Work Text:
When it rained, it poured. His windshield wipers worked furiously to clear visibility in his widest sensor, as the rest of the drivers on the road conveniently decided that today would be the day that they forgot all the laws of the road. The amount of times he had to blare his horn at some swerving afthole in front of him could have set a record amongst the cavalry ranks if any of them were still around. If he hadn't been the only one left–
No time to think about that.
He had to keep going, keep pushing the limit of how fast he could go above the speed limit before he got pulled over, because if he stopped moving then they'd catch him. The Autobots, High Command, Optimus counted on him to remain undetected and he could not fail them now—not when he had seriously and truly messed everything up for somebody who probably wouldn't ever return the favor…
Prime had always warned that his friendship with Breakdown would lead to ruin. Perhaps if he had specified that it would ruin his mission, force him to swap from alt to alt to alt, and run on pure fumes maybe then… Oh, who was he kidding.
He'd do the same damn thing again, risking it all for his friend. For companionship. For…
Every part of his frame ached—he couldn't even remember the last time transformed out of his vehicle mode. He recharged, fueled, and rested his wheels as a regular run of the mill car. And even then, those small breaks barely lasted long. The world passed by in a whirl of colors and scents to the point where he didn't know where he was or where he was heading only operating on the need to escape.
But every time that he thought, I've finally gotten far enough away, I can rest now, those dreaded vans would creep around the corner and he'd have to speed off again.
GHOST tracked him with an efficiency that would have had Hound seething with jealousy, his green palette a convenient cover for the overflowing envy. Thinking about it turned the thought from amusing to miserable to confounding.
How? How did they keep finding him? Always a step behind, at the corner for every sensor he had available… His inadequacies as a cavalry scout felt insurmountable the longer he had to keep driving and driving and driving.
And that engine of his—the one that was designed from the onset of his forging for endurance—it sputtered out, practically on its last leg as it begged for rest.
He could not grant it that. He could grant it fuel.
Turning abruptly at the first service station he saw, the black truck driver behind him honked his horn for a solid three seconds while the shotgun passenger flipped him off as they passed. He ignored the aggressive act, knowing that on some level he deserved it since he didn't appropriately signal his turn, and slowly crawled to a stop at one of the pumps.
Opening the door, he manipulated one leg following the other as the driver stepped out. Pulling up the hood to the grey jacket that he projected, he kept the fingers gripped tight around the hem as he hurried into the gas station.
As he opened the door, a bell rang—signifying the entrance of a customer. The clerk at the counter barely acknowledged his entrance, headphone wires tangled around his lanyard as he scrolled away on his phone. With brown, untamed hair and a certain amount of leftover baby pudge to his face the kid reminded him so sharply of Spike that he kept his own head down and looked away.
On a gloomy day like this, he was the only person in the convenience store. Rows of product stared back at him as all the way at the end of the store a row of fridges illuminated their contents. From the entrance, he could already tell that it needed a restock of… just about everything.
Stomping his boots to shake off mud and rain, he dropped the hood to his jacket—droplets of falsified water staining the top, going all the way down the sleeves. Even his faux black vest gleamed with stray raindrops that he meticulously allowed to drip off of it.
He didn't have time to pretend to browse through the aisles for travel snacks. Walking right past the bright packaging of chemically modified chips and candy, he carefully made his way to the counter.
"Fifteen on pump three," he informed the clerk as he pretended to dig through his vest pocket for cash. The kid jolted slightly, knocking his earbuds out and leaving them to clatter against the counter.
"Oh! Sure thing, miss." He placed down a constructed twenty dollar bill against the counter. The clerk picked it up and noticed immediately that something was off. He never could quite get 'touch' right when it came to mimicking humans and their currency.
Quietly, as he was likely trained to do, the kid felt the bill against the pad of his thumb—and when he rationalized that it did indeed feel flat and therefore fake, he proceeded to double check the various other security measures that were far easier to imitate. The lower corner denomination changed with the light, all of his focus spent on the precise color change that his act stilted for a moment. Water froze on his skin, half-way fallen down his brow from the wet front of his coils.
But while that passed his inspection, the intangible weight in-between his fingers called for more inquiry. The kid held the note up to the light and upon finding the barely visible imprint of that horrid portrait proceeded to pull out his counterfeit pen.
What sort of frustration must he be going through when his thumb clicked on the ultraviolet light and found the bright security thread peering up at him? Intimately, within his subconscious, the kid knew that the bill couldn't possibly be real, and yet here it withstood every measure against his till going under at the end of the night.
And it would go under when mysteriously the count revealed it was twenty dollars short.
Guilt festered quickly at the back of his computer. The kid—he didn't sound much like Spike but the resemblance was far too uncanny that for a moment he understood how humans felt interacting with him in this form—finished scraping his pen against the bill, the lines coming back unmarred before he laughed awkwardly, "Sorry, they have us checking every bill over ten."
He shouldn't apologize at all, he hadn't done anything wrong. The kid trusted his instincts and if this were any other normal interaction, he wouldn't have been led astray by deception.
