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“How do we even know Metroplex is alive?” Rodimus wondered aloud. He fidgeted with the modified energon scanner Brainstorm had made him once again. Digits twisting and turning the knobs he wasn’t quite sure even did anything.
“Faith.” Drift replied sagely. “It takes more than a millennia to end the life function of a titan.”
“Maybe,” Rodimus relented, dropping the scanner. “But you have to admit, running in circles looking for him is getting old. I mean, how the hell did someone lose an entire Titan?”
For that, Drift had no ready answer. It was a question that had floated between both sides during the war and in the silence after. He fell into a silent rhythm a few paces behind Rodimus, the metallic clack-hiss of his pedes echoing too loudly against the dead pavement.
Rodimus continued to steer himself in wide, restless arcs, his chassis tilting as he chased the frantic pulse of a strong energon reading. He held the tracking device at arm’s length with locked servos, his posture as stiff as if he were carrying a primed thermal detonator.
Drift allowed his gaze to wander, tracing the jagged skyline of the abandoned city. The air here tasted of stale ozone and ancient, settled dust. His spark, full of reverence and heavy melancholy. Whoever had lived here had vanished in a spark-beat; the city felt unnaturally empty.
As they glided past yawning corridors, Drift peered into the gloom. He saw dinner tables still set with energon cubes that had long ago crystallized into jagged blue salt. Recharge slabs stood vacant, their soft biolights flickered out cycles ago. Scattered across the floors were the jagged shards of personal lives—data-slugs, small metal carvings, and children's trinkets—all surrendered to the slow, suffocating velvet of the dust.
Drift felt a sharp, cooling pang in his spark, his cooling fans spinning up with a mournful whir. He paused, his optics cycling to focus on a small, sparkling-sized handprint pressed into the grime of a nearby wall—a ghostly smudge of innocence left behind.
Up ahead, Rodimus was already a dozen paces away, his tires chirping against the grit as he followed his invisible path with restless speed. Sparing one last, pain-filled grimace at the wall, Drift forced his servos to move, falling back into formation.
“I swear, if I find out this is one big circle again, I’m shooting Brainstorm out of the airlock.” Rodimus groused, the harsh static of his frustration bleeding through his vocalizer. He twisted his helm sharply, tilting the scanner at an awkward angle as if a new perspective might change the maddening signal.
“Making a tuned scanner that shows only the epicenter of a large energon reading must be rather difficult,” Drift offered.
“Hey, you’re third in command. You’re supposed to be on my side.” Rodimus shot back.
“I’m supposed to be a voice of reason.” Drift corrected softly, his optics flicking back toward the shadows of the empty homes they were passing.
Rodimus stepped into the epicenter of the reading—a desolate expanse that marked the dead heart of the city. Drift scanned the horizon, his optics narrowing; the absence of buildings here was jarring, leaving a hollow, toothless gap in the skyline that felt unnatural.
Instead of structures, a massive, archaic circle was carved directly into the floor, composed of gigantic, interlocking plates of tarnished metal. The seams between them were packed with centuries of black grit. Rodimus, his attention tethered to the flickering screen in his hand, failed to see the raised lip of a central plate. His pede caught the edge with a harsh clank, sending him sprawling forward. He hit the ground with a heavy, reverberating thud that seemed to echo through the very foundations of the plaza.
Drift instinctively tensed, his hand hovering near the hilt of a sword as his spark stuttered. He held his breath—the silence suddenly heavy and expectant. Seconds ticked by. The only sound was the wind whistling through the jagged ruins and the frustrated hiss of Rodimus’s vents as he pushed himself back to his pedes. Drift let out a long, slow shutter of air. What had he expected? A trap? A transformation?
Rodimus snarled, casting the scanner aside; it clattered and skidded across the ancient metal plates. He stood there for a moment in the biting cold, running his metal hands down his faceplate in a gesture of silent, bone-deep frustration and exhaustion.
“Hail the Lost Light,” Rodimus ordered. “We’re obviously done here.”
“But the energon reading—” Drift started, his optics still tracing the strange, interlocking geometry of the floor. The signal had been so potent, so rhythmic.
“Is obviously wrong!” Rodimus barked, cutting him off with a sharp gesture toward the discarded scanner. “Who would have thought? Brainstorm made something that frags up the minute we actually need it to work.”
He threw his hands up in a theatrical display of exasperation before locking his servos behind his helm. He began to pace the circumference of the metal circle, his cooling fans whirring at a high, agitated pitch as he struggled to vent the heat of his frustration. The vibrant flames on his chest plates seemed dimmed by the gray, oppressive shadows of the plaza.
“Just get them on the comms, Drift,” he muttered, his helm bowed.
Drift turned his back to the center of the plaza, his fingers dancing across his vambrace to key up the comms. The channel opened with a burst of harsh, crackling static that filled his audio receptors.
"Magnus, this is Drift. We’re requesting—"
The ground beneath them moved with a loud shriek. He had just stepped off the edge of the metal circle when the interlocking plates began to grind. The groan of metal against metal was deafening, but to Drift, masked by the static of the comms, it sounded like distant thunder.
Ultra Magnus’s stern, clipped voice filtered through the static—"Report, Drift. Is the objective secured?"—effectively muffling Rodimus’s startled, undignified yelp.
