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Drag Strip is the fastest of his siblings, he always had been, and always will be. It’s a fact, like that the sun will rise over the horizon, or that Wildrider is ass at playing Clue.
His speed always made him better at not getting caught. Getting caught meany punishment in whatever stupid, impulsive thing he did.
He had broken a vase when it first happened. He was ten. He could hear the nuns racing after him, and that made him pump his legs harder. He will not get beaten, he will not get beaten, he will not get beaten. It replayed over and over in his head. Faster, faster or she will catch him.
He wishes his mother was here. He doesn’t have a lot of memories of her, but he remembers that she was big and strong and imposing. She wouldn’t have let him be burned or beaten or whipped so hard he felt blood pool into his mouth.
He turns a corner, blinks, wishes for his mother to be here, blinks again, and then suddenly, he isn’t in the school anymore. Instead he is in a trench.
The trench is wet, sticky mud up to his ankles. Mud sprays up his uniform—now a boring brown instead of the proper one the school had him in—and onto his face.
Where the fuck is he?
He can’t feel his siblings’ thoughts and feelings and the moving of their lungs and he doesn’t know what to feel. He’s always had his siblings, always been able to feel them with him even at the rare times when they were miles away. Where are his siblings?
His heart pounds in his ears, so loudly that he cannot hear the orders being barked at him until rough hands clasp onto his shoulders and spin him around.
Then, he is face-to-face with his mother. Or, what he thinks is his mother. Her hair has been clipped short. She doesn’t look like his mother any more than she looks like a man, but he knows that she is. A boy can pick his mother out of a crowd, he remembers one of the other boys telling him. He isn’t sure he could, but here, now, in this disgusting trench, he knows he isn’t wrong.
She is masquerading to be a man. He isn’t sure why. Why is she here, in this trench? Why is Drag Strip here?
Starscream said his mother had to go to war, and that’s why he and his siblings were left in Starscream’s care. Is this the war Starscream was talking about? One with shit and blood spraying as artillery shells explode past the winding muddy walls of the dug-out?
“What are you doing?” she asks, aggressive and cold and angry and everything he thinks a mother shouldn’t be.
Maybe this is what his mother is like, he doesn’t know her, doesn’t remember her that much, other than the colour of her hair and the deep rasp of her voice. Motormaster knows more about his mother than he does, Motormaster remembers more.
“Standing here, ma’am,” he answers. He falls into the role easily, nodding stiffly, just as he was taught to do in school. He is supposed to be a solider. He doesn’t know why; he doesn’t know where he is, but he knows he is a solider, now. He doesn’t want to be one.
Her eyes darken, the grip on his shoulders gets sharper, pain wriggling through the rest of his arm. He wonders for a moment if she will break it off.
“I am not a ma’am—“ she starts, but is cut off by an explosion right outside the trench.
Megatron throws herself over him, pulling him to the ground. She covers him with her body as dirt and blood coat their figures.
There’s screaming. Drag Strip feels like it’s right beside him until he realizes it’s him. He’s screaming. He snaps his mouth shut so hard he thinks he cracked a tooth.
He pulls himself up on shaky legs, chest heaving as adrenaline twists in his gut.
He runs. Megatron calls after him. Calls him solider as if she does not even recognize her own son. Would she? Would she know his face—know him as her own blood—if she saw him at the entrance of the school?
He runs and shuts his eyes as another bomb goes off and when he opens them again he isn’t in a dugout. Instead, he is in a small neighbourhood, with grey, drab, pale houses. The sky is cloudy, sun covered in layers and layers of shades of white. The grass is dead.
He trips over his shoes—different from the ones he had at school school, different than the boots from the trench—but catches himself before he can go face first into a gravel road.
His siblings’ bonds hit him like a truck. They are alive, they are alive and he can feel them, emotions aligning with his own. They are upset. He doesn’t know why.
He can see his brothers up ahead, younger, but still his brothers. They all look about seven, and, when he looks down at his thin body, he thinks he must look about seven too.
“Motormaster?” he asks, walking up to them, trying to bite back the relief of seeing his older brother from leaking into his voice.
Motormaster looks up, and so does Dead End and Wildrider. His mother is there too, in proper lady attire with long hair and a solemn, sobering look on her face.
They are looking into a sunroom, at the front of a house. As he peaks in, he sees Breakdown sitting on a couch, isolated from both the outside world and the house.
Breakdown looks scared, more scared than normal. His eyes are wide and shiny with tears, threatening to spill. He is laying down, feverish.
“What’s wrong with him?” Drag Strip inquires. He just lost his siblings in the trench, he won’t loose one again.
Megatron purses her lips. “He has polio. The doctor will be coming for him in an hour.”
What? Polio? They had a cure for that, didn’t they?
“What?” Drag Strip manages, staring at his brother.
“He couldn’t bend his neck,” Wildrider explains. He doesn’t sound the same, his tone trembling slightly, expression shocked. Drag Strip wonders if he’s about to cry.
“I don’t want any of you getting near him. That’s an order,” she says, ushering them away.
Drag Strip steals one final glance at Breakdown.
It takes Drag Strip less than a week to get back to the school. There wasn’t a lot of running around, mainly picking weeds out of the garden and trying desperately to not think about his brother immobile in a hospital bed.
When he finally runs again, chasing Wildrider to give him back the biscuit he stole from the store, he is brought back.
The school’s stone walls and slippery floors make him sick.
He is still being chased by the nuns, as if no time has passed at all.
He can feel his siblings presences, right where he left them. It’s better than the trench.
He has no idea what happened, if it was a confusing vision from God—one violent and raw—or if he is hallucinating from lack of sleep.
He doesn’t manage to outrun the nun, and ends up with stinging pain on his back and the feeling that his travels—imaginary or not—was the most alive he’s ever been.