Chapter Text
To us now, as humans, it is hardly a rare thing for a child to be born amidst the carnage of war.
Cities are leveled and entire civilizations vanish in, if considered how long we as a species have existed, the blink of an eye. Death by the hands of fellow man is something each generation of us has known and something our children will pass on to their children, they will pass it on to theirs and so forth and so forth until the last of us are gone.
So for us it wouldn't be surprising to find a screaming infant beneath the rubble of a building, at least not as surprising as it had been to Kup.
Kup had seen many cycles of war already by the time he had found himself in the rubble left behind by a bombardment. Normally his fellow Autobots didn't resort to such things but two members of the Decepticons high command had been present so they had been forced to take rather drastic measures.
Seeing as both Megatron and Starscream had been caught in one of the many explosions, a few teams had been sent out to search for any signs of them. Be it a flake of their paint or their charred frames, anything would have been satisfactory.
He himself wasn't as optimistic as some of his younger team members, but a small bit of hope had remained in his spark.
The sector he was in had been leveled by the blasts, almost unrecognizable now, a smoking mess of rubble. There had been a hospital once, but now he was standing in its shattered remains.
Kup was about to turn back and look in the other direction when he heard it.
A chirp.
Tiny, barely louder than a whisper, but there.
He froze where he stood, not daring to move. Again a little chirp rang out, and this time he fould tell from where it was coming.
He ran faster than he had in a long time, rushing to where the sound had come from. His sprint took him straight to a collapsed wall that had broken into many brittle pieces. With a sigh he stepped onto one of the parts, hoping dearly that he had heard wrong.
But no, louder again he heard it, the exhausted cry of a sparkling.
Desperately he pushed aside the pieces of the wall, getting coated in dust and ash in the process. It didn't take long at all to find the source of the noise; a newspark.
Small and curled in on itself it beeped at him, its optics not yet open enough to see clearly, but it could tell that there was someone leaning towards it.
Kup bit back a sob as he pulled it free. By some miracle the small thing had survived, completely unharmed by the rubble around it.
“Oh sweet Primus.” He lifted the sparkling up to his face and gently brushed away some dust from its thin plates. Crimson red, warm purple and a deep gold made up its plating. Not that it had much of it yet, no, this sparkling couldn't have emerged longer than a joor ago. There were long gaps where its protoform poked through and it still had remnants of gestational fluid sticking to it
“Come then kid, imma take you back to base. If your carrier's alive then they fill know to look for you there.”
He diligently ignored the sparklings four-digit servos and the little nubs on its back.
There's no way the decepticons could've sent a sparked seeker into battle.
Well, maybe he had given the cons too much grace.
Seeing the bitty in clearer light made it painfully obvious that it had some seeker in it. Its optics were blue, sure, but they were narrow like a flightframes and its legs bent just like a seekers did.
Kup himself didn't see any issue with that, really, it was just a bitlet, but almost all bots that were at the base when he got bad seemed to want to offline the poor thing immediately.
Which was kinda sickening, seeing as that went against basically all morals they had boasted to have as Autobots.
So a meeting had been called.
One with all the big guns.
Kup had been ordered to the front and was now standing by a huge table. All around him there were bots, most he had never seen before, some he had already worked with.
He had hoped that they would be mature enough to not be unreasonable, but his helm had been for naught.
“What do ya’ mean ‘what should we do?’! That's a damned seeker bitlet if I ever seen one.” Someone, Kup didn't recognize their voice, shouted angrily.”I say we end it before its creators come a-calling! It's a decepticon like any other.” A wave of murmurs passed through the gathered crowd, one filled with far too much agreement for his liking.
Kup tightened his hold on the little sparkling, which seemed to have sensed that he was the only one in the room seemingly not out to kill it. The tiny thing was shivering as it tried to press itself to his spark, getting more and more frustrated by the unfamiliarity of its rhythm.
“What kind of bot would willingly end a sparkling because of its frametype?” His voice slipped out of his vocalizer before he truly realized what he was doing. It was loud and carried far throughout the crowd, causing a hush to fall over them. “Sentinel Prime would!”
He looked down at the bitty, taking in its appearance once more. Yes, it had the typical wing nubs of a seekerlet, but its helm looked nothing like any standard model he was aware of. A hybrid then, not a seeker. Something they should celebrate, not end.
“Do you wish to be like that traitor? Then I tell you; go ahead! But this is no seeker and it is no Decepticon. This is a newspark that has lost everything it had before it even went online.” As if to voice its agreement, the bitlet let out a loud beep.
