Remember Me, chapter 11
Saturday, 13 February 2021 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keaaluTitle (chapter): Remember Me (11)
Series: Transformers, G1-based “Blue” AU
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Where a dithery jetboy with questionable ethics and even more questionable loyalty sets out to cause problems for himself. And one of our heroes is definitely losing his marbles.
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You’re gonna have to make a decision about this eventually, you know.
Ramjet was pretty sure that consciences didn’t get much more annoying than his own, right now. It never had anything remotely useful to say, and now didn’t seem to want to shut up, either. It kinda felt like a thought had broken away on its own, and was waiting in a dark corner to jump on him with a gotcha! the instant he put a thruster wrong.
At least he knew what to expect from his wingmates if they got to heckling him. (Plus, if the need arose, he could just turn around and punch them in the head.)
He vented a long sigh of stale air and let his arms dangle.
Was this how those traitorous pitglitches had felt, contemplating betraying their Decepticon allies and running away to Cybertron? Suddenly unsure of everything in the entire universe?
All his life, he’d been secure and happy in his knowledge he was doing the right thing – at least, right for him, anyway. If his wingmates got in the slag, sure, he’d usually help them out of it, but wasn’t going to take ownership of whatever fraggery got them in it in the first place.
And now suddenly he had absolutely no idea if he was doing the right thing. Had ever been doing the right thing. All because a defenceless little bot not much bigger than an energon cube had got sucked into their war, when there was absolutely no reason for it except… stupid… politics. Yanked into the lives of a bunch of bored, aggressive mechs who really had nothing better to do with their time than smash dents into each other, set on pursuing a dead-end conflict that had been going on so long everyone knew that it was just gonna creep on forever as an eternal stalemate until they finally went extinct.
He felt a tiny bit sorry for the little brat. It wasn’t her fault her parents were traitorous fragsticks who deserved everything they were gonna get, right?
Right?
Okay, so he wasn’t even sure about that, any more. They’d all been keeping themselves to themselves, former-Autobot and ex-Decepticon alike, tired of pursuing the idiocy of their war when there were so few of them left now, and quietly getting on with putting the place back together. Was he really just that resentful that they hadn’t invited him and his trine back to enjoy it, too?
He probably wouldn’t have invited himself either, to be fair.
No-one would deny the huge steaming pile of proving Megatron wrong that was involved in rebuilding the planet, but somehow the scarlet traitor seemed to have been mostly forgiven and people seemed to not outright hate him, any more. So, maybe there was still hope for a trio of idiots who couldn’t quite seem to detach themselves from Megaton’s campaign. Right?
Ramjet glared at the ceiling. Couldn’t be a good sign if people liked Starscream best.
It was just circumstances, though. Right? He’d got lucky. Everything kinda just aligned in the right way and forced his hand. Finally ditching the ‘Cons was never gonna have been very high on the Screamer’s list of slag to do, but with his wingmates announcing we’re done with this and crashing spectacularly out of the conflict, he’d been forced to make a decision between them and the faction. Or rather, to choose between the wingbros that seemed to love him unconditionally in spite of – or perhaps because of – his multitude of faults, and his single-minded pursuit of leadership of a faction that (let’s be honest) was never gonna accept him as their leader even if he did get there.
Unexpectedly, the little family he’d chosen won out, in the end. Ramjet couldn’t help wondering if he’d pick his bros in the same way. Or if they’d pick him.
Ramjet had been homesick for centuries. He didn’t want to admit it, because giving the Screamer any form of credit felt like tacit surrender, but home looked good, right now. Really good. Like, a how-do-I-get-my-bros-and-me-in-on-this kind of good. Even those short, fat little new towers looked impossible degrees better than this rusting old tin can. And they all had enough fuel to get them in the air, any time they wanted to.
That one little glimpse of home had stirred up a whole new mess of conflicting feelings in his spark. Over the vorns, he’d had the occasional thoughts of deserting and going home – who hadn’t? – but never as bad as this. And he knew his wingbros wouldn’t just drop everything and follow him, so for now he was stuck. No matter how many burrs they worked into his plating and how often they ended up brawling, they were still trine and he didn’t want to leave them here. Thrust might have been charmed around to the idea of leaving, with a little gentle coaxing and being persuaded that it was his idea all along, but Dirge was still riding high on the Boss’s praise and Ramjet hated that he couldn’t trust the mech not to blab if he confessed that he wanted out.
There was a better than good chance Starscream would probably be on his way any breem now, but Ramjet accepted that he’d given up pretending to be on duty. (Dare he confess to hoping the former air commander would show up and solve the problem of what to do by taking their prisoners back? Then Ramjet could work on convincing Dirge that going home looked good.)
Speaking of prisoners.
He realised – somewhat belatedly – that Skydash had vanished.
Slag.
He twisted around on his seat, hoping to spot her. Still in the vicinity, because he could see her signal close by. Just not exactly where-
Please don’t be under the terminal again; Primus.
