Chapter Text
You know, coming back from the dead never really got old.
It was darkness, sure, but it wasn’t cold, it wasn’t even the numbness of a deadened limb. It was just the strange, sudden sensation of coming back online, lacking the memory of ever dropping offline in the first place.
Starscream didn’t busy himself thinking about the… theological implications of his repeated returns from the dead. There were certain Cybertronians who placed their faith in things reality simply didn’t endorse, notions of Primus under their pedes and Unicron leering down from the depths of space, creations of Vector Sigma billions of years in the past that wielded unfathomable power. Starscream had never personally believed in much beyond the occasional curse directed at Liege Maximo for unfavorable winds, but fanciful conceptions of life after one’s spark had puttered out did not align with his many experiences with death, the last of which had been especially interesting.
It had felt… longer. That was not to say that he remembered being offline, (weren’t you paying attention?) but the set of circumstances under which he awoke were vastly different than when his optics had fizzed out and and the pain in his helm had reached a breaking point. His hijacked clones had been on the precipice of delivering a blast that not even someone as infuriatingly durable as Megatron could survive, much less all the annoyances that called themselves Autobots and organics in the vicinity, the two ninja-bot-ninnies were doing some sort of… weird ceremony, the fragments of the Allspark hanging in the air in front of them, and then—
He had lurched back into consciousness with a shout into the night, having previously been lying flat on his back on an organic highway ramp. They’d apparently been in the process of trying to move him, laughably small barriers and vehicles of their own assembled presumably in an effort to try to drag his frame off their precious concrete.
Starscream had figured out relatively quickly that the thing keeping him online had been wrenched from his frame along with all the other shards of power, and had felt the presence of a different shard within his spark chamber. He had also figured out directly after that, based on the presence of a still-standing organic city around him and a distinct lack of blasted, uninhabitable bedrock, that his plan had failed.
Again.
And. Of course. He had given the calm, rational, measured response that any bot in his position would have given: he stared at the ground for an unbroken three cycles or so, then threw back his helm and screamed so loudly that it shattered the windows of at least five buildings.
This sensible reaction was then followed by an immediate takeoff to around eighty thousand feet above the wretched, slimy surface of the planet that seemed determined to attempt to make a fool out of Starscream. It was far enough outside of the reach of the crude things humans called jets to allow him to cruise in as much peace as could be afforded, and high enough to catch Cybertronians with only his internal receivers. Up there, sharp, thin wind whistling over every line of his frame, Starscream was able to ascertain that somehow, the ninja-bots had managed to use the power of their… processors, or something, to fully contain the blast of one of his clones.
Following that, it appeared as though Megatron had… oh, how to say this tastefully… gotten his aft handed to him on a silver platter by the little leader of the merry band of Autobot heroes that had set up their shop around the city.
Newsfeeds from Cybertron scarcely talked about anything else, the unprecedented nature of having the entirety of Decepticon High Command incarcerated within Trypticon Prison, the unusual assumption of power by the Autobot that was somehow more pompous than the late Ultra Magnus, the celebrity status of the plucky repair crew that had taken them all down, blah, blah, blah.
All in all. Not the best set of circumstances the Decepticon Armada had ever found itself in.
And without a tachyon transmitter, access to a spacebridge, or a handful of stellar cycles to spare flying to New Kaon under his own power, Starscream was effectively marooned on Earth. The power of the Armada was right there, the entire population of Decepticons, leaderless and reeling from the defeat of the supposedly-infallible Megatron— and he was powerless to reach out and take it.
Small mercies, though— apparently after all the business with that infuriating human invention that cut off your head and parasitized the rest of your body, the other humans had decided to leave the mines that had housed the Decepticons on Earth alone, wash their servos of it. The area around it was cordoned off with more of that ridiculously thin yellow tape, and a good chunk of the amenities in the smaller offshoots of the mine lay untouched. As pretentious as Megatron could be, Starscream couldn’t deny that he did have good taste in oil.
