Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Rewind sat at the helm of the small ship, feet propped up on the dashboard. The ship was quiet, as usual. Peaceful. Quiet was Dominus’s preference, over the haste and business of the cities on Cybertron. Quiet was better for thinking, better for writing. Rewind couldn’t figure out which his own preference was. He could appreciate quiet, of course, and he liked that it was relaxing for Dominus. But every so often the silence was more oppressive than freeing. Rewind was coming to realize that he was better at doing than thinking. But there was no belief that he and Dominus prescribed to that said he couldn’t change that.

Rewind checked his chronometer. It had only been forty-five seconds since he’d begun thinking about quiet versus chaos, space versus cities. Dominus could get wrapped up in his head for hours, and Rewind was starting to accept that maybe that was one of the things he would never understand about his partner. And vice versa. Dominus wanted Rewind to write a book detailing his experiences before they had met, for Dominus to put through to his publisher whenever they got back to Cybertron. But even with all this free time as the ship sailed from hint to tiny hint of Luna One’s location, Rewind had yet to pen a single word.

He watched the stars for a while, feet up on the dashboard of the cockpit. Dominus was in their quarters, writing or thinking as he did, and Rewind didn’t want to disturb him.

The navigational controls on the ship let out a beep, and Rewind leaned forward to look at it. They were two hours from the planet that Dominus’s contact wanted to meet them on, and it was time to switch from autopilot to manual piloting to keep the ship from accidentally hitting any others in this more crowded region of space.

Rewind flipped the switch for the manual controls and angled the nose of the ship so that he was facing the planet ahead of them. There were a few ships in his field of view, none that were even remotely in danger of collision. On impulse, he reached for the camera that had been sitting on the dashboard since Dominus had used it for a video call with his contact. He took a picture out the front window, capturing the growing planet in front of them, its sun, tiny but recognizable in the background, the ships scattered around the planet, and at the edges of the frame, tiny faraway stars in the inky sky.

It was then that the door between the cockpit and the hold opened. Rewind shoved the camera away from himself as fast as he could, but not fast enough for Dominus not to notice. Rewind put his hands by his sides and spoke with the intention of distracting Dominus from the silliness with the camera. “How did your work go today?”

“It went well. I need to put feelers out for the paper artists in this system to see about adding pages,” Dominus replied as he crossed the small space and took a seat next to Rewind. He was referring to his journal, which held his rawest thoughts that he hadn’t yet shaped completely enough to type up and publish. One of Dominus’s hands hovered over the camera, where Rewind had hastily placed it on the dashboard. “May I?”

Rewind shrugged, focusing on piloting the ship. They were coming up on another ship and he had to change the angle of approach by a few degrees to stay out of danger of a collision.

Dominus moved his hand to his lap, away from the camera. “If you don’t want me to look, I won’t.”

“You can look,” Rewind said. Dominus was always thinking that having secrets would be good for Rewind somehow, but Rewind had never understood the appeal. Pushing the camera away had been a kneejerk reaction to expressing curiosity about something that he wasn’t known to like, from back when being surprising was the same as being out of line. He hadn’t quite managed to get rid of the instinct, even though Dominus had always said and acted like he appreciated Rewind’s individuality.

Dominus picked up the camera with gentle fingers and turned the miniature viewer back to the last picture taken. Rewind snuck a glance over. It wasn’t a bad photo, he didn’t think, but it wasn’t like he had much of a basis to judge these things.

“This is lovely,” Dominus said, and something that had been tense in Rewind’s spark eased at the praise. “You capture the vastness of space so exquisitely, and the uniqueness of the ships in the view, and the focus on the planet…truly excellent.” He flipped back one more, to the camera’s recording of the video chat, then back more—everything else was business related. Dominus shut the camera off and set it back on the dashboard, nudging it towards Rewind. “Do you enjoy taking pictures?”

“I don’t know,” Rewind replied honestly. “It’s not something I’ve had much chance to think about.” He cringed at the words as soon as they left his vocalizer. He’d had plenty of chance to think about any topic imaginable. They’d been in space for five days, just since their last stop, and Dominus had spent most of that on his writing.

Dominus didn’t challenge him on it, though. “You clearly have the talent,” he said, after a moment of thought. Everything Dominus said was immaculately thought out. He was so careful not to give Rewind orders, or even bias him for or against some course of action. Sometimes it felt respectful, like Rewind really was being treated as an individual, but at other times it was overbearing. He had to wonder, when Dom worded his sentences that carefully, whether he’d be doing the same if Rewind were a normal mech.

It was such a small concern, though, in the whole sweep of what he and Dominus had together. There was plenty else to dwell on—like what they might find on the planet that was rapidly growing larger in the front window. The purple clouds of this planet’s atmosphere were now just visible, giving the round object in front of them some texture. There was a ship speeding across the atmosphere, all gleaming metal and sharp angles, a refreshing contrast from the dizzying swirls of the pastel-colored clouds. On an impulse, Rewind picked up the camera again. He snapped another picture.

 --

Rewind woke to light streaming in through the berthroom’s round window. He was surprised that he hadn’t woken to Dominus’s movements around the small room—Dominus always awoke at first light, no matter where they were. Rewind liked the habit. He liked sunrises, and liked seeing cities go from the mutedness of early morning to their daily bustle. It had been one of the first things he’d been able to articulate to Dominus that he liked, even after months of pestering.

That got him thinking about the thing with the camera yesterday again, and he opened his optics a bit irritated, for no real reason.

He left a note on a datapad next to the berths, just in case Dominus’s meeting didn’t last too long and he got back to the ship before Rewind. He slipped out of the ship into bright sunlight. After a moment, his optics adjusted to the light level and he noticed that the strip of road next to the shipyard where they were parked had changed completely from how isolated it had been last night. Now, there were mechs and organics alike vending wares that varied from art to fuel to what looked like astrological readings.

 Rewind ducked back into the ship to grab the camera, and then walked out into the crowd.

 The sun was setting by the time he returned, full to bursting with stories for Dominus, who had likely spent the better part of the day cooped up in meetings. The camera had dozens of new pictures and even a few short videos on it—the buzz of the marketplace from the monorail station above, an organic street performer juggling bottles that had fire spewing out of them, and all of the other small and large things that had happened to catch his eye. Most of all, he had an answer to Dominus’s question: yes, Rewind enjoyed taking pictures. He was even on his way to understanding what Dominus liked so much about writing.

The ship was lit when Rewind returned, and Dominus was sitting at the controls. “Have you been waiting? You could have messaged me,” Rewind said as the door slid closed behind him.

Dominus turned toward him, expression grave. Rewind was immediately on edge. For something to upset Dominus, it had to be intensely bad. The expression eased at Rewind’s question, though.

 “I didn’t want to interrupt your day,” Dominus said.

 “How did your meeting go?”

 “The information my contact had is older than some we’ve discovered so far,” Dominus said. He delivered that news flatly — clearly that wasn’t what was concerning him. Rewind waited him out. “However, he had more recent news that spurred me to make a decision.”

 “About the search?” Rewind’s worry had faded. Maybe what he’d seen on Dominus’s face when he’d walked in was thoughtfulness rather than apprehension.

 And immediately, the worry came back. “I’ve decided we’re going back to Cybertron.”

 —

 Dominus never told Rewind what, exactly, he’d learned from his alien contact. Rewind suspected that it wasn’t much, considering Dominus’s newfound hobby of meticulously checking every news broadcast in the system each day. But no one around these parts had been talking about Cybertron before, and they certainly weren’t doing so now.

 Rewind spent much of the months-long journey bracing himself for getting back. On Cybertron, he’d only ever been lesser, or, just as bad, an exception. Until this voyage, he hadn’t known what it was like to be treated equally to everyone else. The people out here didn’t know anything about Cybertronian social structures. It had felt like progress — like the logical next step after Dominus befriending and believing in him. And now they were going back — back to the same undesirable status quo, despite the small progress Dominus had made.

 Rewind and Dominus had left Cybertron a long time ago — a lot could have changed, he supposed, in the fifty or so years they’d been out of contact. Dominus’s obsessive checking of the news stations suggested that whatever had changed was probably for the worse.

 It was a tense time. There was only so much to talk about when their lives were so defined by the monotony of space travel and wondering what was happening on Cybertron. Dominus spent a lot of time writing. Rewind thought about writing and never did any. He fiddled with the camera, but there were only so many pictures one could take of ever-similar starscapes.

 The first scrap of information they got delivered more questions than answers. Rewind listened to the broadcast as he saved it to his database: The war on Cybertron appears to be drawing to a close, with Decepticon troops advancing on the few remaining Autobot strongholds.

 “What are Decepticons?” Rewind asked.

 “I don’t know.” It was the first time Dominus hadn’t had an answer for one of Rewind’s questions. 

The news came thick and fast soon after: Decepticons turned out to be terrorists who had overthrown the Cybertronian government and were now working towards world domination with the eventual goal of conquering the galaxy. The Autobots were the resistance force, formed in response to the fall of the government and trying to restore peace to their planet. 

“I plan to sign on with the Autobots,” Dominus said one day, as they drew closer. “You can, of course, choose—” 

“Don’t even start,” Rewind interrupted. “Of course I’m joining you.” Rewind would have preferred that they discuss it like rational people, like equals. Like partners, instead of Dominus acting, ridiculously, like their decisions didn’t have any bearing on each other’s. He didn’t bring it up, though. The outcome would have been the same anyway. 

They arrived to chaos. Dominus had gotten in touch with Autobot leadership, so they had instructions on where to land and how to do so without getting shot down. Dominus was absorbed into the Autobots’ leadership immediately, and Rewind expected that he’d be left alone — in the past, giving Rewind orders would have been an insult to Dominus. 

Not so now. The Disposable class, he learned, was a thing of the past - though he couldn’t muster up any excitement about it, given the overall state of the planet. Rewind was put to work decoding and categorizing datapacks sent from spies behind enemy lines. He and Dominus went from being in each other’s company constantly to seeing each other not more than every few days, usually in meetings. 

Rewind didn’t dare complain, though, because whatever the Autobots were doing seemed to be working. They took back city after city, and for a while it seemed like the tide of the war really was turning. 

Then the Decepticons started sending contingents into space and things got a lot more complicated. The war on Cybertron ground to a halt as both sides focused on preparing themselves for a war amongst the stars. Dominus got even busier. 

Rewind was sorting through a packet of data from an agent whose reports had been monotonous recently, his battalion defending a Decepticon-held city that the Autobots currently had no interest in attacking, when Dominus walked into the archival center. 

“How goes the most important job in the base?” he asked as he strolled through the door. 

Rewind paused in his work to turn toward him. “Don’t be ridiculous.” 

“I’m not being facetious. One day, when this war is over, all that will be left of it is our records. They’ll allow us to recognize what led to our successes and mistakes and inform our decisions so that the future is filled with the former.”

“Sounds like something anyone with an archivist conjunx would say.” 

Dominus graced Rewind with one of his full smiles at that, the one that had always been elusive and that had become rarer and rarer since they had first learned of the war. “Perhaps. But you know I only say things I honestly believe.” 

Rewind only nodded, knowing, from years of being around Dominus, that he was going somewhere with this. 

Before Dominus could say anything else, though, his communicator buzzed with an incoming message. He only took a second to read it before saying “I’m sorry,  I—” 

“Have to go.” Rewind turned back to his work, trying to be nonchalant about it. It wasn’t Dominus’s fault he was busy — they had a war to fight. “See you next month, then?” he joked. 

He waited a beat for Dominus’s reply, only to find that Dominus had already gone. A month passed before Rewind started wondering where he was.

Chapter Text

“You’re not working tonight, right?”

“No, Tumbler, I am not working tonight, just like I wasn’t the last five times that you asked.”

Tumbler turned away from Prowl and crossed his arms. He believed that the number—five—was accurate. But he didn’t think the question was unreasonable. It wouldn’t be the first time that Prowl had broken plans with Tumbler by picking up a shift. “Just checking,” he muttered.

Prowl vented loudly, and Tumbler couldn’t resist looking towards him to see his face. “I’ll be there this evening,” Prowl said, his voice even. He’d looked annoyed for a moment, but his face had smoothed out. Now his optics were cast down at a datapad. He poked at it with one finger, not looking like he was doing anything in particular. “I might be less reluctant if you would tell me what we were doing.”

“I keep saying you’ll like it,” Tumbler said, again, for the umpteenth time. “What, are you worried?”

“My processor can—”

Tumbler sighed out loud. “Can you not?”

“You asked, and my point is, I’m always worried.”

Tumbler sensed that the conversation was only going to devolve from there, so he decided to make his exit. “I’ll see you tonight. After shift, outside the station, don’t bring any work.”

“Yes, as you’ve said,” Prowl replied, and Tumbler didn’t bother to respond to that. He slipped away back towards his own office. Lately, it had seemed like the tension in the city at large was affecting whatever he and Prowl were. He had been hoping that tonight would work towards fixing things, but it was looking more and more like there was no fixing it. Ever since the heist, which Prowl had since refused to talk about in any capacity, they’d barely managed to exchange a few sentences without starting to snipe at each other. Tumbler missed Prowl—enough to put together his plans for tonight. Not enough to stop rising to his bait every time he scoffed at Tumbler wanting to do crazy things like hang out together, though.

The rest of the shift was a slog through piles of boring paperwork. As the clock ticked towards the end of the day, Tumbler felt more and more nervous about the evening. He wanted to spend time with Prowl. But he wasn’t sure that time would change anything.

When the shift ended, Tumbler stood up so fast that one of the other detectives gave him an annoyed look. Tumbler ignored him. He’d learned in the charged weeks since Shockwave’s arrest that you just had to ignore some things. Sometimes there just wasn’t enough space in your head.