At last he spotted her; two bright little pinpoints of light in the corner. The sparkling watched him from her bucket, fingertips wrapped around the rim and little more than her optics visible, peeking up over the edge. The instant his gaze lit upon her, she flinched and ducked back down, out of sight.
Ramjet frowned. “Uhh... What are you doing in there, Tiny?”
“Not a bad.” Her words echoed softly up from the pail. “No lid.”
He crouched next to it. “Uh. You haven’t been bad yet. Have you? You, uh.” He wasn’t really sure how to deal with this, honestly. Brats being brats he could handle (kind of), but this was a ridiculous learning curve. “Don’t have to sit in the bucket if you don’t wanna?”
The sparkling shied away from him, tucking her knees up and hugging them, curling into a ball at the bottom. “Not hurt family. Am stay in bucket.”
“Come on. Don’t be a glitch.” He picked her up; she froze. “I can’t keep watch on you in there. Anyone could come along and take you away if I’m not watching.”
She stayed motionless in his fingers while he carried her to the terminal. “No hit family.”
“Uh, right? I guess not?” He knew from experience that Warp’s kids were just as sneaky – and as good at getting where they shouldn’t be – as their sire. He’d not seen her up to any specific mischief, but had the brat snuck out somehow? “Why, what have you been doing that means someone needs a punch?”
She wasn’t very forthcoming. “No hit.”
“Fine.” A sigh. “Whatever. No hit.” He deposited her on her small aft on the terminal, and she immediately turned her back to him.
Skydash sat on the terminal and played with her small feet, for a while. Since at last settling on the idea that Decepticons were genuinely bigger and uglier and scarier than her parents, she was fairly well-behaved and mostly stayed subdued and quiet, so long as ‘Mean Blue’ didn’t show up with his scary engines – although Ramjet wasn’t stupid enough to try and fool himself that it was because she wasn’t frightened, any more. The tiny bot wasn’t even old enough to have a full dictionary at her disposal, yet; small wonder she couldn’t articulate her fear properly.
“Want Ama, Arrgie.”
“…Still not gonna happen.”
She peeked back over her shoulder at him. “See unnolawp?”
He thought about it for a few seconds but couldn’t parse it to anything except ‘Skywarp’ and figured it was just a sparkling-y mangling of the name. “He’s not here for your benefit. He’s under arrest. Because he’s been bad and needs to learn his lesson to not do it any more.”
She shuffled around a little, and gave him a very long stare. “Make bad at home. Police not hit.”
“Oh look; Tiny finally joins me at the point I’m making. Maybe if they weren’t all a bunch of Autobot cowards who talk too much, and gave him a decent punch in the head every now and then, he wouldn’t be such a troublemaking fragface all the time.”
He realised Skydash was just staring blankly at him, and figured perhaps he was expecting a little much from a sparkling. How did you explain that sometimes a mech’s helm was so dense, you had to hammer the point home with violence?
He changed the subject. “So you’re gonna be a winglet, huh.”
She cocked her head, frowning. “What am?”
“A flier,” he corrected himself.
Skydash bobbed her head, just once. “Ama say can.”
“Well, if your bearer is that scrappy little dirtbot, I figure she probably didn’t get much choice in the matter anyway.”
Skydash’s head perked over the other way, unable to parse the sentence.
Doing it again, RJ. “Not scared of heights, then?”
She shook her head. “Like fly. Day take.”
“Well, that makes a change. No-one else in your family seems to like it. Maybe there’s hope for you yet, Tiny.”
Skydash remained silent for a few moments longer, then tucked herself down into as small a bundle as she could, hands wrapped around her ankles and shoulders rounded, and shuffled forwards on her aft. “…when to see Ama, Arrgie?”
“Oh Primus please don’t start that again-”
“Unnolawp to take?”
He gave her a long stare. “What?”
She uncurled slightly, leaning forwards. “Unnolawp take, see Ama. Arrgie stay, is not bad with Meg’tron?”
Ramjet narrowed his optics at her, but patted her on the head, just once. “I’m not sure letting Skywarp take you home will keep me from getting in the slag with Megatron, but… thanks, I guess.”
* * * *
Skyfire had wandered in a murk of half-formed anxieties for what felt like a small eternity, unable to quite stop thinking long enough to get offline.
And when he did finally managed to switch off, someone woke him back up far too soon. A hand dropped onto his shoulder and jolted him awake.
“Thanks,” a deep voice rumbled, louder and a lot more confident than it had sounded in recent orns.
Skyfire took a second to recalibrate his optics and clear a little of the muzziness from his vision, and finally focused on a nice tall flask of high-grade on the table. “Oh!” He wiped his face with one hand, and picked up the flask with the other. “Thank you. This looks like just what I needed.”
Thundercracker drifted around to settle in one of the chairs opposite. Now the migraine had eased, he actually looked fairly alert, optics bright crimson again, armour back to his usual well-polished blue – not that weird dusty grey sickly hue he’d taken on in the last few orns. “No, thank you, for getting him to take some downtime.”
