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.
The Neutral medic's quarters were the closest to the Medbay, a decision of both habit and sensible practice. After closing Megatronus's chassis, cleaning off her tools and putting the equipment back into their proper places, Cleaver had been grateful for the short distance.
Leaving Ravage to watch over his stasis-locked Commander from atop the supply cupboard, Cleaver had forgotten to pick up a fortified ration in her move to sleep off the five hour surgery on the genocidal mech's spark. And the clusterfrag of the last three days in general.
Stasis was set to wear off in four hours, and she set her chronometer to half an hour before then. Curling up onto the berth, her rotors just touching the stone wall, she offlined her optics and set about trying to convince her processor that it was just as exhausted and overclocked as her systems insisted.
Minutes later the door slid open, and she onlined one optic to see a familiar silhouette.
Hours. Days. Two planetary rotations in local time, by his chronometer, a mere vent cycle, but it was all starting to blend together into a riptide swirl of one explosion after another, until Ironhide could all but feel it reverberating through his frame in dull shocks and twitching impacts.
It was better, now, in the quiet of the night hours, when nothing had immediately imploded on the social or political sphere anytime in the last little while. He felt scraped raw, like his entire endomass had been chilled and heated repeatedly until the protoform itself cracked and splintered, plates peeling away like rust, but it was, for all of that, better. Less split strut broken than he had been in the wake of Optimus' ill-thought query, a little more steady for the repeated pulse reassurance of cohort within Shadowrunner's field, until he could cycle a full ventilation again and stand on his own.
He hadn't protested when she had pushed him towards quarters, conceding that his systems needed a bare minimum of recharge before he truly did do something glitch ridden and throttled on account of his processor firing at half capacity. There was no question of going back to base, not so long as Megatron - by any name - was holed up in the DMZ, not while Optimus quite obviously had no intention of leaving him unobserved, and not while Ironhide's own cohort was anywhere near the entire slagging mess. He had a nominal place in the chambers used by the Neutrals, somewhere he could work on things when Cleaver didn't want him in her space, but he'd never actually recharged there.
It shouldn't have been a surprise, then, to find his pedes in front of the medic's door, already pinging for entry before he could think better of it - glitchwit, she'd been doing surgery for hours, she'd want recharge, not his own self barreling in to disturb her.
The door slid back easily at his codes, though, and a burst of blue light from Cleaver's optics emerged from the shadows around the berth, her greeting only partially muzzy with cycled down overtones. "Hey," Ironhide answered reflexively, voice low, and then it was only natural to step inside, optics switching to frequencies that didn't require light as he let the door slide shut behind him.
Cleaver had her back to the wall, room at her side for Ironhide to ease himself down to the edge of the berth. His hands went to her, touching frame and arm blade and sliding down to press lightly against her side, passive scans gauging the tension in her systems and the reassuring warmth of her manufacturing plant. It eased another measure of the knot inside of him, even as it cranked a few others tighter, but she was there and real and safe and whole beneath his hands and he made himself concentrate on that. "How're yeh holdin' up?"
Cleaver cycled her optics back down when Ironhide's field washed into hers, swallowing and mingling as it always did. A tangible safe haven, intimate and warm. She slid the blade he'd run his hand along to rest on his thigh, sighing as she felt a few more overly torqued lines ease.
"Be better when this is all over," she admitted, tipping her helm down to rest against the scar-flecked plates of his jaw. "Reckon that everyone's feeling the same way."
Cleaver thought of Moonshot and Cat, hidden away anxious but safe. Sideswipe somewhere on the planet stewing cold and bitter, filling with a rage he would have every right to dispense upon her when he got back. Megatronus in the Medbay, unconscious and easy to kill for good, but as she'd known him before the revelations of the mentacide projects had come out and so trusting of her care. Prime in the Atrium and then in the corridor. Shadowrunner. Ironhide.
"You alright?" An apologetic grimace towards Ironhide's collar armour, and Cleaver glyphed stupid/understatement immediately after. She shifted back again to meet his optics, the shared near-identical blue lights picking out every surface imperfection in his plates. The scantest history of his war. "I know... Know you're worried, and can't imagine how glitched it's driving you having him here."
She hesitated, then the long blade of her arm transformed into a hand to curl around his chassis and pull herself in close. The quiet rumble of his powerplant was as much a comfort as the embrace. "Doing the best I can, love. To get this over with."
"Gettin' that, yeah," Ironhide agreed quietly. There was more to say - dozens of things, countless, a part of him that was still vibrating with the need to protect, guard, that counted it as right to demand why and wherefore the threats had been allowed in the first place. Another part was still aching with line twisting fear and loathing, wanted nothing except to wrap himself around her, keep at least one thing safe and secure.
