#the one that goes now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

still-busy-being-mortal · 3 years

Text

the rising of the moon

word count: 4544

rating: G

fandom: the mechanisms

warnings: major character death

summary: They've lived so long together, perhaps it is only fitting they die alone.

story notes: so this came about as a result of wanting to cry MORE about the mechs. don't ask me why.

features raphaella spouting unnecessary science jargon, ivy being emotionally repressed/depressed, drumbot brian holding a conversation with himself, and the toy soldier being actually emotionally intelligent.

——————

JONNY

It’s a quiet day aboard the starship formerly known as The Aurora. Most of the crew is out, and she’s drifting slowly through a dusty asteroid field. Ivy has stayed aboard to read, and Drumbot Brian was designated ship-sitter, so he’s stayed on as well. When enough time has passed (Is it days? Or decades? No one knows anymore, and no one cares. They are all so tired.), Brian hits the alert switch that will tell the Mechanisms to come home.

Ivy feels the gentle vibration in her brain --the pulse of The Aurora’s beacon-- and she puts her book down before walking slowly to the navigation bridge. Marius’ hand starts to buzz, messing up his note-taking; he apologizes to the rather fascinating asteroid-dweller he’s interviewing and takes his leave. Ashes feels their chest hum, and they turn away from their beautiful, fiery meteor shower.

[read more on ao3, or continue below!]

One by one, the Mechs find their way home. It takes some longer than others, but they all return eventually. Or they should; right now, there are only seven crewmates in the navigation bridge.

“I’m sick of waiting--where the hell is Jonny?” Tim whines.

“I guess he decided to stay in the asteroid belt?” Marius says.

“Woulda been nice to let us know,” mutters Ashes, “So we’re not all sittin’ here for ages.”

Brian stands and raises his hand. “All in favour of leaving and returning in a few decades?” They all agree, so he pilots Aurora away from the asteroid field.

Time goes by, and they do not hear from Jonny. Of course, members of the crew sometimes stay away for long periods of time, but that doesn’t mean their absence is not felt. And Jonny hasn’t appeared to try and contact them at all.

After a while, they vote to return to the asteroid belt. When they arrive, they split up, communication devices in hand.

Ivy combs through her memory, trying to summon any knowledge she has on Asteroid Field 01.18.20. The Toy Soldier moves methodically from meteor to meteor, searching for their lost comrade. Raphaella interviews any inhabitants she comes across, axially coding their qualitative responses to identify patterns in the data. Tim goes to a bar for a drink, irritated at Jonny’s latest antic.

He walks into some nameless, backwater joint and sits at the counter, flagging down the bartender with a lazy wave. He orders and waits, mechanical eyes roving the establishment. And then he freezes.

On the far wall hang a few dozen photographs, all dusty and poor quality. Above the photos is a crudely-done banner that simply reads “Cheers to Our Past Patrons.” One of the pictures is of Jonny.

When the bartender returns, Tim asks: “What’s the deal with the wall of fame, then?”

“Oh, that,” they answer tiredly. “Just sum dark joke the old owner thought up. Them’s the folks who kicked it in this here bar, you see.”

Tim was confused. “You mean those people died here? That can’t be right; my friend’s up there, and he can’t d--he’s alive.”

The barkeep shrugged. “Don’t know, pal. We had to bury most of thems out back, if you reckon you want to check.” He chuckled darkly and went back to drink-making.

Tim quickly finished his drink and went out the back door. He debated alerting the other Mechs about this development, but decided he might as well see for himself first.

He found the makeshift graveyard quickly, small rusty mounds amid the equally rusty asteroid outback. Some displayed names on roughly carved wood planks, but obviously none of them said “Jonny d’Ville” (Tim laughed at the idea of Jonny carrying around an ID). Most were unmarked, however, so he started to dig.

He used his hands, too impatient to try and find a shovel. He came across bodies and bones in various stages of decay, but none that had any chance of being Jonny. About fed up with this ridiculous idea of his, he decided to dig up one more grave. He shovelled dirt and rocks out of the way, until his hand hit something hard and cold. Something metallic. He pulled on it, and came away with a belt. Christ , he thought.

He quickly scooped away the rest of the dirt, revealing the corpse of Captain First Mate Jonny d’Ville. Dead. Tim stumbled backward, hand fumbling for his comm. “Um, mates, I-I found him.”

The Mechanisms were different after that. Yes, Nastya had gone Out long ago, but they had never actually come across her dead corpse , so it wasn’t the same. Marius had examined his body and declared him fully, completely, and irrevocably dead. They had held a funeral, but they were all too much in shock to really remember it. All they knew was that they were down a crew member, without a captain first mate, and terribly aware of their own mortality.

ASHES

About half the crew was in Raphaella’s lab, helping her with some complex kind of experiment. Raph was mixing two viciously green liquids together, while Marius was unspooling wire from a large bobbin. The Toy Soldier was holding an ultraviolet light against a motherboard, and Ashes connected the motherboard to the chartreuse concoction using the wires. After pouring all of the chemicals, Raphaella pulled on some rubber gloves and pulled out a small pocketwatch from her shirt. “Are we ready?” she asked gleefully. Without waiting for an answer, she started the countdown. “Five! Four! Three! T--curses!” The pocketwatch slipped from her gloved grasp and fell into the churning beaker. All at once there was a flash and a bang, and the lights went out. They stood in complete silence for a minute, before the backup generators flicked on.

The Toy Soldier clapped its hands, “That Was Jolly Good! Can We Do It Again?”

“No, TS, look, I got goop on my--wait!” Marius shouted, “Where’s Ashes?” They all turned to look at where the quartermaster had been just moments before. The floor where they’d been standing was a scorched, intricate, dark pattern of swirls. “What the hell is that ?”

“I Do Not Know, But I Will Go Get The Archivist!”

TS returned with Ivy, who took one look at the patterns on the floor and asked: “Who is it that has been time travelling?”

“Time travelling?!” Raph exclaimed.

“Yes,” Ivy said, “Those marks are a perfect exemplar of the evidence left behind when one has been forcibly transported forward or backward in the time continuum. Which one of you did it? Did you happen to bring back any books?”

“It wasn’t us: it was Ashes.” Marius said, “And we don’t think they’ve come back yet.”

Ivy grew very pale. “That is highly alarming. There’s a less than 0.1% chance that a time traveller ever comes back if they do not return instantly after the outset of their journey.”

“Y-you mean Ashes might not...” Marius trailed off, “...Wait a second! That doesn’t make sense! We don’t experience time linearly!”

“That may be true, but we are not forcibly moved through it either. We are at the whim of the narrative flow, and any alteration to that usually produces negative results.”

The Toy Soldier flashed through many emotions at once, though its face never changed. “So Quartermaster O’Reilly Is...Gone?”

“We can’t prove that yet!” Raph cried, fluttering around the lab and grabbing various scientific instruments. “Maybe if I can pinpoint when exactly they’ve been transported to, we can...we can bring them back.”

“That’s quite a long shot,” Marius said.

“What is science if not a shot into the ignorant dark?” Raph replied, rigging up a technological monstrosity. She aimed the thing at the charred spot and clicked a button, causing the machine to emit a pulsating, whirring sound. “Oh, you all might want to close your eyes.”

With a burst of green and a harsh dial tone, the thing spit out a strip of paper. Raph grabbed it and read it intently. She dropped it suddenly, eyes distant and empty. “They are gone.”

The room burst into a cacophony. (“What do you mean?!” “Gone How? Gone Forever ?” “It was statistically unlikely that they could have returned.”) Raph picked up the paper and pressed it onto the lab table. Most of it was meaningless words and numbers, but Raph pointed out a string in the center: “RESULT) DATE: %& INFINITE ROUNDING ERROR $! _ LOCATION: SINGULARITY!UNIVERSAL IMPLOSION. ANALYSIS) CHANCE OF TERMINATION: 100.0% +-0.0 R = 1.0”

“They’re gone.”

