The Human Stain: Chapter 16

You and I got something
But it's all and then it's nothing to me
Yeah
And I got my defenses
When it comes to your intentions for me
Yeah
And we wake up in the breakdown
Of the things we never thought we could be
Yeah

-Goo Goo Dolls, Here is Gone

White.

The first thing her mind attached itself to was the incredible whiteness her vision presented. There were a few grainy outlines to mark things separately from one another, to distinguish one object from the next, but they had all one thing in common.

So white…

Was she dead? Had she gone to heaven?

Her head lolled sideways across a soft surface – a pillow – and she realized she was lying with her back to a bed. A sharp pain hit her nervous system by doing this, and it confused her as to why this was so. The room came into clearer focus as her eyes adjusted, giving her better insight into her surroundings. There was a door across the room with a small, vertical window in it. Flickers of color passed by this aperture in the door, and she knew there was a hallway beyond it. A window was just to the right of the exit, and sunlight beamed through the glass. A table was next, as well as a low metal stool with rolling wheels. A steady hum to her right pulled her eyes to the source of the sound.

An ECG machine was at her bedside, monitoring her vital signs. Her recent escapades popped clearly into the forefront of her brain, and her left hand fluttered to her throat.

It was wrapped and stiff. By twisting her head slightly, she could feel the resistance of stitches pulling against her skin.

"Claire," Smokescreen's voice said.

Heaven? Hardly. She was definitely in hell.

Wincing, the woman used her peripheral vision to ascertain there was indeed a figure to her left. She moved her head slowly, movements made careful now by the knowledge of her stitches.

His face was slightly blurred, still fuzzy from her weak focus – for a moment she saw a man with dark hair and she could pretend it was Smokescreen's hologram form. It was the only similarity that Simon and Smokescreen shared, after all.

But, no.

He came into plain focus much too early, and she cringed at the sight of Simon's features on a man that was not Simon. He was standing some feet from her hospital bed, hands in the pockets of his pants. When he saw he had been acknowledged, he began to advance.

"Don't!" her voice cracked in protest. "Stay away!" Her right hand groped within the limits of its leash – it was hooked up via lines to the ECG machine. Unfortunately, she could not find the patient call button that alerted a nurse. Where the hell was it?

"Claire, it's me." He was speaking in that strangely inflected voice again, as if he couldn't coordinate his words with his respiration.

"Like hell it is," she spat back, groping restlessly with her left hand along the metal bed frame. Leave it up to the hospital to keep those call buttons insidiously hidden in case emergency situations like the one she happened to be in cropped up. In the far reaches of her mind, she held the deeply imbedded knowledge that it was Smokescreen, but she wasn't ready to face that yet. She would never be ready, really – thus she kept denying what she knew to be true.

"What do I need to do to prove it to you? Do I need to give you details of the truce we made?"

She opened her mouth, swallowed thickly, and then shut it. Damn.

He held his hands out before them, staring at them as if they were rather curious. Truthfully, they most likely were quite curious to him.

"How.. how did.." she stuttered, willing her mind to process the truth.

"I am .. not sure," he admitted, still staring cautiously at his human hands. He turned them over back and forth, and then held them closely to his face as if investigating the whorls at his fingertips. "I remember fighting Barricade and Starscream, and then I was pushed back… and the rest… I was thrown from the spot. When I came back online, I was not in my body anymore."

"Barricade? Starscream?"

He nodded, and returned his steady gaze to her impatiently. She got the feeling this was not a subject of concern for him, and he was rather irritated by the change of subject. "The flying Decepticon was Starscream and the land-based Decepticon was Barricade."

It blew her mind that he knew their names - that they had names. He must have run into them before, on some other world. She wasn't quite sure why, but it annoyed her that she knew so very little beyond the boundaries of everyday human affairs. There appeared to be so much more happening elsewhere, but human limitations trapped her in the headlines of Earthly endeavors. Humans were simply not ready to focus on something much greater than themselves.

