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Echo kicked his pedes back and forth beneath the counter, clutching his sippy cube of energon in his servos with the proud dexterity of someone who had only recently been entrusted to do so by himself.
"Wazzpinator izz zzo happy for zzcraplet girl!" Waspinator tittered, letting Reverb gnaw on his arm to placate him, "How doezz it feel to be finizzhing zzchool?"
"Kind of scary, honestly!" little Whirl laughed, leaning on the bar top, "I've been in school so long, getting to move out and actually be a real rescue team is like- I mean, it's awesome, but gosh, it's really big, you know!"
Waspinator nodded sagely. The mood in the bar was light, happy. A banner stretched across the far wall congratulating her on her recent graduation, hanging over a crowd of well wishing party goers. Her father and his conjunxes, her current classmates, her old classmates, friends from Cybertron, old Lost Lighters more like distant aunts and uncles she only got to see on holidays than anything else.
She felt spoiled, coming here from Earth, with its mild weather and gentle gravity. It was rust raining outside, and everyone seemed quite happy to socialize a little longer in Maccadam's than brave the acid drizzle beyond its doors. Whirl didn't really blame them; it wasn't as much of a problem for her as it was for them, but she hated the feeling of disconnecting burnt out nanites, and that was probably pretty similar.
"I wanna be a Rescue Bot, too!" Echo announced suddenly, slamming his energon cube against the countertop between his legs.
"Oh, yeah?" Whirl asked, faceplate split open in a smile, "What kind of Rescue Bot?"
"I wanna be like you," he nodded, firmly, expression the deep seriousness only a toddler with a sudden goal can muster, "whatever you do!"
"I'm a police bot," she reminded him, "you gotta learn a lot of rules, and you gotta be really fair and take care of people and make sure everyone is doing the right thing!"
Waspinator immediately giggled, and she frowned at him pointedly. He clapped his clawed servos over his split mouth sheepishly.
"Wazzpinator zzorry," he snickered, "zzcraplet girl continue pleazze."
"No, what did I say that was wrong?" she asked, stubbornly.
Waspinator gave her an apologetic shrug. "In Wazzpinator experienzze, polizzebotzz are… hm. Well-"
"A buncha sleazebags!" Brainstorm hollered as he slid right into the conversation, plopping down beside her. "A right lot of arseholes, no matter what planet you're on."
"Hell yeah," said Sandstorm, who was pretending to sleep at the end of the bar despite there not having been any alcohol at this party.
"I'm a police bot," she reminded him, getting offended, "things aren't like they were before."
"Oh, Whirls," Brainstorm sighed emphatically, "You'll see soon enough, I'm sure. You're still young."
"I'm not that young," she started to argue, when the other Whirl slid in and dropped a clawed arm around Brainstorm's shoulders.
"C'mon, Stormy, lay off, willya?" the old soldier rumbled, voice light on the surface, but with an edge beneath it.
"I'm just sayin', is all," Brainstorm shrugged, though he seemed to relent.
Little Whirl, however, was not satisfied with that. "No, I wanna know what you're saying. What are you trying to say?"
"It's just that-" Brainstorm started, before Whirl visibly squeezed his shoulders and narrowed his optic warningly.
"Storm," he said, in a voice that sounded like "we talked about this."
Little Whirl frowned more deeply. "Come on, you can't think that, Dad- like, you used to be a police bot, too, didn't you?"
The older Whirl's shoulders tensed and Brainstorm immediately took a swig of a drink and hid behind the glass, deeply uncomfortable.
"Well-" he began, awkwardly, "That was- I mean, yeah, I was, but- that was. Different."
"Different how?" she prodded, "I'm a real police bot, like, just because things are safer now I'm not just a traffic cop or something, I'm really-"
"That's not what I meant," Whirl cut her off, " I mean- Whirlygirl, we were- I was- Brainstorm is trying to say that we- that there's always room for corruption, is what he means."
"Corruption?" she repeated, furrowing her browplates together, not understanding. She knew the bullet points of history, the assault of Megatron as a prisoner had kick-started the war, and had come up in her classwork, though it generally focused on wartime history. "Things are different now, though."
"I don't-" he paused, uncomfortable, looking away, for an exit, maybe, and then back, "Some things, yeah."
"You changed," she pushed again, ignoring the fact Brainstorm was still holding a mug in front of his face and sitting between them.
"I-" the older Whirl froze, shifting up straight, antennae swinging upward.
"What?" little Whirl asked, at his uncharacteristic silence. She noticed, suddenly, he wasn't the only one who had gone still- most of the old guard had.
"Get down," he said, quietly, voxbox hissing static at the unusually low volume.
"Huh?" she asked.
"Cover the twins!" he ordered, and swung an arm toward her, shoving Whirl Jr into Echo and over the top of the bar and into Waspinator, just as the front of the bar tore open in a hail of laser fire.