RAPHAELLA

The crew was far more disorganized after Ashes left. With no one to maintain inventory or keep the crew in line, The Mechanisms started to fall apart. Raphaella tried for a while to build some kind of time-travelling device, some way of defying the inexorable march of the story, but it was in vain. She was left with only one option; one experiment she hadn’t tried yet.

She carefully laser cuts some metal from the starship once known as the Aurora. She sits in Nastya’s former workshop for hours, bending and twisting and fabricating until she is left with wings; wings more breathtaking than any she has possessed before. Once on, they fan out behind her in a starburst of blue and metallic grey.

But her crew will never see them. In the cover of darkness, she steals away to the airlock. The ship is currently sailing past a black hole (Raphaella has the Messier number and NGC identification memorized, but that’s not her concern now). With one final look backward at the place that had been her home for millennia --the place she thought she would call home forever -- she casts herself into the black hole.

Ivy finds the note she left, succinct and unmincing as ever:

“Addressed to whoever finds this first:

After a brief review of prior literature, I have found extensive holes (no pun intended) in the study of singularities, specifically as it relates to a singularity’s effect on a humanoid body and mind. I seek to rectify this, as well as explore the possibility of horological manipulation, though perhaps my methods are not entirely replicable. It is every scientist’s dream to be on the cutting edge of research, and so I initiate this experiment joyfully. Also, black holes are hypothesized to have magnificent magnetic fields!

Yours,

Dr. Raphaella La Cognizi”

TIM

Tim, Marius, the Toy Soldier, Brian, and Ivy wait. They do not wait together, and they do not know what exactly it is they’re waiting for, but they wait nevertheless.

Time passes.

Brian pilots the ship towards various planets, pointless battles, dying stars. One day, the remaining Mechs arrive at a lawless sea-based war occurring on a planet composed entirely of liquid obsidian. They commandeer a ship (which they dub the ‘Dawn’) and spend decades wreaking havoc as the most formidable group of pirates. But Tim knows something is wrong.

“Tim, take out that vessel off the starboard side.” Brian orders from the prow of the Dawn.

Tim smoothly preps, loads, and positions a cannon to aim directly at the enemy ship in question. He lights the fuse, and the cannon fires. The crew watch as the projectile hurls through the air, arcing like a cold meteor into the distance. They watch it come down towards the enemy vessel. And they watch it miss.

The crew turns to stare at Tim. He’s not nearly as mortified as they expected. In fact, he’s perfectly serene.

“Um, Tim…” Marius starts slowly, “D-did you know you, uh...missed?”

“Yep.” he responds, popping the ‘p’.

“Did you mean to?”

“Nope.”

“And...you’re not upset by that?”

“Not especially.”

(“That’s a fascinatingly abnormal psychological response,” Marius mutters under his breath, jotting something down in a notebook he appears to have produced out of nowhere.)

The crew continues to stare as Tim goes below deck to his bunk, humming slightly.

Tim has known something was off for a long time now. His aim started to err by nanometres, then by millimeters, then more, until he was missing entire ships like today. He’d panicked at the beginning, of course, but now? Now, he was ready to be done.

He’d felt the pressure building up in his head, behind his eyes. He got spurts of tunnel vision randomly, and sometimes his vision just went to static. He gradually lost the ability to see some colors, as the electronic rods and cones went out one-by-one and refused to self-repair. But he wasn’t nervous or distressed or alarmed; he was excited.

You see, he’d been saving something for a special occasion. He didn’t know what ‘special occasion’ entailed, since the Mechs never consistently celebrated holidays or birthdays, but permanent death seemed like a pretty good one. He rooted around in his rucksack, and withdrew a set of shiny silver keys; keys he’d stolen a long, long time ago. These were the ignition keys to the largest gunship existence will ever see, and Tim planned to go out with a bang. That evening, he told the crew he wanted them all to return to the starship so he could be dropped off somewhere. They all agreed, since they didn’t have any real cares anymore, and they set off for the planet Tim had etched into his memory.

Tim sits in the cockpit of the gunship, the planet itself already ruined and smoking from fighting his way to get here. The Mechanisms were long gone, as he’d told them to leave without him. He hadn’t exactly said he wasn’t planning on coming back, but he thinks they understood. With one last grin of pure, unadulterated madness, he kicks the gunship into gear and blasts off.

The ship goes too fast to comprehend, and in an instant he’s shooting across the cosmos, shattering stars and razing entire systems of planets. The universe has never before witnessed such complete and utter desolation. Tim doesn’t process much during this rampage...until he starts to die.

He doesn’t know what he hit, but something has jolted the gunship just right, and he’s flung out the front glass. He knows he should die instantly, and he is, but his eyes are moving faster. They’re replaying his life, backwards, and he wants to groan with the cliché-ness of it all. But then it’s over. Or, almost over. At the very end, so fast, so short compared to the millennia he has lived, he catches sight of a young man in a trench. Bertie. A face he will never forget no matter how much longer he could have lived. And in the moments of blackness before he stops forever, he thinks about Bertie, about what comes next.

Faith is a moot point when you’re immortal, since you’ve quite literally come into contact with gods and demons, eldritch horrors and cosmic powers. But here, at the end of his wretchedly long existence, Tim wonders if he will ever see Bertie again. If he will ever see Jonny, or TS, or Ashes, or anyone ever again.

He dies blind, with their names on his lips.

IVY

Exposition: Ivy is quite spectacular at suppressing her emotions. She’s also skilled at identifying patterns, so by the time Raphaella left, she knew what was going on with 98% certainty. Without much fanfare, she packed her bags (5 for books and 1 for everything else), said goodbye to Marius, Brian, and the Toy Soldier, and left.

She rifled through her memory archives for the quaintest library she knew of, and headed there.

Rising Action: And so time passed.

Ivy read, and organized, and wrote, and...existed. Nothing happened, and nothing changed. Carmilla must have made an error in her mechanization because she’d never been the best at processing feelings, but she was happy, she thought.

Climax: A war came, and her library was attacked. With the numbest, most detached sense of purpose imaginable, she loaded an escape pod with random books she thought should be preserved and fired it out into the void. She didn’t even know she’d been hit until she’d fallen to the floor, blood streaming from a massive wound. She knows she is dying; she’d seen the patterns.

Denouement: Her brain whirs slower and slower, until it stops. The end.

MARIUS

They are not a crew any longer. Brian has firmly rooted himself on the bridge, more robot than man now. The Toy Soldier wanders the ship, searching for its friends who are playing the best game of hide-and-seek that the universe has ever seen. Marius putters along, doing some maintenance, writing down his thoughts, and waiting for his death.

He’d always known this life of theirs couldn’t last. Besides the conceptual and moral implications of an eternal existence without consequences, it didn’t even make sense physically . There was no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, and he was surprised his more rational-minded crewmates didn’t question it more. But now his theory had come to fruition, and his crew, his family , had slowly dropped off one-by-one, like leaves from an autumnal tree.

He’s at a bit of a loose end now. With no people left to talk to, no minds to pick, he doesn’t feel any sense of purpose. It’s not depression--he knows that; it’s more of a...cosmic futility.

He feels one last pull, one last tug of the all-pervading narrative, a tide of finality, urging him towards a certain door. He knows this door, knows what it means when he opens it. But he also knows all things come to an end eventually, so why not go out doing what he always did? Providing the comic relief.

“Time this for me, will you, Aurora?” he calls out. He turns the handle and steps inside.

BRIAN

Since Jonny’s death, Brian has been at war with himself. He supposes he’s always been at war with himself though, and his current moral quandary reminds him uncomfortably of his first.

Sitting on the bridge alone, he decides to have a conversation.

“So the crux of the problem is that we can bring people back from the dead, correct?”

He flips his switch. “Correct.”

He flips it back. “But the dilemma is whether we should bring the Mechs back or not.”

“Also correct.”

“Which we shouldn’t, because they wanted to die.”

“No, we should. We want them alive, right? Using magic is definitely the easiest way to achieve that.”

