Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There’s a thin shattered haze over everything when Ravage opens Drift’s door and jumps inside. It’s an intimacy only she’s allowed; Gasket isn’t small enough to fit into the speedster’s seats. Ravage normally prefers to stay sober, but inside of Drift, she will sometimes allow herself to get thoroughly wrecked. This is one of those rare occasions.

There was a riot today, and they are alive.

Drift shouldn’t be on the road. He’s no more sober than she is, but people hear the music they’re blasting and most have the good sense to run when they see the flash speedster come barrelling down the way. People in the Dead End know who they are. They may be part of Gasket’s crew of do-gooders, and prone to interfering with ‘legitimate business’—but they get away with a lot because Drift, and Ravage, and the birds will all kill you. If the yellow bird gets you, you’ll end up in one of his art projects.

The streets are mostly empty anyway. There’ll be crackdowns, reprisals later, but not tonight. Tonight they can do whatever they want. Tonight they can live forever, or at least pretend that they will. They’re not in the clinic like some of their friends are—especially Laserbeak—they have scratches and other minor injuries, but they didn’t get hurt—and they’ve been told to get out of the way.

Their circuits are so thoroughly boosted that they’re feeling no pain. Drift opens up his roof; Ravage stands up in her root mode and yowls. She’s full of rage over what happened to her red bird sister, so she yowls until her intakes hurt.

“It sounds like you’re coming,” says Drift through his internal speakers, laughing.

Ravage might be insulted if she were sober. “How would you know what that sounds like when even I don’t know what that sounds like?”

Ravage yowls again. She wants to dance, but all the clubs are shut down. It’s a pity, because they have money. Several smug slummers who used to harass her turned up to watch after the riots got onto the news, as if that were a show put on for their benefit. Ravage and Drift took a break from the protest to rob them and leave them trussed up in an alley, unconscious. Maybe they’re dead. Maybe they got away, maybe they’re in jail now, or maybe one or all of them got trampled.

Ravage doesn’t care if they’re dead, though she’d be amused if they got dragged in by the cops. She doesn’t ‘face. Not for money, not for fun, not for love. Her friends can ask, even though the answer hasn’t changed so far. Anyone else who asks too aggressively might end up dead.

Halfway between root mode and alt mode, catgirl and cat, her tail swishing with uncontrolled energy, she looks up into the smoggy night sky. Seeing nobody flying up there, she pulls out her guns, one in each hand, and fires into the air.

Drift laughs so hard that she can feel the seats shake under her hind paws. “I love you,” he says. It is what it is. Drift loves Syk and shooting things up, but he’s been fond of her since she first woke up in the clinic in the bed next to his. She was a stranger to freedom and poverty then, another castoff from the brighter world he knew before the accident—a world that hides its cruelty under pretty paint and fancy fuel. Except Ravage is actually happier, here.

And maybe she’s one of the things he loves. What’s important is that he’s got her back and she has got his, and when Laserbeak and Buzzsaw aren’t around, he and Gasket are the only people she trusts, aside from Ratchet, who patches them up and lectures them all but doesn’t ask too many questions.

“Love you too,” she says, because a part of her actually really does love him. He reminds her of Stalker, who is dead, because Ratbat found him sleeping in her bed one night, and shot him for the audacity.

Ravage puts the guns away, and wraps her arms around the seat in front of her, squeezing the soft, compressible mesh of his interior and rubbing her cheek against it, marking it with her own scent. She knows everyone she’s ever met by scent, and she makes sure she can smell herself on the ones she is willing to touch. “We lived.”

“We did.” Drift takes the turn up ahead on a pin. Ravage leans into the G-force, laughing like this is a carnival ride. Her claws sink into the yielding material, even though she doesn’t mean them to. Drift’s self-repair routines kick in at once, because tonight, they’re actually not starving.

“Watch the claws,” Drift says, but he’s laughing along with her.

“Sorry,” says Ravage, and kisses the tear in the cushion as it closes.

“I bet you’d say yes if I asked you tonight,” Drift wonders aloud.

“Maybe,” says Ravage, and a little thrill shoots up her spine, a heavy warmth in her abdomen, but she shivers. The thought of it is exciting, but the reality of frames and being held and being small is terrifying. Her spark knows Drift would never hurt her. Her body thinks the world was made to hurt her.

“I won’t, though.” Drift’s voice is a little choked up through the speakers. “I won’t.”

Ravage stares at herself in the mirror. In root mode, she’s not so different from the rest of them, but even if she were, Drift wouldn’t care, doesn’t care. She sleeps as a cat here not because it makes her slightly safer, but because she can sleep curled into Drift’s side when it’s freezing out and the birds aren’t around.

“Why not?” Ravage murmurs. She can smell his want, even when he is a car. “This is the best chance you’ll get.”

Drift’s engine purrs and revs. “Because I love you, and you said you would never say yes until I could ask you sober. And tonight you’re not sober either, beautiful.”

Ravage likes it when he kisses her, either on top of the head between her ears, or on her mouth, regardless of what shape her mouth is at the time. But that is all they ever do, because Ravage is not the virgin most people think she is; she was Senator Ratbat’s personal servant, and she did everything that he or his guests required her to do; especially the guests, from whom she had to get as much information as possible.

The thought of letting anyone touch her like that scares her stupid, energon icing over in her veins. And she knows him. If they become lovers, if he sees how broken she is, that there are marks on her despite Ratchet’s frankly amazing if not miraculous work, he’ll just have another reason to burn down the world.

Ravage doesn’t want to burn down the world; there are too many people she likes in it. She only wants to kill all of the Senators, except maybe Shockwave, and dance on their graves, and destroy the Matrix that drives all the Primes completely fracking insane; but then, she wants to heal the world. She’s taken over a few of Gasket’s reclamation projects and something inside her gets softer and warmer when broken things get fixed, when crystals and flowers grow, when people can come inside and stay there. At least for a little while.

Even if the cops always do come back and break everything down.

Megatron’s promised that someday, they won’t. The cops will go down with the Senators. She met him on the dark web back when she worked for Senator Ratbat, and couldn’t decide whether she thought Rewind was lucky or simply just pitied him. She saw one of his poems and sent back a response. Then she started sending him copies of Ratbat’s files, of Recordings she made.

Megatron used to say they could fix all of this without violence. She always doubted that, and now he’s changed. She doesn’t know why. She’s not sure it’s a good change, but she believes they will have to do some killing before they can do any good.

She doesn’t even know what Megatron looks like, or if that’s his real name. Drift sometimes asks her if she’s even sure that Megatron’s real, and not just a trap that’s been laid in the dark web for people like her. But Ravage believes.

Megatron calls her Parvilla. Back when the rest of her cell told her how important she was, how precious her sacrifice was, he alone told her to run if she ever got the chance.

She tried; she almost died, and Ratchet told Ratbat he’d killed her.

Sometimes she does odd jobs she gets from people she used to know on the Senatorial floor. They’re always dirty and dangerous. They’re always better than being the prettiest littlest kittiest slave in the house. None of the people or things she has to track down and kill ever tell her how perfect she is when they want her, how stupid she is when she fails, or promise and threaten that someday she won’t have to work and can just be the beautiful pet she was meant to be.

Drift told her once that racing was a lot like that. He could say no without being beaten, of course, but there are other methods the high-castes use to make their pretty toys comply.

“Stop brooding,” Drift says. The roof closes; one of his internal compartments pops open.

Ravage takes the vape and sucks the mist into her system. Then she presses the button again and floods his interior with it. “’M not brooding,” she grumbles. “I just want LB to be here with us.”

“She’ll be fine with Ratchet, and Buzzsaw’s roosting on the roof of the clinic; it’s his turn to guard the place. Gasket just pinged me. Let’s go down to the pier.”

Ravage nods. She feels like she’s floating, like she might float right out of her body, but Drift closed the roof, so she doesn’t.

Chapter Text

Gasket grins when he sees Drift pull up to the pier. Then Ravage ejects herself with a mischievous grin, and Drift transforms back into his root. They run to him, and he hugs them both—but he hugs Drift tighter than Ravage, because she squirms and pushes back if he’s not careful. And because he is, and touches her firmly but lightly, she blinks at him before she slips out of their arms. There’s a fire on the beach below, and people drinking cheap engex. There is music, and there are arguments, and those are the things Ravage runs toward instead of away from.

Gasket pulls Drift in closer and kisses him. Drift’s mouth tastes of Syk sweats, which Gasket doesn’t mind as much as he knows he should, and that actinidine vape that Ravage loves but doesn’t do much for anyone else. “I’m glad you came,” he says after the kiss. “I knew that protest was going to go bad.”

Drift laughs it off, glancing down and away, but his cheeks flush. “She wanted to go. So did Laserbeak.”

“And Laserbeak’s spending the night with Ratchet, now.” Gasket sighs. He isn’t that much older than the two of them, not really; it’s only a couple of centuries, really. But sometimes it seems like they’re light-years apart. “At least you look well-fuelled.”

“Remember those Praxians who wanted to buy a night with Ravage last orn, and the more annoyed she got after she told them she’s not for rent, the higher they raised their bids?”

Gasket frowns, because he does remember those idiots, very well. “Why does she attract that sort so often, and why are you smiling about it?”

“Because we rolled ‘em flat.” Drift grins. “They came to watch the show and we got everything good they were holding, including their money, their drugs and their weapons.”

Gasket sighs. They make him feel old, they’re so young…and so dumb, sometimes. But kind, under all the bravado, and angry…and pretty. It’s a violation of the Functionist code and the natural order for him to have someone who looks like Drift in his arms.

By the time Gasket finishes kissing Drift, Ravage is already down on the beach, dancing her way through the crowd. Nobody seems to take notice of her, but somehow they all slip out of her way until she is right in front of the fire where she wants to be. None of the bigger mechs reach for her, no matter what she does with her hips. Nobody tries to lead her or pull her into their orbit. She’s performing, but they’re the only ones watching.

“How does she do that?” Gasket wonders aloud. “If I were her size…”

“She’s just Ravage.” Drift shrugs. “Probably does it the same way she can be standing in the middle of a room and nobody notices she’s even there until someone says something stupid and she tells them off in free verse.”

“What happened when she auditioned to dance at that club, anyway?”

Drift shakes his head and laughs out loud. “She’s banned from every one of those clubs, Gasket. She’s not nice enough to the customers.”

Gasket snorts. “You mean she isn’t nice at all.”

“Why should she be?” It’s a rhetorical question, and Gasket doesn’t answer it. They stand there with their arms around each other’s waists and watch Ravage dance.

They talk a little while about the riot. Drift assures him that none of their reclamation projects got trashed this time. The music is nice, but all the tracks are by the same band. “Did someone record that concert Rav crashed?”

Drift frowns. “Of course he did.”

Gasket looks down at the party, past Ravage and the fire. The music box is here. He’s playing the concert recording for everyone.

“Drift,” he says quietly. “Why do you have a problem with him? He’s a harmless glitchbrain.”

“He’s stalking her,” Drift says, and stretches. “He knows her name and calls her out on the street. Buzzsaw and Laserbeak told me. She goes and sits with him and shares her energon, if she can get him to understand that he’s starving. He’s the one who told Ravage and Laserbeak to call themselves ‘she’, you know. Not that I care about that, it suits them, Ravage especially, but…” He shrugs. “He’s still stalking her.”

Gasket groans. “He’s a bigger burnout than you. I don’t know what he’s on, but it’s killing him. He won’t be a problem much longer.”

Drift doesn’t respond to that. He glances back at Ravage and watches her. Ravage is leaping over the fire, transforming as she dances, back and forth from root to alt, collapsing into her catness and lunging up as a mech. She is putting on a real show, and the music box is watching her raptly.

Gasket puts a hand on Drift’s shoulder. “Maybe they know each other from before. You can tell he used to be posh before he got hooked on whatever it is. Maybe that’s how he knows who she is. It’s not a bad thing for her to have friends who aren’t us. If we could get him to come inside, we might be able to keep him alive.”

“He’s posh. If someone comes out here to find him, they might find her, too.” Drift shrugs. “I know I used to see him at the races, now and again. He never looked happy to be there. I just can’t remember who he is.”

Gasket takes this in. Ravage is only safe in the Dead End because Felixi’s chip was destroyed and Felixi is legally dead. And Ratchet’s said she has to keep her head down, though he won’t say why. But then he looks at the music box, and he shakes his head. “Nobody’s looking for him, Drift. He’s fallen from grace, just like you. That rusty patch, right there? Somebody scraped his paint where his glyphs were. He was part of a House once, and he went to some sort of school. But he’s nobody, now.” Gasket leans against the railing. “Don’t you think it would be nice if we could save him?”

Gasket doesn’t know what else to say. He knows that Drift is not in love with Ravage. Drift is not in love with him, either. Drift thought he was in love with someone once, and he was wrong, and he won’t discuss it, not ever. He says it won’t happen again, and Gasket doesn’t believe him.

“She’s worth ten of him,” Drift says quietly. “He’s a bigger burnout than I am.”

Gasket likes Ravage, because she’s a hard worker, and she’s always ready to help with whatever needs doing. He won’t send her out to salvage energon because the enforcers will shoot to kill if they find any beastmode breaking down corpses or taking the energon, but she does everything else they need to do. And she’s usually sober, even if she isn’t tonight. But she’s even younger than Drift is; Ratchet made a big deal about that when he brought her down and asked Gasket to look after her, and to make sure she didn’t end up addicted or selling herself, insofar as he could.

Ravage and Drift make out sometimes—which is more than she’ll do with anyone else—and Gasket thinks they might be siphoning. He warned them it’s a dumb thing to do when you’re hungry, but they denied it, so whatever they're doing, it’s not about that.

“She’s not looking at him,” Gasket points out. He can’t look at her too long before she starts to blur around the edges. Drift can, and the music box can, and he doesn’t know how they do it. “Are you afraid she likes him?”

Drift laughs. “She’s not looking at anyone. She’s in her own little world right now.” He turns back to Gasket. “I just don’t like it when he looks at her like he thinks she could save the whole world.”

Gasket sighs. “Maybe he just thinks she’s cute,” he says after a moment. “Stop worrying. She’s every bit as dangerous as you are. She’s not some half starved cyberkitten covered in rust that you found in a dumpster; she’s Ravage, and she can take care of herself, even boosted.”

This one knows: Ravage is visible only of her own volition. Ravage: permits this one's presence.

At first he craved the silence and darkness she wrapped herself in.

He had forgot darkness and silence. He had forgot peace, too. Most of all, he had forgot knowing himself to be something apart from the static and noise. And knowing one other.

In the centre of the darkness, she remained: glowing golden, the sound of bells as she passed him by on the street.

He cannot bear her pain. The world is full of pain, but hers has meaning. And yet he cannot turn away from it.

Everyone sees her once she stops dancing. She starts talking instead.

She talks about a world that doesn’t have to be like this.

She says they are being deceived.

She knows what he knows; that all mechs are people. All of them, even the ones she kills: because she knows there are worse things to be than a killer.

Chapter Text

Pharma was sitting on the couch, thruster heels crossed on the table, with a stack of datapads next to her, and she was very, very cross. Ratchet could feel her irritation even before he entered their townhouse—her field was just that agitated. Glit didn’t want to come in, but he had to, so he went into alt-mode and slinked in behind Ratchet, close enough to Ratchet’s legs that it would have been really annoying if Ratchet hadn’t known why.

“What happened to my party ambulance? You were missed at last night’s reception.”

Oh, that voice. Ratchet knew it so well. Light and airy and casual. Full of barely restrained fury. He stood in front of the door, letting Glit stay behind him. Squawktalk was on his perch, head tucked under one wing, apparently napping. He ought to have been awake, or asleep in the room he shared with Glit, on their recharge slab. Ratchet couldn’t ask him why he was there without waking him, so he didn’t.

Pharma should have already flown off to the hospital.

Ratchet wanted to shout that there had been riots in Rodion yesterday—that even if he’d wanted to leave before the reception in Iacon started, he wouldn’t have been able to get out, and that after the riots were done, his clinic was packed, and he could sure have used her help, by the way—and thank Primus the Senate was out of session that tenday!

Pharma wouldn’t have cared about any of that, though. Ratchet wasn’t sure when she stopped caring, but there had to have been a time when she cared. They’d only been conjunxed for a couple of decades. Ratchet could remember being the Party Ambulance, but he was having a hard time remembering what Pharma had been like back then. She’d been the only jet in their class, and he’d been the only one who had figured out that she was a she. Somehow, though, they had to have once been in a place they could’ve come from and ended up here, wherever and whenever that was.

Ratchet couldn’t imagine how he had conjunxed the femme who was sitting on the couch in that moment. He chose his words carefully. “I had a prior commitment.”

“To whom? A bunch of empties, leakers and buymechs?” Pharma picked up a datapad from the stack on the couch beside her and pressed a seal into the touch-sensitive surface. She was signing off on her progress notes, but why do it here? Had she been waiting for him to get home?

Ratchet shrugged. Nothing he wanted to say would make anything easier. Nothing she wanted to hear was going to come out of his mouth. They were at another impasse, and he didn’t know what might provoke her. The last time she was this angry, she didn’t stop at yelling; she broke things, things that had cost him a great deal of money when he had been younger and hungrier. “It was very busy last night.”

Pharma rolled her optics and pressed her seal to the next datapad. “I’m sure it was. I went without you. They asked me where Glit was. What kind of prior commitment did you have out there that required you to take my cat? It was one thing when you allowed him to read our books, but why do you keep taking my cat to your clinic?”

Glit wound himself around Ratchet’s calves. Ratchet was tempted to lean over and pet him, which wouldn’t have helped, and equally tempted to tell him to transform, which also wouldn’t have helped. Glit wasn’t going to stand up for himself. He couldn’t.

Pharma was droning on: “They’re talking about us. You’re making me look really bad, Ratch. You’re the Senatorial CMO, and I won an award last night, and you weren’t even there. If the Senate had been in session I could’ve at least made excuses. Don’t you care about your academic career anymore? And if you don’t, could you at least bother to care about mine?”

“I’m sorry I missed that, but I couldn’t have stayed.” Ratchet did feel a bit bad for missing the award, but not even a tenth as bad as he would’ve felt if he’d gone to the party, and come back to the Dead End and found out that Gasket—or worse yet, Ravage or Drift—had been killed, and perhaps he could’ve saved them. “You didn’t tell me you were up for anything.”

“Oh, but I did,” Pharma reminded him firmly. “I told you three times in the last tenday. I marked it on your calendar, too.”

There had been something on his calendar, but Ratchet had deleted it at about the time his day nurse had started pulling the blast shields down over the windows. He hadn’t even looked at it.

“Well, I’m sorry,” Ratchet repeated, but he didn’t really regret having been there to save lives. And he hated fancy university hospital dinners and award ceremonies. It made him morose to see all of the funding they wasted. Instead of purchasing fancy fuel and expensive high-grade vintages and crystal energon fountains, it could have been used to expand services to the lower castes. Sure they’d have to open up more residency slots, but there were plenty of non-traditional candidates desperate for a chance. Once he got Pharma to let Glit take the Ambus Test—

No. Glit was taking the Ambus Test. Full stop.

“Liar,” said Pharma, and Ratchet exploded.

“There were riots! My clinic was full, I had to turn people away if they weren’t in immediate danger!” Ratchet could hear his voice growing louder and deeper but he couldn’t seem to stop it. “I could’ve used your help, too. You could’ve spent the night caring for patients.”

“One of us has to take care of the politics. And it’s certainly not going to be you.” Pharma sighed and got up. She did not hug Ratchet or offer him her hand. She crouched, knees bent, and glared at Glit, who lowered his head, ears flattened down to the sides.

Pharma took each of his forepaws and flipped them over to inspect them. Ratchet was sure that it must be humiliating, but Pharma was already furious, and Glit did belong to her, legally. “Primus, Ratchet, are you letting my cat do trauma surgery now?”

“In another few years, he’ll be a better intensivist than you ever were,” Ratchet grumbled.

Pharma slid her hand underneath Glit’s chin and made him let her look directly into his optics. “You’re supposed to be my bodyguard. That is why my mentor purchased you. The two of you were surplus to requirements special ops models, and they made him buy both of you, because otherwise you were going to be scrapped, remember? I suppose it’s fortunate. At least I had one guard last night. But you belong to me.”

Glit looked up at her, trembling.

Pharma shook her head. “Don’t you have something to say to me?”

“Leave him alone!” Ratchet stepped between them. “I gave him an order. You weren’t there to countermand it. I need a bodyguard more than you do, anyway.”

“Only because you choose to go into places where people like us don’t belong.” Pharma stood up and stretched. “The department is running a pool on how long it will be before we disjunct. And Caduceus is taking bets on whether or not you are going to ask me for Glit as a condition of severance, even though he was a gift from my mentor.”

Disjunct.

The word went through Ratchet’s spark like a bullet, and he froze, but just for a moment. A cascade of relief spread through him, effervescent and bright, which was a strange reaction to the concept of disjunction, but now that she’d actually spoken the word, he didn’t have to wonder if or when she would say it. The rest of it—however long it took—was just negotiation.

Glit was curled into a miserable hunch. Ratchet really wished he’d transform into root and stand up. Pharma preferred them to stay in alt-mode around the house, like expensive and probably dangerous exotic pets, except when they had to clean the townhouse because Pharma and Ratchet were too busy. When she went out, sometimes, and took Glit along, she put jewellery on him that matched hers. She treated him more like an accessory than a bodyguard.

Now it was up to Ratchet to figure out what to do. He had to figure out if Glit would be able to stand losing his sibling to go with Ratchet and take the Ambus Test and become an apprentice, or if it would be easier for him to give up those hopes to protect Squawktalk from Pharma’s rage. Because there was no way Glit could answer that question honestly.

“I might,” Ratchet finally said. When he was able to glance at Glit, the feliform looked…relieved. Good.

“You don’t own anything as expensive as that cat,” said Pharma, frankly. “So tell me what I get for letting him go. Assuming we do this.”

Ratchet discovered, to his complete surprise, that the prospect of freedom was unbearable to let go, even in hypothetical. “We’re doing this,” he said. “The question is how embarrassing you want it to be.”

Pharma blinked. “You can’t mean that—?”

“I can and I do. You don’t give a frag about any of the things I care about anymore,” Ratchet said quietly, “and the way you treat Squawktalk and Glit makes me want to purge fuel sometimes.”

“You can’t afford both of them,” said Pharma flatly. “And you’re not going to out me—”

“I know,” Ratchet said, and didn’t answer her question, although he would never have told anyone that she was a femme without her express permission. He had been thinking of other kinds of embarrassment. And then he turned to Glit. If only. “I’m sorry, Glit. We have to leave Squawktalk.”

Glit said nothing, but he narrowed his optics, blinking at Ratchet, and Ratchet knew that it meant he had made the right choice.

Pharma began to laugh out loud. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of high-grade, still laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Ratchet snapped. He was dead tired from working steadily throughout first the noise and the violence and later the night and his own weariness, yet he felt curiously energised, as if some reserve of strength he thought long gone had been released to him again.

“Something stupid that Senator Ratbat said.” Pharma shook her head. “I know it can’t be like that, your ethics would absolutely forbid it. He thinks you and Glit—”

“He should stop assuming that everyone else is like him!” Ratchet shouted, unable to keep himself civil after hearing the Senator’s name. He would never forget how hard it had been to keep Ravage alive, or how hard he had had to work to ensure that her life would still be worth living if he succeeded. “Or does he forget that I was the one who smelted that Recorder of his?”

Pharma fell abruptly silent for a minute or two before speaking. “No. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t forget. He said I should ask you why it took you so long to dispose of the body. He didn’t get the signal that the chip had been smelted until long past your working hours.” She studied his face as if she were suspicious, herself.

“He’s making that up,” Ratchet snarled, indignant that Ratbat would say such a thing, and to his conjunx. “Would you like me to tell you what he did to her?”

“It failed the Ambus Test,” Pharma said quietly. “And even if it hadn’t, it’s dead, so it’s not a femme now.”

“So would you if someone had ever abused you the way Ratbat did her!” Ratchet shot back. “Nobody under that kind of stress could pass that kind of test. She wrote poetry. Did you know that?”

Pharma made a face. “Of course not. Assuming it’s true, how do you?”

“I repaired her a few times before that.” Ratchet knew he’d screwed up, and that Pharma probably wouldn’t forget it, but at least Ravage was legally dead—or rather, Felixi was—and as long as nobody saw her, she would be safe. “And I’ll keep your secret. As long as you want it to be one. But I think you should consider being the person you are. Arcee gets away with it.”

Pharma shrugged, and didn’t acknowledge what Ratchet had said to her. “Glit,” said Pharma, glancing back down at the cat mech directly, “are you his adjunx? If you admit it now, I’ll get you tested and set you free. But if you say you’re not, and you’re lying, I’ll smelt you myself.”

Ratchet started toward her, not knowing exactly what he was going to do if she didn’t stop making threats, but Glit transformed and stood up at his full height in root mode. Which was still much smaller than either of them, but the fear was gone out of his face and his bearing.

“I am not,” said Glit. “He would not take advantage of me in that way. Please don’t ask me what I want. Nothing I could say right now would be completely true. I don’t want to lose my aviform bond-partner, but I would also rather live with Ratchet. I prefer the work that he gives me. I’m not even really your bodyguard. I spend more time cleaning this townhouse than I do protecting you.”

“He’s yours,” said Pharma, “but you keep nothing we’ve jointly acquired since conjunxion. The townhouse is mine. The office space is mine, though you’ll still have your offices at the University and the Senate building, as well as that…other one. I keep the practise. You have plenty of patients elsewhere, even if some of them don’t pay their bills, and the Senate pays you a salary.”

“Fine,” Ratchet growled; he liked his private patients, but Pharma and the rest of their partners were all good physicians, and they would be cared for.

“You’ll keep your job at the Senate,” Pharma said idly. “I know my family helped you to get it, but you know enough now that the rest of them won’t want to let you go. Especially Ratbat, given how many of his messes you’ve had to clean up.”

Ratchet winced. He did not want to be grateful to Ratbat for anything. “We can discuss the legalities later,” he said. “I’m going to bed. You can go into work. I’ll sign off on everything I need to sign. But we’ll be gone when you get back.”

Chapter Text

The crackdown comes just long enough after the riot that some of the less lucid Dead Enders have started to relax, thinking maybe it’s not going to happen this time.

Ravage knows better. She’s made arrangements. If they all shelter together, at any of the past and present project sites, they’ll all be murdered, and Solus only knows what the cops might do to them first. She’s got a tiny two-room flat in one of the sparkbroke hotels and she’s paid for it for a week using some of the money she stole from the Praxians. It’s big enough for her and her birdsibs.

It isn’t big enough for a fourth person, not really; but there’s Soundwave, sitting right out on the street corner, big, blue, and stupid. (He’s actually brilliant, but not in a way that does anyone any good, himself included. Ravage isn’t sure why she cares so much.)

“Soundwave!” she shouts.

The blue mech looks down at her as she runs to him, venting fast. “Ravage,” he says, and a goofy grin lights up his facial derma, like the sunset after a long, hard day’s work. He holds his hand out to her. It makes her feel giddy inside, in a way she has never experienced before, and she wants to take it and clamber up into his lap for a chat. She has been trying, unsuccessfully, to teach him to focus on one thing at a time.

He’s only good at that if the thing she asks him to focus on is herself.

“You have to come with me,” she says, forming the thought to be just as loud in her mind as it is in her voice, because sometimes that works. “You!”

“M-mm-me?” Soundwave does not have a very good concept of I or me or mine, and she’s impressed he got the word out. But he can probably feel her panicking, even though it doesn’t show, because she can’t afford to look panicked and get all the burnouts and crazies going too.

“Yes,” she says firmly. She takes his hand. “Come with me.” She’s asked him to come inside before, over Laserbeak and Buzzsaw’s objections. The night they first spoke to each other, he was standing with one foot in Mortilus’ receiving room, and she brought him to Ratchet, and then she brought him inside. But Buzzsaw and Laserbeak hadn’t wanted him there, and after he was well enough to leave, he did. “And this time you have to stay inside.” She bites her lip plate. “I don’t know for how long.”

Soundwave nods gravely. His mind is full of numbers and sounds and things that just don’t make sense, but through the light link that taking his hand has granted her, she can feel the mass of enforcers, looking forward to violence and…why? She does not understand how people can be like this, but he looks down at her. “Trouble…coming,” he says. “Tell everyone?”

Ravage winces, because he could blast it into the mind of everyone on that street, and he will if she doesn’t tell him not to. “I wish we could,” she says. “But it will bring them faster if people are panicking. Please. Come with me. They will kill you.”

“They always kill.” Soundwave is thinking about the riots a tenday before, about all of the minds that went out that night. It’s been quieter for him, but…before it was quiet, there was so much pain that he stopped existing outside of it, and later, all he could do was go down to the beach and play back the concert. All of this he is sharing with Ravage, along with the way he felt when he watched her dance. She’s a creature of darkness but somehow he sees her as glorious, shining flame. Watching the flame reminded him that he could be someone too.

“They’ll kill you,” she says firmly.

Soundwave, who hasn’t much care for himself, briefly considers that maybe that would be fine, that all of the noise and pain and all of the violence and hatred and misery and all the starvation, the hunger that’s never sated no matter how full his tanks are, would finally be gone.

And Ravage bursts into tears, because he’s a huge inconvenience sometimes, yes, and he’s also an idiot most of the time, and she hasn’t got any idea what to do with him, but the thought of him gone is unbearable.

“No!” she says. Tears and shouting are not like her, they both know that, but she’s doing them anyway. “No! You can’t die!”

Soundwave can move surprisingly fast when he chooses to. He pulls her in close, gathers her up, nuzzles the top of her head. “Soundwave: will stay. With Ravage. With you.”

Ravage normally hates being picked up, but she settles against him, into his arms. “Promise? Even if Buzzsaw and LB complain?”

“Promise.” Soundwave kisses the top of her head, which surprises Ravage so much that she’s dumbstruck; he transforms around her, and she’s never seen him transform before, either. Now he’s something with wheels: still a music box, but a mobile one.

“I have to be able to see to guide you there.”

A panel clears and becomes a window. {Why do you care about me?} he thinks in her mind.

{I don’t know. I’m allowed to like things! And people, sometimes, even. Maybe I just like you.} He makes her feel special and important, but she knows that’s stupid. All of the things about Ravage that are special have been reasons that people have tried to destroy her.

His mind is like hers, but worse. That’s another thing that makes her like him; she can’t get so bad that he won’t understand. Even when she’s so bad that all Drift can think of to do is offer her Syk.

Meanwhile, she’s guiding him at each turn.

He’s blasting music. Ravage doesn’t recognise the song, but it’s been popular for the better half of a year. It’s a song that she likes to dance to.

“Show Soundwave how to dance,” he says as he transforms back into himself and sets her lightly on the ground in front of the hotel. “Soundwave: wants to be fire with you.”

Ravage laughs, blushing a little. She feels seen. Soundwave doesn’t know what he’s asking for, and neither does she, but the look in his optics, soft and more focused than she’s ever seen him before, makes Ravage feel wanted: wanted for herself, in a way that does not connect in her mind to any of the other ways in which she’s been wanted.

Soundwave wants something that neither of them has a word for, yet, and she thinks she might want it too, once they figure out what it is. But the time for that is not now. “Just come in,” she says. “And you’ll have to turn off the music. I’m sorry. They’ll make us leave if you’re loud.”

