Fic: Mother's Legacy, Mother's Curse
Sidestory of sorts to the planned Detective Conan/Magic Kaito/Supernatural crossover fic Mother's Legacy, Father's curse. Knowledge of one is not needed for the other as of this point. Some of you may have read this already - it's the Simmons/flamethrower fic, now with shiny title and properly updated header.
Title: Mother's Legacy, Mother's Curse
Fandom: Supernatural, crossover with Transformers (2007 and 2009)
'Verse: Legacy/Curse'verse
Characters: Reginald Simmons, Seymour Simmons (both separate from each other - they're twins), Simmons' father, OCs,
Rating: T for descriptions of bloody wounds.
Warnings: Alien robots not actually involved until part 4. AU. Deviation from Movieverse canon in that to solve the Reginald/Seymour name debate I made Reginald and Seymour two separate characters - twins. This focuses on Reginald - the "first" name for Simmons in Movieverse.
Summary: Inspired when going through sakon76’s LJ to reread fanfic; found a line about making an icon with Simmons/flamethrower as an OTP. Reginald Simmons has always been fascinated with fire.
Disclaimer: I own none of this.
Notes: Set between movies 1 and 2 of the Transformers series, and any time canon for Supernatural, though preferably before season 5. Draws from both live-action movies of Transformers. Originally posted in 4 parts; breaks will be labeled
Part One
Reginald Simmons has always been fascinated with fire. His preoccupation with flame stems in some way from his mother’s mysterious death when he was six months old. His father claimed that he saw her burning on the ceiling, blood dripping down from a wound in her stomach - but Reginald never really paid much attention to it, deciding that his father had somehow been driven insane via grief.
He believed it, and so did his twin Seymour, until the night they found out that the Closet Monster was real.
Their father burst in and blasted it with his shotgun before ordering them to pack.
The remainder of the Simmons family left their temporary home before it was dawn.
They moved around the country some. Their father left them with friends as often as he could, but occasionally had to take them with him on what he was beginning to call hunts. He never tried to force them into hunting until they showed an interest. Seymour was far more action-oriented, and learned how to shoot every gun in their father’s growing arsenal by the time he was ten. Reginald, who had always been more fascinated with the scientific aspect of the hunt, did the research, looked up cells, and, when demons began showing up, found several exorcisms that they could use.
Reginald graduated on time, as did Seymour. Reginald went to university, pointing out that the larger libraries would give them access to more materials useful for finding more supernatural entities to fight when his twin and father protested. They eventually agreed, albeit grudgingly, and he went off to double-major in history and urban legends of the world (which he did as a custom major).
He was halfway through his schooling when Sector Seven contacted him.
*****
As it turned out, he was perfect for the job. Whenever descriptions of odd things came along, he was assigned to go check it out to tell the difference between supernatural entities and the real alien threat (aliens! GIANT aliens! GIANT alien ROBOTS! It was every true geek’s dream come true.)
Part Two
Disclaimer: I own only the crazy idea which spawned this and Maria Vasquez. Read below for further clarification.
The day he found out that his family had been involved with the giant alien robots (NBEs, he was learning to call them - non-biological extraterrestrials) he fumed briefly before deciding that finding out that that supernatural entities were real was more overwhelming then his father’s duty to protect the world from the giant al- NBEs, especially given that the supernatural world had a more immediate impact on his life (i.e. killed the man’s wife).
Time passed. Reg settled into his job comfortably, headed the research division when he wasn’t out hunting down suspected NBE locations and eliminating the supernatural. There were hints of NBEs who had already been on planet for a long time (meaning long before Sector Seven had been started - probably from around the time the world was emerging from the Ice Age, if not farther back). His life narrowed to only the Sector and the few times he came into contact with his family. His father and his twin hadn’t found any more traces of his mother’s killer beyond occasional hints of mysterious deaths of mothers of newborn babies.
He was slowly but steadily falling in love with a fellow researcher. Her name was Maria. Her parents had been from Spain, but they’d migrated to the US, and she’d grown up learning both Spanish and English. There was the barest trace of an accent when she spoke, not that Reg could really bring himself to care (honestly, he probably wouldn’t have cared if she spoke Chinese as long as they both were talking about the same thing). They were the same age, unlikely to marry outside of Sector because there wasn’t enough of a lack of genetic variation to outweigh the security needs, and so Maria Vasquez and Seymour Reginald Simmons were married a year after they’d started seeing each other formally.
