Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Isolation protocol activated.

Secondary function: primed. Initiate purge?

Y / [N]

Secondary function on standby.

Partition integrity: 100%

.

.

.

His hand hurts.

Rewind onlines suddenly, an abrupt snap into lucidity that means he’s waking up after an abnormal shutdown, and he becomes aware that his hand hurts and his head feels full of static and he doesn’t know where he is all at once.

He powers up his optics and stares up at a ceiling he doesn’t know, grey metal split by flaking orange veins of rust. He’s lying on a recharge slab, he realises, but he’s not plugged in.

There’s a low, rising and falling susurrus of sound that he thinks is feedback ringing in his audials until he sits up and sees someone hunched on the floor beside the slab. The mech’s staring down at the floor and he’s… he’s muttering to himself, that’s what’s making the noise.

He looks like he’d be tall, standing up, but he’s pretty lanky except for the big wheels on his shoulders.

Rewind’s vocaliser crackles, and he has to reset it. “Hello?”

The mech doesn’t react, doesn’t seem to have heard him. Rewind tugs on one of his shoulder wheels.

“Hey, where are we?”

The stranger just keeps staring down at his lap, like he can’t even feel Rewind’s fingers digging into the rubber of his wheel. Rewinds hops off the slab and looks to see if maybe he’s holding something, but no, he’s just staring at his empty hands, muttering too low to make out the words.

Unease slowly congeals in Rewind’s lines. This isn’t right.

He kneels down to try to look the mech in his yellow visor, little puffs of the dust that coats the floor rising up around his knees.

“Can you hear me?” Rewind tries again.

He goes to tip the mecha’s head up – hoping that looking him in the optics might make him at least notice Rewind – but while one of Rewind’s hands meets his jaw, the other glances off.

Rewind stares at his own closed fist like it’s a parasitic interloper at the end of his arm, and not an integrated part of his body he’s had his whole life. He hadn’t even realised he’d been clenching it, but his fingers are curled so tightly his joints creak. It’s why his hand hurts.

One hand still on the mech’s jaw, Rewind uncurls his fingers and discovers he’s holding what looks like some kind of improvised communicator.

Small enough to fit into the palm of his hand, it’s a clunky little thing made up of a boxy shell entangled in colourful wires that jut out from the right side and loop around to plug into the left. 

He doesn’t remember how he got it. With a dread that consumes him like corrosion eating through a spark chamber, it dawns on him that he can’t remember specifics for much of anything at all.

Rewind triggers a systems check as the flood of panic crests.

Partition: successfully established. Partition integrity: 98%, the diagnostic reports.

Rewind drops the device and jerks the other mech’s chin up, harder than he means to but he can’t help it, his hands are shaking. The isolation protocol partitioned his memories and isolated his databanks, he only would have used it if there’s a serious risk to his archive. This mecha must have been here when Rewind activated it, he must know why. He must know if Rewind’s archive is still in danger.

“Do I have a virus?” Rewind babbles. “Did someone try to hack me? Was I attacked? Is it – is it some kind of neural degeneration? You’re not even really looking at me why won’t you –”

The scrape of metal on metal slices the air, a sound like a blade being drawn.

Rewind flinches in surprise and looks down. Needles gleam where they’ve extended from the tips of the mech’s fingers.

“What…” Rewind trails off. “You’re scaring me.”

He stays still, frozen, and the mech doesn’t move either, the light of his visor dim like he’s lost in thought. He’s still murmuring softly. It makes Rewind’s plating crawl.

Slowly, unbearably slowly, Rewind lets go of his jaw.

The mech’s gaze drops back down to his lap. His needles retract, then extend again. He’s enthralled by it, like he hadn’t realised he could do that and he’s fascinated by the motion.

Rewind sits back on his knees, feeling lost in a way that goes beyond not being able to remember where he is or how he got here. He’s not really sure why. Though he knows on a level as innate as the isolation protocol itself that it is normal after partitioning his memories to be unable to understand contextual connections, even though they may still trigger emotional responses.

He doesn’t know what to do.

So, he needs to find someone, then. Someone who can tell him what’s going on. What happened that was so bad that it made him trigger the protocol.

“I’m going to go find help. Will you…” be okay?

The snick of needles retracting again is the only answer.

Rewind waits for a response, the distant hope that he’ll get one slowly shrivelling as his chronometer ticks inexorably onward.

Did someone do something to this mech, to make him like this? Was it whatever made Rewind decide to isolate his databanks? He feels completely useless, having no idea what to even begin to do to help when something is so clearly wrong.

He’ll just have to settle for finding someone else who can. There must be other people around here. There must. He’ll find out what happened. Find someone who can help. Get access to his archive back. Don’t think about the possibility that if there are other people here they might be responsible for whatever happened to make that mecha like that.

Rewind climbs to his feet, wiping dust out of the joints in his leg plating.

He's in some kind of bunkroom, with multiple berths and a single door. A light in the hallway beyond flickers intermittently, and the corridor turns out to be deserted when he peeks around the doorway. He looks back into the room, at the mech there, hunched in the pool of his own shadow.

Rewind tries to close the door – better than leaving the room open to anything that might be skulking around – but the controls turn out to have long since died of disrepair, and he isn’t strong enough to pull it closed himself.

Okay. That’s a no go then.

Both directions of the hallway look the same, so Rewind picks left at random and starts to walk. The sheet metal has been stripped cleanly off the walls in places, leaving wire filled cavities exposed. The hallway is lined with doors, some of which are open to rooms identical to the one he woke up in; spartan apart from multiple recharge slabs. Given the slabs and the scale everything’s built to, the building is probably Cybertronian. A barracks maybe? What other kind of places would Cybertronians build to sleep this many people?

The world spins around him suddenly and sickeningly, his gyroscopes abruptly destabilising and he stumbles –

– stumbled as he hopped down off the medical berth but the doctor didn’t move to help him. He clearly noticed but didn’t seem to care, more interested in flicking through results on a datapad.

 “Alright,” the doctor said. The attention he turned on Rewind was clinical. “The operation results all seem to be as they should, but I need to test your memory, make sure no functionality was impaired. What is your name?”

“Rewind.”

“And mine?”

“Tetralog.” Functionist accredited surgeon, standard ambulance alt mode, brain module specialist with a focal interest in physiological data storage.

“Why are you here?”

“To be upgraded to be able to purge my databanks. Because that’s a mandatory condition of my employment by the house of Ambus.”

Tetralog nodded to himself. “No difficulties with recall. Good.”

Rewind fidgeted awkwardly while Tetralog made notes.

Tetralog had a boxy frame, like most ambulances. He had lots of hard angles that made his expression seem more forbidding than it really was. Rewind had been with Dominus at Tetralog’s office for the consultation when they’d booked this appointment. Tetralog’s extensive credentials had been displayed on the wall behind his desk, he’d seemed proud of his expertise. Passionate about his field.

For all that everyone kept insisting that this upgrade was necessary, because he’d be a repository for sensitive information which required a high level of security and might be targeted by enemies or malcontents, et cetera, et cetera, no one wanted to take the time to explain when he asked how it worked. But Tetralog seemed like he might welcome genuine interest in his work.

 “So, how does it work?” Rewind said as he hopped back up on the edge of the medical berth, his feet swinging over the side.

“The how isn’t important, just that it does.”

Or Tetralog was actually one of those people who felt his work was wasted on mecha without the ‘necessary’ functional aptitude to understand. That’s probably what Rewind should have expected. He resolutely didn’t show how much the brush off stung.

“I still want to know.” Rewind pushed. Tetralog hadn’t seemed overly invested in the Functionist philosophies, it was worth a shot. “I mean, knowing things is my function.”

“That it is.” Tetralog agreed. He gave Rewind a smile that was patronisingly indulgent. “You memory sticks are always so curious.”

Tetralog ticked something off on the datapad, swiped down, then flipped the pad around to show Rewind a schematic for the torso of a bot that looked like him; one with a memory stick alt mode. The diagram was a cross sectioned view of the head and chest, with the armour transparent and the brain module, auxiliary databanks, and wiring connecting the two all depicted in precise technical detail.

Tetralog tapped on the auxiliary databanks, sheltered behind the thick armour of the chest and close to the spark.

“These databanks – an absolutely fascinating unique feature of your frame type – are capable of storing and retaining information at a much higher quality than the memory banks of the brain module, and will be where your employer deposits his work.”

Which Rewind already knew, but he kept that to himself. If he still corrected every mecha who assumed he wasn’t aware of basic facts he’d never have time for anything else.

Tetralog traced up the path of one of the lines which lead up from an auxiliary databank to stop just below where it connected to the brain module. “In the event that the data is at risk of damage or unauthorised access the adaptations I’ve made as part of your new isolation protocol will allow you to physically sever the connections between these databanks and the brain module. Should this defence not be sufficient for protecting the data you house, the protocol has a secondary function that can purge the auxiliary databanks entirely. And,” Tetralog added like this was an innovation he was particularly proud of, “to prevent any sensitive information you may have absorbed into standard memory being accessed instead, it will also stop you from being able to access your memory banks, though that is only done through software based measures, encryption and the like. Avoids all the expensive risks of operating directly on the brain module.”

 “Oh,” Rewind said quietly.

If that happens, will his employer even bother to pay to get him repaired? It would be much easier to replace him. There are so many other memory sticks. And if they didn’t, he’d be useless. Worthless. What’s the point of a memory stick that can’t store data?

“What are the chances of that happening?”

Tetralog laughed the question off and it made the ugly feeling Rewind fought to keep down twist in his chest.

“Exceptionally low. I’ve had two or three patients come back needing their connections repaired after an unsuccessful hacking attempt, and one very unlucky memory stick who’d been infected with an aggressive virus to try and destroy the information he was storing, but the majority of my patients never need to use the protocol. Honestly I doubt Dominus’ work will attract the kind of attention that –”

– Rewind comes back to himself, sprawled on the floor of the dilapidated barracks. A deep ache radiates through his chest, throbbing in time with the turn of his spark.

Was that… a memory? That shouldn’t be possible, he shouldn’t be able to recall specific memories, not without assistance from an experienced medic. Could the isolation protocol not have executed properly?

He runs the systems check again.

Partition integrity: 92%

Chapter Text

Tension prickles across Rewind’s back. He feels like he’s being watched, but every time he looks over his shoulder there’s no one there. Still, the heavy sense of being observed is growing slowly more smothering, like a malevolent cloud pressing down on him.

He’s wandered out of the berthroom lined corridor, through a larger room scattered with dilapidated chairs, and into a wide corridor uninterrupted by doors or windows.

Still no sign of a single person. Which is becoming increasingly creepy and frustrating, but is also a small relief. He doesn’t need to worry about someone unfriendly finding that mecha he left helpless.

The corridor ends in a T intersection. It looks like there used to be a sign on the wall saying where each path went, but there’s nothing left of it now except peeling outlines of black paint. Rewind takes the right at random.

A muted scrabbling sound echoes from behind him. Rewind almost manages to repress the shudder of fear it causes. He hasn’t seen so much as a sign of another living thing since he started walking, but every now and again, he’ll hear that. Distant scrabbling, like vermin moving somewhere in the walls.

The building’s in enough disrepair that it wouldn’t be surprising if pests had moved in. Except he hasn’t yet seen anything that pests could be eating, mechanical or otherwise. Those noises must just be the building settling. Or something.

He keeps hurrying down the corridor.

Finally, he comes across tire tracks. They show up clearly in the dirt that’s built up over what must be at least decades of neglect and probably from a speedster, guessing from the axle width. The tracks are smudged like they were going fast. He starts following the tracks in the direction the driver was headed.

Partition integrity: 87% the message reminds him from where he’s pinned it in his HUD.

That isn’t right, it shouldn't be degrading. Something must have gone wrong when he activated it, some sort of malfunction that meant it didn’t execute properly. Too bad it didn’t malfunction enough to let him remember at least enough to know what’s going on.

He doesn’t have to follow far. The tracks lead into a huge mess hall, turning so sharply once inside that the floor’s scorched with burnt rubber where the driver lost control and nearly fishtailed into a stack of tables left piled against a wall. The tracks show that whoever he’s following managed to regain control of the skid and made a beeline for…

Some sort of weird structure hulking against the far side of the mess hall.

Overall it looks something like a shack, if a shack was built by a group of semi-professionals in a hurry. Hastily constructed, the metal walls are fused with sloppy welds, but the door is heavy and looks unbreachable. It looks about as old as everything else in this place.

Those stripped-down walls he’d seen, this must be where the metal pulled off them went. But why? Why would anyone build this misshapen lean-to in the mess hall, rather than use one of the bunkrooms?

As Rewind approaches it, he hears muffled noises coming from inside. Abrupt and rhythmic like arguing. Are there people in there?

Unable to find a way to open the door, Rewind knocks loudly on the metal.

“Hello?” He ventures.

The noise cuts off abruptly, usurped by a silence that’s almost frightened.

“Is anyone in there?” Rewind tries again.

This goes beyond deeply unsettling.

He tries the door again, but it’s stays stuck fast. It must lock from the inside.

“Anyone? I’m not sure where I am and– I need help. Please.”

The silence stays the same, thick and overstrung.

Rewind traces a bubble that had formed in a weld near the door and strains to hear anything from inside the structure. Maybe he was wrong, and there’s not actually anyone inside. The noise could have been from a radio, or some other kind of recording. But then why did it stop when he knocked?

Fear rises up, thick and choking, and he looks back over his shoulder.

There are more tracks, footprints this time, trekking away from where he’s standing to a different mess hall entrance from the one Rewind came in through. Not able to stand waiting around here for another moment, Rewind decides to follow them.

They lead him to a vestibule where the dust on the floor has been disturbed a great deal, footprints muddled like a lot of people walked through recently. There is a reinforced blast door taking up most of the far wall. If Rewind is right and this is a barracks, that's got to be the main entrance. Given his luck with doors so far, it’s probably locked. The blast door is in better condition than what Rewind’s seen of the rest of the base. It hasn’t been stripped for sheet metal like most of the walls have. Even with the war-grade steel pockmarked by age the door’s still impressive. Whoever built the barracks must have really wanted to keep someone out of here.

Rewind stops eyeing the exit and does a double take. 

There's someone else here.

He'd looked straight past them, probably wouldn't have noticed them at all if it weren't for their flashy red and yellow paint job standing out next to the dreary metal of the wall. 

He's standing near the door, stock-still and optics dim. From the sleek lines of his frame and the sharp edged spoiler jutting from behind his shoulders his alt mode is some kind of speed oriented vehicle. Maybe he's for racing, or some other form of entertainment? He must be several tiers higher up the Grand Cybertron Taxonomy than Rewind is.

The excitement of having found someone who can help deflates before it really begins. He's not sure how, exactly, but something about this makes him think of that mecha who was with Rewind when he woke up. Something here feels the same. An uneasy sensation coils in his chest.

This stranger hasn't noticed Rewind. In fact, it almost seems like he has fallen asleep standing up. Weird. 

"Uh," Rewind clears his vocaliser.

The other mecha's optics flicker to blue life. There's one more vacant moment, and then his expression changes with the sudden completeness of a screen switching on, a total shift from blankness to exuberance even before he turns to Rewind.

"Rewind!" The mecha beams.

"Yeah. That's me," Rewind says, surprised. They know each other. That must be a good sign, right?

It's a big space, this entrance hall. It's a long span of weathered floor that stretches between them, long enough that the finer details of the mecha are too blurred by distance to see clearly. It obscures the nuances of his body language.

"So this might be a bit of a weird question, but who are you?" Rewind asks.

The mecha pauses long enough that it feels like he’s actually having to think about it, but there’s no reason for him to need to lie. 

"Rodimus. My name is Rodimus. Don’t you remember?" Concern is audible in Rodimus' voice as he walks over to Rewind.

As Rodimus gets closer what Rewind had thought was a small red rectangle, vibrant on the yellow of his chest, resolves into an emblem of blocky lines stylised to resemble a face. Something about the symbol makes Rewind feel safer.

"No, but that’s not that important right now.” Because it’s not, not compared to things that are really urgent like finding out what is going on. He will need to get a medic to assess this malfunction in his isolation protocol – what if it's endangering the information in his databanks? – but first, he said he was going to go and find help, and now he's found it. "I found a mecha back in one of the bunkrooms and there's something wrong with him, can you help?"

Rodimus gets close enough that it would only take a step or two more and Rewind would be able to reach out and touch him. There’s a weird popping sensation in his chest, like a snap of static electricity somewhere deep down.

And suddenly Rodimus' concern just... drops away. The worried downturn at the corner of his mouth, the way his optics are clearly searching Rewind for any signs of injury, it all just smooths away all at once. 

"There are others outside. We have to find them," Rodimus says. 

Rewind tries to get a handle on the unnerved feeling unfolding in the pit of his fuel tank. That response seems disconnected from his question, but maybe it isn’t and it’s Rewind who isn’t making the connection. “You mean that they’ll be able to help him?”

Seeming to abruptly lose interest in Rewind, Rodimus turns away to walk over to the side of the massive blast door. Rewind trails after him and to where the control panel for the door has been gutted, the plexiglass screen in fractured pieces on the ground and the operational mechanisms gleaming in the hole that was left behind, wires and gears arranged with the ugly utility of mechanisms that aren't supposed to be visible and so compromise no efficiency for the sake of aesthetics.

Incautious of the few sharp-edged shards that still jut from the control panels frame, Rodimus reaches into the broken open control panel and begins rearranging the wires. He works with confidence, stripping back and reconnecting wires without seeming to need to hesitate at all to find out what does what.

Curiosity nibbles at Rewind. "Do you work with non-sentient machines a lot?"

"The blueprints for this mechanism were communicated to the collective."

"The collective?"

Rodimus doesn't answer, too focused in the rewiring. 

Without thinking about it Rewind queries his databanks for the term ‘collective’. 

Partition integrity: 85% pings back to him.

The complete absence of a response from his databanks – not a negative result but no response at all – is like the sickening lurch that follows stepping forward onto what you think is solid ground only to find empty space. He hates it. He's useless right now. Completely useless.

And even though he can't be certain without his databanks or memories, Rewind can't shake the sense that this emotional barrenness that Rodimus is suddenly shrouded in is wrong. It doesn't fit him the way that burst of vibrancy he'd shown when he'd first woken up had.

Rodimus removes his hand from the control panel and presses a button on the right of it. He points at an identical button on the left side, too far away for Rodimus to reach without having to let go of the one he’s holding down.

"You need to push that."

"It takes two people to open the blast door?"

"Yes. They need to be simultaneously activated to deactivate the failsafe."

Rewind pushes aside his disquiet. There are people out there who will be able to help. 

He steps up beside the panel and presses the button.

There's an ear-splitting grinding sound as a motor judders to life beneath their feet. The door splits down the middle, its two halves laboriously trundling into recesses in the wall. The brilliantly bright light of an alien star spears through the widening gap. Rewind raises a hand to shield his optics and follows Rodimus, who doesn’t seem to be having the same trouble adjusting to how blinding the sunlight is, outside.

The metal of the barracks floor gives way to soft dirt and foliage as they step out into an organic forest. Thick tree trunks crowd the barracks, pressing in closely enough that many of their branches bend at odd angles where their growth has been redirected by the walls. A lazy breeze twists through the quietly rustling leaves.

Close by a group of richly coloured, feathered animals leap from the boughs of a tree and fly away above the treetops, communicating with each other through deep, whooping calls.

It’s beautiful.

Rodimus doesn’t seem to see the beauty, crushing small plants underfoot as he clinically surveys the landscape.

That feels wrong too. Some deep certainty in Rewind protests that Rodimus should recognise the value of this organic life and appreciate this alien world.  

“The other machines are not far away. We must find them," Rodimus says.

The words rub Rewind the wrong way, maybe because something about how Rodimus says ‘machines’ reminds him of how people throw around the word ‘disposable’ like it doesn’t cost anybody anything.

“Other people, you mean,” Rewind says curtly.

It does look like there were people out here not that long ago; the underbrush around the ramp up to the door has been trodden down and hasn’t had enough time to spring back up again yet.

Looking along the side of the building to see if he can work out where the tracks came from, Rewind notices that the metal of the exterior wall next to the entryway has been tinted. The decoration is half hidden by the branches of nearby trees, but by backing down the ramp a bit he can get a pretty good look at it.

Inlayed into the building by this sheet of purple tinted metal, easily twice as tall as Rewind, is a symbol that looks sort of like a Cybertronian face stylised into straight lines and sharp angles.

Danger is his immediate gut reaction to that emblem, followed by that sudden swooping sensation in his gyroscopes, and Rewind goes to bring a hand up to his head and nearly smacks himself in the face, hit with a nauseating sense of disconnect from his own body –

– ‘The devaluation of the most common alt modes is inevitable while the Senate utilises Functionism to maintain its iron grip over Cybertron; it is demanded by Functionism’s foundational political principles.  

These principles are disguised as being unquestionable economic truisms rather than ideology which, by design, privileges a distinct group at the expense of all others. The justification for labelling citizens with extremely prolific alt modes as sub-Cybertronian is couched in the language of economics, Functionists explain this practice as being the natural result of the laws of supply and demand.

The more that supply outstrips demand, the less value each individual unit of a resource is worth in turn. So the Senate claims that if there is only a need for five thousand laser pointers, but fifty thousand laser pointers emerge from the hotspots, then is that not a sign from Primus Himself that an individual with a laser pointer alt mode is inherently disposable in the sense that he is literally unnecessary? Is it not implicit in the natural order that mecha who turn into such common objects are worth less than mecha who whose alt modes assign them to roles for which supply and demand are more evenly matched?

The Senate and the Functionist Council say so. But in truth the label ‘disposable’ is a tool of political control.

This becomes apparent the moment a mere modicum of thought is given to the Senate’s power over Cybertron’s economy. The Senate controls the funding which builds infrastructure and creates new jobs. If there are more laser pointers than there are jobs which require them, the Senate has the power to create more of those jobs to reduce that inequality, and their decision not to do so is a politically motivated one.

Aggregated together the six most common alt modes make up a significant proportion of Cybertron’s population. If even one of these groups united under the banner of common experiences and defied the Senate’s control, they would be a serious threat by value of sheer numbers alone. If all six were to do so, the rebellion the Senate would be facing would come close to half of all Cybertronians. Neutralising this threat was the true purpose behind the invention of the ‘disposable’ class. By ensuring their economic disposability, the Senate has manufactured a justification for labelling these people as socially disposable, which in turn is used to legitimise their enslavement and over-policing.’

A hand came to rest on Rewind’s shoulder and startled him out of his reading. Dominus stood behind him, he’d leaned over his shoulder to see what Rewind was so absorbed in.

“We’ll be landing on Cybertron soon,” Dominus said. He gave Rewind’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze, and Rewind raised his own hand to entwine their fingers.

Rewind tipped the datapad so that Dominus could read the title at the top of the page. “Have you read this?”

“‘Towards Peace’?” Dominus read aloud. “Parts of it, yes. It seems to say a great deal of things that needed to be said. A pity that the movement that was sparked by this philosophy has become what it is.”

“Pity, yeah.” Rewind fiddled with the datapad, scrolling back and forth before he powered it down and subspaced it. “Minimus is already waiting, right? I should get ready.”

“Minimus and another Autobot who will perform the Rite of the Autobrand for us.”

Rewind hopped off the chair, just slightly too tall for him, and landed on his feet. But Dominus didn’t leave. He stayed in the cramped berth quarters of their shuttle, hovering uncertainly behind the chair.

“Rewind,” Dominus said, “perhaps I am wrong, but I get the feeling… If receiving the Autobrand is not something you are comfortable with, you do not have to do it.”

“I want to,” Rewind said, a little too quickly, but he didn’t want Dominus to notice how the knot of uneasiness in his chest twisted at the words.

Dominus studied him a moment longer, his face slightly pinched with concern. He clearly wanted to push this further, but their shuttle was about to breach Cybertron’s atmosphere and he needed to go and take over control from the autopilot to guide them down.

“If you are certain,” Dominus said before he left for the cockpit.

Rewind sighed.

If only it was as simple as whether or not he wanted to join the Autobots.

So much had changed in the centuries since they’d left Cybertron in search of Luna 1 – it felt like everything had changed – but… From what they’ve heard so far it seemed like the Autobots rose up to defend the old order of things.

The datapad sat heavy in his subspace.

It seemed like the Autobots got their start in opposing a faction founded on the philosophy that every Cybertronian had a right decide how they live their life, that even his dataslug alt mode didn’t make him worth any less than anybody else. What sort of people would join a cause based on opposing that? What would the world turn into if the Autobots won? And how could Rewind justify pledging his allegiance to them? How could he justify actively helping them?

How could he not, when Dominus was joining?

There was nowhere Rewind wanted to go if his conjunx wouldn’t be there with him. But more important than that was the centuries of Dominus’ work, unique datasets from test results and census data and complex statistics that took years to develop and more, stored on Rewind’s databanks. If Dominus became an Autobot and Rewind didn’t, they would eventually be separated. He couldn’t cut Dominus off from the data stored in Rewind’s archive, he didn’t have the right.

So he’s going to join the Autobots, because how he felt about it couldn’t be more important than that.

