R - E - S - P - E - C - T

Before Chromia can make her way to Nyon for another training session, Hot Rod cuts her off with a comm: << I'm outside Iacon, so I hope you drive over from the embassy rather than taking the long way. >>
<< Location? >> Chromia blips back at him in a staccato burst of query. She doesn't ask what he's doing there; she does ask, << Someplace where you aren't surrounded by adoring fans? >>
Hot Rod answers in fairly laconic fashion: a location ping and a promise, << I'm alone. >> It's a long stretch of road between Iacon and Nyon and it is not very well traveled. Nyon lacks the commerce or industry that would draw heavier traffic.
<< I've heard that before. >> Still, warned, Chromia takes no short cuts and makes no delays, but roars up out of Iacon with the idle tearing hurry of a two-wheeler on a direct line, hurtling over bumps and obstacles without any apparent need to pause. Her headlight gleams up out of the distance and she doesn't brake until she's almost there.
He's hard to miss, between the golden flames splashed over crimson or the spoiler that arcs above his taillights. Hot Rod idles until Chromia draws up nearby, and then transforms into root mode to greet her with an openly awkward expression. "Yeah, hey. Good. Glad you hadn't headed out already or anything." Point? Nah. No rush.
Chromia reverts to root mode to stand braced in the face of his awkwardness, unhooking the familiar training stick from her back only to punch the ground underfoot. "What's going on?" she asks him.
Hot Rod rubs the back of his helm with his hand and gives a muddled sort of almost glare to the pavement and metal. "Ugh, okay -- look, this whole training thing. It's been great, but if you don't want to, I don't want you to feel obligated to. It's not like you really owed me anything, and if you did, anyway, it would've long since been paid off."
Chromia eyes him for a moment, and it's a little difficult to read her expression because mostly it resolves only as a narrowing of her eyes. She makes a sound like an unvoiced gust of air, a faint hiss like a compressor releasing just a little bit of its load. In a voice with very little intonation, Chromia says: "Hot Rod, is this you breaking up with me?"
Caught flat-footed a moment, Hot Rod sheds a measure of awkward with the slow hint of a grin. "Yeah. It's just not working out." A little more seriously, he says, "It's not me, it's you," which -- /which/. Which, well, there are better ways to put. /Any/ way is a better way to put it. "Actually it's because of Barricade's visit the other day and all this scrap I keep getting about needing to responsible and be a leader or whatever and I don't think people are going to take me seriously if they hear you and I definitely think that they are going to think twice about listening to me which could actually end up dangerous for everyone," he ends up saying in a somewhat confused rush. It's not Blurr-fast, but it's fast.
"Stop making nonsense, then," Chromia advises him with a stern look. She twists the staff in her hands, as if to use it to dig into the ground underfoot, and leans against it in a slight shift of posture her that renders her less straight-and-direct, her head canted, considering. "Do you want to be responsible? A leader?" she says. Her head lifts very slightly, then, and she studies him intently. "Are you looking to be taken seriously?"
Hot Rod looks mulish, which is amazing, given that mules haven't evolved yet. He meets her intent look in kind. "Who /doesn't/ want to be taken seriously?" He misses the first two questions. Somehow.
"Plenty." Chromia continues to watch him an intent regard. "Maybe they want to be taken seriously by their friends, by their lovers, by their enemies. But by /followers/?"
Actually wincing at her choice of words, Hot Rod says, "I don't think--. 'Followers' is kind of taking it too far, but yeah, I don't think my friends will really listen to me if all they remember is a bunch of people telling them why they shouldn't!"
Chromia thinks about it. Chromia thinks about it for a noticeable length of silence. "I'm not really inclined to leave you to wallow around trying to figure that out on your own, spinning your wheels and waving your arms," she says finally. "I am not going to leave /Flareup/ in the hands of an untried mech who believes really hard. /However/ hard you believe. However fierce your ... ideals." She says the word a little like she doesn't quite know what to do with it. She draws closer to him on a single weighted pace. "If you want to lead, you earn that, Hot Rod. You think it puts these bots at risk to hear me rake you in front of them, I'll train you separately, but I'm not going to be /nice/. I don't coddle. I don't even coddle the bots I love best in the universe. And you don't need that. You get plenty of people being nice to you."
