Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Brainstorm flicked on the digital microscope and drummed his fingers on the benchtop while he waited for the connection to the screen to configure. Zeta Prime was supposedly highly invested in the New Institute...that didn’t seem to be reflected in funding for scientific instrumentation.

At least they had a few digital microscopes to work with. He preferred to work with them over traditional optical microscopes, which were hell to use if you had a visor; the digital model transmitted everything under the scope to a monitor where he could work without giving himself a headache.

He picked up his prototype with a pair of tweezers and placed it in the clamp under the scope. Watching the screen, he used the keypad to wiggle the stage around until the needle’s tip came into view. He checked the shape of the barbs against the photographs he’d taken of the pre-testing model. Then he twisted the dial on his battery pack and the barbs retracted flush against the needle. Brainstorm grinned.

His theory was that the flaring barbs would make it easier for the mnemosurgeon; it'd grab to the neural net and steady the needles so that if their hand shook they wouldn't ruin the injection. But engineering barbs with sufficient durability was proving to be a challenge. None of his prototypes had made it through the rounds of testing at the autopsy department. This was the first one he'd gotten back with all its barbs intact.

Brainstorm hopped on a rolling stool and kicked off, grabbing his desk to stop himself from running into the wall. He rifled through the pile of datapads, why did he have so many datapads, until he found the one with his most recent batch notes. He kicked off again back towards the microscope and flicked out a hand lens to check the tag on his battery pack.

The alarms blared and Brainstorm startled so badly he nearly fell off his stool. The obnoxiously familiar voice of Insidon cut in after a few seconds. "Attention staff, there is an oncoming spyplane sweep. All nonessential equipment must be deenergized and all personnel are to proceed to the underbunker. If you are currently in operation, please push the panic button in your cube. Someone will be by to assist you. This message will repeat...Attention staff, there is an oncoming—"

Brainstorm got up dropped his datapad on the workbench in disgust. How was anyone ever supposed to get anything done when they were being continually interrupted? He kicked the stool out of his way as he went back to power down his terminal.

Something clattered and then there was the awful sound of glass shattering. Brainstorm winced. That would be his successful prototype. He looked over his shoulder and, sure enough, the fragging stool had caught on the line to the battery pack and the whole thing had taken a swan dive over the edge of the workbench. Great.

"I am a genius," he informed the empty room. He crunched over the broken glass to power off the rest of his equipment and paused at the doorway to sweep the bits of glass that had gotten stuck in his boots back onto the floor. He'd deal with all that later.

The overhead lights in the hallway were already dimmed to half power, emergency lights flashing red in a protocol Brainstorm liked to call "Make Evacuating As Difficult As Possible".

He was sticking close to the wall so that any security in a hurry didn't trample him, so it was maybe a little bit his fault that he knocked over the mech as he was exiting one of the surgical suites. Only a little bit his fault though, he was going to portion 40% of the blame to the lighting and 55% to the mech not watching where he was going.

He went down like an MTO in a drop plane.

"Whoops," Brainstorm said. "Let's get you upright." He offered the mech a hand and nearly got stabbed for his trouble. They were still wearing their surgical needles, clip-ons, looked like. Brainstorm adjust his approach and pulled them up by the elbows.

"Thanks," the mech said, looking overcharged as Brainstorm had been the night he discovered you can drink weapons-grade nucleon. He must have been in the middle of surgery when the alarm went off.

"No problem, no worries," Brainstorm said, shifting to the mech's side to help him walk. "Do you have a...spotter? An assistant? You know, someone helping you out." Who can take your stumbling aft off my hands.

"Hmm?" They hummed vaguely. Well that was helpful.

There were almost to the steps before someone rescued Brainstorm from his mnemosurgical dead weight. Not that he had anything against the mech—he was a perfectly affable dissociated uncoordinated pile of limbs.

"Chromedome, there you are," someone hissed. Trepan. One of, like, two people in the mnemology section Brainstorm knew on sight. Trepan frowned in annoyance when "Chromedome" failed to respond.

"I found him in the hallway," Brainstorm supplied helpfully. "He's gonna be okay, right?"

"He's fine," Trepan said, grabbing the mech by the back of the neck and pulling him forward. "Trainees. They always panic when they hear the alarm and forget the disengagement checklist. Even the more promising ones." With a practiced motion he pulled the mech over by the helm and slid his needles his neck. Brainstorm looked away.

"Trepan?" The mech sounded less slagged out of his mind than he had moments earlier. "Where am I?"

"You're at work. We're on lockdown and you botched the extraction procedure. I had to pull you out." Trepan said shortly.

"Sorry," he said. "I just—"

"Come, we can talk later. When we're not in a public hallway," Trepan said. Brainstorm thought was a great idea and slipped around the pair and down the stairs. Brainstorm found himself a nice quiet spot in the evacuation bunker and sat down to work on refining his latest design. It was important that the needles be able to automatically retract if the surgeon wasn't thinking straight. He hadn't thought about that earlier. He’d have to add that to his list of planned improvements.

Brainstorm knocked at the door and shifted his briefcase under his arm to check his notes. Another graduating trainee, another set of needles to fit. Brainstorm was ready to have this over with already—he had a spark signal disrupter he was writing up funding proposals for. It would be so useful, if he could only get anyone to acknowledge his genius and potential. He hadn't gotten pulled into the engineering section because he'd been really good with needles.

The door slid open and Brainstorm waved, still searching his notes for the trainee's name. "Tumbler?" he asked.

They huffed a laugh. "I like you already. You're Genitus, right? Trepan told me you'd be coming to fit me with my integrated needles."

"It's Brainstorm, actually," Brainstorm said. He lowered his notes and paused for a moment, trying to place the face. The trainee from the lockdown drill. "Wait, weren't you Chromedome?"

Chromedome threw up his hands and sat down on the berth. "I take it back, I don't like you. My name is Tumbler. Everyone calls me Chromedome."

"Well, I don't see why. Based on our interactions so far, "Tumbler" seems like an excellent name. Very apropos," Brainstorm rambled.

Chromedome squinted at him, clearly not making the connection.

"I ran into you during a lockdown evacuation last year. Knocked you flat on your aft," Brainstorm supplied helpfully.

"Oh. That was you. Sorry, my memory of that whole thing is pretty fuzzy." Chromedome put his hand to his chin contemplatively. "So my name is appropriate because I can't stay on my feet. And your name is appropriate, I assume, because you're good at thinking of dumb puns on the fly."

"Excuse you," Brainstorm said hotly. "My name is because if you give me five minutes and a thing that needs inventing I can invent it in triplicate."

Chromedome nodded. "Humble, too. Why would you need three different versions of a thing? Wouldn’t it be better to invent it once?"

Brainstorm put his hands on his hips. "Do you want to get drinks sometime?"

"What?" Chromedome squinted even more skeptically than he had the first time. "Are you hitting on me?"

"What? Primus, no. I've got one love and it's my work." Brainstorm said. "Besides, you're not my type. No, I meant do you want to hang out in a platonic socializing context? I've been stuck in New Institute purgatory for over a year and I have determined via extensive testing and rigorous application of the scientific method that every single person here is exceedingly tedious. Not even worth talking down to. You seem to be the exception to the rule."

"Oh." Chromedome looked at him blankly for a minute. He shook his head, as if brushing aside some errant thought. "Yeah, I'd like that. I don't have much free time but....sure."

"I suppose I should start fitting these," Brainstorm said awkwardly, shaking the briefcase in his hand. "Your bespoke pokers await."

"Yeah, I might need them eventually," Chromedome agreed. He watched as Brainstorm opened the case and laid out his supplies. "I kinda figured they'd have a medic actually put the needles in."

Brainstorm snorted. "Like I'd trust those cretins with my precision engineering. Don't worry, this isn't going to hurt very much. Don't even need to use a sensorblock," Brainstorm said, picking up one of his scalpels and bouncing it cheerfully in his hand.

Chromedome looked vaguely off-color. "But these ones do go...in the fingers, right?"

"Uh-huh. Well, they rest in the back of the hand. But there are channels that we'll put in through each finger segment so that the needles can extend. And then the electrical system for each needle has to be deepwired into your sensornet so that you can control the trigger mechanism and the injections..." Chromedome really did look like he might be sick, so Brainstorm relented. "I'm having you on, Chromedome. I'm just here to fit you for the needles. I still have to manufacture your custom set and then they'll have an actual medic do the surgery."

"You—" Chromedome threw his hands in the air. "You fragging gearstripping liar! You were freaking me out on purpose!"

"Yeah, your face was pretty hilarious when you thought I was about to slice your hands open with a box cutter," Brainstorm said.

"You are an aft." Chromedome glared at him. "I can see why nobody wants to go drinking with you."

It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

"Brainstorm," Chromedome whined. "This isn't necessary."

"Oh?" Brainstorm gave a passing surgeon a jaunty wave as he pushed the stool along. Chromedome covered his face with his hands. "Well, if you feel like you have your ship legs, by any means—get up and at 'em! I'm not wheeling you around for my health."

Chromedome didn't take him up on the offer, which was a relief. He's already maneuvered Chromedome onto the stool twice and it was like trying to shove a minibot into a suitcase—limbs everywhere. Besides, they were nearly there.

Brainstorm rolled them up in front of the door lock and waited while Chromedome triggered the optic scan. The blank steel door slid open with a squealing noise that made Brainstorm want to open up the walls and start doing preventative maintenance. He’d make a note to poke at the maintenance crew later.

For how, he rolled his friend into the berthroom. Once Chromedome's pile of limbs were safely on the berth, Brainstorm sat down on his lab stool and put his feet up.

"So what the hell was that for?" he asked conversationally. "You know you can't hold your engex. And your sudden urge to drink me out of nightmare fuel aside, you're being...glum. More so than usual." He thought it over. "Something happen at work?"

"I can't talk about it," Chromedome said. "It's classified."

"Like that's ever stopped you before." Brainstorm waved his hand dismissively.

"Well, yeah." Chromedome said. "It has? We never talk about my work."

Brainstorm thought it over and, yes, now that he thought about it, they didn’t really get into the nitty gritty about what Chromedome did on the day-to-day. Which was not something Brainstorm usually minded, he preferred to keep his mnemosurgery as theoretical as possible. But now there was a puzzle to be solved. "Well, today's the day! What is it? Some Decepticons with some really gnarly memories? Had they been to one of Megatron's poetry recitations? Were they a—"

"Don't," Chromedome said, throwing his arm across his face. "Two trainees died in surgery yesterday, okay? And I got to do their autopsies before we handed the bodies over to medical."

"Well, slag." Brainstorm thought that over. "Why you? You're barely out of being a trainee yourself."

"I'm on autopsy assignment, I was the one up," Chromedome said with a shrug.

"Still, that's...awful. Did you know them? Did I know them?"

"You probably didn't—they were brand new. One of them had asked me directions to the commissary the other day because he'd gotten lost. Soma and Cajal."

Brainstorm definitely didn't know them. Okay, he didn’t know many of the mnemosurgeons well. Any. Present company excepted. They tended towards the...standoffish. The senior surgeons had all come out of the original Institute—and Brainstorm was less than convinced by their contrition for the old days. Then the new surgeons and trainees seemed to have been recruited from the least sociable dregs of the science academy.

He murmured something about not knowing them but it being a damn shame, or whatever you were supposed to say when two newsparks kicked it and your friend had to read their dying thoughts.

He paused for a beat. "Wait, why is that classified?"

Chromedome waved his hand at him in what was definitely intended as a shushing motion. "Yell that louder, why don't you? Tumbler is giving away classified information to his pushy aft of a friend."

"Just answer the damned question, you know I can't handle suspense. It's bad for my constitution."

"It's classified," Chromedome said, suddenly serious, "because we have no idea why they're dead. First theory was some sort of assassination, but there was nothing like that in their memories. They were just...in surgery. And then they were dead. We'll see what the medical autopsy comes back with, but as of right now I have no idea what killed them."

Silence filled the room like a bubble of rapidly expanding pressure, until Brainstorm had to pop it or risk suffocation. "That's not good," he said faintly.

"Yeah," Chromedome agreed.

"Could be, uh, you know, a terrible coincidence?" Brainstorm suggested. "Bad batch of knockoffs, internal wiring short-circuited?"

"Brainstorm, you know I know you’re cold constructed, right?" Chromedome asked. "Like I said, I don’t know. But something killed them."

"You don’t think it was...doing mnemosurgery, do you? You are playing around with electric signals in the brain, if you shocked yourself the wrong way I can imagine it going...poorly. Could be something to do with the neural interface with the trainee needles, do you think? I should review the design, make sure there’s not too much resistance on the bridge between the charge injectors and the neural mesh…"

"If you think there’s a chance, definitely. Trepan said that he'd never seen anything like it at the old Institute so...yeah," he finished awkwardly. "Yeah."

"Yeah, of course, I’ll run up a model and do some testing tonight, just as soon as I sober up." Chromedome looked so relieved to have someone offer up a solution that Brainstorm was tempted to not ask the question that was on the tip of his tongue. "What if it’s nothing with them and nothing with the needles? What if it’s mnemosurgery itself?"

Chromedome shook his head. "Don’t be absurd. If mnemosurgery killed people Trepan would have heard of it."

"Yeah but what if? If mnemosurgery killed people, what would you do?"

"What do you mean?"

"Chromedome, we're discussing hypothetical risk of sudden and inexplicable death when doing mnemosurgery. You know, mnemosurgery. The thing you do for a living. Most people have an aversion to ending up suddenly and inexplicably dead, Chromedome."

"Yeah, I guess."

Brainstorm shuttered his optics and counted to ten. Someday he was going to meet a person with less self-preservation instincts than Chromedome. Probably shortly before that person cut off their own arm with a chainsaw.

Chromedome shrugged. "I mean, I’d keep working. There’s a risk of dying no matter what you’re doing, better here than up there getting shot at."

"I don't get you," Brainstorm said, setting the stool to twirl and pulling his legs in. "What's so great about mnemosurgery? Is it a power trip? Are you secretly a voyeur? I want this explicated, Chromedome. I don’t like the inexplicable."

Chromedome stared at the ceiling for a bit and Brainstorm wondered what brush-off answer he was about to make up. "I've always been interested in mnemology, even before I knew the Institute was real. I mean, was there a single reason you wanted to do engineering? Or did it just...fit? I could tell you some slag about how when I was a detective I would fantasize about being able to know the truth—the real truth—when everyone was always lying to us, but I don't think that's it. And now I'm here and I've been given this opportunity to learn something so far above my station. I'm helping the war effort in a way almost nobody can do."

"I can understand that a little, I guess," Brainstorm said.

"Anyway, I'm not worried about that happening to me. I've been doing mnemosurgery for months now and nothing has gone wrong—whatever happened to those two was clearly a freak accident. I'm sure the senior staff will be looking into it and, when they've figured it out, they'll let all of us know."

Brainstorm looked up from his reading as the door slid open. "Oh, there you are. Finally."

"Brainstorm, what are you doing in my lab?" Chromedome asked, shouldering past him and over to the workstation.

"Looking for you, obviously," Brainstorm said. "I knew you'd come back to work eventually, you're a workaholic."

"Brainstorm, please, what could you possibly need to tell me that couldn't wait—"

"Seventy-two hours? Because that's how long I've been waiting for you to show up at your hab suite. Shift schedule said you were off rotation but I checked every single place you go—here, your hab, my hab, my lab, the commissary and...yeah, that’s about it. No sign of you anywhere."

"Oh, has it been that long?" Chromedome said awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. "Sorry. Ran into someone and got to talking, lost track of time."

"Flummery! That is absolute flim-flam flummery. Chromedome, mate, I love you but the idea of you talking to someone for seventy-two hours is truly unbelievable. The Chromedome I know barely manages three sentences consecutively before he starts trailing off in long "contemplative" silences. Who were you even talking to?"

"Oh, fuck you," Chromedome said. He picked up a UV disinfection wand and pointed it pointedly at Brainstorm. "For your information, I was talking to Mach."

The name was familiar but Brainstorm wasn't getting a face. "Mach."

"Yeah, one of the new guys," Chromedome said. "One of Prowl's covert-ops spy types. Little spyplane; black with gold wingtips."

"Oh, that Mach." Brainstorm said. He wasn't a fan of the small attache of spies who were bunkered at the New Institute—he didn't trust people who lied for a living. But he especially didn't trust Mach. "The knave. The feckless scoundrel. The ignominious scrounger. That Mach."

"Were you doing vocabulary puzzles the whole time you were waiting for me?"

"Your new friend is a thief and a sneak," Brainstorm said stoutly. "I caught him in my lab trying to make off with a highly volatile solvent."

"I'm sure he had a good reason," Chromedome said. "I'll have to ask him about it sometime. He tells the funniest stories."

"You have no taste in companions," Brainstorm declared. "Wait—"

"Nope, you said it!" Chromedome was probably grinning under his faceplate; the aft. "Yeah, you and Mach. My disreputable duo."

"How do I rank equally with a stranger you met three days ago?" Brainstorm wailed.

"I meant, you're the only two people I talk to. Speaking of—Brainstorm, you know I love talking to you, but I do have to actually do work at some point. Given that I'm on shift."

Shifts. Genius didn't work on a schedule. Brainstorm had, for instance, invented two different motion sensors while waiting for Chromedome to show up. And solved several vocabulary puzzles. "Oh, very well," he said, "but the next time you want to disappear, send me a comm or something? I thought maybe you'd dropped dead at work."

Even mentioning the ongoing trainee-sudden-death syndrome mystery didn't seem to burst Chromedome's blissful bubble. Brainstorm made a graceful exit and pushed "tell Chromedome about his idea for a motion detector that could identify people by their gaits" back in his calendar. Maybe he'd have a working prototype by then.

Interesting people, Brainstorm reminded himself, don't get bored. He checked his comm messages but there was still no reply from Chromedome.

Brainstorm didn't really want to do more work; all his current ideas were still percolating in the back of his brain module. He could recharge, or he could drink. Or he could...damn, the Institute really was a depressing place to work. It beat being blown to bits in an infantry charge but...yeah.

It wasn't like there was nothing to do. Brainstorm opened up his copy of ’The Metallurgist's Handbook’ and settled in to read. The information would probably come in handy eventually. He found a great quote right away and went to send it to Chromedome, then paused. The last whole string of messages in their conversation had been his, with a few sparse one word replies scattered in. Brainstorm erased the message and tried to focus on his reading.

Chromedome would remember he existed eventually, once the novelty of his new "best friend" wore off.

Brainstorm squinted at the ceiling in the darkness. He was awake. Why was he awake? His chrono told him that it was still six hours until his wake-up time, so he couldn't see what might have—

Oh.

"Hey. Hi. Brainstorm, right?" A tiny spyplane with gold wingtips jumped down from the emergency exhaust vent, landing with a graceful bend of his knees. "Oh, sorry, were you recharging?"

Brainstorm spread his hands in demonstration, hoping the berth and the plugged-in infuser and the lights off might help them get a clue. "Mach, I presume?"

"That's me!" They bounced on their heels, tapping their fingers against their legs. "You're Chromedome's friend, right?"

"I guess so," Brainstorm said with a shrug, scooting back against the infuser case where he kept a miniaturized pathblaster for safekeeping. Spies who came to wake you up in the dead of the night were not to be trusted. "Haven't seen him much lately."

"Oh, he talks about you all the time. ‘Brainstorm thinks this’ and ‘Brainstorm said that’ and ‘If Brainstorm were here he'd say’. Nonstop." Mach didn’t smile, per se—visor and faceplate didn’t leave you much to work with—but he conveyed his amusement quite clearly with his hands and still-bouncing heels. "Can I ask you your advice?"

"About Chromedome?"

"Yeah."

"Well you're already here, why not? Sit down, make yourself comfortable," Brainstorm said with an edge of sarcasm that appeared to go entirely over Mach's head. Then again, Mach was pretty short. Mach climbed up onto Brainstorm's desk chair and then sat on the edge of his desk, using the chair as a footrest.

"So Chromedome asked me to be his conjunx endura," he said.

Brainstorm waited a moment for any additional context. None seemed to be forthcoming. "Excuse me?"

"Conjunx endura? You know, a sparkmate," Mach said.

"I know what it is! It's everything else in that sentence I was confused on."

Mach nodded seriously. "I have no idea what part of the sentence could be confusing you."

"Context, please," Brainstorm said, pressing the heel of his palm against his forehead. "Are you and Chromedome in a romantic relationship?"

"I...don't...know?" Mach said with a shrug. "Can you give me some clues? How would you know if you were in a romantic relationship?"

He seemed actually serious about the request. Brainstorm wracked his brain for a useful description. There were some things you didn't expect to have to explain while half-asleep in your berthroom, talking to a stranger your best friend was apparently intent on bonding with.

"Okay, uh, clues. Well, the big one would be that someone has used the "L" word—that'd be "love"—or the "S" word—"sparkmates". That kinda thing. Other than that, lots of physical closeness? Emotional intimacy? Weird sparkfeelings when you think about them? Would you want him to be your partner in life?"

Mach nodded very seriously. "I don't know. Some of those? Chromedome definitely says he loves me a lot. I didn't think he meant like that. And we spend a lot of time together, he likes holding hands, I think I like it too—"

"Okay I don't actually need to know all the details—"

"Emotional intimacy? I guess there was the mnemosurgery, but you probably meant on a routine basis..."

"The what?" Brainstorm slipped suddenly off the stable ground of assuming your best friend wouldn't use brain surgery to make someone fall in love with him. How bad of a judge of character could he be?

"Oh!" Mach clamped his hands over his faceplate, as if to shove the words back in. "That was supposed to be a secret. You don't have any surveillance equipment running in here, do you?"

"I don't surveil myself, no." Brainstorm saw him moving to ask another question and cut him off. "And yes, I swept for bugs. I don't think Axotomy and all them need to listen to me while I'm off-shift."

"You wouldn't tell Chromedome I told you, right? I'm supposed to keep it a secret but," he flapped his hands anxiously, "I need your help to figure out what to do."

"I can keep a secret," Brainstorm said.

"Yeah, but will you keep a secret? This secret, specifically."

"I promise I will never tell anyone, cross my spark," Brainstorm said. But he wasn't ruling out slugging Chromedome without context if circumstances warranted. "Please explain the thing I will never tell anyone."

"So I'm not normal," Mach said, matter-a-fact. "According to the folks at the thawing facility I'm ‘defective’." He made little air-quotes as he said it. "I'm not good at subtle or slowing down or figuring out why people do the things they do. But I'm good at stealing and I'm the best at getting past security scans so," he shrugged. "I thought that was good enough? Until I went to recharge in my room and woke up in my brain with a stranger inside." Mach squinted. "Have you ever had mnemosurgery done on you?"

"I have not," Brainstorm siad. And I will not, my thinking whatsits are just fine the way they are thank you.

"Well, Chromedome says usually you don't feel anything. But if the surgeon wants, they can bring the subject up into consciousness with them. And that's what he did. He told me that he'd been ordered to smooth out my personality so I'd be more ‘normal’."

"But you're an Autobot!" Brainstorm protested.

Mach quirked an optic at him. "Yeah?"

"Mnemosurgery is supposed to be the thing we use against...other people. Them. Decepticons."

"Oh, Stormy," Mach reached over to pat him awkwardly on the shoulder. "That's really sweet."

"He tried to brainwash you?"

"No, that's what I'm trying to tell you. For one, it wouldn’t be "brainwashing", they didn't order him to do anything to my memories. Just personality adjustment. But more importantly, Chromedome didn't. He got in my head and used that as cover to warn me. Then he helped me figure out how to pass better, so they wouldn't send me to a second surgeon."

"Right," Brainstorm said. "But how do you know he didn't mind-whammy you and then pretend he didn’t?"

"Well I'm still like this," Mach said, gesturing at himself. "I think he's better at his job than that. Or—oh! You mean, ‘how do I know he didn't brainwash me into falling in love with him?’ Well...yeah. I'm not in love with him? He's in love with me. That's why I'm here for your advice."

"Primus, I am lost." His head was still reeling from the idea that Chromedome, his Chromedome was apparently brainwashing Autobots. That seemed like the kind of thing you should tell your best friend. Actually, it seemed like the kind of thing you shouldn’t do, period, but if you were doing it you ought to mention it to your best friend. He wasn’t really sure how to handle the revelation that Chromedome had a love life on top of that.

Really, what had he been thinking? That Chromedome was just going to interrogate dead people forever? He was going to have to take some time to process this, preferably without any tiny thieves watching him flail. Brainstorm focused back on the conversation at hand—Mach was zooming away on his one-mech conversational freight train.

"Chromedome says he loves me. He asked me to be his conjunx endura, so he’s probably serious about that. But I don't know how to—I don't think this feeling is love yet. I think it could be? But I'm not ready. And even if I was, I don't know if this whole sparkmate thing is a good idea. He needs so much love and support and I'm me and I can't be his everything like that."

"I think you've answered your own question," Brainstorm said. "You're not ready. Tell him that."

"Can it be that simple?"

"Yeah," Brainstorm said, letting all his years of complete inexperience in all spheres of romance of all kinds roll off his back. "Sometimes it's that simple. And as for the second half of what you said—maybe remind Chromedome that he has other friends? Well, another friend. I can help carry some of that."

The elevator chimed again and Brainstorm checked the display. Getting close. He understood theoretically that the New Institute had been built as an underground bunker for security reasons but noody needed this many levels. Had they been trying to tunnel to Vector Sigma and got discouraged, then used the resulting excavation project to build the facility?

He pressed himself into the front corner of the elevator as the doors opened, where he wouldn't be visible to any passers-by. After a beat, the doors closed again. Brainstorm hopped up and caught the access hatch on his first try, then awkwardly clambered out onto the roof of the elevator. He kicked the door closed behind him and braced himself for the lurch of it going back into motion.

Sure enough, the elevator started down with a jerk. He jumped as the top of the alcove appeared into view.

He rebounded off the wall and his momentum nearly carried him back into the chasm, but a pair of hands—one average, one tiny—steadied him.

"Hey Stormy," Mach said. "Did you bring anything to drink?"

"You know," he said, brushing himself off and sitting down on the railing of the maintenance alcove with as much dignity as he could manage, "most people have a sensible fear of heights. Heights or enclosed spaces. Heights or enclosed spaces or getting caught sneaking around on government property. I'm just saying, you could hang out in your berthroom or something."

"But this is our special spot!" Mach said. He was cuddled up on Chromedome's lap, the glass in his hand half the size of his head with two absurd neon curly straws sticking out of it.

"It's nice to have your own space," Chromedome said, in a tone that said Mach likes sneaking around and I like Mach being happy. "But if it makes you nervous, we could hang out in your room next time."

"I wasn't saying that I'm scared," Brainstorm protested. "I am merely passing the time by pointing out your eccentricities."

"Ooh, I want to go next!" Mach said. "Let's start with Brainstorm and the fact he never brings anything to drink when we hang out."

"Hey!" Brainstorm protested. "Just because I haven't finished my color-and-flavor changing engex recipe yet doesn't mean it's not going to be a smash hit once I'm done with it."

"Hey now, hey now," Chromedome said. "It's fine, I brought plenty. Let's not start."

"Ah, our chief brangler wrangler is at it again. No fears, Chromedome, me and Mach are merely engaging in what is commonly referred to as ‘sporting’."

"Brangler wrangler?" Chromedome repeated, squinting skeptically at him.

"Are you okay Chromedome?" Mach asked, reaching up to pat the side of his face. "Headache?"

"I'm fine."

"Do you need a nap?"

"I'm fine, Mach," Chromedome said softly. "I don't want to waste out time together fighting over the same stupid slag over and over."

"Oh! I get it. You're worried." Mach stood up and planted his hands on Chromedome's shoulders. "It's an easy mission and I'm the best there is. I'm gonna come home to you."

"You can't know that."

"I'm gonna come home," Mach repeated. He leaned close and whispered, but Brainstorm could still hear every word. "And then you should ask me to be your conjunx again, okay?"

Brainstorm cleared his throat. "I'm still here."

"Do you feel left out?" Mach asked sweetly. "I could be mushy with you too, if you wanted."

"Can I please have something to drink before you two start canoodling again?" Brainstorm asked, holding out his glass. "I need something to do to pass the time while you're being gross."

Mach threw a straw at his head, which somehow led to a spraying-people-with-straws fight, which finally dispersed the awkward tension that always seemed to build up like static while they were apart. Once they were thoroughly engexed, inside and out, the conversation settled down to freewheeling badinage and what-ifs. Brainstorm found himself swinging his legs over the edge of the alcove, listening to Mach explain in excruciating depth how he would break into the New Institute "if the facility was taken over by Decepticons or something".

"You couldn't use the freight elevator," Chromedome protested sleepily. "They would totally see you."

"Well, not the delivery elevator. Sometimes the Institute's headhunters have to bring people in and there needs to be plausible deniability, see? So there’s an elevator entrance just for them that’s a huge security camera blindspot. So step one, I'd need to have you with me and you'd have to hijack one of the headhunters when they were entering the facility."

"Wait, I thought this was if the facility was taken over by Decepticons," Chromedome said.

"Oh yeah. Well, if it were Decepticons, I'd just wait until they opened the main entrance to do some Decepticon-ing and then dive inside. Go supersonic down the main hallway on the first floor. Then use some tabescite to dissolve through the floor—"

Brainstorm snorted. "Mach, are you plundering my lab again?"

"Only in the hypothetical."

"Well, as a hypothetical reminder, if you need something from the lab I'd really much rather you ask. I can synthesize tabescite but it's a pain in the aft if I need it for an experiment and it's all wandered off somewhere."

"Oh. In that case you should probably do inventory again."

Someday he was going to kill this mech. This tiny infuriating mech. As it was, Brainstorm settled for throwing a straw at him.

Mach grew on him, sorta like a rust spot on a bit of unpainted machinery or chondrules accreting onto an asteroid. If you’d asked him, Brainstorm would have claimed that he was a creature of habit and he just got used to Mach being around. Or he might have made a joke about Mach’s endorsement of his color-shifting engex, which everyone else thought tasted "slimy". Really, Chromedome had been right from the start—Mach told great stories and he had an insubordinate streak that made him worth talking to.

The ceremony was a disaster. Brainstorm was the only guest and it was really for the best, given that Chromedome startled so badly at being asked that he nearly fell down the elevator shaft. "I think when I said ‘not yet’ he thought I meant ‘not ever’," Mach confided in him later.

It took Chromedome years to settle down about Mach’s line of work—literal years where Brainstorm could tell whether Mach was out on assignment by whether or not Chromedome showed up at his habsuite after shift, too full of nervous energy to stay in his room alone. Brainstorm didn’t recharge much those days, neither of them did. But they got used to it and Mach coming home after missions became a thing they took for granted.

He'd been in the shuttlebay to take delivery.

He’d ordered some supplies and they’d been scheduled to arrive that day and so he’d been in the shuttlebay, waiting for them to show up.

He’d considered, later, what an absurd happenstance it was that he just happened to be there at that moment.

One of the security mechs, Volley, swooped into the shuttlebay. He had something in his arms. Someone. The front of his frame was streaked pink with fuel and his hands were soaked to the wrists. Brainstorm always remembered his hands. He saw Brainstorm and yelled "Get a stretcher! I've got a fader."

Brainstorm was already rushing to the emergency kits by the blast doors. He pulled the lever, opening the chamber and bringing up a comm line with medical. Brainstorm dragged one of the stretchers out and tried to remember how they unfolded from their storage mode.

On the other line, a medic asked what their emergency was.

"We've got a fader incoming," Brainstorm said, finally getting the last of the catches open. "Minibot. Volley found him. We're bringing him to you now." He picked up the comm and jogged to meet Volley, who’d stopped at the doors out of the shuttlebay.

Brainstorm pulled the stretcher up in front of him. "Come on, mate. Patient on the stretcher."

Volley didn't move. His optics were overheating at the edges, light sparking through. His hands were shaking. He was an MTO who'd never seen combat.

Brainstorm put his hand on the mech's shoulder. "Patient on the stretcher, Volley. We can still save him."

Volley exhaled and uncurled enough for Brainstorm to lift the patient out of his arms. His tank churned. Gold wingtips. He wouldn’t have known him otherwise.

"Hey Stormy," Mach whispered.

Brainstorm spoke into the medical comm as he started pushing the stretcher at a run. "Patient is Mach of Tetrahex; sparktype vitreous-positive. Perforated spark. Major fuel loss. Did you get that?"

"We have someone en route," the medic promised. "Is the patient awake? Keep the patient awake if at all possible."

Brainstorm tossed the comm over to Volley, who'd finally snapped back into motion. "You talk to them," he snapped. "Mach. I'm right here. We're going to get you to the medics."

Mach coughed wetly. "Don't think that's going to do much good, Stormy," he said. "I need you to call Chromedome, okay?"

"Of course," he said, wheeling them into the elevator. Volley, following close on their heels, punched in their security code to switch the elevator to emergency mode. Brainstorm had been doing his best to tune out his security report, but couldn't help making eye contact with Mach at the word "torture".

"Turns out Megatron doesn't like spies," Mach said. "And he especially doesn't like spies that report to the mnemosurgery department."

"Mach, I'm sorry."

"Why? You didn't do anything."

"I'll make the call," Brainstorm promised. The elevator doors opened to a mob of medics, who pushed him aside to take patient and stretcher. Nobody bothered to say a damn thing to him, but Brainstorm hustled along after them. As he went he brought up comms again. "Chromedome, you need to get down to medical."

Brainstorm stepped sideways to bodycheck the assistant head of mnemology. Axotomy stared at him in shock.

"I said no. That is his Conjunx. Show some damn respect."

"We are at war, Genitus," Axotomy said. Brainstorm hated it when people used his real name. Not that he needed any additional impetus to hate this smarmy-mouthed creep. "There is no time for bereavement leave at war."

"He's not even dead yet," Brainstorm snapped. "And yeah, if we were on the front lines you could hand Ch—Tumbler a gun and throw him on the battlefield and he'd probably take a few ‘Cons down with him. But Chromedome doesn't get to shoot his enemy; he has to play head games with them. And his head is not in the game right now. He's one junior mnemosurgeon. You'll manage without."

Brainstorm stopped himself short of threatening to fight the assistant head of Mnemology. Barely.

"You're very protective. Tumbler is lucky to have you as a friend. Convey my condolences to him," Axotomy said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. He walked away.

Brainstorm gave himself a minute to stop steaming before he went back inside.

Underneath the mass of life support equipment, Mach looked even smaller than he had before. Chromedome had left the chair to kneel beside the berth, his hand covering Mach's. The medics had cleared out of the room and the lights were dimmed.

Chromedome was crying. Brainstorm hesitated.

"Stormy's back," Mach rattled.

Chromedome glanced over. "Is he gone?" He asked.

"Yeah, he's gone." Brainstorm said. "Should I go too?"

"Stay. Please." Chromedome said. "You've got to help me convince Mach not to give up."

"Chromedome, I'm not giving up. You heard the medic. It wouldn't do me any good—don't waste it. You only have so much to give away."

"But there's nobody but you!"

"Right now. Today. Chromedome, you're too wonderful to be alone forever. They'll be others after me."

"Never." Chromedome swore. "There isn't going to be anyone after you because you're going to make it. You're going to be fine. Just drink it."

"Innermost energon isn't a miracle cure, Mach said. "Tell him, Stormy."

