Fic
Title: Borealis 75/92: Heartlines - pt 6
Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairing(s): Ensemble. Lots.
Warnings: PnP, sparksmex, OCs, minor character death, angst.
Summary: Wherein there is a lot of Seeker action you bet! Also Shockwave doing unpleasant things, lots of snuggles, microbot sads, and a bit of Miles and Beachcomber on the beach.
Notes: Suggested listening: For Lissi - Pioneer from some Tenchi Muyo OST or other. ;D I hope that link works because my sound system is not working atm. =_= Also, the Homomdans are shamelessly lifted from Iain Banks' Look To Windward. I took some liberties, but Ar Be-Ka will be showing up again. ;D
~7800 + 9400 words. = 17,200 aklfaklsghasdhaklshfas
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
BOREALIS: Heartlines - Part VI
2079 - October
“Have you three been topside yet?” Thundercracker landed neatly, handing Prowl down to the mesa top without a bounce, Strake and Countermeasure right beside them. They had spent the last couple of months in China. Thundercracker’s reparations included building houses for the poor and dispossessed. (He agreed with Mirage - the way this planet’s physical processes casually murdered its inhabitants was disturbing. Earthquakes were just wrong.) Strake, Countermeasure and Prowl always offered to help, but Thundercracker found the repetitive physical task both soothing and a focus for his thoughts. A meditation on things he’d done he now deeply wished he hadn’t, and on things he might do in the future. (Like clang Perceptor senseless. Cybertron would have a sun again! Soon, soon!) This particular jaunt, Strake and County had spent most of their time enjoying the company of the Spychangers. REV and WARS were dependably snarky and hilarious, and CounterArrow’s quiet humor reminded them of Mirage.
The new alphas fluttered their wings. “You mean orbit?” Impulse asked, torn between excitement and nonchalance.
“We were waiting until Borealis got back,” Serenity said. Which would be in a few weeks - Prime had just gotten a ping from her. Three months earlier than anticipated. Serenity would be happy to meet her, but wondered what was up. Prime hadn’t elaborated.
“Why?” Strake asked. “We can show you better than a delta can.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the way Borealis teaches orbital mechanics,” Ranger said, bristling slightly. “And she likes doing it.”
“But we’re the same frametype,” Strake said. His armor stayed down but his fields went just a tad spiky.
“And we’re ex-Cons,” Thundercracker said. Everyone looked at him, then away, uncomfortable. “Let the new ones decide for themselves, Strake.”
Serenity walked up to TC and offered an arm cable. She remembered the footage from Beijing, but she trusted Prime. And Prowl. TC accepted and opened his side of the link without hesitation. I want to know how you feel about newsparks. And memory-custodians.
Newsparks? Thundercracker cocked his head, but kept his responses open, let her follow his associative emotional and linguistic threads. Prime told me before I left the Decepticons how few of us this war had left alive. Megatron, Galvatron never admitted that we’d nearly wiped ourselves out. Newsparks are important.
So are the experiences of the elders, Serenity said, rather unashamedly basking in his harmonics. The glyph for “important” had echoes miles deep. He would die to protect any of them, despite Prime’s geas; or live on in unimaginable suffering for a geological age, separated from the Allspark and his first trine. He needed to protect them. She wriggled further into the link, pushing, and he let her, the connection becoming intimate. She found herself leaning eagerly into his flight memories - storms and battles and leaps into space. Races and dances and wings brushing wings at hypersonic velocity just to prove you could.
You’re trine leader, he said, warmth and a kind of instinctive comfort coloring his fields and harmonics. His place was at the leader’s portside wing, had always been so. He liked it that way, was good at it. She swept closer, enjoying his contentment, snuggling into his personal love for and loyalty to Prime, and Prowl - and Starscream-that-was. He caught her wandering hands and held them away from his chest. Serenity, you haven’t integrated yet.
Oh! Ah, I’m sorry. How about memory-custodians, then?
He smiled. That? Is weird. I have some of the Ixchel memories, though. And some of Will Lennox’s. And I know you have Sarah Lennox’s entire mindstate. She could hear and feel how alien he regarded these memories as being, how strange this alliance; but he was Cybertronian, and Cybertronians adapted.
Which ones of Will’s?
Hn. Battles mostly. Interactions with Ironhide. Paratrooper training. A few others, mostly sensory suites. Limited, but enlightening.
Understanding your enemy.
Avoiding the disgusting squishy bits. He gave her hands a squeeze and let them go.
Nothing about Annabelle’s birth, then?
Gyaaugh!
Serenity laughed and withdrew the link. “Thank you, Thundercracker.” The internal exchange had taken a couple of seconds. “Let’s go up with them. We can fly with Borealis when she arrives.” And pick up a few gravity-surfing delta tricks, maybe, but pass up the offer to learn important frame-skills from same-type veterans? That would be plain stupid. Ranger was nodding. She could tell he’d come to the same conclusion.
Up they went. Blue and silver leading, black and silver flanking. Serenity’s colors were gold and blue, Volley’s gold and turquoise. Impulse was currently mauve and bronze but he changed his mind every week. Five. Thundercracker felt the imbalance like a cut fuel line. He didn’t blame Prowl for delaying a rebuild, and neither, Thundercracker was proud to note, did Strake. Strake’s devotion to Prowl filled him with quiet delight.
And if Starscream was here - he and Skywarp were in the Sol system somewhere, they thought, but were unsure where - would he try to kill these newsparks, or would he set aside faction programming and pride and help in their training to the best of his considerable ability? Thundercracker didn’t know. He wanted to believe the latter. He hated that he wanted that.
They flew. Past the blue into the black. Wheeling and rolling giddily, giggling, as gravity loosened its hold, wings glittering in the hard sunlight. So young, so trusting. So graceful even out here beyond the air, where they had to relearn how to maneuver with precision. And there was Strake, three million years older than them, but somehow with a similar natural exuberance, just as happy as they to fly and laugh and admire the gleaming blue world below them.
And it wasn’t that they made Thundercracker feel old. He was old. There had been a very good reason, he remembered, to hide how old he was. Chronological age wasn’t that important. Prime was just curious, he’d said. But maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to unpack those memories. Sometime. Later.
The western United States rolled by beneath them, pale and arid, higher elevations tipped with black that would turn green closer to, irrigated greener to the west, in California, grey with cities on the coast. Prowl and County were lying on the mesa top, looking up, catching the faint glitter of the alphas as they orbited by. Prowl sent Thundercracker and Strake glyphs of pleasure and unabashed admiration, and Thundercracker’s spark expanded, young again, hot with anticipation.
They looped the Moon, as Borealis had done with Ranger, and then Rain; but unlike them did not land, winging directly back to Earth. Serenity began to tremble first, watching their homeworld expand.
Oh! Strake looped around the three young ones, herding them closer together. Serenity was transmitting a weird sound, not keening exactly, not singing either, but maybe a combination of both.
Skyfire, you in range? Thundercracker figured he probably was. Prowl trusted them this far, but most of the older Autobots did not. Serenity is…ah, there go the other two…
Integrating? Skyfire approached, blipping a quick IFF. Not that TC would mistake him for anyone or anything else, but there were plenty of EDF satellites here in geostationary that liked to be reassured.
Yep. They’re fairly safe up here, Thundercracker said, but for the sake of monitoring and company we should take them down to the embassy.
Ratchet yelling at you, too? Skyfire asked, grinning.
Yep.
…
Three weeks later.
Serenity didn’t want a cooped-up hole below the embassy. Ranger wasn’t entirely comfortable about trying this in orbit, alone. Moonlight on the mesa top seemed a reasonable compromise. She flew down and he climbed up and they took hands in the center, the expanse of stone around them both gouged and polished by decades of metal feet. Kissing with metal lips and laser-sharp teeth was no worse than keeping their braces from locking, back in high school.
Now it was wheels and wings, cannon-parts and missiles, talons and compound ankles, and she had to stoop to kiss him, and he had to extend his pedes; but their hands explored as they had once done, discovering themselves and each other. They had energon pumps for hearts, but their sparks spun as pulses once had raced.
It felt odd at first, being so small in her hands, standing beneath the shadow of her wings; odd but …nice. She had a broad, keeled chest to snuggle into, a streamlined waist to wrap his arms around. Long, clever fingers dipping so neatly into the heated spaces in his body. She was bigger, she was stronger, faster. She was the one who must gentle her powerful talons on his body. Nice, yes and more than nice. He arched and shivered beneath her. Seeker, his programming said. Deadly and beautiful! Her engines sang, a high, musical chord like no mortal jet, ringing with echoes of an ancient world neither of them had yet seen in the metal.
Down on the stone still warm from the day. Shoulders and helms, tires and heels and sharp, sharp elbows scraping sparks from the rock. Fingers and mouths found good places, different from human places, and began the mapping of future pleasures in these bodies. Erogenous orogeny. Charge leapt from metal to metal and Ranger laughed because it no longer mattered who came first when physics sent them past the edge together, and nothing was over until they wanted it to be. He loved these bodies!
Serenity grinned. Cables sleeked and pinned him to the rock, wide open and shouting as the link flashed through them like blue fire. Mind link, body link, they felt themselves light up, felt each other, blended and whole at once. If tactile had been a cartography of new realms of delight, cables was leaping into an outrushing tide; bubbles rising through their minds toward the light, sinking into and with each other; no bottom to this ocean. Love and joy swept them up in a stopless current from depths to heights, crashing glittering in consciousness-fragments on their moonlit shore.
Intertwined, fans and coolant pumps humming, they rested, putting themselves back together. It occurred to them that it would be possible to plumb the depths of each other’s memories; to seek out discrepancies in the shared lives of Sarah and Will, every lie, every omission, the things they had never told one another as human beings limited to spoken words. Every petty feeling, every selfish act could be recalled and tallied, every experience compared; but none of those things seemed important. Their human memories were important, but manufacturing conflict was pointless. Serenity and Ranger acknowledged the possibility - and skimmed on to other ways of sharing.
Their sparks thrummed, so close, Ranger draped over Serenity’s chest. Opening they found strange, as Rain had, but they trusted each other and there were plenty of experienced mechs nearby if they got nervous.
