So Many Wondrous Things

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
IDW
Ironfist/Verity Carlo
angst. spoilers for LSOTW,
for flesh_and_steel 's Winter Fun challenge. I, uh...failed on the 'fun' part.  Just a bit. 
For those who don't know: Ironfist had been working on a special type of bullet, a cerebroshell.  There was an accident in his lab and he ended up with one of them in his cortex. It's slowly pushing inward and will kill him. 

“But, it’s beautiful!” Ironfist’s blue helm turned slowly, taking in the snow-white landscape, blazing under an almost impossibly blue sky, with an almost methodical precision. As if trying to memorize it down to the last detail.

The thought made Verity sick with the injustice of it all. “Just snow,” she said. “Pisses most people off.”

“But why?” He stepped forward, snow crunching under his footplates, marveling with each step how…soft it seemed to be. Even softer than that ‘pillow’ device Verity had in her quarters. It seemed…marvelous. Everything seemed marvelous. Earth was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen.

…not that he’d seen many beautiful places.

War zones and labs and…Garrus-9. Not much beautiful in any of those places. And it felt like it was too late, but still, he wanted to try.

“It’s a bitch to drive in,” Verity said. She’d shoved her hands into her red parka’s pockets, hood pulled up over her face, framing it with a white sort of fur. It was also, Ironfist thought, suddenly, beautiful. She was beautiful. Why had he never noticed that before? She stepped after him, stretching her legs, trying to jump from one of his footprints to another.

“I suppose it might be…slick?” He bent over, scooping up a handful of the stuff.

“Cold, too,” Verity said. “We’re kind of wusses like that.” Her mouth quirked down. She didn’t, he’d noticed, seem to have the highest estimation of her own kind. It was almost as if she wished she were Cybertronian. It defied all logic, even Aequitas’s.

Ironfist squeezed the snow in his hand. It was cold—but nowhere near as cold as other places he’d been. “In Kimia,” he said, “I worked for a whole vorn in the superconductor lab. It is much colder than this, here.” He looked over at her. “Metal is increasingly conductive at lower temperatures, because the protons do not—oh. I’m sorry.”

“No, keep talking.” Verity shrugged. “Only way I’m gonna learn that science stuff.” She smiled up at him, and the white fur was like a halo around her face.

Ironfist tilted his head. “It’s not important.” Not as important as the thousand other things he wanted to say, and do. Strange how feeling the end rushing toward him, he felt no fear. Not like on Garrus-9, where he’d been terrified. He wasn’t afraid of dying anymore—maybe it was Aequitas, or maybe it was just…how slowly, but inexorably it was approaching—j ust painfully, painfully aware of all he’d miss. And all he’d missed out on. There was no way to make up for the time he’d lost, but there were some things he so desperately wanted. “A-are you cold, Verity?”

Another of her shrugs. She wasn’t one to want to admit to weakness, anyway. Ironfist squatted down, tossing the handful of snow from his fingers and scooping her up.
“Your…pants?” Is that what they were called? She didn’t seem to give him that look she gave him when he got stuff wrong. “Are wet.” And he could feel something like a shiver through them. She was cold, even though her thermal scan read nearly normal.

“Snow,” she said, but she tucked her legs up under her, against the warmth of his palm. “So, another thing is, you don’t get cold.” She frowned, envious.

“Not like you do,” he said. “But we also don’t have anything like this.” He gestured, carefully, with his other hand, at the snow-sketched trees, the soft rolling contours of white.

Verity pulled her hands out of her pockets, resting a mitten on one of Ironfist’s finger joints. “Just covers up the fact that everything’s dead.”

They both stiffened at the word. It had become somehow almost forbidden between them, the fate they both knew was too soon coming. Her eyes sparkled with tears, and seemed brighter, somehow, than the icicles that dangled from the brown tree branches, than the sunlight that almost glared off the snow. “Fuck,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“There is nothing to apologize for,” he said. “It’s my own fault.” His own experiment with the cerebro-shells. His own sloppiness. And the fact that he’d dragged Verity into this mess. “I suppose it shows us that even death can be beautiful?” He had to talk about it, wanted to talk about it, to make things clear and right with Verity. The hurt in her eyes when he had voted with Perceptor had wounded him more than he’d ever thought possible, hurt worse than the bullet slowly eating its way through his cortex. And he remembered the bright light returning when they’d faced Overlord. Together. And how it had swelled his spark with courage.

