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soundwave_ascendantSoundwave knew something was wrong even before the door closed behind him. Ravage was in the washracks upstairs, and she was furious. A quick visual inspection of the premises showed Glit and Lotor playing a datapad game in the parlour. The gate on the back-access road had been intact when he returned. He checked The Big Conversation. There was nothing untoward being posted that day.
Once he got behind his desk, though, there was a disassembled laser rifle lying in front of him, and a datapad full of screencaps from Ravage’s comms.
Rumble and Frenzy had got access to Ravage’s contacts, and they had been texting people. One of those people was Ravage’s friend Evie—the one who had talked him into buying Thunderflare, except he hadn’t—he’d gone out via PINPoint and liberated the little elephant, like a real and proper Decepticon.
Evie had not had any patience with their nonsense, and Rumble had got annoyed with her when she started to treat him…well, like Ravage did, sometimes. And had started sending her obscene text messages from multiple blocked numbers.
Ravage walked into the office and sat down behind her desk. Which faced his. Her arms were crossed across her chest and she was waiting for him to say something.
Soundwave decided to open with the obvious response. “Situation: unacceptable.”
“You’re telling me,” Ravage replied with a quiet snort. “He sent that to an eighteen-year-old girl. And I’m not dropping zeroes. She put up with it for a little while because she thought he was younger than she was.”
Soundwave nodded. He had access to a lot of cultural data even though he wouldn’t have claimed to understand very much of it. Eighteen was…legal, in most localities, for receiving messages about interface, but these propositions had been unsolicited and unwanted, as were the spike pictures. This would not have been acceptable behaviour among crew on the Nemesis. He would not have tolerated it in the Io Commune.
“Query: does Ravage have a preferred form of punishment in mind?”
“Sort of,” Ravage said quietly, and glanced out the window.
Soundwave followed her line of sight. Esmeral was planting flowers near the back gate, in the hope that it would be more noticeable in the future, and Clobber was helping her. Soundwave was not sure why this particular activity held his conjunx’s attention so securely. “Name it.”
“Manumission,” Ravage said flatly, still not looking back at him.
Unexpected. Soundwave considered this. “In most situations, Ravi-brightspark,” he said delicately, “that would qualify as a reward.” He hoped she would understand that he was not actually trying to be snide. He felt a little better when Ravage’s field sent out a flicker of yes-I-love-you-but-I’m-still-mad and she looked straight into his optics to give him a little blink when she heard the endearment.
“It shouldn’t be.” Ravage said quietly. “We already discussed this. Anyone who’s competent to make their own decisions should be released upon request. Megatron set a bad precedent with those two.”
Soundwave frowned, but at least she hadn’t mentioned Ratbat. Apparently, she really had moved past it. Once he’d understood her completely, he hadn’t been sure she was going to.
Ravage continued, calmly. “Involuntary servitude has no place in Destronian or Decepticon communes or communities, nor has involuntary guardianship of adults, except in extreme cases like that of Buzzsaw, whom we really need a better solution for.”
Soundwave nodded. It also wasn’t lost on him that the twins were the ones who liked to remove Buzzsaw’s cassette from the vault it was kept in when Ravage and he desired to be absolutely alone.
“I’ve come out as strongly as I can about cassette modification, without casting shadows on you, because none of that was your idea, and it was very special of the Autobots to withhold their research on the matter as well. But this isn’t a good look on us, having this slag go on right under our noses and letting them get away with it because they’re cassettes, which in too many people’s minds, means they’re children forever.”
Soundwave ex-vented heavily. She wasn’t wrong. She rarely was. But. “Rumble and Frenzy, though: really capable of making adult decisions?”
Ravage shrugged. “They know they don’t have to be. Why should they bother?” She looked down at her disassembled rifle. “I know. We can fix it. But Strika gave me that. And what if he was taking pot shots at the Eliksni, and got out far enough into the Wilds that it would work? That would be a monumental fuck-up, in terms of our relations with the entirety of the Nexus. I don’t know what ‘Pokémon’ are, exactly, the Espurr Mantis has got has almost nothing in common with LB’s friend Morrigan, but at least some of them are people. I mean…you told them that. The Espurr is a person. Maybe not much smarter than an Eradicon, but a person.”
