A Journal of Artistic Musings

iBitch

2008-05-14T07:01:46Z

I've decided I don't want this to be just my art and writing journal anymore, mostly because, uh, I haven't really been doing any art-and-writing lately that isn't DDD-related. So instead I'm going to actually use it like a normal person uses a normal LJ--to post quiz results and inside jokes that don't mean anything to anyone but my friends. (Sorry Xanga. I still love you. Really.)

Actually, since I'm bored, I'm just going to rant about stuff.

I hate my sister's computer. ...Okay, that's a lie. I hate being restrained to my sister's computer. I hate that she can take it away from me whenever she wants, that she can use it to punish me when I do something she doesn't approve of something I'm doing. She hasn't actually taken it away from me yet, but she's threatened to, and even when she means it as a joke, it's scary. I don't think she understands how scary that is to me.

Actually, I get the feeling that this whole summer is going to be characterized by my family sniping ungently at me over my computer usage, and not getting it. Sorry, family. I know for you the computer is a fun thing that you can use to talk to friends easy, or a disturbing technological marvel, or otherwise merely a curiosity, but to me it's my life.

...That's kind of dramatic.

Still. As "troubling" as it may sound, the Internet's the most important thing to me in the world. It's where my girlfriend is, it's where DDD is, it's how I communicate with my school friends. It's how I communicate with the world, basically, and entertain myself, to boot. It's how I keep Blackout quiet, how I keep Lucinda mollified, how I keep up with fannish things.

It keeps me from going BUGFUCK, for serious.

Which is why I'm so terrified the verdict on Theta will come back SCREWED. I don't want to fight with TCNJ and Dell over getting a new computer, even if they can save my files from the old one. I don't want to lose everything I have on there. I want Theta. I want her back whole, I want her back working, I want her back now, so I can curl up in my room and stay up 'til ungodly hours and not have to deal with Mom bitching and Jolie threatening to cut me off.

So, hopefully, lol. Hopefully it'll all come back cool. IDK. I just want it to happen sooooon, whatever happens. I hate being in limbo like this and it's only beena couple days, hahah.

Blarg. Whatever. Whine whine whine, heh.

TL;DR: I miss Theta and my family Doesn't Understand Me, woe.

ARGH. I WANT TO SEE IRON MAN. If my dad/friends crap out on me again tomorrow, I'm just fucking going by myself. I've been waiting since last Friday. >:|

ARGH. I WANT A COPY OF IF. I'm really tempted to just buy it, and I'm probably going to cave and do so soon anyway, but I'm trying to hold out. I should be saving money so I can spend it all doing stuff with Norry when she gets here. And in that vein...

ARGH. I WANT IT TO BE JUNE. Pls to speed up, time, kthnx. Love, Janella.

ARGH. I WISH WE HAD BBC AMERICA. Just wanna watch Robin Hood on a real TV, lol. Although she said she'd let me, I don't have much faith in the friend up the road who does get that channel, and said I can come over to watch it when it's on.

ARGH. I WANT A SNAKE. ....Uh, yeah, I just really want a pet snake. And Az McQueen passed right before finals started--Mom didn't tell me 'til I came home, and let me just say, that was a fabulous thing to be greeted with when I walked in the door. Really.--so I have, like, a slot, as horrible as it sounds. But snakes aren't allowed on campus as pets, so. I wouldn't be able to bring him (legitimately) to college with me in the fall.

ARGH. I WANT TO CHANGE MY MAJOR. Still have to talk Mom into it, alas. She's convinced I want to because of Orgo, and it's more than that. I just...have to convince her. My dad told me the other day I need to decide what I want to do and do that, and it kind of...scared me, I guess? I don't know. I guess I don't really know what I want to do with my life, other than just vaguely. I want to do science, I want to write, yeah, yeah, but what? Blarg.

ARGH. I WANT...no, wait, I think I'm done with this section of tonight's excessively long blog entry. Okay!

TL;DR: I WANT THINGS I CAN'T HAVE, AS EXPRESSED IN CAPSLOCK.

Watched 30 Days of Night with my mom and sis last night and it was...surprisingly good. I wasn't too impressed by the ad campaign when it was in theatres, and I've seen so many shitty horror movies the past couple of years that I didn't have high hopes at all.

But it was good. The vampires were scary as fuck and it was a novel setting and the ending made me fucking BAWW. I loved it, loved that the ending wasn't a traditionally happy ending, but was satisfying nonetheless. It fit. I dunno, it was really, really good. I kind of zoned for a lot of the movie because I can't really stomach straight horror anymore and I was texting Norry and writing porn in a notebook, but I watched the last, like, half-an-hour, and it was...yeah. Awesome.

~~And the very last scene made me think Eros and Blackout and I aksjdlakjdlaksd don't know why except I kind of do but I'm too lazy to articulate it and yeah.~~

I'm in the middle of Gaiman's Interworld right now, and I feel bad, because it's interesting and pretty funny sometimes and I do, like, legitimately want to read it...but I just bought Someplace to Be Flying during my ridiculous book binge yesterday and I really want to read that too, but I'd feel weird stopping Interworld now just for that, so, like, hahaha. I don't know. Babble, babble. I don't know what I'm trying to say, it's almost three AM.

Damn I can't wait to get my own computer again. I want to get the lead-ups for EPIC PLOT on DDD started so ridiculously bad. Like, I keep writing drabbles and stuff about it in private posts to myself just so I won't forget this emotion or that turn of phrase or whatever that I want to try and hit upon.

How lame is that, huh? We don't even know when we're going to get a chance to start the pre-plot, and I'm planning little things like that, and trust me, I know it's stupid to try to rock-solid plan out happenings in an RP, because sometimes the characters just don't cooperate. But. It's just bouncing around in my head and I need to get it out, y'know? This is what I do now, instead of "legitimate" writing. I dunno, I'm lame.

So I was driving around with my sister and a friend yesterday and we were talking about how cool it would be to have boulders for a lawn, instead of grass. And I say, "I'd just, like, go outside in the morning and bask." And I meant it like I'd lay in the sun and feel the boulder under me and let it, like, ground me, or however it is the hippies have chosen to phrase that feeling that I get when I touch a rock and am consumed by its history, its connection, its, um, rockness. But Jess just looks at me and goes, "Like a lizard?"

There you have it. I'm a lizard.

TL;DR: 30 Days of Night had a good ending. I picked the wrong book to read and am too stubborn to change. I am a lizard.

Godsfuck, this entry got kind of long. Haha. [Goes back to LJ-cut and make helpful summaries--but not to proof for spelling and grammar, because it is three now, and I just can't be assed.]

Because I'm too fucking lazy to actually log in to Facebook...

2008-04-28T05:25:35Z

Janella Baduini has changed her status to 'feels sort of like Blackout right now'.

lols i forget if that's actually what the change-status messages look like

[lol meant to post this at midnight]

2008-04-21T15:33:58Z

IT'S MY BIRTHDAY.

I DEMAND PORN.

...

Okay, not really, but it is my birthday.

jkbaduini @ 2008-04-09T03:58:00

2008-04-09T08:02:15Z

So ~~today~~ yesterday was apparently national Draw a Bird Day?

Also! I said that I would totally upload that awesome daffodil icon levade made next time I logged into this LJ but I seem to have lost it. *is a FAILURE, but folks, we knew that already* Halp pls?

jkbaduini @ 2008-03-25T23:54:00

2008-03-26T03:56:56Z

For the reading pleasure of ~~DDD chat~~ you, o great Internet, I present:

A Brief Biography of Chuck Norris

In the beginning, there was nothing...and Chuck Norris. Then Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked the nothing and told it to get a job. That done, he went off and had a beer with God. God, bored and slightly boozy, decided he wanted to try the creation thing too, and said, "Let there be light." Of course, Chuck Norris has no place in his heart for rudeness, and said, "Say please."

After the minor lesson in manners, Chuck Norris sat back and watched God play. He had to admit, the Big Guy wasn’t bad...but he’d forgotten a few things. And so it came to be that Chuck Norris had to create the bolt-action rifle, liquor, sexual intercourse, and football--in that order, of course. He does have his priorities straight.

So God peopled the Earth with everything on it, and Chuck Norris looked down upon it, and saw that it was okay (after his additions). For a while, things went well. Of course, there was that whole incident with the dinosaurs--they looked at Chuck Norris wrong, and he couldn’t let them get away with that, now could he? So they went extinct.

(This is widely held by all intelligent people to be solid proof that the theory of evolution is false--there are only the animals Chuck Norris allows continued life. Darwin’s fanboys just won’t drop it, though!)

Chuck Norris does not limit his interactions with the animal world solely to killing them, however. He is also responsible for many of the species alive today. Most notable are polar bears, all of which are descended from a normal bear that was so terrified of Chuck Norris that it fled to the North--and all of its fur turned white. (Also notable are giraffes, the sons and daughters of a horse lucky enough to have been roundhouse kicked in the chin and survive.)

So for many years, Chuck Norris limited himself to the events of the Earth, and had nothing more to do with God and his works. He was too busy roundhouse kicking all those cavemen into shape. Hairy Neanderthals do not worthy opponents make. There was a time of peace (and occasional roundhouse-related deaths), and then came the birth of Jesus.

Of course Chuck Norris had to visit the son of his old drinking buddy God, and so he accompanied the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem. He gave the baby the gift of beard, and unlike the more expensive but far less practical gifts of the other wise men, this one Jesus carried with him for life. This got Chuck Norris written out of the Bible, and the Three Wise Men roundhouse kicked out of life.

The world turned. Chuck Norris lived on, Jesus didn’t. (Nasty bit of work, that.) Chuck Norris occupied himself with spreading fear of his name and making the legend of his mighty roundhouse kick an immortal one. He centered many of his operations in the United States--in fact, one of the reasons the colonies won the Revolutionary War is because most of the British army was roundhouse kicked into space by him. (This orbiting body is today known as Pluto.)

Of course, Chuck Norris does visit other parts of the world, making history in every single country he visits. He particularly likes Italy. He once had sex with every nun in a convent in Italy; these nuns went on to give birth to the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only undefeated professional football team in history. (Since he had so much fun the first time, he visited Italy again a few years later. He had to leave. All the nuns were hiding.)