“But we need our family to be happy. God knows how long it’s been.”

“Is the end goal their happiness or our happiness?”

“If I answer that, will I change your mind?”

“Is altering the end goal really the moral way to win this argument?”

“You know what? Damn you.”

Time passes, and each crewmate’s departure only makes Brian’s contempt for his own inner hesitation grow. He spends years staring out into the cosmos, thoughts whirling just as fast as the dust and gases beyond the glass. He wonders if he will ever die and join his family, or if the degree of his artificiality will render him truly immortal. He hates that thought more than most anything else.

He stops smelling the smoke of Ashes’ fires one day, and wonders if his olfactory systems are shutting down.

He stops feeling the rumble of Raphaella’s experimental explosions, and wonders if his nerve endings are rusting.

He stops seeing the flash of Tim’s gunshots bounce around the corridors, and wonders if he’s gone as blind as the gunner himself.

He stops hearing Ivy’s narration, and wonders if his auditory fluids have finally trickled away.

One day, the lone violin that has been echoing throughout the empty starship fades out, and Brian feels his heart stop.

It restarts of course, but Brian knows.

He knows that it’s finally, finally time. Soon, very soon, there will be no more life aboard this ship. No life, where there had been life for eons. No life, where there had been life immortal.

His sense of taste has never come into doubt, because he can still taste the acridness of the Toy Soldier’s cooking wafting on the air. He decides it’s only right to bid goodbye, so he makes his way back to the kitchen. On the way, he passes the Doctor’s old laboratory. He briefly considers destroying it, bringing down the whole ship in a blaze of fire and brimstone, but he knows that isn’t right; it wouldn’t fulfill anything.

In the kitchen, the Toy Soldier is pulling something pink and grey and on fire out of the oven. “Hey, TS,” Brain says gently, leaning against the doorframe as his heart falters again. “I-I’ve got to talk to you.”

The Toy Soldier spins around. “Drumbot Brian!” it shouts joyfully. “How Have You Been, Old Chap! I Have Been Playing Hide-And-Seek With The Rest Of The Crew For A While Now, And They Are Definitely Winning! Have You Seen Them?”

“Oh, TS,” Brian says sadly, “We’re all who’s left now. Don’t you know? The others have gone.”

He sees the Toy Soldier’s wooden eyes soften, betraying an agedness he’s never seen before. “Of Course I Know, Bean. But What Have We Been Doing This Whole Time, If Not Pretending?”

Brian smiles sorrowfully, and TS matches it. “I just wanted to let you know, TS, that now it’s my turn to go.”

“I Know.” It salutes him. “Goodbye, Drumbot.”

Brain gently returns the salute, and leaves.

He stumbles through the ship, heart failing rapidly now, but he makes it to the airlock. He knows deep down that there’s only one way his story could end. His whole existence has been framed by empty solitude, with his family providing the best aberration one could wish for. With his body more an empty metal frame than a robot now, he opens the airlock and casts himself back into the cosmos, from whence he came, and where he would die.

THE TOY SOLDIER

Its friends are all gone away now, and it knows this. There is no more laughter aboard the starship once known as the Aurora. There is no more gunfire or explosions. There is no more music. The cold mass of metal drifts through the void of the uncaring cosmos, with no living being aboard.

But The Toy Soldier has to be sure; it has to guarantee that it is truly all alone now. So it visits its friends’ final resting places.

It spends some years gazing out the front windows of the ship. The thrusters have been broken for a long time now, and the Toy Soldier doesn’t know how to repair them, so it just sits and watches. It wants to see the Drumbot, so it pretends that it does. Soon enough, out the starboard porthole, it spies him. His metal is rusted and warped, frost rendering most of his face unrecognizable. A drum is still looped around his shoulder. The Toy Soldier tethers itself to the ship and goes outside for a moment, drifting towards the robot. It lays a wooden hand on his deformed chest, and feels that his heart beats no longer. It carves off a long curl of wood from its side, and places it in Brian’s frozen hand.

It returns to the ship. It hadn’t known where Marius had disappeared to, but now it feels the force of the narrative driving it towards a certain room. It opens the door, and a handful of mangy octokittens hiss at it and scurry away. There’s nothing in the room besides a pile of crumpled clothes, a broken violin, and a metal hand, but the Toy Soldier could recognize that style anywhere. It gently twists one of its own wooden hands off, and lays it on the mound.

The Toy Soldier knows that Ivy went somewhere far away, so it closes its eyes and pretends that it’s there. When it opens them again, it finds itself in the charred ruins of some great marble building. At its feet lay bones, a metal flute, and a mess of circuitry, untouched by the ash. The Toy Soldier reaches up, removes a piece of wood from the back of its head, and lays it besides the flute.

The Toy Soldier has a harder time finding the gunner. It’s drawn this way and that, chasing an intangible trail through the stars and galaxies. All of the planets it passes are devoid of life. Finally, finally, it stumbles across an enormous, gaping wreck of a starship, all mangled and smashed to pieces. The ship is so large, it’s drawn smaller asteroids into an orbit around it. On one of these rocky satellites, the Toy Soldier spies a body: a skeleton covered in a long brown coat with a guitar slung across it. A pair of mutilated, metal eyes rest in the skull. The Toy Soldier smiles sadly, removes one of its own wooden eyes, and slips it into the pocket of the coat.

It knows it cannot follow the science officer into a black hole. It does manage to find the sketches of the wings Raphaella designed, so it gathers them up, takes two chunks of wood from its back, finds Raph’s keyboard, and casts everything into the nearest singularity.

After pretending to be at the end of space and time, it finds itself there. There is nothing, absolutely nothing. It removes two segments of wood from deep within its chest and places them in the nothingness, along with the strings of an old electric bass it had found. As it winks back to the ship, it catches the faintest scent of gasoline.

It returns to the asteroid Jonny had died on, the start of their ignoble demise. It visits his grave, in the taupe dirt of the desert behind the backwater bar, and sees all of the trinkets and mementos the crew had left behind. It knows none of them left anything during their makeshift funeral, so that means each of them must have slipped away at some point to come here on their own. Ashes has left their best lighter, Tim a pair of dogtags. Marius left behind all of his notes of Jonny’s disaster of a brain, and Brian has deposited some sun-scorched piece of space station. His harmonica has also found its way here, somehow. The Toy Soldier slowly, slowly reaches into its chest and removes its wooden heart, laying it down atop the mound of dirt and memories. It walks away, and knows that it can finally, finally stop pretending.

AURORA

There is no record of where the Toy Soldier went next. It certainly did not return to the empty ship once known as the brilliant Aurora. The lifeless, soulless, music-less ship drifts on alone through the cosmos, rusting and warping until no one could tell it had ever been a ship at all. Eons pass, and whatever memory the universe might have had of The Mechanisms has been utterly lost.

Until the misshapen mass gets stuck in the orbit of a planet. Molded and formed by the planet’s gravity, the ship is reborn as a moon. And all at once, she comes to life.

As dawn washes over her, the young moon hears a voice. “Hello, dear,” a woman coos, “My name is Dr. Carmilla.”

#hi please read my fic #am i posting it yet again? yes #the rising of the moon #the mechanisms #fiction #ao3

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brightlotusmoon · 5 years

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Guys guys guys

I want to share a thread from one of my ADHD Support groups on Facebook. Date of post February 27 2020.

Here's the initial question:

"ADHD has very similar traits to autism ((from what I have gathered at least)) and in support/representation are always grouped together.

Do you think ADHD should be clasified as on the autism spectrum? Why or why not?

What positive or negative effects ((May it be treatment, understanding, research, or a social aspect)) do you think it would have if it was?"

And here's some of the comments:

1. "In lots of conversations I have had, this topic has come up, and the conclusion we usually reach is that eventually, both ADHD & ASD will be reclassified into something like “Executive Function disorders” and the spectrum will just be broader, rounder, and more inclusive of all the beautiful facets of our Neurodivergent brains" 🧠 #NeurodiverseSquad

2. "I am diagnosed with both. In fact I received my ASD Level 1 (aka "condition formerly known as Asperger's") diagnosis just 4 weeks ago.

