A/N: Hallo, all! I've finished my school work for this year! Curse my hubris in taking a university and a college course simultaneously. (Americans are much more impressed with that than Brits are.) WHICH MEANS WRITING. AW YEAH. (probably. I might have to get a job, perish the thought.)

Anyhow, here's the glorious fireball of 2000-words-ish awesome that I have been working on, on-and-off like a really unhealthy relationship, for the best part of this year.

Do enjoy. Reviews are great too! Many thanks for everyone who stuck with my writing, which was a terrible idea really, because I'm quite like a Lancia Stratos; very nice to look at and drive, but I rust and fall apart if I get even slightly wet.

That metaphor didn't work at all.

Cheers! Enjoy, all!

Dani & Blades Fight Homesickness, Girls Aloud, The Very Concept of Time, and The Inexorable Progress of The Glorious Ship

Dani onlined her optics when something faintly thumped on the roof of the firehouse. She sat up, cycled her optics to clear the cleaning film off of them, and looked around the underground bunker.

Blades' white-and-orange berth was noticeably empty, and her onboard sensors were pinging Sigma-17-Four's radar contact up above her. Her chronometer read 03:52 – boy was she thankful to Chase for helping her calibrate it to tell the time in hours and minutes instead of cycles and kliks or whatever Cybertronian time was measured in. She sighed and stood up off of her (her!) grey-and-orange berth, the faint orange lights dimming as she took her weight off it.

She flexed her shoulder, the joint making a soft pneumatic hiss as she warmed up her systems. Dani licked her lips automatically (a very human thing to do, especially seeing as she couldn't get chapped lips anymore, and on top of that didn't breathe) and took the lift up to the firehouse roof.

She caught sight of Blades' blue-ish plexiglass canopy before the lift had fully arrived. He was sitting on the edge of the helipad, his legs dangling over the edge. Dani very quietly padded up behind him – the fact that she weighed about three and a half tonnes notwithstanding, she was impressed that she could pad quietly in wedges – before he scared the life out of her by tapping the helipad next to him and saying "Hey, Dani."

"Dammit, Blades. I was sneaking up on you." Dani whined, dropping out of super-sneak mode and coming to sit beside him.

Blades smiled cheekily. "360 degree radar. Nothing sneaks up on me."

"How are you scared of everything, then?"

Blades shrugged. "Still surprises me when I see it."

Dani laughed. "Okay. What're you doing up here? It's 4 in the morning, Blades."

"Uh. I was, um, I was just, ah..." Blades sighed. "I was just thinking."

"About what?" Dani asked, leaning a bit closer.

"Chase's comm call. Uh. It, uh, it got me thinking." Blades explained, leaning back and looking up at the moon. "I don't have any parental units. It was just me and my brothers and sister." He made an accommodating movement with his helm. "I guess the Acolytes too." Spotting Dani's confused expression, Blades snapped his fingers, searching for the right word. "Uh. Um…, uh, uh… Monks! That's the word on Earth."

"You were raised by monks?" Dani asked. "Kinda explains a lot."

Blades rolled his optics. "Hilarious. Nah, we were important. Gestalts are important things. So the Acolytes of Primus looked after us instead of, uh, instead of a normal orphanage."

"What's a...gestalt?"

"Uh, okay. Right, so my siblings and I can kinda transform into a bigger, super robot. We, well, we combine."

Dani made a face. "What, like some kind of Aquarion?"

"Oh Primus no. Ugh. No! Ew. That's...that's just wrong. No." Blades sputtered. "Don't. Ew. Graham's TV taste is awful. Never again. You're ruining the moment."

Dani sniggered. "Sorry. So, gestalts?" she asked.

"Well," Blades started. "My siblings are kinda the only family I've got. You know? And they're all, uh, they're all scattered across the galaxy." He grimaced. "I mean, we can't actually combine anymore, First Aid might die or something, but still. I can't really help but miss them."

"Hey, it's totally okay to miss them, Blades. I went to a summer camp literally three miles away from home and I hated it." Dani said.

Blades laughed quietly. "Doesn't really sound like you, Dani. Sounds like me."

Dani knocked him on the shoulder softly. "Hey. Lighten up, okay? You can always just comm call them whenever. And besides, you've got me – uh, us, as in the entire Burns family and rescue team in a completely platonic sense, on Earth."

Blades looked a little happier, and he raised his optic ridge at her slightly hurried ramble towards the end.

Dani rolled her optics and shoved him teasingly. However, she suddenly noticed the quiet and rather chintzy tones of Elvis Presley's Can't Help Falling In Love filtering over the firehouse roof, as if they were in some kind of straight-to-DVD romcom or a fan-fiction on the internet written by a student who had been drinking quite heavily beforehand. She frowned and looked around for the source of the music which sounded a lot like it was being played on a cheap boombox that she had a strange suspicion that Graham had gotten for free from Doc Greene because it had a tendency to suddenly spray boiling hot orange juice out of the speakers whenever he pressed the fast-forward button.

The music suddenly skipped and the song rapidly cut off; only to be replaced by intermittent bursts of eardrum-shattering Girls Aloud while a voice which Dani had a strange suspicion belonged to Graham cursed the foolish technology for foiling his plans of glorious shipping, rather loudly and at length.

