It was early in the morning with the mist still clinging to the ground and the sun not yet strong enough to pierce through the cloud cover. It spoke of rain already and by midday it would probably pour down again.
The soft thrum of the air-conditioning system, circulating cooler, cleaner air into the room, was the only sound at the moment, barely penetrating into the thoughts of the two men looking at the testimony of human cruelty.
Will Lennox looked downright sick at the sight of the twisted metal, of the multiple parts that showed what might have been a Transformer but had gotten stuck just before his death. Once it had been a motor bike. Then Sector Seven had played God and the spidery legs sticking out at odd angles showed that the experiment had failed horribly. Caught in mid-transformation, dead before it had had a chance to unfold.
Yeah, he felt sick. And tired. Tired of seeing so much senseless death. The whole room was filled with boxes, all labeled, all evidence of something horrible.
Sam walked around the bike, looking a little pale. Will knew that his friend had been working with these twisted remains for a while now. It was what occupied him when he had time to pass, when he didn't want to go anywhere, when he needed to do this. Lennox had found a similar obsession after the first time he had seen the casualty list.
He went to a table and carefully scooped up another failed experiment, another kill, depositing it in a sealable container.
"How many?" Will asked tonelessly.
Sam sighed, shoulders slumping a little. "Too many. And not all were ever kept. Ratchet went through the records and compared them to what Ironhide saw on you. We have about two thirds of what's apparently the complete list in here."
Will swallowed and joined Sam at the table. His eyes fell on the tiny body of the Nokia and he reached out, one finger touching the charred remains. At the time he had felt little in the ways of compassion when Simmons had killed the poor thing. His own men had been attacked by the Decepticons and he hadn't been able to tell friend from foe. That had changed within the hour, meeting Bumblebee, watching them fight, dying for the humans.
"Wish I knew how to work the Allspark part in me," he murmured.
"Considering that you aren't the Allspark… I doubt you could give life, Will," Sam told him levelly. "And even if you could…"
He nodded briskly. He knew what the younger man was about to say. Lennox put the tiny robot into its box;, its coffin, he thought darkly.
"How can you work here?" he wanted to know, shivering a little.
"I don't come here all too often. Ratchet sorted out the experiments from the dead shells. I usually help him when it comes to trying out what Sector Seven came up with in the way of ground-breaking inventions." He scrubbed a hand over his face. "Gives me the creeps, though. Really badly. I mean, they weren't so different from the Autobots, y'know."
Lennox nodded. Looking at the twisted bike he couldn't help but see Ironhide, and thinking of his partner as nothing but an experiment, tortured and twisted and so very scared…
Because the experiments had been scared. Woken up, caged in, trapped, people staring at them…
They had had no spark. The Allspark had transferred energy, but no spark. They hadn't been sentient like the Autobots. Still… Will felt goose bumps all over. His sick feeling turned to nausea.
Sam picked up the list Ratchet had provided. It was the complete one, the one that had scrolled over Will's shoulder after leaving the Hoover Dam facility. The names of ghosts.
"We might never know about the others," he said softly.
"Yeah. What about these? What's Ratchet doing with them?"
"For now? Store them here. It's not like the Autobots bury their dead. And we may need them one day."
Lennox swallowed, then gave another brisk nod. His eyes were on the bike again, the largest of them. The small fridge transformer had been more humanoid than this thing, had had a head and four arms and fingers, like the Mountain Dew machine. But the bike with its spidery appendages and desperate grapple for anything as it died had much more of an impact. It was alien, terrible and scary, but Will only felt shared pain.
Being with the Autobots had done that, had changed his mind. There were those who couldn't care less about what happened in the secret labs. They looked at the metal as nothing but scrap to be reused. Epps was different. He had been down here once and left in a hurry. Lennox felt the same need right now. It was an almost physical sickness.
"I'll be upstairs," he mumbled and left, not even waiting for an acknowledgement from Sam.
He needed air. He needed the sky and the sun and the desert. He needed to be out of here.
Outside it was a cloudy day. Rain was threatening in the distance, over the mountains, and Mission City might get a flooding. Everything smelled of rain, of static electricity, and Lennox felt himself shiver a little. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and started to walk. He had no place in mind, wandered aimlessly over the base grounds, left the perimeter, headed out into the desert.
He needed to clear his head of the images still running before his inner eye.
In the distance, the darkness still spoke of rain and thunder and storms.
It was three hours later that he stopped and got his bearings. A wry smile passed over his lips. Damn, he had gotten far. The base was no longer visible, there was nothing but landscape all around him, and he still, despite the loneliness, he felt better than in the last hours. The creepy feeling of so much death had evaporated.
