Chapter Text
"So, you wanna drag, do you?"
If Blurr could have stopped, could have reacted physically, to words over open comm channels, he would have.
(It wasn't addressed to him, really, except that it was; he shouldn't have been able to pick up on it except that he was an Intelligence agent.)
Open comm channels.
Open, Cybertronian comm channels.
He could have wept, sobbed, fallen to his knees, but he wasn't in control of his frame and his vocalizer had failed him weeks (decacycles, Earth units of time were so uniformly short but so useful for Earth) ago, the selective mutism that came with this frame convincing his systems that Talking Bad and clamping down on his ability to do it.
Which was fine, it kept him from undignified begging.
"Not now," someone else said, over open comm channels, "those drivers need help."
"But I can catch this guy!" said the bot who was, evidently, the yellow-this-time harbinger of Blurr's death, the speedster he'd show up before his sacrifice play.
Thank fucking Primus.
Against his will (more or less), Blurr accelerated away from the little yellow sub-compact, who added, "... I think," to his assessment.
Bumblebee, then, one of Longarm Prime's Academy classmates and Sentinel Prime's first cadet class's wash-outs. It would be Blurr's job to show Bumblebee that he wasn't, actually, the fastest thing on four wheels, and possibly, hopefully, that speed wasn't everything.
This life sucked.
It sucked.
It had sucked from the moment he'd come online as a sparkling, of all the odd things, a Cybertronian child, in a frame and processor too underdeveloped to contain Blurr waking up again, remembering everything again, and certainly not the knowledge that the loop, the remembering, the curse, hadn't broken, he was another new Blurr, and he had to start over again without his bar or his friends or his hope or Swindle. (Apparently, most sparklings' first action wasn't to collapse into broken sobs and inconsolable wails. Luckily his speech issue had kept Blurr from babbling anything intelligible at the caregivers who tried to help him. Letting random people know how many times he’d been Blurr was almost never a good idea, especially right at the start of a new life.) Despite Cybertron being allegedly post-war, it had still sucked, rigid and borderline functionist if not for a need for workers to become warriors-- heroes, they liked to call them-- and Blurr had silently decided to just... set this lifetime aside for grief.
He wouldn't avoid the story, the narrative, when it came for him, but until the Red-or-Yellow Speedster had to be shown up and the sacrifice had to be made, he'd just... get along however, mourn his hopes, grieve a life he'd cautiously dared to live, and bow out of this life with some measure of grace.
Professional racing had been a consideration-- he could dredge his charisma up from wherever he'd dropped it, he knew how, and despite the death map across his exposed protoform, Blurr was certainly pretty enough to manage it. But there'd been mutterings that his voice wouldn't hold him back in the Elite Guard, and somehow that was where he'd ended up.
Kup was the first familiar face in this life, and it had nearly broken Blurr. He'd forgotten to expect to know people sideways, amid the annoyances of having to grow up.
But once a Wrecker, always a Wrecker, and the Academy wasn't really a challenge. The Elite Guard couldn't find a unit that wanted to tolerate him, but Highbrow Prime had poached him for Intelligence, and Blurr didn't fight that, either. (He considered pointing out that a game of Hot Rivet wasn't won by catching and keeping the rivet, but... he shut up about it.) He wasn't good at spycraft, however-- not unobtrusive enough, too distinctive, and not a dutiful enough little cog in the "great Autobot machine" to give a frag about appeasing his new boss... but Highbrow Prime wasn't going to admit he'd made an error in judgment, and made Blurr act as a bodyguard instead of as an actual Intelligence agent.
Blurr had figured that would be his sacrifice moment, and tried not to resent how much Highbrow Prime was not worth dying for.
Then Highbrow had gotten himself killed-- at least after leaving written evidence behind that he'd been the one to decide not to bring Blurr along, making the ridiculous mistake of actually going alone when a note promising important information on Decepticon High Command activities said ‘and come alone’-- and the new head of Intelligence, young Longarm Prime, was...
... Definitely a better boss. Blurr wouldn't have regretted dying to protect him.
