Ep0.5 - Canadian Rockies - 'Third Date' - 'Closed'

[Deleted]

<<OOC mature warnings for 'facing (spark and tactile) and gratuitous levels of fluff and sap>>


It had taken a little bit of planning, some arranging and acquisition and setup, and mostly some thought. Ironhide had, during otherwise quiet patrols, turned a considering optic to the human internet which had assured him that there were any number of scenic, remote, uninhabited and strangely beautiful locations left on the otherwise populated planet.

Ironhide had never really given much thought to the beauty of an organic landscape. He appreciated the solar system's sun, the yellow-orange dwarf star that provided light and life to the planet they were on. He appreciated that rather much - he'd seen enough dead systems and black space to last an entire function, Cybertron's own self included. The steadiness of the rising and setting sun with each planetary rotation and the warmth of it on his plates when he was cutting down the highway at a clip (or better yet, parked and just soaking it up - 'sunbathing', Miko called it) was an alien and familiar thing all at once, pinging off of memories he had to unarchive - they had had this, once. Their people had known this. That familiarity, he found, made the alienness of the organic a little less strange.

So Ironhide looked, and surfed around the human's fledgling network, and found it was more than just 'organic' and 'alien'. The colors were different, the shapes were strange, the vistas no less weirdly organic, but he found he liked them.

He liked them more when he looked at them through the lens of what he would like to show Cleaver.

After that, it was practicalities. He marked off a triple handful of potentially good places that were decently remote from human habitation on a map, then correlated it with known Decepticon or any Cybertronian activity, and removed anything that overlapped. Then removed anything that was unfavorable in the current orbital season. After that, it was footwork, and Shadowrunner's little log scrambler patch got some work as he personally checked each location. A handful were discarded as unsuitable for one reason or another (completely indefensible, too sandy, too wet, too infested with who knew what kind of organic but Primus, the stench - it had taken him hours to scrub that off before he'd dared to step foot back into base, and even then the smell had lingered for a bit between the control room and the wash racks and he hadn't heard the end of that one for awhile).

In the end, he had settled on a location in the Canadian portion of the Rocky Mountains, wooded forest and flat rock overlooking a pristine lake that reflected the surrounding mountain peaks. Brief comm contacts with Cleaver (and her voice, even just the sparse brush of glyphs, could leave him lighter and warmer for breems afterwards, like hours in the hot Nevada sun) had confirmed a schedule of possible days, worked around her current patient and his own duty roster.

After that, the rest had been easy. A few minor edits to the duty roster on an otherwise uneventful day, assigning himself a long range patrol that wouldn't have him back at the base until after sunset. Several heavy tarps to cover over the loose organic bits of the outlook, two cubes of energon, two cubes of highgrade - simple, almost meagerly austere, but the sunlight glittering across the surface of the lake was almost like the crystal glitter of Cybertron's canyons.

Running hot and jittery like a youngling was worse than ridiculous. He knew exactly what he was doing, where this was going, but more than anything, really, he found that he just wanted to see her again. Venting his systems, Ironhide opened his comm, sending a ping along the signal to Cleaver, coordinates packet attached. ::Got a breem or five, darlin'?::

::For you, I got cycles,:: Cleaver replied from her buried ship, sliding down from the repair berth where she’d spent the last breem buffing out cleanser from between her finger joints. With Barricade gone, Reflector peacefully occupied and their energon store good, the medic had found herself with enough empty time to have a flutter build in her spark that wouldn’t ease no matter how much cleaning and polishing she applied her servos to. Surface nanites kept her plates sterile in the sense that she could perform open-mesh surgery without contaminating a mecha, but it had been a long time since she’d put aside time for a thorough scrub down.

She’d long thought she’d grown too old to get nervous like this, that kind of excited anxiousness at something promising just over the horizon that was unlikely to go any way but wonderfully. But then, she’d also thought she’d grown too old to care and be cared for by another like this, and the prospect was as strange as it was thrilling. He’d been plaguing at her thoughts since the last time - when sand and exposure had been the only things stopping her from saying yes. Ironhide’s voice across the comm. had rekindled that spark of heat, and she turned the coordinates in her mind like a precious stone. ::You waiting for me?::

::Take yer time, there ain't any rush,:: Ironhide commed back. The little surge of warmth her voice brought him left a lingering heat behind, anticipation curling through him.

He hadn't tried to put it into words; didn't, in truth, want to. Oh, he could guess what some of the others might say if they knew - he had spent his entire function in one sort of military establishment or another and had quite possibly heard every ribald comment about a mech's personal dealings that anyone could come up with. He even knew, within a reasonable doubt, what his cohort would say - Blue lived for the joy of the moment, and Jazz was poured from a similar mold.

Part of it was protection; Cleaver's trust meant too much to him, personally, to share freely with the others without her consent. The rest was a different kind of protection; as much as he didn't think any of them would protest his keeping company with her, he didn't want to hear what they might have to say about it. He didn't want barrack level humor and innuendo leveled at her. Whatever it was... it wasn't that.

Ironhide just didn't know how to put words to what it was.

He had his sensors flung wide and the tickle of the ground bridge was unmistakable. He turned to face it as she came through and found he had to throttle back and correct an arrhythmic thump in his pumps at the sight of her, his smile unconscious and spark felt as he stepped forward to meet her, voice rough at the edges. "Hey."

“Hey,” came the reply in kind, and though she was making an effort not to act like a sparkstruck youngling, Cleaver knew that she was smiling in a manner that on anyone else she’d call idiotic.

The sweet, hot joy fell to the wayside when she finally looked past Ironhide to the vista surrounding them. For all her time here, she’d not explored this world. It would have been asking someone to find her and make life difficult, when all she wanted to do was stay buried and keep getting by. But then Ironhide had suddenly offered her a whole lot more than ‘getting by’, and Cleaver hadn’t realised she’d been starved of it until her spark had leaped so hard and so fast.

It was stunning - alien and strange but still beautiful in its clear water, strong trees and mountainous backdrop. A soft ex-vent from a ‘breath’ she hadn’t realised she’d been holding, and Cleaver looked back to Ironhide with a surprised, flattered smile. “How’d you find this place?”

