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If there’s one thing Bumper had noticed from his time on Earth, it was how moody the planet was. Traveling with the amusement company, he’d seen more of the planet in the past few months than he ever had of Cybertron in the younger years he’d spent there. Valleys of fertile farmland, with meticulously cultivated human crops, too wide to see the mountains that dotted them; mountains so tall that their peaks rolled like hills, their snow-capped tips fading into arid desert; oceans of blue-and-gray water flanked by townhomes in bright colors; forests of trees that could tower over the tallest of Cybertronians; and all the expanses of land in between, the suburbs, strip malls, and the things humans called “cities”. Many were impressive, some beautiful in their own right. But it was all so… desaturated. A far cry from the gorgeous colors of the Cybertron Bumper had left behind. Even the bright greens humans claimed represented the Earth only dotted the predominantly brown landscapes of the planet.
It was no wonder that they sought out carnivals at all. Amusement parks and permanent theme parks were beacons of color and light in the gray, brown expanse that made up the Earth. On Cybertron, those colors meant the planet was alive; to Bumper, it felt as if the carnival was the only living beacon on a dead planet. It wasn’t a feeling he could shake, no matter how much he got used to humans and their culture.
But the demand for fair rides fell in the colder months. Humans, more thermally sensitive than Cybertronians, weren’t as interested in rides when the weather turned colder. Winter, as his crew had explained to him, also marked a social turning point in the local human culture. The first month of the cold season marked the end of the previous year, a time for both celebration and reflection, and rest to prepare for the new year. Humans wanted to hunker down and work harder when the new year came.
So, too, the amusement and attractions industry had its own cycle. Without riders (or with less riders at parks further south), they would service their rides. They would break them down to the nuts and bolts, test and examine every part, and then put them back together. This was a bigger deal at permanent parks, since the towering structures of their rides were time-intensive to examine.
Bumper and Himalaya were exempt from this process. Well. The foreman had listed off a number of agencies they’d have to find a way to submit paperwork for to prove that Bumper and Himalaya had been examined and were ready to operate, and how that would probably involve at least partially disassembling and examining them, but that they were willing to work with them to determine what exactly that would entail. If they were willing to work with him, that meant they were willing to fuck off and keep their hands the hell out of his frame (look, TWO human-isms, he was interested in their culture!). And Himalaya’s, too, if he could get some common sense through the larger mech’s head.
But that was a January problem. December Bumper didn’t want to think about that yet. December Bumper had been enjoying the relative quiet of the storage lot. Some of the rides had been loaned out to holiday festivals dotting the human civilizations within the company’s working radius. Most of them, though, were still here. Including Himalaya.
It probably would have been a little more heat-efficient for the massive Cybertronian to turn into his alt form. Being lucky enough to pick a portable ride for an alt form, Himalaya could technically fold up from his alt form into a portable trailer. (He was very bashful about it, and how it wasn’t really a second alt-mode, because the two were related and the ride was intrinsic to the trailer he’d learned to transform into.) Instead, he’d leaned (carefully) on a warehouse on the company’s property, looking out from the hills into the valley below them, and motioned for Bumper to join him.
There was a soft snow that evening. He’d seen this type of precipitation, distantly, on the peaks that dotted the highland desert roads they’d taken to return to the property for winter. His human crew had shown him occasional videos and fictional media that featured it. But he’d never seen it up close before. It was… quiet. It looked like it should have made a louder sound than it did.
The snow didn’t reach too far below this elevation, but the storm itself continued west below the hills. Bakersfield shone distantly through the gray rain; eclipsed by the clouds, it almost looked pretty. (Most human cities were gray and grimy and seemed rudimentary to Bumper, but even other humans held Bakersfield in disdain for being especially gray and grimy. Beyond the slightly smaller scale, he couldn’t tell the difference.) Beyond the city, meticulously cultivated farmland stretched as far as his optics could see. That, even to someone as jaded as Bumper, actually was beautiful.
There wasn’t much to do on the property other than watch the snow fall. Maybe it should have been boring, but the alien precipitation was fascinating. It was so different up close from what it looked like in the media humans had shown him. It was one thing to know, rationally, that water crystals could form in such small shapes that they could drift through the air, and that each of these crystals was a six-pointed figure. It was another to actually witness how as the afternoon turned into evening, the clumps grew in size; how even a soft wind blew them in almost-perfectly-aligned shapes, reminiscent of a Lorenz function; and how despite the cinematics of it, they were almost completely silent.
For once, even Himalaya was quiet. Maybe too quiet. It wasn’t something he could normally necessarily pick out, because when Himalaya was in his base mode, he was usually either talking about something, or moving around—walking to a destination he couldn’t reach in his alt-mode, or people-watching, or finding ways to piss off Bumper when he’d told him to leave him alone without saying anything. But the power-consumptive larger mech almost always had a couple of open vents running, even when he was idling. In the cold, every single one of those vents was closed.
