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Today you are a turbofox, running across the acid wastes and digging burrows in the brittle crust of the planet, bounding across plains and leaping over chasms. You are fast and free and wild, untethered and unhindered by society.
But you are lonely. The other turbofoxes have balked at your presence, run away and hide at your approach. They can tell you're different, somehow, just by looking at you. Maybe it's your smell, your em field, maybe you aren't copying the shape right. You can't be sure. But they know you aren't one of them. You are alone out here.
The sun dips below the horizon and you begin to regret coming here. You begin to regret a lot of things, actually.
It had all felt so important a day ago, and now you can't really remember why. It all felt like it would crush you to dust. Tired of the stares and the whispers, a visit to a doctor who had refused to touch you had been the final straw. You had yelled at him, that you were sick of Transformers and sick of Autobots and sick of their world and their society and their rules and most of all sick of him playing house as if he were your father and you a child, as if you were not a group of things, some young and some old. As if you didn't have piles of varying experiences and information, incongruent but endless, as if you were a thing to be loved or kept.
You had been cruel. And you had been wrong.
You curl up in a shallow burrow you have dug for yourself, the metal ground cool, and miss the soft padding of your berth at home. You miss the full thrum of his engine in the other room, a reminder you aren't alone. You miss your night light. It was shaped like the Matrix.
You might have parts of you that are old and you might have piles of experiences, but you, as a one-thing, are young. The memories of your nanites are just video files, but not your memories. You are a new thing, still learning what it is you are and how to be it, but you're starting to wish you weren't at all. You thought maybe it would be freeing to be a wild animal, and no one could tell you what to do but- now that it's dark, and quiet, and you are alone, you want to be anywhere but here. You don't feel like a turbofox. You feel like a sad little girl.
You curl up tighter and consider disassembling yourself. Maybe you should just send all your nanites away, remake themselves as new many-things and stop being you anymore. It's difficult to be you, in a world where no one wants you to be at all. Maybe it was foolish to try.
You hear his rotors in the distance before you raise your head from your burrow and look out. He's got his searchlights on, scanning the desert floor for you. He doesn't even know what you look like. You could be the dust storm catching the light. It's silly to look for you as if he could find you.
You bury your head again in your paws. He's being stupid and silly and stubborn. Everyone else on this planet is sick of you. The rest of his race would be happy if you would disappear into the desert to hunt turbofoxes and stop hanging around their cities, where they constantly watched you with paranoia, deeply aware that at any moment you could turn into a red wave of hunger and devour a whole building in under a minute. They don't want you found.
He passes overhead, searchlight scanning wildly across the ground. He's looking for you anyway. Even if no one else wants him to find you.
The light passes over you and your squint your optics into it, pressing your plating together tightly and duck your head back into your burrow. Even with your optics scrunched shut, you can hear him transform and thump on the ground as he lands on his pedes. You bury your face further into yourself, wound tightly into a ball as his pedesteps approach, ruffling your plating outward like spikes. You know you're getting fuzzy, it's undoubtedly how he could tell you're you and not a real turbofox. You can never fit in, not with the Autobots, not with the turbofoxes, not with anyone.
"Leave me alone!" you snap when he kneels down behind you, old hydraulics squeaking, "I am no one's daughter!"
"Okay," he says, and his voice is warbly, statticy, an old and beaten voicebox that never works right, "You don't gotta be nothin' you don't wanna be."
"I know," you assert stubbornly, refusing to look at him, "I don't need anybody."
"Everybody needs somebody, Whirlygirly," he says, voice sounding uncharacteristically sad, "Come on. You ain't gotta do nothin' you don't wanna. You can be a turbofox if you want, but you just can't run off without tellin' me nothin'. I worry about ya'. Have you eaten?"
You shift uncomfortably. You have not.
"No," you admit, letting your shoulders sink in defeat, "Everything out here is corroded. It's no good."
You hear a snap and look up, finally. He's broken off one of his stabilizer winglets and is holding it out to you, like you're actually a frightened turbofox he's trying to calm down. You feel guilty.
You snap back into the root mode you picked out and sit on the ground, cross legged and sniffling. You let yourself be picked up and dropped into his cockpit like a snivelling toddler like you used to when you were younger. He holds the winglet up to you again and you take it, still feeling guilty, but not more guilty than hungry, and start nibbling at the corners.
"Aw, shucks, kiddo," he sighs, "You can be a turbofox if you want. We can go off world if you want. I ain't a mind reader, though. I dunno what you want unless you tell me."
"I don't know what I want," you say, miserably.
"How 'bout we talk big picture in the morning, huh, after breakfast and a nap?"
"Okay."
"Do you wanna stay out here tonight or go back home?"
You shove the last of the winglet in your mouth and you're already feeling better. You always get sad when you're hungry and then you feel so guilty after. You wish you could just disappear. "Home."
"Aight," he says, simply, as if it really were that simple. He stands and snaps the cockpit window closed over you as he transforms, and he flies you home, even though he wobbles on his left side without the stabilizing winglet.