With little to do but stew, and believe him, stewing got old after a while, Starscream had taken to the other thing that he had plenty of practice at: searching. Not for the Allspark this time (apparently what was left of it was being contained in the Cybertron Hall of Relics under highest guard), but for something, anything that could give him an advantage in getting off this mudball for good and returning (less triumphantly than he would like, but returning nonetheless) to his Armada.
Starscream had sat at the cracked-but-still-operational monitors and compiled footage, human and otherwise, on anything remotely interesting happening on Earth. There were rumblings of some kind of anti-technology human group (boring), a rash of new human films about their conceptions of aliens (inane), and, to make matters worse, the polity was absolutely crawling with civilian Autobots. On the worst days, before he gathered that travel restrictions had been put into place, the city looked like the base of Vos’ Crystal Spire had, a teeming crush of tourists. Nothing even remotely interesting was happening—
Until, that is, a metal refinery in a neighboring polity called in the most unusual break-in. One that was apparently important enough to tear the great Optimus Prime away from his engagement with a gaggle of Autobot excursionists.
Tailing them a comfortable distance outside energy signature range (not that Starscream had one to sense, but old habits died harder than he did) and a good seven hundred feet above them, Starscream won himself private box tickets to one of the strangest robberies he’d ever laid optics on. And that was saying something, considering he’d personally written up a statement on the theft of several crustaceans from an open air organic market by none other than Blitzwing.
He’d honestly thought that Blackarachnia would have gone offline by now, done in by one thing or another, but the… creatures that made their grand escape from the inner divisions of the polity were unmistakably like her. All grotesque fusions of plating and organic outer casings, but distinctly powerful if they were in their element. The Autobot team’s leader had been given a run for his credits by only two of them, and that was with the techno-organics giving no indication of possessing any actual strategy.
In short, it looked like the startings of a potential new squadron to Starscream.
He veered downwards, cutting through the atmosphere as the gaggle of techno-organics made their strange, halting flight towards a piece of land that jutted out into the lake that surrounded the polity. It was dotted with organic structures and contraptions, but his quarry was heading for the little artificial beach pressed between the towering buildings.
The importance of a grand, well-choreographed entrance could not be overstated in a situation like this, and as such, Starscream held off on transforming until his thrusters kicked up sprays of water on either side, gesturing grandly as he took in the merry band at a closer distance.
“Greetings, techno-organics!” Right thruster in front of the left, hold the pose, hover, project, “I am Air Commander Starscream , exalted, supreme leader of all Deceptico—”
There was a tree flying straight at his helm.
It whistled past his helm, missing by a scant few nanoangstroms, and landed in the water with a colossal splash, sending flecks of water speckling his armor. He whipped back around, the sheer audacity of these reprobates slicing the words in his vocalizer neatly in half, and watched as the four of them were surrounded by a kind of… warbling, blue light?
It shimmered around them, warping like a column of superheated air, while the one who had thrown the tree at him locked his massive purple optics on Starscream’s and, parting his mandibles to be heard around the growing hum of building energy, drew in a snarling in-vent and shouted across the water;
“FRAG OFF!”
Before the energy snapped across space in an optic-popping flash of white, and when Starscream’s sensors had recalibrated, they were gone.
After a lengthy talk with the head of the Chicago police department, a human who was only slightly less abrasive than Fanzone, Optimus and Sari had been allowed to leave after they had given statements on what they saw of the crime. She was accompanied by another human who was furiously scribbling down notes, who they were told was a lawyer who represented the company, trying to assess the damage of their lost assets. He mentioned that they had plans to sue, though Optimus wasn’t exactly sure how well that plan would work.
After checking in with Sari to make sure she didn’t have anything more serious than a couple dents and the energon from his shoulder had slowed to a seep, they’d flown back to Detroit in silence, aside from informing her about the briefing he’d decided was now necessary at the end of the cycle. He’d gotten no comms or distress calls from anybody else over the course of the day, and beyond a group of disappointed tourists, their city seemed mostly free of issues. Even though that was a sure sign of trouble coming on the horizon.
Collapsing his jetpack and leaning in on the far wall of his room, Optimus sat down heavily on the edge of his berth, turning over packets of data in his processor. Okay. Nothing was here to physically do right now, but there were things he could do with this information, create a file for these new Predacons, but he also had to get his shoulder motivator looked at, update Waspinator and Blackarachnia’s profile in their databanks, tell Prowl about—
He ex-vented, short and a little involuntary. Right. If they wanted to talk to the Dinobots, they’d have to do it themselves.
