Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

11:57:44 PM
[Initiating Boot Sequence]

11:57:47 PM
[Power Self-Test Successful]

11:57:49 PM
[Accessing Sensory Array]

A humming, buzzing sound worms it’s way into your consciousness.

11:57:55 PM
[Audio Receptor Test Successful]

Like a light switch was flipped, colors bloom before your eyes. You can’t tell what they are.

11:58:01 PM
[Visual Receptor Test Successful]

Cool metal. A faint stinging thrums throughout your body.

11:58:16 PM
[Tactile Receptor Test Successful]

You’re laying down horizontally. You’re aware now, of your limbs. Something seems off about them, but your mind isn’t active enough to truly ponder the thought.

11:58:32 PM
[Proprioreception Test Successful]

11:58:40 PM
[Base Sensory Array Test Successful]

11:59:05 PM
[Activating Primary Processor]

…

Mechanical shrieking.
A blur of motion hardly perceptible.
Sound is a screeching, staggering thing.
Colors unable to be processed swirl around in neural relays and stab straight into your visual cortex.
Pain. Numbness.
Voices you almost recognize, but you can’t determine the source or tone.

Agony. A thrashing, seizing movement. It is jarring and shocking and horrible. This only makes you shake more.

You’re held down, more colors flash in your vision, but you don’t know what any of them are. Shapes, tones, shadow, your mind cannot comprehend any of it. Something approaches your line of sight and more voices echo around you, but it cannot be interpreted.

Another consciousness bursts in your mind, a painful, unnatural, scraping intrusion. You panic even further at the burning touch, and it recoils. You pick up on it’s panic in addition to your own, starting a feedback loop of discomfort and agony.

Resolve echoes from the intruder, and a cooling balm spreads through your mind at it’s origin. Systems shut down, vision fading as your thoughts slow.

Audio input is the last thing to fade.
Only as you’re close to oblivion do you realize you were the one making that horrible sound.
Your own screaming follows you into the abyss.

12:00:00 AM
[Override: Emergency System Shutdown. Medic ID: r4647-12214-1]

-----

The room was drowned in shadow. Ratchet sat down heavily in the chair, his optics the only illumination in his dim office. He leaned his elbows on the desk and buried his head in his hands- hands that rarely, if ever, wavered. He was built sturdy. In body and in mind. And yet… he couldn’t shake the feeling something was wrong. More than just a botched onlining.

Issues coming online weren’t uncommon from such extensive procedures. This, though, was unprecedented. There was no core coding, no preset pathways to follow that would ease the process of awakening. The best he could do was try again… buffer against the onslaught of data until the processor can manually test how to interact with the world. It was almost horrifying, that he hadn’t considered this possibility.

All cybertronians were onlined with this knowledge. It was innate.

Theoretically he could write the coding himself, implant it into the patient and let them assimilate the information. But that wasn’t exactly an option here, and there was no telling what sort of strange alien tangles would be within the pained mind. It would likely be a minefield if he delved too deep. He had no idea what their mental imprint was based on or how it would be patterned, and going in cold was a good way to lobotomize someone. The thought made him grimace. Lobotomization was probably not far off from what they’d already done.

Cybertronian minds were normally organized, thoughts delineated in categories and files. Even the messiest of people, with scattered minds and disconnected thoughts, had a type of structure to it all. Whether you understood it or not, it was there. It took a lot of time and training to turn your own processor into an incomprehensible ball of nonsense- and even then there was some base structure holding it together no matter how good an operative you were. Ratchet grinned wryly as he took a moment to ponder what sort of musical disaster Jazz’s brain was built around.

In a normal situation, the spark would try to bridge the gap, even if there were such deep coding errors. It was automatic, and though he shudders to make an organic comparison, instinctual.

A ping bounced from the door to Ratchet’s HUD to cheerfully alert him of the Prime’s presence. The medic shook himself out of his ruminations and sent a command to switch the lights on a second before sending a return ping. The door slid open with silence, despite the fact it had been squeaking for several days. Ratchet let himself feel a sense of grim amusement. Perhaps the door had sensed the mood.

Standing in the doorway, Optimus Prime loomed. He made no move to enter the room for an uncomfortable amount of time, staring at Ratchet with an unidentifiable expression until, finally, the door chimed at him in displeasure. He took a step forwards as it slid shut behind him.

“Ratchet… did we do the right thing?”

“You know as well as I do that we’re not the people who can answer that.”

Ratchet gestured vaguely, and Optimus made his way closer to the desk, his helm fins at an angle that displayed his nervousness clearly.

“But we were so rushed, so panicked, I-…” He stopped at that, looking at the far wall in shame. “I’m not too proud to admit my judgement was skewed.”

“Everyone’s was. Mine was, Wheeljack, Sunstreaker- don’t carry that guilt on your shoulders like everything else.” The medic took a second to consider, and then tacked on- “Don’t be a fucking dumbass.”

The prime looked as if he was about to be offended, before stopping himself. “Sunstreaker? I was… unaware he had feelings on the matter.”

Ratchet shrugged. “Who knows with that one. Might just be worked up from his brother. Either way, Optimus, you aren’t the one to blame for this. Earlier was a… a minor stumble. I know what I’m doing.”

“I apologize. I trust your medical expertise, and I have for millions of years. It’s just...”

“We’re all just a bit shaken up, given the circumstances. I get it. Don’t worry about it.” The medic waves at Optimus dismissively, then straightens and points to the door. “And tell all those worriers to go back to work. If anyone is still outside the medbay by the time I’m finished in here, there will be hell to pay.”

“Heh, I assure you my friend, I will. Before I go, though…”

The large mech idles awkwardly instead of moving towards the door, as if debating with himself whether or not to speak up. Ratchet, in an unusual show of patience belying the strangeness of the situation, waited quietly for him to speak.

“Are you alright? You’re being… unusually gentle. You’d be ranting at me by now, normally.”

Ratchet was unable to muster even the faux anger to playfully respond.

“Nothing’s normal right now, Optimus.”

The large mech nodded solemnly, walking to the door with surprising somberness given his size. He took a small moment to pause before pinging the door open again. The medic could see him quietly stop and stare at the door to one of the private medbay rooms in the back before the office was once again closed off. The sentimental fool always showed his spark so openly. Ratchet shook his head and turned to the terminal at his desk.

He sat there for several seconds without moving, dreading the usually monotonous clerical work. If he hadn’t literally held his friends lives in his hands on multiple occasions, he’d say this was the worst part of the job. Unlike Jazz, he did not possess an allergy to completing his paperwork, but it was detestable work anyways. In the moment, surrounded by energon and screaming, he could work. He could fix things. It was meditative, in a way, despite how often he yelled and complained. But now, as it’s all over, all he had to do was sit and think. When the chaos and the rush faded and all he had was a silent medbay and injured comrades. There was something chilling about quietly logging every tragedy that had passed through his medbay doors.

And that quiet chill that clung to his plating is why- despite his optimistic words, he could admit it to himself.

They’d done something horrible.

Chapter Text

3:20:23 PM
[Initiating Boot Sequence]

3:20:27 PM
[Power Self-Test Successful]

3:20:35 PM
[Accessing Sensory Array]

It is quiet now. It was not quiet before, in the void of shutdown. Like a shadow cannot be cast without light, silence can not fall without sound. You are barely aware, barely conscious of any sense at all, but you know it is quiet.

3:20:53 PM
[Audio Receptor Test Successful]

3:20:59 PM
[Activating Primary Processor]

3:21:05 PM
[Override: Primary Processor Activation Delayed. Medic ID: r4647-12214-1]

3:21:12 PM
[Primary Processor Activation Stalled]
[Booting In Safe Mode]
[Warning: Access To Processor Functions Will Be Limited.]

A soft hum begins playing in the background.

You’ve never heard music quite like it before. You could not have, because you’ve never heard music.

“Hey kid.”
{Hey kid.}

The words echo strangely, being both heard externally and sent directly to your processor at the same time. The voice in both is the same, and the digital imprint in your mind comes with a medical identification. That leaves you strangely comforted in your limited awareness. Whoever owns this voice is safe to be around.

Now that you know you aren’t alone you listen more intently to your surroundings. You strain your hearing as hard as it can go, and you can sense your own internals clicking away as well as those of the medic beside you. Another voice chuckles from nearby and it nearly startles you with how close it was. This one’s frame is nearly silent- even aware of his presence so closely, you can only barely detect the muted shift of gears.

“Curious already, huh?”

“Yes, they seem to be adjusting to the new protocols pretty well.”

The new mech’s voice flows strangely, in a similar way to the music that idles in the background of your processor. It is… pleasant.

“Aw, that’s sweet.”

“What is? I’m not plugged in there like you are, Ratch.”

Ah, there it is again! It’s nice. You were worried, when you first heard him, but this voice is so familiar you can’t bring yourself to be anxious. You hope he says more.

“They like your voice, apparently. Thinks it sounds like music.”

There, you can just barely hear the shift of the mech moving closer, and the quiet tap of him patting your leg.

“Well, that’s jus’ adorable. Can’t blame ‘em, I’m pretty damn slick.”

“Sure you are. Just keep playing music and talking to them, I need to monitor these.”

“Sure, mech. I can talk to this lil sweetspark all day. How ‘bout some different tunes?”

A new song begins in the background and something in you abruptly shifts. It leaves you wrenching away from the medic’s careful grasp on your mind with the first stirrings of panic.

{Hey, it’s okay.}

You know this song. It’s a beautiful melody, twisting and winding and you know this song. You’ve never heard music before. {Kid? You need to listen to me.} The pitch changes and you expect it to happen, like you’ve listened to this tune a hundred times before and you know this song. What is music?

“Everything okay in there, Ratch?”

It burns.

It doesn’t burn- it can’t- you’re not even capable of physical sensation. {You need to calm down.} Your processor functions are slowed, detached, limited. Audio input is your only connection with the outside world right now and before this instance you didn’t even know what burning was.

“Ratchet?”

“Shut the music off!”

It burns anyways.

It aches in a way you can't physically describe, even if you had the mental acuity to try, ripping and scalding your mind. It tears at the constraints of your thinking and scratches at the walls of memories you don’t have. {I’m shutting this down. Sorry, kid.} You scrape your way to vocalizer access without being consciously aware, but before you are able to scream your panic is doused in a flush of sedation.

You lay there in quiet, dim contemplation. The song has long since ended.

“You need to leave. Now.”

“Yeah.”

There’s a strange tone to the second voice, but you can’t find it in yourself to care. After the short exchange you can nearly hear footsteps. Footsteps that would be silent entirely if not for the haste with which they were made.

The door closes with a soft noise and again you are left in the quiet. It seems more lonely than it did before, stretching for a long time with nothing but the gentle shift of gears and the clicking of your internals.

The medic pats your arm softly, and though you can not feel or see it you can hear the gentle thump. His hand rests on you for a moment before sliding carefully up to your head. The gentle scrape gets louder as he approaches, until you hear the quiet click of him connecting. Again there is another mind next to your own. Funny- you can’t remember when he left.

“Good test. We’ll work on it some more tomorrow.”
{Good test. We’ll work on it some more tomorrow.}

He sounds tired.

You’re tired too.

3:35:13 PM
[Override: Induced recharge. Medic ID: r4647-12214-1]

-----

He sent a request to Prowl’s inbox, tinged with alerts for urgency. Prowl responded with his usual promptness, within half a second. It made Jazz’s plating itch to tell him to chill out, but that’d make him a hypocrite right now.

::I’m going on a mission.::

::I wasn’t informed of any plans that were ready for implementation.::

::I’m informing you now, aren’t I?::

::I know what you were doing five minutes ago, Jazz. Did it go poorly?::

Damn his incessant need to keep track of everything, Jazz thought uncharitably. The saboteur growled lowly as he rounded the corner, slipping back into a grin as he passed Hound and Trailbreaker chatting with each other quietly. They glanced over and made some brief greetings as Jazz spun around to wave at them, passing by without a word.

::It went as well as we expected.::

::So it went badly. I’m sorry, Jazz. I know you were excited.::

He unlocked his door with a cold fury, tapping the codes in firmly and sending a burst of encrypted numbers to the door simultaneously. It slid open and he stepped inside, not taking the time to signal the lights to turn on.

::Jazz?::

The saboteur’s voice grew cold and sharp over the line.

::We both know you hate chit-chat, Prowl. Can we get back to the mission?::

He tapped a light rhythm on the metal panel 3 skips from his desk and 2 wheel-lengths above. At the deftly clicked song, the panel shifts over and outward, revealing an arsenal nobody but a very foolish or very skilled mech should have access to. He let his frown slip into a thoughtful gaze as he juggled between his option of a concussion grenade and a very illegally modified ‘glue gun’.

::I don’t think now is a good time to be off-base, Jazz. You know everyone looks to you as the unofficial morale officer. Having you leave at such a critical time is not going to look good.::

::I’m aware. But now is as good a time as any to implement 17-B Chromium as any.::

He stepped away from the hidden cache and it slid back into his wall smoothly. As he moved to leave the room, an image-capture on his desk caught his attention. He let his frown return and slid a hand down his face in a rare expression of misery and exasperation.

::That is verifiably false.::

::It needs to be done at some point, might as well be now.::

He leaned to the side and turned the image display off.

::This really isn’t the time for this kind of fit, Jazz.::

::Fuck off.::

Prowl’s presence dimmed on the connection, and he sent a silent ping of acknowledgment before Jazz could feel a tinge of regret. The connection was mutually cut as Jazz let the door to his quarters slide shut behind him and headed towards his new mission. He took a circuitous route through the base to the exit, avoiding other mechs and cheerfully greeting them when he couldn’t.

As he took his first step beyond the base’s secure position, he sent a quick query to the base’s systems and noted with satisfaction that his duty roster was changed. He slipped into alt-mode with ease, and once he was far enough down the road he let himself grimace internally at his brusque behavior.

A little bit of shame sneaks its way back into his processor before he has time to delete it. Shame serves no purpose for a mech like him. But…
He smoothly slides around a bend in the road and slips a little notice in the corner of his HUD, registered to pop up when he next approaches the Ark.

[Notice: Get Prowl Semi-Sarcastic Apology Flowers Or Some Shit Like That. He’d Hate It.]

A song begins to flow from his speakers as he drives. The same song he’d played earlier in the medbay. It was their favorite.

Prowl was right, earlier, and it makes him feel incredibly stupid.

He had been excited.

Stupid.

-----

On the other end of the cut connection, Prowl sits in his office quietly.

“Hmm. Always so mercurial.”

He took a moment to edit Jazz’s duty roster and shifted to the side to carefully clear a space on his desk. The semi-sarcastic apology flowers he will be receiving tomorrow need a place to sit.

Chapter Text

You online with a buzzing in your audios, but it fades quickly as you reset them. It took a while to learn how to do that manually, but with the medics careful teachings you had the handle on simple things like that. Things that came naturally to him, it seemed.

Speaking of the medic, there is a connection request waiting patiently in the edges of your consciousness.

“Hey kid.”

{Hi Ratchet!}

“We’re going to online your optics today. You ready for that?”

{Yes! We’ve been practicing with my audio input forever! I want something new to do!}

“If you think a week is forever, then I have unfortunate news about the cybertronian lifespan.”

There’s an uncomfortable shuffling on your other side, and you startle in your own mind before Ratchet catches on to the source of your wariness.

“This is First Aid again, he was here for a few moments the other day.”

{I remember him, I just didn't know he was here. Hi First Aid!}

“They say hi, Aid.”

“Hello! Its nice to see you again.”

You ping at him in greeting, the closest you can get to a real hello at the moment. Ratchet sends a small blip at you in warning, then moves in your processor to a setting you weren’t even aware of. He releases the block of coding with little fanfare.

“Alright kid, its gonna be pretty blurry at first.”

There is a jarring click in the back of your senses, and you’re exposed to an entirely new dimension. Your visual feed crackles into a static-laden image of the room. It takes you a long while to come to terms with it, slipping this new sense into your perception of the world.

It’s as if sound twisted and revealed an entire new dimension, your 2D world shifting into 3 dimensions for the first time. The room is dimly lit, and a cold bare-metal grey color. There are splashes of red and white rather close-by that you assume are your allies. You ascertain their identities when they speak, but can not quite comprehend the data.

“Are they alright?”

“It happened with the audio input too, just stay back and give me a moment to clear the processing cache here.”

The static fades, but the view remains blurred and distorted. Uncomfortable errors try to build, but Ratchet’s clean medical precision sweeps them away and untangles them via the neural handshake. Though this is your first time seeing, it seems to just snap into your thoughts in a way your audio processing had not.

{It feels right. This is way easier than the sound was.}

“You’ve had more practice. Your processor has also been self repairing in your sleep. You were flying blind with the audio onlining.”

{Why is everything so distorted? I don’t think it is supposed to look like this.}

“We’re still doing some tweaks. I thought it would be best to keep things at low input at first, ease you into it.” Ratchet shifts in the corner of your view, and First Aid lifts something up to show you, wiggling it slightly in his hold for emphasis. “That’s why First Aid is here. We’re going to be testing your visual acuity, and I need to be plugged in to make sure its accurate. “

{What kind of tests?}

“The boring kind of tests.”

“You’re so mean, Ratchet! Don’t worry, it wont be too bad.” First Aid chuckles, and presses something on the datapad, causing it to light up a bright yellow with a single blue dot in the center.

“Now, please do your best to stare right at the dot.”

-----

First Aid is a liar. Ratchet was right. These were the boring kind of tests.

It wasn’t exactly the tests themselves that were the bad part, but they were annoyingly repetitive. And lasted for hours.

Apparently, optical feeds needed to be calibrated very specifically, and yours had not been on the standard cybertronian wavelengths. Or anything near the standard cybertronian wavelengths. You’d passed the tracking tests rather quickly with a near perfect score, but after a good ten minutes of staring at various flashing hues Ratchet noticed your color perception was shifted too far to the red end of the spectrum. And thus began your torture.

You lay in your bed, resetting your vision every few moments to clear the static that kept steadily building as the testing approaches hour three. The two medics sit next to you on either side of your helm, quietly deliberating together and pointing to a display that’s located to the side of your bed. A hand reaches around and taps on your shoulder to gather your attention again.

“Hey, what color is this?”

You flicked your optical feed over to look at the datapad resting on the side table.

{Red.} You could not convey that single concept with more exhaustion if you tried.

“They say its red still.”

“I think we just about have it set, then!”

The relief that one statement gives you is almost dizzying. You latch on to the connection you still hold with the head medic and send across a heartfelt thank you. His coding startles, as if he hadnt realized you could do that, and he snaps back across the line in scolding.

“Don’t be dramatic, it wasn’t that bad.”

{It was the worst. I was fighting for my life out here.}

Ratchet grimaces at your word choice. Right- through all of this you had forgotten the reason you were in the medbay in the first place. You try to come up with an apology but the words are scattered in your mind at the sudden grim reminder.

“Don’t worry about it, kid. I know you didn’t mean it.”

He adjusts himself on the seat next to your head and looks as if he is about to say something else, but is cut off by an alarm screeching to life. You startle, and both medics jump to their feet in an instant. Ratchet reaches his hand over and disconnects from you with an abrupt spit of static across the line, and before you even realize it they’re both gone. They had spoken something to you before their departure, but you were too stunned by the alarm and the swift, inelegant cut of the hard-link connection to process it.

The shriek of the alarm dies without warning and you’re thrust into silence.

You realize this is the first time you have been both alone and awake at the same time.

In their rush to leave, they had left the datapad used to test your color vision on the table next to your bed. You don’t like it. The color is bright and cheerful and horrible. You stare at the glaring red, still shining brightly on the screen, and the room seems all the more empty.

You feel a twinge of discomfort start to gather.

Your building worry is only compounded by yelling outside of your room. You’re not sure how long its been, your internal chronometer not yet properly integrated. There is crashing, and then the sharp, distinct screech of powered tools dig into your audio receptors.

You don’t know whats going on. You pick out Ratchets voice, contributing to the yelling, and that only scares you further. Ratchet had been a calm anchor through your entire functioning so far, short as it is, and to hear his voice in such a tone strikes a chord in you. Through it all, the red hue burns into your newly activated optics.

You hate red.

The door slides open and shut with a soft noise punctuated by an unusual thud. Nobody enters the room. You slide your gaze to the door and see a hand caught in the mechanism. It pushes the door to the side, and though your optics are not fully calibrated, you can tell it is neither Ratchet nor First Aid. You can tell one thing about the intruder, though.

You have never seen a color so beautiful.

If you had before the accident, you don’t remember. It shines in the dull room, almost a beacon. Your gaze tracks the splashes of pink scattered on the frame. You don’t know what it means, but the softly glowing streaks only accentuate the gleaming plating.

Vision still blurry and swimming as the optical coding settled itself, you could not see the mech properly. But you could drink in the color perfectly fine. They stand there, just in the doorway. Behind them, the sounds of the medbay echo. They’re louder without the closed door to block them, but you pay the shrieking of power tools no mind.

You do not know this mech, but you trust them. The blur in the doorway softens any worry you felt. In that moment you know who they are- even though queries to your memory cache return with nothing.

{Come closer, please. I cant see well yet, you’re too far away.}

You beckon silently though you know it is in vain.

{Please. Come closer. I know you. I need to know you.}

You aim your thoughts at them as hard as you can, but there is no response. You can not yet speak aloud, and they are not plugged in for medical diagnostics like Ratchet had been.

They turn as abruptly as they had arrived. The flash of gold retreats from your vision no matter how hard you beg for it to stay. The door closes behind them, fully this time, and leaves the room feeling muted and empty.

You’re calmer now than before they had arrived. The sounds outside your walls are not as terrifying as they once were. But in the fear’s place is a small curl of an unidentifiable emotion.

{Come back. Please. I need to see you again.}

-----

“What were you doing over there?”

“Not getting my arm repaired, that’s for fuckin’ sure.”

Ratchet sighed and gestured to the medbay exam table in front of him with a welder.

“Alright, whatever. Just get your prissy ass over here. If I find out you bothered them I’m gonna re-code your taste receptors to only taste the flavor sour. “

“Sure you are.”

The repairs went swiftly, and he left the medbay without much fuss. He never wanted to be in there in the first place, his arm wasn’t even that bad. He had more important things to do.

He approached the room more slowly than usual. He could both hear and feel the music once he entered the proper hall, and he was left mildly surprised they hadn’t gotten a complaint about it yet if it was that loud from the outside.

Sunstreaker stood in front of the door to his shared quarters. He could feel the heavy beat reverberate in both his audials and his spark. He searched his connection with his twin, pulsing a small query. There was no response. Sunstreaker’s outward appearance did not change, but internally he suddenly felt much more weary than before.

He pinged the door to open and stepped inside, sending a signal to shut off the music. The abrupt silence that fell was almost more oppressive than the heavy sheet of sound. Sunstreaker closed the door behind him and stood, looking into the corner of the room.

"Not like you to miss a fight, Sides."

"You had it covered."

He walked closer to the occupied bed. He took his steps slowly, taking care not to disturb the newly placed welds on his frame.

"I was in the medbay and everything."

"I knew you’d be fine.

Sunstreaker sneered. His brother was better than this, languishing in a dark room. They should be out there, together. Doing what they do best.

He did his best to calm the churning in his spark. Aggression wont do any good here, and Sideswipe needed him.

“If you were in the medbay... did you...” Sideswipe started, turning over towards his twin before trailing off.

"I don’t think they recognized me. But they're fine."

Sideswipe’s optics softened, and he held his hand out towards his brother. Sunstreaker took a step forward and placed his own on top. They stayed like that for a quiet moment, hand in hand. With a quiet exhalation from his vents, the moment was broken, and Sideswipe retreated back to the corner of his bed and turned away.

Sunstreaker stared at his twin with his hand still stretched forward.
With hesitancy, he sent a small tap through his spark.

An identical tap echoed back at him, small but present. The quiet tumbling of his spark was soothed with that one glint of recognition. He dropped his hand back to his side, and turned off to his own bed on the other end of the room. A shifting sound came from his brothers bed as he laid down, and Sunstreaker tilted his head to the side.

Sideswipes optics caught his own.

"Thanks.”

Chapter Text

He didn't bother with repairs. He knew he hadn't been injured, and in the panic he had been able to slide out of the room without being stopped.

"Sides! Everyone was worried! Me included, do you know what happened out there? Higher ups won't tell us anything and Powerglide saw you covered in-"

Sideswipe stopped pushing through the crowd that had gathered in the hall and turned to face Bluestreak. The sniper's doorwings immediately flinched and angled themselves downwards as the blue of his optics paled.

"Oh- oh Primus, Sides, is that-?"

He reached a hand out to him, but before he could try to comfort his friend his hand was batted away.

"No."

The other bots gathered at the doors heard the strange tone in Sideswipe's voice, and they gave him a wide margin as he stalked through the group that had gathered. Bluestreak stayed there, hand lowering as his optics flicked between the medbay doors and his rapidly retreating comrade.

-----

His room was bright, and his plating glinted in the light. It was empty, his brother no doubt still in the washracks. Or still returning from the battle. Or in the medbay. He didn't feel like exerting the effort to check.

It didn't matter anyways. Sunstreaker would never forgive him. Sideswipe looked down at the crimson coating on his plating, and hated it.

He raised his hands to his face and sat on the side of his bed, staring blankly into his palms. Sunstreaker was never going to forgive him. He wasn't going to forgive himself either.

It wasn't the scrape of metal, the crash of artillery, the sensation of metal twisting and breaking beneath his power that had horrified him. It wasn't the vital fluids that stained his hands- he barely noticed them even though they seeped into the delicate components.

Sunstreaker grabbed his hands and pulled them away from his face. He said something, but Sideswipe ignored it. His twin growled, face set in that perpetual frown as he pulled a rag from his subspace. He began cleaning the mess from the joints in Sideswipe's hands, his touch surprisingly gentle despite the rough movements and the snarling of his engine.

They had killed before, were inevitably going to do it again, and he will not feel an ounce of remorse or hesitation when he does. It was in the job description. That wasn't the issue either.

His optics closed automatically as a new rag came towards him. The touch was soft as Sunstreaker cleaned the stained handprints from his face. Sideswipe's expression was blank and unchanging as it happened. His optics opened again at a gruff command from his twin, a small brush coming to clear the glass coating his visual receptors from debris. He hadn't even noticed it had been tinted that color until it was cleared.

It was a feeling. Fritzing around his spark and making his chest feel strange. He cuts his brother off from their link as it finally dawns upon him. Sunstreaker is never going to forgive him.

He felt an arm being thrown around his shoulders, the rumble of his brother's engine as they sat together on the bed. He tilted his head to look, and saw nothing but fury on Sunstreaker's face. It wasn't aimed at him, but it didn't have to be.

Guilt. He felt guilt.

-----

Route 32 was a failure.
Repeat.

Route 33 was a failure.
Repeat.

Route 34 was a failure.
Repeat.

The furious hum of the secondary tactical processor stings. He restarts the simulation again despite the burn. Route 35 blooms and fractures in his mind, and he doesn't hesitate to pick up the shards and craft a new one.

Route 35 was a failure.
Repeat.

It's a habit, at this point. It's a coping technique, Ratchet would say. It is a way to move forward. It's a way to look back. Time travel, in a limited way. 'It sounds something like torture', Jazz would always say, and then look at him with a strange expression Prowl can never place.