Ironhide chuckled, stepping into the warmth of her field, almost close enough to touch. "Did some huntin' around," he admitted. "Little bit of trial and error."

He reached up, almost hesitant, to rest a hand on her shoulder, the tiny shock of contact a welcome echo. "You like it?"

“Very much,” she replied, unable to stop from taking another look over the scene. She turned slightly to move back into him, backstrut close and warm against his powerful chassis. When an arm settled around her waist, Cleaver covered the scarred hand with her own.

After several kliks of basking in shared fields, the shared pleasure of the moment, Cleaver cast Ironhide a sidelong smile over her shoulder. “Course, I’d have met you in an abandoned warehouse with a chemical-tacky floor and still been happy about it.”

Ironhide exvented, shaking his head. "Ah wouldn't do that t' yeh," he rumbled softly. "Well," he amended after a beat, "not if Ah had a choice."

The pulse of her humor warmed him through to his core and his head, when he stopped his motion, came to rest against the side of her helm. He pressed a light kiss to the edge of her audio, cycling a shaky vent. "Ah..." missed yeh. thought about yeh. want yeh. lo-

He cut off the tumbling chaos of thought threads and unvoiced things with a quiet click of his vocalizer. "Ah'm glad t' see yeh again."

“I’m seein’ that,” she uttered softly, and the insinuation that seeing wasn’t quite enough for her flowed easily through her field, and she could have laughed at the reciprocal feeling she found in return.

Ironhide met her before halfway, completing her turn into his body with strong hands and enveloping arms that barely conveyed what had been cut short and suppressed at their last meeting. The stupid necessities - time, a cover story, a location that wasn’t half-clocked to be distracted in - had been covered, and Cleaver knew as truth that Ironhide had done everything in his power to make sure that they were safe here for this. Liberated of worry, she met him with the same barely-throttled hunger, hands sweeping and pulling into the sensitive nooks she wanted to memorise at his sides, kissing and being kissed with that depth of affection that just didn’t come from a casual tryst. Sweet and potent and perfectly strut-melting. And without any pressure to rush to a peak.

They didn’t need to breath, at least not through their mouths, but a break to nuzzle and lay feathered kisses to necklines gave Cleaver opportunity to speak. “Brought you somethin’.”

The last time Ironhide had felt as light, as young, as he did right then, it had been... longer than he wanted to devote a processor thread to unarchiving, not when most of his threads were busy recording touch and taste and scent and feel, new memories writing in a stream floated on the quickened, joyous spin of his spark. "Yeh didn't have t' do that," he told her, but words utterly failed to hide the little delighted skip in his lines, and Primus, not only was he too old to be reacting like a youngling over a surprise, he'd never even been one in the first place.

Cleaver's smile was infectious, though, the pulse of their fields over and through each other was better than a tank full of high grade. He wasn't sure what he expected - when was the last time anyone had given him anything? The question was filed in the 'never mind' stack, along with the one about age - but the container of a handful of thin, brittle cylinders she produced made his vents stutter and startled an honest bark of laughter from him.

"Where," he asked, delighted, "did yeh find those? Primus, Ah don't even remember th' last time Ah saw one." He leaned in, nuzzling against her cheek. "'Fraid Ah didn't bring yeh much, 'less yeh count a better grade than that paint cleanser Ah brought yeh last time."

“Brought me all a’this, stupid mech,” Cleaver uttered with a nod to indicate the scenery, and every single thought of consideration that had gone into it. She leaned a shoulder into him to maintain contact, but stepped away fractionally to hand over the tube of rust sticks. Such an insubstantial token, and it had felt stupider and smaller the longer it had been waiting in her hold. “Had them in dry storage along with a few other bits and pieces since Cybertron went. Probably one of the last tubes left in the ‘verse.” She nudged against him, affectionately arch. “Don’t go eatin’ them all at once.”

He cupped a hand to the back of her helm and tugged her a little closer, engine a steady purr that sung appreciation as much as his field did. "Ah'd rather share 'em," he said, suggestion in tone and the flicker caress of reaching EMs. A chuckle wound its way up from his tanks. "An not with th' ravening horde back on base."

Tubes left hands occupied, though. Ironhide slipped it away, freeing both hands to raise, framing her face, thumbs ghosting across her cheeks as he tipped his head to bring their forehelms together. It was heat, all of the ends of where they had left off the time before picking up once more, but that wasn't the core of it. As much as he wanted where they were going, it was enough just to hold her close, feel mesh and the steady throb of her systems underneath his hands and the pitch of her voice and field sinking into his sensors. "Missed yeh," he admitted, the easiest of all of the things unsaid. "Yeh been good?"

Cleaver shuttered her optics, voice a murmur. “Mmhm. Distracted, but nothin’ to report.” She wouldn’t speak of her time with Barricade, here. Or about Moonshot’s arrival. Or Reflector’s latest antics, either, though for different reasons. In part it was for their privacy, and a deeply ingrained ethos of confidentiality. But mostly it was because this was hers, and selfish as it sounded to her own audios, she didn’t want to share Ironhide.

She onlined her optics and found his contentedly half-shuttered, though as bright and emotive as they’d been in her memory files for him. “And you? Blue getting by, alright?”

Ironhide hummed agreement, hands slipping down to the back of her neck, fingers sliding over lines. "Blue's doin' fine," he told her. "Had some new arrivals lately." He hesitated fractionally, picking words. "Cohort, one of them. Haven't seen 'im since th' original launch. Think that did Blue more good than anythin' else." Cohort, the back of his processor reminded him needlessly, that he hadn't told about where he was going, or why, but the itch to just hold Cleaver and not subject her to the others trumped the certainty that keeping secrets from Jazz was a lost cause before it ever happened. That could be dealt with later.

He closed his optics, mapping the planes of her back with his hands, mouth ghosting across the edge of her helm. "Suppose we could sit," he suggested. "Ain't plannin' on goin' anywhere anytime soon."

