Title: Universal Concepts, sequel to Exercise in Translation and Preferred Means of Communication

Rating:  PG-13 for xenosexuality, language and horror factor (but 'Bee doesn't see what he thinks he does!)

Pairing:  Bumblebee/Mitzi York.

Notes:  Only the character Mitzi York and the non-Cybertronian entities on the freeway are completely the product of the universe in my head-space.  Everything else existed before I sat down to write.  11,200 words in total - too much for one post here at DA.

Six months on restriction, confined to the Ark, meant six months Bumblebee spent absolutely as much time as possible on the internet.  They were the first six months of what he hoped would continue to be a significant relationship.  What am I doing? he thought nervously as he drove out on liberty for the first time since the convention, ZoeSister was a nice web acquaintance, and is a true friend now.  Mitzi.  Her middle name is like something I can imagine a female Autobot choosing:  Ambrosia.  He played with Cybertronian approximations, femme-seeming word forms in his own language that might come into English as Ambrosia.  It pleased him.  There would be bad puns at his expense if his friends ever learned Mitzi's middle name.

They make a lot of fun of me already, but I try to react like they expect me to, so we can all have a laugh.  But that thought led him to contemplate more important expectations, namely Mitzi's.  Humans have such varied requirements of their friends, more of lovers, can I live up?  How can I know what she even wants?  What she needs?  His processor churned on that for a while, going over all the ways they communicated.  He hoped he would learn how to understand her quickly enough, and that they would be able to spend time together regularly.

A really sobering thought hit him, about the time he got on the freeway and began his road-trip in earnest:  They're so short-lived!  Maybe I should have petitioned for a shorter, more severe punishment?  Six months is half a year, so over half a percent of her entire life.  More than that, of the lifetime left to her.

He put it in perspective:  at twenty-six years old, she was a third of the way through her model's nominal lifespan of seventy-eight years.  A third, translated to his model, was over thirty-six thousand vorn, which was longer than he'd been aware.  Like most of his brothers-in-arms, Bumblebee refused to count the time in stasis after the wreck of the Ark on Earth.  Only Ironhide and Wheeljack insisted on including that down-time in their ages, for reasons he never cared to fathom.

And she's a creator, herself, he remembered, fondly reviewing pictures of her and her family he'd downloaded from her Photobucket account.  Byron is a sparkling, even by human standards, he reasoned, lingering on the image of Mitzi with her five-year-old son.  If she wants others, this won't last long, he thought, with her hard-wired taboos against having more than one lover at a time.  It saddened him briefly, but even if we interact the rest of her life, and she lives longer than most humans...  He promised himself that he'd cherish every moment in her company.  Megatron might get me next time, anyway, he thought grimly.  Just because we can extend our lives indefinitely, doesn't make us immortal.

He realized he'd been speeding.  He was nearly to the exit for the Sequoia National Forest when he registered it:  the calculated time for the trip was thirteen hours and he was only a few miles out at the twelve-hour mark.  There was still daylight left when he was supposed to arrive at dusk so the other campers might not notice or report a vehicle out of place.  He slowed down to precisely the speed limit, and farther, and dropped into the right lane, only to realize he was still gaining on the rig a few hundred feet ahead.  Bumblebee let the raised pick-up in the left lane overtake him and slipped in behind it to pass.

He noticed the pick-up had something dangling from it precariously.  He trained visual sensors on it from a normal following distance and was alarmed to find the something appeared to be the reproductive organs of a male biological, similar to a bovine or equine.  His best invasive scans showed that the truck was just a truck, yet his optics saw the organs, testicles, of a mammal.  Definitely mammalian.  He was fascinated, and he was disturbed.  I didn't know their technology was already so advanced.  While he poured through his databanks, looking for anything he might have picked up about successful human hybridization of their biological beasts of burden with mechanical vehicles, an awful thing happened:  the semi they were passing blew a tire.  The semi itself was unaffected because the tire was not on a driving or a steering wheel of the tractor, and the trailer was not heavily laden.  It was a recycled and reconditioned tire, one truckers call a "retread", so the treaded part came off in a long continuous piece and was whipped out into the passing lane by the wheel behind it, right into the path of both the pick-up truck-animal thing and Bumblebee.  The driver of the pick-up managed to cut the wheel back and forth in such a way that the rubber didn't impact the side of the vehicle and was straddled in the middle of the lane.  To Bumblebee's horror, the tire-turned-debris struck the pick-up truck creature sharply and tore the poor thing's flesh, removing the organ.  All Bumblebee could do was swerve to avoid hitting both, and in his desperation to avoid crushing the truck-creature's testes the blown retread struck his own undercarriage painfully.

