Fic
Title: Borealis 43/73: Quotidiana
Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: PG-13 for m/m snuggling/snogging
Characters/Pairing: Ratchet, Perceptor, Miles, Beachcomber, OCs as needed
Warnings: Implied slash, human/bot kissing, a couple of swears
Summary: Wherein Perce and Ratch get to visit, and Miles gets a new job - with random bits of day-in-the-life of the Oregon base.
Notes: Still out of chronology, but Monster Mash is being a huge, messy roadblock. If I can't get that finished this week I'll put Gestalt up next Friday for Protectobot-y Goodness!
~3500 words.
BOREALIS: Quotidiana
2019 - May
Ratchet?
The call came through softly, unobtrusive, meant to be ignored if more pressing things required the recipient’s attention. Ratchet answered at once. Perceptor? Are you well?
Oh certainly, certainly. I was merely wondering if there was anything I could help you with, regarding the new-kindled ones.
Perceptor’s tone was not simply wistful. An edge of longing, almost of desperation cut across the lower harmonics despite the scientist’s obvious effort to hide it. That he had failed to do so entirely was telling. Ratchet wished he could instantaneously close the physical distance between them and take his friend in his arms. Looking for more ways to overwork yourself as usual, I see. Re-inventing the Wells wasn’t enough?
Nonsense. You and Wheeljack had already laid the groundwork. All you needed was a fresh perspective, you said so yourself.
Ah yes, now I recall why arguing with you is so irritating. You remember everything.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
There was a charfuckingtreuse Hummer parked at the curb in front of his parents’ house. Miles squinted, holding up a hand as if to fend off the eye-searing rays. “Hey, Ratchet,” he said as the passenger door opened so he could toss his duffel inside. His iPod microbot, Scuffle, peeked out at the big Autobot for a moment, squeaked, and snuggled back down into Miles’ shirt pocket. “You’re my ride? How’d I rate the VIP treatment?”
“Hello, Miles,” Ratchet said, approximating a sigh. “You’re doing me a favor. Perceptor and I have been in contact since his team landed, but we have had little time to meet face-to-face. Besides, Prime recommended you for this position. I rather doubt Beachcomber will ever get too corporate for you.”
“Wow. You’re never gonna let that one go, are you.”
“No.” They drove in silence for several miles, Ratchet opening up to near 100 mph once they were outside Tranquility and the long Nevada highways stretched ahead. “Seriously, Miles - World Wildlife Fund?”
“Total cubicle farm, man.” Miles was nervous. The Oregon base already had a team of human scientists working closely with the Bots. He wasn’t used to having the lowest IQ in the room.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Even at the speeds Ratchet could travel on open roads, it took the better part of a day to reach the Oregon base. Miles dozed through much of it, and Ratchet let him.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” They were pulling off 101 onto what appeared to be a set of dirt tracks in the middle of the forest. There was no fence, no sign.
“Yes, Miles.”
Attributing the weirdly smooth ride to Ratchet’s rather advanced suspension, Miles didn’t learn until later that the new Autobots had buried slabs of rock from their excavation beneath only the paired wheel-trails. Their heaviest cohorts could drive thus without getting bogged down and without disturbing any more of the landscape than absolutely necessary. Second growth forest - the trees old enough to be big (though not huge) and mossy - filtered hazy sunlight to shadowy green as the little road wound between steep hills. Ratchet rolled down the windows without being asked, and Miles breathed deep.
When they reached the last turn and came out into a clearing, Miles almost didn’t realize they had arrived. “Whoa,” he said. “Where are the Ewoks?”
From the robots’ point of view, it would take little time for the trees destroyed in the crash to regrow, but guided by human foresters, they had planted seedlings and encouraged the natural succession of plant life. Only the protruding hull of the ship, the downward-sloping ramp into the newly expanded hangar beneath it and the road would betray the base’s location in a decade or three.
Perceptor and Beachcomber emerged at the top of the ramp as Miles got out so Ratchet could transform.
“Hello!” Beachcomber called, waving.
“Welcome, Miles. Ratchet.” Perceptor said. He bowed forward, peering at Miles intently. Or rather at Scuffle, still hiding in Mile’s pocket, firmly in iPod mode.
Miles poked it gently. “I don’t know why he’s so shy,” he said, embarrassed.
“Hmm,” Perceptor said. He straightened, palpably withdrawing his high-beam attention, refocusing on Ratchet.
The approach wasn’t the wild tackle Miles had come to expect among the younger bots, but Ratchet and Perceptor’s embrace was no less fervent. He wondered if they ever got parts caught in each other, but then supposed that if you had lived for millions of years as a complex-bodied robot, you probably got the hugging without snagging thing figured out.
“You and I shouldn’t remain geographically proximate,” Perceptor said into Ratchet’s shoulder. “We make a ‘high value target’, as the humans put it.”
