Mikaela Banes is waiting.

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Title: The Princess is in Another Castle

Warning: The present, and memories—old and older.

Rating: PG-13 for language

Continuity: Bayverse, (Dark of the Moon spoiler alert?)

Characters: Mikaela Banes

Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

Motivation (Prompt): "Afterism(n) - A concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late." - John Alexander Thom

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All her life, Mikaela has waited. She'd waited for her father to make everything better. She waited for a fairytale Happily Ever After with a handsome Prince. More recently, she's been waiting for a great big nameless something to fill the emptiness of vast starlight nights at 3 AM when the outside world gaps so huge it will bury her in insignificance. The inside of her head feels hollow, and she clutches that hopeful waiting to herself like the Pepto-Bismol coating over jagged thoughts that would drop through her body, slice her chest open, and spill her out.

Joey told her to go outside and scream furiously at the foothills when the waiting got to be too much, even if it was 3 o'clock in the morning. "I sleep heavy," Joey said. "If it helps, it helps. Do it."

For Joey, it was that simple. Complicating things was for other people. When Mikaela's father had called his cousin and asked to move in, just for a little while, Mikaela had heard the grunt from across the room. "You got a job?"

"Trucking," her father had said shortly, because updating family on life after prison wasn't something anyone enjoyed.

"You ain't gonna be here a lot, then."

"Nah."

"The girl gotta job?"

"Not yet. She's got a hand with cars, though — "

"I remember. Yeah. Don't worry about it."

And that had been it. No questions, no plans; just the click of the other side of the connection hanging up. Two weeks later, they had jolted down the miles-long dirt road leading to Joey's place, and there had been a room waiting. Simple as that.

Mikaela misses Joey.

Josephine Banes lived in the Bad Lands of the Dakotas, and she lived her life like it was no one else's business. It was an attitude Mikaela had never encountered before, but Mikaela had grown up in cities and towns where there were always other people poking their noses into everyone else's lives. Joey had grown up the isolated daughter of a pot-smoking hippy and a quiet Native American woman. They'd given their daughter with 34 acres of land and a dislike of company, along with the rampant headstrong willpower to forge a living from selling art to tourists in far-away galleries. Mikeala's father had given her a juvenile delinquent record and the ability to repair cars.

The government had bent rules left and right for Sam, because Sam had a golden alien robot hovering over him. Mikaela had waited for her record to be erased, and the paperwork had blown through the years with a constant mantra of, "Dear Ms. Banes: we are unable to process your request at this time. Please try again at a later date. Thank you for your cooperation." She'd been patient, because she knew how to wait. Plus, she'd known that the government really only made exceptions for the hero, not for the hero's hottie girlfriend. So it hadn't surprised her when the paperwork just up and disappeared one day, and she heard no more about her record going away.

"It takes all kinds," Joey noted, and nodded her toward the rusty Chevy out back. "We don't care, out here." It's the closest Joey ever came to offering advice, and Mikaela took it to heart.

Behind Joey's trailer/shack house is the woodshack and the junk shed, around which various pieces of transportation have come to die the slow death of rust in a state where rain rarely falls. The desert stretches out beyond it, shale-stone and rock under sand. It reminds Mikaela uncomfortably of Egypt, but Egypt is far away. Here there are no pyramids. More importantly, there are no alien robots, and the nearest neighbors are the foothills rising from the desert, beautiful and desolate. They - like the cars and tractors and assorted mechanical junk Joey picked up from the nearest towns in the following months for her cousin's daughter to fix — never offer to judge her.

So Mikaela goes outside when she can't sleep, and she screams at the foothills until the inside of her throat rasps hoarse and dry and it feels like air is scraping over her collarbone at the base of her neck. Sometimes, she stops working on an engine or a fence and just whacks it with her open hand, even if it hurts.

Because Joey was right: it helps. Especially when it hurts.

Mikaela misses her without missing her, if that makes any sense. Really, though, life always makes sense if you wait for it. Mikaela's been waiting for so long she knows the way it works, so she doesn't worry about the sense and just feels what she feels.

She misses the cigarette smoke and smell of spilt Bud Lite, and the cock-eyed grin that accompanied the guilt-free drinking binges when they broke open the cooler and drank for no reason other than the haze of alcohol. Her mother's relatives would have never let an underage girl drink. Even if it had been easy enough in Tranquility to find parties where the high school graduates too dumb or too poor to go to college smuggled in liquor, there had still been that disapproval hovering over her. But Joey didn't care. Even if the government confidentiality packet with all the i's dotted and t's crossed hadn't zipped her lips, Mikaela didn't have words to say aloud what bothered her - and it didn't matter. Not to Joey, and after a while, not to Mikaela, either.