*****
Life with the Sector was better than it ever had been. They were pulling even more technology from the Ice Man every day, adapting it to what mankind could safely use at the moment.
Part Three
Thomas Banachek, head of the Advanced Research Division (or at least the part that focused more on researching the structure and technology of the Ice Man/NBE-1), whose office was on the side of the Dam opposite that of one Reginald Simmons, heard faint echoes of screaming and for a moment stared in shock. Then, the radio at the side of his desk buzzed with an incoming message, so he hit the button in hopes of finding out what the situation was.
“Banachek - what’s going on out there?”
“Tomit’sRegyou’rethefirstI’vetoldMaria’s
pregnantandshe thinksitmightbetwinsandI’mgoingtohangupnowbye!”
(His father remarried; his new wife had a deli shop somewhere. Reg never went to the wedding, but sent a sizable monetary gift.)
“Reggie?”
Click.
After a brief silence, Thomas merely sighed and turned back to work.
He’d offer his congratulations to the new father later.
*****
Julie and Rachel Simmons were born healthy, well, and on schedule. Reg fairly glowed for the first five months after they were born, proudly showing off the latest photographs of the girls who had already become known as the Simmons twins. The first call he made to his father and brother revealed that his father was planning to retire from hunting and that his brother had been injured on a hunt - he now had a broken leg - but that the doctors expected him to make a full recovery.
The night of the twins’ six-month birthday, his life came crashing down again.
Reg had not forgotten the stories of his mother’s death, and wisely took all the precautions that he could - salted the doorways, windows, and vents, particularly in the twins’ room, drew a Devil’s Trap on the floor of the nursery (hidden beneath a rug by the baby bassinet, drew another Devil’s Trap by the door to their bedroom, convinced Maria to move the twins to their room the week before, during, and after the twins were six months old (his excuse was that it was easier to take care of the twins that way - he was definitely not going to spoil the truth of his paranoia to his new wife), and, after she went to sleep, manacled one of her arms to him, knowing that he’d always been a lighter sleeper than she had been and therefore able to unlock the manacle if they needed to take care of the twins at night.
In the course of all the careful planning, Reg had failed to take into account one small fact:
Maria Vasquez knew how to pick locks and always kept a lock-pick on her person at all times.
He woke to panic, the twins’ crying muted by distance and walls, and the realization that Maria’s side of the handcuffs lay in bed with him.
Instantly he was out of bed, running through almost-forgotten exorcisms through his head as he grabbed the gun he’d kept stashed under his pillow (that paranoia had been excused due to the nature of his job) and sprinted down the hall.
He found the twins crying in their bed, Maria nowhere in sight, and an odd red stain on the cover.
He recognized the look of fresh blood.
Far too afraid for this type of scenario, he looked up at the ceiling.
The still-living form of his wife stared down at him, eyes wide, chest barely moving, blood spreading from the wound on her stomach and dripping onto his face even as he stared up. The ceiling erupted into flames around her even as he shook his head sharply. Reg had no choice but to grab the twins and run for their lives.
It was every nightmare he’d ever had come to life.
Part Four
Disclaimer: see previous chapters. Note: Maria Vasquez is not intended to be any reflection on Maria Gonzales from the Ghosts of Yesterday novelization.
Reg withdrew to the Hoover base to raise the twins. Being head of the research division allowed him to take care of the twins and do his job at the same time; he’d long since mastered multitasking. Hunting was too dangerous now - he did not want to leave his girls motherless and fatherless. At any rate, he had been training others to hunt so that they could further eliminate threats to national security, and searching out potential NBE locations was safe, but dull, and would require him separating from his girls. That was something he wanted to avoid.
Knowing that fleeing from fire had not brought him the desired results - that he would be able to flee the thing which set him on the path to his present life - Reginald decided that he would take a different tactic:
If you can’t beat them, join them.
This necessitated becoming intimately acquainted with fire - how it worked, what burned faster than others, the smell of smoke, what could be used to start a fire. He taught his daughters to respect fire - respect it, for respect and fear could come in the same package. He dove deeper into the research aspect of his job, created new weapons and gave suggestions for what new weapons could be. He raised his daughters not to be afraid of the dark, taught them how to pack rock salt into cartridges, to lay down salt lines for protection, to never break the lines, to identify what it was that they might end up fighting, and to exorcise demons. New information was coming in through the meticulous network he’d cultivated, information of hunters focused towards hunting a being with yellow eyes.
A yellow-eyed demon.
