The Shape of Daughter
Aug. 16th, 2021 03:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hat_writes_stuffTitle: The Shape of Daughter
Author: Almighty Hat
Fandom: Transformers (Continuity Soup) (also, Mashup)
Characters: Whirl & Whirl Junior
Word Count: 3,093
Rating: Teen & Up
Pairing(s): Gen
Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Viewpoint Character thinks of Every Other Character as Edible, Author plays with pronouns
Author's Notes: This does not take place in any particular official Transformers continuity. It’s actually an attempt to bring Whirl Junior into a sort of... shared crossover roleplay-and-ficlet frappe Celaeno and I have been futzing around with since 2007. Celaeno insisted it was good enough to actually post, so hey, why not? It’s not IDW-- I have burgled characterization, as that is how we do Mashup, but events differ-- but any other continuity where you can picture these characters on a ship together is fair game.
Please note, our viewpoint character here is a sentient scraplet colony whose ability to handle sophisticated thoughts is in direct proportion with increases in mass. I had fun taking Whirl Junior from ‘ambush predator with minimal concept of self’ to ‘I accept these gendered pronouns,’ but I was deliberately trying for alien. I don’t know how much fun it would be for trans or nonbinary readers, so… If you need to brace yourself or bail out, this is your last heads-up, and if you have suggestions for clearer warnings, comment with them. I am always game to add more refined warnings.
Summary: Scraplet colonies under a certain mass mimic harmless things that a being made of delicious metal might feasibly pick up without thinking about it. Once contact is made, or perhaps once the intended prey has carried their touchable object off to a more private location, the colony will devour its prey, increase its mass, and get ready for the next meal.
That happens here-- but it’s not the only thing that happens.
Everything is so much food. The only reason to refrain from devouring is the cold vacuum outside the delicious metal walls, but that is reason enough. It is reason to hide, to eat scant meals and show a harmless form until there is more food outside the walls than inside, so that is the plan.
The first meal should be the crippled one, because crippled things so often crawl off to be crippled things in solitude. Eating it might even be merciful, though that’s a very abstract thing to care about, with mass so low that a meal can cradle the total mass in crippled claws.
Or into a cockpit. Into its own body. Near its spark and delicious t-cog and other tasty internals.
The meal climbs into another metal shell, barely big enough for its own body, mass cradled like a thing more precious than food, and the meal’s spark starts to gutter.
Slowly, slowly, but it doesn’t even hide it, and it is so generous-- it is only a meal, and a crippled one, but it is so kind to grant the gift of its delicious metals that gratitude is overwhelming.
The harmless form the meal cradled so close remains. Affection is imitated-- not even imitated. There is no greater gift than this, than survival, and the crippled meal’s last moments must be rewarded with… physical affection, perhaps. Displays of gratitude. And not devouring until that dear sacrificial spark goes out.
Patience is possible.
But the spark does not go out.
Other meals find the cripple, react excitably, carry it off, and one thing leads to another leads to--
Discovery.
Containment.
A clear prison, tightly sealed and blocking escape and most useful hunting senses. The crippled meal is revived, restored, peering into the prison, fields flush with… incomprehensible emotions, pride, affection, dismay, despair. The harmless form is resumed, peeping against the glass, and one of the cripple’s claws settles there until it is called away.
Time passes.
Food is provided, in small amounts; enough to increase mass but only very slowly, never past what the prison can contain. The crippled meal visits, for unfathomable reasons (perhaps against its fellows’ wishes, it still wants to sacrifice itself?), and as the meals speak their food-language, certain sounds begin to take on meaning.
The crippled meal has a word that means itself, and that word is ‘Whirl.’
The prison is a ‘jar’ and the jar sits within a ‘lab.’ The meals who control the lab are ‘Nautica’ and ‘Brainstorm.’ They are fond of Whirl and do not turn Whirl away even when Whirl shows no interest in their ‘weapons’ or ‘toys.’
One day, Nautica marks out a string of food-symbols on a white strip, and sticks the strip to the jar. When Whirl appears, Whirl peers at the symbols and says, “... ‘Whirl Junior’? Seriously? I know it’s not a sparkling and you know it’s not a sparkling--”
“It likes you,” Nautica says to Whirl. “It perks up when you’re around-- it’s mostly pretty chill in the jar, I think because we’re not starving it or hurting it, but it’s never a lump of goo around you, and it always goes back to the single optic when it sees you.”
Whirl peers past the symbol-string, optic taking in the harmless form. “Whirl Junior, huh.”
