#ao49

Letting go of a shallow ex-vent, Optimus allows his optics wander sideways, scouring the mostly-empty silo as he gathers his wits. However, his search comes to an abrupt halt no sooner than it begins when his optics slide over to a pair of stark, white pedes.

Upside down, Ratchet’s formidable scowl could almost be mistaken for a deep if waning smile, but even from his angle on the floor, Optimus can’t pretend that those vivid, blue optics hold anything other than heated aggravation. Arcee might argue that such a look can be accredited to scuffing up the silo floor, but Optimus knows better.

Speaking of his warrior… It seems Arcee and Bumblebee have yet to return from their reconnaissance, their signatures absent when he sends out a cursory ping, though doubtless they’ll be speeding home soon enough if Miko still has her phone on her.

Bulkhead, at least, is accounted for, quaking on his tyres near the gantry staircase with his engine kicking out unhappy growls and revs, and from the sound of muted thuds on glass and muffled voices, Optimus has to assume that the Wrecker has yet to relinquish his three, young passengers. Unsurprising, given their chillingly close call.

But they are safe now, he concedes with a pulse of reassurance in Bulkhead’s direction, even if the airwaves around his big, green vehicle-mode remain soured by palpable distress.

Optimus… finds he can relate to the Wrecker’s hesitancy. He has his own precious cargo after all, cocooned between two protective servos and held directly above his roaring spark-chamber. 

You’re one of only a few humans he’s ever held, and the very first that he’s held quite so closely. Notches of a fragile spine brushes the underside of his palm, a marvel of human biology but so unbearably critical. One slip of a disc and…

Furrowing his brow plates, he lifts the barely-there pressure of his servo until he can no longer feel your spine…

It’s as he’s focusing on the warmth of your palms braced on his that he realises you’ve stopped moving, a fact that presses uneasily against his spark, even more-so when he recalls the mottled bruise spanning the width of your shoulder blades.

He almost rips his servos apart for fear of putting pressure on your injury, only refraining thanks to the very real concern that doing so might aggravate your wounds even further.

All he can hope, above anything else, is that you aren’t too injured. And that he can keep you calm long enough to explain himself and prevent panic from setting in.

“Optimus Prime.”

Which will be quite the feat, he’s certain.

Even the seasoned Wrecker, arguably parked a safer distance away, winces at Ratchet’s tone. It’s dangerously slow and measured, exuding the kind of calm that precedes a vicious tornado.

“If you open your servos…” the CMO continues, “And I see another human sitting there… so help me Primus, I will not be held accountable for what I might say.”

It isn’t very often that Optimus can be made to feel like an insubordinate youngling again, but there’s an undeniable sway to Ratchet’s manner that could humble even the noblest and most dignified of mechs. He may be a Prime, yet it seems even Primes aren’t exempt from the medic’s punitive condemnation.

Then again, laying on his spinal column on the floor is hardly a dignified position from which to rise in the first place.

At the very least, Ratchet’s threat sounds deliberately vague, leaving Optimus with no doubt that whatever the medic ‘might say,’ it’ll be said well out of earshot of the children, and more than likely limited to the privacy of their comms.

Optimus can almost feel that pair of shrewd optics trying to bore a hole through the top of his helm, but he has to brush his oldest friend’s inquiries aside in favour of tending to a far more pressing matter.

His brakes hiss like a sigh as he eases the tension from his shoulders and – tentatively – begins hoisting his torso off the floor, gears whirring noisily with the effort of keeping each movement careful and sedate.

Once seated in a proper position, Optimus releases a steady ex-vent, draws his servos towards his faceplate, and with the care of a giant unfolding his hands from around an injured bird, he begins to ease his digits apart, letting light spill through the cracks.

-----

It had to happen eventually, you tell yourself, though you wish for all the world that it didn’t have to happen in the first place.

Cracks of light splinter the darkness as the entity holding you starts to shift, like a great mountain cave finally relinquishing its victims to the perils that lay beyond it. That’s all you can envision for yourself; More peril. More terror.

There was another voice filtering into your metal prison, different from the ones you’ve heard so far, and in your terror-stricken mind, you can only reason that it indicates the presence of yet more of those titans.

