Title: Sometimes They Leave Fingerprints
Summary: Leaves tickle when they brush against a protoform; Vehicons and Eradicons notice things when they finally remove their masks; there is decay and beauty in the desert. Third in my Knock Out/Bulkhead series.
Warnings: Slight swearing and fluffiness abound.
Dedication: Here we go—to Demonurfer, LM and Secondstorm for actually enjoying the two fics previous to this one. Yes, I am just this grateful.
Written also for the confessor over at dirty-tf-secrets who stated "After watching the season two finale of TFP, I now have the best crack pairing. Knock Out and Bulkhead. Why? Because of one thing KO said to him: 'You first, big boy.'" Wish granted.
-:-
I wonder how it can be. All of us quaking cowards, hiding under covers one day, storming beaches the next. Shrinking violets, impossibly frail. Our best days spent unquestioning. Hurdling into hailstorms. The rest just spent. Opposite extremes, apt definitions of the same thing. An inexplicable paradox perhaps best left in a bowl full of kibble to be lapped up by Schrodinger's cat.
-In Plain Sight.
i.
He could feel it growing inside the plating of his back after Ratchet had done up the Tox-En and Hardshell injury as best he could, but there were no words that left him in discomfort when he began to twitch at the feeling of tiny, soft things tickling his protoform at any given time. It didn't hurt him, not at all, and he didn't want something so small and fragile to be destroyed just because it had slipped under his plating with some fresh soil and drops of water at the wrong time.
He figured, from what Miko and the other children told him of the things, that it would die and he could leave it until then.
But, as it seemed, it wasn't one of those things that grew out of the cracks in any given sidewalk that choked grass and proper flora just so it could spread more of its offspring that would do exactly the same in any given garden or unwatched patch of fresh earth. And it wasn't something that sprouted pretty leaves and petals and gave off wonderful or Primus-awful smells that humans coveted and often converted into that "perfume" and "cologne" to spread over their tender necks and wrists to attract a mate.
As the weeks progressed (such a surprise, he thought, after the second moon had turned since the beginning of the notice of the thing clinging to the inside of his armor) and the touching increased rather than stopping and giving signs that the thing was dying from lack of nutrients and water, Bulkhead finally realized that it was a tree growing inside his back and that meant that he would actually have to crack open the sealed injury once more to take a look and hope that Ratchet wouldn't just burn it to a crisp, natter on about not telling him about it sooner and then seal his injury again.
…That was too much to hope for. Ratchet would probably nuke the little sapling on sight before letting Bulkhead even take a look at it.
As strange as it was, Bulkhead had gotten attached to the tickling and the knowledge that he was carrying something that was alive.
("Our teacher put a microphone right next to her homeroom plant at the beginning of the year," Raf had once told Bumblebee to help stave off boredom during monitor duty; Bulkhead had listened in while still pretending to watch an open field with nothing but a dead snake laid out in the grass and its insides writhing from blowfly maggots eating their first meal, "When she turned on the microphone and pushed it an inch beside it, the Bonsai gave off a microscopic scream. And that's why nobody touches the plants in school anymore."
Bumblebee had tilted his head, optics betraying his skepticism until Raf fished out a recording of the event. The yellow 'Bot had flinched back along with the recorded students at the sound the plant made. Bulkhead had mentally compared the noise to a combination of static and rock hard chalk just being used on a blackboard for the first time. Most unpleasant.)
Thus, going to Ratchet was out of the question….
ii.
The Vehicons and the Eradicons were, perhaps, the most afraid and unsure of the war being settled; the war being their only purpose and the entire reason they were all created. When it ended with their leader's death and Starscream's choice to just, basically, say "Fuck it, let's make peace," they were left with nothing.
And then they moved into the Autobot's base so, as Prime suggested, things could be rebuilt by getting to know each other. Many of the generals and higher ranked Decepticons got on well with the 'Bots they had considered once to be their rivals (Starscream and Arcee spent much of their time in private arenas fighting out their own personal grudges and then dragging themselves and each other, arms slung over the other with servos digging into the other's plating, back to base with verbal barbs toward each other and for Ratchet to look over with disdain for the both of them; Soundwave and Optimus wandered around the consoles in the main area of the base to see what could be done about building their own bases further about the Earth without disrupting human culture—like entomologists observing ant colonies and the honeycombs of bees and making joint decisions of whether to avoid them altogether or built safe houses made of environmentally safe materials; Ratchet bellowing to Knock Out about treating patients while his claws were still sharp as the points on a knife), but the mechs and femmes once considered just drones didn't start to feel comfortable in the least until the human children started paying attention to them.
