#🗡 ⦅ down the rabbit hole. ⦆⠀⠀/ saved .

[leepores]

tag drop.

[asimplearchivist]

ℂℍ. 𝕀𝕍 — 𝕀𝕟 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕀𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕞

𝐂𝐇. 𝐈𝐕 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐀𝐕𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐄

[𝓪𝓼𝓲𝓶𝓹𝓵𝓮𝓪𝓻𝓬𝓱𝓲𝓿𝓲𝓼𝓽'𝓼 𝓶𝓪𝓼𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓵𝓲𝓼𝓽] [𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐒𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐒 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓] AO3 | SPOTIFY | PINTEREST summary 🗡 ⤏ cade yeager’s older sister never knows what she’ll find in their barn upon returning from her routine antiquing trips—the submission box at the driveway is often littered with junk of all kinds that they try to fix for a living. ⤏ you just never would have expected for him to take on the task of repairing a cybertronian.pairing 🗡 bayverse!optimus prime/yeager!reader word count 🗡 3.3k a/n 🗡⤏ here are all the unfinished snippets, as requested. thank y'all for giving so much love to this little project I never saw fully realized. it means the world to me that even the works that I don't consider my best still find homes in people's hearts. :) ⤏ the last two scenes, separated from the rest by two lines rather than one, take place during TLK. 🗡 MASTERPOST 🗡 🗡 PREVIOUS CHAPTER ⤎ 🗡

“So you're telling me," you began, "that you bought a shitty, bullet-riddled cabover that was mysteriously abandoned in an old theater, not questioning how in the hell it got in there?"

"It could've been a prop," Cade defended half-heartedly.

"And," you pressed on, "you somehow managed to find out it was a transformer by - what, exactly? Plugging it into a battery?"

"There was a hole blown clean through the radiator," your brother mumbled. “Artillery shells were in the cab. There was something up with it and I wanted to find out what - and I thought that I could knock out two birds with one stone if I bought it - him - and sold the engine block for parts.” He cast a glance up at the transformer crouched behind you both, guilt radiating off of him in waves. “You would’ve been pretty expensive, dude.”

The rusted robot blinked, but did not comment.

“I do feel bad about that,” he added. “I’m sorry.”

“There is no need to apologize, Cade Yeager,” the transformer rumbled finally. “There is a very good chance that you saved my life.”

Your brother’s eyebrows shot up in surprise and he opened his mouth, perhaps to ask how, when you directed your attention to the transformer in question.

“And you,” you started, brows furrowing. Optimus met your accusatory gaze placidly. “How did you wind up there to begin with? Why’d you came to Paris, Texas of all places? Why hide here?”

“I hadn’t a choice,” he responded (because honestly, what else could he be with that trench deep voice?), shifting back and resting his weight against one of the massive support beams holding the barn’s roof up. He folded his arms over his broad chassis, looking just as uncomfortable with the whole situation as you felt. “I was in critical condition while attempting to make my escape. My self-repair protocols were overriding my base cognizance core. I had to find shelter in order to go into stasis lock without being easily detected. Nothing short of a missile barrage or a medical override can pull a Cybertronian out of a healing-induced stasis lock.”

“Or one faulty missile,” Cade mumbled.

“You were attacked, right?” you inquired further, leaning forward and away from the smaller beam you yourself had been leaning against in an attempt to look at ease (mostly for Cade’s sake, though - he was still tenser than a rabbit because he probably thought you might jump at Optimus again, or vice versa). “By the government?”

“An organization called Cemetery Wind,” he confirmed. “They are being authorized to hunt us down and terminate us.”

You bristled, back straightening with a snap. “And you’re staying here? Endangering my family?”

Optimus, evidently, was not one to remain complacent when attacked, even verbally (or he had been through too much to allow him to), because he, too, straightened and narrowed his optics at you. “I offered to take my leave as soon as I came back online,” he said clearly and curtly, “but it was insisted that I remain long enough for repairs to be conducted.”

You turned your intense, unwavering stare to your younger brother, who visibly began to sweat.

“Look,” he started, standing up and taking a step between you and the metal titan curling his segmented lip. “I convinced him to stay. I couldn’t just let him go, he was literally falling apart! They would’ve been able to take him down with a two-by-four! He could barely stand up!"

“Cade, do you realize how much trouble you could get in for harboring a national fugitive? Offering them medical support?” you asked him, voice neutral but dire. “We’re already losing the house, do you want to go to federal prison on top of that? Think about Tessa.”