Since then, Chuck Norris has lived a quiet life. These days, all he does with his time is maintain the world’s population of ninjas. Yes, we’re well aware there aren’t many ninjas left. That’s what they get for messing with Chuck Norris.

I may have posted this on here before. If I did, apologies. Can't be assed to find it.

Ficbits, Lucinda and Matthew

2008-03-17T22:01:26Z

Lucinda's been bugging the hell out of me lately, so I decided to try and exorcise her a little. Best way to do that? Fic. This is just short little blots of words; I'm just playing.

Nicked a prompts table from ships50 for inspiration. These are Lucinda/Matthew. If I actually managed to do more than two or three, I might post the table to keep track. As it is, enjoy some ficbits.

Prompt: 09. My Name Is...
Word Count: 218
Rating: G

~*~

He stared at her from the kitchen, fascinated, unable to look away. She was huge in his eyes, dignified and beautiful, and in the moments he looked, she occupied the entirety of his mind, spinning her way through and settling herself in. He was sure, if she left now and he never saw her again, he would never forget her pert, sun-tanned face, her big, gold-brown eyes, her dark, slicked-back hair. He would never forget the corded muscles of her arms, the definition of her shoulders, the tan and brown arches of her wings rising above and behind her.

He would have been happy to watch her from the kitchen, to let her eat and pass away, going on to whatever business she may have had. He would have been happy to hold that memory, to allow it to thrill him when he tired of thinking about all the normal, human faces that surrounded him. He would have been happy just to have had a glimpse of her.

But Rick got behind him, and shoved between his wings, and Maria was pulling his hands, and both were chanting, “Talk to her, talk to her, talk to her.” So Matthew ducked out of the kitchen and around the counter, and gingerly settled himself behind her.

And he introduced himself.

~*~

Prompt: 17. Regret
Word Count: 143
Rating: PG

~*~

Lucinda wondered if he ever regretted it. He’d had a home, a life, a family, and now he had…her.

And the sky.

Lucinda didn’t think anyone could regret the sky, but she’d been denied it for so long when she was a kid. Not discouraged from it, not hinted and sneaked and snuck into denying it herself like he had been, but flat out denied it. That had only made her covet it, and she relished every moment she spent with her wings spread to the wind.

But that was her. She knew it had been different for Matthew. They had made him clip his own wings, but in response he had had a home, a job, a family, friends. He had had a life.

Now he had the sky, and he had Lucinda, and…what else? His regrets?

She was afraid to ask.

~*~

Prompt: 47. Silver
Word Count: 215
Rating: G

~*~

She couldn’t sleep. Lucinda tossed and turned, hating that she felt the need, trying not to wake Matthew. Finally she gave up, and skinned the blankets away, sliding out of bed and to her feet.

They’d been here too long. It was why she couldn’t sleep—she hated being in one place for too long, hated seeing the same four walls over and over, every day. It made her nervous, made her restless, made her—corny as it was to even think it—flighty.

She knew Matthew liked being in one place, though, and that was the problem. He liked getting to know a town, staying there long enough to start to recognize people and places. He’d never been as consumed with wanderlust as she was; she was starting to doubt he’d ever even been touched by it at all. He came because he was following her. He was doing it for her.

She flipped a chair around and sat, letting her tail and wings drape off the seat. She stared at him, his white face silver in the moonlight, cut by the dark tracks of his mask-and-moustache. He looked so serene.

Hmph. She would stay, for a few days more, as many as she could stand. For him. She would do it for him.

~*~

More to come, probably. XD;

jkbaduini @ 2008-02-07T09:10:00

2008-02-07T14:11:56Z

This was the last thing I needed to see in my comic book before falling asleep, especially since there hadn't been anything like it in the first three.

THAT IS ALL.

ETA: ...Why am I struck by a sudden desire to make a stencil out of that and go graffiti-ing? WHY.

jkbaduini @ 2007-12-22T18:35:00

2007-12-22T23:36:06Z

Title: No Other Choice
Fandom: Transformers
Rating: Low.
Summary: Blackout ~~is emo~~ reflects on his orders, and the state of his symbiont.
Word Count: 328
Disclaimer: I didn't build this sandbox, I'm just playing in it.
A/N: DDD-canon-based. We actually had a Scorponok for a while, but the character's been MIA. This distresses Blackout. I have no idea whether this even makes sense or not--it just kinda...got...written. -.-;

~*~

Relocate. Refuel. Rest. Relocate. Refuel. Rest.

The routine was simple, mindlessly repetitive, and one that took up far too little of his available processing power. What was there to engage him, tucked against spires of rock or sitting among wrecks in some military salvage yard? What was there to do other than monitoring the comm lines, listening for orders?

Even that bizarre nexus online linking disparate worlds could only hold his interest for so long. It was symptomatic of how terminally bored he was, that he allowed himself to log on even after the restoration of his legitimate communications equipment. Better to lower himself to interacting digitally with inferiors, though, than engaging them in the real world. In the real world there could be casualties, repercussions.

He was getting pinged. The silence from his drone had lasted for cycles, but now he was getting pinged, regularly, consistently. It was simultaneously a relief and another thing he refused to dwell on too extensively. It meant Scorponok was alive, somewhere out there, still under the sand halfway across this dirty little planet. It also meant that he was still damaged, and probability dictated that he was only minimally operational. The ping was a failsafe, designed to kick in only when the drone unit was severely incapacitated, so that its master could recover it for repairs--he'd be getting transmissions if Scorponok were capable.

Unfortunately, this particular drone's master was under orders that kept him here, pinned on this continent. Blackout wasn't free to retrieve Scorponok. It was singularly frustrating, and every cycle that ticked by only registered to him as another chunk of time he could have used in recovering his symbiont.

He had his orders, however, and he would not break them. If Lord Megatron wanted him here, here he would stay, until told otherwise. There was reason behind his lord's plans, and if he didn't understand it, he would at least trust it.

There was no other choice.

~*~

jkbaduini @ 2007-12-16T14:58:00

2007-12-16T20:00:52Z

I will not write fanfiction I will not write fanfiction I will not read fanfiction I will not look at fanart I will not RP I have a physics final in less than 24 hours and I know nothing about rotational motion and dear Tallest why do I have no control?

D:

ETA: God damn it, kink meme.

...-.-;

2007-12-13T08:09:42Z

Okay, so I did the memething doing the rounds at DDD out of a sense of idle boredom for my real LJ with absolutely no intention to post it, except...

...Lucinda is laughing so hard about the "tie me down" one that it's giving me a migraine. Goddamn headvoices.

OMG LOL WUT?

2007-12-08T06:03:24Z

Metafigures, Installment 2! HOORAY FOR ME.

~~Yes, I made a separate journal for it. I'm optimistic, okay?~~

BLARG. Also, HONK.

2007-12-04T01:51:06Z

Dammit, I had a really awesome TF crossover plotbunny and now I can't remember what the other fandom is. I want to say X-Men: Evolution, but I dunno if that was it. GRRR.

Savage Garden bunny seems to have died. Blackout-'voice is still annoying. Working on Peculiar Institution, Through the Thin Place, and I never did put the Dewbot fic up, did I?

New installement of Metafigures coming, uh, soon. (And I haven't forgotten about Fangirl, either, Sef, I swear! Or your package! *EPIC FAIL HERE*)

I hate finals time. I invariably get all this inspiration, and no time to do anything. Seriosuly, 'Spir, leave me the hell alone. It's bad enough I have to deal with Red-sama, Blackout, and Lucinda all being obnoxious twits, do I need you bugging me too? ~~I thought Insanity was s'posed to be the malicious one.~~

jkbaduini @ 2007-11-25T20:03:00

2007-11-26T01:05:49Z

Dear Tallest, where did this irrational compulsion to write Transformers songfic using Savage Garden lyrics come from? NO, brains, "Break Me Shake Me" is not Ironhide and Blackout's anthem, even after the War starts. STOP SAYING THAT.

PORNY FIC. [Reciprocity]

2007-11-03T07:25:29Z

This is what happens when a muse turns into a headvoice. ~~That's my excuse, anyway.~~

Title: Reciprocity
Fandom: Transformers 2007
Rating: R, for language and, y'know, robot sex.
Summary: Pre-war. Ironhide is annoying and Blackout is frustrated, and there's one particularly enjoyable way to work it all out.
Word Count: 2,930
Disclaimer: Yeah, Transformers? Not mine. No profit being made, it's all in fun, etcetera, etcetera.
A/N: My first attempt at the for-real-type robot sex. I THINK I DID GOOD. But I dunno for sure. Un-betaed and it's very early in the morning, so excuse typos. They shall be hunted out and taken care of appropriately.

~*~

Blackout liked watching Ironhide work. There was an intensity to the smaller mech, a dedication, that Blackout found absolutely compelling; he could sit and watch Ironhide tinker for hours.

It was a pity he didn’t have the time for it now, because his friend was really absorbed in the project he was working on. He was seated on a sturdy stool, leaning over the table, hands buried in what looked like an exploded particle cannon. There were components strewn everywhere, some of them warped and charred, others rendered completely unrecognizable by the damage they’d sustained.

“You’re hovering,” Ironhide pointed out without looking around, setting a relatively unscathed section of tubing down and picking up a bent cartridge coupling.

“I’m observing,” Blackout responded from his position leaning in the doorway.

“You’re bugging me.” Ironhide sat back on his stool, straightening up and turning to face Blackout. “You know I can’t work when I’m distracted.”

Blackout grinned. He happened to know that very well. He pushed away from the doorframe and strode over, standing just close enough to crowd Ironhide. “So take a break. Come to the rally with me.”

“No.” Ironhide turned back to the table and reached across the mess of parts for one of his tools.

Blackout reached over him and pinned his arm to the table. “Yes,” he said, leaning around him to catch his optics and not coincidentally pressing his chest to the other mech’s back. “You’ve been working on this forever. You need to take a break or your visual circuits will short.”

“Like the Pit they will,” Ironhide growled. “Leave me be, Blackout, I need to finish this commission on time.”

“And just who is it you’re working for, hmm?” Blackout asked, leaning more of his weight against Ironhide. “Who’s so important you can’t come out and have a little fun?”