The sudden realization was just a mite depressing.

She moved to jar the somber thoughts from her head, or at least to ignore them for now. Her body ached in protest, sparking landmines in her head. She swung sideways on one hip, but met resistance in the form of the tubes attached to her body. Disgusted, she began to rip the electrodes off a section of skin just below her collarbone.

"What are you doing?" he asked, his voice rising in alarm.

"Getting out of here. What does it look like?" she snapped back.

"You can't just…"

"Watch me."

She was pissed now. Not just pissed at the world and her current state of affairs (which she had every right to be), but the fact that Smokescreen was inhabiting her ex-husband's body. Okay, maybe not his body per se (that was well and truly dead), but his physical manifestation. That was the proverbial cherry topping her cow-pie of a life, and it stunk more than she could bear.

A hand stilled her progress, just as her own hand draped itself across the second electrode above her heart.

He touched her hand.

He was touching her.

Her lips parted in shock and she stared dumbfounded at the hand atop hers. Beneath the double stack of their palms, her heart sped up and the jumpy scrawl on the ECG machine did likewise.

Claire slowly lifted her eyes. The warmth radiating from Smokescreen's hand was all too palpable, all too human – and therein was the problem - he wasn't.

He was returning her gaze, looking just as surprised as she. The consciousness swirling beneath the brown eyes was neither Simon's nor that of a stranger. It was Smokescreen's, no matter how much her mind denied it. He was looking at her in a new way, almost as if he had never really seen her before. His eyes traced the features of her face – the slope of her nose, the line of her jaw – and she watched him do it.

They stood like that as the moments marched by, until Smokescreen began to lean a little too close for comfort. His face – Simon's face – was mere inches from her own when she realized how little personal space was between them. His eyes began to close in increments, just as hers widened.

Claire moved first, jerking away. Her hand rose quickly from her chest, effectively batting his aside. Her eye frantically searched the room for an escape. Oh god, was he about to kiss me?

Smokescreen seemed to snap out his strange stupor, and stepped back. Claire desperately patted about the bed like a blind woman in search of that pesky call button. She cleared her throat. "Uh… I need a phone. I need to call work."

Smokescreen blinked rapidly, looking all too quixotic for her tastes. He attempted to speak, failed, and tried again. Claire bet he hadn't been affected by a loss of vocal capabilities before, and it showed. "I'll notify someone."

He turned on his heel and left the room, closing the door behind him. His retreating footsteps echoed down the hollow hallway beyond, and Claire flopped back upon her pillow with a rush of pent-up air. She hadn't realized she had been holding her breath.

Smokescreen had hovered over her bedside just a few moments earlier, looking all too much like Simon – and yet not. He had closed his eyes and bent his face for hers and –

No.

The one word echoed firmly in her mind, reaffirming her blatant objection to the possibility. If he was really Smokescreen, he was just an alien robot. It was all her fault, really. She had started to let her guard slip when she began referring him – it – as being male. It was only a regression of reason from there that lead her to even entertain her confusing attraction to his holographic form.

I mean, who wouldn't be attracted to that hologram? He was hot!

She groaned, and put a hand to her head. It was thoughts like those that got her in situations like these. Why in the world would a robotic alien wrapped up in the guise of her ex-husband want to kiss her for? She must have imagined it.

Unless…

A red flush sprang forth to stain her skin a bright hue. It rushed upwards, causing her cheeks to burn.

Of course, the memories.

Trans-Organics likely had the ability to assume their victim's memories. That only meant that Smokescreen had access to every single memory that Simon ever had of Claire, including the intimate ones.

Hoo-boy.

She renewed her endeavor to detach herself from the monitoring equipment in earnest.

Claire's fingers ripped at the electrodes on her body, casting them aside the moment they were removed. She was such an idiot, such a frigging moron. She would die of mortification if he returned to the room and she was still occupying it. Had anyone ever died of embarrassment before? It was an oft-used cliché, so perhaps there was a grain of truth to it.