“Starting to sound like a good plan,” Cleaver hummed in turn, letting him guide her back and down onto the meticulously arranged tarps. She was fast learning his little ways like that - his want bordering on need to orchestrate comfort and secure spaces, to reassure as well as to protect. It was good to know that even amongst the most stalwart warriors who’d been fighting in this war since its inception that there was still a warmth for others, beyond cohort-in-arms. When she’d first seen Ironhide, weapons hot and engine geared for a fight, she’d seen a walking powerhouse of death. The moment he’d spoken, however, inquiry laced through with genuine concern, and then his automatic want to physically help, the war-machine had shrunk down into something else. Something kind.

She accepted a rust stick that he handed to her, watching him take his own with a quiet pleasure before taking the tip between her denta. Field relaxing into easy longwave, Cleaver looked over the scene again. No rush. It was even nicer not to rush, to enjoy the company of each other first. “Do the others suspect you’ve got a spark the size of a planetary body?”

Ironhide grinned, amused. "If they really know meh at all, yeah." He leaned into the warmth of her field, plates brushing, and shuttered his optics for a long moment as the taste of the rust stick - better than his memory of it - burst sweet through his mouth.

"Mind yeh," he added, "that's only if they know meh. Ah'm pretty sure there's still some former Autobot recruits willin' to swear Ah eat sparklings and aligned with Unicron, after Ah put 'em through basic maneuvers." He chuckled, pressing a kiss against her shoulder. "Yeh peg meh for easy before or after Ah dug yeh that hole?"

“Pegged you for chivalrous digging the hole,” Cleaver replied carefully, one optic narrowing slightly in search of the possible trap. “‘Easy’ never entered into it.” Her gaze dropped, darkened fractionally, and she skimmed the tip of her thumb in slow, thoughtful circles against a part of the mech’s sunlight-warmed armour.

“Surprised you-” A false start she didn’t want to complete in her own processor, let alone put out into the air between them. Not now. Whatever petty insecurities were still rattling around after all these cycles were her business, not his to pander to. Too old. Too battered. Too much of a pacifist for a warrior. Too quiet a life. Not enough to carry an interest, let alone anything else. Waste of time and energy at this point.

Cleaver snapped the poisonous thread of thought before it could reach down to her spark and wreck the precious thing she was trying to kindle. She forced the ghost of a smile back onto her plates, met his optics again. “Surprised you didn’t already have someone back home.”

Ironhide huffed slightly, dropping his optics as he hesitated, faltering, over words. Cleaver's fingers, circling across his plates, made him draw a deeper ventilation. Coward. Always been useless at this. "Ah don't... This ain't somethin' Ah do, much," he admitted quietly. He pressed another kiss to her shoulder, hand curving around her side. "Hasn't been anybody 'back home' for awhile, but that ain't..."

Slagging words. He exvented sharply. "Don't go thinkin' that's why Ah'm here," he added hastily. "It ain't about how long it's been, or who's missin' where. Ah'm here for you."

It was infinitely easier to shelve personal anxieties when assuaging another’s, and Cleaver’s hand slid around Ironhide’s wrist as easily as she smiled into his neck. “I’m gettin’ that. And, at the risk of presuming too much, I ain’t chalked you as the pit-stop type. So quit frettin’ and kiss me.”

Actions had always been so much easier and cleaner than words, and Ironhide's spark pulsed relief at her request. Talking was hard. Putting words to the feeling ricocheting around his circuits was nearly impossible. But to reach out, frame the planes of her face (rich with the print of her spark and beautiful, and he was a coward not to tell her that) between his hands and press his mouth to hers - that was perfect.

He shuttered his optics and tried to convey, in touch and feel, the words that wouldn't come.

Cleaver let him come like a solar wave, giving over to the rush of warm energy that seeped into every space, caressing every micron of mesh like something pure and clean. It felt natural to flatten her rotors into a fan that would let her lie back, and Ironhide gleaned the unspoken invitation to follow like that was natural too.

One hand trailing his flank found a sunken cannon mount on the upwards caress, and she followed a hunch to press the blunts of her fingers into the seam. Hydraulics, coolant, stabilising servos, and buried beneath the mechanisms for so much strength was the sweet cord of a neural line. She thumbed it, curling into his hot mass as he mapped her alike.

Ironhide wanted to memorize her; the sound of her systems, the weight and mass of her, the angle and plane of her plates, the pitch of her wave, taste and sight and feel, so many levels of feeling.

The low growl of his engine was unconscious, purred into her systems, sound and vibration cycling higher with her touch. Ironhide broke away only to map the long lines of her throat with tiny kisses, fingers tracing over plates to stroke at seams, blindly searching for sensors nodes. Warm and perfect and he wanted...

He pressed his mouth to the base of her throat, venting a low, rumbling moan. There were too many things caught up in his vocalizer, too many half formed threads circling in knots through his processor, and the only one that made it free was the sound shapes of her name, uttered on tones that tried to give voice to a fraction of it. "Cleaver."

Her vents stuttered on the outflux at the utterance, low and rumbled and underscored with a dozen associated glyphs, all of which she absorbed and savoured. It was better than touch and Cleaver arched with it, sighing a sound that could have been his name, an invocation of Primus or just I’m here. Internally she could feel the barriers between spark case and the sturdy plates against the outside ‘verse loosen in anticipation, in easy want and headily escalating need.

The teases of sensation they’d engaged last time, the playful tricks picked up and perfected over time and partners, had no place here. They felt impersonal, somehow, bordering on cheap, which this was lightyears apart from. No bravado now. Daring from the ache, Cleaver ran a charged hand down Ironhide’s central seam, over the hidden spark that she didn’t need to see to know was blinding.

Her touch undid him, struts arching to push into her hand, plates unlatching with an almost obscene haste. Ironhide vented static on the edge of a low, subsonic keen, catching at Cleaver's wrist to still her for a moment as he tried to throttle back systems that were humming with a sharp, charged harmonic.

The tiniest brush of her fingertips along the edge of his loosened plates dragged something that might have been an oath from the depths of his tanks and ripped the thin tissue of control away again. His spark, spinning fast and hot within his core, pulsed need at her in a broken rhythm, surging up through his systems and field to roll heavily into hers.

Steady.

A medic’s field pulse, gentle and assured and taking a degree of control now for the purely selfish fact that Cleaver wanted to draw this out for as long as possible. So hot and dizzyingly fast in the coming, now they were here she wanted to draw out and savor every nano-klik of it.

