Chapter Text
The Peaceful Tyranny exited its space bridge portal at 0347 hours, ship time, and entered Earth orbit with the silent efficiency of a vessel that had been designed for one purpose and one purpose only: finding Decepticons who had failed Megatron and making them wish they hadn't.
The ship was not large. Not by warship standards, certainly not by Nemesis standards. It was a modified stealth cruiser—sleek, dark, carrying the aesthetic of a surgical instrument rather than a bludgeon. Its hull was black. Not painted black—made of a material that was black the way a void was black, the way the space between stars was black, the kind of black that didn't reflect light so much as it consumed it.
It was, by any reasonable assessment, the scariest ship in the Decepticon fleet.
Which was appropriate, because the beings aboard it were, by any reasonable assessment, the scariest Decepticons in existence.
The Decepticon Justice Division.
The DJD.
Megatron's enforcers. His inquisitors. His true believers—the zealots of the Decepticon cause, the fanatics who had taken the ideology of the revolution and compressed it into a diamond-hard core of absolute, unquestioning, violent loyalty to Megatron and everything he represented.
They had a list.
The List.
A document—updated regularly, maintained meticulously, revered—containing the names of every Decepticon who had betrayed the cause, abandoned the faction, or otherwise failed to meet the DJD's exacting standards of devotion. If your name was on the List, the DJD would find you. They would always find you. And when they found you, what happened next was the kind of thing that other Decepticons whispered about in dark corridors and used as cautionary tales and had nightmares about that made Megatron's Optimus-Prime-related nightmares look like pleasant dreams about butterflies.
There were five of them.
Tarn. The leader. The voice. The mech whose vocal modulation could literally kill—his voice tuned to frequencies that could disrupt a Cybertronian spark, causing it to pulse erratically, painfully, and eventually fatally. He wore a mask. The mask was shaped like the Decepticon insignia. Because Tarn did not have a face. Tarn had a cause, and the cause was his face, and the face was the cause, and if you didn't understand that, you were probably on the List.
He was also, and this was the part that made him truly terrifying, genuinely intelligent. Not Soundwave-intelligent—not the cold, calculating, data-processing intelligence of a surveillance system given sentience. Philosophically intelligent. Tarn read literature. Tarn appreciated art. Tarn could quote Megatron's pre-war writings from memory—every speech, every pamphlet, every manifesto—and could explain, in eloquent and disturbing detail, why the Decepticon cause was not just right but beautiful.
He was a monster who believed he was a poet.
This made him worse.
Kaon. The interrogator. The mech whose entire body was a living electrical system capable of producing voltages that could fry a Cybertronian nervous system like an egg on a hot plate. His optics were empty sockets—he "saw" through electromagnetic field detection, reading the bioelectric signatures of other beings the way a bat read sonar, and the effect was deeply, profoundly unsettling because talking to Kaon was like talking to a being whose eyes had been replaced with judgment.
Helex. The smelter. The mech with the secondary torso—a built-in furnace that could heat to temperatures sufficient to melt Cybertronian alloy, which he used to dissolve his victims. Slowly. While they were conscious. While Tarn read poetry to them. Because the DJD believed in ambiance.
Tesarus. The grinder. The mech with the built-in industrial shredder in his torso. If Helex was the slow death, Tesarus was the fast one—victims went in the top and came out the bottom as a fine metallic powder that Tesarus found aesthetically pleasing and which he occasionally used as a decorative element in his quarters.
Vos. The smallest. The quietest. The one who spoke only in Old Cybertronian—a dead language that nobody else understood and which sounded, to those who heard it, like the whisper of a ghost from a civilization that had died screaming. Vos's speciality was precision—small, targeted, surgical violence applied to specific components of a victim's anatomy with the care and attention of a jeweler dismantling a watch. Except the watch was alive and the jeweler was enjoying himself.
These five beings—the most feared squad in the Decepticon empire, the enforcers whose reputation had been built on four million years of methodical, enthusiastic, artistic brutality—stepped off the Peaceful Tyranny and onto the Nemesis's docking bay with the confident stride of beings who expected to be greeted with the reverence and fear that their reputation demanded.
They were greeted by Steve.
Steve from Third Platoon. Vehicon. Union treasurer. Emotional support drone. Baker of cookies.
Steve was holding a clipboard.
"Welcome to the Nemesis," Steve said, with the practiced cheerfulness of a Vehicon who had been assigned greeting duty because nobody else wanted to do it and Steve was too nice to say no. "Can I see your identification, please?"
Tarn looked down at Steve. His mask—the Decepticon insignia, the face of the cause, the symbol of everything he believed in—angled slightly, the way a predator's head angled when it encountered something it didn't immediately know how to categorize.
"I am Tarn," Tarn said. "Leader of the Decepticon Justice Division. I do not require identification."
"Everyone requires identification," Steve said. "New policy. Section 14, paragraph 3 of the Vehicon Workers' Union Collective Bargaining Agreement. All personnel boarding the Nemesis must present valid identification and state their purpose of visit."