A dull roar started building, the sound of their shuttle having entered Cybertron’s atmosphere, and fine tremors began to shake everything –

– Rewind comes back to the present with a lurch, still standing up this time but hunched in on himself.

Dominus.

Grief wells up, all the more awful because he doesn't know why. On its heels comes a heavy guilt that Rewind can't understand which sits like a foreign object in his chest. But somehow it isn't crushing. It feels like maybe he's had time to process it, to figure out how to live with it, even if he can't remember that anymore.

"We must find them," Rodimus says, repeating himself.

Rewind convinces his body to straighten from its defensive curl, his optics irresistibly drawn to the badge emblazoned on Rodimus' chest. Autobot, the context from his newly accessible memory fills in the word. The inseparable opposite of the Decepticon badge on the wall behind them. He doesn't feel conflicted about his decision to join the Autobots anymore. He wonders what has changed since that memory that resolved his fears.

Rodimus is still standing just beyond the barrack's entrance. He doesn't seem to have moved at all from where he was before Rewind’s involuntary memory recall. 

Rewind checks his chronometer. He's lost a fair chunk of time thanks to... whatever this thing that keeps happening to him is, but Rodimus is acting like nothing strange has happened, as if he somehow also missed the minutes of what was presumably Rewind staring blankly into space.

That finishes off Rewind's shrinking hope that his sense that something is genuinely, dangerously wrong not just with this place but with the only lucid person he has found here.

He perfunctorily pings his database for any information at all to help him, and dismisses the Partition integrity: 75% notification that brings up. He can't be certain of anything, except his own intuition shouting at him that his current ignorance has let him wander into obvious danger without even realising. Rewind thought– he assumed that they knew each other. That Rodimus was a friend. 

But Rodimus knowing his name doesn't actually mean anything, not really, he'd just let himself think it did.

Facts. He needs facts. At least enough to know how much trouble he's walked right into.

"What are we doing here?" Rewind asks, his spark whirling unsteady rotations. Hopefully Rodimus will focus on the question and not Rewind subtly shifting to put more space between them.

Rodimus goes to repeat himself again, “We need to –”

“Find them, yeah, you said, but I don’t mean right now. What are we doing here, as in on this planet? We came here together, right? Why?"

Rodimus doesn't ignore the question. Not exactly. It’s more like he doesn't understand it. His expression goes flat, like all of the person has drained away and left a mask behind. That popping sensation in Rewind's chest comes back again, an insistent itch.

He shouldn’t have said anything. He should have just run. He's suddenly and horrifically aware of how much smaller than Rodimus he is.

 A distant, motorised sound slices through the tension and Rodimus looks up, through the gaps in the canopy to the sky.

The trees started to tremble as the choppy sound gets closer, waving back and forth in the growing wind. It’s the sound of rotors, Rewind realises, from some sort of aircraft.

A helicopter plunges down through the foliage with all the finesse of someone who can’t find it in themself to give a damn. It wobbles in its decent as leaves snag in the rotors, setting down heavily not far from Rewind and Rodimus.

The cockpit pops open and a bot jumps out, sliding down the helicopter’s blue plating and hitting the ground with a thud. The undergrowth – nearly knee deep for her, she can't be any taller than Rewind – doesn't slow her down as she jogs over to them, waving and grinning like they are the best news she's ever heard.

And when Rewind looks back from the newcomers everything in Rodimus' body language has suddenly shifted again; he's smiling and animated and going forward to greet the new arrival, calling out a delighted "Lug!" in the exact same tone he'd greeted Rewind with.

In fact, everything single thing about Rodimus’ demeanour is exactly the same as that moment; the same warm grin, same little wave. Perfect deja vu, like someone's reused a segment of footage he's already seen.

It makes Rewind’s doubt and uncertain crystallise into pointed barbs of panic. It's not just him now. These people are in danger.

"Wait!"

Rewind lurches forward, arms out to ward off Lug, trying to get between her and Rodimus. 

"What?" Lug says as she stops.

With a bemused series of whirrs and clicks the helicopter transforms, unfolding into a bot who's all spindly angles and confused squinting.

"I second that question," the helicopter says, using his claws to pick greenery out of the rotors in his arms.

Rodimus turns to Rewind, stopped just short of the others.

"You okay?" Rodimus' concern nearly makes Rewind's head spin because it's changed so fast from his blankness just moments before these people arrived. 

Rewind fumbles for what he how he can convince these people about something being very wrong here when they haven't seen what he has. No-one’s going to believe the word of a data stick over a race car, and Rewind doesn’t have any proof.

Lug looks between Rewind and Rodimus in confusion. "Is this about the quarantine? Your message didn't come through properly, but from what we received it sounded like the base would stay in lock down until Nautica fixed the thing that set off the quarantine?" She peers past them into the yawning entry to the Decepticon barracks. "Is that not what's happened? Where's Anode?"

"A quarantine?" Rewind echoes in shock.

Oh. He'd thought that the locked blast door really meant business about keeping someone out, but of course that's true for the reverse too, isn't it? It would be just as useful for keeping people in.

And he'd opened them. Rodimus hadn't been able to break the quarantine without Rewind's help. Oh Primus, what has he done?

"I didn't realise," Rewind says, sick with guilt because whatever happens to these people now it's his fault, "I didn't know about the quarantine."

Rodimus laughs self-deprecatingly. "That’s because it was an accident. We were messing around with the base's power grid and set off the quarantine stuff by mistake. Pretty dumb, right?"

The helicopter snorts. "Ugh, and here I got all excited for nothing.”

An accident? Rewind doesn't know what to think about that. The two newcomers have just accepted it like that's something have to deal with all the time. Maybe it is? It's not like Rewind can remember. 

He didn't actually see anything in the barracks that would require a quarantine, did he? It was creepy, yeah, but being old and empty doesn't make it actually dangerous. Doubt ties Rewind's thoughts in knots. He looks to Rodimus, who is still a lot more friendly – more animated – than he had been before the others showed up. Rewind couldn't have just imagined that odd behaviour before, could he? 

Or... or maybe he did. He's malfunctioning, he knows that, he's losing time and re-experiencing memories even though that shouldn’t be possible, the isolation protocol should have blocked those off entirely. Maybe paranoia is just a part of whatever’s wrong with him?

"'fraid so, but you can still come in and check on everyone." Rodimus shrugs. "No point in coming all this way for nothing."

"This'll be the first time Anode's managed to visit an uncharted planet and not step in a truckload of trouble. I'm going to have to see it to believe it," Lug says, and starts heading into the base, the helicopter and Rodimus on her heels. Still unsure of himself, Rewind trails after them. 

But when they cross the entry to the barracks, stepping out of the bright sliver of natural light slicing in through the doorway and into the washed-out glow of the old fluorescents, Rewind hovers on the threshold. He doesn't want to go back in.

He didn't think they were paying much attention to him, but the helicopter stops too, cutting Rewind a sharp glance with his single optic narrowed. His claws click together as he flexes them.

"Yanno, you guys have been down here for hours, but that distress beacon is still broadcasting. I figured you would have switched it off if nothing's wrong. What's the holdup with that?" The helicopter turns to Rodimus, his head tilted to the side like an inquisitive bird.

Things go a bit quiet when Rodimus doesn't answer. Lug frowns. Rewind scratches at his chest, distracted by a prickling like static electricity.

And just on the edge of hearing there's that sound again, a sort of scrabbling noise. The one that had followed him when he was exploring the base.

"Rodimus?" The helicopter prompts.

"Whirl?" Rodimus responds.

Then Rodimus puts a hand on Whirl's arm, just above the curve of the rotor. Whirl looks down at it in surprise like that’s a strange thing for Rodimus to do, but doesn't shake him off.

"Is anyone else coming here?" Rodimus asks.

"Ultra Magnus was a bit on the big side for me to give him a lift, so he's catching up. Reckon he'll be here any minute."

"Good."

Rodimus' grip on Whirl's arm turns fierce as he yanks him off balance.

Whirl swears in surprise. Something scuttles out of the hole in the wall where the door controls used to be, skittering across the floor.

It moves so quickly that Rewind only gets a brief impression of silver metal flashing under the lights and spindly legs before the tiny thing scurries up Whirl's leg to squeeze into the gap where the bottom of his cockpit juts from his chest.

Terror roots Rewind to the spot.

"Whirl!" Lug yells in panic.

Whirl scrabbles at his cockpit, his claws squealing shrilly against the glass.

“What the frag! Get it out–”

Whirl wrenches to the side hard enough to break Rodimus' grip, but it carries him too far and he overbalances and falls, crashing to the ground so hard the metal floor dents under him.

Another one of those things appears from the corridor behind Lug, zigzagging across the ground towards her.

Rewind tries to yell a warning to her but his vocaliser locks up helplessly with fear.

Lug runs to Whirl, dodging his flailing limbs and trying fruitlessly to pull him up. Whirl’s shouting has turned wordless.

The second thing leaps onto Lug's back. She jerks and tries to twist to grab it, but it slips sinuously through her fingers and crawls through a seam in her plating.

Whirl stops flailing and goes still. 

After a moment Lug stops panicking too, stilling until she is just standing slack and staring emptily into space.

The ensuing silence is somehow worse than everything that came before it, because now Rewind can hear how Lug and Whirl are whispering to themselves, very quietly, like that mecha who was with him when he first woke up.

Rodimus turns to him, and Rewind's paralysis breaks with a full-body flinch away from him because Rodimus has been so still, somehow watching all of this happen with complete impassiveness.

"We must find the last one," Rodimus says.

Every word, each inflection, it’s a perfect re-enactment of how Rodimus had said those things before.

It’s too much.

Rewind runs.

Chapter Text

He bolts away from the base, away from Rodimus and Whirl and Lug – and oh primus that was his fault, he helped break the quarantine, he let out the things that were trapped inside the barracks, what happened to Lug and Whirl that was his fault – and into the trees.

Ferns tangle around his legs and branches whip at his face as he runs blindly forward.

The cracks of tramped twigs and his own venting are so loud he can’t hear anything else, but he can’t shake the fear that something is chasing him. That something small and spindly is racing after him to jump up on his chest and burrow into a gap in his plating.

As the stays in his legs start to burn from exertion he bursts out of the sudden edge of the forest and onto an open plain.

He slows to a stop, bracing his hands on his knees, his fans thrumming rapidly in his frame as they work to vent out overheated air. He’s not sure that he wants to be in this wide-open space where everything can be seen for klicks around, but he can see now with the short organic grass that carpets the wide-open space that there is nothing after him.

And forward, in the opposite direction of the base, he can see an indistinct mass in the distance.

It’s distant, too far away to make out more than the blocky shape.

But it’s getting larger. It must be moving, coming closer. Rewind’s gasping in-vents are becoming less desperate, and he’s starting to hear a rumbling in the air.

It’s the roar of an engine running full throttle, and as it comes closer the shape resolves into the hulking form of a truck. Sunlight reflects blindingly off of the cab’s windshield. The air vibrates subtly around Rewind as a heavy-duty engine powers the truck over rough ground.

Relief does a dizzying tango with fear; Rewind can’t even begin to work out if this person is friend or foe.

He takes a few anxious steps backwards towards the trees, halfway to running again, further, far enough away that he stops imagining spindly legs clawing into his armour, but the truck has already seen him and is changing course towards him.

And what if this person doesn’t know about the things in the barracks? Somebody has to warn them.

Rewind can feel the vibration of that engine all the way up his legs by the time the truck gets close enough to see the clumps of grass that are being pulled up and tossed into the air by the spin of their tires. It's close enough that Rewind winces with worry about a collision before the truck transforms with a rushed hiss of hydraulics of someone feeling stressed. The blue and red mecha wipes at the dirt caked around his wheel rims with a look of disgruntled repugnance.

Fear pulses through Rewind like a second sparkbeat. His mind's eye won't stop looping that awful moment when Whirl stopped struggling and just went still, like something inside him had been forcibly switched off.

He can't let those things hurt anyone else. 

The words pour out of Rewind with the force of a ruptured dam, "It's not safe, there are these- these things in that base..."

He falters. He can't think of how to explain those things when he didn't so much as see one clearly, how can he communicate how just seeing one made quivering revulsion swell up in him?

The mecha starts to lift a hand and Rewind stumbles back from him, helplessly reminded of Rodimus' hand on Whirl's arm, the guise that had been manufactured to cover the chance to make him vulnerable.

The mecha's frown pinches with concern. He withdraws his hand and instead slowly takes a knee, lowering himself until he's much closer to Rewind's level.  

"Rewind?" Oh. He knows Rewind as well. Or at least his name. "Are you alright?"

"No." Any answer but an honest one is beyond Rewind right now.

Apprehension darkens the mecha's expression. Something about that, about him, feels more… he seems less emotionally vacant than Rodimus had, even when Rodimus had been making those calculated efforts not to. Fear eases its vice grip on Rewind’s chest a little. He still shrinks back a step as the mecha straightens, but the mecha only activates a comm link. Whoever he's trying to reach doesn’t answer, there is nothing but dead air in return.

"Whirl, Lug, check in."

What was it that Whirl had said? That someone called Ultra Magnus was catching up with him and Lug. This must be Ultra Magnus, then.

A small, guilty part of Rewind hopes this isn't him. How is he supposed to explain what happened to Ultra Magnus' companions?

"Whirl. Lug. Please respond," Ultra Magnus tries again. 

When the white noise stretches beyond breaking point Magnus turns his optics to Rewind.

"What sort of 'things'? What exactly happened?"

"It was my fault," Rewind confesses. "It's my fault the quarantine was broken. But I didn't know, I didn't mean..."

He has to stop, has to focus very hard on trying to stop the trembling that is making his plating clatter. He can't quite seem to manage it.

Ultra Magnus is watching him struggle, and that makes everything even worse. Because even though he doesn't feel wrong the way Rodimus did, what is Ultra Magnus going to do once he knows what happened to his friends?

But then Magnus shocks Rewind out of the panic spiral he's descending into; he transforms back to his alt, shrugging open his passenger side door in invitation.

"We'll head back to the shuttle. Anything that can give Whirl trouble is something that I want to know as much about as possible before I run off to meet it.”

The open door reinvigorates Rewind's stale fear. Can he trust this mecha?

Rodimus has seemed safe too, at least at first.

But he has to hope, though, doesn't he? Not everyone on this planet can be an enemy. You can't see the good in people if you aren't open to looking for it.

And what’s the alternative? There’s nothing else around as far as the optic can see, and he’s definitely not going back to the barracks.

It would just be nice if, sometime soon, Rewind met someone who didn't scare him.

Choosing hope over fear, he climbs into Magnus' cabin, pulling himself up to see over the dashboard and watch the truck pull a U-turn and take them both back the way Ultra Magnus had come.

Technically, Rewind hasn’t actually seen a lot of things in the brief stint that he can remember, which kind of takes the impact out of thinking that this ‘shuttle’ Ultra Magnus takes them to is the most ridiculous thing Rewind has ever seen. But, he’s certain even if he had access to his full lifetime’s worth of memories for comparison the statement would still be true.

It’s… weirdly spherical? As they circle around to the front and more of it comes into view he finds that with the viewscreen shaped like that, framed by gold plating that gives it the shape of a visor, it almost looks like a giant head.

It kind of looks like Rodimus, actually. Which only makes it more strange.

It also makes Rewind question his perception of Ultra Magnus as an extremely no-nonsense type of person, since this is what he travels around in.

Rewind disembarks so that Ultra Magnus can transform to root mode and follows him onto the shuttle. Ultra Magnus boards it indifferently, like it’s just a normal shuttle and not desperately begging for a double take and a whole stack of questions.

Is this what Rewind’s life is normally like? Would he also be using transport that he’s suspecting doubles as a monument to someone’s unrestrained ego like it’s no big deal if he wasn’t being forced to look at it with new optics? He queries his databanks. The response only returns the result that the partition has degraded: 64% integrity. Concern about that decay doesn’t last long before it is consumed by a Molotov cocktail of burning curiosity and trepidation about finding out what decisions he’s made that he ended up with something like this being normal.

Compared to the flashy exterior the shuttle is almost disappointingly average on the inside; just the same sort of essential hardware and stations that Rewind can remember from the shuttle he and Dominus had searched for Luna 1 in, completely without the audacious ornamentation on the outside.

It is bigger than the shuttle he and Dominus had used. Big enough to have been carrying a lot of people, several more than Rewind has seen so far. He hopes they are all safe.

Magnus immediately moves to check the shuttle’s communications station.

Being inside the shuttle feels odd, Rewind is coming to realise. Like a thought is halfway to unfurling at the back of his mind, a twinge from somewhere beyond accessible memory. There's something about this place. It's comforting. It feels just shy of familiar, and like he knows he will be safe here.

 “I can’t detect Lug or Whirl’s signals at all now,” Magnus says lowly, more to himself than to Rewind as he agitatedly flips switches to adjust the station’s settings. “That might just be the base’s shielding blocking the signal if they have gone inside. But that might be holding out too much hope."

Rewind stands nearby uncertainly, wishing he knew how he could be useful here.

Ultra Magnus gives up and steps away from the communications station. He notices Rewind's uncertain hovering and frowns. Then again, he was frowning already. It's more like his frown changes tone to convey a different shade of emotion.

It looks like something has just occurred to Magnus. "Where is Chromedome? It's odd for him to not be with you in a crisis."  

“Who?” Rewind answers blankly.

That response disturbs Ultra Magnus for some reason.

“Sorry. I have an emergency protocol which segregates my memories and my databanks,” Rewind explains. “I must have needed to use it a few hours ago, so there’s a lot of stuff I can’t remember at the moment.” 

“You still have that? I thought you’d gotten it removed.” Magnus looks surprised, and also a few shades shy of distressed.

"Why would I have removed it?"

"Because… It's a modification that treats your personhood as inconsequential compared to your functionality as an information repository," Magnus says, taken aback by Rewind's question. Something about this is important to him. "Modifications like the isolation protocol are objectifying. They’re only justifiable if you push the argument that your only value is in your capacity to be a useful object."

It's understandable, from an intellectual standpoint, why Ultra Magnus would be passionate about things like this. While trucks aren't that high up in the Taxonomy, they are several rungs above the disposable alt modes. But understanding that doesn't stop the flash of anger that flares up because Magnus doesn’t have to be aware that not everyone can afford the luxury of having objections like that.

"Well, yeah, maybe, but I wouldn't be much use without it." Rewind doesn't entirely succeed at keeping the snap out of his voice.

"You don't need to be useful." Ultra Magnus' face darkens with the shadow of suppressed sadness. "You were the one who convinced me of that."

That can’t be right. Data collation and storage are what he’s for. Even if Dominus is gone, as he feels like he is, Rewind wouldn’t have let himself become redundant. He definitely wouldn't have preached redundancy. That's tantamount to suicide.

"Who's my owner?" Rewind asks.

"No one," Magnus says abruptly. "No one owns you anymore. No one's owned you for a long time."

And that can't be right either. None of this is making sense. He must have found someone that he could be useful to. 

Maybe this Chromedome person Magnus mentioned is his owner. It would explain why Magnus expected them to be together. Rewind can understand why his owner hasn't told Magnus about the arrangement if Magnus gets like this about it.

Maybe. Today's been full of maybes, there's so much he can't be sure of. He hates how much there is that he doesn't know.

Ultra Magnus glances at the communications station. "We simply don't have time for this, no matter how much I want to convince you. Ratchet's with the landing party, once we find them he can deactivate the protocol and you’ll remember. But we need more information to work with. Can you tell me what happened? Clearly. What was in the base that made the landing party lock it down?"

Frustration wells up in Rewind like an itch under his plating. He tries to remind himself that it isn't Ultra Magnus' fault that he can't remember, but Rewind is frightened and tired and lost and can't be sure of anything at all, and the thought doesn't go very far against all of that.

"Look, I get why that would seem like a straightforward question to you, but I don't know. I don't know what happened, and I don't even know if the stuff I do know is what you want to hear or if it was all totally normally and everything's supposed to be like that now." The anger that flushes hotly through Rewind is awful, it amalgamates with the fear he's been carrying since he woke up and makes his fuel tank roll nauseatingly.

"I understand that–"

"I'm not sure you do, but alright. Let's try something that might actually be helpful, and let me ask some questions, okay? How about we start with why we’re here?"

"Here, as in on this planet?"

"Well, I dunno. Are we not normally on this planet?"

Magnus' optic ridges draw together. The pause stretches, and it stretches thin.

"I see your point," Magnus concedes.

Then Magnus surprises Rewind, speaking haltingly as if each word is being carefully deliberated over.  "I... have been informed that I can be deficient when it comes to certain social graces, and that can make emotionally fraught conversations with me unpleasant. I can't imagine what you are currently experiencing must be like. It appears awful enough that I do not honestly wish to."

Well. That douses Rewind’s anger as thoroughly as a candle falling into a bath. He hadn’t been expecting an apology, or for Magnus to acknowledge Rewind’s feelings as legitimate and reasonable. Rewind gets the sense that Magnus is not someone who finds apologies easy.

“This would be easier if you were able to use the footage from your camera,” Magnus says, still sounding frustrated with himself for putting his foot in his own mouth.

Wait, what?

"What camera?" Rewind looks down at his empty hands, as if a recording device he's somehow managed to not notice until now will suddenly materialise in them.

"It's not hand held," Magnus taps the left side of his own helm. "It's deep wired."

Rewind reaches up and touches the side of his head curiously, his fingers bumping up against the curve of the deep wired camera he hadn't known was there.

Oh. That’s new. When did he get that installed?

An even bigger question than that: why? He can’t imagine what he would have needed it for.

"I had no idea that was there," Rewind says.

“The isolation protocol will have encrypted your memory of getting it installed. We’ve also got that protocol to thank for not being able to use it. You’ve said before that the recordings are stored directly in your auxiliary databanks, and the camera's connections to them will have been severed along with the ones native to your frame.”

“Or maybe not,” Rewind thinks aloud slowly. He’s mapping out the camera with his fingertips, feeling the smooth curve of the lens. What does it look like? What does he look like with it?

“How?”

“The protocol didn’t work right. I’ve been… remembering things. Not voluntarily, but still. And if the memory partition didn’t execute right, maybe the other stuff didn’t either? It’s worth a try.”

“It is,” Magnus says with restrained excitement. “The recording light is on. Can you access anything of the inside the base? Anything at all might be useful.”

Jumping at the chance to be helpful, Rewind puzzles through his HUD, scoping through prompts and notifications. And then going back and examining each one again more slowly when he can’t find what he needs. 

Partition integrity: 61% the reminder informs him unhelpfully from the corner of his HUD.

"How do I use it?" Rewind asks, finally giving up.

“I… don’t know. You are the expert. Normally.” It’s almost comical how someone as big as Ultra Magnus is can seem to deflate so much from disappointment.

Shame washes through Rewind. A chance to finally be useful and he can’t even manage that. 

Okay, think practically about this. Software controls can’t be the only ones the camera’s got, because that would only be accessible to him, and what would be the point of that?

“It must have some kind of exterior controls, right?” Rewind reasons out loud, tracing the side of his helm again to see if he can feel them.

Magnus walks over, and Rewind has to tip his helm back to be able to look him in the optics. Magnus’ hands hover nearby Rewind’s head uncertainly. “Do you mind if I…?”

It feels kind of weird that Magnus asked permission before touching him. People don't normally bother to do that. Not as far as he can remember right now.

"Go for it," Rewind says, tilting his head to make the camera easier to access.

Magnus frowns as he peers down at the side of Rewind’s helm. “This will be easier if we are closer to the same height. Hold on a moment.”

Magnus directs Rewind to a bench set into a wall, probably for passengers to secure themselves during turbulence judging by the straps and buckles attached to it.

Rewind hops up onto the seat. He figured that Magnus would stand over him, but instead Magnus surprises him again by sitting on the floor by his side. Rewind furtively checks Magnus’ expression, but he doesn’t seem at all irked at having to lower himself for a disposable.

Like this they’re equals, at least in terms of height.

All the little things that aren’t making sense suddenly line up.

“Are we friends?” Rewind asks.

As soon as he’s spoken Rewind cringes internally, feeling like an idiot. Obviously the answer is ‘no’. For friendships to form you need to think of someone as a person first. Most mecha don’t see ‘person’ as compatible with ‘disposable’.

The question makes Ultra Magnus fumble.

“I certainly hope so. Wait,” Magnus scowls at himself, “I should not let my own awkwardness make me ungenerous. Yes, we are friends.”

Huh.

As Rewind struggles to reconcile that, Magus uses his closer perspective to check over the side of Rewind’s helm, his concentration entirely focused on searching for the manual controls. Or at least it seems that way, as Magnus is studiously avoiding meeting Rewind’s optics.

“I find that I value our friendship a great deal. I am much happier with myself than I once was, and I feel that I owe a… not insignificant amount of that change to it,” Magnus says, speaking with careful vulnerability.

That’s– Rewind feels warm and disbelieving at the same time. He wants it to be true, and it even makes sense together with the unexpected way Magnus has been treating him. But how can it be? He can’t imagine what he could have to offer that would make Magnus actively value his friendship.

Now able to see better, Magnus finds and presses what must be some sort of latch in the side of Rewind’s helm, and Rewind feels the uncanny sensation of cool air wafting against circuity normally covered by the plating that sits over his camera as it lifts up.

