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Scavenger had never before felt lonely. Or perhaps he had but just hadn’t noticed until now - there were always five voices that melded with his own, always five other streams of thought flowing from somewhere else into his. It was constantly loud, filled with feedback, and although he’d never claimed to dislike it he felt like he’d taken it for granted.
Five other voices had become four, and although it was still loud, it just wasn’t the same.
It was business as usual, so to speak, which wasn’t as much business so much as it was waiting around for instructions or something he could actually do. For Scavenger that wasn’t much on a good day anyway, so he took it upon himself to avoid the others even if his spark cried out for close proximity.
He spends hours digging in the dirt of dead Cybertron, feeling a little silly as he pokes at the ground and tries to come up with something to say to the others. Bonecrusher would probably just snap at him, really, and Hook would say something much meaner but not as blatant. Scavenger had once doubted they truly meant it when they were awful to him, because they were one unit, they were Devastator - but they aren't Devastator anymore, and perhaps they’d only tolerated him by circumstance.
If he spoke to the others, would they listen? He isn't sure. Bonecrusher would probably laugh at him, and there's no one who would admonish him for it now. Mixmaster might laugh, too, in that mean way he does that means he's sneering. Scavenger's fairly certain that they'll get tired of him now, and think him useless, and although he wants another mech in the gestalt to fill that gap, what then?
Scrapper will disappear, and Scavenger doesn't want him to, but it's more than that. He feels guilty for having bigger worries than the fact Scrapper died. He feels so guilty that his greatest worry isn't that they won't combine again, it's that they will - and that they'll all discover that if Scrapper can be replaced, then so can Scavenger.
Maybe they would be better off without me, he thinks for a moment, sifting dust through his fingers like a newbuild in a sandpit. Without the doubt, the fear, and the hesitation. Maybe Devastator would work better.
His spark aches, those little pulses of pain from the others so apparent, and a larger one underneath that has been shoved way, way down. It hurts some nights, because Scavenger has been recharging on his own, too afraid to face the pain that he can feel from a distance. Afraid of how monumental it might feel when he gets too close. And isn't that the story of his piece of this puzzle - being too insecure to do things right, and hurting everyone else in the process? The weak link of an already crumbling tower?
He can hear Mixmaster’s voice in his memory; Don’t be stupid, Scavenger, we need you just like we need every one of us. Except that isn't quite what Scavenger wants to hear.
Don’t be silly, Scav, he remembers Scrapper saying one day, kneeling in the dirt with him while he picked apart pieces of useless shrapnel. We want you here. Who else can keep us all a little grounded and a little loose? I think you keep the others in check more than they like to admit.
Maybe Scrapper had been right, or maybe Scavenger is remembering the conversation entirely wrong. He supposes hindsight does that; makes memories into something fond even if they had once stung. The memory comforts him either way, and through the fractured bond that ties his entire being together, he feels a few responding pulses that aren't quite as sore. Faint, almost shy, but there.
If you asked Megatron, they didn’t mourn Scrapper.
In fact, if you asked anyone they didn’t mourn anything - they were too stupid, too hard-headed, too intent on the next moment of battle to wish for a funeral. If they did grieve, it was for the devastation they could no longer cause.
Bonecrusher mourns Scrapper in his usual brand of anger that had once felt righteous but is now just rage for rage’s sake. He punched boulders and ripped up old pieces of scrap, and when he tired of that he caused fights with the Seekers just to get shoved in the dirt. Starting fights had never been a problem until he was alone, and the new discovery brought with it a satisfying amount of pain to dull the grief.
It was Hook who came to ascertain the worst of his injuries, and the close proximity with him just brought more pain that Bonecrusher wanted to claw from his chest. Hook’s fingers were as deft as always, almost gentle, like he was handling a front-end loader rather than a bulldozer.
Bonecrusher said as much, and Hook left him with his knuckles half-welded.
Long Haul is taking it as hard as everyone else is. Bonecrusher isn't sure what marked him as an easy target. He was walking past him one moment and the next they were in the dirt, and he can't quite remember who threw the first punch. Maybe that gap in his memory banks is from taking a fist to the audial.
At the end of it, when Bonecrusher is panting and staring at Long Haul across from him on the ground, it's suddenly apparent that everything is loud in the wrong way. That the noise comes from others around them, not inside them, and that nobody actually pulled them apart.
