Holding Out For a Hero
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TFA
Rodimus, First Aid, Hot Shot, Ironhide, Brawn
spoilers for Transwarped, Season 3 episode 1 and excessive Captain Kirkiness.
written for the DW holiday fic exchange for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
raisedbymoogles , who loves Rodimus, so I thought I'd do some TFA Roddy!
Not as planned, Rodimus thought, fighting a tide of panic. Elite Guard statistics had put his team together, the perfect match, the perfect complements to fight against the notorious Team Chaar. Rodimus had dubbed them Team Athenia, because, well, of course, they needed a name. Every good team had a cool name. Everyone knew that. And any team Rodimus was on was going to be the best.
And they were the best! They were just…having a kinda bad day right now.
Starting with Hot Shot. Of course, a lot of the things in Rodimus’s ‘To Be Fixed’ column began with that phrase—and Red Alert’s, too. But it wasn’t the kid’s fault. He certainly tried.
Which was, honestly, more than he could say for, say, Brawn sometimes.
Rodimus had told the kid a thousand times not to be overconfident. To move, get out of the way, be a moving target. That was Rodimus’s own strategy and yeah, look how awesome that was!
Well…most of the time.
But right. Anyway. Hot Shot. Silly kid stood there, gloating, flush with pride as his attack had disarmed most of Strika’s missiles.
Yeah. ‘Most’ being the operative word. So the kid, engaging in some premature gloating, had gotten nailed in the leg.
Right. Next mission brief, Rodimus told himself, point to highlight: no premature gloating. Bad for the rep, too. Team Athenia did not gloat. …prematurely.
But first, they had to get out of this mission. In one piece.
Ooops. Already too late for Hot Shot.
“Status!” he demanded. Overhead one of Strika’s missiles raced with a fssssshing hiss toward the newly-arrived Elite Guard ship. Backup. Finally!
Ironhide, as usual, was the first to answer. “Functional.” He rattled off coordinates in a clipped, hurried tone, and it took Rodimus a cycle to translate them to actual space. Frag. Why couldn’t he just say ‘to the left of the space bridge’? Why’s it always a twelve digit, three coordinate grid to locate anything?
“Brawn,” Rodimus prompted. “Location.”
“Uh. Under Ironhide. So like, what he said, but minus one millimechanometer on the z-axis?”
Under Ironhide? “We don’t have time for that!” Rodimus barked. “Team Chaar is going to eat us alive!”
“Already done that,” Red Alert said, coolly. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“And where are you?”
A snort. “On top of Ironhide.”
“And slimy,” Brawn said, helpfully.
Oh, gack. Mental images that should not sully the cortex of any decent mech marched through Rodimus’s cortex. Red Alert must have picked up his, uh, hesitation.
“It also burns,” she added. Ew. Next point for the brief: redefining TMI. “Spittor got me.”
OH. Oh. Okay. That was…still icky but at least less, you know, combat inappropriate.
“Hot Shot? Location and status! Now!”
“Yeah, well. Pretty much where I got dumped. Because I HAVE NO LEG!!!” Rodimus heard the whooshing rush as Hot Spot activated his flamethrowers. Well, nice signal beacon, at least. Kid had promise. And just the right kind of ‘think outside the box’ attitude. He just needed, you know, a bit more military discipline.
Not as much as Ironhide, though. That was a little too much. Rodimus would swear that the battered red mech brushed his dentae by the numbers. Rodimus could see him now, standing in front of the mirror. Up down up down up down, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two….
“Yeah, well, we’ll work on that,” Rodimus said. Huh. Tactical problem here, the kind they didn’t teach in the Academy. Three groups, each pinned down or, well, unable to move. How to rally, and on whom? The Elite Guard Command comm channel blinked at him. On it! Seriously! Give him a break!
It was, of course, Red Alert who figured it out, to ask the inconvenient question. He’d always suggested in his evaluations that maybe, perhaps, she might consider getting a bit more tact. You know. In the interest of bedside manner. And because a pretty ladybot like herself? Her words should be as attractive as she was.
Yeah, well. Apparently she was still working on it.
“So, Roddy-mouth,” she drawled. “Location and status?”
“I’m, uh, on the far side of the space bridge.” Primus this was mortifying. But, you know, they’d have to find out sooner or later, right? Oil Slick’s words echoed shamefully in his cortex. Mortifying, honestly. But wrong. Totally, totally wrong.
He hoped.
Brawn hopped on. “Status. What’s the matter? Need some help finding your readouts?”
Frag. Fraggity frag frag. A parade of some of the more colorful invectives Kup had taught him marched through his cortex. “Uhh, no. I’m kind of…,” in trouble, immobilized, rusted down? “…stuck.”
