Glove Compartment - One of the Family - Judy Witwicky's Story
Wow, I'm productive today. This took a while, having stalled at least twice before it was done, but it's finished at last and here for perusal.
It was no secret to anyone that Judy Witwicky loved her roses. When she was not planting and cultivating them in her garden, she was busy indoors weaving them into simple bouquets or elaborate arrangements for some occasion or the other.
Jazz was particularly fascinated by the whole thing. Sometimes when he was parked in their back yard with nothing to do, he liked to watch her at work, impressed by how something so simple that grew in dirt could be made to look so beautiful with just a little trim here and a couple of ribbons there.
Today she was busy doing a bouquet for a wedding with a bunch of yellow and white roses. The daughter of one of her cousins was getting married and Judy had been commissioned to do the three main bouquets - for the bride and her two bridesmaids. The two bridesmaids’ ones had been completed over the last couple of days, and now Judy sat under the porch in the back yard surrounded by roses, ribbons and rolls of tissue paper.
Jazz sat a few feet away from here in his Solstice form and observed closely how she placed the flowers together, randomly at first, and then in more of a pattern as the bouquet took shape.
“So will you be attending this wedding?” Jazz asked her.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe.” She shrugged, hands working fast. “She’s not really my favorite cousin. I know Sam wont go, he’s afraid of one of the bride’s sisters. Ron hates getting dressed up for these things.”
“You’re not on good terms with her?”
“Well, we’ve had our fair share of disagreements over the years. The last one was a couple of months ago. She thinks its time for Sam to get into a serious relationship with a proper girl and not someone like Mikaela. I told her Mikaela was a lovely girl and Sam had the right to choose who he wanted to go out with, and that was the end of that discussion. Haven't spoken to her since.”
“But you’re still making these bouquets for her,” Jazz commented.
Judy shrugged. “She asked me to do them before we had our disagreement, and well, she’s still family.” She finished tying the flowers together and started adding some ribbons to the bunch of flora.
Jazz watched in rapt attention while he conversed. “These kindred bonds you humans have are rather curious. Despite whatever misgivings you may have about each other, the bonds keep you tied together and obligated to each other to a certain extent.”
The woman quirked an eyebrow at him as she reached to cut off the ribbon. “Don’t you have anything like it where you came from?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, I see. So you never knew who your parents were? Or if you had any brothers or sisters?” Judy wrapped some tissue paper around the stem of the bouquet.
“Transformers are created a little differently than humans are, Judy. If I ever had creators, I don’t remember them. Definitely don’t recall any siblings. It was basically every mech for himself. Maybe we were all connected through a common source of life, which was the Allspark, but we don’t have family units as you know them.” Jazz shifted on his tyres.
Judy finished the bouquet and stood, gathering up everything. “I guess I’d better go deliver these sometime today. Would you mind giving me a ride to her place”
“Not at all, Judy.” Jazz opened a door for her.
“Alright, just give me a few minutes to put some of these things away and grab the rest of them.”
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The drive to Judy’s cousin’s house was mostly quiet until Jazz broke the silence.
“You two should patch things up. From what I understand, family is important to you humans, and the bonds you have are something quite unique to your species,” he said. “You should talk to her.”
“I’m not going to let her walk all over Sam and Mikaela.”
“You don’t have to, but you can explain to her that she shouldn’t judge people before meeting them.”
“Well, I suppose I can try.”
Jazz pulled up alongside a small urban house and turned into the drive. He opened a door to let Judy out and popped open his trunk for her to retrieve the flowers. Arms full of rose bouquets, she looked around them.
“Are you sure you’re going to be alright out here all alone?” she asked.
“I’ll be fine. You just go on in and talk to your family.”
“I wont be long, I promise.”
“Take all the time you need.”
Judy headed to the house and Jazz saw her rap on the front door before it opened to admit her. As he watched her disappear inside, he thought about what they’d talked about before - about family and what he had told her. What he hadn’t told her was that sometimes he got envious of the whole family dynamics that he saw between the Witwicky family on a daily basis, of the bonds that human families had in general. As a Cybertronian, he never knew what it was like to have those kinds of bonds, and a part of him wished he could.
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Sometime later, Judy emerged from the house and headed back over to where Jazz was parked in a considerably better mood than she had been when they’d arrived. She looked at the car as she approached and thought back to what he had told her about not knowing his own family or what it was like to have a family in general. To her maternal nature that just wasn’t right.
From what she knew of the Autobots, Bumblebee and Jazz were two of their youngest, would probably be in their mid-20s had they been human, and she couldn’t imagine Sam at that age without her and Ron there to watch out for him now and then.
Shaking her head slightly, she opened the door and slipped inside, closing it gently after her. Once she was settled, Jazz started his engine and pulled back onto the road. This time, while the drive wasn’t exactly quiet - Jazz had his radio playing on some country music station - the mech wasn’t quite chatty either. She guessed he was still brooding on the whole concept of family.
“Y’know, in a way, the other Autobots are kind of like your family,” she said.
The radio gave a slight hitch, as if Jazz had been startled out of his thoughts. “What do you mean?”
“Well, family doesn’t just mean biological bonds. When you’ve been living with people for so long that you know them inside-out, they become your family.”
“I guess… if you put it that way.”
“Uh huh. So do you feel any better?”
Jazz was about to answer when the loud screeching of tyres caught his attention, and he cast his scanners back in time to see a pickup truck come barreling at them. He reacted immediately, fishtailing sharply out of the way, but the truck still managed to clip him on the rear fender as it went roaring past them. Jazz hissed, but kept steady and continued to drive.
Judy released her death-grip on the door handles and glared after the truck. “Are you alright, Jazz? I felt him hit you.”
“I’m fine.”
“Didn’t sound fine. Pull over and let me take a look.”
“Judy, its nothing, really.”
“Bumblebee will kill me if I let anything happen to you. Pull over, please.”
Jazz let out a dramatic sigh, but knew better than to argue. Judy could be just as stubborn as Ratchet was and trying to argue with either of them was just a waste of energy. He pulled off the highway at the next exit and found a suitable spot to halt.
Once he had stopped, Judy got out and went to examine his fender. There was a considerable dent in the panel coupled with a nasty-looking rend. To her surprise, there was a small trickle of pale blue fluid leaking from the cut. It served as a reminder that Jazz was not just a car that could talk, but a living, feeling being that could hurt and bleed.
Going back to the door, she reached inside for her purse and took out a small pack of rose-scented wipes, pulling a couple of sheets out and tossing the rest of the pack into the glove compartment. Then she scrunched up the damp cloths and gently dabbed it to the wound, just like she used to when Sam was little and came home with cuts and scrapes.
Jazz hissed in pain again, but held still. The dampness of the wipes took away some of the heat of the sting and the soreness of the bruised panel enough for him to relax a little. Judy cleaned up the last of the bleeding fluid, disposed of the soiled wipes and climbed back in.
“There. I don’t know how much that helps you, but at least you’re not bleeding. You’ll have to get Ron or Ratchet to take a look at it once we get home and put some robot-bandage on it or something,” she said.
“Yeah, thanks… but why? You didn’t have to do that.”
“Well of course I did. You’re a part of the family now.”
There was a smile in Jazz’s voice when he replied. “As long as I don’t have to call you ‘mom’, it’s an honor.”
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