We are a literate, intermediate to advanced AU Transformers RPG Based off of the first season of TFP with dashes of other incarnations sprinkled here or there. Characters from any continuity are welcome however must be restyled to match the TFPrime universe.
Active, with ongoing plotlines, we are always willing to integrate new characters into storylines once incorporated into the setting.
Ironhide leaned into her, dipping his head to nuzzle at the top of her helm like she was a youngling half her age, field pulsing a steady reassurance and comfort. "Bettin' they wouldn't, yeah," he agreed.
Venting softly, he tugged her a little closer, plates along his back and arm flaring to offer an instinctive mantle of protection for her smaller mass. "Ah'm sure yeh can do it," he told her firmly. "But Ah sure as scrap ain't askin' yeh t' do it without help. Yeh need anythin', yeh come t' meh. We'll sort it out. Hear meh, bitlet? Promise."
Shadow couldn't help it; as much as she knew she shouldn't, she tucked herself in closer, seeking that offering of protection. It helped, even if Ironhide was still just one other frame buffering her from a threat that wasn't real and wasn't physical.
"Will you stay with me?" she asked, and immediately regretted it. He was already wasting time he normally spent off-base; she should be grateful for that, not asking for more.
All over again, she missed her cohort, where she would never have needed to ask.
"Sorry. Don't expect you to just stay." This was the sort of request that required compensation; even if she didn't particularly want to offer it, the need to not be alone was greater. "I know you have better things to do, but whatever you want...I can make it worthwhile." The glyphs she used weren't openly seductive - Labyrinth hadn't always been satisfied with something as simple as 'facing, and she knew better than to imply she could anticipate what would be asked of her - but the invitation for him to take whatever he wanted in trade for his time was still unmistakably there.
Ironhide... froze. For one klik he just froze, processor threads tangled up in a hopeless garble of slagged code before he wrenched them back into some sort of order again. Shadow had... yes, she had. Her glyphs were vague enough to allow interpretation, but the sentiment...
More than the onset ache in his processor there was a deep pang in his spark. There had been a time, when he had been newly sparked - when 'bitlet' had been one of several names applied to the youngest of the cohort, himself included - when the line between fullframe youngling and cohortmate had been more fluid with the automatic assumption that the one would grow into the other. Now... he would be hard pressed to align the two in spark and processor even if Shadow had genuinely asked, which she hadn't. That wasn't a request, it was an offer, and all the possibilities that went with it - the idea of what had set that in her processor as an acceptable offer in exchange for something she shouldn't even have had to ask for to begin with - made him sick and pained clear through his spark.
"No." She was already pressed up against him, it was simple to scoop her up and tug her into his lap, hugged tight. "No, bitlet, no - you don't need t' do that. Of course Ah'll stay, Ah wasn't gonna leave, yeh don't gotta ask. It ain't anythin' yeh need t' ask for or do anythin' for, bitlet." He tucked her helm beneath his chin, rocking gently, plates flaring around the mass of her frame. "Ain't gotta ask, sparklet. Ah'm here. Ah ain't goin' nowhere."
Shadow flinched when Ironhide moved, dread rising until she realized he was simply tucking her back into much the same position she had recently abandoned. It didn't make sense...and then the meaning of his words filtered through the haze of desperate need, shifting him slowly, slowly back in the direction of true cohort, and away from Labyrinth's singular position, cohort but separate, above, loved and terrifying all at once.
She missed her cohort, a dozen sparks beating in time with hers, a dozen processors that understood her without need for clarification. She missed others who knew what she needed before she knew it herself. She missed trusting in the certainty they would be there when she needed them.
Sometimes, it felt like the more she tried to find her place in this new cohort, the less she fit, small differences grating like fine sand caught in gears. And sometimes, like now, the familiar comforts that truly felt like cohort hurt more, because she didn't know how to find them again.
She let him feel the pulse of her gratitude - that he was there, that he was staying, that he hadn't demanded anything in exchange. And then, because there were still echoes of shared loss and understanding between them, she admitted, "You and Jazz always tell me to ask if I need you...but I never had to ask except with Labyrinth. And Labyrinth's rules..." She vented shakily. "I never know what the rules are supposed to be with you."