Ratchet chuckled. “Perhaps, but most of the Cons are scared lubeless of you, so I think we’re all right.”
“Yes,” Perceptor said softly, disengaging the embrace and looking away. “I suppose they are.”
Oh, Perceptor. Ratchet felt like a thoughtless old clinker.
“Hey, Miles, want to head out to the beach?” Beachcomber asked, leaning toward him and making a show of not really whispering. Perceptor and Ratchet didn’t seem to notice, though.
“Uh, yeah. Sure.”
Beachcomber transformed and Miles, at a loss as to what else to do with his duffle, tossed it in the passenger seat and got in.
“So. You’re a geologist, huh?”
“Yep,” Beachcomber said easily. “Never met a feldspar I didn’t like.” His engine was quiet, like an electric motor; despite his appearance, not even trying to sound like a normal dune buggy. He drove along slowly, giving Miles ample time to take in the ecosystems that would soon grow familiar. Cloud forest and small ferny meadows, giving way to brushy dune grasses and the cool grayish sand heavily laced with local serpentine in a crescent-shaped beach cradled between rocky crags. There were only a few puffy clouds in the sky and the sunlight took the sting out of the maritime wind.
Once Miles was clear, Beachcomber transformed and stretched out on the sand with his hands behind his head.
“Doesn’t it suck to get sand in your joints?” Miles asked, pretty sure he’d heard Ironhide or someone complaining about it.
“Shiiiiiielding,” Beachcomber sang, letting a flux shimmer across his armor.
“Nice.” Bird crap probably slid right off, too. A few gulls wheeled above them, but not like the mobs at fishing wharfs, and they were being relatively quiet. Miles tossed his duffel onto a rock and plopped down on the sand nearby. Not against him, not yet, but near. Watching ocean waves was always mesmerizing. He wondered how it seemed to the robots, whose world had had no water oceans. The Rust Sea, Wheeljack had once explained, was more like a red, sandy desert, and though semi-liquid in places, that liquidity had nothing to do with H2O. Except they’d visited a lot of other planets, hadn’t they. Probably nothing on backwater Earth surprised them.
“There are some tide-pools at the foot of the cliffs to the south, there,” Beachcomber said, with the air of someone revealing the location of a secret hideout - though he showed no inclination to move from his comfortable nest on the sand. “And there are a couple of sea caves around the point. Do you snorkel? I guess we’ll have to find you a wetsuit, first, hm?”
As far as job interviews went, this wasn’t what Miles had been expecting.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Forehelm to forehelm, Perceptor and Ratchet stood leaning heavily on one another, linked by several pairs of cables, transferring eons of experiential and scientific data back and forth.
At least they’d come down into the base rather than stand outside waiting to get shot at, Hoist thought as he skirted around them. The events of late last year were riding hard in his CPU. Hard work would take care of that, he told himself crisply as he transformed, heading out to 101 to meet Grapple and Huffer. There was plenty of rebuilding still to do, and they were just the bots to do it.
How many tanks do you want to build up here? Ratchet asked.
Only two, for now, Perceptor said. None of the others here seem sanguine. I suppose we can hold the overflow from your lot.
Ratchet traced the refined curve of Perceptor’s jaw. Give them time.
I know. We had scarcely accustomed ourselves to the loss of the Allspark. Now this… He slipped fingertips into Ratchet’s chassis, under the heavy structures of his chest. The data flow over the cables slowed, altered, became more emotional feed than intel exchange.
You haven’t even asked Beachcomber, yet, have you. Ratchet leaned into the link, basking in the quicksilver labyrinths of Perceptor’s mind. Not that I blame you. It’s doable, even as small as he is, but hazardous. And not fun.
Hm. Just because you and Prime thought you were going to end up a radioactive crater. Consider! The Firstforged did this. Think of the permutations! We could create entirely new subsets of-
I should have known something so radical would flip your switches.
Perceptor laughed, and drew Ratchet further into the cool dimness of the base, kissing him soundly.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2019 - June
“So, what were you, before?” Dr. Yasmina Abizaid asked over the low, rumbling whir of the big centrifuge. Perceptor had been explaining how they used their alt modes not only to blend in with other planets’ intelligent life forms, but as tools and transportation. On Earth, the Cybertronian scientist was an older model Land Cruiser, stuffed with unrecognizable junk in the back, painted primer red for the most part but for the front fenders, which were still the original turquoise and somewhat shiny.
Perceptor didn’t look up from the cultures in his hands. Even out of the incubator he could maintain their optimal temperature by channeling excess heat from his spark to his hands. “I was…artillery,” he said softly.
Yasmina looked at him. It was hard to tell if he’d hesitated over that last word. A long hesitation to the robots might be several nanoseconds, and undetectable to their human listeners. On the other hand, a human-detectable hesitation might only mean that their attention was engaged with another conversation or twelve, somewhere else. Dr. Frank Wilhaggin, the human contingent’s leader, had said, rather sanctimoniously, back when they were new to the base, that it didn’t really matter from a human perspective which it was. You had to decide for yourself and act accordingly. One couldn’t expect the finer considerations from aliens, after all. Yasmina still felt there was a difference, even if humans might never have the sensory capacity to distinguish between them without asking the robot directly.
