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Whirl kicked her pedes beneath her chair, staring at the floor. She watched them fuzz in and out of shape, trying out different pede styles, lost in thought. She’d been sitting there awhile now, told to think about what she’d done by the program manager, Bug Bite. He was a short mech with white plating and she’d disliked him the second she met him. She hadn’t gotten along with the other enrollees, either, not the sparkling aged bots or anyone else. She was sure they could tell she wasn’t like them, just by looking at her, and she was starting to regret her choice to try to fit in with the Cybes. Maybe she should just take after a turbofox and run away into the wilderness, to try to live as a wild animal for awhile, answering to no one, eating stuff she found on the ground and going anywhere she wanted.
It sounded lonely.
The front door slammed open, startling her, and she jolted in her seat, momentarily losing control of her whole shape and having to focus to put it back together again. Her guardian had arrived, panting like he’d flown the whole way here, ducking in the standard sized doorway as he turned back and forth, scanning the lobby with his one glowing optic.
“Whirlygirl!” He said, and she dropped to the floor, skittering over to hug him, shoving her face into his chest, wrapping her arms around his waist and she crushed her optics shut. It felt like if she just closed her eyes tightly enough and buried her face in his armour, she could just vanish from this place and from around these people and just be home, suddenly, and not have to think about it anymore.
“Took you long enough,” a voice said behind her, and she tightened her grip around his waist.
“Some of us have real jobs, eh?” said the old soldier, “You caught me luggin’ a freight lift, I couldn’t exactly drop it, could I?”
“You were certainly under the impression I had a real job when you dropped it off here,” Bug Bite said dryly, “And since then it’s damaged the structural integrity of the very building. I told you I’d take it only under if it was capable of controlling itself, and you promised me that-”
“Quit callin’ her an it, will ya?” The older Whirl spat back at him, “And how’d she manage to gnaw on somethin’ long enough to hurt it anyways? Don’t you supervise these kids?”
“It’s not a she , Whirl, it’s not even Cybertronian ! I know Cop-tur vouched for you, but you can’t expect me to-”
At about that point, Whirl’s pedes picked up off the floor as the mech she was hugging vaulted forward and punched the instructor in the faceplate. It wasn’t that she was adverse or unfamiliar with violence, she’d eaten her share of mechs at this point, anyway, but she was so startled by the sudden movement that she lost focus on her shape, and before she realized what she had done, she realized she’d eaten through the first layer of armour plating she was clinging to, tearing her arms away and skittering back along the floor.
The older Whirl didn’t even seem to realize she’d hurt him, still punching the instructor with dented claws, wordless. She shrunk back against the line of chairs in the lobby as people from the other rooms suddenly realized there was a fight going on and dragged her guardian off of him, still kicking indignantly. Bug Bite stood up, wiping energon away from his mouth.
“You’re delusional,” he spat, “Like everyone says. I knew I shouldn’t have given you a chance.”
“Whatever,” said Whirl, still held down, “Don’t need your crummy education program anyway. What do you know about Cybertron? You wasn’t even born here. Let me up.”
“I know you’re used to doing whatever you want and making up the rules whenever they please you, gallivanting about in lawless deep space, but you’re in the real world now, and I’m calling the cops,” Bug Bite snapped.
“Slag it,” he swore, “Are you for real? I only punched you like, a couple times, you baby.”
“Hello, police?” Bug Bite said, holding one audial, “Yes, I’d like to report an assault.”
“Frag off,” Older Whirl muttered, before he suddenly looked over at the little scraplet-sparkling, as if he’d just remembered she was there, “Go home, Whirlygirl, I got this under control, okay?”
“Are you sure…?” She asked, softly, looking up at Bug Bite, still on the phone. She considered turning into a great big dragon and swallowing him up, but he would have told her to do that if he thought it was a good idea.
“Yeah,” he said, “Just go home. I promise I’ll see you later.”
Home did not feel like such when she shut the door behind her, form fuzzy on all the edges, colours all out of wack. As soon as the door clicked shut, she melted like butter on a stovetop into a red pool of guilt-shame-anger and writhed in it, shapeless, formless, frustrated. She wasn’t a child, she wasn’t a Transformer, she wasn’t even a proper scraplet colony anymore.
