[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Park and Wreck [Cassandra/Avalanche]

[Avalanche]

((Post written collaboratively with Cassandra))

Wonderful. The little juvenile idiot was one of those kinds, the kind that wouldn't or couldn't back down under any circumstances, and apparently his foul attitude was based on thinking he was untouchable. Avalanche had dealt with a lot of mecha that liked to parade their bad behaviour because of connections to authority over the long cycles of her existence, and there was no faster way to get on her bad side. Permanently.

And the most infuriating thing was this: it did make a difference. Corrupt law enforcement was hardly something new to her, and if that was how it worked here, it didn't matter who was in the right. The absolute last thing she needed to do was to draw more attention to herself right now; the wretched business with the paint and the yelling and honking was bad enough.

But there had to be some way to make the little vandal reconsider messing with her without causing more trouble for herself. Taking his bike... now that could work. Put it somewhere awkward, then let him have fun trying to get it back, while Butch came back and got this damnable truant officer to show up.

"Sure."

Avalanche stepped away from her altmode, heading for where the bikes lay on the dusty ground.

The minute Avalanche stalked toward their bikes, the other three boys lost their nerve. Even Mark, who still stood his ground, had an incredulous look. "Hey, come back here!" Mark yelled, taking a step forward. His voice was wavering, panic starting to creep across his features. "I'm not done with you yet!"

But his friends were, and they sprinted to where they'd left their only fast way out of the lot. With every step the holotar took, the children became more and more desperate to hop on and pedal away. One started to speed off, while another tipped over and almost took another boy with him. At least none of them had helmets, or any of the protective equipment they should've been wearing. That would've slowed down the process even more, and only added to their fumbling.

Avalanche slowed as she watched the other three scramble for their bicycles, her boots kicking up a puff of dust from the dry ground as she came to a complete halt. She watched the panic with a certain savage satisfaction, then crossed her muscled arms beneath her chest and glanced back at the boy that was suddenly all alone.

"Take it now, and leave. Or I'll take it to the police, tell them about your fun and games with spray paint, and you can pick that up from your father yourself."

Mark was caught between shock and fury. His shoulders were rigid, his eyes glaring, his mouth half-twisted in a gritted-toothed snarl. His shoulders hiked up like a Seeker trying to make themselves look bigger. His fists clenched, and he sputtered like an idiot. "You can't - you guys - you just - "

"What's going on over here?" Butch called distantly, phone in her bad hand and barely-filled bucket in the other. (She hadn't been kidding when she said the tap's flow needed work.) "I heard yelling, Ava - "

"FUCK YOU!" the boy thundered, whirling around to look at Butch. Butch stopped in her tracks, startled for a moment. She ducked as Mark took his shoe and sent it flying at her face, likely in an attempt to stop her. The boy then spun on his heel, reached into his backpack with one hand, and yanked out something shining. It was a canister of some kind, likely one of the paints used to mar Avalanche with. He glared with all the baleful hate he could muster, and then threw it at Avalanche's face with full force. Butch's eyes widened and she tried to dart for him, but he dodged her arms and made his pitch.

[Avalanche]

There really was nothing as good at improving a foul mood as seeing the one that was the core and heart of your ire spluttering impotently with rage. There the other vandals went, one-two-three, leaving a single very frustrated young idiot with no backup and no audience. There was nothing so devastating to a certain sort of damn fool as a lack of people to show off their toughness to.

And finally, Butch. A witness, and someone that could actually carry out Avalanche's rather toothless threat to call the one pursuing the boys. The avatar opened her mouth to tell Butch to do just that, when the abandoned leader of the little pack yanked off his foot covering to throw at her.

What utter idiocy was this?

The boy's intent, as he delved into the bag, was pathetically clear. Avalanche had several million years of experience in hand to hand fighting on the kid, and while she didn't know what he was rummaging for, it was some kind of projectile. He straightened, Butch lunged, he hurled it-

-and Avalanche stepped four inches to the left, the can smacking into her open palm with industrial position, her gaze never leaving the boy. "Stepping up from vandalism to assault, is it? I'm sick of giving you chances to be smart when you're not going to be, so this is the last time. Take your bike and fuck off."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Mark stared. Butch stared. The boy's mouth moved to speak, but no sound came out. Butch scowled at him, though not nearly with as much anger as Avalanche did. "I suggest you listen to the woman, boy," she said. "I have Officer Mendez on speed-dial, and your artwork has the same look as the other graffiti the dump guys've dealt with. We're going to be charitable and give you a five-minute headstart, and *maybe* not mention you attempted to assault both of us."

