Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It still seemed weird to Miko that you could drive for hours in America and be inside the same region. In the early days of her exchange here, she'd asked about it a lot. "Are we still in Nevada?" "Still Nevada?" "Still Nevada?" and the bleak desert landscape had stretched on and on and on, into the horizon and, apparently, forever.

(Her other question had been, "Why didn't any of you put anything in any of it?" This had been more satisfactorily answered by experience than pestering her extremely boring host family. Firstly, because nobody wanted to be here; secondly, because it was hot and there was no water, which had eventually led to the first point; thirdly, because the American military guys were hiding a bunch of giant robots from space out here, so the boring landscape of this specific chunk of nowhere in America was, in a peculiar way, actually pretty well occupied, in the end.)

This evening she was watching it out Bulkhead's window, squinting when the apocalyptic red of the Nevada sunset shone straight into her eyes. She had another project about 'exploring other cultures' that she had to write (in English, ugh), and although Miko spent more time exploring vastly other cultures than probably any other fifteen year old on the planet, Agent Fowler had gotten pretty mad when she joked—joked!—that she was just going to write about last Saturday's lesson on demolition by implosion, because it was basically critical cultural knowledge, if you were a Wrecker.

Not that it wouldn't have been a cool paper, but Fowler badly needed to chill out. She wasn't an idiot. She wouldn't put Bulkhead, or any of the others, in danger. Duh. That was why, while Fowler had been popping a vein, Bulkhead had laughed. Even Optimus Prime had given her a weary smile, which was how she knew her joke had been harmless.

"He wouldn't know funny if it bit him," she complained to Bulkhead. She was secure in his front seat, well strapped in, and still smarting from secret agent man's lengthy lecture. Outside, brown rock gave way to yet more brown rock at speed, for although Bulkhead was not nimble, he was heavy and had a powerful engine, and once he got moving along a predictable road, he moved fast. He wasn't great at fast stops or sharp turns at these speeds, but it was a nice way to travel through the endless empty desert out there.

The ground bridge took up more energon than they could justify using for a schoolnight homework project. Miko got that. Unlike what Fowler clearly thought, she wasn't actually four years old.

She bet Jack 'responsible' Darby would have wet himself if he was let loose in the streets of Shirokanedai.

Bulkhead rumbled around her, a soothing growl of mechanical noise distinct from the well-muffled sounds of the road rolling away underneath them. "I don't think he had joking on his processor," he offered. "Hey, what's the point of this thing we're going to see, anyway?"

"Drive-in theatres are classic Americana," Miko offered with an air of tremendous authority, largely fake. "And The Thing From Another World is a cinematic masterpiece. Even the United States Library of Congress agrees." The Library of Congress was basically like America's National Diet Library, she figured. Her teacher had said anything posted on their website was a fine source for her project, anyway.

"Uh, sure," said Bulkhead. "But what… is it?"

"It's this ancient movie—about an alien coming to earth and killing a bunch of people. And then they made it again—because it was so old, I guess—and added in stuff about it pretending to be humans. And maybe communism? Wikipedia could really stand to be clearer."

Although in Miko's experience, a lot of historical stuff that seemed pretty benign was about communism in America. She knew this because sometimes they had to do lame newspaper reading activities for class (again, in English, which she loved to speak but hated to write) and it turned out that journalists could still upset a lot of people just by saying something was communist. She didn't really get it, and on careful examination it didn't seem like Raf or Jack really got it either.

Anyway. Sometimes old movies about aliens were really about being worried that your friends were communists. Which Miko guessed was great news for the actual aliens in their midst, who were not communists.

"Huh," said Bulkhead eventually. "Humans sure think a lot about aliens, considering nobody seems to believe in them. Uh. Us. Believe in us."

"Yeah." They were probably lucky that most people didn't believe in aliens. The Autobots tried, but the Decepticons didn't put nearly as much effort into camouflage. An out-and-out firefight with the Cons was not exactly a stealth operation.

The drive-in, when they arrived, was old—they were all old, now—and during the daylight it was occupied by a flea market, traces of which still remained in the signage and advertisements on faded boards nearby. They had come so far west that they were almost in California, and it showed in the slightly (very slightly) greener surrounds. There was faded grass on the hill Bulkhead brought her to, for example.

He parked his enormous bulk at the back, on the grassy hill, to avoid obscuring anyone else's view.

This was probably what prevented the two Decepticons up the front from noticing him when he arrived. Bulkhead didn't notice them, either, and, in actual fact, Miko got through most of the event without suspecting there might be anything but other humans in safe, non-sapient vehicles out there.

The old black and white version of the movie ended after eighty-seven perplexingly old-fashioned minutes.

"I think this Carrington guy was way too easily impressed by alien life," Miko opined, enjoying the breeze from her perch on his still-warm hood. She had a unique and expert perspective on the matter of what made a satisfactorily cool alien.

The 1982 version of the film started then. It was a more lurid and exciting film, and not just because it was actually in, you know, colour.

They got as far as the doctor character getting both of his hands chomped off (an immediately fatal injury, in this film), before a familiar noise startled Miko. It was the scoff of someone who disdained what they were watching—but it wasn't human. It was the kind of scoff you only made with an engine. It was so familiar, and, well, Cybertronian, that she looked around with her brows furrowed.

At first, she was only determined to find who had followed them all the way out here from the base. Then, her gaze caught on the silhouette of a low-slung sports car shining in the glow of the big screen. It was parked about half an inch from a heavy military vehicle, not unlike Bulkhead's own alt mode.

Despite sticking out in this crowd of battered secondhand cars and giant American SUVs, Miko wouldn't have been able to pick Breakdown out of a line-up. He was 'some military vehicle,' in her mind. But Knock Out was flashy. Even just the light of the screen glancing off his shape in the dark was recognisable—especially since, once you'd seen the sports car, you did then go looking for the same big military alt mode who was never very far away.

She sat right up on Bulkhead's hood and thumped his plating with her small fist.

"Hey," he started, shifting on his tyres.

"Bulk!" she hissed. "Cons!"

That got his attention away from the gore on the screen and the sting in his hood, and he popped open his driver-side door for her immediately.

"Get inside," he said, in his no-nonsense voice. It was never good when he broke out the serious voice.

Miko scrambled down and threw herself into his insides, and he slammed his door closed before her butt had even hit the seat. The click of the doors locking down securely was a comfort. Sealed inside Bulkhead, Miko was practically untouchable. Maybe not from someone like Megatron, but from Breakdown and his hammer? Please.

But Bulkhead didn't go over there and give her a front-row seat to kicking Con butt. He rumbled unhappily around Miko for a moment and then backed up, pulled out, and started them on their way out of the drive-in.

"What are you doing?" she cried.

"Leaving. Mik—Miko," he interrupted himself, "stop yanking on my door, I'm not going to open it."

With a gusty sigh, she subsided. She did kick him. Technically. A little. But it was, you know, pretty gentle. The lights and noise of the drive in disappeared and Bulkhead began to pick up speed again on the road.

"I can't believe we came all the way out here and you're just going to run away. We could've taken them."

"I'm not saying we couldn't've," Bulkhead admitted. "But we'd probably have crushed some of the humans."

Sure. And if they hadn't done that, they would definitely have blown their cover. Miko understood this… intellectually. But that didn't change how mad she was about it. "Ugh. This sucks. What were those two even doing there?"

There was a looong pause. "Watching movies at the drive-in theatre, I guess."

"Oh, come on!" She felt that this was patently ridiculous. She could barely imagine Decepticons doing normal bot-things like recharging, let alone doing regular stuff like watching movies. And what reason did someone like Knock Out, whose chief interest was his own shiny reflection, have for checking out the cult classics of American B horror films? "More like they were there to—to terrorise all the people at the drive-in!" she insisted. She paused. "Who we abandoned," she added, pointedly.

Bulkhead gave a little chuckle. "Nah. I'm thinking if they wanted to terrorise the drive-in, they wouldn't have sat through the first two hours of the Alien."

Probably not, Miko conceded, if only internally. To Bulkhead, she just sighed. "That's a different movie."

"What, really?"

"Yeah." A better one, too.

"Huh. Aliens, huh…"

Yep.

They rolled on.

Miko looked out through Bulkhead's windows, but all she could see was what his headlights—politely turned on, so other human drivers with poor night-vision could see him—illuminated. It wasn't much. Once they made it out of the sleepy town where they'd found the drive-in, the empty landscape took over again. The street lights were few and far between out here, and clouds covered the stars.

"It's weird," Bulkhead said, at length, "I haven't been able to get a communication through to base." His radio turned itself on. Static came through his speakers—on every station. Miko watched the tiny glowing numbers climb and climb. Nothing. "There's an odd signal interfering with it."

"Nothing…" She checked her own phone, which displayed no bars. "Me, neither. Do you think—those Cons—?"

"I think it's human," Bulkhead said after a considering pause. "So unless they've started working with humans, it's probably coincidental."

"That seems… not so likely." She got the impression most of the Decepticons thought humans were, at best, amusingly clever lower life forms.

"It'd probably be a good idea to check it out," Bulkhead decided. "Optimus Prime will want to know what's causing a total comms disruption like that."

"Hey, I don't mind a detour," said Miko. "Maybe we'll get some good intel and tonight won't be a total waste of time."

"Sorry about the drive-in, Miko," said Bulkhead ruefully.

She felt the pressure of his huge frame wheeling around to change their direction, pressing her into the door for a moment.

She patted his steering wheel, careful not to actually turn it anywhere. "It's okay. I get it. Besides, I got plenty to write my project about. I'll just get Raf to… totally legally download the rest of the movie later."

Bulkhead chuckled. "All right, then."

Optimus Prime got very weird about them all lawbreaking. Even though, reading between the lines, he'd done plenty of that himself, once upon a time. It seemed impossible that a mech who exuded the most concentrated aura of Dad Miko had ever encountered (including, but not limited to, from her actual dad) had once run with Megatron. But philosophically she supposed that even old people had to have been young once. Not her parents, obviously. But some old people.

"How far away do you think this signal is?" she wondered. Now that she was aware of it, it was hard to keep her eyes off her phone's tiny colourful screen. No reception. It didn't even flicker. On a whim, she shut it down.

"Close," Bulkhead said. "I bet even the Cons at that drive-in can't get their comms right now."

"Maybe that's why they're there." A break from hearing from Starscream or Megatron would be pretty attractive, Miko thought.

Her phone finished restarting. Nothing. Well, it'd been a long shot.

"Ha," said Bulkhead. Then, after only a minute or so, they topped a rise in the landscape and what was very clearly some kind of government base came into view: illuminated by big floodlights, military vehicles a lot like Bulkhead's alt mode parked in short, neat lines, one big squat building that was probably super well-fortified but which was inevitably also super ugly, and one or two guys all in dark colours looking like tiny dots at this distance, walking around.

"Looks like Fowler's guys," Bulkhead decided.

"Yeah, probably." Miko didn't have nearly as many run-ins with Men In Black back in Tokyo. She wasn't sure if it was just her, or if America was crawling with shadowy military types. Maybe, somehow, both.

A military base was a boring end to an annoyingly interrupted evening. She sagged back into Bulkhead's seat.

"Let's get a short-range reading and then get back to base, okay?" Outside, Bulkhead's headlights turned off, plunging everything into dimness. Now there was really nothing to see, unless Miko counted the military base. Which… she did not.

"Sure," she said. Bored already, she pulled up Snake on her phone. Its tiny illuminated screen was clear in her lap, and it didn't need reception for that.

So it was that Miko was way more occupied with chasing a high score than she was with anything outside the vehicle when Bulkhead exclaimed, "Whoa!" and a vicious shock ran right through him.

It stung so hard Miko dropped the phone into her lap. She yelped.

"Miko!"

"What's going on?"

"I—I hit something," Bulkhead did not sound certain. "Drove over something. Hang on."

She squinted, but the only light was the dim glow from the incomprehensible Cybertronian indicators on Bulkhead's dashboard. She couldn't see a thing outside. Suddenly aware that there might be danger—or that he might need her to get out and push, somehow—Miko shoved her phone into the pocket of her shorts and zipped it up. Better not to lose it.

"I'm not—ungh," Bulkhead's engine growled in strain. "I'm not sure what's… Augh!" There was another shock. Light coruscated across his instruments and crackled through his metal.

This time, Miko screamed too. Her arm, pressed against his driver-side door, stuck to it for a horrible moment. When she pulled it away at last there was a big hot strip down her arm that hurt even when she wasn't touching it. Miko's heart pounded hard inside her chest, going faster than she thought she'd ever felt it go before.

On his panels, Bulkhead's indicator lights all… flickered.

"Bulk?" she whispered, clutching her burned arm to her chest.

There was nothing: darkness, and silence.

"Bulkhead?" she tried again.

At last, his lights came back on and steadied. Distantly, outside the safety of Bulkhead's interior, Miko could hear movement: footsteps, deep voices. She sat very still in the dark.

Slowly, she crept her hand onto Bulkhead's steering wheel and wrapped her cold fingers around it. Beneath her hand he was warm.

"Miko." When he spoke, his voice was thick with interference, and he was grim. "That's not Fowler's guys."

"What?" she whispered.

"It's MECH. Remember them?"

Miko felt cold down to her toes. "The ones who kidnapped Breakdown? Who took Bee's t-cog?"

"That's them. Listen, Miko, they've completely fried my actuators. I won't be going anywhere under my own power. Not without Ratchet's help."

That was… not good. That was so not good. They had sailed past 'get out and push' territory and ended up in some much worse place Miko hadn't even known existed. Had she really wanted this night to be more interesting? Really?

"That means they're going to need to tow me to take me anywhere. So, here's what we're going to do." He sounded certain, steely, like he had a foolproof plan. Miko felt herself settling, despite everything. Okay. She was listening. "When they come back, they'll have to move the net to hitch me. That's when you make a run for it."

What? No! "Bulkh—"

"No," he interrupted, urgently, before she could even get it out. "Listen to me, Miko, there's no time. When I unlock the door, you run for it, no matter what. Don't look back. Run for it, and go get back up, okay? I'll be counting on you."

Part of her wanted to scream 'THIS is your plan?' but she chewed her bottom lip and couldn't come up with anything better herself.

Run. Get back up. Sure. She could do that.

Miko's mouth formed a grim line.

"I won't let you down." She patted the lower curve of his steering wheel. "Count on it."

"I know you won't," said Bulkhead, with no sign of strain in his voice. He wass still crackling, but he sounded as laid-back as he always did.

Miko clenched her fist in her lap.

Outside, more voices were now remarkably close. Miko sat, tense and invisible in the dimness inside Bulkhead's cab, blood rushing in her ears. He wasn't as permeable as an actual car, and she strained to hear as the men moved around.

"Careful on the approach—they're all dangerous. No losses, Jones."

