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The Cybertronian sky never held any stars. It was vast and dark and thick with a solid ceiling of uniform magnetic clouds and not a glimpse of light to be seen through it; blank as a void. There was nothing to see in the sky, and no answers to give, but after a late night driving down old unused back roads and trespassing through fields both boys stared up at it like it contained the unseen secrets of the universe. It had been a good night tonight. Rodimus always considered it a sort of a victory when he got Blurr to loosen up for a few megacycles – smile, laugh, maybe even crack a joke or two – and this time had been no exception. Blurr had a smart, sarcastic sense of humour and was as quick with his wit as he was with… well everything else really, but he never gave anyone the chance to just see it.
They had found some old mining equipment abandoned on one of the farms, climbed around on it naturally, and then booked it when a lone scraplet poked its ugly little head out from behind a half-mangled drill. Once Rodimus finally caught up to Blurr – back at the car – and following their own nervous laughter gas station slushies had seemed the natural course of action. Blurr had hardly said so much as a word since then. He just stared up at the purple-black sky with his knees pulled to his chest and nursed his slushie for longer than Rodimus had honestly thought possible. It must have been all melted by now. What was he thinking about? He wanted to ask, but had ended up rambling on about his own stuff instead; maybe it would get Blurr to open up too.
“So yeah, he wants me to go to some super elitist academy in Iacon, but it’s kind of…” Rodimus waved his servo in some vague gesture meant to portray the exasperation that could be Ultra Magnus. “It seems like a lot of work, you know?”
Finally Blurr took his optics off the sky and his mouth off the chewed up straw on his slushie. Only to shoot Rodimus a look so disapproving that for a moment he could have believed Ultra Magnus himself had materialised in front of him. “Are you serious? You have a chance, a real chance, to study at the most highly renowned institute on Cybertron and through it receive the very highest credentials in whatever field you want, and you don’t want to go because ‘it seems like a lot of work’?! Do you even listen to yourself?”
All right, so it was a tad entitled of him to shrug his shoulders at an offer most mechs would never even receive, but Rodimus just laughed it off pulling himself up to lean on his forearms, and then to a proper sit.
“Only sometimes.” He admitted with a grin. “But come on, I mean you can’t tell me you’ve never wanted something you knew other bots would hate you for, right?” Blurr was kind of shy and really closed off, but he was still a teenager as full of rebellion and bad decisions as the next, right?
He flinched. Blurr actually flinched, twisting back around abruptly and clamping his mouth around his straw again. Immediately Rodimus felt his spark drop.
“Slag—that was stupid. Forget it, okay?” The words were out of his vocaliser before he even had a chance to asses just /what/ could have set the other off. With a start Rodimus was turning back towards his friend and knocking his own long since drained slushie cup to the ground in doing so. He wanted so badly to touch Blurr – kiss Blurr, prove to Blurr that he didn’t have to do everything on his own – but Blurr didn’t like to be touched most of the time and so Rodimus settled with patting the hood of his car in an awkward semblance of a comforting gesture.
“It’s okay, you know? We’re supposed to do stupid things now. That’s like half the point of school.” Blurr was practically hiding behind his melted drink, straining his optics straight ahead into a different kind of nothing. If he only knew what kept running through his mind… Whatever he’d done Rodimus wanted to undo it. It had been a good night tonight. “And I don’t think anyone could hate you.”
Added charm, no matter how cheesy, got results. It was only an instant, but Blurr flickered a smile and Rodimus breathed a silent sigh of relief.
“What do you want to do?” His words were nearly a whisper and Rodimus tilted his helm in question lost to what the track star was asking. Blurr tried again. “Where is it that you want to go instead?”
“Oh.” With a sheepish grin he admired Blurr’s attention on him for once instead of whatever it was that kept plaguing him. “I don’t know, It’s not like I want to be leading the city-state or anything. Maybe I could – I probably could – but I’d rather help like people in immediate danger and stuff.” And stuff. He’d sold it better to his father, but it was late and this was Blurr and all he really, really wanted to do right now was be with him. No one understood how cool Blurr was. Rodimus didn’t understand how hard he’d fallen.
But Blurr was smiling now; opening up a little, finally. It was more of a smirk, smug and pretty. “So what you really want is a cape and some mutant ability to fly without wings, is that what you’re saying, because it sounds to me like that’s what you’re saying.” His tone was cheeky and Blurr took a sip of his drink before making a face at it. It had all melted.
“Uh, no, I want a high-tech suit of armor and rocket boosters in my pedes to fly, that’s what I’m saying.” Obviously. Rodimus leaned back on his servos again the picture of satisfaction. “Capes are tacky.”
“You’re tacky.” Blurr was only half into it, leaning forward to launch his useless slushie – for it could hardly even be called a slushie anymore with no slush – towards the nearest garbage. He missed and the plastic cup exploded in a pool of green juice. “No you really are. Rod, you have got to be without a doubt the tackiest mech I know, and that’s not even the slightest bit of an exaggeration. It’s not an honour!” Blurr insisted when his friend split into a grin again.
