Confessional, Part 2
Title: Confessional
Rating: PG
Warnings: Smooching. And Beethoven.
Main Character(s): Prowl, Sunfall the Dreaded OC
Genre: Angsty Romance
Summary: Sunfall, freaking out as usual. Why? Because Prowl kissed her. HORRORS!
Part 1
The soft, slow strains of the second movement of Beethoven's third piano concerto washed over me, the flutes and the violins laying down a lyrical, longing melody that soared above muted, slurred arpeggios in the low strings. It was soothing. And at the moment, I needed soothing.
I was keyed up, as usual, post-battle. It would be hours before I was entirely settled and calm again. This, though, was entirely normal. I'd experienced it thousands of times before and would, no doubt, experience it thousands more times in the future.
I was also more than a little uncomfortable, thanks to the stinging but mostly superficial laser burns that marred the width of one door panel as well as the front of one shoulder. They weren't serious enough to bother Ratchet and the other medics with yet, occupied as they were with the seriously and critically wounded. They might be so occupied for the next couple of hours, even, by which time the burns might very well have taken care of themselves. This, too, was normal.
But then there was Sunfall. She was abnormal. Or rather, she had a singular talent for making me abnormal. Try as I might, I couldn't seem to erase from my mind the look on her face as she’d pulled away from me in the Control Room. Her expression had been half pleased and half...something. Upset? Confused? Betrayed, even? Interpreting others' emotions was, to say the least, not my forte, so I still didn't know, even after having spent the last hour or so thinking about nothing else, here in the relative safety and sanctity of my office. Usually when I thought about something in that kind of methodical way, I could puzzle it out. I could organize and mentally label every aspect of any situation appropriately, place all of the elements of whatever was bothering me where they needed to go in my mind until everything was all neatly and rigidly compartmentalized, until everything made logical, rational sense.
Sunfall never made logical, rational sense, no matter how much I tried to make her make sense. Sometimes, I perversely wondered if that exact quality was what made her attractive to me, on the theory that opposites supposedly attracted. If that was the case, it was…strange.
The very reason I'd gotten along with Claire and her brother Chip in the first place was because they, uniquely amongst the few humans I'd gotten to know well, usually made sense. For all that the two siblings had their differences otherwise - one a cerebral and somewhat straight-laced scientist expert in many diverse fields, the other an artistic, free-spirited musician - they both had a talent for making sense, for not being bizarrely…well, human, as every other human seemed to be. Perhaps this made them abnormal amongst their own kind - Chip, at least, had often said that he had more Autobot friends than he had human ones - but it made them excellent companions for me. Their presence didn't ruffle me even in the long term as the presence of, say, Spike, often did even in the short term, even if he didn't say anything. It wasn’t Spike’s fault; he just had an energy about him that nagged at me and that the Chase siblings entirely lacked. I could - and often had - spent hours with one or the other of them for various reasons, and not only had I not felt ruffled but I had actually enjoyed myself immensely.
But Sunfall wasn't entirely Claire. She had a good chunk of Claire's memories and a number of her unconscious mannerisms, the latter of which was distinctly disturbing at times. She had Claire's wide, bright smile, her lilting laugh. She had Claire's sometimes perverse and always dry sense of humor and also her temper and her tendency to hold stubbornly to grudges. And when Claire was dominant rather than co-dominant or entirely receded, those things brightly shined through in Sunfall, like sunshine piercing storm clouds.
But those occasions were rare now and were only becoming rarer. As time went on, as Sunfall settled into life, the blended personality of Claire and Sunfall was the one usually in control, unless one or the other of them was deeply distressed for whatever reason. It was a deliberate compromise between the two of them. It was the only way, so Sunfall herself had told me, that they could live peacefully together, long-term, sharing a single body.