Drift spun around just as the floor beneath the Captain began to gape open in violent, jerky spasms. The massive plates retreated like the iris of a predatory eye.
“Drift!” Rodimus screamed, his frame lurching as his pede slipped into the widening chasm.
From the depths of the new orifice, a brilliant, blinding blue light erupted. It wasn't dim by any means, but a torrential pour of azure radiance that washed away the gray shadows of the dead city, bathing Rodimus’s terrified face in a haunting, celestial glow.
“Rodimus!” Drift severed the comm-link mid-sentence and lunged back toward the chaotic grinding of the plaza.
The platform was a death trap of shifting geometry. Drift scrambled onto the moving plates, his stabilizers whining as he fought to keep his footing against the violent, jerky retraction of the floor. Rodimus was hanging on by his servos— scraping desperately against a receding metal plate as it vanished into a narrow slit in the floor.
“Drift!” Rodimus’s optics were wide, reflecting the terrifying azure glow from below.
Drift didn't think; he threw himself into a desperate slide across the vibrating metal, his chassis sparking against the grit as he reached out with every centimeter of his frame. His servos grasped at the empty air just as the plate Rodimus was clinging to retracted fully into the darkness.
For a heartbeat, their optics locked—blue on blue clashing in a moment of pure, unadulterated panic—and then Rodimus was gone.
Drift skidded to the very lip of the chasm, his fingers digging into the jagged edge of the opening as he peered down. He wasn't looking into a simple hole; he was looking into an ocean. Below him stretched a vast, shimmering sea of liquid light—a subterranean ocean of pure, undiluted energon that pulsed with a rhythm like a giant’s heartbeat. The radiance was so intense it felt physical, a warm pressure against his sensors that smelled of life. Somewhere in that swirling, blinding blue abyss, Rodimus was a tiny, dark speck falling toward the glow.
Drift didn't hesitate. He launched himself into the void, tucking his limbs to narrow his profile and cutting through the rushing air like a falling blade. The roar of the wind whistled through his vents, competing with the hum of the vast power source rising to meet them.
Mid-fall, some cold logic flickered through his processor: he had no grappling line, no flight thrusters, and no plan for actually getting out. He was simply falling with intent. He could only pray the shimmering blue abyss was truly a reservoir of life-giving energon and not something more sinister.
He plummeted past the jagged shadows of the chasm walls until he reached Rodimus. The Captain was a blur of flailing red and gold against the sapphire glare. Drift collided with him mid-air, wrapping his powerful servos around Rodimus’s chassis and pulling him into a jarring, protective embrace.
“I’ve got you!” Drift roared over the atmospheric scream.
Rodimus gasped, his fingers digging into Drift’s shoulder plating. His optics were blown wide, two circles of flickering white light reflecting the sheer impossibility of the ocean below. He clung to Drift as if the swordsman were the only solid object left in a dissolving universe.The heat of the energon pool was rising now, a thick, sweet scent that saturated their sensors.
As they plunged into the ocean of blue a sensory overload that felt as though the wind were knocked out of both of them all at once. The liquid was thick, humming with a heavy, magnetic viscosity that saturated their armor. Behind their closed optics, reality fractured into blinding flashes—jagged splinters of another life that seared directly into their processors.
They saw a Titan, ancient and weathered, resting upon the raw metal foundations of the world after a planet-shaking battle. They felt its exhaustion—the slow, tectonic shift as he transformed into a state of permanent camouflage, becoming the very city they had just walked upon. They felt the tickle of being inhabited, the strange, bustling warmth of thousands of smaller sparks making a home in his hollowed-out chassis.
Then, the sky blackened. Drift and Rodimus felt the sudden, searing terror of a hailstorm of Decepticon rocketbombs raining down over the city many years later. They felt the vibrations of the massive frame beneath them wincing, the agony of fire and the hollow, echoing grief as the inhabitants fled, leaving the city to go cold and silent.
Both Drift and Rodimus’ sparks reacted violently to the shared memory, wailing in a muffled but deafening frequency.
Just as soon as it began, it ended. One moment they were drowning in the Titan’s memories; the next, the world snapped back into focus with a harsh, metallic rattle. They were back in the city center, sprawled across the now-sealed metal plates.
Both of them were drenched in a thick, shimmering coating of spark-fluid that clung to them like liquid mercury. They were still clinging to one another, fingers locked into gaps in armor, sparks thrumming at a synchronized, frantic pace.
With a series of awkward, mechanical coughs and the sharp click of resetting joints, they untangled their limbs. The silence that followed was heavy, weighted by the ghostly images of war and the ancient giant still vibrating beneath their pedes. Neither spoke; the shared trauma of the vision had bypassed their vocalizers and gone straight to their cores.
A shadow stretched across the plaza, growing larger until the familiar, bulky silhouette of the Lost Light drifted overhead, its engines a low, comforting rumble in the thin atmosphere. A rescue shuttle detached from its side, its thrusters carving bright needles of light through the gray gloom as it began its descent.
They just watched in silence. Rodimus reached up with a shaky hand, slowly wiping the translucent fluid from his optics, his usual bravado nowhere to be found.