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.
"Knowing it's junk code doesn't make it hurt less." Shadow let him pull her in, let him fit their frames together in the way that soothed him best. A part of her protested that he was still wrapped around her, when he was the one hurting, the one who should be tucked safely away amidst the frames of his cohort, but there weren't other frames to be had, and this was obviously helping, draining some of the tension and twisting fear out of him.
He deserved more, but he had her, and she would have to find a way to be enough for now.
"I'm here if you need to talk. Or if you need to not talk." She pressed in close; her field, echoing her words, was as solid and tangible as the frame she was resting against. "I'm here."
Ironhide flinched at her words, strut and mass deep, and for one nanoklik it was all WRONG - frame, field, feel, everything that had been familiar and right and cohort turned jarringly unfamiliar for one spark shaking moment.
Familiar and not. Cohort and not. Old and new rubbed raw neural sparks against each other in his processor, forcing a shudder with the sour electric feel of it, even as he bit back the sharp retort that wanted to surface for words in her voice that he himself had uttered only a klik before.
Venting, Ironhide ducked his head, managing by sheer force of will and a good bit of shifting to tuck his helm beside and slightly lower than Shadow's. Wrong he reminded himself, did NOT mean not-cohort. It just meant different. It meant he'd let himself fall too far into old patterns, things left over from an era before either of his bitlets had even been sparked, and it was no one's fault but his own. "Sorry," he told her roughly, voice thick with static. "Sorry, didn't mean... Ah'm all fragged up right now, ain't nothin' yeh did. It's just... yer right. It's junk code. Shouldn't matter."
He couldn't make voice or glyph put any surety in the words, however, not when the pain of it echoed through him - old code, never rewritten, only patched, and there had been a time when he would have razed most of a species for any one spark, cohort or otherwise. Vice versa, there had been a time when the thought of raising a hand to a Cybertronian spark had been unthinkable, worse than tearing out his own with his own servos, and the juxtaposition of those two extremes was distilled now into a gelled whole that would have been anathema to core coding - junk coding - that he couldn't - wouldn't - erase.
Archaic. Obsolete. Relic of a bygone era and a people and planet that no longer existed. Ironhide shuttered his optics, venting harshly, and tucked himself a little lower to be able to press an audial to the warm plates of Shadow's shoulder, listening to the tick and click and fluid rush of her inner systems.
Last Edit: Nov 19, 2012 17:32:42 GMT -5 by Deleted
Shadow shushed him gently, a soothing note emerging from her vocalizer as she reached up to cup one hand over his helm where it rested on her shoulder. The space they were in was too open, their frames too different in size for her to properly shield and protect him, but she could offer that small shelter against the sick twist of his field and the shudders running through his frame.
"Slag should." She tipped her helm against his, wrapped comfort around him. "We can talk about what should be all day and not change anything." Her voice dropped to a near whisper, glyphs of apology wreathing her words. "I'm sorry I hurt you."
She paused; it felt strange, clumsy, trying to find words for promises which had always just been, woven between thirteen sparks that spun the same. "I know nothing's okay right now, Hide. I know you're fragged up, know you're hurting, and junk code or not doesn't matter because it's part of you and we deal with it. We deal with it, because that's what cohort does. You're safe," safe-protected-sheltered-accepted-loved. "Talk to me, yell at me, whatever you need. And if you need to just let go," a small shift, pulling him in closer, safer, "I promise I will stay with you and protect you and pull you back, no matter what it takes."
Last Edit: Nov 19, 2012 20:04:01 GMT -5 by Deleted
Wrong, different, and then suddenly, shockingly, right.
The sound that ripped from Ironhide's vocalizer was broken, sub-sonic static in discordant harmonics of code scrubbed Basic, pure pain laced with need and an unquantified longing that he had honestly managed to forget. For one horrific klik all he could do was hold to her, clinging to that promised stability as his own protocols ripped each other apart in bursts and starts of code layered atop each other, shuffling and repatching in sickening flurries as priority was given to the things that couldn't be compromised, his own systems cobbling together a brutal triage for themselves.
It pushed him back from the edge, forced him back to his metaphorical pedes, but he was close enough to the brink to taste the lightning spark edge of it and it was a hundred, a thousand times worse for that long forgotten taste.
Let go, it whispered, and oh, Primus, he wished he could.
It was several long moments before he could do more than drag in ragged broken vent cycles, waiting for the tremors to ease. "It ain't yeh," he managed when he could, trying to put everything - love-cohort-gratitude - into the pulse of his field. "Yer doin' right. Ah just... Ah can't." Something almost like a laugh - if it were layered in glyphs of pain and hopeless anger and parsed through an ancient human 'modem' - broke free. "Ah can't. Not here. Not now. Not with..." HIM lingered in his glyphs, a pronoun that needed no proper name put to it, not with the vision of that looming silhouette behind Shadowrunner still making his fluid pumps trip over themselves.
