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shadow_vector2012-05-02 06:19 am
The Tale of Rumble
Bayverse
Barricade, Frenzy, kitten
schmoop
for
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mewsing! They got angsty on me. :(“Lookit! Lookit lookit lookitlookitlookit!” Frenzy cartwheeled in front of Barricade, the larger mech having to slam on his brakes in alarm. The little hacker righted himself, holding out in his smaller set of arms a…grey rag looking thing.
“Frenzy. Stop picking up garbage.” Barricade was tired of it. Wherever they went, Frenzy dug up the weirdest, grossest stuff. Which was one thing—their job wasn’t exactly cut out for clean machines—but Frenzy kept trying to bring them inside. Barricade had a strict “no messing up the leather seats” policy. And humans were gross enough, without actually trying to hunt stuff down. One time, they’d been parked outside a Chinese restaurant, and a human had staggered past and purged his tanks on the sidewalk. AFTER the half-hour catalog of every color and food item Frenzy could recognize in the puddle, Frenzy had pronounced, sagely, that the human had purged because his Chinese food had obviously not been made with authentic, genuine Chinese people. He’d only managed to keep the little freak from investigating and ‘collecting a sample’ by locking his doors. Which had led to an override/relock rodeo between them, until Barricade had given up and just driven them away. Sometimes, cover needed to be broken.
The things Barricade had to put up with in the name of the war.
“Isn’t garbage. Is furry!” He held the blob up, and Barricade could see part of it squirm.
“What the…? Sentient mold!” No fraggin’ WAY he was letting that thing in his interior.
Frenzy cackled. “ Not mold! KITTEH!”
“Even worse.” Whatever that was. It looked like some sort of rodent, now that he studied it more closely—four little flailing limbs, big amber optics, a tiny mouth that opened to start squalling.
“Kitteh haz a hungries!” Frenzy chirped.
“So?” Like Barricade cared.
“We need cheeseburgers!”
“No.” Yeah, Barricade remembered that, too: Frenzy’s fascination with human food. Only Frenzy tended to roll around in the stuff, covered with dripping cheese, rivulets of grease, bits of tomato and lettuce sticking to his armor. The one time Barricade had broken his “don’t ask Frenzy questions for the sake of your own sanity” rule, the hacker had explained—spastically—that it was ‘scent camouflage’ and made him watch a video of lions rolling in elephant manure.
Which told Barricade all he needed to know about what cheeseburgers were. And no, not in his interior, thank you very fraggin’ much.
“Kitteh wants cheeseburger!”
The thing squeaked as Frenzy shook it for emphasis. Behind Frenzy, Barricade saw the white orbs of approaching headlights. Frag. About to get their cover blown over a kitteh. “Get in.”
Frenzy crowed triumphantly, his longer set of arms pumping the air as he scrambled over to the passenger door, probably knowing Barricade was already regretting the decision.
They piled inside, Frenzy clutching his prize. “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger!” he chanted.
“No! No cheeseburger,” Barricade snarled. “Don’t you know fraggin’ anything? Kittens don’t eat cheeseburgers. Milk.” Fraggin’ entire human internet at Frenzy’s disposal, and the idiot only checked it for lolcats and Socially Awkward Penguin memes.
“Milk! It does a body good!” Frenzy turned the kitten around, studying it. “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard!”
“Cram it,” Barricade snapped. “Turn you into a fraggin’ milkshake.”
Frenzy stilled for a moment, then giggled. “Then you could eat me!”
Barricade grunted, gunning the accelerator. “Look. End of story, we’re getting milk and then we’re leaving the damn thing there.” Call him a softie, but he had a thing against wiping out dronelings of any sort. Not that he liked them or found them cute or anything (unless cute was some codeword for ‘entirely disgusting’.) Just…kind of a bully thing to squash them so young.
He just wasn’t a bully. That was all. And the damn thing looked like it could use some fuel.
Frenzy subsided, his mouth twisting into a cartoony frown. "Milkshake," he mumbled, distressed, clutching the kitten.
Barricade let his engine growl do the talking for him.
[***]
“MILK. Kittens like milk! Milkens like kit!” Frenzy squealed, dashing across the empty parking lot, clutching the waxed boxes. Barricade was hunched in his alt. The kitten had settled—after a strange ritual that was apparently how they reset their directional gyros—of walking in a circle, into a tiny ball on the driver’s seat, washed in the red light of the PETCO sign. Frenzy scrabbled at the door with his free hands until Barricade popped the door for him, and then clambered inside.
“Alarm?” Barricade said. Because the crowning touch on his night would be police showing up to investigate the strange police car with a kitten and a…whatever idiot thing Frenzy would turn into. And…four boxes of Tiger’s Milk. Yeah, not suspicious at all.
This night would NOT end in the impound lot. Not again.
“PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF,” Frenzy retorted. “Stupid monkeys.”
“Silent alarm?”
Frenzy chittered.
“Closed circuit.”
“Everything,” Frenzy said, soberly, “is better with Spongebob.”
Right. It was time to invoke the ‘don’t ask questions’ policy. “Right. Feed the thing.”
“Not a thing!” Frenzy said. “Kitteh!”
Barricade’s headlamps rolled. “Whatever. Feed it.”
Frenzy nodded, holding out one of the waxed board containers. “Here you go, kitteh. Milkshake!!”
The kitten looked up, jaws parting in a yawn as it staggered to its little paws. “Mew?”
“Milkshake!” Frenzy said, holding the carton down.
“Idiot,” Barricade muttered. “Have to pour it out.”
“Where?” Frenzy’s optics rotated on their stalks.
Good question. Frag.
