TFG1 - May Silence Make You Strong

Title: May Silence Make You Strong

Rating: G

Relationships: Brawn/Hauler/Huffer, Cliffjumper/Sunstreaker/Sideswipe (Bromance only)

Summary: Huffer complains and grumbles his way through every day; that's what everyone has accepted as normal. What they don't realize is that constant insults toward the Minibot engineer have been accepted as normal also. This is probably why they never expected the nicknamed "mute" of their group to get so steamed about it. It's like you're screaming, but no one can hear.

“Ugh! All this work Prime’s assigned to us is sure to attract the Decepticons’ attention,” Huffer sighed as he pressed his shoulder against the large metal box in front of him and pushed it toward the collection he’d started.

“And that’s a bad thing, why?” Sideswipe asked, sounding so genuinely confused that Huffer whirled around to stare at him, planting his hands on his lean hips.

“‘Why?’ Do you like the battles we go through, Sideswipe?” Before Sideswipe could answer, Huffer stepped closer and barked, “I don’t! I just want to forget the Decepticons and go home!”

“Yeah, we know; you say it at least a dozen times a day,” Brawn sighed.

“But since fate isn’t exactly that kind to us,” Huffer continued, pointedly ignoring Brawn, “we had to land on this miserable ball of scrap, full of new people for Megatron to kill, and keep fighting!”

“We’re fighting for a cause,” Cliffjumper reminded him, both bored and irritated by Huffer’s speech.

“Really? From what I’ve seen, our concept of it is so watered down that I’d love to know! What exactly is our cause?” Huffer demanded, turning his sharp aero blue gaze on the other Minibot expectantly.

Cliffjumper opened his mouth, but Sunstreaker spoke up at that moment. “If you keep on, Huffer, the only thing getting the Cons’ attention will be your racket! Shut up!”

“Complaining won’t get the job done,” Hauler added, speaking up for the first time. “So let’s hurry and get it done before the Cons notice anything happening.”

Huffer glared weightily at Sunstreaker but did as Hauler suggested, turning on his heel and bending to heft some long pipes onto his shoulder. He hissed in surprise and discomfort as dull pain trailed down his frame.

“My chassis hurts,” he announced worriedly.

“Do you need some help with those?” Brawn asked patiently.

“No! Take them!” Huffer snapped, shoving the pipes into Brawn’s arms and hugging his own against his chest. “I need a break.”

“Yeah, so do we,” Sunstreaker muttered.

Huffer bristled and grimaced for it, pulling his arms behind him to rub his backstrut before hugging himself again. “If you’re so sick of me, you can handle all the work!”

“Yes, we can!” Cliffjumper burst out. “You’re just getting in the way!” The Twins nodded fiercely in agreement, while Brawn and Hauler glanced at each other, their expressions saying all they needed to.

Huffer didn’t seem to have a response to that, other than blinking a few times. At last he shook his helm and walked stiffly away.

—

Huffer glanced up with a dark frown as Cliffjumper and the Twins arrived in the rec room with cubes of energon. He could smell the nauseatingly sweet fuel even from this distance and he huddled into himself at his table in the corner, hoping to block it from his sensory net, which was already overloaded with the inexplicable pain that had started yesterday.

“Prime said he needs it done today,” Sideswipe was saying. “And, well, he wants to know why Huffer’s not working on it.”

Said engineer perked up a little at his name, a hint of a smile ghosting over his face. Prime had asked specifically about him, even with those heavy lifters present.

“What’d you tell him?” Cliffjumper asked.

Sunstreaker threw up his hands. “We told him Huffer threw a glitch fit and left. Isn’t that how it happened?”

“You told me to leave!” Huffer screeched, silencing all other conversations. The Twins looked like they’d been caught in Huffer’s headlights, while Cliffjumper wore a ‘here-we-go-again’ expression.

“You made it perfectly clear that you were disgusted with me,” Huffer continued, lowering his tone slightly as his pain flared like fire following a trail of oil. “I know what you think of me! You think I’m a bother and probably wouldn’t mind if I happened to blast myself into space. Or maybe since you all love battling for the cause so much, you’d prefer it if I was deactivated by force?”

“We would never want a fellow Autobot to die!” Sunstreaker snapped.

Huffer forced himself to stand, stifling a keen of agony and trying not to double over. “Oh, you think so?” he spat, forcing his pain into words. “You’re always telling me to shut up, be quiet, don’t speak, stop talking, zip it, stuff it, snap my trap! You’ve called me a skipping motor, a manifold mouth, a blabber, and a windpipe!” Huffer’s vents were churning steam and yet he found himself unable to retain any air he took in. “Death…is the ultimate silence…”

With that he crumpled, curling into a compact, shivering ball, and let himself scream.