Celadon spiral arms, saffron wings wrapped around each other, corona to corona, nearly touching photospheres. Two unique sparks carrying threads of Ironhide and Ratchet, Beachcomber and Perceptor met and twined, their radiation singing an old-as-the-universe Magnificat; their souls magnifying the wonder of their creation. Expanding with spacetimelove, attracted and delighted by their dissimilarities, the two young suns, pale green and gold, pulsed then blazed; a springtime nebula in autumn, coruscating through them and lighting the desert like dawn.
…
“That was awesome,” Ranger murmured against Serenity’s shoulder. Their fields wound slowly around and through each other, lazy, fulsome, not quite sated.
“We should do it again,” she agreed. “A lot. Soon.” Wrapping her arms around him, she sat up abruptly, staring into the sky.
Impulse and Volley stooped upon them from the tropopause where they’d been waiting, watching. Letting their trine leader take the first sip.
“Ranger?” Serenity flicked shoulder armor as the pair landed at the other end of the mesa, hot from the air and glittering with starlight.
The whirlwind of three alpha bodies around him? Yes…oh hell yes!
They gathered him between them, eager to forge their bonds in this way newly open to them, and leapt for low orbit. Falling sustained, four voices, four energies braided into a spiraling, sparking, giggling, radiant comet tail.
…
Even beyond the clarity gained post-integration, some things Serenity understood now in a completely different and stunningly physical manner. Ranger! she tight-beamed, harmonics full of intent. Impulse and Volley watched them with half-shuttered optics, engines at low hum.
He stirred against her chest. Mmmrr.
Optimus!
His optics lit as he lifted his head; bright and irised wide. I know! Waiting had gotten harder and harder over the past sixteen years; especially as the physical affection aspect of the robots’ lives had become less and less hidden from general humanity. The seven basic genders had made a splash in 2078, but then in one day the Cons had destroyed the Taj Mahal, Khufu’s pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, half of Macchu Picchu, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Himeji Castle and a chunk of the Forbidden City. Humanity had been kind of distracted by that.
He's so...so...!
I know!
You, too?
YES! Is that weird?
No, it's hot! It seemed odd somehow that there should be a straightforward glyph for requesting interface, but not only was there, there were entire lexicons of variations, with wide-ranging degrees of elaboration. But what she and Ranger lacked in many cases was social context. The language made it possible to just ask someone for intimacy or help with a quick defrag, but was it polite to do so? And they couldn't help thinking it might be a little beyond the pale to make such a request of the Prime. I suppose you don’t want to ask Ironhide.
Uh…not really.
I’ll ask Ratchet, then.
Ratchet would of course instantly blab to Ironhide. Ranger covered his face with his hands. Oh god.
He says we can either just ask Prime or we can make goo-goo optics at him whenever we see him and he’ll take pity on us.
Outstanding. They could start their polyamorous career in the most pathetic way possible, mooning after Prime like a quartet of groupies.
Or we could pounce on him.
Damn, you really are an alpha, aren’t you.
Mm.
…
Bands of platinum-bright clouds poured lines of rain on the desert amid spears of afternoon sunlight, rainbows ghosting from tattered remnants to full arcs and multiples. Optimus paused, his weight shifted onto one hip, and tilted his head to look over his shoulder at the four mechs watching him.
What were they supposed to do, with fields like that and a gaze like that directed at them? They ran to catch up.
Prime had lifted a feed from the local TV station’s Doppler and was aimed at the heaviest front, dropping his shields as the leading edge swept over them. They followed his example, Ranger tilting his head way back, lifting his arms, bending his torso in a slow sort of dance, humming in tune to the music the rain made of his metal body. Serenity and her wingmates held out their hands and shivered as the water dripped down through them. They had not felt this before.
Rain sleeted down their bodies, Prime’s fields wafted through theirs, drawing them onward, closer, to a pile of rocks near the cliff where the Twins had tried out their steel whips. Shielded thus from view from the embassy, Optimus sank cables into them, pulled them closer, and flooded the link. Flooding the torpedo tubes before firing, Ranger thought helplessly. He'd forgotten to engage his articulation locks and would have fallen if Prime hadn't caught him.
This is so weird, a part of Ranger thought, as Optimus gathered them in. Serenity and her wingmates were currently taller than Prime, and their wings made them broader, but Prime’s arms fit around them as though designed for that purpose. Weird, Ranger thought again; because for years, decades, Optimus had in a real sense been his, Lennox’s, commanding officer. On paper, for the benefit of human governments and militaries, Lennox and Prime shared command; and later, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and then C-in-C of the Earth Defense Force, on paper Lennox had had the greater authority. It was the humans’ planet. But on the ground, in the thick of it, Lennox had never had any trouble following Prime’s orders. Deferring to three million years of battle experience, against these very foes, was simply common sense.
Cybertronians, though, had never had anything like human rules against fraternization. Ranger’s body, his spark, curled against Prime’s like coming home. He was aware of the others, their keen edges and shivering wings, but Prime made each caress, physical, field and mental, feel as though there was only the two of them.
MmmmmrrRangerrr…
The purr of his name in that voice, the glyphs around it spiraling outward in combined meanings he could only grasp the edges of, mind-phantom hands roving his body until he arched once, twice in overload. Optimus kissed the Seekers through the afternoon, but as the sky turned deep blue he turned his head, brushing his lips gently against Ranger’s. Ranger climbed up out of the strutless state he’d been in, wrapped his hands around Prime’s helm, drawing the kiss, and Prime’s internal fields, deeper.
Ranger…mmm…Ranger, open…
Ranger’s dentae clattered. He felt the command sling through his systems, electrifying, that breathless moment when the pieces of his chest began to slide apart and he felt the air on his inner workings, sizzling on the photosphere of his soul. The blue-white giant approached. Pale celadon petalled up to meet it, unfurling shyly. Not his first touch spark-to-spark, but Prime was…Prime was…
Optimus… Not fear, but a weight of knowledge nurtured this hesitation. Knowledge already possessed, knowledge soon and swiftly to be acquired. Prime nuzzled him, engine thrumming. Prominences from their coronae wisped at each other, not quite touching. Ranger wanted him, wanted this, with his entire body, down to the resonating strings, poising on the brink to draw out the threshold.
They touched. Two atmospheres mingling, spirit and spark. Had he thought he had understood before what a Prime was?
He arched, desperate, and Optimus slipped an arm beneath him, helping him spread himself wider. Sinking, immersed, drowning, no, not dying, his human mind rejected the image; falling back into the deepest, plushest featherbed, miles deep before I sleep, on the clearest Sunday morning with nothing to do but make love all day. Optimus hummed above him, enjoying the sensations, clean skin on clean soft sheets, warm bodies softly pressed together, though now their bodies were nothing like that, nothing soft about them but their voices sometimes and the way their touch could be gentle with tiny, fragile beings. Optimus opened vistas of memory to him, and yet greater vistas of emotion; twenty-five thousand shades of love, contentment in a yearlong embrace, the security of knowing and being known completely - spiked with sadness, knowing that sometimes that was not enough, but hope for a someday he had time enough to wait for. Easy to be patient, and patience a balm like time like Prime to heal all wounds. The love of sun to sun, shivering planets into being, gravity of affection tenuous but felt across vast distances, like holding hands across a galaxy. Sending ripples of life across spacetimelove, this joining of sparks that was and was not sexual, framed by human experience as it was, but sixteen years of robot life full of love, too, coloring everything with a wider spectrum. Ranger dug his fingers into Prime’s armor, holding tight as the cataclysmic rush of charge began, lightning in the dark, as Ranger’s lights, for a little while, went out.
…
Strange, Ranger thought. Not for the first or last time. Optimus lay on his side, Ranger curled in the hollow of the Prime’s body; Serenity spooning up on the other side with Impulse and Volley draped over the lot of them, Volley’s cheek spar resting on one of Ranger’s feet. Strange that overload - physical climax - caused unconsciousness (unless one knew Red Alert’s trick). Intimacy and vulnerability.
Big hands petted him, a single finger tracing his central seam. He opened eagerly.
In Ranger’s mind they twined together as bodies made of light. That’s what sparks were, kind of. Light and energy and matter that could be divided and shared, and love to bind them all together; and to guide them to their ultimate home when the soul’s fuel at last ran out. He was aware of Serenity and the others nearby; a warm, neighboring trinary system.
Optimus sank into him, layer by layer, not a merge but passionate inquiry, fundamental parsing; a wind through the leaves of everything he was. A calling, note by note, listening for resonances, harmonies, echoes. Prime’s body might not be able to sing, but his spark surely could. Ranger began to feel a little laid bare, as though any further and he’d unravel…
Instantly, Optimus withdrew to a safer level, to a more bearable intimacy, wholly pleasurable.
Is there something wrong with my spark? Ratchet hadn’t said anything of the kind, and the alphas’ sparks and his own had been so individual, so different from each other, besides the essential spark-ness of them, that he realized he had no basis of comparison. Except, now, with Prime’s. And that probably was an apples and oranges thing.
No indeed, beloved, Prime assured him, bending his head far to kiss his forehelm.
What happened when I - when Will - died?
I do not know for certain.
You have ideas, though.
Through their cables, Optimus transmitted both formal glyphs and raw emotion/cognition. Acknowledgement uncertainty concern. Wish to gather more information, wariness toward haste and the mistakes caused by it. Ranger knew how the Allspark/sparks could sometimes alter memory and perception if one delved unprepared.
Yeah, Ranger said, in kind. Frustrating but definitely understood.
Strange, Ranger thought. And wonderful.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2079 - November
White mackerel clouds made a bright pattern against the ruddy desert below as she flashed through the upper atmosphere. Memory-custodians, huh? So that’s what the kids are calling it these days.
Welcome home, Borealis! Spark of my spark, said his glyphs, warm and enfolding.
“Borealis! Borealis!” A bunch of baby jets swarmed out to meet her as she transformed and landed on the road next to the embassy. And not so baby jets, and a load of other people she hadn’t seen for the better part of a year, none of whom cared that her armor was still hot from re-entry, climbing into her arms or onto her shoulders or clinging to any available surface.
Serenity! Aren’t you three cute! Were I unwed, I would take you in a manly fashion.
’Cause we’re pretty? Serenity purred.
’Cause you’re pretty.
Thank you, that was very restorative.