“Stuck.” Red Alert sighed. The sigh of the ‘I’ve saved your aft *how many* times now?’ A loud FWHOOOOOOM cut out audio communications for a handful of kliks as one of Strika’s missiles exploded against the hull of the rescue ship. Rodimus winced. Frag. They kind of needed that ship intact!
“Heroically stuck,” he asserted. Well, more or less. Five against one? Yeah. Heroic.
“So you’re like…stuck because you’re holding them all at arrow point?” Hot Shot, riding that fine line between gullible and pretend belief.
“Uhhh, not exactly.”
A mutter and then a stream of curses. “Right,” Ironhide said, crisply. “We’re on our way.”
“For the record, I fraggin’ hate this!” Brawn’s voice was strangely muffled, and broke with a shuddering clonking sound.
“Thrill for me too, honey,” Red Alert said, sourly. “That’s my aft you’re stuck to.”
Oooooooo that was not an image Rodimus needed right now. Wanted, yes! Wanted very much! But…covered in rust and paralyzed? He could not even come close to properly appreciating it. Much less, you know, getting in on a bit of team bonding.
“Your aft, maybe,” Ironhide muttered. “Just don’t look where his slaggin’ left hand is.” Clonk. Clonk.
Blackout plummeted from the sky. At first Rodimus thought the copter must have been hit, until he saw the mech transform on the way down. He landed with a thunderous crash that blanked power to the space bridge, cracked the ground, and…oh frag. Oh no no nononono. Rodimus wailed inwardly as the copter’s power stomp tilted him off base. Tilted. Over. Over and…oof. Onto his face.
Things had just gone from bad to worse. Which he had not quite believed possible, but, well, here it was.
And just in time—clonk, clonk, clonk.
Oh. My. Rodimus’s optics pushed as far to the left as he could manage, to try and figure out what that misshapen lump ambling toward him was. It was Ironhide, stuck to Red Alert, both of them stuck to Brawn. They loped along, three-legged-race style, Brawn stuck between them with Spittor’s gluey acid spit. Team…erm…bonding.
Above them, the Elite Guard ship lay down a blast of covering fire. Blackout wheeled up from the space bridge, guns blazing. Rodimus winced, helpless. In the rust coating, his fingers twitched. If only he could have gotten a shot off! His optics strained, pitifully, for the sky.
“Nice going,” Red Alert muttered, shaking her head. “Cosmic rust, huh?” Her feet stopped, close to his face. Then they shifted, with a series of groaning complaints as she forced the other two to squat down with her.
“Look. I was distracted.”
Brawn’s head peeped around one of Red Alert’s hip panels. “What? Pretty femme walk by?”
“Strika.” Red Alert cocked an opticridge at him. Was she teasing? He couldn’t tell. If she were teasing, it was pretty hot. If not, yeah. He’d have to have that ‘you can attract more cyberflies with sweet energon,’ talk with her again. But…he hoped it would go better than last time. Though…he had learned a lot about cyberflies from that.
“No!” His temper boiled over. “I was trying to stop the enemy from getting to the bridge!” They burst out laughing. Even Ironhide barked out couple of ‘har-har’s. Team Athenia, falling apart. And…laughing at him. His team. His brilliant team…suddenly tilted over, toward him. He could see it happen in slow motion, the glistening, gluey armor arching toward him, looming over him until…schlorp.
A sole tear trickled from his paralyzed optic, runneling through the rust accreted on his face. He was trying. He really, really was! And now he had Red Alert’s face on his arm, Ironhide’s shoulder gouging him in his, uh, leaderly parts, and hopelessly, helplessly gummy.
Red Alert stopped abruptly. “We were laughing at the fact that only you’d be du—erm, brave enough to face down Team Chaar on your own.”
“I vote for dumb—ow!!” Brawn’s face met a dainty, pointy elbow.
“Cosmic rust’s no joke,” Ironhide said, nodding grimly. “It fraggin’ hurts.” Rodimus didn’t know if Ironhide’s sympathy hurt or helped. But Brawn? Yeah. Add ‘this is not a democracy’ to the training brief.
“HEY down there!” Warpath’s voice crackled over all four of their comms. “You lose your invitation to the turboclam-bake or something?”
A sudden light, a bright white circle, snapped down upon them from the Elite Guard ship. Rescue! But Rodimus couldn’t help but feel it came…just a bit too late for his dignity. “Yeah,” he said. “Ready for pickup.” Not like they had any dignity left. He sighed.
“Hey, buck up, chosen one,” Red Alert said, her face squashed against his shoulder. “Got a countertoxin for the cosmic rust up there. Have you fixed up and sexy in no time!”
Sexy? Did Red Alert just call him…sexy? His mood brightened, considerably. Like to ‘homing beacon’. His mouth, under the rust, stretched into an attempt at a smile. “Well,” he said, “Till then, I guess we’re,” he paused, for effect, “stuck with each other.”
