Ep1 - Rec. Room - 'Girly Chat' - Closed

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Cleaver emerged from her quarters later than normal after fitful recharge following a day of flying. A third of the way in and firmly established in the rapid-growth part of carriage, the sparkling had had its skeletal structure built and was now being layered with neural fibres. Produced like web in the manufacturing plant and extended outwards for grafting, the fibres were constantly pinging electrical signals as the lattice built, which was sending all manner of itching feedback into Cleaver’s own systems. The stray charge had twitched through every plate and part for three days, necessitating frequent flights, re-arranging most of the Medbay and jumping Ironhide whenever he appeared.

Finally, it was over, and she could drop down into an undignfied pile of old parts like she wanted to, and tell the 'verse to go frag itself if it wanted anything from her for the rest of the day. Moonshot had pinged back as on the gun range, Sideswipe was off elsewhere and Sunstreaker was recharging peacefully. Peace and quiet reigned.

Collecting two cubes from the dispenser, Cleaver had made her way to the array of sofas in the recreation area of the central atrium, flicked on the television, and sprawled along the length of the sofa. Pedes resting on one arm in exactly the posture she'd been cuffing Sideswipe for, the femme took a sip of mineral-enhanced energon and began channel hopping. Finding a House. MD marathon, she unlatched some of the catches in her overheated abdominal plates to ease pressure off the gestation chamber with a sigh.

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She felt loose, relaxed after a hot shower and a morning of down time. The skin of her arms felt fresh, and for the first time in a long time her grip was unrestricted by skin tight from scabbing or scarring. Still undecided on her destination, she rode through the corridors on the Apache. Last night had been one of those nights. The kind where, for some reason, all thoughts hit at once leaving a sobering feeling in its wake. Passing the med bay, she peeked in to see a flash of Yellow.. but no Red beside him, as she'd seen at first. Moonshot wasn't anywhere to be found… and with a sinking feeling she remembered why she wouldn't be able to find Reflector.

She made a turn into central atrium, hearing faintly the sounds of television. Just by the show, she could guess who it was even before seeing the little gleam of orange over the back of the sofa… it brought a small smile, an easy smile, to her face as she brought the Apache up into park beside it. She loved her boys… But Cleaver was calm. Something she could relax into.

"Mornin'." Taking a long stretch she bent her arms back before releasing, shaking off her slip-ons and shaking her fingers through the wet, newly washed hair. Her glasses were left off, contacts taking their place and the modeling of a ripped off-the-shoulder T-shirt and her musty sweatpants seemed to complete her 'It's Sunday, damn it' look. All at once she flopped on the floor next to Cleaver's head-end, shoving her back behind her to support herself and easily slipping into a comfortable quiet, watching until it appeared to be a commercial break. "Jus us this mornin', huh?"

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"Mmhmm." Wirelessly, Cleaver muted the television for the adverts. Apparently she was only running on half a processor if she hadn't just gone for the recordings in TiVo. Another sip of energon to wake up before she shifted slightly to look down at Cat. "You hungry? I sent the holo shopping yesterday."

One of the trickier but direly necessary installations in the new base was a human-sized kitchen. It was set against the wall in the corner of the recreation room, consisting primarily of a microwave, fridge/freezer and a sink plumbed up to the atmospheric water extractor outside the mountain. The oven was proving a little more problematic to set up, but the femme was confident that by the end of the week Cat could cook on a stove if she wished. Not that she minded all the take-out, but she was aware of nutritional values and wanted to get some fresh meat, vegetables and fruit into her human companion.

Not that she'd actually seen Cat each much - she was a very lithe human with low fuel requirements. Breakfast together this morning seemed like a pleasant idea, though, and she was keen to push it.

"There's bacon," she offered in a tempt.

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"Mmmmmmm…Yay, thank you!" It came out as part of an exhale on a full body stretch, the memory of fresh smelling bacon enough alone to make her grin. "The magic word… I think so, yes." Bacon, even microwaved bacon, sounded like heaven compared to cold pizza and left over Chinese. It'd been a long time since she bothered with anything else. Her stomach almost rumbled, reminded of the smell of a home cooked meal around family as she piled her arms with a few cook-by-microwave and toaster things.
"One day I'll have to show you my Mom's Frittata recipe. Every Sunday, that was breakfast." She tapped the fridge door closed with a hip, laying out miscellaneous ingredients to throw together in some type of tasty fashion. In one dancing movement bacon was tossed into the microwave, bread slapped into the toaster, and ended in a twirl on the balls of her feet in front of the coffee machine.

