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Jetfire always enjoys the lab at this time of day. Generally mid-morning is when most of the mechs onboard are completing their daily tasks so that, unless the war summons them somewhere, they can have more free time. Which means if Jetfire is up earlier than everyone else and does all his tasks first, he can be guaranteed an hour or so of quiet silence in which to work.
He starts his day by tending to his desk plant, a gift from one of the numerous Witwickys. Honestly, he’d still been so overwhelmed by the sudden end of his four million years in stasis when he received it that he didn’t remember who’d given it to him, and at this point he was afraid to ask. Still, it seems happy for the attention he gives it as he moves it from the grow light it sits under at night, waters it, and decides if it needs anything else.
He gives it just a little nitrogen fertilizer, and wonders if he’ll see it visibly react at all to the addition over the next few days. He makes a few observations, and then gets on to his real work of the day.
He has a few different types of samples he’s working with today, all of them from the local environment, or at least relatively local environs, of their current home. Mt. Saint Hilary, Oregon, is part of several fascinating geological processes, and Jetfire desperately wants to know more about the entire area of this Pacific Northwest . With Mt. Hood to the north, and Mt. Jefferson to the south of St. Hilary, he'll soon gather similar samples from them as well.
He has samples of volcanic ash from St. Hilary's recent eruption which had brought the rest of his fellow Autobots out of stasis, as well as glacial flour suspended in water from the nearby rivers. And then there is his farthest-flung sample, collected for him by Sideswipe, of soil from the floor of the Willamette Valley. A quick bit of research has informed him that it is likely a type of soil known as Jory , which he looks forward to confirming later if possible.
As he sorts things out and begins to test them, he can hear the sound of mechs moving through the corridors outside. Perhaps he should really go out and socialize with them more. His samples can wait. Yet, he finds it easier to stay put and ignore the goings-on outside. He knows why most of the Autobots still likely harbor their quiet doubts about him, and it would be best not to press their current levels of tolerance for his presence more than necessary.
It can be a bit lonely at times, but he'll live. It’s still far better than being trapped in stasis under the ever-increasing weight of the ice above him.
By the time his solitude is interrupted, he's begun to get some basic results from some of his tests, and is hurriedly writing them down.
"You got an early start," Wheeljack hums as the door shuts behind him, and Jetfire glances up with a smile. Here, at least, is an Autobot who hardly treats him any differently than any of their fellows. "What are you up to?"
"Studying the local geology of course! It's amazing, isn't it?" Jetfire watches Wheeljack set down a tray of supplies, likely for his own experiments that day. Some days, it feels like they’re still back on Cybertron, at the University of Helex in one of the student mini-labs. Back before the war, when Jetfire had been paired with two other students, in order to approach their given topics with three different fields of expertise.
"Yeah, I'm still more of a mechanics mech myself," Wheeljack turns. "So tell me about it."
Jetfire takes a deep vent, before opening his mouth again to begin gushing about the geology of the region. He begins with a quick overview of the Pacific Ring of Fire, created locally by the Juan de Fuca Plate's subduction under the North American Plate, which created the Cascade Range. How the Cascade range was constantly shifting, and that Mt. Saint Hilary itself was younger than the Ark's crash landing, which meant that rather than colliding with an already existing mountain, the mountain has literally built itself on top of the Ark . He mentions the history of the Missoula floods carrying massive amounts of water and soil into the Willamette Valley, and how the flooding has shaped the landscape of so much of the Columbia River Basin.
He gets so carried away in his excitement as he zooms in on the maps that he forgets this isn't the old days. The next sentence slips out almost involuntarily.
"Imagine, a wall of water more than five hundred feet above us at this location! It would have been so amazing to watch from the air, wouldn't it, Starscream-"
The second the name slips out of his mouth, he freezes. It’s like his entire frame goes rigid as he looks between the images he's been showing to Wheeljack, and the mech himself. The name has just slipped from his tongue as if the mech who carries it was still in the room with them. But those days were long, long gone.
Wheeljack speaks. "Hey, it's alright. You can relax."
Slowly, Jetfire forces his frame to release from its tense position. "Sorry, I just—"
"To you, it's been what, three or four years?" Wheeljack sounds sympathetic. "Trust me, I kept asking you to get me things off tall shelves a lot longer than that. I'm not going to be angry."