"I'm not wallowing!" Hot Rod insists with a wave of his arms that he cuts notably short. Er. "I don't know why everyone seems to think that this was all my idea to go stand up front and start marching and see who'd follow, because it wasn't! But I'm not stupid, and I'm not blind, and I get it, okay? Responsibilities! I get it! I'm not asking you to /coddle/, and I don't give a scrap how much you mouth off when it's us, but when it's not -- it's a respect thing." He runs down to the end of his point a little helplessly. "I'm not going to ask you to pretend to respect me if you don't. But I need every last scrap of it I can get."
Chromia smiles just a little bit, her breath huffing past the smile with the faint narrowing of her gaze. "You earn it," she says. After a moment, she even corrects herself, "You are earning it." Her feet resettling in a wider plant, she says, "Sometimes the person who leads is the person who steps up. Sometimes you do the job that no one else is bothering to do because you see it needs to get done. Because somebody's got to do it. I ... respect ... that here, in Nyon, on Cybertron, that's you." She scowls a little, as if annoyed that she's even admitted that much. And then adds, "But I don't think you know entirely what you want, or if you do, I don't think you want to admit it. It's hard to tell the difference between you acting confident and being confident."
Hot Rod hunches his shoulders and vents long and low. "I know what I want," he says, and then ruins it all by adding, "I think. It's just everyone seems to act like it's a lot bigger than I thought." He looks deeply pained. "Chromia, Exodus wants me to give a speech. I don't know how to give a speech!"
"What does he want /that/ for?" Chromia asks, suddenly on Hot Rod's side in this conversation where a second ago their positions were much further apart. She ticks her thumb against the training stick.
"Ugh," says Hot Rod, which is not much of an answer. He rolls his eyes eloquently. "A real leader can give speeches. Did you ever see the speech Pax gave when he addressed the Senate?"
"Talk is cheap," Chromia says with a little prickle. "It's for politicians or--" She looks obscurely guilty in a flicker of her gaze, and then clears her throat with a little engine rattle, and says, "Or diplomatists. People whose weapons are words."
"I'll use any weapon I have to if it'll help Nyon." Hot Rod has settled somewhat as they've talked, to the point where he's lost both tension and awkward so that the quieter words way more determined than stubborn, without the petulant edge. "And speaking of words -- will we still be seeing in Nyon, then, or just when try to convince Flareup to come back?"
"I told you," Chromia says with a slight lift of her head. "I'll train you separately. They won't hear me beat you up." She considers for a moment, and then tells him frankly, "I said I wouldn't be nice. I didn't say I thought it wasn't worth doing. I just hope I don't train you and your /friends/," she grants him the word in lieu of those more weighted and leaderly with a little sardonic narrowing of her gaze, "up to just the point where you know just enough to get yourselves killed really effectively."
Hot Rod waves a hand in a quick gesture. "No, I said--." He breaks off, then tries again. "Let me clarify, this isn't -- not entirely, anyway -- about what you say when we're training. It's what you said around Barricade. It's how something, uh, friendly might not always sound that friendly. I don't give a scrap if Flareup and the rest see you put me through a wall. You do it to them, too. I care when the only thing they hear is you calling me an idiot, when that's what strangers hear. You get the difference?"
Chromia seems amused after a moment's pause. "Yes," she says. She blinks at him in a shiver of the lids of her eyes. She confides, at this point, "I mostly wanted him to leave."
"Yeah, well, he can go suck a tailpipe. That's going to be harder on Shiftlock than it needs to be," says Hot Rod with a sudden, fierce scowl. "All that bigger picture scrap -- cruel to be kind, you know. Comes a point when you're just being cruel," he tells cuddly, cuddly Chromia. "Getting caught up in the big picture is when you start thinking stuff like that Institute was a good idea. Hit me -- /really/ hit me -- if I ever start getting like that, okay?"
"I'm not worried about that," Chromia tells him seriously. Even when she was talking smack about him in front of Barricade, after all, there was some consistence of vision here. "But you can be assured that I will." She spins the training stick in her hands, twirling it en route to cracking agains the ground once more. "Didn't I also tell /him/ I thought /he/ was stupid?" she asks a little like she's just checking because it's hard to remember how many people she insults.
"I don't know, I wasn't really listening." To the parts that weren't about him. /Hot Rod/. Watching as she spins the stick, he settles back on his wheels and asks, "Want to head to Nyon, since we've worked all that out? How fast do you go?" Implicit: WANNA RACE. Speed tickets are a great way to convince her to respect him in front of others.
Chromia starts to say something and then laughs a little. She slides her training stick back across her back, hooking it into place. "Let's see," she says, and promptly takes off, seeming to leap into her two-wheeled form and peel off across the road.