Her own chassis cracked apart, nowhere near wide enough for a merge but enough to release a stream from her core. A promise that it was coming. Twisting gently out of Ironhide’s grip on her wrist, Cleaver pressed her hand into the internal mechanisms normally shielded by the blastdoor-thick armour of his outer frame. Eddies of his spark energy tangled at her fingers, lurching a current of heat through her lines that had her press a moan to his neck, then, somehow, his mouth.

Ironhide was venting raggedly, a tremor shuddering through internal components where her touch seared him. He wanted to bury himself in the feel of her kiss, the taste of her; to loose himself in it and not surface, one shining moment drawn out into eternity.

His core swelled, pressing out to meet her, electric frissions racing hot through his circuits as thin tendrils of self reached between them. A moan rose out of the heat, echoing within their sealed mouths. His hands were full of her, heated plates and solid mass and…

Oh. Need wracked through him, deep and hungry, making his systems stutter harder, engine a bass counterpoint. His hands slid down her sides and he caught her close, fingers hooked into her dorsal plates as he pulled, rolling.

Ironhide landed with a grunt on his back, the not insubstantial mass of Cleaver's chassis spread across his own, and for one nanoklik the world flashed white, nothing but burning heat and longing. The kiss broke and he hummed a deep, aching note, backstruts arching to push his retracting chestplates into her hands.

Reaching up, he ghosted light fingers around the open edges of her chest, his ventilations seizing in a hard stutter as spark energy crackled across his palms. He met her optics, his own blanching out to static at the edges as he pressed up, wanting to feel. His vocalizer, rebooted hard, twice, bled into a rough keen at the lower registers. "Please…"

It would have been simple to read that single groaned sound as a request to merge, but even half-clocked with charge, Cleaver could parse out the subtleties in the word. It was a surrender for more, a gift of himself to her and whatever she wished to do. An indication that his pleasure was parasitic, bordered on orchestrating hers and yielding wholly to her whim.

In a warrior frame, that was an exhilarating and astounding find.

Straddling his hips, one hand planted atop his abdominal armour, Cleaver pulsed warm assent and slid her other hand into a side vent. It was a means to hold him as much as to stroke across interior sensory nodes, her pedes tucked against his legs and shifting with him. She slid the tips of four fingers down the split in his chassis, triggering it wider with each coaxing caress. The periphery mingling of spark-self was a radiated sensation, warm and intense in its own right whilst underscored with an ache for completion.

However, if he was yielding complete control to her desires, then she was going to wring at least one overload out of him before they merged.

Words drained out like energon from a fuel line, leaving nothing but feeling and reaction behind. Ironhide gasped, which only threw his vents open even wider and Cleaver's fingers, slipped deep inside, were coaxing burning flares from sensors that sparked up and down his side.

The fingers at his chest, though, were the ones stroking white static splinters into his processor, all coherent words lost in the roar of his engine and strut melting sensation. He keened, only half aware of the sounds in his own throat, trembling hands feathering along her hips and up across the vents of her side. Charge curled around his tanks, skating up his spinal links, drawn by the touch of her hands and the weight of her across him and the hot ache of spark for spark.

He could lock his vocalizer to a volume that wouldn't be heard for kilometers in every direction; he could hold optics open despite the washes of static and rising HUD alerts, focusing on her face. He couldn't force words into being from the scrambled threads of his processor, and he couldn't suppress the swirl of feeling that began in his spark, half formed glyphs and shades of emotion, admiration and desire and love, so beautiful, so strong, yes, please yes woven into every memory file she touched. Wrapped in it, saturated through with it, held down and helpless, the first cresting surge of charge within his lines caught him by surprise in white hot static and blistering heat.

Faceplates taught with emotion she didn’t know she still possessed the ability to feel, let alone this strongly, Cleaver dipped her hand lower to cradle the precious light spinning hard and wild inside Ironhide’s chassis. A privilege to see, even more so to touch like this, and she did so delicately, the slight motions stoking the shivering energies to higher crests. Her own spark spun in synchronising frequencies, swelling and aching and almost too much to resist crashing against his, open and clutching and wanting.

Setting a hard lock on her chassis to stay semi-closed, to wait until after this moment, Cleaver withdrew her hand to lace it hard around Ironhide’s neck. In the same instant, she bowed down to brush her mouth across the edge of his corona, murmuring into his soul: “I love you like this.”

It was her hand that ripped open the floodgate. The hard press against Ironhide's throat burst like set charges in his systems, crackling through him in a rush that bowed his struts with a howl. Into that, the whisper against his core dropped like a megaton bomb, obliterating everything in a shockwave that rolled out and over him. For an incalculable moment of time there was only electric fire, arcing over sensors to ground through his innermost systems and crackle up and over their touching plates. Optics blazing, Ironhide arched beneath Cleaver, shuddering, her name a thunderous roar of an invocation.

She rode out most of the feedback, helm thrown back and optics near-white, and then it simply became too much, too hard, impossible to resist any longer. Before Ironhide’s crest had come close to tapering off, Cleaver raked her hand up his side to frame his helm and with a suddenness that was almost desperate pressed her open chassis to his.

The overload charge built, swelled and shattered in a nova of liquid light within seconds, and Cleaver buried her face into the mech’s helm with a cry, fingers digging into the gaps in his thick neck. It wasn’t wholly the neural pleasure of it that fritzed her processor, but the influx of him that fell against her spark like a piece that had been missing. Old strength rooted in a love of kin, not violence. An ambition to protect, not to advance. A wealth of dogged old pains from hard lessons sorely learned.

Shakily, quietly against his audio, Cleaver shuddered, “You’re exactly like I imagined.”

Ironhide reached up with trembling hands, cupping the back of Cleaver's helm in one and sliding the other across her ventral plates, holding her close. His spark shuddered close to hers, full and rich with the feel of her, sensations of steady strength and caring that rang chords through him that he didn't want to let go.

Venting shakily, he pushed himself up, rolling her gently beneath him. Freed, his plates spun open, flaring wide to cover her, safe and protected and so very precious.

He had to reset his vocalizer, the click hard in his audios before he could find his voice. The words were whispered hoarse against the lines of her throat as he pressed his face close, still edged in static and deep, rough notes. "Love yeh."