They sat outside on the wrung-out couch from the Eighties, shared the beer, and looked up at a sky as big as all their problems. Grief and frustration were nothing new in the world, and Joey's weathered face showed she'd been dished out her own share of the hateful cosmic pie. Mikaela's father had been out driving the circuit, and there was no one to share the pain with but an older woman as wiry as barbed wire and twice as sharp. There was no comfort to be found in her acid commentary when they did speak, but comfort felt false to Mikaela's raw thoughts.

Back in high school, Mikaela had been the socialite. She ruled the popular cliques, and she'd had a dozen friends who'd gladly have stabbed her in the back for gossip. Not one friend knew about her time in Juvie. Not one friend understood it when she left Trent for Sam, and when Mikaela had graduated from high school, she'd deleted every number on her cellphone but NEST emergency numbers, two Autobot frequencies, Sam's home number, her aunt's home phone, and Sam's cell. She'd spent one glorious summer content in that, even on the nights when she thought it a little weird that hardly any of those remaining numbers called her directly. They'd mostly called Sam, and she'd just tagged along.

With everything that had happened, she'd lost the cellphone and all the numbers anyway. In the following year while Sam had been busy getting his medal and his freshman year in college and his new girlfriend, Mikaela had gotten a new cellphone with five numbers on it. Three of them had been for coworkers at the motorcycle repairshop she'd worked at. One had been a pizza place. The last had been Sam's. When she'd asked, the Autobots had mysteriously failed to forward their numbers to her again. NEST had never dignified her with a reply.

Of course, she'd never seen Autobots or NEST members again once Sam moved away to college. All the NEST soldiers she'd thought were her buddies stopped coming around. Ratchet suddenly had stopped meeting with her on weekends and relocated to Diego Garcia with Bumblebee. They'd met up one last time, fighting together, risking their lives and killing and nearly dying out on the sands of Egypt, and then Autobots and NEST alike had sent her back to Tranquility without even a nod. She never got a medal of her own, even though she'd bled for her world, too. She never got anything, but she'd waited because...mostly because she hadn't wanted to admit what she already knew.

Mikaela had waited, just as she had her entire life. And when her father had gotten off parole for good, she'd broken up with Sam because the truth was that she'd been waiting for nothing.

They'd moved because her father couldn't get a job worth anything in Tranquility, and she'd left with him because Tranquility had nothing but false hopes held from back before she grew the fuck up. There hadn't been any Autobots to hold her there, no friends made at work or leftover from school, and there weren't any memories she wanted to remember. By then, she'd gotten used to being the pariah; from socialite to outcast in a year of someone else's life.

Mikaela had waited for her father to make it better, and he'd told her it'd all be okay. "A few years trucking," he'd said, "and we'll have enough for the shop. You and me, girl. You and me and some greasemonkeys, huh?"

He'd smiled, and she'd smiled back because that had always been their dream. Regardless of the speedbumps and traffic on the roads they'd taken, she'd always known Dad would come back into her life and change everything to make it better, make it right. Aliens and boyfriends and the government could all go to Hell. A repairshop required business sense and a good hand in the cars, not a college degree or a spotless record. All their cash and their hopes had gone into buying the old freightliner semi-trailer truck, and for a while, the dream had seemed attainable. They'd moved so far away nothing reminded her of Tranquility, and at least the isolated location had given her an excuse for why no one visited. When she'd let her cellphone battery run down, it allowed her fool herself some more.

So her father had hit the road for weeks at the time while Mikaela had repaired old junkers in Joey's infinite backyard. She'd screamed at the foothills when it'd gotten too bad, but she'd begun to sleep better. He'd caledl her on the road, and those times had the power to make her smile on her worst days. It'd taken time, slowly, slowly, but the rents in her torn heart had started to mend.

Sometimes, however, she'd sat on the cinderblock steps nursing a beer or even just an iced tea, and she'd wondered what Sam had been doing. On her more masochistic days, she'd used her phone to check his Facebook page. Then she'd sat on the cinderblock steps and suppressed the tears until her teeth squeaked from gritting them angrily, and that's how she'd known she wasn't over him yet.

Two months after they'd broken up, his relationship status had changed again, and it'd punched straight through her heart when she'd looked up his new girlfriend.