Hook doesn't patch up either of them. He's unnervingly absent, no scathing words or uppity remarks to make. Scavenger’s worried words and bleated admonishments are missing. Mixmaster’s gruff voice and usual sharpness in the wake of a fight he hadn’t taken part in are also gone, not having been there in the first place. Scrapper’s voice is gone, too, but has been for longer; there is no admonishment or leader-like solving of the problem. There is just horrible silence, and Bonecrusher doesn't like how much he's getting used to it.
In the end he helps Long Haul up, clasping him by the forearm and dusting off his plating. Nicks and dents all over, indistinguishable from the old wounds never fixed, and Long Haul shoves him away with a rumble of his engine that sounds only a bit like a warning and a lot like a plea.
“Sorry,” Bonecrusher mumbles, the word tasting like it comes from someone else.
Long Haul turns with a growl of something unintelligible, stomping away, and Bonecrusher’s spark feels just that little bit more lonely.
Making a potentially combustible alchemical concoction while feeling a bit frayed at the edges probably wasn’t Mixmaster’s best decision, but he didn’t have his usual impulse control standing at his left, so he was pretty sure he could be forgiven when it blew up in his face.
Nobody was at his left, but while he's sat on his aft in the ground, smoke still puffing from the makeshift containers and his front feeling a little too prickly, Hook comes up on his right and picks him up.
Not that Hook is nearly enough to pick Mixmaster entirely off the ground; as it is, Hook just takes him by the arm and tugs him up to standing. Mixmaster still feels a lot like he’s been picked right up off the ground, gyroscope spinning, and he doesn't think it is entirely from inhaling noxious burning gas. Hook seats him on something only a little better than the ground and begins quietly fussing.
Mixmaster missed the louder fussing. Hook wasn’t always so quiet, so restrained. Now he has a pinched look behind his faceplate that Mixmaster can't see, only feel. He's used to Hook saying something, at least about Mixmaster’s poor decision making or his awful choice of timing. Hook is instead resolutely silent.
He adjusts Mixmaster’s plating that was knocked off-kilter, smooths his thumbs over dents and doesn't linger. As much as the touches inspire warmth pooling in Mixmaster’s extremities, he doesn't act upon it, and Hook seems disinclined to mention it. He fixes up the deeper dents with his fingers, pushing them out manually, and then takes a cloth from his subspace that Mixmaster has no idea where he’s gotten; and when Hook begins wiping him down, only then does Mixmaster realise some of his paint has bubbled from the heat of the chemical reaction.
It's sore, a pinching, burning sort of feeling, and Hook is none too gentle. It seems his patience has run thin. That part, at least, is familiar, and it gives Mixmaster an odd sense of comfort that Hook is still himself somewhere in there.
"That was a dumb thing to do," Hook grumbles as he regards the now soot-blackened cloth he had used to rub Mixmaster clean. It had been one of his good cloths, too. "You aren't always that careless."
"Don't think you can blame me for the change," Mixmaster grunts before he can stop himself. They all know what the change is. He doesn't need to be so abrasive about it.
Hook clearly has the same idea. He tosses the dirty cloth into Mixmaster's lap, taking a few steps back. "Fine. I won't," he says, right as he turns around and trudges off with hunched shoulders and a bristling field that Mixmaster can't quite feel anymore.
He isn't so sure why he can't feel it. Is it the loss of Scrapper, suddenly tearing all of them apart from within? Being unable to combine, to bring Devastator the relief of living? Or is it just them, pulling away from each other when the damage dealt means that they need to be closer than ever?
Mixmaster misses the chemicals. At least if they blow up it happens quickly.
Hook's hands aren't real, forged medic hands like he sometimes wishes they are, but they can fix things. He can fix the most important things - his gestalt members, all of them accident-prone and built only for war, cobbled together for a project that is a sum of parts. Hook is one of those faulty, haphazard parts, but if he doesn't work then the others won't, either, so someone had to pick up the role of being the one who built rather than broke.
Of course, they all build. They construct. But they also break, pillage, and destroy; it is the sum of who they are. Hook, however, has never quite enjoyed breaking things down into pieces. Not like his gestalt members; He likes the whole. The sum. The end result.
Despite it all, Hook ends up slamming his servos into the wall of misshapen metal, banging his fists until the knuckles split and he feels a little better about them not working as well as he wished.
