Raf's hand finds the hem of your shirt, tugging on the fabric and dragging your attention off the Medic, "It's just a scan."
"Yeah, he likes his own personal bubble but doesn't know other people have 'em too," Miko sighs loudly from Bulkhead's shoulder, "You just gotta let him get it out of his system."
Only Optimus, who has been observing you closely from the moment Ratchet walked back into the hangar, notices the spike of alarm that his old friend isn't quite fast enough to catch before it arches through his field.
"Ratchet?" he prompts, straightening up as best he can without rising to his pedes. It hadn't escaped his notice that your heartrate decelerated by a fraction when he wasn't towering high over you.
From the corner of an optic, the Prime sees your head snap towards him, and he wonders if you'd forgotten he was even here in all the ruckus.
Muttering to himself, the Medic flaps a servo at Optimus's question, as if he finds the interruption bothersome. "Mm, I knew this shouldn't have waited," he grouses, then snaps two digits together with a metallic 'shing,' thrusting his servo out towards the humans and sending one of them cowering back like a whipped dog. "Jack. The towel."
"Uh, I-Um," Jack stutters, squinting dubiously at the Medic's digits, "You... wanna do it?"
Picking up on the direction this is heading, you try to draw yourself out of the cage of your own arms, shooting fretful glances between Jack and the impatient bot. "Er, he's not coming anywhere near me."
Which is likely to go down as well as a lead brick.
Sure enough, Ratchet's optics snap from his wrist down to you, glare loaded like a pistol and aimed directly at your upturned face. Even Jack has pivoted to look anxiously at you in profile, his expression twisted up as if to say, 'And what exactly do you think I can do about it?'
"Believe me," the Medic grouses, jutting his chin at you, "Were it not for the circumstances, I'd have no qualms about you staying as far from me as possible."
Optimus knows better than most how Ratchet's berth-side manner goes. For all his curtness and prickly conduct, he's a damn good medic, due in part to his dogged ferocity in cowing even the most unruly or unwilling patients.
The difference here though, is that this patient is nowhere near the same size as the doctor. However daunting it is for Cybertronians to witness a Ratchet in full medical-specialist mode, it must be far more intimidating to be on the receiving end as a human.
“From what I’ve heard, you’re lucky to still be standing at all,” Ratchet tells you with no shortage of reprimand, “The warheads on Starscream’s missiles are packed with an Energon compound; a substance that does not pair well with the human body upon exposure.”
Behind you, Bulkhead makes a sound like air being sucked through gritted teeth.
“So, those are Energon burns?” he frets, wincing at your back, “Scrap. That’s gotta hurt..."
Bewildered, you brave a glance over your aching shoulder, peering up at the underside of a wide, silver jaw. It lifts a few inches when the bot meets your eye, and you'll only realise later that he'd been offering you a reticent smile.
Ratchet just harrumphs.
“Well, I’m assuming they must be, but I won’t know for certain until I’m allowed to examine them more closely!” he snaps, shooting you a very pointed scowl that you return with the barest huff, giving the arm he’d ’scanned’ you with a cagey look.
Bolstered by the pair of humans hovering close behind you, you somehow find the guts to shake your head at the bot and meekly announce, “Not a chance.”
The entire room descends into a tangible silence as Ratchet’s features grow impossibly harder.
Some great, metallic mass gently shifts its weight nearby, and a throat is cleared as quietly as it possibly can be.
You were wrong before... when Optimus got stern. Now you feel like you've crossed a line.
With bated breath, you watch the darkened shadows extend over the alien's face, keeping yourself stock-still like a rabbit caught in headlights until-
"Suit yourself," he sniffs, brushing off his affront with a dismissive shrug.
Everyone, yourself included, seems to exhale in unison.
"But-" he adds briskly, commanding the room to listen once again, "Might I recommend drawing the heat out sooner rather than later? Immediately, is my suggestion, unless you want your tissue to keep 'cooking,' so to speak."
A horrifying image in itself...
Straightening to his full height, he swings his servos around to clasp them behind his back and leans over the gurney, and if it weren't for Raf and Jack unwittingly cutting off your path of retreat, you'd have probably backed over the ledge.
"Now, I don't care who does it..." Ratchet's optic twitches, his volume increasing with every word, "But if someone doesn't get that towel on your burn this instant, I'm going to-"
Jack, ever sticking to his self-imposed role of peacekeeper, is quick to jump in. And he does so by turning his back on the Medic and addressing you directly.