She coiled into herself, bubbling and thrashing, a pit of red despair that coated the floor, wallowing in its own misery as it lost shape and meaning. It had been foolish to try to hold the same shape for so long, to try to pick a shape and make it hers , to try to slip into a culture, a community, to try and be a one-thing when she was many-thing , built to interact only by destroying.
She could be a turbofox and run through the acid wastes, eating whatever she found and howling at Luna-2 at night, the queen of the desert. She could become a dweller and plow through metal beneath the surface, living in darkness and creating tunnels anywhere she wanted to go, consuming anything that dared get in her way. She could be a technohawk, and fly above everything, so high no one could even see her. She could be a jet, and then a space shuttle, and take off into space and go anywhere she wanted, anywhere else. She could collect other scraplet colonies, become massive, become everything, become Unicron’s terrible daughter, a red creature wrought from fury and consume everything she set her trillions of eyes on, until all were one, within her.
Instead of being any of those things, she became the shape she’d worked so hard to pick out again, rubbing moisture from her eyes as she hugged her knees to her chest, consumed by overwhelming guilt. He was probably going to lose his job again, and he was in jail again, and it was her fault, again. Everything she touched, she broke, and if she could just settle for being the thing she was, that would be a good thing.
By the time the sun was overhead the following day, she had eaten through half the furniture, stressed, hungry, unable to keep all her thoughts cohesive and her pieces in line. She was intermittently allowing herself to become a puddle and reform, shuffling everything together to force herself to keep her thoughts straight, and every time, it just felt hollow, a hunger that metallica would not satisfy.
The door lock clicked and the handle turned, and she snapped back together, lifting her head, optics dull and glassy from crying.
“Hey, you home?” the other Whirl asked as he opened the door, and she was not too distracted to notice the mesh wrapped around his midsection, stained a dull energon-pink. “Looks like you were hungry, huh?” he commented, assessing the nearly destroyed room with a quick glance.
Whirl started sobbing, overcome suddenly by a wave of solidarity and cohesiveness as for the first time since the previous day, every nanite in her colony felt the same overwhelming thing: guilt.
“Shush now, don’t do that,” he said, shutting the door and scooping her up like an oversized energon cube, “Ain’t nothin’ worth all that fuss.”
She wrapped herself around the bottom of his cockpit, pressing her face into the side, her legs curled against the underside as he rocked her back and forth, thrumming his engine with a dull rumble that reverberated through her core.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed into the glass, “I’m really sorry.”
“Ain’t nothin to be sorry about, pipsqueak,” he soothed, still rocking her back and forth like a sparkling, “He don’t know shit.”
Whirl didn’t know what ‘shit’ meant, but surmised it was probably one of those human swears the old soldier liked to indulge in when he was really mad.
“Are you gonna go back to jail?” she asked, and he exvented, frustrated.
“Yeah, well, probably, yeah. But I gotta do a trial or whatever first, you know, the whole system thing, or whatever. Won’t be too long, though, I only punched him, he still got all his limbs, and I only got six months for an arm last time, so, a dented faceplate can’t be more than that, huh?”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, feeling useless.
“Nah,” he said, pushing the bottom of his helm against the top of hers, “I’d go back and punch the git again. You recharge at all last night?”
“No,” she admitted, sniffling.
“Aw, Whirlygirl,” he sighed, “No wonder you’re so upset. You know you get all addlepated when you’re undercharged, huh?”
“I know,” she said, curling tighter against his cockpit.
“C’mere,” he muttered, hugging her tighter as he rocked her gently, in the ruins of their apartment living room, engine thrumming.
“Packed and all eyes turned in, no one to see on the key,
No one waving for me, just the shoreline receding.
Ticket in my hand and thinking wish I didn't hand it in,
Cause who said sailing is fine?
Leaving behind all the faces that I might replace if I tried on that long ride,
Looking deep inside, but I don't want to look so deep inside yet,” he sang softly, like an old, half remembered lullaby, and the last thought little Whirl had before she slipped off into recharge was that her dad was a terrible, terrible singer.