It was too fast. Too sudden, too insane, but Primus it was also too easy to turn her face into him. To stop him hiding. To quietly reply without hesitating, “‘It’d be impossible not to love you, ‘Hide.”

She couldn’t remember that last time she’d felt this small, this protected and safe in strong arms. Wasn’t sure it had ever happened before quite like this. There was something in the way the mech was holding her as well - not like a lifeline, exactly, but like a purpose. Like it was a need to hold. Running a hand down Ironhide’s back, Cleaver pressed a kiss to his temple, sighing into his quiet stillness. “You okay?”

He managed a weak huff that could almost have been a laugh, nuzzling gently against the side of her face. "Never better," he rumbled softly.

A kiss against her jaw turned into more, a string of them, gentle touches punctuated by soft words. "Ah couldn't've imagined yeh," he admitted quietly. "Ah ain't that good." More kisses, across her mouth, her throat, tiny presses that bled warmth into her mesh.

"Ah'm... sorry," he vented softly against her collar strut. Raising his head, he met her optics. "Ah ain't tryin' t' rush yeh, or crowd yeh." He cupped her face, stroking his thumb gently across her cheek. "But Ah do love yeh," he repeated softly, spark spinning erratically with something almost like wonder, a heady, incredulous feel as he touched her. Her acceptance eased something inside of him, a niggling fear of moving too fast, too impulsive. He exvented slowly, letting it fade beneath the singing contentment and delight in his core, pulsing that gently out to share with her.

Cleaver cupped the back of his neck, shielding the vulnerable point in her hand like she could deflect harm from just that. “Told you - I ain’t one to be rushed, and I can handle you. That includes saying ‘no’ if I want.”

She kissed the corner of his mouth, because anything more than a corner would sink deeper and this needed saying. “Don’t apologise to me for anything. If I let you, I wanted you to.” Her optics narrowed, tightened at their edges as her vocaliser cracked static. “And, Primus, don’t apologise for loving me. Couldn’t ever have asked for such a precious thing as you’ve given me. Can’t thank you enough for it now, neither.”

Ironhide shuttered his optics briefly, mouth ghosting across hers. "Ain't nothin' t' be thankin' meh for," he rumbled softly. Words, unstoppered, welled up from spark to throat, unfiltered. "Ah ain't got half of what Ah'd give yeh if Ah could, but what Ah've got's yers. Whatever yeh need."

Dropping down, he pressed a kiss to the strut of her throat, another one to the edge of her chest plate, his voice low and thick with vibrations. "Whatever yeh want."

Cleaver’s optics shuttered with a smile, helm tipping back with an engine-hum and a hot sigh of air. Stamina as well... She stroked his helm again, the motion comfortable and easy and already a comfort to her sensors. Want to be with you. See you with Blue. Know the sound of your systems in recharge. Fix you and shout at you for having to but know you’ll still love me whatever the words. Let you look after me sometimes, and watch over you so long as I can. Memorise you in strut and spark and then never be happy with the memory, needing to keep having you to retrace every inch. Want to give you everything you want, and know you enough to give the things you never told me you wanted. I want.

She cupped his face, lifting his helm and sitting up enough to lay another soft kiss on his mouth. “Want t’make you happy, however that is.”

He followed the kiss, soft and deep, his hands rising to cup her face in turn. "This makes meh happy. You do. Bein' here, with yeh."

Ironhide closed his optics, greedily recording nuances of touch and tactile senses, his forehelm pressed to hers as his fingers lingered across the planes of her face. "Want t' make yeh feel good," he whispered against her mouth. "Want t' hold yeh. Protect yeh. Primus, Ah don't wanna let go."

“Well you’ve been doin’ most’a that already, sweetspark,” Cleaver rumbled back with a laugh, the words a quiet vibration into the microplates of his mouth and cheek. If she were younger, less starved of affection, this would have been overwhelming.

Ironhide had crashed hard and fast, generating and radiating more feeling than seemed possible from such a scant handful of meetings. Cleaver had never believed in fate-synchronized sparks, of individuals so perfectly matched that this kind of core-deep passion was inevitable. Evidence to the contrary had now completely swayed her, however.

The high was fading away, higher reasoning coming back in reluctant tricks, and much as Cleaver wanted to remain in this blissful limbo, the facts were cropping up. She was a Neutral, he was an Autobot warrior. She wasn’t going to begin to fight for him or join his side, not after all this time. He’d respect that decision, she was certain, perhaps even admire it, but it would make life harder. She was used to hard, and neither of them were so young and stupid as not to be able to work it out, but she could feel that loner-aside-from-a-hitchhiker part of her life close like a tomb.

Ironhide let his mouth slide over the fast-becoming-familiar planes of her cheek, mouthing down to the edge of her chin and into the lines of her throat. There were things that needed saying, things that needed talking over and none of this was some Golden Age holo story, but not slag it, Right Then. Not yet. It could wait, just a little longer. He wasn't willing to let it go, not yet.

He traced a fuel line, hand slipping down to map her shoulder, the edges of vents and plating. "Then let meh do some more," he suggested, the words rumbled into the rhythm of her pumps beneath his mouth. He brushed a transformation seam with a teasing touch, following it around to her back. "Ain't either of us got anywhere t' be but here, right?"

The attention to her transformation seams specifically made Cleaver shift a little, something between a thrill and a flash of anxiety jumping through her lines. “You got me to yourself, aye,” she replied with a queer smile, optics bright with amusement.

Ironhide smiled against her throat, his laugh a low vibration. "That a yes, dahrlin'?"

He liked the way she moved against him. Liked the little flutters and starts he could feel, synched so closely to her that he could feel them like ghost brushes against his own systems. He traced the seam again just to get that reaction, engine purring for the little jump she gave. Some mecha liked those seams dug into, tertiary sensors that mapped and controlled a transformation giving their own kind of feedback. He couldn't reach further to her back without shifting them again, but the barely perceptible seam spiraled around her shoulder and branched from there, across chest and down her arm. Pleased, Ironhide dropped his mouth to her shoulder, tracing the unique taste of thinner metal along the seam that descended into her arm.

