Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Waspinator had some experience in putting himself back together. Not a lot, but it was there, in Wasp’s memory files in places that weren’t uncoupled or corroded or any kind of whatever else. Modularity , that was what all the doctor-bots had said, the thing that let them pop off one of Wasp’s legs while it still kicked at them from halfway across the room. It was a funny feeling, one that definitely didn’t hurt as much as a big servo-full of other things, but Wasp and Waspinator both still preferred to keep their frame together . 

The ground had been gritty, rough and grimy, little chunks of rock getting stuck and grating in his seams as he had dragged his helm back to his neck. The other end of his glossa, the part that had been torn and leaking something, dangled out of the back of his helm, and he had tasted the bitter and salt before he shoved it back through the seam of his neck. This place, the planet that Waspinator and Spider-bot were both stuck on, was bright and warm-sunny and stayed that way until the night cycle, not counting the sometimes that massive gray clouds had rolled in and poured down a barrage of rain. 

Even though the warmness was good, the rains weren’t nearly as good as Waspinator wanted them to be. It was all at once a smarting reminder of how close Wasp had come to his revenge in the city, while at the same time something little but insistent in the back of his processor whispered at him. Over and over and over, get somewhere safe, don’t even think about flying, stay there, stay close and wait and he wouldn’t get lost. Ignoring the whatever-it-was and going out anyway sent the inside of his helm itching and put a tightness in his chassis. Anyway, it wasn’t like he had anything exciting going on anywhere else yet, so Waspinator would wriggle into somewhere dry and watch the water pour down from the sky and listen to the cannon-shots of thunder sounding above him. Here, away from it, the little thing seemed to be satisfied, and he could listen to the soft shush es of the rain on the endless green leaves. It was nice. 

“Waspinator.”

It was nice. 

“Waspinator .”

It was nice and he could listen to the rain. 

“ Waspinator— “

“ What?!” He snarled, whirling around to face Ant-bot, wings snapping high. 

He was met, as usual, with the same wide, red optics and their overly enthusiastic stare. 

“When will we be allowed to return to the colony?”

Waspinator ex-vented, heavily. Once Ant-bot got… well, antsy, there wasn’t a lot that could be done to stop him. 

“Aw, c’mon, ‘Ferno, don’t get your thorax in a twist! There’s plenty of kiester-kickin’ right here!” Shifting to look behind Ant-bot, Waspinator saw that Two-head had wrapped the snake part of his arm around Scorpo-bot’s neck, and was yanking it tight with a smile on his intake. 

“But the Queen may have need of something! Of us!” Ant-bot said, claws tense and gesturing in the vague direction of the looming volcano. 

Waspinator shook his wings out, big ones first, then little ones, and ex-vented. It sounded like Scorpo-bot managed to free himself, based on Two-head’s yelling, and he turned back to the rain at the mouth of the cave. Sure, Spider-bot might “have need of something”. Waspinator would be more surprised if Spider-bot didn’t need them for one stupid thing or another. 

“If Spider-bot needs Predacons, Waspinator will tell. ” 

“‘Sides,” Two-head cut in “We’ll have to head back up there anyhow to get our energon! I don’t know about y’all, but I’m startin’ to feel it. I hope this batch’s better than the last one!”

Right. That was the other thing. 

Back when he had first put most of himself back together, he thought he would only have to see Spider-bot when it was absolutely necessary. She did have a couple important pieces of him, like one leg and a good chunk of one wing. But when he’d tried to get them back and then leave the stupid island for good, Spider-bot had started talking again. Just like she’d done with Wasp. 

“ So, what’s your plan? Fly all the way back to Detroit? ” Spider-bot hadn’t even been looking at Waspinator, just fiddling with another black piece of metal on a crooked table. “ You’re about three size classes bigger than you were, buzz-boy. You’ll need energon. Have you thought about where you might get that? ”

And that was what was so infuriating about it all: Waspinator could hate Spider-bot all he wanted, could seethe and hiss until night cycle, but she wasn’t wrong. Wasp was from Iacon, he’d only ever heard about energon farming. There was nothing but organic foliage and moisture on the whole island, and not a drop of energon. Waspinator, used to tanks that read half and a quarter and an eighth full, hadn’t noticed that yet. 

So he stayed there, tied with an invisible cable to Spider-bot’s stupid volcano base and her stupid bitter, runny energon. And when she needed something, he either got it for her or she locked down her refinery and wouldn’t let Waspinator have any energon at all. 

Ant-bot was grumbling to himself, kicking dejectedly at the pebbles by his pedes, arms folded over the optics of his beast mode. Another crack of thunder split the sky, and the wind blew the rain in sheets across the trees and their leaves. Waspinator glanced back and forth from Ant-bot to the rain and back again, watching how Ant-bot’s claws dug into his upper arms and his antennae twitched. Then, Waspinator swung one of his primary claws down and snatched some dry, brown organic plants near the bottom of a rock. 

“Here,” he said, holding them out to Ant-bot, “go burn.”

Ant-bot’s optics zeroed in on the combustible, expression visibly brightening at just the word. The twigs were out of Waspinator’s claws in a nanoklik, and were on fire in another as Ant-bot turned deeper into the cave. Two-head and Scorpo-bot had apparently gotten bored of fighting, and now, having noticed the light from the little fire, were determinedly looking for more fuel. 

This… thing, not quite a game, whatever it was, did double duty. “How much can you give Ant-bot to burn before Ant-bot starts cackling”, but also the covert “get Predacons warm again” underneath it. Ant-bot barked a sharp laugh as the bundle of burning twigs in his digits became more of a torch, watching the other Predacons root around for enough organic material for a bonfire, shouting encouragement all the way.

…Waspinator hadn’t wanted to go and start stealing other bots. Spider-bot hadn’t wanted that at first, and seeing the other parts of the planet was a welcome change of scenery from the island. It was always just some barrels of oil (all for her) metal (also for her) and pieces of hulls and equipment from the Cybertronian ships in the city where Bumble-bot was ( also for her). Then the solar cycle came when she said she wanted a someone . Wanted a bot to do the same thing to them as she did to Wasp , and Waspinator had snarled and snapped his wings and said that he wouldn’t , and she didn’t say anything and started locking down the refinery. 

“ Fine, then. I give you three cycles, maybe four before your tanks run out. ”

Waspinator had made it almost a full decacycle, recharging and recharging and hurting and hungering until he was finally forced to admit that he couldn’t carry out his plans if he was offline. He went back to Spider-bot, took the energon, and let her send him off. The bot he stole was red and a little white, and he cursed Waspinator in a couple different languages the whole way back to the base. Then Waspinator had left and waited outside, because he felt sick at the thought of watching it happen and sick at the thought of leaving entirely. The worst part was that he didn’t even know why Spider-bot had suddenly wanted him to steal other bots. 

A cheer went up from the back of the cave. Ant-bot stood proudly over the blazing inferno he’d made, while Two-head threw his snake arm around his shoulders and Scorpo-bot busied himself warming his own frame. Waspinator, deciding that the rain wouldn’t be stopping anytime soon, ducked further into the cave to join them. 

After a while of nothing, waiting outside the volcano and listening to the lava bubble and pop sluggishly, something had been shoved unceremoniously through the doors in the side of the mountain. The something looked a lot like Waspinator in some ways, and a lot like the bot he stole in other ways. More red, more brown, bigger, more legs and feelers than before, just like him. In all honesty, Waspinator had been expecting a fight, if the bot stayed as angry as he had been.  

But Ant-bot had only sat there on the dark ground, legs going one way and thorax going another, and stared at Waspinator with big, prompting optics. 

“ Do you serve the Colony as well? ” 

After parsing through what that meant, it became clear that Ant-bot didn’t remember anything beyond a few minutes ago. Spider-bot had told him that he was a Predacon, that he was there to do what she wanted, and then “ thoroughly and brilliantly examined me for… something! Something that no doubt pertains to the great and inscrutable machinations of the Royalty! ” The other two times that had given them Two-head and Scorpo-bot had been almost the same, but Waspinator never stopped holding out for as long as he could against Spider-bot’s threats. 

Ant-bot ex-vented contentedly and transformed to his beast mode, tucking his limbs under him and settling down by the fire. He was almost close enough for Waspinator to think he might become the next kind of kindling, but fire was Ant-bot’s favorite thing in the galaxy, aside from the “colony” he was always talking about. Two-head yawned and leaned against Ant-bot, both hands behind his helm. 

“Waspy?”

Waspinator grunted. He didn’t particularly like being called that, but he didn’t think Two-head had a snobby strut in his frame. 

“D’ya think we’ll ever get to go with you when ‘Rachnia sends you off for supplies?”

Waspinator clicked his mandibles and hummed.

“Maybe.” He said. “Spider-bot might want more than Waspinator can take alone. But Waspinator not know for sure.” 

“I sure wish that’d happen soon,” Two-head went on, shuttering his optics. “It sounds interestin’ out there. More… stuff than ‘round these parts.” 

Waspinator chuffed in agreement. Every time he came back from a supply run, the other Predacons demanded to know where he had been, what he had seen, if he kicked any skidplates, if there were any imminent threats to the Colony, if he’d seen anyone new. Since Spider-bot didn’t really talk to them unless it was to tell them to leave her lab alone or to give Waspinator lists and locations, they relied on Waspinator and Waspinator alone for information about the planet outside their little island. 

Granted, Waspinator didn’t know that much about the planet. Wasp had been out of the Stockades for eight cycles and had spent five of those cycles actually getting to Earth, and the other three either impersonating Bumble-bot or running from the Autobots. But he told them what he knew, the planet was full of organics, they lived in cities, which were big collections of buildings, which were like Spider-bot’s base but without the volcano around it, and bigger and taller. Trying to explain things with only their frame of reference was tough, but it only made them more interested in what he had to say. 

And now, they were wanting to go with him. They spent more time following Waspinator around than any of them did Spider-bot, they asked Waspinator their questions and had learned a long time ago that Waspinator could out-fight any of them if need be. They scrapped with each other seamlessly throughout any given solar cycle, to relieve boredom or over big and small problems alike. 

The first time Ant-bot had tried to fight Waspinator, to really fight him, Waspinator had sidestepped his charge, caught one of his heels, and thrown him over his helm against the cliff face. Even though Waspinator wasn’t small anymore, Wasp had been, and so Waspinator remembered how to use another bot’s momentum against them. After that, Ant-bot had, however reluctantly sometimes, listened to Waspinator, respected Waspinator. They all did. 

Which was good. It was very good. Waspinator’s plans didn’t exactly involve too many other bots, but there was definitely room for bots on Waspinator’s side. He had to be careful with thinking he had friends, but having Predacons wasn’t bad. 

While Waspinator had been doing all his thinking, Scorpo-bot was in recharge, that much was clear, and Ant-bot and Two-head looked well on their way. The storm would probably go through the night cycle, and this was as good a nest to make as any…

Static and feedback suddenly screeched through Waspinator’s audials as his comm roared to life. He shot up, startled, one claw gripping the side of his helm. 

“Agh!” He snarled before accessing the comm again, “What Spider-bot want?” Waspinator demanded. 

Ant-bot had also leapt up at the sudden noise, sending Two-head crashing to the ground with a startled yelp.

“You see! The Queen has need of us!!”

He thrust one claw in the air, spun on his heel, and immediately started to march out towards the jungle. Waspinator shot out his unoccupied claw and grabbed Ant-bot’s scruff bar, optics still narrowed and waiting for a response. 

“Come back to the volcano,” Spider-bot’s voice said in his audial, “all four of you. This little errand’s a bit more… involved than the others.” 

The comm fizzled out, and Waspinator growled. 

“Well?” Ant-bot demanded, twisting around Waspinator’s grip on his scruff bar. Two-head and Scorpo-bot both looked at him, optics wide. Waspinator was the only one with a working comm link. 

“Spider-bot wants Predacons back at base. All Predacons.” 

A grin exploded across Ant-bot’s faceplate as Waspinator let him down, claws flexing and twitching as he grabbed Two-head and hoisted him onto his back. 

“I knew somethin’ like this’d happen soon!” Two-head whooped. “C’mon, ‘Ferno, giddyup!”

”Wait for Waspinator,” he said, hauling Scorpo-bot up. Only Waspinator and Ant-bot could fly, and it just didn’t make sense to make Two-head and Scorpo-bot walk when they could be carried, and they would all get to where they were going faster. 

The universe had decided to be a little kind, and the rain had let up from a downpour to a drizzle, the gray sky lightening as it did. The little thing at the back of Waspinator’s helm wasn’t happy to leave the cave, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as times before. Scorpo-bot latched his claws securely onto one of Waspinator’s arms, and with the droning sound of Waspinator’s wings and Ant-bot’s thrusters and another holler from Two-head, they took off towards the smoldering volcano. 

Chapter Text

“What are you waiting for, Autobot?” Bat aside the elevated vent cycle warnings, ignore the burning cracks in his armor, energon dripping into one optic, “ Finish me. ”

The Hammer crackles with energy. Whiplike blue flashes of lightning dance over his plating. It feels hot in his servos, hotter as his tensor cables strain with keeping it drawn backwards over his helm, ready to fire, alter the atmosphere, to strike down, kill, avenge—

“…and if you look to your left, you’ll be able to see the very crater left by the last known use of the Magnus Hammer, in the servos of Optimus Prime himself!” 

Optimus cycled his optics. Hard. The small crowd of bots in front of him murmured excitedly, standing on toe-segments and peering over each other’s helms, squinting in the sun for a look at the grand conclusion of the Earth Tour:

A crater in the concrete, with a few shards of what used to be a fusion cannon still sticking out of the pulverized asphalt. 

“Scan all the pictures you want, but please mind the field!”

The leader of this tour group shared a frame with Bumblebee, but held the attention of the group well enough. She’d introduced herself as Glyph, with the added fact that Earth and English had marked her 6000th language module download. She gestured grandly at the crater and stepped aside, letting the crowd swarm around it. 

The first small wave of Autobot-stamped ships that had arrived on Earth after his team’s return to Cybertron carrying the cold, gray frame of one of his closest friends had erected a little barrier in front of it, with exactly zero prompting from him or, to his knowledge, any of his teammates. It was small, just a transparent magneto-shield supported by a couple thin rods around the crater’s perimeter, but it had been enough to draw flocks of… interested bots. 

They stared at everything in Detroit with wide optics, with a soft kind of awe under the clicking camera-scans and their never-quite-hushed conversations with each other. They came by the shuttle, so frequently that Optimus had started to see new logos pasted onto their sides, offering a circuit-tour of the Milky Way as a whole, with Earth as the crowning jewel of the trip. 

Glyph’s small elbow nudged him. 

“Just wanted to say thank you!” She said, smiling. “I know you’ve got your servos full with your team and the hyu-mans , not to mention all the talk on Cybertron about the succession—”

“It’s nothing!” Optimus cut her off, rubbing at the back of his neck. “It’s nothing. I mean, Earth can be a bit… strange, if you’ve never been to an organic planet before.” He cast a sidelong glance at the stragglers at the back of the group. They seemed more preoccupied with scoping out the humans they could see down the streets that hadn’t been blocked off for Cybertronian tours. 

Glyph gave a short chirp. 

“That reminds me! Everyone!” She said, turning to the group and amplifying her vocalizer, “Please be sure to keep the dominant organic species in mind! Research has shown that they’re harmless to Cybertronians,” She waved a servo in the direction of a couple and their smaller human. “They’re far more scared of you than you are of them!”

This earned her some scattered, if somewhat nervous, chuckles. Optimus ex-vented and busied himself looking anywhere except the crater. Succession shouldn’t even have still been a topic of conversation. Ultra Magnus had succumbed to his injuries, returning to the Well of All Sparks not two cycles after Optimus and his team had briefly returned to Cybertron, without naming a successor. From what Optimus had heard, there hadn’t even been any last words. 

For better or for worse, the statutes that dealt with leadership had bumped Sentinel up from acting Magnus to just… regular Magnus. 

“…I’m just glad I was able to get a ticket!”

From the back of the group, two bots, one a soft green and the other a darker blue, were talking. 

“No, no, definitely. The spaces are so limited,” the blue bot sighed, “and what with all the credits going towards the defense budget…”

“My thoughts exactly. I just can’t help but wonder if that would be the case if—“ The green bot cut themself off and straightened, and Optimus didn’t miss the glance in his direction. 

The continued talk of succession, months after Ultra Magnus’ ceremonial smelting, was… strange. It was unsettling, no matter how dimly he was aware of it, to think that his designation was getting thrown around on Cybertron as… what? A challenger? An alternate option? The passage of power for the position of Magnus was absolute, Council-approved and sealed into the records. Optimus was a Prime , and with any luck, he’d stay that way. 

Glyph clapped her servos together, two sharp tings! that turned optics in her direction. 

“This monument,” ( Monument? Optimus didn’t recall anyone building it) “marks the halfway point of our tour. Next up is the tallest hyu-man building in Detroit, Sum-dac Tower! Although, I think we can all agree it’s not much next to Fort Max.” She laughed along with her group.  “Since Optimus Prime has worked closely with the organic who built the tower, he’s agreed to tell us a bit about—“ 

“OPTIMUS!” 

It was Sari’s voiceprint, no doubt about that, shouted and amplified from halfway down an adjacent street as Optimus whipped his helm to look. She was zipping towards them in a bright little blur of orange and blue, optics and jetpack trails alight. She cleared the helms of the tour group easily, earning a few startled shouts along the way (“No one said they could fly! ”) before settling into an easy hover that put her at optic-level. 

“ Whoo, I’m glad I caught ya! Arcee said you’d be out doing something…” Sari slowly spun in midair, seemingly just processing the sizable group of Autobots she’d spooked. “… else. I didn’t interrupt, did I?”

“Well— technically, yes, but you’re usually not free from your… elevated school this time of the cycle?”

”It was a half day today! Something about an ‘institutional time’, whatever that means, BUT!” Sari said, sticking both servos up for emphasis before forcefully pointing at him, “Arcee told me to give you a message!”

Arcee had made it very, very clear that whatever happened after everyone had arrived back on Cybertron, she would be staying at Ratchet’s side for it. After being checked three times over by every director at Iacon General to have some record of her miraculous recovery, they’d agreed that essentially releasing her into full-time medical care with Ratchet was a reasonable idea. It didn’t hurt that they both felt like they had a lot to catch up on. 

When everybody had returned to Earth, Arcee had come with them. She shared a room with Ratchet, who was, shockingly, happy to clear the space for her. In the last few months, she’d been accessing her schoolteacher protocols now that there was a young bot around to teach, and had been monitoring communications in her spare time. 

And when Arcee had a message for you, you listened. No matter how that message reached you. Optimus nodded, prompting, at Sari. 

“Something’s going down in Chicago,” a quick glance at a map on his HUD revealed a sprawling metropolitan area even bigger than Detroit’s, about three hundred human miles away, “a metal company just called in an alarm. They’re talking about these huge monster-things that look like… either plants or lizards, the screaming made it kinda hard to understand.” 

“Right.” He turned to the assembled tour group, whose attention was now squarely on him. “Apologies, everyone, but it looks like I’m needed elsewhere. Sari, is the jetpack—?” 

“The homing transport should be here just about…” A human-made buggy, little more than a platform with some attached wheels and motion sensors, puttered around the corner, bearing a bright red collapsible. 

“I thought you were supposed to monitor those things.” 

“I was monitoring it! …most of the way here.”

Optimus ex-vented, yanking the jetpack free from the magnetic field that kept it secured to the transport. 

“Right. And I think I’m right in assuming you weren’t planning on flying back to base?”

Sari giggled. 

“No way! What, you think I got my jetpack all warmed up for nothing? Besides, I’ve always wanted to see Chicago!”

There was little to no point in pushing back against Sari tagging along on a mission. Since Earth had become an Autobot tourist hotspot, the kinds of threats rarely exceeded that of an accidentally-kicked fire hydrant and petty crime. Sari had been testing her wheels putting a stop to them, and Optimus couldn’t lie, she’d taken to it like a racer to the road. 

He didn’t think lifting off was ever going to get any less equal parts disorienting and exhilarating as the ground disappeared from beneath his pedes, just like it was never going to stop feeling vaguely wrong having to tune out the sounds of cheering as he lifted off. 

Normally, when Waspinator took the ground-bound not-spacebridge to wherever Spider-bot sent him, he took a cycle or two to just stand still. Look around him. Take in the lack of walls and right-thereness of all the different ways Earth could be big and open. 

This time, getting sent with company didn’t afford him that luxury. 

“Ain’t nobody ever told us about—”

“You fool! These are the buildings that Waspinator has spoken of—”

“He didn’t say they were this big —!”

Spider-bot had sent them into the middle of another big human city. This one was by a huge lake, and had a river running through the middle of it. It kind of reminded Waspinator of a miniature version of Lower Iacon, dirtier and darker than the tallest residential buildings. Not as nice as the low, flat buildings in the middle of huge grass fields, but it was still a place. 

Spider-bot hadn’t bothered to put them exactly where they needed to be, even though Waspinator knew she could. Instead, he’d had to herd the Predacons through the narrow streets that were choked with those weird not-alts that carried screaming humans, past a big, fancy-looking building that had taken way too much effort to get Two-head to leave alone, and now they were here. Standing in front of a building with a sign that said something about “sushi”, whatever that was. 

“ This, ” he said, pointing across the street to the sturdier-looking building with blue on the windows, “is what Predacons are here for.”

Scorpo-bot was listening, Ant-bot was staring like usual, standing strut-straight at attention, and also helping by keeping a firm grip on Two-head’s shoulder. Not quite as bad as Waspinator had thought. 

“This place does metal refining,” Waspinator cocked his head, antennae twitching. Sirens in the distance. He had to speed this up. “Spider-bot wants gold, platinum, and palladium. Waspinator will stay here and keep watch, Predacons go inside and find.”

He put all four servos in front of him, flat. 

“Got it?”

Three nods. 

“Okay.” Maybe this could go some kind of alright. “Repeat what Waspinator just said.”

Ant-bot opened his intake like he was about to say something, then stopped, Two-head used his snake arm to scratch his helm, and Scorpo-bot simply kept staring at him. 

Waspinator felt one optic twitch and successfully beat down the urge to scream (even though it was a close match). 

“Glad to get away from that tour, huh?”

Optimus huffed behind his battle mask. 

“Was it really that obvious?”

“Come on, it’s always the same story!” Sari said, looping lazily around a cloud as they made their way towards Chicago. “They show up, stomp around, look at you and go ‘wow!’ and then they leave. Isn’t this at least a little more exciting?”

It was, but… it was wrong to say that a potential threat to Earth was exciting. It was concerning, it was worrying, it was… other things that should weigh on his processor more heavily than he felt them now. Not exciting. 

“I chose to come back because we still have a responsibility to this planet. You understand, don’t you?”

Sari nodded, shrugging with one of her barely-audible chirps. 

“Yeah, I get what you mean. ‘S why I go out ever day after school.”

“Anything give you any trouble lately?”

“Nope. The SUV’s still doing time, and somebody like me flying around scares ‘em off pretty good.”

“That’s only part of what I meant.”

Sari was only in the second portion of her first year at what Optimus guess was the human version of Boot Camp, minus the more dangerous training exercises. She huffed and rolled her optics, coasting slowly downward to be closer to him as grassland rolled along beneath them. 

“It’s okay. I’m just glad Charlie and I got our schedules to line up. She’s taking auto shop class this semester, but I didn’t think they’d let me into that one. But we’ve got English together, and she’s thinking about starting a band!” She squinted at something on her HUD. “Ooh, I wonder if she’s asking Miko about guitar…” 

Optimus nodded. Charlie Watson was a recurring figure in Sari’s stories from school, and, according to Bumblebee, was “pretty cool!” On the other servo…

“What about… the other one?”

“Ugh. Not now. I don’t even wanna think about Mikaela if I don’t have to.”

Even though the door was the tiniest thing Quickstrike had ever seen in his function, once they busted it and a good chunk of the walls open, the inside sure was something! All big and gray, tubes and pipes creeping like vines around the contraptions that were hissing and spitting like there was no tomorrow. 

Inferno had taken point, spraying a sheet of fire into the air. 

“This establishment,” he’d yelled, loud enough for every scared-looking critter in the place to hear, “is hereby claimed FOR THE ROYALTY!” Quickstrike had hissed his arm to add to the effect, and it sounded like it’d worked!

The critters were loud little things, and fast, too, scrambling and running for the hole that’d been their door, or disappearing into the maze of machines and pipes. Inferno nodded, satisfied with himself, and walked inside at a clip while Quickstrike and Scorponok trailed behind. Nobody could blame them, it wasn’t everyday that you got to go into a building!

“Now,” Inferno said, “we have been instructed to procure materials for Queen and Colony. It would first serve us to find these materials!”

Made sense to Quickstrike! 

“I’ll go lookin’ for the yellow stuff—”

“ Gold— ” Scorponok said nervously. 

“That’s what I said!” 

Inferno nodded, satisfied. 

“Very well. I shall take the…” he paused, optics squinting like he was trying to see the thought in his own helm, “ palladium, and Scorponok shall find the platinum. ”

Quickstrike didn’t blame him for having to think about it, the words sounded almost the same, and Waspinator had said they looked near the same, too. Inferno turned around and holstered his flamethrower, standing on the tips of his pedes to get a better look at the little segment of gray that was higher up than everything else. It had a little connector with it, tiny little blocks and some metal that went all the way up to it, probably for more things with tiny legs. Like the loud critters with the two legs, or the furry things that always darted out of their way back home. The ones that flapped wouldn’t need no help walking anywhere, so maybe they weren’t allowed in buildings—

“ Quickstrike, ” Scorponok hissed, halfway over to one of the tanks that was wider than he was tall, “go look for the stuff!”

“I was! ” he snapped, “Just thinkin’ is all—“

“But Waspinator said to be fast!”

“ Fine. ” Quickstrike groaned, and made his way over to the other tank. Scorponok was alright, but he was such a goody two-pedes when it came to doing what Waspinator said. And it wasn’t like Quickstrike was gonna up and leave or nothing! But there was only so much new stuff you could put in front of a mech and tell him to leave it alone—

Like whatever that was. 

Quickstrike had seen something out of his snake eyes, something bright. He poked his helm out from behind the big tank, looking with his bigger optics now. It was a box, about the size of one of the little running critters. It was mostly blue, but it had little spots on it that glowed different colors, and an even tinier blinking light on it. How was anyone supposed to resist checking something like that out!

It was heavier than he expected, and crashed on the hard gray floor when he tipped it over. 

“What are you—“

“I’m fine!” He called back, trying to sound as interested in the job they’d been given as possible. The outside was hard, and cracked when his snake bit into it. The other pieces could get peeled away, piece by piece with his other servo, and came away… wet? 

There was stuff inside it, stuff that wasn’t energon. It was thinner, and kind of… fizzly, in a couple different colors, and it smelled extra sweet, so maybe it wasn’t a half-bad idea to just taste a little—

“That is not what we came here for!”

Quickstrike groaned, not even turning either helm to look at Scorponok. 

“And how d’ you know that?” He demanded, ripping another side of the box off and spraying some more liquid across the floor.

“Waspinator didn’t say anything about… liquids? And that’s not yellow metal!”

Glaring, Quickstrike jabbed his snake at one of the rows of little capsules inside. 

“ Is too yellow! See!”

Optimus and Sari landed in front of a building that his HUD informed him was called the “Art Institute”, and promptly received a radio transmission from the Chicago police confirming that they were en route. Apparently this city had even worse driving problems than Detroit, and trying get to the spot of the disturbance was more challenging than they’d anticipated.

To save time, Optimus collapsed his jetpack wings inward, and was now running towards the location of interest while Sari flew beside him. 

“And just remember—“

“Keep my processor, be aware of my surroundings, and get people out of the way if things get hairy.” She finished for him. “This isn’t my first mission, Prime!” 

“I guess not,” Optimus said, “but that still doesn’t mean that—“

They rounded a corner, and Optimus instinctively threw his servo up, blocking Sari’s immediate flight path, because Waspinator was leaning on the shopfront of a sushi restaurant, not fifty feet away.

His optics widened as his processor helpfully brought relevant files to the top of his awareness. “Wasp never go back to Stockades—“ “No bot is innocent, Optimus! You of all bots ought to know that!” “It Waspinator now, Bumble-bot!” “That’s just the price of science,” “Either way, we’re rid of them both.”

Thrust back to reality, processor still racing, Optimus took a step back, servos up and guiding Sari along with him as Waspinator’s helm snapped in their direction. His mandibles clicked and his wings went up, claws tensed, wary and ready to fight in a nanoklik. 

“Woah!” Sari exclaimed under her breath, breaking the silence. “Who’s this?” She asked, voice nearly lowered into subfrequencies. 

“ Waspinator, ” came the growled response, “can hear fleshy-bot.”

Sari cringed, moving backwards in the air from the motion. 

“Oops.”

“I—” Optimus began, faltering, “Waspinator. We thought you’d gone offline on Dinobot Island. You and Blackarachnia.”

Waspinator chittered and narrowed his optics, hexagon lenses flashing in the sunlight.

“Hm. Waspinator harder to take offline than that .” His gaze flicked in the direction of the building across the street (the one with the giant hole in it, as Optimus now noticed), antennae twitching. “What Hero-bot want?”

“To find out what you’re doing here!” chirped a voice next to his shoulder, “It’s kind hard to ignore someone like you making a mess like this—”

“Waspinator not making—”

“Sari—”

“It’s true!”

“We are here, ” Optimus said forcefully, “to investigate what’s going on. You can’t just break into human settlements.” He thought for an instant. “You can contact me if you need something this badly. I don’t want there to be—”

Waspinator made a sound that was half scoffed static, half a harsh buzz. 