Ironhide used his free hand to push Blackout’s off his arm, and shoved away from the table, knocking the bigger mech back. He resettled himself on the stool. “This is direct from the Lord High Protector himself.”

Blackout hadn’t known that—all Ironhide had told him when he’d first started work on this was that it was a big project for a high-profile client. “What did he hire you to do?”

“Classified.” Ironhide turned on the stool to face his companion; he was grinning, just a little. “It’ll be impressive if I can pull it off,” he said, “but I can’t tell you anything until then.”

Blackout advanced again, big fingers splayed. “I bet I could make you tell.”

Ironhide scowled. “Go to your little get-together and get out of my exterior plating,” he said, planting a foot in Blackout’s abdomen and kicking him away.

“You should come,” Blackout insisted. “Word on the net is Megatron himself will be there. Come see your boss.”

He shook his head. “And listen to him rant endlessly on the glory of Cybertron? No, thank you. I’ll take a commission from him, but that’s it.”

Blackout pulled his huge frame erect, feeling vaguely insulted. “He says some logical things, Ironhide,” he rumbled. “It might do you well to listen.”

Ironhide vented air in annoyance. “If you say so,” he said, in a distinctly dismissive voice.

Stubborn slagger. All thought of watching him work was gone, replaced by annoyance. “I don’t know how long I’ll be,” Blackout said.

“Fine,” Ironhide replied, watching him evenly.

“It may be late.”

“I’m sure I’ll still be active.”

“I might not return before the next solar cycle.”

“Good for you,” Ironhide said, leaning back against his work table. “Now will you leave? You’re still bugging me.”

Blackout snarled and threw up his arms in exasperation. “Fine,” he said. “Enjoy your work.” He turned and left.

Ironhide watched him go, then turned back to the disassembled cannon.

*

He was still bent over the table when Blackout returned, more than half the night cycle ticked away. The massive mech came in, highly animated and in clear good spirits. He was drawn inevitably to the light of Ironhide’s workroom, and shook his head in irritation. Maniac didn’t know when to stop.

Ironhide was welding two spidery components together, handling them delicately. He was absorbed, oblivious—he didn’t acknowledge Blackout at all as he slid into the room and stood against the wall, watching.

Or so Blackout thought. Ironhide set down the welding torch, retracted the protective facemask, and swiveled on his stool to face his observer. “I thought you would be gone until tomorrow?”

“It was starting to get rowdy,” Blackout said, grinning broadly. “Thought it prudent to leave.”

“An event sponsored by the Lord High Protector got rowdy?” Ironhide asked guilelessly. “You don’t say.”

Again, that frisson of annoyance, like a power surge in his tactile net. “He wasn’t there for that,” Blackout said, keeping is voice level. “He spoke briefly and left early.”

“And then it got rowdy.”

“Yes.”

Ironhide leaned one elbow against the table, a perfect picture of nonchalance. “But you were smart enough to get your aft out of there.”

“Some of the attendees were new recruits of Megatron’s task force,” Blackout said, referring to the corps of fighters under the Lord High Protector’s control, held in reserve against attack or invasion. “You know how they can be.”

“We’re not too far removed from them ourselves, you know,” Ironhide said, contemplative. “Not really. People say the same things about us.”

Blackout was not in the mood for another one of those discussions; not now, with his energy draw still high and his senses functioning at near-maximum capacity. “We’re not like them,” he said firmly, sauntering away from the wall and towards Ironhide.

The smaller mech watched his approach evenly. “I’m not going to get anything else done tonight, am I?” he asked.

“Nope,” Blackout said, wrapping his hands around Ironhide’s arms and lifting him up off the stool.

“Good.” Unexpectedly, Ironhide shoved against him, briefly pressing them together along almost the full length of their bodies before pushing away. “I was ready for a break anyway.”

Blackout reached for him, but Ironhide spun away, eluding the blunt fingers. “Get back here,” Blackout growled.

“I don’t take orders form you.” Somehow, Ironhide had gotten himself between Blackout and the door, and he ducked backwards out of the lab. Blackout gave chase, expecting to be led on a chase—he didn’t expect an ambush. Ironhide, standing just outside the door, palmed it closed and rushed Blackout. He actually managed to slam him back against the far wall of the hallway.

It wasn’t often that Ironhide had the physical upper hand—Blackout massed too much more than him, was too hard to overpower through force alone. Even as Ironhide grappled with him, reaching for his sensitive places, Blackout managed to force him away, using the wall for leverage.

“Nice try,” Blackout chuckled.

“I’m not done yet,” Ironhide responded.

Then the chase began. Ironhide dodged around him, actually managing to slide on the hard floor, dragging the fingers of one hand along Blackout’s hip as he went. Blackout grabbed for him, missed, and lost a moment trying to regain his balance.

Ironhide abandoned the professional section of the building they shared for the residential, remaining just out of reach the whole way and being really obnoxious about it.

“Tease,” Blackout snapped, straining for him. He was still energized, riled up from the high emotion of the rally, and impatient. Ironhide laughed, and disappeared through a doorway. The recharge room. Maybe not so much of a tease, then.

Blackout slowed and drew himself up, already anticipating what the next few moments might hold. There was no other entrance into the recharge room; the chase was over. He stepped through the door—and promptly tripped over the storage locker that had been thrust into the doorway.

Ironhide fell on top of him. He was smaller than Blackout, yes, but not substantially so, and was more than capable of pinning him to the floor.

“You sneaky little scrapheap!” Blackout snarled. Ironhide chuckled again, and then there were his hands, spreading across the joints of Blackout’s shoulders, touching just enough to stimulate the nerve net. Blackout’s arms twitched involuntarily, and he tried to draw them up, to push himself up off the floor, to roll Ironhide off him and take back control of this encounter. Ironhide shifted his weight, pinning Blackout’s arms with his knees and making it even harder for the top-heavy mech to heave him off.

Ironhide’s hands were roaming, delivering threshold-light touches all across sensitive joints and seams. Blackout knew what those powerful fingers were capable of—this was almost annoying in comparison.

“Stop squirming,” Ironhide commanded, rapping him hard directly between the shoulders.

“Get off me,” Blackout replied.

“Oh no,” Ironhide said, drawing one finger down the center of a dorsal armor plate. “This is what you get for bothering me when I was trying to work.” The fingertip slid along the edge of the plate, then slipped under. (Blackout had to mute the warning alarm that began to go off with the intrusion, disabling the whole system and annoyed he’d forgotten to do so before.) Ironhide slid the finger back and forth, friction generating heat generating sensation. Blackout tried more determinedly to knock him off.

The finger withdrew, leaving a residual tingle, and for a moment Ironhide did nothing more than sit there, keeping Blackout prone on the floor.

“What are you doing up there, recharging?” Blackout snapped.

“Planning.”

The hands descended again, with none of the delicacy of before. It was an attack, fast and brutal, a relentless burrowing through the external armor and into the sensitive components below. Blackout let out a strangled sound—involuntary—and his attempts to twist free were still failing spectacularly. There was pleasure in Ironhide’s invading hands, but he refused to enjoy it. He couldn’t; not here, not like this, flat on his face. It was undignified.

Still. Ironhide knew him, knew right where to go to elicit a response, and Blackout had been so eager when he came in, and Ironhide knew that too. Why else linger, why else take his time, probing and scratching and scraping, hard, but doing it so agonizingly slowly?

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Coherence disintegrated; more basic subroutines started coming to the fore. He squirmed again, trying to worm his way free. He had to regain control—

Ironhide leaned back just a little too far, a little too sure in his dominance right now, and Blackout was able to wrench his arms free. He rolled to one side, throwing Ironhide off, and scrambled to his hands and knees. Ironhide was in motion too, struggling to his feet, and Blackout didn’t want to know what he planned to do next. He lunged, knocking the smaller mech’s legs out from under him and bringing him to the floor.

They came together, each trying to get the advantage over the other. Hyper-sensitive, Blackout had trouble focusing beyond the sensation of Ironhide against him; Ironhide pinned him again, with little trouble, but this time on his back, and this time using the full length of his body to hold him down. He was grinning again, and already his hands were pulling at the seams along Blackout’s side, seeking entrance.

Blackout could give it back now, though, his own big hands rising and latching on, prying directly into the circuitry underneath. Ironhide bucked against him, sucking air into his intakes and clenching his fingers. Something wrenched painfully and Blackout snarled, “Easy!”

“You hate it easy,” Ironhide said, laughing. There was an erratic hitch in his voice.

“Maybe I’m not—” Ironhide stroked along a particularly tender length of cable casing, distracting him. “Maybe I’m not in the mood for rough right now.” Ironhide’s fingers clenched again, causing a spike of pain that made Blackout arch.

“Don’t lie,” Ironhide admonished. “You’re terrible at it.”

Blackout could have come up with some witty retort to that, but preferred to respond with his body, locking his arms around Ironhide and inducing contact along the entirety of their ventral surfaces. Ironhide moved against him, full-length sensation—Blackout dug his fingers into Ironhide’s back and they ground together.

“All the way?” Blackout hissed.

“A-all the way.” The space between them decreased again as Ironhide pressed himself closer. Sections of plating slid back, couplings and cables coming together, connecting them. Data-flow started, sensation sharpened, and Blackout made his move, reaching for that one vital link and disconnecting Ironhide’s optical circuit.

“What the—Blackout.”

Ironhide reached for the connection and Blackout pinned his hands. “Uh-uh. None of that!”

“That’s not fair,” Ironhide snapped, straining against Blackout’s grip.

“Neither is a locker in the doorway,” Blackout said, inclining more of his weight against Ironhide and conveniently pinioning his knees.

“You are a slagger,” Ironhide grated, but he stilled.

“And you adore it,” Blackout said, his laugh more a deep rumble than anything else. He straddled Ironhide, transferring both his hands to one wrist and using the newly freed hand to trace a track down the side of his face. He tried to twist away, still obviously angry; Blackout let the finger trail down his throat struts and into the plating on his chest. Ironhide arched his torso into the touch, then growled and tried to wrench his arms free again.

“Reenable my optical feed, you glitchy waste of a spark,” Ironhide said. His attempt to sound intimidating was somewhat defused by the fact that was flat on the floor with his arms restrained and his eyes blinded.

“And what’ll you do if I don’t?” he asked, running his thumb along the edge of an external plate tantalizingly. “Hmm?”