And then they are brought up short by a different problem.

“We seem to have found the manual controls. Hmm. They are a bit more delicate than I can manage,” Magnus says.

They both look at Magnus’ raised hand, which is large enough that it could easily wrap around Rewind’s entire helm.

Rewind considers seeing if he can feel out the controls and activate them himself, but he’s hesitant to mess around with components inside his own head without at least being able to see what he’s doing. Perhaps there’s a mirror or something around here that he can use to make sure he doesn’t break anything delicate. Or at least important.

Ultra Magnus studies his own hand, considering. “Or at least that I can manage as a currently am.”

Whatever that means, it seems to give Magnus an idea for a solution. He stands up and back, taking a few measured paces away from the bench.

“Not to worry, this is perfectly normal,” Magnus assures Rewind.

And then he splits apart.

He literally disassembles, unfolding from the chest outwards so that a much smaller bot can neatly step forward from the pieces.

A rush of giddiness makes Rewind glad that he’s already sitting down, because for the first time in accessible memory he experiences what it’s like to see someone and actually recognise them –

– Minimus had surprised exactly no one when he’d volunteered to be the one to take inventory of the supplies they’d need to get off the Necroworld and reclaim the Lost Light from the mutineers. Rewind had found him cataloguing how much energon they could transport, to calculate precisely how long it would last them under strict rationing.

There are some conversations that will never be easy to start, no matter what direction you come at them from. Rewind opted to begin with what was most important.

“Are you alright?”

Minimus didn't look up from the cubes. “Hm? Fine, though I would be better if we had the proper medical logs rather than just Ratchet and Velocity's estimates for the crew’s energon consumption rates and fuel efficiency. Underestimating even one person's needs could leave us starving light years away from any supply outposts."

"That... sounds awful," Rewind said. "But I meant, um, about after what happened. With Dominus."

Rewind had to keep reminding himself that he hadn't been the only one here who Dominus was important to. When Dominus... when he had saved Chromedome, he wasn't the only one who had been hurt by the consequences.

Minimus stiffened.

"Maybe you should talk to Rung a little," Rewind suggested gently.

"I already have, actually. He was very... helpful."

Part of why Rewind had thought that now was a good chance to have this talk was because he’s better at reading Minimus' mood when he was out of the Magnus armour. He’d gotten a lot of practice at it, back in the early days when Rewind had just been hired by Dominus and Minimus had been around more often than not.

Minimus was without the armour at the moment, as it needed to be downgraded from the Maximus Ambus version back to its usual size, and as far as Rewind could tell Minimus was being genuine. Like he'd been able to make peace with his brother's death.

That's good. At least one of them has been able to.

"I don't blame you, you know," Minimus said, suddenly and seriously. He still was not quite looking at Rewind, instead almost grimacing down at the energon cubes. Minimus continued on determinedly, "The domestication had already destroyed Dominus’ mind, and what you did was a reasonable choice considering the situation you found yourself in." 

For a moment Rewind just stood there, a little stunned. He hadn't come here expecting forgiveness.

"Thank you," Rewind said. He felt strangely lighter, somehow, like he'd put down something heavy that he'd been carrying.

Minimus shrugged, still bent to his task of tallying up the crate of fuel.

Rewind considered the cluster of similar crates that were all open behind him, still waiting to be counted.

"Would you like some help?"

Minimus finally looked up from his work. He didn't smile, but his facial insignia twitched like he was thinking about it. "That would be appreciated."

Rewind got a spare datapad to tally up his own counts on, and they divided the remaining work evenly between them. Apparently the Necrobot'd had a distillery that they could use to make more energon if it turned out there wasn't enough for the trip, but they would be able to head out faster if what was already cubed up and transportable was enough. Rewind propped himself up on the side of a crate and started counting. 

Minimus finished up with the crate he had been working on when Rewind had first found him and moved on. His next one was half empty, and he braced one hand on the lip of the container to lean down and sort the cubes into orderly, and easily countable, rows.

And although Rewind had already decided that he hadn't come here to ask these questions – because this conversation wasn't about Rewind, it was for Minimus, who was grieving – they still built up like a physical pressure on his vocaliser. Every minute that ticked by of working together with Minimus in companionable silence made it worse. 

He shouldn't risk reopening emotional wounds that Minimus had only just started to heal. But Minimus is the only one he can ask. The only other person who still remembers.

Rewind wanted to be reassured. Or at least to be certain.

"Do you think Dominus was ever going to tell me about being a loadbearer?"

Minimus straightened. "I cannot speak for my brother, but I think he may have tried to convince himself that it didn't matter."

"It matters to me. I just– I shared everything about myself with him."

Chromedome, hiding things. Countless years with Dominus, and Rewind hadn't even really known what he looked like. These things keeping happening and Rewind had started to wonder if it's because of him. To think that there was something inherent to Rewind himself that brought this out in people.

He needed to know. “Did Dominus ever talk to you about me?”

"Of course. Although I get the sense that there is something specific you want to know about."

"Did he... I'm sorry, this is stupid. Of course he cared about me. And he said– He acted like... I keep thinking about how much of a scandal it was. Dominus Ambus, accepting a disposable as his conjunx endura. I mean, if you wanted to make a statement against the Taxonomy that's a hell of a way to do it. That isn't why we took the Rites, though."

"You did them because you loved each other."

"Yeah. At least, that's what he said? And he was so earnest. Except it turns out that there was all this stuff that I never knew about him, and now I can't stop thinking about it, I can't stop wondering if I was just..."

Convenient.

Disposable.

It wouldn't have been the first time Rewind had been discarded after he'd stopped being useful. He'd just thought– he'd hoped Dominus was different.

Now here he was dumping all of this on Minimus, and that's not fair of him at all, to have pushed his own issues onto somebody else like this. It's not fair for him to do that to anybody, and Minimus especially can't have wanted to hear about this.

With deliberated precision, Minimus put down the datapad he had been working on.

"Would you believe," Minimus began as he folded his hands together and looked down at them contemplatively, "that I have had doubts along similar lines to yours? Dominus did not tell me that he was infiltrating the Decepticons. He never so much as hinted at it. He preferred to let me grieve for centuries rather than giving me an indication that he was alive. It is very difficult to think of those as the actions of someone who truly cared."

Minimus cycled a ventilation before he continued, "But there is no doubt in my mind that Dominus loved you. There couldn't be, not with how he talked about you; he was in awe of your passion and kindness and how fiercely you held on to them when you lived at the bottom of system that took great pains to crush those things out of people like you. And I am sorry if it is unkind for me to do so, but I..."

Minimus' face hadn't changed, but the faint sound of grinding metal told Rewind that his hands had clenched.

"I reassure myself that Dominus did care, because I know that he loved you and he still abandoned you too, in the same way. Dominus decided that a chance to get the Autobots closer to winning the war was more important than you and me, but that does not mean we meant nothing to him. That was just who he was. It is only a matter of accepting it.” –

– Rewind comes back to the present to find himself lying down, which is something he's becoming more familiar with than is probably healthy. This time though it feels like he has been lain down gently, without the dull aches of impact that follow having fallen. Minimus is standing over him with a medical scanner, fiddling with it agitatedly, muttering something about the readings not making sense.

"I'm okay," Rewind says as he struggles to sit up.

Rewind's return to lucidity doesn’t assuage Minimus' concern and he tries to convince Rewind to stay lying down, but Rewind ignores the direction and swings his legs over the edge of the same bench he'd been sitting on before that flashback. Each time he wakes up from one it gets easier for him to recover from the after effects; he needs barely any time at all to fight off the persisting sense of vertigo. Is that a good or a bad sign? Rewind wonders as he checks his partition reminder.

Partition integrity: 54%.

Minimus puts a hand on his shoulder to steady him, which Rewind appreciates even if he doesn't really need it.

"You had– I don't know, it might have been some kind of seizure, I couldn't get you to respond to me at all. You just kept muttering something, but I couldn't make out the words," Minimus says.

"This isn't the first time. Remember how I said I wasn't remembering things voluntarily?"

"You had a flashback? I didn't think the isolation protocol was capable of causing something like this, even if it didn't execute properly." Then Minimus puts together what happened immediately beforehand. "I caused it, didn't I?"

He did, but honestly Rewind is grateful to have that part of himself returned to him. It gave him back a comforting feeling of kinship with Minimus, from knowing that someone else had recognised when Rewind was hurt, and was struggling, and had not only seen those things but had also understood how he felt. That was... there aren't words for how much that meant.

And Minimus had been right.

Rewind suspects he’s regaining contextual knowledge alongside each relived experience; after each one he is instinctively knows more things even though he still cannot directly remember how he knows. He is certain now, for instance, that Minimus has never been a disposable. Which means Minimus was right that Dominus' abandonment of Rewind had nothing to do with that, because not being a disposable hadn't protected Minimus from the same thing.

There is a surge of old guilt, that Minimus had been suffering as well and Rewind hadn't noticed, even though he had been perhaps the person best equipped to do so. That he'd been so tangled up in the fear that Dominus left the way he did because of what Rewind is, he hadn't realised that Minimus had experienced the same pain.

"It's a memory I'm happy to have back. It’s good to recognise you, Minimus," Rewind says, covering the guilt with a smile in his voice.

At first Minimus looks surprised to have been remembered, then his shoulders sag with relief. Though he also straightens and leaves Rewind to balance on his own, uncertain of his capacity to provide support now that it is no longer essential.

"I hope this means I don't need to explain the Magnus armour again? It's happened enough times recently that it's gotten a bit dull, honestly," Minimus says.

"Happy to save you the trouble, then. There's a lot of gaps, still, but I've got that much context at least." Rewind mentally pokes at the new knowledge that has leaked out around the decaying partition, trying to figure out what the most concerning gaps are. "Are we still trying to get the Lost Light back from Getaway?"

"We reclaimed the Lost Light some time ago, and believe me, how that happened is too long and improbable to go into right now. The ship's in orbit around this planet at the moment. We came here because we picked up a Cybertronian distress signal. When we arrived, we were able to determine that the beacon producing the distress S.O.S was of a design that was used almost exclusively by the Decepticons during the heyday of their Infiltration Protocol."

Minimus pauses to get a sense of Rewind's reaction to this, looking like he's waiting to see if Rewind gets what makes that significant.

He doesn't. "Does that not happen a lot?"

"Almost never on a planet with thriving organic life like this one. Several stages of the Infiltration were the translation of the Decepticons’ rhetoric that organic life will always be a threat to Cybertronians, and so should be eliminated, into action. Planets host to Decepticon bases during that time are typically barren now because of the 'cons intensive extermination efforts against the native lifeforms."

"That's awful."

"It is. It is also why we decided to send a landing party – consisting of yourself, Chromedome, Rodimus, Drift, Ratchet, Nautica, and Anode – to investigate distress signal. We thought it was possible that it might have been activated by organics with no other means of signalling for assistance. Also, Rodimus said that any organics who were able to 'kick the cons off their planet' were people he had to meet. It wasn't until the landing party entered the base that we found out it was equipped with shielding that interferes with communications signals and we lost contact with them. There's been no communications since they entered the barracks, at least until you. We have no idea what's happened to them."

Rewind taps his camera. "But I might. And you are small enough to manage the manual controls now."

"That was the idea."

Minimus does have more success this go around, hopping up onto the bench next to Rewind to examine the controls. Rewind tips his head slight to the side so that Minimus can see what he's doing more easily. Minimus tentatively flips something that Rewind can't see but feels like it might be some kind of switch.

Nothing happens.

"Nothing is labelled and I don't know what I'm doing," Minimus warns him.

Rewind almost shrugs, but cuts the impulse off so that he doesn't jostle anything. "Just give it a try. What's the worst that could happen?"

Chapter Text

Minimus sighs something about tempting fate and tries another one of the camera’s controls, equally without success. Rewind wishes he could see what he’s doing, but he trusts Minimus, so it's okay that he can't. Or at least bearable.

"How long’s it been since you stopped hearing from the landing party?" Rewind asks to distract himself from the discomfort.

"Nearly four hours. After the first two I came down along with Lug and Whirl to see if we needed to mount a rescue, and we found that the base had been locked down. We don’t have the right kind of firepower to break through its outer shielding without putting everyone inside at risk, so we’ve been standing by hoping for a signal from one of you since then."

Rewind hears a click and feels a shift in the side of his helm. An electric jolt zips down through his neck to his chest where it feels as if it earths itself in something in there with a biting sting. His hand flies to his chest, the reaction instinctive and not at all helpful because the pain is inside, under the plating where he can’t ease it.

The shuttle wall opposite him brightens with projected light from his camera. 

The projection is distorted, grainy visual static warping the image in swaying waves while the colours fluctuate between brilliant hues and drab greyscale. The pain in his chest fades as the footage clears somewhat and Rewind feels vindicated; just like how the memory encryption was incomplete, the isolation protocol mustn’t have completely severed the cables that connect his auxiliary databanks to his brain module. It looks like it only damaged them, judging by the distortion in the playback.

It's hard to tell what's going on at first. The footage is shaky and focused in an extreme closeup of something, the timestamp in the corner of the frame shows that this recording was only a short time before Rewind woke up in that sparse berthroom.

Then he makes sense of what he’s looking at – the camera’s being angled down into a large computer terminal, one that has been cut open so that, in the recording, Rewind can desperately rifle through its internal components. He finds a hexagonal microchip and pulls it up towards the camera. The chip is too much to the right to come into focus properly, so bringing it closer to the camera was probably incidental, he must have needed it closer to his own optics to examine it.

Past-Rewind drops the microchip with a hissed, “This isn’t right either, where is it,” that gets overwhelmed by a deafening crash of metal on metal so loud that trying to recreate it makes Rewind’s speakers buzz. He flinches, accidentally shaking the projection as past-Rewind darts a glance over his shoulder. It turns the camera to show the mecha with the shoulder wheels behind him – that’s Chromedome, he remembers that now.

For a moment he’s excited to have that much back. That drains away as Rodimus comes into view as well, lunging at the camera and stopped just short by Chromedome bodily dragging him back.

Even with the crackle in the speakers the fear in past-Rewind’s voice is palpable.

"Should I–"

"I've got him, just find that thing Nautica needs!" Chromedome shouts.

Rodimus says nothing. He struggles against Chromedome’s hold silently with an unnatural single mindedness.

The camera turns back to the computer terminal, panning across a large table with a holographic top ringed by other workstations and terminals as it goes. They must be in the barracks’ command centre.

Past-Rewind's arms re-enter the frame as he reaches back into the broken open terminal with shaking hands while the blunt thuds of Chromedome wrestling to keep Rodimus restrained continue behind him, out of the camera’s view.

Knowing that this is just a recording – that nothing he’s seeing can hurt him now and probably won’t in the footage either because he’s uninjured – barely helps with the feelings that are unspooling in him, too sharp and fractious for him to put a name to. Because what he’s watching did actually happen to him at some point, and he didn’t even know.

Instead Rewind focuses on keeping his body still so the projection stops wobbling. Beside him Minimus is leaning forward, his free hand clenched on the edge of the bench, as if being closer could let him see the things that are happening outside the limits of what the camera’s captured.

Every moment that past-Rewind spends frantically searching the terminal's innards, and the camera spends correspondingly showing only that small view and nothing else, feels like a physical strain as it hides the danger lurking just out of sight. There’s no way to turn and see how close it is, any moment Rodimus could break out of Chromedome’s hold and they wouldn’t know if he has.

Finally a part is pulled from the depths of the terminal; a boxy shell encircled by colourful wires that jut out from the right side and loop around to plug into the left.

"I've got it," the wavering playback of Rewind's voice says. "I've got it!"

Chromedome and Rodimus come back into the camera’s view just in time to see Rodimus take advantage of Chromedome's distraction, knocking Chromedome’s legs out from under him and pining him to the floor.

Instantly, as if it was somehow signalled, one of those things darts out from behind a workstation, skittering across the floor and leaping up onto Rodimus' shoulder to scramble down his arm and spring onto Chromedome's chest–

In the present Minimus recoils, reflexively letting go of the manual controls.

The projection flickers out.  

"That was a cuckoo," Minimus near spits the words. "There are cuckoos in there."

"You know that that thing was?"

"Not from personal experience. During my time as Tyrest's enforcer a section was appended to the Accord when we first encountered these weapons, to classify their use as a war crime and prohibit the development of similar devices able to commandeer the central nervous system of a sentient being.”

Cold realisation starts to dawn. "That sounds like body snatching."

“That is how it’s often referred to. Though we didn’t use it in the Accord because the modus operandi of cuckoos has a scope beyond what is generally thought of with that term."

Minimus already seems to have recovered from the shock, cool and calm again. Rewind doesn't understand how he can manage that, this means people have had the control of their own body stolen from them. People they know. People Rewind now has it on good authority are their friends.

"We have to go back to the barracks. We have to go save everyone from these things," Rewind says.

Minimus looks pained. 

"It's not that straight forward. Cuckoos are insidious, they were designed to be a weapon of both physical and psychological warfare. A cuckoo doesn’t just hijack a Cybertronian’s body, it wires into the brain module to rifle through our memories to make a replica of our personality so that it can fool everyone into thinking that it is the person whose body it has taken over. It uses the trust it’s stolen to isolate the host’s friends and kill them, all while they believe that this is being done to them by their friend. And aside from all that, once the cuckoo has reviewed all its host’s memories and completed its replica of their personality it will destroy the brain module and fully integrate itself with their body. What if we go charging in and that’s already happened? For all we know there is no one left to save," Minimus says, growing more rigid and intense with each word.

Then he slumps heavily, bracing his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. "Sorry. I am finding this discovery a little stressful."

No fragging joke about these things being a war crime, Rewind thinks a little hysterically as a swell of hopelessness threatens to crash down on him. Weapons that turn people into weapons, that steal all autonomy away from you and hold you hostage in the prison of your own body before killing you... It's so awful that he just feels numb.

"How could anyone invent something like that?" Rewind says.

"For the organics who made these weapons, the Entyp, it was a matter of self-defence. Their conflict with the Decepticons had reached the point where they couldn't win unless the Decepticons started sabotaging themselves, so they found a way to make that happen. Once a cuckoo has destroyed the brain of its host, it will find and infiltrate the place where it can cause the most harm to as many Cybertronians as possible."

Does the Entyp’s desperation make a weapon like this okay? Even when it's one where innocent people can be caught in the crossfire like this?

Did anything good even come out of it? "Did it work? Did they manage to drive off the ‘cons?"

"No. Even the Decepticons were appalled by the Entyp’s invention and redirected more forces into their effort to exterminate them. So many cuckoos had been deployed before the Entyps were driven to extinction that the Decepticons were forced to abandon the planets after conquering them. Their solar system is marked on our interstellar maps as a no-fly zone now, but not all of their remote outposts were ever charted,” Minimus says. “It looks like the Decepticons who built a base here didn’t know what they were sharing a planet with, and now we’ve stumbled into it.”

Bleak silence fills the shuttle.

Knowing all this now, it seems like a miracle that Rewind got out of that base at all. He must have come so close to being hijacked. He thinks of what he saw happen to Whirl and Lug, and shudders.

Which leads to another train of thought.

"Rodimus wasn't convincing," Rewind thinks out loud. 

Minimus lifts his face from his hands to look at Rewind incredulously. “How do you mean?”

"I ran into him, after I woke up. He was weird. Creepy. Even though I couldn't remember what he's normally like, I could tell that he wasn't acting right."

Minimus mulls that over.

"The Entyp went extinct centuries ago, these weapons have been carrying on with no one to maintain or repair them. It would make sense that they’re starting to malfunction," Minimus says tentatively, like he's testing the integrity of the idea.

"Then we can tell who’s been hijacked! And how long does it take, before the brain module is destroyed? It must take time, right? We don't know that anyone is beyond saving yet." The thread of hope buoys Rewind like a lifeline.

"From what I found researching this weapon for its inclusion in the Tyrest Accord, it can’t do damage to its host while it’s reviewing their memories and constructing a duplicate persona. There’s a lot we don’t know about that process, but it’s accepted that it must take at least three hours,” Minimus says, though he doesn’t seem as optimistic as Rewind.

Three hours? Then there’s definitively still a chance for Lug and Whirl. And judging by the timestamp on the footage of Chromedome being attacked, he’s got hours left before he’s beyond saving. There’s still a chance for him. Maybe Rodimus too?

Rewind blindly feels around the side of his helm, searching for the dial that Minimus had used to start the projection.

He finds it, restarting the footage back up from where it had left off. He experiments with the controls until the recording rewinds, skipping backwards through snippets of colour and motion. When he hits play again, the timestamp shows that they are now watching what happened thirty-six minutes before the fight in the command centre.

He’s rewound into the middle of an argument.

"–it's not like it can happen again. The cuckoos will leave me alone, it has to be me." Rewind's own voice is steady and forceful as it comes through his speakers.

Chromedome is standing right in front of the camera, arms folded, filling up the shot. Almost hidden behind him is a door, metal crisscrossed with sloppy welds peeking out from the small slices of negative space between him and the edges of the frame. It’s familiar – it's the door from that shack Rewind had found in the mess hall of the barracks, but this time he’s looking at it from the inside.

From inside, it’s clear that the walls of the shack are multilayered, sheet metal laid over sheet metal with all the joins welded. There are no gaps. The cuckoos wouldn't be able to get into this place. It must have been purpose built to be a safehouse, a refuge from these weapons. 

Chromedome's voice snaps with brittle anger. Something about it tugs at Rewind’s spark, the pull of an inexplicable certainty that the anger is just a paper-thin coating over his fear, like thin ice over a deep lake.

"But Rodimus is still out there! Not Rodimus. You know what I mean–"

The projection’s distortion takes a sharp turn for the worse, the image washing out into shades of off white and the audio slurring into the ebb and flow of speech gone too fuzzy to make out what’s being said.

Anode cuts in as the projection's clarity improves again, "Somebody's got to go out there, we need an integrated circuit from a transceiver if we don't want to end up like them."

The camera swivels around, revealing more people; Nautica, Drift, Anode, and Ratchet. The inside of the safehouse is small, but not so small that it forces them to crowd together like they have, shoulders pressed up against each other and any movement forcing someone else to shift to make room for it.

No, they've all crowded together to keep as much space as possible between themselves and the back of the room, where a macabre line of emaciated corpses sit slumped against the wall.

The bodies are clearly very old, having been grey for so long that dull orange rust has eaten away at their joints and flourished around the edges of the Decepticon badges at the centre of their chests. The husks that remain of these Decepticons are arranged in an orderly row, and the way Nautica is unconsciously picking at her hands makes Rewind wonder if the members of the landing party had to move the bodies themselves to make space for everyone in this small room.

Everyone in the recording looks at the long dead Decepticons for a moment as Anode punctuates her statement by forcefully pointing at them. Then they go back to ignoring them with grim determination. 

"I have to be the one to go, Domey," past-Rewind says as the camera turns back to Chromedome. Past-Rewind reaches out, his hand entering the frame to reach up and gently tug at Chromedome's crossed arms, convincing him to unfold them and sliding his hand into Chromedome's. The trembling in past-Rewind's hand stills as Chromedome curls his fingers over it. "I'm the only one of us we can be sure will be able do this."

"I know. I know, but you going out there alone, I can't–” The light of Chromedome's visor is sorrow bright, nearly streaming at the edges where optic filaments are threatening to burn out. “I'm going with you."

"What good will that do? You'll just end up like Rodimus," Ratchet says from off screen.

"If this works then that won’t matter, the logic bomb will fix it. And it's not like I’ll be risking anything that Rewind isn't already," Chromedome says determinedly. 

An argument over whether or not Chromedome should be allowed out of the safehouse breaks out, but in the present Rewind tunes it out. Chromedome was with him later, so it's a forgone conclusion who wins it. His gaze lingers on Chromedome, captured by him passionately arguing his right to follow Rewind into danger, the same way it had been captured by seeing him putting his life on the line to protect Rewind from Rodimus in the recording they watched before. These things don’t feel like the actions of someone who thinks of Rewind as property. They don’t fit with Rewind’s expectation that Chromedome is his owner.

He pushes the thought aside, because he wants that to be true too badly to be able to trust that he’s reading this right. The middle of a rescue mission turned disaster isn’t the place to get distracted by wishful thinking, and he’s got more important things to deal with right now, doesn’t he? What is this 'logic bomb' Chromedome was talking about?

Rewind skips the recording backwards again, trying to see if he can pick a point where he might find an answer to that question based on how people are interaction with each other. When things get far back enough that it looks like nobody’s started panicking yet, he hits play.

“You okay?” Chromedome is asking, the shot tilted up to look him in the face. He’s reaching to the side of the camera, a hand on past-Rewind’s shoulder.

“I’m fine. Just got some weird thing where I keep freezing up for some reason. Like I’ll go to do something and I just won’t move for a second,” past-Rewind says.

Chromedome’s frown is apparent in the squint of his visor.

“That doesn’t sound good. How long’s that been going on for?”

“Maybe an hour? I’m going to ask Ratchet about it later, right now doesn’t seem like the best time for a check-up.”

The camera swings down and the image becomes a wider shot, revealing that this conversation is happening in the safehouse. The Decepticon corpses lie nearby, sprawled around the floor.

