Chapter Text
A dull noise caused the minicon to begin to awaken from her recharge with more than one grumble.
Turning under the blanket, still suspended in a state that was neither sleep nor wakeful, Nickel felt that soon the heat and torpor would win their battle against the awakeness. The muffled - barely perceptible - and rhythmic sound of the pendulum in the corridor next to the bedroom came to aid, leading her step by step to sink back into some pleasant dream.
She reached out one hand to the other side of the bed instinctively, seeking the presence and the warmth of her mate, Bustin.
The second dull noise, louder than the first, came at the same time as she realized that her water-green digits had found nothing but emptiness.
Now fully awake, she got out of bed and looked around, also removing the blackout panels that in the morning prevented the light from the large windows -that occupied most of the bedroom walls- from waking them both up too early.
Everything seemed to be in order in the part of the garden that she saw, no one was on the balcony and Bustin could have got up for a trillion reasons, even though it was late at night. He could have dropped something on the ground floor, Nickel thought, and yet she felt strongly restless, a feeling that got even worse when she heard again the dull noise of before, but more prolonged and louder.
After a very brief thought that urged her to open her medic's briefcase next to the bedside table and grab the scalpel -the closest thing to a weapon that she had there- Nickel decided to leave the room carefully and to go downstairs.
Part of her suggested that she was acting irrationally - "Get a 'weapon' just beacuse I heard a noise, even though I know that I’m not alone in the house? Good thing my superiors and my collegues appreciate my so-called nerves. What if Bustin isn't feeling well? An unsheathed scalpel wouldn't help him much" - but the other one, that was predominant, led her to grab her improper weapon more tightly by hearing other noises of objects falling to the ground.
"Looks like the noises are coming from the bathroom," she thought.
Maybe her thinking hadn't been wrong and her partner was really sick, she said to herself, so she decided to hurry up. How else to justify the noises, his absence, the fact that in the rooms and corridors she was passing through everything seemed to be in order and...
She interrupted her steps just before stepping on a liquid puddle the size of her hand, neither the first nor the last in a long series which, as she saw at a very quick glance, seemed to start from the main entrance of the house.
"What is this?... " exclaimed Nickel, graining her blue optics.
She could see the delicate luminescence of the drops and the patches closest to the front door, very typical of the cybertronian life fluid, but she also noticed - with feelings that were now overcoming the restlessness and becoming something far worse - that those closer to her and to the bathroom were increasingly polluted by a dark, slimy looking matter to which she could give neither a name nor a specific color. Not even in the most crude medical manuals, dealing with the strangest diseases and the most terrible infections, she had ever seen anything like it.
"Bustin?..." she decided to call him, though mindful of how in certain horror movies actions like that meant trouble "Bustin, where are you?... are you okay?!"
Her partner's house, which had recently become hers too, seemed totally alien to her at the time. No longer a "safe nest" that she had quickly learned to know and appreciate, but the refuge of something monstrous and dangerous -wounded or not.
"Where is Bustin?" she asked herself again.
The scalpel trembled slightly in her hands as her audios picked up the sound of the pendulum upstairs chiming at three in the morning.
"What happened to him?"
She went closer to the bathroom. The puddles widened, darker and darker, and she realized that the same liquid started to run under the door.
"What is-"
A faint moan through the door revealed to Nickel that her partner was in there. She would always recognize his voice, no matter how altered it might be.
"Bustin!" exclaimed the minicon, venturing against the handle only to discover the door was locked. "Bustin, what's going on?!"
From the inside came another muffled moan.
" Nnniiickeeeel ..."
The variation in tonality between the normal one and a more gurgling and monstrous one, more consonant to a hellish creature than to a transformer, made Nickel jump backwards.
The scalpel, which shone slightly because of the artificial lights in the garden, almost fell from her hand, and the dark liquid reached her wheels.
She was tempted to run away. She would still be in time to reach the door and leave that place, leaving to their fate whatever was behind that door...
"That's enough!"
Instead she decided to break through with three well-set shoulder straps, slipping miserably in the last one and avoiding falling only thanks to her quick reflexes that led her little hands clinging to the jambs.
But when she noticed movement in front of her and lifted her optics, she could not hold back a scream.
What until a few hours earlier had been her partner's body as she knew it, was widening and deforming every passing nanoclick, giving shape to outgrowths that were stretching and giving birth to whole new limbs, including what looked like membranous wings with a network of disgustingly swollen and pulsating vital fluid pipes; Bustin's colours -predominantly black, white and turquoise- were disappearing, leaving room for shades which were neither girgie, nor purple or dark rust, rather a mixture; pointed jaws opened on the large "tentacle" which had replaced his head and bent against the ceiling, while from the large gash which was just below the chest, dark matter continued to flow out as if it had been a small waterfall.