"Sir."

"Silas'll be pleased we got another one, won't he?"

"Well… two out of three is a passing grade," someone said, dry as bone.

Another voice laughed in response. "Where did you go to school?"

Miko felt cold with fear, hot with outrage, and sick with disgust all at the same time. It took her a few long seconds to figure out what these men meant—two out of three? Were she and Bulkhead two? Did they know she was in here? She didn't think so. Had some other member of team Prime gotten worried about them not comming in and wandered out into a trap?

She was feeling so many things, all coiled up and ready to run, that it was as if her brain was made of thick soup. It took her a few long seconds to think it through and keep it simple. She'd already seen two other Cybertronians out here today: Breakdown and Knock Out. Which meant MECH had one of them, too.

She couldn't figure out if that was good or bad for Bulkhead. She could only hope MECH decided to dissect the Con first.

"Get ready," Bulkhead warned, a staticky whisper through his speakers. Miko breathed in, then out, carefully measured.

She fought down the stupid urge to cling to him. She was going to run, get help, and then come back and rescue him—if he even needed rescuing. It would be fine. It would be fine.

"On your signal," she whispered, trying to sound like a badass with a mission and not like a frightened teenager.

Outside, something scraped against Bulkhead's exterior.

"Now!" he hissed.

Miko threw his door open and exploded out into the night air. She caught a close-up glimpse of a man in the wan moonlight through the clouds, and swerved nimbly around him. Then she sprinted for the hills.

Behind her, something made a weird bark—once, twice! Miko, accustomed only to the sounds of blaster fire, did not recognise the noise. But clearly Bulkhead did, because he shook with the sound of clattering metal and gave a mighty roar with his whole frame, a huge rumbling that shook the ground beneath Miko's feet.

"Take it down! Subdue it!" someone cried, and Miko kept running and running, legs and lungs burning as she powered straight up the hill.

And then she stopped dead, for behind her something awful had happened. With a flash of light, Bulkhead's roaring voice and thunderous engine had gone silent.

Chapter Text

Miko looked back over her shoulder. The MECH goons were now all distracted from her, so it was safe enough, but all she could make out was a confusing scene in bright pale flashes of crackling light: scrambling black silhouettes swarming the enormous shape of her felled friend.

Run, she remembered. Get backup.

Miko stumbled up the hill on trembling legs in the dark, propelled by her determination to do exactly that.

This was not an abandonment. She was going to get backup.

She scrubbed one arm over her stinging eyes and set off with a will.

After she'd made it over the hill where they were less likely to catch a glimpse of the light, she began checking the reception on her phone at regular intervals. If not for its little glow, she probably wouldn't have noticed the trap laid out on the rocky ground in the darkness.

She tripped on something in the dark, which was hardly new: the ground was sandy and rocky, which was a combination that annoyed her under normal circumstances and became downright perilous when you couldn't see, for anywhere off the beaten path, there were small rocks that moved underfoot, unmoored in the fine dry dirt of the desert. In just the diffused light of the moon through the clouds, the cabling would have been virtually invisible. But when she kicked angrily at something that resisted her, she leaned down, picked up a long rope of—something?

She dropped it at first, pinwheeling her arms and jerking back from a long, thick, textured coil of something.

She froze there, heart thundering. They'd had a whole class meeting about rattlesnakes and what to listen out for. Whatever this was, it wasn't one of those—and it was unlikely to be the lethal kind of snake she'd imagined, which might have been haunting a rocky outcropping in her home country.

…it was the dead of night, so it probably wasn't any kind of snake, actually. Didn't they go somewhere else when it got cold?

Annoyed, both with her own brain and the coil of whatever sitting out in the middle of nowhere, she flipped her phone over and shone the synthetic pale light of the screen upon it.

The coil, too, was synthetic. She dug her nail into the matte dark coating on it and some of it flaked up, revealing… more matte dark coating. Okay. She shone the phone around, hunched over it and following its layout in the dimness. Her stomach felt tight as she discovered what it really was: a net, laid out upon the ground, across an area of space that was much, much bigger than she was.

"That's what they used to get Bulkhead!" she cried.

Her voice was loud enough to startle her in the quiet. And angry enough, too. In her fist, the light of her phone landed on something almost hidden in the shadow of a desert rock: a knee-height black box with a bunch of cords coming out of it.

"And that," she said slowly, eyes narrowing, "has gotta be what's powering it."

She didn't know one kind of battery or cable from another, really, but someone else might need to see it. She stuck her tongue between her teeth and snapped several pictures her phone before walking across it, right over the cables and through the wide openings in the mesh of it. It was not designed for someone of Miko's composition.

She ripped the cords out of the black box before she went on.

She tripped on another one ten minutes later. It caught her around the ankle and she scraped her knee stumbling around in the dark. There was no reason to cry about it: Miko was an old pro at scraped knees. But the stress of the evening made her blink fiercely into the dimness for several long moments.

"Stop it!" she hissed, absolutely furious at herself. She couldn't waste time being a baby about skinned knees. She had to find somewhere with cellular reception!

She came across more and more of the traps as she hiked through the pitch black desert night—usually, she stumbled on a cable. As she did, a picture formed in her mind. She didn't like it.

The signal that had interrupted Bulkhead's commlink, and which was even now messing with the reception on her trusty flip phone, had been at once both an obstruction for MECH's intended captives so they couldn't call for help—and bait for a trap. And she and Bulkhead had fallen for it completely.

They'd just had to pick somewhere they knew cybertronians would show up. She remembered what the men had said when they'd got Bulkhead: two out of three. Maybe this was a common area for the Decepticons. Maybe there was an energon mine nearby. She ground her teeth. Stupid Decepticons messing things up.

Miko checked her phone again. No signal.

There would be no signal, she guessed, until she was out of range of all these traps. And she kept stumbling onto more and more of them.

Why did MECH have so many of them? Didn't these things cost, like, money?

She kicked a cable in frustration. It moved, unsatisfyingly heavy, and thumped back to the ground. If there was a current running through these things, she never felt it. At this rate it would be morning before she'd walked far enough on her useless human legs to get a phone signal and even call for help. And who even knew what might be happening to Bulkhead in that time?

A flash of light and a crash of metal on metal interrupted these increasingly incoherent and desolate thoughts. Miko went still once more, listening closely. It probably wasn't as close as the flash of light had made it seem. She knew what it sounded like when you were next to a bunch of cars punching each other. Sound just carried strangely in the weird rocks and empty spaces of the desert…

It was probably the Decepticon. Whichever one MECH hadn't managed to catch.

Good common sense said that Miko should turn tail and run in the opposite direction from any Decepticon. There was basically no good way for her to meet one of those guys all alone in the dark.

Miko stopped walking. Calm down, she thought. You can't help anyone if you panic.

She thought about how far from help she was—and therefore how far from help Bulkhead was. And she thought about when the rest of the team would expect them back, when they'd get worried and come looking.

Miko's fingers squeezed tight around her little flip phone, so tight she could feel her own pulse thumping inside her fist.

The rest of team Prime would probably start searching for them before she could even find a phone signal. She couldn't remember how often they checked in, but after Cliffjumper the window had changed from days to some alien unit of time that could be measured in hours and minutes.

Running away would be safe. It was exacrtly what Bulkhead had wanted her to do. And yet, Bulkhead's priorities were not necessarily Miko's priorities: he was perfectly content to fling himself into danger as long as he could be assured of her safety.

But Miko did not aspire to safety.

So she turned towards the sounds of the Decepticon. She took off at a jog with just the tiny light of her phone bobbing against the rock underfoot to guide her. Bulkhead was in trouble. And Miko was going to get him backup.

The Decepticon was closer than she'd expected, after all that. Just over a jutting ridge of rock was some kind of installation—perhaps a deserted outpost or extra facility built by the same absent authority who'd built the base MECH was inhabiting. It looked pretty identical in style, although it was a smaller building and not a complex: a lot of squat, ugly, concrete fences with chain link tops and rolls of barbed wire… her brain could fill in the military vehicles and men who weren't present just by looking at the space.

From where she stood atop the ridge, Miko could make out a couple of big cybertronian bodies moving in the dark. It helped that they both had lights built right in. The pitch blackness of the nights out in Nowheresville, Nevada might have been great for the drive-in theatre, but it wasn't so good for dashing around in the middle of the night trying to save her friend.

Beyond the fence, dim bio lights illuminated the flashy red armour of Knock Out. He loomed over the prone frame of one of those big, purple guys. It was either a vehicon or an eradicon—she wasn't very good at telling them apart in robot mode—and it had a drill attachment, big and bulky on one side. Maybe there was a mine out here somewhere. Huh.

Miko flinched when something Knock Out did created a bright and unsettling flash again, which ruined her night vision (such as it was) for long seconds. The purple guy moaned a thick, staticky: "Ow."

"Hmm," mused Knock Out, like he hadn't even heard it.

Miko hesitated on her rocky ridge, squinting out at them. She didn't think the pair of them would be able to get the purple guy loose, since these traps were pretty clearly designed with cybertronians in mind.

Knock Out pulled his shock rod out of a compartment and used its tip to pry at the purple guy, doing something Miko could not make out at all. There was another crackle—Knock Out lurched away with a yelp, disgust clear on his face in the bright light of the accompanying flash—and the air was acrid with the sudden, awful smell of burned plastics and hot metal.

"Well, that's never good," he murmured, holding the rod aloft and leaning in again.

The purple guy didn't answer at all this time.

Miko scrambled down the slope of the ridge, rocks scattering unsteadily underfoot, and hurried forward. She hit the fencing and did not let it stop her: she climbed to get closer to the Decepticon over the other side. Her boots skidded on the concrete at the bottom—it rose higher than her head—but with enough enthusiasm and at least one pulled muscle, she caught hold of the chain links above and hauled herself up with some effort.

Of course, then there was the barbed wire... She sighed a huge sigh that rustled her bangs and tossed her jacket over the coil of them before slithering over. So Bulkhead would owe her a jacket. Whatever.

It occurred to Miko that his last words to her had been to run and not look back. But she'd gone miles on foot and still had no service on her phone. So there was no calling the cavalry today (and indeed no helpful lift back), and since someone had to break into the MECH base and rescue Bulkhead, it might as well be Miko.

She'd have preferred working with Wheeljack again.

Actually, Miko would have preferred Optimus Prime. Bringing Optimus Prime out here to put the hurt on some MECH goons was—well, he was a big kitten, most of the time, but he could be direct when his people were hurt. And like Miko always said, there was no kill like overkill!

… Actually if she was constructing a fantasy wish list, she'd really, really have preferred Bulkhead.

Which brought her all the way back to point one: get Bulk out of MECH base.

She'd seen Knock Out in action before, too. He was no Bulkhead, because, you know, who was? But... she got the impression he hadn't exactly taken the hippocratic oath.

"I don't want to do this... because it is disgusting…" Knock Out was saying, touching his own headlights with one clawed hand for just a moment, "and I am sure you'd prefer I didn't do this to you. But we can both take comfort in knowing it's going to hurt you so much more than it hurts me."

The hand transformed into a shiny spinny wheel of death.

"Hey! Doctor Doom!" Miko called out from her perch on the fence. Knock Out looked up, peering warily out into the dark. "Are you looking for a way in? I bet I can help you there." She jumped down from the chain link fence and her boots skidded on the concrete and at last thumped on the plating of the downed miner. She jumped off him, too, landing finally on the ground. She patted his smooth warm armour with one hand, and then crossed her arms, leaning back on one hip in a posture of confidence that she almost felt.

For a moment she felt incredibly, unstoppably cool. What an entrance! Nailed it.

Then Knock Out actually properly turned to look at her, and the full weight of his irritable attention fell upon her tiny, fragile human body. Oh, sure, he was a small cybertronian, but even Bumblebee weighed enough to crush a human by accident. When Knock Out took one step towards her, the ground vibrated with it, and Miko was suddenly and horribly aware that he was this terrible, mountainous thing of metal and light: dense, sharp, and—in his case—very, very fast.

If it was possible for a cybertronian face to sneer, then his was sneering. His glossy face plates were just malleable enough to show her the curl of his lip.

"And what, pray tell, does a fleshy like you think you know about…" He paused for a moment. Glanced at the miner with its ticking frame and blank visor. Tipped his head back towards the buildings.

"Well, I'm thinking you don't want to go and tell Soundwave about whatever you were out here doing," Miko said, before he could say any more and define what it was she was and was not meant to know about. She flattered herself that she knew quite a lot about getting her own way—and step one was to never let anyone else interrupt your narrative. Even if they were, like, two million times your size. She propped her fists on her hips. "And I'm also thinking you want your partner back. Seems like maybe we have that in common."

"…Well." Knock Out eyed her. Contemplated it. It was like all the calculating, self-serving gears were whirling away inside his metal head as he stared down at her in judgement. "As a human yourself, I'm sure you're more familiar with their…" he paused as though he wasn't quite sure he had the right word. "Culture."

Miko considered how conversant she was with US military culture for all of half a second, and then pointed at Knock Out. "Yeah! Absolutely. Piece of cake."

She'd seen movies. It'd be fine.

Probably.

Knock Out crossed his massive arms over his chest plates and stared down at her. His glowing optics looked unconvinced, burning like coals out of the dark.

"Besides," she added, feeling the weight of that judgemental gaze, "I can do this." She picked up a loop of cable and heaved it away from the purple guy's fingers. "Tada."

"Oh-ho…? You're the pride of your species, I'm sure." His eyes got bigger the way they did with optical zoom, looming huge in his face. It was even more unsettling in the dark of the environment.

"It's a limited time offer," Miko declared, dropping the cable. It hit the ground with a hefty thump. "Take it or leave it."

He looked narrowly down at her, claw-tips tapping a rapid tick-tick-tick upon his high-gloss top coat. The silence hung in the air between them for one second. Two. Three.

"Fine," said Knock Out, finally. Then the enormous mass of him tumbled down towards her, metal clattering and whirring as it shifted and cut whistling through the air. She stepped back, but it was only Knock Out taking one knee to offer her a long, sharp claw. Even in the banked glow of his bio lights, the metal gleamed. "It's a deal."

Miko didn't hesitate. She clapped her small human hand on his claw and shook it vigorously in the unholy red light of his eyes. She grinned. "Pleasure doing business with you."

"Oh, that remains to be seen," he said, perfectly ominous. "Now uncover his arm. He has some things I need. Then we'll go and get my partner—and yours."

Big bot, clear priorities. Miko loved a solid plan. "Sweet."

What Knock Out turned out to need was both the internal gun mounted on the vehicon, and also his first aid kit. Unlike Bulkhead or Ratchet, he didn't tell her not to look when he sliced right through the vehicon's plating and started ripping stuff out.