“The Espurr knew words in several languages,” Soundwave reminded her. “Francour is immature, and without programming, but still can pick up things like that. This is impressive.”
“Well,” said Ravage, who was clearly more upset about Evie—even though that was personal, and she didn’t think that would be as convincing to him…which was upsetting, honestly, “everything they do comes back to us. Frenzy’s grown up a little, but Rumble’s resisting it; he broke my rifle, and more upsettingly to me, he harassed my friend, which he deserves a few nights in the brig for, like anyone else would get. That slag would never have flown on the Nemesis. What if he’d been sending texts like this to someone like, I don’t know, Thunderblast? It’d be on The Big Conversation in astrosecs.”
That would actually be hilarious, Soundwave thought but didn’t say, because he knew it was not really funny; even if there weren’t political implications, despite how terrible a person Galvatron’s conjunx actually was, it was completely unacceptable to importune people for interfacing. “Situation unlikely. Even he can solve that risk assessment equation correctly.”
“That’s not a good answer,” said Ravage sharply, and Soundwave realised he’d said the last bit out loud. “It means he’s picking on people he thinks he can get away with picking on, and those are the worst—”
Soundwave knew exactly what that meant and he shared with her the wave of remorse he felt at having said those words. “I know, brightspark. I know what it means, he didn’t learn it from us, but he learned it from people around us, and it’s bad, and we have to do something about it. Put him in the brig, if we have one. You have the authority. But it wasn’t near the top of the list of amenities we’d expected to need here.”
Ravage laughed out loud, which was a relaxing thing to hear. “I think Clobber can make a project of that. But the other thing is more important to me. I don’t want to put him in the brig because you technically own him and I’m your fed-up conjunx. I want to put him in the brig because he’s a Decepticon, and when you and I started in with this thing, we were supposed to be better than the fragging alternatives.”
“The pressure to engage in polyamorous activities aside…we were, back then,” Soundwave admitted.
“I think a better name for that would be ‘orgies we got used to having because half of the Conclave used to be gladiators, and Megatron is incapable of keeping his panels locked for too long,’” Ravage said wryly, and hearing that come out of her made his spark sing a little. In fact, he may even have produced a few bars of terrible porn soundtrack music, which made Ravage slump back in her seat with pure laughter.
When Ravage got her composure back and sat up, she went on. “Did you know that they’re actually older than we are? I did the math. They came from Messatine with Megatron. He wasn’t a gladiator yet, back then. Were we even little spots of light in the ground yet? I don’t really know.”
Okay, maybe she hadn’t done all of the math. Soundwave smiled at her. “There are records, probably. Your point has been made. I was never an appropriate mentor or guardian for them. Although I think I did not do too badly, over the years.”
“That’s not it.” Ravage smiled sadly. “I never was, but you used to be great with them, back when we were all a lot younger. But you don’t have time anymore, I never had patience, and now they’re five million years old and set in their evil little ways. They know we’ll get them out of whatever trouble they get themselves into, and now? We just can’t. If Destron, if a Decepticon homeland, is to be a real thing, Soundwave, then we have to be just a little more impartial. Unsheathing the blades—or the claws—can’t just be something we do when we feel like it. Not because we can say that people have this or that right that cannot be enforced, but because these are not the people we want in our families and homes. They have become your pets, and I’m not cleaning it up anymore, when they drain their tanks on the floor.”
Soundwave thought about the baby elephant briefly, but…she was a baby, and she was actually taking quite well to her training. Not that the twins ever peed on the floor. They did worse things, though.
“I know,” said Ravage. “You have a soft spot for small things, but then they grow up to be big things. And those two are not growing up.”