For all the reasons she'd had for breaking up with him, him cheating on her hadn't come up. It had honestly not even crossed her mind. But this Carly girl had a transparent work history and open nature, and it was too easy to trace the lovebirds' relationship back to their very first meeting in the Oval Office, where a boy had gotten a medal and Mikaela hadn't. A boy who was going to the very best Ivy League college; who was now dating an international, highly-educated and widely-networked lady; and who had left behind the high school graduate hottie with no friends of her own because she'd lived through him, if only unintentionally.

It'd hurt her in a way Sam treating her like property never had.

Other times, she'd left the phone on the rickety table at her bedside for days at a time. She'd felt better, those days. The radio had wailed bad country music while she'd worked, and she'd stunk to high Heaven because the heat made doing laundry regularly a pain in the ass. Instead of caring, she'd skipped showers for the sake of pure sensation: the stickiness of sweaty skin, the itch of hair too long in a ponytail, and the slick feel of engine grease. She'd sat on the cinderblocks and watched the sunsets, and Sam had been a distant memory, unable to hurt her.

During the endless Bad Lands' evenings when breathing cycles into hypnotic rhythms and the only sound is her heart and the wind, other thoughts filter past the pain. Silly ideas, serious considerations, and often, the memories that bring too much emotion when brought out into direct daylight.

As darkness creeps out from under the house and pools in the desert sand, drying the sweat on her brow, Mikaela remembers her mother.

Her parents got married when she was two years old. One of the few memories she has of her mother is swathed in white gauzy fabric, the touch of satin cool on her cheek while the large, warm presence in blue jeans she knew as Momma lifted her up onto the coverlet beside the dress. She knows now that it had been a cheap secondhand store buy, but costume jewelry and playing dress-up is fairy magic for children. That kind of magic doesn't cost money. While her mother's face never comes into focus except in misty dreams before sunrise, Mikaela strongly remembers the dress.

Even stronger is the song, strong enough to ache in her chest on mornings when she wakes wiping the grit of forgotten tears from her eyes. "Here comes the bride," sings soft and clear in her memories as the headdress drifts across her eyes, and Mikaela laughs in her memories, looking up through the glinting blur of rhinestone glitter at the singer. Laughter answers laughter, as bright as Mikaela's little-girl giggles. Her mother had been so happy on that special day. "Not your turn today, baby, but soon. You just wait."

Two years later, and Momma choked to death on a fishbone at the diner where she worked second shift.

There had been happiness, if not magic, in those quick years. Mikaela doesn't remember much of them at all. She doesn't even remember the funeral.

"Life's a bitch, and then you die," Joey told her on the drive home from another funeral, years and years later. Mikaela was crying too hard to answer, the drunken sobs of the totally bereft. She held onto an open Jack Daniel's bottle and glared out the truck window in a useless attempt at hiding her tears, but Joey never commented on the sobbing any more than she'd commented on the screaming. There was no comfort to give one so hurt, and little enough anyone could do for Mikaela's wounds but offer a place to stay, a job to do, and all the space she needed to heal.

Sam's love life no longer mattered. Nothing mattered for long months after that.

Mikaela doesn't remember her father's funeral, but she remembers the clink of the keys as the Sherriff handed her the plastic bag holding her father's belongings. She walked out to the parking lot as if in a dream, eyes too swollen and sore to produce any more tears for the moment, and just stared at the semi. It sat there, looking inoffensive and old. Optimus Prime would have never taken it as his alternate mode, and that had been a strange reassurance to Mikaela when they'd found it, she and her father. No Decepticon or Autobot would disguise themselves as an old semi that had seen better days, and it had given her that much more distance between new life and old. It had taken all their cash to buy, old as it was, but it was serviceable and working and hadn't helped a bit when her father's heart had given out at 6:46 PM in a truckstop in Montana.

Seven years in prison doing time, calling his baby girl every week because they were both waiting, and almost two years on parole, working the craptacular job at the motorcycle place while Mikaela had finished high school and finished dating a total loser who could save the world but not their relationship. Then, once there had been no more excuses to stay in Tranquility, they'd gotten little over a year together on the outside. Most of that had been snatched between hauls: the brief, exhausted rests when he'd come home to see her, maybe worked with her a bit in the makeshift garage in the junk shed, and then her father had disappeared onto the road again.

She'd been waiting for him, and he'd always been working for a later they never got. Now it's too late, and Mikaela has more memories of him from a distance than she does up close. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that she can do about it anymore.

Joey asked with the rough caution of the inexperienced what Mikaela wanted to do with the semi. A few tears pressed out of red eyes, and a voice that didn't seem to belong to her answered that she'd drive it back to the Bad Lands. Joey looked at her for a minute, but only said that they'd have to drive fast, to make it in time for the funeral. "Follow on my tail," she said, and Mikaela nodded numbly.