Instead, he gestured with one gleaming claw at a loop of cable. "Lift that, will you? Ugh, I don't usually carry heavy ordnance to the cinema," he said drily, "but I am revising that position as we speak."

Miko dove in and heaved up the loop he'd pointed at, straining with the effort. Whatever the stuff was made out of, it was dense.

Knock Out eyed her with one unsettlingly large, red optical lens. "You're not going to drop that, are you?"

"I won't if you hurry up."

Knock Out made a face. "The unreliable hardware on you humans," he muttered, and then he examined the vehicon and just… sawed his arm off at the joint so he could drag it away from the trap.

There was a tremendous scream of tearing metal, a smell like burning, sparks of light—the works. None of this seemed to touch the distasteful moue of Knock Out's features. Miko swallowed and kept her grip steady.

He withdrew with the arm from the vicinity of the trap. Miko dropped her cable and looked at the vehicon curiously. Even now, he wasn't making any more noise, and the lights on his frame were dim. The energon leaking from him was the brightest thing about him.

"Is he …gonna be okay?" she wondered aloud. Was he even alive?

"Of course he will," Knock Out sniffed. "What do you take me for? These little pests won't do more damage in a few hours than I can fix. They wouldn't even know where to start."

"What?"

Knock Out looked up, squinted at her, and then rolled his eyes extravagantly. "And I'm sure your Autobot medic is, erm, equal to it, too," he assured her with an air of greatly exaggerated patience. "He can't be that decrepit… besides, you know Breakdown has been trying to dismantle that Bulkhead for millennia, and he hasn't managed it yet, so I think you can assume he's of fairly sturdy construction. They can't have had him for more than an hour, either…"

Miko looked at the leaking vehicon and decided Knock Out had misunderstood what she'd meant because he'd more or less entirely forgotten about his existence. At least his confidence about Bulkhead's survival was comforting. In… a way.

"If Breakdown's not okay, I'll deactivate him myself," he muttered, extracting the matte grey case of what Miko recognised vaguely as a cybertronian first aid kit. Bulkhead kept his in the trunk. Vehicons, apparently, had a compartment on their off-arms.

"You really were just out at the drive-in movie theatre watching movies," Miko marvelled.

She came closer, peering into the arm. Things were still sparking in there, and the energon was bright blue on Knock Out's claws. He peeled back a panel of metal as she watched, digging in deeper, past the energon lines, to get at a flickering component in the eerie blue glow.

Then something occurred to her. "You knew we were there!" For how else could he have known Bulkhead had only been trapped an hour or so ago?

"What else does one do at a drive-in theatre?" he wondered. "I don't go to socialise with the humans, if that's what you're implying."

No, he went to socialise with his own species—with Breakdown—which was incredible enough, to Miko. Decepticons having friends seemed like a bizarre novelty in the context of her experience with them.

She'd thought it had been some weird Decepticon plot, actually. But now she remembered that Knock Out had been involved in human stuff before. He'd been involved in that street-racing thing Jack had gotten all caught up in, hadn't he? And just because she'd filed his activities under 'freaky Decepticon stuff' did not mean that it had been, you know, actual, official, Megatron-Sanctioned Decepticon Activity.

"Is that why you were street racing, too?" she wondered, mostly to herself. "It's not like the Decepticons need a few hundred American dollars."

"Perish the thought."

He dipped his claws into the arm again as she watched. The sound of tearing metal came again, then, and it was as familiar as it was uncomfortable, after the past year. Miko inched even closer, eyes fixed on the arm.

"I," Knock Out said grandly, gesturing at himself with his drenched claws and getting a glowing blue drip on one of his headlights, "am a racer. I like to go fast. I like to win. That's all there is to it."

For one mercifully brief moment, Miko found herself totally understanding a Decepticon: go fast, win. Yeah. She could get that.

And then he added, "And I like it when they cry because they lost," almost as an afterthought. "There's a lot of money in racing, even here. Sometimes they get very upset."

Miko was prevented from finding an answer to that by Knock Out at last finishing whatever he'd been up to with the vehicon's dismembered arm. What must have been internal weaponry came free with a squelch of thick, syrupy lubricant. Knock Out examined the gun, a naked-looking thing of skeletal metal. He wiped the fuel and lubricant off it with one already-dripping thumb and checked the reservoir, which was low even to Miko's inexpert eye. He tucked it away inside an internal compartment of his own.

Then he rose back up to his full towering height and whipped a cloth out of somewhere. "Energon," he complained, "can't live without it, but it makes such a mess." He wiped off the droplet that had gotten on his headlight and then sluiced it from each claw, one by one, swish, swish, swish.

When he was clean, he turned back towards Miko with a look on his face like he was contemplating the worst task in the world.

"I don't suppose you're hiding a set of wheels beneath that dull fleshy exterior, are you?"

"My ride's been impounded," Miko pointed out. She jabbed her thumb over her shoulder in the vague direction of the MECH hideout.

"Mm-hm." His expression didn't improve. "I was afraid of that."

A moment of silence followed.

It extended.

"Uh, hello? Earth to Knock Out?" It felt very, very weird for her to say his name like that. "Are we going to go kick their teeth in and do our heroic rescue or what?"

He made that same engine noise that had so handily given him away at the drive-in earlier.

"I am weighing my options," he drawled, but despite this uninspiring comment, he extended his clawed hand out to her. "I've decided you're marginally less horrible than explaining this situation to Soundwave—or persuading Starscream to go behind his back. Again."

The way Knock Out said 'his' was with a terrible significance, almost in title case all on its own. Miko doubted he meant Soundwave when he said it like that. This was a different 'he' entirely. A chill passed through her at the thought.

"Well, hurry up, then," he prompted.

Miko squinted at his claws in the dark. "You're not going to transform?"

Knock Out was offended. "Here? Do I look like an all-terrain model to you?" Without waiting for an answer, he snatched her up impatiently, lightning-fast with his movements in a way that Bulkhead just simply never was.

"Whoa!" Miko yelped. She squirmed in his grip, but then he dumped her on the smooth, warm curve of his shoulder. She clung to the edge of what might have been a wheel well as he began to move.

"My undercarriage would be shredded. Now don't move. And try not to leave fingerprints."

"Well, sor-ry," Miko mumbled. But soon she was occupied with trying to stay put while Knock Out walked on foot through the dark landscape.

His bio lights offered only a little more light than her phone, but it was enough that she could pick out the regular geometric shapes of the traps—even though, it became quickly apparent, he couldn't. Was this why Bulkhead hadn't seen it?

"It's not as though they emit heat or any other proper signals," he complained. "And everything here looks strange in the dark—your whole planet is an eyesore: one ugly mass after another."

"Huh," said Miko, who really did not think about earth as a homogeneous kind of place very often.

"I'd use my headlights, like a mechanimal," he said, some minutes, and a new trap, later. "But they'd see them coming… And you're here anyway." A claw came perilously close to her face, gleaming out of the dark in the glow from his eyes. She twitched back, but it didn't touch her. "So you might as well earn your keep. Eugh," he added, "that smells damp. Please tell me it's not another swamp."

"It is definitely not a swamp," Miko said, with full confidence. Nevada was desert, desert, and, for a little change of pace, more desert. "It might be the MECH guys." She didn't know how far they'd travelled, or exactly how far away the MECH buildings were, but they had to be pretty close by now. The giant robot express was always faster than you thought it was gonna be. Big feet. Big legs. Big strides.

This time, Miko was up high enough to see the flood lights well before they'd mounted the hill.

Knock Out hummed at the view of the whole facility laid out before them. "Curious. Why are they not on the rise? They'd have a better view. Surely even the quaint human processor can conceptualise that much."

"I think they're just squatting," Miko opined. "They didn't build the place, and whoever did didn't care about stuff like that. These guys aren't, like, official. Agent Fowler says they're ex-military mercenaries."

There wasn't really a sound, exactly, but the steady mechanical thrum of whatever Knock Out was made of inside became more intense for a second as he evaluated. "Interesting. But useless information at the moment. It's bigger than I expected, and I'll need more of a plan than ripping the roof off and holding a human hostage."

"Uh, yeah, we will," said Miko slowly. It occurred to her that she might have been the hostage in question. "Where do you think they've taken Bulkhead? And Breakdown. I guess."

"A central location within the complex," Knock Out said. "If they are, as you say, 'squatting', and they're indifferent to damage to the building and surrounds, they'll want to put as much space between Breakdown and freedom as they can. That's if they're smart," he added, and she could hear his face shifting into a frown.

"I give it fifty-fifty then," Miko quipped.

It was very weird, too, to feel rewarded by the mean, synthetic laugh of a Decepticon officer. But she couldn't help but smile at her own joke with him.

"Let's take a look around and see if we can find the entrances." Knock Out's bio lights disappeared as he spoke, and suddenly the night was very dark indeed—but the light from the compound was enough for Miko to just about make out the traps laid out for cybertronians in the dirt.

"I think this is where they got Bulkhead," she said when they came to the spot at the bottom of the hill. The rocks and dirt were all messed up, but there was no obvious trace of her missing friend. Her heart squeezed strangely in her chest, a feeling that communicated itself up her throat.

"I can smell that," Knock Out said with a noise of distaste. "Burned out wiring lingers. And now you, too. Are you having some kind of… biological function?" he demanded.

"No," growled Miko, rubbing fiercely at her eyes. She wasn't.

"Whatever you say. But whatever you're not doing, it smells corrosive, so keep it away from my paint."

"Ugh," said Miko. If she had been actually crying, she'd have taken the opportunity to smear it into his high-gloss polish, but since she wasn't, and more importantly it had really just been a tiny sting in her eyes and maybe, like, one whole tear, she'd already stopped doing it.

She just didn't like thinking of Bulkhead sitting there helpless with his wires burnt out while the MECH guys surrounded him and towed him off. It made her feel bad in a way she couldn't quite articulate, but felt as a terrible, physical thing, with all of her organs and, apparently, her entire face.

Stupid feelings. "Let's just go already," she said, instead of getting into it with Knock Out. Of the many things she wasn't going to discuss with a Decepticon, what made her cry ranked pretty highly. "These guys picked the wrong bot to mess with."

"Yes, I'm sure they're trembling in their little armoured booties," drawled Knock Out.

Yeah. Fine, sure. Whatever. She was tiny. She was fleshy. She wasn't really scary.

A scrawny fifteen year old girl wasn't intimidating, even to another human.

Hardshell had thought that, too, probably. Before she blew him up.

"You think? I give it fifty-fifty." This time she didn't feel particularly funny, and this time Knock Out didn't laugh.

They made it around the whole perimeter of the compound in the dark, moving as quietly around the well-lit glow of the base as a several-tonne metal giant could move. Knock Out was quiet compared to Bulkhead, but that was not a high standard of stealth. They had to stay back far enough that each stomped rock didn't bring every armed guy in the place down upon them.

There were three exits: one on either side, and a third at the garage where more important cars were kept under cover.

"They're hideous," Knock Out opined loftily, in a whisper that carried at least no further than his footsteps. "You humans make so many ugly cars. You'd never believe how long it took me to select and scan an alt-mode."

Miko eyed the cars from her perch on his shoulder. The ones under cover were cleaner than the ones parked out in the elements, but she didn't really know what was 'good looking' by cybertronian standards. She had a vague—very vague—impression that someone had once said Optimus Prime was particularly cute, but she had quashed and repressed that memory. It felt unsettlingly like someone admitting they had a crush on her dad.

"I'm not really a connoisseur of… if the cars are attractive," she said, waving one arm. If nothing else, it would feel disloyal to agree that Knock Out's alt-mode was way cooler than the battered utilitarian military models out here—Bulkhead was a battered, utilitarian military model. And he was cooler than Knock Out could ever be. So there.

"I'm sure even you can see that they're caked in the refuse of half the desert," Knock Out pointed out. Apparently he was deeply invested in relative vehicular ugliness.

"Pretty caked tyres on some of them," she agreed, because she at least knew that even bots who liked getting dirty hated it when the dirt dried in their tyres.

This incited an actual shudder from Knock Out. She clutched the edge of his armour, waiting for it to subside. Bulkhead never did that.

She patted him. "If I get time to write in the dust, I'll be sure to date it. Just for you."

They backed off from the compound again once they'd discovered all the entrances and exits. Miko guided them away from traps on the ground and winced every time Knock Out crushed part of the landscape underfoot. Knock Out let his lights come back up with a sound of relief.

"Well?"

Miko rubbed her chin. "At least it's flat around there, so you can drive if you need to…" That was probably how they'd selected where to build. "But I don't think I saw any door that was better than another."

"No…" He tapped one claw on his arm thoughtfully. She could feel the vibration of the tapping in her butt where she was sitting on his shoulder. Weird. "And the humans are spread evenly around the complex. They're patrolling in pairs, from the heat signatures. Two or more at each entry point." Tap, tap, tap. "You're such a damnably fecund species. So many of you little creatures," he said, almost admiring through his frustration. "There must be at least forty in that—" he waved a hand back over his shoulder "—hovel alone."

"That's nothing," said Miko, who didn't know what the word 'fecund' meant in English anyway, "my hometown has, oh, twelve million."

She could hear Knock Out's optics reset from where she sat on his shoulder. Ha.

Then the number he'd estimated caught up with her and she bit her lip. Forty humans would be nothing to a cybertronian under regular circumstances, but she'd didn't know what else MECH might have done with those cable things they'd invented. If they could disable Bulkhead and Breakdown—and that vehicon miner-bot—then they could disable Knock Out, too.

And Miko wasn't going to bet on herself in a fight against forty armed adult guys with guns.

"Augh, what are we supposed to do now?"

"I don't suppose there's some exploitable aspect of their culture or communications system," Knock Out posed.

"It doesn't really work like that."

"No." He sighed, deep and unsatisfied through his vents. Somehow, she got the impression that Knock Out had been hanging around humans a lot more frequently than had the bots of Team Prime, before now. "Not for us, either."

Miko knew she wasn't dumb, but there were really some times she just wished she was smarter. This was one of them. She wasn't even sure how much studying would have solved this problem for her, though.

Bulkhead was relying on her to help him. She couldn't just sit here in misery, mystified by her own bad feelings, she had to do something.

"Think," she muttered. Then, annoyed, "What would someone smart do?"

"Not this," Knock Out lamented. "And I'm afraid that's coming from the smartest person present."

She didn't even bother to argue. He was a doctor, wasn't he? He was probably pretty smart.

This thought triggered another in her mind: a memory of Ratchet—who was really, properly smart, definitely smarter than Knock Out, despite how grumpy he was—talking to Raf. "There's no point sitting around and wishing for more data you don't have," he'd been saying, picking irritably away at a human sized keyboard with one finger. "You have to start with what you do have and build your way up."