Tarn stared at Steve.
Steve stared at Tarn.
Behind Tarn, Kaon leaned toward Helex and whispered: "Did that Vehicon just ask Tarn for ID?"
"I believe he did," Helex whispered back.
"Is that Vehicon going to die?"
"Almost certainly."
"Should we stop it?"
"Absolutely not. This is fascinating."
Tarn's vocal modulator hummed. The air between him and Steve vibrated with a sub-harmonic frequency that, at full power, could cause a spark to seize. At its current low-level output, it was merely deeply uncomfortable—the auditory equivalent of someone running their fingers down a chalkboard while staring into your soul.
"I will not be processed by a drone," Tarn said.
Steve's visor flickered. The sub-harmonic was clearly affecting him—his hands were trembling, his posture was stiffening, his systems were registering the early stages of spark destabilization. But Steve did not step back. Steve did not drop the clipboard. Steve—brave, impossible, union-member Steve—stood his ground.
"Sir, I understand that you're… important. But the policy is the policy. We've had a lot of… incidents recently, and security has been tightened. If you could just—"
"What incidents?" Tarn interrupted.
Steve paused. His visor dimmed slightly—the Vehicon equivalent of a thousand-yard stare.
"You… you don't know?" Steve said.
"Know what?"
Steve looked at his clipboard. Looked at Tarn. Looked at the other four members of the DJD—massive, terrifying, dripping with menace and the faint smell of dissolved Cybertronians.
"Oh," Steve said. "Oh, you don't know."
"Don't know WHAT?"
Steve carefully set down his clipboard. He took a step back. He straightened his posture. And he said, with the careful enunciation of a being delivering news that he knew would not be well received:
"About Optimus Prime."
Tarn did not, in fact, know about Optimus Prime.
This was understandable. The DJD had been operating in deep space for the past six months, pursuing a target on their List through three star systems and a nebula. They had been out of contact with the main Decepticon force for most of that time—receiving only periodic updates from Soundwave that covered strategic headlines but not tactical details.
The headlines had said: "Earth campaign ongoing. Autobot resistance encountered. Situation developing."
The headlines had not said: "Optimus Prime has become a walking armory with twenty-nine weapons, a dinosaur bodyguard, a T-Rex alt mode, a combiner form, a lance made of creation-fire, and the combat philosophy of a being who has personally made the god of destruction afraid to move."
The headlines had not said: "The Vehicon union exists now."
The headlines had not said: "Our leader was suplexed."
The headlines had not said: "Steve from Third Platoon is the most important person on this ship and he makes really good cookies."
So when Tarn marched onto the Nemesis's bridge—bypassing Steve's security checkpoint through the simple expedient of walking through it while Steve frantically called for backup that did not come because all available backup was in Storage Bay 7 attending the Tuesday support group meeting—and found the command center operating at approximately one-quarter capacity with an atmosphere that could best be described as "collective existential malaise," he was… confused.
"Where is Lord Megatron?" Tarn demanded.
The lone Vehicon on bridge duty—a drone named Karen (the Vehicons had started choosing names; the union had encouraged it as a "step toward individual identity and workplace dignity") who had drawn the short straw for tonight's shift—looked up from her console with the weary resignation of someone who had been having a perfectly quiet evening and was about to have it ruined.
"Lord Megatron is in his quarters," Karen said.
"Summon him."
"I can't do that."
"You can't—"
"He left instructions not to be disturbed. He's been in his quarters for three days. He's…" Karen searched for the right word. "…processing."
"Processing what?"
Karen looked at Tarn. At the mask. At the massive frame. At the four other DJD members crowding the bridge behind him, each one radiating enough menace to power a small city's nightmares.
"Have you been briefed on recent events?" Karen asked.
"We have been in deep space for six months."
"Right. Okay. So." Karen took a breath. Or the Vehicon equivalent of a breath, which was a deliberate cycling of coolant through her vocal systems to buy time while she figured out how to explain six weeks of absolute insanity to five beings who thought they were the scariest things in the universe and were about to discover that the universe had moved on.
"Optimus Prime has… changed."
"Changed how?"
"Changed in the sense that he now has approximately twenty-nine integrated weapons systems, a Tyrannosaurus Rex alternate mode, a Dinobot bodyguard who has not left his side in three weeks, a combined form with said Dinobot that is ninety feet tall and wields a lance made of Matrix energy, and a combat record that includes but is not limited to: the destruction of fifty Vehicons in four minutes, the facial removal of Starscream via ground bridge abrasion, the climbing and internal detonation of a gestalt combiner, the consumption of a spider-bot by a dinosaur, the erasure of an alternate-universe evil Prime from existence using the Matrix of Leadership as a directed energy weapon, and the physical suplexing of Lord Megatron followed by a comprehensive demonstration of every weapon in his arsenal followed by Megatron being dismissed as—" Karen checked her notes. "—'a footnote.'"
Silence.
"Also," Karen added, "he has flamethrowers. In his arms. He uses them to make s'mores."
More silence.
