Notes/ This one is late… and short it would seem. I could have kept writing, but that would heave meant still longer to update, so short it is. Yeah, I guess I was just too undecided over what to do with this chapter exactly and therefore rewrote, took forever, reconsidered, started over again. Back on track now and I have a direction! Go me! Next chapter hopefully up soon
"Hi Knockout! How've you been? Any better? How's Arcee? Bulk' says you might have more good news, and if I ask you might tell me!" Miko chattered at record speed over the comm system, and she barely took a breath between her rapid fire questions.
Knockout, near the far corner of Ratchet's workshop, could only laugh in amusement at the little human. He looked up to the wall mounted screen across the room, and watched as she grinned at him, while she wiggled and shifted while sitting on her brightly colored bed covers, obviously trying not to drop her computer.
"Ha. Well I think I may have clearly understood about a third of what you just said," the red bot chuckled, grinning at the monitor and its camera.
"Sorry." Miko said, laughing. Then speaking at a reasonable speed she asked again," How've you been?"
"I've been good. Very good in fact. More than that actually. Wonderful!"
When Miko laughed again at the bot's answer, Knockout carefully moved the cart, reversing it so that he could put slightly more distance between himself and the camera by backing as close to the wall as he could. For a second or two the little human only looked at him with her head tipped first slightly to one side and then the other, trying to understand what it was he had backed up to show her. Finally her eyes opened wider with realization, and the confusion on her face turned to a wide grin at her webcam.
"No more shoulder straps!" she exclaimed. Her excitement caused the volume of her voice to rise again. "You can sit up and balance now!"
"Yep."
"Not walking though yet…?" Miko's voice lowered again and suddenly she looked slightly sad, disappointed.
At first Knockout wanted to remind his human friend that he likely never would, that that hope was gone, for reasons of Cybertraonian physiology that she would never be able to make sense of, and he would never know exactly how to explain quite well enough. But she looked at him over her monitor, with a familiar look of childlike hope behind her sad eyes, and instead he only smiled again.
"Not yet," he said. "But I'll keep on trying… for you as well as Arcee and the youngling."
"Youngling?" Miko tipped her head just slightly to one side, thinking. "Like… a little baby transformer?"
"Basically, yes."
"So, Arcee is… pregnant?"
"Well in a manner of speaking, yes."
"That is so incredibly cool! You and Arcee are gonna be parents! Will I get to meet the baby when you come back to Earth one day to visit? Is he going to turn into a sports car too, or will he be a little motorbike?" Miko's second round of rapid questions ended abruptly, and her face took on a look of baffled confusion, before she questioned thoughtfully, "wait. You guys are made of metal. With wiring for nerves, super complex computer processors for brains… How can a cybtertronian be..."
When the little human's question died in the air unfinished, he filled in the blanks and quickly answered her anyway, with a slight laugh. "It's not exactly what you would consider a live baby, Miko. Arcee's body is only carrying the spark. We built a tiny body to contain it when it's ready to detach from her own spark."
"So… little bots are both born and built..."
"Exactly," Knockout said in response, surprised at the small human's open minded understanding, and acceptance of the matter. He himself smiled again in the direction of the camera mounted to the wall, double checking to determine the range of it's view. "Would you like to see the youngling frame, Miko?"
"Can I?" the little human's brown eyes lit up and opened wider with excitement again.
"Ratchet completed the final finishing touches this morning. Arcee will be done with her duty shift soon, and I can finally show her the frame. You can surprise her with me."
Knockout rolled the cart forward and then turned so that he could move toward a work table near the wall half way across the workshop. He parked alongside the worktable and reached forward with his functional hand to grab the corner of a metallic silver sheet that served as a protective cover for the youngling frame. Reaching over his cart's tray, he grabbed the corner, and then reversed the cart a ways, taking the sheet with him, pulling it off of the frame. For a moment he tried to fold it however messily and working one-handed, while it lay draped over the tray. When that didn't quite seem to work so well, he raised his left hand the little he could and grabbed the edge of the cover with still barely functional fingertips until he could hold the fabric with his left hand just well enough that could use the right to make a couple of quick, if not still entirely uneven folds.
