[Bay] War Without End - Skywarp - Pt II
May. 3rd, 2014 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dracoqueen22Title: War Without End – Skywarp
Universe: Bayverse, post-DotM, canon-compliant
Characters: Thundercracker, Skywarp, Ratchet, Drift, Wheeljack, Dreadwing, Tracks, Prowl
Rating: T
Warnings: mentions of character death, angst, some language, canon typical violence, background pairings
Desc: Friends. Alllies. Peace. Family. Skywarp never imagined that any of those terms would include an Autobot.
Family meetings become a weekly thing. They are so few, stretched across so many duties, it’s a rare event that they are all in the same vicinity. It's a bit strange how him calling it a family meeting has kind of made it that. Yeah, they gather to talk intelligence, update everyone on the hatchlings, the progress of the Ark, but they gather for other reasons, too.
So Wheeljack and Ratchet can bicker like a couple that's been bonded for megavorns. So they can all mutter about the moony optics Ratchet and Drift toss each other when they aren't looking. So Dreadwing and Tracks can cuddle for whatever-frag reason they cuddle, and Warp can poke at TC until his trinemate takes a swat at him or Prowl unbends long enough to crack a smile.
It's kind of nice actually, now that Skywarp thinks about it. Nice to have a place to call home even if this cluttered old barn is only temporary. Maybe Tracks was on to something when he said that Dreadwing was his home.
Energon for thought.
Prowl always presides, standing with his back to the medcorner and facing the rest of them. Except Ratchet because the medic likes to putter around doing whatever it is he does when he's tending the hatchlings. That he enjoys tossing comments at them over the crate barrier is probably part of it. Sometimes, if Drift's feeling brave, he might join Ratchet over there.
Jack makes everyone groan with his ever-growing list of needed supplies for the Ark, though they'd gathered a fair amount from their raid on DC. Prowl reminds them that they can't go back, that the humans are bound to put two and two together eventually. They'll have to make do with what they have.
“Has Lennox made any recent contact?” Ratchet asks… or hollers rather.
Both Prowl and TC shake their helms.
“No,” the tactician consults the datapad in his hand. He seems permanently attached to the thing. “And neither has Sunstreaker. I’ve no doubt that they are tightening their security. There is a high possibility that we must discount their aid in the future.”
“Then we are flying blind, so to speak,” Dreadwing murmurs, almost as though to himself. Despite shifting to internal calculations, he hasn't paused in grooming Tracks with hands sliding constantly over a pair of pseudo-wings.
“We can make some small assumptions,” Prowl says, stylus sliding over the screen. “They are searching for us. There have been no new arrivals. And they have chosen to make Chicago their new base of operations.”
Ah. Warp does remember hearing something about that on the news. It was important enough that the all the major broadcasts covered it. The Autobots are setting up base in Chicago, both to continue rebuilding and to start anew.
“What of the remnants in DC?” Dreadwing inquires mid-stroke.
“You mean whatever we didn't take?” Tracks replies with a smirk, only to scowl when Dreadwing pinches a brace.
Prowl's lips nudge up toward a smile, however small. Progress!
“Yes. They are shipping anything of importance or classified to the Chicago base. It is out of our reach now.”
“You know,” Drift comments, hands folded atop that massive sword of his, the jewel gleaming in a way that always makes Skywarp uneasy. “If you consider all the variables, we outnumber the Autobots.”
Skywarp raises an orbital ridge. “How do you figure that?”
“Bumblebee is never on base and hasn't been since the last time I did a maintenance check.” Ratchet's answer floats over, proving he’s still listening. “But I wouldn't count on the twins if I were you. If Sideswipe intended to leave, he would’ve done so when I did.”
Prowl's stylus pauses. Warp only notices because he's been watching their leader so closely. He's kind of made it a personal mission of his because no bot can go through what that mech has in such a short period of time and not crack. Or start shooting stuff. Or both.
“Ratchet is correct. Sunstreaker might be wavering, but when it comes down to it, they will obey orders first.” Prowl’s tone quiets. “Unless they come to us, we must assume that they will not side with us.”
The twitch of his sensory panels belies his true feelings on the matter though.
Warp glances at TC, but his wingmate isn't paying attention. Or if he is, he's not showing it.
Maybe, Skywarp thinks almost casually, it’s better that he breaks now when they can do something about it. Rather than later when everything's on the line. No one's saying it, but they can all feel it. The weight of impending doom. The knowledge that their world is shrinking around them and that there's every possibility the humans will find them before they finish the Ark. They may evenly match the Autobots right now, but all it takes is for the humans to get twitchy and decide that a tactical nuke might solve all their problems, and then, nothing will be left of this barn and their home but some scattered pieces.
And even if they don't go the nuke route, a strafing run from a party of F-22s would still put a serious dent in their armor and take out the hatchlings. A stray bullet hitting any number of machinery or combustible materials and the whole compound will go sky high.
They're standing on a hair trigger, a landmine, and they all know it.
“I did a flyover down the coast,” Skywarp says, thinking that it is now or never. “They were making another trip out to the Abyss.”
TC's gaze whips toward him while his comm. pings their trine-specific line. “You mean a cargo of Cybertronian tech. Specifically anything in DC that wasn't any use.”
“And any ‘Cons they've offlined as of late,” Warp confirms but ignores the ping. It has to be done. “Not that there are many. They're running out of those, and once they do, they'll have nothing left to distract them from us.”
Cold silence descends, punctuated by the tight spike of a mech's energy field, like a slap to the faceplate. Warp glances at Prowl from the edge of his sensors. The tactician has gone entirely still, save for the minute rattling of his frame, his sensory panels arched.
Skywarp doesn't know, and Prowl hasn't said. Not what he'd seen or witnessed or found out for that near-year he spent with the Autobots and their Prime. But he has his suspicions, and if such a casual mention of this invokes such a reaction, perhaps he doesn't need to know at all.
“There were not only Decepticons in that freight,” Drift says in a low, dark tone. “Remember?”
Tracks makes a disgusted noise, gears grinding like a rusted axle in his chassis. “Treating us like melted slag. Treating sentient beings like garbage. It's barbaric.”
Prowl's voice cuts through the air. Low and vicious and like nothing Skywarp has ever heard the calm tactician use. Not even in the midst of battle.
“Hound is not garbage,” he hisses. “And Optimus has no right to do this.”
“There's nothing we can do about it,” Tracks points out, either heedless of the razor's edge that Prowl walks or uncaring. “He's Prime.”
“He's Fallen,” Prowl all but snarls, hands at his sides, fingers clenching and unclenching in slow, steady motions.
Skywarp lowers his helm as the energy in the room spikes with shock. They have all at one point suspected such a thing about the vaunted Optimus Prime. But no one has put it into words until now. How long has Prowl seethed with this suspicion?
There's a noise, a creak of aging wood, and Ratchet appears in the entry just behind Prowl. One hand grips the crate-wall. The medic's field betrays his unease, winding with the general discomfort permeating the room like a spill of used oil.
“Prowl...”
“Tell me I'm wrong,” their leader demands, and his tone is edged as he stares at the floor, optics getting bluer and bluer. “Tell me that a true Prime would act like this!”
Wheeljack's vocal indicators pulse an apprehensive grey. “That's not our call to make.”
“Why not?” Prowl's ventilations emerge in sharp bursts. “If the Matrix is so flawless then the first Fallen would’ve never arose. But this is where it's judgment has gotten us!” One hand flings out in a vague direction of Chicago. “Abandoned. Homeless. Treated like scrap by the very mech who should be our champion!”
Warp flicks out a wing. “Oh, now you're getting it. Aren’t you, Autobot? Your precious Prime is no better than the Senate and the Council before him. And still you wonder why we followed Megatron!”
Dreadwing growls before anyone else can offer a word. “There is a reason we are all here together, Skywarp. Don’t bring faction into this.”
“Faction has nothing to do with it!” Skywarp insists, popping up to his pedes, reading the room of frantic emotion all too easily. “I just want everyone to face the facts. Prime has condemned us to extinction for this planet and these stupid squishies. The sooner we accept that the oh-so-special Prime is just as fragged as the rest of us, maybe we can move on.”
Optics narrowing, Tracks rises as well. “You should watch your tone, mech. You insult eons of culture and respect. You call us fools.”
“If the cog fits,” Skywarp retorts.
Tracks' engine rumbles, but Dreadwing's hand on his shoulder gives him pause. They share a glance that says everything and nothing before Tracks pulls back.
“Fighting each other will solve nothing,” the larger Seeker murmurs.
“Especially since Skywarp is right,” Prowl inserts, his vocals soft but somehow cutting. “We are all fools. Prime is broken, Fallen. We should have seen it long ago. We could have saved so many lives if we paid attention to the mech and not the title.” The aggression fades from his frame. Replaced by something else, something Skywarp has been watching for. “Primus, but I have been a fool.”
Ratchet's mouth opens and closes. As if he is struggling to find words and debating amongst the ones he does find. Jack's hand closes his arm, and he shakes his helm firmly. Prowl's tone is soft, but his energy field is a vile sting of conflicting emotions that no longer conceals the torrent beneath.
“Megatron's equally to blame,” Skywarp says with a shrug that is far from nonchalant. TC's watching him closer now, and good, maybe he's starting to get it. “When it comes to that, we're all pretty fragging stupid. We only have ourselves to blame for this mess we're in.”
“Not. Helping,” Ratchet hisses, looking as though he wants to pounce across the room and throttle someone. Specifically Skywarp.
“I am,” the flyer retorts with a scathing glance. “Just none of you can see it and all of you are too soft to do it.”