Cleaver stiffened, succeeding in suppressing the reaction until his glossa traced static over a sensory node and she barely had time to jerk her right arm back with a shiver as the transformation was triggered. From the elbow down, her forearm slid back into its natural configuration of a wide, oar-like blade, her hand sealing away into the sharp tip. Her left arm followed suit, seemingly of its own accord. In her alt form, the limbs provided the bulk of her tail and the anti-torque stabiliser rotor, laced through with flight sensors highly sensitive to pressure and temperature.

They were also dangerous and impersonal in form, reducing her ability to touch down to either a clubbing strike or a hacking swipe. Woefully unsuitable for something like this.

With a trace of embarrassment, Cleaver shifted back onto her elbows in order to get the space from Ironhide to transform them back into more traditional limbs. She couldn’t abide the thought of clumsily catching him in the sequence. “Sorry - gimme a klik.”

Ironhide reached out and caught her before she could, hand closing over where her wrist had been. He hadn't thought... well, no. He hadn't thought, not really, but looking back over memory files in a quick rifle he could recall seeing the blunt forms whenever she stood idle, hands unneeded, and not just as transformed tools for digging after energon.

His own frame, underneath countless vorns of weapon and armor mods, was as base standard for a ground frame as it was possible to get. Most everyone he'd served with had been the same, or close enough to. The rumors, though - countless barrack rumors, half boast, half titillation - about flight frames and rotaries, and he'd always blown it off as nothing but exaggeration. It'd never mattered to him because a frame alone, polished, exotic, or otherwise, was rarely what caught his optic and he'd never found one type more or less engine revving than the rest unless it came attached to mods he hadn't seen before and wanted to take apart.

The rumors, though, about flight frames and wings and rotary blades and mounts, suddenly clicked into a very different configuration. It was one that pulsed heat through his lines as he
visually measured the blunt span of Cleaver's forearm rotary and abruptly found himself wondering just how many of those rumors about flight sensitive sensors were true, and how many he could find if he put his mind to it.

She was tense, though, and not in a good way, and he put a smooth, purring rumble of warmth into his voice. "Don't have'ta do that for meh, dahrlin'." His thumb was on one of the tiny seams that would break apart to reveal her hands but it was to the edge of the blade that he dropped his mouth, humming vibration into the metal where, from what little he knew about flight mechanics, there would have to be sensor lines to feed intel back to her the way his own undercarriage sensors fed back through his wheel wells.

Cleaver let him take the blade because she trusted him, and moving it away would have been a countering move to that, though she did watch with mounting unease. When he put his mouth to the warm metal, however, and sent a vibration down through lines that had no business being alight now with his voice, she thunked her helm back down with a sharp exhale.

“Not playing fair, mech,” she uttered in stifled voice, though was privately wondering why she hadn’t let anyone do this before... It wasn’t anything like a feeling of ecstasy, but the attentions to overly sensitive feeds was sending a thick, liquid heat up and through the rest of her frame. If he kept going at this languid rate with his ministrations, Cleaver suspected she’d fall into a half-dazed engine-purr in very little time. Any more than this, she’d likely be dragging him back up and across for more.

There wasn't, in truth, anything to Cleaver to dislike, but oh, Ironhide liked that hitch in her voice and the heavy weight of her limbs relaxed into his hands. Liked it quite a bit and wanted more of it. He stroked light fingertips across the blade of her forearm, diagnostic charges that he used on weapon systems mapping out a weak echo map of the cluster nodes beneath.

Pleased, he traced the edge of the blade, cut across the shallow dip of a transformation seam, and sealed his mouth over one of those shadowy nodes that he was willing to bet contained sensors. His hum turned thicker, layered vibrations of engine and deep sound pressed into the warm mesh beneath his glossa.

Cleaver moved at that, one pede jerking back to knock into Ironhide’s back with enough force to rock him. She was going to tell him to stop, but then he picked up her other arm as well, and she just couldn’t.

Another stuttered intake and Cleaver twisted fractionally in his grip. “You’d better be going somewhere with this, mech, or Primus help you...”

Ironhide chuckled, venting warmth across her mesh as he leaned back. "Oh, Ah'm goin' somewhere with it, dahrlin', don't yeh fret," he assured her. Her best sensors had more shielding than he could easily reach by vocalizer vibration alone, and her tone didn't encourage a lengthy exploration.

It was a tone he was very familiar with, though, and he grinned as he pulled her arms to him in an awkward sort of embrace, the flat blades of her rotors pressed against the underside of his chassis, beneath the block of his engine. He could see her realization in the flare of her optics which only made his smile broader as he opened up the stops of his full power plant, revving hard.

Cleaver would have started when he moved her blades. Would have protested this blatant exploitation of a flight-frame novelty, but as soon as that roar tore out of his chassis, reverberating straight down and through her into the ground at her back, words were quite beyond her. She’d never given the natural configuration of her arms much thought outside of keeping them out of the way, but now they were acting like massive generators of searing, shaking pleasure.

It was more than enough to make her spark flare hard in its casing again, grasping out for what it was rapidly recognizing as its partner, and just the proximity of him was enough to set off an arching cry and flashed-white optics. Not as intense as a full spark-merge, but so soon after the last and from first-time stimulation of the blades, it was a near thing.

Coming down with a muzzy sound that it took Cleaver a moment to realize was coming from her, she curled into the solid cocoon of mech that Ironhide had put her in. She didn’t need to look to know that he was slagging pleased with himself. Her vocaliser clicked to say... something. Thank him, apologise for going solo there, mutter affection profanities at him. What came out was too garbled a mess of sounds and static to decipher, and having already given up on dignity for today, the femme just gave up with a contented sigh.

Now, that had been satisfying. Ironhide curled over her, his own lines pulsing in pleasant sympathy from the backlash of her charge, the roar throttled down to a low, comforting hum. The last time he could recall provoking that sort of sound from a partner he had had his glossa on a spark casing and Primus, he wanted to do that too, wanted to know what she tasted like when the charge hit. He wanted to know all of the ticks and sounds and tastes of her system, in pleasure and out; her rhythm in recharge, her tells for waking, which systems she stressed and how he could ease them, wanted hard memories of the map of the feel and taste of every plate, every line, every part of her he could touch.