TFA
Rodimus, First Aid, Hot Shot, Ironhide, Brawn
spoilers for Transwarped, Season 3 episode 1 and excessive Captain Kirkiness.
written for the DW holiday fic exchange for
raisedbymoogles , who loves Rodimus, so I thought I'd do some TFA Roddy! Not as planned, Rodimus thought, fighting a tide of panic. Elite Guard statistics had put his team together, the perfect match, the perfect complements to fight against the notorious Team Chaar. Rodimus had dubbed them Team Athenia, because, well, of course, they needed a name. Every good team had a cool name. Everyone knew that. And any team Rodimus was on was going to be the best.
And they were the best! They were just…having a kinda bad day right now.
Starting with Hot Shot. Of course, a lot of the things in Rodimus’s ‘To Be Fixed’ column began with that phrase—and Red Alert’s, too. But it wasn’t the kid’s fault. He certainly tried.
Which was, honestly, more than he could say for, say, Brawn sometimes.
Rodimus had told the kid a thousand times not to be overconfident. To move, get out of the way, be a moving target. That was Rodimus’s own strategy and yeah, look how awesome that was!
Well…most of the time.
But right. Anyway. Hot Shot. Silly kid stood there, gloating, flush with pride as his attack had disarmed most of Strika’s missiles.
Yeah. ‘Most’ being the operative word. So the kid, engaging in some premature gloating, had gotten nailed in the leg.
Right. Next mission brief, Rodimus told himself, point to highlight: no premature gloating. Bad for the rep, too. Team Athenia did not gloat. …prematurely.
But first, they had to get out of this mission. In one piece.
Ooops. Already too late for Hot Shot.
“Status!” he demanded. Overhead one of Strika’s missiles raced with a fssssshing hiss toward the newly-arrived Elite Guard ship. Backup. Finally!
Ironhide, as usual, was the first to answer. “Functional.” He rattled off coordinates in a clipped, hurried tone, and it took Rodimus a cycle to translate them to actual space. Frag. Why couldn’t he just say ‘to the left of the space bridge’? Why’s it always a twelve digit, three coordinate grid to locate anything?
“Brawn,” Rodimus prompted. “Location.”
“Uh. Under Ironhide. So like, what he said, but minus one millimechanometer on the z-axis?”
Under Ironhide? “We don’t have time for that!” Rodimus barked. “Team Chaar is going to eat us alive!”
“Already done that,” Red Alert said, coolly. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“And where are you?”
A snort. “On top of Ironhide.”
“And slimy,” Brawn said, helpfully.
Oh, gack. Mental images that should not sully the cortex of any decent mech marched through Rodimus’s cortex. Red Alert must have picked up his, uh, hesitation.
“It also burns,” she added. Ew. Next point for the brief: redefining TMI. “Spittor got me.”
OH. Oh. Okay. That was…still icky but at least less, you know, combat inappropriate.
“Hot Shot? Location and status! Now!”
“Yeah, well. Pretty much where I got dumped. Because I HAVE NO LEG!!!” Rodimus heard the whooshing rush as Hot Spot activated his flamethrowers. Well, nice signal beacon, at least. Kid had promise. And just the right kind of ‘think outside the box’ attitude. He just needed, you know, a bit more military discipline.
Not as much as Ironhide, though. That was a little too much. Rodimus would swear that the battered red mech brushed his dentae by the numbers. Rodimus could see him now, standing in front of the mirror. Up down up down up down, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two….
“Yeah, well, we’ll work on that,” Rodimus said. Huh. Tactical problem here, the kind they didn’t teach in the Academy. Three groups, each pinned down or, well, unable to move. How to rally, and on whom? The Elite Guard Command comm channel blinked at him. On it! Seriously! Give him a break!
It was, of course, Red Alert who figured it out, to ask the inconvenient question. He’d always suggested in his evaluations that maybe, perhaps, she might consider getting a bit more tact. You know. In the interest of bedside manner. And because a pretty ladybot like herself? Her words should be as attractive as she was.
Yeah, well. Apparently she was still working on it.
“So, Roddy-mouth,” she drawled. “Location and status?”
“I’m, uh, on the far side of the space bridge.” Primus this was mortifying. But, you know, they’d have to find out sooner or later, right? Oil Slick’s words echoed shamefully in his cortex. Mortifying, honestly. But wrong. Totally, totally wrong.
He hoped.
Brawn hopped on. “Status. What’s the matter? Need some help finding your readouts?”
Frag. Fraggity frag frag. A parade of some of the more colorful invectives Kup had taught him marched through his cortex. “Uhh, no. I’m kind of…,” in trouble, immobilized, rusted down? “…stuck.”
