#also Shockwave being fed up with people's shit was great

[sophiegoose]

Me, sitting in the theater watching Transformers ONE after spending over a decade watching the live action films:

[seancekitsch]

Drew: Klaus Hargreeves x Reader Smut

Warning: canon talks of drugs/addiction, alcohol consumption, 80s movies, unprotected sex, two flawed people smangin

Little continuation of Prize Buck

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“But no— no! You never told me what you were like.” He almost laughs, or maybe he does. But it sounds more like a cough or a sob. That’s what drinking everclear will do to you. The liquor so strong it could tear the nail polish off both of your nails right now if you spilled it; the very bottle you were passing back and forth tonight. It was high time you bought one of these bottles of the strong shit. Klaus had been screaming in his sleep lately. You knew he had a good grasp on his abilities, even enough to conjure Ben long enough for you to see him half a minute. But sometimes in his sleep is when they got to him. Both of you had come to the conclusion if he got good and plastered he could probably sleep through the night without you waking up or having to soothe him and remind him to ground himself. Wine made him too handsy and he never actually got to sleep when he got his hands on you, beer made him feel full and sleepy before he was drunk enough to block them out. Liquor depended on the night, and if one of his siblings tried to stop by. Sometimes when they came by he could be tipsy and sleep without screaming; other times they seemed to exacerbate it without meaning to. So everclear was tonight’s test. It was like taking a razor to your esophagus, but he needed to find some way to control his abilities while he slept in his own way, in his own time.

You hadn’t really spoken about what life was like for you before meeting Klaus in the clinic. Sure, he knew the gist— disgraced anthropologist has a mental breakdown on amphetamines and ruins literal years of research for herself and six of her colleagues— but he didn’t know what your life was like. What you were like. For the past hour, you’ve been reminiscing on the circumstances in which your friendship formed. All the group therapy sessions you hadn’t taken seriously. The week where you were too sick and lethargic he spoon fed you soup and spilled most of it down your shirt. The good times.

“I guess I was cool. I- I don’t know. I really liked. Still like music. Got to touch a lot of old things. I only ended up in one magazine cover story.” Your fingers wrap around the bottle, grimacing at the smell before finishing, “Unlike you, Mr. Celebrity.”

You can hear the scoff come from beside you as glass comes to lips, warm liquor to tongue.

“Hey! Unfair. I was no Drew Barrymore. Plus, she never had to wear that mask in public.” He waits to continue until after you’ve swallowed and put it back down to continue talking, and runs his hand up your calf. You still had yet to buy any kitchen furniture, and Klaus kept swearing he would take some from the academy, so instead of the couch or mattress you sat on the counter, bare legs dangling against the lower cabinets while he leaned up next to you. The building had no air conditioning, and on a hot evening like this, the two of you had to clamber into the small kitchen to take in any of the breeze that the old and rusting window unit could provide. Hence, your bare legs. Shorts season struck early this year because even his family using time travel could not stop global warming.

“I bet you were one of the best. You’re smart, you’re always so modest” He says with an off handed flick of his wrist that ended with his fingertips catching on the neck of the bottle where yours also rested, “You know, you would have made a great Drew Barrymore.”

The shift in his tone tells you exactly what he’s thinking without even having to look in his eyes. Instead, your eyes had shifted to the neck of the bottle on the counter between you. It was amazing how even though you’d been carnal with your roommate, that he still sent shockwaves up your spine like you’d stuck a fork in a socket. It was hard not to focus and watch his hands as they traced patterns only he could see in the expanses of skin pulled taught around bone and muscle.

“You’re just saying that,” you chuckle.

“No, really,” his fingers travel up your own, reaching each knuckle and paying special attention to wiggle each ring on the way up, “ or at least we could have made a great Two Coreys. ‘Do all kinds of stuff, like fight vampire bikers to INXS, learn to drive a car, switch bodies with an elderly professor to impress the popular girl at school, go on a tropical vacation... doesn’t that all sound fun for us?”

“You forgot the one where they play brothers that swap partners at the organized crime ski lodge and there’s an alarming amount of horseback riding accidents,” you provide, challenging him and his pop culture knowledge. His eyes are sharp on you, gaze making you feel naked in his presence.