Soundwave nodded. They had reached the venting stage, hadn’t they? “We’ll do as you wish,” he assured her. “Only: what if they don’t want to be freed? They resented the arrangement in the beginning, but Megatron pushed—and now, they may be comfortable.”
“You get a choice, too,” said Ravage. “I do expect you to make it. They can’t force you to be their guardian if you no longer consent to be.”
“I won’t,” Soundwave said, quietly. He wasn’t sure why he liked having dependents. It was a soft thing, but it was a pleasure. Perhaps it was a pleasure that was meant to end, though.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Ravage, answering the question that he hadn’t asked out loud. He was the telepath, but the sparkbond worked like that, sometimes. “Laserbeak is fine, and she likes things the way they are, and I’m okay with the dumb stuff that she does sometimes, as long as she actually gets away with it. She's my sister. I’m not asking you to dump her out of the nest. Just get rid of that nasty slave code, which you already said she could do—”
Soundwave nodded, and brightened a little. “Are you suggesting that I should not stop having any cassettes in the household at all?”
“I accept that you were forced into an artificial situation and that you made your peace with it very differently than I did,” Ravage said, gently, and he could feel that she really did understand how different it was for him, who had been told all his life that he wasn’t competent to handle himself, let alone anyone else, and that he should be, because of his caste, than it was for her, who had been told all her life that she was property.
“And I like having birbsister live with us. I’m a communist and a communard and I don’t mind having other people living in my home, although I do not want them sleeping in your chest when we are fragging. Which I think is probably disruptive for them, as well as for us. But they need to be people that we can both live with.”
Ravage picked up a long stick with feathers on the end. He was not sure what it was, although the sight of it made her laugh, and she tapped him on the cassette panel screen with it. “Either you need to start mentoring sparklings, and letting them actually go when they’re grown, or you need to stop taking the mini-cons nobody else in the fleet wants to deal with and dumping them on my sister and me when you have to go and do complicated logistical Soundwave things, but my sister is already bored, and I’m now expected to produce shimmering prose on demand for the media.”
When she put it like that…he had to admit, it was fair.
“Evie thought they were your sparklings. I’m afraid some people who aren’t Cybertronian probably think I gave birth to them.” Ravage’s field contracted in disgust just imagining what little she knew about the process of human birth, and applying it to herself.
Soundwave hadn’t the heart to tell her it was probably even grosser than she thought it would be. “I think they’d be more likely to suspect me of having done that—”
Ravage snickered. “You never present as a femme and I do, sometimes, like today. For some reason it’s almost always the organic femmes that do it.”
Soundwave wasn’t sure he entirely agreed, but he also didn’t feel he fully understood the grievances of Earth femmes, and he understood, dimly, that this was a thing. Ravage, who had little to no interest in human culture, could not be expected to understand it at all. But he believed her when she told him the humans were sure she would be the carrier, even though Ravage would never be able to carry a newspark; humans carried the entirety of their offspring, even the frames, didn’t they?
“They’re Megatron’s creche brothers,” Soundwave finally admitted. “And he loves them.”
“I know. They can go live with him, if they want. Frankly I sometimes think they’d make very fine Autobots.”
“Ravage,” said Soundwave. “That’s harsh. Even for you, brightspark.”
“What? The Autobots are hoodlums, have you met them? I’ve spent the better part of a year living with Autobots and they’re idiots! Rumble sent pictures of his spike to my human teenager friend!” Ravage fumed. “And that’s why I’m going to tell Megatron about this! They love you. They love me. But we don’t have the purchase on them that we used to have. Ironically, he still does.”
“Why do you think this is?”
“I don’t know,” Ravage admitted. “But I think perhaps they see the inherent hypocrisy in our current relation to them. You like taking care of people. I get it. Well, you know I hated being changed like that, but I made my peace with it because the alternatives were being domesticated, being killed, or at the very least being taken away from you and staying with Ratbat for the rest of my life. And in the beginning, you hated it too!”
“I did,” said Soundwave, very softly. “Everything else was just so much worse. I would never have let them do that to you otherwise. I would never have accepted your consent to that.”