Tracks lurches forward, anger twisting his faceplates. “You--”
“He's right.” Prowl's words are barely a whisper, but they cut through the room as if he's shouted. He's staring at the ground, staring right through it. “We are all fools. We are all to blame. Something has broken in Optimus. He isn’t Prime. Has not been for a very long time.”
His sensory panels flatten against his back. His armor draws close, as though protecting himself.
“Should we have seen it sooner?” he asks, but it’s directed at no one. “Were we looking for it? All we saw was the war, the next battle, hoping and praying there would be an end. All the while knowing peace was impossible. There was too much anger, too much pent up hatred and despair.”
Pain leaks into his voice, his field, and the whole barn has gone silent. Skywarp even is without words.
“So what if Prime killed a few Decepticons?” Prowl shrugs in such a painfully human fashion. “So what? That's a few less we have to fight. Maybe that's what we need to do to claim victory. Except no one ever defined what victory would be. So Prime sends the Allspark into space to protect it, and dooms us all in the process. We didn't protest then, so what right do we have to protest now? How dare we claim to miss Cybertron when we didn't fight to save it?” He shakes his head. “Oh, we fought. Each other. Over and over again. Killing ourselves and our planet, and still we didn't stop.”
Prowl's optics lift; his gaze wanders the room. But Skywarp wonders if he's even really seeing any of them.
“And this is what we have left. A Fallen Prime. A destroyed planet. A mishmash collection of traitors. Who do we have to blame but ourselves? Autobots? Decepticons? We're all to blame. We've lost everything. It's no more Prime's fault over Megatron's. It's all of ours. We listened. We reacted. And we kept on fighting.” He sucks in a ragged ventilation. “I'm tired of fighting.”
“I know,” Thundercracker replies in the heavy silence that follows, and Skywarp has never heard his trinemate sound so gentle before. “That is why we are all here.”
They stare at each other for what seems like a long time before Prowl's armor eases from its defensive clamp.
“I... apologize,” he says with another of those extended ventilations. He dips his helm. “I did not intend to lecture everyone. Please excuse me.”
He turns and leaves. Not quite a run, but close enough to be called fleeing. Prowl brushes between Dreadwing and TC in the process, field screaming the state of his processor.
TC turns, but Skywarp puts a hand on his trinemate's arm.
“No,” he says. “I got this. You just do what you're supposed to do, Mr. Lieutenant.”
“Don't break him,” his friend says subvocally.
Warp flicks out a wing, slapping TC on the upper arm. “I know what I'm doing.”
At least, he hopes he does.
Skywarp leaves, just as the conversation behind him picks up. Ratchet's protesting, trying to go after Prowl himself, and Thundercracker is arguing his case.
Good. Prowl doesn't need a medic poking at him to find where it hurts. He doesn't need a psychologist either. He just needs someone to listen, and fortunately, Warp's very good at that. When he feels like it, that is.
There aren't very many places for Prowl to have gone. He doubts the tactician would be in the lab, and space aboard the Jackhammer has always been limited, strained as it is. Their storage house is far too cramped, and since it is far too risky to linger outside, that only leaves the barn serving as shared quarters between TC and Skywarp and now Prowl as well.
Their boss is sitting at TC's desk, staring blankly at the cobbled collection of tiny computer monitors. He hasn't plugged into the system yet, which proves he isn't working. It's more an illusion of being occupied.
There's no chair for another mech in here. Instead,Warp leans against the wall, ignoring the way it creaks and groans beneath his weight. It's held up so far.
Prowl knows he's here. Skywarp wasn't exactly subtle about it, and that twitch in his panels proves that Prowl sensed his arrival immediately. Silence reigns, but Skywarp, for once, exhibits patience which is rewarded when Prowl is the first to speak.
“I’ve spent my entire functioning in service. I’ve always been reliable and needed, from one Prime to the next, to whomever was owed my loyalty. I’ve never asked for anything because service is in my coding. One might almost say that it is branded to my spark. And yet...” Prowl's helm lowers, half-turned as though watching Warp from the edge of a sensor. “I feel as though I’ve been discarded as easily as Prime had tossed my brother into the deep.”
Ah. Now we get to the crux of the matter.
Skywarp folds his arms. “Have you even given yourself time to grieve?”
“There’s been no time.” Prowl ex-vents softly. “And there was no mausoleum to offer me comfort.”
“I know a little something about that.” Skywarp frowns a little, digging deep, trying to bring fractured memories to the fore and as always failing. “I had a brother once. He was a lot like you, I think, not that I can remember much about him.”
The chair-crate combo creaks as Prowl turns. Looking at him with those calm optics that nevertheless appear so incisive.
“You can't remember?”
Warp unfolds an arm, tapping the side of his helm. “There was an accident, not that I can tell you what. My memory core got damaged, irreplaceable, and I couldn't recall where my backups were, if even had any to begin with. There's a lot I don't remember, and even more I wish I could.”
Sympathy floods Prowl's field, twining with the echoes of grief that have been dark and consuming as of late.
“That's the hardest part,” Skywarp admits. “The not remembering. I know I had a brother, but I can't remember anything about him. All I have are these echoes, fragments of feelings, a mech that I loved. It's the worst thing.”
“Was it during the war?”
Warp shakes his helm, ending the scanning program before it can give him another negative response. “No. It was before all this craziness started. I guess he got the lucky end of the deal.”
Prowl raps his fingers on the desk, metal tap-tapping on aged wood. “Sometimes, I wonder and I ask myself, wouldn't it be better if we had kept on fighting? Maybe we had our chance. Maybe we deserve to die out like this.” His engine settles into a low, thoughtful rumble. “Maybe it's better this way?”
“Maybe it is.” Skywarp rolls his shoulders, wings rustling. “Maybe it isn't. I can't really answer that except to say I'd like to try living just this once. What we have here, it's not fun, but it's something.”
Prowl's expression turns thoughtful as he shifts back toward the computers. At least the dizzying edge of utter despair has left. Maybe now he'll be able to process. His field had been driving Skywarp crazy. Or well, crazier.
“It's kind of nice, too. To fight to live,” Skywarp says, turning to leave because he's done what he came to do. “Better than fighting to die at any rate.”
“Better indeed,” Prowl replies, and his panels drift out of their rigid posture. A very good sign.
Warp grins to himself and takes his leave. If he happens to hear a murmured gratitude on his way out… well, that's his secret to keep.
o0o0o
Anxiety isn’t an emotion that Warp is familiar with. He is more of a leap-first, look-later Seeker. Has been as long as he remembers. It helps when he needs that split-second decision making to calculate warp vectors and landing points. But when it comes down to life outside of combat, that mentality often leads to his fellows branding him as stupid or excitable.
He's neither. Well, perhaps a bit of the last one.
Warp's gotten used to the way others tolerate him. TC and Starscream had always understood to a certain extent. They had to since they are all part of the same trine and know him better than anyone else.
Still... Warp's very functioning has never left much room for anxiety. He doesn't waste processor space on worrying. Rarely does he bother with caution.
But Skywarp isn’t stupid. And only a stupid mech would dare bother the Hatchet in the sanctity of his lair with a possibly idiotic question.
It’s one of the few times that Warp can ever remember exhibiting a degree of restraint. He creeps into the medbarn, stealthily tiptoes through the common area, and peers around the partition.
The hatchlings are quiet, probably recharging. It's all they ever do. A few tanks bubble with supplemented energon, ready to feed the hatchlings at a moment's notice. And Ratchet himself, the most feared medic in all of Cybertron, is fiddling with something at the table in the middle.
Warp tries to get an idea of the medic's energy field from his current position. It's always hard to tell Ratchet's mood from expression alone. He can look perfectly peaceful on the outside but be a brewing storm of agitation and angst in his spark.
Mech needs a good, hard interfacing like no one he’s ever seen. Drift better get his aft in gear soon, or Warp will have to take one for the team.
“Either come in or leave,” Ratchet says, and Warp nearly leaps backwards in surprise. “I heard you minutes ago.”
Warp whuffs a ventilation. “You could’ve said something.”
The medic glances up from whatever it is he's tinkering with. “Considering it's you, I thought you'd speak up first.”
Ratchet's calm. Not quite a good mood but not angry at the world either. It's probably the best Warp's going to get.
“Oh.”
“Did you want something?” Ratchet asks, dropping his optics back to his work. He puts down a wrench and picks up a bolt-driver. “I know you didn't come to see the hatchlings.”
True enough. Warp doesn't trust himself around the smaller frames. They are so delicate and so quiet. They unnerve him in a way nothing else does.
He busies himself with examining the energon distiller that he had built for Ratchet's use in the medbarn.
“I was thinking--”
“You sure it's safe to do that?” the medic inserts with an amused whuff of his ventilations.
Indignation wars with relief. Teasing generally means Ratchet's in a forgiving mood. Still...
Skywarp tosses a scowl at him. “I'm being serious.”
Chuckling, Ratchet tosses the driver onto the table and places his project down beside it. “I'm listening.”
A sulk threatens to make an appearance, but Skywarp dials it back. He fiddles with the controls for the distiller.
“Do you think you can fix my warp drive?”
He can feel Ratchet's gaze on him, raking him from helm to pede. The medic's mood tangibly plummets.
“You broke it already? Primus, Skywarp.”
“It's not broken!” Skywarp snaps, whirling around and nearly clipping the distiller with a wing tip. “I mean, not since you fixed it the first time. But that didn't finish the job.”
“... What?” Ratchet cycles his optics.
Skywarp lowers his shoulders and swallows down indignity. “Do you remember Jetfire?”
Miniature faceplates shift and flex as Ratchet goes through a range of emotions before confusion takes precedence. “What are you getting at?”