He felt his shoulders relax a fraction when he exited the station and saw Prowl, arms crossed, lurking near the door. Tumbler walked over and Prowl turned to face him. Tumbler wasn’t totally sure that he wasn’t imagining it, but Prowl seemed to relax at the sight of him. That was good. Maybe this evening wouldn’t be a total loss.

“Transform,” Tumbler said instead of bothering with a greeting. He started his own sequence, eager to beat the traffic that was already filling the roads. “And follow me.”

Tumbler was gratified when Prowl didn’t raise another objection to the secrecy—his objections were many, and he’d voiced them repeatedly. But now he seemed to be trusting Tumbler, after all his reluctance. His reaction gave Tumbler a weird sense of pride—weird because, he reminded himself, all Prowl had done was not complain.

Tumbler made sure that the bag of supplies he’d put together was secure and that Prowl was ready to go. He pulled away from the station, ignoring the looks of the other detectives who seemed to be noting the fact that the two of them were taking off together. Not their business.

Traffic was pretty bad getting out of the city. Someone had set up a security checkpoint on the main highway from central Iacon to the residential areas on its outskirts, and Tumbler and Prowl had to wait in traffic for minutes, inching forward towards the sunset. Tumbler wouldn’t ordinarily have been bothered by it. He would have relished the time to observe the landscape and the people around him. He worried now, though, because he knew that the roadblock would bother Prowl. He kept glancing back at him to make sure that he hadn’t turned around—it was impossible to tell his mood in alt mode, but Tumbler could guess that he wasn’t happy. Even less happy than he’d been about this whole thing in the first place.

After proving to the grunts at the roadblock that they weren’t Decepticons, the highway stretched long and flat in front of them. The sun was setting already, casting an orange hue over the landscape.

Tumbler gunned it towards his destination, Prowl right on his exhaust. He hoped that the rush of speed would distract Prowl from thinking about the roadblock and all the tension in the city that it represented.

It was only about ten more minutes of driving before Tumbler pulled off onto a tiny one-lane road that most mechs going down this highway would have ignored completely. Prowl didn’t like one-lane roads either, Tumbler knew, but it was unavoidable. “Just a few more minutes,” Tumbler called back, driving at a more reasonable pace now that they were off the highway and the terrain was hillier.

Prowl didn’t reply. Bad sign, but not as bad as turning around. Tumbler honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if he had.

Soon enough, they emerged from their semi-sheltered one-lane road into an expansive clearing, surrounded by mountains but flat and empty in the middle, just in time for the very end of the sunset. Tumbler stopped and transformed as Prowl drove up to him.

Prowl reached him and transformed, and Tumbler found himself waiting anxiously for his reaction. Prowl looked around, optics skimming over the sunset just as quickly as they did the rest of their surroundings. “This is it?” he asked, and Tumbler couldn’t contain his reaction.

“Yes, this is it! It’s just a dumb little beautiful park that I found when I was driving around one day, and I figured we could find a place to sit and watch the sunset if it weren’t for the stupid roadblock.” Tumbler sighed. “I’m sorry about the roadblock. I’m sorry I dragged you out here. I know you’d rather be at home reading and that’s fine, I just thought, for once, we could…” he trailed off, not sure how he wanted to end the sentence.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Prowl said, shadows from the mountains between them and the disappearing sun covering his frame. In the distance, Tumbler could hear the occasional car speeding down the highway. “It’s nice. I was just asking you if this was our destination.”

“Oh.” Tumbler sighed again and tried to put the moment behind him. “Well, in that case, yeah. I also brought…stuff.” He grabbed the bag of energon candies and the blanket he’d brought.

Prowl walked over to poke through the bag and selected one of the candies, the only flavor that he ever ate. Tumbler had made sure to pack plenty. Since Prowl didn’t seem to be averse to anything he’d suggested so far, Tumbler said, “We missed the sunset, but we could still hang out here for a while and look at stars.”

“Why exactly would we do that?”

Tumbler thought that Prowl must be trying to make a joke, but his head was tilted quizzically as he glanced up at the stars like he’d never noticed them before. Tumbler and Prowl had been made the same week, but sometimes Tumbler could scarcely believe it. There was so much Prowl missed out on, what with being a workaholic who never talked to anyone but Tumbler.

“Just to look. Because they’re pretty, and it’s nice to think about how there are all those other planets and galaxies out there where our problems don’t matter.”

“You can’t see planets or galaxies by just looking at the sky with your optics,” Prowl argued, sitting down on the blanket that Tumbler had laid out. He wasn’t looking at the stars. He was looking at Tumbler.

“I know. That’s not the point. You’re not that obtuse.”

Prowl huffed and then, miracle of miracles, looked up. Tumbler tried to follow suit, to do what he’d ostensibly come here for—an activity that he had enjoyed in the past, by himself, or with some of the other deputies on the roof of the precinct. Ever since during the first week of training, when he’d been dragged up to the roof in a weirdly mellow hazing ritual, he’d taken time to look at the stars. It helped. Prowl had been extra irritating lately, but Tumbler could tell that he’d also been stressed. He’d hoped it would help Prowl, too.

But now he couldn’t even pay attention to the stars. He couldn’t take his optics off Prowl, who was looking at the night sky with such an intensity that he could have been on a stakeout. Tumbler had no idea what he might be thinking. Nothing good, he could guess.

“Our problems do matter,” Prowl said after several minutes of silence, when the sun was completely gone from the sky and the stars were visible in full, more of them than could ever be seen through the smog of Iacon.

“I know,” Tumbler said. He was about to elaborate, but he stopped himself. He didn’t have anything to say about the current situation that Prowl didn’t already know. That Prowl didn’t already torture himself thinking about, even though there was so little he could do about it.

They sat in silence instead. Prowl didn’t relax, but Tumbler tried to. He stretched out on the blanket and amused himself tracing patterns in the stars, ignoring constellations that he knew existed and imaging his own instead. A turbofox. A skyscraper. The matrix.

The matrix. The stupid matrix, the stupid bomb, the stupid heist. This was probably the time to bring it up, if he was going to. He could ask where Prowl had seen fit to go, what could possibly have been more important to him than the safety of the entire city, which he, as a cop, had sworn to protect. Something stopped Tumbler from asking, though. Maybe he didn’t really want to know.

After an hour, Tumbler was starting to get cold, and Prowl was still glaring at the sky like he was taking notes in his head. Tumbler took his optics off the stars and turned his attention to Prowl.

“This isn’t helping you,” he said. “You’re just as tense as you were when we came out here.”

“None of this changes any of the problems in the city,” Prowl said. “They don’t go away just because you let them slip from your processor for a while. You just have to fix them.”

“Sometimes that’s not possible,” Tumbler said. “I know you don’t want to hear it, but there’s nothing you can do about Shockwave or the Decepticons or the Senate or the unrest. People like you and me just don’t have the influence. All we can do is work with what’s in front of us and hope for the best.”

“Sitting out here isn’t my best,” Prowl said. “I could be at the Precinct, strategizing. Patrolling. Doing something for other people.”

Maybe Prowl would never understand that sometimes you had to do things for yourself. Tumbler reached over to put a hand on Prowl’s, which was clenched in a fist against the ground. Prowl jerked away.

Tumbler sighed and sat up. “If you can’t fix everything, what are you going to do? Just work towards that until you die?”

Prowl was still for a moment. Tumbler started gathering their trash in preparation for the drive back.

“I want to leave the planet,” Prowl said finally, after Tumbler had already stood up.

“Leave the planet? Why?”

“It’s like you said. We only have so much power to change things. Maybe away from this place we’d find something we really could make better, or we’d become people who can change things here.”

Tumbler cocked his head to one side. “We?” he echoed.

Prowl stared back at him, unflinching. “That’s what I said.”

“No,” Tumbler said, without even thinking about it. “I’m not leaving.”

“I mentioned it before, and you didn’t argue, so I had reason to think that you were less than entirely averse,” Prowl said, his voice sharp.

“Well, I am. This planet is my home, and I wouldn’t abandon it,” he said. He crossed his arms. Of course Prowl would find a way to make the night end on a lousy note. Primus, why couldn’t Tumbler have just kept his mouth shut?

“You said it yourself. Mechaforensics is as far as your brain can get you when you have to abide by their rules,” Prowl said. “But if you didn’t? You have so much potential. Who knows what you’d be able to accomplish somewhere else?”

“I’m done talking about this,” Tumbler said. He started to transform.

“I won’t ask again,” Prowl said, his voice even icier now.

“So don’t,” Tumbler replied, waiting for Prowl to finish transforming so they could get out of there. “My answer wouldn’t change anyway.”

Prowl didn’t respond to that. He just gunned it, racing past Tumbler and back toward Iacon. Tumbler, not seeing any other choice, followed.

--

It had been a week since the Stargazing Fiasco, as Tumbler had privately dubbed it, and he and Prowl had yet to say a single word to each other that wasn’t strictly necessary and business-related. Everyone had noticed, and a few of the other detectives had even pulled Tumbler into a bar once after a shift to see if they could get the gossip. Back in the old days Tumbler had been so desperate to be liked he would share unflattering stories about Prowl just to ensure he would keep getting invited out. Those days had ended long ago (though the nickname that had been bestowed on him during one of those nights had stuck), and complicated as his feelings were about Prowl right now, Tumbler refused to get back in the habit.

At the end of a week, Tumbler came into the office to a message in his inbox telling him to report to another precinct. He’d been selected for a specialized training program that would have him out of the Central Iacon mechaforensics office for the foreseeable future. The missive contained a meeting place and time and no other information.

Tumbler went straight to Prowl. This had to be him. Nobody else cared what Tumbler did. Hell, his supervisors were mostly just happy that there was someone willing to work with Prowl uncomplainingly. They had no reason to transfer him out of forensics.

Prowl, as usual, was in his office. They hadn’t had a new case recently, what with Sentinel Prime’s security forces taking over the investigation of every crime that would have required them to go out and investigate. It seemed Prowl had been in his office since the night Tumbler had dragged him away, taking the briefest of breaks only to fuel and recharge. Not too long ago, Tumbler would have commented on it, would have nagged him to get more rest, to take a real break. Now, he got the impression that it wasn’t his problem anymore. He didn’t know if Prowl ever thought that it had been.

“Transfer orders?” Tumbler started the conversation.

Prowl looked up from a report, his face betraying no emotion. “It’s what you wanted.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t say—”

“It’s mnemology, Tumbler,” Prowl said. “You’re not supposed to know that yet, so you didn’t hear it from me.” He looked back down at his datapad. “You’re welcome.”

Chapter Text

The back room of the clinic was dark. There was a bulb out in the corner. Rewind knew that he would have once been frustrated by the lack of light to work by. But the numbness had taken over everything, it seemed. Even anger was so much energy to muster these days. He’d feel things again after he found out the truth. That was his priority now—his life’s work.

Rewind didn’t feel anything as he opened the last casket in the last row. At one point there had been a flicker of anxiety every time he’d done this, and then, later, worse, a flicker of hope. Hope that he’d know, that he’d be done. He hadn’t felt either in months.

He opened the casket. Not Dominus.

Something unnameable seized Rewind’s spark then. This was the last clinic in Iacon. He’d tried everywhere, everything. Autobot intelligence simply listed him as missing. He wasn’t in the lists of the dead. He wasn’t on the roster at any Autobot outpost. And he wasn’t here. He was somewhere else out in the universe, and the universe so huge that Rewind’s search might well last forever.

He heard himself crying out before he realized he was doing it. This was the end of the road, in a way. He’d searched all the gravesites, all the records, all the clinics. There were so many other possibilities out there—less likely, but better ones, mostly, than what he’d been searching for recently. But there were so many. So much more time to spend worried and alone.

He didn’t notice the other bot in the room until he was standing right in front of Rewind.

“The worse the death, the more painful the memories,” the other bot said as Rewind stared up at him.

A relinquishment clinic wasn’t a bad way to go, Rewind supposed. He wondered what he’d be feeling right now if it had been Dominus’s body in that coffin. Relief, probably. And guilt for feeling it. If it had been Dominus in the casket, this bot’s soft words might have helped.

Rewind didn’t voice any of that, though. “Who are you?” he asked instead. He didn’t recognize him as one of the clinic workers he’d seen while scoping out and then sneaking in through the employee entrance. One of the doctors, maybe?

“Most people call me Chromedome,” Chromedome said unhelpfully.

“Why are you here?” Rewind had considered asking ‘what do you do here?’ but at the last second remembered to make his question broader. After all, it wasn’t like Rewind worked here. And it hadn’t been that hard to get in.

Chromedome looked away at the question. “To do something about it,” he said, sounding almost confused. Conflicted, that was it.

Rewind found himself shivering at the low words, at the mech’s guarded demeanor. He waited for Chromedome to say something else. As the silence stretched, Rewind realized that despite the location, despite the open casket between them, it had been a full minute since he’d thought about Dominus.

The relief of being able to focus so easily on something else—someone else—overshadowed the guilt. Rewind had an interminable path ahead of him. No leads, and all of known space in his search radius. He was so close to being crushed under the weight of the responsibility, and here was this Chromedome, who he’d only exchanged a few words with, but was already so fascinated by.

There was only one thing Rewind’s spark would allow him to do. “I’m Rewind,” he said to Chromedome, who brought his attention back to Rewind at the words. “Do you want to go get a drink?”

--

“I’m sorry about your—”

“I didn’t know him,” Rewind said, kicking a piece of rubble ahead of him as he walked down the sidewalk next to Chromedome. Chromedome was keeping his steps slow so that Rewind could keep up without having to jog. Rewind assumed he was leading, and turned toward a quiet little oilhouse, the only one he’d been to in this part of town.

“Oh,” Chromedome said, in the tone of someone who wanted to ask a question.

Rewind wasn’t in the mood to answer questions, though. “Have you always lived in Iacon?” he asked instead to jumpstart a conversation about literally any other topic.

“Pretty much,” Chromedome replied. “I mean, yeah. I was born here, worked here ever since except for a few stints. It’s changed a lot, though. Hardly feels like the same place.”