She doesn't remember the funeral. She remembers the hours of driving with no noise but grumbling diesel engines, and blank lengths of time on the highway when she tried to remember the color of her father's eyes. Later, she checked his driver's license to make sure, because she didn't know. She couldn't remember.

What she does remember is sitting on her parents' bed with white drifts of sparkling tulle falling around her shoulders onto her thighs. She'd always clung to fairytales and dreams, even after her mother 'went away.' The Princess would be saved by the Prince, and then that magical song would play, and they would all live happily ever after. If she just waited long enough, before would become later. If she waited, trembling under the veil, poor shield that it was, the miserable now when the first of her father's many shouted phone calls about money they didn't have would pass. It would all be okay.

Her father had promised her that in not so many words. "Just you wait, baby," he'd said to her during the car trips she's later told were heists. But she's told by cruel men in blue uniforms who pinched her wrists with metal cuffs and twisted her ear when she'd cried for her father, so deep down she never really believed them. The car trips had been father-daughter time; not quite magic but not the same as reality, either. The Princess learning to repair royal coaches from the King, with his rough stubble and good nature as he'd guided her hands on the parts. Still waiting for it to be okay, still waiting for later.

"Just you wait," her father had said, and it'd been half a plea once he was behind bars. She'd gotten her own criminal record, too, and it'd been hard to not loathe the King when she'd moved in with her mother's relatives. They weren't mean, and they hadn't openly blamed her father for anything, but they weren't magic in any way. They were normal people with normal lives, and Mikaela…

Mikaela forgot to call them for two months after her father died, and they were shocked when she told them. "You're moving back here right now!" her aunt said shrilly, surprised and disturbed but equally concerned for her niece's well-being. "You can move into your old room, and the store on the corner of 56th and Reedman is hiring cashiers. You'll be able to move out into your own place in a few months if you want. Honey, it'll be alright. Do you need help with movin - "

Joey took the phone from her slack hand and walked out of earshot, saying in a voice of concrete and gravel as she went that, "Mikaela's not going anywhere." Whatever else she said in the following conversation, she hung up soon after, and Aunt Cindy didn't call back.

Mikaela just put her face in her hands and cried. She didn't ask for her phone back, and Joey never brought it up. Neither one spoke about Mikaela leaving.

The semi sat under the tin roof of the woodshack and waited with the patience of inanimate objects. Living things change. It's a fact of living, and Mikaela sometimes still catches herself watching the semi for movement idly, as if it would come to life overnight. But it didn't, and it doesn't.

Only Cybertronians would move like that, and she doesn't know what she'd do if the semi came to life with the distinctive sound of parts transforming. Kill it, probably. Sam had been the romantic, the one who wanted to talk and fumbled in a complete fail when lives were on the line. Mikaela was the type to run and grab a chainsaw to kill the threat with. He'd been more inclined to babble hysterically under pressure, but she reacted.

They'd worked well together, but it'd taken her a while to realize that Sam would work well with anyone who had a level head. She hadn't been special in that respect, so she'd worked hard to become special. Her choices had been limited, since college hadn't been an option. She'd asked Captain Lennox what the chances were that she get into the NEST forces if she joined the Army; he'd kindly not laughed in her face. She'd boldly marched into Ratchet's workspace and listed her mechanical qualifications before asking for a basic course in Cybertronian medical repairs. Ratchet had openly dismissed her, which had been a more honest reaction than NEST had given her in the long run.

But she'd been insistent, so Ratchet had instead consented to teach her how to take a Cybertronian apart. "I want to learn to help," she'd protested, because Sam had practically been repulsed by war and killing and all the violent realities she accepted as part of an alien robot deathmatch.

Ratchet hadn't said anything about the odds of a human helping a wounded Autobot over encountering a functional Decepticon, but he'd said, "We will start with this. Later, perhaps, I will teach you medical repairwork." She'd backed off the subject, because at least Ratchet had kept her busy while Bumblebee and Sam debated music and went for long drives where they talked like little boys about unimportant topics.

Captain Lennox hadn't laughed in her face, but he'd introduced her to the only three female members of the NEST team to let her see the humor herself. They were built like bank vaults and looked like they could break into them with one hand, and Mikaela had looked down at her far more delicate frame with a rueful grin. Maybe if she'd started training years earlier, she could have had some hope of becoming the best of the best that joined NEST. They'd laughed at her in turn and had taken her under their formidable wings on the days when Sam, yet again, ditched her on base to take off with his mechanical buddy. They had taken her to the shooting range where Ironhide didn't edit his roaring disdain for human abilities — she'd never commented on the difference when Sam was around — and had patiently taught her the best way to disable a Decepticon with a handgun, a grenade, and every overpowered gun in the line-up that had 14 letters and numbers in its name. This, she'd been able to do. "I drive, you shoot."