Prowl is capable of making mistakes just as any other cybertronian is. But he does not repeat them. He will not allow it. He does not repeat his mistakes.

Route 36 was a failure.
Repeat.

Except for when he does. Ceaselessly. He changes parameters, shifts some numbers around, and presses play again. It's almost meditative, after every tragedy, to see how he could have fixed it. What numbers he could have moved.

He isn't an outlier. He's smart, sure, he lives and breathes statistics and data with every inhalation of his vents, sure. But what makes him special is the gnashing beast welded to his mind. It is a unique and powerful thing, voracious and insistent.

He reviews the mission reports and medical records again, the information passing through his thoughts and chewed to bits by the secondary tactical processor like a starving predacon. And once it has it's fill again, he lets it off the chain to run rampant.

Route 37 was a failure.
Repeat.

Route 38 was a failure.
Repeat.

Route 39 was different.
Alter variables. Check for errors.
Repeat.

Route 40 was a failure.
Review route 39.
Repeat.

Ever since they arrived on Earth, they've been at a standstill. Autobot and Decepticon both have failed to make a truly decisive strike against the other. Both forces are still focusing on destroying eachother, but there is a hesitation there. A wariness that wasn't in place on their homeworld.

Some found the peace refreshing, but to some- Prowl included, it itches. His tactical processor growls in the edges of his thoughts at all times, and claws at him for more numbers to devour. He was not upgraded to be idle. And as it chews and rearranges the data of this most recent and shocking tragedy, he reflects. This might change things.

The others have already headed down to the medbay with Ratchet for the initial reactivation, and Prowl finds himself hoping it goes well. He knows it won't.

He didn't care about the victim. He had no personal connection to them beyond a few passing greetings. Their life was valuable, he took his duty seriously and as a tactician every life on the battlefield was held in his hands. But he had no personal connection to them, and he wouldn't normally allow himself to dive so deep into the data like this.

But Jazz cared.

Sideswipe cared.

Ratchet cared.

Optimus Prime, Sunstreaker apparently, Gears, Blaster, even more that he didn't have the bandwidth to name as the simulations hoarded his processor.

It will change things. He needs to see how far.

Route 245 was a failure.
Repeat.

[Insufficient Data.]

Repeat.

[Insufficient Data]
[Simulatory Systems Shifting To Stand-By]
[Elapsed time: 7.8436 Hours]

The tactician slowly leans away from his desk, and lets his wings droop low. He examines the simulations, and returns with no clear conclusion. Prowl lifts a hand to his face and rubs at his sore optics, which had been staring unseeing as he delved through his own processor.

The stalemate they had inadvertently placed themselves in was going to shift. Though not in itself a blow against the Decepticons, the fact that this is even possible will destroy the fragile stability- not even taking into account the hit to morale. Prowl, with all his logic and intellect, can not determine whether this is going to be a desired outcome. What they'd done should not have even been attempted.

But it had already been done. And his job was to work with the facts.

Fact 1.
This endeavor was a serious drain on resources and time. I will need to requisition more materials soon.

Fact 2.
A number of Autobots involved will have a higher chance of aberrant behaviour during the fallout. Monitor them carefully to ensure continued group cohesion.

Fact 3.
No one can find out they did this. Not the wider Autobot forces, not the Decepticons, not their human allies, not the victim.

Thank Primus they already put out a gag order.

Chapter Text

Your limbs are heavy, leaden, dead. It takes an eternity to move, and with every careful shift of pistons and turning of gears you need a long break to process any further action. You shut off your visual feed, blocking out the excess stimulus so you can further focus on the task at hand.

You sit up in your bed.

You re-engage your visual sensors, Ratchet standing nearby. You feel his hand on your upper arm, guiding your movements. Your motions are stuttering, tentative, and hesitant. But you are determined.

You swing your legs to the side.

First Aid is behind Ratchet, adjusting the monitors as you’re disconnected from them. He steps forward and pushes some equipment out of the way, making space for you to shuffle to the edge and get up.

You stand.

Your engine rattles with the exertion. You have never had to use it to this extent before, and it vibrates with newfound power. With the support of the medic, and your arm still holding the bed behind you, you do not fall.

You walk.

First Aid reaches over to grasp your other arm, as you slip and stumble on your third step. But you do not fall, and you continue. You are steadfast, despite Wheeljack’s concerned comments from the side.

They lead you around the room in several short laps. On the final circuit of the room, you begin to head back towards the bed. Abruptly, you shake the two medics off with a burst of confidence, and make the final few steps entirely on your own.

First Aid lets out a small yelp of worry, and Ratchet grumbles as he rushes forwards to help you. Wheeljack, who was standing by the bed this entire time, moves to help you sit back down without stumbling.

Ratchet frowns at you, but is cut off from his complaining at the sound of your voice for the first time.

You speak.

It’s quiet. It’s delicate. It’s riddled with static. But you can hear your smile in the words.

“Thank you.”

-----

Wires crossed and twined together. Metal soldered and tubes snaking throughout. Steel tempered and joints fitted. Spark… well, that’s beyond him, but a spark containment unit is well within Wheeljack’s capabilities.

It takes a lot, to build a body.

Cybertronians aren’t like humans- not that he knows very much about how humans are constructed. But he knows that they don’t need to create their forms manually. They don’t need to spend hours upon days in the lab, speaking with Ratchet, Huffer, First Aid.

Welding, welding, welding.

Soldering, soldering, soldering.

Piece by piece crafting a new person.

He was there when they got the call. Ratchet turned to him, medbay already prepped for the battle raging outside, and the look on his face was one Wheeljack had already seen far too many times before. He knew he didn’t have the time to comfort his friend, but he so dearly wanted to.

Funny, how he can’t remember the exact words that were said, but he can remember precisely every schematic and blueprint that shot through his processors as he ran back to his lab, desperately shuffling through materials and half-finished projects.

After the hurried adjustments and constant collaboration with the others, there was a lull when he had space to himself. Building a frame is intensive and time consuming, but he found relief in the space to think it gave him.

Not enough space to regret, though. Wheeljack isn’t one to regret. He does his job, does his best, and everything else will happen regardless.

He wasn’t alone every time, he isn’t the only person on the Ark capable of constructing new bots.

First Aid was begrudging and nervous, but the steadiness of his hands showed promise in the future. He was hesitant, when working. Almost as if he wasn’t quite certain of what he was doing, but Wheeljack always enjoyed the presence of his creations and they worked quickly when together.

Huffer was… reliable, if not a particularly good conversation partner. His movements were steady and his work was high quality. Could do without the headaches from all of the complaining, though.

Ratchet’s companionship was a quiet and brooding one, both of them working in tandem to construct the body. He had a feeling Ratchet did not find it as meditative as he did.

-----

He stands back as they rise for the first time, and takes stock of his handiwork. Their engine revvs smoothly despite a stuttered start. Movements tender, new, but no fundamental mechanical issues that could be caused by a faulty frame. This isn’t the first time he has had to build someone, First Aid is right there after all, but it is the first time he’s needed to do so under such circumstances.

Wheeljack observes as they pace around the room with the cautious assistance of the two medics. His reputation for explosivity is earned, yes, but vastly over-estimated, and he praises himself internally for a job well done.

His newfound ally, hopefully friend, stumbles back towards the bed, and Wheeljack reaches out to steady them. He helps them sit back down with care. No use in ruining his good work already.

The excitement of their first steps fades as the exhaustion catches up. Wheeljack and Ratchet both took their leave, trusting the apprentice medic to handle resetting their injured ally on the monitoring systems once again.

Wheeljack catches up to Ratchet outside the door, putting a hand on his shoulder as they walk back towards the office in the back corner of the medbay.

Before he could speak, Ratchet grumbles out loud, “That went surprisingly well.”

“Sure did!” The engineer’s fins flash a cheerful hue, “When are we going to tell them?”

“We aren’t.”

“Ratchet. They don’t know their own name.”

“We’ll need to make up a new one, then.”

Wheeljack stops, stunned. Ratchet sits down heavily into his chair, and gestures at the seat opposite him. Wheeljack sits down as well, pondering.

“That’s... That isn’t an option.”

“We have no options. The transfer- Wheeljack, you were there. You know how bad it went.”

“But not as well as you do, clearly. You’ve been in their programming, is it really that bad?”

Ratchet sighs, hesitating. He stalls for time by reorganizing and updating some of the files on his terminal, but Wheeljack has known him long enough to see it for what it is.

An attempt at deflection.

A very poor one.

He stays silent,
Letting it stretch on until it snaps,
And with it- Ratchet’s frustration.

“You wanna know so bad, ‘jack?”

Wheeljack stays quiet, staring placidly at his friend until the rest spills out.

“They’re not even the same person. Their name is the least of it. Their memories are so poorly translated- things have been going well so far, but I have no idea if they’ll ever recover who they were.”

“I’d ask if you were sure, Ratch, but I know you’re better than guesswork. Is it really all of their memories?”

“Possibly. Pieces bleed through, and there’s still some things that have transferred over smoothly, but those are few and far between. We just have to hope they’ll be able to reconstruct those files subconsciously over time.”

“Primus. What about their…?” He trailed off, gesturing vaguely in the air.

At this, Ratchet sighs again, this time a long and frustrated one as he sunk his head into his hands. The engineer idly sketches a message to Ironhide to help him cheer him up later.

“Prowl forged a death notice to send them.”

“PROWL WHAT.”

Chapter Text

Red.

Staring down at you in horror.

Your optics were stained in it. It burned into your vision.

“How bad is it?”

It was red.

The heat burned so hot you could see it, warping the metal around you. The distance seemed impossible. It was only a few steps away. The streets stretched out forever before you.

“Oh shit.”

You were trapped, pinned, and no matter how hard you tried to struggle you couldn’t get your limbs to respond. As you stood there, frantically running through the chaos, you tried in vain to call out to him to free you. He couldn’t hear you over the shouting.

“Looks like rain, doesn’t it?”

He grinned at you. The light shimmered as he turned his gaze back up to the sky, letting the rain plink plink plink off of his face and clean the optical glass. It almost looked sad.

“Sure does.”

You loved that song. You hummed along as the puddle of your internal fluids stained the ground beneath you and mixed with the rain.

“Looks like rain, doesn’t it?”

He grinned at you. The light shimmered as he turned his gaze back up to the sky, the flickering fires reflecting off of his plating. It was almost beautiful, if it didn’t burn so badly.

He sped up as he saw you, reaching out to try and shift some of the wreckage. You’re held, gently, by a crushing vice of metal and the gentle touch of his hand. You wanted to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. You felt half melted already.

It’s a nice day, you think, staring out into the ocean. Shame about the rust.

“Am I gonna be okay?”

-----

Ever since you mastered walking, the medbay has become your domain. Ratchet and First Aid have graciously allowed you the freedom to look around during quiet hours, provided you don’t touch anything without permission. You hungrily take in all you can of your surroundings when you have the chance, and right now you’re keeping First Aid company while Ratchet is out. You watch his work intently.

He’s operating a printer. When he selects a schematic on his datapad, the machine whirrs to life, extruding a thin sliver of material and moving in mesmerizing patterns, stacking and weaving it together until you get… anything. A piece of armored plating, some internal tubing, even a party hat if you wanted one. Happy birthday, so explained First Aid.

The fabrications aren’t perfect, nothing ever is. So as he manually files away and adjusts the finished pieces, you watch as the printer whirrs back to life to begin the next part in the queue. You note that some of the parts look awfully familiar, and idly thumb the blocky emblem on your own plating as more subtype-B-gamma chestplates are churned out.

You hesitate to break the silence, but find a gap between the fabrication as he resets the machine for the next batch.

“I’ve been having weird thoughts.”

First Aid straightens up, alarmed. He looks over at you with a look that is simultaneously soft and intense, and you’re reminded of how Ratchet first described him before you met. ‘He would help a seeker reach the top shelf if he could. Which- right, you don’t know what seekers are. Listen they can fly and- what I’m getting at is he’s a sweetheart, kid.’

“What kind of weird thoughts?”

“When I’m recharging, there’s… weird stuff. It’s all glitchy.”

“Oh,” he said, relaxing minutely, “Those are just dreams, they’re normal. What have you been dreaming about?”

“Um… chaotic things. Uncomfortable things. Like I’m pinned down by something I can’t move, and people are talking to me but I don’t know what about.”

"Ah, that is… not normal. Some of that might be, um. Recollections from the crash."

"I thought my memory core was pretty scrambled?"

"It is, but the purpose of dreams and recharge is to reset and rearrange data in your processor, which you cannot do while aware and conscious. Your processor must be starting to unravel some of the sensory data that was left over."

First Aid’s gaze suddenly drops as he grabs a freshly-printed tire rim and starts rifling through the toolbox next to the printer. It takes him a moment before he finally produces a drill, which he then spends another few silent moments studying.

"Are you okay?"

"It's just a little disturbing,” he mumbles, resetting the drill angle.

At the confused huff from your vents he startles, and removes his hands from the drill carefully. He raises his hands in placation, visor brightening.

"Not that anything is wrong with you! Just that the first memories you're starting to unravel are so unpleasant. I'm sure you'd prefer to not remember the incident at all."

You take a stuttering moment to process the sentence, and reach up to adjust the tiny party hat seated on your head.

"I guess so."

“You’ve been strangely calm about this, you know.”

“Do you… want me to be upset about it?”

“No, of course not. It’s just that, well. If it was me I probably wouldn’t be dealing as well.”

“I mean, I don’t remember anything, so there isn’t much for me to get upset about. That’s how I see it, anyway.”

First Aid hums in acknowledgement, and you two fall into an amiable silence as you work.

You reach up and remove the small fabricated hat from your head, placing it delicately on First Aid. He jumps slightly at the contact, glancing back over at you with poorly concealed mirth.

-----

Your hand reaches up to grasp it, but your strength has left you entirely and you can’t pull it from your chest. You reach out and pat his arm.

He glanced away from you, and you could tell he actively fought the urge to dodge the contact. You moved to get up, give him the space he clearly desired, but he stopped you with a deceptively gentle grip.

“Just don’t tell anyone. It’s none of their business.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Heh. I know.”

It’s red, you notice again for the first time. It’s always red.

“Oh shit.”

“Am I gonna be okay?”

“Yeah. You’ll be fine.” The voice hitches slightly at the end, covered up in the rough exhalations of vents that have been working too hard.

“Must have been some race, huh hotwheels?”

“Ugh. Who taught you to say that.”

You laughed delightedly at the expression of disgust on his face.

It should hurt. It really, really should hurt. You glanced downwards and felt nothing. The fracas around you dimmed to a low background buzz. There was no pain, there was no joy. Just a numb resignation.

“What’s an Autobot?”

“You want the literal answer or the fancy metaphorical one?”

He asked, thumb gesturing to the image emblazoned on his chest. The sigil, some blank interpretation of a face, glimmered red in the harsh light.

The stranger approached, gun in his hand. He stepped from the Ark with a skip as he spotted you. You tried to match his gaze.

"How bad is it? Am I gonna be okay? Sideswipe?"

Sideswipe looked down at you in horror.

“Oh shit.”

Chapter Text

For the duration of your brief existence, Ratchet and First Aid have been quite keen on keeping you tucked away in your private room of the medbay, ushering you back to your bed when patients arrived. But Ratchet hasn’t returned yet, and only First Aid is on duty. First Aid has trouble saying no to you.

Surely a little bit of socializing wouldn’t be noticed.

Your audio settings dial up upon hearing the now-familiar sound of the medbay doors opening and a not-so-familiar voice speaking to the medical assistant. You can’t make out the foreign sounds, but you’d recognize First Aid’s mellow tones anywhere.

You poke your head out from your doorway to get a glimpse at the mystery bot. Upon seeing his yellow paint you feel a strange twinge of excitement– the unnamed silhouette from the day your optics were onlined?– but then note his small stature and round frame. Someone entirely new, then.

Upon seeing your movement in the corner of his eye, First Aid turns to face you with a mildly disapproving look. “You really shouldn’t be out here right now, Ratchet will be upset. Patient-doctor confidentiality, and all.”

The stranger gives a small wave. “Aw, I don’t mind. Hiya, I’m Bumblebee!”

“Hello.”

“Seriously, he’ll ground all three of us.” First Aid interjects.

“Can he even do that?”

“Who would stop him?” Bumblebee replies cheekily.

First Aid sighed and set his welding tool back on the table. You step into the broader medbay and make your way over.

“There are some parts I need to fabricate real quick, can you watch them for a moment?”

It was unclear which of you he was speaking to, but you nodded at the same time Bumblebee said ‘yep!’ anyways. You watch him go, turning around the corner into the room where the printer and parts storage is. Once First Aid was gone, you turned to Bumblebee with an almost predatory gaze.

“Uh, you okay there, pal?”

“Who is Sideswipe.”

“What?”

You stare at him, optics focused entirely on his face. Bumblebee shifts awkwardly.

“What do you wanna know about him?”

“Anything.”

“He’s just another soldier. Fun guy. Alt mode is a ground-based racer, has an unhealthy love of grenades, is a split-spark twin.”

“That’s it?”

“He’s red, I guess? Why, has he caused any problems? He’s friendly and all, but the mech can’t stay out of trouble for anything. Been pretty quiet lately, though.”

“No, I haven’t met him. I think. They mean well, but Ratchet won’t tell me anything, and First Aid always gets skittish and weird. Wheeljack always just says ‘ask Ratchet’.”

"I... really can't tell you more, guy. I don’t know what you’re after."

"What about the... that song. The guy with the-" at this you gesture to your optics, crudely making a V-shape in the air over them. After a frustratingly long moment, Bumblebee tilts his head in bewilderment.

"You mean Jazz? He hasn't even been on base for a while, how do you know him?"

"Yeah. How do I know him?"

“I don’t know! This is weird. Maybe you met them before your escape pod crashed or something, back on Cybertron?”

“Do you know anything about that?”

“That’s, um. I mean I only know that’s what everyone says. That your ship crashed here on earth and you were badly damaged in the landing when they found you.”

“Right. My ship. That I had.”

“The repairs were pretty extensive, which is why you had to be pretty much entirely reconstructed. That's what I hear, anyways. Are you alright?”

You don’t respond, busy turning his words over in your mind. None of what he said sounded familiar, but the medics had been right when they said your memory was scrambled. How would you be able to tell what was accurate and what wasn’t?

“This conversation has, no offense, been very confusing. And I sorta feel interrogated, a little? Um. Actually, my knee feels way better now, I probably don’t even need the replacement part. I think I’m gonna go."

“No you aren’t.”

You turn to the sound and see a short but intimidating mech prowling towards the bed Bumblebee was sitting on. He exuded authority, despite you not knowing him. On his forehead was a bright streak of red. Bee shrinks back and laughs nervously.

“Repairs come before reports, Ratchet’s orders, Prowl.”

“I am aware.”

Their words taper into a strange combination of clicks and chirps as they speak amongst themselves. None of your caretakers have ever said anything like it, at least not around you. You reset your audio processing, sure you’re mishearing, but it continues. Prowl looks at you and one of the small wings on his back twitches. His gaze is cool and analytical, nothing at all like how the medics look at you.

“Right. As for you, we need to get you the proper data packs for Iaconi Standard.”

“Ooh right, had forgotten about those.”

At your blank look of confusion, Bumblebee smiles at you warmly.

“No offense to you, pal, but it’s kind of a hassle shifting back into speaking base code 7.1 for you. I don’t know how the medics do it so easily. It’s the standard language pack everyone is pre-installed with, before we download an actual language to use.”

“It is efficient and takes up very little file space or CPU, but quite unwieldy and rather useless in actual conversation. We’ll need to change that if you intend to integrate into the Ark.” Prowl added.

“It seems normal to me.”

“That is because you do not have a proper language pack integrated yet. You will notice a stark difference when you do.”

“We’ve basically been speaking in javascript this whole time, heh.” Bumblebee joked.

“What’s javascript?”

“Human thing. Nevermind,” Bumblebee says, looking back over at Prowl with a slight frown. “I’ll get your report to you as soon as I’m done here, you didn’t have to come all the way down here to debrief me.”

“I did not come here to debrief you.”

“So what, you just hopped on by to see if I was alright?”

“You were injured on my orders, I am genuinely concerned for your wellbeing.”

“Huh. And not because you’re eager to read what Jazz is up to?”

“Whether or not that is a factor is irrelevant at this time.”

“Sure.”

After this, they soon reverted back to the melodic clicking from earlier. Sensing this wasn’t really your business and suddenly feeling very tired, you creep back to your room. You pass First Aid on the way, humming a tune to himself as he goes. He stops when he sees you looking so disquieted.

“Everything alright? Bee didn’t overwhelm you, did he?”

You give him a half-hearted smile. “No, he was fine. I think I’ve made enough progress socializing today, is all.”

“Alright. If you ever need anything, let me know, I’ll be there.”

Your smile changes into a real, genuine one. If First Aid could help a seeker reach the top shelf, he would.

“I know.”

Chapter Text

Prowl was right, as it turns out. And apparently very precise with his words, as your new language pack delves into your memories and decodes the conversation he had with Bumblebee the other day. The conversation itself was nothing incredible, but the new words and structures push their way into your consciousness and tumble around. You find even your own thoughts seem less… basic, now that you have a proper language to express them in.

After the upload, Ratchet disconnected you from the familiar cord winding from the terminal next to your bed and into the back of your head. Wheeljack handed you a series of small devices, not quite full datapads and clearly limited in their functionality, but much sturdier than the ones Ratchet and First Aid carried around. With your newfound ability to read, the time to catch up on some studying seems to have arrived.

You have the sneaking suspicion these are educational booklets intended for newly minted sparklings. Not that that’s very far from the truth, as amnesic as you are. They mention things like sparks and t-cogs in simple words and bright colors. You idly poke at your own “thoracic armor” as you read the section on ‘The wonders of the Transformation Cog’, squinting at cartoonish renditions of various alt modes on the screen. You wonder what Ratchet’s alt mode is, or Bumblebee’s. You wonder about your own.

“Ratchet, what’s your… alt-mode?” You ask from your perch in your private room.

“I’m a… hmm.” He trails off, adjusting something on the datapad in his lap.

“Oh yes, a hmm,” You tease, “This paragraph says that's a very impressive alt mode. You must be proud.”

He snorts a small laugh and glances up at you. “I’m an emergency medical response vehicle, you little smartass.”

The innocent grin on your face gives way to curiosity. “What’s my alt-mode?”

Ratchet pauses and stares at his datapad for a silent moment. Before you can worry too much, he looks back up and gives you a small smile.

“We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”

You groan and dramatically fall backwards on your bed.

“That’s cruel, Ratchet! I wanna know!”

“To be frank with you, kid, you don’t have one. There’s no t-cog in you right now.”

You shoot up from your languid position on the bed, staring at him in horror.

“I’m MISSING a vital organ?”

“Hmm. Well it does sound pretty bad when you say it like that.” He says when confronted with your horrified stare, “You’re fine, it’s just a… particularly difficult part to fabricate. Its absence won’t affect your function at all.”

You lift the instructional holograph projector and wave it around towards him.

“This thing says t-cogs are pretty damn important, Ratchet!”

“Those things are very simplified, as I’m sure you can tell.”

He rises from his seat, flicking his datapad off and gathering the others that were laying on the small table beside his seat.

“By the way…” he says as he walks past, petting your arm affectionately on his way out of the room, “Who taught you to say damn? I need to throw something at them.”

“You.”

“Ah.”

“How important is a t-cog, exactly? Don’t try to change the subject!”

He lingers by the doorway, leaning over to manually flip the light switch instead of activating it remotely.

“Don’t worry about it, kid. You’re safe, I promise. Get some rest.”

—--

Your internal chronometer says it’s 4 am, but your fuel gauge says it's breakfast time. You wander from your room, glancing around blearily at your dimly lit surroundings. If you remember right, from your last foray out, the energon dispenser would be-

“It’s cruel, Ratchet!”

You jolt awake.

“I know. I know, Aid. But what else could we have done?”

You quietly creep closer down the hall.

“We could have just let them die. We should have.”

You strain yourself, dialing up your auditory sensors as high as they can go.

“Well what do you want me to do now? Kill them myself?”

You listen to a hushed conversation only ever meant for medical professionals.

“No! But what I’m saying is-”

You subconsciously lift your hands to your face. Iaconi Standard is a very direct language, and the modifiers in tone left no ambiguity. They’re talking about you.

You sneak away with more stealth than you believed yourself capable of. Your head is swimming with discordant thoughts. Your vision is unfocused and you hear buzzing behind your audio sensors and in your processor.

“Woah bud, watch where you’re going there.”

Wheeljack grabs your shoulder to steady you as you bump into him. You look up into his optics, your own bleached almost white with emotions you can’t think enough to identify. His fins flash in surprise and he softens his entire demeanor.

“You okay, champ?” He asks quietly, and you slowly shake your head.

You feel like you’ll never be okay ever again.

He gently pulls you closer to him, and you wrap your arms around him in a hug. He reciprocates, and pats your back with a gentle rev of his engine. With your face muffled against him, you murmur something you don’t want to say.

“First Aid wants me dead.”

Chapter Text

The woosh of the medbay doors sounds vengeful as you re-enter the medbay, Wheeljack at your back. Upon hearing the door ping, Ratchet and First Aid swivel from their position at the main desk to give you a stricken look.

“Where have you been? You’re not supposed to leave the–” Ratchet begins, but you cut him off.

“I’m not a prisoner, am I, Ratchet? I can go where I want.”

Ratchet’s expression darkens a shade, and he directs his attention to Wheeljack instead. Beside him, First Aid’s visor flickers to stressed white.

“They’re not ready to be out and about yet. There’s still tests to be run, things to learn, preparations to be made. This isn’t the time, you should have brought them back to their room the second you found them.”

Wheeljack lays his hand on your shoulder, an uncharacteristic weight in his movements.

“They were crying, Ratch. This isn’t a pet project.”

“They’re a responsibility! If they get hurt, Primus forbid, on my watch…”

“How old were the Protectobots, before we first sent them out on the field? The Dinobots?”

“That was different-”

“How? How is it any different?” you blurt out, sick of being sidelined in your own conversation.

“Kid, listen, you’re not ready for this.”

Wheeljack’s hand on your shoulder is a steadying anchor. He glares at the other two silently, and his support gives you the strength to stay in the room instead of fleeing like you want to.

“All this time you’ve been taking care of me, but you’ve been lying about something. I’m not stupid. You think I don’t notice every time you avoid eye contact, every time you change the conversation when I ask questions?

He sighs heavily. “You always were an observant one, kid.”

“Was I? Because I wouldn’t know that, would I?”

First Aid turns to Ratchet, “I told you they’d know.”

Somehow, his conspiratorial tone makes your temper boil over. You take a step forward, the hydraulics and pistons in your movement hissing with the jolt.

“I trusted you. You were my friend.” You look between the two of them from First Aid to Ratchet, “You were inside my head, rearranging things. Wheeljack wouldn’t tell me anything either, but at least he wasn’t actively pretending to be my friend while wanting me to die.”

The desperation in First Aid’s tone is evident. “You weren’t supposed to hear that. I never wanted to hurt you! I love you like one of my gestalt, I just wish it wasn’t…” He heaves a huge gust from his vents, circulating air to try and cool his panicked systems. “I wish it wasn’t under these circumstances.”