Ravage nodded. It was an old pain but it was still sharp. There had not been very many worse ones.
“I learned not to mind it so much when it made me feel closer to you than most people were. That changed pretty fast, though, because it turned out not to be true.”
Soundwave looked down at his finger servos. He’d known that Ravage wanted more privacy, and also that she’d missed her old body (and he had, too). He just hadn’t known it was possible to fix all of the changes, and curse the Autobots for not just telling them so. But Soundwave had never realised that this of all things had affected how special she felt with him, perhaps because neither of them had wanted it in the first place. And perhaps it had affected how special she felt with him just as much as her previous habit of getting it on with her friends every now and again had affected how special he’d felt with her, when he had really not wanted to admit that. “That really did bother you.” Soundwave pursed his lip plates together.
“Yeah, I’m never sharing a berth with Slugfest and Beastbox again, okay-thanks?” Ravage quipped. Soundwave knew she was being kind in not mentioning the mistakes he had made with Ratbat, and accepted the joke as it stood.
“No. You are not.”
Suckerpunch came into the room just then with two cubes of energon sitting on top of him. Ravage leaned over, collected them, and set them on her desk. “Thanks,” she told the mini-con, who transformed and gave her a sidehug before he left. Then she pushed one out toward Soundwave, who grabbed it with a cable and grinned at her. Suckerpunch, who knew a serious discussion when he saw one, was already making himself scarce.
Soundwave considered the likelihood that Optimus or Starscream or Galvatron, or…any of the other Cybertronian leaders would sidehug a cleanerbot who brought them a drink. He decided that Ravage had a better sense of these issues than he did. He’d seen him on the Weak Anthropic Principle, too, and his first sight of Ravage out there had been a snap from Misfire that had showed Ravage passed out on a couch covered with other people’s junk and a blanket that had seen better days, looking like he might well be having the best recharge he had had in over a year.
Ravage was now licking drops of condensation off the outside of her cube. “I love you,” he said, reflexively, just because the sight of her being herself made him feel that way.
Ravage gave him a long, slow blink, which he returned. “I love you, too. We’ll work this out.”
Once he got behind his desk, though, there was a disassembled laser rifle lying in front of him, and a datapad full of screencaps from Ravage’s comms.
Rumble and Frenzy had got access to Ravage’s contacts, and they had been texting people. One of those people was Ravage’s friend Evie—the one who had talked him into buying Thunderflare, except he hadn’t—he’d gone out via PINPoint and liberated the little elephant, like a real and proper Decepticon.
Evie had not had any patience with their nonsense, and Rumble had got annoyed with her when she started to treat him…well, like Ravage did, sometimes. And had started sending her obscene text messages from multiple blocked numbers.
Ravage walked into the office and sat down behind her desk. Which faced his. Her arms were crossed across her chest and she was waiting for him to say something.
Soundwave decided to open with the obvious response. “Situation: unacceptable.”
“You’re telling me,” Ravage replied with a quiet snort. “He sent that to an eighteen-year-old girl. And I’m not dropping zeroes. She put up with it for a little while because she thought he was younger than she was.”
Soundwave nodded. He had access to a lot of cultural data even though he wouldn’t have claimed to understand very much of it. Eighteen was…legal, in most localities, for receiving messages about interface, but these propositions had been unsolicited and unwanted, as were the spike pictures. This would not have been acceptable behaviour among crew on the Nemesis. He would not have tolerated it in the Io Commune.
“Query: does Ravage have a preferred form of punishment in mind?”
“Sort of,” Ravage said quietly, and glanced out the window.
Soundwave followed her line of sight. Esmeral was planting flowers near the back gate, in the hope that it would be more noticeable in the future, and Clobber was helping her. Soundwave was not sure why this particular activity held his conjunx’s attention so securely. “Name it.”
“Manumission,” Ravage said flatly, still not looking back at him.
