Jetfire sighed. The parabolic vector window had closed cycles ago and he was just going to have to come to terms with the fact that Sixshot was not coming. He'd sounded wary enough on the comm, and Jetfire honestly couldn't blame him. It would be a perfect set-up if Sixshot were that weak. And if Jetfire hadn't wanted it more than anything. Just to see, just to settle, just to know.

But Sixshot was not weak, and Jetfire, it seemed, would have to suffer on the edge of unknowing forever. Make his own peace with his unsettled spark.

His wings drooped as he headed back to the small shuttle. So much deceit and…it hadn't paid off. No, wait, that was a wrong thought. Deceit was deceit whether or not it had achieved its ends. His morals were…so messed up. He had a lot of thinking to do—he hoped when he put the shuttle on autopilot, his cortex would find the time and the will to start sorting through the morass.

His feet clanked on the deck of the ramp. He gave one last, lingering look over the greenish calcite stone of the asteroid. No sign of any life but his. Foolishness, to think he'd turn to see Sixshot standing there—quiet, enigmatic, aloof.

His hand reached to tap the keypad that raised the ramp, and suddenly he felt a grip like iron around the wrist, squeezing, twisting, pulling it. Jetfire found himself driven forward by the pain in his strained servos, his cheek striking the wall in front of him. His vid-feed blanked from the impact.

"Sixshot," he said, his voice muffled by the wall in front of him, its cool kiss of metal soothing against his suddenly heated plating.

That gruff, too familiar laugh, and the feel of the Decepticon's chassis heavy against his wings. "Should kill you now."

Yes, Jetfire thought. And I won't fight you. It would make everything so much simpler. "I wasn't followed. This isn't a trap." Please, he added, believe me. I'd never do anything to hurt you. Optimus had given his word, and even then, Jetfire thought, I doubted. Even then, I double checked. This is how far I have fallen.

"Know that. Tracked you in." The grip tightened on his wrist.

Oh. Of course. Also how he'd gotten onto the ship, no doubt. "I, please. I just wanted to talk to you."

A long moment. "So talk."

"I…can I turn around? Please? I want to see you."

Another moment, which Jetfire realized, for the first time, was hesitation. Sixshot was unsure of himself. Was it a victory? Or a sign he had damaged something wild and fierce? The hand twisted his wrist up higher behind his back, anterior shoulder servos whining at the strain, and Jetfire felt a blazing heat like tongue of flame across his upper wing edge. Sixshot's…mouth? What else could be that hot, that insistent? What else could make his net shudder with a scalding rush of desire like that?

And then the hand released him, and the heat on his wing was gone, and by the time he turned around, Sixshot had composed himself entirely, inscrutable, mask over his face, arms folded across the green chassis. Like a wall, blocking his spark.

"Thank you," Jetfire said.

"Talk." The red optics bored into him, so unlike the blue clear pools of the Autobots, which seemed to want to receive. The red optics seemed to want to do, to move, to take.

And he wanted to be taken. Always had. It was just…ridiculous at his age, at his size. He felt ridiculous. Starscream had loved the idea, almost too much—that the idea of Jetfire, his size, his latent power, was more alluring than the shuttle himself.

And now, given his chance, Jetfire found that words failed him again, only this time because he had too much he wanted to say and an awareness of how very little time they had. He would never take time for granted again. He held his hands out, white and open, palms upward. No threat—not that he ever had been. "The rescue—I didn't know about it. I didn't even think." He dropped his head. "I just…didn't want you to think I would do that to you. Be-betray you." His hands curled, helpless.

Sixshot tilted his head.

"I-I'm a terrible soldier," Jetfire added, lamely. "It's why they put me in R&D to begin with." He raised his optics, face flat with the agony of the truth, bracing for Sixshot's scorn.

"Enough killers already," Sixshot said.

"I just," Jetfire moved, scrubbing a hand over his face, stopping when he saw the subtle tension in the Phase Sixer's frame. "Sorry," he said. "I just," he shrugged. "I don't know what to do." So he'd come, and dragged Sixshot out here, into danger, into mutual risk, because…he didn't know. It seemed the most selfish thing he could have done.

And yet…Sixshot came. Despite the risks he knew more clearly than Jetfire did, despite his own life, his own faction, he came.

"Sixshot, may I ask a question?"

A curt nod.

"Why did you come?"

A calculated shrug. "In the area."

Jetfire waited. Sixshot had done this to him enough—swathed in silence until words forced themselves from Jetfire's vocalizer. Although…Sixshot didn't normally have to wait that long. Words seemed primed to spill whenever the white mech was around.