Ironhide made an incoherent sound. Blackout loved it when he did that. He slid his massive frame off to better access some of the hidden nerve nodes down at the joints of his hips. Ironhide trembled, then kicked his legs up and around, catching Blackout square in the side. The top-heavy mech toppled.

Ironhide was on his feet faster than Blackout had thought possible, crouching with one hand bracing himself and the other reaching back to fix the connection. The blue flickered back into his narrowed eyes. He launched himself at Blackout, but instead of another aggressive encounter, he seized him and hauled him to his feet. “I wouldn’t be doing this,” he said, scraping his palms down Blackout’s sides, “if I couldn’t see.”

“Oh, I think you know me well enough to not need your eyes,” Blackout said, his voice low, one hand reaching for the sensitive zones so recently denied. Ironhide thrust against the questing fingers, pressing against Blackout, forcing him back towards the wall. He wasn’t going to let that happen again; he pivoted them around and pinned him instead.

That was more like it.

They could never keep up that coyness, that long, teasing bouts of caress and distraction that characterized other couplings—not for long, anyway. They’d tried it a couple of times, but the cuddling didn’t interest them nearly so much as the tussling. Let tame mechs be satisfied by tame pursuits.

Ironhide’s vocal processor was hitching again, his movements losing coordination. Blackout would have been delighted, would have loved to prolong the encounter, would have shown Ironhide what he got for being a tease and a trickster, for trying to cheat his way into control. But dammit, he had come in here horny and he had been humiliated and he wanted overload. Now.

“Synchronize,” he hissed, forehead-to-forehead with Ironhide, pressing him hard into the wall. “All the way!”

“All the way,” Ironhide echoed faintly. He grabbed Blackout by the hips, forcing them together. Coupling jacks linked, connected, and an electric thrill swept them both—

—heat—friction—sensation—

—input—flow—data—

—power—electricity—power—heat—data—

“Hnh! There! Yes!”

—synchronicity—reciprocity—

—touch—graze—grope—pry—

—fondle—grab—scrape—

“Do that keep doing that don’t stop!”

—power—heat—tingle—burn—

—see—feel—hear—feel—feel—

—reciprocitysynchronicityTHERE—!

Circuits all across Blackout’s processors stuttered and tripped, interrupting themselves; he pitched against Ironhide and barely managed to catch himself against the wall. Intake valves opened all the way, sucking air in and across overheating pumps and servos. He moved to disconnect, but Ironhide was still clinging to him, quaking and clawing at him and…was he growling?

His processors weren’t fully rebooted, not yet, but Blackout knew what Ironhide needed anyway. He reached down, closed his hand and pulled, and his neural net erupted with feedback from Ironhide’s overload. The smaller mech started ventilating too. He was twitching, his fingers clenching and unclenching rhythmically; then he relaxed. Only Blackout slumped against him kept him upright.

“Off,” Ironhide said eventually, shoving at Blackout. He shook his head; he was comfortable leaning against the wall, Ironhide cooling down beneath him. It was unusually peaceful. “I swear to Primus, Blackout, if you go into recharge on top of me…”

“Fine.” Blackout pushed himself upright and disconnected, stepping back as his exterior plating reverted to its usual configuration. Ironhide stumbled forward, apparently not expecting such prompt acquiescence; Blackout grabbed him by the shoulder, steadying him. Ironhide shook his hand off.

“I should get back to work,” he muttered, looking towards the door.

“Ha!” Blackout grabbed him and shoved him towards his berth. “Recharge, or you’ll addle your processors too much to do anything useful.”

Ironhide stumbled, then glared at Blackout. “I still don’t take orders from you.”

“Go, or I’ll drag you there myself.”

Ironhide went, and Blackout followed.

~*~

Meme drabbles coming soon!

ETA: Oof. Note to self--no more posting at 3:30 in the morning. Ninja-edited for grammar and some really poor word choice in a coupla places.

Meme stolen from meilithian

2007-10-29T23:59:09Z

The first fifteen people to comment on this post with a prompt get to request a drabble from you. ~~In return, they have to post this meme in their journal (though, no pressure).~~ Post all fandoms you’re willing to write for.

...I don't think I actually have fifteen people who read this journal regularly. WHATEVER.

Fandoms:
Transformers (2007)
Gaiman and Pratchett's Good Omens
Varley's Gaea Trilogy
Phantom of the Opera--Leroux, Kay, or Lloyd-Webber
Monsters, Inc
Invader ZIM
Lackey's Dragon Jousters novels
McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern
Labyrinth
Bakker's Raptor Red
Jurassic Park--book canon or movie franchise
Hellboy--comics or movie

These are the ones I feel really comfortable with, but if there's another you know I'm familiar with and want to request that instead, feel free!

Like meilithian, can I request a character/pairing, and/or keyword? :D

~~Big orgo exam Tuesday. May be some delay.~~

jkbaduini @ 2007-10-28T19:45:00

2007-10-28T23:50:53Z

Title: Through the Thin Place
Fandom: Transformers 2007
Part: 1-2
Rating: R, for language and mentions of nudity.
Summary: Sam and Bumblebee manage to fall through a hole in the fabric of space/time, finding themselves in a world where their lives are a blockbuster movie.
Word Count: 4,679
Disclaimer: Yeah, Transformers? Not mine. No profit being made, it's all in fun, etcetera, etcetera.
A/N: Yeah, yeah, I know. It's a self-insert. Crime among crimes, as bad as Mary-Sue, except in this the author acknowledges what she's doing. Just...give it a chance, 'kay? "Anything can be pulled off by the right writer," right?

~*~

Janella had stripped and dropped into bed almost as soon as she’d gotten home from her little excursion to Shades of Death Road. Jess and Travis she’d left at Jess’ parents’ house down the road, and her younger sister was out with some of her own friends, and who knew when the hell she’d be back. She’d lingered long enough to get her cat up from the basement, and then she’d gone to bed.

Now she was staring at her bedside clock over the ear of the stuffed giraffe in her arms and wondering why she was awake. Hera was curled against her hip, but her head was up and her fur was standing on end—awake and alert. Shit. Why?

The screen on her bedroom window bonged hollowly, the sound it made when a particularly large moth bounced off it. She blinked, and wondered if there was a bug out there trying to get in. She curled her giraffe, Freddie, closer, and tried to fall back asleep, telling herself it was nothing. The screen bonged again.

“The hell?” she muttered thickly. She rolled over, and shrieked at the sight of a face peeking in the edge of the window. Hera yowled a protest and jumped off the bed.

“Please don’t freak out,” the face in the window pleaded.

She scrabbled at the covers, bunching her sheets against her chest. “I’m naked!” she squeaked—not at all what she’d intended to say, but that was what came out when she opened her mouth.

He flushed red and looked away. “Sorry, sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t know.”

Janella slid out of bed and into the crack between the bed and the dresser, out of his sight. She groped around, scrabbling to find something to wear, and pulled a big T-shirt over her head. It only fell far enough to cover the obscene bits, but it was definitely better than nothing.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she demanded, standing up and keeping the bed between herself and the window.

At least he had the good graces to look ashamed. He held something up. It wasn’t until he said, “I found this in the Mickey D’s parking lot,” that she realized it was a cell phone.

“Is that mine?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I figured.”

“Huh.” She reached out to turn on the lamp and then edged around her bed and walked over to the window. He tilted the phone so she could see it better. It looked like hers. She shoved the window open as wide as it would go and unlatched the screen quickly, setting it aside and sliding out. He handed the phone over. She only had to flip it and see the swatch of masking tape on the back to know it really was hers.

“Huh,” she said again. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

She planted her feet against the angle of the roof and put the phone in through the window and on the dresser. She looked back. “Was I right?” she asked.

He looked blank. “Huh?”

“You are Sam Witwicky, aren’t you? Or am I just crazy?” she asked.

“You’re…not crazy,” he said after a minute.

She let out a staccato laugh. “You don’t sound exactly sure about that,” she said, craning her head and trying to see down over the eaves of the roof and into the driveway. She could just make out the curve of her Camry’s trunk, but nothing else out of the ordinary. But she realized she could hear something over the muffled rushing sound of wind in the trees, something other than the summer night-sounds she was accustomed to.

Around the edge of the house came a shape, tall and bipedal, yellow on black and silver even in nothing more than the light of the moon. Further attempts at banter were stalled by his appearance, which was disorienting enough to send Janella reeling back against the siding. Her bare feet slipped on the shingles covering the roof, and she fell.

She fell, but she didn’t go anywhere. Almost as soon as she hit the roof there was a giant hand in front of her, arresting a slide that didn’t even get started. For a minute, she didn’t move; she only stared at the gleaming metal fingers. It wasn’t disbelief, exactly, that stunned her, but something closer to awe.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Are you all right?”

She looked up over the fingers and into his face. In the dim moonlight, his eyes glowed with particular vibrancy. “I’m…fine,” she managed, after swallowing to clear the knot in her throat. “Just, um…um.”

How many times had she imagined a situation like this? Meeting a favorite character, or an author, or an actor, and wowing them with her suavity, her absolute, undeniable coolness. When this happened in her head, it went a lot more smoothly…and she usually wasn’t half-naked, with an ass stinging from the impact with the shingles.

“Your vital signs are abnormally elevated,” he said, bending in for a closer look. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, you don’t look too good,” Sam added.

Had she been rational, Janella might have wondered how he could tell what was “good” for her, since they’d only met twice, and both in bad lighting situations. Unfortunately, she wasn’t feeling very rational right now. Her breathing was shallow, and she didn’t trust that her legs would support her if she got to her feet. She clutched at the big hand supporting her, and managed to mutter, “Dizzy. Dizzy. Ground, please.”

Carefully, Bumblebee caged her in his hands and lowered her to the ground, retaining his hold on her until she was steady on her feet. She tried to smile her thanks, but opted instead to lay out flat on the grass of her yard—heedless of the night-chilled dew—while the robot straightened up to get Sam down from the roof as well.

“Jesus, you look terrible,” Sam declared once he’d been returned to the ground. She blinked and deliberately closed her eyes.

“You identified us by name, yet still seem to be shocked at our appearance,” Bumblebee commented. “Why?”