Ironhide held her for long moments, just held and rocked, frame humming softly with wordless reassurance while he sorted through possible answers to find the one with the most truth in the simplest, least ambiguous words. Finally he vented softly, ducking to bump his helm gently against hers. "Shadow, sparklet... Ah'm sorry. An' Ah'm glad yeh said that, because we ain't tryin' t' make this harder for yeh."
He shuttered his optics as he leaned his helm against her, thumb rubbing small reassuring circles against the linkages at the back of her neck. "First thing Ah learned when they took meh outta th' Guard, bitlet, is that mechanisms outside come with more notions an' rules than Ah'd ever heard of an' it seems like everyone's different. An if they're good about it then that's how they make 'em all mesh - by talking, by asking, instead of just assumin'. Ain't how yeh or Ah came up knowin' it, but it works. Jazz... Jazz is keen on talkin' because he doesn't know yer rules and he doesn't wanna hurt yeh by accident. So he needs yeh t' ask just so he doesn't assume wrong an' do more harm than good, an' he'll be askin' in return. It ain't that he doesn't want t' help, he just likes t' have it all spelled out first so he ain't runnin' blind."
Shadow was still, listening, and Ironhide hugged her a little tighter for a moment, intakes full of the scent of polish and warm mesh and the electric tang of her field. "Yeh an' Ah, though... maybe we've got more in common. An' maybe Ah've been doin' this wrong, an Ah'm sorry f'r that. Was a time Ah knew exactly what yeh meant - didn't have t' ask, would've been everyone just knew. Been a slaggin' long time since Ah had that, though, an' Ah'm a little rusty at it. Gotten in th' habit of askin', instead of just doin'. Been times Ah would've scooped yeh up like this 'cus yeh looked like yeh needed it if Ah'd gone with mah first impulse, an' slag all what th' rest of 'em thought, an' maybe Ah should've."
He pressed a kiss to her forehelm before settling his own helm back against hers. "Bitlet, sometimes rank an' duty supersedes cohort, an' that's just th' way it is. But any time Ah'm off duty there ain't nothin' more important than mah cohort, an' that includes yeh. That's mah only rule. Yeh ain't ever intrudin', yeh ain't keepin' meh from other things. If yeh need somethin' an' Ah ain't seein' it, well, sometime's Ah'm running too many things in mah processor. Go ahead an' give meh a nudge, 'cus it don't mean yer not more important, Ah'm just focusin' wrong. Ah'll stop askin' before doin' an' yeh just tell meh if Ah'm doin' wrong, alright?"
New cohort, new rules, one of the very first things Jazz had tried to impress upon her, with tell and ask right at the top of those new rules. Shadow knew, even before Ironhide had told her, that the new rules weren't intended to make things harder, that Jazz had been trying to draw her away from the things that sometimes still locked her up in panic, but in the absence of further clarification, her understanding of the new rules had been shaped by old expectations.
No easy thing, to strip telling of the specter of vulnerabilities revealed and begging to be exploited, or to strip asking of its sense of debt incurred and payment required. Asking was by far the worse; Labyrinth knew them all well enough to see their weak points, but the older they'd gotten, the more heavily the debts from asking had weighed, Labyrinth's way of making it clear they shouldn't want or need more than they were offered. And usually, he'd been right: everything they needed, the thirteen of them were capable of providing for each other.
Without the Thirteen, the price of what she needed had become increasingly terrifying.
Ironhide was telling her it didn't have to be paid, which would have been suspect from anyone else, even Jazz. But if her new cohort had new rules, something in her processor had long ago decided Ironhide had a set of rules unique to him, and those rules didn't require her to look for the traps hidden in his words. He was as safe as it was possible for an outsider to be, and as close to familiar as she had.
And for all that, for all the warmth and comfort pressed around and against her, for all that telling was easier than asking...it was still hard. "I'd like if you did that," she said, and let the flood of relief in her field tell him how much easier that would be than having to fight the conditioning against asking. "It'd be like..." She paused, because she wasn't oblivious to her new cohort's opinion of her old cohort, but there was no other word she could use, the glyphset intentionally idealized, "home."
Her relief said everything that was needed, raw and hurt and young, and her words gave permission. The floor was hard and never the best place, barring an emergency; the berth was close enough to be perfectly serviceable. Ironhide scooped Shadow up without thought - without the endless chain of double guessing himself and triple thinking every move, estimating propriety versus personal distance versus the somewhat standardized set of societal rules that still, to that day, didn't always make sense to him.