She didn't want to test it, personally. Up until now she had somehow stayed alive despite invading extraterrestrials the size of skyscrapers. It would just seem, hm, a bit anti-climatic to die of something as simple as her own embarrassment after all that.

Once the last electrode was removed, Claire cast the bedsheet covering her form aside and turned herself so that her feet touched the linoleum floor. They had left her prosthetic on, which was a bit strange. The press of her skin against the hard surface was refreshing, and it helped stay the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm her. Taking a deep breath, the woman pushed herself upright and stood with one hand on the bed for support. She was garbed in a patient's gown, white to match the room. Her eyes appraised the contents of the room, seeking her clothes. When her search came up empty, she realized that they must have disposed of her garments – they were hardly fit to be called clothes after that last encounter with the Decepticons.

Damn it. She would just have to make her escape insane-asylum style, hospital gown and all.

Creeping to the door and attempting to keep her prosthetic from making too much noise at the same time, Claire hesitated long enough to listen for sounds from the hallway. She was escaping because A) Smokescreen knew what she looked like naked and B) she was still clinging to the fear that it really wasn't Smokescreen at all, but the Trans-Organic playing her for a fool. Reason B was more a cover for Reason A, as she couldn't really believe Reason B but it would make a good excuse later if she was cornered for answers to her actions. The option to stay was really no option at all.

After a long stream of silence, Claire made her move. Her hand twisted the doorknob quietly, and she opened the door wide enough so that she might slip through. There was a tension lining her shoulders that had nothing to do with her injuries, but she ignored it. Peering into the hallway reassured her that there was no one present and she snuck forward. It was rather difficult to keep her prosthetic from making too many sounds as she moved – she was resigned to keeping her pace unfortunately slow. The hospital's corridor was rather narrow, lined with rolling tray tables and other miscellaneous items that made it even smaller. Claire kept one hand to the wall, steadying herself with every step she took. This was not where she envisioned herself to be after last night, but her plans never took the form she wanted them to. She should have been used to that by now.

Voices.

They were faint, perhaps on the other end of an adjoining hallway just ahead. Male and female, definitely. As they rose in strength, Claire could register the male's as Smokescreen's voice and the female as unknown. A nurse? Nevermind, it didn't matter. She pivoted in one fluid motion despite her downtrodden state, and began to slink away in the direction she had come. Claire moved faster than before, ignoring the telling echo of her prosthetic on the linoleum.

There was a missed beat in the conversation, and Claire knew he knew that she was out of her room. Smokescreen might have been reduced to a hybrid state of robotics, but he still had the capacity to do things beyond human ability – and that included hearing.

Shit.

Desperate to remove herself from the hallway, Claire panicked and ducked back into the room she had just vacated. It was decided then that she was really, really bad at escaping hospitals.

Granted, she was somewhat the amateur. It wasn't like she had done this sort of thing before.

The pair of footfalls sped up, and she had enough mental faculties to close the door behind her. She had just made it to her bed when the door reopened. Claire was immediately joined by a short blonde woman and Smokescreen-as-Simon.

The blonde was somewhat chubby, but young. Her thin, straight hair was pulled tightly back from a heart-shaped face that scowled with disapproval at Claire. Just beyond her, Smokescreen mirrored her facial expression.

"Ms. Walters, why are you sitting up?"

Claire was perched on the edge of her bed, devoid of electrodes and appearing as if she had only recently removed them. The nurse seemed oblivious to the fact that she had done more than that.

Good.

"Uh… sorry, they itched," Claire offered lamely.

The shorter woman huffed as if that was just another recycled excuse she was tired of hearing, but heard far too often. "Ms. Walters, you cannot just…"

"Claire, please get back into bed." It was Smokescreen. His brow was furrowed low above his eyes, and his voice held a command that was meant to brook no argument. He had most likely heard her out in the hallway, or he wouldn't have arrived so quickly. He wasn't telling the nurse, however.

Why?