When Soundwave stops the music, they can hear the riot cops, marching in armour over their armour. They probably won’t come into this building because you have to have at least some money to be there, and she sure hopes Drift remembers that he is supposed to be in the room next to theirs. He reaches for her hand again, and she gives it to him without thinking, and leads him in through the side door, because she’s not getting charged for bringing him in or Buzz and LB will kill her themselves.

“No. Not literally, no, they won’t kill me.” Ravage shakes her head, because something in Soundwave has just come alive, and it’s ready to fight. “Come on, though. Those cops sure will.”

“Fight?” A wave of anger spills into and out of her friend. Some of it’s the police themselves; he really wants to shut them out, just feeling them is painful, and of course he can’t—but the rest of it’s all his.

“Not today,” says Ravage. “They might be looking for me, but I’m not in any of the places they’d look. They can’t find me.”

“I will protect you,” Soundwave says fiercely and firmly, almost as if he were lucid. It occurs to her that he does have weapons, even though she’s never seen him use them.

“Let’s hope you don’t have to,” says Ravage, as she opens the door to the small flat. “Just get inside.”

Chapter Text

Drift hates situations like this. There are six of them in the rooms Ravage rented, because his own rental fell through somehow, possibly due to the number of people who wanted to stay for more than the usual two-to-four breems in this place. Six mechs in two rooms and they have to share a ‘cycler.

Given the crackdown, it’s better than sleeping rough on the street without a recharge slab, but at least when he’s outside, he doesn’t have to stay put if the colours around him are swirling and muddy in ways that indicate tempers are short, including his own.

They’re indoors, and the doors are locked, and the windows are covered (which doesn’t help with the feeling of near-suffocation; he’s not like Ravage, he isn’t meant to stay in small dark places).

They’re relatively safe. But he doesn’t want to be safe. Drift wants to be out there, but there are too many enforcers and even he doesn’t have enough weapons or enough charge and ammo. Patrols every three-to-five breems, and the schedule varies, so people can’t think they know when the next one will be. Flyovers—he wants to shoot all of them down. He thinks he could, if he had enough Syk to keep his reaction time short. But there isn’t enough.

There’s only barely enough coolant. Aside from that…there’s not enough of anything. Not energon, not Syk, not any other drug that makes things more tolerable. Not even enough ventilation except when a few of them slip outside right after the last patrol marches by or flies over, and open the door a crack for the others.

The Dead End is under siege. It happens, and they know how to survive it, but it’s still its own slice of the Pit. Everyone stays inside while it’s light. Ravage slips out when it’s dark to steal or forage what she can, because money’s not worth very much when there’s nobody open to take it. She slips through the shadows more easily when there are more of them.

Eventually the enforcers will all get bored, or be called away to deal with an actual problem. Until then…here they are. And they’re getting bored with this, too.

The music box is here. He’s a big mech, bigger than any of the rest of them, but he’s folded himself up around his helm in a way that looks brutally painful. Drift thinks he probably is in pain, but he doesn’t have any visible damage, and he doesn’t ask for drugs.

“Why is he here?” Drift asks. It’s a rhetorical question and one that he wouldn’t be asking if Ravage weren’t ‘foraging’.

“Because she’s in love with him, dumbaft,” says Buzzsaw, shaking the sleep from his head as he pulls it out from under his wing. “Kinda cute, if you ask me. They don’t know they’re in love. Can’t you tell? Aren’t you the one who thinks you can see fields with your optics?”

Drift shrugs. “I wouldn’t know either, Buzzsaw. I thought I was in love once, and that was a joke.” He frowns. “They do get bright around each other sometimes, though. Her and the music box.”

“Designation: Soundwave.” It’s a strange voice, a hypermodulated voice, the kind of voice you’d expect from a ‘helpful pre-recorded message’. The kind of message that’s supposed to keep people like them from wasting the time of legitimate organisations or businesses. It’s so weird it could only belong to the music box.

“Soundwave.”

Drift sighs. “Okay, fine, Soundwave.”

Soundwave shifts and sits up, though the effort seems to exhaust him. Laserbeak brings him a cube and two Copper Curlz. He drinks from the cube, which probably isn’t nearly enough for someone his size, but he drinks it in measured sips anyway. He eats one of the Curlz, and gives Laserbeak back the other, which is astonishing. He is clearly still in pain.

“Well, are you?” Drift asks quietly. He wants to know if Soundwave will admit to being in love with Ravage. Or at least obsessed with her.

“This one is one for now,” Soundwave says after a moment, which isn’t an answer. “Quiet,” he says, which appears to be more of a statement of fact than any sort of request or command. “Ravage is near. She is hurt—”

Soundwave tries to stand up and walk toward the door, but he only manages to lean against the wall. Nobody even thinks to wonder how Soundwave would even know where Ravage is, when she isn’t actually here.

“Scrap,” Drift mutters, and pulls an injector out of his subspace. Only two doses left, and here goes nothing, but he gives Soundwave a shot of Syk, and the big mech stands up, and the weird, unfocused look in his golden optics is gone, and then they turn red.

“Go,” Soundwave says, and heads for the door—and they do. The air outside is smoky—something’s burning nearby—but it’s still delicious.

Drift vents all of the stale air out and his engine revs as he vents fresh in. Soundwave winces. He is wearing a removable helmet; he takes it off, and a fin rises from the back of his head. He grits his dentae, but then he nods, as if he’s speaking to someone else, and puts his helmet back on with an audible sigh of relief.

“What did you do?” Soundwave asks. “You stopped it. Mostly.”

Drift stares at him for a moment. “I gave you a very expensive and addictive circuit booster,” he says. “It blocks out pain, among other things. Why are you in so much pain? You don’t appear to be damaged.”

“Because everyone else is,” Soundwave says, as if that were supposed to make sense. “But she is in pain—”

Drift nods slowly. Ravage’s stalker cares about her, at least. He’s not convinced they’re in love because, first off, he’s currently not convinced that that’s a thing that exists. But it’s not good that Soundwave can talk like a normal person…on a full dose of Syk.

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Drift says. “It’s expensive, but if this is the first time you’ve had it…it’ll probably last you a while. What do you take, mech? You’re fucked up all the time.”

“If you had asked me first, that would have been the first time that I would voluntarily have taken a mind-altering drug,” Soundwave says, very firmly, and sets off down the road, right in the middle of the road, without even trying to keep to the shadows.

Drift groans and follows him. He wonders if Soundwave can lie. He doesn’t act like someone who’s on a mind-altering drug. He acts like someone who has been on them for years and has just got out of withdrawal.

They go around a few corners and into an alley. Drift doesn’t see anything, but Soundwave knows where he’s going and he tosses a dumpster out of the way like it’s nothing.

Ravage is on the ground; she can’t have been down long, because nobody’s taken the energon cubes or the packaged snacks in the bag she was carrying. There’s energon trickling out of her mouth and half a mecharat in one of her hands. She’s shaking, and probably conscious; Soundwave picks her up. Drift braces himself for the fuss, but instead she snuggles into the big mech’s arms.

“Cat,” says Soundwave.

Ravage transforms back into a cat. Soundwave drapes her over one arm and squeezes her in a manner that not even Drift would dare to attempt, and she spits out a great glob of mecharat protoform.

“Fuck, Rav, I told you they poison those things!”

“Poison smells,” Ravage protests weakly. “And I didn’t smell—”

Soundwave puts his fingers into her open mouth without even thinking about it and tugs on something. Drift expects her to bite him but instead he pulls out something sharp and wriggling with too many tiny limbs that Drift doesn’t want to look at too closely. He holds it under Ravage’s nose for a moment, and she makes a horrible face that Drift recognises as the face she makes when she’s trying to make sense of something she smells.

“Ugh,” Ravage says. “Thanks, ‘Wave.”

“Did you swallow any more of them, Rav?” Drift asks, frowning; he doesn’t want to hear a ‘yes’, but if that’s the truth they’d better find it out.

Ravage and Soundwave both shake their heads. “There was just the one,” Ravage says, spitting out energon.

“How many times have I told you not to eat those things?” Drift says, scowling a little, although there isn’t much of a sting in it; he does know what it’s like to be hungry.

“We don’t have enough fuel, and I can.” Ravage spits out more energon. They’re going to have to take her to the clinic. If anyone’s even there. And if the patrols don’t find them and kill them all.

Drift looks up at the sky. There’s nothing flying overhead. It’s about patrol time, he thinks, but maybe they might get lucky. Then again, they’ve been lucky kind of a lot lately, and that doesn’t bode well, or does it? He glances over at Soundwave. “How did you know?”

Soundwave shrugs. “She knew she’d almost swallowed that thing.” He closes his optics, just for a moment. “There’s nobody coming. How far is the clinic?”

Drift decides not to waste time wondering why, or if, Soundwave’s actually sure there won’t be a patrol. It’s not like they can just stay where they are, or take her back to the hostel like this.

Chapter Text

Glit was at his wits’ end. Ratchet was stuck in Iacon, doing the work they paid him for at the Senatorial Building. Even though there was very little work to be done, he couldn’t exactly call off and go straight to the Dead End, so Glit was stuck watching the patients. The clinic hadn’t been busy, exactly—the enforcers were shooting to kill—and so far there hadn’t been anything Glit couldn’t handle, even though he wasn’t supposed to be working unsupervised (or legally, at all).

But now there were two mechs standing under the camera at the side door in the alley, and the bigger one was carrying Ravage.

Glit had thought he’d seen her in the clinic before—when Laserbeak came in after the riot—but he’d been told that she was dead. Then again, Ratchet had never said Ravage was dead; he’d only said that Felixi was dead. And that had just been a pun on her serial number that her owner had thought was pretty. Their owners could rename them, and mostly, they had, but Ravage would always be Ravage to her siblings.

On the last morning they spent in the townhouse, Pharma and Ratchet had argued about her, and Pharma had called Ravage ‘it’, which was precisely the moment at which Glit knew he couldn’t stand to spend a moment longer under her manus. He hadn’t known Ravage was ‘she’ until then, but Ravage had never been ‘it’.

Glit opened the door. Ravage was clearly alive, but there was a trickle of energon coming out of her mouth, and she looked really woozy, which was not a diagnosis at all, just a fact. The big, blocky blue mech carried her in his arms as if she were made of spun glass. The pointy one standing next to him was, hilariously, carrying a bag full of groceries. Glit remembers: his name is Drift, and he shouldn’t be so surprised that Drift doesn’t remember him, given how fragged up he was the last time Glit saw him.

“This is Ravage,” said Drift. “She’s a she, not a he.”

Glit smiled. “I know. She’s my sister. I’m Glit, Ratchet’s apprentice, you’ve seen me before—”

“Glitterbomb!” Ravage’s voice was slurred, and she spit out more energon. “Glitterbomb, you’re a doctor now? This is Drift, he’s my friend, and the big guy is Soundwave. He’s…also my friend.”

Ravage started to laugh. Glit wondered how stoned she was. He’d seen Big Blue before too, usually because somebody beat him up, and he’d never not been out of it. “Did you give her a…painkiller?”

Glit really, really hoped she wasn’t a burnout. But after what Ratchet had said to Pharma, he couldn’t exactly blame her if she was.

Drift shook his head. “We don’t have anything like that.”

Glit didn’t believe it for a minute. “Look, I don’t care what you’re holding, but if you gave her something, I need to know what it was, because if she’s got an internal bleed, I’m going to have to knock her out…and open her up.” He winced. He’d never done a surgery alone. He really didn’t want his first time doing surgery unassisted to involve his own sister.

“We’re out,” Drift said. “There is nothing I have on me that wouldn’t make everything worse. I’m a dumb burnout, but even I know you don’t give circuit boosters to someone who might bleed out if their fuel pump goes Velocitron on them.”

Glit failed, he was sure, to hide his relief. “Do you know how she got hurt?”

“She tried to eat a mecharat that had a parasite in it,” Soundwave said bluntly. He carried Ravage to an empty berth. Once he had her arranged—propped up on pillows, so she wouldn’t choke on her own energon—Soundwave produced the thing. It was partly crushed and very dead, but Glit could see the suckers and tiny, bladed limbs. “She bit it by accident, but it didn’t die. So instead of establishing itself in her fuel tank and making her sick, it tore up the inside of her intake.”

Glit blinked. When they’d been trained for special operations, they were taught that they could eat mechanoid wildlife as a last resort, but it was supposed to be exactly that, and apparently Ravage hadn’t remembered the safety precautions. “Why was she eating a mecharat when the three of you have a bag full of fuel?”

“Because there are six of us in our hidey-hole, and Ravage isn’t selfish enough for her own good,” said Drift, who was also failing to look like nothing ever bothered him. That amused Glit more than it should’ve, but he was glad that he wasn’t the only one. “Soundwave pulled it out.”

Glit sighed. “Well, if he could reach in and get it out, it probably isn’t as bad as it looks. I thought perhaps she’d been beaten, or fallen, or some other blunt traumatic mechanism of injury—”

The two mechs looked at him blankly. Glit sighed again. “It’s not trivial, because she’s bleeding,” he said as he hooked his sister up to an energon line. “But once we get that energon replaced and stop the bleeding, and I give her something to prevent infection and kill any spawn neither she or you were able to see or feel, and some actual painkillers—she’ll be all right. And I can take care of this all by myself.”

At that point, Glit wondered who, exactly, he was trying to soothe.

“You’ll do fine,” Soundwave said, which was actually really bizarre of him. But Glit had never seen him this lucid before.

Glit hooked up the anaesthetic—the dose was the same as his own would be—and the anti-infectives—and watched his sister slide under. Anaesthetics were tricky. You didn’t want the patient to go into active electromagnetic recharge or slip into a defragmentation cycle while they were out, but you wanted them unconscious. Ravage did not try to do both, like some of the patients they saw on circuit boosters. She just smiled as the pain went away.

Soundwave’s expression also relaxed. He was still holding one of Ravage’s hands.

“You should really let go,” Glit said gently. “I need to make this a sterile field. And you probably don’t want to watch me take the bolt out of her jaw so I can get in there.”

“I’ve seen worse,” said Soundwave.

“At least sit down,” said Drift, shaking his head. “I know you feel like you just want to go and do something, do it right now—but this you can’t fix.”

“I’ve actually not been this calm in years.” Soundwave sat down. “I forgot what it was like before it activated.”

“You feel calm?” Drift shook his head and sat down next to him. Glit pulled a curtain around the berth while he worked on Ravage. She’d been pretty lucky. The thing hadn’t got very far down her fuel intake tubing, and he was able to clean and seal most of the rips with relative ease.

“I can’t believe you feel calmer on Syk,” Drift said, and Soundwave didn’t say anything.

Glit couldn’t let himself think about that too hard, because he was busy repairing Ravage—but paradoxical drug responses were a real thing in some kinds of outliers. Unfortunately, neither he nor Ratchet could prescribe Syk—it wasn’t used in medicine because it had a lot of side-effects—and he didn’t know what to offer instead. But there had to be something.

“There,” he said quietly. “No more hunting for you.” Ravage was still unconscious, but it felt good to say it. “You eat first, especially if you’re the one buying the fuel.”

“That’s what I always say!” Drift yelled back. “She awake?”

“Of course not,” said Soundwave, even though there was still a curtain around the berth.

“It won’t be long,” Glit said. “Her injuries were…well, not minor. But not life-threatening. I’m sure she’d have healed on her own, but she’ll heal faster on medical-grade, and…it would be disastrous if the cursed thing spawned. Now it won’t matter.” He opened the curtains.

“Ravage is kind,” Soundwave said as he walked to the side of the berth. “She made me fuel, even when I didn’t think I needed to. She’s very kind.”

“She always was,” Glit said, and tried not to be angry, but couldn’t quite manage it. “She didn’t hate fighting like I do—I hate having to kill anything—but. Ravage is a beautiful person, and no-one should ever have hurt her. Is she hooked on your slag?”

“No,” Drift said quietly. “Ratchet would strip us for parts if we let her get hooked.”

“Good,” Glit replied. “I wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t try to stop him either.” He blinked slowly at Ravage, feeling a little ridiculous because she was still out of it.

The other two were looking down at her as well. Soundwave’s field was possessive and sad and wistful. Drift’s was fond, irritated and confused. Glit could feel them flowing around his sister. “Conjunx and amica?” he finally asked. “People like us aren’t allowed, but…they can’t stop you from doing the acts or making the promises.”

Drift laughed softly. “People like us don’t make promises,” he said. “It’s hard to think about endurata when you’re figuring out how to live through the tenday—”

But Soundwave cut him off without even looking up. “If I thought she would have me,” Soundwave said, and kissed the hand he held in his own. “She deserves someone who’s cogent without a circuit booster.”

Drift stared at him in complete, utter shock.

“We can help you get off those—” Glit began, and then stopped when Soundwave looked down at him, reddened optics already fading to amber.

“This is the first time I’ve tried it,” Soundwave said, “and if they’re addictive…I suppose I shouldn’t think of trying to get more.” He blinked optical lubricant out of his eyes. “I don’t have money. I won’t depend on her for drugs. The helmet I wear, it helps, but not much. I’m an empath. The drugs turn it off. Not completely, but enough that I was able to lead Drift to her, and stay lucid long enough to get here.”

Glit swallowed. “There’s probably something else that would help, I’ll ask Ratchet. He’s just—really busy.”

“You mean he can’t get out of Iacon,” Drift said wryly, in a fond voice.

“Yes,” Glit admitted.

Ravage opened her optics. “Hey there,” she said. “I’m not dead. I missed you too, Glit. Stalker’s gone, but Buzzsaw and Laserbeak live here.”

“Squawktalk is with Ratchet’s horrid conjunx,” Glit said quietly.

“Conjunx? Really?” Drift’s expression was horrified.

“Not for much longer, Drift,” Glit replied, “but please don’t tell him I mentioned that.”

Drift chuckled. “Throw the doc a disjunction party,” he said, shaking his head. “We’ll all contribute.”

“I don’t think he’d like that.” Glit looked down at Ravage. “I’ve heard nothing from Stripes and Sundor or Wingspan and Pounce. But I think some police department somewhere bought Howlback and Garboil.”

“Of course,” Ravage breathed out with a flurry of curses.

“Howlback’s also a she.” Glit sighed. “Don’t eat mecharats. If you’re buying the food, you eat first. And if there isn’t any fuel to buy, you cut them open first and clean them up. No matter how hungry you are.” To think he’d thought Ravage was lucky once, to live in a home so grand.

“How are you even a doctor?” said Ravage, coughing. Glit handed her a glass of coolant.

“I’m not, technically. But when the disjunction is final, and Pharma no longer owns me…I’m taking the Ambus Test. And then I will be.”

“I hope you do better than me,” Ravage groaned.

Glit tried not to think about what Ratchet said to Pharma about that. Ravage was smart enough to have passed, and they were well-trained enough that she should have passed. But nobody could pass a test like that while being abused. Finally, when she’d slipped into recharge, he looked up at Soundwave. “If she says yes, please find a way to get her off Cybertron.”

“I wish I could.”

Drift was staring at Soundwave again. “I know who you are,” he said. “I remember. You came to the races. You’re Senator Shockwave’s brother.”

Soundwave shook his head. “In another life, perhaps.” He frowned. “Ravage won’t remember me. I couldn’t remember her when my head was full of…the whole world. But I’ve always loved her.”

“Then why didn’t you buy her?” Drift snapped back at him.

“Even if I’d wanted to own her,” Soundwave explained, “and even if I hadn’t been a minor, Senator Ratbat would never have sold her…in his mind, he called all that love. That is why I’m not sure if I’m really in love with her. I know what I feel, and I know what everyone else feels. And some of the things that people call love—”

Drift slammed his hand into the window, which didn’t break because it was both glassteel and covered by a blast shield. He ran to the door, but it didn’t open.

“I won’t let you out,” Glit said gently. “Listen. They’re out on patrol. I don’t care how many of them you think you can shoot. They will find this place, and then they will kill us all.”

Drift snorted. He looked like he was thinking of shooting the lock. But eventually, he sat down on the floor.

Soundwave didn’t have the sense to dry his own tears; Glit handed him a napkin, but he had to show him what to do with it.

Drift glared at them all. “If you were a minor,” he said, “she should have been too. She was less than a quarter-vorn when she turned up out here. The only mentors she’s ever had are Ratchet and some guy on the dark web I’m not even sure is real.”

“I can tell that both of you were forged.” Glit smiled ruefully. “There is no age of majority for cold-constructed mechs, and we have no mentors. We are adults as soon as we roll off the line, and beastformers, like Ravage and myself, are never free to make our own decisions unless we can pass the Ambus Test. Ravage and I had ten years of intensive training, and we might have had more if the defence project hadn’t been defunded. That’s eight more years than most cold constructs get.”

Chapter Text

Soundwave is back in the dark in the tiny room they share with Ravage’s kith. He has no idea how much longer his mind will be clear. Everyone else’s emotions and thoughts are still there, but there’s distance between his thoughts and feelings and everyone else’s, and if he wants to tune them out for a moment or two, he can do it.

Soundwave hasn’t had that kind of clarity since just before he hit breakthrough. It’s precious, and he’s desperate to hold onto it as long as he can.

Paradoxical drug reactions. Telepathic dampers. He’d heard more than Glit was saying out loud, but it had been a choice, and he’d never thought he’d have that choice again. Even if he gets more Syk—or Glit finds him a safer drug that they can afford—or if lining his helmet with whatever it is Glit was thinking about can help—will any of these adjustments or adaptations continue to work for more than a little while?

Soundwave wants his life back. Not his old life—the only thing he’d have back from that if he could is his brother Shockwave—but a life of his own. A life he can share with Ravage (and her kith), but not a life split open and spilled on the pavement for everyone else to wallow in whether he likes it or not.

Ravage can share her field of darkness and silence with him, but it doesn’t give him this kind of clarity. When her field is wrapped around his and she hides her golden brilliance in the mist that shades into whatever light it can bend, he just wants to bask in her. Even if he didn’t love her, the peace he feels when he’s entrained with her is a desperately needed respite from the clamour and pain and noise of Cybertron’s noösphere. As much as he wants to learn focus, when she clambers into his lap and he holds her and they talk about nothing and everything—he just wants to rest.

Ravage is a cybercat now, curled up in his lap and snuggled as close as she can, purring. She’s healing, barely aware of the pain in her throat. He’s glad Glit sent her back with medical-grade. When her ear flicks against him now and again, his spark and his mind are full of effervescent delight, unsullied by the hatreds and fears and miseries that surround them. She’s purely adorable.

Drift reminded him of who he was before his fall from grace.

There were plenty of things that Soundwave hadn’t wanted to remember: the callousness of his mentors, the frustration Shockwave felt when he tried to argue on Soundwave’s behalf, the pain of all the people who served his kith and their peers, and the pressure from his brother and their mentors alike to succeed, to hone his intellect and increase his processing power—until, of course, it became too much to control.

But when Ravage had danced at the soiree that Ratbat had given to honour his brother…

Soundwave hadn’t initially cared that her frame was small and lovely and perfectly crafted. But when she danced, the whole room was suffused with golden radiance. Her mind and her spark and her body were one, and her limbs and head and tail lashed out from her spark like flames. When she moved with the music, she transcribed it into the space around her, rising and falling through the shapes the rhythms and melodies made, becoming another instrument and completing the symphony.

He’d known she was in terrible pain—but he’d also known that this and this alone drove it out of her mind. That these moments of perfect beauty were precious to her—that even if the room was full of lustful strangers who would cheerfully have devoured her and everything that she was, she was completely herself and in this way she was above them all.

He hadn’t known if she had noticed him then, but he could never keep from beaming when she passed him in hallways and her golden warmth overcame him. When he caught her optics, she would blink almost imperceptibly, a faint curve on her lip-plates that she could deny was a smile—to anyone else but him. Nobody else ever seemed to notice it, though.

They rarely spoke, but it felt as though they had a secret too precious to be spoken aloud. He knew she was abused. He did not want to be another noblemech who wanted her to perform, or surrender herself. And he was sure that if he ever acknowledged the feelings she’d evoked in him, the sweetness of their understanding would be poisoned forever.

But now…now, they’re free. They’re destitute, but she isn’t a slave, and he isn’t bound by anyone else’s rules and traditions whether he likes it or not. Their lives are worth nothing to the law, but just as nobody cares what happens to them, nobody really cares what they do, and there’s nothing to come between them except for his madness and Ravage’s trauma.

Tomorrow, will he be able to remember any of this? Will he remember the answering ping of emotion her field returned when he wrapped her up in his love to shut out her pain and her fear? Will he still know that it came from her, and wasn’t a fantasy from his past, or someone else’s story threading through his mind?

Will he be brave enough to kiss her? Will he be lucid enough that she’d want to let him?

Soundwave doesn’t know, and he’s afraid to go into recharge with her. What if he wakes up and he’s an inarticulate wreck again?

“Stop brooding,” Drift mutters. “You’re her project. She’s not going to send you away.”

“I don’t want to be her project,” Soundwave says; “I want to be her lover.” He’s never admitted that before—not even to himself.

“Good luck with that.” Drift pulls a vape out of his subspace and takes a pull from it.

Soundwave rolls his optics. It’s not just about interface. “If she wanted that from me, I would be honoured. But—”

“You and half the Dead Enders who still have brains, mech.” Drift shrugs. “But she won’t.”

Not with you, Soundwave thinks, but he doesn’t say it, because he wouldn’t care if Ravage did. Not if it made her happy. Not if it helped her get over what she’s been through. He could never deny her anything that gave her joy. Drift cares for her, and because he does, he wouldn’t be a threat.

But Soundwave knows that if he says a word of this, Drift will do his fervent best to make him regret it, because he’s proud with the fierceness of those who have nothing left but their pride.

“She does love you,” Drift says, ex-venting vapour. “I used to think you were stalking her because you knew her before, but…I know how they treated her in Iacon.”

“Someday she’ll kill them. Or I will.” Soundwave shrugs. “We are being deceived. But not for much longer.”

“Oh, frag. Not you too.” Drift groans. “The poetry she’s shown me is nice, and the essays are better now that he understands we’re going to have to wash the corruption out of the State with spilt energon…but in the end, until proven otherwise…it’s just another set of promises that won’t come true.”

Soundwave has to smile, because Ravage has rolled over in his lap and she’s even cuter than she was before. But he does understand. “Mostly,” he admits, “I just like to listen to the things she says about how it should be. I want that kind of life.”

Drift nods. “If any of that stuff ever happens, then I’ll follow him without question through the Pit, because then I’ll know that he knows where the exit is. But until then? Fuck, no.”

Soundwave ex-vents softly. “I want it to be true.”

“Yeah,” Drift says, “and wanting things to be true is how you get really fragged over and out, Soundwave.”

“If you wait until someone else makes it true,” Soundwave muses, “then sure. But we can make it happen ourselves.”

“You think?” Drift looks sceptical.

“I don’t always mind violence,” Soundwave admits, though this is a thing in himself that he doesn’t quite like; the darkness makes it feel as though they’re friends. “There are some minds that need to be shut down for good. I’d kill Ratbat for a bag of Copper Curlz, and then I’d give you the bag of Copper Curlz back.”

“How?” Drift frowns.

Soundwave just laughs. “I do have a shoulder cannon,” he says, but what he doesn’t say is that there are other ways, too. There are ways to kill with sound. And ways to kill with your mind, but the hatred has to be so absolute that you won’t feel guilty and let it wash back on you after you let it loose.

In Ratbat’s case, that wouldn’t be much of a problem.

Chapter Text

Ravage wakes up overheated, because she’s at the bottom of a cuddle pile, which is not something they normally do when it’s warm out, let alone when six of them are crammed into a poorly-ventilated room. On top of that, she’s lying between Drift and Soundwave, each one of whom has an arm thrown over her, although they are very carefully managing not to touch one another, despite being in recharge. It’s all she can do not to laugh out loud at that. Gasket’s next to Drift, and Laserbeak and Buzzsaw are snuggled together behind Soundwave.

Ravage’s memories of the last…two days? are all jumbled. She remembers leaving to go and get more of the stuff they need. They were running low on everything. Usually she would’ve taken Laserbeak, but they’d been hearing and seeing a lot of flyovers, and Laserbeak can’t hide the way Ravage can. So she went by herself, even though neither Soundwave nor Drift had wanted her to. But Drift had already been starting to get shaky, and Soundwave was…Soundwave.

Ravage sighs. It’s touching, really, that everyone’s all over her, but she needs to breathe. And use the ‘cycler. And wash her mouth out, because it tastes awful. Not awful like gross food or vaping too much—awful like she’s been really sick.

She does what she needs to do, and showers, and rinses her mouth out with solvent, brushing her fangs with foaming cleanser even though it tastes nasty. She feels like a person again once she dries herself off, and cracks a covered window or two for ventilation. It isn’t light out yet.

Looks like she managed a pretty good haul, though she has to wonder where she got the cubes of medical-grade energon. Someone’s written her name on those. The handwriting looks familiar, but it doesn’t belong to anyone in this room, and two of them have already been emptied.

Ravage takes the third out of four, and drains it. There are Bismuth Bites, which she also doesn’t remember ever seeing around here, but she knows those will settle her internals, so she eats one, and then she eats two, and then she eats three, and after a moment they’re gone.

“Those were for you.” Drift sits up on the recharge slab and smiles at her. “Hey, you.”

“Hey, you,” says Ravage.

“Drink the other one,” Drift says. “We’re fine with the mid-grade.” He gets up to go and splash coolant on his face, and whatever, and when he comes back, he stands in front of her, looking nervous.

“Yeah?”

Drift leans over and kisses the tip of her nose. “I was afraid we were going to lose you,” he says, glancing down at the floor. Ravage follows his gaze even though he’s clearly just being nervous, and she sees the marks someone left on Drift’s wrist.

The someone must have been her. The others don’t siphon, except Gasket, and Gasket only does it when Drift asks him pretty. “…I bit you? While I was out of it? And you let me?” Ravage and Drift have tasted each other’s energon once or twice before, but… “In front of my brother, and sister, and Gasket, and Soundwave?”

“You slept most of yesterday but last night you woke up and you couldn’t keep anything down. I commed your brother. He said that slagger must have spawned in you, and the medicine he gave you was killing them all. Laserbeak went over there right after the next patrol and picked up some more.”

Ravage blinks. “My brother—? Not Buzzsaw, but…?” She’s very confused. She has a lot of brothers, but she has no idea where they are. And she thinks she’d remember if Drift met them.

“You called him Glitterbomb,” said Drift, taking her hands in his. “He’s…a doctor. He’s Ratchet’s apprentice, in fact.”

“You met Glit?”

“He said that after you finished purging you’d be too weak for a full dose, so I took the first dose, which was nasty, but I survived, and I topped myself off with your medical grade and let you drink it diluted.”

It takes a few moments for this to start to make sense. She has flashes of memory; she remembers lying on a berth in the clinic. She remembers Drift pacing around, and Soundwave…holding her hand? And talking, in whole sentences even. None of it makes sense, especially not the part about Glit being a medic. They were trained to be killers, although Glit had hated that.

“Glit is Ratchet’s apprentice?”

“Yes,” Drift says gently. “You talked to him about your other siblings. But maybe you don’t remember it because he was giving you painkillers. He took your jaw off, Rav, and then he put it right back on.”