“-Ah, hey! If you won’t let Ratchet help you, will you let me?”
And... strangely enough, the distraction he'd been aiming for seems to work.
Robbed so unceremoniously of steam, Ratchet's bluster comes to an anticlimactic halt, and he takes a step back, silent save for the click of his dentae as he snaps them shut.
You, in the meantime, give your head a quick shake as if to dislodge the mere sight of Ratchet and opt to blink several times at the teen standing in front of you instead, a gear in your brain clunking heavily into motion.
What did he say?
It's hard to think straight when the eyes of no less than three extra-terrestrials are searing into the top of your skull.
Focus. First, shrink the whole world down until it fits on the face of the kid standing in front of you. Nothing really exists further than what he's telling you.
That's how you plucked up the resolve to leave home in the first place. Back then, you shrunk the world down to the contents of your rucksack. You need a toothbrush. Hairbrush. Driver's licence... Don't think about all the ways this could go horribly wrong. Don't look at the bigger picture. If you do, your nerves will fail you, every time.
Shamefully, it's only now you're actually looking closer that you notice the streak of dirt marring Jack's pale cheek. At a glance, he doesn't seem too worse for wear, but you'd forgotten to check... You shouldn't have forgotten to check.
Embarrassment kicks a belated question through your teeth.
"Y'okay?" you grunt articulately, like you're coming out of a daze.
You watch his eyebrows disappear beneath his fringe. "Uh... Yeah?" He gives a short chuckle. "I'm fine." Lips quirked, he nods his head towards the sopping towel in his hand.
Following his gaze, you blink stupidly at it for a moment before your brain catches up with his implication.
You have no idea what kind of state your back is in, but it certainly feels like a big, ugly mess. Nobody should have to deal with that, least of all a kid.
“Nah, you don't wanna do that,” you dismiss, holding out your hand for the towel, “I’ll manage.”
But for some reason, Jack just bites his lip and briefly pulls the towel back towards himself, cycling through expressions like he’s thinking about something very hard, until eventually, his face sinks into a stern frown more suited for a teacher than a teenager.
“You… probably won’t be able to reach,” he tells you, though his voice is small and uncertain, as if he isn’t used to telling someone older than him what to do, “I got it. Hold still.”
You hadn't expected him to flip his own script, not after he seemed insistent on offering the towel for you to take.
Before you can peel away, he’s stepping deftly around you and pinning the entire swathe of fabric up against your back with a sopping-wet ‘squelch.’
“Aghh!” you gasp sharply, reeling forwards to try and escape the sensation of something cold touching such heated skin, but Jack is deceptively persistent, shadowing your half-hearted retreat as he keeps the towel pressed across your spine until you freeze on the spot, shoulders bunched up around your neck.
He'd wet it thoroughly at some point, that much is clear. Water squeezes out of the fabric and dribbles in rivulets down your back, soaking right through your scruffy tank top and leaving you shivering in your boots.
"What was that for!?" Christ. You barely know this kid.
“Relax,” he chaffs amicably, “My Mom’s a nurse. I was learning first-aid when I was, like, six years old.”
Begrudgingly, you have to admit, the cold might be starting to help.
"A!... Does - does she know you're... here?" you ask, teeth chattering. Does she know about any of this, goes unspoken.
"God no. No, she does not. She thinks I'm at a slumber party."
The slap of boots hitting the gurney pulls your head up from where you've tucked it against your chest, spotting Miko sauntering towards you along the rubber surface.
"My foster parents never know where I am, thank god." Coming to a stop in front of you, she takes up position beside Raf and folds her arms boastfully across her chest, casting her eye over you from head to toe, lips pursed in contemplation.
Taking a hesitant step forwards, even the youngest of the trio chimes in, "None of our parents know."
Which... is troubling, to say the least...
"O-okay?" you croak, doing your utmost to ignore the three, enormous elephants in the room, "So, who does know?"
"You, now," Miko says.
"The Government," Raf adds, to which you can't help but snort.
"Stop the Presses."
From behind you, Jack is the last to give his input. "And us."
Letting go of the towel with one hand, he scrubs a palm up and down the back of his neck and crooks a small grin when you glance at him over your shoulder. "It's a... pretty exclusive club," he admits.