Instead, Longarm had tolled Blurr's death knell, and sent him to Earth, to keep track of the bare handful of Autobots and Decepticons there.
The shattered Allspark wasn't diminished, and humans remained creative, and Master Disaster's control over Blurr was an actual fresh hell that he wasn't looking forward to remembering eternally.
Voluntarily mode-locked-- because Master Disaster couldn't figure out how to make Blurr stand up again, and Blurr wasn't going to do it for him-- silenced by his own frame's foibles, under the physical control of someone who cast him as the star player in an illegal demolition derby street racing... thing, and kept in perfect repair by an Allspark fragment that flawlessly healed him even as it powered the remote that drove him into vehicles and barriers, seeing Bumblebee, hearing that challenge, came as something of a relief.
First, show up the speedster.
Then, die to protect someone.
Escape was on the way.
It wasn't long at all before Bumblebee returned with some sort of rocket boosters, and Master Disaster unleashed Blurr on him. "Go show that buttinski that my races are by invitation only. Now!"
And he jerked at dials on the remote.
Blurr hated that part.
Master Disaster never forgot that Blurr was a person, and talked to him like he was a person, whether or not Blurr answered, giving orders Blurr would never have followed... and then just made him "obey" using the remote. Used like an object, spoken to like a person, and it was the dissonance of it that made it hard for Blurr to... not ignore it so much as get lost in his own processor. Let the human use his frame, it didn't matter because Blurr wouldn't be in it for too much longer, most likely.
(Most likely. There'd been a long, long time in his last life between the show-up and the final sacrifice.)
(... Primus, he missed Swindle. That hadn't been the final sacrifice, but-- Swindle had lived. It would have been worth it, if it had been his last moment in that life, just for that.)
(He couldn't think about Swindle now, not those wide fake-innocent optics, or the bitching about how someone so stupidly rich could be such a haphazard bookkeeper, or the perfect order Blurr's books were in once Swindle finished with them; not the wide salesmechanism's smile and especially, especially not the way he fit in Blurr's arms, the angle of his helm under Blurr's cheek, the reaction being whatever it might be, slick cheer, affected grumbling, but always, always coming with a nuzzle back, he couldn't think about that now.)
The human drivers fell back as Blurr was steered down the... culvert? Gully? Something meant for water rather than cars, he was at least sure of that much.
Bumblebee talked to himself.
"Wants a little showdown, does he?"
Blurr didn't, but the story did.
"Uh-oh," because Bumblebee was in a puddle of... something brown that Blurr didn't care to know the origin of. "Goodbye traction, hello scrap heap!"
That wasn't likely.
Blurr couldn't offline the Red-Or-Yellow Speedster, that wasn't how it worked, and he certainly couldn't muster up the kind of willpower that might, might let him shake off Master Disaster's control.
So he wasn't at all surprised when Bumblebee reversed his rocket things and blasted backwards down the concrete structure meant for water not cars. He only sort of paid attention to Bumblebee asking Blurr to wait, to, "Back off, will you?" because, nice as it was to hear another Cybertronian voice, it wasn't like he could.
It wasn't like he could avoid knocking his side into Bumblebee, either, or how hard a tap it was-- though, again, another Cybertronian. Living metal. Violent contact or not, it was almost dizzying in how it cut through the months of sheer isolation since leaving for Earth. His frame did what it was told, and he hated it but couldn't do anything about it--
-- And then Bumblebee stood up.
Blurr at least tried. He tried. He couldn't make his vocalizer cooperate, but he tried to tell Bumblebee not to do that, to transform back, to run run run go get gone as fast as he could don't let him see don't let him near you don't let him get you go go go run.
All he could do was brake, sharply, when he was made to brake, and try to force a scream when Master Disaster called down, "Oi! Don't move a muscle! Or piston! Or whatever it is you Autobot things move!"
Bumblebee fell for it all, agreeing to show up for an actual race, and he was-- young.
So young.
Blurr had forgotten how young it was possible for Autobots to be, here.
(Longarm Prime was Bumblebee's age, but never seemed so young as all that.)