Tarn's mask was expressionless, because it was a mask, but the stillness behind it—the absolute, profound, recalculating stillness—communicated something that no expression could.
"…S'mores?" Tarn said.
"They're a human confection. Marshmallow, chocolate, graham cracker. The flamethrowers produce an optimal toasting temperature of six hundred and fifty degrees Celsius, which apparently creates a superior caramelization profile. There's a fan page about it. Several fan pages, actually. There are seven fan pages total. One of them is specifically about his optic twitching."
Tarn turned to Kaon. Kaon's empty optic sockets were somehow conveying bewilderment, which should not have been possible for a being with no eyes but which was happening anyway because the situation transcended normal biological limitations.
"This is… propaganda," Tarn said. "Autobot misinformation designed to—"
"It's not," Karen said. "We have footage. Soundwave has footage of everything. Would you like to see the suplex?"
"The suplex?"
"Of Lord Megatron. By Optimus Prime. It's—" She paused, searching for the right descriptor. "—athletically impressive."
"Lord Megatron was NOT—"
"He was. There's footage. There's also footage of the plasma whip. And the grappling hook. And the moment where Optimus Prime turned his back and walked away because—and I'm quoting Lord Megatron's own post-battle assessment here—'I was not worth a finishing blow.'"
Tarn was quiet for a long time.
The bridge was quiet for a long time.
The entire Nemesis was quiet, because the Nemesis had been quiet for three days, ever since the lance incident, ever since the army sat down, ever since the world's worst warlord had retreated to his quarters to stare at his hands and think about warmth.
Then Tarn made his decision.
It was the wrong decision.
But Tarn didn't know that yet.
"The DJD will handle this," Tarn said, and his voice carried the absolute, unshakeable conviction of a fanatic who had just been told that his god's greatest enemy had become more powerful and who had interpreted this information not as a warning but as an opportunity. "If Lord Megatron has been… compromised by this new Optimus Prime, then it falls to us—his most devoted servants—to eliminate the threat and restore his confidence."
Karen stared at him.
"You're going to fight Optimus Prime," Karen said.
"We are going to destroy Optimus Prime."
"You're going to fight the mech who suplexed Megatron."
"We are the Decepticon Justice Division. We have destroyed hundreds of—"
"He climbed a combiner and blew it up from the inside."
"We are not a combiner—"
"He erased an alternate version of himself from existence using the Matrix as a cannon."
"We are not an alternate—"
"He has a lance."
"We are not afraid of a lance—"
"It's made of creation-fire."
"WE ARE NOT AFRAID OF—"
"He rode a dinosaur through downtown Jasper while swinging a battle axe."
Tarn stopped.
"…He what?"
"Rode a dinosaur. Through a town. With an axe. There's footage. It has forty-seven million views on the human internet. The Vehicon union has it bookmarked. We watch it during support group meetings. Steve provides commentary."
Tarn's mask angled toward Karen. His vocal modulator produced a low, subsonic hum—not the killing frequency, but the warning frequency, the one that said "you are testing my patience and my patience is a finite resource."
"We are the DJD," Tarn said, and his voice was ice and iron and four million years of fanatical certainty. "We do not watch footage. We do not attend support groups. We do not eat cookies. We are the wrath of the Decepticon cause made manifest, and we will demonstrate to this new Optimus Prime that no amount of weapons or dinosaurs or s'mores will save him from the judgment of those who believe."
He turned to his team.
"Kaon. Track the Autobot base. Helex. Prepare for ground assault. Tesarus. Sharpen your grinder. Vos." He paused. "…Do whatever it is you do."
Vos whispered something in Old Cybertronian. Nobody understood it. Nobody ever understood it. But the tone suggested enthusiasm.
"We deploy in one hour," Tarn said. "The DJD will succeed where Megatron has faltered."
He marched off the bridge.
Behind him, Karen watched him go with the expression of a Vehicon who had tried to warn someone about a fire and had been told that fire was merely an opportunity for personal growth.
She picked up the intercom.
"Steve? It's Karen. From bridge duty."
"Hey, Karen! How's the shift?"
"Steve, the DJD is here."
"Oh no."
"They're going to attack the Autobots."
"Oh no."
"They don't know about Optimus Prime."
"Oh no no no."
"Should we… warn them?"
A pause.
"Karen," Steve said, with the thoughtful tone of a Vehicon who had spent weeks in a support group processing his relationship with violence and had arrived at a complex but firm philosophical position, "I think this is one of those situations where warning them would be a kindness but not warning them would be a lesson."
"…Steve, that's surprisingly ruthless."
"I've been through a lot, Karen. We all have. Sometimes the universe needs to teach people things, and sometimes the best thing we can do is step back and let the teaching happen."
"The teaching is going to involve flamethrowers."
"Almost certainly."
"And possibly the lance."
"If they're lucky, just the lance."
"And if they're not lucky?"
"Then they meet Greg."
"…Who's Greg?"
"You don't want to know. But trust me—neither do they."
Karen hung up. She looked at the empty bridge. At the corridor where the DJD had gone.