“ No. Waspinator done with Autobots. Autobots called Wasp traitor, Autobots lied to Wasp, Autobots made Wasp lose everything! ” He snapped his mandibles, purple optics burning as his helm twitched to one side. “Hero-bot not need to be here. Predacons will—”

“FOR THE ROYALTY!!!”

Optimus whipped his helm towards the strange battle cry, and only had a nanoklik to process what looked like another techno-organic tearing out towards the street from the hole in the building before he sent a rash of flame in his direction. 

Ducking out of the way as Sari did the same, Optimus then had no warning before something slammed into his midsection, sending him sprawling into the concrete. The something was a bot, another techno-organic, with blue and yellow plating and large red optics, joy making itself clearly visible, even without a standard intake. 

“I knew this cycle was gon’ be good!” 

Optimus rolled to the side, dodging a quick strike from an… arm that was also an organic creature, the fanged intake leaving a small crater in the pavement. He stood in time to find another gush of flame licking at his temperature sensors, and he spun around to find the same flamethrower leveled with his optics as its owner charged down the street towards him.

Then a zip of orange dove between them. Sari flexed both servos, spun in the air, then lashed out with a coil of electric blue cording aimed at the cackling techno-organic’s legs. She landed, skidding to a stop as her boots formed into cleats, giving her purchase as she yanked the cord tight.

The red techno-organic landed hard, smashing his chin on the concrete before giving another yell and trying to right himself. Optimus only had time to nod at Sari before the one with the biting arm was on him again. 

“I gotcha, Pri— HEY!” She yelled as she was scooped up by a gigantic (to her) claw, attached to a grayish techno-organic with a yellow visor that had emerged from the building. 

Okay. Make a plan. Get to Sari as quickly as possible. Keep the coiled arm off of his throat, don’t let the energon stop flowing to his processor. Shift his center of gravity, then throw the techno-organic off. Move in three, two—

The weight was abruptly wrenched off his back before Optimus could execute the command, and he gave an involuntary shout of pain as claws dug into the seam of his shoulder, past armor, scratching into his very protoform . 

One servo clapped to the injury, gritting his dentae, Optimus turned to see Waspinator holding the techno-organic that had been on his back by the scruff bar, looking twice as incensed as he had before.

“ ENOUGH! ” Waspinator roared. He wheeled on the techno-organic that had Sari, who was kicking and slashing at the armored claw that held her. “Put fleshy-bot down. ”

The claw popped open instantly, and Sari was flying before she even got close to the ground. She took a moment to stick her tongue out at the bot that had held her before returning to Optimus’ side, optics wide with concern when she saw the pink seeping out from between his digits. 

Waspinator slashed away the cord that still entangled the bot with the flamethrower with his free claw, then used that same claw to yank him to his pedes. 

“Predacons leaving,” he snarled. “Where are metals Waspinator told Predacons to get?” 

“Scorponok has them!” The other bot said zealously, even as he rubbed at his jaw, “and Quickstrike and I will assist with carrying the load!” 

The bot dangling from Waspinator’s other claw— Quickstrike , apparently, nodded. 

“But— come on, Waspy, we were in the middle of kickin’ some keisters!” he pleaded, wriggling around the hold on his scruff bar, “‘sides, it’s only two of ‘em! We got ‘em outnumbered!” 

“ No, ” Waspinator said, dropping the bot, “Predacons have what Predacons came for. Now, Predacons leaving. Go help.” He shoved Quickstrike in the direction of the building, then turned to the side, pressing a claw to his helm. 

“Spider-bot. Predacons done.”

Optimus felt his tanks drop. He saw Sari turn towards him, but couldn’t move to look in her optics. 

“Aren’t we gonna—?”

Distantly, he felt himself shake his helm and speak softly.

“No. They’re retreating, and we’re underprepared. I’m getting a sample of the comm frequency Waspinator’s using. We’ll be better prepared the next time they show up.”

The other techno-organics emerged from the building, holding what looked like metal carts that had been ripped from their tracks, all filled with loose chips and pieces of metal. Waspinator chittered again for their attention, then snapped his wings out. The techno-organic who had grabbed Sari, Scorponok, let himself and his cart be picked up. 

But Quickstrike leveled his arm at them, hissing with it. 

“Don’t think you’ve seen the last of us, you yellow-bellied windbags!”

The red techno-organic raised his flamethrower to the sky, standing at his fellow Predacon’s side. 

“Should the Royalty command it, we will not hesitate to destroy you!”

From further down the street, Scorponok twisted around, gesturing with a claw. 

“Inferno—!”

Relenting with a frustrated half-yell, Inferno knelt to allow Quickstrike to clamber onto his back. With that, the Predacons took to the skies, a massive cloud of dust swirling in their wake as sirens finally drew nearer. 

Now all that was left was to figure out what to tell Bumblebee. 

ORD South ATCT to all pilots: be advised of an unidentified aircraft in ORD airspace, last seen at 4,500 feet. Proceed with caution. 

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. 

Chapter Text

Optimus onlined his optics— and immediately slammed them shut against the slat of sunlight that fell across his faceplate from the open window of the warehouse, biting off a groan. He pushed himself to his pedes and in-vented deeply, beginning to stretch (mostly his left, as the sharp sting in his right shoulder joint reminded him).

Keeping with the tradition of the last couple hundred stellar cycles, Optimus hadn’t recharged particularly well. 

The fluxes had started up after the incident on Archa-7, and had never really gone away. Less often, he was back there, directly in the caverns, every sensor exactly as it had been when they were ambushed, watching Elita fall to what he thought had been her death. Mostly, though, it was just vague impressions, colors, and the inescapable, certain sensation that something was wrong.  

The feeling had stayed the same as time marched on, but the visual data his processor recalled changed, having been given new and exciting material to metaphorically chew through. Darkness, red optics, blinding blue light, blaring alarms, the hiss of a ruptured hull, the scream of the wind, urgency pounding through his chassis, weight in his servos and on his back—

It left him feeling like he’d skipped straight through recharge, like that tight feeling around his spark carried him clear through to the next solar cycle. 

This solar cycle was shaping up to be clear and sunny, same as the last, as Sari told them Earth’s summer inched closer. Optimus sent a wireless command to the energon dispenser, resetting his vents as he trudged to the main command area. His Team wasn’t awake yet, they all thought that he was the glitched one for waking up as early as he did. In Optimus’ opinion, it was just one of many steps a ‘bot had to take to keep vigilan—

Their replacement Teletraan-1 unit beeped urgently, Optimus’ energon halfway lifted to his intake. 

INCOMING TRANSMISSION

FORTRESS MAXIMUS, IACON, CYBERTRON

CALLER ID: SENTINEL MAGNUS

Optimus stared for a long moment. 

He had been online for eight whole cycles.

It would be so easy to let the call drop. He hadn’t been awake, he hadn’t seen it, the Magnus could leave a message if it was so important—

Optimus allowed himself to heave the largest ex-vent he was capable of giving, shutting his eyes and setting his cube off to the side against the protests of his rumbling tanks. He was still a Prime, it was his duty to answer a call from his superior. Not to mention that it was better to get this over with fast.

He picked up the call to a cacophony of noise and— what he thought was some kind of placeholder screen, but turned out to be Sentinel’s new helmet, incredibly close to the camera as he fiddled with something. 

“Is that other Boss-bot?” Someone— Jetfire, that was his vocalizer, called from offscreen. 

“Oh! Be telling him we are saying hello!” And there was Jetstorm, sounding like he was behind the video feed. 

“Mute it, both of you!” Sentinel yelled, drawing back from the monitor and pointing emphatically to the side, “Aren’t you two supposed to be supervising that hearing at Iacon General?!”

Optimus set his intake and waited as the Jettwins scrambled away, chirping dual “Yes, Sentinel Prime sir!”

“And that’s Sentinel Magnus to you!” He yelled after them, shaking a fist. 

Sentinel glowered in their direction for a moment, before apparently remembering that he’d made a call. 

Optimus saluted (it saved the cycles Sentinel would have spent yelling at him for not saluting if he just sucked it up and did it in the first place). 

“Sentinel Magnus.”

He doubted his tone could’ve been flatter if he were actively trying. 

“Optimus,” Sentinel said, “Nice to see that someone still respects the chain of command.” 

He paused for a moment, sitting back in the console’s chair. 

“Real shame to see that your profiling system is glitching.”

Optimus cycled his optics. 

“We saw that a couple threats had been mistakenly moved back into your ‘active’ category. Ones that we know are offline.”

Smelters below—

“I’m not doing this again, Sentinel,” Optimus said, “I saw it with my own optics, Waspinator is online, check my shoulder joint if you don’t believe me. Or is this more of a ‘Decepticons on Earth” situation, where you have to see a Predacon for yourself to—”

“Okay, okay!” Sentinel hissed, holding his servos in front of him. “Just… give me a nanoklik.”

Optimus watched in bewildered confusion as Sentinel stood, cape billowing behind him (and snagging on the chair), and walked offscreen. He heard the telltale clicks and beeps of acknowledgement, before the view of Cybertron in the call’s view was replaced with fortified, segmented shields, rolled down over the windows.

“There. Can’t have this particular bit of information getting out.”

“Why?”

“ Because—” Sentinel started, on the verge of a shout, before he lowered his volume, “Because your little mudball decided to turn itself into a tourist destination. We have Autobots on the ground there, civilian mechs, and—”

“And you want the visitors safe.”

Sentinel stopped, tilting his helm. 

“No, we don’t want to cause a panic!” He said, “The revenue from the travel is unlike anything Cybertron’s seen in millennia! We might even be able to get back into the billions on debt this stellar cycle…”

Optimus stared at the screen, words failing him. 

“Are you seriously—”

“It’s not like we’re not going to do anything about it!” Sentinel said, defensively raising a servo, “I called an emergency council meeting last night cycle. I was in favor of sending some Autotroopers to their location to just… finish the job, but no, Perceptor thinks they’re ‘scientific marvels’ and that they should be studied for the greater good—”

Optimus pinched his nasal ridge, the brim of his helmet down. Sentinel obviously didn’t notice. 

“So they decided to go through a middlemech,” He finished, vocalizer dripping with disdain on the last word. 

“Why aren’t they sending someone from the Science Guild?”

”We can’t be seen showing interest in techno-organics!” Sentinel said, like it was the most obvious thing in the universe. 

Optimus’ will to continue fighting this point was draining away by the nanoklik. 

“So you called to… alert us that we should expect… who did you hire? I don’t think many bounty hunters accept scientific work.”

“They don’t,” Sentinel admitted, “but you wouldn’t believe how many neutrals jump at an extended commission.” He leaned forward again, squinting as he hit a few keys, and soon a second window had opened on the screen, bearing an image file. 

The mech was grinning at the camera, that much could be seen even with the mask that covered the bottom half of his faceplates. His optics were bright yellow, his gray helm and crest bare, but showing signs of relatively neat upkeep. The picture was only from the chassis up, but his paint was warm purple and green, offset by yellow accents and a servo that looked like it was waving at the camera mid-image grab. 

“This is…” Sentinel paused as he narrowed his optics again, trying to read something on the screen. “Meso… Mesotrophic. No. Mesothorium—”

“Mesothulas.” Optimus read carefully from the profile that had populated under the image.

“That’s what I said. He’s a neutral scientist, but Perceptor tells me he has a pretty impressive scientific background, and he didn’t seem to think twice about studying techno-organics. Actually seemed kind of excited about it.” Sentinel shuddered. 

Optimus ex-vented, nodding and eyeing the cube that lay just out of the video screen’s view. 

“So we just have to… let him tag along whenever the Predacons show up?”

Sentinel waved a servo. 

“He’s a self-sufficient mech, you probably won’t even have to talk to him at all. The Council just felt you should be informed so he isn’t mistaken for a Decepticon or something.”

“Right,” Optimus said, sensing the end of the conversation, “We’ll keep our scanners open.”

“I tell ya, Optimus,” Sentinel went on obliviously, “It’s one thing after the next. This and then the offensive effort and that musician—” he shook his helm and scoffed, “It’s a good thing someone like me’s around to handle it all.”

Optimus couldn’t find the energy to respond. Blame it on the lack of fuel. 

A bang sounded from somewhere behind the monitor, and Sentinel looked up. 

“Ah, that must be Jazz. ONE KLIK—”

The call cut off unceremoniously, leaving Optimus with a blank monitor, save for Teletraan-1 asking if he would like to view the attached profile in greater detail. 

Optimus ex-vented, sat down, and finally took a pull from his energon. 

He took five nanokliks to savor it, pretend that he didn’t have to do this, then opened Mesothulas’ profile. 

Blackarachnia punched the key that opened the large bay doors, and let Waspinator in. 

She could hear him coming even when he wasn’t dragging what sounded like metal carts with no wheels, he chittered and growled incessantly , and today wasn’t any different. She turned the new helmet she was working on to the side, watching the light reflect back like liquid on the black metal. 

A crash as Waspinator threw down the load. Blackarachnia could practically feel his optics glaring, boring into her back. 

“So?” She said, voice echoing just a bit over the hum of the refinery beyond the walls, “How was the little field trip?”

Waspinator huffed. He reminded her sometimes of the ‘bots in boot camp that would run across the Academy’s path sometimes, but more sullen and with a greater capacity for violence. 

“Predacons got what Spider-bot wanted,” he spat, and then it sounded like he kicked at one of the carts. 

“No complications?”

”Had to try to explain metals to Predacons,” he said sourly, “And keep them from squishing fleshy-bots.”

About how she’d expected their first group mission to go. Less than promising, but they’d all apparently made it back online—

“Oh! And Autobots showed up.”

Blackarachnia whipped around. 

“What?”

“Spider-bot sent Predacons to middle of city, fleshy-bots noticed! Called for help and—“

“No Autobot would be able to drive that distance in the time you were there—”

“ Ohh, Spider-bot didn’t know? Hero-bot has big, fancy jetpack now—”

“How many times have I told you about your stupid nicknames—”

“We are here,” and it was Optimus’ voice dropping out of Waspinator’s intake, “to investigate what’s going on,” he narrowed his optics at her, and the next words were in his own nasally rasp, “Spider-bot remember now?”

Blackarachnia held his gaze, determined not to let any expression slip. Waspinator hardly ever touched the ability he was sparked with before she’d changed him, so much so that she sometimes forgot he had it. 

“If Optimus saw you, then we might have a problem.”

“Predacons been having problems…”

She tuned him out, looking at the metal on the floor and trying to think. It was alright. All this did was put a deadline on something that was going to get done. Her perfect techno-organic soldiers were already most of the way done, physically, she had the formula down pat. Four experiments had been more than enough to do that. 

Blackarachnia knelt, grabbing a tiny ingot of gold as Waspinator grumbled and shuffled out of her way, clicking his mandibles and flexing his claws—

His claws. 

She straightened up, snatching at his right primary claw as he snarled, her usual disgust for the filament-like setae on his arm buried under the possibilities that raced through her processor. 

“What Spider-bot—”

“What is this?” She demanded, every optic trained on the thick crust of congealed energon wedged between Waspinator’s digits. 

“Waspinator had to get Two-Head off of Hero-bot.” He said, looking perplexed, “Waspinator scratched Hero-bot by mistake. This his energon.”

Blackarachnia moved back to the table she had been working at, dragging a complaining Waspinator most of the way with her. She turned back with a pair of tweezers, and gently, carefully freed the crusted energon, the CNA.

Waspinator snatched his servo back, muttering under his vents. 

“Can Waspinator leave now—?”

She waved a servo over her helm, in the direction of the refinery output slot and its waiting cubes. 

“Yeah, yeah. Take fuel for everybody.”

Blackarachnia didn’t even hear Waspinator leave. With just this one, tiny piece now in her possession, getting the ball back in her court might not be so hard…

Chapter Text

“No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir,” Ms. Darby read again, “but I do bite my thumb.”

Sari’s English class was sixth period, in that space of the day that seemed like the most hopeless. Two periods to go, just long enough to make it feel like the day would never end . 

Charlie was finishing her third origami crane in her unassigned-assigned seat next to Sari. They had all gotten classroom copies of the play they were reading, but Charlie’s seemed to be the most beat-up. The pages were all dog-eared and soft in that way a book was when it was close to dying. 

Sari’s wasn’t too bad, but there was a stain on the first half of the pages that made them stiff and kinda hard to open. They were reading from a really old author who wrote plays, like, pre-modern steel old, and so far, they’d just been learning about his life in olden times. Lots of pictures of people in fancy clothes and neck ruffs. That had been on Friday, the day after her and Optimus’ trip to Chicago and Bumblebee’s freak-out. Today, Monday, they were reading about biting thumbs and fighting. 

“Alright, everybody,” Ms. Darby said, “what’s going on here?”

The board was divided in half. They’d been talking through the action, the old-timey language, and keeping track of the characters in different colors. “CAPULET” was written in purple on the left side, and “MONTAGUE” on the right side in red. 

Sari pretended to reread the lines. 

“Mikaela?”

“Well, it’s pretty clear they’re being insulted,” she said, and Sari could just feel that stupid smug ambience from across the room. 

“That’s right,” Ms. Darby gave a little congratulating point with her stylus in Mikaela’s direction. “But it looks like such a small, silly thing, right? I mean—“

She put her thumb behind her two front teeth and flicked it out. The class snickered. 

“That doesn’t seem like it’d cause a sword fight.”

Charlie folded down the head on her crane, then slid it forward across the desk and made it peck at Sari’s arm. 

“Charlie,” Ms. Darby said suddenly, and Charlie’s mop of brown hair fell in her eyes as she jerked her head up, “what’s another… rude gesture that have the same effect?”

Sari watched as Charlie thought, then glared at Mikaela when she heard whispering and giggling. 

Charlie was quiet for a long moment, then slowly raised her middle finger. 

The class laughed and Ms. Darby smiled. Any other teacher would’ve jumped at the opportunity to write Charlie up for that, but Ms. D was different. A little cooler. 

“Exactly,” she said, “but why would something like that be a reason to start a fight this big?”

“They hate each other already,” Sari said simply. She looked past Daniel Witwicky’s head out the window, at the city and the little bit of sky she could see, thinking about blips on monitors and energy signature tracking. “Anything seems like a reason when it’s like that.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Mikaela said, leaning forward, voice sweet like antifreeze was sweet, “don’t you help your Autobot friends fight the bad guys?” 

Sari, like a responsible teenager, did not punch her. 

“Yeah. I do. Or would you want a Decepticon to step on you and your expired lip gloss—”

“Girls.” Ms. Darby said sharply, “Enough. Sari does bring up a very good point, though. This is obviously a fight that’s been going on for a long time. ‘Ancient grudge break to new mutiny’… ”

They read further without anything else really happening. Sari stayed awake by trying to read the parts in her friends’ (and enemies’) voices. “Peace? I hate the word” actually did sound like something Megatron might say. 

The bell rang sooner than she thought, and she and Charlie stood together. They would swing by the English classrooms to walk with Miko to the history class they all had for seventh period. Charlie left her cranes on the desk. 

“I’m just not sure why we’re studying this at all,” she was saying as they walked, “it’s not like there aren’t cooler plays. Like, why aren’t we looking at the one with witches?”

Sari didn’t quite know which one Charlie was talking about, but a quick search in the corner of her vision should fix that…

“Macbeth, right?”

“Exactly!” Charlie said, throwing one hand up, “it’s so much cooler. And everybody knows that they both die at the end of this one, so what’s even the point?”

Sari hadn’t known that. She’d been driven to databases, again, after they’d finished reading that book about the rich guy and the green light, just to keep up with what everybody was saying about the play that was also a love story they were reading next. 

It was like that with a lot of things, that she either just hadn’t seen or read or heard of before, or other stuff that was… less physical. Like having a mom or having been to middle school, or elementary school for that matter, spending her days playing video games and running around with other kids, not just Autobots. 

Charlie understood, or if she didn’t, she didn’t make a big deal about it. She was nice enough to either just fill Sari in or actually be excited about getting to tell somebody else about the joy of being twelve and winning your class a pizza party. She didn’t make her say out loud that her “extracurriculars” were mainly flying around the city on her jetpack and stopping what Captain Fanzone called “petty crime”. 

“Oops!”

Sari stumbled as Charlie crashed into her, books and pens going everywhere as Mikaela fragging Banes shoulder-checked her. She looked back at them, smirking as she continued down the hall. 

Sari didn’t feel like putting up too much of a fight with urges to punch that weren’t befitting of a responsible teenager. She’d bitten her way out of a tight spot before, she could do it again—

“Hey,” Charlie’s hand came down on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

“No!” Sari exclaimed, clenched hands balled into fists, “it’s not! What do you mean—”

“I mean, ” Charlie said, kneeling to grab her notebook and a handful of pens, giving her a look, “it’s okay. ” 

Oh. 

That was a look that she’d shared before with Bumblebee when they decided to go to Five Banners and tell Optimus it was a fact-finding mission, with Bulkhead when they went and repainted Powell’s signs, with Prowl when he agreed to show her the lethal-level ninja moves. 

Ignoring the twinge in her heart— spark, Sari smiled back and helped Charlie up. 

One minibot and two hundred and thirty seven point four square miles of city. Endless highways, urban sprawl, tight corners, something new every day and down every road—

And Bumblebee was going stir-crazy. 

There’d been nothing to do for months after they defeated Megatron (for the second time) and saved the city (for the… umpteenth time). It was slow, happy, and that was great! It was great that they didn’t have to worry about getting slagged by Decepticons or the Elite Guard breathing down their necks or getting their heads cut off or melted by acid or whatever. They’d done what they always did, helped the humans out with repairs and rebuilding, done repairs on the spacebridge that now sat on top of Sumdac Tower, it was great. 

And nothing had changed once other Autobots started to get curious! Scrap, it’d even been really fun the first couple of times, before actual bots stepped up as guides and everybody had just swarmed around Bumblebee and his fellow Team members with a million and one questions. He had fun answering them, telling them all his most kick-aft stories about fighting the Cons (Optimus had told him to keep his intake shut about the human threats they’d faced. The ‘Bots from Cybertron were still scared of them, like Jazz had been and Bee guessed Sentinel still was). It had been amazing, holding everybody’s attention in the palm of his servo, having them all look at him with nothing but admiration, awe, even envy in their optics. 

And then… he hated to say it like this, but it got old.  

It was like the first couple decacycles they’d been on Earth, before Starscream had shown his ugly faceplate and launched them all into Con chaos. All they’d been doing was going around the city area, looking out for… municipal irregularities, was what Prime called them. Potholes, Earth animals stuck in trees that didn’t belong there, fires, crashes, stuff like that. 

When you’d been running with blaster fire, regular fire, explosions, metal-eating nanites, hyperfrost, sonic attacks, swords, null rays, time-stops, acid, power-stealing, decapitation, cybervenom, bounty hunters, space barnacles, and the general threat that you might die at your heels for as long as it felt like he’d been, present conditions felt a little… boring.  

Was boring the wrong word? Maybe it was, maybe it was better to say that it felt like there was too little going on, like something should be happening, but it wasn’t. 

And now that Sari had upgraded herself, she had to do what Bumblebee thought sounded like human boot camp, even though her creator said that she was physically only eight or so stellar cycles older than she was before! That was basically nothing! Even so, that still meant she was cooped up in some building for megacycles every day when she had to be there, plus all the time she had to spend doing “home-work” for boot camp. And she was doing patrolling and crime-stopping of her own on top of all of that. 

It’d been almost a month since they’d last been able to hang out, just them.

So that left Bumblebee where he was, making his rounds around Dodge Park and flipping between radio stations on loop. Earth’s sun was brighter than Cybertron’s, nicely toasty, and was doing an almost passable job of distracting him from the fact that there was a giant monster techno-organic bug that hated his inner workings and absolutely wanted him dead. 

Bumblebee slid over into the next lane, weaving between cars and trucks and ignoring honks. There’d been just a handful of seconds on Dinobot Island where he thought that the whole thing with Waspinator would end well, that his apology would be accepted and he wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore, and those had been dashed instantly by the next crazy string of words out of Waspinator’s intake. After the explosion, he’d thought that at least the danger was over, even if Waspinator went offline as he’d been online: a huge crankshaft. 

Arcee had tried to talk to him a few times over the couple of days after they all learned about the Predacons, with that vaguely disappointed or frustrated look in her optics, for more information about the whole situation. Even though Bumblebee thought he and Bulkhead explained it pretty well, she still seemed put off by it. Why, really, Bee couldn’t say. 

As far as he was concerned, Wasp had gotten out of life as good as he’d given. If he hadn’t been so… mean and suspicious, Bee probably wouldn’t have even suspected him! Shockwave wouldn’t have even needed to pin his comm on anyone else! And even though he did, it was evidence, hard proof that Bee had seen with his own optics, heard with his own audials, anyone would have thought the same if they were in his pedes. 

And Shockwave had— Bee hated to admit it, but Longarm had been nice. Genuinely nice. It had felt like he was the only one in the entire camp who actually believed that Bee could do what he said he would do, join the Elite Guard and become all that he was meant to be, like he thought it was so possible he was helping with the spy bot situation instead of trying to take the credit for himself. 

Looking back it was stupid, it was so stupid, everything seemed so obvious. Bumblebee accelerated the nanoklik the light turned green, darting between cars to merge onto the street. The red lens on Longarm’s forehelm, the way his servo on Bee’s shoulder felt three times as heavy as it should be, the vacant, empty look in his optics that snapped into smiling or frowning or anything when he noticed someone was looking, everything had been an act, the longest con by the creepiest Con he’d ever seen, every time he listened to a story or laughed at a joke or said that he was from east of Iacon had been fake , a sheen of polish over—

His radar beeped at him, loud enough to knock him out of his own helm, once, twice, three times. The signal was too big to be anything but a ship entering the atmosphere, and it was heading for the Park. Bee took a deep vent, closing the radar display and making a sharp left. He’d done this a million times. He could welcome a tour ship, field a few questions, snap a few pictures. It might even be enough to take his processor off of… everything, even just for a little bit. 

Bumblebee didn’t have to battle too much traffic to make his way back to the park, which had kind of become an unofficial landing pad for ships arriving via Earth’s spacebridge that didn’t have the capacity to hover in-atmosphere for megacycles on end. It was mostly empty today, just a couple smaller shuttles parked over on the far ends. They tried to leave as much of it open to the humans as they could, you know, it was their park first. 

It actually looked like he’d been a little late on tracking the ship, he could see a distinct dark shape on the green grass. Weird. Usually their sensors picked it up while it was still in orbit, or at the very least passenger transports were slow and steady in landing. Bee swerved up onto a curb and transformed in midair, sailing over the little fence around the park and landing on his pedes. 

He screwed up his optics, squinting at the ship that’d landed, partly shaded under a tree. The longer he looked, the more sure he was that this… probably wasn’t a passenger transport. It was smaller, for one, more like a skiff than anything else, with dark plating and a long, low profile, with sharp thrusters and miscellaneous pointy things that weren’t exactly giving Bee the best feeling about this. 

He stepped closer, sending a quick ping to Prime just in case. They hadn’t seen so much as a troublemaking neutral since after they took Megatron and High Command in, but something that looked this suspicious probably meant he should at least do… some kind of check. 

There was a breeze, just enough to rustle the leaves over his helm. The light shifted, and Bee could feel his plating tick as it started to cool down. He made his way under the raised hull, between two supports that propped it up on the ground and probably acted like stabilizers when it was flying. It was smooth, black-purple, just enough like the glimpses of the Nemesis he’d seen from space and on the moon to pull the image files to the front of his processor. Looking up at the plating over his helm, where he would’ve guessed the pilot’s seat would be, he saw a dark shine run over a set of characters that almost blended into the black against them. Ther— There-op-side? Th—

“Theraphosida.” Said something from behind him. 

Bumblebee didn’t scream, and he didn’t flail, but he might have jolted a little bit and spun around with a small noise of surprise. Nothing excessive. Nothing excessive at all. But anyway, he whipped around and very nearly got his stingers out, aiming up. 

There was a helm poking down from a hatch in the hull, fixing him with a bright yellow stare. 

“My ship,” the mystery mech went on, “and I’d be much obliged if you stopped skulking about it. I reserve that right for myself.” He chuckled.

Bumblebee cycled his optics a few times, rooted to the spot as the mech swung down from the ship, landing neatly on his pedes. He was, Bee noticed, pretty distinctly Con colored. Lots of purple and green and yellow, and, kinda worryingly, no insignia. 

“Well,” the mech said again, “You don’t look like the Prime I was told about. Too short.” 

Bee had enough time to scoff, affronted, before the bot went on. 

“Eh, I suppose cloaked entry wasn’t the most friendly way of getting here,” he said, walking towards Bumblebee and forcing him to step backwards into the sunlight, but looking more like he was talking to himself, “but one can never be too careful in the first moments of a new experiment!”

He laughed, raspy and vaguely sinister, which did not do anything to convince Bee that any part of this was good news. 

“But oh, look at this!” The newcomer said, throwing his arms out and gesturing to the wide expanse of park around them, again, too fast for Bumblebee to get a word in edgewise, “such biodiversity! And on such small strata, too! All the way down to the primary productive trophic level—”

Enough was enough. Bumblebee’s turn to talk now. 

“Alright, now just hang on a nanoklik!” He exclaimed, “What are you— how did— are you the— who are you?”

The mystery mech turned to Bee with a withering and uniquely unimpressed glare. He’d been looking at the leaves on the fringes of a tree and seemed kinda put out at having to stop. 

“Hm, let’s see… Cybertronian, my ship, potentially, and Mesothulas . ” He said, ticking the answers off on his digits. 

