30.July.06

Premature Dreamscapes

By: Sinead

Author’s Note: So I’m slacking. I have a strange muse these days . . . I really don’t have one that works with my schedule at all, so it’s hard to work with that. As soon as I’m able to, I’ll get the next in Nurannoniel’s and Lady Venom’s series going, but until then, this should help me a bit with the creative processes. I hope.

~*~

“You don’t . . . you don’t understand.”

“Well if you told me why, then–”

“Dearest, the family–”

“Oh, don’t start with that excuse again! ‘The family doesn’t approve,” the femme taunted. “Gimme a slaggin’ break! My family doesn’t like that I’m in love with you, either!”

“I can’t go against my parent’s wishes! I still live in their house, so I still have to abide by their rules!”

“Fine, but I can see what the real truth is! You’re afraid of this! Afraid of commitment!”

“Please, please, don’t say this . . .”

“Oh, I will. My brother was right when he said you were a spineless coward.”

“Beloved, no–”

“We’re. Over.”

~*~

Awakening from that dream with a start, the Maximal swung her legs over the side of her berth, shuddering. That was a memory that was haunting her. She never liked it. Never liked saying what she did back then. Breaking his heart.

Every night, she broke it again in her dreamscapes.

And now she saw his face every day, remembered it, but he . . . couldn’t.

A quiet alarm went off. It was supposed to have woken her.

Watch responsibility was hers for the next three-megacycle shift.

She sighed, and stood, dutifully walking to the command center and relieving Cheetor of the monotonous task, knowing that he was eyeballing her lithe form. He was such a total slobber-fest over any freaking femme that it was like gagging on a spoon whenever around him. You had to keep yourself choking back laughter around every corner.

“Heeey, so–”

“No. Go sleep it off. Alone.”

“Aww, that’s not fair, now–”

“Shut it, kitten. Leave me alone.”

“Darn, but you and your–”

“Didn’t I tell you to leave me alone?”

Sighing mightily, the younger bot nodded. “All right, I get it. Fine.”

“Better,” she muttered, settling herself in the stool before the screens. Before long, she was joined by another bot, one who she relaxed around when he was watching her back. Being an ex-Pred wasn’t ever easy, and there were more than a few who would love to see her doing something she shouldn’t be, looking into files that she shouldn’t have been, and generally leaping at the opportunity to try to lynch her.

“How goes it?”

“Can I kill Cheetor?”

“Sadly, I don’t believe Optimus would enjoy that kid gone . . . he’s like a son to him.”

“Yeah, yeah . . .”

Her brooding silence marred the usually-easy camaraderie-within-the-silence between them. Rhinox picked it up. “Another dream?”

“The same.”

“I’m sorry. I know that it’s hard seeing him, knowing how he doesn’t remember you.”

“Hard?” she hissed, turning to face the large technician, her expression that of pained disbelief. “It’s torture.”

Rhinox rested his large hand upon her shoulder, smiling tenderly, carefully, wanting to reassure her that he would be there to listen to her if she needed it. But to speak those words to her would be cause for her to push him away. Just like her brother. “Especially since he’s with another.”

“No kidding,” she grumbled. There had been a time where she would have pushed his hand away. But at this point in her life, with the pain she’d already endured in the war, she really couldn’t afford to refuse any comfort from those select few whom she trusted. “I want to tell him that I love him, that I remember him, that we were so close . . . that I’m sorry I broke his heart, that I want to share a relationship with him again . . . but . . .”

“But Blackarachnia loves him, too.”

“Yeah.”

“You know that Cybertronian law allows up to four in a Spark-union.”

“I never want to share a mate. Never.”

“Is that your beast talking, or the Cybertronian?”

She sent him a crimson glare. “That’s the possessive Predacon bitch talking.”

“You know, you and Blackarachnia are a lot alike.”

“I know that. Why do you think he fell for her?”