What did they have here? A building of forty military guys with well-guarded doors and missing friends, that was what. Thanks, brain-Ratchet, she thought sourly. Except… that wasn't quite all, was it? They knew there were three entrances to the complex. And one that was purposefully designed just for cars, right?

And they had to have taken Bulkhead somewhere they could access by vehicle. They couldn't have moved him, otherwise.

"The garage was on the west side, right?"

Knock Out gestured vaguely with one hand, barely pausing in his tapping as he thought, but he was pointing towards where she'd last seen the sun go down, so she smiled.

"Why don't we go set the east entryway on fire?"

The tapping stopped. "…You have my attention."

"It's like… distracting the teacher so you can get out of detention."

She'd done that three times now. Bulkhead got antsy when she was too late for pick-up time after school, and she hated to inconvenience him. Actually, when she thought about it, this was almost exactly like sneaking out of detention. Well, except that her teachers called her host parents if she got caught, instead of, you know, shooting at her.

Basically identical.

"People totally panic when things catch fire," she shared knowledgeably. At least, teachers certainly did. "And if their stuff burns down they'll get in trouble, probably."

"That is how it usually goes," Knock Out allowed, the voice of experience.

"So they'll go that way," she pointed east. "And we go that way," she pointed west. "And boom, we zoom into the garage and get inside while they're putting out the fire. And then we make for the centre and find Bulkhead!"

Knock Out hummed. It was a thoughtful hum.

"Except I don't know how we're going to set a fire at the east entry," Miko admitted. MECH was unlikely to provide a handy wastepaper basket full of used worksheets. "We'd have to get pretty close. And I guess there's no way to know if the entry through the garage will fit you… And I don't think I even have a lighter or anything. It's a shame we don't have any energon… that stuff goes up like—kaboom!" she gestured, miming an explosion with her hands. "You know?"

"Yes, energon mines and missiles are not typically an advisable combination," he said, clearly remembering the same events she was. "But let's not throw the whole plan out just yet," he advised. "It's not bad."

"…Yeah?"

"Aha, there it is," he said. Miko swayed in her perch when he reached into a compartment and pulled out the first aid kit. "It only needs a little… help."

Chapter Text

Knock Out laid the components out on the ground in the dim glow of his own lights. It reminded Miko of the girls at her school back home, who would unzip their pastel pencil cases and arrange mechanical pencils and kitty-shaped erasers just so before opening a note book to fill with surgically precise characters. Needless to say, Miko herself was more of a 'there's a biro in one pocket and a receipt in the other,' sort of student, much to the dismay of parents and teachers alike.

The similarities didn't last. The first aid kit and the gun were both splattered with softly-glowing cybertronian gore, and Knock Out regarded them with a complete detachment that her fellow students probably would not have managed.

His shiny claws clicked and caught little flickers of bio lights when the angle was just right. Miko kept an eye on them and stayed out of their way as she leaned right in to watch what he was doing.

"That's a painkiller, right?" She pointed to one of the syrettes, which he had slit right open and was mixing with the insides of a canister of emergency coolant. The first aid kit had three of them, and not really a lot of anything else, which was totally different to the kits she'd seen with the Autobots.

"Oh? You've seen it before? It's cheap to produce. The miners have it in case of collapse—you take one if you think someone will dig you out." He cut the second and third syrettes, too. "If not, take all three."

Miko opened her mouth. Then she shut it again. The Decepticons just didn't even have to try to be like this, huh?

Knock Out didn't notice her expression, evidently more caught up in what his hands were doing. He warmed to the topic, though. "You want to learn? You should—it's useful."

Did she want to learn about setting medicine on fire? Yes. Yes, she did. This was why she liked Wheeljack, mostly. Miko inched even closer, squinting at the glowing objects in the dark.

"Chemically, this is similar to the explosives the Decepticons use to blast down to the energon levels on this ugly little planet—but if you mix too much of this with raw energon, you'll get a toxic cloud that would affect every spark in a twenty mile radius."

"Really? Cool!" Miko leaned in. "Is that what you're gonna do here? Poison them?"

"No. It's too volatile—I'd have to get the concentration right, and I'm all out of raw energon. But in the absence of energon exposure—" Now, he finished mixing it with the coolant, closed the canister, and then reached for its total opposite: a heat pack that was usually only useful for the icy vacuum of space, according to Bulkhead. "—It will still explode just fine."

"It's gonna explode?" Miko could not possibly have hidden her excitement at the prospect. "Kaboom?" She gestured widely, arms swinging.

"Kaboom," Knock Out agreed, voice purring around a playful smile. "The coolant keeps it stable while the heat pack is warming it up, but once it reaches a certain temperature, any little bump will set it off."

"And that's in the first aid kit?" Miko marvelled. Did Knock Out even know how many times she'd just ignored that yellow striped kit in Bulkhead's trunk? And all this time, it had been filled with mystery bomb components. Who knew?

"Even these little stripped down ones." Knock Out snapped the heat pack in the middle, mixing whatever caused the reaction that made it go steamy-hot, and then wrapped it around the canister. "Of course," he added, "blowing up your first aid kit means no coolant, heat pack or painkillers later, if you need them. Field surgery can be uncomfortable."

"No kidding." It didn't sound like the Decepticon energon miners really expected to get field surgery, though, did it?

Knock Out got to his feet with only the softest creak. His carefully polished frame made only the gentle hiss of metal on metal and the hum of internal mechanics. He was sure better maintained than a lot of the Autobots she worked with. Including Ratchet, who always seemed like he should be less creaky than he was, given that he was their medic. Miko could feel Knock Out move through her boots better than she could actually hear him.

Getting their little bomb over to the east entryway was less of an ordeal than she initially expected. She'd envisioned some kind of Mission Impossible type of stealth scenario, you know, sneaking right up to the doors and laying their bomb? Which hadn't seemed to her to have a high probability of success. Although Knock Out was not as conspicuous and noisy as Bulkhead, it was still pretty hard to hide an entire sports car. But they didn't do any of that, and, instead, Knock Out clutched the makeshift device tightly in one claw and stopped when they were still well outside the illuminated area offered by the big bright flood lights.

Dusty, parked vehicles, not rated highly enough for the little garage, dotted the landscape around them. From among their shadows, Knock Out selected one of the farthest away from the compound itself and paused to slice its door off for use as an improvised shield.

Miko watched him test his grip on it as the explosive started to click ominously in his hand. She knew that heat did something to metal, and that was why cars went tick-tick-tick when they were cooling down. But if it was expanding, or contracting, she wasn't sure.

She wasn't used to being the person who questioned any harebrained plan, and she found that she didn't like it. Nevertheless, into the dark and the silence, watching the imposing shape of the compound sit undisturbed in its pool of lights, she wondered: "Are you sure this is going to work?"

"Yes," said Knock Out, unhesitating. "I'm just… er, bracing myself for the damage it's probably going to do to my finish."

He seemed to sigh then, a gusty breath through his vents, and strode forward, armed with the bomb in one hand and the car door in the other. Miko scrambled—both to keep up, and to stay out of the way. Knock Out might have looked like a ballerina next to guys like Bulkhead and Breakdown, but he still made the ground throb beneath Miko's feet with every thumping step.

"It's possible a few fleshies are about to die," he went on, airily, speaking down to her from his tremendous height, "and that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make."

"Uh-huh."

"…But if you have any remaining vestiges of intra-species sentiment," he paused, and his face did something quite complicated. It was hard to say what expressions they were in the dimness of the night. "Well! I suggest you get over it."

Miko didn't know quite what to say to this, so she only said: "No, I think I'm good."

Knock Out made a noise that might have indicated relief. "Then step back."

Miko considered, and having considered, she decided getting as close as she could to Knock Out's glossy finish was the safest place to be. She ducked around him and hunkered down. He planted the car door gingerly in front of them both—although for her, mostly by accident.

Knock Out hefted the weight of the device in his hand. His optical lenses narrowed in little red circles, like targets.

Then he tossed it: a long, easy underhand toss.

Miko flinched, but the little improvised explosive hit the ground and rolled to a stop without doing anything at all, only a few metres from the east entryway. The patrols hadn't come back around again, but they'd come through and see it in a moment or two—the men were never that far from their stations.

"It's definitely going to blow up?" Miko asked, peering out from around his leg. She did not (for the sake of their temporary alliance) stick her fingers on him. He (also for the sake of their temporary alliance) crouched very, very still, apparently painfully aware of how close her sweaty little person was to his gleaming top coat once more.

"Oh, yes," he said, taking aim with the blaster they'd liberated from the frame of his vehicon subordinate. The fuel on it was still wet and softly luminous, and it was getting his claws even messier.

He sighed heavily again.

"Breakdown had better be alive to fix what this is going to do to my paint," he muttered.

Then he fired.

The recoil from the blaster was bigger than Miko expected. She'd never even seen Bulkhead blink in response to firing one of his, but this was clearly sized for a fixture inside one of the Decepticons' generic, brutish miners, and it kicked hard in Knock Out's sharp-clawed hand, jolting his lighter frame. For a moment, she felt his tyre brush her bare arm.

Then, the entryway exploded.

It wasn't anything like three tonnes of energon meeting two missiles. But Wheeljack had detonated that mine from the air, and Miko had only seen it as a huge blue cloud rolling out from the destruction far below the Jackhammer, a safe distance away.

This was different. First, it was a wall of noise: ripping air, tearing rock. The shockwave from it made Knock Out sway back, and Miko stumbled onto her butt even though he and his car door took the brunt of it. She huddled there in his shadow for a deafening, roaring second, legs akimbo and arms raised to cover her eyes. Chips of rock streaming from the site of the explosion bit into her skin, caught up in her hair, skittered right past—she saw one through her squinted eyes, clear as anything, leave a long grey slash in Knock Out's pristine red finish. She couldn't hear it, though: by then, her ears were ringing.

For a moment there was a really loud silence.

"That's in your first aid kit?" Miko demanded into it. Her voice sounded wrong to her ears: too quiet, even though she was speaking normally. "Why doesn't everyone do that?" This was not in Ratchet's lectures about first aid. She'd have paid more attention if it had been.

"Can't possibly imagine," Knock Out murmured. It was challenging to say whether or not this was sarcastic.

He fell then to checking his finish, clicking in frustration when he found the scratch she'd noticed.

"You know, nobody ever appreciates how much time and energy it takes to look this good when we've been at war for millions of years," he complained, transforming smoothly at last. His alt mode was… well, Miko felt a bit disloyal about saying it, but there kind of was something about a low-slung bright red sports car gleaming in the low light. Ugh. "Least of all Decepticon high command. Alright, get in. Don't touch anything."

"Megatron looks pretty shiny to me," Miko said, sliding into maybe the most buttery soft leather interior she'd ever been in. She didn't try to put her boots up on the dash. She examined her options and quickly sandwiched her hands between her thighs. See? She could be polite. She was being so-o-o polite right now.

"Of course he does!" Knock Out's voice came through his internal speakers loud and clear—and aggrieved, too. "It's easy to look shiny when you're the same color as dead metal!"

"Huh." Miko really had never considered this. Like, why would she, right? She guessed Arcee was, weirdly, the exact colour of spilled energon, if she thought about it. And Optimus Prime and Bulkhead sure had their share of bangs and dents. Bumblebee too. Optimus Prime's was the frame that really showed it, though. "Is red… hard?"

"Yes," he said, aggrieved. His engine rumbled, low and heavy, and it vibrated through his frame. It was an unfamiliar feeling. It wasn't that he had a more powerful engine than Bulkhead—but he had much, much less mass to move than Bulkhead did.

Then he really started moving. They were gone like smoke on the wind well before the soldiers got around to investigating the disturbance. Knock Out's wheels kicked up dust as they went, much to his evident disgust.

Under other circumstances, Miko might have enjoyed the sheer, staggering speed of the ride. But as it was, Knock Out performed a hair-pin turn and blasted straight into the compound's garage without wasting a second. Less than one whole minute elapsed as they hurtled around the entire complex, dark landscape a terrifying blur around them.

"Ugh. Brace yourself," said Knock Out, and this noise of disgust was all the warning Miko got before the door between the garage and the interior complex loomed right up before her in his windscreen.

A regular vehicle had a crumple zone. But although Knock Out looked like a regular vehicle to human eyes, he was made of stronger stuff than actual fibreglass and steel. He had not been built with a view to protecting the humans riding inside him: no manufacturer had ever thought it would be a good idea for him to crunch up and distribute the force from a crash, because he was the life form that needed protecting, not his cargo.

The force with which he hit the garage doors might have cracked a headlight, but it didn't so much as buckle his hood. There wasn't much force transferred to Miko in his cabin, either, for as Ratchet was fond of saying 'it's not really the speed, it's the stopping you need to worry about,' and Knock Out barely slowed. But 'not much' was still not 'none,' and so Miko was thrown back against his seat, clutching at his door and wheezing as the air disappeared from her lungs.

Outside, the sound of tearing metal roared around them. The garage doors crumpled, ripped, and went streaming back past his windscreen.

A black-dressed figure slammed up onto his hood, and then bounced away somewhere with a gross meaty noise. The corridor ahead was wide enough for bigger cars than Knock Out, which made sense if you were planning on kidnapping a cybertronian and hauling them into your weird military base—the corridors all had to be massive just to move them.

Moments after their entry into the wide grey corridor, Knock Out braked so hard Miko almost lost a tooth to his steering wheel. And that hurt.

"Hey!" she cried, clutching at him. "Squishy teenager on board!"

She released his wheel from where her knuckles were bloodless and white on its curve.

"And this affects me how?" he wondered.

She ground her teeth. "If I go splat," she enunciated slowly, sounding unsettlingly like that one mathematics teacher who thought she didn't speak English, "I go splat in you."

"Uh." There was a short pause. "Hmm. Point taken."

His door clicked then, drawing her attention away from the growing bruise on her face and instead to the compound outside the highly relative safety of a Decepticon's front seat.

The corridor was wide, and on the left and right it opened into rooms that looked mostly to be either empty or used for storage. The only way deeper into the building was straight ahead, but…

"Uh-oh," she mumbled, seeing the way ahead—and presumably to Bulkhead—barred by a net made of the same dark cables. These ones, however, were already lit up, glowing brightly. She could hear them humming as Knock Out rolled slowly closer. It was hard to see anything behind their light, but she thought there was movement back there. "Can you see those guys behind it?"

A pause. "No."

That was, of course, when one of them shot at the two of them straight through the net of the cables. Knock Out yowled, like a cross between a stepped-on cat and an angry angle grinder. He turned into a dizzying whirl of dense, deadly metal around her for a second, and then he snatched her up before she could vomit at the sensation.

He twisted away and scrunched himself into the doorway of one of the side rooms, hunching low to fit.

Miko clutched at Knock Out's thumb and tried to ignore the powerful sense that her insides were one more crazy dip or turn away from becoming her outsides. "Whoa."

