Ep 0.5 - Tradition - Closed

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Ironhide gave Shadow the better part of a week without so much as a word; just stood back and watched the femme go from duty shift to her quarters and out on the solitary drives she preferred, with nothing except the time it took to traverse the corridors inbetween. No words, no contact, no racing around the base with Bumblebee - no interaction with anyone where she could avoid it, and quick, perfunctory things where she couldn't.

He stood back and sat on his hands and waited, because NOT waiting was, he was almost certain, what had caused this in the first place. He held his peace and only checked the duty logs, making sure that she was still logging on them, until their end-of-week second lesson timeslot was fast approaching and Shadow was still doing her very best to embody her name as an insubstantial shadow haunting the base.

It was pushing it, and he knew it, but there was a fine line between enough distance to get some perspective and to cycle your systems fresh, and too much distance in which a processor could convince itself of the slagging stupidest things. Ironhide was well aware of that pitfall - had been down it and had to climb his way out of the smelter from it several times himself - and the sad truth was that Labyrinth had laid far too twisted of a minefield through an impressionable young processor for anyone's peace of mind. Left on her own too long, Ironhide wasn't sure any of them would be able to piece out where Shadowrunner's conclusions had taken her, or why.

Which was why, the night before she would have to either come to him on her own or default on a scheduled lesson, found Shadowrunner with a long patrol scheduled that brought her back to base late. From patrol she went directly to her quarters and fifteen kliks after that found Ironhide at her door, pinging her with a wordless request.

And if there was one cube of high grade in his hand and several more shoved into his subspace, well... some discussions were best had with preparation first. Besides, overcharged confessions and bonding ranked right up there with 'embarrassing positions on the floor' for things which looked to quickly become a Shadowrunner and Ironhide tradition. Far be it from him to break a burgeoning tradition. Not when he suspected he was going to need the high grade just as much as she did.

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Away from base and driving through the middle of nowhere, Shadow could almost pretend she had never tracked down the Autobots, that she was still alone and free and that she still believed her cohort was alive somewhere. It was a bittersweet fantasy at best, one that sometimes left her on the side of the road shivering with a complex tangle of grief and need. Even so, it was often tempting not to go back, as if without the Autobots as constant reminders of reality, her memories would recede to fiction.

Sometimes, it was tempting not to go back just because the constant reminders, of all the things she wasn't and couldn't be, hurt.

Shadow spent most of her last patrol considering the option of not returning to base, ingrained obedience warring with the dread of having to face Ironhide the next day. Obedience ultimately won out over the ache of loss (was it really loss when what you'd lost had never been real?), but she was contemplating the odds of successfully skipping the next day's lesson when Ironhide pinged her.

For a nano-klik, she froze, processor racing back over the past week to confirm that no, she hadn't done anything requiring attention or disciplinary action. She didn't have to answer, she didn't have to see him if she didn't want to...but by that point she was moving, keying open the door, field clamped tight to her frame. She didn't want to see him, didn't want the reminder that she'd believed, however briefly, that no ties didn't have to be her future.

Labyrinth had been right, though. Labyrinth had always been right, and she'd been a fool to think her cohort could be replaced.

"I have not," she said, optics fixed on the door frame and her voice gone flat and dull with the effort of keeping it from shaking, "so much as been late for monitor duty this week, it's eighteen hours too early for you to decide I skipped our lesson, and as far as I know I haven't fragged anyone off lately. So why, exactly, are you here?"

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He had thought most of a week would be about the right time to give her - long enough, but not too long. Looking at her in the doorway of her quarters, Ironhide felt his systems dropcycle, a creeping numbness through his tanks and pumps. A week had obviously been far too long and he started to wonder if space had been the right call at all.

No help for it now. She made him ache, deep through his struts, with an almost physical need to tug her close and soothe some of that flat misery out of her frame and field, but there was a right place and time for everything and this most assuredly wasn't it. Not yet. Instead, he pushed the cube forward a little, into her frame of vision where she was determinedly not meeting his optics, and kept any hint of judgement out of his voice, his field as open as it had ever been for her. "Can't be here because Ah missed yeh? Ain't always yer CO or yer instructor, y'know."