“So that thing on your back isn’t just a scope,” she ventured. Given the extent of the fighting late last year, she wasn’t too surprised not to have seen any footage of him on the news. As far as she knew, Perceptor had stayed on-base, taking in casualties. “It’s a cannon?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No elaboration. Maybe it was tech he wasn’t supposed to talk about.
“Did you like being artillery?”
Perceptor looked at her this time. “It wasn’t a matter of liking or disliking. It was simply necessity.”
She wasn’t getting anything from his tone. He was being careful. Too careful? She had already talked to Beachcomber enough to know that not all the robots liked being soldiers. Not all of them had Warpath’s enthusiasm for the war that had killed their homeworld. She tried a slightly different tack. “Is the Land Cruiser more comfortable, then? Is that possible? Might one be more comfortable in one alt mode than another?”
Perceptor laughed, thinking of Tracks and Sunstreaker. “Some of us are more in love with our vehicle modes than others.” He considered, not just what she asked, but what she didn’t. “We are constrained by mass, to begin with, though I have known some people to test those limits.”
Yasmina thought of Arcee and Beachcomber. In robot mode they were near the same height. Arcee was a tough, muscular motorcycle, and a rather attenuated biped.
Beachcomber was a cute but lightly built sand buggy. As a biped, his body was rather cobby and more solid than many of the smaller bots tended to be. He was blue and white; sky and waves, she thought, whatever those colors might symbolize back on his homeworld. Maybe. He seemed forthright, but was kind of quiet, she’d noticed.
“I like the Land Cruiser for its utility,” Perceptor said. “For a non-tracked vehicle it handles rough terrain - which is in abundance on this planet, though I’ve seen worse - with remarkable agility. So, yes, I am pleased with this alt mode. Pleased to not be so explicitly a weapon, though perhaps that is merely self-delusion. Would it be better to maintain one’s honesty about such a thing? I still wield the cannon, among other things.”
“Yes, but Prime said you could reprioritize your scientific pursuits, right? You remain a cannon, but not just a cannon.”
“Indeed,” said Perceptor, and Yasmina thought there was a smile on his long, avian-piscine face.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Dr. Joey Sutherland looked up at Beachcomber, his hands pausing in their task of sorting rock samples, and grinned. “I have that same…well, I hate to call it a problem.” Walking the streets of his home city, San Francisco - and one had to admit this would be more likely there than elsewhere - Joey had on more than one occasion been stopped by a stranger who wanted to kiss him.
Beachcomber, it seemed, had just had this happen to him, in Ashland.
“Oh?” Beachcomber asked, grinning back. Joey could see why someone would want to kiss him. He had the closest things to lips that he’d seen on anyone but Prime.
“Maybe it’s because you’re…not huge,” Joey said, suddenly wondering if the robots ever had neuroses about their size. Beachcomber was only about nine feet tall - within the realm of possible human heights, if you counted hormonal abnormalities. He could look down at Yau Ming, which Ming would find unusual. But the scale of affection with Beachcomber didn’t seem quite so insurmountable as that with, say, Prime. Or Skyfire. Joey shook his head mentally. Good grief. What could a human do with Skyfire besides ride inside him with about three platoons of friends?
Beachcomber chuckled. “Scale issues can always be overcome,” he said. Joey was pretty sure the jovial lasciviousness in the robot’s tone wasn’t just his imagination. He was glad he hadn’t been drinking anything.
“Yeah,” Joey said, when he’d recovered. “But we’re…squishy.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing, dude,” Beachcomber said. “No, wait, Primrose,” he said suddenly to one of the little crablike drones they’d built out of parts of their spaceship. “That goes here, this goes there.” He pointed, to keep the boxes of samples in proper geological order. The drone, careful without being mindful, set the box down as directed. Joey wondered how fine a line it was between a drone and a person, and whether it creeped any of the Autobots out. He suspected the Decepticons didn’t give a rat’s ass, either way.
“I guess I shouldn’t ask for any further details,” Joey said hopefully. Beachcomber laughed.
The sky outside had turned to pewter. It had been raining on and off all day. Beachcomber and Seaspray were the only two who didn’t seem to mind. What humans called acid rain wasn’t strong enough to affect the Cybertronians’ shielding, let alone the armor beneath. There was still a lot of complaining, though. Frank - whose tolerance for whingeing was small - had once said, “Well, you shouldn’t have landed in bloody Oregon, then!” Temperate rainforest was no climate for dry-loving robots. Perceptor hadn’t seemed affronted, merely nodding, but Yasmina and Joey and Marcus and Juan had glared daggers at Frank. Perceptor had worked a practical miracle bringing their heavily damaged ship down in more or less one piece. He hadn’t had the luxury of being picky about the landing site.