Once that first information came through, he sent out for checking the information in question, verifying it with at least ten different sources. And what he found changed his world yet again:
John Winchester, father of Sam and Dean Winchester. The Winchester brothers were already quickly becoming infamous, despite the fact that the youngest - Sam - was starting college. He was doing well on his own, too - took care of several poltergeists situated in Palo Alto, California, even as his father and brother worked on their own hunts across the country.
The Winchester wife/mother, Mary, had died when the younger son, Sam, was six months old; died in flame and fire, and John Winchester had reported seeing a shadowy figure with eerie yellow eyes.
So the yellow-eyed figure was a demon, as it turned out. All that remained, then, was finding a method of tracking its movements and then destroying the demon.
The problem was in finding a method of killing that didn’t merely expel the demon from its host.
Years passed, though, with no progress. The techs spread rumors that all the computers were going to crash and declare the date to be 1900 instead of 2000. His girls aged, entered middle school, got to high school, entered college to experience the outside world. Reg found out that his father had been managing Sector operations when he was notified that his half-sister was now unofficial head of the Sector.
Then, in 2007, his world changed yet again.
They’d intercepted a phone call which set off all the flags - a yellow Chevy Camaro, ancient beater, followed its owner around without any visible signs of a human driver, the kid owner insisting that it just ’stood up’. Triumphant, Reginald led the team to Nevada to intercept what they’d dubbed NBE-3 after its landfall some years before and the fiasco with mimicking the Cube’s frequencies.
The night had started out so well . . . but then everything got shot to hell.
NBE-1 was hostile, of course. They’d assumed that all the NBEs would also be hostile, and prepared accordingly.
They’d forgotten about the Ghost-1 mission. The mission which had warned them that more NBEs existed . . . and that there were also good NBEs to go with the bad ones.
(Once everything was over, Reg would look at his life, consider the saying that “to assume makes an ass out of you and me”, and laugh long and hard.)
Despite the initial hitches in taking the humans in question into custody and encountering more NBEs (becoming rather intimately acquainted with the foot of one in his case), they got the humans to the Hoover base. The kid’s parents were sent to a separate room, and the kid and his (hot and so similar to Maria) girlfriend with the military unit who’d fought the NBEs overseas plus the SecDef and the human hackers who’d broken the NBE code all went to see the Ice Man.
Then the little smartass tore his life’s dream apart.
His girls were grown and living in Mission City, just twenty-two miles from the Hoover base, and still occasionally taking trips to see him and hunt down possible locations of their grandmother’s killer. The army captain in charge of the strike unit insisted on taking the Cube to Mission City. He wasn’t stupid; he could do the math. Mission City would have enough buildings to provide decent cover . . . but it would also inevitably lead to civilian casualities.
His girls’ lives would be in danger.
He threw himself into helping the SecDef, recalling the radio he’d nicknamed Maxwell long before, knowing that it worked on shortwave frequencies and still had a chance of reaching a military base. He’d cannibalized the microphone long before, though, and all but forgotten the radio set.
The realization that there was no microphone set his world spinning.
With no military backup, the Sector strike teams would be as good as dead against the NBEs if the others were as well-armored and well-armed as the Ice Man (Megatron) was.
His girls would die.
Reg had never been particularly given over to metaphor, but the chill which ran through his body was rather like being dunked in a tub filled with ice water. (The sad thing was that he knew what it felt like from experience.)
He had never been gladder to hear the blonde speak when she suggested hotwiring the computer to submit Morse Code. The relief which washed over him was enough to outweigh his annoyance at the fat guy for yelling at him to get a screwdriver.
There was still hope. His girls would be safe yet.
Then the little NBE attacked them.
They blockaded the doors quickly. The SecDef went for the ancient shotguns quickly, throwing one at the blonde because the fat guy was in the process of linking the computer to Maxwell. Remembering one of his early requests, Reg ran for the weapon he’d named for his mother.
Fire poured out of the flamethrower as he screamed at the little robot. He was not going to lose his girls - they were all he had left of Maria. He prayed all the while that his actions would make a difference - even with military support, it was stupid to expect that there wouldn’t be civilian casualties, and his girls had been raised knowing about the Sector and his work. They’d be on the scene of the attack as fast as they could, to help take down the NBEs (Decepticons, he had to remember, the Decepticons) and to pull the wounded away where they could.
His girls would survive his death, if he failed.
After everything he’d been through, his life’s dreams shattered repeatedly, he wouldn’t survive theirs.
He prayed to God that his girls would survive. They had to survive. They had to live.