Ironhide flushed a vent through his systems, shaking his head slightly. "Sorry."
Last Edit: Nov 23, 2012 18:29:29 GMT -5 by Deleted
"It's all right." The words, bare and inadequate and on the surface wrong, when so many things were so far from right, were tangled in modifiers that turned them into reassurances and promises both. It's all right that you need this. All right that you don't feel safe right now. There's time, all the time you need. It will be all right. We'll make it all right.
Curled together like this, with neither willing to let the other go, it was easy to fall back into the habit of strength shared freely, of cohort-my place-my responsibility-my right-mine.
"There's nothing to be sorry for." Safe, her field promised. Safe-protected-loved. Shadow pressed her helm against his. "It's okay if you just want to sit and hold on for a while. Sometimes, that's what it takes, and I'm not going anywhere. I promise."
Ironhide rested his helm against Shadow's, exventing slowly. Gratitude, his field whispered against hers. Love-cohort-thankful-needed, glyphs layered to express spark deep appreciation and the even deeper levels of cohort and togetherness that was slowly, bit by bit, seeping into and dispersing the sick feeling.
"Thank yeh," he managed aloud, voice thick with white-static that was edging into more weary than pained. "Helps... just t' hold. Glad yer here. Want yeh safe, but more glad yer here."
Shadow heard Ironhide's systems gradually cycling down, felt some of the tension easing out of him, and pushed the steady certainty that this was where she belonged into her field. Here, with cohort, where she was needed.
"I'm glad I'm here, too," she assured him. "I wouldn't want you dealing with this alone. Especially not when you're..." She nudged him gently. "When was the last time you got any recharge?"
Last Edit: Dec 20, 2012 17:37:02 GMT -5 by Deleted
The question caught him by surprise, making his vents hiccup and optics cycle a tad too slow as Ironhide tried to focus. "Recharge? Ah... ain't been that long. Duty shift? Local rotation, Ah guess, give or take..."
A check of his chronometer - and a quick calculation against local DMZ time versus Omega outpost time - turned up a number more like a rotation and a half, well over the local time synched duty shifts, but still far within his operating parameters. Ironhide opened his mouth to say so but Shadowrunner was just staring at him, with a particular Look that every femme he'd ever met must have had installed in their base code, and the half-flippant reassurance ground to a halt before it reached his vocalizer. "An'... Ah've been running half of that on combat protocols," he admitted with a long vent. High alert levels ran down system efficiency, even for military builds, clogging a mech's processor with a backlog of sustained high-gain sensor logs and tactical protocols that ate up available reaction threads. Ironhide could, when prepared, sustain that kind of state for days with careful management - but the current situation he had gone into cold, everything activated in a wrenching flash, and half a day later his systems were still struggling against conflicting off-duty and combat protocols to implement a priority flow that wouldn't eat up more than he could afford.
Venting again, he leaned his helm against Shadow's, letting his optics dim. "Point taken," he told her. "That a hint, darlin'?"
"Hint is such a mild word." Shadow clicked at him with affectionate irritation, slipping free of his hold and back to her pedes. "Glitching idiot. Go find a berth while you can still recognize one."
She leaned against him, warmth pulsing through her field as she weighed the situation. Steady enough, she decided; the waves of sick horror which had been coming off him had faded to a lingering unease, and that could easily be blamed on the need for a few hours to recharge and defrag. And while she was still not thrilled to be leaving him alone, she didn't doubt he'd rest easier knowing the situation was being monitored.
One hand settled on his shoulder, comfort and reassurance along with a gentle nudge. "Go get some recharge. I can handle things for a few hours."
Ironhide leaned into Shadow's touch, then transmuted the motion into a slow, creaking rise to his pedes, exventing heavily. "Ah hear yeh, bitlet," he agreed, affirmation and compliance in his glyphs.
Easy to rest his helm against hers for a long moment, but it didn't get him up and moving, and her nudge prompted him back into motion. "Alright, Ah'm goin'... comm me, if there's anythin'. Yeh will, right?" Shadow pulsed an affirmative at him and Ironhide throttled back the rest of his systems that wanted to try to cycle back up to alert levels. "Okay. Trust yeh for this." The proper response - the real response - stuck in his vocalizer and down in his tanks, in levels that couldn't and wouldn't let go but could be suppressed for the sake of a few hours of spinning first level systems down for defrag.
Ironhide reached out to gather her close for one more moment, field tangled and threaded through the comfort of hers, then reluctantly withdrew. "Alright. Just for a few hours. An' yeh give a yell if anythin' else comes up," he rumbled. Shadow gave him another Look, one drawn straight from the textbook of 'how to wrangle recalcitrant cohort', and he huffed a weak laugh and pushed away from the wall, wavering slightly but keeping his feet. "There. See? Ah'm going, Ah'm going."
A few hours, with cohort on watch. It was... possible. Ironhide drew in a deeper ventilation and pushed one pede in front of the other, heading for the DMZ quarters.