Their curiosity was infectious in a way. Jack had gone out of his way to show them about the town of Jasper in their vehicle and aerial modes with Arcee, playing tour guide and teaching them about drive-in movies, charity rock concerts, discreet drag races and, best of all, the car washes. All of the Vehicons adored Jack for treating them all with his own allowance money to one go at the car wash each, going so far as to remove their face coverings and thank him in a more personal way that wasn't hindered by their voices being distorted and their optics being covered.
Starscream had yelped one day when he'd wandered into base after another brawl with Arcee and found the purple and silver beings had been sequestered to the main room by Miko so she could take pictures of their real faceplates and have them catalogued for her personal use in getting to know them by sight and by their individual names. The Seeker had laughed almost maliciously when Miko had found out that Vehicon and Eradicon names were mostly just numbers mixed with random letters, but she had knocked that reaction down when she squealed high and long and hopped up and down, saying something about "christening" and how the days would be so much fun with something to do. Starscream had pulled out a particular Vehicon by the name of Steve before this "christening" could take place, unlikely to be pleased if the only drone whose name he could remember was changed.
Raf was the first one in the entire base to realize that the drones were really just like the kids, in a way. They didn't know how certain things worked, because nobody had ever been there to teach them basic things like socializing, how to have fun, what is was to have someone look out for them for no reason at all. So he took it upon himself to do such things with the help of Bumblebee. He showed them how to play video games like 'Rock Guitar' and 'Celebrity Spotlight' and 'Boogie, Hop, Riot,' all of which they adapted to quickly—Miko being there to take phone pictures of three "V and Es," as she liked to call them, in particular (Starscream called them by Steve, Roy and Wayne) pumping their fists in the air when they were victorious in 'BHR' over Raf and Bee. The one by the name of Steve, with his thin faceplates that gave him a look similar to Smokescreen with hints of Starscream mixed in, had the biggest grin out of all of them and she'd framed the picture and left it secretly for Starscream despite Raf saying "I told you so" the following morning when the Seeker yelled at her for entering his room without permission.
All of this lead to the Vehicons and Eradicons taking in their environment and what happened within it, much more.
So, when the Vehicon that Starscream called Steve saw Bulkhead sneaking out of base with some of Knock Out and Ratchet's tools, he got curious and questioned the only doctor available about it…
"Why would he take my wrench?" Knock Out questioned over his shoulder at the Vehicon that still had his mask removed upon request of the three children, the full-on visage of Steve or any of the drones leaving Knock Out a little freaked out, the reason he continued polishing himself and tried not to look too close at him if he could help it, "Was he injured?"
Steve blinked and then shrugged, "I couldn't honestly tell, sir. I saw him with the tools and then he was in vehicle mode heading out into the desert. There was no way I could tell."
Knock Out used his sharp talon to remove a dollop of wax from a canister he had sitting on a table with his other cleaning tools; the fluffy purple towel in his hand being lathed in the wax before he set it against himself and the matte look turned clear in its wake. Steve didn't consider this unusual behavior for the red sports car, so he simply crossed his arms over his chassis and waited for his answer to that statement.
After Knock Out finished with the dollop of wax, he looked back up at Steve full in the face, carefully considering over something internal that Steve dare not verbally question aloud.
"Which way was he heading, exactly?"
iii.
A lot of times, Knock Out noticed, humans made things that seemed creative and beautiful and fun, and then after something went wrong, they abandoned them to the wilderness and the elements to rust or decay.
Such was what he found a few miles north of Jasper where once had been what seemed to be a rather lovely theme park that he recalled the little female human on base said was both for learning for little kids and for entertainment for teens and adults. It had been closed due to some suicidal motorcyclist deciding that the best way to take himself offline was to go out on his bike, drive the general speed limit until he was a city block's length from the main gates and then up the speed to well over ninety MPH in the direction of one of the 'Poetry Walls' for the tiniest of the humans. Needless to say the man turned himself into an ugly smear that splattered brain and body matter everywhere and ruined the park's reputation and killed any desire for humans to enter.
Knock Out would have liked to have seen that act, but he was happy enough to just look at what was left of those 'Poetry, Musical and Quotation' walls while following Bulkhead's sizeable treads in the dried out earth.