Mark turned his head back and forth, trying to glare indignantly at both Butch and Avalanche. He growled, clenched his fists, and sprang away from both women. Running as fast as he could to his bike, Mark was up and on it in a flash, eyes flinty. With one last angry look at both janitor and (what Butch presumed to be a former) soldier, he kicked off the ground and pedaled away on his bike. Horns honked and tires squealed as he pealed straight into the lot's traffic, cars stopping abruptly. Butch watched, looking a little nervous until he hit the sidewalk again, disappearing down the road in a whir.

After a moment of silence, Butch looked at Avalanche. "Well," she said, "for a teenager, that was a pretty pathetic attempt at standing his ground." She walked over and splashed what little water she had on a section of the truck. The solvent began to flow off in a trickle, hitting the ground with a loud splash. Butch would need to make a second run to the tap, and it didn't escape her notice that people were staring despite the drama being over.

"You want to pull over to the tap?"

[Avalanche]

Avalanche's dark eyes tracked the boy's face as he passed through disbelief, fear, shame and fury like a kaleidoscope of shuddering frustration that the world wasn't being the way he wanted it to be. Officer Mendez. Now she had the name, if it came up again. And then, all at once, he buckled. Within seconds he was peddling frantically away, minus a can of spray paint and one foot covering (shoe, it was a shoe).

She nodded at Butch as the woman moved over and spattered water across her armoured hide. Some of the irritating itch faded as the solvent ran down her side in rivulets to pool around her wheels.

Reassess. What had just happened? She'd been graffitied, she'd refrained from blowing her cover, she'd met the same group and warned them to leave with no physical contact and no hostile actions performed. None of it was ideal, but she'd handled it was well as could be asked. It'd do.

She crossed the concrete, picking up the discarded shoe and jamming the spray paint can into it, then slammed it into a nearby bin with distinctly unnecessary levels of satisfaction.

"Hope it's as unpleasant riding a bicycle with one shoe as he deserves," she remarked to Butch, in tones that suggested it was extremely unlikely to be sufficiently uncomfortable unless the pedal was coated in spikes and mouse traps. "Yeah, I'll pull on over. This stuff has done its work, so let's get it off my paint before it does more than it should."

Swinging up into the cab, she barely touched the key before starting her own engine with a growl, finding it a distinct relief to break her frustrating physical stillness. Navigating slowly and with care, she made sure to be aware of what was around her in every direction, absolutely determined not to have any more complications that day.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Butch nodded and said nothing. "I'll get Officer Mendez on the phone," said she, putting down the bucket to dial him up. While Avalanche went on ahead, Butch stayed in place, turning toward where the boys had gone. In less than a minute, she had the officer on the line, discussing with him what had just transpired. Avalanche would have a few minutes to seethe in silence if she so chose to.

When Butch came back to the auto-parts shop, she went straight to their tap. Her expression was neutral again, though her brows furrowed a little when the tap gurgled on. After a few moments of only a trickle of water, she gave it a couple of thwaps. That seemed to jar loose whatever was restricting its output, and the bucket began a second, slow fill. Butch didn't wait for it to reach a full load, instead standing up and splashing what she had on the truck. Leaving the tap running the entire time - possibly to see if she could get the flow to work better - the woman worked without conversation.

The traffic in the lot began to slow a little. People who'd witnessed the confrontation with the boys moved on. The tarmac became a little hotter, the air a little drier, as the afternoon sun dipped. Butch wiped the sweat from her brow with one arm. Avalanche was free to talk or otherwise do as she pleased, Butch's focus on getting the solvent off. (That, and running over to grab the small can of sample paint that they had left behind. A parking SUV almost ran it over before Butch sprinted over in a moment of remembrance.)

[Avalanche]

On the phone. Right. Avalanche was doing her best to keep up with the way humans talked; she had a vocabulary of the local language, but the idioms and ways of expressing things were harder to guess without more exposure to the actual people. It was going to take some time before her mannerisms, word choice and simple evasiveness wouldn't immediately mark her out as suspicious, and the only way to overcome that hurdle was to risk that exact suspicion falling upon her.

Butch was... hard to read. Were all humans like that? The juveniles weren't, but then they were juvenile...

Avalanche chose to keep her avatar securely hidden away in her cab for the time being, guessing that the sight of a dump truck parked by the tap would attract less attention - and less possible attempts at interaction - than an apparently human woman loitering beside it.