Sam had never really had much interest in what she did while he was busy with the soft, utterly false side of the Autobots she only saw when she was at his side. She hadn't asked why they changed for him when they'd seen what he could do under pressure. Maybe because she hadn't been any different when the Decepticons had come for them, but Sam persisted in believing conflict to be unnatural. She'd taken what she could get and waited for Ratchet's medical lessons like they'd grant her a little bit of Sam's optimism. It'd been her link to Sam's world, because his time with Bumblebee had been some kind of sacred time-out-of-time that she hadn't been allowed into unless she was making out with him. Hormones had still trumped aliens, at least at times.

She'd waited, but she'd never gotten the medical lessons. She'd gotten harder instead of softer, and instead of understanding Sam, she'd been a bit disgusted by him.

Well, life changed you, even if you couldn't choose how. Mikaela had waited for her choice, but she didn't get what she waited for. Had she ever?

The Banes women kept living, and they changed because of it. Joey's eyes sank deeper in her skull in the months after her cousin's death, and Mikaela lost weight. Since the only mirror in Joey's rambling trailer-meets-shack house is a cracked door on the medicine cabinet and nobody said anything on the rare occasions they went into the nearest towns, it hardly mattered. Months later, Joey sold four paintings in a row and started letting her hair grow out, iron grey and coarse as a Brillo pad. Mikaela's muscles filled out and toned, taking on the sleek hardness of tensile cable. Without trying or caring, she ended up with the tight body of a woman who works with heavy machinery. Maybe Lennox wouldn't laugh at her these days, but it's a little late to think about that.

She worked late at night under the harsh glare of a bug zapper and one bare bulb out in the shed. Joey rose before dawn to paint the kind of scenery tourists liked to buy paintings of. They passed at dinnertime. Joey taught her to cook on the old gas stove, one monotonous meal at a time. They joked that they were sharing the secret family recipes of Chef Boyardee. No restaurant would serve what they fixed in the old kitchen with its even older appliances, but two women with no real interest in food beyond fueling their bodies could eat it for months.

They lived in the same place, but they occupied different worlds. So far as roommates went, it was a good match.

She wonders, standing underneath brilliant stars - that one is Cybertron, and, yes, recognizing it still makes her heart spasm - if she still wants to be a Princess. Being a trailer-trash, borderline poverty Princess seems more realistic than most of her dreams.

High school had pushed the dreams down, because she'd come out of Juvie a tough bitch with something to prove. Maybe she'd been dead-set against magic. Maybe it'd just been a hiatus while she waited for the King's return. Maybe she'd been trying to replace being a Princess with being queen of the cliques, the prom queen who had the strongest sonnuvabitch on the football team in her arms and between her legs.

And, yeah, it'd been misguided and probably stupid. Who'd been there to tell her it was wrong, though? The King had been locked up. Her aunt had been a little convinced all the attitude and bad behavior came from the carjacking, but it wasn't against the law to want to be the most popular hottie in the school. Her grades hadn't been the best, but it hadn't been like anyone thought she'd ever go to college. She had looks, not riches or brains. Not the right kind, anyway.

Princesses got swept off their feet by rich Princes, got married, and got that mystical Happily Ever After. Mikaela wasn't a Princess, and by age 17, she'd started to accept that fact.

She'd been waiting for years, and she could even say for sure what she waited for anymore. If there are no fairytales, is there magic? If there is no later, is now all she had to hold onto for the rest of her life? Get through high school by the skin of her teeth, get knocked up by the jerk football player, get an abortion, get dumped for someone more willing to put up with his shit, get a crap job, and eventually get her criminal father back in her life? It'd all dangled in front of her like it was anything to look forward to.

Her mother had spoken in her dreams sometimes, drowned out by the noise of commercials and adolescent bitterness, and Mikaela had woken with her eyelashes crusted in the mornings. "Not your turn today, baby, but soon. You just wait."

Mikaela had found out the hard way that she couldn't be in a relationship where she wasn't equal. She couldn't submit. She couldn't be anyone's Little Bunny, always in the back seat and never driving. That'd been the last straw for her. It'd opened her eyes. Mikaela wasn't a Princess, not the kind in flowy dresses and bridal crowns. Princesses in the old stories didn't get off their frilly asses and save themselves, and Mikaela had finally started growing out of her adolescent bitch-queen persona enough to recognize that. She'd been on the verge of throwing it all in Trent's face and storming off when Sam had interrupted.

