A fanfiction that's been a long time coming...

[lstarrunner]

Title: Preferred Means of Communication, sequel to Exercise in Translation

Rating: PG-13 for adult issues and implied xenosexuality.

Pairing: Bumblebee/Mitzi York.

Notes: Only Mitzi York and her family are original. Transformers & Firefly/Serenity belong to corporations, not me. 5050 words.

Bumblebee reviewed the longest email Mitzi had ever sent him. Written to him while she was on travel for work, it contained details about her life that anchored her in humanity, to his way of thinking. Her extended family relationships are foreign, he thought, Like learning a new language. For a mech from Vector Sigma, understanding attachment to one's creator was a mental leap, achievable, but only really when he got to know a created spark, like Seaspray. Mitzi's connectedness to her family, especially siblings who had very little personally in common with her - completely unlike friends - was a challenge, an abstraction for him. So much of our interaction is abstract, really, he thought. The main thread of our conversations is a fiction, a television fantasy about people who don't exist. Except for her word-choice, and her spelling, she could be another Autobot Browncoat, like Jazz or Blaster. But even when we discuss Patience or Badger, we learn about each other then, too, he had explained this to his friends enough times that the follow-up to the criticism 'those people you have in common don't exist' was automatic: we use them to discuss concepts, and we find we have understanding and attitudes in common.

"Dear Bumblebee," she had written, "You ask me so many questions, and I feel like I only half answer them most of the time."

"I told you about Chris," the father of her little boy, "but I don't think I can exaggerate the impact he had on my interaction with men since. Chris is a good guy, but he's still a kid, himself. How do I explain that? He is my age, physically," Bumblebee knew they met in college, attending classes together their first year there, "but he may never settle down. I don't think it's in his nature. He's fun to be around, but, he is the center of his universe, if that makes any sense. Not that I'd ask anyone to make me, or even our child, the center of his universe, but, I'm not going to act like he's the center of mine, either. Even before I got pregnant, I had plenty of responsibility. He was fun. Neither of us wanted our relationship to be any more serious than it was, and we were together as a couple longer than a lot of people who do get married."

"My mom still nags me about it sometimes, knowing that he offered and I turned him down."

"Was that stupid? Or selfish? She says it was both, when she gets mad at me. But Chris wouldn't have been happy, white boy with conservative parents married to a black girl," it was hard for Bumblebee to remember that humans, whose colors really were all shades of brown, set great importance on it, claiming different colors were different races. It was only the beginning of Mitzi's thought, "and there's enough politics in baseball that he might've blamed his lack of career in it on me and Byron, eventually. And I wouldn't have been happy: if we'd gotten married, I probably wouldn't have finished college, and then where would I be? Probably divorced, living on alimony and welfare with no prospect of a job like I've got now. I know that last year of school was a lot harder because I had Byron, and Ma had to spend a lot of time in Texas-" where she went to college, "-helping me with him, but we lived through it. And with Chris getting a slot on a minor league team back home (he's from back east, outside of D.C.) and transferring over there for his senior year, it would have been worse if we had gotten married."

Bumblebee didn't think Mitzi was anything but reasonable. Human cultures' insistence on bonding permanently, or at least exclusively, with a partner with whom they created a sparkling, mystified him. Most Cybertronian bonds were temporary, lasting only until the creators' sparks recovered and their shared bond with the creation faded. Some bonded permanently, but it was almost unheard of since the latest upheaval decimated the Autobots. Several cultures here insist on bonding permanently before even initiating any intimacy, he mused. Bumblebee remembered how weird it was to watch Spike and Carly dance around each other, pretending in front of everyone else that they didn't know each other perfectly well before they got married, and then almost carrying on that pretense out of habit afterward. Repression, at its most pervasive, he thought, trying to regulate not only the creation of offspring but personal relationships.

