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You are doing your best to ignore the blaring of the alarm overhead, room bathed in red as you frantically type coordinates into the spacebridge.
"Hurry up!" Breakdown yells, holding the door shut. There's a boom from the other side as someone attempts to ram it down, but there's not a Con out there stronger than Breakdown. But one mech can only hold off so many for so long.
"I'm going as fast as I can!" you scoff, "I'd like to see anyone other than Soundwave go any faster!" You slam your fist on the console, activating the bridge. It roars to life against the wall, making the room a bizarre mix of red-green that makes it even harder to see than it already was. "Let's go!"
"Alright, KO!" he cheers, and kicks the door, buckling the metal beneath his pede and knocking back whoever was on the other side before he transforms and tears off through the bridge. You wait until he's vanished through it before you follow, escaping this Primus forsaken dark ship and every bastard on it, escaping the 'Cons and this stupid fragging war and the wretched planet you've been stuck on- only when you transform and your tires hit the floor, a potshot from the doorway spins you in the wrong direction, and the next hits you square in the engine with a metal shriek of protest. You turn it over in a blind panic, trying to get back to your root mode, when another shot hits you in the spark chamber mid transformation, and just like that-
And just like that, you wake up.
You come out of recharge with your vents flared, platelets all held taught, internals working hard as if you had just raced a marathon. You shake your head, dismissing your alarm protocols and setting to work settling your internals again. You haven't recharged peacefully in weeks. You really need to get some rest.
You notice a gouge in your arm where you had clawed into the metal during recharge, right through the paint and scowl. Of course you did. You don't even have your own rotary buffer in your room anymore, you'll need to walk all the way down to your desk in the medical bay to fix it. There's no way you can get anymore recharge until it's fixed, though, so you begrudgingly rise.
Dreams are not common among Cybertronians. So uncommon, in fact, you had never had one before until two weeks ago, when you had shot out of recharge in a panic, gasping and fumbling for a weapon, confused and terrified, alone in the dark. In the first one, you had followed Breakdown through the spacebridge on his final mission, and you'd fought Airachnid yourself, for what little good it had done. Since then, they have been relentless , a nightly affair following a similar premise. Breakdown is still alive. You try to save him, try to escape the decepticons, try to not join in the first place, and every time, you fuck something up and get killed. That's not the way things went, not even close.
You need to run a full defrag to try to clear whatever extraneous data is glitching your recharge. It's getting out of hand, and the Autobots are beginning to notice how exhausted you are, asking questions you won't answer.
You expect the medical bay to be empty this late in the evening, but you would only be so lucky. The little blue spy femme is here, sharpening one of her arms. Your scowl only deepens. Surely she has something for that in her personal quarters, she shouldn't need to come here for such a simple thing.
Then again, you're here for a rotary buffer.
"Good evening," you greet her, flatly, crossing the room to your desk.
"You're up late," she comments, sounding disinterested.
"I've had difficulty adjusting to the planetary time change," you dismiss.
"Same," she lies, poorly, optics on her armblade and the rotating sharpener. You sit on the desk and twist your right arm flat so you can get to the damaged area, pulling a cloth from your subspace to wet in the sink at your side. You click the buffer on.
You don't even know where these dreams have been coming from. You've run a full systems analysis every time and pulled up no anomalies in your core processing. It's not a virus or any other kind of malware you can diagnose. Your best guess that it's the result of a broken codestring somewhere, some command without an end tag, attempting to execute some kind of process that can't be done, working through itself again and again. You don't want to have to dig through your software line by line for a ghost, but you can't think of any other way to get these nightmares out of your processor.
"Knock Out," Arcee says, interrupting your thoughts, and you look up at her, confused.
"What?" you snap, irritated.
"Your arm," she says, pointing. You blink your optics and look down, swearing and yanking the rotary away. You've laid into it in your distraction and eaten out an entire oval of paint.
"To the pit with it," you snarl, throwing the rotary down and pushing yourself off the desk to dig around beneath it for paint to fix what you've done. Foolish. Careless. You aren't used to doing this yourself.
"Are you alright?" she asks, behind you, with the audacity to sound concerned.
"Yes," you snap, shoving aside a box of spare lugnuts.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Because it seems like you're upset about s-"
"If you would please ," you spit, turning around to face her, still crouching in front of the desk cabinet, " spare me the insult of pretending you care. I can perform my own maintenance perfectly fine ."
She seems genuinely taken aback, which suits you just fine, and you return to the cabinet, grabbing the gallon of primer from behind the back and slamming it on top of the desk.
"Wow," she says after a moment, "you really are in a more foul mood than normal, huh?"
You answer her with silence, opening the container of primer and grabbing a brush from your subspace.
The position is awkward, though, at the end by your elbow, and you can feel her wretched optics boring holes into you.
"Fine," she says after a moment, moving toward you, "let me get it."
"As if I require your assistance for something as simple as-"
"Oh, shut up," she mumbles, ignoring you and holding her servo out for the brush. You regard her with suspicion for a moment before handing it to her, and tilting your elbow up. She patches it quickly and hands the brush back. You have to wait for it to try now.
Arcee returns to the whetstone and shuts it down, replacing the cover and transforming her blades away quietly in the dimly lit room.
"They go away eventually," she says, bizarrely, "for the most part."
"What?" you balk, confused.
"The nightmares," she says, keying the door open, "don't let them get to you." She leaves you alone in the medical bay.