“You’re welcome.” Skyfire took a sip and a moment to savour it. He realised, somewhat belatedly, that Starscream had taken advantage of his downtime to disappear. “I don’t know if it worked so well. He would seem to have gone straight back to work.”
“Well, we knew that would happen. Hopefully he’ll have at least defragmented and decompressed a little.”
Skyfire reviewed what he knew. Perhaps Thundercracker was right? They had all got a few fragments of rest, at least. After somehow extracting Star from his lab without completely waking him up, he’d made it the dozen or so steps into the lounge before deciding he didn’t want to risk attempting to get upstairs, because the fractious seeker carried awkwardly in his arms definitely wouldn’t stay mostly-dormant that long. Instead, they’d settled on the couch, Starscream with his long legs stretched out across the shuttle’s lap.
Starscream had been quietly muttery for a little while, something about whether their plasma cutters would work underwater and how to not flood Nemesis in the process or would that actually work as a distraction but how would they approach without being seen and without flooding their own air-handling because he’d never actually tested this refit underwater… but Skyfire had mostly tuned it out, and eventually the words had faded into garbled nonsense, and finally silence.
Last he remembered was dozing, distractedly stroking the blue thrusters in his lap, audio receptors full of the subtle sound of an offline seeker’s fans purring.
He couldn’t quite pinpoint the time he himself had offlined, but it must have been fairly comprehensive because said thrusters had now vanished, without his noticing it. So had their owner. Great. Primus only knew what Star might have slunk off to do.
Thundercracker patted his shoulder. “I’m going to go and check on him.”
Skyfire took another indulgent sip of his high grade, and didn’t argue.
In the background, he heard: “Uh, Star. What is, uh. All… this?”
…Skyfire sighed to himself, and put the flask back down.
He peered over Thundercracker’s head to find a lab full of even more chaos than it had been when he’d finally extracted Starscream for an unwilling nap. Every previous experiment had been scooted rudely off the main bench and now sat in a muddle of mixed glassware on an overloaded trolley in the corner. The main workbench seemed to have been cleared solely to provide access to a large empty stretch of wall, against which dozens of holograms now projected, connected with hand-drawn squiggles, strings of glyphs and connecting lines.
“I’m reviewing my options,” Starscream explained, distractedly, mapping another line between the hovering images, then grasping whole handfuls of images and shuffling them around. “I’ve had plenty of experience in trying to beat him, but it’s not mattered so much before, has it. If I can see what didn’t work, I might be able to narrow down what will.” He glanced over at them. “…what?”
“Yooouuu… do realise… we’re trying to rescue the sparks, not… preparing for a full-on assault to kill Megatron. Right?” Thundercracker reminded, cautiously.
“As they might end up being one and the same, yes: I do realise.” Starscream didn’t even look away from his strings. “It’s called being prepared.”
Thundercracker shot Skyfire a look that was ever so slightly accusatory, and backed out of the doorway with a little beckoning flick of one hand.
The shuttle drew himself subtly straighter, objecting to the insinuation that he was somehow responsible, but followed him anyway.
“I just got over my migraine and I feel another coming on already.” The blue mech sagged into one of the big slouchy chairs in the atrium, and helped himself to Skyfire’s high grade. “So, do you want to update me on what’s been going on – apart from Star apparently losing the last few of his marbles…”
* * * *
Down in the brig, it had been quiet for a while.
In his gloomy corner, Skywarp allowed himself to come back to life. Acting sad and scared had stopped being fun a while ago – for him and everyone else. Of course, a selection of former allies had paid sporadic visits, to taunt and jeer and try to goad him into a fight – not that he took a lot of goading – but the limited room to move in the cell had meant smashing the bolts out of each other wasn’t much fun. No-one seemed to want to incur the wrath of the boss by removing him to somewhere with more room to move, and risk letting him loose in the process.
The novelty quickly wore off. No-one had been down for a quarter-orn at least, now.
Now. To make his great escape. If he left it much longer, who knew what sort of half-smelted plan Starscream would hatch, and then it’d definitely all ride off into a Pit-coloured sunset.
He examined his cuffs; yep, definitely ones he knew how to get out of. Especially as no-one had bothered to confiscate his secret weapon…
Pulsar had, ah, ‘moulted’ an aerial after a particularly vigorous bit of ‘exercise’ one evening. It had rolled away down the side of the berth, where Skywarp had found it some time after she’d headed off to work, grumbling about having to visit the station medic again. He’d tucked it away into his subspace, for safekeeping, fully intending to give it back to her eventually (as the stirrer in a fancy energon cocktail, perhaps). A mech could never know when he’d need a vital component of someone else’s positioning complex, though, right?
He manipulated the slender silver stem very, very carefully between his denta, and lifted the cuffs to his mouth. Next to the controls was a small hole – not so much a reset to default as a failsafe in case the battery failed, but you needed a key. Or brute force applied in just the right way with something appropriately sharp.
The broken end of the aerial only just fitted through the gap. Frowning in concentration, he worked it across the mechanism of the lock, and after an instant-… He felt the loops around his wrists loosen in place. “Ha.” He triumphantly shook them off. “Let’s see what else you bunch of slaggers didn’t do right.”
