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.
He was fine the way she'd been fine after going to Relay's ship, and she was probably courting a faceful of claws, but right then - with Steeljaw's frame and field both proclaiming misery at her - Shadow didn't care. She scooped him up and settled him in her lap, tucked against her abdominal plating, one hand against his shoulder and the other running down his back to the weld marks.
She didn't know how to help, didn't know if she could help, or if he'd accept anything she offered. She piled those doubts with all the other things she didn't know and shoved them aside to be worried over later.
::No need to apologize/don't be sorry/I don't mind,:: she chirped softly, falling into Basic out of habit, apology and comfort in her field. ::I'm sorry, though. I didn't know/wasn't thinking when I asked, and I'd fix/undo it if I could.:: She ran another careful caress over his plates, felt them shiver and ripple at her touch. ::If this helps, then it's fine/don't worry about it/stay here.::
He was shaking, strut deep, plates rattling against each other in a cacophony of tiny metal on metal chimes. Stupid. Stupid, glitched, soft sparked idiot. Steeljaw huddled into Shadowrunner's lap, a tight ball of compounded misery, and mashed his face into her thigh plate because if he didn't have to LOOK then maybe he could just pretend the entire thing wasn't happening.
Glitch, and he had no one but himself to blame.
So many memories, unpacked, refreshed, and in all of them was Uplink. Host, carrier, creator, cohort, all inclusive to each other in the way only sparked hosts and symbionts were, always there, always never further than Steeljaw could reach out and touch with frame or link. The memory of happier times, a civilian life with no fears, normal day to day events and an entire way of life lost to the black - the reminder of those hurt, thrown up in stark contrast between the ruin that had come later or the stark reality of now. That hurt was only a dim thing, though, compared to the LOSS - empty, broken, only half of a whole, and without the shelter of Uplink's systems he was cold, so miserably, blisteringly cold.
Shadow was chirping about fixing it, the soft sounds of Basic pinging even older memories of comfort and safety and a world that started and ended with the enclosed warmth of his host's systems. It made him shudder harder, pressing up against her abdomen in a vain attempt to leech the heat from her systems through layers of plate, and drew a black, ugly rasp of a humorless laugh from his vocalizer.
'Can't/Don't,' he clicked sharply, the abbreviated sounds of Basic easier in his vocalizer than full words. 'Impossible/hopeless, can't be fixed. Lost/gone/dead.' His own fault, he should have added, but even Basic took too much effort when he was shaking his plates off, vocalizer glitching from static and vibration. Shivering, he pressed tighter, buried his face against her hip as he tried to curl around her, and old memories lead to even older ones. Before Basic there had been machine code, the first communication he had learned as a still attached portion of Uplink's systems, tapped out in field pulses between their still tethered sparks.
regret, he pulsed into her, tap tap pause tap in quantum octaves of depth that conveyed full glyph sets through the base-most root. system status operable. regret. gratitude.
He had no idea if she even recognized it, but his vocalizer had locked up and those brief pulses conveyed the only gist he could manage. i am/will be fine. sorry. thank you.
Of course it couldn't be fixed; Shadow knew that, knew she would have torn into anyone who said something so stupid, and knew she was lucky that Steeljaw was either a better mechanism than she was, or that he was hurting too badly to care. If she had thought, she never would have said it, but then, if she had thought, they wouldn't be here.
She fell silent, letting him burrow, curling protectively over him when he had wrapped as tightly as he could against her and it still didn't seem to be enough. Touch had always been solace in her unit, and she might not know what Steeljaw needed, but right now touch seemed the one thing she could offer.
She couldn't do anything to help, but she could, at least, do her best not to make things worse.
There was a point when the possibility of "I meant to do that" was well and truly lost, the ship already undocked and on its way and you were left standing on the loading platform. When one had been wailing out misery in a shivering wretched ball in someone else's lap for a good handful or more of kliks... well. Claiming that it was utterly part of the plan was just compounding stupidity on top of other stupidity, so Steeljaw, when the shivering clench had eased and he felt as though he might be able to extract himself from trying to occupy Shadowrunner's plates along with the femme, pulled back enough to not-quite look at her and nudged at her side with his head.
"Thank you," he managed, then rebooted his vocalizer with a subdued click. "I'm... sorry. That wasn't..." He cycled his optics off, letting his helm rest against her plates for a moment more. "It's been a long time since I looked at those."
"It's all right," Shadow said, straightening so that Steeljaw could remove himself from her lap - or not - at his own pace. "I was asking for more than I realized, and honestly, if I had memories like those I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have coped with stirring them up nearly as well."