“Mmmmm, no. Just testing you,” Klaus hums, and the conversation dies in a way that’s comfortable. More the Notebook than Shakespeare, you note. But your roommate’s body doesn’t mimic the nonchalance of the words flowing away from you. He squeezes your knuckles before slipping the bottle from your loose grasp, taking it to the head as he shifts to turn himself more so that now his torso is pressed between your legs to face you. He is sweaty and shirtless, and you know your knees will peel off of him when you try to spread your legs further. Which, by the way he’s looking at you, they will be spreading further.

Everything about Klaus’ movements has this theatrical weight to it. Klaus is a big person, not in mass or size like his brother, but in the energy his movements cast. It’s like watching a production. His heart is no muscle, but the core of a planet drawing others into his orbit, compiling the cast of characters. His touch is magnetic and burning all at once, directing the action. As submissive as he can be, you’d be a marionette in his grasp if he asked of you. That being said, there’s beautiful choreography in the way he tilts the bottle back and gulps once, twice despite the burn. Commanding stage presence in the heavy fall of his arm followed by percussion when the glass bottle clangs on the counter just behind the curve of your ass. An unspoken monologue in his eyes as he leans down into you, snagging plump lips on your own.

He tastes fucking disgusting is your first thought, but that fades to more, more, more. You grab onto his shoulders, the sheen of sweat familiar and matching your own, and pull him in as close as you can. There’s a point when you get so close to a person you can pretend you’re one, but for now you’ll settle with scooting to the edge of the counter to press yourself up flush against him despite the heat. There’s a brief moment where he stops, but it’s only to help you out of your shirt. The damp thin material peels off of you and reveals your chest, then your skin reunites with his. His warm dog tags press into your chest, now their own form of a kiss, as your mouths meet again hungrier this time. His hands find purchase at your ass, glide all the way to the top of your denim shorts. It’s quick and easy the way his fingers slide to the front and up to cup your chest. The way he squeezes is rough, but not hard. He grasps at your skin like it was meant for him, and maybe it was. That wasn’t too far fetched to think with the way you responded to him. You moan in earnest into his mouth with each of his squeezes and the ministrations of his fingers.

Your hands travel from his biceps to his hair to his shoulder blades and repeat, tracing a route that makes his skin tingle despite the staleness of the room. He mumbles something against your teeth, something that sounds like ‘need you’ but you don’t need to understand what he said to know you and he both want your hands to travel south. Your fingertips kiss his chest, his nipples, his ribs, and then fall to the hem of his pants (your pants, some flimsy tie dyed things you bought at one of those woowoo stores that sold a lot of incense and wind chimes) before you pull your hands from him all together. His strangled whine all but dies in response when your hands fumble with his and move them down to the button on your shorts, effectively telling him to do away with them. You break the kiss again to lean your head back on the cupboard behind you, and lift your hips as best you can without sliding off the counter. He’s slow to remove them, both because of how they stick to you and because he’s vexing. Once they hit your calfs, you wiggle them off yourself before settling your bare ass back on the edge of the counter and sitting up straight again.

“Commando? You slut!” He exclaims with a devilish smile, and you have half a mind to hit him. But instead, you settle for returning the favor, much easier for you to give a strong yank and his (your) pants are also around his ankles.

“Commando? You slut too!” You echo, and you both laugh and you crane your neck smash your lips back onto his.

You’re both dizzy and laughing, and it makes it all that much easier for him to ease into you. Sliding slowly, Klaus is met with little resistance. You yourself are aroused and soaking, the norm for your body when Klaus is close to you like this. Your body easily reacts to him, and you like to think his body is equally as receptive to you. He stays like that for a beat, making sure you’re comfortable with the angle and everything, before ramming back into you as one of his hands hits the cupboard behind your head to stabilize himself. Your legs wrap around his waist and meet cross ankled at the small of his back, angling to help push him all that much deeper into you.

This is different, you think, than all the other times. Sure, Klaus is setting the pace for once instead of you, but that’s not it. Maybe it’s because of your talking even minimally about your past. Letting him peek over the wall you held near and dear. You viewed yourself before the clinic as someone who no longer exists. A dead relative that sits on your shoulders. Or maybe it just was the rocking motion and your ass catching the corner over and over sure to welt and melting pain into the pleasure. It’s like you’re lost at sea, and Klaus is both the life raft and the storm. He’s all hands and hips and whimpers against your neck.

