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Oct. 2nd, 2013 06:08 pmThis was not his Cybertron, and everywhere he looked, he was reminded of the fact. It was hard not to be jealous of the bustling metropolis he could see through the window. The busy thoroughfare outside was currently clogged with Cybertronians, sporting altmodes weird and wonderful, jostling and vibrant and alive.
He yearned to be down there on the street with them, gliding among their ranks just to feel the press of their EM fields, to taste the faint life-signal tang of the sparks in their chests. Even just to sit up here and look down on these unfamiliar faces-- a dozen, two, three, more-- was enough to make his engine turn over in his chest.
The contrast could not be more stark than when he looked out at this living Iacon and thought about home.
This Iacon was not his accomplishment, not something he could be proud of, and those busy sparks outside weren't his people, not really. The Cybertronians here tended bulky, so many of them broad and heavily armored. They were made up of planes and angles and wide barrels and thick struts. He didn't often see the kind of litheness that he was used to-- any time he saw a smaller cyb, they were either just as heavily armored as their more massive brethren, or they seemed... frail. (There weren't many of those latter.) There was a certain absence of trim waists and narrow chassis, of strong, lean limbs--
Unless he was looking at a reflection, anyway, but Wheeljack didn't seem to have one hung in his lab.
That was another incongruity, this scientist Wheeljack and his lab full of experiments and engineering projects. Oh, the Wheeljack he knew was something of a tinkerer, and this Wheeljack effaced himself by claiming the same, but the difference in scope was like comparing a headlight's beam to the wash of a floodlamp. Just the fact that he had a lab, spacious and busy with clutter and well-stocked with equipment, spoke to that difference. The fact that Bumblebee looked to him first to solve the problems that plagued their living Iacon spoke to the difference. (Bumblebee! In charge! And what a Bumblebee, short and round and walking with a cane, with a round candid face that too clearly betrayed how he was feeling-- which seemed to be a constant state of annoyance, something else incongruous to a mech too used to a narrow-faced Bumblebee who alternated between joviality and dead-seriousness with little else in between.) The fact that--
"Oh! Scrap--! Blurr, a little help here--!"
Faster than thought he moved, swinging his body off the bench under the window and hitting the floor with his wheels already out. Weaving nimbly around worktables and equipment racks, he zoomed across the lab to the source of the shout in an instant.
Wheeljack was kneeling on the floor beside a big messy prototype, attempting simultaneously to shore up a tilted outer panel with his shoulder, hold together two components with his knees, and wield a soldering iron. In another instant Blurr had taken in the whole tableau; without prompting he moved, taking the weight of the panel off Wheeljack's shoulder and pushing it back into place on the flank of the prototype machine.
"Thanks," Wheeljack said, purging his vents in a sigh-- familiar-- while the translucent fins projecting to either side of his head flickered with light-- very, very unfamiliar. It had been days since Blurr had found himself transported to this strange Cybertron, most of them spent here in the company of this mech, and he still wasn't used to the lightshow that was this Wheeljack's audial fins. His Wheeljack (and how stange was it, to think of that stubborn, argumentative Wrecker as his?) had only solid metal for his audial fins.
His Wheeljack also had a mouth, one that was exposed far more often than kept covered by its segmented guard. Mercurial though he could be, his moods were at least easy to read. If this Wheeljack had anything behind his faceplate, he hadn't yet opted to show it to Blurr. Maybe he didn't have anything at all, a concept that Blurr found distinctly unnerving.
It was just another uncomfortable, inescapable little reminder that this wasn't where he was supposed to be.
"Thanks," Wheeljack said again, but his voice had a distracted distance to it now that Blurr had become familiar with. "Can you hold it there for a minute, I just gotta go get--" He was up before he finished his sentence, up before Blurr's affirmative, mumbling to himself as he hurried away into the lab with the soldering iron still clutched absently in his hand.
Purging a sigh of his own, Blurr dropped from his wheels to his feet, thumping down against the floor. The panel creaked a little with the shift in his position, but he turned to put his back to it and leaned it back up into place.
Wheeljack returned a few minutes later with a roll of fabric in one hand and the soldering iron still in the other. "Think I can get you to keep holding that for me?" he asked Blurr. "This should only take me a couple'a minutes, but I'm gonna need both hands."
"Sure," Blurr said quietly. "Go ahead." What else did he have to do today, when he'd been not-quite-commanded to keep him sequestered here in the lab until they'd figured out what had happened to bring him here?
As he watched, Wheeljack knelt on the floor and opened the fabric roll at his knees. Blurr didn't recognize the items arranged on it, couldn't even comprehend their strange shapes until Wheeljack started fitting them on his fingertips one-by-one.