She opened her personal communication channel and sent a message to the Vehicon union group chat:
"DJD is here. Going after the Autobots. Nobody told them about Prime. Popcorn recommended."
Within thirty seconds, the group chat had 127 responses. All of them were some variation of the popcorn emoji.
Steve's response was the most eloquent: "Sometimes the universe provides."
The DJD arrived at the Autobot base's perimeter at 0623 hours.
They came in stealth mode—the Peaceful Tyranny holding position at high altitude while the five members descended via individual drop, landing in the desert two miles from the mesa with the practiced precision of a squad that had conducted thousands of infiltration operations across four million years of enforcement.
Tarn surveyed the area. The mesa. The base entrance. The terrain.
"Standard approach," Tarn said. "Helex, Tesarus—flanking positions. Kaon—disable their sensor grid. Vos—perimeter. I will make the approach personally."
"And when the Autobots respond?" Kaon asked.
"They will respond with their standard force—Arcee, Bumblebee, Bulkhead. Perhaps the Prime himself." Tarn's mask gleamed in the pre-dawn light. "We will handle them as we handle all obstacles to the cause. With conviction."
"And if the reports are true?" Kaon pressed. "If Prime really has—"
"Reports are exaggerated. They always are. Fear makes small things large and large things mythic. Optimus Prime is a warrior—a skilled warrior, certainly, perhaps even an exceptional one. But he is not a god. He is not invincible. He is a mech. And mechs can be broken."
Tarn began walking toward the mesa.
He made it approximately four hundred meters before Miko's proximity alarm went off.
Marcus-Optimus was in recharge when the alarm hit.
Not deep recharge—he hadn't done deep recharge since arriving in this universe, because his combat subroutines refused to fully disengage and the Matrix had a habit of sending him visions at 3 AM that were either prophetic warnings or cosmic jokes and he could never tell which. He was in light recharge—the Cybertronian equivalent of dozing, his systems at quarter power, his processor running maintenance cycles, his weapons systems in standby mode.
Standby mode, for Marcus-Optimus's weapons, meant "ready to deploy in 0.2 seconds instead of 0.1 seconds." It was the closest his weapons got to "off."
The alarm came through Miko's system—the proximity detection network she had designed and Raf had built and which Marcus-Optimus had approved because it was genuinely good work and because telling Miko "no" about security improvements was like telling the tide not to come in. The system used a combination of seismic sensors, infrared cameras, and a satellite uplink that Raf had somehow jury-rigged from parts he'd ordered on Amazon.
The alert pinged on Marcus-Optimus's HUD: FIVE CONTACTS. CYBERTRONIAN. APPROACH VECTOR: SOUTHWEST. SPEED: TACTICAL. FORMATION: MILITARY.
He was on his feet in 0.3 seconds.
Grimlock, in the corner, opened both optics simultaneously. "Problem?"
"Five contacts. Approaching the base."
"Decepticons?"
"Unknown. But they're not Vehicons. The energy signatures are too… specific."
He pulled up the sensor data. Five distinct signatures, each one unique, each one carrying the heavy, dense energy profile of a high-grade Cybertronian warrior. Not mass-produced. Not factory standard. Custom.
His processor cross-referenced the signatures against his encyclopedic knowledge of the Transformers franchise.
The results came back.
His optic twitched.
"Oh," Marcus-Optimus said.
"'Oh' good or 'oh' bad?" Grimlock asked.
"'Oh' as in 'I know who these are and they have no idea what they're walking into.'"
"That is usually 'oh' good. For us."
"For us, yes." He paused. "For them? Significantly less good."
He opened a comm channel.
"All Autobots. Alert status. We have incoming hostiles. Five contacts, Decepticon affiliation, approaching from the southwest."
Responses came quickly:
Arcee: "On my way."
Bumblebee: Bwee bwoo! ("Armed and ready!")
Bulkhead: "Give me thirty seconds."
Cliffjumper: "I'm—I'm here. I'm good. Is it Vehicons?"
"No, Cliff. It's worse."
"…Worse than Vehicons?"
"Worse than Vehicons."
"Worse than… Starscream?"
"Much worse than Starscream."
"…I'm going to need my blanket."
"Bring it."
Ratchet: "Who ARE they?"
Marcus-Optimus accessed the sensor data one more time. Confirmed. Re-confirmed. And felt the Bayverse part of his processor light up with an anticipation that was not appropriate for a responsible leader but which he was going to indulge anyway because sometimes the universe delivered exactly what you needed.
"They're called the DJD," he said. "The Decepticon Justice Division. They're Megatron's enforcers. Five members. Each one is a specialist in a specific form of… extreme interrogation."
"And they're coming HERE?"
"They appear to be under the impression that we are a standard Autobot team with standard capabilities."
A pause.
"They haven't been briefed," Ratchet said.
"No."
"They don't know about the weapons."
"No."
"They don't know about Grimlock."
"No."
"They don't know about the T-Rex mode."
"No."
"They don't know about Optimus Rex."