He fucks the thoughts out of your head, and thus the words out of your mouth. You’re not used to him being in charge like this. This is easily the quietest you’ve ever been with him, but it’s not for lack of enjoyment. No, this is heavenly. Every whimper, every moan... because of what you— what your body does to him. Absolutely musical. A cacaphony only heightened by the tempo of your heaving chest, the tightness of your core already threatening to burst.

Your legs tighten around his back, pulling him so close that his thrusts hit deep, deep as they can go and he never fully pulls out of you. It’s more of a deep grind into your cunt, and each roll of his hips earns a high pitched whine from you and a low grunt from him. This feels good.

He slows down considerably, taking the time to savor feeling you squeeze him as he slowly works you both to and over the edge. He’s in no rush when it feels like this.

You, though, you’re teetering. On both the physical counter and the precipice of ecstasy. Any thrust now and you’ll be shaking and sobbing and drenching him, but you foolishly try to hang on because it’s unclear if Klaus is as close as you are or if he has any tricks up his sleeve.

A shuddering breathy moan against your jawline alerts you; no, he is as close as you are. You bear down, changing the angle just so, but in a way that hits the perfect spot, and you scream. You scream so unexpectedly you surprise yourself as you feel your body overcome and surrender to a shaking, intense orgasm.

The way you tighten and shiver against him triggers his own, and he stills inside you as deep as he can go, and shakes as well. A moan escapes past his lips in a strangled cry, and then he goes quiet. savoring this feeling.

Instead of pulling out, he stands there holding you. He reaches one of his hands down though, the same one that was against the cupboard near your head, to grasp your calf. He half assedly begins to knead his thumb and middle finger on each side of the muscle, easing any tension or stiffness that might have occurred while you were holding him so tightly against you. This is so tender. This is closeness. You lean forward towards him with your hands draped onto his shoulders, letting him catch you as post sex exhaustion begins to creep it’s way behind your eyes. But for Klaus it seems to come so naturally. It’s almost an absent afterthought of an action while he kisses your cheek, your jawline, your earlobe.

“You, dear Fraulien, have earned yourself a bed frame,” Klaus announces in a whisper against the shell of your ear. If you weren’t on the brink of slumber, you could have sworn he had a twinge of a German accent.

“What?”

“I’m going to buy you a bed frame,” he punctuates it with a kiss this time. You have to laugh. Shutting your eyes feels so good while laying in his arms.

“You’re going to buy it?”

“Well, there’s probably a good one somewhere at the Academy. One with a nice headboard. Only the best for my partner to handcuff me to.”

Partner.

You’re wide awake again.

Klaus sleeps peacefully tonight.

[brandxspandex]

Smashing through some pre-modern Spotlight issues on the way towards the meat of the main story in my IDW re-read.

Spotlight: Thundercracker again leaves me wondering how the hell Thundercracker managed to live with being a Decepticon for so long. After all, this Spotlight is set towards the beginning of the Great War and Thundercracker already has misgivings serious enough that he’s moved to commit some pretty severely treasonous acts, and this was back when organic genocide was just a side effect of the Decepticons’ goals, rather than a goal in itself. If he was already upset with how the Cons treated organics at this stage, I can’t imagine how he would have reacted when they made cleansing the galaxy of organics their policy, and I can’t understand how he stuck around after that point. I used to think that the increase in the Decepticons’ outward brutality probably corresponded to the increase in their inward brutality, so as Thundercracker gained more and more reasons to leave the Cons he also got more and more reasons to be afraid of leaving. Yet this issue confirms that the DJD existed even at this point, and Thundercracker was still willing to risk acting on behalf of his morals regardless. I suppose it’s possible that the DJD’s tactics were less extreme at this point, but I still find it hard to wrap my head around the fact that it took Thundercracker millions of years to take the final little step towards a heelfaceturn.