Yet, many of the Autobots still saw Sunfall simply as Claire, forgetting that Claire was but one facet of Sunfall. But for a select few, like Wheeljack, they didn’t seem to realize that Sunfall was an individual all her own. She had her own strengths and weaknesses and a personality that in many ways wasn't Claire's at all. She had opinions, likes, and dislikes that differed from Claire’s. She had a penetrating intelligence, a sharp wit, and an equally sharp tongue on occasion. She was more deeply observant and occasionally far more cynical and sarcastic than Claire had ever been. For all that she was basically brand new, she was more mature than Claire had been at her death, and she was already world-weary on occasion, likely a by-product of her circumstances.
And as Sunfall had begun to discover herself over the eight months of her life so far, I had simultaneously discovered an appreciation for Sunfall as Sunfall, completely separate from Claire. Sunfall not being Claire was actually freeing in some ways, albeit vastly confusing and disquieting in many other ways, and the confusion and the disquiet prevented me from telling Sunfall how I…felt.
I had, admittedly, been developing deeper feelings for Claire a few months prior to her death. The emotions had been unfamiliar and therefore unsettling, and it had taken me quite a while to admit to myself that I'd had them at all. Once I'd made that admission, I'd spent long hours trying to figure out what, exactly, to do with the emotions. I had eventually come to the conclusion that to do anything about them at all was ultimately futile, that all possible courses of action could only end badly. Even if things worked out perfectly, Claire would be dead in a matter of five or six decades. Human life spans registered as a few blinks of an eye on the Cybertronian time scale, and to become entangled with so ephemeral a creature was asking for emotional turmoil that I wasn’t sure that I could handle. Distance from everyone had its distinct advantages. It meant less pain. It was selfish, perhaps, but it had served me well.
Still, I'd been entertaining thoughts of going ahead anyway, somehow. A small but vocal part of me argued that I was fighting a war and that because of that there was no guarantee at all that I would outlive Claire. So, this part of me argued, both of us should take what we could get while we could get it. I had been edging ever closer to accepting this argument, day by day, had even begun tentatively formulating a plan to put the logic to good use, but there had still been doubts in my mind. Manifold doubts. So, I had said nothing to Claire, thinking that I had time to carefully resolve all of the issues in my mind before adding her into the equation.
But in reality I hadn’t had any time at all. Suddenly and unexpectedly, Claire had been killed. As painful and as difficult as that had been for me, there had also been, briefly, a sense of guilty relief. I had thought that Claire’s death would put an end to disturbing and crippling doubt and indecision, two things that I otherwise never experienced. I had thought that I could move on, that I could simply clamp down further on my emotions and, this time, never let anyone in again. Ever. I could truly become the cold and unfeeling individual that many perceived me to be. The notion was greatly appealing, actually.
Except that the indecision hadn’t ended at all. I’d had a few weeks of a reprieve, but then, reborn as part of an Autobot, Claire had, in a way, continued to plague me. Or maybe “plague” was too negative of a word. Emotions were not my forte, so when the more troubling amongst them assaulted me, I did tend to think of them as little plagues, indeed. But Sunfall wasn't a plague.
At first, I'd been attracted to her because, like practically everyone else, I had seen her simply as what was left of Claire, and I had wanted to cling to that for entirely selfish reasons. There had been all sorts of simple if/then logic involved. If Sunfall was Claire, then Claire was still alive. If Sunfall was Claire, then I could forgive myself for my part in her death because she hadn’t really died at all. If Sunfall was Claire, then I could still be a part of Claire’s life and she could continue to be a part of mine. The if/thens were comforting. It was classic, basic logic resting firmly on what I had thought was a valid premise. It was soothing in its simplicity, like the Beethoven piece that was playing.
But slowly, as Sunfall had come into her own, I had begun to recognize her as the new and different individual that she was, and I realized that the premise upon which I’d been basing my logic - that Sunfall was Claire - was flawed. Worse, I’d found myself beginning to deeply appreciate Sunfall for her own merits. The problem was that, once that had happened, there was no longer any simple, reasonable if/then logic to the attraction. Rather, the attraction was something that simply existed for no apparent reason, and this, more than anything, was disturbing.