The storm had not come his way, sitting like a brooding entity in the distance, watching and waiting. There were the faint rumbles of thunder, vibrations coursing through his body as if he seemed to pick up the natural force with every cell, and something told him he would be out in the rain soon if he didn't go back.
Will shook himself and inhaled deeply, letting the air out in a long, slow breath. He closed his eyes; let the serenity of this nothingness take over.
A crackle disturbed him and he almost jumped, heart hammering.
"Damnit!"
"Lennox, where in Cybertron's name are you?" a gruff voice demanded.
"And hello to you too, Ironhide," he muttered.
Will had forgotten he was still wearing the ear piece, something that was a left-over habit from his Army days. Of course it helped when he was trying to contact Ironhide, but it put a crimp into his need to be alone and work through what had happened.
"Where are you?" the mech repeated.
"Outside."
"Not on base grounds."
Will squinted into the distance. "Nope."
"Lennox…" came the warning rumble.
"I took a walk, Ironhide. I'm fine. I just needed some time."
Silence greeted that statement.
"Okay," the weapons specialist finally relented.
"Okay?"
"Yes."
"Okay." Will smiled. "I'll be back in a few."
He didn't need to imagine the expression in the blue optics; he knew it. Ironhide wasn't happy.
Just how unhappy his friend had been was apparent when Will hiked back not much later. He was about an hour on foot away from the base when he was greeted by the black Topkick. Lennox rolled his eyes.
"You gotta be kidding me," he murmured.
Ironhide transformed and Lennox sighed. That expression he knew: Ironhide was about to explode in a fit over something or other his human friend had done; or not done.
"Don't," he only said, before Ironhide could get a word out. "Just don't. I needed this. And I'm not about to die out here because I take a little walk."
Ironhide growled.
"I'm not helpless, so can it, all right?"
The mech went down on one knee, facing Will. "No, you're not," he said slowly. "And I know you can take care of yourself. Leaving word where you are going might help, though."
"You were worried," Will stated.
"I was worried."
"Why?"
There was a creaking noise from deep inside Ironhide, followed by what passed as a sigh for mechanoids.
"You didn't react well to the dead shells."
That was a mild word for it. "They creep me out."
Ironhide reached out and touched the pale runes. "I can see that."
Will looked at his skin. The glyphs were all but pale shadows of their former strong presence.
Shocky runes. Uh-huh. He hadn't really noticed because he had been too busy staring at everything but his marked skin.
"Want to walk some more or drive?" Ironhide asked as he removed his touch.
"I think I walked enough."
Ironhide rose, then transformed, and he opened the door. Lennox climbed inside and leaned back against the seat.
"I know they all died long before you guys came, but now I understand it. Back then, when Simmons gave life to the phone and then killed it… I didn't feel a thing."
"Now you do?"
"Yeah."
"You can mourn the past, but you can't let it take over, Will."
"Know that."
"I've seen too many deaths to count," Ironhide said, sounding a little far-away. "The war took too much from us all."
"Wasn't a war here. I've been in war zones, 'hide. I know loss. This was deliberate. Create something, watch it die. Zap it because it goes out of control."
A hum passed through the cab. The Topkick hadn't moved yet. Lennox slid deeper into the seat. One hand was rubbing over the steering wheel.
"Shit," he only commented.
He had read the report from Mission City. He knew the other machines had been subdued. A pretty word for 'killed'. The Mountain Dew machine had put up the most fight. The airbag creature had been unable to leave the car. The whole vehicle had been confiscated and then zapped. The X-Box had managed to flee and hide, but it had been found in the end, too.
"Fuck," he whispered, fingers clenching, knuckles white.
Ironhide said nothing. Then, "Did you feel any of it in the lab?"
Will shook his head. "No. Just under the Dam. At least a little. It felt weird, like ghosts. What's left of it in those boxes… it's just metal. It makes me sick, though."
Runes swirled with more life now and Will kicked up his legs on the seat, gazing out the passenger seat window. He watched the glyphs creep over his hands. The Allspark was inside him, hidden from scanners, hidden from knowing eyes, though it wasn't one hundred percent camouflaged. The runes were a dead giveaway. He couldn't use it, though. And would he want to resurrect the dead things? They had been terrified and because of it, and aggressive. Would bringing them back change anything?
No.
"I know Sector Seven isn't all bad guys with twisted morals," he finally broke the silence. "Hide the past to protect the future, all that stuff. What they did, a hundred years ago, was incredible. It's not them who started to harness the Allspark energy; it was their descendents."