In response, you swallow, flexing your sweaty palms and lowering your gaze to the floor, heart beating an unsteady rhythm against your sternum. After a stretch of quiet, you hesitantly whisper, "Is it the kind of club you can leave?"
"Oh, if only they would," Ratchet primly laments in a bitter grumble.
It doesn't come as much of a surprise that Miko is the next to jump in, throwing out a hip defensively and narrowing her eyes at you. "Why would we wanna leave?"
You can think of a few reasons, the most prominent of which are standing very close by.
Without taking your focus off the gurney, you give a sardonic little huff and gesture loosely in her direction, muttering. "You tell me..."
"We can leave," Jack steps in rigidly, "We're not being held prisoner here, if that's what you're worried about."
No. What you're worried about could hardly be encapsulated by a single sentence. At least the cold water on your back is doing wonders to draw pain out of the burn. You finally feel like you can breathe again.
Fidgeting with the turned-up cuffs of his shirt, Raf adds, "The Autobots are trying to protect Earth. We... just want to do what we can to help them. E-even if it isn't much."
You stare at him for the breadth of a second before a soft, rumbling voice fills the silence, one that has kept relatively quiet for some time until now.
"The three of you have been invaluable additions to the team," Optimus say resolutely, startling you yet again when his timbre rolls through your chest.
All of the children seem to stand a little taller at that, sending each other shy, knowing smiles as they bask in the warm glow of his acknowledgement whilst you stand there among them, insignificant. Which suits you down to the ground. If a chasm opened up underneath you right now and whisked you all the way back to a world that makes sense and has rules, that’d be just fine by you.
Tucking enough of the towel over your shoulders to ensure it stays where it is, Jack finally takes a step back and lets his arms drop, wiping them dry on the front of his jeans.
"We're here 'cause the world is in danger, and we can't just… hide a-and pretend it isn’t happening while they’re risking their lives to try and save it," he tells you to concurring nods from Miko and Raf, sounding far more confident in himself than he did before, "And we stay because they're our friends."
The boy's statement earns a proud hum of the Prime's engines.
You, on the other hand, are at a loss.
This morning, you thought you knew everything. You knew the cows needed to be milked at six o’clock. You knew the fences in the North paddock needed fixing. You knew Terry was an eccentric conspiracy theorist but an otherwise decent old man.
And you knew aliens didn’t exist.
Serves you right for thinking the world didn’t hold any more surprises for you.
Muzzily, you look at the kids in turn, Raf, Miko, then you pivot your neck around to stare at Jack, your head bobbing with fatigue. They’re all watching you right back, Raf from behind his spectacles, expression ever so slightly scrunched up like he’s plagued by something insurmountable. Miko with something akin to suspicion, or perhaps anticipation. And finally, Jack, who’s making a valiant effort to school his face into a look that isn’t full of pity.
You don’t hold it against him. You’re sure you must look pretty pitiful. Especially compared to them; kids who’ve taken on some grand and perilous burden that you can’t seem to even ponder on too long for fear of going mad.
Saving the world… That's quite the undertaking.
Well, if they want to get themselves killed for the greater good, who are you to tell them they shouldn’t? Hell, if you had even half their courage when you were that age, maybe you would have grown into someone your parents could be proud of today.
The air is thick and charged with unspoken things, and you can’t help but wonder if they’re all waiting for you to say something.
You feel like the punchline of a joke you aren’t in on.
For once, it’s a joke you don’t want to be a part of.
“Then you’re all better people than me," you tell them at last, earning three sets of blinks. Perhaps they assumed you'd argue the point that children have no place in an alien war. Shit, maybe you should... But then, what the hell do you know?
You only signed up to convince some kids to leave a mine, not contend with... whatever the hell kind of mess this constitutes as. So far as you're concerned, you've already answered the call of duty, and now you're paying for it. No good deed, and all that...
"Whatever this is..." you say quietly, "I don't want any part of it. I just want to go home…”
Home? Fuck, it must be bad. Back to expectations higher than the stars, back to the place that was privately happy to see you go because it meant you might finally go out and do something useful. Back to where you couldn't hide from your painful mediocrity. You remember the look on your father's face when you rolled out of bed at ten in the morning on a Saturday once. Cold disappointment.
It's all so terribly laughable now, of course.