"So?" She said, piecing together a pot of coffee with movements that were more muscle memory rather than actual thought. When it was brewing, she turned, leaning back against the counter to stare back at the femme. Fueling for two. In truth, she hadn't asked much beyond the 'how are you feeling today' since she found out (which wasn't all that long ago, now that she thought about it), partially because of how busy they'd been in setting up the base, but also… the two newest tenants. Red and Yellow.
But now with things finally seeming to settle, and just them in the atrium on a Sunday morning with bacon in the air, chatting seemed to flow out easily.
"How're you and the 'plus one' today?" A familiar question, but never any less sincere than the first time she'd asked it.

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Cleaver watched the assembly of the meal with mild interest, finding the whole thing more like a chemistry experiment. Energon came (less so now, but certainly back on Cybertron) in various charges and mixes, but it basically boiled down to the same fuel in every cube. Human sustinance was less efficient, and a wide range of it had to be assembled and ingested to supply all the materials the body needed to maintain, repair and move itself. And then an emphasis was placed on taste and aesthetics, superfluous to dietary requirements but fixation points on the cookery shows she'd occassionally seen.

"Tired and bigger, respectively. Base to ourselves all day, and I'm looking forward to spending it on my dorsal plates." No Autobots were due to pass through today - top secret mission thing that Ironhide had been quite excited about, so doubtless it involved lots of violence and explosions. Cleaver was making a point of not thinking of what that might be.

She watched the toasted bread pop up out of the toaster (Sears Item# 00806904000 | Model# 135308) and move onto Cat's plate for the next part of the mystical process, bacon still spinning in the microwave (Sears Item# 02067909000 | Model# 6790) . The femme made a thoughtful noise. "Does your creator's Frittata recipe require a wok? I like the look of woks. They're so alien, and there seems to be an element of performance in their use." The search she'd run in the background pinged back, and she clicked in the dismissive. "Nevermind, it's usually in a skillet... I'll get you a skillet and a wok when the oven's installed."

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She shrugged a shoulder, turning to pour a cup and dress it up, toying with little designs with the creamer as she did so. "Wok or skillet: just something to cook the eggs in. But yeah, usually skillet." The bacon pinged in the microwave right about the time she finished spreading peanut butter and jelly over the toast and damn did it smell good, microwave or no. Nothing tasted quite so good in the morning as meat and grease.
…And the thought of said meat and grease in an actual skillet over a hot stove…

"Good Lord, I can't wait. I'll be in here every night." Home cooked meals, daily, were as much a part of her family as Christmas was. And damn if it hadn't been a long time… enough to actually make her pause and think, not for the first time in the last few days, of the relatively quick changes in life. She took a thoughtful sip, forehead wrinkling in the way that it did when the gears in her head were turning, smiling as a memory surfaced. "My uncle has this giant brick oven outside in his garden, and another one in his kitchen… He uses them for almost everything. Cooks every night, outside or in." Eyeing a corner in the kitchen she tilted her head as if to size it up. "…What do you think about a brick oven?"
The place was certainly big enough and the set up, at least as far as internal hook-ups went, wouldn't be so wildly different. It was about the look, the feel, the use-- she shook herself, shooing away any Tony mannerisms. He had enough expression for the both of them.

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Cleaver ran the search as Cat returned to the seating area with her meal, frowning when a) Sears didn't sell them, b) she gained an idea of the smoke and dirt produced, and c) when she concluded that Cat would likely want a 'traditional' brick oven with no obstruction between herself and the fire heating it. Her optics skipped over the human's newly-healed arms, vents hitching briefly at the thought.

"I'd, worry about it more. They seem dangerous," she finally replied, using the same tone she'd used on Reflector when he'd decided he absolutely had to have a connection to the primitive, virus-riddled and dangerous-human-infested Internet. After a pause, Cleaver went on in much the same way as she had then, because she cared about Cat and wanted her to be happy. "But with some creative installation, I think you could have one. If you're careful. And you wear your gloves when using it. And someone's here with you when it's on fire."