So rather than being freed of pesky, annoying emotions and the inconvenient and sometimes paralyzing attachments that they wrought, they were instead only intensifying at a rate proportional to the amount of time that I spent in Sunfall's company. Realizing this, I'd very logically attempted to avoid her as much as possible for a while, but I had discovered that to do so was impossible because I had found myself seeking her out anyway, against my own better judgment. The result was that I felt completely out of control at times, which was even more disturbing than an attachment that had no logical basis. So, if I avoided Sunfall I found that I was more disturbed than I was if I just went ahead and spent time with her. It made no sense. Whatsoever.
When I had mentioned this to Wheeljack once, he’d said that often the hallmark of love, when it was truly real, was precisely that it made no sense whatsoever. I had chewed on that for a good long time; it still wasn’t sitting well with me, although I was beginning to believe that it was true.
The trouble was that I had difficulty discussing emotions and attraction, much less expressing such things. Particularly, I had trouble talking about such things with Sunfall herself. This was compounded by the fact that I knew that Sunfall was wary of me, that she thought that I was interested in her only because of Claire, and I hadn’t yet had the courage to disabuse her of that notion. She resented the automatic assumption that she was simply Claire in a different body, and more and more as time went by, I could understand her resentment. She was quite obviously frustrated by the fact that she was, in a way, not in control of her own life, that she was almost being compelled to live someone else’s life, that those around her only seemed to appreciate her because of Claire rather than for her own myriad merits. I could relate to the feeling of out-of-controlness, and I found that I could empathize with everything else, even though empathy was emphatically not one of my strong suits.
But the empathy, among other things, drew me to Sunfall. Sometimes, now, I found myself forgetting that Claire was a part of her at all. It had been a while since the last time I had looked at her and had seen not the striking Autobot that she was but a small, fragile human female with big, soulful brown eyes. Now, I tended to see only the Autobot, fine-limbed, intelligent, standing out in a crowd thanks to her brilliant coloration, deep gold melting into burnt orange melting into deep crimson. She was just Sunfall to me now, and when I was honest with myself, I could admit that she was very, very dear to me. Every aspect of her, as disturbing and intriguing and occasionally annoying as she was, was very, very dear to me.
I had tried to make her see that today, in the Control Room, as she had walked up to me, smiling a bright, wide, beautiful smile that was undeniably Claire's, as she had wrapped her arms around me in relief. “They” said that actions spoke louder than words, and I had taken “their” advice.
I shouldn’t have. Because, after a few long moments of a very enjoyable kiss, during which even the presence of a loud and enthusiastic audience had faded away until I was aware only of Sunfall, warm and willing in my arms, she'd broken the kiss, apparently in something of a panic. She’d backed away from me, her eyes wide with shock and, I thought, not a little fear, and then she had almost literally run away from me. Backwards. My attempts to find her afterwards, so that I could talk to her, had failed. I’d made the rounds of all of her usual haunts, the target range and Wheeljack’s lab amongst them, and she had been nowhere to be found. So, I had retreated to my office, my mind in an unaccustomed whirl.
It was still in a whirl, and the whirl was intensifying rather than settling down. Thinking and attempting to rationalize the situation was not solving my problem; it only seemed to be making things worse. I realized that I wanted, needed to talk to Sunfall. The question was: How to find her. Autobot Headquarters was a big place, and it was also entirely possible that she’d left Headquarters altogether. She had a tendency to do that when she felt a need to think. She could be anywhere.
Even right outside my office door, apparently. This I discovered as I stood up to go find her. At the same moment that I was standing up, the door slid quietly aside…and there, as if magically summoned by my troubled thoughts, was Sunfall. She stood there, the light from the corridor behind her highlighting her form and shining softly off of her sunset-hued armor. She was standing exactly on the threshold, so that she was neither inside nor outside of my office and so that the door wouldn't slide closed. She stared at me silently, appraisingly. Her eyes were narrowed, and she was frowning slightly at me not in anger or in sadness but in thoughtfulness, her head tilted slightly and inquisitively to the side. I'd been halfway standing when the door opened. Now, I allowed myself to plop back down in my chair, watching her from a safe distance, doing my best to ignore the internal flutter that I felt just because I was looking at her.
