Crosshairs & The Girl - Crosshairs X Female Reader

Chapter 1 - Introspection

Am I...a social individual?

I wouldn't say so, but I've had other people tell me otherwise.  I am aware I can be a troublemaker in a team setting, and I am aware of my peculiar personality.  Getting the job completed is at the top of my list, but how I get there is always questionable.  I may screw over the team so I can be the hero of the day, but sometimes I see the beauty in multiple people coming together to create something wonderful.

It all depends on how I am feeling.

I've been told I am extroverted.  I talk a lot.  I enjoy talking.  But sometimes I just talk because I want to feel that I am noticed and, well, appreciated in some form.  I got lots of insecurities, and knowing that people are paying attention to me is part of it.  I crave for others to know about me; it makes me happy.

Nah, to hell with that!  I am confident!

What am I talking about?

Am I...insecure?

No.

No, no, no.

I'm smart, savvy, cool, funny, and...lonely.  I miss Drift, but he went off on some sort of journey to find the Knights of Cybertron.  Kinda left me behind, but then again, I didn't want to go.  I should have gone, though, but I know that I'm not ready for something like that just yet.  I'm sad and foggy headed.  I need a place to, a place to think for once.  I can't just shoot everything that troubles me.

I mean, I could, but that means I would have to shoot myself.  And that's what I hate about disliking yourself.  You just can't escape, and you gotta learn to love yourself.  I know it's a bunch of corny crap, but, dammit, it's true.  And truth hurts like hell, but I need to face it to get better.

I look out the window of my ship, and I see a faint reflection of myself.  The faint, broken image of a soldier who's fervor and epicness died a long, long time ago.  I kinda fell off the deep end after I finished working with Prime...kinda lost my way and started over thinking everything.

Things that Drift would think about.  Things like what my place is in the universe and what I want myself to be.

Right now, I want myself to be who I was.  The true Crosshairs.  The boombastic, awesome, energetic lad that would jump out of ships and dropkick Decepticon scum into the ground.  But for some reason, he's all gone.

And now it's just the shell of Crosshairs, and it hurts.  So I came back where everything was lost, back to the last time I was truly one-hundred and one percent. 

Back to earth.

The seatbelt clicks as I unhook myself from the seat, and I sit in the strange silence that the ship creates.  Just the hum of rapidly spinning gears and the fading whirl of the quantum engines powering down for a brief hibernation until I decide to go home.  But I don't really know if I want to go home.  There's still civil war, but now it's all psychological.  There's still hatred between both the former members of the Autobot and Decepticon parties, and the neutral NAILs aren't helping the situation at all.  They blame us for the death of the planet.

And they aren't wrong.

And again, the truth hurts.

I stand up and raise my arms above my head, pulling my alloy muscles into a nice, tight stretch.  I do a little run in place, trying to get my senses heightened again after the boring trip here, and I trot over to the ship's door.  I pull it aside, and the gears hiss as they help me force my way out into the wilderness I had settled down in.

A blast of sticky humidity hits my face, and I sigh and sit down on the edge of the ship, my feet planted on the muddy ground beneath.  It's peaceful, and organicness has grown on my during my previous "pleasant earth vacation".

Now, it really is an escape.

I look around, trying to see if I can get a peek of a flower or something.  I really enjoy those quite a bit.  I like their bright colors, and I would look at them to remind myself of Cybertron while I was here.  They just reminded me of home.  My optics suddenly become hooked on something peculiar yet shockingly familiar.

"I knew I would see one of you critters," I mutter to her.  "but I didn't think this fast."

The woman crouched in the bushes stares up at me with wide eyes, obviously afraid, before she takes off running.