Mitzi explained her current life. "Ma doesn't want to admit it, but she likes it here in LA. She misses Marley," he knew that was Mitzi's sibling closest to her age, which was significant for them, "but Marley's doing okay in Shreveport, got a job as a receptionist at an oil field office and a boyfriend who treats her well. She hated school. Only Ma was surprised when she dropped out after two years." He could imagine her shrug at that point, with her mostly live-and-let-live attitude. "She won't ever make the kind of money I will, and do already, but she probably won't have to, with her life likely to be closer to what Ma imagined for us all than she'd ever admit: married to a stable man, making enough money herself to feed her kids. Ma acts like she'd have been perfectly happy with me if I had dropped out of school to marry Chris and go with him, as the good little wife. I know the woman, though: she'd have picked at me, the same as she does now, to get back to school and earn as much money as possible, anyway, always nervous about how we'd pay for Marley and Joy-" her youngest sibling, "-to got to college."

"We all like LA. I landed this job at Boeing, and Ma didn't want to move from Louisiana, but she didn't like the idea of Byron in day care all day every day, and it's working out. Really well, really. I don't think we'd have got Joy in school if she'd stayed around home-" Minden, Louisiana, Bumblebee knew that was 'home' if Mitzi didn't obviously mean Los Angeles, "-because those friends of hers were all, well, skanky." He assumed that was highly derogatory by context. "I mean, at least working at the casino or flipping burgers is honest work, but I know that Jamie she adored so much was dealing drugs in the parking lot. She was on something when Ma moved them out here, and I thought for sure she'd run away to get back there, but she didn't. Marley told her in no uncertain terms how her life would be if she wanted to stay with her: Marley's a bit of an extorcionist, maybe," he had to smile at her spelling there, because spell-check would have caught that, if she'd used it, "but she thought cleaning the apartment for her would be a great way for Joy to pay rent. Lord knows none of Joy's no-good friends could take her in."

"Joy doesn't even clean up after herself, yet, Bee, and Ma never made her, and I don't complain because Ma cleans most of our flat herself, better than I could do if it were just me and Byron here. And Joy likes LA, dreams big now, wants to work in movies, be a set designer and prop master. She's going to school now, and even did well enough her first semester to get a little scholarship to help with her next year at El Camino community college. We've got Byron in kindergarten now, and Ma found a place to work as a hair dresser part-time, which I swear gives her more energy than staying at home ever did."

"It dawned on me the other day, that my mother is still a relatively young woman, herself. My mentor at work, who seems older than her in my eyes, is only forty-three. Ma's forty-five this year. She could run rings around John-" Mitzi's team lead and mentor, "-and he's got kids who are all younger than Joy. His youngest is only a couple years older than Byron. Generations seem to run totally different among engineers than I'm used to, Bee. My momma was a grandma around the time John and his wife were having their last baby."

Then she fell to musing about his people. She didn't say, 'your kind,' or 'your species,' as so many of the humans who knew about them seemed to: she called them 'your people,' or 'your race,' when she didn't use the word 'Cybertronian'. She seemed to regard 'transformer' as equivalent to 'human', and made jokes about 'vulcans' such that he had to read up on Star Trek to make sure he got them; she used 'Cybertronian' as similar to 'American' as if it were a cultural origin, as if it were no more alien to her than 'Chinese' or 'Hindu'. She had asked him to spell out the places of his origin - planet and continent and locality - for her on more than one occasion.