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At some point about halfway through, Catherine became tired of imagining Cleaver's expression. She turned slowly as she sat to see it for herself, expression fixed in such a way that it showed she was fighting between the humor of it all and defending herself. She waited for her to finish, lips pursed to hide a smile and eyes half lidded to feign a look of NOT. AMUSED. Unspoken though it was, her mind went straight to the only thing related to the topic: 'I'm never going to live that one down.' "Okay, first, this is an entirely different situation. 'Kay. I know 'hot' means 'danger'." She adjusted herself as she spoke, coming to fold her legs under herself in her chair and raise her fingers to count out her points, hands shifting with almost every word in the way they often did to emphasize her words. She spoke about as much as with her hand gestures (the closest thing she could get to an EMF) as she did with words.

"SECOND." Here she dropped her shoulders, almost deflating. "He looked terrible! And just because I stuck my arms in his chassis to fix a leak---there was a purpose for that, by the way, it wasn't just because it 'looked fun'---doesn't mean I'm going to stick my hands in an oven to pull out a pizza." She leaned herself back against the table, taking a piece of bacon and lazily taking a bite. At first glance, someone could have taken Cat for offended… and though she did believe what she was saying, that smile (the same one that always seemed to be there) was peeking out in her eyes. "…But if you prefer, I can just ask Moonshot to hang while I cook…" She meant for the words to form a mental image of a troll face (playfully intended, of course)… if Cat was dangerous by herself, Moonshot and Cat together were catastrophic.

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Cleaver's optics brightened at the image her processor threw up, and widened when it became graphic. "No, no Moonshot and fire. Primus, there wouldn't be a base left..."

Cleaver had spent enough time with Cat (and her sense of humour) to be able to read the undertones in her voice, and the micro-cues in her body language that she'd been utterly blind to for weeks at first. Cat wasn't truly offended, but with the way Cleaver was treating her right now, she had ever right to be. Suppressing an uncomfortable grunt of effort, the femme forced herself upright on the sofa to regard Cat properly.

"And I know you're an adult, Cat, and have far more presence of mind than to risk yourself without compelling cause to. I just..." She twitched her helm in the negative, optics narrowing in an expression approaching a frown rooted in grief as opposed to anger. Her gaze drifted downwards, a thumb flicking idly across the bottom of her flared abdominal plates. "The Twins and I go a long way back. Gave up on the notion of ever seeing them again a long time ago, and having the first time I see them being with my servos in Sunstreaker's internals trying to keep them both alive... Just, don't want to keep seeing the ones I care about slagged. Stupid with things as they are, I know, but this sparkling's got half my protocols in a twist."

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"No."

She felt something pull on her heart strings, driving her thoughts, her voice before she could piece together the words to form it all. No, what? She didn't want to imagine Cleaver, carrying, and buried in any mech's dying frame, least of all one of the medic's own friends, close friends. And with a cold feeling creeping up from her toes and fingers, she began to wonder how common something like that was. How common was it for Cleaver? To a medic in a war older than she knew that had stretched across space, from a planet now dark. A war, she again realized the same as she had when meeting Reflector and Barricade, that was probably mostly beyond her understanding.

And that… realizing, knowing that void was there in her mind, and looking at Cleaver's face, how she seemed to be carrying it all… simultaneously gave her a new respect for the DMZ as what it was, and a respect for information she wanted to learn and understand. All of this in one complex flash of emotion that seemed, for a moment, to radiate from her eyes and the slight pull of her brows. "It's not stupid." She clarified. She didn't say any more on it; the way her eyes looked, so often conveying the inner complex combinations of emotions simple vocabulary didn't have the capacity to frame, somehow deepened without language's restrictions-- her expression said more, always, than she ever could.

But she let herself smile, slowly, 'reassurance' adding itself to the many brown hues of her eyes. It was soft, understated in the way it would try to slip in to pick someone up. "They look stubborn… seems like they couldn't leave you alone for long." At that point she pushed away from her seat, walking the short distance between kitchen table and the mech-sized couch. She wouldn't try to climb up Cleaver, not with her systems running hot as they were, but she did lean against the base of the couch and angle her head upwards to watch her, be close. "You're surrounded by stubborn idiots. Who will shamelessly mooch off of you." And then a bit more seriously, her tone softening and dropping. "I can't imagine…" She started, shaking her head. They both knew what she left trailed off. But she refocused her eyes on Cleaver. "Today, at least, it's a quiet Sunday with House and breakfast." 'And we're not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere.' She seemed to add quietly.