"Trial and error is the way of evolution."
Will cocked an eyebrow. "Philosophical streak once more, huh?"
"I'm only saying that what your forefathers did and what others of your kind continued to experiment with… they didn't do it out of spite. I believed your race to be cruel and selfish and destructive, Will. You took Bumblebee and tortured him."
Lennox winced a little.
"But Prime was right when he said we weren't so different. The Allspark created us, but we used its power, too."
"Not like this."
"No. But we went to war over it, destroyed our kind, our planet, scattered the survivors across the universe." Ironhide's voice was quiet, filled with regret and mourning. "I lost everything and when we finally found the Allspark, we had to sacrifice it for your world."
"Do you regret it?"
"No," was the immediate answer, soft and gentle and filled with emotions that had Will shiver.
Resting one hand against the metal frame of Ironhide's car form, the runes strengthened and there was a trickle of something, then a little tingle that grew, and Will pulled his hand away. A shudder raced through the Topkick.
"Ironhide?" Lennox managed, shivering.
"What did you do?" the mech wanted to know.
"N-nothing. I…oh…"
It had felt like… at least a little bit like…
"Did we?" he asked.
Ironhide rumbled. "No. You stopped."
Will laughed, sounding confused and shaken. "I what?"
"You stopped!" Ironhide accused.
Lennox raised his hand and slowly touched the metal again. There was no reaction.
"I don't know… It never happened when I was human…" he stumbled over the words.
Ironhide gave an unhappy whine, clearly caught off guard and left wanting. Lennox closed his eyes, inhaling deeply, letting the breath out slowly. He finally fumbled for the latch and opened the door, almost falling out. The change to protoform was instinctual and when his optics came to life, he was looking at the bipedal mode of his partner, who had transformed just as quickly.
Connections formed, Ironhide drew him close, and the rush raced through him. Not like before, not needy and uncontrolled but slow and deliberate and drawn out. Will shivered, felt Ironhide's very spark shudder, too. Then it was over and it seemed like it had lasted for hours.
Strong hands kept him from going down on his knees and Will fought the desire to change back, but his bodily needs couldn't be denied. Ironhide followed him down, kneeling again, cupping his hand around the exhausted human form.
Light tingles spread out from where they touched and Will shied away a little, though there wasn't enough room to move much.
This was new. He had never… this long… this intense… and now as a human?
Blue optics reflected what's running like jackrabbits through his mind. Ironhide was very much aware of the changes and the newness of it all.
"Okay?" Will wanted to know.
"I'm fine. It was unexpected."
"You're telling me."
Things were still changing. Damn. Every time he thought it was over, that he was about to settle in his abilities and the newness, he was hit by something else once more.
"Will?"
"I'm okay."
Ironhide looked skeptical, but he let it go. Instead he brushed his thumb over Lennox's stomach, ever so gentle. The runes on Will's face had to be blinding from the looks of it and he could bet on the blue light in his eyes again. Lennox didn't want to think of arousal at all, didn't want to call the feeling he experienced anything that was connected to human sensation.
"Home?" he queried.
Ironhide snorted. "You want to?"
"What I want is to stay the hell away from the lab and its contents, but we both live there."
"Humans are happy to camp," Ironhide pointed out.
"You want to go camping with me?"
A shrug.
"Where?"
There was a soft whirring, then barely audible clicking. Lennox chuckled.
"How about we just drive around a bit? There are some nice back roads."
"Which are murder on my shocks."
"Don't complain. You wanted to go camping."
Ironhide snorted. "You don't want to go back to the base."
"I never said so."
A growl answered that and Will jumped off the metal hand, smiling at his friend. His expression became more serious.
"That was new," he remarked carefully.
"Very," came the confirmation.
"But okay…?"
Ironhide nodded. "Unexpected, but I have to expect that."
Lennox chuckled, running a hand through his hair. "Sounds like you expect even more."
"If something happens, it does. Don't hold back what you can do, Will."
"Even if it's just making out while I'm still human?"
Ironhide rumbled softly, then shrugged.
Will started to walk back, needing the exercise again. His thoughts were no longer chasing each other, but he wasn't all that calm either. Ironhide followed in car form and somewhere throughout that walk, they ended up next to each other, Will's hand resting on the deep black fender, and the purr of the engine reverberated through him. It felt nice and good and familiar.
A man and his talking truck, he thought with faint amusement. But his could transform, packed quite a punch and… the sex was great.
Michael Knight, eat your heart out.