“You probably shouldn’t ask Skyfire,” Beachcomber said, and Joey could have sworn he winked somehow, behind the silvery visor. “He’s kinda shy about that sort of thing. As shy as we get, anyway.”
Joey was once again glad not to have been drinking anything. He gazed into Beachcomber’s visor, seeking a glint of the optics behind. A lot of information seemed to pass between them. Joey dusted off his hands and stood up. Beachcomber remained seated, carefully setting his samples aside.
Wondering if he was about to cause an intergalactic incident, Joey leaned in, putting his hands on the robot’s shoulders, and kissed him.
Beachcomber was warm. Joey had noted that before, when a steadying hand had kept him from stumbling on the trails around the mountain. These weren’t cold, heartless, unfeeling robots like the madmen of science fiction liked to imagine. And Beachcomber’s lips, made of many small plates, were hard but responsive against Joey’s. The robot’s hand lightly touching his back felt huge across his shoulders, but not threatening. It was comforting, a surety of care, safety, protection. Joey was glad he had shaved off his habitual mustache and goatee, though. He didn’t fancy getting hair caught in metal lip components.
“See?” Beachcomber said as they parted, both warmer than before. “Scale is not a problem.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Teddy-bear sized housekeeping drones scuttled about, keeping the place clean and discouraging various forms of terrestrial wildlife from taking up unwanted residence. The base doors were always open, except in the worst weather or during Decepticon attack. The robots were unaffected by the range of temperatures prevalent in this area, climate muted as it was by the ocean nearby. The human quarters were therefore father in, behind a double set of automatic not-glass doors.
The restriction on wildlife didn’t apply to domesticated pets, though the definition of “domesticated” was stretched a little. Beachcomber seemed to have an odd effect on organic life - there was an entire clowder of cats and a pack of dogs, small birds, large birds, fish, herptiles, and Marcus, who was a licensed falconer, had a one-legged red-tailed hawk who spent as much time as she was allowed perched on Beachcomber’s head.
Drones and animals and humans and robots and the AIs whose presence was more or less ubiquitous in both Autobot bases. All living in a peculiar muddle of work and happy arguments and swirl of cultures. Seven human languages were spoken, and at least three humans were trying to learn Cybertronian, despite the lack of necessary vocal equipment. A kind of pidgin was evolving, though, of sounds they could make and still be understandable.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Perceptor paused suddenly in his bustling. His shoulders slumped and he shook his head.
"What is it? What happened?" Miles asked. One of the other bots was giggling, so it couldn't be very terrible.
"Bother," Perceptor said, taking up the task again with his usual aplomb. "Beachcomber's fallen off the continental shelf."
"Again," the giggling bot, Seaspray, added.
"Ah, yes. Now he's claiming he didn't fall, since his balance, as I well know, is quite good." Perceptor seemed to address the ceiling, his volume increasing dramatically. "As though having JUMPED off makes it BETTER!"
Miles laughed. Perceptor was fun to watch. He had first struck Miles as a cute, if somewhat elderly (whatever that meant, in this case), absent-minded professor type. He talked to his experiments. So far the experiments didn’t talk back, but anything was possible when Perceptor was involved, according to Wheeljack.
The scary thing was, Perceptor wasn't really absent-minded. At all. He might seem to have lost track of the conversation or something he was doing, or something Wheeljack was doing - but in reality he knew perfectly well and was only prioritizing something else for a moment.
Thinking about Perceptor naturally led to thinking about Beachcomber. Beachcomber, Miles told himself, wasn’t really a guy robot. Yeah, his voice was pleasantly deep, and he was nine feet tall and everyone used the masculine pronoun for him. But his forging was ae, and besides, of the two Autobots that appeared “female” to most humans, Arcee was scary as shit, and Borealis was freaking ginormous. How do you go about kissing someone who could probably fit your entire body in her mouth? It didn’t really bear thinking about.
Miles didn’t consider himself to be a Captain Jack Harkness exactly. It had more to do with Beachcomber. Beachcomber was distracting; and apparently pretty much everyone found him so. Miles had noticed how even Skyfire leaned down to be close when Beachcomber was talking, or humming, or singing or smiling. Ironically, the only one who seemed able to resist Beachcomber’s “distraction field” was Perceptor, although Miles wondered if Perceptor was really immune or just reacted in an atypical fashion; getting more tetchy instead of mellowing out. Despite this, Beachcomber was the only mech Miles had caught Perceptor getting snuggly with.
"Want me to go get him?" Seaspray asked.