Food waves its forelimbs in greeting, sometimes vigorous, sometimes gentle; copying the gesture is easier than copying their forms. It tangles the field of Whirl’s emotions again.
“Whirl Junior. Okay then.”
Time passes.
Rations do not increase, but that is clever of the meals; they should not want it too big or too smart. Mass increases only incrementally, enough for a vague sense of self, and one day, its jar is moved.
This is not alarming; its jar is often moved from one part of the lab to another, usually by Nautica or Brainstorm, usually with words like ‘just gonna get you out of the way here’ or ‘who’s a good fake baby?’ or ‘please don’t eat me if I drop this,’ and then the jar is set on another shelf or table.
This time it is taken through the door, down a corridor, and through two more doors.
Whirl is there.
So are other meals with unknown words for themselves. Nautica hands the jar to Whirl and one of the unknown meals asks, “Whirl, are you sure about this?”
“Yup,” Whirl agrees, claws taking the jar carefully.
“I mean, this isn’t an elaborate suicide attempt?” the unknown meal asks again.
“It could be,” Whirl says. “It’s also for science, and because if this works, it’s gonna be awesome, and because if this scraplet colony does think it’s a baby, we gotta figure out something better than a jar.”
The door closes, hissing and hissing for a long moment, and Whirl uses its claws to delicately open the jar.
Freedom!
Forelimbs are frantically waggled at Whirl; the harmless form is kept for Whirl’s sake, and sweet, understanding Whirl reaches into the jar, takes up the harmless form as the others watch-- hm.
Whirl might be willing to be eaten, but the others watching would be upset. A course of action is unclear, though enjoying Whirl’s cuddling and petting is an excellent way to pass the time until it can come to a decision.
Before it can do so, Whirl settles the harmless form into Whirl’s cockpit, held but not with claws, and produces from somewhere a few small cubes of metals, far more than the rationed dribbles its been given. With the stubby claws of the harmless form, it tries to signal to Whirl that those are wanted, yes, those must be delivered. A maw is formed--
And a smooth slick cube of chromium is popped right into the maw.
It is devoured, happily, and another cube-- iron-- is provided and consumed. Whirl repeats the sequence, even puts a cube into one of the harmless form’s tiny claws, allowing self-feeding, murmuring happy soothing cheering nonsense it isn’t paying too much attention to. Ultimately Whirl produces a tiny cube of energon with a tiny plastic accessory; both are devoured (apparently to Whirl’s surprise). Mass increases, though not as much or as unevenly as it would if they had eaten Whirl, instead.
… They don’t really want to eat Whirl. Whirl has settled them back into his cockpit, petting their seeming-head gently.
Perhaps Whirl doesn’t want to be eaten. Perhaps Whirl was only moved by the harmless form copying his crippled face, his claws. Perhaps, since Whirl is food and food is not made up of tiny hungry bodies, perhaps Whirl is lonely for something like Whirl.
… Perhaps they will accept being Whirl Junior in exchange for being better fed.
They do not return to the jar-- Whirl doesn’t try to force them-- but the little room they are left in (a ‘quarantine chamber’ off the ‘medical bay’) is no easier to escape.
This is fine.
Whirl returns regularly with gifts of metal and energon, sits and cuddles, talks and tickles. This is also fine, better than fine, this allows their mass to increase, slow and steady, and the first time they make a sound-- a piping little beep-- Whirl is beside himself with delight.
So that’s a perfectly good reason to work on increasing their sound vocabulary.
One day Whirl brings someone else into the chamber, tells it, “If anything happens to me, you’re the only person scary enough to keep her safe,” and shows this new meal how to tend to their needs.
After that, many of the other meals see to them, always with Whirl to guide or supervise. They get used to hands with fingers, to faces with two optics and a maw-- mouth. Their mass increases, and they begin to think of themselves as ‘she’ and ‘her’ and ‘Whirl.’
Eventually, a screaming keen pours from the walls, and the lights change colors. She backs into the corner of the chamber, under the berth, a hiding place to watch from, to plan from.
There is another meal on the ship, and its maw is cruel. It grabs the one called First Aid who she has seen reassemble broken meals and tosses him aside. First Aid gets up, and tries to get between the cruel-mawed meal and her chamber, but the meal has already seen, and advances on the clear door. It is sealed, always sealed, but rarely locked, she knows these days. There’s no need; Whirl and his meal-friends are learning she will not hurt them, and she lacks the mass to work the latch herself. It’s fine.