The world, it seemed, had split open around her, suddenly loud like she had not known in many years, but she knew better than to doubt her father's instructions. She grabbed Reverb from Waspinator's arm as he snatched a blaster from beneath the counter and took a defensive stance above them. Whirl wrapped herself around the shrieking sparklings like a blanket, tense and terrified beneath the bartender standing over them like he was guarding the Well of Allsparks from destruction.
The whole thing lasted less than thirty seconds, but it felt like longer. As silence finally covered the room, she peeked her optics over the counter again. The bar was a hazy mess of smoke and dust and soldiers who had been partygoers a moment ago. She recognized them, in shape, but in their optics, they were strangers to her.
"Report?" called Rodimus, over the ringing in her audials, who was standing against the back wall, holding two of her classmates to his chest with his back toward the door as if he might shield them with his body. Drift had a sword out beside him and looked disappointed he hadn't had the opportunity to use it.
"Clear," answered Cyclonus from the front door, looking outside.
"How many hurt?" said Drift next, moving along some unwritten checklist little Whirl had been excluded from.
"Juzzt a little bit," Wazzpinator replied, moving to offer her a hand to stand up- with his left, she noted, because his right was hanging limply at his side, a bullet hole clean through the shoulder.
"No casualties?" Tailgate called, already sounding relieved.
"It would appear we were lucky," said Cyclonus, inspecting the broken glass frame of the buildings front with distaste, "Your investment in reinforced glass paid off, Waspinator."
"Not for the firzzt time!" Waspinator singsonged, tossing his blaster back into its drawer, "Wazzpinator have very good inzzuranzze plan. No worriezz."
"Where's my Dad?" little Whirl burst, her voice strained and raspy, not seeing the massive mech in the light streamed room.
"He followed the shooters," Cyclonus informed her, with an edge of disapproval to his tone, "He will be fine." Cyclonus turned away from the door and made his way quickly over to her. "Thank you for holding the twins. You don't have to worry about them anymore."
"What?" she said, looking down as she realized she was still clutching them against her chestplate. She let Cyclonus take the crying sparklings from her servos and stepped back, feeling wobbly. She felt servos steady her against her back and glanced back into the bright, concerned faceplate of Tailgate.
"Why don't you sit down?" he suggested gently, taking her hand.
"But- Dad-" she argued, even as she followed him to a chair that was still standing.
"Will be fine," Tailgate finished for her, firmly.
"Is this about the Eukarian demonstrations?" she heard someone ask somewhere, and Waspinator buzzed furiously in the distance.
"That'zz the third windowplate thizz week!" he snapped, throwing one arm in the air, "Wazzpinator not even from Eukarizz!" She stood up with a jolt.
"First aid!" she cried, "I gotta do first aid!"
"On who?" asked Waspinator, looking over at her sudden outburst.
"You!" she said, pointing at his arm, streaming energon.
"Me?" he blinked, looking at his injury, before scoffing, "No, no, izz no big deal. Wazzpinator can fix. Little Whirl girl zzit down and rezzt."
"You got shot !" she said, feeling especially helpless.
"Wazzpinator get zzhot all the time," he waved away dismissively, "no problem."
She sat down, feeling a churning in her internals. She wasn't sure how much time passed before she heard pedesteps on the broken glass out front and the doorframe opened, Whirl Sr stepping in silently. He was holding his left arm in his right, and the winglet on that side had been bent at a horrific ninety degree angle. He was nearly as purple as Cyclonus with energon, pock marked by divets from the acid rain.
"Eh?" prompted Rodimus. Whirl shrugged and tossed his torn off arm onto the nearest table, then spat static through his vocalizer. Rodimus looked disappointed.
Whirl looked away from his arm and at his daughter, uncharacteristically wordless, before he turned toward Cyclonus. "Take the kids home."
Cyclonus nodded, and Whirl Jr jumped when she felt a tiny hand on her arm and looked down.
"Let's go home," said Tailgate to her.
"I'm not a kid," she argued, pointlessly. She looked back up at Whirl Sr, but he wasn't looking at her anymore. He was walking toward Rodimus, turned away from her.
She let them take her home.
Little Whirl did not need to recharge like true Cybertronians. Well, technically untrue- she didn't need recharge, but her individual nanites did, and were perfectly capable of rotating their shutdown sequences so that she was never required to be more than 10% offline at a time. She liked doing full recharges well enough, needless as it was, but anxiety limited her options. Her system was extremely energy efficient, far more so than her peers, but it left her with a lot of time at night with nothing to do and no one to talk to, and she found herself lying on the couch in silence, her father still not home. Cyclonus had been on the phone since they got home in their bedroom, door shut, voice muffled.
She listened to the distant voice of Tailgate talking down the twins through the walls and wondered what she had left the old soldiers to. She should have been able to handle that. That's one of the things she had trained for. It shouldn't have shaken her. There was protocol to follow. She didn't even know what tipped the old mechs off to the danger before it happened and why she hadn't noticed.
Whirl looked up from the floor to the holovid playing on the tv, volume low, voices muffled through her hazy perception. Some old Earth sitcom, vapid and uninteresting, fluff to pull her thoughts away from the afternoon. It wasn't working well.