Sixshot's frame grew tenser, the stabilizers behind his shoulders almost vibrating. And then he moved, a blur of white so fast that Jetfire's optics couldn't track until the hands were on him, one around his throat, the other in the divide of his wings.

"Dangerous," Sixshot murmured.

Jetfire said nothing coherent, a soft sound escaping his control of more than half desire. Sixshot's hands on him were hard with need, and seemed to glow white hot across his net, yearning coalescing to something close to pain. Beloved pain. He leaned into it, his optics wide and earnest, his own hands clutching the green shoulders for balance. "Not dangerous," he breathed. "Not to you." His words were uncertain, begging to be true. He didn't want to bring any harm to Sixshot, directly or indirectly. He didn't want to be dangerous.

Yet…Sixshot was dangerous to him. He had no worry, no fear that the Phase Sixer would kill him. Not even now, when no one would find his body, but…there were other dangers, and before those, he was prostrate, helpless.

And Jetfire opened himself to the danger, welcoming it as a wanted companion. He could feel Sixshot's aroused EM field, unique, vibrant, twisting, almost alive, against him, and it filled a void, as though he had been flying too long in space and had just re-entered atmosphere.

Jetfire didn't know what to do, but he knew what he wanted to do: he laid his head down against the shoulder, nuzzling against the vertical stabilizer. His arms slid around the shoulders, pressing himself against the other mech, his canopy slick against Sixshot's armor, clutching to Sixshot as though hoping to eradicate the distance between them.

"Dangerous," Sixshot repeated, the word rumbling against Jetfire's chassis, his hands greedy on Jetfire's wings. Jetfire melted against him, giving in to the touch—places he could not manage to touch himself, in his own, pitiful attempts to keep himself sated. Poor substitute, especially in the presence of the real thing—Sixshot's hands heedless, unrelenting against him, flaming lines of touch across his armor, his net; Sixshot's EM field pulsing hard against his; even the smell of him—the ionized tang of alien oil, the scent of his heated enamel, of some foreign alloy, combined to an intoxicant that swept Jetfire away.

Jetfire lifted his head from Sixshot's throat. "What should we—" Jetfire's words were silenced as Sixshot's hands joined behind Jetfire's back, jerking him closer, fingers curling around Jetfire's lower wings.

"No questions," Sixshot growled, adding, "Yet." He yanked down on the wing edges, forcing Jetfire downward. Jetfire sank to his knees, Sixshot dropping with him.

Jetfire allowed Sixshot to push him into position, along the hard decking of the shuttle, the hands reintroducing themselves to his frame, down his legs, around his torso, teasing along the bevel of his canopy. Jetfire shuddered, his own hands resting on Sixshot's shoulders, merely going along for the ride, curling over the armor as his body twisted and writhed under the white, merciless hands.

Jetfire could feel Sixshot's optics on him, like a hand of fire, sliding over his body, feeding on his lust. He didn't know why he wanted this, and he knew even less what he thought doing this one more time would do—make separation more painful. Dig this addiction's claws in deeper. He belonged back with the Autobots. He could be safe, and adored by First Aid.

But just thinking of the smaller jet twisted something in him, something large and dark recoiling from the innocent optics, that brightened and blazed when he looked at Sixshot, met the orange-red gaze licking at him like flames.

"I want you," he murmured, a confession, a revelation, a choice.

Sixshot met his gaze with the flat affect Jetfire had come to find so strangely soothing. "Have me." There were layers of meaning there that Sixshot seemed to hear, and then duck away from, lowering his head to rest against Jetfire's chassis, head turned to the side as if trying to hear the revolution of Jetfire's spark. One hand roamed over the chassis, palm flat curling to fingertip brushes, to trace the seam of Jetfire's interface hatch.

Jetfire sighed, his frame trembling, arching into the touch, wanting the touch, the intimacy, wanting every barrier between them torn down. Wishing he could eradicate the largest barrier between them—faction, belief—but right now…he would take this.

Whatever that said about him, he felt purer for admitting it.

He stroked his hand over the white helm on his chest, trying to memorize the contours, the feel of the armor. This might be the last time. It felt like they were closing a circle and the thought tore at Jetfire even as part of him wanted this endless circle of longing and doubt and worry and denial to be closed.

Fingers, somehow more practiced than he remembered, opened his hatch, stroking down his module, curling the cables around one finger in a lazy spiral. "Oh," he said, the word like a song, a single pure note of desire. Sixshot rumbled against him, a baritone counterpoint, and his fingers moved to circle the sealing collar of his access port.

