Ep 1.5 - Just One Question (closed)

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(Set before "Shady Characters," directly after "Strong Words".)

There was some warning in the air. A cold, dark pressure that constricted the lungs, muffled sound and smell, had your skin flinching at every sound like you expected it to herald an oncoming blow. Or maybe it was only all in Soledad's head, but she'd heard the groundbridge open and ran to meet Shadow, only - she hadn't come through. Other mechs had, each one of them fuming, but no Shadow. And something was very, very wrong.

A smart human would have stayed on the walkway in the control room, or in the video game arena with the other kids, where it was safe. But Soledad didn't care about safe. Not now. She was done with safe.

Ahead, a huge red hulk of a mech, stomping away from her with his shoulders hunched. Every body movement screamed to leave him alone. Soledad quickened her pace as the mech put his hand on one of the door controls.

"Ironhide!" she called. "It's Ironhide - right?"

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<< ooc - moogle, I know this was started awhile ago, so things have kinda plinked as we wrapped the other threads. I'm bringing Hide in directly after Strong Words. Soledad would have been on base less than two days at this point and the news hasn't actually hit the base yet - but Sol would know that Shadow left and hasn't come back yet, and anyone (like Steeljaw) could tell her that if you're looking for Shadow a good place to start would be Ironhide. Do you want to tweak your opener a little? >>

Mission protocols, coupled around tactics and priority list triage, had narrowed everything into a tight focus in the time it had taken Ironhide to leave the Prime in the lower levels and make his way back to quarters. It reduced processor threads and error alerts on his HUD to a bare minimum, wrapped in the insistent pulse of a list of things that needed doing RIGHT NOW. There were a handful of things he needed, one thing he needed to leave, and then there were a counted finite number of steps from quarters to the control room, to the ground bridge, and from there to Africa.

Find Shadow. Supplies, a note to be left for Jazz and Bluestreak, leave, find. In that order. He kept it queued in repeat, something to focus on that was neither rage nor pain nor the spark throbbing ache of fear. Do these things, in this order. Everything else would be... later. After. His bitlet needed finding first, and whatever fallout there was afterwards was for then.

His shoulder pauldron plates ached and itched in turn, mesh sensors impossibly aware of the engraved Autobot sigils burned into them. He tried not to linger on it, relentlessly deleting his thought threads every time they turned there, and focused back on the list - get, note, leave, find - to block out the echo of the Prime's words and the system churning feel of the other mech's proximity.

The sound of his name, uttered somewhere down below his knees, had to be repeated twice before he even registered it, only sluggishly pulling him away from the focus of his actions. He paused with hand on doorway to his own quarters, registering lack of EM, range and vibration of voice, lowness of origin point, and only belatedly managed to focus on the organic who was hailing him. Upper register, probably female, not Miko, not June. He narrowed his optics. "Who're yeh t' be askin'?"

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Jesus funloving Christ he's even bigger up close.

Soledad didn't back up a step, but it was a near thing. Clenching her cold hands into fists, she swallowed hard and looked into the bright blue eyes (or whatever) of the mech whom, she was told, Shadow trusted most. Cohort's like their families, Raf had told her between shared bites of sandwich. I guess Ironhide's like the dad of their cohort. Or maybe the big brother, at least.

Soledad hadn't had great luck with big brothers in her own life. Or fathers, for that matter. She was staking her heart on Shadow being luckier than she was.

"Soledad," she answered. "Shadow kind of - rescued me and brought me here." And before they could get too bogged down in introductions, "Listen, I'm not getting in your way. I just have to ask you one question and I really, really need a straight answer." Another deep breath, desperately wanting to blink but she couldn't break that gaze for an instant. "Where is she? Where is Shadow?"

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The dregs of sound that curled up out of Ironhide's tanks were probably something the human couldn't even hear, not on their limited organic receptors. Another Cybertronian would have heard the subsonic keen of it, would have felt the ugly frantic knot of his field, but the human had neither and her blindness to the cues inherent in his species bought Ironhide a precious moment to swallow it back and try to make his vocalizer sound like something better than a box of rocks in the barrel of a tumbling polisher.

"She... ain't here," he managed. His optics focused downward, taking in the human's appearance and filing it beside those he already had marked as part of their base. Soledad. The one Shadow had rescued - smallish, dark hair, and she had obviously imprinted on his bitlet if she was here, now, trying to find Shadow through him if nothing else worked.

Ironhide cycled a deep ventilation and forced himself to turn fully, to face the tiny organic femme and give her her 'straight answer'. "She ain't here right now, but she will be. Ah'll bring her back."