Cade pleaded your name with frustration tinging his tone. “...he’s - come on, he's hurt, can't you see that? And humans caused this! They’re hunting him like an animal! It wouldn’t be right to turn him out when he’s so-”

As if on cue, the chugging rumble originating from Optimus' chassis coalesced into several heaving cough-like sounds, dust puffing from the alien robot's mouth as his shoulders heaved and optics flickered. A frown creased your face as what must’ve been the rusted transformer’s ventilation systems sputtered and whirred in an attempt to clear whatever obstruction was trapped within.

You looked back to Cade, expression softening minutely. “Cade, you’re heart’s in the right place - it always has been, and it always will be - but...I think you’ve gotten a little in over your head this time. The risks are too big, and I don’t want to see you get hurt for trying to do the right thing.”

“I…” He paused, then sighed and shook his head. “It’s not fair,” he mumbled, crossing his arms, and you had a sudden sense of deja vu extended over a decade back.

“It usually isn’t,” you told him gently. “But...we shouldn’t let him stay here any longer. The government has eyes everywhere, and we don’t know if they’ve figured out where he is or not.” 

Cade opened his mouth to protest and you reciprocated to cut him off, but Optimus had apparently had his fill of just listening.

“I did and do not intend to endanger you or your family,” he stated firmly. “I will leave immediately if you should desire it.”

You turned back to face him and straightened, eyeing him warily. “Right now?” you tested.

“Yes.” He met your intense stare with a level one of his own, lacking no less intensity. “I will be out of the state by sunrise.”

Silence, heavy and tense, stretched out between the both of you. Cade glanced between you warily, panic growing in his expression, but he didn’t dare intervene in the unspoken test of mettle and resolve. Neither of you moved, and when you narrowed your eyes Optimus narrowed his.

Finally, you let your arms fall to your sides. “How much longer ‘til you’re repaired to full combative capacity? Can you defend yourself?”

Optimus blinked and pulled his great head back in clear surprise at your clean one-eighty. Nevertheless, you could practically see the tension bleed from his battered frame. “Your brother is an impressively ingenuitive individual. He has already repaired the places with the most damage, and I am no longer in critical condition.”

“Wait, what?!” Cade interjected, his eyebrows shooting halfway up his forehead. “You were - while I was dinking around trying to figure out what to do you were dying?”

Optimus raised an optical ridge. “I was in no danger of offlining, Cade. I simply was on the verge of going back into emergency stasis-lock for self-repair. The repairs you made on my energon lines and plating breaches were enough to prevent that.”

“And - and your spark casing?”

“While it was extremely uncomfortable and had great potential to become dangerous, it was not a pressing issue at the time.”

The man sighed shakily, rubbing at his forehead and looking very clearly frazzled. 

You glanced between them, eyeing the plates and wires and inner workings visible in Optimus’ joints in a new light - he was alive, obviously, but entirely mechanical. You’d almost never believed the thought of transformers existing, only ever having seen them on the news, but now that you had one sitting there in front of you, watching you with silent vigilance and wariness, you finally resigned yourself to the reality of the entire situation. 

Yeah. You were probably going to regret this.

“Looks like you’ll both need to fill me in on all the specs,” you sighed, rubbing at your face. Your eyes burned with weariness but you weren’t about to let the stranger know, no matter how kindly he acted towards Cade. You met your brother’s gaze. “What you’ve already done, what we need to do, et cetera. But first, I’m making a pot of coffee.”

Cade glanced at the clock on the wall and grimaced. It was still unbearably early, but it was already too close to daybreak to go back to bed without wasting the day. “Yeah. Maybe two. I’ll go ahead and set up, and, uh...yeah.”

You cast a lingering glance at Optimus, who seemed to have relaxed for the most part, except for the fact that he was still eyeing you with careful scrutiny. You returned the look before walking out of the barn and into the dewy dawn air.

This was...going to be interesting.

“Does this hurt?”

“No.”

“Can you feel it?”

“Yes.” The massive tree trunk of a leg beneath your hands shifted and tensed minutely. “While a Cybertronian’s outer plating is not nearly as sensitive as a human’s skin, there are still enough sensors to give an impression of pressure and heat. It takes severe stimuli or damage to trigger pain.”

