#transformers eject

Terror transformed

             It’s 2018 on the human calendar, and this year’s Super Bowl contestants are the Eagles and the Patriots. You knew the names only because they were said every thirty seconds by the announcer, yet you still cared so little for the sports that you couldn’t even say where the teams were from. You didn’t even know which team Eject was rooting for; all you knew is that they were doing well, from all Eject’s cheering about it.

              You’re sitting on the couch with Eject, munching on a bowl of pretzels and, like the rest of the robots that mill around, wait patiently for the commercials to come on. Eject is the only one paying attention to the actual sport part of the Super Bowl; the rest of the autobots just loiter around because there is literally nothing else to be doing right now. Rewind was sitting on the couch with you earlier, squishing your tiny human body between the two cassettes, but he had left to go reenact last year’s Totinos commercial (the lesbian one, with Kristen Stewart) with his husband, Chromedome, and kept ignoring Eject and his sport mania.

              So now, there was just you and the robot that would scream as loud as Siren whenever the ball crossed an arbitrary line and moved the team a centimeter closer to the endzone.

              At first, it was a bit annoying, you will admit it, but after a while, his unending enthusiasm wore you down and became infectious. This wasn’t like sitting with a bunch of Uncles watching the game, this was like you were becoming a part of it, like Eject was personally throwing you a football and cheering for your ability to catch. It was kinda nice, actually, to be able to let loose and scream with him every thirty seconds. As Ring (Rang? That orange guy with the glasses you met once or twice) would say, it was probably something about venting your pent-up emotions, and self expression, and blah-blah whatever, it was just fun to get excited for something. It was fun to make noise and share beaming expressions and high-fives and shoulder bumps and half-hugs and full hugs and for him to throw you in the air a little bit in joy and-

Oh. Maybe you actually just liked physical contact with Eject. Maybe that was it.

              You’d never really thought about Eject before, to be perfectly honest. He was a simple guy, for a large transforming robot, and there wasn’t that much depth there. Rewind cracked jokes about him a lot, and you assumed most of them were true, but you didn’t know him well enough to know for sure. During the setup for the next play, you watched him instead, optics alight with the delight of enjoyment of something, a permanent lopsided smile on his face, hunched forward as if being closer to the screen could get him closer to the action. He had sat like this the entire game. Hell, he’d been sitting like this during the puppy bowl at noon! It was sweet, how he just allowed himself to enjoy what he liked and refused to accept negative commentary about it.

              He seemed fun, you realized, and decided right then and there that you were going to get to know him better. Start things slow, one first down at a time.

              The next time his team scored, he pulled you in for a hug, nearly crushing your bones, but it was still nice. When he moved to let you go, you planted a kiss to the metal of his cheek. It was a lot warmer than you expected of hard metal, and the imprint of your lips lingered slightly as something only seen by a certain angle of light, but you were looking up at Eject, who had started to set you down and instead stopped midway through, holding you up off the ground about half a foot away from his face. You thought for a moment that you’d accidentally crashed Eject.exe, but he came back to reality a moment later and ruined your chances of seeing the Dorito commercial by pulling you back in for a real kiss.

              He was good. Not great, but good. He fumbled (get it? You could make football references) a little too much, was a little bit handsy for a first kiss, but it was nice.

              “Goal!” Rewind jokingly yelled, summoned back in by the commercials. Chromedome hovered in the doorway by Blaster; both of them were watching the commercial, but when he caught you looking at him, he gave you a thumbs-up.

              “Wrong sport, Rewind,” Eject grumbled as he set you back down on the couch.