Rewind tipped his head up thoughtfully as they walked into the oilhouse. “How so? I’m curious, I’ve never been back to the places I lived before the war started.”

Chromedome seemed taken aback at that, as if someone asking his opinion on something so mundane as the mood of the city was surprising. They sat down at the bar. “I guess it’s that…it used to be easy to figure out who to hate. The Senate, the rich, the alt-mode exempt. These days, the lines are blurred.” Chromedome gave an uncomfortable half-shrug as he turned toward the approaching bartender.

As Chromedome was ordering his drink, Rewind looked past him at a tall white mech—maybe a helicopter?—who’d been fidgeting in his seat at the bar since they’d arrived. The mech had just shot to his feet at the sight of the bar’s newest patron, who was brown and about Rewind’s size and carried himself with a haughtiness totally inappropriate for his prewar caste. Rewind was immediately interested.

The bartender turned to Rewind, and Rewind ordered a drink, still distracted. The brown mech was gesturing to the white one at the bar to sit back down, and then he was sliding a datapad with a gold sigil marked on it across the bar to the white mech.

“The auction will take place two hours from now,” the brown mech said, barely loudly enough for Rewind’s audials to pick up. “I don’t know how much you were told, but the wares tonight are primarily prewar literature—handwritten original copies.”

Rewind’s spark surged. Prewar literature, handwritten. This whole time, he’d been working off the assumption that someone, somewhere had Dominus’s book. It could be wherever Dominus was, but since it was too large and unwieldy to have spent much time off their shuttle back in the day, there was a high chance that Dominus and the book had been separated. And the book was the one thing that Rewind had to search for, the one concrete thing besides Dominus himself, and it might even contain clues.

Rewind had to get into that auction.

“We’re each getting to the location by separate routes, to keep from attracting attention from the authorities,” the brown mech said. “You’ll need to go five hundred paces by way of the arm of Adaptus.”

The white mech, confusingly, just nodded at that. “And that will be the auction location?”

“No. That will be where you find the second instruction and the password you need for entry,” the brown mech said. He stood up, hoisting the datapad with him. “May the betting be in your favor.” The brown mech turned to go, and the white helicopter turned back to the bar, seeming content to take his time finishing his drink now that he had his instructions.

Chromedome was looking down at Rewind, and Rewind cringed as he realized that he’d been ignoring his companion for several minutes in favor of eavesdropping on the conversation down the bar. He’d wanted this to be his evening off, to talk to a person for more than a few minutes, to not think about his increasingly hopeless quest for as long as he could manage.

But it didn’t feel hopeless right now. Dominus’s book was out there somewhere, and it might be in this city, in a secret location that they had a clue and a head start to be able to find.

“Did you hear that?” Rewind whispered to Chromedome, nodding as subtly as he could toward the white mech, who was now slumped casually, reading something on a datapad.

Chromedome nodded, looking confused. Rewind took the leap. “Come on!” he said, too softly for anyone but Chromedome to hear. He left some Shanix on the bar for his half-finished drink, and jumped to the ground. He wasn’t sure if he expected Chromedome to follow. Rewind was going to do this either way, but he wouldn’t be averse to the company. Far from it.

His relief was greater than he expected when Chromedome stood up too, and followed him out the door.

Rewind rounded on his companion the minute the door shut behind them. “Five hundred paces by way of the arm of Adaptus,” he repeated. “Any idea what that means?”

Chromedome shook his head. “Davos turns into a helicopter, so, I dunno, however far you can go in five hundred—” He whirled his arms in a way that was probably meant to mimic the motion of a helicopter’s rotors. It was adorable. “You know?”

Rewind nodded. “I guess? But how would he know what direction—wait, you know his name? You know him?”

Chromedome shrugged. “I know of him. He works in intelligence.”

Do you work in intelligence? Rewind wanted to ask, before he thought better of it. If the answer was yes, Chromedome would probably deny it anyway.

“Let’s climb up to the roof,” Rewind said instead. “That’s where he’d take off from, right? Maybe there’s some kind of clue up there.”

There was a fire escape around one side of the building, rickety from the bombing that had torn apart the building next door. Rewind climbed up first, taking the stairs carefully but not too slowly—he had no idea how long their head start might last. Once his feet hit the roof, he switched on his camera and took a panorama.

The city was muted from what it would have been like before the war. There were lights on in the buildings that hadn’t been reduced to piles of rubble, which was about half of them. There was no sound up here except the rumbles of planes patrolling above them and the occasional car going by down below. Rewind could imagine what this place might have been like before the start of the war—mechs walking down the street in spades, music drifting up from the oilhouse they were on top of or the many others that Rewind suspected had once been on this block. It wasn’t like things had been perfect back then. But the war had a unique way of sapping the life out of everything.

Chromedome climbed up over the edge of the roof after Rewind and stood behind him, looking out over the city. “Any clues?” he asked.

Rewind shook his head. The roof contained its share of metal shavings and grime, but nothing significant.

Rewind accessed his database. “Maybe it has something to do with Luna 1?” he guessed, thinking back to the mythology surrounding Adaptus. He pulled up a familiar map of the lost moon’s orbit and found the position in the sky where it ought to be relative to their position. He pointed a finger. “So, that way and…right, we still don’t know what he meant by paces.”

“Maybe it’s simpler than that?” Chromedome suggested. Rewind disabled the orbital map to look where Chromedome was pointing.

A few blocks away, in the center of a pedestrian walkway, was a statue of the gods over a story tall. Half of it looked recently rebuilt, while the other half bore pockmarks from whatever attack it had been damaged in.

On the pockmarked side, Adaptus had his arm reached out, hand tilted slightly upward and fingers splayed, as though he were in the midst of blessing any Cybertronian that stood beneath him. More importantly, the arm was pointing straight down an alley that vanished into the darkness away from the square.

Rewind could have smacked himself. “Of course!” He knew about the statue, he had footage of the damn statue. It was so obvious, and to think that he would have spent all evening up here, drawing farfetched conclusions about helicopter paces and Luna 1.

But Chromedome had zeroed in on the possibility impressively fast. “You’re good at this,” Rewind observed, already stepping back towards the fire escape that would take them back down to the street.

“I used to work around here. I would have figured it out earlier if I’d realized we were so close to the city center,” he said. He shrugged. “Like I said. The city’s changed.”

Rewind finally hit his limit on refraining from asking personal questions. He didn’t really want to have it turned on himself, but Chromedome made him so curious. “What did you do back then?” he asked.

“I was a detective. The police station looks right down on the statue. Hung out on the roof of the station as a trainee, even. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner.”

“Well, all that matters is that you did.” Rewind hopped down the last few steps, landing heavily on the ground and spinning around as he waited for Chromedome to catch up.

Davos was still in the bar, now having what looked like an intense conversation on his communicator. Rewind hustled away from the front window and turned toward the statue, hearing Chromedome following at his heels. He stopped when he reached the city center, a few steps away from the spot under Adaptus’s outstretched arm. Rewind wasn’t particularly religious, but he had plenty of reason to avoid treating his alt mode like a blessing.

“This next part we’re just going to have to guess,” Chromedome said, coming up behind Rewind and peering down the alley ahead of them. “Five hundred paces for him is probably twice that for me, but whoever left him his next clue had to make it pretty obvious if they want him to find it. Let’s go.” He set off, Rewind happy to follow this time. Of course Chromedome had been a detective—his sound guesses and the authoritative tone he’d taken on since they’d started following this trail were a big change from the uncertainty and shyness of before. Rewind decided that he liked both parts.

The alley was dark, and Chromedome switched on a set of headlights after just a few steps. The roofs sloped over the alley, blocking out most of the stars. The silence, the darknesses, and the surfaces that had managed to remain untouched by the war made it feel like a place totally forgotten by civilization, where no being had set foot since a time when this had been a different city. But that couldn’t be true, because there was supposed to be a clue here.

A few minutes later, Chromedome stopped, bending down to illuminate something. There was a door set in the wall, so covered in grime that Rewind wouldn’t have immediately identified it as anything.

Beneath the door, something white and square peeked out.

Rewind, closer to the ground, reached down to grab it. It was paper, like Rewind had seen in Dominus’s book and a few sets of orders so top-secret that digitizing them at all was too much of a risk. It sent a little thrill through him, being able to see and touch it. It made what might—might—lie ahead all the more real.

Rewind unfolded the piece of paper. This one contained a set of coordinates and below them, a handwritten word: percipience.

Rewind keyed the coordinates into his GPS and then handed the note to Chromedome. GPS told him that they were only a few blocks away. “It’s not—” far, he’d started to say, when he heard the sound of footsteps in the alleyway behind them.

Rewind froze and looked over his shoulder. Davos’s frame was more shadow than anything in the darkness, but clearly recognizable all the same. And he’d definitely noticed them. He was running.

Well, they’d made it this far. Chromedome was still reading the note, so Rewind grabbed his loose-hanging free hand to get his attention. “Come on!” Chromedome’s gaze jolted from the note to Rewind’s, then from Rewind’s face to the mech racing down the alley toward them.

They took off, Chromedome keeping Rewind’s pace, hands still locked, the note flapping in Chromedome’s other hand. “We have to stall him!” Rewind said, diving into another alley that would lead them away from the coordinates listed on the note.

“I have an idea,” Chromedome said, and then he was leading Rewind around a tight corner, down a set of hidden stairs, into an even deeper darkness.

But then it wasn’t. At the bottom of the staircase was a light, and what lay beyond that was a shocking sight after the burned-out desolation of the alley above. Chromedome had led him into an old monorail station, bustling even though the train was defunct these days because of the bombings.

Rewind barely had time to admire it before there were footsteps behind him on the stairs, and Chromedome pulled Rewind through the doors and into the station proper. “We can follow the monorail line to the location!” Rewind said as they ducked through the crowd. There was a haphazard bar set up in one corner of the station, and mechs hawking various other goods at the station’s edges. The whole place had a speakeasy feel.

They were close to the tracks when Davos burst through the doors into the station, eliciting indignant sounds from the crowds. Rewind looked around the place once more—there had been no door guard, no one appeared to be in charge, and there certainly wasn’t an engex license on the door—and yelled, as loud as he could, “POLICE!”

The atmosphere snapped from laid-back to chaotic. People started moving in all directions, blocking Davos from Rewind’s view. Rewind could hear Chromedome laughing out loud as he pulled Rewind after him down onto the tracks.

Chromedome let Rewind set the pace again as they walked at the side of the tracks towards the stop that would take them to the coordinates on the note. “We close?” Chromedome asked after a bit. Rewind couldn’t help but smile under his faceplate. Chromedome could have just put the coordinates in his own GPS—he was still holding the note, even—but he hadn’t. He was trusting Rewind to do it instead. It had been so long since Rewind had been relied on by another person. And even back then, Dominus hadn’t depended on him, not fully. And it was probably warranted, as since he’d disappeared, Rewind had done nothing but fail him.

But maybe, maybe tonight would be the end of that.

“Right up there,” Rewind responded. There was a light ahead of them—another station, and according to Rewind’s GPS, their stop.

The station was just a little too high off the monorail tracks for Rewind to reach. He didn’t even have to say anything before Chromedome was bending down, lacing his fingers together to make a step for Rewind to use. Rewind nodded his thanks and clambered his way onto the platform. There were no stairs this time—the staircase that had led here was blockaded, probably due to structural damage from a bomb. The other side of the station had an elevator that Rewind could hear running above them.

Chromedome climbed up onto the platform behind Rewind and Rewind made for the elevator, pressing the only button next to it. The elevator whirred, stopping above them once before the doors on their level opened. Not about to back out now, Rewind stepped inside. Chromedome followed.

The elevator went to two other levels, and Rewind pressed the highest one on a guess. They were right on top of the coordinates listed on the note, and what kind of secret gathering took place at street level?

Rewind’s spark seemed to vibrate in his chest as the elevator ascended. This was it. They’d made it so far, and they were quickly rising toward either Rewind’s first breakthrough or more nothing. He could deal with it being nothing. He’d had plenty of disappointments already in his quest. What he’d never learned to cope with was the waiting, the anxiety of not knowing what, exactly, you were going to have to learn to live with.

The elevator doors slid open, revealing two heavily armed guards. Rewind looked up at them, trying to appear as nonthreatening as possible, which wasn’t hard.

“Password?” one of the bigger mechs said in a gruff voice.

“Percipience,” Rewind said confidently. The guards parted, revealing an open door behind them.

Rewind all but dashed through. Inside was a stack of datapads next to five paper books on display. One was slim and purple, two were blue and seemed to be part of a set, one was black, and one was the soft tan color of Dominus’s journal.

Rewind’s optics blazed for a second with the crush of victory before he took in the other details: the volume was more pristine than Rewind remembered Dominus’s being, and more importantly, it was far too small. Even more significantly, it had a title on the cover. A week of travels with Thunderclash, by a mech Rewind had never heard of.

He could cope with defeat. He could cope with hope, and the loss of it. But that didn’t mean that the first few seconds weren’t sparkshattering.

Chromedome had stepped up behind Rewind, where he had stopped just past the room’s entrance. “Anything good?” he asked, without a particular note of interest, and Rewind was pulled out of his anguish by the realization that Chromedome had never asked him what he’d come here for. He’d never questioned what they were doing, just followed and supported.

Rewind stared  up at Chromedome, who was standing almost too close to him. He didn’t flinch back as Rewind appraised his faceplate, trying to figure out how to respond after all the emotional intensity of the last few seconds.

He never got the chance.

“What are you doing here?” The voice came from behind Chromedome, and Rewind had to peer around Chromedome’s legs to get a look at the mech. When he did, he felt his optics widen.

Prowl of High Command was standing in the entrance, regarding Chromedome with a surprising amount of hostility.