The human woman came alongside; Avalanche opened her driver's door and stepped down to help. Something was wrong with the water feed system, but the measly trickle it provided was enough to resuming rinsing the solvent off, little by little. Butch didn't seem inclined to conversation, and so Avalanche worked beside her without any further comment as between them the last traces of the mess on her paintwork were rinsed away.

It wasn't particularly tidy work. Avalanche's top grew sopping wet from spilled water, sticking to her simulated skin; it was a new sensation, and one she was honestly a little distracted by, very different than the water beading on her hull. The unwanted attention that the renewed confrontation had generated was slipping away, and every wandering stare that moved on was a burden removed from Avalanche's shoulders.

Eventually, at long last, the bucket was returned, the tap turned off. While Avalanche's scratched, battered paintwork hardly looked new, it looked better than it had before the young idiots had tried their hands at decorating her, all the dirt and dust of her day driving around town rinsed away. The wet shimmer to the metal was already evaporating into the hot, dry air.

"...alright. Looks like we're all done." Avalanche broke the quiet, nodding up at the bulky form of her altmode. The human hadn't seemed to want much in the way of thanks before, but still... "Thanks again for your help. You want a lift to anywhere in town, I'll get you there. And I owe you."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"No you don't," Butch said. "Shit happens. You want to get out of here, or do you need to fill your tank or grab something to eat?"

She grabbed the pot of sample paint and walked up to the passenger door. Opening, she slid it onto the floor mat of that side, then hopped down to look at Avalanche. "In case there are any spots or places we missed," Butch said, "I've left a can of paint with an approximation of your color. That way you can go over anything if you need to. I need to keep this for work."

Butch held up the bottle of Lift-Off. "It's only about eight bucks if you need to grab some more. But if we're lucky, Officer Mendez will catch those boys and keep them out of trouble for a while. He knows them and their parents - he'll handle it, I'm sure."

The janitor walked over to the cab and hopped up into her seat. Buckling up, she waited for Avalanche to join her. Once both were safely in the cab, she added, "And if you're going to make an alias, don't use something so obvious as a pun. Especially a pun based on something blazed across your hood." She gave a wry smile, small and slight.

"Probably should change that top, too, unless you want more staring. Doesn't leave much to the imagination when it's soaked like that. I know a place we can stop to get you a change."

[Avalanche]

While it was spiced with a curse she wasn't quite comfortable she knew the full context for, Avalanche got the general meaning of 'shit happens'. It was a familiar sentiment. Sometimes, for no especially good reason, the universe poured a vat of molten slag over your plans and you just had to adapt. The best plans were resilient enough to take that into account, but there was always something you hadn't thought of.

She didn't know much about Butch, but she knew enough to respect the human's wishes. If she didn't want to be owed, then the debt was put aside. Avalanche didn't enjoy being owed favours either.

"I'm good for all that," Avalanche replied, following the woman up to the cab and climbing into the driver's side. "I'll take the paint, though. Hope this Mendez tracks those idiots down soon. The last thing I want to do is have to deal with them again."

While taking a new altmode had erased some of her surface plating damage, there remained some scratches and scuffs that originated from fights unimaginably further away than anything the human could possibly imagine. A little paint to cover some of it wouldn't do any harm. Maybe Patch could do something useful with it.

She buckled her seatbelt, seeing Butch do so; it was something she hadn't tended to notice while she was alone in the cab, but this was all about fitting in. Looking normal. Which is why Butch's words about her choice of supposed human name made her wince again, visibly so.

And then her comprehension of the conversation ran straight off a cliff.

Avalanche hesitated, withdrawing her hand from the key in the ignition, and looked down at herself. The cloth was wet and clinging to her. So? It was a dry city, sure, but people had to get wet sometimes. And she knew it rained in other places. The cloth would dry. What did imagination have to do with it? The simple lack of understanding on her face was too blatant to be effectively hidden.

Well, she couldn't just sit there. Starting her engine, she took hold of her wheel and pulled away from the fuelling station, merging into the flow of traffic. "Look. People have called me Avalanche for a while." A few million years, actually. "I was just trying for a name that sounded a bit more normal for around here. I don't have any currency on me; should have brought some with me, but I thought I'd just roll around the city for a bit and go back. Is the top that bad?"

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"You could probably let it dry, but not in public," Butch said. "You fit your shirts pretty tight. There's a lot of men around here with nothing better to do than imagine what they might not be seeing. I think you've had enough bullshit for one day."

