Transformers ( Bayverse ) - I Bleed When I Fall Down

34 - Threatening Presence

    The day had gone as one could expect, with their almost habitual horse ride with Luna and Bear, a remedial trot for Trinity around the pasture. Though today had included a decent stall cleaning, and while it didn’t exactly smell like roses, neither complained. Both refused to, really. It was almost a game to see who would give first. Though Optimus’s extraterrestrial origins gave him a stronger sense of smell, and made it harder to cope. He made a face a bit of the way into it, and Fay just grinned, the smell hardly registering in her mind at this point. It was almost completely faded.

    She laughed lightly when she caught Optimus’s face contorting against his will at the odor from the stable stalls. “Something wrong?” She prodded, cleaning out another chunk of used and abused straw bedding.

    He raised an eyebrow before turning back to his work, Fay trying not to smirk, and failing. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” he replied evenly, though the smell of the place was horrid to his sensitive sensory input. Fay snickered, shaking her head at him in amusement.

    “Whatever,” she shot back in an almost sing-song tone, thoroughly amused at his discomfort in the barn’s stables. “You must be some kinda freak or something, you know that? According to my biology teacher, the sense of smell is the weakest of the five. It’s the first one to get overwhelmed and shut down, which is why pig farmers can handle being pig farmers. Their sense of smell adapts and they don’t even really smell it after a while. And here you are, unable to even handle the smell of horse shit and sheep shit.”

    She laughed at her own joke, though Optimus didn’t look all that amused. His eyes examined her as she laughed. She truly was beginning to trust him. She was letting a few walls crumble at their feet. She was letting the world become a brighter place. A magical place filled with infinite possibilities. And that was a very good thing.

    Because it would help her absorb the shock of the truth when it came to punch her in the gut in the near future. Even if Optimus was the one to deliver the blow. Though he supposed it would be better if he were the one to inform her rather than one of the Decepticons . . . If it were one of them, then it could send her world into a total tailspin.

    “You must be some kind of alien or something,” she continued, mostly to herself, but Optimus tensed slightly. “Of course, an over sensitive sense of smell can’t really mean that much . . . I mean, my biology teacher told me that my while my hair color is normal for the genetics I received from parents, my brother’s isn’t . . .” She sighed, and Optimus watched her carefully, her mind getting dangerously lost in a mental maze.

    “My mom has platinum blonde hair, with this absolutely ridiculous blue sheen that she insists on keeping, even at her age. Though she still looks plenty young, still. Anyway, she has platinum blonde. My dad has jet black. Quite the couple . . . before the accident, at least . . . Anyway, my brother had platinum blonde, too. According to my biology teacher, that shouldn’t have been possible unless either my brother or my father was dying his hair . . . Because darker hair colors tend to be dominant over lighter ones . . .”

    She shook her head with a sigh, trying to focus on her work quite suddenly, a couple other possibilities falling into her mind, and out of her mouth, before she could think it through thoroughly. “So, that leaves two options: either my mom cheated on my dad, or my brother was adopted. And with either of those, where does that leave me? Am I bastard child? The product of an affair between my mother and some mystery man as well? Am I adopted, too? I don’t know what to think. My mom said she hadn’t been cheating on my dad, at any point, but that . . . It would explain so much . . . You know . . . ?”

    Optimus let a small frown cross his features. It was hard to keep from her the truth. But he felt it would be even worse than what she was imagining already. He knew it wasn’t easy for her to keep going like this. To keep imagining strange scenario after strange scenario, but he couldn’t exactly just blurt out everything he knew. He had to handle the situation with dignity and respect, especially to Farrah. She’d been through so much already. And yet it had just started. She had plenty more trials that would be thrown at her. And he wasn’t even sure if they would ever end. That was probably one of the hardest things about all this. About the mission.