He examined his arms. The small hatches protecting his weaponry had tiny spots of solder holding them closed. He picked at them with his fingertips, but getting the welds off would take time and effort he didn’t have to spare right now.
No matter. He could probably do without his cannons for a few breems, right? Provided he could teleport himself close enough, his fists were his best weapons anyway.
And at least his cannons were still attached. He could figure the logistics of safely getting them back online later. If worst came to the worst and he absolutely needed them, he could probably shoot them free.
He grimaced at the idea and resolved that he wouldn’t go trying that too soon.
Not to mention, it’d draw attention he really didn’t want. The whole plan involved no-one actually realising he’d snuck out. Knowing he couldn’t get out due to the subspace baffle on the cell, no-one usually bothered to check in on him. Conveniently, it also meant he essentially turned invisible, because the baffle also blocked his beacon from talking to Nemesis and telling it where he was. Getting in trouble in his old Deception days had once involved a protracted multiple-orn stay in the brig solely because everyone thought someone else had let him out and they collectively forgot he was even there. It was only when Thundercracker finally came looking for him they solved the mystery.
So unless they were actively sitting up there watching the live feed the whole time – and hopefully he’d made himself sufficiently boring that no-one would be – nothing else would be keeping watch on him. They’d assume by merit of the fact they couldn’t see his beacon, he was still nicely tucked up in the brig. Therefore, following on in that logic, if he unplugged his beacon and somehow got out, they’d not know anything about it.
That was the plan, anyway.
Unplugging the beacon was going to be the challenge.
Of course, he had conscious control over his positioning beacon; he could (and often did) turn it on and off at will. But turning it off didn’t guarantee no-one could see it – someone determined enough with a big enough sensor (like a scientist with a starship-sized antenna array) could still get an echo off it if they tried hard enough. He wasn’t precisely sure how it worked. Explaining slag like that was Screamer’s field.
No, the only guaranteed way he was going to disappear was if he unplugged it altogether. And that was gonna need something sharp. Of course his jailors had found and confiscated almost everything that looked remotely useful, but even Hook had missed the critical little tool Skywarp needed – a tissue knife, stolen from Starscream’s lab back home. (Having Coneheads in their patch had evidently upset his wingleader’s attention, because he’d been too busy trying to get everyone to help him scheme his way to a solution to spot the teleport as he sauntered through the door and rummaged through all the neat boxes of equipment.)
Tucked inside his armour, sandwiched between stabilisers and power regulators and held flat against the outer core of his heel turbine, the paper-thin blade was completely invisible if you weren’t looking for it. Skywarp unlatched the casing on the back of his thruster, and carefully lifted it out. It hadn’t suffered too badly – a little bent at one end, but it should still be able to cut.
Right, good. He flexed his fingers and drew in a long draught of cold air.
Right.
He could probably get away without having to unplug it though. He hurt enough already without adding to it prematurely.
Right?
No different to straightening a broken nose, you coward. Or popping a dislocated joint back into place. Primus knows you’ve done that enough times.
He knew where in his helm his beacon was located; same as all the policedorks with their spikey hairdos, on the right side of his helm near his audiovent. Deep enough to be safe from routine damage, surface enough to get a good signal out.
He’d never needed to unplug it before now, though. Where was Sepp when a mech needed her, huh. Grimacing in concentration and moving decisively before he could chicken out completely, he slipped the tiny blade down the seam and delicately worked it through the connectors.
“Aih-!” A tiny bright spark of pain that felt like it went all the way through his helm told him he’d succeeded. His diagnostics immediately protested that his beacon was unintentionally offline. “Ow. Ow, ow ow ow.” He sat and hissed to himself, clenching his fists, until his autorepair rerouted signals away from the damage and the pain faded.
He put his fingers up to his audio vent; they came away coated in a thin film of energon, glowing a sickly pink in the gloom. “Great. Leaking.” He glared at his fingers. “Like I need more obstacles.”
The instant he was out, he was going to have to make every last second count. If they caught him, slinking down corridors? Well, they wouldn’t make the same mistake of forgetting to watch over him again. He’d probably end up welded to the floor into the bargain. Leaving a trail of energon droplets was probably counterproductive.
He stood and stared at the bars for a very long time.
How in Pit was he going to do it? He’d not teleported without seeing where he was going for… well, almost his entire life. Right now, he couldn’t see into the quantum universe at all. It felt like he was enclosed in a pocket universe that went no further than the walls of the cell – like being tucked inside his own subspace. It was going to come down to physical measurements and triangulation. Doable, sure, but… without his quantum sense, it was gonna take a lot of brainpower.
Come on, mech. Brave, right? You have the biggest processor capacity of your trine; put it to work for a change.
The less he had to worry about moving, the better. If he knew where absolutely everything was without having to actively look at it, it’d take less brainpower. He offlined absolutely everything he possibly could – fans, pumps, microhydraulics. Then he went through and offlined every possible unnecessary subroutine he could find.
Every single erg of brainpower focused on every last atom of his structure.