Know what the first rule of flying is?
Love! the three alphas chorused, and all the jets dissolved into giggles.
“Perceptor, they’re adorable, can I keep them?”
“It’s like some kind of insta-geek field,” Eject marveled. “She wasn’t even in this galaxy when they decanted.”
“Heya, Jazz.” She couldn’t quite manage a full salute as she passed the First Lieutenant on her way inside. “I’m covered in beeeeeeeeeeeeees!” Jazz laughed. The last time she’d been on-planet Rewind had hosted an Eddie Izzard marathon. “Hullo, Ranger…oh, I get a kiss now? Wooo!” She switched to tight-beam,What does Mikaela say about the “memory custodian” nomenclature?
Ranger sighed. She said calling it by a nice shiny new name didn’t change things, and felt even more like a creepy cover-up. I understand where she’s coming from, but…it’s hard on Bee.
Urgh. She’d be sure to give Bee extra snuggles when she saw him. She switched channels, casting her thought around the turn of the planet to Argentina, where Skyfire, Beachcomber and Miles were tootling around the Ischigualasto Formation. Skyfire! Someone…uh, they called themselves Homomdans...put up a new wormhole near Svirskalix Tertius! Cuts the time from here to Cybertron back down to six months!
And they let you use it?
I asked nice. I also…might have made puppy-optics at them.
…You made puppy-optics. At a Homomdan.
It worked! Or, was inconsequential, one or the other. She shrugged, bouncing Serenity and her trine, who whooped and giggled and tightened their claws on her armor. The being I spoke with was really nice! Skyfire, in Argentina, was bent over, hands on knees, laughing and being pestered by one geologist and one human about what was so funny. Ratchet and Perceptor had joined the embassy crowd and were propping each other up, equally overcome. I suppose making cute shouldn’t have worked on that species? I’m not even sure they were vertebrates…?
“Ancestrally,” Perceptor explained between chortles, “the Homomdans reproduced via fractionation. Now, as far as I know, they grow new individuals in tanks, much as we do. So you are correct, taking on the mien of a submature entity should not have been a compelling argument, as they have little tradition of caring for young.”
“Huh. Well ne said nir name was Ar Be-Ka iSchloear and to give nir regards to Optimus, so that might have been more the point than anything my face was doing.”
“Ar Be-Ka!” Optimus had joined the reunion now that they were in the main hangar and people scooted around on Borealis to make room for him to hug her. He stood on the tips of his pedes and reached up and could just about wrap his arms around her waist when she crouched somewhat. “Aaah, Little Bird, I’m glad you got to meet nem! The Homomdans were once among our closest allies.” Homomdan lifespans were measured in millions of years, but that had been no guarantee that Be-Ka would still be alive by the time Cybertronians could take a place again on the galactic cultural dance-floor. “You actually spoke to Be-Ka nemself?”
Borealis rolled her optics, but reached down - somewhat encumbered - extending a wrist cable, transferring the entirety of the experience to him. “I actually did.”
Someone just made Optimus really happy, Hot Spot commented from the other side of the equator.
I think that’s my new favorite pastime, Borealis said, grinning bemusedly.
Sweets, Jazz purred at her, that’s a lot of people’s favorite pastime.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
A few days later.
“Hoist! Hooooiiiiist!”
Hurriedly scooping the latest fruits of his labors into a suitable box, Hoist scurried up the ramp and outside. Borealis had landed on the bare mountainside and was now leaping down to the entry clearing. She paused when she spotted him. Gauging the distance, she made an immense show of prostrating herself at his feet, arms outstretched, her hands making pathetic grasping motions. Weak mewls escaped her vocoder. Hoist considered fleeing back to the kitchen.
“Is it true?” Borealis moaned. “Did you really make…?”
“Yes,” he huffed, pretending exasperation. “I did make.” With a flourish, he withdrew a single confection - scaled for deltas - from the box he held behind his back. Smallish, domed, squatly cylindrical, robin’s egg blue, with a layer of softer filling of a pale lavender in the middle. Borealis’ enormous fingertips snatched it from him with lightning delicacy.
She sat up and brought it to the olfactory vents in her cheek spars. Sugars no longer appealed to her Cybertronian fuel systems, but other high-energy compounds were interpreted by her CPU as “sweet” and thus stimulated her pleasure centers. Similarly, though the scents of vanilla and chocolate and other things Ixchel Chase had enjoyed were still pleasant, other aromas also brought with them a more visceral - or core programmatical - reaction. She nibbled, a precise, testing bite. The outer surface was slightly shiny, crunchy, and gave way to a soft, airy, chewy center, with a creamy manganese filling between the two halves. “Oh my god,” she whimpered, and took another bite.
“Did I get it right?” Hoist asked, bringing the filled box forward. Borealis’ optics were shuttered, and she continued to nibble slowly, her fields swirling and feathering in heavy, dark, blissful enjoyment. Hoist was pretty sure he’d gotten it right.
The gypsum doughnuts had continued to be popular. Certain people insisted on teasing Prowl and Streetwise about them, but Prowl would only eat them if TC or Strake (or, especially, Prime) fed them to him bit by bit during or after interface. Making a special ritual out of something mundane. Hoist thought Mirage had probably given him the idea. Now there would be another goody for the treat menu. French macarons.
“Hoist.” Her voice was faint, pleading.
“You’re going to eat them all, aren’t you.” He’d been hoping to get at least a few others to test them, but now that Borealis was home…
She leaned down to kiss him, hooking a sticky finger behind his knees. “How many more do you have besides the ones in that box?”
“I’m not telling.” He pushed the box between them, as if to fend her off, but he didn’t struggle as she slipped another macaron into her mouth and gently lowered him to the ground. They offered cables at the same time, and soon Hoist was awash in the bliss of macaron appreciation and enjoyment. Yes, he had gotten them just right.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
3 days later.
Crash! Crang! Spaang! Whoops and shouts and howls of outraged dignity, hum and whine of energy weapons discharged at their lowest setting. They were doing well, the three of them. Seekers in general were not fond of close quarters fighting. All the more reason to drill them harder on it. Air-to-ground they already had down. Ironhide watched them wheel and parry and swing, firing solid gold (soft, with no penetrating power to speak of; they just stung) rounds at point-blank, evading or blocking most of them, duck and turn and kick - becoming very much a dance. Ironhide huffed steam from his core vents. This sort of exercise was no doubt helping them trine, but wasn’t doing as much for their reflexes. They were ready to move on to opponents other than themselves.
The usual suspects showed up to help. The Lambo twins, Cliffjumper, Arcee. Lots of noise and dirt scuffed up and Ironhide kept having to shoo them away from the road. The din was making the visiting ambassadors and other dignitaries nervous.
Prowl, Thundercracker, Strake and Countermeasure landed on the mesa top to watch. Ironhide considered enlisting their help. Maybe later. Shortly thereafter, Borealis came in from the other direction and landed on the road. Talk about someone who could use a little more hand-to-hand practice…was she actually tippy-toeing?
“BOREALIS!”
“Oh crap.”
“Would you kindly assist us?”
“Yessir.”
Serenity beamed as the delta shuffled over. It was so hard not to jump up and hug her head or something. Big sister! She felt an upwelling empathy for Ixchel and Borealis and how they were meshed; she now had what Borealis called the “Good Parts Version” of the Ixchel memories - the parts people most seemed to like sharing; the parts of a human life that taught the most about what humans thought they were, and who Ixchel had been. Slow Sunday mornings and graduations, swimming and breathing and singing, rubbing sleep from heavy-lidded eyes, and being rescued by Ratchet. Coffee Americano and vanilla latte. Chocolate. A purring cat in your lap. (Steeljaw had the sound and vibration down, but he was not squoodgy like a good cat could be.) Serenity’s spark-self and Sarah-self conflicted for a moment in a flash of emotional turmoil. Lissi didn’t like fighting, it wasn’t right to drag her into it unwilling, was it? Versus the excitement of taking on a much larger, powerful foe with her wingmates beside her! Borealis wasn’t a veteran in the same league as Ironhide or Skyfire, but she had fought in real combat! She had taken on a whole battleship! And dented herself pretty badly, but hey Ratchet could fix just about anything, right?
“Start on the ground,” Ironhide said. “Basic maneuvers. If you remember them, Little Bird…”
Borealis shot him a bland look and unsheathed her arm scythes.
Oh.
Serenity saw Impulse and Volley’s optics widen, knew her own were doing the same. The curving blades more than doubled the delta’s already considerable reach, and the edges glowed orange-hot.
“The bigger they are,” Impulse said, twirling his arm-bolters.
“Keep telling yourself that,” said Sideswipe. He kinda wanted in on this action too, what with Astrotrain and Blitzwing making themselves annoying lately; but it would probably be more fun to watch.
There was a good deal of cautious circling at first, Borealis reluctant to throw the first punch. Ironhide bared his denta, but Skyfire was often just as bad. Judge the enemy by how he attacks, versus hit first hard enough and you might not have to hit again. Balance in all things, Ironhide supposed. Emboldened by her apparent reluctance and slowness, the alphas began to nip and harry her - there were three of them and she only had two arms.
Until Impulse got too close and Borealis stepped on him. Ironhide wasn’t sure what the poisonous look she shot the watching Thundercracker was all about. Probably he didn’t want to know. In any case, the alphas now knew to avoid her feet unless they could be very fast on their own. Risk assessment all part of the process.
Wheel and bank, feint and drive, whirling faster. Borealis remained calm at the center, and Ironhide allowed himself a few nanoseconds of pleased pride. She was as good a student as she could be. Not everyone was forged a soldier.
Volley ducked and swung under her arm, zipping inside her reach where he could do more damage and she couldn’t-
-do anything? He suddenly found himself pinned between her chest and upper arm.
Squeeze him, Ironhide said.
But… Borealis began. Squishy…
Until his armor creaks. They needed to understand that they could be crushed. They needed to respect others’ strengths. Arrogance was a common alpha trait. Don’t assume getting closer gives you the advantage. Volley yowled and Borealis let him go.
But our missiles and rays can’t penetrate her armor, Impulse complained. What was the use of distance weapons if they didn’t work, and of getting close if that got you smushed?