When she'd met Samuel Witwicky, Mikaela had thought maybe her Prince had come after all. They'd met an alien and fought to save their planet, and he'd been an incredibly sappy romantic under all the geekiness in a way that none of the jocks she'd dated had ever been. He'd worshipped her like an alabaster Princess up on a pedestal, and for a while, the difference had been enough. The little girl in her had woken up and she'd fallen for the hero hard. She'd gotten into the car, and she'd met all his new friends, and that'd been enough. They'd done awesome things together, and so long as they'd been together, she hadn't really noticed that she had nothing on her own.

But relationships aren't that easy, not in high school or a reality where there are alien cars, and Mikaela Banes had seen Sam Witwicky off to college - and found herself still waiting.

And in the waiting, she'd realized some things that had been bothering the part of her that had known she still waited. No, not the insecure part of her that had coyly broken up with her Prince to try and make him admit to loving her. No, it'd bothered her still after all the excitement when Sam had died and the adventure had sucked her back into the life that didn't belong to her. It'd bothered her because, even though she'd been killing Pretenders and capturing Decepticon spies, nobody had looked twice at her unless it was to notice her boobs.

Sam had treated her like a Princess. Yeah, well, Trent had treated her like a Princess, too, even if his particular vision of a Princess dressed in lingerie. He'd opened doors for her, escorted her around, did and decided everything for her as if she had no mind to think with, ordered her about like a dog, and held her on his arm like a decoration. It had been the first time Mikaela had actually been treated like a girly-girl, like she still had that veil all in white, but she hadn't been a child who thought it was what she wanted anymore.

Fairy magic loses its shine and becomes cheap tricks when children grow to teenagers. Reality breaks the back of fairytales. Sleeping Beauty was raped, Little Red Riding Hood was horribly burnt by stomach acid, and the hard truth is that some women aren't suited to be helpless royalty. Trading the rough-edged jock and his great truck for the romantic guy with an alien car hadn't changed that fact that, underneath the different words and mannerisms, Trent and Sam had both treated her the same way.

"Come here, do that," she'd said to Sam, and from the confusion in his eyes she'd known he hadn't understood anymore than Trent had. "Let's go. Get in the car. It's my car! Why do you automatically take my keys every goddamn time we go somewhere?" She'd been dashing the tears from her eyes, refusing to let the pain stop her, and he'd already been brushing the argument aside because it had clearly been filed under Cry Time; Girlfriend Upset in his brain. They'd had this kind of discussion about his treatment of her before, and he'd known it could be solved by an avalanche of stupid, stumbling apologies and remembering to put what was important to her ahead of his own interests for a single day. The problem this time had been that she'd seen his act, known the time limit, and already knew he'd revert right back to the same selfish, babbling, idiot-Prince she'd wanted, once upon a time.

It had somehow been worse because she knew it wasn't just her he did it to. "I'll never understand how Bumblebee puts up with you," she'd said unsteadily when she knew there was no hope of them staying together, because there were some subjects that couldn't be touched any other time. "He's supposed to be your friend, but I've seen how you treat your friends. Where's Miles, Sam?" It had hurt to force the words out, but it had been time. It'd been time when she'd watched her boyfriend's best friend from kindergarten slouch across the graduation stage, GPA in the toilet and a drug habit that half the school knew about but Sam didn't even notice because he'd just stopped talking to the guy the day his Camero turned into an alien robot.

It'd been time then, but she hadn't said anything because she had her own selfishness. She'd wanted what she'd been waiting for, but the time had come. She'd brought it up now, and it'd hurt to see Sam flinch. "How do you justify talking down to an alien older than our country? Do you have the ability to just block out the facts and forget that he rips the gears out of Decepticons and has been doing it for longer than we've been alive? For God's sake, Bumblebee's an Autobot and a killer and a professional soldier, and you treat him like - like he's Mojo!"

Sam had recoiled like she'd struck him, and that had been the end of it. Even if she'd had more to say, he'd turned off at that point. He treated everyone like they were less than himself, and what made it so difficult for him to understand was that, in his eyes, he was just trying to protect them. Trying to make them his.

Everything they'd gone through together, and it had been as simple as Joey's outlook on life at the very end. Because Mikaela had been waiting for equality, for a Princess with the magic song that would give her equal rights, but they'd never been together. It had been Sam first, and Mikaela following in his shadow like a trophy. No brides here.

"Not your turn today, baby, but soon. You just wait."

Mikaela's waited all her life, Momma. She's tired of waiting.