"I don't know why we assumed the traps were just outside," Knock Out said, a bit incredulously.

"It made sense when they were just on the ground. What're we going to do about it?"

"What are you going to do about it, you mean," Knock Out pointed out. "You're meant to be dealing with those things."

Miko stared at him.

To be completely, unflatteringly honest, even when she was seriously contributing to Team Prime, it was in a more, uh, emotional support role. Rarely did any of the bots try to encourage her to really contribute physically. It was the squish factor.

Even if she wanted to, which she usually did, she didn't get to help unless she was, you know, actively ignoring a safety direction Optimus Prime had felt was too obvious to actually give. Even Wheeljack had tried to pat her on the head and send her home, out of danger.

She knew that this happened because the bots cared about her. She knew that. They wanted to keep her safe.

But Miko did not aspire to safety.

"What," said Knock Out, who very much… did not care about her.

Miko licked her teeth.

Huh. "Nothing. You're right."

So she pulled out her phone, stuck it out past the edge of the doorway where her skull would have been in considerable danger, and rapidly snapped several photos even as some scary MECH weaponry went hiss-hiss-hiss and flared right past them in a streak of light.

"Oh, peripheral modifications," Knock Out noted.

"It's a phone. No service, but the camera works."

The angle had been better from the height of Knock Out's hand, too. Over the glow of the cables stretched across the corridor, she could see more than one of the MECH guys. There were a few of them back there…

Behind them, though, was a familiar box. "Does that look like a battery to y… Are you playing with my hair?"

"No." Knock Out lifted his claw away from where he had very much been fluffing one of her pigtails. "You're so small I hadn't noticed before. You painted it."

She paused. The surrealism of the situation refused to leave her. "Uh, yeah. Back home, my school would have made me dye it black again. Here, they don't care about that stuff."

"They make you change your paint?"

"Um…" Miko had not known how to explain the conformist respectability of middle class Japan to Jack, so she sure as heck didn't know what to say about it to Knock Out. "It's the culture," she explained vaguely, because this always worked on her host parents, and it would have to work for Knock Out, too.

"Battery?" she extended her phone, tiny screen forward, facing Knock Out. His red optical lenses expanded as he squinted, which was quite audible at this distance.

"Yes. And… Ooh." He tapped the tiny screen gently. "Look there."

Miko looked. "The roof?"

"Humans." He tapped again. "Always so concerned with airflow." And this was when she realised he was pointing to the vents.

"Oh." Miko's eyes rose to the roof of their own little room, where there was indeed another vent.

Knock Out followed her gaze. He reached up and hooked one claw into the vent cover, then ripped it out with a little tug. "And it's just your size," he purred.

Despite what Knock Out might have thought, the ventilation system behind the vent covers was not 'just Miko's size'.

There was no room to turn, and she had to shuffle along on her elbows and try not to make a lot of noise with her boots. There was this weird patch right on her arm, where she'd been pressed right against Bulkhead's door when he'd been shocked, and she felt kind of sick every time anything so much as touched the burn there. The inside of the system was also badly lit and so dusty that in her opinion it needed shovelling more than it needed sweeping. Her eyes watered and itched the whole miserable distance.

"I can't believe I thought this was a good idea," she muttered under her breath. Reminding herself that she was doing it for Bulkhead could get Miko past physical pain, terror and nausea, but her staunch loyalty and friendship was taking a blow at pure grossness. What was she even breathing in, up here? Freaky t-cog-stealing experiment-y germs? Gross.

Every so often—distance seemed impossible to measure in distance when feet felt like miles in the tight metal tubes—Miko came across a patch of light that meant another vent. The first one had been about six feet in front of the glowing MECH trap stretched across the corridor. Choosing that one would have been a really embarrassing mistake to make. The second one had been another side-room off the corridor, filled with dusty boxes and a single defunct desk lamp. Not helpful.

The third little patch of light was the one she wanted.

She peered down at the MECH soldiers who were manning the corridor, trying not to breathe too loudly and feeling her way around the fixtures of the vent cover. She was only going to get one shot at this: she had to be deft, and quiet—all six of the men down there were trying to get a look at Knock Out, it seemed like, so she had the opportunity to drop down behind them and rip the plugs out of their little battery.

She was going to need to get Knock Out in this part of the corridor before anyone started shooting at her, so they'd be distracted by how big and mean he was and try to kill him instead. They had much lower chances of success if they shot at him.

So this was going to be some serious secret agent stuff. Miko Nakadai was already a way cooler secret agent than Fowler was. He didn't crawl through enemy ventilation systems or anything. What a let down that had been.

She carefully began unscrewing the cover. One of the screws was stupidly stiff, but getting crud off its thread with her nails and, at length, her house key, seemed to help.

"What's it doing?" one of the guys below demanded nervously.

"Nothing, far as I can tell."

"Just standing there?"

"Maybe it's frozen," another suggested. "Needs reimaging. Beep-boop, reinstall the drivers." So…. Like… It was good to know she didn't have to hide from the national brains trust or anything.

The screws were all pretty loose, twisted down from the inside by her slow, steady efforts. One of them came free entirely and dropped to the floor right beside the battery with a tiny, awful 'plink', a sound that Miko heard in her bones.

She froze.

She didn't breathe.

"It's gotta be up to something," one of the guys opined. She watched him shift his grip on his big gun.

They were worried about Knock Out, she realised. She was worried about the damn screw, but they had not even heard it over the hum of their barrier and their anxiety about the large and hostile metal alien on its other side.

Miko's heart thundered inside the fragile cage of her ribs. Okay. Alright.

"'It' can hear you," called Knock Out's voice, distant but shockingly reassuring to her in her current predicament. "What ever could I be up to?" he teased.

She twisted another screw out. The men down there were too distracted by Knock Out to hear this one, either. That was enough for the cover to sag on one side. She caught it with her fingertips and held on. Her hands had never been less steady, somehow.

"Guess it's not frozen then. Shame."

She inched closer to the vent, desperate not to make a sound as she gathered more of her body weight over the opening. This was it. She had to go through and she was going to need to do it head first, because there was no room to turn. If Miko lived through this, maybe she'd take up advanced yoga or something.

"Oh, don't worry, you'll find out soon," Knock Out said loudly. Did he know she was this close, or was he just guessing based on how she'd taken a million years to get this far? The timing of the distraction was impeccable, whether he had some magic robot heat-map or not. She was not going to get a better chance.

She fixed her gaze on the battery. The cables extending from it linked it to the trap, and all she had to do was pull them out of the battery.

Okay.

She breathed in. Keep your eye on the ball, as the Americans said. Or, in this case, on the battery.

"In fact," Knock Out went on, commanding all their attention, "I'd say you're going to find out… right… about…"

In one movement Miko let go, knocked the cover free, and then dove for the battery.

She hit it, too: her body impacted the casing and then the floor with a heavy thump, and the light in the corridor dimmed as her weight ripped some of the cords out. Yells of surprise and alarm echoed off the walls.

She took her nails to the connectors and began tearing them free without looking up. Distantly, she heard Knock Out's synthetic voice coo, "Oh-ho," and then the ominous vibrations of his approaching steps.

Miko figured the men in the corridor had worse things to worry about than her. She heard weapons firing behind her. She did not look back, although her hands were shaking and her heart was in her throat. There were two more cables, then one more, and then she tore the last one free—just as one of the MECH soldiers grabbed her by the neck.

For a second her brain registered nothing at all, so fixed was her attention on the task before her, but then her nervous system kicked into high gear. The world was a blur of drab grey and green and black, and the man who had her neck was yelling at her, but she couldn't see his mouth and the sudden pressure on her windpipe had her blood roaring and her ears ringing so hard she couldn't hear anything at all.

Miko wheezed as the room spun dizzily around her. She was being lifted, by—by her neck, which was a thing that was only meant to happen in action movies! She clawed at the gloved hands upon her throat and completely failed to scream. Her nails tore, but the soldier's gloves did not.

She could not see his eyes through his dark goggles.

The room was swimming, then. The room was swimming, and spotty, and all she could hear was ringing, like a scream.

Knock Out's foot came down almost delicately, right in front of her, and after a single moment of terrible pressure she could suddenly breathe again.

"Oh," she rasped, ragged and horrible. Her chest heaved. "Oh, oh," and the next noise that escaped her was a scream, loud and shrill and panicked. Then her knees shook and unhinged, just a little, and she put both her hands on Knock Out's shiny red leg and leaned hard into him. Her arms shook, too. Okay.

The oxygen hit her, then. She was floating. Her limbs were jellyfish made of clouds. Her whole being was cotton candy.

…Knock Out's face was really, really close.

"Hi," croaked Miko.

"Hi yourself," he returned.

"Did you," she started. She licked her lips. Her voice sounded pretty bad.

…Somehow, despite enough pure terror that she couldn't believe her heart was still going, and her entire out of body experience, Miko was still standing. Her legs didn't feel attached, but when Knock Out poked her upright with the flat of his claw, they took her weight, and upright she stayed.

She was bruised, she was battered, but she was on her feet. So she was prepared to bounce back like a badly aimed rubber band.

"Did you just tread on that guy?"

"Yes," said Knock Out, who had not moved his foot. "It is disgusting. I don't want to look."

She looked down. She couldn't see a thing. She thought she could smell it, though. All she felt in that second was a relief that she was once again alone with Knock Out. She was alone with Knock Out, which meant she was safe.

"Okay," she said. She jerked one thumb over her shoulder. "That way?"

"That way," Knock Out agreed, and then he transformed around her—a much more familiar sense of whirling metal death, now—and she sagged into his comfortable driver's seat as he continued off down the corridor.

Chapter Text

There was, unfortunately, one last cable trap—and Miko, dazed and still breathing hard in Knock Out's driver's seat, didn't see it. She wasn't sure what the hell Knock Out's excuse was, but he and Bulkhead had both missed spotting them in the dim lighting. And, now that Miko had taken out that battery, the corridor was only as well-lit as Knock Out's cracked headlights could make it.

Had there been more light at some point? If so, they'd gotten broken. She wouldn't be surprised. She and Knock Out were really wrecking the place.

There was a flash of light and a crackle of noise, then, and Knock Out's displays all lit up brightly and went dark. His brakes flexed with a squeal, and he made a noise of pure electronic agony through his radio.

Inside him, Miko thought ow, and her whole body seemed to burn and prickle just the way it had when Bulkhead had been shocked with her inside. Her heart thumped a heavy and confused beat, way too fast and high up in her throat.

It lasted a moment that felt like forever, and then the light dimmed just in time for her to see both the dark cabling of a net on his windshield. It must have been thrown or shot at them, somehow. A net gun? Was that a real thing or just a Loony Toons thing? Where had it come from?

Knock Out reeled on his wheels and, despite his brief flirtation with actually braking, his momentum kept them going—and going, and going. Miko hunched in her seat as they hit something on the floors and swung sideways with the awful shriek of tortured metal.

"Get it off me!" bellowed Knock Out through his speakers. He sounded horrible.

And then, before Miko could yell back that she couldn't throw herself from a moving car and help anyone at all afterwards because she wasn't made of metal, the cables lit up again and light cascaded over them both once more.

Am I gonna have a heart attack? Miko wondered, wheezing, but then Knock Out's passenger door slammed into a wall at last in a grotesque shower of sparks. The whole cab shuddered with the impact, and Miko—not belted in—smacked hard against the door. Knock Out's side mirror folded in, but not far enough. Somehow, through the impact and the sounds of Knock Out's howling, Miko absolutely heard the glass of it shattering.

Miko clutched at his wheel in the sudden silence, breathing hard.

"Okay!" She said aloud to herself, heart tap-dancing in her mouth. "Not dead yet! Good going, team."

She heard boots on the concrete, and she suddenly realised that she was a sitting duck if she stayed stupidly clinging to Knock Out's steering wheel in the corridor.

"My turn!" she yelled, and heaved his door open.

"Yes, your turn!" he screeched back.

There was light everywhere, now, flooding the corridor suddenly, and Miko blinked hard even as she squirmed out. There were people spilling into the corridor from the far end: huge, black-clothed guys with all their masks and their guns.

All she could think in the moment was that she'd be dead if she didn't free Knock Out before they shot her. Terror gave her tired limbs strength, and Miko used it to haul on the cables, dragging them away from the ugly scorch marks they'd left all over Knock Out's hood and roof.

"There's a girl with it," someone was yelling, loudly enough that even Miko's ringing ears could capture it. "The transformer is accompanied by a human child—"

"Child!" Miko squawked, between panted breaths. "I'll show you child!"

"Hold your fire," came a deep and smoky voice through the PA system, interrupting the report. They were using the PA system. Did that mean they were jamming their own signals, too? "Capture her while the transformer is disabled. I have some questions for her."

So, great—they weren't shooting at her, and Miko got a few precious extra seconds while these rent-a-cop versions of the men in black dashed down the corridor towards them. She didn't look up, instead heaving on the last of the cables while Knock Out's enormous engines revved hungrily beneath her hands. This last trap had totally wrecked his paint job, which even his first collision with the door hadn't done more than scratch.

Knock Out was scorched and peeling where cables of their trap had fallen on his frame.

The combination of their new orders and Miko's panicked determination meant that Knock Out and the MECH goons were only metres from each other when he was at last freed.

"Ugh, my wheels," he complained, transforming with the horrible grind of displaced metal.

Once all his seams were opened wide to accommodate his transformation, the whole corridor began to reek of burned wires and hot rubber. This was not a good smell. Miko's stomach communicated its dissatisfaction with an acrobatic flip in her insides.

Then, Knock Out noticed his paint. His voice hit a brand new note of crackling fury: "My finish!"

Miko had spent every moment of her adventures in xenological studies thus far in the company of Autobots, whose wise and (importantly) benevolent leader disdained the sacrifice of even a single human being to his cause. Knock Out, on the other hand, was a Decepticon and therefore regarded human beings as a sort of temporarily amusing vermin, most of the time—as if a scraplet had unexpectedly developed sapience, somehow.

For the next several seconds—and, oh, it only took seconds, perhaps a minute or two at most—Miko had her understanding of xenology as regards the cybertronian species rearranged and broadened. This was, not coincidentally, also kind of what happened to the anatomy of the human soldiers around her.

The sounds might have been the worst part: wet, crumpling, crunching noises, muffled only a little by kevlar and cloth.

One of the soldiers, seeing death coming for him with a whirling saw blade and wrecked paint, began firing wildly despite his orders from the public address system. Perhaps when faced with an enraged metal titan, he simply panicked and his training deserted him. Miko hit the floor when she saw the first flash from his gun, slipping on the horrifying, wet mess Knock Out had already made of it.

She flinched when one of his big red arms came down before her, cratering the concrete, and then realised it was a free shield and squirmed to tuck all her limbs in around behind it.