By Solus, what had led him to this new low? At this point, there was very little difference between him and the Decepticons. Both on the run, starving, desperate for just a momentary solace as those humans hunted them down.
All for Breakdown, all for chasing after a friend that would never slow his roll to allow Bumblebee to catch up.
He should have never sacrificed his energon suppressor for more speed. He should have swallowed his pride and stayed in hiding, like Optimus asked him to.
"You're good," he smiled at the kid, imagining Spike the entire time. He missed his little friend so dearly. Were he still alive, he would have run straight to him for safety. Spike would have provided him sanctuary, a place to lay low whilst GHOST and their dogs searched for a trail that grew ever colder.
But Spike was dead and this child spitting on his memories of his friend slowed him down with that whole interaction. Frustration pounded away at his spark even as regret swelled the empty cavern of his chest.
The clerk started to ring him up, moments away from authorizing the pump for fifteen dollars worth of disgusting crude oil to fill his tank drained of all possible energon and an anxious tremor snuck past his computer to reflect in his hands. His eyes darted away, roaming over to the nearly empty display case of mint gum.
"Can I add on a pack of gum?" he asked, figuring that no matter what happened next or throughout the rest of the night—twenty dollars would have been missing from the till. Shoplifters probably filched packs of gum all the time, the inventory reflecting a certain allowance of missing product by upper management. "That way you could keep the change."
But Primus forbid if that child tried to give him back any amount of change whatsoever. He would not enable furthering the trade of his illusory money for fuel when he didn't even deserve that.
He hoped his actions wouldn't result in the kid getting fired. He hoped that they could reason away a missing twenty dollars and not enforce a write-up on a child who had done the job right.
"Are you sure?" the kid questioned, forcing him to restrain letting his irritation at the continued conversation leak out onto his face. "We sell those for $2.99 which is about, uh, I think it's $3.25 after tax? You'd be losing out on a dollar-seventy five."
He filed away the statement regarding the tax, by which he'd allow a background program to determine what state he was even in through that tidbit, but shook his head. His stiff smile grew even more tight as he repeated, "Keep it."
"If you say so," the kid finished up the transaction, scanning the bar code on the back of the gum. He'd leave it at whatever scrapheap he paused at next. "Pumps ready when you are."
"Thank you–"
A chime filled the empty store, interrupting him.
"Welcome in."
Occasionally, in those solitary nights where he had not a single soul to keep him company, he wished that he could become human. It was an absurd concept—who in their right processor would want to give up the extraordinary ability to transform and race at speeds human vehicles could only dream of? They'd call him crazy on Cybertron. Pathetic too.
But then he fell lap first into moments like this, where he manipulated his avatar into turning toward the door and found relief in controlling every micro expression of his fake.
He recognized those shades, that work uniform compliant hijab. Schloder and Bagheri shook off the rain the same as he had choreographed earlier, except this time the droplets were real. The mud too as Schloder scraped his shoes against the store mat in disgust.
Inconspicuously, he grabbed the pack of gum and shoved it into his vest pocket. The anti-gravity element of his hologram would last so long as he kept his cool—he could not have the stupid chewing gum fall through the totally normal, not at all relevant woman up at the counter.
Bagheri stared down at a device, eyes roaming across the store as they flicked up and back down at the screen. "He's definitely here," she confirmed to Schloder quietly, practically under her breath.
They moved further in, walking down the rows of confections and snacks. If he hadn't felt hunted until now, then he felt very much like an animal in a cage waiting as the butcher approached.
The second that they left the door cleared, he exited. Arms lax at his side, gait unhurried.
Grey darkened skies thundered above him. He approached the pump and started to fill the jeep. On the screen, the numbers cycled quickly as it went up and up and up until the prepaid fifteen dollars worth of gas went straight into his emaciated tank.
But he didn't watch the screen, not needing to watch the credit line. Instead, he stared into the store and watched as the two GHOST agents searched up and down for him. With his computer disconnected as he piloted his disguise, their energon-scanners must have given them confusing readings heading into the building. And as they knew all well and good—Transformers couldn't enter any human-sized establishment.
Or so their intel informed them. As with their t-cogs, this was a secret that the Autobots would keep hidden from the humans.
Fifteen dollars worth of gas wasn't very much fuel at all. He barely needed to wait a minute or two before the pump automatically ceased. But in that time, he watched as Schloder stalked up to the counter—prim and proper as always, arms laced behind his back as he dipped his head in a cocky manner toward the clerk.
They spoke, a simple back and forth before the kid shrugged and jerked his chin out toward the filling stations.
All three of the humans inside the store turned to look at him. They couldn't see the face he extensively modeled until it was to his liking but they didn't need to.
Yellow cars still looked yellow, even at the dead of night and especially under the bright fluorescent of the shade above the pumps.
Presumably, Schloder thanked the clerk for his assistance and Bagheri already had one hand on the push-bar to the door before their conversation concluded.
But he was already slamming his driver's side door open and closed, dispersing the hologram and collecting his miniature drones as he slammed on the gas—speeding off.
GHOST would follow him, they always would, probably even to the ends of the Earth…
But Bumblebee wouldn't make it easy.