He pulled over to the median to recover and try to figure out how to help the truck-creature without transforming.  He watched, aghast, as the driver of the pick-up truck continued on, oblivious to the injury inflicted on his beast.  That human's bad as a Decepticon, he thought morbidly.  Still, his own injury wasn't anything that would require help, and he thought he could wait until traffic died down a bit then back up quickly and scoop up the lost body part that had come to rest against a reflective lane divider.  Maybe it can be reattached, he thought.  There was a long break in traffic approaching, after a J.B. Hunt tractor-trailer.  His scans proved the composition of the lost part was organic, a complex hydrocarbon, more solid than the flesh of other mammals he'd noticed, but That's some sort of mechanized creature, he thought, so its - his - make-up was bound to be different from natural creatures.  Recording the license plate of the F-150, California SKMYBLS, so he could return the poor creature's part, he prepared to make his dash across the lanes.

The driver of the J.B. Hunt rig changed lanes at precisely the wrong time and rolled over the truck-creature's testes.

Bumblebee was horrified.

He sat there at the side of the road, processor functions on hold, pumps cycling fast.

The lost part was a purplish-blue patch of hydrocarbons on the pavement.

He nearly expelled the energon he'd taken in before departing the Ark.

Shaken to his spark by the heartlessness of the human drivers - The owner never even pulled over to check on his animal!  The poor thing just had to keep running!  And the other- just rolled over it- didn't even notice.  Bumblebee sat for a few breems.  His holding tank stopped sloshing so violently; he slowly got back onto the road and followed the rest of the directions Mitzi had sent him.

The delay left him only about twenty minutes ahead of schedule.  Mitzi was already waiting for him in her car.  She got out and stood beside her Mustang as he pulled in beside it.  She was smiling, and more than he remembered, more than the pictures he had did her justice.  He was suddenly stiflingly aware of the fact that they'd only met in person once before.

He was so happy to see her, and so disturbed by what he'd witnessed, that he almost forgot about the possibility of watchers.  He nearly transformed right there beside her in the parking area.

"Hey there, Bumblebee," she said slowly, and trailed her fingers over his front fender as she walked to the passenger's side door.  As if she knew he was about to do something stupid, she reminded him of the plan:  "I pitched the tent at the farthest campsite."

Before she could touch the door handle, he opened it gently, earlier distress temporarily forgotten.

"Quite the gentleman, aren't you?" she asked.  She paused to look at his roof, tracing the near edge of his hidden Autobot insignia with the tip of her index finger before turning her body to get in.

Bumblebee thought he recognized it as a rhetorical question, until she hesitated to get in and sit down.  "I don't know how to answer that, Mitzi.  But it's very good to see you."

She laughed and seemed to relax:  the tension left her hands where they gripped the door frame and his roofline.  She was looking at his dashboard and interior.  "It's good to see you, too.  It's just- I-" she closed her eyes and dropped her head, "Honey, it's weird to think I'm going to sit in you.  Like I've sat in any number of passenger seats in my life."

Bumblebee chuckled and let the sound travel in his plating to her fingers.  She looked up at that, but couldn't seem to find a place to rest her eyes.  "You're welcome to the driver's seat if you want, but..." he approximated a shrug on his suspension, "Have you ever been carried by another human?"  The intimacy and care of that ought to be universal, he thought.

She nodded, assuming correctly that he could see her.

"Think of it just like that.  Only-" he stopped, nervous about confirming what suddenly struck him as a possible reason for her hesitance.