Too much, not enough. He cycled a vent, trying to use the feel of it through his inner systems to still the tremors that lingered there, his hands pressing warm to Cleaver's plating. "Gettin' what yer doin', or Ah think Ah do... could've used some forewarnin', though."
It was the least of what he could say, but perhaps the most true. He tried to keep the growl out of his vocalizer, kept it even and steady, but a hint of something deeper vibrated through his chassis, rumbling through him in the ghosts of all of the tangled knots inside of him. Why? No warning, no intel, nothing shared that could have mitigated the mess - WHY?
Last Edit: Nov 17, 2012 19:54:53 GMT -5 by Deleted
Cleaver frowned a little at the tight vibration in his chassis, the tension of withheld remarks holding his lines taut. She could hear some small part twitching, a quick click-click-click that could have been a coolant valve flexing over a bubble, or a solid round knocking in and out of the chamber.
She didn't pull back to meet his optics, parse out the underlying tone - his hands were both reassuring and fixed with intent on her plates. Curling her own fingers a little tighter, she pulsed a wave of reassurance into their mingled fields.
"Thought you'd just get upset, or angry. Plenty of good reasons for both, but it wouldn't have helped anything." A pause, then: "I was taking care of it."
"Takin' care of..." it slipped out before he could still it, degrading into a blurt of static. Ironhide stiffened, plates twitching before tightening without thought to his frame, defensive and reflexive all at once.
Cleaver had stilled and Ironhide dragged in a rough ventilation, much of the hard won steadiness he had regained in the hours since he had spoken to the Prime draining out in ragged bursts of cross current charge that twitched and jerked through him. "Yeh were..." He couldn't even formulate the words properly, one glyph after another rewriting the one before in a mess of a tangle, and what finally emerged wasn't as gentle as he would have liked. "How was that 'takin' care of it'? How long's he been here for? Primus bless, love, Ah nearly took a shot at th' fragger when he came up behind Shadow like that!"
He vented harshly, letting himself sag slightly. "One bit of forewarnin' could've headed all that off. Why didn't yeh say something?"
Cleaver withdrew instantly with a frown, pushing herself up with one blade against the berth and swinging her pedes over the side to sit. The move made something pull tight in her chassis, and she curled forward to rest the 'elbows" of her root-mode arms on her knees, optics fixed on some indistinct point in the near-dark. She didn't see the faint outline of crates, half-cleaned miniature parts and tools that were piled ahead of her. She saw Shadowrunner and Ironhide in the Atrium.
"'m sorry," she began quietly, not entirely sure how to put it into words. She was used to angry mechs, and Ironhide's prickling field and sour tone now wasn't a patch on Sideswipe in a snit. But that it was the Sire feeling like this...
Cleaver shook her head a little, separating out the useless emotional subroutines for the moment and focusing instead on the logic. On answers. "Honestly thought saying would have made things worse. That you'd come in and want me to, turn him away, not help like he'd asked, on account of the bitlet."
One blade separated into a dozen long, flat parts, shifted about and reassemble into a hand already being raised to her helm. She scrubbed across shuttered optics, pressing on the aching components that had spent too long macro-focused and concentrating. The jacks from the magnifier itched. She was tired, this clusterfrag of a situation was getting harder with every passing hour, and she was really struggling to meet Ironhide's expression.
"In, repair and then out. Wasn't supposed to involve anything or anyone else." Dropped her hand, found his bright, almost demanding stare as two sharply blue glows in the dark. "Should have warned the ones coming in, though."
Ironhide forced out an exvent, reaching up himself to dig his thumb into the scars around his optic. Cleaver's field was fatigue sour, tinged with the burn of stress, but his normal response - to soothe and support - was hard to push into his own field when his core felt like brittle layers of crystal, whole but fractured in micro breaks that were waiting to slip apart.
A neural tremor of something sick slick and sour shivered through his arm strut, aching. He clenched his hand against the berth and scrubbed his raised hand over his helm and back to dig another sharp pinch at the cables in his neck. "Ah get why yeh'd do it," he told her levelly. "DMZ, Neutral, medic - yer gonna fix what needs fixin', if they're askin' an' not breakin' yer peace. Ah just... Ah ain't followin' th' not tellin' part." He huffed another exvent, engine rumbling a low note. "Matter of keepin' everyone safe, yeah? Mecha gotta have some forewarnin' for not runnin' into each other all sudden like, even in a neutral area."
