Prompt five
“We’re not ready,” Stalker echoed.
“Ready for what?” Mindwipe paused. Skystalker could recognize, by now, the almost invisible tic of the optics across the larger mech’s HUD. “Flying? You are ready.”
“Uhhh, no we’re not,” Sky asserted. “And we’re not going.” Stalker linked his claws together, as if subsiding. Not quite brave enough, or individual enough to actively protest against…either of them.
“You must go,” Mindwipe said, puzzled. “It is on the schedule.” As if that settled everything. And for Mindwipe, it normally did. If he logged something into hard data, it was…reality. Not open to change. So much was unstable in Mindwipe’s life, like…anything that happened recently. He lived by hard data. Which, to Skystalker, was no way to live at all. Life had always been in the color of things, not the facts. And right now, the color was the greygreen of fear. He wasn’t ready to fly again. He could barely manage to transform simultaneously. And that had taken…a decacycle of practice in one of the hangars. Probably a blessing, Mindwipe’s condition, for that. Skystalker had a backlog of memory caches of attempts to transform and then change back. Mindwipe probably had one, having dumped the rest as short term glitches.
“Look, what if something bad happens out there?”
“Out…oh. Out flying. I will be there.”
Skystalker…didn’t quite share Mindwipe’s usual cheery confidence. “You won’t remember,” he accused, catching himself too late. Mindwipe probably didn’t like being reminded of his…condition. Every time they had talked about it, even obliquely, Mindwipe had lost his breezy demeanor. At those moments, Skystalker knew that the larger bomber was acutely aware of the damage the solenoids that gave him his power had done to him.
And sure enough, a barely perceptible tightening of the bomber’s shoulder wings. “I have a reminder on a centiklik loop.”
Sky drooped. Less that he had no excuse for his resistance, than the stab at the consideration that Mindwipe, who could barely remember his name, had remembered and logged a workaround for this. “I…uh….”
“You’re afraid.” Mindwipe’s head tilted, his optics behind the visor studying Skystalker, taking in the body language of both of his frames.
“Look. I can barely manage to walk!” Stalker burst out. “I can’t do simultaneous astrogation!” Sky nodded earnestly.
“Perhaps you don’t know that you can,” Mindwipe offered. “Perhaps you have merely forgotten?”
Skystalker felt all four of his hands bunch into fists, as though the memory reference were some sort of gibe. No. He knew better: one of the…up sides? Down sides? of Mindwipe’s status was that he was literally incapable of holding onto a memory long enough to form a grudge, much less work out a referential insult. Do not take this out on Mindwipe, he told himself. Do not take this out on your only ally. “I’m…afraid, yeah.”
“What would make you less afraid?”
Oh, Primus. So much. And all of it completely impossible. First and most, he’d be less afraid if he had his old body back-big, sturdy, capable. But even more than those, familiar. He knew from aeons of time every response, every limit to his systems in his old fighter frame. He knew the feel of flight from that body as clearly and effortlessly as he knew anything. And part of him, he realized, did not want to fly this way for fear of overwriting those memories, losing that part of himself.
Skystalker had been quiet for too long: Mindwipe gave his tic again-reminding himself, no doubt, of what was going on. “We need to go flying,” he repeated. And then, more slowly. “And you are afraid?”
Skystalker nodded both of his heads.
“What if…?” Mindwipe’s central optic irised for a klik, as it did when he was pushing his cortex into the future. Into that place with no memories. “What if I took one of you. And then the other would fly, but the other was with me directly?” The large hands twisted, as if apologizing for the unclear explanation.
“You mean, jacked into your system? As a secondary?”
Mindwipe nodded. “Yes.”
Skystalker hated the idea that he might lose his memories but…he’d be jacked in with Mindwipe. Maybe the bomber didn’t realize the intimacy of what he was offering. But he was offering, and Mindwipe did not know how to be insincere. Connected to Mindwipe’s basic programming. He could fly as a bomber, he could have that power, if vicariously. He could know his only ally at a level that…very few mechs ever experienced. And moreover, he would not be afraid. He would not be lost.
“And you can monitor yourself this way as well.” That small nod of the pointed chin Mindwipe gave when he felt completely satisfied with an idea or with Skystalker’s progress. Skystalker had learned to hang for those moments, transform, retransform, all for that same sharp nod of approval.
Sky unlocked his frame. “Okay. And Mindwipe? Thanks.”
“For…what?” Mindwipe blinked. “And…why aren’t we flying? It’s on the schedule.”
Damn I need icons of these two.