“Was it cool?” Ravage asks, still holding his hands.

Drift’s shaking. “It was absolutely not cool. Also, he did it behind a curtain. He had to chase Soundwave out.”

“Thank you.” Ravage ex-vents. “For taking me to the clinic, and getting us past the patrols, and finding me. That was dangerous. And it must have been weird.”

Drift shrugs. “Who even knows what weird is out here? Love you, bitch.” He tugs Ravage into his arms. “Wouldn’t be the first time one of us took a dumb risk for the other,” he says, and holds her as tight as he can, as tight as she’ll let him. “I could’ve lost you. We could’ve lost you. If it wasn’t for Soundwave, we would’ve.”

Ravage can hear the repressed tears in his voice, and feel them in his hands on her back. “I almost died? I thought…I thought I had a mecharat parasite in my throat.”

Drift swears softly. “Yes, you silly bitch. You did. But you were down on the ground when we found you. You could’ve laid there for breems if it wasn’t for Soundwave. Some afthelm could’ve come along and taken everything you were carrying, and cut your lines and siphoned you out. Or maybe a patrol would have come along, and that would’ve been the end of you.”

Ravage blinks at him. Both out of affection and also because she’s confused. But it’s true that she did go down, and going down on the street most usually means that you don’t get back up again.

“You’re not going out by yourself again,” Drift says firmly.

Ravage doesn’t feel like arguing, even though she knows she’ll do what she wants to do if she really wants to. “Thanks.” She twines her arms around his neck and rests her head on his shoulder. “What’s Soundwave got to do with all this? I know I have to have hallucinated this, but…he was talking. In the clinic. I mean, he can talk, you’ve even heard him do it, but…I think he was talking a lot.”

“He found you,” Drift says quietly. “He knew you were hurt. You didn’t comm us. If he hadn’t known…I would never have known what happened to you. Sure, the parasite wouldn’t have killed you, maybe…but somebody else would’ve. Promise me, Rav. No more rats. Okay?”

Ravage nods against his shoulder. She’s feeling teary herself. Drift is still shaking, and she knows that’s partly withdrawal, probably, but she also knows she scared him. She remembers pulling the gross bits out of the rat and taking a bite of the protoform, only there was something inside it, and—

Drift rubs his face against the top of her head. “Anyhow. Soundwave pulled himself off the floor and announced you were hurt. I don’t know why it didn’t even occur to me that he might be hallucinating or something, but…we went out and found you.”

“You’re getting along with Soundwave now.” Ravage can’t help smiling. “You’re using his name.”

“He told me his name, yeah.” Drift shrugs. “He’s okay. On Syk, he’s more than okay.”

Ravage groans. Nothing bothers Drift when he’s on Syk. He has done gross things with grosser people on Syk. “You two are going to have to get along when you’re not fragged up…”

“That’s not what I meant,” Drift murmurs. “He was already in pain before you got hurt. He couldn’t move. He knew where you were, and he sure couldn’t give me directions. I needed to get him out the door, so I gave him a dose.” He kisses the top of Ravage’s head. “That’s how much I love you, bitch.”

Ravage is shocked. Drift had hardly any of his drugs left. She would never have expected him to be so generous with his supply, not even if he was set for a tenday or more. “Is that why you’re shaking?”

Drift laughs bitterly. “I’ve still got a dose left. It’s not bad yet. I know better than to go out looking while the patrols are still here and you know they’ll get bored pretty soon…”

Ravage pulls back and fumbles the drugs she scored for him out of her subspace. She has several injectors but she gives him just one; he’ll take multiple doses and do something stupid if he knows how much she is holding. It can be a surprise. When he needs it. “Part of what took me so long was getting your drugs, bitch,” she says, chuckling. “I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to, but I aimed to try.”

Drift kisses her right on the mouth, even though she’s sure she tastes disgusting. “Love you, bitch,” he murmurs into her ear, and takes a dose at once. “How?”

Ravage chuckles under her breath. “Well, I didn’t suck anyone’s spike,” she says, although she knows he knows that. “Stupidity is a capital offence out here and one of the slagging enforcers was out on his own by himself, being guilty as sin itself.”

“You killed an enforcer for this?” Drift stares at her for a moment. “You have more than this. Don’t you?”

“Maaaaybe—” Ravage laughs again. “I’d kill an enforcer for looking at me if he was alone and there weren’t any spy-drones around. Which there weren’t. They even turn their frame cams off when they’re out to shake the local entrepreneurs down for their fix and yours too. I’m trained for black ops, Drift, you know that, even if I didn’t get to finish my training.”

She doesn’t really want to talk about this too much, though. “So what happens to Soundwave on Syk?”

Drift shrugs. “He’s a normal person. More or less. It’s amazing.”

Ravage groans, because of course he is. Syk decreases empathy, especially in naïve users. “Great. Of course the cure for Soundwave’s constant tripping would be nothing cheap. Looks like you’re sharing the rest of my drugs, which I don’t take myself, with him. So don’t take more than you need to stay good.”

Drift nods, and then he looks down at her seriously. “It’s not a cure. He will get hooked if you keep giving him that slag. And it will fuck him up. Or the things that he’ll have to do to get it will. And no. I will not let you do those things.”

Ravage groans again. She doesn’t want to know if she’d let someone touch her like that to help Soundwave. She doesn’t want to know if she could tolerate a spike in her face to help Soundwave. Or who she’d be willing to kill for him, either, for that matter. But she doesn’t want him to have to go back to suffering all the time, either.

“Glitterbomb says there might be other things they could do.”

Ravage nods. “I thought there was stuff I could salvage and put in his helmet—it comes off, it’s not part of him—at some of the construction sites, but nobody’s building out here and we’d have to find something that wouldn’t irritate the fin on the back of his head—” Then she stops herself because she can’t believe she just said that.

“I know about the crest. I’ve seen it. He used it to locate you.” Drift shrugs.

Ravage is quietly impressed. The drug has to have dampened his empathy quite a bit for him to have needed to take off his helmet for that. “Wait. You called him Glitterbomb?”

“You called him that!” Drift says, laughing.

“I’m his sister,” Ravage says, shaking her head. “We named ourselves after characters on The Cybercats of Darkmount. We were half a year old. The postnatal centre matron didn’t care.”

Drift snickers. “That’s adorable.”

“Hey,” says Ravage, “Prince Ravage was awesome.” She sighs. “You said there was another dose of anti-parasite…stuff.”

Drift nods. He pulls a small blue bottle out of his subspace and hands it to her. “It’s nasty.”

“Of course it is.” Ravage lets go, walks over to the cubes, and prepares a shot of fizzy coolant, and a second shot of sweet oil. She downs the medication, then the coolant, then the oil, so she doesn’t taste much of the medication.

“Seeing him like that…I could almost understand why you…” Drift’s voice trails off wistfully.

Ravage glances back at him. “Why I what?”

“Buzzsaw says you’re in love with him,” Drift says, not looking at her. “With Soundwave, I mean. Not Glit. Of course not Glit.”

Ravage wants to laugh, but she can’t, because she sure as slag doesn’t know what else to call what she’s feeling. Even though the idea of being in love implies sex, and she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to do that again. She also can’t laugh because she knows there’s more to this than the bit that Drift actually said. “It feels…it feels like I’ve known him a really long time.”

“Don’t you remember?” Drift frowns. “You told me I had to be wrong when I said he knew you from before. But he told me he met you. He came to a party with Senator Shockwave.”

Ravage blinks. “He was one of the Senator’s—” She cannot imagine Soundwave as one of the Senator’s playmates, even allowing that Soundwave has probably not always been fragged up.

“They’re brothers.” Drift shrugs. “I saw them once at the races together.”

Ravage stares at Drift, because she doesn’t remember Shockwave having a brother. “…what?”

This isn’t like the way that everything from the last two days is all jumbled up. Ravage was a Senatorial Recorder and the information’s all there—she’s just in the wrong state of mind to process it properly. This is…it’s just not there. It’s been erased.

Drift grimaces. “What is it? Rav? Rav, are you okay? If he hurt you I’ll—”

Soundwave, who has apparently been awake for a little while, strides over to stand between them. “I would never hurt Ravage!”

Drift, in the process of downing a cube of mid-grade, just shrugs. “Good,” he says. “Because I’ll kill you if you ever do. Or if you get her killed.”

Ravage is the one shaking now. She walks away from them both to the window. It’s lighter outside than it was. Soundwave’s field reaches out and swirls around her, but with only about half of its usual strength. She turns to look at him. “I don’t remember this at all. You knew me before?”

Soundwave walks back over to her. “Soundwave: did not remember before, either. Too much interference.” He sighs. “It will come back. It…is coming back.”

Ravage looks up at him. She can’t imagine it, how awful it would be to have had his own mind to himself for a while, and feel it slipping away. “I have more of the drug Drift gave you,” she says. “But. I don’t want you to get addicted. And I’m not sure I could get enough for you to be on it all the time.”

“I didn’t expect to get more.” Soundwave looks down at her. “I just want to be able to talk to you properly.” He holds out his hands, and she takes them. He presses his lip-plates to her forehead…and she sees herself, dancing, through his optics.

Ravage knows she’s beautiful when she dances, but she never knew she could be beautiful like that. She knew he could see her field and her spark energy as blazes of colour. But she didn’t know what that was like.

Ravage looks up at him. At the same time, she sees herself, younger and frightened, giving him shy little smiles in the halls. And then she sees herself standing on the roof of the building, looking down at the streets below. She doesn’t remember any of this, but Soundwave calls out to her to come back. He’s terrified she’s going to jump. He can’t bear the thought of it, but he knows she suffers and he isn’t sure he’s not just being selfish. He doesn’t want to let her die.

And yet he isn’t sure he can stop her. Does he have the right to deny her that escape from what she’s going through? She isn’t sure what she’d have said back then. But the conversation he starts with her is trivial. She must have wondered what was on his mind. She can’t remember how she felt. She can’t remember what she said, except for the bits he remembers. She feels her hand slip into his, and she doesn’t remember that either. Nor the moment when they realise they’re holding hands, and let go of each other, because it is dangerous for them both, but especially for her.

They have conversations on balconies, on the roof. They’re just…young. They talk about silly things. And she tells him how they are all being deceived. She stops just short of telling him about Megatron, and that’s a relief. Whoever took her memories would have taken that too, if she had mentioned it. There’s a clawing pain in her fuel tank. It’s not just hunger.

Her spark hurts. She bursts into tears, she lets go of his hands. She feels dangerous. She wants to hit someone, but she’s surrounded only by people she loves.

Ravage extends her claws and rakes them over the armour plate on her upper legs with all of her strength and it hurts, oh, it hurts, but at least it quiets her mind, both the pain and the feeling of strong metal under her claws. Then her wrists are in Soundwave’s hands and he’s holding her, firmly but gently. She can hear it in her mind. He will not let her hurt herself. “Stop.”

Ravage slumps against him, and he lifts her up until her face is just a bit above his. “Please. Don’t hurt yourself.”

She rests her head on his shoulder. “Why can’t I remember you?” she sobs against his neck cables.

Soundwave sighs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I just remember that you disappeared. And people said you had died.” He hugs her close to him. “I didn’t even remember that when I was out there thinking everyone else’s thoughts. But I’m glad I remember now. I would never have wanted to forget you.”

Ravage has gone numb, but she nods.

Chapter Text

From a chapbook attributed to "Parvilla Stanixa":

You! they say.
You, with the dancing paws, and the swivelling ears!
You, who were built for our pleasures!
Why do you have to have so many feelings?

If I can’t feel the music, how can I dance it?
If I can’t dance for myself, how can I dance for you?
How can I make you come if I can’t feel what you feel?

You! they say.
You, who purr when you sing: why do you have to have so many thoughts?
Why are there words in your songs that we did not give you?
There are not supposed to be tears on your face!

How could I make you laugh if I had no words?
And how will I make you cry, someday?

You! they are calling. You!
Where do you go with that knife?
Who do you think you are?
What is that dripping from your claws and your teeth?

I was not built for your pleasure alone.
When they sold me, they sold me entire.
You are forgetting that I am a weapon of memory.

When they sold my ears and my eyes,
When they sold my valve and my voice,
They sold my memory as well.
You would like to believe I own those things.

(as would I)

It’s not even hard to deceive you.
Nothing between us is private.

I was also bought with the knives in my hands.
Those too have their functions and uses.
I was not only made to observe and to dance and submit and report.
I can kill for the one who bought me.

Deceive yourself; I do not mind.
Forget that I was bought, and I am lent to you.
Forget what I could do to you
If all my parts and memories were truly mine.

He threatens to make me forget every one of you,
And I’m not sure I want to remember.
But I cannot forget the price that was paid for me.
He makes sure to remind me daily,
And someday I will pay all of it back.

The ledger is his, but the debts will be paid.
Even if I forget all of your names, and all your faces:
The debts will be paid by someone out there
And I’ll buy myself back with my knives.

Chapter Text

The party was going splendidly. High-grade fuel of all varieties was flowing freely, and there were dainty snacks made from gelled energon and various oils, coolants, and minerals. The service was elegant; there were plenty of things you could say about Shockwave’s politics, but it was impossible to fault his hospitality. Pharma was there with Caduceus, and it was the first time in years she’d gone to a party like this with someone who actually wanted to be there. With her. He’d been so excited when she’d asked him. Perhaps she should have done so sooner. Arriving with Glit, her own property, had always made her feel desperate.

Pharma was beginning to feel like herself again. She had finally won her family over to her unorthodox choice of career. She looked good. She had done well—she was in line to become head of the department if she played the position she’d found herself in correctly, and she had admirers. Squawktalk was if anything a better bodyguard without the traitorous cat. Perhaps it understood how mutually beneficial their situation was. Squawktalk didn’t have ambitions unsuited to its status.

(She still remembered a text that Ratchet had sent her that morning. He’d called her a hypocrite for arguing with him about Glit, reminding her that Seekers weren’t supposed to be doctors, either. As if that were in any way similar to making a medic out of a tiny feliform warmech.)

Pharma’s mentors were also pleased. They liked Caduceus. They had never, ever liked Ratchet. (Perhaps, in the beginning, that had been part of Ratchet’s appeal. They hadn’t wanted her to become a medic, either.)

This was the life she had wanted. And then Ratchet walked into the room.

Of course he’d turn up now! It just made everything look worse—now that they were mid-disjuncture, he was finally willing to come to a party? But this was Shockwave’s party, and Orion Pax was the latest of Shockwave’s scandalous love affairs. And Orion Pax was still Ratchet’s amica—so the invitation must have come from him. And Shockwave was flirting shamelessly with them both!

“Don’t look at them,” said her mentor, Brightaerie of Vos. “It’s unseemly, and if he sees you, he will think that you still care about him! And after the scandal of him demanding one of your bodyguards as a condition of severance! Are you ever going to punish the bird for not telling you about Ratchet and the cat?”

Pharma chose not to argue. She knew that Ratchet and Glit weren’t lovers, but she wasn’t sure the truth was any less embarrassing than the rumours going around. It was better to let people think that Ratchet had lost his head over a pretty disposable than to tell them…what? That Ratchet was going to send the Functionist Council a two-ton barrel of Go Frag Yourselves in the shape of a little white cat? She could ruin him by spoiling that. She could ruin him by telling them about the clinic, or just about all the supplies he’d misappropriated. There were so many things he was doing that she could thoroughly ruin him for. He’d end up with no head and no hands. And Glit would end up in a smelter.

Pharma did not tell Brightaerie any of this. Any one of the trine that had mentored her would have gone through with it without spending a klick on thinking it through. Pharma wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t want it to happen, not any of it. Ratchet was a good physician, and it wasn’t Glit’s fault he’d been lied to and told he was capable of doing things that no feliformer would ever be able to do.

It was hard not to watch Ratchet with Orion and Shockwave. Ratchet was rough around the edges, and his alt-mode was a mobile medical unit, which sometimes made him look rather like a stack of big boxes. But when he moved, he was an amazingly sexy stack of big boxes, particularly when he was smiling. She wondered if he would be going home to Glit tonight, or recharging with Orion and Shockwave. There had been rumours about Ratchet and Orion, too, and those she was frankly less sure about. Orion Pax was practically shareware, and Ratchet…well, he’d been the Party Ambulance, hadn’t he?

There’d been a time when she wouldn’t have cared, because she’d have gone with them. Did she regret becoming respectable, after all?

“I hope you’re not regretting letting him go,” Caduceus said, later on in the evening. “He was making you miserable. You outgrew him a long time ago, Pharma.” But Caduceus looked more nervous than supportive. “He hasn’t changed a bit since we were students, has he?”

“Don’t worry,” said Pharma. “You’re the one going home with me tonight—if you want to, of course.”

And of course, Caduceus did.

Senator Ratbat wasn’t dancing, because every time he went out on the dance floor he saw Felixi whirling and twirling, even though there were no feliforms present at the party. When he’d purchased the feliform mechlet, he’d immediately wanted to make a pet of him. Perhaps a consort, though not a conjunx; that was out of the question. Ratbat’s alt was also fairly bestial; he’d scrambled his way up through the ranks in Stanix before the Functionists had come to power. Asking the authorities to rule Felixi alt-mode exempt would make it look like Emirate Balto had made a mistake in getting Ratbat himself so ruled. He was no Dominus Ambus.

Felixi had betrayed him at every turn. He hadn’t wanted to put him to work. He had had Stalker for that, but Stalker had surprised him in Felixi’s bed one night, and he’d had to have Stalker smelted because he’d attacked him, insisting that he was defending his brother. And all Ratbat had ever got from Felixi after he put him to work was beaten, sullen obedience.

He’d wanted Felixi’s spark. He could have taken it—if he’d been brave enough. But when Ratbat had looked into those dark red, expressionless optics, he’d seen nothing but dull resistance, and he’d known that if he forced his spark into Felixi’s spark, which was special somehow—though mostly all it seemed to do was make it hard for him to find his servant when he needed to—he’d have ended up dead. Still, he regretted snuffing out that spark.

But the suspicious information leaks had stopped with Felixi’s death.

He had been so excited when he’d seen the first glimmerings of growing desire in Felixi’s optics, until he’d realised that Felixi’s shy, soft glances had been meant for someone else. He could have tolerated that if it had been Proteus, or the Prime. It would’ve stung, but it would have been useful. But Felixi had chosen Shockwave’s idiot brother. The one who’d go for tendays without speaking, then accidentally drop something someone was keeping hidden into a conversation, to no-one’s advantage at all.

House Kymatos had finally rid itself of that idiot. But Shockwave had shielded his brother. And Shockwave had brought him into their path—his, and Felixi’s. Shockwave, his fellow reformer. At least he knew now they were never going to be friends.

Shockwave fell out of recharge in the middle of the night, which wasn’t unusual. It was raining, and fat blobs of acid hit the window, leaving trails of vapour behind.

He missed Soundwave. He hoped his brother was alive out there, somewhere. And indoors. He stood by the window a long, long time, wondering where his brother had ended up.

Finally, he heard the soft noises of blankets as Orion sat up; Ratchet was the type to fall into recharge deeply and immediately, like all medics and soldiers, but Orion was a light sleeper, too.

“Come back to bed.”

“I’m thinking about Soundwave. My brother—” Shockwave ex-vented, but then Orion said a surprising thing.

“There’s someone who looks a lot like him in Rodion. I tried to speak to him, but the mech’s too wasted to talk to me. I asked what his name was five times before he told me he had a thousand of them. I have no idea what he’s tripping on.”

“You saw him?” Shockwave’s spark stuttered. That was exactly the sort of thing Soundwave would say when he had his episodes—the ones that had grown more and more frequent after the girl disappeared, probably into a smelter. “He’s a very rare alt, Orion.”

“Yes,” Orion said, “but you said your brother was friendly.”

Shockwave shrugged. “He always had fits and episodes, and it just kept getting worse. I tried to keep our mentors from finding out, but it was inevitable. If he was in a state like that—”

“The mech I’m thinking of only talks to one person,” Orion replied. “A little thing, really. Caught him tagging once. I was just going to give him a lecture, but he emptied his can of purple spray paint right into my face and ran off. The process of getting it out of my optics was…memorable.”

“I’d like it if my brother had a friend.” Shockwave’s longing for Soundwave was like a current he could only flow into if he wanted to ever get out of it. At times he thought Soundwave was watching him, or listening at least, from wherever he was. “Jhiaxus fragged both of our sparks to the Pit before we were even kindled. Tell me about the friend.”

“All right,” said Orion, “but remember, a rare alt is not a unique one, necessarily. He could be someone else, not your brother. Don’t get your hopes up.”

Shockwave gestured, as if to wave the warning away. “Just tell me, Orion.”

Orion sighed heavily. “It’s a feliformer. A weird one. Sleek model, not the usual type with the boxy arrangement around the neck and head—I have no idea what purpose that serves—and blacker than the inside of a collapsed mineshaft on Messatine. Like a mirror image of Ratchet’s also very unusual cat. Blends right into the shadows. Silver trim and dark red optics, and even in root mode, his audials are almost right on top of his head. They swivel. Unless he’s mistransforming on purpose—”

Shockwave heard a strangled noise come out of his intake as his spark stuttered again. “That can’t be true,” he rasped, although he desperately hoped that it was. “Orion. Are you sure? Are you really sure?”

“What,” said Orion. “You think that’s the…girl? I know you said he got really difficult after they smelted her. What did she even do…?”

Orion still wasn’t used to femmes, even though Shockwave would have bet that friend of his, Ariel, was a femme and just kept it under her plate. And Shockwave was afraid to say yes. It might not be true if he dared to say yes.

“You didn’t tell me she was a cat—”

“He kept insisting she wasn’t dead, she couldn’t be,” Shockwave said, and his hands shook. “And why would that matter?” He leaned against the window, because it felt like gravity had cut out from under him all over again.

Orion rolled his optics. “How am I supposed to identify someone if I don’t know they’re a cat?”

Chapter Text

The lovely Parvilla, who danced all night in the colours of fire—
By day she wept in the darkness and silence she stole from the night.

Parvilla has broken her chains!
Parvilla is out in the world!

Parvilla can go where she pleases.
She can wander as far as she likes,
But she has a home if she wants it—
In a city where no-one has seen her
And everyone loves her.

I regret that it’s been so long since I contacted you, but at the same time, I know you must either steal or pay dearly for your access these days, so I also feel that it would be wrong of me to try and reach you if I didn’t have something important to say — especially since the depth at which we communicate is, of necessity, so dangerous.

I am always glad to see your poetry, or hear of its travels. I am pleased to report that it has now been seen in Uraya! It is particularly popular in the entertainment districts, but there are also a great many beastformers there; in the local dialect, they call themselves Kaiju. You should consider going there yourself sometime. I know that Rodion is where you ended up by necessity, but I could wish you wouldn’t stay in Liaconia.

Your last chapbook was wonderful. I particularly liked the one about paying your master’s debts with your knives. I am sorry to say that I had not realised until now that you are a therioform. It should go without saying, but I want you to know that knowing this changes nothing between us.

But I know what you want to hear. (And also what you need to hear, though you will not like it at all.)

I have finally been sentenced. Please believe me when I say to you that I am neither surprised nor displeased. It could have been so much worse, my precious Parvilla. I am going to Kaon.

I know exactly what you are thinking, but you have forgot how many supporters I have there. Titanika is there, for one. (She would love to have you in her establishment, and she swears to me no-one would ever touch you there; you would strictly be a performer.)

I know that for the majority of our acquaintance, I’ve been a pacifist, but I’ve changed, Parvilla — you know that I’ve changed. Someday we will re-release The Sacrifice of Violence! And there will be new poems, new stories. Some of the stories will be true. And some of the words will be yours as well as my own. I promise you this, Parvilla.

I have survived so much.
I will not be cut down in Kaon.

I have not been a stranger to violence, even though I have abhorred it. I have been fighting my entire life. When I was new to the mines, I had to fight for my share of everything — and for the twins as well. And the time I have recently spent behind bars has provided me with ample opportunity to hone my skills.

Be not afraid, Parvilla — and know that you are loved beyond measure, and that simple death would be far too kind for the one who thought he could own you.

I have a friend among the enforcers in Rodion, and I think you already know him. Please do not kill him. He did not have a choice in his work, and I think that if he could have his own way, he would be a librarian. I know you were very angry when he caught you — now that I can guess at your alt, and I know what you were writing on that wall, I know it was you. You painted him purple, which is hilarious, but the Hunter swears to me that he doesn’t arrest Decepticons unless they are engaging in violence against other people, not property. Enforcers do unconscionable things, but we do not live in a society where people freely choose their work, Parvilla — and he is the one who let me out the first time I was imprisoned here on Cybertron.

If you must stay in Rodion, then you should try to make a friend of him.

I know you love community organising, rebuilding and repairing, but I could use your intellect, and your administrative skills. Kaon would be the perfect base for our work. I don’t think one in ten of the people who live there support the Senate or the Prime. They hold the games there because it’s the only way to keep that population in check.

Titanika would keep you safe.

I would offer to be your protector, but I would not want the others in the arena to think you were mine, and theirs for the taking if they can defeat me. Not every match is to the death. And I know you will say that you are a trained killer and can handle whatever comes your way, that you could have dealt with your oppressor if he had not had you chipped; but you are small, and Kaon is full of enclosed places, in which someone your size could be easily trapped.

Still, when I read your words, I know how your spark cracks when you see your work torn down and destroyed by enforcers, and that would not happen in Kaon. You could be happy here, I know.

Come to me, Parvilla. Come and bring your friends with you.

Yours fondly and unreservedly, M.

Chapter Text

Come to my party, you say; and I will in my time:
But don’t expect me to spend the whole night by your side.
I’m not going to come there to dance for your friends
And write them new drinking songs.

When I come to your party, my love,
I will come with an army of lovers
I will make an appearance at midnight
And put on a show that is not a performance.

I’ll be a general too:
I will not be your consort.

Dearest Megatronus,

I’m staying in Rodion for now, because I’m doing good work here.

The enforcers can destroy the restored buildings they say we have stolen. They can uproot my gardens, they can steal our fuel and our drugs, they can beat us and worse, it’s true. But the thing I’m building here is, as I often am, invisible to them. My friends get discouraged after they come in here and undo so much of our labour, of course, but we still protect and care for one another.

The Dead End was waiting for us. The medic who runs the free clinic, who employs one of my brothers there. G who has been trying to rebuild and make safe places for such a long time, D who is fragged up on circuit boosters and loves to fight and break things, but serves us as our protector, and S who has, at least for now, arranged things so that you can reach me — we are no longer slaves.

They throw us out and we come here and they love to watch us squabble and steal and maim and murder each other. There are people who come here from places like Praxus and Vos and Polyhex to watch us, even when we’re rioting — who want to fuck us for thrills, and try our drugs, and hear our music, and watch us dance — so they can tell themselves and one another stories about it. Stories about how this is what we are when no-one’s making us be productive, and everything they do to us is justifiable, because we don’t care about anyone but ourselves, and we can’t see further into the future than the next tenday, or the next score, or the next fix.

But people care about each other here. It only needed a candle to set them on fire.

Now we know who our real enemies are. The people who point and laugh and play with their spikes while we fight over all the sad scraps they permit us to have. They’re our enemies. Not us. We can learn to share and to build and to care for each other in material, tangible ways that ameliorate the poverty we live in just a little bit.

Before I came here, most of them already knew, but nobody talked about it. Now they are talking. I go to parties, I dance, I drink with people. I hide myself at first so I can enjoy the music without concern, but then I talk to them, and so do my friends.

People here know they are being deceived. They are ready to rise up and transform our world, if we can just reach a critical mass, and I feel that we’re near that point.

Meanwhile — you are being sent to a gladiatorial pit! I hope you can see the relevance of what I am saying here is only amplified a thousandfold. You’re going to fight other people like us for their entertainment. Don’t forget that. You think you’re going to unionise the gladiators, and maybe you even can, if you don’t make so much trouble they eat you alive within the next tenday.

I am not moving to Kaon. Titanika’s offer is kindly meant, and yes we are fond of each other. But I’m not going to darken the door of what everyone pretends is not a brothel even if all I am meant to do there is sing and dance — except as an organiser, which Titanika herself is already doing admirably. I don’t want to see what goes on in there. I am not yet so far removed from my days in the Senate that I can be anything like objective about it. I am not going to be your Recorder and your accountant and your scribe and your ambassador there.

The people here are just as angry as they are in Kaon, M.

I’ll come and visit you in Kaon, though I doubt I can afford a ticket to the games unless those idiot Praxians come back here with as much shanix as they were carrying the last time, and I support you in everything, but I don’t want to watch mechs fight each other, even to wounding, for the entertainment of the real barbarians of Cybertron!

You are still so very good, my dearspark. You accept that violence is necessary but I really wonder how you will feel when you’re doing it every day. It is going to change you. I probably should be there for you, to keep watch over your spark — but I’m needed by more people here, and you will need all of them, too.

You are still too trusting! All you have to hear is that a mech is on your side, and you believe him. I know you haven’t seen the level of duplicity and debauchery that I have seen, but very soon you will. Have faith in the will of the people, but trust individuals only so far as you know them.

But even if someone’s intentions are good, we are still who we are and our hands can be forced. T isn’t going to be at my side every breem. The PH (what a terrible alias, it’s his own name in Tarnish!) may actually not intend to harm any Decepticons when we’re not being violent, but he has supervisors who can order him to, and that’s not even taking into consideration that sometimes life here requires us to be violent in order to survive!

I wish I were surprised that PH is an enforcer here, and here of all places! You must tell him it was Parvilla he thought he was going to lecture. I know he doesn’t like my poetry as much as yours, but he respects me in the fora, does he not? He may not have chosen his work, but he still has to do it. He cannot keep his vows to you if he is being watched. And the very fact that he would make you such a vow, knowing the truth of his life, is suspicious! Either he’s as naïve as you are, or he is deceiving you, and you are letting him because you want it to be true.

I love you so very much, you brilliant fool. You’ll either lead us into the city of light, or you’ll end up being the death of us all. Listen to me and the second one might be less likely.

Yours, I am. But I am also Rodion’s. And I believe I may have found the Signal. He’s been very ill, but he isn’t dead as you feared. That is a story I wish I could tell you, but now is not the time.

Parvilla

Chapter Text

Gasket is a little irritated, but he’s trying not to show it. Ravage and Soundwave are rewiring a server in the basement of the latest building they’ve reclaimed, and he wishes they’d leave it alone, because what really matters is access to solvent and coolant—data is accessible secretly, privately, elsewhere. You shouldn’t log in where you like to recharge; it’s a rule he’s followed for vorns, and it’s kept him alive.

But Soundwave insists he can connect them to data without drawing enforcers within a breem, and Ravage believes him, and…everyone wants the service. Everyone. So even though this is his crew, Gasket knows he’s not getting a vote.

The two of them work silently, until something in the electronics responds to something they do. Then, by way of celebration, they sit and look into each other’s optics and giggle. This would be annoying even if they could explain to him in very small words what they are doing and why and he could understand those very small words. The last time he saw people behave like this, he was in his old postnatal centre—and so were the gigglers.

“Hey,” he finally says, “I’d feel a lot better if I knew what you two were ‘talking’ about!”