Finally Brainstorm caught sight of the vial clutched in Chromedome's fist. He sighed. "Chromedome, you can't make Mach take it. That's his decision."

"I'm offering it—"

"And I can't accept."

"Domey." Brainstorm put his hand on his shoulder. "It won't help. You heard the medics—his spark is ruptured. Innermost energon would strain his spark more, he'd burn out faster."

Chromedome stood up fast, like he might try and take a swing at him. Brainstorm backed up a step, raising his hands placatingly. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But Mach is right."

Chromedome looked down at the vial in his hand. The glow of the innermost energon colored his hand pink.

"I'm sorry," Brainstorm said again. He spread his hands a bit awkwardly, then stepped into a hug. "You don't have much time," he whispered. "Your conjunx needs you." He'd shooed out the medics and their death clock earlier, but not before he'd seen the countdown.

"Okay." Chromedome straightened up and pulled back from the hug. "Okay."

He turned back to Mach and sank down to the floor. "You're right. I'm sorry. I just—" his voice broke and he shook his head angrily. "You made me better, Mach. You made life worth living."

"Is it cheating if I say ‘same’?" Mach asked.

"Yes, but I'll allow it," Chromedome said. "Cheat as much as you want."

"What about stealing?" Mach asked. "Can I steal whatever I want now too?"

"Anything."

"What if we stole peace? It'd be nice to be able to get a little quiet around here."

When the door opened, Brainstorm knew from the suffocating silence that Chromedome wasn't there. The room was dark; the box of Mach's possessions was still sitting on the berth untouched. All that time hacking Chromedome's door code, wasted.

Brainstorm took a circuit of hiding places he knew Mach and Chromedome had spent time together. The air vents above the commissary, the boiler room down in the sub-basement, the abandoned extension behind the autopsy wing. He found Chromedome, inevitably, in the last place he checked. The nook inside the central elevator shaft where they'd all spent so much time together.

"Hey." He said, kneeling down to shake Chromedome by the shoulder. "You awake?"

Chromedown shook his head, no bothering to power up his optics. "Go away Brainstorm."

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," Brainstorm said. "Buddy, it's been days. I know you need time. I am on board with you needing time. But if someone doesn't tell Axotomy and them that you're going to end up court martialed for dereliction of duty."

"That's fine."

"That's fine, is it? Chromedome, you work at the New Institute. What do you think happens to people who get court martialed out of the New Institute?"

"Dunno." Chromedome shrugged. "Preferably something fatal."

Brainstorm barely resisted the urge to slap him. "Is this what you think Mach would have wanted? For you to roll over and die?"

"What he would have wanted doesn’t matter anymore. He’d gone. There’s nothing left for me here," Chromedome said.

Am I nothing?

Brainstorm clenched his hands into fists and let his breath his out through his teeth. He couldn’t help right now; it hurt too damn much. "I'm walking now, before I say something I regret," he said. "After I call someone from security who can get you to your room."

"Yeah, security? This is Genitus. Does anyone have eyes on Tumbler of Iacon—room 396?" Brainstorm looked around the room. It was spotless. Suspiciously spotless. Like someone had gone on a cleaning bender. The box with all of Mach's personal effects was missing.

His comm fizzed for a moment—nothing in this damned place worked right—and then one of the geniuses at the control center spoke. "He left his habsuite this morning to go to work."

"To go to work?" Brainstorm asked. "Are you sure?"

"He was on duty today."

"Is he still there?" Brainstorm asked, shutting the door behind him and hustling towards the Autopsy wing. He'd asked them to keep an eye on Chromedome, not let him wander around the facility alone. What if he'd—what if—what if—

He burst through the door. Chromedome's hands were pink to the wrist, scalpel in hand. Behind him, the door alarm started bleating something about surgery in session. Brainstorm struggled to move.

"You okay Brainstorm?" Chromedome asked, setting aside the scalpel in a tray. His visor furrowed in concern as he followed Brainstorm's gaze to where it was fixed on his bloodied hands. "Unfortunate causal effect of working autopsies. Let me just clean up."

He activated the solvent spray. Brainstorm watched the pink run down the drain. Finally he managed to make the words come out. "Chromedome, what are you doing here?"

"Are you okay, Brainstorm? I'm at work. I'm doing work. At work. I'm told it's a thing people do."

Brainstorm opened his mouth to say something and then thought better of it. He'd wanted Chromedome to push through his grief. He hadn’t said "tell me when you start working because I'm scared to death about you", though a good friend might have guessed that. But Chromedome had always been a bit oblivious.

"I really do need to get back to this," Chromedome said, frowning apologetically. "I am so behind right now. We can get together later, though? Drinks after my shift is over?"

"Sure," Brainstorm said. "It'll be good for us to get together, remember the good times. Mach would have wanted a wake with lots of hard engex and debauchery."

Chromedome paused at shaking the solvent off his hands. "Mach?" He sounded confused. "Who's Mach?"

"No. You fragging didn't." Brainstorm whispered, horrified. He pushed past Chromedome to the light on the other side of the surgical slab. In the blue of the UV the fresh needle marks on the back of Chromedome's neck jumped out like a punch to the face.

"What are you talking about Brainstorm?" Chromedome asked. "Are you okay? First you burst in here like someone's chasing you and now you're—you're being weird. What's going on?"

"Mach of Tetrahex. He died a week ago."

"Never heard of him."

"Chromedome, he was your conjunx endura."

"That's ridiculous."

"Tell that to the needle marks in the back of your neck."

Chromedome craned his neck, as if he could see over his own shoulder somehow. "Brainstorm, I've always had scars there. You have to experience mnemosurgery as a patient before they let you do your first live reading."

"Yes, but—" Brainstorm stopped himself. That wasn't the point. The point was that there was something Chromedome didn't remember that he needed to remember. Arguing wasn't going to fix that. "Read me."

"What?" Chromedome started at him.

"Read. Me. If you don't believe me, I've got all the proof I'll ever need right up in here." He tapped on his forehead for emphasis.

"Brainstorm, this isn't the kind of thing you should do for a joke—"

"Good. Because I'm not joking. Mach deserves better than this." Brainstorm looked around. "Should I sit down? There seems to be a body in your workstation."

Chromedome shook his head. "None of this makes any sense. Why would anyone—"

"Not anyone, Chromedome. You." Brainstorm said. "You were looking for an escape. I was afraid that meant suicide. I didn't realize it could have meant this. You couldn't handle the grief, so you made it go away."

"I would never do something like that."

"Read me and tell me that again."

Chromedome hesitated. "You're serious," he said flatly.

"I hope that's not your way of saying ‘mnemosurgery is excruciatingly painful for the recipient.’ But yeah, I'm serious. Would you be able to tell if my memories were implanted?"

"Yeah. External memories are very distinctive. They've got a certain...taste to them. They never quite fit. Harder to pick out, the more skilled the surgeon."

"Yeah then do it." Brainstorm pointed to the chair by the desk. "Should I sit down?"

Chromedeome glanced at the greyed out body on the slab. "Yeah, that'd be best." He walked over to the room controls and dimmed the lights while Brainstorm went to sit. "Active mnemosurgery can cause light sensitivity," he explained.

"It's not excruciatingly painful, right?" Brainstorm asked. "I'm not backing out either way but I would appreciate a bit of a heads up so I can steel myself if that's the case—"

"It's just a pinch," Chromedome said. Gently, he laid one hand on Brainstorm's shoulder to steady him and splayed the fingers of his other hand against the back of his neck.

Brainstorm restrained himself from the urge to babble questions. He didn't want to find out what happened when a mnemosurgeon was distracted while trying to inject.

He trusted Chromedome. He trusted him. Still, all of a sudden he couldn't help thinking of all the things he didn't want people to know. Focus on Mach. Focus on Mach. That's what he's here for.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Chromedome asked. "You look really anxious."

"You're taking so damn long. The suspense is making me jittery. Just get on with it." Brainstorm snapped.

"Okay." There was a pinch, like someone had flicked him in the back of the neck and then the floor fell away beneath him. Brainstorm grabbed for the chair but found that there was no chair. He was in his alt mode, pushing hard for the horizon. Below him the darkness bloomed with bursts of light; explosions and exchanges of fire. He dragged his optics away and focused on the horizon. Don't look, don't look—

"Relax, Brainstorm.This isn't real, this is just your mindscape," Chromedome said. He was floating off Brainstorm's flank, apparently motionless as the ground hurtled past beneath them.

"I didn't think I was going to see you," Brainstorm said.

"People don't, usually. But I'm here as your guest, you get to pilot," Chromedome said.

"How?" Brainstorm asked.

"It's intuitive," Chromedome said. "Just think about what you want to remember and...drop into it. More literal with you than most folks."

"Drop down there?" Brainstorm asked, as a chain of explosions lit up the ground.

"It's not real," Chromedome reminded him. "Just think about a memory and let yourself fall into it."

Brainstorm powered down his optics and thought of Mach. He didn't know what memory he should focus on, there was just so much—

"You really think this stuff will do anything?" Mach asked.

Brainstorm's optics jolted on and he found himself in his lab, with Chromedome at his side. There was another him in the room, busy spraying a canister of silver paint over Mach's arm from where he sat on the workbench.

"Ye of little faith. I have been thinking about this paint for years," Brainstorm said with a flourish of the paintcan.

"Well I've been thinking about stealing the Matrix of leadership for years, doesn't mean it's ever going to happen."

"Mach!"

"I'm not going to steal it. I just think about it sometimes. Anyway, how does fancy camouflage paint relate to mnemosurgery? I thought you were the engineer for mnemosurgery."

"Well, it's not like I've always worked at the Institute," Brainstorm said. "I bounced around a bit between Operation: Solar Storm and here. For awhile there I was working as a courier at Kith Kinsere. Plenty of airtime to think about all the people who wanted to shoot you dead if they could see you."

"A courier, eh?" Mach perked up, suddenly interested. "So you've not always been a boring shut-in?"

"Excuse you," Brainstorm said. "Who here is doing who a favor?"

"We don't even know if it works. And it better dry clear, I don’t want to wander around looking like a shiny tin can."

"It'll work," Brainstorm promised. "Only the best for my best friend's Conjunx."

This wasn't what he'd wanted to show Chromedome. Brainstorm tried to think them into a different memory and the scene smeared around them. The floor dropped out beneath them and Brainstorm grabbed for Chromedome's hand to steady him.

"You okay?" Chromedome asked.

"I don't know what I'm doing," Brainstorm said.

Chromedome looked over his shoulder and frowned. "I don't think this is where you wanted to go. You look...new."

Brainstorm spun around and found himself in the killing fields outside Ultrix. It took a moment to find himself among the bodies, but there he was—with a hole the size of someone's fist through his abdomen, hands pressed weakly over the wound. As he watched, a bulky red soldier picked his way over the bodies, a scanner in hand reading for lifesigns. He paused when he saw Brainstorm.

"Oh, Genitus," his old CO, Carrel, said. "At least you made it." He knelt down beside him and opened up one of their first aid kits.

"Yeah, I'm doing great," Brainstorm gritted out.

"I was watching you this time. You know you didn't hit any of the Decepticons," Carrel said. "You're supposed to be shooting them."

"Bad luck," Brainstorm said. "Bad aim."

"That would be more convincing if you'd fired your weapon," Carrel said, sliding one hand under Brainstorm's back and lifting him to slide a fusible patch under him. He wrapped it over the wound and heated it to seal the wound.

"Whoops."

"I'm not going to court martial you, Genitus. It's a waste of everyone's time. But I can't have a sniper who doesn't shoot people. I'm going to recommend you to Posthaste for courier work. Use those wings of yours."

Brainstorm reached up to grip Carrel’s hand. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Courier work is second only to field medics for non-combat casualty rates." Carrel pulled him to his feet. "Command thinks they know what everyone was made for. I figure that's how we got ourselves in this mess."

"Brainstorm." Chromedome shook his shoulder. "This isn't what we're here to see."

"Right." Brainstorm shook his head. "He's dead, you know. They're all dead."

"Brainstorm. Focus." Chromedome put his hand over Brainstorm's visor, blocking out the view. "It's easy to get sucked into your emotions at the time of the memory or to end up bounced around like a pinball. There was something you wanted to show me. What was that?"

"Mach." Brainstorm said. "I needed to show you Mach."

"What do I need know about Mach?"

"He loved you." Brainstorm said.

"Stormy, don't go."

Brainstorm cursed. He pushed Chromedome's hand away and found himself back in the medibay's surgical suite. Mach was lost underneath the mass of surgical equipment and swarming medics but Brainstorm was there, kneeling awkwardly at the head of the berth with one hand squeezing his.

"I won't go," Brainstorm promised. "I'm right here."

"Thanks." Mach whispered. "I've always been afraid of dying alone."

They were watching the scene from the corner of the room and Brainstorm wondered how they could hear everything so clearly. He wondered how his brain knew to construct the room from a different angle. He wondered how he could slip them back out of this memory before anything worse happened.

"I'm right here." Brainstorm promised. "Mach, I am so sorry."

"What for?" Mach asked.

"The paint. It was supposed to keep you safe—"

"Stormy. The paint was fine. They tracked my spark signature inside the base," Mach said. "You didn't cause this."

"Mach!" Chromedome cried, staggering into the room and collapsing by the berth.

Brainstorm grabbed for his Chromedome. "Make it stop," Brainstorm said. "Please."

Chromedome dragged his optics away from the scene in front of them and must have seen something in Brainstorm's face, because his frustration softened into pity. He waved his hand and everything froze.

"Give me a minute," Brainstorm said, tipping his head back to open up his intake. He felt like he was overheating. This was inside his head, how did his body feel so awful?

"We can stop," Chromedome said. "I believe you, Brainstorm."

"You haven't even seen anything good," Brainstorm said. "I've got to show you the things you should remember. The good things"

"Do you want me to just go in alone?" Chromedome asked. "You don’t have to relive all this with me."

"Yes. Primus, yes."

"Are you sure? I know it’s a lot of trust to—"

"Just do it," Brainstorm said.

The room around him winked out and then Brainstorm powered on his optics. He was sitting down in a chair and his head hurt like hell. He was in Chromedome's lab, the lights obnoxiously bright but the walls reassuringly solid.

Behind him, Chromedome said, "What did I do?"

Brainstorm turned to find Chromedome sunk down to the floor, staring at his needles like he'd never seen them before.

"I think it's pretty obvious what you did," Brainstorm said, as gently as he could. "And I can't say I wouldn't have been tempted, if I were you."

"Yeah, you might have been tempted, but you wouldn't have done it," Chromedome said.

Brainstorm couldn't find it in him to lie. Chromedome looked up, face grim at his silence.

"I'm so sorry," Chromedome said. "For leaving you to grieve for him alone."

"Don't be ridiculous, you remember now—"

"I've seen your memories," Chromedome corrected. "Mine are beyond retrieval. So I know what I should be remembering, but that's not the same. I know I loved him. But that’s gone now. I’m sorry."

"We just have to keep on going, like Mach would have wanted. Come out with me tonight. We'll have a drink, a proper wake for Mach," Brainstorm said.

"Yeah," Chromedome said. "Good idea. Just give me a bit, okay? I need some time to process this."

Brainstorm stepped into the commissary and looked around. He'd hurried over after he got Chromedome's ping, even though he'd been lying down most of the day with a terrific helmache. He wasn't sure if it was the mnemosurgery or the stress, but if he hadn't made a promise neither Megatron nor Zeta Prime nor the promise of a readable scientific explanation for mass displacement could have pulled him out of his nice dark habsuite.

Chromedome waved at him from across the bar. He looked...better. Chipper even. Brainstorm wondered how much he'd already drunk—there was only a single cube out on the bar but the bartenders here were scrupulous about clearing away empty drinks as soon as your fingers left the glass.

"Brainstorm, finally." Chromedome grinned. "I was worried you weren't coming. I feel like I haven't seen you in forever."

Brainstorm froze. "You saw me this afternoon, Chromedome."

Chromedome frowned. "Did I? I can't remember. I was really busy at work today, I must have forgotten. I don't know how I let myself get so far behind, but there is just a mountain of work on my to-do list."

"Chromedome, why are we here?"

"Here here? To drink. Catch up a bit."

"Nothing else?"

"What other reason would we need?" Chromedome asked.

It was the first time Brainstorm considered whether he would have been better off never meeting Chromedome. Being alone at the Institute, no friends to die or break his heart. Things would have been simpler, that way.

The first time, but not the last.

"So the important thing to remember is that all three of the smelters you have to work with are deceptive spawns of glitches, but they're bad in different ways. I put little paint markers on the doors to help me remember. The red door and blue door are going to try to kill you because the ventilation is all screwy. I recommend not using either of them. And then green door on the end tends to jam up when you're trying to pour the ore into the chamber and I swear I have put in maintenance requests every forty-eight hours for the past month and nobody's so much as glanced at it—"

"I'm sorry, are you okay?" The newbie was squinting at him with great skepticism.

"What? I am in perfect health, I assure you. Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Brainstorm considered if perhaps he’d gotten a bit off topic. There probably wouldn't be any reason the mech would need to use any of the smelting furnaces in the subbasement during his first day on the job.

"You're not, like, mad at me for taking your job, right? I didn't ask to get assigned to the mnemology department, I swear." The newbie wrung his hands, shifting a bit awkwardly on his feet. Pivot, that was his name. Pivot was a solid looking mech, not the frametype you'd expect for the science-y lot. Brainstorm would have bet his favorite hand lens he transformed into a transport van. A boring black transport van.

Brainstorm wasn't "supposed" to be a scientist either. He wondered how Pivot had ended up here, taking his job as head of R&D for mnemology. As a department of one, the sole engineer was automatically head of R&D. He waved his hands apologetically. "Not at all, not at all. I didn't dream of needles when I was a protoform, you know," he said. He’d never actually been a protoform, but that was on a need-to-know basis. "Come on, sit down, I'll grab you a drink. This is probably all my fault, actually. I requested a transfer to weapons development. I was getting bored doing the same thing day after day."

He pulled over his favorite stool and then realized there really weren't any other seats in his little cubbyhole lab. Former lab. It was going to be Pivot's lab, now. He waved for Pivot to sit and climbed up onto the lab bench to fetch the engex he'd been saving up in the ceiling vent.

"You're sure you're not angry? Because I don't feed people I like volatile liquids that have been exposed to who-knows-what kind of noxious laboratory fumes. No drinking in the lab, no drinking things that have been exposed to stuff in the lab, that's my watchword. Though actually I don’t drink at all. Engex makes me sick." Pivot babbled, drumming his hands on his knees as he awkwardly perched on the seat. He needed a good shine, whatever regulation polish he'd been using was leaving blotchy streaks over his black finish. Brainstorm could hook him up with a good supplier.

"Suit yourself," Brainstorm said, plucking a flask off the drying rack to fill up. Pivot spluttered in horror as Brainstorm took a sip. The smoky flavor gave it a nice rounded taste. Brainstorm capped the bottle to take with him to his new lab. "I'm only going to be three floors up, so if you have any questions or you can't find anything, just give me a ping. I'm told my lab notes can be...challenging, sometimes, so there's no shame in asking questions. The folks you're working with are a reclusive lot, but they've never given me any trouble."

"Nobody I should be worried about?" Pivot asked, in the voice of a person who worries about everything.

"Like I said, I haven't had any trouble. Except for getting someone to do some fragging maintenance on the facilities here. Oh—not someone you should be worried of but if you could do me a favor?"

"Of course, yeah."

"Tumbler of Iacon—everybody calls him Chromedome. He's my friend. Keep an eye on him for me?"

Someone banged on the door and Brainstorm watched his creation, carefully made through hours of work and painstaking precision, tumble to the floor. It made a terrific noise as the pieces clattered and rebounded. The reprehensible bungler outside continued banging.

"Brainstorm! Open up, I need to talk to you!" Chromedome yelled.

"You just ruined my experiment!" Brainstorm yelled back. "It was sensitive to vibrations!"

"...is it going to kill us all? Should we issue an evac alert?"

"No, but I'm going to kill you," Brainstorm snapped, striding over to the door and pulling it open. "Ping me next time."

"I did, you weren't answ—" Chromedome paused and narrowed his eyes. "Are those...empty energon cubes? What were you doing, stacking them?"

"No, I was not "stacking them", I was attempting to beat my personal record of tallest unsupported tower of energon cube packaging. It takes incredible skill to get above sixteen levels, I’ll have you know."

"Don't you have work to do?"

"Yeah, it's down in the materials synthesis committee. They're deciding if my new propellant is ‘cost effective’. Anyway, if you're so worried about my productivity, why are you here interrupting me at work?"

Chromedome ushered Brainstorm inside and shut the door behind him. "I need to ask you something. Something important. Do you know anything about the conjunx ritus?"

"Do I know anything about what?"

"The four acts, Brainstorm. The conjunx ritus."

"No, sorry, I heard you fine. I just—where's this coming from? Academic interest?"

Chromedome looked around and leaned close. "Not exactly but—you have to keep this a secret, alright? I don't want to scare him away."

Oh slag.

Brainstorm remembered that stupid blissed-out expression. It had tended to materialize when Chromedome started going on about Mach's virtues. "I think I've met the one. I've got to get this right, Brainstorm. What if I mess it up and he doesn't want to be with me? I would ask someone else for help but—nobody I know has a conjunx endura."

"When the hell did you meet this guy, Chromedome? I saw you...okay, I saw you nine days ago. But you definitely didn't mention that you were dating anyone nine days ago."

Chromedome crossed his arms across his chest. "We met yesterday. But! I just know he's the one. He's sweet and he's funny and he enjoys listening to me talk about my work and—he's just perfect, Brainstorm."

"Yesterday? You met yesterday?" Brainstorm put his face in his hands. "I think you need to slow down, Chromedome. There's no way to ask someone to be your conjunx endura after a single day without scaring them off. Wait a week—wait, no. Wait a month. Maybe six. Some people wait a couple decades."

"Decades?" Chromedome squeaked. "Oh no. No, no, no. Someone would have snapped him up already. A perfect mech like Pivot? He'd be settled into a sweet relationship with someone who's less of a—"

"Pivot?" Brainstorm repeated faintly. "Big boxy transport van Pivot? Stole my job Pivot?"

"You hated that job. He said that you said something about me, so he came to introduce himself and we just...ended up talking all night. He's just wonderful."

"That's great," Brainstorm said faintly. "I'm really happy for you but, uhh, I don't really know anything about the conjunx ritus," he lied. "Wait a few weeks, for sure. Maybe look it up on the net. Read some books. In the meantime, I just remembered something very important and time sensitive I'm supposed to be doing so—sorry, sorry, talk to you later—" he shoved Chromedome gently out the door, ignoring his protests. He locked the door behind him and went back to sit at his lab bench.

Frag, he should have predicted this might happen. He should have planned for it. What was he supposed to do now? Should he try to tell Chromedome about Mach again and hope this time he could face the truth? But to what end? Mach was gone and if Chromedome had a chance to be happy with the new guy....but maybe Brainstorm had a duty to tell Pivot about Mach. He would want to know if it was him and there was a chance that Chromedome might one day...

Brainstorm reached over and snagged an empty energon cube. He didn't want to sit on this with an empty tank.

There was a comm message blinking on his HUD. Brainstorm checked his chrono and, yep, it was, in fact, unreasonably early. And he was off duty. He swiped away from the message and tried to settle back into recharge.

Another comm message pinged. Brainstorm sat up with a growl of annoyance. Whoever had used the urgent tag on their comm to override his "do not disturb" had better be dying or he was going to introduce them to his new portable flamethrower and also a sense of common decency.

The message was from Chromedome. So was the earlier message. Brainstorm clicked in, his brain lurching up to speed.

«Hey, sorry to bother you but I need help getting to my medical check-in.»

«No, seriously Brainstorm. I need an assist.»

Brainstorm rolled his optics. Not dying then. «Were you drinking last night? Also: do you know what time it is? Frag off.»

«I wasn't drinking. Brainstorm, please. I'll owe you a favor.»

«You already owe me approximately 1,998 favors; I'm not sure what benefit I could get out of additional debenture on your part. So what is the problem exactly?»

«I can't get up.»

«This feels like the set-up to a joke, but I’m too tired to expand on the comedy that is your life. Why don’t you ask your conjunx for help?»

«He isn’t my conjunx, Brainstorm. We’re taking it slow. And I don’t want to worry him. Just come over here and help me walk to the medstation. If I miss another weekly check-in they're going to make me do a physical.»

«You want me to get out of my berth, during my assigned recharge time, to help you walk to a medstation. So that you can be cleared for work, which you are obviously incapable of doing. So that you can avoid getting medical leave that you obviously need?>

«I don't need to stand up to do mnemosurgery.»

Brainstorm sighed and stood up. "Alright, that's it," he muttered. He unplugged from the infuser case and coiled up the leads before heading off down the hallway, still typing.

«I'm coming to you. Give me five.» It took him a little under three minutes, he hadn't factored in the complete lack of elevator traffic at stupid-o-clock in the morning. He didn't bother to knock when he got there, just punched in the door code real quick and stomped inside.

"Alright, that's it!" Brainstorm declared. Chromedome was sitting on the floor, one arm up on the berth like he was trying to hold himself up. He squinted at Brainstorm in confusion.

"That's what?" he asked, voice slurred.

"You and me are going to the medstation," Brainstorm said, kneeling to get one of Chromedome's arms around his shoulder so he could help him stand.

"That's what I was asking you to do," Chromedome said. "You could have just said ‘yes’."

"I'm taking you to the medstation because you're not well, you idiot." Brainstorm staggered to the door and glared at Chromedome. "Do you know what's wrong? Are you the least bit concerned about it?"

"Haven't been recharging well," Chromedome said with a shrug that nearly made Brainstorm lose his grip. "Probably that. Been really tired lately."

"Okay, well, ‘really tired’ and ‘can't stand’ are not the same thing." Brainstorm leaned Chromedome up against the wall while he called for an elevator. "What would you be doing at work that's so important?"

"Oh you know, work stuff," Chromedome mumbled. "I'm just so far behind Brainstorm. I don't know how I got so far behind but...I just need to focus, dig out. I don't have time to be sick."

"You can't get caught up on work if you're dead, you idiot," Brainstorm said. "We’ll see what the medics have to say."

Mnemosurgeons had to report to a medical check-in once weekly and get cleared to stay on the surgical roster. It was supposedly to prevent the use of circuit speeders, because injecting in two directions at once was a solid recipe to leaking brain module out your optics. Brainstorm hadn’t gotten a straight answer from Chromedome on whether circuit speeders were involved with the whole "trainee sudden death" incident, but it would explain things.

Anyway, the medics were in a wing adjacent to central command for the mnemology department. Command for the New Institute was a bit rigidly hierarchical and, in the case of the mnemology department, built around six senior surgeons who’d won their way back into favor from the original Institute. Conveniently, their offices were right in a row:

Trepan (head of the training section, Chromedome’s assigned mentor):

"What do you mean, you cleared him to work?" Brainstorm fumed. "He couldn't stand up! What's the point of a weekly health screening if you pass the walking dead with flying colors?"

Trepan folded his hands on his desk pointedly and waited. "Are you done?"

"Depends what you have to say. I reserve the right to yell more later," Brainstorm said, pacing.

Apparently Brainstorm did not reserve the right to yell more later, because Trepan shooed him out of his office with the assistance of a guardian droid. Which was cheating. That was fine. Five more jerks to yell at.

Pavlov (training section coordinator):

"You'll be happy to hear that there was nothing seriously wrong with your friend," Pavlov said, not even looking up from his datapad. "He had a charge imbalance in his sensornet that was easily corrected by the medic at his screening."

Brainstorm wasn't a medic, but that didn't sound like a not-serious problem. "And how did that happen? Is that a thing that you see happening often to folks? Or is that just a thing that happens to mnemosurgeons?"

"We have seen no evidence that mnemosurgery harms the health of our surgeons—"

"Then why are there health screenings for mnemosurgeons?"

"If we didn’t conduct screenings I wouldn’t be able to say there was no evidence, because we wouldn’t be collecting data," Pavlov said.

Brainstorm wasted a few minutes trying to talk to him, but Pavlov was like a brick wall of nonsense. Eventually they wound themselves down to the most annoying excuse: the chain of command. Pavlov suggested Brainstorm go talk to Chromedome’s assigned mentor and, when told that he’d already talked to Trepan, shrugged uselessly. Brainstorm walked out in a huff.

Insidon (supervisor for field operations):

"I’m sympathetic, Genitus," Insidon said. "But I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do. I’m not a medic, nor am I Chromedome’s supervisor. Maybe try speaking to them?"

Most. Annoying. Excuse.

Luvox (second supervisor for field operations):

"I have an appointment right now, actually," Luvox said, waving his hand dismissively. Brainstorm could barely see him over the shoulders of the enormous Guardian Droid blocking the doorway. "The name Tumbler doesn’t ring a bell—try talking to someone in his direct chain of command."

Ranvier (head of mnemology department):

Not at his desk.

Axotomy (deputy head of mnemology department):

Was Chromedome’s supervisor, which at least meant Brainstorm wasn’t going to hear that stupid fragging chain of command excuse again. On the other hand, Axotomy was the most tedious mech ever forged.

"Genitus, you are a very good friend, but you are not a medic, nor are you qualified to make medical determinations. If the medics said that Chromedome was cleared to work, that was a judgement based upon their medical expertise."

Brainstorm crossed his arms across his chest. "Cool, can I talk to them? I just have a few questions about their ‘judgement’."

"Brainstorm, there is far too much actual work to be done in this facility for you to waste the time of all my staff," Axotomy said, blatantly ignoring that he was not the head of mnemology. Pompous git. "I would appreciate it if, in the future, you could take your concerns to your chain of command instead of distracting members of my department. I will be notifying your supervisor as such."

Oh, for Primus’s sake.

"Oh, I’m sure they’ll be horrified to hear that," Brainstorm said sarcastically. He basically never saw anyone in his chain of command. Engineers were less a linear hierarchy and more a equal-opportunity chaotic mess.

"Out." Axotomy pointed at the door. "You will watch your tone with me, Genitus. Your supervisors are very happy with your work and so I have tolerated you interrupting my business and questioning my authority. But I outrank them. There are plenty of places for a bright engineer on the front lines."

Brainstorm considered three or four pithy replies and clamped his mouth shut. He gave Axotomy a sharp nod and left the office.

Brainstorm had been trying to avoid Pivot. It was nothing personal; the mech was probably perfectly nice. Nice and personable. But, after Mach...Brainstorm thought it was best to stay away.

But he had offered to help Pivot in a work context, so when a message came in about double checking needle quality control, Brainstorm made himself put aside the project he was working on and head downstairs to his old lab.

When he got there, Pivot was a mess. He was leaking emotions like a ruptured chemical containment unit, too overwhelmed to get a sentence out without crying. It took a few tries to figure out what Pivot was trying to say: that a surgeon had died and Ranvier had called him in to claim it was due to a manufacturing error in the needles he'd fitted.

"I don't know what I did wrong," Pivot said miserably, taking a sip of med-grade energon Brainstorm had broken out of his emergency pack. Pivot didn’t drink engex, because of course he didn’t. "Nobody told me there was a chance someone could—"

"You have the needles?" Brainstorm asked. He didn't really know what to do with feelings, but he'd had years and years of experience staring at needles under a microscope. Brainstorm checked them over, inside and out, from the conductive end to the deep wiring interface. "There is nothing wrong with these," he said.

"Why would they tell me there was something wrong if there was nothing wrong?" Pivot asked.

"I think they were just guessing. Had the surgeon recently had new needles fitted?"

"Yeah."

"There you go, easy scapegoat. You're new, the needles were new, no need to look into the problem any further." Brainstorm hesitated. Chromedome had asked him not to tell Pivot what had happened...but there was no reason he had to say it had been Chromedome. "I had a surgeon who was showing unexplained symptoms of something—weakness and difficulties with motor control. The official medical team brushed it off and, when I tried to complain, I couldn't get anyone in command to listen to me. Like they didn't even want to hear the possibility there was something going wrong."

Pivot rolled his glass in his hand thoughtfully. "Well, they do mnemosurgery too. They've got a strong incentive to not believe there's anything going wrong. Cognitive biases and all that."

"Exactly."

"If there's something putting mnemosurgeons at risk, that means there's something putting Chromedome at risk," Pivot said. He snapped his fingers. "We should investigate. If we can present Ranvier and all them with actual data they'd have to listen to us. "

Brainstorm wasn't so sure about command listening, but he wasn't about to walk away from a mystery. He and Pivot talked, decided on a strategy. Decided to keep things low-key. Decided to not say anything to Chromedome.

"But he deserves to know!" Pivot protested.

"He already does know," Brainstorm said. "That's my point, he's in denial. He'll just try to talk you out of looking into this—wait until we have something concrete to show him."

They agreed to meet back up in four days, to give them both time to collect data.

Over those four days, Brainstorm found excuses to work on a new and promising gait analysis system that he installed "for testing" in a few facility hallways. Coincidentally including one leading up to the mnemosurgical department, where he decided to station himself for data collection. Chromedome pulled him aside on day three, but not to inquire about Brainstorm's promising science experiment, for which he had several unassailable explanations. No, inevitably, Chromedome was worried about Pivot.

"He's told me he was busy last night and the night before," he said. "Do you think he wants to break it off? Did I do something wrong?"

"Chromedome, sometimes people are just busy," Brainstorm said, not mentioning the ever-increasing lag time for Chromedome replying to his messages ever since he’d started hanging out with Pivot.

"You don't think he's mad at me?"

"If I see him, I'll ask," Brainstorm promised. "But it's probably nothing."

"Well, it's not nothing," Brainstorm announced.

"You can say that again," Pivot said, raising his hand in a little half wave. He was wearing goggles and gloves and for a moment Brainstorm forgot some people actually used protective equipment and assumed it had to be a bizarre fashion affectation. Then his brain caught up with him and he remembered that Pivot didn’t even drink engex. Of course he used goggles when working with the lab equipment.

"I could say it again, but I don’t see why I would," Brainstorm said, sitting down on the second stool. He wondered where Pivot had gotten it and why he’d never considered getting a second place for folks to sit in his lab.

"For emphasis, presumably," Pivot said. He took off the goggles. "Okay, so, to get right into it—there’s a whole bunch of people who are sick and they all think they’re the only ones."

Pivot’s plan had been to play straight with what Ranvier had told him—and tell the various surgeons on his rounds that there had been a manufacturing defect in the last batch of needle fittings which might be associated with neurological symptoms. Somehow Pivot’s...Pivotiness lured several mnemosurgeons into opening up based on that pretense.

"Mostly I was getting exhaustion, trouble remembering tasks, and trouble keeping straight which memories were their memories, which definitely seemed to be the thing they found most distressing." Pivot shrugged. "Not that I wouldn’t be freaked out if I started remembering being a Decepticon. Two mechs mentioned chronic aches in their arms that seemed to center around the deep wiring connection point and got worse during surgery."

"None of that sounds fatal, but it does sound consistent with my findings. My, uh, attempts to test engex tolerance weren’t a great success—there were some mechs drinking at the commissary each night but almost no mnemosurgeons. But my gait analysis cover did yield results! I found that mnemosurgeons walk considerably more slowly on average than spies, headhunters of facilities maintenance. They also walk more slowly after their shifts than they did beforehand to a greater extent than any of those other groups. I also saw three different mnemosurgeons fall or nearly fall during our study period."