The hand withdrew, rubbing the module between fingers and palm, and then Jetfire felt the solid small click of his module connecting home in Sixshot's port. His datastream pulsed, the ebb and swell wave of his kind. And Sixshot's armor might be numb, but his underlying systems were exquisitely sensitive, and Jetfire could feel the taut vibration against him.

Their hands collided, reaching for Sixshot's module, both clumsy with need and longing too deep for laughter. Jetfire twisted his rib struts, anything he could do to diminish the distance between them, holding himself rigid until he felt the module seat against him and Sixshot's datastream, its hard, insistent pulses, against him. They both seemed to sigh, simultaneously, contrary to the hitching of their physical desires, as though something had been settled, some pressure relieved.

Sixshot clambered up Jetfire's body, and their bodies joined, hands roaming and insistent, wanting and owning, rolling over and over. Sixshot tilted his head, opening his throat, and Jetfire found himself burying his face in the gap, his kisses going swiftly—too swiftly—from gentle licks and nips to insistent bites and a raw scraping nuzzle. A force, a freedom he had never had with another mech, the feral force that had blossomed under the Phase Sixer's attentions. All the while their datastreams danced, intently, intensely, skirting around each other, swirling in a rhythmic display of color and light and sound and sensation.

Jetfire's body snapped into a rigid shudder, once, twice, as Sixshot's datastream reached synchrony, thrusting them into overload, Sixshot's hands digging into the bend in his wings, bunching the metal. Jetfire tasted energon, hot and dark and rich from where his dentae rent a fuel line.

A hard hand cupped his head there for a long moment, Sixshot refusing to let him move, apologize. Jetfire lay, shuddering, in the circle of Sixshot's arms, the intoxicating sweetness bubbling over his glossa.

Sixshot released him, slowly, twitching as Jetfire licked the damaged hose in mute apology. Sixshot's hands smoothed the backspan of Jetfire's wings. Jetfire tilted his optics up, aware of the energon tingling on his lips. Sixshot gave an amused growl, wiping his mouth with one rough thumb. Jetfire thought back to First Aid, and his touch on Jetfire's cheek, and how different they felt—one welcome, almost like a touch from himself, the other distant, foreign, merely reminding him of his boundaries and differences.

"Thinking," Sixshot said. A question, and a judgment. Jetfire searched the orange-red optics for some hint, seeing only some depths he could never fathom. They called to him, like a mystery, like a scientific discovery, and something more.

It was that, or the overload, or the strange intoxication of Sixshot's energon in his mouth, but Jetfire found words pouring a torrent from his mouth, powerless to stop them. Even as he spoke, his optics widened in a sort of mortified fear. But, he thought, this was the end, the closing of the circle, and perhaps it is better to leave no words unsaid, no matter how foolish, no matter how childish and raw.

"I want...to get overcharged together and laugh at stupid nonsensical things. I want to fly with you. Why did we never fly?" His hand brushed the stabilizer. "I want to watch you at work, yes, even your work, because it's you, and you in your element is…beautiful to me. And I want to wake up touching you. And I want to explore all the different ways we can interface. And I want to see all six of your modes and give them silly nicknames that make you laugh when I'm not with you, and I want to bring you little presents, small things, just to surprise you, just so you can have something. So you don't forget. And I want to kiss you, on the mouth." His fingers traced the center line of the mask, feeling a burning heat behind the metal. "And I want to feel you all over, to know every inch of your plating blind. Bu-but most of all I want you to be happy." Jetfire winced at the selfishness of the next words, even as they poured from his mouth. "And…I want to be the one that makes you happy." Jetfire finally clamped his mouth shut over the desperate pathetic torrent of words. As if it were merely the matter of enough words to fill the distances, the differences, between them.

He dropped back onto the floor, letting his gaze fall, too ashamed to meet Sixshot's optics. The moment stretched, both of them silent, still, wrapped in themselves. Jetfire's hands fell back by his sides, as if he had ceded his right to touch.

And then one white hand caught Jetfire's chin, turning it, raising it, firm, inexorable. Their optics met, and a thumb feathered gently over Jetfire's mouth, brushing his lip plating and cheek, the gaze meeting his ardent and intense.

"Yes."

And the word was a gift and everything between them, and it held all the answers. How? When? Why? It didn't matter. Nothing mattered except this thing, this nameless thing that would have glared at the name 'love', that made them both no longer feel lost, made them both, for these moments, and in every way that mattered, free.