“He could teleport others,” Warp says, remembering Stars’ description of Jetfire's abilities all too well. He never forgot them. “I wonder if I can do it, too.”
“Have you tried?” Ratchet frowns.
Skywarp fidgets. “Once.”
“And?”
His wings twitch. “Pain.”
It's not quite a lie.
He's actually attempted to take a passenger twice in his functioning that he can remember. The first time had been an accident. Someone grabbed his arm as he'd opened a warp gate. That mech hadn't survived. Skywarp himself had spent several diun in a medical center as scientists worked to fabricate a leg, an arm, and both of his wings.
Pain had been the entirety of his existence. Warp had learned his lesson.
But in Chicago, Skywarp had risked it. This time with intention, an act borne of desperation. He concentrated, grabbed TC, and tried to get them both out of the city before the humans could blow them out of the sky. The war was lost, Cybertron gone, Megatron in pieces and Starscream headless.
All Skywarp had wanted to do was escape. He wasn't going to leave TC behind.
So he had grabbed his trinemate, ignored the pain of his wounds, and tried to warp away. He had not succeeded. His only consolation, before they hit the ground and the building buried them, was that he hadn't killed them both.
“Then there's your answer,” Ratchet offers, picking up his wrench again. “You can't warp with passengers.”
“But would you look?” Warp insists. “Maybe my generator is damaged. I can't look for myself or access my own schematics, so it has to be you.”
This causes Ratchet to frown again. All mechs can access their own schematics. Otherwise, how else would their nanites know what to maintain?
“Why not?”
Warp taps his helm. “Damage. I don't know how. I can't remember.”
“Your memory core got fragged?” Now, Ratchet sounds interested. He circles around the table. “You never mentioned this before.”
“More like it's glitched.” Skywarp shrugs.
Ratchet gives him a searching look. “You know, I'd have to do a hardline processor scan. That's root coding.”
“I know.”
Inwardly, he winces. Hardline scans are the most intimate medical link-up there is. Ratchet will be able to see and access everything, and with his medical training, he could do whatever he wanted. Wipe Skywarp clean. Alter his code. Anything.
Warp lifts his optics to the medic. “But I trust you.”
Ratchet's field flares with shock. He throws his wrench back to the table and lets out a gust of air.
“You're a crazy glitch, you know that?”
“TC tells me all the time,” Skywarp says with a half-smile.
He feels a wide but efficient scan pass through him and ping across the rest of the medbarn. No doubt Ratchet is seeing if they are alone.
“You want to do this now?” the medic questions.
That earns him a cocky wave.
“No time like the present.”
Flickering his optics, Ratchet gestures to the only fully-functional medberth they have. Wheeljack keeps meaning to bring in the portable one from the Jackhammer, but it's somewhere near the bottom of a list of priorities.
“Hop up on the berth.” Ratchet hustles across the floor to do a quick scan of the hatchlings. “I'll tell Prowl that we'll be out of contact and not to be disturbed for an hour. Maybe more depending on what kind of mess I find in that processor of yours.”
“Might take a few days then,” Warp jokes as a thread of uneasiness winds its way through his spark. He eases himself onto the berth, but it’s slowly.
He does trust Ratchet. There is no other medic he'd rather have mucking around in his coding and his processor. But there will always be an element of discomfort to allowing anyone that much power over him.
Ratchet snorts. “Better not. I've got other things to do.” He roots around in his crates, producing a couple scanners of various designs.
Warp reclines back and lets the cushion support his wings. He gazes up at the slats of the barn above him.
“You still sure you want to do this?” the medic asks as he steps into Skywarp's peripheral vision.
He cycles a few ventilations. In the upcoming weeks, they could certainly use this tactical advantage. And Skywarp's tired of not knowing, not remembering. If there's anything Ratchet can do to help, than he’s willing to risk it.
“Yeah,” he says firmly and offlines his optics, manually commanding his medical interface port to pop open. “Do it, Ratchet.”
Fingers wrap around his wrist, with a gentleness that Skywarp has come to expect from the medic in the case of injuries not caused by stupidity. “Set your permissions for me?”
“Done,” Skywarp says as the alien sensation of another mech plugging into his systems winds through his sensory net.
He can feel Ratchet's presence like a prickle in his circuits or a ghost in his coding. Once he identifies the markers of 'Ratchet,' it's easy enough for Skywarp to allow the medic deeper access. His firewalls permeate, one by one, and Skywarp tries to get comfortable.
“I'm going to put you in a light stasis,” Ratchet says, both aloud and a direct transmission to Skywarp's internals. “It'll be easier on you. If there's an emergency, you can be good to fight in under a minute.”
Skywarp's talons prick at the berth padding, but he ex-vents and forces calm into his field. “I trust you,” he repeats, and he's honestly not sure if he's reassuring himself or Ratchet at this point.
He feels Ratchet considering Skywarp's trust before the medic does what he does best when confronted with emotional attachment. He sets it aside.
“Initiating stasis,” Ratchet says.
Skywarp would laugh if he weren't so nervous. When he wakes up, he's so going to have to tease Ratchet. And then lock him in a closet with Drift.
With that thought dancing around his processor – and Ratchet's confusion at his seemingly random amusement – Warp submits to the welcome stasis.
They don't dream. They can, however, slip into memories during their recharge. Like humans, their processors continue to function even if their frame and outer systems are shut down.
Stasis, for Skywarp, is never boring. His memories, few and scattered though they are, love to initiate themselves. Once, long ago, a medic had offered him a simple data patch, something to stop the constant playback. Warp had declined.
Sometimes, the playback is all he has left of a life he can't really remember, can't fully access in his online hours.
Most of the time, it’s even enough.
Sometimes, it isn’t.
He remembers the sound the repair chamber makes as he floats suspended in a thick gel of energon, repair nanites, and cooling fluid. His systems are flush with the substance; he can feel it sticky in his gears and under his plating. It's going to take forever to wash out, not that he can remember how long he’s been here.
He can't remember how he got here in the first place. He remembers pain, flashes of light, someone shouting. He remembers a pair of crimson optics looking down at him, arched wings branded with the city-state of Tarn.
Words beyond his prison are muffled, mere vibrations against the thick material that surrounds him. He has limited movement, and every now and again, he drags a blunt clawtip down the inside of his prison. It’s made of sturdy material, transparent for the most part, but the goo turns everything a pale, hazy green.
He sees mechs walking in front of his chamber. They are all sorts of designs, mostly worker class, a few medics. Every now and again, a Seeker or two stops by to look at him, making a notation on a datapad before moving on.
He can't remember who he is. He can't turn to look at his wings, remind himself of his origins. He gets error messages every time he pings his memory core. And someone has either removed or turned off his communications array, along with dulling his motor network. He can twitch, but he can't break free. And perhaps he shouldn't. He's still getting warnings, lists of wounds that have yet to repair or are in the process of healing.
He recharges because he has nothing better to do and the gaps in his memory fill him with discomfort. He doesn't know how long he's been in this prison, and time loses meaning without a reference point. Joors pass. Then orns.
Finally, he is released. The gel drains out the bottom, and the tube opens up, expelling him onto a shiny metal floor. He lands on hands and knees, sputtering goo from his vents, splattering the floor and the mechs around him. Two of them look down, fields brimming with disdain and disgust. They are groundmechs.
Of more interest is the Seeker with them. He is familiar somehow, the glyphs carved into his wings speak of a Tarn hatching.
“What is your designation?” one of the grounders demands, treads bristling with warning. A tank then, military-design.
Military?
He does look battered and worn, a few blaster marks scoring his chassis. He's seen battle recently. Have they gone to war?
“His memory core is damaged,” says the other grounder, the medic symbol stamped on his chestplate prominent and bright. “He may not know. He is also missing his ident chip.”
“Deserter then,” the tank says with a disgusted chuff of ventilation.
The flyer is the only one to step forward, gripping him by the elbow and pulling him to his pedes. He wobbles, uncertain, but offers the Seeker a shaky smile. The grounder, at least, isn't wrong in one respect. He doesn't remember his designation. There's a gaping hole in his memories, a block in his core that’s laced with error messages and warnings of incomplete data.
He flexes his wings, tries to turn and see them, but as far as he can tell, his plating is as smooth as a newly hatched Seekerling.
“They were damaged,” the flyer says, vocals deep and resonating. “You’ve been rebuilt nearly from your protoform. It’s a wonder you survived at all.” His field is warm and welcoming, nothing like the two grounders. “Can you remember your designation?”
He shakes his helm.
“No.” He looks around, but there are no windows, nothing to indicate where he might be. The Seeker is from Tarn, the medic has a Perihex accent, and he can't place the tank at all. “Where am I?”
“You're in Kaon,” the medic says and stomps toward him, the prickle of a scan dancing across his frame. “They pulled you out of some wreckage almost a vorn ago.”
His optics cycle wide. That long? It really is a wonder he isn’t offline, if it’s taken his injuries that long to repair.
“He's repaired, for the most part. There's nothing I can do for the core unless I replace it altogether. He'll probably continue to have memory problems, even with storing current events,” the medic continues, though his words are directed toward the tank. “The rest can be handled by self-repair. I leave him in your care.”
The tank's engine gives a low-tone rumble. “What am I supposed to do with a half-fixed Seeker?” he demands and scrapes a big, rough hand over his helm
“I just repair them. It's up to command what to do with them afterward,” the medic tosses the words over his shoulder. “He's your property now.”
“P-property?” he repeats.
Beside him, the Seeker's face flashes with a grim look before it is smoothed over by restraint. “The military is obligated to pay for your repairs since you survived. It’s why he hoped to get your designation. He wants to stake a claim on your accounts.”