“That might have something to do with the fact that you’re characters from a movie,” she said, her voice monotone. She was too nauseous for acerbity (though she probably wouldn’t have been able to snark to them even if she were feeling well).

“A movie?” Sam repeated.

“Characters?” Bumblebee asked.

She groaned, and carefully propped herself up on one elbow. She could see Sam leaning over her, and Bumblebee crouching behind him. Sam took a step away as she watched.

“The live-action Transformers movie was based on a cartoon that was big in the eighties,” she explained, “which was, in turn, based on a line of toys for little kids.” She took a deep breath, trying to curb the whirling in her head and the pit of her stomach, and said mildly, “Can’t you just hack the Web and find out for yourself?” She looked straight at Bumblebee as she said it.

He looked sheepish, an effect not so much of facial expression as of posture. Sam and Bumblebee exchanged a look, and Sam shrugged slightly. The mech leaned back on his heels and was silent, except for some muffled whirring, for about a minute.

Janella welcomed the silence. It gave time to lay back and try and organize her thoughts, which for a large part of the night had been an endless loop of Camaro—Yellow—Sam—Camaro—Bumblebee! She wasn’t able to arrange her mind that much in the brief respite, but at least she stopped her mental record from skipping.

“She’s right,” Bumblebee reported in a low voice (for a giant robot). He straightened up and looked down at Sam, before playing a sound byte in a familiar little girl’s voice. “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

Sam laughed, then frowned. “Wait,” he said. “What do you mean?”

“I think we moved more than geographically, Sam,” Bumblebee said. “I think we went through some kind of spatial-temporal anomaly.”

“Spatial-temporal…what the hell are you talking about?”

“Wormhole,” Janella muttered, still flat on her back.

“I don’t think so,” Bumblebee said. “At least, if it is a wormhole, it’s not of a type I’ve ever encountered.”

“Like the ones in space, right?” she asked, sitting up again. The world didn’t lurch the way it did last time. “The ones you use for travel.”

“Yes.”

“How d’you know that?” Sam asked her.

“Ghosts of Yesterday,” she said. “Prequel novel for the movie. You guys aren’t supposed to be here.”

It was a non-sequitur; she knew it, and she could tell that they did too. “No,” Bumblebee said, “and I’m not sure how to get us back.”

Sam gaped up at the mech. “You’re serious,” he said.

“I wouldn’t joke about something like this. Much.”

“Okay, so…we’re in another dimension or parallel world, or…whatever,” Sam said. “Does this change our plan?”

“Not really.” Bumblebee crossed his arms. “We know where we are—kind of—and how we got here—hypothetically. We still need to get back. The only thing that’s changed is—”

“You’re recognizable,” Janella interrupted, getting to her feet. “Hell, you’re practically icons right now…though I suppose most Transfans wouldn’t automatically think of you when they saw a Camaro…” She paused, and shook her head. (Not a good idea, but at least she didn’t fall down.) This wasn’t classic Bumblebee, it was Bay Bumblebee—the one she knew best. “Whatever. You’re recognizable. I’m not going to be the only one who wonders why the hell Shia LaBeouf is driving around rural New Jersey in a car that hasn’t even been released yet.

“Which is why you can’t stay here,” Janella continued, shaking her head and fisting her hands on her hips. “My sister will be home any minute,” she said before either of them could react, “and while she will probably not automatically jump to the weirdest possible conclusion, like I did, she will be suspicious if she finds you.”

“You mean we have to leave?” Sam asked.

“I mean I will not be held responsible for any reactions—or overreactions—on my sister’s part,” she said.

“We can’t risk being seen by too many people, Sam,” Bumblebee said, “especially if they’re likely to know—or figure out—who we are.”

“Where are we gonna go?” Sam turned to Janella. “Where can we go?”

“Um.” Janella took a deep breath and closed her eyes, unfolding her mental map of the area and looking it over. “Um. Route 80? One of the truck stops?”

“No good,” Bumblebee said immediately. “I want to stay close. The phenomenon that brought us here is probably localized, and if the others come for us, it’s more likely than not that they will arrive in the same place we did.”

“Where did you guys come through, anyway?” she asked.

“On the road where we almost hit you,” Sam said.

She laughed out loud. “Shades of Death. Of course. Of course!”

“Why is that funny?” Sam asked.

“Weird shit always happens on Shades of Death,” she explained, then sobered. “Listen, you guys’ll have a problem if you want to stay in the area. There’s really nowhere around here that a car can park overnight without getting busted.”

“Nowhere?” Sam repeated.

Janella shrugged. “Not to park. The cops are pretty strict around here.”

“What do you suggest?” Bumblebee asked.

She thought about it for a minute, but now that the shock had worn off, she only felt tired. “Drive around all night?” she suggested. “No! Drive around ‘til my sister gets home, and then you can park in our driveway until dawn.”

“Dawn is only 5-point-33 hours off.”

“Would you rather drive around that whole time?” Janella asked.

Sam sighed. “All right,” he said. “If that’s what we have to do, that’s what we have to do.” Bumblebee took the cue, and began to revert to Camaro mode. Janella felt shaky at the sight, and knew she was probably gaping like a moron, but she managed both not to babble like an idiot at the sight, and to remain upright. In less than a minute, the sleek yellow car was sitting on her lawn. The doors popped open invitingly.

“Thanks,” Sam said to her, smiling thinly, before jogging the few steps and swinging into the driver’s side seat. He pulled the door closed, but the passenger side remained wide open.

She didn’t dare say anything, for fear that what her mind was suggesting wasn’t true…or was it that she was afraid it was?

The window buzzed down and Sam leaned out. “I think he wants you to come too!” he called.

“Me? Um. Why me?”

“An indigenous navigator can be invaluable, especially, if trustworthy, in times when stealth is essential.” Bumblebee’s voice issued with some slight distortion from the car’s speakers, and it had the air of recitation. There was a pause, and then, “Will you help us?”

“Um,” she said, knowing she sounded absolutely idiotic. “Can I put some pants on first?”

**

“Some ‘indigenous navigator’,” Sam muttered, looking over at the girl who’d eventually gotten around to introducing herself as Janella. She was fast asleep in the passenger’s seat. “You want me to wake her up?”

Bumblebee answered by lowering her seat back slowly to near horizontal. The chick murmured something and rolled on her side, drawing her legs up into the seat.

“I thought the point of bringing her was so she could keep us away from the cops,” Sam pointed out.

“Did I tell you Ratchet’s determined a set of physiological reactions that, generally, indicate when humans are lying?” Smoothly, the Camaro decelerated and took a sharp curve like it was nothing. “She didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“Seriously?”

“She wasn’t lying outright, but enough of the signs matched to indicate discomfort when she was instructing us.”

“So she was bullshitting.”

“Yes.”

“Then I guess it’s all right to let her sleep,” Sam said, looking over at her again. Mikaela appeared in his mind’s eye, and this girl with his and his friends’ names on her tongue suffered for the comparison. He leaned back in his seat, stretching his legs in the foot-well, and tried to look like he was paying attention to the road.

“I still haven’t been able to detect anything that resembles a Cybertronian signal,” Bumblebee said some time later, his voice low.

“Well, what d’you expect?” Sam asked, surprised at the bitterness in his voice. “We’re characters from a frickin’ movie.”

Bumblebee was silent for a moment, and when he finally spoke, it was with a stiffness rarely heard. “We managed to come through. It’s not impossible that the other Autobots will be able to track us and come through themselves.”

“You don’t sound too sure about that,” Sam pointed out.

“It’s hard to be sure about something I don’t understand myself,” Bumblebee snapped, the engine revving as he said it. In the other seat, the girl stirred.

Sam sighed, and rubbed his hand across his eyes. “All right, all right,” he said. He didn’t want to open his eyes again—he was tired. He was so very tired. “Listen, let’s head back to this chick’s house,” he said heavily. “See if her sister’s back.”

Bumblebee’s acknowledgement came in the form of a very deft and very illegal u-turn.

**

The sun was in her eyes, and it was annoying as hell. Janella groaned and rolled over, snuggling into her—

Her pillow was gone. In fact, she realized, her entire bed was gone, and it had been replaced by a seat upholstered in yellow and black leather. She blinked blearily and lifted her head, and all of a sudden she remembered.

Typically, Janella was neither a fast nor an early riser. She tended to set her alarm clock more than an hour before she needed to be up, simply so she could lay around in bed and wake up at her own pace. She was capable of waking up fast, though, if she had to, and this was one situation that warranted it. She jerked upright in her seat and looked around.

She was still in the car…Bumblebee.

Sam was asleep in the driver’s seat, which was reclined, like hers, as far as it could go. He was facing away from her, and snoring quietly. She could see her Camry parked next to them, and beyond it her sister’s, a year older and with a green paint job instead of blue.

“Holy…what time is it?” she asked, scrubbing at her eyes.

The response was immediate and low-pitched. “Six-fifty-three a.m.,” Bumblebee said.

“Good,” Janella said, sighing. “Okay. Good. Let’s get out of here before she leaves for work.”

“Before who leaves for work?” he asked.

“My mom. She’ll flip her lid if she finds me asleep in some stranger’s car in the driveway.”

“And where should we go?”

“Back to the McDonalds, I guess,” she said, shrugging. “I don’t know. Somewhere away from here.”

“But not too far,” he said.

She laughed. “Right. Not too far.”

Leaning over, Janella poked Sam hesitantly. “Hey. Um. Wake up,” she said. He muttered something incomprehensible and drew away. “Up!” she urged. “Come on!”

“Wha’s goin’ on?” Sam muttered.

“Come on, switch seats with me,” she said. “You can keep sleeping, just move over first.”

That must have registered. He rolled over and pushed himself half up. Janella opened the door and slid out of the Camaro, leaving the passenger seat open for him. She hurried around the front of the car and got into the driver’s side, moving with some hesitance. As she sat, the back of the seat came up. Sam had hauled himself over into the passenger seat and was already asleep again.

She pulled the door closed as the engine started up, buckling the seatbelt almost by instinct. Bumblebee reversed, backing around the twin Camrys and pulling down the driveway. “The McDonalds?” he said once they were on the road.

“Mm. No, you know what? There’s a Burger King down the road from it. They—” She interrupted herself with a yawn. “They have Mountain Dew there.”