Bumper took his eyes off the view to glance up. Himalaya’s face was a little hard to see from where he was currently seated, but he was as entranced by the view as Bumper was. His visor had a way of diffusing the glow of his eyes, so that even in the dusk, he could make out a peaceful smile on Himalaya’s cheeks.
“You guys doing okay in the cold?”
Bumper processed Himalaya’s startled jolt before the meaning of the words actually hit him. He looked ahead. The property manager, Ben, was looking at both of them. Bumper couldn’t estimate human ages, but Ben was older than most of the other crewmembers, including the operators, mechanics, and electricians. (He was not older than the foreman.) His beard wasn’t helping him much from the cold; he had his arms wrapped around him underneath his dark parka.
“It just occurred to me that you guys probably aren’t too comfortable out here in the cold, that’s all. I could squeeze y’guys into the big warehouse if you’re chilly. It’s just—well, Himalaya, I guess you know the drill, there isn’t much space for you in there if you aren’t tucked up into your trailer.”
Himalaya looked down at Bumper, not saying anything. Bumper looked up at him and furrowed his eyebrows. Himalaya’s voice was soft when he spoke. “You cold?”
Bumper shook his head.
Himalaya turned back to Ben. “I’m not cold either.”
“Well, if you change your mind…” Ben seemed to hesitate for a second. Then, he clipped a key off of his keyring and tossed it to Bumper. “This’ll getcha into the big warehouse. It won’t disarm the alarms. You have my number, though. Call me if you use the key, I’ll reset the alarms from my home computer. Otherwise I’ll be driving out here in the middle of the night. And if you really need me, you know where I’m at.”
Bumper nodded, clipping the keys to himself just below the rubber ring around his chest. “Thank you.”
“You’ve done good work for us this season, boys. Don’t take those keys for granted. I just don’t want you freezing out here. Go inside if it gets too cold for you, I mean that.”
“We will, Ben. Have a good night,” Himalaya nodded.
Despite learning their language after him, Himalaya was better at human niceties than Bumper was. Ben nodded back and gave them a short wave before treading through the snow to the front entrance of the property. The chain-link fence shut behind him, and the night returned to silence.
The sky was dark now. Human settlements were always so much more impressive to look at at night. Even Bakersfield looked like a little star cluster. The 58 streamed into the city from below them, nighttime travelers escaping the winter weather to head into the valley from the east, from Tehachapi and the deserts beyond, not much unlike where Bumper had crashed to Earth. Four other highways fled the city at odd angles, red and white glimmering lights streaking off into the rest of the valley.
Bumper looked down to find Himalaya’s legs coated with a layer of snow. Concerned, he leaned out from below his shoulder and peered up at Himalaya’s frame. To his horror, the larger mech was entirely covered in a layer of snow. It couldn’t have been more than maybe 3/4ths an inch, and it was still far less snow than was on the ground. But… He hadn’t noticed how cold it must have gotten, then. Himalaya must have been more efficient at sheltering him from the cold than he thought.
There were no humans around. There was no point speaking their language. When he spoke, it was in their native tongue. “Hey.”
Himalaya ignored him. Had he been too soft? He didn’t think he’d have to be loud to punctuate the silence, but. Well. It hadn’t worked. “Hey.”
This time Himalaya responded. The glow told him he’d snapped his eyes open. It flickered as he blinked, then he peered down at Bumper. “Hmm?”
“You sure you aren’t cold?”
He genuinely considered the question. His eyes went a little distant, as he (hopefully) poked through his HUD for any temperature warnings. After a moment, he nodded. “I’m holding stable. What, are you cold?”
“You’re covered in snow.”
His brow furrowed. He looked down at himself in shock. He moved his arms to touch the snow on his legs, moving Bumper’s shelter in the process. He was suddenly acutely aware of how cold it actually was. “Oh.”
“What, did you not notice?”
“No, I- well, I knew some of it was accumulating, I didn’t know it was that much.”
“Primus, Himalaya-” He wanted to make some snarky comment about how it was a miracle Himalaya had found humans who could keep him running, because of his lack of survival instincts, or… something. But the wordplay wasn’t really there, and he took a little too long to figure out how to put the words together, and now Himalaya was staring down at him with incandescent yellow eyes, and there was another thought brewing in his chassis that he couldn’t put words to.
“What?”
He turned away for a moment, trying to put his thoughts into order. But that second stray thought was pulling him in a direction he didn’t really want to follow, and it had banished whatever words from that first thought he’d been able to come up with. He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
And the thought had led him to its completion without Bumper’s permission. Himalaya’s voice was fine when he spoke human languages, mostly English and a little in Spanish. But Cybertronian languages just… resonated through his frame. Both in a way human languages didn’t, and in a way smaller Cybertronians’ frames couldn’t. Even without him trying.