"What, 'Bee?  'Only' what?"  She unconsciously moved her hands back and forth along the door and window frames as if feeling the texture of the finish and the seal.

He reflexively twitched the door away from her hand, "That tickles!"  But he admitted his train of thought:  "Only, in this mode, I get to touch more of you at once."

She laughed, and plunked herself decisively in the passenger seat.  "Fine.  I was worried about sitting on something sensitive."  Her hand was on the door pull, but it closed of his impulse.

"You are, but-" he wondered if he were somehow in dangerous territory but started slowly forward over the dirt track to the campsites, "is that a bad thing?"

She patted his dashboard and ghosted her other hand over the edge of the steering wheel and gear shift, "If it's okay with you, it's okay with me."

"It's definitely okay with me," he said, and surprised her by fluidly slipping the seat belt across her hips.

"I can handle this," she said, nodding.  Bumblebee liked what that movement caused in the rest of her body as she rested against his seat.  "Seriously, I think all I need to get comfortable with this- -arrangement," he heard the smirk in her voice before he registered the subtle change in the expression on her face, "is to know where to look when I talk to you.  My momma taught me to make eye contact, and the older I get the more I need it."

He thought for a moment about the logistics of his interior and his various optical sensors.  "The simplest way," he started, then realized he had passed the last of the campsites in the row, "Mitzi, have I missed your camp?" He slowed down further, barely crawling along the path.  With his headlights and variety of sensors, he wasn't terribly concerned for his own sake in the dark, but Mitzi simply would not be able to see much outside in a few minutes.

She looked around them, and shook her head again, "No, we've got a ways to go.  When I said I got the farthest campsite, I meant the absolute farthest, the last point in the park designated as still within the camp area.  Technically," she searched his dashboard, and he understood she was seeking optics out of habit, "no one's supposed to have a car out this far except the Rangers."

"I hope I don't get you in trouble," he said.  He noticed the texture of the path change as it became steadily more grassy and less bare dirt and pebbles.  Back to their other conversation, "Would you be satisfied by myoptical sensors in the rearview mirror?  They're wide-angle, but a big part of how I see in this mode."

Her eyes immediately snapped to that mirror.  She reached up as if to move it, but stopped herself, dropping her hands back to the dashboard.  Looking closely, trying to see past the mirrored surface, she moved her whole body subtly.  She squinted her eyes a little, "You see through the mirrors?"  She looked briefly at both outside mirrors, but returned to the central one.

"Yeah, and in other ways, too.  I like how you look in infrared, and you reflect a lot of UV.  It's a neat effect, but I don't know how to explain it to you.  You don't have analogs to those sensors."  That was one of the less fun aspects of their differences.  He changed the subject:  "Are you comfortable, thermally?  I can warm the seat if you like, or draw heat away faster."  Much more potential in exploring that difference, he thought.

Mitzi seemed to agree:  her facial expression relaxed into a knowing sort of smile.  She shifted purposely, settling down farther into the seat.  "I'm good, thanks.  Still seems weird, to be sitting on part of you, have my feet on part of you, be in you.  It's- I don't know."  She looked out again, "There."  She pointed ahead, "That family-size tent, that's mine."

As he pulled up to it, she changed the topic completely: "How are you, 'Bee?  Six months without getting out of the house except for work would make me crazy.  And how was the drive?  Does a long drive like that make you tired?" she referred to his thirteen-hour stretch, "Or, is that even a long way to you?"

He rolled to a stop, the image of that poor truck creature at the fore of his mind again.  She unbuckled herself, opened the door and hopped out, then looked at him expectantly.

"Oh Mitzi it was awful, I saw-" but how did he describe what he saw?  How describe the sense of empathy he had for the truck-thing.  What was it, anyway?

Concerned, she held out a hand, palm up, inviting something.  When he didn't speak or move, she prompted him, "I'm sorry you got in trouble 'cause of me."  She mistook which question he was answering.

