[July/August 2008 Entry, #5 of #7] Seeing Better
Title: Seeing Better
Rating: K
Universe: G1
Pairing: Skyfire/Fireflight - so fluffy it can also be read as platonic.
Word Count: 3,113
“He’ll be fine.”
“How can you be sure, Ratchet? You see how much damage he’s -”
“He’ll be fine.”
“With all due respect for your medical opinion -”
“Skyfire, he’ll be fine!” Ratchet collected himself and spoke more calmly. “I’ve seen this sort of damage before on mechs smaller than him. It won’t be an easy recovery for him, but it will eventually be a full recovery.” The chief medical officer smiled briefly before turning back to his task. “Trust me.”
Skyfire reluctantly ended his protests and watched the physician at work. To his overprotective optics, Fireflight appeared far from fine. The Aerialbot’s wings were all but completely stripped of their housing, his brilliant red fuselage was pockmarked with deep gouges and holes, his nosecone and tail were out of alignment, and all of the damage rendered him locked in protective stasis and likely unable to transform had he been alert.
Despite himself, Skyfire chuckled at the nature of Fireflight’s victorious opponent: nature. The youth had let his curiosity get the better of him and flown directly into a fascinating cloud that he just had to see better. A conical, spinning cloud. Ignoring warnings from the rest of his team and from Skyfire, Fireflight had instead learned at close range just how dangerous a tornado was and just how fast it flung projectiles of collected debris. And true to form, the last word he had uttered before falling into stasis lock had been: “Wow.”
If Fireflight were to die from the heavy damage he had sustained, Skyfire thought, the scatterbrained little Aerialbot would die happy. What better way for an inquisitive mech to go out than while in the middle of learning something new, getting a different perspective on something, seeing something better?
Skyfire banished the thought of Fireflight’s death, even as Ratchet summoned Wheeljack to assist him in the emergency repairs to the young mech’s frame. Though he was still in stasis, Fireflight’s body began to seize involuntarily, signaling the start of a critical breakdown… somewhere. Wounds that had long since been sealed burst forth anew, producing streams of fluid on the Aerialbot’s frame and splashes on the medics’ chestplates.
“Pump failure,” Ratchet grimly reported.
“Don’t do this to me,” Skyfire whispered from the corner of the medbay to which he had been restricted for the duration of the surgery.
“Wheeljack - direct stimulation, now!” Ratchet ordered. Wheeljack retrieved an electrical device and swiftly connected two prongs to the pump within Fireflight’s fuselage that had stopped sending vital fluids to the rest of his frame.
“Clear!” Wheeljack shouted. Ratchet took a step back; Wheeljack pressed a button on the direct stimulation device; the pump reading on the vital signs monitor jumped erratically several times before settling into a slow, weak rhythm.
“Stay with me, Flighty,” Skyfire quietly urged the young mech as though he could hear.
“Stabilized,” Ratchet observed with a troubled tone to his voice. “But that shouldn’t have happened.”
“Recommend a full internal scan,” Wheeljack said.
“Agreed,” Ratchet affirmed. Wheeljack collected the bulky full-body scanner from another corner of the medbay and maneuvered it carefully until it was centered over Fireflight’s frame.
This would be a long repair process, if repairs were indeed possible. Skyfire sadly decided that staying would help no one. Besides, Ratchet had said Fireflight was stabilized.
Without a word to the busy medics or the unconscious Fireflight, Skyfire left the medbay and stepped outside the Ark. Hardly any evidence remained of the frightening and dangerous weather that had mangled Fireflight’s frame. The sky was a deep and nearly cloudless blue; the air temperature was comfortable; the grass glistened with a fresh covering of rain. Skyfire smiled sadly to himself at the image of Fireflight enjoying the view on beautiful late afternoons such as this, darting through the wispy clouds as though he were trying to capture them, occasionally running into other midair obstacles.
The events of another late afternoon, long ago, had introduced the veteran scientist and the rookie Aerialbot. Fireflight, true to form, had been distracted, this time by the movement of a gathering of Terran flying organisms known in the local language as starlings. To be fair, it was a stunning distraction: thousands of individual creatures tumbling and turning as one, creating a dynamic splash of black and gray across the sky. The spectacle so caught Fireflight’s attention that he had missed the treetops… again… and this time had been so ensnared that he required not only a quick untangling, but also a ride to medbay. And who was large enough to offer that ride?