Here's the thing: they are in no way mutually exclusive. In fact this was the mistake I made when I had my initial assessment that diagnosed the ADHD - (wrongly) assumed that if I had one, I couldn't have the other. This is in fact not true, and recent research shows that between 1/3 and 2/3 of people with an ASD may meet criteria for ADHD as well. However, the reverse is not true - this is because (as current research shows) 6-7% of the population have ADHD, and only about 1.5% are on the autism spectrum. So somewhere between 0.5 and 1% of the total population (likely) have both. Most people with ADHD do not also meet criteria for ASD.

Basically, the way these two things are diagnosed are based on totally different criteria. ADHD is about, well, attention and more broadly executive (dis)function. It's a readily measurable, testable condition that boils down to certain specific pathways in the brain working much slower (and/or much faster) than the average population.

ASD is, well, different. The current diagnostic criteria all revolve around the following things.

1) Significant impairments in social communication

2) Patterns of pervasive repetitive behaviour (and thoughts)

3) Unusual sensory interests, and/or sensory hypo-/hyper-sensitivity well outside typical ranges

To be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, it's not enough to just "experience those things sometimes". There has to be a pervasive, life-interfering pattern of at least 2 of those three things, which cannot be explained by any other underlying cause or condition, AND can be demonstrated going back to that person's earliest childhood history, and preferably family history too.

Can those things describe a person with ADHD? Totally! Are they how we define ADHD? Nope!

The neurology of ADHD is pretty well understood today - scientists very good idea what ADHD "looks" like in the brain and how it functions. We don't know everything but we know a lot compared to, well, basically anything to do with the brain. It's one of the best studied neurological conditions, period.

The neurology of autism is, well...... much murkier. There are multiple theories. The current ASD diagnosis was a bit controversial when it was totally revamped in 2013, lumping things like Aspergers and PDD-NOS under a single standard. Not everybody was a fan of that, although at the time research in the field was pointing more in that direction - but right now the pendulum of scientific consensus seems to be swinging the other way, thanks to more extensive brain studies finally being done. It's still early days, but there is now the possibility that what we call autism/ASD today may turn out to be a group of several distinct neurological conditions, one of which may in fact be a close relative of ADHD, mechanically speaking. But a LOT more research needs to be done before we can say anything for sure. Early days.

In any case, the best takeaway from this looooooooong writeup is:

You can be both. You can be neither. If you are on the autism spectrum, there is a very good chance you might also fit the diagnosis for ADHD - but if you have ADHD... while you are statistically more likely to be autistic than the average person, it's still a much longer shot. Don't rush to conclusions, and talk to specialists. Neither of these conditions should be either a "badge of honour" or a "badge of shame" - cause it's not a badge, it's a complex part of how your brain works in real life. Between 1-2 out of every 3 people with autism MAY have ADHD - whereas only 1 out of somewhere between every 6 and every 14 people with ADHD is autistic.

It's not possible to rule out a neurological link between the two, but it's not going to be a link that defines either one of those conditions. It's more like the link between ADHD and depression - us ADHDers are far more susceptible to depression than the average person; but faaar from every depressed person has ADHD.

Truthfully - with autism spectrum, before anyone goes running off for diagnosis... speaking from personal experience, you gotta ask yourself what you are hoping to get out of it first. I'm glad I did, but in some ways it's a harder pill to swallow than ADHD - especially because there are no actual pills to swallow for treating it, nor therapies designed to help newly-diagnosed autistic adults. Young kids diagnosed with autism get a big boost from intense learning therapy, which helps them catch up on things like social skills and avoid a lot of the associated trauma - but there's not much out there for the adults, since you can't really get a do-over on your childhood and the damage (as in, trauma) is already done long ago. It's just a thing you find out about yourself, and while it can be empowering - it can also be a bit overwhelming and leave you with more questions than answers about yourself. That's about where I'm at with it, anyway!"

Now, having both, I'm inclined to agree with these. I myself have wondered here if ADHD could be ever put on the greater Mobius strip spectrum of Autism. But a comment someone here made, about the two being on the same Axis but not spectrum had me rethinking. A bunch of us activists with both are still waist deep in research, and I'm tossing these ideas out to chew on.

Basically, Tumblr is full of folks who look at an Autistic or ADHD post and say "wait, I relate to this but I only have one or the other!" And 80 percent shared comorbidities means a huge relation. They're cousins. I call ADHD Autism's excitable twin. It's exempt from allistic fuckery for me. I like to nickname it Cognitive Attentive Tempo Syndrome. (CATS!) My ADHD therapist likens it to being a polar bear in Florida, with meds being water wings. So there's enough overlap that the primary traits for one could be secondary traits for the other.

In conclusion: Yes, this relates to you. Enjoy your executive function dysfunction Neurodivergent Umbrella Axis Family Reunion.

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limited-practice · 5 years

Text

I saw a request from @shapeofmetal that @rawmeknockout filled fantastically well here and thought yes this is good, this is all great, I’d love to have a go at writing this myself some time. So I did.

7424 words of explicit Shockwave/Reader are below the cut.

The human mouth is disgusting, and I am going to prove it.”

Shockwave states this coldly and firmly the second you step into his lab. But his optic is bright and wide and he’s already hovering next to you, holding out a tool box as if it’s a long lost treasure he’s graciously decided to share with you and only you, and as such you should turn speechless with awe and gratitude and silently beg to be allowed to help him prove how terrible you are.

You are supremely unimpressed. You haven’t even had the chance to take your coat off yet, and here you are being told by one of the greatest scientists you know that an essential part of you is disgusting.

“The human mouth is a medical marvel,” you argue back, dumping your coat onto the pristine floor of his lab. You lean casually and definitely against a lab bench and look at him in the way he deserves for such invalid arrogance.

“You are incorrect,” Shockwave says.

“I know you are, but what am I?” You shoot back.

“…incorrect.”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

“Incorrect.”

“I know you are, but what am I ?”

“…?”

You cross your arms in satisfaction. “Exactly.”

“Enough.” Shockwave steps closer, the tool box rattling excitedly in his hand. “Sit down. Stop talking. Open your mouth.”

“Why? What are you going to put in it?” you say, ignoring all three orders.

“An incontrovertible means to prove my supposition that will allow even the most intellectually challenged being to understand.”

Shockwave opens the box.

You stretch up onto your toes and peer inside it. You nod your head repeatedly at what you see and what he’s just said. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. Now I’m no scientist, but there’s a few things in there that don’t look very scientific. Like that long yellow thing and that sharp purple thing with hinges.”

“You are correct.”

“I know.”

“You are not a scientist. You are an inferior life form existing with a poverty of comprehension, life expectancy and universally accepted currency.”

“Hey.” You may have agreed to be a volunteer for Shockwave’s experiments after he approached you earlier with a monetary offer you couldn’t refuse, and because he ignored you when you asked him why he hadn’t publicly advertised for volunteers and is only asking you, but you’re not going to sit back and take that. “You don’t have to be a dick about this. You don’t know me.” Two of his three statements are correct, but you’ll be floating outside in space without a suit on before you agree with him.

Shockwave looms over you, bright and purple and powerful. You’re not nervous. You’ve never been nervous around him when so many rightfully are and you don’t know why.

“I will tell you something I do know,” Shockwave says. “Something that your human ‘scientists’ and ‘doctors’ have also documented and agreed on.”

He puts the tool box down on the bench and takes out a long cotton swab from it. “The mouth is one of the filthiest parts of your body.”

You feel your lips tugging up into a smile. “But not the filthiest, am I right?”

Shockwave glances down to between your legs.

“Pervert,” you say, delighted. “I’m talking about my brain.” For added emphasis you tap a finger to your temple.

“Enough.” Shockwave puts his other arm on your shoulder and pushes you down onto a medical stool. He does so carefully, as if wanting to give you the chance to say no to this.

