The Complications of Life

By: Nightelfcrawler

Disclaimer: I do not own, merely covet adoringly.

Authors' note: This is a re-telling of the movie-verse, given that do not assume any of it happened the same way. I'm writing from scratch with all new secrets. And while certain characters have been included, do not assume end results.

Warnings: Contains a background of slash relationships.


Chapter Four

The door opened abruptly, startling her out of a sound sleep. Squinting up into the bright light spilling in from the hallway, she saw Banachek staring down at her with a solemn expression. "Parks. We need to talk. Come with me."

Dread filled her in a flood. She reached out but didn't find the consciousness of her partner drifting about in the back of her head. He was asleep, or in recharge as he called it. She was in this solo. Following Banachek, she found herself lead through the halls up into the upper levels, and into a small interrogation room where Banachek shut the door firmly behind them, locking the two of them in there together. He turned to face her, his expression falling from it's stoic cop façade to one of disappointment. "Parks… Alexis… What on earth were you thinking?" She winced. "Repairing the alien? Did you forget everything you learned in training?"

"No, sir." She said quietly.

"Then why didn't you tell us you knew more? What's been happening? Why were you sneaking in when the technicians were off-duty? Why were you repairing it without authorization?"

"Because what they're doing here is wrong, and you know it." She said calmly back, staring across the table at him with a firm resolution in her gaze. "Keeping him here, drugging him, running experiments and not even TRYING to communicate. Did you really think this is acceptable Tom? I mean, alien invasions aside, he's done nothing to harm us at all, and here you are taking him apart rather than trying to help him."

"We don't know why he's here…"

"I do." She said quietly, interrupting him. Tom fell silent, staring at her. "He crashed here fleeing a war on his home world. He doesn't mean us any harm, in fact he's been studying us for quite some time. He's a scientist."

Tom stared at her with a mixture of disbelief and concern. "And how do you know all this? No one has been able to communicate with him yet."

"He doesn't trust anyone else, seeing as they aren't doing much to help him. Sure, you stopped him from dying on the field, but you haven't done anything else yet to make him want to trust you."

"And you know this because…."

"Because he made the first move when he injected me with some nanites." She replied quietly. "They enable me to communicate with him. That's how I know, we've been talking."

Banachek stared at her blankly, then put a hand across his face as he sighed. "I was afraid of this."

"Look, I know how it sounds." She said quietly. "But he really is no threat to us."

"You don't know that. For all we know, he could be lying to us just to get free. The moment he's free, he unleashes destruction on the base as punishment for holding him."

"You're right, he could be planning that." She admitted. "I have no way of proving his story one way or the other. What I do know is that he's posed no threat to me, he's opened up and told me a great deal about his world and what's going on there. His people are at war over some ancient artifact, control of it. He's a neutral and takes no sides, and doesn't want to be a part of the war. He thinks wars are stupid, and wishes that it had never started. His people are all robots like him. They'd never heard of biological life until he and his partner discovered our world and began studying it from afar. They were interested in finding more about us, but didn't want to make their presence known for fear of it causing interference. If he meant to have them invade us, they could have done it ages ago. From what he tells me their race is very old, ancient by our terms. They were out flying about the universe before our planet was even capable of sustaining life! That's why they're so interested in how we develop, since they watched us grow from scratch!"

"And you take this all on the word of an alien who violated your body by injecting foreign material into it!" Banachek replied, shaking his head. "I'm sorry, but we can't simply just accept his word at face value."

"You can't keep him here forever." She said softly. "It'll be sending a clear message that we're hostile to the rest of them. Then they'll take action."

"Do any others of his kind know he's here?" She stayed silent, feeling that sinking feeling of dread fill her stomach. "I thought not." He replied softly. "If no one knows he's here, then no one will declare war on us. We cannot take risks. Until we can verify what he's telling us, and until we can confirm that you are not compromised, I'm afraid I'm going to have to place you under secure guard."

"You're arresting me?" Alexis was on her feet, alarm spreading through her like a wildfire. That emotion was enough to jolt her partner out of recharge. She felt his consciousness latch onto hers, following every word intently. "You can't do that!"

"Don't make this difficult." Tom rose to his feet, gesturing to the window. The guards outside the room stormed in, and Alexis had the sinking feeling of being suddenly cuckold. "You know I don't want to do this, but you broke protocol and are a security risk."

You cannot allow them to contain you. Came the sudden alert voice in the back of her head.

I know that! She sent back hotly, glancing wildly at the men as they approached with handcuffs. But I'm out of options here!

Fight them.

What?! I can't take on two armed guards!

Yes, you can. The answer was said so certainly, so firmly, that she nearly didn't act. However, up until now her makeshift partner had known exactly what she was capable of, right down to her skill set, and she knew instinctively that if he said she could act, she could.