Simple, easy. Right. She was a perfectly manageable armful, scout class that took little effort to lift and negligible mass to carry to the berth. Ironhide eased her onto it, nudging her towards the middle of the surface. "Here - curl up a bit, sparklet."
It was a type of relief to his own spark to settle himself down over her, braced across elbows and knees as his dorsal plating flared into a shield above them both. It was something he had had to unlearn in life after the Guard, a maneuver that both Chromia and Jazz found claustrophobic and even Bluestreak had grown out of, but which had once been the quickest means he knew to triage when a pile of cohort mates couldn't immediately be arranged.
Curled over and around her, Ironhide pressed his helm to Shadow's and cycled his vents to draw cool air into the heated nest hollowed out beneath his overarching plates, engine crooning a low rumbling counterpoint. "Safe, bitlet. Ah gotcha."
Last Edit: Aug 17, 2012 18:24:24 GMT -5 by Deleted
There was a moment, a triple sparkbeat of time between floor and berth, when Shadow wondered if Ironhide had changed his mind about her offer. The thought made her tense only a little; still worth it, still better than being alone, and she couldn't imagine Ironhide got his charge off the pain of his berthmates.
Nothing had changed in his field, though, or in his touch, and then she was on the berth and...cocooned. Surprise held her still until she felt the press of Ironhide's helm to hers, comforting and familiar.
With a slow, careful exvent, she relaxed, uncurling until their frames were pressed together at multiple points, almost like having her cohort packed around her. That made it better; almost perfect, in fact, the resonance of his single field against hers somehow enough when it filled all of the available space. Safe, protected, and her systems were beginning to cycle down, not toward recharge but toward a healing, almost trancelike state that she hadn't felt since...since before their last mission.
this-yes-perfect Nothing so clear-cut as words or glyphs, but she couldn't keep her reaction out of her field any more than she could hide the steadily slowing purr of her engine. Home-family-safety-cohort, with all the painful parts removed, the rough edges polished smooth.
"You don't mind? This isn't..." A hesitation, just the slightest hint that she wasn't sure she wanted to hear the answer, no matter how badly she needed to ask. "You're sure I'm not...being a nuisance?"
Last Edit: Aug 17, 2012 23:56:30 GMT -5 by Deleted
Feeling Shadowrunner relax was a balm; there had been times - more often than not in the Guard - when it had been a struggle, a fight against hyper alert frontline protocols that required physical restraints to convince the one who needed it most that 'safety' meant 'off duty' and 'stand down', and that it was truly safe to do so.
Shadow was a youngling still, though, and she relaxed into his hold with a pulse of need and relief, her field flowing into safety-cohort-home against his. It eased his own protocols into standby, settled his systems into a smooth rumble of longwave purr that synched and interwove with Shadow's own. Venting softly, Ironhide pressed a little firmer against her helm. "Ain't a nuisance, bitlet, an' Ah don't mind at all."
He settled a little more solidly down onto his own locked struts, shifting to equalize his mass, plates flicking to compensate and keep the hollow beneath him safely covered. It was a position he could hold for entire shifts, if necessary, though Ironhide suspected he might be more stiff coming out of it than he once had been. It was comfortable while held, though, and he let her feel that, along with his own solidity. It gave him a few moment where his own hesitation wasn't quite as noticeable, though the pause dragged slightly longer than it should have before he pushed his vocalizer into working. "Tell yeh a secret, Shadow luv - been a long time since anyone let meh do this an'... Ah miss it. So we're good." He pressed his cheek guard to hers, nuzzling slightly, vocalizer slipping rough. "Stand down, bitlet. Ain't nothin' else t' be doin' right now."
Even content as she already was, it helped Shadow to hear Ironhide's words. No lines crossed, no debts incurred, and their fields were weaving together in the easy familiarity of cohort.
The missing pieces were still missing, but for the moment at least, she felt their lack less acutely. For right now, she was not an outsider vainly struggling to fit in, she was precisely where she belonged.
It was what she needed to cycle her systems down that final half step, still not into recharge, but to a point where the universe narrowed to the field and frame around her, to cohort, and she didn't need to worry about anything else because her cohort had her back.
<<fin>>
Last Edit: Aug 18, 2012 20:24:45 GMT -5 by Deleted