On your hands and knees, trembling stiffly on the warm slab of metal beneath you, you can’t bring yourself to let your eyes wander to anything except for the horrific details being revealed dead ahead.

More light bleeds in as the walls creak apart, and though your eyelids twitch and your retinas sting fiercely at the intrusion, you won’t blink. Couldn’t if you wanted to.

How could you, paralysed as you are by the dread that sits weighty as ice in your bones, freezing your muscles solid?

Jesus, you’re not even sure you’re still breathing.

Well… even if you are, you certainly stop when the tremendous hand that had once been bearing down on your head tilts away entirely, exposing you to everything it had once hidden you from.

You thought it was terrible to be trapped…. But this?

This is worse.

Much worse.

“Oh god,” you wheeze faintly.

The heart in your throat gives a violent seize before it shrinks back towards your chest, retreating in a manner that makes you wish you could follow.

Because there it is.

Your monster. Your Reaper.

Those terrible blue lights from the cave hover just a few scant metres away, bearing down on you as though there’s a physical weight behind them, pinning you cruelly to the metal beneath you like a corpse under autopsy.

In the cold, obtrusive light, there’s no escaping that dreadful façade.

Up close like this, you can make out the darkness beyond those lights now; strange, grey apertures surrounding two rings of preternatural blue. Like winter given form and shape - they cut you right through to the core and render you helplessly, hopelessly trapped.

Not for the first time, you find yourself wondering after those men in Ancient Greece, who met the ophidian Gorgon’s stare and were doomed to an eternity of stone.

Maybe… that’s to be your fate, stuck on this slab of living metal by limbs as heavy as lead, losing your mind under the gaze of an unfathomable entity.

Paradoxically, you can’t tear yourself away, staring with wild trepidation straight into eyes that stare back and flicker minutely up and down, whirring softly in a way that makes you feel like a cell under a microscope.

And then, unexpectedly, the ‘eyes’ blink.

Barely a second stretches between the soft ‘clicks’ of metallic lids, and yet, there’s something to be said for breaking the line of sight. It’s like interrupting a curse or pushing air into drowning lungs.

Muscles unlock, all the hair on your body flies to attention, and suddenly, you can move.

With an explosion of movement that seems to catch the behemoth off guard, you rear violently backwards away from its silver face, your eyes rolling in their sockets as you throw your jaw down and let out a shriek so cacophonous, your vision ripples and your eardrums cringe inwards, and all the world seems to saturate with that one, harrowing sound.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAA-!”

The metal beneath you jumps in response, and the giant’s eyes widen – as if you’re the one who’s frightened it.

“OH GOD!” you howl nonsensically, scrabbling to your feet despite the uneven surface.

Your horror reaches a crescendo when a thin line begins to open up in its face, the same kind of mouth you saw on the tall, silver one, and for a gut-churning moment, you fear you’re about to hear his voice again.

Before you can hear anything however, your frantic back-peddling carries you one step too far. Reaching the edge of the appendage below you, your boot hits open air, and just like that, you have a whole other host of problems to worry about.

Arms flailing, you start to topple, burning through the last of the air in your lungs until your mouth is left to hang open in a silent scream as gravity takes you by the throat and pulls. You’ve seen how vast these things are. A fall from such a height may be enough to kill you.

Oddly, that isn’t as alarming as it ought to be.

The last thing you see – the last thing you fear you’ll ever see – is that unnatural face staring down at you before your eyes screw shut and you brace yourself for the impact to steal you away from whatever horrors you’ve stumbled upon.

The impact hits you far sooner than you thought it would.

Your spine collides with something solid and warm, something that dips with the momentum of your fall and brings your descent to a relatively gentle stop.

Then, the pain arrives.

Burning, searing, a shock of agony that spreads fire between your shoulders. Whatever you’ve landed on… it has to be scalding to the touch, like metal left to gather heat under the desert sun. That’s the only explanation your addled head can come up with.

It hurts. It hurts like a brand, so vicious that you instantly try to lurch upwards and off the source of the pain, but at that moment, something wide and heavy curls around your front before you can move, a claustrophobic pressure trapping your arms against your torso.

It’s a shame you’ve already screamed your throat raw because you’d love to be able to wail your guts out now, if only to detract from the burning skin on your back.

