Alexis was being pushed and shoved by passing people, but that didn't move her. Her feet were planted; her eyes seared on the large viewport. She was on the Autobot's ship in space, and her planet, the once beautiful orb of blue, green and white was grotesque and ugly, the poisoned inky blackness stretching and saturating the rest of the planet.
Her gaze shifted as bright weapon's fire commenced. Ships came from the far side of the moon, spreading out and attacking the escaping Autobot ships. The ship she was on dipped and curved, twisted and rolled. Oddly, Alexis stayed upright. If she hadn't been watching the lights of space shift and turn, she would have never known how the space vehicle just moved.
She didn't get to watch the battle long. Long enough though to watch what she now knew where Decepticon warships, due to catching the insignia of one flying by, attack the ship right next to them. It exploded and sent waves of vibrations and light at them. Before it touched them, the space shifted and blurred until the lights became fine lines around them.
Earth disappeared.
Alexis still stayed there and watched the lines of light, wondering as her eyes blurred and her heart hammered, if Timothy, no, Thundercracker had been on one of the attacking ships.
Telling herself it didn't matter, she turned and melted into the swarm of panicking humans.
Finding her brother not long after her arrival on the Autobot's ship, and their departure from Earth, she was surprised to find that Josh and Amanda, her once dear friend when she had been a slave, had met and become friends.
"It's a miracle," Amanda told her when they found one another. "I was telling Josh that I had a friend with a brother by that name, and it ended up being him! I mean, what were the chances?"
She shrugged her shoulders, wondering even with the sight of her friend before her, why she couldn't seem to feel much. Numbness was plastered to her soul, and even as Amanda hugged her and then her brother picked her up and spun her around, she felt inhuman and indifferent.
Placed in an immense room, the humans were to find apartment sized cubicles waiting for them. There were hundreds of survivors on board, and it took two days just for everyone to get settled. By then, she was sharing one of the cubicles with her brother and Amanda. They had a bunk like bed in their room, while Josh slept on a couch in the outer room.
Feeling as if the world was pushing by her, and she was stuck in limbo, Alexis slept for a week. Not because she was tired, but mentally worn out.
"I wish I knew what was wrong with Lex," she heard her brother speaking to Amanda in the other room, during that blur of a week, his voice low and strained.
"Didn't she tell you? Thundercracker killed Timothy," Amanda whispered with care.
Alexis didn't remember telling Amanda anything about that. Shifting and bringing the sheet tighter around her body, she turned.
"I've never seen her like this," Josh said with evident anxiety.
"She can't stay in bed forever, let's give her some time," Amanda recommended.
Their voices became lower when they moved away. Alexis ate, went to the bathroom, and even showered. But she couldn't recall the details. As if her world was the dream and her dreams were turning into reality, differentiating the two was difficult.
But she couldn't stay in bed forever. It was only when the headaches came, and the nightmares became more abundant that she forced herself out of the bed and pushed herself into the outer room.
Alexis still felt horrid. She loved her brother and had thought of Amanda often, and yet she wanted to be by herself. Wanted to shift away from the world, bury her head and forget what she had seen and what she felt.
But she wasn't allowed to. Her brother forced her to remain out of bed, making sure she stayed up and awake.
When the meetings began, the ones that involved what they intended to do now that their planet was inhabitable, few came. Hundreds of survivors on the ship and only nine, including Alexis showed up. But she understood. She almost didn't go herself. But she needed to know.
Sideswipe led the meetings, unable to fit in the human-sized area, he was forced to use his holo-form. The first meeting, Alexis stared at him the entire time, unable to look away. Even when he caught her several times, she continued to stare. She couldn't stop herself. Now knowing what Timothy had been, and seeing a version of that in front of her, had her curiosity, no matter how painful, awaken. But they felt human, might as well have been human. Remembering Sideswipe picking her up and holding her, remembering him leaning his body against her as he activated the shield, she couldn't help but feel as if everything was different and yet exactly the same as it had been. Knowledge though, changed the perceptive along with the emotions behind what he was and what Timothy had been.