Unexpected. Soundwave considered this. “In most situations, Ravi-brightspark,” he said delicately, “that would qualify as a reward.” He hoped she would understand that he was not actually trying to be snide. He felt a little better when Ravage’s field sent out a flicker of yes-I-love-you-but-I’m-still-mad and she looked straight into his optics to give him a little blink when she heard the endearment.
“It shouldn’t be.” Ravage said quietly. “We already discussed this. Anyone who’s competent to make their own decisions should be released upon request. Megatron set a bad precedent with those two.”
Soundwave frowned, but at least she hadn’t mentioned Ratbat. Apparently, she really had moved past it. Once he’d understood her completely, he hadn’t been sure she was going to.
Ravage continued, calmly. “Involuntary servitude has no place in Destronian or Decepticon communes or communities, nor has involuntary guardianship of adults, except in extreme cases like that of Buzzsaw, whom we really need a better solution for.”
Soundwave nodded. It also wasn’t lost on him that the twins were the ones who liked to remove Buzzsaw’s cassette from the vault it was kept in when Ravage and he desired to be absolutely alone.
“I’ve come out as strongly as I can about cassette modification, without casting shadows on you, because none of that was your idea, and it was very special of the Autobots to withhold their research on the matter as well. But this isn’t a good look on us, having this slag go on right under our noses and letting them get away with it because they’re cassettes, which in too many people’s minds, means they’re children forever.”
Soundwave ex-vented heavily. She wasn’t wrong. She rarely was. But. “Rumble and Frenzy, though: really capable of making adult decisions?”
Ravage shrugged. “They know they don’t have to be. Why should they bother?” She looked down at her disassembled rifle. “I know. We can fix it. But Strika gave me that. And what if he was taking pot shots at the Eliksni, and got out far enough into the Wilds that it would work? That would be a monumental fuck-up, in terms of our relations with the entirety of the Nexus. I don’t know what ‘Pokémon’ are, exactly, the Espurr Mantis has got has almost nothing in common with LB’s friend Morrigan, but at least some of them are people. I mean…you told them that. The Espurr is a person. Maybe not much smarter than an Eradicon, but a person.”
“The Espurr knew words in several languages,” Soundwave reminded her. “Francour is immature, and without programming, but still can pick up things like that. This is impressive.”
“Well,” said Ravage, who was clearly more upset about Evie—even though that was personal, and she didn’t think that would be as convincing to him…which was upsetting, honestly, “everything they do comes back to us. Frenzy’s grown up a little, but Rumble’s resisting it; he broke my rifle, and more upsettingly to me, he harassed my friend, which he deserves a few nights in the brig for, like anyone else would get. That slag would never have flown on the Nemesis. What if he’d been sending texts like this to someone like, I don’t know, Thunderblast? It’d be on The Big Conversation in astrosecs.”
That would actually be hilarious, Soundwave thought but didn’t say, because he knew it was not really funny; even if there weren’t political implications, despite how terrible a person Galvatron’s conjunx actually was, it was completely unacceptable to importune people for interfacing. “Situation unlikely. Even he can solve that risk assessment equation correctly.”
“That’s not a good answer,” said Ravage sharply, and Soundwave realised he’d said the last bit out loud. “It means he’s picking on people he thinks he can get away with picking on, and those are the worst—”
Soundwave knew exactly what that meant and he shared with her the wave of remorse he felt at having said those words. “I know, brightspark. I know what it means, he didn’t learn it from us, but he learned it from people around us, and it’s bad, and we have to do something about it. Put him in the brig, if we have one. You have the authority. But it wasn’t near the top of the list of amenities we’d expected to need here.”
Ravage laughed out loud, which was a relaxing thing to hear. “I think Clobber can make a project of that. But the other thing is more important to me. I don’t want to put him in the brig because you technically own him and I’m your fed-up conjunx. I want to put him in the brig because he’s a Decepticon, and when you and I started in with this thing, we were supposed to be better than the fragging alternatives.”
“The pressure to engage in polyamorous activities aside…we were, back then,” Soundwave admitted.