“Fair call,” Chromedome says. He wanders over and nudges one of them with his foot. "I suppose these guys must have been who set off the distress beacon we picked up. It’s weird though, none of them look like they were hurt.”

Ratchet pushes into the safehouse, shooing Chromedome away from the body and squatting down to examine it.

"You're right, this mecha didn't die from an injury. No sign of disease or toxic substances either," Rachet says.

He prise open the corpse’s chest armour and examines what little the rust has left behind with pragmatic professionalism.

"Looks like his internals self-cannibalised to the point of catastrophic malfunction. This ‘con starved to death." Ratchet straightens up and brushes the dust off his hands. "I can't be certain without examining all of them, but I'd guess that everyone in here did."

"Wow, okay. That's grim," past-Rewind says.

In the present, Rewind hopes that at some point hearing his own disembodied voice saying things that he doesn’t remember saying will stop mildly unsettlingly him. It hasn’t yet. 

In the background of the shot Nautica can be seen next to the safehouse door, elbow deep in the wiring of the door’s control panel.

She pulls a frayed cable from the panel and squints at it critically, a spark of electricity jumping from the exposed wires to zap her finger. "Am I the only one who thinks that's weird? This door only locks from the inside. It's not like they couldn't have just let themselves out to go get energon."

"Clearly something happened here," Drift says from somewhere off camera. He sounds like he is outside the safehouse. "Maybe Rodimus or Anode have found something that can help explain this."

"Honestly I'm surprised the beacon is still broadcasting. I expected that at least one of them would have found it and switched it off by now. They've both been off exploring for long enough," Ratchet says as he goes back out of the safehouse.

"They’ve been gone for ages,” past-Rewind says, following Ratchet. “We’re going to have to go look for them if they don’t come back soon.”

"Normally I’d say that you're worrying too much, but normally we’re not in a building that blocks our comms. I don’t much like the idea that they’ve run into more trouble than they can handle while we’re just standing around here," Ratchet says.

The camera follows Ratchet over to join Drift where he's standing near the mouth of one of the corridors connected to the mess hall, helm tilted like he's listening intently.

"What do you reckon? Should we go looking for them?" Ratchet asks Drift.

Drift shushes him and listens a little longer.

"Do you hear that?" Drift says.  

The damaged connection to Rewind’s databanks makes itself known again, the image stuttering and the colours oversaturating into overbright intensity. It turns Drift’s optics a blinding blue that’s painful to look at, and the red lines underneath leave transient afterimages along the screen as he turns to face them.

Surely the interference from the damage should be consistent, not fluctuating between getting worse and better like this. Does the fact it’s not stable mean that the connection is still degrading? Or, Rewind hopes, maybe it’s a good sign. It might mean that his self-repair is fixing it.

"Hear what?" Ratchet responds, a little belligerently. He doesn’t seem to have appreciated being shushed.

"I think it’s Anode," Drift says.

There is a faint sound, just on the cusp of hearing, that might be the thrum of an aircraft. It's hard to tell with it echoing off the metal plated walls and the distortion of the playback’s audio. 

Then Anode comes into view, which settles that doubt. She's in vehicle mode, gliding so close to the ceiling she's nearly grazing it. She speeds down the length of the corridor and within seconds she's touching down and flipping into root mode just short of the camera. There's a shallow gash in one of her wings, causing it to sit at a crooked angle behind her shoulder when she transforms.   

"Rodimus attacked me," Anode gasps shakily, like she can hardly believe it herself.

Drift launches into asking Anode about the hows and whys and what she means by 'attacked', but Ratchet is peering down the corridor Anode just came from. Past-Rewind must notice this too, because the camera shifts focus from Anode and Drift to the hallway.

With the saturation of the projection so optic searingly exaggerated, the shine of light glancing off silver metal is unmissable.

The walls of this corridor are pitted with gaps from where the plating was stripped away for the construction of the safehouse – far away but unmissable for Rewind and Minimus is a cuckoo clambering out of one of these gaps. The weapon moves with stiff jerks of its limbs, like it has been stationary for a very long time and is still getting used to moving again. Maybe the cuckoo entered some sort of hibernation mode once the Decepticons who had staffed this base were gone. It must have waited for people and activity to return to the base and reactivate it, like the vibrations from Anode’s turbine when she flew passed.

There’s no way to tell if past-Rewind has spotted the cuckoo slowly making its vertical way down to the floor, but the way the camera hasn’t centred in on it indicates that he hasn't.

Ratchet has been only incidentally captured in the shot. His face is just inside the corner of the frame by chance, so it’s by pure luck that here and now Rewind and Minimus are able to see it twist with horrified recognition as Ratchet sees what past-Rewind has failed to notice and likely realises what the safehouse in the mess hall is for – and why the Decepticons starved to death in there while they waited for someone to respond to their distress beacon.   

“Run!” Ratchet barks as he grabs Drift by the shoulder kibble, hauling him back towards the safehouse.

Still twitchy and quick on the uptake Anode is after them in a dash. 

Past-Rewind lags behind them for a confused second before he follows, hot on their heels.

Nautica and Chromedome were still inside the safehouse. Once everyone else gets in there with them Ratchet turns to Nautica and demands, "Close the door, tell me you can close the door."

Nautica resets her optics, looking from the control panel she's still immersed in to Ratchet and then back in surprise. 

"Why– I mean, I probably can."

Drift unsheathes one of his swords in a move that looks like unconscious reflex. "What did you see?"

"A cuckoo," Ratchet says grimly.

Drift's optics pale a shade. He clearly knows what that means.

"A what?" Nautica asks.

Ratchet gives her an explanation of what these weapons do that isn’t any less horrifying for how blunt and brief it is. Nautica's rewiring becomes much more urgent. The camera turns as past-Rewind moves away from the door to be closer to Chromedome. In the present, Rewind really wishes he'd keep the frame on the safehouse door as long as it’s still open so he can see if anything comes through. 

Nautica must convince the control panel to spark to life because the loud grinding sound of the safehouse door drawing closed eclipses everything else.

There's a moment of relieved silence.

Then Anode says, "So. What do we do now?"

And the silence changes tone to one of people collectively realising that they are still in a lot of danger and don’t have many options.

Understandably this is followed by a lot of panicking and uncertainty. Rewind fast-forwards through it, because he wants to find out what he and Chromedome were trying to achieve in the barracks’ command centre and he’s sure that whatever plan the landing party comes up with here will explain that.

Controlling the playback is coming to him more easily now, and the camera feels less like a bizarre addition tacked on to his frame. Before he couldn’t work out why he would have gotten this modification, but the more he watches, the more he understands. If he hadn’t recorded these events they might have been lost. They definitely would have been lost eventually, as the people who were there either forgot or eventually passed away. But with his camera he was able to record it. Preserve it. Share it with people who weren’t there with more detail and accuracy than someone talking about what they remember can offer. Alongside that, reviewing the recordings feels kind of like the opposite of how the flashbacks make him feel; he’s rediscovering things about himself and his experiences, but instead of him just being pulled along helplessly for the ride he gets to decide what he revisits, and when, and how much. He’s in control of it.

People move rapidly around the screen as Rewind fast-forwards the footage. He sets the speed back to normal when body langue indicates that something Nautica is saying has captured the attention of everyone in the safehouse.

"–these weapons are just non-sentient machines, if the operating system is simplistic enough this'll work." Nautica appeals to Ratchet, "How advanced is their software?" 

Ratchet shrugs.

"It was never relevant to my work, so I can’t say for certain. But from what I heard the operating system for cuckoos was a rush job. There wasn’t time to stress test it, and only the peer-to-peer networking protocols these things use to swap information between them got enough development to be robust and well designed. Apparently everything else about the OS is basically a slapped together mess just functional enough to do what it needs to.”

"Right, a simple operating system like that will crash if we feed it a paradox. Just a basic transmission like 'this sentence is false' injected into the cuckoos’ peer-to-peer network would do it," Nautica says.

"Hang on. If we want to broadcast a logic bomb on the frequency they use for communicating with each other, don't we need specialised hardware for that? That doesn't sound like something we can just MacGyver up out of what we've got in here," Anode says. 

Nautica nods. 

"We’ll need a cuckoo. It doesn't have to be functioning!" She adds quickly as everyone reacts to that statement. "I only need the hardware so I can send the transmission."

"You’re saying we need to let those things in here? In here, as in the place we all just bolted to get away from them?" Ratchet says.

“Yes,” Nautica says. "On the bright side, it only needs to be one."

Rewind watches the recording with a sort of amazement that Nautica convinces them all that this is what they have to do, and the group plans out how they are going to lure in and disable a single cuckoo.

He waits tensely as he watches. He’s braced for things to go wrong – because what hasn’t gone wrong on this mission so far? – equal parts afraid and feeling certain that someone will mess up and cuckoos will come flooding into the safehouse, overwhelming everyone inside. But somehow the landing party’s plan to open the door a crack, luring just one cuckoo inside and having Drift skewer it the moment it crosses the threshold, works like a charm. There are no new causalities, and they get the door closed before any more can get in. Drift even manages, on the first try, to disable the weapon without damaging it too badly to send the paradox transmission.

In the projection everyone gathers around the now deactivated cuckoo, pulled in by the morbid compulsion to be, metaphorically, face to face with one of the weapons threatening their lives.

The camera draws in close to the little automaton pinned to the floor by Drift’s sword, and for the first time (within accessible memory at least) Rewind is able to see a cuckoo clearly, rather than as just a skittering flash of silver. It turns out to be a simple device, hardly threatening when it's not in motion; the core is thin and cylindrical, and along the sides of it are six spindly legs which hang limply where they emerge from small and evenly spaced holes. It has no other features. Not optics or audials or any other recognisable means of perceiving the world around it, the way a Cybertronian or organic lifeform would. It's clear from looking at it that this thing was designed and built for a singular purpose, and not to give even the illusion of it being truly alive.

Nautica pulls the sword out of the cuckoo and picks the deactivated weapon up, turning it over in her hands, trying to understand it. Her examination finds a thin seam in its underside which she peels open.

Her face changes as she picks through the cuckoo’s internals, fear dissipating as being able to see what makes the weapon tick transforms it from something terrifying and unstoppable into a mundane and controllable device.

But then the fear comes back.

"I can't use this," Nautica says, "not on its own. I need a transceiver. Or at least an integrated circuit from a transceiver, that would be enough. The comms station in the command centre has to have one.”

“But that means someone will have to go out there to get it," Anode says. 

Everyone in the recording is paying close attention to Nautica and this wrinkle in the escape plan, so no-one seems to notice at first when past-Rewind – who must have been staring fixedly at the cuckoo this whole time, the camera hasn’t once shifted from it – quietly says, "...you know how I thought an animal jumped out at me when we got here, and then it disappeared so I assumed it had run off?"

Minimus’ ventilation cuts off as he freezes, distracting Rewind from the projection.

Before Rewind has a chance to ask what’s wrong, Minimus’ hands are on his helm, prying his fingers off the camera controls. Rewind flinches but that doesn’t deter Minimus from what he’s doing, the footage projected onto the wall of the shuttle racing backwards as Minimus rewinds it – and that makes the shock of this worse, the blank surprise of being grabbed contorting into queasy incredulousness that Minimus just laid hands on him without asking. Without at least saying something first. Without at least acknowledging Rewind in any way.

But he shoves down the urge to push Minimus away, forcing himself to drop his own hands into his lap and sit still and stop overreacting. This is only a part of his function. It’s what he’s for. That Rewind will perform his function for other people is a given, it’s not something they need to ask permission for every time. He’s just… he’s just being overly sensitive. He needs to get a grip on himself and stop being unreasonable about normal things.

Minimus skips quickfire through the footage, only slowing it down for as long as it takes to get a sense of what's happening before moving on further back.

The recording moves in reverse through the landing party exploring the barracks until it reaches the beginning of the expedition. It shows a snapshot of them outside, clearing the tangled forest undergrowth and stepping onto the ramp that leads up to the base’s closed blast door.

Minimus hits play.

Minimus and Rewind watch the landing party work to get the blast door to open, only to be obstructed when uncountable years of neglect cause it to jam almost immediately. Past-Rewind slips through the gap, only big enough for him, to see if he can try to get it rolling again from the other side. And as past-Rewind is poking around trying to find what’s causing the jam, something leaps out at him from the dark.

It's only on screen for a moment before it lands on past-Rewind's chest so hard it knocks him off balance and he stumbles.

Just a split-second flash of silver metal.

Minimus leaps up off the bench and away from him before Rewind even knows what's happened.

Without anyone attending the controls, the projection stops. The popping and crackling of Rewind’s speakers from the audio distortion dies off, and it’s been background noise for so long that the silence that replaces it feels loud.

It's like the whole world shrinks down to the afterimage of that last frame in his mind's eye. A cuckoo leaping up onto his chest.

That can't–

It couldn't have–

He'd know.

He can't have been walking around with a bodysnatching weapon inside of him and just not know. And he's awake and aware and in control of himself so obviously no matter what it looked like happened in the recording, it didn't. It couldn’t have.

"Don't move," Minimus says, holding the medical scanner he'd blindly snatched back up off the bench defensively out in front of himself as if it’s a weapon. His optics dart from Rewind to the empty Magnus armour.

Rewind just blinks at him, dumbfounded. Minimus is… afraid. It’s never occurred to Rewind that he could frighten anyone, small and disposable as he is.

“Wait, I don’t–” Rewind goes to stand up, and Minimus’ focus snaps to him and locks on like the scope of a sniper.

“I said don’t move!” Minimus’ fear is cooling as he steels himself. "Stop pretending. I know you’re not Rewind. I know how cuckoos use their victims against the people they’re close to, that isn’t going to work on me now. Rewind is dead. You’re just the weapon that killed him.”

Chapter Text

The accusation hits Rewind like a slap, but instead of being angry in the wake of it he’s just… tired. All he can do is stare hollow eyed at Minimus as the thought, Oh. This again, rattles around his head. This again, the demand he prove his own existence. Prove he is sentient and as much a person as everyone else is, coming from someone already convinced that he can’t.

From Minimus, who is his friend.

There’s a snap as the scanner’s plastic casing cracks under Minimus’ grip. “What were you trying to do, use me to get aboard the Lost Light? Sabotage the ship? Cause as many casualties as possible?”

"No, I didn't- I never even thought about that!" 

Minimus doesn't respond to him. Clearly didn't really hear him, his attention instead obviously consumed by trying to get to the Magnus armour without giving Rewind an opening.

"Minimus, please! I'm not infected. I'm me," Rewind begs.

He feels a flash of longing; a wish he was bigger, stronger, to have the kind of frame that would force people to actually listen to him because they’d be afraid of what he could do if they didn't. It feels familiar. A well-worn fantasy.

He isn’t that sort of mecha, though. He can’t force Minimus to hear him. He’s just small and easy to disregard and so very sick of being nothing more than a disposable even to the people important to him.

"I thought you were better than this," Rewind can't help snapping.

Reflexively he cringes at letting that slip out. He knows on a level deeper than conscious thought that he's toeing the line of something he's not supposed to say out loud. A half-remembered medley of past owners and strangers and fellow disposables all ringing through his mind, telling him this is just how the world works and how he's obnoxious and pathetic when he complains about it.

It’s still true, though. Why shouldn’t he say it when it's true?

"I thought you'd changed. I thought you were different now from the people who tell me I'm only a thing."

And somehow, that does make Minimus falter.

“What? No. Your alt mode has nothing to do with it. This is different.” He shakes his head, seemingly put off balance by the reminder of how he'd treated Rewind in the early days after Dominus had acquired him. He looks down at the medical scanner in his hand. "It's completely different," Minimus reassures himself, the realisation that he's holding the means to lay any doubt of that to rest written plainly on his face.

He points the scanner at Rewind’s head where the cuckoo, if he had one, would be coiled around his brain module.

Even though he knows, he's sure there can't be anything there, Rewind still holds his in-vent as the scanner's screen lights up.

The cheery beep it makes when the scan completes is so at odds with the tense atmosphere he has to repress a slightly hysterical laugh.

Hesitant to split his focus, Minimus only glances down at the result glowing on the screen. And then he does a double take and looks again, his attention sliding off Rewind completely.

“What's it say?” Rewind asks, although he's certain he already knows. You were wrong. I'm not possessed by one of those things. I can't be.

Optics wide in disbelief, Minimus points the scanner at Rewind’s head to check again. The way his slack frown twitches when the new result comes through shows that it must be the same.

"Nothing that shouldn't be there,” Minimus says, words tumbling over each other faster as he continues. “You're fine. But how can that be possible? In the recording, it really did look like… and you were in there for so long.  Longer than it would need to take over. How could you have walked through a building crawling with cuckoos without being possessed?"

Confusion and shame are mixing with the fear in Minimus that hasn't burned through yet, an engine of emotional pressure that's pulling him taut like a coil spring. There's a fine tremor in his hands as he gestures. And as he gestures to punctuate his words the scanner he's still holding dips down, moving from Rewind's head to point at his chest.

It beeps.

Minimus looks down in surprise. Strangely then he does something that looks almost like he relaxes, the tension bleeding away.

"Oh, of course," Minimus says to himself. "The databanks."

"Of course what? What about them?"

"They're atypical," Minimus says, and he turns the scanner around.

On the results screen is an image like the one he saw in Tetralog's office after getting the isolation protocol installed; the shapes of components inside his chest rendered in bright white to contrast with the deep black of negative space. Except this version is wrong. Where there should only be the neat geometry of his auxiliary databanks there is a mass clinging to the right side. The scanner shows lines extending from it, a pixelated depiction of its legs – now used as connective tendrils – coiling around both databanks, the sharp hook on the end of each one digging in.

That’s me. He can't look away from the screen. That’s inside me.

He feels lightheaded. The thought it's a good thing he's already sitting so that he doesn’t fall down unfolds slowly, as if it's filtering in through something thick and congealed. 

Rewind stares down at his own chest. He presses a hand to the plating, and it feels the same as always. Solid. Warm. Giving no hint about the body snatching weapon burrowed beneath it.

He listens to himself say, "I thought cuckoos were supposed to go for the brain."

“The circumstances they were made under didn't leave much time for testing. Many survivor accounts detailed the weapons making mistakes when they targeted Cybertronians with uncommon body plans.” Minimus rubs a hand over his face. He’s still on edge, even if he’s no longer the livewire of fright he was before. “Auxiliary databanks were actually one of the most frequent examples in the witness statements.”

That is… It’s a lot. To process.

“I think I need a moment,” Rewind says, tripping over his own feet as he gets up off the bench.

Minimus is between him and the shuttle exit. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

“Protocol for cuckoo outbreaks dictates I should lock up anyone I cannot be certain isn't being controlled. Contain and eliminate. That’s the official procedure.”

Rewind hears the words without understanding them. Minimus takes an aborted step toward him as he stumbles passed, but then stops and lets him go.

He must walk out of the shuttle, but it’s like he just finds himself outside, soft grass curling against his feet.

He looks vacantly at the trees far off in the distance, densely packed and inscrutable. Anything could be hiding in the busy tangle of the treeline. Even thinking about getting any closer to it is terrifying. He’s caught staring at the trees, waiting for cuckoos to come crawling out from behind leaves and branches, a wave of parasitic weapons silently creeping down trunks and across the ground to engulf him.

His knees buckle and his back clangs against metal. His plating squeals against the shuttle as he slides slowly down until he's sitting sprawled, only propped up by the hull behind him.

His spark spins in frantic rotations. He presses a hand over it. It's too subtle to be picked up on normally, but in the current quiet he notices tiny vibrations through his chest plating, hints of his own systems carrying out the rhythms of keeping him alive.

Metal grinds on metal as his fingers dig into the armour above his spark, his vents turning shallow. All these systems are still going on, heedless of the intruder lurking amid them. What makes him who he is might be killed and the motions he can feel under his palm would just continue on, unchanged and fundamentally uncaring of the fact that the body he’d securely thought of has his - as being him - was being piloted around by something else.

To his own shock he starts to laugh, an involuntary hiccup of sound that becomes a heaving sob of breath.

He curls forward, his legs tucked up and forehead resting on his knees. It blocks out the trees and the grassy plain and the rest of the world, but can’t block out the notification pinned to his HUD.

Partition integrity: 39%.

The flashbacks, they didn’t feel the same as watching the camera footage did. They’ve been more than images and sounds of the past, they are a re-experiencing of what he'd thought and felt then. For a time he's again the person he's apparently become. And after he can remember what that is like. How that other person who is but isn't really him sees the world. Sees himself. A bridge that crosses millions of years of differences. When the Rewind-of-now had used the isolation protocol, had he understood the way it would revert him to this past version of himself? What did he think about that? What does he feel about who Rewind is currently, the Rewind-from-then?

Was he afraid it would be like what the cuckoos do to people? Another person controlling his body?

The flashbacks haven't… at least some of them haven't been random. They were linked to what he was seeing or doing at the time, like they were triggered.

Rewind offlines his optics, thinking as hard as he can about the room he’d first woken up in. All the details he can remember, the rust-streaked ceiling, the chill of the recharge slab, the low muttering–

–“Keep running,” Rewind’s harsh venting fractured his voice, forced a pause between the words. “Come on, we can do this. Just keep moving.”

Chromedome stumbled and Rewind did what he could to steady him, careful not to crush the transceiver gripped tight in his fist. His legs nearly gave out as he held his arm and tried to support his unsteady weight. Chromedome leaned sideways but at least with Rewind’s help he didn’t fall.

“Close to the safehouse?” Chromedome said, his words slurred.

Rewind slowed, and looked back down the long corridor they were fleeing through.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure where we are.”

They’d been running from Rodimus – or the thing using Rodimus’ body – since the barracks’ command centre, more concerned with what they were running away from than where they were running to. There was nothing familiar about the door lined hallway they’re in now.

Chromedome tipped forward as if the floor had pitched under him like the deck of a ship in rough weather. Even though Rewind’s support was the only thing that kept him upright, he uncoordinatedly started trying to pull his arm out of Rewind’s hold.

“Go without me. You’ll be able to find the way back to the others faster.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Rewind said.

“Don’t–”

“I won’t.”

“You need to,” Chromedome said, desperate. “You know you need to. I can't have much longer.”

Rewind pushed aside the vivid memory of the cuckoo leaping onto Chromedome’s chest when Rodimus had him pinned in the command centre. There’s guilt, too, trying to eat away at him. Because he had taken the time to activate the barracks' emergency quarantine before he'd leapt in to help. The cuckoo had slipped under Chromedome's armour during that delay. 

“We can’t argue about this here,” Rewind said, conscious of the open stretch of the corridor they were standing exposed in. He was sure they had gotten away from Rodimus ages back, but what if they hadn’t?

He pulled Chromedome through the nearest open door, and his conjunx staggered on the way in. His coordination was deteriorating rapidly.

The room was a berthroom that looked like it had been sparse even before time and neglect had run their course on it. He tried to guide Chromedome over to sit on a berth, but he was too unsteady. He lost his balance and collapsed to the floor two steps short.

“Domey!”

“I’m fine. I mean I’m not fine, obviously, but it's alright. Don’t worry about me.”

Rewind knelt beside him. He took Chromedome’s hand, interlaced their fingers. “I’m here.”

Chromedome held onto him like a lifeline, even as he said, “You have to get back where it’s safe.”

“I will. But not yet. As long as you’re still here I'm staying with you, okay?”

"Okay." Chromedome slumped against the side of the berth, the yellow of his visor washed out pale. "Okay."

Chromedome's engine thrummed unsteadily. He was so scared. They were both so scared.

“I love you,” Chromedome whispered.

Rewind leaned forward, brought his fist the component was held in up to carefully brace against his conjunx’s chest, and brought their foreheads together.

"I love you too."

They stayed together, and waited, and Chromedome’s hand was warm in his.

Even when it went limp.

Even when Rewind had to let it slip out from his own.

The sob that he had been forcing down surged free, wet and ragged.

It’s not okay, but it will be. Rewind is going to get the transceiver back to Nautica. Things will be okay again.

But to do that, he does have to go.

“We’ll see each other again soon,” he promised.

Rewind stood–

He tried to stand.

Nothing happened.

He tried to move, to twitch a finger, to do anything. He couldn't. His body remained inert and unresponsive like it was an object he was claustrophobically trapped inside. Even as terror strangled him, his spark spun steady and his vents stayed even, untouched by his panic. He felt static electricity prickle in his chest.

Then, like a switch was flipped, he moved again. He flailed, all the things he’d been trying to do happening at once and he fell and smacked against the floor.

He scrambled to his feet, paced aimlessly, flexed his free hand. Reassured himself that he could move again.

That was… that was bad. That was a bad sign. It lasted much longer than the lagging thing he’d been experiencing before.

He stopped pacing in front of where Chromedome was slumped against the side of the berth with his head bowed.

I must be just about out of time.

He rubbed the plating over his spark and auxiliary databanks. He pictured an anatomical diagram he’d been shown a long time ago, the internal cables that connect his databanks to his brain module. There might be a way to give himself more time. Enough that the logic bomb will be able to do the rest.

 He offlined his own visor for a moment. Gathered the strength do to what he’s decided.

Chromedome made a sound, and for a second Rewind thought that, impossibly, he was going to say something.