Because he almost never was trying. If anything, Himalaya put a lot of effort into being quieter than he naturally could be. Yeah, sometimes he didn’t seem to have a functioning volume control in his voicebox, especially when he got excited enough to lose track of his surroundings. But also, Himalaya had, by his own admission, spent his entire life trying to minimize himself. Other Cybertronians were put off by his size. Humans were even worse about it. Even the most understanding members of their crew still thought of Himalaya and Bumper as machines they couldn’t control, even after the effort they’d put into unlearning it. It wasn’t even something they could hold against them, not after following news of badly maintained and operated amusement rides leaving humans with deadly injuries. So he tried to seem smaller. Speaking quieter was one way to do that.
But despite millions of years of practice, his native language betrayed him. Even within little quips like that, in quiet conversations, barely trying to punctuate the snow, his voice was so… rich. It was almost warming. If he let himself, he could close his eyes and sink into it…
If that wasn’t an incredibly weird thing to think about your coworker.
He’d lost his chance for the retort to land. Himalaya turned away from him and sighed. “I guess I should at least try to melt some of the snow off.”
He looked up at him with concern. “Woah, how do you plan on melting-”
He stopped as all across Himalaya’s frame, incandescent lights flickered and blinked on. He knew from months of working together that they could light up a number of colors. But right now, he had them on a warm white.
“It’s not much, but over time, it might help. Not that I have any on the tops of my legs, though. I guess I wasn’t that cold there anyways.”
“You have any on the top of your head?”
“Did it-?” He lowered his head and touched the top of it. He smiled when his fingers closed over the layer of snow. “I didn’t even notice it on top of my helmet. I really thought the building was protecting me from the worst of it up there.”
His smile was so warm when he laughed. Bumper wanted to look away, to shake away whatever the hell thought that was, but he kept looking. There was a funny familiarity to his appearance right now, with the tiny lights blinking through the snow.
He noticed Bumper staring and paused. “Do I look silly? With all the snow?”
He’d shrunk himself a little as he’d paused. Couldn’t have that. “You look like…” Pity. He’d have to interject some human phrases to get the thought across. “You look like those houses with Christmas lights up, like they have up in Tehachapi. Or in the movies the mechanics were showing us this morning.”
His expression to that was a little hard to decipher. He was smiling, though, so probably good? He looked down at his arms, lighting up the snowfall around him with golden-white bulbs.
They paused for a moment like that in the silence. Bumper hoped he hadn’t said something wrong. He knew Himalaya generally liked humans; he wouldn’t have let them doll him up like they did, with all the painting and lights, if he didn’t. Was comparing him to a human religious tradition a little too far?
Himalaya readjusted how he was sitting. Bumper leaned away to give him room. Then, he lifted his arm up, inviting Bumper to lean against him. As he did, Himalaya closed a glimmering arm around him, glowing softly and protecting him from the elements.
“Maybe it’ll be a little warmer with the lights on.”
“You sound like you’re cold.”
“I’m not cold,” he said. “I might even open a fan with all this extra power draw. I could open one facing the chilly bumper car next to me who seems a little too insistent that I’m the one that’s cold.”
Well, that’s not fair. “You better not waste any energy on keeping me warm when you’re the one getting snowed on.”
“Not with my highly advanced thermal-protective energy barrier keeping the snow from sticking to me.”
Bumper wasn’t dignifying that with a verbal response. He leaned out from under his arm, grabbed a piece of snow off of his leg, and threw it up at his face.
Himalaya scrunched up his face. Then he looked down at Bumper with a challenge in his eyes. With his free arm, he flicked a piece of snow towards Himalaya. He swung back within the cover below Himalaya’s arm.
“…Fine. Maybe we can go inside. But I want a little more time out here first.”
Himalaya chuckled and pulled Bumper close to him. Bumper’s vents hitched – startled by the other Cybertronian’s size, not for any other reason. But this was Himalaya. He relaxed. If there was anybot who wouldn’t hurt Bumper, it was him.
They sat there for a moment. Himalaya’s breath slowed as he savored the winter air. There was something metallic about the cold, Bumper realized. It tingled on his finish and tasted funny if it landed on his tongue. It was pleasant… until it wasn’t. He tucked himself closer to Himalaya, seeking the warmth of his lights. Himalaya, in turn, held him closer.
Those lights were warm. But it couldn’t explain the odd warmth that grew through Bumper from everywhere his frame contacted Himalaya’s. It seemed to draw from the larger bot and gather in his core, surrounding his spark like a blanket. It wasn’t real warmth, just… this rush of sensation a little like it. He wanted to sit with it. He wanted to sink into Himalaya and let that warmth envelop him. It was easier to sit with the sensation of it than the thoughts that wanted to race through his processor—did Himalaya know he had this effect on him? Was this the kind of warmth he wanted to impart on Bumper? Would Bumper hurt him if he asked him?
Bumper wasn’t going to ask. Maybe it was a fluke, a trick of the moment. That wouldn’t stop him from savoring the moment before it left, though. He focused on the view: the human civilization glittering in the valley, the stormy sky blanketing the hillside, and the snowflakes, illuminated by the only Cybertronian in the galaxy Bumper could come close to saying he trusted.
He didn’t know when the storage yard had started to feel like home. But he had a dawning idea of whose fault that was, even if he’d never say it out loud.