Xeno

Would you like a little sap with your linguistic theory? Yeah, probably not. :(

Written as a response to a prompt "lost in translation". I know, my cleverness with titles is just *dazzling*.

*****





Starscream crouched uncomfortably under the dubious shelter of the parking garage’s top level , his optics keen on the comm node Barricade was turning over in his talons. Next to him on the ground was a small slightly-flattened cube. Jennifer watched, nervously, her hands balled into her coat’s pockets. The wet sound of falling sleet pattered down around them from outside—under each of the mechs small spatter-edged puddles had formed.



“Are you able to make the adjustments or not?” Starscream asked.



Barricade glared up at him. “Yes,” he said, testily. He clicked open a panel on one thigh. “Have to use a command override line, that’s all.” He pulled a small cable, like a jack, from the paneled compartment in his thigh, and inserted it into the comm node. His smaller set of optics flickered. “Stop staring at me,” he muttered absently. “Make me self-conscious.”



Starscream snickered. “Maybe I am simply admiring you.”



“Pfuh,” Barricade snorted. “Now leave me the frag alone while I do this.”



Starscream squatted lower, reaching one hand toward Jennifer. “He will not damage it, Jennifer,” he said, soothingly. He inched closer, his large feet splashing in slushy puddles running in from outside. Little bits of detritus eddied around a drain: candy cellophane wrappers, ticket stubs, a dismal construction-paper valentine. Which made Jennifer kind of sad to look at. Had it been thrown away, or just lost?



“I know,” she said. She stepped closer. “I really appreciate you—both of you—doing this.” Barricade grunted a response.



“It is no bother, Jennifer,” Starscream said. “I had promised I would assist in your research. This way will be much more convenient.”



“Still, I’m sorry you had to come out here in this weather.” Jennifer shivered as a raw wind gusted around the jet’s bulk.



“This weather presents no real challenges to our operational efficiency,” Starscream said, turning to look at the pinkish sky. “Does it hamper yours?”



“This stuff, no. Not unless it gets a bit colder and it turns to ice. This is just ugly and no one wants to go out in it.”



“Thought you humans liked this ‘snow’ stuff,” Barricade muttered.



“Well…the first few times. And when it’s real snow and it’s falling, it’s so pretty.”



“What the frag you call this? Fake snow?” Barricade looked up.



“Technically, I think it’s sleet.”



“Technically, you should be more precise,” Barricade muttered. “Kind of defeats the purpose of ‘technically’ if you aren’t fraggin’ sure.”



“Barricade,” Starscream said, warningly.



“Just saying.”



“No,” Jennifer said. “He’s right.” He’s also the one reformatting the comm node so it would display the visual aspect of the language in a way she could see it. So…she owed him a bit. “Back where I live, we’d call this ‘snain’.”



“Mellifluous word,” Barricade said, sarcastically.



“It’s a blending between snow and rain, kind of like how smog is smoke and fog.”



“I thought that smog was a kind of pollution.” Starscream looked out into the falling mess.



“Yeah, well, that’s it. You make a new word to fill a gap and it doesn’t necessarily mean precisely what the component parts do.”



“That makes a…human amount of sense.”



“Barricade…,” Starscream repeated.



“What!? Seriously. Just…nothing on this fraggin’ planet makes any sense once the squishies get into it. Global warming, no, global cooling. ‘French’ toast which isn’t toast OR from fraggin’ France! Cold wars and hot wars but no just kind of lukewarm wars. And what the hell is LUKEWARM!?”



Jennifer started laughing. Barricade growled at her, then gave a shy sort of smile. She was kind of warming up to the jerk. She still couldn’t figure out what anyone would see in him…that way. But he could be funny. “He’s got a point. But that’s how all languages work.”



“Not ours,” Barricade said. “Ours makes perfect sense.”



“To you, because you speak it. You don’t see any of the lexical gaps in your own language.”



“There are no gaps in our language.”



“That is untrue, Barricade. She has previously pointed out to me that our language does not have a word that precisely matches the Autobot word for ‘peace’.”



“Sure we do. ‘Delusional.’ Maybe with a side order of ‘boring’.” He paused. “Huh, kind of see your point. Scary thought.” Another grin, a little lopsided. “My point is, we don’t need a word to distinguish one kind of stupid H2O precipitate from another. Because who cares? It all sucks pretty equally.”



“It depends if you have to drive in it,” Jennifer said, “right? I mean, ice and such?”



“Ice,” he said, tartly, “is not precipitating. Totally different.”



She was going to argue the point between glare and black ice, just to rile him up further. But Starscream was shaking his head, half aggrieved, half amused. “You have work you should be accomplishing,” the jet admonished.



“Yeah, fine.” Barricade knelt down by the small display cube. “You want projection or not?” Jennifer hesitated, confused. “Projection would be easier,” he hinted.



“Projection’s fine,” she said. Starscream shot him a look. He shrugged. The jet settled himself onto the floor, awkwardly stretching his legs out. Jennifer winced—he was sitting right in the middle of a puddle. He gestured her to come closer, balancing her carefully on one outstretched thigh.



“I regret that your weather has made me wet,” he said, cautiously draping one talon around her shoulders.



“They don’t corrode, you know,” Barricade muttered. He cursed, the projector cube almost slipping from his grasp. “Frag.” He settled himself flat on the floor as well, laying the parts out in front of him. His foot kicked the construction paper heart out of the swirling puddle around the drain. “Gack!” he said, shaking his foot, the pink and red paper stuck to it. “What is this horrible invention?”