Not without putting a lot of energy into it, no, Ironhide agreed. Together, though, you are a threat. Remember, too, that deltas are slower than you in atmosphere, and they’re not as maneuverable. They’re scientists, explorers. Cons may change their programming but that’s how ours are. They aren’t going to want to fight, and they’re slow to anger. Taunts won’t get you anywhere. Ironhide made a face. That said? Don’t piss off Skyfire. I mean it. Just don’t. He decided not to mention at this point that in every hand-to-hand fight that he’d ever seen between Skyfire and Starscream they’d been evenly matched. Mutual hatred, perfectly balanced. Now. Let’s start again.
The spar went on well into the afternoon; the young alphas chafing to get into the air, each leap at the delta’s head or wings lasting just a touch longer than gravity’s strict dictates allowed.
“All right!” Ironhide bellowed. “Take it to the roof!” Thundercracker, Strake, monitor.
Borealis transformed and was already rising fast on AG drives. The new alphas scrambled in a flash of wings and feral grins to catch up. The elder alphas transformed and followed.
Keep her down in atmo, Ironhide warned. Don’t let her reach stratopause or you’re toast. Powerful and sleek, the alphas grabbed for height, pummeling the heavier ship below. The thinner the air, the more maneuverable and faster Borealis could get.
“Good,” Ironhide muttered to himself. Borealis slipped and slid, fully utilizing three dimensions, but the nascent trine kept on her, pushing the advantage numbers and maneuverability gave them. The delta got past them a time or two, and made sure they remembered the lesson. There would always be more to learn. None of them could afford to become complacent.
After the spar, Borealis felt pleasantly tired rather than exhausted. The alphas flocked off into the embassy to bathe and snuggle and recharge, but she activated her AG drives and floated up to the mesa top. Casual back flip because dude antigravity! She landed and settled into sphinx pose, glancing at Thundercracker, who pretended not to notice. Shifting her feet, she tapped her fingers on her knees. A few wisps of cirrus cloud above them seemed to hold some fascinating secret, considering how hard Thundercracker was staring at them. After a moment she side-eyed Thundercracker again; leaning in, then straightening. Smug bastard. Thundercracker stood very upright and poised, wings arrayed but also subtly tense. If she stepped on him now it would be in full knowledge of what it meant among Seekers. He wanted to get stepped on. Her growl distorted the air around her throat like heat-shimmer; rousing in him very alpha-ish responses. A worthy adversary. A challenge. An ally who could drop from above, who could traverse vast distances and arrive with unlooked-for aid.
Prowl ignored them. Strake gave every appearance - hard fought for - of doing so. Strake was pretty sure that if he laughed TC would smack him and Borealis might punch him. (Hulk punching Thor.)
Borealis considered her options, shifting the grip of her talons on the stone. Step on him or no? She flared her wings, balanced to leap, and locked gazes with him. He uncrossed his arms, similarly prepared. Their fields bubbled and flowed - then flared and they sprang upward in unison, making for space.
Strake fell over laughing. Prowl, laughing softly more at Strake than TC, curled up against him.
They spun circles around each other as they flew, closer and closer, until their wings touched. She thrummed at the expert brush of his hull against hers, and he rumbled his engines, sound transmitting through metal in the void. They nudged each other, belly to belly as she parked neatly at a volume of L5 not otherwise crowded. Borealis transformed. TC followed. His armor gleamed in the hard sunlight, a lighter blue than hers, striped on his wings with silver, marked in subtle places with glyphs, and in not so subtle places with fading scars. He was old and worn and hard…and so goddamn sexy she couldn’t fathom why she hadn’t grabbed him already. She wrapped a hand around his waist, her thumb along the edge of his chest.
She half expected teeth and claws from him; and there was a fierceness in his gentle caresses, his sharp hands on her star-hardened armor. Goddamn sexy jet… So sue me I like blue… She pressed her mouth to his lower abdomen, armor thinner under the chest. So hot…
He accepted this as his due, amused that the concept of “hot” was used in the same ways in English and Cybertronian. Seekers in general and especially alphas were attractive even to many non-Cybertronian species. To deny this with some feeble effort at false modesty or self-deprecation was pointless.
Like scoring a supermodel… she murmured, putting them into a slow spin so that his armor was now in sunlight, now in her shadow, storm-blue diamond bright then glossy-black reflecting stars.
No, that’s Mirage. Sort of. Mirage was more like a geisha, the original meaning, when Westerners weren’t mistaking them for expensive prostitutes. A highly trained artist and entertainer.
Mmmm Mirage.
We are in complete agreement there. Alphas are more like rock stars.
She laughed, though her mouth never left his body. He’d said it with such unshakeable assurance. Fair enough. Rock stars dated supermodels. Can you sing?
Can you make me?
She pushed the fine manipulators in her fingertips into gaps in his armor, seeking the lower thoracic nodes. Finding them. Thundercracker arched, bared his denta - and then she pulsed heavy scans through his chest. His spark pulsed back and he overloaded hard and fast, but so good.
Primus, he liked deltas. Their soft, deep voices, their fantastic sensor arrays in long, sensitive hands, their fabulous engines. He’d liked deltas three billion years before Starscream had been kindled, and even if meeting Skyfire here on Earth was fraught, TC was still glad to see the white starship alive, glad to feel those big hands on his body again. And here, now this new one, who was in bloom for Skyfire - that was nice. Their mutual affection for the elder delta a bridge between them.
He likes you, too, you know, he rumbled, rousing quickly again enveloped in her fields. More than he lets on. More, maybe, than Skyfire knew himself. Well, they all had that problem sometimes.
Mm. Skyfire liked her, she knew that. She had a sneaking suspicion that Skyfire liked her - at least in part, at least at first - because her spark had a great many resonances in common with Ratchet’s, and Skyfire’s love for Ratchet was deep and abiding. But she couldn’t explain that to Thundercracker. The tips of his thoracic cables tapped at her chest and she uncovered her ports, sleeking her own cables at him. The link engaged smooth as glass, though Borealis scrambled behind her outermost firewalls to set her inner thought-streams in order. Once she had her security protocols set, she opened up wider, welcoming his mind, curious and eager to share his wealth of memory.
He wrapped his arms around her neck, touching forehelms. So young. So young! What had they done? What had they become? He understood the concept of children now, as he had never bothered to in all his long life. These newkindled sparks the Prime-as-Allspark was drawing forth, and the humans…such a young species, a child species…and he had swept through Beijing with their blood on his feet…
With Prime’s help, he had excised the parts of his programming that had made it possible for him to do that, but if Prowl must endure the memories of what he’d done, so would Thundercracker. He kept the worst of it behind firewalls, but she felt the edges of his distress. Fleeting and firmly mastered. This wasn’t the time, and she didn’t need to watch him thrashing at himself. She was kissing him, trying to distract him, soothe him. Even if it didn’t work, even if she did something wrong, she had to try to help, he could feel that in her. Such Autobot coding.
Dangerous, she thought, this mech she was snogging. Ixchel had never liked bad boys. But she had always fancied older men. Fear me, love me. Do as I say and I will be your slave. No. This wasn’t that kind of story. This was old and scarred, young and battered, flight and new stars and dead planets and teetering on the edge of extinction. Everything lay under the shadow of the war. Evil the absence of love. Letting entropy win. To which side of that equation had she pledged herself? Maybe not so formal a vow as Ranger repeating a human oath upon his decantation, but hull and spark had she not felt it as deeply?
He smiled, emotions mixed, and stroked her chest. Open? If she wanted to distract him, that would be the best way.
Hm. She unsealed her chamber. She definitely wanted this, but it was going to be interesting. Drift knew about the merge process, he had progeny of his own. He had left the Decepticons five thousand years ago, though, and his conversion had been catastrophic, by the accounts she’d heard. No one who had them wanted to share those memories, and not many people had them. But Thundercracker and Strake had not been told. Not yet. Her merge scars from Tessera had faded almost completely, but she couldn’t disguise her spark. Well. Let him come to whatever conclusions he would. She opened her chest.
Another thing he liked about deltas. Big sparks. This one had originally been half her current size, he knew, her spark grown to fit the body it powered. Going the other way was trickier - once you go big you don’t go back - though it could be done. It was done for the very aged. As their sparks became dim and feeble, they would be installed in small, light frames to prolong their lives.
He hated that thought, loathed the idea of it. Slowly fading, weathering, corroding until even movement was an effort.
That was long in the future for the pale blue giant before him, though. Hot and young and vital, drawing forth his own spark’s desire. Two sparks made to fly. Prominences flirted and flashed, stroking outward into each other’s chambers, striking deep with pleasure. Ah! He felt so fine, so well honed, full of a long life’s knowledge; canny and wise, protective and strong and more than a little broody. Ah! She felt so good, so curious, powerful, full of a scientist’s never-ending quest for knowledge; an explorer, determined and resilient, intelligent and more than a little nerdy.
There was something else about her spark, though. Something familiar in the way she handled his, meeting him strength for strength, care with care, allowing him as far in as he could take, demanding nothing more of him than he could bear. She felt…she felt a little like…Prime? Not exactly like, but…
He hadn’t the cycles to formulate a more coherent thought; their shared energies gathered, coalesced; blue plasma rippled and ribboned over their armor, spinning out as perfect spheres in the weightlessness of space.
Thundercracker fought hard to remain conscious. They weren’t entirely safe, though help if they needed it wasn’t far. He withdrew all but one pair of cables, stroking her face as she rebooted, immensely pleased that she had trusted him so.
She came online slowly, doing thorough systems checks she must have picked up from Skyfire, stretching theatrically then curling around him and nuzzling his helm.
First memory? she warbled sleepily at him.
Mm. Can’t. Not without some heavy-duty dredging. Will bits circa the reign of Volant and Alpha Trion do?
Ooooo! Yes please! Ratchet had shared some of that, too, but it would be fantastic to get a different perspective.
His first trine. Flocks of alphas gathered for Processions and Great Dances, flying in tight formation, swift and deadly in battle - the latter few and far between for much of his early career.
She drank in the ancient architecture, the views of a planet she had only seen in ruins, outside of others’ memories. The arrayed Seekers and their Lord were breathtakingly beautiful, pale armor glittering in the warm sunlight, their Prime’s darker coloration a striking contrast. Borealis giggled.
Oh my god, TC, seriously?