He was the only mech, besides probably the Prime himself, who wouldn't be. Jetfire sits down slowly. Although his wings can hardly cant as much as a seeker's, they still take a downward tilt.
"I just—"
"Jetfire. It's alright." Wheeljack is watching him, set up for his own experiments completely forgotten behind him. "Really. I'm not upset, and no one should be."
"How can you not be?" Jetfire groans, putting his head in one of his hands as he glances back towards his samples. "I just— like you said, it's only been a few years to me, which is a perfectly reasonable amount of time for a casual research trip for our kind. I keep expecting him to walk right in that door, even though I know he won't, and—"
He cuts himself off, not wanting to marinate in self pity, but even Wheeljack knows he has more to say, he just needs time to figure out how to say it.
"How are you so used to it, working alone or working with different people all the time?"
"Well, I've had a few million years to get used to it," Wheeljack chuckles a little, in the way their professors once did when they said something that marked them as ‘ young bots with not much life experience’ . "Enough mechs go in and out of those doors, it all just starts to blur over time."
That, honestly, does not sound that pleasant to Jetfire, and his face must say that, because when Wheeljack glances up, the amusement fades from his field.
"Oh. Sorry, that was insensitive."
It is more than that, but Jetfire's never been good at holding a grudge, and Wheeljack has never been that good at delivering competent apologies on the first try. So they just kind of awkwardly look at each other for a bit, until Wheeljack clears his throat.
"You know, now that most of the fussing around your brief time as a Decepticon has died down, maybe we should talk about it?"
"What is there to talk about?" Jetfire lets the bitterness be heavy in his tone. "One of my best friends brings me back from my catatonic state after four million years, lies to me, and betrays all my morals in the pursuit of power. Open and shut case, I think. What needs to be discussed further?"
"Your feelings on it. The fact that Starscream didn't used to be like that, so maybe you need to talk to someone about what he used to be like and not get it thrown back in your face that he isn't like that anymore."
"Yes, and that will magically fix everything. Absolutely won't get me any unhappy looks from all the others or anything of that nature," Jetfire groans. "I'm fine, Wheeljack, really."
The Wheeljack he remembers would have likely dropped it there, knowing he was lying but willing to wait for him to work it out on his own, or come talk to him in his own time. But this Wheeljack doesn't drop it quite so easily.
"I didn't say you had to talk about it with the others. Just me. I'm probably the only other Autobot that understands what Starscream used to be like, and doesn't just have memories of him in the here and now."
Jetfire pauses, considering those words. They make an alarming amount of sense. After all, back in their days at the University of Helex, Jetfire can only recall Starscream ever having four friends. His two trinemates, and his two lab partners. Even then, he had been a bit of a hard mech to get along with, but he hadn't been-
He wasn't a mech who just shot his friends for refusing to kill people in cold blood.
Still, it wasn't exactly a pleasant topic to get into. So he adjusts some of his samples and moves them around. But Wheeljack never turns back to his own experiments, just watching him with his.
"What are you even working on?" Jetfire tries to deflect attention towards Wheeljack's own experiment. "Looks like you stole half of the supplies from Ratchet's office on that tray."
"One, it's not stealing if he's my conjunx and he watched me take it without saying anything. And two, don't think I'm not noticing you avoiding this. You need to talk about it, Jetfire. Better to do it now than just let it fester more than it already has."
Jetfire tries to desperately redirect the conversation one last time. "Are you sure he didn't say anything, or did he do that 'I'm disappointed in you' look that he does every time you grab enough random chemicals that he knows you're definitely going to blow something up, like Professor Switchoff always used to give you?"
Wheeljack says nothing, which is both an admission that Ratchet absolutely had done the aforementioned look, and that he was still seeing through his friend's desperate attempt to not talk about this . Jetfire groans.
"It's not like my final mission with the two of you is a fun thing to talk about."
"Fun, no. Necessary? Probably." Wheeljack picks up a small toy, rolling it back and forth between his fingers. "I'm willing to wait until you start talking though. We don't have to discuss absolutely everything, but you need to start talking it out. I've seen what happens to mechs who hold all their feelings about loss in. And it isn't pretty."