“It’s a paper heart,” Jennifer said. “Valentine’s day was the other day.”



“Aaaaaand I’m sure that makes perfect sense. To squishies.” He paused to pick the soggy scrap off his foot, pinched between his talons. “Fraggin’ squishy sense, just like I said.”



“Jennifer, why does it not look like a human heart?” Starscream tilted his head. “Barricade? Does that look like a human heart to you?”



The smaller mech looked at the sodden shape. “No. Then again, maybe I just haven’t squashed one flat enough. Why the frag you give someone an anatomically incorrect heart, anyway?”



“It’s to symbolize love.”



“Love? What the frag is—how the slag does a heart symbolize anything?”



Jennifer faltered. She’d…never really thought about it. “I guess, you know, that it’s like you can’t live without a heart, so if you give someone a heart, like, your heart, you’re saying you can’t live without them.”



Barricade squinted at her. “You know, if you squishies are trying to be all technical, it’s not the heart you can’t live without. Well, not any moreso than you can live without those air bladders in your chest. What you should really give them is a visual representation of the medulla oblongata. Now…THAT, you squishies can’t live without.”



“I do not think that that would be an attractive symbolic representation,” Starscream said, softly. “The brain is altogether an unattractive organ.”



“So’s the actual human heart,” Barricade said, brandishing the wet shape. “Left to their faulty representational skills, they’d make a medulla oblongata that looked like a mushroom.”



He was kind of right. And she could just see the cards: I mushroom you. She covered a laugh with her hands.



Barricade flicked his hand, the pink heart splatting onto the wet pavement. “And what’s this ‘love’ nonsense, anyway?”



“It is like our word,” and Starscream gave the rapid Cybertronian blurt for the word Jennifer remembered meant something like ‘loyalty to death.’ “Only, apparently, not.”



“Fan-fraggin’-tastic,” Barricade said, rolling his optics. “That clears it ALL up. The loyalty part or the termination part? Or do I not want to know?”



Jennifer sighed. “Neither, really, in practice. It like…never lasts even though you think it’s going to and…apparently the loyalty thing’s like impossible for most people.” She felt Starscream shift under her, suddenly, and a strange gaze went from the jet to the car. She looked up. “Should I move?”



“No, Jennifer human,” he said. He ran one long talon in a line down her back, and then hooked it around her, pulling her back against his chassis. “Please do not move.”



“Yeah, well…you humans are inferior. Loyalty programming would fix all your issues.” A pause. “Well, about that at any rate.”



“Loyalty programming does not fix everything,” Starscream said, pointedly. “Nor is it the same as this concept. As Jennifer has said, the word does not mean simply the component parts.”



Barricade snorted, as if this were a private joke they had. “So, when do you squishies wise up and realize it doesn’t really mean forever?”



Jennifer shifted, pulling Starscream’s hand around her. “Some of us don’t,” she said, quietly.



Barricade’s goading grin faded. “Stupid concept anyway,” he muttered.



“Is it really?” Starscream’s voice had an edge. He’d stiffened at Jennifer’s quiet reply, tightening his grip around her. “How would you describe your feelings for your xeno, Barricade?”



“Feelings?” he scoffed. “Ridiculous concept.”



“Is it really?”



“Well, I like her, and I trust her not to do stupid stuff. And she’s fraggin’ hot. Whatever you call that.” He waved one hand dismissively.



Jennifer found herself smiling. “Love, maybe?”



“Agh! No way. Not even sure what this alien concept is.” He showily ducked his head over the comm node, trying to radiate that he was Far Too Busy for this sort of nonsense.



“Now you are being imprecise, Barricade. If you are unsure, how do you know you are not?”



“Shut up, jet.” He squirmed awkwardly on the floor.



“How does she feel about you?”



“Don’t know. Don’t care.” He gnawed one of his labial plates.



“Well, then, let us try: how do you feel about me, Barricade?” Jennifer could hear Starscream’s smirk.



“Oh that’s easy. I hate you so much it itches like space lice.” Barricade disconnected his small jack from the device and spent a few seconds showily coiling it around his talons before stowing it. “Like I said. No idea what this stupid love thing is. If it were useful, we’d have a fraggin’ word for it. We don’t, it’s not: end of story.”



“Maybe more like Sapir-Whorf,” Jennifer mused. She felt Starscream’s optics on her. “It’s also known as ‘linguistic relativity’. Basically the idea is that if you don’t have a word for it, you really can’t perceive it. There’s this big flap about Whorf because he brought up this total nonsense about the Inuit having like a dozen different words for snow. They really don’t, but that doesn’t invalidate his theory as much as the debunkers want to think.”



Barricade looked up, interested. Or, at least relieved that the pressure wasn’t on him anymore.



“Like you guys have two names—Autobots and Decepticons, right? What do you call someone who’s neither?”



“Spare parts,” Barricade joked. She allowed herself a grin. He couldn’t turn that ‘jerk’ thing off, could he?



“And…what do you call us?”



“Squishies.” He smirked. “Because you are.”



She laughed. “That’s language and power—totally different. But I mean, where do we fit in? We’re neither faction. NOR spare parts.” He frowned, but she could see the point dawning on him.



“And so…love?” Starscream prompted.



“Well, linguistic relativity would say that if you don’t have a word for it, like Barricade, you can’t properly recognize it.”



“And…what happens if we do, say, borrow or make up a word for it?” He tried to sound joking, but his voice was strangely soft.



She craned her head upward, her sleet-frazzled bun flattening against his chest plating. “I honestly don’t know.”