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Deadlock has been having... strange dreams.
It's hardly the first time he's dreamed of Megatron. In the decades after Megatron's murder by the Senate, his recharge had been fragmented by his brain module revisiting memories of him in muddled fragments.
These dreams are not like back then.
What he has been seeing in his recharge is not the normal reconstituted memories. Now, he sees Megatron as he has never known him, in places that Deadlock has never been. In these dreams – or visions? Deadlock's dreams have always been fuzzy and vague and fade when he wakes. These are clear and sharp and real as if he has shuttered his optics in one place and onlined them in another – the badge on Megatron's chest is not a Decepticon one.
They happen rarely at first, and Deadlock writes them off as the product of a strained processor. The constant, endless tension of being on guard for the inevitable moment when the Senate cracks the last gasp of the Decepticon resistance, for when all he has left in his future is helplessly watching his friends hunted down and hoping that when they catch him he'll be given a clean death (knowing he won't get one), must be getting to him. Stitching fragments of memories into a soothing fantasy where Megatron is still alive is his mind doing whatever it can to reduce the stress. A lot of the details in these fantasies are bizarre, but overstrained processors aren't known for their logic.
The explanation holds up as the dreams become more common, and another bot begins to appear in them. Deadlock's sure this mecha is familiar, and eventually he places him; Ratchet, that medic from the Dead End clinic who'd saved his life millions of years and a lifetime ago.
They get more vivid. Deadlock starts to wake with feelings clinging to him. In the dark, fingers digging into his recharge slab hard enough to leave scratches, he struggles to name them. He surges up off the slab when he finally does, pacing the cramped length of his apartment. Safe. Content. Maybe his processor isn't being kind to him after all. Maybe it's decided that letting unconsciousness be a reprieve from reality is a waste, when it can be used to torment him with illusions of things he can’t help needing and cannot have instead.
The dreams change again. They invade Deadlock's recharge every night.
For the first time since they began, he begins to feel afraid.
Again, he sees a new person. This mecha is fiery and brash, and in the dreams Deadlock knows straight down to his spark that he trusts him.
He wakes and knows that he has never met this stranger. Not once. Not so much as in passing.
The leftover, alien willingness to follow that stranger anywhere he led tugs at Deadlock like the gravity of a star. Every moment until it fades away, the fear that it won't is an acrid taste under his tongue.
Deadlock tilts a small mirror in one hand and a UV light in the other, straining to see the bounced reflection of the back of his neck in the larger mirror in front of him. His knees almost go weak as he sees that there are no new puncture marks, and that the old ones are still smoothed down with age. They would be jagged if they had been reused as entry points. It's a relief. But shadowplay is far from the only gun in the Senate's arsenal.
He has one of his team run a coded message to a dead drop for Soundwave. Even the limited contact is a risk, but a more acceptable one than knowing he might be compromised and keeping it to himself. He has Krok step up to take over the mecha under his command, instructing him to scramble all of their active operations. Whatever's been done to him, Deadlock won't let himself be a liability to his team.
Soundwave sends him a trusted doctor. The tests Deadlock submits to are uncomfortable, thorough, and come back completely clean.
He keeps himself off active command. He may have been cleared, but he's not safe, not until he has an answer about what's happening to him. He throws himself even harder into the pretence that the Senate sanctioned re-education still holds him in its grip, that Deadlock the Decepticon is still erased from existence. Be compliant. Be polite. Smile at the enforcer handing out energon cubes to the ration line. Chat with the coworker assigned to the rivet gun with him on the factory floor at work. Don't complain. Don't let anyone see the anger.
It feels like anger is the last thing keeping him going, some days.
One day he dreams of a place he recognises.
It's the sprawling outdoor market in Bitrex. In the dream, he's looking at it from the bridge of a spaceship, projected on a viewscreen.
Bitrex is in driving distance of Staniz. Deadlock could be there in half a day.
Barely out of recharge, stumbling with grogginess, Deadlock staggers out of his apartment and down to the street. It's only luck that saves him from grazing another car driving past as he transforms and pulls out onto the road. By the time he reaches the highway he's awake enough to stop being a road hazard. Also awake enough to realise skipping his work shift is going to draw attention.
He guns his engine and keeps driving. He is so far beyond giving a frag.