Massive pedes storm across the floor, leaving flakes of some metal behind. “You,” the tanks says, jabbing a thick digit in his face. “Can you fly?”
“I have wings,” he replies, and frustration eats into his own field. “I'm at least old enough to do that.” He should probably feel grateful; instead, he's irritated at the gall of this grounder.
“It’s a Seeker's natural instinct,” the flyer says, his own field spiking with increasing bursts of annoyance. “You may sign him into our custody. I've received permission from my commanding officer.”
A whuff of rattling air escapes the tank. “Fine. The less I have to deal with the better.” One big hand waves dismissively as he shoves a datapad at the Seeker. “He's all yours.”
The tank storms off, and he is not sad to see the grounder go. He is abrasive, and that scuffs against his plating like an acid storm.
The Seeker cycles a ventilation but just shakes his head and turns away.
“Come with me.” The datapad disappears into a compartment on his arm. “I’m Thundercracker, by the way. Major under Commander Skybright. My unit is the one who found you.”
They exit the medical center and into a hallway filled with noise and other bots. Grounders and aerials alike crowd the corridor, all of them plated in thick, military-grade armor.
It’s like onlining to a whole new world. He doesn't remember much, but it seems impossible that he could have forgotten something as important as a war. He remembers peace and exploration and a golden age of unity and invention. Not this, whatever it was.
Thundercracker is talking, but he's not hearing all of it. Not when they pass by a window and he gets his first glimpse of the city, of Kaon. His optics cycle wider, and he comes to a halt, staring out at the smoke-clogged skies, the masses of mechs and femmes trudging through ash-covered streets. It’s entirely dark, the city lit by thousands upon thousands of street lights. It can't be night, not according to his chronometer.
Where is the sun?
“I don't understand,” he says. “What did I miss? What kind of Cybertron is this?”
“A lost one,” Thundercracker comments, stepping up beside him. His field is flat with mixed emotions, none of them pleasant. “We’re a planet on the brink of war, and there’s nothing that can stop it now.”
“With who?”
Thundercracker doesn't look at him, instead staring out over Kaon. A Kaon that is unfamiliar to him, ruined and bleak.
“Ourselves.”
“--warp. Skywarp, can you hear me? Blast it!”
He stirs from stasis with all the alertness of a drugged turbofox. He feels as though he has to swim to consciousness, and though his processor doesn't ache, Warp feels different.
“What's wrong with him?”
“Slag if I know! I'm not an expert on Seekers!”
Something crashes on the edge of his hearing, and he flinches.
“'M fine,” Skywarp says, but his words slur and his vocalizer glitches. “'m awake. Maybe.” His optical shutters feel sealed shut; he can't seem to lift them.
“Did you break him?”
“He was already broken!” That snarl is most definitely Ratchet. “I'm the glitch trying to fix him. Primus!”
“Well, whatever you did, it didn't work!”
And that irritated tone is TC. Warp can feel his trinemate's field as an agitated whirl against his own, concern mingling with exasperated affection. That there's a touch of caretaker's worry in it, which makes Skywarp want to smirk. TC can't help doing what he does best when it comes to Warp – taking care of him.
“That's because I'm not through yet!” Ratchet snaps.
“Ratchet. What do you need?”
Another voice, one he doesn't immediately recognize, but is perhaps Prowl because the Autobot tactician is the only one who would sound so calm in the face of Ratchet's fury.
“Time! Parts! Knowledge! Equipment!” There's another loud crash. “All of which I don't have, slaggit all to the Pits!”
Awareness trickles in. Skywarp fights with his diagnostics, his control circuits, and his systems until he can force all to obey. His optics snap open, and he tries to roll to his side, but his limbs don't want to respond.
“Why can't I move?” he demands and nearly celebrates when his words come out coherent and without static.
Instantly, three helms come into view. Two pairs of blue optics and one pair of red.
“Safety precaution,” Ratchet offers as the distinct prickle of a scan washes over Skywarp's frame, making his circuits twitch. “I've had my servos in your internals for the past ten hours. Do you have any idea how old you are?”
Warp cycles his optics. “Is that a rhetorical question?”
“Actually,” Prowl says with traces of amusement in his tone as he glances at the irascible medic. “It's not.”
Confusion replaces anything else Skywarp might have been entertaining. “If this is a joke, I don't get it.”
“It's not a joke,” TC cuts in, but his tone is soft as he lays a servo on Warp's shoulder. “Your spark chamber is significantly older than anything Ratchet can recognize.”
Skywarp's ventilations shudder.
“I don't...” He trails off, orbital ridge flattening. “What are you saying?”
“I couldn't fix your memory core.” Ratchet stares grimly at the results of his scan. “The damage is vorns old. Older than the war. But I did what I could for your warp generator. Which, by the way, is also like nothing I've ever seen. Intact anyway. It's an original.”
“An original?”
Skywarp feels a bit like one of those Earth birds because all he can do is repeat what Ratchet is saying to him. It doesn't make any sense.
“Like Jetfire's,” TC clarifies, and his tone holds something Skywarp hasn't heard in his trinemate before – awe. “You're a Seeker, Skywarp.”
His mouth open and closes, something like hilarity bubbling up in his chassis. “Of course I am. And so are you. And Dreadwing.”
Prowl shakes his helm. He has a finger on his chin and taps it thoughtfully.
“What Thundercracker means to say is that you are a Seeker.” The last is spoken in an older Cybertronian dialect, overlain with glyphs. “Like Jetfire. One of the first.”
Skywarp cycles his optics. “I... what?”
Ratchet reaches for his arm, plugging into an auxiliary port, and finally, Skywarp is getting a response from his extremities. Too little too late because he thinks if he gets up, he's going to pass right back out. They are all talking nonsense.
“We stopped using adamantium on spark chambers vorns before the first rebellion because we ran out,” Ratchet explains, his actions professional if not his words. “Kup doesn't even have it, and that fragger liked to talk as if he was Primus' berthmate.”
Warp's vocalizer engages with a click, but nothing emerges for several long seconds. “Ratchet, you're not making any sense.”
“Adamantium,” the medic stresses around ground denta, “is so rare as to be almost considered myth. It also just so happens to be the base construction of your protoform.”
Motion fully restored, Skywarp sits up with a startled jerk. His spark whirls in its chamber.
“That's not possible.”
“That's what I thought when I saw your spark chamber. It's why I started poking at your base.” Ratchet jabs him with a finger, right between two pieces of plating on your shoulder. “Someone should have noticed by now. So either you've been fixed by some really inept medics, or you've never been that badly damaged.”
Thundercracker shakes his helm. “They always dumped him in a stasis tube. No one had the patience for delicate repairs. You either survived on your own power, or you made room for the next piece of fodder.”
“Skywarp, as much as I want to, I can't fix your warp drive,” Ratchet says with a dismissing wave of his hand. “It's technology beyond my scope. Maybe if I still had access to the Archives, I might have been able to do something. But now?” He shakes his helm, field spiking with helplessness. “I did the best I could.”
Warp looks at his hands, five digits and taloned as they are. Just like Stars' and TC’s, a bit slimmer than Dreadwing's. They are the only shape he’s ever known, and it’s then that he remembers that Skywarp isn't even his designation. It's the one TC gave him. Strange how that's not occurred to him before. He's never heard of an ancient Seeker named Skywarp.
Just who the frag is he? Why can't he remember?
He pings his memory core, runs into corrupted sector after corrupted sector, fragments of conversations and sensations that have never made sense and still don't. He remembers having a brother but not his name or faceplate or appearance. He remembers joy from once upon a time but not why or how.
He doesn't have a fragging clue who he is.
“Skywarp--”
He bats away the hand on his shoulder. Only to realize it was Ratchet after the fact.
“Don't call me that,” he snaps, spark twisting and spinning with frantic bursts. “That's not who I am, is it? So how can you call me that?”
Two Autobots and a Decepticon look at him, and all Warp can see is the pity. They are giving him distance, and Skywarp wonders why. Are they that afraid of him?
There's a low-pitched whine in the room, batting at his audials, and then Warp realizes that his battle protocols have activated. His cannons are powering up, activating, prepared to defend him from an outside threat. There are no enemies here, only friends and family, and Skywarp has to consciously dial it back down.
“You are still Skywarp,” Thundercracker says, tone carefully modulated. “You’re my wingmate and the same mech who studied under Starscream. That is what matters.”
His memory core startles.
“I think we should call you Skywarp.”
That's right. It was TC who gave him his current designation. After wandering here and there for orns upon orns, it was TC who finally offered him something better than the number they'd been calling him.
Warp's memory is a patchy collection of fragmented images. He doesn't remember much of anything from before TC found him, and even after that, his memories don't store properly so occasionally, he loses them.
“Does it matter who you were before?” Prowl questions. “Does it matter what you can't remember? Do you think this is my original frame? Do you think any of us are the same as our beginning?”
“We've all lost pieces of our original selves,” Ratchet adds with a softness that Skywarp doesn't expect of the irascible medic. “My base coding is as tattered as your memory core, but what can I do but keep moving forward?”
“Why do you let him do that?” Skywarp asks, anger clear in his tone, spiking in his field, as he applies the field patch to Starscream's right thigh panel.
The grating chuckle that emerges from the Air Commander's vocalizer speaks nothing of humor.
“Because it's the only way to keep moving forward,” Stars says with a grim smile. “There's no meaning in the past if I can't grow beyond it. No matter what I have to suffer.”
Skywarp dips his helm. “Move forward, huh?”
He glances from one of them to the next, and TC shifts closer and lets their fields mingle with familiarity and friendship. Warp vents out.
“I suppose there's nothing better to do than give it a try.”
