Work Text:
Face, meet rock bottom …
It occurs to her somewhere between the time she was wandering her apartment naked looking for a working lighter, and sitting in a warm bath exhaling burning smoke. So late into the night that even the shitty little town had gone to bed. Leaving her the lone soul in an empty night. Listening to insects buzz around her bathroom light.
Pink water swirling around her limbs, sparkling and heavy with the scent of roses. Curling smoke floating up into the air from a cigarette. Gaze fuzzy, barely focused as she examined the spattering of bruises on her legs. Pressing manicured nails into the darkest ones. Dull, distant pain that barely registered blooming as she dug into them. “What a disgrace,” they would say if her family could see her now.
“Good thing they don’t even bother to call me,” the words bleed into the silence. It seems so much louder than it is, breaking the quiet feeling like a sin. It’s unspoken but she thinks that it was good they weren’t even really her family. Not anymore… but her family wouldn’t be too proud either she guessed.
Thinking about it too hard, rock bottom seemed far away at this point. She felt as if she’d punched right through it and just kept falling. Everything was too mundane. From the sounds of the night, to the smoke burning her lungs. Leaving her floating in an endless static, misery.
Age fifteen was when she’d reached her peak. Leaving nothing but that long fall afterwards. Realistically she knew they could never have stayed here on earth, it was never going to be home. She also knew that she would never have been able to stay in America. The school year was going to end, then she’d have to go back to Japan. Ratchet had stayed on earth for some time though, travelling back and forth. She wondered if he still came back. His visits had longer spaces between them each time when she’d last spoken to Jack and Raf. Without her knowing his visits had also died, just like her contact with the two boys from back then. The last pieces of that time fading out with a whimper.
Somewhere out there in the universe, farther away than her brain was able to comprehend, were autonomous alien robots. Recovering from a war lasting millions of years. A span of time that a human like her could never really manage to understand. It was so big, so vast. Thinking about it made her dizzy. In the face of it she was so small… so easy to forget.
It had been exactly what she was afraid of watching Bulkhead and Wheeljack leave. They were going to forget her. She was going to be nothing more than a tiny speck in their lives. Face fogging over as time passed. Did they even know she was nineteen now, did they even know four years had passed?
Were their years longer? Shorter? Did time just work differently? Would they even care if they knew she wasn’t okay? That she was living on her own now and terrified.
Miko slammed the butt of her palm into her forehead. Making a loud, frustrated noise as she sunk lower into the water. One arm hanging over the edge of the bathtub, her cigarette sitting between two fingers.
Thinking about it was going to do nothing… it never did. Bulkhead was still out there somewhere. And she was here, sitting in a bathtub smoking when she should be asleep because she had a dead end job at a convenience store to go to in the morning. It didn’t matter how exciting, how magical life was when she was fifteen.
They never really show you the aftermath of all those magical coming of age stories, what happens to the protagonist when all the magic is gone and life is normal again. She wished she knew that it would be like living without air. Then maybe, just maybe she wouldn’t have wished so hard for something magic in her life.
She looked over to the window with it’s yellowed glass. Cheek smushed against her shoulder, a heavy pout on the lips of an exhausted face. The dim flickering light overheard barely enough to give the small bathroom an orange glow. The stars were muted in the sky, but she stared at them anyway. Maybe one of them was one of Cybertron’s suns.
She’d never really know. None of her questions would ever be answered, because she was here and they were there. One day she wouldn’t be here, but they’d still probably be there. All she could hope was that Bulkhead and Wheeljack would remember her name. Remember her face… Remember that they’d left a wrecker behind.