First thing was first. Getting the Predacons into their databanks was the most important thing, making sure his team was aware. Optimus sat forward, elbows resting on his knee joints, and wirelessly accessed their database on every threat they’d encountered since coming to Earth. Optimus himself had been the one to start it, as was policy, and the rest of his team had reluctantly followed the standards on incident reports and descriptions.
He flicked through the profiles that populated his HUD. It was a bit strange to see humans interspersed with the likes of Decepticon High Command, but keeping a record was important. Even if his team (mostly Bumblebee) had decided to take a couple liberties in their descriptions of events and the enemies they’d faced.
Soon the Predacons had their own subheading, a tag for any future incidents involving their group, and a membership roster with five slots and room for more. He removed the glaring red “OFFLINE” tag from Blackarachnia’s file, then Waspinator’s, moving them to the “active” category that was… empty, except for them. After defeating Megatron and their return to Cybertron with the rest of Decepticon High Command, the active threats on Earth had been reduced to nothing. The only remnants of Soundwave, his mini-cons, had dropped off their radar decacycles ago, there was no sign of the Constructicons, every human threat they’d faced was present and accounted for in jail. Optimus could never quite shake the feeling that he was wrong in having an empty “active” category, like he was turning a blind optic to… something that was a threat, waiting for the right moment to strike.
And it looked like that threat had found its moment.
Two of the five members were already accounted for, with writeups on their known abilities and backgrounds, so he set to work on the other three. They were mostly mysteries, confined to the designations he had caught and a propensity for fire, in one case. Optimus couldn’t help but wonder where exactly the other three had come from. Blackarachnia was only techno-organic because of an accident with her downloading ability, and Wasp had been converted with transwarp energy. Wherever they had ended up, it was clearly somewhere that had enough equipment and materials for Blackarachnia to at least try to continue her experiments, and to want to continue badly enough to send the Predacons on errands. But that still didn’t answer the question of what she was doing or why she was doing it—
“Have you been sitting there since you got back?”
Optimus blinked. Ratchet was at the door.
“I—“ he started, glancing at his chronometer, “—have?” A full megacycle had gone by.
Ratchet huffed unhappily.
“Sari told me you’d been in here for a while. And with a busted shoulder joint, might I add.”
“Sorry,” Optimus said, straightening as Ratchet approached him with the scanner, “I was just updating our files.”
“Mhm,” he grumbled, tugging Optimus’ shoulder plating out of the way. “And I suppose you were just going to let everybody find out what did this to you on their own time?”
Optimus didn’t have to look to know the expression on Ratchet’s faceplates.
“I wasn’t,” he said, “I was going to tell you all… more formally tonight.” Since Sari had started high school, she’d been a staunch proponent of fuelling together at the end of a day, whether that was with her father or with the Team. Tonight she’d remained in the base, and had primed the energon dispensers herself.
“Medicine doesn’t really give a loose wire about formality,” Ratchet said, retrieving a mesh patch from his subspace. “And neither do I. Gashes like that, in a place like this, don’t happen on your routine patrols.”
He felt the edge of the patch touch his protoform, and suppressed a shiver.
“Your nanites should take care of it on their own, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook for telling me what got you.”
Optimus ex-vented and tried to hold still as Ratchet applied the patch.
“Waspinator’s back, which means Blackarachnia is too. And there’s more of them. Techno-organics, I mean.”
Ratchet finished the sealant spray coat and said nothing, taking a seat on the unoccupied chair across the room. He had a tendency to go quiet when he was thinking, or remembering, or considering what to say. He subspaced the rest of his tools and steepled his digits, looking somewhere on the floor before hazarding to ask,
“And you’re… alright?”
More than a servo-ful of talks with Ratchet that extended well into the night cycle had taught Optimus that the mech cared, he really did. There was just… no easy way to talk about these things. He sighed.
“I think so. I just… I can’t say I’m glad to see them, but at least we… know to expect them now.”