Maybe it was true. Rodimus stretched an arm behind Blurr in an obvious move and winked. It was a joke. Sort of. “Yeah but on me they call it charm.”
“Is that so?” An absolute drawl from Blurr, well as close as he could get with how fast he talked.
Rodimus nodded mock-gravely and Blurr made a face at him for it. “It’s true. On me, tacky looks good. Now on some people it’s all animal print shirts and socks with sandals, but with me—“ it was only getting harder to keep a straight face the longer Blurr looked at him like that “—it’s straight popped collars, and sitting on a sports car overlooking the town from the top of some cliff. I mean, there’s not actually any cliffs around, but you get the idea.” Tentatively he moved his servo from its spot behind Blurr to Blurr’s waist, but curled up as he was he didn’t seem to mind.
Blurr scrunched up a little tighter on himself and sighed. He was still smiling though. It was hard to hide it. “You know I don’t think I actually see any difference there. Hmm, nope. None whatsoever, it must be all in your head.”
“Hey.” He was serious in earnest this time. “There’s a big difference between cyber-cat sweaters and what I do.” A really big difference, a monumentally big difference; and who was Blurr to talk about fashion choices? He wore sweatshirts with shorts! He looked great of course, but Blurr would have looked great in pretty much anything.
He looked great now, half laughing at Rodimus and half challenging his claim in an all too rare flicker of happy confidence. “I don’t know anyone with a sweater like that; who do you know with a sweater like that?”
“Believe me, you don’t wanna know!” Blurr pushed him away laughing and Rodimus pressed on. “I will tell you this though; on anyone else it would probably be a dress.”
Who was the biggest mech they knew? “You’re such an idiot.” Maybe it was true, but Blurr didn’t appreciate Rodimus’ company any less for it. “I’ll believe that when I see it. And I really hope that never happens.” It was a type of company he’d never had, one he’d thought he’d never wanted. Blurr beamed up at the starless sky even knowing it had no means to reply to him and Rodimus… Rodimus just stared.
Then he had an idea. As sudden and striking as all his best ideas came. “We should hit the road this weekend!”
“What?” Blurr was incredulous from his voice to his expression.
Emphatically Rodimus continued. “Road trip!” It was an impetuous plan. “Come on! You, me, the car – just for the weekend, we can get away for a bit, maybe find a town with a proper cliff.” It was a great idea. And true Blurr had never agreed to any of his invitations like this before, but those were always with friends and got so loud, and maybe Blurr just didn’t like doing things in a group. It had been a good night; they always had a good time together.
All at once the excuses piled up again. “No, I can’t go anywhere this weekend.” Defensive. Within nanokliks Blurr had gotten tense again, and the servo that had hardly left his side since it reached it finally fell away to the car’s hood.
To his credit, Rodimus didn’t skip a beat. “Next weekend then, whenever.”
“Midterms are coming up, you know my grades—I can’t afford to let my average slip.”
They had done this dance before, but it wasn’t about the group was it? “I’ll help you during the week, you can take a break for a day and a half.”
“I don’t have the money; unlike you, I have to worry about that. I can’t just take off for a weekend.” Blurr rattled off excuses like he’d planned and recited them, and Rodimus finally slipped to his growing exasperation.
“When have I ever asked you to pay for anything?” It was supposed to be a joke. He didn’t get the tone right. Rodimus could have flinched himself, but before he got the chance Blurr was jumping off the hood of the car and making his way to the passenger seat with optics set hard.
“You need to take me home now.”
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that Blurr felt so trapped by whatever was going on that he couldn’t enjoy himself for a weekend and it wasn’t fair that Rodimus was only allowed to guess at what the real problem was. “Blurr! I’m trying to—“ That wasn’t fair either. “Fine.” With a sigh as world-weary as he felt in that moment Rodimus turned his back on the black sky.
The drive home was quiet. Unbearably so. A thousand times Rodimus wished he would just say something to Blurr, but every time he tried his vocaliser would catch and something would force it back down. He wasn’t a coward; he didn’t want to make it worse. Rodimus had never felt so much the villain. Blurr felt the pressure of the silence too, with every sideways glance looking more and more wrapped up in guilt. In a motion he went to flick the radio on, thought better of it and let his servo fall to the bottom of his shorts. Rodimus turned it on instead, but the rock ballad that filtered through the speakers just washed a bitter tune through the car.
Blurr’s complex was one of the smaller ones; not too far out of the way that they could be reckless, but quiet enough you didn’t have kids throwing illicit parties and peering out their windows at all hours of the night. It was a nice one, and Rodimus pulled onto the professionally maintained driveway wishing he could have been taking Blurr anywhere else instead.
“I’ll uh—See you tomorrow, kay?” Blurr nodded. Only nodded. He looked like he wanted to day something, but those words never came either; spiraling into nothing.
Like the late drives, dark nights, and cheap junk food, waiting for Blurr to safely close the door behind him had become routine. After which Rodimus drove off again, car filled with nothing but the sounds of radio and looking ahead to the road, long, dark, and empty. And try as he might he found that it had no answers to give either.