Bumblebee spoke as he transformed.  "Don't be!  That, the six months, it wasn't bad at all.  I-" bipedal, he set his hand over hers, which seemed to be what she meant for him to do.  "Today, I saw-"  What are the words for what I saw?

He started to try to tell her what happened as she hugged him.  "This truck on the highway, it-" he paused to process the technical biological words into ones he was confident she would understand clearly as an engineer, not a medical or veterinary professional.

She moved to step away from him, touching his cheek as she did so.  "Let's sit down in the tent and you can tell me all about it, okay?"

He dimmed his optics in agreement, then remembered that she had no way to know what that gesture meant, so he nodded too, as humans did.  She knelt to unzip the tent, explaining, "I got the only one at the sporting goods store," finished with the bottom, she slowly stood up as she unzipped the right side, "with a door big enough to drive through, just in case there were people around."  She reached across the door flap, fully opening up the tent.  She stepped inside and again offered him her hand.

He took it gently in one of his and stepped as lightly as he could into the cloth enclosure.  Trying to shake the ill-feeling from seeing the truck-creature mutilated (further?), he attempted a romantic gesture he'd seen in human media - Didn't all the men who met Inara in polite company kiss her hand? - he held her hand as if it were sculpted crystal and drew the back of it to his lip components.

She smiled up at him knowingly, and he wondered if he were in trouble.  "We'll get to that, Honey, I promise, but something shook you up."  Holding tightly the hand that held hers, she zipped them into the tent, making it just a little darker inside than out with window flaps open on either side wall.  She left the bottom of the flap loose.  She stepped into him, and released his hand to pet the sides of his face, down to his neck, and rocked up on her toes to kiss him hello.

Optics off, How did you get me all off-balance? cycled through his processor, between the passing horror on the highway and the promise of reliving his memory of their first meeting.

She drew away a fraction.  "Definitely not latex," she breathed against his mouth, so he knew she was actively remembering their first kiss, too.  He powered his optics, then dimmed them as far as they would go without turning off when he realized they were bright enough to light up everything in the tent at their nominal setting.

Mitzi shook her head, and he wondered if he had done something weird, or something inappropriate.  Before he could ask, she said, "I didn't remember that clearly.  Wow.  Talk about bright blue eyes."  She touched his optic ridge, and trailed her fingers down either side of his face as she spoke, "My weakness, blondes with big blue eyes."  She paused, then, "When it gets cool enough to close the flaps, I want you to show me how bright your eyes can get," she sighed, with a tone he couldn't read, "but you're right to tone it down."  She sat on her sleeping bag, stretched on the floor against one side wall of the tent.

He remained where he was, watching her.

"You're still thinking about it, aren't you, Bumblebee?" she asked, looking up at him.  "You don't have to tell me about it if you don't want to, but-" she lay down on her side, facing him, "we've got a few days, and you may not be tired, but I am, and it'll probably help you to talk about it?"  In tone, it sounded like a question, but the words didn't, so he didn't answer, just processed her words and his own thoughts.  "'Bee?"  She seemed very concerned that he remained silent, just looking down at her.  "Bumblebee, what happened?  Did one of the Decepticons attack you or something?"  That possibility seemed to upset her, and she started to sit back up.  "Could they have tracked you here?"

He sat a little abruptly, careful not to tear the floor of the tent with his feet.  "Nothing like that," he answered, cycling cooling air to try to combat the increased rates of his other systems.  He sat with his legs folded up under him, in the way that was comfortable for his model.  He felt like he took up the majority of the floor of the tent.  Am I really so much bigger than you are? passed randomly through his processor, I'm only a fraction of a meter taller.  Flat-footed, he was just over eight inches taller than Mitzi's five-foot-eleven-inch height.  But seated with her legs folded before her, Indian style, he thought he'd heard it called, he estimated that he took up nearly twenty-five percent of the floor space of the tent where she occupied less than ten percent.  I do out-weigh you by- he did the math, which he hadn't before, -twenty times.

It wasn't enough distraction.  One of his pumps whined, and he briefly felt embarrassed by that involuntary expression of distress.  Being unfamiliar with his bodily functions, Mitzi had to interpret it within her own experience, and seemed to reach the right conclusion.  She looked worried for him, and shifted to her knees to shuffle off of her sleeping bag and closer to him.