The small metal frame that lay carefully placed, on top of the work table, would soon house the spark of his own child. But as it was at the moment it was of course only a lifeless and uninhabited miniature bot frame. He had seen the finished body before, just that morning. And he had looked in a lot on the process of building it over several days. But still, looking at it again, seeing it completed, he was just as impressed, and filled with excitement as he had been earlier.
"Why is the body such a plain gray color?" Miko questioned. She looked intently at the view over her monitor, observing the details of the small body, including it's dull gray color coated only in a thick layer of clear oil based protectant. "All of you are so… bright."
"The body will began to take on its colors, once it's inhabited by the spark."
"It looks like he's going to kinda look like you. But he'll look a bit like Arcee too."
Knockout nodded, still not able to stop his smiling. The features given to the little bot frame, had obviously been deliberate on the part of its builders. Ratchet had put a lot of great effort and detail into a near perfect copy of Knockout's headgear, with it's perfectly symmetrical points, and his over sized pointed ears. He'd crafted little back fins for the child, that served as a perfect match to Arcee's. Then there were two small and delicate little hands, two little feet, arms and legs that sat so clearly disproportionate to the body so as to appear cute and childlike.
"How big is he?" Miko questioned after another moment in which she had again looked at the frame, but could not exactly work out it's size, in comparison to the full sized cybertronian adult that sat oddly angled near it.
"She actually. And six feet, seven and around a couple hundred pounds."
"That's huge!"
"Not so much no," Knockout chuckled. "Not for cybertron. I'd be twenty-two feet tall, if I could stand up, remember. Arcee is sixteeen, five."
"Wait… a baby girl transformer? Whoa cool! About time we had another girl on team Prime!"
Knockout only laughed once again at Miko's over the top enthusiasm. But a moment later, he saw her face fall, as her smile left her.
"Miko?" he questioned, cautiously.
And the little human stared at the monitor with confusion written on her face, and tears forming at the corners of her eyes.
"You know how to do things," she explained as tears sudden fell down her cheeks. "You can drive that machine, and fold a sheet, and probably so much else. You're not helpless, or useless. And I wanted to say I was impressed with all that, but I know that would be just as bad as feeling sorry..."
"Oh," Knockout said, understanding at once. "Miko, I'm impressed everyday with myself and just how much I can do if I try. You know, sometimes it's fun to almost make a game of it in a way. But never feel sorry. I don't. Not anymore. I have a life just as good as I want to make it."
"Was the youngling that big news Bulk' said you may just have for me?" Miko asked after a second, switching gears quickly and smiling through sniffles. Knockout nodded happily.
Behind him, the door slid open, and he turned quickly to face Arcee, as she hurried into the workshop. He rolled the cart toward her and reached out with his right hand to take the one that she immediately extended toward him.
"Ratchet said I would probably find you in his workshop," she mused. "I guess he was right. "What are you doing in here?"
"Waiting for you to come and find me, so that I can show you our completed youngling frame." Knockout kept his tone deliberately playful and his expression proud and silly.
"It's finished!"
"Yep. As of this morning according to Ratchet."
"Hi Arcee," Miko said, waving at her webcam and smiling on the monitor.
"Miko!" The smaller blue bot exclaimed. "How are you?" She saw then the redness of her eyes, left over from her very brief bout of crying. "You okay?"
"Yeah," Miko said, right back to smiling now and meaning it.
Arcee, only a second later, ran across the room in only a couple of long paces, and was instantly busy admiring the youngling frame on the worktable.
"Knockout," she exclaimed. "She's beautiful. This is the cutest thing I've ever seen."
"You guys are going to be great parents," Miko said, watching over her monitor, as Arcee retrieved the metallic cover from the corner of the worktable, unfolded it and carefully covered up the frame once again.
Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break
The Chrome Hubcap energon bar was not overly busy, but it was not exactly dead quiet either. Knockout sat, parked on his cart pulled up to a table in the far corner of the place, and with Arcee sitting close to him at the table. Both laughed loudly at the antics of some bot, a neutral, clearly overcharged on too much high grade. He had began to quite obnoxiously sing some old Cybertronian battle song, but he'd obviously forgotten most of the lyrics and instead chose to invent his own. The lyrics he created were dirty and downright inappropriate. But somehow it was also just a little too hilarious.
"Thank you for coming out tonight," Arcee said, leaning in closer to her mate. Unable to partake in high grade obviously due to her carrying status, she took a drink from her container of energon strongly flavored with cobalt and aluminum, and enjoyed that just as much.
"I like a night on the town as much as anybot," Knockout smiled. He gave a slight laugh as the drunken singing bot was finally tossed from the place by a large framed employee, a minute after he'd purged his tank into a decorative wall fountain. "And this is a decent little place… though slightly nicer before that bot decided to… uh, redecorate." The fingers of his left hand, resting near his hand controls, gestured slightly, with as much motion as they could, in the rough direction of the fountain across the bar.
Arcee shook her head with a look of disgust and disbelief and, and then finally chuckled her agreement. Her optics moved toward a dance floor in the middle of the place. She smiled, watching Bumblebee and Speedbreaker, who appeared to take turns copying each other's dance moves, while amid a small crowd of other bots, while a rhythmic dance club track placed.
"The frame really is beautiful, you know," she said quietly as she could over the volume of the music. She shifted slightly in her chair so that she could lean over to rest her head on his shoulder panel, while he sat on his cart.
"I'm glad you like it," Knockout answered back.
"I love it." Arcee raised a hand to her spark chamber, and mused out loud. "Do you think she'll like it?"
"I'm sure of it."
The music track had changed a moment ago to something far slower. and when looked again toward the dance floor, she saw 'Bee and Speedbreaker were trying hard to dance together to the much slower song.
"You were right about those two," she said, chuckling over the pair of young bots and their awkward tendency of repeatedly stepping on one another's feet.
"Oh I completely called it," Knockout laughed. He took a drink from his own container, set it back down carefully, and grinned as he held out his right hand to her. "Arcee, dance with me!"
She stared at him for a brief moment as though he had truly gone insane. But a second later she reached out to grab his extended hand as she jumped up from her chair, almost spilling her drink accidentally when her knee banged against the table in uncharacteristic clumsiness. She took his other hand, his barely functional one, with her left and carefully swung it back and forth roughly in time with the song, while he used his right to pull her toward him lightly and gently send her rocking backward again. He laughed, and she grinned a bright smile.
"I guess you really can dance with me," Arcee said, her mate's laughter causing her to laugh too.
"Yes."
"I love to watch you do… well, anything really. I just love that look of yours."
"Ha. What look would that be?"
"That laughing mischief in your optics right along with the triumphant little smirk that screams 'you'll never stop me now.'"
"Outgunned, outnumbered, all odds against us… an Autobot doesn't know how to surrender, to give up and lie down and die quietly. That look you speak of, I've seen much the same on you in battle." Knockout stopped his adapted idea of dancing, and instead used his right hand to gently pull her closer to him, swinging her body sideways slightly so that she came to lean against his right side. "I remember the day fought each other in a train tunnel once on Earth. You were strong and quick, beautiful and terrifying. That might have been the day I'd first known I could have loved you, if I hadn't been been so full of rage, so in love with myself and the loyalty I thought might just protect my tailpipe."
Arcee stayed quiet for a moment, looking at his optics as the two smiled at each other. Finally she gave a slight laugh, meant to hide her almost sad disbelief, and admitted slowly, "All I really wanted was to send you straight to the scrapyard that day."
"Save my own spark, and do my best to save my paint-job. Both were pressing priorities." Knockout smirked at her and reached for his energon container, which she quickly moved to retrieve and hand to him, when he found the reach awkward and nearly knocked it over instead of grabbing it. "That never stopped me from realizing you were beautiful though."
