We are a literate, intermediate to advanced AU Transformers RPG Based off of the first season of TFP with dashes of other incarnations sprinkled here or there. Characters from any continuity are welcome however must be restyled to match the TFPrime universe.
Active, with ongoing plotlines, we are always willing to integrate new characters into storylines once incorporated into the setting.
She fit against him just exactly like and completely unlike his bitlet. Shadow was dumping pain and grief through her field, a morass of emotions that resonated through his own until Ironhide offlined his optics and wordlessly hauled her across the relatively undamaged plating of his hip. He tugged her into a proper hug where he could wrap both arms around her, pressing his face plates to the top of her helm, engine stuttering a low, pained sound of his own.
Slag. Slag and scrap, and they were walking wounded with more than just their plating in shreds. It was easier to concentrate on her pain than on the lingering cold ache of his own - easier to focus on the tangible loss of old wounds re-opened and friends and cohort lost than it was to try to quantify the ache of some vague rewrite of self. He held her tight and pulsed comfort and support into her with each ventilation; he found, somewhat to his surprise, that it calmed his own as well, easing the ragged vibration of his systems the longer he held her. "It's alright," he rumbled softly.
On impulse, he pulsed fond affection over her. "Yeh ain't alone. Yer family, now."
For as long as she cared to remember - as long as she'd been part of the Lucky Thirteen - Shadow had never had a problem working by herself because she knew, no matter how bad things got, at the end there would be home and her team, her family, to put her back together. Without her realizing it, that lack had worn at her since she'd crashed on Earth, and now made it all but impossible to pull free of Ironhide's hold.
She should. She knew she should, knew this wasn't a luxury she was allowed. No ties; her team was her first and only priority.
A fact Ironhide seemed utterly unconcerned about, and she greedily soaked in the comfort he offered, pain and need lancing through her when he called her family. Her grip tightened, just briefly, in acknowledgment of his words, and she vented softly, finally relaxing in his hold.
Wonder how he'd feel if he knew how you treat family, Barricade smirked in the back of her processor. You think Labyrinth would call this loyalty? Let your family die and just replace them? It should have been thirteen of thirteen, Shadowrunner. You know that. Just like you know you don't deserve this.
His words were like a blade against her spark, because she knew. Of course she knew. And Primus help her, at this moment she did not care.
The local human language was both bafflingly loose and terribly specific at the same time. They had words for situations and concepts that Cybertronian did not, precise concepts rendered down into a paltry collection of organic syllables that, in Cybertronian, would have requires a multi-level glyph construct to convey.
The Cybertronian construct would have been painstakingly exact, describing not just a situation but the feeling and circumstances behind it. English, in comparison, had only one word for a sweeping range of vaguely similar situations, that one vague word meant to convey a standardized emotion and readily identifiable circumstance in two quick syllables.
The word was "orphan".
In English it meant, specifically, a youngling bereft of creators. The feeling, though, could be applied to any individual bereft of family, and in that respect the Autobots were, almost universally, orphans. War had claimed so many, there was no one who hadn't lost someone, be it friend or cohort or kin. He was, Ironhide knew, luckier than most - his youngling was, if not currently well, at least very much alive and that was more than many could say. His original cohort was long gone but the new bonds of whatever sort forged over the vorns still existed - he had no proof beyond rumor's continued silence but he knew, in his spark, that Chromia still lived, even if it was only his belief that made it so. His Prime lived and carried on the fight. Even Ratchet, cantankerous glitch that he was, was a point of warmth anchored in the landscape of Ironhide's personal universe.
The femme in his arms didn't have that, or little enough as to make no difference. If cohorts were the equivalent of organic 'families' then Shadowrunner was, in true fact, an orphan, and her family lost in the worst of ways.
He had, when he had been a bit younger and the war a bit newer, spent breems of every down-cycle comforting an orphaned sparkling who was almost too young to remember but every bit old enough to feel the loss. He couldn't have said, then or later, how he knew to do it - full-framed, he had no experience with sparklings, but protocols he hadn't even known he possessed had swamped every other system into mental stasis lock when he had a handful of wailing Bluestreak.
Silently wailing Shadowrunner wasn't really much different in the grand scheme of things and Ironhide tucked her against his plates, running his engine hotter for a soothing warmth, and let system vibrations and a wordless vocal hum blend into a deep, purring wavelength that Chromia had once called 'liquid recharge' bottled up and poured over her audio array. With any luck, it would work on spec ops femmes as well as it had on stubborn frontline femmes and fussy sparklings.
Barricade had finally gone silent, his voice drowned out by the rumbling purr coming from the frame she was curled against, a wordless assurance of safety/comfort. Shadow let herself drift on it, skirting the edge of recharge without quite slipping over, thoughts blurring one into the next and emotional subroutines trying to untangle themselves.