He couldn’t just say that it felt right to have something to strive against again, whether it was knowing about the existence of an enemy or… relishing the chance to fight it, that knowing they had a threat to face was making things seem normal when they had never been so close to peace , that—
“Prime.”
His optics snapped up to Ratchet’s.
“If you’re gonna keep getting lost in your own helm, you’ve got to get better at hiding it.” Ratchet said with a half-sad smile. “I know it’s been… a lot, since we beat the Cons, but… you’re doing fine. You’re doing just fine.”
Optimus returned the smile and earnestly tried to find comfort in his words.
A moment passed between them in silence before Ratchet spoke again.
“Did you tell Sari to keep this byte in the subroutines, or…?”
Optimus’ optics dropped open and his finials shot up. There was no way Sari was actually going to wait until their “team dinner” to tell everybody she could about the new enemies they’d faced—
“WHAT?!”
Ratchet pinched his nasal ridge and hauled himself to his pedes as Optimus ran for the base’s common area. Once there, Bumblebee was in the process of trying to force words out of his silent vocalizer, an empty cube on the ground, as Bulkhead attempted to wipe away the sheet of energon that coated his face and chassis. Apparently, Bumblebee had done something of a spit-take.
“Yeah!” Sari went on enthusiastically from her perch on one of the base’s many platforms. “They were huge, one of them had this crazy flamethrower, the other one sounded like a cowboy for some reason? But their leader was the one who actually got them to stop, but he also got Optimus pretty good—”
Before Optimus could get a word in, Bumblebee rounded on him, optics cycled huge with horror.
“Waspinator’s online?!”
“I was going to tell you—“
“ Tell me when?! When he shows up in the middle of the night cycle to fragging DEACTIVATE ME?!?”
“Language!” Said another voice from the far corner of the common area. Arcee drew closer, a cube of energon in each servo. “Just what is going on over here?”
Bumblebee had taken to pacing the length of the room, gripping the sides of his helm.
“Bee, what’s wrong?” Sari asked as she produced an electric-blue squeegee to wipe at Bulkhead’s optics. “These guys are—“
“So, you remember that one time? A little bit after you upgraded? Where I almost got my function stolen? Wasp was the guy that did that. ” Bumblebee said, more than a little hysterically.
“We knew him back in boot camp. He was a huge crankshaft.” Bulkhead added.
“He was! He stole my legs one time! Then shoved me into a locker!”
“And he was always going on about how dumb I was—“
“ And he called me short!”
Arcee, having handed one of her cubes to Ratchet, held up her free servo.
“Alright, that might be true, but what does this have to do with him… stealing your identity?”
“Yeah,” Sari said, “it sounds like he hated you—“
“And he does!” Bumblebee exclaimed, “because I—”
He froze for a nanoklik, servos mid-gesture.
“Because Shockwave framed him.” Bulkhead finished, now mostly cleaned of energon. “He was in the same platoon as us, pretending to be an Autobot. Shockwave planted his communicator in Wasp’s stuff, and when Bee reported it, they threw him in the Stockades.”
Sari blinked, brow furrowed, before Ratchet interjected quietly, speaking more to Arcee than anyone else.
“This was a couple hundred years before all our business with the Allspark. All that time in the brig did a number on his processor.”
“He’s crazy. Capital ‘S’ scrambled. ” Bee went on, “He blames me for getting put in the Stockades! Even though I totally didn’t do anything! Then he impersonated me! Switched our paint jobs and everything, even our voices!”
“After that… incident,” Optimus’ turn to comment, this time with an air of finality to it, “Blackarachnia kidnapped him and turned him into a techno-organic to try to figure out how to change herself back. We thought they’d both gone offline on Dinobot Island, but apparently not.”
Bumblebee flopped down on the couch they’d constructed with an ex-vent that seemed much too big for his frame. Optimus glanced over at Arcee, who had a servo placed over her intake, optics wide and troubled.
“And that— the framing happened… before you even finished boot camp?” She asked.
Bulkhead nodded, and Bumblebee made a miserable noise of affirmation.