Mitzi was very tactile, and reached out to him as he told her, haltingly, what he saw.  He off-lined his optics, so he didn't have to see his horror transfer to her.  Why am I telling you this? he thought, noting that she squeezed his fingers reassuringly.  You're an engineer, you might know something about the hybrid, he reasoned, and you deserve to know what's being done on your own planet.  At the point in the story where the tire tore the creature's flesh, she drew in air sharply and made a choked sound.

He didn't know it, but she was trying desperately not to laugh.

Bumblebee thought he was upsetting her, but kept talking, and quickly, clinically, came to the end of the account, with the smear on the pavement.  Mitzi was making little gasping sounds, and he could feel her shake violently.

He on-lined his optics when she reclaimed her right hand, recriminating himself for laying such an awful story on her.  "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have-"

Mitzi cut him off with a hand motion, then confirmed the worst by reaching up to wipe a tear from her cheek.  He didn't understand what he saw: a human would have seen she was laughing so hard she cried.  She was breathing hard.  He imagined she was having trouble with her cooling system, as he did with his when he was upset.  Her face was contorted so that it almost looked to him as if she were laughing, if she hadn't had tears in her eyes.  He reached out to her again, and gently pulled her the rest of the way into his personal space.  She cooperated.

"No, I am sorry, I- I should have kept my vocalizer still, I've upset you-"

Gasping, she got up on her knees on his thighs and pulled herself up straight against him to hug his head to her chest and plant a trembling kiss on top of his helmet between his horns.  "Oh, 'Bee, no, it's good you told me what happened.  Sshhh."  She stroked the back of his helm and neck in a way he knew was meant to comfort.  He held her around the waist and hips, and she leaned back against his arms to look down into his optics.  "Honey, Sweetness, you poor thing," she kissed him between his optics, smiling gently.  "That pick-up truck was just a pick-up truck, with a le-se pi-gu for an owner."

He started to vocalize to protest and she shushed him.  "No, 'Bee, trust me.  That- that-" she shook her head, smiling tightly as she decided on the right word to use, "that appendage was just an affectation, a plastic piece of garbage," she enunciated especially clearly for emphasis, "hung on the frame of a perfectly good truck.  A normal truck.  Tell me again, what you said the license plate was?"

Bumblebee wanted to believe her, but didn't understand the significance of the license plate.  "Ess-kay-em-wye-bee-ell-ess.  But I don't think it's related."

Mitzi laughed, and kissed the bridge of his nose, then looked him straight in the eye from so close to his face he could feel her breath across his chin. "That's 'cause you aren't as familiar with men as you think you are.  Honey, that is a custom plate, I know 'cause it's too much for coincidence.  The jerkwad driving the truck hung plastic testicles from the belly of the thing and ordered a plate that reads 'suck my balls'.  He's an asshole.  The truck is just a truck.  It was jacked up on its suspension, right?"

Bumblebee could not imagine why a person would want to pretend his vehicle was really an animal under its plating, why the phrase 'suck my balls' would be familiar enough for Mitzi to read it in those letters and be so certain it was a vanity plate, or why the scenario as Mitzi understood it added up to an unpleasant entity behind the wheel.  At least I was right about that part, he thought, having thought the worst of the driver for his treatment of the damaged truck-animal.  He nodded, and wondered how Mitzi guessed the truck rode at least ten inches higher off the ground than it was meant to.

She ran her hands over his shoulders, a satisfied look on her face.  "He's - the driver-owner person is - compensating for his own short-comings.  Figure the higher the truck's jacked up, the smaller the driver's endowment."  She put emphasis on that last word, with a raised eyebrow and a smirk.

Bumblebee tried to look like he understood, dimming his optics a tick.  He suspected she was not referring to an interest-bearing monetary account.

She continued, "Think of it as his way of telling the rest of us not to bother to talk to him."