After letting Bumblebee live, Thundercracker seems to imply that if all Autobots were like Bee he would be willing to switch sides, or perhaps that they wouldn’t be at war in the first place. While Bumblebee is an exceptionally friendly guy for sure (in fact this issue takes time to hammer home that in terms of heroic intent Bee is pretty much on Optimus Prime’s level, even if he lacks Optimus’s focused leadership abilities – which is a big theme of Bee’s own character arc), Thundercracker seemed particularly taken with Bee because he went out of his way to save organics, which doesn’t seem that unusual a trait among Autobots. Sure, we’ve seen some Autobots that don’t seem to give a shit about organics, and some that have just been nasty pieces of work in general, but most Bots we’ve seen have been of the heroic, organic-saving inclination, so it seems as though Thundercracker must have had a warped perception of the Autobots if he thought Bee was an exception (unless of course particularly heroic Autobots are overrepresented amongst the main characters, which may very well be the case). So maybe Thundercracker didn’t switch sides and go to the Autobots because he was under the impression that they were no better than the Decepticons (and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cons were fed propaganda to maintain those sorts of perceptions).

Thundercracker also seemed pretty hung up on the fact that being a Seeker was his identity, which may have made leaving the Decepticons difficult for him. I guess that before the war most Cybertronians had a very solid sense of their identity, which was defined by their alt-mode, before the war began and threw all of this into disarray. While a big reason the war was fought in the first place was precisely because many people didn’t like being boxed into these limited identities, it must have nonetheless been very disorientating to many to have the familiarity of their old identities disrupted. Thus it wouldn’t be surprising if many went on to dig their heels into whatever identities they could find in wartime.

Spotlight: Shockwave sees Shockwave going about his whole Regenesis Ore thing, which makes me wonder how much of the energon throughout the universe was due to Shockwave’s actions and how much of it just existed out there independently. I often wonder what sort of substance energon is exactly, and whether it is in anyway comparable to any real substances or if it is something completely alien and unknowable. The fact that we’ve seen Transformers converting known matter into synthesised energon suggests that it is at very least made of the same fundamental elements as the known universe. Still, I wonder if it’s something that can arise in the universe without any sort of Cybertronian involvement.

It’s interesting that Shockwave puts his (temporary) downfall in this issue down to his failure to factor in the universal constant of chaos, given that now he’s back he seems to be fixated on “the higher order of logic that is chaos”. Was this the beginning of the path that led him to decide that becoming some sort of chaos worshipping furry was the way to go? Speaking of furries, it’s kinda funny that Shockwave ended up becoming the furry Prime when his spotlight is also the issue in which the Dinobots get their dinosaur forms. Turns out that with Shockwave, everything begins and ends with furries.

Shockwave puts his inability to anticipate and understand the Dinobots’ rash, emotional actions down to his strictly logical thought process, to the point where he actually has to shut down his higher processing to allow him to “evolve” a primal subroutine approximating rage in order to deal with them. Shockwave’s apparent evolution in this issue is never really brought up again (at least, not yet), but then again, even before reappearing in this currently ambiguously un-shadowplayed state, Shockwave was suspiciously snarky and melodramatic for a guy without emotions. I gotta say that I find it kinda hard to believe that Shockwave finds irrational and emotional behaviour so mind-bogglingly shocking and hard to process given that this issue is set a few million years into the war and he has been with the Decepticons for all that time, a movement filled to the absolute brim with spectacularly emotional and irrational individuals.

Also I’m going to post this panel because when required to draw the gadget that enables Shockwave to signal his ship it sure as hell looks like the artist just decided to give him some car keys:

I can’t really recall Cliffjumper doing anything that notable in IDW outside of his Spotlight (and spoilers in the Unicron prologue issue he unfortunately got rather unceremoniously killed off off-panel) so I had forgotten that he’s apparently a total badass whose name strikes fear into troops of Cons who he then wipes out single-handedly before using one of their severed hands to hammer in the grave of the little organic girl he wrecks vengeance in the name of. I do really like how the Autobots have their little friendly round cars like Cliffjumper and Bumblebee as their spies, saboteurs and deadly assassins.

We see some very human-looking aliens in this issue, which is honestly something that always bugs me, even though it absolutely saturates sci-fi. It just strikes me as so astonishingly unlikely that evolution would pull the same trick so many times that it really pulls me out of the story; it’s something that stretches my suspension of disbelief that little bit too far. That’s why I love it when sci-fi provides some sort of explanation behind the humanoid pattern recurring throughout their setting, often in the form of some sort of progenitor race seeding genetic blueprints throughout the cosmos. And you know what? In IDW I’m just going to assume Shockwave’s behind it at this point. It seems like exactly the kind of thing he’d do and he’s responsible for pretty much everything else in the continuity so let’s go with that.