The outdoor market is a jumble of traders who gather between the boarded up buildings of Bitrex's industrial district at the start of the lunar cycle to hawk anything and everything people are willing to spend credits on. Loud, packed with mecha, it'd be great for giving someone the slip. Less great when you’re the one trying to find people.
Deadlock lurks on the main thoroughfare that connects the east and west sides of the market, where the disorganised layout creates a bottleneck. He settles into a spot behind a stall selling wiring that’s allegedly scavenged from decommissioned spaceships, but by the look of it was more likely pilfered from one of the abandoned cities. It gives him a good view of everyone passing by but makes it hard for them to see him.
He waits.
It takes a long time. Shadows grow long and crawl across the ground. He doesn't mind. Deadlock has refined a predator's patience when it comes to hunting.
Then, for a moment, Deadlock thinks he's having a waking dream. But no, this is real, the orange mecha waking by the stall is real. Deadlock tenses as his chest seizes with an echo of the feeling from the dreams, that pull of loyalty.
The stranger’s not alone. Another person is walking with him, white and red with two swords at his hips and one on his back.
Deadlock slips into the crowd and follows them. They seem to be browsing, zigzagging between stalls that catch their interest. Far as he can tell they’re not on their guard, and with all the other shoppers as cover he’s able to slip close unnoticed. With the competing noise he can only catch snatches of what they're saying to each other, hardly anything.
And then he hears the stranger say it.
'Drift'.
Anger explodes in Deadlock like fire igniting in his lines. He clenches his teeth so hard he tastes energon and feels his fangs cut into lower lip. Drift. The name the Senate had forced back on him when he'd been 'rehabilitated'.
When the stranger's heavily armed friend stops in front of a display of spacecraft engine filters and the crowd flows between the two, Deadlock doesn't think. He lets hatred guide his hand to the small handgun he always keeps hidden on himself.
He strides up behind the stranger and shoves the muzzle of the gun into his back, hiding the weapon from the crowd around them with his body.
"Walk," Deadlock snarls.
Strangely, it’s not the barrel pressing into the plating over his transformation cog that makes the stranger freeze, but Deadlock's voice.
"Okay, okay, cool, we can do that," he says as he lets Deadlock push him into motion.
Deadlock hardly knows where he's taking him. It isn't as important as getting this guy away from his backup and watching on his hands in case he tries something. When they pass a blind alley that's empty because it's too narrow for a stall to set up inside it, it seems as good an option as any. He shoves the stranger into it, crowding him to the back until they're hidden from people on the street.
Cornered against the end of the alley the stranger turns around and for the first time Deadlock gets a good look at him. There's an unevenness to the paint at the centre of his chest that Deadlock – somehow – knows must be a colour swatch to cover up the Autobot badge. Sensible, since that badge would attract a lot of confused attention. No one's worn one since the Senate exterminated that movement centuries ago. All the other details, the bright paint job, the spoiler, the sleek frame suggesting a fast car alt, he's exactly how Deadlock remembers. Doesn't remember. You can’t remember someone you haven’t met.
Deadlock opens his mouth to make some kind of demand, what's been done to me? What is the Senate planning? Who are you?
But the stranger cuts him off before he can speak, hands raised in a placating wave, "Look, Deadlock, whatever this is about I wanna get out that there’s been a huge misunderstanding–"
Deadlock doesn’t hear the rest over the roaring in his audials.
‘Deadlock’. Only other Decepticons call him that because no one else knows he isn't still the puppet the Institute made him. The Senate don't know he's been freed from their control. They can’t know.
They must know. It’s the only way all this makes sense.
He lashes out with a fist, cracking the stranger across the side of the helm with a punch that sends him reeling. The stranger's fists come up sluggishly to defend himself – but not in time to block the follow up hit that knocks him down unconscious.
Deadlock stands over him, venting heavily.
He shakes his head, trying to clear the hot rage fogging it. (Not fear. It's not fear. It's not).
He shoots a quick comm to Krok, vague enough it won't matter if it's intercepted. Need picked up. Bring friends. Plus his coordinates.
With his team’s help, he’ll be able to get this mecha somewhere secure. Whatever the Senate's plotting, they haven't closed their trap yet. He pulls him up into a sitting position and sets about tying his hands behind his back to prep for the others getting here.
Deadlock will make this Senate agent spill everything he knows about what the Senate’s plotting. And then he'll put a stop to it.