He clicked his vocalizer off, looking away. The question that wanted to ask itself wasn't fair, not to Cleaver or her rights as a Neutral medic, but... cohort, his processor whispered, backed by spark. She was cohort, and she hadn't told them - had deliberately not told them, and the juxtaposition of that with cohort in his head was a jarring one that didn't make sense. "...was he here? When Ah came in last night?"
Confusion was pulsing off of the mech in waves, but it wasn't really anger. Yet, she decided. Though relieved that he was trying to understand, accept her viewpoint even if he didn't agree with it, Cleaver knew he wasn't going to accept what had felt like the natural course of action at the time.
Her dorsal vents flexed, cycling a complete shunt of air. Did it again. Braced.
"Yeah." Quietly but terribly loud, and her field crept in tight to her plates at the flicker across his optics. She directed her own away and down, but clarified: "In recharge in the sublevel. Had a camera on him."
Ironhide sat back... then stood up, took two steps towards the far wall just in order to have space to move, heavy armor plates twitching fitfully across his dorsal and ventral planes. His vocalizer clicked over twice as he turned, took another step back towards the berth, towards Cleaver, and had.... no idea at all what to say.
She said it so steadily, as though it were the most natural thing in the world - yes, Megatronus had been there. Yes, she had already been aware, been involved in the Decepticon's treatment, and yes, despite numerous openings where any number of things could have been said, she had deliberately NOT told him one slagging thing about the situation, leaving him walking sensor blind through a potential minefield that had very nearly blown up in all their faces in the atrium. That was the tactical concern, and a very real one, flagged high on his list.
The secondary concern was personal but right then, in her quarters, just the two of them, it flagged even higher than tactical concerns about base policy. Ironhide took the last step back to her side and sank slowly down to the floor beside her pedes, settling onto his knees to try to catch her downturned optics. "....Why? Why not tell meh?" He clicked his vocalizer over again, the glyphs harsh in his systems. "Were yeh... did yeh think Ah'd..." But he honestly didn't know what she had been thinking, and the possibilities that loomed up at him were uglier than he wanted to voice. Don't yeh trust me...?
Rotors twisting from the mount, Cleaver shuttered her optics at the wash of disappointment and betrayal, drawing her blades together between her hanging pedes. She hadn't meant for any of this, but it was happening all the same, and she was struggling to flag the multiple points where she'd stepped wrong and set a course for this conversation.
The simple answer to the why was curt, unhelpful and would just be shutting Ironhide out again: Because it wasn't your business. It was mine.
The complex answer was what needed to be given, but she wasn't sure of how to word it. Wasn't certain of what it was he needed to hear to understand that it had been habit and not maliciousness to keep him in the dark. Another Autobot would have told him, of course. Information like that was shared by default so that plans and procedures could be formulated and put into practice.
All the signifiers aching in his field were of cohort, though. That was the root of incomprehension, of the arguable betrayal. And that was even harder to respond to because half the time she didn't get how his cohort functioned at all.
His cohort, she realised with a pang.
Onlining her optics again, she found him still knelt and patiently waiting for an answer. His posture was deliberately that of wanting an answer, not demanding it. Of diffusing conflict. She fluttered her field against his in appreciated of that - for his patience and unwillingness not to simply shout at her.
"Not used to being held accountable for what I do," she started, then broke off with a grimace as she played that back to herself. "I know that sounds awful, is awful, but... I'm not sayin' this right."
Cleaver sat back with an agitated rush of air, blades shifting to rest on either side against the berth and support her mass. After several long moments of staring at the opposite wall, she looked back to Ironhide again. She wanted to lay a blade against his side - he was already kneeling so close - but didn't quite dare to.
"Spent a long time just me and a minibot going around the 'verse, and prickly an' argumentative as Reflector was, he ultimately followed my lead. Before that, before Kaon, before being - " A grimace of a smile framing a grunt, "- discharged from the Medical Board, was just me, Tempest and Forge. Didn't know what Tempest did half the time - was away at Vos a lot, and he left me to my own work as well. There was a respect and an expectation for space. Cohort was, more of a spark closeness than being in each others' subspace all the time. Time we all spent together was special, and cohort was always there in the background, safe and secure. It was more like a, foundation, than the structure itself."
Cleaver angled her helm down a little, pressing her glossa to the back of her denta with a wave of apology. "Been trying to get my processor around your cohort, Love, and making sure you fuss over this bitlet because that's what's normal for you, but it's an effort. Not a chore, not like that - but a processor thread needs running to remind me that you, Jazz, and probably Shadowrunner and Bluestreak run different to what I've known."