“But you aren’t going to tell me what circumstances those are, are you?”

Both of the medics cast their gaze downwards.

“What about you, Wheeljack?”

“I can’t.”

“Please.” It comes out as barely a whisper.

“I really can’t. It’s out of my hands, Prowl’s orders. I would if I could.”

“... I know you would.”

“Where are you going?” Ratchet asks as you turn your back to him.

“To find Prowl.”

-----

“I am disappointed.”

The room is silent after their departure, just the three mechs staring at each other with uncertainty. Wheeljack’s words are quiet, but slams the medics with the weight of a hammer.

“Jackie, I-”

“I thought you were better than that. Both of you.”

First Aid slips off his face guard so he can discreetly swipe away the static charge gathering beneath his visor before he speaks.

“I meant what I said. I love them, but I wish they didn’t exist.”

“I hadn’t realized you had such a capacity for cruelty, Aid.”

“It’s not cruelty, it’s basic ethics! We swore an oath to prevent undue suffering, and we violated that oath!” The young medic’s words are blots of static through his crying, but he stands firm. "You may not understand, but as a Protectobot, this is against everything you coded me for.”

“I know it’s an ethics violation. But the alternative was letting our war kill them. Is that a loss we’re willing to take?”

“I don’t know. I like them, truly I do, but we fucked up. You fucked up. I warned you from the start, but since I’m the apprentice you didn’t listen.”

Ratchet sags back into his seat, all the fight leaving him and being replaced by a deep exhaustion he rarely lets show. “I know, Aid. Believe me, I am acutely aware of my fallibility.”

Wheeljack takes a step forward to comfort his friend, reaching over to grasp his creation’s arm as well.

“Don’t do that to yourself, Ratchet. You were under a lot of pressure, I enabled you. Nothing happens in a vacuum.”

Ratchet manages to crack a tiny, rueful smile. “So does that mean you forgive me?”

Wheeljack’s fins flash a dim but cheery blue as he starts walking backwards to the doorway.

“Oh I’m pissed, but that’s not going to stop me from caring about you both.”

First Aid puts his face mask back on, grabbing a datapad from the nearby desk. “That’s fair,” he mumbles, “Love you.”

“Love ya too, bud. I’m gonna go catch ‘em before they find Prowl. Primus knows he’s got no bedside manner.”

-----

“Looks like rain, doesn’t it?”

He grinned at you. The light shimmered as he turned his gaze back up to the sky, letting the rain plink plink plink off of his face and clean the optical quality glass. The trails of rainwater almost looked sad.

“Sure does,” you said, watching the downpour begin from the safety of your perch. After a moment of deliberation, the gentle rush of water and a muted melody flowing in the background, you break the peaceful moment.

“Hey Jazz?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you actually like it here?”

“Course I do. What makes ya ask that?”

“I don’t know… it’s gotta be weird, right?”

You take a moment to ponder the question, despite the strangeness of the situation.

“I’d say the literal one, for now. Metaphor can wait.”

The mech gestures widely to the rest of his group. “Well, sweetspark, if that even is your real name, we are.”

That explains literally nothing.

“You seem like you’re taking it better than most, but…”

The mech deliberates for a moment.

“Nah. I’m not really a ‘home’ kinda mech. Wherever I am, wherever my buds are, that’s what’s goin’ on. Get me?”

You stifled a laugh. He holds you gently, moving his free hand around to the canvas with practiced ease.

“I’m not gonna have this ruin my reputation, alright? As far as anyone knows, I can’t stand you.”

“Oh, of course. My lips are sealed.” Despite the gruff tone, you smile and stare fondly at the impressionistic landscape. “Can’t let anyone know you’re getting soft, huh?”
He grins, a subtler and less feral version of the one he uses around the others.

“But yeah, I get it.”

“Hey, you’re not the only person I talk to. I’m a man about town.”

“And here I thought what we had was special,” you teased.

The mech adjusted his seating on the rock face as the music looped. “To be frank, at first I didn’t really care about this place.”

“At first?”

The trip is long and lonely. You feel hunger, dimly gnawing at your insides, and turn your gaze back to the window. The stars are as beautiful as they always are.

It doesn’t help though.

“I got a lil’ more perspective on the situation.”

“Aww. You're a sap.”

“I am a very dangerous mech, sweetness.”

“You're a very dangerous sap.”

Jazz held his hand to his chest, in a playfully mocking gesture. “Why thank you. Accuracy matters.”

You hope this moment never goes away.

The song loops again.

Chapter Text

Going to find Prowl, you realize, was easier said than done. It isn’t until the medbay doors fade behind you that the fury of your conversation with the medics is eclipsed by disorientation.

You really wish those educational datapads they gave you came with a map.

As it is, you currently find yourself aimlessly wandering the orange halls, too busy looking for any signs or arrows to notice the occasional passerby looking at you funny. Until one practically fills the silhouette of the hallway.

You have no idea how you missed him. The bot was the only other person in the corridor and several times your size. He flags you down, and you slow your aimless circling so he can approach.

“You’re the new guy, aren’t you? Arrived a month or so ago? You look a little lost.”

“Um,” You say intelligently, “Probably because I am.”

He chuckles, holding out his massive hand for you to shake.

“Well in that case, would you like some help? I know I wished for a guide my first few days on board. I’m Skyfire, now the second newest person on the Ark.”

“It’s nice to meet you.” You pointedly don’t finish your response, glancing down from his face. You stare at his outstretched arm suspiciously, grabbing it with no small amount of trepidation. A mech this big could crush you with less than a thought.

“I need to find Prowl. Can you help with that?”

“Prowl, huh? Sounds important. In that case, his office is right this way,” he says. Grateful, you fall into stride alongside him, putting a skip into your step to keep up with his much longer legs.

“Why don’t any of the doors around here have signs?”

“Well, we all live here full-time anyways, and it isn’t a very large base, so there’s no real need for them. Not to mention we’d rather not give the Decepticons clear directions if they ever made it inside.”

“That makes sense, I guess. Still annoying though.”

“I agree completely.” He adds, nodding.

“It’s so empty though… I imagined it would have more people.”

“It’s 4 am, not exactly the most busy time of day.”

You eye him skeptically.

“Why are you up, then?”

His huge wings flutter behind him, abashed.

“I got distracted analyzing some organic samples… again. They’re just so fascinating. I mean, the ways they can adapt is just-”

‘Nevermind,’ you think, as he gushes about something or other, wings fluttering and angling the datapad he held to show you some indecipherable images, ‘This mech couldn’t crush anyone. He’s a dork.’

He stops speaking, sensing your gaze on him, and gives you a self-conscious look. “Ah, I’m sorry, didn’t mean to ramble. Most bots aren’t very interested in organic studies.”

You smile at him indulgently, “What were you analyzing?”

At the encouragement, he beams and continues talking about… whatever a nucleoid is. It’s nice, though. You didn’t realize it at the time, but you missed this. Talking to people. Listening to them. The medics meant well, but they had isolated you, you think with no small amount of righteous anger.

“Well, did you know that humans have developed ways of genetically altering rice to produce more beta-carotene? It’s interesting- they’ve actually changed the-”

You nod as if you understand any of those words whatsoever, when he stops abruptly.

“Hmm. That’s weird.”

He’s staring at you, tilting his head slightly. When you tilt your head to match his, he glances back towards the datapad he held as if bashful from being caught.

“What?”

“It’s probably nothing, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“That just makes me worry more.”

He chuckles and rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. “It’s just I think this is the first time anyone has ever actually wanted to go to Prowl’s office.”

The half-joke catches you off guard, and you can’t help but laugh. The humor lightens your mood, if only slightly.

You snap back to reality as your companion comes to a stop and you look up to see Wheeljack approaching from the opposite direction. He’s walking swiftly, arm outstretched as he gets closer.

“There you are, kiddo. You gave us a scare when you stormed out like that,” Only then does he look up at your companion. “Ah, hey, Skyfire. Thanks for intercepting the new guy before they got too lost.”

Skyfire smiles, evidently needing no introduction. “It was no problem, they weren’t the only one wandering around at this hour. Speaking of which, I should probably get back to my work, if you’ve got this handled?”

“It was nice to meet you,” you interject shyly, before Wheeljack can reply for you.

“It was nice to meet you, too. Hopefully we’ll see each other again at a more opportune time.” Skyfire says with a little wave, and then sets off the direction he came.

Wheeljack watches Skyfire go, then looks over from you to the door ahead of you.

“Prowl’s is right over here. I can take you the rest of the way, if you’re sure. You ready?”

You square your shoulders and lift your chin. “Yes.”

And then you enter.

The office is dark. In the center is a desk, a single desktop light illuminating the same mech you met all those days ago in the medbay. He is hunched over various datapads and several holo-projections, a half consumed cube of energon and a strangely incongruous flower bouquet on either side of him. Small projections on his back flick at your presence, though he does not look away from his work.

“We aren’t scheduled until 9:35 am, Wheeljack.”

“I’d say I’m surprised you’re working at this time, but that’d be a lie.”

“You’re active at this time as well.” Prowl counters.

“I’m just here to check up on my friend, here. Hopefully I’ll be out of your processing threads in a minute.”

You turn to face Wheeljack. “I can’t go with you. Not yet. I need answers, and this is the only place I can get them.”

“Your ‘friend’ has made themselves clear. I can handle this interaction myself. You may leave.”

Wheeljack gives you a worried look. “You don’t have to have this conversation, bud. If you’re overwhelmed you can always go to my lab instead of the medbay.”

“Thank you,” You say softly, “But I can handle myself.”

“Alright, kiddo. Take care,” With that, he pats you on the head and makes his departure, flashing a warning glare at the mech behind the desk before he leaves.

The door shuts behind him, and it’s just you and Prowl.

“State your purpose.”

Well, he certainly doesn’t bother with pleasantries.

“Ratchet won’t tell me anything. First Aid won’t tell me anything. Wheeljack says you’re the one who ordered them not to. So here I am.”

Prowl doesn’t look at you. He continues to scan the work on his desk, swiping through graphs and reports without pause.

“I knew it was inevitable for you to sense something amiss. They haven’t informed you of anything at all regarding your stay?”

“Nothing useful.”

“That’s good. It’s for the best that this is kept obscured.”

“So you did order that, then.” You step closer, glancing at what held his attention so firmly, but you had no hope of ever interpreting the rapidly fluctuating numbers and values on the screen. He didn’t even bother to hide his work from you.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Hmm. I can not afford to give you the information you want at this time.”

“Excuse me? You can’t afford to give me my information?”

He finally glances up at you, for one small moment.

“That knowledge is dangerous. If it were to leak, crew cohesion and morale would be compromised. It is my job as tactician and second in command to mitigate such factors.”

You can only blink, dumbfounded. The bot behind the desk only continues in the midst of your stunned silence.

“Your confusion is understandable, but I do not have time to coddle anyone’s feelings. The procedure you underwent was a steep investment of Autobot resources. We are at war, and expending such resources without a return is a mistake I can not afford. However, you are not combat-capable, so a more domestic arrangement will be made.”

“‘Domestic arrangement’?” you echo. “What do you have in mind?”

“You will work. The Ark is in constant need of maintenance, cleaning, busy-work that our crew is too strained to perform adequately. In return, I will give you the information you seek. After I have deemed that doing so won’t jeopardize our position.”

You feel a burst of spite well up within you as he speaks. “And if I don’t want to?”

“The alternative is returning to the medbay under Ratchet’s supervision, with no assurance you will ever obtain what you came here seeking.”

“So I’m being extorted?”

“You’re being bargained with. Do not misunderstand. I hold no ill will towards you. You are a victim of circumstance, and none of this is your fault.” After signing something on a datapad, he looks up at you and lowers the wings on his back slightly. “I am sorry for contributing to your distress. If it was in my power to change this outcome, I would have. But this is the situation we are in.”

The open admission deflates any indignation you felt. It was the first time anyone has apologized to you since waking up. The same kind of frustration you felt building with every dodged comment in the medbay is absent here. This isn’t what you wanted, but at least you’re getting somewhere. At least he isn’t pretending to protect you.

“I understand.”

“As soon as I can safely justify the risk, you will be given all information regarding your arrival to our base and the procedure you underwent.”

He levels his gaze and you match it. He does not move, he does not twitch, he does not glance away. You hold firm.

“I will uphold my end of this deal to the best of my abilities.”

And you believe him.

Chapter Text

Only after you finish talking to Prowl do you allow yourself to go to Wheeljack’s lab– with the help of directions provided by the second in command, of course. Despite the early hour, Wheeljack was waiting with a pack of energon gummies in hand and happy to show you to a cot he had already set up in a quiet corner formed by some shelves. Suddenly exhausted by your conversation with Prowl, that is where you fell asleep for what remained of the morning before being nudged awake by Wheeljack.

“Up and at ‘em, champ. Prowl’s gonna tear me a new one if I’m late for our meeting, and you have a brand new job to get to.”

You sit up in your cot, blinking blearily as your memories of the early morning come trickling back to you. “Oh… right. That starts today?”

Wheeljack chuckles as he collects some datapads. “That it does. Prowl doesn’t like wasting time, which is why you should get up and get some breakfast, already.”

You make a show of rolling out of bed and meandering over to the energon dispenser. Wheeljack shakes his head at your theatrics, but his helm fins flash appreciatively when you slide him one, as well.

“What’s your appointment with Prowl about, anyways?” you ask, and take a sip of your energon.

“Hehe, let’s uh…” Wheeljack shuffles his datapads, making sure they’re in the right order. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

“... War stuff?”

“Yep.”

“Oh, okay.”

Once you finish your energon, Wheeljack gestures to the door and you follow him into the hallway. You instantly notice that the halls are filled with more activity than when you met Skyfire, bustling with bots of all shapes and sizes starting their day. You try your best to take in your surroundings, but can’t help but notice some bots slowing their stride and turning to gawk at you.

Before you can ponder it any further, though, you feel a gentle touch to your shoulder and look up to see the same door to which Skyfire guided you last night.

“Here we are, kiddo. You ready for the big day?” Wheeljack asks. His hand is still resting on your shoulder.

Feeling a sudden flutter of nerves, you look away from Wheeljack and stare at the door. “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”
Wheeljack must sense your anxiety, because he gives you a reassuring pat. “Don’t worry, Prowl might come off cold but he’s mostly harmless. He won’t have you working the energon mines or anything like that on your first day.”

“You have energon mines here?”

“Figure of speech, kid. Wait here while I talk to the boss.” Wheeljack disappears into the office for a moment, and you can hear the faintest murmuring of a muffled conversation before he emerges again. “Everything’s sorted! Come on in,” he says, beckoning you over.

Timidly, you enter Prowl’s office for the second time that morning. He’s exactly where you saw him last, a placid island amidst a sea of datapads. The only noticeable difference is the cube of energon next to him, which has now been drained by half. His gaze remains inscrutable when he looks up at you.

You open your mouth to issue a greeting and find yourself immediately cut off by a datapad being thrust at you.

“Here is a list of your duties. They will be updated as you complete them. A map of the Ark is included and indicates where cleaning supplies can be found. You are already acquainted with Bumblebee, so he will be your guide in your new tasks.”

Wheeljack shrugs at you sympathetically as you leave.

“He’s… very mission oriented. You’ll do great.”

“I hope so.” you mumble. You’re so busy fidgeting with your datapad that you don’t notice the yellow minibot waiting outside the doorway until you almost bump into him.

“Oh! Hi, Bumblebee.”

Bumblebee lifts his hand in greeting. “Hey there! Prowl said you need a guide, so here I am. Wanna take a look around the base before we get to work?”

You surreptitiously look behind you to see Wheeljack has once again disappeared into Prowl’s office, closing the door behind him. No turning back now. “Sounds good to me,” you reply. Bumblebee smiles and gestures for you to join him. Tentatively, you follow.

Once you’re down the hall, you look down at your new companion.

“I’m sorry you have to take time out of your day to help me.”

“Are you kidding me? If Prowl hadn’t switched my schedule to work cleaning duty with you for a few days, I’d be out on the backroad patrol with Cliffjumper.” He shrugs as he comes to a stop by a closet, manually unlocking it with a click. “I’d be a real big dummy to complain. Plus, I like feeling helpful.”

“Oh, I see…” you trail off, and then remember your conversation in the medbay. “I’m sorry about before. I didn’t mean to pounce on you, it’s just…”

Bumblebee waves a hand placatingly. “Oh that? That’s nothing, I’d already forgotten. No worries, pal!”

His reassurance successfully relieves some of your tension, even as he opens the closet to reveal a veritable hoard of cleaning supplies. The shelves are lined with neatly-organized bottles and canisters in all colors. Stacks of rags are piled upward. Brooms, mops, and vacuums lean against the walls. A buffer even lays on the floor toward the back of the closet.

“Wow. You guys are well-stocked,” you observe.

“Yeah, thanks to our trade agreements with the humans or something like that. I didn’t pay attention.”

“Humans? Those are the little… organic guys, right?”

Bumblebee laughs. “Two legs, no feathers? Like to talk a lot? Those are the ones.”

“It’s good to know I’ve been paying attention,” you joke.

“Yeah! Soon you’ll be freewheeling around the Ark on your own in no time.”

“I’m glad you’re my guide. You’re nice.”

“Hehe. You’re nice, too.”

You follow Bumblebee in a winding path around the Ark and see offices and quarters, labs and a warehouse, a firing range and gymnasium. You try to commit it all to memory, determined to remember yourself without needing the help of the provided map.

You might be new, but you’ll be the most useful novice the Ark has ever seen. Prowl will be awestruck by your competence and efficiency, and Ratchet will see that all his worrying was for nothing. They’ll all see.

One of the last stops he takes you to is the Autobot rec room, where most of them spend their off-time and get their energon.

Not many people are there, except for a small gathering in the corner. Bumblebee explains it away with a wave of his hand, saying that most work shifts have started already. He ushers you to the multi-colored Energon dispensers on the far wall, making sure to point out the labels on each one.

Upon spotting you, the mechs in the corner scatter. One chokes on his drink when he sees you and slinks to the exit as quickly as possible, avoiding your gaze the entire time. The second gets up and follows him, but only after staring at you silently with a sharp look for an uncomfortably long amount of time. The final one waves cheerfully though, bouncing over to greet you and your companion.

“Hello! It’s nice to finally see you, we were all so curious but Ratchet threatened to bash our heads in if we tried to bother you. He’s nice like that. It’s good to see you finally out and about, I guess that means you’re feeling better now? Your repairs must have taken forever to integrate, I know that feeling. Anyways, sorry, my name's Bluestreak, what's yours?”

You’re overwhelmed with the deluge of words, still trying to process his introduction by the time you recognize his question. A question you don’t have an answer for.

“I’m… uh.”

Bumblebee steps in to rescue you. “They don’t have a name yet, Blue.”

“Oh? Really? That’s surprising. I mean, I get sometimes it can take a while for your coding to align properly and grab you a name, and sometimes your coding can shift your designation if there’s been a big change- Prime wasn’t always named Prime obviously, but I didn’t think you were a newling. And you’ve been in the medbay way longer than a name would take to settle in. Unless you had like, really bad processor damage I guess.”

“I actually don’t really remember much from before. They said a lot of my coding wouldn’t encode properly, something like that.”

This bot is certainly expressive, you note to yourself, as his optics widen and the small limbs on his back flutter.

“You were that hurt? That would do it, I guess. I mean- obviously it was bad, but woah! I’m really glad you’re okay now! Are you like, factory settings? If your stuff won’t encode I guess you wouldn’t- sorry- that must be a sore topic, wow that was rude, I didn’t mean it. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable or offend you or-”

His speech speeds up as he rambles, gesturing with his hands rapidly as he does. You take pity on him, and reach out to grab his arm and steady him. Bumblebee just chuckles.

“It’s fine, I don’t mind. I’ve said before, I don’t really remember much. So I can’t really remember anything to be upset about.”

“Forgive me if this is still rude but… that’s kinda sad.”

“Hmm. First Aid said the same thing.”

Sensing the lull in the conversation, Bumblebee holds up a hand. “It was nice to meet you, Blue, but me and my friend here still have some of our tour to get to. You know how Prowl is about his schedules.”

“Oh man, I sure do! Sorry, didn’t mean to waste your time with my rambling,” Bluestreak explains breathlessly. “I hope you like the tour! Maybe when you’re done with your shift we can talk more later?”

You get the feeling Bluestreak would be doing most of the talking, but you nod regardless.

—--

“And this will be your room!”

You step into the darkened space after Bumblebee. There’s no working lights, and you look around by the light of the doorway behind you. It’s dusty, full of miscellaneous broken items, and- the biggest factor- effectively pierced by a huge slab of rock slanting into it. It cuts off and fills the rest of the room, forming a smaller living space than was probably intended. Much smaller, just barely within appropriate room sizing.

“It’s… certainly a room. Better than the cot in Wheeljack’s lab.”

“Yeah, sorry. This is all we got. Half the ship got crushed in the Ark’s original crash, and we still haven’t had time to clear everything out even though it's been a while.”

A rock shifts from the jutting intrusion into the room, and falls onto Bumblebee’s head with a quiet ‘tonk’. He glances upwards, and then to your worried face.

“Oh it’s okay! This room is perfectly stable! Grapple says so. All we gotta do is clean out the debris so another crew can come in and fix it up.” He turns on a clamp light he brought with a flick of his wrist, then spins around, pointing playful finger guns at you. “Then, bam! New habsuite, all for you!”

“Why haven’t you guys cleared it out earlier?”

“Eh, it hasn’t really been worth the effort. We have other spaces that are higher priority, I guess. I’m not in charge of that stuff. Plus this place is just barely big enough for one bot.”

You shift your hold on the supplies you’d brought to grab the datapad that contains all the info on your new duties, Bumblebee wordlessly lifting the bucket full of stuff from your hands.

“Thanks.”

“Why don’t you just keep that datapad in your subspace?”

“My what?”

Bumblebee chuckles as if you made a joke, then stops abruptly and stares at you in horrified awe.

“You- you’re joking, right?”

“Nope. At least, I don’t think I am.”

You think back to the educational programs you’d been given a few days earlier, and suddenly wish you’d actually read through them all instead of getting bored and harassing First Aid. Not your most tactical decision, there.

“You really don’t- wow.”

“Is it that big a deal?”

“Prowl told me you had some important files missing when he told me to take care of getting you adjusted, but that’s…”

You feel a prickle of impatience at Bumblebee’s disbelieving reaction. Wasn’t he supposed to be guiding you?

“It can’t be that serious. You’re freaking me out, Bumblebee.”

“You’re not messing with me? You actually don’t have any of the base info packs?”

“No?”

He takes a deep invent, cycling air through his systems to calm himself. He powers his optics off for a moment. And when he opens them again, a wide grin spreads across his face.

“You’re gonna love this, then.”

He drops the bucket on the ground, reaching forward to snatch the datapad from your grasp. He’s holding it aloft, and before you can lean over to grab it back-

It vanishes from his hands. You stare in a mixture of awe, confusion, and horror.

“What the fuck.”

“That’s what a subspace is.”

He says, cheerfully, as if he hasn’t just literally disintegrated the one thing Prowl gave you to take care of. You lunge forward, grabbing his hands and manually moving him around, looking around his form as if it was simply hiding behind his head or under his arm. He allows this easily, giggling slightly as you make him spin in a circle.

“What the fuck, Bee. Where is it.”

After a good 30 seconds of your investigations, he shakes you off and gestures as if he’d done a magic trick.

“Ta-da!”

And then, when you glance back at his right hand-

The datapad is back.

“What the FUCK.”

—--

You’ve acquired a shadow over the past few days. A bright, sunflower yellow shadow. While his twin seems to be avoiding you whenever you spot him, the same can not be said for Sunstreaker. It’s strange- from the stories Bumblebee and some others have told you, you’d think it would be the opposite.

It doesn’t make you as nervous as it probably should.

Even now, as you fiddle with the settings in your corner of the communal washracks, he’s there. Glaring at you from his own spot on a bench by the wall and smoothly buffing his armor. To be fair, he’s probably staring because you’ve been unsuccessfully messing around with the various levers and buttons for almost 10 minutes, but it’s still rude.

After the ten minute mark has actually passed, he sighs in exasperation and gets up to stomp towards you. You wilt under his piercing gaze.

“Hi?”

“What’s your fucking problem now, newbie?”

“I just can’t figure out the controls on this thing.”

“Haven’t you ever used a shower before? Seriously?”

You shrink in shame. “Not really… not that I can remember.”

“I know about your memory problems. Practically everyone does since you told Blue. That’s not an excuse.”

“Well, they didn’t show me the controls when I was laid up in medbay. Ratchet usually turns it on for me…”

“Oh my fucking god.” He drags his hand down his face, then reaches over your head to grab a rag from the rack on the wall. “Typical.”

“What are you doing?”

“Helping you. Someone has to, apparently.”

Sunstreaker presses in a series of buttons and tilts knobs with practiced ease. He reaches for a lever in the wall, and as soon as he pulls it a stream of solvent spurts from the nozzle, washing over you without warning.

It’s intimate, in a weird sort of way. He isn’t rough, but he certainly isn’t gentle as he orders you to tilt your head or move your arm so he can scrub the hard-to-reach spots. The solvent isn’t freezing cold, at least, warmed with the geothermal energy that runs throughout the Ark and below it. It would be meditative if not for the barked out commands and his insistence that you pay attention for next time.

“Why, you’ll just help me again, won’t you?” you joke.

Your insolence earns you a swat with the wet rag.

“I’m not going to be friends with someone who can’t take care of themselves.”

The mention of ‘friends’ catches you off guard. You glance over to the side, up at his face, and see vulnerability there. He hasn’t realized what he’s said.

There’s an openness on his face. A lowering of his defenses, which is torn away and replaced with his normal emotional distance as soon as he sees you notice it, the aloof behavior Sunstreaker usually maintains returning in an instant.

Abruptly, he turns off the solvent and wrings out the wet rag before returning it to its place. Your vision goes dark as a dry towel is unceremoniously thrown over your head.

“Dry off any droplets with microfiber towels so you don’t fuck up your finish any more than you already have. And don’t use too much pressure, the towel does most of the work for you and you don’t want any scratches,” he commands.

You get the distinct feeling he’s done with you, at least for now. He doesn’t say another word while he finishes in the washracks.

And if he catches your hand as you move to leave the room, teaches you how to safely clear the accumulated grit from the delicate joints in your wrists with a stunning amount of care, you don’t tell anyone. Not that it did happen, because he thoroughly threatened you into not speaking about it. So it didn’t happen. Of course.

—--

You had just finished your shift when another alarm blared over the intercom. Upon hearing it, all the Autobots in the area had immediately stopped what they were doing and leapt into action like one tuned machine. You, as a civilian, have been left behind, your audio receptors still ringing with that terrible sound and a chill echoing in your struts.

You were unceremoniously dragged along by… Bluestreak, you think? You can’t remember. Whoever it was, they dropped you off in the communications hub with Blaster to get you out of the way and keep you safe. You only met him once, for a few moments during your tour with Bumblebee.