Drift is standing guard in the basement, in comms with Buzzsaw and Laserbeak; they’re doing aerial reconnaissance from above the building. He rolls his optics, glances sidewise at Ravage and Soundwave, and shrugs. “No you won’t,” he tells Gasket, walking up to him and leaning against him like Ravage would do. He’s picked up so many of her mannerisms.

Gasket drops a kiss on top of his head, carefully. Drift is very cuddly, sometimes, but he is also very pointy. “Yes, I will,” he says, and walks up to the two miscreants, plopping down on the floor where they’re both sitting down. “Share.”

Ravage’s face is black, but she laughs very sharply and glances away from them both. Soundwave’s blue face flushes lavender, and he ducks his head, but he takes his blast mask off to talk.

“Don’t aaask,” Drift says with a singsong lilt. “Don’t ask it, Gasket…”

Gasket snorts, though playful Drift is better than angry Drift. “No. I want to know.”

Ravage giggles. “I’ll tell you a little, and you can say if you want to hear more.”

“You woon’t,” Drift chants. “Don’t ask it, Gasket…”

Soundwave retracts his visor. His optics are golden, which usually means he is in a good mood.

Ravage smiles shyly. “Well, that last bit…I asked him if he’d still love me if I got stuck in my alt mode.”

“Oh fuck bitch,” Drift says through a vent, shaking his head. “Don’t ask people questions like that! People will tell you what they want to hear anyway! It just starts fights.”

Gasket sighs. Drift’s old lover, whoever he was…had said that if Drift ever hurt himself racing and had to retire, he’d take care of him. But that hadn't happened. Gasket privately agrees with the advice, because questions like that do start fights. He also suspects that Ravage already knew the answer and just wanted to hear him say it out loud, or at least out loud in her head, or whatever. Beastformers care about questions like that, even if there’s a chance that someone could lie to them, and it’s…probably hard for Soundwave to lie to her inside of her head.

“Soundwave: will love Ravage regardless of shape, form, or function. All are beautiful.” There is something sly in his optics. “And all are pleasant to touch.”

Whatever that slyness was makes Ravage giggle again. “Stop that,” she whispers, but clearly she doesn’t mean it, and then addresses the others. “Do you want to hear the rest of it?”

“No!” Drift snaps, but he’s laughing. “Gasket, I told you! Did you really think they were having some kind of intense technical discussion?”

Gasket sighs. “I had hoped,” he said. “Given how dangerous this is, I had hoped they were concentrating on what they were doing.”

“Soundwave: could do this from a recharge slab, with Ravage’s hands alone. Would be harder to do without cables, but.” His expression is somehow both blank and incredibly smug.

Ravage, who probably understands Gasket’s objections better than Soundwave does, just shrugs. “I wouldn’t understand it. I just don’t mind getting telepathic instructions, and my hands are small, and I can unscrew things with my claws, and…”

Gasket feels a wave of rage breaking over him, but he counts primes (the numbers, not the obnoxious high priests) until he has calmed himself. “You’re telling me that you have no idea what he’s doing and you’re trusting him with our collective fate? Seriously, Ravage?”

Ravage trembles slightly, and doesn’t look at him, but she nods. Then Soundwave breaks the silence.

“Megatron trusts me.”

“What.” Gasket scowls. He knows that Ravage has access to boards on the underweb where she and Buzzsaw talk smack about revolution, and people boast about blowing things up sometimes, and he doesn’t like it; it’s stupid. Megatron is the name of their stupid guru and he’s been on the news once or twice, but mostly for getting arrested. This whole thing is stupid and Soundwave’s in on it, too?

“Rav,” says Drift, aggrieved, “why didn’t you tell me that he was another Decepticon? Back when I thought he was stalking you?”

Or in other words, three tendays ago, Gasket thinks but does not say out loud.

“Well, first because you’re not one of us—yet.” Ravage looks up at Drift with a cheeky grin.

“I’m not exactly a joiner,” Drift says, and rolls his optics.

“Drift: is still here,” Soundwave says. “Drift believes that the world could be better.”

“So do I,” Gasket says. “But that doesn’t mean blowing up temples and starting bar fights at Mac’s is a good idea.”

Drift shrugs. “We can’t afford Maccadam’s place.”

Ravage rolls her optics. “The truth is, I didn’t know that back then. We communicate on a system that Soundwave set up long ago. When he was a decivorn old, which is actually funny.”

Gasket’s optics flare and he shakes his head. “That is not fragging funny. It’s reckless.”

“We know each other by handles and tripcodes and nicknames and passphrases,” Ravage continues. “It works.”

“Those things can still be discovered and faked,” Gasket says with a sour expression.

The lovers speak simultaneously. “Not on my system—” and then in the same sparkbeat, “I’d know if he lied to me.”

“Megatron: would not have trusted Soundwave, had he known my identity.”

“Or your age,” Ravage says, giggling. She rests her head against Soundwave’s shoulder.

Gasket is boggled. Just…boggled. Megatron, the Dangerous Terrorist Leader, is running his entire operation on code that was written by an unsupervised sparkling an eight-year-old forged mech from a noble House.

“It works,” Soundwave says, “and it’s untraceable, because I wrote it in the planetary machine language, encrypted it multiple times, and ran it through servers that manage the power grids of whole polities. They’d have to blackout at least five major cities to get rid of me, if they even knew I was there, and I’m routing this through my own network.”

Gasket only partially comprehends this. Part of him still thinks it must be incredibly ingenious, completely unbelievable taurslag, and he has no idea how to question it properly.

But that’s not what Drift has been thinking about it. “You two—you had two separate conversations going, one online and one in person, and you didn’t know that you were both the same people? You didn’t know?“ He laughs out loud, shaking his head. “Bitch, that’s priceless.”

Ravage looks up at him with none of the good humour that epithet normally elicits (when it comes from him). “It’s a good thing I didn’t know. Since someone who wasn’t him got into my head.”

“And you ran the site and you didn’t know either—?” Drift’s field and expression are a little more sombre but probably not as much as they should be. Gasket can’t really blame him though.

Soundwave smiles. It is a blindingly stupid, gormless grin. Gasket is almost embarrassed to look at it.

“She is Parvilla,” says Soundwave, as though that meant everything. Gasket has no idea what it means.

“Nah,” says Ravage, but she leans against him, again in the way that a cybercat does. “I’m Ravage. But they call me Parvilla online. So I put that on my tags and under my poetry.”

“Good,” says Drift firmly, and Gasket isn’t sure why.

Soundwave sighs. “You are Ravage, yes. You always have been Ravage and you always will be. But I had a crush on Parvilla even before I saw you dance.”

Ravage looks up at him, a slightly sceptical expression at first, and then they are both looking into each other’s optics like they just created the universe instead of rewiring a server.

Soundwave is beaming. “Everyone that I have ever loved has been you.”

There are tears in the corners of Ravage’s optics. Soundwave leans over and kisses her. Gasket’s just grateful it isn’t a lewd kiss. He has seen one or two such kisses since Soundwave turned up.

Then Soundwave decides to explain himself further, and Gasket wonders how he can’t know that nobody else wants to hear this—or if maybe he just doesn’t care.

“Everyone I have ever had romantic feelings about has been her. On the underweb. In the Senatorial Building. On the street, when I couldn’t remember my name or why I wanted to trust her.”

“Keep going,” Drift mutters. “I didn’t need my morning ration anyway.” He glances at Ravage. “He’s making you soft, bitch.”

“He makes me harder, too—” Ravage begins, and Gasket knows she’s being serious but he can’t help laughing. Drift laughs out loud.

“Bitch,” Ravage says, “I’m’a show you a thing or two—"

“Don’t need to know about that, and I don’t want to see it!” Drift teases her, and then, more softly: “I’m glad you can want it again, even if not with me.”

Ravage buries her face against Soundwave’s chest. Something comes out of her mouth that sounds a lot like: “We haven’t yet.”

Gasket and Drift exchange glances; Gasket wonders if Drift is thinking what he is. He’s more afraid for her now that he knows they’re waiting. For something. Only Primus knows what. He had no idea how weird Ravage was until he met Soundwave. Are they waiting because of her trauma? Or is it because they know this is serious, and interface will change things in ways that they won’t be able even to want to undo?

“You are embarrassing her,” says Soundwave, in an only slightly menacing monotone.

“Sorry,” Drift huffs, with a shrug. Gasket doubts it.

“I mean.” Ravage finally looks up at them both. “I mean that I would be more than vicious to anyone who ever tried to hurt him.” This is a completely useless explanation, but Gasket can hardly begrudge her desire to save face. “He’s mine.”

Drift nodded. “From my point of view, that’s the problem. Don’t let any of…whatever ‘this’ is…make you stupid. I don’t want to ever hear you say you would die for someone.”

Ravage frowns. “You’d die for me,” she points out.

Drift just shrugs. “That’s different,” he says, and walks out of the room. Gasket is tempted to follow him.

“Don’t,” Soundwave says. “We’ll get back to our work.”

Gasket doesn’t.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Enjoy this illustration by Red Dragon. It can be found in his tumblr here:

Chapter Text

Megatron liked being clean. Showers in the mines had been quick; they were public, and nobody liked having to wait very much. Megatron really liked baths. In the mines, they were a rare treat, often a reward or a favour. But Megatron had never been as clean as he was right now in his entire life, and Lugnut wasn’t done fussing. When the big mech reached for his panel, Megatron put his hand over Lugnut’s wrist. “Lugnut,” said Megatron quietly, “I think that’s enough. I don’t need a happy ending.”

Lugnut snorted. “I wasn’t going to jack you,” he said. “Some other time, though, if you want.”

Megatron, hand still on Lugnut’s wrist, looked up at him. Lugnut was hard to read—people thought he was an empuratee, but he actually had five eyes, and had been built for heavy labour—but his field wasn’t. He was totally serious. Both about not jacking Megatron now, and also about being more than willing to, later.

“This is uncomfortable,” Megatron said, glancing down at his body. “I know how to clean my arrays myself. But I don’t normally have an audience. Why are you still here? I do know how to take a bath, I promise.”

“Gotta get you shined up, first time on the dance floor,” Lugnut replied, “and you have to be really clean. I have to inspect you. Or Strika can, if you’d prefer that.”

Megatron allowed himself to emit a faint sigh. This made no sense whatsoever. “I thought my ‘first time on the dance floor’ was several tendays ago. Unless we’re not talking about the dance floor in the Arena.”

“Nope,” said Lugnut. “People like you. A lot. You’re going to get lots of attention tonight. I promise you, it’ll be glorious.”

Glorious.

Lugnut liked that word an awful lot.

Megatron liked Lugnut. He hadn’t known what to expect when Strika had told him she’d taken a consort, but the two of them had a solid bond and were obviously happy together. “Does Strika know you want to jack me?”

Lugnut laughed. “She’d like to watch. But she’s too polite to say so.”

“Strika?” Megatron shook his head. Strika of Kaon was one of the least polite people he knew, which was saying something, and was also one of the things he liked about her. She was rude all the time. But she could be kind, and maybe that was what Lugnut had meant to say. His vocabulary did not have the range that Megatron’s did.

Lugnut had been fighting in the Pits of Kaon for a long, long time. So long that he didn’t have a tracker, because he’d done his time: he just liked it there. This boggled Megatron, but he appreciated it. He was grateful to Lugnut and Strika both for training him, but he was glad that they were both free. It meant Strika was out of the arena, and it meant that even though they could make Megatron fight anyone they told him to, Lugnut could say no, and he would.

“Well, she wouldn’t want to assume that you’d let her join in. After all, you’re the glorious Megatronus,” said Lugnut, grinning in a way that reminded him of Impactor a bit, even though their faces couldn’t have been more different.

Megatron missed Impactor more than he’d thought he would. “Without your help and Strika’s, I would probably be dead by now. But I can clean my own array. Although I don’t suppose I mind letting you look at it. But it’s weird. I don’t normally show that to anyone who isn’t a medic and isn’t going to touch.”

“We would do anything for you, Lord Megatron. Anything.” Lugnut shrugged. “Just, not tonight.”

Megatron…didn’t doubt it. Strika and Lugnut had provided him with intensive training before he ever went out into the arena, and it had saved his life. Miners were big and sturdy and there were a lot of fights, but the arena was very different. Miners didn’t usually try to kill each other, and they didn’t have fancy weapons, or particular styles that you needed to know in order to stay alive, let alone win the match. And then there were the mechanimals, and the aliens. The aliens were often the worst. Some of them were too terrified to put up much of a fight, but…some of them were justifiably enraged. And also venomous.

“Don’t call me Lord,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “I’m sure Strika’s explained to you that we want to destroy the nobility, not to replace them.”

“You have a noble and glorious soul,” said Lugnut. “There’s more than one kind of nobility. We’d follow you anywhere.”

They’d had that argument before. Megatron never won it. Persuasive oratory didn’t really work on Lugnut. Strika believed in him, but she’d been a fleet commander in the last war, and her judgement was rational. She believed the arena would do him good, that it would help him get over the last remnants of his pacifism.

Lugnut just believed in him. At first, because Strika did…but now he was more devoted than ever.

“What was it Parvilla said?” Strika said as she came in with a tray of fuel set on top of a basket of towels and…cosmetics? “Ah yes. She said we’ll follow you though the Pit because you have been there before, and you know where the exits are.”

Megatron frowned. “That’s true of Parvilla, but not of me,” he said flatly. “She worked for the Senate, and they made a whore of her whether she liked it or not.”

Strika sighed heavily. “That’s…usually how it’s done,” she said, and she looked even more uncomfortable than Megatron felt. “They’ll be expecting you upstairs tonight. They’ll say the party’s for you. But it really isn’t.”

Lugnut snorted. “It’ll be glorious. Megatron can handle anything.”

Megatron really wished that were true. “Parvilla says her actual name is Ravage,” he said, “and she wants to be called that. I named her Parvilla on the boards. But she named herself Ravage before that, even if she wasn’t allowed to use it when she worked for the Senate.”

“Ravage,” said Lugnut, revving his engines for a moment. “I like it! It’s hot!”

Strika ignored the deflection. “Lugnut liked the parties, but I did not. You know the nobles that come slumming to Kaon from places like Iacon and Polyhex often have warframe fetishes, don’t you?

Megatron’s optical shutters twitched briefly. “I never thought about it, but that makes sense…”

Strika nodded. “They pay to come to our parties as well as our matches. And they bid on us. Not on me. Anymore, and I was never popular for that, thank Primus—I’m not pretty, and I’m not weird enough to be exotic—like some people—”

Lugnut laughed out loud. “Don’t let her scare you, it’s fun. Most of them want to be mech-handled and fragged through the berth. They’re not allowed to do anything that could leave marks unless you consent to it, and most of us don’t—we still have to fight the next day, after all.”

Megatron allowed himself one moment of barefaced existential terror. They hadn’t told him anything about that when they’d sentenced him. They hadn’t told him that when he arrived. He supposed he could at least be grateful that he’d heard it first from his friends.

Megatron had had plenty of sex, even though Impactor hadn’t thought so. The vast majority of the sex he had had just for fun had involved Impactor. Terminus…well. That had been another story entirely. It had only happened rarely, and Terminus had always said they shouldn’t, that it was unfair, that he had too much power, which Megatron had thought ridiculous. How could Terminus say he had too much power when he couldn’t get up and walk on his own? He deserved a little pleasure, and it wasn’t like Megatron hadn’t enjoyed it immensely…

Interface of all sorts—sticky, hardline, field play, kink—had been a currency in the mines, like intoxicants and cy-gars and pornography. Megatron actually didn’t remember the first time he’d had sex. He’d learned early on that being good at it could get you favours. And he’d been amazed the first time he’d done it with Terminus. It was a different thing entirely when you were in love.

But for all his experience, Megatron had never fragged anyone he didn’t actually know before. Terminus had been his only lover and mentor, and Impactor had been his best friend, and Rumble and Frenzy had been his creche sibs. Everyone else—other miners, and even supervisors he’d wanted favours from—had been someone he’d known very well. Even though there had been no guarantees that you wouldn’t get hurt, and he had, a few times—you knew who you were dealing with.

“I’m sorry,” said Strika. “I could protect Parvilla because the Pits don’t own her. She’d be like any of my other waitstaff—free to make her own choices about how much money she wants to make and what she was willing to do to get it. But you—I can’t get you out of it…”

Megatron barely heard this, lost in his own thoughts, but he realised he had to say something, because Strika looked like she might be ready and willing to cry. “It’s all right,” he said, as if she were the one who needed the comforting. “It’s all right. I can do this.” Cautiously, he put a hand on her arm.

“Okay,” Strika vented softly. “I’d offer you something if you needed it, but…it’s better if your processor’s clear, at least until you know what to expect, or maybe have favourites.”

Lugnut frowned. He leaned over, across the tub—and kissed her.

Which was awkward for Megatron, because he was underneath them.

“I know it was rough for you, my glorious lady,” he told Strika, gently. “But it’s not rough for everyone. He might have fun. I did.”

Strika nodded, mutely. Lugnut stroked her face for a moment. Then she shoved the cube on the tray she had carried into Megatron’s hand. It was enriched energon. At least the gladiators ate well.

“So when are we getting Ravage?” Lugnut asked, because the silence was awkward, and so was Megatron trying to wash his spike with one hand and drink a cube with the other one.

Megatron sighed. “I think I was wrong and she’s actually happy. In Rodion.” Then he winced. He sounded mopey. Mopey like he was when he’d realised Impactor had no intention of not fragging anyone he thought cute just because Megatron had finally said yes. He didn’t think it was really a good look on someone like him.

Lugnut shrugged. “I’m happy here,” he said. “I’m going to fight for you because a lot of people aren’t, but I’m having the time of my life, for the most part.”

Megatron nodded. Lugnut loved three things, apparently: Strika, sex in general, and punching things.

“Silly girl,” Strika said, but her tone was affectionate. “She’d better come for a visit, at least. I’ve always wanted to meet her. You want her, don’t you? There is no shame in it: she’d be lucky to have you.”

Megatron winced. “How do I know the answer to that? I’ve never even seen her! Besides, she was only half-grown when we met her.”

Strika just shook her head.

“She’s tiny,” said Megatron. “Orion Pax met her, but he didn’t know it. I put it together when he told me about it.”

“I hope you didn’t out her,” Strika snapped. “I’ve never, not once, not even a little bit, liked or trusted Peacehunter. He says he wants things to be better, but he’s still a fragging enforcer.”

Megatron sighed. “She’s a feliform…” His voice trailed off, and he shook himself. “We've exchanged so many poems.”

Lugnut chuckled. “So that’s why you’re always looking at beastformer porn.” If he had had brow ridges, Megatron thought, he would have been waggling them.

“Don’t be silly,” said Strika. “It’s not like that. It’s spiritual. They write poetry to each other.”

“No!” Megatron sputtered, very nearly spitting out some of his fuel. He shook his head, groaning. “I didn’t know she was a cat until Pax caught her tagging!”

He did—very much—like beastformer porn. Or rather, he had. It had lost its lustre when he’d realised that most of the people in the images and holoclips had had no more choice about their careers than he had had. How many of them had wanted to be medics?

But he liked unusual frametypes. Impactor had ragged him about it. If Impactor were there he would have already been telling Megatron that he knew perfectly well he was going to end up sharing a berth with Strika and Lugnut eventually…and he would’ve been right.

Not tonight, though, apparently.

“The police are the worst,” Strika grumbled, sliding back into her rant as if she had timed it. “I don’t care if he chose to be what he is, he’s too damned good at it to be trustworthy. If they don’t start out as terrible people, they end up that way anyway. Whores hate them, you know.”

Megatron was not about to argue with Strika about Orion Pax. He knew he would never win. Instead, he decided good news was in order. “Parvilla—Ravage, I mean—found the Signal in Rodion. You were wrong. It is not a trap. The boards are back up because he’s online again. He was ill when she found him, had been for quite a long time….”

“What signal?” Lugnut frowned.

“The one you can’t stop,” Strika retorted, “until somebody did.” She scowled. “How do we know he hasn’t had an attitude adjustment?”

Megatron shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said, feeling suddenly small and insignificant and crushable. “But Parvilla would know, I think.”

“Parvilla is in love with him, isn’t she?” Strika asked pointedly. “You deserve her. You do. But so does he, and…I don’t think there’s anything to be done with it.”

“What?” Megatron asked after he managed not to spew fuel. “What are you talking about? You’ve seen the poetry she writes me! She called me ‘my love’!”

…maybe he did have a little crush on Parvilla. Or rather, on Ravage.

Lugnut leered at him with all five optics glowing and biolights flashing with mirth. It was very impressive and Megatron hated it.

Strika snorted. “She’s always addressing her poems as if she’s talking to lovers. The love was in the things she didn’t say. The things they couldn’t take from her. If she’s found him, though, I really hope he’s still all right.” She started removing polishes and waxes from the basket. “Be nice for her to find out what an overload actually feels like, for once…”

Chapter Text

Soundwave is watching the sunset when he feels Ravage’s warmth grow closer behind him; he sends a tendril of love/encouragement/welcome from his mind to hers. She never hesitates to let him in; her trust is the most precious thing that he’s ever been given.

Ravage doesn’t normally get to see sunsets. She sits down beside him, slipping her hand into his without making a sound. Her optics can’t bear bright light, but they’re shuttered. She’s opened her mind in order to see it as he sees it, because Soundwave sees colours she can’t.

Soundwave removes his blast mask and stows it in subspace. “I love you,” he murmurs aloud, even though ‘I’ is a difficult word for him. His mentors used to say that his voice was too gentle, too tentative, lacking authority, but Ravage loves his voice, and sometimes he talks just to share her pleasure in it.

The bright rush of joy that floods her field upon hearing him say what she already knows spreads into his own, and he sets the words on repeat: “I love you, I love you, I love you…” It comes up out of him floating on laughter.

“I love you, too,” Ravage says between repetitions, again and again, until they settle into tossing the thought back and forth, mind to mind.

Suddenly he’s all too conscious of how far above the street they are. Once he saw her on a ledge like this, listening to the call of the void that offered her freedom.

“Don’t worry,” Ravage says, noofing his shoulder. “I haven’t felt like that in a very long time.” She’s learned to love life for herself, and rage propels her to do all the work she does, but Soundwave knows that she’s always going to be more invested in staying alive when he’s there supporting her, and he also wants to be further away from the edge so that he can stop thinking about it.

He stands up and holds out a hand. She giggles when she sees herself through his eyes, and then she jumps up into his arms, and he catches her, laughing. She wraps her legs around his waist and kisses him, then buries her face in the crook of his neck and shoulder. She doesn’t nip. They’re both too low on fuel for siphoning not to make them feel worse, rather than better.

It’s hard not to think about spiking her when she has her ankles crossed behind his back and her pelvic block’s flush against his.

“You don’t have to try not to think about that,” she whispers, though he hears the words as she thinks them. “I think about that a lot myself.”

Soundwave has never done it, but he doesn’t feel like a virgin, because he’s been caught up in other people’s experiences whether or not he wants to be. He knows what it would feel like, just as he knew how kissing would feel before she opened her mouth to him. Except, of course, that it will be better. Everything is, when it’s happening to him, and with her, and because they both want it to.

“I don’t like it when other people think about fucking me,” Ravage says into his neck cables. “But I like it when you do.”

“Why?” He nuzzles the top of her head. “Drift never wanted to hurt you, so it can’t be that.”

“Drift feels sorry for me,” she says, with a soft little laugh in it. “Poor little Ravage, so beautiful, but she doesn’t know what pleasure is. I could help her get over it, and that would be fun for me too.”

Soundwave kisses her forehead, and down her nose, before kissing her mouth. “How am I different?” he asks after the kiss, the tip of his nose pressed to hers.

“You spend a lot of time thinking about how I’m going to look when you finally make me overload,” Ravage says, with a slyness in her voice that hits him somewhere between the base of his spike and the exterior nodes of his valve.

She’s not wrong. He also wants to give her all of the pleasures that she was denied when her master chose to use her and lend her out like a ‘hospitality’ drone, but his reasons for wanting to pleasure her have nothing to do with the uses to which she’s been put in the past, and he doesn’t think of her as damaged and in need of fixing. He just wants to make her feel good, and feel beautiful, and most of all, to feel loved and adored.

“What if I really, really want to?” she whispers against his mouth, and then she kisses him again.

And yet, she’s rattled. They’ve tried to do it before, and she hasn’t been able to open her panels to him. She doesn’t want that to happen again.

“Soundwave: is not giving up. Will never give up. Even if it takes a million years. We will do it, and you will enjoy it.” He hopes it doesn’t take a million years; he hopes it happens in the next five breems. But she is worth waiting for.

Ravage kisses him, and her kisses spread warmth and desire and lust throughout both of their bodies. She’s done this before and he always loves it, but he’s conscious now of a pulse spreading along with it. Her spark and his are pulsing in time, entrained, as if they were one, and the energy glitters and dances throughout their neural nets. He hadn’t expected that; he has never experienced anything like that, in anyone’s mind. Does it mean something? Will this be the night when she finally opens to him?

He lets his imagination run wild through his memory banks. The memories aren’t really his, but he wasn’t asked if he wanted to have them, and he’s glad he can at least get a sense of what she might like, as he inserts them into only the very best of the experiences he has been unable to shut out.

She concentrates on the bits where the person whose recorded mind she is in is opening up to the other. She is trying to make her body understand how it feels to be penetrated when there’s as much charge in your valve as there is in hers, right now.

{Ravage could spike, if that would be easier.}

He also hasn’t been spiked before, but he isn’t afraid of it, even though his valve is still sealed. He’s thought before about how she would look with the pull tab clenched in her teeth and the seal hanging out of her mouth, her spike hilted all the way up in him. She’d try to be gentle, but even if she slipped up a bit, she’d be playful enough not to hurt him.

“I do want that,” she says, “but first, I want this.”

She’s had people she hated inside her, but he’s her love and she’s never had him, and she’s not going to put up with that. She deserves to know what it’s really supposed to be like. And also, if her body belongs to her, like everyone keeps telling her it does, then it ought to do what she wants it to do and stop glitching when all of her nodes are swollen with charge and the gel’s dripping out of the seams in her panel.

And she won’t be able to spike him until she knows—in frame and spark, not books or borrowed memories from strangers—that spiking does not have to hurt, and that she will not hurt him.

That’s the piece Soundwave’s been looking for. It has always eluded him until now.

{We’ll be mind-linked. You’ll know if you do something painful, and then you’ll stop, and you’ll do something else. Just like I would.}

They’ve been over that part. She knows that she might have scars, even though Ratchet says he fixed everything that was fixable, and that the only part he couldn’t replace was one that has to come out of most people eventually anyway. She knows that if he causes her any pain he will stop at once, because they’re both too sensible to deny that the possibility exists.

Is that why her body will not cooperate?

She accepts his silences, and his meltdowns, and the way his syntax crumbles under pressure, and his strong opinion that life needs a soundtrack when stealth’s not required. And Soundwave accepts her quick temper, her stubbornness, her inability to tolerate full sun, the sickness she feels when she smells certain kinds of decay, and her occasional worrisome desire to eat things she’s killed.

He accepts this uncertainty, too. He needs her to know that even if sometimes he has to hold her until she can sleep and then pump his spike in the washracks, he will not give up on her. She’s just as frustrated when her body refuses to open as he is when he can’t stop himself from planting his aft on the floor and rocking, trying to shake the words loose so he can explain.

“Stop talking,” she says, with a soft laugh. He hasn’t said a word but he knows what she means. He had to acknowledge the possibility that it might happen again, but if they think about it more than that, she’ll freeze before they even get started.

Freeze. The sky’s getting darker.

“We should go inside,” Ravage murmurs. “It’s going to get cold, isn’t it?”

Soundwave shakes his head. If he silences his own desire and his own thoughts, he can feel Laserbeak sleeping, curled up against Buzzsaw, who’s almost asleep himself. “Not for a while. If we go inside and make out, we’ll wake up the birds again, and they’re going to complain.”

“They’re recharging this early?” Ravage winces. “They need more fuel, and they need high-grade; it’s really for fliers like them, not so that goons can get stupid.” She is now feeling guilty for not having stolen more fuel, but all she could get in the area near their worksite was a packet of rust sticks.

“They don’t want to be bothered right now. Do you?” Soundwave says gently.

Ravage glances away, embarrassed. “No. The only thing I want right now is you.”

“If they were desperate they’d steal,” Soundwave reminds her, “and you know that. They know we’re going to divert that shipment tomorrow. You’re hungry, too. Like we all are.”

Ravage nods, and slips out of his arms to her feet. They have an old mesh blanket stashed up here. She spreads it out and sits down on it. The blanket isn’t much cleaner than the rooftop itself, but it serves as padding and makes things more comfortable.

Soundwave kneels, and takes her hand in his own. He kisses the palm and the wrist and the pads of each digit. She flexes her claws out, carefully, and he sucks on them. Ravage whines, and even if he couldn’t feel what he’s doing to her through their link, he’d know it’s a noise of pleasure, so he does the same thing to her other hand. He’d do it to her feet if he didn’t know how filthy the rooftop is, and the thought makes her giggle.

They fall backward together. He kisses her mouth, and she arches her back so he can slide one of his arms underneath her and roll and pull her on top of him. Being underneath him makes her feel safely surrounded sometimes, but just for the moment he doesn’t want to have to consider his weight; he wants to do nothing but kiss her and stroke her back, staying clear of the oversensitive spinal struts and ghosting along the seams of her armour plate.

This is what they always do, when they try. They lie like that for a while, kissing and touching and stroking each other. Their hands wander; so do their minds; he imagines her open and ready, her valve dripping with hunger.

She already knows where some of the most sensitive seams in his plate are, and she lets him release the cables in his arms to wrap around her limbs and slip into her ports. The more securely he holds her against him, the safer she feels.

Conductive gel has begun to seep out around the seams in the panels that cover her array. He knows what the swollen nodes in her valve will feel like under the sensory pads in his digits. He can imagine the wet sounds that his fingers will make in her, slipping in and out and opening her up inside, feeling for places that need to be touched and scars to avoid.

Her hips shake lightly against him. He wants to hear her cry out as he touches her. He can imagine/remember the way it will feel when he presses his mouth to the swollen pleats of her labial mesh and laps at her glowing, hot nodes. Without words, he promises her that it’s going to be good: he is going to make it so good for her.

He will enter her gently, let her set the pace if she wants. It will be good. He will fill up the ache she is already feeling inside and connect to her ceiling node with the tip of his spike. She can ride him as hard or as soft as she wants. She makes soft little noises, an aborted miaow that catches in the back of her throat. It means: want.

She is shaking with lust, more afraid that she won’t be able to do it this time than she is of being taken again. Behind her panels her callipers are tightening around empty air.

Soundwave doesn’t know what else to do to reassure her. His thighs are damp with her lubricant and his spike is aching and he wants to let it out, but he hasn’t done that before; he is afraid she will be frightened when she sees it.

“Show me, I want to see.” Ravage is stroking his panel with her fingertips, and tracing the seam with a half-sheathed claw. He can’t resist that.

He lets it out, pressurising instantly as it emerges, and she wraps her hand around it, stroking him, which is something he hadn’t imagined before. He does not want to overload now, but he could. Seeing the light that flares in her optics as she lets him thrust right into her curled hand is almost enough to do it even without the sensation.

Soundwave did not want to rush this but he doesn’t want it to stop. He reaches down, between them, to stroke her panel gently with two of his digits, tracing the seams and sliding through the silky wetness. Ravage is moaning, but her panel stays closed, and the next moan turns into a hiss of frustration. She’s fighting herself again.