Skyfire still remembered many of Fireflight’s words on that journey. But more than his words, Skyfire remembered his utter fascination at all things Earth. This impulsive little mech embraced the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unexpected and the bizarre. He loved having a whole planet to explore and millions upon millions of reasons to explore it. He craved discovery, he treasured knowledge, and he reveled in the realization that he would never, ever run out of questions.
In short, Fireflight was very much like Skyfire when the old mech was himself young.
Skyfire tapped into the recesses of his memory bank and recalled every detail of that afternoon and that first meeting: the flock of starlings, still cartwheeling through the autumn sky; the rustling and crunching of multi-colored leaves in the forest canopy; the groaning of a young mech, plenty injured and plenty more embarrassed.
***
It was rare that Skyfire was called for a rescue mission that involved no enemy fighters in the area. The “enemy,” this time, was a large native botanical specimen.
The scientist mildly chuckled at the sight of a small aircraft with its nosecone stuck in a tree trunk. The occupant of the aircraft - rather, the aircraft itself - moaned quietly and managed to produce two coherent words: “Help me.”
“Fireflight, I presume?” Skyfire wryly said.
“Yeah,” the trapped mech replied in a tiny voice.
“This might hurt for a few kliks,” Skyfire warned the Aerialbot. He firmly grasped the mech’s fuselage and pulled, straining against the surprisingly tight grip of the tree and struggling to maintain solid contact with the slick metal. Fireflight, startled and in pain, cried out sharply. “Try to relax,” Skyfire awkwardly suggested.
“You relax when you’re stuck in an organic flyer trap!” Fireflight retorted with a shout that gradually turned into a whine. Being painfully rescued gave the flyer some energy and some words, Skyfire observed as the whine continued. “All I was doing was looking at those - I don’t know what they’re called, but thousands of ‘em - and these things just grabbed me!”
“And you’re out,” Skyfire interrupted Fireflight as his nosecone emerged from the tree with a loud pop.
Fireflight fell silent for a moment. “Huh. How about that,” he mused. “I’m out.”
“Can you transform?” Skyfire asked, extending his arms to give Fireflight a bit of freedom while still holding him securely above the ground.
“I can try.” Fireflight did so, progressing agonizingly slowly through his transformation. He briefly looked satisfied with himself… until he moved his head and discovered that the impact had injured his neck. “Ow!” he involuntarily shouted.
“Take it easy,” Skyfire consoled the smaller mech. “I’ll get you to medbay.”
“I can get to medbay myself,” Fireflight stubbornly insisted.
Skyfire refused to release the Aerialbot. “Your neck is injured. You’re not taking any chances.”
“But - but - but -” Fireflight spluttered.
“But nothing.” Skyfire positioned one arm carefully under Fireflight’s neck and the other beneath his knees before beginning the journey - thankfully, a short one - back to the Ark.
The first stage of the journey passed in silence. Fireflight sulked and glared, mortified at the nature of the emergency that had landed him in this position and frustrated at his inability to move his head to see anything other than the chestplate of the mech carrying him. The young flyer sighed heavily in disappointment, and the sound brought Skyfire to a brief halt. The larger mech looked down at his passenger and, with a warm smile, gingerly tilted Fireflight’s body until he could see the sky directly above him.
“Wow,” the youth marveled, his scowl vanishing and fading into almost giddy amazement. Fireflight’s raw exuberance coaxed Skyfire to direct his optics upward, and he was rewarded with a clear view of a spinning, spiraling swath of hundreds - no, thousands of tiny charcoal-hued beings moving as a cohesive unit and creating a vibrant contrast against the deep blue sky.
“What are they?” Skyfire asked himself aloud, poring through the database of random Earth knowledge in his processor.
“Why are you asking me?” Fireflight answered the question with a question.
“I’m not.” Skyfire continued searching his processor. “I’m asking myself, I suppose.”
Fireflight laughed in recognition. “I do that a lot. Never get an answer.”
Just as Fireflight finished his self-deprecating comment, Skyfire found an entry in his processor that matched the small flying organics. “Sturnus vulgaris,” he repeated the Latin designation for the creatures. “Known to the local humans as the starling. Some in this country consider it a pest.”
Fireflight looked amused and also mildly disgusted. “How can anything that remarkable be called a pest?” he objected.