“Fine.”

She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She was almost vibrating with the thrill of being here, sitting in this seat. It was kind of awkward, though—okay, a lot awkward. She was unusually conscious of herself, the way she was sitting, and knowing that he was aware of it. Her body wanted to slouch in the seat, her feet stretching for the pedals and her hand casually guiding the wheel; instead, she sat erect with her feet flat on the floor, trying to figure how much pressure to put on the steering wheel.

“Won’t your sister be suspicious if she wakes up and finds you’ve been gone all night?” Bumblebee asked a while later, catching her (of course) in the middle of a yawn.

She clacked her jaw closed, tried to swallow her embarrassment, and said, “I, uh, left a note. Said I was sleeping over a friend’s house.”

“Ah. This is a valid excuse, then?”

“Most of the time, yeah. She probably won’t question it.” She ran the hand not hesitantly touching the wheel through her hair, back to front, and added, “Wonder why the friend didn’t sleep over at my house, maybe, but no. It won’t bother her.”

Silence fell again, and Janella couldn’t help fidgeting a little. If the ride into town wasn’t like, three minutes long, she would have asked Bumblebee to turn on the radio, but she didn’t want to seem rude. The awkwardness was broken soon enough by the mundanity of ordering breakfast at the drive-through anyway. The Burger King didn’t have a massive parking lot like the McDonalds did, but he parked them in the most secluded corner anyway.

She unbuckled her seatbelt and applied herself purposefully to her food. Sam continued to sleep in the passenger seat, and she was still feeling tired herself; hopefully, the Dew would help that.

“Okay,” she said after a while, crumpling the last of the paper wrappers into the bag. If she were in her own car, she would have chucked the garbage into the backseat or the footwell for later. Here, she just held it in her lap. “So you two came through at Shades of Death Road.”

There was a silence before Bumblebee answered. “Yes.”

“What were you doing back, er, in your world?” she asked. “Anything, like, special?”

“Special?”

“Evasive maneuvers, fancy driving?” she elaborated. “Anything that would be difficult to recreate accidentally?”

“Why?”

She leaned back in the seat, picking up the Mountain Dew and taking a long drink to give herself a second to organize her thoughts. “’Kay. Shades of Death Road—where you came through—is a haunted place, where the worlds are said to intersect.”

“The worlds?” Bumblebee interjected.

“Yeah. Like, the living world and the world of the dead,” she said, “or the human lands and the realm of Faerie. The mundane and the supernatural, basically.”

“You’ve had experience with these other worlds?” he asked.

“What? Uh, no. Well, not a lot,” she admitted, thinking that now was probably not a good time to start talking about Edward, their Ouija buddy, or the ghost car, or any of the other weird things she’d seen. “But I’ve read about it. A lot.

“The thing that some of the stories say is that, to cross between one of these worlds and the other, you need to walk a specific path,” she explained, clasping her hands between her knees and leaning forward. “Most of the time that’s a euphemism for death, but I think sometimes they mean it seriously—a person has to physically walk a certain path to make the crossing. So what I’m wondering is if you guys ‘walked’ some specific path on your way here. Do you…um, remember?”

“We were driving,” Bumblebee said, “through a thunderstorm. I…lost control, and we went off the road. I’m afraid I don’t remember exactly what happened.”

“Hmm. So there wasn’t any zig-zagging or swerving or anything?”

“Not really.”

“Well, that’s good,” she said, leaning back again. “Easier for someone else to follow you through.”

“Is that likely?” he asked. “That others will be able to repeat what we did and come through as well?”

She shrugged. “I don’t really—I mean—I know what I’ve read, but I don’t really have enough first-hand experience to say.” She tapped her fingers nervously against her knee, and continued in a rush, “I’m inclined to say yes. If you guys did, others should be able to do it, too, and maybe even go back the other way. But I…I don’t know for sure.”

“You know as much as you know,” Bumblebee said. “And it was more than I knew about what happened, so I thank you for sharing.”

It wasn’t exactly glowing praise or effusive thanks, but Janella knew she’d offered scant comfort to someone who’d rolled out of everything familiar and into a very real danger. “I’m just sorry I couldn’t help you more,” she said quietly.

“Better little than nothing,” he said. The car shifted on its axels slightly, and she couldn’t help but interpret it as a shrug.

“So,” she said, after five long minutes where the only sounds came either from outside or from deep within the Camaro’s engine compartment. She meant to continue with, “What do you plan to do next?”, but Sam cut her off by snorting loudly in his sleep and rolling over into the door. It was enough to wake him up.

“Wha…?” he muttered with striking wit and intelligence, pushing himself up and blinking at her.

“Wake up, Sam,” Bumblebee said gently, though firm. “We need to decide what to do.”

It took him a few minutes to turn coherent enough to speak, and then it was only to hint with all the subtlety of a rhino on fire that some coffee would really go down well. Janella grinned wryly and went obediently into the Burger King to oblige. When she came back out, Sam had gone from reclining in her seat to sitting vertically, talking with clear animation to Bumblebee.

As she approached, she realized that his voice was overloud in the nearly-empty parking lot, and that maybe the talk wasn’t so much a talk as an argument. She stopped halfway across the lot, torn between delivering the cup in her hands and giving them privacy they were due. She compromised with her sense of propriety by averting her eyes when she leaned into the Camaro, conscious of the sudden silence, and withdrawing as soon as Sam took the proffered coffee.

With nothing else to do, she slipped back into the restaurant, buying another little something as an excuse to sit at one of the booths and try not to look suspicious. (It wasn’t that she was doing anything wrong, but she knew that if she looked like she was, the Burger King staff might not hesitate to call the police, which would raise a lot of questions she had no good, ready answers for.)

Without a watch to monitor the time, she couldn’t have said how long she’d sat in there while they…did whatever it was they were doing out there. Finally, though, Sam stuck his head in the door, saw her, and gestured. “Come on,” he said when she stood. “We need you to direct us to the nearest motel.”

“Motel,” she repeated blankly.

He nodded. “Somewhere cheap, that we can stay without having to worry about cops or sisters or anything.”

She couldn’t detect any censure in his voice at the comment, but couldn’t help deflating a little. What kind of fan was she that she couldn’t provide appropriate shelter for these idols of hers in their time of need? She tried to shake the thought from her head, forcibly making room in her thoughts for that mental map. She didn’t have a lot of suggestions for them, but there were some cheap motels in the area that she could direct them to.

She didn’t expect to be dropped off at her house before they went hotel-hunting. “Um.”

The door swung open. “Your help so far has been invaluable,” Bumblebee said (and did his voice sound a touch subdued, or was she imagining things?), “but we’ve taken up too much of your time. We can continue from here on our own.”

“Oh,” she said. She glanced at Sam, who shrugged. She unbuckled her seat belt and slowly got out of the car.

“Thank you,” Bumblebee said. “Your assistance so far has been invaluable, but we can proceed from here on our own.”

“Okay,” she said, knowing her voice sounded faint. She took a step back, thought about it for a second, then lunged forward just in time to catch the passenger’s door, holding it open and holding the Autobot up. “Um. What are you going to do…after that?”

“We’ll see when we get there!” Sam said with a grin.

“Oh. Okay. Um.” God, she just couldn’t talk today! “Listen, if you guys need anything—anything at all—you know where to find me, okay?” I’d do anything for you. “Please. Don’t hesitate to come and find me if you need me, okay?”

“Thank you, Janella,” Bumblebee said. She shivered to hear him say her name.

“And I’ll keep looking. Um. Researching, you know? And I’ll let you know if I find anything out, okay?”

“We would appreciate that,” Bumblebee said; she could see Sam nodding in agreement.

“Okay,” she whispered. Take me with you. I want to help you. She pried her hands off the door and stepped back. The door swung gently closed. “Good luck.”

It wasn’t until they were gone that she realized that, even if she did find something new out, she had no way of getting in touch with them again, short of tracking them down physically. Damn.

But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try.

~*~

Clearly, I lied about the incipient posting of legitimate fic.

Is to can be crack tiem nao? ["Through the Thin Place" 1]

2007-10-22T02:50:21Z

So I wanted to wait until I'd actually finished this to post it, as I'm wont to do with multi-parter fics. But then I set aside work on the first to write nearly the entirety of a sequel, and kept putting off finishing this, and realized that I'll probably never get around to the mega-editing job I'm convinced this needs. SO. Here it is, in all its unbetaed glory.

(I'll be posting a real, legitimate-type fic soon, I promise.)

Title: Through the Thin Place
Fandom: Transformers 2007
Part: 1-2
Rating: PG-13, for some unsavory language
Summary: Sam and Bumblebee manage to fall through a hole in the fabric of space/time, finding themselves in a world where their lives are a blockbuster movie.
Word Count: 4,429
Disclaimer: Yeah, Transformers? Not mine. No profit being made, it's all in fun, etcetera, etcetera.
A/N: Yeah, yeah, I know. It's a self-insert. Crime among crimes, as bad as Mary-Sue, except in this the author acknowledges what she's doing. Just...give it a chance, 'kay? "Anything can be pulled off by the right writer," right?

~*~

All over the world, there are places that transcend the natural. These are magical places, locales couched in mythology and lore, swatches of countryside purported to be home to things that inspire story and legend.

They’re held to be haunts of supernatural creatures, homes to things with abilities beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Some of the tales hold forth that these creatures come from other worlds—and this is closer to the truth than any of the stories surrounding these places.

There is not simply one incarnation of existence, there are many. These exist concurrently and in parallel, sitting alongside one another, each one separate and unique. There exist similarities, yes; in fact, many of them are nearly identical excepting one or two little factors. But different they are, and distinct.

Mostly.

These parallel dimensions rub against each other, and always have, and the contact long ago wore thin places into the fabric of existence. And it is in these thin places—magical places—that things can cross through.

**

It was a dark and stormy night, and Sam felt like a complete and total dink just for letting that thought cross his mind. Despite the triteness of the phrase, though, it was true. It was undeniably night, and there was a storm of remarkable ferocity lashing the countryside.