She rushed the first man with her shoulder, taking him completely by surprise. He flew backwards slamming into the wall as she forced her way past the other, ducking as he reached for her, her knee ending firmly in his gut as she ducked through the hallway. Her heart pounding, she didn't even hear the alarm begin to blare all around her, caught by surprise at how she'd single-handedly taken down two men twice her size in a matter of seconds. She skidded around the corner, flying by several other men who shouted in alarm as she sped by them on legs faster than she had ever used. It felt as if the ground was lifting away from her as she skidded around the corner and abruptly came to a stop. Men were flooding down the corridor, guns in hand. But oddly enough they weren't coming for her, they were running FROM something.

The explosion that filled the corridor blew her clear off her feet and into the adjacent wall. With a shriek of surprise, she narrowly avoided being struck by flying cement as it rained down the hallway, smoke flooding the corridor as alarmed shouts filled the air. Coughing, she lifted her head uncertainly in time to see a massive shadowed figure emerge from the hole in the wall directly in front of her. She wondered briefly if he'd been holding back on her, obviously having broken the chains with ease to escape. The alien stood taller than she had imagined, filling the hole so that no light shone through. There was no way he could possibly fit inside the small corridor she realized as it's gleaming red eye scanned the corridor and finally landed on her. MOVE. The order came sharply. She scrambled to her feet and bolted right for him, ducking and dodging debris and groaning men as she headed directly towards the towering figure. The moment she jumped through the hole, the robot turned and lifted an arm at the wall again, firing two short blasts with something that had not been on his arm before. A glowing narrow piece of metal that appeared to be a gun blew violet light out of it's barrel, slamming into the wall. The concrete shattered and collapsed, effectively blocking the hole he had just made. Startled, Alexis fell over her own feet, staring upwards at him with shock. Not only did he tower over her in a massive complex mass of metal, but it was then she realized something she hadn't realized up until this point. The two strips of metal that she had thought were loose panels from his armor were in fact in a fixed position across his back and in a very particular shape. The realization of what they were hit her the moment he bent down and scooped her up into his enormous hand. Grabbing onto his large thumb, she only just managed to hold herself still to witness him lifting his arm to blast a hole in another wall. Instantly an enormous corridor opened up, clearly a loading tunnel. He made a low grunt that grated like metal on rock from the mouthpiece covering his face, and his optic flashed down at her. This will be rather… disorienting.

"Wait, what…?" She started to ask, her eyes wide as she stared at the tunnel.

Hold on tightly.

She felt his entire frame rumble, as if a strong motor were igniting, and then suddenly they were moving, and moving fast. With a gasp, it was all she could do to hold on tightly as the air whooshed by all around her, ripping her hair free of it's tie to smack her in the face. She managed to squeeze her eyes open, and saw the tunnel rushing towards them at an incredible rate, and knew instinctively that she had been right about those flat panels. They were wings. They weren't running through this corridor, they were spinning rather wildly from side to side, coming dangerously close to the walls in some cases, as the robot flew wildly down the open tunnel. It was all she could do to cling on desperately to his thumb to avoid being bounced around in his half-closed fist that was clutched tightly to his chest as they spun through the tunnel. She peered back behind them and saw a burning trail of blue plasma coming out of one of his feet, the other was black and dark, dangling helplessly, and considering she had only barely attached it the night before she wasn't surprised that thruster didn't work. She turned back around, thanking her lucky stars that she wasn't motion sick with the wild spinning they were doing, twisting around cables and pipes, as his wings were only barely small enough to fit within the tunnel. Then, up ahead she saw the closed doors that signaled the end of the tunnel, and gasped. They were going to smash into those in mere seconds like a fly on a windshield. In a panic, she glanced up at the robot, and saw his face appeared to be in a tight state of concentration. Their trajectory abruptly straightened, ceasing the wobbling, and she watched as he lifted his other arm. Cringing she ducked down covering her head and braced herself. She felt the concussive blast before she heard it, debris bouncing off the robot with loud heavy clanks before suddenly a rush of smoke and dust surrounded her.

And then they were free.

Bright sunlight spilled around her as suddenly her stomach did a loop as their trajectory changed, this time G-forces pushing her into his palm as he tilted upwards, tearing into the open sky above them. She watched in wonder as the desert fell away smoothly beneath them, the base growing smaller and smaller. The wind was hot and smelled of arid plants instead of sick fumes, but as she felt her heart soar at their newfound freedom, she saw something that sent fear rippling through her. "WATCH OUT!" She screamed mentally as well as out loud.