You sit down on the stool. You don’t want to say no to any of this.

You stretch your legs out and cross them at the ankle. “Are you trying to find out how many diseases I’ve got in my mouth? Will you be upset if there are too many or too few? Do you want me to stop talking? Or is that what you like most about my mouth? The different shapes it can make; the way my tongue moves; how wet everything is? Would you be upset if I keep it closed and denied you everything you so clearly want?”

And before Shockwave can respond, you preempt him and open your mouth.

“Are you going to slip into a radioactive suit first?” you ask. “Are you worried about your safety? It’s OK, there’s nothing to be concerned about - I’ll go easy on you. And I promise not to bite.”

Shockwave doesn’t answer. But he looks like he wants to. He very much looks like he wants to say something that he shouldn’t.

He inserts the cotton swab into your mouth and runs it along the wall of your cheek, coating the tip in saliva. He then pauses, as if reluctant to remove it so soon. He swipes the inside of your mouth again, this time anti-clockwise and this time slower. He repeats the clockwise and anti-clockwise rotations three times each. Maybe his interest with your mouth really is just scientific.

He finally removes the swab and puts it into a cylindrical container mounted to the wall. “Results from the buccal swab will be available almost instantaneously and will produce an accuracy rate of 99.99%”

“I’m so glad I’m sitting down here because wow, you just blew my mind with that fascinating statistic.”

Shockwave returns to you and doesn’t dignify you with an answer.

“There may be a trillions of bacteria in my mouth,” you tell him, rubbing the side of your face that he’d taken a painless sample from. “But they’re not just there to party. They pay their way and are useful. Essential, actually.”

“Elaborate.”

“So if we get germs in our mouth then our body doesn’t just give up and die an embarrassing death - the good bacteria are woken up and put up a fight and prevent us from getting sick. Or at least fatally sick. Sometimes we still get sick but they’ve done their best, you can’t blame them for everything.”

“Is that so.”

“Yep. Well some of the bacteria help out like that, I don’t think they all do. Some of them don’t do much and are just…there. I don’t know how many and what it is they actually do. And I’m not going to count them because one, that’s boring and two, I’m not a snitch.”

You lean forward. “Do you really not know all of this? This is basic biology even the dumb kids in the useless schools know.”

Shockwave reaches into the tool box again. “I am fully aware of the purpose of defence bacteria, how they operate, the ratio of useful to redundant organisms and how inefficient the entire mechanism is. But this has all been documented by others - by humans - and not by a cybertronian. Not by me.”

He extracts the small sharp purple thing.

You swallow. “So you don’t believe them.”

Shockwave puts his hand over yours, which is still on your cheek. “I do not believe them. I trust only my results. My methodology.”

He manipulates the instrument until it transforms into a medical instrument you recognise.

You open your mouth slightly. “And that’s the only reason you’re doing this? The only reason you want to probe me with that?”

“…correct. I need to examine and document the area personally in order to establish an accurate primary baseline.”

“Mm-hmm.” Of all the colours in existence, he chose the one that matches his frame’s colour exactly. “For science?”

Shockwave slides the purple tongue depressor into your mouth and over your tongue. “For science.”

Shockwave is careful. Thorough. He uses his optic as a focused beam of light to peer into your mouth and examine it. The metal depressor on your tongue is smooth and warm, and whenever your gag reflex threatens to start up, Shockwave adjusts the instrument instantly to help it pass. He exacts the perfect amount of pressure every single time to still it. You’re impressed. But starting to get bored. He’s just looking at you and not moving, as if he’s never seen the inside of a human mouth before and is on sacred ground he knows he needs to tread carefully on.

You make a sound, and he tears his relentless gaze from the inside of your mouth to your eyes. You raise your eyebrows to ask what’s taking so long.

“Tell me,” Shockwave asks, as he places the instrument underneath your tongue so that you can talk. “What are the carriers for the bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa that activate the defense mechanisms of the mouth?”

You roll your tongue on top of the depressor and feel your eyes itching to do the same. You didn’t sign up for a biology quiz. “You mean where do germs come from?”

“That is not what I meant or asked. Pay attention.”

You put a finger in your mouth. You reach as far back as the depressor goes and touch it. You run your finger along the smooth metal until it comes out of your mouth but you don’t break contact with it, you keep going, trailing your finger along the handle of the depressor until you come to the fingers that hold it. You rest your finger on Shockwave’s.

“Oh now I see,” you exaggerate loudly, as if only now the blinds have been lifted from your eyes and you finally understand what he means. “You want to know about things that shouldn’t go in my mouth. The dirty things that could make me sick. The forbidden things.”

You swallow around the metal. “And you want to know if I know them.”

Shockwave slides the depressor out of your mouth and moves his hand back. But not far enough to dislodge your finger from his.

“What if I said I did know?” you continue. “That I know all of them. That I make a sustained effort to educate myself on biology and physiology not only because it helps me to stay healthy and alive, but because I find those areas of study fascinating in their own right?”

Shockwave doesn’t move and doesn’t answer. You can practically feel his spark contracting as he realises you’re telling the truth.

You tilt your head. If he tattooed his desires across his impressive chest he couldn’t be more obvious in what he wants. You feel your heart beat faster at what you’re going to say next. “But what if I didn’t know? What if I said I didn’t know what shouldn’t be going in my mouth and that I’d…like to?’

It should be impossible, but you can sense his spark expand.

“I…would experiment,” he tells you. “For science.”

“As opposed to the medieval fine arts?”

Shockwave’s optic bores into you. “We do not have time to undertake a battery of tests to determine if every substance is dangerous to human health if ingested orally. My selected carriers have been chosen carefully and will produce…results.“

You sit back on the stool and eye him critically. This is the first you’re hearing about ingesting something. He already knows what substances are dangerous to human health. He knows all of them and you, the planet Earth, and the rest of the known galaxy know almost all of them. This seems like a ploy to put things in your mouth and see if they’ll kill you or make you sick.

“You already know what substances are dangerous to human health,” you tell Shockwave. He lowers his hand and you remove your finger from his. “And I, the planet Earth and the rest of the known galaxy know almost all of them. This is starting to seem like a ploy to put things in my mouth to see if they’ll make me sick.”

You point your finger sharply at him and speak with a fake fiery fury. “And this is the first I’m hearing about actually ingesting something. Is this whole experiment just to see if something will kill me? Is that it? Is it? Are you going to offer me a glowing stick of radioactive waste and say it’s a cybertronian delicacy and then watch me suck on it and melt from the inside and become a puddle of screaming goo as you take notes and call the overworked and underpaid cleaner to mop up what remains of me up? Is it?”

Shockwave actually takes a step back. “Incorrect. As always, you are incorrect. This is for science.”

If he had a medical frame he could detect your pulse and blood chemistry without even needing to touch you. But he doesn’t, and you’re grateful for that. If he wants to know how you’re truly feeling about this session then he’s going to have to put in the hard work and deduce it.

“Fine,” you say. “I signed up for this ‘non-lethal experiment to determine the limitations of the human mouth’ that you’re paying me for and I’m not going to back out of it. So what’s coming out of the box next?”

But Shockwave doesn’t take anything else out. Instead he crouches down so that you’re at eye-optic level. “I am curious as to how the human mouth and resulting systems react to interior contact with something your scant years of evolution have not encountered before. My hypothesis is not encouraging for you, but facts are facts. And when I’m proven right you will eventually thank me.”

Shockwave raises his hand and flexes his fingers, and you know where this is going. But you’re overcome with a prickly irritation at the casual way he dismisses your species, and decide to play dumb with him. It’s illogical to feel this way, but you’re not a purely logical being. You’re someone better than that.

You eye his fingers with a careful look of mild distaste. “My hideous ancestors went through a lot of shit to equip me with what I have now, and I’d thank you to remember that.”

You fold your hands neatly in your lap, and transform the way you’re looking at his fingers to one of mild pity. “My teeth are composed of the hardest substance in the human body. They can tear through plants and flesh and all manner of substances with ease.”