Instead, all you can do is gasp out a creaking, broken noise, arching pathetically against the surface below you.

Distantly, through the ringing in your ears, you can hear more voices. One in particular rises clear above the others, strident in its familiarity.

“-please, try to remain still. You are injured,” it – he – IT implores in that same rich timbre that coaxed you into a truck, that frightened off the Aston, that told you its name was Optimus.

Instinct begs you to keep your eyes firmly shut so you don’t have to witness what’s to come. But you have to see. You need to see or you might go mad by imagining all the things it’ll do to you.

Biting the bullet, wrench your eyes open.

And find that sadly, you haven’t woken up in your bed back at the farm, a discovery that saps your conviction that this might all have been nothing more than a terrible nightmare. Instead, the giant’s face still looms above you, slightly further away at least, though you don’t feel much safer now that you can see more of it.

Red and blue, so unerringly recognisable, a paintjob you’ve become rather acquainted with over the last few days. Silver smokestacks rise up behind towering shoulder struts. A mammoth chest made from panes of darkened glass and – God, you think you’re going to be sick.

It looks as if someone took a Peterbilt truck and unfolded it like origami to create something monstrous. You can see wing-mirrors, tyres…

Your consciousness tilts warningly to one side when you bend your chin down and realise you’re enclosed almost entirely inside one of its gargantuan, grey fists, left with nothing free expect for your head and your feet. Toes curl to cling to the soles of your boots when they begin to slip off as you thrash.

Fingers made from interlocking joints of metal twitch and move with microscopic precision, adjusting around you every time you manage to move a limb. It doesn’t occur to you that not once do they squeeze with anything like enough pressure to cause damage.

Your back is still on fire though.

Somewhere between choking on a sob and uttering a curse, you dart a brief look to the side of the behemoth and catch yet another pair of dazzling, blue lights blinking at you.

 Suddenly, that catch in your throat unhooks, and you can blurt out another shriek.

“WHAT THE F?!-”

“-Will you stop that incessant racket!”

You don’t rightly know whether it’s the authoritative tone or the shock of being addressed so abruptly by something that shouldn’t exist, but whichever it is, you find yourself compelled to obey.

Quaking uncontrollably, you slam your jaw shut with a painful click of teeth, gritting them fiercely to try and keep them from chattering.

“By the Allspark, I could hardly hear myself think with you carrying on like that.”

You can feel your heart making its steady journey back up your throat as you dangle helplessly in the titan’s grasp, your attention now lazer-focused on the wall of red and white metal snarling in front of you and drawing closer with heavy, thundering footfalls that shake the teeth in your skull.

At least it’s smaller than the one holding you, though that’s of little comfort when it still clears the height of a two-storey house, and its ‘face’ is contorted into something that could resemble a human’s expression of anger. Your stomach turns at the comparison.

It too looks like a vehicle unfolded, broad in the shoulder and square in its form, and sporting two wicked-sharp, red panels on its head that jut to each side like the horns of a devil. Your stomach turns at that comparison as well.

When it stomps to a halt, glaring at you all the while, its face stands level with the hand entombing you, your captor’s fingers flexing almost imperceptibly against your stomach.

You wonder if this one intends to kill you like the sleek, silver one did. Then you wonder how in the world you haven’t simply died from a heart attack yet.

Given how your night has unfolded so far, a nice cardiac arrest seems like a very placid way to go.

But one second stretches into two, then three, and you don’t die from a heart attack, and neither does the new behemoth raise a hand against you. Instead, for reasons you can’t begin to fathom, it appears to be... studying you, slipping metal shutters halfway over its eyes until you’re sure it’s squinting at you.

When the hole for its mouth splits open, you recoil as far as the cage of fingers will allow.

“Optimus-“

You let out a pitiful wail at the truth being spoken aloud, tears cutting tracks through the dust on your cheeks. When did you start to cry?

“- You said there was an injury?"

You neither hear nor see a response, fixated as you are on the new colossus through blurry vision, but it must have received one because a moment later, its head rocks with an acknowledging nod and it barks a sharp command, raising one immense, white arm and jabbing a thumb over its shoulder.

“Gurney. Now.”

