fateandfortune

It's impossible not to notice the change that comes over her; anyone would see it. He thinks that he should have put off the question longer. Given her whatever more time to enjoy that fleeting happiness following the revelation of his immunity to her powers. But it's too late to take it back now... the moment is gone.

"I don't want to make the kind of mistakes that can be avoided," he says carefully instead. "Yesterday on the roadside, you said I had no right to make decisions for you when I didn't know."

Among other things she'd said to him. But it had been the absolute terror and panic that had gripped her so strongly that she couldn't even stay on her feet that had fazed him. Because just then, on a deserted lane with no one around, he'd been able to help her through it. What if the next time it happened, because of him, and it wasn't safe to do so?

A few more minutes of happiness wouldn't wipe out the need for this conversation. As much as she'd like to live in a fantasy of everything being okay, that won't help either of them survive this place.

She wraps her arms around herself, suddenly feeling very small next to him. Of course, she's small compared to him, that's always been more than apparent, but... she'd never felt it before.

"I've always tried to be the type of person who would never regret saying or doing something out of fear," she tells him after a moment. "I'm sorry I wasn't able to be that person for you yesterday, sugar. You didn't deserve that. You didn't know."

Knock Out didn't so much move as surged down to her eye level with astonishing speed, his platelets clicking into new formations to support the movement, hands braced on the dirty factory floor so they were very nearly face to face once again.

"Don't," he bristled, his voice unyielding. The dozens of tiny red lenses that made up his optics were clearly visible from this distance, focused on her intensely. "Do not blame yourself for being frightened. For acting based on experience. You have nothing to apologize for."

If she didn't know him, that sudden movement would have scared her senseless and sent her screaming out the door. But she does know him. She trusts him with her life and so her only reaction is to take half a step back until he's settled at her level. There's no spike of fear or stress within her, and her expression remains set in some semblance of sadness.

"I'm scared out of my mind, Knock Out," she says in a steady tone, looking straight into those red eyes without hesitation. "Every minute we've been here, it's all I can do to hold myself together and not fall apart. But that's no excuse for my actions toward someone I care about. People letting fear get the better of them is what started this war and I refuse to be like that myself. We both deserve better than that."

If she'd said just about anything else in that instant, he would have admitted to his own fears. That humans of this world would start hunting him the moment they knew he existed. That even if they still did all the right things, made all the right moves, picked all the right places to hide... his time here was going to be limited. Far more than she had yet to realize. That the dull realization of what might come after terrified him more than four million years of battlefields ever had.

But Rogue cared so much. She would take it as some failing, find some blame to put on herself, as if it were somehow her fault that he was stuck here alongside her. He wouldn't do that to her.

Letting his own indecisions and fears dictate his actions had already cost Knock Out the one dearest to him. He carried that guilt as best he could because there was no other choice. But he couldn't bear to lose someone else to those same weaknesses of his.

No. He wouldn't add to her burden.

"We're allowed to be imperfect once in a while," is what he says instead. He pushes up with his hands, getting back to his feet again. His tone is deliberately light, easy. "You're wrong if you think I'm going to hold it against you."

Imperfect is all she ever has been, but she can't tell him that. He knows nothing of her life before their shared world. If he did... Would he pity her? Would he second-guess all his words and actions in an attempt to not dredge up more pain from her past? That sort of reaction is what she's always hoped to avoid, along with the worry of burdening someone else with her lifetime of heartache.

It feels wrong for him to stand again so soon, though she knows she can't ask him to stay down at her level. It wouldn't be comfortable for him, and what reason would she give? That she finds his eyes fascinating and wants just a little more time to memorize the way they watch her before he leaves her forever?

"I've never thought that," she assures him with a shake of her head instead. "That's not who you are. Not with me, anyway." Because she knows he's different with others — she doesn't hold that against him either.

Knock Out wished he knew how better to approach this whole issue. He didn't know where Rogue's pitfalls were -- and in all fairness, she didn't know where his were either -- but despite the last few days being technically a success, he feels like they'd been communicating on two different channels. But their current predicament is so tenuous, and their partnership so inexperienced, that he is left unsure. They had been fast friends in the Porter world, but they hadn't spent a lot of time together, and almost none of it in stressful situations. This is new to both of them.

