Chapter Text
There had been so much that had changed and so much that hadn’t. Finding himself at another Elite Guard social function with his team was familiar, and so was Rodimus being overcharged and obnoxiously partaking in the karaoke that was offered (which was a horrible idea for such an event).
What was new was Rodimus pointing and singing to Blurr who sat in the audience, laughing hysterically. Though Rodimus had not announced that he and Blurr were officially together yet, any bot with a pair of working optics could see the feelings blossoming between the two. Blurr seemed tired-- he usually couldn’t stay out late due to the fact that he was still recovering from his spark transplant and needed frequent recharge-- but happy, his face bright pink and a wide smile stretched across his face as he laughed. Cliffjumper was set next to him and seemed much less enthused to be so near Rodimus. He had his helm in his servos and was shaking it. Cliff still wasn’t all that close to Ironhide or the rest of his team, but he was close to Blurr now, and since Blurr was always with Rodimus, it meant that Ironhide got to see more of him. The minibot still kept his hot-headed attitude, but it was dulled… as if he knew he should spend his anger elsewhere now.
Ironhide was sitting with the rest of his crew, but his optics had drifted to the other side of the room to Optimus’ team. Once they had returned to Cybertron, Ironhide had taken the opportunity to reconnect with Bumblebee and Bulkhead. He apologized for being so mean to them back during camp and was hoping for a second chance. He was so relieved that both of them were more than happy to try out a friendship with him.
Ironhide sighed as his tank bubbled with nervousness. He’d been putting off a… certain conversation with them for a long while, but he had finally decided that tonight would be the night. He was just still trying to find the strength to even walk over to them.
“Hey, you alright, ‘Hide?”
Hot Shot’s voice made him jump. He turned his helm to meet the other’s gaze.
“I, uh… I’m gonna go say hi to Bee, Bulk, and the others real quick,” Ironhide blurted, quickly standing up. “I’ll be right back.”
“You didn’t answer his question,” Brawn interrupted.
“I’m fine!” Ironhide replied with a wave of his servo. He quickly headed towards the other table before Red Alert could chime in as well.
“Hey, Ironhide!” Bulkhead greeted. “Coming to join us?”
“Yeah, actually,” Ironhide chuckled. “Do y’all mind?”
“Not at all,” Optimus said with a smile. “Take a seat.”
Ironhide murmured his thanks and pulled up a chair to sit between Bulkhead and Sentinel. It was only then that he had realized that Jazz and Sentinel were also at that table. He supposed that made things slightly more awkward but… he had already committed.
He sat there for a while, waiting for a lull in their conversating. Ironhide wasn’t paying attention enough to know what they were talking about. He was too busy preparing himself to speak.
Eventually, the conversation they were having faded into a small moment of silence. Ironhide quickly decided that this would be the time to chime in.
“Hey, uh, could I ask y’all about something?” he blurted.
Everyone looked at him with wide optics. He supposed it was a bit rude to not contribute anything to the prior conversation and then randomly speak up.
“Uh, sure,” Bumblebee answered. “What do you want to know?”
“It’s um…” Ironhide cleared his vocalizer. “I wanted to ask about Wasp. I heard that y’all ran into him on Earth after he broke out.”
A deafening silence fell over the group. Sentinel didn’t even try to be subtle and loudly exhaled, covering his face with his servo. Bumblebee and Bulkhead awkwardly looked away.
“Yes, we ran into Wasp on Earth,” Ratchet eventually answered, breaking the silence. “We had… more than one encounter with him.”
Ironhide perked up.
“Yeah, he kind of, uh…” Bumblebee nervously chuckled. “He kind of tried to replace me? Like, he switched our paint jobs to try to pretend to be me and get the others to think I was him in some sort of, like… revenge plot, I guess? But the others figured it out and he managed to get away from us after that.”
Ironhide blinked. That seemed… odd. The Wasp he knew wouldn’t have tried to do something as ridiculous as that. He probably would have just beat the slag out of Bumblebee.
“He was kind of running around the planet for a bit until he got captured by Blackarachnia and the Dinobots,” Bulkhead continued. Ironhide raised an optic ridge. “Uh… I-I wasn’t really there. I’m probably not the best bot to explain it.”