Then he went right back to looking at the leaves and tapping on a wrist-mounted datapad. 

“And to answer the question you didn’t ask, I am here on a research commission offered by your Autobot Science Guild. And if you have the means to do so, I would very much like to speak with Optimus Prime.”

After a ten-cycle long call with Bumblebee that mostly consisted of… offended yelling, Optimus had managed to get them both back to the base. Mesothulas neglected to scan an Earth alt  mode, but was Autobot by frame, and Bee had said he drove with. Some regard for traffic laws. 

Bulkhead was sitting on the floor, working on another painting that he said he was going to donate at the request of some “human doctor people”, even though Optimus couldn’t really fathom why they’d need it for anything medical. Ratchet was stationed by their main monitor, reading or rereading Mesothulas’ profile while Arcee typed at her lesson plans for Sari. 

Optimus himself was tracing a line from the open main doors straight back to the Autobot insignia on the floor. It might be better to stand directly at the doors, better to… greet the scientist? But then again, Bumblebee knew where he was going, and it might force them both to transform earlier than they expected and then that would throw everything off—

“Prime. ”

Optimus stopped in his tracks, turned towards Ratchet’s voice. 

“You’re wearing a track in the floor, for spark’s sake. They’re ten nanokliks away, just stay where you are.”

Arcee looked up from her work, shooting him a softer look. 

“It’s alright, Optimus. I know meeting new ‘bots can be—”

Tires screamed on the pavement outside, and Optimus’ optics and finials shot up in the direction of the sound. 

Bumblebee flipped out of his transformation sequence through the open doors (Optimus privately noted that his second thought had been right) and immediately shot Optimus a look, optics burning and intake screwed up in a tight, frustrated line. 

“I got your mech!” he proclaimed, throwing his servos up and walking straight over to Bulkhead, “Mesogleas, or whatever.”

“Mesothulas.” came another voice as the mech in question made his way inside. He held his arms half to his chassis, digits flexing as he twisted his helm, taking it in. 

Optimus was realizing too late that he didn’t actually know how to properly greet a neutral Cybertronian. But he’d been sent on behalf of the Science Guild…

He stood at attention and briefly saluted. 

“Welcome to Earth, Mesothulas. I’m Optimus Prime, and my Team and I—”

Mesothulas made a sound like his engine was failing to turn over that quickly devolved into a full-out laugh. The rest of his words stuck in Optimus’ vocalizer as he stared, what could have—

“And what exactly is so funny?” Ratchet snapped. 

Mesothulas leaned back, brushing a servo over one optic and ex-venting the last of his laughter. 

“Ah… oh, your little military theatrics.” he swatted the air playfully with one servo, voice suddenly flat, “I’m not doing that. Anyway—”

He swiveled on one pede, walking towards their Teletraan unit. 

“Let’s see what we’re working with!”

Optimus stared after him, at a complete loss. His Team sported similar shades of shock and (in Ratchet’s case) outrage, and Bumblebee hiked his shoulders up and gestured at the neutral with an expression that could really only mean “See?!”

Mesothulas waved an arm at the rest of their base as he stared at their main console, shooing Ratchet out of the way with his other servo.

“Well!” he said brightly to… no one in particular, digits flying over the console’s keys, “this is. Functional. If a bit ramshackle… how did this come together?”

Optimus nodded in Arcee’s direction, grateful for her servo on Ratchet’s shoulder. 

“We— the humans of this planet were kind enough to give us some of the materials, and we were also forced to take some parts from our ship. Like the original Teletraan-1 unit.”

“Ahh, cannibalism!” Mesothulas laughed, “how fun.” 

He paused, yellow optics darting around the screen as he muttered to himself. 

“Why are your files organized like this?” he said finally, “Are your profiles not sorted by type?”

“They’re organized by affiliation, kid.” Ratchet snapped, elbowing Mesothulas out of the way. 

“We found it was easier to keep all the Decepticons in one place.” Optimus said, trying to convince himself that it would make a difference in Mesothulas’ mind. 

Mesothulas hummed, tilting his helm in the other direction this time. 

“Hm. I suppose. It stands to reason that you’d allow something like that, you’re just a field medic. Science demands something a bit more… rigorous.”

Ratchet’s engine growled as he rounded on him. 

“Just a field medic—”

“Your focus is on the mechs you’d ideally be treating, you’re not concerned with the biology of your enemies! I see only descriptions of weaponry and exploits here, there is nothing that lends itself to research of my caliber!”

“And what exactly would that be?”

“I,” Mesothulas said, flexing his servos again, “am a scientist. I intend to gain a better understanding of what I believe to be the next major breakthrough in robotic life in this universe, and I cannot do that at present if there is next to no information in your drives about them!” 

“And it took this long for you to take your shot at this study?” Ratchet challenged. “I thought a mech as obsessed as you sound might be a little further along by now.” 

Mesothulas snickered. 

“Ha! I’ll concede that point. Though not for lack of trying. The only one I’d ever even heard of up until just a few cycles ago was not too keen on a partnership with me.” He pushed off from the console, rolling one shoulder joint. “Blackarachnia seems most content to work alone, and though I understand the sentiment, merely speaking with her would be invaluable to my research!”

Optimus locked optics with Ratchet and ex-vented, intake pressed into a tight line. 

He crossed the room and accessed the Predacons’ shared file, pulling Blackarachnia’s profile to the main view. 

“We’ve had a few… encounters with her ourselves.”

Mesothulas spun around, yellow optics wide. 

“Here?”

Optimus nodded and quickly moved out of the way as Mesothulas rushed back to the main screen and slotted a datastick of his own into one of the info-ports. 

“Bumblebee and Bulkhead first encountered her in the city on a human holiday almost a stellar cycle ago.” 

“What does she want with you?” Mesothulas didn’t move from the screen as his digits clattered across the keyboard, copying and uploading large chunks of text. 

“It’s…” Optimus could feel Ratchet’s optics, Arcee’s optics, Bulkhead’s, Bumblebee’s on him, just say it, “personal, on some level. And the last we encountered her, she was trying to find a way to change herself back into a full Cybertronian.” 

Mesothulas froze. 

“You’re. She used to be Cybertronian? That’s your theory?” His voice had taken on a strained note of disbelief. 

“He doesn’t think,” Ratchet said quietly, “he knows.”

“How?” Mesothulas demanded, rounding on him, “What proof do you have? This changes everything if it’s true, how do you know—?”

Optimus battled down the roil in his tanks and forcefully reminded himself that this was an operative of the Science Guild on a Magnus-ordered commission, and that withholding information was anything from insubordinate to felonious under the right circumstances, and steeled himself. 

“I knew her before the incident,” he said. 

Mesothulas’ optics widened in a silent, impatient go on.

Giving a report. That was all he was doing. 

“We were in the same Academy cohort together, and she was called Elita-1 when I knew her. Her ability lets her download and copy other mechs’ powers, and at one point, I allowed myself, her, and another cohort member to investigate the planet Archa-7 in hopes of recovering Decepticon resources.”

He swallowed. 

“While investigating, we were attacked by native organic spiders, and the structure we were on began to collapse. Just before escaping, Elita’s power failed and she disappeared into the ship.”

Just giving a report. He’d given this one before. Not difficult.

“She told me that she tried to use her power on the spiders, but was infected with their venom instead. Her last known location was a lab on Dinobot Island, and she’d managed to turn another Autobot into a techno-organic. The experiment caused a trans-warp explosion, and both of them were presumed offline until very recently.”

It was too quiet. 

His chassis was tight, his spark pounding in his audials, there was something thick and heavy in his vents.

Distantly, Mesothulas was saying something. 

“That is…”

His shout of “Incredible!” was drowned out by the scream of an alarm klaxon over Optimus’ comm and the base’s audio system. 

Optimus’ processor snapped back into place. That was a centralized proximity alert. Something was happening, close, and now.

No time for anything else. 

“Autobots,” he called as his Team leapt up, “Transform and roll out!”

Revenge. The thought was scraping the inside of Waspinator’s processor, scratching like digits on a wall, on plating, and he couldn’t wait.

The ground-bridge took longer to power up than it ever did, Spider-bot couldn’t say her stupid, complicated instructions fast enough, the nanokliks and cycles crawled by. Even the zap of going to the somewhere else felt stretched, sending a shudder through his plating and making his spark hum in tune. 

Then the electric blue prickle faded away, and he squinted and snapped his mandibles as his optics recalibrated against the sun. 

They were back in the city, in the middle of a street, horns blaring around them, and Two-head had just landed on the front of one of the not-alts. Waspinator could hear screaming from inside it.

Ant-bot greeted the city where Hero-bot and his Team was, where Bumble-bot was by cracking his neckplates with a barked laugh and slinging his flamethrower out to the side. 

Two-head managed to pull his pede out from the hood of the screaming fleshy-bot container with Scorpo-bot’s help, and he looked up at the skyline with huge optics as Waspinator beat his wings one, two times. 

“Well I’ll be!” he said, snake arm shielding his optics from the sun, “This the same city?”

“No,” Waspinator groweld, barely hearing himself over the buzzing racket in his processor, the anticipation rattling in his limbs, “different. Has Autobots.” 

“Shall we prepare for a fight?” Ant-bot clicked the little lighter flame on, “For Queen and Colony we will slay any who oppose us!”

“No,” Waspinator bit out, tasting something like energon and feeling his stingers spark, “Spider-bot has plan. Fight happens later. Now…” 

He leaned forward, planting one pede and wedging one claw under the front of the not-alt Two-head had stepped on. The fleshy-bots scrambled out, and Waspinator hefted it over his helm. 

It went through the air almost too quietly, but made up for it with a big crash and a bigger boom as it landed, crumpled, then exploded, urged by Ant-bot’s happy burst of fire. 

Waspinator swept his pede back, ripping up a path of concrete, and shot a spray of stings up the street as fleshy bots ran every direction.

“Predacons,” he roared, snapping his wings open wide, processor red with revenge, “TERRORIZE!”

One of, if not the most important things in this life (or unlife, whatever it is you wanted to call whatever he had going on) was persistence, plain and simple. 

Agreements were rarely made after one meeting, alliances could take stellar cycles to form, and under duress, it was often one’s only option. Millennia of being persistent had made him rather good at it. 

So, as infuriating as his lack of luck with the Predacons had been a few cycles ago, that was no reason at all to abandon the plan entirely. If anything, it was a reason to continue. New troops were in short supply, and he was not about to let these ones slip from his servos without so much as a fight. 

He’d gone back to his makeshift home, done a little thinking, and decided that a different approach was perhaps in order. They didn’t seem to respond well to cordial greetings, maybe he was going about this in too complicated a manner? Energon was always a safe bet, and he knew for a fact that techno-organics still took it as fuel thanks to Blackarachnia, but what else could they want? Starscream didn’t even know where they vanished off to, or how they managed to vanish there. 

These were all things that could (ideally) be remedied with more information. So he kept his optics on the scanners, flew around a bit, waiting for another incidental peep that he could take advantage of before the Autobots. 

And lo and behold! An attack, mounted directly in the middle of the city, clogged with human traffic and all. Starscream surveyed the situation from about twice as high as the big, ugly tower where Megatron had kept his moldering head for however long, then swooped just a bit closer for a better look. 

The Predacons… didn’t seem to be after anything. At least not this time. They destroyed and blasted indiscriminately, crumpling and ripping up their pick of the choke of vehicles on the road, taking potshots at skyscraper windows, one of the occasionally sending gouts of fire into the air, cackling all the way. Certainly a turn from their first mission Starscream had personally witnessed. 

Soon enough, the plucky little team of heroes arrived, sirens blasting and sporting a new, purple member? Something at the back of Starscream’s processor swore that the mech was familiar, no files presented themselves, so oh, well, he couldn’t have been that important. 

But apparently he wasn’t fast enough for this particular encounter, again. No sooner had the Autobots set clunky pede on the scene were the Predacons on them like space barnacles, utterly vicious now that they weren’t being restrained by their green leader. 

In fact, he looked the most enthusiastic to be fighting. 

Ah! There it was! What said “I’m on your side” better than giving some actual assistance in a fight! With him on their side, the Predacons would outnumber those puny Autobots, and his superior firepower and tactical knowledge would make all the difference. 

Starscream dove, wind whistling across his plating. Which one, which one… ah. Megatron’s defeat, that annoying little Prime that had been so insistent on protecting the Allspark, currently locked in combat with a flamethrower under his ax. 

When you had it in a fight, momentum was not a thing you wanted to give up easily. Starscream leveled with the pavement, claws extended as he hurtled forward, and slammed into the Prime, wrenching him away from the Predacon with a vindictive shout. He felt glass crunch under his left null-ray and grinned, shoving the Prime backwards.

“Autobots!” He crowed, “Predacons. We meet agai—”

Something was… off. 

He cycled his optics once, twice, but the blue-tinged shimmer of the air refused to go away. 

The Prime seemed to notice it too, as he glanced at the rest of his Team, still locked in combat, and Starscream’s processor caught up an instant too late. 

The blue grew brighter, a sharp sensation prickled at his extremities, and with a zap and a blinding flash, the world went white. 

Chapter Text

Bumblebee emerged from floating weightlessness, then promptly smashed his face into the dirt. 

Dirt? 

Dirt, it was soft and squishy and weren’t they supposed to be on pavement? Then he rolled out of the way, because there was a claw buried in the ground right where his helm would have been. 

He sprang up, turned around where was he?! and immediately caught Waspinator’s vicious backhand to the chassis. 

His vision flashed white, he heard Prime shout something, heard his own plating slam against the trunk of another tree, the strut-rattling growl of something way too big over him—

“GET AWAY FROM HIM!”

He pushed himself up just in time to watch a wrecking ball whistle through the air, cracking Waspinator on the side of the helm and he was so close to Bumblebee that he could see the little hexagons in his optics, get up and get away.  

They were somewhere that was— green, very green, and his first thought was of Dinobot Island, but it was darker here, higher humidity pricked at his sensors, the trees were different, somehow, and oh! Right! Can’t forget the Predacons trying to slag him and his Team stomping around the place!

Ratchet’s magnetic field crackled around one Predacon, claws snapping inches away from his faceplates, he caught the flash of red and magenta that was Prime and Starscream? he couldn’t see Arcee anywhere, or that creepy scientist, but Waspinator had grabbed the cable that connected Bulkhead’s wrecking ball to the rest of him and yanked, sending him straight into his waiting blasters, so Bumblebee kind of had bigger problems to deal with here. 

He dove out of the way, dodging left, firing off a shot into Ratchet’s magnetic field and frying the Predacon inside it, who was sent flying towards Prime by the explosion.

“Doc-bot!” For once, Ratchet’s perpetually grumpy faceplates were kind of a comfort. “Where the spark are we?!”

“Beats me, kid,” he said, “but you might want to duck!” 

Bumblebee almost asked what for, but then remembered that those rapidly-approaching pedesteps belonged to a Predacon who wanted to kill him, and dropped flat. 

Inferno watched as Waspinator was seized by some sort of crackling pink energy and swung, snarling and swiping, into the thick of the jungle, away from the Autobots he had been charging. Priming his flamethrower with a distinctly satisfying click, he met Quickstrike’s optics from where he crouched behind the large green Autobot, perfectly clueless as he groaned about his injuries sustained at Waspinator’s servos. 

He nodded, denta bared in a smile, set his gaze on the Autobot with the prongs still extended from his arms, felt the promise of fire licking the edges of his spark, then leapt into the air, aided by his wings. 

“For Queen and Colony!” He proclaimed, leveling the weapon, “TERRORIZE!!”

He was growing rather fond of that battle cry! Fast, powerful, and something about it just seemed to encapsulate their mission and purpose for the Royalty. 

Inferno rained fire down on the hapless Autobots, targeting the pair that Waspinator had been after, forcing them to run in the opposite direction, towards the struggling pair that consisted of the Autobot that had accosted them in the first city, and what Inferno thought might be the mech Waspinator had called a “Decepticon” with venom in his vocalizer. They were fighting too, but that was to be expected. 

Quickstrike gave a whoop of victory from atop his perch on the green Autobot’s shoulders, snake arm waving triumphantly with something clutched in its jaws. Ah! The… SRE? CNA? The… thing the Queen had instructed them to retrieve! Excellent!

Inferno shot his fist into the air, acknowledging his fellow soldier’s accomplishment with a victorious shout, before he felt something close around his pede. He barely had time to see the flicker of pink energy before he was yanked towards the ground. 

But! The foolish Autobot had underestimated him! Inferno rolled in the air and furiously beat his wings, not against the energy’s pull, but forward, crashing himself directly into the very mech who sought to bring him down!

He missed the small yellow one by a bit, but no matter, for focus on the task at servo was paramount! He flipped the struggling Autobot over, pinning the pesky conductors prickling with magnetic energy at his sides, keeping them there with his legs and secondary servos. A rustle in the bushes ahead of him told him that Waspinator was likely on his way back, and Inferno began the hurried business of locating the thing for himself, sinking his claws into the Autobot’s back until they came up pink— success!

The Autobot thrashed and Inferno’s processor snapped back from the happy, bright fire of victory and back to the task of Royal command. Tightening his grip, he snapped his wings into position and took off, straight up, dragging the Autobot with him. 

Such a meddlesome intruder to the Colony’s territory should be burned without hesitation— but something that spoke a bit calmer in the back of his processor noted that the Queen enjoyed picking such things apart! Inferno himself had been included among them, and would be again if she decided it so!

Inferno nodded to himself, pleased at the thought of preemptive action for the glory and happiness of the Royalty, and decided that the river just a few kliks away from this clearing-hill would be an excellent place to dump such a thing until it was needed again. 

Scorponok came back to himself slowly on the spongy ground, groaning and feeling like his processor had been stirred with a stick. Everything hurt, and everyone seemed like they were yelling, and metal was crunching and moving in front of him—

Oh. That was right. The mission. 

Little blips from the network that linked him to the rest of the Predacons said that their mission was two-out-of-three done. Quickstrike and Inferno had to hang back because of… well, Blackarachnia had said a lot of stuff about “sample contamination” and other fancy words, but the most important thing was that they had to stop once they had the energon she wanted, or something bad would happen. 

He stayed where he was, watching the Autobot they’d seen before spin around, catching a strike from the mech his memory file tags helpfully said was called “Starscream” with the blunt side of his ax. Scorponok’s superoptic ridges knit together over his visor, Blackarachnia had said they already had what she wanted from that Autobot…

He should really be doing something, but getting between the whirlwind of claws and blades for something that he hadn’t been instructed to get didn’t sound… super great. Time to think. Do some thinking. There were three Autobots and three of them. Quickstrike had been sneaking up on the big green one, Inferno had reported a victory, which meant there was only one left. One left for him. One. Okay. That was doable. 

Right?

He peeked up from the gaps in his claws, just in time to hear something coming up behind him, and fast. The little yellow Autobot was headed in his direction, aimed for the two others that were still fighting. 

“Boss-bot!” he yelled, bringing up his tiny stingers, “thought you might need some he -AAALP!”

The word turned into a yell as he was snatched off the ground, the Decepticon’s servo closed around his chassis. 

“This again!” Starscream sneered, holding the Autobot at arm’s length as the other Autobot tensed, weapon raised. “I might just do us both a favor and get rid of this little annoyance once and for—”

He was cut off by what Scorponok could really only describe as Waspinator exploding out of the trees behind him. 

Enough was enough was enough was enough this was the third time Waspinator had been denied his revenge and nothing nothing nothing not even a Decepticon was going to stop him this time.

A word-gone roar clawed its way up his intake, and there was nothing in his vision except the pink plating keeping him from revenge and there was nothing in his processor but the can’t-ignore call to strike, sting, his revenge was right there and this was in the way, in the way—

There was metal shredding under his claws, there was energon and oil running like rain down his arms, there was the punch of his stinger through crunching glass over and over, plants and mud ripping up and mixing under his pedes as they barreled forward until—

Gravity did Waspinator’s job for him and pulled the mangled hunk of metal out from under him, crashing down the steep hillside in a blur of Decepticon-color and what he thought was a little Autobot-color too, but it didn’t matter, not now, he whipped around, snarling, just in time to see a stupid piece of yellow plating vanish into the trees. 

Not this time. 

The Autobot had made a lot of noise and had nearly grabbed Inferno again with his bothersome weapons, but he-of-air-superiority had prevailed. 

He lighted rather delicately on the ground of their initial return to the Colony’s territory, right primary servo held up and away from him. The Queen had specifically instructed them not to contaminate her samples, and Inferno was nothing if not the best servant of the Royalty that he could possibly be!

Quickstrike was sitting on the large green Autobot he had felled with his cybervenom, alternately rising and falling through the air as the mech’s chassis heaved with his vents. He waved as Inferno touched down, sliding to the ground. 

“Hey! Got your stuff?” he asked brightly, waving with his pink-stained snake arm. 

Inferno nodded sharply, grinning at the prospect of a mission well done. 

“‘Nok’s still over there, I think he—”

Inferno looked and was met with a bright yellow Autobot and cursing as he hopped on one pede, away from… what Inferno thought was merely a patch of ground, but turned out to be Scorponok! It seemed as though he had remained low, waiting to catch their enemies off-guard!

He laughed triumphantly and gestured for Scorponok to join his fellow Predacons. Their newest member scuttled over and transformed, holding one claw carefully in place as he did so. 

“We have obtained it!” Inferno proclaimed, “In the name of the Queen, let us now return to the Nest with the spoils of our victory!” 

Scorponok made an uncertain noise, clacking his clean claw. 

“Should we wait? I mean, for Waspinator—”

He was cut off by an audial-splitting scream, and all three Predacons startled, whipping towards the source. 

They watched the yellow Autobot take off into the jungle, sprinting at full-tilt, tires spitting up shredded mud and plant matter, and just as quickly watched Waspinator crash after him, shrieking and swiping at the trunks and foliage that dared to be in his way.

The canopy-shaking pedesteps, screeching, and general clamor took a long moment to fade. 

“He is…” Inferno paused, “…doing something else.”

Waspinator had already fulfilled his duty to the Colony by returning with the Queen’s important thing on the first mission Inferno had the privilege of attending, therefore exempting him from this mission’s stipulations. Normally, he would accompany the Predacons back to the Nest proper, but in his absence…

Inferno stepped forward decisively, snapping his wings. 

“Our mission is successful!” He pointed skyward. “Let us now return to the Colony.” 

Quickstrike whooped. 

“D’you think after we drop all this off, we can go kick some keisters proper-like?”

“That will depend on the orders of the Queen,” Inferno said, “but she may order us to burn the intruders…”

He snapped himself out of the fire-lovely reverie. Focus. 

“Now, we march!”

Chapter Text

Whatever machine Blackarachnia was using to transport her troops and any potential guests along such distances was obviously calibrated wrong. 

Mesothulas had a decent grasp of spacebridge theory. Though he wouldn’t exactly be confident in his ability to take one apart and put it back together in a more efficient configuration, he still knew that the basics demanded the use of a linked transmitter and receiver, and that the mechanism itself had to be calibrated for a certain quantity of matter that it was to transport across space (and, according to some, time). Considering the apparent lack of receiving device on the Predacons, he was forced to assume that Blackarachnia had altered the technology to interpret a mech’s signal as the receiver, allowing for the mobile pickups that had become the status quo.

As for the calibration: that explained why he was deposited aft-first into a sizable crater of mud, lacking the presence of the majority of mechs he had been surrounded with when the bridge field had first taken effect.

Secure in the knowledge that his most important tools were either tucked safely away in his subspace or within his helm, he was able to extricate himself from the pit with… minimal thrashing and struggling. 

Spacebridges (or groundbridges, as it seemed) couldn’t selectively teleport individual items wrapped up in the same matter package. That was why the Autobots’ Nexus had been necessary; if one spacebridge could do the work of twenty there wouldn’t be any need for multiple. Taking that principle into account and assuming it to be true, it was likely, then, that he was in more or less the same place as the rest of the majority. At the very least, probably on the same continent. 

He put his servos to the small of his back and stretched, hopefully dislodging some of the crusted mud in the process. A signal sweep would reveal the location of the Autobots, at least, techno-organics seemed to have the most wonderful ability to mask theirs—

The mud behind him made another loud squelching sound.

Ah. 

It seemed that the miscalibration hadn’t only affected Mesothulas. 

The Autobots’ communications specialist was hauling himself out of the same patch of muck a stone’s throw away from him, the mud failing to keep its grip on his glossy plating. Helpfully, the signal sweep returned precisely one Autobot in the immediate vicinity. 

Hm. 

This batch, if the translocational field had extended with the range he ascribed to it, then it had snatched up… ten of them, four Predacons, five Autobots, and a Mesothulas. Twenty percent error rate was not ideal, he wondered if there would be any work saved when he—

“Ugh—” from behind him, “where…? Ratchet—?”

Mesothulas shushed him with a hiss.

“I have already done a signal sweep. We appear to be in the minority of those displaced outside the intended transwarp target area.” He thought momentarily. “And keep your vocalizer down.” 

“Now hang on just a nanoklik—”

Testing a patch of ground with his foot and finding it acceptably stable, Mesothulas started walking, picking his way out of the muddy field. He could hear the Autobot following behind him. 

“We need to—” he paused as he made a slightly longer jump, “regroup with the others! If they’re fighting alone—”

“You may regroup with the rest of your Team,” Mesothulas said, not turning, “I have an investigation to pursue.”

“And you’re going to go where with this investigation? Wander off into the jungle, alone?”

“That is the plan!” Mesothulas laughed. “Getting to their base is of the utmost importance if I am to carry out any kind of meaningful observation.”

Moving through the jungle was necessary if he wanted to get where he needed to go, and it would likely have to be on foot, seeing as his two-wheeled alt mode wasn’t particularly conducive to off-roading. Pity, his digits were itching to get there as fast as possible, but sometimes slow and steady was necessary. 

Now out of the mud and mire, Mesothulas studied the treeline for a moment before deciding on a direction. 

“What are you even following?” The communications specialist asked. Hm. He didn’t think he would still be here. 

“Tracks,” he said, switching his visual feel to infrared. The perks of doing away with standard blue optics! “If this is indeed the site of their base, any residual markings or signs of movement in the undergrowth will likely point towards it.”

A faint trail, but one nonetheless. 

“Half of them can fly,” the specialist pointed out flatly, “and you can’t be sure those thermal signatures aren’t from organic life.”

“And how would you know if there’s organic life of sufficient size in this biome?”

“I was an educator,” he retorted, “I like to know a little bit about the planet I happen to be living on.” 

They glared at each other for a long moment while Mesothulas shook his metaphorical fist at the fact that he was right.

“What would your solution be?” Mesothulas demanded, “What would linking up with your little teammates accomplish right now? We have no idea how far outside the intended transwarp radius we were displaced, I’m quite sure none of them have my tracking skills or knowledge of organic life—”

“I don’t know,” he said, throwing his servos up in frustration, “Maybe nothing! But Ratchet’s a medic, Bumblebee has some… history with their leader—”

“I am not hearing any kind of rebuttal to my argument here.” 

“We’re a Team! We should—”

“If you’re so worried about them you can radio them—”

“I can’t!” he barked, before taking a visible in-vent to steady himself. “I’ve already tried wireless communication. There’s something blocking me, and before you say anything, I know it’s probably the vegetation.”

Mesothulas waited. He should’ve guessed from the energon-pink plating that there was a considerable amount of bite to him. 

The former educator ex-vented again, pointedly. 

“If this base you’re talking about exists, and someone had the means to transwarp the Predacons to Detroit, they probably have some kind of equipment there, too.”

“You’re thinking of a communications assembly.”

“I’m hoping for one. And if it’s there, I’ll know how to use it. Mesothulas,” Finally, a mech who could remember his designation! Even if he was one out of a couple hundred he’d met in his function… “I don’t know what you know about being an Autobot, but we try to stay together. It’s a big galaxy, and—”

He could just picture the class of wide-opticed newsparks hanging on to his every word. 

“I know plenty about being an Autobot—” he stopped short, realizing that he didn’t actually have his designation in his memory banks. 

“Arcee.” 

Ah. That subsonic lilt— those were distinctly not the default subvocalizations he thought he’d hear.

“Arcee,” Mesothulas repeated the designation and underpinnings, and amended his tiny profile to match her terms of address (keeping accurate records was important). “In fact, that same Autobot propensity for teamwork was a major factor in my decision to leave. I much prefer my time and my research to be my own.”

Her superoptic ridges furrowed. He could practically see the thought-trees in her head, turning him over like a specimen for study. Or perhaps more like an unruly sparkling that she was trying to figure out how to best deal with.

“Alright. Just… we’ll head there first.” She said. “Once we’re there, then I can send a signal to the rest of my team.”

“Oh, so now you have faith in my tracking skills.”

She glared at him again, but they still started off in the direction of the tracks Mesothulas had seen. If they belonged to a native lifeform, it was a big one. 

The miraculous thing was that apparently, Starscream hadn’t even died this time around. 

As much as he was loathe to admit it, a small part of him sort of knew that he was slagged the second something that heavy moving that fast had slammed into his spinal strut, then everything sort of dissolved into that strange, sluggish, almost foggy feeling that getting your frame absolutely ripped apart had. 

But he definitely hadn’t actually died. Going offline never brought him back to Skyfire. 

The flux, or hallucination, or whatever it was was cool and blue-white, an office with perfectly clear windows that fanned out for the whole of the Vosian skyline. The pale sun bathed the room in its light, there were heavy pedesteps behind him—

And Starscream lurched fully awake into searing agony. 

A strangled groan tore its way from his vocalizer. Then another. Vector Sigma, it felt like his entire chassis had been blasted with a superheater cannon, his cockpit canopy was digging shards of shattered glass into his empty spark chamber, which was a whole new kind of pain that he was pretty sure only a few Cybertronians had ever lived to experience. 