Before anyone could voice their displeasure at his words, the Prime finally stood.
He was still the imposing figure Kup remembered seeing so often, always in the distance, across the room or the battlefield. But now he was so close Kup could smell the scent of smoke on his plating.
The Prime had walked to him in a few long steps, and while most of his features were hidden behind a mask, it was clear that he held no ill will to either him or the sparkling. It was his optics, so bright and blue, almost the same shade as the newsparks, that said more than words ever could.
Said newspark let out a series of clicks he wasn't familiar with as it began to turn in his grasp. Its tiny servos, too small to even properly grasp but one digit of a minibot, reached for the Prime eagerly, nearly frantically.
The behemoth before them lowered himself to his knees to be level with the bitlet. “It has the spark of a fighter.” Optimus Prime spoke calmly and raised his huge servo so that the sparkling could nuzzle it.
“Take it to Ratchet so he can check if it is healthy. I assume you are willing to take it as your apprentice, Kup?” What could he do but nod? He wasn't one to abandon a helpless bitlet to these sparkeaters all around him.
Unsurprisingly the medbay was filled to the brim, mostly with greying frames and stressed medics, but Kup didn't let himself get distracted by the sight. He knew where Ratchet's room was, a secluded and more quiet area hidden away to give patients even in situations like these some privacy if needed.
He raised his servo to knock on the medics door, only for it to slide open before he got the chance to. Ratchet was focused on some readings when they strode in, but Kup didn't need to announce himself for the sparkling immediately began to chirp loudly while looking at the bright white lights handing over them.
The medic looked up from his scans at the noise, his optics instantly locking onto the little newspark.
Ratchet, despite being younger than most of the other Autobot medical personnel had risen in their hierarchy quickly and without mercy, probably being the youngest bot to ever reach the position of Chief Medical Officer.
He was a hardened professional through and through, but for a single klik Kup could see his mask slip away.
Soft blue optics turned cloudy at the sight of the tiny thing threatening to cry again.
“Put them in the bowl, don't want them to fall off the berth while I examine them.” His red servo gestured to the examination table and, indeed, there was a bowl placed on it. Kup gently laid the bitlet down and watched as it tried to flip itself out of its containment, its little claws leaving behind nasty scratches where they got caught.
“I will give them a through scan, seeing how little they are. I doubt they're a minibot, so I need to rule out any illnesses that might've stunted their growth “ Ratched explained as he held a large scanner over the bitty. “I'll also run their CNA in our database to see if we might find any of their relatives.”
Kup nodded along, watching the sparkling closely as it followed the light of Ratchet's scanner attentively.
“Okay, the results only take a moment to load, you can pick him up again. He is a little mech by the way.” The medic spoke as he stepped back a bit. Kup immediately scooped the bitlet up and he instantly started pawing at his faceplate with amused beeps.
“Ah, see here, they are ready.” Ratchet flipped the screen towards Kup and gestured at some of the glyphs that he didn't know the meaning of. “This right here is the percentage of seeker coding he has, it's about 25 percent, meaning that one of his Carrier’s or Sire's creators was a cold constructed seeker. The rest isn't in our system so there must be a lot of hybridization in this little mech.”
Said mechling cooed happily whenever Ratchet's pen swung near his servos and Kup stopped pretending that it wasn't an adorable sight. “And his creator's? Was there any match at all?”
The medic shook his helm slowly. “Haven't been able to find anything. Well, the miners couldn't have sired or carried this little one in the time that would have been needed for him to fully develop. Only by a small margin, mind you, but since he is a fully gestational sparkling it's more than likely that he was sparked just before the energon rivers were filled again.”
Kup glanced down at the sparkling and tried to see if anyone he knew looked like him, but it was a futile attempt seeing as the mechling was too young to have any defining features beside the wing nubs yet.
“I also believe that his sire was deactivated.” Now that made him perk up. Ratchet shrugged at his obviously confused expression: “He's fully formed but small, meaning that he received synthetic code nourishment. Usually, when a Sire and Carrier interface the transfluid would be used as a type of strengthening agent for the protoform, but when the Sire is gone? Then you get a smaller sparkling.”
A somewhat offended chirp left the sparklings intake, as if he knew that Ratchet had called him small. “The carrier could've also been injured, which is also very likely in a war.”
Kup adjusted his grip on the mechling, letting him test on his chassis again.
“I'll put all of this in his file. Get him back here in a few vorns to get his firewall updated and his anti-virus software checked. Do you have a name I can put down for him?
Kup looked at the bitty, the little red fighter, and smiled.
“Hot Rod.”