Then he crossed his fingers, and stepped out through the bars.
Series: Transformers, G1-based “Blue” AU
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Where a dithery jetboy with questionable ethics and even more questionable loyalty sets out to cause problems for himself. And one of our heroes is definitely losing his marbles.
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You’re gonna have to make a decision about this eventually, you know.
Ramjet was pretty sure that consciences didn’t get much more annoying than his own, right now. It never had anything remotely useful to say, and now didn’t seem to want to shut up, either. It kinda felt like a thought had broken away on its own, and was waiting in a dark corner to jump on him with a gotcha! the instant he put a thruster wrong.
At least he knew what to expect from his wingmates if they got to heckling him. (Plus, if the need arose, he could just turn around and punch them in the head.)
He vented a long sigh of stale air and let his arms dangle.
Was this how those traitorous pitglitches had felt, contemplating betraying their Decepticon allies and running away to Cybertron? Suddenly unsure of everything in the entire universe?
All his life, he’d been secure and happy in his knowledge he was doing the right thing – at least, right for him, anyway. If his wingmates got in the slag, sure, he’d usually help them out of it, but wasn’t going to take ownership of whatever fraggery got them in it in the first place.
And now suddenly he had absolutely no idea if he was doing the right thing. Had ever been doing the right thing. All because a defenceless little bot not much bigger than an energon cube had got sucked into their war, when there was absolutely no reason for it except… stupid… politics. Yanked into the lives of a bunch of bored, aggressive mechs who really had nothing better to do with their time than smash dents into each other, set on pursuing a dead-end conflict that had been going on so long everyone knew that it was just gonna creep on forever as an eternal stalemate until they finally went extinct.
He felt a tiny bit sorry for the little brat. It wasn’t her fault her parents were traitorous fragsticks who deserved everything they were gonna get, right?
Right?
Okay, so he wasn’t even sure about that, any more. They’d all been keeping themselves to themselves, former-Autobot and ex-Decepticon alike, tired of pursuing the idiocy of their war when there were so few of them left now, and quietly getting on with putting the place back together. Was he really just that resentful that they hadn’t invited him and his trine back to enjoy it, too?
He probably wouldn’t have invited himself either, to be fair.
No-one would deny the huge steaming pile of proving Megatron wrong that was involved in rebuilding the planet, but somehow the scarlet traitor seemed to have been mostly forgiven and people seemed to not outright hate him, any more. So, maybe there was still hope for a trio of idiots who couldn’t quite seem to detach themselves from Megaton’s campaign. Right?
Ramjet glared at the ceiling. Couldn’t be a good sign if people liked Starscream best.
It was just circumstances, though. Right? He’d got lucky. Everything kinda just aligned in the right way and forced his hand. Finally ditching the ‘Cons was never gonna have been very high on the Screamer’s list of slag to do, but with his wingmates announcing we’re done with this and crashing spectacularly out of the conflict, he’d been forced to make a decision between them and the faction. Or rather, to choose between the wingbros that seemed to love him unconditionally in spite of – or perhaps because of – his multitude of faults, and his single-minded pursuit of leadership of a faction that (let’s be honest) was never gonna accept him as their leader even if he did get there.
Unexpectedly, the little family he’d chosen won out, in the end. Ramjet couldn’t help wondering if he’d pick his bros in the same way. Or if they’d pick him.
Ramjet had been homesick for centuries. He didn’t want to admit it, because giving the Screamer any form of credit felt like tacit surrender, but home looked good, right now. Really good. Like, a how-do-I-get-my-bros-and-me-in-on-this kind of good. Even those short, fat little new towers looked impossible degrees better than this rusting old tin can. And they all had enough fuel to get them in the air, any time they wanted to.
That one little glimpse of home had stirred up a whole new mess of conflicting feelings in his spark. Over the vorns, he’d had the occasional thoughts of deserting and going home – who hadn’t? – but never as bad as this. And he knew his wingbros wouldn’t just drop everything and follow him, so for now he was stuck. No matter how many burrs they worked into his plating and how often they ended up brawling, they were still trine and he didn’t want to leave them here. Thrust might have been charmed around to the idea of leaving, with a little gentle coaxing and being persuaded that it was his idea all along, but Dirge was still riding high on the Boss’s praise and Ramjet hated that he couldn’t trust the mech not to blab if he confessed that he wanted out.
There was a better than good chance Starscream would probably be on his way any breem now, but Ramjet accepted that he’d given up pretending to be on duty. (Dare he confess to hoping the former air commander would show up and solve the problem of what to do by taking their prisoners back? Then Ramjet could work on convincing Dirge that going home looked good.)
Speaking of prisoners.
He realised – somewhat belatedly – that Skydash had vanished.
Slag.
He twisted around on his seat, hoping to spot her. Still in the vicinity, because he could see her signal close by. Just not exactly where-
Please don’t be under the terminal again; Primus.
At last he spotted her; two bright little pinpoints of light in the corner. The sparkling watched him from her bucket, fingertips wrapped around the rim and little more than her optics visible, peeking up over the edge. The instant his gaze lit upon her, she flinched and ducked back down, out of sight.