Forgetting the fact that she would feel more than mortified upon facing him again, Claire let her irritation rise to the fore. "I'm fine, really." She crossed her arms over her chest as if to prove that point.

Smokescreen's dark look only became blacker. "Claire…" he warned.

"Here, let me reattach these," the nurse cut in, obviously uncomfortable with the battle of wills the two demonstrated. She hovered over Claire like a flitting hummingbird and eased the taller woman back into the hospital bed before reattaching the electrodes. She chastised Claire like a child all the while, warning her against attempting the stunt a second time. Blood loss was serious and not to be trifled with and yadda, yadda, yadda.

Claire wanted to scream at the nurse, to tell her that shape shifting aliens from another world were serious and not to be trifled with, but somehow she failed to get that particular memo on that particular danger – most notably the one still standing in the doorway. Being warned against blood loss seemed laughable.

But no, she pursed her lips and merely appeared sullen instead. The nurse finished hooking her up like science experiment ready to be tested and stepped back.

Now I just need Smokescreen to zap me, and we're all set.

The thought coalesced all too suddenly and her eyes widened for it – no, no, she did not need any zapping today. He couldn't zap her anymore, he wasn't a hologram.

Too bad, that. Too damn bad. She would have actually preferred the hologram to the material version of Smokescreen. Why the hell did he have to look like Simon, of all people?

Oh, right. God was laughing at her – she almost forgot she was his living, breathing cosmic joke. Good one, God!

"Are you going to stay with your wife much longer, Mr. Walters?" the nurse inquired, turning for the door. "You should watch her as long as you can. Speak to the nurse on duty when you feel like stepping out so we can keep an eye on her."

Claire paled. The short blonde chick thought she was married to Smokescreen. Ye Gods. It was slightly understandable, as they did share the same last name. Still, hadn't anyone informed her?

Smokescreen swallowed a laugh, and Claire shot him a peevish glare. "I will do that, thank you."

What?! He didn't even bother to correct her?

"If you need a phone, there's one to your right." The nurse paused, thought better of leaving, and walked around Claire's bed to a half-drawn curtain. She pulled it away, revealing an extension of the room Claire had failed to notice. Not three feet away to her right was a phone sitting atop a small table. "This room is capable of holding two patients, so I can understand how the phone might be missed."

"Actually," Claire began, "I'd like to clear up one thing…"

"I would have missed seeing the phone too if I had been in your place," the woman smiled. The nurse was no longer on edge, seemingly mollified by the fact that Smokescreen would be watching his wayward 'wife' once she left.

"No, it's not…"

"Thank you for your assistance," Smokescreen smiled, moving forward with a strange sort of affability.

"Anytime," grinned the blonde woman, moving for the door. "If you need anything, just hit the button over Ms. Walters' head."

Claire glanced directly up. Oh, hell. There it was. One big button, positioned within easy reach on the wall. She comforted herself by thinking it was a rather stupid place to put a call button.

With that, the nurse was gone. An uncomfortable silence settled between Claire and Smokescreen. Claire still hadn't uncrossed her arms from across her chest, and when Smokescreen's line of sight began to creep below her chin she decided it was a good thing.

"What are you looking at!?" she snapped irritably, unsure of how to handle the fact that he had full knowledge of every single thing she had ever shared or done with Simon.

"I was looking at your neck wound. The nurse said it wasn't deep." He stood halfway between herself and the door, currently immobile.

Claire moved her head down as if to look at the said infliction, but of course she could not. Her hand moved up instead, and fluttered over the stiff stitches. "Oh." She suddenly felt stupid for thinking he was going to look at her chest. But… wouldn't he? Wouldn't he want to?

Of course not, idiot. He's a robot. They don't have hormones.

Correction: He was a robot. Now he was something straddling the fence between human and robot, and she wasn't sure what he felt or knew or wanted or…

"Claire."

Her eyes tore up to meet his. She couldn't help it.