“Stop,” he says, and rolls her onto her back.

“I don’t want to stop, I want you to—”

“I know. But you have to stop thinking about it and just let it happen.” He takes her hand from his spike and kisses it, licking his lubricant off her digits and claw tips. “Let me try something.”

Ravage’s consent is wordless but unmistakeable. Soundwave slides down over her until his face is between her legs. He licks the gel from her thighs and traces the seams of her panel with his glossa, pressing his mouth to the heat, amazed that her forge is on fire and her panel has not at least softened. Did Ratchet replace it with durasteel?

Ravage moans as he presses sucking kisses to the panel, teasing the seam with the tiniest and most delicate licks. He can feel her pleasure and frustration at once. The panel almost comes open once or twice, but something inside her that she isn’t conscious of sends out an override. But he wonders if something is actually stuck, because she wants this as much as he does.

“May I use my cables?” he asks, out loud and in her mind.

“Anything you want,” Ravage groans. “Pull it open if you have to. You have my consent. I am asking you to do this.”

“I never want to force you,” he whispers against her panel. “I’m fine if we don’t.”

“Maybe you are,” says Ravage, and he feels her burst into tears, “but I’m not.”

Soundwave slips a cable into her through the seam of her hip joint, and another on the other side, looking for ports to plug into. She has plenty of data ports that are further away, but he wants to get as close as he can to the actual mechanism.

“Hack me,” Ravage says, and there is a growl in the words that is louder still in their minds. “It’s not force if you have my consent.”

He doesn’t like the idea of breaking her open like a safe…but she wants it.

He finds a port on either side of her array and plugs in. She is so charged up that he’s suddenly afraid she might short something out if he can’t get her to overload, so he transmits a gentle pulse into the mechanism and slowly, her panels do open, releasing a flood of gel; he slips his digit into her and sucks on her anterior node, and then she does reach an overload, but he knows it isn’t enough to release her completely, or even to pull him over the edge with her, and then he’s pulling his hand back before the panels snap shut again.

Soundwave is at his wit’s end, but he slides back up to kiss her mouth, because if he did it once he can do it again, and he needs to keep thinking that for them both until she relaxes again.

She kisses him harder than she ever has before. Soundwave is deeply relieved that she isn’t angry again with herself.

Their sparks are pulsing in unison and there’s a fullness in his chest that wants to explode even more than the throbbing in his spike does. This sensation is completely outside even his vicarious experience. The seams in his upper torso, and hers, are glowing.

Ravage puts one hand on each side of the central seam in his chest and lightly pushes his chestplates apart. He lets her, astonished at how good it feels, how wonderful it is no longer to be constrained.

His spark chamber is open.

“Sit up,” she says, and he does, although his spike is still pressurised and he doesn’t want her to be any further away than she already is. Her chestplates come open without any effort at all. At least something is going to be easy…?

Her spark chamber opens as she straddles him, and then she takes his spike in hand.

Soundwave is astonished; her panels have finally come open without being hacked, and she is guiding him into her slick valve, which clenches around him, and oh, it is so much better than it ever was in his memories as she slides right down onto him, joyous and laughing, until he is fully sheathed in her. She’s smaller than he is, but somehow he fits her perfectly. Her callipers ripple around him, and yet it’s not a tenth as overwhelming a sensation as the pull of his spark toward hers.

Then she is pressing her chest into his, and their sparks actually touch.

They are one. It’s deeper by far than a mindlink. Their sparks have merged completely. They are one on every level from living spirit to frame. They are made of nothing but love. She is his. He is hers. They are part of each other forever now; he can feel the connections dazzling through their neural nets, too many and too deeply for any mortal power to break.

He knows that spark-bonding happens through merging, but he doesn’t think it’s supposed to happen this fast, after just one merge—and she thinks, as does he, with one mind, that they have been somehow impossibly blessed. They can never be parted again, no matter how much physical space comes between them. She is safe with him; he is safe with her. She will open for him forever.

A small part of him has been trying to hold something back, to make sure she can get what she needs from him; it lets go. Her frame stiffens briefly, and the callipers in her valve contract in waves around him, bringing him over the edge with her in a massive release of charge.

The charge isn’t even all theirs, but Soundwave can’t mind that. She’s had residual charge building up in her arrays since the first time someone was gentle enough to try and arouse her, because she wasn’t good enough at pretending she wanted to be violated, and every time she’s ever made out with Drift, or with him, has only been fanning the flames.

But he’s the one she wants. The one she has chosen. The one she is clinging to like an anchor while the storm of it rushes through her body and their sparks are knitting themselves together.

Crying and laughing with joy and relief and love, in his arms, as their sparks begin to let go, but not entirely, as bits of themselves incorporate into each other, Ravage nestles closer as he rocks her into the afterglow. “I love you,” she says. “And I hope you don’t mind if I want to do this a lot.”

“I love you, too.” Soundwave shakes his head, amused. “That’s the idea,” he said. “You’re supposed to want it, or it’s not supposed to happen. And I also want to do it a lot.”

“Good,” Ravage says, nuzzling his face. “I’m coming for your valve seal next.”

Soundwave can’t wait.

Chapter Text

Ratchet didn’t know that seeing Ravage and Soundwave into the clinic together was just the beginning of a very long day. He’d been worried about them ever since Glit had told him that Soundwave came in with her during the siege, but they were good for each other, and he had to admit that since Senator Ratbat believed she was dead and House Kymatos (except for Shockwave) had repudiated and abandoned Soundwave, probably nobody cared to go looking for them.

He did worry about Shockwave, though. The Senator from Kalis could not stay out of trouble for a hot breem and his mouth needed trigger discipline.

Soundwave’s treatment plan was working, mostly because he complied with it—but it was also because Ravage, and her aviform partner Laserbeak, had put a lot of work into supporting him in it. They’d even managed to source the expensive materials he’d wanted to line Soundwave’s helmet with, and he didn’t ask how. Glit could not have done a better job of sewing it in than Ravage and her sister had managed to do.

But something had changed. It took him a while to pinpoint the difference. Ravage seemed more sure of herself than she ever had before, and Soundwave wasn’t yearning anymore.

Oh, Primus. They’re lovers now. But they’re so young—

No. They weren’t. Ravage was a cold construct and while she had been sold before her training and upgrades were finished, she had reached the age she would have reached by the time that would have taken, and Soundwave would have come into his majority by now if that blasted mentor of his hadn’t declared him incompetent and junked him.

Ratchet cleansed his leaky optics with a soft cloth. Somehow, even with Drift’s rather dubious notions of ‘help’, he and Gasket had managed to keep Ravage alive long enough to grow up. And she’d found Soundwave, and she’d kept him alive.

“She made an appointment,” said Glit. “They need to speak to you privately.”

Ratchet winced. Ravage didn’t move like she was hurt, and neither did Soundwave, but Ratchet still got a flashback to the night he’d smuggled Ravage back to the Dead End in stasis and put her back together on the table in their one good operating suite.

The cats’ designers had been perverse. Their CNA was a mess; some of it was Quintesson work, which Ratchet wasn’t even supposed to know was a thing, and there were other bits he’d run searches on only to get the Department Head asking about his ‘sudden interest in extinct Predacons’. Even though their carefully selected sparks—and Ratchet did not know the selection criteria, but Glit had told him that they had been told that they were selected for this—had been put into cold-constructed frames, their frames were also perversely designed.

They had gestation tanks. Atavistic organs that sometimes developed in forged mechs no matter how hard the blacksmiths tried to prevent it, that never did anything useful. Most of the time the tank would eventually end up producing undifferentiated sentio metallico overgrowth riddled with broken strings of CNA, and it had to be removed before that slag took root in the protoform and started to replicate itself elsewhere. A lot of mechs had them removed before that could happen.

Ravage’s had had to come out because the connection between the tank’s upper intake and her spark chamber had been broken by a blow that ought to have done for her, and he’d found most of her innermost energon in the biggest piece of it. So after he’d welded her spark chamber closed, he had had to take the pieces out without spilling it, and pour it back in so she didn’t have to run dry.

“Did you have an interface problem?” Ratchet asked gently, after ushering them both into his private office. “I’m sorry, Ravage, I did my best. But you’re an unusual model, and even though I could scan Glit to get an idea of how things should look…you weren’t in any position to tell me if the results were properly functional, then.”

Ravage snorted. “As I recall, at the time I said something along the lines of ‘take all of it out and send it back to the Senator with my compliments’, and you told me you would take all of it out if I still wanted you to once I’d healed, but you’d need to figure out how I worked first.”

Ratchet nodded. “Well…I hope you don’t regret deciding not to be unsexed?”

“Not at all,” Ravage said with the warmest and sweetest smile she had ever produced in his presence, and then looked up at Soundwave fondly. “Ratchet also told me that the Senator thought I was dead and that it would be better for me, and for Ratchet himself, if he continued to believe that.”

Ratchet winced, but Ravage and Soundwave were laughing. It wasn’t a nice laugh, and he hoped they were going to stay safe, and not try anything stupid. But it was probably just Ravage, laughing about her trauma so that she wouldn’t have to be embarrassed when people tried to address the pain underneath.

Both of those kids needed therapy. Neither of them would be getting it. It was hard enough to get surgical trainees to come out to a place like this, but they could be lured with the promise of interesting trauma cases.

Soundwave finally spoke. “There is a line of intrusive code in her interface protocols and it doesn’t allow her to open her panels unless it is bypassed. I have found two ways to do this.”

He sounded so much like his brother when he talked about any kind of science. It was a crime that he would never get a proper education.

“How do you do it?”

“Spark-merging, usually. The other method is to send a slow, low-energy pulse simultaneously through both of the internal medical ports on either side of her valve array, but it’s much less effective after the first overload, no matter how charged she is.”

The first overload. Ratchet grinned in spite of himself; little Ravi had got herself a mech who’d take good care of her. Then the rest of it sank in. What in the name of Primus had Soundwave been thinking?

They were less than a vorn old, and they were encouraging the formation of a permanent spark-bond! And when they weren’t doing that, Soundwave was plugging into internal medical ports he shouldn’t even have known about!

“Soundwave: knows lots of things he should not know.” The modulation had come back on.

Inwardly, Ratchet cursed. It was hard to school his internal thoughts around Soundwave. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it’s just dangerous.”

“Affirmative,” said Soundwave. “Ravage had critical levels of charge when I first attempted the hack. I did not want her to short out internally. I did not know of the risk…but I would have done the same thing if I had.”

“How’d you find the ports?” The voice was Glit’s. Ratchet frowned. When had Glit come in?

“Glit, we had a talk about your sister's medical privacy, did we not? What’s going on out front?”

“Nothing, it’s quiet, still early.” Glit shrugged. “Anyhow, you don’t know I won’t turn up with the same problem someday.”

Ratchet snorted. First Aid would have told him about it. “I was under the impression there was nothing whatsoever wrong with your arrays, given how much you like using them.”

Glit shrugged again. “It is a part of our intended function, so yes, I do enjoy having that circuitry activated.” He scowled. “Interference with that can cause dangerous levels of overcharge. Good on Soundwave for finding a workaround.”

Ravage was quietly crying in Soundwave’s arms, hopefully just from embarrassment and not because she was triggered. “I’m sorry,” said Ratchet. “I can send him out—"

“We are already spark-bound,” Ravage snapped through her tears, “and I’ll never regret it! Never! It happened the first time we merged, and it was a miracle!”

Soundwave frowned, probably because he knew exactly how everyone in the room was thinking and feeling, and it had to have been painful.

Ravage went on: “Everything Ratbat did to me that night, everything Soundwave’s family did to him—it was all because Soundwave loved me, and wanted me for his own, and I wanted and loved him too, and I’d never wanted anyone else!”

A lot of very ugly blocks dropped into place, and Ratchet was horrified by the edifice they made. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, very gently. “You’re very young for the commitment that you’ve made, but after everything you have been through, I can’t deny that you have earned the right…”

Glit just sat there, looking horrified.

“Our laws are interpreted by Functionist slaghelms who won’t acknowledge your right to be bonded, but the two of you are conjunxed,” Ratchet explained. “You’re not even conjunx electa, or conjunx endura. You two are conjunx eterna.”

“Good,” said Soundwave. “She’s mine and I’m hers, and anyone who ever tries to part us again will end up stuck somewhere between Unicron’s maw and his obstructed aft exhaust port.”

The wording was more Ravage than Soundwave, Ratchet thought, but the sentiment was shared…by everyone in the room, apparently.

“Well,” said Ratchet, still stunned. “Congratulations.”

He had only spark-merged once, with Pharma, on the night after their conjuncture ceremony. Neither of them had ever wished to repeat it, though it had been pleasant enough. Pharma had felt it was too revealing. She had never really had a private life, and Ratchet respected her desire to maintain some boundaries.

Ravage and Soundwave—especially Soundwave—had never had privacy.

Ratchet scanned their fields. The bond was already well-established, and for all he knew, the silly kids might even have started the process before they ever ended up out here. He didn’t know how to ask about that. Then—

Ravage had pulled herself together. “Sometimes I just want to do it,” she said. “Without having to merge when we don’t have time to do that. I love doing it, don’t get me wrong, but…”

Ratchet sighed. “You just want to get sticky without any impediments—?”

“Of course she does,” said Glit, rolling his optics.

“Sometimes we just want to fuck,” said Ravage. “Like everyone else does. Sometimes there isn’t time or space or privacy enough for anything more and we still want it bad. Don’t tell me you don’t know how that works!”

Ratchet tried not to laugh, but Soundwave’s mask was lowered and his visor was up, and the expression on his face was the smuggest thing Ratchet had ever seen on anyone who wasn’t innately punchable.

And that was how he ended up with Ravage on a table while Soundwave held her hand and discovered that he, too, had to open her array through the medical ports, and that not keeping the pulse on would cost him a valve speculum. It was Glit who ended up patching the code.

Ravage had been programmed not to open her panels without Ratbat’s permission. Glit’s own code had no such unwelcome additions so he just replaced the offending routine with his own programming.

Ratchet swore loudly and inventively; how had he missed that?

“It’s archaic, that’s why,” Glit grumbled. “It’s…what did you call it, Quint-era slag?”

Ratchet growled, but now that the problem was solved, Ravage and Soundwave departed in grateful haste. He hoped they wouldn’t do it in the alley. Everybody did it in the alley—people turned tricks there! and sometimes he just wanted to hose the entire place down with the strongest anti-nanobial solvent they didn’t have nearly enough of.

The day was still shaping up to be a quiet one, and Ratchet actually took a nap, which was probably his first mistake. He woke up from his unintended and all-too-short nap because Glit had barrelled into his private office, slamming the door shut behind him, and was now sitting under his desk in a vaguely cat-shaped ball, shaking.

“Stay put,” said Ratchet, grabbing a wrench and an arc welder.

The clinic was absolutely free of patients. The cleaning was done. The day nurse was playing a game on a datapad and he couldn’t even yell about that.

Ratchet went back into his office. Glit was still under his desk.

“What’s got you so spooked?”

Sometimes, when Glit was very bored, he did take a wild notion to chase things that didn’t exist, but it had been a long time since the last time he’d done it. As Ravage’s creche-sib, he was no older than she was, and the last time he’d done it, he hadn’t been any more fully cooked than Ravage had been when he’d brought her out here.

And when Glit chased invisible vermin, he always caught them and killed them. He did not scootch up under a desk and hide from them.

“Comm,” Glit said. “Why does Brightaerie know the frequency code? Pharma does not know the frequency code!” His tail twitched.

Ratchet’s mind went clear and cold at once. Glit was right. Pharma wouldn’t have given them away to her mentor, and—more importantly—she couldn’t have.

“Did you say anything?”

Glit shook his head. “I was afraid she’d recognise my voice! I triggered the wrong number message, the one that says the code’s been reassigned.”

“Good job,” said Ratchet, and gave him the kind of ear skritches he would never have tried to give Ravage, because for some reason, Glit liked that. Then he paused mid-skritch. “She?”

Glit shrugged. “Where do you think Pharma gets it? Not the gender variance, but the attitude she has about it? The Vosni still know about girls, but the Vosni don’t care. Unless they care what people in Iacon think, and everyone in that family cares more about what people here think than they care what their neighbours at home think.”

Ratchet leaned back in his chair. Suddenly so many things made sense. Vos chafed as much under Iaconian rule as Tarn, Uraya and Kaon did, and Brightaerie was a good little collaborator. Still, it was galling to know how long he had been a part of this…family? without knowing that the head of the family was also a femme. Even Glit hadn’t told him. But Glit really couldn’t have, could he? Until the day of the breakup, Glit had been Pharma’s property. He would still have been Pharma’s property if Ratchet hadn’t got Dominus Ambus to give him the Ambus Test.

And he’d passed. They hadn’t told Pharma yet, because they were planning to see if they’d need to. She wanted out of the marriage and Ratchet thought she might be more reasonable if she didn’t know they’d already taken that step.

Dominus Ambus owed him some very fine liquor, but what he really owed was an apology, and to Ravage, which was never going to happen because she was legally dead. It made Ratchet’s dentae itch that he couldn’t tell the snotty little bastard that Ravage had probably failed the test because she was being continually traumatised, and not because feliforms were not intelligent.

“Well,” said Ratchet, “that’s good, then. At least she doesn’t know that whatever she has actually does lead to us.” He wondered who might have been able to come up with it and then scowled. That little brat Caduceus had worked with him here once or twice, but he’d worked here—surely he wouldn’t have—?

“Why are you so scared of Brightaerie?”

Glit’s expression was confused and unreadable. Ratchet leaned back in his chair.

“Did she threaten you?”

“Repeatedly,” said Glit. “But not today. She thinks we’re lovers because I sit in your lap at home.”

Ratchet snorted. Ignoring the numerous ethical issues, they did not find one another the least bit attractive that way. Ratchet did have an unethical crush he was deeply ashamed of and tried not to think about, but it was not Glit. He just liked to pet Glit a lot, because Glit liked to be petted, which was a nice arrangement for both of them.

Glit was not a telepath like Soundwave, but something must have given away Ratchet’s thought process, because he leapt up into Ratchet’s lap and began to purr insistently.

Ratchet gave in to the inevitable.

“I thought you were dating First Aid.”

“I was,” said Glit. “But that’s not going to work out.”

“Oh?” Ratchet sighed. “Do I want to know why?”

“Nothing to do with Functionist aftslag,” Glit muttered. “We are just…not compatible.”

“Really?” Ratchet was very surprised. First Aid seemed like the type of person who would appreciate a cuddly, purring lover who was just as idealistic as he was himself. “I would’ve pegged you for possible junxies, if only the law.”

Glit snorted. “It’s not that I can’t be dominant,” he said with a quiet sigh. “I am not rough enough for First Aid, who wants me to use my claws on his bare protoform. The correct response to ‘I could sever one of your secondary energon lines completely by accident’ is not ‘That’s all right, you know how to patch that in time, right?’”

Ratchet sat there for a moment, continuing to pet Glit, on autopilot. Refusing to let that sink in.

But then it did, anyway. “Yeah. I’m not sure I want to know any more about this. You want me to talk to him?”

“Absolutely not,” Glit said with a sniff. “I just want you to know I am never going to date him again.”

If only that had been the end of the excitement for the day.

Chapter Text

The lovers never appeared at midday, when the sun was highest and brightest, but Orion would see them around the Dead End in the mornings and evenings. He was sure that the boxy blue mech was Shockwave’s brother, and Megatron had confirmed for him that the feliformer was his muse, Parvilla of the Sorrows, whose tears would never fall again once she came home to Kaon.

But Parvilla had not gone to Kaon, and she was remarkably free of sorrows and tears. It had never occurred to Orion that anyone could truly be happy living in a place this bleak and broken, but unless she was focused on something concerning or complex, Parvilla was always laughing these days.

Orion hadn’t remembered it before, but he’d seen her around back when he’d first met Shockwave and Soundwave. She had belonged to Senator Ratbat, and they had called her something else. Shockwave had been furious because Senator Ratbat mistreated the cat and refused to sell her, but he wouldn’t discuss it with Orion in front of his brother, and when they were alone, somehow the subject never came up. And then the cat had been killed, except not, because she and Soundwave were currently playing in the street.

Parvilla had dropped to all fours and was running through the street, but not at full speed. She was allowing Soundwave to catch her. When he did, he picked her up, and she licked his face. Orion watched him kiss her long nose, and then she transformed back into her root mode.

Soundwave set her down on her feet. “When we get home—”

“I know,” Parvilla said, grinning back at him.

“Oh, do you?” Soundwave pulled something round—a ball? from his subspace, and tossed it to Parvilla, who caught it and ran another half-block, and then threw it back to him. Were they actually playing with a ball in the streets of the Dead End of Rodion?

Nobody else in the streets seemed to notice, but Rodion was a place where people tended to mind their own business, and exuberant behaviour wasn’t completely unusual, though it was more common after dark. Orion had forgot how young they were. Parvilla was a cold construct and had always been the same size, so he hadn’t been sure of her relative age back then. But Soundwave had still been a minor.

Orion had initially gone looking for them because Shockwave wanted to know if they were alive and well, and would probably find a way to put them somewhere else that was safer and more comfortable, if he could. This would’ve suited Orion; he wanted them out of his beat.

Orion was investigating energon shipment diversions. Every so often, in no clear or predictable pattern, trains would disappear from the route trackers. The paperwork on every end looked fine. But energon was going missing—everything looked fine when it arrived, but shipments were clearly being shorted in a manner that made it impossible to stockpile and hoard the excess.

One person—who probably didn’t know that someone under him was the one profiting—had complained. The rest of the officers in charge of distribution didn’t want to talk about it.

The trains claimed to be unaware of any deviation from their routes. They were not infected with processor viruses. They had not been reprogrammed. There was no data trail. Most of them were cooperative, although this one smart-aft called Astrotrain thought the whole thing was hilarious.

Nobody seemed to be getting rich from any of this illegal energon trading, but there were noticeably fewer empties and leakers on the streets, even in Rodion. People who didn’t have proper identification, and were serving no function, were looking remarkably well-fuelled. Unsurprisingly, no-one was willing to say how or where they were being fed.

Orion could not say that whoever was doing this deserved to be punished; but he was expected to bring someone in.

Orion could not forget how distraught Shockwave had been when his brother was turned out of the house. People had told Shockwave to put his energy into convincing the heads of his House that as a Senator, he deserved to become their heir, and reminded him that there was no evidence anywhere of his brother’s continued functioning.

Soundwave had not gone to the Functionists looking for work. He had not appeared at a temple to accept Primus’ charity. He hadn’t gone back to Jhiaxus, as some had expected him to. He hadn’t signed up for any other form of assistance, and he hadn’t turned up in any accredited hospitals or clinics. No-one had ever found his greyed frame, but it was still most logical to assume he was dead.

Shockwave disagreed, and once, when he was absolutely fendered on high-grade, designer circuit boosters and an extremely illegal alien aphrodisiac that was probably made from the tears of organic sparklings, he had told Orion that the people who told him his brother was dead were unaware of Soundwave’s talents. That the young mech had ways of staying in contact with friends nobody even knew he had without leaving a data trail, and that none of these communications were going through traceable channels.

On the underweb, Noisechan One was quietly celebrating the return of its creator, the Signal. Most people seemed to believe that Parvilla had found him. Orion was supposed to be a police officer, and police officers weren’t supposed to frequent the noisechans. But Orion thought otherwise: there were a lot of people talking about crime there, and even though they were technically anonymous, they gave away identifying information out of ignorance.

Unfortunately, the only references to energon diversion on the noisechans were from people expressing approval. None of them seemed to know anything potentially actionable.

Orion had a lot of suspicions. But he wasn’t about to arrest Soundwave for stealing from the wealthy in order to feed the poor. Shockwave would never forgive him, and his enemies would use the evidence to destroy him and hopefully every other progressive in the Senate, as well.

What Orion desperately needed to know was who else was involved. There had to be some rich, predatory slagger who deserved the empurata sniffing around that operation. There always was, in Rodion, and there were ways to make sure that they ended up dead rather than interrogated.

Orion was praying for one of two possible outcomes: that if he told Shockwave his brother and the cat-girl still functioned, Shockwave would get them out of the Dead End, perhaps to one of the colonies where no-one would care how weird Soundwave was as long as he could process data like that, and no-one would care that his conjunx was a cat—or a girl. Or that Ratchet would convince them to stop it and give up whichever of the crime bosses had to be in on it. But Ratchet refused to talk about them, even when Shockwave was asking the questions. To Orion, he had privately said, very firmly, that the cat was dead, and he had been there when she died, and that if Soundwave was alive somewhere, it wasn’t the Dead End, or any other part of Rodion.

Orion did not like having his amica lie to him so blatantly. On at least one occasion he’d told him that if Ratchet wanted a severance so he could make Glit his amica, he could have it.

Ratchet had told him that he was an idiot, and then he had kissed him.

Orion thought it was probably true that he was an idiot. He certainly did feel like one. He kept on shadowing the lovers.

Parvilla leapt twice her height, over Soundwave’s head, which Orion hadn’t known was even possible for her in root mode, and she caught that ball again. A minicon with a Tarnish accent began to swear very fluently, having lost a bet to his friend.

It was beginning to get very dark.

The buymechs were coming out, like stars reappearing as clouds floated away. Some were pathetic; others were flashy as exotic birds, lounging near the entrances of bars until the doors came open. A few former racers were driving around very slowly with their roofs retracted or open, stopping when hailed for a frag or a night on the town, such as it was.

There was a drug deal going on across the street, right out in the open; but Orion was off duty, and it wasn’t his problem.

Soundwave put the ball back into his subspace and shared a cube with Parvilla, sitting beside her on a cracked bench next to the long-dried out fountain. They talked, and then he began to play loud, rhythmic music from Tarn.

Parvilla danced: first she danced on and over the sculpture that had once been a fountain, and then Soundwave joined her, which was when it got really interesting. Parvilla in root mode, bipedal, only came up to the middle of his chest, but she could jump and leap, and sometimes she danced with him, but at other times she danced on and around him; he let her use him as a scaffold or a pole when the music was too much for him to keep up with. She incorporated transformations into her dance as well, and had a trick that made her seem to disappear and reappear.

Orion had seen this show several times, not always in entertainment districts; it sometimes happened in markets, or out by the beach. But it only happened in places you didn’t go wearing uniform badges or armour, unless you were going with your twenty best and closest well-armed friends.

Parvilla would perform a few dances with and without, on and around her lover, until she had gathered a small, enraptured crowd. Then, she would talk to them, and she’d let them stay as long as they liked, until she was out of steam. She was recruiting for Megatron, which was something else that Orion did not want to tell his bosses or Shockwave. She would listen, she would talk, she would dance; she would tell people how and why they were being deceived. Sometimes, when the conversations were interesting but Parvilla was tired, Soundwave would sit down on the street and let her drape herself across his shoulders and talk to the people who lingered around as a cat.

Orion couldn’t hear the quiet conversations she had with the individuals who came to her, but when she spoke to the crowd, he could not fault her logic. She was a persuasive, dynamic speaker, and she was right about everything that was currently wrong with Cybertron.

But her solutions were always radical. She wanted to destroy the Functionists, the Senate, the Temples and the Primacy. And she told people to steal as well as to dance, to sabotage as well as rebuild, to occupy, to resist, to revolt, as well as to give things away, and fall in love with the world and each other. She was very fond of that last bit of advice. She always glanced for at least a moment at Soundwave when she gave it.

Orion also still remembered the time she had filled his optics with purple spray paint.

Once, someone asked her if she was the Voice of Tarn. Parvilla had laughed, and told them that she was the Voice of Stanix, and then she’d asked the crowd to find her the Voice of Rodion. Now she always asked them to find her the Voice of Rodion, so she and the Voice of Tarn could come and have a few drinks with them.

Orion had loved the Voice of Tarn…but now he wasn’t sure he knew him anymore. The Voice of Stanix had always grated on him, because she was absolutely not a pacifist, and she and Megatron had gone rounds about it. He’d thought she was more highly placed, because she always gave reports about the Senate, and inclined to thinking of herself as an authority, because she spoke like someone who expected to be listened to; but Stanix was a military mass-production site, so it made a sort of sense that she was a person who’d been bought and sold.

Parvilla had impressed him as a very angry person on the noisechans—not a sorrowful one. She was still a firebrand, but Megatron was becoming even worse. Sometimes Orion wondered what he was doing with these people, but nobody else was standing up in open rebellion…

There was a soft click behind him. “Don’t move, scrofa.”

It had been a mistake to get lost in his thoughts in Rodion. Why had he thought that Parvilla and Soundwave would put on a street performance without any backup? How had he not noticed that there were at least three condorlights in the sky?

The voice of the mech behind him sounded familiar, but Orion couldn’t place it, so he didn’t move, and he didn’t speak, either.

“What made you think it was a good idea to come out to this part of scenic Rodion without your partner, scrofa?”

Orion ex-vented slowly. He had recognised the voice. It belonged to Ratchet’s pet thug and self-proclaimed personal protector, a flashy racer who’d become a Syk addict. Orion hated him. “I’m not here on duty. Not even undercover.”

“You’re lucky the good doctor is fond of you,” his assailant hissed. “If he weren’t, I would have already ventilated your cranial casing.”

“But you won’t. Because he is.” Orion chuckled. He had seen this mech kissing Parvilla, before he had known that she was Parvilla, and he’d seen him take her for joyrides. It had to have rankled that she’d dumped him for Soundwave. “I’m surprised you’re still friendly with her.”

“To the end of our days, scrofa. You frag around with her, you frag around with everyone here. Think of her as untouchable. Untouchable, and beloved of Rodion.”

“Because she and her lover are feeding you all?” Orion hadn’t realised how much he didn’t want it to be true.

The mech just laughed. “Can’t we love her because she deserves to be loved? It’s nothing like that. All of the people who know her will kill for her, and that includes Ratchet.”

Orion had known that Ratchet had lied about her. But it stung to the spark that this mech, who sold his guns when he was lucid and his aft when he was not, had been told the truth when he hadn’t. He very nearly growled aloud. He’d arrested this mech—Drift, he thought—more than once, but he left him at the clinic, knowing every time that Ratchet would refuse to let him take Drift in.

“I’ve done you a few favours,” Orion said calmly. “Mostly in the interest of not upsetting our mutual friend. Do you want to keep on that way? Because I don’t have to be nice to you, especially not when he’s not around. I don’t have to keep bringing you back to him if he doesn’t know that I found you.”

“I don’t have to let you leave here alive, if he doesn’t know that I’ve seen you,” said Drift. “Stop following her. Stop following the music box. Get out of here and don’t come back alone. Ideally, don’t come back at all. And stay away from Ratchet, too. He doesn’t need part-timers like you fragging up his life. He belongs to us, too, now.”

“You wouldn’t be alive if I hadn’t taken you to Ratchet,” Orion snapped. “He’s my amica. Please put that snub-nosed whatever away and get out of his life.” Orion turned and grabbed Drift’s arm; the burnout shot, but the shot went wild, and fortunately didn’t hit anyone else.

“Unprofessional,” Drift hissed. “I could name your weapons. I could even do it sober. Nobody needs a cop for an amica!”