Somehow, Jetfire suspects Wheeljack's reference relates to the topic at hand. Oh, how he wishes it didn't.
After another pause, Wheeljack speaks.
“I’ll start then. Remember how we had to apply for the mission? All the paperwork and tests? Skywarp and Thundercracker hated Starscream for not talking you and me out of it!”
Jetfire can’t help the chuckle he has at the memories. “It wasn’t supposed to be that many solar-cycles they were alone on Cybertron.”
“No, but Starscream made TC help him do all the paperwork,” Wheeljack snickers. “Which meant Skywarp was always lounging around our lab complaining about them not doing anything fun.”
“TC had to help us with our work too.”
“Bingo,” Wheeljack hums, fondness filling his field for these old days. “We were brilliant when it came to science, but Thundercracker and Starscream were the only ones who even partially understood bureaucracy. But we passed all the physical and mental stress tests for an off-Cybertron mission. And when we got in, remember how we celebrated?”
Jetfire closes his optics as he remembers the trine, him, and Wheeljack going out to a popular club for students in Helex. Drinks and cocktails, and the trine’s inside jokes that while he and Wheeljack never fully understood, they enjoyed seeing. Starscream always seemed to just open up in those moments, happy in ways he seldom was around anyone but the four of them.
And then Skywarp and Thundercracker were on the dancefloor, Wheeljack was hitting on some other students, and Starscream—
Jetfire still remembers the sensation of the heated blush on his faceplates as Starscream, more than a little overcharged, began to flirt with him.
“Yeah,” he manages. “That was a good night.”
“And then we got assigned a random planet from a folder of supposedly suitable exoplanets for study.” Wheeljack prompts him. “Do you remember Starscream’s reaction when we got this one?”
“He was so mad that they’d given us the least developed planet of the bunch, because it meant you couldn’t join us on the ground for testing. Said they were discriminating against us because there were two fliers in our group.”
Wheeljack nods, and Jetfire could still feel Starscream’s righteous anger at the edge of his plating. There had been legitimate problems at the time on Cybertron in regards to seekers and shuttles whenever they left their enclaves in Vos or Altihex. How often had Jetfire merely been viewed as a form of transportation for other mechs? Something he still experiences on and off even now.
But all the best scientific programs had been in the real research hubs of Cybertron. If you wanted to get a good education, to be seen as a legitimate researcher in your field, you needed a degree from a university with a reputation like those in Helex or Iacon.
“Maybe they were,” Jetfire continues. “But you said not to worry. You’d take all the research we’d send you from the ground and process it from orbit. We’d be able to start at least some of our lab experiments earlier than any other team, and probably have time to test more hypotheses too. I was always so surprised you gave up your chance to see a planet beyond Cybertron up close and personal so easily. If you hadn’t been happy, we probably could have forced the issue to be reassigned to another planet.”
Wheeljack shrugs. “Like I said, I was always more of a mechanic at heart. To me, the big deal wasn’t so much going to another planet as it was the travel to get there. Running the mobile lab from orbit also left me in charge of a whole ship, with no supervision to stop me from running my own little experiments.”
“You nearly blew yourself up in orbit twice.” Jetfire recalls the frequent losses of communication with Wheeljack in the mobile lab as he started tampering with the school’s property yet again.
“But I didn’t.” Wheeljack grins. “And let me tell you, Starscream snatching the radio out of your hands to berate me for those incidents left echoes that are still ringing in my ears. Besides, Starscream’s chemistry specialization and your interest in exoplanets made you two much better suited for on the ground studies, and unlike those other planets, no Cybertronian had ever set foot here before. I figured you and Starscream could really annoy those smug professors if you discovered something down here that had two fliers entered into the history books.”
Jetfire feels warmth at first at Wheeljack’s confidence he’d once had in them, but then the melancholy returns. Wheeljack is right. To him, it’s so recent . To his old lab partners, it’s merely a distant blip in their memories.
“I suppose we did make it into the history books. Just not the way we’d ever hoped to.”
Wheeljack’s smile fades, and Jetfire looks back at the view of Earth projected on the screen in front of him, so similar to the initial scans the three of them had taken upon arrival at the exoplanet they were hoping to study.