You sit down cautiously on the chair next to him when he reaches a hand back and waves you forward. He’s too busy to engage with you at the moment, typing in on the console and adjusting frequencies and- It’s all just overwhelming. Your own inexperience dwarfs you.

You’re new. You’re… confused, a lot of the time. But you know you don’t want anyone to get hurt.

Sweet Bumblebee. Dorky Skyfire. Ratchet and First Aid, despite your lingering bitterness regarding them. Even Sunstreaker, the weirdo who you swear has been following you.

You’re worried.

“Hey,” Blaster says, attention still firmly focused on the screens in front of him, “This is far from our first skirmish. They’ll be fine.”

“It’s not your first skirmish, but it is mine.” You look down at your hands, tightly coiled in your lap.

He diverts his focus from his work, turning to you with a gentle smile.

“Hey, you’re okay. They’ll be okay.”

“I’ll be okay. But what if they won't? How can you be so sure?”

“Take it from me, we’re professionals. This ain’t just any crew you’re on, this is the best of the best.”

“Really?”

He lifts his hand up in a snappy, half-assed salute. “We’re the Prime’s personal, hand-picked squad.”

You smile at his theatrics, despite still being too worried to really laugh.

“You’re focusing on it too much, newbie. You need something else to occupy yourself.”

“Yeah, probably.” You say, staring at the vast array of controls in front of you. Your reverie, however, is broken by the faint music playing in the background changing. Your memory makes you perk up.

“Hey, I know this song.”

“Really?” He says distractedly, the monitors ahead of him catching his attention once again. He adjusts the cord linking him to the computer systems. “That’s weird. It’s an original composition by a friend of mine.”

“Jazz?” you guess. Just a hunch.

“Hmm? Yeah, him. Great guy.”

You get the feeling Blaster isn’t paying full attention to the conversation at this point, and despite your burning curiosity you fall silent to let him work. The crackle of distant voices from the console have his full attention.

After a few tense moments, your arm is nudged, and you look over to see his hand bumping against you. He’s holding something in it, and you grab it cautiously. You lift the box to your face to see a large amount of gently glowing sticks.

“What’s…” You say, not sure how to finish the sentence, when you look over and see one in his mouth. He glances at you, and points at it with a wink. You get the gist, and grab a single stick, bringing it to your face. Ever so cautiously, you stretch your tongue out to touch it.

…

Oh my god.

…

Oh My God.

“Yeah I know, right?” Blaster says helpfully.

You nibble down the rest of the stick and immediately grab a second, mowing them down like… like something that… mows things down. It doesn’t matter. There’s tasty food that needs to be eaten. Your worry mostly forgotten, you snatch another stick and start crunching on it, humming along to Blaster’s Battle Playlist (patent pending).

Then Blaster grabs the box back from you during your distraction, and you swear you almost hiss at him for it.

“Yeah, uh, Ratchet will be furious if I let you have that much candy. You’ve decimated the entire box.”

“I only had a couple.”

Blaster side-eyes you and tilts the box to the side. Only a few pieces can be heard rattling around, and as you lean over you see there’s only a few fragments left. Whoops.

Then he grins and grabs another box from his subspace, tossing it to you. It’s a different flavor, judging from the label. You look back over at him in surprise.

“But I’m not Ratchet, so go wild. I got a craving for treats, too, sweetness.”

Blaster is your new favorite bot.

—--

Today you’re assigned to clean and organize a long-deserted storage closet. The space is dark and cramped, far smaller than the maintenance closet. If the toppled boxes covered in dust and scattered miscellany were any indication, the room hadn’t been touched since the Ark crashed. You wade into the dark, wiping away layers of dust with a rag and sorting through the stored materials, organizing boxes that haven’t been opened since the Ark originally crashed. And you do it all by yourself, because your assigned guide for today has opted to silently lean in the doorway instead of help.

He isn’t obtrusive, but he’s There, in a way you’ve noticed is exclusive to Sunstreaker from all the times you’ve seen him, even as you toil in the out-of-the-way storage room. You wouldn’t be upset, since he’s actually scheduled to be here and help you work through the wreckage, but since you’ve arrived he’s just been standing there and watching you do everything.

Sure, if something is too heavy to move or you don’t know what it is, he’ll step in and use his impressive strength to shift it or boredly explain an item’s purpose. But mostly he just stands there impassively and sketches on a modified datapad. Staring at you, sometimes. You’ve gotten the feeling he isn’t much of a conversationalist.

Despite your mild discomfort, you make a sizable dent in the chaos before you’re interrupted. Sunstreaker grunts quietly, and you look up to see a new Autobot entering the store-room. He looks a lot like Prowl, but the colors and casual posture were all wrong. The arrival nods in greeting at your lounging companion, then approaches you.

“Hey! I hear you’re the new guy on base.”

“Yep, that’s me.”

“I’m Smokescreen, pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“What are you here for?”

“Right to business, huh? That’s alright. I’m the resident psychologist- or at least as close to it as we have, here. It’s my job to get to know people, and cut off confrontation before it has a chance to begin. Sort of an unofficial morale officer, alongside Jazz.”

Sunstreaker snorts in the background, coughing his vents in a way that distinctly sounds like the word ‘bullshit’. You both ignore him.

“Sounds like an important job. Why haven’t we met before now, then?”

“Ah, well. I do also need to build an official psych profile for you- the medics didn’t let me get close to you while you were convalescing. They’re not fond of it, despite the fact that I’m a medical professional as well. And I’ve also been… busy, during your stay here so far.”

He extends his hand towards you, smiling warmly. You gently place down a small box of rubber tubing and lift your own hand to meet his.

And then, like a string was cut, like a prey animal that’s spotted a predator hiding in the bushes, his entire demeanor shifts. Smokescreen retracts his hand like he’s been burned, and steps backwards. He looks at you closely, despite keeping his distance. You can tell, from the way he moves his head and the light of his optics, that he’s resetting his visual receptors. You stop sifting through the wreckage entirely, unnerved.

“What’s-”

“Why do you move like that?”

“I- Excuse me?”

The small wings on his back twitch and move, shifting as if to try and get a better angle. Like they can’t decide how they want to sit on his back, constantly tilting to face you in different ways. The easy-going grin on his face is replaced by an impassivity that, honestly, makes you a little scared.

“It’s just- I don’t get it. I can read everyone. Something’s wrong with you.” He takes another step backwards, closer to the doorway.

“What’s wrong with you?” He mutters, mostly to himself. His doorwings keep flicking this way and that on his back. They flinch violently when a furious snarl echoes from behind him. Sunstreaker steps forward from his place by the corner. His approach is emphasized by another quick growl from his engine.

“How about you fuck off before I make you, Smokey.”

You’d be frightened of the ferocity in Sunstreaker’s gaze, the rumble of his engine, if he didn’t turn to face away from you. Having firmly set himself between you and Smokescreen, he flexes his fiercely clawed hands. You back up as much as you are able to in the small space.

“Look at them! Do you not see that?”

“All I see is an asshole wasting our time.”

“Come on Sunstreaker, even you have to notice how unnatural that-”

And then Sunstreaker says something that you can’t translate. Not because it’s so vulgar, though assuming from Smokescreen’s reaction it most assuredly is, but because it isn’t in any of the standard language packs you’ve been supplied with. Though his tone is furious, it’s quietly spoken. His words are low and rumbled, almost hidden beneath the revving of his engine as he presses in close. Smokescreen attempts to get a word in edgewise, but he has no real space to talk as he’s nearly pinned by the much larger mech.

Sunstreaker steps away, then. Clearly finished with his intimidation, he stares silently as Smokescreen flees the room with all the dignity he can manage. The heavy thrum of his engine dulls to a low rumble as he looks back, grabbing the box of rubber tubing and tossing it back to you. You catch it with trepidation under his gaze, and he sneers.

And then the moment is gone, and all hostility in the air vanishes.

He paces back to his spot on the far wall by the door, leaning nonchalantly and examining his talon-like claws with an apathetic appraisal. As you look closer though, from the edges of your optical feed, you can sense him keeping an eye on you. Periodically scanning the room and checking all the exits (which would only be one, but he seems to be including the ventilation shafts on the ceiling) with a suspicious gaze.

As you shuffle through the boxes and sort inventory, you shuffle through your own memories as well, piecing together snippets from all the times you noticed him nearby. You realize that every time, he was displaying the same behavior.

Watching out for approaching threats.

He’s still just as gruff and dismissive as ever. That’s just how he is. But you think you understand why he’s like that just a little more than you did before.

You do wish he’d actually helped you instead of filing his claws though. Even if they are, admittedly, nice claws.

—--

You hum while you mop the floor of a hallway in the Ark, absorbed in your task. Your idle humming twists around the melody of a song you can’t name, but that feels so familiar. Footsteps pass behind and around you as various Autobots go about their day and work shifts, and you pay no mind to it.

Strangely though, a lone mech paces the hall during a lull in activity. He’s whistling as he walks past, then stops and backtracks to be behind you. For a stunning moment, your humming and his whistling sync together.

It’s the same song.

You look over from your work in awe and see the mech extending a hand to you. His whistling dissolves as you stare, and he tilts his head at the extra cleaning tools you’d brought. His V-shaped visor brightens, and his smile grows.

“Need a hand?”

Chapter Text

Staring at his outstretched hand in shock, it takes you several seconds to convince your voice to work. He tilts his head at you, retracting his hand slowly, and that spurs you to reach forward and grab on to it to keep him from retreating any further.

“You’re…”

You speak slowly, still stunned. He shakes your hand, and you find yourself unable to finish the sentence. His armor is scuffed slightly, and you can’t hear his engine whatsoever, despite the close proximity. You’re not the best at reading people, but he has a sort of… energy to him. You’ve seen this before, after the battle when you were holed up in the communications hub with Blaster. It’s something in the glow of the eyes, in the way the returning warriors would shift their stance.

As if they weren’t sure the battle was actually over yet.

You process all this information in an instant, and then it’s wiped away. He lights up with a smile, too soft to be a grin or a smirk, adjusting himself to be more open and friendly. You find yourself questioning if you ever saw anything at all. Jazz takes the mop from your free hand and leans it against the wall.

“It's Jazz, my mech. Pleased to make your acquaintance. Nice to see you actually up and awake this time.”

“This time?” You question aloud, the words sounding hollow.

“Yea yea, before my mission. Was there when Ratch’ activated your audio processin’ systems, but somethin’ came up and I had to go. Got worried when you were nowhere to be seen during my check-up in medical just now.”

You chuckle self-consciously at the mention of the medic, and it snaps you back into the moment.

“Yeah, I’m… well, you found me. Here I am.”

“Here you are!” He laughs softly, mirroring you. He sounds almost incredulous.

It takes a beat before either of you say anything. The silence is awkward, and you’re eager to be rid of it. Your growing suspicions crawl to the forefront of your mind, and you decide to give them a voice.

“You were there when I was onlined? Could you tell me anything about it?”

There’s no noticeable change, but you can tell this has piqued his interest. He speaks slowly, as if testing the words as he speaks them. Or maybe testing your reaction to them.

“Yeah, I know a thing or two. Quite a lot, actually. Anything specific you wanted to know?”

You jump on the opportunity he gives, seizing any small crumb of knowledge. You’re reminded of his constant presence in your dreams, a ghost that’s been haunting you the more your processor decrypts. Surely he knows something. You find the words spilling from your mind before you have a chance to filter them, some subconscious subroutine trusting him already.

“Something is wrong and nobody will tell me what it is, but I know it.” You emphasize the last words, desperation tainting your voice. “They can be as nice as they want, but I know something is off. I know I’ve been here before, I know I’ve met you before, but I don’t know what’s wrong,” you ramble quickly, sounding like Bluestreak even to yourself, “please tell me something. Anything.”

He stares at you, the blue of his visor flaring slightly before dulling back to its soothing gradient. He doesn’t say anything. The quiet seems to last forever, and you notice in the back of your mind that he no longer lacks the constant shifting and clicking of gears most other mechs have.

“I’m not crazy, Jazz.” You intend it as an assertion, but it comes out more like a plea.

He reaches out to you again, pulling both of your hands up and gripping them firmly.

“I know you ain’t, sweetspark. Just didn’t expect you to be so quick with the worries. Shouldn’t have this conversation in a hallway.”

He turns his head, glancing down each end of the corridor. The coast being clear, he moves away, keeping one of his hands on you to pull you along. You turn back for your cleaning supplies, but he just gently coaxes you forward and murmurs to leave it. You don’t encounter anyone in the halls during the journey, and you wonder if he’s doing that on purpose.

Jazz’s hand resting on your back guides you to the familiar hallway of offices where you found Prowl and leads you to a nondescript door. He slides his hand along the bottom of the keypad, instead of directly pressing it, and flips something. It slides open to reveal an office similar to Prowl’s, but absent of the buzz of an active terminal and several datapads. There’s a thin layer of dust coating much of the room, belying his long excursion from the Ark until recently.

There are several thick squares on the desk- a heavy duty datapad similar to the kind you’d been given in the medbay, but you suspect they don’t hold similar content. There are posters of various kinds on one of the walls, and a small sound system on a shelf next to an isolated terminal similar to the one you’ve seen in Ratchet’s office. There’s even a small lava lamp on one of the shelves, the size of your hand. And a gigantic sign larger than your chestplate written in some sort of neon marker that says ‘Stop Stealing My Lava Lamps You Little Bastards’. The word bastards is underlined. Thrice.

The second the door closes behind you, you begin to gush. “So they said I was in an escape pod or something, and it crashed, but I don’t-”

Jazz cuts you off with a wave of his hand as he swings one of the chairs in front of his desk around, falling into it casually.

“Oh no, that’s all slag.”

“I knew it!”

You feel a flare of vicious vindication. Jazz must notice it, because he chuckles at your reaction.

“What really happened then?” you prompt.

He hums to himself as he thinks. “I can’t…” he trails off, his visor dimming momentarily before continuing. “I wish I could, I really do, but that’s not my call to make. And I think that info might hurtcha.”

“I feel pretty hurt already.”

Jazz sighs. “I know ya don’t really know me, not like I know you. But I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.” He leans forward in his chair, glancing off to the side in avoidance. “Nothin’ more than what I’ve already done, anyway.”

You opt to focus on his first sentence. “We knew each other, then? Before?”

He nods, glad for the chance to change topics.

“Oh for sure! We were buds. Amigos.”

You feel a sudden vulnerability, then. He could say anything to you and you wouldn’t know any better. But you look at him, the hue of his visor gently swaying between various blues, the way his attention shifts from you to the much smaller sign that says ‘our lava lamp now idiot’ in a childish scrawl. You need to know more. Anything at all.

“Tell me about it?” You don’t quite whisper the words, but it’s a close thing.

He reaches over and grabs the second chair, sliding it around to face you.

“Sit down, chief. I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

“As much as you’re allowed to.”

“Well, sure. But that don’t gotta be such a bad thing. For example, that song you were hummin’? Get this-”

—--

You’d been ignoring it and working as hard as you could, but Smokescreen wasn’t the only mech who reacted strangely to your presence. He was the most notable, of course, but after that incident you came to realize other mechs found your presence… strange. Unsettling. Like they were seeing a ghost.

But with your work in the hall forgotten, and Jazz studiously ignoring his comm receiver, you two talk. And talk. About nothing, for what seems to be hours. He even listens and laughs at some of your stories too, despite your very limited supply of them. He just acts… normal. As if you’d hung out like this a million times before. Maybe you have.

Jazz treats you like his friend. You hope you’re his friend, you find yourself thinking, after he tosses you a few energon gummies and laughs at the betrayed look on your face when you find out they’re sour.

You don’t learn as much as you’d hoped, and you still feel a bit jilted by the way he dodged telling the real story. You feel like that a lot apparently. His stories are funny, but frustratingly vague. You try to needle some information out of him here and there, but he’s a master of redirection and you find yourself invested in a new joke regardless of your best attempts to stay on track. Despite yourself, though, you enjoy it. When Red Alert finally sends Inferno to strongarm Jazz into heading to his full post-mission debrief, headlock and all, you can’t help but laugh.

—--

It’s not every day you get to threaten someone on the Ark. Finally, your time has come.

Hound stands before you, arms raised in surrender. You firmly grip the nozzle of a power washer in your hands and stare into his eyes, unswaying.

This scout will not make it another step into the Ark.

“Look, I promise I’ll go right to the washracks. If you just let me past–” he pleads, shifting his weight as if to shuffle past you. Several clods of dirt are shaken off his frame with the movement.

You brandish your weapon to stop him, squinting suspiciously. “And track mud everywhere on your way there? Not on my watch.”

Hound shrugs sheepishly. “It can’t be helped.”

“I could just give you a bath right here in the hallway and spare us both the trouble. Cleaning one section of the hall is easier than the entire path to the showers.”

At first his eyes widen in fear, but then his gaze shifts beyond you. You don’t hear anyone, and won’t risk turning your head from your target to look.

“Oh, thank Primus. Mirage, help me out here.”

Mirage wordlessly approaches from behind, coming to a stop primly next to you. In his hands, he holds a bucket already filled with soap. He passes it over to you in front of Hound’s horrified gaze, and you take it with the hand that isn’t holding the power washer gratefully.

“Mirage… how could you…”

“It’s for the best. You’re literally caked in mud.”

Mirage turns to walk away as Hound opens his mouth to speak again. Before he can say anything, you turn the power washer on. The sound of a yelping jeep reverberates throughout the entire Ark.

Your reign of terror begins now.

—-

Bumblebee is busy with something else, apparently. He’s long been placed back on normal shifts, since you’re decently acquainted with the Ark and your new function. Not all work can be done by a mech of your size though, and since Bumblebee is busy you’ve been assigned the second best option.

“Holy fuck I hate this goddamn shit. Who designed this crap. Genuinely, I want to know, so I can beat his ass.”

Working with Cliffjumper leaves something to be desired.

“Honestly I have no idea why they thought this was a good idea. It’d be better to rip the whole goddamn piece of shit wall out and just replace it. Whatever. Fuck.”

You have been so, so spoiled by having Bumblebee as your help thus far.

“Hey,” he says, throwing something out of the dark space, “Check this thing, grab the repair part from the box if it’s below 60% on the Hallinger’s Scale.”

You catch the thrown object, despite fumbling with it for a moment. “The what scale? How am I supposed to be able to tell?”

“Check on your HUD, you should probably have some application for these if you’re working on repair work. Flip the switch on that thing and open it, there should be a prompt on your visuals. Just follow the instructions on the application. I can’t tell cuz it’s too fucking dark in this shit-hole.”

“Uh.”

You stare down at the object in your hands, uncomprehending. Time stretches onwards as you tilt it, examining the sides as if the answer is written somewhere on the part.

Cliffjumper sighs, exasperated, peeking his head out from behind the wall panel.

“Alright newbie, what’s your HUD layout like?”

“My what?”

Cliffjumper snaps his fingers impatiently.

“Your visual feed, what do you see on there? Any prompts?”

“I don’t know? I just… see. What do you mean by prompts?”

“Vector Sigma rusting his ass off. Okay. That explains it.”

“Vector, what?”

“I’m just. Wow. Calling someone to get this fucking handled for me because I am not qualified. Hey Prowl-? No. No I’m- Prowl. It’s the newbie. They don’t- NO I’m not harassing them they’re fine! They’re doing their job or whatever.”

You can tell he’s speaking out loud for your sake, since you’re well aware comm calls can be done silently. He stands there for a beat, then turns to you, looking annoyed.

“You’re doing your job, right? You good?”

“Yes?”

“Yeah they’re fine, listen. They don’t have a HUD. They’ve been loading all their visual feed completely blank, apparently. No anything. Just the most basic ass newbuild visuals. They’re not getting any of the prompts, so they don’t have any of the datapoint integration. I know. Did they not load this fucker with the base datapacks, or- Yeah. That’s what Bumble said. Well I don’t know, I’m not their fuckin’ creator!”

He winces, then, and sighs.

“Are you okay?” you ask.

“I am, but he sure as hell ain’t. To put it lightly.”

“It’s not that big a deal. It’s fine.”

“Oh ‘It’s not a big deal’ are some famous last words, dipshit.”

“Well I-”

“Hold up,” He snaps, lifting a hand to silence you, “Prowl’s back on the line. He’s ordering you to the labs to meet with Perceptor, ASAP. Literally moving schedules around.”

He jumps out of the wall and grabs your hand without warning, walking off towards the section of the Ark reserved for the scientists.

“I can’t believe they had you walking around with your visual feeds fuckin’ naked like that. Seriously. Why would someone be let out of the medbay if they ain’t got this shit installed?” He mutters, entirely to himself.

As you’re pulled back to Wheeljack’s lab, which is ostensibly also Perceptor’s lab, you can’t help but feel embarrassment squirming inside you. It seems not a day goes by without being reminded of how far behind your peers you are.

When you reach the labs Cliffjumper notes the green light above the door and enters without preamble. “Hey, Percy! Your 2 o’ clock is here, just like Prowl asked.”

The one autobot present in the main lab looks up from his work at a holographic projector in the center of the room.

You sigh internally and glance at Cliffjumper next to you. Why does every other Autobot have to be red?

Much like Prowl, Perceptor doesn’t bother with formalities. “So, I hear you’re missing a heads-up display. That is a fairly important piece of software to have.”

Add that to the list of basics you’ve been missing out on. “So I hear,” you say, trying to stay casual. “That’s why we came to you.”

Perceptor closes the holograph he had been looking at and gestures towards the stool next to his. Discreetly you turn to shoot a quizzical look to your minibot companion.

Cliffjumper waves a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll finish the thing myself. Probably safer that way, anyway. Don’t kill them or Prowl will kill me.” And with that, he turns and departs the lab, leaving you with the Autobot scientist.

Tentatively you sit next to Perceptor in the indicated stool. “So… how does this work?”

He pulls open a drawer below the surface of the table and withdraws a data stick. “This can be plugged into your neural port to upload the files directly to your processor. Once they’re there, the data stick will be removed and you can select your preferred settings yourself. It’s a simple process.”

“Is that safe?” you ask.

“What do you mean?”

“Plugging something directly into my processor.”

“Of course. Ratchet did something similar, albeit more complex, as part of your repairs. Installing a HUD template is far simpler. This is just a standard out-of-the-box HUD integration program,” Perceptor explains and holds out the data stick.

You take it, turning it over in your hand. The idea of something being plugged into your head again fills you with trepidation, but you’ve taken enough of Cliffjumper and Perceptor’s time. It’s too late to back out now.

“Well, here goes nothing…” you say. You reach for the back of your neck with unpracticed hands, right where your spine connects with your skull, and feel a small rectangular port. That's where you insert the data stick, hearing a solid click as it slots into place.

And then your vision corrupts.

Glitches flicker at the corner of your vision in neon colors. What look to be Cybertronian glyphs appear in fragments, broken into shards of barely coherent language. You vaguely think you can see the color ‘Σ’. You blink, hoping to make the image resolve, but the errors remain. You’re rapidly becoming nauseous.

“Is this supposed to look like… that?”

You can see Perceptor tilting his head in the center of your vision, which is thankfully unaffected. “Look like what?”

“Uh, there’s no text or anything. It’s just… weird. Glitchy. Also I’m getting a migraine.”

“That is certainly not the intended effect.”

“What’s wrong with it then?”

“Hmm. It’s possible, due to the incredible processor damage you incurred, that it rebuilt itself around a corrupted scaffold pattern…” Perceptor mumbles more things to himself, none of which you understand. “Of course such a thing would make it incompatible with more advanced protocols, even if they are made to fit with base standard coding… that would hardly match, like trying to shove a chess piece into an advanced 3d puzzle and hoping it would solve it…”

“Um?”

Without warning you hear another click from the back of your head and your vision mercifully clears. As you rub your eyes dazedly he turns around, shuffling through a different drawer. He pulls out a different data stick from the first with a triumphant flourish.

“Try this. It’s a middleware program. It won’t be as fast or as efficient as directly using the first one, but it should route around whatever scaffold-specific issue is causing the problem.”

You eye it skeptically. “You sure it’s not gonna spam my visual feed again?”

“If you’re that concerned, we can take a visit to the medbay and get a proper scan done.”

You grimace. You’ve seen both Ratchet and First Aid several times in the halls as you’ve worked these past few weeks, and you’ve ignored them politely every time. You don’t feel like breaking your streak now, despite your anger having started to cool into discomfort.

“Nevermind. Give me the… thingy.” You take the second data stick and plug it in, with less hesitation than the last.

A world of information opens up before you. Numbers in the corner of your screen display your fuel levels, the current time, and there’s even a small pop-up next to Perceptor. When you focus on it for a moment, it expands into an informational inset, telling you his name, function, and various other things that would probably be useful if you were actually a soldier. In all the time you’d been online, you had no idea.

Ratchet was coddling you far more than you had realized.

As you stare in amazement, you turn your head to a nearby reflective surface. Some sheet of metal, its purpose unknown. There’s a similar pop-up by your own head, and when you expand it… nothing. Before you could inquire about this, however, Perceptor asks a question of his own.

“If you don’t mind me asking… if you didn’t have a proper HUD installed before now, how did you know when your fuel levels were low?”

“I just… felt thirsty.”

He squints, as if looking at a particularly fascinating experiment.

“I see.”

You feel like you gave the wrong answer.

Chapter Text

Walking around while absorbed in your new HUD interface is probably a bad idea, but you’re dazzled by the plethora of customization options available to you.

Minimaps. Weather widgets. Notes apps. And a drop-down menu that lets you change the color and design of each one. You flick through the various options as you walk down the hall. Hmm, no, too busy. That preset looks like a spreadsheet. This one’s fine- nevermind, nevermind, there’s a weird little paperclip in the corner asking if you need any assistance today. Begone.

The parade of options spooling and unspooling at the edges of your vision are abruptly interrupted by a solid clang.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” you say absently, “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“My apologies. Neither was I.” a deep baritone rumbles.

You look up to see Him. The Guy. Commander of the entire Autobot Forces. And you just ran into him. You can even see a small smudge on his chest where the paint got scraped off from your impact.

Oh my god.

“Hello... Mister Optimus Prime. Sir.” you fumble, suddenly at a loss for words.

His optics crinkle at the corners, as if he’s amused by your situation.

“Just Prime or Optimus is fine, thank you.”

“Yes sir. Optimus. Uh. Sir.”

He subspaces the datapad he was holding. “Take it from me– don’t try reading and walking at the same time.”

The self-deprecation makes you smile. “I’ll try to keep that in mind, sir. Er, Optimus.”

To your surprise, there’s no confusion or discomfort in Optimus’ eyes as he speaks to you. He even falls into step alongside you as you return to gather the supplies left over from your work with Cliffjumper.

“How are you doing? I assume your recovery is going well, but I haven’t spoken of it to Ratchet in some time,” he asks you.

“I’ve recovered just fine, with Wheeljack’s help. No complications, at least so far,” you reassure him.

He hums thoughtfully. “I’m glad to hear it. I hear your injuries were quite extensive, so it’s good they’ve all been repaired successfully.”

“Yes, Ratchet and First Aid were very thorough,” you force yourself to say.

“How are you adapting to life aboard the Ark so far?” he asks.

The attention immediately puts you on the defensive. Thankfully, you've returned to your work area by now and busy yourself cleaning the mess Cliffjumper left for you. You turn away from Optimus as you shuffle materials around in your cart, and you take the moment to calm your reaction before you turn back around with a smile on your face.