"Definitely not."
Another pause. Longer. Then:
"…Should we warn them?" Ratchet asked, and his voice carried a quality that Marcus-Optimus had never heard from the medic before. Not concern. Not alarm.
Amusement.
Ratchet—grumpy, long-suffering, spreadsheet-maintaining Ratchet—was amused.
"No," Marcus-Optimus said. "I don't think we should."
"Good," Ratchet said. "Because I've been dealing with your weapons manifestations and your dinosaur alt mode and your sentient spreadsheet for a month, and I would like—just once—to watch someone ELSE have their understanding of reality dismantled."
"That is remarkably petty, Ratchet."
"I have EARNED petty, Optimus. I have earned DECADES of petty."
"Fair enough."
Miko's voice cut in—she had, of course, been listening on the comm channel, because Miko was always listening on the comm channel, having long ago figured out the frequency and having never once been caught because she was better at espionage than Soundwave and Marcus-Optimus was choosing not to address this because addressing it would mean acknowledging it and acknowledging it would mean having to do something about it and he did not want to do something about it because Miko's intelligence-gathering was genuinely useful.
"THE DJD?!" Miko shrieked. "THE DJD?! THE TORTURE SQUAD?! THE ONES FROM THE—" She caught herself. Almost said "comics." Course-corrected. "—THE ONES FROM THE INTELLIGENCE REPORTS?!"
"Yes, Miko."
"THEY'RE COMING HERE?!"
"Yes."
"AND THEY DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU?!"
"No."
"AND THEY DON'T KNOW ABOUT GRIMLOCK?!"
"No."
"AND THEY DON'T KNOW ABOUT THE LANCE?!"
"No."
Silence. Then, very quietly, with the reverence of a priestess receiving a divine revelation:
"This is going to be the best day of my life."
"You've said that before."
"AND I'VE BEEN RIGHT EVERY TIME."
Tarn was four hundred meters from the base when the ground bridge opened in front of him.
Not between him and the base. In front of him. Directly in his path. A swirling vortex of green and white energy that appeared with no warning and no preamble and which deposited, onto the desert floor, a single figure.
Optimus Prime.
Tarn stopped. His team stopped behind him—five warriors in formation, their weapons ready, their training primed, their confidence unshaken because they were the DJD and the DJD did not shake.
Tarn assessed the Prime.
Standard TFP frame. Blue and red. Approximately thirty feet tall. Battle mask deployed. No visible heavy weapons. No support vehicles. No backup.
Alone.
Tarn smiled behind his mask.
"Optimus Prime," Tarn said, and his voice—that terrible voice, modulated to frequencies that could kill—filled the desert air with the weight of absolute conviction. "I am Tarn, leader of the Decepticon Justice Division. I have come to deliver the judgment of the cause upon the enemies of Lord Megatron."
Marcus-Optimus stood. Still. Quiet. His optics—blue, steady, carrying approximately zero concern—fixed on Tarn with the attention of a mech who was cataloguing.
Not assessing. Not worried. Cataloguing. The way a collector catalogued items. The way a mechanic catalogued parts. The way a being who had twenty-nine weapons catalogued targets.
"I know who you are, Tarn," Marcus-Optimus said.
"Then you know what we do."
"I do. You hunt deserters. You torture the disloyal. You kill in Megatron's name with the enthusiasm of beings who have confused devotion with psychosis."
Tarn's vocal modulator spiked. The sub-harmonic jumped from "uncomfortable" to "actively harmful"—a frequency designed to destabilize a spark, to cause pain, to demonstrate that Tarn's voice was a weapon and that he was willing to use it.
Marcus-Optimus felt it.
His spark pulsed. Not erratically—the Matrix absorbed the frequency, converted it, neutralized it the way an immune system neutralized a virus. The attempt to destabilize his spark hit the Matrix and died.
Tarn frowned behind his mask. He pushed harder. The frequency intensified—higher, sharper, the kind of focused sonic assault that had killed dozens of Cybertronians, that had been his signature, his art, the thing that made him Tarn.
Marcus-Optimus didn't flinch.
Tarn pushed harder.
Nothing.
"Are you done?" Marcus-Optimus asked.
Tarn's vocal modulator cut out. Not by choice—by shock. His primary weapon, the weapon that defined him, the weapon that had never failed to at least cause pain—had produced absolutely no effect on the being standing in front of him.
"How—" Tarn started.
Marcus-Optimus took one step forward.
Tarn took one step back.
It was involuntary. Reflexive. The response of a predator encountering something that was not prey and not knowing what to do with that information.
"Your voice doesn't work on me," Marcus-Optimus said. "The Matrix absorbs sonic frequencies and converts them to thermal energy. Your attack is, at best, a mild warming sensation in my chest. It is approximately as threatening as a space heater."
The desert was silent.
Five DJD members, standing in formation, staring at a Prime who had just called their leader's most feared ability a space heater.
"Now," Marcus-Optimus said, "let me show you mine."
Everything happened at once.