"Interesting," Pivot said, nodding like he was actually hoping Brainstorm was about to pull out some graphs. Brainstorm decided he liked this one after all. He pulled out all the graphs he’d prepared, just in case, and let Pivot ooh over them for a bit.

"The other thing I noticed," Pivot said, once he was done geeking out over data visualization, "was how consistent everyone was in their rationalizations. They all said they hadn’t mentioned any of these concerns with the medics and they seemed pretty distressed by the suggestion. They were certain that either they were messing up fundamental techniques or that they had some personal incompatibility with mnemosurgery that would lead to them getting sent away if they came forward."

"Huh, that is a weird coincidence. Not a big sample size, though," Brainstorm said, steepling his hands and trying to think. "Most mnemosurgeons were trained by the same couple trainers, maybe they’re biasing people to be afraid of coming forward with complaints? I think we’re going to need more data. The stuff you said, about cognitive complaints, that definitely sounds like somehow doing mnemosurgery is impacting the surgeons’ brains. That’s definitely not supposed to be possible."

"I agree, we need more data." Pivot nodded. "But we should probably present what you found to the senior mnemosurgeons first."

Brainstorm boggled at him. "Did you miss the part where at the beginning of this we decided to keep things low key and talked about how the senior mnemosurgeons are probably in denial and would have good reason to suppress this kind of research?"

"Look, I’m not an idiot. I kept a copy of my research on a datastick and I made sure to give my presentation separately to three different people, so that if one of them wants to suppress the results they’re going to have to go through the other two."

"Who, exactly, did you tell? What did they say?"

"Ranvier, obviously. Trepan, because he’s the one running the training program. And then Insidon, because you’d mentioned that he seemed the most sympathetic when you were trying to talk to them earlier. I mean, none of them said much. Trepan and Ranvier accepted my explanation that the needles I’d made definitely weren't the cause of death and they said I should keep looking into this and have you bring them your findings. Insidon was busy, he excused himself to go to a meeting halfway through. Seemed very anxious."

"Right. Great. We’re going to be murdered and our bodies are going to be crushed in a trash compactor," Brainstorm announced, moving aside some stuff on the table so that he could lightly beat his head against it.

Pivot patted him on the head with his ridiculous gloves and said, in what was probably meant to be a soothing tone, "Woah, woah, I’m supposed to be the anxious one here. We’re not going to get murdered for doing our jobs, Brainstorm."

"Well maybe not murdered. Demoted and sent to haul rocks in Altihex. Axotomy said as much last time I tried to talk to him."

"Pfft, as if. You’re, like, a genius. They’re not going to send you away. Now, if somebody gets mad they might send me away, but I doubt it. Why would they have told me to keep working on my research if so?"

If me and Pivot get sent away, Chromedome is going to be all alone. Frag it.

Brainstorm stood up and offered Pivot a hand to shake. "It’s been real, Pivot. If we’re still here tomorrow, let’s meet again and put together a more formal research strategy."

Pivot shook his hand, squinting skeptically. "See you tomorrow then?"

"Tomorrow."

Chromedome steepled his fingers and considered the small cubical object on the counter in front of him. "Is this an alarm clock?" he asked. "I have a built-in chrono, you know. I'm not an antique."

"It is an alarm clock," Brainstorm agreed. "You can use it to assess whether it's a reasonable time of day to call someone before you start sending me messages. And, more importantly, it's a great cover." He looked around and put his finger to his faceplate to remind Chromedome to keep his voice low. Brainstorm knew there weren't any bugs in the room, but there were definitely some in the hallway. "This way you can keep it out by your infuser case and nobody will think anything of it."

"What else does it do?" Chromedome asked.

"Let me," Brainstorm said. He picked up the cube and spun it around, looking for the edge he'd marked in white. He tapped that edge on the table and then held it up as the cube split open, revealing a communicator. "See?"

"So it's...a communicator. I have one of those already, Brainstorm," Chromedome said, baffled.

"Yeah, but this one is special. If you need to reach me, anytime, anywhere, this communicator has the frequency for a pickup I've had specially wired to my audial. High powered, encrypted frequency, blah blah technical stuff."

"We work in the same facility Brainstorm."

"We might not always," Brainstorm said. "Look, hopefully you'll never need it. But if you ever do? Now you've got it. Think of it as a just-in-case present."

"You're a bit paranoid, sometimes," Chromedome said.

"Anybody who works here and doesn't end up a little paranoid has been walking around with his optics powered off," Brainstorm said. "I don't know if you've noticed, but there is some skeevy stuff afoot here."

Brainstorm couldn’t remember ever going to a facility meeting that included everyone. There were meetings for the engineering program, sure. And he presumed that the headhunters and the spies and the mnemosurgeons and the security bots all had their own meetings as well. Important information about the facility itself was usually transmitted via memos.

They had all gathered in the underbunker that was used for emergency lockdowns; there was nowhere else that was large enough to hold them all. Someone had built up a little dais at the far end. Between the sea of shifting kibble and jostling mechs Brainstorm could see Trepan, Ranvier, Luvox, Axotomy and Pavlov standing up on that dais. He wondered where Insidon was. Brainstorm had never liked any of them, but Insidon was his least un-favorite. He'd never given the impression that Brainstorm wasn't fit to kiss the ground he walked on, let alone change out his needles, which was more than he could say for the others.

He hoped this was going to be short—he’d woken up with a pounding headache and a comm message from a weapons engineer in Petrex asking him to elaborate on the potential military applications for his new biometric gait analysis software. Brainstorm was sure he’d had a justification in mind when he’d been developing it, but he hadn’t written it down and now it was just...gone. Sometimes he got overly excited about an idea and forgot to think of an application for it, these things happened, but it was really annoying to have to scramble to justify them post-facto. Maybe it could be used for programming security systems?

Someone brushed up beside him and Brainstorm turned to see Pivot, an apologetic smile on his face. "Do you know what this is about?" he whispered.

"No clue," Brainstorm whispered back. "Where's Chromedome?"

"He had a headache," Pivot said. "I told him to rest; I'll let him know whatever this is about afterwards."

"That's sweet of you," Brainstorm said. Pivot was a sweet guy. Brainstorm was still trying to keep his distance but they’d run into each other a few times after their failed research project. He remembered being so sure that they were going to find some link between mnemosurgery and that bot’s death, but the data just didn’t back it up. If there was nothing else you could trust in life, you could trust your own data. It ought to have been a relief to be wrong, but Brainstorm mostly felt embarrassed.

"He needs someone to tell him that he doesn't always need to push himself," Pivot said. "I wanted to ask you—" he frowned. "You keep turning down my invitations to hang out and that’s fine. I can respect that. But you weren't in love with Chromedome, right? I know you're good friends and I don't want to be a wedge between you two."

"Oh Primus, no. Definitely not in love with Chromedome," Brainstorm said, shaking his head. The crowd around them was bubbling into murmured conversations as they grew impatient for whatever was about to happen to start happening. Still, it was a more public place than he'd have wanted to have this conversation. "I like being friends with him but I cannot exaggerate what a bad couple we'd be. If I had time for relationships, which I don't."

"So you're not—"

"You didn't do anything. I just lost someone close to me a few years ago and it hurts sometimes, seeing you two so happy together." Brainstorm shrugged. It wasn't quite a lie. "Don't tell Chromedome, okay? He doesn't know about them."

"So is that going to be a no on you coming to our ceremony then?" Pivot asked.

Brainstorm grimaced. He was wearing his faceplate, but Pivot must have caught the expression.

"Pfft, okay. No pressure. Well, heads up that Chromedome is probably going to ask you soon. We were thinking this week but then he's been having those headaches—"

"If I could have your attention please," Ranvier said, voice echoing out on the PA system. The crowd quieted down as Ranvier waited for silence with a steely expression on his face. "Thank you," he said. "I understand you all have work to attend to; we won't keep you here long. I have the unfortunate duty of announcing that Insidon of Pescus Hex has died. He suffered spontaneous spark failure last night. There will be a memorial ceremony in two hours in the hangar bay, if you wish to attend."

Spontaneous spark failure? Brainstorm squinted skeptically. That wasn't a thing that just happened to people, not without some heavy circuit speeders involved. He hadn't pictured Insidon as the recreational medicinals sort. Maybe...but their results had been conclusive. No link. Brainstorm was a person of science, not conspiracies.

Ranvier waved Trepan up to the podium.

Trepan adjusted the microphone, making a horrible squealing sound. "As some of you know, there have been a number of deaths within this facility. Most of these were within the surgical department; trainees or recent graduates and we had every reason to believe the issue was one of substance use or poor technique. We arranged weekly medical check-ins for the surgical department, but found no evidence of injury in any surgeons—including Insidon."

Ranvier thanked Trepan and stepped back to the microphone. He said, "Now, Insidon was no amateur. He developed many of the mnemosurgical techniques that form the lifecord of our art. Given that, we will be requiring all workers in this facility to attend weekly health check-ins. It’s possible that Insidon was assassinated. It is possible that there is some environmental hazard that has gone til now undetected. I understand this will cause some inconvenience but I remind you that everything we do here we do for the Autobot cause.

"Furthermore, I will be requesting our engineering department develop a more comprehensive security system such that threats can be responded to before they endanger persons at the facility."

"Pfft," Pivot said dismissively. "Security theater. That'll definitely solve the problem."

Brainstorm agreed, but he didn’t want to encourage Pivot by agreeing. He might have taken it as an indication that Brainstorm wanted to be friends with him.

"I don't see how that's going to solve the problem, it's already dark," Pivot said, voice tinged with panic. Brainstorm looked around the darkened server room. No sign of Pivot, but there was Chromedome, sitting by one of the wall panels they'd opened up. He hadn't realized their "all-hands-on-deck" situation had extended out of the engineering department but he wasn't about to complain. The damned security system upgrade had dragged on for most of a year and was taking up more of engineering’s time than any of their actual work.

"Sweetspark, just try it," Chromedome said softly. "Power your optics down, okay? Right now you can see that it's dark—"

"I'm not a sparkling, I’m not going to forget that it's dark because my optics are off," Pivot snapped.

"Pivot, trust me, okay?" Chromedome said.

"Okay, okay, I’m trying it," Pivot said. There was a moment of silence. "Okay now it’s dark and I’m still stuck in a wall and I can’t get out. Okay. Okay. No need to panic. Not going to panic," he said, clearly panicking.

"You’re not trapped, sweetspark. You walked in there and you can walk right back out if you need to," Chromedome said. "Really. If you tell me how to do it, I’ll do the wiring for you—"

"No, I can handle this," Pivot snapped. "Sorry. I don’t mean to snap, I’m just—why did the control grid have to get put inside the walls? And why do I have to be so scared of fucking everything?"

"Okay, remember the vid program we were watching last night? The hero’s love interest—"

"His name is Venture."

"Yes, right, Venture. He was stuck on the catwalks above the smelting pool and Venture is scared as hell, right? So he freezes up and doesn’t move. That’s a good instinct, isn’t it? Because the reason he’s afraid is that he saw the scientist—"

"The scientist’s name is Voltways."

"Thank you, yes, Voltways. How are you so good at remembering names? Anyway, he’s afraid because he saw Voltways fall through the catwalk in the opening act. Freezing up is a learned response triggered by a sensible fear." Chromedome was getting into his speech now, hands waving with emotion.

"Are you telling me that what I need to do is have you swoop in on a chain hanging from the ceiling and kiss me midair and then slip and nearly fall into the smelting pool so that I’m forced out of my panic by the need to rescue you from a horrible melty death?"

"No, I’m telling you both that it’s okay to be afraid and that you can’t power through it by thinking about your fear more and more until you explode. You need to think about something else."

"Something like ‘Afterwatch: Smelting Pool Vortex of Insanity’?"

Chromedome smiled. "See, you’re too damn smart for me. How are you feeling now?"

"Uh, okay? Scared, but better?"

"Do you think you can do the wiring or do you want me to take over? Because nobody has to know if you’re not ready."

Brainstorm decided that probably he could come back and check on the power supply wiring later. He probably should have decided that several minutes earlier, but nobody had to know that but him.

They were a sweet couple. It had taken him time to see the appeal in a mech that anxious and high strung. Pivot was sweet and he cared a lot and he wasn’t going to get Chromedome into any trouble. If they kept their heads down, maybe they’d all make it out to the other side, after Zeta finally stamped out this terrorist uprising.

They were on lockdown again, which was normal. Annoying, but normal. There were perennial fears that Decepticon spies would locate the New Institute, so any time one of their sweeps passed overhead the entire place had to pack up, power down and go hide in the underbunker. Brainstorm figured it was rubbish—they were too deep and the upper floors were too well shielded for any aerial sweeps to detect them.

Anyway. Lockdown: routine. Chromedome not showing: irregular. Irregular and suspicious.

Pivot was a worrywart, so he and Chromedome were usually some of the first people downstairs during a lockdown. They weren't in their usual spot, holding hands and looking mushy. Brainstorm walked a circuit and decided that they weren't anywhere in the room.

Brainstorm retreated to the doorway and, after checking for any busybodies watching him, sidled through to the other side. Security teams would be sweeping the hallways for folks who weren't downstairs yet, but Brainstorm could never get a decent signal from the underbunker. He hustled to the control room for the smelters and closed the door behind him, bringing up his comm. "Chromedome, where are you?" he hissed.

"Why do you ask?" Chromedome said, after an interminable wait. He sounded casual, suspiciously casual.

"It's a lockdown and you aren't down ," Brainstorm hissed. "Where are you?"

"Oh, slag." Chromedome said. He repeated the fact that it was a lockdown, presumably for Pivot's benefit. Where in the pit were they that they hadn't noticed the facility was on lockdown?

"Chromedome, are you outside?"

"Shh!" Chromedome whispered.

"You're outside during a lockdown? Chromedome, what the frag? If you're outside when the sweep goes over they're going to see you."

"Well it wasn't a lockdown when we left," Chromedome said. "Frag. Brainstorm, could we get an assist? We'd left the shuttlebay door propped but the lockdown sequence sealed it behind us."

"I can't believe this. You. And Pivot. Outside. Pivot? I trusted Pivot to keep you from doing anything half-brained while I wasn't watching. ‘Don't leave the facility without authorization’, it's the one rule that actually makes any sense around here." He checked the hallway, then scurried out towards the emergency stairs. Elevators would all be on lockdown, but he could jimmy the door to the stairs.

"Look, are you coming or do I need to call Trepan?" Chromedome asked.

"I'm on my way," Brainstorm said.

It was a near thing, breaking into the shuttlebay. He’d been on the team installing the new security system—which was the only way he’d known to get out his UV light and sweep for the laser grid by the landing area. Luckily that tech was designed to detect Decepticon intruders and could be persuaded, with a little finagling, to ignore friendly Autobot spark signatures.

When he finally yanked the side door open Chromedome and Pivot nearly knocked him down the stairs in their haste to get inside. Brainstorm grabbed for the railing and then for the...prop sword that Pivot had dropped while trying to stop Chromedome from falling.

"I thought you weren’t going to come!" Chromedome gasped.

"I thought we were going to die," Pivot said.

"What in the name of sanity were you two doing out there?" Brainstorm asked, waving the prop sword.

Pivot blushed, throwing his arm around Chromedome’s shoulder. "It was our anniversary. We wanted to do something special."

"Sneaking around outside?"

"Pivot wanted to see the sunset," Chromedome said. "It’s been five decades, you know. Pivot deserves the world, but I figured if a glimpse of the sky is the best I could do...it’d be worth it." He bumped helms with Pivot, face sickeningly fond.

Pivot squeezed his hand and smiled at Brainstorm. "Also we wanted to reenact one of the scenes from the Afterwatch trilogy. It’s perfect up there. Whew! Near death experiences are invigorating! Let’s get downstairs before someone notices us and we have to explain the prop sword," he suggested.

"I was trusting you to keep him out of trouble," Brainstorm said.

"The near-death experience bit kinda snuck up on us," Pivot said. "Up until then it was a wonderful evening."

Brainstorm stood at the controls, watching the gauges as the smelting pool rose in temperature. Gas injection, ventilation, pressure sensors...he kept his eyes fixed on the little spinning dials and firmly away from the viewport. There was a seat but sitting down like he was melting a load of scrap would have felt disrespectful. At least he’d talked the bereaved down from joining him in the control room. They were waiting outside in the anteroom instead. They weren’t making any noise—the ceremony had been earlier, there were no speeches left—but Brainstorm felt incredibly fidgety knowing they were in the room beyond.

Pivot should have been the one operating the smelting furnace, but he'd never gone back and actually shown Pivot how to work the smelters, had he? Just given him a long list of warnings that were now long past their use-by date.

Chromedome was out there, waiting. Twice unlucky now. Brainstorm didn't know anyone else who'd completed the Ritus a second time and Chromedome had managed to lose both of them. At least he wasn't alone this time. Slag, that was an awful thing to think.

Brainstorm's optics flicked over to the viewport again before he could stop himself and he cringed away from the line of coffins. He was going to have to force himself to look at them, if he was going to operate the controls on the crane. An easy job—lift the coffin, pivot over the smelting chamber, release. Frag. Pivot.

It had been an accident that Pivot died. The Decepticons had planted the contaminated corpses hoping to kill mnemosurgeons, clever enough to realize that the Autobots had been scouring Decepticon casualties for military intelligence. Pivot had been investigating one of the early casualties and had pricked himself removing their needles. At least Brainstorm hadn't been there to see it this time. At least Chromedome had time to say goodbye as he’d slowly wasted away in the medibay.

The dials were all reading "ready to go" but Brainstorm wasn't ready. Once he was done with this he was going to have to go back out and talk to Chromedome. He didn’t really have a plan, except that he had to prevent a repeat of what had happened with Mach.

He’d stay with Chromedome, he decided. If he’d let him. Brainstorm could work remotely, they could stay holed up in Chromedome’s hab suite for weeks, until Chromedome could deal with the pain.

Maybe he was worrying for nothing. Chromedome had a lot of time to come to terms with what was going to happen to Pivot. Maybe all that time would make him strong enough to carry on.

But first, Brainstorm needed to be strong and do the fragging thing.

He walked out of the control room feeling half-dead. The bereaved were all still standing around, and they stared at him expectantly. Was he supposed to say something? Wasn’t there some counsellor or at least some neo-primalist wannabe who could say something banal and comforting?

"It’s done," He said. "I’m sorry for your loss and—" he paused, scanning the room. "Where did Chromedome go?"

Everyone pointed towards the door.

Brainstorm hissed in frustration. "Okay, someone else is going to have to step up and do the speech. Sorry."

Then he ran.

He made the logical assumption that Chromedome was probably headed to the closest elevator in the subbasement. The lowest levels of the Institute had been built for rapid evac, which is to say the hallways were just wide enough to transform and fly, if your jet mode was compact enough. Safe? No. Stupid? Extremely. But Brainstorm caught up with Chromdome faster than you could say "flight-alt modes prohibited indoors" and just in time to catch him walking out of the armory.

"Catch" was, perhaps, an exaggeration. It would be more accurate to say that Brainstorm saw Chromedome, rapidly applied reverse thrust to avoid taking his head off, nearly ran into a wall, transformed back into his root mode and landed on his aft, skidding for several feet along the floor. In reaction to this series of events that could certainly have landed Brainstorm in a morgue, Chromedome ducked and then kept walking.

"Seriously? Seriously?" Brainstorm yelled, climbing to his feel and jogging to catch up with him. His legs were burning like he’d just lost a layer of paint, but there wasn’t time to be self conscious. Chromedome was holding a plasma gun.

"Woah, hey," Brainstorm said, ducking between Chromedome of the elevator door. "What is that for?" He pointed at the offending weapon, which Chromedome had definitely just stolen from the armory.

Chromedome met his optics and stared. "It’s for shooting people. What do you think it’s for?"

"Who, exactly, do you plan on using that on?" Brainstorm asked. "It’s not like command is going to give you permission to head out onto the front lines and go on a rampage of revenge. You know that."

"Yeah, I know that," Chromedome agreed. "But I don’t need to go to the front lines, because we have Decepticon scum right here in this facility." He lunged past Brainstorm to hit the elevator call button.

There were Decepticons in the facility—POWs who were temporarily transported in from the prison camps. Brainstorm wracked his brain for any other ‘cons that Chromedome might mean and came up empty. "I can’t let you do that, Chromedome. It’s wrong. They’re just footsoldiers, they had nothing to do with what happened. You don’t want to do that—"

"You don’t know what I want!" Chromedome yelled, shaking him by the shoulders. "And you certainly don’t know anything about how I feel."

The elevator pinged behind him and Brainstorm stretched out to block the doorway. "Chromedome, you know Pivot wouldn’t have wanted this."

"Don’t say his name. You hated Pivot," Chromedome hissed. "Besides, what difference does it make if they die here or on Garrus Five or in an infantry charge in the middle of nowhere? Dead is dead is dead and every Decepticon deserves to die for what they’ve done."

Brainstorm considered protesting that he hadn’t hated Pivot, but there was really no point. Chromedome wasn’t listening to reason right now. "Chromedome, as your friend, I’m not going to let you do this. Please. Just put the gun down."

Chromedome tried to shove past him and Brainstorm shoved back, sending him stumbling a few steps. Chromedome lifted the plasma gun, hand shaking. Brainstorm stared him down, spark blazing. "Chromedome, shoot me or don’t. But I’m not going to let you destroy yourself like this."

Chromedome sank down onto his heels, dropping the gun on the floor with a clatter. He wrapped his hands around the back of his helm. "I couldn’t keep him safe," he said. "I should have been able to keep him safe. I couldn’t do anything for him."

"You did everything for him," Brainstorm said, crouching down to move the gun away. "You were there for him while he was alive; you were his everything."

"What does that matter now?"

"He was loved, Chromedome. He was loved and so, so lucky. You had a thing most people never get, don’t cheapen it by pretending that didn’t matter. But you’ve been taking care of Pivot for a long time—now it’s time to take care of you. You’re hurt, Chromedome. Let me help. Let someone help."

"You can't help me," Chromedome said. "Nobody can."

His hands moved down from the back of his helm to the back of his neck.

Brainstorm lunged to grab his wrist but it was too late. Chromedome's needles slid in and his optics dulled, chin nodding towards his chest.

He'd thought he'd have a little more time, that Chromedome would have been held back by his presence. He'd fucked it up, somehow. He'd made him feel cornered and desperate and now there was nothing to do except hold him up so Chromedome didn’t fall over and sever his lifecord.

"I hate him. He's awful," Chromedome complained. He waved at the bartender to refill his drink. "Look at him, just standing there in the corner like a creep, watching me."

Brainstorm looked over. Sure enough, there was Scattergun, standing by the wall with his arms crossed over his chest and a serious expression on his face. He was handsome, for a motorcycle frame. Sharp jawline, red biolights bright against his black plating. If Brainstorm hadn't been with Chromedome he might have been tempted to offer to buy him a drink. But there was really no chance Scattergun would accept, given that: "He's your bodyguard Chromedome. He's supposed to watch you."

"Why do I need a bodyguard?" Chromedome moaned.

"I don't know, because the Decepticons are out to get mnemosurgeons? You remember what happened to Insidon. And Ranvier. And all those poor guys who got poisoned." Brainstorm waited for the nod that indicated Chromedome still remembered the poisoning incident. He wasn’t sure how much Chromedome had lost when he blanked the stuff about Pivot. "I mean, I wouldn't be a fan either, but I like having you around. Nobody else buys me drinks."

"You're fragging cheap, you are," Chromedome said. "What are you going to do with all the credits you're saving, sit on them?"

"I'm just saying, we could be drinking for free if you were just willing to try the engex I distilled in my lab—"

"—on the equipment you use to make nerve toxins? No thank you." Chromedome pointed at Scattergun and the bodyguard tipped his head up, watching them like a hawk. "Okay so maybe I need a bodyguard. Why do I have to get a humorless gearstick like that? You know he checks my berthroom for explosives? It's like living with Red Alert."

"Give it time, he'll probably lighten up. Everybody gets a little intense when they start a new job. Plus, he's totally your type."

"My what?" Chromedome choked on his drink.

"Dark frame, piercing optics, good with his hands," Brainstorm said. "Oh come on, don't make me pretend I haven't seen you mooning over every mech with midnight frames and contrast biolighting. Give it a week or two and you'll be snogging Scattergun in the—"

"Nope! Never. There is zero chance of that ever happening because even if he is—" Chromedome looked around, leaned close and hissed "—stupidly attractive, he's still an arrogant humorless gearstick and I am not wasting my first kiss on him."

Brainstorm glared at the door panel. He'd definitely reprogrammed Chromedome's door to let him in without needing a password and here it was, encrypted again. He rolled his optics and sat down to hack the door. Some people would say "you should just knock" but he'd planned on sweeping in and surprising Chromedome and that was what he was going to do.

Finally, he got the door rejiggered back to his preferred security settings. He gathered up his stuff and pushed the door open with his hip. "Guess what time it is!" he crowed as he swept inside.

Scattergun threw himself in front of Chromedome and two guns appeared like miracles from somewhere behind his shoulders. The guns stayed perfectly steady, pointed at Brainstorm's chest. Ah, so, not the time to reveal that his flavor-shifting energon tasted amazing if you lit it on fire.

"Scatter, it's Brainstorm," Chromedome said from where he was now shoved between the corner of the berth and Scattergun's shielding frame. Chromedome put a reassuring hand on his shoulder wheel. "We're safe."

Scattergun dropped his gaze from Brainstorm's, lowering the guns to his lap. "Sorry," he rumbled. "I shouldn't have let my guard down just because the door was locked. Anything could have—"

"Scatter." Chromedome said, squirming out from behind him to stand on the berth in front of his bodyguard. "It's fine. You're allowed to relax for a minute, you know." He reached down and tipped up Scattergun's chin with one hand before leaning down to—

"Oh shoot, I just remembered," Brainstorm said, covering his face with his hands. "I needed to go to the airlock. And throw myself into deep space. Sorry, I'll come back later."

"You're making your friend uncomfortable," Scattergun said, voice muffled by the kiss.

"Are you shy Scatter?" Chromedome murmured.

Brainstorm backed away, bumping into a table and then the wall before he managed to get safely out the door and get it closed behind him. He shook his head, trying to displace the mental image. Called it.

The door opened up beside him and Brainstorm jumped. Scattergun was there, but at least his guns were safely out of sight. He looked a bit bashful, which made Brainstorm think that maybe he wasn't going to be immediately murdered. "Did you need something?" Scattergun asked, voice neutral and professional.

"Uhh, nope." Brainstorm said. "I just walked into the wrong room by accident. Poor sense of direction."

Scattergun smiled. He had fangs. Brainstorm hadn't noticed that before. He didn't know anyone but Decepticons who had fangs, it was a very Con aesthetic choice. "You are a terrible liar," Scattergun said softly. "I can see why Chromedome likes you. Please, in the future, try not to startle me. I will feel terrible if I blow your head off."

"Noted. And, uhh, congrats? Congratulations. Have a great night," Brainstorm said. "Nice meeting you, Scattergun."

He ran.

"I need to talk to you about Scattergun."

Brainstorm leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the table. Chromedome was practically vibrating, so he could about see how this was going to go. He'd been expecting it for weeks now. "You want to talk about the guy right outside the door? The one who just swept my lab for weapons even though I'm a weapons engineer?"

"He'll give them back," Chromedome said. "And we can talk quietly. Sorry. He just takes his job really seriously."

"I've noticed," Brainstorm said. "So, what is it you wanted to talk about?"

"Do you know anything about the conjunx ritus? I think he might be the one, Brainstorm." Ouch. Direct hit, straight to the spark. "I've done a lot of reading but I want it to be perfect. Scattergun deserves perfect."

"Okay, can we take three giant steps back and talk about this?" Brainstorm said. "You've only known Scattergun for, what, three weeks? Are you sure this is a good idea?"

Chromedome narrowed his optics. "You looked him up," he said accusingly.

"Yeah, you're my best friend," Brainstorm said. "I take it you know what's in his service record."

"He defected from the Decepticons. I hate the way people hold that over him. Any of us could have ended up on the wrong side."

"Chromedome, that's not my objection," Brainstorm said. "I'm just saying, why did he get assigned to the New Institute of all places? Why would they risk giving him access to so much critical military intelligence unless...."

"Don't even say it," Chromedome said, poking Brainstorm in the faceplate. "Don't you dare say it."

"He's hopelessly loyal and he's in love with you and, given where we work, I think it's important to ask."

"The institute did not brainwash someone into falling in love with me!" Chromedome shouted. "Fuck you. Am I really that awful that you can't believe someone would like me back on their own?"

"Domey, I didn't mean it like—"

"He's clean, if you need to know. No tampering. He’d wondered that himself, so I checked. He is a former Decepticon, after all," Chromedome growled.

"Okay, okay, it was just a question." Brainstorm held up his hands. "So he's in love with you and you want to be with him, what's the hold up?"

Chromedome sat down, finally. "I have to do something big. Something dramatic. I need help brainstorming it."

"Ha, ha, very funny. Why not just ask him words with your mouth? Why does it have to be a whole production?"

"I can't just ask him. He puts so much effort into his mixes, I don't want him to think I'm not willing to put the same kind of time and effort into this relationship—"

"Wait, back up. Mixes?"

"Mixtapes?" Chromedome said. He waited a beat and then prompted, "Music?"

"Wait, strong and silent has been wooing you with bootleg music?"

"Shhh!" Chromedome glanced at the door. "Shut up, Brainstorm, I promised I wouldn't tell anyone. And they're not ‘bootlegs’, they're mixtapes. It's different."

"How so?"

"Well, the point is the way the songs are ordered and selected. Also, they're rerecorded off his internal playback; you pick up the hum of his spark and all that mixed with the music. It's more...intimate. Also, sometimes there are messages in there. Sometimes he speaks over an instrumental piece."

"Mushy," Brainstorm said. "Okay. Well, if that's the name of the game, why not make a mix for him and tell him you want to do the conjunx ritus that way?"

"I can't," Chromedome said, flopping over dramatically. "He's been doing this for years and he's really good at it. If I tried it would be an amateurish nightmare, Brainstorm. He'd hate it."

"Chromedome, you've got it bad," Brainstorm said. He thought it over. "Why don't you just wait a few days for Scattergun to propose to you instead? He's probably listening in and has heard most of this conversation so, you know, hint hint Chromedome wants to be your conjunx."

Chromedome glanced over at the door, horrified. "I'm going to die."

"I don't see why you have to be the one to propose," Brainstorm said. "You're terrible at it."

"Huh?" Chromedome looked over. "What?"

Brainstorm lied on reflex. "Just extrapolating from this trainwreck of a conversation. Look, if Scattergun likes you it's not because of your deep knowledge of the conjunx ritus or your speechmaking skills. Sometimes less is more, you know?"

Chromedome looked back at the door. "I don't..."

"Just go," Brainstorm said. "He's waiting for you."

It didn't matter what had gone before, he reasoned with himself. The important thing was that Chromedome had a chance at happiness. He just hoped it'd work out this time.

The war got worse. The Prime went mad and was deposed, "gunshot that killed a civilization" and all that. The Decepticons conquered the planet and the whole facility went on lockdown for five intolerable days. When it was over, there was a new Prime and Iacon had been liberated and nobody was quite sure what was going to change at the New Institute because of it.

But apparently someone talked Optimus Prime into keeping business as usual. He visited, once, briefly. There was a speech in the underbunker where they’d all holed up during the lockdown. He talked about his hopes for democratic solutions that would undermine Decepticon support—apparently he was calling it the "Grand Convocation", which was a ghastly name. The inner circle—Luvox and Trepan and Axotomy—presided over the event and showed the Prime and his soldiers around a bit afterwards. Brainstorm wondered what kind of sanitized summary they gave.

Things did change, after that visit, mostly for the worse. Energon supplies were low and everyone ended up on split rations. The commissary bar closed shop and engex was formally banned. There was a new Ethics Committee for the weapons department, who took immense pleasure in rejecting all of Brainstorm’s best ideas as forbidden by the ‘Non-Conventional Weapons Act’. Section 19 of the Autobot Code, apparently. Brainstorm hadn’t been aware there was a code—possibly there hadn’t been or possibly nobody had cared. Brainstorm had looked it over and decided everything to do with the New Institute was probably in violation of Section 19. Apparently they were useful enough that they were exempt from Ethics Committee oversight.

Overall, the New Institute was becoming a terribly dreary place to work. There was a curfew every night and, to conserve fuel being spent on "unnecessary movement", living quarters were relocated to be next to people’s workspaces. The hallways were dead as the abandoned commissary bar, except for the medics walking their rounds. They’d decided to switch from having folks visit the medics to having the medics come round to everybody, presumably because the medical check-ins were pointless and people kept skipping them.

Time got away from him and Brainstorm didn’t see much of Chromedome for the next few years. WIth all that had been going on, he wasn’t sure how much he could blame Chromedome’s new conjunx for that. It didn’t sting as much, the third time around. Brainstorm had struck up some digital friendships with other engineers outside the New Institute and he had his work to keep him busy.

Still, when he got Scattergun’s comm late one night, he didn’t hesitate to break curfew to hurry over. Chromedome was his first friend, after all.

"Thank you for coming, Brainstorm," Scattergun said.

Chromedome's room had transformed into a sickroom. Worse. It looked like a hospice ward at a medcenter.The lights were dimmed and there was music playing, soft and soothing. The berth had been moved so that a chair could be positioned next to it, the head of the berth elevated so Chromedome was somewhere between lying down and sitting up. The leads for his infuser case were taped down with white tape, and there was a set of safety caps over his fingertips, the sort Brainstorm had designed to stop novices from accidentally extending their needles in recharge and stabbing themselves.

Brainstorm fell into his chair and reached out to take Chromedome's hand in his. It was stiff and cold, like he was touching an empty. "What happened? Why isn't he at the medstation?" Brainstorm asked. Chromedome looked like he was deep in recharge; only the coldness of his frame gave away that there was something wrong. That and the concern in Scattergun's face.

"We've been to the medstation," Scattergun said. "They sent us back here. Apparently he ‘overexerted himself’ and ‘needs to recharge’. I'm going back to talk to them. Stay here with him?"

"Scattergun, wait. What do I do?"

Scattergun paused in the doorway. "If he wakes up, tell him where he is. Tell him who he is. Keep him safe till I'm back."

"Has this happened before?"

Scattergun nodded, mouth a tight line. "If anything changes for the worse, call me right away."

And then he was gone, like a moody protagonist in a cheesy vidshow. Brainstorm tried to be charitable; he'd probably be feeling a bit short if his conjunx was mysteriously unwell and unconscious. Still, he had questions. A lot of questions. And he could hardly ask Chromedome to answer questions while he was unconscious.

With nothing better to do, Brainstorm pulled out his datapad and decided to do a little searching. Back in the day he and Pivot had done the research, concluded that the little blips he’d been seeing in Chromedome’s health weren’t related to mnemosurgery. But maybe they’d been wrong—maybe even if there wasn’t an epidemic amongst mnemosurgeons there could still be something wrong with Chromedome. Because what could it be besides the mnemosurgery—Chromedome didn't do anything else.

He couldn’t find anything about mnemosurgery. Or at least, nothing on the open net. But most of the surviving pre-war medical archives were poorly indexed, so he couldn't be sure there wasn't something lurking in there. Anything from the first Institute would have been classified, which helped him...not at all. He put the datapad aside and tried to think.