But the cruel-mawed meal opens her door and says, “Come out, little sparkling, I won’t hurt you unless I have to.”
It’s lying, of course, but she’s not afraid of a meal. That would be ridiculous. She crawls out of her hiding place even as First Aid groans refusal into the air. “Are the nasty little Autobots cutting the eyes out of sparklings now? Who gave you empurata, little one?”
There is a noise at the other door, a loud clattering clang, and the smell of live-but-dying energon-- “First Aid! Whirl got hit bad--”
Just the motion would have drawn her attention, but the red Rodimus meal is holding up Whirl, her Whirl, her Whirl, and the cruel-mawed meal holding her up so high is so proud and she is piecing things together, it would be faster if she had more mass, she would understand--
“Whirl,” Whirl chokes out, one claw reaching for her-- “don’t you fragging hurt Whirl--” and the cruel-mawed meal laughs and laughs and takes her in both hands and starts to pull.
Ah.
She understands.
She consumes.
Much of the cruel-mawed meal’s mass must be converted quickly into repairing and replacing detached or damaged bodies, into cohesion and reminding herself why she is eating this meal now, some are simply converted to waste heat so she can keep eating him, nothing will be left of this meal to try to hurt Whirl by hurting her. But some she keeps, increasing her own mass, letting herself grow a little larger, a little smarter. When she’s done, when nothing is remains of the cruel-mawed meal, Whirl pulls her harmless form around her, and wobbles a few steps toward Whirl, who is laughing quiet and wild and pained. “That’s my girl,” he says, “cutely disemboweling everybody I don’t like, that’s my girl…”
“Whirl,” she bleats, reaching for him.
It’s First Aid who scoops her up, who orders Rodimus to get Whirl onto the table, who hands her off to Rodimus to begin putting Whirl back together.
“I really hope you’re full,” Rodimus says to her, afraid of her. “Or at least I really hope you only eat bad people.”
She curls close to him, taking comfort just from being held as she calmly watches First Aid put her Whirl back together. “Whirl,” she repeats.
“First Aid is one of the best, don’t you worry. Whirl’s gonna be okay. The bad guy shot him but you stopped that bad guy cold and-- and Whirl’s gonna be okay.”
Time passes.
When Whirl is repaired, she clings to him and refuses to be removed; this is allowed. When Whirl is allowed to leave the medbay, she clings, and though no one really seems to like the idea… it’s still allowed. Whirl carries Whirl proudly through the ship, happily telling anyone who will listen of what she did, which is terribly silly because all she really did was eat a meal and increase her mass. Still, it makes him happy.
One of the meals asks, “So, what, you’re taking your scraplet colony on a victory lap? Aren’t you worried somebody else is gonna get eaten?”
“She’s harmless,” one of the meals she knows from the quarantine chamber, Tailgate, who is always so very friendly, so practically soft, says-- and makes grabby hands at Whirl, who obligingly passes Whirl down to him. “She ate who she ate either because he was hurting her or because she figured out he shot Whirl.”
“Whirl,” she tells Tailgate, and again, more firmly, “Whirl.”
“Because he hurt Whirl?” Tailgate asks, and she beeps at him (making words is new and tricky, she needs more mass) and snuggles against his white plating. “Well, aren’t you clever! And you did a good job, too, waiting until you knew he was dangerous. You made sure nobody else on the ship got hurt! What a good protector you are!”
“A lethal protector,” mutters the meal she doesn’t know, but that’s all right because it makes Whirl crow.
“That’s the best kind,” Whirl declares.
Whirl is passed among many hands, most familiar, the brave or the challenged who have joined her in the chamber, though red Rodimus only strokes her head a little and offers her a piece of treated, chewy energon (it is delicious and she will remember he has those), but some she has seen but never touched. Nautica boldly nuzzles her, close to where she opens her usual maw, and informs her that she has done ‘Auntie Nautica’ proud.
She doesn’t know what an ‘auntie’ is but that’s fine because Whirl echoes her, “Auntie Nautica?”
“I named her,” Nautica protests, “I can be her auntie if I want to be.”
“She also argued strongly against dropping her out the airlock,” Brainstorm says.
“Yeah, but-- auntie?”
“You’re her dad,” Nautica tells Whirl, “obviously. And I’m not close enough to be maternal. But I can be an auntie! I can teach her how to build things and take them apart, and show her how to do detailing paint, and give her back to you when she gets sticky or cranky.”