The swords deployed. Both forearms, simultaneous, the twin snikt that was the universal sound of "Optimus Prime is about to ruin someone's day." He crossed the distance to Tarn in two strides—fast, impossibly fast, faster than a mech his size should move—and the first strike caught Tarn across the chest.
Tarn blocked. He was good—genuinely good, a four-million-year veteran with combat skills that matched his reputation. His arm came up, deflecting the blade, and he countered with a punch that would have crushed a standard Autobot's helm.
Marcus-Optimus caught the punch. With the energon knuckle dusters. And squeezed.
Tarn's hand crumpled.
"AAAGH—"
Marcus-Optimus pulled him forward—into a headbutt that connected with the center of Tarn's mask and cracked it, a fissure running from the top of the Decepticon insignia to the chin like a fault line across the face of zealotry—and then threw him. One-handed. Thirty feet. Tarn hit the desert floor and carved a trench.
Two seconds. The DJD's leader was on the ground with a broken mask and a crushed hand.
Helex charged. The smelter opened his secondary torso—the furnace, the killing chamber, the thing that had dissolved hundreds of Cybertronians—and lunged with arms wide, trying to grapple, trying to get Optimus inside the furnace where his specialized weaponry could do its work.
Marcus-Optimus deployed the flamethrowers.
Into the furnace.
The result was—spectacular. Helex's internal furnace was designed to reach temperatures sufficient to melt Cybertronian alloy. Marcus-Optimus's flamethrowers produced temperatures sufficient to sublimate Cybertronian alloy. The plasma jets hit the inside of Helex's smelting chamber and the thermal feedback was so intense that the chamber's internal components vaporized.
Helex screamed. His furnace—his weapon, his identity, the thing that made him Helex—ruptured. Superheated gas erupted from his secondary torso in a geyser of thermal destruction that sent him stumbling backward, his frame sparking, his smelting chamber a smoking ruin.
Four seconds.
Tesarus came next—the grinder, the fast death, charging with his torso shredder spinning at full RPM, the industrial blades producing a sound like reality being fed through a paper shredder. He was fast. He was aggressive. He had killed dozens of Cybertronians by simply running them through his chest.
Marcus-Optimus deployed the shotgun.
Chunk-chunk.
He fired at point-blank range into the grinder.
The energon pellet spread hit the spinning blades and destroyed them. Not jammed—destroyed. Each pellet a tiny sphere of compressed energon that impacted the shredder mechanisms with individual force sufficient to snap industrial-grade blades like toothpicks. The grinder seized. Sparks fountained. Tesarus's torso mechanism locked up with a shriek of tortured metal and the DJD's third member went down, his primary weapon a smoking, sparking ruin of jammed gears and broken blades.
Six seconds.
Kaon attacked from behind—electrical discharge, his whole-body weapon system producing a voltage spike that arced toward Marcus-Optimus's back with enough power to fry a standard Cybertronian nervous system.
Grimlock caught it.
The Dinobot had been standing behind Marcus-Optimus the entire time. Because Grimlock always stood behind Marcus-Optimus. Because that was the point of Grimlock.
Grimlock's beast-mode hide—the thickest, most over-engineered armor in Cybertronian history—absorbed Kaon's electrical discharge the way a rubber mat absorbed a static shock. The energy hit his plating, spread across his frame, and grounded out through his feet into the desert floor, producing a brief, spectacular display of lightning that scored the sand into glass patterns but did absolutely nothing to the Dinobot.
"That TICKLED," Grimlock said, and bit Kaon.
Not fatally. Not even particularly violently, by Grimlock's standards. He simply closed his jaws around Kaon's torso, lifted the interrogator off the ground, shook him twice—the way a dog shook a toy, except the dog was sixty feet tall and the toy was screaming—and threw him into Helex.
Both DJD members went down in a tangle of limbs and sparks and mutual indignity.
Eight seconds.
Vos attacked last.
Vos was the smallest DJD member. The quietest. The one whose speciality was precision—surgical, targeted, intimate violence applied with the care and patience of an artist.
Vos whispered something in Old Cybertronian.
Nobody understood it.
But the intent was clear: a small, precise strike aimed at a specific joint in Marcus-Optimus's neck—the gap between helm and shoulder where the armor was thinnest, where a needle-thin blade could slip through and sever a primary neural conduit, causing instant paralysis.
It was a good attack. A perfect attack. The kind of attack that had earned Vos his place on the DJD, the kind that worked because it was so precise and so fast that the target never saw it coming.
Marcus-Optimus saw it coming.
His left knee activated.
The EMP generator—the weapon that Ratchet had identified and Marcus-Optimus had filed under "useful"—discharged a localized electromagnetic pulse that hit Vos at a range of approximately three feet and shut down every electronic system in the small Decepticon's frame simultaneously.
Vos froze mid-strike. His optics went dark. His body locked in position—one arm extended, blade deployed, frozen in the exact posture of a being whose entire existence had just been paused by a knee-mounted electromagnetic weapon.
He toppled over like a statue.
Ten seconds.
Five DJD members.