Paralyzed by the horrifying sight, Nickel watched helplessly till the end of the mutation of the creature that now occupied three-quarters of the bath - even though it was really large, like the one they shared upstairs. Only Bustin's black mask remained, of all his normal features, placed just under his jaws and partially absorbed by his"skin". Nickel saw that the eyes of white pixels flickered slightly when the creature turned in her direction.
"No. Not 'the creature', he's not a creature," she thought, as her feet moved forward on their own. "This is my mate. I have no idea what's happened to him or what's going on in general, but I can see that he's hurt and needs help."
She wouldn't have been able to say whether that courage came from the same spirit that she brought out as a trainee doctor or, more "trivially", from love; the only certain fact was that she approached her new patient with more decisive steps, heedless even of the sewage.
Perhaps she had gone insane.
Or maybe she had simply never woken up, that was a nightmare and on a subconscious level she knew it, even if she had a completely different impression.
"Bustin! You still recognize me, don't you?"
" Nnniiickeeeel ."
There was no longer a shred of normality in his voice -which Nickel had the impression of hearing resonating directly in the processor- either, but he recognized her, otherwise he wouldn't have pronounced her name; and every circuit in her body was convinced -or wanted to be convinced - that, whatever Bustin had become, would not harm her as long as he knew who she was.
"I don't know what happened, but... but it doesn't matter, okay?! We'll find... we'll find a way to fix this," said the minicon. "Starting with that wound!"
"Ggggo away... Nickel..."
In the monstrosity of that voice, Nickel distinctly felt a note of tiredness, and the fact that Bustin was still able to think clearly, which was something more than the "merely" recognizing her, led her to open every door she could get to looking for medicine and any tool that could help her slow down or stop the bleeding.
"No. You're hurt and I'm not leaving you here like this, and not just because I swore a fucking oath as a medic," she replied, determined, "There must be something for- aah! Let go of me NOW! " she exclaimed when one of the monster's limbs grabbed her from behind at waist height and pulled her away.
Though Bustin's hand was enlarged and deformed, the gesture by which he caressed her face with absolute delicacy - even now that he was a monster - was way too familiar.
"Sleep, Nickel..."
"Sleep?! How can I sleep in this situation?! Are you... are you..."
She felt her processor quickly become confused, her metal eyelids become heavy, her legs sag. Before plunging into torpor and unconsciousness, however, she also felt that her last fear -falling into the dark sewage- was averted by a creepy limb of her mate, who quickly supported her.
***
The first thing Nickel saw when she opened her optics was the burnished metal ceiling of the bedroom, with the two LED strips, obviously off, which crossed in the middle dividing the ceiling in four squares.
She catapulted out of her bunk, noting first that Bustin's side on the berth had been redone, just like every day - She was never able to get up before him.
Once the blackout panels were removed, Nickel was almost blinded by daylight. That revealed to her that it must have been quite late. Shortly afterwards, her inner clock told her that it was almost lunchtime.
She saw her briefcase where she had left it, so she opened it quickly and saw that all the tools were clean and tidy in their place as she had left them the night before. After this, Nickel ran out of the bedroom, reached the stairs and rushed down them three by three.
Feeling the Spark in her throat and the optics moving feverishly trying to catch at least one tiny detail out of place, Nickel rushed towards the bathroom. There was no trace of the liquid that she had seen, the door was in perfect condition and, as always, the bathroom was tidy, white and immaculate.
"Is it possible that I imagined it all and it was all just a dream?!" she thought.
"Nicky? Dwarfie?"
Hearing Bustin's voice -his normal voice- calling her, metaphorically put wings at Nickel's wheels, and she reached the kitchen in seconds.
"Good morning! I admit I was starting to worry," said Bustin, who was wearing a very manly flower apron, tinkering with a pot full of long-sliced energon crystals and aluminum sauce. "It's almost lunchtime. I know, you're an intern and you need to practice, but in that clinic they make you work a little too hard and- ahem, what's going on?" he asked Nickel when she ripped his apron off and started examining his chassis and abdomen. "Normally I'd say you want to interface, but your expression doesn't... Nicky? You're shaking," Bustin said, approaching with the intention of holding her. "What's wrong?"
"Your values and your vital fluid," said Nickel, in a firm voice, backing out. "I want to see them. I want to see everything, or else... or else I..."
"All right, now I'm starting to get really worried," said the other minicon, quietly obeying and showing his values to her "Is there a pandemic going on or something? Something escaped from a lab? Hope we don't end up like last night's movie, then..."
