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shadow_vector2010-04-24 06:45 pm
Two Kinds
Bayverse
Sideswipe, Ironhide, OC
no warnings
More or less pointless crack written for
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flesh_and_steel 's zombie challenge.
“You see,” Elina was saying, through a mouthful of food from a white carton that she was, for reasons completely beyond Ironhide’s reckoning, eating with two little sticks, “Two kinds of people: zombie people and vampire people.”
Ironhide shook his head. Yet another of SGT Vasquez’s Theories of Human Interaction. She had previously informed them—Sideswipe listening with rapt attention—that people were either Superman or Batman people, or cat or dog people, beer or wine people, and…that was all he could remember other than he knew there had been more.
“What about werewolves?” Sideswipe asked. “What about werewolf people?” The two of them had taken to sitting on the floor around the CQ desk whenever Vasquez was on duty. She’d succeeded in getting Sideswipe hooked on some video game called HALO, and some cartoon about some teenaged superheroes. She was, he’d decided, a very bad influence on Sideswipe. She kept threatening to get him a Facebook page so he could play Mafia Wars, but Ironhide had managed to steer them off course every time. Sideswipe did NOT need any more distractions. Especially ones that involved possible contact with other humans.
“Werewolf people are furries,” she said dismissively, waving her chopsticks. “Perverts don’t count.”
“Oh.” Sideswipe looked blank. Yeah, Ironhide would try to explain that to him later. Hopefully without Sideswipe asking how he knew.
Ironhide rolled his optics. He wasn’t really as annoyed as he pretended to be. And she knew it. “Fine. Tell us about this zombie thing.”
She bounced, the old metal chair she was sitting on squeaking. “Right. Well, you see, like, both come back from the dead, but vampires are all aristocratic and stuff—ain’t no ghetto vampires, right? And zombies are more, like, equal across the classes.”
“I thought zombies ate brains,” Sideswipe said. “That makes them smarter, right?”
Oh dear Primus, he should never have introduced the two. They…fed upon each other, Ironhide would swear it. Either that or they’d made some secret pact to drive him insane. “Eating brains doesn’t make humans smarter. Would ingesting a new chip board make you think faster?”
Elina tilted her head. “You know, there’s actually a species that does get smarter after eating brains. This kind of flatworm thing. They taught one to navigate a maze, then chopped it up and fed it to other flatworms and those worms who had like, never seen the maze before or anything, could automatically do it. Pretty cool, huh?”
Sideswipe gaped at her.
“Platty-hell-minties or something like that,” she said, calmly. “What? ‘Lina paid attention in science class, you know. I was going to be a scientist when I grew up.”
“What happened?” Sideswipe. Tactful as always. Ironhide winced.
She grinned, tapping at the back of her hand with her chopsticks. “This happened. And Weequahic. Where I’m from, only two ways a woman earns money: taking her clothes off or making beds at the Motel Six on I-78. Not for me.” The smile faded. “Actually, I tried that myself. I got fired from the Motel Six for stealing a sheet.”
“That was, uh…pretty dumb.”
“Don’t I know it! Knew it then, too, of course. But you know, I’m there going day after day, making bed after bed, and I don’t got sheets of my own. I guess I just went crazy one day about it.” She shrugged. “Real dumb thing is, if I were smart, I’da at least stolen food, you know?”
She stuffed some more food into her mouth. “And thus began my grand adventure in Pharaoh’s army.” Ironhide frowned. These little glimpses she gave into her past seemed…awfully sad. He was bitterly quiet about his own past, and her openness about hers was more than a little hard for him to understand. Ancient history, she’d laughed, once. Ancient history? He’d been on interstellar deployments that lasted longer than her whole life.
“I, uh…I still don’t get why werewolves don’t count.” Sideswipe, sidestepping anything that even remotely resembled introspection.
“Right. If you don’t buy that they’re perverts, try this on for size, Wheelyfeet. Vampires and zombies come back from the dead. That’s their thing. Like they’re breaking the ultimate rule. Once you cross that line and you’re dead, you ain’t supposed to come back. Werewolves just get hairy.” She winked. “Don’t’ know about you, but Elina Vasquez ain’t afraid of body hair.”
“ So which are you?” Ironhide asked. “Vampire or zombie?”
“Me? Zombie all the way. Vampire people can be perverts, too, with all this weird blood fetish stuff. I knew a guy who swore he was a real-live vampire. Drank blood, the whole thing. ‘Course, he tells me this, standing outside the bodega at 2 in the afternoon, in the sunshine right? Like he’s never even seen a vampire movie.” She rolled her eyes, dismissively. “You don’t run across people pretending to be zombies, man. No freaky wanna-be zombies running around out there. Zombies? Pure.”
She narrowed her eyes. “So, what about you guys? What are y’all afraid of?” She winked at the Southernism that Ironhide had teased her about before.