You raised a brow, glancing up towards the transformer’s head, but when you realized he had already been watching you with an unreadable expression, you were quick to drop your gaze back down to what you were doing. The torn panel of plating on his frankly massive calf dwarfed you easily, and you’d been melting the edges with a welding torch so you could meld them back together. It worked like stitches, or so Cade had told you. He was working on the alien’s other leg, closer to his knee where some of the wires and cabling were either torn or frayed. Cade had promised that he’d fill you in on the harder stuff as it popped up, but he’d told you that handling the easy fixes for the time being would make things go a lot faster in the long run.

“So is that what you are, technically?” you asked him, setting the welder aside and grasping the edges of the plating before slowly pulling them back together. You saw some of the cables visible through the crevices between the metal layers tense as you reached for the pitcher of water near you. Maybe he wasn’t being completely honest about it not hurting. You doused the meld, keeping a careful eye on it until you were sure it was sturdy and would stay together. “A Cybertronian?”

“Yes. We herald from Cybertron, our home planet.” Out of the corner of your eye, you saw that his fingers twitched on his thigh, clenching and unclenching.

“Okay.” You leaned back and glanced along his calf, spotting another smaller tear in a plate near his foot. (Would it be called a foot, though? He didn’t technically have toes...) “I...guess you have different terminology, don’t you?”

“English equivalents, yes.”

You pursed your lips, thankful the welding mask strapped over your face hid your expression. He hadn’t spoken much since you and Cade had started work nearly an hour previous, and even then it was only when either of you asked him a question. “Like…?”

“We call ourselves mechs instead of men.”

You flipped on the welder and started at the crux of the tear, watching as the metal began to shift color until it began to glow before beginning to move along the edges. “Okay. What else?”

“There are several anatomical differences, though your language lacks some words to equate to. Arms and legs, for example. But we refer to our hands as servos, our fingers digits.”

There was a long pause, and you exhaled slowly. “...Anything else…?”

“You call your heads helms, right?” Cade popped up from Optimus’ other leg, his voice muffled from the spare welding mask he had.

“Yes.” The mech shifted minutely, air gushing out of his sides with a cloud of dust. You wondered how that worked. “We refer to our bodies as a whole as frames, everything above our legs our chassis.”

“Eyes?” you inquired.

“Optics.”

“Hm.” You tugged at the corners of the metal, pleased to find that it was more pliable than its much larger comrade. The hot seam hissed and popped as you soaked it. “Anything else I need to know? Basics?”

“While we share the same basic shape and similar organs, I still function more similarly to your Earthen machines,” he rumbled.

“Organs?” You looked up to him at that, your brows rising.

“For lack of a more suitable word,” he responded, optics appearing iridescent through the lense in the welding mask. “They’re biomechanical.”

This intrigued you. “So you’re literally a living machine, not just a robot.”

Air gushed out of his sides again, and you were almost certain that it was a sigh. “At a most basic definition, yes. Most humans that we have not interacted with directly believe us to be simple machines.”

You gazed at him a long moment, not sure how to describe the tone that his voice had edged into. It wasn’t a happy sound, for certain. “...Okay. What kind of organs do you have?” you asked, redirecting the conversation deftly. “Is anything damaged?”

“Cade repaired my sparkcasing and sparkchamber. It...serves similarly to a human heart - it pumps fresh energon through the frame. It’s the most important biomechanism we possess, and was thus the most dire to repair.” He twisted his calf outward to show you another tear in a smaller plate tucked under his knee. “Most of the other wounds have already been taking care of by my self-repair systems while in stasis.”

“So that one wound was a pretty bad one,” you assumed, gripping part of the metal and stepping up in one of the wheel wells so you could reach the tear. His leg jerked beneath you but other than that he remained still. You wondered if it was sensitive.

“Yes. As I mentioned before, it was a possibility that I could have offlined had I not been discovered by Cade.”

You stilled, his words finally clicking. He could die. Evidently, so could the rest of his species. They were mechanical, sure, but they were entirely mortal.

What a sobering thought.

You resumed your work, the barn lapsing into silence again save for the hiss of the torches and the crackle and hiss of hot metal. Optimus would tense up every now and again, and you started to take note of the places he seemed to be the most sensitive. The gaps in his plating that exposed the inner wiring and cabling seemed to be the worst places, and the metal paneling shielding those places were slightly less so. With this information, you were better able to avoid those places and make the process easier for the both of you. Less and less, he flinched, and less and less you had to worry about getting your hand pinched off by his twitching metal.

But as you worked, you began to notice that there was a difference in the metal layering his form than that which was underneath.