Your brain feels as hot as your back as you attempt to piece together the fragments of information you’re catching. Gurney? A medical word. Are you at the hospital? Maybe you hit your head in the cave, and everything you’re hearing and seeing are just vivid hallucinations filtering into your unconscious mind from people in the real world…

Then again, you doubt that very much.

You’re fairly certain you wouldn’t be able to feel pain quite so acutely in a hallucination. And you’re not entirely sure you’ve left the cave either. Rapid, darting glances left and right reveal towering walls of red rock surrounding you, and when you tilt your head back, you shrink under the weight of a cavernous ceiling hanging overhead, dotted with fluorescent lighting and metal pipes that stretch beyond your field of view. At least the silver giant is nowhere to be seen…

Wait. You’re moving.

Are you?

Something thuds against the ground, and your body roars with the ensuing vibrations that rocket through the metal around you.

A hard blink clears your swimming vision for a second, just long enough to see a veritable plateau of concrete rising up to meet you.

You bark out an involuntary yelp when the soles of your boots hit something solid, and then, inexplicably, the gentle compression around your body begins to wane, and it’s with a wild lurch of your guts that you dare to hope for the impossible, that you’re being let go.   

Of everything that’s happened thus far, this moment feels the most surreal.

It’s an agonising wait for those fingers to ease open enough for you to escape, but the moment you see that gap ahead of you, that clear stretch of runway that houses no giants and no monsters, you don’t waste another second.

You bolt, like a rabbit sprung from its trap, out through the fingers as they curl away from you… But for as quickly as you move, you’re quicker to discover that you’ve overestimated yourself.

Fear, it seems, is a potent if unpredictable poison. The same concoction that lent you the strength to run in the cave seems to have robbed you of that privilege here. Muscles gone lax from incessant shaking steal your balance, and you only manage to dart forwards a few paces before you’re crumpling onto your hands and knees with resounding slaps of skin on concrete.

A soft intake of breath from behind you interrupts your self-pitying sob and freezes you to the spot, causing your own breaths to stop pumping in and out of heaving lungs until the air grows stale on your tongue.

“What in Primus’s name happened in that cave?” the ‘smaller’ one blurts at your back.

You can feel the telltale prickle on the nape of your neck as your captors scrutinise you, observe you, yet for as desperately as you want to flee, you can’t bring yourself move a muscle. At least earlier, you had the kids to help you pretend-…

Oh, shit.

The kids.

The last you saw of them, they were being whisked away by that gigantic green truck…

Hurling out a long-suffering groan, you stiffly draw one leg forward and plant a boot beneath you, using it to shove and bully yourself up onto two unsteady feet. You… really, really don’t want to turn around and face what’s behind you. But the thought of having them to your exposed back is…

Your neck bends first, eyes staring straight ahead, and your shoulders soon follow, then your torso, and finally, your legs stagger in uneven steps until you’ve turned yourself about, coming face to torso with the metal leviathans.

You won’t look into their eyes. It’s taking all of your reserves just to stay upright, never mind meeting their gazes.

They seem… much bigger now that they’re standing side by side, lending each other vastness.

Only too aware that running isn’t likely to get you anywhere fast, all you have left of courage is enough to ask the first question that immediately comes to mind.

“Where….?” you start hoarsely, pushing words off a tongue gone thick and numb. You must have bitten it at some point. You taste blood. “Where are the kids?”

The two of them share a glance, silent in the space of a pregnant pause. Perhaps they imagined you’d ask where they’ve brought you instead… Hell, you’re tempted to ask yourself the same thing.

“Hmph. That’s precisely what I’d like to know,” the red and white one scoffs eventually, and it’s too human, too clear, too much inflection to suit the robotic body. You’re struck by the very sobering notion that you absolutely should not be seeing this.

There’s a sudden whir of gears as it twists itself to one side, and you gape in abject horror as all the plating moves seamlessly with it, bending with the fluidity of a person’storso.

“Bulkhead!” it snaps so promptly that you cower, ducking between your shoulders despite how tight the skin on your back feels, “Let them out, for frags’ sake! You’re worse than a carrier.”

A new sound. Your anxious ears latch onto it instantly, clocking the direction as you flick your eyes towards the edge of the ‘gurney.’

It’s the sound of a car door opening.