It was the kind of storm his parents (and driver’s ed teacher) had always cautioned him was better handled by pulling over and waiting out the worst of it. And had he been by himself he may have—but he wasn’t, and he wasn’t driving. Sure, he was sitting in the driver’s seat, and yeah, his hands rested on the wheel, but it was for verisimilitude only. The sleek yellow Camaro that was his rather fantastic ride drove itself.

The car was a better driver than he was.

“This storm is something else, isn’t it?” he asked, leaning back in the seat and letting one hand drop casually beside him.

“I’ve been through worse.” The voice emanated from the car’s stereo speakers. “But you’re right—for this planet, it is impressive.”

“You’re sure you’re doing all right?” he asked. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the car, it was just that he had a tendency to get nervous when the rain was coming down so hard he could barely see the Camaro’s nose through the windshield.

“I told you, I’ve been through worse,” the car replied. There was more than a little amusement in his voice.

“All right,” Sam started to say. Lightning cracked impossibly close, dazzling his eyes, and the thunder was loud enough to deafen even the roar of rain on the roof. Sam let out an involuntary yelp, which turned into a panicked shout as the car lurched and the wheel began to spin under his fingers. Though he couldn’t see out the windows, it was obvious the Camaro was out of control. He could vaguely hear, over the constant drone of the rain, the squeal of the car’s tires against the asphalt.

The car lurched again, and Sam bounced in his seat, and he was pretty sure they’d gone off the road. “I thought you had it under control!” he shouted over the din.

There was no verbal response, but the wheel continued to turn and the brakes released with a pop. The car rolled and bounced, and failed to lose speed. Sam gave up all pretense of driving and settled for grabbing onto the seat and the armrest, trying to dampen the jolting he was getting.

The brakes slammed on again, and the Camaro’s rear end swung around. Sam was thrown against the door, and cracked his head, hard, against the glass. His vision blacked, more than could be attributed to the hour of the day, or the clouds choking the moonlight.

Sam blinked rapidly and shook his head, rubbing at his eyes and trying to clear his vision. He was still strapped in the Camaro’s driver-side seat, but it was quiet—had the rain stopped? If it did, it had been weirdly fast, but…he blinked again. There was strong moonlight coming in through the windows. “Did I black out?” he asked.

The car’s engine was rumbling gently. “Yes, but not long.”

“Not long?” he asked. “The storm’s completely gone.”

There was silence in the Camaro for a long time. “I don’t think it’s the storm that’s gone, Sam. I think…it’s us.”

“…What?” He leaned forward in the seat, peering forward through the windshield. The car was idling in a swatch of overgrown grass surrounded by trees. He couldn’t be positive, but he was pretty sure the road they’d been driving on was bordered mostly by short-shorn grass. He definitely didn’t remember trees, especially not this many.

The speakers hissed softly as they delivered the car’s next pronouncement. “We’re not in the same geographic location as we were a few minutes ago. In fact, we’re all the way across the continent.”

“Wait. You’re saying that somehow, in the space of a few minutes, we…what, teleported across the country?”

“Something like that. Sort of. I…” There was another momentary silence. “I don’t really know.”

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Sam muttered. He slumped back in the seat and passed his hand over his eyes.

“I can’t reach any of the others,” his car reported not long after, “on any of the available channels.” The voice sounded worried, and with good reason. While Sam didn’t even pretend to be able to comprehend a lot of the higher electronics involved, he was aware that his car could communicate with his comrades in more ways than one. That he wasn’t able to raise them was somewhat…distressing.

“That’s not good,” he pointed out, unnecessarily.

“Extremely not good, though I’m not detecting any Decepticons either, at least not nearby.” By nearby, he probably meant something in the vicinity of the continent, or maybe the hemisphere.

“So what do we do?” Sam asked.

“We figure out where we are, how we got here, and how to get back,” the car responded, without missing a beat.

“Well, that’s straightforward enough,” Sam said dryly. He sighed. “So what do we do right now?”

“I suspect we look rather conspicuous sitting in the middle of all these trees.” The rumble of the engine picked up and the accelerator depressed itself carefully. The car began to roll forward, nosing between two of the trees. “Let’s get somewhere a little more populous, and then we figure out what happened to us.”

Sam bobbed his head, knowing the car would pick up the non-verbal signal. He adjusted the seatbelt unnecessarily and put both hands on the wheel, as if he was driving. The car came out of the trees and onto the verge of a narrow lane of asphalt. He paused for a moment, idling; Sam had a chance to see the road bending sharply to his left, and curving more gently to his right. Then, with a lurch that rocked its chassis on its suspension, the Camaro pulled onto the road—

The glare of headlights whipping around the corner to the left blinded Sam.

What happened next was confusing; it wasn’t so much a series of events, to Sam’s perception, as a series of sensations. He heard the Camaro’s engine pitch up from a grumble to a roar, and the horn of one (or maybe both) of the cars began to blare. Brakes squealed, he was flung against the seatbelt, and the forest outside the windows spun into dark streaks, broken by the white glare of the other car’s headlights.

The spinning stopped. Sam groaned and shook his head. At least he hadn’t blacked out this time. “What, did you not see them or something?” he asked.

“I’m not omniscient.” The voice emanating from the speakers was defensive. “Are you all right?”

“Dizzy.” Sam unbuckled his seat belt and rotated his shoulder experimentally. It was bruised, and would probably be stiff tomorrow. Of course, that thought only reminded him that they didn’t know where they were, and he wasn’t even sure where the two of them would be tomorrow. “How about you?”

“Minimal cosmetic damage,” he reported. “I’m all right.”

“Good. I’m gonna go see who we almost hit.” He matched action to word, swinging open the door and stepping out carefully. His legs held him.

The Camaro had spun across the road, ploughing a furrow backwards in the weeds on the other side. The other car, a dark Camry sedan, had stopped at a slant, half-on and half-off the road, at the end of a long track of black rubber and disturbed soil. Two people—a tall, heavy-set man and a short, stocky woman—were standing on the side of the road, arguing. Even as he approached, the woman broke off and stalked directly towards him.

He could see as she came closer that she wasn’t so much a woman as a girl, one wearing an oversized T-shirt with flames splashed across the chest like wings. And at the base of the flames, in a yellow triangle, was a blocky symbol exactly like the one inset in the steering wheel of his Camaro.

**

Janella hadn’t had any qualms about running Shades of Death Road. It didn’t even bother her that they were doing it at night, and late, at that; she’d driven the road a couple of times, without trouble (if not without weirdness). But when Jessie had suggested that they let Travis drive, she’d been a little worried. Still, they were all sober, and he had his license, so she’d shrugged and acquiesced.

He was driving fast, too fast. But it was almost midnight, and it wasn’t like it was a Friday or Saturday night, so other than a few joking protests, she made no complaint.

Then they were flying around a corner, and there was another car in the middle of the road, and then she kind of lost track of things for a minute. When the car stopped moving, she got pissed.

She leapt out of the car and practically fell on the driver’s door, scrabbling at the handle. Travis opened the door hard, pushing her back, and stood. He was a big guy, tall and wide, and he cut an imposing figure in the moonlight, but she didn’t let that affect her at all. “What the hell is wrong with you?!” she snapped, flailing her arms and craning her head back to look up at him.

“Don’t get mad at me,” he growled. “It was an accident.”

“You were driving too fast! Augh, I knew I shouldn’t have let you drive!” She lashed out at him with her hands fisted.

He shoved her. “No one’s hurt and your car’s fine,” he snapped. “It was an accident. Chill out!”

She snarled, but turned away, knowing that her anger was only fueled by the adrenaline of the almost crash. But he was right; no one was hurt and the car was fine—it hadn’t been an accident so much as a thrilling near-miss. Or so she told herself.

Someone had stepped out of the other car, so she left Travis behind and walked towards him. She glanced him up and down, a tall, skinny kid who didn’t look visibly injured, or even all that angry, and then looked at the car. That didn’t look visibly injured either, which was good, because she wasn’t much in the mood to foot someone else’s repair bill…er, again.

Then she realized what she was looking at. The car they’d very nearly t-boned was stunningly yellow, even in the broken moonlight, with two thick black racing stripes painted back from the hood. It was a sleek, modern, gorgeous…Camaro.

It was a Bumblebee car.

Janella felt a goofy smile break her face at the sight of it, her left hand going as if by instinct to the badge pinned to her jeans. The first piece of Transformers merchandise she’d ever bought, it was the Autobots’ insignia, and she wore it every day.

“Everyone all right?” the kid asked, and she looked back at him. Part of her brain informed her that he looked like Shia LaBeouf, but she had a tendency to over-estimate similarity of appearance, and anyway, it was dark out.

She switched her smile to a more normal grin. “We’re all okay. You?”

“All right,” he said. He rubbed her shoulder and gave a little half-smile. “No damage.”

“Car okay?” she asked, using the question as an excuse to glance at the car again.

He looked over as well. “Seems to be,” he said, shrugging.

“Cool,” she said. “So what happened? We came around the corner and there you were.”

“I’m, um, kind of lost, actually,” he admitted. “I was just, y’know, turning around.”

“’Kay,” she said agreeably, sticking her hands in her pockets. There was something a little off about his manner, but hell, it was Shades of Death road. No reason not to be nervous on Shades of Death after dark. There were rumors of all sorts of weird shit that went on up there, ghost cars and murders and mysterious happenings; it was a haunted place. Also, because of all the teenage joyriders who went Weird New Jersey-ing out there, police tended patrol the road frequently. “So everything’s all right?”

“Looks like it,” he said.

“Cool. Drive safe.” She grinned and turned away, hurrying back to her Camry, One-Eye—but not without another look at his car. Travis was still standing by hers, and Jess had gotten out as well. She met her friend’s eyes, and let the smile come back. “Did you see it, Jessie?!”

Jessie grinned back. “I’m still looking at it,” she said. “Bumblebee car.”

“Bumblebee car!” she squealed, giggling. “That almost made it worth it, Travis,” she added, smacking him on the arm. He grumbled something that sounded vaguely threatening. “All right, everyone back in One-Eye,” she said, waving her hand in a spacious circle. “Let’s roll out!”

**

Sam made a great show of looking his car over, waiting for the Camry to pull back on the road and away. When it was finally gone, he slid back into the driver’s seat and closed the door. “Huh,” he said.

“What?”

“Something weird,” he said. He ran his fingers over the symbol on the steering wheel contemplatively. There was no doubt that it was the same as the one that had been on the girl’s shirt.

