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Windblade’s favourite part about Earth, she thought, was the lower gravity. Caminus had been a dense planet, and Cybertron’s size had given it a mass only slightly lower, a pull only just less than what she was used to. Here on Earth though, when she stole time between meetings with Metroplex and the mechs who helped her run Little Cybertron and what few friends she still had, she turned off her gravitational correctors and relished in the feather-light pull on her wings. Even the air resistance of Earth’s thicker, oxygen-rich atmosphere wasn’t enough to stop her from breaking any and all personal speed records she’d kept track of, and with a bit of practice she’d learnt to use it to her advantage.
She cornered sharply, far faster than she had ever managed on Caminus, and pulled up into a looping twirl with a whoop of pure joy. There was something about flying for the sake of flying, no goal but the wind under her wings and the pulse of her rotors pushing her higher, faster, free-er. That last one wasn’t a word, really, but she sure did feel it when she flew like this. Windblade flipped to point her nose down at the ground below, and let herself fall. It was almost like floating, after a lifetime spent in the heavy pull of Caminus, and she turned her sensors inward, discarding visual input and trusting her instincts to keep her from hitting the ground.
There were no flight paths near her, and she’d not seen any little personal aircraft earlier, so she could just... relax. Let her rotors spin freely as wind rushed past and through them. She twisted slightly as she passed back down through the layers of air currents, a slow, lazy twirl for no reason other than it felt nice. At least, right up until pain abruptly lanced out from her left rotor. Her combat subroutines sprang to life at the impact, all deactivated sensors snapping back on, and she grimaced as she realized she was falling through a bunch of the little feathery organics the humans called Birds. Not something she could fight, just a rookie mistake.
With only one functional rotor it was something of a miracle she managed to land well enough she could transform and walk away from it, but by the time she reached the outskirts of Little Cybertron Windblade’s appreciation for that fact had sharply waned. She was achey, and exhausted, and as she looked at the Cybertronian-sized streets ahead she realized that simply walking in and heading for the hospital would end with her fielding questions the whole way there. Questions she would really rather not have to answer right now. She couldn’t just wait for night either, she’d only managed to clear a few Earth hours for herself to go out flying, and most of that was gone now. She could call for a personal transport to meet her at the edge of town, which would also raise questions but she wouldn’t be expected to answer them immediately, or perhaps she should comm someone to bring a medic out here to at least straighten out her crumpled plating before she walked back to work? She was pretty sure she hadn’t taken any serious damage, and running a city left her precious little time to slack off nursing surface damage.
Her deliberation was interrupted by a low rumble, the sound of dirt being shifted aside by something massive coming up through it. The ground before her opened, and Windblade let out a small laugh. Right, Metroplex was an option too. “Thank you, dear.” she said, descending the offered stairs, keeping a hand on the wall as dim lights glowed to life along the top of the hollow root her Titan had invited her inside of. He wasn’t quite up to speaking yet, last she’d heard, but he’d been getting much better at micro-level field control and they could have rudimentary conversations that way, even when she wasn’t at his processor chamber.
Right now, eddies of worry safety comfort swirled around her, and if her sense of direction was good Metroplex wasn’t bringing her to the hospital. “I’m fine, you know.” she told the empty hallway. “It was really a rather smooth landing, considering.”
Metroplex’s field agitated around her, disbelief clear as any words could convey. He really was getting good at this, she’d have to remember to commend the cityspeaker who suggested it. She opened her own field up, letting it blend with Metroplex’s at the edges, sending out gentle waves of comfort safety reassurance with each measured step. She wasn’t moving particularly fast- her damage was almost entirely superficial but she’d still had to walk back, and her pedes just weren’t designed for Earth soil- but still she seemed to be making uncommonly good time. Metroplex’s work, no doubt. The fact that she couldn’t hear his internal mechanisms grinding away without turning up the sensitivity of her audials was a particularly good sign, especially since nobody had come down to service these parts manually. Their efforts must have finally taken enough strain off of Metroplex’s systems for his self-repair to get to work on things other than major malfunctions.
It seemed hardly any time at all before the corridor came to an end, but Windblade didn’t even slow her steps. True to her trust, the wall slid away in front of her just before she walked into it, and she swept her wings back to slip through the narrow door which had just opened in the back of Metroplex’s processor chamber. “Where are your cityspeakers?” she asked, looking around for her former co-worker and the small crew of trainees who kept close optics on Metroplex. They were rather conspicuously absent, leaving the restored and tidied-up room cavernously empty with just her and Metroplex in it.