What?
Part 2
.
Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairing(s): Ensemble. Lots.
Warnings: PnP, sparksmex, OCs, minor character death, angst.
Summary: Wherein there is a lot of Seeker action you bet! Also Shockwave doing unpleasant things, lots of snuggles, microbot sads, and a bit of Miles and Beachcomber on the beach.
Notes: Suggested listening: For Lissi - Pioneer from some Tenchi Muyo OST or other. ;D I hope that link works because my sound system is not working atm. =_= Also, the Homomdans are shamelessly lifted from Iain Banks' Look To Windward. I took some liberties, but Ar Be-Ka will be showing up again. ;D
~7800 + 9400 words. = 17,200 aklfaklsghasdhaklshfas
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
BOREALIS: Heartlines - Part VI
2079 - October
“Have you three been topside yet?” Thundercracker landed neatly, handing Prowl down to the mesa top without a bounce, Strake and Countermeasure right beside them. They had spent the last couple of months in China. Thundercracker’s reparations included building houses for the poor and dispossessed. (He agreed with Mirage - the way this planet’s physical processes casually murdered its inhabitants was disturbing. Earthquakes were just wrong.) Strake, Countermeasure and Prowl always offered to help, but Thundercracker found the repetitive physical task both soothing and a focus for his thoughts. A meditation on things he’d done he now deeply wished he hadn’t, and on things he might do in the future. (Like clang Perceptor senseless. Cybertron would have a sun again! Soon, soon!) This particular jaunt, Strake and County had spent most of their time enjoying the company of the Spychangers. REV and WARS were dependably snarky and hilarious, and CounterArrow’s quiet humor reminded them of Mirage.
The new alphas fluttered their wings. “You mean orbit?” Impulse asked, torn between excitement and nonchalance.
“We were waiting until Borealis got back,” Serenity said. Which would be in a few weeks - Prime had just gotten a ping from her. Three months earlier than anticipated. Serenity would be happy to meet her, but wondered what was up. Prime hadn’t elaborated.
“Why?” Strake asked. “We can show you better than a delta can.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the way Borealis teaches orbital mechanics,” Ranger said, bristling slightly. “And she likes doing it.”
“But we’re the same frametype,” Strake said. His armor stayed down but his fields went just a tad spiky.
“And we’re ex-Cons,” Thundercracker said. Everyone looked at him, then away, uncomfortable. “Let the new ones decide for themselves, Strake.”
Serenity walked up to TC and offered an arm cable. She remembered the footage from Beijing, but she trusted Prime. And Prowl. TC accepted and opened his side of the link without hesitation. I want to know how you feel about newsparks. And memory-custodians.
Newsparks? Thundercracker cocked his head, but kept his responses open, let her follow his associative emotional and linguistic threads. Prime told me before I left the Decepticons how few of us this war had left alive. Megatron, Galvatron never admitted that we’d nearly wiped ourselves out. Newsparks are important.
So are the experiences of the elders, Serenity said, rather unashamedly basking in his harmonics. The glyph for “important” had echoes miles deep. He would die to protect any of them, despite Prime’s geas; or live on in unimaginable suffering for a geological age, separated from the Allspark and his first trine. He needed to protect them. She wriggled further into the link, pushing, and he let her, the connection becoming intimate. She found herself leaning eagerly into his flight memories - storms and battles and leaps into space. Races and dances and wings brushing wings at hypersonic velocity just to prove you could.
You’re trine leader, he said, warmth and a kind of instinctive comfort coloring his fields and harmonics. His place was at the leader’s portside wing, had always been so. He liked it that way, was good at it. She swept closer, enjoying his contentment, snuggling into his personal love for and loyalty to Prime, and Prowl - and Starscream-that-was. He caught her wandering hands and held them away from his chest. Serenity, you haven’t integrated yet.
Oh! Ah, I’m sorry. How about memory-custodians, then?
He smiled. That? Is weird. I have some of the Ixchel memories, though. And some of Will Lennox’s. And I know you have Sarah Lennox’s entire mindstate. She could hear and feel how alien he regarded these memories as being, how strange this alliance; but he was Cybertronian, and Cybertronians adapted.
Which ones of Will’s?
Hn. Battles mostly. Interactions with Ironhide. Paratrooper training. A few others, mostly sensory suites. Limited, but enlightening.
Understanding your enemy.
Avoiding the disgusting squishy bits. He gave her hands a squeeze and let them go.
Nothing about Annabelle’s birth, then?
Gyaaugh!
Serenity laughed and withdrew the link. “Thank you, Thundercracker.” The internal exchange had taken a couple of seconds. “Let’s go up with them. We can fly with Borealis when she arrives.” And pick up a few gravity-surfing delta tricks, maybe, but pass up the offer to learn important frame-skills from same-type veterans? That would be plain stupid. Ranger was nodding. She could tell he’d come to the same conclusion.
Up they went. Blue and silver leading, black and silver flanking. Serenity’s colors were gold and blue, Volley’s gold and turquoise. Impulse was currently mauve and bronze but he changed his mind every week. Five. Thundercracker felt the imbalance like a cut fuel line. He didn’t blame Prowl for delaying a rebuild, and neither, Thundercracker was proud to note, did Strake. Strake’s devotion to Prowl filled him with quiet delight.
And if Starscream was here - he and Skywarp were in the Sol system somewhere, they thought, but were unsure where - would he try to kill these newsparks, or would he set aside faction programming and pride and help in their training to the best of his considerable ability? Thundercracker didn’t know. He wanted to believe the latter. He hated that he wanted that.
They flew. Past the blue into the black. Wheeling and rolling giddily, giggling, as gravity loosened its hold, wings glittering in the hard sunlight. So young, so trusting. So graceful even out here beyond the air, where they had to relearn how to maneuver with precision. And there was Strake, three million years older than them, but somehow with a similar natural exuberance, just as happy as they to fly and laugh and admire the gleaming blue world below them.
And it wasn’t that they made Thundercracker feel old. He was old. There had been a very good reason, he remembered, to hide how old he was. Chronological age wasn’t that important. Prime was just curious, he’d said. But maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to unpack those memories. Sometime. Later.
The western United States rolled by beneath them, pale and arid, higher elevations tipped with black that would turn green closer to, irrigated greener to the west, in California, grey with cities on the coast. Prowl and County were lying on the mesa top, looking up, catching the faint glitter of the alphas as they orbited by. Prowl sent Thundercracker and Strake glyphs of pleasure and unabashed admiration, and Thundercracker’s spark expanded, young again, hot with anticipation.
They looped the Moon, as Borealis had done with Ranger, and then Rain; but unlike them did not land, winging directly back to Earth. Serenity began to tremble first, watching their homeworld expand.
Oh! Strake looped around the three young ones, herding them closer together. Serenity was transmitting a weird sound, not keening exactly, not singing either, but maybe a combination of both.
Skyfire, you in range? Thundercracker figured he probably was. Prowl trusted them this far, but most of the older Autobots did not. Serenity is…ah, there go the other two…
Integrating? Skyfire approached, blipping a quick IFF. Not that TC would mistake him for anyone or anything else, but there were plenty of EDF satellites here in geostationary that liked to be reassured.
Yep. They’re fairly safe up here, Thundercracker said, but for the sake of monitoring and company we should take them down to the embassy.
Ratchet yelling at you, too? Skyfire asked, grinning.
Yep.
…
Three weeks later.
Serenity didn’t want a cooped-up hole below the embassy. Ranger wasn’t entirely comfortable about trying this in orbit, alone. Moonlight on the mesa top seemed a reasonable compromise. She flew down and he climbed up and they took hands in the center, the expanse of stone around them both gouged and polished by decades of metal feet. Kissing with metal lips and laser-sharp teeth was no worse than keeping their braces from locking, back in high school.
Now it was wheels and wings, cannon-parts and missiles, talons and compound ankles, and she had to stoop to kiss him, and he had to extend his pedes; but their hands explored as they had once done, discovering themselves and each other. They had energon pumps for hearts, but their sparks spun as pulses once had raced.
It felt odd at first, being so small in her hands, standing beneath the shadow of her wings; odd but …nice. She had a broad, keeled chest to snuggle into, a streamlined waist to wrap his arms around. Long, clever fingers dipping so neatly into the heated spaces in his body. She was bigger, she was stronger, faster. She was the one who must gentle her powerful talons on his body. Nice, yes and more than nice. He arched and shivered beneath her. Seeker, his programming said. Deadly and beautiful! Her engines sang, a high, musical chord like no mortal jet, ringing with echoes of an ancient world neither of them had yet seen in the metal.
Down on the stone still warm from the day. Shoulders and helms, tires and heels and sharp, sharp elbows scraping sparks from the rock. Fingers and mouths found good places, different from human places, and began the mapping of future pleasures in these bodies. Erogenous orogeny. Charge leapt from metal to metal and Ranger laughed because it no longer mattered who came first when physics sent them past the edge together, and nothing was over until they wanted it to be. He loved these bodies!
Serenity grinned. Cables sleeked and pinned him to the rock, wide open and shouting as the link flashed through them like blue fire. Mind link, body link, they felt themselves light up, felt each other, blended and whole at once. If tactile had been a cartography of new realms of delight, cables was leaping into an outrushing tide; bubbles rising through their minds toward the light, sinking into and with each other; no bottom to this ocean. Love and joy swept them up in a stopless current from depths to heights, crashing glittering in consciousness-fragments on their moonlit shore.
Intertwined, fans and coolant pumps humming, they rested, putting themselves back together. It occurred to them that it would be possible to plumb the depths of each other’s memories; to seek out discrepancies in the shared lives of Sarah and Will, every lie, every omission, the things they had never told one another as human beings limited to spoken words. Every petty feeling, every selfish act could be recalled and tallied, every experience compared; but none of those things seemed important. Their human memories were important, but manufacturing conflict was pointless. Serenity and Ranger acknowledged the possibility - and skimmed on to other ways of sharing.
Their sparks thrummed, so close, Ranger draped over Serenity’s chest. Opening they found strange, as Rain had, but they trusted each other and there were plenty of experienced mechs nearby if they got nervous.