A carefully aimed shot went right over both their heads and into the wall behind them. They both looked up. There was another feliformer with a bigger gun on the rooftop nearby. She, or he, or it, looked a great deal like Parvilla did, enough to be a twin-spark, maybe.

“Frag off, Howler,” said Drift. “You’re interfering with a citizen’s arrest.”

The cat laughed riotously, but their gun was on a stand and they laughed without breaking their stance.

“You certainly looked professional lying on the street in your own purge,” Orion muttered at Drift.

The cat stopped laughing. “Shut up, Pax,” they said. “You’re not supposed to be here. I will not get you out of trouble again without direct orders from Prowl.”

Why did the cat know who he was? Orion could not remember ever meeting this cat. But then he remembered seeing the cat in a flimsy; the cat worked closely with Prowl. “You’re the one who’s out of your jurisdiction. Would you like me to comm Prowl and ask him if he knows where you are?”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the cat said, laughing again. “Our jurisdiction is everywhere.”

Drift laughed back at the cat, and at Orion too. “You parasites have fun working out whose jurisdiction you think this is,” he said, “but it’s actually ours.” He transformed and took off.

The cat stood down. “He’s not wrong, Pax,” she said. “This isn’t the world we belong to.”

“Then what are you doing here? And who are you actually here to take down?”

“You don’t need to know. Don’t creep on my sister.” She—Prowl’s cat was a ‘she’—glanced away, but her tail twitched and lashed the air. The meaning of this was lost on Orion. “We only send riot police out here, and they don’t all come back. What the Pit did you think you were doing out here?”

“Does Prowl not care about the energon…redistribution?”

The cat shrugged. “It keeps people quiet. It destabilises the positions of the worst of the crime bosses here. I haven’t asked him about it, though. Both he and I have plenty of other concerns.”

“So you’re not involved with it,” said Orion. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, although if Prowl didn’t want this uncovered, Prowl could damned well advise him on how to handle the matter.

“I don’t tell people Prowl’s business,“ said the cat, “and you shouldn’t either. I would especially try not to tell Prowl what you think his business is.” The cat drew an invent between pointy dentae. “My name is Howlback. Stay away from my sister. She’s not a criminal, and she’s no business of yours.”

Chapter Text

Ratchet sent Glit home early, because the clinic was quiet. He regretted this decision the instant Drift appeared in front of the door. Drift rarely turned up after dark if there wasn’t some state of emergency, whether or not it was personal. He did not appear to be injured or ill. He was lucid enough, but he was also far too pleased with himself to be fully sober.

Ratchet wondered what he was going to be warned about, or bragged to about; they were often enough the same thing. He didn’t want to have to call Glit away from his date—which apparently wasn’t with First Aid—or to drag Jacomus and Winnow back from wherever they were and hope they were sober, or beg First Aid to drop in and help.

“Is everything all right?” He let Drift in.

“I’m just fine,” said Drift, “but you might tell your buddy Orion that he doesn’t have to be wearing a badge to stand out around here. He’s been stalking Ravage and Soundwave.”

“How do you know that without stalking him? Did Ravage or Soundwave complain?”

Ratchet got down a bottle of oil, a bottle of high-grade, and two glasses. He put a digit’s worth of high-grade in his, and offered Drift a glass without the additive. He didn’t have any idea what Drift might have already taken. Drift didn’t complain, which meant there was certainly something floating around in his energon lines.

“It’s only stalking if I planned to do it,” Drift complained. “Not if I go out there to back them up and I see him doing it.”

“I told him that Felixi was dead, which she is,” Ratchet grumbled. “And that if Soundwave Kymatos still functioned, it wasn’t out here.”

“You trust him a little less than I do, then.” Drift’s optics were laser-bright and it felt like they were burning right through him. “He’s your amica, Ratchet, and the Dead End is part of his beat. How long did you think you could keep this up?”

“I wasn’t planning on the two of them putting on shows like they have been,” said Ratchet. “They’re idiots and they’re going to get themselves killed, and I did not risk our lives dragging her out here to have her killed the way they will kill her. I even told her that. Why does she do it?”

Drift sighed. “I’m not sure I can explain. I don’t fully understand it myself. Ravage believes in things I gave up on a very long time ago. It’s infectious, you know. I think I’m immune, but I think if Pax tried to arrest them in front of their fans, there’d be riots.”

“That is not a good thing!” Ratchet snapped. “Especially not if she’s gone political!”

Drift took a gulp out of his oil, set it down, and stared at Ratchet for an uncomfortable number of astrosecs before finally saying, “She’s always been. She thinks you’d be proud of her, and I think…maybe you should be, even though I don’t want to be a part of the thing that they’re doing.”

“Idiots,” Ratchet said, more fondly than not.

Ratchet had never known Soundwave well, but looking back on the things he remembered, he ought to have noticed that the young mech was suffering from an unacknowledged, unsupported and unaccommodated disability, and needed help, which probably wasn’t what he got when he visited Jhiaxus. And he had always liked Ravage, and he had watched her change from a vibrant newbuild into a suicidal wreck, and then into a silent, secretive shadow with a worrisome sense of purpose. She wasn’t the only one, of course, but she’d suffered more than most of the Senatorial slaves did.

Which was probably why he hadn’t been able to let her die, even though she might have thought it a mercy herself at the time.

“You saved her life so she could live it,” Drift said quietly, into his glass of oil, before he took another drink. “You surely must have known she wasn’t meant to spend her entire life repairing abandoned buildings, planting crystals, and restoring infrastructure.”

“I don’t know why not.” Ratchet frowned. “It’s a perfectly fine life, if she doesn’t get too brave and lose it. What I’d wanted was for her to be safe to write poetry, and to dance without being prostituted.” He was sure his face was blister-hot pink. “I guess I picked the wrong neighbourhood for that last one.”

“You didn’t, though,” Drift said. “Ravage is deadly herself. And even if she weren’t, you haven’t seen some of the things that Soundwave can do. They have backup. But he also has a shoulder cannon now, and he can use his voice offensively.”

Ratchet had wondered about the shoulder cannon; Soundwave obviously hadn’t had it when he’d been found beaten half to death in the streets, or when Ravage had brought him in raving from starvation, exhaustion and exposure. He’d had one before, but this one looked different.

“I suppose I’m glad he’s armed,” Ratchet allowed, “now that he’s developed a sense of self again. It’s mostly self-in-relation-to-significant-other, but I’ll take it for now. I know they make decent money sometimes, even though nobody here ever seems like they have any. His music’s damned good.”

Drift chuckled. “Anyhow. Pax was watching her dance from an alley like he knew he was doing something wrong, and when I left there, Howlback was schooling him.”

“I thought she intended for people to watch when she dances in public,” said Ratchet, frowning. “He has saved your life a few times, you know, Drift.”

“He wouldn’t have, if you’d let him arrest me,” said Drift. “But that is the thing: I probably wouldn’t have noticed him if he’d been out there clapping and cheering in the middle of the crowd. Howlback was very annoyed. She was in position to assassinate someone and our argument was distracting her—so she fired a warning shot over our heads to keep people out of the alley and encourage us to leave.”

“I’d have thought he’d be working with Howlback.” Ratchet frowned. “She’s one of Prowl’s. I’m not sure how I feel about her hanging around down here so much. I wanted her to see her siblings, but…”

“Cops are jackrods,” Drift said with a shrug. “I know she didn’t choose the job. But I also know she likes it. And I think she might even like Prowl.”

“Nobody likes Prowl except Tumbler, and I’m not sure about him.” Ratchet snorted; he knew it wasn’t funny, but he also sometimes felt that Prowl was trying to make people hate him, on purpose.

“She told Orion she wouldn’t get him out of trouble again if Prowl didn’t tell her to.”

“And you were the trouble.” Ratchet rolled his optics. “This sounds like it’s almost as much fun as the conversation that I’m going to have to have with Orion will be.”

Drift laughed softly. “Why did you lie to your amica?”

Ratchet scowled. It was a legitimate and serious question, and he hated thinking about it. “Orion Pax is involved with Senator Shockwave,” said Ratchet. “The Senator is Soundwave’s brother—”

“I know that,” said Drift, cutting him off.

“Too many people do,” Ratchet shot back. “Unless their Head of House has a fatal accident, though, he can’t protect Soundwave, and Ravage’s former owner has developed delusions about them both. I don’t want Shockwave coming down here and drawing attention to them from people who are better off believing she’s dead and I smelted her. For all of our sakes. I’m sure you can imagine how bad it would be if her former owner discovered that I lied about her death and she never went into the smelter…”

“I was sure she was a goner,” Drift admitted. “But if Pax is your amica, he ought to be willing to help you protect them, because you are also protecting yourself.” He shook his head.

For someone who was objectively living one of his worst lives, Drift could be very judgemental.

“Why’d you do it?” Ratchet changed the subject. “You were here when I brought her in. And you asked me to let you donate innermost energon to a stranger. I shouldn’t have let you. I knew you were probably on something.”

“She deserved to live.” Drift sipped his oil. “Nothing I take goes into the innermost.”

“I’d be more likely to believe that if I even thought you knew all of the drugs you’ve taken,” Ratchet grumbled, but he didn’t mean it unkindly, and Drift didn’t take it that way, apparently. “Situation was desperate, though. It’s just…you’ve never offered to do anything like that for anyone else, before or after.”

“I would for you,” said Drift without hesitation.

Ratchet felt as if the bottom had fallen out of his fuel tank, except he’d seen that injury before (in Ravage, in fact) and he knew he’d be down on the floor if something had hit him that hard. “Don’t say that, kid.”

“It’s the truth.” Drift shrugged. “I’d never seen an injury like that before, although I guess I knew it happened. And you can’t see Ravage like I do. She’s golden.”

Ratchet managed not to roll his optics. Somehow, Drift could visualise EMF fields—at least, that’s what Ratchet believed he was doing, since he wasn’t delusional and it happened whether or not he was stoned—but he thought it was silly to ascribe a meaning to any of it, particularly not when it came to moral goodness or ‘spiritual truth’, whatever that was. And Drift couldn’t even control it, let alone focus it properly. “You ever tell Soundwave that?”

“It was one of the first real conversations I had with him,” Drift said quietly, “and he sees the same things in her I see, though he isn’t objective at all—”

“He knows he’s in love with her, so he knows what his biases are,” Ratchet said, shaking his head, “and he also knows there’s no Primus.” Still, it was odd. Ratchet knew Soundwave could also see EMF fields. “From here he looks more objective than you do, kid.”

“No, he’s just arrogant.” Drift snorted, and he didn’t even try not to roll his optics at that. “Soundwave just thinks that if there were gods he’d have heard them by now, whether or not they were actually talking to him.”

Ratchet couldn’t help laughing. Or fault Soundwave’s logic. “Can you blame him?”

“Well,” said Drift, “he is more lucid when he ought to be wasted than most people are when they’re sober.”

“That’s because of the way his processor works,” said Ratchet, and poured them both more oil. “It’s a paradoxical effect. Some outliers get them. But I shouldn’t be talking about this with you.”

Drift shrugged. “I assure you he doesn’t care.”

“Only because there’s a part of him that’s not sure if we’re all faking being alone in our own heads,” said Ratchet. “Though he’s better about that, now that he’s closer to Ravage, and he knows that nobody else can get into her mind.”

“Closer? That’s one word for it.” Drift burst out laughing.

“They’re in love,” said Ratchet, frowning.

“They actually might be,” said Drift. “But don’t think I’m going to decide it’s a thing that exists for everyone. I believed I was in love once, and you know very well how that ended.”

Ratchet winced, and didn’t press it. “They’re a little obnoxious, aren’t they?”

Drift burst out laughing again. “They’ve missed a few early construction shifts. And Laserbeak complains because they forget to close the door. I thought I’d feel…something. But I was just happy for her.”

“Good. I was worried about that,” Ratchet mused.

“I still wouldn’t throw her out of my bed,” Drift said quietly, glancing down and to the side.

Ratchet shrugged. He had nothing to say to that. He had had trouble viewing Ravage as a full-grown adult until early that morning, when he and Glit had fixed the intrusive line of code in her interface protocols—so he couldn’t really appreciate the sentiment when sometimes it felt like caring for Ravage and Glit was as close as he might ever get to mentoring newsparks.

Actually, there was one thing he could say. “I hope you understand that she really does love you. She met him first, that’s all.”

“Taurslag,” Drift said with a snort. “Primus spun those life-cords at the same time. Don’t even try to tell me he didn’t. I don’t doubt she loves me, but not in the way she loves him. And I’m fine with that.”

“Gasket loves you,” said Ratchet quietly.

“Do you think so?” Drift smiled slyly. “We’re amica…benefica,” he said. “You know, I bet if you clanged Pax you’d get it out of your system and see what an afthelm he is—you shouldn’t confuse amica benefica with amica endura—”

Ratchet burst out laughing this time, and completely in spite of himself. When he could talk again, he just shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. I have.”

“Ugh,” said Drift, with a small growl. “Bad enough that you have such a horrid conjunx. Pax always has to remind me that he brought me in here that one time—”

“It wasn’t just one time,” said Ratchet.

“I only remember one time—”

“You don’t remember a lot of things,” Ratchet said gently, though he didn’t expect the conversation to be any more productive than it ever had before. “It’s possible to get clean, you know. You don’t even really have to suffer. Glit and I can knock you out so you don’t feel the withdrawal while we’re adjusting the programming.”

Drift shrugged. “Why do you care so much about this?”

“Because you might die,” Ratchet said bluntly. “And not one word from you about you’re surplus to requirements, or whatever. You belong in this world for a reason.”

Drift rolled his optics. “When you know what it is, let me know, Doc. Anyhow. I still think you should close up early tonight and maybe stay home with…whatever you do for fun. The fact that Orion Pax and Howlback are both here means something is going on and I don’t trust that. A good book?”

“The Voice of Tarn put out another chapbook,” Ratchet said after a little while. He didn’t feel like trying to confront Drift about being evasive, or tell him that the he was the only person who could ever discern his purpose. “Ravage sent me a copy after they left here today.”

“You like…the Voice of Tarn?” Drift gave him a sidewise look. It was one of the first times he had ever seen Drift so unsettled when none of them were in mortal danger. “Really?”

Ratchet frowned with his entire face. Drift knew he liked Ravage’s poetry. “Is there some reason why I shouldn’t? I do like good poetry. And when you read Ravage’s poetry along with his, it sometimes looks like they’re arguing.”

“They are,” Drift blurted out. “They absolutely are.” And then you could see the shock come over his face as he realised something; if only Ratchet knew what it was.

Ratchet finally realised he had been staring, and glanced away. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Where would he ever have met her?”

“Online?” Drift shrugged.

Ratchet considered this. Drift knew very well that he worried about some of Ravage’s activities online. In some ways, they were more dangerous for her than the tagging was, though probably not the impromptu dance performances.

“Is Ravage a Decepticon, Drift?”

Ratchet had suspected that for a very long time, and he wasn’t sure he could blame her for that after everything she had suffered. He just hadn’t wanted her to become a terrorist. He’d carefully never asked her about it, and he still wasn’t sure that he wanted to know.

“You should ask her that,” Drift half-mumbled, glancing away.

Ratchet knew what that meant, and frowned. “Is the Voice of Tarn a Decepticon?”

“Uh…yeah,” said Drift, clearly surprised that anyone thought otherwise.

Ratchet groaned. “Are you a Decepticon?”

“Absolutely not!” Drift snapped. “They’re atheists!”

Ratchet in-vented deeply. “The last time I checked, the Voice of Tarn was a pacifist, and Ravage wasn’t an atheist. It’s one of the few things that she and Soundwave argue about, though they do it as sweetly as possible.”

“You should finish the new chapbook,” said Drift. “Go home, Doc. You work too much.”

Ratchet would normally have argued with that. But he had another problem, one he’d been trying to deny for a very long time.

The problem was the way that the light hit Drift’s face, casting shadows around his optics and making his lip-plates shine silver-bright. It reminded him too much of the dreams he hadn’t wanted to have—the ones where Drift had looked at him, and they had kissed. It hadn’t stopped there.

Ratchet didn’t really care if Drift was a Decepticon, he supposed; it was just that he didn’t want Ravage or Drift to die senselessly, not after all the work he’d put into repairing them, multiple times. And it certainly wasn’t how soft Drift’s lip-plates appeared to be. Drift was his patient.

Drift was an addict.

And Drift didn’t need more spikes in his life.

Dreams were dreams, but there was clearly something wrong with him if he felt these emotions and stirrings when he was awake and Drift was sitting right there.

“I probably should, but the things you’re saying sound like you’re telling me that the clinic is going to be full tonight, Drift.”

Drift cocked his head to one side and looked at him, thinking. The tips of his finials sparkled a little. Was Ratchet imagining that, or had he just not ever noticed it before?

“I don’t think so,” he said, though it took him a while. “Not unless things go wrong. And they’d have to go very wrong. They don’t do things like that out here. There’s already enough violence here. The Decepticons here are not pacifists, but they don’t like violence for the sake of it.”

Ratchet snorted. “So they’re not like their friends in Uraya or Tarn? Or Kaon?”

Drift just shrugged. “I don’t make these decisions. I’m not even part of it.”

Now Drift was the one changing the subject. He scooted his chair a little closer, leaning into Ratchet’s space and Ratchet’s field, and spoke more softly than before, even though they were alone. “I heard you’re getting disjuncted.”

“Glit has a big mouth,” Ratchet grumbled, but he didn’t have the energy to deny it.

Drift flashed him the sweetest, cheekiest smile he could manage, which Ratchet had never seen before and was truly impressed with, and then he winked. “Rav wants to throw you a disjunction party. I told her that I’d like to be the present. Some situations are better with professional help.”

Then Drift leaned back in his chair, stretching his cables out, but in a surprisingly arousing way.

“No!” Ratchet growled, almost reflexively, even though he was turning the idea around inside his mind. He didn’t want to want this. It was not the kind of person he was, or ever had wanted to be. “Absolutely not—”

“Oh, I understand you value your privacy,” Drift had said with a little shrug and roll of his shoulders; he tried to make it look careless and casual, but Ratchet could feel his field between them, stinging with embarrassment and shock at being rejected. “Just remember the rule. Cops pay double because half the time they don’t even bother to ask, but medics are always free. And even if they weren’t, Ratchet…I like you.”

Before Ratchet could launch into a discussion of how Drift didn’t value himself enough, and how unethical that would be, and why it would be unethical, Drift stood up and walked out of the clinic, only looking back from the door to blow him a kiss.

A breem or two later, when Ratchet finally felt like he could stand up again, he locked down the clinic and headed back to the slaggy, overpriced flat he’d been sharing with Glit at the juncture of the Dead End and Rodion proper. Glit was out, but Ratchet didn’t worry about that. Freedom was very new for Glit, and he was spending a lot of time out exploring.

He sat down in an armchair, smiling when he saw a scratch in the timeworn upholstery, and settled down to read the chapbook Ravage had sent him.

The Voice of Tarn was definitely no longer a pacifist.

Sometime later, Ratchet woke up because someone was banging on the door to their suite. “Ratchet! You’re not in your clinic! You’re not at the hospital! You’re not at the Senate! I know you don’t have anywhere else to go!”

Ratchet opened the door and stuck only his head out. The voice was all too familiar. “Where did you get this address?”

Pharma looked…terrible, surprisingly. Behind her was Squawktalk, in root mode. Ratchet decided he didn’t want to hear the explanation Pharma was putting together and addressed the bird. “Squawktalk, what happened?”

The aviformer stared at Ratchet, but finally spoke; her name was ironic at best. “Brightaerie has Glit.”

Chapter Text

Glit had been thinking about his date with Winnow, which was why he’d been oblivious to the dark Seeker who’d plunged from the sky and swept him up like an airazor with a mecharat.

Glit’s first thought had been to resist, but they were already at a terrifying altitude by the time he finished thinking it, and then they crossed out of the Dead End and into Rodion proper, approaching the tallest building in town, where there was another Seeker.

“Hey TC,” said his captor, “is this the right cat?”

“Yes, Warp,” said TC, in a tone of long-suffering patience. “You’ve seen him before, you know.” TC touched his ear, probably to trigger a comm, and said “Target acquired.”

“I’m Glit of Stanix!” Glit sputtered. The wind rushing past his audials was so loud at this height that it actually hurt, and not just because it was cold. “You could have just asked! Why did you kidnap me? I have a date tonight, and for what it’s worth, I don’t remember seeing either of you around anywhere, either!”

“We know,” said Warp, whose arms tightened around him. “I mean, we didn’t know about your date. But we know who you are. And I know what you’re probably thinking, but if I drop you at this altitude—”

“I’ll be a pile of disconnected parts in a puddle of energon when I land. I’m not stupid,” Glit muttered, rolling his optics.

“Warp‘s kinda stupid, though,” said TC.

“You’re stupider,” said Warp, and they took to the air again, laughing, and then—

the glittering darkness explodes out of every atom within and without the frames that hold them together and spinal struts twining around one another as they twist three hundred and sixty degrees and in a direction that’s somehow perpendicular to up and down and north and east and south at west and all at once but it doesn’t hurt and how does it not hurt bodies don’t work like this space doesn’t work like this hey are we dead—

The twist that Glit had felt centred somewhere between his fuel tank and spark chamber had brought everything he had consumed since that morning up and out and all over Warp, who was swearing fluently and profusely in several dialects, some of which Glit did not know.

Normally Glit would have said he was sorry, but he wasn’t. Not at all. The jerkaft deserved to be splattered with used food. He’d been minding his own business!

The spires of Vos appeared below them. Which wasn’t surprising at all, since Glit had been taken by Seekers. And given that everyone Glit knew in Vos was related to Pharma, he was pretty sure that he didn’t want to go wherever they were going.

Which was, apparently and unsurprisingly, Brightaerie’s familial estate. Glit had spent a few days there with Squawktalk after Brightaerie had purchased them from the project they had been part of and before she had given them to Pharma. The only person he had liked at all was Starscream. He did not want to live there ever again. And he also did not want to die there.

Pharma had once imagined that he might be clanging Ratchet, which had been ridiculous, and had promised to smelt him if she ever found what she considered creditable evidence of it. Glit had never considered even the possibility of clanging Ratchet. But evidence could be manufactured.

Therefore he was relieved to be greeted by Starscream, not Pharma and not Brightaerie—even though the greeting consisted of Starscream grabbing a hose and dousing both Glit and Warp in cold solvent. TC got hit as well, yelped, and jumped out of the way. “What the frag, Screamer?”

“I’m not having Warp and Glit come into the house like that,” Starscream snapped. “It’s disgusting! Wait out here. I’m going to tell Brightaerie that you’ll need a moment to dry off.”

Glit did not say anything. He knew better than to talk to Starscream when he was in a bad mood, and it could’ve been worse; Starscream had called him by name.

Starscream and Pharma were related through their mentors, who had siblings in each other’s trines. They had both grown up on the estate and they had both had ambitions considered unseemly for Seekerkith. Squawktalk had told Glit recently that Starscream had bonded with two mechs that Brightaerie had described as ‘street thugs’, which probably just meant that they lived in a neighbourhood where they could see other people’s houses.

Clearly, TC and Warp were the ‘street thugs’.

As soon as Starscream went indoors, TC (who was blue) tried to smile at Glit, but only managed a wince. “Screamer’s normally nicer than this,” he said. “He’s just mad because he thinks whatever Pharma and Ratchet and you are doing will reduce his chances of getting into school himself.’

“Well, that’s stupid,” said Glit, and then he realised where he was and thought better of it, but the purple one he’d thrown up on snorted and laughed. “I know Starscream. It’s you I don’t know.”

“It is stupid,” said Warp, “and TC is lying out his aft. Starscream is not normally nicer than this. He just loves us. But he doesn’t love you.”

“He doesn’t have to,” said Glit. “I didn’t say we were friends. But I like him better than most of his relatives.”

Warp actually smiled at that. “You do?”

“Yes,” said Glit. “He wants to be a scientist. I want to be a surgeon. Starscream doesn’t even know that I am legally a person now. When he finds out, he’ll either be furious, or he’ll think it’s funny that I got one over on the Functionists. Any idea which way he might swing?”

The two seekers glanced at each other and shrugged. “It depends on who’s yelled at him last, and for what,” said TC. “I’m Thundercracker, he’s Skywarp, and we know you’re Glit. Congratulations on passing the test. I’ve heard it’s wicked.”

Glit shrugged. “My sister coached me on the high society aftslag parts.”

“Oh, did she do especially well?”

Glit laughed bitterly. “She failed. They made her take it on the scheduled date, even though she’d been beaten the night before.” It felt wrong to call it a beating, but Ravage was keen on her privacy. She was angry enough that Glit knew how badly she’d been abused, when he hadn’t been anywhere near her then. “But she should’ve passed. She used to be a Recorder.”

“Recorders never pass,” said Starscream, returning. “They know too much. Except for the one Ambus conjunxed, their jobs are for life, and if Ambus’ conjunx ever leaves him he’ll probably be found in an alley somewhere.” He glanced at Glit. “And yes, I know you were built to be a Recorder, but that’s not the work you’ve been doing.”

“It’s not,” Glit agreed, and then glanced away before saying, “For what it’s worth, I hope you do get into the Science Academy. You’re one of the smartest people I know.”

It was true, but it was also the right thing to say, because Starscream straightened his back and squared his shoulders, and his wings twitched happily. “Thank you, Glit,” he said. “Is it true that you’re running a clinic?”

“I don’t have a degree,” Glit demurred, “so I can’t run a clinic. I work there, though. And Ratchet says I’d be good at it.”

“I suppose he would know,” Starscream allowed, lips pursed in a half-scowl. “I’m glad you passed the test, because I didn’t like where this was going at all, and I was furious she thought she could just order Skywarp to do it. Thundercracker wasn’t even supposed to go. I thought I’d have to toss him out a window to get him to follow along.”

“We don’t like leaving you alone here,” said Thundercracker. “Skywarp can handle himself if he needs to. I sat on a roof and played Copper Drops.” He shrugged. “We love you, you know.”

For a brief moment, Starscream’s expression softened, and while he didn’t return the sentiment aloud, Glit knew what the little swallow and nod he did actually meant. And so did the other two.

“I’m fine,” said Starscream, ducking his head. “Nobody’s going to kill me here. That place where Glit works—”

“It’s not as bad as you think,” said Glit. “I have friends there.”

“I’m sure it’s different for you than it would be for me,” said Starscream after a long, long moment. “Do you ever see any Seekers there?”

“Not often,” said Glit. “People do get rolled when they come down from Vos to gawk at us, but…I’m sure if a Seeker didn’t behave like he thought he was superior to beast-modes and war-builds and scrapped racers—”

“Exactly,” said Starscream flatly. “Anyhow, before we go in, I want to warn you: Brightaerie is going to be fucking furious when she finds out you’re a whole other person. Do you have your identification with you?”

Glit nodded. “I carry the document in my subspace, as advised, and it’s encoded on my identification chip, as well.”

“Good mech,” said Starscream, nodding.

“Why, specifically, will that make her angry?” Glit frowned. “What does me being free have to do with the role she thinks I played in this disjunction? I don’t decide what Ratchet does with his time, or how much of it he devotes to what Pharma wants.”

“Because she sold you,” said Starscream, rolling his optics as though he thought it was funny. “It was going to be a whole thing, and I was trying to figure out if there was any way that I could get you out of it, and I wasn’t having much luck with that.” His expression softened again.

Glit was sincerely surprised—both that Starscream had cared, and that Starscream was willing to admit he could not figure out what to do. He was touched that Starscream cared, but he couldn’t say thank you or even acknowledge it because Starscream would just pretend that his reasons were wholly selfish and Glit shouldn’t make this into some kind of big deal, they weren’t friends after all, they couldn’t be—

“She’s going to have to give all that shanix back,” said Skywarp, grinning. “With a little extra to soften the blow!”

Glit looked back at Starscream, who wouldn’t look him directly in the optics, and at Thundercracker, whom he had at some point decided he liked without noticing it at the time. “I don’t want to know who she sold me to, do I?”

“No!” Thundercracker snapped, and before anyone else could say anything.

“What if he won’t take his money back?” Glit sighed heavily. “I don’t understand why Brightaerie would do this. Ratchet didn’t even plan to tell her I’m free, even though I no longer have value as chattel! He was just going to let Pharma wash through his financials on my account, to get it all over with. He has friends, and we have energon, and a roof over our heads when we aren’t busy working, and that’s all he cares about!”

“You think Brightaerie believes that?” Starscream shrugged. “Anyhow I’m not too sure she doesn’t have plans for Pharma that Ratchet won’t like.”

Glit shivered involuntarily. There were things about Pharma that he hated, but he could not, entirely, hate Pharma. She could have refused to allow him to read the books she and Ratchet surrounded themselves with. She could have told their superiors that Ratchet was secretly training him. She could have told them about the clinic, that it wasn’t just a few hours one day in ten and an object lesson to his students about the dregs of society—that Ratchet had misappropriated supplies, hired nursing staff, that Glit had practised medicine unsupervised when no-one else could come—she hadn’t known that part, but she had guessed…

She could have demanded personal services, as Ravage’s owner had done, for himself, and his friends, and for people he had wanted to trust him. It was awful, but he did feel gratitude to Pharma, because she could have destroyed them both, and her mother—

Her mother would have, and probably still intended to ruin them somehow. She just didn’t know what to look for.

“Starscream,” Glit said wearily, and with heartfelt exasperation, “just tell me things. Then you won’t have BA sending your trine-mates out to places they might get killed in order to drag me up here when you don’t even want her to win!” He shook his head. “I had a date tonight.”

Thundercracker hesitantly put his hand out close to Glit’s face, and Glit inclined his head so that the big blue Seeker could reach his ears; then, skritching commenced. “I’m sorry,” said Thundercracker. “We did—the three of us—too.”

“We had opera tickets,” Starscream whined. “I need a drink.”

Skywarp brightened. “I bet he’d fit in my cockpit. We could still go! I could get us there before they lock the doors—is your date little, too?”

Before Glit could even consider how he might want to answer those statements, Brightaerie’s trine-mate Laserstorm opened the door. “Skywarp and Glit have had plenty of time to dry off, Starscream. It’s time that you all came inside.”

It was really not a request.

Glit looked up at the flickering sky and realised that they were all locked in, even though this part of the estate appeared to be open to the air. He did not want to go into the house. But he didn’t have any idea how to get out of the estate on his own, either, and could only hope Winnow had told someone that he didn’t show up for their dinner, or that someone had seen Skywarp grab him. He wasn’t sure how safe it was to use comms; he remembered that there had been times when Starscream had been cut off from the rest of the world.

Howlback was cold and tired when the Praxian bastard she’d been looking for finally moved away from the crowd. She was a good enough shot to take him out safely, but she hadn’t wanted to ruin her sister’s performance—even if it might have been good for Ravage to realise how dangerously she and her spark-mate were living, it might also have started a riot, which was part of what she was hoping to avoid—for now. He went into an alley to void fluid and she dropped him cold with three silenced shots.

Then Garboil, who had been lazily circling in the air above the crowd along with Laserbeak and Buzzsaw, dropped the package.

She had a moment of amusement over that. Pax would probably not be the one to find it. Just as well they hadn’t tied it up with a bow and a notecard.

The work hardened you. She’d known that going in, but Flatfoot had purchased her and her bird-brother and assigned them to Prowl, and it was what it was: work, or die. So she worked, and she did bad things, but she didn’t dare do them badly. It was a rare pleasure to do something good.