"You know… I saw that very same look of yours on the day you left the 'cons." Arcee smiled as she spoke, but Knockout only shook his head slightly with helpless confusion on his face-plate.
"I still barely remember that. I've tried to but… I just don't. The bots have filled in a few ridiculous blanks and even Miko back on Earth understands that winning team running joke however."
"The look on your face... it was priceless indeed. Looking back well in hindsight I see it was only meant to hide self doubt and the fear of the unknown. But at the moment I may have laughed out loud if I'd known then I really could trust you."
At that moment, Bumblebee and Speedbreaker came back to the table, and when they had once again sat down in their chairs, Arcee sat back on hers too.
"You've got some crazy moves, 'Bee," Speedy laughed. "Seriously what kind of dancing was that even supposed to be?"
"I might have picked up a couple things from a few little humans back on Earth," 'Bee answered, laughing back.
"Earth always sounded to me like it must have been such a neat and interesting place," Speedbreaker mused wistfully. Her expression became serious and yet somehow always dreamlike as she said, "an organic planet? I wouldn't have imagined such a thing was possible, and yet I've heard so much about it now, so clearly it is."
"No reason you'll never get to see it yourself actually, Speedy," Arcee said. She smiled confidently in the younger bot's direction. "Earth is our home away from home. We still have friends that want to see us again as soon as we can make it back. You could come with us. They'd love you!"
"My creator and carrier would each lose a few lug nuts!" Speedbreaker exclaimed, laughing.
"You're a grown bot, Speedy," Bumblebee said, grinning at her. "We're building our own lives together because we want to, and if you want to leave the planet, or anything else in life, well, they'll get over it."
"Ooh, such an impressive little rebellious side, 'Bee!" Knockout remarked. "Now, keep it up and you're really in business." He both laughed and grinned a little too much, until Arcee reached over and playfully smacked him lightly, before she burst out laughing herself.
"Please ignore him, Speedy," she said, still laughing as she grabbed the little orange and silver bot gently by one arm, and gestured lightly with her other hand toward Knockout. "He's an incredibly bad influence."
"You better believe it!" Knockout laughed, with his ever familiar smirk now across his face-plate.
"I'll grab all of us some more drinks," Arcee chuckled, standing up to do exactly that.
The Chrome Hubcap had begun to get busier, as it got later into the evening. And she found herself in the midst of a small crowd of bots, gathered at the bar, pushing against each other lightly and hollering opt drink orders as they gestured with waving hands, and pointing fingers. Arcee stumbled backward slightly, when a large bot who had already so clearly had slightly too much to drink backed up against her trying to balance his table's multiple drinks. Before she managed to catch herself and stand up straight again, she instead crashed lightly against a bot directly behind her.
"Pardon me," she said, turning to face whoever it was she had banged into.
"All good," the white and pale yellow fellow said with a slight shrug of his shoulders. His face-plate though showed a sudden look of recognition, just before Arcee turned back around, and with that he questioned, "how is your bondmate?"
"I'm sorry..." Arcee mumbled, clueless.
"I met the two of you once in a shop a while back. Understandable that you wouldn't remember me. You had your suddenly very sick mate to deal with."
"Right. Of course." Acree slowly returned his look of recognition, and she slowly smiled a little at the stranger, as she waved toward the table she had just left, and to her bondmate, who sat on his cart laughing with their teammates. "He's great now, as you can see."
"Ha, I see that," the white and yellow bot chuckled. "Sure looks like a confidant fellow."
"You have no idea. Our lives are certainly never boring. Hey… thank you again for the help that crazy day. He was completely fine when we went out to shop. It was his idea to go and pick up a few… it was all good when I left him for just a couple of moments..."
"Oh, no I completely understand that. A random reboot will usually just kind of happen out of nowhere. And a bot's still gotta live a life."
"Yeah. And now it can be a month between two of them, and then a couple days between the next five, so we just sort of.. " Arcee stopped speaking right in the middle of a sentence, as reasoning caught up with her speech. Her optics opened just slightly wider as she fully clued in to this stranger's implication. "You've seen and dealt with this before. That's how you knew exactly what to do with..."
