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Marissa’s life was basically just one absurd, often catastrophic, almost always giant alien robot-related event after another at this point, and she had become pretty damn good at taking it all in her stride, so the fact that a giant alien robot had developed a really obvious crush on her shouldn’t have fazed her. At the end of the day, the fact that a giant alien robot had a crush on her didn’t faze her, the thing that made it a little bit awkward was the fact that said giant alien robot with a crush on her was also one of her best friends.
Maybe it wouldn’t be awkward if it wasn’t so obvious, but Thundercracker seemed incapable of hiding his emotions, or rather perhaps because he’d spent four millions years hiding his true feelings about the radical fascist faction he’d been a part of, he had no interest in ever hiding his feelings again. At least, he had no interest in putting in anything but the most minimal effort when it came to hiding his emotions, because he didn’t outright admit that he liked her, but the fact was painfully clear to absolutely everybody, especially Marissa.
Marissa could have brushed off the fact that Thundercracker often made the romantic leads in his screenplays thinly veiled stand-ins for the two of them as just an example of Thundercracker’s insistence on basing his writing on true events; given he didn’t have any real romantic experience (that Marissa was aware of anyway) he had to base it the closest thing he had, which was their friendship. Even then however, knowing that Thundercracker had written a dozen different ways that a relationship like theirs could evolve into a romance was a bit weird, especially when Thundercracker personally read out his screenplays to her. Honestly it would have been creepy if Marissa thought Thundercracker knew that she could see right through his metaphors, but Thundercracker’s confidence in his writing ability had never been anything if not over-inflated.
That’s probably why he also thought that the letters and poems he sent her from ~*~A Secret Admirer~*~ were romantic and mysterious as opposed to completely ridiculous and obvious. Marissa blamed this new hobby of his on all the young adult novels he had been reading lately for some reason, which had been filling his head with the idea that people found having a secret admirer exciting rather than creepy. It didn’t help that Thundercracker seemed incapable of playing up the mystery element in his letters to her without coming across as weirdly threatening; it was like the instinct he’d developed after four million years as a Seeker to hunt down and seize targets took over when he described the way he was “observing her from afar”. Reading them always made Marissa feel like she was in the crosshairs of a fighter jet that was about to swoop out of the sky like a predatory bird at any moment. Plus Thundercracker’s awkward attempts to describe the ways her physical features were appealing made him sound like a serial killer cataloguing her body parts for storage later. She had to give it to him however, his description of her ears as “skin and cartilage vortexes spiralling inwards towards the mysterious black abyss of your intellect” gave her the biggest laugh she’d had in what was maybe her entire life.
Cybertronians didn’t have a lot of the same physical tells that humans did when it came to being attracted to someone; they didn’t sweat, blush, or have racing heartbeats or dilating pupils, but Mariassa knew more about Cybertronians than probably any human, so she’d come to recognise their own tells. The excited wiggle of the wings for one was a dead giveaway, and whenever Thundercracker did it in the presence of other Cybertronians the two of them got Looks. Thanks to Thundercracker’s very evident interest in her the two of them got a lot of Looks from other Cybertronians and their colonist cousins; Marissa was pretty sure she had noticed Starscream outright gagging at one point after witnessing Thundercracker’s behaviour around her. That was one occasion where she was actually happy that Thundercracker was so obvious.
On top of all that there was also just the fact that Thundercracker was finding every excuse to hang out with her these days. Not that they didn’t hang out a lot before, but now Thundercracker was coming up with ways to make the time they spent together downright excessive, and while he had generally been happy to be around her before, now seeing her made him full-on giddy. The way he beamed when he was around her made it clear that she was up there with screenwriting and Buster in terms of things that he absolutely adored.
Marissa knew that Thundercracker was utterly ridiculous, but she still didn’t understand how this could have happened; not so much the fact that Thundercracker had developed a crush on her, though that was pretty weird, but more the fact that his behaviour seemed to suggest that he thought something might eventually come of it. She just didn’t know how he could think such a thing was possible, given that there were some pretty glaringly obvious incompatibilities in the way. There was the age difference for a start; Marissa generally didn’t date human guys that were much older than her, let alone alien guys that were many times older than the entire human race itself. Not to mention that his immortality wasn’t a very good fit for her mortality; she’d be dead before an infinitesimal fraction of his insanely long life had passed. Then of course there was the basic physical incompatibility; the size difference was insurmountable, and even if that wasn’t in the way Marissa still wasn’t entirely clear if Cybertronians had any desire or ability to…well, ok, she was reasonably certain Blackrock did but she was also pretty sure he was an exceptional case.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t like Thundercracker, and maybe if he had been human there might have been some chance something happening between them. He was a massive dork and frustrating idiot sure, but she wouldn’t have been friends with him if he didn’t have his likeable qualities as well, like how he made her appreciate things about Earth and humanity that she’d never really paid attention to before. Plus there was the fact that he’d managed to hold onto, or perhaps recover, so much earnest joy and zest for life despite having lived through four million years of hellish war, trapped in a violent and oppressive regime. Then there was the passion he put into everything he did, even if what he did he was often totally stupid, which somehow just made it all the more charming. Also, against all odds, he was ultimately just a kind and decent person, and after all the strife not-so-decent people had put her entire species through, Marissa really appreciated that quality. And…
…and…
…
…Marissa had made a lot of seemingly impossible things work, especially when it came to relations between humanity and giant alien robots. If she could make the pairing of humans and Cybertronians work on the level of interstellar political relations, then she was pretty sure she could find a way to make this work too.