Ironhide was quiet for a few kliks, the sound of their systems and ventilations the only thing in the room. He had been trying to meet her downcast optics before - now he found his own sliding to the side, away and down, unable to meet Cleaver's gaze while he tried to parse her words into something that meant more than the literal words themselves.
A cohort that... was not, by any measure he knew, a cohort. Different ways of doing things, he reminded himself, and the Towers were about as far from his own function class as he could imagine. Different ways, different combinations, and he had told Shadow to ask but hadn't done it himself.
A cohort with... space, and he tried to imagine it, tried to weave it into the patterns he already knew, and found himself curled a little lower on the floor, his forehelm resting against Cleaver's knees, plates tucked tight to himself and the sick feel in his tanks of having too much space already. Unable to process wanting more, or a world where cohort was such a nebulous thing that it wasn't present, touchable, immediate and tangible.
The Towers had always scanned stiff to his optics, full of traditions and societies he didn't understand, but he had never parsed just how lonely they must have been.
He should, Ironhide knew, get up. Cleaver's field was all wrong, stressed and strained, and he needed to get up, pull her into his arms and be the anchor she could lean on, but for long moment all he could do was kneel at her feet, his helm pressed to her plates, unable to make himself look up and ask the questions that needed asking. One or the other, but not both. His vocalizer, when he rebooted it, was rough at the edges with clipped traces of his original cant creeping into the phonemes. "Ah... didn't know that. How it was, for yeh, back then. Have Ah... been fussin' too much? Ah've been tryin' not t', tryin' t' not be all in yer space all th' time. If yer expectin' - needin' - space--" it felt more alien than several organic based languages he knew, alien and strange in his vocalizer, "--yeh gotta tell meh how much, love. Ah don't... it ain't th' way Ah know it."
"Primus, no," Cleaver replied, quicker and surer than anything she'd said to him thus far. She slid down off the berth with no grace whatsoever, transforming both arms for the job, and set her aft down next to the red mech as close as she could get.
She found his hand, pressed it to her jaw so that he'd look at her. "No, Love. I'm the one needs changing. Cause my way of doing things obviously doesn't work any more."
There'd been a brittle humour in the admission, vanishing as quickly as it came with a lance of old, spark-deep hurt. "My old cohort's gone, and the Towers ain't even smoking rubble." She squeezed his hand, venting across the chipped landscape of his knuckles. "Got habits and processes ingrained that don't work now, an' I'm finding them by fallin' over them. I don't want space, don't want what was. I want this."
Still clasped, Cleaver lowered their hands to the manufacturing heat emanating from her chassis. "Got a chance to have something new, something better than answering to no one. Got a sparkling coming that's never gonna know what loneliness is." She shook her helm a little, optics bright with shame, frustration and apology. "But it's new, and overwhelming sometimes, and first instinct when it gets hard is to shove you out because the silence and the space is what was normal before. I kept you out with Megatronus because it felt easiest, natural, and that was wrong. An' I'm sorry I didn't think of what that could do to you and yours."
Ironhide let out a slow ventilation discharge, clearing circuits and systems before drawing another. That close, already level to one another, it was easier to lean forward and wrap his arms around her, fitting their chassis together with a close-knit pulse of love and wordless reassurance.
"Ain't askin' yeh t' change if yeh don't wanna," he told her quietly, "but yeah, that was a bit of a tactical problem." He let humor infuse his field along with the words, making the entire situation a little lighter - a rookie mistake, no harm done.
He rested his chin against her shoulder - comforting, but still avoiding optic contact for a klik more as he mulled over words. "Yeh really didn't... yeh were in separate places all th' time? Doin' stuff yeh didn't talk about?" He grimaced, pressing a quick kiss to her shoulder. "Ain't criticizin'. Ah just... Ah can't even imagine it."
Cleaver huffed a vent-shunt of a laugh, optics shuttering. "Probably like I can't imagine a half-dozen frontliners all piled and recharging on top of each other. 'm learning, though. You and Jazz have this nice, persistance to you."
Her smile faded as if absorbed into the warm metal of his armour, field humming low and thick within the natural swell of his. Physically Ironhide was as solid as his namesake, but at his core was a reservoir of lost, found, broken and waiting-to-be-forged bonds with other sparks, awash with the protective vigor of a Guardian. It made Cleaver feel... lesser. Like a fraction that had long mistaken itself for a whole.
"I'm sorry, Love." The utterance was stronger for the context, layered with a new multitude of glyphs and nuances of meaning. "Can't promise I won't frag up again down the line. Old cyberdogs an' all. But I will try. Just need some firm guidance from time to time."