Ep 0- Getting to know the locals. -open-

June had just finished dropping off the kids with escort from Bulkhead. The Bots seemed to keeping an eye on the children at all times. She’s just come off a night shift and out of sheer nerves been unable to sleep. She would have just liked to sit in the parking lot all day with Bulkhead, but he didn’t seem to think that would be a very good idea and she’d been set sensibly back to base. The human sized facilities still worked, most likely for the sole purpose of having new human occupants every day.

She’d taken fifteen minutes to take a shower and pull on a proper button down and jeans, knotting her hair back again and inspecting herself in the mirror. June Darby: my son is friends with giant robots. She resisted the urge to slap her own face in glass and instead wandered the base. Tensions were still so high you could cut a cheese block with it – Barricade, the Decepticon who attacked Ray, had gotten free. She imagined Ray was hiding somewhere in the human bunks.

The sound of TV attracted her however, to one of the back rooms ostensibly converted into the Bot rec room. They even had a massive… ‘couch’. One of the new mechs, Bluestreak, was seated watching TV by themselves. Hmm, well. No reason not to be friendly.

“Hullo there!” June waved as she circled around to the front of the couch.

June laughed. “Well, then I guess someone’s already pointed out all the on base humans. You’re Bluestreak right? It’s nice to meet you too.” She tilted her head a little bit. In the bunker lights it was not hard to see the littering of still silver metal welds on the little Autobot’s body. Bluestreak appeared to be about Bumblebee’s size, but significantly slighter in build. Whereas the muscle car bot had… well, muscle, Bluestreak was a much slenderer build. June was… also having a slightly difficult time parsing the slightly staticy alto of Bluestreak’s voice and guessing their gender. Hmm…

“So,” she said brightly, “how are you feeling, hun? I heard you got it pretty rough in the last fight. Ratchet’s been keeping you locked down. You got a clean bill of health. I’m a nurse so it’s both professional curiosity and actual worry.”

“Yes, Jack’s mine, and you’re exactly right.” Damn. Still zero gender markers. Hmm, tricky interspecies social cues were tricky. “I work at a hospital. I just got off a night shift and the kids are at school right now so I thought I’d say hi to the newcomers. I’ve spoken with Shadow a little bit, only seen Ironhide briefly but he seemed pretty worried about you. Are you two friends?”

She supposed it was a great deal more serious than that. She knew paternal behavior when she saw it, regardless of whether or not her ex-husband had been over burdened with the instinct, Ironhide clearly was. She was curious to hear Bluestreak’s side of that however… and hoping to get even the slightest confirmation of what pronoun she was supposed to be using for this Bot.

“I understand,” said June, smiling. She folded her arms. “I’m a mom. I sensed a fellow parent the moment I laid eyes on that guy.” She tapped her temple as though to indicate some keen sixth sense on this account, rather than a simple recognition of common parental symptoms: the fretting, the irritability, the dread, and that blinding clutch of hope… “There’s a lot of word for ‘parent’ even in human languages and I don’t think any of those quite cover it either. He’s clearly your family so… I’m glad that you have him.”

It was clear, even to her, that that was rare. June had never had to ask the others about their losses. There were there in the air around them somehow – the weight of a war so big it was incomprehensible as the sun and nearly as old. It was in the way Arcee looked at Jack, or Bumblebee or Bulkhead and resolved not to see them hurt. It was in every word Optimus Prime spoke – so controlled it bordered on impossible. It was how Ratchet go so mad when the others came back hurt - the rage of someone who'd spent so long putting them back together there was nothing left to do but get mad... because all your grief had been expended on them. It was the way no one mentioned why Bumblebee couldn’t talk.

And damn, she still couldn’t tell if Bluestreak was a guy or a girl.

“Please,” said June, extending a welcoming hand. “I’d love to answer some of your questions for once. I spend most of my time asking questions about the Autobots and they’ve been here so long they don’t seem to have many questions left for me, exactly.” She beamed, utterly pleased. “ So… how can I help you, Bluststreak?”

After Bluestreak had lifted her onto what was ostensibly the ‘armrest’ of the massive, Cybertronian sized couch, (where the hell did they get that? Or had the Autobot brought it with them in whatever craft they’d come in?) June thought a bit.

“Well, Bluestreak, I don’t know if you’re familiar with mammalian physiology, but I’ll do my best to explain.” She held up to hands palm up. “Two separate genetic donors, male and female, have to each donate their hereditary material to create a single human fetus in the womb of the female. That would be a… carrier I think is an appropriate Cybertronian terminology for this. Ratchet told me that Cybertronians have dozens of ways that transfomers come online, one of which is a type of symbiotic sparking where one bot has to carry the sparkling and share systems with them until the new-spark is ready to operate independently.”

She looked apologetic.

“I know lots of you aren’t sparked that way, but that’s the closest parallel I can think of with limited knowledge.” A shrug.

“So, the mother carries the unborn fetus for nine months approximately and gives birth. The newborn is then raised in whatever culturally appropriate family structure is available to them until they reach adolescence and so on. Jack’s father, ah, donated his genetic material to me to make Jack” She paused, perusing her knowledge of Cybertronian reproduction as she’d discussed it with Ratched. “I suppose it’s like when some Cybertronian cohorts get together and each donate some of their source code for a blank-frame’s basic software. For humans, you only need two sources, but those two are also donating the genetic data passed down to them from their parents and so forth. Does that make sense?”

“Oh when he was done donating, he figured his part was over so he left,” said June somewhat wryly, though there was a touch of wistfulness in how she said it, some ghost of regret. After she said it aloud she supposed that was mildly petty of her… but then she remembered that being petty was hardly outside her rights after that bastard took a hike out of Jack’s life. “Let’s just say we don’t know where he is or when he’ll decide to drop by and it’s been largely decided that things are pretty much better that way. He stuck around for a while but when it became clear that he wasn’t doing either Jack or me any favors he just… exited that picture.”

She shrugged. “Things go like that sometimes.”