Celadon spiral arms, saffron wings wrapped around each other, corona to corona, nearly touching photospheres. Two unique sparks carrying threads of Ironhide and Ratchet, Beachcomber and Perceptor met and twined, their radiation singing an old-as-the-universe Magnificat; their souls magnifying the wonder of their creation. Expanding with spacetimelove, attracted and delighted by their dissimilarities, the two young suns, pale green and gold, pulsed then blazed; a springtime nebula in autumn, coruscating through them and lighting the desert like dawn.
…
“That was awesome,” Ranger murmured against Serenity’s shoulder. Their fields wound slowly around and through each other, lazy, fulsome, not quite sated.
“We should do it again,” she agreed. “A lot. Soon.” Wrapping her arms around him, she sat up abruptly, staring into the sky.
Impulse and Volley stooped upon them from the tropopause where they’d been waiting, watching. Letting their trine leader take the first sip.
“Ranger?” Serenity flicked shoulder armor as the pair landed at the other end of the mesa, hot from the air and glittering with starlight.
The whirlwind of three alpha bodies around him? Yes…oh hell yes!
They gathered him between them, eager to forge their bonds in this way newly open to them, and leapt for low orbit. Falling sustained, four voices, four energies braided into a spiraling, sparking, giggling, radiant comet tail.
…
Even beyond the clarity gained post-integration, some things Serenity understood now in a completely different and stunningly physical manner. Ranger! she tight-beamed, harmonics full of intent. Impulse and Volley watched them with half-shuttered optics, engines at low hum.
He stirred against her chest. Mmmrr.
Optimus!
His optics lit as he lifted his head; bright and irised wide. I know! Waiting had gotten harder and harder over the past sixteen years; especially as the physical affection aspect of the robots’ lives had become less and less hidden from general humanity. The seven basic genders had made a splash in 2078, but then in one day the Cons had destroyed the Taj Mahal, Khufu’s pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, half of Macchu Picchu, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Himeji Castle and a chunk of the Forbidden City. Humanity had been kind of distracted by that.
He's so...so...!
I know!
You, too?
YES! Is that weird?
No, it's hot! It seemed odd somehow that there should be a straightforward glyph for requesting interface, but not only was there, there were entire lexicons of variations, with wide-ranging degrees of elaboration. But what she and Ranger lacked in many cases was social context. The language made it possible to just ask someone for intimacy or help with a quick defrag, but was it polite to do so? And they couldn't help thinking it might be a little beyond the pale to make such a request of the Prime. I suppose you don’t want to ask Ironhide.
Uh…not really.
I’ll ask Ratchet, then.
Ratchet would of course instantly blab to Ironhide. Ranger covered his face with his hands. Oh god.
He says we can either just ask Prime or we can make goo-goo optics at him whenever we see him and he’ll take pity on us.
Outstanding. They could start their polyamorous career in the most pathetic way possible, mooning after Prime like a quartet of groupies.
Or we could pounce on him.
Damn, you really are an alpha, aren’t you.
Mm.
…
Bands of platinum-bright clouds poured lines of rain on the desert amid spears of afternoon sunlight, rainbows ghosting from tattered remnants to full arcs and multiples. Optimus paused, his weight shifted onto one hip, and tilted his head to look over his shoulder at the four mechs watching him.
What were they supposed to do, with fields like that and a gaze like that directed at them? They ran to catch up.
Prime had lifted a feed from the local TV station’s Doppler and was aimed at the heaviest front, dropping his shields as the leading edge swept over them. They followed his example, Ranger tilting his head way back, lifting his arms, bending his torso in a slow sort of dance, humming in tune to the music the rain made of his metal body. Serenity and her wingmates held out their hands and shivered as the water dripped down through them. They had not felt this before.
Rain sleeted down their bodies, Prime’s fields wafted through theirs, drawing them onward, closer, to a pile of rocks near the cliff where the Twins had tried out their steel whips. Shielded thus from view from the embassy, Optimus sank cables into them, pulled them closer, and flooded the link. Flooding the torpedo tubes before firing, Ranger thought helplessly. He'd forgotten to engage his articulation locks and would have fallen if Prime hadn't caught him.
This is so weird, a part of Ranger thought, as Optimus gathered them in. Serenity and her wingmates were currently taller than Prime, and their wings made them broader, but Prime’s arms fit around them as though designed for that purpose. Weird, Ranger thought again; because for years, decades, Optimus had in a real sense been his, Lennox’s, commanding officer. On paper, for the benefit of human governments and militaries, Lennox and Prime shared command; and later, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and then C-in-C of the Earth Defense Force, on paper Lennox had had the greater authority. It was the humans’ planet. But on the ground, in the thick of it, Lennox had never had any trouble following Prime’s orders. Deferring to three million years of battle experience, against these very foes, was simply common sense.
Cybertronians, though, had never had anything like human rules against fraternization. Ranger’s body, his spark, curled against Prime’s like coming home. He was aware of the others, their keen edges and shivering wings, but Prime made each caress, physical, field and mental, feel as though there was only the two of them.
MmmmmrrRangerrr…
The purr of his name in that voice, the glyphs around it spiraling outward in combined meanings he could only grasp the edges of, mind-phantom hands roving his body until he arched once, twice in overload. Optimus kissed the Seekers through the afternoon, but as the sky turned deep blue he turned his head, brushing his lips gently against Ranger’s. Ranger climbed up out of the strutless state he’d been in, wrapped his hands around Prime’s helm, drawing the kiss, and Prime’s internal fields, deeper.
Ranger…mmm…Ranger, open…
Ranger’s dentae clattered. He felt the command sling through his systems, electrifying, that breathless moment when the pieces of his chest began to slide apart and he felt the air on his inner workings, sizzling on the photosphere of his soul. The blue-white giant approached. Pale celadon petalled up to meet it, unfurling shyly. Not his first touch spark-to-spark, but Prime was…Prime was…
Optimus… Not fear, but a weight of knowledge nurtured this hesitation. Knowledge already possessed, knowledge soon and swiftly to be acquired. Prime nuzzled him, engine thrumming. Prominences from their coronae wisped at each other, not quite touching. Ranger wanted him, wanted this, with his entire body, down to the resonating strings, poising on the brink to draw out the threshold.
They touched. Two atmospheres mingling, spirit and spark. Had he thought he had understood before what a Prime was?
He arched, desperate, and Optimus slipped an arm beneath him, helping him spread himself wider. Sinking, immersed, drowning, no, not dying, his human mind rejected the image; falling back into the deepest, plushest featherbed, miles deep before I sleep, on the clearest Sunday morning with nothing to do but make love all day. Optimus hummed above him, enjoying the sensations, clean skin on clean soft sheets, warm bodies softly pressed together, though now their bodies were nothing like that, nothing soft about them but their voices sometimes and the way their touch could be gentle with tiny, fragile beings. Optimus opened vistas of memory to him, and yet greater vistas of emotion; twenty-five thousand shades of love, contentment in a yearlong embrace, the security of knowing and being known completely - spiked with sadness, knowing that sometimes that was not enough, but hope for a someday he had time enough to wait for. Easy to be patient, and patience a balm like time like Prime to heal all wounds. The love of sun to sun, shivering planets into being, gravity of affection tenuous but felt across vast distances, like holding hands across a galaxy. Sending ripples of life across spacetimelove, this joining of sparks that was and was not sexual, framed by human experience as it was, but sixteen years of robot life full of love, too, coloring everything with a wider spectrum. Ranger dug his fingers into Prime’s armor, holding tight as the cataclysmic rush of charge began, lightning in the dark, as Ranger’s lights, for a little while, went out.
…
Strange, Ranger thought. Not for the first or last time. Optimus lay on his side, Ranger curled in the hollow of the Prime’s body; Serenity spooning up on the other side with Impulse and Volley draped over the lot of them, Volley’s cheek spar resting on one of Ranger’s feet. Strange that overload - physical climax - caused unconsciousness (unless one knew Red Alert’s trick). Intimacy and vulnerability.
Big hands petted him, a single finger tracing his central seam. He opened eagerly.
In Ranger’s mind they twined together as bodies made of light. That’s what sparks were, kind of. Light and energy and matter that could be divided and shared, and love to bind them all together; and to guide them to their ultimate home when the soul’s fuel at last ran out. He was aware of Serenity and the others nearby; a warm, neighboring trinary system.
Optimus sank into him, layer by layer, not a merge but passionate inquiry, fundamental parsing; a wind through the leaves of everything he was. A calling, note by note, listening for resonances, harmonies, echoes. Prime’s body might not be able to sing, but his spark surely could. Ranger began to feel a little laid bare, as though any further and he’d unravel…
Instantly, Optimus withdrew to a safer level, to a more bearable intimacy, wholly pleasurable.
Is there something wrong with my spark? Ratchet hadn’t said anything of the kind, and the alphas’ sparks and his own had been so individual, so different from each other, besides the essential spark-ness of them, that he realized he had no basis of comparison. Except, now, with Prime’s. And that probably was an apples and oranges thing.
No indeed, beloved, Prime assured him, bending his head far to kiss his forehelm.
What happened when I - when Will - died?
I do not know for certain.
You have ideas, though.
Through their cables, Optimus transmitted both formal glyphs and raw emotion/cognition. Acknowledgement uncertainty concern. Wish to gather more information, wariness toward haste and the mistakes caused by it. Ranger knew how the Allspark/sparks could sometimes alter memory and perception if one delved unprepared.
Yeah, Ranger said, in kind. Frustrating but definitely understood.
Strange, Ranger thought. And wonderful.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2079 - November
White mackerel clouds made a bright pattern against the ruddy desert below as she flashed through the upper atmosphere. Memory-custodians, huh? So that’s what the kids are calling it these days.
Welcome home, Borealis! Spark of my spark, said his glyphs, warm and enfolding.
“Borealis! Borealis!” A bunch of baby jets swarmed out to meet her as she transformed and landed on the road next to the embassy. And not so baby jets, and a load of other people she hadn’t seen for the better part of a year, none of whom cared that her armor was still hot from re-entry, climbing into her arms or onto her shoulders or clinging to any available surface.
Serenity! Aren’t you three cute! Were I unwed, I would take you in a manly fashion.
’Cause we’re pretty? Serenity purred.
’Cause you’re pretty.
Thank you, that was very restorative.
Know what the first rule of flying is?