“I could ask you the same.” This wasn’t the shy, thoughtful Chromedome from the clinic or the professional, quick-minded one from the search for the clue. This Chromedome matched Prowl for hostility. His voice was flat and his visor blank.

“I always seek out these events. There’s always a chance that some important piece of intelligence could slip out of Autobot hands otherwise,” Prowl said. “You, on the other hand, have never. Is this part of your life crisis? One attack and you ask me to let you quit the job I pulled many strings to get you in the first place, and plan B is taking up art collecting?” Prowl managed to make it into an insult somehow.

“If you must know, I’m here because it’s important to my friend Rewind,” Chromedome said, nodding down at him. “And I’m sure we all agree it’s best not to let this argument escalate here.”

Indeed, the few other mechs in the room were paying them varying amounts of attention, but they had all definitely heard the verbal blows Prowl and Chromedome were trading.

Rewind finally spoke up. “Actually, there’s nothing of interest to me here. We were just leaving.”

Chromedome and Prowl both turned to him then. Chromedome looked surprised, presumably because he still had no idea why Rewind had wanted to come here in the first place, and Prowl…Prowl was looking at Rewind like he was a scuff mark on Prowl’s plating. Rewind felt immediately combative. Prowl was one of the most important Autobots there was, but all Rewind wanted to do right now was do something, anything, to get that superior look off his face.

“Alright then. We’re going,” Chromedome said in an affectless tone. Rewind followed him out of the room and down the elevator.

They emerged on the empty monorail platform at the very bottom of the building. Chromedome took one step out of the elevator and then sat down on one of the benches against the wall next to it, resting his head in one hand.

After a moment, he looked up. “We can go back if you want,” he said, back to sounding like the Chromedome from the clinic—tired, but honest. “You didn’t have to leave.”

“I meant what I said, actually,” Rewind replied, sitting down next to Chromedome on the bench. “I was looking for one specific book, and they didn’t have it.”

Chromedome nodded, peering curiously over at Rewind. He didn’t look like he was going to press for details, but Rewind felt like he owed him a more complete explanation at this point. “The reason I was at the Relinquishment Clinic is more complicated than you probably thought,” Rewind said. “I’m looking for someone.”

He told Chromedome the whole story, in more detail than he’d ever told anyone. He told Chromedome about Dominus vanishing into thin air, about the places he’d searched since, about the book that had disappeared with him.

“You must love him a lot,” Chromedome observed quietly when Rewind was done and feeling emptier somehow for having bared his soul to this near-stranger. Rewind was so, so grateful to him for using the present tense.

“I do,” Rewind replied, just because he could. It was good to remind himself, sometimes. Chromedome’s expression changed, just a twinge of something unidentifiable. “You know Prowl?” Rewind asked, grasping for a subject change.

Chromedome seemed to shake himself out of his mood a little and nodded. “We go back.” His tone was dark, though, and Rewind sensed he should leave it alone. For now.

“I hate him already,” Rewind said, taking a leap of faith. To his relief, Chromedome laughed at that with what seemed to be genuine mirth. “Did you see that look he gave me? Ugh.”

“There are…aspects to Prowl that most people don’t understand,” Chromedome said. “But yeah, he can be a real nightmare.”

Rewind laughed aloud at that, the unexpected deadpan delivery, and Chromedome more hesitantly joined in. Suddenly it seemed like they were laughing at this whole strange evening, at the fact that they could, what with the war and Rewind’s quest and whatever had brought Chromedome to the clinic weighing on them so heavily. Laughter wouldn’t stop any of those things from being horrible. But it could push them aside for awhile, and maybe that was important too. Rewind wanted to savor this moment. He wanted to make it last as long as he could.

Chapter Text

Recharge feedback was supposed to be complete memories. An accurate rendering of an event, as seen through one’s own optics.

Chromedome’s brain had laughed in the face of the last bit for a long time. He’d been having recharge flashes of memories that he knew weren’t his for a long time. Usually he couldn’t figure out the source of the memories until he awoke. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t, like, the best part of his day. But he could cope with it.

This one was different. There was something hazy about it, as though some details had been wiped away, leaving a scrambling of bits in their wake. He knew whose memory it was, at least – Rover of Iacon had been a Decepticon foot soldier he’d autopsied back when the war had been concentrated on Cybertron. He’d died in…some battle. This battle, which raged in Rover’s memory in perfect detail. Which Chromedome also remembered, in a haze of stressful work in medical bases they’d had to keep moving as the Decepticons kept finding them. It had been an Autobot offensive, called…called…

A grenade hit the ground in front of Rover and the world went briefly white and then black, and Chromedome woke, jerking upright and holding onto the edges of the berth as his mind slowly let the war scene go and took in the details of his habsuite on Kimia Station. The narrow room with its narrow door, Rewind’s box of souvenirs on one of the front shelves, Rewind himself still peaceful in recharge. Chromedome felt a surge of relief that he hadn’t woken.

That had been strange. The autopsy report had been rote, Chromedome remembered. Rover hadn’t known anything about Decepticon strategies. He remembered filling out the form, remembered feeling like it was a waste of his time…so why the glitch?

Chromedome tried to remember anything else about the day he’d filed the report and found that he couldn’t. It was a while ago, and the day had probably been average, for that time. Autopsies, reports, hanging out in the base’s social rooms with…whoever. It didn’t matter, it was a long time ago. Before he’d even met Rewind.

Chromedome thought about asking Rewind if anything had been strange about Rover’s death. Then he nixed the possibility - Rewind would figure out why he was asking and he would worry. Best to avoid that. Chromedome would definitely have been able to tell if Rover had mnemosurgery performed on him before, which was the most common cause of those kinds of blanks. Maybe it had just been processor damage from the grenade that had killed him. Chromedome wouldn’t have thought anything of it at the time, and of course he’d have been working with corpses from that battle all week, so he would have remembered what it was called…

That had been a long time ago. Not worth focusing on. To distract himself, Chromedome checked his comm inbox.

Oh, hell.

Well, he certainly wasn’t thinking about the – Fifth? Fourth? Something Offensive anymore. He had a shiny new problem to deal with.

Knowing that if he said no he would have to deal with repeated, similar memos until he said yes, Chromedome replied to Prowl’s comm in the affirmative.

In three weeks, Kimia was sending a shipment of new technology to the Valkyrie, the Autobot flagship at the most volatile seat of the war. Kimia Command had put out a call for volunteers to escort the shuttle, open to anyone but the weapons engineers. The likelihood of capture was high enough that they had to consider the possibility of Autobot secrets getting into Decepticon hands. Two minutes after the call had been put out, Prowl had sent a comm suggesting that Chromedome volunteer.

With the sinking feeling that the morning so far was going to predict how the rest of his day would go, Chromedome started going about his routine.

His work had recently been focused on one project – operating on Decepticons that Prowl and some others shipped over, scouring their brains for one particular secret: the identity of a Decepticon spy that had infiltrated bizarrely deeply into Autobot Command. The Decepticons were acting on knowledge that they could only have gotten from someone high up – someone who had either been impersonating an Autobot for years, or who had recently switched sides. All of Chromedome’s other projects had been pushed aside while the spy was on the loose.

He was currently working his way through a pile of POWs – kept unconscious by Kimia’s medics until Chromedome was through with them – that had been sent over from the Valkyrie. As he set his station up for the day, he wondered what it was that Prowl had at the Valkyrie that he wanted Chromedome to come over for. He figured about equal odds between a Decepticon too high-profile for Prowl to risk sending to Kimia and an uncooperative Autobot in need of what Zeta Prime had called a nudge.

The day proceeded smoothly, contrary to Chromedome’s pessimistic expectations. Brain after brain, all with no information about the spy. Chromedome was beginning to think that the spy was reporting to Megatron personally or some crazy slag like that, in which case it didn’t matter how many footsoldiers or lieutenants he injected – he wasn’t going to find out the spy’s identity.

When he was finished, Chromedome was faced with the choice of going back to his habsuite and hanging out by himself, or figuring out something else to do. He was too tired for the Exit Rooms, Rewind was at work, and trying to recharge after the mess that had been his last recharge cycle sounded less than appealing.

In the end, he made his way to Brainstorm’s lab. It was always nice to watch Brainstorm work on something more horrifying than Chromedome’s own work.

Brainstorm’s presence was obvious even from outside the door. His voice was running through his entire litany of personal made-up swears, ardently enough for Chromedome to hesitate before pushing the door open.

Nobody inside appeared to be dead, which was good, but the room was filled with an acrid green smoke. Chromedome paused at the threshold.

“Shut that! Shut that now!” Brainstorm shrieked at Chromedome. Chromedome obeyed, stepping the rest of the way into the lab and shutting the door behind him before remembering to consider his personal safety.

“Is that – dangerous – or –?”

Brainstorm let out an emphatic sigh. “Remarkably, no. I’m calling it fear smoke.”

“Are you ser-”

“I know! I know! It’s not a good name! I’ll come up with a better one, I just invented it.”

“So – dare I ask – “

“What does it do? It’s doesn’t, like, kill people, it’s more of a ‘defensive weapon’.” The sarcasm was thick on the last two words. “Prime wants more of those, and considering that the very category is an oxymoron, I figured it was the perfect place for a meta-weapon. I pitched some great ones, but this boring slag is the only thing that’s gotten approved.”

“Didn’t sound boring when you were telling me to shut the door,” Chromedome said, skeptical. The smoke hung heavily enough in the air that he could barely see Brainstorm bustling around at one of the benches.

“Well, that’s because of what it does do. It’s scary, right? Looks like it could kill you, smells like it could kill you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, in a place where I haven’t disabled all of the alarms – I can’t have security on my ass every time something dangerous happens in the weapons lab – this stuff would trigger all the critical systems it encounters – fire, poison, pressure loss, probably meta-weapon detectors – all the big ones. It’d shut an attacking ship down and send the crew scrambling to figure out what the ship suddenly says they’re all dying of. And since it’s not actually dangerous, it’ll be able to get through most forms of shielding. It’s the kind of last resort that we wouldn’t need if High Command would just let me make what I wanted.” Brainstorm, now more visible, rolled his eyes and turned back to his lab bench. He appeared to be using some sort of fan apparatus to suck the smoke into a cannister.

“Sounds pretty useful, in a very, very specific situation,” Chromedome said.

Brainstorm visibly perked up. “It does, doesn’t it? High Command thinks so too, I guess. They’re sending some with you when you go to the Valkyrie in a couple of weeks.”

“How in the pit do you know about that?” Chromedome had been under the impression that Brainstorm’s main source of station gossip was Chromedome himself.

“Swerve stopped by because he was out of silicon flakes.”

“Ah.” That was answer enough. Swerve had probably caught Brainstorm up on things Chromedome hadn’t even heard about yet. “Yeah, a change of scenery will be nice. I’ve always loved a good warzone at this time of year.”

“Beats your day to day,” Brainstorm said, a bit too serious. “Doubt your boo is going to be happy about your little trip,” Brainstorm said, apparently seeking some gossip of his own.

“He’s not my boo.”

Rewind was important to him, and the best thing in his life, but he wasn’t and never would be Chromedome’s conjunx.

And every time Brainstorm brought it up, even to tease, Chromedome bristled at it and Brainstorm backed off too fast, looking – thoughtful? More like frustrated. It was annoying. Chromedome didn’t understand why they kept having this conversation. “He doesn’t have to find out,” Chromedome said, with the intention of distracting Brainstorm with the answer to the actual question that he’d asked. “The trip’ll only be a few days and we work staggered shifts right now.”

Brainstorm snorted with laughter, disturbing the last few wisps of fear smoke as he siphoned them into the canister. “You really think that’s going to work?”

Chromedome sighed. It probably wouldn’t. The real best case scenario was that Rewind found out while he was gone. They would have the progenitor of all arguments about it afterwards, and things would be tense for a week or so and then fine. And Rewind wouldn’t find out that it was Prowl rather than altruism that had brought Chromedome to the Valkyrie. “It’ll be fine,” he summed up.

“Sure it will,” Brainstorm said, his tone of voice not agreeing with the words.

-

Chromedome awoke to the habsuite door being slammed open. He was on his feet and ready for a fight in seconds, before his processor caught up with his body and he realized that it was Rewind standing in the doorframe.

He shook his head to clear it, focusing his attention on Rewind and the datapad he was waving frantically in the air.

“I found something!” Rewind said. Chromedome felt his optics widen. Rewind was working on several research projects, but his outsized excitement could only mean one thing.

This was about Dominus.

“What does it say?” Chromedome asked, his processor still staticky with recharge. The response was all but automatic, leaving his vocalizer before all of his processor had a chance to catch up with the situation. That was good, because it meant that Rewind couldn’t hear the near-panic that immediately followed.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want Rewind to find his conjunx. But if—when Rewind found Dominus, it would transform Rewind’s life and leave Chromedome in the dust. Chromedome had trouble imagining life without Rewind, these days, so he could argue that it was fair to be apprehensive.

Rewind stopped waving the datapad in the air so that he could consult it. “It’s a military intelligence report from ages ago. Most of it’s redacted, but there’s a location! ‘Redacted, redacted, Ambus redacted, redacted, a couple sentences about negotiating an armistice agreement after Autobot forces kept a Neutral colony from falling to Decepticons—then the location of the summit and a date!”

 “Is it nearby? Does it even still exist?” Chromedome asked, doing his best to push away his personal concerns. This was important to Rewind. And that meant that it was important, full stop.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been to the communications center yet,” Rewind said. He clutched the datapad to his chest, fingers locked onto it as though it might disappear if he held it any less tightly. “One of my web crawlers picked this up—the parts that aren’t redacted were just added to public record today.” He hesitated, looking up at Chromedome with wide, honest optics. “I know it’s the middle of your off-cycle, but—”

“Of course I’ll come with you.” Chromedome smiled encouragingly under his faceplate, knowing that Rewind could hear it. He still felt hollow at the thought of what might happen to him if Rewind and Dominus were reunited, but the feeling was muted by the intense warmth of the realization that Rewind had come to him first, before he’d even followed up on the information in the ship’s archives. For now, being Rewind’s second favorite was pretty damn good.