She still had a hand against his shoulder, and the dull, faintly discolored state of some of his plating gave her an excuse for a distraction. "I know saying I'm sorry doesn't help, but will you let me apologize another way?" She ran her thumb along the fairly well defined dividing line between where Steeljaw could reach, and where he couldn't. "I can help you polish the plating along your back until you've healed up, if you'll let me."
He HAD been going to get up, still not quite able to meet her optics, but her words - her OFFER - yanked his pedes out from under him and dumped Steeljaw right back into her lap. "Yes, please?" he said, and Primus, he didn't care how pathetic he sounded. Ratchet had power washed him within an inch of his function, thank everything, until he was infestation free and clean, but the medic hadn't wasted any time with polishing. It had been one of the first things Steeljaw had done when he had been released from the medbay, but there was an entire swath of his back which he simply couldn't reach without undoing some of the medic's hard work.
He laid himself out across her thighs, trying not to project just how ridiculously hopeful the offer made him. It was like the one lingering bit of itch that he hadn't been able to get at. "I would be deeply indebted if you could."
She couldn't doubt his enthusiastic acceptance, and Shadow was reaching for the polish before Steeljaw had finished settling himself in her lap. This was its own kind of bittersweet, summoning memories of home and cohort and those all too rare times together when nobody was broken in frame or spark.
Bittersweet, but she still smoothed the polish into his plates with the same care she would have devoted to Wildfire or Phaseshift, the familiarity soothing even as the memories stung. She had to stop herself from slipping into Basic again - she probably should put more effort into breaking the habit, because while Bumblebee understood her reasons she doubted anyone else would - and asked, "How are you healing up?" She grinned, hoping to lighten the mood for both of them. "And more importantly, how are you managing to endure Ratchet?"
"Healing about as to be expected, short of leaving my aft in stasis on a medbay berth for another orn," Steeljaw replied. Her touch was soothing - painful in the memories it called up, other hands from long ago, but it eased a very palpable physical itch that let him sag against her, field relaxing into something less taut and aching. "And really, another rotation would have bored me into stasis as it was. There's only so much Angry Birds any sentient can play, in Rio or outer space or anywhere else, and Ratchet deems World of Warcraft entirely too much excitement for a recovering patient. He throttled my internet after he caught me in a raiding party."
His engine slipped into an easy gear, loose and thrumming, as he arched into her hands. "This is perfect, thank you. It's been driving me insane. Though really, beyond a certain amount of overzealousness about his function and a lack of attention to the niceties of polishing, I'm not sure what you all have against Ratchet. You're not the first I've heard say something like that. Really, he's a very good medic."
Shadow chuckled as Steeljaw relaxed, alternately flopping across her lap like a particularly happy rag doll and twisting around to get his body under her hands just so. She made sure to pay extra attention to the areas that he pushed into her touch, quietly determined that he was going to look as close to perfect as possible, given the damage he was still repairing.
His defense of Ratchet was unsurprising, given the state he'd been in when he arrived. And he was right: Ratchet was an excellent medic. And she had absolutely no intention of admitting that Ratchet was an excellent medic who scared the slag out of her, like Labyrinth at his absolute worst...except Labyrinth had never yelled at them for doing their jobs the way Ratchet did.
"I don't know what the others have against him," she said, focusing her attention on a dull patch right at the base of his 'mane'. "Probably just the natural conflict of opinionated veterans versus domineering medic."
Steeljaw snorted something that sounded suspiciously like 'frontliners' into Shadowrunner's plating; when her polishing ministrations hesitated for a fraction of a klik he raised his head, enunciating it more plainly. "Frontliners. Oh, I've met a few - ex 'Cons, ex 'Bots. Universally horrible at prioritizing repairs versus anything else they could possibly be doing. I can see why Ratchet has the attitude he has, but if you're polite to him he's actually perfectly polite back."
Venting softly, he half shuttered his optics, flaring the plates of his neck to give her better access. A few moments later, however, he was moving again, squirming to lean head and forequarters over the side of her thigh. "Here - that scrape you were working on. Lean a little this way." Clamping both fore pedes to her plating, he leaned down to examine it critically and huffed.
