You Are My Knight - Optimus Prime x OC

- 7 -

Deep Space, 2500 years ago

A lone cube floats in the vast emptiness. Cold, alone, empty. Cybertronian markings etch the cube, any light that reaches it reflecting off of the faces.

It's almost cruel to subject this artefact to never be found in the coldest, outer reaches of space, having long left the galaxy that Cybertron resided in.

Comets fly past it, possibly detached from their orbit, thousands of years ago as it continues to go its direction. One lone comet shoots past, grazing the cube's side and sending it off to another trajectory as it makes its way towards the Milky way. To its eventual new home, Earth.

2007

Kaede flops onto his bed, exhausted after a long day's hard work and learning yet another method of medical procedure from Ratchet. As the weeks went on, it was getting harder and harder, the processes and procedures getting more complicated as it went on. Now Kaede knew how to build a servo, a joint, and a pede from scratch. He hadn't even gotten to the other internal organs. What the hell was a t-cog? As Kaede scrolls through the datapad on his bunk, he reads the anatomy of a Cybertronian almost aimlessly, reading it out loud quietly to himself.

Restless, he swings his legs off his bed and rubs his face before getting up to go take a shower. He passes by Chris' room with a yawn and slips into the bathroom, undressing and turning the water on. As Kaede washes himself, he starts humming a familiar song to himself, still humming it as he gets out and dries himself off. With a huff, the song not leaving his head, he grabs his ukulele back from high school and dusts it off, strumming at the strings and tuning it before eventually going outside to sit on the porch. He plucks at it, trying to remember the notes to it, messing up a few times before getting into the flow of it.

Kaede then leans back in his chair as he plays, looking up at the stars as he begins to sing 'Pili Me Ka'u Manu' to himself. As the song ends, he sighs, strumming again aimlessly. The front door opens and Chris comes out with a fond smile and a couple cigarettes, lighting one and taking it into his mouth before handing the other to Kaede. He accepts it and lets Chris light it as he sits down beside Kaede.

"Haven't heard you sing in a while," Chris hums. "You usually do that when you're really happy," he says, inhaling his cigarette before exhaling a cloud of smoke from his nose. Kaede hums as he looks out, still plucking at a few notes.

"Or maybe I'm just really tired," Kaede jokes, the cigarette tucked between his lips. "Ratchet's giving me the med school treatment and I just wanna relax," he says, exhaling smoke as he speaks. "This new job's kicking my ass, man." Chris laughs.

"Well, that's what you get for pursuin those guys," Chris replies. "You and Optimus getting along at least?" he then asks. "I've seen him coming up here some nights when you aren't even here."

"You talk to him?" Kaede asks, glancing over to him. Chris shakes his head.

"Dude's got enough on his plate already, he's spoken to me once and it was just to ask if I was doing ok since y'know, when we met him and all of them," Chris says, blowing smoke in Kaede's face. Kaede waves it away with a cough and glares at him for a moment.

"Hmm," Kaede hums as he takes his last take of the cigarette and crushes the butt of it into the porch's concrete ground. His attention goes back to the ukulele. "How 'bout another song? You better have heard this one before, it's like the best known song by Iz." He begins to sing out the lyrics as he strums.

~ Somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high.

And the dreams that you dreamed of, once in a lullaby. ~