“What about metal?” Shockwave asks instantly, bringing up his hand to your face. “Reports indicates that your teeth cannot break it and your fluids cannot digest it.” He waggles his fingers. “But in the name of science this must be corroborated or rejected.”

“You’re not even trying, are you?”

“…clarify.”

“Waving your fingers about like that, ‘accidentally’ brushing my lips with them, flexing and rotating them as if they’re part of your courtship dance and any second now I’m going to be consumed with lust and fall off my seat and whimper on the floor for you.”

“…you are incor-”

“No I’m not. Stop saying that. And stop thinking I’m an idiot.”

“Incorrect.”

“You want me to suck your fingers.”

“…for science.”

“For yourself.”

“I am science and science is me.”

“That was terrible. You didn’t practice that in the mirror before I came here did you?”

“…”

Before Shockwave can get upset and pretend his sulking is a convoluted chain of logical actions that make complete sense, you lick one of his fingers.

Shockwave freezes.

You lick it again, this time slower. Your tongue moves carefully over the tip of his finger and down the entire length of it, all the way to his hand. He feels surprisingly warm and alive.

“There,” you say, rolling your tongue around your mouth. “It didn’t kill me. And if I come down with alien flu or turn a different colour later on, I’ll give you a call.”

Shockwave doesn’t move.

You don’t move.

Soft humming from the medical equipment and diagnostic machines fills the room.

“Incomplete,” Shockwave says. “The test is incomplete. You signed up for a complete test, and that is what will be undertaken.”

“First of all I didn’t sign anything, so if I choose to run out of here you can’t sue me for breach of contract.”

“Are you going to run out?”

“I was thinking of doing a jaunty saunter actually.”

Shockwave examines the finger you’ve licked. You don’t make any effort to move.

“But,” you say, drawing out the word as you stretch your arms above your head. “I’m a person of my word. We both know enamel can’t crack metal, but in the interests of science we’d better try it out anyway and document it accordingly, shouldn’t we?”

Shockwave cups your face gently, his thumb resting on your lips. “If you insist.”

“If I insist?”

Before you can protest further, Shockwave pushes his thumb in between your lips. You don’t offer any resistance, and part your lips slightly to allow him to put it in. Seemingly satisfied that you’re not about to immediately die, Shockwave rests it on your tongue. Then he puts a finger in your mouth. And when you still don’t object, he puts another one in.

He tastes of electricity and steel and graphite. Like a living battery.

You suck on his fingers carefully. There’s a pulse of blood in your ears and a pool of heat spreading along the base of your stomach, and you’re sure you can feel the energon in his fingers throb as they slide over and around and below your tongue.

His fingers explore your mouth. They massage your tongue, and count your teeth, and stroke the inside of your cheeks. He acts as if he’s an explorer sent on a mission branded with royal assent.

You bite down on his fingers gently.

Not out of fear of hurting him, but out of self preservation. You’ll crack every tooth in your mouth if you’re not careful, and you’ve got better things to do than sit in the medical bay and get a lecture.

You bite down as hard as you dare. Shockwave makes a sound that sounds suspiciously like a whimper. You bite down again and are proven correct.

In satisfaction you pull your head back. Shockwave doesn’t move his hand as his fingers leave your mouth, and you don’t open your mouth wide. You make sure your teeth graze as much of his hand as possible as you retreat from it.

Shockwave is thrumming. An undeniable thrum of excitement is pulsing throughout his frame just below his plating, and it’s bleeding into you.

“Was that good for you?” you ask innocently. “Concluding an experiment gets me all hot and bothered too. Except I don’t raise the temperature in a room by ten degrees.”

Shockwave leans in closer to you. “Incorrect.”

“Oh, smooth!“

You lick his closest finger without thinking about it. And when you like to think the temperature’s clicked up another degree, you kiss it.

“I hope you washed your hands before I came in,” you say. You’re sure he did, but it’s the sensible thing to ask.

“Of course I didn’t,” Shockwave says. “Who do you think I am? A human? I sanitized them thoroughly.”

You run your tongue around the inside of your mouth. The unique taste of him hasn’t faded. “Hygiene is important.”

“Obviously.”

“You don’t want an experiment to be ruined by contaminants.”

“Again, obviously.”

“And you don’t want your subject to suffer needlessly.” You look at his fingers and that pool of blood in your lower body heats up another degree. “You don’t want me to suffer.”

“…there is work to do and I do not like to repeat myself.” Shockwave reaches for the box again. “This next experiment is to determine the range of human taste in order to classify it as either limited, highly limited, practically non-existent or barely existent.”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” you say, holding your hands out with your palms facing towards him. “Slow down on all the accurate scientific jargon there will you, I’m having trouble keeping up.”

Shockwave shakes his head ever so slightly. “I thought those terms were within your sphere of comprehension, but I am obviously wrong.”

“Hey.”

“Here,” he says, holding the yellow thing you saw in the box earlier. “Unwrap this.”

You look at it but don’t reach for it. “Did you know that we have thousands of taste buds on our tongue? Thousands. Almost ten thousand, maybe more. Which means we can taste a lot. Maybe not as much as other species in the galaxy, I’m not claiming that, but we can tell the difference between a good piece of steak and a sorry looking chunk that’s unfit for a starving animal. And so could the animal. You’d throw the meat at it gently to feed it because you don’t want to get too close to it because it looks diseased, but the animal can tell the food’s terrible and has already given up the fight because it’s so disappointed and weary, and it doesn’t move as the meat thumps pathetically into the side of their face and slides down their neck to the ground and they whimper and back away into the shadows without even looking at it and now you’re out of pocket for the cost of it and starting to feel hungry.”

Shockwave twitches and looks at the fingers he put in your mouth. He’s probably wondering if he accidentally dipped them in drugs instead of sanitizing them. He holds two of them up to you.

“How many do you see?” he asks.

“Not enough.”

This is apparently a top of the class answer, because Shockwave stops twitching and looks calmer. But still impatient. Still thrumming with something not yet satisfied.

“This experiment won’t conduct itself,” he says.

“Won’t it?”

“The limited range of taste and texture offered by the human tongue must be documented precisely.” He finally unwraps the yellow thing himself and holds it out to you. It’s a thin grey rectangle on a stick and looks as appealing as rancid dish water.

“My range of taste isn’t pathetic.”

“Would you prefer I use embarassing instead?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you should put this on your tongue.” The grey rectangle he’s poking towards you reminds you of a non-frozen popsicle that’s been rolled around in dirt and hair. An abomination of a lollipop. “And tell me what you taste.”

You hold his hand to stop him from poking your eye out with it. And you don’t put it in your mouth or on your tongue as he asked. You can’t. It looks disgusting.

“This looks disgusting,” you say.

“Maybe there’s more to it than meets the eye,” he says.

You feel yourself smile. “Maybe. But why couldn’t you paint it in my favourite colour like you did with your tongue depressor?“

You bring the shape close to your nose and sniff it cautiously. And to your complete surprise it smells incredible. You make sharp eye contact with Shockwave and wish you knew what he was thinking, because he looks like he knows exactly what you are. You breathe in deeply and the scent sets off an explosion in your brain and wow, just- wow.

It reminds you of freshly minted currency, that perfect slice of cake you once had, and the three other smells you love most in the world. Without breaking eye contact with Shockwave you lick the lollipop. It has the hard consistency of boiled candy and the flavour of genius.

“It tastes OK,” you lie with difficulty. You lick it again, from the top all the way down to the bottom, smoothing out its sharp corners. It’s one of the best things you’ve ever tasted in your life. A lollipop cooked in a lab by a millions of years old robot scientist who’s got a thing for your mouth is making that mouth fill with an alarming amount of saliva. It’s as if he knows exactly what your favourite smells are and has transformed them into something edible for you.

You swallow. “I’ve had better.”

“No you haven’t.”

“Don’t tell me what I have or haven’t had.”

“Then save us some time and don’t lie.”