-

Chromedome stood behind Rewind, watching as Rewind, with shaking fingers, typed the name of the planet from the report into the research terminal. When he finally, hesitantly pressed the search button, dozens of results popped up almost immediately. Chromedome could see Rewind’s brief shiver at the presence of information, after so long without any clues at all. He reached out and put a supportive hand on Rewind’s shoulder before he could talk himself out of the gesture.

Rewind cycled his vents and then went back to the search bar, added the word Ambus to narrow the results.

Now there were three documents. Rewind inched the cursor to the heading of the first one and clicked on it. Chromedome could feel the tension in the cables under his hand as the page loaded.

It was a news article from the same year that the summit had allegedly occurred. Chromedome’s optics latched onto a name, not absorbing any of the contents of the article.

Minimus Ambus. Of course. Dominus’s spark brother, who had been a formidable Autobot legal officer before receiving some top-secret assignment and disappearing, like his brother, from history.

“I’m sorry,” Chromedome whispered, assuming that Rewind had reached the same conclusion by now. Rewind’s only response was to turn around and wrap his arms around Chromedome’s waist, burying his face in Chromedome’s plating.

Chromedome eased himself to one knee so that he could return the hug properly. He gathered Rewind in his arms, felt him nestle his helm into the crook of Chromedome’s neck.

Rewind broke away after a few minutes, venting shakily.

“I’m sorry,” Chromedome said, still at eye level with Rewind, trying to convey his honesty with his optics. “I’m sorry that this wasn’t the one.” Seeing Rewind this run-down, this disappointed, again, like always, was almost more than his spark could bear. Chromedome’s feelings on Dominus himself, and the concept of finding him, were complicated. But he would endure anything to not have to see Rewind this heartbroken anymore.

Rewind blinked a few times, then sighed, running his hands over his face. Then he reached out to lay a hand on Chromedome’s shoulder, a reversal of their positions before.

“Thank you,” Rewind said quietly. He pulled Chromedome into another hug. “Just…thank you for being here. I wouldn’t be able to do this without you.”

Chromedome held him, trying his best to be grateful for what he had and accept what he never could.

-

Two days later found Chromedome and Rewind in a familiar spot, sitting on the hull outside the engine level of Kimia Facility. They didn’t make it out here often anymore.  The facility was constantly on the move these days, under constant threat of attack by Decepticon forces. Despite being primarily a weapons development facility,  Kimia was woefully undermanned when it came to military personnel who had the skills to defend it. When the station was in motion, the engine levels were off-limits to everyone but the engineers and the command team. When it was still, though, like today, the engineering floors were all but deserted, leaving a clear path to the emergency exit with the broken locking mechanism that Rewind had discovered years ago.

The exit led out to an recess in the station’s structure that made a sort of platform, perfect for admiring the stars around them. The constantly crowded observatories didn’t nearly compare.

As usual, they settled in the corner of the recess away from the door, hands loosely clasped in each others’ just in case one set of clamps failed or the station moved unexpectedly. They’d talked about nothing, and then lapsed into a slightly awkward silence. Rewind had been high-strung for days, constantly chattering, switching between topics at lightspeed, but refusing to talk about anything real. Probably still dealing with the supposed hint about Dominus and the crushing disappointment that it had amounted to. Chromedome had no idea how to alleviate the burden. So he sat there, tracing patterns in the stars with his optics, hoping that Rewind would speak first, would tell Chromedome what he needed.

Eventually Rewind spoke. “I have something for you,” he said, handing Chromedome a datapad that Chromedome recognized as as the kind used for legal documents. Chromedome adjusted his posture so that he could take it. Instead of powering it up, Chromedome looked back at Rewind, clueless as to what this could be.

“I’ve renounced Dominus as my conjunx in the public record,” Rewind explained. Chromedome absorbed the words, but...he must have misheard. Dominus was the most important thing in Rewind’s life by a margin Chromedome doubted that he could even comprehend. He turned to Rewind, letting his bafflement show in his features. Rewind nodded at the datapad. “That’s my copy of the documents. He’s been MIA long enough that I can legally do this—I’m way past that point, to be honest.”

“But—why?” Chromedome couldn’t stop himself from asking.

Chromedome wasn’t prepared for the raw intensity in Rewind’s gaze as he met Chromedome’s optics. “Because I want you to be my conjunx.”

Chromedome was dumbstruck. He faltered with the beginnings of words, dissecting Rewind’s declaration for all the ways he might have heard wrong. Luckily, Rewind saved him from having to speak.

“This isn’t me giving up on him, and I’m not going to stop looking,” he said. “But…after what happened a few days ago, I realized that I can’t continue like that forever. I can’t pin everything on him. And…it’s silly of me to act like he’s the only important thing in my life.” Rewind’s hand tightened on Chromedome’s. “When we met, I was on the verge of losing it. I think you’re the only reason that I didn’t. And you’re the only reason I’ve been able to handle everything since.”

“I—you—” Chromedome tried to come up with a reply, unable to keep his face from breaking into a joyous smile. He stifled it after a moment, though. “What about—you know, if, when—” when you find Dominus?

Rewind caught Chromedome’s meaning without making him voice it. “We’ll deal with it then. Or maybe…maybe we’ll never have to. But I’m sick of my whole life revolving around waiting. We both deserve better. If…if it’s what you want.” His blue optics were wide and bare.

“It is what I want,” Chromedome said, his voice coming out an overwhelmed whisper.

Rewind moved so that he could wrap his arms around Chromedome and Chromedome returned the gesture with all his spark, still clutching the datapad tightly. He felt his optics burning from the intensity and unexpectedness of it all. Rewind felt like he was shaking a little, and Chromedome, suddenly worried, pulled away so that he could cup Rewind’s jaw in one hand.

His spark leapt when he focused on Rewind’s face. He looked happy, happier than Chromedome had ever seen him. Chromedome couldn’t resist smiling at the sight, and he let Rewind pull him close again.

Chapter Text

“You shouldn’t have come.”  

“Maybe you shouldn’t have, if you’re going to be such a gearstick about it. Besides, it’s not like it matters at this point.”

Predictably, Chromedome didn’t respond. Rewind crossed his arms with a huff of frustration. He got it. Chromedome worried. Chromedome caring was nice – it had been a long time, before him, since Rewind had felt cared about.

But not even Chromedome seemed to understand that Rewind wasn’t about to betray Dominus just to keep a bunch of old videos safe.

The supply ship that they were on was huge, but crowded with weapons and Primus knew what else. They were on their way to the space surrounding a formerly organic planet that the Decepticons were trying to cyberform. The planet had been abandoned years ago, but the Autobots were still trying to save it on principle – and the more Decepticons they could mow down in the process, the better. Kimia had received a formal request to send a selection of traditional and experimental weaponry. None of the weapons engineers were eligible as escorts, which left very few eligible people on Kimia. Rewind had volunteered as soon as he’d heard.

Chromedome had been grumpy ever since. Even though he’d signed up as well. The hypocrisy was getting more annoying by the second.

Their destination, a warship called Valkyrie, was almost in view ahead of them. Rewind switched on his camera in anticipation. They would be dropping off the supplies and then hightailing it out of there, on a trajectory that would make them look like one of the Autobots’ regular supply ships.

The battle revealed itself first in flashes of light from far ahead. Rewind wasn’t sure how good the video quality was going to be, the explosions were so faint. But he stopped wondering when the Valkyrie came into view.

It was a fortress in space. About the size of Kimia, but instead of being protected by flimsy metal, a few guns that looked like they had been built in as an afterthought, and security protocols so lax that Rewind and Chromedome could usually sneak onto restricted levels with no trouble, the Valkyrie was adorned with cannons and guns of all sorts. Airlocks off the sides contained rows upon rows of fighting aircraft, and a force field surrounded the mile or so around the fortress in translucent, warning red.

Chromedome punched in the buttons to hail the Valkyrie’s communication’s center as Rewind took it all in, zooming in and out at the ship’s various details. The battle in the distance was just visible ahead of them, going strong judging by the explosions that occasionally studded the background.

A hole winked open in the force field right in front of them, and Chromedome piloted the shuttle through. Two fighters met them on the other side, working their way around the ship in a scanning pattern.  

“I hope they know we’re supposed to be carrying weapons,” Chromedome said, the first words he had spoken since their argument earlier.

The scanning ships seemed to understand, and cleared out so that they could move forward to the base.

Minutes later, the ship was docked, the Valkyrie crew had begun unloading it, and Chromedome was apparently still not speaking to Rewind. Rewind tried to read Chromedome’s mood from his arms-crossed standoffish posture. Prospects weren’t promising. 

“We’re two for three,” Rewind couldn’t help but say eventually. “We made it to the Valkyrie, we docked safely, and now we just have to make it back, which, since we won’t have  a ship full of weapons, should be the easiest part.”

No response from Chromedome.

Rewind sighed and settled in to wait. As the minutes dragged, he pulled up footage of their approach, zooming in on some shots and cutting the boring parts so he’d have a nice reel to show his coworkers back on Kimia. When he heard footsteps headed their way, he kept at his task, figuring the bot was about to release the ship back to them after some boring conversation and paperwork.

“With me,” the bot said, once he’d stopped in front of Rewind and Chromedome. Very blunt, and very familiar.

Rewind returned his optics to the scene around him just in time for him to see Chromedome stand up.  

He turned to Rewind. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Now it was Rewind’s turn to refuse to communicate. He shrugged his shoulders and pretended to go back to video editing. Chromedome followed Prowl across the shuttle bay floor. Too wary to actually keep working without Chromedome keeping watch beside him, Rewind sat and stewed. Chromedome’s utter lack of surprise when Prowl had showed up, not voicing even a token protest - obviously he’d arranged this meeting with Prowl in advance. Sure, he hadn’t wanted Rewind there because it was dangerous. But apparently, he also hadn’t wanted Rewind to know about this.

There was really only one reason Prowl would have asked him to come here in the first place.

Chromedome wasn’t even supposed to be doing mnemosurgery anymore. Kimia’s medic had said so. He’d had the sound of a medic who didn’t believe his patient was going to take the advice he was dolling out when he said that, though—kind of like the COs who told Rewind that it was recommended that he stay as far away from active battles as possible.

Rewind knew that Chromedome was doing it all the time, these days – some special, top secret assignment that Chromedome had assured him was important. Rewind believed that it was. Well, most of him did.

Thing was, Rewind had also read – and archived – lots of medical research. Habitually practicing mnemosurgery was classified as an addiction, and research on its impact on practitioners was…bleak. He’d never been sure whether he could apply that definition to Chromedome, though. Chromedome, who did other things and only did mnemosurgery when ordered.

Chromedome, who had apparently tried to quit and failed to before he’d even met Rewind. Chromedome, who had taken a dangerous trip all the way out here just to…just to…

Prowl was back, headed straight for Rewind. Rewind sat up ramrod straight, fearing the worst. Rewind eyed Prowl, still wary, as he sat down next to Rewind.

“I noticed the way he looks at you,” Prowl said, looking straight ahead. To anyone who glanced over at them, he might have not been talking to Rewind at all. “Which means there’s something you should know.” 

Rewind could have stopped him. He could have walked away. What kept him seated was ancient and innate and had nothing to do with Chromedome. Rewind wasn’t going to believe Prowl over his almost-conjunx, no matter what Prowl said next. But there was no circumstance that would make him walk away when he had the chance to learn something.

Prowl almost certainly misread him, a smug smile on the corners of his mouth as he continued. “To be honest, I suspect you already know, in a manner of speaking. At least, that database you have attached to your brain knows.”

Prowl looked over at Rewind. “His original name was Tumbler of Iacon. You might want to look him up before things…cascade.” Prowl looked straight ahead and stood up, then turned back to Rewind. “I’ve seen this before.”

Before Rewind could ask any questions – not that he would have – Prowl had spun on his heel and was walking back across the shuttle bay.

As soon as he was out of sight, Rewind pressed his hands to his temples, frustration at Chromedome and frustration at Prowl warring within him. Of course he knew Chromedome’s original name. Whatever Prowl was hinting at, though…Rewind was pretty sure it would come as a surprise. And Prowl was right, it probably was buried somewhere in his archival memory.

Rewind just felt drained by the time Chromedome returned. Prowl wasn’t with him, at least. His faceplate looked slack and washed out, as it always did after he injected someone these days.

“You ready to go?” Rewind asked, trying to stop the thread of irritation that was trying to slip into his voice. He was still mad that Chromedome hadn’t told him about his real reason for coming here. But right now his only goal was just to get them both back to Kimia safely.

Chromedome seemed to sense this and nodded, not technically breaking the terms of the Chromedome Silent Treatment. Rewind sighed.

They got on the ship, Chromedome kicking a forgotten canister out of the way and snorting at it for some indecipherable reason. They strapped in quickly and Chromedome successfully maneuvered the ship out of the airlock. The shield surrounding the Valkyrie blinked open to let them through and Chromedome started pressing the sequence of buttons that would switch the ship to hyperdrive mode.

The shift happened slowly. First Rewind thought it was light pollution from the battle behind them. Then, suddenly, he was certain that it wasn’t.

In front of them, and creeping around the sides of the ship’s front window, the stars were going out.

Rewind didn’t remember clapping a hand down on Chromedome’s arm, but apparently he had. Chromedome was looking at Rewind, instead of the disturbing blackness out the window. He was using his other hand to pry Rewind’s grasp on his wrist loose so that he could wrap their hands together. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Look outside.” Just as he said it, the scene changed – the lights came on.

They weren’t in open space anymore. They were in some wide room with metal walls, and the ship’s forward motion had stopped. Whatever vessel they were in must have had better cloaking mechanisms than Rewind had thought was possible. It had tricked them into flying right inside it.