Later, he consoled himself. There would be time, later. He would make time, one way or another. Slag the war - they weren't sparkless drones and his off time was his to do as he pleased. What he pleased was right there, folded into his arms, safe and sated and his spark spun in synchronicity with hers, his every system humming with the echo of hers. He feathered soft kisses across the edge of her helm and let field and glyph speak in a shimmering cascade between them where words seemed too loud, love and devotion and joy singing through him.

Another lazy rumble underscored with the ticks and pops of a heated system slowly cooling off, and Cleaver shifted her blades minutely against Ironhide’s chassis. She had no urge to transform them, was adjusting quickly to his easy and... imaginative acceptance of them. It was nice.

“Gonna put me to ‘charge if you keep doing that,” she warned in a dozy mumble, optics already shuttered as she soaked the feel of his weight, warmth, strength and spark deep into her mesh.

Ironhide laughed softly, a bare brush of sound. "Go ahead, if yeh wanna," he told her. "Safe enough, an' Ah got yeh." He nuzzled against her cheek, drawing in a ventilation rich in the feel of her and the scent of warm metal. "Yeh need t' be somewhere, yeh let meh know, but we can stay here long as we want."

Cleaver frowned a little, helm twitching in the negative. “Don’t want to miss anything.” She onlined her optics again, smiled up a little at his steady gaze on her. “It’s just good to be alone with you. Ship’s been getting crowded lately, and unless I get comm.ed, I’m in no hurry to get back.”

Ironhide arched a brow ridge, humming a soft inquiry note. "Yeh too?" he asked. "Been havin' a mess of folks turn up at base lately. Startin' t' look like an actual base, not just Prahm's strike team."

The medic made a thoughtful sound, twisting to one side and Ironhide, in beautiful synchronicity, let her go in order to scoop against her backstrut on his side. She covered his arm with a blade before thinking better of it, transforming the limb so that she could interlace her scratched and chipped fingers with his.

“Becoming a hostel for strays. Got berths enough for ‘em, but it’s getting too fragging crowded. Thinking about building an extension.” Cleaver smirked, vents exhaling a laugh. “Maybe with a hot tub.”

He chuffed another short burst of laughter, exvented warm against her shoulder. "Yeh put in a tub big enough for two," he warned, "an' Ah'm tellin' th' rest of them t' go find somewhere else t' play."

It was impossible to stop touching her, frames pressed close, mouth ghosting over her plates, but Ironhide kept his touch light. There was a Pit slagging set of protocols in the back of his processor that was taking notes whether he wanted it to or not; he shoved it down and away. Neutrality was not a faction. Refugees were not troops.

He tucked his face against the side of her throat, rumbling softly. "Yeh all doin' alright? Got enough t' go around?" Not, he reflected sourly, that he could do much about it - the Autobots were scraping just as much as everyone else - but there were Energon deposits too small or broken to be worth League's time while that he had the coordinates of marked off.

Cleaver squeezed Ironhide’s hand a little, marvelling again at just how much concern the warrior could fit into his spark. “You giving me those cubes went a long way. Rationed out and mixed with the reclaimed stuff... Not like I’m letting the lodgers off earning their keep, either. It’s just the space...”

She paused, stumbling at the thought that had been circling in her processor since Moonshot arrived. Hadn’t vocalised it to anyone, but it felt easy and somehow automatically natural to bring it up with Ironhide now. Saying it aloud would be committing to it as a ‘thing’ and not just a stupid notion she’d been flirting with in the privacy of her own mind. But then, she’d already committed something to him...

“I’ve been thinking about, setting something up. Like the Autobots have.” Cleaver turned slightly, meeting one of Ironhide’s bright optics. She’d spent the last forty years living in the ship because she was ready to leave this planet any time the option was better than sticking around. To put down roots was an unsettling notion after so many years wandering the ‘verse, following the dead, but it was an easier vision to hold lying here in the mech’s arms. “Something permanent.”

He could feel the thread of trepidation in her ventilation cycle and passing in faint vibrations through her plates, echoing in his own systems like an extension of hers. Ironhide tightened his hold infinitesimally, fitting her closer against him.

"Seems like Ah've been going where an' when they told meh most of mah function," he offered quietly. "Here, though… here's different. Ah don't think we're leavin' here." Not by Prime's order, not unless Megatron left first, and possibly not even then. He brushed his mouth across Cleaver's cheek. "Been a long time since any of us have had anythin' permanent. Ah know how it makes meh feel, thinking about it. Can't think it'd be any less for th' folks yeh've taken in."

“Not like there’s anywhere better to go,” Cleaver replied gently, optics drifted back down to take in the vista they’d been ignoring recently. “Been, I don’t know, always moving on thinking that somewhere else was always going to be better. Hasn’t occurred in a while that just staying put and investing in someplace could be what makes it better. Makes somewhere a home. Somewhere with kin, even."

Ironhide cycled a deeper ventilation and tried to tell himself to stop. Just stop. Slow down, stop, but a part of him sang in thrilled harmony that he might, in whatever small way, have been part of her decision. That 'kin' might mean this, here, now, and Primus, he wanted.

Too fast, he tried to tell himself, but his spark wasn't listening, beating in time with hers.

She'd rolled with him once, an admission gasped on the edge of overload taken in stride. He wasn't sure, with thought threads in play, that he dared to risk it again.

He pressed a kiss to her throat anyways, fingers tangled up with hers, thumb stroking over the abdominal plating beneath his hand. "Ah ain't lookin' for 'better'. Ain't never much cared. Kin an' cohort, that's home t' meh." He drew in a shallow ventilation. "Ah could see-" very much see his field sang silently, yes, this, here "-puttin' down supports here an' stayin'."

“You reckon it’s a good idea, then?” Cleaver began, smacking away the thought that she was asking for his validation. She was asking because she wanted his opinion. Wanted him to be a part of this future. “Carving out something solid. Making a...” Primus help her “Neutral base?”