The exoplanet study program for students was supposed to be one of the safest off-Cybertron research programs you could be involved in. His disappearance and presumed death certainly had ended that claim.
Wheeljack shifts slightly. “Would you tell me what happened? I know Starscream’s version, from back then. And I believe it, but—”
Jetfire looks down at his lap. Wheeljack falls silent. It takes him a while to find the right words.
“Starscream and I were fascinated by the polar ice caps,” he manages. “As you know, water ice is a rare thing on the planets settled by mechanized lifeforms, which was what most of Cybertron’s exploration had brought us into contact with. We just generate too many emissions that warm our atmospheres for these sorts of weather conditions. I wanted to see the impact the ice caps had on the landscape. Starscream wanted to study their chemistry. I suppose he was planning to try his hand at a version of deep ice core samples and studies.”
Wheeljack nods. “You had a camp on the tundra, I recall, and flew out to glaciers and ice sheets.”
“Yes. But to work on the ice sheets in the north, which was our preference as it allowed us the chance to retreat to solid land if necessary, it meant we had to wait until they were forming, during the winter. Otherwise, our thrusters would be so hot when we landed that we could have easily melted the ground underneath our feet and taken a rather unpleasant salt water bath. So we were in the Arctic as the days went completely dark around us, and the storms got worse and worse.”
He remembers their shelter, with thermal heaters and lights around their landing craft. A sort of lean-to for Cybertronians, providing them with just a little extra space to move around in on the days conditions truly were just too dangerous to go out in.
Cold wasn’t what killed Cybertronians. The accumulation of ice on their plating, however, could very easily turn deadly.
“I’d lose radio contact with the pair of you for days during those storms.” Wheeljack runs his fingers over the toy he’s been fidgeting with. “I hated that, but I trusted you. I trusted both of you. And you were so excited about your preliminary findings. I never thought—”
Jetfire hears the guilt in Wheeljack’s voice, and realizes that for millions of years, both his friends have likely carried survivor’s guilt over what they have believed to be his untimely demise.
“You couldn’t have stopped us, Wheeljack. Like you said, we were excited and invested in the particular line of research we’d stumbled across. Given what I know about water ice now, it would have only been a matter of time until a disaster struck.”
Jetfire has to admit, he’s glad to be here in the Pacific Northwest now, where permanent ice is confined to the glaciers on mountains. If something happens to him here, the Autobots can and will find him. Or at least, he hopes they will.
He still holds some bitterness at how the Autobots left him under the ice again after he had realized his mistake in trusting Starscream, and came to their aid. It’s part of what makes it so hard to truly integrate with them even now. They still believe he might turn on them, and he worries that were he to be entombed yet again, they might not bother to save him.
“That storm—” He tries to push past his feelings on such a tender subject. “It came out of nowhere. Struck hard and fast. We’d been out taking samples, and had no time to get back to the shelter. Starscream would have been more vulnerable to the ice accumulation than me. I told him to get up and above the storm while I collected our equipment. He told me to abandon it, but I couldn’t. We couldn’t have replaced most of those instruments, and I thought— I believed that I—”
He falls quiet, and takes a few deep vents.
“I thought he could navigate me through the storm. And he tried. Oh, he tried. But maybe I took too long and let too much ice accumulate on my wings. Maybe I got hit by a gust of wind stronger than I expected. I just remember that as I was launching upwards through the worst of the clouds, I started losing altitude. My comms turned to static. And then I crashed. I fell into a crevasse, I think, and lost consciousness.”
“Emergency stasis,” Wheeljack mumbles. “Your spark rerouted everything else to keep itself alive.”
Jetfire nods. “Next thing I knew, I was being pulled up out of the ice by the Decepticons. And there was Starscream, and I— I thought, just for a moment, that it’d been months at most. That you two had gotten a rescue crew from Cybertron and come and found me. I almost didn’t believe him when he told me how long it’d been.”
As things lapse into silence, Wheeljack finally sets down the toy, lacing his fingers together.