Chromedome snapped his hand out of Rewind’s to jab at the controls. “It’s not going anywhere. It’s like it –”  At that moment, everything on the control pad flashed at once and then all of the lights in their ship died. Some kind of EMP?

Chromedome’s hand found Rewind’s again and squeezed.

The ship started to creek, then screech with pressure, and then a panel of hull was ripped off. Standing behind it were about a dozen Cybertronians with Decepticon badges and guns.

“Surrender,” one of them growled. Rewind slowly let go of Chromedome and raised both hands above his head.

-

The Decepticons had put them in a cell together, at least. Rewind was certain that Chromedome’s petty silence had ended when their ship had been swallowed by whatever Decepticon fortress they were in, but he couldn’t think of anything to talk about. The only topic on either of their minds, Rewind suspected, was what happens next, and voicing any of the possibilities that were going through Rewind’s processor was…unappealing.

Rewind and Chromedome both dealt in information, in their own ways. Between the two of them, the information they knew might be able to turn the tide of the war in the Decepticons’ favor. The only strategic choice was to torture their secrets out of them.

Not a great topic of conversation.

Footsteps in the hallway. Rewind looked over at Chromedome, who met his optics, equally panicked. Neither had time to say anything before a hulking figure, black and silver except for the purple badge in the center of his chest, came to a stop outside the bars of their cell.

“Hello, Autobots,” he snarled, hands clasped formally behind his back. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Are you?” Chromedome asked, barely loud enough for Rewind to hear. Rewind shot him a look.

Luckily, the Decepticon didn’t appear to have noticed the muttering. “I am Deathstrike,” he said. Rewind was so, so glad he’d gotten that on film, because the prospect of a Decepticon named Deathstrike existing was just…too good not to be public knowledge. That had to be one of the darker-and-edgier names that Megatron was known for bestowing on random recruits. Before Chromedome could squeeze in a comment on that, Deathstrike continued. “I assume you want to know why you’re here.”

Rewind suddenly, emphatically, did not.

Deathstrike didn’t care. “You are on a research vessel of the Decepticon Army,” he said, like he was announcing it to a room full of soldiers instead of two wary Autobots. “We had some visitors recently who taught my researchers the basics of mnemosurgery in exchange for nothing but safe passage out of Decepticon territory. It’s been a tremendously fruitful pursuit. All the missing Autobots you know have probably ended up on our ship.”

Despite the fact that he really ought to be fearing for his own life right now, Rewind latched onto the running theme that he'd held constant in his processor for thousands of years. All the missing Autobots, no matter the source, was a clue.

Deathstrike was wearing a faceplate, but Rewind could sense that he was grinning all the same. “We were just going to mine you both for information and then kill you. But our scans turned up some exceptionally interesting results.”

Rewind froze, filing the hint away to work with in the event that they survived the immediate threat. Somehow, this was worse than he had imagined. They didn’t just want Chromedome’s knowledge, they wanted his skills.

But in the midst of Rewind’s panicked thoughts, Deathstrike had raised a finger and pointed it at Rewind.

“You have memory stored outside of your brain module. A lot of memory. Memory that I’m sure the Decepticon Army could use,” he said with a leer. After that chilling revelation, he pointed to Chromedome. “We don’t know how to access that memory. We suspect that you do.”

Rewind almost wanted to laugh. All this, and it was probably going to end in old-fashioned torture after all.

“It’s not possible to access this frametype’s archival memory through mnemosurgery,” Chromedome said. “It’s a separate system. You’d have better luck with a cerebro-shell.”

Deathstrike chuckled. “And you probably tell your sparklings that Autobots don’t lie,” he said. “Our guests familiarized us with the Nexus Bypass, and made it clear that any mnemosurgeon worthy of the title would have it in his arsenal. I’ll be back in an hour. You’ll have changed your minds by then, or you’ll both die.” He turned and walked back the way he came down the hall.

Rewind shivered as soon as Deathstrike was out of sight. “Is that true?” Rewind asked, as quietly as he could. The Nexus Bypass was the primary reason he was “forbidden” from entering combat situations. He could die, sure, and that would be bad, but the possibility that the information he carried could be stolen had much bigger repercussions.

Chromedome just shrugged. To anyone watching them, it would look like a noncommittal answer. But Rewind knew that it was a yes. If Chromedome had been telling the truth, he would have told Rewind so to reassure him. What Chromedome was saying was that he could access Rewind’s database using mnemosurgery.

Rewind inhaled sharply and tried to focus. They needed a plan. They needed to come up with a plan where Decepticon sensors wouldn’t know about it.

Rewind opened up a localized inter-Autobot radio channel and used it to ping Chromedome. Chromedome gave no physical indication that they were speaking as he accepted the ping and sent a message. <I don’t think I convinced him.>

<Why is he so convinced you’ll do it?> The question certainly wasn’t the priority right now, right here in a Decepticon holding cell, but it was at the front of Rewind’s awareness all the same. Radio had less filters than speech – if you formed a thought, it was sent. People mostly used it for emergencies for that reason.

<Decepticon stereotypes of Autobots and mnemosurgeons are at odds. Autobots are supposed to be weak and wrong, but more misguided and underfoot than evil. But Megatron despises mnemosurgeons. The feeling’s seeped into his followers. We’re evil and we’re terrifying. I’m confident that this Deathstrike isn’t operating with his permission. But, yeah – that’s why.>

Rewind sent an affirmative ping, struggling to switch to planning. His processor was mostly concerned with worrying about just how familiar the typical Decepticon mindset was to Chromedome.

Chromedome’s thoughts, broadcasted probably unwillingly over the radio link, distracted him. <Of course. There is no spy. It’s him.>

Rewind’s response ping was questioning, and Chromedome explained. <I’ve been working recently on scouring brains to try to suss out the identity of a Decepticon who’s been passing on Autobot secrets. We thought it was someone who flipped, or went undercover and then rose up in the ranks. But that was making less and less sense. That’s what I was doing on Kimia. Prowl had a POW who would have known, almost definitely, if there was a spy, and he didn’t know anything. Because there is no spy. Just amateur mnemosurgeons. I was searching for a ghost, that whole time.>

<We need to plan,> Rewind sent, squashing all other thoughts. The implications of all this could only be dealt with if they survived.

<I don’t know what they did to our ship. I wouldn’t bet on being able to use it to escape,> Chromedome started.

<There were other ships in that hanger.> Rewind reviewed the footage of their march to the cell. <If we can get there, I think we can get out. And even if we have to launch ourselves into space, it’ll be a better death than whatever they have in mind.> Rewind wouldn’t have said that out loud.

Chromedome seemed to take it in stride. <There was a room off to the side of the hallway they took us through that had everything you’d need for maintaining mnemosurgery equipment. If I agree, there’s a chance they take us there.>

<And then what? We fight our way out?> Rewind asked.

<If I tell them that I need space to work, they’ll give me space,> Chromedome said confidently. <I can take two of them, one if they’re really jumpy.>

Rewind was on the verge of agreeing with the plan when his thoughts betrayed him. <He said all the missing Autobots you know.>

<You believe him? It sounded like bragging to me. And Rewind, it’s been so long.>

Rewind cut off the connection.

Chromedome kept his optics on Rewind for a beat and then leaned his head against the wall, hand outstretched. Rewind reached across the gap between them to brush the tips of Chromedome’s fingers with his. He knew that they couldn’t be more affectionate than that here – if Deathstrike and his people knew that they were almost-conjunxes, they would use it against them. The barrier that the knowledge erected between them only made Rewind more eager to see an other side of this, to be free and safe and able to touch and talk to Chromedome like he wanted to.

For now, he had to wait.

-

Deathstrike showed up at the appointed time, with four guards. Rewind and Chromedome stuck their hands through the bars when instructed and they were put in energy cuffs just like they had been when they first arrived. The bars to the cell winked away and one of the guards immediately put a hand on Rewind’s shoulder, shoving him forward. Out of the corner of his eye, Rewind saw Chromedome jerk towards him tellingly, and Rewind did his best to give him a subtle warning look.

After that, the guards didn’t pay much attention to Rewind at all. Everyone involved knew that if he ran, they would catch him.

They were marched to the room Chromedome had remembered, with its stark metal cots and shelves of supplies – mostly unfamiliar to Rewind – lining the walls. Rewind’s optics were immediately drawn to the corner, where a terminal was connected to a massive file storage system. Two of the guards stayed outside as a door slid shut behind them, leaving Rewind and Chromedome alone with the other two guards and Deathstrike.

Too many.

Chromedome extended his hands so that the guard would uncuff them and then strolled over to one of the walls, browsing the supplies they had on hand, peeking into containers. “You’re running very low on insulation media,” he observed, holding up what indeed looked to be a nearly empty bottle. “I can’t do something like this without it.” He looked back at Deathstrike and the guards, who looked…intimidated. Deathstrike nodded at one of them and he slipped out of the room. Chromedome must have been right about what Decepticons thought of mnemosurgeons. “And uncuff his hands,” Chromedome was continuing, gesturing dismissively towards Rewind as he continued to examine the shelves. “I need the whole body aligned for this to work.”

The remaining guard looked towards Deathstrike and hesitated.

“What, you’re scared of an Autobot a third of your size who turns into a data slug?” Chromedome attempted to make the disaffected vocalization that he’d never quite been able to master, and subsequently winced, but the taunt apparently did the trick. Rewind refrained from moving as the guard undid the lock on his handcuffs and whisked them away.

Chromedome set down one last bottle and then turned back toward Deathstrike, the guard, and Rewind. “Sit at the edge of that cot,” he said to Rewind. Rewind complied, noticing how deftly Chromedome had gotten him out of Deathstrike and the guard’s reach. He sat down on the cold metal as Chromedome walked over, a bottle and some tubing in his hands. He set them both down on a rolling cart nearby and extended his needles.

“I thought you needed the-” Deathstrike started.

“Later. It’s a long procedure,” Chromedome said. Rewind was glad that he could detect the tiny pauses, the moments of insecurity in Chromedome’s speech that a stranger would never notice. Being aware of Chromedome’s tells was the only thing keeping him from actually being afraid. The Decepticons might be onto something, Rewind thought, as Chromedome moved the needles suddenly out of Rewind’s line of sight. He was glad he didn’t have a radio channel open right now.

Deathstrike took a step closer, Rewind assumed out of scientific curiosity, and that was apparently what Chromedome had been waiting for.

He tackled Deathstrike at an angle that carried both of them into the guard. The guard fired his plasma cannon at the ceiling on his way down, breaking a fluorescent light. An alarm started wailing. Rewind could only watch as Chromedome slid his needles into Deathstrike’s neck.

And out, just as quickly. Deathstrike went slack on the floor. Chromedome retracted the needles, then offered Rewind his hand. Rewind ignored it in favor of going to grab the plasma cannon that the guard had flung away in the fall. The guard was trapped under Deathstrike’s much larger frame, optics dark.

Chromedome readied his needles again as the door slid open, revealing the two guards that had been in the hall. Between the needles and the gun Rewind held, the two Autobots seemed to give them pause.

“Drop your weapons and I won’t touch you,” Chromedome said. The uncertainty was gone from his voice. He wasn’t trying to trick anyone anymore – he meant what he said.

The guards’ guns clattered to the floor. One at a time, they backed away and took off down the hall.

Chromedome took a step toward the door, but Rewind grabbed his hand. “Wait.”

“Wait?”

“That computer.” Rewind pointed to the terminal and its volume of databanks in the corner. “Whatever they know, it’ll be on there.”

“I don’t know how we’re going to get out of here if we stay,” Chromedome urged, gaze snapping between Rewind and the still-open door.

Rewind’s gaze was torn between Chromedome and the computer. “All the missing Autobots you know." 

"Rewind." 

"I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t check.”

Chromedome shut off his optics for a moment, and when he opened them, they blazed bright. “Alright. I’ll buy you as much time as I can.” Chromedome grabbed one of the cots and started pushing it toward the door.

Rewind booted up the computer, unsurprised to be met with a biosensor lock. “I need Deathstrike,” he said to Chromedome. He turned toward where Chromedome had been standing in the open doorway just in time to see Chromedome twist open a canister that set something green drifting through the air like smoke. “What is that?”

“It’s Brainstorm’s. Whoever was unloading the ship we took to the Valkyrie missed it. I grabbed it before they moved us.” He rolled the canister, still spewing green smoke, into the hallway and shut the door after it.

“What does it do?” Rewind asked, just as several more alarms started blaring at once.

Chromedome picked up Deathstrike by one elbow and started dragging him over to the computer station. “Just that,” he said, gesturing to the ceiling in indication of the alarms. “It’ll keep them scurrying around looking for the problem and out of here for a few minutes, I hope.”

Deathstrike’s optical scan was all that was needed to get Rewind access to the computer’s memory files. Rewind dove in as Chromedome went to drag some more tables to blockade the door.

He typed Dominus Ambus into the searchbar, a familiar motion that he was pretty sure his fingers could perform even if he was already dead. He went to hit search.

His finger paused over the key.

Rewind had insisted on this course, even though it might well get both him and Chromedome tortured or killed. He’d wanted this enough that a life after this without checking had seemed impossible.

His hand was shaking.

All the missing Autobots. This was the most likely avenue he’d had to real information since…ever.

What if he found something?

He glanced over at Chromedome, still barricading the door. Watched Chromedome flinch back as something hit the door hard enough to shake the walls.

Chromedome had put his life in danger for Rewind to do this. Rewind refused to let it be for nothing.

He put his hesitation aside. He hit search.

Zero results. These people hadn’t heard of a Dominus Ambus. But Rewind never stopped there. He found a list of files, navigated to the subfolder that contained information on this ship’s ‘visitors.’ He held still as his optics took in the list of names – what if they’d spelled it wrong – but there was nothing. Just other Autobots – some, as Chromedome had suspected, high-ranking – and the IDs of a few nameless secret agents. 52. 616. 113. 