The echoes of the words kept his curiosity when he transformed out of vehicle mode and walked the same—or as close to the some—as Bulkhead's strides that turned into prints in dirt in biped mode that reminded the cherry red mech of Breakdown so much that he had to look closely at the words on the walls or he would have gone into that place inside himself that was far darker than he thought he could have ever made it, 'See this leaf, little girl, blackened under the snow? It has died so that it will be born again on the branch in springtime. Once I was a stupid girl; now I am an angry woman. Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it. -Kissing the Witch: The Skin.' Up in the lining of what once was ivy on the first wall, 'In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.-Aristotle.' And at the farthest end of one of the walls, where there were dark brown spots with the smells of iron wafting onto the light breeze and leading him to the sounds of clanging metal that had to be the big lug he was looking for, 'There was once a story about the Greek gods; they were bored, so they invented human beings. They were still bored, so they invented love. After a time, they decided to try love out for themselves. And finally, they invented laughter…so they could stand it. -Feast of Love.'
Roving around the walls and one pede stepping right into one of the prints of Bulkhead so that he almost tripped, arms waving in circles to balance himself, Knock Out found himself looking back up to find the green mech sitting on the edge of a long dried out fountain pool that barely curved into the ground and its center figure that had once spit the water (beautiful, marble figures carved into the visage of four white greyhounds circling the heels of Diana the huntress in her full hunting regalia, three other female figures with her that could have either been fellow goddesses or her ladies in waiting, baskets of flowers in the hands of the smallest figure) onto the presently dusty tiles of the fountain causing a shadow to hover over the much larger mech.
Bulkhead hadn't noticed him and had Knock Out's—or perhaps it was Rathet's—wrench set on the golden ground along with what appeared to be the plating from his back; the metal spinning, meaning that he had probably removed it just before Knock Out had set his sights on him. Bulkhead's arms trying to maneuver backwards in his back cavity for something Knock Out couldn't see.
"What in the Pit are you doing?"
Bulkhead gave a squeak that, because of how deep his voice was, sounded more like a shout and removed his arms from behind him so he could catch himself as he started to fall forward. He didn't catch himself, the tiles beneath him slick and slippery and unable to support his weight and leaving him to look like that animal the humans had shown them by the title of 'Bambi' when it stumbled onto frozen water for the first time.
This vulnerable position allowed Knock Out to see what Bulkhead had been trying to grab at inside his back cavity.
A struggling to stand tall, red organic…thing…stood at its puny height of five human feet just at the center of Bulkhead's spinal struts, yellow-green leaves waving a little because of Bulkhead's attempts to get up from where he lay prone on tiles. Knock Out's red optics followed it from the very top of its height and down to where it seemed to be spreading itself like Airachnid's webbing into Bulkhead's internals and protoform, a strong distinction between the two.
When Knock Out stepped closer, boggled at the thing growing inside of the bigger mech's back, found in coming closer that behind the carrier for all of the tools Bulkhead had taken with him, there was a china bowl that was about the same size as a spare tire filled with dark black and brown soil; the soil wet and smelling—as Knock Out was close enough finally to touch the former Wrecker—of some sort of animal…
"…Excrement?" Knock Out finally spoke up again, crouching to optic level with Bulkhead thought to screw the architecture and punch it so it crumbled beneath his servos and he got enough of a grip to sit back up and look at Knock Out it what the red mech could only conclude to be absolute embarrassment.
"…Manure, actually. When healthy and particular dirt is, y'know, mixed in…. it's called manure. Or, at least, that's what Raf said."
Knock Out just blinked at him.
Bulkhead grinned nervously in the silence until he tentatively pointed backwards at the thing growing in him, "I think it's a Redwood tree. Seems that the last time we 'Bots fought your 'Cons… I knocked down a Redwood and either one of its seeds got into a crack in my armor or a shoot found its way in. One or the other—"
"What are you hoping to do with it with my tools and the other good doctor's?"
Bulkhead's mouth clicked shut and he just looked around the fairgrounds, optics looking over at the elegant merry-go-round and the Ferris Wheel; the kindergarten slides catching his attention before Knock Out stretched out a talon and tapped Bulkhead on the forehead to get him to explain and hurry along about it.
"…I didn't want to kill it, so I thought if I took it out, planted it and then went back to base, Ratchet would just think I made a mistake out training like I do every so often."
"And you didn't realize that you could have caused permanent damage to your back struts and protoform?" Knock Out sneered, grabbing the wrench and then tucking it back into the carrier case, standing up; he got behind Bulkhead and then crouched down, servos bracing at the edges of the Wrecker's open plating in curiously and with keen optics taking in the parts of the plant that would come out with simple prodding or would require a firm tug.