Why Chromedome, specifically? For half a second he imagined Scattergun having done something. A Decepticon pretends to defect, gets assigned into the most hated branch of Autobot intelligence, starts taking out the Autobot operatives. But Brainstorm didn't actually believe anyone was that good of an actor—and it wouldn't have made sense. Scattergun hadn't known he'd be assigned to the New Institute when he defected. And he wouldn't have called Brainstorm for help if this was some evil plot.

So it had to be something else. Brainstorm didn't know anything about Chromedome's medical records, because he wasn't a creep. Chromedome was Cold Constructed, but so were most of the surgeons. Maybe something to do his low reserves of innermost energon? Brainstorm vaguely remembered someone telling him that the reservoir of innermost energon provided a buffer that protected the spark against the demands of the sensornet. Something like that.

There was a knock at the door and Scattergun walked back inside. "Any change?" he asked.

Brainstorm shook his head. "Any luck?"

Scattergun shuttered his optics, spinal strut stiffening as he coldly recited, "As Tumbler's conjunx I understand you may feel that you have special insights into his life. But you are not a trained medic and you are not qualified to make diagnoses. Tumbler requires rest, not medical intervention."

"What an absolute cretin." Brainstorm said.

"I'm not a doctor or a scientist, so they assume I can't see facts when they are right in front of my face." Scattergun growled, sitting down on the side of the berth.

"What's been happening, Scatter? I hadn't heard anything from Chromedome, I had no idea he was...like this."

Scattergun grimaced. "He did not want to tell you. He insists it is nothing and that he just has to ‘power through’."

"You don't think it's nothing," Brainstorm prompted.

"When we met, sometimes he would have nightmares. Sometimes he would lose track of where he was or what he was doing. On a bad day he would tire easily and need to sit and rest on the way back from work. It just gets worse and worse. I took him home from his last shift in a wheelchair. He woke up last night and—" Scattergun rubbed at the back of his neck. "—he got confused about where he was. He thought he was at work and I was Decepticon POW."

"He tried to inject you?" Brainstorm asked, optics flicking over to the safety caps over Chromedome's fingers.

Scattergun looked sick. "He stopped. Once he realized it was me, he stopped."

"I'll talk to them," Brainstorm promised. "Maybe they'll listen to me."

"Thank you," Scattergun said. He looked over at Chromedome and his face softened. He picked up Chromedome's hand in his, smoothing circles over it with his thumb. Brainstorm didn't see anything different, but Scattergun said, "Hey sweetspark. You with us?"

"Scatter?" Chromedome asked, voice soft. "Why are you playing your apology mix?"

Scattergun glanced over at the console. Brainstorm had been tuning the music out; he certainly hadn't picked up on any lyrics. It was quiet, gentler music than he'd imagined being Scattergun's style.

"Did something happen?" Chromedome asked. "I feel like I've been shot in the head."

"That's probably from when I hit you," Scattergun said softly. "I'm sorry."

Chromedome's eyes flashed on. "You what?" He reached up and grabbed Scattergun's shoulder and used it to drag himself up to sitting. "What did I do? Babe, what did I do?"

Scattergun looked away. "You were confused. I know you would never—"

"What did I do?" Chromedome begged.

Scattergun leaned forward to rest his helm against Chromedome's. "You thought you were at work and I was a Decepticon. You tried to inject me. But you were weak and confused, sweetspark, there wasn't a chance that you could hurt me. I’m just sorry I hurt you when I panicked."

"Oh no," Chromedome pulled away. "Oh, god no."

"Look, I know you two are having a moment right now but if this gets any more awkward I'm going to be complaining about how awkward it is from the Afterspark," Brainstorm announced. "Can we skip ahead to after the tearful confessions and the forgiveness and the kissing and whatever it is conjunxes do when they have freaky slag happen like this?"

Chromedome looked over. "Scatter, why is Brainstorm here?"

"Hi to you too," Brainstorm said.

"I needed someone to watch you while I went to talk to the medics," Scattergun said.

"I told you not to worry him," Chromedome said.

"Yes, I am still here, a person who could be talked to instead of about," Brainstorm said. "By the way, Chromedome, I would love to hear what reason you have for not telling your best friend that you're headed on a one-way train to the afterspark for inexplicable reasons. Because that's not information I would have cared about or anything."

Chromedome winced. "I'm not dying, don't be dramatic. I was just worried that if you knew you'd end up marching into Axotomy’s office and getting yourself court-martialed."

"Me? Me? I'm a paragon of restraint. A model of decorum and military discipline. I would never get in a shouting match with your supervisor."

"Don't you dare give me that ‘reduced schedule’ slag! Chromedome doesn't need a reduced schedule, he needs a doctor who’s not one of the hacks you've got on payroll to look at him and figure out what in the Pits is happening to him."

"Genitus, your friend struggles to pace himself with his work, that does not mean—"

"I struggle to pace myself with my work. Some days I get nothing done, some weeks I don't sleep and stay in my lab around the clock. Guess what? I've never dissociated and mistook my conjunx for a stranger! I've never needed a wheelchair to get back to my habsuite! He's not having understandable, normal problems. He's having fucked-up weirdo problems and if you could look even slightly concerned about the fact that my friend is falling apart, that would be great."

"It's the faceplate," Axotomy said. "Makes it harder to emote. I’ve been thinking of giving it up for exactly that reason. Am I allowed to speak now?"

Brainstorm waved a hand. Go right ahead. Dig yourself deeper, you self-righteous prick.

"First, the good news. Your friend is going to be put on medical leave. He is a valuable asset and I won't see him wasted. The other good news is that you are going to walk out of this room. Now, if it were up to me, I'd be happy to write that self-righteous expression off your face and send your body down a sluice drain, but I'm told you are very valuable to your section. So you're going to be promoted far away from here. There's a remote reconnaissance project that is trying to reverse engineer some of Shockwave's latest horrors, you're going to be assigned to it."

"I won't go."

"Brainstorm, for someone who works in military intelligence you are startlingly naive," Axotomy said. A hand clapped over the back of Brainstorm's neck and lifted him off the floor. Brainstorm strained to look over his shoulder and found the Genericon bodyguard assigned to the head of mnemology. "Did you think I was going to argue with you?" Axotomy asked. "I make the rules here, Genitus of Operation: Solar Storm."

The Genericon lifted him onto the table, one huge hand squeezing Brainstorm's wrists together behind his back and the other digging his helm into the tabletop. Axotomy stood up and fluttered his fingers, needles extended. Brainstorm tried to thrash away from him but brute force and fisticuffs had never been his forte.

"Don't you dare," Brainstorm snarled.

"I could have done this quietly, without you ever realizing," Axotomy said. "It costs more this way but, in your case? It's worth it. Now keep still. For troublesome subjects I prefer to go in through the eyes."

"Hey Chromedome, how's medical leave treating you? Catching up on all the good vid programs none of us have time to watch?" Brainstorm had been excited to see Chromedome's name on his comm; they hadn't talked in what felt like forever. Of course, Brainstorm had been busy. Fieldwork was a nightmare, you had to tromp around with a whole crew of soldier-types and stop them from drinking your lab supplies and there was never a decent signal. He missed his lab. But it had been such an exciting opportunity...how could he have turned it down?

Brainstorm realized that Chromedome still hadn't said anything. "Chromedome? You there?" In the background he could hear music playing; he had a fuzzy recollection of the song that was playing. It had been…"Why is Scattergun's apology music playing?" he asked.

"They took Scatter off life support today. He's dead," Chromedome said, voice breaking. "He's dead."

The news sent him reeling. Even after what had happened to Mach, to Pivot, Brainstorm just couldn’t conceptualize the idea of Scattergun being dead. Surviving was Scattergun’s business—in Brainstorm’s head the ex-Decepticon had been invincible. "What happened?"

Chromedome took a moment, and then said, "There was an electrical fault in the door panel and when he went ahead to sweep the room...It was my fault. He hadn't wanted me to go back to work. If I'd listened to him he wouldn't—he wouldn't be—"

"You can't think like that," Brainstorm said. He got up and closed the doorway of his makeshift lab, poking his head out for a moment to check on the soldiers lounging out in the hallway. He went to his berth and sat down, wracking his brain for what to say this time, a way to fight the inevitable.

"I don't know how to be alone," Chromedome said. "You're gone now, Scatter's gone. What am I supposed to do?"

"Okay, first thing, you're not alone. I'm going to stay on the line with you as long as you need me to. Secondly, I need you to resist the urge to do something drastic. You're hurting a lot right now but remember, Scattergun would have wanted you to be safe."

"I just feel numb right now and I feel awful for feeling numb," Chromedome said. "It feels like this is something happening to someone else."

"You've probably been awake too long and you're having a hard time processing," Brainstorm suggested.

"I don't want to recharge," Chromedome said. "I feel like if I recharge I'll—Primus this sounds stupid—I feel like if I recharge he'll really be gone."

"Then stay awake," Brainstorm said. "I'll stay up with you."

"Sorry, you're...I don't want to sound like I didn't think you were a good friend but you're handling this much better at this than I was expecting," Chromedome said.

"That's because this isn't the first time," Brainstorm said. "Now please, please don't freak out on me, because there's no gentle way to say this. You are the luckiest and unluckiest bastard I have ever met. You had a conjunx before Scattergun. Two of them. They died and I was there to try to help you get through it. But you couldn't get through it, so you got out. So I'm speaking from experience when I say: I know you have two hands full of temptation right now. And Scattergun deserves better than that."

"I would never—"

"Can you tell me that? Can you tell me that for sure? That you're not even slightly tempted? That you haven't thought about how you could make it all go away?"

In the background, the song changed. Chromedome asked, "What were their names?"

"Mach and Pivot."

"And you never tried to tell me?"

Brainstorm laughed. "Oh, I've tried to tell you. I have told you. You just don't remember because you keep wiping them from your memories. That's why I'm asking you now—don't do that to Scattergun. He loved you so much and there's nobody else who can carry his memory now."

"No, of course not." Chromedome agreed. "After what he did, of course not."

The conversation ground to an awkward halt and Brainstorm tapped his fingers along to the tune of the song. Chromedome didn't seem ready to talk more about Scattergun, but changing the subject to talk about something else just seemed terminally awkward. But he couldn't hang up now. He had to think of some way to break the silence before it swallowed them—

"Do you know this song?" Chromedome asked suddenly.

"I'm not really a music guy," Brainstorm said. "Tell me about it?"

"The group is—was—one of Scatter's favorites. They're called ’Last Man Standing’, they're a couple of Autobot artillery engineers. They send out recordings via datalogs. Do you hear how the song sounds slightly off? How there are beats that are missed and some of the chords sound wrong?"

"I mean, I hadn't really..." Brainstorm stopped and listened for a moment and, now that Chromedome had described it, he could hear that. "Yeah, kinda. Very artsy of them."

"This is a recording of one of the first songs they released, redone several years later. Three of their members had died in the Tetrahex Surge and they did the performance without them."

"That's very high concept," Brainstorm said. "I never thought of Scattergun as the type."

"He loved music, all sorts. He wasn't good at expressing his emotions, at putting things into words. When he wanted to say something and didn't have the words he'd make me a mix. This one was after—I don't know if you'd heard about this? But he got in a fight once, at the commissary, back before it closed down. It was the only time I ever saw him slip out of his bodyguard persona in public. Someone at the bar must have heard he was a Decepticon and made a jibe. He dented the bar with their head, scared me half to death. I thought he was going to get reprimanded and sent away; he thought I was scared of him. I woke up the next day with this on my workbench in the lab."

The song faded out smoothly and a drum picked up a surging beat. A voice cut in, dancing between the drumbats in a disorienting rush. Brainstorm could barely pick up a pair of words strung together but he could feel the urgency, a kind of desperation. "Tell me about this one," he said.

"That's Semisonic. He was a Decepticon, up till he was executed for ‘soliciting insurrection’. He was terrified he was on the wrong side of the war, a lot of his music is about that. Scattergun said that Semisonic's work was what first made him think about defecting."

"So what's this song about?" Brainstorm asked.

"It's about a nightmare—waking up half transformed and being unable to get yourself back to yourself. Just shifting farther and farther towards something you can't recognize or escape."

"Harsh. Did Scatter like any happy songs? Maybe the self-flagellating misery mixtape isn't the right idea for this exact moment?"

Chromedome snorted. "Yeah, he liked happy songs. Give me a minute." There was the sound of tapes clattering together and then the song stopped. "I mean, all of these are sad now, Brainstorm, because they're his. This was the mixtape he made the night I asked him to be my conjunx."

A swell of synthesizers rose up out of the silence, picking out a jaunty tune. Two voices joined them in harmony. "The band is called Vroom," Chromedome said. "And this song is called 'True Love At Last.' They're a prewar band, Scattergun had a few recordings of concerts of theirs."

"What did he do? Before the war?"

"Well, he’s an MTO so...nothing." Chromdome said.

They talked for hours. Chromedome played more of his music. Most of it wasn't stuff Brainstorm would have ever listened to, but a few questions here and there and he could draw Chromedome into talking about Scattergun. Halfway through, they hit some of the first mixes Scattergun had made and Chromedome broke down. But on the other side of that Brainstorm felt like there was hope.

Eventually, Chromedome said, "Brainstorm. I know you have to go."

Brainstorm glanced guiltily at the door of his lab. People had barged in a few times, to let him know it was time to move out. Their scouts insisted on them moving camp at regular intervals for fear that Decepticon intelligence would track them down. Brainstorm had shooed them away, but he wouldn't be able to do so forever. "I don't have to go," he lied.

"Brainstorm, I'm going to be okay. I wasn't sure at first but I am. I'm going to be alright."

"I'll call back as soon as I can," Brainstorm said. "The first moment I can call back, I will."

"I'll look forward to it," Chromedome said. "Thank you for everything, Brainstorm. From both of us."

Brainstorm wasn’t sure if he believed he’d made a difference. He wanted to believe. He wanted to believe that next time he called they would talk about Scattergun again. But it was hard to trust like that anymore.

Chapter Text

Chromedome had shared in a thousand deaths. More than a thousand—enough that the details blurred together and merged to become one great monster lurking at the back of his mind. Some of the dead had feared the end, had fought to the last flare of their sparks. Some had run towards death like life was the monster hot on their heels. Some of them had been in incredible pain, some had been momentarily at peace. Chromedome shared in their suffering, their contentment, their brief passage out of the known universe.

Death began to feel familiar. And as the rest of his world twisted out of shape, Chromedome started looking at the tangled cumulation of death as something welcoming, safe.

He didn't want to die. Not at first. But when he would wake up to report to his shift, he'd picture that monster waiting for him and the relief would send him to his work. When he would read his orders and the air would grow thick like molten steel, the spectre of death would wrap itself around him in reassurance. You and everyone here will soon end. It doesn't matter what you do between now and then.

He didn't realize how badly he wanted it until Overlord shot him and he woke up not dead.

He wasn’t sure where he was. He knew he should power on his optics and find out. But the minutes crept by and he...didn't. His limbs were heavy; the weight pulling him irrepressibly down, down, down...

"Tumbler, the medics tell me you're awake." The voice was stern. Cold.

Chromedome resisted the urge to shake his head, deny it. "Axotomy?" he murmured.

"You're in the hospital," Axotomy said. "Do you remember Overlord's attack?"

Chromedome shuddered. "Yes." He had been dying. He'd been so close to getting out.

He had to get out.

Chromedome pushed himself up, ignoring the ache beneath his spark. He powered on his optics and ducked his head away from the light. He studied the weld marks on his plating rather than looking up to face Axotomy.

"You should probably lie back," Axotomy said.

"I'm resigning," Chromedome said. "I'm done."

"Tumbler, you should probably lie down and get some rest. You just woke up and I'm sure you're very upset—"

"I'm not going to change my mind," Chromedome said. "I'm done."

"Of course you're going to change your mind," Axotomy said, reaching over to grasp his shoulder. "Just give it a minute."

Down, down, down…

He woke up in hospital, and not the one at the Institute. He remembered being shot by Overlord, which explained the hospital but not the stabbing pain in his optics.

There was a chair beside the berth for a visitor to sit in, but it was empty. He wondered if Brainstorm had been called. But, of course, Brainstorm was very far away and very busy. He'd expected someone to be in that chair, but now he wasn't sure who.

A medic came by and assured him that he would make a complete recovery and would be back at work soon.

The thought of going back to work froze the fuel in his lines, the panic so unexpected he almost let it show on his face.

He couldn't go back. He wouldn't go back.

He asked the nice medic if anyone had accompanied him to the hospital and was unsurprised to hear that Axotomy was there. Axotomy was always talking about how much potential Chromedome had and now that Trepan was gone...Chromedome was a valuable asset to the Institute.

He asked the medic where he could find Axotomy and found himself directed to a small office on the top floor. He had to use a wheelchair to get there. The medic had assured him he'd be on his feet in no time.

"Chromedome, the medics didn't tell me you were up," Axotomy said sharply when he opened the door. Axotomy had stopped wearing a faceplate since the last time Chromedome had seen him. It made it easier to see his disapproval. Chromedome wasn’t sure he liked the change. "I would have come to you."

"It's fine, here's better," Chromedome said. He wheeled himself into the room, optics fixed on the large window in the office. You could see the sky. Chromedome couldn't remember when he'd last been above-ground. Beneath them there was a city that looked shockingly whole. Based on the news reports that had come in to the Institute, he'd imagined all of Cybertron had been leveled. "Where are we?" He asked.

"The hospital at Teledonia. The city is currently a non-combat zone; Tyrest and Dai Atlas have been working on negotiating for a possible peace agreement with Decepticon and Autobot officers out of the city forum. Not that anything will come of it, but it is convenient to have a hospital you know won't be bombed by those terrorists."

"I'd never been here, before the war," Chromedome said. He wheeled up to the window and looked down on the streets below. There were citizens wandering about, shop windows lit and advertisements blinking bright at the street corners. It was such an unexpected sight that he could barely believe that it was real.

"Did you come up here with a question?" Axotomy asked, coming to stand at his shoulder.

Chromedome looked over. "Not exactly. I came here to tender my resignation."

"Chromedome," Axotomy said reprovingly. "Not this again. I cannot possibly allow you to resign—you're one of our most gifted surgeons. What you've done for the Autobot cause is incalculably valuable—"

"And yet you can't force me to continue to do mnemosurgery," Chromedme snapped. "If the army wants to conscript me, that's fine. If you want to arrest me, that's fine. But I signed up voluntarily to serve and I'm unvolunteering myself. I'm not injecting again."

"I do not understand where this idea is coming from, Chromedome," Axotomy said. "I was certain I'd wiped all this fatalism clean the last time. But here you are again."

"You what?" Chromedome asked. It occurred to him, belatedly, that he shouldn't have come here. He should have resigned in a letter and run. Because it was true that military force couldn't compel him to inject again. Axotomy could.

Axotomy lunged for him and Chromedome wheeled backwards. The chair caught on the corner of Axotomy’s desk and tipped—the impact with the tiled floor like getting shot all over again. That medic who'd predicted he'd be on his feet in "days" had been a fragging optimist.

Chromedome scrabbled away from the chair, towards the light of the hallway spilling under the doorway. Axotomy followed.

Axotomy kicked the fallen chair out of his way and stepped over Chromedome, putting his hand out to hold the door closed. "Really, Chromedome, what do you think would happen if you got out of this room? Do you think I would just let you run? If you could run," he said, with a twist of his mouth. "I think that might be a bit beyond you right now."

"Gotta say sir," Chromedome gasped, "A lot of things are falling into place all of a sudden."

"Oh?" Axotomy said. He reached down to grab Chromedome's neck. Chromedome hooked his elbow around Axotomy's ankles and heaved, throwing him to the floor.

Chromedome crawled for the door but found himself caught by the leg. He kicked Axotomy in the face and enjoyed a moment of satisfaction before Axotomy got on top of both of his legs, holding him down. He hadn't expected to get away, but he didn't intend to go down easy.

"Yeah," Chromedome said, popping his needles out and swinging wide at Axotomy's face. "You've finally explained this fucking headache."

"Would you stop it," Axotomy growled, lurching back from the needles.

"Nah," Chromedome said. "I'm going to make you bleed for it."

Axotomy slapped his hand away and elbowed Chromedome at his surgical patch. Chromedome gasped as Axotomy managed to pin both of his hands to the floor. Axotomy shifted his grip, pushing his forearm hard against Chromedome's wrists as he lifted his other hand away.

"Incredibly immature," Axotomy said.

"Well maybe you can smooth that out this time around," Chromedome spat. He waited until Axotomy extended his needles, then bucked up to knock his helm against Axotomy's chin. Axotomy spat fuel on the floor and Chromedome grinned, triumphant.

"I can see why you leave all the actual mnemosurgery to the new recruits, Axotomy," Chromedome sneered as the bastard pressed his needles up against his left optic. "See if you can do a better job this time around.

He woke up with a song in the back of his head. When he tried to pin the melody down it would run, words and tune melting down to static. But when he tried to ignore it the song crept close and stood behind him, just out of sight. He suppressed the urge to needle the song away. It would be...bad. That would be bad.

When he powered on his optics, he found himself in a hospital. He wondered if maybe he'd tried something. But when he checked the chart at the end of the berth it said he was recovering from a shot to the chest, which—

Overlord. He sat back on the berth, hand pressed to his midsection where he'd been torn through. He was whole again, surgical patch gone and repaired plating smooth under his hand. How long had he been out? How had he forgotten—

He tried his legs and found they could hold his weight. There was a button beside his berth, one that would probably call in a medic to tell him that he shouldn't be standing up yet. He looked at it and then—

He was walking somewhere, but he wasn't sure where. The beat of the song was carrying him and he stepped in time with it. He had to get out. There was an exit sign overhead but he passed it by. He had to get out. He had to get out.

He found himself on an upper floor, facing a door with a makeshift nameplate. Axotomy. He wasn't sure how he'd known to come here. Maybe he'd awoken earlier and the medic had told him Axotomy had accompanied him to the hospital. That was probably it. It was good luck that he'd remembered the way.

What was he doing? The beat at the back of his mind shuddered in time with his spark and he pulled back from the door. He was here to resign. Autobots didn't get to resign. He couldn't resign. He knew that. They were at war and he was a soldier, he had a duty that he couldn't abandon. He should knock anyway, tell Axotomy what he was feeling and ask for his help. Maybe there was a shrink somewhere in the force who could make him feel less like his spark was being squeezed down to a pinprick at the thought of going back to The Institute. At the thought of knocking on that door. He couldn't resign—that wasn't the way out and he needed a way out.

Chromedome leaned against the wall. He squeezed his hand into a fist and then released, tried to still it shaking. The song was pulsing in his lines, pushing at his intake and he couldn't remember a damn word of it. He should knock on that door and ask for help.

Like the coward he was, he ran instead.

He ran from the hospital, bleeding time like gasps of air. This might be his last chance. This might be the only time that the paralyzing inertia broke through to desperation. The beat of the song would leave him soon, leave him legless and unable to move. He felt like screaming. He felt like singing. He didn't know where he was but he knew where he was going.

He took the streets at random, passing brightly lit advertising and bustling oil halls and gleaming shopfronts and surly security forces and people—so many people, all of them staring like they could see death at his heels as he tried to brush past them. He didn't stop until he found the clinic.

It was a relinquishment clinic, but not the sort he'd once raided with Prowl. It was built on the shell of a clinic like that—they'd already had the surgical equipment and the storage for bodies. An easy renovation project. Chromedome had heard about these new clinics from a—from a—someone had told him, but he couldn't remember who. Maybe he'd just read an article.

He remembered being immediately entranced at the idea. Dying was a hard business as a Cybertronian. He didn't want to suffer. Maybe he deserved it, but he didn't want it. If he tried and failed, someone would find him. If the Decepticons found him, who knows what they would do? If the Autobots found him they'd send him back to the Institute. He shuddered at the thought.

He tried to compose himself a little, pacing the street in front of the entrance. Someone passed him by, a green mech with sympathetic optics. They looked back over their shoulder at Chromedome. He looked away and pushed through the door.

The door closed on the booming quiet. The entranceway was small. Ahead of him there was a booth with dark security glass and a shadowed mech behind it. There was a sign taped beside the booth: Please sign your release before proceeding to the waiting room.

The mech at the booth pushed a single-use datapad out under the glass and Chromedome took it. It was a bunch of legalese asking him to affirm that he was aware of what he was doing and was there of his own free will, without coercion. It listed all the possible things they could do with his body after he was gone, emphasizing that relinquished frames were not guaranteed burial. It asked for his name and a list of persons he would like notified, after. He hesitated, then left that section blank. He signed his real name.

When he passed the datapad back under the glass, they buzzed him through to the waiting room. It was a dimly lit space with high metal walls and a bench running along opposite sides. Three doors lay along the wall between the benches. There were four mechs sitting, waiting. They were all gathered together on one of the benches. Chromedome joined them, sitting a few awkward spaces away from the last mech.

He observed his companions in sidelong glances. Some of them were Decepticons, he realized. Hating Decepticons had always come easy, but in this room he was impossibly grateful to have them there. One of them—probably a truck, was sitting stiff as a board, hands clutching his knees. His head was bowed—Chromedome wondered if he was praying. Next to him there was a pair of genericons, one with his arms crossed over his chest, the other slouching like he was at a friend's house a few drinks in and ready to take a nap. Only his optics gave away his fear. Finally there was a speedster who was vibrating with anxiety. He swung his legs and looked around, head on a constant swivel.

The speedster's optics met Chromedome's and he tipped his chin up in acknowledgement. "Till all are one, right?" he whispered.

Chromedome nodded, suddenly beyond words. The reality of what he was about to do came crashing down on him. This was the end. The list of things he would never do again, never get to do, loomed out in front of him.

"Sparkflight, you are wanted in room two," a voice boomed over the intercom.

The speedster hopped up and bounced a moment on his heels. "See you all on the other side," he said with a giggle. The room was silent, but that didn't stop him from giving them a jaunty wave as he crossed the floor to door number two and pushed through.

In his absence the silence sank deeper over the room. Chromedome realized abruptly that the song that had been carrying him was gone. He strained to remember something about it, anything to drag the song back. It was irrational, panicking about some half-forgotten song when he was ready to let a stranger snuff out his spark. He just needed to calm down. Uncurl. Steady his ventilations before the Decepticons in the room noticed.

Someone wailed and Chromedome startled to his feet. His head snapped to the room the speedster had gone through, but that wasn't where the sound had come from. It had been somewhere down below. Comedome glanced at the others, but they were solidly staring at the opposing wall, ignoring him. When he and Prowl had raided the relinquishment clinic in Iacon, there had been a hatchway leading down to the lower level. This clinic had a similarly small footprint, it was likely they would need a basement to store the bodies before they were shipped out.

Chromedome lay down, pressing his audial up against the floor. He could hear something down there. It was quiet, but there was someone crying, choked sobs muffled by the distance between them. Chromedome rolled to his knees and swept his fingertips out over the floor, looking for a seam. Finding one, he scrambled over and began searching for a way to access the hatch. There was a handle that folded out of the floor which, when pulled open, revealed a ladder down into the dark.

Chromedome looked over at the others. One of the genericons met his optics and shrugged. "What are they gonna do, not kill you?" he asked, voice softer than Chromedome had expected. The con grinned, teeth splintered and sharp.

Chromedome nodded nonsensically and swung himself down onto the ladder. There was a handle on the inside as well, so he pulled it closed behind him. At the sound of the hatch closing the person below fell silent.

"Hello?" Chromedome called, pitching his voice low. When his feet hit the ground he looked around to find a narrow corridor. No helpful door labels this time. "Hello?" he tried again.

"Who is it?" a voice answered.

Left. Chromedome stepped to the door and paused, hand on the handle. "I mean, I'm not famous, you aren't going to know my name," he said. "But I don't work here, if that's your question. I just came to see if you were—" what definition of "alright" would lead to someone crying underneath a relinquishment clinic? "—hurt."

Chromedome pushed the door open and found a minibot sitting beside an open coffin, a greyed out frame visible within. The minibot squinted at him in confusion, "Who are you?"

"Everyone calls me Chromedome," he said.

"What are you doing here?"

"Here, here? Intruding on a private moment, apparently," Chromedome said, rubbing his helm. "Sorry about your friend. He wouldn't have suffered, if that makes you feel better. I've—uh—" don't say you've read corpses who've had their sparks snuffed, he's a total stranger "—heard it's not a painful way to go. Worse the death, the more painful the memories and all that."

The minibot furrowed an optic skeptically at him and crossed their arms. "Nobody says that except New Institute spooks."

An Autobot then.

Chromedome winced and put his hands up. "Yeah, that's me. I'm a mnemosurgeon. Was a mnemosurgeon. I mean, I'm going to—" the air suddenly pressed down on him, growing dense like cooled slag as he tried to vent. He pushed his hand against his torso and tried to focus on pushing air through his fans for a minute.

"Why are you here?" the minibot asked again, softer.

"Why does anybody go to a Relinquishment Clinic?"

"Well I was here looking for someone," they said. "But they're not here and you are. My name's Rewind, by the way. Rewind of Lower Petrohex. Now, what's so bad out there that a mech like you would want to end it in a place like this?"

Chromedome backed up, optics flicking towards the door. The tone was light, curious. But Rewind was an Autobot who could pick out a mnemosurgeon by a poorly chosen turn of phrase.

"Did they send you?" he asked. "I'm not going back. You can't make me go back and—" he choked on the end of the sentence. The air was so heavy that he had to reach for the doorframe to hold himself up. He could get past Rewind. But if they knew where he was, they could stop the clinic from going through the procedure. He would go back, they would take him back.

He needed to make himself useless. Death was immaterial, as long as he could stop from going back there. He was pretty sure he could do it—one injection to mangle his mind beyond recovery. And then he'd be safe.

"Chromedome." There was someone holding onto his hand. Rewind. His name was Rewind. "I don't work for the Institute. I'm not going to make you go anywhere. I'm not going to make you do anything. You don't have to panic."

"That's what you'd say if you were one of them," Chromedome said, words falling out of his mouth in a rush. "Why would you care what I do if you don't work for them?"

"You came down here because you thought I was in trouble, right? You came down here to help me out and then planned on going back upstairs to die. Forgive me if that triggers a protective instinct in me." Rewind squeezed his hand. "You don't want to go back, you don't have to go back. But that doesn't have to mean death. We're in Teledonia—it's neutral territory. You can run."

"You're an Autobot, don't you care...."

"When the Functionists decided I was ‘disposable’ I lost the ability to say no," Rewind said sharply. "I am not going to suffer our side driving people to places like this."

Chromedome looked down at his hand and realized he'd extended his needles on instinct. Rewind was holding onto him anyway, two hands clutching his, anchoring him in reality. Shamefaced, he retracted his needles. "I don't have anywhere else to go," he confessed.

"Come home with me," Rewind said. "We'll figure it out."

Rewind led him out of the clinic basement through the delivery entrance then wound a confident path through the city streets. The light was glaring compared to the dim of relinquishment clinic. Chromedome stopped at one point, tugging back on their joined hands, to lean against a wall until he could get the pain behind his optics under control.

"You okay?" Rewind asked.

"I might have done a runner out of the hospital," Chromedome admitted. When Rewind's optics started roving over him, looking for any sign of injury, Chromedome raised a reassuring hand. "They did surgery, I'm fine. Just not used to being on my feet."

"It's not far from here," Rewind said.

Knowing Rewind had been a disposable was immensely reassuring, which Chromedome felt a little guilty about. It was also nonsense—just because a person had been oppressed didn't mean they were trustworthy. But knowing that Rewind was used to thinking of people in power as inherently untrustworthy helped soothe the part of him that was still expecting that the next turn around the corner, the next intersection they crossed was going to lead him straight to Axotomy.

He wondered why Axotomy had accompanied him. He was a single mnemosurgeon. Surely there was someone less important who could have chaperoned him to the hospital and back. Maybe there was other work needing the Assistant Head—well, slag, now that Trepan was gone, Head of Mnemology. He wondered if Trepan was dead. He'd never especially liked the mech but to be captured by Overlord of all people...he shuddered.

Rewind led him to a row of tightly packed prefab apartments; the upper levels only accessible by ladders that littered the front face of the buildings. The paint was peeling, layered thick like sedimentary strata in gunmetal and black. It wasn't until Rewind led him up to one of the ladders that he realized the absurd scale they were built on. The front door of the ground floor apartments only came up to his shoulders.

Rewind seemed to realize that at the same time and shrugged apologetically at him. "Might be a squeeze," he said. "But it's private."

"Was it built as public housing for minibots?" Chromedome asked. He'd lived in provided housing for the police academy and then the force and then the institute...he’d never really thought about how normal people found a place to live.

"Yeah, someone realized you could make a killing on subdividing lots into little warrens for minibots," Rewind said cheerily. "But the rent is cheaper than a standard apartment, I get a lot more out of my stipend this way."

"Stipend?" Chromedome asked.

Rewind scrambled up the ladder to the second story, swinging himself onto the metal balcony while he waited for Chromedome to follow him. "I'm an archivist," Rewind said. "There's records in Teledonia that I'm archiving for the Autobots, while they're still around. It's cheaper for me to pay rent out here than for them to house me in one of the barracks and shuttle me to and fro."

Chromedome got to the top of the ladder and realized that the hatchway onto the balcony was only wide enough to fit his shoulders if he twisted through at a diagonal. Rewind grabbed his hands to help pull him up.

"We're being really subtle," Chromedome joked. "None of your neighbors are snitches, right?"

"My neighbors don't talk to people with badges," Rewind said. "And they're pretty much all at work right now." He got up and opened the door. "Come on in, Chromedome. Make yourself at home."

Chromedome stooped under the doorframe while Rewind got the light. It was...humble. The entire unit was cast out of rigid polymer, the singular bench and berth cast out of the same material as the walls. It looked like the only things that had been added to the unit were the infuser case, a spigot and drain for the washracks (separated from the rest of the room by a screen) and a single solar lamp hung from the ceiling. Rewind had made his mark in the collection of boxes stacked beside the berth and the small assortment of keepsakes piled on top.

Chromedome crouched down to sit on the bench and found his knees ended up at his chest. He looked around and realized there was no need to be concerned about snooping neighbors now that they were inside—there were no windows in the entire apartment.

"Great place, isn't it?" Rewind said, shutting the door behind him. He considered the space next to Chromedome on the bench and obviously concluded that there wasn't really space for the both of them to sit, because he walked over to sit on the berth instead.

For the first time, Chromedome wondered how minibots got onto standard-size berths. Did they jump? Did they use a stepladder? Maybe all the minibots on the force had their own miniature berthrooms like this, but it seemed unlikely.

"So how are you feeling?" Rewind asked, pulling up his legs up onto the berth and resting his chin on his knees.

Chromedome looked around. "I'm not hurt," he said.

"You thought you were going to die an hour ago and now you aren't. That’s a lot to process."

"I don't really feel anything," Chromedome confessed. "I guess that's messed up, isn’t it? Nothing feels real right now, it hasn't since I woke up in the hospital."

"That’s not unusual," Rewind said. "You're going to be okay, Chromedome."

"You know many folks who've—" Chromedome stumbled over the words, "—done things like this?"

"I was disposable class, so, yeah. I've had friends who committed suicide. And I had some who I talked down from it, once upon a time."