"Sadly, yes." The strange bot paused a moment, his face-plate taking on a suddenly slightly sad expression. "My sister… she took a fall from an upper deck of a refugee ship years ago. Hit the floor levels below head first. Her only injury ended up being massive processor damage. I take care of her. I'm the only one she's got. But we've been dealing with reboots, among other things, since the accident."
"I'm sorry to hear..."
"Don't be sorry," the white and yellow stranger held a hand up and raised on finger, while beginning to smile a little. "Firestorm, my sister, would tell you to never be sorry. That it is what it is, and let's all stop with the pity and let her do things her way."
"She sounds just like Knockout," Arcee grinned. She gestured toward her table again, where her mate was still laughing almost hysterically over something that was not exactly clear, while Speedbreaker, shook her head, obviously confused, and Bumblebee just looked from one of them to the to the other helplessly.
"Those two have got to meet sometime," Arcee mused. She chuckled with a slight laugh at first, but quickly her expression turned serious as she suggested, "Let me meet her. I want to bring her to the Autobot base. Our medic... he's the best Cyberton has got. If anyone can do anything to help your sister..."
"You can certainly meet her, and I'd love to say hello to that mate of yours. My sister is waiting for me at our table. Perhaps your little group can join us over there. It's like I said… a bot's still gotta live a life, and does enjoy getting to go places… meeting everyone..."
Firestorm turned out to be a young bot, so clearly just barely into her adulthood. And small framed, lightweight, with a delicate and almost fragile body structure. She was pale yellow and simple white just the same as her brother, and grinned brightly despite the shaking of both her hands as she held a container up to drink from it with difficulty. When Knockout steered his cart into the empty space left for him between her and Arcee, the fragile almost-youngling stared up and him and down to his cart and back again in obvious amazed wonder.
Just the understanding and sense of knowing that it was not impoliteness, but instead only a kind of sheer amazement at seeing another bot, damaged like her and not offline as a result of Cybertron's endless history of killing the weak and broken, made Arcee wipe a tiny stream of coolant from one optic.
"Okay, here's the plan I think," Knockout said, quickly taking charge, while looking intently at the young bot he so clearly related to himself, and rolling the cart forward and back slightly as he spoke, more than likely only to show the curious young bot how it was he was able to drive it by himself. "We'll comm Ratchet in a moment. Let him know we are bringing in an unexpected non-emergency patient."
"Your vocalizer… better'en me… mine..." the little bot said, her own speech considerably jumbled and slow. Both of her arms and hands held awkwardly in front of her after she had put the container down, continued to constantly shake slightly.
"It would seem so," Knockout answered back. He smiled at the young bot, and instantly he showed the compassionate, calm and understanding nature that once might have been so easy to let go unnoticed. "You see though, the processor is a bit of a ridiculously funny thing. When one is damaged, it seems we never really know exactly what kind of mess it is we'll get. It's fully doubtful by now, I'll ever walk, whereas I think you can."
"Walknot good… run muchmuchworse. I tryitstill thouhg…" the little bot smiled so brightly again. So far it seemed she never stopped smiling.
It was perfectly clear as soon as the group of bots had gotten up and began to make their way out of the place intending to go right to the base, exactly what it was the little bot had been talking about when she had eluded to her own mobility issues. Getting up from her chair, she stumbled forward nearly falling to the floor with a clear lack of balance, before she caught herself by grabbing the chair back to stead herself before she began to walk forward with short and unsteady stumbling steps. He body rocked itself slightly from back to front and slightly less from side to side continuously in such obvious struggle to maintain an ever precarious sense of balance.
Once outside of the place though, she surprised the little group of Autobots with a retained ability to transform into a vehicle mode – a sleek and low riding white three wheeled Cybertronian road cruiser, with yellow doors and line work. The vehicle veered to the left than the right and back again horribly sbut she could certainly move faster and with far greater efficiently that way. Her brother only grinned at their surprise, before he dropped into his own nearly matching vehicle form, and hurried off after her down the road leading toward the base.