You really thought you had it bad? You thought you were unhappy? You suppose it takes being faced with life-threatening odds before you can put things into perspective... Because at least you were surviving.
“Finally! A human with some common sense!” That’d be Ratchet, you fathom, squeezing your eyes halfway shut at his strident declaration.
“Wait. Seriously?” Giving a brusque scoff, Miko jabs her hand at you, fingers pressed tightly together in a uniform line, “You’re gonna stand up to Screamer like a total hero, and then turn around and call it quits? Where's your sense of adventure!?”
Gone. Buried in the same hole you left the energy of youth behind to die. Maybe if you were standing here ten years ago, when you thought kids were invincible and death wasn't permanent, you'd be jumping headlong into this whole thing without hesitation.
Maybe if you weren't a coward, you'd think the world could still be saved.
Stiff-backed, you retort, "I didn’t come to Jasper to be a goddamn hero.”
“Huh.” This time, it’s Jack who speaks up, shifting his weight onto the opposite foot and drawing the eye of everyone – human and alien – in the hangar. “Could've fooled me when you came down into the mines and protected us from Starscream.”
A neve in your temple twitches as you clench your jaw whilst an inexplicable ball of agitation ricochets off your stomach walls, and before you can keep yourself in check and wonder why you're getting wound up - beyond the obvious reason of your still being here - you turn on the boy, lips parting around your teeth in an ugly lour.
“I was only down there in the first place because my Boss told me to stop some dumb kids from getting themselves killed in an unstable mine."
"Dumb kids?" Miko parrots, her face scrunching up to mirror yours, “Why are you being such a jerk all of a sudden?”
“Miko!” Raf hisses.
Soundly ignoring him, she throws a shoulder out towards you, arms still firmly crossed over her chest. “You were so nice when we met you the other day!”
"You four have already met?" Optimus asks.
Ignoring him, you sneer at the girl, “Oh please. That was the first time we met, and we talked for like, ten minutes, tops! Maybe you caught me on a good day.” Eyes burning, you let your expression go lax and breathe out a miserable little huff, entirely toothless. “Maybe a jerk’s all I am.”
Food for thought, you suppose, because now the kids are looking at you in a whole new light, as if it's only just occurred to them that you really are nothing more than a stranger.
Only the Autobots remain dubious, with one in particular outright rejecting the absurdity of your claim like it's the most preposterous thing he's ever heard.
Optimus does nothing to conceal the discontent that sours the oceanic waves of his EMF. Across the gurney, Ratchet picks up on it first, brushing his own field up against the Prime's. Inquiring.
Even Bulkhead, not as perceptive as Ratchet but no less aware of their leader's disquiet, glances first at Optimus, then at you, his optics thinning to slats of blue as he casts his doubt.
Oblivious, you try to avoid each stare, even the children's, and swallow down the knee-jerk impulse to apologise, especially when you make the mistake of sneaking a glimpse at Raf's face. You didn't know it was possible for a kid his age to look quite so... disappointed.
He must not have liked that you called him dumb...
"Am I allowed to go now?" you croak, slowly inclining your head in the direction of a red and blue mass that hovers in your periphery.
"... I gave you my word," Optimus sighs, reluctance leaving a heavy tack along his glossa. He pulls away from the gurney, easing himself up to his pedes without any inclination to hurry. "Come, I will take you back to the Dairy..."
With any luck, a peaceful drive with you tucked safely in his passenger seat might give him a little more time to help you see that your safety now hangs in precarious balance. Considering the calibre of mech who will be baying for your head on a platter, he knows his case will have to be even more convincing than it was in here.
But as he lowers his servo once more to the rubber surface, he's reminded that a few gentle words and reassurances from your fellow humans will hardly suffice to make you lay your trepidation aside, just like that.
"No!" you bleat, and Optimus has to pretend very hard that his spark doesn't buck when the fear you seemed to have somewhat shaken off returns in a flash of your bobbing throat and eyes that re-fill with tears. "I-I can't-! Not with you... Not you."
It shouldn't be anything new that you won't accept his help when he offers it, and he shouldn't - as a Prime - let that get to him like it does.
You’re staring at him tearfully, and it occurs to him that you must be picturing every awful thing that might happen to you if you get inside his cab. You were already wary on Highway 49, before you knew what he was.
He can’t imagine how much more difficult it’s going to be to coax you back in after he’s betrayed your trust so significantly.