***
Back to Part One | On to Part Three
Universe: Bayverse, post-DotM, canon-compliant
Characters: Thundercracker, Skywarp, Ratchet, Drift, Wheeljack, Dreadwing, Tracks, Prowl
Rating: T
Warnings: mentions of character death, angst, some language, canon typical violence, background pairings
Desc: Friends. Alllies. Peace. Family. Skywarp never imagined that any of those terms would include an Autobot.
-------------------
Skywarp - Part Two
-------------------
Skywarp - Part Two
-------------------
Family meetings become a weekly thing. They are so few, stretched across so many duties, it’s a rare event that they are all in the same vicinity. It's a bit strange how him calling it a family meeting has kind of made it that. Yeah, they gather to talk intelligence, update everyone on the hatchlings, the progress of the Ark, but they gather for other reasons, too.
So Wheeljack and Ratchet can bicker like a couple that's been bonded for megavorns. So they can all mutter about the moony optics Ratchet and Drift toss each other when they aren't looking. So Dreadwing and Tracks can cuddle for whatever-frag reason they cuddle, and Warp can poke at TC until his trinemate takes a swat at him or Prowl unbends long enough to crack a smile.
It's kind of nice actually, now that Skywarp thinks about it. Nice to have a place to call home even if this cluttered old barn is only temporary. Maybe Tracks was on to something when he said that Dreadwing was his home.
Energon for thought.
Prowl always presides, standing with his back to the medcorner and facing the rest of them. Except Ratchet because the medic likes to putter around doing whatever it is he does when he's tending the hatchlings. That he enjoys tossing comments at them over the crate barrier is probably part of it. Sometimes, if Drift's feeling brave, he might join Ratchet over there.
Jack makes everyone groan with his ever-growing list of needed supplies for the Ark, though they'd gathered a fair amount from their raid on DC. Prowl reminds them that they can't go back, that the humans are bound to put two and two together eventually. They'll have to make do with what they have.
“Has Lennox made any recent contact?” Ratchet asks… or hollers rather.
Both Prowl and TC shake their helms.
“No,” the tactician consults the datapad in his hand. He seems permanently attached to the thing. “And neither has Sunstreaker. I’ve no doubt that they are tightening their security. There is a high possibility that we must discount their aid in the future.”
“Then we are flying blind, so to speak,” Dreadwing murmurs, almost as though to himself. Despite shifting to internal calculations, he hasn't paused in grooming Tracks with hands sliding constantly over a pair of pseudo-wings.
“We can make some small assumptions,” Prowl says, stylus sliding over the screen. “They are searching for us. There have been no new arrivals. And they have chosen to make Chicago their new base of operations.”
Ah. Warp does remember hearing something about that on the news. It was important enough that the all the major broadcasts covered it. The Autobots are setting up base in Chicago, both to continue rebuilding and to start anew.
“What of the remnants in DC?” Dreadwing inquires mid-stroke.
“You mean whatever we didn't take?” Tracks replies with a smirk, only to scowl when Dreadwing pinches a brace.
Prowl's lips nudge up toward a smile, however small. Progress!
“Yes. They are shipping anything of importance or classified to the Chicago base. It is out of our reach now.”
“You know,” Drift comments, hands folded atop that massive sword of his, the jewel gleaming in a way that always makes Skywarp uneasy. “If you consider all the variables, we outnumber the Autobots.”
Skywarp raises an orbital ridge. “How do you figure that?”
“Bumblebee is never on base and hasn't been since the last time I did a maintenance check.” Ratchet's answer floats over, proving he’s still listening. “But I wouldn't count on the twins if I were you. If Sideswipe intended to leave, he would’ve done so when I did.”
Prowl's stylus pauses. Warp only notices because he's been watching their leader so closely. He's kind of made it a personal mission of his because no bot can go through what that mech has in such a short period of time and not crack. Or start shooting stuff. Or both.
“Ratchet is correct. Sunstreaker might be wavering, but when it comes down to it, they will obey orders first.” Prowl’s tone quiets. “Unless they come to us, we must assume that they will not side with us.”
The twitch of his sensory panels belies his true feelings on the matter though.
Warp glances at TC, but his wingmate isn't paying attention. Or if he is, he's not showing it.
Maybe, Skywarp thinks almost casually, it’s better that he breaks now when they can do something about it. Rather than later when everything's on the line. No one's saying it, but they can all feel it. The weight of impending doom. The knowledge that their world is shrinking around them and that there's every possibility the humans will find them before they finish the Ark. They may evenly match the Autobots right now, but all it takes is for the humans to get twitchy and decide that a tactical nuke might solve all their problems, and then, nothing will be left of this barn and their home but some scattered pieces.
And even if they don't go the nuke route, a strafing run from a party of F-22s would still put a serious dent in their armor and take out the hatchlings. A stray bullet hitting any number of machinery or combustible materials and the whole compound will go sky high.
They're standing on a hair trigger, a landmine, and they all know it.
“I did a flyover down the coast,” Skywarp says, thinking that it is now or never. “They were making another trip out to the Abyss.”
TC's gaze whips toward him while his comm. pings their trine-specific line. “You mean a cargo of Cybertronian tech. Specifically anything in DC that wasn't any use.”
“And any ‘Cons they've offlined as of late,” Warp confirms but ignores the ping. It has to be done. “Not that there are many. They're running out of those, and once they do, they'll have nothing left to distract them from us.”
Cold silence descends, punctuated by the tight spike of a mech's energy field, like a slap to the faceplate. Warp glances at Prowl from the edge of his sensors. The tactician has gone entirely still, save for the minute rattling of his frame, his sensory panels arched.
Skywarp doesn't know, and Prowl hasn't said. Not what he'd seen or witnessed or found out for that near-year he spent with the Autobots and their Prime. But he has his suspicions, and if such a casual mention of this invokes such a reaction, perhaps he doesn't need to know at all.
“There were not only Decepticons in that freight,” Drift says in a low, dark tone. “Remember?”
Tracks makes a disgusted noise, gears grinding like a rusted axle in his chassis. “Treating us like melted slag. Treating sentient beings like garbage. It's barbaric.”
Prowl's voice cuts through the air. Low and vicious and like nothing Skywarp has ever heard the calm tactician use. Not even in the midst of battle.
“Hound is not garbage,” he hisses. “And Optimus has no right to do this.”
“There's nothing we can do about it,” Tracks points out, either heedless of the razor's edge that Prowl walks or uncaring. “He's Prime.”
“He's Fallen,” Prowl all but snarls, hands at his sides, fingers clenching and unclenching in slow, steady motions.
Skywarp lowers his helm as the energy in the room spikes with shock. They have all at one point suspected such a thing about the vaunted Optimus Prime. But no one has put it into words until now. How long has Prowl seethed with this suspicion?
There's a noise, a creak of aging wood, and Ratchet appears in the entry just behind Prowl. One hand grips the crate-wall. The medic's field betrays his unease, winding with the general discomfort permeating the room like a spill of used oil.
“Prowl...”
“Tell me I'm wrong,” their leader demands, and his tone is edged as he stares at the floor, optics getting bluer and bluer. “Tell me that a true Prime would act like this!”
Wheeljack's vocal indicators pulse an apprehensive grey. “That's not our call to make.”
“Why not?” Prowl's ventilations emerge in sharp bursts. “If the Matrix is so flawless then the first Fallen would’ve never arose. But this is where it's judgment has gotten us!” One hand flings out in a vague direction of Chicago. “Abandoned. Homeless. Treated like scrap by the very mech who should be our champion!”
Warp flicks out a wing. “Oh, now you're getting it. Aren’t you, Autobot? Your precious Prime is no better than the Senate and the Council before him. And still you wonder why we followed Megatron!”
Dreadwing growls before anyone else can offer a word. “There is a reason we are all here together, Skywarp. Don’t bring faction into this.”
“Faction has nothing to do with it!” Skywarp insists, popping up to his pedes, reading the room of frantic emotion all too easily. “I just want everyone to face the facts. Prime has condemned us to extinction for this planet and these stupid squishies. The sooner we accept that the oh-so-special Prime is just as fragged as the rest of us, maybe we can move on.”
Optics narrowing, Tracks rises as well. “You should watch your tone, mech. You insult eons of culture and respect. You call us fools.”
“If the cog fits,” Skywarp retorts.
Tracks' engine rumbles, but Dreadwing's hand on his shoulder gives him pause. They share a glance that says everything and nothing before Tracks pulls back.
“Fighting each other will solve nothing,” the larger Seeker murmurs.
“Especially since Skywarp is right,” Prowl inserts, his vocals soft but somehow cutting. “We are all fools. Prime is broken, Fallen. We should have seen it long ago. We could have saved so many lives if we paid attention to the mech and not the title.” The aggression fades from his frame. Replaced by something else, something Skywarp has been watching for. “Primus, but I have been a fool.”
Ratchet's mouth opens and closes. As if he is struggling to find words and debating amongst the ones he does find. Jack's hand closes his arm, and he shakes his helm firmly. Prowl's tone is soft, but his energy field is a vile sting of conflicting emotions that no longer conceals the torrent beneath.
“Megatron's equally to blame,” Skywarp says with a shrug that is far from nonchalant. TC's watching him closer now, and good, maybe he's starting to get it. “When it comes to that, we're all pretty fragging stupid. We only have ourselves to blame for this mess we're in.”
“Not. Helping,” Ratchet hisses, looking as though he wants to pounce across the room and throttle someone. Specifically Skywarp.
“I am,” the flyer retorts with a scathing glance. “Just none of you can see it and all of you are too soft to do it.”
