#databuffering

Rampage had never met a sparkling in his life.

He didn’t know where they came from. He barely knew they existed. So when he and Depth Charge had one on the way… the whole thing was a learning experience.

It was a novelty, at first. The entire time they were waiting for Whiptail to emerge, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. What would she be like? What sort of alt mode would she have? Would she automatically gain a beast mode? How long would it take her to grow? Would she like him?

Then she made her appearance. The novelty wore off very quickly, replaced by a very different set of questions that he just hadn’t thought to ask before.

“What do we feed her?” he asked, the thought hitting him hard and with a small amount of panic. She was so small, so impossibly tiny, and he was starting to feel like there was no possible way she would even make it to adulthood. She was still mostly a blob at this point, and the entirety of her fit into the palm of his hand. He could sit on her. He could crush her by accident. It would be so easy.

The thought terrified him, but here he was, with an infant, and he didn’t even know what infants ate.

Depth Charge placed a hand on Rampage’s leg, squeezing it comfortingly. He tasted calm. Rampage tried to focus on that. There was that underlying hint of worry that had been there since they’d first realized she was coming, but it wasn’t any worse now than it had been. “It’s not hard,” Depth Charge said.

He took Rampage’s other hand in both of his and flipped it over, revealing Rampage’s wrist. He traced the joint there.

“There’s a mechanism here that you have to activate,” Depth Charge said. 

Rampage looked at him, confused, and flexed his wrist. Nothing happened. “How?”

Depth Charge turned his own hand around and showed Rampage his wrist, and sure enough, a little tube popped out, pointing up toward his hand. “Like that.”

Rampage stared at his own hand, trying to figure out how he was supposed to make this happen when he’d spent his whole life up to this point not knowing about it. What if he just didn’t have that part? But he gave it a shot, groping blindly through his command routines, and finally found the correct one. Sure enough, the little tube popped out, just like Depth Charge’s. 

He smiled at Depth Charge.

“Good. Whenever she’s hungry, we’ll give her that,” Depth Charge said. “She drinks energon we’ve already filtered down for her, so we’ll have to make sure we’re getting enough ourselves.

Hesitantly, Rampage tried it. He brought his arm to Whiptail (so small, so impossibly small), and gently guided the little rubber tube into her mouth. It took her a moment to figure it out, and in that moment, Rampage worried she wasn’t going to be able to do it, or that he was doing something wrong, or that she wouldn’t want energon from him, but in the next she took it in her mouth and started to nurse.

Relief and fondness flooded Rampage. She was eating!

"How’d you know how to do that?” Rampage asked. “I thought you’d never taken care of a sparkling.”

“Movies,” Depth Charge admitted. His voice got a little softer as he leaned over Rampage to watch their daughter eat her first meal. “I know we don’t really know what we’re doing, but we’ll figure it out. You don’t have to worry.”

Well, Rampage was still going to. And so was Depth Charge. But it made him feel a little better. He hadn’t just been thrown into the deep end with this tiny creature to take care of—he was in the deep end with Depth Charge right next to him.

Of course, there were other questions, too.

“When will she learn to talk?” he wanted to know, which Depth Charge didn’t have an answer to. 

“Why don’t they come out with legs? It seems impractical,” he said, poking at her very active but not very useful protoform. She made little sounds of laughter whenever he did, so he wasn’t planning on stopping any time soon. Depth Charge didn’t know the answer to that, either. 

And then. 

“Why won’t she stop crying?” Rampage groaned, after having his recharge cycle interrupted for the fourth time that night. Depth Charge had already fed her, and she was refusing more food, so that wasn’t the problem. They’d tried to make sure she was comfortable. She was right between them, since being separated upset her. They’d done everything Rampage knew how to make her happy, and none of it was working.

“I don’t know,” Depth Charge sighed, throwing an arm over his face. “I think they just do that sometimes.”

That was not the answer Rampage wanted to hear. He dragged himself to a sitting position and picked her up in the hopes that cradling her close to his chest would calm her. He tried gently bouncing her, and that seemed to work for a moment, but then she screamed louder than she had before. Rampage didn’t know what to do.

Slowly, Depth Charge rolled up and onto his feet. “I’ll take her,” he grunted, holding out his hand. Rampage didn’t know what he was planning on doing with her, but at that point he was so tired he didn’t even wonder. He just deposited the formless sparkling into his hand.

Depth Charge walked out of the room. Rampage heard the screaming fade with distance and sighed in relief. He didn’t even remember lying back down. One moment he was awake, and then he was out.

He woke some time later, feeling reasonably well-rested, and came to the startling realization that he was alone. It took him a moment to remember that Depth Charge had taken Whiptail and left, but the fact that he hadn’t come back yet… Rampage got to his feet and started to search.

He didn’t have to look for long. Depth Charge was close to the mouth of the underwater cave they’d made a home out of. He walked on the ocean floor, slowly swaying Whiptail from side to side. Notably, she wasn’t screaming.

“How did you do that?” Rampage asked once he’d gotten closer, in a hushed tone.

“We just walked until she started to recharge again,” Depth Charge said, turning to face him. “If I stop too long, she wakes up.”

Which meant they’d been walking for hours. “Want me to take over?” Rampage asked.

“Yes,” Depth Charge admitted. He had to be dead tired. He wasn’t getting any more recharge time than Rampage was, and one could argue he needed it more, not being immortal. But he’d still taken her, so Rampage could rest. Rampage was seized with an untamable feeling of affection that got his spark in a vice grip. He pulled Depth Charge into a loose hug, nuzzling their faces together tenderly.

“You’re really good,” Rampage told him, and ever so gently plucked their daughter out of his hand. She twitched, and for a moment he was sure she was going to wake up, but she settled back down in her other parent’s palm quickly enough.

“Thanks,” Depth Charge said, and Rampage could detect just the slightest twinge of fond amusement underneath the exhaustion. He turned and trudged back up to the air pocket their cave was in, and Rampage took over the duty of walking around while swaying Whiptail from side to side.

She’d gotten a little bigger, but still wasn’t any more defined than she had been. Depth Charge said she’d grow limbs eventually, and would form armor, but he wasn’t sure how long it would take, and Rampage hadn’t seen any evidence of this yet. 

She was still so little. Sometimes Rampage just wanted to stare at her forever, and he indulged himself now, since there was nothing else for him to do. He hadn’t known he could feel like this about anything, and he didn’t know exactly what it meant or where it came from, but he knew that she’d only been in his life for a little while and he couldn’t imagine it without her.