Optimus has fought a lot of battles. Battles he’s won, and battles he’s lost, incalculable in scope. He knows the game, better than most. And if he thought that this was a losing battle, bringing you into their fold, he’d have to concede defeat.
But he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re worth the fight.
Again, you stumble back a few inches, rocking on your heels “I-It's nothing personal,” you lie through your teeth, echoing the sentiment you told him on the first night you met, "I just..." Unable to think of anything substantial however, you finish lamely, "Not you."
Parting his dermas, Optimus goes to offer another reassurance, but it isn't his voice that speaks up first.
"I can take you back!"
In near-perfect unison, every head slowly pivots around to stare vacantly at Bulkhead.
You're a little perturbed to find he only has eyes for you, at least until he blinks, blue lights winking off and on again as he pulls them away from you and flicks them around at the faces peering back at him.
"... What?" he asks.
Ratchet lets out a dubious 'hmph,' draping a servo across his hip. "Never thought I'd see the day Bulkhead started acting like a gentlemech."
Abashed, the Wrecker's silver jaw lowers to gape at him for several seconds before it clangs shut again, and he lets his optics fall to the ground, idly scuffing a pede at the concrete below him. "Just tryn'a help..."
Blowing an exasperated breath through rounded cheeks, you drag a hand down your face and primly address the room at large. "Look, just show me the door... and I'll be on my way, all right? Alone..."
"Out of the question," Optimus contends, "Our base is at least a thirty minute drive to your place of work, and I cannot condone letting you walk there in the middle of the night by yourself.
Funny. If he'd condoned it the other day, you probably wouldn't even be in this mess...
Regarding the back and forth listlessly, Ratchet starts, "If you're in a hurry, I could always just ring up a Ground-"
"- That will not be necessary either," Optimus cuts in, prompting a sigh from his oldest friend. Undeterred, the Prime gives Bulkhead a resolute nod, then lowers his helm to you, optics hooded and dim.
"Bulkhead will return you to the Dairy," he acquiesces, hesitating just long enough for you to notice the pause before he adds, "If that is your wish..."
No. Yes?
You have half an idea of what 'returning you to the Dairy' will entail, and you know you don't have the courage to do it. You want to leave, but if leaving means being taken...
A hundred different thoughts spin endlessly downwards, circling the proverbial drain until an ache begins to form between your temples, and you lift your hands to clutch fistfuls of the towel that still lays draped over your shoulders and hangs down your back.
And then, as if you weren't already busy trying to hold the pieces of yourself together by spit and spite, Miko heaves an airy sigh and announces, "If Bulk's going, then I'd better come with. Gotta get back before my foster parents realise I snuck out again and hide the key to my bedroom window."
"I told you to stop climbing out of there," Bulkhead admonishes even as he brings a servo up to the gurney and lays it flat on the surface, "What if you fall?"
Again, an expression of care that challenges your expectations.
Beckoning for you to follow, much to your bemusement, the girl begins trudging over to the offered hand, watched all the way by her guardian's attentive optic. "Hasn't happened yet."
"Doesn't mean it never will."
Miko tosses her head back and groans, "Okay, sorry Mom. I won't do it again."
And that's what's wrong with this picture, you realise, among a myriad of other things.
It's all too...
... casual.
If you close your eyes, you could almost pretend that this is simply a pair of friends bickering with one another, not a teenage girl and a monolithic, metal alien from another world entirely.
Turning to find you still standing squarely in your spot like a tree that’s put down roots, she frowns, placing one hand on a giant, grey fingertip and using the leverage to pull herself up and into Bulkhead’s servo.
“Well?” she barks, “You coming?”
Distantly, you find your legs begin to move of their own volition, treading cautiously in the girl's footsteps and approaching the palm she's settled herself down in.
It... helps, you think, seeing her place her life quite literally in the hands of something so vast, so astronomical, without even a sniff of ceremony. Like watching someone safely navigate a minefield without getting blown up before it's your turn.
It isn't lost on you, the cowardice behind needing a kid to mollify at least some of your fear.
You don't bother to ask her if it's safe. She certainly seems to think so. Instead, you stiffly trundle to a halt just in front of the hand, lips pressed together and clamped viciously between your teeth.
Grimacing, you hedge a wary glance up at the underside of that massive chin, then peer beyond it to find Bulkhead observing you through wide, enraptured optics, somehow glowing brighter when you reach out and blindly fumble for a handhold.