Butch looked out the window. Her left elbow rested on the edge of it, the hand attached cradling her face. Leaning into the armrest, she said, "I get the impression you're not used to being around people. I get it. I've gone off on my own for a bit on a camping trip or some other whim, and come back looking like a nightmare. Then again, I could be the asshole here and assuming things I shouldn't rightly assume." She kept staring out the window, watching as the dry desert scenery flicked by.

"Still, if you'd like to stay out of town for a bit, there's a scenic route. Turn left here and we can loop around the edge - it'll keep you out of the heavier traffic. It's the gas station, the storefronts and the houses that get the most busy. Up there is a car lot and some other things, but not much."

Butch became silent, waiting for Avalanche's answer. Except if they went over a bump or the odd pothole, she'd remain still as stone in a comfortable half-rest. The day was hot, she was sweating, and she looked even more tired than before. A noticeable smell had begun to rise off of her, too - the smell of tobacco and faded cleaner, but also something meaty. Old. A tad putrid, even, and not in the sour way human body odor was. The temperatures outside and the moisture on her skin must've brought it out of her clothes.

[Avalanche]

"I get the impression you're not used to being around people."

"I'm not," Avalanche agreed with a wry smile, grateful for the way out she was being offered. "Spent a lot of time just getting the work done. Didn't have much time for anything else."

She made a show of turning her steering wheel as she rounded the left-hand turn. Having someone else in her cockpit - particularly someone as perceptive as Butch seemed to be - meant she had to pay a lot more attention to miming using the controls rather than just letting her avatar lounge in the driver's seat.

A route around the city that wasn't much travelled? That sounded useful. Especially when she wanted to avoid unnecessary human contact. Definitely worth taking the time to tap this human's local knowledge.

"Alright, let's go for a drive," she agreed, amiably enough. "I've been rolling up and down the centre of the strip. Wouldn't mind seeing things from another angle."

The scent coming from Butch's clothes didn't go unnoticed, but Avalanche simply lacked context to interpret it. It could have been food, or something the woman had been exposed to, or just how humans smelled; she set the thought aside, though with a little caveat to check whether she should be using some kind of scent on her avatar to cover up the natural lack of any kind of smell.

And speaking of things she didn't have the context for... Avalanche frowned slightly as she drove, replaying Butch's words through her mind again, trying to figure out what she was being warned about.

Break it down. She shouldn't be seen in wet clothing in public. Some kind of social thing she wasn't getting? Men would be imagining what they weren't seeing. Had Butch caught on to the fact she was hiding something about her appearance? Why would only men be suspicious of her? And her shirts were too tight? What did that have to do with-

Realisation finally clunked home, like megaliths mating.

The natives are physically attracted to me? She only just stopped herself from exclaiming the words aloud, but the flash of incredulous realisation was clear on her face as she looked down at herself again.

Her first instinct was to protest the sheer ridiculousness of it. A human, hitting on her? But when they looked at her, they weren't seeing a confused, irritated Cybertronian. They saw another human, one that was physically fit. And while she'd read enough to understand the nudity taboo, she apparently hadn't recognised that coverings that suggested the outlines of the body beneath could be enticing.

Every scenario that she'd dreamed up in which trying to pass in human society went wrong, it had been due to their recognising her as an intruder in their midst. It had never occurred to her that she might pass too well for one of them.

"...right. I get it," she murmured, a touch of awkward embarrassment on her face.

[Cassandra Cassidy]

Butch looked over and smiled at her. Some might've called it "cheeky". "Not used to men's attention, either?" she said, and turned her eyes back to the passing desert. "I'm surprised. A lot of folk around here would think you're a real ten-out-of-ten. At least you wouldn't have to look hard to find company."

She was definitely teasing Avalanche now. It wasn't mean-spirited, but who knew how Avalanche would react to the compliment-slash-quip. Butch might've been on the small amount of camaraderie they'd built up in the last hour and a half to help her chaff fly. Maybe Butch was a touch of an asshole - or oblivious with such subjects' appropriateness - and didn't realize how she came across.

Once more, the matter was left for Avalanche to suss over. Butch's expression was content but unrevealing. She'd relaxed a little into her seat, as if the scenery hypnotized her. A few cars passed them by, but most of the traffic was coming from the south of town, where the highway met up with Jasper. The odd house or business popped up, only to disappear as fast as it'd appeared in the selfsame landscape.

"It's quiet out here," Butch eventually murmured. Her voice was distant, the words more like voiced thoughts. She might've not realized she was talking. "Hike far enough and all the sounds of life fade away. It's nice, even if it gets tiring carrying around all the supplies you have to pack. Worth it when you find a nice spot to sit down, or a good view of where you came from."