Perceptor waved his hands about vaguely. Miles had increasingly gotten the feeling that Perceptor had once been accustomed to having more than two arms. "Oh, give him a week. As long as he stays in contact." He regarded Miles with a long-suffering expression. "He'd be down there all century if we let him. "
Table of Contents
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Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: PG-13 for m/m snuggling/snogging
Characters/Pairing: Ratchet, Perceptor, Miles, Beachcomber, OCs as needed
Warnings: Implied slash, human/bot kissing, a couple of swears
Summary: Wherein Perce and Ratch get to visit, and Miles gets a new job - with random bits of day-in-the-life of the Oregon base.
Notes: Still out of chronology, but Monster Mash is being a huge, messy roadblock. If I can't get that finished this week I'll put Gestalt up next Friday for Protectobot-y Goodness!
~3500 words.
BOREALIS: Quotidiana
2019 - May
Ratchet?
The call came through softly, unobtrusive, meant to be ignored if more pressing things required the recipient’s attention. Ratchet answered at once. Perceptor? Are you well?
Oh certainly, certainly. I was merely wondering if there was anything I could help you with, regarding the new-kindled ones.
Perceptor’s tone was not simply wistful. An edge of longing, almost of desperation cut across the lower harmonics despite the scientist’s obvious effort to hide it. That he had failed to do so entirely was telling. Ratchet wished he could instantaneously close the physical distance between them and take his friend in his arms. Looking for more ways to overwork yourself as usual, I see. Re-inventing the Wells wasn’t enough?
Nonsense. You and Wheeljack had already laid the groundwork. All you needed was a fresh perspective, you said so yourself.
Ah yes, now I recall why arguing with you is so irritating. You remember everything.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
There was a charfuckingtreuse Hummer parked at the curb in front of his parents’ house. Miles squinted, holding up a hand as if to fend off the eye-searing rays. “Hey, Ratchet,” he said as the passenger door opened so he could toss his duffel inside. His iPod microbot, Scuffle, peeked out at the big Autobot for a moment, squeaked, and snuggled back down into Miles’ shirt pocket. “You’re my ride? How’d I rate the VIP treatment?”
“Hello, Miles,” Ratchet said, approximating a sigh. “You’re doing me a favor. Perceptor and I have been in contact since his team landed, but we have had little time to meet face-to-face. Besides, Prime recommended you for this position. I rather doubt Beachcomber will ever get too corporate for you.”
“Wow. You’re never gonna let that one go, are you.”
“No.” They drove in silence for several miles, Ratchet opening up to near 100 mph once they were outside Tranquility and the long Nevada highways stretched ahead. “Seriously, Miles - World Wildlife Fund?”
“Total cubicle farm, man.” Miles was nervous. The Oregon base already had a team of human scientists working closely with the Bots. He wasn’t used to having the lowest IQ in the room.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Even at the speeds Ratchet could travel on open roads, it took the better part of a day to reach the Oregon base. Miles dozed through much of it, and Ratchet let him.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” They were pulling off 101 onto what appeared to be a set of dirt tracks in the middle of the forest. There was no fence, no sign.
“Yes, Miles.”
Attributing the weirdly smooth ride to Ratchet’s rather advanced suspension, Miles didn’t learn until later that the new Autobots had buried slabs of rock from their excavation beneath only the paired wheel-trails. Their heaviest cohorts could drive thus without getting bogged down and without disturbing any more of the landscape than absolutely necessary. Second growth forest - the trees old enough to be big (though not huge) and mossy - filtered hazy sunlight to shadowy green as the little road wound between steep hills. Ratchet rolled down the windows without being asked, and Miles breathed deep.
When they reached the last turn and came out into a clearing, Miles almost didn’t realize they had arrived. “Whoa,” he said. “Where are the Ewoks?”
From the robots’ point of view, it would take little time for the trees destroyed in the crash to regrow, but guided by human foresters, they had planted seedlings and encouraged the natural succession of plant life. Only the protruding hull of the ship, the downward-sloping ramp into the newly expanded hangar beneath it and the road would betray the base’s location in a decade or three.
Perceptor and Beachcomber emerged at the top of the ramp as Miles got out so Ratchet could transform.
“Hello!” Beachcomber called, waving.
“Welcome, Miles. Ratchet.” Perceptor said. He bowed forward, peering at Miles intently. Or rather at Scuffle, still hiding in Mile’s pocket, firmly in iPod mode.
Miles poked it gently. “I don’t know why he’s so shy,” he said, embarrassed.
“Hmm,” Perceptor said. He straightened, palpably withdrawing his high-beam attention, refocusing on Ratchet.
The approach wasn’t the wild tackle Miles had come to expect among the younger bots, but Ratchet and Perceptor’s embrace was no less fervent. He wondered if they ever got parts caught in each other, but then supposed that if you had lived for millions of years as a complex-bodied robot, you probably got the hugging without snagging thing figured out.
“You and I shouldn’t remain geographically proximate,” Perceptor said into Ratchet’s shoulder. “We make a ‘high value target’, as the humans put it.”
Ratchet chuckled. “Perhaps, but most of the Cons are scared lubeless of you, so I think we’re all right.”