She wondered if Prowl knew that the bot had also had it in for Ravage, because one of his buddies had harassed her, and she and Drift had made short work of them the next time they’d shown their faces out here. He probably didn’t. But he probably wouldn’t have cared, because he’d made himself a problem in a thousand other ways, and she’d solved the problem. If there was anything that Howlback and her master agreed wholly upon, it was that the peace needed keeping.

For now.

It did occur to her that Pax should have been suspicious that she was talking to Drift. Drift was an afthelm frequently—it wasn’t her fault she’d been sold when the Project was defunded, just like the office furniture—but if he’d seen anyone other than herself or Garboil up there, they’d have had a fight on their paws. Not that she minded a fight, but she didn’t like fighting with her sister’s friends.

At some point she figured that she and Prowl would probably be on opposite sides of a fight, but it didn’t need to be right now. They weren’t ready. Megatron was in chains in Kaon, and Ravage had only just begun to get back some of her old stability and confidence, and Glit didn’t have his licence to practise. The Mechaforensics Division was full of evil jackrods, but it was also a sweet place for a Decepticon who had the capacity to serve as a Recorder to be. As long as she didn’t fuck up.

Howlback never fucked up.

She couldn’t afford to. She knew too much, and she cared too much, and every day she had to remind herself of that, because if you ever stopped caring…they got you. And then you were part of the problem.

Brightaerie was, in fact, utterly furious. She’d looked at Glit’s documentation as though she’d have liked to destroy it, and Laserstorm had put one arm around her shoulders, while Wildscream had gently taken it from her and handed it back to Glit.

“We can’t do that,” Wildscream had said. “He’ll frag something up eventually, and then they’ll revoke his papers. Maybe he’ll kill someone. He absolutely can’t be good at this.”

Glit hissed, and everyone jumped, and then Starscream chuckled.

“Why can’t I be good at it? Pharma is good at it,” Glit snapped. “You people are such slagging hypocrites!”

Laserstorm punched him in the face. It would’ve hurt coming from anyone, but Laserstorm was significantly larger than Glit was, and he wasn’t holding back; Glit felt a nasal strut break on one side as he fell, which hurt, and then energon spilled from his nasal vents. The smell of it clogged his nasal and vomeronasal sensors.

He did not make a noise, other than the noise of the strut snapping. He wouldn’t give them the pleasure of hearing him cry out, no matter how much it hurt.

Starscream’s fists were clenched and Skywarp had one hand on his shoulder.

Thundercracker leaned over and helped Glit up, glaring at all three of the elder trine. “He’s a citizen,” Thundercracker finally said. “He’s not Pharma’s property, nor yours, anymore. If I’m asked who did this, I am not going to lie, even if Star thinks he has to.”

“Who exactly do you think is going to come asking?” Brightaerie said, slipping out from under Wildscream’s arm. “The local constabulary? Iaconian Mechaforensics?” She glared at all four of them. “I suppose we’ll have to renegotiate the financial agreement before the disjunction is published. But I’m getting back what I was paid to sell you, cat. Don’t think Ratchet and you are going to come out of this any better than you would have done otherwise.”

“I want to go home,” said Glit, who had grabbed a mesh from his subspace and was holding it to his nose in an attempt to clean himself up enough that he would be able to find and staunch the tiny energon line until he could get somewhere that he or Ratchet could fix it. “Now that we’ve established that you don’t have any legal right to detain me, even if you did have the right to dispose of Pharma’s property without her consent.”

“What makes you think we don’t have her consent?” Brightaerie shot back.

Glit sighed. “The part where you had to send Skywarp to kidnap me? Maybe?”

Skywarp actually laughed out loud. His field was shaking with relief.

“We don’t have to let the two of you stay here,” said Wildscream pointedly. “You don’t belong here anymore than the cat does.”

Before Starscream could say anything, Skywarp just stepped between his own trine, Glit, and Pharma’s mentors. “That’s fine,” he said. “Don’t think our families wouldn’t be thrilled to have Star living with us.”

“Nobody’s leaving this house until Pharma comes home,” Brightaerie snapped.

A soft voice floated through the currents of atmosphere from another room. “I told you, Bright, those cats ruin everything. The lot of them should’ve been smelted.”

“Nobody asked you, Vapourwave,” said Skywarp under his breath, and as the grounder swept into the room, Glit realised that he was looking at Vapourwave of Kalis. The head of the all but disgraced House Kymatos. The mentor of Senator Shockwave. And the former warden of his sister’s conjunx.

“Warp—” Starscream groaned.

Glit knew what Starscream had to be thinking: he was thinking that Skywarp had just made everything worse for them all. But he hadn’t. Even though the Kymatos was a guest here, apparently—and hopefully not his prospective buyer—and antagonising one of Brightaerie’s friends would bring more surveillance and petty revenges upon them as long as they continued to live in the house, it was also a fact that submission to bullying only got you more bullying, and that it was good to remind Brightaerie that as long as she didn’t claim them, they didn’t have to claim her, either.

“Take the little slagdrop up to your suite, Starscream,” said Laserstorm. “Now.”

Starscream was only too eager to lead them all out of her way. When they reached the sitting room of Starscream’s suite, Starscream tossed a rug over the couch and helped Glit sit down.

“Now he’s going to ruin the rug, not the couch,” said Thundercracker, sitting down beside Glit.

“I like the couch,” said Starscream. “Brightaerie chose the rug.”

Glit took a small first aid kit and a mirror out of his subspace. Primus, he looked a complete fright, didn’t he?

“Anything I can do to help?” Thundercracker had begun to scritch Glit’s ears again. Embarrassingly…it did help, and Glit leaned into it.

“I just need to push that strut back into place. I don’t have a welder, but it’s not a compound fracture, so the pieces will hold until Ratchet and Pharma get here,” said Glit, suddenly wearier than ever before in his life. “And then I need to clean up.”

“Star’s good at cleaning up,” said Skywarp diffidently.

Glit knew this to be true, but he didn’t think they should treat it as a good thing.

“I am,” said Starscream. “And I’d love to redo your detailing, but…I actually think that maybe Ratchet and Pharma should see what they’ve done.” He scowled.

Glit’s spark went out to him. “Starscream,” he said, and his voice shook with pain as he stuck a chunk of absorbent insulating material up one nasal vent, “do you know you are being deceived?”

Suddenly, all three of the Seekers fell silent, and they were all looking right at him. Glit shrugged.

Skywarp groaned. “Glit,” he said, “do you know that you need to watch what you say in this jewel-encrusted slaghole of a house? Especially when that Wave is here. He hears everything.”

Glit sighed. He knew better than to say anything out loud, but he couldn’t help snorting, even if it hurt. He wanted to transform into his alt-mode, but then he’d have an even bigger broken nose. It was just that it would have been nice to curl up into Thundercracker’s lap and pretend for a little while that he actually was a cat, who did not have these problems.

Chapter Text

Ratchet went into crisis mode as soon as Squawktalk finished her sentence. He grabbed the bag he always kept right by the door and shoved it unceremoniously into subspace. “Pharma, you know you’re going to have to come with me. I can’t fly, and your family has probably changed its access codes.”

“Of course I’ll fly you,” said Pharma. “How else would you get to Vos?”

Ratchet still wasn’t used to this Pharma who didn’t find things to complain or argue about all the time. Was she in shock? “Thank you,” he said, “for caring about him. For Squawktalk, and for me, if not for Glit himself. Are you all right?” He took a moment to look up at her.

“I’m fine. I was just…wrong about Glit.” Pharma winced. “I was wrong, and…” The words fell out of her mouth carelessly and in a hurry, like she couldn’t wait to get them out, and then she hesitated.

“You’re sorry?” Ratchet hadn’t expected her even to try to apologise. “Tell him.”

Pharma nodded. Ratchet was almost amused. Vosni apologies were always terrible. Although maybe he shouldn’t be blaming the whole polity; it might just be his conjunx and her family. She was the only Seeker he’d ever known well.

“He is a good surgeon,” said Pharma. “And he’s very, very bright. He needs to take the Ambus Test right now.”

Ratchet queried his reality matrix to make sure this wasn’t a particularly vivid recharge hallucination, but they actually were having this conversation. “What changed your mind?”

“First Aid submitted a paper to the IJM. He had a co-author, who insisted on remaining anonymous and uncredited. I don’t know why they said they’d pull it if he didn’t name the other writer—”

“Because the editorial board is full of Functionists and there’s no such thing as a young doctor who doesn’t want publication credit,” said Ratchet, cutting her off. “Not unless he’s not a doctor and he knows he isn’t supposed to be. Let me guess who the co-author was.”

“They pulled it when they found out. Now they can’t submit it anywhere else, either.” Pharma ex-vented. “I reviewed it. I thought it was brilliant. And Aid is smart, but…parts of it weren’t smart the way Aid is smart.”

“So now you want to go and rescue him, because now he’s valuable?” Ratchet scowled. It was ironic that was what had changed Pharma’s mind, but it wasn’t funny. “Glit’s already passed the Ambus test. He’s got his documentation. Dominus owed me a favour, and I collected. You should comm Brightaerie right now and tell that he is a legal person, before she commits an assault.”

Pharma didn’t react to the news itself. “I would, if I didn’t think she might just disappear him. She’ll just ask me who’s going to file charges like that.”

“Me!” Ratchet growled. “I’m still CMO of the Senate, though Primus only knows for how long—they get worse every joor!”

“I, ah. I don’t think you should be saying that where people can hear you,” said Pharma. “Especially not in this hab tower. The security’s awful.”

“How did you even find out about this?” Ratchet closed the door and locked it behind himself.

“Starscream,” said Pharma. “He’s angry about it, too. They treat his trine-mates, well…like you.” She glanced away.

Ratchet barely remembered Starscream. But he sympathised as they headed toward the elevator, just as Drift came out of it, charged up and ready for some kind of action he wasn’t going to get. Pharma wasn’t wrong about the security.

“I don’t have time for this, Drift,” Ratchet snapped, raising his voice, “and I’m not interested.” Only one of those things was completely true, but he said them both and completed the trifecta: “Go home!”

“Don’t be an aft!” Drift huffed. “Glit never showed up for his date and Winnow’s beside himself! Then Positron told us some winged fucker made off with him! I haven’t told Rav yet—”

“Don’t,” Ratchet said firmly. “I am not going to discuss any of my patients in front of company!”

“I won’t, she’s working.” Drift frowned at him, and then took a long look at Pharma, and finally at Squawktalk, who looked exactly as much like Laserbeak as Ravage looked like Glit. “But Howlback better not be involved in this! I told you she was out by Miracle Square with that fuck-truck Orion Pax!””

“Howlback would not harm our brother,” said Squawktalk, squaring her tiny shoulders and flaring her wings. Drift very wisely took a step back.

“Your friend can come too,” said Pharma before Ratchet could answer. “He looks dangerous. How many knives and guns does he have? I can see at least five!”

“Don’t answer that,” said Ratchet, but Drift ignored him.

“Fuck yeah I’m dangerous!” Drift stood up tall, having all but forgotten that a tiny aviformer had made him take a step back half an astrosecond ago.

“We’re going to get Glit back and bring him home,” said Pharma. “I don’t know who Howlback is—”

“Our sibling,” Squawktalk said, with visible annoyance. “Was nobody listening?”

“—but I know who did this, and it wasn’t him. Them. Whatever.” Pharma glanced at Ratchet, and then back at Drift.

“Howlback is her,” said Drift, “unless scrofa’s a gender. Maybe it is!” He thrust one hand up into the air with the zeal of a scholar who’s just made a world-changing discovery…at the bottom of his third glass of engex.

“Pharma, he’s loaded,” Ratchet demurred. “This isn’t a good idea—”

“It is an excellent idea!” Drift said firmly. “I love to threaten rich afthelms.” Drift grinned and showed off all his fangs. “I love it so much I’ll do it for free!”

Pharma looked Drift up and down in a way that Ratchet did not, he had to admit, really like. “He’s not slurring his glyphs and his balance is still good, and he will scare the slag right out of my mentor. I can’t beat that price, so he’s hired.”

“FINE,” Ratchet snarled; he was deeply, existentially terrified by what his life was becoming, and he knew it was only going to get worse. “Why the Pit not? And no, I don’t think that’s what Howlback was here for, Drift, because that idiot Positron would never have even seen her!”

Pharma shrugged. “He has the sense to dislike Orion Pax,” she told Ratchet. “A sign of good sense on his part, even if he also likes you.”

“Let’s go up to the roof so you can transform and we can go,” Ratchet said, grabbing Pharma’s elbow as the elevator stopped on their floor yet again and pulling her in. “We can’t just jump out of a window.” At least Ratchet couldn’t. He couldn’t discount the possibility that Drift was so boosted he’d float.

Pharma didn’t fuss. Once on the roof, she transformed; she was a striking, elegant jet. “Everyone in. If you can mass-shift, do it. I can handle your weight but there might not be quite enough space in the cabin—could get uncomfortable.”

Drift couldn’t mass-shift, which was unfortunate because he was pointier than either Ratchet or Squawktalk were, making it likely that they’d both get poked. He leaned against Pharma’s side as she opened her door and extended the boarding ramp. “Who are you anyway, flygirl?”

Ratchet rolled his optics. “This is Pharma,” he said, laughing, “and she’s my conjunx, at least till the end of the cycle, so you can stop trying to make me jealous now, kid. Pharma, meet Drift. He’s my friend. And also my patient, no matter how much he flicks his finials or flashes his fangs at anyone here.” He climbed into the cabin and made himself as small as he comfortably could.

“I’m Squawktalk,” Squawktalk blurted out into the momentary silence. “I’m Pharma’s assistant and Glitterbomb’s sister. Please stop forgetting I’m here.” She transformed and flew into the cabin, and landed, without any warning, on Ratchet’s shoulder. At least she took up less space as a bird.

“Glitterbomb,” Drift repeated. “I absolutely love that name for him. It suits him. Like a rain of pastel fizz and shimmer.” Ratchet groaned, hoping that Drift would not launch into discussing the colours that only he and Soundwave could see.

“Wow,” said Pharma as she took off. “That sounds like something Parvilla would write, don’t you think, Ratch? I know you read underground poetry, I’m sure you’ve heard of her—”

Ratchet gave Drift a warning look when he heard the first snicker. “I’ve heard of her,” he said. “Where’d you hear about her?”

“Minerva likes her,” said Pharma. “You haven’t met her yet, have you? She’s a visiting fellow from Uraya. She’s completely open about being a femme.”

“You could be too,” said Ratchet, looking up at the ceiling. “We all know there are a lot more of you out there than anyone knows. And if you’ve read Parvilla, you know—”

“Parvilla can afford to be brave. Nobody knows who she is,” Pharma said, with a burst of soft static.

“I do,” said Drift. Ratchet kicked him. “I kissed her once. She’s a dancer.”

Ratchet kicked him again. Drift made a face at him and kicked back. Squawktalk made a coughing noise.

“It says that in her poetry,” Pharma said, and Ratchet just glared at Drift, who refused to look back at him. He knew Drift cared too much about Ravage to betray her, but he didn’t know how wasted Drift was—

“She’s from Darkmount,” Drift continued cheerfully. “I won a few races there when I was good. She let me claim her at an afterparty once. Her energon tastes like starlight, and I bet you can’t figure out which one of her poems she wrote the next morning.”

Ratchet suddenly realised that Prince Ravage of Darkmount had been an intelligent cybercat character on a holo-show for newsparks, whose family, friends and allies had included characters named Glitterbomb, Laserbeak, Howlback, and Pounce, and he stared at Drift in utter and unfeigned disbelief.

Pharma giggled. “What do I get if I guess correctly?”

Squawktalk tucked her head under her wing and let out a few bleeps that Ratchet was sure were a comment on the general intelligence and efficiency of everyone present.

“I don’t know,” Drift said, “is there something you want?” His smile drew all the air out of Ratchet’s vents, in part because Drift was looking at him when he said it, and Pharma, of course, was watching the sky she was flying them through.

“So do we have a plan?” Squawktalk finally asked.

“We do,” said Pharma. “I’m going to land on the pad on top of my mentor’s house and then we are going to go in and demand that she let Glit go back to Rodion with us.”

Squawktalk groaned. “And do we have a backup plan?”

“I think that’s why I’m here,” said Drift, and this time, when Squawktalk groaned, Ratchet groaned with her. He could almost hear the mech he had thought he had married speaking again in Pharma’s voice. Every impure thought he had ever tried to deny having had about Drift simply vapourised. He remembered her, stubborn and proud, when they had been young and determined to fix things, to make not only the mechs they served but the whole of Cybertron better.

Ratchet remembered the girl he had seen, the one she had hidden from everyone else, because it was hard enough to get into that school as a Seeker. He remembered why he had loved her so fiercely and so protectively. He remembered her confidence and her righteous anger, all of the things he thought he’d seen bleeding away day by day until there was nothing left but a shadow of who she had been. But all of those things were still there in her. She was changing. He could not deny she had the potential to be someone he’d already met, that he knew she contained.

When they landed, and Pharma transformed, Ratchet swept her into a fierce hug and kissed her.

Pharma kissed him back, twining her arms round his neck and leaning into it, and he dipped her a little.

Squawktalk made ugly, unhappy bird noises and Drift nodded and laughed, but neither of them noticed until they heard Starscream’s voice: “HEY!”

Ratchet and Pharma froze, then pulled themselves apart from each other, only a little reluctantly.

“Please come in and get your cat before Thundercracker asks me if we can keep him, Ratchet,” Starscream said with a little sniff. “I stood up to the lot of them over my trine and I’m not going to lose him to anyone else.”

Drift, Ratchet thought, looked…almost disappointed. And more than he ought to have been simply because he would not get to fight with more Vosni high-castes than he’d probably expected, while drunk as a lord and boosted into the stratosphere.

“TC loves you,” said Pharma. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

When they entered the house, Brightaerie and her trinemates were sat in the parlour, along with a mech that Ratchet did not know, who was not a flight-frame and didn’t look Vosni. “Pharma,” said Brightaerie, as if the rest of them were furniture. “I think we’re going to have to revisit your disjunction settlement. Ratchet has deprived you of a valuable piece of property, and I’m not going to let him get away with trying to split what’s left half-and-half.”

“I am planning to do that already,” said Pharma, flatly. “And your input will not be required.” She glanced back at Ratchet, who was standing in the shadow of her wing. “Want a bird, Ratchet?”

Ratchet was startled, but… “If you don’t need her, it’s better to keep them together, I think.”

“Done,” said Pharma. “Done before witnesses. Starscream of Vos and Drift of—”

“Rodion,” Drift said, with a shrug.

“Drift of Rodion, then.” Pharma smiled. “Stop trying to run my life. I’m a tenured professor at the University of Iacon. I’m clearly old enough to decide whether or not I still want to keep slaves. And I don’t think I actually do, Mentor.”

“But the cat was our family’s property. So is the bird,” said Brightaerie.

“You gave me the cat and the bird,” Pharma snapped. “On my Flight Day. Starscream was there. Glit was, and Squawktalk remained, my personal property.” She drew herself up to her full height, wings partly spread, and glared down at them all. “And now she’s Ratchet’s.”

“You will regret your involvement with those models, Pharma,” said the strange mech, whose broad chest was coated in sea-green glass. “They ruin everything they touch.”

Ratchet tensed. He hadn’t recognised the other mech, but now that they’d spoken, and he’d actually looked at them…he knew who they were. Their sons both resembled them, but in different ways. They’d probably commissioned the blacksmith to culture the protoform with their own CNA!

And he also knew that Ravage was being referenced here.

“She didn’t ruin anything,” said Ratchet through his dentae. “She was the one who got ruined. Would you like me to describe the condition of the body? If Shockwave had bought her and you hadn’t involved yourself—”

“My household would still have been ruined,” said the Lord of Kymatos, entirely failing to hide the quaver in their voice. “And Shockwave had no reason to buy the glitched thing. I have only one son.”

Ratchet frowned. It sounded almost like they had regrets about what they had done.

Pharma stepped in front of Ratchet, which he hadn’t expected at all. “You wanted Glit yourself,” she said. “I heard you tell my mother—” And then she clapped her hand to her mouth as Brightaerie’s optics went silver with rage. “My mentor,” she began, and then looked up at Brightaerie, and then—

“No. My mother,” she repeated. “I heard you tell my mother you wanted Glit. So I’d shut up about the feliforms if I were you, Lord Vapourwave. You can’t have Glit. Even if he hadn’t passed the Ambus Test, he was not my mother’s to sell. She gave him to me. You’re a horrible person. You always have been. And if I were the son you don’t have, I’d be grateful that you had disowned me. But he’s probably dead. At least he and that poor little girl are at peace now. And whatever he did to Ratbat to make you disown him probably wasn’t enough.”

Ratchet hadn’t put all of those pieces together himself. He’d thought the Kymatoi disowned Soundwave for being…well, Soundwave. He hadn’t associated any of that with Ratbat’s hospital stay, which he hadn’t been involved with. He wondered if the Kymatoi had let Soundwave go to avoid facing trial for his actions. Pharma was right about one thing. Whatever Soundwave had done to Ratbat had not been enough. If only because the existence of one Ravage probably meant there were countless others that Ratchet had no idea about.

There were footsteps behind them. A blue Seeker, whom Ratchet thought was probably Thundercracker, walked into the room, with Glit asleep and purring in his arms. He glanced back and forth from Pharma, to Ratchet, to Starscream, and to Squawktalk and Drift. He looked scared, Ratchet thought. And why shouldn’t he?

Drift walked over before Ratchet could move, and took the cat from Thundercracker’s arms. But Glit was a lot heavier compared to Drift than he was to Thundercracker, and he woke up and transformed back into root mode, so he didn’t have to be carried.

In root mode, there was still spilt energon on his face, and his nasal vent was still packed.

“Do you want to file charges for assault, Glit?” Ratchet asked, enunciating each word clearly so they would all hear it despite the soft voice he was using.

“What I want,” said Glit, pulling himself up straight to every minim of his ridiculously tiny height In the face of the relative giants who’d struck him, “is to forget it ever happened, not bankrupt us both as their lawyers come up with new and more ridiculous strategies to try to deny, and then avoid responsibility, for what they did in front of Starscream, Lord Kymatos, and both of Starscream’s trine-mates. I’d rather not keep reliving an evening I’m stupidly pleased is now almost over. Can we just leave and go home?”

“Get out of here,” said Brightaerie, finally standing up. “I do have guards here, and since Starscream is apparently completely incompetent—I’m just about ready to summon them, Ratchet. Take the cat and your drunk friend and the bird and go home. Pharma…you stay.”

“No,” said Pharma. “I’m taking them home. So I know that they actually got there.”

Brightaerie considered this. “So be it,” she finally said. “If I ever want you back here, I’ll send for you.”

After they landed, Drift immediately transformed and drove off. He drove around town for a while and then parked himself In front of the building they’d just taken over and decided to use as a home for themselves, this time. He transformed, went inside, and walked past his own room to the room where Ravage and Soundwave recharged.

They lay there, half-entangled, in recharge. He watched them. He could feel his processor turning something over and over but he couldn’t have said, even then, what it was.

Ravage opened one optic and looked at him. Then Soundwave opened both of his.

“I’ll go,” said Drift.

Ravage shook her head. “Come here,” she said. “We don’t know what happened—well, I don’t, anyway—but we don’t want you to be alone.”

At least their panels were closed. Drift walked over to the nest they’d made on the old recharge slab they lay on—a pile of soft fabrics and cushions. Ravage had always liked nesting.

“Come on,” she said, and he lay down beside them, uncertain what to do.

Ravage sighed, and stretched out her arm, resting her wrist on his chest. “Fuck’s sake, Drift, you’re crying.”

Drift started to deny the accusation, but his face was wet. Instead, he looked up at Soundwave, whose face remained expressionless and only barely conscious.

“Her decision. Not mine.” Soundwave closed his optics and tightened one arm around Ravage, and let his hand fall lightly on Drift’s shoulder. “Don’t own her. Don’t want to.”

Drift took Ravage’s hand in his own, brought her wrist to his lips, and bit. She made a soft, happy noise as her energon began to trickle into his mouth. He supposed he could understand why Soundwave didn’t care. Unlike Drift, he had only ever given himself over to one person. Drift would fuck practically anyone, but he only drank from his trusted intimates.

Soundwave was right; she really did taste like starlight.

Once they had fixed Glit’s nose, he thanked them both, and then he went into his recharge chamber and locked the door; he needed to catch up with his sister, he'd said.

There were a thousand and one things that Ratchet had wanted to say to Pharma, but he didn’t say any of them. She sat down on the couch with him, and took his hand, and laced her digits through his.

He leaned over to kiss her again, and then she got up, turned to face him again, and sat back down, straddling his lap.

The rest of the world faded into obscurity as Pharma kissed him.

It was a long, long kiss, a searching thing, even though he couldn’t call it exploratory. Pharma’s lips, and Pharma’s glossa, and Pharma’s hands knew his body entire. She knew exactly how to build his charge.

Which meant that she couldn’t deny she was doing it on purpose.

Or that Ratchet didn’t know what was happening between them.

The tips of her digits found seams, sensory cables, bits of bared protoform, and Ratchet—Ratchet had been aroused since before he’d left the clinic, except for the moments when anger and justified rage washed every other emotion out of his systems. And he knew exactly how to get at her, too.

Her pelvic panel was hot against his, and then she opened it; he dragged two digits through the bared mesh of her valve, but it was already wet and she moaned, and he barely noticed his own panel open until she slid right down onto his spike and ground herself against him.

For some reason, Ratchet didn’t feel inclined to slip any of his other cables into any of her other ports, and she apparently felt the same way, because she just rode him—hard, a little rough even, and then he thought about the couch that he and Glit both lounged on and grabbed her aft with both hands, and stood up. They didn’t make it into his recharge chamber.

He had her against a wall, her wings beating against it probably loud enough to wake the Sparkless, but Glit had been given a pain patch so Ratchet was sure that he wouldn’t wake up for a while, and he rutted into Pharma’s slick valve, into the folds and nodes he knew so well, plugging into her ceiling node and pulsing into her, variable cycles of energy in a rhythm he knew she adored.

He felt a cable at his aft exhaust port and he let it in with a tiny moan, which pushed her over the edge, but only for the first time.

She was incredibly beautiful when the pleasure took her, he thought, her emotional armour all gone, reduced to something mortal and needy and vulnerable, and he fucked her through her overload and right into a second one.

He’d clean that wall later. It was a problem for Future Ratchet.

Right-Now Ratchet was carrying her into the recharge chamber at last, and lying back down underneath her on his bed while she rode his spike. He reached for hers, and she thrust right into his hand. By the time she was ready for that release, Ratchet himself was ready to let go, and they did, her callipers fluttering around his spike, her cable sending dazzling sparks through his aft.

Then she fell down beside him.

They hadn’t fragged like this in years.

Pharma was giggling like she had when she was an undergrad. He rolled on top of her to kiss her again and her spike repressurised against him, and Ratchet laughed, and then she flipped him onto his back and was sliding down between his legs to eat him like a bowl of frozen coolant foam, sucking and licking his nodes, fingers moving inside him—he always had loved her hands—until he came again, sparking against her mouth, and she laughed right into his valve.

When he came back from wherever he went, she was fucking him into the berth. He wrapped his legs around her waist and held on tight, and they went on like that for the rest of the night. When she finally collapsed on him, both of them fucked out and exhausted, the sky was beginning to brighten already.

“I love you,” she said, and then, before he could answer: “I’m leaving you anyway.”

Chapter Text

Megatron sometimes came out of defrag completely alert, in the middle of the rest cycle, when everyone else was deep in recharge. He’d been like that since he and Impactor and Rumble and Frenzy were together in their creche at the postnatal centre in Tarn. It was his favourite time to write, and he’d written the best of his poems on those nights…but not lately. That last poem he’d sent to Parvilla had been garbage.

Another gladiator who’d also been needled had told him to wait a few orns—and try to avoid taking blows to the head—because if they’d meant him not to be able to write, he wouldn’t have been able to write his own name. Still, it was infuriating when sometimes the words that came out of his mouth were words that meant something completely different from what he’d intended to say, but began with similar sounds, or had similar rhythms.

He stared at his slate and stylus for breems.

It didn’t help that there weren’t any windows. He only knew that it was night because his internal chronometer said so. Finally, he went back into recharge, even though he couldn’t get his mind to shut down and reorder itself.

In the morning he took his rations with Lugnut and Strika.

On the way to their quarters, he considered what his life had become.

Megatron had thought he’d be making a statement in Kaon. Over the body of the first headliner he had killed, he’d started to shout about justice and peace and how he had never wanted violence at all, but this was what they had made of him, and the whole of the world was a giant gladiatorial pit. But the crowd had been cheering, and no-one had heard a word of it. All they wanted was blood.

In frustration, he’d taken his helmet off and let his sensory crown unfurl, because he was more than a miner and more than a convict. Strika had blessed him out for it later; those petals were delicate and sensitive, and every mech who took him on was going to try to get that helmet off his head.

“Megatronus,” the crowd had chanted, over and over. It started in the cheap seats; some of the afts in those seats belonged to Decepticons, who had come to support him. But it had spread throughout the crowd, and now even the wealthiest patrons were chanting it—the ghouls and the pede-lickers up in the boxes who were there because watching less fortunate mechs fight for the scraps they were given in the slums wasn’t bloody enough for them.

To them, he realised, he was the Fallen incarnate. A symbol of a future they were terrified for, a future in which they’d be no more consequential than anyone else, and probably less so, because they produced almost nothing but pain.

And now they shouted like that whenever he entered the arena.

Lugnut opened the door and given him a forehead kiss. “Megatronus the glorious!” he’d said after that, one arm around Megatron’s shoulders.

Strika glared at them both. “Don’t call him that!”

Lugnut put both of his hands up, acknowledging defeat, and they drank their cubes, trading gossip and pleasantries. Megatron was still learning about the other top gladiators: people like Overlord, Grimlock and Scorponok. It was important to know who had patrons, and who those patrons were. It was important to know who cheated, and how, and what to do if you suspected your fight had been fixed.

At the end of it all, though, he’d had to ask. “Why do you care if the crowd calls me ‘Megatronus’?”

Strika snorted. “If you keep on letting them call you Megatronus, it will be difficult not to become Megatronus. Do you want to become the Fallen One?”

“No.” Megatron glanced away. “But it scares the aftslag out of the people who put me here, doesn’t it?”

“They were already scared. Scared of your words.” Strika rolled her optics at him. “Anyhow, people should go by their own names, or change them if they don’t suit. We need to stop letting other people define who we are. If you’re tired of Megatron, pick something else.”

“I’m very fond of ‘Megatron’,” said Megatron, shaking his head. “I’ve made the sacrifice of violence now. I want them to see what they’ve made of me.”

“What matters is what you make of yourself,” Strika snapped, and punctuated the sentence with a knife, which she tossed aside and into a used target still hanging from one of the walls. “If you won’t take care for yourself that way, at least stop calling Ravage Parvilla. She isn’t a little girl anymore, and that’s what ‘Parvilla’ means. And yes, I know what it means in Tarnish, but she isn’t that to you, either.”