"I'm going to get a CDL-A," she told Joey, "and get enough money together to start a garage." The same dream her father had tried for, but it was something she wanted still. It was something worth trying for. No more waiting.

Joey just looked at her. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"You got money for the course?"

Barely, scraped out from under the bed, nickled-and-dimed from tractors repaired in the junk shed, and wringing out her father's sad bank account. $3,000 was a lot of money in the Dakotas. It was a lot of money to her anywhere. "Yeah," she said again, and Joey nodded.

"Good on you."

So she found herself in school again, even if the school was just a grubby used textbook off E-Bay and studying done over the Internet connection on her phone. It was easier to think of it as school than as testing. She'd never had any ambition to get the licenses and whatnot the state demanded, legalities lining up in neat rows that fed money into government coffers and reminded her yet again of the criminal record that came up every time she had to fill out her history on paper. Mikaela put her head down and studied, pretending she was in school.

When it got too bad and she couldn't pretend anymore, she went out back and screamed at the uncaring foothills.

The old freightliner's engine turned over faithfully, and she practiced driving it on the dusty roads. She'd known how to drive big trucks for years - "I'll drive, you shoot." - and had gotten the hang of this one with Dad while driving from Tranquility, but she'd never driven it legally. It wasn't hard to drive forward, but learning to back up with a trailer was a bitch. When she could handle it on the pot-holed dirt roads around Joey's place, she packed a cooler for overnight with Best Of variations of their daily fare and took the truck out on the highways. She took it slow and stuck to the back roads where Highway Patrol didn't care so long as you weren't obviously drunk-driving. Diesel cost like she couldn't believe, but she threw herself into repairwork. Joey found her two junkers to fix up, and she sold them on Craigslist for a few hundred each.

When that still wasn't enough, Joey came back from a gallery sale with a wad of crumpled bills. "You moving out?" she asked when she threw it down on the ugly old couch between them.

"You want me to?" Mikaela asked back.

Joey shrugged. Later, she shook her head.

When the time came, she drove Mikaela to the closest city offering the test for the Commercial Driver's License. It took them four hours to get there, and two hours for the test. Mikaela didn't worry about the practical driving portion, but she sweated bullets on the written test. Joey told her to stop being a twitter-bug and assume she passed unless informed differently. It made a kind of sense, and Mikaela spent a couple more hours talking with a company representative who was there to recruit drivers just like her. He gave her an application and his card when she told him she had her own semi and trailer already. Assuming the test came back with an 80% or better, Mikaela came out of the testing center with a job. Not a bad day, all around.

Joey's Dodge blew a tire on the way back home; Mikaela and Joey swore in chorus while jacking the rear axle up because the asphalt was too soft to hold weight in the heat.

"Life's a bitch, and then you die," Joey had said to her, but reality wasn't that dramatic for normal folks. Normal people had normal lives as mediocre as all the rest of the world. Statistically, there were a few special people, the outliers from the main group of humanity, but the majority wallowed in lives as unexciting as opening an unlabeled can for dinner. Mikaela had coasted her outstanding moments, and realistically, a mundane life was all she had to look forward to. What really happened was that an alien robot knew you in passing, labeled you interesting for as long as it took the special people to move on, and then never noticed you again.

Wheelie had said it best, when he'd stayed with Sam at college instead of going back to Tranquility with her: "Warrior Goddess or not, y'ain't where the action is. I gotta keep an eye on this dolt. You can watch yerself."

Maybe she hadn't been ignored so much as passed over by the White Knights and Princes who made it into the stories. She could take care of herself. Princesses got the interesting lives, but Mikaela didn't need someone else to save her. Life's a transforming car who'd dismissed her, the boy she'd broken up with, and she wasn't dead yet. She wasn't going to wait around for the end.

She was done waiting for her Prince, or her father. Neither had come through for her, so it was up to her.

Mikaela's CDL-A arrived in the mail two weeks later, and it was her turn.

She misses Joey, when she takes to the road, but there's something in the constant idle of an engine that's always been able to soothe her. It's a numbness applied to still-open wounds, and it lets her turn off her mind. Mikaela takes her first cargoes, ships her first round on the circuit, and misses her father's cousin while she's gone. Truckers are mostly guys, and a lot of them aren't all that great at hiding how they ogle her chest. It's okay, for the most part, although she deliberately doesn't think about how sometimes, when she guns the engines to climb through the Rockies, it reminds her of the bass rumble of sentient engines. The catcalls on the loading docks sounds like the idiot Twins heckling NEST soldiers for missing a target, and the more suave attempts at getting into a truck cabin-bed put her in mind of Sideswipe smoothly edging around mission objectives that are more brutal than Sam wants to hear.