“A very long story short, Wasp got mutated into a techno-organic by a Decepticon,” Optimus finally spoke up. “But something went wrong with his mutation… and he sort of--”
“Well, we don’t really know what happened!” Bumblebee interrupted, trying to keep a positive attitude. “He was all like… glitchy and unstable and then kind of just… blew up!”
Ironhide’s spark dropped.
“He’s dead?”
Bumblebee stammered over his words. “We, uh, we don’t know for certain, but--”
“We never found his shell,” Sentinel interrupted. His arms were tightly crossed across his chest and he was staring down at the table. “And I doubt that either one of them survived that blast.”
"Sentinel.” Jazz frowned at him. “Be considerate.”
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it for him,” Sentinel snapped. His gaze turned to Ironhide’s. It was harsh at first, but after a moment, it seemed to soften a bit. “You wanted to know what happened to Wasp and I want you to know the truth: Wasp was deranged, unstable, got taken advantage of by a ‘con, and-- I hope-- went offline quickly.”
Ironhide couldn’t find anything to say in return for that. His spark felt as if it was being twisted over and over again, but the weight of the situation had not completely hit him yet. He couldn’t feel the coolant gathering in his optics, but he knew it would come eventually.
Sentinel huffed and leaned back in his chair. He pinched his nasal ridge. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” Ironhide replied, keeping his voice rather steady considering the lump building in his throat. “I was the one who asked. I’m sorry if I made things awkward… I assumed it wasn’t good but… I dunno. I guess I just… didn’t expect that.”
“We probably should have told you sooner,” Bulkhead said with a sigh. “I’m sorry we didn’t. I know you and Wasp were buds; you deserved to know what happened to him.”
“I told him I was sorry,” Bumblebee blurted. “I don’t think it helped much since I told him after he got mutated but… I at least got to tell him.”
“He would have forgiven you.” Ironhide sighed. He dragged his servos across his face, trying to casually wipe away the coolant building in his optics. “I know he would have. He never hated y’all.”
There was a small moment of silence.
“He didn’t ?” Bumblebee squeaked.
Ironhide opened his intake to reply, but stopped himself and chuckled.
“Slag, he would fragging kill me if he ever heard me tell y’all this,” he murmured, a smile desperately trying to form on his face. “Wasp was mean and all but he was just… insecure. He always said that he also got picked on growin’ up and that going to boot camp was his first chance to change that. I’m not gonna sit here and say that either of us were right in the way we picked on you, but Wasp would have gotten over it eventually. He just… he just needed to feel accepted for a bit. He would’ve apologized to y’all.”
“You really think so?” Bulkhead replied, tilting his helm.
“He would have,” Sentinel suddenly said. He was staring down at his cube, swirling the energon. “Wasp was a good bot.”
All optics turned on Sentinel. Ironhide’s were the widest.
“You’ve never talked about him before,” Ironhide murmured. “Especially not in a good light.”
“I thought Wasp was a traitor for more than fifty stellarcycles. I never wanted to talk about a bot I had such high hopes for that turned out to be a ‘con.” Sentinel snorted and shook his helm. “Seems like it happened anyways.”
Ironhide’s tank twisted at the reminder of Longarm… well, Shockwave, he supposed. No one ever seemed to mention him by either name; the references were always vague and followed by hurt silence.
“I really thought the world of Wasp, Ironhide,” Sentinel said, looking up at him. “And I’m glad someone else did, too. He would have been a good commander and a good Prime.”
Ironhide opened his intake to reply but nothing escaped his lips. He tried again but got choked up. He huffed and buried his face back into his hands. He felt Bulkhead lay a careful servo on his back.
“It just ain’t fair,” Ironhide sobbed. His words were slurred and barely coherent. “Wasp would have lived such a good life-- y’all could have gotten to know him the way I did. Instead that fragging traitor-- fragging Shockwave took it all away from him and took him away from me .”
Ironhide let out an ugly yelp as he felt someone hug him from behind. He managed to twist himself around to see Rodimus with Blurr at his side. Ironhide buried himself into Rodimus’s arms.