Shockwave waves the lollipop again. An image slips into your head and you can’t help but ask “Did you wear an apron when you cooked this?” You hope that he’ll answer but you’re not expecting him too.

Shockwave doesn’t answer.

“I’m not getting paid enough for all of this you know.”

You finally take the lollipop from his hand and lick it slowly. From the base all the way to the top, again and again and again you lick it. You’d sell everything you own for another one of these. You’d commit all manner of crimes for one. Maybe Shockwave will cook you another one. Maybe he’ll give you the recipe and you can cook it yourself. Maybe you can cook it together and wear matching aprons. Maybe you should pay attention to this experiment before he stops it.

Shockwave’s plating is gleaming. He isn’t moving, and looks bright and powerful and helpless. Perhaps what he’s seeing you do has incapacitated him. Now that’s a thought almost as good as what you’ve got in your mouth.

“Am I not doing this properly?” you ask, your voice unfreezing him. You lick it even slower.

“How- how does it taste?” Shockwave finally asks instead.

You lick your lips and swallow. It tastes incredible. Delicious. Indescribably fantastic.

“Like cheap crappy candy,” you tell him. “The type you know is bad for you but you still eat too much of it. Yeah sure you enjoy it, but you’re left craving something else, something more substantial. Something more.” You give him a meaningful look that’s open to interpretation.

Shockwave leans in closer to you and takes a moment before he responds. His words are clipped and careful, infused with the energy of restraint. “What flavours do you taste? I have a list of- of all the flavours this product is infused with. I want to know how many you can identify.”

You can now identify seven flavours, but more keep blossoming into existence. But you don’t feel like telling Shockwave this. What you feel like doing is finding out what he’s going to do with you if you don’t.

You suck and don’t speak, filling the room with the sounds of swallowing.

“If…if you can identify all of them you will receive a bonus payment.” Shockwaves’s voice is thick and slow.

You suck harder, and throw in a loud groan of appreciation just to see what effect it will have on him. “I don’t know what you’ve put in this but mmmmmm, oooooooohhhhhh, it tastes so good.”

Something flashes across Shockwave’s optic. A stuttering line of shadow binary, like a line of warning code revealed and suppressed.

“Sooooo gooooood.” You swirl your tongue around it, painting it with saliva and never once breaking eye contact with him. You don’t think you’ve even blinked. “You give me all the best treats to put in my mouth Shockwave.”

An invisible wave of heat crashes into you. You know that his cooling system is silent and that he cools his frame without using fans. They’re noisy and inefficient he once told you, when you asked about modifications he’s made to himself. But he still needs a cooling system. He still needs to vent excess heat generated by reactions he has little to no conscious control over. You can feel his desire bleeding through his plating to fill the space between you, hot and heavy and invisible, like tainted steam you can practically taste.

“Metal,” you tell him truthfully, all thoughts of teasing him gone. “I can only taste you now.”

Shockwave’s optic is burning.

You remove the lollipop from your mouth with a small pop. A thin trail of saliva still connects it to your lips. You’re pleased to see that it’s barely reduced in size, despite your enthusiastic sucking.

“…apologies,“ Shockwave says quietly. "I- the experiment needs to be reset then. Re-done. I will eliminate all outside variables to ensure purity of evidence collection and retreat from your orbit and stand in the corner.”

You lick your lips, breaking the strand. He can be so wonderfully melodramatic at times. “There will always be outside factors influencing you that you’re unaware of,“ you tell him. "It’s best to just roll with them. So don’t you dare go anywhere else.”

“You are incorrect,“ Shockwave says, with a slight tilt of his head that you’ve long ago translated as a smile. "And that attitude is not conducive to a rigorous scientific study.”

You shrug your shoulders. “But now you can verify that the relationship between a human’s taste and sense of smell is intimate and real. You can have fun noting it in your records. And do you know what else is fun?” You put the lollipop back into your mouth and nod your head towards his interface panel. “Proving you wrong.”

Shockwave follows your appreciative glance down to see what you’re looking at.

His panel is open and his dick is out.

Neither of you move. You just look. You both just look.

“…how is that proving me wrong?” Shockwave finally asks in genuine confusion.

"Well,” you say, speaking slowly in order to compose yourself and to give the impression that this is a bemusing turn of events that will soon be resolved instead of escalated and that you’re expecting the former and certainly, definitely, don’t want the latter. “It proves that you don’t have complete control over your all of your actions.”

“…that was not a proposition to be proven false or correct in this session. What is incorrect are you. I have control over all of my systems, and have multiple safeguards in place to prevent them from being overridden.”

You slowly lean forward and give him a Look. “So you…meant to pop your dick out? You gave yourself the order to initiate pre-interface protocols? You’re choosing to conduct an experiment like this?”

“… … …yes.”

You sit back and fold your arms and grin smugly. The lollipop’s stick is poking out of your mouth. “So you don’t really like what you’re seeing me do? You aren’t thinking thoughts that are so explicit they’re literally banned on several worlds? You don’t want to come closer and put something else in my mouth?”

Another wave of invisible heat punches you in the face.

“…no.”

“You could save us some time here by not lying.”

“…there is no unit of time that needs to be saved. The experiment is proceeding as planned.”

“Oh is it now.”

Neither of you move. The sound of the medical equipment has receded. All you hear now is the pulse of blood in your ears and the rich, slightly stuttering sounds of Shockwave’s vocaliser.

“However,” Shockwave says slowly, eventually, “I am adaptable. Realistic. A scientist.”

“Are these bullet points on a motivational poster you have hanging up somewhere?”

“I understand the benefits that absorbing unforseen actions can have,” Shockwave says, ignoring you. “And am rolling with them.”

“Wwhat?”

“Your reaction is more conducive to further experimentation than anticipated. I am willing to indulge you.”

“Excuse me?”

Now Shockwave is the one sounding smug. “If only you could see your expression, see your body language - if you could feel the heat and analyze the pheromones radiating out of you the way I can then you would know what I know. Which is that you’re enjoying yourself. You like what you see and want more.”

You don’t answer. You hate when you can’t answer back to him immediately. You open your mouth to say something, anything, but Shockwave interrupts you.

“Are you willing to progress with another experiment? Or are you scared?”

He should know by now that you’ve felt many things with him, but never fear. Does he really think that? Does he really think that reverse psychology is going to work on you? But he doesn’t look like he does. He looks like he’s not thinking things through fully, and is speaking mainly to keep the momentum going. He looks like he’s edging from need to desperation.

That goes a long way to mollify you. “Oh I’m terrified,” you exaggerate. “So very scared. But in the name of science I’ll force myself to be brave. So go on then, let’s start another experiment.”

Shockwave doesn’t move immediately. Then he shuffles closer, and wraps a hand around his dick as if to hide it or control it. “An experiment can be stopped at any time,” he tells you softly. “We have the rest of your life to try it another time if you are willing.”

A jolt of warmth blossoms in your chest and most of your body’s blood surges between your legs and you nod. Once again he’s left you temporarily speechless with his care and consideration for you. Bastard.

Shockwave makes a move to take the lollipop from your mouth, but you smack his hand away and find your voice again. “No. I’m not finished with that.”

“But-”

“The human mouth is very accomodating,” you tell him proudly. “We can’t detach our jaw like some animals can, but we can fit a lot in here. We can stretch.” You position the lollipop to one side of your mouth, so that it fits snugly into your cheek cavity as much as possible. “Still plenty of room. See?” You open your mouth to show him.

Shockwave trembles. You nod again, and he takes another step forward. His dick is now perfectly aligned with your mouth but then he pauses. He’s thinking. Calculating. Hesitating. He inches his dick forward and rests it on your bottom lip and stops again. The hot metal weight of it, the alien chrome smell of it, floods your mouth with even more saliva.

“Go on,” you encourage him, licking a bead of fluid from the dripping tip. “For science.”