When he looked Chromedome’s visor was lit again, though he was staring unfocusedly into his lap. He was whispering something, too quiet to make out the words. Or, rather, something was whispering with Chromedome’s voice.

Rewind's hand curled tighter on the transceiver. He pulled himself up onto the berth. Tetralog had been insistent that it’s best to be lying down for this. He reached out and his free hand found the rubber of one of Chromedome's shoulder wheels.

“I don’t want to forget you. I don’t,” he reset his vocaliser, “I don’t want to forget myself. Not even for a little while.”

 He ran the command for a function he'd never needed to use before.

Isolation protocol activated.

Secondary function: primed. Initiate purge?

Y / [N]

Secondary function on standby.

Partition integrity: 100%–

–Rewind comes back to himself, sitting with his helm resting on his knees.

Echoes of the emotions he had just relived are still reverberating through him, and now that he’s paying attention he notices what he didn’t feel. Where was the background, careful vigilance that keeps him safe? Normally, Rewind has to be ceaselessly alert to the harm other people can inflict on him, not just physically, but emotionally. Especially those he’s close to, because he knows firsthand how much deeper it cuts when they forget to treat him like a person instead of a tool to be used. He doesn’t like pre-empting the worst anyone he interacts with can do to him, but bracing for it sometimes lets him cut things off before they happen. Or at least deflect the worst of it. He’s seen other disposables worn down by the commonness of these small injuries until they couldn’t take it anymore. His vigilance is one of the few things he can do to save himself from becoming one of them.  

It’s been a habit for so long he doesn’t think about it. Or he didn’t, but then he’d gone into that flashback paying so much attention to how he felt that it had been thrown into sharp relief, and – he? A version of him? This different person he has become over the course of all those experiences his partitioned memory has ripped away – hasn’t been doing it at all. Not in any of the flashbacks that took place close to the present, now that he thinks on it.

A knee-jerk panic kicks up at the realisation that this, this future version of him must have lowered that defence for good.

He wasn’t safe. How was it that in so many of these memories he’s re-experienced, he had felt safe? In them he hadn’t even felt the self-defensive fear Rewind is feeling now from only thinking about permanently having his guard lowered like that. 

The gulf of time that spans his missing memories is almost tangible. In this moment he’s not even sure if he wants them back. This person he apparently became is so unintelligible to him that his body might as well have already been piloted around by a stranger even before the cuckoos.

Chapter Text

Rewind sits up. He squints as sunlight washes over his optics once his face isn’t buried in his knees. It's changed to be more golden than when he last looked, the sun lower in the sky as it makes its way to setting. He's been out here longer than he realised. 

Gingerly, he stretches out his legs, pushing against the stiffness of staying hunched up too long. He needs to go back inside. Regardless of everything else, there are still people trapped in the barracks. He should talk to Minimus about what the plan is for saving them.

Halfway to pulling himself to his feet a world-tilting bout of vertigo rocks him and his knees buckle and–

 –Another muffled boom shook the walls. Across the room from them, on the side already cracked open and scorched from a past attack, part of a beam jutting out of a hole in the ceiling snapped off its tenuous connection and hit the floor with a metallic thud. Rewind didn’t flinch. The world changes. He’s lived long enough to see how drastically true that is. He just never thought it would change in a way that left him numb to the impacts of an in-progress bombing.

His mind on other things, he said, “He has to be dead, doesn’t he?”

He’d been worrying at the conclusion for months. Pushing it away, circling back around to pick at it again. This was the first time he had been able to acknowledge it out loud.

Chromedome hummed where he was hunkered down beside him, the two of them tucked together into the most structurally sound corner of the bombed-out building.

“Jaywalk? Nah. I saw him get to cover. He’s still kicking.”

“No, not Jaywalk.”

Silence held them in its grip as a low flying seeker squadron roared overhead.

Once they passed, and the air no longer thrummed from powerful jet engines, Rewind picked up one of the stray pieces of debris scattered over the floor. He turned it over. It was brittle, and too charred to guess at what it had been before.

“If he was still alive, he would have come back to me by now. So he must be dead,” he said, and he was surprised by how his voice shook. He'd been breaking into morgues for years already. But that was just… being thorough. Trying every option. Not because it was likely. Admitting that he now thought it was has unmasked that what’d seemed like coming to terms with the loss was instead only a thin coat of denial painted over the ache of grief.

Chromedome hunched, and his gaze skittered away from Rewind’s. Something like exhaustion was written across the slumped lines of his shoulders. He was exhausted so often. Sometimes Rewind thought he seemed exhausted all the time.

“Do you want to stop looking?” Chromedome asked.

“No!” Whether his search has become about being with Dominus again, or loyalty, or simply having to know why – it’s all tangled together into a knot Rewind can’t untie. One that keeps him bound to the need to see this through. If he’d been going to give up, he would have done it before he started searching morgues. “No. But. If he is dead, what am I supposed to do after I find him? If he’s gone, then…” he tried to find words that capture how unmoored he felt when he thought about it. Undefined. “I guess I just don’t know what I’m for without him.” 

Explosions boomed outside. The debris snapped as he fiddled with it, breaking unevenly in two.

“What do you like doing?” Chromedome said, no longer avoiding Rewind’s optics.

“What do you mean?”

“I figure that means it’s left up to you now, doesn’t it?  What you do. Outside of deployments at least, but that stuff’s not what you meant. So, what do you like doing?”

“I,” Rewind blinked. It felt taboo to be asked that. Even thinking about the answer triggered an impulse to check over his shoulder for eavesdroppers. “I don’t know. What do you think I should do?”

Chromedome laughed. Not an entirely unhappy sound, but there was a bitter edge to it too.

“Don’t ask me. I’ve always made all the wrong choices. Trust me that anything you pick will be better.”  

“Something I like?” Rewind pondered. Chromedome’s interest in his answer seemed genuine, and he was enjoying the candour, didn’t want to puncture it by rejecting the question. Slowly, he felt out an answer. “I actually do really enjoy documenting. Given everything I probably should resent it, you know? And for a while I thought I did. But it always felt more like something I convinced myself to feel than anything that came naturally.”

Without Dominus and his work to upload into his databanks anymore, Rewind had taken to carrying around a datapad; noting down events he witnesses, people he meets. Archiving had been demanded of him for such a long time he had forgotten it’s an activity he genuinely does like doing, until backing up the new additions he’d made to his datapad into himself at the end of each day had revitalised a part of him that had died and been hollowed out.

Still, he felt guilty about that being his answer. With Dominus, archiving was something he’d always done for him, just an enduring piece of their original dynamic – even keeping it up while he’s missing was only Rewind keeping things in order for when they’ll be reunited. But if there’s never going to be a reunion, then he can’t use Dominus to justify it. Continuing to do archival work unavoidably becomes Rewind’s own choice.

Now it was his turn to drop his gaze to the ground. He scuffed a foot through a small mound of ash that had caught in a crack in the floor. “Makes me a hypocrite, doesn't it. How can I say the Functionists were wrong about alt modes and immutable biological imperatives and then turn around and want to keep doing what they forced me to do, now that I’m free to choose anything?”

Chromedome considered the question for longer than it deserved, when 'you can't' was so obviously the answer.

 “Maybe you just got lucky, having what you enjoy and what your body’s good at line up. I reckon even if you had been born a car or something instead, you’d still be into documenting. That's just you," Chromedome made a sweeping gesture that encompassed not just Rewind’s frame but his personality as well. “Also, it’s like what you said the other day; that what you hated most was all your choices being taken away from you. Even if the activity’s the same, doing it because you want to makes it different from when you were forced to.”

Rewind blinked. “I did say that, didn’t I.”

“Stuck in my mind. I’ve been thinking about it on and off since,” Chromedome shrugged. 

It had been an offhand comment. He hadn’t expected Chromedome to remember it. And Chromedome's conclusion was right, Rewind realised. Getting to archive on his own terms, for no-one but himself again, was what made all the difference. He had cut through to the heart of the matter so easily. 

Impulsively, he wanted to ask him what it was like to have been constructed cold - or really, to have been a ‘knockoff.’ If that's why he just gets the ex-disposable stuff.  

Because it hadn't been like this with Dominus. Dom'd often need things… explained. Though he'd always listened attentively when Rewind talked through what he'd experienced, and the emotional legacy of those things which still persisted in him. And Dominus’ thoughtful compassion in that had been a lifeline. A kindness that back then Rewind had been starving for.

When he thought of Chromedome’s intuitive understanding, against it Dominus' edified sympathy felt paler. Insufficient. Maybe it was unfair to compare them. Or maybe it was just a sign that Rewind's changed. How he was a different person now from who he was back then.

“Anyway, it’s not like you need to justify it, really," Chromedome said and interrupted the train of thought. "No one’s going to have a go at you for sticking to archiving. People are too busy trying not to get triple tapped on the battlefield to care about the ethics of your life course.”

He looked up in time to see Chromedome wince.

“Wait, that came out badly. Of course it matters. And I- I do care about what you do. I just don’t think you have to worry about anyone giving you slag over this stuff, is what I meant to say.”

Chromedome’s visor flushed, turning honeyed gold with embarrassment at having stuck his foot in his mouth. Outside the world was still being torn apart by bombing runs and gunfire, but that felt like it didn’t matter as much as Rewind laughed, and Chromedome looked so relieved and he chuckled too, and Rewind thought, I’m glad he's here.  

Rewind bumped his shoulder gently into his side. “You're fine, I got what you meant."

“You should get something that’s better than having to transcribe everything by hand, though. It took you hours to copy down that interview you did with Stripes the other day, even with how fast you type.”  

“Ugh don't remind me, it felt longer. Sometimes I think about…” Rewind trailed off. It was kind of embarrassing to admit out loud. This has always been wishful thinking, not something he'll ever get the chance to actually do.

“Yeah?” Chromedome subtly leaned toward him, unexpectedly eager and interested.

Could he trust Chromedome with this? He thought so. He wanted to. “Getting a camera, a deep wired one. Imagine what I could do with the time I'd save being able to upload video and audio directly into my databanks. I could record so much more.”

“A camera, huh?” Chromedome said thoughtfully. “You know… I used to work with a surgeon who can implant mods, and I reckon he'll have one. He owes me a favour, too.”

Rewind dropped the bits of debris he’d been fiddling with and they crumbled on impact with the floor. Chromedome had said it casually, but his offer wasn't a small thing at all. Nobody’s been making prosthetics or mod parts since the war kicked off. Those are valuable, and getting more priceless by the day.

“That’s– you don’t have to do that! I mean thank you, really, but I’d feel bad if you wasted such a big favour on me.”

“Rewind,” Chromedome said, earnestness woven through the words, “it's not a waste. I've, uh, been trying to think of a gift I could offer you for a while now.”

Rewind’s spark spun faster. He felt like they’d come right up to the edge of a threshold, the border of something new, and he wanted–

–Blades of grass tickle his faceplate. He groggily pushes himself up onto his forearms, and sees that he's been lying face down on the ground. The world spins, forcing him to offline his visor again. Ugh. That had come on suddenly. And hot on the heels of the voluntary flashback he'd triggered on purpose, like one had catalysed the other.

Slowly, he lowers his head back down onto the ground as he waits out the roiling in his tank. When the world stops wobbling like a spinning plate about to topple he chances switching his visor on again. Thankfully, he doesn’t throw up all over himself immediately. It's little victories like that which make all the difference. One gradual bit at a time he flips himself over onto his back, and then gazes up at the blue curve of the sky.

Chromedome doesn’t own him. He never has. Rewind is certain of that now.

What a strange thought. Of course there were significant people in his life who hadn’t owned him before Functionism truly became mainstream, but that'd been so long ago. The details blurred in the fog of information creep. And that had made it worse too sometimes, the knowing firsthand how different things can be at the same time as each day surviving as a disposable ate away at his hope life could go back to being like that again. Rewind holds his hand up to look at it in the sunlight, the phantom sensation of holding Chromedome’s hand as they waited in that sparse berthroom still tingling on his plating. Patchy as his memory of it is, he still prefers the life he is living now, apparently routine brushes with danger and all. He wishes he could remember more of it.

Though the reason he can't remember is he used the isolation protocol to give himself longer to save everyone. It’s time to follow through on that.

Rewind gets up, no longer unsteady on his feet, and goes back into the Rodpod.

Minimus is back in the armour, and in the middle of a call on the shuttle’s comms. Informing the Lost Light about the cuckoos, it sounds like. Whoever’s on the other end sounds grim as Magnus relays what he’s learned. Rewind sits where he’s easily visible at a reassuring distance away and waits, heels up on the edge of the bench seat and his arms wrapped around folded legs.

Minimus – Ultra Magnus? It feels weird calling him ‘Minimus’ like this. Rewind should ask him what he prefers at some point, but they’re both a bit preoccupied right now – steps away from the comm station as the call ends.

He can feel Magnus studying him from across the room.

“I am who I say I am. I'm me,” Rewind says. “That’s why I activated the isolation protocol, I was cutting off the cuckoo's access to my brain.”

Magnus has his arms crossed. Hardly any time has passed since he knelt next to Rewind. Now, he stays standing back as if regulations specify a minimum safe distance and he is following it to the centimetre. “It’s unlikely that you could be controlled with the connection to your databanks severed, but I don’t have the medical expertise to be certain.”

“So what now?”

“I’m going to rescue the others. My own non-standard physiology will afford me some protection, and the logic bomb plan we saw in the recording is the most viable option to retrieve everyone with minimal casualties. This shuttle doesn’t have the needed part, so I’ll find the one we know is in the barracks and get it back to them. You’ll stay here.”

Rewind jumps to his feet.

“I’m not going to just sit around while everyone’s in trouble! I’m coming too.”

Ultra Magnus hesitates, and Rewind isn't familiar enough with this frame to tell if it's because he's still not sure if he's being controlled or if Magnus is only reluctant to go against the rules by not keeping him contained - never mind that there's almost certainly rules against cooperating with someone carrying a cuckoo as well. Either way, he doesn't immediately say no.

“I've been in there before, I know the layout. You’ll find the transceiver quicker with me guiding you,” he appeals.

In the end, it's practicality in the face of crisis that wins out.

“Alright. Let’s go,” Magnus nods.

Ultra Magnus is conscientious about locking up the Rodpod as they leave. Rewind eyes the gun holstered on his back as he does.

“Just try not to shoot any of our friends.”

“Wasn’t planning on it. I'm only endeavouring to be prepared.”

He seems less afraid of Rewind now that he’s back in the armour. The reassurance of being so much larger and stronger, maybe. Or perhaps he feels more capable in it.

Still, when he transforms Rewind can hear that he’s uncomfortable. There's a small stuttering as his internals rearrange into his other shape.

“You okay?” Rewind asks.

“What?” Magnus says distractedly, his cabin tilting away subtly on his shocks. “Of course. Yes.”

“Are you sure?” Rewind asks again. Magnus is even harder to read in this mode. If Chromedome were here, he could probably explain. People with wheeled vehicle alts are better at reading emotional expression in those forms.

Ultra Magnus idles, his engine rumbling, his cabin doors staying firmly shut.

“I apologise. I'm finding myself very aware of your current… condition,” he finally says, voice stiff.

Rewind presses a hand to his chest unconsciously. “Ah, yeah, I get it. I can walk.”

“The offer is appreciated, but we don’t have time. If you were going to harm me then you would have done it while I was out of the armour and vulnerable.” It makes sense, but it sounds more like a reassurance for himself than a confident statement. Magnus unlatches his passenger side door and swings it open. “I’ll manage. Let's go.”

As they drive away from the Rodpod, the rapid rotation of Magnus’ wheels uprooting clumps of grass that Rewind can see being flung into the air behind them in the wing mirror, he thinks, We should've had a team huddle or something.

He mentally squints at the impulse thought, and the mental image of Rodimus that had popped up alongside it.

Rodimus would have insisted on a team huddle before they rolled out; Rewind had known that. Then he forgot. Now he remembers again. So many memories are coming back to him. Under any other circumstances that would be a good thing, but…

Partition integrity: 25%, the tracker pinned to his HUD warns.

He knows what the malfunction is now, at least. The cuckoo is attacking the partition, working to pilfer his memories for constructing a facsimile of him.

He shudders, and tries to find something to take his mind off it.

Magnus isn’t in the mood for talking – Rewind can feel his cautious attention constantly on him, vigilant the first sign of aggressive or unexpected behaviour. 

Instead, Rewind manages to distract himself by examining how his camera works. He spends the rest of the drive figuring out the internal controls, relearning how to operate it hands free through trial and error.

The sun starting to set by the time they get to the barracks. Fading orange light dapples the Deception emblem where it glares down at them from the wall as they reach the base of the entry ramp. They’d had to walk the last part of the way, the trees giving Magnus trouble even in root mode. While Rewind had walked through the woods unhindered, Magnus had needed to diligently sidestep trunks and take care not to tear off branches with his shoulder stacks.

Whirl, Lug, and Rodimus aren’t out here at least. The only sign left of them is the crushed undergrowth where Whirl had landed.

Rewind is already at the top of the ramp when Magnus stops at the bottom. 

Apprehension is clear in his grim expression as he looks up at the open maw of the barracks' entrance. Rewind only gets halfway back down to check on him before Magnus shakes his head slightly and starts to ascend.

Together they pass through the entryway, and as the warm sunlight from the star gives way to pallid fluorescent lighting, a shiver crawls across Rewind’s plating. Involuntarily he remembers Lug and Whirl flailing, then going still, and his optics dart around the room searching for spindly, skittering things. Everywhere looks clear for now, but the fear remains like a lump in his throat. 

“Which way do we go?” Magnus asks lowly.

Speaking carries the uneasy risk of drawing attention. Instead Rewind points at a mess of footprints in the dust and starts following them.

It's the same tracks he found last time he was here; tracing them backwards now will lead them back through the mess hall and then to the bunkroom where he'd dropped the transceiver.

The dead quiet they're walking in amplifies every tiny noise. Rewind can hear some kind of scraping sound. The buzz of the lights. Magnus’ muted footfalls, which are surprisingly quiet for someone so large.

They’ve been lucky so far; no sign of people or cuckoos.

As they follow the tracks to the mess hall the scraping gets louder. Rewind steps out from the sheltered corridor into the wide open space of the room.

His vents wheeze a breath of air as his whole body locks up. Jerkily he throws up a hand to signal Magnus to stay out of sight behind the turn.

There are people in front of the safehouse.

Lug. Whirl. Rodimus.

Chapter Text

Fear pours over him like water from a broken faucet. For a moment thoughts of running, hiding, doing anything at all are washed away in the deluge and he can only stay frozen to the spot.

That scraping splits the air again. The three infected are digging their fingertips into seams that were once robust but have been eaten away by time and corrosion. Whirl manages to force the point of a claw under a sheet metal edge and levers it up. Rodimus and Lug pivot towards him with unnatural synchrony. Together they wrench the panel up, the patchwork safehouse wall squealing until the welding gives out and they drop the rended metal to the floor, adding it to the dozen twisted pieces already discarded behind them.

They're forcing their way through. Peeling the safehouse open to get at the people huddling inside.

Rewind has never been so profoundly grateful to be tiny as he is now. His cuckoo controlled friends haven’t noticed him. The tables stacked against the closest mess hall wall are between him and them, blocking most of him from their view.

Stiffly, he backs up behind the edge of the corridor he just rounded, not taking his optics off the infected until the wall cuts them off. Only then can he bring himself to turn his back to the mess hall and usher Ultra Magnus back the way they’d come.

Rewind’s vocaliser crackles once they’ve gone far enough for it to be safe to speak, forcing him to reset it.

“They’re blocking the way we need to go, the, um. The others.”

“Is there another route we can take?” Magnus says.

Rewind patches what he saw when he first woke up, in the flashbacks, and the camera footage of this place together into a mental map of the barracks. “I think so? We might get lost, though.”

“It will be risky either way. Better to pick the option with less chance of harm to us and them.”

So he guides them both back to the entrance and from there down another, unfamiliar hallway that he’s pretty sure heads in the right direction. The walls here have also been heavily stripped, panelling pulled off in large swathes to supply the safehouse’s hasty construction. As they travel further in he notices a very faint sound, a continuous sort of… hissing.

He looks up at Magnus, who nods in silent confirmation that he hears it as well.

They creep cautiously forward, peering around the corner as the hallway takes a sharp turn.

It terminates not much further down at a set of double doors. There are traces of what used to be signage, at face height for mecha who aren’t Rewind or Ultra Magnus, but it’s too worn to read beyond half a word which might once have been ‘power.’ Both doors have a rectangle of closed slats in the bottom third that look like they can be flipped open for ventilation. The gaps where sheet metal has been removed from the walls stops abruptly a few metres shy of them. In fact, a wall panel next to where the removal stops looks like it might have been taken off and then reattached.

The hissing is louder and definitely coming from behind the doors. It’s possible to tell now that there are two aspects to the sound, an intermittent rumble at the base and an unceasing rushing over the top.

Rewind tilts his head, trying to place what it reminds him of. Just loud enough to be heard he says, “It sort of sounds like an engine.”

Magnus steps in front of him protectively as he dwarfs the door handle with his grasp and eases the doors open. Rewind leans around him so he can also peer into the room.

The rumble is unleashed into a deafening roar, no longer muffled by the doors' soundproofing, so loud it shudders through his body as physical force.

The room is huge, high ceilinged, and yet it feels cramped due to the two behemoth water pumps it houses. Flowing water, that’s what we’re hearing, Rewind realises as his optics follow pipes as wide across as the length of his arm from where they connect – one jutting straight up at the top of each pump, the other joining horizontally at the front before taking a sharp turn upwards – to where they rise up to run parallel with the ceiling and disappear into holes cut to size in the wall. The pumps thump roughly every other second, the other half of the sound.

Nothing else moves inside the room. No people, no cuckoos. 

They go in. Rewind ducks out from Magnus’ protective sheltering, curious to get a closer look at the pumps.

“I think these are the hydroelectric generators. They must be powering the whole barracks,” he says. Energon based power is the standard, but even Decepticons use alternatives like electricity in places where supply lines are unstable.

Huh. He hadn’t known he knew that. The discovery that he does makes him feel… capable. He smiles to himself.

Magnus shakes his head, pointing to his audials. He didn't hear. It’s too loud.

He points to a door opposite the one they came in.

As they walk across the generator room, the lighting changes. By the exit it seems thicker. Sluggish. It ripples strangely.

A focused point of cold pricks at Rewind’s shoulder and he flinches backwards. 

He goes to slap whatever did that off him but there's nothing there. He huffs out a vent of air in confusion before he feels a tiny spot of wetness on his plating, and looks up above where he had just been walking.

Water has gotten into the ceiling light and pooled between the fluorescent tube and its casing, distorting the illumination it casts. Drops are oozing slowly from the casing edges. Discoloured rings of water damage have bloomed around it like bouquets of rust. As he watches, another of the droplets swells too large to keep resisting gravity’s pull and falls. If it splashes when it hits the ground there is no way to hear it over the generator.

“I hate it here,” Rewind mutters to himself as he pats his shoulder down just to be sure nothing else is awry, not that he can hear himself over the din. He strides ahead, seizing the door handle and wanting nothing more than to get this over with so they can get out of this place. “I hate it here so much.”

He yanks the door open, and both he and the cuckoo on the other side freeze at the same time.

He thinks Magnus falters mid-step behind him. The cuckoo cants to one side, like the vibration from the pumps destabilised it. It lifts its two front legs into the air, the movement too fluid, its limbs just flexible wires without any joints for the movement to hinge on. Leaning back onto its back four legs, the raised front ones curve in their direction.

There is a biting snap of electricity in Rewind’s chest – it breaks the grip of the fear that had wiped his mind blank of everything but images of these things jumping up onto Whirl and Lug, onto Chromedome, on his own chest.

Over his shoulder he sees Ultra Magnus backing up, not taking his optics off the cuckoo as he unslings the gun off his back.

Rewind slashes a hand down through the air to signal Magnus to lower the weapon. Cuckoos have a shared network, don’t they? There’s only one now, but what will they do if shooting it makes a bunch more show up?

He rubs at the armour over his databanks, on top of where he felt that electrical sting, and steps directly between the cuckoo and Magnus. The cuckoo skitters towards them and a subconscious part of Rewind's mind has him tensing to run, but he pushes the instinct aside. He mirrors it as it crawls in a semi-circle around them, staying in its way. The static in his chest prickles again.

The cuckoo waves its legs in the air in a way that isn’t curious, or frustrated, or anything that would suggest thought. It moves with the rote mindlessness of an automaton performing precoded instructions. Then it lowers them and skitters away, disappearing around the bulk of a pump.

Tension flows out of him in the form of a full body shudder. He turns to Magnus, who is staring at where the cuckoo disappeared with revulsion twisting his mouth. Rewind catches his arm and pushes him back towards the door, following behind and keeping a wary optic out for the cuckoo that is still somewhere in the room.

When they're both out and the door is pulled shut behind them, Rewind lets out a vent he hadn't realised he was holding, overheated air rolling over him. He scrutinises the new corridor they’ve stepped into and is relieved to see no more cuckoos. The door fits snugly into its frame and has cut off a lot of the noise, enough that they would be able to hear each other again, if either of them were in the mood for chatting.

“Hold on,” Rewind says quietly fifteen minutes later. “I recognise this.”