Rhinox laughed kindly, removing his hand to whisper, “But did you know who else is quiet about his growing affection, but wishes that he could be able to come clean to you?”

“Gee. Cheetor? Sorry, he let himself outta the bag when he suddenly realized that he had ‘the prime parts’ to keep a gal happy.”

“No,” Rhinox said through his chuckle. “He’s still in the infatuation stages of love. Will be for another three stellar-cycles, if I know kids his age well enough.”

Groaning, the femme hid her face in her hands theatrically. “Tell me it’s not Rattrap. I like having a simple friendship with him. Yelling and chewing each other out, following up on a certain someone’s mantle of so-called ‘responsibility’ to torment the vermin to within an inch of his life that I just had to take up.”

“Rattrap would never love you for that reason alone. You’re too much like . . . him.”

“I know. It keeps me safe, sometimes.” She pulled her hands from her face, letting them fall to her lap with the soft brushing of fine metal against well-woven synth-skin. “So who is it, Rhinox, that you’re talking about, if it’s neither of those two?”

“Me,” was the soft-spoken reply. The Maximal smiled once, then left her in a stunned silence. She watched his back weave its muted colors into the darkness of the entrance.

~*~

“S-Silverbolt?”

Turning with a warm smile that caused her mech-pump to shudder, the femme blinked a few times before asking, “Could I have a moment of your time?”

“Better not be to do anything but to talk,” a newly-Transmetal-Two’ed Blackarachnia griped.

“Please, believe me, I wouldn’t dare try,” replied the dark-hued femme.

Silverbolt chuckled, then motioned for her to precede him. She did, and they ended up outside, under the stars. Sighing, she said, “It’s all right if you don’t remember.”

“Remember what, lady?” he asked, his noble voice warm and encompassing.

“What I’m gonna tell you.”

Silverbolt’s ears lowered. “I . . . I do remember, Raeptyr. It came to me after the time-storm. I . . . I did not know if you, yourself remembered that we had been close to sharing a Spark-union.”

Raeptyr sighed, then rubbed her face. “I wanted to say that . . . if . . . we could still be friends, it would mean a lot to me.”

“I would wish that it could be more than that. Blackarachnia knows that you and I were more than simple friends before the Wars.”

“I can’t share a mate, Blot-face,” she chuckled. “You remember our talks, huh?”

“Your family’s tradition of having only having one mate.” He smiled a little sadly.

“Strange, isn’t it, that things come to this. Our families got their wishes, huh?”

“Dinobot dying wasn’t on their Sparks, I should hazard.”

Looking away sharply, the twin of the deceased bot fought to keep her face under control. “No. It wasn’t.”

“I . . . I am sorry . . .” he brushed the back of his knuckles against her cheek.

Slapping the hand away sharply, she stalked off into the twilight, snarling over her Transmetal-Two shoulder, “If we can’t have each other, don’t tease me.”

~*~

“Rhinox, please, you might know how to help me with this,” Silverbolt whispered, later that evening. He had approached the technician with an excuse that he needed to have something fixed in a holo-cam, but with hopes that the wise mystic might have some kind of insight on what the right thing to do in this situation. “I love both of them. I can’t figure out what I should do or say.”

Rhinox’s Spark sank. Not this. He shook his head. “Silverbolt, I’m not use in this. I’m sorry.”

“But . . . even a little . . .”

“Rattrap knows more about the things that have to do with love than I would.”

Seeing the truth in the elder’s optics and hearing it in his voice, Silverbolt went off in search of the other Maximal. Rhinox sagged, then rested his head in his hands, his elbows upon his knees. Pain just tore at his Spark. Raeptyr still loved Silverbolt, and he loved both the femmes.

How unfair.

Someone sat beside him on the bench. He inhaled sharply, starting and looking to his left. Raeptyr was sitting beside him, her back to the table he was sitting at, optics straight ahead, but her back slightly arched forward, as if she felt defeated. Her voice was tired, laden with tears freshly sobbed. “How can I love him if he clearly loves another more? I . . . I will not share a mate. I can be strong, show him a front that all I want is a friendship, and I will not interfere in his relationship with Blackarachnia. But . . . I wish it was different.”