After everything he’d been through, all the good he’d done, despite running from his past, he didn’t particularly care if he died.
His life no longer mattered.
His girls’ lives did.
And that was what counted.
Fin
Author’s Notes
Title: Mother's Legacy, Mother's Curse
Fandom: Supernatural, crossover with Transformers (2007 and 2009)
'Verse: Legacy/Curse'verse
Characters: Reginald Simmons, Seymour Simmons (both separate from each other - they're twins), Simmons' father, OCs,
Rating: T for descriptions of bloody wounds.
Warnings: Alien robots not actually involved until part 4. AU. Deviation from Movieverse canon in that to solve the Reginald/Seymour name debate I made Reginald and Seymour two separate characters - twins. This focuses on Reginald - the "first" name for Simmons in Movieverse.
Summary: Inspired when going through sakon76’s LJ to reread fanfic; found a line about making an icon with Simmons/flamethrower as an OTP. Reginald Simmons has always been fascinated with fire.
Disclaimer: I own none of this.
Notes: Set between movies 1 and 2 of the Transformers series, and any time canon for Supernatural, though preferably before season 5. Draws from both live-action movies of Transformers. Originally posted in 4 parts; breaks will be labeled
Part One
Reginald Simmons has always been fascinated with fire. His preoccupation with flame stems in some way from his mother’s mysterious death when he was six months old. His father claimed that he saw her burning on the ceiling, blood dripping down from a wound in her stomach - but Reginald never really paid much attention to it, deciding that his father had somehow been driven insane via grief.
He believed it, and so did his twin Seymour, until the night they found out that the Closet Monster was real.
Their father burst in and blasted it with his shotgun before ordering them to pack.
The remainder of the Simmons family left their temporary home before it was dawn.
They moved around the country some. Their father left them with friends as often as he could, but occasionally had to take them with him on what he was beginning to call hunts. He never tried to force them into hunting until they showed an interest. Seymour was far more action-oriented, and learned how to shoot every gun in their father’s growing arsenal by the time he was ten. Reginald, who had always been more fascinated with the scientific aspect of the hunt, did the research, looked up cells, and, when demons began showing up, found several exorcisms that they could use.
Reginald graduated on time, as did Seymour. Reginald went to university, pointing out that the larger libraries would give them access to more materials useful for finding more supernatural entities to fight when his twin and father protested. They eventually agreed, albeit grudgingly, and he went off to double-major in history and urban legends of the world (which he did as a custom major).
He was halfway through his schooling when Sector Seven contacted him.
*****
As it turned out, he was perfect for the job. Whenever descriptions of odd things came along, he was assigned to go check it out to tell the difference between supernatural entities and the real alien threat (aliens! GIANT aliens! GIANT alien ROBOTS! It was every true geek’s dream come true.)
Part Two
Disclaimer: I own only the crazy idea which spawned this and Maria Vasquez. Read below for further clarification.
The day he found out that his family had been involved with the giant alien robots (NBEs, he was learning to call them - non-biological extraterrestrials) he fumed briefly before deciding that finding out that that supernatural entities were real was more overwhelming then his father’s duty to protect the world from the giant al- NBEs, especially given that the supernatural world had a more immediate impact on his life (i.e. killed the man’s wife).
Time passed. Reg settled into his job comfortably, headed the research division when he wasn’t out hunting down suspected NBE locations and eliminating the supernatural. There were hints of NBEs who had already been on planet for a long time (meaning long before Sector Seven had been started - probably from around the time the world was emerging from the Ice Age, if not farther back). His life narrowed to only the Sector and the few times he came into contact with his family. His father and his twin hadn’t found any more traces of his mother’s killer beyond occasional hints of mysterious deaths of mothers of newborn babies.
He was slowly but steadily falling in love with a fellow researcher. Her name was Maria. Her parents had been from Spain, but they’d migrated to the US, and she’d grown up learning both Spanish and English. There was the barest trace of an accent when she spoke, not that Reg could really bring himself to care (honestly, he probably wouldn’t have cared if she spoke Chinese as long as they both were talking about the same thing). They were the same age, unlikely to marry outside of Sector because there wasn’t enough of a lack of genetic variation to outweigh the security needs, and so Maria Vasquez and Seymour Reginald Simmons were married a year after they’d started seeing each other formally.
*****
Life with the Sector was better than it ever had been. They were pulling even more technology from the Ice Man every day, adapting it to what mankind could safely use at the moment.