The robot didn't turn it's head, but she felt it's concentration turn as it threw itself to the side wildly, just in time to miss the brunt of a missile that had been aimed directly for it's back. It missed blowing them to pieces, but tore an enormous chunk out of it's left wing, and Alexis felt their stability in the air immediately falter. The robot threw itself to the side, twisting elegantly like a cat in mid-air, avoiding another missile lobbed at them, doing an impressive dance of aerobics as the F-22's streaked after them, intent on taking him down. A loud cacophony of sound burst from his throat, and she had the distinct impression he was cussing them out in his own language. His grip around her tightened protectively as he suddenly dove down straight for the ground at breakneck speeds. The two jets followed him, hot on his tail. Alexis could see the pilots' heads inside their cockpits as the closed in on the injured flying robot. How was he planning on losing them? Cover your ears. Came the sudden command in her head. She looked wildly up at his gleaming red optic, but obeyed instantly, slamming her thumbs into her ear canals, and hunkering down preparing for the worst.

She felt it more than heard it. It started out as a vibration in the metal she was crouched on in his palm, and then worked it's way to a jolting jarring sensation in her very bones. She could hear the distant whine of something piercing the air, and watched in horror as the jets' windshields shattered behind them, the pilots reeling in disorientation, before tearing off to either side, breaking off pursuit just in time for the robot to throw himself aside, spinning to avoid missing the desert floor, skimming inches above the surface before tearing back up skyward in a tight spiral that would have been enough to make her vomit if she had anything in her stomach. When they straightened back out again and her head stopped spinning wildly, she saw the two jets still flying, but far behind them. "What… what did you do?" she breathed glancing up his way.

His expression was still a focused mask of concentration, as his gaze didn't waver enough to look her way. I sent a sonic pulse that disabled their systems momentarily. They won't be following us.

Alexis immediately knew something was wrong. His mental voice was tightly controlled, hesitant. She could now feel it, distant as he appeared to be trying to hide it from her, but there was a definite sense of lack of control wavering at the edge of his consciousness. He was barely staying lucid. "You need to put down!" She insisted, concern for his safety filling her with fear. "You're in no shape to be doing this!"

I have no choice. I must get far enough away so we are not recaptured.

She couldn't talk him out of it. Their trajectory did not change as he soared high above the desert landscape. It seemed they were up there for hours, but as the sun began to fall, so did his trajectory. A concerned glance up at him told her that he was focused on something, and she turned her gaze to see what it was he was aiming for. She saw it after a moment, a cave cut out of the side of a sharp box canyon, hidden well from view by several rocky cliff faces. It was here that he lowered himself until at last he touched down with his non-functioning thrustered foot, stumbling a little as they landed and came to a stop. For a moment, neither of them moved. Then, slowly he lowered his hand and set her down. Alexis climbed to her feet unsteadily, used to having to kneel for the last several hours, and watched as the robot slowly limped his way to the overhang, and half-sat, half-collapsed on the ground with a shuddering thud. When he didn't move again, she slowly approached and stood by his limp hand, gazing up at him. "Hey…" She said softly. His optic flickered back on, but she noticed that it was lit with less light than normal. He was exhausted. "Are you going to be ok?"

I… must rest. I… am not well enough to have… done that. Came the slow hesitant response. You are free to go where you wish… I do not wish to detain you because of my troubles.

"A little late for that now." She mumbled, sitting down next to his foot, and leaning against it, glad for the hot metal that was nearly warm enough to burn her. "I'm in this just as deep as you. I'm not going anywhere."

I must rest now…

She watched as his optic flickered back off, and she felt his presence retract from her mind as he lapsed into unconsciousness. She ran a hand over her face, feeling slightly shaky after their crazed flight from captivity. Granted, she was relieved he was free of the government's hands, but now they were both in trouble. Out in the desert with a wounded robot. She frowned and rose to her feet, slowly walking around to his other side, and staring at his left wing. Half of it was missing, fluids dribbling down his side to pool on the ground. Not only did that look painful, but she knew that losing more fluids would probably be deadly for him. Grimacing, she carefully began to climb his slippery metal chassis, working her way up until she was able to straddle his wing, pushing herself along it's edge until she reached the ruined edge and could study the broken lines. It was quickly growing dark out here, and she had to move fast or she would not be able to see what she was doing. Using her hair tie, ripped pieces of her pants and shoelaces, she managed to tie off the ends of the broken lines and cables that were dribbling fluids. By the time it was dark, she had managed to stop the leaks, and was covered in blue and brown gunk. But she felt better knowing she had done what she could to help him. She wandered outside, staring up at the stars before walking to the middle of the narrow canyon where a small creek ran, splashing herself with water to clean herself off. It was cooling off, but she knew it wasn't going to be cold enough to be dangerous to her, so after cleaning she simply returned back to the cave, sat down at his foot, and let sleep claim her.