You palm meets the edge of warm, solid metal, and you go rigid, watching him closely for any change.
When he doesn't move - doesn't even blink - you drag down a quaking breath and tear your attention away from him, turning to Miko instead.
She's scooted backwards, poised confidently on the edge of a titanic wrist as she casts a few, pointed looks between you and the empty palm.
You are going to be phenomenally annoyed if this turns out to be an elaborate trap.
Clenching fingers keep the towel in place as you swing a leg over the side of Bulkhead's digits, and the rest of your body begrudgingly follows suit.
You don't notice the excited ping that Bulkhead sends to the other bots in his presence when you drop into an awkward crouch in his servo, nor do you hear the hum of approval from Optimus, who silently commends his warrior for handling you so patiently.
Keeping a tight lid on his giddiness, Bulkhead starts to move, retracting his arm from the gurney and taking a careful step backwards to lower you both to the floor.
He's barely reached solid ground before you're throwing yourself off his servo, stumbling uneasily over his thumb in your haste and earning yourself a snicker from Miko as she hops down beside you, letting your unorthodox ride straighten back to his full height.
You'd almost forgotten how much worse it is looking up at them from the floor again.
To your shock, Bulkhead starts to amble away from you and Miko, moving further into the spacious centre of the hangar, his jaw still twisted in that odd, cumbersome grin.
He's leaving? You thought he was...
Miko must catch the perplexed frown aging your face because she suddenly leans across and knocks you with her elbow, lips quirking in a grin. "Wait for it..."
God, if you have to do any more waiting just to get out of here, you'll start assuming the foetal position.
And then the colossal bot starts to fall apart.
Quite literally.
At least, that's what you assume is happening at first. Pieces of metal twist and slide into one another. Vast, green plates break apart and fit back together in a transformation so seamless, so fluid, you can't hope to follow it all with the naked eye. Closer and closer to the ground, the parts that make up 'Bulkhead' condense, until within mere seconds, you're left gaping at a familiar, armoured SUV, sitting where the robot had once stood as innocently as any other car you might see on the road.
From the corner of an eye, Miko watches you, her chin tipped back with an air of pride. "Pretty cool, isn't he?"
You snap your jaw shut at once, ashamed to have been caught gawking. Still, you're not dignified enough to simply brush the feat aside. "Extraordinary," you breathe.
So that's how they do it... Ever since you first laid eyes on them in the mine, you knew the vehicles and machines were one in the same, but what you couldn't fathom was how they transitioned between one and the other.
Now, you know. For better or worse, you've yet to decide.
You're nearly shocked out of your stupor when the truck in front of you seems to push itself higher on its wheel struts in response, and the mobile antenna on its backside swings ever so briefly back and forth.
"Ah, it's nothin' really," Bulkhead's voice emerges, just as Optimus's had, from the truck itself, bashful, "Any Cybertronian with a T-Cog can do it."
Still reeling from the transformation, you only jump a little when both front doors pop open in invitation.
Miko wastes no time making a beeline for the passenger's side, all but throwing herself into the cream, leather seat with a 'hup!' and kicking her boots up on the dash. The brazen treatment of what's essentially a giant, robotic alien makes you seize up in anticipation of a rankled scolding....
But whatever rapport Miko has with this juggernaut must be watertight because he says and does nothing to suggest he's even aware that she's putting dirty boots all over his interior.
Sluggishly, you bend your neck down to spare your own wellingtons an appraisal.
Dusty. Flaked in places with dried mud and cow shit.
... What if he-?
No.
You can do this... You have to. This is the only way you get out of this mess.
One last step.
The door sits open, a waiting maw, the leather seat a tongue and the wheel a palate against which you could be crushed so easily... This isn't the same as when you pulled yourself into Optimus's cab. Now, you have the luxury of being vividly aware that this 'truck' is hardly a truck at all.
Your boots carry you to the door, where you raise a leg, stiffly slotting it into the driver's footwell and falling still.
Despite yourself, you hear yourself asking, "Is this... okay?"
Which part of his body are you treading on? His face? His shoulder? Is the door equivalent to an open mouth? You can't shake the vile imagery of parasites making their home in the body of a much larger creature.
But Bulkhead's engine just kicks out a throaty purr as he replies, "Course it's okay."