Ramjet frowned. “Uhh... What are you doing in there, Tiny?”
“Not a bad.” Her words echoed softly up from the pail. “No lid.”
He crouched next to it. “Uh. You haven’t been bad yet. Have you? You, uh.” He wasn’t really sure how to deal with this, honestly. Brats being brats he could handle (kind of), but this was a ridiculous learning curve. “Don’t have to sit in the bucket if you don’t wanna?”
The sparkling shied away from him, tucking her knees up and hugging them, curling into a ball at the bottom. “Not hurt family. Am stay in bucket.”
“Come on. Don’t be a glitch.” He picked her up; she froze. “I can’t keep watch on you in there. Anyone could come along and take you away if I’m not watching.”
She stayed motionless in his fingers while he carried her to the terminal. “No hit family.”
“Uh, right? I guess not?” He knew from experience that Warp’s kids were just as sneaky – and as good at getting where they shouldn’t be – as their sire. He’d not seen her up to any specific mischief, but had the brat snuck out somehow? “Why, what have you been doing that means someone needs a punch?”
She wasn’t very forthcoming. “No hit.”
“Fine.” A sigh. “Whatever. No hit.” He deposited her on her small aft on the terminal, and she immediately turned her back to him.
Skydash sat on the terminal and played with her small feet, for a while. Since at last settling on the idea that Decepticons were genuinely bigger and uglier and scarier than her parents, she was fairly well-behaved and mostly stayed subdued and quiet, so long as ‘Mean Blue’ didn’t show up with his scary engines – although Ramjet wasn’t stupid enough to try and fool himself that it was because she wasn’t frightened, any more. The tiny bot wasn’t even old enough to have a full dictionary at her disposal, yet; small wonder she couldn’t articulate her fear properly.
“Want Ama, Arrgie.”
“…Still not gonna happen.”
She peeked back over her shoulder at him. “See unnolawp?”
He thought about it for a few seconds but couldn’t parse it to anything except ‘Skywarp’ and figured it was just a sparkling-y mangling of the name. “He’s not here for your benefit. He’s under arrest. Because he’s been bad and needs to learn his lesson to not do it any more.”
She shuffled around a little, and gave him a very long stare. “Make bad at home. Police not hit.”
“Oh look; Tiny finally joins me at the point I’m making. Maybe if they weren’t all a bunch of Autobot cowards who talk too much, and gave him a decent punch in the head every now and then, he wouldn’t be such a troublemaking fragface all the time.”
He realised Skydash was just staring blankly at him, and figured perhaps he was expecting a little much from a sparkling. How did you explain that sometimes a mech’s helm was so dense, you had to hammer the point home with violence?
He changed the subject. “So you’re gonna be a winglet, huh.”
She cocked her head, frowning. “What am?”
“A flier,” he corrected himself.
Skydash bobbed her head, just once. “Ama say can.”
“Well, if your bearer is that scrappy little dirtbot, I figure she probably didn’t get much choice in the matter anyway.”
Skydash’s head perked over the other way, unable to parse the sentence.
Doing it again, RJ. “Not scared of heights, then?”
She shook her head. “Like fly. Day take.”
“Well, that makes a change. No-one else in your family seems to like it. Maybe there’s hope for you yet, Tiny.”
Skydash remained silent for a few moments longer, then tucked herself down into as small a bundle as she could, hands wrapped around her ankles and shoulders rounded, and shuffled forwards on her aft. “…when to see Ama, Arrgie?”
“Oh Primus please don’t start that again-”
“Unnolawp to take?”
He gave her a long stare. “What?”
She uncurled slightly, leaning forwards. “Unnolawp take, see Ama. Arrgie stay, is not bad with Meg’tron?”
Ramjet narrowed his optics at her, but patted her on the head, just once. “I’m not sure letting Skywarp take you home will keep me from getting in the slag with Megatron, but… thanks, I guess.”
Skyfire had wandered in a murk of half-formed anxieties for what felt like a small eternity, unable to quite stop thinking long enough to get offline.
And when he did finally managed to switch off, someone woke him back up far too soon. A hand dropped onto his shoulder and jolted him awake.
“Thanks,” a deep voice rumbled, louder and a lot more confident than it had sounded in recent orns.
Skyfire took a second to recalibrate his optics and clear a little of the muzziness from his vision, and finally focused on a nice tall flask of high-grade on the table. “Oh!” He wiped his face with one hand, and picked up the flask with the other. “Thank you. This looks like just what I needed.”
Thundercracker drifted around to settle in one of the chairs opposite. Now the migraine had eased, he actually looked fairly alert, optics bright crimson again, armour back to his usual well-polished blue – not that weird dusty grey sickly hue he’d taken on in the last few orns. “No, thank you, for getting him to take some downtime.”
“You’re welcome.” Skyfire took a sip and a moment to savour it. He realised, somewhat belatedly, that Starscream had taken advantage of his downtime to disappear. “I don’t know if it worked so well. He would seem to have gone straight back to work.”