He spoke before he thought about it. “I don’t.”

They turned to blink at each other in surprise, causing Raeptyr to smile and shake her head. “It’s a hard road, Rhinox. My life was never easy. Still isn’t. Complicated beyond what you know of.” She sighed, a strange, indescribable smile upon her face. “I’ve never gotten a simple situation to deal with since I was nine. And that was a long time ago. Over thirty stellar-cycles.”

“I’m still stuck on how you got upgraded when the clone was made. And that was nine weeks ago. I’m never stuck this long on a problem.”

Smiling wider, Raeptyr replied, “You’ve heard my take on it, and you still won’t believe that it could even be remotely true.”

“It’s not logical,” he replied, turning to face her.

“No, but is the Spark suddenly bound by logic? I seem to recall a human saying that goes something to the extent of ‘the soul cannot be confined by the laws nor the mind of man.’ There’s something to be said about their overall culture.”

“You and your brother both love this planet.”

“As do you.”

“But the technology of Cybertron draws me more.”

“Yet you do not hate your beast mode.”

“Sometimes. Do you?”

“Never. It binds me to something larger than myself.”

“But being from Cybertron and being created from the planet itself isn’t something to bind you to those roots?”

Raeptyr grinned to him, leaning in as if she couldn’t believe what he just said. “Rhinox. It’s the size of a large moon.”

“So Earth is huge,” he laughed. “I concede victory to you in that regard, but–”

“You love flowers.”

Sighing, he nodded.

“And you love how the land flows, without a building in sight. It calls to something within you that the technician wishes to hide deep in his soul.”

“Slaggit, Raeptyr–”

“And you enjoy watching the sunset over the savannah, or over that lake of yours, sighing over something that I could only wonder about.”

“Raeptyr, not now.”

“Please?”

He ignored her. “All right, you’re making your point. But back to logical rules.”

She smirked, and her voice was dripping with sarcasm. “Ah. Yes. How they rule the mind, soul, and body?”

“They do, and you’re not listening!”

The once-Predacon laughed, throwing her head back. “Of course not! If my brother was completely ruled by logic, would he have made his decisions as he did?”

“Mmm, fine. You have that point, too.”

“So what’s to say that, even while dead, he could have defied logic and the inferred law of nature to possess a back portion of that Spark that was put into a clone? Cybertronian’s law of nature is hardly without bots coming back to life for various reasons, as you should recall from medical courses. Sometimes they don’t even know the reasons.” She winced a bit. “Besides that point, I watched Megatron split Rampage’s Spark. It was a tiny, spit-sized part of the beast’s core, and it sparked a skin, bubbling and protecting it from anything.”

“Interesting.”

“No kidding. I was enthralled at seeing it happen, since that’s theoretically impossible. But the screams put me offa my food for a while.”

“Oh, that I remember.” Rhinox leaned in again. “So you’re saying that what he took from Rampage wasn’t a full half of a Spark?”

“Not enough to power a bot half of Rattrap’s size, nevermind one that comes up to Rampage’s shoulder. Megatron wouldn’t know about size-ratios of the Spark to the body. Heck. Even a few medics aren’t able to get it right all the time.”

“Interesting. So the Spark is too small for the body, yet it powers it to above functional capacity. We’ve seen his self-repair, we’ve seen his speed, his quick intelligence that’s beginning to really show these last few weeks, and you’re saying that he should be hardly able to move?”

“Affirmative.”

“Sounded like Dinobot there,” he said kindly, smiling. The smile faded. “Logically–”

Raeptyr silenced him with a chaste kiss. Pulling back an inch, she whispered, “No more logic.”

Rhinox sighed deeply, able to cover his shock with that motion. But he saw in her face that his eyes gave away his pleasant shock and sudden hunger for her. His voice was a whisper. “You know that someone was watching?”

