#soft au

• “Sometimes making lists helps me think,” he admits, embarrassed. And you’re just smiling at him, staring to make him slightly uncomfortable. Can’t tell what you’re thinking. “I’m sorry. You must find this boring,” he adds, setting the pen aside. Forgot about you because he was so worried about his people. About why this has happened to them. Would suspect the Decepticons of being involved, expect they’re affected, too.

• Shaking your head, you’re fighting to not smile. Everything about him this size just screams for you to pick him up. Hug him and play with his finials. Trying to be good and let him have his quiet dignity since other Autobots are about and he’s their leader. He deserves to be respected. Unfortunately, he’s also stinking cute and his optics widen slightly when you lean to pick him up and pull him into your lap.

• Uncertainly saying your name, you wrap your arms around him and squeeze him. Hugging him to you as you press a kiss against his head. Several kisses. Bewildered, he’s not sure what’s going on, but a couple of other bots had mentioned that their humans had gotten aggressively affectionate since they’d all ended up tiny. And you just keep kissing him, your fingers gripping his hand to play with his servos. Like you can’t stop fussing over him. Isn’t used to this. To someone being so happy to see him for a reason other than what he represents. Because you don’t just see the Prime.

• Growling possessively as he sits back and watches you ride his spike while carrying his sparkling, he feels you fist his spike, muscles trembling. And you tense, shuddering as you grab at his hands for balance, little fingers gripping him. Little shards of discomfort hazing into pain sinking into him through your field. “That did it,” you gasp, paling. Lifting you off his spike, you’re clutching at his hands, breathing raggedly. “Medical,” you add on a groan.

• Breath shuddering and loud in your ears, you’d been half scared your water would break first. That you’d make a mess on him, but it’s just uncomfortable, contractions that make it hard to breathe. Aware of him wrapping a blanket around you as he picks you up, you try to calm your breathing like those stupid books say to do. “Your spike,” you groan through your teeth, body tensing. Maybe trying to hurry things along wasn’t a great idea. And he’s trying to hide his slowly depressurizing and slick spike behind his plating with a grimace before his mask snaps into place and he’s rushing you out into the daylight naked and wrapped in a blanket.

• Stumbling into Medbay, the medics on staff look up in surprise. Not that he blames them. You’re groaning, squirming in his arms, both of you scenting of interfacing as his plating lifts aggressively. Can feel your pain and it’s putting him on edge. “Follow me,” Ratchet growls, recovering first. Grip on you tightening, he follows. Wanting a Decepticon medic assisting. Isn’t sure he completely trusts the Autobot. Not with you and his sparkling. Shifting you against his chassis, he grabs Hook in passing. Dragging the other medic after him as the mech struggles.

• Breathing raggedly as you’re laid down, Ratchet reaches to remove the blanket around you and Soundwave grabs his arm, plating flared up as he growls. And it’s sweet he’s trying to protect your modesty, but this kid isn’t waiting. Flipping the blanket off yourself, you can be mortified later. Especially when two more medics poke their heads in. Why not? The more the merrier. Feel almost delirious at the absurdity of him taking you to his medics in his panic not to the human medical building on base. Because none of the faces staring at you look the least bit confident. There’s no time to have him take you across base to the other facility, though.

• “Let go and move. You’re in the way,” Ratchet snarls, breaking free of his grip and your expression becomes panicked. ‘Don’t leave me,’ you’re pleading to make his spark ache. And Pharma shoves him, the medic’s wings lifting. Pushing him up toward your head and out of their way. One of the others, Flatline reaching to press down on your stomach and you groan to make him lunge at the medic with a snarl. You grab at his arm and his attention swings back to you. ‘Water just broke,’ First Aid murmurs and he’s tense, reeling with your pain as you cling to his hand. Knows the medics have been learning after he’d sparked you, but he doesn’t want them doing it hands-on with you as their first patient. Sees another medic, Knockout poke his head in at the noise and then retreat hurriedly as he realizes what’s happening.

• Clinging to his hand to keep him with you as much as to keep him from attacking the medics, you hear one of them saying you’re actively in labor and you’re snarling ‘no shit’ at the mech that said it. Where’s the epidural? Head turning to demand it, you shudder with a contraction so hard you bite into the inside of your cheek and taste blood. Everything blurring to a haze of pain as you cling to Soundwave’s hand and get told to push. Screaming, sobbing, and swearing at Soundwave, at all of them.

It sent an uncomfortable anxiety jangling through Whirl whenever he saw those humans outside the gates, shouting into a megaphone, decrying their government, the military and the caretakers while people with guns stood by and watched. Every time he saw them, some part of him wondered if this was the day that the other pede would drop and those protestors would say or do the wrong thing and they either got swept up and disappeared or got open-fired on. It's what the Senate and the Functionist Council would have done--what they did. "Peaceful protest is a Constitutionally recognized and protected right under the First Amendment," you explained, and he zeroed in on you, single optic focused as he took in every word. "In summary it says that the government can't arrest a person for speaking out against or criticizing the government, so as long as they're not causing harm, they're not committing any crime and can't be arrested or face legal punishment."

"Didn't they try tipping one of your guys' cars?" You remembered hearing about that a few months ago. Couldn't remember whose caretaker that had happened to, but you'd bet money they were one of the first to move into the new dorms. 'Yeah, and I think that's the one and only time those gate guards have ever stepped in. Last I heard, a few protestors got tasered and pepper-sprayed and they had to get reminded that if their peaceful protest turned into a mob then they'd be dispersed like one. They went back to booing anyone coming or going, and they've even stopped throwing things at vehicles.' Your last words were spoken with a sardonic smile and sarcastic enthusiasm.