"Slag. I can't even imagine."

"You really don't need to. For now, let's focus on keeping you safe. Do you feel dissociated now? Do you feel the urge to do anything unsafe?"

"Uh, maybe the first one?" Chromedome said, closing his optics and trying to focus on his body. "I'm pretty sure this is real because my head hurts like hell. But other than that I feel really...floaty? Like I'm hovering somewhere up here," he gestured upwards and accidentally bumped the light bulb, sending it swinging. "Sorry. As long as I don't think about work I feel fine."

"Then let's not think about it right now. When I'd feel like that, Dominus—" Rewind shook his head. "Sometimes it helped to hold onto someone. Do you think that would help you?"

"Yeah," Chromedome breathed. "When you held my hand earlier, that helped."

Rewind clambered down from the bed and walked over. "Is it okay if I..." he nodded at the space on the bench next to Chromedome.

"Of course," Chromedome said. He realized as Rewind settled in behind him, side pressed against his, that Rewind had probably kept his distance for fear of scaring him. It ought to be the other way around. "Aren't you scared of me?"

Rewind laughed, laying his hand, palm up, on Chromedome's leg. "Why would I be scared of you?"

"What if I was lying and I was actually there to, dunno, assassinate you?" He almost said "wipe you" but shied away from it at the last moment.

"I'm not that valuable," Rewind said lightly. "Certainly not valuable enough to merit a long-con. I'm an archivist. Now, I guess you could be a Decepticon looking for information, but I don't have inside access on classified intel. Don't have that kind of rank."

Chromedome took Rewind's hand. "You are helping a deserter. Doesn’t that worry you?"

"Nobody knows you’re here," Rewind said. "So: no. You said that everyone calls you Chromedome. Is that not actually your name?"

"It's Tumbler, actually," he said. "But I've pretty much given up on getting people to use it."

"Tumbler?" Rewind asked, thumb tracing circles into the palm of Chromedome's hand. "It's a nice enough name, but...kinda generic, isn't it? Lot of Tumblers in the world."

"Well, just like the rest of them, I was imagining a pretty high-octane life when I picked the name."

"Vid program stunt performer?" Rewind asked lightly.

"I was hoping for Iacon Police takedown and pursuit unit," Chromedome admitted. "I was constructed cold, I always knew I was going to be working for the force. Ended up as a detective instead. Which, looking back, was hopelessly lucky. Didn't seem that way at the time."

"Do you want me to call you Tumbler?" Rewind asked.

"I probably wouldn't realize you were talking to me. I think that ship has sailed," Chromedome said with a sigh.

"Never too late," Rewind said. "I wasn't always called Rewind. It was a—it was a gift."

"From your friend? The one you were in the clinic to find?" Chromedome asked, pieces starting to click in place. He was feeling a lot better and he wasn't sure if it was because of Rewind's hand in his or because his new acquaintance presented a whole new set of mysteries. Chromedome hadn't had a mystery in forever.

"Friend was a, well. An omission. He's my conjunx endura," Rewind said. He winced. "Maybe he was my conjunx endura. He went missing and I haven't found anything to explain it."

"What was his name?" Chromedome asked.

"Dominus Ambus," Rewind said.

"Wait." Chromedome looked over at him. "The Dominus Ambus? Dominus Ambus is missing?"

"The one and only," Rewind sighed. "Guess I had a bit of classified intel after all."

"I'm sorry," Chromedome said. "That must be awful."

"I miss him so much," Rewind said softly. "I'm going to find out what happened to him. I'm going to find him. No matter what. I owe him so much more than that, but if that's all I can do...I'm going to find him."

"Wait, you interrupted looking for Dominus Ambus—the Dominus Ambus—to help me?"

"I'd already checked all the coffins at that facility and he wasn't there, so you really weren't interrupting much. That was why I was—yeah. Frustration got to me. Another clinic down, zero clues. But even if I hadn't—I wasn't going to leave you there. You needed my help."

"You're kinda amazing, you know that, right?" Chromedome asked.

"I'm really not," Rewind said. "Any decent person would have offered to help."

"That’s definitely not true. Or maybe the world just doesn’t have a lot of decent people? But I’m 100% certain that most people would have heard ‘New Institute’ and backed off, even if they’d planned to help. You’re fearless."

"Okay, I am definitely not fearless. I’m scared of lots of things." Rewind said. "But I am stubborn as fuck. There’s no way I’m giving up on Dominus and once I offered to help you? There was no way I was giving up on you. That’s just not the kind of person I am."

They'd decided the best plan was for Rewind to keep to his normal routine. He'd left Chromedome with a netlinked datapad and a newly created comm profile to contact him "in case of emergencies" and a long list of things not to do while keeping a low profile. No going outside, no using any of his built-in communication equipment or comming any of his known associates. Who would he contact anyway? There was Prowl and there was Brainstorm and both of them were Primus-knew-where. And even if he knew where they were, he wasn’t confident they wouldn't contact the Institute to come pick him up; out of duty to the Autobot cause or under the assumption he was going insane.

Was he going insane? Chromedome lay on the floor of Rewind's apartment and looked at the ceiling light overhead, counting seconds on his chrono. He'd given up on the bench, it was more comfortable on the floor. It felt too invasive to sit on Rewind's berth, even though the mech had offered it to him last night before he turned in to recharge. He didn't want to intrude more than he already was. It was also why he hadn't opened up any of the stacked boxes of research notes, even though Rewind had given him permission. He could have browsed the net on the datapad, but he hadn't even gotten as far as turning it on. He just lay on the floor and counted seconds and wondered what was wrong with him.

He didn't love the things he did at the Institute. He understood that some of it was necessary, the intelligence they dragged out of Decepticon operatives and corpses saved lives. He had doubts about the things they asked him to do to his own side. But he'd sworn to serve and he couldn't disprove what they said—that it was kindest to nudge people towards making the right decisions rather than have them suffer the consequences of making the wrong ones. That the Autobots would have already fallen without his work.

Nonetheless, he'd been uncomfortable for a long time. And if someone had offered him a chance to change fight the Decepticons another way, any other way, he would have taken it. That wasn't what scared him. It was the urgency of the day before. He'd felt barely coherent when he'd run. He'd been well and truly panicked.

Maybe he'd gotten mixed up in memories from his reads? He'd wondered about that, whether the spending so much time in other people’s brains could change you. None of the other mnemosurgeons talked about it, so he assumed he was just being paranoid. But so many of the Decepticons he injected were terrified of mnemosurgery, a spark-stopping fear. Maybe that was where this was coming from?

He rubbed at his helm and decided the best thing he could do was wash off. Maybe that would wash away some of this fog, make him feel awake again. He dragged himself to his feet and and shuffled through the screen to the washrack.

The ceiling was even lower here, probably because they kept the solvent piping up above him. He fumbled for a reasonable way to stand in the stall and ended up sitting on the floor instead. He turned the spray on as cold as it would go and realized he'd forgotten to look for a brush or cloth to actually wash off with. He'd forgotten to ask Rewind if it was alright if he used his washrack. What if Rewind was getting charged for his solvent use and Chromedome dissociated again and wasted it?

He stood abruptly and whacked his head on the ceiling. Clutching his head, he reached over for the handle and got solvent spray right in his optic. He cursed, and then remembered he was supposed to be quiet and not attract attention. He cursed again, more quietly.

Finally he got the spray off and crouched there, dripping wet, spark racing.

He didn't have anything to dry himself off with, he realized. Most washracks he'd used had come with blower fans that obviated the need for such things, but he didn't see anything like that in Rewind's. He wasn't going to be an aft and get the rest of Rewind's apartment wet, so apparently he was going to be stuck in here, dripping and feeling like a fool until it all evaporated off.

It hadn’t worked the way he’d planned but at least the momentary panic had made him feel less foggy. He wasn't sure how long that would last, so he tried to make a to-do list for the rest of his day. He should figure out how to operate Rewind's infuser case so he didn't mess it up later in front of him. He should turn on the datapad and start researching what was wrong with him. And then he needed to start figuring out a long term plan. He couldn't mooch off Rewind forever and hide in his apartment.

List in hand, his brain started buzzing to be allowed to start before he lost momentum again. He forced himself to wait until he was sure he wouldn't leave puddles on the floor, at least. He tried to satisfy the buzzing by tapping out a rhythm on his legs, stopping when he realized he couldn't remember what song he was remembering. He'd add that to his to-do list—looking for the song. Maybe that was a clue? Maybe the song had come from the memories of someone else and that's why it was wrapped up with these feelings that felt so foreign? He wasn't even sure if this was the same song that had been chasing him the day before.

There was a raised threshold at the edge of the washracks, to keep liquid from spilling out across the living area. Given how his day was going, Chromedome felt pretty good about noticing that before he left and neatly avoiding tripping over it. He stretched out in the main area. His helm brushed the ceiling but at least he could stand up. He ran through his to-do list under his breath. If he didn't lie back down he wouldn't get sucked back down into another shiftless spiral. He checked the infuser case first. Except for the difficulty in getting the case to open—the catch was built for smaller fingers—everything looked familiar. The wiring for the electrical hookup led up the wall to the ceiling instead of into a circuit box, so it was probably a solar travel model that had been installed indoors for cost reasons.

Next he was going to get that datapad and turn it on. Rewind had left it on top of the stack of boxes by the berth, beside a few knick-knacks. Or maybe they were important work equipment, Chromedome wasn't sure what being an archivist entailed. There was an old camera on top of the stack. Chromedome picked it up gingerly. He didn't know much about cameras, but this one was definitely an antique—just the shape of it made it look like it should be in a historical drama. He turned it over in his hands and caught sight of the inscription.

Your passions are not frivolous. You have all my love and support, always. ~Dominus.

Slag. Chomedome flinched back like the camera was hot and put it back as quickly as he could. Intruding on Rewind's private life like a sneak, when he welcomed you into his home? Pathetic. He huffed a breath and tried to calm down. Rewind had invited him to look at the research he had in the boxes—he would have necessarily needed to move the collection of things off the top of the stack before he would have been able to do that. No harm done. He reached over for the datapad, hand still shaking and knocked into the camera.

It hit the ground with a clink of glass cracking.

"No." Chromedome whispered, sliding to the floor after it and scooping it up in his hands like an injured bird. "No, no, no."

He turned it over in his hands, a sob rising up in his throat. The glass lens in the front had cracked and the corner was dented but that had to be fixable, right? Camera lenses, they were replaceable, right? He finally succeeded in locating the power switch and turned it on. Hopefully the fall hadn't done anything to the camera's memory.

The display stayed dark. He switched it off and tried again. Nothing. He lifted the camera up to his audial as he tried to power it on, listened for the slightest sound to indicate it was turning on.

Nothing.

He let himself cry then, dropping his head onto his knees and trying to choke back as much noise as he could. His mind hurdled from catastrophe to catastrophe and he dug his fingers into the floor to stop himself from getting up and bolting. He wasn't going to run away from this. Rewind might send him away, but he wasn't going to just disappear with no explanation.

Once he'd calmed down a little, he reached for the datapad. He should send Rewind a message explaining what had happened before Rewind got home. His helm was pounding again, a steady throb behind his visor. He squinted at the screen as it lit up.

There was already a message from Rewind. His spark dropped out from under him as he hesitated to open the messaging application. He was suddenly convinced, with all the power the paranoia and guilt stewing up in his brain could muster, that somehow Rewind knew. Maybe he'd bugged his own apartment and was watching the whole time. That didn't even make sense. Still, his finger hovered over the icon, absolutely certain that Rewind knew. He shuttered his optics and pressed his finger to the screen.

He powered his optics back on a sliver, just enough to make out the words on the screen. There were a whole series of messages.

How's your morning going?

You doing okay?

I hope you're doing fine and I'm just being paranoid. Check in with me?

I'm coming home early. See you in an hour or so

He checked the timestamp on that last message—it was nearly an hour ago already. He needed to reply, send something. Anything. He clicked into the text box and then froze up again, unsure of what to type. Rewind was going to be home soon enough anyway.

A message popped up almost instantly: Hey! Hi

You doing okay? I saw that you finally got online

He had to say something. It seemed to take forever but he managed to type out the words and hit send.

He put the datapad down and tried to vent evenly. Sometimes mistakes happened. Mistakes like breaking someone's prized possession that they were given by their missing-presumed-dead conjunx endura. Little, unsolvable, completely unfixable fuckups. Sometimes that happened and sometimes people died but usually nobody died and he wasn't going to die because it was going to be fine—

"Chromedome!" The door slammed and Chromedome flinched. He glanced over at Rewind, who was standing in the doorway, hands braced against his knees with his little fans whining like a jet plane about to take off. Rewind staggered over, gasping like he was relying on secondary cooling to keep his temperature under control. He waved his hands wildly at Chromedome. "You're okay!"

"Rewind, I am so so sorry," he said as the minibot plunked himself down to sit next to him on the floor. "I'm a disaster today, but I swear if there's some way I can make it right—"

"Oh Primus, I thought you were dying," Rewind gasped. He slumped over to lean on Chromedome's shoulder. "For reference, when a recently suicidal person sends you a message that says "I'm sorry I ruined everything" it's easy to work yourself into a panic. Oh Primus. You're fine."

"Slag, I'm sorry," Chromedome said, abashed. "I didn't mean to worry you I just—I really am sorry, but I've broken it."

Rewind finally looked over at the camera cradled in his hands. "Oh, Chromedome," he said. Chromedome had no idea how to take that tone—was he laughing at him? But he let Rewind lift the camera out of his hands. Rewind turned the camera over, glancing at the cracked lens and the dented corner and then setting it up on the stack of boxes. "It's fine."

"It doesn't turn on, I don't know what I did," he said.

"You didn't do anything," Rewind said. "It hasn't turned on in years. I dropped it the second day I had it. Off a bridge. Into a lake. The internals all shorted out and, given that it was an antique and we were off-planet, there was really never any hope of fixing it. The only reason I have it at all is because Dominus, deep down in that big spark of his, was impossibly sentimental. He hired a boat to go out into the lake and then dove under to find it for me."

Chromedome struggled to compute. "Wait, I didn't break it?"

"I mean you broke it a little bit, but given that I was the one that hurled it off a bridge I don't really have room to be mad or anything," Rewind said. "On the other hand I am a little annoyed about the terrifying message. I'm going to cut you slack for that one though because you're having a bit of a crisis at the moment."

"I'm a disaster," Chromedome moaned, leaning his head against his knees.

"You're going to be okay," Rewind said. He reached over to put his hand on Chromedome's shoulder.

"Tell me about him?" Chromedome asked. "Dominus?"

Rewind huffed a laugh. "I assume you saw the inscription on the camera." When Chromedome looked away Rewind squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. "Really, I'm not mad. That's ancient history for me."

"Ancient?"

"I'm pretty old," Rewind said. "You're cold constructed, so you're definitely younger than me. But even if you weren't I'd still be pretty confident—I was alive before there were Disposables."

"Wait, really? How old even—"

"I was forged shortly before they switched to the new calendar," Rewind said.

"Damn." Chromedome thought that over. "So how long ago was this camera incident?"

"Oh, well I'd actually been using 'ancient' as a figure of speech. Imprecise of me, I know. Dominus gave it to me shortly after we started his quest for Luna I."

"Were you with Dominus when you were a—" he catches himself before he could finish the sentence. "Sorry, that's none of my business."

"I'm not ashamed of it," Rewind said. "I didn't do anything to be ashamed of. And yeah, I was with Dominus before I was free; it was his advocacy that started the integration movement, you know? I don't know if that's really a thing they talk about anymore. Not one of his more glamorous public achievements, but it was the one he always said he was most proud of." Rewind dipped his head a little. "Dominus wasn't the only person who held my contract, but he was the last."

"I've never known someone who knew a celebrity before," Chromedome said. "It's strange, thinking about Dominus Ambus as a person. I mean, I know he's a person. But he'd written part of my acculturation curriculum when I first came online."

"I didn't know enough to be star struck when we first met," Rewind said. "I was a truly disagreeable disposable at that point in my life. I was lucky that Dominus was unworldly in the realm of disposables as I was in everything else—I think the first time I told him no I flipped a switch in his brain. But yeah, he was always Dominus first."

"I am sorry about the camera," Chromedome said. "If I'd lost someone, all of that stuff—the things they'd touched—I'd want to keep that. I think. Sorry, I don't know what I'm talking about, I should stop talking." He groaned.

Rewind stood up. "I think you need a nap."

"I what?"

"Come, come, up," Rewind said, tugging on Chromedome's hand until he stood up. Once Chromedome was standing Rewind pushed him towards the berth; Chromedome humored him and sat down. "Now lay down," Rewind said, shaking his hand for emphasis.

Chromedome stretched out until he was lying down, his legs hanging off the berth. Rewind contemplated this, hand to his chin. "Okay, you're going to need to turn onto your side and bring your knees in."

"I'm not even tired," Chromedome protested half-heartedly.

"We can talk if you prefer," Rewind said. "But if you apologize to me again I'm turning the lights out and going into standby." He sat down on the edge of the berth and leaned back against Chromedome's chest. "So what do you do to relax, Chromedome? What do you like?"

"Like, hobbies?" He didn't really have hobbies. He couldn't say "drinking", that sounded pathetic. Slag, how had he forgotten to cultivate some socially acceptable hobbies so he could make smalltalk when he met compelling strangers?

"Yeah, like hobbies," Rewind said. "I do photography. And videography. Got a real soft spot for documentaries, thought that's more work than hobby at this point. So that's me. What about you?"

"I like music," Chromedome said. "I guess that's a thing?"

"Oh, what kind of music?"

Chromedome shrugged. It was hard to shrug while laying down. "Bits of this and that. I had this song in my head the other day but I can't seem to figure out where it came from. But I know I like Vroom? Don't know where I first heard their stuff, but they're a lot of fun."

"Vroom?" Rewind repeated. "Like, vroom vroom?"

"Exactly like that."

"Never heard of them," Rewind said, reaching for the datapad. "I don't listen to a lot of music. Dominus wasn't opposed to music, but he was never much for the arts. Just didn't connect to it, he always said. He was very supportive of my work, but...not really his thing. He was always trying to find ways to compliment them and ending up terribly stilted. 'The lighting in this piece makes it easy to distinguish the identities of all the figures pictured, Rewind.' He did appreciate when I did documentary work—it gave him so many more hooks to comment on them authoritatively," Rewind said, impossibly fond.

Rewind continued messing with the datapad for a bit. Music began playing, a tune Chromedome recognized.

"Ugh, no, don't start with that record," he said. "It's really sad."

"Oh?" Rewind paused the music and glanced over at him. "I wouldn't have guessed from the title. "True Love At Last" ought to be a happy album, don't you think?"

"Dunno, it always makes me sad," Chromedome said. "If you want to listen to it you can."

"No, no, tell me where to start," Rewind said. "What's a good album?"

"Start with "Crash Crash, Boom Boom," Chromedome suggested. "That's a fun one."

Rewind laughed at the name, but it didn't take him long to find a download. He wiggled his hands in time with the music, a thing that Chromedome wasn't sure if he realized he was doing. It was cute. Nope, nuh-uh, it was not cute. "Cute" was not an acceptable adjective for describing a widower who was helping him run from the New Institute.

"I like them," Rewind said. "They're peppy—they'd be great background music for reviewing photo archives. That kind of work always makes me start drifting off."

"I thought you were a nerd. Aren't you supposed to like all that boring nerdy stuff?" Chromedome teased.

"I like history, I love archiving, I do not love poring over the abysmal handwriting of the old library technicians who insisted on writing all the identifying details of the photos in their collection in microscopic print."

"Gross," Chromedome said in solidarity.

The next song came on and Rewind took up wiggling his shoulders in counterpoint to his hands. Chromedome pillowed his head on his arm and tried to stay present in the moment. The things he didn't want to think about were lurking at the fringes of his attention, but as long as he kept his brain on the music they couldn't get to him. The "just don't look" school of problem solving. "You gonna dance?" he asked.

"Me?" Rewind asked. "Oh no, I don't dance."

"Not when people are watching?" Chromedome suggested.

"Well, that too. I mean, besides Dominus, he always loved to—sorry. I keep bringing him up, that must be awkward for you."

"He's your conjunx, you're not just going to forget him. So much of your life is spent together, it's only reasonable that a lot of your memories would touch on him," Chromedome said. He didn't resent Dominus Ambus. Perfect, inimitable, scholar-philanthropist, tragically missing Dominus Ambus. That would be absurd. "But go on, dance if you want to. I promise not to judge."

"They always say that," Rewind said, immediately hopping off the berth and starting a shimmy that resembled no dance Chromedome had ever seen in a vid. It seemed to involve a lot of dramatic hand gestures. Maybe that's the sort of dancing people did in clubs nowadays. Maybe that's the sort of dancing people did in clubs way back in the day? Back when Chromedome had been going to places outside the Institute he'd usually tagged along with Prowl and Prowl had favored the utilitarian engex-focused bars. Prowl was not a fan of dancing in public.

When the song ended Rewind skipped over to the datapad to check the next track listing. "You should join me Chromedome. I heard exercise is good for people who are de—for breaking through that mental fog. Engages the spark and the body."

"Hey, you said you wanted me to rest, now you want me to get up. Make up your mind," Chromedome protested.

"That was before you insisted I dance."

"You were clearly inspired by the spirit of music and I was concerned that if the infection wasn't treated you might suffer spontaneously spark failure. That's a sad tragedy happening all over this planet, you know," Chromedome said. "I mean, on top of the murder and war and death and suffering. On top of all that there's the sad tragedy of dancey people who, in restraining themselves from pursuing their dancey urges, hasten themselves towards the afterspark."

"Fine, fine. But you get to DJ," Rewind said, tossing him the datapad. "It says "Splitwise" is the next song. Is that a good one?"

"Not their best work," Chromedome said, skimming through the list. "How much can your neighbors hear through these walls and are any of them especially religious, because 'Passe Primus' is a great song but a little sacrilegious."

"Oh, none of them would care, put it on," Rewind said.

Later, when Chromedome was starting to lose bits of their conversation to sleepy static, Rewind collapsed onto the berth and turned the music off. He curled up into the space at Chromedome's chest, warm like a space heater. "This okay?" he asked.

"It's your berth," Chromedome said, vaguely remembering his intention to not steal Rewind's berth as well as his normalcy, but there was no way to get back out of the berth without climbing over Rewind. He was so tired he would probably squish him. Being anxious was exhausting.

He needed to stop him. The mech with the grey visor shook his head as Chromedome stepped in front of the door of their barracks. He didn't have a plan for this. He needed a plan.

There were bodies on the floor, the other members of their squad who'd tried to stop him. "Don't take another step," he said, backing up to the door. He didn't have a weapon on him. Chromedome had never needed to carry a weapon because he'd never been allowed on the front lines—he was on the front lines why didn't he have a weapon—he pulled out his knife and held it up as if he expected it to make a difference. "You were their friend," he hissed.

The mech looked down at his hands, which were covered in spent fuel. "I just want to walk out of here, Flux. Please, step aside."

"You're betraying the cause," Chromedome spat. "You're betraying Lord Megatron."

"If the purpose of our movement is to reject a world in which we are not the masters of our own destinies, why am I not allowed to choose to leave?" the mech said. "Let me pass, Flux. I don't want to hurt you."

Flux—Chromedome—Flux stepped towards him, knife hand wobbling. "I've called in an alert. You'll never make it out of this camp alive—"

There was a knife in his side and a knife missing from his hands. The world seemed to slow down as the mech shouldered past him, magic trick complete. Chromedome grabbed for his shoulder. "You'll never make it out, Scattergun," he gasped.

"Neither will you, Chromedome," Scattergun said. "I'm sorry." Then he pulled the knife free.

Chromedome woke up. He was in a dark room and the song was back, rattling around his head like a drumbeat, like ten drumbeats all piled atop one another and screaming for him to run, to go. He had to escape. Scattergun was coming—wait, no. He didn't know who that was. He didn't know where he was.

Chromedome lay very still and tried not to give himself away by screaming.

Something moved on the berth beside him and Chromedome tried to scramble away, but he ran against the wall and found no escape. The motion tugged at the cord plugged into the side of his helm and Chromedome was momentarily distracted by the realization that they'd already gotten him, there was something in his brain and he had to get it out he had to get it—

"Chromedome! Stop it, you're going to hurt yourself!" Rewind said and the lights flicked on.

Chromedome blinked owlishly at Rewind. "Where am I?" he asked, even as he began to remember the tiny room and the ceiling light hanging just low enough to bang your head.

"You're in my apartment. You were recharging," Rewind said.

"Oh yeah. Must have been a memory purge. I remembered the time I got stabbed in the barracks at—" Chromedome stopped. That didn't make sense. "That couldn’t have happened to me. I’m not a Decepticon."

"Is that possible? Memory purges of other people's memories?" Rewind asked.

"It's not supposed to be." He disconnected the leads of the infuser case and crawled off the berth. He got to the door before he realized he couldn't go out. "I don't know what's happening to me," he said, staring at the door. It was a relief to admit it. "Something is wrong and I know it's wrong but I don't know what it is. I should go—"

"Where?"

"Back. Clearly I'm messed up in the head, if I could just get the doctors at the Institute to look at me," he shuddered, "they could prune that out. They could take away the fear." That and the song and Scattergun’s voice rolling over and over in his head, apologizing to him with that desperation that seemed so out of place in the scene.

"Chromedome, you were terrified of going back there—"

"That's why you know there's something messed up in my brain. I don't even know what I'm afraid of! I don't know why any of this is happening and I don't know who Scattergun is and I don’t know why he said my name and I don't know what fucking song is playing in my head and I want it to stop. I just want it all to stop," he said, voice breaking.

"Don't go back," Rewind said. "You don't know why it's happening but there has to be a reason. We're going to figure out what that is. And then we're going to do something about it." He offered Chromedome his hand.

Chromedome laughed. "How?"

"We find a trail and we follow it," Rewind said confidently. "You said a name just then. Scattergun. Who is he?"

"I don't know. He was in the memory, he was—the name feels familiar. More than it should be. It feels important. It didn’t feel like a normal memory purge—there was a bit at the end where Scatter started—talking to me, he used my name. But I’ve never met him. Even if all the rest of it came from some Decepticon I read, how could I remember something that never happened?"

"Scatter?" Rewind repeated.

"Yeah, it was like—wait." Chromedome realized what Rewind had meant. "I don’t know why I called him that. It feels…it feels right? But I don’t know him."

"The music you mentioned—was that also in the memory purge?" Rewind asked.

Chromedome shook his head. "No, but when I woke up it was back. I don’t know if it’s linked or not, but it’s this song and I don’t know where it’s from and now I can’t get it out of my head. I feel like it might be linked to Scattergun? But I don’t know how or why or how I could know that if it was."

"Right. Scattergun. Let’s figure out who he is," Rewind said, offering Chromedome his hand. Hesitantly, Chromedome let himself be led back to the bench. Rewind grabbed his datapad and powered it on before sliding into place beside Chromedome, pad balanced across his knees and one hand wrapped protectively around Chromedome's.

"Who was he? In the memory? Was he the person whose memories you were reliving, or someone else?"

"He stabbed me. Well, not me. It was a Decepticon barracks and he was—he was leaving and the people in his squad were trying to stop him. He was deserting, I think."

"Okay, so we're looking for a Decepticon-affiliated bot under the name Scattergun...there really can't be that many of them," Rewind said. He started typing.

"Do you have a database of the entire population?"

"Don't be absurd. I have multiple databases," Rewind said. "Checking census records first...okay, that's not promising." Rewind glanced over at him. "Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"The last census was before the war started and Scattergun is a pretty Decepticon-y sounding name. It's possible he changed his name."

"Or that he was an MTO and didn't exist before the war started," Chromedome suggested.

"Also possible," Rewind said. "Okay, so that's out. I'll check my Decepticon roster, but that's pretty incomplete so I'm not really expecting a hit." He typed for a little bit and shook his head. "Nothing."

"It's okay if you can't find anything," Chromedome said.

"Nope" Rewind shook his finger at him. "We're not giving up yet. Tell me everything you remember about this memory. Where were you? Who else was there? Were there any details in your surroundings we can use to narrow down on a date? I need more data."

Chromedome stumbled through retelling the dream again, trying to figure out what might be important. When he mentioned that the barracks were at Kith Kinsere, Rewind stopped him.

"That's it. I think I’ve got something about Kith Kinsere," Rewind said, putting his hand to his temple and shuttering his optics. He stayed there like that for a long moment, unmoving.

"Rewind?" Chromedome asked. "You okay?"

Rewind's optics blinked on. "Accessing my internal database," he said, voice more metallic than Chromedome had ever heard it. Like he was speaking through several layers of compression and decompression. "I have footage of news reports from Kith Kinsere. There was a riot at the Decepticon barracks, which the Autobot artillery used as an opening to retreat from the siege wall." He reached down to his forearm and popped open a compartment to reveal a linkup cable. Rewind plugged the one end into his datapad and the other to his helm. The screen blinked white and then flashed to reveal a newscaster in a brightly lit room.

"We are receiving reports that the Decepticon insurgents at Kith Kinsere are in disarray. There has been a riot at their installation, with tens or maybe hundreds of terrorists either deserting or fleeing the chaos. Zeta Prime's troops took this opportunity to drive back the insurgents from their outpost north of Kith Kinsere—could this be the turning point the citizens of Kith Kinsere have been waiting for? Next, we bring you in-the-air footage from one of our flyby photographers."

The newsroom vanished and was replaced by aerial footage swooping down over a bombed out road. There were bodies strewn about, Decepticon badges ripped from their plating. A few soldiers were hunkered down behind a barricade made of an greyed-out tank and were firing back into the smoke and flames of what must have been the gate to the barracks. One of those soldiers sighted the newsglider and waved at them. "Send help!" he yelled, words unmistakable even as his voice was lost in the chaos of the recording. The soldier beside him shoved him to the ground as a flash of laserfire lit overhead. That soldier glared at the camera before bringing his gun back to bear on the Decepticon installation.

Chromedome grabbed at Rewind's arm. "That's him. That's Scattergun."

The recording froze, then rewound a few seconds. There he was—black frame, grey visor, face still fuel-splattered. Chromedome knew him, he was sure of it.

"I've seen him before," Rewind said. "I'm sure of it."

"Where?"

"I'm not sure yet," Rewind said, passing the datapad to Chromedome and pulling the cord from his temple so that he could get up and pace. "I don't know him, but I've seen him. Somewhere recently."

Chromedome picked up the datapad and stared at it, willing his brain to work and connect the dots. He was certain that he was missing something here, but he had no idea what. Or maybe there was nothing there at all and his brain had just fixated on the imagery in his memory purge because it was disturbing and seemed like a more reasonable thing to be afraid of than whatever was actually wrong with him.

"Oh." Rewind stopped pacing. "Oh." he repeated.

"Oh?" Chromedome echoed.

"Good news is I know where he is. The bad news is he's definitely dead." Rewind said, spinning around and striding to the door. "Come on, let's go find him."

"Wait, what?"

Rewind clasped his hands together, bouncing on his heels. "Okay, so you remember how I said I was looking for Dominus, right?" He asked, words coming out rapidfire. "Well, in doing that I've been to a lot of places you're not supposed to go. There's a dump site outside of town, municipal waste mostly. Someone tipped me off a few weeks ago that there are bodies there and I checked it out. No sign of Dominus, but sure enough, there's a mass grave. Mostly Decepticons, not entirely. I saw that face," he pointed at the datapad, "in amongst those bodies."

"How would he—"

"Well, something is weird about your memories circling around this guy. You’re half-remembering things you can’t be remembering and you work for the New Institute...which happens to be relatively close to a bunch of Decepticon bodies disposed of where they're not supposed to be? I think we've got to assume that it's connected somewhere. That's why I need you to come with me and check it out."

"Rewind didn't we decide it was too dangerous for me to be walking around?"

"Walking around for no reason. This is a reason. A really good reason. If you use mnemosurgery to read Scattergun and figure out why he's important that could crack this entire mystery wide open and that'll tell us what we have to do next."

"You just said he was dead," Chromedome protested.

"Mnemosurgeons can do reads on dead bodies, right?" Rewind said, sounding far more confident than any civilian ought to be.

"Limited memory retrieval," Chromedome corrected. "Memories tend to degrade rapidly over the first few hours after death. There might be some residual memories left, but there's no guarantee it'd tell us anything useful."

"Okay, but it might?" Rewind asked.

"It might," Chromedome agreed. "Red letter days tend to stick around the longest."

"Then we have to try." Rewind held out his hand for Chromedome to take. "We can’t fix this if we don’t know what’s wrong. And if we can’t trust your memories, Scattergun is our next best shot at figuring it out."

Against his better judgement, Chromedome let Rewind lead him back outside. He shifted to his alt mode so that Rewind could ride inside, navigating them through the moonlit streets towards the outside of town.

"There's nobody out here," Chromedome eventually said, not quite asking the question.

"There's a curfew," Rewind said. "Don't worry, I'm steering us around the patrols."

Chromedome realized that he had—once again—found a friend who was more willing to break rules and hop fences than he was. Which ought not to have been as surprising—he'd met Rewind when Rewind was literally breaking and entering. He swallowed down his hesitation and took them out onto the open road outside of Teledonia. Eventually Rewind's directions led them to an access road that cut through a huge bermed structure. Inside there was mountains of waste; mostly rubble from bombed buildings and jagged bits of heat warped metal. Chromedome transformed back to his root mode and they picked their way down into the junkyard.

He wondered how Rewind had found the bodies the first time around. Had he hunted through the entire junkyard? Or had his "tip" included coordinates? Who was giving Rewind information that included things like that?

Rewind walked out onto a beam that was jammed across two piles and jumped down into the narrow space below. He silently waved Chromedome down after him, both of them hesitant to speak as they approached the place where the bodies were hidden.

There was a tarp hung between a pair of junked railcars, all the doors and windows missing, the insides gutted and smelling of ozone and spoiled fuel. Rewind walked to the edge of the tarp and looked back at him. "You ready?" he asked. Can you handle it? was left unspoken.

"I've seen a lot of dead people," Chromedome said.

"I have too," Rewind replied. "Always have to brace myself."

I don't, Chromedome thought. The sight of bodies didn’t turn him around the way it did other people. He could remember that it used to, back in Iacon, but after he started mnemosurgery it was like a switch had flipped. He’d always put that down to exposure therapy, but...maybe there was just something messed up about him. "I'm ready," he said, and stepped forward to help Rewind lift the tarp away.

The bodies were stacked atop one another in rows, packed in as tightly as possible. They looked peaceful, like they'd fallen into recharge and greyed out in their sleep. Nothing like the torn-apart victims of war Chromedome was used to seeing. It was jarring.

"I assumed these were dumped by a relinquishment clinic," Rewind whispered. "But a clinic would usually sell bodies for parts, it's just bad business to waste them. Someone didn't want to risk taking these bodies to a scrapyard or a smelter; they wanted them gone."

Chromedome was busy scanning the rows of bodies. He found Scattergun near the top of the pile and, bracing one foot on the railcar, grabbed the body by the shoulderwheels to pull him out. At the first tug the frame's metal scraped loudly against the surrounding frames. Chromedome froze. He pulled again, trying to slide the body free as gently as possible. The metal scraped and squealed but he forged ahead, shoulders up around his audials as he finally dragged the body onto the ground with him. He fell back onto his aft, hugging the body to his chest, suddenly aware of how heavy it was. Apparently nobody had stripped out the internals.