“It took three days for Starscream to be able to regain radio contact with me, and another five before he could return to your shelter. We called in the university. They actually did send a rescue crew. Starscream was almost manic in the way he kept searching for you. He never stopped believing you were out there, and that we just needed to find you. They even brought me down to the surface to try to see if I could engineer some sort of signal to force your comms back online. If it worked, you were still too far under the ice for the contact to be made. We searched. All spring and summer, we searched. But by that point, the University of Helex figured they were doing more harm than good to their reputation by keeping up the search for a dead mech. That it would be easier for everyone to move on if we just ‘accepted’ the truth.”
Wheeljack looks up slowly. “I wish I could say I objected, but— Jetfire, I was watching as Starscream literally became a shell of himself in front of me. He was obsessed with finding you, and refused the idea that felt like reality. I eventually agreed with the university. You were gone, and we had to leave. Starscream- well, back then, it was obvious something had begun to form between the two of you. He fought back when they tried to remove him from the planet. If he’d been taking proper care of himself, he probably would’ve been able to fend them off, at least for a bit. But they sedated him, and kept him under sedation until we’d left this solar system.”
Jetfire can see the pain in Wheeljack’s face as he admits the next part.
“When they let him wake up, he looked at me and asked me how I was able to sleep at night leaving you behind. He didn’t talk to me again for the entire voyage back to Cybertron. He submitted his transfer papers before we even landed and went back to Vos. I tried to keep in contact, but his trine made it clear he had no interest in talking to me. There was quite the scandal attached to his name in the scientific field because of it. He could only really get a job in Vos because it was his home city. Your disappearance, and how the rest of Cybertron handled it? It broke him.”
Wheeljack looks back down at the ground, apparently finding something interesting near his pedes to casually observe.
“Next thing I knew, his name was showing up as an early supporter of the Decepticons. Cybertron gave him an ax to grind, and he was going to let them see how sharp he could make it.”
This silence is a long one, filled with grief from both of them, and heavy things still being left unsaid. And yet, Wheeljack is right. There’s no judgment hanging in the air, no reminder of how Starscream’s not like that anymore, Jetfire, get your head out of the clouds! The deep well of sorrow Wheeljack is showing him speaks volumes.
“If I’d been here, If I hadn’t been so fragging stupid, then maybe he wouldn’t have taken their side in the war,” Jetfire mumbles.
“It’s not your fault, Jetfire,” Wheeljack tries to reassure him, but Jetfire just moves his hand to illustrate the point, gesturing to his Autobrand.
“How is it not my fault?”
Wheeljack’s eyes take a slightly more steely tone, like he’s heard this doom and gloom before. “Starscream was a grown mech, making his own choices. Maybe your disappearance and the way it was handled helped fuel the anger inside of him that led him to the Decepticons, but in the end, joining them was a choice he made. And the responsibility of that decision lays solely on him, not you.”
“But—”
“Starscream wasn’t the only one who lost a friend that day, Jetfire.”
And there, in Wheeljack’s optics, Jetfire sees his friend’s unspoken anger. Anger at the University of Helex for having given them such a dangerous planet to research. Anger for the school not taking more precautions. Anger that the university had given up on Jetfire, and forced him to agree in the hopes that he wouldn’t lose a second friend as well. Anger at himself for not trying to reach Starscream through other means before telling him they had to give up. Anger at letting Starscream have so much space after their shared loss, space which had likely nurtured the seeker’s growing rage rather than giving him time to grieve.
Wheeljack is carrying just as much rage as Starscream is. And yet, here he stands, having chosen his side in this war. A side where he has had to set that anger aside and learn to live with it as a constant companion, rather than allowing it to control him.
It’s the first time Jetfire really allows himself to contemplate how Wheeljack has changed in his long absence.
“A lot of things change when you live on timescales like we do,” Wheeljack sighs. “And there’s a certain point where each mech’s path is his or her own. And yet, some things are a lot harder to change than others. I, for one, am glad to have my friend back, no matter what decisions he’s made in the past. It’s not his fault he only had part of the story at first. What matters is the decision he made once he saw what was truly in front of him.”
Jetfire meets Wheeljack’s optics. It’s unfair, he thinks, that all this time has allowed Wheeljack to gain the wisdom their professors once almost seemed to lord over them while he still feels like such a youngster in comparison. And yet, it’s not meant to be perceived that way. It’s affection, the sort any mech feels when reuniting with a friend.