For what seemed hours but which was more likely seconds, Sunfall and I stared at each other, frozen. I was trying to decide whether or not it was a good thing that she’d shown up on my doorstep; Primus only knew what she was thinking. Her face was unreadable as she silently stared at me, and then she nodded crisply, as if she had reached a decision about something, and then she was suddenly moving toward me. The door slid closed behind her as she approached me, not stopping until she was close enough that she could bend down and kiss me.
This was exactly what she proceeded to do.
There was no passion in the gesture, though. The kiss was chaste, lasted only a few seconds, and seemed far more curious than anything else. When it was over, Sunfall pulled back from me and then held my gaze for a few more seconds after that. Her expression was thoughtful, her mouth twisting a bit in contemplation, as if she was analyzing a set of data that she had collected.
"I wanted to see," she quietly explained a moment later, still holding my gaze, obviously sensing that I was about to ask her what she thought she was doing, "if I'd feel an overwhelming need to run away."
I blinked at that. In a way, that was one of the reasons why I’d kissed her earlier, too. I had found, not really surprisingly, that I hadn’t felt a need to run away from her at all; my initial response had been more along the lines of running away with her, to someplace not quite so public. Obviously, Sunfall had felt quite differently at the time. But now here she was, apparently repeating the experiment that I had run and not running away this time.
Yet.
"And?" I prompted when Sunfall neither moved nor seemed inclined to say anything else.
Sunfall sighed then, straightened, crossed her arms over her chest, and said, “Well, I’m still here, aren’t I?”
She was, indeed…but she seemed faintly annoyed about it more than anything else.
“So I noticed,” I observed with a small smile.
She frowned at me, eyes narrowing.
“Don’t get cocky,” she admonished me. “I have no freakin’ clue what to do about you.”
I sighed, leaning tiredly back in my chair.
“The feeling is entirely mutual, I assure you,” I said.
Which wasn’t entirely true, actually. There was a very small but quite distinct part of me that knew exactly what to do about Sunfall. It entailed, at the moment, locking the door to my office, gathering her to me, and then putting my desk to a use for which it had never been intended. The rest of me recoiled in appalled alarm from the very notion, though.
Sunfall was snorting at my words, meanwhile. Shaking her head, she paced around to the other side of my desk and then flopped down into one of the chairs there, slouching deeply into it and lacing her fingers over her abdomen.
“Well, I guess the trick, then,” she said quietly after a few moments spent staring at me, “is for us to figure out what to do about each other.”
“That’s…easier said than done,” I answered after a moment.
“Tell me about it,” Sunfall sighed, all resigned. “Look, I’m thinking we each need to lay a few cards on the table here, Prowl. We’ve been dancing around…things. And I just…just…”
“Can’t do it anymore?” I finished when her voice trailed off uncertainly. When she nodded in response, I assured her, “I know the feeling.”
She looked at me sharply, surprised.
“Do you?”
“Why else do you think I kissed you, Sunfall?” I asked exasperatedly in return. “In front of other people? I’m tired of dancing, too.”
I watched as Sunfall stood up then and began to restlessly, agitatedly pace around my office. After a minute or so, her thoughts gathered, she faced me again with her arms folded across her chest like a protective shield.
“Claire loves you very much, you know,” she announced out of the blue.
“I know,” I answered with equanimity, although I blinked at the sudden change of subject. I’d been aware of Claire’s feelings for me for a long time, since well before her death. And I knew from various conversations we’d had since Sunfall’s “birth” that the salvaged bits of Claire that resided within Sunfall remembered those feelings well, that she was clinging to them as a way of anchoring herself in the confusing reality of her new life. As such, they had not faded. Perhaps they had even intensified. But Sunfall wasn’t entirely Claire. This, I knew as well. “But you don’t,” I added calmly.