Without warning, a shadow falls across you, and in a movement so fast it hurts your neck, you wrench your attention up to the red and blue giant, stumbling backwards another few feet when you notice that it’s bent to loom above you, blotting out the overheads and casting you in darkness.

“What Ratchet here means to say is… they are safe,” it rumbles in a voice you used to find soothing, but now only puts you ill-at-ease, “You are safe.”

Too wary of what it might do, you bite your tongue and swallow back an incredulous scoff. Safe. In what wild universe is any of this safe?

But then… as if to prove your doubts baseless, you hear a voice. A familiar voice, and not in the awful way that its voice is familiar.

“Finally!”

It’s the girl’s voice. Miko? And accompanying her shout is the sound of boots slapping on the ground as she belts out another whoop of evident exhilaration. “Most! Intense! Rescue! Ever! I can’t believe Screamer fell for that flashlight trick! Ha! It was awesome~!”

She’s… she’s okay?

Your heart does a somersault, torn between relief that she’s here and horror that she’s here.

Not only that, but it seems the others aren’t far behind her. You can’t see them from your perch, but you can certainly hear their eldest bark in a clipped, sensible tone, “Glad you had fun. If you never drag us to another cave again, it’ll be too soon.”

“Hey, I didn’t make you follow me through the Groundbridge.”

“Oh, we were just supposed to let you go alone?”

“Um,” the last and shiest of the trio pipes up over his bickering friends, “What happened to Y/n?”

The mention of your name lights a fire beneath your heels.

Mindlessly, you make a clumsy break for the edge of the plateau and open your mouth, ready to scream ‘Get out of here!’

Only, you’re swiftly stopped in your tracks, skidding to a halt and immediately back-peddling, retreading the distance you’d just covered when a mountain of army-green metal begins to rise up into view over the lip of the gurney.

Thousands of shifting parts slide away and slot into each other in a dizzying display that leaves you reeling, blinking rapidly to try and force your eyes to focus on what they’re seeing.

When it stands to its full height across the chamber, blue lights beaming down at you over a solid, titanium chin-guard, you find you recognise it in shape alone.

And ‘Oh good,’ you lament miserably to yourself, ‘Now there’s three again.’

The other two remain in your periphery as the largest of their group raises its bulky arm, a movement you follow with wild, burning eyes, the children below you momentarily forgotten. A dark hand unfurls, four digits splay out wide, and as you gulp and tense your wobbly legs, ready to retreat even further from its menacing stance, it suddenly starts moving its appendage from side to side.

Aghast, you blanch at the very recognisable gesture of a wave.

“Uhm… Hi,” it blurts out – you daresay awkwardly – in a deep-toned voice before promptly bulldozing over itself in a muddle of rushed, stilted sentences, “I’m... uh.. Bulk. I mean-! I’m Bulkhead. But you… you probably already knew that… Heard, ah… Ratchet say it earlier… Oh, you can call me Bulk though, if you want. All my friends do.”

… Are… Is it expecting a response? Stiff as a board, you blink at it, your jaw working up and down as you try to form words. But evidently, your deafening silence doesn't deter it in the slightest.

"I just wanted to say, you were a pro out there!" it gushes, the lights in its eyes dazzlingly bright, “Never thought I’d see the day a civvie out-conned a Con, and not just any Con, but Starscream?”

“-Hey, Bulk? Vantage point, please?”

“O-oh,” it stutters, giving a start as it drags its gaze off you and drops it instead, bending over with the same hand outstretched towards the ground, “Sorry, Miko.”

And then it stands upright again… with Miko in its clutches.

The sheer sight of the willowy girl balanced precariously at the centre of its wide palm slaps you with the brutal force of a punch to the gut.

“Wait! Please! Put her down!” you yelp without thinking, hardly believing the words flying off your own tongue. Who are you to be making demands of these things?

“Hey! No, it’s okay! They’re friendly,” Jack calls up to you, spinning on a heel and motioning his arms back and forth.

And that’s when the funniest thing occurs to you; he looks like he’s trying to get you to calm down. A pathetic breath wheezes out of you, the kind that might have been a laugh… Then again, it could just as easily have been the sound of a very aggrieved cow.

