Stolen Virtue

By: Sinead

Edited January 23, 2005: I didn’t quite like the direction this would have taken on, had I continued with it. Please forgive, but I hadn’t touched this story since I finished this part, and then began a second one directly afterwards. So what I’ve done was deleted the end of this part, edited a few places in the main body, and sent it skittering in a new, fresher direction. One that will hopefully let me complete this beautiful tear-jerker.

Author’s Note: There have been numerous amounts of authors wanting to see more of this story. I stopped writing it for selfish reasons, I guess, seeing that I had to crack down on more than one other writing project. I’m still trying to get those done, and I’m trying to avoid death while doing so. But I guess that this story never really felt “finished,” the same way that those who had said to continue it have. Another story that never felt finished is “Taiyoo Soshite Tsuki,” a story of mine that I had taken two months to write, rewrite, and edit intensively. So I’m sorry for the over-two-month wait for the next installment of this project.

Part Nine: Building a New Foundation

            Two months passed since the Beast Warriors and their Bonded had been reunited. The second cottage had been finished, and an addition on the first cottage had been started. It would be finished before the first frost, since they could work around the clock in shifts. Arrangements were being made so that both the Bonded and the Warriors would be able to live upon the premises, even though most of the people had gone back to their homes to start preparations for moving in. Lady Venom had already moved into the cottage. Sinead was in the process of getting all her belongings packed and ready, but already spent the weekends with Dinobot and the rest of the crew.

            “Rattrap, hand me that hammer.”

            “Yeesh, hold on!”

            “Hey! Where’s Rhinox?”

            “Working at that lumberyard, remember? Where we get all this wood, duh?”

            “Yeah, forgot . . .”

            “Blast!”

            “Whatcha do?”

            “Hit my thumb. Slaggin’ hurts.”

            “Uh, duh?”

            “Shut up, Cheetor. And how’s that romance going with that girl from town?”

            “Dinobot! C’mon, she’s only a friend!”

            “Hmph. She doesn’t look at you as if you were a friend.”

            “But I only think of her as a friend.”

            “Which is understandable on your side, however, don’t keep that to yourself when around her.”

            “Yeah, like you would understand human girls that well.”

            “I’m Bonded to Sinead, furball. Fine, don’t believe me. Ask Rattrap or Optimus if you want to.”

            “Looks like I got here just in time,” a female’s voice said, laughing.

            Dinobot launched himself off of where he was sitting astride a beam, hammering the final nails through the bottom of the skeletal-like wall frame, and wrapped Sinead up in a bare-chested embrace, not caring of the others who were watching, whistling and jeering. She kissed his nose, smiling up at his face, then looked up at the human forms of Cheetor, Optimus, Rattrap, Megatron, and Tarantulus. They had been working on the addition in the midday August heat and looked it.

            She smiled. “I brought pizza and soda. Take a break. I know you guys need it.”

            Relieved, the humans thanked her, rushing into the house, leaving Dinobot alone with his love. “So?”

            “So what?” Sinead asked.

            “You came early on a Friday. Usually you’re here on Saturday morning.”

            “So I was curious about what you had to tell me.”

            He smiled, picked up his shirt from where it was hanging over a horizontal support beam for where a window would be, and lead Sinead by the hand through the woods on a path that looked slightly-worn. “Now. Close your eyes.”

            “Why?”

            “Please?”

            “Oh, all right.” She did, and Dinobot took her hands, leading her over the path that he had packed down by pacing in his robot mode, thinking. After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the small clearing that they had discovered together. The humanized Cybertronian stopped, then whispered, “Okay. Look.”

            Sinead opened her eyes, then drew in a sharp breath.

            A small, one-floor house stood before her.

            She looked at Dinobot. “This is what you were working on, that Rattrap wouldn’t let me go and find you.”

            “Yes,” he replied, beaming. His smile always came easily at this point. “Do you want to see the inside?”

            Sinead nodded, and Dinobot rested his arm around her waist, bringing her to the door. It opened inward, hissing softly over a woven mat. She stopped, looking around at the fourteen-foot-deep-by-sixteen-foot-wide room. A loveseat was just to her left, a moderate-sized window behind it, and an old woodstove a foot wide was in the corner of the room directly in front of her, the pipe that would carry the smoke passing through the wall behind it. Logs were piled to the right of that, as well as a few were within the open stove, waiting to be lit. A waist-high, half-filled bookshelf was between it and a door, which was just to her right. Both the floors and the walls were sanded planks of wood, but two deerskins took up most of the living area, providing a comfortable walking area, and she could tell that the walls were thickly insulated against both heat and cold. A small kitchen table was on the wall to the left, with a chair on either end. One more door was directly opposite her, four feet away from the woodstove. It stood ajar, showing a still-unfinished area.

            The young woman turned to look at Dinobot, who was smiling kindly, watching her reaction. “Well?”