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Cleaver's mouth angled in a half-smile, and she dropped a hand down as a platform to Cat whilst accessing her subspace and pulling out a heat-shielded blanket. Soft on one side, shiny and non-conductive to temperature on the other. Soon she had the human sat cross-legged atop the red blanket on her chassis, her pedes back up on the end of the sofa, and House burbling quietly in the background.

"Did you meet any of the humans whilst we were at the Autobot base?" she asked, returning topically to that day for the first time since they'd gotten back. The medic had been honestly horrified by Cat's condition, and had treated the tiny organic far more gently than she would a mechanoid patient after the fact. Since then, the Twins had arrived and been pretty all-consuming of Cleaver's attentions, not to mention the sparkling and getting the Base into any kind of order.

It really had been too long since they'd really talked, just the two of them.

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"Yeah." She said, absently smiling at one of House's many witty comments as she settled herself upon the blanket. There was a warmth that spread over it, as if it were over sun-warmed sand on a beach. Pleasant. And in sweats and an oversized T-shirt, she shameless stretched out similar to Cleaver, head pillowed in her arm. "Met June, as you know. All the kids… Raf, Miko, Jack. And one who happened to be yellow and metal."

"It's funny, how different they all are. It's funny to watch them just sit and talk. But it looks like they're all pretty tight, too." She paused, frowning slightly. "And young. Wasn't expecting to see a 12 year old… I mean yeah, why not? Just… dunno." Shrugging she quieted, watching a few more seconds of a House group pow-wow before continuing, adding almost as an afterthought, tone quiet enough to sound as if she were speaking to herself. "June filled me in on how they met Bee an' everyone, too. ..Guess I never realized how easy I had it."

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"Easy?" Cleaver repeated, her tone arching. "Dehydrated, hungry, seeking help with a broken down vehicle and no shelter in the desert, only to be kidnapped by a panicking alien? Primus - they must have had it rough."

The medic performed a quick scan of Cat's skin temperature in relation to her plates, aware that humans had a nasty habit of cooking themselves to the ultimate detriment of their health. Cat's pigmentation afforded her greater protection than many humans from the sun, but not from direct heat sources. Satisfied that she wasn't at risk from the heat of the manufacturing process, Cleaver adjusted her plating to cradle her human companion more comfortably.

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At that point she rolled onto her back, staring straight up at the ceiling, though easily able to tilt her head to see Cleaver directly if she wanted. "Well… Yeah. It wasn't exactly an ideal situation, but… I mean I got chocolate and met you." She paused, tapping her fingers on her abdomen as she tilted her head towards the television. That's right, she really might have been in trouble if she somehow never made it to the Jasper limits. It only just seemed to pale in comparison to being attacked by Decepticons on your first day. Barricade aside, she felt she'd never really been attacked, not truly. Never truly had contact with the Decepticons… and she was sure not all of them were like Reflector. More like Barricade, probably.

"June said they were attacked by Decepticons, all of them, the first time they met the 'Bots." And they were so young. She felt young. And she couldn't keep June's voice from her head.

It's already taken everything from a few.

"Just sounded like there were things a lot darker than what she was letting on. And in comparison…" She shrugged, letting the end of the sentence trail off. '…I got it easy.' Her pause was heavy, like she wanted to say more, was thinking about how to say it. The things that seemed to be sprouting these thoughts. "There's a lot of stuff I don't know." She continued. "S'pose I haven't really asked, either. Didn't want to at first."

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Decepticons were a deadly and terrifying run-in for armoured Cybertronians. Cleaver couldn't imagine the terror of an attacking Con as the first contact with her species that this fragile race experienced. No wonder the Autobots had 'adopted' the little human cohort for protection. Cat's experience had been far less threatening and the medic still felt the need to protect her from the fallout of encountering the Cybertronian race.

Cat was right in that she hadn't been asking the obvious questions, particularly after Barricade's conscious appearance in the human's life and interacting more with the Autobots. Cleaver hadn't wanted to press answers, content that Cat had an inquisitive mind and that if she wanted more information outside of the medical field, then she'd ask.

It appeared that she hadn't taken a sense that such questions might be considered rude, invasive or simply off-limits into account.

With familiar care, Cleaver touched a fingertip to Cat's shoulder. "You can ask anything, Cat. Can't promise that it won't be skewed with my own opinion, but I'll answer any questions you might have as best I can."