“Yes,” Perceptor said softly, disengaging the embrace and looking away. “I suppose they are.”
Oh, Perceptor. Ratchet felt like a thoughtless old clinker.
“Hey, Miles, want to head out to the beach?” Beachcomber asked, leaning toward him and making a show of not really whispering. Perceptor and Ratchet didn’t seem to notice, though.
“Uh, yeah. Sure.”
Beachcomber transformed and Miles, at a loss as to what else to do with his duffle, tossed it in the passenger seat and got in.
“So. You’re a geologist, huh?”
“Yep,” Beachcomber said easily. “Never met a feldspar I didn’t like.” His engine was quiet, like an electric motor; despite his appearance, not even trying to sound like a normal dune buggy. He drove along slowly, giving Miles ample time to take in the ecosystems that would soon grow familiar. Cloud forest and small ferny meadows, giving way to brushy dune grasses and the cool grayish sand heavily laced with local serpentine in a crescent-shaped beach cradled between rocky crags. There were only a few puffy clouds in the sky and the sunlight took the sting out of the maritime wind.
Once Miles was clear, Beachcomber transformed and stretched out on the sand with his hands behind his head.
“Doesn’t it suck to get sand in your joints?” Miles asked, pretty sure he’d heard Ironhide or someone complaining about it.
“Shiiiiiielding,” Beachcomber sang, letting a flux shimmer across his armor.
“Nice.” Bird crap probably slid right off, too. A few gulls wheeled above them, but not like the mobs at fishing wharfs, and they were being relatively quiet. Miles tossed his duffel onto a rock and plopped down on the sand nearby. Not against him, not yet, but near. Watching ocean waves was always mesmerizing. He wondered how it seemed to the robots, whose world had had no water oceans. The Rust Sea, Wheeljack had once explained, was more like a red, sandy desert, and though semi-liquid in places, that liquidity had nothing to do with H2O. Except they’d visited a lot of other planets, hadn’t they. Probably nothing on backwater Earth surprised them.
“There are some tide-pools at the foot of the cliffs to the south, there,” Beachcomber said, with the air of someone revealing the location of a secret hideout - though he showed no inclination to move from his comfortable nest on the sand. “And there are a couple of sea caves around the point. Do you snorkel? I guess we’ll have to find you a wetsuit, first, hm?”
As far as job interviews went, this wasn’t what Miles had been expecting.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Forehelm to forehelm, Perceptor and Ratchet stood leaning heavily on one another, linked by several pairs of cables, transferring eons of experiential and scientific data back and forth.
At least they’d come down into the base rather than stand outside waiting to get shot at, Hoist thought as he skirted around them. The events of late last year were riding hard in his CPU. Hard work would take care of that, he told himself crisply as he transformed, heading out to 101 to meet Grapple and Huffer. There was plenty of rebuilding still to do, and they were just the bots to do it.
How many tanks do you want to build up here? Ratchet asked.
Only two, for now, Perceptor said. None of the others here seem sanguine. I suppose we can hold the overflow from your lot.
Ratchet traced the refined curve of Perceptor’s jaw. Give them time.
I know. We had scarcely accustomed ourselves to the loss of the Allspark. Now this… He slipped fingertips into Ratchet’s chassis, under the heavy structures of his chest. The data flow over the cables slowed, altered, became more emotional feed than intel exchange.
You haven’t even asked Beachcomber, yet, have you. Ratchet leaned into the link, basking in the quicksilver labyrinths of Perceptor’s mind. Not that I blame you. It’s doable, even as small as he is, but hazardous. And not fun.
Hm. Just because you and Prime thought you were going to end up a radioactive crater. Consider! The Firstforged did this. Think of the permutations! We could create entirely new subsets of-
I should have known something so radical would flip your switches.
Perceptor laughed, and drew Ratchet further into the cool dimness of the base, kissing him soundly.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2019 - June
“So, what were you, before?” Dr. Yasmina Abizaid asked over the low, rumbling whir of the big centrifuge. Perceptor had been explaining how they used their alt modes not only to blend in with other planets’ intelligent life forms, but as tools and transportation. On Earth, the Cybertronian scientist was an older model Land Cruiser, stuffed with unrecognizable junk in the back, painted primer red for the most part but for the front fenders, which were still the original turquoise and somewhat shiny.
Perceptor didn’t look up from the cultures in his hands. Even out of the incubator he could maintain their optimal temperature by channeling excess heat from his spark to his hands. “I was…artillery,” he said softly.
Yasmina looked at him. It was hard to tell if he’d hesitated over that last word. A long hesitation to the robots might be several nanoseconds, and undetectable to their human listeners. On the other hand, a human-detectable hesitation might only mean that their attention was engaged with another conversation or twelve, somewhere else. Dr. Frank Wilhaggin, the human contingent’s leader, had said, rather sanctimoniously, back when they were new to the base, that it didn’t really matter from a human perspective which it was. You had to decide for yourself and act accordingly. One couldn’t expect the finer considerations from aliens, after all. Yasmina still felt there was a difference, even if humans might never have the sensory capacity to distinguish between them without asking the robot directly.