[Away] Metroplex blinked up, the glyphs glowing a friendly amber in the air around his processor. [Windvoice desires solitude.]
Either she’d been projecting a lot more in her field than she meant to, or Metroplex knew her better than she’d thought. Probably the latter. “Thank you, Metroplex.” she smiled, approaching his processor and lifting a hand to trace old, familiar glyphs in the air over its delicate surface. This was by far the least tiring way for him to communicate, and after his field manipulations and the micro-transformations to bring her here so quickly, she wanted to spare him as much effort as possible.
A hatch in the floor popped open next to her pedes, and when she looked down a cortical link cable lay flopped on the shiny decking. Cityspeakers were not, strictly speaking, supposed to link directly to a Titan’s mind without another speaker present to bring them back if they got lost. Chromia had been enough, when they were first here, and then... well, nobody on Cybertron could call her out on it because none of them knew. Now that there were other cityspeakers present though, there was a very real and present risk of them losing faith in her if she was caught breaking one of the most basic rules.
“The doors are locked, right?” she asked. The sound of locks engaging rang throughout the room, and she chuckled softly as she knelt to take the cable in hand. It plugged into place easily, securely, and she opened her processor to Metroplex. «I’m fine, see?» she offered up her most recent diagnostics. Metroplex’s field buzzed against hers, a press of concern upset don’t-believe-you as he sent the diagnostic right back at her, highlighting the catastrophic damage to her turbine.
«Okay, but it wasn’t anything dangerous.» she pulled up the memory of the last klik of her flight, the utter peace and lazy joy which had been shocked away by that Solus-damned Bird.
Metroplex tugged at her irritation, and she let it rise to the fore. She hadn’t been scared, wasn’t even properly angry. She had been bombed, possessed, shot at and stabbed. Really, a bird in her turbine didn’t even rank in the top twenty injuries any more, except maybe for most embarrassing. Metroplex’s worry still ensconced her, and Windblade leaned into his presence, not seeking data but giving it. She had survived so much, protecting him. Had given so much of herself to keep him functional, keep him safe. Metroplex’s concern softened, affection seeping in to take its place, sinking into the crevices of her processor like that sticky Earth treat one of their representatives liked. Car-something, she’d only asked to be polite.
Metroplex’s amusement rang through the cable like a bell, like a gong, deep and resonant, shivering through every layer of her coding right down into her spark. «See a medic, Windvoice.»
His voice in her processor was deep, deeper even than the few recordings she’d found of him speaking during the early war, but it was far more familiar like this than it had ever been in her audials. So too was the array of subglyphs he tagged her name with, [Child of Caminus] stuck close to the lines of her designation trailing into a spiral of increasingly affectionate modifiers until it terminated in a glyph so archaic she’d needed to go digging in the cityspeakers’ archives to find its meaning. [Spark of my spark]
«I will, Metroplex.» she promised, attaching similarly ancient glyphs to his name. Devotion and adoration and something near to reverence, a glyph only used in relation to Caminus when a cityspeaker first swore themself to His service. Even the oldest of their records had no proper translation of it, but it never failed to make Metroplex purr with approval, the tide of his emotions throttled by the cable linking them so she couldn’t drown in the vastness of them. Still, it was an effort of willpower to anchor herself back in her frame when her processor was swamped with such a sense of rightness.
She was His, spark and processor and frame, Speaker of his will above all others of her kind. He will grant this honour to no other while her spark still spins, and as surely as she knew this she knew that to utter the glyphs of devotion to another Titan would shatter his spark. Caminus would always be her first home, but Metroplex was her city, and she was his Speaker. Her vents gaspped in a rush of fresh, cool air as she detached the cortical link cable, letting it retract back down beneath the floor, and she pushed herself to her pedes, leaning against one of the supports which braced Metroplex’s processor. The doors unlocked, and Windblade caught a flash of her name as Metroplex spoke it to her mind, the glyphs burning blue as her spark before they winked out of sight and one of the trainees was suddenly there, helping her out the door, promising there’s a ride outside for her.
“You worry too much.” Windblade murmured. Metroplex’s laughter shivered the air around them, and she let herself be guided out to the waiting ambulance.