Log 3: Cultivating a Tree Spark

Prompt: Nature

Episode: Home is Where the Spark Is

Notes: Bumblebee, Sari and a briefly mentioned Prowl.

"Sari?"

"Yeah Bumblebee?"

"Can you help me with this?"

The yellow bot was gesturing at a box about the size of a garbage can but half its height that was filled with an uneven mass of recently shoveled earth.

"Suuuuure," she agreed carefully, searching for something that might require the Allspark key.

When she found no keyhole or anything out of the ordinary, she asked an almost guilty question. "What is it?"

"Nature," declared the Autobot as if it were quite obvious.

After a long perusal of the box and its contents the red head carefully corrected him.

"It's dirt."

"No, I put a tree spark in it a day ago but...I think I messed it up," Bumblebee admitted.

Sari's face scrunched in confusion. "What's a tree spark?" she muttered under her breath trying to puzzle out what her friend might mean, hands on her hips. The autobots were prone to using creative (and consequently confusing) phrases for describing Earth oddities they had never come across before.

Since a spark was kind of like a heartbeat maybe...

Her eyes lit with insight. "OH!! You mean you planted a seed?"

"Seed? Is that what these are called?" the Autobot asked.

She inspected his outstretched palm and confirmed he'd buried seeds under the soil and not bolts and wing nuts from a scrap heap. After all, maybe that was where Autobots came from and Bumblebee had tried the same thing to get a tree.

"It looks like you did fine Bumblebee. What's wrong?" He'd clearly watered and placed the plant-to-be in appropriate sunlight.

"Where's the tree?"

"What tree?"

"The one that supposed to come out of that seed thing. It's supposed to get as big as the one in Prowl's room right?"

"But you only planted it yesterday!" she exclaimed smiling.

"And?"

"The tree in Prowl's room probably took like fifty years to get that big," Sari gestured as wide as she could with her arms to illustrate the span of time.

"Well that's not a long time...is it?" the yellow bot asked.

"It is for humans. I'd be as old as my dad by the time the tree got that big."

"Oh," he conceded quietly.

She peered up at him wondering at his defeated tone. "Why are you trying to grow a tree?"

"It's an apology."

He didn't need to elaborate for whom or why. The two regarded the box and its unassuming dirt, puzzling out what to do about this new dilemma.

"Maybe you should be patient for a couple days and see what happens? This tree might be like a super tree and grow really fast," Sari declared.

"Well...I guess..."

"I'll help," she assured putting an unassuming hand on his leg and giving a bright thumbs up.

Two months later, Prowl found a box where there had not been one yesterday. A scraggly stalk of a plant, the bare sapling green beginnings of an oak tree rose just about two feet from the surface of the dirt.

So the attached note's contents were not much of a shock considering the two authors.

Despite the fact that Bumblebee had learned how to be still occasionally, Prowl figured his base programming just insisted otherwise. Sari's scrawling Earth English and Bumblebee's designation were attached to the bottom.

'Nature takes too long. We got tired of waiting for it to get as big as your tree. So you can have it now, even though we wanted to wait for it to get bigger.'