“Stuck.” Red Alert sighed. The sigh of the ‘I’ve saved your aft *how many* times now?’ A loud FWHOOOOOOM cut out audio communications for a handful of kliks as one of Strika’s missiles exploded against the hull of the rescue ship. Rodimus winced. Frag. They kind of needed that ship intact!
“Heroically stuck,” he asserted. Well, more or less. Five against one? Yeah. Heroic.
“So you’re like…stuck because you’re holding them all at arrow point?” Hot Shot, riding that fine line between gullible and pretend belief.
“Uhhh, not exactly.”
A mutter and then a stream of curses. “Right,” Ironhide said, crisply. “We’re on our way.”
“For the record, I fraggin’ hate this!” Brawn’s voice was strangely muffled, and broke with a shuddering clonking sound.
“Thrill for me too, honey,” Red Alert said, sourly. “That’s my aft you’re stuck to.”
Oooooooo that was not an image Rodimus needed right now. Wanted, yes! Wanted very much! But…covered in rust and paralyzed? He could not even come close to properly appreciating it. Much less, you know, getting in on a bit of team bonding.
“Your aft, maybe,” Ironhide muttered. “Just don’t look where his slaggin’ left hand is.” Clonk. Clonk.
Blackout plummeted from the sky. At first Rodimus thought the copter must have been hit, until he saw the mech transform on the way down. He landed with a thunderous crash that blanked power to the space bridge, cracked the ground, and…oh frag. Oh no no nononono. Rodimus wailed inwardly as the copter’s power stomp tilted him off base. Tilted. Over. Over and…oof. Onto his face.
Things had just gone from bad to worse. Which he had not quite believed possible, but, well, here it was.
And just in time—clonk, clonk, clonk.
Oh. My. Rodimus’s optics pushed as far to the left as he could manage, to try and figure out what that misshapen lump ambling toward him was. It was Ironhide, stuck to Red Alert, both of them stuck to Brawn. They loped along, three-legged-race style, Brawn stuck between them with Spittor’s gluey acid spit. Team…erm…bonding.
Above them, the Elite Guard ship lay down a blast of covering fire. Blackout wheeled up from the space bridge, guns blazing. Rodimus winced, helpless. In the rust coating, his fingers twitched. If only he could have gotten a shot off! His optics strained, pitifully, for the sky.
“Nice going,” Red Alert muttered, shaking her head. “Cosmic rust, huh?” Her feet stopped, close to his face. Then they shifted, with a series of groaning complaints as she forced the other two to squat down with her.
“Look. I was distracted.”
Brawn’s head peeped around one of Red Alert’s hip panels. “What? Pretty femme walk by?”
“Strika.” Red Alert cocked an opticridge at him. Was she teasing? He couldn’t tell. If she were teasing, it was pretty hot. If not, yeah. He’d have to have that ‘you can attract more cyberflies with sweet energon,’ talk with her again. But…he hoped it would go better than last time. Though…he had learned a lot about cyberflies from that.
“No!” His temper boiled over. “I was trying to stop the enemy from getting to the bridge!” They burst out laughing. Even Ironhide barked out couple of ‘har-har’s. Team Athenia, falling apart. And…laughing at him. His team. His brilliant team…suddenly tilted over, toward him. He could see it happen in slow motion, the glistening, gluey armor arching toward him, looming over him until…schlorp.
A sole tear trickled from his paralyzed optic, runneling through the rust accreted on his face. He was trying. He really, really was! And now he had Red Alert’s face on his arm, Ironhide’s shoulder gouging him in his, uh, leaderly parts, and hopelessly, helplessly gummy.
Red Alert stopped abruptly. “We were laughing at the fact that only you’d be du—erm, brave enough to face down Team Chaar on your own.”
“I vote for dumb—ow!!” Brawn’s face met a dainty, pointy elbow.
“Cosmic rust’s no joke,” Ironhide said, nodding grimly. “It fraggin’ hurts.” Rodimus didn’t know if Ironhide’s sympathy hurt or helped. But Brawn? Yeah. Add ‘this is not a democracy’ to the training brief.
“HEY down there!” Warpath’s voice crackled over all four of their comms. “You lose your invitation to the turboclam-bake or something?”
A sudden light, a bright white circle, snapped down upon them from the Elite Guard ship. Rescue! But Rodimus couldn’t help but feel it came…just a bit too late for his dignity. “Yeah,” he said. “Ready for pickup.” Not like they had any dignity left. He sighed.
“Hey, buck up, chosen one,” Red Alert said, her face squashed against his shoulder. “Got a countertoxin for the cosmic rust up there. Have you fixed up and sexy in no time!”
Sexy? Did Red Alert just call him…sexy? His mood brightened, considerably. Like to ‘homing beacon’. His mouth, under the rust, stretched into an attempt at a smile. “Well,” he said, “Till then, I guess we’re,” he paused, for effect, “stuck with each other.”
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