It’s easy to find his smile, even if it’s not an uncomplicated one.
“And I’m glad to have my friend back as well.”
Wheeljack gives him one of those looks of comfortable fondness that comes with age. And yet, Jetfire discovers he has a question remaining on the tip of his tongue.
“Wheeljack?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think there’s a chance—even a small one—that there’s still some good in Starscream?”
Here is where he expects Wheeljack’s attitude to falter. He wouldn’t blame him. After all, Wheeljack has had four million years to see this new Starscream that Jetfire can hardly even begin to imagine. It would be so easy for his friend to have compassion for Jetfire’s recollections of the past, but little mercy for his idea of the present.
But there’s no hesitation from Wheeljack as he replies.
“Yeah. I do.”
Jetfire isn’t sure if his shock is visible or not, but it doesn’t matter. Because that, of course, is when his early start to the morning decides to register as several tests concluding at once, resulting in the Ark’s scientific equipment beeping at him rather loudly and continuously.
Wheeljack chuckles. “Well, we’ve made a good start at talking about it. Probably should get back to our actual work and continue this conversation later, shouldn’t we?”
“I suppose.” Jetfire turns back to his experiments, silencing the beeping devices and beginning to examine the readouts. “You never answered my questions, by the way, about what you’re working on.”
“Oh! Upgrading the fuel for Grimlock’s fire breath.”
Jetfire blinks, and then snorts. “Oh, so Ratchet didn’t just give you the look Professor Switchoff always used to give you, he gave you the—”
“Yes, the ‘ I will tell you it’s all your fault with no sympathy if I have to reattach your limbs later’ look, I am familiar with it.” Wheeljack sighs. “That mech. No sense of scientific adventure!”
“How many times has he had to reattach your limbs?”
“In the words of our dear human friends, I’m pleading the fifth.”
Jetfire can’t help but laugh as he goes back to his readouts. The heaviness has eased in the room. They’ll talk about it more later, Jetfire supposes, but for now, it’s a start.
He finds himself drawn to the ash samples from Mt. St. Hilary, noting the difference in the ash layers from the same eruption. Although he can’t be certain without further testing, he wonders if Mt. St. Hilary’s ashfall is similar in composition to its northern and very similarly named fellow volcano, Mt. St. Helens. The academic research humans had done has broken that eruption’s ash into three distinct layers. A bottom layer of older rocks and crystal fragments, a middle layer of glass shards and pumice, and a top layer of fine particles.
Wait— isn’t there a volcanic glass that had been manmade by accident, and then on purpose, following the Mt. St. Helens eruption? How would that differ from the ash left behind by St. Hilary’s eruption?
He’s about to ask Wheeljack if he thinks that getting ahold of some of Mt. St. Helens’ ash, or even its volcanic glass, would be possible considering the reasonable protections the humans have placed around collecting samples from the volcano’s national monument, when he hears glass shattering, and Wheeljack’s quiet proclamation of “Scrap!”
He turns to find Wheeljack yanking a fire extinguisher out from under the table as the very much on fire contents of the beaker began to try and drip down onto the table. The resultant aerosol of fire suppressant chemicals, however, immediately set off the multitude of fire alarms.
Jetfire grins. “Oh, this brings back memories!”
“Can it!” Wheeljack says, but he’s laughing as he does it. “Teletran-1, we’re fine! You don’t need to deploy additional suppression systems, I promise!”
Jetfire communicates the actual proper codes to the Ark’s computers in order to stop the entire room from being doused in fire suppression foam, another blast from the past, but one he can thankfully avoid today. As the fire dies down and the alarms stop blaring, Wheeljack turns to face him.
“Now, I know what you’re going to say—”
“I wasn’t saying anything.”
“—but I had everything under control.”
Jetfire can’t help but snort. “Uh huh.”
And then suddenly over the intercom, and Jetfire realizes it’s the ship-wide one, Ratchet’s tired voice echoes.
“Wheeljack, what did you do now ?”
Jetfire can’t help but fall into giggles as Wheeljack’s helm fins blush bright pink.