“I’m doing well. Bumblebee has been very helpful. I just recently got my own habsuite.” You say, keeping your tone level.

Optimus nods approvingly. “Yes, he’s a very dependable fellow. If he was your guide, no wonder integration into our crew is going smoothly. The bots here were hand-picked for the Ark mission on Cybertron, and they’re the most trustworthy mechs you’ll ever find.”

He reaches his open hand over to you, and you take it firmly, shaking his hand. No better way to make a good impression.

“Nevertheless, if you are ever in danger or need assistance, help of any kind at all, my door is always open to you.”

Strangely, you feel warmth spread through your chest at his sincerity. You want to stay suspicious; the mech is clearly important and you still don’t know the circumstances of your arrival here. But for all your hard work aboard the Ark these past few weeks, it’s been a while since someone simply asked how you were doing, and it affects you more than you’d like to admit.

“Thank you, Optimus. I really appreciate it. I just might take you up on the offer…” you trail off. It’s only a matter of time before you make another embarrassing mistake. You’d prefer not to do so in front of the leader of the free Cybertronian world or whatever he technically is. “If the opportunity ever comes up.”

He chuckles at that. “Hopefully that opportunity won’t come quickly. I’ve known many bots that have found me too intimidating to approach; I do hope you won’t be one of them.”

You smile at him, sincerely this time. “I don’t think you’re intimidating at all.”

“Why, thank you. It has been a pleasure talking to you, but I’m afraid I have some paperwork to attend to in my office,” Optimus says with a small wave. “Please, take care of yourself.” You wave in reply, and with that he sets off down the hall.

You find yourself feeling oddly saddened by his departure.

—--

Bumblebee hands you a small box of flavored energon- Ooh, solar energy flavor- as Bluestreak’s doorwings wiggle with excitement. He’s retelling some sort of Cybertronian fairy tale, but dramatically messing it up at every opportunity.

As he speaks, you and Bumblebee have been half-heartedly playing some weird digital game against each other on a datapad. You don’t fully understand the rules, but he assures you you’re doing a great job, even as he not-so-subtly reaches across the table and turns the tooltips option back on after your fifth loss.

“I don’t know, Bee, maybe I’m just not cut out for this one,” you muse and lean back in the booth.

His smile drops as he watches you. They both look at you in confusion as Bluestreak’s story ends.

“Guys?” You question. Maybe Bumblebee really, really liked this game. “Did I say something wrong?”

Bumblebee laughs awkwardly, shuffling and pressing a button to reset the deck.

“Sorry! Sorry, it’s just uh.”

Oh no.

“With the lack of kibble, it’s kind of hard to judge your body language sometimes. And your electro-magnetic signals are pretty muffled so it’s…” Bumblebee trails off, unsure how to continue.

Not again.

Bluestreak picks up where Bumblebee left off after a few seconds of consideration.

“You’re just pretty hard to read. Not that it’s a bad thing! Prowl is pretty hard to read too and I like him. And nobody knows what Mirage is ever thinking cuz he’s a spy I guess so his EM stuff is always lowered, and he’s fine by me. He’s pretty cool actually. Don’t tell Cliff I said that, by the way. You’re not the first bot to have issues with body language or anything and it’s not like, I mean we aren’t, I don’t know, bigoted against monoformers or anything.” He shrugs, fiddling with the straw on his drink. “It’s just a bit to get used to.”

“What he means,” Bumblebee interjects upon noting your confused silence, “is to not worry about it.”

You wish you could just wave away your concern, could say this was a rare occurrence, but the more time you spend with the crew the more common this has become. The worst part is you don’t even know what you did. Every time you question their reaction, you get baffling explanations and rambling apologies. As if they didn’t know what the problem was, either.

The energy in the room is decidedly uncomfortable.

The feeling is sliced away with the sliding of the door. A red mech– again, do they always have to be red?– strides in. Both Bluestreak and Bumblebee perk up at the addition, the latter lifting his hand to wave him over. As he approaches, you shrink back in the seat. That’s Sideswipe, you can recognize him now. And you also know he doesn’t like you.

His brother is there as well, thankfully, just a step behind. Sunstreaker has become something of a… well, friend wouldn’t be the exact word for it. He’s prickly and irritable, but he's among the small group you’ve found that doesn’t seem to avoid you so far. Then again, that’s only when he’s without his twin. They seem to share some sort of connection you can’t quite understand, and are never very far from each other.

“Sides!” Bluestreak yells, excited. “It’s been forever!”

“We talked yesterday, Blue.”

“Yeah but only barely. I hope you’re feeling better. We all know you took it hard.”

“Hah, yeah, uh. Well I’m…”

Sideswipe finally gets to the table, his steps faltering when he sees you sitting in the booth, having previously been hidden just behind Bluestreak. His eyes lock with yours and his open expression flattens.

Sunstreaker, without pause in his steps, punches Sideswipe in the arm, reprimanding. There are no words spoken, but his brother breaks the impromptu staring contest with you to pull over a chair. Sunstreaker simply steps forward and falls into the booth next to Bumblebee.

You fall silent and watch the stream of conversation flow away from you towards the newcomers. They speak of battles you’ve never fought and movies you’ve never watched. Through it all, Sunstreaker’s twin sits there, quietly morose. It’s when he casts you a sullen gaze for the third time that you lift your hands in resignation and scoot out of the booth.

“Thanks for having me guys, but I think it’s about time I turn in.”

“Aw, you don’t wanna stay? I’m about to get to the part where Sunny fell on his aft in front of this entire Decepticon squadron.”

“That did NOT happen.” Sunstreaker snaps, flicking a piece of trash that smacks directly onto Bluestreak’s forehead. He brushes it aside, giggling.

Sideswipe chooses this moment to speak up. “Totally fuckin’ did and he looked like a jackass.”

You’d smile at the exchange, but it just makes you feel tired.

“No, it’s fine. Maybe another time, guys. I’ve got work to do anyways.”

They all murmur their goodbyes, and Sideswipe’s gaze tracks your progress out of the room. Despite the fact that you’re facing away from him, you can feel it. His discomfort is like a physical pressure, and you feel noticeably relieved of it once you’re out of the room.

Maybe it’s time to take Wheeljack on the offer of his lab, given so many days ago. You are, after all, feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Your mind whirls with new vocabulary as you make the familiar trip to the labs. Kibble? Electro-magnetic signals? Monoformers? Some of the terms Bluestreak used sounded familiar, like you had read them in the medics’ guides or heard them spoken offhandedly about before, but you’d never consciously registered the meaning. Could that have been what Smokescreen was talking about when he said he couldn’t read you?

Was there really something wrong with you?

Before you know it, your ruminations are cut short by the door to the labs sliding open.

“Wheeljack?” you call tentatively.

“Hey, long time no see! How you been, champ?” Wheeljack replies from the heart of the lab.

You stop right in the doorway, momentarily surprised.

There’s a fucking dinosaur.

Standing there.

Looking at you.

You have no idea how you know what a dinosaur is, but you are absolutely 100% sure that this is one.

Wheeljack, from behind the dinosaur, lifts his hand to gesture while the other one remains steadily on something at his desk. “Oh, this is your, ah. Hm. I wonder how that works. Anyways, this is one of my other creations, Sludge.”

“... Hello.” You say, caught off guard by the unexpected presence in the lab.

He looks at you with a tepid curiosity. “Hi.”

Wheeljack gives Sludge an affectionate pat. “He would be with his brothers right about now, but they were roughhousing and things got a little out of hand. Snarl is with Ratchet getting patched up in the medbay.”

Maybe going to Wheeljack’s lab in hopes of some R&R was the wrong move. Regardless, the door beeps at you angrily for standing in its way, so you take a few steps further in.

“New bot have name?” Sludge asks you.

“Ah, no, not yet,” you reply, rubbing the back of your neck self-consciously. “I haven’t found one that fits yet.”

Surprisingly, the Dinobot nods his head as if he’s heard this a thousand times before.

“Me Sludge took forever to meet Sludge.”

It would be a sort of beautifully poetic statement, if not for the bad grammar and the fact that, one can not stress this enough, there is a giant robot dinosaur looking at you and saying it. Still, he seems nice enough, and you make a dedicated effort to get over your nervousness.

“What was it like?”

“Hmmmmmm.”

He hums to himself a long, low note. You wait patiently for his answer.

“Hmm. Hmmmmm.”

You are still waiting.

“Hrrmrmmmm…….”

Wheeljack snickers quietly behind him, adjusting some mechanism or another.

“Ah, Sludge?” you prod.

“You interrupt me Sludge. Not polite bot,” he scolds.

Somehow, you feel yourself flush with embarrassment, internal vents speeding up to disperse the heat. “Ah, I’m sorry.”

He continues as if you didn’t say anything at all. He nods to himself good-naturedly and smiles.

“That okay though. Me Sludge not polite bot too. Get name easy. You bot don’t do anything. Name find you, easy.”

“What do you mean?”

“It go snap.” He says, clacking his fangs- do brontosaurs even have fangs?- with the word snap. “Snap like… hmm…Sludge step on thing and it break. Snap. You know name when you have name.”

He nods, like this is the most impactful wisdom the world has ever beheld. And, honestly? It probably is. He’s certainly wiser than you are, in this aspect at least. Despite the strange way of speaking he does actually make a decent amount of sense.

“So I’ll just know it when I have it?”

“Hmmmm.”

Oh god not again.

“Hmmm.”

He has to be doing this on purpose. You can see the gleam of intelligence in his eyes as he stares at you. You’re not an expert at dinosaur facial expressions, but that is definitely mischief you see.

“Sludge please.”

“Hehehehehe. Yes. You bot will know. No worry.”

And the conversation is seemingly over, as he disregards your presence entirely and lumbers off through the doorway you just entered through. You take slow steps forward and stop behind Wheeljack.

You peer over his shoulder and watch as he solders something. The sound is strangely soothing, as is his quiet humming as he works. Wheeljack eventually breaks the silence as he resets some sort of mechanism.

“So?” Wheeljack says, not looking up from his task.

“‘So?’” you echo.

“So, how did your first conversation with a Dinobot go?”

You let yourself ponder that for a moment.

“It went.”

“They have that effect on people,” He says, laughter clear in his voice, “I love it, they’re fantastic.”

“So… I’m not crazy for not having a name?”

“Of course not. Do you think Cliffjumper came off the assembly named Cliffjumper? Would be kind of bad parenting there if you ask me.” He glances over at you, his voice taking on a mocking tone. “‘Hello newbuild, your name is Playing-with-Knives. Please do not play with knives.’”

You appreciate the effort to lift your spirits. It does work, a little, but while watching him do his job is soothing it also reminds you of the things you should be doing. You crowd closer behind as you watch his deft movements.

“I’m gonna go… work, I guess.”

“But it’s your day off?” He half-questions and half-asserts. “You can do whatever you want.”

“Maybe I wanna do work.”

“You don’t have to, champ. Everyone deserves rest.”

“I know. I just…” You rest your head on his shoulder, watching as he carefully twists wires together. “I wanna feel useful.”

“You are useful. You’re my little lab buddy.”

“...Thanks.” You mumble, leaning forward more and hugging his back. “I am still gonna go do work though.”

He reaches a hand behind his shoulder to give you a pat. “Aww. Okay. Have fun!”

—--

Your assignments take you all over the Ark, permitting you temporary access to even the most restricted of spaces. Such as, for example, the brig.

Granted, you were never supposed to be there at the same time as captives. But war is unpredictable. You have no warning, just the sound of voices echoing through the hallway outside the room and the grinding groan of the door being pulled further ajar; you had been instructed not to fully close it behind you during maintenance.

“Well if someone didn’t get SHOT, not naming names, Skywarp,”

“It’s not my fault Mr. Groundpounder incorporated over here shot my fucking warp drive, dickhead.”

“That insult makes no sense.”

“YOU make no-”

“You’re both dickheads, shut the fuck up.”

You turn to the sound of bickering quickly growing louder, and see a squad of Autobots flanking a trio of winged Decepticons, their armor dinged and scorched but otherwise intact. They’re unceremoniously shoved into the room, and you notice just how much taller than you they are.

You left a cart of cleaning supplies by the doorway, and it is quickly discovered by the group as the foremost Decepticon lets out an undignified yelp and trips over it.

“Way to go, Skywarp.” The red one behind him notes dryly.

“Hey, I’m not the idiot who left a cart in the…” the seeker hisses from his position on the floor, but then trails off as his crimson eyes lock onto you, clutching a mop in your hands as if it could protect you. You’re frozen in place, staring directly into the burning red. And they see you, all three of them, the other two turning their heads to look at you in complete synchronicity.

Your attention, however, is drawn from the Decepticons to Ironhide when he addresses you. “What are you doing in here, kid? You’re not scheduled today.”

For just a moment, his words make all three Decepticons pause. The light of their optics glow just a touch brighter in recognition, as though a decision had just been made in the span of a second. And then several things happen in a blur.

The red one slams an elbow into Ironhide, knocking him backward. The blue one spins and kicks Inferno in the gut, doubling him over. And the one on the floor–Skywarp– darts forward, eyes locked on you.

You see the Autobot guards try to reach out and grab the seekers, but it’s too slow, caught off guard by your unexpected presence and the sudden blows. There’s a flurry of movement you can’t fully process, and then you’re propelled backwards by a force much stronger than you, slammed into the wall behind you and then pulled forwards in front of them like a very small shield. Your mop clatters aside uselessly.

Their hands, bound in front of them, have just enough mobility to grab your arms, one each, so they can keep you away from the Autobots. You’re intensely aware of the danger. Their larger frames thrum with power and the willingness to use it, and you dare not writhe out of their grasp, despite every circuit in your body demanding it.

“Let them go, Starscream. They’re a civilian.” Ironhide commands.

“With an Autobot emblem on their chest? Right. Hmm. I’ll think about it.”

There’s no way they can fit through the small space of the door while keeping you in their grip. You’re dragged to the far corner as if you weigh nothing at all, the three of them crowding you with claws and wings. One of them snickers quietly but cruelly at the Autobots, left without a way to recapture them or free you.

Not battle-capable, Prowl’s voice echoes in your mind.

The leader, Starscream apparently, gestures at the other two. The blue and purple Decepticons jostle and pull you slightly upwards, forcing you fully upright from your hunched posture so their commander can get a closer look at you. He tilts your head up, index finger under your chin and his claws precariously grazing the fuel lines in your neck, staring at you with an intensity you couldn’t have prepared for. His gaze spears and dissects you, as if you were a specimen under a microscope. Ironhide is saying something, but neither you nor Starscream register what it is. The pump that distributes your energon feels louder in the frozen moment. His two companions mumble to each other above you, too quietly for the Autobots to readily discern.

“Huh. No battle grade armor?”

“No real armor at all, looks like. Pitiful.”

“Wow, our claws are leaving, like, actual gouges. I’m not even trying to.”

You do not appreciate him pointing it out, as you’re already more aware of the gouges than you’d like to be. A single black talon is drawn down from your shoulder to your elbow. A thin metal shaving curls away and drifts to the floor. You stare at it, suddenly unable to will your eyes upward. Starscream is still staring, analyzing you. He breaks his silence with a twitch of his wing.

“Oh, well. That’s interesting.”

Then he smiles. It is a pretty smile, but not a pleasant one. His fangs glint in the harsh light of the brig.

“This is hilarious, actually. I’m going to let you go. You’re welcome.”

“We’re what?” the blue one echoes.

“Release them. They’re of no use to us. Let the Autobots have their little… knockoff.”

The one on your right releases you immediately, without questioning. It’s a flippant motion, as if he doesn’t care either way, despite the fact that he was the first one to grab you.

The one on your left is less apathetic.

“We’re just gonna let them go? Better to have shitty leverage than none, Star.”

“Hmm. Not as much as you think. I mean, look at them.”

They look down at you, and then back at each other. You can vaguely sense there’s some sort of conversation there, one you aren’t privy to. Starscream notices your staring and winks. Skywarp looks at the ceiling in boredom, bringing his hands up behind his head to lean against the wall.

Then there’s a scandalized exclamation from above you and the blue one releases you instantly. As if he’d been touching something repulsive. You know he’s the enemy, but his disgust still makes your fuel run cold. You’re shoved forward, and before you can even stumble to a stop the other Autobots charge past you to regain control of their prisoners.

As they’re subdued, Skywarp glances to the side at his companions in interest. You’re making your way out of the room when he snaps his head back towards you with a look of shock.

Then he bursts out laughing.

He does not possess the subtlety of his fellows, and through his maniacal laughter he continues to gawk at you with incredulous glee. The security personnel hurry to get them under control.

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT, DID THEY SERIOUSLY TURN THEIR DEAD BUDDY INTO A DRONE?”

His cackling follows you into the hallway, stuttering and repeating like a glitched playback in your head.

“WHERE’S THEIR FUCKING SPARK?”

Chapter Text

You don’t take your tools with you. You leave the cart behind, still upturned from when that seeker tripped over it. You don’t run, but it’s a close thing. You don’t even know where you’re going, you just want to be far away.

You don’t do it consciously. Your footsteps just lead you here, like you’ve walked along this path many times before. The beep of a negative door response rings in your thoughts as your fingers dig into the panel to unlock the office door. Another door slides open next to you. Someone steps out, a wing on his back tilting in your direction. He turns his head, and you hunch over more.

You lift your head to look at him, and Prowl stares at you with incredulity. You feel pitiful, engine hiccuping and stuttering as you grip the door panel. He walks over and reaches to grab your hand, prying it away from the lock and staring at you like he’s keeping an eye on a cornered animal. He brushes his hand against the mechanism, slipping deft fingers beneath the corner to flip a switch, and the door opens. You rush inside.

The room is empty and dark, and you sense Prowl behind you sending out a small ping. The lights above you brighten at his command. It’s Jazz’s office. You hadn’t even realized. You spin around when Prowl stutters his vents to catch your attention.

“Will you be alright on your own for a moment?”

“Uh. Yeah. Maybe?” Very smooth. You are so good at keeping it together. “Yes.”

He squints, disbelieving, but doesn’t call you out on it. “Jazz will be by shortly. Wait here.”

“How. How short is, um. Shortly? Going to be?” You stammer.

“2 minutes maximum, I have already alerted him to your presence here.”

He steps backwards and the door slides shut again behind you, the lock engaging with a snap you can just barely hear.

“...Thank you.” You say quietly, to the shut door. If you were being honest, you were starting to wilt even more under Prowl’s stony gaze.

You walk forward and gingerly place yourself into a couch seated against the wall. The room is eerily silent, and it lets your mind echo.

Their claws pressed into your arms effortlessly. You can still feel it, the gouges they dug into you still there- and stinging more the longer you ruminate. It’s pathetic. You know it is. Here you are, surrounded every day by trained soldiers, and this brief interaction has you running. Nothing even happened. But you can’t help it.

It isn’t just that brief meeting with them though- those three towering, clawed, vicious strangers. Manhandling you like you were nothing. It’s more than that. The entirety of your stay aboard the Ark has had an undercurrent to it. Like you weren’t meant to be there. They just put words to it. The punctuation at the end of the sentence.

The only sounds in the room are the whirring of your internal fans and the uneven growl of your engine.

You get lost in your thoughts, and the door opening again barely registers. The feeling of hands gently touching your arms, however, shocks you out of your spiral. Your optical apertures are fully dilated behind the glass, leaving your vision distorted. You stare into the blue abyss of his visor.

Blue. Not red. It isn’t red.

He speaks in a low tone. “Sorry sweetspark. Didn’t mean to startle you.” His hands ground you, strategically avoiding the claw marks. He’s crouching, at eye level, then smoothly slides onto the couch beside you.

“Jazz, It was- I don’t, I. They were so big and their claws, Jazz, and I couldn’t…”

“I gotcha, don’t worry. They can’t get ya.”

“I was so scared.”

You slide off of your seat and into his lap, hugging him close. He shushes you gently.

“I know, I know it, sweetspark. You’re fine now. You were very brave.”

You cling. He rests his chin on top of your head, and begins humming a tune you can’t recognize. With your head resting against him, your engine begins to smooth into a more natural purr; echoing his.

“What… what are you doing here?”

“Got a comm from Ironhide. He said that you were grabbed by the seekers, an’ then Prowler pinged me your location data out of nowhere. So I made to go find ya and make sure you were okay.”

“Oh.”

“Are you?”

“Hm?”

“Okay, doll. Are you okay?”

You swallow your anxiety and try to calm your thoughts.

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

He doesn’t believe you, but that’s alright. You don’t believe you either.

“It’s okay to be a little freaked. You haven’t been online that long. Of course this is a shock to ya- you’ve never had to deal with anythin’ like this before.”

You accept his words easily, but a shard of shame still digs into your chest. “Was I tougher before?”

He hesitates to answer. “Hmm. Depends on what you mean by tough.”

Embarrassed, you drop the subject. You sit with him and stare at the other end of the room, a lava lamp slowly flowing up and down on the desk there. Eventually, you two start humming songs together, playfully weaving melodies into each other. You don’t know as many as him. Abruptly, a thought comes to you, and you interrupt him.

“Hey Jazz?

“Mhmm?”

“One of them, he said I…” You cling tighter, laughing the last words quietly. They were kind of ridiculous, after all. “He said I was dead.”

He grips you tighter.

The quiet hum of his engine cuts out, then back on. As if he had to physically hold himself back from fully activating his stealth modifications. You lean away from him and study his face, much as Starscream did to you. He’s a spy, so naturally he’s unreadable. But that in itself is a tell, because from what you’ve seen so far, Jazz loves to present a cheerful face.

“Jazz? Did I say something wrong?”

“No, of course not. It ain’t you, it’s…”

A puzzle piece clicks into place.

“You said we were friends, Jazz.” You pull back out of his lap, putting more space between him and yourself.

“Still are, I like to think.” His visor dims, almost imperceptibly.

“I’m tired of not knowing things,” you say, scooting backwards and standing up. He mirrors your actions.

“Yeah.”

He’s not going to tell you what you want to know.

“Are you going to tell me what it is?”

But you know who will.

“I care about ya. You gotta remember that, sweetspark.”

A bad deflection, if it is one. Maybe it’s a plea. The difference doesn’t matter to you.

“I know.”

Your body is moving before your mind even chooses a destination. You don’t need to decide. There is only one place in the whole world you could possibly go now. Your legs carry you towards the medbay as if on autopilot.

It’s not true, obviously.

Skywarp deceives. He’s literally a Decepticon. It’s what he does.

But…

The Ark seems to darken around you in your one-minded march. Faintly, you think you hear Jazz’s voice echoing from behind you, but you pay him no mind. Not even he could stop you from your objective, now. He seems to sense that, as he doesn’t make the trivial effort to stop you.

The path to the medbay is so ingrained in your mind that you reach it without a second thought, despite having worked so hard to avoid it. The doors admit you with a chirp, making First Aid look up from the terminal at the front desk in surprise.

“Oh, um. Hi? What are you-”

“I need to speak with Ratchet.”

“Okay.”

First Aid eyes the scuffs and claw marks on your armor, and scampers away without further comment at the tone in your voice. He vanishes around the corner in the back of the medbay. You stride deeper into the medbay with confidence. The room you had been confined in when you first arrived looks just the same as always.

When Ratchet enters, you’re sitting on the edge of the bed, fiddling with one of the instructional datapads you had been given when you first learned to read.

“Primus, kid, what happened to you!” He exclaims, rushing forwards and slipping a small kit from his subspace. He places it on the bed next to you, but you put your hand down on top before he can open it. “What- you’re all torn up, kid. Let me fix it.”

For a moment, you feel trapped by the concern evident in his eyes, and all you want to do is let Ratchet take care of you, like he did before. But the gentle sensation of his hands trying to examine your injuries snaps you to the present, and you recoil from his touch and steel your resolve.

You lift the datapad in your hands, turning it around to show him the screen.

[What’s a spark?] the title screen says, cheerful animations fluttering around the screen.

He glances between the screen and your face, realization dawning. “Oh no.” He says.

[The spark is an important part of your body! In fact, it’s just about the MOST important! The spark is responsible for powering the Cybertronian body and processor. Taking good care of it is essential to your continued functioning! It’s the only part that can never ever be replaced.]

Ratchet is a grouch, and he puts up a good front, but he’s a softy inside. You’ve learned this. He took care of you, so gently, in your first moments of life. Easing the burden as your coding shifted. Spending a frankly inane amount of time making sure your optical feed was perfect.

You can’t help but feel guilty as you see the resignation on his face. You keep going anyways.

[The spark is what makes you a person. It impacts your emotional responses, bridges coding gaps, and is what forms your electro-magnetic field. This organ is what separates Cybertronians from drones and AI programs! Even mechanimals have little spark shards in their chests.]

You press pause. The look in his eyes is too much for you at this point. You drop the datapad to the side, but the words come out before you have a chance to control them.

“What’s a spark?”

“What, the cutesy little video wasn’t enough?” He says, and you can detect a hint of bitterness in his tone that isn’t aimed at you. You hope.

“Ratchet.”

“That’s a complicated question.”

“I don’t care.”

Ratchet slumps backward into the bedside chair in resignation. “Fine. It really depends on your personal views, but the physical structure of a spark is a sort of miniature, partially subspaced nova fracture that can be held in crystalline stasis and encased in a spark chamber that can both sustain it from blipping out of its alignment and interpret the signals it gives off.”

“... Simpler answer, please.”

“A soul, if you believe that sort of shit.”

You take the answer with trepidation. You turn it around in your mind, handling it roughly. You lift your hand off of the medkit he had brought, and with a gesture you allow Ratchet to look over the mild injuries you’d sustained. They’d be nothing, if you had a normal frame with any amount of armor. Neither of you speak beyond a mild hiss when the repairs aggravate the stinging cuts, and a few grumbled orders to twist so he can examine a scratch.

He finishes quickly. The repairs pose no challenge to the CMO. As he finishes up, you give voice to it. That pulsing, writhing piece of code in the corner of your thoughts.

“Do I have one, Ratchet?”

He snaps the medkit closed.

“What kind of question is that?”

He’s dodging the question.

“Answer me.”

“... No.”

Even mechanimals have sparks.

—--

Prowl suddenly finds himself regretting the confiscation and subsequent destruction of one of Sideswipe’s illegal and poorly constructed energon distillers.

Were they safe? No.

Was the energon good? Debatable.

Would it shut his tactical processor up and knock him unconscious for a week so he would no longer have to deal with this shitstorm? Yes, Primus, yes it would.

Optimus reaches a hand out, tapping him gently on the shoulder. “Prowl? Are you alright?”

“I am perfectly functional.”

“That’s not the question I asked.”

Prowl evades with a curt, “Let us begin the meeting.”

“Ratchet ain’t here yet, give it a sec,” Wheeljack interjects, “He’s checking on the kid again.”

“It’s been two days, they’re gonna keep hiding in that room until y’all give ‘em space.” Ironhide grumbles.

“We will have to start without him, he can catch up later.”

This is, on all counts, an unmitigated disaster. What’s even the point of gag orders, honestly. He activates the holoscreen at the center of the table, information blooming at the fingertips of each member of the group. Behind him, a large screen blinks awake and displays a time-line of events.

“A few days ago, there was a security breach in the brig.”