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Soledad felt her eyes narrow. She should have known - grownups in authority always did this. Passed you off with as little information as they could, a pat on the head and a hope you would just go away. Just because Ironhide was orders of magnitude older than her and could squish her with no effort - did he really think he was protecting her?

"I know she's not here," she said, slow so her voice wouldn't tremble. "If she was here I wouldn't be bothering you. Something bad happened," she stated, digging her fingernails into her palms. "Didn't it? That's why no one will talk to me. Do you think I can't handle it, is that it?" she demanded, outright glaring now. "Because I've never been in a war, but I've seen my share of horrible things, okay? And I've survived." She took a deep breath. "So treat me like a grownup. Because whatever the truth is, not knowing is worse."

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Ironhide's engine turned over, the space of the corridor abruptly full of the deep, strut-rattling growl of a heavy motor under stress. "Ah ain't presumin' t' judge yer comparative age," he told her bluntly, flat voice, flat field, still and solid because to move was to invite not knowing what the movement would bring. "Ah'm treatin' yeh like th' civilian yeh are, an' th' only thing yeh need t' know is-" intake, exvent, field shattering to pieces to uselessly scream into the ether all of the things that he didn't even know how to begin to say, cohort-inclusion-kin-fear-anger-loss, "we will find her an' bring her back."

He was looming, plates bristled and endlessly shifting to try to target the threat that wasn't there. Ironhide drew a full intake and made himself step back, leaning against the edge of the door to try to reduce how he must look to something so small. "She ain't in trouble here," he told her, trying to put as much belief into the words as he could. "An' Primus willin' she ain't in trouble out there. She'll come back when we find her or when she wants t'."

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...Arrrgh.

Soledad folded her arms around herself, shifting her weight as her feet itched to pace. She couldn't feel, was not even aware, of the storm of glyphs surrounding Ironhide, but a similar storm was building in her. One of them was going to shatter. Maybe both.

"Is there..." She swallowed, tried to make her voice steady. "Is there some reason she wouldn't want to come back?"

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...any reason... wouldn't want to...

Cohort, shattered, was something Ironhide never wanted to have to experience again. There had been more vorns than he could clearly count spent piecing himself back together after the loss of his first and to imagine it not just broken by loss but shattered, torn apart by dissent... he could barely even imagine it and the sick feeling that surged up from his tanks, hot and cold through his lines, very nearly drowned out the burning fury. Ironhide gripped the door frame at his back, fingers leaving marks in the thinner metal.

"...No," he managed thickly, but he couldn't put conviction into it and he couldn't focus on the little organic at his feet. "Her home's here. Cohort - we're here. She knows that."

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Cohort. There was that word again. "If you say so," Soledad said doubtfully, glancing away. So far this cohort thing was about as full of bullshit as her father's 'family is everything'. Maybe Raf got it wrong.

But Shadowrunner had trusted Ironhide. Maybe she got it wrong too. Soledad leaned against the wall, trying to breathe through the knot in her throat. "Families break up all the time, you know," she said, more to herself than to Ironhide. "Sometimes it's the people who know you the most who can rip you apart the fastest. Sometimes your best option is to bail."

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The doorframe gave a sharp, ugly shriek of metal as human constructed steel pressed and tore beneath Ironhide's hand. The rage spiked, hot and burning, but it was the sharpness of fear that ground his voice through gravel, snapped through the growl of his engine. "Yeh've got no idea what yer talkin' about," he snarled. "'Families' - maybe yer families do, but Shadow is cohort an' Ah will NOT let anythin' happen t' her."

Too little too late, a traitorous portion of his processor whispered. Too much protest when the damage was already done, when Cleaver's unknowing actions had, entirely by accident, already cut Shadow to the core. When things were already straining at the seams, ripping apart, and he was scrambling to find all the pieces, much less put them back together. A cohort formed of nothing but the fragile bonds of choice and spark emotion, without code or history to bind them, and Shadow with a processor full of more hurt and tangled knots than any frame her age should bear.

The pain was an ugly throb beneath the anger, aching through his spark. "We'll find her," he told the organic femme numbly. "We'll bring her back. She ran because she was hurtin', but it ain't th' kinda thing bein' alone's gonna help."

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Soledad actually jumped back before she could stop herself. Then stepped back a few more paces, because screw acting like you weren't afraid of anything when a giant, terrifying robot had just ripped his doorjamb off with his bare hands and roared at you loud enough to crack your ribs. But just like with Starscream holding something sharp, something happened to Soledad when she was running entirely on adrenaline. Self-preservation threw up its hands and went 'welp, you're on your own, chica.' Her 'things you should not say' filter crashed, and no she would not like to send an error report to Microsoft.

