Don't own Transformers, yadda, yadda, yadda. Own a bunch of the characters mentioned here, and…well, that's about it. :( I also don't own 'At the Dam' by Joan Didion.
'thinking/reading'
-memory-
'Internal speech/comm.'
"normal speech"
"foreign language"
'Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be driving down Sunset Boulevard, or about to enter a freeway, and abruptly those power transmission towers will appear before me, canted vertiginously over the tailrace. Sometimes I am confronted by the intakes and sometimes by the shadow of the heavy cable that spans the canyon and sometimes by the ominous outlets to unused spillways, black in the lunar clarity of the desert light. Quite often I hear the turbines.'
Athena frowned at the neat print on the data-pad held in her hands, curling her legs beneath her on the relatively small seat. Silverbolt obligingly lifted the armrest separating the two chairs, allowing her more room. The deity gave a small smile and thanked him, returning to the passage.
'Frequently I wonder what is happening at the dam at this instant, at this precise intersection of time and space, how much water is being released to fill downstream orders and what lights are flashing and which generators are in full use and which are just spinning free.'
Something twitched in her head, and Athena tilted her head to the side, a curious gesture. Ratchet and Arcee had told her that it had likely come from Erin, as very few mechs or humans did so. Closing her eyes, she dug deep in the crevasses of her mind.
-
The air was hot and dry, but the hot she could handle: she was an outdoors type of person, and running track in humid weather made it easier to cope with the almost light feel of the desert sun on her exposed skin.
She danced down the long stairs, fingers running down the coppery-gold-some-sort-of-metal railing, turning at the bottom to stare up at the rest of her family who walked down slowly. She had recently stopped running for track, so she was still in shape, enough to be able to run around even in the desert.
"Ow!" rich, bubbling laughter rose in her throat and spilled out into the rather empty stairway as the woman complained about getting shocked.
-
She was hidden – safe, presumably, but hidden mostly. Concrete poured around her, heavy turbines whining and whirring heavily.
She was trapped, alone, in her concrete prison. Scaffoldings in metal and wood wound around her, chains that held her to her concrete dungeon.
-
Athena took a deep, shuddering breath and jerked her head to stare out the window, ignoring for the moment the worried questions of Silverbolt. Achingly bright clouds – white fluffy creations reflecting the sunlight – drifted past, and past them, Athena could see the ending of the California coastline and the beginning of the never-ending blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean. White waves bled into greenish water, then to aqua, and further on into the dark indigo depths.
"Are you all right, Athena?" frigid blue eyes jerked to Armonie who gingerly sat next to her, careful not to crowd her. "Silverbolt says you suddenly stopped reading."
Reading? Oh yeah; she'd been reading to him. Not that he couldn't have looked it up himself: she needed the practice, and he was the only one who would appreciate the passage and be patient with her slow reading skills.
She took a shaky breath, feeling Armonie's rich brown eyes inspecting her maternally. "We are fine," she said at last, sounding a little weak. "Sorry, Silverbolt."
There was a pause. 'It's all right, Athena.' He said at last, still sounding a little worried. 'Are you sure you're all right?'
Athena gulped and gave a shaky smile. Armonie shoved a water bottle in her hand and she drank gratefully. 'We'll live.'
He didn't sound convinced, but he said 'Okay,' anyway.
Armonie, seeing that the deity was okay, patted her shoulder before returning to her seat a ways away. The plus side on being on an enormous Boeing 717 with only seven or so passengers was that it didn't matter where one sat. She took another shuddering breath and picked up the data-pad from where it fell and uncurling her legs to stretch them, began to read once more.
'I used to wonder what it was about the dam that made me think of it at times and in places where I once thought of the Mindanao Trench, or of the stars wheeling in their courses, or of the words As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen. Dams, after all, are commonplace: we have all seen one. This particular dam had existed as an idea in the work's mind for almost forty years before I saw it. Hoover Dam, showpiece of the Boulder Canyon project, the several million tons of concrete that made the Southwest plausible, the fait accompli that was to convey, in the innocent time of its construction, the notion that mankind's brightest promise lay in American engineering.'
Her head "itched" with that familiar sensation and she stopped abruptly, biting down hard on her lip and squeezing her eyes shut, the muscles in her back tensing and releasing, rippling with her force of will to suppress the rising, disorienting memories.
'You're remembering, aren't you?' Silverbolt asked gently, and his hologram appeared beside her, startling her momentarily. 'It's all right,' he said kindly.
Ratchet, in Skydive's cargo hold (though apparently running continuous scans on Athena), spoke then. 'It's unhealthy to try and suppress it, Athena.'
'It's just disorienting.' The deity grumbled. 'It's like doing three totally different things at once. It's just that you don't know which is real and which is a memory.'
Silverbolt made a low, sympathetic noise. 'I know the feeling: I hear it fromthem all the time.' If the other Aerialbots heard that, they ignored it. Anything else her companions said was drowned out as the memory she was trying to suppress rose up suddenly.
-
Quickly, she ducked behind a large bin, her laughter giving her position away. Not that her opponents were much better off. The tiny white balls struck her, and as they fell and struck the pavement with sharp pops.
Two small forms slammed into her, sending her toppling over with a cry of mock fear. "Ehwin!" the little boy on her back tugged on her hair.
She twisted her head to the side, grinning up at the boy on her back while pretending to try and get free. She popped up on her hands and knees, bouncing around as the boy dug his heels into her sides.
-
"Stop crowding her," Katie's irate voice sounded around her as her eyelids flickered. Her chair was nearly flat, and she was sprawled out across two. For a long moment she stared at the panels above her head before turning her head. The humans on board as well as Silverbolt's hologram were around her, each face worried.
Armonie knelt at her head and placed a cool hand on her tan forehead. "Get some rest," was all she said, and all Athena could do was nod in mute agreement. Even before everyone left her she was asleep.
-
A hand shook her awake. "Look out the window, Er." A soft voice whispered near her ear. "We're home."
Through the thick fog clinging to her mind, she managed to raise her head and flip open the window. It was night, and the skies were dotted with small pinpoints of light – stars – and painted here and there with little spots of fluffy clouds. Beyond it was home.
Lights dotted the green landscape, rising up the mountain and stopping at seemingly random intervals. The golden light from houses and streetlamps lit the mountains and the island beautifully, and it seemed to her for a moment as if the entire island was a figment of her imagination.
For a brief moment, her breath was stolen at the beauty. 'I'm home,' she thought, and a smile curled her lips upward, the first genuine smile in three days. She didn't realize how much she'd missed it.
-
'Athena,' a soft, cool hand shook her shoulder gently, and she blearily blinked her eyes open. 'We're almost here. Look out the window.' She sat up quickly and thrust the blind up before Silverbolt could.
It was mid-afternoon, and the sky was a rich pale blue, dotted with richly white clouds that were nearly blinding in the light. Far below them the ocean pulsed, a dark blue-indigo blanket that stroked the tan shores with lacy fingers. Richly green mountains rose slowly from the earth like a sleeping beast, and homes of many colors dotted the sides of the mountain and the flatland as if trying to climb but failing and turning back around.
A stray thought drifted through her head, and for the first time, Athena didn't care if anyone heard. We're home.