Sunfall sighed, and her stiff posture relaxed a little, her shoulders slumping.
“It’s not that simple, Prowl,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “Sometimes I wish that it was. But it’s not as if a partitioned half of my spark is all hers and the other half is all mine and never the twain shall meet. It’s all mashed up together, and it only gets more mashed up as time goes on. And on the one hand, I know you really, really well, Prowl. I love you, even. On the other hand, I hardly know you at all.”
I nodded at that, knowing and understanding that it was true, but… “The thing that you’re not seeing, Sunfall,” I said quietly, “is that exactly the same thing is true for me when it comes to you.”
She just blinked at me.
“Think about it,” I implored her, rising from my chair, walking around to the other side of my desk, and then leaning comfortably back against it. “If we’re laying cards on the table here, Sunfall, then here are a few for you: It seems to me that you’re busy thinking that I only see Claire in you, but that’s not the case at all. I’m very well aware that you…are much more than the sum of your parts. But I only really know one part of you. I’d like to know the rest, if you’ll let me. But I don’t want you to feel obligated, just because of my connection to Claire. That’s not fair to you.”
“That’s what Wheeljack said,” Sunfall quietly said after a moment spent staring at me, still blinking at me.
“And Wheeljack usually gives very good advice,” I agreed. “But then, you know that already.”
I knew that she and Wheeljack had grown close over the past few months. Wheeljack had a way of talking to people, of putting them at ease, and more than anything, Sunfall needed ease sometimes. I was glad that she’d found herself a confidant, someone mature and more or less emotionally neutral, someone who would make her hear what she needed to hear. Wheeljack excelled at that sort of thing, when he set his mind to it.
Sunfall was nodding, meanwhile.
“When he said that…” she ventured softly, hesitantly, “I said that it wasn’t fair of me to…to deprive you and Claire of each other.” She looked shyly away from me then, suddenly staring with absorbed fascination off to the side, at the blank wall of my office. Nervously, she shifted her weight from one leg to the other, back and forth at random intervals; it was one of Claire’s unconscious mannerisms.
“But like you said,” I answered her softly, “you aren’t separable. You’re all mashed together. What there is of Claire in you is an integral part of you. I can’t have the one without the other.” I paused, debating with myself for a moment…and then, deciding that I had little to lose, I added significantly, “Moreover, I don’t want one without the other.”
In response, Sunfall stilled, to the point that she seemed unnaturally still. It crossed my mind that I'd said way too much way too soon, especially when she closed her eyes and murmured a reflexive and almost prayerful "Oh my God." I watched her warily after that, waiting for her to turn on her heel and flee. Part of me wanted to reach out to her and pull her to me so that she couldn’t flee. We needed to work this out between us. But I held myself in check, not wanting to spook her more than I’d probably already spooked her. I kept my arms crossed firmly over my chest, and Sunfall didn't flee.
Instead, after a long moment, she opened her eyes and leveled an odd look at me. She was smiling, but her eyes were slightly narrowed in…fear?
"I think you just made Claire the happiest dead person in the universe," she announced.
I gave her a half-smile and said uncertainly, "I…imagine so. But,” I added, “it isn't really Claire that I'm worried about right now. I need to know what you think, Sunfall. What you…feel."
Sunfall drew in a deep breath and then let it out very, very slowly as she gathered her thoughts. She started to pace again, but this time it wasn't frantic, upset pacing. It was contemplative, almost meditative. I watched her, knowing that she was struggling with what I'd said, waiting to hear what she'd say in response once she’d thought it all through. Unaccustomed anxiety prickled somewhere in the back of my mind as I watched Sunfall pace the width of my office and waited for her response. Eventually, she turned to face me again, standing a few paces away.
“I feel torn,” she announced. “I didn’t want to be dragged into this…this thing between you and Claire.”
“I know,” I said, nodding. “And I understand.”