She still misspelled them regularly, not that he didn't recognize them anyway, and not that there was any direct correlation between the English rendering and the original Cybertronian word. There's no connection between my name, his original name in his processor, and 'Bumblebee', except that I claim it as mine. Still, he chuckled when he read her personal versions of those names: she typed this letter on a company laptop on an airplane, and sent it as an attachment to an empty email as soon as she was connected to the internet. She added them to her own machine's spell check, he knew, but the unfamiliar computer didn't have them. So, "How do generations fall within Sybertronion families?" she asked, and, "You seem real comfortable with the ideas of sex and gender as we have them and babies as we make them here, but, do Sybertronion people reproduce sexually somehow? You refer to all your friends in your unit as 'he', actually all the transformers you've ever mentioned have been 'he' when you didn't use names. Do you have women? Or, do your people just build new ones when you have time and resources for it? Talking to you, you seem no more different to me than any other person from Earth who was raised in a different culture than me. That would be kind of a big deal, though, all men, male. But WTF, you think more like I do than a lot of the people I grew up with. Even my family doesn't get the whole Browncoat draw. Joy enjoys the show, and started going to shindigs with me with the local Browncoats, but Marley and Ma don't like anything a bit science fiction-like, and Ma figured out what Inara's 'honest living' was immediately when I tried to get her to watch the first episode and refused to watch any more after that."

"I think it was too close to someone she knew as a kid, who ran away to New Orleans. She never told me much about her, growing up, but her friend wanted more than Bossier City had to offer back then. Ma grew up in Bossier City, and her and Dad bought a little house in Minden after they got married." Mitzi had told him all about her father earlier, who was killed when she was thirteen: hence, her sense of parental responsibility for her sisters. "Now that we're in LA, and she feels what draws people out here from all over the country, she's talked about Shirley at least half a dozen times. 'Shirley would've liked it here,' she says. I know she'll tell me the whole story eventually, but I think she does know what happened to Shirley because the first time she said that, I said that Shirley may have come out here after making some money in New Orleans, and Ma said "no". Just no, like she knows that didn't happen, for a fact."

"I kind of got the impression that Shirley either started out, or ended up, a prostitute. And it isn't like in the Firefly 'verse, where the oldest profession is respected, even a little. Nobody sets out to become one, and there's no school like Inara taught at."

"I guess not many folks become what they set out to be, though."

"Did you want to be a soldier, Bumblebee? I don't want to bring it up if it makes you sad, but I didn't always want to be an engineer, and didn't have any idea there was such a thing as a thermal analyst, even when I chose my major at college. I wanted to be a veterinarian or a business owner, but I didn't like biology or chemistry 101, and the two business classes I took were just too boring to take more like them. Not hard, not challenging or interesting at all, and cook-booky, formulaeic." Mitzi's spelling. "I was- am -good at math, and really enjoyed the programming class I had, and when I told my counselor after my first semester that I wanted something that had the same feel as working with my dad on his car when I was a kid, she suggested I declare myself a mechanical engineering major so I could take the freshman level survey course and lab. That department didn't allow non-majors in their courses, and I could always transfer back out if I decided I didn't like it. I think that survey course was the most fun I'd had in school since that shop class in high school." He had to do a little research to understand that statement, too. "Really. And when I got in thermodynamics and had to exercise judgment just to get close to the right answer, I loved it. Programming came easy to me, cook-booky but a structure to create in, so ... here I am."

"You referred to having a processor as an analog to me having a brain," she referred to something he'd said, the one time they met in person. "Do your people learn new subjects by downloading the information? I mean, I watched you learn some new things while we were together," he couldn't help but picture the knowing smile she'd given him when she said almost exactly that to him before they said good-bye that day, "but experience is different from education. At least, for humans. Is it that way for transformers? But, what I'm wondering, what is 'school' for your race? Since you mentioned you have specialties, like you and Jazz are in recon, and you have a medic, a comm officer and a commander, you must know different things. How did you come to that? Did you have any freedom to choose," he knew that was particularly important to her, in her own life, "or were you built for it, programmed for it? Or, is it less organized than I imagine, more like the Browncoats or SWE," she named her engineers' volunteer group, the Society of Women Engineers, that seemed to do for her what the other Minibots did for him, "where you see a need and fill it, if you're able, and if no one sees it, or is capable of doing it, it just doesn't get done? That doesn't sound very militaristic to me, but I guess there's no reason to assume your military is as regimented as I think ours is. What's your turn-over rate like? You said your people pretty much live until someone kills them," she repeated a simplification he'd offered her when his explanation of Cybertronian life-spans proved overly detailed, "so, do you just do the job you've got until either you die or someone in an even more necessary job does, and you have to step up to fill the gap?"