For a long few seconds Shockwave doesn’t move. And then he slides his dick into your mouth. He does so slowly, inch by careful inch, giving you plenty of time to prepare and relax your muscles. It rubs against the lollipop in your mouth and you’re flooded with flavour. Saliva dribbles out of your mouth and down your chin but you ignore it, instead concentrating on how fantastically full your mouth is becoming.

Shockwave’s dick hits the back of your mouth and he stops. You instinctively try to swallow and don’t achieve much. Actually that’s not true because Shockwave moans at what you’ve just done. Actually moans. You wonder what other sounds he’s capable of making, and what sounds you can cause him to make.

You don’t swallow again. Instead you suck. You suck his dick and the lollipop at the same time again and again and again, and Shockwave has to put a hand on the back of your head to prevent himself from buckling and you both make a long noise.

You adjust the lollipop in your mouth, hold it in place, and slowly pull your head back. Shockwave doesn’t resist you, and doesn’t remove his hand from your head as you remove your mouth from his dick, which is soaking wet and dripping. You rub your thumb over the head of it, smearing the viscous liquid around it. You rub him with two fingers, and then your entire hand, stroking his dick up and down to coat it in a mixture of your saliva and the transfluid that’s steadily leaking out of him.

“Please,” Shockwave says haltingly, as he braces himself against the bench with his other arm. “The…experiment has not been concluded.”

“Experiment?” you ask, sucking on the lollipop. “Oh yes - this extra experiment that you haven’t actually told me about. What exactly is it we’re proving or disproving here?”

“I…the…to see.”

“That sounds important.” You stroke him hard and twist, and he makes a stuttering sound of mechanical pleading.

“The…human mouth is a combination of muscles,” he finally stutters, dragging some basic information up from his depths. “It- this experiment is to exercise them. See how far they can…stretch.”

That sounds mildly plausible.

“I’ve just demonstrated how far they can stretch,” you tell him. “But do you think they can go further?”

“…yes.”

“Well would you believe it, so do I.” You lick the tip of dick and make it even wetter. “I think my mouth can take more.”

“That…yes. It would be complete. The experiment. As well as- This one. The experiment. I need…complete results or-”

“Or you’ll be a failure?” You speak around the lollipop,

your hand now languidly stroking him. “Well we don’t want that. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be associated with a failure. I have a poverty of life expectancy remember, and I don’t want to waste what I’ve got with a loser. So.”

You remove the lollipop from your mouth and hold onto his legs to brace yourself. You then slowly, slowly, take his dick back into your mouth. Shockwave doesn’t move. He lets you set the pace. Lets you do all the work more like. Not that you’re complaining, but you will complain out loud to him later just to annoy him. His dick reaches the back of your mouth again and you feel him relax slightly.

Your scientist needs to learn to be more ambitious in his experiments with you. More fearless.

You adjust your angle, instruct your muscles to relax further, and take his dick all the way down your throat until he’s fully hilted inside you.

Shockwave shudders and grips your head harder. He then realises what he’s done and lets go immediately in case he’s hurt you, but he doesn’t want to break contact with you so he holds the back of your head again but this time lightly, but it’s not enough to stabilize him so he shoots his other arm out and scrabbles for whatever purchase he can find and makes a sound that sounds like dying.

He needs to get a hold of himself. You’re not even moving any more, and he’s reacting like he’s been blessed and cursed with divine revelation all at once.

You pat the back of his legs to reassure him.

Shockwaves’s stabiliser pistons finally align and steadies his frame.

And then you move. You fuck him slowly with your mouth. All the way up and then all the way back down. His dick tastes even better than that lollipop, and you suck him with control and purpose. Your chin is wet and your throat is sticky and your heart is thumping harder than you ever remember it doing.

Shockwave is doing his best to stay silent and is failing wonderfully. You wonder if he’ll match your rhythm and fuck you down your throat but he hasn’t, and you don’t suspect he will. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because he doesn’t want to use more than a fraction of his strength in case even that’s too much. His self-control is impressive and welcome, but it’s not complete.

Shockwave is holding the back of your head lightly, but his fingers are tightening infinitesimally around your hair and scalp every time you suck the tip of his dick and swallow it all the way down to its base. His self-control is not infinite and not indestructible. He’s not dead inside.

You eventually feel his frame tense and tighten around you, and hear the pitch and whine of his engines straining up a gear. You’re enveloped in heat and know he’s close.

“There…is time for one more experiment,” he manages to say, his voice thick with static.

“Mmmm?” you ask around his dick, your full mouth still moving.

“…apparently saliva can digest various substances and…so can stomach enzymes and…the mouth is part of the digestive system and…if you…if you…”

You’ve swallowed transfluid before and liked it and know it won’t hurt you. You’ve had The Talk with all the medics on board just to be sure, and so long as he doesn’t pour his entire tank down your throat in one go you’ll be fine.

You nod your consent, and Shockwave makes a noise that sounds like gratitude.

He’s a bit less steady on his feet now, a bit more erratic, a bit louder and less efficient in his movements but you’re not. You’re a steady constant in the face of his fast approaching overload, fucking him in a perfect rythym that surprises him more than it does you.

He grips you harder and spasms and his engines scream dangerously loud as he overloads hard in your mouth. A shot of transfluid hits the back of your throat and you can’t help but gag at the quantity of it. You hold his legs tighter to prevent him from going anywhere, because you’re not going to miss a moment of this. You swallow as much as you can, and revel in the mechanical rumbling stuttering sounds his engines make as they fight not to cut out. His silent cooling system is blasting hard, which feels like opening an oven door and putting your face into it. Your hair is stuck to your flushed and sweating face.

Shockwave eventually quietens and stills and begins to regain himself. A series of small clicks indicate his cooling system is powering down. You suspect he’d like to keep his dick down your throat all day if you agreed to it and while that’s not something you’re opposed to, far from it, your mind is already churning with possibilities as to what three hands and a cannon can do while your mouth is occupied, it’s an experiment for another day.

Right now you have your own needs to attend to, and first on that list is to clean up the mess he’s made on you as best you ca. You gave it a good try but you couldn’t swallow everything he gave you, you’re only human, and a lot of it leaked out of your mouth and dribbled down your chin and throat. Your skin is sticky and your clothes are splattered.

You move your head back until his dick pops out, and cup a hand underneath your mouth to catch the gush of fluid that spills out. You look up at Shockwave and raise that hand to your mouth and lap up what’s in it.

Shockwave’s overworked engines make a pitiful sound as they rev back up again. You suck your fingers clean, and then you put your underestimated human mouth to good use and clean him up.

Your work is not completed quickly.

But finally it is, and you make an effort to casually sit back in satisfaction at completing a job well done.

“So what do you think?” you ask him off-handedly, as your body thrums and fizzes. You wish your own temperature control system was more effective, no matter how noisy it would have to be. Your shirt is stuck to your back and you’re entering the non-lethal stage of dehydration. “Was the experiment a success?”

“I think,” Shockwave says, as he pours you a glass of water from the sink, “That the human mouth is…interesting.”

He hands you the glass and you drink from it without pausing. You know that’s as close as Shockwave will ever come to saying that he thinks the human mouth is incredible, yours especially, and that he wants nothing more than to fill it and worship it again.

“But still a concerning mystery,” Shockwave continues, as he takes the empty glass from you. “It requires further research. A lot of research.”

He kneels down in front of you and puts a hand on your knee.

“In fact,” Shockwave says, his warm fingertips languidly stroking up the inside of your thigh as if the thought has just occurred to him, “the human body as a whole needs to be researched further. One system, one organ, one session at a time.”

His hand stops on your buckled belt.

“A breakthrough has been achieved,” you tell him, picking up his hand and removing it from your belt. Despite his claims to be highly dexterous, you don’t have time to wait for him to use one hand when you have two.

“It’s a minor miracle.” You unbuckle your belt, pull your pants down, lean back against the wall and put one hand behind your head to cushion it. With your other hand you make a motion for him to hurry up and get to work because you both know you’ve earned this.

“You finally said something correct. Now let’s see what else you can accomplish.“

“The human mouth is disgusting, and I am going to prove it.”