—

“What’s wrong with Huffer?” Brawn demanded with uncharacteristic anxiety as Ratchet emerged from the med bay.

“His amenduct fissured,” Ratchet announced solemnly, causing a collection of winces and concerned murmurs.

“His…what?” Spike asked from below, confused.

“An amenduct is exactly that: a duct that helps our self-repair codes amend for diseases or corruptions,” Perceptor explained quickly. “Before more research was conducted on the subject, most Cybertronians thought it was a useless pipe. We’ve learned better in recent centuries.”

“So Huffer’s burst?” Spike’s eyes were growing wider by the second.

Ratchet nodded with a look of consternation. “And released toxic oils into his energon lines. I was able to filter them out in time, but I don’t know how such severe stress could have built up so suddenly! Usually there are warning signs—pain in the tanks and backstrut, purging, hot plating, anything! Has he been complaining of things like that?”

There was a long, stiff silence. “We’re…used to…y’know, tuning him out. Or just telling him to shut up,” Sunstreaker fumbled at last.

“W-We didn’t think it was anything so big,” Sideswipe added nervously. “It just seemed like the regular old stuff.”

Ratchet stared at them in disbelief. “He was complaining of pain…” His voice rose a few notches with each word. “…and you didn’t tell me?”

“C’mon, Ratchet, he always complains about every little ache! What did you expect us to do?!” Cliffjumper demanded.

“Listen to him,” Ratchet bit out through clenched teeth. “He nearly died, and he still needs a replacement duct for his fractured one.”

“Amenducts aren’t a critical component of our biology,” Perceptor pointed out.

Ratchet shook his helm violently. “They are in Minibots. If it were up to me, I’d take it from Cliffjumper and show him how refreshing whining is when you’re in excruciating, life-threatening pain!”

“Ratchet,” Optimus started to sigh, but another voice interrupted him.

“Prime, I’ll give him my amenduct if Ratchet clears me.” Ratchet and Optimus jerked around toward Hauler, who wore a hard expression.

Brawn immediately protested. “Hauler, that’ll put you out of commission for weeks!”

“True, but someone who was there has to make this right,” Hauler declared. “You and Cliffjumper are Minibots and the Twins are young warriors. I’m the only one of us five who can afford to give it up.”

Now that the sacrifice was being made for him, Cliffjumper looked both relieved and guilty. “He’ll…probably complain that he didn’t need your duct,” he pointed out in a quieter tone.

“And I’ll be happy to listen,” Hauler countered. “I’ll also be happy to listen to your apology to him once he’s recovered.”

“Apology for what?” Cliffjumper asked in disbelief.

“Did you ever stop to think that the reason he complains so much is because he’s hoping someone will hear him and—instead of telling him to be quiet or challenging what he’s said—someone will acknowledge that there may be some truth to what he’s saying and sympathize? Comfort him?” Hauler tried, crossing his arms. “When have any of us done that? And now we’ve hurt him so badly that he thinks we want him dead!

“If he doesn’t think he can trust his own teammates with his opinion about the world and its slagged-up problems, how can he trust us to protect him in the field? He’s already a perfectionist, we all know that, and that’s fraggin’ stressful. I should know from my Constructicon days—we should all know! Didn’t we have to fit perfectly into that caste system on Cybertron?! And I don’t know how you were going to answer him, Cliffjumper, but that is our cause: to give everyone, even people like Huffer, especially them, freedom to speak! Ratchet, you said the duct broke from severe stress!” When the medic nodded somberly, Hauler glared around at the group. “That’s on us. The stress of distrust that we’ve forced on him will turn him to all-or-nothing-thinking. Maybe that’s why Huffer wants to go back so badly; maybe he thinks that if we’re back on Cybertron with its caste system, he’ll feel like he belongs somewhere! Sooner or later it’ll make him reckless and then he will get himself killed. Think about how close it was—still is—today. What if the last words you said to him were ‘you’re just getting in the way’?”

Forcing himself to relax his defensive stance, Hauler concluded, “Hound and I were talking recently and he told me you consider me a ‘mute’ most of the time, so this is me saying my piece. It’s something a human said once: ‘Words may sting, but silence is what breaks a heart’.” On that note he dropped his gaze to the ground, shifting his weight restlessly back and forth. The only sound was the creaking of the ship and vents cycling the air.

“Looks like you have a contender when it comes to rousing speeches, Optimus,” Ratchet muttered in a pedal tone before gesturing for Hauler to follow him for pre-op.

END


Author's Notes: So here's what I've done with this: the Cybertronian "amenduct" is reminiscent with the human "appendix", but seeing as humans don't critically need their appendixes, I decided to limit the critical need for amenducts to Minibots.

And I have a lot of feelings about Huffer and Hauler, in case it wasn't obvious.