They've come to a T intersection where another corridor meets theirs. Peels of black paint cling tenaciously to the wall, the final remnants of the sign indicating where each direction went. He touches a curl of paint, chalky and crumbling under his fingers. Based on the shape of the paint that's left, it must have once said ‘generator’ for the way they came, and ‘mess hall’ for the way they would go if they continued straight forward.

“I came this way when I first woke up. We're almost at the bunkrooms." 

Ultra Magnus follows Rewind as he retraces his steps, taking the turn down the conjoining path. As they pass through a large room with dilapidated chairs that Rewind also recognises, the extra walking space makes it obvious how Magnus is maintaining an awkward distance behind him. Like he's caught between staying protectively close but also keeping a safe distance from Rewind, and settled on an unhappy medium that doesn't satisfy either impulse. 

When they reach the bunkrooms, the doorways that have been left open all look the same. It will take hours to search each individually if he can’t remember the right one. Was that it? No, he’d walked further than this, he’s sure. He ducks his head into what feels like the right room. But it's empty and undisturbed, just six recharge slabs and a whole lot of dust. Maybe it's actually the next one along?

Searching his memory for a distinctive feature to help find it, he looks up, remembering the veins of rust that split the ceiling he'd woken up to. There, a few doors down, the slice of the ceiling he can see through the doorway is streaked with orange.

Relieved, he hurries ahead into it, half his attention on recalling where exactly he'd dropped the transceiver - It was near the berth he'd lain on while activating the isolation protocol, he's sure. In the far row out of sight from the doorway in case Rodimus had still been chasing them.

So it's not until he's already in the room that he realises there's already someone in here.

Standing there beside the berth Rewind is after. Tall and lanky, aside from the big wheels on his shoulders. Last time Rewind had seen him, he’d forgotten his name.

“Chromedome,” Rewind breathes.

Just where he'd left him. 

Why is he still here?

Chromedome is facing away, head bowed and one arm raised in front of him like he’s studying something he's holding. But then he spins around quickly and he is… relieved, so obviously relieved with how his visor brightens and his hunched shoulders uncurl and his voice breaks as he says, “Thank god you’re okay, I was so worried after you disappeared…”

Chromedome walks forward eagerly, reaching out for him. A jolt of electricity stabs inside Rewind’s chest. He flinches back at the sudden pain.

Chromedome stops short.

“Rewind? Are you okay?” he really does sound confused and- and hurt, though he's trying to hide it.

Without thinking Rewind almost reaches out to comfort him, the desire to soothe his conjunx and reassure him nearly faster than conscious thought. 

This isn’t real. It's only the cuckoo trying to use Chromedome to manipulate him. Rewind mustn’t… he can't…

He feels light-headed.

“Did you find-” Magnus says as he ducks through the doorway, forced to stoop to keep his finials from snagging on the frame, but he cuts himself off when he catches sight of Chromedome. His gun’s up, but he's not pointing it at anyone. Not yet.

Chromedome gawks at him in surprise. “Ultra Magnus? Guess a rescue party did come down for us after all. I'd say I'm sorry we missed the chance to heroically save the day ourselves, but I’d really much rather have you here.”

Chromedome honestly does sound like he's glad. Magnus watches him with a hard expression. His gaze cuts to Rewind and back again. He’s uncertain, and Rewind gets why, Chromedome seems so normal. So… himself, from what Rewind can remember. Except for how he’s been standing in this room for hours on end, apparently.

“Is it here?” Magnus says to Rewind.

The transceiver. The reason they came here. It slipped right out of his mind.

Keeping at least one berth between him and Chromedome, Rewind circles around far enough to see the floor where he remembers dropping it.

It isn’t there.

“Is something going on?” Chromedome shifts nervously, crossing his arms. “What’s got you guys acting so weird?”

As he moves, Rewind's optics catch on something in his hand. Bright colours that stick out against the orange chest plating. Colourful wires peeking out from between Chromedome's fingers.

Domey, Rewind goes to say, but the pet name catches in his throat. He should say it. Chromedome is acting normal and so Rewind should too, he should keep the situation stable and ask him Domey, what are you holding? and persuade him to hand the transceiver over.

He can’t make himself say it. His fans are whirring, cycling hot air out of his frame, at odds with how chilled he feels. He can’t make himself say it because however convincingly the body in front of him is acting like Chromedome, it isn’t him. Behind his optics there is a cuckoo puppeteering him. Co-opting his very self while it pulls his strings, as if he is nothing more than an object to be used and then disposed of when he’s no longer needed.

Rewind’s hands ball into fists. He’s so angry that he’s shaking.

“Rewind,” Magnus says lowly. “He’s holding it.”

Chromedome opens his fist, and there it is. Undamaged. The cuckoo's literally had it in hand all this time, why hasn’t it destroyed it? “The transceiver? You’re trying to take it back to Nautica. You need it for the logic bomb. I should…”

Chromedome trails off. And then, like a reel of film rewound a few seconds, he says it again. The same way. Exactly the same way. His tone, the slightly confused squint of his visor, everything is identical.

“I should…”

It’s like how Rodimus had been odd. Magnus said that the cuckoos must be deteriorating. Getting buggy with disrepair. That this one is still in this room all these hours later, could that be a symptom of the code it needs to make decisions malfunctioning? Even if it is, the cuckoo's ability to imitate its host is clearly still functional, what if that means now that there's exterior stimuli for its copycat function to be reacting to it’ll circumvent the error? Best to act now, although not recklessly. Rewind’s not so furious to have forgotten that Chromedome might get hurt if they try to take the transceiver by force. Even if it wasn't his conjunx, he refuses to harm someone who is being used like this.

He strides over to almost arm’s reach of Chromedome, feeling a little dizzy when another sting of electricity snaps in his chest as he gets close – and if he was in a different frame of mind he’d be reassured by how Magnus hurries to follow, a protective shadow at his back clearly ready to step in at a moment's notice, but instead it just makes him want to snap at Magnus that he is not totally incapable – and thrusts out his hand.

“Give it to me,” he says roughly. He can’t manage anything more tactful. Not right now. “I’ll deal with it.”

That jolts Chromedome from whatever loop he was stuck in. But Rewind’s light-headedness turns into familiar vertigo. No, not right now of all times–

–“I just don’t get- come on, slow down.”

Rewind did not slow down. Not that it made any difference, thanks to Chromedome’s stupidly long legs. Even being forced to duck around customers perusing the market stalls Rewind stormed passed wasn’t enough to stop him from keeping up.

“I am sorry, okay. I shouldn't have waited so long to tell you. I was… I was waiting for a good time.”

“As if there’s ever a good time to say you had three other conjunx you never mentioned before,” Rewind snorted. “And I told you to stop apologising for them, I’m not angry about that.”

“Aren’t you? You seem pretty upset.”

And normally Rewind would try to have a better handle on himself, but right now he didn’t have the resources to smooth over his knee-jerk reaction. They’d come down to Troja Major because of the subtle - and not so subtle - hints from everyone else aboard Skip that they would benefit from getting some more space, but every time he rounded a corner in this market he kept half expecting to see those billboards. YOU ARE WHAT YOU DO. TAKE PRIDE IN BEING A MEANS TO AN END. They’d left that alternate universe, but he could still feel Functionism’s shadow casting over him in a way it hadn’t in millennia. He felt scraped raw.

So he snapped back, “What an observation. Really showing off those ex-enforcer investigative skills with that one. I couldn’t possibly be upset about anything else! No, you’ve decided that you being married before is the most important thing, so if I say I don’t care about that then I must be lying.”

He turned sharply down a narrow gap between two stalls. Chromedome fell behind, and had to double back and slide through a larger passage to keep following him. He jogged to get ahead of Rewind, planted himself in his way and forced them both to come to a stop in the middle of the busy thoroughfare he had dashed into. A stranger bumped into the back of him and bit out something disgruntled in a language Rewind wasn’t familiar with. Other passersby gave them dirty looks as they were forced to go around their obstruction. 

“I wouldn’t be guessing wrong if you weren’t forcing me to guess in the first place. I’m not a mind reader. I mean technically I can read minds but that’s not- ugh, forget that. Please just talk to me, Rewind. Tell me what this is about.”

Someone shoved past Rewind so hard they almost knocked him over. Pushed off balance, while he stumbled he got caught in the thick throng of people swirling between the booths and started to get carried away before Chromedome grabbed him and pulled him back out of the current.

Clearly this wasn’t a great place to have this conversation. Rewind kept a firm grip on Chromedome as he manoeuvred into the crowd, going with the flow until a gap let them exit out the other side. When he had led them far enough the hawkers’ shouting to advertise their wares and services over a bout of grief stricken wailing that was currently making Howling Town live up to its name dropped almost to background noise, they stopped. 

“I’m not bothered that you’ve been married before. I’ve married before. Be a bit of a double standard if I was put out about that.” He let go of Chromedome’s hands and folded his arms over his chest. He’d tried to imagine forgetting Dominus and couldn’t even consider discarding him like that. “I can’t believe you erased them. You loved these people, and now you don’t even know who they were. Does anybody? Is there anyone who remembers them now, or what happened to them?”

Chromedome hunched. He started to rub the back of his neck, then jerked his hand away when he realised he was doing it.

“I…” Chromedome started, like he was going to defend himself, or explain, but he only trailed off. Difficult to say he had good reasons when he no longer knew what they were. His reasons for doing it were as missing as everything else. 

Rewind hugged himself harder. The shame that had stopped him from talking about this before now lodged like a physical obstruction in his throat. He could just- not talk about it. He wanted to. He can’t. He tried to get at it in a roundabout way. “You know where we met?”

“Of course.”

“Right. When you told me why you were there you said you’d had this… crushing feeling you couldn’t get away from. Like something was terribly wrong, but you could never figure out what. And when you decided to go to the relinquishment clinic you felt so relieved. Because you still didn’t know what the problem was, but now you were at least doing something about it.”

Rewind drew rough gestures in the air with his hands. This wasn’t explaining it right. He tried again, “These people mattered, and they should be remembered. But I’m… I’m glad you made yourself forget them. Because if you hadn't maybe you wouldn’t have felt the way you did, or maybe it would have helped you understand why. So you might not have gone to that clinic. We wouldn’t have met. And even if we did, if you still had all those memories, you wouldn’t think the same way. You wouldn’t make the same decisions. You wouldn’t be you.”

There is a box in their hab on the Lost Light with a souvenir from Hedonia packed away in it, because Rewind has never been there. Our experiences make us who we are; even if literally everything else is the same, different experiences make for different people. But that’s only if we remember them. We are what we remember.

And so he was glad, and his chest lurched with sickened repulsion at the gratitude. Chromedome is the person he loves because he made himself forget. The erasure itself was untenable. He didn’t know how to reconcile those facts, or find clarity while trying to hold them both in his mind felt like being torn in two–

–Rewind wakes up in the dark.

He flails upright, smacking his arm against something solid. He peers into the gloom, and by the blue light of his own visor sees he’s right next to the recharge slab. Holding onto the edge of it he pulls himself up onto unsteady legs.

“Domey?” He whispers, disoriented. And then, “Minimus?”

Silence is his only answer. His visor and biolights barely illuminate the room, long shadows stretching behind every object and soupy darkness pooling at the border of his thin circle of light.

He wraps his arms around himself. He’s lost almost twenty minutes to the flashback, his chronometer tells him. Partition integrity: 12%.

Experimenting with the internal controls he’d practised on the way here, he turns his camera on and uses it to project the image of a blank white frame. It takes his optics a moment to adjust to the sudden brightness, and then he is able to look around and see he’s still in the same berthroom as before. He hasn’t moved, but he’s alone now, and all the lights have gone out.

“This is worse than the first time I woke up here,” Rewind mutters to himself, just to have some noise to make it feel less like he’s the only person left in the whole world.

The urge to find Ultra Magnus – or Chromedome, even, who isn’t himself but would still be better than being alone in this oppressive blackness – almost pushes him out the door before he turns back and checks the room for the transceiver. In a bunkroom so spartan it isn’t a long search. 

He can’t find it. 

Rewind laps the room twice before he’s forced to accept it’s gone. Though at least there are also no broken pieces like there would be if it had been smashed, either.

He slumps against the last berth he’d searched behind. The transceiver isn’t here. Without it, Chromedome and Rodimus and the others…

Anger bubbles hotly in him and catches in his throat. But it’s focused inward, directed at himself. He’d been within arm’s reach of the transceiver. They’re doomed because he failed. He’d been useless when it mattered most. The anger propels him up and he strides out into the hallway. He needs to act, to do something useful to cover his failure while he still has the chance. 

He looks down the corridor in both directions, as far as the light of his camera will reach until it finds its limit and the path becomes a black maw. It’s so quiet. There isn’t so much as the scrabbling of cuckoos in the walls. It feels like his fans' frantic whirring must be audible to everything in the base.

For a moment he swears he can smell energon, cloying in the air. He is somewhere else, a spaceship, dark and desolate and a slaughterhouse of corpses. He shakes his head. Tries to place what his body is recalling, but it slips away from him and the air smells clear once more.

What is he supposed to do now? There’s no sign of what’s happened, or where Magnus has gone, or where the transceiver has been taken.

But there are people waiting in the safehouse. They still need someone to help them. Maybe he could lure away the possessed mecha and give them a chance to make a break for the barracks’ exit.

Even though he’s familiar with it now, the route to the mess hall is rendered alien under his camera’s white light. Bleached, with thin shadows that crouch down to nothingness as he approaches only to loom up behind him once he’s passed.

Not far from the T intersection, Rewind pauses. 

Something’s wrong with the floor up ahead, the way it’s bouncing the light. It’s reflecting back to him crisply like the floor has suddenly turned to mirrored glass. 

Cautiously, he nudges the edge of where the change starts with his foot. Ripples flow out from the disturbance, scattering the reflected light into kaleidoscopic patterns. It’s water. Pooled so thin it stopped spreading down the corridor and has settled into perfect stillness.

Irrepressibly curious, he heads in the direction the spill has come from. As he walks water splashes over his feet and seeps into his joints, shockingly cold on his internals.

When he reaches the intersection he tips his head to the side, listening intently. No noise at all, except for the slosh as he adjusts his feet. The rumble of the pumps has stopped. He looks down the path directly to the mess hall, then changes course towards the generator room instead.

Gradually, his light pushes back the impenetrable void of darkness until it reveals the corridor’s end in that single door. They’d had closed it behind them when they passed through earlier. 

Now it’s thrown open, hanging half off its hinges.

He peers around the doorframe. The water is deeper in there, as if the weight of the pumps warped the floor, sinking it down. Pooled deep enough to cover his ankles as he steps slowly inside. His light struggles to reach the high ceiling, making the space feel cavernous.

Behind the second pump, he finds Ultra Magnus.

Rewind hurriedly splashes over to him. Magnus lies slumped below a massive dent in the pump, as if he’d been thrown against it. The pump’s casing concaves unevenly and at the deepest point the metal has split open. Water trickles sluggishly from the opening, down to Magnus’ shoulder where it drips into his lap. His optics are dark, and his biolights are unlit. The firearm he was carrying is no longer by his side.

“Magnus?” Rewind’s voice quavers.

His hand hovers just shy of Magnus’ shoulder.

Magnus is sprawled awkwardly where he’d fallen, slumped to the side and with an arm across his chest. When Rewind closes the gap and touches him, his plating is cold.

Cold, but not grey. Rewind tugs aside the arm that crosses over his front.

A hole blooms in the centre of Magnus’ chest. Emptiness yawns where sturdy metal armour should be, the outer plating and inner circuitry folded back, paused mid-transformation. Beyond that there’s an empty hollow, as if some huge monster had cracked him open and cored him out.

Rewind forces himself to breathe evenly. It’s not really him. It’s armour. Just armour. Magnus’ arm falls limply to his side as Rewind lets it go leans forward to aim his camera into the empty heart of the suit, flooding it with light to be certain Minimus isn’t still in there. It doesn’t look like it, but Rewind also isn’t certain where exactly he should be looking. Then he sees movement deep within the cramped internals. He leans in even closer, angling the light so he can see.

A cuckoo surges up from the bottom of the hollow. 

Six sharp points of pain dig in across his helm, neck, and shoulder as its hooked feet latch onto him. His vision is a blur of silver.

He rears back, slips. Falls backward into the water. 

It inundates him, streaming through his joints and seams. He cries out as bitingly cold water washes over his spark chamber.

The cuckoo scrabbles down to his chest. He feels a crackle of electricity from deep within himself, and it hurts as the water conducts it to sear the organs around his databanks. The cuckoo on the outside of him stops, its programming having no contingency for only now at this late stage of the attack sensing the cuckoo already underneath his plating.

He blindly grabs the thing while it’s frozen, fingers closing around one of the wiry legs and he rips it off himself. The cuckoo wriggles around to escape. He fumbles to get a better grip on it.

He smashes it down on the nearest hard surface. Smashes it down again when that doesn’t stop the cuckoo’s writhing, its legs coiling around his arm halfway up to the elbow. And again.

And again.

When he sits back on his knees, his fans gurgling as they churn water out of his body, the cuckoo is finally still. It had broken in half at some point, the part he is still holding reduced to shattered pieces. 

The only liquid coming out of it is the water. They don’t do anything to trick you into thinking they are truly alive. Not even bleed.

He blinks, and takes in for the first time that the surface he’d been battering the cuckoo against was Magnus’ thigh. Paint has been scraped off. There are little bits of cuckoo all over him.

“Sorry about the mess,” Rewind says without thinking. He looks up at Magnus’ face and is met with dark optics.

The hiccupped sobs he’s been holding back since he woke up after the last flashback raggedly escape him. The anger he’d felt at himself tries to boil back up but its mask has been stripped away; there’s no longer any hiding from the fact that fear is the engine that’s driving it - consciously he knows, from what he’s recalled and how Minimus had treated him in the shuttle, that the world is radically changed from the status quo of when his isolation protocol had been installed. Minimus isn’t going to condemn him for failing to be useful. 

He looks down at the shattered cuckoo in his hands, vision blurred by what might be tears or water.

Knowing it isn’t making it feel true. What feels true is that nothing is more important than being useful, and that right at the critical moment he’d been useless. He’d been useless in front of a non-disposable. And he knows what that means, he’s seen first hand what is done to datasticks who can’t work or have attitudes that make them a poor fit for servitude. His utility is the weight his life is measured against, and he’d promised himself he would never let the scales be tipped against him. He’d promised himself.

Though how much does that matter in the current situation? Very little, really. Either way, it won’t change what he has to do next. He’s going to help everyone trapped in the safehouse, and Minimus too, if he can find him. Even if he was absolutely certain doing so would get him condemned as a useless disposable, he would still do it anyway.

Chapter Text

He decides to go to the mess hall first. The partition tracker flashed in warning when it dipped down into single digits: Partition integrity: 9%. Best to help the people in the safehouse to start, since he knows where they are, then use whatever time he has left after to search for Minimus.

He follows the route that takes him back past the entrance. Thankfully the flooding hasn’t spread too far on this side so by the time he gets to the blastdoor he’s no longer sloshing through it. The planet’s sun must’ve set or be close to it, no light reaching through the thick canopy, as dark outside of the cracked open front doors as it is in here. The vestibule feels cavernous in the dark. The light of his camera can only illuminate partial slices of it at a time as he searches for signs that Minimus might have gotten out and escaped back to the shuttle. 

He doesn’t find anything to support his hope that he did.

It’s a relief to move on, because at least he can light up most of a corridor at once. In the open darkness it had felt like anything could have been standing next to him and he’d have no way of knowing as long as it sidestepped his solitary beam of light.

Strange shapes pitted into the corridor wall catch his optic as shadows snag on them. He does a double take and draws closer, the obscuring shadows fleeing to reveal the indents are bullet holes. On the floor below them lies an inert cuckoo. Rewind nudges it with a foot, and it slumps over to show that a shot had skewered it right through. 

 A scrabbling in the wall behind Rewind startles him into moving again, fast, nearly jogging to get away from that noise.

He knows he’s near the mess hall when the quiet enshrouding the base like the hushed silence of a mausoleum is shredded by a shriek of tearing metal. He stops projecting his camera, feeling his way along in the dark with a hand on the wall until it disappears into the empty space of a doorway.

Peering carefully around the frame reveals the yawning span of the mess hall, the blackness punctuated only by Whirl, Lug, and Rodimus as they continue to single-mindedly lever metal sheets off the safehouse despite the power out - the small glow of their optics and biolights like the bioluminescence of carnivores in the abyssal depth of the ocean, scavenging the sunken carcass of an unlucky creature.

There’s also yellow light in the middle of the room, closer to the doorframe he is half hidden behind than the safehouse. It’s only after tracing the shapes he can see limned around it that he realises he's looking at a lanky mecha standing there, still and silent. Chromedome. Motionless like he had been when Rewind woke up, before the cuckoo puppeting Chromedome's body had abruptly switched over to impersonating him.

Rewind's hand tightens on the doorframe. Chromedome might still have the transceiver.

It's risky, but with the almost non-existent visibility Rewind might be able to sneak up behind him to see if he's holding it. Cautiously, he edges out of cover and into the room, hyperconscious that all it takes is for one of the infected to look up and his own biolights will immediately give him away. 

Before he can take another step a discordant noise that doesn't fit with the din of the assault on the safehouse grabs his attention. 

It sounded like a low whistle. The kind you’d use to catch someone's notice. He scans the mess hall trying to pinpoint its source. Is that a faint outline of something among where he remembers the pile of tables being? 

The stack is against a wall, well away from the safehouse and its assailants. Rewind approaches it at an angle so he can keep an optic on the infected while he creeps closer. Even in the pitch black it’s hard to be sure, but it looks like there’s a red glow behind one of the overturned tables.

When he's close enough to confirm that his optics aren't playing a trick on him, he also sees what it is; red optics peaking around the side of the furniture.

Reckless hope makes him walk faster, scurrying over until he's can see the face illuminated by those red optics clearly and his spark lurches in his chest in relief.

"Minimus," he whispers nearly too loudly as he hurries to where Minimus is frantically beckoning for Rewind to hide with him.

As he ducks down next to Minimus an unapologetically survival focused part of himself braces to feel a crackle of electricity in reply to a cuckoo inhabiting his friend's frame. But he doesn't. The weapon in Rewind's chest doesn't stir. Minimus isn't infected. 

Also behind the sideways table's cover is the gun Minimus'd had while in the armour, seeming all the more impressive next to his reduced size.

"Thank Primus you're okay, when I saw the armour I worried there was no way you could've made it,” Rewind breathes.

"Benefits of being a loadbearer," Minimus replies, equally sotto voce. He glances over the top of their cover. "Chromedome chased me here but then stalled when I gave him the slip. I take it that construction is where the rest of the landing party are?"

Rewind nods.

Minimus' frown deepens, and he lays one hand on the gun at his side as he continues, "There's no way passed without getting spotted. But I'd rather not risk a fight, even with Ratchet close to hand. And one against four is bad odds even with superior firepower."

Two against four, Rewind thinks. That hesitance is more pronounced, Minimus' reluctance to count on Rewind stronger right now with danger so viscerally present. Minimus didn't leave Rewind to venture into danger alone like he could have, but still he's obviously keeping watch of Rewind as intently as Rodimus and the others.

Rewind understands. But a desperate idea is coming together in his head, and it needs both of them to work.

"The transceiver, does Chromedome still have it?" Rewind asks.

“No.”

Minimus holds up a hand, and the combined glow of their optics outlines a boxy shell with wires looped from one side to the other. He watches Rewind closely, as if half braced for the reveal to trigger something in him.

The flicker of hope Rewind has been sheltering flares brighter. Their best hope isn’t lost yet after all.

“With the two of us, I think we can get it to Nautica,” Rewind says quickly. “I can make a distraction, give you an opening to get around the infected.”

Minimus’ optics widen slightly. Whatever reaction he’d been guarded against, this wasn’t it. But then he shakes his head. “There are too many of them. There would only be a few seconds before they overwhelmed you, and that construction is too far. It’s not enough time to cover the distance.”

It’s Rewind’s turn to peer over the top of their shelter. He can’t help flinching as Whirl pulls up another panel with a nasty crunch. It’s hard to tell with nothing but the small light produced by bodies to go off of, but it doesn’t look like they’ve broken through yet. Though they can’t be far from it now. The stretch of the mess hall between here and the safehouse is impenetrably dark, revealing nothing.

“I think… I could get closer,” Rewind says, withdrawing back behind cover. In the face of Minimus’ naked disbelief he continues doggedly, “It’s pitch black in here. If I switch my lights off I’d be basically invisible.”

Minimus’ frown thins, sceptical. “That would mean turning your optics off as well. How can you get to the safehouse blind? All it will take is you tripping over a stray chair and they’ll all bear down on you like a tonne of bricks.”

"But I’ve been here before, and my camera was recording when I came through here. I can use the footage to find my way safely."

At least he hopes so. It's a plan that has a real chance of working, the only one they have, and from the resigned look forming in Minimus’ features he realises that too - his facial insignia twitching as his brows draw down, an expression Rewind’s familiar with from back when Dominus would make a claim during one of the brothers’ disagreements that Minimus couldn’t dispute and he would be forced to concede the point.