Skyfire grinned broadly. “I like the way you think.”
In his attempt to bashfully lower his head and deflect the compliment, Fireflight received an unpleasant reminder that his neck had yet to repair itself. His legs flailed and kicked wildly in reflexive reaction to the jolt of pain, leaving a pair of Aerialbot-foot-shaped dents in Skyfire’s forearm.
Fireflight looked apologetically at Skyfire, who failed to keep a straight face for more than a few kliks. The scientist’s good humor reassured the young Aerialbot enough that he soon joined what became uproarious laughter at his own expense.
“Never did get your name,” Fireflight remarked as their laughter died down. “How’m I supposed to thank you if I don’t know your name?”
“Skyfire,” the older mech belatedly introduced himself.
“Well, then,” Fireflight said with a pleasant smile, “thanks, Skyfire.”
***
The late afternoon had dissolved into early evening with no word, good or bad, from the medics. Skyfire looked toward the west and watched the setting sun tint the sky in warm hues of orange and red and violet. He turned to the east and observed pinpoints of distant starlight emerging as the light of Earth’s nearest star disappeared. There would be no moonlight tonight, Skyfire learned from a quick check of the lunar cycle. He could almost hear Fireflight’s voice speaking what would certainly be the younger mech’s reaction: “So we get to see the stars better.”
Seeing the stars better, seeing the flora and fauna better, seeing something better. That had always seemed to be Fireflight’s goal, as long as Skyfire had known him.
Long before Fireflight even existed, long before the war existed, it had been Skyfire’s goal. He had come here, and fallen into more grave danger than he hoped Fireflight would ever encounter, simply because he had wanted to see this then-uncharted planet better. Then, seeing better had nearly cost Skyfire his Spark after millions of this planet’s years encased in ice. And now, seeing better could still cost Fireflight his Spark after a momentary and ill-advised rendezvous with a tornado.
Was a closer look - seeing better - worth the peril?
Skyfire silently berated himself for asking the question. He heard the voices of his younger self and his Aerialbot friend shouting in unison, “Of course it is!” And of course it was. Taking a closer look, Skyfire remembered, had a way of bringing great rewards and sparking greater questions.
***
Fireflight, still relegated to light duty and banned from transforming thanks to the neck injury that was more severe than first thought, reclined on the ground and let his fingers explore the grass. He hoped he had trained his face to look calm and peaceful rather than depressingly bored, but as he soon learned, he was unable to trick Skyfire.
“I believe the humans call your mood cabin fever,” Skyfire laughed melodically.
Fireflight scoffed. “I don’t care what the humans call it. I call it bored out of my cranial casing.”
“Well, then.” Skyfire stretched out in the grass next to Fireflight and produced a magnifying implement. “Let’s fix that.”
Fireflight looked skeptical. “Let me get this straight. We’re gonna stay right here, and that’s supposed to make me less bored?”
“Yes,” Skyfire said with no hint of joking. “Turn over. Actually look at the grass.”
Fireflight gave the ground little more than a passing glance and chuckled sourly. “You have a weird concept of interesting, Skyfire. Anyone ever told you that?”
Skyfire ignored the barb and silently directed Fireflight’s attention to the magnifying lens. The Aerialbot sighed and humored the scientist with a brief look through - and the brief look turned into an intrigued closer look, and the closer look became a long, mesmerized stare. Under Skyfire’s lens, Fireflight saw a collection of creatures of which he had never before been aware. Tiny beings with six legs, or eight legs, or legs too tightly packed to count, or no legs at all, skittered and slithered amid the grass and soil. And the blades of grass themselves popped into stunning, three-dimensional view, revealing textures and veins invisible to the unaided optic.
The emergence of this entire new ecosystem brought a disturbing thought to Fireflight. “Skyfire,” he mournfully whispered, “we walk on these things. We step on them.” He again ran his hand through the grass, more cautiously this time. “How many of them have we killed?”
Skyfire smiled sympathetically and patted the sensitive young Aerialbot on the arm. “Truth be told, I’m not sure,” he admitted. “But there are millions of them - billions, perhaps more - and with so few of us by comparison, I doubt we’ve made much of an impact on the survival of any of these species.”
“That’s not the point!” Fireflight protested. “Are they sentient?”