“Well, we knew that would happen. Hopefully he’ll have at least defragmented and decompressed a little.”
Skyfire reviewed what he knew. Perhaps Thundercracker was right? They had all got a few fragments of rest, at least. After somehow extracting Star from his lab without completely waking him up, he’d made it the dozen or so steps into the lounge before deciding he didn’t want to risk attempting to get upstairs, because the fractious seeker carried awkwardly in his arms definitely wouldn’t stay mostly-dormant that long. Instead, they’d settled on the couch, Starscream with his long legs stretched out across the shuttle’s lap.
Starscream had been quietly muttery for a little while, something about whether their plasma cutters would work underwater and how to not flood Nemesis in the process or would that actually work as a distraction but how would they approach without being seen and without flooding their own air-handling because he’d never actually tested this refit underwater… but Skyfire had mostly tuned it out, and eventually the words had faded into garbled nonsense, and finally silence.
Last he remembered was dozing, distractedly stroking the blue thrusters in his lap, audio receptors full of the subtle sound of an offline seeker’s fans purring.
He couldn’t quite pinpoint the time he himself had offlined, but it must have been fairly comprehensive because said thrusters had now vanished, without his noticing it. So had their owner. Great. Primus only knew what Star might have slunk off to do.
Thundercracker patted his shoulder. “I’m going to go and check on him.”
Skyfire took another indulgent sip of his high grade, and didn’t argue.
In the background, he heard: “Uh, Star. What is, uh. All… this?”
…Skyfire sighed to himself, and put the flask back down.
He peered over Thundercracker’s head to find a lab full of even more chaos than it had been when he’d finally extracted Starscream for an unwilling nap. Every previous experiment had been scooted rudely off the main bench and now sat in a muddle of mixed glassware on an overloaded trolley in the corner. The main workbench seemed to have been cleared solely to provide access to a large empty stretch of wall, against which dozens of holograms now projected, connected with hand-drawn squiggles, strings of glyphs and connecting lines.
“I’m reviewing my options,” Starscream explained, distractedly, mapping another line between the hovering images, then grasping whole handfuls of images and shuffling them around. “I’ve had plenty of experience in trying to beat him, but it’s not mattered so much before, has it. If I can see what didn’t work, I might be able to narrow down what will.” He glanced over at them. “…what?”
“Yooouuu… do realise… we’re trying to rescue the sparks, not… preparing for a full-on assault to kill Megatron. Right?” Thundercracker reminded, cautiously.
“As they might end up being one and the same, yes: I do realise.” Starscream didn’t even look away from his strings. “It’s called being prepared.”
Thundercracker shot Skyfire a look that was ever so slightly accusatory, and backed out of the doorway with a little beckoning flick of one hand.
The shuttle drew himself subtly straighter, objecting to the insinuation that he was somehow responsible, but followed him anyway.
“I just got over my migraine and I feel another coming on already.” The blue mech sagged into one of the big slouchy chairs in the atrium, and helped himself to Skyfire’s high grade. “So, do you want to update me on what’s been going on – apart from Star apparently losing the last few of his marbles…”
Down in the brig, it had been quiet for a while.
In his gloomy corner, Skywarp allowed himself to come back to life. Acting sad and scared had stopped being fun a while ago – for him and everyone else. Of course, a selection of former allies had paid sporadic visits, to taunt and jeer and try to goad him into a fight – not that he took a lot of goading – but the limited room to move in the cell had meant smashing the bolts out of each other wasn’t much fun. No-one seemed to want to incur the wrath of the boss by removing him to somewhere with more room to move, and risk letting him loose in the process.
The novelty quickly wore off. No-one had been down for a quarter-orn at least, now.
Now. To make his great escape. If he left it much longer, who knew what sort of half-smelted plan Starscream would hatch, and then it’d definitely all ride off into a Pit-coloured sunset.
He examined his cuffs; yep, definitely ones he knew how to get out of. Especially as no-one had bothered to confiscate his secret weapon…
Pulsar had, ah, ‘moulted’ an aerial after a particularly vigorous bit of ‘exercise’ one evening. It had rolled away down the side of the berth, where Skywarp had found it some time after she’d headed off to work, grumbling about having to visit the station medic again. He’d tucked it away into his subspace, for safekeeping, fully intending to give it back to her eventually (as the stirrer in a fancy energon cocktail, perhaps). A mech could never know when he’d need a vital component of someone else’s positioning complex, though, right?
He manipulated the slender silver stem very, very carefully between his denta, and lifted the cuffs to his mouth. Next to the controls was a small hole – not so much a reset to default as a failsafe in case the battery failed, but you needed a key. Or brute force applied in just the right way with something appropriately sharp.
The broken end of the aerial only just fitted through the gap. Frowning in concentration, he worked it across the mechanism of the lock, and after an instant-… He felt the loops around his wrists loosen in place. “Ha.” He triumphantly shook them off. “Let’s see what else you bunch of slaggers didn’t do right.”