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"Aren't you? Unless social worker is a better job description."

Primus, she hadn't meant to say that out loud, hadn't meant to sound so angry, hadn't realized hearing her own thoughts spoken would hurt so much. For half a klik, she just stared at the high grade and desperately wanted him to (stay) go away, because the memories that kept trying to surface hurt too.

She couldn't even be angry at him. Only at herself.

Shadow broke the stalemate between them by turning away. She might not be able to tell him to leave, but she could at least put space between them.

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She turned away but she didn't close the door in his faceplates, and Ironhide took that as an opening and put himself firmly on the inside of the doorframe, letting it slide shut behind him. "Ain't here for work, social or otherwise," he told her, keeping his voice level.

Subspacing the cube, he let his hands fall loose at his sides. "Ah'm here f'r yeh, Shadow. Ain't leavin', an' ain't abandonin' yeh." He had unconsciously braced himself, processor tracking multiple ways the scenario could go, half of which devolved into some form of attack. "Missed yeh, bitlet. Worried about yeh."

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For the first time, Shadow hated how spartan her quarters were, providing no distraction to make her retreat less obvious. "I'm fine. I don't need you to check up on me."

I don't need you at all, she thought, but her vocalizer refused to produce the sounds.

She had gotten the table between them, but the wall was at her back and there was nowhere else to run, no way out with Ironhide looming just inside the door. Shadow glared, hating him for taunting her with things she couldn't have, hating herself for being fool enough to want things she knew she couldn't have.

Stupid. Stupid. Just tell him to leave.

"There have to be," she finished bitterly, "better things you can waste your time on."

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"'s mah time," Ironhide countered, "an' this ain't wastin' it."

He took one step into the room, gauging the distance by whether he could, in a pinch, still block access to the doorway. The feel of Shadow didn't tell him if she was more likely to break or bolt - ducking, or just letting her hit him for that matter, he could handle, but if she bolted he wasn't laying any odds on keeping her, at all, in any capacity. "Talk t' meh, bitlet, Please." It was blunt as weapon fire, but that was Ironhide in a bolt cap. He didn't have Jazz's way with words, or much use for diplomatic dancing around a subject. "Can't help what's wrong if yeh won't talk t' us, an' Ah wanna help."

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"You can't help when I do talk to you, either," Shadow snarled, "because you either don't listen or you just don't understand a slagging thing I say. I talk to you all the time, I talk to you even when I should know better, and all it does..." Her voice was degrading into static even as it rose in volume, pain escaping into her field in waves. "...all it ever does is remind me I don't belong here."

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"Ah'm listenin'," Ironhide replied quietly. "An' maybeh Ah ain't understandin' but if yeh tell meh what yeh need, Ah'm listenin'."

The pain sheeting off of her drew him like iron shavings to a magnet, an ache to hold and comfort that he could feel in his spark. He took another step towards her, then another, slow but steady.

"Yeh do belong," he told her, his glyphs open with invitation. "Ah know... Ah know, bitlet, Ah know it don't always feel like it." So many old things, layering deep through his voice, understanding-sympathy that spread out to her, offering. "Ah do know. But even when we must feel like strangers, Shadow, yeh got a place here. Ain't nothin' that'll change that."

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"I don't want a place here," Shadow blurted. "I don't want to be here. I want..." Home. Cohort. Tundra. Wildfire. Phaseshift. Viper...

She leaned against the wall, spark aching with all the pieces that had been torn away. "I don't want to be here," she whispered. "I want to go home."

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Ironhide exvented softly, his own spark aching with an old, old misery that pulsed in sympathetic time to Shadowrunner's broken whisper. It felt like the last pieces falling into place, forming a shape he could almost read. Taking the last steps forward around the edge of the table, he reached to tug her firmly in against his frame.