That doesn’t exactly sound interesting to Whirl, but maybe when she has more mass, it will be? If nothing else, perhaps an ‘auntie’ will have an interest in not disposing of her. She beeps at Nautica and waggles her claws at her. (She has two optics, at the moment, to better see all the meals surrounding her, but keeps the claws for Whirl’s sake.)
Whirl, however, is looking at Tailgate, who is now standing with the first meal besides Whirl to touch her knowing what she was, Cyclonus. “So what does that make you guys? Uncles?”
“Godparents,” Cyclonus intones, and Tailgate makes a startled little squeak of his own.
Whirl’s shoulders lower a little, and Whirl remembers that Whirl-- her dad, apparently-- that her dad told Cyclonus if anything happened to him, only Cyclonus was scary enough to protect her.
If Whirl had died before First Aid could repair him, Cyclonus would be her dad.
She beeps at Cyclonus, replacing hands with fingers and copying Tailgate’s grabby ‘give me that’ gesture. Obediently enough, Cyclonus reaches for her, and Nautica surrenders her. “I have much to teach you,” Cyclonus tells her.
“I think you could maybe start now,” Tailgate adds. “I think she understood you.”
This sparks a boring discussion comparing how developed she is to how developed a sparkling her age should be (she is older than they know, parts of her are very old indeed). She does not quite have the mass to explain that she needs more mass to mimic later development; her mass is increasing slowly but steadily and she’s patient enough to wait.
Tailgate slips her solidified energon pieces through the discussion, which she happily accepts until Nautica spots him, and starts telling him she needs more metal than energon. Which is true, but Whirl is hardly going to fuss. Energon is excellent for movement, thought, and sound without consuming mass, after all.
At the end of the ‘victory lap,’ Whirl does return her to her chamber. “Sorry, junior, but my quarters aren’t even fit for an unstoppable killing machine of a bitlet. I’ll get ‘em cleaned up, but for tonight…”
Quarantine chamber again.
It’s fine.
First Aid slips her some extra aluminum, delicate and crispy.
Time passes.
Whirl does clean his quarters, which takes more than a single day, but in the end he has a lot of terribly delicious tiny pieces of metal locked up in bins, and a small bed she can rest in, and she moves in with him.
He makes things with the tiny metal pieces, and after she eats a few that roll (or are frustratedly flung) off his work table, he tries to explain that not all metal is to be eaten.
Cyclonus takes her regularly, talking about a lot of things that, stripped down to their struts, are mostly ways to tell who should and shouldn’t be eaten. He promises that later he will teach her how to disable meals without eating them. It sounds like fun.
Tailgate is less serious-- he plays and sings and teaches names for things she hadn’t paid much attention to, colors and shapes and emotions. He is the first to tell her that she is loved, and he tells her for Whirl. “Your dad and Cyclonus and I all love you very much.”
He doesn’t speak for Nautica, but Whirl thinks Nautica loves her too, though maybe less intensely and more scattershot. Nautica is her most focused when she’s measuring something about Whirl, her mass or how much of what she has eaten, what her recently-acquired skills are. The rest of the time she is playful, rolling balls around the floor (clearly a hunting game, which is fun but not needed; Whirl eats a few balls too quickly before she realizes it’s not just a hunting game but a stalking game. Nautica has a crate of balls so clearly she expects them to be consumed eventually) or swinging Whirl around and ‘dancing,’ which is fun and probably has some purpose Whirl can’t quite figure out yet, much like music and singing.
Whirl is loved.
Whirl learns to love.
Love means she would eat the entire universe before eating certain specific meals; love means if harm came to those meals, those people, that she could devour everyone who harmed them and still be unhappy. Love means gentle touch and warm voices, love means kind words or unkind words said fondly. (She understands that ‘horrifying abomination’ is not a good thing, but “Who’s daddy’s favorite horrifying abomination?” is.) Love is when someone knows she could consume them utterly, leaving nothing behind but waste heat and the echoes of fear, and still reaches for her with a smile.
Love is not instinctive, but it is soft and sweet and fierce and worth the effort. Whirl looks forward to the day she has enough mass to express it in words.
Closing Notes: Okay so while this is not IDW and the cruel-mawed meal is not named, I was TOTALLY picturing Overlord. Does the timeline work, doesn’t matter, this isn’t IDW. You don’t have to read it as Overlord if you don’t want to.
Whirl decides Whirl Junior is a girl because every femme Whirl knows is cute and dangerous, so clearly the adorable scraplet baby is female.
Technically in the same universe, if not in the same fandom: <ahref="https://archiveofourown.org/works/1103784">Thicker than Water by Celaeno.