This, Skyfire could not answer. Such tiny creatures would seem at first to have no physical room for the cognitive structures necessary for self-awareness. They seemed analogous to the small, spindly drones employed in the medbays and research laboratories of Cybertron: possessed of the ability to follow commands, think semi-independently and take rudimentary evasive action if necessary, but - despite those indications of intelligence - not classifiable as sentient. But Earth was different; humans, comparatively diminutive size notwithstanding, were certainly every bit as self-aware as Cybertronians. Perhaps size did not matter here. Perhaps Fireflight’s fears were true and they had in fact been slaughtering dozens, hundreds, of sentient beings with every step.
“Skyfire?” Fireflight prompted the larger mech.
Still having no satisfactory answer, Skyfire simply placed his hand on Fireflight’s arm again, this time leaving it there.
***
The absence of moonlight did indeed serve to make the stars appear brighter in the midnight sky. Activating what limited telescopic properties his optics possessed, Skyfire moved his gaze from star to star, hoping to make some discovery - a binary system, a collection of planets - that would distract him from useless worry.
He barely noticed when four flyers in jet modes taxied to bumpy landings on the ground a few hundred yards from him.
Silverbolt, Skydive, Air Raid and Slingshot, in that order, ran past Skyfire without so much as a hello and chaotically crashed their way into the Ark. Their arrival focused Skyfire’s thoughts once again on Fireflight. If the rest of the Aerialbots were in such a frantic hurry, he decided, something important must have happened in medbay.
Wheeljack stopped the scientist at the door of the medical wing. “Easy, big guy, let the team have some team time,” he said breezily. The engineer’s tone hinted at good news.
Skyfire anxiously asked, “How is he?”
“Online and awake,” Wheeljack reported. The tense connections in Skyfire’s frame relaxed a bit. “He’ll be stuck here on total rest for at least a week of local time, on light duty for a while after that, and he’s got a few more minor patch jobs in his future. But he’ll be just fine.” Wheeljack laughed. “As long as he doesn’t want to be a storm-chaser when he grows up.”
“Thank the Matrix,” Skyfire breathed. He looked over Wheeljack’s head and through the window in the medbay entrance to see four clearly relieved Aerialbots clustered around the recovery berth of the fifth. Silverbolt, ever the protective and paternal team leader, stood closest to Fireflight and relentlessly fussed over him, deflecting the others’ repeated attempts to pull him away and take his place.
Fireflight peeked through a gap in his teammates and locked optics with Skyfire. The wounded mech smiled brightly and tried to wave. Failing, he made an animated request of Silverbolt, who reluctantly left Fireflight’s side and opened the medbay door. “Kid says come on in,” the Aerialbot leader invited Skyfire.
The scientist needed no second invitation. He somehow restrained his urge to barrel into the medical suite and throw the other Aerialbots aside, instead quietly joining the team in the back of a loose semicircle around Fireflight’s berth.
It was Fireflight himself who invited him to the front of the group. “Hi, Skyfire,” he said in a soft voice that tried its best to sound enthusiastic.
“Hey, Flighty,” the older mech said with the same quiet eagerness.
“That was some storm, huh?” Fireflight marveled.
“Sure was.” Skyfire forced himself to stop smiling. “And if you ever fly into another one, I’ll revive you just to offline you again.”
Fireflight offered what passed for a sharp, businesslike nod. “Sir, yes sir.”
“We’ll be back later, space case,” Skydive cheekily bade farewell to his teammate. “You recharge.”
“Bye,” Fireflight mumbled to the four departing Aerialbots - then stretched out his hand and grabbed Skyfire’s arm. “Stay a klik, all right?”
The smile returned to Skyfire’s face as he settled into a kneeling position next to Fireflight’s berth and began gently stroking the smaller mech’s hand with one finger. “All right.”
The young Aerialbot settled into a recharge cycle, optics darkening and frame stilling except for vital functions. The monitors connected to his processor and fuel pump produced stable, strong, reassuring readings. What damage that remained was substantial in appearance, but mostly superficial in nature and would be easily fixed in the coming days. Soon enough, Fireflight would be back to his excitable, absent-minded, overeager, dangerously inquisitive, altogether lovable self.
But for now, there was healing to be done and rest to be gotten.
Skyfire shifted to a more comfortable seated position and leaned his head against Fireflight’s berth. Before long, though, he shifted yet again, back to his knees… just to see the young mech better.