Sideswipe grinned. “Me? I ain’t afraid of nothin’.”
“Oh come on,” Vasquez said, setting the carton of food down on the battered metal desk. “Everyone’s afraid of something.”
“Not me. I’m special.”
“What about deactivation or whatever you call it? Not afraid of that?”
“Slag no! Only thing I’m worried about about that is taking enough of them out with me.”
“That’s like…super-hooah,” Vasquez said, her smile tilting at her dark brown eyes. “How ‘bout Mr Tough Stuff himself, here?” Those brown eyes turned to him.
Sideswipe’s blue optics glowed, spiraling wide in amusement. “Yeah, ‘Hide? Vampire or zombie? Which scares the coolant out of you more?”
“Huh.” Unsurprisingly, he’d never really thought about this. Just like he hadn’t thought about Superman versus Batman or the whole host of other weird choices she’d insisted helped divide humanity into comprehensible chunks. But he saw the glittering challenge in Sideswipe’s optics. Whichever answer he gave, Sideswipe would make sure he never lived it down. This was a tougher decision than it appeared on the surface. “I’m going to have to say I’d rather be a vampire than a zombie.”
“That wasn’t the choice!” Sideswipe complained.
Vasquez laughed. “Vampire, huh?” She raked her optics up and down him. “So wrong, you know.” She cracked open her bottle of strawberry soda. How the Pit she drank that stuff—and with everything from pizza to Chinese food, like now—Ironhide would never know. The bottle hissed as she opened the cap.
“Vampires,” Ironhide said, “are merely salvaging vital fluids.”
“That the mech, erm, human being salvaged from is still kinda using!” Sideswipe said, hotly. “That’s not cool.”
Ironhide glowered. “There’s got to be a way to not kill them. Take just enough, right?”
Vasquez snorted through a mouthful of soda, slamming the bottle on the desk to grab at her nose. “Ow, you bastard.”
“What? What’d I do?” He bent over, worried. What was going on? How was it his fault?
“You don’t make someone laugh when they’re drinking soda! Ow!” She started laughing again. “So you’re like the ethical vampire, or something, right?” She clamped a napkin over her nose, one hand idly recapping her soda.
“I don’t know why this is so funny to you. But yeah. If I needed their fluid to survive, I’m pretty sure I could find a way not to kill them getting it.” He’d done enough death-salvage. He was pretty sure he’d know when to stop.
“Could do the same as a zombie,” Sideswipe said. “Only take enough brains, right?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Vasquez said. She tilted back in the chair, propping her knee against the desk, tilting back to look at them, the napkin still pinched over her nose.
Ironhide shook his head, rolling his optics.
“What?” Sideswipe said, defensively. “I read somewhere that humans only use like ten percent of their brain. That’s like…ninety percent I could eat, right? What? What’s wrong?”
“Doesn’t work like that,” Ironhide scoffed.
“It should!”
“Hey! Leave him alone,” Vasquez said. “Us zombie people stick together, you know.”
“You’re being ridiculous.” Whose side was she on? Apparently whichever side drove Ironhide crazier.
“Ha!” she said. “JUST like a vampire. Elitist.”
“Yeah!”
“I am not.” This was ridiculous. And they were ganging up on him. “Maybe I don’t want to be a mindless drone with one thing on my processor, and that’s eating other processors.”
“Huh. I think he’s calling us stupid, Sideswipe.”
“I think he is.”
Ironhide tossed his head, irritably. Not getting sucked into this one. “Look, can we just watch the movie already?”
“What’s the movie?” Sideswipe bounced closer to the television screen.
“This is a classic. 1968 Night of the Living Dead.” She moued at Ironhide. “Zombies, I’m afraid. Not, you know, your people.” She placed the small silver disk into the battered DVD player.
“My people?”
“You know,” Sideswipe grinned, “vampires.” He snatched up one of Vasquez’s chopsticks, brandishing it between them. “And I know just how to take your kind out.”
“You two are impossible,” Ironhide said. “Seriously. Can we just watch the movie?”
“Fine with me,” Vasquez said, hopping to seat herself on the desk’s surface, leaning back. Ironhide shifted forward so that her shoulders rested against his chassis.
She tilted her head back, looking up at him. “Vampires,” she said, softly, through the opening music, “are way sexier, though.”
He hoped Sideswipe was too engrossed in the movie to notice how he surreptitiously tucked his arm around her.
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a very enjoyable addition to the challenge.
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I am under no notion this is deathless prose, but I like to participate in challenges...just for the sake of being a good comm member!
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OK, I like that. I love the exposition on the differences between zombie people and vampire people. You do such a great job with the banter between the three of them.
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Glad you liked!
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♥
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I'm a werewolf guy myself :P No worries about being OOC, you nailed it.
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Glad you liked it!
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xD hahahaha that was win.
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Glad you liked!