"Uh... Whirl? Sir?" He heard your concerned tone when he didn't respond, but his gaze had lifted towards where the entrance to the base was, outside which the protestors were undoubtedly still stationed with their little signs and megaphones. They were out there most days, dawn to dusk, in varying numbers, and he'd seen some of them there that morning. 'I'm gonna go talk to 'em.' He said as he stood and began walking, not missing your dismayed little "What?!"

"Relax, Squishy, I really am just gonna go talk," he attempted to reassure you with a wave of his clawed graspers and a backwards glance over his shoulders as you ran after him to keep up with his long stride. "See? I'm not even bringing a blaster with me." 'Whirl you have guns built into your chest!' you shouted and he briefly paused like he hadn't remembered that, before continuing on with a "yeah, good point."

He might have felt a little guilty about you huffing and puffing as you ran after him, and more or less ignoring as you calling after him that he shouldn't go antagonize them, but then he hadn't asked you to come with him, nor had he asked your opinion on if he should, so you were really just doing this to yourself, and was he really at fault that you were out of breath and wasting it telling him to not do something he didn't intend to do anyway? 'Ah, there they are.' Right where he'd last seen them.

You'd never had to run from one side of the base to the other like that before, and you hoped you never would have to again, but with a chaotic bot like Whirl, it could be down to a coin toss on any given day. He made it to the ten-foot-tall, barbed-wire topped fence separating the base from the outside, on the other side of which were the protestors and he simply stepped over it with his long, spindly legs. The protestors stopped in their megaphone shouting and a nervous shiver seemed to pass through them as they--almost as one--took a shuddering shift back away from your menace of a mech. You, on the other hand, slowed and doubled forward with your hands on your knees as you wheezed to catch your breath and to your mortification you saw a number of other bots and their caretakers, as well as some of the soldiers on base, had followed to see what the ruckus you were making was about. Just your luck that the Autobot leader and a ranked human officer were among them. At least if things went south, there would be multiple someones in the same size category to pull Whirl back if something made him fly off the handle. You saw multiple protestors pull out their phones to take pictures and record your mech, and groaned when you were sure you'd see him on Youtube before the day was out.

"Hey, pardon the interruption, guys, but I wanted to talk to ya real quick," he stated while taking a knee in the gravel and grass with as much politeness as he could muster--a passable courteousness by most people's standards, he was sure, but if his old boss was watching, he'd say Whirl was being positively angelic--oh, there was Ultra Magnus now, talking in hushed tones with Prime. 'Well we've got nothing to say to you, alien!' shouted who Whirl assumed was the leader of the protest, based on him being the one holding the megaphone and he respected the man for it. Because he could feel the fear in the mass of the group's mingling EM fields, even this far away, as they began picking back up their ET go home chant. "That's fine, you don't need to say anything. Just listen. I just wanted to tell you guys how cool I think it is that you all get to do this."

The protest leader had lowered his megaphone, and you couldn't really hear his words, but you thought you saw his lips form the words what do you mean. And you couldn't look away as Whirl went on to explain. 'I mean, this sort of thing--the protesting and calling out your government and the like--that all never would have flown back on Cybertron. I mean, slag, I left my Functionist-assigned job in the Aerial Corps to become a watchmaker--something I was damn good at, mind you--and what'd I get for it? The senate had me 'punished' by mutilating me, taking away my original face and hands and leaving me as the oh so handsome mech you see before you today. Directly speaking out against them? That's the sort of thing that got good mechs disappeared for good.' Your stomach twisted and your chest ached listening to him. All the time you'd been assigned to him, you'd just thought he'd been made that way.

He hated talking about this, hated how it made his claws tremble and the need to either fight or run lift through him, hated the way these humans were looking at him. "I don't want your pity, squishies. I just want you to know that you being out here, doing what you're doing, is important. That the fact that you get to do this unimpeded is good and you should be out here telling the world about how you want things to change, because not everyone gets to..." One of the protestors put their hand over their chest, apparently touched by his words, and that left him more than a little uncomfortable. Whirl knew that if there was anything he wasn't meant to be, it was comforting and encouraging and he suddenly found himself wondering why he'd come out here in the first place. He found himself suddenly running out of politeness when he heard Impactor's voice growling in Neocybex Fragging softie...

'All that said,' Whirl continued, raising a clawed limb and clacking his graspers together loudly as his tone reverted back to his normal, chaotic self and his single optic pinned like a hawk that just caught sight of new prey, 'if you little slaggers ever go back to your car-tipping ways and my conjunx ever gets hurt at your hands, I'll be coming back out here to blow every last one of you to Hell!' And you heave a sigh, because yeah, that's how you'd expected this to go.

And Ultra Magnus is shouting his name and admonishments that Whirl only half listens to as he steps back over the fence, responding with a half-hearted "Yeah, yeah, I didn't even hit anyone." Because he really should be happy with that, at least. Then he spots you along that small crowd of caretakers that had formed and a discomfort twists through him knowing you heard everything. Yeah, he'd just laid it out for all those protestors, but he didn't have to be around them every day. None of them were courting him or being courted by him. But you were. Your opinion matters to him and part of him resents both you and him both for letting it get that way. He couldn't fight that discomfort with violence, not with you. So he took his refuge in absurdity and audacity. "C'mere, Squishie, I'm still due for a nice bath."