He forced his optics open, squinting in the damnably bright sunlight of this pathetic planet. Pain and too much light unfocused his optical relays, and then the world sharpened as his pupils snapped into place. 

Based on the amount of green so close to his faceplates and something tickling his left lateral vent, he was lying semi-facedown on the ground vegetation of wherever they’d ended up. Judging by the relative quiet, the Predacons had abandoned him in favor of their current mission, whatever it may be. He shifted and heard a noise that was definitely not supposed to happen when one attempted to move their arm, and hissed through his dentae. 

He’d survived worse. He’d survived so much worse. He’d crawled back to his own fragging legs on the surface of the moon, realigned his spinal strut one vertebrae at a time, he could manage this—

Something moved behind him. Something of not-insignificant size. 

Starscream cursed himself for not starting a full diagnostic scan earlier, it would be very nice to know if his weapons were online right now, and instead focused on gritting his dentae through each fresh wave of fiery agony that pulsed through his frame. 

“All receiving Autobots, this is Prime,” the something said behind him. “Autobots, come in—“ and Starscream pounced. 

The element of surprise was on his side, his enemy was distracted, his claws hadn’t failed him yet, and it would have made for a perfect attack strategy had his legs not given out from under him mid-attempted swipe and one arm simply refused to function.

He missed by a rather embarrassing distance, and managed to snarl out “Autobot filth!” through the fresh wave of pain it sent through his… everything. 

“When I get my servos—“ another swipe, another miss, “on your little team—“ he was good at this, he swore, “I’m going to shred them—“ Maximo preserve him, this was getting old, “one by one!”

Then something in his chassis made a truly awful noise, and standing (or moving) simply wasn’t an option anymore. He fell back, hard, against a tree. He hadn’t needed to vent since returning from the dead the first time, but something in the back of his processor insisted that he should be venting, hard.

The Autobot didn’t even have the decency to look properly wounded.

“What?” Starscream snarled, “too high and mighty to fight now?” It was objectively untrue, he had very much seen the heroic antics of this particular Autobot in recent days, but it was the shot that counted. 

“I’m not going to fight someone in your condition.” He said from behind his battle mask, infuriatingly even. 

“Condition—?!”

“You look… bad.” 

“You look bad.” Nailed it. 

The Autobot regarded him flatly. Starscream didn’t care. 

“I’ll just have to find,” Starscream shifted gingerly, nope, his weapons were still down for the count, what joy, “another way to convince the Predacons to ally themselves with me—”

“They won’t.”

“And why is that?”

“They’re taking orders from Blackarachnia.” The Autobot was looking with furrowed superoptic ridges at something on his wrist while his other servo pressed digits to the side of his head. 

“Blackarachnia?”

No answer. Starscream groaned and tried one final time to divert power to his weapons hoping against hope that they would finally come online and let him slag this Autobot once and for all. Killing the mech who’d nearly killed Megatron had to count for something, didn’t it? By the… transitive property, or something. Shockwave was always the one they went to for calculations and the like. 

Alright. That wasn’t going to work, he’d only succeeded in making himself lightheaded. He obviously needed… some amount of time to recuperate, or at least to get himself standing and flying again. Then navigating the island would be that much easier, he could regain the air advantage and finally finish what he’d set out to do. He had a plan. He always had a plan. 

And that plan did not involve any Autobots. Specifically ones that were still online. 

Or around him in any way at the very least, which seemed the more likely case the more warnings crowded their way into his HUD. 

“Don’t you have some… things to be getting back to?” He sniffed. “Things like that merry little band of Autobots you drag around everywhere?”

Still no answer. 

“Or are you finally wising up and striking out on your own?”

“There’s something going on with the communications field on this island.” Came the extremely-businesslike response. “I’ve been trying to contact them—“

“Then why not go look for them yourself?” Maybe an appeal to practicality would work here. “No sense in having to drag dead weight around—“

“You’re a known member of Decepticon High Command,” the Autobot snapped, “and you tried to destroy Detroit. Multiple times.”

Time to get technical. 

“Would a known member of Decepticon High Command be just as invested in slagging Megatron as you seem to be?”

“You—“

“I tried to offline him!” He made the mistake of trying to gesture magnanimously and only made something grind painfully in his shoulder joint. “I work for myself and myself alone.”

The Autobot stared at him flatly. 

“Nice try. My memory’s not so glitched that I don’t remember you want to take his place.”

This was getting… tiresome.

“Well, someone had to give me an opening!” he snarled, “and you weren’t even kind enough to take him off the map for me—”

“I wasn’t going to offline him—”

“Why? You really think that a mech like Megatron is ever defenseless—”

“That’s not what I said—“

“Your entire Team would’ve been behind you, they would’ve congratulated you, for spark’s sake—“ Starscream stopped short. “Or. You’re still playing heroes.”

Tense, sharp quiet. 

“Offlining him would have been too conventional, is that it?” he pressed, “It wasn’t enough to slag him, you had to put your own little insufferable flair into it. 

“I bet the humans loved that, I bet your Magnus would have, too, your Commonwealth. Leaving the mech who almost destroyed them all online— oh! Pardon me, I almost forgot, your Magnus never got the chance to find out. 

“What kind of glory is it, then? You didn’t even let your Team go back to Cybertron, even though they beg for your attention, you shut up on this disgusting little backwater planet, for what? To show every sycophantic Autobot out there how humble you all are?”

An engine was revving, and Starscream should’ve noticed it, but he was hurting and exhausted and for the love of Cybertron, he was torqued off.

“If you’re so committed to the hero act, march off into the wilderness and at least try to assemble your little Team. You might even stand a chance against the Predacons, Autobot.”

Just a bit more pushing…

“Better hurry. Your little scout might be lost. And your annoying ninja-bot—”

An ax embedded itself in the trunk of organic matter, inches away from Starscream’s head.  The Autobot had thrown it, that much was clear, and he stood, blue optics burning and focused straight on Starscream. 

The jungle was silent, like the humming energy blade had sucked out all sound for itself. The Autobot stalked over, managing to convey the energy of looming while still being slightly below Starscream’s optic level. He shot out a servo and took the handle of his weapon. 

“My name,” he snarled, “is Optimus Prime. I serve the Autobot Commonwealth and I will perform the duty that has been given to me by this Primacy.”

He ripped the ax out of the tree, decisively deactivating it. Starscream’s claws sank into the soft, organic ground, something bitter building at the back of his glossa.

“I am finding my Team, and I am taking you into custody, and all of us are going to get off this island.”

The utter fragging audacity— 

The Autobot sheathed his ax with a sharp, final ring, moved away, and pressed his digits to one audial while Starscream imagined tearing his plating off, plane by plane. 

“No response. Not from anyone.” His optics shut for a nanoklik, and Starscream’s frame tensed again. “We’re gonna have to continue on pede.” He couldn’t miss at this range, he had several size classes on the Autobot, he could—

He could see it. 

The tight line of tension that carved its way though the Autobot’s shoulder joints, the patch underneath it that was barely visible, the snap between silence and furious insistence. 

Megatron hid it better, much better than this, but Starscream knew the look of a mech rapidly approaching his breaking point. 

It was like the bytes of information and snippets of memory files were knitting themselves together in front of his optics. Starscream had said it himself, this mech was the Commonwealth’s darling, for all intents and purposes, he was a hero. A hero that he could see the stress fractures in a lightyear away. 

Oh, yes. There it was. The missing component to his plan. 

Starscream could absolutely make him worse. 

Opening her window was easy, getting the screen out had been harder. But Charlie’s parents didn’t raise no quitter, and she was able to jimmy it enough until she could slide it behind her headboard. 

Her room wasn’t messy, Charlie much preferred the term “full of personality.” Besides, “messy” implied that she didn’t know exactly where everything was and where it went, like the paperclip that was under the left front leg of her desk, or her favorite Smiths shirt was always in the top right corner of her bed. The rubber-band-ball lived next to her frog lamp, her backpack went over the chair, it was really a pretty good organization system. 

She hadn’t been exactly forthcoming with Sari about what her plan was, only that it meant getting even with Mikaela. And who was Charlie to mess with a good formula? Eggs were basically the go-to thing for revenge. 

Charlie popped the top on a fresh can of Blue Bison. She needed all the help she could get staying awake for this, especially since they had school the next day. It was late enough to be pitch black outside, even the solar-powered street lamps had gone dark. Sari had promised that she would take care of transportation, so Charlie was ready for a bedsheet-rope situation more than anything else. 

She stuck her head out the window and into the cool night, and watched the fireflies blink in and out over her backyard. Maybe she should grab her hoodie. Wouldn’t that be good for more… sketchy stuff like this? Should she have invested in a ski mask—

Those two fireflies weren’t going away. Charlie squinted as they blinked out and came back in unison. Something prickled at the back of her neck. Those were eyes. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she did, and fear lurched through her gut, barf-inducingly fast—

“Charlie!”

It was Sari. Of course it was Sari. Who else would be zipping up to her window, perfectly eye-level a couple feet away, who else had eyes that shone in the dark like that?

Charlie puffed out a breath, determined not to look as scared as she had just felt. 

“Hey!” she said, leaning out the window and grinning, “gimme a second, I need to get the stuff.”

“Stuff?” Sari asked, drifting closer to the window and peeking inside. From this distance, Charlie could hear the faint thrum of her jetpack, which made perfect sense now that she actually thought about it and was acting like the girl with a plan that she was. 

“Yeah!” Charlie said, reaching between her two milk crates full of records (real records!!) for the four cartons of eggs and digging through The Big Pile of Clothes until she found the twelve-pack of toilet paper that it had hid so well. “I told you we were gonna get even.” 

Sari’s eyes caught the light of Charlie’s lamp. When she was close enough, Charlie could see the little segments in her irises as they moved. She shook the eggs enticingly. 

“C’mon, don’t tell me you’ve never egged a house before?”

“It was more like going camping and dealing with zombie space barnacles for me,” she said, “but I’m totally in!”

Charlie pumped her fist and decided to grab a hoodie after all, before pausing. 

“Does this mean you could see in the dark this whole time?”

Sari blinked. 

“I mean, I don’t think you have a flashlight or anything—“

“No, I don’t I just…” Sari trailed off. “Huh. I don’t know if I’ve ever needed to.” She swung her legs up and sat on the windowsill. “When I was a kid I thought flashlights were just a thing people had.”

“So like…” Charlie finished with the bag she was putting rolls of toilet paper and eggs into, stood up, and flipped her light switch off.

Darkness slammed down on them, and Sari’s eyes glowed faintly across the room. 

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Three, and you’re also sticking your tongue out and giving yourself bunny ears.”

“That is so cool.”

Sari giggled. “Everything just looks black and white in the dark. But didn’t you say something about getting back at Mikaela?”

Charlie nodded and gingerly felt around for the bag (Sari helped a little). But by the time Sari had picked her up Lois-Lane-style to fly off to their revenge, something else had entered her mind. 

“Your… friends,” she started, Autobot friends implied but not said, “are they gonna miss you tonight? Or like…”

Sari shook her head. 

“Nope. Bumblebee called me earlier and told me to stay away from the base, there’s this new scientist from Cybertron visiting or something and he gives them the creeps. So I’m good staying out!”

“Nice! You know where Mikaela’s house is?”

“I’m literally looking at a GPS map right now.”

“Hell yes.”

See, the thing was that prisoner transports just didn’t happen all that often. 

Yeah, if they were captured off-planet or something, sure, they had to be taken back through the spacebridge network and then brought to the corresponding prison, but the point was that inter-facility transport wasn’t something they got a lot of.

At least not with Decepticons. 

The guys over at Iacon General had talked to the ones at Trypticon, apparently there had been some big, fancy medical hearing that every department head had been in on. Roundabout had been posted as part of the guard outside, while the two flyers from the Elite Guard got to sit inside and “supervise”. He was pretty sure that they’d just been on comms with each other the whole time, but hey, they were Guard. They’d earned that right. 

Anyway, the tribunal (which he thought their Director of Framework headed, Roundabout had heard a lot of his smooth vocalizer through the doors) had actually ended in the doctors’ favor. Alpha Trion had left first, looking torqued off, followed by Pharma, the Director of Administration, who was putting in a good bid for smuggest ‘Bot Roundabout had ever seen in his function. 

And that meant that Autotroopers like him were stuck trying to follow the rules sent over by the hospital while also keeping their own sparks beating while getting a Decepticon restrained. 

After a few cycles of back and forth, which really meant “a lot of Autotroopers getting horrifically injured one way or another”, they’d found a solution. 

So now Roundabout was there, blaster ready, staring straight ahead and trying to keep the hum of the hovering platform behind him relegated to background channels. Hearing and not hearing something right now was kind of life or death, just a little bit. 

Iacon General wanted the Con for “study”, but then that meant that they wanted him in as good of a condition as possible. They balked at the regular stuff like stasis cuffs, because forcibly induced torpor changed the way energon circulated through your frame, shock-sticks were a no-go because of potential damage, and there was apparently something about this specific Con that meant they couldn’t even gag him. 

All in all, not great. 

But, being honest, Roundabout was grateful he had a partner. The transport car they were in was pretty plain, nothing but the standard moorings and front door-window-combination for ‘Bots of a normal size. It was just the two Autotroopers, a Con, and a piece of yellow tape on the floor showing them exactly where to not step, but at least, thank Sigma, he wasn’t alone. 

The solution they’d come up with to get every party satisfied, the fussing doctors at Iacon General and the Trypticon officials who were actually concerned with safety, turned out to be kind of simple. Turns out, all they’d needed to do was slap a pair of full-coverage cuffs on each of his servos, then weld the other end to the platform. It didn’t completely eliminate mobility like would be ideal, but it forced the Con to his knees within a clear danger zone that could very much be avoided.

Every member of High Command was uniquely freakish in their own way, but this was the first time that Roundabout had seen one that hadn’t been from the crowd at the celebratory parade or behind a very thick force field at Trypticon. Megatron’s dead gray plating was chilling in its own way, as was the simple hugeness of the big green bomber jet, but Roundabout always hurried the fastest past Shockwave’s cell, when the Con was in from his continuous interrogation. Something about it, just the one searing red optic boring a hole into him out of the blackness where a faceplate was supposed to be— eugh.

However, having to stand in a transport with his back to a Con, free of any protective forcefield, was quickly coming for Shockwave’s place as the creepiest thing he’d experienced guarding Cons.

The air prickled at the back of his spinal strut, he could’ve sworn it was colder inside than it was outside, temperature regulators be damned, and he might have just been jumpy from the unconventional transport, but something felt off.

He stole a glance back. Maybe it was just… whatever was going on with the Con’s frame. 

Roundabout wasn’t a scientist, but… there was no way that he should be seeing rotary pistons that big on a flight frame. The wings were right there, plain as a day cycle, scraping the edges of the transport when they turned a corner too hard, empty cannon sockets on his back were there, everything that he needed to confidently say sure looks like a flight frame to me! But there was just enough there that made something at the back of his processor itch, something that told him that either his optics were malfunctioning, or whatever was going on with this guy wasn’t supposed to happen. 

“If you want to stare, at least do it openly.” 

Roundabout and Stickshift both jolted, grips tightening on their blasters as the Con spoke. They looked at each other. He sounded… weirdly put-together, like one of those mechs who spent time reading at the Archives. 

“You’ve looked back eight times in the last five cycles. Give or take, my chronometer is offline.”

Stickshift glared through his visor. 

“We’ve got nothing to say to you, Con.”

The mech rolled his one visible optic and ex-vented shortly, pushing a gust of freezing air at the pair. 

“That’s right. Autotroopers.” He said, disgust dripping off his glossa. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Demanded Stickshift, turning fully. 

“You’re worse than your workers,” the Con went on, glyphs twisting with an accent that Roundabout couldn’t place, “at least they’re color-coded.” 

“What would you know about that?” His partner challenged, his plating already fluffed out. Stickshift was never really that good about keeping his coolant. 

“You want to stand out, so you take the same frame and face as everyone else. Well done.” 

“We are serving our Commonwealth.”

“You’re stock. Cannon fodder.” He sniffed, cold and unruffled as ever. “Those worker drones disgust me. But I almost feel sorry for you. Almost.”

Stickshift scoffed. 

“We’re not the ones you should feel sorry for. You’re the one the docs at Iacon wanted a look at so bad.”

“Sticks—” They weren’t supposed to be talking to the prisoner, let alone telling him where the transport was headed. 

“Iacon…” the Con said, almost musing.

Stickshift nodded, self-satisfied, “Seemed real eager to get their servos on you.” He looked at Roundabout. “Think they’re gonna cut him open, or what?”

Roundabout didn’t say anything. The sinking feeling in his chassis had gotten worse. 

“You don’t live there, don’t you?”

Stickshift’s visor flickered, a confused optic-cycle. 

“In Iacon.”

“What are you—”

“Unless they’ve given up on their cleaning protocols, you don’t get scuffs like that walking down Avalon Boulevard.” The Con said tonelessly, “Dust. Wear and tear on a Commonwealth-sponsored frame.

“Where, then? Sub-street Kaon? Those gladiator barracks they lease out? Or…” His lip curled in disgust. “… ah. Tarnian trash.”

Steam shot out of the gaps in Stickshift’s plating and Roundabout made the executive decision that right then would be a good time to tap into their internal comms. 

//Hey. Take it easy. I’m gonna check in with the pilot.//

The transport, essentially being a trailer, had been hitched to someone else’s alt mode. They’d talked to him a little bit before they’d left Trypticon, and he seemed like a nice mech, even though he was more used to hauling around heavy medical equipment than Decepticons (and never mind the fact that Roundabout could not remember his designation for the spark of him). 

He crossed to the door in front of the two of them squinted out of the porthole. Iacon went by outside at a clip. Driving with the roads cleared out specifically for you was nice. 

//Hey!//  he sent, hoping the lack of name wouldn’t get noticed too hard, //got an ETA on Iacon General?//

An affirmative blip back. 

//Shouldn’t be long now,// came the answer, //maybe ten mor—//

The trailer shook, suddenly and violently, and Roundabout spun around while also trying to keep his gyroscopes stable, a combination that yielded falling on his aft while his processor struggled to fully register the absolute horror-vid that was playing out before him. 

Because that was way too much energon, Stickshift was screaming and his arm was pinioned at the elbow between the Con’s jaws, his dentae were sunk down into the joint and ripping, and Roundabout jumped up and held onto Stickshift as best he could but—

Something tore, something snapped, and they fell backwards, slamming into the wall. 

Stickshift screamed again and energon spurted and slicked his chassis. His ruined arm jerked and spasmed, crushed pistons throwing up little curls of electricity, trying too hard to move like they should. Laughter shattered Roundabout’s audials and he forced his helm up, he wouldn’t purge, he wouldn’t purge—

The Con screamed with laughter as he leaned forward as far as his bonds would allow, energon covering the bottom half of a faceplate that was pitch black and slashed with red, dripping from glass-shard dentae fixed in a hysterical smile. 

Roundabout’s optics were frozen, fixed on the Con as the faceplate slid out of place, whipping to the side before coming back red and snarling. 

“And that’s only a taste of it, Autobots!”

The black face again, energon smearing against the long sides of his helmet.

“What’s the matter?!” He crowed, “Didn’t they tell you I bite?!”

He broke off into more cackles, energon spraying from his intake and welded cuffs creaking, and the transport trundled on. 

Chapter Text

Bumblebee didn’t know how long he’d been running. 

Mud sucked at his pedes, and when it didn’t, he was stumbling through a layer of vegetation that reached up to his knee-joints. Nothing even had the decency to look different, it was all just green, trees, and more green, he didn’t know how far he’d gotten or where he was or where he should be, it was all just light and shadow racing across his optics and branches whacking into his plating and even worse than that were the noises from behind him. 

Pedesteps he could handle, however big and ground-shaking they were, but it was that and the droning buzz of beating wings that rattled around the inside of his processor that really set him on edge. He had his stingers, he had his wits, he had his wheels, he could get by on that alone, but nothing that was that big and flew was ever good news. Especially when the big evil flying thing hated him and hated him specifically enough to make mech-mush of Starscream to get a chance to slag him. 

Bumblebee sprinted straight under a fallen log and cleared a little trickle of water that flowed off to the side just as the trees thinned out. Huh, perks of being small, great to have you at a moment like this! 

He honestly couldn’t decide which was worse: the snarling and growling behind him, the screams that sounded half like a ‘Bot and half like an enraged mechanimal, the wordless, snapping fury that promised nothing but going offline, painfully, or— or the dead silence? 

Bee whipped his helm around, vents heaving, trying to get his bearings. His audials strained in the sudden quiet, listening for something, anything, any kind of hint of what he knew was chasing him. The water bubbled and gurgled, the sun beat down on his already-overheated frame, he might be good, but Bee knew he wasn’t that fast. Especially not running through rough wilderness without so much as a dirt path to speak of. Waspinator was bigger, freakishly faster, had an alt that could fly and was organic, so he was probably just fine at navigating this island, slag, he probably knew it like the back of his servo, how long had it been since Dinobot Island—?

“Bumblebee?”

His helm snapped to the left. 

“Bulkhead?!”

“Bumblebee!”  

Scared. Strained. In trouble.

Bee tripped over his own pedes, sloshing in the stream for a nanoklik, running towards his friend’s voice. He hadn’t seen what the other Predacons were doing, but Bee and his Team were on their territory now. 

Bee shouted for Bulkhead again. And again. And again— alright so maybe he was panicking a little bit, but give him a break! Anyone would be—

A scream split the air from the same direction. Bumblebee’s spark stopped and a cold pit opened up in his tanks.

“ARCEE!” he yelled, vocalizer cracking, pushing his aching legs to the limit. 

They were in trouble, it had to be all the Preds, maybe even more that they didn’t know about yet, enough to overpower Bulkhead, enough to— oh, Vector Sigma what if Arcee was hurt? Bad, and where was Ratchet? Did they get separated or—

A slick patch sent him tumbling, paint scraping off on the rocky riverbed. No time. He scrambled up, desperate to keep moving, to be there, he had to do something. He fought his way back into the jungle, stinging away the worst of the undergrowth, optics darting wildly for any sign of his friends, a fight, motion, anything—

Wingbeats, fast as his hammering spark and he couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the claws whistling towards him. Pain exploded across his chassis and his frame might’ve actually left the ground before he crashed back down, flat on his back. 

He brought his stingers up, crossed in front of his faceplates, and waited for the next strike. 

That didn’t come. 

He shoved himself to his pedes, jerking his helm up towards the trees. That wasn’t just scenery, that was cover, cover for the guy that was trying to slag him, and getting out from under it meant that he would at least be able to see the however-many-tons of Predacon as it descended to take him straight to the Pit. 

What was he doing? He had to keep moving. Bee cast one last sweep of the trees and took off again. Every nanoklik counted when you were in a fight, but it was always better if you weren’t alone, but they weren’t really alone, but three’s a crowd, he guessed—

Prime shouted behind him, wordless and thick with pain. 

Bumblebee skidded to a halt so hard he left tracks on the jungle floor. 

That wasn’t possible. He’d just been that direction, if any of his Team were anywhere near here he would’ve seen them, picked up their energy signature, or maybe he hadn’t, something in his processor whispered. 

His vents were coming harder.

He’d done it before, he’d been so wrapped up in one thing that he couldn’t see another, but that was different, right? He would’ve seen if his friends needed his help and they do, that’s what he’s doing, that’s what he—

“Bumblebee!” Ratchet’s voice?

“Doc?!” He whipped around. “Where—”

A massive weight crashed down onto his pauldrons and smashed him into the ground, and his only thought was that something had landed on him. Claws closed around his helm and slammed it into the dirt once, twice—

Then nothing. The weight vanished and he was just laying there, hurting. Bee’s engine revved weakly and he chased the retreating shape with stings that suddenly felt way too small to do anything. 

What was this? His helm spun, his spark pounded, everything was starting to hurt and his team was close but he couldn’t see them, couldn’t pick up their signatures, couldn’t let them know where he was or that he was being hunted—

Arcee screamed again, and Bumblebee executed the only command in his processor that made any sense:

He ran. 

“So,” Arcee said, breaking a silence that Mesothulas would have been just fine with keeping intact, “you’ve studied techno-organics?”

“I study organics,” Mesothulas said, because they were talking about his life’s work and not just some one-and-done fling of a research topic, “and how they interact with mechanically based worlds and organisms.” 

Ignoring the sigh that answered, he bent down to study the latest in the set of tracks they were tracing, apparently together. Much too big and narrow to be mammalian, but the craters at either end spoke to him of claws. Lack of negative space suggested that there was most likely a flatter surface that made this print, and it was deep enough to suggest a good amount of weight behind it, meaning that there was a good chance that it was something bipedal and within the size ranges of Cybertronians. 

Mesothulas chuckled to himself, saving an image of the print for later organization in his collection of field samples that couldn’t be removed from the field itself. 

“Well, it’s definitely one of the Predacons.” Arcee said. 

“And how would you know that?” Mesothulas demanded as he straightened up, nevermind the fact that he’d come to much the same conclusion. He hadn’t seen her examining any tracks or evidence through the undergrowth—

She was pointing at the trunk of one tree, about shoulder-high on the both of them. Carved into it, rather crudely, was “QUICKSTRIKE RULEZ” surrounded by squiggles he thought might be representative of lightning bolts. 

Mesothulas blinked, then scowled. 

“Can you think of any organic animals that might do that?” The former educator asked, with a level of light innocence that was unquestionably fake.

Mesothulas scowled harder. 

“Fine,” he conceded, filing the name away under his taxonomic tree for the Predacons, “then it seems we are headed in the right direction. If not towards the base itself, something that can point us there.”

They walked a bit further, finding several other pieces of carved graffiti along the way. Some of them were cut off in the middle, all were simple, and all carried a distinct air of something Mesothulas could only describe as juvenile. 

Arcee hummed, bending down to look at what appeared to be a crude pictogram of another Predacon, the one with the flamethrower. 

“I never really thought I’d see these again.” 

“Again?” 

“You’d be surprised at how often young ‘Bots scribble on things before they grow out of it,” she said fondly.

“Yes, yes. Education.” 

“Don’t sound so unimpressed.”

“I’m not!” he said, throwing his servos up, and he wasn’t. “It would be fascinating to observe how a new processor develops. And I imagine it’s not for the faint of spark.”

She laughed.

“It’s really not. We had so many given back into planetary care after their keepers decided it was too much work, and I don’t think it’s changed much since I’ve been gone.”

His narrowed optics were apparently enough of a question on their own. 

“I was… the war effort needed intelligence officers; I wanted to do everything I could to help.” She waved a hand, though not entirely dismissively. “I was injured in the field, there was a bounty hunter involved, I was transporting alpha-black classified access codes, and… my memory was wiped. All of it.”

“And I’ll tell you how I got it back, hold your horsepower,” she said, beating him to asking a highly intelligent and scientifically oriented question, thank you very much, “but I was shut up in a room in the Central Infirmary until just a few months ago. Everything between then and now is just… gone.”

Mesothulas thought, turned the bytes over in his mind and plucked at their connecting strings. 

“Was it an EMP blast?”

The sounds of motion from behind him stopped. 

“Yes,” she said after a long moment, “it was.” 

Electromagnetic pulses and the things that generated them were fickle, fickle things. They required training, a competent processor, a basic medical understanding of the Cybertronian frame at the very least, and using it as Arcee had described, as what sounded like a makeshift mnemosurgical device, it was a miracle that all parties involved hadn’t simply been killed. 

It was a testament to both dumb cosmic luck and the sheer strength of her spark that she was even speaking to him now. 

And instead of properly articulating any of this, Mesothulas came up with a word that felt much, much too small. 

“Impressive.”

He lifted a branch out of their way, drawing a stare from the bird at its base. 

“It’s a much longer story than this, but Sari was able to help Ratchet recover my functionality.”

“Mm. Who or what is ‘Sari’?”

“Part of our Team. I’ve heard a lot of stories from the others about her. She’s a young ‘Bot, and she’s half human, so there’s been plenty I’ve had to teach her about Cybertr—”

Mesothulas stopped in his tracks and wheeled around.

“Wh— you mean to tell me,” he began, “that there has been another techno-organic in your immediate company this entire time?!”

Arcee opened her intake to deliver a (no doubt scathing) response, but the voice that sounded came from behind them. 

“Now I don’t know ‘bout no other techno-organic,” it said, nasal and mean, “but I think this one’ll do just fine!” 

They whipped around as one, granting Mesothulas an up-close look at what was undoubtedly the most interesting of the Predacons. Not to say that any of them were dull, of course, but to be fair, this one had the advantage of somehow sporting evidence of two organic modes at once. He cycled his optics, grabbing image captures of all the important bits, a cluster of legs that seemed to act as one servo, the distinctive shape of the grasping pincers, and that was so clearly the head of a snake—

Arcee’s arm slapped down in front of his chassis. Mesothulas hadn’t quite realized he’d been moving closer for a better look. 

She held her other arm half-out in front of her. 

“We’re not here to fight you—” 

“Well, my name ain’t Quickstrike if I ain’t here to fight you!” Ah, yes. That made sense. “Not every day I get to scrap with someone that ain’t a Pred!” 

“And you… you’re a Predacon?” Arcee said in the distinct tones of someone scrambling to stretch a conversation out as far as they could. 

“Right as rain, sugar-bot!” He exclaimed cheerfully, oblivious to the glance Arcee and Mesothulas exchanged, “There’s me, ‘Ferno, Scorponok, Waspy’s around here someplace, I dunno what he’s doin’, but we all got the go-ahead from the boss-lady, and now I’m here to—”

“Wait,” Mesothulas interrupted, sensing an opportunity to confirm a hypothesis, “you’re taking orders directly from Blackarachnia? Here?”