Ping! Ping! Ping! went the sound of something hitting him—bullets, right? Had to be bullets, though they sounded nothing like the live blaster fire she was used to—and his whole body vibrated with a mechanical snarl.

"Do you filthy—ugh—disgusting—ungh!—skinjobs have any idea how difficult it is—" He ripped away a man's firearm with his free hand and tore the long barrel off, sending it skidding over by Miko's knee on the wet, wet floor, "—to get scratches out of my right arm?"

There was no answer, but the sound of gunfire and Knock Out's saw continued unabated. Blood—more blood, rather—splattered straight across Miko's hunched body, catching in her hair and collar.

This wasn't like watching Bulkhead tear strips of vehicons—or even like watching Knock Out violate the dead to get at their internal components. Somehow, the shock of human death seemed, like… um, more.

Miko blinked a little more. Her face was close to the ground, and she had a magnificently close view of the blood gathering in the cracks of the little impact crater Knock Out had made.

"Aurgh!" With a howl of bitter frustration, Knock Out hurled one black-clothed leg at the wall. It hit with an unexpectedly solid thump.

He stood there in the mess he'd created for just a moment. His vents creaked open, blowing boiling hot air down on the whole mess of it. The stench rose under the heat. It turned out that inside human bodies were a lot of things that smelled mighty bad.

Knock Out was physically steaming, or maybe smoking. Whatever had gotten fried inside him was seriously damaged. It took him a moment to finally regain control of his feelings.

"Well! I suppose at least you're a useful sort of fleshy," Knock Out mused to Miko then, in a fairly good imitation of his regular urbane drawl. He transformed his arm back into a real arm, then pulled out a cloth to clean the blood off his claws—although the rest of him was such a mess it seemed unlikely to make a difference.

Miko had a lively comeback that would spark mood-alleviating banter, really she did, but she couldn't think of it, or open her mouth and make something happen just yet. She could feel the hard ground through the knees of her leggings. Around those points of pressure, the thick material was soaking up blood.

Knock Out seemed to note the bizarre silence, because he looked carefully around before he moved his feet. He spotted her finally and turned around, plenty fast despite the worrying creak of his internal components. "Oh," he said, peering down at her. "Your paint…"

Miko stayed utterly still on the ground as he reached down towards her with one gleaming claw. With pinpoint precision, he flicked a smear of—ha, wow, something!—out of her hair. "And that pink colour was so stylish. Will it wash out?"

Slowly, Miko raised her hand and touched her own hair. Her left pigtail had already started to go tacky as it… congealed. The blood was really bright red on the floor, but where it was more thinly spread it was already darkening and kind of clumping.

"Um," said Miko, feeling a little dazed and not quite like she was actually inside her own body. Her hands seemed to move underwater-slow.

"Hel-lo?" Knock Out frowned. "I didn't hit you, did I?" He went to one knee with a grating mechanical squeal, peering closely at her. His red optical lenses went tiny and then huge, zoomed right in.

For a moment she thought he was trying to scan her like a new alt-mode. That would be weird.

"Hmm," he murmured. "Your electrodermal activity has changed. And your respiration and heart rate, too. Aha," he tapped his own chin. "Did you get shocked again when they shocked me? I hope not. I don't mind telling you, I am not equipped for surgery upon organics—and your little fuel pumps are more sophisticated than you might imagine."

"No," said Miko, spurred into speaking at last by the thought that if she didn't start now he might seriously try to crack her open and jump start her. "I mean, yeah. But it's fine! I got shocked with Bulkhead earlier." The cables probably weren't meant to hurt humans, but the bots were themselves pretty much all metal. When they got shocked, passengers got shocked. "It'll," she fingered her hair again. It was still gross. "It'll wash out, and if it doesn't, I'll cut it all off. I've always wanted to see what I'd look like with a mohawk."

Knock Out watched her like he could smell bullshit. This was an expression June Darby and Ratchet also shared. Was it something you just got for free if you worked in a sick bay? Did Decepticons have a sick bay?

"Is it the dead fleshies?" he said then, which was shockingly astute of him, considering. "I did warn you. They probably only had forty-five years left, you know. Practically on the scrap heap."

"Pfft, no," Miko said.

Get it together, Miko, she screamed at herself. She was here for Bulkhead, and these MECH idiots should have already been—in fact, deserved to be!—roadkill. "Excuse me for being a little surprised to be," she gestured widely, "SHOWERED in bits of some guy." Her hands illustrated the bloody rain with speckled fingers.

Knock Out rocked back. He was still staring at her like he was about to get out the dissection knife. After a second he said, in a tone of exaggerated surprise: "Really? On the Nemesis that's an easy shift. What kind of operation are the Autobots running?"

Miko laughed, a weak little, "ha," that didn't feel very good in her throat.

Knock Out was still watching her, narrow-eyed and critical.

"We try to keep it to a light spattering at most," she quipped back.

More than anything, this seemed to reassure Knock Out that she wasn't about to just keel over.

But inside, she was thinking of what Optimus Prime had said almost as soon as she'd met him: then for the time being, we must watch where we step.

She had not appreciated what Ratchet had meant when he'd so illustratively said 'splat.' She couldn't imagine it then.

But now she could imagine it really, really well.

Knock Out creaked back up to his full height and the moment of cameraderie was over, then, because he rediscovered not just the dent in his arm, which he'd already been pretty steamed about, but also the blackened strips on his hood and doors, which were now decorating much of his shoulders and chest. This seemed to be too offensive for him to express in words, because all that came out was another bone-rattling noise of pique.

Miko took a step back, which only drew his attention down to her.

"Let's go," Knock Out growled, bending to scoop her up. "The sooner we get Breakdown the sooner I can go back to the Nemesis and fix this mess."

Miko could feel the new texture of his paint underfoot when she stood upon his shoulder again. It did not seem like a good idea to comment—and his ruined paint and creaking insides were an unhappy reminder of what could be happening to Bulkhead right now.

Miko's heart was still going too fast and weirdly off rhythm, thumping away in her throat like it was as upset and unsettled as she was. She pulled on one of her pigtails as Knock Out strode forward, releasing a flaky sprinkle of dried blood to rain down on his headlight below.

Oops.

…He probably wouldn't even notice.

But she stopped playing with her hair, anyway.

At last they reached the end of the grey concrete corridor. There, lit by its own little halogen light in a cage, was an equally grey security door. It was large enough for a cybertronian to pass through, but even from this side, it was obvious how heavily reinforced it was from the thick, steel bracket in which it was set.

"Well, now, that's inconvenient," said Knock Out.

Miko blinked at it. For some reason, she was struggling to pay attention from her seat on his shoulder. Even her grip on his seam was looser than it had been. She was… kind of tapped out, actually. Not just 'up too late' tired, or 'kind of sleepy' tired, but a much deeper fatigue. Her hands were starting to shake a little about it.

"Hello?" Knock Out prodded her with the back of one claw. "Aren't you my resident human expert?"

"Umm," said Miko, unhelpfully.

She wondered for a moment why he couldn't just transform and drive through it. But then the creaking noise of his internal mechanics reached her once more, penetrating the haze. He probably couldn't even hit the right speed right now. He was probably just as tapped out as she was.

"There's probably a security pass on those guys you, uh…"

"Sawed into fleshy pieces." He sounded pleasantly unaffected.

"Yeah. That. Can't you just… pull out the panel?" That always worked in movies.

"Is that how it works?" Knock Out said doubtfully, but then he transformed his hand into its circular saw and with it sliced a chunk of metal bracket straight through. Then he dipped his claws in and tore out the whole fixture in a shower of metal shavings and orange sparks.

The door groaned unhappily but then, at length, went BEEP and swooshed open, one side a fair bit faster than the other.

"Well." He paused. "…The more you know."

"Yup." Man, pop culture was so underrated as, like, reference material.

He peeled the panelling off his claws and tossed it to one side with a clatter.

She was aware enough to take stock: the humans had all fled—and, in something of a hurry, too, because it wasn't like they'd cleared up very well. There was still a humming from somewhere deeper in the room, and cables on the floor, abandoned where their screens and power sources had been removed. The room was large, with bare patches of wall that hinted at hasty remodelling and tyre marks on the pitted concrete floors. The overhead lights had been left on, bright and glaring down.

Two huge tables were set up in the centre, below a sagging mezzanine, and upon each was one missing bot.

Both of them were still lively enough to struggle.

Miko gave a deep sigh of relief and leaned hard against Knock Out's plating. He didn't even complain.

Neither of the bots captured by MECH had a good view of the doorway, and Bulkhead was the furthest, so he probably did not know who had come when he bellowed, "There's a bomb! They put a bomb in my fuel tank!"

That got Miko standing right back up straight, knuckles white on Knock Out's transformation seam. Everything was suddenly sharp and bright again as her tired body put in a huge, valiant effort to produce another fight or flight response.

"Bulkhead!" she cried out.

"Miko!" Bulkhead yelled right back. Then he paused and the reality of what he was hearing seemed to sink in: "Miko?"

"Knock Out!" That was Breakdown, who was the closer, and could just about angle his face for his good eye to catch them.

"Wha—Knock Out?" Bulkhead repeated, incredulously.

"Ah," said Knock Out, in a tone of affected nonchalance, like Breakdown was five minutes late to a coffee date and not strapped to a giant, metal dissection table for a bunch of psychos. "Breakdown. There you are."

"Didn't you hear me, Con?" Bulkhead bellowed. "Get her out of here! There's a bomb!"

"Don't you dare," hissed Miko. "I'm not leaving him."

"I've seen more explosives in a bot's insides than I'd like to, lately," Knock Out said breezily, even as he strolled in between their adjacent dissection tables, examining the pair with critical eyes. "So I've read up on that particular malady. But better a fuel tank than strapped to a spark chamber. Fuel tanks are…" He swayed to Bulkhead's side with a creak and tapped two claws on his middle, purring: "Built tough. Especially yours, big bot."

Having said as much, he turned away—turning Miko with him, in her perch on his shoulder—and flexed his hand into its bladed form. It whined a high and painful note as he sawed straight through the shackles holding Breakdown to the table, sparks flying as the sharp cybertronian alloy made swift work of the thick metal.

He left him to his own devices to get his feet, tucking the saw away again.

Breakdown transformed his arm into its hammer form and commenced slamming away at the bindings on his ankles: CLANK. THUNK. CLUNK.

Miko twitched with each impact, which rang loudly in the echoing room. If this bothered any of the bots, it didn't show.

"Of course," Knock Out added then, looking back towards Bulkhead, who had renewed his furious, if fruitless, struggle against his bonds, "a fuel fire could ignite the energon remaining in your lines and burn out your processor. It's a painful way to go."

Bulkhead, upside down and clearly unwilling to give an inch, glowered up at him even as he strained his huge metal arms against the shackles.

"I'm not scared of pain," he said, showing his teeth. But as Knock Out leaned closer with his taunting voice and critical stare, his eyes shifted to Miko's bedraggled little form on his shoulder. "Say, did something happen to your paint, Doc?"

This reminder didn't seem to please Knock Out very much.

"I think this is where you get off," he said coolly to Miko, and dropped her right on Bulkhead's chest plates.

She landed on her butt with a grunt. "Ow. Hey!"

"Don't put her there!" snarled Bulkhead.

"Wait! What do we do about the bomb?" Miko wondered.

"We?" Knock Out paused and frowned down at her. "You don't do anything. You'll be perfectly safe as long as it's inside his fuel tank. Like I said, he's built tough. He might even survive it."

He made the terrible mistake of looking right at her while he said it, which made him privy to the play of emotions on Miko's face.

There was a long, long pause.

He pulled a truly extravagant face at her. "Stop it. Stop looking at me like that."

Having been told, she actually did. She crossed her arms and angled her head down. This, somehow, was not better.

Breakdown interjected, "Knock Out? My actuators are still fried."

Knock Out glanced back at him.

Breakdown looked much worse for wear himself, one-eyed, scuffed and battered. He had not succeeded in breaking a shackle, but he'd busted the spot one of them was once welded to the table, which seemed to suit him. He commenced working on the other without pause: BANG, BANG.

After a long, banging, hostile pause, the doctor heaved the most put-upon sigh in the world. It was boiling hot and reeked of burning wire. "In just a minute, Breakdown. Apparently, I have this to attend to, first."

"…You're joking," said Breakdown, shedding the last of his bindings with an almighty clatter.

Knock Out gave this comment all the attention it was due, which was none at all. He was busy stalking around the table to inspect the fresh weld marks the MECH technicians had left.

Bulkhead seemed for a moment to weigh his options between struggling harder and staying very still. In the end, he stilled.

"Ugh, they're savages." Knock Out traced something on his side with one shining claw. "This is going to take weeks to smooth, no matter how I close it…"

"You're not joking?" marvelled Breakdown.

He looked at Knock Out. Then he looked at Miko and Bulkhead, turning his head to capture them in the glow of his remaining eye.

A moment passed while he and Bulkhead eyeballed at each other—in as much as either of them had, you know, eyeballs.

Then Breakdown looked back to Knock Out again.

Miko, who was watching them all tensely, saw him open his mouth. Evidently Knock Out did too, because without even looking up from his perusal of Bulkhead's plating, he held up one claw and said, "Breakdown!" in a singsong voice. Then: "Do not speak to me about this."

Whatever Breakdown had been about to say, he swallowed. "Didn't say a thing."

"And what a wise choice that is. Now, the fleshy and I used our extra painkillers to blow up the entryway," he added, as his hand did the increasingly familiar shift to circular saw. This time, he didn't immediately start it spinning—instead he pulled a tiny spray bottle out of a compartment, sprayed the blade down, and waited a moment for the spray to evaporate. "And I'm certainly not giving you mine. I don't suppose your kit survived your kidnapping? No? Ah, well." He lifted the saw and gave it an illustrative little spin. "It's a function of memory to repress pain, so this will almost certainly hurt less in hindsight."

"That's real comforting," said Bulkhead, through his teeth. "I never thought I'd meet a bot with a worse bedside manner than—" And then his voice shorted out entirely when Knock Out began to cut.

Energon splattered, and, weirdly, Miko flinched. She'd seen so much blood today that somehow the glowing blue fuel took on a strange new significance. She turned away from the sight. On her weak and shaky legs, she slithered down from Bulkhead's chest to lean against his shoulder next to his face, instead.

"It's going to be okay," she offered helplessly, which was about the best she had in her just now.

"Uh-hunh," he said, grimly, through his teeth.

Breakdown had finished hammering off his other shackle, and now his engine scoffed. Miko looked up to meet his single yellow eye over Bulkhead's tense, still frame.

Sparks flew, the saw whined and Knock Out muttered to himself as they stared at each other.

"What," said Miko eventually, flatly.

"What yourself, squishy," he said back. Somehow, he made it sound like a threat.