Rewind was trying to send the information over to the Valkyrie, so that at least the mystery Chromedome had been working on would be solved, when all the lights winked out in the room. The terminal screen went black.

“Slag,” Rewind hit the side of the monitor, knowing full well that it wouldn’t do anything but hurt.

“Rewind?” Chromedome’s voice was everything Rewind needed in that moment. It wasn’t harsh with panic from the situation or dark with anger that Rewind had gotten them into it. It was curious, it was kind, it was loving.

Rewind turned towards it. The glow of Chromedome’s visor was the brightest light in the room, now, and Rewind made his way toward it. His hands fumbled for Chromedome’s and found their place even in the darkness.

 “Thank you,” Rewind whispered.

“Was there –?”

“No.” In the moment that followed, the screaming of the alarms and the crashes and grunts outside faded into the background as Rewind was brought back to a very different night, in a very different place, and realized something. “You stayed. You stayed for me. You didn’t have to, and you didn’t want to, but you stayed.”

Chromedome’s optics, like a sun in the darkness, flared with emotion. “I would have done it even without conjunx ritus. But if it counts for you –”

Rewind couldn’t help but vocalizing a squeak of happiness as he hugged Chromedome close. “It does. It so does!”

The door made an unpleasant crunching sound but Rewind ignored it, shuttering his optics and determined to spend as many seconds as possible blissfully happy in the arms of his conjunx endura.

“I love you,” Rewind said, hoping his voice carried over the cacophony.

Chromedome hugged him tighter. “I love you too.”

A blast echoed through the room. Suddenly there was light. Their time was up.

“Chromedome? Rewind?”

They hadn’t told the Decepticons their names. Rewind looked up, camera on.

The hallway outside was still lit, and there were Autobot badges on the three mechs on the other side of the ruined door. Three mechs familiar from vids and stories alone.

“Springer?” Chromedome had released Rewind, and was rocking back to stand up, catching Rewind’s hand on the way. “What are you doing here?”

“Rescue mission!” Springer replied, vaulting smoothly over Chromedome’s waist-high blockade of the door and into the room.

“And trashing this place,” Impactor added, sending the pile of furniture flying with one kick and waltzing into the room behind Springer. Topspin stayed outside, blasters at the ready.

“I guess we’re getting out of here after all,” Chromedome said, genuine surprise leaking through the sarcasm in his voice. “Here’s the ringleader, by the way.” He gestured to Deathstrike’s prone form on the floor.

Impactor took a step forward and shot Deathstrike in the spark.

Rewind jerked. “You’re not even going to question him?”

“Our orders were to raze the place, not mine it,” Impactor said. “You want to leave or what?”

“Let’s go,” Rewind said. He supposed there was a reason he wasn’t the one ordering the Wreckers around.

Twin Twist was waiting in the shuttle bay, lounging next to the ship the Wreckers must have arrived in. “We fixed up your ship,” he said, gesturing with a blaster to the familiar vessel, now with the hull panel replaced with hasty weld marks. 

Rewind didn’t manage to relax until he and Chromedome were traveling at hyperspeed back towards Kimia. He shuttered his optics, blocking out the starscapes whizzing by, and reached out blindly with his hand. 

Chromedome took it, swinging their joined hands between them a bit as he pushed some buttons on the console with the other. His vocalizer made some indecipherable vibration that made Rewind open his optics and look at him in concern. The disgruntled expression on Chromedome’s face, and a near-repeat of the same sound, made Rewind realize what was going on, and he couldn’t help but laugh.

“Pfft,” he said, just to tease him. At Chromedome’s hurt look, he followed it up with “You’ll get it one day.”

Rewind believed it, he realized. And he knew that he would be there to see it, as Chromedome’s conjunx. The thought filled him with more joy than he’d ever expected.

As they flew, hands clasped securely together, Rewind thought back to his conversation with Prowl in the Valkyrie’s shuttle bay what seemed like a lifetime ago. Some secret of Chromedome’s, that Prowl thought he should know.

By the time Chromedome dropped the ship out of hyperspeed and Kimia had appeared in their front window, Rewind still hadn’t made the database inquiry that Prowl had suggested. As Kimia loomed in front of them, clunky and ill-equipped for war and safe, Rewind decided that he wouldn’t. Prowl had an agenda, like Prowl always did. Whatever he wanted Rewind to see wouldn’t change Rewind’s mind anyway.  

Chromedome gave Rewind’s hand one last squeeze before pulling away so that he could dock the ship.

Chapter Text

The Kimia Neuroscience and Mnemology Lab was one of the quietest places on the station. Nestled in the middle of the soundproofed laboratory floors, far from the engines and the disruptive vibrations that they could manufacture, it could have been a windowless gray-walled lab just about anywhere. The humming of lab equipment was the only thing that disturbed the silence.

Chromedome was alone in the lab, spinning his chair in half-circles as he waited for the timer on an experiment to finish. His current project was figuring out a way that mnemosurgery might be performed on less-than-fresh corpse brains, the kind of low-priority work that had sat at the  bottom of his to-do list for ages, that he was just getting to now that the war had “ended.” So far his idea of heating the brain in a solution of nannites and other essentials that usually reached the brain through the circulation was showing some promise. He had a ways to go — perfecting the incubation solution, modifying sets of needles so that the overheated material wouldn’t cause the surgeon a prohibitive amount of pain, and streamlining the process so that it could be performed outside of an idealized lab environment.

For today, though, all he had to do was wait for the timer to finish and then pop the set of experimental skitterer brain modules he’d been working with into the freezer. After that, conveniently, he couldn’t work on the project for two days because touching the brains would ruin the experiment. Mid-project though he was, the prospect of a break was very welcome.

The timer dinged. Chromedome stood, put on a heat-shielding glove, and grabbed the tray. Just had to move it to the freezer, and then —

The floor bucked under Chromedome’s feet. The tray of skitterer brain modules went flying as Chromedome was thrown against one of the lab benches.

So now those were lying on the floor somewhere in the lab. Gross, and a complete waste of the whole afternoon’s work. But that wasn’t the priority right now. Kimia Station didn’t just do that. Something was wrong. Chromedome had to find Rewind.

The ship rocked again as Chromedome was bolting toward the door, making him stumble and grab onto a lab bench to stay upright. This time, the lights flickered and came back at emergency levels. Frag, this was really bad. He made his way to the door, keeping a hand on the bench for balance.

The alarm was louder now as the hallway opened up to him. As soon as the door was opened far enough to allow him through, Chromedome slipped out into the empty hallway, covered in shadow from the intermittent emergency lights.

Something barreled into him from behind, sending both of them tumbling. Chromedome felt what must have been claws at his throat. He seized the wrist attached to them, using their momentum to bash his attacker’s head against the nearest wall. He scrambled to his feet.

The attacker was limp on the floor. His faceplate was distantly familiar. Scourge, his processor identified.

But…this couldn’t be Scourge. He – it? - appeared to be conscious, but it wasn’t speaking, just making a guttural animalistic growl.

If this was Scourge, Chromedome would be dead.

Only one way to find out. Chromedome extended the needles in his hand, and, after checking that there was no one else coming down the hallway, inserted them with practiced precision into “Scourge”’s neck.

The initial flash of memory and thought and emotion was blindingly intense, the kind that Chromedome had only ever experienced before from bots who had died in battle. What had happened to him? Chromedome got a handle on the invasion and kept one optic on the hallway as he dug deeper into the bot’s memories.

This wasn’t Scourge. This bot looked like Scourge, but was young, shockingly young, younger than any Cybertronian that Chromedome had known existed. Its first memory was of waking up alongside rows and rows of identical frames.  In that same moment there was something walking toward him, something – someone? – that this bot felt immediate and powerful allegiance to. The figure came into view slowly, as if stepping out of a fog, but once it was clear, Chromedome recognized it at once as Galvatron.

What in all the shapes of Adaptus was Galvatron doing? Why were his soldiers on Kimia?

None of it mattered.

Chromedome refocused and pushed forward, until this bot’s first view of the outside of Kimia. It had been on one of several approach vessels, all filled with identical Scourge frames—Sweeps, they were called. They attached their ships to the hull and set down some kind of gel and braced themselves for an explosion – this Sweep had been blinded at it, had flinched, and then followed its orders to take the ship, slaughtering at will as it went. They were to clear the way for the Lieutenant to get to the bridge and kill the officers and bring the ship to –

Chromedome stopped the replay and moved backwards, focusing on the moment when the frame had entered Kimia. The blinding explosion, the feeling of being pushed forward by the identical soldiers behind him onto the enemy ship just as his vision cleared - there.

Just a part of a minibot frame, in this thing’s peripheral vision. Dark, squat, unmoving on the ground. Not worth bothering with when there were soldiers to kill.

Chromedome removed the needles so fast that his head spun from the abruptness. He stumbled to his feet and took off down the hall towards where the Sweep had come from – the hallway between the A-V room where Rewind usually worked and their quarters, the site of Rewind’s everyday walk home.

The image of Rewind and the haze that always came after injecting distracted him. He didn’t notice the other Sweeps until he was practically on top of them. He caught himself on a protruding doorway to stop himself from running into their line of sight, only to be yanked by the arm into the room he’d stopped outside of.

Chromedome swung, his free arm making a wide arc for whoever had grabbed him. But he was too slow – the assailant caught his arm easily. Chromedome struggled for a moment more before he realized that he was being spoken to.

“Chromedome! It’s me!” Chromedome’s optics finally settled on the bot in front of him, and the image and the voice combined made him finally realize that it was Brainstorm.

Chromedome immediately sagged from his offensive stance, and Brainstorm sensed it, releasing him. He reached out again to pat Chromedome’s shoulder awkwardly.

“-good that you’re here,” Brainstorm was saying, and then he shoved a…gun? Probably a gun, into Chromedome’s hands. “These things’ll get us through the ship, but they run out of ammo faster than Blurr can race, so: two people, two guns, lots of spare rounds.” Brainstorm shoved a bag at Chromedome, which he adjusted so that it was slung over his shoulder. He picked up one of the…bullets was definitely the wrong word for what looked like square blocks of glass, but that was far from the issue of the hour. The gun, once he’d seen what went into it, was pretty simple. Lock and load.

Which was good, because it didn’t look like Brainstorm intended to explain. “Shuttle bay’s that way,” Brainstorm said, nodding down the hall Chromedome had just come from.

“Rewind’s that way,” Chromedome replied, jerking his head the other way, toward the cluster of Sweeps that he’d been trying to avoid in the hallway. That was the way he was going, no matter the consequences.

“Oh-kay. Looks like these guns are going to get an early field test,” Brainstorm said, hefting his onto his shoulder. “Surprise ‘em?”

Chromedome raised his own gun in answer. Brainstorm appeared to read something in his face, then jumped out into the hall and fired.

It sounded like a bomb going off, and for a moment Chromedome worried that the hull of the ship had been breached and they were all going to be sucked out into space, preventing him from ever finding Rewind. He stepped out from their hiding place and found the scene to be much better than expected. The ship didn’t appear to have been damaged at all, but the majority of the Sweeps were on the ground, dismembered.

Chromedome, knowing that this wasn’t the time for asking questions, fired his own weapon at the remaining Sweeps who were now making a pitiful three-unit charge towards them. The sound of the gun was just as deafening, but Chromedome was prepared for it this time. The Sweeps collapsed all at once, legs and arms disconnecting from their bodies in a way that was nightmarish but clearly not deadly.

Chromedome stepped over the struggling pieces of Sweep frames as best he could, reloading the gun as he raced down the hallway. Brainstorm clicked another round into place behind him. “-knew I’d need a gun for battles on spaceships, didn’t think I would be using it here-”

He turned the corner and ran straight into another four of the Sweeps, too close to shoot. Chromedome whacked one on the head with his gun as hard as he could, ignoring Brainstorm’s squawk of protest, then ducked out of the way so that Brainstorm had time to back up and shoot them. Chromedome didn’t even bother to wait for Brainstorm to catch up once these Sweeps, too, were piles of limbs on the hallway floor. He could see Rewind.

Details came to him slowly as he ran down the hall. Rewind’s optics were glowing—he was alive. He was still on the ground, half his body covered by debris from whatever the Sweeps had done to the hull of the ship. His optics locked onto Chromedome’s.

Chromedome knelt next to him, relief and panic dueling in his mind. He took Rewind’s outstretched hand in his own and tried to force both emotions back far enough to assess the situation.

Rewind was trapped, but Chromedome knew that he and Brainstorm could lift the debris pinning him to the ground. He also knew that these sorts of injuries could get worse when whatever was crushing the person was removed. In any other situation, Chromedome would have waited for a medic to be present before moving him. As it was—

Thundering footsteps around the corner. Chromedome looked up and shot the three Sweeps as soon as they entered the hallway. He felt Rewind flinch at the noise, his grip momentarily tightening on Chromedome’s hand.

As it was, getting out of here was more important than Rewind not passing out from energon loss. Everything above his legs looked unharmed - medical attention would have to wait until they weren’t surrounded by improbable beings intent on killing them.

“I see you found Brainstorm,” Rewind said, nodding to the gun. Chromedome felt himself smiling despite it all, just from hearing his voice. As if on cue, Brainstorm ran up behind him.

Chromedome gave Rewind’s hand one last squeeze and then released it to stand up. “We need to move this,” Chromedome said.

Brainstorm seemed to reach the same conclusion, because he handed Rewind his gun even though it was bigger than Rewind’s whole arm and then grasped a section of the piece of metal trapping Rewind.

Chromedome kept his gun raised, using the other hand to help lift the piece of metal off of Rewind. Rewind’s gasp of pain at having his injuries jostled was almost lost in the scraping of the metal, but it hit Chromedome straight in the spark anyway. They managed to shift the debris so that Rewind was freed. As soon as the crumbled block of ship hull was stable against the wall, Chromedome knelt again to assess Rewind’s injuries. One of his legs was crushed and leaking energon, and the other was covered in deep lacerations.