Rating: K
Universe: G1
Pairing: Skyfire/Fireflight - so fluffy it can also be read as platonic.
Word Count: 3,113
“He’ll be fine.”
“How can you be sure, Ratchet? You see how much damage he’s -”
“He’ll be fine.”
“With all due respect for your medical opinion -”
“Skyfire, he’ll be fine!” Ratchet collected himself and spoke more calmly. “I’ve seen this sort of damage before on mechs smaller than him. It won’t be an easy recovery for him, but it will eventually be a full recovery.” The chief medical officer smiled briefly before turning back to his task. “Trust me.”
Skyfire reluctantly ended his protests and watched the physician at work. To his overprotective optics, Fireflight appeared far from fine. The Aerialbot’s wings were all but completely stripped of their housing, his brilliant red fuselage was pockmarked with deep gouges and holes, his nosecone and tail were out of alignment, and all of the damage rendered him locked in protective stasis and likely unable to transform had he been alert.
Despite himself, Skyfire chuckled at the nature of Fireflight’s victorious opponent: nature. The youth had let his curiosity get the better of him and flown directly into a fascinating cloud that he just had to see better. A conical, spinning cloud. Ignoring warnings from the rest of his team and from Skyfire, Fireflight had instead learned at close range just how dangerous a tornado was and just how fast it flung projectiles of collected debris. And true to form, the last word he had uttered before falling into stasis lock had been: “Wow.”
If Fireflight were to die from the heavy damage he had sustained, Skyfire thought, the scatterbrained little Aerialbot would die happy. What better way for an inquisitive mech to go out than while in the middle of learning something new, getting a different perspective on something, seeing something better?
Skyfire banished the thought of Fireflight’s death, even as Ratchet summoned Wheeljack to assist him in the emergency repairs to the young mech’s frame. Though he was still in stasis, Fireflight’s body began to seize involuntarily, signaling the start of a critical breakdown… somewhere. Wounds that had long since been sealed burst forth anew, producing streams of fluid on the Aerialbot’s frame and splashes on the medics’ chestplates.
“Pump failure,” Ratchet grimly reported.
“Don’t do this to me,” Skyfire whispered from the corner of the medbay to which he had been restricted for the duration of the surgery.
“Wheeljack - direct stimulation, now!” Ratchet ordered. Wheeljack retrieved an electrical device and swiftly connected two prongs to the pump within Fireflight’s fuselage that had stopped sending vital fluids to the rest of his frame.
“Clear!” Wheeljack shouted. Ratchet took a step back; Wheeljack pressed a button on the direct stimulation device; the pump reading on the vital signs monitor jumped erratically several times before settling into a slow, weak rhythm.
“Stay with me, Flighty,” Skyfire quietly urged the young mech as though he could hear.
“Stabilized,” Ratchet observed with a troubled tone to his voice. “But that shouldn’t have happened.”
“Recommend a full internal scan,” Wheeljack said.
“Agreed,” Ratchet affirmed. Wheeljack collected the bulky full-body scanner from another corner of the medbay and maneuvered it carefully until it was centered over Fireflight’s frame.
This would be a long repair process, if repairs were indeed possible. Skyfire sadly decided that staying would help no one. Besides, Ratchet had said Fireflight was stabilized.
Without a word to the busy medics or the unconscious Fireflight, Skyfire left the medbay and stepped outside the Ark. Hardly any evidence remained of the frightening and dangerous weather that had mangled Fireflight’s frame. The sky was a deep and nearly cloudless blue; the air temperature was comfortable; the grass glistened with a fresh covering of rain. Skyfire smiled sadly to himself at the image of Fireflight enjoying the view on beautiful late afternoons such as this, darting through the wispy clouds as though he were trying to capture them, occasionally running into other midair obstacles.
The events of another late afternoon, long ago, had introduced the veteran scientist and the rookie Aerialbot. Fireflight, true to form, had been distracted, this time by the movement of a gathering of Terran flying organisms known in the local language as starlings. To be fair, it was a stunning distraction: thousands of individual creatures tumbling and turning as one, creating a dynamic splash of black and gray across the sky. The spectacle so caught Fireflight’s attention that he had missed the treetops… again… and this time had been so ensnared that he required not only a quick untangling, but also a ride to medbay. And who was large enough to offer that ride?