“Pfft. Yea, you could say that.” Jazz scoffs.

“That breach involved a confrontation between Designation: ID 44323-V and the Elite Trine. ID 44323-V is not fully aware of the circumstances of their existence, but does know much more than would be preferred at this stage. The main issue, however, is that Starscream is now aware, as is his entire trine.”

“Are we really gonna do the number designation thing?”

“Until they have a name, that’s what they’re registered as in the system.” Red Alert chimes in helpfully.

Wheeljack leans forward on the meeting table, flicking a stylus around and looking pointedly at Prowl. “Fine then, whatever you say, Designation ID 2384-K.”

Prowl gives no acknowledgement of this barb except for flicking his gaze upward in an eye roll before continuing.

“We have no eyes in the Nemesis currently, and there is no telling how Starscream plans on using this knowledge. While preferably we could have kept him contained on the Ark until we were able to ascertain the amount of information he gleaned, that was not possible. As of now, we must operate under the assumption all Decepticons are aware of this advancement.”

“Ugh,” said Ironhide intelligently, “Megs would absolutely do a shitty zombie army thing, wouldn’t he. Just to spite us.”

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t talk about my friend like that, bud.” Jazz inserts cheerfully, malice in his smile as he stares at the offender. Prowl finds himself grateful he isn’t at the receiving end of that look this time.

“Look, Jazz, they were all our friend, but that was… before.” Ironhide replies diplomatically. “Now they don’t have a heart, or a spark. Hell, the poor kid doesn't even know their own name. I don’t really think they count as the same person anymore.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

Prowl flicks to a slide on the presentation behind him. “Categorically, yes, it does matter. You’re loyal, Jazz, and that is commendable, but how long can we afford to indulge this? I’m not unsympathetic, but we have a war to fight.”

Wheeljack frowns at that, the expression clear in his body language and electromagnetic field despite the blast mask he wore. “‘Indulge-’ really, guys?”

The strategist forges onward, ignoring him. “This isn’t just about your friend. This has the potential to decisively shift the paradigm of the war. The Decepticons do not share our qualms with using humans as cannon fodder. Should Megatron reach the same realization as our medics have, the war will be as good as lost.”

Jazz seethes in his seat, silent. The figures on the screen can not be denied. Prowl can tell when he accepts the information; Jazz is as stubborn as they come, but he isn’t a fool.

They all know the tactician is right.

There’s an uneasy pause as the room takes in the words, each looking over their portion of the holo-display on the table. Ratchet enters then, sitting down in his spot between Optimus and Wheeljack. He looks over the informational display on the desk, and the others wait patiently for him to catch up. Prowl gives him a nod once he looks up from the table, lifting a datapad and examining its contents carefully before gesturing to Wheeljack.

Wheeljack begins to speak. “If this procedure is perfected, it could be the beginning of a dark age for both species.” A tinge of horror creeps into the engineer’s voice at this. “Super soldiers- without the spark of a Cybertronian, or the mindlessness of a drone. Sparks are in short supply. Human neural imprints are not, and will require much less training to perform adequately in the field, since their minds are naturally more adaptive.”

“Once you get past the screaming.” Ratchet points out.

“Yes,” Wheeljack sighs, “Once you get past that.”

“Hard to imagine the quirky lil janitorbot as a super soldier, but… yeah. I can see it.”

“We didn’t want to force them to be a soldier by giving them combat-grade armor, in addition to the resource cost.” Ratchet explains. “Obviously the Decepticons will feel differently.”

“Or if it’s leaked to human authorities- You know they’d jump at the chance for outliving their flesh forms, and we would lose a significant amount of leverage. It has happened before.”

“There would be an uproar about why we’re holding out on them.” Optimus weighs in, “We stand to lose quite a lot of positive public opinion.”

“Well, that’d certainly make the whole ‘protecting earth’ thing much more difficult.”

“Oh come on, our human allies aren’t that stupid, have a little more faith.” Wheeljack tries optimistically.

“Our friends aren’t. The politicians are.” Jazz chimes in darkly, his expertise in human culture and social dynamics coming into play. “This is just the sort of ammo they’ve been looking for; you know they hate havin’ to rely on us and supply us with materials to keep the Cons at bay. They’d do anything, and the chance to live infinitely longer? That’s a feast for ‘em.”

“Yes, because that state can be called living.” Ratchet snorts derisively, the various vents on his frame stirring the air. “This is all dependent on if the process even CAN be perfected, you realize.”

Optimus stares at the display behind Prowl with a grave intensity. “Is that a risk we can take?”

“We need contingencies.” Red Alert asserts.

The room devolves into a flurry of discussion and plotting. Prowl sits down at the table at his place on the other side of Optimus. He reaches a hand over and cautiously pats Jazz on the arm. The saboteur glances over at him in mild surprise. Jazz sighs, then manipulates some of the information at his station, pulling it to the side so the tactician can see it as well.

All of the assembled bots do the same, picking a secured datapad or bringing up a display at their station to begin their work. As they sort through data, scraping together backup plans for backup plans and poking holes in ideas, a hushed conversation flies.

“They’d be harvested- that’s what it would be, a harvesting. They’ve done similar things before.”

“We might have another Nebulon situation on our hands.”

“We better fucking not have another Nebulon situation. Once was… once was enough.”

“Prowl, would you please input the values used for the resource cost on that operation?”

“Wheeljack, you constructed the device used to translate the neural input- how scalable is this?”

“Our friend out there is a fluke. Human minds are not meant to withstand this kind of trauma.”

“Yeah there’s no way Gamma-232 is going to work. That’s just not how the system was designed.”

“And there’s no telling how long they can survive in this state- Cybertronians live for millennia. Humans live for decades. The structure just isn’t in place to mentally handle that kind of timespan.”

“Yeah, try explaining that to the humans, see how it goes.”

“I don’t think the Decepticons would plan on keeping them alive very long afterwards anyways.”

The discussion and planning continues like that for over an hour. At a quick gesture from Prowl, all officers present fall silent. He lifts a secured datapad, pulling back from the allure of the facts and figures in the system. Prowl stands up and backs away from the table, his doorwings hiking up higher on his back in a display of muted surprise.

“Incoming communication from Starscream.”

The assembled bots watch the tactician curiously.

“What does it say?” Red Alert prompts.

Prowl doesn’t answer for a long time. The rest of the room waits with bated vents, a few resetting their optics and audio receptors in anticipation. They know better than to rush him, and let Prowl’s tactical processor consume the information and integrate it before he speaks.

The tactician’s eyes blink on and off, and he checks the screen again.

“Starscream sent me a winky face emoticon.”

“Again?” Jazz asks.

Prowl wordlessly holds up a finger, presumably so he can let the rest of the message load. Trust Starscream to send a single emoticon and then wait the exact amount of time it takes for Prowl to react before sending the rest of the information. Prowl lets a begrudging amount of respect form and dissolve in the time it takes for the rest of the text to load. Intense cleverness held back by an infinite love for pettiness, it’s such a shame.

“Prowl?” Optimus inquires.

Had Prowl been a human, he might have blushed. As it is, he resets his vocalizer and reads off the datapad. “‘Don’t worry about me, I made it home safe.’ He included a spark emoticon here. ‘As for your dirty little secret, my lips are sealed. I can control Thundercracker, and I suspect Skywarp forgot about it the second he stopped laughing. Megatron won’t know a thing. I do hope you’ll remember my kindness, Prowly, next time we have to negotiate trade agreements.’ And then there's several more spark emoticons.”

“‘Prowly’?” Wheeljack echoes.

“That’s nothing. He called Ultra Magnus ‘MagnAss’ one time in an official correspondence. With a little aft emoticon and everything.” Ironhide whispers conspiratorially.

“Oh wow. That’s so him.”

“Can we please return to the topic at hand?” Prowl interrupts, tossing the now-dark datapad down onto the table in exasperation. It causes the holo-display above the table to flutter a moment as it passes through.

“So what, we just trust his word? Starscream’s both crazy and smart, never a good combination.” Red Alert mutters, likely already simulating various nefarious scenarios in his head. “He’s probably just saving it as blackmail.”

Prowl sits back down in his seat and steeples his fingers in front of him. “I do not think Starscream is lying. Not about this. Tactically speaking, he has always been more… deliberate, than Megatron. I think he has just as many reservations as we do about the procedure and is trying to mitigate the risk of scaling up the operation.”

“If it is really so risky…” Optimus says, his deep voice cutting effortlessly through the discussion. “Then perhaps we ought to remove ourselves from the equation.”

“You don’t mean..?” Ratchet begins to ask, but trails off into incredulity.

“I do,” Optimus says gently. “We have been conducting ourselves here on Earth with the best of intentions, but it would be selfish to continue imposing ourselves on the planet after the harm our war has already brought to it. This additional threat is just the latest, and most possibly devastating, in a long line of them.”

The assembled Autobots take a moment to process their leader’s words. Red Alert is the first to speak up. “I’d like to call for a vote to implement plan 124-473B, as I’ve called for many times before.”

“Red, you can’t… that… it just feels like giving up.”

“At times, that can be the optimal play.” Prowl opens his own portion of the table’s display. “I do not need to explain the plan again, though I will call up the document should anyone need it. We all know the reasoning, we all know the numbers. The only thing that has changed is circumstance. Is now the best time?” He flicks through the data, the holographic image disappearing into a different one at his command. “I think yes.”

They all look at their leader at that, gauging his reaction. Optimus Prime sighs heavily, reaching his hand out. Prowl wordlessly hands a datapad over, and the Prime glances over it quietly for a few seconds. He looks back up, placing it gingerly on the table.

“Let us vote, then.”

Chapter Text

There’s a sticker on your wall.

Your room is small, all things considered, but it isn’t cramped. It’s certainly more comfortable than the medbay room you had been staying in before, if only because the space and everything in it belongs to you. Nobody can come in and force you out. They could, obviously, break down the door, but the point is the space is yours. The little bed that was hand-repaired, the flickering but working lamp, the few small keepsakes you’d managed to scrape together. It isn’t much, but it’s yours.

Except for that sticker on the wall.

You have no idea where it came from. Maybe Bumblebee, that one time? Or someone on the repair crew when they came by to fix up the bed and work on the room’s wiring.

It doesn’t matter, really, but you’ve been sitting in here alone for a while and don’t have much else to look at. Surely, if it’d been here this whole time, you would have noticed before. But yet here the sticker is. You’re not even entirely sure what it means, it’s just a small rainbow that says ‘You’re a Star’. Which makes no sense at all, because wouldn’t it be better to put that text on a picture of a star?

This is mind-numbing.

{ VZZT }

You’re startled from your crouch on the floor when there’s a ping at the door. You turn away from the sticker, secured firmly on the rock face bisecting the room.

You stare at the door.

It doesn’t stare back, because it’s a door.

After a long staring contest (which you win, because it is a door and doors cannot stare) you can hear the quiet shuffle of someone moving. You’re frozen, like a deer caught in the headlights. Listening.

The presence on the other side of the door fades away.

You stand up and make your way to the door, cautiously sliding it open. There’s energon on the ground, a small cube enough for a single day. You glance down each end of the hall before grabbing them and quickly moving back inside. You don’t know who's been leaving them for you, and frankly you’re too nervous to find out. You don’t want to look at anyone. You don’t want to look at yourself.

What you do want to look at, though, is that damn sticker.

Yes, that’s a much more appropriate use of your time.

You carry the energon cube back to your bed, stepping over the broken slivers of glass from the small mirror that had come with your tiny workstation. You set the energon on a shelf beside your bed. After a moment's deliberation, you sit down and pick it up again to sip it carefully.

Ooh, Solar energy. Those always taste nice. Much better than geothermal- you have no idea how the others like that stuff. Not that your preference is important. All that matters is refueling so you can, eventually, return to work. Just not today.

Tomorrow, probably. (That’s what you told yourself yesterday, too.)

As you drink, you spot a small dent on your hand. It doesn’t matter, really, but you’ve been sitting in here alone for a while and don’t have much else to look at. Surely, if it’d been here this whole time, you would have noticed before. But yet here the dent is. You’re not even entirely sure what caused it, it’s just a small nondescript indentation.

This is mind-numbing.

—--

Days have passed. The duty roster changes, but the private room of the medbay remains vacant, which leaves only one place the Ark’s newest arrival could possibly be.

Bumblebee isn’t an idiot. He’s heard the rumors spreading through the Ark- he's part of Jazz’s special operations for crying out loud. He’s fully aware of recent events, but he’s yet to make his mind up about it. What he does know, however, is that his friend has not been seen in the rec room for days, which means they’re in need of fuel.

Bumblebee winds his way towards the habsuite he had helped fix up a while ago, energon cube in hand. He slows to a stop before he reaches it, another frame already blocking the space in front of the door. First Aid is just standing up from placing a cube at the entrance, glancing over at him. Bumblebee reaches his hand up in a wave, amused. There was no formal agreement in place, no actual shifts decided on, but every day without fail someone brings energon to the door. It seemed inevitable there would be a double-booking, as it were.

They stare at each other, then back towards the doorway and the fuel gently shimmering at its base.

“The ones from yesterday are gone, so at least they’re fueling,” Bumblebee says, flicking a hand to cast his cube into subspace.

The medical technician appears less optimistic. “It isn’t good for them to stay in there all day.”

It’s been several days, and they’ve accepted the door isn’t going to open for them any time soon. They turn together, walking down the hall.

“Not like you’ve seen them around much lately, have you?” Bumblebee remarks.

That was apparently the wrong thing to say, as First Aid curls in himself as he walks, his shoulders hunching self-consciously. “I guess.”

His curiosity is piqued, but Bumblebee is kinder than he is shrewd. He makes a mental note of it, then raises his hands in a placating gesture. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant it seems like they’ve been kind of avoiding the medbay.”

“They… have.”

Forget “piqued”, his curiosity was practically drooling. Bumblebee cocks his head innocently. “Oh?”

“It’s my fault. I was too harsh, but-” First Aid looks down at him from the corner of his visor, then back up. “You’ve heard the rumors. You already know.”

“‘Rumors’? Can’t say I have,” Bumblebee replies, feigning surprise.

First Aid huffs in an approximation of laughter. “Come on, don’t play dumb with me, Mr. Scout. You literally crawl around in the vents all the time.”

“Touche. I may have heard a thing or two. But I’d prefer to get my intel straight from the source.”

The amiable glow of First Aid’s visor dims regretfully. “I told them they shouldn’t be alive.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t mean it though.”

“Didn’t I?”

“Nah. No offense, First Aid, but you're the sweetest spark that ever flickered.”

First Aid drags a hand down his face. “People keep telling me that, but it’s starting to feel like a platitude. I should have known better than to activate my faulty vocalizer.”

“Hey, you’re relatively new to this whole medic thing. Not even Ratchet perfected his bedside manner right away, probably. Actually, now that I think about it, he still hasn’t.”

“C’mon, Bee, be serious.” First Aid murmurs, a small touch of amusement flickering in his EM field before dissipating.

“I mean it, that mech has a mean wrench-throwing arm.” He continues, his voice getting lower as they approach the medbay’s doors. “Could take out a seeker’s eyes mid-air with that thing.”

“Look, I appreciate the effort to cheer me up, but I can’t stop thinking about… them.” First Aid whispers. He steps into the medbay with a single-minded determination. “I’m worried.”

“You and me both,” Bumblebee sighs. He wanders around the room, winding through the repair-beds and carts of tools. He watches the medical technician disappear for a moment into Ratchet’s office and takes the liberty to jump up onto one of the beds. He gets himself comfortable when First Aid reappears, a sealed container in one hand and two glasses in the other. “You’ve picked up some bad habits from Ratchet, haven’t you?”

“Is that a no?” He says, chuckling when Bumblebee jokingly swipes for the glass. “It’s not even real Engex, don’t worry. You won’t get more than a light buzz. It’s just a pick-me-up for long shifts.”

Bumblebee watches him pour the drinks with a quiet fascination. One of the fizzy ones, neat. The liquid bubbles and sparkles- “Can’t we just give them a spark?” He says, before he has a chance to hold the thought back.

“That’s not how it works. Would be a lot easier if it was, though.” First Aid mutters, lifting his hand to hand one of the glasses off to Bumblebee.

“Well,” He says, accepting the drink gratefully, “Why not?”

“Sparks aren’t just an organ like anything else we can replace, even if we did have an extra lying around. It would completely overwrite their personality matrix. Not to mention their mind doesn’t follow Cybertronian standards, coding-wise.”

“And what does that mean for them, exactly?”

He sits down on the bed next to Bumblebee. “Either the spark would snuff itself out due to frame incompatibility, or it would completely rewrite their processors. It would be the same as killing them and putting someone else in the body.” First Aid replies, completely deadpan.

Ah, there it is. The folly of curiosity– learning things you won’t like. Grimacing at the information, Bumblebee stirs his drink idly with a finger. “I hate to put it this way, but… according to the grapevine, wasn’t that done already?”

First Aid laughs, bitterly murmuring into his cup. “That’s how I know I don’t wanna do it again.”

Bumblebee integrates this information silently. He takes a small sip of his drink, keeping his eyes on the medical technician. The silence stretches. Bumblebee says nothing, letting his companion draw his thoughts out of hiding.

“My brothers…” First Aid says, breaking the quiet. Bingo. “The other Protectobots… we were all made at the same time. We’re a team, a unit. We literally turn into a single guy.”

“A single very big guy. Very cool.”

“And they still see me as the little brother. The innocent one. The naive one.”

Bumblebee can hazard a guess as to why. “Because of your pacifism.”

“They may shoot and fight, but I’m a medic. They like battle, but I’m the one who sees the results close-up. They fire a gun, but I’m the one who has to clean and weld the wound.” First Aid places his empty cup down on the bed. A soft tint of frustration seeps into his tone. “They inflict pain but I’m the one who has to see and fix it. Everyone sees me as this gentle spark who’s never done anything wrong and doesn’t know anything about cruelty or tragedy, but I’m not.”

“Hey, you don’t gotta tell me twice. I’m in the same boat.”

“Yeah, but you play it up. You’ve built up that perception on purpose.”

“You can’t build if there wasn’t already a foundation. I get your frustration. I’ve found it more useful than not,” Bumblebee says, fondly remembering all the times someone didn’t expect the cheerful, bright yellow minibot to have a gun, “But the infantilization can become… grating.”

“The point is, they didn’t act like that. They didn’t look down on me, because they didn’t know that they should. I liked…”

“You liked being looked up to.”

First Aid whispers the next words as if they were something shameful. “I liked being the big brother for once.”

Bumblebee thinks for a moment, then starts delicately. “If that’s true, then… why did you say what you did?”

“I disagreed with Ratchet from the start. It’s part of my base programming.”

“Elaborate?”

“I’m a Protectobot. We were made to protect organics. Our coding latches onto humans like a human’s coding would latch onto a puppy. It’s part of our social behaviour algorithms. The preservation of life is our highest priority.”

“But your brothers, like you said before, they get up close and personal in battles. I saw Blades stab a guy like, five times in a row. That isn’t exactly preserving life.”

First Aid grimaces. “That’s our base programming, but we each… adapt and interpret it differently. But that in addition to my pacifism and medical oath… it doesn’t… I don’t hate the person we made. But what we did to them was a corruption of everything I was made for. It’s not right. I protect humans, I don’t mutilate them. Or at least I didn’t.”

The final nail in the coffin. Confirmation achieved. Bumblebee’s espionage training cheers in the back of his mind but he quiets it swiftly, reaching a hand over to pat First Aid on the back sympathetically. He switches tracks, fitting that knowledge into the puzzle pieces of his mind.

So they did convert a human, as opposed to the other plausible theories floating around in his head. The only question now is… which one. No humans have been allowed around the Ark ever since the incident, which leaves his information spotty at best. It could be anyone.

But then again… no. It couldn’t be.

His chest feels floaty, spark buzzing with unspent energy. It’s the rush of a puzzle solved, intel gathered, a job well done. Paired with it is the sinking, drowning feeling washing over him. He knows who it is.

Bumblebee thinks about Spike, and has to mute his voice for a moment to process.

Oh, no. Poor Jazz.

—--

Jazz was wrong.

The Decepticons have you again, and they’re not going to let you go. Not when the Autobots stand around you like an audience, watching in silent condemnation.

Again, talons dig into your arms. Again, crimson eyes stare into you. Again, you hear scornful laughter.

“Please. Please, let me go. I’m not worth it,” you plead. But no matter how much you beg, your voice can’t seem to rise above a staticky whisper. You can barely hear your own words over the boom of shots fired and the thrum in your chest.

Starscream, looming before you, unrestrained and dreadful, tilts his head and sneers at you. “Clearly.”

Another voice echoes from beside and above you. “They’re so soft,” it says, a strange tone to his words. “We could probably break them with our bare hands.”

You bow your head in shame, but Starscream’s optics still burn in your vision, somehow. “I just wanted to help.”

Starscream’s mouth curls in disgust and he gestures to your captors. “Put them out of their misery.”

You open your mouth to protest, but before you can make a sound the grip on both of your arms tighten, and the seekers begin to pull.

You feel your plating buckle and cables tighten before your fragile frame is torn in two, metal shearing apart with hardly any effort. A deluge of red cascades from the mangled wreckage of your body to the floor at Starscream’s feet. Your vision is split in two, each optic staring from a different angle on either side of the spillage.

All you can do is watch helplessly until the blood stops flowing to reveal an exposed human body, curled limply in the middle of the carnage. The fractured shards of a spark chamber impale it in the chest. It does not move, and you cannot see its face.

The laughter of the seekers stops abruptly when they notice it.

“Oh shit.” Sideswipe says, looking down at you in horror.

You snap awake.

—--

It doesn’t matter at all.

You’ve been notified of some loose panels in one of the Ark’s walls and have been assigned to replace them. A simple cosmetic fix. The light on your datapad alerting you of the problem is a constant blinking beacon in the darkness of your room. The list of your duties has been updating remotely during your absence. You stared at the list, sometimes, trying to convince yourself it was worth the time. New tasks would appear, and after an uncertain amount of time vanish yet again. As if they’ve already been completed. Or possibly whoever is assigning the tasks is trying to take it easy on you.

Guilt gnaws at… nevermind. You don’t feel anything. You made a commitment, and you’ve been slacking. It’s as simple as that.

Forcing yourself up out of your bed and towards the maintenance closet feels like an impossible task, your legs feeling as though they were made of lead instead of Cybertron-Earth alloy. But you carry on anyway, hesitantly poking your head out the door to make sure no one was passing by. You suspect if you’re seen so soon in your shift you would retreat to the solitude of your room again.

Hiding is no longer an option. Not when you went against orders and disappointed Prowl. Disappointed all of them. You have to make yourself useful again. It’s the entire reason you were built, your only redeeming quality. You need to justify your own continued existence.

With this purpose hardening in your mind, you carefully scan the shelves of the closet and pull down the needed toolbox. It wasn’t a complicated task, really. It’s nothing to check the datapad again for the location of the corridor, setting the box on the ground to begin your job once again. A simple fix. You can do this.

You’re startled from your focus by a familiar voice.

“Oh! Hey!”

You pause in your motions. Bluestreak stops a small way away, and he waves to you nervously.

“Are you alright? It’s been a few days since we’ve hung out or anything… and Bumblebee said he hasn’t seen you either, and. Uh. How are you doing?”

The gesture is kind, but it doesn’t matter how you feel. You’re not even a person. You’re just a drone that’s programmed to think it is. “I am operational.” You say flatly.

He frowns, and tries again, stepping closer. “It’s been a while since we’ve seen you out of your room, we kinda missed you.”

“Sorry,” you reply, “I’ll make sure to do my job from now on.” You make good on that promise by resuming your work. The tool you’re using slices through the panel’s welded connections with ease. You stare intently at the disconnected parts.

“That’s… not what I meant at all. I was just wondering, you know, if you’re like. Okay? Because no offense, really none meant at all, but your plating is kind of scratched up and I don’t think you’ve been taking care of yourself and that’s usually not a great sign, so…”

You ignore his statement, reaching over for a wrench.

Bluestreak watches you remove the bolts in the wall, his gaze bobbing to follow your twisting movements. “We’re worried about you. Me, Ratchet, Wheeljack, the twins-”

“Sideswipe hates me.” You cut in. “And Sunstreaker hasn’t been around. I don’t see why this is relevant to my current work.”

Bluestreak moves as if to say something else, but cuts himself off before it starts. “Wait, you think– Primus, Sideswipe doesn’t hate you! He’s the one- He’s just… Sides has been in a funk lately. Sunny’s worried about him.”

You catch on to Bluestreak’s stutter, but you can’t find the energy to care about it. Sideswipe’s feelings don’t matter. Your own feelings don’t matter. This conversation is just a distraction. “Well, yeah. Being around a drone that thinks it’s a person has to be disconcerting.”

You turn back to look at him, and you find yourself feeling dull surprise at the amount of sadness on his face. Bluestreak is expressive, but the way his wings sink low and his eyes dull to a glint of sorrowful blue gives you pause. “Is that what you think? Is that the conclusion we led you to?”

“Nobody led me to any conclusion!” You snap. “Nobody told me anything, you all just let me drown in confusion.” You fight your tone back to the monotone of before, the tone you’re supposed to have. “I’m not going to keep pretending to be someone I’m not.”

“I don’t care.” He says, his hands clenching into fists at his side. “You’re our friend. That’s the part I care about. You have people that like you. I promise you, you’re not alone.”

“I don’t feel liked.” You say. You can hear the phantom whispers of the Aerialbots, bewildered by your lack of an electromagnetic field when you walk by. The way Smokescreen stares at you whenever you’re in the same room, like he’s dissecting a bug. Brawn staring up at you with wide eyes, caught off guard by your approach and trying to subtly hide his twitching trigger finger. And that was before. “I feel like a freak.”

“So? We’ve been at war since forever. We’re all messed up in some way, you don’t need to isolate yourself. If you really need space I mean, I’ll go, but I just think it’s important you know that. Yeah.”

“That isn’t as comforting as you want it to be.” You mutter, reaching to grab your tool again. You don’t remember when you dropped it. A thought comes to you, and you tilt your head back to him. “Why are you so attached? We practically just met.”

The look on his face twists in a way that you did not anticipate. “I- well, we. Sunstreaker said that- um. I don’t…”

You level your gaze and stare straight at his face.

“The person you knew before me is dead, Bluestreak.”

He doesn’t reply. You stare at each other.

He glances away. You don’t.

There’s a faint click from the mini-welder activating. It grabs his attention, shifting it back to you as you move your gaze away and back to the wall. From the edge of your visual feed, you see the wings on his back droop in defeat.

You return to replacing the panel.

Neither of you say anything further, and after a long awkward moment, he eventually leaves you alone.

Your chest feels emptier than ever.

Chapter Text

One day at a time.

Day by day, you venture further outside the refuge of your room to resume your assignments. Completing the familiar tasks and watching them disappear from your datapad is a beacon through your malaise, a purpose to strive for. Nobody can fault you when you make the work roster roll.

You’re so proud of the achievement you can retreat back to your room at the end of your shifts without feeling guilty for your isolation.

However, your plan of curling up in your bed after finishing dusting the storage rooms is interrupted by a melodic knock at your door.

You pause from organizing your desk to eye the door suspiciously. You know exactly who it is. Whether you can stand to face him is the question.