“So that thing on your back isn’t just a scope,” she ventured. Given the extent of the fighting late last year, she wasn’t too surprised not to have seen any footage of him on the news. As far as she knew, Perceptor had stayed on-base, taking in casualties. “It’s a cannon?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No elaboration. Maybe it was tech he wasn’t supposed to talk about.
“Did you like being artillery?”
Perceptor looked at her this time. “It wasn’t a matter of liking or disliking. It was simply necessity.”
She wasn’t getting anything from his tone. He was being careful. Too careful? She had already talked to Beachcomber enough to know that not all the robots liked being soldiers. Not all of them had Warpath’s enthusiasm for the war that had killed their homeworld. She tried a slightly different tack. “Is the Land Cruiser more comfortable, then? Is that possible? Might one be more comfortable in one alt mode than another?”
Perceptor laughed, thinking of Tracks and Sunstreaker. “Some of us are more in love with our vehicle modes than others.” He considered, not just what she asked, but what she didn’t. “We are constrained by mass, to begin with, though I have known some people to test those limits.”
Yasmina thought of Arcee and Beachcomber. In robot mode they were near the same height. Arcee was a tough, muscular motorcycle, and a rather attenuated biped.
Beachcomber was a cute but lightly built sand buggy. As a biped, his body was rather cobby and more solid than many of the smaller bots tended to be. He was blue and white; sky and waves, she thought, whatever those colors might symbolize back on his homeworld. Maybe. He seemed forthright, but was kind of quiet, she’d noticed.
“I like the Land Cruiser for its utility,” Perceptor said. “For a non-tracked vehicle it handles rough terrain - which is in abundance on this planet, though I’ve seen worse - with remarkable agility. So, yes, I am pleased with this alt mode. Pleased to not be so explicitly a weapon, though perhaps that is merely self-delusion. Would it be better to maintain one’s honesty about such a thing? I still wield the cannon, among other things.”
“Yes, but Prime said you could reprioritize your scientific pursuits, right? You remain a cannon, but not just a cannon.”
“Indeed,” said Perceptor, and Yasmina thought there was a smile on his long, avian-piscine face.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Dr. Joey Sutherland looked up at Beachcomber, his hands pausing in their task of sorting rock samples, and grinned. “I have that same…well, I hate to call it a problem.” Walking the streets of his home city, San Francisco - and one had to admit this would be more likely there than elsewhere - Joey had on more than one occasion been stopped by a stranger who wanted to kiss him.
Beachcomber, it seemed, had just had this happen to him, in Ashland.
“Oh?” Beachcomber asked, grinning back. Joey could see why someone would want to kiss him. He had the closest things to lips that he’d seen on anyone but Prime.
“Maybe it’s because you’re…not huge,” Joey said, suddenly wondering if the robots ever had neuroses about their size. Beachcomber was only about nine feet tall - within the realm of possible human heights, if you counted hormonal abnormalities. He could look down at Yau Ming, which Ming would find unusual. But the scale of affection with Beachcomber didn’t seem quite so insurmountable as that with, say, Prime. Or Skyfire. Joey shook his head mentally. Good grief. What could a human do with Skyfire besides ride inside him with about three platoons of friends?
Beachcomber chuckled. “Scale issues can always be overcome,” he said. Joey was pretty sure the jovial lasciviousness in the robot’s tone wasn’t just his imagination. He was glad he hadn’t been drinking anything.
“Yeah,” Joey said, when he’d recovered. “But we’re…squishy.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing, dude,” Beachcomber said. “No, wait, Primrose,” he said suddenly to one of the little crablike drones they’d built out of parts of their spaceship. “That goes here, this goes there.” He pointed, to keep the boxes of samples in proper geological order. The drone, careful without being mindful, set the box down as directed. Joey wondered how fine a line it was between a drone and a person, and whether it creeped any of the Autobots out. He suspected the Decepticons didn’t give a rat’s ass, either way.
“I guess I shouldn’t ask for any further details,” Joey said hopefully. Beachcomber laughed.
The sky outside had turned to pewter. It had been raining on and off all day. Beachcomber and Seaspray were the only two who didn’t seem to mind. What humans called acid rain wasn’t strong enough to affect the Cybertronians’ shielding, let alone the armor beneath. There was still a lot of complaining, though. Frank - whose tolerance for whingeing was small - had once said, “Well, you shouldn’t have landed in bloody Oregon, then!” Temperate rainforest was no climate for dry-loving robots. Perceptor hadn’t seemed affronted, merely nodding, but Yasmina and Joey and Marcus and Juan had glared daggers at Frank. Perceptor had worked a practical miracle bringing their heavily damaged ship down in more or less one piece. He hadn’t had the luxury of being picky about the landing site.
