dunmurderin: A clownfish, orange and white, with a banner saying he is NOT a Combaticon!  So no one mistakes him for one, y'know? (Combaticons by Koilungfish)
[personal profile] dunmurderin
Title: I Got a Girl

Characters/Pairing: Blast Off, Range Viper #3
Word Count: approximately 2100 words
Rating: a mild R
Author's Note: Evy was a character in the GI Joe cartoon produced by DIC in the late 80s/early 90s. Her sole appearance was in the episode "I Found You...Evy." Like Blast Off, I have no idea why these two seem to be a match, but they do.

I Got a Girl


Blast Off was locked in orbit 124 kilometers above the surface of the earth. Specifically, he was hovering over a set of coordinates off the coast of the Achit Nuur, largest freshwater lake in Mongolia.

"Are you in position?" Onslaught's voice was under control again, a far cry from his earlier raging.

"Yes." Blast Off matched Onslaught's tone, coolness for coolness.

"Good. You will remain in place for the next twelve hours." Onslaught spoke carefully, his words clipped as if his control was beginning to slip. "I want that sector fully mapped and a detailed report ready upon your return." A pause while Onslaught switched to a team frequency, making sure that the others heard his final order. "To insure that you are able to maintain the proper focus, you will remain under radio silence until your time is up, Onslaught out."

Blast Off waited until he was sure Onslaught had broken the commlink before he replied. "Slag you. We both know I was right. Idiot."

As he focused his imaging sensors on the correct coordinates -- a six by six meter square patch of ground -- Blast Off reviewed the argument Onslaught, trying to determine where he'd gone wrong. And, because he was a Combaticon, what insults had stung his brother hardest.

On the whole, he hadn't said anything to Onslaught that he hadn't said before. Onslaught was hopelessly enamored with his own plans and had a potentially fatal need for them to be right even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. He did have a tendency to flail like a loose high pressure hose when his strategies were thwarted, leaving Blast Off and Brawl to pick up the slack.

No, Blast Off mused, the problem wasn't what he'd said. The problem was that he'd said it at maximum volume in full audial range of both Scrapper and Motormaster. It was one thing to argue privately, but quite another to point out Onslaught's faults in exacting detail in front of other gestalt commanders.

"And calling him a scraplet-addled Empty probably didn't help either," Blast Off sighed, calling the thirty-six square meter patch of ground into focus on his highest resolution.

The ground below was uninteresting -- no doubt part of the reason Onslaught had chosen it. Various forms of vegetation carpeted the ground, broken only by small rocky patches here and there. At his current resolution, Blast Off would miss only the tiniest of organic creatures. After a moment's hesitation, he scaled his resolution back to the point where he'd pick up anything human-sized or bigger -- unlikely though that prospect was.

And then, he settled in to begin watching and waiting. He was used to doing this, even enjoyed it at times. What truly made it a punishment was being ordered here in disgrace.

Well, that and the radio silence. Oh, he was still receiving standard Decepticon transmissions; Onslaught didn't have that kind of authority. But he was cut off from the usual background chatter of his brothers talking with him and each other. Even if he didn't usually answer them, just being able to listen to, say, Vortex teasing Brawl or Swindle excitedly describing some new weapons design he'd developed gave him something to be able to focus on when things got truly tedious on patrol.

"Stop that!" he scolded himself. "It's twelve hours, you can do that easily enough! No whinging, you're just going to have to live with being bored. You'll be listening to those idiots gabble soon enough."

Strengthening his resolve, he began to tighten his focus and engaged his data storage units. He was debating shutting down all but his most essential systems and simply dozing his way through his punishment when a patch of ground stood up.

At first, he thought it might have been a tree -- except that trees rarely grew quite that quickly. And most trees, in his experience, didn’t walk around as this one had begun to do. A moment’s careful study and a quick infrared scan revealed the ‘tree’ to be a human in camouflage gear.

Blast Off hesitated a moment, then widened his scanning area. Another IR scan showed no other humans nearby.

“Alright,” he murmured, tightening his focus onto the human again. “I’ve found you, now what are you doing out here?”

# # #


Range Viper #3 -- or Evy as she still sometimes thought of herself now -- rubbed the knuckles of one fist along her lower back in an effort to try and work out some of the kinks in her spine. Behind the skull-like mask of her helmet, she scowled at this reminder that she was getting older. The time had been when she could have held position all day then stood up without so much as a creak. Now, she caught herself stifling grunts and trying to muffle popping joints after a mere six hours in position. Soon, she’d start slowing down and when that day came...

She pushed the thought from her mind. Distractions killed quicker than bullets and fretting about the inevitable simply wasted energy. When the day came, she’d be too slow and one of the Joes or one of her fellow Range Vipers would end things for her. That was the order of things; fretting about it was like worrying about whether the sun would come up in the east.

Besides, she was in some of the most desolately beautiful country on the planet. The sun was out, the weather a balmy 30 degrees Celsius, she had a near endless supply of water and fresh fish in front of her and she was, happiest of all, the only Range Viper within a fifty-mile radius. What more could a girl ask for?

A hot bath would be nice, murmured that part of her she referred to as Soft Underbelly. She sheered at it, chasing it away as she began to slip out of her ghillie suit.