“I won’t come in if you don’t want me to, but I do really miss ya.”

Jazz knows you’ve been working again, and he knows your shift is finished for the day. Your list of excuses for hiding away shrinks around you.
Hesitantly, slowly, you inch towards the door and extend your hand so you can manually open the door mere inches.

“Can I help you?” you ask the visored mech standing at your door. He tilts his head at your voice.

“I should be the one askin’ that, actually.” He prompts, again. This isn’t the first time he’s made a preposition along these lines. You appreciate his attempt at giving you space, letting you sit in your room alone and undisturbed, but every day without fail he would keep trying to draw you out.

It’s unusual, the feeling of being desired. He’s a kind person, all things considered, and his need to make sure you’re alright is… nice. But at the same time, it’s grating. He obviously has some sort of connection that you lack the context for. A history that you aren’t privy to. The worst part, though, is that despite your lack of knowledge, you feel it too. Like an encrypted line of code in the back of your mind.

From the moment you first met him, Jazz was your friend. From before you first met him, Jazz was your friend. When you were panicked and scared, where did you go? To Jazz’s office. A path you were never shown. A path you’ve followed a dozen times before.

His presence is comforting, and that’s the cause of the discomfort.

In front of you he stands, questioning.

“Yes.”

“Mmm?” Jazz hums.

You step back away from the door. “Yes, you can help me. Come in?”

He’s a cheerful person, and his various facial expressions usually include a grin. The one he wears as he steps into the room is different, though. It’s the same one he had when you spoke with him for the first time. Soft, friendly, and… purposeful.

You gesture at your desk and perch on the edge of your bed, unsure of how to begin. You’ve imagined talking to him so many times that now, with the opportunity finally in front of you, your words have left you.

He settles in the proffered chair. “So… how you holdin’ up?”

You’re not sure how to answer. You have no words to give that won’t sound pitiful. So you settle for vagueness. “I’ve… been better.” You catch his hand twitch, and then it starts tapping a short repeated melody against your desk. You feel like you answered wrong.

“Is there any way I can help?”

Your mouth twitches in a half-hearted effort to smile. “Would you happen to have an extra spark or t-cog laying around?”

Jazz pantomimes checking his pockets. “Nah, can’t say that I do. Must have used up my last ones.”

“Darn,” you say, pretending to snap your fingers. The attempts at comedy aren’t enough to pull back the dark shroud covering your thoughts, though, and your movements feel stilted. As if you’re moving while submerged.

“Jazz?” you ask eventually.

“Yep?” he responds, his casual pose contrasting with the laser-focused gaze he’s locked onto you. You try to speak but find yourself unable in the face of his attention. You can’t bend your thoughts into anything that would… work.

You decide to start small, a tiny crumb of information that couldn’t possibly hurt. “Before… the accident… what did we like to do? Where did we like to go?”

Jazz tilts his head at the questions, seeming surprised by them.

“We liked to drive around together, mostly.”

“Just… drive?”

“Yeah. It was a good break from responsibilities. For both of us.” He says wistfully. “Roam around, see the sights. See whatever we could.” He rests his arm on the desk and props his chin up with his hand. His face drifts from its lock on yours, and his visor’s cyan flows to a deeper hue. He snaps out of it with a quick gesture and points to you. “One time in particular, we saw this street performer sneeze. Knocked over his whole set. You laughed ‘til you got sick and we had to pull over.”

You tilt your head in a mirror image of Jazz. “I don’t think I’ve sneezed in a while.” His movements freeze in an expression of… something, but you pay it no mind. You dim your optical feedback, focusing, as if trying to pull the shared memory from the depths of your code. An image returns from the search, colors wrong and pixelated, but definitely there. You can almost see it. It’s just barely beyond your grasp, and the more you focus on it the less coherent it becomes. Your own subconscious rendering is altering the memory in real-time.

Still, though, it’s something. The sound of two laughs at once. The miserable but deeply amusing honk of a clown toppling over. A distorted image. 

A grin reflected in a windshield.

The wraith of a memory drifts into the back of your mind, teasing at more history hidden in the darkness.

“That’s… that’s not enough. I need. Something. Something real.”

 “Anything you wanna know, I’ll give you.” Jazz says, like it’s just that easy. “Cat’s out of the bag. If you want me to tell you your name, if you want me to grab that medical file from Prowl’s desk. Say the word.”

—--

“Anything you wanna know, I’ll give you.” Jazz says, because it really is that easy now. “Cat’s out of the bag. If you want me to tell you your name, if you want me to grab that medical file from Prowl’s desk. Say the word.”

They look at him, plain blue eyes blank. Even for a trained spy there’s nothing to pry at. For anyone else, it would be unnerving. In Jazz it just instills a crawling feeling of shame. He should have never let them get to this point.

Their voice clicks with static as it reactivates.

“Why do I like you?”

“Pardon?”

“Even though my memories are broken, I like you.” They say, emphasizing the last words. As if they weren’t the right words for the job, but the closest ones they could verbalize. “I want to know. You keep speaking to me, but you never say anything.”

“We were friends.”

They tense up, leaning towards Jazz. “You keep doing that! I know this person I’m seeing here isn’t the real Jazz. Let him speak to me! No more spy persona.”

Jazz raises his hands in placation. “No, really. We don’t have a word for it.” There’s no click, no noise or flash. No indication of movement at all, but suddenly Jazz is sitting in front of them. His visor is gone.

This isn’t Jazz the intelligence officer anymore. 

It’s Jazz. The honest one.

“We were friends,” He says. “Real ones.” The dark, unlit optics of his face seem to be dead, but the emotion they convey remains clear. “We don’t have a word for it. For us Cybertronians, changing how we present is second nature. But I promise, I would never lie to you. That’s not what friends do.” He stresses the word friends. It’s not the word he wants to use, but just like you, it’s the only one he has.

“How did we meet?”

It was summer.

The warmth of the sun was still foreign to the mechs. Even more unfamiliar was the sunshower that ended as quickly as it began, startling some of the less adventurous mechs back into the safety of the Ark. Rain on Cybertron was much more dangerous. He can still recall it with perfect clarity, the gentle water leaving the whole area covered in a fine mist. It was almost… pretty. 

And then they were there.

“Oh fuck. Hello.”

This wasn’t first contact, that had already been established. But still, they really needed to ramp up security if random humans were approaching on little-used hiking paths and almost slamming face first into people’s legs. The situation was chaotic, true, but the faction’s intelligence officer not noticing that sort of thing was just a bad look.

“Sorry little guy, but this area is supposed to be off-limits.” Jazz said, gentle as he could, in what he’s… reasonably sure is the local dialect.

Instead of walking away and never returning, which is what Jazz had hoped the interloper would do, they simply stood there peering up at him with round organic eyes.

“Um… that’s the problem,” they replied after a beat of silence. “I… don’t really know how to not be in this area. I think I’m lost.”

It takes him a good moment or two before he’s able to interpret the sentence. Imperceptible to the organic (hopefully, anyways) but still longer than he would like. “I understand. I can escort you back to where you came from, if you would like the assistance.”

“Oh thank god. I thought I was gonna get eaten by a puma or something.”

Together they set off toward a path Jazz was able to locate using his visor and a quick scan of the area. Jazz makes sure to slow his gait to allow the much smaller human to keep up.

“So, what are you called?” They broach.

“I’m designated as Jazz.” He replies. “In this language, anyways,” he adds as an afterthought. Accuracy is vital to preventing miscommunications, after all.

The human peers up at him curiously. “‘Designated’, huh?”

“Is that… not an appropriately casual way to refer to it?”

“Oh wow. Uh. Nevermind. Anyways, nice to meet you, Jazz! Is it okay to ask why you’re named that? Do you like music?”

He synthesizes an approximation of a small laugh. “Do I like music? You have no idea.”

The interaction was relatively brief, and surprisingly pleasant. Until he finally rounded the corner for the entrance to the hiking trail. The human took a sigh of relief and moved a few steps away, but before he could say his goodbyes and turn back to the Ark, they called out

“Are you guys… okay? No offense intended, but you’re kinda bad at the whole ‘talk like a human’ thing.”

Jazz’s movements don’t falter despite his surprise. Fuck. If it was that obvious, just from this short walk, then they were really gonna suffer in the diplomatic meetings two weeks from now. There’s still so much they don’t understand about their new organic neighbors.

“That obvious, huh?”

The small creature pinches its fingers together, leaving just a sliver of gap between them, and squints. “Just a little bit. A smidge.”

Jazz gets the impression it is more than a ‘smidge’.

Despite the chaos and disorientation of the Ark behind him, though, Jazz can’t help but smile a little at the organic’s frankness. “Well… care to illuminate me?”

A soft voice cuts through the recollection.

“I’m sorry.” 

Their head is bowed as they listen, the glow of their eyes fluctuating at the edges. Jazz is hit with the realization that Cybertronian bodies can’t cry.

“You have nothing to be sorry for.” He says, reaching his hand out towards theirs. He doesn’t bridge the gap. “This wasn’t your decision.”

“No, really. I’m so sorry.” They continue, reaching their own hands out to grasp Jazz’s. “Your friend died… and all you have to replace them with is this. I can’t… be them for you. I’m really sorry, Jazz.”

“No.” Jazz states firmly. His voice leaves no room for argument. It’s heavy with conviction. “You are not a replacement. You don't have to be them. You shouldn’t. Your programming was based on my friend, but you have an identity of your own.” He stands up abruptly, sliding smoothly from the chair. His visor appears back on his face in a motion so quick it isn’t even perceptible. “I can go get the medical file right now. You deserve to know.”

They raise a hand, and Jazz falls silent immediately. His every movement stills. Even the subtle clicking of gears and the thrum of his fuel-pump seems to become softer.

“I want to know. I want to know so badly. But…” they trail off, anxiously knitting their fingers together.

Jazz stares at their face, seeking. His stance relaxes and he nods. “But you need time.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Can I, um. Could I be alone right now, please?”

“Of course. If you ever need anything-”

“I know. Thank you, Jazz.”

The walk to his room is normal. His perpetual smile flashes at those he walks past, just like usual.

He raises a hand to his face and slides the digits along the edges of his visor. The sound of his engine cuts out, despite the fact that it still rumbles within his chassis. He sits in a true silence, only afforded by the modifications his frame had undergone in the name of his job.

Quietly, stealthily, efficiently. 

He grieves.

Those first bewildering days on a new planet are still fresh in his long-lived memory. As official spymaster and unofficial cultural investigator, it was his duty to examine their surroundings. Learn the ins and outs of the native lifeforms. How to blend in. How to stand out.

It was exhausting. It was isolating. It was fun, sometimes, but they were all disoriented from the crash and trying to fit their old war into this new world. Navigating languages and cultural standards for a species with whom they had nothing in common was… difficult, to say the least. He was writing brand new social algorithms to integrate, without any sort of checks and balances. There was no safety net, no life-raft to depend on. Cybertronians are natural mimics, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a difficult adjustment. Especially considering most Cybertronians had long since lost those algorithms in favor of ones more conducive to warfare. 

Humans tend to take it for granted, but Cybertronians are not human. In both body and mind, they are entirely alien. It was First Contact, and the only person with the real expertise to handle it was Jazz.

Others assisted, of course. Bumblebee, the ever clever spy and his burgeoning friendship with a human youngling, was a boon. Blaster tapping into their rudimentary broadcasting (No planetwide servernets yet, damn.) was invaluable– now they could analyze languages and behaviors without in-person failures of communication. Those could have proven disastrous when they began attempting to approach figures of authority on the planet. Various other bots contributed various other things to ease the transition, but the primary job of interpreting these strange little organics came down to him.

He was adaptable. He was smart. He was trying to translate without a Rosetta Stone.

Despite his love of it now, Jazz isn’t ashamed of the truth. He wasn’t exactly what one could call a ‘fan’ of the planet and its inhabitants. Individually, sure, they were alright. They could be pretty cool, all things considered. But he yearned for home.

His perspective was tilted to the side, straightened out, and made presentable with the arrival of a new friend. Friend is a good word to call it, he supposes, but it didn’t quite capture the exact angle of the partnership.

Originally averse to making such vulnerabilities clear, the Autobots hadn’t made the depth of their ignorance known. This new being saw the tightrope the Autobots had been walking, scrambling to avoid falling into the unknown and thus ruin any and all relations on this planet they were stranded on with no resources, and had accepted it whole-heartedly. There was a life-raft, now. A hand on the other side of the bridge, reaching out.

Jazz still had a war to win, a world to interpret, and a mountain of paperwork he didn’t want to do, but it was easier now.

Humans are a highly social species, and Cybertronians are as well. Sometimes, there’s just a connection. Despite the system incompatibilities, there’s a soft click in the coding. Bumblebee latched on to a family on some of their first days on the planet, following one of the younglings curiously and being followed in turn. Powerglide had… well, Jazz hesitates to name whatever that thing going on with Astoria is, but it’s the same principle, even if both of them are weird about it. Carly and Ironhide had become close as well. 

It was just a thing that happened. Sometimes, between completely different puzzles cut from separate molds, two pieces fit together perfectly. It was a unique type of friendship, a flavor each species individually couldn’t quite grasp. Bumblebee liked to laugh and call it “little buddy syndrome”.

Jazz misses his little buddy.

Their liaison had made the world of humanity so much easier, so much brighter. They had gifted him the ability to find joy on this pale blue dot.

Jazz was horrified by the circumstances, but… he had hoped… he wished…

He had so much he wanted to show them, like how much they had shown him, such a short time ago.

He had been excited.

Stupid.

Chapter Text

Wake up, refuel, work, recharge. Wake up, refuel, work, recharge. Wake up, refuel, work, recharge.

The routine you’ve adopted over the past few weeks helps to focus you, keeping you productive while allowing the bare minimum of passing pleasantries to any bot who might pass you. Jazz continues to visit you on occasion to catch you up on the goings-on of the Ark and share music with you, which is quite enough socialization for you. Sending Bumblebee the occasional meme via datapad is better than nothing.

Still, despite your progress, something still feels… off-kilter. Wrong.

You feel wrong.

Carefully you get up from your bed and poke your head out the door. You scan the hall, satisfied to see nobody is around to see you.The lights are dimmer than usual, mimicking the darkness outside and saving energy. Cybertronians don’t have a circadian rhythm like a human’s, but it’s more convenient to follow the cycles of the planet you’re on, meaning the halls will likely stay empty for a good while. You step the rest of the way from your room, quietly working your way down the corridor.

Maybe a shower will help clear your thoughts.

As you get to the washracks, you slow. Carefully, you open the door and scan the room. Empty. You enter quickly before anyone spots you, and– ‘That’s silly,’ you think to yourself, ‘I’m not doing anything wrong. Why should I be so sneaky? I live here. I’m just going to take a shower.’

You giggle nervously to yourself for no reason in particular and find a stall, adjusting the switches just as Sunstreaker had taught you. It isn’t long before you’re going through the normal routine of cleaning yourself, shifting your hands to clean all the fragile joints and taking a careful moment to rinse clean the optical glass protecting your eyes.

You pause as you see your reflection across the room. There’s an alcove in the wall there, lined with mirrors at all angles. Probably for checking paint or markings or… something like that. You wouldn’t really know, because you’ve never needed to use it. You can’t help the urge but to try and pose from across the room, watching your figure twist and tilt from all angles. What do the Autobots see when they look at you?

Blank.

You have no paint, beyond the red face on your chest that stares back at you in accusation. There are paints in a designated section of the room, blues and yellows and other beautiful shades for other people to wear. Each Autobot, each Decepticon even, can be distinguished by the colors they choose to don. And you’ve chosen nothing. Plain, cold metal graces the eyes whenever someone sees you, with a nearly invisible topcoat placed there solely for protection’s sake.

Weak.

You’re small, despite not being classified as a minibot. That alone isn’t a damnable offense, but your armor itself is almost nonexistent. You’re thin, slender, almost painfully so. All of your allies wear armor of some sort, some wearing armor thick enough to stop… well, you wouldn’t know, but you assume it’d be pretty impressive. You don’t even have an alt mode, and all the utility that comes with one. Compared to that you’re just… nothing.

Dead.

… Self explanatory.

You tear your gaze away from the mirrors and try to resume your bathing. You grab a brush, moving it gently over seams to try and rid yourself of the grit from work. One thing sticks in your mind, though. It’s burned itself into your thoughts.

The glaring red of your Autobot insignia is hidden beneath your hands, peeking out between the digits.

You never asked for this.

You never swore an oath or committed yourself to a cause.

Do you even… deserve to wear it at all? To be here?

Placing the brush down carefully, you reach over to grab a different brush. You watch yourself out of the corner of your visual feed as you pick it up. A heavier one- a sturdier one. The steel scrubbing wires on the end stare up at you in reproach.

Before you even know what you’re doing, you’ve begun. You start in slow, scraping arcs. The sound makes you wince. After a few seconds, you’re so demoralized you lower the brush and stare at the bristles uncomfortably. But… there. There’s a flake of red on the end of the brush. It’s just a tiny bit, but you look down and spot a noticeable streak on the symbol.

You lift the tool to your chest again. You ignore the screeching sound this time, focusing on the steadily vanishing mark.

When your right arm gets tired, you switch to your left.

Your hands keep moving, over and over. The motion feels… robotic.

The insignia can’t be seen anymore, just a bare patch of scraped metal, but you keep going.

You’re so absorbed in your motions that you barely even register the tinge of pain. You hardly even recognize why you’re doing it anymore. You keep going until you can feel the metal beneath your hands dip a little under the pressure. It hurts, the sensors beneath the now thinned plating throwing up errors and warnings all over your HUD. But the harsh sting is held at bay by another, stronger emotion.

Relief.

Finally, you tear your gaze away from your chest to stare at the floor. The red flakes that used to be your Autobot emblem lazily swirl around the drain at your feet before disappearing. Still, a slurry of metal powder and cleaning solvent remains, too clotted to drain away.

That won’t do.

As the Ark’s janitor, cleaning the mess is easy, working diligently and quickly. By the time you finish, turning to look one last time around the room, there’s no evidence you were ever there.

Until you step out into the hall and freeze in place, locking eyes with another bot stepping around the corner at the same time. The door to the washracks closes behind you with a subtle hiss, but it feels like a punctuation mark. He’s already closer than you’d like, a few short strides away, and you imagine you can hear the fragile workings of his optical display adjusting as he stares at you.

Sunstreaker looks at you like you’re a very small, very frail prey animal.

You look at Sunstreaker like you’re a mouse caught in a trap.

His eyes dart down, then up again, taking in the state of your finish and the bare wound where the insignia used to be. He squints at you. There is a small burning pain where you scraped your chest raw, but the longer he stares at you like that, the more it grows.

“What the fuck did you do.” His voice is flat. There is no questioning tone.

“I, um,” you eke out, unsure how to explain this bout of self-injurious spontaneity. At the moment it had seemed imperative to remove the Autobot brand from your body, like removing a splinter or a thorn, but Sunstreaker’s countenance summons a fresh wave of shame.

“I swear to god I can’t leave anybody alone on this ship. Fucking. Ugh.” He grumbles in exasperation, impulsively reaching forward to grab at your arm.

You reflexively recoil, your memory suddenly flooded by sneering Seekers. And, to your own surprise, another memory. The grasping of medic hands, pulling and twisting. The jolting agony of steel embedded into flesh. “Don’t touch me like that. Please.”

He freezes the instant you recoil and scans your fearful movement, and then carefully retracts his arm in favor of beckoning you instead.

“Follow me.” His voice leaves no room for argument as he turns on his heel and sets off towards the barracks at an efficient clip. You struggle to keep up, following behind as if by gravitational pull.

You turn down the hall, away from the room you just left, and you can’t help but question aloud. “Where are we going?”

He tilts his head to look at you, a cold anger on his face. He looks away again, continuing on his path. His lack of response isn’t comforting.

“Um. Sunstreaker?”

“We’re going to my room so I can fix this.” His face scrunches slightly, and while he doesn’t turn his head fully, you can tell he’s reset his optical sensors to focus on you. “Nobody has seen you like this, right? Jazz doesn’t know?” For someone as vain and perfectionist as Sunstreaker, being seen with someone like you must be a faux pas.

“N-no. I just… it was kind of an impulse.”

“It always is.” His voice is flat.

That’s the last thing either of you say, until you finally arrive at his quarters. He stomps in with surprising grace, then turns to glare at you until you follow him within. He moves immediately to a shelf in the corner, and you stay standing in the middle of the room. The space is almost neatly bisected in the middle, a bed on either side. Both sides are in equal states of mess, though in very different ways.

One side, the one Sunstreaker is now rummaging through, would be clean and organized, if it weren’t for the various personal grooming tools and waxes, blank canvases, and a very meticulously cared-for series of knives on a side table. The wall on that side is also strange, some sort of scribbled mural that’s been drawn over itself more times than you could reasonably count. Odd.

You turn your head to examine the other side, and see posters dotting the walls, stickers placed in random locations, several other random items on the floor- oh. That is a loaded gun, just sitting there on the floor. And one on the bed. And that sword is propped up at the desk with novelty giant googly eyes on it. It appears to be having breakfast.

There’s a screeching noise that catches your attention. Sunstreaker has pulled a chair out from his desk, and gestures to it. You step forward quickly and sit down to avoid aggravating him further.

“So.” He starts, grabbing something from within a box on the desk next to you. “What possessed you to do this.” Again, his statement doesn’t have the lilt of a question. There’s a tone to his voice though, that makes you think…

You feel incredibly stupid, now. You’re beginning to suspect Sunstreaker is talking about something very different. He wipes some sort of putty on your chest, then shuffles through the box again. His engine growls and he stomps to the other side of the room to look for something else. “I was worried I would get in trouble,” you whisper. “I just wanted the symbol gone.”

“What?” He says, his tone seemingly holding genuine confusion. “Why would I give a shit about the insignia? It’s your frame, do whatever you want with it.” He pauses, then turns around and approaches you. He leans down slightly, so that his face is level with yours. “Within reason. If you ever try this again, I will hunt you down.” His menacing aura is significantly lessened when you can see a googly eye shotgun having breakfast with the sword right behind him.

“Yes, sir,” you respond, allowing a hint of a smile to twitch across your face.

His frown doesn’t leave, but it softens. He lifts up a tool for you to see, and you are pleasantly surprised to recognize it from your time in the medbay. It’s comforting, at least, that your ability to recall new memories remains intact. Now you realize what he’s doing, as you see him spread the repair putty across the– oh.

You watch as he uses the small paddle to distribute it evenly, and only now are you realizing the depth of your mistake.

There is a crater in your chassis. A self inflicted one.

He reaches to grab more putty, gently spreading it in the afflicted area. You’re silent as he works, absorbing the knowledge of what you have done. You look more closely at the error warnings you’ve been ignoring.

There is a crater in your chassis. Your armor isn’t very thick in the first place; any further and you would have…

Sunstreaker is quiet as he applies even more putty to the wound. His artist’s hands work evenly and smoothly. You can’t tell if he’s taking a long time because it’s that bad an injury, or if it’s just his perfectionism.

Either way, it’s a long time before he finally steps back and speaks.

“So, what’s your new color scheme going to be?”

“Color scheme?” you echo in confusion.

Sunstreaker folds his arms and taps his finger impatiently. “I need to know what color paint I’m using. You can’t have automotive putty just sticking out for everyone to see.”

You recognize the logic of that, but despite your ruminations earlier you’ve never truly thought about it. “I’m not sure…” you start, lifting a hand and tilting its plain gray in the light. “Your yellow is pretty, but I don’t think I’d want that for myself.”

“Yellow.”

“...Yeah?”

“You think I- I am NOT yellow.” He scoffs, offended. “I’m #ffc600.”

You tilt your head, trying to refocus your vision on his plating. Plating that is… clearly yellow? “I don’t know what… that means…”

He rolls his eyes, stepping away to rummage through a container. “Well look at me with your optical sensors like a normal person,” he says, turning his head back to glance at you, “and you’d be able to tell.”

At that your smile fades. “But… I’m not a normal person.”

“Yeah well, neither is Sideswipe but I keep him around.” He calls, still sorting through his ample body work supplies.

“I used to be human.” You blurt out. You stare at his back, desperate for any sort of reaction.

He doesn’t look at you, but his hands stop their work. “How do you figure that?”

Somehow, you feel your chest restrict with discomfort as you page through your memory files. “I was working in the brig… I wasn’t supposed to but I thought I could help… the seekers, they told me I was a toy. A replacement. For whoever I… for whoever this was before.”

You didn’t even realize he had gotten this close while you were speaking, but now he's right beside you. He looks down on you from the corner of his optics. The look on his face is cold as ice, and you almost shy away from the hand he reaches out to grasp you with. “Don’t you listen to a damn thing those decepticunts say. They don’t know anything about you.”

Unlike before, his grip doesn’t make you flinch when it touches you. It’s not harsh, but a steadying force. An anchor that grounds you.

And then the moment is ended by Sunstreaker tossing a booklet of color swatches into your lap.

“Here. Pick one. Or two. Three. Whatever. Just pick something.”

You hesitantly pick up the booklet, as if worried you’d break it somehow, and flip through the pages. A rainbow of possibilities flutters before your eyes, complementary palettes and designs included. “I can pick any of these?” You murmur, half to yourself. The amount of options is overwhelming.

“Yeah, sure, whatever.” He says flippantly. “I can just mix or synthesize any colors I don’t have. Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, what do you think would look good on me?” you muse. “You have way more experience than I do.”

Sunstreaker looms behind you, but you feel strangely at ease as he snatches back the booklet. You can hear the rustle of the pages as he flips to the blues.

“Blue suits you. Pick one of these. I’ll do something that compliments whichever one you like.”

Overwhelm slowly turns into excitement as your eye alights on a particular pearlescent finish. You can’t describe exactly why, but it’s perfect. Sunstreaker notices the smile slowly appearing on your face, and grumbles for you to let him see. You tilt the swatches towards him, finger tapping on the color.

“Alright.” He says, then goes to prepare the paint and spray gun for application. As he does, you watch him ponderously. He takes a while to mix the paint properly, and it gives you plenty of time to sort your thoughts.

“You good?” Sunstreaker asks, crouched in front of you. You reset your optical sensors, realizing you’ve been staring into space for the past 10 minutes.

It’s tenuous, and not anything like how you feel for Jazz, but you’re hit with the same sensation. Staring up at his face, looking down at you with such intense concern, you realize… this is familiar. You just don’t remember why.

“Sunstreaker… can I ask…” But you don’t get the rest of it out. The tone in your voice probably clues him in, because he cuts you off swiftly before you can even finish the thought.

“If you need me to be there, I will. That’s all you need to know.”

“Okay… but-”

“No,” he snaps, then tilts your chin with his hand. “Keep your head at this angle, or it’ll smudge. I’m starting now.”

—--

Several hours later, though it wouldn’t have taken half as long if he wasn’t such a stickler about his work, you finally leave Sunstreaker’s room. Frankly, you’d have thought going to the washracks paints section would be required at some point, but apparently Sunstreaker has an almost fully stocked supply stored under his bed. Including a tool for spraying paint, all the polishes and sealants required to keep the paint from chipping, and- well it was quite a lot more than one would expect. Apparently the fact that you’d just taken a shower, and had zero prior paint to clean off, helped a lot as well.

