Title: Miscommunication

Description: "Metamorphosis" side story. Mirage is confused as to why DB can't speak properly.

Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers. That's why this is fanfiction. All original characters are not to be used without permission, which I will probably give if asked nicely.

Author's notes: Actually wrote this about a year ago and dusted it off tonight. First time writing in waaaaaaay too long. My writing muscle is soooore ...

Miscommunication

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
- Maya Angelou

Light, careful footsteps alerted Mirage to pause before his next shot. With his audial receivers turned nearly all the way down to compensate for the noise in the shooting range, he had felt rather than heard the rhythmic tapping vibrating through the floor. He might not have noticed such a thing with the gunfire pounding all around, but this particular noise had become a familiar source of anxiety over the past orn.

Sighting the target again down the barrel of his rifle, Mirage opened a comm line.

::Ratchet. She's out again.::

::OH FOR—::

The connection terminated abruptly. Ignoring the small vibrations that continued to approach, Mirage checked his targeting program and locked on, preparing to deliver a quick barrage of shots dead centre of the dummy's "spark". His dummy, as always, was half again as far away as the other targets. The only Autobot besides himself who could shoot at that range with any accuracy was Bluestreak, and the Datsun's scores were always playing leapfrog with Mirage's. The spy's finger tightened on the trigger.

A ghostly touch on his arm made him jerk, the shot went wide and half the automatic barrage was delivered into his neighbour's target dummy, shredding the thing nearly in half and prompting an indignant "Hey!" from Trailbreaker.

Mirage slammed the safety on the rifle before allowing himself to react further. The touch had recoiled at the sound of the shooting, and its source was staring at him from a few paces away with big, round optics. The tiny green femme looked thoroughly shocked, staring between him and her outstretched hand as if the contact between them had caused the offending noise. The curved panels on her back quivered once.

He felt his engine churn. He had begun to hear the sound of her footsteps trailing him around the Ark so often of late that at first he thought he was losing his mind. Every time she would appear, he would call Ratchet and the medic would come to drag her away. It usually wouldn't be more than a day before she was back again. Once it had been less than an hour. But this ... this was the first time she had dared to come close enough to touch him.

By now, some of the others in the shooting range had noticed her presence and the noise level was dropping as they paused their activity. Some called out a greeting, another laughed ("She got you that time, Mirage!") and the rest turned away, uninterested, and resumed firing at their targets. The femme didn't acknowledge any of them. She looked up at Mirage and made a quiet chirping noise.

"Er, hello," the spy answered awkwardly. Those odd sounds were all he ever heard her make. She had a vocalizer, but no one knew if she was actually programmed to talk or if she even had the capacity to understand anything that was said to her.

She chirped again, higher-pitched and a little more musical. It sounded almost inquisitive.

"You aren't supposed to be here, you know," he told her. "It's ... dangerous." The words seemed to fall flat on the floor between them.

The little femme tentatively put one green and grey foot forward. When Mirage made no reaction, she took another step closer. The larger mech felt an urge to move back, but in the confines of the shooting lane there wasn't really anywhere to go. Another step brought her firmly into what he considered his personal space, and he stood awkwardly pressed against the plexiglass barrier with his rifle held away from her.

The top of her head, with its mess of silver-cased cables and pointy chevron, came to just below his elbow joint. Her tiny green and silver hands stretched out, hesitated, and then pressed delicately against his armoured forearm.

Realizing there would be no sudden explosion of gunfire this time, her face split into a grin and she emitted a burst of rapid high-pitched noises not unlike a piece of medical equipment gone haywire or a timer going off. Just as his processor made that abstract connection, the noise shifted into the lower hum of an automatic drill, then segued into a series of sharp mechanical clicks ... the sound of someone using a socket wrench.

Is that what she does, he mused. Rather than making words, she used her vocalizer to imitate sounds that she might hear in Ratchet's medbay or Wheeljack's workshop? He wondered if after this she'd ever try to simulate the sound of his rifle going off. The thought made his mouth twitch.

Predictably, Ratchet's entrance into the shooting range was made more dramatic by him somehow managing to slam open the automatic sliding door with an audio-shattering crash, and by the startled sound of a clipped alarm klaxon that burst out of the femme's vocalizer when he did so. Wheeljack trailed in behind the storm of white and red medic, looking surprisingly anxious.