"Still awake?" a soft voice asked from the doorway. She didn't look up, but she hummed and affirmative. Tailgate crossed the room and she sat up just long enough for him to sit down, and she laid her helm back down in his lap, staring blankly at the holovid screen.
"You seem upset," he commented, "More than I expected. You've seen combat before."
"That wasn't combat," she replied, "That was a drive by. There were kids inside."
"Yeah," he said. Tailgate stared at the screen with her for a moment, in mutual silence, before resuming. "He's going to be alright. Your dad is very good at things like this. He's been getting very good at recovering, too, when things like this happen. You don't have to worry."
"It's not that," she murmured, "I know he'll be fine. Better mechs than whoever drove by today have been trying to kill Dad for the last four million years and haven't been able to. I'm not worried about what anybody other than him is gonna do to him."
"Fair enough," Tailgate acquiesced, "What's on your mind, then?"
"He doesn't think I should be a police officer, does he?" she asked.
"...Well," started Tailgate.
"Why did he help me get into the Academy if he didn't actually think it was something I should do?" Whirl pressed, feeling frustrated, "If he really hates cops so much why would he let me be one?"
"Because it was important to you," Tailgate said, without pausing, "and that's more important to him than how he feels about it."
"Things aren't like they used to be," she argued, "It's different now from when he was one!"
"In a lot of ways, but not all of them. He is… right, that not everyone is as good a person as you are, Whirl. You're going to have to face that, at some point."
She paused, her internals swirling, "Well, yeah, but- I mean, but I'm not like. I'm not."
"You aren't," he sighed, "You're still young. You have to learn your way through the world on your own. As long as you keep being a good person and caring more than the people around you, you'll be okay."
She frowned, pulling her shoulders inward, "If he thinks- like, if he thinks all cops are bad and that I'm gonna do some kind of bad cop stuff eventually, then like- why doesn't he- I mean- if he really thinks that then- then he should say that, like-"
"Those people are strangers," Tailgate murmured, almost to himself, "but she's my little girl."
Whirl was silent for a moment. "That's horrible," she said, softly, "Did he really say that?"
"You'll understand, someday," he sighed, "or, maybe you won't. I hope not, honestly. There's a lot of really terrible things in the world that can happen to a person, and I hope they never happen to you."
"Don't you think things can change?" she asked, "that they can be better than they were?"
"I don't know," Tailgate admitted, "But we'll find out together."
They both looked up as the door opened. Whirl bundled up his acid tarp and tossed it in the bin as he shut the door, before he noticed the two cybes on the couch watching him. His arm was back on, though it had been stripped down to the functioning skeleton.
"Hey," Whirl Sr said, simply.
"Hey," said Tailgate. Whirl Jr was silent.
"...Drift fixed my arm," Whirl said, flexing his skeletonized arm upward, the internal pistons shifting as he did, "I gotta go back tomorrow to get my armour refitted."
"You're going to need a repaint to fix all the acid marks," Tailgate pointed out, "I can't believe you still have a windshield."
Whirl looked down at his chest, and the uncracked orange glass, "I wish. This is new. I keep em on backorder."
"Do you really?" Tailgate asked, cracking a smile, "You should switch to plexiglass if it's that big a problem."
Whirl's helmet plating flattened like a wrinkling cat nose, "Plexiglass is so light, it throws off my whole weight balance, I hate that stuff, plus, it always-"
"Did you kill them?" Whirl Jr blurted out, sitting up quickly. Her father stared at her for a moment, before letting his arm fall back to his side.
"No," he said.
"Did someone else kill them?" she pressed.
"No," he answered again.
"What did you do to them?" she pressed again, voice rising in pitch.
"...Called the cops," he said, finally, with a shrug.
"Really?" little Whirl asked, surprised.
"Figured I oughta," he mumbled, "Ain't my call to make no more, anyway." He scratched the back of his helm uncomfortably, before he shook it, as if shaking away a thought, "How are the twins?"
"Just put them down," Tailgate responded, "They're asleep."
"D'you think it would be okay if I went and sat in their room?" Whirl Sr asked, "Just to watch them?"
"I think that would be fine," Tailgate said, "They seemed pretty tired once they stopped crying."
"Stay the night, Whirlygirl, will ya?" Whirl asked, tilting his helm back to her, "I don't want you heading home like this."
"Yeah," she agreed, pulling her knees up beside her on the couch.
"I know you don't need to, but Stormy said an 80% reboot might help you defrag and repattern before you go, and that you might feel better. And if you want an oil bath, you go ahead and take one, alright?"
"Okay," she said, "I can do that."
"That's my girl," Whirl sighed, before he headed down the hall towards the twin's room.
"Am I gonna regret my job?" she asked, when he was gone.
"Maybe," he answered, honestly. "But you have to do what you think is right, even if what you think is right changes."
"...Alright," she said, after a moment, "Stay while I reboot?"
"Of course."