And Master Disaster would kill the kid for money, because people watched races for the crashes, Blurr knew.
(Those were some of the pointless deaths, dying on the track. Blurr usually didn't mind them, because as traumatic, pointless deaths went, they were usually either fast or packed with painkillers. He knew in his spark that the pointless deaths were supposed to be punitive, the narrative getting back at him for not playing along, not finding someone to die for, but Blurr had a finely-graded scale of Good Death To Bad Death, and honestly anything that was fast, relatively painless, or blessedly both was pretty high on the Good Death side of the scale.)
He at least knew it wasn't going to happen-- Bumblebee dying for a more exciting race.
Blurr might, though.
Bumblebee was at the race when Blurr was moved into position.
"You don't fool me, Decepticon," he said, quietly, and Blurr could have laughed (hysterically) if he could have made any kind of noise.
The human child, Sari Sumdac, climbed out of Bumblebee's driver's seat a moment later, something glowing around her neck-- evidently the Allspark Key could glow, which was interesting.
(Blurr didn't notice how it pulled at her, couldn't know that the Allspark had decided this fragment was particularly urgent, that the Keyholder, the Allspark Speaker, needed to get this situation handled promptly, now, immediately, but then, Sari didn't pick up on all of that, herself. She just did what needed doing without very much prompting, which the Allspark loved about her.)
The child headed for Master Disaster's control trailer, which was dangerous, but Blurr couldn't do anything about it... except note that Sari might actually count as both red and yellow. It wasn't impossible that she'd be vital, somehow, too; he wasn't often around young humans, but he was familiar enough with them. Dying to protect a child wouldn't leave him with any regrets, for all it might not be great for the child in question psychologically.
But Sari returned to Bumblebee only a moment later-- clutching the remote.
Blurr felt several important processes stall out or crash.
She had the remote.
"Quick!" she said, hammering on Bumblebee's door, "Let me in!"
"Oi!" Master Disaster had either seen her or had gone right for Blurr's controls. "Give that back, you little thief!"
Bumblebee and Sari fled, and the human drivers mistook that for the start of the race, which further angered Master Disaster. He ran for his trailer while Blurr...
... sat there, trying to process faster.
Was he free?
Was he free?
Was it that easy?
"What did you get yourself into now, Bumblebee?" someone muttered, and instead of being stuck in a processing loop, Blurr sat there, frozen, trying not to indicate to anyone that he'd overheard. "I guess it's time for me to--"
The Autobot-- Bulkhead, certified space bridge repair technician with remarkably high test scores in that certification, and new mechanism to Blurr across realities-- grunted and froze.
Literally, not the way Blurr was frozen.
Iced over by the Decepticon Blitzwing making a sudden appearance, and that let Blurr know exactly how things would play out-- protect a human child and a young Autobot (or two) from a triplechanger, or die trying.
Blitzwing flew off after the racers, and Blurr-- ignoring Master Disaster's protests-- took off after Blitzwing.
He paid attention to whether or not Blitzwing noticed him (he did not) and to the fight, or flight, mostly, noting that, despite Bumblebee's record as a wash-out and screw-up, he held his own remarkably well for a sub-compact Autobot worker against a Decepticon warbuild triplechanger, and not due to Blitzwing's unstable nature in this reality. Bumblebee dodged bolts of ice with relative ease, and when Blitzwing iced over the entire... concrete thing that Blurr was still bothered not knowing the actual term for, causing Bumblebee to spin out?
Bumblebee transformed, stood up, and skated easily over the ice.
Blurr thought he could hear the child laughing.
It was good, actually, that the only thing Blurr would need to be an object lesson for was that speed was useful but couldn't be relied on-- maybe Earth had been good for Bumblebee, or being responsible for a child, or maybe he'd just matured over time, but-- this wasn't the bumbler from Sentinel Prime-then-Minor's logs as a drill instructor, or the well-meaning near-sparkling Longarm Prime had briefed Blurr on. This was someone young and still impulsive but, at least under pressure, capable.