Love! the three alphas chorused, and all the jets dissolved into giggles.
“Perceptor, they’re adorable, can I keep them?”
“It’s like some kind of insta-geek field,” Eject marveled. “She wasn’t even in this galaxy when they decanted.”
“Heya, Jazz.” She couldn’t quite manage a full salute as she passed the First Lieutenant on her way inside. “I’m covered in beeeeeeeeeeeeees!” Jazz laughed. The last time she’d been on-planet Rewind had hosted an Eddie Izzard marathon. “Hullo, Ranger…oh, I get a kiss now? Wooo!” She switched to tight-beam,What does Mikaela say about the “memory custodian” nomenclature?
Ranger sighed. She said calling it by a nice shiny new name didn’t change things, and felt even more like a creepy cover-up. I understand where she’s coming from, but…it’s hard on Bee.
Urgh. She’d be sure to give Bee extra snuggles when she saw him. She switched channels, casting her thought around the turn of the planet to Argentina, where Skyfire, Beachcomber and Miles were tootling around the Ischigualasto Formation. Skyfire! Someone…uh, they called themselves Homomdans...put up a new wormhole near Svirskalix Tertius! Cuts the time from here to Cybertron back down to six months!
And they let you use it?
I asked nice. I also…might have made puppy-optics at them.
…You made puppy-optics. At a Homomdan.
It worked! Or, was inconsequential, one or the other. She shrugged, bouncing Serenity and her trine, who whooped and giggled and tightened their claws on her armor. The being I spoke with was really nice! Skyfire, in Argentina, was bent over, hands on knees, laughing and being pestered by one geologist and one human about what was so funny. Ratchet and Perceptor had joined the embassy crowd and were propping each other up, equally overcome. I suppose making cute shouldn’t have worked on that species? I’m not even sure they were vertebrates…?
“Ancestrally,” Perceptor explained between chortles, “the Homomdans reproduced via fractionation. Now, as far as I know, they grow new individuals in tanks, much as we do. So you are correct, taking on the mien of a submature entity should not have been a compelling argument, as they have little tradition of caring for young.”
“Huh. Well ne said nir name was Ar Be-Ka iSchloear and to give nir regards to Optimus, so that might have been more the point than anything my face was doing.”
“Ar Be-Ka!” Optimus had joined the reunion now that they were in the main hangar and people scooted around on Borealis to make room for him to hug her. He stood on the tips of his pedes and reached up and could just about wrap his arms around her waist when she crouched somewhat. “Aaah, Little Bird, I’m glad you got to meet nem! The Homomdans were once among our closest allies.” Homomdan lifespans were measured in millions of years, but that had been no guarantee that Be-Ka would still be alive by the time Cybertronians could take a place again on the galactic cultural dance-floor. “You actually spoke to Be-Ka nemself?”
Borealis rolled her optics, but reached down - somewhat encumbered - extending a wrist cable, transferring the entirety of the experience to him. “I actually did.”
Someone just made Optimus really happy, Hot Spot commented from the other side of the equator.
I think that’s my new favorite pastime, Borealis said, grinning bemusedly.
Sweets, Jazz purred at her, that’s a lot of people’s favorite pastime.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
A few days later.
“Hoist! Hooooiiiiist!”
Hurriedly scooping the latest fruits of his labors into a suitable box, Hoist scurried up the ramp and outside. Borealis had landed on the bare mountainside and was now leaping down to the entry clearing. She paused when she spotted him. Gauging the distance, she made an immense show of prostrating herself at his feet, arms outstretched, her hands making pathetic grasping motions. Weak mewls escaped her vocoder. Hoist considered fleeing back to the kitchen.
“Is it true?” Borealis moaned. “Did you really make…?”
“Yes,” he huffed, pretending exasperation. “I did make.” With a flourish, he withdrew a single confection - scaled for deltas - from the box he held behind his back. Smallish, domed, squatly cylindrical, robin’s egg blue, with a layer of softer filling of a pale lavender in the middle. Borealis’ enormous fingertips snatched it from him with lightning delicacy.
She sat up and brought it to the olfactory vents in her cheek spars. Sugars no longer appealed to her Cybertronian fuel systems, but other high-energy compounds were interpreted by her CPU as “sweet” and thus stimulated her pleasure centers. Similarly, though the scents of vanilla and chocolate and other things Ixchel Chase had enjoyed were still pleasant, other aromas also brought with them a more visceral - or core programmatical - reaction. She nibbled, a precise, testing bite. The outer surface was slightly shiny, crunchy, and gave way to a soft, airy, chewy center, with a creamy manganese filling between the two halves. “Oh my god,” she whimpered, and took another bite.
“Did I get it right?” Hoist asked, bringing the filled box forward. Borealis’ optics were shuttered, and she continued to nibble slowly, her fields swirling and feathering in heavy, dark, blissful enjoyment. Hoist was pretty sure he’d gotten it right.
The gypsum doughnuts had continued to be popular. Certain people insisted on teasing Prowl and Streetwise about them, but Prowl would only eat them if TC or Strake (or, especially, Prime) fed them to him bit by bit during or after interface. Making a special ritual out of something mundane. Hoist thought Mirage had probably given him the idea. Now there would be another goody for the treat menu. French macarons.
“Hoist.” Her voice was faint, pleading.
“You’re going to eat them all, aren’t you.” He’d been hoping to get at least a few others to test them, but now that Borealis was home…
She leaned down to kiss him, hooking a sticky finger behind his knees. “How many more do you have besides the ones in that box?”
“I’m not telling.” He pushed the box between them, as if to fend her off, but he didn’t struggle as she slipped another macaron into her mouth and gently lowered him to the ground. They offered cables at the same time, and soon Hoist was awash in the bliss of macaron appreciation and enjoyment. Yes, he had gotten them just right.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
3 days later.
Crash! Crang! Spaang! Whoops and shouts and howls of outraged dignity, hum and whine of energy weapons discharged at their lowest setting. They were doing well, the three of them. Seekers in general were not fond of close quarters fighting. All the more reason to drill them harder on it. Air-to-ground they already had down. Ironhide watched them wheel and parry and swing, firing solid gold (soft, with no penetrating power to speak of; they just stung) rounds at point-blank, evading or blocking most of them, duck and turn and kick - becoming very much a dance. Ironhide huffed steam from his core vents. This sort of exercise was no doubt helping them trine, but wasn’t doing as much for their reflexes. They were ready to move on to opponents other than themselves.
The usual suspects showed up to help. The Lambo twins, Cliffjumper, Arcee. Lots of noise and dirt scuffed up and Ironhide kept having to shoo them away from the road. The din was making the visiting ambassadors and other dignitaries nervous.
Prowl, Thundercracker, Strake and Countermeasure landed on the mesa top to watch. Ironhide considered enlisting their help. Maybe later. Shortly thereafter, Borealis came in from the other direction and landed on the road. Talk about someone who could use a little more hand-to-hand practice…was she actually tippy-toeing?
“BOREALIS!”
“Oh crap.”
“Would you kindly assist us?”
“Yessir.”
Serenity beamed as the delta shuffled over. It was so hard not to jump up and hug her head or something. Big sister! She felt an upwelling empathy for Ixchel and Borealis and how they were meshed; she now had what Borealis called the “Good Parts Version” of the Ixchel memories - the parts people most seemed to like sharing; the parts of a human life that taught the most about what humans thought they were, and who Ixchel had been. Slow Sunday mornings and graduations, swimming and breathing and singing, rubbing sleep from heavy-lidded eyes, and being rescued by Ratchet. Coffee Americano and vanilla latte. Chocolate. A purring cat in your lap. (Steeljaw had the sound and vibration down, but he was not squoodgy like a good cat could be.) Serenity’s spark-self and Sarah-self conflicted for a moment in a flash of emotional turmoil. Lissi didn’t like fighting, it wasn’t right to drag her into it unwilling, was it? Versus the excitement of taking on a much larger, powerful foe with her wingmates beside her! Borealis wasn’t a veteran in the same league as Ironhide or Skyfire, but she had fought in real combat! She had taken on a whole battleship! And dented herself pretty badly, but hey Ratchet could fix just about anything, right?
“Start on the ground,” Ironhide said. “Basic maneuvers. If you remember them, Little Bird…”
Borealis shot him a bland look and unsheathed her arm scythes.
Oh.
Serenity saw Impulse and Volley’s optics widen, knew her own were doing the same. The curving blades more than doubled the delta’s already considerable reach, and the edges glowed orange-hot.
“The bigger they are,” Impulse said, twirling his arm-bolters.
“Keep telling yourself that,” said Sideswipe. He kinda wanted in on this action too, what with Astrotrain and Blitzwing making themselves annoying lately; but it would probably be more fun to watch.
There was a good deal of cautious circling at first, Borealis reluctant to throw the first punch. Ironhide bared his denta, but Skyfire was often just as bad. Judge the enemy by how he attacks, versus hit first hard enough and you might not have to hit again. Balance in all things, Ironhide supposed. Emboldened by her apparent reluctance and slowness, the alphas began to nip and harry her - there were three of them and she only had two arms.
Until Impulse got too close and Borealis stepped on him. Ironhide wasn’t sure what the poisonous look she shot the watching Thundercracker was all about. Probably he didn’t want to know. In any case, the alphas now knew to avoid her feet unless they could be very fast on their own. Risk assessment all part of the process.
Wheel and bank, feint and drive, whirling faster. Borealis remained calm at the center, and Ironhide allowed himself a few nanoseconds of pleased pride. She was as good a student as she could be. Not everyone was forged a soldier.
Volley ducked and swung under her arm, zipping inside her reach where he could do more damage and she couldn’t-
-do anything? He suddenly found himself pinned between her chest and upper arm.
Squeeze him, Ironhide said.
But… Borealis began. Squishy…
Until his armor creaks. They needed to understand that they could be crushed. They needed to respect others’ strengths. Arrogance was a common alpha trait. Don’t assume getting closer gives you the advantage. Volley yowled and Borealis let him go.
But our missiles and rays can’t penetrate her armor, Impulse complained. What was the use of distance weapons if they didn’t work, and of getting close if that got you smushed?