“A large boy, if I’m any judge of footfalls,” she said, turning to look at Optimus. “Ah. I was right.”

“Can you both do me a favor?” the kind leader asked quietly, voice amused.

“Sure,” she said nonchalantly, her countenance that of a fully-fleshed out raptor instead of a skeletal one; a dead bot walking. While the clone was white, one human culture’s color of death, she was black, another human culture’s color of death. Her accents were a matte gold, and always glittered unexpectedly when the light hit her. Sometimes they shone brightly, revealing their true color. Other times they were almost a dulled bronze. More times than not, Rhinox found that he could predict her mood by how the light reflected off of her body.

Which was just another excuse to look at her curve-filled form. Which was juvenile. But he never acted upon his impulses.

“Not in the middle of the command center.” He smirked. “Or I’ll have to reprimand Blackarachnia for getting Silverbolt into strange . . . situations.”

“What?! I heard that!” the widow spider shrieked from the storage rooms under the command platform. She came out, looking up at the leader in shock.

“And besides,” Rapetyr snickered. “You are the one that thinks that she was the one who instigated that, ah, ‘session’.”

The other ex-Predacon femme looked up to the slightly-older one. “Are you serious? How’d you know?”

“Well,” she said, standing with a yawn, stretching her arms above her head. “He and I were . . . close. In such a regard.”

“That’s how Silverbolt knew!” Blackarachnia shrieked.

“Knew what, dark poison?” the very bot asked, walking in, confused.

“That-that . . . oh. I shouldn’t say it in front of Optimus, now should I?”

Rhinox and Raeptyr burst into howls of laugher, and the leader gave them all a deadpan glare. “I’m going out to make sure that our proto-humans are settling well in their new cave-dwellings. Don’t do anything where the cameras will catch it, all right? Rattrap was snickering over the most recent batch when I last spoke with him.”

Silverbolt and Blackarachnia visibly paled, but joined the technician and the she-raptor upon the platform after Optimus Primal left them. Silverbolt was watching Raeptyr closely, causing both Rhinox and Blackarachnia bristle. The femme in question turned to look at him, her face clear and calm. “It would never work out, Quicksilver.”

“Your old nickname for me . . .”

“Before we got involved with each other. When we were kids. Remember that time? When we didn’t know any better? When everything was so simple?” Raeptyr smiled, and it was sad. “It can’t be that simple any more. You and Blackarachnia love each other. It’s deeper than the love you and I shared. Trust me, I know from watching you two. And she and I could never be co-mates to you. We don’t play well in sandboxes, and I know that we’d never be satisfied sharing you.”

Silverbolt’s own face melted, and he couldn’t look at her after her admission that she knew that he loved Blackarachnia more than he loved Raeptyr. What’s more, is that her words rang true in his Spark. Nodding, he whispered, “So . . . we were doomed from the start?”

Her chuckle caused him to look up at her face again. It was right before his own, and she pressed a finger to the end of his nose. “Why say that? We’ve always been good friends. Why stop that friendship? Now!” Turning to face Blackarachnia, she nodded at the bot that she had once . . . and still did . . . loved with almost everything. “You two go and talk marriage.”

“Raeptyr–”

“Silverbolt, if you don’t go, I will kick you out. Literally. It wasn’t meant for us to be.”

He nodded, turned, and walked out to the gun turrets, Blackarachnia by his side. As soon as they were out of sight, Raeptyr turned to walk to her quarters, head down, but found herself facing a large, spike-encrust chest. She looked up, meeting Rhinox’s gaze. They were the same height. He smiled once more, just as sadly, and she indicated that he walk with her. For all she knew, Rattrap had hacked into the security cameras from his room. It wouldn’t shock her in the least.

Once safe from all bugs, she pressed the heels of her hands into her face, choking back the sobs. “It-it’s never fair, is it, Rhinox? It’s never simple . . .”