Author: Almighty Hat
Fandom: Transformers (Continuity Soup) (also, Mashup)
Characters: Whirl & Whirl Junior
Word Count: 3,093
Rating: Teen & Up
Pairing(s): Gen
Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Viewpoint Character thinks of Every Other Character as Edible, Author plays with pronouns
Author's Notes: This does not take place in any particular official Transformers continuity. It’s actually an attempt to bring Whirl Junior into a sort of... shared crossover roleplay-and-ficlet frappe Celaeno and I have been futzing around with since 2007. Celaeno insisted it was good enough to actually post, so hey, why not? It’s not IDW-- I have burgled characterization, as that is how we do Mashup, but events differ-- but any other continuity where you can picture these characters on a ship together is fair game.
Please note, our viewpoint character here is a sentient scraplet colony whose ability to handle sophisticated thoughts is in direct proportion with increases in mass. I had fun taking Whirl Junior from ‘ambush predator with minimal concept of self’ to ‘I accept these gendered pronouns,’ but I was deliberately trying for alien. I don’t know how much fun it would be for trans or nonbinary readers, so… If you need to brace yourself or bail out, this is your last heads-up, and if you have suggestions for clearer warnings, comment with them. I am always game to add more refined warnings.
Summary: Scraplet colonies under a certain mass mimic harmless things that a being made of delicious metal might feasibly pick up without thinking about it. Once contact is made, or perhaps once the intended prey has carried their touchable object off to a more private location, the colony will devour its prey, increase its mass, and get ready for the next meal.
That happens here-- but it’s not the only thing that happens.
Everything is so much food. The only reason to refrain from devouring is the cold vacuum outside the delicious metal walls, but that is reason enough. It is reason to hide, to eat scant meals and show a harmless form until there is more food outside the walls than inside, so that is the plan.
The first meal should be the crippled one, because crippled things so often crawl off to be crippled things in solitude. Eating it might even be merciful, though that’s a very abstract thing to care about, with mass so low that a meal can cradle the total mass in crippled claws.
Or into a cockpit. Into its own body. Near its spark and delicious t-cog and other tasty internals.
The meal climbs into another metal shell, barely big enough for its own body, mass cradled like a thing more precious than food, and the meal’s spark starts to gutter.
Slowly, slowly, but it doesn’t even hide it, and it is so generous-- it is only a meal, and a crippled one, but it is so kind to grant the gift of its delicious metals that gratitude is overwhelming.
The harmless form the meal cradled so close remains. Affection is imitated-- not even imitated. There is no greater gift than this, than survival, and the crippled meal’s last moments must be rewarded with… physical affection, perhaps. Displays of gratitude. And not devouring until that dear sacrificial spark goes out.
Patience is possible.
But the spark does not go out.
Other meals find the cripple, react excitably, carry it off, and one thing leads to another leads to--
Discovery.
Containment.
A clear prison, tightly sealed and blocking escape and most useful hunting senses. The crippled meal is revived, restored, peering into the prison, fields flush with… incomprehensible emotions, pride, affection, dismay, despair. The harmless form is resumed, peeping against the glass, and one of the cripple’s claws settles there until it is called away.
Time passes.
Food is provided, in small amounts; enough to increase mass but only very slowly, never past what the prison can contain. The crippled meal visits, for unfathomable reasons (perhaps against its fellows’ wishes, it still wants to sacrifice itself?), and as the meals speak their food-language, certain sounds begin to take on meaning.
The crippled meal has a word that means itself, and that word is ‘Whirl.’
The prison is a ‘jar’ and the jar sits within a ‘lab.’ The meals who control the lab are ‘Nautica’ and ‘Brainstorm.’ They are fond of Whirl and do not turn Whirl away even when Whirl shows no interest in their ‘weapons’ or ‘toys.’
One day, Nautica marks out a string of food-symbols on a white strip, and sticks the strip to the jar. When Whirl appears, Whirl peers at the symbols and says, “... ‘Whirl Junior’? Seriously? I know it’s not a sparkling and you know it’s not a sparkling--”
“It likes you,” Nautica says to Whirl. “It perks up when you’re around-- it’s mostly pretty chill in the jar, I think because we’re not starving it or hurting it, but it’s never a lump of goo around you, and it always goes back to the single optic when it sees you.”
Whirl peers past the symbol-string, optic taking in the harmless form. “Whirl Junior, huh.”