He squeezed out from underneath the body, bracing the helm to lay it out gently on the dusty ground. He glanced at Rewind. "Do you want to watch this part? Injecting tends to make people squeamish."

"I've never gotten to see a mnemosurgeon in action," Rewind said. "You're not sending me away now."

"I might not get anything useful," Chromedome warned him, trying to temper expectations. "I probably won't. These bodies are cooled, there's going to be very little residual charge left in the brain module."

He'd thought that maybe he'd freeze up when the time came to inject. But everything went smoothly, motions he'd practiced hundreds of times. His needles slid out and clicked into place. He shone his integrated light through the lens of the visor, marking the injection points with the tips of his needles. It was easier to get deeper in the brain module if you went through the optics, deeper where there might be some charge left even as the body cooled. Chromedome drew his needles back in slowly, bringing his fingers forward as he did so that his fingertips met up with the cold glass of the visor.

Then he plunged the needles through the glass.

He jolted as his push of charge was echoed back up his hand, his arm already aching, an old familiar burn. He glanced at the readings on his HUD, then dismissed them. Some mnemosurgeons liked to track the numbers. Chromedome always had the most luck playing by feel. He waited until the connection felt steady and then dropped his consciousness down into the brain of the body beneath him.

Terpan would say that that wasn't how mnemosurgery worked. He would go on and on about the science of it, of charge being echoed back against the pulses given out by the needles and then carried up through the surgeon's sensornet so that he could interpret them as if they were impulses carried from their own spark-brain bridge. But that wasn't what it felt like. It felt like falling into the subject's brain module, of squeezing himself into the small room, the innermost bunker, the only space left above water as the mech sank into oblivion. He steered by instinct, pulling himself deeper and deeper until he found something still burning.

"Don't hesitate."

-

There was a gun in his hands and a body at his feet and people were screaming, screaming screaming—

-

"What are you doing, soldier? You freeze like that in real combat and you're going to—"

-

There was a tape in his hands, labeled ‘Semisonic’. He turned it over and over and over, leaning up against the wall of the bunker.

-

"Do you ever wonder? If what we're doing is worth the cost?"

-

There was a mech under him, crying with fear. Scattergun glanced over his shoulder, where backup was waiting. "You have a chance to live," he said. "Join us. Fight with us."

-

There was a gun in his hands and a body at his feet and people were screaming, screaming screaming—

-

"So you wish to prove your loyalty to the Autobots," a voice said. "What can you possibly do to prove that, Decepticon scum?" The room was dark and his hands were chained together, shoulders pressed up against the mechs on either side of him. He squinted at the white mech, head pounding.

-

He cleaned his gun, disassembling it slowly as he tried to keep his hands from shaking. The music was a beat in the back of his head. He watched his squad laughing on the other side of the room, voices fragmented and garish. Nine people between him and the door. Between him and freedom from the guilt.

-

"You will be posted to the New Institute, where you will be assigned to guard one of the mnemosurgeons. His name is Chromedome. If he is hurt, in any way, during this assignment you will not be returned here alive."

-

"Are you afraid of me?" Chromedome was almost thrown out of the memory at the sound of his own voice.

"Yes," Scattergun said. "I'm sorry." Chromedome tried to weave the fragments together, to follow the thread, but there was nothing left. He drifted through the space where there had been memories, watching little flecks of light and color spark across his vision, booms of gunfire like thunder and a pulsing beat like music. He focused on the music, letting it pull him further down into the darkness.

Scattergun tried to pull Chromedome away from the operating table. "You've done enough, love. You need to stop." Chromedome was shaking his head and Scattergun knew he was going to lose this fight. He stepped into place behind Chromedome and wrapped his arms around his conjunx, helping him stand.

-

Scattergun lifted his conjunx off the floor of the lab and into the wheelchair in the corner. "Chromedome? Can you hear me?" he asked, pressing his hand to the side of Chromedome's face. Yellow optics flickered and then dimmed under his hand. Chromedome's needles were still extended, hands laying loose over his knees. Scattergun fought down the urge to snap them off, to pull out the poison that was killing his conjunx. Oh, they thought he didn't know. They thought he was too stupid to know or too loyal to care. But he could see it, day by day. His conjunx was dying.

-

The operator on the phone refused to put him through. "Please," he begged. "Tell Prowl that it's urgent. It's about Chromedome."

"Who?"

"The mech he personally assigned me to protect! I'm calling to let him know that I've failed and that he needs to come here and do something about it."

"If you were supposed to be able to connect to Prowl, you'd already have his number. Please report to your superior officer and follow the proper chain of command—"

-

Chromedome kissed him and Scattergun melted into his arms. "I'm going to be okay, Scatter," Chromedome whispered. "You don't have to worry about me. The medics looked me over and I'm going to be fine—I'd just overworked myself."

Scattergun clung to him, wishing that was true. "I would do anything for you," he said. "I love you." He wanted to spill out his certainty that this was the end, but he couldn't bear to have Chromedome laugh it off or dismiss it. Not when he knew what was coming. He'd keep Chromedome safe as long as he could, to the best of his ability. And then, maybe, when he died, Prowl would finally come to count the costs. He could only hope that he'd been given this assignment because Prowl cared if Chromedome lived and not out of some vindictive jab at his ex-lover.

-

Scattergun lengthened his stride to come around ahead of Chromedome. "Let me get that," he said.

"I can open a door myself," Chromedome protested.

"I need to sweep the room," Scattergun said and reached for the door handle.

The ceiling was above him, lines of white light tubes criss-crossing the black. Everything hurt, radiating down his arm and into his spark like he'd been poisoned. Had he been poisoned? He was losing his focus, the world was—

His world was—

Chromedome was—

"I'm here, please say something," his conjunx sobbed. The lights on the ceiling danced above him and Scattergun realized that he was dying. He wouldn't be able to protect Chromedome anymore. No, that was unacceptable. He needed to get up. He needed to protect Chromedome, he needed to make him understand that the people that ran the Institute were keeping things from him. Important things.

"No—let me go!" Chromedome screamed.

"He's dying, Chromedome," someone replied. "If you're injecting at the moment of death the rebound could kill you. You know that."

"I just need to tell him I love him, let me go—" Chromedome sobbed. "I need to know that he can hear me, please—"

The room was quiet but Scattergun knew he wasn't alone. The lights overhead dimmed, and someone approached, steps heavy as they came to the head of the berth. "Oh, Scattergun. If you had only kept your head down, you could have lived out your little conjugal fantasy with none of us the wiser. But you just had to play the hero." He couldn't feel his body, everything outside lost in the fire of sensations within. But he bet Axotomy had just laid a patronizing hand on his shoulder. It was exactly the thing he'd done every time Scattergun had tried to tell him about Chromedome's illness.

"He's been told you're already dead," Axotomy said. "I thought about making the voltage higher, removing all risk of that idiot injecting you. But then I wouldn't have had the chance to gloat. And honestly, gloating is one of the sweetest pleasures one gets in life. I don't believe in depriving oneself of life's pleasures."

There was pain and then the world lit bright again, Axotomy standing in front of him with his hand buried in his spark. Scattergun shook from the pain, but he refused to cry out. This isn't real, he reminded himself. This is in your head.

"Everything is in your head now," Axotomy said. "You're not getting out of this one alive. I just wanted the chance to see your face when I tell you what is going to happen next. You're going to die. And then Chromedome is going to forget you."

"He deserves to be happy," Scattergun rasped. "I don't fault him for that."

"Oh no," Axtomy said, twisting his hand inside Scattergun's spark. "I don't mean he’s going to move on. He's going to forget you. Completely and totally. I bet by the time I'm done snuffing out your spark, he’ll have already succumbed to temptation and needled out every trace of your existence."

"That isn't possible. He would never do that." Scattergun insisted.

"Oh, such loyalty." Axotomy smiled, delighted. "He’s going to do it, because he doesn't know how to handle grief. He's too fragile to take the suffering. Always has been."

The meaning of his words connected and Scattergun reared back in horror. Axotomy caught him, dragging him forward by the neck. He pushed his face into Scattergun's and snarled. "Yes, that's right. You're not his first conjunx. You're not the prettiest, the kindest or the most talented of the people that he’s buried and then burned from his memories. He just can't help falling in love, I guess. We all have our flaws."

And then he ripped out his spark.

"Chromedome!"

He was on the only space left above the water, the innermost bunker, a room in the darkness with the walls closing in on him. He needed to follow the path he'd taken to sink down this far but the lights had all faded out, path gone cold. He could hear someone calling his name, voice muffled by the distance. He pushed more energy into the injection, trying to light a pathway back out and feeling himself draining out in the effort.

An ember lit in the darkness and he threw himself towards it, rushing back up into himself. The world spun. His head lolled back and he looked a the moon overhead, wobbling above the shadowed silhouettes of rubble and wreckage.

"Chromedome!" Rewind grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him. "Are you okay?"

Chromedome tried to pull himself together, mind awhirl with staticked overlapping memories. There was coolant leaking out of his optics; he brought his hand up to wipe off his face and then stopped when he remembered the needles. He squinted at his hand and found they’d already retracted when he'd severed the connection to Scattergun. Scattergun. Chromedome covered his face with his hands. "I forgot him. I forgot him," he said. "I'm a monster."

"Who was he?" Rewind asked.

"He was my conjunx," Chromedome whispered.

He tried to explain what he'd seen, piecing it together out loud as he went. Scattergun’s defection, Prowl’s role in assigning him to the New Institute, Scattergun’s doomed attempt to save Chromedome… He couldn’t quite make himself explain the part where he’d been the one to make Scattergun disappear, couldn’t quite bring himself to lie and say he hadn’t done it.

Rewind listened to the story in horror. "They killed him? They murdered your conjunx?" He demanded.

"I don't know who was involved but...apparently. Yeah. My direct supervisor murdered my con—" he paused, breathless at the thought. "My conjunx."

"We have to fix this." Rewind said.

Chromedome squinted at him. "What is there to fix?" He waved his hand at Scattergun's dead body. "He's dead, Rewind. He's dead. Axotomy runs the New Institute, now that Trepan is gone. Even if he was the only person involved, he runs the New Institute. Who am I going to report him to, the Prime? Who do you think they'd believe, me or him?"

"Well, they could have another mnemosurgeon read Scattergun's memories and confirm what you saw," Rewind said.

"It doesn't work like that. You get one shot with an empty," Chromedome said. "What was left is all burned up now. There's nothing to read. And anyway, knowing what we know, how could we trust any mnemosurgeon to not be under his influence?"

"Okay, so we need to find proof. Physical proof. Physical proof that Scattergun existed—"

"No, we don't. There is no 'we'." Chromedome shook his head. "You need to go home. And I need to run. This proves it—I'm not going crazy and I'm not being irrational—there really is someone out to get me. And if Axotomy was willing to murder someone to keep me under his thumb, he's not going to let me slip away. I need to get off planet, as soon as possible."

"But this is wrong!"

"Everything is wrong!"

"So what's your plan? If you're going to run, how's that going to go?" Rewind asked, crossing his arms across his chest. Chromedome hadn't wanted Rewind to know what a coward he was.

"The city's neutral, I'm sure that means there are refugees gathering here to make their way off planet. I find them, get passage somehow. Never look back."

"That's a plan a little sparse on details, but you do the best you can," Rewind said. "Chromedome, he was your conjunx. Are you just going to let this go?"

"He died because he was trying to keep me safe. He realized that mnemosurgery was making me sick—was making every mnemosurgeon sick. We’re talking a cover-up on a massive scale. They'd have to be injecting every surgeon and most of the support staff to either make them not notice or not care." Chromedome shook his head. "It'd be us versus the entirety of the Institute."

"What if we went outside the Institute? There's other branches of Autobot intelligence," Rewind suggested.

"Do you have an in with Autobot intelligence?" Chromedome snapped.

"Not anymore," Rewind said. "But you do, don't you?"

"What?"

"Well, you said that Scattergun had tried to reach out to Prowl. He did that for a reason, because he thought Prowl would care about you in particular. I assume that means you know him."

"Prowl and I don't talk anymore," Chromedome said. "And it wouldn't matter anyway, because Prowl would probably approve of what they're doing. It's utilitarian. If the mnemosurgeons don't know they'll be making the ultimate sacrifice they can't quit because of it. Hiding the truth is practical."

"Is that what you really think he'd say?"

Chromedome shrugged. "If we contact him we’ll find out. But I think that's a plan that ends with us both on an operating table. I just found Scattergun, I don't want to lose him again."

"Right." Rewind deflated. "I'm sorry, I'm being unfair. You just lost your conjunx. I'm projecting. If it was Dominus...but it's not Dominus. You should do what you think is right."

He wanted to be that person. He wanted the bravery Rewind imagined for him. "He said there were others. That there mechs I'd forgotten before Scattergun. And now they're just....gone. There's no way I can ever get that back. I wonder what they were like? I wonder what they were like, that they could love me when I'm like this."

"They were lucky to have you," Rewind said fiercely. He looked down at the body laid out beside them. "What if...what if they weren't totally gone? What if there was someone who still remembers them?"

"Who?" Chromedome asked, even as the answer presented itself to him. "Brainstorm!"

"Axotomy does," Rewind said at the same time.

"What, what? Oh, Primus, no. No, I'm not even touching that suggestion."

"Well, we can brainstorm other ideas, but I'm just saying—from what you said, Axotomy definitely knows. So all you have to do is—" Rewind wiggled his fingers at him.

You are full of bad ideas," Chromedome said. "And I didn’t mean we should brainstorm other ideas, it's a name. My friend Brainstorm used to be stationed at the New Institute with me. He got transferred to an off-site research project a few months ago. It's a long shot, but what if he knows? But then again, he probably doesn't. If he knew, why wouldn't he have told me?"

"Let's find out," Rewind said. "Let's call him and see what he says."

"Yeah, there's an issue there," Chromedome said. "I don't have his comm frequency."

"He's your friend."

"Yes?"

"And you don't have his number?"

"The kind of assignment he's on is a ‘burn all your numbers and disappear from the face of the planet’ kind of assignment. I have a way to contact him, a last-resort emergencies phone, but it's back in my habsuite."

Rewind looked at him expectantly.

"So there's no way of contacting him without breaking into the Institute," Chromedome admitted.

"So when do we go?" Rewind asked.

"We aren't going," Chromedome said. "You're right, I have to risk this. I owe it to them, whoever they were. But you shouldn't involve yourself in all of this. If you got hurt—"

"Let's jump ahead to the part where you realize you can't change my mind," Rewind said. "I thought I was the only one looking for a lost conjunx. And somehow, chance brought me to you. And you've got an opportunity to find the truth and put things right. I'm going to help you see that through. You can understand that, right?"

"It's going to be dangerous."

"That's why I'm going."

"That doesn't even make sense," Chromedome said. He sighed. "Okay, we have to make a plan. But first, we have to figure out what we're doing with Scattergun."

Rewind sat down next to him. "I don't think we can bring him back to the apartment without attracting a lot of attention."

Chromedome reached over to lay his hand over the dead mech's chest. It was cold. "I don't want to leave him here like this. But we probably don't have time for a proper funeral. From what I saw of him, Scattergun wouldn't have wanted us to get caught for the sake of formalities. But leaving him here like this feels so wrong."

"If someone finds him here, that could lead to them discovering all the other bodies," Rewind said. "They were all important to someone; they deserve to be discovered as well."

Chromedome considered it. "Give me a minute with him?"

He waited until Rewind had walked a bit aways before repositioning the body to sit leaning up against the tarp. Chromedome reached into his hip compartment to fetch the vial he carried with him. He laid the empty vial in Scattergun's hands for safekeeping while he opened up his chest to get an offering. Probably his last one; Chromedome had always been low yield, he didn't have much innermost energon left.

When the deed was done, Chromedome again settled the vial, now half full, in Scattergun's hands. Now anyone who found the body would know that Scattergun was loved. Even though Chromedome couldn't remember loving him.

He leaned forward and pressed his forehead up against Scattergun's. "I know you'd tell me to run," he whispered. "And I will. Just have to do this first."

"He's coming in, do you have the shot?" Chromedome whispered.

Rewind snorted. "You're asking me to not shoot a guy, I think I can handle it." He'd already told him, at length, about Dominus's philosophy of the self-sufficient Cybertronian and about his years practicing sharp-shooting under his tutelage.

"Sorry, anxious," Chromedome whispered. "Let me know when."

The red-painted truck rumbled in along the path beneath the bluff. They slowed to a stop and then transformed, the headhunter carrying his cargo in his arms. He set the bodies down and looked around. Apparently seeing nothing amiss, he powered up one of his integrated exhaust vents to blow sand away from the access hatch.

"Now," Rewind said. There was a popping sound as he squeezed the trigger. The headhunter whirled around towards the bodies just as Chromedome dropped off the bluff behind him and sank his needles into his neck.

Chromedome pushed inside, stomping out the mech's senses like a someone stomping out a spreading fire. That done, he drew back to short term memory and wiped out the noise of the shot. Just a normal, uneventful arrival. Nothing exciting happening.

Chromedome waved at Rewind with his other hand, holding the mech in place until he felt Rewind's hand in his.

Then, slowly, he began to let the mech's senses filter back in. Sight, sound, proprioception, his awareness of time. Physical sensation he kept numbed around the site of the injection.

The mech lifted his hand to his face in confusion for a moment and Chomedome clamped down on his urge to look over his shoulder, smoothing away the odd feeling that someone was watching him. This was normal, routine. The mech moved to pick up the bodies and Chromedome stepped with him, keeping his hand perfectly steady against the back of his neck. He followed the mech like a shadow as they went to the entrance and the mech opened the door with the sensor that read his spark signal and optic refraction. Chromedome ducked down out of view of the security camera; Rewind was short enough that he was already below its line of sight.

The mech habitually stood in the far back corner of the elevator, Chromedome nudged him to step forward today. This sent up little eddies of confusion which Chromedome then had to smooth away. He was so deep in that work that he missed the chime of the door opening until he heard it echoed inside the headhunter's mind.

He shifted gears, sliding deeper into the mech's brain-sensornet connection, hunting down the circuits for motor control. Gently, he began to push charge into so they fizzled and curled. Those connections were hugely redundant, they'd reconnect in a few minutes after he pulled free but in the meantime...Chromedome pulled back into himself and retracted the barbs from his needles, letting the mech step away from him. The needles slid free and Chromedome held himself motionless as the mech walked out of the elevator, momentarily having forgotten how to turn his head to look behind him.

Rewind and Chromedome stayed silent as the mech walked away, Chromedome's mind struggling to settle back into its shell again. He wanted very much to sit down, hand shaking where he held it outstretched. He thought about what he'd seen in Scattergun's memory and he wondered whether he should have mentioned the dying part to Rewind. He wondered whether death was inevitable at this point. Had mnemosurgery broken something inside of him and now he would continue to fall apart slowly, degrading even if he stopped practicing?

The door closed, sealing them in, and Chromedome let himself sink down onto his heels in exhaustion.

Rewind whispered, "That was amazingly creepy."

"Thanks, I think?" Chromedome said.

"Carry this for me," Rewind said, passing over the gun. It was a minibot's self-defense gun, comically small in Chromedome's hands. He tucked it away out of sight and then held out his arms for Rewind to lie down. They'd practiced this, back at Rewind's apartment, but it was still amazing to see Rewind draw himself in, disappearing into the anonymity of his alt mode as he shrank smaller and smaller in Chromedome's arms till he was only the size of a portable datastick. Chromedome had never thought about how disposables had been altered for mass displacement until Rewind had brought it up. He had to admit it was convenient for their plan, but he didn't like the way Rewind was now so small that Chromedome could hold him in his closed fist. It was a level of power over someone that felt viscerally wrong.

Head in the game, Chromedome. He crawled over to the doorway and slid his needles into the space between the doors. There was a catch there that emergency services would use to open the doors in case of an emergency power outage. Though they used a special tool for it instead of mnemosurgical needles. He tried to keep the pain from showing on his face, not wanting to make Rewind worry. He hadn't exactly explained how sensitive his needles were; how sensitive they had to be to locate and manipulate delicate microcircuitry without being able to see it.

The door slid open and Chromedome scuttled out, Rewind clasped loosely in one fist. There were security cameras in this hallway too, but they were stationary. Chromedome had their locations memorized from...he wasn't sure where the memory had come from.

Rewind had pointed that out, when they were making this plan. Chromedome had immediately suggested hijacking a headhunter to use the back entrance and Rewind had asked him if he'd thought about doing this before. Chromedome hadn't known the answer then either. But it wasn't impossible he had. It wasn't impossible someone else had and he'd just picked up on that knowledge. His brain was like a scavenger hunt without any of the connecting clues.

He zig-zagged his way down the hallway, trying to keep his pace unhurried and casual even as he wound his way around the ranges of the cameras. If he was lucky he wouldn't run into anyone. This wasn't a busy hallway. But he didn't really believe in—

"Chromedome!" He froze and looked over his shoulder, tried to look natural as he moved the hand holding Rewind behind his leg. It was one of the newer mnemosurgeons, what was his name...

"Oh, hi, um..." It would come to him in a minute.

"Cerebros," they said with a smile. "I hadn't realized you were back! They told us you were there when Overlord attacked." Cerebros shuddered. "That sounds awful."

"Yeah, it wasn't great," Chromedome said.

"I heard Overlord took Trepan," Cerebros said.

"He did," Chromedome said. "I don't know anything else, though, sorry. Everything after I got shot is pretty blurry."

"I haven't heard much either," Cerebros said. "Senior staff have been making themselves scarce ever since. Probably going to get more security again. I'm not even sure who my supervisor is anymore, it used to be Trepan."

"Hopefully things will settle down," Chromedome said, trying not to look antsy as he glanced down the hall at where he was meant to be going.

"Well, it's good to see you back. Take care of yourself okay?" Cerebros said, reaching over to give Chromedome an awkward half-hug.

Brainstorm had always complained that the other mnemosurgeons at the Institute were antisocial and, on the whole, he wasn't far off. Cerebros was one of the few exceptions. Chromedome hoped they had him doing easy work; both for the spark and the body. He didn't like the thought of Cerebros changing into someone like him. Or worse, someone like Trepan.

Still, they couldn't have him running back to the commissary and yelling that he'd just seen Chromedome in the hallway. Chromedome swallowed his regrets and wrapped his arm around Cerebros, returning the hug. Then he extended his needles and tapped inside. Cerebros felt it, Chromedome could feel the disturbed ripples as Cerebros realized that he'd been injected. Chromedome didn't have time to deal with that. With a tremendous push he threw Cerebros into standby mode, following the body to the ground as it collapsed.

From there it was simple work to excise the last five minutes of memory. He then spliced in a memory from several months ago of Cerebros having felt faint after work, hoping that when Cerebros awoke he'd assume he'd fainted. Chromedome got back up, shaking his needles off before drawing them back. He stepped over the body and then resumed his weaving pattern towards the server room.

The door to the room was locked and outside Chromedome's clearance level, but the walls of the server room were where the core of the security system had been wired in. Chromedome knew that from—he just knew that. Suddenly aware of the gaps in his memory, his brain appeared to have abdicated responsibility for making up explanations. Chromedome crouched down and unbolted one of the panels from the wall, revealing a darkened space just deep enough to step inside; wiring blinking and glowing, luminescent. Chromedome looked down at Rewind, unsure of what to do for a moment. "Sorry," he whispered, setting him on a ledge inside the wall before following after him. He crouched to bring the access panel back up, using a strip of magnetic tape to hold it in place. Hopefully nobody would notice the missing bolts until it was too late.

Chromedome picked Rewind up again, then began to crab his way along the narrow space to the access terminal. "This isn't going to hurt you, is it?" Chromedome asked.

"It's fine," Rewind said, voice oddly high pitched and tinny at this size. "Do it."

Chromedome slid Rewind into the slot for the datastick.

Or rather, he tried to.

"Fuck. Ow," Rewind hissed. "Other way. The other way. Flip me over."

"Sorry, I always do that," Chromedome whispered.

"Everyone does," Rewind said.

This time Rewind slid smoothly into the slot. Chromedome lifted his hand away and waited, unsure of how long it would take Rewind to do his work. The indicator light next to the access terminal lit up and began to blink green. Chromedome wondered how many datasticks Prowl had working for his "Diplomatic Corps". It seemed a damned convenient alt mode for infiltration. Briefly, Chromedome allowed himself to fantasize about going to Prowl and offering up himself and Rewind as secret agents.

It wasn't likely to be better work for his conscience, Chromedome reminded himself. And Rewind was busy—he had to find Dominus. Plus, Rewind already had a calling doing archival work. Just because Chromedome was at loose ends didn't mean Rewind wanted to upend his life to—

"Chromedome!" A tinny voice squeaked at him.

Chromedome startled. "We in trouble?"

"No, you're spacing out on me," Rewind said. "I'm done here."

"Oh. Sorry," Chromedome said, pulling Rewind out of the datastick slot. "Did it work?"

"Security system is paused, the security stations have all been locked inside, inter-autobot radio is being jammed and all the alarms have been silenced," Rewind said. "Let's try to get to your room before people start noticing all that."

Chromedome undid the magnetic tape and tipped the panel out enough to scan the hallway for observers. All clear. He stepped out into the hallway and sealed up the panel as quickly as he could. "Do I even want to know how you know how to do that?" he asked. "Do you have a dark criminal past I should know about?"

"Please, nothing that exciting," Rewind said. "I've just spent a lot of time plugged into server networks with very little to do for entertainment."

Chromedome hustled down the hallways towards his room, ducking back around corners a few times to avoid confrontations with other mnemosurgeons, headhunters and guards. His arm was aching again. And the last thing he needed was a line of collapsed, confused or otherwise obviously mnemo'ed employees leading straight to him.

At last they got to his room. Inside, the place spun with missing pieces, details from Scattergun's memories that were no longer there. The datasticks in their neat rows beside the console, the chair placed beside the berth, the gun cleaning kit on the table. All gone. It was a moment before Chromedome forced the room into focus and realized that something else was gone as well.

"It's not here," he said. The phone Brainstorm had given him had always sat on the table beside the berth, verisimilitude for its disguise as an alarm clock. There was nothing on the table. No alarm clock.

"Let me down, I'll help you look," Rewind said.

Chromedome sat down on the berth. "It's not here. We're not going to find it here."

"You haven't even looked!"

"I know where I left it!" Chromedome hissed. "And if Axotomy has been fucking with my head so does he. The only reason it wouldn't be where I left it is if someone came here and took it. This was a mistake. We shouldn't have come here."

"Okay, so if Axotomy took it, where would he have put it?" Rewind asked.

"Why does it matter?"

"Because we can go there and take it back."

"He probably destroyed it. No. We're leaving, now, before we get caught."

"If he was going to destroy it, why would he let you remember having it?"

"To lure me into coming back here," Chromedome pronounced grimly. He stared at the door, waiting for a horde of guards to burst through to arrest him.

"Or, Axotomy knows that you have only one friend. And so when you slipped out from under his thumb, he decided that either Brainstorm was involved or that he could use Brainstorm as leverage to get you back," Rewind said.

Chromedome wanted to deny the possibility. "If he took it, it would be in his office," Chromedome said. "That's not far from here."

The path between them and Axotomy's office was clear. He opened up the security panel for the door and slipped Rewind inside, anxiety rising up as he waited. He didn't know what he would do if Axotomy was inside. Punch him, definitely. Try to run. But he didn't think he'd make it far.

The security panel chimed and Chromedome pulled Rewind free. He pushed the door open a crack and looked inside. The room was empty. He shuddered out a sigh of relief, then closed up the security panel and slipped inside, closing the door behind him.

"Okay, put me down and I'll help you search," Rewind said. Chromedome set him down on the desk but didn't wait to watch him transform back as he started rifling through drawers in search of the communicator. If Axotomy had it, he would definitely have kept it in his office. But where would he have put it?

"Chromedome, can I have my gun back?" Rewind asked. "Just in case."

"Yeah, of course," Chromedome said, pausing to fetch it out of his compartment before passing it over. "If you were going to hide a small cube, where would you put it?"

"Behind the energon dispenser," Rewind said, pointing. Axotomy had an energon dispenser with a stack of empty cubical glasses sitting next to it, the sort Chromedome associated with the intensely snooty types who refused to drink at the commissary with the plebians. He'd seen them sometimes in the apartments of rich bots when he'd been on the force. He went over to the dispenser and pushed aside the glasses, finding one errant cubical object behind them that was not an empty glass. Chromedome picked up the phone and turned to boggle at Rewind.

"How in Primus's name did you guess that?" He asked.

"Wait, was it really there? My next guess was going to be the air vents."

"Okay, now we have to go," Chromedome said, turning the phone over in his hands. "You should transform back."

"What is this?" Axotomy asked.

Chromedome and Rewind froze, then turned towards the doorway where Axotomy was standing, his guard at his shoulder. "I should have guessed this had something to do with you, Chromedome," Axotomy said. "You have a near supernatural ability to interfere with my—agh!" He dropped to one knee, hand to his throat.

Chromedome turned to look at Rewind, just as Rewind lifted his tiny pistol and fired three more shots into the guard that had been looming behind Axotomy. They crumpled to the ground as Rewind watched, face steely. "Get him, and bring him in here before someone sees from the hallway," Rewind ordered, striding over to the door.

"What are you talking about, we have to run," Chromedome said. "I can't believe you just shot two people."

"He's not dead," Rewind said, grabbing the guard's body by the arm and hauling him into the office. Chromedome finally shook off his shock enough to help. "That's Axotomy, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Chromedome said, staring at his supervisor, crumpled onto the floor with his hand clutching his neck, pink fuel bubbling up between his fingers. He'd stopped wearing a faceplate at some point since Chromedome had seen him last.

"This is your chance, Chromedome," Rewind said. "Like you said, it's a longshot that Brainstorm knows anything. But Axotomy does. He took your conjunx away from you—now you've got a chance to get them back."

"You," Axotomy gasped. "I know you. Dominus Ambus's pet disposable. You'll regret involving yourself in the affairs of your betters."

"Chromedome could read you even if I put a put a bullet in your spark," Rewind said cooly. "So maybe keep that name out of your mouth."

Axotomy knew Rewind was involved. Chromedome walked to the door and closed it, clicking the lock. He looked down at Axotomy and found he wasn't afraid any more. He was angry, yes. Disgusted. But he wasn't afraid.

Axotomy must have seen something in his face, because his optics widened. "Everything I've done, I've done to make you a better soldier for the Autobot cause, Chromedome. None of this was personal."

"Not personal?" Chromedome repeated in disbelief. "You told me my conjunx was dead and then gloated as you murdered him. What could possibly have been more personal, you monster?" He reached down and grabbed Axtomy's leg, dragging him close. Chromedome dropped to his knees, pinning Axotomy's shoulders to the ground, and stabbed his needles into his neck. Axotomy thrashed beneath him, mind writhing like a live wire dropped in water.

Chromedome shook with fury. He tore into the pathway to Axotomy's mind, ripping through flimsy layers of defenses, fighting the urge to tear his mind to shreds. He surged down towards the core of Axotomy's mind; the hub from which memories traced their roots. The white room where the spark lit brightest.

But when he got there, it was all wrong.

There was no white room. Lights flickered all around him, shuddering pale things, each supporting their own hub of memories. They branched and forked and twisted together into vines and weeds. He'd never seen a mind like this, never felt a place that felt so wrong, so unfamiliar. He shuddered.

He tried to trace a path to the nearest hub, but found that the connections had frayed and withered, that there was no path he could push charge through to reach it. He tried to retrace his steps and found himself lost for a moment, unable to move forward or backwards because so many of the circuits were burned out. "What did you do to yourself?" he asked, dragging himself back to safety. He hadn't wanted to bring Axotomy up; he didn't want to see Axotomy's face. But while he was confident he could raze this place to the ground, he had no idea how to locate a single salvageable memory.

"I did mnemosurgery," Axotomy said. His voice was clear but his form appeared shattered, broken into shards split between the flickering lights spiraling up out of sight. Chromedome could see a single optic staring at him, flickering in sync with the light. "This is what mnemosurgery does to the mind, Chromedome. It builds ghosts of connections, circuitry with no source and no termination and it burns out your connections to do so. You want to find the memories of your lovers? Be my guest."

"Take me to them," Chromedome ordered.

"Or what?"

Chromedome knelt down and sank his fingers into the ground beneath him. He wormed his way upwards in search of Axotomy's consciousness, relatively unaffected by the destruction of his memory centers. Chromedome took hold of that thread and opened himself wide, looping in his anguished drive towards self-destruction when he'd woken in the hospital and holding it there, forcing Axtomy to stay in that moment until Chromedome could no longer hold it. "Or I'll finish the work you've begun and I'll destroy you," Chromedome said.

Axotomy spat garbled static at him, the visible optic wobbling like a plucked string.

Chromedome waited.

"How did you do that?" Axotomy gasped.

"I'm not here to teach you how to do mnemosurgery," Chromedome said. "Show me what I want to see."

The ground shuddered, then darkness swallowed the space. A scene flickered to life, details slipping in and out of existence at the edges of his vision. But the figure at the center was clear enough.

It was Prowl.

"I don't want your little sneaks swarming all over my facility, Prowl," Axotomy said.

"Agreed," Ranvier said. "There is a chain of command and Zeta had promised us that the New Institute facility would be autonomous." They were all there—Ranvier, Axotomy, Trepan, a few mechs Chromedome had forgotten but he was now sure had always been part of the inner circle. Luvox, Pavlov, Insidon. Axotomy still remembered their names and now Chromedome did too.

"I'm not sending them there to spy on you," Prowl said, straight faced. "I'm sending them there because it's the only Autobot installation in a hundred miles and some of my fliers only have a range that's half that. I cleared this with Zeta before I came to you."

"We get to clear all personnel that are stationed at the Institute for security risks," Trepan said.

"You mean ‘stripmine their brains for secrets you can use as leverage over me’," Prowl said. "I can't stop you but I'll let you know off the bat—they don't know anything. I'm not fool enough to send you anyone with leverage over me."

"We would never," Axotomy said. "Did you want to hear about Tumbler's progress, by the way? I heard you made a glowing recommendation to Zeta get him tested into the program."

Fury flashed across Prowl's face for half a second, hen disappeared back under his mask of neutrality. "And I wasn't wrong, was I? He's incredibly talented."

"He's awful at technique and following proper procedures," Trepan said.

"And yet he's "one of the most gifted intuitive mnemosurgeons I've ever seen," isn't that right, Axotomy?" Prowl said with a smirk. "I don't need to send spies into your facility, Ranvier. Zeta forwards me your reports personally. Does he forward you mine?"

This wasn't what Chromedome wanted. He didn't care about Prowl. He wanted to see his conjunxes. "On topic, please," he said.

The scene cracked, like a shockwave through glass plating, and then fell apart. "This way," Axotomy said, the mote of light with the floating optic guiding Chromedome towards one of the falling shards of glass. "I cannot make the path linear."

Chromedome followed him into the shard as it became another scene, this one darkened like all visual details had been lost. Like a memory from a dead man, with only the voices left.

A door slammed and the noise made a shockwave that shook Chromedome where he stood.

"Did you know your mnemosurgeon is fraternizing with one of Prowl's agents?" Ranvier asked.