“Ratchet,” she said, aghast, “that’s—”
“Formative algorithmic implementation time. I know, ‘Cee.” Ratchet said, looking at the floor.
“In the Stockades—” Arcee let out a vent and turned back towards the room at large. “And did any of you ever tell him he’d been framed?”
“Well, it sounds like he knows that,” said Sari, “you didn’t try to tell him what was going on?”
“I did!” Bumblebee exclaimed, twisting to look over the back of the couch, “I told him that it was Longarm’s— Shockwave’s fault, twice, and he still wants to slag me.”
“And did you ever apologize?” Arcee asked, arching a superoptic ridge in his direction.
“I did!”
Arcee narrowed her optics.
“I… did— ”
Optimus shook his helm, making his way into the middle of the room.
“You can tell Arcee about the context later. Right now the most important thing is making sure all of us know as much as possible about the Predacons.”
His tanks grumbled. It was fine. He’d fuel after the briefing.
Red lightning bloomed over New Kaon.
Strika had seen it before, of course, but it was a different experience to see it from the atmosphere, rather than glimpse it over her helm on the ground. Their capital was plagued by perpetual storms that Magnificus attributed to the alternating wind patterns, or something like that.
Lugnut always talked about it, headwinds and tail wings, pressure and stratospheric turbulence coming easy to him as venting, optics to the skies.
She ex-vented. Folding her arms across her chassis, her spark, shuttering her optics for a moment. The ache would not pass, and it would not diminish. It had not as the solar cycles had gone by, turning into decacycles, turning into—
“General?”
Strika turned, quickly, optics snapping open. Plenty of mechanisms who had failed to notice Maelstrom had gone offline for it. The doctor approached the same control panel Strika stood at with a respectful dip of her helm, servos clasped neatly behind her back, under her splay of rotary blades.
“Maelstrom.” She was too tired to summon up any kind of tone.
“I’ve been sent to perform something of a wellness check,” she said, Tarnish and lilting as ever, “or to retrieve a report. Whichever one you prefer.”
Strika did not answer. She could just picture it, Cyclonus probably put Maelstrom up to this. Blackout was too scared of her to try. Instead, she brought up the communication draft before her. It was short, nothing more than a string of easily-overlooked characters that could be mistaken for a junk tag to an unobservant Autobot.
“Without Shockwave’s claws on our encryptions, it will have to be enough.”
Maelstrom tilted her helm, reading.
“And this is for…?”
“Blitzwing.”
“Ah.”
“The first step is moving him. Out from Trypticon.”
“You know whatever happens where he’s going won’t be pretty.” Maelstrom didn’t phrase it like a question.
Strika shook her helm.
“This is the only way. We need him there, and I will tell you and your team why when the time is closer. Right now, I need to—“
“What you need to do is rest.”
There it was. Strika had nearly forgotten.
“You’re performing shockingly well, but you’re operating on the same recharge cycle as all of us.” Maelstrom paused. “ Most of us. But cognitive function starts to decline after only two misaligned cycles—“
“I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself.” Strika said emphatically, turning to square off with Maelstrom.
They held each other’s stare for a long moment.
“Don’t make me say it.”
“Say what?”
“Because I absolutely will.”
“What are you talking about—”
“Megatron left you in command of the Decepticons in his absence,” Maelstrom said, cool and crisp, “and we deserve a strong, alert leader. Would you really be so callous as to outweigh your want to continue working over the need of the many you have been charged with overseeing in this time of crisis?”
Strika cycled her optics, stunned and vaguely outraged, and then Maelstrom’s voice softened at the edges.
“…I can’t claim to know exactly how much you’ve taken on. Nor what it’s like to be separated from your consort for so long.”
Her spark squeezed and her processor ached. The desire to either give a scathing retort or to simply throw the mnemosurgeon off the bridge was getting horribly weaker.
“But I do know that you won’t be able to deliver on the help you want to give if you can’t keep yourself functioning first.”
And with that, Maelstrom simply left, almost as quietly as she had come in, leaving Strika standing there, dumbfounded, on the bridge, the first pebble that would hopefully give way to an avalanche at her pedes.
She read it once more, began the transmission, and headed for her too cold, too empty berth.