Ratchet made a straight line for Mirage. "Is she alright? Did anything happen?"

"Nothing. She's fine," the spy stammered, perplexed.

Wasting no time, Ratchet plucked the tiny femme off Mirage's arm and held her at arm's length. His optics flickered rapidly as he did a quick, thorough scan of her systems. Finding Mirage's words to be true he rounded on the blue racer, those same optics glaring from under his grey chevron like twin solar storms.

"Of all the fragging places she could follow you to!" he snarled. "Why did you let her stay in here? Are you daft?"

"I didn't ..."

"What if she had run out into the firing lane, hmm? Did you think about that? Primus!"

His fuel tank gave a sudden lurch. Ratchet was right, of course. He should have taken her out of there immediately. What had he been thinking?

"And you!" the medic turned on Wheeljack and shoved the squirming handful of green bike-femme into the engineer's arms. "If you can't watch her when you say you are going to watch her, then put her in stasis or something!"

There was absolute silence in the shooting range as Ratchet's angry footsteps pounded out, slamming the poor (and slightly mangled) automatic door shut again. Mirage was glad his audios had still been dialed down. Someone cleared their vocalizer and shuffled their feet, and one by one the rest of the room turned back to its own business. Muffled firing started up again on the far end of the range.

With a long suffering sigh, Wheeljack set the little femme on her feet. "Sorry about that," he told Mirage. "I got carried away with this plasma dynamic converter and well ... she kinda slipped out the door when I wasn't lookin'."

Mirage couldn't help feeling badly himself. The femme's whole demeanour seemed to have collapsed inward. Her head was downcast and her wing-panels drooped almost to the floor. She made a half-hearted ping that trailed off forlornly, as though a power cord were pulled halfway through the sound. Wheeljack gave her shoulder a pat.

"Why does she do that?" Mirage hadn't intended to blurt the question, but it came out like that anyway.

"Make noises?" the inventor's fins flashed blue. "Don't we all do that?"

"Imitate noises. She doesn't try to speak ever?"

"Ah." Wheeljack nodded. "Sometimes, but it's the same thing really: she's just imitating. Her speech programming just won't seem to take for some reason. Ratchet's actually working on that right now."

Mirage felt sudden pity. To be unable to express oneself to others or be understood by one's companions ... no wonder she behaved so strangely all the time. How very lonely for her. "But she can be fixed?"

"Oh sure," Wheeljack said brightly. "Maybe. Probably. I mean, in a manner of speaking, right?" He shrugged. "It's easier to understand the noises, in my opinion anyway," he winked at the spy, who in turn looked confused.

The inventor tugged on the tip of her chevron. "Come on, DB. Say goodbye to Mirage. It's time to go back."

"Goodbye ... Dirtbike," Mirage made a half-hearted wave. She brightened visibly at the sound of her name, and when she looked up at him she gave a happy little squirm, emitting two short chirps that just might have been the inflection of his name.

Wheeljack held a hand out for her, which she obediently grasped as he led her away. As they walked through the battered door, he heard Wheeljack ask, "So, what do you wanna help me with now?"

The answer was a long undulating hum followed by three sharp clicks. Wheeljack's voice drifted around the corner. "The ion destabilizer? Sure, we can work on that one."

Shaking his head, Mirage decided to leave such matters for the bots who understood them and turned back to the firing range to continue his target practice. It was the last time he heard those quiet footsteps shadow him like that again.

Only days later, Ratchet managed to install a functioning speech program in Dirtbike. Yet despite his success, she often struggled to find adequate words or fell short in her speech altogether. It was as if losing her own unique way of communicating had cost her something else in return, something irreplaceable. Mirage never heard her try to imitate another sound after that, and she no longer made her tentative attempts to approach him as she had done in the firing range. He supposed Ratchet was responsible for that as well.

One evening over a cube of energon in the rec-room, Wheeljack quietly told Mirage that shortly before the completion of her speech program, Dirtbike had snuck up behind Ratchet and emitted such a realistic sound of gunfire that the medic had done a full duck and cover under his desk. Mirage chuckled into his cube, took in the incoherent hum of the dozen or so conversations that drifted around the room, and wondered if perhaps the little femme hadn't been as misunderstood as he'd thought.

End "Miscommunication"