Part Three
Thomas Banachek, head of the Advanced Research Division (or at least the part that focused more on researching the structure and technology of the Ice Man/NBE-1), whose office was on the side of the Dam opposite that of one Reginald Simmons, heard faint echoes of screaming and for a moment stared in shock. Then, the radio at the side of his desk buzzed with an incoming message, so he hit the button in hopes of finding out what the situation was.
“Banachek - what’s going on out there?”
“Tomit’sRegyou’rethefirstI’vetoldMaria’s
pregnantandshe thinksitmightbetwinsandI’mgoingtohangupnowbye!”
(His father remarried; his new wife had a deli shop somewhere. Reg never went to the wedding, but sent a sizable monetary gift.)
“Reggie?”
Click.
After a brief silence, Thomas merely sighed and turned back to work.
He’d offer his congratulations to the new father later.
*****
Julie and Rachel Simmons were born healthy, well, and on schedule. Reg fairly glowed for the first five months after they were born, proudly showing off the latest photographs of the girls who had already become known as the Simmons twins. The first call he made to his father and brother revealed that his father was planning to retire from hunting and that his brother had been injured on a hunt - he now had a broken leg - but that the doctors expected him to make a full recovery.
The night of the twins’ six-month birthday, his life came crashing down again.
Reg had not forgotten the stories of his mother’s death, and wisely took all the precautions that he could - salted the doorways, windows, and vents, particularly in the twins’ room, drew a Devil’s Trap on the floor of the nursery (hidden beneath a rug by the baby bassinet, drew another Devil’s Trap by the door to their bedroom, convinced Maria to move the twins to their room the week before, during, and after the twins were six months old (his excuse was that it was easier to take care of the twins that way - he was definitely not going to spoil the truth of his paranoia to his new wife), and, after she went to sleep, manacled one of her arms to him, knowing that he’d always been a lighter sleeper than she had been and therefore able to unlock the manacle if they needed to take care of the twins at night.
In the course of all the careful planning, Reg had failed to take into account one small fact:
Maria Vasquez knew how to pick locks and always kept a lock-pick on her person at all times.
He woke to panic, the twins’ crying muted by distance and walls, and the realization that Maria’s side of the handcuffs lay in bed with him.
Instantly he was out of bed, running through almost-forgotten exorcisms through his head as he grabbed the gun he’d kept stashed under his pillow (that paranoia had been excused due to the nature of his job) and sprinted down the hall.
He found the twins crying in their bed, Maria nowhere in sight, and an odd red stain on the cover.
He recognized the look of fresh blood.
Far too afraid for this type of scenario, he looked up at the ceiling.
The still-living form of his wife stared down at him, eyes wide, chest barely moving, blood spreading from the wound on her stomach and dripping onto his face even as he stared up. The ceiling erupted into flames around her even as he shook his head sharply. Reg had no choice but to grab the twins and run for their lives.
It was every nightmare he’d ever had come to life.
Part Four
Disclaimer: see previous chapters. Note: Maria Vasquez is not intended to be any reflection on Maria Gonzales from the Ghosts of Yesterday novelization.
Reg withdrew to the Hoover base to raise the twins. Being head of the research division allowed him to take care of the twins and do his job at the same time; he’d long since mastered multitasking. Hunting was too dangerous now - he did not want to leave his girls motherless and fatherless. At any rate, he had been training others to hunt so that they could further eliminate threats to national security, and searching out potential NBE locations was safe, but dull, and would require him separating from his girls. That was something he wanted to avoid.
Knowing that fleeing from fire had not brought him the desired results - that he would be able to flee the thing which set him on the path to his present life - Reginald decided that he would take a different tactic:
If you can’t beat them, join them.
This necessitated becoming intimately acquainted with fire - how it worked, what burned faster than others, the smell of smoke, what could be used to start a fire. He taught his daughters to respect fire - respect it, for respect and fear could come in the same package. He dove deeper into the research aspect of his job, created new weapons and gave suggestions for what new weapons could be. He raised his daughters not to be afraid of the dark, taught them how to pack rock salt into cartridges, to lay down salt lines for protection, to never break the lines, to identify what it was that they might end up fighting, and to exorcise demons. New information was coming in through the meticulous network he’d cultivated, information of hunters focused towards hunting a being with yellow eyes.
A yellow-eyed demon.
Once that first information came through, he sent out for checking the information in question, verifying it with at least ten different sources. And what he found changed his world yet again:
John Winchester, father of Sam and Dean Winchester. The Winchester brothers were already quickly becoming infamous, despite the fact that the youngest - Sam - was starting college. He was doing well on his own, too - took care of several poltergeists situated in Palo Alto, California, even as his father and brother worked on their own hunts across the country.