"Manipulators," he said in response to the question Blurr hadn't actually asked. He wiggled a handful of fingers now sporting caps with projections off the tips. "Used to be that if you had big hands but ended up in a field where you worked with little things, you could just get your hands modded with all kinds'a tweezers and micro-manipulators in the fingers, but that was a long time ago." He picked up his soldering iron with the other hand and leaned into the guts of his machine, his voice coming out slightly distorted by the components inside. "Used to be I could get by fine on my own, using these and other little tools like 'em, but I haven't had to for a while. I'd been planning on having-- er."
One thing Blurr had learned very early on about Wheeljack was that he lectured like he'd been sparked to do it. As long as there was someone close enough to register while he was working, he talked, the words rolling out of him in a gentle, relentless cadence. He explained what he was doing, discussed his thoughts, even went into theory and history and prior experience. He spoke with such an affable, natural charm that even Blurr, who had to admit that he usually preferred to talk himself rather than listen, didn't mind the lectures. There was just something pleasant about them. Natural.
Except for when Wheeljack tripped over this-- him. The other Blurr. His Blurr.
"--Uh. Well, it's not like I can't do it myself, just gotta get the hang of these again," he finished, awkwardly, and fell silent.
Not for the first time, Blurr found himself wondering about the spectre that haunted the lab, this alternate Blurr, his other self. If this Wheeljack and the Wheeljack he knew back home were different, he couldn't imagine the incongruity between himself and his alternate.
There were clues though, everywhere he looked: in the ladders and step-stools that littered the lab. In the way everyone danced around talking to him about his other self with him, and continued to dance around the subject with delicacy even when they thought he couldn't hear. In the harried way that Wheeljack worked on his projects, rushing and overwhelmed, calling without thinking for Blurr's assistance over and over and over again...
In the way that there was space for two on the bunk that Wheeljack insisted he take, and the way that the engineer seemed to prefer to working on the problem of his appearance here-- and the other Blurr's disappearance-- instead of recharging himself.
Blurr hadn't spent eons collecting intelligence for the Autobot cause without learning how to put clues together.
He couldn't help but wonder how his Wheeljack was faring with the Blurr that they all hoped had appeared on his world-- a Blurr who seemed to be small, was definitely Wheeljack's lab partner, and seemed, above all other things, to require some kind of special care or handling.
And he had no choice but to hope that he'd have the opportunity to find out. He thought maybe he could be happy here, in time, on this Cybertron where there were more than a dozen unique cybs besides the Vehicon drone troops, where their species actually had a chance to survive and recover from their war.
But he was aware that he was probably the only one who would, if it came to that. This was not his Cybertron, and jealous of it though he was, he couldn't in good conscience wish to stay.
He yearned to be down there on the street with them, gliding among their ranks just to feel the press of their EM fields, to taste the faint life-signal tang of the sparks in their chests. Even just to sit up here and look down on these unfamiliar faces-- a dozen, two, three, more-- was enough to make his engine turn over in his chest.
The contrast could not be more stark than when he looked out at this living Iacon and thought about home.
This Iacon was not his accomplishment, not something he could be proud of, and those busy sparks outside weren't his people, not really. The Cybertronians here tended bulky, so many of them broad and heavily armored. They were made up of planes and angles and wide barrels and thick struts. He didn't often see the kind of litheness that he was used to-- any time he saw a smaller cyb, they were either just as heavily armored as their more massive brethren, or they seemed... frail. (There weren't many of those latter.) There was a certain absence of trim waists and narrow chassis, of strong, lean limbs--
Unless he was looking at a reflection, anyway, but Wheeljack didn't seem to have one hung in his lab.
That was another incongruity, this scientist Wheeljack and his lab full of experiments and engineering projects. Oh, the Wheeljack he knew was something of a tinkerer, and this Wheeljack effaced himself by claiming the same, but the difference in scope was like comparing a headlight's beam to the wash of a floodlamp. Just the fact that he had a lab, spacious and busy with clutter and well-stocked with equipment, spoke to that difference. The fact that Bumblebee looked to him first to solve the problems that plagued their living Iacon spoke to the difference. (Bumblebee! In charge! And what a Bumblebee, short and round and walking with a cane, with a round candid face that too clearly betrayed how he was feeling-- which seemed to be a constant state of annoyance, something else incongruous to a mech too used to a narrow-faced Bumblebee who alternated between joviality and dead-seriousness with little else in between.) The fact that--
"Oh! Scrap--! Blurr, a little help here--!"
Faster than thought he moved, swinging his body off the bench under the window and hitting the floor with his wheels already out. Weaving nimbly around worktables and equipment racks, he zoomed across the lab to the source of the shout in an instant.
Wheeljack was kneeling on the floor beside a big messy prototype, attempting simultaneously to shore up a tilted outer panel with his shoulder, hold together two components with his knees, and wield a soldering iron. In another instant Blurr had taken in the whole tableau; without prompting he moved, taking the weight of the panel off Wheeljack's shoulder and pushing it back into place on the flank of the prototype machine.