Well then...
Something hesitant prompts you to look back and search for the others, letting your eyes glance off Ratchet and Optimus and adhere to the two boys staring back at you from their vantage point on the gurney.
You don't know what prompts it.
"Be safe," you stress to them, brows set in an uncompromising frown.
Jack raises a hand in farewell, whereas Raf starts to fidget, pulling at a loose thread on the hem of his vest. "We'll see you around?" he calls.
But you've already pivoted away from them, your one and only request imparted for them to heed as they see fit. Or not, as the case may be.
It's too late to pretend you care more about their lives than your own anymore. You're leaving them, after all, and while every part of you is hoping against hope that these aliens are as good as their word, and that they won't hurt anyone, you can be damn sure that hope isn't going to help these kids if you're wrong.
You should be putting up a fight here like you did in the mine, and you would...
... If you thought they were really in danger.
Towel in hand, you pull yourself into the waiting driver's seat like there's a bomb underneath it, afraid that the slightest pressure could set it off.
Then, the door thuds shut behind you, and you're sealed inside, at last granting you reprieve from Optimus's unwavering gaze.
The Prime's optical shutters click when you vanish from view, breaking the spell of melancholy and foisting him back into his own processor, slowly letting his surroundings bleed back into focus.
He watches, arms at his sides, as Bulkhead rolls forwards and begins to drive across the hangar. After a second, he loses battle with his restraint and sends a brief instruction for the Wrecker to heed.
'Get them home safely.'
Bulkhead's field buzzes with amused reassurance as he fires back, 'Count on me, Boss.'
"Optimus..."
The Prime tunes his audials to Jack's soft voice and prompts the boy to continue by giving him a curious hum, not quite ready to take his optics off the scarlet glow of Bulkhead's brake-lights as they near the corner.
"I-I'm sorry," Jack blurts before he can lose his nerve, "We... kind of ruined your shot at all that Energon, huh?"
Not unkindly, Optimus vents a thoughtful sigh.
How very like Jackson Darby to try and shoulder far more than his own share of the blame when he shouldn't be shouldering even an ounce of it in the first place.
"You are not blame for the actions of our enemies," Optimus tells him, firm yet gentle.
"Yeah, but if we weren't down there in the-"
"Jack... On this planet, we are never short of opportunities to secure more Energon," he assures the boy, easing his titanic body around to face the gurney once more and bending at the waist so neither of them need strain their necks, "The only takeaway from tonight's mission is that you are all safe. Nothing is more important than that."
Jack ducks his head, whether to hide the flush that creeps into the tips of his ears or to escape the unhesitating care in Optimus's gaze.
"Still..." he mumbles, hitching his shoulder up in a shrug and letting his sentence trail off.
Affectionate, the Prime's spark warms like a furnace. "I know."
What he also knows, beyond Jack's habit of apologising, is that young Rafael has been fighting back yawns for the last five minutes and making concerted efforts not to rub at his drooping eyelids. Jack himself doesn't seem to be faring much better, his posture heavily drooped, skinny shoulders slumping, and the increments of time between each blink growing shorter and shorter.
It might be the early hours of a Saturday morning, but that's no reason to keep children from their recharge cycles any longer than necessary.
"Ratchet," he calls over a shoulder to the waiting CMO, "Please check in with Arcee and Bumblebee, see what their ETA is. If it is anything longer than ten cycles, I would ask that you please see Rafael and Jack home safely."
Recent events must have taken at least some sort of toll on Ratchet because the Medic doesn't try to protest at all.
"Consider it done," he nods agreeably, raising a brow as Prime pivots on his heel strut and walks with a purpose across the hangar, "And where are you off to?"
Ah. No doubt he's still thinking of that explanation he was promised...
But Optimus doesn't pause his stride as he heads towards the lift that'll bring him to the top of the butte, where there'll be an uninterrupted view of the stars, and coincidentally, the perfect vantage point from which to oversee a pair of headlights ferrying two, precious souls down the highway towards Jasper.
I'm finally mostly settled into my new place, and trying to get back in the grove of writing (with a secret update schedule that I will not share so that I might actually stick to it lol), however, I've strained my wrist bad, so typing is a slow process. Hoping it clears up soon!
Robot who misunderstands and gets offended when you call them hot and starts rambling on about their highly efficient cooling mechanisms and wow they look really cute bragging like this