“As weird as the two young women from the car we almost hit talking about me?” Bumblebee asked.

“That’s not weird,” Sam muttered. “We almost crashed. People tend to talk about it when they almost crash into someone.”

“By name.”

“What?”

There was a quiet whirr, and then voices that weren’t Bumblebee’s began to issue from the speakers. They were grainy and kind of staticky, but clear enough that Sam could recognize the girl he’d talked to as one of the speakers. He listened as they said something about a ‘Bumblebee car’ and started laughing.

“Okay, that’s weird,” Sam admitted. “The girl I talked to, she had this on her shirt.” He tapped the symbol on the steering wheel at ‘this’.

“It’s no coincidence, then,” he said.

“Huh,” Sam said. “Maybe we shouldn’t have let them drive away.”

“Well…I did take the liberty of accessing some of the electronics in the other car,” Bumblebee said, nonchalantly, “so we can track them down again, should we need to.”

“Do we need to?”

“I…don’t know,” Bumblebee said. “I’ve never been in a situation like this before, and if there’s some protocol for handling it, I don’t know it.”

“Hey, all that means is we get to make it up as we go along,” Sam said with a shrug. It startled a laugh out of the car, rendered tinny by transmission through the speakers.

“Oh, this is going to turn out well,” Bumblebee said, his voice wry. He pulled out onto the road, going more slowly this time, but no one came around the corner to surprise them. Without further incident, they left behind the unlucky corner of the road and accelerated for the nearest town.

**

“Mmm. Hungry now,” Janella said, pressing on the accelerator pedal and pointedly driving past the turnoff that led to her house.

“You know what? So am I,” Jessie said, looking surprised to find that she was. “Burger King?”

Janella glanced at the clock. “Too late. It’s McDonalds or Wendy’s.” She drove on, listening as Jessie and Travis began to debate back and forth which they preferred. She let it go for a minute or two, and then said, “Of course, I’m craving the Arches, and I’m driving, so bugger what you guys want.”

Travis tried to protest, clearly uninformed of the Rules of Janella’s Car; Janella let Jess explain while she drove. They pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot and into the drive-through lane.

It wasn’t a problem for the night shift to fill Jess and Janella’s small orders, but Travis wanted some bacon and chicken thing, which, of course, necessitated the pull-around-and-park. Janella cranked the windows all the way to admit what breeze there was in the muggy summer heat, and leaned back to wait.

After a few long minutes, full of the requisite complaints about the time it was taking for the food to come out, another set of headlights slowed and came into the McDonald’s lot. As the car turned and took the glare of its lights out of their eyes, Janella gasped. It was a bright yellow and black Camaro, and it had to be the one from before. There weren’t too many brand new yellow Camaros with racing stripes driving around Hackettstown. “Bumblebee car!” she exclaimed, bouncing in her seat and giggling.

Jess grinned. “Janella, I think he’s following you!” she said with a laugh.

Janella let herself sigh with theatrical ecstasy. “How cool would that be?” she said, turning in her seat to look out the back windshield at the Camaro. It had pulled around the building without going through the drive-through and parked in the corner of the lot. As she watched, the headlights went out.

“Wonder what he’s doing?” Jess asked.

Travis, ever the one to make an off-color joke, pantomimed exaggeratedly smoking a joint. Jess snickered, but Janella only rolled her eyes and turned to see if the food was coming out yet.

When she turned back, her eyes went to the rearview mirror, and she was surprised to see the kid-who-looked-like-Shia halfway across the lot and closing. She waited until she was sure that he was heading their way, then loosened her seatbelt and leaned out the window.

“Hi,” she said, all that she was able to manage of a number of witty openings that came to mind.

“Um. Hi,” he said.

“Something I can help you with?” she asked, wondering why he’d come over.

“Yeah, actually,” he said. “I’m…” He paused, looked briefly uncomfortable, and continued with, “kind of lost. Wondered if you could help me out.”

“I’ll try, but I suck at directions,” she said frankly. “Where are you trying to get to?”

She saw him glance at Jess in the shotgun seat and Travis in the back before he said, “I’ve got the address in my car.”

She stared at him when nothing else seemed to be forthcoming. “And…?”

“…Come look at it?”

Yeah, that wasn’t suspicious at all.

Now it was her turn to glance at Jess and Travis, both of whom looked just as leery about this prospect as she felt. But she was still hopped up on adrenaline from the almost-crash, and besides, it’d sure be nice to get an up-close look at that car.

“You guys wait for the food,” she said to her friends, unbuckling the seatbelt. “I’ll be right back.”

Jess grabbed her arm. “Want me to come?” she hissed in a low voice.

“Naw, I’m okay.” She grinned with a lot more cockiness than she actually felt. “I watch ninja movies, remember?” With that, she turned and opened the door, pausing to make sure her phone was in her pocket before following him.

Most girls her age would have had eyes for the behind of the tall, skinny, relatively good-looking guy walking in front of them—she only stared at the car. He glanced back once or twice, some furtiveness in the motion, and then turned around to face her. “Okay, I lied,” he said.

She felt the pace of heart quicken, and stepped back convulsively. “Yeah?” she said guardedly.

“I don’t need directions.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Listen, I just wanted to ask you something,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. She stiffened. “Um. What’s that, on your shirt?”

She blinked, taken completely aback, and gaped at him. That was probably the absolute last thing she’d expected to hear. While it wasn’t an unwelcome question, it was a weird one, at least for the circumstances. “It’s…it’s a Transformers thing,” she said, the bizarreness of the situation enough to keep her from flashing her nerd cred through a long, fan-jargon-filled initial explanation. “The Autobots insignia.”

“Autobots,” he repeated. She’d expected derision or blank incomprehension, but his tone was thoughtful. Even in the dim light in the corner of the parking lot, she didn’t miss the way his eyes darted at his car.

“Yeah,” she said, bobbing her head. “They’re the good guys. Actually…” She trailed off, and looked over the Camaro again. “One of the Autobots transforms into a car exactly like this.” She smiled fondly. “He’s my favorite.”

The kid was looking at her with a truly odd expression on his face. “Your favorite?”

“Bumblebee.” Another girl might have felt ashamed of her fannishness for a franchise directed primarily at boys, or at least been unwilling to express it so openly in front of a total stranger, but not her. She knew that she probably looked—and sounded—absolutely psycho, but she didn’t care.

“I’m really surprised how much your car looks like him, actually,” she admitted; Bumblebee’s alternate form for most of the second half of the movie was a top-of-the-line Camaro, a model that was only just being released. It was strange that a kid so seemingly young had such a smoking car. Suiting action to word, she added, “I half expect to peek in the window and see—” She stopped dead.

There was the familiar blocky insignia, inset in the Camaro’s steering wheel. It was exactly the same as the one on her shirt, and pinned to her hip.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, taking a step backwards. “Oh my God,” she repeated, taking another. “Oh my dear sweet Almighty Tallest on the Massive above.” This time she tripped over her own feet and fell back onto the asphalt, scraping her palms and completely ignorant of the pain.

“Whoa! Are you all right?” the kid asked, looking surprised. She switched her gaze from the car to him, noting anew his striking resemblance to Shia LaBeouf. It was more than a resemblance, in fact. He looked exactly like him. If it weren’t for that, she would have suspected that this was the car they’d used in the movie, but she’d always been prone to flights of fancy. Her mind automatically skipped the more likely conclusion and jumped right to the weird one.

“You’re Sam Witwicky,” she said, her eyes widening.

He froze, half-bent with his hand outstretched, presumably to help her up. “What?” he said, guardedly.

“You are, aren’t you? Oh my God. You’re him.” She scrambled to her feet. “And if you’re him, then that means…” She trailed off, turning to stare with even wider eyes at the Camaro. She couldn’t finish the sentence.

He didn’t say anything immediately, and before he got a chance to make any response to her assertion, Jess called across the parking lot, “The food’s out! Let’s get the hell out of here!” She turned and looked over her shoulder, then looked back; the kid—Sam—had that deer in the headlights look.

“I…I gotta go,” she stammered, getting to her feet.

He grabbed her by the arm, preventing her from leaving. “You can’t tell anyone,” he said urgently.

“I won’t,” she assured him, without even thinking about it. He released her, and she backed away. He remained standing, watching her, until she turned on her heel and sprinted back to her own car.

“What’s wrong?” Jess asked as she opened the door and practically fell into her seat.

“Huh? Uh. Nothing,” she said. She pressed on the brake pedal and put the car in reverse. “Just…nothing.”

“Did he try anything?” Travis asked ominously, leaning forward between the two front seats.

She shook her head, looking in the review mirror at the Camaro. “No,” she said. “He just needed directions.” She looked over at Jess and forced a smile. “Now gimme my hamburger.”

**

Sam watched the girl who’d known his name sprint back to her car. He ran one hand through his hair, a nervous gesture, and only turned away when they’d pulled out. The Camaro’s driver’s side door popped open invitingly, but a gleam of silver caught the corner of her eye and he stopped.

There was a cell phone on the ground, where the chick had been fallen. He bent and picked it up, weighing it in his palm, before getting in the car.

“This changes the situation considerably,” Bumblebee said without preamble.

“Yeah,” Sam muttered distractedly. “This is her cell phone.”

“It is. And…?” As he spoke, the headlights snapped on and the car shifted into reverse, backing out of the space in the corner of the lot.

“Well, we should probably get it back to her. It sucks to lose a cell phone.”

“Does it? There’s not a lot of data on them. It shouldn’t be hard to recover.”

“Cell phones aren’t backed up on anything,” Sam explained. “Trust me. It’s no fun trying to find phone numbers again.”

“That’s…” Apparently, Bumblebee reconsidered what he was about to say and trailed off. He turned the corner and accelerated in silence. “It’s probably not a good idea to seek out someone who recognized us,” he said finally.

“Not even someone who said you’re her favorite?” Sam asked.

“…Well. If it’s really so much trouble to replace a phone, then I guess it’s our duty to return it.”

Sam laughed, then frowned. “Wait, how do we get it back to her when we don’t know, um, anything about her.”

There was definitely a smug tone in his voice when he said, “Leave that to me.”

~*~

Next part coming. Just...coming.