"Breakdown!" Knock Out barked, sharp and imperious. "Come here and clamp this."

He heaved himself from the table with a disturbing metal groan, and creaked stiffly over to Knock Out's side. There were, Miko noticed as he came closer, some serious marks on his armour, too, including some thick weld lines in sharp silvery relief.

"Did they take anything?" Knock Out asked, without looking over at him.

"Not this time, Doc," sighed Breakdown. "Really gotta stop letting them get the drop on us… I'm gonna get a complex. Clamped. You gonna reattach that tank?"

"No," sniffed Knock Out. With a horrific sucking noise, he heaved Bulkhead's entire fuel tank straight out of its frame and out through the incision he'd made, peeling back his armour slightly to do so. It was all slick with glowing blue fuel, but way less than Miko'd expected, given it was, you know, a fuel tank. The tank, a utilitarian thing made of silvery-grey matte-coated metal, showed a massive and hastily-made weld—and when Knock Out moved it, something inside it went clunk clunk clunk.

He lifted it up, testing the weight, and rattled it back and forth. "Put this over there somewhere, will you?"

Gingerly, Breakdown took the tank and retreated with it to the far wall, where he set it carefully on the floor.

Bulkhead watched the whole series of events with a wide eye.

Miko cringed inside. What did it have to feel like, watching—and feeling—one of your organs pulled out and waved around in the open air?

… and yet, it was also pretty cool.

"How does that all work?" she prompted, leaning over so she could get a look into the cut.

"Miko," said Bulkhead, strained.

But Knock Out hummed, ignoring him entirely. "The fuel system is a series of major lines that carry liquid energon to the vitals: his spark, his processor, and his t-cog. Think of it like roads in a city map, carrying traffic. Anatomically, a fuel tank is a repository for processed energon. If we didn't have them, endogenous energon would only last us a few hours at a time. Although you don't have to fill them with energon," he added. "In heavy duty industrial models like this, most any fuel will do in an emergency."

"Wait," said Miko, "you mean you could fill someone up with gasoline?"

Breakdown was hovering again, energon-stained hands at the ready to assist anywhere he might need assistance. But Knock Out mostly ignored him now, only occasionally pausing to transform some additional tool out of one of his fingers or wrists. One of them was a small, sparking thing that hissed as it melted various things closed within Breakdown. Miko could smell the fusing inorganic material, much to the disapproval of her stomach.

"Well, it's not exactly a high performance blend, but if it's gasoline or starving..." Knock Out said, not sounding very concerned, although Breakdown's face suggested he would have preferred not to even think about it. "Someone real heavy duty could use biofuels, in a pinch."

"Biofuels?" Miko repeated. She really felt like sometimes people forgot this was, like, an actual foreign language for her. .

"Oh, the product of a laboratory reaction between certain fats and alcohols—usually lard."

"From animals? Cool!" Weird. But cool.

Breakdown's engine made a rough grinding sound.

"Very cool," Knock Out agreed. "In a disgusting sort of way."

Bulkhead, who clearly thought otherwise, made a faintly sick noise. "Do we have to keep talking about this?"

Sensing weakness, Knock Out's voice came out as a purr: "Oh, are you squeamish? Did you hear that, Breakdown? The wrecker is squeamish."

Breakdown looked down at him with his single eye. A wash of hot, reeking air from his vents fluttered Miko's hair. "Bulkhead? Always has been," he drawled.

Bulkhead was, it was very clear to Miko, not particularly squeamish. She glowered up at Knock Out from the table by his head. "We don't have to talk about it," she said, mulishly.

"Well, you're almost done anyway. Your endogenous energon stores will get you back to… whatever rock you Autobots keep scuttling out from under. I'm sure even your medic is capable of figuring out what to put where. As much as I hate to leave a mess like this, he's going to have to open you right back up, so—"

Here, Knock Out's conclusion was interrupted by a sudden crack and a huge WHUMPH from the other side of the room, and a blaze of light. The glow of it flared, streaming their angular shadows all huge and monstrous across the floors. It was followed by a wash of heat that made all the hair on Miko's arms prickle.

They all turned towards it the noise. Fire licked at the outside of Bulkhead's abandoned fuel tank, rapidly consuming the energon that slicked its surfaces. It hissed and crackled, eating the fuel, and then went quiet and dark once more. It was over in seconds.

There was a moment where they all just stared at it.

"Ohhh," said Miko. Inside, she was thinking about what might have happened to the rest of Bulkhead's energon, and all those vitals to which his fuel lines led, just like Knock Out had described: spark, processor, t-cog.

"That's strange—" Knock Out turned back to Bulkhead "—I don't hear a 'thank you'."

Flat and unenthusiastic, Bulkhead said: "Thanks."

Ever petty, Knock Out cupped one energon-glazed hand up near his audial sensors: "I don't think I heard you. A little sincerity wouldn't go amiss! Or shall I leave you and the human to figure out your shackles?"

Bulkhead glowered harder. Breakdown did not bother to pretend his laughter was something else.

"Thank you, Doctor Knock Out," he growled, through his teeth.

"Ah, there you are." The saw made a reappearance to slice through the bindings at Bulkhead's wrists. "Disassembly is always a simple procedure, anyway—it's the reassembly that's a pain in the exhaust."

Miko hovered uselessly on the table, watching as Bulkhead transformed his fists and hammered away at his own ankles until the second set of shackles gave up. Somehow his banging and clattering seemed much less annoying than Breakdown's had.

The other two spoke quietly to one another as Knock Out did something weird with Breakdown's frame, which involved actively plugging into something near his neck with a little spool of cable while he wrenched something deep in his chest plates. It looked quiet, familiar and strangely sweet between the two of them. This was fascinating, because Miko was still having trouble really catching on to the idea of Knock Out actually being sweet with… like, anyone? He just wasn't that friendly a guy.

He'd seemed a lot more at home when he was disassembling MECH goons out in the corridor, honestly.

The moment between the two broke when Bulkhead heaved himself off the table. They both turned at the telltale groan of distressed metal—which must have been Bulkhead and the table both, Miko figured.

There was a long, hostile pause.

Knock Out unsnapped his cable from Breakdown's neck with a decisive click. It respooled itself with a little zippy noise like the cord on a vacuum cleaner. Miko blinked slowly.

Bulkhead and Breakdown sized each other up.

In that moment Miko remembered that Breakdown and Bulkhead were, like, serious big time nemeses. There was capital-H History there.

"No," said Knock Out, sounding just as dangerous as Miko had ever heard him. "Don't even think about it. We're falling back."

"You sure? It's favourable odds." Breakdown offered his contrary opinion.

He didn't move the gaze of his single yellow optic from Bulkhead's massive frame, but he did tap the head of his hammer lightly on his opposite hand.

Knock Out was clearly in charge in this relationship, though, and he wasn't having it. "The only thing you and I are going to do now is go back to the Nemesis and take an oil bath," he growled. "It'll be a miracle if Big M hasn't noticed we're missing by now anyway, and my finish is ruined. Now, move out."

Breakdown at last glanced over at his partner, but he'd clearly already taken in the mess of his paint. There was a short, considering silence. His posture relaxed then, seams unlocking and hammer transforming back into a hand. His fingers flexed. "Have it your way, then."

Knock Out didn't answer this, but his entire being seemed to say, yes, I will, thanks.

"Keep it closed, don't get anything in it, don't transform, and don't try to walk all the way back to Nevada," he said to Bulkhead instead, leading his reluctant partner from the potential of another violent confrontation. "And if it needs saying: don't drink anything."

Bulkhead rumbled something unintelligible. He watched them go, standing stiffly next to his own dissection table, but the pair offered nothing more threatening than Breakdown's glower on their way out of the room.

Once the thunder of their footsteps had faded to nothing, the silence seemed huge. Massive. Very complete.

Miko shook herself to alertness once more and turned to Bulkhead. "So, do you think we should take your fuel tank with us?"

"Miko..." Bulkhead's face could probably have looked unhappier but she couldn't immediately remember when.

Now, it occurred to Miko that he'd told her to go get backup and she'd returned with a Decepticon and exactly zero backup. This had seemed like a much more reasonable decision, back when she was making it.

"So, uh, listen, there was no reception for miles," she started, gesturing tiredly. "And Knock Out had lost his partner already, so…" She spread her hands. "Here we are! I know it's not the backup you had in mind. But it turned out fine."

He looked down at her: at the burn on her arm, her missing jacket, bruised neck, and all the scrapes, stains and cuts she'd accumulated in the course of her short, violent adventure.

"No," he said, "it didn't."

His disappointment felt like a physical weight. She hunched down into herself. Her gross, tacky hair scraped weirdly on her arm.

Then, as she so often did when faced with opposition, Miko rallied. She lifted her chin and took a posture of righteous indignation.

"Uh, ye-es, it did! We rescued you! No more MECH guys, no more fuel tank bomb, no more weird dissection table." She pointed one shaky finger at him. "That means we won."

Bulkhead's face was still doing the thing, which she absolutely hated.

"Bulk," she whined, sagging. "Come on!"

He offered her his hand, and she stepped into it without thinking about it. Even if they were having a difference of opinion, there was no way he'd do anything to her. It was nice and comfortable in his hand, unlike in Knock Out's sharp, silvery clawed grasp.

"Come on, let's…" Bulkhead sighed. When his vents cracked open like that, he also stank just as bad as Breakdown and Knock Out had. Not ideal. "Still don't know where that signal jammer is. Let's head on back to base. What are you even covered in?" He added, squinting down at her. "You smell rusty."

"Um," said Miko. She didn't want to think about how much drying blood was still on her. Then, spotting a distraction, she added, "Hey, don't forget your fuel tank!"

"Oh… right, thanks."

"You think Ratchet's going to be able to fix it?"

He scooped up the tank in the hand that wasn't occupied by Miko herself, grunting as the effort of bending over tugged at the spot where Knock Out had not bothered to close up his side. "I dunno… might need replacing…"

And so together they ambled out of the building and into the starlit desert night.

Chapter Text

After the excitement of the evening, the quiet desert night fell like a veil over the senses: it was dark and silent except for the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of Bulkhead's huge metal feet. Miko fell asleep in his palm, waking and dozing in fits. Her heart beat still felt weirdly off, and she was starting to really notice all the aches and pains of the night, so it wasn't a particularly restful slumber.

She missed the point at which Bulkhead's comm unit started to pick up a signal again, and even dozed right through their trip through the bright, murmuring wormhole of the ground bridge.

She woke up when Bulkhead took his first abrupt and jerky step back from Ratchet, though—which coincided with Ratchet in full voice. This was always a difficult phenomenon to sleep through.

"Wha?" she said, startling awake.

"Eup! Give me that!" Ratchet was bellowing.

After a disorienting second (in which she somehow expected to hear either her own mother's aggressively cheerful 'good morning!' as she opened the blinds, or else the frame-shaking rumble of Knock Out's engine), Miko righted herself and peered over the wall of Bulkhead's fingers.

They were back in the Autobots' base. And now Ratchet had confiscated Bulkhead's fuel tank and was turning it around in his hands. His voice had fallen into furious mumbling, but it surfaced again in a clear, sharp: "Get on the medical berth. Now."

Bulkhead followed him more or less meekly. Another time, he might have, would have, put Miko down. There was a high walkway and a mezzanine level in the base. The humans mostly hung out there so they didn't—Miko blinked widely, thinking of the crunch of bone when Knock Out had trodden on that guy, a memory so sharp she could almost smell it—uh, so they didn't get… hurt.

"We were shortly to mount a search for you," Optimus Prime said, in his steady and deep voice. He always spoke like this: like he was going to finish what he was saying, and he had all the time in the world to say it, and he expected that you would sit there and listen until he was done. He was usually right. "It was the Decepticons?" he asked.

Miko turned around to catch him looming over Bulkhead's shoulder. "No!" she said, even though he certainly wasn't addressing her. "Those MECH guys again!"

Optimus looked down at her as though seeing her for the first time. "Miko," he acknowledged, after a pause.

"MECH and the Cons," said Bulkhead. He swayed through the air to sit on the medical berth under Ratchet's temperamental eye. "Ran into Knock Out and Breakdown having some trouble of their own."

He still did not move to put Miko down, until Ratchet picked her up in two fingers and confiscated her, too.

"And I'm guessing it wasn't the humans who did this hack job surgery on your tank," he growled. He pushed Bulkhead flat on the berth and the big guy went obediently. With his other hand, he dropped Miko up on the mezzanine.

Usually she would have bounced back from a two-foot drop like a badly aimed rubber band. But tonight, she wasn't ready for her own weight, and when she went to take it, her muscles were already fatigued. Her knees unhinged. She stumbled and might have fallen right upon her face, except for the intervention of one of Optimus's huge blue fingers, which arrested her movement.

"Eugh, what are you covered in?" demanded Ratchet impatiently, turning away to find a cleaning cloth. "Liquid rust?"

"Yes," said Optimus Prime, with much more gravity. Unlike Ratchet, his gaze—blue optics, direct and unflinching—was actually fixed right on Miko. "That is a very good question."

He did not sound as though he was actually wondering, though.

For the first time that evening, it occurred to Miko that a lot of people had died tonight. Sure, they'd been BAD people. Not ones she'd miss. But they had indeed been people, which Optimus Prime usually cared about. Her role in all of that might not be viewed as, like, totally irreproachable.

Knock Out had killed a lot of people. Like at least ten.

"Are you all right?" Optimus asked.

"Yeah," said Miko, and then she actually thought about it. "Uh, well, I got a few scrapes and bruises. But I'll be better in no time."

His face didn't change in the slightest. Not for the first time, Miko wished she could feel EM fields like a cybertronian. Optimus Prime had one hell of a poker face.

"Um… could use a bath," she said then. What she really wanted was a shower and a bath, actually: a hard scrub under some killer water pressure, and then a long hot soak.

"There are some facilities in Agent Fowler's office," Optimus offered slowly. "Which he will unlock for you shortly. What matters most for now is that the situation is resolved, and that you are both safe."

"Right," Miko agreed. "Safe and sound. No sweat. Nothing to worry about."

"Miko," Bulkhead sighed, from his position on the medical berth.

She cringed a little on the inside. She didn't really want to have any kind of conversation about the events of this evening with Optimus Prime. She wasn't even sure she wanted to tell Bulkhead about all of it.

"If you've any urgent information to relay," Ratchet said, "do it now. The rest of your report will wait until after surgery."

Bulkhead grunted. "I don't think you're gonna see much of them for a while—MECH that is. Can't speak to the Cons."

"Humph. Good," said Ratchet, with an air of finality, and then he shot him full of anaesthesia and sent him into blank-eyed, drooling insensibility.

Optimus Prime turned back to Miko. Though he said nothing, his silence had a distinctly expectant tone.