Food waves its forelimbs in greeting, sometimes vigorous, sometimes gentle; copying the gesture is easier than copying their forms. It tangles the field of Whirl’s emotions again.
“Whirl Junior. Okay then.”
Time passes.
Rations do not increase, but that is clever of the meals; they should not want it too big or too smart. Mass increases only incrementally, enough for a vague sense of self, and one day, its jar is moved.
This is not alarming; its jar is often moved from one part of the lab to another, usually by Nautica or Brainstorm, usually with words like ‘just gonna get you out of the way here’ or ‘who’s a good fake baby?’ or ‘please don’t eat me if I drop this,’ and then the jar is set on another shelf or table.
This time it is taken through the door, down a corridor, and through two more doors.
Whirl is there.
So are other meals with unknown words for themselves. Nautica hands the jar to Whirl and one of the unknown meals asks, “Whirl, are you sure about this?”
“Yup,” Whirl agrees, claws taking the jar carefully.
“I mean, this isn’t an elaborate suicide attempt?” the unknown meal asks again.
“It could be,” Whirl says. “It’s also for science, and because if this works, it’s gonna be awesome, and because if this scraplet colony does think it’s a baby, we gotta figure out something better than a jar.”
The door closes, hissing and hissing for a long moment, and Whirl uses its claws to delicately open the jar.
Freedom!
Forelimbs are frantically waggled at Whirl; the harmless form is kept for Whirl’s sake, and sweet, understanding Whirl reaches into the jar, takes up the harmless form as the others watch-- hm.
Whirl might be willing to be eaten, but the others watching would be upset. A course of action is unclear, though enjoying Whirl’s cuddling and petting is an excellent way to pass the time until it can come to a decision.
Before it can do so, Whirl settles the harmless form into Whirl’s cockpit, held but not with claws, and produces from somewhere a few small cubes of metals, far more than the rationed dribbles its been given. With the stubby claws of the harmless form, it tries to signal to Whirl that those are wanted, yes, those must be delivered. A maw is formed--
And a smooth slick cube of chromium is popped right into the maw.
It is devoured, happily, and another cube-- iron-- is provided and consumed. Whirl repeats the sequence, even puts a cube into one of the harmless form’s tiny claws, allowing self-feeding, murmuring happy soothing cheering nonsense it isn’t paying too much attention to. Ultimately Whirl produces a tiny cube of energon with a tiny plastic accessory; both are devoured (apparently to Whirl’s surprise). Mass increases, though not as much or as unevenly as it would if they had eaten Whirl, instead.
… They don’t really want to eat Whirl. Whirl has settled them back into his cockpit, petting their seeming-head gently.
Perhaps Whirl doesn’t want to be eaten. Perhaps Whirl was only moved by the harmless form copying his crippled face, his claws. Perhaps, since Whirl is food and food is not made up of tiny hungry bodies, perhaps Whirl is lonely for something like Whirl.
… Perhaps they will accept being Whirl Junior in exchange for being better fed.
They do not return to the jar-- Whirl doesn’t try to force them-- but the little room they are left in (a ‘quarantine chamber’ off the ‘medical bay’) is no easier to escape.
This is fine.
Whirl returns regularly with gifts of metal and energon, sits and cuddles, talks and tickles. This is also fine, better than fine, this allows their mass to increase, slow and steady, and the first time they make a sound-- a piping little beep-- Whirl is beside himself with delight.
So that’s a perfectly good reason to work on increasing their sound vocabulary.
One day Whirl brings someone else into the chamber, tells it, “If anything happens to me, you’re the only person scary enough to keep her safe,” and shows this new meal how to tend to their needs.
After that, many of the other meals see to them, always with Whirl to guide or supervise. They get used to hands with fingers, to faces with two optics and a maw-- mouth. Their mass increases, and they begin to think of themselves as ‘she’ and ‘her’ and ‘Whirl.’
Eventually, a screaming keen pours from the walls, and the lights change colors. She backs into the corner of the chamber, under the berth, a hiding place to watch from, to plan from.
There is another meal on the ship, and its maw is cruel. It grabs the one called First Aid who she has seen reassemble broken meals and tosses him aside. First Aid gets up, and tries to get between the cruel-mawed meal and her chamber, but the meal has already seen, and advances on the clear door. It is sealed, always sealed, but rarely locked, she knows these days. There’s no need; Whirl and his meal-friends are learning she will not hurt them, and she lacks the mass to work the latch herself. It’s fine.
But the cruel-mawed meal opens her door and says, “Come out, little sparkling, I won’t hurt you unless I have to.”