“‘Course I am!” Quickstrike said brightly, “she’s the one who’s got the energon and all. D’you…” he wiggled some of the digits on his other hand at them, “know her?”

“Of course we do,” said Mesothulas as he made a mental note about that comment on energon possession, “why else do you think we would be here? We’re friends.” Arcee nodded along. 

Quickstrike hummed, optics narrowing in thought. 

//Do you think he’ll drop the fighting thing this easily?// came Arcee’s voice over the short-range radio. 

//Unlikely,// Mesothulas answered, //combat is often one of the most important social practices in many organic hierarchical structures…//

“Alright, I’ve reached myself a conclusion!” Quickstrike proclaimed out loud, jabbing his snake arm pointedly into the air. 

“If y’all do know ‘Rachnia, I reckon you wanna speak with her. And since you’re new, you don’t have the first clue on how to get there.”

Mesothulas bristled just a touch. He had been in the midst of following this very Predacon’s trail.

“So, I’m chargin’ admission!” Quickstrike planted his feet, obviously in a ready stance, “and the price is one kiester-kickin’ if you wanna get to the base!”

Oh no. 

Mesothulas considered himself prepared, no doubting that, but all the same, he was a scientist. The object of his work was not to fight the things he studied, but to understand them. He’d prepared for the most dire of circumstances by a potent cocktail of cybervenom he’d synthesized himself, effective on both organic and mechanical entities alike, but it did lean more towards the “fatal paralysis” end of things than not, and they needed this mech online to take them where they needed to be—

“Mesothulas?”

He turned towards Arcee, the explanation about his cybervenom sitting on his tongue— and then stopped short, because she was holding an electric-blue laser sword in each hand. 

He blinked. 

Arcee gave a small smile and spun one blade, effortlessly adjusting her grip. 

“I’ve got this.”

Oh. 

Well.

Optimus hacked through the thicket of vines and tried his comm frequency one more time. 

He shouldn’t have done that. 

Starscream had eventually hauled himself to his stabilizing servos after a few long moments, even though the going was slow and he was leaning on alternating trees for support. The gash in the tree behind him had been weeping sap. 

He shouldn’t have done that.  

They’d gone on in silence. Wherever they’d ended up, it was lush with organic life, and the chirping and calls from the woods still fell on the side of “normal sounds for Earth animals” and not “probably Predacons”. The only real sounds were their respective pedesteps and the occasional slash of his ax. 

Vector Sigma, he really shouldn’t have done that. 

He couldn’t afford to lose control at… what? Decepticon taunts? He’d said it himself, he was a Prime, he had planetary jurisdiction, not to mention the optics of every ‘Bot in the Commonwealth on him or wanting to be on him at any given moment.

His comms system flashed red in his HUD. 

Prisoners were not to be engaged with, they were not to be listened to, he knew that. And he wasn’t acting like it. He needed to get it together. He needed to—

“So… do you know where you’re going, or are we just stomping around wherever your spark says so?”

Optimus did not turn back and glare. 

“We’re trying to reach running water.” If this place was anything like Dinobot Island, his hunch might be right. “The trees won’t be as thick there, and we might be able to get to some higher ground.”

“Can I trust an Autobot to know the first thing about higher ground?”

“Considering that this Autobot can also fly, I think you can.”

“And where exactly did you acquire the ability to do that?”

Optimus pursed his derma. It was probably classified in some regard, wasn’t his jetpack an experimental piece from Project Powermaster—?

“Please,” Starscream spat in the silence, “what am I going to do with it? Build one for myself, because I need the means to fly so desperately?”

Fine, Vector Sigma—

“It’s a jetpack.”

“Ah.” Starscream said, unreadable red optics pointed down at him, “then that explains a great deal.”

“Such as?” Optimus dropped to a crouch and tried to test the soil for moisture. It stood to reason that it would be… wetter, the closer they were to water?

“Beyond you being an Autobot, it’d be more accurate to say you’re piloting yourself like a ship . If we’re being generous enough to say that you are flying, then you fly like you drive.”

“How does that even translate?” He demanded, unable to let that go, “flying is nothing like driving—”

“Exactly!” Starscream made a sweeping gesture with his free claw, “It’s not. I’ve never seen anyone ignore their pitch axis more, and much less in a fight!

“You acted like there was a straight line across space that went directly to Megatron’s cannon, and going in any other direction was not an option. Being in the air gives you options, options that aren’t colliding with your foes head-on and hoping.”

Starscream sniffed disdainfully. 

“You wouldn’t need to do half as much blocking with that Hammer if you knew the first thing about evasive maneuvering.”

Optimus stared as Starscream looked somewhere off into the jungle over his helm.

What.

“I’ve literally seen more skilled flying on the way to work.”

What.

“At least rewatching Mega-bum’s defeat is fun. Makes him look even more stupid than he already is.”

Optimus intended to say something along the lines of… a couple different questions that were fighting for space in his processor. “Are you giving me advice?”, for one, “you really hate Megatron, don’t you?” was another, “you re-watch the footage??” was yet another, but what he ended up saying was;

“You have to commute to work?”

Blame it on the long couple of… everything, the fact that his processor was in a few dozen different places right now, that he was just tired, but for some reason, that was what had stuck out to him.

Apparently Starscream found it just as baffling as Optimus. 

“...yes?” He answered, optics narrowed down into confused slits, “Well, no, but… you can’t not know what—”

“I know what commuting means!” Optimus snapped, “But you’re Second in Command? Of the entire Armada?” There was no figure in similar standing that he could think of within the Autobot government. It was the Magnus, and then… that was it. But if you were a Magnus, it took up every instant of every cycle, it was less a job and more of a state of being.  

“I wasn’t protoformed that way!” Starscream said indignantly, “I know you can’t imagine a Cybertron before the War, but it was real.”

They’d started walking again. The sun was lowering, he could see that much through the thick canopy of leaves above them. He’d always been interested in the Great War, had taken as many data tracks as he could aboard their ship when he was first assigned to the repair crew, but there was less on the Golden Age that came before it.

“There aren’t any polities that have them on Cybertron anymore, but the airways to us were like highways for Autobots,” Starscream said, “and when you’re going two hundred and fifty mechanometers per nanoklik, you need to be able to course correct.”

The image was… sort of disturbing, if Optimus was being honest with himself, the thought of a sky choked with thick black lines of aerial alts sending something deep in his processor on edge. Ships and transports had always been restricted to the eastern edge of Iacon, enough that dock workers had their own distinctive set of accents from where the territory jutted up against Tarn. If they were still using loading docks and tower landing pads for deliveries, then…

“Where?” He asked, the itch to know seizing his vocalizer, “What polities? You don’t sound like a dock worker—”

“I should certainly hope that I don’t—” Starscream said, “Wait. A dock worker?”

“Wasn’t Tarn a Decepticon stronghold before the War—”

Starscream snorted, of all things. 

“That is priceless. All Megatron’s stupid snobbery and the Autobots still think he sounds like a cargo hauler.” He chuckled again, then winced and pressed a servo to his side. “Him and Shockwave both. Someone had to teach him to cover up the accent for his little infiltration job, and it was not easy.”

“I’m glad they got some competent mech for the job, then.” Optimus said flatly. 

Starscream glared, his nasal chevron wrinkling slightly. 

“They did,” he spat, “the Senate had a rather exacting standard on the conduct of its members. I was the clear choice.”

Senate— unfamiliar, unfamiliar enough that Optimus’ HUD helpfully supplied a list of synonyms: assembly, chamber, parliament, guild, council. Where would—

“Ah,” Starscream said, startling Optimus out of his wandering thought trees, “I think we’ve found that running water you were going on about.”

The trees thinned out abruptly, and Optimus’ full field of vision opened up for the first time in what felt like cycles. The river was orange and red in the light of Earth’s setting sun, throwing flashes of rippling white as the water churned and moved. Optimus ex-vented again, not so much exasperation, but for the fact that something finally seemed to be going right. Or at least, making sense. 

Water would follow the laws of Earth’s gravity, it would flow from higher ground to presumably empty into some bigger body of water. Which meant that they needed to go in the opposite direction—

Something snapped from the other side of the river, loud enough for his finials to prick up at the sound over the rush of water. Movement from behind the trees, something bigger than him. Optimus reached for his axe. 

“On second thought,” Starscream said, “that might not be all we’ve found.”

Having received the Queen’s most untenable decree that they had done their duty to the letter of her standards, Inferno and the present Predacons had been given the glorious opportunity to do as they pleased with the mechs that now scurried across their territory. 

She did not appear to care that Waspinator was absent, and had taken their respective samplings of stuff with an incredible amount of finesse and scientific precision. Then, since there was no need of them, she had, in her infinite generosity, given the time back to them. She had even given them an extra half-cube of energon each for their good work!

Fire singing in his lines and feeling half full to bursting with the tacit praise, Inferno had decided to scour their jungle until he found the wretched things they had retrieved. The Royalty had made no mention of them in passing, and had rightfully waved Inferno off when he dared to speak out of turn and question her whims. He took that to mean that she trusted the matter in the hands of her most able and willing servants, a task that he would take on with everything he had to offer!

Quickstrike and Scorponok had agreed to this plan, and the Predacon forces had dispersed to cover different areas of the island with more efficiency. Quickstrike was at the grove of trees he frequented with some regularity, and Inferno assumed that Scorponok was keeping somewhere closer to where they had last seen Waspinator. Inferno himself had struck out towards the middle of the island, where the smaller hill and the river sat in the shadow of the volcano that sheltered their Nest. He had deposited the white and red Autobot there, it seemed like a good plan to continue with something he knew for certain. 

Except the Autobot hadn’t been precisely where Inferno had left him. Upon slightly more consideration, it stood to reason that a quarry wouldn’t remain entirely still under the face of danger such as he, but it was no matter. He would search every inch of this island until he and his fellow Predacons had done their duty defending their territory, and Inferno’s palms itched with the anticipation of the kick of his flamethrower and the lovely sight of everything that could catch burning at the flick of his digit. 

Patrolling the thick of the jungle was easier in his beast mode, he could better smell the ground and sense the vibrations of any creature that crossed his path. The world seemed friendlier to him this way, no two legs to trip over and no tall helm to smack on branches, just the beautiful mosaic of his home and the sweet surety of a mission in his processor. Just moments prior, he’d felt the thundering rapids of the river, then the clumsy, uneven footsteps of one— no, two intruders on the other side!

Inferno snap-turned towards the sound and transformed, the itch to burn back in full force, stronger, and he crossed the thin strip of jungle that separated him from the foolish Autobots that had the gall to exist on the sacred territory of the Colony. 

He was met with a most peculiar and rather disappointing sight; peculiar for the fact that the ungainly duo was made of only one Autobot and a Decepticon, both enemies of his Colony, to be sure, but ones that he had also seen locked in combat with one another not a few megacycles ago, and disappointing for the fact that they were on opposite sides of the river. 

Ordinarily, this would have been no issue. Inferno didn’t particularly like water, and so it was usually easily avoided with the aid of his wings. However, today had been tiring, demanding combat and increased movement, both by means of teleportation and under his own power. Even with the magnanimous gift of more fuel from the Royalty, Inferno still knew that his weapons ate up a good deal more power than he considered convenient,(not that he was insinuating in any way that the Royalty was deficient! If anything, the inefficiency lay with him and him alone!!) and he knew with certainty that both of these mechs could fly. Attempting to match them both in the air would likely accomplish nothing but making himself useless to the Colony’s given mission, which itself would be far worse than going offline or getting injured in any conceivable way. 

So he waited, toe-segments on the edge of the riverbank, and scowled. 

“INVADERS!” he yelled, “INTRUDERS TO MY COLONY! INFERNO CHALLENGES YOU TO COMBAT!”

Both of them winced. Perhaps this volume was insufficient. 

“I AM HERE AT THE QUEEN’S COMMAND!” he shouted, louder, “TO DESTROY YOU FOR THE CRIME OF TRESPASSING ON OUR GLORIOUS TERRITORY!”

“CALM YOUR ACTUATORS,” the Decepticon yelled back, “WE CAN HEAR YOU FINE!”

“ALRIGHT,” Inferno yelled again, slightly before his processor had actually parsed the meaning of the words. He cleared his vocalizer, then strained to listen in on any plots that may have been forming while the fools thought he was distracted. 

He couldn’t catch much over the water, but he did manage to distinctly hear the phrase “like Lugnut” from the Decepticon. Inferno did not know or care what that meant, as it seemed to have no bearing on the current situation. 

“Shall I stand here til night cycle?” he demanded, projecting but not shouting, “or will you fight?!”  

The Autobot moved, one hand occupied with his ax, before the Decepticon’s broad arm came down in front of him. They exchanged short words, and Inferno glowered. Cheap tricks would not work so easily upon him. Whatever they plotted, he would be ready. 

The Decepticon advanced. 

“We ask only one thing before you commence with destroying us, noble Predacon,” he began, “your dedication to your…”

“Colony.”

“Colony is most admirable. I’m sure this… running liquid is a fine home for it.”

Inferno scoffed, then fully laughed as the sheer absurdity of the statement hit him. 

“This?! My Colony inhabits a structure far greater than you could possibly comprehend!”

“Well, I—” the jet said, almost pitiful in his ignorance, “I merely assumed that—”

“You have assumed wrong, Decepticon!” Inferno proclaimed, gesturing with one claw, “My Nest sits within the embrace of the core fires of this very planet! Upon only the highest vantage point from which to survey its vast and beautiful territories!” 

He retrieved his flamethrower, the call to burn steadily growing to a blaze that could not be resisted for much longer. 

“It is there that I shall bring your lifeless frames, and it is there that I will throw them into the liquid fire our Queen commands!” He flicked the pilot light on. “Enough talk! For the Colony, TERRORIZE!”

His vision tunneled to the Decepticon, the enemy that stood ripe for the burning just across the river, his wings snapped into position and within a sparkbeat he was off the ground, staring down the barrel of his flamethrower and ready to ignite—

Something snagged around his ankles, pinning them together and making him wobble in the air. He snarled, searching for the source of the obstruction so he could destroy it, and found the Autobot on the shoreline, grappling with a cable that emerged from his forearm, the same that ensnared Inferno! 

He strained backwards against the hold, dragging the Autobot forward on the bank, yes, Inferno would sweep him away with the river! Let his home aid him in his quest! Inferno beat his wings, every piece of his body tight against the resisting tension—

And then the Decepticon stepped in beside the Autobot, grabbing at a higher section of the rope, yanking up, then wrenching it down almost faster than Inferno’s eyes could track. The sudden pull made something in his hip connectors scream, and he flailed in the air as the water rushed up towards him. 

In honesty, he knew it was over the second one of his wings brushed the water. When it rained, a far more common occurrence, the drops were small enough to slide and be shaken off, but not here. The deluge of water slammed into his wing, coating it in a horrible icy wave, and when it made contact with its twin on his back, they simply stuck together. And as he said before, Inferno was not very fond of water. 

He screamed and thrashed as the current seized his body, the tension of the cable releasing just in time for one of his feet to catch on an unseen rock and send him tumbling blindly through the water as it carried him away from his quarry, his prize, his mission. 

Inferno tried to screech again, and the water did not care. 

The tree creaked as Waspinator landed on one of the thicker branches, cracking and groaning out against the night sounds the jungle made. 

Good. Better for Bumble-bot to hear him with. 

Waspinator laughed to himself, then decided to use Hero-bot’s voice to do it for good measure. 

Earth’s big, bright sun was gone, it was night and it was working perfectly. His plan, that was. Bumble-bot was so stupid, believed every little word and scream he heard, and he ran so fast and so far after all of them. 

Bumble-bot ran and ran and focused on what he was hearing, what Waspinator was making him hear, and he could never be quite fast enough to block Waspinator when he swung down from the trees and slashed.

“We should just leave him,” he said, laying lazy on the branch, letting his voice drop into the grind-and-gravel of their Doc-bot. “Never been of much use anyway.”

Bumble-bot was tired, Waspinator could see it in the shake of his legs and stingers and chassis with every vent he took. His optics were wide and he was cycling them again and again, manually—  

He was trying not to cry.  

A laugh bubbled up in Waspinator’s chassis, happy and satisfied and his plan was working. He didn’t bother to be someone else as he moved to another tree. Bumble-bot whipped around to follow the sounds. He couldn’t see in the dark. 

“He’ll slow us down,” said Hero-bot.

“He’s never helped,” said Bulk-bot. 

“We can’t afford dead weight,” said Doc-bot. 

“Useless,” said Energon-bot, sharp as he could make her sound. 

Waspinator waited for the buzz of tiny stingers that aimed in his direction, and got an actual sob instead, that was swallowed under the warm burst of gleeful chitters that erupted in his own chassis. 

The shots came soon, though, but Waspinator was already gone. No claws this time, just a shove into the nearest tree, bang, another dent, another bruise. 

Waspinator perched again, safe and covered with the dark, him-colored canopy of leaves. 

Bumble-bot took in a huge, gasping vent. 

“Come out here and fight me like a ‘Bot!” he yelled up at the trees, facing the wrong way, “Stop it—”

“He’s not worth it,” An extremely emphatic Hero-bot. 

“We should’ve left him ages ago,” Doc-bot. 

“Stop—”

Waspinator laughed again with Bulk-bot’s big, rounded sounds and shivered his wings. This was fun. He should’ve done this back when he was Wasp. Plenty of bots to sound like, plenty to dig and kick at Bumble-bot’s processor, friends that he could turn into enemies—

A thought struck him like a little rock.

He’d missed one. 

“This is just sad,” said the Fleshy-bot, the zippy orange one, “We don’t need him. We never have.”

The night went quiet, and Waspinator smiled, landing with a muted thump on the ground that was soft with plants. 

Right there, his revenge was right there in front of him, and like the Pit he’d let it get away again.

Chapter Text

Quickstrike hit the ground with a whack that felt like it rattled every strut in his body, stars could’ve been spinning around his head and he wouldn’t have noticed!

Behind him, the Autobot with the swords who’d apparently decided it was time for him to meet his maker said something to her friend. She didn’t even sound out of vents! 

“Are you ready to be a little calmer now?” She asked, and it took him a second to think that she was talking to him. 

“That’s one way to put it,” he said directly into the ground, not even bothering to keep how tired he was out of his voice. He’d thought that a tussle with the Autobots would be fun! Him and Inferno had been having a great time fighting their leader in that first city, the only reason they hadn’t kicked his skidplate halfway down the street was because Waspinator made them stop. 

But now that they had their run of the place (well, not like they didn’t usually, but now there were other mecha there, ones that weren’t Predacons!) he figured that there was no reason that fun had to get cut short again! Even if Inferno had insisted on going off by his lonesome, it was still alright. He’d been so sure that he could come out on top, especially considering that lots of the new Autobots looked smaller and more breakable than the first one he’d seen. 

In hindsight, he should’ve figured that he was in for a rough time when the lady stepped up to fight. She was shiny, sure, but she was the same color as the energon that came from scrapes and scuffs that scuffed too hard, the energon that they’d all had to claw hard to get at from the other Autobots. And then she had actual swords—  

“You didn’t kill him, did you?” Asked the other one, the purple one with the raspy voice.

Quickstrike tried to flush the dirt and dust from his vents, failed , and rolled onto his back to give it the oomph he needed. 

“I ain’t dead yet!” He said, “but I am… mighty sore. Hooh."

The sun was going down, he could see it by the orangey-red sky through the tops of the trees. Maybe he could just lay here for a bit and…

A pink hand stuck right into his vision. 

“A deal’s a deal,” she said, “I believe you said the price was one—“

“Kiester-kickin’,” the raspy one chuckled, sounding like Quickstrike in a way he wasn’t quite sure he liked. “And I believe that has been delivered in spades.”

“Aw, fine,” Quickstrike said, forcing himself to sit up and waving off the pink ‘Bot. He did say so, and even if he didn’t want to bring them back to the base (which he didn’t), he wasn’t too keen on meeting the business end of her swords again. “I’ll take ya.”

He took another second to set his helm on straight and make sure nothing was broken bad (it wasn’t. Just dented up good). The swords had been put away, and the purple one had since sidled closer to the both of them. 

“Well done!” he exclaimed, “and laser swords? How in the galaxy did you come by those? Much less learn to use them like that?”

The pink bot smiled. “Ratchet said that he was trying to make pointers for my lessons, but he got a little carried away.” She shrugged, “and… you can say that I was a little more enthusiastic than other recruits with the combat portion of training?”

The purple one laughed (Quickstrike was noticing that he did that a lot), yellow optics slitting. 

“It’s certainly served you well, I can see that much—“

“You two done?” Quickstrike asked. 

They both straightened, leaning away from each other just the littlest bit. 

“‘Cause it’ll be a hike from here to there, ‘specially seein’ as I don’t think none of you can fly.” ‘Bots looked different from him and the other Predacons, sure, but Quickstrike knew a wing when he saw one. Like with that big one, the Decepticon! Even if his were all weird and didn’t even move up and down when he flew. 

“You assume correctly, Quickstrike—“ he was confused for a second about how this mech knew his name, before remembering that he had kind of said it himself upon meeting them, “but we are more than equipped to follow you.”

Quickstrike supposed that you didn’t need much more than two feet to follow something else, and—

“Quickstrike!”

He looked up from the thing he’d been poking. At first he thought it was a vine, but it was thicker and had a weird kind of texture going on about it. Plus, when he poked it, it started moving, so obviously he’d stuck around to find out more. 

But he guessed he must’ve stuck around for too long, because now he couldn’t even see the other Predacons, and could just barely hear them. 

“Right here!” He called, then went back to looking at the thing, which was still moving— ohh. Ah, alright, there was the head, like a tiny version of his arm! The snake flicked its tongue out at him. It must’ve been tasting the air like he did, and Quickstrike did it back, friendly-like, and laughed to himself. 

It was green enough to blend right in with everything else around it, and Quickstrike wondered if there was anywhere that he could do that. Probably not, not much seemed to be him-colored around these parts, but Waspinator said that the planet was even bigger than here, so maybe—

The snake hissed suddenly, and Quickstrike whipped around. It hadn’t been directed at him. 

Quickstrike was the smallest Predacon, which he felt like maybe should have bothered him, for some reason. It didn’t, though, because he was just as tough as any of the others, and he could climb them when he needed something, and Inferno had an easier time carrying him for flying than Waspinator did Scorponok. But that also meant that he didn’t see the things that lived in the trees as easy as the rest. 

They shared the island with other kinds of critters, some like them and some less. Like the furry ones, they never seemed to like them a whole lot. Specific to that group were the big hairy ones that liked to get around in the trees. They didn’t take too kindly to the Predacons no matter where they were. 

Like just now! Quickstrike looked up in the direction of the hiss, and glared at the thing— that was right, Blackarachnia had said they were called gorillas one time— at the gorilla in the tree above him. 

It huffed at him, staring back as it postured from the branch. Two could play at that game, and Quickstrike growled back. He’d never fought an organic one-on-one before, but there was a first time for everything!

It growled again, and this time it turned into a roar as it beat its chest with its fists. Quickstrike set his feet square and tensed as it snorted and stamped a fist, then moved faster than Quickstrike would’ve expected for an organic, leaping from one branch to the next, he’d have to be fast to catch—

Something slammed into it from the side, knocking the gorilla to the forest floor a ways away from him. It turned around, baring its teeth, and then the ground shook as Waspinator dropped his full weight forward into a crouch beside Quickstrike and roared right back, ignoring the “Hey!” from Quickstrike himself. 

The gorilla didn’t even stick around to look scared, just turned around and disappeared into the rest of the forest while Waspinator chuffed and straightened up. 

Quickstrike could hear the click-click-click of Inferno’s flamethrower just a bit behind them. 

“HA! Shall we give chase?!” Inferno had a way of making the simplest thing sound some kind of fancy.  

Waspinator hummed. “No,” he said, “not worth it. Gorilla-thing will stay scared.”

Inferno sighed but holstered his flamethrower anyway, saying something to Scorponok about how “the other creatures of this land need to learn proper respect for the Colony”. 

Quickstrike squinted at Waspinator. 

“Y’know, I had that.” 

A puff of air from his vents. 

“Maybe.” Waspinator said, “But Two-head still needs to learn to follow better.”

“I was lookin’ at something—!”

“Or at least yell back when hears name.”

“I did!” Quickstrike insisted as they started off again, “y’all just need to get your audials checked!” 

—and actually, he’d better ask. 

“What if you aren’t?”

“Beg pardon.” The purple one said flatly. 

“It’s real easy to wander off ‘round here,” he said, “and you’ve never been. What if I need to yell for you?”

“We won’t wander off,” the pink one assured him, “but if you’re asking for our names, I’m Arcee.”

“Mesothulas.”

“Bless you.” Quickstrike said. 

“No, you—” the purple one— Mesoblast, groaned. “Just… try your best.”

“Now that we’re all properly introduced,” said Arcee, “we should get going.”

Mesothelioma nodded, made to follow Quickstrike in the direction he’d been inching towards, then stopped with narrowed eyes. 

Another second passed before he apparently found whatever he’d been squinting around in his processor for, and then he turned to Arcee. 

“How much can you see right now?”

Quickstrike tilted his head. It was around that time of sunset-into-night where things started to lose color, sure, but it wasn’t like he could see any less because of it. 

Arcee blinked her blue optics and made some kind of face. 

“Not much.”

“Headlights?”

Two little spots of light on her shoulders flickered, then went out. She sighed, sounding exasperated. 

“They must’ve been damaged when we were teleporting.”

Mesospheric hummed, sounding displeased.

“What’s the holdup?” Quickstrike asked, leaning on a tree. It shouldn’t have mattered that there was no light like in the daytime, wasn’t seeing it like this good enough—?

“Autobots aren’t outfitted with low light visual systems,” Mesomorph said, almost to himself. “And time is of the essence…”

He stood there for a second. 

Quickstrike opened his intake, they were dawdling an awful lot for—

“Quiet! I am thinking!”  

Mesophiles stood there for another second, before looking like he decided something. He stuck his hand out to Arcee. 

“We’ll make better time if I don’t have to verbally describe every tree branch and rock that might be in our way.”

She looked at his hand for a long moment, like she was running calculations or something in her mind, then stepped forward and took it, nodding to Mesothoracic. 

He nodded back, then turned to Quickstrike. 

“Lead the way, pardner.”

“Come out here and fight me like a ‘Bot!”

This was wrong. 

Like, okay, no duh that this was wrong, it was all wrong, and clapping his servos over his audials didn’t work. He’d tried that before, and he was still hearing his Team sneer at him from places they couldn’t logically be.

The world was shrinking, pretty soon it would just be blackness and one single tree and his frame soaking the dirt with energon. 

“Stop it—”

His spark pounded against its casing, his digits tingled, sparked with the leftover current from too many shots that did nothing, Optimus and Ratchet were sneering at him—

“Stop—”

His vocalizer broke, his throat was tight and his optics were stinging, target locks hunted across his vision and found nothing as Bulkhead laughed at him, which didn’t make any sense but it still sounded like him, you know, maybe he wasn’t still on the island, maybe he’d actually just died and this was the Pit, the Well of All Sparks had already said “Hey! We don’t want this glitch!” and tossed him into this void, the black nothing where all he had to do was run for his life and get hit and hurt over and over and over again. 

His vents had been coming fast for a while, he couldn’t even start to try to say how long, but his chassis rattled and ached, his helm hurt, every sensor in his frame screaming DANGER over and over again, trying to kick his motor relays and reaction computation past their highest setting. 

It almost didn’t feel real. It felt like the only thing keeping him attached to his frame was terror, a cold, hard output spat out against the front of his awareness with every spin of his spark:

You’re going to die.

More power to his sensory systems, more power to his weapons that were already humming.  

You’re going to die here. 

His stingers were up, look for the trigger and take it out, things were about to get crazy, crazier than they’d been, the smallest thing could be ten tons of Predacon out to get him. 

You’re going to die here and nobody’s even going to care enough to find your shell. 

More power, look harder, move faster, think quicker that Sari was talking about him like she stepped in something disgusting—

Wait. 

Something thumped behind him, but Bee couldn’t make himself move. The running loop in his processor had stalled out, shivering and juddering, waiting for a chance to start up again, but he wasn’t going to let it. 

It was a point of data that he could hold like it was solid, like nothing else in this fragging nightmare-scape was, it was real and he knew it was real: 

Sari wasn’t there. 

It was the middle of Earth’s weird short decacycle, she was in the middle of lessons and classes, she didn’t have time to go on missions with them, she wasn’t there.  

Things shifted behind him as he beat himself over the helm with that one piece of data, she wasn’t here, so she couldn’t say that, she would never say that, and Bee was finally able to have another quick thought that didn’t relate to his own impending death:

Hey, you know the whole darkness problem? And how you can’t see? Headlights might fix that real nice. 

He gulped down one more vent of still-grossly-humid air, then executed the command. Light flooded the world, his HUD lit up with all the new information it had to parse through, he turned around and stared directly into Waspinator’s bulging, hate-filled optics, so close that he could see the little hexagon lenses inside them.

Bee yelped and stumbled back, falling to his back and elbow joints, but grabbed onto the point of data again like it was the only thing keeping his circuits from coming unspooled. 

“Sari wouldn’t say that.” He choked out through his aching vocalizer, manually cycling his optics one last time. “She’s my friend. She wouldn’t—”

Waspinator roared and slammed his fist into the ground as he lunged forward— but Bee hadn’t needed to roll out of the way, even though he flinched so hard his plating rattled. 

“NO!” he snarled, “Bumble-bot not have friends! ” 

“Yes I do!” Bee blurted indignantly before he could even think to do anything else. 

