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The first nightmares are always the worst.
Robbie woke up gasping in a cold sweat, his right arm tingling uncomfortably. Panicking, he moved to a sitting position among the messy blankets, and breathed a sigh of relief seeing the odd metal of the cyber-sleeve. His arm had simply fallen asleep. The metallic surface reflected the little moonlight coming in through the window, its alien strangeness only further accented by the glowing blue bit on the back of the hand.
Through the sleeve, he felt a twinge of alarm and concern. Twitch . Seconds later, a red drone appeared outside the open window, hovering for a moment before transforming.
“Twitch, no!” Robbie whisper-yelled, just as she was about to climb through the window and into his bedroom. He raised his hands up before him. “It’s OK, I’m OK. Just please don’t…” Robbie sighed. “You know the rules, no bots in the house. I really don’t want to get grounded.”
She glanced furtively around the room, finding of course that she and Robbie were the only ones there, nothing to be afraid of indeed. “What was that?” Twitch finally asked.
“Just a nightmare,” said Robbie.
“A what?”
Right, the Terrans don’t sleep. “It’s like, um, well when we sleep, we dream. Dreaming is like seeing movies in your sleep, and nightmares are bad dreams.”
Twitch’s face scrunched a little; Robbie could feel her confusion through the sleeve. “Scary movie you weren’t expecting, in your sleep,” she concluded.
“Pretty much, yeah.” He got up out of bed and clambered through the window. Twitch stepped aside to make way for him, and the two of them sat down on the slant of the roof.
The late summer air was still warm, save for a slight breeze, but Robbie was just fine in his pajamas. He hugged his hands around his knees and looked down, at his parents’ parked vehicles, at the barn where Thrash and Bumblebee most likely were, at the field that stretched out, dotted with the sleeping forms of cows. Beside him and in the same position sat Twitch, taking in the same visuals from what he could tell. The night was almost entirely quiet, save for various animal sounds and the barely-there internal humming that accompanied Cybertronian life.
“What did you see?” she asked after a few moments.
Robbie shuddered, remembering the silhouette of Optimus towering over him, of running through fog after Twitch and Thrash, his sister and parents nowhere in sight, and the tingling on his arm as the cyber-sleeve disintegrated to nothing and Twitch’s familiar mental presence faded to empty quiet.
“You disappeared,” he admitted. “Everyone was gone, and you, and this–” He gestured with his cyber-sleeved arm. “Just sorta faded away. It was so quiet.”
Neither of them said anything for a beat or two, then Twitch spoke up. “That can’t happen, though,” she said. “The sleeves can’t come off, right?”
She was right, as far as Robbie knew anyway. He had tried, just out of curiosity one day, and the metal wouldn’t budge. It stuck to his skin like it was already part of it, and it actually hurt a little when he tried to peel it off at the elbow. He mentioned it to Mo later, and she said she’d had a similar experience. After that, the both of them just let the sleeves be.
“You’re right.”
“And we’re safe here,” added Twitch. “We’ve got Optimus and Megatron on our side, we’ve got Mom and Dad, and Bumblebee too! We’ve got a home, and even when Mandroid got us, we kicked his…what was that word again?”
“Butt,” snickered Robbie.
Twitch giggled, trying and struggling not to laugh too loud. It was still very late, after all. “Humans have such funny words for things.”
“Yeah…we do.” A laugh always lightened the mood, even if it was joking about butts. She was right, too, about being safe. The way it stood, they were probably one of, if not the best protected family in the country. Not even the president had giant alien robots around, living with her and her family. “We do.”
She gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Hey, you wanna see something cool?”
“Twitch, I always wanna see something cool. What is it?”
Looking around as if someone was eavesdropping, she dropped her voice to a whisper. “We’ve got baby foxes out in the yard.”
“Whoa, that is cool! Where?”
“Out in the trees,” Twitch added. “I saw them when I was out flying one night. Pretty sure there are four of them. Wanna go see?”
“Yeah!” He stood up, carefully with the slant of the roof. “We shouldn’t get too close though, Mom says if we do, their parents might not go back to them. I think it was something about smells, or humans finding their nest…” Robbie struggled to recall the exact details; he’d only started learning more nature things after leaving Philly.
“We’ll be okay, we can keep our distance. Even up in the air, you can still see good.” Twitch shifted easily into her drone alt mode, hovering in the air before him. “You ready?”
Robbie nodded. He clambered on top of the drone, and off they flew into the woods, eager to see some wildlife first-hand.