“I think a better name for that would be ‘orgies we got used to having because half of the Conclave used to be gladiators, and Megatron is incapable of keeping his panels locked for too long,’” Ravage said wryly, and hearing that come out of her made his spark sing a little. In fact, he may even have produced a few bars of terrible porn soundtrack music, which made Ravage slump back in her seat with pure laughter.
When Ravage got her composure back and sat up, she went on. “Did you know that they’re actually older than we are? I did the math. They came from Messatine with Megatron. He wasn’t a gladiator yet, back then. Were we even little spots of light in the ground yet? I don’t really know.”
Okay, maybe she hadn’t done all of the math. Soundwave smiled at her. “There are records, probably. Your point has been made. I was never an appropriate mentor or guardian for them. Although I think I did not do too badly, over the years.”
“That’s not it.” Ravage smiled sadly. “I never was, but you used to be great with them, back when we were all a lot younger. But you don’t have time anymore, I never had patience, and now they’re five million years old and set in their evil little ways. They know we’ll get them out of whatever trouble they get themselves into, and now? We just can’t. If Destron, if a Decepticon homeland, is to be a real thing, Soundwave, then we have to be just a little more impartial. Unsheathing the blades—or the claws—can’t just be something we do when we feel like it. Not because we can say that people have this or that right that cannot be enforced, but because these are not the people we want in our families and homes. They have become your pets, and I’m not cleaning it up anymore, when they drain their tanks on the floor.”
Soundwave thought about the baby elephant briefly, but…she was a baby, and she was actually taking quite well to her training. Not that the twins ever peed on the floor. They did worse things, though.
“I know,” said Ravage. “You have a soft spot for small things, but then they grow up to be big things. And those two are not growing up.”
Soundwave nodded. They had reached the venting stage, hadn’t they? “We’ll do as you wish,” he assured her. “Only: what if they don’t want to be freed? They resented the arrangement in the beginning, but Megatron pushed—and now, they may be comfortable.”
“You get a choice, too,” said Ravage. “I do expect you to make it. They can’t force you to be their guardian if you no longer consent to be.”
“I won’t,” Soundwave said, quietly. He wasn’t sure why he liked having dependents. It was a soft thing, but it was a pleasure. Perhaps it was a pleasure that was meant to end, though.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Ravage, answering the question that he hadn’t asked out loud. He was the telepath, but the sparkbond worked like that, sometimes. “Laserbeak is fine, and she likes things the way they are, and I’m okay with the dumb stuff that she does sometimes, as long as she actually gets away with it. She's my sister. I’m not asking you to dump her out of the nest. Just get rid of that nasty slave code, which you already said she could do—”
Soundwave nodded, and brightened a little. “Are you suggesting that I should not stop having any cassettes in the household at all?”
“I accept that you were forced into an artificial situation and that you made your peace with it very differently than I did,” Ravage said, gently, and he could feel that she really did understand how different it was for him, who had been told all his life that he wasn’t competent to handle himself, let alone anyone else, and that he should be, because of his caste, than it was for her, who had been told all her life that she was property.
“And I like having birbsister live with us. I’m a communist and a communard and I don’t mind having other people living in my home, although I do not want them sleeping in your chest when we are fragging. Which I think is probably disruptive for them, as well as for us. But they need to be people that we can both live with.”
Ravage picked up a long stick with feathers on the end. He was not sure what it was, although the sight of it made her laugh, and she tapped him on the cassette panel screen with it. “Either you need to start mentoring sparklings, and letting them actually go when they’re grown, or you need to stop taking the mini-cons nobody else in the fleet wants to deal with and dumping them on my sister and me when you have to go and do complicated logistical Soundwave things, but my sister is already bored, and I’m now expected to produce shimmering prose on demand for the media.”
When she put it like that…he had to admit, it was fair.
“Evie thought they were your sparklings. I’m afraid some people who aren’t Cybertronian probably think I gave birth to them.” Ravage’s field contracted in disgust just imagining what little she knew about the process of human birth, and applying it to herself.