And his thieving human companion had Blurr driving under his own power again.
If the sacrifice for this life was incoming, it would be one Blurr could accept. This was a pair of young people worth dying to protect.
(Objectively worth it, worth it by other people's standards, too. The last time he'd gotten between a triplechanger and a target, it had been Astrotrain and Swindle, and then Swindle had turned around and saved Blurr.)
And then Blitzwing brought down a bridge on his own head, and it seemed like maybe the youngsters had handled matters on their own.
Good for them. Bewildering, but good for them.
Blurr, however, had been heading for the bridge, and had to seek an alternate route to keep an eye on Bumblebee and Sari-- just in case. Just in case.
Just in case they rescued a second human from a barrage of Blitzwing’s missile fire, which was only the first barrage of missile fire.
What did Blurr have that could stop a triplechanger? A jet and a tank? He disregarded his saw out of hand; it could work, but Blitzwing was three times Blurr's height in robot mode. Making it work would take too long. If Blitzwing stayed in one of his alts, stasis cuffs wouldn't be any help.
The only weapon he had that was in scale with Blitzwing was if Blurr managed to use his own bumper to stab him with.
Which he considered, before Sari leaned out of Bumblebee's window and set Blitzwing spinning with Master Disaster's remote.
... Fair. Clever.
Unpleasant, but as long as she stopped, also probably deserved.
Until Bumblebee jolted, and the remote went flying, and Blurr's spark flipped over in its casing.
No, no, no, no that couldn't just sit there waiting for anyone to pick it up, no no no--
If Master Disaster found it again-- if Blitzwing picked it up--
Bumblebee drove down the watercourse thing, under the bridge Blurr had found as an alternate route and vantage point, and Blitzwing returned to jet mode to chase him down, weapons powering up once again. Ice would immobilize Bumblebee, if it hit him, but it could kill the humans instantly, and Blurr--
(He'd been under his own power, he'd been free, he'd been free, he wasn't going to let anyone take his frame from him again, this life wasn't worth that, not again not again not again)
Blurr made the sacrifice.
The guardrail shattered as Blurr hit it, between the shape of his alt mode, being made of sterner stuff than an Earth vehicle, and the speed Blurr was capable of; from there it was just a matter of hitting Blitzwing.
Red, yellow, young, speedster, bystander.
(Suicide.)
And Blitzwing--
Blitzwing veered away at the last possible instant, the crankshaft, clipping an office building and flying off. Blurr couldn't pursue in the air, and thudded heavily to the ground.
"Everybody stay back!" Bumblebee ordered, "I'll handle Blitzwing," which was crazy talk, but he ran off after the Decepticon anyway.
Sari and the other human ran down the concrete thing-- and passed Blurr, who transformed, then struggled to get to his hands and knees.
Okay.
That had not been a good landing.
And he wasn't used to not immediately being repaired by an Allspark fragment after crashes and hard landings anymore.
Fragging ow.
Sari had the remote in her hand.
"You are Cybertronian!" she exclaimed, and Blurr--
Blurr pushed himself, as hard as he could.
"Reh-- that," he pointed. "Don't-- don't let-- D'saster--"
The other human-- adult male, and from the badge, law enforcement-- put a hand on Blurr's pauldron. (Blurr expected to shudder at the touch, but it wasn't like Master Disaster's fondling. The hand was still small, still oily, but it was pressing comfort, reassurance, not petting possession. Human, but in the good way.) "We won't, son," the adult said, "That--" there was a pause Blurr recognized as editing language for a young audience, "jerk is going down."
Blurr sagged, forehead coming to rest against the concrete.
"You good here? Nothin' vital leaking?" the adult human asked, and Blurr lifted his head enough to nod. "Stay put unless somethin' comes after you, we'll get you help after the bust."
By the time Blurr realized he'd expected a sub-compact worker, an adult human, and a human child to take on both Blitzwing and Master Disaster, simply because one of the humans spoke with confident authority, they were done successfully driving off Blitzwing and arresting Master Disaster, which Blurr discovered by staggering in the direction they'd all run off in. No Blitzwing, crushed trailer, cuffed Master Disaster, the adult human having summoned more law enforcement and going through procedures Blurr vaguely recognized. It was a pleasant surprise, after half expecting to find nothing but paste and parts.