"Just gave myself a chill, there. Hope I didn't write something too touchy. Let me know if I did, and I won't go there again." She was always trying to be considerate and think about what she said, what she asked. He did the same.

He enjoyed the way she signed off, in her emails, this particular letter, and most of their instant message conversations: TTYL <3 U - MAY for "talk to you later, love you, Mitzi Ambrosia York".

-X-X-X-

Their chances to have instant message conversations were limited mostly by Mitzi's commitments. Bumblebee's most common duty was on console in the communication center, so when he had the PM duty, noon to midnight, he could be logged in all evening and catch her for a few minutes if she found time to log in.

Since he was on restriction, he cultivated a lot of favors, trading duty with anyone who asked him, and standing other Autobots' shifts very often, telling them up front that as soon as he was off restriction and found a time when Jazz had no missions planned for him, he'd call on them to spot him so he could have a few weeks off. Mitzi was planning a camping trip specifically so they could have private time together.

After her business trip, she was particularly busy the rest of the week, conscious of making up for lost time with Byron and then having an evening meeting of her SWE section that kept her out too late and saw her turn in very early the following night. She logged in for a few minutes most nights, and neither of them worried about the days they missed each other. Even a short conversation was cherished.

The night she got home from Washington, D.C., he caught her for a few minutes as he stood Sunstreaker's comm duty:

-ZoeSister- Hey Bee.
-Bumblebee- Hi Mitzi! How was your trip?
-ZoeSister- OK. Nothing special.
-Bumblebee- Thank you for the long letter.
-ZoeSister- My pleasuer, Honey.
-Bumblebee- You must have been up very early today to be home already.
He could tell she was very tired when she started getting letters out of order, different from her generally bad spelling.
-ZoeSister- Yes. Flight left Regan airport at 6:30 am, Eastern time
That was just her misspelling Reagan, he knew.
-ZoeSister- so 3:30 our tiem.
-Bumblebee- I bet Byron was glad to see you.
-ZoeSister- Yes.
-Bumblebee- You asked some questions in your letter...
-Bumblebee-...would you like me to try to answer some of them now, or reply to your e-mail?
-ZoeSister- Thankyou Bee.
-ZoeSister- email best
-Bumblebee- Thank you for logging in tonight.
-ZoeSister- No problem! I missed you the last few days. Miss yuo in general.
-Bumblebee- Missed you too.
-ZoeSister- Write me that email, ok? I gotta goto sleep.
-Bumblebee- I'll do that.
-ZoeSister- TTYL <3U - MAY
-Bumblebee- <3 U 2.

He hadn't noticed when he started replying to her with that, "love you, too," it meant, but it felt like the right thing to send.

-X-X-X-

As the end of Bumblebee's restriction neared, their outing became a reality: Mitzi sent him a pre-paid cell phone so they could talk once in a while.

They had to keep their calls short, both because Mitzi really couldn't afford to put a lot of money on the phone and because Red Alert called all radio frequency communication with the human world a security breach. Mitzi insisted that she understood that, and would keep the conversations short, limited to the things she "needed to hear about."

Setting differential importance on communication methods was another thing they had in common: interaction in person first, followed by real-time voice, then real-time text, with written one-way communication last.

Video chat was specifically prohibited by Red Alert: Bumblebee did ask. The security director would have prohibited instant messaging and email if Prowl would agree to it. Bumblebee wasn't the only Autobot with an internet life, though, and Prowl relied on email in his dealings with government agencies who had gotten farther and farther from phone calls and faxes over the years they had been interacting, so Red Alert's campaign against email was dead before he thought of it. Jazz went to bat for Bumblebee on the instant messaging front, claiming he liked that idea himself, of chatting real-time with humans who shared his love of music. Bumblebee also knew Jazz kept up with a couple of anarchists' forums and found the lag of personal messages within the site annoying when he really wanted to know something, and the entity with the answer was just on the other end of the web. In fact, Bumblebee knew Jazz's last two successful sorties to put a stop to the Decepticons' latest weapons development had been built around human-designed explosives he'd discussed with conspirators on the internet.