"I…" he started, and then stopped. The corners of his mouth curled downward, and she wished she knew what he was thinking. It wasn't fair, to watch these unfamiliar expressions play across so familiar features. It was like watching a favorite movie she had seen several times before, to know how it was supposed to play out, and then to find one day that one of the main characters had a personality shift. That change inexorably transformed everything, from how the other characters would interact with him, to how the plot ran. They had words for this alteration - a bad sequel.

She was no doubt in one right now.

"Look," she said, lifting her hands as if to illustrate her point. "I don't… well, I suppose I want to know one thing… how did you manage to get stuck in Simon's body?"

"This isn't Simon," he corrected.

"I know, I know, but for simplicity's sake… work with me here. How did you get there?"

"I already explained this to you. I told you all I know."

So he did. She supposed she was just not ready to accept that explanation. "Ok, fine. Question number two… and this is the harder one for me… do you have any of Simon's memories?"

"No."

That answer made her exhale in total relief. There is a God.

"I have all of them."

Claire froze completely. Maybe she needed to become an atheist after all. "Wh-wh-what?!"

He began to pace, shaking his head as if to clear it. "It's not like I wanted them!" he protested, the first edge of frustration entering his tone. "I had them the first moment I was aware of my surroundings. This… this body…" he stared down at his hands, as if disbelieving they were his own, "this body is nothing I have encountered before. Everything is different. I do not feel connected anymore, I feel alone in my processor…"

The thought struck her as odd. Alone in his processor? Connected? She sat there, attempting to puzzle it out. The only way she could even remotely begin to understand it was likening it to being without a cell phone in the woods – some people would feel alone and out of sorts without a way to contact the outside world in case something bad happened. If this was how he felt without a constant link to the internet, she could rationalize it. It seemed foreboding in a way – what if one day humanity was able to connect to the internet, 24/7? What if they were suddenly severed from that link? Would they feel isolated, lost? The current generation depended heavily upon the internet already; it was only one more step until they were actually linked to it in their minds.

She was worlds away with alien thoughts tumbling through her brain when his voice brought her back into the room. "I do not understand how you humans can deal with this. I cannot… I am alone."

Claire sorted through her mixed feelings and tried to offer a solution. "Have you tried contacting Optimus Prime or any of the other Autobots?"

Smokescreen shook his head. "I feel I have the ability to, but I cannot use it without risking alerting the Decepticons. This primitive processor does have the ability to speak with other Cybertronians, but it is likely not without monitoring."

She felt slightly stung. If he thought that a hybrid human/Cybertronian brain was primitive, he surely wasn't referring to the robotic part as sub-par.

They both stopped speaking after that, and the minutes stretched by. Claire stared up at the ceiling, occasionally glancing at the offending call button on the wall over her head. "So now what?" She was too fixated on their next move that she had completely forgotten about her anxiety over what memories he had retained. It was stupid – trivial even – anyways. There were greater things at stake than her personal dignity.

Smokescreen took a tentative step forward, causing her to lock her eyes with his. They were no longer the vibrant blue of his holographic form, but they were lighter now than Simon's had ever been. They had that lit quality – wholly inhuman, but enticing all the same.

Whoa, back up.

Enticing? Where had that come from? She must have lost more blood than she had originally thought. Maybe the nurse did have good reason to give her a thorough scolding.

Smokescreen stood by her bedside now, looking down at her with a frown. She wasn't sure she liked the moods and thoughts sliding behind his otherworldly eyes. For the first time, she noticed his irises were ringed with blue on their outermost edge – ah, so not all was lost.

"What are you looking at?" she hedged.

"You."

"…And why would you do that? I look like hell."

"Actually…" he glanced down at himself. He hadn't cleaned himself up, or changed clothes.

"Okay, point taken," she conceded.

He smiled then, the first true smile she had seen on him. It wasn't becoming so discomfiting to see him using Simon's lips to pull it off, either – Simon had never smiled at her like that. He had smirked, grinned, beamed proudly – but he never smiled so genuinely. That action alone made it quite real to her that it was no longer Simon behind those eyes. It might not be something she was ready to accept, but it was a start.