Skyfire still remembered many of Fireflight’s words on that journey. But more than his words, Skyfire remembered his utter fascination at all things Earth. This impulsive little mech embraced the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unexpected and the bizarre. He loved having a whole planet to explore and millions upon millions of reasons to explore it. He craved discovery, he treasured knowledge, and he reveled in the realization that he would never, ever run out of questions.
In short, Fireflight was very much like Skyfire when the old mech was himself young.
Skyfire tapped into the recesses of his memory bank and recalled every detail of that afternoon and that first meeting: the flock of starlings, still cartwheeling through the autumn sky; the rustling and crunching of multi-colored leaves in the forest canopy; the groaning of a young mech, plenty injured and plenty more embarrassed.
***
It was rare that Skyfire was called for a rescue mission that involved no enemy fighters in the area. The “enemy,” this time, was a large native botanical specimen.
The scientist mildly chuckled at the sight of a small aircraft with its nosecone stuck in a tree trunk. The occupant of the aircraft - rather, the aircraft itself - moaned quietly and managed to produce two coherent words: “Help me.”
“Fireflight, I presume?” Skyfire wryly said.
“Yeah,” the trapped mech replied in a tiny voice.
“This might hurt for a few kliks,” Skyfire warned the Aerialbot. He firmly grasped the mech’s fuselage and pulled, straining against the surprisingly tight grip of the tree and struggling to maintain solid contact with the slick metal. Fireflight, startled and in pain, cried out sharply. “Try to relax,” Skyfire awkwardly suggested.
“You relax when you’re stuck in an organic flyer trap!” Fireflight retorted with a shout that gradually turned into a whine. Being painfully rescued gave the flyer some energy and some words, Skyfire observed as the whine continued. “All I was doing was looking at those - I don’t know what they’re called, but thousands of ‘em - and these things just grabbed me!”
“And you’re out,” Skyfire interrupted Fireflight as his nosecone emerged from the tree with a loud pop.
Fireflight fell silent for a moment. “Huh. How about that,” he mused. “I’m out.”
“Can you transform?” Skyfire asked, extending his arms to give Fireflight a bit of freedom while still holding him securely above the ground.
“I can try.” Fireflight did so, progressing agonizingly slowly through his transformation. He briefly looked satisfied with himself… until he moved his head and discovered that the impact had injured his neck. “Ow!” he involuntarily shouted.
“Take it easy,” Skyfire consoled the smaller mech. “I’ll get you to medbay.”
“I can get to medbay myself,” Fireflight stubbornly insisted.
Skyfire refused to release the Aerialbot. “Your neck is injured. You’re not taking any chances.”
“But - but - but -” Fireflight spluttered.
“But nothing.” Skyfire positioned one arm carefully under Fireflight’s neck and the other beneath his knees before beginning the journey - thankfully, a short one - back to the Ark.
The first stage of the journey passed in silence. Fireflight sulked and glared, mortified at the nature of the emergency that had landed him in this position and frustrated at his inability to move his head to see anything other than the chestplate of the mech carrying him. The young flyer sighed heavily in disappointment, and the sound brought Skyfire to a brief halt. The larger mech looked down at his passenger and, with a warm smile, gingerly tilted Fireflight’s body until he could see the sky directly above him.
“Wow,” the youth marveled, his scowl vanishing and fading into almost giddy amazement. Fireflight’s raw exuberance coaxed Skyfire to direct his optics upward, and he was rewarded with a clear view of a spinning, spiraling swath of hundreds - no, thousands of tiny charcoal-hued beings moving as a cohesive unit and creating a vibrant contrast against the deep blue sky.
“What are they?” Skyfire asked himself aloud, poring through the database of random Earth knowledge in his processor.
“Why are you asking me?” Fireflight answered the question with a question.
“I’m not.” Skyfire continued searching his processor. “I’m asking myself, I suppose.”
Fireflight laughed in recognition. “I do that a lot. Never get an answer.”
Just as Fireflight finished his self-deprecating comment, Skyfire found an entry in his processor that matched the small flying organics. “Sturnus vulgaris,” he repeated the Latin designation for the creatures. “Known to the local humans as the starling. Some in this country consider it a pest.”
Fireflight looked amused and also mildly disgusted. “How can anything that remarkable be called a pest?” he objected.
