stunt_muppet

This is another one of those times when I spent all day on the internet, finally got something written, and then decided, fuck it, I'm just gonna finish this no matter how late it gets, deadlines are a-commin'. Which is why I'm up at 1 on a school night again. I'm making a note here, Muppet: huge success.

Anyway, because I only managed the one fic for my week of Miko love for ,womenlovefest I figured I could at least post some mroe stuff by the end of September (when posting "closes"). It's not finished, yeah, but it's started and I know where it's going.

I'm gonna link to it on the main post in the morning, though; no sense staying up later than I have to.

Title: Joyride
Fandom: Transformers Prime (with crossovers with Animated, G1, and Bayverse)
Characters/Pairings: Miko Nakadai/Sierra (this chapter); future crossover characters listed in their respective chapters. 
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1257 (this chapter)
Content Advisories: Mild romance; references to offscreen violence (futurechapters); AU
Summary: Or, five girls Miko hasn't kissed.
Notes: Written (belatedly) for womenlovefest. WIP, unbetaed.

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That dark-haired boy from her math class had a new bike. She knew because Sierra had said so.

It handled beautifully; she'd seen him riding it to and from school. It was fast and sleek and turned perfectly, almost within one lane of the road. It outran Vince easily, when he'd challenged Jack to a race; Sierra had told her that too. There was even talk that he'd be in the midnight races, this coming week.

No wonder, really. What else was there to do in this town? She'd been impressed, when she first came to Nevada, by the spreading salt flats, running past the horizon, broken up by pillars of stone as jagged and bleak as a skyscraper was neat and organized. But days had become months, and the sand stopped looking like an alien planet and just looked like sand, and then the only thing those huge plains were good for was swerving and speeding and doing anything you could to keep your adrenaline running.

Lucky for her, she got host parents with a sleek and speedy midlife-crisis car tucked away in the garage. And who didn't seem to notice anything about it so long as she brought it back clean.

Maybe now that that boy was in the races, she'd figure out why Sierra seemed to like him so much. He was so...just there. Nothing really exciting about him, nothing to interest a girl like her.

To be fair, Miko hadn't seen anything exciting about Sierra, either, and then she'd caught the preppy girl with the plaid skirt and the hairbow staring at her car when she took it for a test-drive.

She'd taken Sierra out along one of the canyons, riding as far as she could up the slopes until the tires squealed and threw sand into the car's undercarriage with a ping, ping, ping. She'd floored it on her way to one of the rock spires and seen how close she could get before she peeled away. And throughout the whole thing Sierra had screamed that she was out of her mind, but when they stopped her gasps had turned to halting laughter.

After that she'd started sneaking to the races, where Sierra stood right in the road while the cars went by, so close they whipped up her hair. Miko could only see her for a split second in the rear-view mirror, but her mouth was open in a wild, daring cheer, and her arms were outstretched just a little, catching the draft off the engines, as if she thought she could fly.

She hadn't won the race, not the first time; she wobbled too much through the turns. But she kept coming back, every night she thought she could get away with it. She'd keep driving till dawn, long after the races finished, tightening her control on the car, learning the right pressure on the pedals and the right grip on the wheel and loving the limitlessness that surrounded her, like if she just kept going she could drive off the edges of the world. And Sierra caught on, nudging Miko awake when she fell asleep before class.

"Where do you go all night, anyway?" she'd asked, after school one day. "Not much to do that late."

"There's not that much to do any time around here." Miko yawned. She'd contemplated just skipping and finding a spot to nap that day; it was hard even to talk, she was so tired. "I just go, you know? See how far out I can get in the desert before I gotta go back."

Sierra nodded, shifting her books in her arms and looking out towards the squat, plain houses and roads and buildings that surrounded them. "Do you ever..." she hesitated, letting the statement drift off in the hopes that Miko would forget about it.

"Ever what?"

"Do you ever - think about not going back?" Her voice was quieter than Miko’d ever heard it.

Miko shrugged, and placed her head in her hands, but the truth was she didn’t really know what to answer. Every so often, when she was on the road, the thought had occurred to her – to not turn around, to get so purposefully lost that she’d have no choice but to go in a straight line as far as she could until she hit another road, and from there follow that road until it ended. And some nights she’d almost done it, pressed hard on the gas like she was calling her own bluff – and then gone back, stepping back from the precipice when every other time she’d flung herself off.

Even back at the airport, on her way from home to Nevada, she’d almost boarded the wrong plane on purpose – didn’t matter where it was going. Only the fact that the staff had actually checked her ticket had kept her off a late flight to Brussels.

“Almost did that, a couple of times,” she answered; it was as close to the truth as she could figure out. “Why, have you?”

Sierra nodded. “Sometimes. I almost – well,” she stopped short. “It’s kind of embarrassing…”

“Pssh. Come on. Promise I won’t laugh!”

She looked around to make sure no one was listening. “I almost ran off with Vince one time.”

“What, that whiny guy? Blech!”

“He’s not that bad, okay. And besides, he’d talked, a couple of times, about just packing up and leaving. Said his parents wouldn’t care. Making a living working with cars, doing something he actually wants to do. And for a while, it didn’t seem like a bad idea – living day by day like that. Just…going where you wanted to. Making every day something different.” She leaned back. “It was more the idea of that than it was him.”

“Come with me tonight,” Miko said, starting up and now completely awake.

“What? When?”

“When I go out for the night. Ride with me. It’s amazing out there in the dark, you have no idea.”

The other girl rolled her eyes. “What, for the whole night?”

“Yeah! It’ll be fun! Do you know how much ground you can cover in four hours with no traffic?” She gave Sierra a nudge in the shoulder, and grinned her widest grin. “We don’t even have to go back if you don’t want to.”

When the sun set that night Sierra was waiting for her, in the parking lot of the school, and they charged into the desert as fast as they could go, and just like the first time Sierra laughed, opening the window so the parched wind could steal her voice away. The sand and salt sprayed white around them like wings.

They did head back that night, but just before they got back home they stopped at the empty car wash, grabbed a few brushes, and cleaned the grit from the tires and chassis, and as they kneeled next to one another to wash out the wheel well Sierra kissed her quickly, giving a little gasp as she did.

“I’m sorry,” she said, staring straight ahead at the car door.

“For what?”

She didn’t answer.

And after that something seemed to shift; they talked, they went to the races, but on her nighttime expeditions Miko remained alone. When Sierra did take a ride with her she was quiet, looking out the window without the thrill Miko had seen in her before.

And then there was the boy with the dark hair, and his sleek blue bike. And there was Sierra, riding on the back one day.

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Crossposted in the morning, y'all.