The Balcony Garden

[heliopauseentertainments]

A request for @korloniumcrystals, a quadruple drabble.

Continuity: IDW1

Rating: General

Relationship: Shockwave/Optimus Prime

Characters: Shockwave & Optimus Prime

Summary: In which Shockwave tends to his crystal garden.

Crossposting: AO3 | Tumblr | Pillowfort

Fic under cut

Decades ago, Shockwave had been surprised to wake up in one of the rebuilt medical centers in Iacon, the remnants of his destroyed time drive removed from his body and Optimus’s masked but worried face looking down at him from nearby. The surprise itself had also been… a surprise. He would have expected a sort of detached analysis of the odds against this outcome, but not actually feeling surprised.

On the balcony of their Iaconian apartment, he sat on a bench, carefully filing away the unwanted burs on one of the crystals he’d been carefully growing with the one hand he still had. He had a particular polyhedral shape in mind for this one, but the accumulating mineral deposits kept having other ideas.

It had been a long recovery, psychologically. Relearning and adapting emotional stimuli and responses again was difficult, but with Optimus’s support and patience, Shockwave had been making progress.

He was still making progress. Every day.

It wasn’t the sort of journey one could complete.

Yet another reality Shockwave was forced to confront, that an improvement without telos was still worthwhile.

The balcony garden had been Optimus’s idea. A project to keep Shockwave busy in his retirement, to keep him thinking, something low stakes while they made sense of what to do with the newfound post-war peace.

The sound of footsteps behind him told him that Optimus was approaching, most likely with refreshments. Yes, that was the most probable occurrence.

The bench creaked as Optimus sat down next to him, a cup of glowing fuel in each hand.

“You looked thirsty.” Shockwave couldn’t have looked like anything, but he appreciated Optimus’s attempt.

The offer to have his head and hand restored had occasionally come up over the years. Shockwave always turned them down. Yet, whenever Optimus leaned over and pressed his forehead against the side of Shockwave’s optical mount, like right now, he felt the odd wish to have a mouth.

Optimus had one, after all, but he always kept it covered unless the were eating, most likely out of solidarity for Shockwave’s mouth-less existence.

“Thank you,” he said, setting the metal file aside before taking the cup from Optimus’s outstretched hand. Gratitude was also something relatively new, but it came easily enough towards Optimus.

Much like his recovery, a garden could also never truly be completed, but he had Optimus with him every step of the way.