"Something already happened to her!" blurted from Soledad's mouth. "Something really horrible happened and you're standing here pulling the big-daddy-knows-best act. No wonder she bailed!"

So saying, Soledad turned to run and hid behind the corner, because she did still have the tiniest drop of self-preservation.

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The human ran, and for one fleeting moment Ironhide was glad - glad that the little organic femme had some sense of self preservation because he was rapidly losing what tenuous hold on control that he had. He wanted to think he wouldn't harm her, wanted to believe that, but everything ached with such a sharp, acute pain that he couldn't hold to that thought with as much consistency as he wanted to.

There had been a time, he remembered, when it hadn't been energon and lubricant and vital fluids from a mech's system lines on his hands. There had been a time when that would have been unthinkable, beyond unthinkable, and the only things that had stained his servos had been organic matter and organic fluids, blood and viscera from half a dozen different races ripped apart without mercy in the defense of his planet.

The pain that surged through his lines was physical, leaping the gap to his sensor net and blaring feedback through half of his interior nodes before he could clamp it down again. Errors slipped across his HUD with increasing insistence, forcing him to devote half his attention just to shunting them aside into a hasty firewall. Vents laboring, Ironhide shuttered his optics, leaning against the cracked door frame. "Ah'll bring her back," he forced himself to say, in case the little organic femme was still listening. "Ah promised her Ah would, an' we'll keep that promise. Her cohort will bring her back."

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Why did I say that?

Even huddled behind the corner, Soledad could hear his systems straining, hitching, grinding like he was broken. It made her head ache and her heart twist with sympathetic pain. Whatever mistakes Ironhide had made with Shadow, it was clear he loved her, and her disappearance was tearing him up.

Maybe I'm just jealous.

Ironhide's voice came to her, rough with strain. "Ah'll bring her back. Ah promised her Ah would, an' we'll keep that promise. Her cohort will bring her back."

Soledad slid down the wall, grinding her knuckles into her eyes and mouth to stifle her sobs.

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The sound filtered to him dimly, in fits and starts, only heard because he was actively listening to ascertain if the femme was still there. Tiny sounds; he had to increase the audio feed and then scrub the resulting high gain, and then it took long moments of running the audio through a recognition match to figure out what it was.

Scrap. Crying - a human organic emotional response to any number of usually negative things like stress or sadness. The femme - Soledad, who had inexplicably imprinted on Shadow, probably for her rescue - was crying.

If he drew in slow ventilations Ironhide could keep his systems steady. Intake, exvent, watching temperature and internal readings fluctuate with each cycle. He needed to be moving, the list of things he was supposed to be doing filling one corner of his HUD insistently, but the sound of Soledad's crying took precedence. Shadow had mentioned the girl, Shadow was obviously important to her, and he couldn't just walk away from that.

It took him a handful of cycles to push himself upright and slowly, for his own sake as well as hers, traverse the short steps to the corner she had darted around. The sound was clearer, there, and Ironhide exvented a full system rush and gingerly lowered himself down the wall to one knee, leaving the little femme pressed to her side of the corner and he to his, the right angle cutting off their view of each other.

"If Ah don't bring her back," he managed, the words static in his vocalizer, "then Jazz will. Or Blue. One of us will. She ain't physically hurt, that Ah know of, an' Ah don't think she's in immediate danger. Sometimes... sometimes scrap goes down an' yeh just need some time away." He hesitated, shuttering his optics as he leaned his helm back against the wall. "Had slaggers on deck an' too much scrap flyin' every which way, too many mechanisms sayin' scrap they had no business with, an' Shadow walked. Ah don't blame her. But now it's over, an' we'll get her back. Alright?"

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Soledad hunched her shoulders, mortified, as Ironhide spoke to her. Trying to hold back her sobs hurt like crazy, burned her eyes and her throat all the way down to her chest, but she couldn't, absolutely couldn't, just let herself cry. Not in front of anyone. Especially not in front of Ironhide.

Would Shadow cry for Ironhide?

The thought ripped a fresh sob from her before she could strangle it. "M'sorry," she mumbled into her damp sleeves. "I don't - m'not..." She swallowed hard and scrubbed at her eyes. "Shouldn't've - said that," she managed in a croaky but coherent voice. "I know that. I just - even though - I'm not... her cohort. Not her family. I know that. But-" Her composure crumbled again, and her next words came out in a wail as she stuffed her head in her arms. "She's all I have...!"