Skyfire grinned broadly. “I like the way you think.”
In his attempt to bashfully lower his head and deflect the compliment, Fireflight received an unpleasant reminder that his neck had yet to repair itself. His legs flailed and kicked wildly in reflexive reaction to the jolt of pain, leaving a pair of Aerialbot-foot-shaped dents in Skyfire’s forearm.
Fireflight looked apologetically at Skyfire, who failed to keep a straight face for more than a few kliks. The scientist’s good humor reassured the young Aerialbot enough that he soon joined what became uproarious laughter at his own expense.
“Never did get your name,” Fireflight remarked as their laughter died down. “How’m I supposed to thank you if I don’t know your name?”
“Skyfire,” the older mech belatedly introduced himself.
“Well, then,” Fireflight said with a pleasant smile, “thanks, Skyfire.”
***
The late afternoon had dissolved into early evening with no word, good or bad, from the medics. Skyfire looked toward the west and watched the setting sun tint the sky in warm hues of orange and red and violet. He turned to the east and observed pinpoints of distant starlight emerging as the light of Earth’s nearest star disappeared. There would be no moonlight tonight, Skyfire learned from a quick check of the lunar cycle. He could almost hear Fireflight’s voice speaking what would certainly be the younger mech’s reaction: “So we get to see the stars better.”
Seeing the stars better, seeing the flora and fauna better, seeing something better. That had always seemed to be Fireflight’s goal, as long as Skyfire had known him.
Long before Fireflight even existed, long before the war existed, it had been Skyfire’s goal. He had come here, and fallen into more grave danger than he hoped Fireflight would ever encounter, simply because he had wanted to see this then-uncharted planet better. Then, seeing better had nearly cost Skyfire his Spark after millions of this planet’s years encased in ice. And now, seeing better could still cost Fireflight his Spark after a momentary and ill-advised rendezvous with a tornado.
Was a closer look - seeing better - worth the peril?
Skyfire silently berated himself for asking the question. He heard the voices of his younger self and his Aerialbot friend shouting in unison, “Of course it is!” And of course it was. Taking a closer look, Skyfire remembered, had a way of bringing great rewards and sparking greater questions.
***
Fireflight, still relegated to light duty and banned from transforming thanks to the neck injury that was more severe than first thought, reclined on the ground and let his fingers explore the grass. He hoped he had trained his face to look calm and peaceful rather than depressingly bored, but as he soon learned, he was unable to trick Skyfire.
“I believe the humans call your mood cabin fever,” Skyfire laughed melodically.
Fireflight scoffed. “I don’t care what the humans call it. I call it bored out of my cranial casing.”
“Well, then.” Skyfire stretched out in the grass next to Fireflight and produced a magnifying implement. “Let’s fix that.”
Fireflight looked skeptical. “Let me get this straight. We’re gonna stay right here, and that’s supposed to make me less bored?”
“Yes,” Skyfire said with no hint of joking. “Turn over. Actually look at the grass.”
Fireflight gave the ground little more than a passing glance and chuckled sourly. “You have a weird concept of interesting, Skyfire. Anyone ever told you that?”
Skyfire ignored the barb and silently directed Fireflight’s attention to the magnifying lens. The Aerialbot sighed and humored the scientist with a brief look through - and the brief look turned into an intrigued closer look, and the closer look became a long, mesmerized stare. Under Skyfire’s lens, Fireflight saw a collection of creatures of which he had never before been aware. Tiny beings with six legs, or eight legs, or legs too tightly packed to count, or no legs at all, skittered and slithered amid the grass and soil. And the blades of grass themselves popped into stunning, three-dimensional view, revealing textures and veins invisible to the unaided optic.
The emergence of this entire new ecosystem brought a disturbing thought to Fireflight. “Skyfire,” he mournfully whispered, “we walk on these things. We step on them.” He again ran his hand through the grass, more cautiously this time. “How many of them have we killed?”
Skyfire smiled sympathetically and patted the sensitive young Aerialbot on the arm. “Truth be told, I’m not sure,” he admitted. “But there are millions of them - billions, perhaps more - and with so few of us by comparison, I doubt we’ve made much of an impact on the survival of any of these species.”
“That’s not the point!” Fireflight protested. “Are they sentient?”