“You probably shouldn’t ask Skyfire,” Beachcomber said, and Joey could have sworn he winked somehow, behind the silvery visor. “He’s kinda shy about that sort of thing. As shy as we get, anyway.”
Joey was once again glad not to have been drinking anything. He gazed into Beachcomber’s visor, seeking a glint of the optics behind. A lot of information seemed to pass between them. Joey dusted off his hands and stood up. Beachcomber remained seated, carefully setting his samples aside.
Wondering if he was about to cause an intergalactic incident, Joey leaned in, putting his hands on the robot’s shoulders, and kissed him.
Beachcomber was warm. Joey had noted that before, when a steadying hand had kept him from stumbling on the trails around the mountain. These weren’t cold, heartless, unfeeling robots like the madmen of science fiction liked to imagine. And Beachcomber’s lips, made of many small plates, were hard but responsive against Joey’s. The robot’s hand lightly touching his back felt huge across his shoulders, but not threatening. It was comforting, a surety of care, safety, protection. Joey was glad he had shaved off his habitual mustache and goatee, though. He didn’t fancy getting hair caught in metal lip components.
“See?” Beachcomber said as they parted, both warmer than before. “Scale is not a problem.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Teddy-bear sized housekeeping drones scuttled about, keeping the place clean and discouraging various forms of terrestrial wildlife from taking up unwanted residence. The base doors were always open, except in the worst weather or during Decepticon attack. The robots were unaffected by the range of temperatures prevalent in this area, climate muted as it was by the ocean nearby. The human quarters were therefore father in, behind a double set of automatic not-glass doors.
The restriction on wildlife didn’t apply to domesticated pets, though the definition of “domesticated” was stretched a little. Beachcomber seemed to have an odd effect on organic life - there was an entire clowder of cats and a pack of dogs, small birds, large birds, fish, herptiles, and Marcus, who was a licensed falconer, had a one-legged red-tailed hawk who spent as much time as she was allowed perched on Beachcomber’s head.
Drones and animals and humans and robots and the AIs whose presence was more or less ubiquitous in both Autobot bases. All living in a peculiar muddle of work and happy arguments and swirl of cultures. Seven human languages were spoken, and at least three humans were trying to learn Cybertronian, despite the lack of necessary vocal equipment. A kind of pidgin was evolving, though, of sounds they could make and still be understandable.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Perceptor paused suddenly in his bustling. His shoulders slumped and he shook his head.
"What is it? What happened?" Miles asked. One of the other bots was giggling, so it couldn't be very terrible.
"Bother," Perceptor said, taking up the task again with his usual aplomb. "Beachcomber's fallen off the continental shelf."
"Again," the giggling bot, Seaspray, added.
"Ah, yes. Now he's claiming he didn't fall, since his balance, as I well know, is quite good." Perceptor seemed to address the ceiling, his volume increasing dramatically. "As though having JUMPED off makes it BETTER!"
Miles laughed. Perceptor was fun to watch. He had first struck Miles as a cute, if somewhat elderly (whatever that meant, in this case), absent-minded professor type. He talked to his experiments. So far the experiments didn’t talk back, but anything was possible when Perceptor was involved, according to Wheeljack.
The scary thing was, Perceptor wasn't really absent-minded. At all. He might seem to have lost track of the conversation or something he was doing, or something Wheeljack was doing - but in reality he knew perfectly well and was only prioritizing something else for a moment.
Thinking about Perceptor naturally led to thinking about Beachcomber. Beachcomber, Miles told himself, wasn’t really a guy robot. Yeah, his voice was pleasantly deep, and he was nine feet tall and everyone used the masculine pronoun for him. But his forging was ae, and besides, of the two Autobots that appeared “female” to most humans, Arcee was scary as shit, and Borealis was freaking ginormous. How do you go about kissing someone who could probably fit your entire body in her mouth? It didn’t really bear thinking about.
Miles didn’t consider himself to be a Captain Jack Harkness exactly. It had more to do with Beachcomber. Beachcomber was distracting; and apparently pretty much everyone found him so. Miles had noticed how even Skyfire leaned down to be close when Beachcomber was talking, or humming, or singing or smiling. Ironically, the only one who seemed able to resist Beachcomber’s “distraction field” was Perceptor, although Miles wondered if Perceptor was really immune or just reacted in an atypical fashion; getting more tetchy instead of mellowing out. Despite this, Beachcomber was the only mech Miles had caught Perceptor getting snuggly with.
"Want me to go get him?" Seaspray asked.
Perceptor waved his hands about vaguely. Miles had increasingly gotten the feeling that Perceptor had once been accustomed to having more than two arms. "Oh, give him a week. As long as he stays in contact." He regarded Miles with a long-suffering expression. "He'd be down there all century if we let him. "
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