"What are you smiling at?" she asked suspiciously.

"The mark."

"The mark," she repeated, obviously lost.

"You have a mark on your thigh, on the upper part by…"

"STOP IT!"

"Huh?" he faltered.

"Oh my god, stop it! You're seeing me naked!" Did she just say that?

"I saw everything when I came back online and…"

"So you would concentrate on that, of all things!?" She was ready to dig her way to China. Her worst fears were just confirmed. Feeling the intense need to retaliate, she reached behind her and chucked her pillow at him. It was flat and hard, anyways.

He caught it squarely between both hands like a pro football player. She should have put his inhuman reflexes into some sort of consideration, but she was just so ... overwhelmed to think clearly.

"I could not stop it. It just came. Everything. It was downloaded to this processor…" he lifted one hand from the pillow and tapped his head, "before I inhabited this body."

"That doesn't mean you can just think of me without clothes!" As if she could ward off any further meandering thoughts of his, Claire gripped the sheets and pulled them to a point just below her chin. She looked and felt like the scandalized heroine in a bad romance novel, and she hated him with every fiber of her being for it. "Stop thinking of me! I know you are thinking about it!" she screeched.

"How am I supposed to do that?" he demanded. He set the pillow behind her head again, and she leaned away from him.

She thought about it a moment, focusing her distraught mind long enough to find a solution – and truthfully, she couldn't. There was no way she could force him to stop thinking about (or, in this case, remembering) something when she had no control over his brain functions. Furthermore, asking him to forget about it would only succeed in making him concentrate on it even more. It was a cache-22. The best she could do was let him forget, or hope he did.

But, dear lord, it was unsettling.

He would see everything in the blink of eye, as that was how memories worked – he could recall them and vanquish them at will, and she had no say in it. He would watch through Simon's eyes everything that Simon remembered. The more chaste things would be their old relationship – the beginning, the middle, the end. The very detailed things would be her honeymoon and every night they had ever had sex.

Claire blanched, suddenly sick to her stomach. Smokescreen would either feel extreme disdain for human coupling (which she pleaded was the case) or the exact opposite…

"Claire? Is something wrong?" Smokescreen asked. He had folded his arms on the left side of her bed, and she found herself scooting as far as she could to the right.

"Give me space. A bubble. Anything."

"A bubble?" he questioned, unfamiliar with the term. He paused as if to research the meaning, but gave a frustrated sigh when he remembered he couldn't. "You'll have to explain your human terminology to me, I seem to be impaired."

"You know, distance! Step back!"

He did, much to her surprise. His expression was guarded, and rightly so. Hers was not much different. They were two different beings, from two different worlds, and now they shared the same damn memories.

She wanted to bury her head in her hands and cry. If he scoured his newfound recollection, he would find that Simon always left her alone when that happened. Maybe he would follow the example.

Pulling her knees up to her face, Claire looped her arms around her legs and hid her face in the circle. There was a pervading silence, and she willed him away with her mind, hoping he would leave her be to her own demons.

He kept proving to be more and more unlike Simon each and every single time. A hand fell to her back, a comforting one, and she knew she should wish it wasn't there.

As the warmth of his palm leaked into the knotted muscles of her back, Claire was chagrined to find that she couldn't.

Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers. All recognizable characters are the property of Haystack. All original characters are mine.

A/N: Well, the move was a success, as moves go. It was one long road trip, I'll admit to that! I'm sorry it took me so long to get this chapter out – I really wanted to make it a bit longer, but you guys had waited long enough. This chapter is very… Smokescreen/Claire centric, so I think that will make a lot of you happy! I think things are changing for these two for the better. It's been a long road, for sure.

Thanks for all the reviews you guys have given me in the past! I should be turning out chapters more quickly now, so I'm sure you guys are glad to hear that. I'm going to pause with drawing illustrations for a bit since I still have a few things to do that are leftover from the move.