This issue implies that Cybertronians have some sort of in-built program that enables them to pick up the transmissions of an alien world they’re on and use them to synthesise a translation of the native languages they can then easily speak, as part of their “robots in disguise” adaptability shtick. This seems to somewhat contradict later instances where we see Transformers attempting to learn languages the more traditional way, but personally I much prefer the idea that they have this more alien and robotic approach. I also like the idea that it is part of the same collection of features that allows them to have alt-modes that mimic the vehicles and technology native to the alien world they’re on, because adapting to alien environments is an intrinsic part of their natures AND HOLY SHIT what if the reason Transformers have such a hard time changing their ways and breaking free of their vicious cycle of war, yet seem to suddenly undergo rapid character development when they encounter other species, such as humans, is because of this adaptability algorithm? When they’re just around other Transformers they automatically adapt to each other so they get stuck in a loop of mimicking the same behaviours, but when they encounter other species with new behaviours they can adapt to them and break out of the loop (same could go for encountering Transformer colony worlds that have been isolated for a while)??? Ok that idea probably wouldn’t hold up to closer inspection in this continuity at least BUT HELL IT’S A THOUGHT.

The idea that Transformers require alien transmissions in order to synthesise translations for their languages fits in well with the fact that Wheelie can’t automatically adapt to the language of the alien he encounters in Spotlight: Wheelie, give that both he and the alien are away from their native worlds. I thought that the alien having a translation device that for some reason requires the speaker to speak in rhyme in order to work was a pretty clever way of explaining Wheelie’s whole speaking in rhyme gimmick.

Wheelie’s Spotlight has the same basic core theme that most of this lot of Spotlight issues seem to have; the main character is faced with a moral dilemma where they can choose between taking the safest option that most benefits themselves, or they can save an innocent (typically an organic) and sacrifice something in the process. Each time the main character realises that if they choose to take the easy option and allow the innocent to befall whatever horrible fate is dangling over them, they will be sacrificing something even worse. The Autobot characters come to the conclusion that this is what defines them as an Autobot and separates them from the Decepticons, but we see Thundercracker making a similar decision in his own Spotlight. But of course, we know where Thundercracker’s storyline eventually takes him.

There’s a major tease at the end of Spotlight: Wheelie involving the presence of the Quintessons that certainly seems like the set up for some kind of significant plotline, but unless the Quintessons turn out to have some kind of important involvement in the Unicron storyline, I guess that’s never gonna go anywhere. It’s a pity, cos I reckon a lot can be done with the Quintessons, and in their sparse appearances in IDW they’ve always been quite intriguing.

Spotlight: Hot Rod introduces everyone’s favourite piece “woah what the hell they’re bringing that back up again now?” in the form of The Magnificence and yo hang on those Omega Guardians in this issue sure look like those things on the cover of an upcoming issue of the Lost Light:

I wonder if Hot Rod’s experience with Dealer plays into his hatred of Getaway. Hot Rod spent so much time angsting over his failures on his mission to collect The Magnificence, including the fact that he had to abandon Dealer in the process, and then he risked his life in order to save Dealer from a Decepticon prison camp. Then it turns out that Dealer was a doublecrosser who had caused the failures on Rodimus’s mission in the first place, and was still planning to stab him in the back. After all that, it wouldn’t be too surprising if Rodimus had developed a bit of a hair-trigger reaction when it comes to people who betray him.

Spotlight: Sixshot addresses the strangely sweet camaraderie between the emotional abyss/utter force of annihilation that is Sixshot and his carnage-loving fanbots the Terrorcons, which is something that, as far as I can recall, is never explored or brought up again. But, nonetheless, it’s nice to know it was a thing. It also features The Reapers, who provide an interesting little taster of some of the other aliens that exist in the IDW universe, from an electric space jellyfish to a berserker virus infected monster bird. The Reapers are all about ending war by pre-emptively destroying any sources of war, which makes me wonder how the hell have they haven’t got around to trying to destroying the Transformers yet. It’s a big universe I suppose.

Reading through these issues provided a nice little reminder of some forgotten characterisation and plot hooks that have been left dangling. It’s sad to think that most of these things won’t have a chance to be picked up now (except for The Magnificence, and I still can’t quite get over the fact that happened), but they are ready fodder for any fanfic writers who may want to pick up where canon is going to leave off.