"You stuck around!" Bumblebee exclaimed, skidding down the slope of the concrete whatever to dart up to Blurr. "And you're an Autobot! ... An Elite Guard Autobot!"
"'M--" Blurr started, choking on it still, and instead waffled a hand.
"Still havin' trouble talking, kid?" the adult human-- the one he'd met before, there were others, now-- asked, and Blurr nodded.
Sari appeared out of nowhere, still clutching the remote in one hand-- but the other hand going to the Key around her neck. "I can help! The Allspark Key--" Blurr flinched away. "... Are you one of those bots who's weird about being repaired by anything but a medic? Because I promise it's okay."
Carefully, Blurr pointed at the Key, and then the remote, and gritted out, "S-same."
"They're the same? ... They're both... Allspark-y..." Bumblebee offered.
Blurr nodded again, vehemently.
"That chucklef-- head," the adult human said, carefully, "Had you in a bunch of his demolition derby crap, right? Been in it for a month and a half now?" Blurr nodded. "Against your will, controlled by that thing?" More nodding. Yes. Good human, smart human, if Blurr had some sort of human treat, he'd offer it. "But you never got a scratch on you, because if those things work the same, it fixed you right up, didn't it?"
Blurr had a new favorite human and didn't know his name.
"Guess you'd rather let Ratchet take a look at you," Bulkhead said. "Is all that from the crash?"
He gestured at... all of Blurr.
And.
Oh, right.
The death map.
Blurr shook his head, unsure how to explain it was just part of his protoform markings (which was true but not the entire truth) without access to his vocabulary. Instead, the adult human asked, "You got a long name, kid?"
He did not-- but he had better than struggling to spit it out.
Blurr produced his identification.
"'Agent Blurr of Cybertron Intelligence'," Bumblebee read. "Holy scrap, you're not just Elite Guard, you're a spy?"
Blurr tossed off a salute that could be generously described as 'sloppy.'
“Cool!” Sari said with a grin.
"You're here to spy on the Decepticons!" Bumblebee concluded, half right. "And then you got stuck in Allspark Fragment Stuff. Wow, that sucks a lot."
"Do you think Ratchet can fix your voice?" Sari asked, and Blurr shook his head-- then carefully tapped the adult human's wrist, where his chronometer was.
"It'll just take time?" the adult guessed, and again, Blurr nodded. "So you three can get him back to your place, right? Get him checked out and all that, give him the time to get his voice back?"
"Sure thing, Captain Fanzone!" Bulkhead answered-- and then jolted. "Oh, right-- I'm Bulkhead, this is Bumblebee, that's Sari Sumdac, she's like an organic sparkling, and this is Captain Carmine Fanzone, he's a police officer, it's like an enforcer but... more human."
Blurr committed his new favorite human's name to memory.
Later, a transmission to Cybertron went out from the Autobots’ base.
"This is Ratchet Minor of the Orion reaching out to Longarm Prime of Cybertron Intelligence. Agent Blurr revealed himself to my team’s younger members in the face of injury and exhaustion. He’ll have the full report for you soon, but around six weeks ago, he was taken captive by a human with an Allspark fragment, only ending up free a few megacycles ago, resulting in minor injury, understandable trauma, and an ongoing-- but ebbing-- nonverbal episode. He’s bunking at our base for now, and given how he keeps leaning towards the nearest EM field and gently prodding humans, I’m not inclined, as a medic, to sign off on his full return to solo fieldwork just yet.
"His prognosis is good, generally, but his spark readings are strange, and I want to keep an optic on those. They’re not unhealthy, exactly, but they suggest long-term isolation-- so long term the math almost can’t add up to Blurr’s age. He’d have to have been a loner since he was a sparkling.
"Please advise stat if there’s anything I shouldn't go poking at in my capacity as a medical provider."