[closed] giant robot sex ed

[smarterthandad]

Who: Valeria & Shockwave
Where: Shockwave's lab (or Val's if Shockwave doesn't have one idk)
When: ??? after they've been hanging with each other a while
What: Shockwave is not as subtle about his giant hopeless sun-eclipsing crush on Optimus as he thinks he is, Val is about as tactful as a note tied to a brick and thrown through your window
Warnings: jfc i hope not

Val missed very little when it came to observing people. Nothing purely physical slipped by her, and even if she didn't always read the emotional signs properly, she noticed them. Most things she let pass without comment, either dismissing them as trivial or saving the knowledge for later use.

This, however, was getting to be a problem, and avoiding it would only make it worse. Val squared her shoulders and gave herself a moment to brace for what would probably be an unpleasant discussion. Adults.

"Professor S? Do you have a second?"

Comments

[tomemyoutliers]

There's an amused hum from Shockwave, and a small twist of his lips upwards at her gesture and comment. It would be exceedingly hard to misinterpret, but it was Optimus they were talking about.

"It's not as simple as that." It isn't, even if he wished it was. "There are four million years between us now, and, well."

It's Optimus, and changing his colors to match hadn't been an effective hint. "I'll keep the suggestion in mind, however."

[smarterthandad]

"No, it really is. It's just that 'simple' and 'easy' aren't synonyms and you're scared." Val pointed at him with the datapad, which was getting a lot of exercise as a prop today.

"You only think there isn't a simple solution because you've overconstrained the problem and you're refusing to admit to yourself that's what you've done. You know you can't pull strings to make someone like you, not really like you, but you also don't want to risk anything by letting the situation out of your control. That's sustainable indefinitely, sure, but at the expense of unacceptable amounts of your cognitive and emotional resources, and it's cowardly. If the problem space requires a calculated risk, you take the calculated risk and accept the consequences. The alternative is stasis, and where does that get anyone?"

So there. Val folded her arms and looked up at Shockwave, adult poise in her child's frame. She might treat her entire life as a games theory problem, intellectualized away from the emotional involvement she wasn't mature enough to grapple with head-on, but one thing she'd never lacked was adult role models willing to take enormous chances, in love and in everything else.