AN: waves sheepishly bookworm here, first TF fic. I got prompted to post this from the TF:Ani LJ site so...shrugs Enjoy? I don't own anything except the idea, including the title (or, for that matter, the summary) as they are taken from JRR Tolkien's "The Hobbit". Which autobot is talking is up for interpretation. But it's probably Bumblebee. Well. It is in my head anyway. Any critique welcome.
This thing all things devours
bookworm
The first time he saw her, he couldn't believe how small she was. So fragile, and yet so full of life. She blazed into their lives with all the force of a tiny rocket, and before long it was as if she had always been there.
As the years went by her energy never faded, even as experience taught her caution. Without realising it, her smile & cheery chatter became a fixture of his daily routine, and when her schooling began to take her away, he found that he missed it.
Time passed, and although she never stopped visiting, the time she spent away became more pronounced, and he learnt to anticipate all the more keenly her visits with them. It came as a shock the day he realised that it had been years since he had been able to fit her easily in one hand, although she continued to seek his shoulders as a perch.
Time moved forwards again without him seeming to realise it, and suddenly she was free to spend time with them again, this time in an official capacity. This time he found that her energy was better focused, but the blazing spirit that had caught their eyes all those years ago had never dimmed.
The next years passed by too quickly, blurs of brilliant memories, where every minute, every second was at once too slow and over too fast, focused through a human lens. And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, her energy at last began to wane. Oh, the smiles were as cheerful as ever, and her curious chatter had never slowed, but she was more likely now to cheer from the sidelines, or even not follow them into battle at all. The day he noticed her hair was more white than red, he realised, for the first time, how impermanent their bond was.
The last time he saw her, she was almost the same height as when they had first begun to part, so bent with age was she. Time had taken her agility, robbing her of her favourite perch on his shoulders, and her eyesight now was failing, although her hearing was as good as ever. Responding to her imperious gesture, he picked her up one last time, allowing her to reach as far as she could to give him a hug.
"Goodbye". She told him "Thank you."
end