Phone calls for other than base business took some fast talking on Bumblebee's part, even though he never suggested using the hard-won Ark phone line to talk to Mitzi.

He got to speak to Mitzi three times while he was confined to the base.

The day he received the package via Spike, they talked too long for Red Alert's comfort out of sheer pleasure of hearing each other's voices, for only the second time. He realized afterward that all she'd really wanted was that personal, real-time confirmation that he liked the idea of the private outing. Neither of them wanted to hang up, though. He looked up when he felt more than heard Red Alert stand over him where he was at the limit of the Ark entryway - the only place the little communicator got a signal. Unashamed, completely comfortable confirming for Red Alert what he knew was rumored in the Ark, he signed off first, saying to Mitzi in Red Alert's hearing, "In case I haven't said it clearly, I love you. See you soon."

Red Alert looked like he might go into processor lock.

Mitzi had not expected that, he knew. "I-" she hesitated, speaking completely different from typing. Bumblebee imagined he could hear processors stall on her end of the line, too. "Oh, Honey! I love you, too. Talk to you later."

They hung up before Red Alert recovered himself enough to complain.

The second time was the day Mitzi's grandmother back in Louisiana died. "I need to lean on someone a few minutes," she explained, having called him and gotten the voicemail because he was in his quarters in the Ark when she called. He called her back as soon as the message got through, somehow penetrating the mountain to trigger the phone while he was in the galley. It vibrated against the wall of his auto-mode glove-box, startling him. His friends gave him a strange look when he stopped talking mid-sentence, startled by the unfamiliar sensation from the otherwise inert lump he'd carried for over a month at that point. He couldn't listen to the voicemail there, because the signal didn't penetrate well enough to let him, so he had to excuse himself from their company. None of them were bothered by it, but he knew they'd ask him about it when he returned.

It was not a fun conversation. She'd called him nearly two hours before, and had just finished making the arrangements to take several days off work. She was driving home from the office when he got through to her. "Can't talk now, driving," she said, and he thought her voice was hard, like Jazz taking reluctant command during a crisis. "Can I call you back in fifteen minutes? Will you be where you get a signal?"

"Yes, I'll wait right here," he said, and she must have heard him because she closed the connection.

True to his word, he was still at the entrance of the Ark when she called him back, thirteen minutes twenty-four seconds later.

As soon as he asked her what was wrong, she started to cry. He recognized the sounds from human media, like Inara's sobs in Heart of Gold. Gone were the matter-of-fact tone of the message she'd left initially and the terse one she'd used to tell him she was driving minutes before. "My momma," she sobbed, "she's a wreck. She was worried about Gramma," he recognized that short-form of 'grandmother', "for months but we didn't have money to fly her out there and have someone watch Byron. She was gonna go when Joy had time off at the end of the semester. And Joy's mad-sad, blamin' me that we weren't in Louisiana to be with her when she died. And," she hiccoughed a little, "I'm sorry. I haveta get a grip. Get a grip so I can be their rock in this. Gotta absorb Joy's anger, and Momma's grief, and explain to Byron that his Mommy's Ma'amaw is gone, who was his Ma'amaw's mommy," Bumblebee followed that explanation of relation well enough, but felt a bit overwhelmed for the child's sake. Mitzi kept going, "and not get him all upset over a woman he don't remember. And Marley-" She breathed heavily. "Ya'll deal with death all the time, even though you shouldn't have to..." where she was going with that, Bumblebee could only guess.