“Does this serve as armor?” you asked, knocking a knuckle on one of the undamaged plates. “Everything underneath seems tender.”

“Yes.”

“If we’re going to give him a wash, we’ll need to wait for a rainstorm. Preferably one with no lightning.” You tilted your head back, squinting at the cloudless horizon. “Cloud cover and visual obscurity and all that. Can’t let everyone in the county know we’ve got a ‘Bot in our barn.”

“I think the forecast predicted rain tomorrow evening,” Cade said, glancing up from the Prime’s gauntlet-like forearm plating. He popped the welder’s mask up on his head, swiping at his sweaty, grimy forehead and squinting down at the weld marks sizzling in the barn’s relatively cooler air. “That feel okay, big guy?”

“Fine. Thank you, Cade.” Optimus’ optics shuttered as he eyed the man’s work. He turned his servo face-up, clenching his digits experimentally. He hummed in satisfaction and lifted his gaze to you. “You are under no obligation to go to so much trouble simply for my appearance, I hope you are aware. It really isn’t nece-”

“All that dust is gunking up your ventilation systems,” you told him, though you were pretty sure he was already aware - he was the one who tried to hide how his ex-vents caught and made him sputter on a regular basis, after all. “The sooner we clean you up, the less likely you’ll be to overheat or...whatever you guys do when you can’t ‘breathe’.” You used air-quotes on the generously used anthropomorphic term. “Besides, a good bath feels good for anybody. Fresh start, and all that.”

Optimus dipped his helm in submission, obviously not looking to argue further since it was evident you’d already made up your mind. Quick learner, you thought wryly.

"Cade, you sent me to the store a couple days ago! What else could you need? "

"What's on the list," he responded, continuing to push the taller man towards the barn door. When Lucas opened his mouth to protest further, Cade made a cutting motion with his hand. "I'll pay you back tomorrow - I've got bids going on an old media player."

"Who the hell knocked my punching bag off again?!"

Cade glanced at Lucas with a pointed look in the form of raised eyebrows. "You going to the store?"

The shaggy-haired blond nodded rather enthusiastically, already making a break for the barn door. "Yep - see you in a bit."

"You knew?!" father and daughter blurted in unison, temporarily distracted from their argument.

"You forget that I'm a light sleeper," you told them flatly, with an equally flat expression. "Optimus knocking over a fan was how I found out about him. It doesn't take much noise to wake me up. Especially," you added, raising a brow and tilting your face towards the Irishman sitting at the counter, "unfamiliar voices at god-awful hours of the night."

Cade's head snapped towards Tessa the same moment her face flushed a deep red. She stared wide-eyed at Shane, who avoided both her and your gaze by fiddling with the gas cans stowed under the lip of the countertop.

“Optimus!” you shouted over the din, and the Prime found his chin caught between your dampened, chilled palms. It took little effort to pull his helm down to where his optics were level with your eyes, and he found that despite the turmoil within him yelling at him to avert his gaze with shame and guilt, he couldn’t. Your face was set in grim determination, a fire blazing in your eyes as you pinned him where he crouched with their depth.

“Yeah,” you hissed, “you made a mistake. Earth’s dying. The end of the world is right around the corner. But this- ” You gestured towards the Knights, their infuriated growls puncturing the air and almost drowning out your voice. “-throwing your life away is not going to solve it! You want to fix what’s happening?”

You pulled him closer, and he could feel your hot, rushed breath puffing over his faceplate. “Then get up there and fix it. There’s no point regretting what you’ve done when you’re just going to lie down and give up so easily! You get up, you find a way up there, and you fight!” You hesitated, a glimmer of something he couldn’t catch flickering over your face before disappearing just as quickly. It made his energon chill and his primary tank drop low into his chassis. “You fight, you fix it, and you come back down here and let me punch you for being gone so long.”

"Remember when I said you were an eight out of ten?" you asked softly.

He hummed in affirmation, the faint upward lilt of a question curving the sound.

"I lied. You were a ten from the start. The voice did it."

Optimus laughed, long and low, warmth blossoming within the depths of his chassis. "I am pleased that you find me so appealing."

“I’m serious!” you laughed, punching his wrist lightly. “The fact that you were a big scary thing in the dark jumping out to eat me was the only thing that kept me from realizing it for so long. But you weren’t so scary once I got to know you.” You smiled up at him warmly. “You’re not so big and bad, even when you try to be.”