"Ah know," he rumbled, tucking her stiffly held helm beneath his chin. "Ah know yeh do, bitlet." He shuttered his optics, field pressed warm and open around her, underscored in ancient echoes of understanding.

He cycled a deep ventilation, the low sound of his engine choppy. "Yeh want home," he told her quietly, without censure. "Yeh want yer cohort, yeah? Yer real one." It hurt to say it, on a multitude of levels, dragged up out of his tanks like an admission. "Yeh want yer squad. Ah know."

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Like reflex, Shadow found herself holding on, fingers digging into the seams of Ironhide's plating even when she meant to push away. It hurt to have him so close, a single field - a single outsider - pressing into raw places that craved familiarity and numbers.

The gentle thread of understanding still managed to twine past her pain and need to escape, though, wrapping and holding until the frame pressing her close grew less alien, until the sound and vibration of his engine snapped back into a place of familiarity and comfort like a misaligned joint being reset. And if he wasn't quite offering the steady rumble she knew, he was offering something more important: he understood.

Shaking, Shadow keened softly against the security of Ironhide's armor. "I shouldn't have run. Should've let Barricade finish the job on Lab's ship. Should have...there was never supposed to be just one of us. Thirteen of thirteen. I should have let him finish."

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Her words cut through him, his spark pulsing hard and heavy in his chassis. Ironhide held her tighter, trying by strength of grip and closeness of frame alone to convey a thousand things that words and glyphs couldn't express. A step back put his backplates to the wall; he slid down it and took her with him until he could draw her into his lap, curling around her shuddering frame, engine rumbling a broken harmonic to her own.

"Ah know," he whispered roughly, the words repeating helplessly. It hurt in his vocalizer, the sounds static laced and rough; he swallowed down his own ache, pushing comfort and acceptance at Shadow. "Ah know it feels like that, Shadow, but it ain't true."

Drawing in a shaky ventilation, he let go of her just enough to cup her helm between his hands, tilting her face up to press his forehelm to hers. "Yeh hear meh, bitlet? Listen t' meh. Listen. It ain't true. Bein' th' last one... bitlet, bein' th' last one left is th' hardest thing yeh will ever do, Ah KNOW, but it ain't impossible. Ain't any 'should' have. Those 'shoulds' - they ain't fraggin' true."

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Shadow made a broken, staticky noise at Ironhide's assurance. She didn't know how to be the last, how to be alone, and she wasn't sure she wanted to learn when the learning hurt like this.

It hurts, she thought, but he already knew that, knew it with a spark-deep ache that whispered and echoed against her own. He understood, maybe not everything but the worst of it, and he still wrapped her in a warm, steady certainty that she could survive.

"I don't want to be alone. I don't want to do this if I have to be alone." The pain was physical now, like gears stripping. "And I don't think I can be anything else."

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Words were such paltry things, less than useless in the face of the pain that was bleeding off of Shadow, but it was all Ironhide had, his own spark breaking around the keening sound of her cries. "Yeh ain't alone," he told her, putting every certainty and promise he had into the glyphs that layered the words. "Ah'm here, bitlet. We all are."

His voice broke, static ripping through it. Ironhide shuttered his optics, wrapped his arms back around Shadowrunner, and rebooted until he could force the words out again. "It... It ain't th' same. Ah know... Shadow, bitlet, Ah know. Ah'm sorry, sparklet, Ah'm so sorry. Ah wish Ah could tell yeh otherwise, but it ain't th' same an' it won't ever be but that don't mean it's WRONG."

He pressed a shaking hand to her helm, tucking her head against his chestplates above his spark. "We're here," he repeated thickly. "Blue, Jazz, meh - we're here. We ain't leavin'. Yeh ain't alone, love, Ah promise. An' Ah know... Ah know we ain't what yeh want, but yeh ain't alone. Yeh don't gotta do this alone. Ah promise, bitlet. On mah spark, Ah promise."