Axotomy replied: "Mach? Yes, I noticed that they were close. Mach doesn't know anything of use and, frankly, neither does Chromedome."

"They're not just close, they're Conjunx Endura, Trepan sneered. "Which is exactly the sort of—"

"Trepan, you've detailed your objections to how the facility is being run in great and exhaustive detail," Ranvier said. "But consider the costs of keeping them docile. Do you strip them daily? Do you use drugs to control them? I remain on Axotomy’s side on this matter—a light touch is often the surest option."

"They're going to be showing symptoms soon," Trepan insisted. "You can't ‘light touch’ away the fact that someone is dying."

Axotomy laughed. "Of course you can. The easiest things to get someone to look away from are the things they desperately want to not be true. Those symptoms are the result of poor technique, of not following procedures as mandated, of environmental toxins, they're chronic ailments they've always had but—Thank Primus—have never gotten any worse. The list goes on and on."

"So what do we do about Chromedome and his loverboy?"

The scene splintered around them as Axotomy said, "We'll wait it out. Spies have a short shelf-life."

Chromedome followed Axotomy this time into the next memory without urging, squeezing himself into the smaller fragment to find himself in his own workshop. The lights were dimmed as Chromedome wiped down the surgical slab.

"Oh, Chromedome," Axotomy said, stepping gently into the room. "I’m glad to see you back at work. It was about time you got back to living your life."

Chromedome stared at him, uncomprehending. "Sir?"

"They wanted to refer you to a therapist, you know. For suicidal urges. I told them that wasn't necessary—you don't need a stranger poking around in your head," Axotomy said, putting his arm around Chromedome's shoulder. "You needed a return to normalcy."

"Sir, what are you talking about?" Chromedome asked.

Axotomy paused, then tipped open his wrist to splash the back of Chromedome’s neck in ultraviolet light. A set of fresh mnemosurgical scars shone white against the faded pockmarks of old incisions.

The scene was already breaking up. Chromedome tried to move back. "Wait, I didn't get to see him. You must have seen him. We have to go back."

"Th—pa—do—es n—go—wards," Axotomy replied, voice broken static.

Chromedome looked back over his shoulder but there was only darkness behind him. Ahead of them there was a light and another memory. Chromedome let himself be drawn into it.

There was a mech sitting in the cramped space at the bottom of the one of the sluice liquefaction chambers. He was dark grey and from his shape he must have been a van or other four wheeled alt. He was folded in on himself and shuddering so hard from crying that it was hard to be sure.

"Really, Insidon, I didn’t see you getting cold feet," Axotomy said, crossing his arms as he peered down into the chamber. "After the things I’ve seen you do?"

"You practically threw him into discovering it—both of them!" Insidon snapped. "I said from the beginning that there were two options—either complete isolation for the surgeons or continual monitoring of every person at this facility. This isn’t an isolated incident, Ranvier, it’s the start of a landslide."

"Well now they know," Ranvier said. "So what is your suggestion? If killing them is such an unacceptable option."

"I’ll wipe them myself," Insidon said.

Axotomy sneered. "You retired from active service for a reason, Insidon. If you go in again, you’ll die. For two engineers? You’re getting soft."

"I don’t need your approval, Axotomy," Insidon said, turning to meet Ranvier’s optics. "I need his."

The smelting chamber melted away and Axotomy was suddenly in his office, staring across the table at the mech nervously shifting in the other chair. "So your name is Pivot," Axotomy said, steepling his hands.

"Yes sir. That's my name. Pivot. That's what people call me, on account of it being my name and—"

"Shut up, Pivot."

Pivot flinched.

Axotomy stood up. "Better." He paced around the table. "I understand that you consider yourself to be in a...relationship, with one of my employees. Chromedome."

Pivot nodded.

"Please do explain," Axtomy said with a wave of his hand, leaning against the table. "What kind of relationship do the two of you have?"

"He's my Conjunx Endura," Pivot said. "Sir."

"Well he certainly moved fast on that," Axotomy said. "Pivot, I'll be frank with you. I have concerns. Chromedome has consistently shown himself to be incapable of balancing a private life against his working life. I'm concerned that, if this relationship is to continue, that Chromedome's work performance will suffer and that—as a result—the Autobot cause will suffer. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"Not really," Pivot said. "Are you ordering me to break off our bond?"

"I'm not ordering anything," Axotomy said. "I'm merely assessing the responses that might make sense in this situation."

"I'm in love with him. Sir. I don't know what else there is to say."

"You're quite sweet, Pivot," Axotomy said. "Do you think you’re worth one of the most skilled mnemosurgeons in our program?"

"I don’t—"

"Oh, there’s no need to answer that question. He’s the one making the decisions, isn’t he? My opinion doesn’t factor into it. Now, Pivot, before you go...there'll be no need to speak of this meeting," Axotomy said. "Consider this your first chance to prove to me that you can be trusted with one of my most talented operatives."

Chromedome was going to strangle Axotomy. No, he wasn't going to wait until he was out of here. He was going to raze this place to the ground. To hell with the "greater good" and the Autobot cause and whatever contributions the New Institute made to that cause. He was going to make Axotomy burn.

"But don't you want to know what happened next?" Axotomy asked. Ahead of them the fragments of the scene were falling to the ground. "You have to choose, Chromedome. Do you go forward, or do you want me dead?"

"I don't have to choose," Chromedome said. "I just have to delay my satisfaction slightly." He stepped forward into the light.

He was in Axotomy's office again, and Trepan was there. This time the edges of the scene were more settled, the figures within clear. A more recent memory?

"So that's another one down," Trepan said. "He really has no manner of luck at all."

"I noticed," Axotomy said, pouring himself a glass of engex before sitting down across the table from Trepan.

"What are the odds?" Trepan asked, drumming his fingers on the table. "Poisoned by a neurotoxin-laced injecting needle? A highly unlikely scenario."

"Trepan, that sounds almost like a question," Axotomy said with a smile. He sighed. "Chromedome is going to be useless now. Hopefully it won’t last as long as last time."

"You could wipe him yourself." Trepan observed.

"There's really no need," Axotomy said. "I’m no Insidon, I’m not wasting myself when the problem can solve itself."

"I don’t get how he does it. Seems like a logistical challenge," Trepan said. "I'm not sure I have the wrist flexibility to manage that."

"Well you could always go through the eyes," Axotomy suggested.

Trepan shivered. "Disgusting. I wish you wouldn't mention doing that while I'm trying to drink."

"Squeamish, old friend?"

"You’re insufferable," Trepan said. "Well, I hope Chromedome’s self-sabotage don’t reduce his shelf life too much."

Axotomy nodded. "We can only hope. I haven't found a single trainee with potential to replace him for deep readings and personality adjustments."

The scene broke and Chromedome followed as it reformed, chasing Trepan and Axotomy into another room. This time Prowl was here, he observed with distaste.

"No. It's unnecessary," Trepan said. Axotomy crossed his arms across his chest from where he stood in the corner of the room, watching as Prowl sputtered in response to Trepan's refusal.

"You just said that Insidon and Ranvier were killed under mysterious circumstances," Prowl said. "And in your report you list several other mnemosurgeons and support staff who were poisoned by a deliberate Decepticon plot. Your program is a valuable asset to the Autobot cause. Why would you refuse to protect your—"

"I'm not saying we shouldn't assign guards to our senior mnemosurgeons," Trepan said. "It's a good suggestion. But accepting guards trained by an outside program? It's an unnecessary security risk. Give us some fresh genericons, that'll be fine."

Prowl huffed. "And what are a batch of green MTOs going to do against a Decepticon threat so insidious that we can't even prove Decepticons were involved? I cleared this with the Prime, Trepan."

"They would not be reporting to you," Trepan said sharply. "You would release them to our program permanently."

"I have told you, I'm not interested in sending spies into your department," Prowl said. "But I'm also not willing to send my best soldiers to be strip-mined."

"Then I guess we're at an impasse, because I can hardly allow new recruits in without scanning them for subversive intentions," Trepan said.

"Oh, no, we're not at an impasse at all. I planned for this eventuality," Prowl said. "I'm going to be giving you a contingent of twelve Autobots. Highly skilled but all of them in need of...assistance in coping with life on the battlefield. Poorly suited for their current positions. And then, additionally, I have one new recruit." He slid a datapad across the table to Trepan.

Trepan glanced at it. "You're giving me a Decepticon assassin."

"Well, I'm giving you a former Decepticon who'd worked a squad on one of the advanced vanguards. Similar, but different. He was one of the instigators of the Kith Kinsere insurrection and told me that he was willing to do 'anything' to prove his loyalty. This will be a good testing ground for him."

"I can see the logic in it," Trepan said. "I sense that there's an additional condition."

"Yes." Prowl nodded. "You will be assigning this one," he tapped the datapad, "to Tumbler of Iacon."

Chromedome balled his hands into fists. "Axotomy! I already know what you did to Scattergun. Take me back to see the others or we're done here."

"Oh? Is there nothing you care about besides your long lost lovers?" Axotomy asked. "They are, after all, dead. Beyond your help. What about your new friend? The little Disposable you were so quick to defend that you swallowed all your hesitations about coming down here with me just because I slighted him—"

Chromedome hadn't meant to inject Axotomy. This was a bad decision. He should be running, right now. He should be escaping with Rewind. "Keep his name out of your mouth."

The disembodied optic blinked at him, sardonically.

The scene around them fell apart, pieces falling to the floor in a barrage of clattering glass. Chromedome ducked. Mental imagery shouldn't feel this real, not to him. He was supposed to be in control.

"Dominus Ambus?" Axotomy's voice asked. "The Dominus Ambus?"

Chromedome spun around, searching for the source of the voice. There was a shard on the ground beside his left foot, Chromedome was somehow sure that was where the sound had come from. He picked it up and peered inside. A distorted version of Prowl stood, his arms crossed and his face sullen. "As far as I know there is only the one," he said.

Dominus Ambus. Axotomy knew what had happened to Dominus Ambus. Rewind was desperate to know what had happened to his conjunx. If Chromedome had a chance to find out—he squashed down the voice in his head that told him to hesitate. He refused to be jealous of a dead mech. Rewind was a widower and so was Chromedome, their duties were to their dead.

Chromedome squeezed himself into the fragmented memory.

"Why am I here?" Axotomy asked.

"Because you and I both know that there are no other options. There is no Autobot who can take on this mission and whom we can trust to carry it out without being destroyed by it except him. But he won't go without the approval of his lover—approval which will never come. Even if we were to bring his conjunx here—an option I dislike for a number of reasons—the mech is a stubborn son of a glitch with a self-righteous streak twice as wide as the Mitteous Plateau. He doesn't understand the bigger picture the way you or I or Dominus do."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"Go in there and smooth this over," Prowl said. "I don't care how you do it. Make up a sweet and touching farewell for Dominus, have him forget Rewind ever existed, have him decide that the sanctity of the mission is more important—whatever it takes to make him say yes."

"I always thought you were softer than me," Axotomy said. "That somewhere, deep down, you had a soft spark. It's nice to be proven wrong sometimes.

"Then you accept?"

"On one condition," Axotomy said. "Years ago, you referred Tumbler of Iacon to my section. He is my soldier now. I will do this if you promise to stop recommending him special favors and interfering with my management. Let me run my section."

Chromedome didn't understand. What mission? Where had they been sending Dominus? He stepped up to the darkened glass and stared through to the interrogation room beyond, where Dominus Ambus—that had to be Dominus Ambus, he was so fucking perfect looking—was sitting at a table with his head bowed.

Struck by the impulse, Chromedome banged his fist against the glass. Dominus didn't respond, but Chromedome felt the memory hum in resonance. He struck the glass again, sending a crack splintering through it. One final blow sent the wall of glass crashing down. Chromedome followed it into another memory.

He was back in the room he’d just left. The glass was intact and Axotomy stood by his side. He was watching the room on the other side as Dominus Ambus paced, hands clasped behind his back. Prowl sat at the table, hands flat against its surface, tracking Dominus with his optics. "I understand that this is a difficult decision," Prowl said. "If there was anyone else I could ask—"

"No, I would never ask you to put this burden on someone else," Dominus Ambus said, drawing to a halt facing the wall. "I could never."

"Time is of the essence. There will be a narrow window in which we can position you as a replacement for their chosen recruit."

"I understand that as well."

"The Decepticon Justice Division are, in some ways, the monsters closest to Megatron's inner circle. If we know what intelligence comes to them, we will be in a better position to save lives. Millions of lives."

"If I did not believe that, I would not even consider your proposition," Dominus said shortly. "But you understand what you are asking of me? That I should commit atrocities in order to be welcomed into the company of monsters? That I should betray every value I hold dear?"

"Yes," Prowl said evenly. "I understand. Will you do it?"

"I will," Dominus said. "On one condition. I understand the need for secrecy but—my conjunx. I need to explain to Rewind why I am leaving. I cannot leave to do this thing behind his back."

"Of course, I understand." Prowl said. "Give me a moment, I'll have someone sent to fetch him." He got up from the table and walked to the door, pausing to speak back over his shoulder. "And Dominus? Thank you."

He stepped through the door, closing it gently behind him, then locked eyes with Axotomy. "You're up."

The memory that Chromedome had just seen began to repeat itself, as Prowl laid out the case for smoothing out Dominus's objections to leaving without saying goodbye to Rewind. Rewind. Oh, Primus, Rewind. At least Chromedome would be able to tell him that Dominus Ambus had tried to stay true to him, even if Rewind deserved so much more.

Chromedome tried to bring back awareness of his body—mental imagery was well and good and all, but mnemosurgery was a science. It's not like he was physically inside Axotomy—he was really only echoing back thoughts from Axotomy's brain module across his own neural circuitry. Chromedome reached out for that awareness...and couldn't find it.

He looked around the room. Axotomy and Prowl were still having their conversation, but there was no sign of the fragmented self-image of Axotomy that he'd followed here. No matter. If he couldn't pull himself out the easy way, he'd just have to go the long way. He reached down to the ground, steadying himself and feeling for a neural pathway that could lead him back the way he'd come. The few pathways he found all felt weak and brittle, with no charge to illuminate the way. Chromedome frowned. It would take forever to wind his way out like that and he and Rewind needed to leave now.

Well, he'd wanted to raze this place to the ground. If that was the fastest way out, all the more reason to do it. A strong enough injection would illuminate all the pathways at once, give Chromedome an escape route back into his body. If it happened to melt Axotomy from the inside out, well, he wasn’t going to cry over him. It was obvious that Axotomy had been luring him down here in hopes of burying him so deep that Chromedome couldn't escape. It might have trapped a lesser mnemosurgeon, but Chromedome had no doubt that he'd be able to escape without immolating himself as well.

"I wouldn't do that," Axotomy said softly.

"And why not?" Chromedome asked.

"Let me show you," Axotomy said, and the world flashed to white. It resolved slowly into colors, gold and white and—oh, that was him. This was Axotomy looking at him. Axotomy looked at him for a long moment, leaving Chromedome uncomfortably aware of how...vacant his body looked, head slumped to his chest and optics gone pale. Then Axotomy looked away towards Rewind.

Rewind had put up more of a fight than anyone could have asked. There were the bodies of two more guards crumpled on the floor in front of him and the guard currently holding him down against the desk was leaking energon in rivulets from his shattered optic. The guard was looking at Axotomy, waiting for guidance.

"What do you want?" Chromedome asked.

"I want my mnemosurgeon back," Axotomy said. His gaze shifted back to Chromedome. "I want things to go back to the way they were—both of us doing what we have to do for the betterment of the Autobot cause."

"I..." Chromedome was frozen.

"Oh, Chromedome. You always fell so fast," Axotomy said. "Do you even realize that you love him?"

No. No, Chromedome didn't love Rewind. That was absurd. Rewind was grieving for a conjunx who might not even be dead, Chromedome needed to get himself to the surface so that he could tell him about Dominus...he wasn't in love with Rewind, he had a duty to pay him back for all the kindness Rewind had offered him.

"I have no doubt that you can kill me," Axotomy said. "But when you do, Hitch is going to shoot him. Not fatally. And then he's going to shoot you—also not fatally. And then he's going to make you watch. Is that what you want to happen?"

"No. You can't," Chromedome panted, looking around for an escape. "He's important. You can't just kill him."

"He's a datastick without a handler, I hardly think we'll notice the loss," Axotomy sneered. "But I'm offering you a choice, out of kindness. It's no more trouble for me to wipe one of you than both of you. Release me and I will see him returned to his life, safe from you and from harm."

Letting them kill Rewind was inconceivable. Letting Axotomy wipe him and send him back to the Institute, never knowing what he'd lost was unbearable. "I don't know how to release you," he said.

"Of course you do," Axotomy said. "If you fall unconscious the automatic disengagement protocols will activate."

"But I need to see that—I need to see that Rewind is safe," Chromedome managed. "That's my cost. That I can see that Rewind's safe."

"You are terribly needy," Axotomy said. "But you are very good at your job. Very well, it's a deal."

Chromedome shuttered his optics and held himself very still. Much as the body needed energon to circulate to provide motion, the mind needed energy to flow from the spark. If you interrupted that flow of charge momentarily, it could cause you to faint. So all he needed to do was...stop—

Chapter Text

Chromedome woke up feeling empty. He was in a hospital, somewhere outside the Institute. He figured he should be worried about that, but he couldn't seem to raise himself to care. He felt hollowed-out.

Eventually a doctor wandered in to remind him that he'd been shot. Overlord. Of course. They asked if Chromedome needed anything and he shook his head. The medic informed him that he'd been brought to a hospital in Teledonia to recover and that he'd been accompanied by a supervisor, Axotomy. He asked if Chromedome wanted him to call Axotomy in, let him know that he'd woken up.

At the mention of Axotomy, Chromedome felt something. He wasn’t sure what, but it was a blip away from the hollow emptiness. He felt...cold?

Chromedome told the medic no. "I need some time to get my head on straight," he said.

The moment they were gone, Chromedome was up and out of his berth, pacing from the door to the window and back again. He felt fine physically—especially considering he’d just been shot. A bit of a helmache, but that was it. How long had he been out? Something must have gone weird with his chrono when Overlord attacked, because he couldn't pin down a date for any of his recent memories.

Chromedome paced, trying to bring sensation back to his emotions the same way he’d try to shake up his sensornet if his leg had fallen asleep. He thought about the fact that the medic had probably ignored Chromedome and was off fetching Axotomy already. He didn’t have much time to—

To what?

There was something on the tip of his tongue, there was water pushing at the levee, there was something buried under this unnatural stillness and Chromedome was pretty sure what it was.

It was about death. It was about him. Failing to die.

Chromedome wasn’t sure when he’d made the decision, but he knew in his spark that the decision was made. He wasn’t going to do mnemosurgery ever again. He was sick of it. Sick of living out the suffering of the dead and the living, of living with the guilt and shame of taking away his fellow soldier's autonomy. Sick of being alone. Of having a life so fragging empty that when he tried to summon up a single thing that brought him joy he couldn't manage it.

If Axotomy was coming, he didn’t have much time. On the second go-around, Chromedome recognized the emotion that stirred a little at the thought of Axotomy’s arrival—fear. That made sense. If Axotomy arrived and he saw Chromedome was well enough to walk, he might take him back to the Institute. Chromedome had to be gone before they got there.

He walked to the window and looked down at the street below. They was only three stories up. Below him, pedestrians hustled in clusters shielding themselves against the drizzle of acid rain as they went. There would be people in the hallways, people whose job was to keep patients safe. They wouldn’t like where he was planning on going. So, in the interest of subtlety, he threw a chair through the window and jumped.

He made a hard landing, but staggered to his feet. Alright, now he hurt. The surrounding pedestrians converged on him but Chromedome rolled into his alt mode and took off.

He drove through a few streets, taking corners like there was pursuit hot on his heels, but pursuit failed to materialize. Eventually he stopped and transformed back into his root mode. Chromedome listened for people beneath the sound of the rain on the pavement and followed those noises to a street market with thronging crowds. He boggled at the hubbub —he hadn't realized there was anywhere left in Cybertron where civilians wandered around open markets long into the evening—and then pushed his way into the crowd.

He was certain he looked peculiar—his face felt frozen and unnatural and he was limping from where he'd jarred his hip during the fall. There was no way he could pass his question off as mere academic curiosity, but there was always a chance that someone might feel obligated to save you from yourself. Chromedome decided to try a different tactic.

"Please, do you know where the nearest relinquishment clinic is?" he asked. The pair of shoppers he'd stopped stared at him, clutching their purchases tight to their chests. Like he was going to rob them. "Please, my best friend...he left me a note and I—I have to stop him," Chromedome begged. Lying felt easy.

It took three tries before he found someone willing to give him directions. He thanked them, profusely, and then hurried off towards his doom with all the haste of a mech whose best friend was about to do something very stupid. He’d had practice at that.

It wasn't until after he'd filled out his intake forms and made it to the waiting room beyond that everything snapped back into place. It was like a sense memory cued by something in the room, maybe way back from when he’d visited that relinquishment clinic with Prowl. The emptiness washed out and the fear rolled in..

There were three other mechs in the waiting room, all Decepticons. Most mechs who went to the clinics were Decepticons, he’d heard that somewhere. Chromedome sat down between them and hoped that someone would say something, that he wouldn't go wordlessly into the afterspark.

Chromedome was distracted from the mounting dread by someone crying in anguish. The noise startled him out of his seat, and he looked around, trying to place it. It was coming from one of the adjoining rooms. Chromedome looked back at the others. One of them shrugged at him, a minute movement of his shoulders. The other two were deep in their heads and didn't seem to see Chromedome at all.

There was a hatchway in the floor that led to a lower level, there was a hallway on that lower level and the noise was coming from a door to his left. Chromedome didn’t stop to wonder how he knew that.

His memories of the clinic he'd raided with Prowl were too sharp. His memories full of awful things that something might be happening to whoever was crying. Awful things they hadn’t signed a waiver for. Chromedome was through the door before he'd even begun to make a plan for what he'd do if that was the case.

Luckily, it wasn't a torture chamber or whatever nightmares his brain hadn't bothered to make tangible. It was a morgue. A morgue with an open coffin and a minibot, looking down at the greyed out body within in obvious misery.

Chromedome didn't know what to say, so he said the first thing that popped into his head. "The worse the death, the more painful the memories."

The mech looked up, startled. "Who are you?" he asked.

"Everyone calls me Chromedome," he said.

Maybe startled was the wrong word. Maybe the minibot was more suspicious than startled. "Why are you here?" he asked, optics narrowed.

"To do something about it," Chromedome said, offering the minibot his hand.

"What in the pits is that supposed to mean?" they asked. "Do something about it? About what?"

"I, um—" It’d felt familiar, like deja vu, like the thing you said when someone needed help. It’d felt like the right thing to say. Apparently not.

"Wait, do you mean him?" The minibot pointed at the mech in the coffin. "He's pretty far gone at this point, I don't think there's anything you could do for him now. Unless—" they squinted at him. "People don't say that. That's not a saying. ‘the worse the death, the more painful the memories’? People don't say that, unless they're mnemosurgeons."

"How do you know that? And also—"

"Oh, I get it," they said. "You think this is my friend and that I'm upset because he's dead. And you're offering to make me forget that my friend died out of some well-meaning but definitely freaky desire to make me feel better. Goodness. No. That would be a no and also a no. You will keep your hands over there and I will keep my brain over here and we'll all feel much better for it."

"That's not what I meant at all," Chromedome said, covering his face with his hands. "Jeez. What is this, an inquisition? I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that. It just popped out." Usually when he let his mouth run on autopilot it just said please and thank you and made vague comments about the war turning around sometime soon. He wasn’t sure why he’d somehow assumed that a morgue in a relinquishment clinic was a situation where he had prepared phrases.

"Mm-hmm." The minibot crossed their arms over their chest, looking very judgemental for a mech who was definitely not authorized to be in the morgue and had just been crying over the body of someone who was apparently not his friend. "So, say I give you a second chance to answer that question. What would you say?"

"I mean, it's a relinquishment clinic, why do you think I'm here? I was just coming over to make sure you weren't being murdered against your will," Chromedome said, rubbing at the back of his helm. "If you're not, that's good. Obviously I’m intruding during an emotional moment. I’m sorry for your loss, unless you actually don’t know this poor sap. I'll just go back out to the waiting room—"

"Wait, you're here to die?" they asked.

Chromedome wasn't sure what the right answer was to that question. He didn’t know the right answer to any of these questions. "That tends to be why people go to relinquishment clinics," he said.

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Didn't have anything worth living for. Didn't have anywhere else to go."

They looked him up and down and then walked over. "You need somewhere to go? I've got a place."

"I couldn't," Chromedome shook his head. "I couldn't put you in danger like that. I'm not dishonorably discharged, I'm kind of, you know...on the run. From the New Institute. You don't want to get mixed up in all that."

"You're sweet," they said. "Look, I'm not exactly a stranger to breaking rules." They swirled their finger around to gesture at the surrounding morgue. "And I'm old enough to make my own decisions. So why don't you trust me to decide how much trouble I'm willing to get mixed up in?"

"I don't know anything about you," Chromedome said. "Why should I trust you?" He did, he realized. Trust him. It was another feeling with no discernable source, no reasonable explanation. He didn't even know the minibot's name, but he trusted him.

"Touché. Well, my name is Rewind. I'm an archivist and an Autobot. But lately most of what I've been doing is...this." He spread his hands to indicate the morgue as a whole. "My conjunx is missing. I’m trying to figure out what happened after he disappeared."

"I'm sorry," Chromedome said. He couldn't imagine it. Losing your conjunx, not even knowing for sure whether they were dead or in trouble or had abandoned you. "If you wanted..." he didn't want to mess this up again, "I could stay with you for awhile and help you look?"

"Sounds like a deal," Rewind said, offering his hand to shake.

Chromedome was pretty sure they were going to find him eventually if he didn't go back to the relinquishment clinic. He wasn't sure if that was irrational, if it was paranoia brought on by the same mental weirdness that had led him to jump out of a window rather than try to leave the hospital by the front door.

When he let that detail slip out on the walk towards Rewind’s place, the minibot took his hand and looked so worried that Chromedome resolved not to bring up anything else about the Institute. He usually tried his damnedest not to be patronizing about minibots—they didn’t like it when folks tried to treat them like they were fragile. It was just something about Rewind that had his spark screaming for him to keep him safe. More mental weirdness. And from what little he knew of his new friend, Rewind seemed the obstreperous sort who’d dig himself into trouble trying to fix things if Chromedome let him.

Rewind led him to a block of apartments for minibots. His place was small—comically small once Chromedome had squeezed up the ladder and through the doorway. On instinct, he ducked as he stepped inside, narrowly missing hitting his head on a dangling ceiling light.

"Well, it's not really a safehouse built for two," Rewind said, "But it beats being dead, right?"

"I don't think anyone from the Institute would think to look for me here," Chromedome said. "I'm sure it'll be fine. So. Your conjunx. What happened to him?"

The answer was that nobody knew.

Rewind had apparently searched most of Autobot-controlled Cybertron already. As one of the only archivists in the army, he had a certain amount of discretion in where he chose to go. "There are cultural artifacts everywhere," Rewind said. "No matter where I go, there's going to be information lost in some other city-state, some other library, some other historical archive. We will never recover most of the knowledge and culture that was held before the war, which is—" he shrugged, "—heartbreaking. But convenient for my search."

Rewind had checked all the Autobot rosters, as well as a good number of Decepticon ones. He'd reviewed passenger manifests on outgoing flights and security footage wherever he could get it. He'd spoken to bodyshop and modshop owners, wondering if perhaps his lost conjunx changed his shape. He'd gone to Autobot command and asked for an official search party to be put together, only to be turned away when—

"Wait. You went to the Prime?" Chromedome asked.

"I thought they might care. Not because he was my conjunx, because he was," Rewind paused. "I forgot to mention. My conjunx is Dominus Ambus." He said it with the pained voice of a person used to having every conversation sidetracked by people's disbelief and starstruck babbling.

Chromedome fought down the urge to say something that ended with a question mark. "Okay, yeah. That makes sense that Autobot command might have been willing to join the search. I take it they didn't?"

Rewind stared at him for a moment, startled. Then he nodded. "They gave me a month of bereavement leave to put his estate in order and to look for him but....resources couldn't be spared to look for one person, even a person as important as Dominus. They said that either he'd been kidnapped, in which case we would be receiving a prisoner exchange offer, or else he'd been killed or had defected in which case there was no sense in wasting time searching. And that was that."

All of those routes of inquiry came up empty but Rewind couldn’t give up. Instead, his search expanded towards the morbid—checking scrap yards and morgues and relinquishment clinics, videos and tapings of executions and hollowings, casualty records from battles. "That's actually one of the things I could use your help with," Rewind said. "I've got these records piling up that I haven't had time to go through yet." He indicated a stack of unlabeled boxes and explained that they contained analogue photo negatives of the battlefield dead. When a battle was over, the medical workers who searched for survivors would photograph all the mechs who couldn't be saved, for their eventual identification. Both sides refused to take digital records from the other, for fear of cyberwarfare. So physical negatives would be made and sent to both sides by courier, the last honorable accord held between them.

"You need a UV projector to review the pictures," Rewind said. "I've got one, but I'm not sure if it works."

"Do you have any pictures of Dominus?" Chromedome asked. "I know who he is, but he was always a low-key public figure; I'm not actually sure what he looked like."

"You're sure you wouldn't mind?" Rewind asked. "The pictures can be gruesome. They're not people who died pretty deaths."

"I was a detective before the war," Chromedome said absently. "I worked homicide."

"Well, we're a morbid pair, aren't we?" Rewind said. "Guess I shouldn't have worried, since you're on the run from the you know," he wiggled his fingers.

"You can say ‘New Institute’. Though I'm not sure how you know it exists. Does being Dominus Ambus's conjunx get you into some inner circle?"

"Not really," Rewind said. "But if you're nosy and have all-access to Autobot records it doesn't take much pattern matching skills to realize that it exists. Whoever redacts files in Autobot intelligence is both supremely irritating and thinks everyone but him is an idiot."

"Do you mind if we don’t talk about the New Institute stuff?" Chromedome asked, rubbing at his helm. "It’s just...i ta lot, right now."

"Sorry, I'm getting carried away. I get carried away. Dominus used to say I had two speeds, backwards and fast forwards. How are you doing? You had a hell of a day."

"I'm not feeling much." Chromedome said. "I probably should be? I should be feeling something. Relief, if nothing else? But I'm just...here. And I'm not dead. My hip hurts a little."

"Why were you in the hospital?" Rewind asked.

"Oh. I got shot." Chromedome glanced down at his plating, perfectly smooth. "For a little bit there you could have put your fist through my internals. I was lucky, it must have missed my spinal conduit."

"That must have hurt."

"Not for long," Chromedome said. "I made it maybe a minute before I passed out. I remember the medic saying I was going to make it. And then I woke up today. Not sure how long they had me out, but I can't even feel the injury anymore."

He let Rewind strategize a bit about how to stay undetected—mainly staying indoors and off data networks. Rewind had a spare datapad that had a guest profile already set up, which they could use to communicate in case of emergencies. Rewind suggested they call it an early night. They'd decided it would be best if Rewind kept up his routines, so as not to rouse suspicions, so he'd be out to do his archival work at dawn.

They talked for a bit longer about Dominus, about Rewind's search and about his work, then settled down to recharge. Chromedome refused Rewind's multiple offers to sleep on the berth, pointing out that he was a guest and also that the berth had been sized for minibots and that Chromedome would have more space to stretch out on the floor. Rewind agreed grudgingly; Chromedome had the suspicion they might play out that argument every night until he left.

Until he left. Chromedome frowned, arms pillowed under his head as he looked up at the ceiling, listening to the gentle hum of Rewind’s fans spinning down. He’d only just gotten here but already that part of him that had always gotten attached too soon was singing that this was home. He didn’t like the thought of leaving.

The UV projector worked. He wasn't sure what had stopped Rewind from testing it out, he just had to flip the power switch and he knew within a few seconds that the bulb was working. But the records...he could see how the enormity of the task could have stopped Rewind from getting started. For his part, Chromedome was grateful to have a task to do. If he’d been left at loose ends he probably would have driven himself into a mental breakdown.

Each box was divided into two rows of five cases, and each case held a stack of sheets of negatives as tall as his hand. Chromedome went through the first stack quickly, pinning his reference photo of Dominus up beside the projector image. But he slowed down as the day wore on. It wasn't that the work was boring, though it was. Or even that looking at so many dead made him feel something sobering about the war; though there was a bit of that. They'd been insulated at the New Institute. Most of his brushes with the horrors of war had been second hand. No, stupidly, he kept being distracted by thoughts of Dominus.

It was a mystery, wasn't it? He'd always loved mysteries, back when he was on the force. Before you could solve pretty much any of them by cracking a guy's mind open. Dominus and Rewind were conjunxes but Dominus had vanished without a trace. It was hard to imagine that could have happened without either Dominus choosing to leave or someone choosing to take him away—someone with the resources to whisk him off without appearing on a single camera or being seen by a witness or anything else that Rewind could track. It felt like a conspiracy, but who would conspire to steal Dominus Ambus? And why?

He caught himself staring at the photograph of Dominus, trying to decide based on that single snapshot if he was the sort of mech who could deliberately leave his conjunx behind without a word in goodbye. That wasn't the kind of thing you could tell by staring at someone's face—Chromedome had seen inside enough heads to know a pretty face didn't predict a kind spark. But he found himself staring at the photograph anyways.

He wondered who had taken the photo. It didn't look like a press photograph, or even a formally posed one. Dominus had a fond smile on his face, a softness to him Chromedome wouldn't have expected. He sat back down on the berth and finally noticed the camera left sitting on top of the pile of boxes. Oh. That was a rather obvious answer to the question. Rewind hadn't mentioned that he did photography.

Chromedome picked up the camera and turned it over. The lens was cracked and there was a corner dented; he wasn't surprised when the thing didn't power on. Presumably Rewind kept it around as some sort of memento. Chromedome caught sight of the engraving and put the camera down, sorry to have intruded.

He left the camera out when he went back to reviewing photographs, not willing to commit the implicit lie in pretending he hadn't been looking at Rewind's things.

Rewind showed back up late in the evening. He closed the door so softly Chromedome might not have noticed him come in except for the breeze. He turned the projector off and watched as Rewind shuffled over to the bench and melted down onto it, stretching out his legs with a groan. Rewind leaned his head back against the wall and looked over at Chromedome. "Why did all of you tall people have to put things so damned far apart?" He asked.

"You sound like an old mech," Chromedome said.

"I am old. That's the problem with being short, nobody stops to think you might have joint pain," Rewind said with a wave of his hand. "I take it you don't know many other datasticks."

"I don't think I know any," Chromedome admitted. "Is that your alt mode?"

"Yeah, we're not so common anymore," Rewind said. "Back in the day all the rich sods had a few datasticks in their collection. Not so many datasticks being forged any more...maybe now that we've developed external computers Primus thinks we're redundant? Who knows." He shook his head.

"You okay?" Chromedome asked.

Rewind sighed. "I hate seeing dead people. I hate this. I hate everything about this." He looked over at the projector Chromedome had balanced on his lap. "Did you get it to work?"

"Yeah, but I didn't find anything. Could take me a few weeks to go through all of these, honestly," Chromedome said.