"Ugh," said Miko, slumping her whole torso over the railing. Compressing her chest hurt—and made her heart beat feel super hard and uncomfortable?—and hanging her head made the bruised and slowly swelling parts of her throat hurt. Unhappily, she straightened up again and met Optimus's eyes. "Fiiine."

Miko was difficult to intimidate, and after the whole awful night, she was so tired that it was hard to muster most feelings. But with Optimus Prime staring down at her, with his glowing blue eyes and permanently grim face, she still felt faintly overawed in a way that nobody—no Autobot or Decepticon or heavily armed human—could hope to match. Her parents couldn't have done it. Her teachers couldn't have done it.

Unfortunately, she—gross—really respected Optimus Prime and that made her feel bad about her role in, you know, all the killing.

When she said, "And I wasn't getting anywhere at all when I ran into Knock Out in the desert," his face could have been carved from the same rock as the mesa outside.

He was like one big, grim statue. A big grim statue that was hearing bad news.

She glossed over the deaths, uh, obvious dangers of her little adventure, but it wasn't much help: Optimus Prime clearly knew she was flaking human-juice onto the floor, and he had few illusions about how it had got all over her clothes.

When she was done—explosions and electric shocks and squished humans and all—she didn't really feel the same way about her own behaviour, either. Despite his blank face, she had so clearly upset Optimus Prime. The decisions she'd made every step of the way made sense to her at the time and they still made sense to her now. Miko did not want to be safe if it meant Bulkhead wasn't, and risking her life was her own choice to make… but she knew a lot of humans might not have died, if she hadn't enabled Knock Out to mount his own rescue.

Faced with Optimus Prime's unwavering and deeply disappointed stare, she somehow felt that, 'they kidnapped Bulkhead and deserved everything that happened to them,' was a weak excuse for the carnage that had ensued at her instigation—even though she believed it.

Miko was painfully aware that what she wanted, and what Optimus wanted her to want, had at some point diverged. This hurt, and she wanted to deal with it by getting mad at him… and then she got a brief, horrifying flash of insight into why Megatron was so furious all the time. Human brains couldn't ever be re-imaged, though, so she needed to stop thinking about that immediately.

When she was done explaining it all, Optimus sighed at her. It was a deep, heavy sigh, through his vents, one that lifted his windshield wipers.

"Miko," he said gravely, "you know I cannot condone a single human casualty."

Miko looked up at him. She was so, so tired, but she set her jaw and scowled. "Yeah? Well they kidnapped Bulkhead," she reminded him. "They put a bomb in him!"

"Be that as it may," Optimus Prime began.

"Right. That's enough. I'll take it from here, big guy," came Fowler's voice from behind her.

Miko twitched. She could hear his footsteps on the metal, now that she was paying attention, but she had not noticed them before the moment he spoke.

He laid one large hand on her shoulder. It pulled on her skin, and she felt the phantom constriction around her throat again. She flinched. If Fowler noticed, he didn't show it.

"Human crimes, human authorities, Prime."

"Crimes?" Miko squawked up at him.

"There's a lot of dead men out there." The hand on her shoulder squeezed, too soft to intimidate.

Optimus Prime hesitated for a moment, but then he at last inclined his head. "As you say, Agent Fowler. In this we will follow your lead."

"Great," said Fowler. "Now, come on, kid, there's a bathroom next to my office."

Miko followed wearily and without protest, even though she knew the 'bathroom' there was a tiny sterile cubby with a sink and a drain, and definitely not the hot bath she wanted.

She thought Knock Out was probably getting a bath.

The office was cool and dim. Its walls were off-white, its carpet was institution-grey, and it reminded Miko powerfully of the building she'd been in earlier that night. Fowler herded her in and she went slowly because her legs felt like lead, but when she crossed the threshold, she looked up for vents.

Fowler sat her in the creaking, uncomfortable chair across from his little desk, and paced for a few long seconds. Miko felt a lot like she did when called to the principal's office at school—which was way better than she'd felt staring at Optimus Prime's disappointment.

A few times Fowler turned towards her like he was finally ready to start speaking, but then he got a look at her and would turn away again.

"If you're just going to walk around, I can just—" She gestured with both hands to the exit into the corridor and the tiny bathroom calling her name beyond. She made to get up.

"You," he said, too loud for the boxy office and the space between them, "sit your skinny behind in that chair until I say you can go. Which might be when you're twenty-five."

"Yeesh," mumbled Miko, sinking back down. Her joints hurt. This was probably what being Fowler's age was like.

Fowler scrubbed one hand over his face and turned towards her. "Fifteen," he muttered.

"Sixteen," she corrected.

"That's not…" He looked at the ceiling for a long moment. He was not looking for vents, she gathered. "Happy birthday," he sighed. Then he finally pulled out his own chair. "Alright. Look. I know Prime says he accepts no human casualties," he began, and then he just came out and said the thing everyone avoided saying: "Well, Prime has what the US Government broadly considers an unproductive outlook on the nature of warfare."

"Wow." Miko licked her teeth. "…Are you allowed to say that?"

Fowler ignored this. "So I am telling you—off the record—that if you reasonably believe that an illegal military organisation has kidnapped and may kill your friends, you're damn right that there is no moral conflict in retrieving them through whatever means necessary."

"That's… what I said," said Miko, more shocked than anything. She was much more used to being lectured about how she was wrong.

"And you're right. Now it is not my job to talk to you about what's right and wrong—" Miko waited, half hoping that he would at last explain exactly what his job was, like, a goal or title or something. No dice, though. "Instead, I have to come up with a way to explain between sixteen and eighteen dead bodies—we're not actually sure—without mentioning that our country is playing host to giant metal aliens."

Oh. As far as Miko understood it, even other parts of the government here weren't really meant to know about the cybertronians among them. When Fowler stopped for breath, she reached for her extensive media knowledge.

"Tough gig, huh? Training accident?" she offered.

"Miko." He glowered at her. "Let me do my own job. All you need to do is talk. There were some biiiig gaping holes in what you said to Prime out there." He leaned forward, over the obstacle of his desk. "If that's the whole story I'll eat my star-spangled shorts."

"…Ew."

His dark eyes lingered on her neck, where she could already feel the bruising beginning to come up by the way it still ached like hell.

"There's a lot we don't know yet about MECH's operations," he went on. He pulled a voice recorder—an honest to god black box dictaphone kind, from the 80s or 90s or something—out and set it on the table. It went on with a click. "So. From the top, soldier."

Fowler's debrief took hours.

It was long enough that the sun rose and some government guy had to call her out of class. By the time it was done, Miko felt dead on her feet and basically unattached to her own body—which might have been a blessing, because she got up at 2 PM and realised what it must have felt like to be, not Fowler's age, but Ratchet's age. Her back hurt. And she hadn't even landed on it or anything… that she remembered, anyway.

Between beginning her report and ending it, Fowler had texted someone something and twenty minutes later a soldier in an army uniform—camouflage trousers and a plain tee-shirt, probably all colours called 'sand,' or 'tan,'— showed up and completely ignored the giant robots to make sure she wasn't, like, dying. He must have been a doctor or something, but she never got to find out because he didn't actually talk. His investigation of her vitals didn't even interrupt her report.

But by two, Miko was finally done… and then they didn't even let her clean up before Fowler and the silent soldier marched her out, bundled her into the helicopter, and flew her away.

It took her a good fifteen minutes to work up the energy just to lift her phone and take a photo of the ground far below. Out the window it was fascinating, but on the phone screen it seemed pretty banal, actually—like the kind of thing you'd get from an image search for drone photos, but, like, worse. Huh.

"As cool as this is," she said—and it was cool, she'd never been in a helicopter, because for some reason Bulkhead said was 'complicated,' and 'historical,' the Autobots didn't include anyone who could really fly. "My host parents are going to go insane."

She was too exhausted to really get worked up about it, and she'd talked for so long that even saying it into the helicopter headset hurt her battered throat.

"Oh, no," said Fowler, "your host parents have been informed you were in an accident and have been air-lifted to a city with a larger hospital. You can leave them to me."

In Miko's opinion, she needed a nap more than a hospital, but her opinion wasn't carrying much weight with Fowler just then. He might have agreed with her on the morality of the situation, but he sure had not agreed with her judgement on the more granular details.

It carried even less weight with the admitting doctor at the hospital where they ended up, because she recommended an overnight stay just as soon as the army guy mentioned Miko's little electrical encounter.

"Fine," said Fowler, over Miko's croaked protest, "overnight it is."

A triage nurse had a million questions about health insurance, and he remained behind to answer those while she got trundled off to a long hospital room. They inspected her throat again, more thoroughly this time, and stuck a bunch of cables to parts of her arms and legs and chest to take a picture (somehow!) of her heart, and she got told she was "doing great," three times in ten minutes by different uniformed people.

And, you know, it started out kind of interesting in that she'd never been in an American hospital before, but a hospital room was only so interesting for so long. After that point, the experience disintegrated utterly: the sounds were novel enough to unsettle but not interesting enough to entertain, the smells were gross and alkaline, and the sheets felt weird and scratchy on her skin.

Fowler didn't come back to the room to see her—waylaid by more work, probably—and Miko discovered that no matter how tired you were, sleeping in a hospital ward was challenging. Three beds down was a child she couldn't see who shrilly asked for milkshakes and ice cream and whose demands were, weirdly, met by the nurses. There were constant voices, light everywhere, and the squeaks of wheels, beeps of monitors, soft footsteps, the buzz of a halogen light that needed fixing…

With her remaining energy, Miko took a hospital bed selfie. She'd never, ever show her mother back home, but hey, maybe someone would find it cool at school.

And then, finally, she got to go back to sleep. It was a fitful and unpleasant sleep in the unfamiliar environment, but she was tired enough to do it anyway. She woke up over and over, but each time it was just a new voice or someone checking her monitors, and each time she gave a sleepy grunt and turned her face away to doze again.

When Miko woke up properly again, it was twelve hours later and the doctor was willing to clear her to leave. Fowler's rumpled and exhausted shape was hunched over a large black coffee in a chair next to her bed, waiting to fly her back to Jasper.

Two days later, Miko lay flat on her back on her bed, one socked foot balanced upon her opposite knee. She was on 'mandatory bed rest,' because the secret agent medic—or maybe the hospital doctor—was a hard-ass.

It hadn't been particularly easy to cover up with her host parents. As far as they knew, she'd been shocked by exposure to 'unsecured electrical works,' and 'dangerous scaffolding'. They thought the only reason they weren't paying through the nose for her unexpected hospital visit was that the company—which did not exist—was paying as compensation.

The night in the hospital had been uncomfortable and still, in her view, unnecessary. Now she was back in her host family's home, in bed, tired but not sleepy. And for sheer boredom, this was worse.

Her burns were bandaged even though they weren't that bad at all, and her throat had been given the all clear for no permanent damage (although her voice was raspy), and her heart was beating on and on and on again just like normal. And now she was still in bed, and really really really bored.

She'd tried texting Bulkhead, but he was still recovering from his own injuries and needed to be in sleep mode for long, set periods while some kind of nanite did something with his fuel tank. Raf was asleep because he was like six or whatever, even if he was a mad genius. And Jack was still obviously mad at her.

Maybe you could use the down time to think about why teaming up with Cons is a bad idea? He'd sent, and then, evidently already regretting even saying it, he'd added, Nevermind. I can't chat right now, anyway, I have homework.

So clearly, he'd been mad and just as clearly he'd been talking to someone equally mad about it and had not gotten over himself. Not naming any name, but she'd bet her left arm it started with an A and ended in RCEE. She was annoyed at Miko, too, for—oh, something something, working with Cons could get her killed, something something, what was she thinking, something something, many dead friends. Miko had kind of tuned her out. Which had, in retrospect, made her madder.

Wheeljack had plainly understood. He'd swung by base, not for any weird sentimental reason like checking on Bulkhead (obviously), but just, you know, totally coincidentally. She'd gotten a message from him that included three thumbs up emojis and, a shame the Cons got away, but what can you do?

But he'd ignored her return message, as was the highly avoidant Wheeljack way of being, so that had gone nowhere fast.

Miko had gotten so desperately bored she'd actually emailed her mother, which in itself had prompted an inquiry about her health. Was she sure she was okay? Jeez.

And so now it was just Miko, her phone games (getting preetttty stale), and her incredible boredom at ten o'clock at night. It was so bad she was seriously contemplating doing her homework, even though she had the perfect excuse not to.

She let her snake die and stared at the bright screen of her phone until it went dark. Then she dropped the phone back onto her chest and sighed noisily into the dark. This sucked.

Miko wished she was still tired, but her forced rest and her long nap at the hospital had left her fatigued but decidedly awake.

For a long few minutes, she just stared at the crack of streetlight on her ceiling and listened to the boring sounds of the small-town American house around her. It creaked as it settled, and the old fridge out in the kitchen clicked and hummed gently for its mysterious fridge reasons. Somewhere out there a distant dog barked.

It was weird here. She couldn't even hear the sounds of neighbours moving quietly around in other homes—Jasper had nothing but space, and the houses were too far apart to hear anything.

On her chest, Miko's phone buzzed. She jumped, and her heel slid off her knee and thumped to the bed again as she fumbled for the device.

UNKNOWN NUMBER, it read, and then the number it gave her was an incomprehensible string of glitched out boxes and mixed languages.

There's nothing on at the drive in, the text complained, as though it was continuing a conversation. How do you fleshies live like this?

How's your paint? Miko texted back, so relieved to have someone to talk to that she didn't contemplate little concerns like, oh, factional alignment in the ongoing alien war.

Immaculate, said UNKNOWN. Naturally. When is it not?

She wasn't taking the bait on that one. I'm stuck on bed rest because my host family is super paranoid even though they let me out of the hospital and said I was fine. I'm so bored. I think I'm dying of boredom.

So she was stretching the truth a little: the doctors had said she'd be fine, after some rest… but she was pretty sure they hadn't meant lying down all the time, anyway.

Can't have that, sent UNKNOWN. And then, after a little moment of hesitation that, in a human being, might just have been typing time, it added: How about a tiny little jailbreak? Have you ever been racing?

Like… street racing? Something moved in front of the street light outside the house, a slow-rolling shadow that crossed her ceiling.

A moment later, she heard the tell-tale growl of the kind of aggressive, snarling engine they put in fancy sports cars. It was a deep kind of rumble she could almost feel in her bones.

Oh, thought Miko. Now this is a bad idea. And then, traitorously, she remembered Jack's text, and thought: Whatever, everyone already thinks I'm all bad ideas all the time.

Her host family would undoubtedly be in bed by now, anyway. And her window was right there—it was ages from all the other houses, so nobody would hear her if she just lifted it and slung one leg out, then the other.

What was stopping her?

Let me grab my shoes, Miko sent back.