“No Bumble-bot doesn’t!” 

“Yes I do!” he yelled more insistently now, processor spinning to try to catch up and make any kind of sense out of this, “They were the ones who—”

“He’s not my friend, Sir!” Waspinator opened his mandibles and that dropped out, Bumblebee’s own voiceprint back from…

“That was from boot camp!” he exclaimed, “I don’t—“

“Ooh, look at me! I’m a big ol’ mudflap workin’ on the space bridge!”

“That was from before—“

“Before what?!”  

“Before I knew him! Like, before I really knew Bulkhead!”

“That not matter!” Waspinator snarled, punching the ground again, “Bumble-bot always been crankshaft, always been annoying—”

“You were worse!”

“WE WERE THE SAME!”

Bumblebee’s audials were ringing from the force of the shout, but the night went quiet around them. A little glowing organic landed on Waspinator, and he didn’t even move. 

“Bumble-bot and Wasp were the same.” He said, sounding like he was Bumblebee’s size again.

“If Bumble-bot could say that and get everything,” Waspinator leaned forward, purple optics burning into Bee’s, “get friends, get Team, get base, get energon, games and sky and roads and light—”

He broke off. 

“Not fair. Not fair.”  

Bumblebee sputtered. 

“That’s— that’s not my fault—”

“Yes it is.” Waspinator hissed venomously, “Bumble-bot was one who told Sarge-bot, snooping around and lying!”

“I wasn’t lying!”

A ragged growl tore from Waspinator’s throat and he moved even closer. 

“No! Waspinator knows Wasp wasn’t lying. Knew it since Bumble-bot opened his stupid intake, knew it since trial, knew it when interrogator-bots wanted to hear different, every nanoklik in Stockades and after. Wasp innocent.”

Wait—

“What interrogators?” Bee asked incredulously, “you were just in the brig, weren’t you?”

A sharp sound that almost sounded like a laugh. 

“Just! No. Stockades where traitors go.” His left optic and antenna twitched in time. “And Autobots want to know all about what traitors did before got caught.

“Bumble-bot ever scream so hard his vocalizer short out? Been kept in dark until Bumble-bot not know how many solar cycles gone by? Been asked over and over about Decepticons Bumble-bot doesn’t know, and get hurt every time Bumble-bot says so?”

Waspinator huffed again, humorlessly, as a pit opened up in Bumblebee’s tanks. 

“Just brig. Stockades ruined Wasp. Bumble-bot ruined Wasp.”

“I didn’t— I didn’t mean to…”

“Still Bumble-bot’s fault.” 

He’s right. Something whispered in the back of Bee’s processor. Of course he’d frag something up so badly. 

When had he ever been good for anything?  

His optics stung. 

Waspinator had leaned back, helm low, but gaze still fixed on him. 

“I—” Bee started, “I’m sorry.”

That was all he had. Do not pass GO, do not collect a hundred shanix, his vocalizer was empty and he felt like all his internals had gone empty with it. 

He didn’t really know what else he was expecting. But another snarling sound was definitely not in the realm. 

“What?!” Bee demanded as Waspinator snapped his wings open, “What did I say?!”

“This not—” he broke off into a droning, aggravated groan. “Waspinator finally about to get revenge, now Bumble-bot says that?!”

“I’ve said sorry! Twice! For something that wasn’t even my fault to begin with!”

That earned him a growl that sounded like it came from whatever freaky organic engine Waspinator had now. Okay, his helm was back in the game, they could get crazy, Bee could fight—

A twig snapped behind him. 

Waspinator jerked his helm up and Bumblebee whipped around, headlights spinning to settle on—

Arcee, Bumblebee’s processor picked up on first, a wave of relief crashing through his systems, she was safe, she was there with him now, she was—

Holding that creepy scientist’s servo?

Mesothulas hadn’t steered her wrong. 

The night wasn’t a problem for him or the Predacon, the latter having the natural ability to see in the dark and the former with what she guessed were some high-tech upgrades that matched his biolights. 

Biolights that Arcee technically could have followed through the dark, but this option worked well, too. 

His directions were curt (“Duck.” “Step up.” “Log.”) but his grip was steady and they were making good progress through the forest, especially now that they had a more concrete direction in mind. 

//And what do you propose we do if the Fuzor is lying to us?// Mesothulas asked over their radio. 

//Fuzor?// Arcee asked. 

She could hear Mesothulas huff out loud in front of her. 

//A term I’ve decided upon for his specific variety of techno-organicism. I’ve never seen one display traits from two organic animals at the same time.//

//Sure,// she said, //but to answer the original question, he doesn’t strike me as being all that…//

// Clever? //

//I was going to say manipulative .//

//Hmm.//

Arcee was unused to being in complete darkness. Cybertron’s sun, though weak, still provided ample light during the day, and the night was lit through and through by street lights, advertising signs, holo-screens, and—

Headlights. 

Headlights snapped to focus on their little group. Mesothulas raised his free servo with a hiss and Quickstrike groaned quietly and screwed up his faceplates, but Arcee’s optics adjusted rapidly to the new light. 

“Bumblebee?” 

“Arcee!”

His faceplates practically lit up, he took two steps forward, and then his expression dropped into something much more like confusion. He raised a questioning digit towards her— ah. 

She looked at Mesothulas, then their linked servos, watched his optics widen ever so slightly in understanding. His digits sprang open. 

Seemingly satisfied, Bumblebee crossed the rest of the way towards her, and oh, he didn’t look good. Scrapes spotted his frame, dribbling energon from a dozen little cuts, his chassis tented inward with a massive dent, and his optics were wide and shining. 

His arms got about halfway up to her pauldrons before she beat him to it, pulling him into a hug. Of course, she would never call anybody on Optimus’ Team (save for Sari) anything close to the bitlets she taught, but some situations demanded the kind of comfort that protoforms took to. 

He was shaking. Holding him like she was, the glare of his headlights out of her optics, that also meant she could see behind him to the small clearing in the jungle, and meet the optics of the massive techno-organic that crouched there.

Arcee had done some reading about the case the Team had told her about, going through criminal records, incident reports from her own Team and that of the Elite Guard. Despite the discrepancies (particularly in Sentinel then-Prime’s case), the entire thing just… twisted her spark. She could see the features that had carried over from his frame before whatever experiment had changed him, the sharp sweep of the mouth guard, the traitor-purple glow of his optics in the dark. 

She’d been shown the outside of the Stockades, once, through a video feed transmitting to Cybertron from Moon Base 1. Her training officer had said that what was inside “wasn’t for a former teacher’s optics”. 

“Bumblebee,” she said slowly, gently pushing him to arm’s length, “What happened?”

“I— I was with everyone else, we were all there, but we couldn’t see you, where were you, where—”

“I was with Mesothulas,” she soothed, “he said we were displaced from the initial transportation. We’ve been trying to get to the Predacon base.”

Bumblebee took a vent and nodded. Behind him, Arcee saw Quickstrike pick his way into the clearing, over to Waspinator. 

“We got separated,” Bumblebee went on, “the one with the flamethrower took Ratchet—”

“I believe that one’s called Inferno,” Mesothulas interjected. Arcee gave him a look. 

“Go on,” she said softly.

”He took off with Ratchet, Optimus was fighting Starscream, then he—” Bumblebee pointed emphatically at Waspinator while Mesothulas made an aborted noise of surprise, “shoved them both down a cliff and chased me into the jungle! And he’s been— saying slag, in your guys’ voices—“

“Okay, okay.” She squeezed tighter, reassuring, on his pauldrons. “It’s okay. Just—“

She turned. “Quickstrike?”

The Predacon, who looked like he was in the middle of talking to Waspinator, started and looked back. 

“How far is it to your base from here?”

Quickstrike scratched his helm while Waspinator’s gaze snapped to him with a series of clicks. 

“Uh… well, we ain’t flying… maybe another day? Half?”

“We’d be walking through the night cycle,” she said, more of an announcement than to any specific ‘Bot. Arcee turned to Mesothulas. 

“We should make camp here.”

He sputtered (so did Bumblebee.)

“But time is of the essence!” He cried, “how are we to reach the base in a timely fashion? Complete my observations—?”

//You have plenty to observe right here!// Arcee said, looking pointedly at him, //And it won’t do anyone any good if we reach the base and all of us are too low on energon to do anything about it. You’re on the same recharge cycle as all of us.//

Mesothulas glowered in silence for a moment. 

//And none of us have fueled. You can’t possibly be operating at peak computational efficiency right now.//

//I’ll have you know that I am still in the green,// Mesothulas shot back, //but I sense I am being outvoted. You’re lucky I don’t trust the Fuzor’s ability to give verbal directions.//

He stomped away, towards the middle of the clearing. 

“What are you—”

“Making a fire!” He said hotly as he stooped, gathering something from the ground that Arcee couldn’t make out from where she stood, “I don’t want to be caught scrambling to come up to operating temperature.”

Quickstrike looked up at that. 

“I know this one! Inferno loves this stuff, we’ll get it goin’ in no time!” 

He bounded off as Mesothulas crouched on the ground, grumbling to himself all the while. 

Bumblebee brought his servos up again, gripping her arms tightly. 

“Woah, woah, Arcee,” he hissed, optics wide, “we can’t stay here. We cannot stay here, not with him!”

“Bumblebee—”

“He’s trying to kill me! He was gearing back up for it when you and what’shisface showed up—”

“Mesothulas, and look,” she said, “let me talk to him.”

“No way—”

“Bumblebee, if he were really trying to take you offline, I don’t know if I would be talking to you right now. Hey,” she cupped a servo aside his helm, “let me try. Okay?”

He struggled for a moment, starting and stopping his vocalizer, and then…

He heaved an ex-vent. 

“Okay. Just… be careful. Please?”

“Of course. Go sit. I’ll call you if I need to talk to you again, okay?”

He nodded, shuffling slowly to the growing fire Mesothulas and Quickstrike were tending, then stopped. 

“I’m not talking to either of them.” He dropped his vocalizer to a whisper, “He’s weird.”

She didn’t know which one specifically he was referring to, but nodded anyway. 

Waspinator felt like he was battling a full-out systems stall. 

Things had turned around and twisted back again so quickly it felt like wrenching his helm around and around, trying to put it back on straight so he could put the rest back together. Thoughts rattled around his head, incomplete and unfinished, never minding what he wanted to finish, to make sense of, to find the humming thread that he had just held nanokliks before—

“Waspinator?”

Two-head. He was here with Energon-bot and another with yellow optics. 

And Bumble-bot had said sorry. 

“I’m takin’ these two to the base,” Two-head said, not caring that Waspinator hadn’t said anything. “I didn’t even know you were over here!”

Bumble-bot had said sorry, and how dare he say sorry and sound like he meant it?

Two-head was still talking, and Waspinator dimly heard it, but Energon-bot had wrapped Bumble-bot up in her arms and Waspinator’s wings were twitching and his chassis ached, hot and hurt and burning-orange. She was looking at him, though, and he met her shiny blue optics out of the darkness and she looked… sad.  

He tore his gaze away as she went to talk to Bumble-bot, who had said sorry, something else yelling in his helm that Two-head had been out. 

Doing things. 

By himself, and that meant he should probably pay more attention. 

“Wait,” he forced out, telling everything he was feeling and wanting to purge his tanks over to stop for now, “why is Two-head taking Autobots to base?”

“Oh! Well, I was lookin’ to fight some of them, I found those two, figured that they were trying to get to the volcano anyway, ‘n decided I should try to wrassle ‘em for it!” Then he rubbed the back of his main helm with his snake-servo. “Only… the pink one’s real good at fightin’. Kicked my skidplate good. So I’m showin’ them the way ‘cause I said so and I don’t wanna get walloped again.”

Waspinator bent down further and sniffed, checking. No sharp snap of energon-smell, so Two-head was okay, just dirty and scuffed. He looked up again, at the mech with yellow eyes who was staring at Energon-bot. 

“What about him?” Waspinator asked, gesturing. 

“That’s Mesomerisms!” Two-head said cheerfully as Waspinator thought that didn’t sound right, somehow, “he’s some kinda science-bot. Talks all fancy-like, and I think he might be a lil’ sweet on—”

“Quickstrike?” Energon-bot called, making the both of them turn. 

She announced to everyone that they would be making camp right there and then, with a final-say-ness to it that shut down even Science-bot’s attempts at arguing. 

Two-head took off to help build the fire, which left Waspinator alone with the roiling, tight feeling that seemed like it was going to live permanently in his chassis. His focus was magnetized, locked onto Bumble-bot, the phantom feeling of claws hitting plating juddering up his arms and he wished so hard that the feeling was back and as good as he remembered, but it was like something had split open and gone rotten in his helm, mucking up circuits that were already wrecked. 

His revenge was right there, he was so close. But he was— he was tired, and it stopped feeling right but he didn’t know when but it still should but Bumble-bot had said sorry and he meant it and what was he supposed to do with that—?!

“Hi,” someone said, and Waspinator jumped. 

It was Energon-bot.

The light of the fire had started to bring color back into things, and he could see more than just her blue optics now. Her paint was a little darker than energon was bright, but it still stood. 

“I’m Arcee,” she said, “and I think you’re Waspinator.”

He nodded. 

“May I sit down?”

He nodded again, still tense and looking for the trick. He sat too, but not so much that he couldn’t get up fast if he had to. 

“How long have you lived here?” she asked. 

“Not long,” it was a weird question, what would she want to know about that? “But Waspinator not know how many decacycles exactly.”

She nodded, smiling softly like it was easy for her faceplates. 

“It’s pretty. I’m not used to seeing this much organic life in one place,” she said, “I’m from Iacon.”

Iacon. That was it, part of the name that wasn’t him anymore. A serial number that had been scrubbed out of his files by one too many forced resets and reboots, Wasp of Iacon except that didn’t work, because traitors didn’t get to have a place to be from. 

“Wasp was too.”

Energon-bot hummed, a little note of something blue in it. 

“Did you like it there?”

He huffed an ex-vent and straightened, unable to stop himself. 

“Waspinator not know. Thinks so, but can’t—”

“Remember?”

He looked down at her, vocalizer tight. 

She looked off towards the light of the little fire. 

“I can’t either. Well, sort of. Something happened to me during the war, and I was offline for a long, long time. The Iacon that we have now is… different. It’s not the one I left.

“I’ve heard a lot of things about you, and not a lot of it has been good.” She vented in. “But I think that the one I’m most confident about is that you’ve been through something… something awful, for something you didn’t do.”

Waspinator’s chassis was getting crushed, and the pressure was climbing with suffocating little servos up his throat. 

“Energon-bot… believe Waspinator?”

“Of course. ” She said, the sorrow in her voice so real that it hurt. She leaned closer, then back as Waspinator instinctively twitched away. “I’ve seen the records with my own optics. You were framed by a member of Decepticon High Command.”

He stared at her, optics stinging. Bumble-bot had been saying nonsense about Longarm, but this was new. 

“Do you want to know more?”

Yes. Please. Please. 

“Here. Come look.” 

And she told him, showed him pictures of a one-eyed Decepticon who folded down into one of the four faces that were burned into Waspinator’s processor forever. Told him that Hero-bot and his Team had beaten all the important Decepticons and that they were locked up in Trypticon, that they were still working to find out all the damage One-eye did while he pretended to be an Autobot. 

“Shockwave framed you,” said Teacher-bot, patiently, “and he tricked Bumblebee into helping him.”

“Bumble-bot still—”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, “but it does mean he didn’t mean to.”

She left off with that and sat still, and let Waspinator take vents that rattled through his chassis. Something in his processor kept screaming at him that this was a trap, that it was fake, just like everything Spider-bot said and did was only to hurt Wasp, and it was Waspinator’s job to make sure nothing hurt like that again. He shouldn’t be sitting here and listening and looking at Teacher-bot’s screens she showed him, shouldn’t be feeling like he wanted to curl up in a cave somewhere and wait until it was all over, just—

“Then why Bumble-bot keep saying it not his fault?

Teacher-bot looked up at him. 

“Do you want to ask him why?”

Arcee sat between them, Bumblebee glowering suspiciously across at Waspinator, who was glaring fit to peel paint. 

“First of all, I’m proud of you both for agreeing to talk.” She said. This whole thing was a great deal more complicated than the classroom squabbles her memory banks were providing her, but following the same principles couldn’t hurt the situation.

“Scrapping it out might seem easier, but it’s not sustainable. You both want to keep living on this planet, right?”

Two silent nods, noticeably not looking at her or each other. 

“You don’t have to be friends by the end of this, you don’t even have to like each other. You just need to be civil.”

Across the way, she met Mesothulas’ optics. He seemed to be in the process of scribbling down incomprehensible notes as Quickstrike talked about something she couldn’t hear. 

“Okay. Waspinator, why don’t you ask Bumblebee—”

“Why Bumble-bot keep being such a crankshaft?”

“Wh— you’re the crankshaft! I—“

“Hey,” Arcee cut in, Vector Sigma, “there is no need for name-calling. From either of you.” She let her voice soften. “Be more specific. You’re not trying to fight each other, you’re trying to understand.”

Waspinator huffed and clicked his mandibles. 

“Fine. Why… why Bumble-bot keep saying it not his fault.” He said flatly, “Waspinator knows what happened now. No thanks to Bumble-bot.”

Arcee decided to let that one slide. 

“I keep saying it wasn’t my fault,” Bumblebee insisted, servos clenched into fists in front of him, “because it wasn’t! Shockwave was the one who planted the evidence on you!”

“And Bumble-bot was one who told Sarge-bot!”

“I know! Because I thought that I was doing something good! I thought I was actually catching a traitor, like, doing something cool, something that could fast-track me to the Elite Guard, so people like you would stop picking on me all the time!”

Arcee drew an in-vent, about to try to direct them again, when Bumblebee went on. 

“I— Longarm was— Shockwave— he was the one who was telling me that stuff. And yeah it looks like a load of slag now, but it was nice! It felt like he actually thought I could make it, but of course the one ‘Bot who actually liked me turned out to be a Con—”

“Does Bulk-bot not count?” Waspinator interjected, “He wanted to be Bumble-bot’s friend from beginning. Bulk-bot not good enough, or what?”

“Yes— no, I mean, he…” Bumblebee’s superoptic ridges furrowed and he looked into the dirt. “I didn’t want to get slowed down. But that was dumb!” He clarified, jerking his helm up, “That was really dumb, and Bulkhead is great.”

Waspinator scoffed, and despite the lack of pupils, Arcee could feel the optic-roll. 

“Get slowed down,” he said, voice dripping with sarcasm, “Bumble-bot talk big. Doesn’t do.”

“I do plenty! You literally downloaded our files so you could pretend to do the stuff I did!”

“Yeah, and was lame!”

“Oh yeah—?”

Arcee put both servos out. They weren’t going to get anywhere down this path. They both looked down and away again, Waspinator grumbling unhappily and Bumblebee’s arms folded over his chassis as his intake twisted into a frown.

She let the silence sit for a moment. 

“Okay. Bumblebee—”

“I know he played me, okay?!” Bumblebee said suddenly, focus jerking back. “I know it was all fake, I know he was just using me to keep his cover, I just—”

His voice broke. 

“I keep thinking that… we got him. On the moon, Bulkhead and me, we fought him, we won, and we took all the Cons we beat back to Cybertron, and that— it feels like it should make everything he did stop hurting so much.

“But I was too stupid to see that I was falling for everything, and I screwed up like I screw everything else up!”

He scrubbed a servo across his optics. 

“I said I was sorry. I am. I’m sorry that any of this even happened in the first place, I’m sorry about the insane slag that happened on Dinobot Island, I’m sorry that I can’t do anything to make up for it and you still want to scrap me—”

“Wasp wanted Bumble-bot to hurt.” Abrupt, softer than Arcee had heard in the span of this conversation, “Wasp wanted Bumble-bot to hurt like Wasp hurt. To know what like.”

He had one knee drawn up protectively to his chassis, curled in on himself. 

“And Wasp forgive Bumble-bot. But Waspinator not want to get hurt again.” He looked over at the fire, purple shining pink in the dim firelight that spilled past Quickstrike’s gesturing servos. “Not want to let…”

He took a sharp in-vent. 

“Waspinator wants quiet. Wants energon when wants energon. Wants Predacons safe. Waspinator not need to hurt Bumble-bot to have that.”

Bumblebee’s optics were cycled open wide. He looked like his vent cycles had been knocked out of alignment, and Arcee’s spark soared with hope.

“Y— yeah,” he said, “okay.” His intake turned up into a wobbly smile. “Yeah. We can just be… boring?” 

Waspinator chittered. 

“Sure,” he said, “can be boring.”

Arcee let out a vent and smiled as Bumblebee gave a short, watery laugh that was answered by Waspinator’s amused huff. This was… honestly, the best she could have hoped for. Not a complete fix, she doubted that would even be possible for something of this magnitude, but neutrality? That was a first step many couldn’t even achieve in the first place. 

Then the soft laughter she was hearing turned into something more like sobs.  

Of course. This had been a long, difficult conversation, it was late, both of them had likely been running their emotional circuitry into the ground, it was perfectly normal to have feelings too big for one’s frame (relatively speaking). 

Arcee made a soft noise with her vents, just to get their attention, and opened her arms. 

Bumblebee practically dove for her, and she got one arm around his back while the other came to rest just behind Waspinator’s helm. 

She looked up and found Mesothulas’ wide yellow optics as the frames she held shook with their sobs. 

//You can recharge,// she said over their radio, //I’ve got them.//

Chapter Text

“And you can’t start a fire why?”

“I’m more used to putting them out.” Optimus snapped as he slumped back against a tree. Organic material didn’t exactly spontaneously combust (at least, as far as he was aware). After sending Inferno down the river, Starscream had smirked. 

(“Well, there you have it,” he’d said, “The best chance of getting any answers waits at the volcano.”)

While energetic signature reading was out of the picture, Optimus had still been able to see the gigantic heat sink that stabbed through the middle of the island. He’d assumed that anything living would want to stay away from something that read like a death trap, but then again… it would be a good place to hide. 

“Leaving us to freeze through the night cycle.” Starscream sniffed.

“We’re well within operating temperature.”

“You’re the one without any weapons to keep hot. Haven’t you ever heard of a thermal tarp?”

Optimus sighed. A fire would be good for warmth, but he was more concerned about not being able to see once darkness fell. He flicked his headlights on and stood.

“Those are for emergencies, and a slightly cooler climate does not qualify as an emergency.”

“What are you talking about?” Starscream asked incredulously from where he sat, propped up against a creaking tree. “Insulation sheeting is—”

“A luxury,” Optimus finished, digging his digits into the side of another tree and coming away with a fistful of bark. “All you need is the berth.”

“For the induction field, maybe!” Starscream countered, “Otherwise it’s just a slab.” He snorted derisively, shuttering his optics and crossing his arms over his cockpit canopy. “I wouldn’t put it past the Autobots to do such a thing to their berths.”

Optimus scraped for vegetation on the ground as he knelt and swept the wood into a loose pile. 

“And what makes Decepticon berths so much better?” he asked flatly.

Starscream slitted an optic open, a sliver of red against the dimming jungle. 

“Wait, are you actually being serious? I—”

Optimus unsheathed his ax. Starscream’s optics shot fully open at the sound, pinprick-pink pupils flickering into sight, trained on the weapon. 

Right. 

Optimus knelt down to the pile he’d made, and slowly made a point of turning the blade away from the Decepticon. With the opposite end of the blade facing what he hoped was good enough kindling, he activated the rocket boost feature on the lowest possible setting. 

The flash of blue energy shot a good chunk of what he’d collected out of the way, but what remained quickly caught into orange and red licks of fire. After he was relatively sure the fire wouldn’t go out, Optimus sheathed his ax again. 

Starscream stared. Then his expression and optics smoothed back over. 

“I thought the whole thing about padding blocks was a myth, you actually don’t—”

Optimus sat down heavily. “What is a padding block?”

“You’re joking.”  

He looked at Starscream flatly. 

“Padding blocks?” 

Nope.

“High-density foam? For recharging on?”

Negative. 

“You really just lay there? On bare metal??”

“It gets the job done.” It was supposed to, anyway.

Two spots of white flashed in Starscream’s optics, then vanished. 

“Well,” he said, “That certainly explains some things about you Autobots—”

“Such as?”

“The massive sticks up your afts, for one.”

Optimus rolled his optics and turned towards the fire. This was pointless. 

“You may as well have been recharging on the ground your whole function,” Starscream went on, “That must be why your medics are in such high demand. I’d bet Iacon General has a whole wing for stiff struts and chronic charge depletion, with nothing between you and the berth.” 

He paused for a nanoklik. Optimus didn’t look up. 

“I’ve been forced to make my base of operations more comfortable over the past few decacycles. I can tell you which—”

Starscream stopped short, vocalizer shutting off with such an audible click that Optimus’ finials twitched at the sound. He glanced up. 

It looked like the Decepticon had stopped mid-gesture, one servo gnarled in the air, his optics wide and… 

“What?” 

“I,” He said eloquently, “Mm.”

Starscream’s superoptic ridges furrowed, and he regarded his cockpit canopy suspiciously as he drew his servo closer. 

“There’s— ghhk—!”

The same vocalizer shutoff, this time coupled with a lurch forward. Optimus shot to his feet. 

Something was wrong. 

“What is it?” He demanded, optics hunting across the Decepticon’s massive frame for something, any indication. 

“I—” Starscream growled, optics slitted in what looked like— pain? 

Steam shot out of the seams of his cockpit canopy as the locks disengaged, the inside already fogged from the heat Optimus could feel emanating from his frame. 

“What are you doing?” he said, tanks going cold against his will. 

“I don’t know!” Starscream snarled. “I can feel— something under this—!”

He hooked both claws between the canopy seams, and yanked it open with a scream of protesting pistons. 

Optimus averted his optics because he was a Prime, for spark’s sake and no matter how fragging strange this night got, he wasn’t going to ogle a Decepticon’s internals for no reason. 

…what he hoped was no reason. Against all information he currently had, but still. 

“Well?” Starscream demanded, panting, still pouring steam from what looked like every vent. 

“Well what?!” Optimus responded in a completely even tone from behind his servo. 

“What do you see?” 

“I am in no way a medic—”

“Do you think I give a single solitary backfire about medical training?!” Starscream shrieked, vocalizer climbing in decibels as he went on, “I can’t very well see into my own fragging cockpit, and I felt something—”

Optimus’ finial twitched. Sharp, rapid taps of metal on metal. Soft, most likely muffled by the Seeker’s heavy armor. 

“moving, and if this festering organic planet has even one more—”

He dropped his servo, told himself he was ready, and moved to peer into the Decepticon’s open chassis within the same vent. Two great outcomes to this. He was either going to be sticking his faceplate up against the Air Commander of the Decepticon Armada’s spark for no reason, or for a very good reason, but with any luck it would turn out to be nothing and he’d just have to delete this entire megacycle from his memory—

Starscream’s spark chamber was empty. 

There was nothing. Not even a flicker past the stacks of magenta biolights and his sleek black inner manifold, soaked and beaded with condensation from the hot huffs of his inner vents. 

“I wasn’t aware I had the visage of Unicron in there.” Starscream said flatly. 

Optimus tried to pick up the pieces of his fragmented thought trees. There was no way the mech before him should be anything but a gray shell, but wasn’t the universe funny about that? The same thing had happened to him not that long ago. 

“I—” say words, it was not that hard, “I don’t… see anything? I might’ve heard something—” 

“Then what are you waiting for?” Starscream exclaimed, straightening, extending a claw like he was going to grab Optimus’ servo, then stopping short. Instead, he simply swept his legs apart, gesturing to the space where Optimus was rapidly realizing he was meant to stand, “Listen harder.”

“Are you serious.”

“Do you think I would lie about feeling something scurry around my internals?” Starscream asked, sounding scandalized, “What could I possibly gain from aAAGH—”

His vocalizer snapped down on the sound and his frame seized and there was the sound again. 

“Alright! Just,” Optimus stepped over one of the Seeker’s thighs, the empty, glistening spark chamber yawning before him, “try not to move? Let me…”

He switched his headlights on, squinting into the place that had, once upon a time, housed Starscream’s soul. The Decepticon’s claws sank into the dirt on either side of him, and from this close, the elevated temperature was almost enough to automatically trigger his fans. Almost. 

Optimus didn’t even know what he was looking for, he wasn’t a medic, and if he was, there was no way he’d know what to look for in a jet’s internals. But you didn’t fake the kind of pain that grabbed hold of your entire frame. He leaned in closer. Even if—

A flash of silver, sliding and writhing behind the main chamber. 

Optimus moved before he knew what he was doing. 

He shoved his servo through the gap and braced his other on the side of Starscream’s cockpit, ignoring the shout of pain and hoping that he could grab whatever it was in time before Starscream threw him halfway across the island, left, right, there, there were feelers worming between his digits, something slick and oily but segmented enough to catch under his servo—

He pulled with all the strength in his frame, brackish oil spraying out as something came out with his arm, something long and thin and silver with sharp grasping legs studded down its body, that shrieked and thrashed in his grip as Starscream’s back arched with the force of the movement, there was more of it—?!

Another servo joined his, black and gray lower down the body of the creature, and Starscream pulled in the opposite direction, white pupils like burning lasers in his optics. 

The creature squealed, jerked, and tore, spraying them both with a noxious mixture of… fluids. Optimus had to call it fluid, otherwise he might just purge here and now. 

He stumbled back a few steps as Starscream tore at the silver body hanging limply out of his chassis. It slithered out with a wet, metallic rasp, hit the ground, and was still. 

All things considered; Sari’s first foray into crime had gone really well!