Tracks lurches forward, anger twisting his faceplates. “You--”
“He's right.” Prowl's words are barely a whisper, but they cut through the room as if he's shouted. He's staring at the ground, staring right through it. “We are all fools. We are all to blame. Something has broken in Optimus. He isn’t Prime. Has not been for a very long time.”
His sensory panels flatten against his back. His armor draws close, as though protecting himself.
“Should we have seen it sooner?” he asks, but it’s directed at no one. “Were we looking for it? All we saw was the war, the next battle, hoping and praying there would be an end. All the while knowing peace was impossible. There was too much anger, too much pent up hatred and despair.”
Pain leaks into his voice, his field, and the whole barn has gone silent. Skywarp even is without words.
“So what if Prime killed a few Decepticons?” Prowl shrugs in such a painfully human fashion. “So what? That's a few less we have to fight. Maybe that's what we need to do to claim victory. Except no one ever defined what victory would be. So Prime sends the Allspark into space to protect it, and dooms us all in the process. We didn't protest then, so what right do we have to protest now? How dare we claim to miss Cybertron when we didn't fight to save it?” He shakes his head. “Oh, we fought. Each other. Over and over again. Killing ourselves and our planet, and still we didn't stop.”
Prowl's optics lift; his gaze wanders the room. But Skywarp wonders if he's even really seeing any of them.
“And this is what we have left. A Fallen Prime. A destroyed planet. A mishmash collection of traitors. Who do we have to blame but ourselves? Autobots? Decepticons? We're all to blame. We've lost everything. It's no more Prime's fault over Megatron's. It's all of ours. We listened. We reacted. And we kept on fighting.” He sucks in a ragged ventilation. “I'm tired of fighting.”
“I know,” Thundercracker replies in the heavy silence that follows, and Skywarp has never heard his trinemate sound so gentle before. “That is why we are all here.”
They stare at each other for what seems like a long time before Prowl's armor eases from its defensive clamp.
“I... apologize,” he says with another of those extended ventilations. He dips his helm. “I did not intend to lecture everyone. Please excuse me.”
He turns and leaves. Not quite a run, but close enough to be called fleeing. Prowl brushes between Dreadwing and TC in the process, field screaming the state of his processor.
TC turns, but Skywarp puts a hand on his trinemate's arm.
“No,” he says. “I got this. You just do what you're supposed to do, Mr. Lieutenant.”
“Don't break him,” his friend says subvocally.
Warp flicks out a wing, slapping TC on the upper arm. “I know what I'm doing.”
At least, he hopes he does.
Skywarp leaves, just as the conversation behind him picks up. Ratchet's protesting, trying to go after Prowl himself, and Thundercracker is arguing his case.
Good. Prowl doesn't need a medic poking at him to find where it hurts. He doesn't need a psychologist either. He just needs someone to listen, and fortunately, Warp's very good at that. When he feels like it, that is.
There aren't very many places for Prowl to have gone. He doubts the tactician would be in the lab, and space aboard the Jackhammer has always been limited, strained as it is. Their storage house is far too cramped, and since it is far too risky to linger outside, that only leaves the barn serving as shared quarters between TC and Skywarp and now Prowl as well.
Their boss is sitting at TC's desk, staring blankly at the cobbled collection of tiny computer monitors. He hasn't plugged into the system yet, which proves he isn't working. It's more an illusion of being occupied.
There's no chair for another mech in here. Instead,Warp leans against the wall, ignoring the way it creaks and groans beneath his weight. It's held up so far.
Prowl knows he's here. Skywarp wasn't exactly subtle about it, and that twitch in his panels proves that Prowl sensed his arrival immediately. Silence reigns, but Skywarp, for once, exhibits patience which is rewarded when Prowl is the first to speak.
“I’ve spent my entire functioning in service. I’ve always been reliable and needed, from one Prime to the next, to whomever was owed my loyalty. I’ve never asked for anything because service is in my coding. One might almost say that it is branded to my spark. And yet...” Prowl's helm lowers, half-turned as though watching Warp from the edge of a sensor. “I feel as though I’ve been discarded as easily as Prime had tossed my brother into the deep.”
Ah. Now we get to the crux of the matter.
Skywarp folds his arms. “Have you even given yourself time to grieve?”
“There’s been no time.” Prowl ex-vents softly. “And there was no mausoleum to offer me comfort.”
“I know a little something about that.” Skywarp frowns a little, digging deep, trying to bring fractured memories to the fore and as always failing. “I had a brother once. He was a lot like you, I think, not that I can remember much about him.”
The chair-crate combo creaks as Prowl turns. Looking at him with those calm optics that nevertheless appear so incisive.
“You can't remember?”
Warp unfolds an arm, tapping the side of his helm. “There was an accident, not that I can tell you what. My memory core got damaged, irreplaceable, and I couldn't recall where my backups were, if even had any to begin with. There's a lot I don't remember, and even more I wish I could.”
Sympathy floods Prowl's field, twining with the echoes of grief that have been dark and consuming as of late.
“That's the hardest part,” Skywarp admits. “The not remembering. I know I had a brother, but I can't remember anything about him. All I have are these echoes, fragments of feelings, a mech that I loved. It's the worst thing.”
“Was it during the war?”
Warp shakes his helm, ending the scanning program before it can give him another negative response. “No. It was before all this craziness started. I guess he got the lucky end of the deal.”
Prowl raps his fingers on the desk, metal tap-tapping on aged wood. “Sometimes, I wonder and I ask myself, wouldn't it be better if we had kept on fighting? Maybe we had our chance. Maybe we deserve to die out like this.” His engine settles into a low, thoughtful rumble. “Maybe it's better this way?”
“Maybe it is.” Skywarp rolls his shoulders, wings rustling. “Maybe it isn't. I can't really answer that except to say I'd like to try living just this once. What we have here, it's not fun, but it's something.”
Prowl's expression turns thoughtful as he shifts back toward the computers. At least the dizzying edge of utter despair has left. Maybe now he'll be able to process. His field had been driving Skywarp crazy. Or well, crazier.
“It's kind of nice, too. To fight to live,” Skywarp says, turning to leave because he's done what he came to do. “Better than fighting to die at any rate.”
“Better indeed,” Prowl replies, and his panels drift out of their rigid posture. A very good sign.
Warp grins to himself and takes his leave. If he happens to hear a murmured gratitude on his way out… well, that's his secret to keep.
Anxiety isn’t an emotion that Warp is familiar with. He is more of a leap-first, look-later Seeker. Has been as long as he remembers. It helps when he needs that split-second decision making to calculate warp vectors and landing points. But when it comes down to life outside of combat, that mentality often leads to his fellows branding him as stupid or excitable.
He's neither. Well, perhaps a bit of the last one.
Warp's gotten used to the way others tolerate him. TC and Starscream had always understood to a certain extent. They had to since they are all part of the same trine and know him better than anyone else.
Still... Warp's very functioning has never left much room for anxiety. He doesn't waste processor space on worrying. Rarely does he bother with caution.
But Skywarp isn’t stupid. And only a stupid mech would dare bother the Hatchet in the sanctity of his lair with a possibly idiotic question.
It’s one of the few times that Warp can ever remember exhibiting a degree of restraint. He creeps into the medbarn, stealthily tiptoes through the common area, and peers around the partition.
The hatchlings are quiet, probably recharging. It's all they ever do. A few tanks bubble with supplemented energon, ready to feed the hatchlings at a moment's notice. And Ratchet himself, the most feared medic in all of Cybertron, is fiddling with something at the table in the middle.
Warp tries to get an idea of the medic's energy field from his current position. It's always hard to tell Ratchet's mood from expression alone. He can look perfectly peaceful on the outside but be a brewing storm of agitation and angst in his spark.
Mech needs a good, hard interfacing like no one he’s ever seen. Drift better get his aft in gear soon, or Warp will have to take one for the team.
“Either come in or leave,” Ratchet says, and Warp nearly leaps backwards in surprise. “I heard you minutes ago.”
Warp whuffs a ventilation. “You could’ve said something.”
The medic glances up from whatever it is he's tinkering with. “Considering it's you, I thought you'd speak up first.”
Ratchet's calm. Not quite a good mood but not angry at the world either. It's probably the best Warp's going to get.
“Oh.”
“Did you want something?” Ratchet asks, dropping his optics back to his work. He puts down a wrench and picks up a bolt-driver. “I know you didn't come to see the hatchlings.”
True enough. Warp doesn't trust himself around the smaller frames. They are so delicate and so quiet. They unnerve him in a way nothing else does.
He busies himself with examining the energon distiller that he had built for Ratchet's use in the medbarn.
“I was thinking--”
“You sure it's safe to do that?” the medic inserts with an amused whuff of his ventilations.
Indignation wars with relief. Teasing generally means Ratchet's in a forgiving mood. Still...
Skywarp tosses a scowl at him. “I'm being serious.”
Chuckling, Ratchet tosses the driver onto the table and places his project down beside it. “I'm listening.”
A sulk threatens to make an appearance, but Skywarp dials it back. He fiddles with the controls for the distiller.
“Do you think you can fix my warp drive?”
He can feel Ratchet's gaze on him, raking him from helm to pede. The medic's mood tangibly plummets.
“You broke it already? Primus, Skywarp.”
“It's not broken!” Skywarp snaps, whirling around and nearly clipping the distiller with a wing tip. “I mean, not since you fixed it the first time. But that didn't finish the job.”
“... What?” Ratchet cycles his optics.
Skywarp lowers his shoulders and swallows down indignity. “Do you remember Jetfire?”
Miniature faceplates shift and flex as Ratchet goes through a range of emotions before confusion takes precedence. “What are you getting at?”