The Winchester wife/mother, Mary, had died when the younger son, Sam, was six months old; died in flame and fire, and John Winchester had reported seeing a shadowy figure with eerie yellow eyes.
So the yellow-eyed figure was a demon, as it turned out. All that remained, then, was finding a method of tracking its movements and then destroying the demon.
The problem was in finding a method of killing that didn’t merely expel the demon from its host.
Years passed, though, with no progress. The techs spread rumors that all the computers were going to crash and declare the date to be 1900 instead of 2000. His girls aged, entered middle school, got to high school, entered college to experience the outside world. Reg found out that his father had been managing Sector operations when he was notified that his half-sister was now unofficial head of the Sector.
Then, in 2007, his world changed yet again.
They’d intercepted a phone call which set off all the flags - a yellow Chevy Camaro, ancient beater, followed its owner around without any visible signs of a human driver, the kid owner insisting that it just ’stood up’. Triumphant, Reginald led the team to Nevada to intercept what they’d dubbed NBE-3 after its landfall some years before and the fiasco with mimicking the Cube’s frequencies.
The night had started out so well . . . but then everything got shot to hell.
NBE-1 was hostile, of course. They’d assumed that all the NBEs would also be hostile, and prepared accordingly.
They’d forgotten about the Ghost-1 mission. The mission which had warned them that more NBEs existed . . . and that there were also good NBEs to go with the bad ones.
(Once everything was over, Reg would look at his life, consider the saying that “to assume makes an ass out of you and me”, and laugh long and hard.)
Despite the initial hitches in taking the humans in question into custody and encountering more NBEs (becoming rather intimately acquainted with the foot of one in his case), they got the humans to the Hoover base. The kid’s parents were sent to a separate room, and the kid and his (hot and so similar to Maria) girlfriend with the military unit who’d fought the NBEs overseas plus the SecDef and the human hackers who’d broken the NBE code all went to see the Ice Man.
Then the little smartass tore his life’s dream apart.
His girls were grown and living in Mission City, just twenty-two miles from the Hoover base, and still occasionally taking trips to see him and hunt down possible locations of their grandmother’s killer. The army captain in charge of the strike unit insisted on taking the Cube to Mission City. He wasn’t stupid; he could do the math. Mission City would have enough buildings to provide decent cover . . . but it would also inevitably lead to civilian casualities.
His girls’ lives would be in danger.
He threw himself into helping the SecDef, recalling the radio he’d nicknamed Maxwell long before, knowing that it worked on shortwave frequencies and still had a chance of reaching a military base. He’d cannibalized the microphone long before, though, and all but forgotten the radio set.
The realization that there was no microphone set his world spinning.
With no military backup, the Sector strike teams would be as good as dead against the NBEs if the others were as well-armored and well-armed as the Ice Man (Megatron) was.
His girls would die.
Reg had never been particularly given over to metaphor, but the chill which ran through his body was rather like being dunked in a tub filled with ice water. (The sad thing was that he knew what it felt like from experience.)
He had never been gladder to hear the blonde speak when she suggested hotwiring the computer to submit Morse Code. The relief which washed over him was enough to outweigh his annoyance at the fat guy for yelling at him to get a screwdriver.
There was still hope. His girls would be safe yet.
Then the little NBE attacked them.
They blockaded the doors quickly. The SecDef went for the ancient shotguns quickly, throwing one at the blonde because the fat guy was in the process of linking the computer to Maxwell. Remembering one of his early requests, Reg ran for the weapon he’d named for his mother.
Fire poured out of the flamethrower as he screamed at the little robot. He was not going to lose his girls - they were all he had left of Maria. He prayed all the while that his actions would make a difference - even with military support, it was stupid to expect that there wouldn’t be civilian casualties, and his girls had been raised knowing about the Sector and his work. They’d be on the scene of the attack as fast as they could, to help take down the NBEs (Decepticons, he had to remember, the Decepticons) and to pull the wounded away where they could.
His girls would survive his death, if he failed.
After everything he’d been through, his life’s dreams shattered repeatedly, he wouldn’t survive theirs.
He prayed to God that his girls would survive. They had to survive. They had to live.
After everything he’d been through, all the good he’d done, despite running from his past, he didn’t particularly care if he died.
His life no longer mattered.
His girls’ lives did.
And that was what counted.
Fin
Author’s Notes