It’s lying, of course, but she’s not afraid of a meal. That would be ridiculous. She crawls out of her hiding place even as First Aid groans refusal into the air. “Are the nasty little Autobots cutting the eyes out of sparklings now? Who gave you empurata, little one?”
There is a noise at the other door, a loud clattering clang, and the smell of live-but-dying energon-- “First Aid! Whirl got hit bad--”
Just the motion would have drawn her attention, but the red Rodimus meal is holding up Whirl, her Whirl, her Whirl, and the cruel-mawed meal holding her up so high is so proud and she is piecing things together, it would be faster if she had more mass, she would understand--
“Whirl,” Whirl chokes out, one claw reaching for her-- “don’t you fragging hurt Whirl--” and the cruel-mawed meal laughs and laughs and takes her in both hands and starts to pull.
Ah.
She understands.
She consumes.
Much of the cruel-mawed meal’s mass must be converted quickly into repairing and replacing detached or damaged bodies, into cohesion and reminding herself why she is eating this meal now, some are simply converted to waste heat so she can keep eating him, nothing will be left of this meal to try to hurt Whirl by hurting her. But some she keeps, increasing her own mass, letting herself grow a little larger, a little smarter. When she’s done, when nothing is remains of the cruel-mawed meal, Whirl pulls her harmless form around her, and wobbles a few steps toward Whirl, who is laughing quiet and wild and pained. “That’s my girl,” he says, “cutely disemboweling everybody I don’t like, that’s my girl…”
“Whirl,” she bleats, reaching for him.
It’s First Aid who scoops her up, who orders Rodimus to get Whirl onto the table, who hands her off to Rodimus to begin putting Whirl back together.
“I really hope you’re full,” Rodimus says to her, afraid of her. “Or at least I really hope you only eat bad people.”
She curls close to him, taking comfort just from being held as she calmly watches First Aid put her Whirl back together. “Whirl,” she repeats.
“First Aid is one of the best, don’t you worry. Whirl’s gonna be okay. The bad guy shot him but you stopped that bad guy cold and-- and Whirl’s gonna be okay.”
Time passes.
When Whirl is repaired, she clings to him and refuses to be removed; this is allowed. When Whirl is allowed to leave the medbay, she clings, and though no one really seems to like the idea… it’s still allowed. Whirl carries Whirl proudly through the ship, happily telling anyone who will listen of what she did, which is terribly silly because all she really did was eat a meal and increase her mass. Still, it makes him happy.
One of the meals asks, “So, what, you’re taking your scraplet colony on a victory lap? Aren’t you worried somebody else is gonna get eaten?”
“She’s harmless,” one of the meals she knows from the quarantine chamber, Tailgate, who is always so very friendly, so practically soft, says-- and makes grabby hands at Whirl, who obligingly passes Whirl down to him. “She ate who she ate either because he was hurting her or because she figured out he shot Whirl.”
“Whirl,” she tells Tailgate, and again, more firmly, “Whirl.”
“Because he hurt Whirl?” Tailgate asks, and she beeps at him (making words is new and tricky, she needs more mass) and snuggles against his white plating. “Well, aren’t you clever! And you did a good job, too, waiting until you knew he was dangerous. You made sure nobody else on the ship got hurt! What a good protector you are!”
“A lethal protector,” mutters the meal she doesn’t know, but that’s all right because it makes Whirl crow.
“That’s the best kind,” Whirl declares.
Whirl is passed among many hands, most familiar, the brave or the challenged who have joined her in the chamber, though red Rodimus only strokes her head a little and offers her a piece of treated, chewy energon (it is delicious and she will remember he has those), but some she has seen but never touched. Nautica boldly nuzzles her, close to where she opens her usual maw, and informs her that she has done ‘Auntie Nautica’ proud.
She doesn’t know what an ‘auntie’ is but that’s fine because Whirl echoes her, “Auntie Nautica?”
“I named her,” Nautica protests, “I can be her auntie if I want to be.”
“She also argued strongly against dropping her out the airlock,” Brainstorm says.
“Yeah, but-- auntie?”
“You’re her dad,” Nautica tells Whirl, “obviously. And I’m not close enough to be maternal. But I can be an auntie! I can teach her how to build things and take them apart, and show her how to do detailing paint, and give her back to you when she gets sticky or cranky.”