“No, you don’t,” she asserted. “Not really. You’re right that, until today, I was thinking that you only saw Claire in me. But then Wheeljack told me that that wasn’t- Oh!” she exclaimed, interrupting herself. She looked at me wide-eyed. “I’m sorry. Please don’t be upset with Wheeljack, Prowl. He…told me some stuff. Stuff you’d said to him, probably in confidence. But he thought it would help me to understand and it did and-”
“I’m not upset,” I assured her quietly, attempting to interrupt her apologies. She kept babbling, though; I briefly wondered if she’d picked the habit up from Bluestreak.
“And what he said made me think,” she was babbling. “And if I hadn’t started thinking then I wouldn’t be here, and we wouldn’t be talking like this, so…”
“Sunfall, I’m not upset,” I reiterated firmly as her voice trailed off uncertainly and she gave me an anxious look. “It’s all right. I’m glad that Wheeljack told you some things, if it’s helping to ease your mind.”
“Oh,” Sunfall responded, nonplussed. “All right, then. Well, when Wheeljack told me that you didn’t see me as just Claire and then you confirmed it yourself, it… Well, it changes…things.”
I nodded understandingly. “Because,” I said, “it’s not about Claire and me anymore. It’s about you and me.”
“Yes,” she said. “And I…I appreciate you, Prowl. More every day, it seems. I tried not to because I wanted so badly to resent you for…Well, you know. But I found that I couldn’t. I…can’t.”
Once again, I was quite familiar with the issues with which Sunfall was wrestling. Mine were slightly different, but overall they were quite similar. Only I had been dealing with them for well over a year now, since before Claire’s death.
“But I need time,” Sunfall was saying. “We need to take things slowly. And I’m sure I’ll try your patience in the interim.”
“I can do slow,” I assured her. “And I can be very patient.” And then I don’t know what came over me, really. Suddenly, I was pushing myself away from my desk, reaching for her, drawing her to me. She yelped in surprise, but she didn’t exactly fight me. “Sometimes,” I amended.
And then, before Sunfall could respond, I kissed her. Just like in the Control Room. Only this time we didn’t have an audience, and she didn’t run away. Instead, she practically melted against me after a moment, wrapping her arms tightly around me to pull me as closely against her as possible as the kiss went on. And on. And on. By mutual but unspoken agreement, it ended what seemed hours later.
“You have a very strange definition of the word ‘slow,’ Prowl,” Sunfall accused breathlessly as we separated. Her voice was decidedly shaky.
I shrugged nonchalantly, my arms still wrapped loosely around her small, warm body. “Consider it a preview,” I answered.
She stared in dismay up at me for a beat…and then she started giggling madly.
And then, displaying his usual excellent sense of timing, Ratchet’s gruff voice announced without preamble over my office’s comm, “A little Bluebird tells me you’re looking less than lovely, Prowl. Stop hiding in your office and get your aft down here so I can fix that door panel.”
It wasn’t a request. Ratchet rarely made requests; vehement demands that he expected to be heeded more or less immediately were much more his style. Without waiting for a response from me, Ratchet closed the connection, and I looked resignedly down at Sunfall. She was looking up at me, her eyes glinting with amusement.
“He knows me far too well,” I said with a rueful sigh before she could say anything. “And I’m going to have to have a word with Bluestreak,” I added.
She snorted.
“Well, he only told Ratchet the truth, Prowl,” she said. Gesturing at my half-charred door panel with her chin she added, “Not only is that not very lovely, but it really doesn’t look too comfortable.”
Which was an understatement. Still, I wasn’t anxious to leave, at the moment. She…felt good. I was quite content to stay right where I was.
“Go on, Prowl,” Sunfall said then, determinedly stepping back from me, taking the decision out of my hands anyway. “Go make Ratchet happy. I’m not going anywhere,” she added significantly, and there was an implied promise in the way that she was looking up at me.
“We’ll talk more later,” I decided. I couldn’t resist leaning down and pressing a kiss to her cheek, though, before I headed for the door. And as I glanced back over my shoulder, as my office door slid closed behind me, I saw that Sunfall was smiling bemusedly after me. It had, I reflected, been quite an…interesting…day.