Disclaimer: Transformers and its various incarnations are the property of Hasbro.

The first chapter is more or less an experiment in deviating from my usual style and an attempt to capture an alien mind, to limited effect.


His legs press into her sides. With a machine's memory, incapable of failure or error, it is their first meeting. She sees his eyes widen with terror. They flee. She feels the press. No, she realizes. She detects texture, weight, temperature. Because she is a machine, she can live in every sensation of memory, and she cannot feel. It is impossible to feel as does flesh. In fear, he clutches at her.

His legs press into her sides. With a machine's understanding of its self, a self-knowledge that is perfect, it is the now. She acknowledges his grip on her. She detects it. His seat shifts against hers. Each flex of muscle changes the distribution of weight. A heartbeat jolts through the flesh of him and the metal of her. She can count the ticks. This is not fear.

The grip on her is wet. His palms are wet, clammy. Fingers squeeze her tight.

She resists the urge to adjust her mirrors . She denies the natural and mechanical impulse to prod him. It is unusual to have a partner of flesh. She cannot upset him, throw him, or distract him. One distraction at the wrong time and a little thing of flesh and bone cannot weld together again like metal.

Traveling dirt roads gums her treads with earth and muck and stones. It threatens her scrabbling grip on the earth. It grinds. Sand and debris work their way inside her chassis, grinding at her and in her just the same.

He does too because he doesn't know any better. Inexperience distilled is simply a lack of knowledge. Flesh has an incredible lack of knowledge of itself. There is instinct, feelings ingrained into their hardware, but so little knowledge of the self or the other. A machine has background processes, core software that inspires or directs, but it knows its own code down to the last digit.

The flesh knows so very little; least of all that it's wearing her down, stripping her, shaving away metal in effusions of sparks.

He would hurt if she told him, feeling. He is so responsible and so self-critical when he fails to live up to the ideal of manhood. There would be pain, but not that kind of pain. It still couldn't be welded, though. Rather, it would be a pain common to flesh and metal. It would be a pain their kinds shared and pain they could share alike.

It is the moment his face cracks – the boy and the mother, speaking in a hanger. They stand before her, knowing that she is there, but not caring if she listens. For his mother's sake, he had put aside childish things and become a man. Yet now, a young man in body, in form, and in function, he is asked to be a boy once more. He had been the only man to stay with her, but now she replaces him. The flesh has an unlimited capacity to forget. It is their gift and curse to forget love and pain. It is their nature to replace, to fill holes and to make whole.

She will never forget Tailgate.

Her race replaces, yes. They replace parts, pieces of themselves, but they do not forget.

She will never forget Cliffjumper.

Partners are not like parts. With both, it is impossible to forget how they interface, the connections. However, a part ceases to be alive when it leaves the body - when the connections break. For a machine, a partner is always so horribly alive. There is never any fear of forgetting; there is only the fear of remembering. A machine lives in the eternal, certain fear of memory. That memory can be erased, but the mere thought is more terrifying than anything else. It is death, as much as a machine can die; death for the self as much as it is for the other.

Still, in the now, she understands the fleshling, his clutching her, his expression, and the anger that they both know is irrational. Thoughts are just electricity and chemical reactions, after all. Electricity and the secretion of hormones or transmission fluids make up the mind, the heart, and the mechanistic soul. At their cores they are the same: sparks. Should it truly be a surprise that she understands his thoughts?

They stop on a great swell of earth and the boy leaves her to rest on her kickstand.

He stands, looking out. Together they see a city, its brick and mortar discernible to eyes and optics both, its parks, and the shifting browns and greens of the hills and planes and shrubs that stretch off into the distance, broken only by the paved roadways that link town to town.

It is the day, the very moment, he determines to fight, and his eyes are hard and cool. He commits himself, and does not do so lightly. Clever boy.

It is the now; the fleshling is standing on a hill. His eyes are hard and cool.

The acrid musk of automobiles lies in the air, discernible only to a machine-perfect olfactory sense, overpowered by the earth and the trees.

His hands form fists, still clutching. He smells of salt and exertion and the light catches his face in just the right way to accent the thin film of stubble that traces his jawline.

He hiccups.

And his face twists into a cockeyed smile, the light now falling across his contorted features to accent the slight dimples of his cheeks while wiping clear the blood-dark flush of facial hair.

She laughs. It is the sound of a radio, something alive but somehow not, a tin sheet being struck and reverberating, a woman's voice, and feeling. He laughs in turn, looking back at her betrayed, but laughing just the same.

And they laugh together, crisp and uplifting.

The wind picks up, its whistle off-set by the rumble of a passing plane far, far overhead which only she can hear as the boy turns and approaches her. His expression blank, unreadable but not unkind, he reaches out to her.

A hand traces down her side, the pad of a thumb catching her gas cap as fingertips follow the outline of her frame. He pauses, hesitating, as his touch reaches her leather seat and lingers.

She feels, and does not feel, as the leather creaks in a dry grip.

His eyes are warm.

And he is warm – a warm little thing of flesh. His warmth presses into her. She feels it. Yes, but what kind of feeling is it? What kind can it be?

She is Cybertronian metal. Lacking an internal combustion engine, incapable of burning, she is cold and unyielding, yet the boy settles himself on the ground at her side, burrowing into her. Their combined weight runs through her wheels, his seat, and her kickstand into the ground.

And for a fleeting moment, she thinks that she can feel her warmth press into him.