...until she found herself onlining her optics, and missing a brief but noticeable span of time.
She flinched with embarrassment, attempted half-heartedly to pull free, but Ironhide still showed no particular inclination to let go, and after a moment the amused blend of affection and self-satisfaction in his field registered.
"You're doing this on purpose." The accusation had no heat behind it, just a tentative pulse of answering affection, the sort she was almost over feeling guilty about with Bumblebee. She couldn't keep her confused gratitude out of her field, either, because while things weren't better in any sense of being fixed - they couldn't be, and she knew that examining her feelings in any real depth was simply going to break her open again - they were less raw, less immediate, buffered by the relaxing thrum vibrating through her very struts.
"I should finish patching your leg," she pointed out, even as she offlined her optics again. The pitch of her engine changed to an answering purr, a lighter counterpoint to his, and she settled back against him, content to remain for as long as he would have her.
It took Ironhide a few kliks to answer, optics dimmed, systems set into the rhythm of the harmonic that was vibrating on the edge of recharge through his frame. "Ah'll see Ratch' about th' leg tomorrow." Lead by example and all that scrap... it really did need to be seen to. His autonomic repairs could do it, but he'd be down for rotations waiting for it. Faster to help it along with a proper weld and patch.
Shadow was a warm, comfortable weight, his leg was patched - and more importantly his weight was off of it - and highgrade, post battle, took a toll. It was tempting to just let his systems finish cycling down but a stubborn voice in the back of his processor that sounded rather like Chromia's informed him, in no nonsense tones, that falling into recharge on the bare floor of an illicit still room, with a busted leg and a lap full of equally ripped up femme, was one of the stupider ideas he had ever had and would prove it in the morning when every system was going to be kinked up even worse than it already was.
Groaning softly, he booted his optics back up, tapping lightly against Shadow's back plating to get her attention, field warm and gentle. "We recharge here an' we're both gonna regret it," he rumbled. "All those patches'll do better on a berth than th' floor."
He was right, and she knew he was right, because thinking about moving was rapidly entering the 'too much trouble to even contemplate' zone.
"I'm not on the floor," she quipped, fully aware that could change easily enough. She grinned, the expression hidden against Ironhide's plating. "And Bumblebee's probably still in my berth."
Ironhide snorted, the hard vent hiccuping through his systems. "So Ah should be returnin' yeh t' him not too much th' worse for wear, is that how this goes?" he answered, amused. "Or do yeh need help rollin' him outta th' berth?"
He tucked his chin over the top of her head which... wasn't getting up, but let him rumble the soft sound of his laughter into her plates. "An' it's all well an' good for yeh, but mah frame's too slaggin' old for this."
The vibrations of Ironhide's laughter drew an answering laugh from Shadow, and if it sent a jolt through the still-throbbing raw patches in her arm, it also felt surprisingly good. She left her optics offlined a klik longer, contentment and gratitude mingling with affection in her field, then stretched and slid out of Ironhide's loose hold.
"I think I can manage him," she said, climbing to her pedes. She retrieved her half finished cube. "Are you sure you don't want me to finish patching you, though? Starscream made a slagging mess of that leg."
Ironhide twisted until he could get a look at his leg, confirming with visuals what the error readouts were already telling him. Grunting, he settled back against the wall again. "If yeh could make sure nothing's goin' t' split open an' drain out between now an' tomorrow morning, that'll be plenty. Whatever patching's done now, Ratch'll just have t' redo then - th' core strut's cracked an' he'll be shovin' everything aside to weld it."
Now there was something to look forward to... rather like rust. Ironhide grimaced and finished off his own cube. "Thanks," he added quietly, because he doubted anyone else had told her as much. "It's been good work, today."
Shadow winced in sympathy. A healthy respect for Ratchet - one which could best be described as "avoid at all costs" - had been the first thing she'd learned about Team Prime. If Ratchet was typical, it was no wonder Labyrinth had never wanted medics around them.
"There were a couple more lines that looked bad," she said, although really, they'd probably be fine so long as he was planning to stay off the leg. She settled in with the patch kit anyway. "Shouldn't take me too long."
She was relaxed; between the high grade, the lingering caress of Ironhide's field against her own, and the simple contact, she might have been more relaxed than she'd been since arriving at the Autobot base, and was making no effort to keep her feelings out of her EMF. She looked up with a little smile at Ironhide's thanks, and knew he would pick up both the burst of appreciation she felt, and the regret. "Thanks for backing me. I don't know that anyone else would have." She vented softly. "I'm sorry you got dragged into it, though. That shouldn't have been necessary. Barricade was my problem."