She sat at her desk now, the perfect picture of a good student who did not spend last night egging Mikaela Banes’ house and writing “BUTT-FACE” on her front door. Well, the last part had been Charlie’s idea, but Sari had been busy making the two trees in Mikaela’s yard look like mummies, so it all evened out in the end. 

They’d left in a hurry at… maybe three or four in the morning? Sari was doing great, she could’ve stayed out all night, but they had heard one of those little yippy dogs start barking inside and they had both kinda panicked and Sari might have scorched the driveway a little bit when they took off again, but she had already flatlined their security cameras. All the ones on the outside of the house were interconnected, it was like they were just begging to be turned off. 

Anyway, she’d dropped Charlie back off at her window. She made it about four steps to her bed before falling asleep, shoes and all. Sari still had the energy to do her little pre-bedtime ritual, even if the bedtime had been pushed back some hours. And it didn’t hurt that she was still practically soaring , like, feelings-wise. That had been fun.

And very, very gratifying. She felt like she woke up looking fresher than normal. Maybe it was all the being better than Mikaela. She’d definitely never be able to egg Sari’s house. 

Her dad and Fanzone had specifically said she was off the hook for patrolling on school nights. They’d actually been pretty emphatic about not doing it anytime but the weekend, because she “had s chool to worry about”. 

(Pssh. School might’ve been something they had to worry about, but she was pretty sure they couldn’t run differential equations through their head. Well… maybe her dad could. He was still really smart with that kind of stuff.)

So, no patrol to worry about, no contacts from the Bots, even Bumblebee hadn’t sent her his usual funny morning BitBot, and nothing to do but slide into her seat in English and watch the magic happen! 

…and wake up Charlie when Mikaela did get there, because she was taking the rest of the passing period to drool onto her copy of Romeo and Juliet.

Mesothulas had spent a good percentage of the night cycle thinking.

Granted, thinking seemed to take up a good deal more of his time than that of other mechanisms, but he had been given rather a lot to contemplate. 

After being veritably strongarmed into staying put for the duration of the night, Mesothulas had begrudgingly resigned himself to making field observations about the recharge habits of techno-organics in what he was forced to assume counted as a natural environment, even though their very presence on the island altered behavioral circumstances to such a degree that it was practically impossible to control for. 

Case in point: The pile of mechanisms that had dropped into recharge together after a good long while of sobbing from two parties, that had been joined after a bit by the Fuzor nestling himself under Waspinator’s thoracic arms. 

He had been reduced to eavesdropping and guesswork absent of his access to the greater intergalactic network to corroborate what he had heard, but he had certainly heard enough. A mech had to make a living, and with the Decepticon drive for research grinding to a halt, Mesothulas had been forced into less scientifically-inclined methods of keeping energon in his tanks. …which meant scuttling about the same circles as bounty hunters when the demand for his toxins and made-to-order cybervenom was low. 

Pretending not to listen to the little conversation Arcee had facilitated was easy enough, less easy to conceal was his surprise at the true depth of the situation. The first intentionally-made techno-organic had originally been an Autobot footsoldier with a startlingly organic designation, who had also been incriminated in Shockwave’s planetside espionage. All before the cohort had finished boot camp, unsettlingly enough. 

The facts themselves did not bother Mesothulas in the slightest. All was fair in war and war, wasn’t that how the saying went? Either way, the truly baffling element to this whole scenario was, as usual, the ‘Bot who had held two mechs who had previously been trying to kill the other in her arms as they all recharged. 

She had managed to single-handedly break the observed field leader of the Predacons with nothing more than her vocalizer. Arcee had steered them through a conversation that touched on Autobot torture, for spark’s sake, and still managed to emerge from it with an ally.  

She was… despite her lack of respect for his methods, Mesothulas could not help but… admire hers. However divorced from scientific reality they may be. 

Now, the sun had risen on the little island again. The sidereal day cycle on this planet was decently comparable to that of the Cybertronian standard, only off by about four cycles. Satisfied with their rest, and not wanting to acquiesce that his analytical systems were profiting off the extra power, Mesothulas, Arcee, and the rest of their motley crew had set off. 

“We are still heading towards this volcano, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you worry!” Quickstrike interjected, “Now that Waspy’s here, we’re definitely gonna get where we’re goin’.”

Ahead of him, Bumblebee elbowed Arcee. 

“This was the guy you were following before you found me?”

“We’re a little lacking in the tour guides department, Bee,” she said, and Mesothulas snickered. “He actually offered to show us the way.”

“He did?” Bumblebee asked incredulously, “he doesn’t strike me as the helpful type…”

“I did have to do a bit of convincing—”

“Convincin’?!” Quickstrike exclaimed, whirling around, “She beat me good! I thought y’all were gonna be easy to slag, but all I got myself was a whoopin’.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Bumblebee said, apparently commiserating, “Your training’s always the hardest, ‘Cee!”

Arcee rolled her optics, but smiled fondly. Mesothulas could… actually picture it very clearly. She seemed the type to make the instruction, no matter on the topic, count— 

“Trainin’?” Quickstrike asked again. 

“Autobots fighting to be better at fighting,” Waspinator responded, looking back at the lot of them and flicking one wing. 

“Ohh,” Quickstrike said, using the fangs of his serpentine hand to scratch his head, “y’mean like how we wrassle with each other?” 

Small clusters exhibit rough-and-tumble play (?), display a lack of familiarity with Autobot-style military social strata, Mesothulas noted in his private log. If he was to be barred from any physical testing until a later date, he would have to make do with behavioral notes. 

“Autobots not call it that,” Waspinator went on, “Training important for Autobot machine.”  

…Waspinator displays distinct contempt for said Autobot-style military strata, Mesothulas wrote, likely the result of previous interaction with Autobot incarceration. 

“Training is important for collaboration,” Arcee corrected, Bumblebee leaning to look around her, “we use it to help ‘Bots learn how to work together, especially in a combat situation.”

Quickstrike was nodding thoughtfully as the information absorbed into his processor (or at least, that’s what he assumed was happening. The actual cognitive ability of the Fuzor was still in significant doubt). 

“So… you mean to say that any Autobot’d know what to do if I did this?!”  

Mesothulas jerked his frame out of the way as Quickstrike punctuated the last word by flinging his snake hand past his shoulder pauldron, where it snapped a micrometer away from Bumblebee. 

“Hey!” the minibot exclaimed, outraged. Waspinator laughed. 

“I thought you said you fought for fun!” 

“Maybe give a ‘Bot a little warning next time?!”

“Aww, too scared?”

“I’ll show you scared—”  

“Alright, alright,” Arcee said, wedging herself between the two of them and holding them both at arm’s length, “I know this might sound like fun right now, but we need to keep moving.” She struggled for a moment, bracing herself against Quickstrike’s attempts to grab at Bumblebee with his other servo. “Waspinator—?”

Mesothulas narrowed his optics behind his visor for about half a nanoklik before claws closed gently around Quickstrike’s chassis. 

“Hey—!”

Waspinator turned around, taking Quickstrike with him. Mesothulas tuned his audials towards the front of the group, fairly confident that Arcee was attempting to soothe Bumblebee’s ego. 

“Two-head can mess with Bumble-bot all he wants later,” Waspinator said, having firmly planted Quickstrike down on the ground beside him, “Need to get Science-bot and Teacher-bot to base.” 

“I know,” Quickstrike huffed, “but it feels like it’s been forever! I dunno what ‘Ferno or Scorponok’s off doin’...”

“Predacons will find us. If not, we find them. Big things coming, Waspinator can tell.” 

If he were inclined to believe things without a shred of visual evidence, Mesothulas could have sworn that Waspinator was looking at him through those fascinating faceted eyes. 

The group trudged on, with the Predacons leading the pack through the jungle. They passed a while in silence while Mesothulas stared at Waspinator’s back, making notes about his gait and weight distribution as he walked in relation to other Cybertronians with comparable body plans, that was to say, not many. The thorax could not be counted as kibble, considering that it made up a large, unignorable component of both beast and root mode—

Mesothulas stopped short, then stumbled forward when Bumblebee walked straight into his back. 

“Watch it—!” the minibot exclaimed, but as usual, Mesothulas was not listening to him. 

“Waspinator, is it?” he asked, circling around. 

The Predacon regarded him flatly, suspiciously. 

“I witnessed what seems to be independent movement next to one of your secondary wing sockets,” he said, “is this ordinary or irregular? Is there some form of symbiosis at work here—?”

“Oh!” Quickstrike interjected, “lemme get that for ya, Waspy!” 

He darted around opposite Mesothulas while Waspinator heaved a sigh. The Fuzor stood on the tips of his pedes and squinted at the two sockets Mesothulas had specified. He shifted his weight, both servos raised, watching, waiting for something that he—

Almost faster than Mesothulas’ optics could track, the snake’s head had shot down and returned, something silver and wriggling clutched in its jaws. 

Waspinator gave a full-frame shudder, readjusting his wings in their sockets and turning around. Quickstrike held his servo aloft, looking extremely proud. 

“What is that—?” Mesothulas closed the distance between them and grabbed for Quickstrike’s hand, magnifying lenses sliding down silently over one optic. Distantly, he noted Arcee and Bumblebee looking over in confusion. 

Clutched in the jaws of Quickstrike’s secondary head was a small, segmented silver creature. Similar in body construction to a centipede, but it sported distinctly smaller antennae. The legs were sharp, but the specimen also had small, sail-shaped vestigial wings that flapped weakly against the snake’s fangs. 

“Aw, that’s just one of the critters that get up on us sometimes!” Quickstrike answered. 

“Itchy-things like to get under plating,” Waspinator said, rubbing at his wing sockets with one claw, “have to be picked out.”

Arcee had ventured closer while Bumblebee hid behind her, expression betraying nothing but abject disgust. How one could feel anything but fascination when encountering a discovery such as this was beyond Mesothulas. 

“Those things… what, they live inside you?” he asked, horrified, “like space barnacles?” 

“No, no,” Mesothulas said, waving a dismissive hand in his direction while he examined the creature, “these organisms are parasitic, yes… but they seem to have no indication of the fungal strategy of growth that space barnacles display.”

He straightened, turned, thinking, and keeping a firm hold on the apparatus that held his specimen (“Woah there!” Quickstrike said).

“This specimen displays traits from other families of Earth’s insects, but also displays traits of Xenos vesparum, and selectionary evolution into techno-organic mutualism is not possible in such a short span of time. If anything, a parasite as sophisticated as this one would have had to existed solely in an organic capacity…”

He trailed off, tapping one digit on his mask. 

(Arcee held up her servos at the mystified bots. Bless her spark for letting him think—)

He rounded on Waspinator. 

“How did Blackarachnia come by the organic material that she used in your experiment?” 

Waspinator visibly bristled. 

“Grabbed little bug from case.” he said acridly. 

“A-HA!” Mesothulas twisted his hand, grabbing the creature firmly from Quickstrike’s jaws, “that explains it! This creature displays traits of another type of insect that parasitizes wasps in an ordinary Earthen ecosystem!”

He shook it for emphasis. 

“It, too, must have been affected by whatever process Blackarachnia used to convert metal and synthetics into semiorganic material! You’ve effectively created a new species, one that preys on your remaining cybernetics while receiving organically-necessary shelter in the form of your internals!

And, and, this also means that such things have the potential  to feast on fully Cybertronian entities! Left unchecked in an entirely mechanical system, they would have free reign of an unlimited food supply, and devoid of predators in the form of Preda cons, I imagine there is scarcely a limit to how large they could become! And if we take the altered metabolic rates into consideration, the process could commence in a matter of hours!” 

Mesothulas’ audience stared at him blankly. It was rather common to be struck speechless in the presence of such groundbreaking science. 

A twinge of pain shot down his arm from the tips of his servos. The little parasite was gnawing on his thumb. 

Ah. 

“So,” he finished, “do not let it do this to you!” 

Chapter Text

There used to be a time, much, much earlier in his function, where Ratchet pictured what things might look like once he got further along in stellar cycles. 

He’d’ve spent the war fighting best he could, certainly never left Cybertron for as long as he’d been living off-world and liking it, settle down somewhere with a nice ‘Bot like he was supposed to. He never dreamed of anything particularly glamorous by any stretch of the processor, maybe just a condo in a little complex in Iacon. Live the rest of the stellar cycles in as much peace as he could, maybe with an honorable discharge to a position at Iacon General, if he was inclined towards thinking wishfully. 

Dragging a screeching ant through a jungle had never once crossed his processor. 

“YOU WILL DIE SCREAMING, AUTOBOT!”

Especially not one who was so inventive with his threats. 

“EVERY REMAINING MICROSECOND OF YOUR LIFE WILL BE SPENT IN FIERY AGONY!!”

After getting deposited on the riverside like a bag of spare parts, Ratchet had been left a little high and dry. Trying to follow Inferno (he’d said his own name a lot in the time he’d been making increasingly graphic death threats) back to the site of the fight would have been almost impossible by pede. It wasn’t an uncrossably hard distance, but the air advantage did mean speed.  

Ratchet had been tramping through the undergrowth of the island, following the curve of the river in hopes of getting a better vantage point somewhere, when lo and behold, what had he seen flailing around in the river like it was dying? The very same Pred that’d dumped him there in the first place. 

Fortunately, he was a mech that was most often prepared. After lifting the waterlogged beast to shore with his magnetics, he’d used some of the spare tensile cabling to make sure the Pred couldn’t get at his flamethrower. Then he confiscated the flamethrower anyway for good measure. 

It took a bit for the ant to fully wake up, but once he did, he made Bumblebee seem quiet. But, if the others had any good sense in them, they’d’ve seen the massive spot of hot at the middle of the island, and hopefully call it as good a point as any to head. Ratchet could only hope that Arcee had landed not too far away from the lot of them—

“I WILL EXTINGUISH YOUR SPARK, REND YOUR HEAD FROM YOUR FRAME, AND PRESENT IT TO THE QUEEN AS A TROPHY—”

“Would it kill you to pipe down?” Ratchet snarled over his shoulder. He was leaving a sizable trail through the brush, the ant’s weight and thrashing limbs smashing down vegetation and scoring trees, and the going wasn’t exactly fast. Now at about mid-solar cycle, if he was being generous with himself, he could get there by the time the night-cycle began. 

The ant fixed him with a furious glare. 

“I shall not!” he spat, struggling against his bonds, “Now that you have served your purpose, you trespass on the Colony’s territory!”

“You lot are the reason we’re here in the first place!”

“IRRELEVANT!” 

Ratchet heaved an ex-vent and yanked a little harder. 

“Doesn’t help that nothing you do is gonna matter to her. Blackarachnia—”

“You will respect our Queen—”

“She couldn’t give half a backfire about you,” Ratchet said sourly, “She’s short on mech-power, and you’re filling that niche nicely.” 

Inferno snarled.

“I am performing my duty. For the good of the Queen, for the good of my sisters, and for the good of the Colony itself.”

Ratchet allowed himself a nanoklik of confusion at the term— sisters, he’d only heard that once or twice in his function— then set his jaw and grit his dentae. Optimus had taken some… encouraging, but eventually, he’d told Ratchet a bit more about what happened with his former friend, before and since they’d arrived on Earth. At risk of sounding too harsh, Ratchet thought that she and that cyber-clown Sentinel took up too much data in Optimus’ processor. 

“That’s the thing about duty, kid,” he said finally, “it eats you right up. What happens when she starts deciding that you’re not living up to her little missions? Because I can tell you, no ‘Bot like her is satisfied with just one.” 

“It is the Queen’s right!” Inferno cried, “We exist to serve her! We will not fail her!”

“That’s always the computing until it happens. Then you’re up a dead zone without a thruster, and on top of it, you’re struggling to even think your way around it.” Ratchet grunted as he was forced to swing them both around a boulder in their path. 

Well, call it a miracle. It was actually quiet for a klik and a half. 

“I always act in the Colony’s best interest.” Came the eventual response. “We are stronger together.”

Hm. First thing the ant had said that even made a byte of sense. 

“You’ve got that right,” Ratchet grumbled, “you and your team do pretty well with each other. Just keep them in your processor.”

Silence again. Hm. Ratchet would’ve started talking to him a whole lot sooner if he’d known this is where it’d get him—

Something snapped in the bushes ahead of him. And the pedestep that followed it sounded big.  

Ratchet shifted, hooking the tensile cable around his left arm, freeing his right and extending his magnetic prongs. Another Predacon would put him at a disadvantage, but if worse came to worst, cutting and running was sometimes how a ‘Bot survived. 

The bushes rustled, heavy pedesteps grew louder, Inferno twisted against the cable to see what was going on, and—

“Bulkhead?”  

The mech in question had tumbled out of the brush and fallen flat on his front, leaving a furrow in the undergrowth with his jaw. He blinked, optics likely spinning from the fall, before they focused on him. 

“Ratchet!” Bulkhead exclaimed, pushing himself to his pedes. Far too quick for a ‘Bot his size, he had both arms slung around Ratchet’s shoulders and was squeezing.  

“Ack— put me down!”

“Oh, right. Sorry.” 

Ratchet rolled his optics, but still patted Bulkhead’s chassis as he was lowered to the ground. 

“It’s good to see a familiar faceplate.” 

“Yeah it is! It was crazy, we were all fighting, and then I just— everything went dark.”

“HA!” Inferno laughed from the ground, “You are no match for Quickstrike’s cybervenom!”

Bulkhead peered over Ratchet’s helm at the techno-organic, before cycling his optics and looking back and forth between them. 

“Doc?” he asked, flicking a digit, “how’re you… uh…?”

Ah, that was right. The ant was closer to Waspinator’s size than anyone else’s. He certainly looked too heavy for a ‘Bot of Ratchet’s size to drag. 

He huffed. 

“Never heard of that medic strength before, kid?” He knocked on his own chassis. “We’re built sturdier than you think. Someone’s gotta be able to drag a ‘Bot your size out of the line of fire.”

Bulkhead nodded, visibly filing that tidbit away. 

“Anyway, I found him floating in the river,” Ratchet went on, jerking a thumb in Inferno’s direction. 

“I was tricked! ” the ant seethed, struggling again, “by that accursed Decepticon! And the Prime!” 

Both Autobots blinked. 

“He’s seen Boss-bot,” Bulkhead said. 

“And Starscream.” Ratchet finished. He could only imagine how that little partnership was working out. He turned to Inferno. 

“Did you manage to find out where they might’ve been going before they kicked your skidplate?”

The ant growled. 

“I was deceived,” he said, “and I fear in my arrogance I have given them the location of the Nest.”

“Is that the volcano?” 

Both sets of optics snapped to Bulkhead. 

“And how did you find that out?” Ratchet asked incredulously. 

“Easy!” he exclaimed, then turned around, fishing for something in the bushes. 

Ratchet was this close to saying something before Bulkhead turned back around, holding an entire Predacon who was looking sheepishly at the jungle floor in one servo, the one with the big claws and long tail. 

“He told me!” 

“Scorponok!” Inferno wailed from the ground, sounding utterly pained. 

Ratchet considered the nervous-looking Pred for a nanoklik, then shrugged. If it got them where they needed to be…

Some of the buildings in Iacon stretched up into the stratosphere, but somehow, standing at the base of this… volcano, Mesothulas had called it, Arcee really felt small.

Maybe it was the fact that buildings had a pretty clear start and end to them. This landscape moved and swelled like it was alive on its own, and the mountain before them stretched up and out. 

Their group stood in a small clearing, Mesothulas squinting, probably taking readings of some feature of the outside, Waspinator listening to a story Quickstrike was telling that exaggerated Arcee’s combat abilities to a degree that was almost unbelievable, while Bumblebee looked at the forest nervously at her back. 

“So,” Mesothulas started, “did you factor in the thousands of mechanometers in altitude to our journey time, or…?”

Waspinator huffed. 

“Science-bot needs to calm his actuators,” he said while Mesothulas scoffed in offense, “this the back entrance.” 

“We could go ‘round to the front,” Quickstrike posited, “but that’d mean walkin’ all the way to the other side of the volcano, and I don’t think y’all’re too keen on any more hoofin’ it.” 

“You got that right,” Bumblebee said, “I think my pedes are just about ready to fall off!” 

Arcee walked forward, joining Mesothulas in looking up at the summit. 

“How many mechanometers up did you say again?”

“A truly depressing number,” he said, “better suited for a shuttle than a climb.” 

She nodded, then turned back to the younger ‘Bots. 

“The way you talk makes it sound like we’re not walking back around, I think,” she said, watching as Quickstrike planted both mismatched servos on his hips. 

The Fuzor (ah, wouldn’t Mesothulas be so proud that his new term was catching on?) chuckled. “Nope!” He said cheerfully, turning towards Waspinator, who was in the process of cracking his neckplates. 

“Normally Waspinator only takes Two-head when Predacons come this way,” he said, rotating each shoulder joint with an audible popping sound, “but can get Autobots too.” 

Quickstrike’s whoop drowned out Mesothulas’ grumbles about not being an Autobot, but it was Bumblebee who spoke up. 

“Wait, wait—” he said, “you mean—” he jabbed a digit into the air, pointed towards the summit of the volcano, expression scrunched up with disbelief. “There?”

“M hm,” Waspinator replied, condescension oozing from his words, “called up, Bumble-bot.” 

Bumblebee’s engine growled, and Arcee took this opportunity to step between them. 

“Alright, the entrance is hidden on the mountainside, thank you for telling us. The sooner we get there, the sooner we can be out of each other’s wiring.” 

Bumblebee crossed his arms over his chassis and Waspinator huffed.

“Waspinator can take Autobots there. Will need to hold on.”

“Hang on—” Bumblebee started, “All of us? At the same time?”

Waspinator paused in the middle of Quickstrike clambering up onto one of his shoulders. His optics narrowed, helm twitching and turning minutely as he considered Bumblebee, Quickstrike, Mesothulas, Arcee herself—

Ah. Of course he’d taken that as a challenge. 

Recharge didn’t exactly come easy after yanking a mechanometers-long creature out of someone else’s chassis. Optimus and Starscream spent the megacyle or so before the sun began to rise again in silence. 

Horrible silence, for the record. 

Optimus hadn’t really been able to do anything except stand there, utterly horrified, as Starscream sat there, panting, half of the creature’s silvery body crumpling in his clawed servos. Pink dripped steadily from the torn end of the insectoid body, casting a faintly luminous glow from the puddles it formed on the jungle floor. Eventually, it seeped into the mud, tinting it. 

Starscream had flung the creature away and shuddered his cockpit canopy and vents closed. His plating had given a full-frame rattle, just once, and then— silence. 

The silence stretched through the rest of the night cycle as Optimus dipped fitfully in and out of recharge, not quite secure enough in his assessment of Starscream’s offline weapons system to completely relax. As soon as the sky began to lighten enough that he could actually see again as the fire he’d made smoldered weakly, he’d gotten up. Not a nanoklik later, Starscream had stirred, too. 

It looked like Optimus wasn’t the only one who didn’t recharge.

They went through the gray jungle in silence, while Optimus’ processor slowly ate itself alive. 

He was operating on too little fuel, and even less recharge. Everything, everything felt fried, overclocked, the sounds of the waking jungle grating on his audials and his injuries stabbing at his pain sensors with every step he took. Not to mention the idea that the mech who was trekking through this Pitscape with him was dead.

In all honesty, that was probably it. It echoed through Optimus’ mind like a stuck subroutine, all of it. Stifling, cloying heat, pouring from a frame that should have been cool to the touch. Yawning, empty blackness, the strut-deep knowledge that this was wrong, biolights that he should never have been able to see winking in the dark—

“You look terrible.” 

His mind snapped back to the present. The dead mech was talking to him. 

“I didn’t recharge well.” 

Starscream snorted. 

“You didn’t recharge at all.”

Optimus whipped a branch out of their collective way. Scrap this. 

“I pulled— something out of your chassis,” he fired back, “I put my servo through where your spark should be. Sorry if that’s kind of strange for me.” 

Starscream made a noise that sounded something like “Mm,” and stepped over a fallen log. 

“Fair enough,” he said mildly, which Optimus didn’t believe for a second. 

“What happened?” He asked, because why the Pit shouldn’t he get some answers, “How did that thing get inside you, how are you still up and walking—“

“First of all,” Starscream spit, challenging, “how should I know where that disgusting thing came from?”

“It was in your internals.” 

“Whatever,” the Seeker answered, “I’ve never even seen anything like that. Not any strain of space barnacles, and all the parasites that your lot inoculates against are strictly adapted for Cybertron’s ecosystem, and I haven’t been there in millennia. You can’t expect me to know every insane thing that Earth spits out.”

Optimus’ superoptic ridges furrowed. 

“Earth doesn’t have anything like that,” he insisted, “Everything strange we’ve encountered has been because of Allspark fragments, the Allspark, or Decepticons.”

Starscream snorted. 

“Please. The only Decepticon devious enough to think of something like this and the scientific insanity to make it happen is locked in Trypticon right now, unless my news sources haven’t been doing their chores.”

“Blackarachnia was listed as offline in our databanks until just a few cycles ago—“

“Blackarachnia?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Shockwave!” Starscream exclaimed, “You’re saying Blackarachnia’s behind this?”

“You’re saying that Shockwave could make something like that?”

They stared, optics narrowed at each other. 

Then, something shifted in the Seeker’s expression, like a set of glass panes sliding away. It set something in Optimus’ chassis on edge. 

“But of course,” Starscream said, “You didn’t think that he was just a double agent, did you?” He swept a claw clear over Optimus’ helm, brushing foliage aside. 

“Shockwave is much more than a decently convincing fake Autobot. He’s a codebreaker, a walking encryption module, and halfway to being a mnemosurgeon. He even dabbles in inventing in his spare time.”

Starscream had stepped— around Optimus, not over him, retain some of your dignity here, Prime, and his wings were held high as Starscream somehow managed to be elegant with the slowly-disappearing evidence of horrific injuries that would have offlined any other mech. 

“There’s a reason Cybertron never knew what hit it, and never would have known without your little Team’s interference. Shockwave lives in the shadows. He’s laid foundations that your precious Council will never be able to excise.” 

Optimus was cold, utterly in spite of the condensation beading in the seams of his armor. Cybertron was… recovering, maybe more so than Earth was recovering, reeling from the loss of a leader that had carried them through the Great War, from work on the inside that could— there was no way that Sentinel could figure this out. Not on his own. Whatever he was doing as Magnus would eat up his attention capacity, and Optimus knew him, that he was more likely to focus on his own image than things that needed changing—

“It might not hurt to have another set of optics on the problem.” 

“You’re not offering to help us.” 

“Of course not,” Starscream said, turning to look at him, a smirk pulling at his lips, “I just want to make sure you know what you’re up against.”

The jungle hummed, and something burned in Optimus’ chassis.

“I know what I’m up against,” he said, and strode past Starscream, “and I know that we beat it once. I can do it again.” 

This was better than Starscream had expected. 

Well, maybe not physically, his internals were aching, and not like they did after a good ‘face, which— not the time to think about that. Anyway, he thought as they made their way through the endless jungle and something else scurried and gnawed at his internal motivator, this was actually shaping up to be fun.  

The Prime was so concerned, not just for the members of his little Team, not just for the inhabitants of this little mudball, but for all of Cybertron.  

Even as a champion , one who had defeated Megatron in single combat, wielding an ancient relic while doing it, no less, he retreated right back to the back corner of the universe, eschewed the adoration of the public, and stewed in a roiling, all-consuming worry. 

What a delicious pile of contradictions to pick at. 

The Prime hadn’t believed Starscream had been offering help for a second, that much was obvious, and checked off the barest minimum of interpersonal reading skills that Starscream had been looking to assess. Everything he’d said about Shockwave had been true, at least. He was one of the most valuable assets the Decepticons had in their proverbial pack of holo-cards, and his loyalty was never in question. It was why Megatron had taken such an insufferable shine to him all those stellar cycles ago, why the old fool had taken him to berth at every opportunity since. Starscream really did have no doubt that he’d used his time on Cybertron under the Autobots’ olfactory sensors extremely wisely. He’d just wanted to see what the Prime would do when faced with the truth, straight from the source coding. 

After all, a former Second in Command was, theoretically, a very valuable asset. 

They continued through the jungle in silence. The terrain had taken a distinct slope upward, as if they were picking their way out of the hot, wet basin of misery in which they had spent an exceedingly strange night. Even though his processor was not starting to itch with the feeling of being forcibly grounded, landlocked, stranded under a choking layer of organic mush away from the sky, he was fine, it had barely been a complete solar cycle, he was fine. He could read and feel the decreasing humidity, the dropping temperature, every indicator of higher as they climbed. The forest would break. He would see the sky again. 

And eventually, he did. The ground became more solid, dark and rocky and uneven rather than sloping and smooth with vegetation. The trees thinned, made a few valiant attempts to claw their way onto the new, unforgiving terrain, then petered out. The sky yawned out before them, ice-blue and streaked through with clouds. Wind whipped across the blasted landscape, and the touch on his wings soothed the itch at the back of his processor. 

The Prime stepped forward, helm sweeping back and forth. Before them, it was a comparatively extremely short distance to the mountain of red-brown rock and the rather conspicuous set of metal bay doors that were set into it. 

“You still didn’t answer what I asked,” Starscream said, “Blackarachnia’s had her spidery little servos in this?”

Prime ex-vented, audibly. 

“She has,” he said grimly, “she’s the one who turned Waspinator into a techno-organic.”

“‘Into?’”

“Shockwave framed one of Bumblebee’s old platoon-mates. He came to Earth looking for revenge, and she decided he would make for a good experiment.” He looked askance, backwards at the jungle. “She was still trying to turn herself back into an Autobot.”