“No hot baths, just a nice cold dip,” she told herself, speaking in a whisper so low she was all but mouthing the words. “That’s the price we paid for all this.”

And it was a price she’d paid gladly. With her survival training, the McWorld had offered no challenges. She’d seen her future without Cobra -- either working a mindless corporate job, trapped indoors behind glass and steel like an animal in a zoo or, worse, being stuck tending to the larval spawn of the parasitic middle class, teaching them survival skills they’d never use or appreciate. Cobra had been her salvation and she would be its staunch protector.

After a swim, of course. A girl had to have her priorities straight.

# # #


Blast Off watched as the human began to remove its outer covering. The outer suit reminded him of the camouflage netting he and his fellow Combaticons used to help disguise their temporary encampments. Underneath, the human was clad sensibly enough in an armored uniform. It was nothing that could stand up against him of course, but at least it was better than the flimsy garments worn by most humans.

An insignia on the uniform caught Blast Off’s attention. It was a stylized snake’s head; a quick review of his databanks identified it as the symbol for Cobra, one of the human terrorist organizations. They were apparently quite the nuisance and a ready market for whatever bits of junk Swindle could sell them.

“Alright, that’s another piece of the puzzle,” Blast Off murmured. “Now, what is a Cobra agent doing out in the middle of nowhere? You’ve got no support, no larger force and I rather doubt you’re sight-seeing.”

By way of answer, the human removed their helmet and set it to the side.

“A female,” Blast Off said the word as neutrally as he could, but his frame shuddered. For a brief, panicked moment he considered calling Onslaught to apologize and beg forgiveness, never mind the damage it would do to his pride.

And then, the human began to remove her outer armor and all thoughts of doing anything but watching her drained out of him.

It wasn’t that he’d never seen a naked human before. Certain areas of the planet were all but covered with them. And a random stroll through their video entertainments would show more examples of human nudity than Blast Off really liked to think about.

No, the difference here was that this particular human was the first one Blast Off had ever seen -- naked or clothed -- who looked truly alive. This one didn’t merely exist as so many of her fellows seemed to, she was alive and aware and clearly more than a little dangerous. She was, blasphemy though it might be, practically a Decepticon made flesh.

Firing his rockets, he lowered his orbit by ten kilometers and followed her movements as she stepped into the water.

# # #


The water was cold, at the point where ‘invigorating’ verged on ‘painful’, but Evy continued wading in. She’d been sweating in that ghillie suit for the better part of three days and she needed to get the stink off her.

She waded out until the water was waist-high before ducking under the surface. She stayed down long enough to scrub her fingers vigorously through her close-cropped hair. It was getting long again,; soon she’d have to hack it back to a reasonable length.

Resurfacing, she swam closer to shore where it was easier to crouch in the water and scour herself with mud from the lake bottom. She didn’t scrub hard, just enough to slough off dead skin and make herself feel clean again. Not quite as good as soap would have been, but if she stuck a three-digit price tag on it, she’d have made a fortune marketing it as the latest spa treatment.
# # #


Blast Off watched with bemusement and a certain amount of disappointment as the human rubbed mud on herself, obscuring his view of her. It was only when she ducked back under the water and resurfaced a few meters later, rinsed clean that he realized she was bathing.

She dove a few more times, disappearing under the water with a minimum of splashing. Her movements reminded Blast Off of a hunter-seeker -- quick, economical and graceful.

When she finally resurfaced, she rolled onto her back and floated with her arms out to her sides. Blast Off barely hesitated before focusing in tighter for a closer look.

Up close, she was utterly engaging. Her body was a collection of sharp angles and smooth planes broken here and there by scars that only added to her attraction. She had the hard, imperfect body of a worker not the soft, sculpted perfection of a trinket. Without fully understanding why he did, Blast Off found her to be beautiful.

He watched her float, enraptured by the way her body moved as she kicked her feet to stay afloat. He traced her, mapping her body the way he’d map terrain before a battle. He worked from foot to head, pausing here and there to linger on a scar or a speckled skin pattern.

When he arrived at her face, he pulled back fractionally to take in her entire face at once. Her eyes were a deep brownish-green that almost matched the color of his armor. He wondered, briefly, if this was a sign or omen of some sort. He was about to dismiss it and move on when the human smiled at him.

Again, Blast Off found himself unnerved, but this time his impulse wasn’t to run away but to go closer. For a terrifying moment, he found himself seriously considering landing, scooping the human up and leaving, taking her somewhere, anywhere. He could take her and leave Earth, avoid Cybertron and find a place where it could be just the two of them, alone with each other until such a time as she passed on to wherever dead humans went.

Wherever it was, it would have a lake.

He was just finishing his course calculations when Onslaught’s voice broke over his radio. “Blast Off, return to base. Megatron has given us a mission.”

Blast Off held back several choice obscenities as his fantasy disintegrated under the cold light of nearly being caught out. “What about my punishment?” he asked, hoping his guilt would pass for normal sulkiness.

“The mission comes first,” Onslaught said, impatiently. “After that, we shall see. Though I’ve never known you to seek out punishment.“ Onslaught chuckled. “Perhaps Vortex is rubbing off on you?”

“Hardly, I’m plotting my course now, I’ll be arriving ASAP, Blast Off out.”

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