"Don't squirm," he suggested. "Or... well, yes, DO squirm if it tickles and I'll stop. I realize some bipeds just seem to find it terribly disconcerting, so I'll keep it quick." 'Disconcerting' was, perhaps, an understatement - there had been yelping and flailing on several occasions, disgust on a few others, and one memorable occasion of completely mistaken intention. Steeljaw was reasonably certain Shadowrunner might, at the worst, be in the yelping and possibly squirming flailing camp. While she'd done a reasonable job on something she was ministering to mostly by feel he could still see the distortion in her finish. Turnabout was, almost universally, fair dealings. Leaning over, he swiped a glossa full of micro-fine buffing surfaces over the scrape in one long, steady lick, tiny transformations in his throat already queuing up the better grade of his polish.
"If Ratchet had given me the opportunity to be polite when I first arrived, I promise I would have been," Shadow said drily. Although, if she were honest she had been guilty of prioritizing a few things - including hacking some of her own systems to be more compatible with Earth technology - above repairs, once she'd reached the point of being functional. And some of the damage had been from her fight with Barricade rather than from the crash (the worst of it had, technically, been self inflicted in her efforts to get Barricade off her; a bit worse than simple failure to dodge). And forty years was a long time to leave even non-vital repairs unfinished; if pressed, she couldn't honestly have tracked the decisions which had led to it.
Not that she had any more intention of admitting that than she did of admitting Ratchet scared her.
Fortunately, Steeljaw wriggling half off her lap was a sufficient change of subject. Shadow stopped what she was doing, watching with a bemused expression as he stretched down and...huh. A little odd feeling, and she was glad he'd given her the warning so that she didn't reflexively jerk at the faint tickling sensation (a bit like dozens of tiny feet suddenly swarming the area, though she doubted Steeljaw would appreciate the comparison), but by no means unpleasant. Effective, too; she already knew that from seeing the parts of his frame he could reach.
"Thought I'd gotten that." She resumed working on the base of his neck - even if he'd had full flexibility, he couldn't have polished the area himself, and it showed - and despite Steeljaw's seemingly-precarious position his mag-clamps held him solidly in place. "Thank you. I'd almost forgotten what it's like to have another set of optics look over my finish."
"Likewise," Steeljaw agreed, pulsing gratitude under her hands. Humor cocked his audials up. "We may all be refugees at the aft end of the galaxy, but we can at least be reasonably polished ones."
Another buffing lick, a polish lick, and then a third, softer buffing lick to remove the polish, the countless tiny plates of glossa and mouth shifting through the transformations in natural sequence. Finished, Steeljaw regarded Shadowrunner's plate again, then snorted a laugh. "I think I may have to do that entire plate, or you're going to have a noticeably different stripe in that one spot."
"I won't stop you if you want to," Shadow said with a laugh of her own, "but I'm afraid it would lead to an endless progression of the plates around it looking off, and there's a lot more of me to polish than you. Though," a thoughtful pause as she regarded the myriad tiny plates beneath her servos, "the amount of detail work involved with you might make up for it."
She pulsed amusement at him to make sure he knew she didn't mind, and lightly tapped the area where she was working. "Flare out your neck plating again, please? You didn't give me a chance to finish before you decided to return the favor."
Steeljaw shuttered his optics, arching and flaring his neck, forehelm pressed to her thigh plate to steady the pose as she worked. "You're only a little smaller than Uplink," he noted, and was pleased that both voice and field only wavered slightly over his carrier's name, "and I used to polish him. Though," he added, pushing another note of humor through, "I doubt you want me licking you all over, and never mind how horribly inappropriate that sounds in the local English vernacular."
In the back of his processor Uplink was crooning softly, a wordless thread of melody that was threaded through Steeljaw's earliest memories. It was different hands, a different pattern and pressure of touches, different plating beneath his pedes, different scents of polish and systems, but it was similar enough that he could offline his optics, listen to that hum, and relax into the luxury. "Thank you," he said quietly. "I really do appreciate this."
Shadow stopped, both servos braced against Steeljaw's shoulders as she laughed at his comment. "Completely inappropriate when you put it that way," she agreed, "and I would be so tempted to let you repeat it in front of the humans. Or at least June and Agent Fowler; I'm not sure I want to know what Miko would do with a comment like that."
Still smiling, she resumed polishing the plates of his neck, taking more care than was really needed until he relaxed across her legs. She didn't expect his thanks - this was the least she could do, after stirring up old memories - but she didn't dismiss them, either. "I'm glad to do it," she admitted quietly, working the polish in smooth, steady strokes down his back strut, toward the first weld scar. "I had a big cohort, before I ended up on Earth. We weren't together that often, really, but when we were..." She shrugged. "Sometimes I miss the stupid little things, you know?"
She vented a small, only slightly forced laugh. "And besides, it's not like I have any hobbies that don't require being outside. If I'm going to be on base, I might as well be doing something useful."