Chromedome scooped Rewind up in his arms and Rewind handed the gun back to Brainstorm. Then Brainstorm took a step in the direction they had come. Chromedome took a step the other way.

“Shuttle bay’s this way,” Brainstorm said, gesturing wildly with the gun.

“We can also get there through the maintenance shaft,” Rewind said, echoing Chromedome’s thoughts. “It’s slower, but we’ll be less likely to run into…those things.”

Brainstorm rested the gun on his shoulder and nodded at Chromedome to lead the way. Just then, a door opened up in the hallway and both Brainstorm and Chromedome pointed their guns toward it.

An orange-and-yellow bot whose name Chromedome couldn’t quite recall stepped out. He was wearing an Autobot badge and wasn’t shaped like Scourge, so Chromedome lowered his gun. He was followed by Swerve and a few other bots from the station.

“You guys mind if we tag along?” Swerve asked. “You’re the first friendlies we’ve found alive since this all started. They’ve got comms down now, but before they knocked those out they were saying-”

Chromedome tuned Swerve out, yanked open the entrance to the maintenance tunnels that crisscrossed the station and stepped in, gun at the ready.

Rewind, who knew these tunnels a little better than Chromedome did, whispered directions as they made their way forward at the head of the ragtag group. Swerve was still talking, though, to his credit, it was in a whisper. Eventually, they made it to the final door that would lead them into the shuttle bay. Chromedome opened it a crack and froze.

There were at least twenty Sweeps milling around the shuttle bay, most of them armed. At their feet were the broken remains of the shuttle bay attendants, most of whom Chromedome recognized.

Chromedome turned Rewind and found his optics dark.

Chromedome made a snap decision. The entrance to the nearest shuttle was a five second sprint from them. Most of the Sweeps were just too far away to stop them, but a few were walking in their direction.

“Rightmost shuttle as soon as I open the door,” Chromedome hissed at the crowd behind him. He didn’t wait for their response. He burst and took the shot that would take out the nearest several Sweeps. He ran at an awkward sideways trot, shielding Rewind’s body with his own as he reloaded the gun. The second shot took out the first half of the remaining Sweeps, who by now had their guns raised. One of the Autobots behind Chromedome cried out as one of the Sweeps’ laser bolts hit.

Brainstorm and Chromedome, Rewind in his arms, were the last to reach the shuttle door. Brainstorm shoved Chromedome toward it. Chromedome climbed on, trying his best not to jostle Rewind. Brainstorm lay down one more shot before diving into the shuttle himself.

“Go. Go!” he shouted, untangling himself from his bag of ammunition as he picked himself up off the shuttle floor. Chromedome met Swerve’s eyes and set Rewind down in back so that he could start the launch sequence.

Theoretically, they could have waited for other survivors. The Sweeps certainly would be too vigilant, now, to let any other Autobots off the station. And the Sweep’s thoughts had been positively bloodthirsty. By leaving now, Chromedome was condemning his coworkers to their deaths.

And if they stayed, Rewind would be killed by the new wave of Sweeps that was entering the shuttle bay, already shooting. Chromedome punched the button to lift off. The shuttle bay doors opened into empty space, and Chromedome guided the shuttle out.

Behind them, the station seemed to tilt away from its trajectory. Galvatron’s army must finally have gotten control of the bridge. Chromedome wondered how much of the bridge crew he’d had to kill and how many of them he’d had to torture to do that, and then he stopped thinking and focused on getting as much distance from the station as he could.

After a few minutes, it was clear that the Sweeps weren’t giving chase. Chromedome slowed the engines to conserve fuel – they definitely didn’t have enough to actually get anywhere, all they could do was get themselves as much distance as possible.

There weren’t any stars visible when Chromedome looked at the space around them. The illumination from the Sweeps’ fleet reflected off the debris of the battle, bleaching out any light that came from more than a few miles off. This might as well not be space at all, just some battle-stricken hell dimension with no way out.

Chromedome turned around to look at Rewind and was rewarded with a thumbs-up from Swerve, who was tending to him. The war was over, and they weren’t safe. Maybe they never would be safe. But for now, at least, they were alive.

Chapter Text

It was harder than one might think to find privacy on the Necroworld.

The fortress, or whatever they were calling it now that they weren’t actually under attack, had four levels and more than enough space for the number of mechs living there, but the lack of doors – of even rooms on the lower levels – meant that there was about a ninety percent chance of someone traipsing through whatever space you’d decided to plant yourself.

Outside was, of course, the obvious choice. The planet was empty of life, minus the mechs living at the fortress. But the reminders of death, in the form of flowers and empty platforms and the occasional body part that some mech had lost in the battle, were nearly as much of an intrusion on the mind as other people.

It was Chromedome who had suggested checking out the roof, and Rewind who had figured out how to actually get up there (an access hatch, which had once a label next to it that Rewind had promptly torn off the wall). That had been three days ago, and they had yet to be disturbed when they retreated there.

The roof of the fortress was mostly composed of slanted surfaces and ventilation hatches, but they’d found one surface both wide and flat enough for them to lay next to each other comfortably, an awkward climb up from the hatch. It was peaceful up there, but their exploration of the various parts of the roof to find it was still Rewind’s fondest memory of this place.

It had been twilight when they’d finally both been free to explore the roof. Rewind had discovered the hatch earlier in the day and had tested it to make sure it opened, but he’d wanted Domey to be there when he first actually used it. It had been a good decision.

“Don’t do that. You’re going to fall!” Chromedome had yelled from halfway across the roof, laughter in his voice, as Rewind had carefully balanced his way across a steel beam connecting one sloped wing of the roof to the next.

The beam was completely sturdy and wider than Rewind’s foot—and not so high above the surface below that falling would actually hurt him, but just to mess with Chromedome, he pretended to wobble, flailing his arms. Chromedome had ran a few steps towards him, and then promptly caught his foot on a ventilation hatch and had an epic fall himself. Rewind couldn’t stop himself from laughing to the point of tears as Chromedome had picked himself up and made his way over to the beam, which was just a few feet above his height. “Oh, I see. Laugh at me, it’s so funny that I care about your safety. The surface of this thing, by the way? It’s hard. I tested it to find out, just for you.”

Rewind had hopped the rest of the way to the nearest wing-shaped structure, which, as he’d expected, served as a very good slide. As he’d also expected, Chromedome caught him before he reached the bottom, spinning Rewind in a half-circle in the air to dispel his momentum and keep him from being flung into the wall in front of him. He put Rewind down and then they climbed to the very top to sit on the ring around the jagged spikes that made up the fortress’s chimney.

That didn’t turn out to be a comfortable place to sit – too narrow to offset the possibility of a long fall into the fortress’s depths – but it had held an incredible view. They’d sat there for the few minutes they could stand, Rewind filming the last vestiges of the sunset while nestled under Chromedome’s arm.

Tonight, they were seated in the one spot that was actually comfortable enough for hours of stargazing. Even though it very much wasn’t the observatory deck on Kimia, or the hull of the Lost Light, Rewind appreciated it. They’d been watching the stars in silence, Rewind with his head on Chromedome’s chest, Chromedome’s arm tucked securely around him.

“There’s something I should probably tell you.”

Rewind just nodded, trying to keep his skepticism off his faceplate as he waited. He’d thought they were finished with secrets. It was probably silly of him, but he’d assumed that with all the awful things that had happened, all the problems that had come between them would fade into the past.

But it was the present, and the moment went on. “I learned something, after the version of you from my ship died,” he said. “Something about myself.”

Rewind felt his spark unclench a bit. This was going to be some patentable Chromedome-self-deprecation trip, not a real secret. Unpleasant, but not a disaster.

“Brainstorm told me,” Chromedome went on. He was avoiding Rewind’s optics again. “He’d known for…a long time. And kept it secret.”

“Known what?” That had blasted all of Rewind’s hunches off into space.

“Primus, I didn’t expect this to be this hard.” Chromedome’s optics were bright with emotion, and Rewind’s dread ratcheted up a notch. “A long time ago, before I met you, I had other conjunxes.”

That seemed to be the main source of worry, if the way Chromedome’s blazing optics inched up to gauge Rewind’s reaction meant anything. Rewind felt a drop of cautious relief at that – it was unexpected, and the implications were too complicated to wrap his processor around, but it wasn’t outright awful. Still, though, all Rewind could say to that revelation was “What?”

“There were three of them. At different times, I assume. Brainstorm told me their names – Pivot, Mach, and Scattergun.” None of those rang a bell. “And, it was the war, they died, and I couldn’t cope with that. So I –“ Chromedome flexed his fingers, and Rewind knew what he was going to say before he could find the words.

“You forgot them.” As soon the soft words left Rewind’s vocalizer, Chromedome was turning towards him so fast it looked painful. Rewind tried to make his expression open and accepting, as he tried to suss out the implications of the story while wondering why Chromedome had brought it up like this, right now.

“I looked them up,” Chromedome said. “They’re gone. Not missing, not mysteries. Just gone.”

“I’m glad you told me,” Rewind said. He searched his spark and found that tired acceptance really was his only feeling about the situation. He was sorry that Chromedome had so much difficulty spitting it out, but that was tempered by how obvious it was that Chromedome was relieved that he’d managed to. Rewind supposed that he might have cause to be jealous, but he dismissed the idea. What Chromedome had confessed had felt like it was about the two of them, rather than about those other mechs. But that begged the question… “Why now, though?”

“Well, I –”

“Oh!” Some part of Chromedome’s statement had triggered a recollection of a long-ago conversation, on a ship that had since been blown to bits. “Oh, Primus. That’s what he was talking about.”

“What?”

Rewind didn’t explain quite yet. Just to test if he might be right, he made a database inquiry. He looked up Chromedome’s official file. There was laughably little that wasn’t redacted, but it took only seconds for Rewind to confirm what Chromedome had told him – and that Prowl had been right. He could have looked up the same thing back then, in what felt now like another life.

Prowl had also been wrong, though. He’d obviously, obviously told Rewind under the impression that the knowledge would push the two of them apart. The mnemosurgery aspect might have been a struggle to deal with, back then, but otherwise? Rewind would have been relieved to know that Rewind hadn’t always been Chromedome’s whole world in the way Chromedome hadn’t, at the time, been Rewind’s.

“It just explains something, from way back. Prowl tried to get me to look them up on my own, so I would feel betrayed and break up with you.”

Rewind could hear Chromedome’s jaw drop in disbelief. “Every. Time.” he said. “Every time I think he’s hit the ceiling when it comes to manipulative schemes, he surpasses it.”

“I didn’t fall for it, obviously,” Rewind said. “And I’m glad you told me. But I didn’t really give you a chance to answer…why now?”

Instead of answering, Chromedome shifted and then held out a wrapped box.

Rewind sat up straight. He barely considered the box, meeting Chromedome’s eyes instead. He’d forgotten about stargazing entirely. “Is this—” He couldn’t bring himself to form the words.

“It’s whatever you want it to be,” Chromedome said. “I know it’s silly, and there’s no obligation for you to—to do anything, or respond. I just thought that, with all that’s happened…things have changed, and I wanted to…”

Rewind took pity on him and interrupted. “I don’t think it’s silly,” he said. He cautiously took hold of the box, still sitting up, legs nestled next to Chromedome’s. “You’re right. Things have been hard. Things have changed. So, thank you. And yes! Of course yes,” he continued, optics overflowing. He didn’t bother to wipe the tears away. He didn’t care if Chromedome saw. He heard the telltale sounds of Chromedome smiling underneath his faceplate and then Chromedome’s finger was gently wiping away Rewind’s tears.

“Open it,” Chromedome said softly, and Rewind remembered the box in his hands. Whatever was in it, he knew, paled in comparison to what it represented. That didn’t stop him from removing the wrapping swiftly, hands shaking a little with the excitement of it all.

He removed the wrapping, and then took the lid off of the plain box that it had concealed. Inside the box was a book as long as Rewind’s forearm and as thick as his palm. It was bound in soft brown fabric, and the pages were worn around the edges—more worn than they’d been the last time Rewind had seen this book, but not by much.

“Oh, Primus,” he said, barely able to get the words out over a swell of emotion.

“Nightbeat found it in a safe on the Peaceful Tyranny,” Chromedome explained. “It was well-hidden. He didn’t think that any of the DJD had ever noticed it.”

Rewind picked the book up out of the box and ran his hands over the spine, the front and back covers, the stack of pages. This was Dominus’s book. His most treasured possession, where he’d written his notes, his thoughts—the raw material for his life’s work – in careful longhand.

“I don’t know if you’ll want to read it, if it was private? But you deserve to have it.”

“Thank you,” Rewind whispered, turning the book over and over again in his hands.

“You deserve it,” he repeated. “Like I said, you don’t need to do anything. I know this was unexpected—"

Rewind stopped him rambling with a shake of his head. “I want to,” he declared. An idea came to him immediately. “If it’s okay,” he started, suddenly nervous. Maybe this wouldn’t be good enough? Should he wait until he could think over it more, or until they were back on the ship and he had more resources at his disposal?

But he couldn’t know if he had more time. He couldn’t know if they would ever make it back to the ship. What he did know was that he had this moment, right now, and he knew how he wanted to shape it.

“I want to share this with you,” Rewind said, gesturing to the book he still held gingerly in one hand. “I want to read it together. You sacrificed so much for Dominus, even though you never met him…would that be okay? Do you want that?”

“Oh, Rewind.” Chromedome’s voice was hushed, and his tone, combined with the way his arm tightened around Rewind’s shoulders, was answer enough.

Rewind opened the book, not bothering to suppress a shiver as he laid eyes on Dom’s familiar neat handwriting for the first time in millennia. Without hesitation, he began to read aloud.