He considers for a moment, then drags the side of his pede across the ground at the base of one of the floor-to-ceiling support beams to push aside dirt and leaves before lowering himself to a sitting position, back to the joist. His shoulder tires fit neatly on either side of the vertical beam, giving him something to lean against, and his legs are stretched out in front of him.

"Come here," he says, patting the ground next to his side. "I do need to know, but it can be at your pace. If you'd rather just sit and not talk at all for a while, that's fine too. We have all day."

She watches him sit, marveling at how easily he moves while being so large and powerful. It's like with the Sentinels except not the least bit terrifying. With Knock Out, she can appreciate what he is because she knows who he is and doesn't have an ounce of fear of him within her. (The ocean of fear for him isn't something she's willing to openly acknowledge yet.)

Stepping over to the area he'd indicated, she pauses partway down to the ground, peering up at him in consideration. He really is so much larger than her...

She straightens up again and instead moves over to pat his leg. "You mind if I sit up here?" she asks, not wanting to assume he'll be okay with something like this. He's not a jungle-gym, after all.

Mildly surprised by the request but not put off by it, Knock Out nods agreement. Rather than make Rogue hoist herself up, he flattens his hand and rests it halfway between the floor and the top of his leg, so that she can use it as a step to climb up.

The lower part of his leg -- the red armored portion that as a whole was his pede -- might be too bulky to make much of a seat. But the thigh area was unarmored, mostly flat and silver, suitable for sitting. Like his chassis had been when she'd touched him before, the metal had an ambient warmth to it.

"Better?" he asks, once she's found a secure spot.

The step up is much appreciated; if she'd had to get up there on her own, there likely would have been a good deal of flailing and she might have tipped right over the other side of him before she'd gotten a good hold. This way, she's settled in no time, stretching her legs out like he has and leaning back on her hands to look up at him.

"Much," she confirms with a bright smile. "You're awful tall, sugar. If I'd sat down there, I'd probably have gotten a crick in my neck."

His warmth feels amazing against her hands, the indescribable comfort of it seeping up through her palms and fingertips. After a few moments of it, she feels infinitely more prepared for the conversation ahead.

"What was it like for you on your Earth? Did you have to hide what you are from humans or could you live openly?" It seems as good a place as any to start. Better to know what she's working with than just starting from scratch.

Knock Out laughs a little at her observation. "I'm only tall compared to humans," he replies. "I'm on the shorter side compared to most other mecha of my frame type."

It's as good a question as any to start them off. "We hid. The Nemesis was shielded so it couldn't be detected in orbit, and we took Earth alt modes for when we're planet-side. That's not to say that no one knows about us - the Autobots have government allies, as well as their--"

(No, don't call them pets.)

"--friends. Children. Most of them. And the wretches that are part of M.E.C.H., however few of them are left now. But as far as humanity in general, they don't know about us. The military somehow managed to keep Megatron detonating the entirety of a Nevada town under media wrap, so that was impressive."

She nods every so often as he answers, a sign that she's paying attention, processing his words to fully grasp their meaning. It's only when he's finished that sighs quietly.

At least they're not starting from zero.

"It was like that for us at first," she explains, considering her words carefully. "Mutants have been around for a long time, but we were such a small part of the population that no one really knew about it. Eventually, the government found it, but our existence wasn't really public knowledge until around my generation when more and more kids started turning up as mutants. Then they started talking about what to do with all of us and how to handle people with powers."

She reaches up to run a hand through her striped hair, pulling it back from her face. "The ones who could pass as normal had it easiest. They could hide in plain sight and no one was the wiser unless they used their powers."

So mutants in Rogue's world were fairly in line with imPorts then; Knock Out supposed he'd never really drawn the parallel before, but it made sense. Some of them were indistinguishable from the natives of that world, able to easily pass in the cities. And some were distinctly inhuman (Knock Out himself was an odd outlier to this category, if only because he technically had a human form that he'd never used) and instantly identifiable on sight.