There were several things in her explanation that eluded him, but Mitzi massaged the plating of his shoulders and moved against him in ways he had only imagined for six months.  She seemed to remember their first meeting as well as he did, gently working her hands into his shoulder seams and stimulating the sensors and circuits, distracting him from his earlier distress and any confusion from her assessment of the cause.

He moved his hands gently against her body, too.  He enjoyed the different textures of her:  denim pants with soft fuzzy frayed edges, smooth satiny polyester shirt, smoother skin, and her hair that was somehow soft and stiff at once.  It was just short enough that he wasn't worried about getting his fingers caught in it, although he had to be careful not to allow individual strands to get trapped in the workings of his knuckles.  He ran one hand through it as delicately as he could, fascinated.

She moved her cheek against his appreciatively.  "Mmmh.  That feels nice, 'Bee.  But I really am pretty tired.  Let's just rest tonight, okay?"

"Okay," he answered, continuing to pet the back of her head, still amazed that his improbable memory was true.  I know this body, and it goes with the mind I know from the internet.  Amazing.

Just as he moved to kiss her, the movement of her hands within his shoulders changed:  the one in his left shoulder stilled and the one in his right shoulder started making sampling motions, as near as he could tell.  Touching some of his internals almost timidly, then backing off; he could sense her rubbing her fingers together.

"Are you okay?" Mitzi asked suddenly, voice rising a few notes in concern.

"Yeah, I'm fine, why?" he asked, connecting her question to the movement of her hand, "What do you feel in my shoulder?"

She withdrew both hands, careful with her left to touch as little as possible on the way out.  "I think you're bleeding, 'Bee."  He supported her as much as she would allow as she stood up.  "Feels like transmission fluid," she continued, reaching with her right hand for a lantern from the end of her pallet on the floor.  Turning it on, they could see her fingers had a pinkish cast on them.  She smelled it, continuing to rub her thumb against the first three fingers of her left hand.  She held them out to him, "What is this, Bumblebee?  This can't be good."

He shrugged a shoulder, wanting to be dismissive, but feeling a little worried, himself.  "It's energon.  Not the raw stuff we store for long periods and take in as fuel, but the hydraulic version I produce from it in one of my processors.  When the blown tire hit me, it must have weakened a line, or cracked it, and when I transformed, the stress made it start leaking.  It's not a big deal."  He had no internal alarms going off, although he could pinpoint the circuit the leak was in by the slightly lower pressure of the system.

"Will it stop on its own?" she asked, wiping her fingers off on a paper towel from the roll she'd left on the cooler at the rear of the tent.  All business, she seemed now, body language very like Wheeljack when he assisted Ratchet.

"I- maybe-," he wanted it to, but, "no, I don't think it will.  It's a pressurized system."  He wouldn't bleed out, but realistically, he was a twelve-hour drive - thirteen, if I stick to the speed limits - from the Ark and real medical attention.  "I'm sorry, Mitzi.  I should get back and have it seen to."

"It's on your undercarriage when you're a Volkswagen, right?"

Bumblebee dimmed his optics in affirmation.

He forgot to nod, but she seemed to understand the Cybertronian gesture.  "Could I wrap it up, make a bandage, a patch, out of duct tape and a hose clamp to hold the pressure?  I have a tool box in my car; I may not be Kaylee, but I'm not useless."  She was thinking, looking out the window over his shoulder toward something outside.  "Is that selfish?  I can do first aid on people- other people- humans," not to leave him out of the former group, he guessed, "-and I tinker with Sally," she named her Mustang, "all the time.  I just," she looked back at his optics, then down at her feet, "I don't want you to have to leave so soon."

Impulsively, he reached out to her again, getting up on his knees as he did so, such that he could rest his head on her shoulder if he wanted.  He looked up at her.  "I don't want to leave, either.  Can you patch me up?  Just be careful not to let any glue mix in with my energon.  Tape may not be a good idea."

She was hugging him lightly in return, and stroked the back of his helm.  "Don't worry, Honey, I'll fix ya right up."  She kissed him soundly before disengaging.  "You wait here, I'll just run down to my car and be back in a shake."

Continued in part 2.