"What—"
"Hush," Knock Out growled, claws tightening over the open plating before one rose and then reached over the lines of the roots, carefully plucking them from the dirt that had apparently been inside of Bulkhead long enough to provide nourishment for the plant. Bulkhead tensed when the fist root detached and he certainly would have slammed his elbow right into Knock Out's smug face; except for the fact that he could feel the medic's other servo carefully hold the main part of the Redwood totally still while he continued with the roots.
They stayed like that for well over an hour, sun setting as two thirds of the tree roots were detached. When the sun was completely lost behind the horizon, the both of them turned on their headlights and continued as the stars came out and lit into the images of Capricorn, Virgo, Scorpio, Draco, Ursa Major and the like that the humans talked about so often.
To Bulkhead it was just peaceful and perhaps Knock Out paying him back for all the times recently that Bulkhead had found him crashed in a ditch because of a skinjob and taken him back to base to have Ratchet fix him up and sometimes to have Bulkhead assist in buffing out the scratches in the red paint. Seemed about right to the large 'Bot, really.
To Knock Out, as he finally removed the Redwood entirely from Bulkhead and said, "Hand me that China bowl," with the green mech turning and rubbing the dirt around, Knock Out setting it into the hole made from such a big digit so the roots tucked into the manure, these were moments that reminded him of before Airachnid ruined Breakdown. Being around Starscream only allowed him to appear peaceful for so long; being around the Autobots was making him less aggressive when faced with actually having to do repairs or getting scratches on his paintjob; being around the children allowed him to explore that part of himself that would eventually want sparklings someday but not any time soon. Being with Bulkhead… it didn't fill the hole left from Breakdown's death with anything solid, but it did feel him with something akin to floating—or something kept him afloat.
"Now, where are you going to plant this?"
Bulkhead shrugged, but held the China bowl with the plant in the center of his extraordinarily large servo protectively, "Maybe if I take it back to base and ask Raf where the best place to put it would be, I'll know tomorrow."
Knock Out snorted and plucked the piece of green back armor from the ground, reaching into the tool box for a welder and then set to work on Bulkhead's back, completely uncaring when the large mech groaned and flinched at the tweaking of metal melting back to metal from the severe flame that would definitely scar worse and less aesthetically pleasing than anything that Ratchet would do, "Seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for something so puny. Who knows if it'll make it to maturity after sprouting inside the grime deposits inside your armor; one would think you'd have more sense to bathe more often."
"Well, like the humans say about little things like this, 'Life is a game, play it. Life is too precious, do not destroy it.' Besides, Prime wouldn't approve of killing something that could make it from nothing."
"That is so…" Knock Out paused, finishing the welding with one last heated burst near the top of Bullhead's shoulder struts before figuring the proper word, "Corny."
"I know," Bulkhead grinned, finally standing up and stretching out his legs, the wires and cables inside that had bunched up making sounds that were most unpleasant to Knock Out, but were signal enough that it was about time to go, "That's what happens when you're in close proximity with Optimus, though. Some things sink in and some things just wash off. Like rain water or whatever."
"Let's hope that it doesn't sink into Starscream. That would just be disgusting."
"Yeah, I know."
Out in the distance, among dry and tall grass that still survived in the desert, three crickets sounded off their chirps to the moon, covering up the awkward silence.
"Well, uh, want to head back?"
Knock Out snorted and, after tucking the tools into his subspace, transformed into vehicle mode, speeding off the way he had come and calling behind him, arrogant as he ever presented himself to be, "Last one back gets to explain our absence to Ratchet!"
"I—wait—you—aurgh!"
The Redwood was very, very carefully put into Bulkhead's own subspace, and he followed after the sports model, putting extra effort into speeding after Knock Out because he desperately did not want to explain anything about the last few hours to the medibot.
In their leaving the fairgrounds, there was nobody to see that when Knock Out had risen from the tiled ground his servo had for, exactly twenty seconds, settled into the servo marks Bulkhead left in the tiles of the dried out fountain while allowing Knock Out to work on him.
Knock Out's and Bulkhead's joined prints would unknowingly remain because beneath some of those tiles there was water that would dampen the desert soil and the cement dust, solidifying the prints which would survive the rain and the wind and would embrace the sunlight always perfect in the desert.
The prints would remain untouched when the two mechs came back—separately, but within the same hour, always—with the Redwood to be planted where it would grow two yards from the merry-go-round with its striped rocking horses, its growling tigers with their bright green eyes, the rabbits ready to bolt at any moment, the giraffes standing elegant; Redwood leaves and shoots and roots stretching from soil to air to sky. There to witness how the two mechs would continue to come back together more often than they did alone after the Redwood's planting.