“I KNOW!” Frenzy lunged over the central console. “Cupholder!”
“No! YOU ARE NOT POURING THAT SLAG IN ME!” Barricade howled, even as Frenzy poured the cream liquid into his cupholder. The kitten squeaked, toddling over, whiskers flicking, as it lowered its face closer and closer to the liquid surface. The kitten began purring, the sound vibrating its narrow ribs.
“Awwwww!” Frenzy said. “I’mma call him Rumble!”
[***]
Barricade had had enough. Rumble was wandering around outside, toddling on its paws. Frenzy was out doing some recon, tapping into a military hardline. He’d seen cats in the area. This was his chance.
He’d come up with a cover story later.
He rolled backwards. Slammed on his brakes, as Rumble wandered into his tirepath. Frag. He rolled forward, spun his tires hard to the right, and began backing up.
Just as Rumble meandered in front of his path again. Another hard stop. Barricade burst from his alt mode, whirling, one knee slamming into the ground. “Listen, you,” he snarled, jabbing at the grey kitten with one battered talon. “Trying to leave.”
Rumble blinked, his eyes wide and yellow and curious.
“Leave. You know. Go away from you.”
“Mmmew?”
“Because. Because I fraggin’ said so.” He jabbed a finger at his chassis. “Dangerous stuff we get into. You?” He poked, flipping Rumble onto his back with a flick of one talon. “See? Wouldn’t last a microklik.”
Rumble squirmed, and then began swatting at Barricade’s jabbing talon, his little tail whipping for balance, and sixteen tiny claws and a handful of miiniscule teeth were deployed against him. It was…cute.
Barricade dropped to his aft in defeat.
[***]
Frenzy howled, but it was the howl of resistance in spite of reality. Frenzy was crazy, but even he respected some laws of the world. One being that what they did was dangerous. All it took was a replay of their most recent battle as he sat, running his little claws over Rumble’s soft grey fur, to get the point.
“Don’t wanna.”
“Frenzy.”
“Frenzy. Frenzy.” The hacker reached for Barricade’s police console with one foot, dragging it over. His optic stalks drooped, claws skittering over the keys. “SUCKS!!!”
“Yeah,” Barricade said, and hated that he meant it. The little grey blob deserved a better chance than they could give it. And what happened when they won? Kittens didn’t do so hot in vacuum.
“Found one.” Frenzy shoved the keyboard away. Barricade called up the info.
“Good?”
Frenzy curled into a spiky ball around Rumble. “Know how to do my job,” Frenzy muttered, and the way he said it, like an actual mech and not the random hebephrenia that was like his own special language.
“Frenzy…” Barricade began.
And then faltered. He knew it was the right thing. And he knew nothing would make it not suck. They'd both seen enough things die in this war. And not enough things live. He'd finally snarled, bluntly, which mattered more to the hacker: Rumble's life or his own selfishness.
On his passenger seat, Rumble gave a contented sigh, resting its chin on one of Frenzy’s spindly arms.
[***]
“Yes, yes, yes. Hold on now. I’ve got it.” The old woman, ankles rising blue veined above faded pink terrycloth scuffs, before disappearing under a flowered housedress that hung on her dowager’s hump like a tent, bent down, placing a matching set of little bowls of food on a plastic placemat on the porch across the street from where Barricade and Frenzy sat. Around her ankles, cats swarmed, each pushing around her for one of the food bowls, spines arching as her knobbed, arthritic fingers stroked down the furred spines.
“Dinner. Yes. I know you’re hungry. I know.” She stood up, surveying the mass of eating cats. “Isn’t that better?”
“This one.”
Frenzy nodded.
Barricade grunted. “Right. Tonight.”
[***]
The old woman unlocked the front door, using two knobbed hands to turn the key. It was breakfast time. There wasn’t much to her life: her husband was dead, her family all on the other coast. All she had were her pension checks, her television schedule and her cats. Day after day, week after week. And shows got cancelled, and the cats aged and died. Time seemed to pass around her like that. But it was how life worked, she’d learned. You live. You live through things, and you cry, and you go on. And there’s always something else to keep you going.
When Charles had passed, her strays had been the only reason she’d gotten out of bed in the morning, because they were hungry, and needed her. It wasn’t love, not really, but it had been enough, the obligation, to keep her going. Even if, sometimes, ‘morning’ was three in the afternoon.
The door protested, weatherstripping giving a rubbery squeak as she opened the door on the sunny day. She’d prepared the bowls already, taking the last of the dry cat food and parceling it out evenly. Tomorrow…well, she hoped her check came in today’s mail. Though she knew they would forgive her a day of starvation.
A dark mass blocked the door, and for a moment, she thought it was a stranger, before her eyes adjusted and saw it was a pile of bags and cans. Cat food, the good stuff, expensive Petsmart stuff she could never afford. A year’s supply, and her little herd was milling around it, excitedly.
“Who…?”
“Mew?”
She looked up. On the top of the pile, a kitten stared down at her, pointed little tail erect and puffy. A metal tag hung from a purple ribbon around its neck, proclaiming it ‘Rumble’.
[***]
To: Grammakat
From: Cade643
Subject: new kitten
Message:
I’m new to the Furry Friends Forum, but I saw your post about how you got your kitten, Rumble. I recently lost a kitten that looked just like him. I know you don’t know me, but I was wondering if you could post some more pics of Rumble and keep us posted how he’s doing.
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And Rumble! *snicker* Perfect porting into Bayverse!
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And.very dangerous to read in a full train without looking stupid while try to not lose a tear XD
(while wearing a uniform....)
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Directly to memories, this one. <33333333333333333
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