[Avalanche]

Avalanche shook her head, breaking into a grin as she leant back in her chair, keeping the steering wheel steady with one hand. She was starting to relax into the charade of driving herself with the avatar, enough so that she could begin to find the humour in the whole situation. One bucket of water and apparently her avatar was too attractive to human males to be seen in public! There had to be other factors she was missing.

She could tell that Butch was teasing her, too. That was a good sign; the woman was relaxing around her. Maybe being frank-to-a-point had actually had a positive impact.

"Not used to men's attention," she confirmed with a flash of a smile and the shake of her head. "Up until I came to Jasper, most men I worked with wouldn't dare." Again, strictly accurate, but rather misleading. She'd long made it clear to the mecha who worked under her that making a move on her would be a serious mistake, mechs and femmes alike. Of course, she had her own preferences, but they had to be put into abeyance when the only Cybertronians around were either her own troops or Decepticons.

Did the bucket of water thing work on human females as well? Butch had been specific about men. Perhaps they required different approaches, or perhaps humans were just more strict in their pairings than Cybertronians were. They did have more complicated biology tied up in the whole thing.

The road was as lightly travelled as Butch had promised, traffic thinning out until they were mostly alone. It reminded Avalanche a little of the end of her journey from Chicago, when it had been just her, the setting sun and a seemingly endless strip of asphalt. Avalanche nodded along in agreement as Butch talked, and when she finally responded, it was in a quiet tone.

"A good view of where you came from, huh. Figure that would be a long and rocky road. But yeah, I understand the appeal. Sometimes you want to put everything behind you for a while."

A wry smile touched her avatar's lips, and she tapped the side of her head. "Shame you can't leave the stuff you carry up here behind so easily."

[Cassandra Cassidy]

"Heh - don't I know it."

Silence fell upon them once again. Butch held less tension in her frame than before, and the quiet had an air of familiarity to it. Avalanche had made a good-enough impression that the janitor's guard had dropped. Now eyeing the sandstone hoodoos and balancing rocks that towered distantly, she scratched her chin with her thumb. Nothing else was there for Butch to say, but if Avalanche felt chatty, Butch would let her fill the cab with talking.

The buildings were gone entirely, after a time. Stretches of desert road went on for miles, heat shimmering off the tarmac in waves. This was the hottest part of the day, and the lucky people that had AC would be sitting to it as close as possible. At least creatures like rattlers would be away in their dens, waiting for night and its sweet relief. Temperatures changed wildly in the desert, with scorching days leading into freezing nights.

Butch would glance over on occasion to Avalanche, but said nothing. A pensive look was on her face. Sometimes, an odd-shaped formation would make her frown or squint. She lifted her head a little when they passed by the odd cactus, as if trying to spot something on the plant or its base.

[Avalanche]

Quiet settled over the cab, underscored by the thrum of Avalanche's engine and the murmur of the fan mounted on her dashboard that wafted cooler air over the two occupants. Some of the tension in Butch's body had ebbed; where before she'd been constantly ready to shove open the passenger door and escape into the road if she had to, now she was settled back in her seat, simply watching the landscape go by.

It was an oddly restful experience. How strange.

Avalanche kept her avatar's gaze on the road, while studying Butch with her other, less obvious sensors. It had been an unthinkably long time since she'd run across another Cybertronian small enough to fit within her cab - any iteration of her cab, across all her past altmodes - and to say that it was bizarre to allow an organic lifeform inside her frame was to indulge in wild understatement. Nevertheless, it wasn't as... unpleasant as she had anticipated it might be. There was an obscure feeling of protectiveness to it; she was bearing the human safely and free from harm. And it felt, in some strange way, companionable.

Perhaps this was what succeeding at socialising with a human looked like. There were many questions Avalanche would have liked to have asked, but even the most careful risked giving away the fact she just didn't know things that humans would do. Like the level of sexual attraction she should expect towards her avatar. Surely her blank incomprehension had tipped Butch off that something weird was going on.

On the other hand, transforming biomechanical aliens probably weren't high on Butch's list of alternate explanations.

Perhaps another day, another time, Avalanche would know enough to be more free to talk. But today, the two simply drove in a silence that was restful rather than strained, and after she finally dropped Butch off on a nondescript side-street, she set off for Omega in a good mood, feeling as though she'd learned a little more than she'd bargained for.

~Fin~