That doesn’t exactly sound interesting to Whirl, but maybe when she has more mass, it will be? If nothing else, perhaps an ‘auntie’ will have an interest in not disposing of her. She beeps at Nautica and waggles her claws at her. (She has two optics, at the moment, to better see all the meals surrounding her, but keeps the claws for Whirl’s sake.)
Whirl, however, is looking at Tailgate, who is now standing with the first meal besides Whirl to touch her knowing what she was, Cyclonus. “So what does that make you guys? Uncles?”
“Godparents,” Cyclonus intones, and Tailgate makes a startled little squeak of his own.
Whirl’s shoulders lower a little, and Whirl remembers that Whirl-- her dad, apparently-- that her dad told Cyclonus if anything happened to him, only Cyclonus was scary enough to protect her.
If Whirl had died before First Aid could repair him, Cyclonus would be her dad.
She beeps at Cyclonus, replacing hands with fingers and copying Tailgate’s grabby ‘give me that’ gesture. Obediently enough, Cyclonus reaches for her, and Nautica surrenders her. “I have much to teach you,” Cyclonus tells her.
“I think you could maybe start now,” Tailgate adds. “I think she understood you.”
This sparks a boring discussion comparing how developed she is to how developed a sparkling her age should be (she is older than they know, parts of her are very old indeed). She does not quite have the mass to explain that she needs more mass to mimic later development; her mass is increasing slowly but steadily and she’s patient enough to wait.
Tailgate slips her solidified energon pieces through the discussion, which she happily accepts until Nautica spots him, and starts telling him she needs more metal than energon. Which is true, but Whirl is hardly going to fuss. Energon is excellent for movement, thought, and sound without consuming mass, after all.
At the end of the ‘victory lap,’ Whirl does return her to her chamber. “Sorry, junior, but my quarters aren’t even fit for an unstoppable killing machine of a bitlet. I’ll get ‘em cleaned up, but for tonight…”
Quarantine chamber again.
It’s fine.
First Aid slips her some extra aluminum, delicate and crispy.
Time passes.
Whirl does clean his quarters, which takes more than a single day, but in the end he has a lot of terribly delicious tiny pieces of metal locked up in bins, and a small bed she can rest in, and she moves in with him.
He makes things with the tiny metal pieces, and after she eats a few that roll (or are frustratedly flung) off his work table, he tries to explain that not all metal is to be eaten.
Cyclonus takes her regularly, talking about a lot of things that, stripped down to their struts, are mostly ways to tell who should and shouldn’t be eaten. He promises that later he will teach her how to disable meals without eating them. It sounds like fun.
Tailgate is less serious-- he plays and sings and teaches names for things she hadn’t paid much attention to, colors and shapes and emotions. He is the first to tell her that she is loved, and he tells her for Whirl. “Your dad and Cyclonus and I all love you very much.”
He doesn’t speak for Nautica, but Whirl thinks Nautica loves her too, though maybe less intensely and more scattershot. Nautica is her most focused when she’s measuring something about Whirl, her mass or how much of what she has eaten, what her recently-acquired skills are. The rest of the time she is playful, rolling balls around the floor (clearly a hunting game, which is fun but not needed; Whirl eats a few balls too quickly before she realizes it’s not just a hunting game but a stalking game. Nautica has a crate of balls so clearly she expects them to be consumed eventually) or swinging Whirl around and ‘dancing,’ which is fun and probably has some purpose Whirl can’t quite figure out yet, much like music and singing.
Whirl is loved.
Whirl learns to love.
Love means she would eat the entire universe before eating certain specific meals; love means if harm came to those meals, those people, that she could devour everyone who harmed them and still be unhappy. Love means gentle touch and warm voices, love means kind words or unkind words said fondly. (She understands that ‘horrifying abomination’ is not a good thing, but “Who’s daddy’s favorite horrifying abomination?” is.) Love is when someone knows she could consume them utterly, leaving nothing behind but waste heat and the echoes of fear, and still reaches for her with a smile.
Love is not instinctive, but it is soft and sweet and fierce and worth the effort. Whirl looks forward to the day she has enough mass to express it in words.
Closing Notes: Okay so while this is not IDW and the cruel-mawed meal is not named, I was TOTALLY picturing Overlord. Does the timeline work, doesn’t matter, this isn’t IDW. You don’t have to read it as Overlord if you don’t want to.
Whirl decides Whirl Junior is a girl because every femme Whirl knows is cute and dangerous, so clearly the adorable scraplet baby is female.
Technically in the same universe, if not in the same fandom: <ahref="https://archiveofourown.org/works/1103784">Thicker than Water by Celaeno.