"It's okay," he said when she didn't finish her thought, cradling the phone gently against his primary audio receiver, "it'll be okay. Everyone who lives, dies. Whether it's from age, and the body breaking down from wear, or from damage, body destroyed early, it's always hard on the," he almost said 'brothers-in-arms', "family left behind. Only the body is dead," he generalized, quickly reviewing the archive he'd built about her heritage, cultural and religious, "the spark, the soul, moves on." He knew her family would need a formal ceremony to deal with the loss. "Do you need help with arrangements?" he refrained from saying 'disposal of the body', which was always a problem for Cybertronians whenever there were grieving close associates to satisfy and time for their wishes to matter. "I have duty all afternoon today. I can get on-line, make reservations, whatever you think can be done that way." How else could I offer to help?

He heard her take a ragged, deep breath. She repeated him, and he understood she was making the words her own. "It'll be okay," she said, "Only the body is dead, the soul just moves on." She was still crying, but quieter. "Yeah. Thank you, Honey." He heard her make a sound that had to be the clearing of her nasal passages as crying humans always had to do, to get the leaked coolant out of their airways.

"What can I do to help?" he asked again.

"You're already doing it, 'Bee, Sweetness," she said, and he didn't understand. "Lettin' me lean on you a minute, and grieve a little, and get a grip." She was breathing heavily, trying to cool overheating internals, to his way of thinking.

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah, or," she took a deep, steady breath that sounded a lot better than any of her speech that day, "I will be. Thank you. I'm sorry for laying this on you like this. But I haveta go, take care of my family here, okay?" She asked a question but didn't stop for an answer, "Thank you. I love you, 'Bee."

"I love you, too," he said, and heard one who had to be her mother in the background before the connection died. Even when we see it coming, death is hard on the ones who care, he thought. Some things are universal.

The third time they spoke on the phone, Red Alert was back in New York, so Bumblebee didn't feel compelled to terminate the connection at all. "I can talk until either you get tired of me or the battery runs out," he said, and they both laughed.

"Now, Honey," she mock-chided him, he could hear the laughter hiding in her voice, "don't offer if you don't mean it."

It was the best conversation they'd had yet, and neither of them was ready to hang up when Mitzi's absolute-must-be-in-bed time rolled around.

"I have to pretend to be a responsible adult," she sighed, "gotta be the grown-up and go to work tomorrow."

Bumblebee didn't know what to say to that. "I hope I don't make your duty harder," he offered.

"No, you make it easier," she countered, "you don't make any demands on my time, you are nothing but helpful, and I-" she paused, as if considering her next words carefully, "'Bee, it's weird, but I rely on you. We never miss each other more than two nights in a row, so I know we will chat very soon, no matter what. The only time we didn't, you told me about it in advance, so I knew not to worry, and... it means a lot to me, that you gave me your boss's contact information," Jazz's email address and the Ark phone line, which he made her promise to only use if she hadn't heard from him or Jazz for a month, "so if the time you were supposed to get back passed, I could at least find out what happened. That's-" she paused, and Bumblebee would have sworn she was crying, "that's very considerate of you. More so than anybody I'm not related to has ever been, really. You offered that, planned ahead, and it really," she paused again.

Into that silence, Bumblebee almost spoke, but Mitzi finished her thought, "That really made me feel like I matter to you."

"You do."

"Yeah. Thank you for that, 'Bee. You don't have to tell me, 'cause you manage to show me, even though we haven't seen each other in almost six months, and only met once, face-to-face."

Her absolute-must-be-in-bed time passed, and they kept talking until the lags between his comments and hers grew so long he thought she had fallen asleep on him. "I think my batteries have run down," she yawned, "forget the phone's."

"Go," he said, mimicking something Kaylee said, "sleep tight, don't let the space-bugs bite!"

She smiled, and her voice carried it to him as she also mimicked Kaylee, he imagined he could hear the requisite eye-roll, too: "Space-bugs?"

They laughed and signed off, both looking forward to some much-needed liberty and an opportunity to communicate one-on-one.

As of 04DEC2008, this fic has a sequel: Universal Concepts.