Not without putting a lot of energy into it, no, Ironhide agreed. Together, though, you are a threat. Remember, too, that deltas are slower than you in atmosphere, and they’re not as maneuverable. They’re scientists, explorers. Cons may change their programming but that’s how ours are. They aren’t going to want to fight, and they’re slow to anger. Taunts won’t get you anywhere. Ironhide made a face. That said? Don’t piss off Skyfire. I mean it. Just don’t. He decided not to mention at this point that in every hand-to-hand fight that he’d ever seen between Skyfire and Starscream they’d been evenly matched. Mutual hatred, perfectly balanced. Now. Let’s start again.
The spar went on well into the afternoon; the young alphas chafing to get into the air, each leap at the delta’s head or wings lasting just a touch longer than gravity’s strict dictates allowed.
“All right!” Ironhide bellowed. “Take it to the roof!” Thundercracker, Strake, monitor.
Borealis transformed and was already rising fast on AG drives. The new alphas scrambled in a flash of wings and feral grins to catch up. The elder alphas transformed and followed.
Keep her down in atmo, Ironhide warned. Don’t let her reach stratopause or you’re toast. Powerful and sleek, the alphas grabbed for height, pummeling the heavier ship below. The thinner the air, the more maneuverable and faster Borealis could get.
“Good,” Ironhide muttered to himself. Borealis slipped and slid, fully utilizing three dimensions, but the nascent trine kept on her, pushing the advantage numbers and maneuverability gave them. The delta got past them a time or two, and made sure they remembered the lesson. There would always be more to learn. None of them could afford to become complacent.
After the spar, Borealis felt pleasantly tired rather than exhausted. The alphas flocked off into the embassy to bathe and snuggle and recharge, but she activated her AG drives and floated up to the mesa top. Casual back flip because dude antigravity! She landed and settled into sphinx pose, glancing at Thundercracker, who pretended not to notice. Shifting her feet, she tapped her fingers on her knees. A few wisps of cirrus cloud above them seemed to hold some fascinating secret, considering how hard Thundercracker was staring at them. After a moment she side-eyed Thundercracker again; leaning in, then straightening. Smug bastard. Thundercracker stood very upright and poised, wings arrayed but also subtly tense. If she stepped on him now it would be in full knowledge of what it meant among Seekers. He wanted to get stepped on. Her growl distorted the air around her throat like heat-shimmer; rousing in him very alpha-ish responses. A worthy adversary. A challenge. An ally who could drop from above, who could traverse vast distances and arrive with unlooked-for aid.
Prowl ignored them. Strake gave every appearance - hard fought for - of doing so. Strake was pretty sure that if he laughed TC would smack him and Borealis might punch him. (Hulk punching Thor.)
Borealis considered her options, shifting the grip of her talons on the stone. Step on him or no? She flared her wings, balanced to leap, and locked gazes with him. He uncrossed his arms, similarly prepared. Their fields bubbled and flowed - then flared and they sprang upward in unison, making for space.
Strake fell over laughing. Prowl, laughing softly more at Strake than TC, curled up against him.
They spun circles around each other as they flew, closer and closer, until their wings touched. She thrummed at the expert brush of his hull against hers, and he rumbled his engines, sound transmitting through metal in the void. They nudged each other, belly to belly as she parked neatly at a volume of L5 not otherwise crowded. Borealis transformed. TC followed. His armor gleamed in the hard sunlight, a lighter blue than hers, striped on his wings with silver, marked in subtle places with glyphs, and in not so subtle places with fading scars. He was old and worn and hard…and so goddamn sexy she couldn’t fathom why she hadn’t grabbed him already. She wrapped a hand around his waist, her thumb along the edge of his chest.
She half expected teeth and claws from him; and there was a fierceness in his gentle caresses, his sharp hands on her star-hardened armor. Goddamn sexy jet… So sue me I like blue… She pressed her mouth to his lower abdomen, armor thinner under the chest. So hot…
He accepted this as his due, amused that the concept of “hot” was used in the same ways in English and Cybertronian. Seekers in general and especially alphas were attractive even to many non-Cybertronian species. To deny this with some feeble effort at false modesty or self-deprecation was pointless.
Like scoring a supermodel… she murmured, putting them into a slow spin so that his armor was now in sunlight, now in her shadow, storm-blue diamond bright then glossy-black reflecting stars.
No, that’s Mirage. Sort of. Mirage was more like a geisha, the original meaning, when Westerners weren’t mistaking them for expensive prostitutes. A highly trained artist and entertainer.
Mmmm Mirage.
We are in complete agreement there. Alphas are more like rock stars.
She laughed, though her mouth never left his body. He’d said it with such unshakeable assurance. Fair enough. Rock stars dated supermodels. Can you sing?
Can you make me?
She pushed the fine manipulators in her fingertips into gaps in his armor, seeking the lower thoracic nodes. Finding them. Thundercracker arched, bared his denta - and then she pulsed heavy scans through his chest. His spark pulsed back and he overloaded hard and fast, but so good.
Primus, he liked deltas. Their soft, deep voices, their fantastic sensor arrays in long, sensitive hands, their fabulous engines. He’d liked deltas three billion years before Starscream had been kindled, and even if meeting Skyfire here on Earth was fraught, TC was still glad to see the white starship alive, glad to feel those big hands on his body again. And here, now this new one, who was in bloom for Skyfire - that was nice. Their mutual affection for the elder delta a bridge between them.
He likes you, too, you know, he rumbled, rousing quickly again enveloped in her fields. More than he lets on. More, maybe, than Skyfire knew himself. Well, they all had that problem sometimes.
Mm. Skyfire liked her, she knew that. She had a sneaking suspicion that Skyfire liked her - at least in part, at least at first - because her spark had a great many resonances in common with Ratchet’s, and Skyfire’s love for Ratchet was deep and abiding. But she couldn’t explain that to Thundercracker. The tips of his thoracic cables tapped at her chest and she uncovered her ports, sleeking her own cables at him. The link engaged smooth as glass, though Borealis scrambled behind her outermost firewalls to set her inner thought-streams in order. Once she had her security protocols set, she opened up wider, welcoming his mind, curious and eager to share his wealth of memory.
He wrapped his arms around her neck, touching forehelms. So young. So young! What had they done? What had they become? He understood the concept of children now, as he had never bothered to in all his long life. These newkindled sparks the Prime-as-Allspark was drawing forth, and the humans…such a young species, a child species…and he had swept through Beijing with their blood on his feet…
With Prime’s help, he had excised the parts of his programming that had made it possible for him to do that, but if Prowl must endure the memories of what he’d done, so would Thundercracker. He kept the worst of it behind firewalls, but she felt the edges of his distress. Fleeting and firmly mastered. This wasn’t the time, and she didn’t need to watch him thrashing at himself. She was kissing him, trying to distract him, soothe him. Even if it didn’t work, even if she did something wrong, she had to try to help, he could feel that in her. Such Autobot coding.
Dangerous, she thought, this mech she was snogging. Ixchel had never liked bad boys. But she had always fancied older men. Fear me, love me. Do as I say and I will be your slave. No. This wasn’t that kind of story. This was old and scarred, young and battered, flight and new stars and dead planets and teetering on the edge of extinction. Everything lay under the shadow of the war. Evil the absence of love. Letting entropy win. To which side of that equation had she pledged herself? Maybe not so formal a vow as Ranger repeating a human oath upon his decantation, but hull and spark had she not felt it as deeply?
He smiled, emotions mixed, and stroked her chest. Open? If she wanted to distract him, that would be the best way.
Hm. She unsealed her chamber. She definitely wanted this, but it was going to be interesting. Drift knew about the merge process, he had progeny of his own. He had left the Decepticons five thousand years ago, though, and his conversion had been catastrophic, by the accounts she’d heard. No one who had them wanted to share those memories, and not many people had them. But Thundercracker and Strake had not been told. Not yet. Her merge scars from Tessera had faded almost completely, but she couldn’t disguise her spark. Well. Let him come to whatever conclusions he would. She opened her chest.
Another thing he liked about deltas. Big sparks. This one had originally been half her current size, he knew, her spark grown to fit the body it powered. Going the other way was trickier - once you go big you don’t go back - though it could be done. It was done for the very aged. As their sparks became dim and feeble, they would be installed in small, light frames to prolong their lives.
He hated that thought, loathed the idea of it. Slowly fading, weathering, corroding until even movement was an effort.
That was long in the future for the pale blue giant before him, though. Hot and young and vital, drawing forth his own spark’s desire. Two sparks made to fly. Prominences flirted and flashed, stroking outward into each other’s chambers, striking deep with pleasure. Ah! He felt so fine, so well honed, full of a long life’s knowledge; canny and wise, protective and strong and more than a little broody. Ah! She felt so good, so curious, powerful, full of a scientist’s never-ending quest for knowledge; an explorer, determined and resilient, intelligent and more than a little nerdy.
There was something else about her spark, though. Something familiar in the way she handled his, meeting him strength for strength, care with care, allowing him as far in as he could take, demanding nothing more of him than he could bear. She felt…she felt a little like…Prime? Not exactly like, but…
He hadn’t the cycles to formulate a more coherent thought; their shared energies gathered, coalesced; blue plasma rippled and ribboned over their armor, spinning out as perfect spheres in the weightlessness of space.
Thundercracker fought hard to remain conscious. They weren’t entirely safe, though help if they needed it wasn’t far. He withdrew all but one pair of cables, stroking her face as she rebooted, immensely pleased that she had trusted him so.
She came online slowly, doing thorough systems checks she must have picked up from Skyfire, stretching theatrically then curling around him and nuzzling his helm.
First memory? she warbled sleepily at him.
Mm. Can’t. Not without some heavy-duty dredging. Will bits circa the reign of Volant and Alpha Trion do?
Ooooo! Yes please! Ratchet had shared some of that, too, but it would be fantastic to get a different perspective.
His first trine. Flocks of alphas gathered for Processions and Great Dances, flying in tight formation, swift and deadly in battle - the latter few and far between for much of his early career.
She drank in the ancient architecture, the views of a planet she had only seen in ruins, outside of others’ memories. The arrayed Seekers and their Lord were breathtakingly beautiful, pale armor glittering in the warm sunlight, their Prime’s darker coloration a striking contrast. Borealis giggled.
Oh my god, TC, seriously?
What?
Part 2
.