Not sparkmates...right? | A Heatshadow fanfic

The First One

Author's note: been having writer's block for a while so sorry if some of the sentences are cringe/awkward

Quickshadow walked down the halls of the Academy to Heatwave's office. He was overworking – everyone knew it. (Except for maybe Heatwave himself.)

The femme knocked on the door, hearing shuffling sounds from within the room.

"Come in."

The door automatically slid open & Quickshadow walked through. The red firebot was sitting at his desk, his frame slightly slumped in his chair. His optics were focused on the monitor to his left, his servos typing in symbols. He barely glanced up to see who was at the door.

"Quickshadow." He said sort of quietly, optics already back to the monitor.

"Heatwave," she replied. A silence stretched on for a few seconds.

"I haven't seen you in a while."

"I've been busy." Heatwave said with a sparkless voice, optics still focused on the monitor. Another pause, then –

"Did you need something, or are you just here to waste my time?"

Quickshadow was a bit taken aback. Sure, Heatwave could be rude or teasing in a joking sort of way – pits, he usually was – but that had just sounded genuinely mean.

However, this was Heatwave, so Quickshadow brushed it off and got to the point.

"I was wondering if there was anything I could do to help with the Academy preparations. Paperwork, any tests that need to be run, that sort of thing."

Heatwave stopped typing for a split second, thinking. Then he continued as if nothing had happened.

"Nothing I can't handle." He lied. He knew the femme would see right through him, but he was too tired to make it sound convincing.

Quickshadow raised an optic ridge. She couldn't tell whether he was lying to her or himself.

His tone is still dull, his optics are dimmed, and his posture suggests he hasn't left this chair in several hours, possibly even a full earth day.

"Heatwave." Quickshadow did not try to hide the concern in her voice. "Are you sure?" She asked him again, as if she were a carrier asking a young spark whether he'd broken something.

Heatwave stopped typing and turned off the monitor. He continued to stare at the place it had been, again contemplating her offer. This time he took a few minutes.

Finally, he took a bin of datapad binders and dropped it onto his desk. The sound of the bin hitting the table was louder than Quickshadow would've thought.

"Those are all files that Optimus sent, not much I need to look over myself, just stuff that needs to get done." Heatwave explained, already reactivating the monitor again. Quickshadow picked up the bin. It was heavy, but not heavy enough that she would have to haul it down the hallway.

"You can come back when you finish the first binder, everything in there needs to be done by the end of the week." Heatwave said, back to typing away again.

Quickshadow nodded silently and walked back to the door, carrying the bin full of datapads with her.

>Many weeks later<

Now Quickshadow partly understood why Heatwave had been locking himself in his office for weeks on end. This filework was mostly excessive reports and essays, more daily than Quickshadow would receive in weeks.

What the femme found strange was that almost none of the paperwork was designated specifically to Heatwave. Most of it could've been done by any of the bots, maybe even their human friends. Why had Heatwave insisted on doing all of this himself?

Some of the work was less writing and more reading – curriculum plans, suggestions, that sort of thing. Quickshadow could easily see Heatwave skipping over these documents altogether, and at that moment she was glad to be the one reading them.

These files were certainly a lot to handle. Quickshadow had found herself walking around the empty halls of the Academy or sitting down to help Cody and Frankie with something, only to pull out a datapad and continue to work.

Frankie had caught her with such in her servos when trying to explain to both the femme & Cody what the definition of the term multi-variable-calculus was.

"Quickshadow? What've you got there?" She tilted her head slightly, looking at the energon-aqua file. Quickshadow had only registered that Frankie was talking to her when she'd said the femme's name.

"It's called a datapad," Cody explained, realizing that Frankie had never seen one before. "It can be used sort of like a book, or piece of paper. Typically, a datapad would only be a couple of paragraphs long... What's that one about?"

"Filework for the academy...again." Quickshadow had gotten tired of staring at this particular document all day – it talked about the average curriculums of bots in rescue academies before the war and whether they could improve. (Another file she felt wasn't necessary to read.)

"I thought Heatwave and Chase handled all of that stuff?" Cody said, confused.

"I persuaded the former to let me handle a few assignments."

"A few?" the boy looked at her knowingly.

"...There are a few more in my office, not many otherwise." Over the years, Quickshadow had learned how to tell half-truths and stand her ground. This was one of the many times those skills came in handy.

"Alright." Cody went back to (halfheartedly) listening to Frankie's lecture. Quickshadow resumed 'reading' the datapad, letting her mind go into a deep trance again.

She was about halfway through all of this work. It was Wednesday. She had three days to finish all of it. Now she truly understood why Heatwave hadn't been showing his faceplate much.

Cody & Frankie grabbed her attention again, asking questions about how math worked on Cybertron. She would finish reading the datapad tomorrow.