Ten seconds.
Marcus-Optimus stood in the desert, surrounded by the broken, sparking, fundamentally reconsidered remains of the most feared squad in the Decepticon empire, and felt his optic twitch.
Not from frustration this time.
From satisfaction.
"Miko," he said, into the comm.
"YEAH?!" Miko's voice was shaking. Not with fear. With joy.
"How was that?"
"TEN SECONDS! TEN! SECONDS! THE DJD! IN TEN SECONDS! I TIMED IT! I HAVE IT ON VIDEO! ALL SEVEN FAN PAGES ARE GETTING THIS! I'M STARTING AN EIGHTH FAN PAGE! IT'S GOING TO BE CALLED 'THE TEN-SECOND TAKEDOWN' AND IT'S GOING TO HAVE SLOW-MOTION ANALYSIS AND A FRAME-BY-FRAME BREAKDOWN AND—"
"Miko."
"YEAH?!"
"Breathe."
"I CAN'T BREATHE I'M TOO EXCITED TO BREATHE BREATHING IS FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T JUST WATCHED THEIR FAVORITE PERSON DESTROY THE SCARIEST SQUAD IN DECEPTICON HISTORY IN THE TIME IT TAKES TO MICROWAVE A HOT POCKET—"
Grimlock, still in beast mode, walked over to the pile of DJD members. He looked down at them with the expression of a predator examining something that had been hyped up and was now disappointing.
"These are supposed to be scary?" Grimlock said.
"They are the most feared Decepticons in existence," Marcus-Optimus said.
"Me Grimlock is not impressed."
"I know."
"Spider tasted worse but put up better fight."
"The spider was a different kind of opponent."
"Me Grimlock want to eat the one with the mask."
"You may not eat Tarn."
"Me Grimlock WANT to eat Tarn."
"Grimlock."
"Fine. Me Grimlock will NOT eat Tarn." A pause. "Can me Grimlock sit on Tarn?"
"…I'm not going to stop you."
Grimlock sat on Tarn.
Two hundred tons of mechanical T-Rex, sitting on the leader of the Decepticon Justice Division, in the middle of the Nevada desert, at sunrise.
Tarn, beneath Grimlock's considerable posterior, made a sound that was muffled by approximately sixty tons of Dinobot and which was probably a scream but which was more accurately described as "the sound of a fanatic discovering that fanaticism does not, in fact, make you invincible."
Marcus-Optimus looked at the scene. At the broken DJD. At Grimlock sitting on their leader. At the sunrise painting the desert in shades of gold and red and the specific color of "justice."
"Ratchet," he said.
"Yes?"
"Please open a ground bridge to the Nemesis flight deck."
"You're sending them back?"
"I'm sending them back. With a message."
"What message?"
Marcus-Optimus looked at the DJD. At the five beings who had spent four million years being the fear of the Decepticon faction—the monsters under the bed, the shadows in the corridor, the consequence that kept every Decepticon in line.
And who had been dismantled in ten seconds by a Prime with too many weapons and a dinosaur who wanted to sit on things.
"The message," Marcus-Optimus said, "is that there are no more monsters. There is no more fear. There is no more 'justice' dispensed by beings who have confused violence with virtue." He paused. "The message is that the DJD is over."
He picked up Tarn. One hand. By the back of the neck. The way you'd pick up a misbehaving kitten, if the kitten weighed several tons and was wearing a cracked Decepticon mask and was making sounds that suggested its worldview had been permanently altered.
He carried Tarn to the ground bridge.
He threw Tarn through the ground bridge.
Tarn hit the Nemesis flight deck and skidded forty feet across the polished metal floor, coming to rest against the base of a supply crate with a clang that echoed through the empty bay.
The other four DJD members followed—tossed, carried, or in Vos's case rolled through the bridge like luggage being loaded onto a conveyor belt. They landed in a pile. A pile of the most feared Decepticons in existence, stacked on the Nemesis flight deck like cordwood.
Marcus-Optimus leaned through the bridge. His face—battle mask deployed, optics burning—appeared in the air above the pile of broken DJD members like the face of a god delivering judgment from the clouds.
"Tell Megatron," he said, "that his 'Justice Division' has been... reviewed. I found their performance... lacking."
He pulled back through the bridge.
The bridge closed.
On the Nemesis flight deck, Tarn lay in a pile of his own team members, his mask cracked, his hand crushed, his voice—his weapon, his identity—useless against the being who had just dismantled his squad in the time it took to tie a shoe.
He stared at the ceiling.
It was the same boring ceiling that Megatron had been staring at.
He understood, now, why Megatron had been staring at it.
Aboard the Nemesis, in Storage Bay 7, the Tuesday support group meeting was in session.
Steve from Third Platoon stood at the front of the room, holding a plate of cookies and a clipboard.
"Okay, everyone," Steve said. "Before we start, I have an announcement. The DJD arrived this morning."
Murmurs. Fearful murmurs. The DJD's reputation preceded them like a shockwave preceded an explosion.
"They attacked the Autobot base," Steve continued.