It nags at her still, the things she hadn't said to Sam. He wouldn't have listened any more than he'd seen what was plainly before his eyes, but some tender part of her wished she'd tried warning him anyway. Wished she'd tried warning him that the cool robots he idolized - but marginalized - had been fighting a war long enough to get truly brutal. That she'd tried warning him that Optimus Prime's best politician's voice spouting "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings!" didn't apply to Decepticons who came to Earth. That she'd tried to warn him, at all, about the dual natures of the Autobots he blithely walked among. She'd witnessed Ironhide's savagery toward even his allies, because if they didn't get it right they'd get it wrong, and this was a real war where wrong meant dead. She'd heard the tales the NEST soldiers told, of Prime ripping the heads and spines out of enemies, and Bumblebee had turned into a whirlwind fury of sharp edges and powered blasts defending Sam in Egypt.

But the moment immediate danger passed, Sam had floated back into cushy denial. And they'd let him. They kept him in the dark about so many things because he was a committed civilian, and she'd seen some of what he turned a blind eye away from. He lived in denial like a total spaz as bad as his neurotic parents, and she hadn't warned him. He probably wouldn't have listened. But, still…she feels like she should have tried.

The truckers remind her of it: the innocence, the hints of more, and the blatancy. Soldiers and aliens walk behind her eyelids, but she forces a smile to her lips and the past behind her. It brings back the nagging worry, and also the helplessness of not knowing quite what to do. There are questions, now, and people who want her phone number. They want to know what she's done, why she's here, what she's capable of. Their questions remind her that she has cover stories, but also that she's making a living, now. They're nosy in the way she hasn't had to fend off in almost three years. She's busy, and they're interested in her business, and she hates it as much as she feels a strange sort of relief.

The trailer-shack home is as quiet as ever whenever she returns, and it's shelter. Yet…it's not a haven.

Momma's memory surfaces in the incredibly long Dakota evenings, and she finds herself humming under the stars: "Here comes the bride…" She stops herself, these days, and briskly rubs the crusts of old tears from her eyes in the mornings. She misses the beer and the cigarette smoke, even though Mikaela herself has never smoked. She sits outside on the old couch, arms kinked along the crooked back, and the stale smell of past cigarettes wars with axle grease. These days, the grease is winning. There's no one home to renew the smoke anymore.

Joey had been wrong. Life is, and then one day, it isn't. Simple as the woman herself, and Mikaela misses that simplicity.

Mikaela is 22 years old, and she'll learn how to pay property taxes this year. She owns 34 acres of land, two decrepit old trucks held together by good maintenance and some bad paint, a ramshackle home, and two makeshift sheds constructed of tin roofs and scrap wood. She drives a semi that has seen better days, and she plans to use what little money she's slowly saving to open a garage in the nearest town. In the meantime, she drives the circuit and comes back to an empty home dark with whirling thoughts, sucking regrets, and old cigarette tar on the walls. She sits on the cinderblock steps and stares with dry eyes at the Bad Lands. Desert wind sloughs over a backyard that goes on forever, right until it meets the distant foothills, and sometimes dirt devils dance between here and there. She likes to think her father and Joey's ashes are swept up in those miniature funnels. It hadn't been exactly legal, but after years in jail, she'd thought a coffin in the ground would be the last thing her father would want. And Joey…Joey belongs to this place more than anywhere else.

It's 3 AM, and Mikaela has to be on the road in 6 hours, driving toward San Diego. Work is a weak shelter, a damp, clammy blanket during a snow storm, but without it, she has nothing to hold onto. Without it, she will fall up into the infinite sky with its brilliant scattering of stars and be lost in the cold, uncaring cosmos. She looks up into the night sky that is not empty, no matter what the government says, and when the burning curve of another world - -Cybertron - breaks over the distant mountains, near enough to reach out and touch, Mikaela Banes is waiting.

[* * * * *]

[ Commentary: This one hurt to write, if only because of the mixture of tenses. I'm not sure how well the blend of memories—old and older—and the present works, but I don't think I can take much more of working on this thing. Mikaela Banes' disappearance in 'Dark of the Moon' became incredibly complicated for me as I thought over possible reasons why she'd leave Sam. I came to realize that I really don't like how Sam treats people in the movies, especially his girlfriends and Bumblebee. I had to wonder if I was the only one to notice this, but then Mikaela took it in directions uncharted. She ended it unexpectedly, too. It was originally going to actually have a 'DotM' plotline. I just don't think I can manage it, anymore.]