"That's fine, it feels like I've had them sitting around forever." Rewind pushed himself to his feet and wandered over to the berth. He bent to sit down and caught sight of the camera. "Oh," He said softly.

"I'm sorry, I didn't realize how personal it was when I picked it up," Chromedome said.

"Don't be sorry, it's fine. It's a long time past." Rewind reached over and picked up the camera, turning it over in his hands.

"How did it break?" Chromedome asked.

"I dropped it over the railing and into a lake," Rewind said. "It was a whole story."

"Huh. Lucky you didn't get any sediment behind the lens then."

"Lens?" Rewind asked.

"Yeah, the lens is cracked," Chromedome said. "You must have been pretty high off the water for that to happen."

Rewind stared at the camera, looking at it as if he'd never seen it before. "I don't remember that happening," he said. "It must have gotten dropped again during one of my recent moves. Definitely wasn't cracked the first time."

"So was that the end of your career as a photographer, or did you keep it up?" Chromedome asked.

Rewind brightened. "Oh no, I've destroyed several cameras since then. Dominus used to say the only thing that could possibly stop me from dropping a camera would be to have it bolted to the side of my head. Which, honestly, I've considered? They make models now that you can have direct wired into your visual processing center. The Functionists would be horrified. That's only, like, 30 percent of the appeal though."

Through a winding conversation on cameras—Rewind had opinions—and Functionism—Rewind had opinions about that too, but it involved slightly more cursing—the topic of Disposables came up. "There's really not that many of us left," he said, with a shrug. "I was one of the lucky ones. The luckiest. I got Dominus."

"I feel like I remember this, actually," Chromedome said. "Wasn't Dominus Ambus involved in advocating for legal rights for the ‘disposable’ class based on sentience tests?"

"Mm, yes, that was a thing he did," Rewind said.

"Wait. Was that because of you? Do all the datasticks and laser pointers and all them have rights now because of you?"

"Don't be silly," Rewind waved him off. "Any substantive legislative and cultural change happens because of the intersection of huge amounts of activism work and good luck. Dominus was just in the right place at the right time and I happened to be his."

"But Dominus decided to advocate for disp—for former disposables—because of you?"

Rewind shrugged. "Well, maybe a little bit."

"Primus, I should get you in a room with Brainstorm. He's my—well, I guess he's my only friend. He's also physically incapable of humility. Spitfire smart, like you are, just a lot more...grandiose about it."

"He sounds like a character."
"Well he's no Dominus Ambus," Chromedome said. "But he's a good friend. Was a good friend. I don't know, things have been weird between us lately. He got transferred away from the Institute and ever since he's been distant. I mean, physically distant obviously. But also distant distant. I’ve called him up a few times and he’s always a hurry to get off the phone. It's like I've done something to make him mad at me, but he won't tell me what it is."

"Have you tried asking him?"

"Um, well, not exactly?" Chromedome stammered.

Rewind laughed, then tried to explain that he wasn't laughing at Chromedome, which was absolute bunk. Still, he had a nice laugh. And he got adorably flustered when Chromedome pretended to be hurt over it. Not adorable. Charming. Chromedome wished he was friends with Rewind. Spending time with him was...nice.

Somehow, despite their best intentions and Rewind's promises every ten minutes that he was absolutely going to recharge in just a couple more minutes, they ended up staying up through the night. There weren't any windows in the apartment and Chromedome had rather lost track of time when Rewind's wake-up alarm started going off, midway through a discursive ramble on the merits of quantum versus magnetic versus optical storage of long term archival records. "I mean, my primary objection to quantum storage is that it doesn't make any fragging sense, how am I supposed to trust that—"

At the sound of the alarm going off, Rewind froze and then, very slowly laid down on the floor and covered his face with his hands. "What have I done?" Rewind moaned. "I can't believe you tricked me into staying up all night, Domey."

"Me? Tricked you? I did no such thing," Chromedome said solemnly. He waited a beat. "Are you going to turn that off, or..."

"I'm keeping it as a cenotaph to my bad decision making," Rewind said.

"I mean, it's not like you need to recharge every night. Nobody recharges every night. It's just nice; to keep your defrag cycle short."

Rewind glared at him.

"Or maybe you need to recharge every night and I should stop talking?" Chromedome suggested.

"I told you, I'm getting old," Rewind said, dismissing the alarm with a wave of his hand and dragging himself to his feet. "After a couple thousand years of fuel deprivation it starts taking a toll." Rewind froze. "Sorry, that was super personal and I don't know why I told you that."

They stood there in awkward silence for a moment. "So, see you tonight?" Chromedome asked. "Unless you want to give up on work and recharge now?"

"Don't tempt me," Rewind said. "I'll see you tonight, Chromedome. Take care of yourself, okay?"

And then he was gone.

The second day passed much the same as the first, faces blurring together until Chromedome was no longer certain he could recognize his own face. He decided to take breaks on a timer, spent the time lying on the floor and studying the ceiling and thinking about Rewind.

He liked Rewind. He liked Rewind too much. He'd only met him the day before yesterday and till kept catching himself checking his chrono like it might magically be time for Rewind to get home. He needed to tone it down—he was here because Rewind was good, because he couldn't look someone in the optics and let them die if there was something he could do to help. Chromedome found himself fantasizing about finding some way to stay with Rewind, of finding the money to escape off-planet together. But that was absurd—Rewind's work was here. And Dominus was here, somewhere. Alive or dead, Dominus was here.

He hoped he wasn't falling in love with Rewind. He'd never been in love before, he wasn’t sure what it was supposed to feel like. It would have been totally inappropriate; Rewind already had a lover and he was mourning Dominus...

Chromedome forced himself to think about other things, but self-reflection tended to lead him back to the great yawning emptiness in his life. What had he even been doing with his time? All those years wasted and he hadn't even cultivated a hobby, made a single friend outside of Brainstorm...it was like after he started doing mnemosurgery every other part of his life withered away.

In any case, he was exceedingly glad when Rewind showed back up.

"Are you sitting around in the dark?" Rewind asked.

"Easier to see the projector that way," Chromedome said, even though he'd had the projector turned off for almost an hour at that point.

"If you say so," Rewind said, climbing up onto the bench to get the cord for the light. "Any luck?"

"Not so far—you?"

"Not with Dominus," Rewind said. "But I did find some fascinating records on the Institute."

"Rewind!" He hissed. "You can't be looking that up! The last thing we should be doing is attracting attention."

"I was reviewing physical records in a deserted library archive, nobody saw me," Rewind said. "Anyways, I wasn't looking at information on the New Institute. I was looking at stuff about the original Institute."

"Why?" Chromedome moaned.

"Well, it's information that ought to be archived, obviously. And I had questions about mnemosurgery but you're obviously....not comfortable talking about it. So I did a little independent research. That's kinda my thing. I'm curious, I investigate."

"What did you want to know?" Chromedome asked, getting up to join Rewind on the bench. He couldn't really sit on it properly, but if he stretched his legs out he could do a lazy slouch.

"What happened to the old mnemosurgeons? I'd always imagined them, I don't know, being arrested or executed for their crimes. But then who would have trained the mnemosurgeons at the New Institute?"

"What did you find?" Chromedome asked. He'd never thought about the fact there might be records about the old Institute.

"There were over two thousand cerebroscientists and mnemosurgeons arrested the day they raided the Institute. Of those, I found twenty-seven who were granted amnesty by Zeta. I assume they might have gone on to work at the New Institute."

"What about the other ones?" Chromedome asked.

"That's what I was going to ask you," Rewind said. "There weren't any records on them."

"No idea," Chromedome said. "I had no idea the old Institute was such a large operation. I don't know how they kept it a secret."

"Well, not that hard, really," Rewind said. "Keep all your personnel on site and wipe them if they start getting restless. If anything slips through the cracks...well, if you were an evil mnemosurgeon there would be multiple options available for a cover up."

"I don't know if anyone's told you this, but you're kind of dark," Chromedome said.

"I'm a realist," Rewind said. "How would you do it?"

Chromedome shrugged. "Dunno. Don't spend a lot of time imagining being an evil mnemosurgeon."

"But I was right that some of the old Institute mnemosurgeons work for the New Institute?"

"That's classified," Chromedome said.

Rewind pouted at him.

"Yeah, they do. Senior staff is mostly original Institute. You don't see them around as much anymore, though."

"Oh?"

"Well, there's more junior mnemosurgeons now so they don't have to take active duty as often. And the senior staff tend to keep to themselves." He thought about it. Who had he seen from the old Institute recently besides Axotomy and Trepan? There were a few mechs on the medical team but there must have been more.

"If they have more experience, shouldn't they be doing more work?" Rewind asked.

Chromedome shrugged. "Nobody asked me."

"Okay, so the stuff I was reading tried to explain this and I still don't get it. How does mnemosurgery work? They refer to it as ‘injecting’ but what are you injecting? Some sort of chemical?"

Chromedome shook his head. "Nah. It's more like...okay. So. Your memory banks are made up of a huge number of gate cells, which are all connected together. Charge applied to each gate changes its polarity and the alternating polarity of thousands and millions of gates in sequence makes up...you. Those sequences all interlink and overlap and all that fancy stuff, but that's the basics. When I inject I'm putting the conductive ends of my needles in contact with certain inner bands of the subject's lifecord, where the sensornet branches into different junctions with the brain module. Electric current in varying intensities and frequency applied to the sensornet causes a field electron emission effect which can either set or unset individual floating gates."

"Yeah that sounds like the summary I was trying and failing to read," Rewind said. "I sort of get how that could allow you to alter the contents of the brain. But how do you read memories?"

"Yeah, that's harder to explain. I've never been good at the theory for that part," Chromedome admitted. "Generally you split the channels, at least two fingers for injecting and two for receiving, though styles vary. These needles are deepwired into my sensornet, so when I want to read what I'm essentially doing is sending pulses and then letting them echo back onto my sensornet."

"But how does it get all the way to your brain? Wouldn't it end up in your arm and make you twitchy?"

"No, no, they're deep wired," Chromedome said. "Line goes all the way up."

"Woah. That's intense," Rewind said. "How did they figure out they could do that without overwriting your brain module? Or overcharging your neural net?"

Chromedome thought about the way sometimes he'd recognize faces of people he'd never met and places he'd never been. He thought about the memory purges where, for brief snatches of time, he wasn’t sure who he was. He wondered...

He shrugged. "They'd gotten the science figured out long before I'd started."

"Well, I guess if there were any long-term impacts they'd have noticed it by now. Especially the senior mnemosurgeons—"

"Hey, can we maybe talk about something else?" Chromedome asked softly. He reached up to rub his temple, where a headache seemed to be building.

"Yeah, of course," Rewind said. "Shouldn't have pressed." He looked over at Chromedome. "Have you really been here all day? We could go out for a bit. Look at the stars."

"Someone could see me. Your neighbors," Chromedome pointed out.

"My neighbors aren't snitches," Rewind said. "And it's not like they have windows anyway."

"Sure, but if they happened to walk by and saw me," Chromedome stretched his hand upwards, "on your tiny balcony, I think they'd remember that. And whatever they remember is information the Institute could uncover. They don't need to tell anyone."

"Do you really think someone's planning to hunt you down and haul you back?" Rewind asked.

Chromedome shrugged. "I don't know. I have no idea. I’ve never heard of a mnemosurgeon who ran before. I don't have a lot to work off of right now."

"Come on, just for a bit," Rewind sid.

"I feel like you're not taking this very seriously," Chromedome said.

"Because you're being, frankly, a bit paranoid. There are thousands of people in this city. There are hundreds of ways in and out. There would be no reason for anyone to suspect you would have gone here in particular or to be asking around in this neighborhood. There aren't any security cameras around here and this isn't Autobot controlled space."

Chromedome wanted to make Rewind understand, but he couldn't think of a way without dragging Rewind deeper. He didn't want to do mnemosurgery anymore and he was pretty sure Rewind's earlier description of what he'd do if he was an "evil mnemosurgeon" had stuck in this head...the Institute didn't have to court martial him. They just had to make him forget that he'd objected.

Chromedome decided to play the headache card and turn in early. "You stayed up all last night," he pointed out. "You should probably recharge too."

Rewind sighed. "If it makes you feel better. But you're taking the berth."

"Rewind, I'm not going to fit. And I'm certainly not displacing you from your own berth."

"You're not going to, we'll both fit," Rewind said. "Just have to do it right."

He manhandled Chromedome into lying down on his side, knees bent to stop his legs from hanging out over the edge. Then Rewind climbed up on the berth and reached over Chromedome to open the infuser cabinet. "Sorry I only have one," he said.

"Don't worry about it," Chromedome said. "I can refuel while you're at work."

After he'd hooked in, Rewind lay down, curling into the space between Chromedome's chest and his legs. "Is this okay?" He asked.

"It's okay," Chromedome decided. He was so close he could feel the hum of Rewind's spark, or maybe that was his own spark huge in his chest.

"Me and Dominus used to sleep like this sometimes," Rewind said . "Before we were...I didn't have a berth of my own, at first, and he was so very stubborn about me sleeping on the ground. I’ve missed this."

Chromedome didn't know what to call the flood of emotions that were currently battling for dominion of his spark so he let the comment lie and lay as still as he possibly could. He was awake long after Rewind drifted off.

Chromedome was on the verge of a breakthrough, he was certain of it. Some of the things Rewind had talked about the night before had made him wonder, and had made him wonder how he'd never wondered about those things before.

What had happened to the other mnemosurgeons from the original Institute? He couldn't rule out the possibility that they had stayed in jail, that they'd moved on to other lines of work...but it was suspicious that whatever it was wasn't part of the public record. Even moreso was his certainty that there was an inner circle of senior mnemosurgeons that had been part of the New Institute—he wasn't sure how many but there had to have been more than two? But there was only Trepan and Axotomy. If there were only two why did he think of them as being a large group?

Rewind was old; he had an excuse for all his aches and pains. Chromedome didn’t. He could remember back when he’d worked as a detective, he hadn’t felt so exhausted all the time back then. He hadn’t felt hollow. It had been easier to think clearly.

It was the fact that he couldn't remember ever wondering about any of this before that he found most unsettling. Sure, he wasn't a genius like Brainstorm. But had he really never wondered why there were mandatory weekly medical checks for mnemosurgeons when weren't any known health effects of mnemosurgery? Had he really never wondered whether the energy used for injecting might be finite?

Wipe them if they start getting restless...there were things that didn't add up. Not just the medical stuff, though he thought that might be the core of it. Rewind had to have noticed, hadn’t he? There was something between them and Chromedome couldn't explain it—the little details that felt familiar before he'd been told. The light hanging from the ceiling that he'd known to duck. The inscription on the camera. The way Chromedome knew he couldn't be in love with Rewind but nevertheless, was.

Chromedome considered the UV projector and knew there was one more thing he had to ask about. But first, he needed to go digging.

He positioned himself in the washrack, sitting on the floor where the polished metal surface of the walls would act as a mirror. Positioning his hand against the back of his neck was difficult, he stabbed himself three times without hitting lifecord. It hurt. He kept going, knowing he was added to his collection of overlapping circular scars.

Chromedome didn't bother to try a memory read once he was inside—it was his brain, he knew what he remembered. Instead he started checking for gates that were reset to a neutral state, places where memories had either never been made or had been erased.

There were a lot of empty spaces. Chromedome didn't know—couldn't calculate—how many days, years, the missing spaces would total to. But it stretched back to when he joined the Institute and grew and grew and grew, until the gaps were larger than the undisturbed memory blocks in between. Chromedome located Overlord's attack and found a disturbing blank space afterwards. He didn’t know how much time he'd lost, but he was certain it hadn't all been asleep in the hospital.

Chromedome dragged his needles free and, not knowing what else to do, curled up on the floor and cried. He hadn't wanted to be right. He hadn't wanted to be right.

Eventually he had to sit up and face the facts. He had three choices—he could run, he end up back at the Institute or he could destroy himself to spite them. The problem was Rewind. No matter which option he chose he wouldn’t see Rewind again. If he suggested it, Rewind might run with him but if they got caught together...it didn’t bear thinking. If he went back, if he died, if he broke himself beyond use, not matter what option he chose he would lose Rewind. And that was unacceptable.

"We need a plan," he said. Out loud, because sometimes you need to talk out loud to make things real. "Panicking doesn't count as a plan." He stared at his reflection and decided that whatever else happened he was sure of two things:

He was going to keep Rewind safe.

Nobody was getting in his head ever again.

That decided, he extended his needles and slid them into the holes in the back of his neck.

When Rewind got home that night, he seemed restless. He waved Chromedome off when he tried to ask if there was something up, tried to redirect the conversation to talk about Chromedome's day. "Any luck?" he asked.

Chromedome shook his head. "I got caught up thinking about...big decision stuff."

"Don't worry, I didn't make any progress either," Rewind said.

"I could look through some of it now," Chromedome suggested.

"Oh, probably better not to," Rewind said. "I'm allergic to UV light."

"Really?" Chromedome quirked his head at him. "I've never met someone with a—" real UV allergy. He swallowed the rest of the sentence, not liking the taste of it. "Never met anyone with a UV allergy before. Does that give you trouble walking around when it's sunny?"

"It's intensity triggered, really only an issue with medical scanners," Rewind said. "But probably better not to risk it with the projector. That's why I'd been putting off looking through the photos."

They tried to talk after that, but Chromedome was distracted by memories of carefully planted UV allergies. Eventually a doctor was going to have to realize the truly improbable number of Autobots with allergies to ubiquitous electromagnetic radiation. But it had been orders.

"Do you want to just relax for a bit and listen to music?" Rewind said.

"Yes please," Chromedome said. He didn't have much of a taste in music but he would happily do anything where he got to stay at Rewind's side without talking to him, when every word felt like a lie of omission.

"Okay, there's a band I've been getting into lately...I can't remember where I heard them first, probably on the radio or something. They're called ‘Vroom’."

Rewind's music was fun, half-familiar in a way that had Chromedome thinking maybe he'd heard them on the radio once before as well. "You should dance," he said, seeing the way Rewind's hands fidgeted against the floor in time to the beat.

"I don't dance," Rewind said. "Who told you I danced?"

"Nobody told me anything," Chromedome said. "You just seem like the dancing sort."

Rewind, sure enough, could dance. Chromedome had never seen a dance that involved quite so many dramatic poses and rapid hand motions—it was kinda like watching someone speak chirolinguistics all by themselves to a beat. Maybe that's how people danced nowadays. Chromedome had never been the clubbing sort. He could have watched him all night, sitting on the berth with his legs drawn in to his chest to keep from tripping Rewind in the small space.

When Rewind wore himself out, he dropped into the berth beside Chromedome. "Are you sure you don't want to talk about it?" Rewind asked, curling up against Chromedome's chest like he had the night before.

"I have to figure out what I do next," Chromedome said. "It's a decision I need to make."

"You can stay with me," Rewind said.

"Not forever," Chromedome said. "I can't hide in your apartment forever, Rewind."

"You're not going back to the clinic, are you?" Rewind asked.

"No, I'm not going back to the clinic," Chromedome said. "Would you...no. That'd be awfully selfish of me to ask. Forget it."

"What? Come now, Domey, you can't say that and not tell me." Rewind reached over and took Chromedome's wrist, pulling it to wrap around his waist. "I am relentless when there's a mystery about, I'm sure you've figured that out by now."

"I did notice that," Chromedome said. "I was going to ask if you would miss me. If I went—"

"I'd miss you," Rewind said. "Not to sound hokey or anything, but I like you. You’re easy to like, you know?"

"Same for you," Chromedome said.

When Rewind was asleep his grip on Chromedome's arm loosened and Chromedome was able to carefully extract himself from the berth. He powered on his integrated wrist light and shone it on the back of Rewind's neck, adjusting the wavelength into the UV range. A lurid set of circular scars marred Rewind’s perfect plating; Chromedome wondered what they'd been to each other, once. Then he switched off the light and left the apartment.

He'd planned to walk to a population center before calling Axotomy; so that they couldn't trace the call back to Rewind. The two MTOs who showed up to block his path onto the main street apparently wanted to save him the walk.

Chromedome rolled his shoulders as he approached them. "Either of you want to call Axotomy for me?"

"Tumbler, we're going to have to ask you to come along quietly—"

Chromedome swiped the guard's feet out from under him and used the opportunity to land a solid punch to the face. He'd been wanting to punch someone all day. The other guard scrambled to get their laser pistol out but Chromedome had already gotten his needles in the neck of his companion. He ducked down behind his new living shield. "Really. Just call Axotomy, nobody has to get hurt," Chromedome said. With his free hand he retrieved his guard's pistol and pointed it at their head. "Tell him I want to make a deal. He wants me back? He can have me. But he's got to come down here in person."

The other guard still didn't move, so Chromedome dialed Axotomy on his comm. "Hey, Axotomy, are you in the area? It's Chromedome. We really should talk."

Axotomy was dripping incenserity. "Chromedome, it's so good to hear from you. We were concerned that—"

"Save it. You want me back? You're going to come to these coordinates in the next ten minutes," Chromedome said. "And tell your lackeys to stand down. I don't want to have to break them."

"...I'll be there," Axotomy said, false friendliness gone.

Chromedome braced his laser pistol against his hip and said conversationally, "So if you knew I was here, what were you two doing hanging out outside? Did I happen to walk out just as you were coming to get me?"

"They told us to keep watch over the archivist's apartment," Chromedome's guard said. "They had the place bugged, so they knew you were there."

"So what, you were just going to let me hang out with Rewind indefinitely? I'm not seeing the strategy there," Chromedome said. He was already feeling a bit worn down from the mnemosurgery he'd done earlier that day, but it wasn't difficult to hold the guard in place and it was hardly more difficult to skim some surface memories to find their orders. "Oh, that's not very nice," Chromedome said. "You were going to break in and threaten that nice minibot so I'd come with you? Not the sort of thing an upstanding citizen would do."

"Only if you wouldn’t come quietly," the other guard said defensively. "If you came with us nobody would have gotten hurt."

"So why were you having them wait another day before threatening me, Axotomy?" Chromedome asked, glancing over at the Director of Mnemosurgery as he walked towards them. He must have flown in to show up that fast—Chromedome appreciated that he was apparently the top of Axotomy's to-do list. He'd never been great at reading Axotomy's body language but he seemed different than usual. More wary. Good. Chromedome had a burning desire to hit someone until they started giving him answers and these guards didn't know anything useful.

"I assumed it would take at least that long for you to become suitably attached to your new...friend," Axotomy said.

"The funny thing is, I felt attached the moment I met him. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you, Axotomy?" Chromedome said. "Tell your guard to fall back and put down his weapon and I’ll do the same."

"Backswitch? Do as he says. We're not looking for trouble," Axotomy said smoothly.

"Boss?" The guard who Chromedome had hooked said plaintively.

"Stay calm Influx. I am sure that when Chromedome and I are done with our business you will be free to go," Axotomy said.

Chromedome waited until Backswitch had put down his gun and kicked it away from them before following suit. He brought his guard—Influx, apparently—down onto his knees. No point in giving up his leverage and ending up kidnapped before he could even lay out his terms. "I'm willing to make a deal," Chromedome said.

"If you come back with us the minibot will not be harmed," Axotomy said.

Chromedome laughed. "Oh no, those aren't my terms."

"What do you want?" Axotomy asked and Chromedome was certain he heard an edge of apprehension in his voice. Axotomy had started wearing a faceplate since he’d last seen him, which made it harder to read his expressions, but his voice was an open book.

"I want to have never learned mnemosurgery and to go somewhere far, far away from this war," Chromedome said. "Don't ask me what I want. Let me lay out my terms: I get to stay with Rewind. And no one you employ touches him ever again. I'm aware that I can't watch him every day and that someone only has to slip through once to destroy everything we have together."

"You would be of considerable less use to the Institute if you're roaming the planet following at the heels of your new friend," Axotomy said.

"And yet, that's my price," Chromedome said. "I'm willing to return to the Institute as needed, or to carry out work remotely. And to sweeten the deal, I'll keep my mouth shut when I drop by."

"Keep your mouth shut about what, exactly?"

"The fact that every mnemosurgeon there is dying and you're manipulating their memories so they don't notice, or so they don't remember noticing," Chromedome said.

Axotomy looked around. "Who told you that?"

"Nobody told me that," Chromedome said. "But when you think about it for a minute, it's really fragging obvious. Honestly, the number of memories you've erased at this point is so unsettling that even a non-mnemosurgeon would realize there was something wrong. You would have been better off stripping me of everything."

"We can't," Axotomy said. "We've tried. There's a critical level of wipes after which the risks of mnemosurgery rise precipitously."

"Well that's pretty inconvenient for you," Chromedome said. "So, what do you say?"

"Honestly?"

"Sure, let's be honest with each other, Axotomy. It'll be a novelty."

"I have no incentive to make deals with you, Chromedome. You aren't going to remember the terms of the arrangement, in any case," Axotomy said.

"I guess I'm not maxed out on erases yet," Chromedome said.

"If you would stop running away and getting yourself in trouble I wouldn't have to keep doing this," Axotomy said.

"The problem is, not all memories are stored in the brain, Axotomy. When you blank out a memory, it can no longer be read from the spark. But that doesn't mean the spark has forgotten. The emotions, the involuntary impulses, they have a tendency to leak through. And, in any case, there's something I should tell you, before you try to get all handsy." Chromedome extended the needles on his other hand and waggled them, grinning beneath his faceplate.

"I can tell you're enjoying this, Chromedome, but if you could stop dragging out the moment and just say what you've brought me out here to say—"

"You can't read me. And you can't write me. And you're certainly never blanking me again. I can see why Trepan was always so adamantly against self-surgery—I did a little rewiring today." He tapped his needles against the side of his neck in demonstration, then retracted them. "The next person who tries to stick their fingers in my brain is going to suffer spontaneous spark failure. Probably kill me too, but the important thing is that I have insurance."

"If it were possible to guard yourself against mnemosurgery like that our department would be useless."

"Well, you have to be a mnemosurgeon," Chromedome said. "You've got to know that mnemosurgery kills people and you've got to be able to intuit how it could do that. And you've got to be willing to give yourself a little brain damage for the cause. I don't think there'll be many takers."

"That is very clever of you," Axotomy said. "It could, of course, be a ruse. I can't discount the possibility. But how can I risk it? The loss of one mnemosurgeon is a tragedy. To lose two in one incident is sheer carelessness."

"Then we have a deal?"

"No."

Axotomy waved a hand and fuel splattered across the pavement. Chromedome felt the pain and confusion as Influx ‘s mind began to fall away from him even as he disengaged and let the body fall to the ground. The feedback was like a blow to the head and by the time he was able to focus again there were two guards dead and a red dot floating on his chest. Sniper. Axotomy must have brought backup.

Axotomy picked up one of the guns that lay abandoned on the pavement and made a show of inspecting it. "Why would I allow a mnemosurgeon that I cannot control stay in possession of that information? It's a shame, because you are quite talented. But your services as a surgeon are hardly enough to outweigh the risks to my department."

Dying wasn't an acceptable option. He wasn't going to vanish into the night without a trace like Dominus.

Chromedome tried to reassure himself that once he was gone the Institute would have no reason to bother Rewind. But of course they would. Rewind was clever and he was curious and he would find out what had happened to Chromedome. And in the process he'd probably take down the whole Institute or get himself killed.

"What if I offered you something more," Chromedome asked, hating himself. Rewind would hate him, if he knew. But he had nothing left to offer, except—"Keeping all those people unawares, all that continually nudging away from the light, that's got to be expensive. How many friends of yours have died to keep that hushed?"

"It will kill you eventually as well," Axotomy said.

"And until it does, I get to be with him."

Chromedome didn't have any illusions of being a good person. It wasn't enough to hate doing horrible things—if he were good he would have refused to do them, for any price. There was a difference between following orders to do evil and volunteering yourself for the task. He thought Rewind could forgive him the first, even if Chromedome couldn't. He didn't think anyone could forgive him the second.

"There you are," Rewind said. Chromedome glanced over his shoulder, head resting against the balcony railing. The sun was just rising, not yet high enough to be seen over the buildings as the light built up around them.

Rewind closed the door and sat down beside Chromedome. "I thought maybe you'd gone," he said.

Chromedome shook his head.

Rewind stared at him, apparently seeing something in his face. "You're not gone, but you're leaving," he said.

"Sometimes your duty to the greater good is more important than the way that duty makes you feel," Chromedome lied.

"Oh, Domey," Rewind said. "I wish you didn't have to."

"So do I," he said. "I'm not giving up on you and Dominus though. If you still want my help..."

"Of course."

"Then I'll help you search as best I can," Chromedome promised. "And whenever I can, I'll come to visit. And if you're ever in the area...I got permission for you to visit me at the Institute."

"Me? An archivist at the New Institute?"

"You never know where the world might take you," Chromedome said.

There were years before the deal that were, in Chromedome's memory, reduced to a smattering of moments. In the years after there were times where he longed to repeat that process. But when he'd rigged his brain to kill, he hadn't made any exceptions.

The moments he would have wanted to keep were all Rewind. Their phone calls: initially focused on the search for Dominus, that grew from weekly check-ins to near nightly aimless, endless conversations. Their messages, both Chromedome's long letters and Rewind's staccato stream of jokes, photographs and song recommendations. Their meetings, days when Chromedome was sent on assignment outside the Institute and took the long way back.

Things changed, as things are wont to do.

Tyrest’s peace negotiations failed and he and Dai Atlas oversaw the departure of millions of Cybertronians who fled the war in the Exodus. Optimus was nearly destroyed at the battle of Sherma Bridge, but Ratchet pulled off a miracle and reassembled him. Nearly half the population died in the Simanzi Massacre and the rest of them were left reeling.

And so things went.

When Chromedome had returned to the Institute there had been nine remaining surgeons from the original Institute, nine people and Chromedome keeping the conspiracy. Six survived until the Battle of Sherma Bridge. There were four after Simanzi. Each of them disappeared unmourned after their passing, not even their fellow conspirators mentioning them as they adjusted their assignments to cover more of the facility.

Mnemosurgeons tend to die on the job. Axotomy did, leaving only Chromedome and one other surgeon to carry on his work. By that point, Metatone was so weak he couldn't extend his needles.

High Command came to Chromedome. Or rather, Prowl did. "Autobot Intelligence is going to be taking over the mnemosurgery department," he told Chromedome. "There was talk of you or one of the others heading the department. I told them you didn't have the stomach for it," Prowl said. "Are you going to fight me on that?"

Chromedome told him that he would sooner walk into an active supernova than take over the mnemosurgery department. Then he told Prowl that if he wanted to keep the program running he was going to need to invest in two things: new trainees and medical researchers.

He didn't elaborate to Prowl about Rewind's role in the deal, but he suspected Prowl might have inferred. Rewind's medical history was accessible to any Autobot, after all. And it was right in his record that Rewind was allergic to UV light.

In any case, Chromedome was removed to light duty after his meeting with Prowl. Metatone died soon after and—in response to rumblings within the department—Prowl called for an autopsy. The results began the first official medical probe into the impact of mnemosurgery on the body; Chromedome was requisitioned for the panel and got to play the delicate game of presenting truths as "new theories".

"A damn waste," Ratchet said, shaking his head at that first meeting. "How many lives could we have saved if someone had told us there was a problem?"

Nobody seemed to consider Chromedome might have been more involved than as another front-line mnemosurgeon too scared of upper management to raise concerns. He didn't correct them.

The war moved beyond Cybertron and it was decided that the scientists and engineers would be moved off-planet to follow it. Chromedome had already packed up his personal effects and was in the process of moving them onto his assigned research vessel. He was supposed to be attending a meeting in a few hours about what to do with the Institute assets that couldn't be relocated—current estimates were that the Decepticons would take the territory the Institute was situated on in the next few months. Chromedome was hoping for some cleansing fire. Brainstorm was going to be at the meeting; surely he’d have something flammable on hand.

It was going to be a big change—out in space rather than sequestered underground. He'd been on a few topside missions each year, made a few pilgrimages to visit Rewind but it was still breathtaking every time he got to see the sky. His room on this ship had a window. There were stars out, spilling light across the berths and empty shelving. Chromedome went to the window to look.

"It's not too late for us to go stargazing," Rewind said from behind him. Chromedome jumped.

When he turned around Rewind was there, really there, standing in his doorway with a little cart of datapads beside him. "Rewind? What are you doing here?" There wasn't supposed to be anyone on the ship except maintenance and onboarding crewmembers but Rewind wasn't—they'd been talking the night before, Rewind hadn't said anything about a new assignment.

"Surprising you," Rewind said. "I'm told we're supposed to double up berthrooms for efficiency reasons. Is that berth taken?"

"You're on my ship? You're coming with us? Off Cybertron?"

"Off Cybertron was inevitable eventually," Rewind said. "Not everything that ought to be recorded is in the past. History is happening at every moment, all around us. They gave me my pick of research vessels, so I picked you."

"Is that a new camera?" Chromedome asked, walking over to help Rewind move his stuff into the room. Rewind preened at the question, tilting his head to show off the new model, bolted onto the side of his helm. "Does this one have the real-time exposure adjustments you were pining after?"

"It does," Rewind. "Also I broke the last one."

"How?" Chromedome asked, running his thumb over the camera. "They're attached to your head now, you've got to keep them safe. The stuff in your head is important."

"Oh, let's not talk about it yet, you'll get all worked up," Rewind said. "I want to enjoy this first." He held out his arms for Chromedome to hug him.

Chromedome did, hesitantly, letting his hands rest loosely on Rewind's upper back. "I missed you," he said. "I can't believe we're going to be traveling together. I can't believe you chose my ship."

"Domey, do I have to spell it out for you?" Rewind asked. He hoisted himself up to stand on Chrmoedome's kneeguards, which got him high enough up to lock his hands around the back of Chromedome's neck. "Domey, why wouldn't I choose your ship? I'm in love with you."

Chromedome hit pause. "But, Dominus..."

"Has been missing for longer than Optimus has been Prime. I love him. I'll always love him, and I'll never stop looking for him. But the person who's been with me through all of that, the person I look forward to speaking to every day? That's you. You're not going to tell me you don't love me back, are you?"

"I do. I just—" don't deserve you "—didn't expect you would return the sentiment. Rewind, you know what kind of work I do. I don't want you to—"

"I know what you do," Rewind said. "And I love you anyway."

If there had ever been a right moment to tell Rewind about the deal, about what he'd chosen to keep Rewind safe, that would have been it. Chromedome decided to spend the time holding Rewind instead.

"You're attending the meeting in a few hours at the Institute, right?" Rewind asked eventually, helm still pushed up against Chromedome's.

"Oh no, you can't make them keep all that stuff. I'm going to lobby for a fiery end."

"Chromedome you can't just burn documents," Rewind moaned. "What I was going to say was, could you give me a ride over? It's kinda inaccessible by foot."

"So you’re finally going to see the Institute," Chromedome said. "And you're going to let me drive you somewhere? And you're telling me you love me, all on the same day? This might be a daydream."

"Life takes you strange places sometimes," Rewind said. "And I don't object to you driving, I just said that a youthful dreams of high octane driving that you held onto long enough to keep the name ‘Tumbler’ does not inspire confidence."

"I can be safe. I can be extremely safe," Chromedome said. "If you're with me, whatever you want. I'll do it."

"What if I want you to be happy?"

"Well, that'll be easy. I'm happy when I'm with you."