His hands were upon her own, gently peeling them away from her optics. “It’s never fair, easy, logical, or something that you should ever, ever try to put into words this early.” Staring at him, pain etched around her face like he’d never seen before, Rhinox pulled her into a careful embrace, walking with her, asking, “Where to?”

“My quarters.”

They were outside the door within five paces, and he opened the door for her, doing the honorable thing in letting her go in on her own, not entering unless asked. But she turned and looked at him sorrowfully, prompting him to walk in after her, closing the door behind himself softly. Once it shut with a soft clink, the hefty wall between herself and her emotions broke, but she cried silently, standing without moving a millimeter. Again, Rhinox went to her, and he brushed her tears away, his voice a low whisper, “You never mourned around us.”

“Dinobot wouldn’t have wanted me to.”

“Are you sure?”

“He told me that I was safe with the Maximals. That I would be considered an equal.”

“And you are.”

“Rattrap is a friend to me only because of his guilt that he didn’t treat my brother better.”

“No. He is intrigued that you could be so close in nature to Dinobot, yet be open to smiling and laughing at his dirty jokes and ill-mouthing of others.” Rhinox replied, his voice soft. “And Dinobot said not to worry, when . . . when he was at the end. That never meant that you shouldn’t mourn. Primus, Raeptyr, he was your twin. You have more than your right to mourn.”

“How can I love another when I can’t keep his death from my mind? Or how can I love someone when I know that he wouldn’t approve of love within a war? How can I love you when Silverbolt admits that he still loves me?!”

“But you love him so much that you’re able to let him love another. To be happy with that other.”

“They . . . they’re Matrix-slagging-matched. I c-can’t interfere with that.”

Rhinox continued wiping her tears, but reached out with both hands to guide her head to his shoulder, holding her there as she sobbed brokenly.

For a lost brother.

For a lost love.

For a fear that she might love Rhinox.

~*~

It was three months later.

“I’m–”

“You say ‘sorry’ and I’m gonna give you something to really cry about,” Rhinox warned, leaning upon his elbow within his quarters, looking over Raeptyr’s waist at a datapad she was holding, laying on her back, trying to fix something. His legs were dangling off of the edge of his recharge birth, one of his arms resting over her hips, the other supporting his chin as he instructed her how to fix a datapad. Raeptyr was higher up, her head near the top of the bed, lying upon her back. She had just fizzled a dohickey that she had no idea could fizzle and explode like it just did. And she had no idea what it did when functional, either.

“I wasn’t. Goon. I was gonna say that I’m thankful that you stayed with me when you could’ve just left me alone. That you pushed me to grieving.”

Smiling, brushing her face with his fingertips, Rhinox whispered, “You always have that helm on. I’ve seen that your brother had hair, once. Not almost-bald like I’ve been since birth.”

Raeptyr stared at him in no slight wonder. “You saw his hair? That’s odd. He was such a stiff about keeping it under a helm when around people that weren’t family.”

“Why?”

“He always had it long. Back when we were kids, reeeeeal young, our elder sister’s friends used to play with our hair. We used to have it down to our waists when we were about five.”

Rhinox stared at her in total and complete shock before laughing hysterically.

“It’s not that funny.”

“But Dinobot–”

Dropping the datapad upon an already-cluttered table by the head of Rhinox’s recharge berth, Raeptyr mumbled, “Hated every second of it. I still have blackmail holographs. I’m thinking about showing them to the clone to see if that programming Rattrap inserted in him is really in there.”

Spluttering, Rhinox shook his head, and Raeptyr pulled her helm off, letting her perfectly-straight hair fall just past her shoulders in a white waterfall. Rhinox blinked in shock at the luminescent sight. “Was it always this white?”

“No. It was once as black as Dinobot’s.”

“Then . . . how?”