Cynthia was among the few that had showed up. She, like Alexis, also stared at Sideswipe. Obviously, it was her first time seeing him as a human. The way she hovered afterward, asking questions that had already been answered, she made it clear that she liked what she saw.
Sideswipe brushing her off and moving toward her brother, had Cynthia following after. Her brother and the Autobot spoke. Amanda hovered near her brother while the two had a soft conversation that Alexis couldn't bring herself to care about. Cynthia interrupted them, introducing herself to Amanda and her brother. When she saw the woman's eyes roll down her brother and her face turn into a very large smile, Alexis excused herself.
The Autobots had saved a lot of data from their planet: music, books, videos, games anything that had been digitized. Alexis began to read books that she had during her childhood. Starting with an old classic that she had enjoyed, she forced her mind into the pages, an excruciating task since they no longer held any interest. She had always wanted a tablet like the one they had been provided, but it was too expensive. Destroy her planet, take away all that she had known, and suddenly she got one. It wasn't an adequate replacement.
Alexis was trying to read the second paragraph on the third chapter, the words oddly repeating as she read the same sentence over and over while her brother and Amanda talked quietly. No one really knew what to do. At the moment, all they could do was adapt as best as they could and go from there. Her brother was already passionate about the Autobots' plans of finding them a new planet to settle, hardly mindful that their friends and family could and probably were as good as dead.
No, that wasn't fair. Every day, they all went to check the posted list on a large flat screen that slowly filled up with names of survivors and the confirmed dead. The survivor list was larger only because the dead were not as easily tracked.
A sound rang through their living quarters, and her brother got up to answer the door. It slid open and her brother hooped and yelled, rushing back to the two women with someone in tow.
Alexis dropped the tablet when she recognized whom it was. It was her brother's best friend from high school, Robert, or Bobby as they had always called him.
"I was reading the list this morning, caught your name," Bobby was saying. "I almost couldn't believe when I found that you were on board the same ship that I am," he turned toward Alexis and smiled, acknowledging her. "Both of you."
Alexis' face was burning. She felt embarrassed and suddenly she was sixteen all over again with her birthday ruined but never forgotten when her first crush, the man before her, rejected her when she told him how she felt. Her heart still tapped quicker at the sight of him, but didn't explode as it once would have, memories causing mortification to try to take hold. But that was years ago. Why did he have to still be as she remembered him? His brown hair was a little longer, his eyes though were still that bright amber, his smile the same one that been capable of making her forget to breathe.
Except she could breathe this time, and that feeling that used to disable her and screw with her words, was nowhere near. Things had changed and years had passed.
They talked for hours. Eventually, their conversations drifted to whom they had lost and who had died, what they had seen, and what encounters they had survived. Alexis didn't have much to say on that topic, but remained and listened. By the time Bobby left, Alexis found a part of herself again. It wasn't seeing him again, but what was said. She wasn't the only one that was suffering, not the only one who had lost. She knew that before but understood it then. She had her brother. She had Amanda. She had been shown grace and survived the unsurvivable. God hadn't abandoned her, would never abandon her. And her family, her parents, her grandmother, her friends, maybe they too had survived. Having hope wasn't pathetic, it was a gift, it was life.
Feeling a little better and able to face the new state of her world, she finally left their dwelling, what she thought of as an apartment, a week later. Two weeks on the ship and she hadn't really wandered around except to go to the meetings. Now, her mind awakening with inquiries, she wandered. She wasn't the only one. There was a bustle of activity, people going here and there, trades being done, so many sitting outside their cubicles and watching the passers-by. Some had already junked up the spaces outside their dwellings, showing a lack of regard for what had been giving them. She saw more than a few scary looking individuals, understanding why her brother didn't want her or Amanda wandering around unattended.