He didn’t know how to explain it to her and more than that, he didn’t know if he even had the right to. He curled his hand closer around her, almost reflexively, trying to protect her. As if there was any protection.

“This stuff comes back—or most of it—in the spring,” she said, her voice high and tight and raw, and her face got redder, not only from the cold, but from holding back more of the crystalline tears that threatened to spill over her face.

“Ah,” Ironfist said. “And I won’t.”

Her face went through a series of movements, almost contortions, which would have fascinated him at any other time, but instead just seemed to twist into his spark.

“I’m so sorry, Verity,” he said. “I’m…I’m not good with words. Not like this.” He could write about the Wreckers, yes. Endlessly, their tales of amazing bravery and tragic sacrifice a sort of stirring poetry.

Although, he didn’t even know if he could write about them anymore. Not that way. He still thought of them as heroes, as larger-than-life, impossibly brave, but…not the same. It wasn’t the same when they were dead.

And he…?

“Verity, I don’t want it to be like this. Between us.”

“Yeah, well I’m not fucking big on you dying, either.” She jutted her lip out.

He stroked it with one finger, feeling the warmth under the surface chill of her skin, feeling the almost satiny texture of it. So many wonderful things. So many beyond his grasp, but this one…? “I know. I mean…I don’t want to spend…what time we have…,” he’d never realized, in all his writing, how slowly the words came to him—short phrases, telegraphic moments. “I mean, like this. Mourn me when I’m dead, but…please…not while I’m alive? Beca-because I can’t comfort you. And I’m a coward and…Primus.” He turned to stare at a clump of snow that dislodged itself from the crook of a tree, and fell with a soft thump. “I can’t bear to see you hurting.”

He felt Verity move in his hand, and when he dared to look, he saw only the back of her hood, her mittened hands banging against his blue palm. “Verity?”

Her shoulders shuddered, once, and then she swiped the back of one mitten over her face before she looked up at him. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.” She managed a smile under her tear-stained cheeks. “And you’re right. Life sucks enough without borrowing suckage from the future, right?”

Ironfist felt a sensation, as if his spark suddenly began spinning, faster, and faster. “Yes,” he said. It wasn’t quite the Wreckers’ ‘live for today’ motto, but…they were the only Wreckers left.

“Right.” She kicked her legs out from under her, and rose to her feet, holding his thumb for balance as she contemplated the jump down. “Gonna show you how to have fun,” she said.

“Fun?”

“You know. Snowball fights. Snowmen.” Her smile quickened, as though taking hold. “Snow angels.”

“Snow…angels?” Ironfist bent quickly, knowing that Verity was just impetuous enough to jump.

“Snow angels,” she confirmed. “And then, maybe cuddling by an open fire, drinking cocoa with marshmallows. Or well, whatever.”

“Where are we going to get an open fire? Marshmallows?” His bright blue eyes blinked, confused, but it was a delighted kind of confusion. This was much better.

She winked. “We’re Wreckers, Ironfist.” Her face looked angelic under its halo of fur, but her brown eyes glinted. “We do what Wreckers do: improvise.”
 

 

Comments

[sasuke-emosauce.livejournal.com]

Ironfist :C

Did you ever happen to see this Mosaic? http://transformers-mosaic.deviantart.com/art/Anything-177622524

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

;-; Poor Ironfist!! Yeah, Ironfist probably isn't the naive little sweetie I write him as. XD. I figure locked up in those labs, feeding on adventure stories keeps him innocent. Thanks for linking me--I got out of the habit of following the mosaics for a long time because, for a while there was like hideous grammar/spelling issues in every one and while I can overlook spelling in a long story, in a Mosaic, which often has less than 100 words, I don't think spelling/proofing is out of order!

Wow, that was a long explanation, just to say, thank you for linking that!