Saving them isn't his job. He isn't a medic, he isn't any sort of field doctor, but somehow he has become a little more of a caregiver than a fighter and the others had let him. Maybe they had needed it once upon a time. Needed him to be something other than just a piece of machinery, and Hook had delighted in the opportunity to be more than a piece or a part. So saving them isn't his job, but patching them up sure is.
He'd never gotten the chance to try with Scrapper.
Hook had replaced him, slid into that role somehow because Megatron had needed it. Now there is a floundering phase of no activity, of a spark-deep wrongness that Scrapper has left behind. Hook is just as angry at him for it as he is upset whenever he turns and expects to be reprimanded for a haughty jab at Scavenger - there's nobody there to tell him off anymore. It should feel good. It doesn't.
Now his knuckles are split and bleeding muddy magenta, and it's all Hook can do to rub a thumb over one hand's wound and smear it around. Dig into the little cracks in the plating, at the sharp cuts of metal that bloomed open from being crushed. Something about it feels poetic. Someone who failed to help another needing to help himself instead.
So he sits down and wraps the wound, doesn't weld it. He wants the sting to sit there for a little, so he remembers. That maybe, if he'd been there, he could have helped Scrapper; maybe gotten over his ego to assist someone other than himself for a change.
There's something there, though. A flicker in his spark that runs up to his processor. A memory, a voice; But you help the others all the time, Hook. You patch us up time and time again. Your ego may be large, but has it ever stopped you from loving us?
He doesn't know if Scrapper ever said those words or if he's just imagining it. He imagines a lot of things, has been ever since Scrapper's body was dragged back and they were instructed to still try. It does sound a lot like Scrapper's voice, though. He hopes he never forgets what it sounds like.
"I'm too proud to go to them first," he mutters, staring at the mesh wraps on his knuckles. They're stained a brownish-red. Ochre, like the dead ground. "How did you deal with my ego all the time?"
I didn't, comes that reply, faint like a memory and yet raw like something new. It wasn't a question of dealing, Hook. Your ego made us believe we could do better.
When Long Haul picks dirt from between his visor seams it's with an angry rumble of his engine, and the cassettes scatter. Soundwave isn't in the mood to watch over them and no other mech wants that responsibility, and with Ratbat spouting drivel it's the other cassettes who seek out trouble. They liked Long Haul up until he stopped hauling and actually turned to look at them.
They're gone in a flash, too small to follow with his visor, and there's dirt clogging the seams anyway. The glass is faintly cracked, a hairline fracture along the front-right, but there are no replacement pieces and Long Haul has dealt with worse. It's the kind of battle scar he usually gets; caused by moving things around and not doing anything of substance.
Bonecrusher gets to barrel into others sometimes, and honestly, Long Haul likes the look of it; getting to smack down the front lines and pick up a blaster. He thinks he wouldn't need one; he's big enough to slam right into an Autobot and send them flying, but he's not a single soldier. He is more. He's a part of a soldier, and alone, he's sort of just there. It's odd to feel like just another soldier. He wonders if that's why some of the MTOs die so quickly - that being one tiny part of something so disjointed is too lonely, and they lose their minds before their lives.
He's not about to lose his mind, but it's a near thing. He can still feel everyone in his spark - the shredded, abrasive edges of Bonecrusher, the volatile mixing pot of feelings that is Mixmaster, the sharp, disjointed pieces of Scavenger, and the hard, solid boundary that makes up Hook. Devastator lurks there, too, just distant, wailing - so disconcerting that Long Haul keeps shoving him back and making it worse.
Sometimes he thinks Scrapper is there, too. He knows it's silly but it might be the only thing keeping him from that common MTO fate; Scrapper's words were always sharp, to the point, and Long Haul tries to emulate it. When he fights with Bonecrusher, he stops because he hears Scrapper's voice reprimanding them; and when they look at each other, dirty and bloodied and reckless, he doesn't see Scrapper at all.
After the fight, it's a strange sort of limbo that he lurks in. He builds up walls, he picks up pieces of debris and makes a humble little place to call his own. He always wanted some sort of place. Like a berth to himself. He used to tell Scrapper all the time, bitching and whining about being the bottom of the pile whenever Scavenger felt like curling up.
Sitting under the awning of debris now, he's cold. Long Haul knows he shouldn't be - his spark is still spinning, his engine is still churning grit from its gaps - but he's alone, and that means he's freezing.