The warning on his HUD inexorably ticks down, now reading partition integrity: 6%, and it's impossible to ignore the metal shrieks that are counting down the time left to save everyone in the safehouse. 

Finally, Minimus presses the transceiver into Rewind's palm.

“How will I know when you’re ready for me to create a distraction?” Minimus says, voice changing to sound more sure of himself as he commits to his chosen course of action. 

“When I get close enough to the safehouse I’ll light up my visor twice. That’ll be your signal.”

Minimus nodded. “I’ll watch for it. Be careful.”

Hand balled tightly around the transceiver, Rewind leaves the shelter of the overturned table and steps out into open space.

He mentally marks down where the infected are, three at the side of the safehouse and Chromedome standing a distance away from them. Then, he systematically cuts off his biolights until finally shutting down his visor.

Blackness swallows him whole.

The claustrophobia of blindness crushes him like a squeezing fist. He almost turns his optics back on in a panic, but he vents deeply to try to slow the frantic spinning of his spark.

He reaches for the camera controls in his mind, calling on his experiments with the internal commands he'd practiced as Magnus drove them to the barracks. In his smothered panic he fails the first try, but the second attempt changes the blankness of sightlessness to the textured opaqueness of deep darkness in his mind’s eye; a still frame of unlit mess hall a moment ago, when he’d stopped recording to switch off the red light on his camera along with the other lights on his body.

Internally he’s able to scroll through footage with shocking speed, so much faster than when he’d projected it. It takes him seconds to find the recording of the room back when it was lit he can use as a reference - although he thinks the perspective does not line up with where he is now. When he’d been here the first time, he’d not walked up to the stack of tables. The closest angle he’s got is at least several metres away.

There is no other choice except to work with what he’s got. He pauses on the frame where he turns away from the safehouse to follow the tire tracks. It gives the best view of the whole room.

In the image he picks out where he’s currently standing with as much certainty as he can, charts a path from there to near the safehouse which navigates around the stray chairs and sheet metal not used in the construction which litter the floor like a lethal obstacle course, and starts to walk. 

They won’t see me. They won’t see me, he thinks like a litany as he takes tiny anxious steps. It’s dark and I’m small. They won’t see me. 

He hugs a wall, desperate to keep distance between himself and the infected for as long as he can. He clutches the transceiver in front of his chest with both hands.

Finally, he’s almost close enough.

He breaks off from the wall, forced to venture out into open space to close the last of the distance.  

His audials strain as he tries to hear every noise the infected make. It doesn’t sound like any of them have changed what they’re doing.

A shock of pain jolts through Rewind’s ankle and something scrapes across the floor in front of him.

Without thinking he minimises the internal feed from his camera and onlines his visor. He sees a chair lying forlornly on its side in front of him. He'd bumped into one of its legs.

He's been walking half a metre to the left of where he thought he was.

His head jerk up to see if anyone else heard.

And he's caught head on in the yellow searchlight of Chromedome’s visor, staring right at him.

Cold horror floods Rewind as he shuts down his optics again. He hurriedly backs away but stops after a few steps, torn. Given the state of the Magnus armour, really paying attention to the transceiver had made the cuckoo controlling Chromedome aggressive before, and Rewind doesn’t stand a chance of stopping him from destroying it if that happens again. But he’s so close to the safehouse now. He can’t let himself be pushed back.

“Hello?”

Chromedome says, too close. Rewind freezes, pulling back up the footage mess hall internally and rapidly trying to pinpoint exactly where he is now, and where around him is safe to stand.

It’s impossible to hear fans, or the clink of plating, or any other natural noises Chromedome’s frame makes over the assault on the safehouse. Rewind can’t guess how near he is. At least he hasn't felt a snap of static in his own chest yet. If Chromedome gets so close for the cuckoos to connect on their peer-to-peer network, it's over. There's no hiding from that.

Should he turn his optics back on? What if another infected is also coming over to see what Chromedome noticed, Rewind won't see them coming if he doesn’t. But what if they aren't and then the light of his own optics draws their attention? 

He can’t signal Minimus. It’s too soon. He’s not close enough.

He keeps his visor off and prays he has got his location right in the footage this time, and dodges a handful of steps to the left. He holds the transceiver behind him as he goes, grateful for every step he takes without hitting anything else.

Are those footsteps he can hear, moving toward him, or is he just trying to listen so hard he's imagining it?

Displaced air brushes over his shoulder.

It's movement, Chromedome stepping into the space he had just been.

Rewind's whole body locks up. He can't tell if he's too frightened to move or if the cuckoo is damaging his ability to control his own frame again.

And that same horror which gripped him when he'd found Chromedome still in that berthroom holds him again, threatening to make him shake. Somehow it's worse now, because he remembers enough to know that if Chromedome was actually Chromedome, he would never make Rewind feel like this. The full horror of how the cuckoo controlling Chromedome weaponises his very self is laid bare to him.

Rewind’s grip on the transceiver is so tight his hand hurts. 

It makes him realise; he's got the key stopping the cuckoos literally in the palm of his hand. He can save everyone. He's going to.

And if these things steal from the personalities of the people they control… maybe he can use that too.

“Stop.” He resets his crackling vocaliser, determination straightening his spine. “Stay where you are.”

“Rewind?” Chromedome sounds relieved, he sounds happy to be reunited again. 

It makes Rewind’s spark twist. It makes him angry. Because it’s manufactured. It's Chromedome reduced to an object to be used. It's their love reduced to a gun in an arsenal.

“I need your help, Domey. I need you to do something for me.”  

He doesn’t turn his visor on. He can’t risk drawing any of the other infected over. Instead he focuses on his hearing, and when Chromedome replies he doesn’t sound any closer than when Rewind told him to stop.

“Of course. What do you need?” Chromedome says, just like Rewind hoped he would. Because he may not be himself, but the cuckoo’s modus operandi depends on convincing people that he still is.

Still, Rewind squares his feet and gets ready to switch on his optics, just in case. If getting at the remaining survivors is a higher priority for the cuckoo than keeping its cover, this won’t work. He’ll have to try his luck sprinting to the safehouse if that’s the case. 

“I need you to distract Rodimus, Lug, and Whirl. Do everything you can to make sure they don’t notice me.”

“I cannot do that.” 

Chromedome’s voice goes flat, a mirror to Rodimus at the barracks’ blast doors. The same monotone cadence as We need to find them.

“But I need you to. Remember how in the safehouse you volunteered to go out and help me find the transceiver, even though it was so dangerous? Everybody knows that when I really need something you would do anything you can to help me.”

“I cannot… cannot…”

Chromedome trails off. The cuckoo must be consulting the personality construct of him it's building, leafing through memories. Piecing together the conclusion Rewind’s drawn from his own reclaimed recollections, that when he really needs something, there isn’t much Chromedome isn't willing to give to provide it. To not do that would be such a divergence from who Chromedome is that the cuckoo would no longer be able to convincingly impersonate him. A partitioned memory almost rings out in Rewind's mind, filtering through only in a flash of dread and Chromedome's strained voice; I found him for you.

“Okay,” Chromedome finally says, abruptly sounding completely normal again.

And then Rewind’s straining audials hear the sound of footsteps moving away from him. 

If the Entyp’d had time to give their weapons more sophisticated programming, his gambit might not have worked. But they didn't, and for him right now, that's lucky.

Rewind holds still until the noise of metal sheeting being pulled off the safehouse stops, and several seconds after that.

Then he onlines his optics and sees the backs of Rodimus, Lug, and Whirl. All four are unmoving, and no one seems to be talking, but they’re facing away from Rewind to focus on Chromedome.

He makes a break for it as fast as he dares to the safehouse door. Using the light cast by his own body to navigate he scampers around chairs and wall panel offcuts until he almost careens right into his goal.

Trying to stifle his thrumming fans, he turns sharply on his head towards the stack of tables stands across the mess hall and flashes his visor twice.

For several vents there's no response.

Then muzzle flash and the sharp retort of gunfire split the darkness. Three of the infected turn to the distraction in one synchronised movement, Chromedome lagging behind the others. They all begin stalking towards Minimus in unsettling lockstep.

Rewind pounds on the door as the noise is covered by another spray of gunfire.

“I’ve got the transceiver! Let me in!”

Raised voices break out inside as Rewind agitatedly checks over his shoulder.

Minimus has been forced to break cover, bolting away from the infected.

Rewind bangs on the door again. “Now would really be a great time, guys!”

The arguing voices get closer and the door - which was electronic and now as dead without power as the rest of the base - begins to drag laboriously open.

“-what if the cuckoo has taken him over?”

“Then we're still better off chancing that than starving to death in here,” Anode says to someone else inside, a slice of her frame becoming visible as she physically pushes the door.

With his tiny frame Rewind slips sideways through the gap when it’s only half as wide as what Anode needs to fit through. Several bots have their headlights on and he has to shield his optics with his free hand, searching through the glare for Nautica.   

Drift is standing defensively in front of her and Ratchet, sword drawn. Too short on time to mess around, Rewind swats the flat of the blade away and holds the transceiver out to Nautica.

Startled like she was expecting him to attack her, she blinks and then grabs the chip. She bends down to grab something sitting next to the old, emaciated bodies. The cracked open cuckoo, Rewind identifies, as she feverishly fits the parts together.

Anode chokes on a disgusted noise and Rewind swings around and sees a cuckoo scrabbling through the crack still in the door she is trying to push closed.

No. No way. They are so close to this nightmare being over, it's not allowed to go wrong now.

"I think fucking not," Rewind snaps.

He steps forward and aims a sweeping kick at the thing. It connects with a crunch and punts the cuckoo straight back out into the dark.

Anode whistles as she slides the door home. "Damn. Nice."

Rewind flinches away from the door as it shudders, something hitting it hard on the other side. It seems at least one of the infected has noticed the commotion - or at least two based on the ferocity.

“Let me in!” Lug pleads from the other side, the cuckoo controlling her modulating her voice sound scared and desperate.

Anode stills, stricken.

"Lug?" she gasps softly.

Her grip on the door falters. Without the electronic lock to hold it closed it starts to slide again, yielding to the outside force.

Rewind throws his meagre weight against it, trying to keep it closed. 

His pedes are sliding across the floor but then Ratchet and Drift join him, adding their strength.

“Got it!” Nautica shouts triumphantly. “Here comes the logic bomb!”

Rewind presses a hand to the armour over his databanks as stinging electricity crackles under it painfully. 

The banging on the door stops all at once.

They all stare at each other in the sudden silence, not yet ready to believe that this isn’t a temporary reprieve so the next assault catches them off guard. Then Anode’s him, Drift, and Ratchet aside to yank the door open as she calls out Lug's name.

She finds her just outside the safehouse on the ground together with Rodimus and Whirl, sprawled like puppets with their strings cut. As Anode drops to her knees and pulls helm and shoulders into her lap, Ratchet squats beside them with a medical scanner in hand.

“The logic bomb worked, I take it?” Calls a voice from across the hall.

Drift swivels to look at the same time as Rewind, and in the beam of his headlights stands Minimus, scuffed and dented but alright.

On the ground next to him, half in and half out of the light, lies Chromedome. 

Rewind hardly hears Drift call back something to Minimus. He slowly picks his way over to the mecha on the ground. The person who’d insisted on risking his life to go with Rewind when he’d had to leave shelter to search for the transceiver. Who would have died if the logic bomb hadn’t worked. For whom being there when Rewind needs him is so important it swayed the weapon that had taken over his mind.

Rewind knows from experiencing the flashbacks that if he was currently the person he’d grown to become, in all the time he can’t remember, that wouldn’t seem so impossible. Incredible. But he isn’t that version of himself right now. His perspective is one transplanted from the height of Functionism. Never in his life has he completely bought into the dogma that there’s something inherent to him that makes it natural for others to discard him… but in a life where that message is relentlessly blared out every day, it feels inevitable that everyone else will believe it.

And yet here he is, with people who don’t hesitate to put themselves at risk for his sake. Not only one, either.

Rewind looks up from where he’s now kneeling next to Chromedome. Minimus is swaying just a little on his feet, looking like he’d very much like to sit down.

“Hey. Glad you’re okay,” Rewind says to Minimus, a smile in his voice.

“Appreciated,” Minimus says seriously. Followed by a wry, “On the off chance we ever do this again, I would also appreciate it if you could incapacitate them more quickly once they’ve started actively chasing me down next time.”

It startles a laugh out of Rewind.

Then Chromedome’s visor flickers and anything else he was going to say slips right out of his mind. Minimus courteously slips away to join the others, giving them space.

Chromedome groans and tries to sit up. Reflexively Rewind moves to support him when he can’t manage it on the first try and collapses back down with a huff as the air is knocked out of his vents, but an ill-defined uncertainty brings Rewind up short. The flats of his palms hover handsbreadth behind Chromedome’s back as he makes a second attempt and is able to lever upright enough to curl forward into a defensive hunch. Arms wrapped around himself, Chromedome shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it.

What do you say to the person who failed memory has left stranded in the no man’s land between a perfect stranger and your inseparable other half?

"So uh," Rewind begins, wanting to get the sorry-I-only-kind-of-know-you-right-now out of the way, but Chromedome looks up at him and he stops. 

He's never seen anyone look so devastated. 

The yellow of Chromedome’s visor flares a nearly washed out white, edges losing definition as filaments burn out into sizzling tears. Underneath the fizzle he can hear the uneven choking of erratic fans. “I almost- I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I tried to stop but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything. I’m so sorry.”

He was aware while it was controlling him, Rewind realises. He saw everything it was making him do.

“Hey. Hey, it’s alright. It wasn’t your fault. It’s over now. How about you come over with me to check on the others,” Rewind says gently as he tugs on Chromedome’s arm, coaxing him to stand.

Chromedome sticks to him like a shadow. Rewind takes his hand, the motion smooth with muscle memory.

All the other infected have woken up too; Anode has Lug in her arms and is refusing to let her go, Lug herself protesting a little but also seems reassured by the contact. Whirl slaps Ratchet’s hand away from him and snaps the next person who touches him is going to need a new arm. Rodimus is sitting upright, head in his hands and looking groggy. 

“Great as it would be to stick around so I can figure out how to burn this place to the fucking ground, how about we get outta here instead?” Whirl says. The agitated spinning of his arm rotors cuts through the stale air with a womp-womp-womp.

Agreement is written over everyone's faces.

“Not so fast, you haven’t had your turn,” Ratchet says to Minimus as they all turn toward the exit.

He waves a medical scanner over Minimus from head to chest. A pair of headlights shift to point at them more directly. Rewind traces it back to Drift, Rodimus’ arm draped over his shoulder to support him but now clearly focused on Ratchet. Drift’s mouth is set in a cautious frown and he has his free hand curls loosely around the hilt of a sheathed sword.

Even if a cuckoo did get him while he was making the distraction, wouldn’t the logic bomb have still dealt with it? Rewind thinks. 

But Minimus looks pleased with the precaution - actually there probably is some protocol about scanning anyone who’s been exposed - and after a minute Ratchet reads over the scanner’s results and says,

“All clear.”

Ratchet breathes a sigh of relief. Drift’s hand moves off his sword hilt. Minimus isn’t any more relaxed by the confirmation, but he would have already known he’s not infected.  

They all stay close together as they leave. Conversation dies out, everyone afraid to break the silence and risk covering up any telltale scrabbling in the walls. 

But they never hear it, and in the corridor to the Barracks’ exit they step over several inert cuckoos, littering the ground where they’d fallen off the walls and ceiling when the logic bomb fried their operating systems.

Rewind tightens his hand on Chromedome’s when they reach the blast door. It’s finally hitting him, this is actually over. Part of him struggles to believe any of them got out of this nightmare at all… but mostly he’s swept up in relief.

He can’t help speeding up into a jog, tugging Chromedome along with him until even his long stride can’t keep up and he has to jog too. The dappled night of the organic forest is so close and Rewind wants to be out there - and no longer in here - as voraciously as he used to dream about blasting off and leaving Cybertron behind way back in the bad old days. 

They burst out into the outside world and immediately everything feels so much more alive. Wind rustles leaves, insects chirp, the canopy is thick but pale snatches of moonlight still break through to give texture to the darkness that’s so different from the blank black inside the Barracks.

Rewind looks up at Chromedome, and something warm swelling in his chest when he sees his partner already looking down at him.

He turns and takes Chromedome’s other hand as well. 

“We made it,” Rewind says, smiling with his voice.

The surge of feeling crests and then contracts and suddenly he feels dizzy. He thinks he might hear someone say something, his name, but the world is spinning around him and- 

–he was putting a new film together. Light danced on the habsuite ceiling as he projected the recordings he looked through, clipping bits he wanted to use. Candid footage and unimportant conversations and just everyday life aboard the Lost Light, routine, ordinary. Special, in its own right. For as long as he’d had his camera Rewind had nurtured a deep fondness for moments like these; the unique, mundane things people chose to do with their time, when there are no requirements or restrictions pressing on them and the choice is entirely their own.

He mostly made these documentaries for himself. Before, Autobot Command was only interested in stuff that made good propaganda films, and now, this isn’t a topic that makes for riveting viewing on Lost Light movie nights. A lot of these personal projects have only been watched by a handful of other people. 

Chromedome’s seen most of them, though.   

He’s here now, lounged on the berth with him - the reason Rewind was projecting his work, despite being able to review and edit internally. Chromedome sat crossed legged, leant back on his hands with his head tilted up to watch the ceiling. Rewind laid on his back in front of him, his own head in Domey's lap, supported by his folded legs as he worked. With the camera’s sound muted, the quiet in their hab was easy, comfortable, warm.

They watched Whirl and Cyclonus sparring. Ultra Magnus reading in a quiet corner of a rec room. Brainstorm in his lab, animatedly demonstrating a new device. But then during a clip of raucous dancing during a crowded theme night at Swerve’s, Chromedome shifted. 

“Wow, I don’t remember that at all. How wasted was I?” He laughed when the camera caught him dancing with less-than-sober coordination. 

“Not that much,” Rewind said, geared up to tease him for pretending to be drunker than he was to excuse the sorry state of his dancing. But then the smile in his voice wilted along with the words. “No wait. This, uh. It was on the other Lost Light.” 

Rewind was caught watching the projection. All of those people. Gone now, except here. Captured in his memory and preserved in his archive. He started when he felt a touch on his shoulder. Chromedome had leaned forward, no longer watching the past, but focused on him. 

Rewind sighed and switched off his camera. He reached up, fumbling from his upside-down view as he reached for the side of his cheek. Chromedome nuzzled into his touch, and the thorny feeling in Rewind’s chest untangled and relaxed its grip on his spark. 

“Can I ask you something?” Chromedome said after a long moment, like he’d had to battle an urge not to speak and won. 

Rewind sat up, hearing the uncertainty threaded through Chromedome’s voice. One of his knees pressed to Chromedome’s leg as he mirrored him, sitting cross legged as well. 

“Anything.” 

Chromedome ducked his head, laced his fingers in his lap. 

“Do you still think that… you, uh, the other you. My Rewind. He said something when- before he died.” 

“Domey-” 

“I know that you’re not the same as him. But. Before he sacrificed himself, he said, ‘every shape serves a purpose.’ If anyone could have an idea of what he might have been thinking at the time, it would be you, right? So do you think,” Chromedome forced himself to make optic contact, and he seemed to be searching Rewind’s visor for more than just what he was asking, “did he believe it was better for him to be the one sacrificed instead of somebody else?”

Rewind’s vents hitched. He felt an impulse to hide, as if he’d been caught out. The reflexive ‘no’ perched in his vocaliser, but lying while speaking on the other Rewind’s behalf felt… wrong. A disservice to the dead, who can no longer speak their own truth when it was covered up by something more palatable. It’s wrong to wash away a part of the other Rewind, to let it be lost in the tide of time so he can shunt a lie to shield himself into its place.

“Maybe?” Rewind hedged, and now it was his turn to look away. “I mean I know- he knew all that Functionist stuff was a load of slag, obviously. But I guess it’s still comforting. In a way. ‘Every shape serves a purpose,’ right,” disposable, “meant he had a lot of experience with people acting like he could just disappear off the face of Cybertron and it wouldn’t matter. And he didn’t want to die, but if someone had to, then he could be the one to do it. And of course it would matter. Like, people would care. But in the grand scheme of things, maybe not as much as it would if it were someone else. And that’s kind of good, isn’t it? It made it easier for him to be the one to pay that price, for the sake of everybody.”

Did that make sense? He felt like he should explain it more clearly. He didn’t know how. It was raw, like trying to describe the pain of a ragged wound while energon was still spilling onto the ground.

He would have been doing wrong by the other Rewind if he’d lied, but he also hadn’t expected Chromedome to take this honesty well. Which was why, when he only hummed thoughtfully in response, Rewind couldn’t resist a furtive glance at his expression. His visor was squinted contemplatively. 

“When you put it that way, then it really should have been me who died, don’t you think?” 

“What?” 

“You’re forged. A real mecha. I’m only a knock-off. I’m worth even less than you - in the grand scheme of things, if that’s how it works. So, following that logic, it should have been me.” 

Rewind had no control over the surge of anger that washed hotly over him. 

“That’s a crock of shit,” he said as he snapped upright, sat up straight and all efforts of avoiding Chromedome’s gaze forgotten. “Everyone knows they made up that ‘knock-off’ rubbish so they could get away with what they were doing to people who’re constructed cold. It was just an excuse that let anyone not branded an acceptable target nod along and go ‘ah yes, this is just how the world works,’ like people hadn’t set it up that way and couldn't set it up differently if they wanted.” 

He vented, his hands curled into fists. Chromedome still looked more serene than he expected. 

Rewind narrowed his visor at him, and then slowly said, “And you don’t believe in all that ‘knock-off’ stuff anyway. I know you don’t.” 

Chromedome reached out, and gently took his clenched hands. He rubbed his thumb over the back of one as he held them. 

“You’re right,” Chromedome said, achingly earnest, “I don’t. I never believed the propaganda about ‘disposables’ either. But sometimes you have trouble letting things go, even when you don’t believe them.”

Oh. Something hot and acrid like shame twisted in the pit of his fuel tank, and he pulled his hands away.

Chromedome lets things go so easily. Rewind has never understood that part of him. Although, he has come to grasp that it is not always a bad thing. It meant he left the baggage of being constructed cold behind him a long time ago. Rewind admired that. And sometimes felt a little jealous of it, too.

“How long have you been working up to having this conversation?” he laughed half-heartedly, a transparent attempt to steer away from acknowledging aloud how that observation hit home.

Chromedome kindly let the redirect pass unremarked. “Ugh, absolutely ages. I drove Brainstorm mad with all the practising what I was going to say with him- 

Chapter Text

Rewind comes back to himself. A sour taste coats his mouth. His vision is hazy, but he would know the shape of Chromedome’s helm anywhere, and he knows it now. Uncoordinatedly, he raises a hand to cup the side of Chromedome’s face, in easy reach as he’s bent low over Rewind.

“You love me,” Rewind says, knowing with his whole spark that it’s true.

Chromedome makes a pained sound like Rewind just twisted a knife. Somewhat still out of it, Rewind frowns. That isn’t right. What did he do?

There’s a coldness in his chest, a numbness. Slowly, Rewind notices that he’s lying down flat on his back. Flattened ferns form a soft cushion beneath him. The way Chromedome’s face hovers above his own, upside down, he must be kneeling at Rewind’s head, right behind him. Out of focus high above that there's warm light peeking through the canopy. It’s morning. He lost a lot of time to this flashback. 

His arms feel weak, his fingers tingle. His hand starts to slide off Chromedome’s face as holding it up becomes too much effort. But Chromedome catches it, and holds it in both his own.

“He’s awake! That’s good, right? You’ve found a way to disconnect it?” Chromedome says desperately - not to Rewind, which is his first fuzzy thought, but someone across from him.

He cranes his neck up to see down his body and… oh.

Ratchet is wrist deep in his chest. 

Rewind’s chest plating has been cut away, an edge of a neighbouring intact plate scuffed from where a seamsplitter had been used and failed to trigger the transformation.

“What…” He struggles to sit up, to see what Ratchet’s doing. He can’t manage to. He runs a self-diagnostic.

Partition integrity: 6% the diagnostic reports after a delay.

Ratchet’s frowning deeply in concentration. “No. His consciousness returning wasn’t because of me. I've got no control over that, even though I'm trying everything I can think of here. But I’ve only read the theory and this is an atypical case, and even if I had the instruments on the Lost Light surgery on brain integrated circuitry needs time and-”

“What’s happening?” Rewind interrupts. “The logic bomb worked, right? If it didn’t then…”

He tilts his head back to look up at Chromedome again. He seems like himself, Rewind’s sure of it.

“It worked,” Chromedome rushes to reassure him, hands tightening on his own. “Everyone else is okay. It did work, just. Not for you.” 

Ratchet twists something that Rewind can sort of feel, in a numbed way, and he flinches at the alien sensation.

“To get at your mind the cuckoo had interwoven itself with the wiring connecting your databanks and brain module. Whatever you did to cut those connections damaged it as well,” Ratchet says.

“The isolation protocol,” Minimus’ voice says from nearby.