            She beamed, then walked over and opened the door to her right, pulling it towards her. This room was the same distance from the front of the house to the back, but it was only about twelve feet wide. Furs were the carpeting, and from what she could tell, there were at least three layers of them. The bed was a queen-sized one, high up from the ground, all comforters and pillows in a natural tan motif. A sidetable had two oil-lamps upon it, along with an old wind-up alarm clock upon a thick book with wooden covers. The author walked over and picked it up. “My spare bible.” She turned. “I had wondered where this had gotten to.”

            He walked over. “You forgot it here once. It’s interesting. Almost like the Code of Primus, but a bit more specific.” His smile was gentle. “You were right about how similar our religions are. Strange, isn’t it?”

            She smiled her answer, and looked at the window facing the front of the house, seeing it mainly shuttered close. Tugging her shirt straight again, she then turned to see a simple open closet, six feel long. The clothing she kept there for the weekends was already hanging there on the left side, while Dinobot’s was to the right. Wooden shelves were below the pole that the clothes were hanging off of, holding folded clothing on the upper two levels, while the shoes were beneath it. The simple metal pipe that would lead outside was nowhere to be seen, and what she saw before her caused her breath to catch in her throat.

            There was an actual four-foot-wide fireplace in this room, complete with a mantle above it holding a single framed picture of Sinead and Dinobot asleep in each other’s arms. Sinead looked up at Dinobot. “You couldn’t have made all of this.”

            “No,” Dinobot agreed. “You know that I have been working and earning money. I have also been looking around for the items I’ve needed at yard sales. The only thing that I bought new for this entire place was the wood I needed and the mattress. Everything else . . . either hand-made or second-hand.” He grinned, and indicated the fur carpets. “Or killed.”

            “Typical male,” Sinead laughed. “No tact.” She put the bible back upon the sidetable, then wrapped her arms around his torso, sighing into his bare, muscled chest. “Why did you make all this for me?”

            “Because we needed a place to get away from the others. Rattrap and Megatron have also started making their own places, but ours . . . ours is farther away. Still on the property, but . . . farther back from the road, closer to the river. It’s just beyond that line of trees. You can see it if you walk back out there.”

            Sinead looked up at him, then reached up to release his hair from the ponytail he kept it in. “So you made this just so you could convince me to make wild, hot, passionate love to you?”

            He blushed, then shook his head, smiling, accepting the tease. “Sinead, you know me better than that. We just needed a place where we could be alone when we do get married by your terms.”

            Sinead smiled, but Dinobot shook his head and whispered, “There is one more thing I wish to give to you.”

            After exchanging a soft kiss, a human Dinobot slid to one knee, taking Sinead’s left hand in both of his.

            Rattrap peeked in through the small crack between the shutters, watching the two humans inside. Grinning, he gave the thumb’s-up to a Cybertronian Megatron, who was behind him. The Predacon leader turned and pumped his fist into the air, signaling to Lady Venom that Dinobot was successful in asking Sinead to marry him.

            She turned, relayed the message silently, but heard something slam into something else, then Dinobot’s bellow of, “Can I never get any privacy?! Slag off, all of you!!!”

            Sinead’s laughed followed the statement, and Megatron ran by Lady Venom, Rattrap under one arm. The other arm was used to pick her up as he continued running. They reached the main cottage, Rattrap holding his head, but laughing. Optimus looked down from where he was starting to construct the roof, then asked, “So? Did he ask her?”

            “Yeah,” Lady Venom replied, smiling and walking over to the house, seeing that Rampage was home already. “And after all the money he payed for that ring, man . . . he shoulda asked her sooner.”

            Rattrap turned human, glad that he hadn’t been organic when his head was clipped by the shutter that Dinobot had slammed open. He sighed, “Lady V, he wanted dat place t’ be completed when ’e asked ’er. You know, so dat dey wouldn’t have ta worry ’bout lookin’ f’r a house. Besides.” He grinned. “You shoulda seen ’er face when she walked inta da bedroom.”

            “Ooh, the most important one of them all,” Blackarachnia said, teasing, as she walked out of the house with an armful of bottled water. “Hey, monkey-boy! Catch!”

            Rattrap shook his head at the face Optimus made, but stayed silent. “Anyways, I’m lookin’ forward t’ when Sapph comes back.”

            “I think the rest of us feel the same way,” Inferno said, starting up the fire for the night’s meal with one of his flamethrowers. He put it away and became human, his unruly red hair falling forward into his darkly-tanned face. “But I got word that Miss Special will be here soon. Paperwork for moving is finished.”

            “Good,” Sinead’s voice said. She appeared out of the shadows behind Rattrap, dope-slapping  him as she passed him. “When is she planning to get here?”

            He took a moment to forward the question to his Bonded, then smiled and replied, “Next week. She started out this morning.”