As imPorts, they'd been treated (on the whole) positively. There were some distrust issues, certainly... normally dependent on whatever upset the Porter was providing them with on a given month... but nothing like the harsh discrimination focused in this world on mutants.

"So they started separating mutants from the general population?"

Being treated like every other imPort had been a breath of fresh air for Rogue after seventeen years of being hated and feared as a mutant. It had been like some kind of surreal dream — and now she was waking up.

"Not at first," she says with a shake of her head, studying the plates of his chest rather than watching his expression. "Not officially. For a long time, it was just prejudice and fear. Families ostracized children, crowds ran mutants out of towns. Even when we tried to help, we were seen as part of the problem."

Shifting slightly, she still doesn't look at his face. "We saw it coming from a long way off, but when they finally passed the Registration law, everything changed. Mutants had to register with the government and anyone who resisted was a criminal. It wasn't a huge leap for governments to start putting restrictions on where we could go, what we could do. When they started putting the 'most dangerous' of us into camps, we ran."

It had definitely been an eye-opening experience for Knock Out as well. Being able to interact in his natural form with humans as an imPort -- even though he still occupied an "outsider" perspective in the fact that they were summoned by the Porter -- had been a dizzying change from having to hide at all times outside the ship. And it had, over the course of the year that he'd been there, helped temper his otherwise intense (though not undeserved at the time) dislike of humans in general.

"Cybertron had something similar," he discloses. "Where outliers were ostracized, persecuted. Given extra restrictions even within the forced castes. Functionism was brutal regime."

But this is her story, not his. Her tale is lining up with the research he's done through the internet so far, at least. "It didn't leave you with much of a choice, especially not if registering didn't keep those who had safe. Be a legal prisoner or an on the run criminal... no good option either way."

She nods distractedly, half of her thoughts on how horrible it was that their worlds had such a thing in common. Why couldn't any species just accept everyone? Why did there always have to be someone who was hated by others?

"It worked for a while. We hid on the outskirts of big cities, making supply runs when needed. We tried to gather intelligence on what was coming next. But when they sent soldiers and Sentinels out to hunt us all down..." Her voice goes a little quieter. "We fought back as much as we could. The soldiers were easy, but the Sentinels... They kept changing their design. They could mimic our powers, track us by our DNA. And then they could find anyone with the mutant gene, whether it was expressed or not. They found anyone who would have mutants in their family, even if it was still generations away. Anyone who resisted or aided mutants was killed or imprisoned, and they didn't care what they destroyed in the process."

So essentially, what they were doing at the moment. It sounded like he was right about keeping them out of the larger cities.

But this also provides Knock Out with some key information about the Sentinels that he didn't have before, namely their tracking capabilities with regards to DNA and mimicking powers. He was assuming, though he had only media confirmation, that mutant abilities ran the same gamut of manifestation as imPort powers had. Everything from mundane, harmless tricks to hugely destructive capacities.

"I wonder if your own powers work on a DNA level as well," he muses thoughtfully. "That would explain why they don't affect me. What kind of range does this tracking have, do you know? I can't--" He mentally reaches out and taps against the impenetrable firewalls of secured military networks reflexively, but there's not so much as an iota of yield. "Trying to get into that information is going to attract attention we don't want," he settles with. "I'm sorry. It's just not my function. Someone better equipped would be..."

But the phrasing Rogue had used was nagging at him. True, they'd seen only a small portion of the country on their travel thus far, but nothing looked destroyed. No newspaper articles had flagged his tracers as wanton destruction.

"Then what happened?"

She glances up briefly at his musing, trying to filter through her memories to find the information he wasn't able to provide through his own means. It had been so long, though...

Those answers will come later. It's that last question that silently demands a response.

"The world ended," she says simply, as if it should be obvious. "Two-thirds of the population carried the mutant gene, so they were taken care of. Cities burned and only the ones who were useful were kept alive." Her voice breaks on the words, splintering as her muscles tense at the horrible memories that surface. "I can still taste the ash in the air. I still see the mass graves in my dreams. We lost the war and they just picked us off one by one until there was almost no one left to fight."