“He could teleport others,” Warp says, remembering Stars’ description of Jetfire's abilities all too well. He never forgot them. “I wonder if I can do it, too.”
“Have you tried?” Ratchet frowns.
Skywarp fidgets. “Once.”
“And?”
His wings twitch. “Pain.”
It's not quite a lie.
He's actually attempted to take a passenger twice in his functioning that he can remember. The first time had been an accident. Someone grabbed his arm as he'd opened a warp gate. That mech hadn't survived. Skywarp himself had spent several diun in a medical center as scientists worked to fabricate a leg, an arm, and both of his wings.
Pain had been the entirety of his existence. Warp had learned his lesson.
But in Chicago, Skywarp had risked it. This time with intention, an act borne of desperation. He concentrated, grabbed TC, and tried to get them both out of the city before the humans could blow them out of the sky. The war was lost, Cybertron gone, Megatron in pieces and Starscream headless.
All Skywarp had wanted to do was escape. He wasn't going to leave TC behind.
So he had grabbed his trinemate, ignored the pain of his wounds, and tried to warp away. He had not succeeded. His only consolation, before they hit the ground and the building buried them, was that he hadn't killed them both.
“Then there's your answer,” Ratchet offers, picking up his wrench again. “You can't warp with passengers.”
“But would you look?” Warp insists. “Maybe my generator is damaged. I can't look for myself or access my own schematics, so it has to be you.”
This causes Ratchet to frown again. All mechs can access their own schematics. Otherwise, how else would their nanites know what to maintain?
“Why not?”
Warp taps his helm. “Damage. I don't know how. I can't remember.”
“Your memory core got fragged?” Now, Ratchet sounds interested. He circles around the table. “You never mentioned this before.”
“More like it's glitched.” Skywarp shrugs.
Ratchet gives him a searching look. “You know, I'd have to do a hardline processor scan. That's root coding.”
“I know.”
Inwardly, he winces. Hardline scans are the most intimate medical link-up there is. Ratchet will be able to see and access everything, and with his medical training, he could do whatever he wanted. Wipe Skywarp clean. Alter his code. Anything.
Warp lifts his optics to the medic. “But I trust you.”
Ratchet's field flares with shock. He throws his wrench back to the table and lets out a gust of air.
“You're a crazy glitch, you know that?”
“TC tells me all the time,” Skywarp says with a half-smile.
He feels a wide but efficient scan pass through him and ping across the rest of the medbarn. No doubt Ratchet is seeing if they are alone.
“You want to do this now?” the medic questions.
That earns him a cocky wave.
“No time like the present.”
Flickering his optics, Ratchet gestures to the only fully-functional medberth they have. Wheeljack keeps meaning to bring in the portable one from the Jackhammer, but it's somewhere near the bottom of a list of priorities.
“Hop up on the berth.” Ratchet hustles across the floor to do a quick scan of the hatchlings. “I'll tell Prowl that we'll be out of contact and not to be disturbed for an hour. Maybe more depending on what kind of mess I find in that processor of yours.”
“Might take a few days then,” Warp jokes as a thread of uneasiness winds its way through his spark. He eases himself onto the berth, but it’s slowly.
He does trust Ratchet. There is no other medic he'd rather have mucking around in his coding and his processor. But there will always be an element of discomfort to allowing anyone that much power over him.
Ratchet snorts. “Better not. I've got other things to do.” He roots around in his crates, producing a couple scanners of various designs.
Warp reclines back and lets the cushion support his wings. He gazes up at the slats of the barn above him.
“You still sure you want to do this?” the medic asks as he steps into Skywarp's peripheral vision.
He cycles a few ventilations. In the upcoming weeks, they could certainly use this tactical advantage. And Skywarp's tired of not knowing, not remembering. If there's anything Ratchet can do to help, than he’s willing to risk it.
“Yeah,” he says firmly and offlines his optics, manually commanding his medical interface port to pop open. “Do it, Ratchet.”
Fingers wrap around his wrist, with a gentleness that Skywarp has come to expect from the medic in the case of injuries not caused by stupidity. “Set your permissions for me?”
“Done,” Skywarp says as the alien sensation of another mech plugging into his systems winds through his sensory net.
He can feel Ratchet's presence like a prickle in his circuits or a ghost in his coding. Once he identifies the markers of 'Ratchet,' it's easy enough for Skywarp to allow the medic deeper access. His firewalls permeate, one by one, and Skywarp tries to get comfortable.
“I'm going to put you in a light stasis,” Ratchet says, both aloud and a direct transmission to Skywarp's internals. “It'll be easier on you. If there's an emergency, you can be good to fight in under a minute.”
Skywarp's talons prick at the berth padding, but he ex-vents and forces calm into his field. “I trust you,” he repeats, and he's honestly not sure if he's reassuring himself or Ratchet at this point.
He feels Ratchet considering Skywarp's trust before the medic does what he does best when confronted with emotional attachment. He sets it aside.
“Initiating stasis,” Ratchet says.
Skywarp would laugh if he weren't so nervous. When he wakes up, he's so going to have to tease Ratchet. And then lock him in a closet with Drift.
With that thought dancing around his processor – and Ratchet's confusion at his seemingly random amusement – Warp submits to the welcome stasis.
They don't dream. They can, however, slip into memories during their recharge. Like humans, their processors continue to function even if their frame and outer systems are shut down.
Stasis, for Skywarp, is never boring. His memories, few and scattered though they are, love to initiate themselves. Once, long ago, a medic had offered him a simple data patch, something to stop the constant playback. Warp had declined.
Sometimes, the playback is all he has left of a life he can't really remember, can't fully access in his online hours.
Most of the time, it’s even enough.
Sometimes, it isn’t.
He remembers the sound the repair chamber makes as he floats suspended in a thick gel of energon, repair nanites, and cooling fluid. His systems are flush with the substance; he can feel it sticky in his gears and under his plating. It's going to take forever to wash out, not that he can remember how long he’s been here.
He can't remember how he got here in the first place. He remembers pain, flashes of light, someone shouting. He remembers a pair of crimson optics looking down at him, arched wings branded with the city-state of Tarn.
Words beyond his prison are muffled, mere vibrations against the thick material that surrounds him. He has limited movement, and every now and again, he drags a blunt clawtip down the inside of his prison. It’s made of sturdy material, transparent for the most part, but the goo turns everything a pale, hazy green.
He sees mechs walking in front of his chamber. They are all sorts of designs, mostly worker class, a few medics. Every now and again, a Seeker or two stops by to look at him, making a notation on a datapad before moving on.
He can't remember who he is. He can't turn to look at his wings, remind himself of his origins. He gets error messages every time he pings his memory core. And someone has either removed or turned off his communications array, along with dulling his motor network. He can twitch, but he can't break free. And perhaps he shouldn't. He's still getting warnings, lists of wounds that have yet to repair or are in the process of healing.
He recharges because he has nothing better to do and the gaps in his memory fill him with discomfort. He doesn't know how long he's been in this prison, and time loses meaning without a reference point. Joors pass. Then orns.
Finally, he is released. The gel drains out the bottom, and the tube opens up, expelling him onto a shiny metal floor. He lands on hands and knees, sputtering goo from his vents, splattering the floor and the mechs around him. Two of them look down, fields brimming with disdain and disgust. They are groundmechs.
Of more interest is the Seeker with them. He is familiar somehow, the glyphs carved into his wings speak of a Tarn hatching.
“What is your designation?” one of the grounders demands, treads bristling with warning. A tank then, military-design.
Military?
He does look battered and worn, a few blaster marks scoring his chassis. He's seen battle recently. Have they gone to war?
“His memory core is damaged,” says the other grounder, the medic symbol stamped on his chestplate prominent and bright. “He may not know. He is also missing his ident chip.”
“Deserter then,” the tank says with a disgusted chuff of ventilation.
The flyer is the only one to step forward, gripping him by the elbow and pulling him to his pedes. He wobbles, uncertain, but offers the Seeker a shaky smile. The grounder, at least, isn't wrong in one respect. He doesn't remember his designation. There's a gaping hole in his memories, a block in his core that’s laced with error messages and warnings of incomplete data.
He flexes his wings, tries to turn and see them, but as far as he can tell, his plating is as smooth as a newly hatched Seekerling.
“They were damaged,” the flyer says, vocals deep and resonating. “You’ve been rebuilt nearly from your protoform. It’s a wonder you survived at all.” His field is warm and welcoming, nothing like the two grounders. “Can you remember your designation?”
He shakes his helm.
“No.” He looks around, but there are no windows, nothing to indicate where he might be. The Seeker is from Tarn, the medic has a Perihex accent, and he can't place the tank at all. “Where am I?”
“You're in Kaon,” the medic says and stomps toward him, the prickle of a scan dancing across his frame. “They pulled you out of some wreckage almost a vorn ago.”
His optics cycle wide. That long? It really is a wonder he isn’t offline, if it’s taken his injuries that long to repair.
“He's repaired, for the most part. There's nothing I can do for the core unless I replace it altogether. He'll probably continue to have memory problems, even with storing current events,” the medic continues, though his words are directed toward the tank. “The rest can be handled by self-repair. I leave him in your care.”
The tank's engine gives a low-tone rumble. “What am I supposed to do with a half-fixed Seeker?” he demands and scrapes a big, rough hand over his helm
“I just repair them. It's up to command what to do with them afterward,” the medic tosses the words over his shoulder. “He's your property now.”
“P-property?” he repeats.
Beside him, the Seeker's face flashes with a grim look before it is smoothed over by restraint. “The military is obligated to pay for your repairs since you survived. It’s why he hoped to get your designation. He wants to stake a claim on your accounts.”