            Sinead grinned, reaching up to tug at his hair and move him out of the way so he wouldn’t burn the meat. He made faces at her behind her back, then turned back into the Predacon most knew him as, continuing to mock her behind her back. Turning, a fire-sharpened stick in her hand, she glared up at him, shaking the smoking stick inches in front of his face. They argued for a while more, until just after everyone was done with the projects that they had chosen to do that day, never once ceasing to keep the meat from cooking evenly.

            “Sinead?”

            “Yeah?”

            “Are you sure that you like this place?”

            Standing up from the couch and walking around the small living/dining room area, she looked at every possible place, silently noting small beauties, and bare areas on the walls. After making sure that she was satisfied, she nodded. “Yes. Yes, I really do love this place. It’s . . . well, it’s kinda like our personalities. I like the small design, but there are a few things that I’d move around, and some reorganizing that I’d like to do.”

            “So . . . I didn’t get it right,” the raptor said, waiting upon the two-seater couch for her to come back.

            She didn’t, still looking around and making notes in her mind. “No, you have almost everything right. I just don’t like having a bare wall. That’s what I was trying to get at.”

            Dinobot’s face relaxed from its tense expression into a smile with a sigh. “Good.”

            “Hey.”

            “Hn?”

            “Mom said that she wants to come up here and see what wonders we’ve done with the place.”

            “Oh?”

            Sinead knelt on the fur rug next to the couch. “And I told her about this small cottage you built for the two of us.”

            The Bonded ex-Predacon rested his head upon her hand, feeling her other hand trace patterns that nobody but she saw. “And what did she think about it?”

            “That she wants to see it.”

            “That’s all?”

            “Not nearly. You’ve met her and had talked with her. She also wants me to still stay around the other girls until we’re formally married, and she doesn’t want us sleeping alone together here until then.”

            Dinobot snorted his amused laugh, smiling. “I love that woman, Sinead. I sincerely think she would cow some of the more reckless of our companions into meek trembles every time she would look at them.”

            “You’ve sen her do none other that that. But I plan upon listening to her.”

            “Until you move up here, right?”

            With a sigh, the young woman crawled up onto the couch beside her beloved, feeling him shift to human and pull her snugly against him. She rested her head under his chin, whispering, “Love, I don’t know when that will be. My work doesn’t seem to want to let me transfer up to North Adams any time soon.”

            “Why? Sinead, I can’t help but miss you when you’re not here. If I don’t . . . if I don’t see you for over a week, I . . . I panic. Matrix and . . . and everything else knows that I’m useless.”

            “But you know that I love you.”

            He knew. By Primus, God, whatever you wanted to call the One that the two believed in, Dinobot knew of his Bonded’s love for him. But it didn’t . . . it didn’t help. “Sinead, Rhinox told me of some Bonded couples that act as we do. He called them ‘special pairs,’ regardless of how far they’ve Bonded with each other. ’Nead, not many Bonded mind not seeing each other for weeks on end, simply because of either circumstances or whatever. The contact between the two Sparks was more than enough.” With a rub at the itch bothering his nose, he continued. “But I’ve seen that none of the others here have just that simple Bonding. Those who didn’t Bond at all seem fine with life, but those who are . . . and who aren’t around their Other, Sinead, they barely hold onto themselves at times.”

            “That’s why you and Rampage were down to glances and those ‘don’t talk to me unless it’s about someone getting himself killed’ looks. And why Lady Venom’s already here with him.” The author sighed, then said, “I think that I’m almost there with negotiating, but they’re not liking it.”

            “They have to? It’s your choice. Your life.”

            “They’ll think that I’m going to say something like that, and that’s why they want me to stay with them. They think that they own me.”

            “You’re an assistant manager there. They’ve even transferred you between some of their stores when you were needed to.”

            “Love, I know. It’s just that they’re pig-headed about the fact that I own my life, and not them.”

            “I can see how that could annoy you.”

            After a moment of just watching the small fire burning merrily away in their stove, Sinead whispered, “Something’s bothering you again. Something deeper than just my not being able to move up here sooner.”

            “I’m having nightmares again.”

            “About . . . that?”

            “Yes.” He sighed, sitting up and rubbing at his head. “I thought that we had stopped them with our Bonding and with my return to you. They were supposed to go away.” With another sigh, his eyes rested upon Sinead. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

            After a moment she also sat up, but rested against him, leaning her head upon his shoulder. “I wish I had an answer, Dinobot. I really wish that I did. But I don’t. And that bothers me. How frequent are these dreams?”

            “They had stopped for three weeks, then had been once evert two weeks, then once a week, but . . . now I can’t get a full night of sleep.”

            “And you’ve gotten used to that again.”

            “Especially with you beside me.”

            “Easy, now, I know you want me to just tell my work to bite me and screw off, but I really can’t.”

            “Deliver an ultimatum.”

            Blinking, looking up at his face, seeing the weary haggard, sheer lust for her to just be around him, holding his hand, smiling at him, laughing with him . . . Sinead knew what she had to do.

            And she set her mind, no allowances.

            “I will, love. Count on it.”