Soundwave hadn’t the heart to tell her it was probably even grosser than she thought it would be. “I think they’d be more likely to suspect me of having done that—”
Ravage snickered. “You never present as a femme and I do, sometimes, like today. For some reason it’s almost always the organic femmes that do it.”
Soundwave wasn’t sure he entirely agreed, but he also didn’t feel he fully understood the grievances of Earth femmes, and he understood, dimly, that this was a thing. Ravage, who had little to no interest in human culture, could not be expected to understand it at all. But he believed her when she told him the humans were sure she would be the carrier, even though Ravage would never be able to carry a newspark; humans carried the entirety of their offspring, even the frames, didn’t they?
“They’re Megatron’s creche brothers,” Soundwave finally admitted. “And he loves them.”
“I know. They can go live with him, if they want. Frankly I sometimes think they’d make very fine Autobots.”
“Ravage,” said Soundwave. “That’s harsh. Even for you, brightspark.”
“What? The Autobots are hoodlums, have you met them? I’ve spent the better part of a year living with Autobots and they’re idiots! Rumble sent pictures of his spike to my human teenager friend!” Ravage fumed. “And that’s why I’m going to tell Megatron about this! They love you. They love me. But we don’t have the purchase on them that we used to have. Ironically, he still does.”
“Why do you think this is?”
“I don’t know,” Ravage admitted. “But I think perhaps they see the inherent hypocrisy in our current relation to them. You like taking care of people. I get it. Well, you know I hated being changed like that, but I made my peace with it because the alternatives were being domesticated, being killed, or at the very least being taken away from you and staying with Ratbat for the rest of my life. And in the beginning, you hated it too!”
“I did,” said Soundwave, very softly. “Everything else was just so much worse. I would never have let them do that to you otherwise. I would never have accepted your consent to that.”
Ravage nodded. It was an old pain but it was still sharp. There had not been very many worse ones.
“I learned not to mind it so much when it made me feel closer to you than most people were. That changed pretty fast, though, because it turned out not to be true.”
Soundwave looked down at his finger servos. He’d known that Ravage wanted more privacy, and also that she’d missed her old body (and he had, too). He just hadn’t known it was possible to fix all of the changes, and curse the Autobots for not just telling them so. But Soundwave had never realised that this of all things had affected how special she felt with him, perhaps because neither of them had wanted it in the first place. And perhaps it had affected how special she felt with him just as much as her previous habit of getting it on with her friends every now and again had affected how special he’d felt with her, when he had really not wanted to admit that. “That really did bother you.” Soundwave pursed his lip plates together.
“Yeah, I’m never sharing a berth with Slugfest and Beastbox again, okay-thanks?” Ravage quipped. Soundwave knew she was being kind in not mentioning the mistakes he had made with Ratbat, and accepted the joke as it stood.
“No. You are not.”
Suckerpunch came into the room just then with two cubes of energon sitting on top of him. Ravage leaned over, collected them, and set them on her desk. “Thanks,” she told the mini-con, who transformed and gave her a sidehug before he left. Then she pushed one out toward Soundwave, who grabbed it with a cable and grinned at her. Suckerpunch, who knew a serious discussion when he saw one, was already making himself scarce.
Soundwave considered the likelihood that Optimus or Starscream or Galvatron, or…any of the other Cybertronian leaders would sidehug a cleanerbot who brought them a drink. He decided that Ravage had a better sense of these issues than he did. He’d seen him on the Weak Anthropic Principle, too, and his first sight of Ravage out there had been a snap from Misfire that had showed Ravage passed out on a couch covered with other people’s junk and a blanket that had seen better days, looking like he might well be having the best recharge he had had in over a year.
Ravage was now licking drops of condensation off the outside of her cube. “I love you,” he said, reflexively, just because the sight of her being herself made him feel that way.
Ravage gave him a long, slow blink, which he returned. “I love you, too. We’ll work this out.”