Rewind rolls his head to see him hovering uncertainly beside Ratchet like he wants to help but doesn’t know how. Minimus’ arms are crossed over his chest, his mouth a tight line below his facial insignia. Every inch of him looks to be held in the iron grip of someone who’s pushed everything down because he needs to be able to function right now, no matter the emotional cost later. He looks like someone who doesn’t know what they'll do if they loosen that iron grip even a little.

Chromedome makes a soft noise of confusion, like he doesn't know what Minimus is talking about.

Ratchet continues, “Yeah, that thing. It damaged the hardware the cuckoo uses to access its peer-to-peer network. It looks like it can still send signals, but it can't receive them anymore. The logic bomb couldn't reach it. And now it’s gotten around you cutting those connections by interweaving with your lifecord to get at your brain that way. I can’t remove it from there without killing you as well.”

Ratchet sits back on his heels. His optics flick from Chromedome’s face, to Rewind’s, to his own hands. His fingers are pink with energon. 

“There’s nothing else I can do. I’m sorry,” he says as his hands ball into helpless fists.

The integrity warning sits on Rewind’s HUD. Ticking down to when the cuckoo will have full access to his memories. When it will be able to carry out its preprogrammed function; constructing a simulacrum of his personality, taking over his body, and ultimately killing him.

Partition integrity: 4%

“Well that's just typical of life, ain’t it. You're the one who put in all the effort getting the logic bomb to work, and you’re the only one who doesn’t get the benefit,” Whirl snorts. 

Rewind looks towards his voice and sees the others further back among the tree trunks that crowd the patch of flattened ferns Rewind, Chromedome, and Ratchet are occupying. Most of the crew cluster together, but not Whirl.

While they mill about listlessly, as if torn between giving Ratchet space to work and wanting to help somehow, Whirl is leaning against a tree with the loose limbed ease of someone spoiling for a fight - or, actually Rewind gets the feeling it’s not so much that as Whirl laying down bait until one of the others gives in and punches him. “So what’s it gonna be? You want us to put you down now, or wait until after that parasite has finished you off?”

“Whirl!” Nautica shouts, appalled by his callousness.

Chromedome bristles, like he would go take a swing at Whirl if it didn’t mean he’d have to stop cradling Rewind’s head.

Rodimus stomps over and starts scolding him for being ‘tasteless’, but Rewind tunes out the rebuke out as he turns Whirl’s question over in his mind. Is that the only meaningful decision he has left to himself now?

It’s not a difficult one. Too much of his life has been consumed by others trying to force him to be a mindless tool for their benefit. He knows which option he’ll choose. 

“Wait,” Minimus mutters like he’s just remembered something. As he almost trips over himself to rush to Rewind’s side he says again, more loudly, “wait! The isolation protocol, Rewind. What about the secondary function?”

Rewind stares at him. 

The secondary function. What had the startup screen said? ‘Initiate purge’?

“The what? What are you talking about?” Chromedome says so fast his voice cracks, feverish with desperate hope.

Chromedome doesn’t know. The protocol was installed before they met, and then Rewind must have never told him about it.

He can't think what to say. How to explain it all to Chromedome in the middle of this crisis, or if there's a reason he never did before, and in his overwhelmed silence Minimus answers for him, “It’s a modification. One that can destroy Rewind’s databanks, and hopefully the cuckoo along with them.”

Rewind yanks his hand from Chromedome’s grasp and sits up with a struggle, crawling away from everyone until his back hits the trunk of a tree. He can feel twisted roots anchoring into the soil under his hands. Dirt cakes into the joints of his fingers.

He can see all of them at once from here; his conjunx and Ratchet on the ground in front of him, Minimus at Chromedome's shoulder now, the others in the background where they're darkened by thicker shade where the trees close ranks.

 “No! I can’t. I can’t do that. These are my databanks we're talking about. I need them.”

“Not to live,” Chromedome says.

“No!”

Chromedome is reaching out, shuffling on his knees to close the distance, but Rewind smacks his hand away. Domey’s visor flares like he’s about to cry.

“I can’t destroy my databanks. I can’t make that decision. A lot of the information on them isn't mine, I’m supposed to protect it. It’s my job to look after it.”

Dominus had entrusted Rewind with his work, and he has never failed in his job of safeguarding it. Now that Dominus is gone, honouring that trust is the last thing he can still do for him. He can’t let that go. 

And... he’s experienced in the flashbacks how the future version of him had been using his capabilities for a new purpose he’d picked for himself. All those moments, saved from the slow fade of information creep. Records of the events which shaped those involved into who they are, each one a point in a unique constellation of experiences which make every person an irreplaceable individual. These moments matter, because the people they gave shape to matter. And he is equipped to preserve them in a way few others are. Doesn’t that mean he has a responsibility to protect the contents of his archive?

“As long as the databanks are intact my archive can be extracted. Even post-mortem, if it has to be,” Rewind justifies.

Everyone’s optics are on him, looking at him with confusion, incomprehension, pity. He’s so awfully exposed without his chest plating. It’s like being back in the hospital after he’d gotten the protocol installed, terrified of the idea of losing his databanks while Tetralog laughed like he only thought Rewind was silly to be afraid, like he was so removed he didn’t even care to think about what the loss of it would mean for Rewind.

What’s the point of a memory stick that can’t store data?

He crosses his arms over his chest and feels rhythmic movements under them, the routines of his body keeping him alive. Except for against a forearm, where instead there is a span of cold, dead metal. The cuckoo.

Chromedome is rubbing circles into the back of his hand with his thumb where Rewind's slap connected. His shoulders slump in resignation, like he's imagining every way he could plead with Rewind and he’s certain they’re all dead-ends.

Chromedome's gaze skitters over to Ratchet, erratic like a cornered animal.  

"Could you force the purge?"

"I can try. Are you asking me to?" The judgement is thick in Ratchet’s tone, but he says it all the same. 

Chromedome curls in on himself, vents unsteady. He stops rubbing soothing circles into the back of his hand and digs his thumb into the metal.

“I can't,” he finally says, his voice cracking, static warping the words. And then to Rewind, “I know how much your archive means to you. But please, please don’t do this. Don't make me live without you."

Rewind stares at Chromedome. His own vocaliser crackles, half booted up to voice the reflexive statement There are other memory sticks out there, as it hits him what a stupid thing that would be to say right now. It’s like he’s tripped and fallen flat on his face, suddenly feeling as if he had been running blind as his awareness expands back to being able to take in anything outside of his myopic panic. The rest of the world re-emerges from behind the eclipse of fear that only a threat to his databanks can invoke.

Don’t make me live without you. Telling Chromedome how many other memory sticks there are out there would be completely missing the point. Chromedome doesn’t care about his function. None of those other people are Rewind. None of them have his experiences. The unique constellation that makes him himself, an irreplaceable individual.

And... what about those experiences of his own? Some of them are preserved in his archive - he's kept his camera running almost from the day he got it - but so many foundational parts of his life were before that. Those are preserved only in his memory. Sacrificing himself for the sake of the data he stores means forsaking those too.

Hesitantly, he stops defensively hugging his chest, his arms dropping limply into his lap. Gradually, a realisation slowly dawns on him that choosing to save himself over his ability to function is an option here. One that nobody here is going to prevent him from taking.

He's never believed what the Functionists preached. But he’s lived so long held captive by people with power who enforced it as truth, he’d stopped being able to see beyond the cage.

He draws his knees up in front of him. He cares so deeply about his archive. About preservation. And he loves the work of doing it.

He can't... He should...

Partition integrity: 2%

Tell me what to do, he almost says.

That is what tips him over into making the choice for himself.

"Dominus would understand, wouldn't he?" he appeals to Minimus, needing one last reassurance before he takes the step he can't take back.

Chromedome is crying. Ratchet looks tiredly resigned. 

But Minimus is thoughtful, looking almost as if he's examining the outcomes of past trials to determine how a piece of legislation should be interpreted. He looks like he is the only person who understands what Rewind is asking.

"There’s no doubt my brother considered there to be things that are worth sacrificing everything for."

Right. That’s obvious. That’s true. It does nothing to settle his see-sawing feeling of certainty any option he takes will be the wrong one.

Partition integrity: 1%. If he's doing this, it has to be before the choice is away from him.

It has to be now.

Isolation protocol: active

Secondary function on standby.

Initiate purge?

[Y] / N

Something snaps in his chest, a barrier breaking followed by the fleeting acidic burn of a chemical reaction. He feels an unpleasant, oozing wetness down his front. He looks down and sees grey-black, molten sludge; the liquid remnants of his databanks.

Numbly he fumbles around where he felt the cuckoo. Now, the wretched thing comes away easily in his hand. The wires it uses for legs and burrowing into its victim hang limp and are ragged at the ends, melted. A weapon left rambling on long after the death of its purpose, disarmed at last.

This is what victory looks like. 

With sudden feverishness he wishes he felt victorious. He wants to feel like he made the right choice. Isn't doing the right thing supposed to feel good? The empty space in his chest does not make him feel so.

He only feels hollowed out.

The cuckoo slips out of his hand as he clambers to his feet and he stumbles across to Chromedome, falling into his arms. His conjunx catches him but then freezes, arms hovering inches above Rewind in an almost-embrace, like Chromedome is unsure of himself after being pushed away before.

Rewind should reassure him. He goes to speak, but instead of words a half-strangled wail escapes him.

The floodgate broken, he can't stop himself from curling into Chromedome's chest as grief pours out of him, racked with shaking as he sobs.

And sobs.

.

.

.

Rewind onlines suddenly, the abrupt snap into lucidity of waking from an abnormal shutdown.

He powers up his optics and stares up at a ceiling that’s familiar as one of the many uniform rooms of the Lost Light. He’s lying on a berth, post-procedure, and thanks to the painkillers he doesn’t hurt at all.

There’s a sound of metal clinking on metal. He rolls his head towards it and sees Ratchet putting away leftover medical supplies into a trolley. The wheels at its base suggest it's meant to be portable, but with its massive size Rewind has his doubts about that. The trolley is stuffed full of resources the medics thought they might need from the medbay, since the quarantine meant they couldn't use the medbay itself for the procedure.

He resets his vocaliser; post-forced shutdown crackling has always been a thing for him. “How’d it go?”

“Textbook,” Ratchet replies. “Your brain module’s in good shape, and there were no complications with deactivating the partition. You should have full access to your memories again. How do you feel?”

 “Fine.”

Watching Ratchet wiping his hands on a mesh cloth is what really brings understanding home to him; he sees the paint on Ratchet’s hands is a touch newer than elsewhere, the shades of orange and white slightly less faded, and he knows the significance and why without having to ask. He remembers.

Finally, he remembers again. Everything. His life, his experiences. Himself.

“I feel great, actually! Thanks doc.” Rewind hops down off the operating table, flush with happiness. He feels free.

Ratchet is clearly exhausted, but he still manages a smile. One that takes on a slant of fond exasperation as he points over his shoulder with a thumb at the closed doors of the makeshift operating room. “Those two are still out there. I told them how long this would take, and everyone else’s gone off to recharge, but they wanted to wait. You wanna be the one to go give them the good news?” 

He does. He really, really does.

Ratchet gives him the go ahead to leave after a stern instructing that, while Rewind should be in the clear now, he needs to let Ratchet know immediately if he develops any sudden motor control issues or blackouts. Rewind assures him that he will as he pushes the doors open. 

Chromedome and Minimus are there, waiting for him.

They are sitting together on a bench opposite the impromptu operating room's doors. Chromedome looks more than half asleep, slumped sideways, the only thing between him and sliding down to the floor completely was how he’d listed into Minimus’ side. Despite the size disparity Minimus himself isn’t having trouble propping Chromedome up; his back is ramrod straight, his head down and optics fixed on where his hands are folded tightly together in his lap.

Minimus startles at the sound of Rewind opening the door, his head jerking up. The abrupt movement jostles Chromedome, his visor lighting up as he groggily catches a hand on the wall behind them to stop himself from sliding off Minimus’ shoulder to faceplant onto the floor. 

“What’s happening,” Chromedome mumbles.

Then he also sees Rewind and is instantly up on his feet. He gets stuck there, like half-awake mind’s gotten stumped on what he is supposed to do next.

Chromedome. His conjunx. Rewind looks at him and knows him, every moment shared all the way back to that first encounter in a relinquishment clinic morgue has been returned to him. The memories might not have actually been gone, only inaccessible, but to Rewind it still feels like he’s got back something fundamental that was stripped from him.

He’s not sure which of them moves first, just that suddenly Chromedome is scooping him up - and up - into a fierce hug. The arms around Rewind tremble and pressed chest to chest he feels the steady rumble of Chromedome’s engine skip as he laughs in a burst of raw, relieved emotion. 

Rewind hugs him back, held at the perfect height to wind his arms around Chromedome’s neck.

“It’s alright, Domey. The surgery went great. I’m okay.” He tilts his head forward, touching their foreheads together. His chest feels very full, like his happiness is too big for his body to contain. “I love you.”

Chromedome’s arms tighten around him. “Love you too.”

As he leans back again he sees Minimus over Chromedome’s shoulder. It seems the tension that Minimus’ been channelling into keeping his back straight and optics on has drained away all at once. Now he looks at risk of falling down off the chair and just not getting up ever again. Even his facial insignia is drooping. 

No wonder Minimus in particular is completely exhausted; he’d drawn the shortest straw in the quarantine. Everyone else got to take it easy while they were confined under observation to a section of the Lost Light that had been sealed off, until enough time’s past that cuckoo infection can be ruled out with complete certainty - from Rodimus' comm calls with his co-captain it's clear Megatron is both very familiar with post-cuckoo exposure process and is taking the quarantine very seriously. Apparently Megatron had overseen the team that had welded shut every vent and duct in the cluster of rooms sectioned off for them to quarantine in personally - but the risk of a cuckoo hiding in a pocket of the Magnus armour meant Minimus had been charged with dismantling it completely. While the armour had been scanned on arrival at the Lost Light just like the rest of them, Megatron had insisted on taking every precaution, and Minimus had happily agreed. It’s been a physically demanding and time consuming task.

Even so, Minimus probably would have finished the dismantling already if he could do it alone. But for safety’s sake while he works he needs another person to attentively watch the feed from a security camera pointed at the armour in the large, secure storage container the armour is being kept in. Minimus has complained more than once about how the hardest part is persuading another person to spend hours unwaveringly concentrating on a screen. When just a few seconds of zoning out could lead to a crucial moment being missed if there is a functional cuckoo hidden in the armour, the role requires a degree of sustained concentration that not everyone quarantining with them has got. 

The sour taste of guilt rises in the back of Rewind’s mouth, because he knows he’d not offered to help Minimus at all. He hadn’t been able to. Since destroying his databanks, he’s not been in a state of mind to help anyone - doing nothing but oscillating between crying himself sick and disappearing into the unconsciousness of oversleeping. He'd even missed Chromedome's surgery to remove the inert cuckoo from his body. Slept straight through it until Chromedome himself had woken him up the next day to coax him into drinking some energon.

It’s almost strange, how the deep well of grief which had been engulfing him only days ago now feels contained, remote. A photograph of an unpleasant event he can put up on a shelf and walk away from. Its chokehold over him has diminished with his memories and experiences fully returned to him. 

He tugs on Chromedome’s shoulder to signal he wants to be put down. Chromedome is much more reluctant to let him go than usual, but he relents and with unnecessary care lowers him back to the floor when he tugs a second time. Rewind keeps hold of his hand, wanting to maintain some contact. 

"I kept you guys up for ages, huh?" Rewind says, as he offers Minimus his free hand to help him stand. 

He takes the offered support and Rewind braces to provide leverage as Minimus tiredly hauls himself to his feet.

Minimus’ brow furrows. He disentangles his hand from Rewind’s and starts to fiddle with one of the circles on his hips, smoothing over the edge as if ensuring it is flush with his frame, his thumb tracing the circumference many more times than necessary.

Rewind tilts his head. Minimus is holding himself at a distance that straddles the line between polite and awkward, as if he feels like this is Chromedome and Rewind’s reunion and he is intruding on it - and Rewind feels a sharp urge to dispel that. Minimus also waited for him all this time, and Rewind is touched that he did. He belongs here too.

"I hope this didn’t cut into time you set aside for dismantling. I can help out with that tomorrow if you want? I’m happy to cover the observation stuff for however long you wanna go for as a thank you,” Rewind says.

Minimus hedges, “I thought you would want to get straight to work on rebuilding your archive, since you’re capable again.”

“Oh. No, actually, I still can’t yet. Turns out the inventory was off. First Aid did a full survey of the storerooms and there aren’t any replacement databanks on the ship. Looks like I’ll have to keep being defunct until we dock somewhere we can buy more. Ratchet let me know while we were prepping for surgery.”

“What? But you’re so much better, I thought…” Chromedome stoops like he wants to see Rewind’s face better. “Are you really alright?”

"Fine, I'm fine," he says, quick to reassure Domey. Then, he continues to Minimus, “I mean, I could start on cataloguing what was backed up on external hard drives as finished films and raw footage to nail down exactly what’s actually gone for good, but I can do that whenever. It’ll be easier after we’ve finished the quarantine anyway. Same with transcribing what I remember of the stuff that’s been lost. No reason not to lend you a hand first.” 

"Well, if you're sure, then. I do need the help," Minimus says, though he still looks conflicted.

Chromedome lets go of his hand so he can steady himself on Rewind's shoulder. Rewind looks up and sees him swaying a little, visor flickering like he's fighting a battle against falling asleep on his feet and losing.

He nudges Chromedome into walking, guiding him towards the rec room that's been repurposed into a temporary dorm for the quarantiners, Minimus following alongside.

The conversation dips into a lull. Chromedome's quiet as he's clearly too tired to be interested in anything besides collapsing onto a recharge slab. But when Rewind looks over to Minimus, he seems to be preoccupied with something.

They're almost at the makeshift dorm when Minimus halts abruptly, a few steps shy of him having left it too late to ask.

"You seem much more-" Minimus starts to blurt out, like he can't restrain the words any longer before forcibly cutting himself off near immediately.

"More what?" Rewind asks. He places his palm against the inside of Chromedome's forearm, above where he's holding onto his shoulder for support, to get his attention so Chromedome doesn't just keep on walking away from them in fatigued obliviousness.

Minimus waves his hands like he's trying to grab the half-formed sentence out of the air and pull it back. Like he had already decided he wasn't going to raise the topic before it came out anyway. And he still seems… frazzled. To be carrying a stressed tension, unabated even after Rewind had emerged from surgery healthy and whole.

Minimus eventually shrugs, “Nevermind. It's not anything that needs getting into right now.”

If Minimus were in the Magnus armour, leaving Rewind bereft of a familiarity with him that stretches back millions of years to when they'd both lived in the Ambus residence, he would probably put this down to awkwardness and let it lie. But Rewind sees the stiffness in how Minimus is holding himself, the wooden way he moves, and knows how to see the tamped down guilt that underpins them.

It hooks on a familiarity - the last time he saw Minimus look like this, he'd had his hands clasped in front of him on his desk, shuffling his way through an explanation that yes, he had secretly been Rewind's brother in law all this time beneath the Magnus armour and no, he hadn't seen fit to mention it.

Although that hadn't actually been the last time he'd seen Minimus like this, had it. That had been the other Lost Light. The other Minimus. Who is dead now, persisting only in Rewind’s memory. 

"More what?" Rewind pushes, crossing his arms.

Chromedome looks slowly between the two of them, coming to sense that Rewind has picked up on something he hasn't. 

Minimus sighs, looking down at the floor as he rubs his neck. "I was going to say you seem much happier. Less distressed, less… devastated. Compared to before the surgery. I wanted to ask what that meant for your archive. If it means you regret purging it less, now. Then I thought that would be a very selfish question. But," Minimus meets Rewind's gaze, squaring his shoulders and clasping his hands behind his back, "to tell the truth, I cut myself off because I am afraid of your answer. The purge was my suggestion. I am afraid if I ask whether you're suffering less now, you'll say no. That you'll always wish you made a different choice.”

Chromedome shifts. Gently, he tugs on Rewind's shoulder. "We don't need to get into this now. Come on, let's just go to bed."

Rewind doesn't let himself be pulled away.

"It was my life's work. It's... a big loss. For me, not just objectively. I do wish there'd been a way to preserve it. But since it really was the archive or me, I don't regret my choice. I think I would do the same again if I had to," Rewind says, honestly. 

Minimus briefly offlines his optics and takes a deep in-vent, shoulders relaxing a little as he stops clasping his hands behind his back with a white-knuckled grip.

Chromedome seems like he wants to say something as well. But for whatever reason he doesn't, instead opting to wordlessly prompt Rewind's back into getting to the dorm again.

It barely takes a minute; they'd practically been there already. Normally an infrequently used sports court, the temporary dorm room is dark and quiet. All of their group of intrepid adventurers unfortunate enough to have been caught up in the ordeal are plugged into their slabs and offline, bar Whirl, who is sitting cross legged on a slab and typing on a pad in his lap. At the intrusion of light from the hallway, let in by their entrance, Whirl looks up. Seeing Rewind his optic wanes into a happy crescent, raising a claw to his brow and then straight out into the air in front of him in what Rewind can only assume is some kind of 'congrats on the successful complex surgery' salute, before bending back down to his pad. Messaging Tailgate, probably. Those two have been in near constant electronically mediated contact since the return to the Lost Light, which seems to be the only thing keeping Tailgate from breaking in to check on Whirl in person. Although it could be Cyclonus. Whirl has gleefully declared he's been sending obscene memes to him so it feels like Whirl's beside him in spirit even while he's locked up in here. If Whirl's boasting is to be believed then Cyclonus’ even responds with a reaction emoji to the particularly obnoxious ones.

"Don't stay up, we've got a long day of armour dismantling on tomorrow," Rewind says by way of goodnight to Minimus.

Minimus nods, and peels off to head over to one of the berths left empty. 

The remaining two available berths are a pair pushed together, flush edge to edge. A little bloom of gratitude unfurls that these have clearly been left for them specifically. It's nice to be thought of.

He’d figured Chromedome was about ready to pass out the moment he lay down. But as he lies down himself and gets ready to plug into the slab, he turns his head and sees that while Chromedome is lying on his side, he’s not yet connected to his berth. His visor glows a soft yellow as he gazes at Rewind.

On impulse Rewind half sits up, supporting himself on an elbow as he leans over and touches his forehead to his husband’s, powering down his optics for a moment and floating in the warm feeling of being together. The arm Chromedome's not pillowed his head on comes to rest on the side of Rewind's face, palm against his cheek, fingers curling across the curve of his jaw. His thumb slowly strokes under the line where the sturdy metal of Rewind’s mask gives way to the delicate glass and filaments of his visor, sweet and soothing.

"Hey," Chromedome whispers.

"Hmm?"

"You really don't regret it?"

Rewind turns his optics back on and leans back a little so he can search Chromedome’s face, and finds it already searching his own.

Chromedome had seen the devastating impact that deleting the archive had on Rewind from up close. He'd been inconsolable. Small wonder he’s not entirely certain about this sudden change.

How do you put something you just know on a fundamental level in a way another person can really understand?

Rewind does ache for the loss of his archive still. All those lost records, moments, pieces of so many different people no longer preserved in a medium that won't die or decay with information creep. Getting his memories back can’t change that.

But the wellspring of the flood of bleakness that had consumed him and left him sobbing and shattered from the purge until he'd woken up from surgery - until he finally escaped from the perspective of the past he'd been stuck in - hadn’t been the loss of his archive.  

So much of his life, his safety and his function were inseparably entwined. Even when his reassignment to noncombatant had been handed down from command, declaring him to be considered irreplaceable in a forever war where it felt like everything had been weighed and found worth the sacrifice to bring victory a hairsbreadth closer, that was because of what he’s for. A positive spin on it this time, but still powered by the same engine that had steamrolled Rewind most of his life. Value and function, one and the same yet again. And before that… 

Well. Before he was an Autobot, he was a disposable. Only an object to be used, in the eyes of other people or under the law. You are what you do. And if you didn't do your job they'd say you didn't have a place in this world, and then you wouldn't be anything at all. Being stripped of his recent memories had dragged him back into the perspective of that time - one from where compromising his capacity to store data could only be seen as the death of safety itself.

That is what had been behind his anguish. The root of the terror so overwhelming he couldn’t think through it. 

But now he’s got all of his memories back. He's the himself of the here and now again. He knows from lived experience that his life doesn’t depend on the work he does anymore. And he knows what matters to the people who care about him.

When Chromedome and Minimus were sitting in the corridor, waiting for him to get out of surgery, it was Rewind they were thinking about, not a purpose he could fulfil for them. No one among the landing party or their rescuers had advocated for his databanks over his life when they learned the cuckoo attached to him had survived the logic bomb. He isn’t afraid of how other people are thinking about him, and what that might lead them to do, like he used to be.

"I'm a different person now," he starts, feeling his way through how he wants to answer the question Chromedome's put to him.

Chromedome's gaze is no longer searching, softening instead. He says, tone a complex mix but with a strong thread of fondness, "Stubborn and frustrating."

"But wonderful?"

"Wonderful." Chromedome moves his hand down from Rewind's cheek to take his hand, entwining their fingers.

"Destroying my databanks and archive, it was the wrong choice for the person I used to be." He says, squeezing Chromedome's hand in his own. "But it was the right one for who I am now. So, no. I really don't regret it."