Miko lets out a snort as she’s raised to its shoulder, hopping off the hand with an enviable disregard of the perilous drop waiting below. You nearly faint when she pivots around and kicks a heel up against a huge, green panel, leaning herself casually against the behemoth’s face as she jerks her thumb at the red and white giant. “C’ept for that one,” she quips.

It’s all so funny you could jump from this high platform and knock yourself out on the concrete below.

But you swore a long time ago you’d never do that in front of kids.

Clearing whatever it classes as a throat, the ‘Optimus’ titan commands the attention of the room with that one, simple gesture. Every mouth falls shut. Every eye turns to look at it. Not even you can resist the pull of anticipation, dragging your wide, bulging eyes around to stare fixedly on the panel of windscreen making up its chest.

“Perhaps it would be best if we had a moment to ourselves,” it hums, shifting its gaze to the other two whilst it cants its head in your direction.

A moment passes where everyone – yourself included – parses its meaning.

When you do, there are… several varying responses.

Firstly, you have to slap a hand over your mouth as the nausea reaches its peak, gulping hard to discourage the vomit from rushing up your throat.

“Can do, Boss,” the green giant salutes, throwing your idea of how the hierarchy stands into disarray.

“Uh… are you sure you don’t want another human to stick around for… y’know… perspective?” Jack’s voice, uncertain and diplomatic, drifts up from below as the behemoth turns and begins stomping away on a substantial set of legs, much to Miko’s apparent chagrin. “Hey! How come we have to leave!?”

Setting aside the fact that it is utterly bewildering to watch her disappear around the corner at the behest of a green colossus without a lick of panic in her voice, you can hardly wrap your head around the fact that none of the children seem remotely alarmed by the events unfolding around them.

Fingers curled, you claw shakily through your hair, gasping in loud, ugly bursts as though there isn’t enough air in the world to fill your lungs. This is getting out of hand…

Oh, who are you kidding? You lost your grip on this situation the second you stepped into that tunnel.

“That’s good of you to offer, Jack,” the Optimus answers with a nod to the boy, apparently unaware that you’re coming apart on the gurney beside it, “And doubtless we will require your assistance in due course, as we will Rafael’s and Miko’s. But for now…”

You look down over the lip of the gurney, watching on feverishly as Jack dips his head in deference to some unspoken request.

“Read you loud and clear,” he replies obligingly – too obligingly, “C’mon, Raf.”

No…

Your jaw drops like a rock when he lays his hands on Rafael’s shoulders and steers the younger boy around, marching briskly along the same path that Miko had vanished down.

“Come… come back!” you rasp weakly, stretching an arm out after them as if you could bridge the distance between you, knowing there isn’t a damn thing you can do from all the way up here.

A bespectacled face turns to squint up at you, framed by the lights hanging high overhead. The youngest, Raf, you remind yourself bleakly, meets your eye, even at a distance. “Don’t worry,” he calls out as he’s guided further away into the blackened, unknown depths of this subterranean prison, “You’ll be okay… Optimus won’t hurt you. He’d never hurt a human.”

At least you can have absolutely no doubts as to this thing’s name now.

You can’t help but shoot a quick glance up at the towering leviathan and find its gaze is smothering you once again, the mouth etched in an eerie facsimile of a smile.

Somehow, you doubt the boy’s claim.

Your entire body rattles with a shiver, and you hurry to look back at the kids…. But they’re already gone, rounding the corner and disappearing from sight behind a sheer wall of rock and metal panelling.

If you were a braver soul, you’d probably try to find a way to shimmy down the leg of the gurney and go haring after them.

But you’re not… So, you don’t.

Instead, trembling like a leaf in a hurricane, you return your attention to the last remaining obstacle that’s standing obstinately in front of ‘Optimus,’ sending its compatriot a narrow glare.

“Kicking me out of my own med bay?” the ornery giant tuts, spiky as a wasp’s sting.

“I apologise, Ratchet,” Optimus replies in that same even tone you’d so nearly grown fond of, “It will only be until my friend here feels a little more…” Pale white pupils flick towards you for a split second before they return. “… informed.”

If either of them sees you bridle at the unearned term of endearment, they don’t say anything about it.

This…. Ratchet gestures sharply to you with one of its hands, causing you to flinch at the sudden motion. And while it doesn’t seem particularly fazed by your reaction, Optimus draws a pair of dark plates down over its eyes, lending it the look of someone wearing a disapproving frown.