You’ve already sent a message to Prowl, so he’d know you’d be a little late to your shift. Not that you really have ‘shifts’, as the most time sensitive repairs are assigned to whoever is closest and capable of performing them. Still, he seems to appreciate scheduling, so you make sure he’s aware of your lateness.

You didn’t think to tell him why, but he’ll see for himself sooner or later.

Though you’re starting to think maybe you should have told him, because Bumblebee just stares at you for, and you’ve timed it, 12 full seconds before actually saying anything.

“Oh my god, for a second I thought you were a pretty intruder and I thought I’d have to kill you.”

“I’ll… take that as a compliment.”

He slides the dagger he’d been holding at his side back into his subspace and grins. “You should! You look great!”

You feel yourself flush with warmth, coolant systems kicking up a small amount to accommodate. “You think so?”

“Yeah! That green is gorgeous! You must’ve gotten a real pro to…do it. Hmm. Are you why Sunstreaker told me to fuck off over comms when I asked why he didn’t come get breakfast?”

“Umm.” You want to defend him, but just sigh instead. It’s so in character for him you can’t bring yourself to deny it. “Yeah that’s probably why.”

Bumblebee chuckles. “Don’t worry, I don’t take it personally anymore. If I did, I wouldn’t have bothered talking to him at all. Besides, it was obviously for a worthy cause. Not everyone gets a Sunstreaker special, it’s a rarity even for his own brother.”

“Really?”

“Yeah! I’m kind of jealous, he must really like you for some reason.”

You’re starting to really like you, too.

Chapter Text

It was a suspiciously short time after they left that the door slid open again.

Almost as if someone had been delaying their entrance until the coast was clear.

“Sideswipe.”

Sideswipe paused as he entered their quarters, flinching at the sound of his brother’s voice. “Yeah?”

“Your friend visited a few minutes ago.” Sunstreaker said, his back to the door as he cleaned up the paint supplies he’d used earlier.

Sideswipe strolled into the room with false nonchalance and leaned against the side of his desk, which generally went unused except for additional weapon storage. “Oh yeah?”

Sunstreaker cut a sideways glance at his brother’s stilted tone. “Yeah. Had to patch them up and give them a fresh coat of paint.”

Sideswipe pointedly avoided Sunstreaker’s gaze. “Patch them up? Huh. Hope they’re okay.”

The glib statement hung in the air. Sideswipe stayed where he was, waiting for a response, and when none came he dropped down into the chair and grabbed one of his guns from the desk. He began to quietly take it apart and reassemble it with the skill that came from eons of practice.

Sunstreaker, on the other side of the room, continued his silent work.

There was a strange tension in the room. Usually both twins, despite their many differences, were completely in sync. An understanding beneath everything, like a destructive but coordinated spar. But there was something off about it now, a rhythm beneath the battle that’s been lost. Discord that had only started when…

Sunstreaker abruptly turned around to walk towards his brother and stopped right behind him, silently watching his twin click an ammo cartridge into, and then out of, place.

“Getting real tired of this, Sideswipe,” Sunstreaker sighed impatiently.

Sideswipe kept mindlessly fiddling with the weapon, reaching across his desk for a low beam adjustment laser. “Tired of what?”

“You know damn well what.” He said, grabbing the tool from Sideswipe’s hands and placing it back down on the desk firmly.

Sideswipe bristled at the insistence. “Look, I don’t know what you want from me!”

“Bullshit.” Sunstreaker says, holding the adjustment tool further away from him.

“That’s not an answer!” Sideswipe exclaims in exasperation, lunging forwards to grab for the laser.

“Bullshit.” Sunstreaker repeated himself. The harsh tone was punctuated by the item being thrown across the room, smacking the wall with a small clatter.

Sideswipe stared at the far wall where it hit. “I can’t talk to the kid, if that’s what you’re driving at. Not about that.”

Sunstreaker tilted his head slightly, staring at his brother with a strange look. “It wasn’t your fault. Fights get chaotic; there was no way for you to know.”

“It was my grenade! I’m the one who threw it! If I had never pulled that pin they would still be here.”

“They are here, though.” Sunstreaker said, rolling his eyes. “A different version, but it’s still them. And you’re ignoring them. Being a jackass, too.”

Sideswipe sagged into the chair at his desk. “I can’t… look at them. Every time I do, I see that face. Their blood. Redder than rust. It- it seeped into the joints of my hands.” He laughed, a morose and weak little sound. “I- ha. I don’t think anyone other than Bluestreak even noticed. Because I’m already mostly red. Heh.”

“I don’t-” Sunstreaker started, genuinely baffled. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset about this. We’ve killed people before. You’ve never given a shit about humans.”

“This is different, Sunny.” Sideswipe stressed, “They mattered to you. I’ve never… I’ve never hurt anyone that mattered before. And I was… I don’t know. It’s different.”

“I don’t blame you, Sideswipe.” Sunstreaker said, derision in his voice. “Nobody does. You’re being a fuckin’ idiot. It’s war, shit happens.” He shrugged. “It was an accident.”

“It wasn’t!” Sideswipe yelled, then dropped his voice to an ashamed whisper. “No it wasn’t.” He raised a hand to his face, trying to disrupt the feeling of Sunstreaker’s intense gaze. “I knew they were there.”

“What.”

“I didn’t want to hurt them, Sunny, I didn’t,” Sideswipe tried to get out, but he was cut off by Sunstreaker grabbing him and yanking him up and out of his seat.

“You did this on purpose?” he asked, instead of immediately pummeling Sideswipe into nothing. A privilege only allowed because of their brotherly bond.

“No! No I, I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t do that to you.” Sideswipe rambled, reaching his hands up to grasp Sunstreaker’s arm.

“Sounds like you did.”

“I thought I saw, I mean.” He paused, as if taking a moment to consult his own hazy memory. “I didn’t mean to hurt them. Maybe… maybe they were there, in the corner of my vision, but I-” He looked back at Sunstreaker, pleading. “They couldn’t have been. They weren’t supposed to be. So I ignored it, I didn’t realize until after…”

Sunstreaker silently released his brother so he could fall back into his seat, but Sideswipe reached forward instead. His grip was clinging, grasping Sunstreaker’s arms and pulling himself close.

“I didn’t mean to do it, Sunny. I didn’t mean it.” Sideswipe babbled, desperation in his voice. “Please believe me, Sunny, please.” Sideswipe was holding on to him at this point. All Sunstreaker could do was stare straight ahead and try not to kill his own brother. “I didn’t mean it, Sunny, I-”

The rest of the sentence goes unsaid but understood.

{Please forgive me.}

{That’s not my decision to make.}

—--

It’s been several days since your impromptu makeover and your interaction with Sunstreaker, and the positive effect on your psyche has been notable. The effect it has on the other denizens on the Ark is also notable, if the trickle of compliments you’ve received is any indication.

Still, though you’re feeling better…

You’re not fully recovered.

You know this.

There’s a hole in your chest where a spark would be. Where a heart would be. A spark chamber, left dark and empty. A splash of color isn’t going to fix that. You know you’re not complete, but you also know you never will be until you know everything. You can’t move past this until you know what it is you’re moving past.

And it’s with this determination that you had calmly sent a formal request to Prowl, through all the proper channels, for a meeting. You’re certain he knows exactly what it is going to be about.

It takes a while to get the meeting scheduled, however. You’re not sure when it started, but activity around the Ark has been slowly ramping up, and paradoxically, decreasing. The halls are more empty than ever, but whenever you do see someone they’re busy. You wish you could talk to Wheeljack about all the things swimming around in your mind, but he’s one of the busiest of all, hardly ever on-base anymore. Jazz, as third in command, is likewise out of reach.

Through all this change, you’ve continued to dutifully complete your tasks. Recently though, you’ve started to feel a nagging loneliness as you finish your decreasing workload early and… just wander the Ark. It seems as though most of the Autobots have decided to respect your solitude and leave you alone.

Just as you want to reach out again.

Finally, after far too many days, the time for your meeting with Prowl has arrived. You approach the familiar door and ping for entry the very instant your internal chronometer strikes the minute, much to your pleasure. You won’t give Prowl any excuse to miss your appointment.

When you enter his office, it’s exactly the same as the first time you came here. Prowl sits at his desk, surrounded by innumerable projections of data and graphs. Even the half-full energon cube is present, though you hope for his sake it’s a new half-full cube and not the same one. He glances up at you and nods, the only acknowledgement of your presence before he returns to what he was doing before you entered.

You approach the desk, standing a respectful distance away. He’s busy as he ever is, apparently, and you wonder if he actually has quarters on the Ark or if he just sleeps here. Several minutes pass before he looks back up at you again. You try not to let your impatience get away from you; you have all the time in the world. You’re not leaving here until you get what you want.

Prowl glances at the blank place on your chest where an Autobot Insignia used to be for half a second. The movement is punctuated by one of his wings twitching, but he gives no note of recognition beyond that. Whether it was in irritation or just a passing observation, you have no way of knowing.

“My apologies for the wait,” he says, “there has recently been a significant increase in the amount of requisition forms that need approval.”

“Why is that, anyways?“ you inquire.

He squints slightly, a tiredness seeping into his expression. “I’m sorry, but I can not answer that at this time,” he says, voice taking on the tone of a customer service worker repeating the same phrase time and again.

You tamp down a momentary flare of irritation, electing to focus on the topic at hand instead. “I’ve done my work. I haven’t complained, not even once.”

“You want the information I have on your procedure.” He deduces, jumping straight to the point.

“Yes. We had a deal, and I’ve upheld my end. I’d appreciate it if you’d uphold yours.”

He stares at you, expression almost blank as the machinations inside his head work over the issue. Probably constructing some sort of elaborate pro/con list, you think, in the good 10 seconds he leaves you waiting. It evidently ends in your favor, because with a quick reset of his optical lights he refocuses back on you.

“Very well,” he acquiesces, unlocking his desk and removing one of hundreds of small datasticks kept within. He reaches forward slightly, handing it over to you. “It will be inconsequential soon regardless. Plug this into the datapad I first gave you, the one that contains your duty roster.”

You feel the weight of it in your hand and let a feeling of finality wash over you.

Prowl feels no such emotion, and immediately drops his hand the second you’ve got a firm grip on the item, returning to his work on 4… no, 5 screens at once.

“Prowl.”

He keeps his gaze on his work, but his hands pause in their motions at your voice.

“Thank you for keeping your word.”

“Likewise.”

As if he’d never stopped, he moves his stylus again, regaining his momentum and burying himself in numbers and logistics you couldn’t hope to understand. You take this as your cue to leave and wordlessly turn around to depart the way you came, the datastick Prowl gave you burning a hole in your hand.

The anticipation of it propels you to your room at a brisk pace, despite your hand trembling slightly. You seem to arrive at your destination in the blink of an eye. Before you can enter, however, you’re met by a surprise.

Someone is already waiting at your door.

He’s never seemed happy to see you before, always miserably glancing at you from the edge of the room, but here he is. Arms folded casually, watching you approach with the smug grin he usually has- the same one that always drops instantly as soon as he sees you.

“Hey, you got a sec?” Sideswipe says, lifting his hand in a casual wave.

You slow your walk as you get closer, studying him cautiously. “I guess.”

You take another step, but hang back before you can get within arms reach. The brightness of his optics is a bit too light to be normal. His relaxed pose, leaning against the doorframe, is a bit too faked. Tense. “Could we maybe have this conversation inside?” He murmurs, gesturing to your door, and you can see how frail his lackadaisical grin actually is.

The presence of one of the best Autobot front-liners fills you with trepidation. He’s being incredibly suspicious, but anyone Sunstreaker approves of has to be… well, he won’t hurt you at the least. And you’re incurably curious about what could possibly drive him to want to see you now, instead of all those other times he had a chance.

He shifts to the side to let you enter your code, a silent presence staring at you with a focus you’d like to ignore. You step in lightly in front of him into the room, the comm line Bumblebee had given you after you’d had your HUD installed–‘For emergencies,’ he had said with a wink–blinking in the corner of your vision.

You’re curious, not stupid.

The door hisses to a close behind you, finally enveloping you away from any potential peering eyes, and while you want so eagerly to do… something… with the data, you’re unfortunately and acutely aware of your shadow. Sideswipe sidles into the room, looming behind you briefly in the small space before he steps away to examine your things. He trails his hand along the rock face that made up one wall as you grab your datapad from your bed. You slip it into subspace, safely alongside the datastick Prowl had given you earlier.

After a beat of silence, “Wow, nice rock,” he says breezily, pointing to it with one thumb.

“Thanks…” you murmur as you sit down on the edge of your bed.

“Seriously, I’d love to get one just like it in my room. I know exactly which half of the room I'd like to be crushed,” he jokes.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” you ask, eager to get this interaction over with.

Sideswipe seems to notice that eagerness, because his eyes dim slightly as the humor leaves his expression.

“Ah, well, you know. This and that.” He tries leaning casually against the rock face, much like his brother once rested in the doorway of that closet so many weeks ago. “How’s the, uh, janitorial work been suiting you?”

All you want to do is sit down and… well. You weren’t sure whether or not you would actually read the file Prowl gave you. But it would certainly be more enjoyable than this.

“Sideswipe.”

“Ugh, gross.” His face scrunches as he speaks. “You’ve got almost the exact same tone Sunny does when he says that.”

You stay silent and cross your arms. This was starting to feel like pulling teeth.

He grimaces, engine revving uncomfortably like he’s fighting the urge to just drive away from the conversation. “Alright, alright. Uh.” He speaks haltingly, looking away from you. “You… died. Before. You know that?”

Ah. So this was going to be one of those conversations.

“Yeah,” you say, unable to prevent agitation from lacing your words. “I know.”

Frankly, you don’t really care what he has to say on this subject. If anyone has made you feel unwelcome on the Ark, it’s him, always staring at you only to avert his gaze when you try to engage. Like he’s horrified by what he sees. You prefer Smokescreen to that-- at least Smokescreen acknowledges you exist.

You can already see where this conversation is going to go, and you’re honestly tired of it. It takes you a moment to register the next thing Sideswipe says, but when you do, it feels like every mechanism and turning gear in your body has frozen for a second before whirring back to their function.

“I killed you.”

In the corner of your subconscious, another file finishes decrypting itself. Then more, like a bolt of lightning through your fractured memories, as if hundreds of files and sensory data points were oriented around a single event.

Things in the edges of your thoughts snap into place.

Then the feeling passes, and you find yourself strangely... unaffected. You want to be surprised, astonished, horrified, but you don’t want to maintain this distance between yourself and Sideswipe anymore. You just want to move on.

And you’re just tired.

You’re so very tired.

Faintly, as if disembodied, you hear yourself whisper “I know.”

Sideswipe’s facade collapses like shards of glass falling from a broken window. “You do?”

No taking your words back now. You run a hand down your face, trying to piece together the scattered images in your memory.

“I also remember…” you trail off, distorted audio in your head playing over itself, grainy images trying to assert themselves into clarity. Your own voice, raspy and coughing. Hands, enormous and metal and gentle despite everything, cradling you to his chest. “You’re the person that saved me.”

Chapter Text

You weren’t supposed to be here.

That would be the loudest thought in your head, screaming for attention, if it weren’t for the voice that yelled at you to MOVE. You obeyed the thought mindlessly, dodging rubble and a stray laser blast as you ran. It was standard procedure. Humans aren’t made for the kind of fights a Cybertronian can get into- in the event of a surprise attack, you were to get the fuck out of there as soon as physically possible.

But you stumbled in your running as you caught something in the corner of your eye. You thought you saw, through the smoke and grit swirling through the air, the silhouette of a cassette slinking along the perimeter of the battlefield. On a direct path…

Your eyes widened in realization, gaze darting to the impromptu- and currently unsecured- triage area. Where you could clearly see First Aid distractedly working on the smoking husk of Smokescreen, none the wiser to the threat.

You scanned the area as you slid to a hiding place behind an upturned car, hoping desperately you weren’t the only one who noticed it, that you’re not imagining things. But the battle raged around you as it ever did, and the Autobots were engrossed in the violence.

Well, you couldn’t just stand by and do nothing.

You scrambled off in the direction of First Aid as quickly as you could, catching a flash of that elusive shadow ahead of you going in the same direction. Always just ahead of you. Without any warning or tell, he lunged to the side, and you got a clear look at him as he darted off in another direction, away from the triage site.

You stopped following him for the moment, and crouched next to what used to be a brick wall. You stared off in the direction he had lunged for so suddenly, straining your senses to figure out why he had seemed so spooked.

It took a long 10 seconds of cowering behind that partially collapsed wall, but you finally got your answer.

A high-pitched whistling sound.

It was so quiet, you only noticed it because the explosions and fighting all around had, somehow, slowed down for a few seconds. In the span of a few short moments, it increased in volume until you turned your head and saw a-

…

…

…

…

—--

…

…

\\=-\-\\\=\\\\==---\\=

…

Hhh

…

—--

…

w

…

What?

…

—--

Opening your eyes is a struggle, so you don’t do it.

You wait there in limbo, muffled ringing in your ears.

Your groggy awareness grows slowly, and as it does, so does your awareness of a burning on your skin.

On everything.

You’d been knocked off your feet by… something.

Your thoughts are muddled and bleary.

With  great effort, you finally open your eyes, and the first thing you see is twisted, half melted, and deformed metal. Weakly, you glance down, and are struck like lightning by the reality of your situation, shocking you out of your state of half-consciousness. Before the dread can build, another large blast hits, this time just barely away from you. A piece of shrapnel slices your burnt cheek. You look back up, off into the distance ahead of you, to the source of the explosion.

A silhouette grows in the smoke. The stranger approaches, gun in his hand, slowing down as he gets closer.

You’re seized by the powerful urge to move, run, escape. Your survival instincts are restless in your head and your heart, buzzing with furious energy to try and save you. Unfortunately that’s not possible at the moment, owing to the approximately five-foot-long piece of gnarled rebar skewering you to the ground. You reach a hand up to grasp it, but your strength is rapidly fading. You find yourself feebly palming at it, unable to pull it from your abdomen.

The stranger’s voice grows louder as he gets nearer to you, trotting easily through the wreckage.

“-think I finally got the little fucker. Yeah, I’m checkin’, I’ll be back in a sec.”

His gaze sweeps the area, just barely missing you behind a pile of rubble, and you shrink into yourself as much as you can, muffling the pained whine that comes from the movement.

“Come on out, shitcan, if you’re hiding around here,” you hear him call, mostly to himself.

You open your mouth and try to call for help, but with a herculean effort all you can manage is a tremulous whisper before a burning sensation radiates up your chest.

Your sound catches his attention, and you freeze in terror too late. The stranger turns his head to you with a feral grin, one that quickly vanishes as he kneels down to your level.

Sideswipe stares down at you in horror.

“Oh shit.”

There’s a pause as he stares at you, then snaps into motion at the sound of your cough. Sideswipe slides the grenade in his hand back into subspace and reaches for you. You’re held, gently, by a crushing vice of metal and the careful touch of his hands.

“How bad is it?” You croak.

He doesn’t respond, pulling out some sort of bladed energy weapon. The screeching sound of metal being severed fills your ears and you stare at the sparks flying overhead, not caring to avert your gaze.

You briefly catch your reflection in his shining metal, and wish you hadn’t.

His careful grip, more cautious than you’ve ever seen him, holds you as the metal pinning you in place is finally severed, and you slip backwards into his second hand, waiting behind you.

“Am I gonna be okay?” You murmur as he smoothly cradles you to his chest with one hand. He stands up, briefly scanning the area and swapping the knife in his free hand with a gun. “Sideswipe?”

He moves swiftly, taking care not to jostle you as he weaves along the edge of the battlefield, far from the flying bullets. You’ve never been as close with him as his brother, but he holds you like something precious, something invaluable.

“Yeah,” he eventually says, “You’ll be fine.” The voice hitches slightly at the end, covered up in the rough exhalations of vents that have been working too hard. You frown in sympathy and reach a hand up, patting him gently on his Autobrand. 

Your vision blurs, and your hand drops.

It should hurt. It really, really should hurt. You glance downwards and feel nothing. The fracas around you dims to a low background buzz. There is no pain, there is no sadness. Just a numb resignation.

You aren’t supposed to be here.

—--

August 3rd

06:15:45 PM

Patient first registered in on-base medical systems.

Extensive injuries present at time of input;

-Severe trauma to chest cavity from foreign object piercing leftmost side

-Fractures of left 10-12 ribs

-Left ventilation sac fully collapsed

-Severe blood loss

-Moderate burns to the front

-Mild audial trauma resulting in disorientation

-Numerous mild abrasions, minor shrapnel damage

Notes;

Medical records incomplete at time of writing, patient transported to Ark medbay due to insufficient time for transport to more appropriately equipped facility.

August 3rd

11:47:08 PM

-Foreign object cut free from wreckage; stabilized on-site

-Laceration to left ventilation sac unable to be repaired. Patient intubated. Right ventilation sac appears to be sufficiently compensating

-Additional fluid introduced intravenously

-Mild audial trauma left to self-repair systems. Status pending

-Mild abrasions treated

August 5th

11:46:32 AM

Patient believed to be stabilized.

If status holds, will be transported to outside medical facility.

August 5th

03:43:06 PM

Internal filters burnt out from overuse. Cause thought to be contamination of heavy metals from foreign object.

Attempted augmentation of internal fluid filtration system via hemodialysis.

August 7th

05:52:11 AM

Filtration system augmentation has not performed adequately. Internal fluid toxicity levels increasing beyond frame tolerances.

Primary fuel pump experiencing cardiac distress

August 7th

01:29:53 PM

Complete cascade organ failure.

August 7th

12:37:15 PM

Patient’s status has been determined as beyond saving. Attempting to connect to neural pattern imaging software.

August 8th

01:49:46 AM

Neural pattern successfully replicated and stored.

August 8th

2:03:34 AM

Patient declared deceased.

September 19th, 11:57:44 PM

[Initiating Boot Sequence]

Chapter Text

The more you read the file, the faster you go. The more you skip. Details blur.

Your hand shakes, and you place the datapad down before you can drop it.

You need to keep it together.

You pick the datapad up again and unplug the datastick, placing them both back down.

You have to keep it together.

You pick them up again, then place the datapad back down and put the datastick safely in your subspace.

You’re okay.

This is what you wanted.

Isn’t it?

You thought you were better than this.

You’re thankful Sideswipe had left before you read that file, keeping your composure as the door slid shut and the trickling of a past life echoed painfully in your head. The instant he was gone, however, you had lunged for your datapad. Finally, here were the answers you had worked so hard for. You could put together the pieces presented in your dreams, images and sensory ghosts slotting together painfully.

You thought you wanted to know.

You slide off of your bed and down to the ground. You cradle your knees and rock back and forth gently as everything you’ve learned integrates into your processor. You do not make a sound; even the constant ticking and turning of your internal mechanisms seems muffled.

And then… you stand up.

Part of you had expected you wouldn’t be able to stand the weight of the new information, that you would crumple back to the floor under the force of it. Yet here you stand, steady and sure.

You look down at your hand, flexing it in the dim light emitted from your own eyes. Your own eyes, your own hand, your own muscle and sinew and metal and pistons. Sure enough, your fingers smoothly curl and uncurl, just as Ratchet and Wheeljack had built them to.

You are unchartered territory, the result of a doctor and an engineer reaching into the unknown. No one had any way to know what you could or could not withstand, and so they tried to shelter you from knowledge that might hurt you.

But now you know.

And you’re honestly fine with it.

It’s disconcerting, sure. Uncomfortable. But by comparison to the gnawing questions that have hounded you for weeks, you just feel fine.

Yeah. You’re going to be fine.

—--

His head hurts again.

That’s the first thought that comes to mind as First Aid is woken from recharge, and he fights the urge to sigh heavily. He doesn’t turn his optical array on, and instead lays still in the dark, listening to the steady whirring and quiet clicking of gears from the other bots in the room. The constant low level noise comforts him, and he wants to slip back to that half-aware state he was in before he realized he was awake.

But when he attempts to reactivate his recharge protocols the action only throws up errors. He tries again, brute forcing it even though he is well aware that’s not how one gets results, and he almost gasps with the lance of pain.

‘Ow,’ He thinks, carefully slipping off his berth and to the floor as quietly as he can manage. ‘Right through the empathy coding, too…’ He winces when he finally gets to the door, pausing to listen to the alert on his HUD. ‘Gonna have to run an extra defrag cycle to fix that. Again.’

He glances back to make sure none of his team mates were woken up by his movements, then slips off to the washracks. Maybe freshening up will help wash off his malaise.

First Aid turns it on, and then stands motionless under the flow of solvent. He turns his head and
stares at the washrag as if staring alone will summon it into his hand, but never makes any motion towards it. For a silent minute he stands under the spray, staring directly through it but focusing on nothing, then reaches a hand and flips the switch to disable the flow. No use wasting resources if he isn’t going to use it.

Still, he remains standing there.

He only realizes he's crying when the hands clawing at his head scrape too roughly, the loud shriek of metal on metal causing him to freeze. He turns his head, consciously dialing his audio reception as high as he can. After a brief moment of panic, his ventilations resume their normal pace, and he turns the sensitivity back down. His team was still asleep. They don’t need to worry about him, on top of everything else.

Each Cybertronian’s mind is built off a central structure, allowing the individual personality to grow and branch off of it. But at the core, there is that pillar that all else is built upon. In the back of his mind, in the recesses of his coding, beyond his conscious awareness, is a small but very important piece of information.

‘They’re alive, they’re alive, they’re alive,’ he thinks to himself, repeating it as if that will make him believe it more strongly.

[Protectobot Primary Directive: ]
[Protect Sapient Organic Life]

[USER ERROR ! ]
[This Unit’s Primary Directive has been violated]
[Continuing to process without resolving this issue can cause a cascade of problems. Please return this unit to the nearest distribution center for repair.]

‘They’re alive, they’re alive,’ he repeats in his head.

[USER ERROR ! ]
[This Unit’s Primary Directive has been violated]

“I butchered them,” he whispers.

[USER ERROR ! ]

First Aid’s head hurts again.

Frustrated, he uses his medic clearance to shut off his ability to register the issue for a timed period. A small voice in his head that sounds unsurprisingly like Ratchet yells at him for abusing his skills, but he’s too tired to pay it much mind.

Problem temporarily resolved, he resigns himself to fixing it properly later and dries himself off from the brief shower of solvent.

He uses the utmost stealth, or at least as much as a sparked ambulance is capable of, and sneaks out of the washracks and back to his shared quarters.

“You alright?”

He almost flinches at the sound, but catches himself before he can react. Streetwise’s voice is muffled and half static, but First Aid can see his eyes glow piercing blue in the darkness. They stare him down from the corner of his vision, still dim from having just woken up.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he eventually murmurs, climbing back into his berth and offering no extra information.

There’s an uncomfortable pause, and First Aid braces himself for the questions he’s sure will be coming. Streetwise is the most observant bot on the team, the most observant Autobot on Earth that isn’t a spy, but the other mech just sighs and turns his head away to go back to recharge.

Though it’s what he wanted, the sleepy dismissal hurts a little. First Aid ignores it and settles down, shutting off his visor.

He stares at the nothingness for a long time before his recharge protocols activate on their own.