This, Skyfire could not answer. Such tiny creatures would seem at first to have no physical room for the cognitive structures necessary for self-awareness. They seemed analogous to the small, spindly drones employed in the medbays and research laboratories of Cybertron: possessed of the ability to follow commands, think semi-independently and take rudimentary evasive action if necessary, but - despite those indications of intelligence - not classifiable as sentient. But Earth was different; humans, comparatively diminutive size notwithstanding, were certainly every bit as self-aware as Cybertronians. Perhaps size did not matter here. Perhaps Fireflight’s fears were true and they had in fact been slaughtering dozens, hundreds, of sentient beings with every step.
“Skyfire?” Fireflight prompted the larger mech.
Still having no satisfactory answer, Skyfire simply placed his hand on Fireflight’s arm again, this time leaving it there.
***
The absence of moonlight did indeed serve to make the stars appear brighter in the midnight sky. Activating what limited telescopic properties his optics possessed, Skyfire moved his gaze from star to star, hoping to make some discovery - a binary system, a collection of planets - that would distract him from useless worry.
He barely noticed when four flyers in jet modes taxied to bumpy landings on the ground a few hundred yards from him.
Silverbolt, Skydive, Air Raid and Slingshot, in that order, ran past Skyfire without so much as a hello and chaotically crashed their way into the Ark. Their arrival focused Skyfire’s thoughts once again on Fireflight. If the rest of the Aerialbots were in such a frantic hurry, he decided, something important must have happened in medbay.
Wheeljack stopped the scientist at the door of the medical wing. “Easy, big guy, let the team have some team time,” he said breezily. The engineer’s tone hinted at good news.
Skyfire anxiously asked, “How is he?”
“Online and awake,” Wheeljack reported. The tense connections in Skyfire’s frame relaxed a bit. “He’ll be stuck here on total rest for at least a week of local time, on light duty for a while after that, and he’s got a few more minor patch jobs in his future. But he’ll be just fine.” Wheeljack laughed. “As long as he doesn’t want to be a storm-chaser when he grows up.”
“Thank the Matrix,” Skyfire breathed. He looked over Wheeljack’s head and through the window in the medbay entrance to see four clearly relieved Aerialbots clustered around the recovery berth of the fifth. Silverbolt, ever the protective and paternal team leader, stood closest to Fireflight and relentlessly fussed over him, deflecting the others’ repeated attempts to pull him away and take his place.
Fireflight peeked through a gap in his teammates and locked optics with Skyfire. The wounded mech smiled brightly and tried to wave. Failing, he made an animated request of Silverbolt, who reluctantly left Fireflight’s side and opened the medbay door. “Kid says come on in,” the Aerialbot leader invited Skyfire.
The scientist needed no second invitation. He somehow restrained his urge to barrel into the medical suite and throw the other Aerialbots aside, instead quietly joining the team in the back of a loose semicircle around Fireflight’s berth.
It was Fireflight himself who invited him to the front of the group. “Hi, Skyfire,” he said in a soft voice that tried its best to sound enthusiastic.
“Hey, Flighty,” the older mech said with the same quiet eagerness.
“That was some storm, huh?” Fireflight marveled.
“Sure was.” Skyfire forced himself to stop smiling. “And if you ever fly into another one, I’ll revive you just to offline you again.”
Fireflight offered what passed for a sharp, businesslike nod. “Sir, yes sir.”
“We’ll be back later, space case,” Skydive cheekily bade farewell to his teammate. “You recharge.”
“Bye,” Fireflight mumbled to the four departing Aerialbots - then stretched out his hand and grabbed Skyfire’s arm. “Stay a klik, all right?”
The smile returned to Skyfire’s face as he settled into a kneeling position next to Fireflight’s berth and began gently stroking the smaller mech’s hand with one finger. “All right.”
The young Aerialbot settled into a recharge cycle, optics darkening and frame stilling except for vital functions. The monitors connected to his processor and fuel pump produced stable, strong, reassuring readings. What damage that remained was substantial in appearance, but mostly superficial in nature and would be easily fixed in the coming days. Soon enough, Fireflight would be back to his excitable, absent-minded, overeager, dangerously inquisitive, altogether lovable self.
But for now, there was healing to be done and rest to be gotten.
Skyfire shifted to a more comfortable seated position and leaned his head against Fireflight’s berth. Before long, though, he shifted yet again, back to his knees… just to see the young mech better.