Massive pedes storm across the floor, leaving flakes of some metal behind. “You,” the tanks says, jabbing a thick digit in his face. “Can you fly?”
“I have wings,” he replies, and frustration eats into his own field. “I'm at least old enough to do that.” He should probably feel grateful; instead, he's irritated at the gall of this grounder.
“It’s a Seeker's natural instinct,” the flyer says, his own field spiking with increasing bursts of annoyance. “You may sign him into our custody. I've received permission from my commanding officer.”
A whuff of rattling air escapes the tank. “Fine. The less I have to deal with the better.” One big hand waves dismissively as he shoves a datapad at the Seeker. “He's all yours.”
The tank storms off, and he is not sad to see the grounder go. He is abrasive, and that scuffs against his plating like an acid storm.
The Seeker cycles a ventilation but just shakes his head and turns away.
“Come with me.” The datapad disappears into a compartment on his arm. “I’m Thundercracker, by the way. Major under Commander Skybright. My unit is the one who found you.”
They exit the medical center and into a hallway filled with noise and other bots. Grounders and aerials alike crowd the corridor, all of them plated in thick, military-grade armor.
It’s like onlining to a whole new world. He doesn't remember much, but it seems impossible that he could have forgotten something as important as a war. He remembers peace and exploration and a golden age of unity and invention. Not this, whatever it was.
Thundercracker is talking, but he's not hearing all of it. Not when they pass by a window and he gets his first glimpse of the city, of Kaon. His optics cycle wider, and he comes to a halt, staring out at the smoke-clogged skies, the masses of mechs and femmes trudging through ash-covered streets. It’s entirely dark, the city lit by thousands upon thousands of street lights. It can't be night, not according to his chronometer.
Where is the sun?
“I don't understand,” he says. “What did I miss? What kind of Cybertron is this?”
“A lost one,” Thundercracker comments, stepping up beside him. His field is flat with mixed emotions, none of them pleasant. “We’re a planet on the brink of war, and there’s nothing that can stop it now.”
“With who?”
Thundercracker doesn't look at him, instead staring out over Kaon. A Kaon that is unfamiliar to him, ruined and bleak.
“Ourselves.”
“--warp. Skywarp, can you hear me? Blast it!”
He stirs from stasis with all the alertness of a drugged turbofox. He feels as though he has to swim to consciousness, and though his processor doesn't ache, Warp feels different.
“What's wrong with him?”
“Slag if I know! I'm not an expert on Seekers!”
Something crashes on the edge of his hearing, and he flinches.
“'M fine,” Skywarp says, but his words slur and his vocalizer glitches. “'m awake. Maybe.” His optical shutters feel sealed shut; he can't seem to lift them.
“Did you break him?”
“He was already broken!” That snarl is most definitely Ratchet. “I'm the glitch trying to fix him. Primus!”
“Well, whatever you did, it didn't work!”
And that irritated tone is TC. Warp can feel his trinemate's field as an agitated whirl against his own, concern mingling with exasperated affection. That there's a touch of caretaker's worry in it, which makes Skywarp want to smirk. TC can't help doing what he does best when it comes to Warp – taking care of him.
“That's because I'm not through yet!” Ratchet snaps.
“Ratchet. What do you need?”
Another voice, one he doesn't immediately recognize, but is perhaps Prowl because the Autobot tactician is the only one who would sound so calm in the face of Ratchet's fury.
“Time! Parts! Knowledge! Equipment!” There's another loud crash. “All of which I don't have, slaggit all to the Pits!”
Awareness trickles in. Skywarp fights with his diagnostics, his control circuits, and his systems until he can force all to obey. His optics snap open, and he tries to roll to his side, but his limbs don't want to respond.
“Why can't I move?” he demands and nearly celebrates when his words come out coherent and without static.
Instantly, three helms come into view. Two pairs of blue optics and one pair of red.
“Safety precaution,” Ratchet offers as the distinct prickle of a scan washes over Skywarp's frame, making his circuits twitch. “I've had my servos in your internals for the past ten hours. Do you have any idea how old you are?”
Warp cycles his optics. “Is that a rhetorical question?”
“Actually,” Prowl says with traces of amusement in his tone as he glances at the irascible medic. “It's not.”
Confusion replaces anything else Skywarp might have been entertaining. “If this is a joke, I don't get it.”
“It's not a joke,” TC cuts in, but his tone is soft as he lays a servo on Warp's shoulder. “Your spark chamber is significantly older than anything Ratchet can recognize.”
Skywarp's ventilations shudder.
“I don't...” He trails off, orbital ridge flattening. “What are you saying?”
“I couldn't fix your memory core.” Ratchet stares grimly at the results of his scan. “The damage is vorns old. Older than the war. But I did what I could for your warp generator. Which, by the way, is also like nothing I've ever seen. Intact anyway. It's an original.”
“An original?”
Skywarp feels a bit like one of those Earth birds because all he can do is repeat what Ratchet is saying to him. It doesn't make any sense.
“Like Jetfire's,” TC clarifies, and his tone holds something Skywarp hasn't heard in his trinemate before – awe. “You're a Seeker, Skywarp.”
His mouth open and closes, something like hilarity bubbling up in his chassis. “Of course I am. And so are you. And Dreadwing.”
Prowl shakes his helm. He has a finger on his chin and taps it thoughtfully.
“What Thundercracker means to say is that you are a Seeker.” The last is spoken in an older Cybertronian dialect, overlain with glyphs. “Like Jetfire. One of the first.”
Skywarp cycles his optics. “I... what?”
Ratchet reaches for his arm, plugging into an auxiliary port, and finally, Skywarp is getting a response from his extremities. Too little too late because he thinks if he gets up, he's going to pass right back out. They are all talking nonsense.
“We stopped using adamantium on spark chambers vorns before the first rebellion because we ran out,” Ratchet explains, his actions professional if not his words. “Kup doesn't even have it, and that fragger liked to talk as if he was Primus' berthmate.”
Warp's vocalizer engages with a click, but nothing emerges for several long seconds. “Ratchet, you're not making any sense.”
“Adamantium,” the medic stresses around ground denta, “is so rare as to be almost considered myth. It also just so happens to be the base construction of your protoform.”
Motion fully restored, Skywarp sits up with a startled jerk. His spark whirls in its chamber.
“That's not possible.”
“That's what I thought when I saw your spark chamber. It's why I started poking at your base.” Ratchet jabs him with a finger, right between two pieces of plating on your shoulder. “Someone should have noticed by now. So either you've been fixed by some really inept medics, or you've never been that badly damaged.”
Thundercracker shakes his helm. “They always dumped him in a stasis tube. No one had the patience for delicate repairs. You either survived on your own power, or you made room for the next piece of fodder.”
“Skywarp, as much as I want to, I can't fix your warp drive,” Ratchet says with a dismissing wave of his hand. “It's technology beyond my scope. Maybe if I still had access to the Archives, I might have been able to do something. But now?” He shakes his helm, field spiking with helplessness. “I did the best I could.”
Warp looks at his hands, five digits and taloned as they are. Just like Stars' and TC’s, a bit slimmer than Dreadwing's. They are the only shape he’s ever known, and it’s then that he remembers that Skywarp isn't even his designation. It's the one TC gave him. Strange how that's not occurred to him before. He's never heard of an ancient Seeker named Skywarp.
Just who the frag is he? Why can't he remember?
He pings his memory core, runs into corrupted sector after corrupted sector, fragments of conversations and sensations that have never made sense and still don't. He remembers having a brother but not his name or faceplate or appearance. He remembers joy from once upon a time but not why or how.
He doesn't have a fragging clue who he is.
“Skywarp--”
He bats away the hand on his shoulder. Only to realize it was Ratchet after the fact.
“Don't call me that,” he snaps, spark twisting and spinning with frantic bursts. “That's not who I am, is it? So how can you call me that?”
Two Autobots and a Decepticon look at him, and all Warp can see is the pity. They are giving him distance, and Skywarp wonders why. Are they that afraid of him?
There's a low-pitched whine in the room, batting at his audials, and then Warp realizes that his battle protocols have activated. His cannons are powering up, activating, prepared to defend him from an outside threat. There are no enemies here, only friends and family, and Skywarp has to consciously dial it back down.
“You are still Skywarp,” Thundercracker says, tone carefully modulated. “You’re my wingmate and the same mech who studied under Starscream. That is what matters.”
His memory core startles.
“I think we should call you Skywarp.”
That's right. It was TC who gave him his current designation. After wandering here and there for orns upon orns, it was TC who finally offered him something better than the number they'd been calling him.
Warp's memory is a patchy collection of fragmented images. He doesn't remember much of anything from before TC found him, and even after that, his memories don't store properly so occasionally, he loses them.
“Does it matter who you were before?” Prowl questions. “Does it matter what you can't remember? Do you think this is my original frame? Do you think any of us are the same as our beginning?”
“We've all lost pieces of our original selves,” Ratchet adds with a softness that Skywarp doesn't expect of the irascible medic. “My base coding is as tattered as your memory core, but what can I do but keep moving forward?”
“Why do you let him do that?” Skywarp asks, anger clear in his tone, spiking in his field, as he applies the field patch to Starscream's right thigh panel.
The grating chuckle that emerges from the Air Commander's vocalizer speaks nothing of humor.
“Because it's the only way to keep moving forward,” Stars says with a grim smile. “There's no meaning in the past if I can't grow beyond it. No matter what I have to suffer.”
Skywarp dips his helm. “Move forward, huh?”
He glances from one of them to the next, and TC shifts closer and lets their fields mingle with familiarity and friendship. Warp vents out.
“I suppose there's nothing better to do than give it a try.”
Back to Part One | On to Part Three