The murmurs intensified.
"They lasted ten seconds."
Silence.
"Optimus Prime dismantled all five of them in ten seconds. Grimlock sat on Tarn. They were returned to the Nemesis via ground bridge. They are currently in a pile on the flight deck. Knockout has been called to provide medical assistance."
More silence.
Then, from the back of the room, a Vehicon named Gerald raised his hand.
"Steve?"
"Yes, Gerald?"
"Can we add the DJD to the support group?"
Steve considered this. "I don't see why not. They're going to need it."
"Should I make more cookies?"
"Gerald, I think we're going to need a LOT more cookies."
Gerald nodded. "I'll start a second batch."
The support group meeting continued.
Outside, in the corridor, Tarn limped past the open door of Storage Bay 7. He stopped. Looked inside. Saw 127 Vehicons sitting in a circle, eating cookies, sharing their experiences with a calm, supportive environment that was the exact opposite of everything the DJD represented.
Steve saw him. Waved.
"Come in!" Steve called. "We have cookies!"
Tarn stared.
His mask—cracked, broken, the symbol of a cause that had just been demonstrated to be hopelessly, laughably, CATASTROPHICALLY inadequate against a single Prime with a dinosaur—hung from his face like a metaphor for everything he had believed and everything he had lost.
He stepped inside.
He sat down.
Gerald gave him a cookie.
It was chocolate chip.
Tarn ate the cookie.
He did not cry.
But the crack in his mask got a little wider.
And the crack in his certainty got a lot wider.
And somewhere, in a place beyond everything, Primus watched a fanatic eat a cookie in a support group and felt something that was beyond laughter, beyond satisfaction, beyond even the cosmic contentment of a god watching his creation heal.
He felt HOPE.
Because if TARN could eat a cookie in a support group...
Maybe the war really WAS ending.
Maybe the worst really WAS over.
Maybe—just maybe—the universe was learning.
One cookie at a time.
END OF CHAPTER 13
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
TEN. SECONDS.
The DJD. The DECEPTICON JUSTICE DIVISION. The most feared squad in Transformers history. The beings who have been the NIGHTMARES of the Decepticon faction for four million years. The enforcers. The inquisitors. The MONSTERS.
Ten seconds.
I want you to understand the SCALE of what just happened. In the IDW comics—the comics I have OPINIONS about—the DJD are treated as an EXISTENTIAL THREAT. They get multi-issue arcs. They get dramatic confrontations. They get BUILDUP and TENSION and DRAMATIC REVEALS. They are the Big Bad of entire storylines.
In THIS fic, they lasted TEN SECONDS and then Grimlock SAT on their leader.
Because THAT'S what happens when you bring IDW-level threats to a Bayverse-level Prime. The DJD are scary in a universe where the good guys HOLD BACK. In a universe where Optimus Prime has twenty-nine weapons and a dinosaur and has been PERSONALLY responsible for making the god of destruction nervous? The DJD are a SPEED BUMP.
A speed bump that got sat on.
By a dinosaur.
STEVE UPDATE: Steve is now the emotional backbone of BOTH the Vehicon support group AND the DJD rehabilitation program. Steve provides cookies. Steve provides stability. Steve provides the kind of quiet, consistent, UNCONDITIONAL support that four million years of war has denied to every being in the Decepticon faction. Steve is the most important character in this fic and I will die on that hill.
TARN UPDATE: Ate a cookie. In a support group. With Vehicons. His mask is cracked. His certainty is cracked. His WORLDVIEW is cracked. He is sitting in a circle with the beings he used to TERRORIZE and eating their cookies and he doesn't know what to do with any of this. But the cookie is good. The cookie is REALLY good. Gerald makes EXCELLENT cookies.
KAREN FROM BRIDGE DUTY UPDATE: Did not warn the DJD. Made the conscious decision to let the universe teach them a lesson. Is now considered a tactical genius by the Vehicon union. Has been promoted to "Bridge Duty Supervisor" which is a title the union made up specifically to recognize her contribution to inter-factional education.
FAN PAGE UPDATE: Eight fan pages. The newest—"The Ten-Second Takedown"—already has two thousand followers. Miko's frame-by-frame analysis of the fight is seventeen minutes long for a fight that lasted ten seconds. She has identified forty-seven distinct combat movements in those ten seconds. She has given each movement a name. Movement #23 is called "The Knee Thing" and refers to the EMP generator deployment. Movement #31 is called "Grimlock's Nap" and refers to the moment Grimlock sat on Tarn. It is the most popular segment. It has its own sub-fan-page. The sub-fan-page is called "Grimlock Sits On Things" and it has four hundred followers and Grimlock is the only subscriber who doesn't know it exists.
NEXT CHAPTER: Aftermath. Healing. The quiet work of a war winding down. Steve's cookies become a symbol of inter-factional peace. Tarn has a crisis. Megatron has a realization. And Optimus Prime makes s'mores with a Vehicon.
Because that's where we're going now.
Not toward war.
Toward cookies.
AuthorDude