“The others weren’t kidding. You really were looking to try to get yourself hurt,” Rodimus murmured into his audial.
Ironhide hugged him tighter. “Shut up.”
Blurr affectionately squeezed his arm, murmuring words of comfort to him. He and Blurr had yet to really talk about how Shockwave had affected them, but he had a feeling the conversation was going to take place even sooner now.
“Get out of my way.” Ironhide perked up when he heard Bee’s voice. “I wanna hug him too.”
Rodimus chuckled as he moved to let Bumblebee have him. They didn’t get to hug each other too long until Bulkhead swooped in, crushing them both in his arms. Bumblebee shouted at him, but all Ironhide could do was laugh and do his best to hug him back.
Bulkhead eventually dropped the two back into Ironhide’s seat. Bumblebee quickly hopped off to start bickering with Bulkhead about how his hugs were more like attempts on his life. Ironhide became distracted as he felt a different servo land on his shoulder. He turned around to see Sentinel.
“I didn’t mean to upset you--”
“No, it’s okay,” Ironhide quickly interrupted. “I’ve been bottling that up for a real long time. I kinda needed to have a meltdown, I guess.”
Sentinel chuckled. “You’re the best bot I know, Ironhide. I’m so proud to have been your sergeant… yours and Wasp’s.”
“Thanks, sarge,” Ironhide replied, his voice soft and genuine. “That means more to me than you’ll ever know.”
Sentinel offered him a smile. Ironhide so rarely got to see Sentinel smile. It just made the exchange all the more meaningful to him.
“I’m not sitting in your lap, Rodimus.”
Ironhide’s helm whirled around to see Rodimus pulling another chair up. Blurr was standing behind Ironhide with his arms crossed, giving Rodimus a look.
“There’s no other spare chairs left! Plus, I doubt we could even squeeze another one into this table,” Rodimus exclaimed as he put the chair between Sentinel and Ironhide’s. He plopped down in and patted his thighs.
Blurr frowned. “That’s demeaning, Rod-- I’m not going to sit in your lap like a protoform!”
“Here,” Ironhide spoke up. He managed to scoot enough to leave some room for Blurr in his seat. “It’ll be a bit tight. You can say no, though. I’ll understand.”
Blurr smiled at him and barely fought off a snicker. He plopped down next to him and squeezed in close, grabbing Ironhide’s arm to drape it across his own shoulder’s.
“Thank you, Ironhide,” Blurr chirped. “You’re so considerate.”
Rodimus fumbled over his words and chose to instead show his anger by frantically throwing his servos up in the air. Blurr and Ironhide burst out into laughter, and the rest of the table did as well. Rodimus quickly took the spotlight, loudly going on about some semi-related story to their current situation. Blurr listened intently, still holding onto Ironhide’s arm and gently dragging his digits across it. It was a small, but very thoughtful gesture. It melted Ironhide’s spark.
Despite the fact that Blurr and the others had essentially coddled him, and that they were all laughing over Rodimus’s current story, he still felt a tiny ache in his spark. He always did when in happy situations like these. Everything could be perfect… but Wasp would always be missing from it. Perhaps he could have been able to cope with it well by now, but Shockwave had stolen the opportunity from him by instead having him learn to cope with the fact that Wasp was a Decepticon. Now, he had to learn to live with the fact that Longarm had been the traitor and that Wasp had been innocent. It was hard.
Ironhide’s gaze accidentally fell onto Bulkhead and Bumblebee again. Both bots offered him big smiles, which he tried to return. Blurr suddenly held onto his servo and gently squeezed it.
“Are you holding up okay, ‘Hide?” he murmured. Rodimus had also turned his helm to look at Ironhide, his optic ridges dipping with worry.
Ironhide hesitated. Though his spark still ached and there was still a bit of a lump in his throat, he couldn’t help but smile-- really, actually, smile. He didn’t have Wasp or Longarm anymore, but he had Rodimus and Blurr and Bumblebee and Bulkhead and the rest of both their teams-- slag, he even had Sentinel. He had so many bots who cared for him and were clearly there for him.
“Yeah,” he replied, nodding. “I’ll be alright.”
And, for the first time in a long time, a part of him truly believed it.