“Shock, the humans say, will cause it to turn white. Before I was turned into a Transmetal, it was midnight black.” She didn’t wait for him to make the first move, and kissed him. They took their turns instigating playful cuddling and teasing, reawakening the children within their Sparks, and the mature love that had waited, dormant, for the right bot to bring it along to life. She rested her straight nose against his slightly-upturned one. “But . . . I don’t want to talk about my past anymore.” He held her face in his hands, kissing it not-as-chastely as she had kissed him. Raeptyr sighed lightly. “I want to talk about our future.”

“Later,” he murmured, smiling softly and leaning in to kiss her against her protests. “After we make sure that there’s gonna be a ‘we’ in the future.”

Pushing him back, laughing, she stared up at his face. “What are you saying?”

“Be my mate.”

“Beast mode and all?”

“Especially that beast mode. It gives you pleasant curves. I’m beginning to really enjoy and appreciate my own to a higher level, too, so it really couldn’t have been that bad in the first place.”

Laughing hard, Raeptyr lost the battle of the wills between herself and her lover, and he embraced her gently. Even as she was a Transmetal Two, Rhinox was stronger than her, and had to constantly keep that strength in check. The femme-bot nodded against Rhinox’s shoulder. “Yes. Yes, I’ll be your mate. As long as you’re my own.”

“I will be. And there’ll never be another femme that you’ll have to worry about sharing me with.” He pulled her up to sit upon his crossed legs, his arms around her waist, her own legs upon either side of his waist, with her hands upon his shoulders right where neck met torso.

“Good.”

Within moments, the room was bathed in a soft light that pulsed, lit by their own Sparks. Slowly, carefully, the separate beats of the two Sparks began to pace themselves until they were matching beats precisely. The lovers were watching carefully, hardly breathing.

“Ready?” Rhinox breathed.

“No,” came the same-toned reply from Raeptyr. “Are you?”

“Nope. I’m scared slag-less.”

“So’m I.”

They were silent for long moments, the Sparks pacing steadily, never faltering in lighting the faces of the lovers. Finally, Raeptyr sighed deeply, shutting her optics off, feeling her Spark pulling at her, telling her what she needed to feel, feeling what she needed to say.

But never in words.

She pulled Rhinox in for a deep kiss, her hands upon the back of his head. He cupped her shockingly golden face within his army-green-skinned hands, and they knew not another moment of what happened in the physical, only what happened with their Sparks.

Yet they would never be able to describe it to anyone who could ask about what it was like, feeling their Sparks combine almost into one singular being. To feel how whatever they considered intimate before was now nothing in feeling the complete closeness of their mate within their souls . . .

There were no words to describe it, no matter what language that they could have used.

~*~

The next morning, they awoke to Rattrap’s frantic yelling growing louder.

Slamming the door open was a bot they never thought that they’d see in the Maximal base without being in chains or Stasis Lock. Optics bleary from their long night, the mated pair could hardly even make out who it was.

But the voice gave him away.

“Twin . . . You’re clearly insane, but it’s . . . good to know that at least you chose wisely who to mate with.” The smile was familiar, even if the face was slightly different; a lopsided, warm stretch across his face that was always reserved for family alone. “My thanks for finding out how to free me from within that killer’s Spark.”

Dinobot pushed the door shut softly, and as Rhinox and Raeptyr stared at each other in total and complete shock, they heard him roaring that Optimus find something useful for him to do else he find something to do for himself. Which somehow had to do with gutting Rattrap.

“Well,” Raeptyr whispered, voice reflecting her smirk. “That’s an unexpected result.”

“You slagging knew all along, didn’t you!” Rhinox said, astonished. “I never thought to look for anything about it when we were–”

All she did was grin at him, then tackle him for more snuggling, sending both of them off the bed and onto the floor beside it with laughter and kisses. Sometimes . . . it was better to keep a secret for a little while.

Like the new little secret that resided within her.

But Rhinox would like that secret.

Once the Wars were over.

Yes, she’d tell him once the Wars were over.

He’d make a wonderful father.