Her words cut through the haze of fluttering spark emotion, pinging solidly off of protocols that were more concerned with safety and numbers and tactics than romance. It was a little like a cold splash of coolant in the optics and Ironhide huffed softly, leaning back a little, his voice and field settling into something steadier and more practical. "Yeh do that," he replied cautiously, "an' either yeh have t' make it so no one can find it - an' don't give out the coordinates, not t' anyone - an' get yerselves armed 'cus this planet ain't that big and th' more of us there are in one place th' easier it is t' find, or else there's gonna need t' be negotiatin'."

He vented slowly. "There's been demilitarized Neutral outposts before. If yeh can get th' blessing of both sides an' everybody agrees yer off limits." He hummed thoughtfully. "Prahm'd go for it in a sparkbeat, Ah'd bet. Can't speak for th' other side, though."

Cleaver was silent for a full minute, considering that, and giving even more thought to how much she truly could disclose to Ironhide right now.

Negotiation with the Decepticons wouldn’t be a problem, she knew in her spark, because she and Megatron went back to when he was still mining unit D-16, and there were a lot of favours she’d never called in. Negotiating for a patch of turf where she and whoever placed themselves there wouldn’t be shot at was well within the realms of possibilities, particularly if she offered it up as an open demilitarized zone. Medical aid and a berth to rest in to anyone who needed it and didn’t break the rules. If the warlord agreed to it, he would honour it for the sake of their history if nothing else. For what she did for him after Crashmaster, Firestrike, Novastar, and every other sadist who’d gotten at the gladiator before Soundwave bought him out of the Syndicate’s clutches.

The thought of telling Ironhide, who’d been fighting the Decepticons and doubtless lost hundreds of allies, friends, kin and cohort to Megatron’s forces, that she had so much history with him twisted her tanks. She didn’t want to harm this precious thing smouldering up from kindling with information like that, taint his perception of her with old history. That could come later - some undefined point in time that she didn’t want to think about just yet.

“I’ll sort something out,” Cleaver ultimately replied, with a finality and assurance that surprised her. Now that she’d decided to, she would do this, because she was far too stubborn an old femme not to.

Ironhide kept his weapon systems from spinning up with a few sharp overrides, despite what the idea of 'something' - meaning anything - involving Cleaver in close proximity to Decepticons did to his internals. Medic, he reminded himself pointedly. Medic, and medics had their own brand of indomitable untouchability, even without being a Neutral. Even Ratchet, as cantankerous as he was, would patch any mecha on a med bay berth, regardless of faction. Ironhide couldn't imagine Cleaver doing any less; could, in fact, imagine her doing quite a bit more and damn anyone who said otherwise. That was the strength she carried with her.

No, more than likely Cleaver would be fine negotiating with the Decepticons; Pit, probably she would be fine negotiating with Megatron himself. It didn't, however, reassure his internals one bit and his protocols didn't spin down easily.

It made him gruffer than he would have liked, voice rough. "Yeh let meh know if there's anythin' Ah can do."

Cleaver could feel the tightness in him, the hot stiffness of pre-combat readiness and ran a thumb across his palm in thanks that he wasn’t trying to take over because this was dangerous. Was letting her do this despite his protective streak likely chanting for him to step in and reduce the innumerable potential threats that embarking on this would provoke. Protective and worried for her, but also respectful of her ability to take care of herself. She didn’t want to put him entirely on the sidelines, however, and there was something he could help her with.

“Can set me up with a meeting with the Prime when I’ve got something solid to offer,” she suggested, playing across the sharp and battered angles of his knuckles again. “Never had an audience with one before. Wouldn’t know the procedure, and I’d be needing an escort into your base again to see him if he let me.”

Another handful of overrides and a safety lock for good measure took his defense systems offline and kept them there, slaggit. Here, he told himself sharply, she's right HERE, right NOW, an' that's th' only thing that counts. Stop borrowing trouble by looking ahead and concentrate on the here and now; it was a trick he'd had to teach himself when Bluestreak had first started venturing further than the reach of the cohorts' hands because he'd have driven himself glitched with worry every time the bitlet was out of sight, otherwise.

Same principle, with even less actual reason to worry, and he throttled back everything clamoring otherwise. A handful of nanokliks spent just soaking in the feel of her in his arms soothed the worst of it - right here, right now. Focus. "Can do that for yeh, yeah," he assured Cleaver, grateful for the grounding press of her hand against his. "Optimus don't stand much on formality, but Ah can bring it up, get yeh all cleared." He huffed softly. "Can't think of any reason he wouldn't go with what yeh want."

Cleaver hummed a laugh, optics shuttering as she drew his captive hand up to her mouth and pressed a chaste kiss to the history of violence there. Her tone turned lighter, playfully teasing. Enjoying company. “Might be worried I’m going to steal ya. Keep you all preoccupied and charge-drunk when you should be doing all that scrap you military types do. Monitor duty. Had an Autobot gripe at me for three orns about monitor duty, one time. Decepticons were going at it something fierce and he fell into a cave I’d been keeping out of the way in. Had half a mind to shoot him myself near the end of it...”

Ironhide echoed her laugh involuntarily, feeling some of the tension that talks of bases and negotiations had injected into his tanks ease. "If it was only half a mind yeh've got more restraint than our medic does," he teased, dropping a kiss to the back of her helm. "An' believe meh, dahrlin', anybody says they enjoy monitor duty, they're glitched in th' head. Ever want t' catch a stupid recruit doin' scrap they shouldn't, monitors are th' shift t' do it in. Bored mechs find th' slaggin' strangest ways of keepin' themselves amused."

He pressed his face back into the crook between shoulder and throat, humming quiet contentment against her neck. "Yer welcome t' steal meh any time," he rumbled. A low vent underscored it, part serious. "If somethin's goin' down an' Ah can't get away, Ah'll tell yeh. But any other time," he squeezed her fingers, "hearin' from yeh's one of th' highlights of th' day."

“Same goes, y’know,” she replied, tipping her helm to catch his optic with a bordering-on-stern look. “I don’t like to be just taking all the time.”

Ironhide hummed softly, a multi-tonal chord of agreement and amusement. "Yeh ain't been takin'," he told her, leaning in to brush her cheek, "but if that's free rein t' call yeh, dahrlin', just t' hear yer voice, Ah won't argue."

He shuttered his optics briefly, holding her close, listening to duel systems echo in smooth, sympatico rhythm with one another. "Won't argue not one bit."

<fin>