"Thanks," Wheeljack said, purging his vents in a sigh-- familiar-- while the translucent fins projecting to either side of his head flickered with light-- very, very unfamiliar. It had been days since Blurr had found himself transported to this strange Cybertron, most of them spent here in the company of this mech, and he still wasn't used to the lightshow that was this Wheeljack's audial fins. His Wheeljack (and how stange was it, to think of that stubborn, argumentative Wrecker as his?) had only solid metal for his audial fins.
His Wheeljack also had a mouth, one that was exposed far more often than kept covered by its segmented guard. Mercurial though he could be, his moods were at least easy to read. If this Wheeljack had anything behind his faceplate, he hadn't yet opted to show it to Blurr. Maybe he didn't have anything at all, a concept that Blurr found distinctly unnerving.
It was just another uncomfortable, inescapable little reminder that this wasn't where he was supposed to be.
"Thanks," Wheeljack said again, but his voice had a distracted distance to it now that Blurr had become familiar with. "Can you hold it there for a minute, I just gotta go get--" He was up before he finished his sentence, up before Blurr's affirmative, mumbling to himself as he hurried away into the lab with the soldering iron still clutched absently in his hand.
Purging a sigh of his own, Blurr dropped from his wheels to his feet, thumping down against the floor. The panel creaked a little with the shift in his position, but he turned to put his back to it and leaned it back up into place.
Wheeljack returned a few minutes later with a roll of fabric in one hand and the soldering iron still in the other. "Think I can get you to keep holding that for me?" he asked Blurr. "This should only take me a couple'a minutes, but I'm gonna need both hands."
"Sure," Blurr said quietly. "Go ahead." What else did he have to do today, when he'd been not-quite-commanded to keep him sequestered here in the lab until they'd figured out what had happened to bring him here?
As he watched, Wheeljack knelt on the floor and opened the fabric roll at his knees. Blurr didn't recognize the items arranged on it, couldn't even comprehend their strange shapes until Wheeljack started fitting them on his fingertips one-by-one.
"Manipulators," he said in response to the question Blurr hadn't actually asked. He wiggled a handful of fingers now sporting caps with projections off the tips. "Used to be that if you had big hands but ended up in a field where you worked with little things, you could just get your hands modded with all kinds'a tweezers and micro-manipulators in the fingers, but that was a long time ago." He picked up his soldering iron with the other hand and leaned into the guts of his machine, his voice coming out slightly distorted by the components inside. "Used to be I could get by fine on my own, using these and other little tools like 'em, but I haven't had to for a while. I'd been planning on having-- er."
One thing Blurr had learned very early on about Wheeljack was that he lectured like he'd been sparked to do it. As long as there was someone close enough to register while he was working, he talked, the words rolling out of him in a gentle, relentless cadence. He explained what he was doing, discussed his thoughts, even went into theory and history and prior experience. He spoke with such an affable, natural charm that even Blurr, who had to admit that he usually preferred to talk himself rather than listen, didn't mind the lectures. There was just something pleasant about them. Natural.
Except for when Wheeljack tripped over this-- him. The other Blurr. His Blurr.
"--Uh. Well, it's not like I can't do it myself, just gotta get the hang of these again," he finished, awkwardly, and fell silent.
Not for the first time, Blurr found himself wondering about the spectre that haunted the lab, this alternate Blurr, his other self. If this Wheeljack and the Wheeljack he knew back home were different, he couldn't imagine the incongruity between himself and his alternate.
There were clues though, everywhere he looked: in the ladders and step-stools that littered the lab. In the way everyone danced around talking to him about his other self with him, and continued to dance around the subject with delicacy even when they thought he couldn't hear. In the harried way that Wheeljack worked on his projects, rushing and overwhelmed, calling without thinking for Blurr's assistance over and over and over again...
In the way that there was space for two on the bunk that Wheeljack insisted he take, and the way that the engineer seemed to prefer to working on the problem of his appearance here-- and the other Blurr's disappearance-- instead of recharging himself.
Blurr hadn't spent eons collecting intelligence for the Autobot cause without learning how to put clues together.
He couldn't help but wonder how his Wheeljack was faring with the Blurr that they all hoped had appeared on his world-- a Blurr who seemed to be small, was definitely Wheeljack's lab partner, and seemed, above all other things, to require some kind of special care or handling.
And he had no choice but to hope that he'd have the opportunity to find out. He thought maybe he could be happy here, in time, on this Cybertron where there were more than a dozen unique cybs besides the Vehicon drone troops, where their species actually had a chance to survive and recover from their war.
But he was aware that he was probably the only one who would, if it came to that. This was not his Cybertron, and jealous of it though he was, he couldn't in good conscience wish to stay.