“Yes, yes, I’m shocked,” Starscream said. It was no secret how much she loathed working with the Armada, even though she liked to pretend to have been an independent or a neutral. “But this means that she’s been able to create more in the meantime?”

“I just don’t know how,” Optimus said, “we didn’t even know that she had survived the transwarp explosion—“

“Hold on. Transwarp explosion?”

“Waspinator kind of. Exploded.” 

“Ah. Lovely.” Starscream thought for a moment. “Is he liable to do that again?”

“It doesn’t seem like it. The instability started up in a few cycles before, and took less time to detonate. She’s probably found a way to suppress it, or it was a one time thing.”

“Well, lucky us.” 

“The transwarp explosion took half the island with it,” the Prime snorted, “we better stay lucky.” 

Upon closer inspection, the doors actually looked to be fairly cohesive. Starscream had expected them to be something more like cobbled sheets of metal haphazardly crammed into the rock. These ones had a full, stainless frame attached to them, and the doors themselves were smooth under the claw marks. 

“Did this island happen to contain a full laboratory, too?”

“It actually did.”

Before Starscream could ask how in the universe Blackarachnia had managed to set that up for herself, hidden hydraulics hissed sharply and the door ground open before them. 

The hallway that reached into the depths of the volcano before them belched out heated air, and Starscream shared a glance with the Prime. 

It looked like they had an invitation in. 

Even though Bumble-bot had been really annoying about it, Waspinator got all of them up to the door-ledge that led to Spider-bot’s lab. Back when it was just him and Ant-bot, they’d found it by accident when Ant-bot had demanded that they “Secure the colony against all possible threats!! Any vulnerable points must be accounted for and guarded as such!!!”  

It looked like nothing but an open hole in the rocky cliff face, big enough to just barely fit Waspinator if he crouched. The first time they’d found this out, Spider-bot hadn’t been there. Which was very good, because Waspinator was sure that if she had seen them, she would’ve sealed off the back entrance with another big, stupid metal door that didn’t break. 

But right now, he just focused on getting his footing on the ledge and letting everybody down. 

Bumble-bot got last pick of how he hung on because he was Bumble-bot, so that meant that he was hanging on to one of Waspinator’s legs. Waspinator overshot the ledge by a good few mechanometers so he could kick Bumble-bot off and he could fall on his face in front of the tunnel opening. Heh. 

Waspinator landed more carefully. Two-head was on his back, small enough in his beast mode to cling around his chassis and fit in the space between his wings as they beat. He scuttled down without a problem. 

That left Waspinator with Teacher-bot in one arm and Science-bot in the other. 

“Thank you,” Teacher-bot said, patting his pauldron as he knelt and put his arm down so she could slide off. Science-bot twisted with more quickness than Waspinator expected, and landed on his pedes with a full-frame plating rattle. 

“Well!” He said brightly, and not really to anyone in particular, “I can definitively say that was not a method of flight I’ve experienced before!” 

“Yeah, the landing could use a little work.” Bumble-bot grumbled from the ground, brushing dust off his already-gross plating. Waspinator scoffed. 

“It worked for the trip up here, and hopefully we won’t be having to make a repeat of it.” Teacher-bot helped Bumble-bot up, then turned to the rest of them. Two-head had transformed and was bouncing on the fronts of his pedes. Hm, now that Waspinator thought about it, he didn’t think Two-head had ever actually been there before. Him and Ant-bot had decided to keep the whole thing to just them, Ant-bot for his thinking that the “Nest” would be safer the fewer that knew about it, Waspinator for not wanting the other Predacons to go letting Spider-bot know about their secret way into the lab. 

Waspinator stepped forward, ducking to not hit his helm, and gestured with one of his little arms for the rest of them to follow. 

“Tunnel is short. Turns into big room soon.”

He glanced back. Two-head was right behind him, and the spot of glowing yellow behind him was Science-bot’s visor. Looking a little harder, Waspinator could see that he was holding Teacher-bot’s servo, just like when they had first come out of the forest. Bumble-bot was hanging on to her whole other arm. 

It wasn’t far to walk, but the room was big enough to stand in and had hexagon pillars all across one wall. It was pitch dark, and Waspinator waited until everybody had caught up to say “Bumble-bot remembers he has headlights, right?”

“Oh!” And whitish light flooded the cavern, “Yeah, no, I definitely remembered.”

Science-bot went “M hm,” before releasing Teacher-bot’s hand. Two-head elbowed Waspinator, optic ridges raising. 

“Cave has a couple different hallways,” Waspinator said, “what Teacher-bot looking for?”

“We’re here for a communications assembly,” she said, “something that can send signals off the island. It’s probably connected to a receiver somewhere, it probably takes up a lot of space to generate its sending power. Does that sound at all familiar?”

Waspinator thought for a nanoklik while Science-bot peeled off from them and poked around at the other tunnels that were too small for Waspinator to fit through, even in his beast mode. 

“Big machine with lots of screens is in Spider-bot’s main lab. Next to energon dispenser. Shows island, lots of… lines, Waspinator thinks maybe the planet—“

“That sounds perfect,” Teacher-bot said hopefully, “just lead the way. We’ll be right behind you. Mesothulas?” 

Science-bot startled and yanked himself out from where he had been chassis-deep into one of the littler tunnels. 

“Ah,” he started, “I’m afraid that this is where I must leave.” 

“What?” Teacher-bot exclaimed while Waspinator narrowed his optics, confused. Where was Science-bot going to go?

“Your goal in coming here was to locate their communications assembly. My work does not rest on such a thing.”

“You can’t possibly be thinking of heading off into this alone.”

“I very much am. I’ve already gotten a preliminary reading of these passages, there’s equipment just on the other side of this one!”

“Mesothulas,” Teacher-bot said, a note of something in her vocalizer, “I know your research is important to you, but need I remind you that you won’t be able to carry any of it out if you’re offline?”

He laughed, but it wasn’t quite so dismissive as the other laughs Waspinator had heard. 

“I can assure you with full confidence,” he said, “I have no intention of dying.”

The worried look in Teacher-bot’s eyes didn’t go away. 

“Eh…” Science-bot tried again, “I will find you again. I assume that this leads to the main chamber you all are headed towards?” He asked, pointing at the biggest of the openings in the rock. 

At Waspinator’s nod, he did the same. 

“This endeavor should not take long. I will find you again, and hopefully, in much better shape.” With that and another, really weird laugh, he clambered the rest of the way through the tunnel. 

Waspinator and Two-head looked at each other while Teacher-bot and Bumble-bot stared after him. 

Hm. 

“Uh…” Waspinator tried after a moment, “communications-thing is this way…?”

Surprisingly enough, Optimus didn’t even need to switch his headlights on. The tunnel that had opened for him and Starscream was studded with spare, industrial lighting. 

“If what you said about the transwarp explosion is true,” 

“It very much is.”

“Then it’s not unthinkable to consider that portions of the lab just warped themselves into the surrounding organic environment.”

Starscream had had to duck to get through the doors, but could more or less stand as they made their way deeper into the volcano. Every time Optimus looked back at him, he was sure that one wing would clip the wall or the ceiling, but he’d hadn’t heard anything so far. 

“We’ve had our fair share of incidents with teleportation.”

Starscream groaned. 

"If it weren’t for spacebridges, I’d say the whole thing was a mistake. Warping around the galaxy is bad, being stuck warping around the galaxy with Megatron is worse.” 

Optimus said something like “Mm.” 

Then, before he could stop himself, “Bumblebee once brought a Rock Lord back with him. To the middle of the city.” 

Starscream snorted, and a gust of air that had to have come from the vents set into his chassis ghosted over Optimus’ shoulders and back. He didn’t shiver. 

“Really.”

“It was— a clean up.” To say the absolute least. One that almost cost him two Autobots. 

“You know, I once watched Lugnut plow directly into a field of those— or something like them. Asteroid mimics that stuck onto anything they touched. ‘Clean-up’ is a bit of an understatement; Blitzwing had to go out and help him, yelling the whole time.”

Lugnut with a rocky, rotund alien stuck to one servo, fruitlessly trying to shake it off while Blitzwing’s red face shouted some long-winded insult at him—

Optimus couldn’t help it. He laughed. 

It was just so— barely even a stellar cycle ago, he would’ve been terrified. Terrified like he was when the Nemesis loomed in front of their ship after they’d found the Allspark, terrified like he was when Megatron himself slammed him against the wall of his own airlock, terrified like he was when Starscream tore through Detroit ready to kill for his prize. Swapping stories with that same mech about Decepticons that would give protoforms nightmare-fluxes, it was absurd. His Academy-self would’ve gone half-grey if you’d told him what he’d be doing just a servo-full of stellar cycles from then. 

The hallway was long and straight, but crags in the rough-hewn walls shortly turned out to be more than crags. Light leaked out of a sizable opening in the wall. 

Optimus stopped. He glanced back at Starscream, just a confirmation that he’d seen it too— and actually locked optics with him as white pupils just— appeared in a sea of red. Starscream gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod as he shifted his weight forward and tensed his claws. Optimus unsheathed his axe and crept forward. 

The room wasn’t small by any means, but the press of its contents made it feel cramped. Enclosed cylindrical chambers, in all about as tall as Starscream, lined the walls. Thick lines of tubing snaked out from the socketed bottoms, disappearing through the far wall, while a rounded glass pane sheltered a plain, empty interior. 

Two cubes of energon lay on the ground. 

“Eugh,” Starscream said emphatically, like Optimus’ inner thought-trees had been given voice, “what a considerate host she’s being. Floor-energon and everything.” 

Optimus ex-vented and sheathed his axe. 

“It’s probably poisoned. Or… venom-ed, or something.” He said bitterly, wishing he hadn’t put off fueling before Mesothulas had showed up and everything had gone straight to the Pit. 

“Well, why look a gift gun down the barrel?” Starscream said, crossing to the energon and picking up a cube. He tilted it experimentally, eyeing the contents. “I can’t die. And if I do die, then you’ll know not to drink the other one.”

Before Optimus could say anything in response to this insane statement, Starscream tipped the cube and his helm back, leaving Optimus staring dumbly at his throat cabling. 

He took a long swallow, then brushed his intake with the back of his servo. 

“Mm,” he said, “I’ve had worse. Heavy on the iron, though.” 

Optimus cycled his optics. Manually. 

He was so tired. 

He sat down on the floor, suddenly feeling the strain of 27% fuel, next to no recharge, and several injuries in every strut and system at once. 

“You don’t have a spark.”

“I don’t.” Starscream sat too, folding his thrusters neatly underneath him, “how astute of you to notice.”

Optimus sat back, resting his weight on his servos. 

“You just drank something that might be poisoned with the express intent of seeing if it’s poisoned or not.”

“Are you just going to spend the time seeing if I offline or not telling me things I already know about myself?”

“Why. How.”

"Well, let's start with the first question," the Seeker answered, wings... shifting on his back, "So I'm sparkless. That's been written about me more times than I can count."

Optimus glared at him. 

"Realistically, though. A blast of energy like that," and Optimus had no doubt that he was referring to the Allspark whiting out the sky and the city and burning through his color receptor cells, "doesn't exactly leave much room for things as measly as Cybertronian sparks."

"It doesn't." He said quietly. 

"Mm." Then, "how did you survive?"

"I didn't." Optimus said, forcing himself to look again into those blank red optics, he was online now, there was no point in evading the truth, "My spark went out. My Team brought me back online with the Allspark key."

Starscream's superoptic ridges raised and— scrunched. His nasal chevron wrinkled. 

"Well," he said, "isn't that clean. I was meandering around the woods before I woke up on a heap of garbage with no energy signature."

Optimus blinked. 

"Wh—"

"After that buckethead up and slagged me! When I had assassinated him fair and square!"

Starscream threw his servos up. 

"And when I went to their decrepit base to finish the job, he had the audacity to kill me again!"

He tensed his claws halfway to being fists. 

"And four times after that. That glitched tin can doesn't even have the decency to be consistently murderable. The bomb worked the last time, why shouldn’t it—”

“It half worked the first time.”

“Hm?”

Optimus looked up at him, the memory and all this new information grinding on his processor like a file. The potentially-poisoned energon was looking better by the cycle.

“I was in the middle of trying to hold him off with the ship’s claw manipulators. That’s when the explosion went off. It took one of his arms off, but he was just as ready to slag us after it.”

“The fact that that sounds so plausible irritates me,” Starscream said flatly, crossing his arms, “so what finished him off for good? If not my meticulously placed bomb?”

“Atmospheric entry. I deployed the docking tunnel while he was distracted by the Allspark, and… I was able to catch myself, he burned up outside the ship.”

Starscream actually chuckled at that, dark and self-satisfied, “I always said that obsession of his would be his undoing. Serves him right.” he paused, “The only thing I could complain about was that he fell at an Autobot’s servos…”

“What?”

“What? I am the one who will take Megatron’s place as leader of the Decepticons, I should have been the one to definitively take his sorry, rusty aft offline for good.” He paused, then tilted his helm to the side as if he was considering something. “Or, come to think of it, if I was obligated to tell the truth, I could always present him as a martyr, though that leaves him with a much more fond memory in the public’s mind. That could be useful for the die-hards, but leaves me seeming more like a tragically necessary interim successor…”

Starscream trailed off, still squinting somewhere off into the middle distance in thought. He had jumped straight from talking about his attempted coup to musing on ripple after ripple of effect that his purely hypothetical actions could have. Did the council have to think about things like that? Was that the topic of countless megacycles of discussion and debate?

“By the way, if I was going to die again, I would’ve done it by now. The energon’s fine.” 

Optimus regarded the energon suspiciously. 

“Are you sure?”

“Even the slowest poisons worth their salt don’t take this long. The composition also isn’t showing anything out of the ordinary.” 

Starscream reached down for the rest of the cube, then said, “Drink it. You look like you’re about to power down any nanoklik now.” 

Optimus glared. 

But he took the cube. 

He downed the first sip, and nearly groaned in relief as the fuel hit his tanks. The world felt sharper, things less… disastrous. They were still plenty disastrous, they just felt a little less bad. 

The little… room? Antechamber? Was silent for a handful of cycles. It was quieter here than the jungle, under however many tons of rock, and warmer in a dry, baking kind of way, not the oppressive heat of the jungle. Unseen machinery hummed somewhere deeper in the volcano complex. Eerie? Yeah, probably. But you had to take rest where you could get it. 

Optimus finished the cube in an amount of time that was perfectly normal and not rushed at all, and set it down, letting his frame adjust to the welcome intake of new fuel. He turned, looking with what seemed like new optics at the… strange equipment around them. 

“Do you recognize any of this?” He asked, gesturing vaguely to the chambers and tubes around them. Worth a shot. 

Starscream scoffed. “What do I look like, a scientist? Why would I know what— oh. I actually do.”

He didn’t even bother to stand up, just leaned closer to the glass. His optics narrowed as one claw traced the path of one thick length of tubing down the center of the bundles at the base of the chamber. The Seeker hummed, sitting back. 

“What is it?”

“Well,” Starscream said, sounding none too pleased, “obviously I can’t say for certain, but it would be remarkably easy to create clones with these.” 

Chapter Text

Bulkhead had agreed to carry Inferno, which saved Ratchet some more ache in his shoulder joints. Just because he could lift a couple times over his own frame weight didn’t mean that he particularly liked to. The rest of their journey to the volcano actually went smoothly, once Bulkhead figured for sure that the ant didn’t have a stinger. Most of it was just Scorponok apologizing while Inferno moaned that the “intruders” were going to make it to their “nest”. 

Soon enough, the massive, smoking spire of the volcano loomed over them, and the sun was dropping low into the horizon for the second time they’d all been stuck on this Well-forsaken island. 

“Uh, doc-bot? Not to sound like a diode-downer, but I dunno how we’re gonna get in there,” Bulkhead said from behind Ratchet, leaning down, “I’m not really seein’ a door.”

“AND YOU NEVER WILL!” Inferno yelled from between Bulkhead’s back kibble. He wiggled for emphasis. “You Autobots are flightless,” so there was one thing he’d managed to catch, “and as such, you shall never reach the entrances of our Nest with any sort of speed!”

“Alright,” Ratchet said, completely ignoring him, “so that just means we need to look low.”

“What?!”  

There was always the chance that investigating the wrong crack or fault line could lead to a spray of lava in both their faceplates, but at this point, anything was worth a try. Exactly how all of it was laid out, Ratchet didn’t know, but if they could—

“You smell that, Ratchet?”

Bulkhead had looked up from where he had been nudging a boulder closer to the volcano’s base, his superoptic ridges furrowed. 

Ratchet sniffed the air, then cycled his optics at the zap of feedback from his chemoreceptors. Sharp and unmistakable, that was energon. He nodded back at Bulkhead. 

“What’re you thinking, kid?”

Ratchet watched as Bulkhead crossed closer to the volcano, Scorponok trailing behind him while Inferno thrashed from his place on his back. 

“Back on the farms, we had these big old vent tunnels for the waste gas that got let off while the energon was getting purified,” he said, pushing boulders out of his way, “because so many ‘Bots had complained to the Harvest Guild before I was onlined.”

Another rock crashed against the ground. 

“They were huge, but they weren’t reinforced,” he said, “because nitrogen dioxide isn’t flammable.” Inferno started wriggling again, antenna flicking up at the word. 

And then, with all the practiced ease of a ‘Bot who’d gone through his first upgrades swinging around bales of energon filters like they were nothing, Bulkhead punched a hole in the side of the mountain. 

Well. Not that exactly. 

When the dust had cleared enough for Ratchet’s optics to refocus, Bulkhead was standing proudly next to a massive hole in a tube of metal that had been painted in the same browns and blacks of the rocks. It was belching a steady stream of noxious red gas, hissing softly. 

Inferno howled like he was the one who’d been hit. 

“I think if we follow this in further,” Bulkhead called over the noise, “we can find our way into the energon processing center!” 

Ratchet blinked, then made his way over and leaned in closer to inspect the crumpled metal further. 

“Good thinking,” he said, then engaged his magnets, “but you’re going to need to take the lead on this one.”

He felt the magnetic field latch onto the jagged edges of the broken tunnel— vent shaft, whatever, and pulled outward, peeling the metal off in shrieking strips until the hole looked more like the mouth of a cave. 

“I’m not the one who knows energon processing like a guardsmech knows a blaster.” 

Bulkhead gave him a little smile, sheepishly rubbing the back of his helm while Inferno tried his absolute hardest to bite his servo. 

“What is this place?” Bumblebee asked, looking up into the black yawn of the cave as Arcee extricated herself from the gap in the wall where the tunnels had let out. 

They’d alternately walked, crouched, and crawled through the system of passageways in relative silence, following Waspinator’s lead. Arcee had been behind him, and he’d stayed to let her use his beast mode as a step down to the rest of the cave (a courtesy he did not extend to Bumblebee, who had fallen on his face). 

“I don’t rightly know!” Quickstrike admitted cheerfully, brushing the cave grit off of himself, “We don’t get let in here too often, and I’ve never been in that way.” 

“This place right by Spider-bot’s lab.” Waspinator said lowly, transforming back to root mode and pointing upwards, “communications-thing should be up there.”

“Oh,” Bumblebee said, sounding unimpressed, “are you gonna fly all of us up there too? Or—”

“Quiet.” Waspinator hissed, pinching his other set of claws together in front of Bumblebee’s faceplates, “Waspinator not know where Spider-bot is. Unless Bumble-bot want to get everyone caught, shh.”

Miraculously, Bumblebee said nothing, though he did look extremely affronted. 

Arcee took a nanoklik to take in their surroundings. The sides sloped up sharply against the segmented metal floor, and she thought uneasily of the Grand Arena in Kaon. She’d been taken to a few dates there in her time, right in with all the shouting and stamping for energon from the crowd. None of those dates had warranted a second. 

She followed where Waspinator’s claw had been pointing to a rocky ledge studded with metal spikes that jutted out over the walls of the pit. 

“Good,” she said softly, walking closer to the ledge, wincing privately at the distance up on her HUD, “once we’re up there, we can—”

The ground gave a sudden, violent shudder. Arcee stumbled and twisted around in the same motion, Waspinator’s wings snapping up to attention while Quickstrike and Bumblebee tensed. 

The blows kept coming, concussive and consistent, loose stones shaking beside her pedes, before a segment of metal buckled upwards and broke . Dust plumed up into the stale cave air, obscuring Arcee’s vision as she half-shuttered her optics and cleared her vents against the particles. 

She looked back up, waving her servo to clear the worst of the dust, and—

“Ratchet?”

“Arcee!”

“Bumblebee!”

“Bulkhead!”

“Ant-bot?”

“SISTERS!”

They crossed the distance in the pit, and Ratchet’s world narrowed. Affection beat out a few millennia of medical training, and he’d wrapped his arms around Arcee before he could even think to get a medical scan in. 

“Are you all right?” he got out at last, servos still resting on her shoulders, finally engaging his scanner, “What happened? Where were you—”

“Mesothulas said something about the teleportation device malfunctioning,” she said as the scan came back, spotless and enough to make some of the tension bleed out of his hydraulics. “We just— we went over the island, we’re looking for a communications array that should be right around here somewhere.”

Somewhere to the left, Bulkhead had tossed their captive Predacon over to the rest of the motley crew, and was in the middle of half squeezing Bumblebee’s optics out of their sockets. 

Ratchet nodded, giving her a once over again, just to be sure. 

“How on Cybertron did you get here without running into one of those Preds?”

She smiled, laughed in a short rush of air from her vents, “That’s the thing,” she said, “we didn’t.” 

“—and after I moved the one Autobot to the river I encountered two more—”

“Ant-Bot—”

“And when I attempted to face them in combat the Decepticon tricked me and I was lost to the river—”

“”Ferno—”

“—and I was sure I would perish before that same Autobot that I first disposed of retrieved me from the river but then I was taken prisoner and my flamethrower has been taken and I have been unable to stop them from breaking into the Colony—”

“Ant-bot, calm down—”

For once in his function, Bumblebee was actually glad to get crushed halfway to the Well of All Sparks in Bulkhead’s arms. Just like when Arcee found him in the jungle, he just wasn’t so alone anymore. 

“Little buddy!” Bulkhead’s vocalizer reverberated through both their frames, “‘M so glad you’re alright!”

“Me too!” Bumblebee choked out, which was apparently then Bulkhead’s cue to set him down. “I can’t even start to tell you the slag I’ve been through— where have you been?!”

“Last thing I remember is being on the ground, I wake up, and I’m still on the ground,” Bulkhead said, “and everything hurts. But everybody else was just gone!”

“Yeah!” Bee nodded, trying to line up everybody’s fun jungle adventures in his processor, “I think I saw you go down, but I was a little busy.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder pauldron at Waspinator, who seemed like he was doing his best to try to stop one of the other Preds from yelling so much, “He chased me into the trees! If Arcee hadn’t found me, I would’ve been scrap metal!” 

“—and the Queen is going to be furious with us for allowing these enemies to live much less to traipse through our territory and gain access to our Nest and we should have just killed them after we had extracted what we had needed and now we are outnumbered and our resources are wasted and we must act swiftly, we can kill them now, we have better knowledge of their tricks and their weaponry, we have beaten them before and we can do it again if we act quickly we must retain the element of surprise we must—”

“So…” Bulkhead squinted his optics and counted off on his digits. “I was knocked out before I found Scorponok, you were off in the jungle with Waspinator and then Arcee, Quickstrike and… uh…” 

“Mesopodium.” Bee finished. 

“Yeah, that sounds right, then Arcee, Quickstrike, and him found you. And then I found Ratchet and Inferno, and now we’re all here.”

“Right! Only…” Bumblebee looked around again, “did any of them say anything about Boss-Bot?”

Bulkhead shook his helm. “Nope. I don’t know if any of us know where he is. Him and—”

“STARSCREAM!” Bee yelled, suddenly remembering, “His aft is in this too!” 

“It certainly is,” said a distinctly spidery voice that Bumblebee had really hoped he was done with for the rest of his function, “Screamer always did have a knack for sticking his nasal ridge into my plans.” 

He whipped around with the rest of the ‘Bots and sort-of-Cons in the pit. High above them, smirking down from the ledge, was Blackarachnia herself. 

She’d made herself a new helmet since the last time Bumblebee had seen her, but then again, a lot had happened since he’d last seen her. Out of the corner of Bee’s optic, he watched his Team tense, Inferno salute, and the rest of the Predacons stand their ground. 

“I am glad that you’ve all made it here, though,” she said breezily, gesturing at the Preds, “I would’ve been so sad if these four yahoos were all I had for an audience.”

“Cut the junk data!” Ratchet yelled, magnet prongs extended on both arms, “Whaddaya want with us?”

“And where’s Optimus?” Bee demanded, feeling like he should at least throw a bolt in the ring on the questions front. 

“Oh, alright.” and she pressed a button on a small, gray remote that Bee could barely see from his position, “I’ll get the whole Team back together.”

Behind them and to the right, a set of doors hissed open. 

“Come on out, Optimus. You’re the star of today’s little show.” 

The doors at his front opened into a massive, cavernous chamber, all dark stone growing from the ceiling and floor like fangs. Behind him, Starscream hissed and brought up a hand to cover his optics. 

Across the floor— his Team. Safe, from what he could tell, scraped up from days in the jungle like he undoubtedly was, but whole and together. Blackarachnia stood above them and the Predacons were clustered to their left, but they were all here.

He unsheathed his axe, moving forward across the stone floor. 

“Everyone okay?” he called.

“No spark-threatening injuries to speak of, Prime.” Ratchet answered, “but we’ll all be due for a refuel once we get out of this.” 

“If we get out of this.” Bumblebee groused miserably. 

“Oh, come on!” Blackarachnia exclaimed, sarcasm dripping from her voicebox, “I’m giving you a fair fight here.” 

“And why make us fight your Predacons?” Optimus challenged. The scene certainly seemed set for it, his own Team and hers braced on opposite ends of the pit. 

She laughed, leaning primly over the ledge, servos clasped behind her back. 

“You all jump to conclusions so quickly.

“After that transwarp explosion thanks to this diode-blown dimwit,” she looked pointedly at Waspinator, who snarled as he put himself between her and the rest of the Predacons, “I had a good, long while to think about what it actually was I was looking for. I’ve tried everything in this universe to cure myself; no Decepticon science or Earthen genetic modification or even the Allspark can fix me. 

“I’ve spent so long trying, wishing that I could go back, hoping that there’s something out there that can undo what happened that day, but that explosion was the last straw. I was getting nowhere with myself. 

“It was time to face facts and be practical. The Autobots don’t want anything to do with a techno-organic, but what if I were to approach them with an offer they couldn’t refuse? 

“Everyone and their creator these days wants a perfect soldier. Megatron was so keen on having one—”

“So what?” Starscream scoffed, servos planted on his hips, “You’re planning on presenting the Autobots with a bunch of uncontrollable triple-changers? Oh, I’m sure they’d pay top-credit for that, you might make Swindle jealous.” 

“Can it, Screamer!” Blackarachnia snapped. “I wouldn’t put myself or the universe through repeats of three-face. Besides, the completely mechanical is so… tired.

“My experiments on Dinobot Island told me one crucial thing— that I can create other techno-organics. Ones that do what they’re told. Of course, that took a couple tries to get right. I found that memory-wiping works wonders on Autobots— well. They’re Predacons now.”  

Optimus turned to the group, processor whirling. 

Waspinator looked at the ground. 

“He’s such a good little errand bot, isn’t he?” Blackarachnia said, smiling poisonously. “Everything I needed to get the first draft over with… and even the inspiration for the final product. 

“With CNA collected from each of you, combined with the cloning process our dear Air Commander was kind enough to verify, I’ll present the Autobots with the next generation of combat operatives—”

With another touch of a hidden button, the final set of doors opened with a billow of steam that lingered in the half-light. 

“The Maximals.” 

With that, one of the figures leapt up and forward, impossibly fast, and Optimus barely had time to raise his axe against the strike of two curved swords. Their wielder flipped backwards upon realizing the blow had been blocked, leaving Optimus staring at— himself. 

The clone— It must have been a clone— whatever it really was, wasn’t exact. Not like the ones Starscream had created in the beginning, when his Team, Lockdown, and Megatron had mistaken them for the real thing. It shared his frametype and some splashes of his colors, that much was obvious, but it also bore unmistakably organic features; coarse filaments— hair on pieces of armor, the swooping, soft lines that no full Cybertronian sported. The clone glared at him over a nasal ridge guard. 

“Boss-bot!” Bumblebee cried from somewhere behind him. 

“Not so fast,” Blackarachnia said, pressing yet another button, “this is supposed to be a controlled experiment.” 

Optimus risked a glance back. Energy crackled up from the floor, a grid of red lasers that hummed dangerously 

“I’ve seen that before,” Bulkhead growled, “you’re using Meltdown’s old tricks!” 

“So what?” She snapped, “It keeps you from messing with my test run, doesn’t it?” 

Optimus dodged left, as the clone tore towards him, axe still raised in defense. The clone’s swords barely struck the force field before they were thrown backwards with an explosion that sent the both of them sprawling. 

Optimus kept his distance, circling in lockstep with the— his clone. His optics darted, the other three Maximals didn’t seem like they were going to make any kind of move, his Team was out of his reach but safe on the other side of the lasers. 

“I think I’ll call this one Primal. What do you think, Optimus?”

“I think that you’re making drones!” he bit out, starting at a run across the space between them and shouldering his axe for a swing, “Life whose only purpose is to follow your orders—”

Two sharp laughs sounded— one behind him, and one above. 

“That’s rich coming from an Autobot!” 

Conversation died down a little after that, as Optimus was more preoccupied with dodging sword swings punctuated by kicks that he couldn’t help but feeling shouldn’t have hurt that much.