Graham's head appeared from the access ladder beside the lift. "Just, you know, go back to what you were doing. Don't mind me." he said, climbing out of the ladder shaft and up onto the helipad. Dani watched with increasing perplexity as he carried the boombox – still screaming Girls Aloud with random interruptions of Enrique Iglesias – over to the edge of the roof, placed it ceremonially at his feet, saluted it, and then soundly drop-kicked it off the roof with his right foot whereupon it flew magnificently through the air and then crashed disappointingly on the driveway, Cheryl Cole's voice finally cutting out with a doom-laden snap and a crackle.

Blades, the emotional moment that he and Dani had been having been by this point so convincingly ruined that she wasn't even sure it had existed in the first place, burst into badly muffled laughter and wordlessly pointed at Dani's engineer-in-training brother with the hedonistic glee of someone who is almost sinfully amused that bad things are happening to someone else for a change.

Graham scowled at him. "Oh, you laugh now, but just wait. I'll catch you both unawares with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers one day, and it will be a great day indeed." he declared, marching backwards onto the lift glaring at the two Cybertronians present.

He triggered the lift and then, because he was much lighter than a helicopter and therefore did not exert the same weight on said lift, began his excruciatingly slow journey downwards, never breaking his glare for an instant. Dani and Blades' optics followed him downwards, Dani with barely disguised animosity and Blades with completely overt amusement.

"Well," Blades said cheerily, once Graham had vanished from sight, "now I feel a lot better." He chuckled once and lay back on the roof, his arms crossed behind his head.

"If I'd known all I had to do to cheer you up was throw a boombox off a roof, I'd not have bothered with the whole heart-to-heart emotionally touching conversation." Dani replied sarcastically.

"Spark-to-spark." Blades corrected automatically, "And using the phrase like that is crazy awkward, so if you would never do it again that'd be great."

Dani turned to him with a dryly unamused look as if Blades was a four-year-old child, then had a thought and tapped her lip in contemplation. "Actually, I've never really asked how old you guys are. Or. Uh. How old I am now."

"About 18 million stellar cycles, although you don't look a solar cycle over 15 million."

"That is extremely unhelpful, Blades. I need you to translate how time works for me."

Blades regarded her with a raised optic ridge. Dani rolled her optics. "Yes, I do know how stupid that sounded. Just tell me."

"Okay." Blades started, sitting up. "So a 'cycle' is about an Earth minute. A 'mega-cycle' is about an Earth hour, and a solar cycle is just an Earth day. We use 'solar cycle' when we're talking about local time. Uh. Relatively speaking."

Dani nodded, noting this all down somewhere in her memory. "Okay. I mostly understand this. Proceed."

"Well, there aren't many more units of time we, uh, even use. There's nanokliks, which is the duration of 8,589,934,592 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom, and-"

"Okay, now you're just being complicated on purpose."

Blades grinned. "Kinda. A nanoklik is basically just one Earth second."

"Why didn't you just say so, then?"

"Because I did a lot of research to find out that fact, and I'd feel like it was wasted effort if I never got to use the knowledge."

"Oh. No, I know what you mean. Back to units of time, though, Blades."

"Okay. An 'orbital cycle' is one month local planet time, and a 'stellar cycle' is a Cybertronian year, or 400 Earth days." Blades finished, looking quite pleased with himself, to be instantly shot down when Dani asked why he still acted like he was 20 when he was in fact about 36 million years old.

"Well excuse me. Forgive me if Cybertronians age much slower than humans, so if I was somehow miraculously turned into a human I would probably only be about 21." Blades retorted. "And hang on, while we're on the subject of maturity, weren't you getting all 12-year-old schoolgirly about Taaylor quite recently?" he asked pointedly.

"That was like two months ago. And, while we're on that, I've been meaning to talk to you about how I've been suddenly finding efficient aerodynamics attractive." Dani said.

"I don't understand the question. Whose aerodynamics are you finding attractive in particular?" Blades replied in a bad attempt at preening, especially when Dani scoffed and told him that his airflow wasn't unbearably hot, more kind of dorkily adorable.

"Not my fault this stupid primitive Earth helicopter form is like a flying ball." Blades scowled. "I'd re-scan if I knew how to do it. Not into a jet though, that would be like running before I could walk."

"Can we get back to the part where if Cody is watching an episode of Airwolf I have to leave the room before I start drooling over the tight aerodynamics?" Dani asked tersely. "I'm not kidding; when a fighter jet flies past I just melt and it's embarrassing."

Blades almost doubled over laughing. "Okay, no, okay. I'm sorry. Really."

He paused in his apologies to almost kill himself laughing again. "Okay, maybe not really."

"You are being just the most helpful guy right now, Blades." Dani ground out. "Yes, it's hilarious that I get all flustered over Airwolf's air intakes. And don't even get me started on Thunderbirds. Can we just skip ahead until you tell me how to not do that anymore?"

"Well, I don't really know what to tell you. Have you tried cold showers?"

"I will push you off this roof, Blades." Dani threatened.

"I'm not even kidding!" Blades said defensively, his hands up. "It took me about a week to even look at y– actually, never mind that. Moving on. Just, I don't know, try not watching the Cybertronian equivalent of a Vegas show?"

"Oh, you're hilarious."

"I mean, I try."

"Good job keeping that part PG-13. For real, though."

"You have no idea how many times I had to rephrase that whole sentence in my head."

Dani rolled her optics and got up. "Sure thing. Whatever. Let's go to bed now, because let me remind you that it is four in the morning and some of us need recharge."

Blades sniggered. "Okay, Dani. Keep your spark chamber shut, I'm coming."

"That was a Cybertronian sex joke, wasn't it."

"I'm not even sorry."

God damn I really outdid myself with the jokes here. I may never be this funny again.