A world on fire and in ruins... it's something Knock Out knows intimately well, has lived through himself. He doesn't say it of course, but it's there in the way he watches her steadily, giving her description the necessary weight it needs.

"That's what you meant, when we were leaving that farmhouse in Iowa. You said the year was the same, but that your world wasn't like this when you left. This is... something new."

A universal anomaly? He knew about as much of the theory as an average scientist who didn't specialize in dimensional theory. Frankly, he wasn't sure whether this counted as a point for or against being some kind of Porter hallucination. It wasn't his world, and it wasn't the one Rogue was from, even if it was a variant of it.

"Did you ever meet Riptide, in the Porter world?" he asked. "He and I were from the same universe, but not the same version of it. We never did figure out why the difference. Maybe that's... somehow what's happening here."

It still didn't explain why he was here, though.

No, she'd never met Riptide, and so she shakes her head at the question. He'd been the only one of his kind she'd had the pleasure of meeting, a fact that makes her indescribably sad now. How many other opportunities had she missed in the year she'd been in that world?

"It might be," she acknowledges before sitting up slightly, pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around her legs. "Or it might be my world. We—" Deep breath. "One of my team used her powers to help change the past. It was a last stand, one last effort to fix things by stopping the war before it ever started. We went back fifty years but I never knew if it worked. The last thing I remembered from my world was the Sentinels breaking in and preparing to kill us all."

But she had no idea why he was here. If only she could answer that question.

His hand came up to rest behind her on his leg. It gave her something to lean against, if she wanted... but the positioning also enclosed her slightly, as if forming a protective barrier between her and the outside world.

"Fifty years..." Knock Out echoed. The same time frame where his research had indicated there'd been a major shift in the way mutants were handled in this world. It was too coincidental to be unconnected.

A frown pulled at his faceplates in contemplation. Her team?

"Would they be able to answer that, if you could contact them? Your team..."

She leans against his hand without hesitation, instinctively seeking that protection he offers even if realistically he can do nothing against the living nightmare that she'd survived.

"There's only one person who was supposed to remember," she tells him, wishing she could give a different answer. "No one else ever did when Kitty used her power. The only reason I do is because I was pulled out before I—" Scrubbing a hand at her eyes, she realizes she's beginning to feel those very few hours of rest that had been anything but. "They might not even exist here. We went into things knowing that changing the past might mean some of us would never be born."

They'd made the call that it was worth the risk. She would have done the same had she been given any say in the matter. By the time she'd known anything about it, it had been too late.

Ah yes, that paradox of time travel. Rogue's aborted sentence leaves only a few options about what she'd been about to say.

Rogue's explanations had definitely helped, but he still lacked information. They needed more insight into the capabilities of the Sentinels, the methodology of human soldiers, and that kind of thing just wasn't available in non-secure locations. If Rogue's knowledge was based on a world that had been changed and technically dismantled, they had no way of knowing how accurate any of this was.

"They might not," he allows. "But it sounds like this place has already done away with supposed to as a general rule, so the possibility remains. Unless it's something you don't think is the right call?"

Seconds feel like hours as she considers telling him. She'd told so few people the truth about what she went through, the whole truth of the situation, that dancing around the subject has become second nature. But if they don't remember, then there's no point in dredging up the past, is there? It's just more heartache that he doesn't need to bear witness to.

"It's probably the only call we have," she finally decides, leaning more heavily against him. "We were based in upstate New York, though. That's not exactly local."

The yawn overtakes her suddenly, cutting off anything else she might have wanted to say, and she blinks heavily when it ends. "Sorry, sugar. I didn't sleep very well last night."

He spends about two seconds considering the route. "We'd have to detour," he agrees. "Go far enough west to avoid the cities due north of here. We'll keep that option open for now, all right? Maybe it won't be necessary."

Rogue's yawn and sleepy demeanor is endearing. "I didn't either," he admits. Unlike his conflicted thoughts earlier about keeping his own fears private, this isn't something he feels he needs to hide. "Do you want me to change to alt? You could nap."

psl.

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