A/N: This is the first fic I wrote for the prompt "Arcee/Cliffjumper – I'm not calling you a liar". It wound up not really fitting the prompt, but I still like it. However, it's both unbeta'd and my first time writing these characters, so please point out any mistakes I made, in characterization, grammar, or spelling.
Warning – this contains past character death, hallucinations, and robots in romantic relationships.
Disclaimer: Transformers is not mine, in any way, shape, or form.
Not Calling You a Ghost
I'm not calling you a liar,
Just don't lie to me.
I'm not calling you a thief,
Just don't steal from me.
I'm not calling you a ghost,
Just stop haunting me.
- Florence and the Machine, "I'm Not Calling You a Liar"
She still felt his stolen touches along the edges of her sensor-net. They ghosted up her chassis, down along her arms, sweet flickers of a love that she could never acknowledge in life, and that was meaningless in death. Oh, she felt the soft swirl of his vents on her armor sometimes alone in the dark on her berth, alone as she had never been when he still laughed and fought and lived. They slid along the very edge of her being, lying to her as she shuttered her optics, whispering static she could not construe as the sweet nothings that he never had said. The falseness of it all hurt her less, though, than the truth would have, so she clung to the ghosts, clung to the lies that spoke of a world where he still lived. The ghost of her dead lover lived in the darkness of her mind, and as it glided over her she shivered, torn between joy and repulsion.
He laughed, wild and free and full of reckless abandon, as he always seemed to do in her memories of him. "Oh, Arcee," he said across the comm, wheels tearing away at the loose Nevada dirt, "You'll never be as great as I am."
"Really?" she shot back, her smaller mass allowing her to keep up despite her weaker engine, "As great at, say, getting almost killed by Decepticons?"
"Naw, that's your talent. Remember back on Nexuron VI, when that tank came at you? Man, if Bumblebee hadn't been there, you'da been scrap!"
"Will you never let me live that down? The guy screamed and begged Bee to spare him as soon as he aimed his gun! He was no threat to me – I was just a little surprised, that's all."
"Makes it all the funnier, Arcee!" he cried, accelerating suddenly and whipping off the road to crash through the lonely desert landscape.
"No! Cliff, get back here! Ratchet will have our sparks for this if you get noticed out here!"
"Relax! No humans for miles! Besides, nobody would look at us and think 'Alien robots!' They'd just think 'stupid kids'. No one's noticed us yet, and I don't think I'll live to see the day they do, these humans are so oblivious."
"Who are you?" she whispered to the air. The touches, stolen like drops of energon from the lines of a dead mech, flowed down her limbs and into nothingness, and she was left as alone as she had been before – not that she would accept that, at least not yet.
"You know, we can never tell anyone." the statement came suddenly, as they lay together, bodies cooling down under the wild panorama of the Mojave night sky. And just as suddenly, it tore her spark apart. No, not with all the rules against it, not with the laws they were still burdened to bear.
"I know." she said. But still – I love you, part of her cried out, the desperate part that hated herself for never gathering up the courage to touch Tailgate, except for that one time when the shells that shook the building they were hiding in stopped, and they were both so glad to be alive, alive when they had seen other, similar shelters torn away and the remnants stained with energon. But she loathed that desperate part (or at least she told herself she did), and they lied to each other at base, lied in every touch and every glance.
She went through the motions of life at base, except for when she was so caught up in this new world of humanity that she'd never really cared to see before that she forgot to hate planet that tore him from her and laughed and fought and lived again. But then, when the humans were gone and the Ground Bridge powered down and the nightly patrols out on their rounds, she fled to her quarters, where the ghostly hands roamed her body again and lied about death, and hated them for lying and hated herself for throwing away her love to a lie (as if she hadn't done that before, back when she stared up in awe at the warriors in the sky and longed to join them, back before Praxus burned in the meaningless hate of those same warriors).
"Arcee," he said, his voice urgent, "About that backup."
"What?" she said sharply, fearfully, into the comm. "Cliff – what is it? Where?"
Then the line went dead, and she tore off after base, opening a comm line in desperation and fear.
Every day, the sensor-ghosts appeared, even if only to flicker across her plating like the memories they were. Every day, she wished and waited for them, waiting for the murmuring static she thought she could hear in the background, for the softly whispered lies she loved and loathed to begin again.
"Who are you?" she tried again, pressing her arms to her body – basic defense of your core, she remembered, protect your spark at all cost, even if you must sacrifice your arms for shelter, and it hurt her, somewhere deep down in her spark, that she thought she loved this ghost – at the very least, I loved Cliffjumper – and still she sheltered herself, as she had done ever since Airachnid and would likely do forever, in all honesty. "Don't lie to me."
There was no reply, just as Airachnid and Tailgate never replied to her whimpered pleas in the same darkness. Cliffjumper was dead. They were only sensor-ghosts.