“Will you at least tell me what’s going on?” the former hisses, “Just who is this human?”

“I will tell you everything,” Optimus replies earnestly, raising a colossal hand of its own and laying it on the other’s shoulder, “Soon…”  

It’s all you can do to send frantic glances between them as if you’re watching a very unsettling tennis match.

Bristling plates seem to flare along Ratchet’s back, and it draws itself up, chin tilting down. “With all due respect, that burn needs medical attention as soon as possible. And the contusion-!”

“-Are the wounds life-threatening?”

“Well! I… I don’t…” It throws its head around to give you an impatient once-over. “I don’t believe so, but-!“

“- Then while I agree with you entirely,” Optimus interjects, “I’m afraid attempting to help before establishing that we mean no harm will only end up causing more pain.”

And just like that, Ratchet deflates, the huge, curved wheel-liners on its shoulders drooping like a ship losing the wind from its sails.

“Though, perhaps…” Optimus adds, “You could tend to the children in the meantime? I’m almost certain they escaped unharmed, but… just to be safe?”

You can almost smell the palpable tension between the pair of them, like ozone in the atmosphere just before lighting strikes. It builds as Ratchet once again draws itself up, sticking out its substantial chest and working its mouth as if chewing over words it knows probably shouldn’t be spoken.

Suddenly, it occurs to you that you could have been looking for a way to get out of here this whole time while they’re distracted with one another.

But just as you let your mind wander to the dearth of possibilities laid out in front of you…

“Fine.”

You blench violently at the brusque exclamation, thrust back to the situation at hand.

“But just so you’re aware, Optimus. I am far from happy about this.”

“I’m aware, old friend,” it replies with an air of amusement.

Harrumphing – somehow – Ratchet gives a prompt nod before it turns itself about and stalks away, muttering something incomprehensible but undoubtably disgruntled as it leaves in the direction of the others.  

And finally, you’re alone with Optimus, a minnow in the shadow of a pike, exposed and vulnerable and desperately, desperately afraid.

You quail, legs bent in a readied position as Optimus lowers itself onto one, titanic knee, sending tremors up through the floor and into your boots when it hits the ground; a mountain shrinking before your eyes.

You don’t want its face closer to yours.

When it speaks… when… he speaks, that unparalleled gentleness is back, resonant and disarming, rolling through you like the rumble of his engine.

“Ratchet only means well,” he begins, and if you close your eyes, you could almost pretend you’re sitting in that cab with your head leaning against the cool glass, marvelling over the advancements of remote-operated machines, “Worry stirs his temper sometimes. But as they say on Earth, his bark is far worse than his bite.”

Feeling like you’re going to faint again, you blink forcefully and try to process what he’s saying, barely picking up on the words His, Earth, and Bite-

Wait. Earth?

Your tongue is glued to the roof of your bone-dry mouth, smothering your ability to make a sound.

“But first, if I may…” There’s a whooshing sound as air seems to flow softly from the gap of his mouth. A sigh. An exhale? Then, the corners of that lipless mouth turn up, and the unmistakable smile that follows is too full of warmth to suit a metal face, too human to belong to him. You’d even hedge to say it looks borderline fond if that admission didn’t sound so ludicrous.

“I’d like to thank you,” Optimus says.

…. Now that kind of admission is ludicrous enough to jerk you upright and unstick your tongue.

“What?” you croak, screwing your face up into a ball when the word hurts to leave a tight throat.

“For your actions in the cave,” he explains, still sporting that smile, “If not for your quick-thinking and courage…” He trails off, and you hear the enormous metal frame groan as his eye-lights dim alongside his smile. “I dread to think of what might have happened to you and the children…”

…. What!?

“But I digress…” he continues whilst you continue to breathe heavily through your mouth, “I believe I owe you… several explanations.”

An understatement.

There are easily a thousand questions buzzing around inside your head, most too risky to voice aloud. You daredn’t ask if he plans to kill you just in case you plant that idea firmly in his brain - or whatever he has knocking about up there. A CPU?

He doesn’t say anything else for a long while, long enough that it slowly dawns on you that he’s waiting for you to make the next move…

Well then.