The horror film with the plague that turned people into monsters that Nickel - although she came back tired from the clinic and happy that the next day would be free - wanted to see, to be precise.
It would have taken a long time for her to stop regretting that idea.
She went through one of her compartments and pulled out a sterile enerstud. "Bend your head forward, I'll get a CNA sample."
Bustin obeyed. "This is all very strange, but I guess you have your reasons, so I trust you."
The meekness with which Bustin made that gesture caused Nickel to remain motionless, and the hand with the enerstud remained still in midair. Shortly afterwards, she slowly retracted it without saying a word, feeling terribly ashamed of what she had been about to do and of her complete lack of common sense.
"Sticking a needle in his neck because of a nightmare? Really?!" she thought, putting enerstud back in its place.
"No... no, never mind. I’m sorry," said Nickel. "There's no pandemic going on or anything like that, it's just that I'm..." huffed, and this time she didn't retract when Bustin held her and caressed her. "A moron. I had a nightmare."
"It must have been a terrible nightmare. That's why you looked scared... but don't worry, it's all right," he murmured, resting his chin on her head.
"I wanted to stick a needle in your neck because of a nightmare! By Prion's shadow, how can you stand me?!"
"I was counting on the fact that if you didn't really have a good reason to do it, you would have stopped sooner... as you did. I think very highly of you, Dwarfie."
"... 'Dwarfie' again? You're not so much taller than me! You're only a head and a half taller!" Nickel protested, looking at him reproachfully but intimately grateful for the words he had spoken to her and the fact that he didn't think that she was a paranoid freak.
"That's right, when you look at it like that we're practically the same height," replied Bustin, without hiding a certain amusement in his voice.
"Hey! I remind you that the best energon lies in the smaller reserves!"
"Never said otherwise," smiled Bustin. "Feel better now?"
Nickel nodded. She wasn't shaking anymore. "I dreamt that I woke up from a strange noise in the house... then I went downstairs, I found stains of life fluid mixed with Primus-knows-what on the floor. The stains led me to the bathroom, then I opened the door and I saw you become a freackin' hideous creature with a huge wound gushing that dark liquid and... and then you made me sleep and… and I was... let's say distressed. I was until now."
"No more horror movies before sleep" stated the other minicon.
Nickel did not protest, resting her head against his chassis. "The only good thing is that you recognized me even though you became that monster."
"I can't imagine a situation where I might not recognize you and you must really have reason to be afraid of me, Nickel. I think you know that too. Otherwise your processor would have made you dream of something different."
"Yes, you're right. But I swear, it felt so real, as much as I know it was absurd..."
A blaze rose from the pot that had been left recklessly on the stove throughout the speech, and after a series of screams of surprise both minicons tried to work it out.
"No, NOT the lid on the flaming pot!" exclaimed Bustin.
The warning came too late, Nickel placed the lid and the contents of the pot exploded partially, invading the stove and part of the shelf next to it, causing a fire. Fortunately, the sprinkler system on the ceiling activated... watering the two minicons, which for a few seconds standed there like statues staring helplessly at the whole thing.
"Is the whole ground floor now-..." began to say Nickel.
"No, the system detected that the fire was here in the kitchen, so the system only went off here."
"Ah! Well, that's better," commented the minicon, feeling pretty embarrassed about the whole thing.
Moments later, unexpectedly, Bustin laughed. "We can both save a shower for today, we've already had one!"
Seeing him acting so calmly, Nickel smiled in turn. "Yes, it's true. Since the fire's out, I'm gonna go get some rags and..."
"No no, I don't want to deal with this right now. Let's take the pot off the stove and clean up there, we'll think about the water later, if it hasn't dried itself. Let's go down the valley to that restaurant you liked, I'm kind of hungry!"
"And I'll pay for everything," Nickel said right away.
"Nick-"
"I almost burned down your kitchen," the minicon interrupted.
"There were two of us here, and it's our kitchen anyway," replied Bustin, quietly. "You haven't settled in yet, huh?"
"No, that's not it, I've settled in, really. You made me bring everything I had in my dorm room and also everything they sent me from home when they knew I was moving... six boxes..." she sighed, massaging his forehead. "And my stuffed animals, and that purple hairy rug..."
"It's a beautiful rug."
Nickel raised her eyes to the ceiling. "I know it isn't."
"And it's longer than you, Dwarfie!" exclaimed the other minicon, running out of the kitchen with a laugh.
"Again?! If I catch you I'll put you down!" cried Nickel, pulling a wrench out of a compartment and running after a fugitive who, as she knew, had probably already flown into the garden.
As he reached the front door she concluded that the one she had, had been just a nightmare, after all... and at that moment, it and the beast within that seemed something far away.