He examined his arms. The small hatches protecting his weaponry had tiny spots of solder holding them closed. He picked at them with his fingertips, but getting the welds off would take time and effort he didn’t have to spare right now.
No matter. He could probably do without his cannons for a few breems, right? Provided he could teleport himself close enough, his fists were his best weapons anyway.
And at least his cannons were still attached. He could figure the logistics of safely getting them back online later. If worst came to the worst and he absolutely needed them, he could probably shoot them free.
He grimaced at the idea and resolved that he wouldn’t go trying that too soon.
Not to mention, it’d draw attention he really didn’t want. The whole plan involved no-one actually realising he’d snuck out. Knowing he couldn’t get out due to the subspace baffle on the cell, no-one usually bothered to check in on him. Conveniently, it also meant he essentially turned invisible, because the baffle also blocked his beacon from talking to Nemesis and telling it where he was. Getting in trouble in his old Deception days had once involved a protracted multiple-orn stay in the brig solely because everyone thought someone else had let him out and they collectively forgot he was even there. It was only when Thundercracker finally came looking for him they solved the mystery.
So unless they were actively sitting up there watching the live feed the whole time – and hopefully he’d made himself sufficiently boring that no-one would be – nothing else would be keeping watch on him. They’d assume by merit of the fact they couldn’t see his beacon, he was still nicely tucked up in the brig. Therefore, following on in that logic, if he unplugged his beacon and somehow got out, they’d not know anything about it.
That was the plan, anyway.
Unplugging the beacon was going to be the challenge.
Of course, he had conscious control over his positioning beacon; he could (and often did) turn it on and off at will. But turning it off didn’t guarantee no-one could see it – someone determined enough with a big enough sensor (like a scientist with a starship-sized antenna array) could still get an echo off it if they tried hard enough. He wasn’t precisely sure how it worked. Explaining slag like that was Screamer’s field.
No, the only guaranteed way he was going to disappear was if he unplugged it altogether. And that was gonna need something sharp. Of course his jailors had found and confiscated almost everything that looked remotely useful, but even Hook had missed the critical little tool Skywarp needed – a tissue knife, stolen from Starscream’s lab back home. (Having Coneheads in their patch had evidently upset his wingleader’s attention, because he’d been too busy trying to get everyone to help him scheme his way to a solution to spot the teleport as he sauntered through the door and rummaged through all the neat boxes of equipment.)
Tucked inside his armour, sandwiched between stabilisers and power regulators and held flat against the outer core of his heel turbine, the paper-thin blade was completely invisible if you weren’t looking for it. Skywarp unlatched the casing on the back of his thruster, and carefully lifted it out. It hadn’t suffered too badly – a little bent at one end, but it should still be able to cut.
Right, good. He flexed his fingers and drew in a long draught of cold air.
Right.
He could probably get away without having to unplug it though. He hurt enough already without adding to it prematurely.
Right?
No different to straightening a broken nose, you coward. Or popping a dislocated joint back into place. Primus knows you’ve done that enough times.
He knew where in his helm his beacon was located; same as all the policedorks with their spikey hairdos, on the right side of his helm near his audiovent. Deep enough to be safe from routine damage, surface enough to get a good signal out.
He’d never needed to unplug it before now, though. Where was Sepp when a mech needed her, huh. Grimacing in concentration and moving decisively before he could chicken out completely, he slipped the tiny blade down the seam and delicately worked it through the connectors.
“Aih-!” A tiny bright spark of pain that felt like it went all the way through his helm told him he’d succeeded. His diagnostics immediately protested that his beacon was unintentionally offline. “Ow. Ow, ow ow ow.” He sat and hissed to himself, clenching his fists, until his autorepair rerouted signals away from the damage and the pain faded.
He put his fingers up to his audio vent; they came away coated in a thin film of energon, glowing a sickly pink in the gloom. “Great. Leaking.” He glared at his fingers. “Like I need more obstacles.”
The instant he was out, he was going to have to make every last second count. If they caught him, slinking down corridors? Well, they wouldn’t make the same mistake of forgetting to watch over him again. He’d probably end up welded to the floor into the bargain. Leaving a trail of energon droplets was probably counterproductive.
He stood and stared at the bars for a very long time.
How in Pit was he going to do it? He’d not teleported without seeing where he was going for… well, almost his entire life. Right now, he couldn’t see into the quantum universe at all. It felt like he was enclosed in a pocket universe that went no further than the walls of the cell – like being tucked inside his own subspace. It was going to come down to physical measurements and triangulation. Doable, sure, but… without his quantum sense, it was gonna take a lot of brainpower.
Come on, mech. Brave, right? You have the biggest processor capacity of your trine; put it to work for a change.
The less he had to worry about moving, the better. If he knew where absolutely everything was without having to actively look at it, it’d take less brainpower. He offlined absolutely everything he possibly could – fans, pumps, microhydraulics. Then he went through and offlined every possible unnecessary subroutine he could find.
Every single erg of brainpower focused on every last atom of his structure.
Then he crossed his fingers, and stepped out through the bars.