He wishes Scrapper were here. It's a futile wish, one he shouldn't entertain, but he does anyway. If Scrapper were here, he'd clutch Long Haul's servos and nuzzle his knuckles, mask plating knocking into metal but somehow feeling tender through the scrape.
Talk to them, Haul, Scrapper would murmur, and ignore Long Haul when he inevitably grumbled. Sometimes all you need to do is tell them how you feel. Sometimes you don't have to keep secrets from everyone. Sometimes there are secrets you can share.
This little hiding place feels a lot like a secret, especially when Long Haul doesn't want anyone to see him cry.
Devastator knows that it's a common belief that he ceases to exist once the mecha that make up his parts are themselves again. It's a fairly understandable misconception; he's not there anymore, he can't speak or move his frame, but he can feel all of them doing the moving and the talking. In a way, he is alive, but unseen.
The pain in his being has grown tenfold since the loss, and he feels it as acutely as all of the others do; perhaps more, because he can feel every one of them ten times over. They aren't just parts of him - they are him, and he is more intrinsically linked with each of them than they are with even each other.
The pain in Long Haul's spark when he curls up under cold sheet metal. The ache of Hook's processor as he counts through things he could have done differently. The exhaustion in Mixmaster's movements when he picks up volatile material. The wince of Bonecrusher's frame when he walks a little too fast. The pangs in Scavenger's backstrut as he struggles to recharge alone.
It's all Devastator can do to yell out into the void and yearn for contact, for something to break, for the ability to shelter them in his servos and croon them to sleep. For them to curl up together again, to quiet the ache in his spark that feels a piece of it is missing - because it is. Because Scrapper is gone, a constant presence now ripped away that Devastator doesn't understand, and the only thing it means is that now he is alive but not allowed to live.
They do not want him gone. He feels them reach out, the caress of their sparks as they grasp for him; but he slips away each time, and the closest they get to each other is brawling in the dirt or walking past with barbed glances. Each time they get close enough to touch, he wants to scream for them to understand, to reach out to each other, not just him; but they never touch for long, and never in the way they need to.
Sometimes, Devastator is not alone in the void. Sometimes there is someone with him.
A familiar light, something soft, something nurturing. Unnaturally so. Nobody he knew felt like this, and yet the light is as familiar as his own.
Take care of them, it whispers, too quick for him to catch a glance. Hold them tight. Don't let them go.
"I can't," he says, his voice so small for someone so big. "They are me. I am them. We can't."
But the light is gone, and with it, a semblance of loneliness creeps in again. Devastator can feel the others; Mixmaster and Hook are together, but not close enough, like every other time. He reaches out, though, feeling that bond strengthen — but then it snaps as they separate, and Devastator feels a lot like he's standing on one leg and swaying to the right.
He is doomed to only ever watch them. He will never be able to touch them the way he wants — but he can push them from the inside, and perhaps watching them fix this will be enough.
Scrapper never liked to say he was smart. He thought that if he was to be remembered, it would be for being part of a group he was proud of. Hindsight was like that; it made him think of all the good rather than the monumental evidence of the bad. They weren't perfect. They made so many mistakes he could scarcely believe that they sometimes made it out of battles alive.
They made it each time, though, with no small thanks to every one of them that did their part. He never quite called himself a leader the way Megatron was, but he did do a good job rallying them when times got tough.
He hoped so. He hoped that even at the last, they were a team strong enough to outlast anything - Even loss. Scrapper had a hope for so many things, and they said that when you died your life flashed before your optics. His hadn't. He'd just seen a couple of faces.
If he thought back, though, there wasn't much else to his life anyway. He liked it that way. He'd always been someone who could walk them a little bit further, take the first step; now they would have to do it without him.
Staring death in the optic, though, brought some things into perspective. That Scrapper didn't really want to go. That his work was unfinished, that he was leaving something only half-built… but had to trust the others to pick up the foundation and make something better without him. A part of him ached to fix it for them. Another part trusted that they would learn to walk again.
He can feel Scavenger's confidence. He senses Hook's doubt. He hears Mixmaster's fear, discerns Bonecrusher's grief. He can taste Long Haul's tears on his tongue.
I won't be far, he says as he stares at the void and it stares back. It's monumental. It's familiar. It's home. Despite it all, it seems he's made it back here after all; looking death in the optic seems not to count when you technically exist in the souls of the living.
Look for me in the morning light, he tries to tell them. I'll remember you. So remember me.