Moving toward one such group, she didn't know whether to do an about-face, or continue forward. There were four of them, couldn't have been more than thirty years old, and they were laughing loudly and drinking what actually looked like beer. Cringing, she walked right through them, keeping her head low even as she remained alert.
Nothing happened. The group ignored her. Glad for that, Alexis continued to walk until she met the very edge of the room, past the last of the apartments and to the very back where a large empty area opened before her. The lighting was dim as if aware that no one was occupying it. The lights blinked on as she approached, spreading along and before her.
Seeing nothing of interest and disappointed by what she did see, or didn't, she returned to her apartment. Alexis didn't go inside though. Head tilting up, she saw a large door beyond all the dwellings. Alexis headed toward it. She had to walk a good while until she was standing in front of it. That was when she realized they were all as good as locked on that level, and whether they were provided for or not, the knowledge of that made Alexis wonder what was on the other side.
She sat a small distance away and waited. An hour passed and then another. Not bored, but needing something to distract her mind, she continued to wait. She didn't know how long she waited, but finally, a small swishing sound commenced and the door opened. A group of humans stepped through, carrying what looked like food supplies.
Alexis waited for them to leave and then quickly went through the closing sliding door. The door completely closing behind her, she found herself in a large empty corridor. It was suddenly colder than it had been, but not uncomfortable.
She walked for a while, turning corners and rounding through long stretches of corridors that seemed unending. Alexis finally came to some sort of construct that above it held a large window. They had no windows or viewports where they had been put. They could have been inside a warehouse or building if they didn't know they were on board a ship.
Moving toward the side, she saw it had thin rungs along it. They were far apart but wide enough in length that Alexis was sure she could climb them. Grabbing hold of the first one, she pulled her body up. The task stretched her body and caused discomfort, but not enough for her to stop. A good fifteen minutes later, Alexis made it to the top of the platform. She looked out, disappointed by the blackness of space and the lack of anything interesting. She remained though. Space was space and even empty and unremarkable it was still... like nothing Alexis had ever seen.
"You shouldn't be here."
Alexis turned around. The swift movement caused a strain against her almost healed shoulder. She winced. Sideswipe looked at her, for once not down. He was level to her, allowing Alexis to see his face up close. She noticed his bright optics and the mechanisms around them, the curves and construction of his face, the metal parts meeting and converging to create his alien yet familiar facial features. His helmet was finally polished, and on the surface, it held her clear reflection. The tires on his upper arms suddenly didn't seem as large as they usually did. And she noticed that the areas of red along his chassis and upper body held tiny specks of what looked liked glitter.
"Why not?"
His doors lifted behind his back. "For one, what you happened to be on top of is where I need to put this." He indicated a large box like thing in his hand.
"Oh, I thought..."
"You thought what?" His metal brows lifted. He put the box down on the floor. Shifting back up, he moved a hand behind her and pushed it and her forward, forcing her off the platform. Alexis landed on his palm. But there had been a moment, a tense, terrifying moment, when she had thought he was going to shove her off and splat that was the end of that.
He brought her closer. Alexis noticed yellow dancing in his luminescent blue eyes with lines of green around it that swam before melting back into blue.
"How did you get up there?"
"Climbed."
Sideswipe tilted his head. "Huh." He continued to look at her. "But you aren't going to see anything here. You want to see something? I'll take you to the bridge."
"I thought I wasn't supposed to be out here," Alexis reminded him.
He smiled at that, and something crept down her spine.
"You're with me now, and since you are already here..." The smile grew.
Alexis fell back as he took off into a burst of a stride. Standing back up, she clung to one of his metal knuckles only long enough to become more firm on her feet.
"What about that box thing." She pointed behind them.
"What box?" Sideswipe asked.
She looked back behind her, seeing the forgotten object still resting on the floor, but now a good distance away.
"Never mind," she whispered.