Shadow didn't voice the other reason it shouldn't have been necessary, though she knew she wouldn't easily forget that all of this could have been avoided if she simply hadn't lost the data which Labyrinth had entrusted to her. Data which might have ameliorated the whole situation. Data which had, almost certainly, included the fragging failsafe they had fought so hard to get, only unencrypted and ready for their use. If Blaster couldn't decode what they'd taken from Barricade...
She shook her head, trying to banish the gloomy thoughts. They had the failsafe. She had done everything she could to make up for her failure, and Barricade was dead, as slowly and painfully as had been possible under the circumstances. She may not have been able to do it alone, but she had still managed to see it done. That was enough. It had to be enough.
A hint of a growl seeped into his engine, some remnant ghost of the anger that had sustained him most of that day. One combustion spark, eager to be fanned back into flame. "Barricade was settin' t' make himself all of our problems," Ironhide huffed. "Mech like that doesn't know when t' stop. Won't stop, not 'til we're all slagged or he is. What we did today..."
It was hard to get the words out of his vocalizer, caught on the raw edge between the heat of anger and the cold, sucking chill that had been dogging his circuits since speaking to Prime and Arcee. He swallowed it down, pushing it aside - a minor rewrite, new routines always settled in his systems like half melted slag for the first few rotations, it would pass - and forced the words out in a gruff growl. "What we did today was necessary and what it got us was invaluable. That's th' bottom line. The rest..." unbidden, the anger called up a smile, sharp and edged, and for a nanoklik he didn't recall in visceral mesh memory the vibrating feel of Barricade‚'s spark in his hand, and didn't care if he did.
"The rest," he finished firmly, "was just sweet rust on th' energon. Th' slagger needed t' go, an' Ah'm glad Ah saw it."
"I don't regret what we did to Barricade. And I'm sure as slag not saying he didn't deserve it." If she regretted anything, it was that they'd been under the clock and she hadn't been able to draw Barricade's death out longer. She vented quietly, turning his words over. "I'm glad you were there, because you deserved the chance to take what happened to Blue out on Cade's mesh, but I'm sorry I needed you to be there. I'm sorry," she paused to reboot the shame/guilt buzz out of her vocalizer, "that I wasn't able to do my job properly."
Her words and the guilt in her field pinged too close to his own, overlapping and merging in a blur that cut straight through the warmth to slice at him. Ironhide reached out before he could think better of it, gathering her back into his arms to tuck secure against his plates, his engine keening a low, counterpoint vibrato to the growl stuck in his vocalizer.
"Not yer fault," he ground out, pressing her close, trying to swallow down the guilt and regret in his own spark to pulse reassurance and pride into her. "Not yer slaggin' fault, femme, an Ah won't hear otherwise. Yeh did everythin' yeh should. Yeh did what Ah told yeh to, even when yeh shouldn't. Couldn't've asked for more."
His words hit her hard, exactly what she needed to hear (from Labyrinth, but she could still see/feel/hear Barricade's claws ripping Labyrinth's chassis wide open, and Ironhide was here and alive and perilously close to sliding into the emptiness Labyrinth's death had left in her spark), tearing through the last of her defenses with absolution for every slip, every opening she had let Barricade take advantage of, every failure to correctly predict the infiltrator's next move.
Safe, a kind of safety Shadow couldn't remember ever experiencing, not even with her entire team clustered around her. She managed not to burrow against his plating like a sparkling only because he was already holding her there with a grip that bordered on too tight, and she need only relax into that security, optics offlined, drinking in both his words and the warmth of his EMF.
She wasn't oblivious, though, to the frequencies running under the ones he wanted her to sense. Threads of pain and regret and loss that she couldn't quite map onto the events of the day, nearly suppressed but definitely there, a low grade background ache that made her suspect he didn't need to be alone any more than she did. She tucked her helm against his neck and pushed warmth/affection/trust back at him, servos catching at his plating, still not burrowing, not really, but definitely holding on more tightly than she had any right to.
"Not yer fault," Ironhide repeated, shuttering his own optics as he rested his chin against her helm, the words rumbled into her along with his pride in her, admiration and approval. Her answering warmth and trust slotted in easily where his sparklet, still laid up under Ratchet's care, couldn't be, soothing some of the knife edge ache inside him. He hummed softly, plates shifting without conscious accord to mantle gently around her, flaring to keep her safe. "Yeh did good, femme. Real good."
Slag it. He shifted gingerly, stretching his legs out with a grimace and settling his back more comfortably against the wall. He'd recharged on worse, to be sure, and the warm weight of the youngling tucked against his chest trumped any minor physical discomfort. He cradled her close, rubbing soothing patterns into the plates of her back with one thumb, and let his systems slip back into the pulse that encouraged recharge. "Get some rest," he whispered against her plates. "It's alright. Yeh ain't alone. Ah've got yer back."