Megatron groaned; he still hadn’t met Parvilla in person, but now he’d seen pictures, courtesy of Orion Pax and his lover the Senator: in root, she was a slim, dark mech with a slender build and a rather delicate face, who had vibrissae and pointed, swivelling audials, like a cat; in her alt, she was a graceful pantherine being. “She’s still tiny.”

Strika let out an annoyed burst of static, and Lugnut patted her thigh. “He can’t control what the crowds say, my queen.”

“Megatronus was the enemy of the Primes.” Megatron shrugged. “At least most of them. And I’m the enemy of the Primacy and the Senate, and the stranglehold that Iacon maintains over all of our other polities—”

“But he failed!” Strika snapped. “Do you want the name of a failure?” She’d tossed back the last of her cube.

Megatron just stared at her, because even if they stopped calling him ‘Megatronus’, his name was still going to be Megatron.

Strika shook her head at him. “Well. At least promise me this. If you ask Ravage for something she isn’t prepared to give you…swear to me that you won’t ever kill her for that.”

“I swear,” Megatron had said, feeling numb. “I swear. I would never hurt Ravage. Never.” He glanced at Lugnut, but Lugnut wasn’t getting into the middle of this, because he was not as stupid as he looked sometimes. “I love Ravage. And she was a little girl when I met her!”

“And Ravage loves you. But I think we all know she’s in love with the Signal, by now.” Strika had sighed. “The other night, in chat…you could feel it coming right out of the screen when she spoke, and was speaking for both of them. And Megatronus probably said that he’d never harm Solus a million times, and look where that got them. That is who Megatronus was. Do not be Megatronus.”

“I would never!” he’d protested, and Strika had just looked away. “I told you I don’t feel that way about Ravage. She actually was a parvilla when I met her, and not in the Tarnish sense!”

“That is who Megatronus was, too,” she had told him. “Don’t be Megatronus.”

Later that day, Megatron killed a pneumalion, three organic aliens of differing types (which was disgusting, and left him covered in a musty-smelling goop that made him incredibly grateful for the mech who stepped in between bouts to hose it all off him) and an ursiformer who had been an especially stupid thief. It left him feeling very queasy, and not just because of the texture and smell. One of the aliens hadn’t even tried to fight. It had just looked up at him (he thought; he couldn’t really see optics in what passed for its face) and waited, looking for all the world like a terrified sparkling awaiting a punishment. He’d wanted to spare it. Was it even an adult of its kind?

The crowd demanded its life. And Megatron was a convict; he didn’t have choices, like Lugnut did. He killed it with one blow. The crowd didn’t cheer very much, even though they had demanded the kill. Later, Scorponok told him: they’d wanted him to play with it for a while, to see if the thing would just let him or if it would finally fight.

But he didn’t have time to think about that before his next bout. The master of the game had decided it was time for him to fight Overlord, and that was when he realised that he was going to die here. He was not Lugnut. He didn’t love this. And the crowd would want him to love it, so no-one would call for his mercy, and…

Realistically, he’d been sent here because the Senate had wanted him dead, but first, they’d wanted him thoroughly discredited. He’d played right into their hands. They’d wanted to see him turn into a brute who revelled in killing, to make the lie true that he’d never really cared about peace or nonviolence.

On the other hand, the alternative was refusing to fight, like that alien had.

Megatron stopped thinking about his own long-term survival in the arena that day. He was there because they wanted him dead. Eventually they were going to start fixing his fights. While Mortilus stalked him, all he could do was make sure they did not kill him easily. Every day he walked out into the sandy pit was meant to be the last day of his life. Thinking about the future, about the way he looked in these fights, was a waste of the little precious time he had left.

Overlord was a killer, and he was as-yet undefeated.

But when Megatron looked into his optics, he could see fear. Irrational fear, because Overlord was a seasoned gladiator, and everyone was afraid of him—yet he was afraid of Megatron, a miner and ex-pacifist with frankly minimal training. Why?

Megatron went into it determined not to lose badly or die without dignity. He had not expected the fear. He had not expected to win. It hadn’t been scheduled as a death-match, though Overlord seemed to relish those most, but Megatron finally understood where he was, and he was as shocked as anyone else when the big mech went down.

The crowd went feral.

Megatron looked up at them all. Overlord didn’t move, because he couldn’t. Somehow Megatron had unstrung him.

They wanted him to kill Overlord. But it wasn’t a death-match, and it was his choice, and that…had also been deliberate, hadn’t it?

He knelt beside his fallen opponent. Overlord couldn’t move, but he was still conscious, and his optics went white in terror, sure he was facing whatever he personally thought was the worst thing Megatron could do to him. Megatron leaned over and kissed his forehead, brushing lips past his audials.

“If you’re going to spike me first, just do it,” said Overlord, airless, unable to put any power In his vox. “Can’t blame you. They’ll love it.”

“You’re not my enemy,” he whispered. “Do you know we are being deceived? Someday we’ll kill them together. All of them.”

Overlord spat energon into his face. The crowd was howling.

“I’d be an awful entertainer,” Megatron said, “if I deprived you of your favourite heavy the first time I faced him, wouldn’t I?”

Silence fell over the arena, punctuated at first by a single loud groan from Lugnut, but then the whispers began and grew into shouts. Megatronus. Megatronus. Megatronus!

Overlord was carried away, spitting curses—not just swears, incantations. Megatron smiled, and the crowd roared.

Megatron didn’t believe in magic, though; or rather, he believed that if magic existed, the Primes had enslaved it along with everyone else, and it wasn’t on his side. And the Signal had said on the board that if gods still existed, he would have heard them by now, because he had heard the voices of cities and titans and even the planet itself, often in glyphs or thoughtforms he could not understand. And those were not gods, because they could be killed or enslaved.

That had had to be bragging, but it still made sense.

A day would come when Megatron would realise that sparing Overlord was one of the greatest mistakes of his life, and Scorponok and Lugnut had rushed to tell him so. But Megatron didn’t believe it. He frowned and glanced around the washrack. “Are none of you his friends? Not one?”

“No,” said Grimlock, who was even bigger than Overlord. “Overlord can’t be trusted.” Grimlock was big and he had a beast-alt that was even bigger, and in front of the crowds he pretended to be dumb as the rocks that the Pits had been built on, but Grimlock was actually smart. He liked poetry, and art, and throwing parties, which he did, impromptu, whenever he won a big prize. Like Lugnut, he’d stayed past the end of his sentence.

Megatron sighed. “I’ll kill him if I have to.”

“You’re gonna have to,” Lugnut said. “The longer you wait…the worse this will be. The crowd loves to hate him. And the rich ones want to hate you, but there are a lot of people who don’t, people who know what you stand for and why you are here.”

Suddenly, he thought of Ravage. She’d understand why he’d done that, wouldn’t she?

The reality of the Pits of Kaon was beginning to sink in. He’d wanted to show the world what the Senate had done to him.

And so had the Senate. They wanted the whole world to see they had broken him, made him a killer. Covered in spilt oil and energon, he had laughed when they called him the name of the Fallen, over and over, and cheered his destruction.

“Stop brooding,” said Lugnut, slapping his shoulder. “There’s a party tonight. Fuck whatever it is out of your head, and relax. You’ll get your chance to take him out the next time.”

“They’re the ones who deserve to die. If anyone does,” said Megatron.

“No slag,” said Lugnut, and after the others left, he hustled Megatron into a stall and jacked him; Megatron wasn’t sure what he wanted, but the pleasure did settle his processor.

“You should go to the brothel more often,” said Lugnut, afterwards.

“They don’t want to be here either,” said Megatron, shaking his head.

Lugnut shrugged. “They like us.”

Megatron shrugged back at him. He didn’t really want sex, and he didn’t want high-grade, and he certainly didn’t want the stimulants and boosters some of the other gladiators used to get out of their sentences faster, because most of the ones who got out that way had done so by dying.

What he wanted most, he supposed, was to feel like himself again. There was something desperately wrong with him, but all of the healers said he was fine.

There was an after-party that night. Megatron was drawn to a short, stocky mech with medic’s crosses on his shoulders. He’d wanted to be a medic himself, and the young mech’s optics were full of wild bewilderment, arousal and shame.

“I wanted to be a medic, once,” he said quietly. “Are you…are you all right?”

The mech looked up at him with bright blue optics, took his faceplate off, and looked up at him with a pleading expression. “I signed a waiver,” he said, and it came out almost like stuttering. “You can do whatever you want to me.”

Megatron kissed him, lifting him up by the hips and pressing him into a wall. “Did you, now?”

The ones who signed waivers were often the worst. A lot of the clients wanted to be used as if they were brothel slaves, but when they signed a waiver, nobody in the Pits could be prosecuted if something they asked a gladiator to do them resulted in death or injury.

Lugnut thought it was funny, a way that they could get back some of their own, but Megatron agreed with Strika: they were the worst, because they wanted you to be the worst you could.

“Yeah. You want an anatomy lesson? It’ll be fun. As much for me as for you, I promise.”

“All right,” said Megatron, although he knew it was probably going to be horrible, and kissed the mech again. He wasn’t sure he wanted to perform a vivisection on this guy, but he didn’t have anything better to do that night, and he had to frag someone.

But it wasn’t actually horrible, because once it became absolutely clear that his partner was really experiencing pleasure from being opened, that all his most sensitive nodes were in places that couldn’t be reached any other way—it was interesting. Interesting, to see the anatomy open and doing its work. Interesting, to know that the nodes on the outer walls of the valve, in places no spike could reach, were so sensitive.

It didn’t get Megatron off, but what he’d wanted most was a distraction, and his partner appreciated that he was actually very skilful with his knives, and could help him a little with the necessary self-repair to follow.

But when it was all over, the small mech clambered up into his arms, and finally, burst into tears.

“Was it not…what you wanted?” Megatron began to go numb with guilt.

“No. It was perfect. But you didn’t enjoy it—”

“I did. Intellectually.” Megatron tried to smile.

“But none of you want to be here!” the medic wailed. “I thought this was going to be fun, all day, that I’d love it as much as Hook said I would, but…it’s just, it’s all pointless, and nobody wants to be here!”

Megatron swallowed. “You did,” he said awkwardly, because he was almost beginning to like this person, whoever he was.

“Thank you for not killing that mech. That’s why I wanted you. That…and watching you take him apart, of course.” The mech’s vents were hot against Megatron’s throat lines, so near the surface of the dermal mesh in the joints of his armour.

“This is not my kind of sex, not really,” said Megatron, whispering into his audial. “But I liked that you just enjoyed the sensation. That you weren’t here…to make me humiliate you. To play the role of the stupid, barbaric disposable in the arena, and then to come up here and help you expiate your guilt for wanting all this to exist.”

The medic ex-vented slowly. “I don’t. I don’t want any of this to exist. It’s barbaric. I don’t know what I was thinking. Except that you probably know how to cut.”

“It must be harder to patch when someone’s not careful,” said Megatron, numb, stroking his back because that’s what you do when somebody falls apart after sex.

“Not really. But It’s much more fun if it’s careful. When you get the right sensors. Maybe you should be a medic, if you ever get out here alive.”

Megatron felt him swallowing. “We both know I won’t,” he said gently. “And I like you. But you shouldn’t come back here.”

“No,” said the medic. “I can’t. But even though you’re not the consort I’d want…I wish I could take you out of here, too.”

Megatron never did learn his name.

Chapter Text

“So tell me. Why’d you let me siphon off Rav that night, and why do you still let me do it?”

Soundwave groaned. He’d heard this question a thousand times and he was tired of it; but then, he realised Drift had said it out loud this time, which meant he could answer it and put it to rest. “Decision: not Soundwave’s.”

Apparently that wasn’t all he had needed to say, because Drift was still thinking about it. The question bothered Drift and he didn’t know why. There were a lot of emotions floating around through Drift’s processors, softened and baffled by drugs, and only rarely did a note of pure emotion rise to the surface. The notes were all different. Guilt and concern and something a lot like lust but not in exactly the same circuits and relays.

“She loves you, though. She wouldn’t want to hurt you—”

“She doesn’t,” Soundwave said, cutting him off. “She doesn’t hurt me when she lets you sink your fangs into her wrist lines. No more than she does when she dances in front of a crowd or exchanges verses with Megatron. She doesn’t do things that hurt me on purpose. She isn’t property. Not anymore.”

Drift was still trying to process emotions. Soundwave felt as if he’d repeated himself at least five times, that each of the sentences he had produced meant the same thing. But sometimes it took repetition, with Drift, especially when he was shattered. Drift had been shattered a lot, lately, even for Drift. Something had happened when he’d gone to Vos with Ratchet and Pharma to rescue Glit.

“Sometimes I used to like it when—”

Drift didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. Soundwave knew that once Drift had believed he was loved in the way he thought Soundwave loved Ravage. But Drift wasn’t Ravage. There was nothing in Ravage’s personality or past that would have been comforted by possessiveness.

“I don’t own her energon lines,” said Soundwave, repeating the thing again with more granularity. “I don’t own her valve or her spike. There’s quantum entanglement between our sparks, but her spark is still hers. Ravage owns herself.”

“But she doesn’t—”

Soundwave shrugged. “She only does it with me because she wants it that way. She doesn’t do anything that she doesn’t want to do. Not with me. Not with you.”

Drift was blessedly quiet, inside and out, for a moment. Soundwave went back to wiring the matrix array. It was intricate work. Some of the wires and cables were very thin, and the ones made of gold were too soft not to catch in Ravage’s claws, so he had to do it without her help.

“You boosted? Those are some of the most normal sentences.”

“Drift,” said Soundwave, “this is very complex wiring. I need my executive function to do it correctly. I can’t be distracted by everyone’s passing thoughts about weather and fuel prices.”

“Right. I’ll get out of here—”

“No.” Soundwave winced, though he knew Drift wouldn’t see his expressions behind visor and mask. He had not intended to try to make Drift go away.

Drift shrugged.

“I can’t take off my helmet, and I have to be medicated,” said Soundwave. He wound a fine thread of gold around a flared crystal peg. “I can talk to the system, but not to the hardware. The hardware has to be what the system requires.”

Drift nodded. “So…”

Soundwave lowered his voice, even though there was no-one around. “Yes,” he said, more softly, “we are still holding. But Ratchet’s access to medications is not always assured. If I don’t have aureochrome and he can’t get any more for a while, we have to have Syk around. Ravage is in charge of our stash. Don’t expect her to give you much.”

“I don’t need much,” said Drift.

“So you say now.” Soundwave sighed, but he hoped Drift could feel the affection as well as the exasperation. Or read it in the colours of his field.

Drift sat down beside him. “Can I help?”

Soundwave was tempted to say that if Drift wanted to help, he should shut (the fuck?) up, but that wouldn’t stop him from thinking, and thoughts that could not be spoken aloud were often more distracting than words. Fortunately, Drift was not a telepath.

He gestured to the other panels he hadn’t set up. “Put the crystal pegs in the holes, but don’t force them. Neither the pegs nor the holes are interchangeable. They are only meant to fit the ones…that they fit.”

Drift nodded and began placing crystals. Soundwave paused to watch him, to make sure he was doing it right, but…Drift picked up each crystal and somehow, instinctively knew where it had been meant to go. There were little flashes inside the crystals when he touched them, which were slightly distracting, but Soundwave could adjust his peripheral vision priority. Drift was doing it faster than Soundwave could do it.

“Perfect,” he said. “You weren’t trained for this?”

Drift laughed. “Neither were you.”

“Soundwave: was not trained to do anything, except by Jhiaxus, and none of that training was useful. Taught self. You?” Soundwave grinned behind his mask. Drift couldn’t see his face. But Drift could see his field.

“Watched you,” said Drift. He grinned a fangy grin. “I’m not as smart as you or Ratchet or Ravage are, but I am not completely stupid.”

“Stop that,” said Soundwave. “You’re a racer. I can barely drive myself in alt.”

They worked in silence for a little while, developing a rhythm. They were going to get this done in half the time that Soundwave had expected it to take. If that.

“Did you ever want to try siphoning?”

Soundwave really did not want to bite into anyone else’s energon lines, but… “Prefer to watch you,” he said after a moment, and glanced away. How ridiculous it was to not want to look—through his visor, even—directly into Drift’s optics while admitting this.

“Yeah?” Drift’s field glowed up around them both.

Soundwave shrugged. He didn’t know why he was embarrassed. He’d never realised that Drift didn’t actually know. “When she’s happy,” he said, very softly. “I feel it as well. She’s not. I mean. Not talking. But. Here.” He brushed the tip of one digit across his helm crest.

“In your mind, yeah.” Drift laughed, but it wasn’t mean-spirited.

“And my spark.” Finally he looked through his visor into Drift’s optics.

“Of course.” Drift nodded.

“She doesn’t love you the way she loves me,” said Soundwave. “But she does love you. And you’re not in love with anyone.”

Drift ignored that last statement. “Don’t you want to feel it what it’s like for yourself though? If you like how it feels when I do it to her—”

“Not the same.” Soundwave frowned. “Cybercats bite each other, sometimes.” He shook his head, because that wasn’t actually it. Ravage was sapient, more so than a lot of the other mechs whose minds brushed across Soundwave’s mind. “Instincts…sensations? Things don’t always feel the same way. Some things…she feels more strongly.”

Drift understood that as well as Soundwave had expected him to. Soundwave did not know how to explain. He set down his work and began to sway back and forth, trying to find the words, and they all disappeared on him. Everything was an interaction of fields and vibrations and harmonies. How to explain that to someone who couldn’t perceive those things?

Ravage’s neural nets were strung with wires that Soundwave wasn’t even sure he recognised, except when he was in her body and she was in his mind and suddenly it was all natural. When Drift had bitten into her wrist, he had felt what Ravage was feeling. Apart from the emotions—her feelings for Drift were different from her feelings for him—the sensation of being bitten was pleasurable to Ravage. Soundwave only liked to be bitten when he was also Ravage, and every node in her sensorium was dazzling, and sometimes she’d bite out of instinct alone. And even then what he liked the most was the way it felt to be Ravage, biting, above and beyond being Soundwave, bitten.

“You’re swirling,” Drift said matter-of-factly, and rested his hand on Soundwave’s shoulder. “You don’t have to do anything, either.”

“Not…that.” Soundwave swirled and swayed in smaller and slower circles, until he stilled.

Drift was worried about him. That was not even close to what he had wanted.

“We see things she can’t,” Soundwave finally managed, the words feeling odd in his intake, over his glossa. Like foreign objects he hadn’t produced all on his own.

Drift nodded. “Yeah, and?”

“She feels things we can’t.”

“You mean like the same way she smells things we can’t?”

Soundwave nodded. It wasn’t exactly the same. It was close, though. Close enough.

“Okay,” said Drift. “I was worried it was because of the drugs.”

Soundwave laughed. “Also a factor,” he admitted, and shrugged.

Drift snorted. “I’m usually more boosted than you are. Little bit of whatever you’ve taken, I won’t even notice.” He began to wind wires around the pegs on the panels he’d put together.

Soundwave hadn’t asked him to, but he did it correctly. “You can see-feel the energy from the crystals? The same as with people?”

“People have auras,” Drift said, but he didn’t explain it.

“Jhiaxus did experiments.” Soundwave shrugged. “Though nothing has happened when Ravage bit me. Except that the sting of her fangs is nice—”

“Yeah,” said Drift; it came out almost as a moan. Which Soundwave hadn’t needed to hear outside of his head, let alone within.

“We spark-merge,” said Soundwave abruptly. “Sometimes as often as we do all the other things. That’s the thing that I wouldn’t want her to do with anyone else, though I wouldn’t try to stop her if that’s what she wanted. And when we do that, I know what it’s like to be in her body. It’s not just the nose or the light sensitivity. It feels very different to be Ravage.”

“We all know you spark-merge.” Drift made a face. He was uncomfortable with the idea of it. Soundwave wasn’t sure why.

“It makes everything else we do better,” said Soundwave.

Drift snorted. “You two have a room with a door on it now. Maybe close it, sometimes.”

Soundwave laughed, because he didn’t mean to leave it open, but he didn’t really understand why it mattered, and when he was with Ravage she was his whole world anyway. “Forget,” he said quietly. “Dangerous?”

“I know she’s hot, but—yeah,” said Drift. “Nobody else should be seeing your sparklights. Even if it does serve as fair warning not to look into the doorway.”

“No,” said Soundwave. “Not that. I forget that you and Gasket and the birds can’t feel the things we do anyway. What she feels when you drink from her, and she drinks from you. What you and Gasket feel when you fuck. How the drugs feel to you, which is completely opposite from how they feel to me.” He sighed, feeling wistful. “What privacy is.”

Drift’s facial derma darkened slightly, and Soundwave went back to the wiring.

“I love her. But not the way you do.”

“Everyone should,” said Soundwave quietly. “Untouchable and beloved of Rodion. Isn’t that what you said to the cop?”

Drift shrugged. “I guess. Don’t expect me to remember.”

“But she’s not untouchable. I can touch her. And you can.” Soundwave smiled behind his mask. “It’s a very rare privilege and honour.”

Drift chuckled. “It is.” His thoughts were beginning to wander, again. He was no longer thinking about Ravage. He wasn’t imagining biting Soundwave again, either. He thought about Gasket a little, but there was someplace his thoughts and imagines wanted to go that he kept pulling back from.

Soundwave didn’t ask about that.

And then he didn’t have to ask. He wondered how he had managed not to notice before.

“You love Ratchet.”

“Don’t you?” Drift laughed with feigned carelessness. “He’s saved your life a few times, too.”

“Not like that,” said Soundwave.

The silence in the room began to drown out other sounds, filling the space between them. Drift had been holding that quiet thing close, trying to keep it contained. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” said Soundwave.

“He doesn’t want me,” Drift said: the words were toneless, but Soundwave felt the pain in his mind.

“He doesn’t know what he wants,” said Soundwave, who was suddenly very clear about that even though really there wasn’t a single logical reason for him to believe that. Soundwave knew Ratchet very much wanted Drift, sometimes, but he couldn’t allow himself to accept that within himself. Telling Drift this would make nobody’s life any easier.

Drift snorted. “You didn’t see him kiss Pharma when she took us to Vos to go and get Glit.” And then he remembered it fiercely, and then, Soundwave had seen it.

Ratchet loved Pharma, too. It wasn’t surprising, given that he had conjunxed her. Ratchet (and Soundwave too) had thought he’d stopped loving her, but the problem was that he was starting to hate who she had become, and now she was unbecoming that thing.

Soundwave had met Pharma exactly once, now that she sometimes stopped by. She made him uncomfortable. “They love each other but they hurt each other. I don’t understand it except that they don’t fit. Ravage and I fit into each other—”

Drift cracked up.

“Not what I meant!” Soundwave glared at him. “She’s small, but she’s bigger inside—”

Drift laughed even harder.

“Not like that!” Soundwave sputtered, and then winced, because if Ravage had still had a gestation tank he might have had to be just a little more gentle, but— “Her being and mine line up together and unlock each other. Everything that we both locked away we can open together.”

Drift pondered that for a moment. He did not understand it at all, even though Soundwave had wanted him to. “This is how Gasket feels when I talk about the things I see, isn’t it? Especially when you see them too.”

“Yes,” said Soundwave, and felt the wave of guilt wash over him. He refused to let himself get drenched in it. Drift had no reason at all to feel guilty about Gasket, or Ravage, or anything else. A mech could only make good choices if any of the choices on offer were good.

“What’s wrong with me?” Drift whispered. “Why isn’t Gasket enough for me? I know he loves me—"

“You’re enough for him,” said Soundwave. “You’re not hurting him.” It was true. Gasket was happy to have whatever Drift wanted to give him. He understood a lot more about Drift than Drift was aware he did. Most of Drift’s friends understood him better than he did; it wasn’t just Soundwave.

“But why is he happy with that?” Drift winced.

“You’re pretty,” said Soundwave, although he wasn’t sure it was a good idea to mention it. “He does think about that a lot.”

Drift glared at him. “He’s not like the others!”

Soundwave groaned. “He can like that you’re pretty and still see the rest of you too.”

Drift snorted. “I shouldn’t be like this. You’re not like this. Ravage is not, either.” Drift shook his head and set his work down. “And don’t tell me ‘nobody else is like Ravage’.”

“I don’t understand,” said Soundwave. He did not understand why this was so hard for some people. Not everyone had what he had with Ravage; not everyone even wanted it. “Gasket: content. Drift’s nature is to want, whether or not he can have. Gasket wants what he has, what he knows he can have. There are enough terrible things he can’t change in the world that he desperately wants to make right. Like Ravage. And Ratchet. And me. And you.”

“Don’t start,” said Drift, but he was already replaying an earlier conversation; Soundwave could hear Ravage’s voice in Drift’s mind, talking easily and gently about the coming revolution, explaining to people in plain language how the Functionist system was structured to set them against each other and not their despoilers.

Soundwave relaxed a little. This was more comfortable than trying to explain Ravage’s sensorium. “Soundwave: does not need to say it. You are already listening. And you know that what she is saying is true. When you’re ready—”

“Don’t start.” Drift did not like it when Ravage talked about the Revolution. It made him want to believe things again. He was sure that believing in things would destroy him.

Soundwave had developed an opinion that only believing in something would save Drift from himself. But it wasn’t the kind of thing you could make people see before they were ready. Not without hurting them more than they already were. So he shrugged, and they went back to work.

Glit was desperately glad when First Aid turned up at the clinic. Ratchet had messaged him that one of the Senators had broken a spinal strut and he was going to be in surgery in Iacon all afternoon. Ratchet thought Glit was competent on his own, but Glit was all too conscious that the illegality of his being a medic only made the clinic even more illegal than it already was. It was also a busy day, and he needed the help.

But First Aid was not his usual bubbly self.

When they closed the doors for five breems so they and the nurse on duty could fuel and relax for a moment, Glit took him aside. “Are you still mad at me?”

It took First Aid a solid astrominute to respond. “Huh?” He looked up at Glit, something that only ever happened when he was sitting down. “I was never mad at you, Glitterbomb. I’m still as fond of you as I ever was. But we both know it’s not going to work.”

“I guess in at least one respect, we’re smarter than Ratchet and Pharma.” Glit rolled his optics. “You know I chose that name when I was five.”

“Five what?” Aid finally smiled a little.

“Five solars,” Glit replied. “What’d you think, five vorns? We aren’t that old.”

“No,” First Aid agreed, and took a drink. “Still. It’s hard for me to imagine that you’re the same age as me, or your creche-sibs.”

Glit shrugged. “Ravage has been through a lot and Howlback has always been painfully serious.”

First Aid laughed, which was like sunlight breaking through clouds (unless you were Ravage). “Ravage is cheerful, or at least she was the one time I saw her!”

“That’s just ‘cause she’s getting laid all the time,” said Glit; he rolled his optics, but he grinned. Ravage had had a rough life after they had been broken apart and it was a good thing she was happy now. “I’d say I’m surprised he fits but I know what Howlback gets up to.”

“Glit! That’s rude!” First Aid shook his head. “Who is Howlback?”

“My other sister, except for some of the birds. You’ve seen her around. The enforcer who looks like blue Ravage.” Glit shrugged. “She’s the only enforcer who’s even allowed past the gate without papers, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed her here.”

“What’s she get up to?”

Glit rolled his optics again. “When her bosses let her have a day off, sometimes she takes the train to Kaon and goes to the Games.”

First Aid’s entire face greyed a little, and he glanced away, so hard that Glit could see it even through his visor. “The Games.”

“I hate them,” said Glit, and sat down. He nudged First Aid’s cube toward him, and then he drank from his own.

“I went,” First Aid blurted out. “A tenday ago. Your sister was there. At the party. I didn’t speak to her, but I wondered if she was related to you. Your frames are rather distinctive.”

Glit stared at him. “Don’t tell me Iaconian Metaforensics was paying for that!” He knew that all the police were corrupt, that went without saying, but this was a new low—

“You’re saying it out loud,” said First Aid. “And it is a new low. Or it would be, if that were true.”

“I suppose she could be spying on that Metatron person they accused of sedition—” Glit winced. He hated having to pretend to his friends—especially Ratchet, but Aid just as much—that he wasn’t a Decepticon. Then he heard what First Aid had actually said. “What do you mean, it’s not true?”

“She has a pass; she doesn’t have to pay.” First Aid swallowed. “Not from her job, and not the kind of pass you pay for once and keep using. She’s friends with those guys.”

“Howlback doesn’t have a job,” Glit said bluntly. “They sold us. I’m the only one of us who’s free, though I’m coaching Squawk for the Ambus Test.”

First Aid glanced away. “I guess a lot of people aren’t free. In this world.”

Glit regretted having corrected him. He’d already been morose. “Don’t pout,” he grumbled. “We’re two of the ones who are. We can do something. Not very much, and you more than me…but later? Who knows?”

First Aid tried to smile but did not quite succeed. “How did she meet those guys?”

“I don’t know,” Glit admitted. “There’s a lot I don’t know about her, since they all sold us out and away. I guess she could have arrested one or another of them…but that wouldn’t make them her friends!”

It was interesting that First Aid perked up when they started to talk about Howlback, Glit thought. Almost as if he wanted to direct Glit’s attention away from himself and his own experiences. (Glit wasn’t doing spycraft now, but they had all been trained for it—and it did help him get better histories from the patients, most of whom came through the door trusting no-one with education or nice paint. Which was good, because it was now instinctive.)

“She was hanging out with the big one, the one who likes poetry.”

“Megatron?” Glit stared at him; maybe they had sent her down there to spy. He’d better tell Ravage—

“No, no.” Aid rubbed his forehead, trying to remember. “He’s not a poet; he just likes poetry. Big saurian alt, and he’s rich as a king. They call him the king. He was wearing a crown. ‘Courage and good cheer!’ he kept saying. He acts like he thinks he’s a noblemech.”

“Oh.” Glit rolled his optics. “I know who you mean.”

Howlback had come to him once with a crooked smile on her face and a broken outermost calliper and told him he needed to fix her because she did not want her masters to know what she had been up to. He’d asked her what she had taken and who had assaulted her, and she’d told him that no-one had hurt her; that she’d had the most fun she had ever had in her life. He’d supposed he’d have to believe her. The alternative was telling Prowl, and then she would never trust him again, so he couldn’t do that.

That was just another thing that Glit didn’t want to think about when he was around Ratchet, or First Aid, or even Squawktalk. He didn’t dare dwell on things he desperately wanted to say, but could not. Ratchet had been so vexed when he’d figured out that Ravage was a Decepticon. Glit had just not had the spark to tell him that he was one too.

But he had been, ever since Flatline had started to talk to him about that, because Flatline thought he was good at their work, and it was a crime that he couldn’t be licenced. “So you didn’t meet Megatron?”

First Aid just shrugged. “After a while I stopped trying to learn people’s names. It was easier not to.” He shuddered a little. “Hook likes working there. It needs to be done, I know, but I guess I’m a coward at heart. I really don’t think I could handle it.”

Glit declined to judge him. It wasn’t his fault he’d come from a sheltered background. “They’re also slaves, even if they were free before they were sentenced,” he said, very gently. “The stuff they have to do is not their fault, which is why I hate it that Howlback and Hook sit and watch. They’re prisoners, you know. Even Clench was a prisoner once and he runs the place.”

“Not all of them,” First Aid said, his voice thick with something that sounded like dull hope.

“Well, no.” Glit sighed. “Lugnut and the ‘King’ have won their freedom. I don’t read the sports pads, but…what can they do? What else are they going to do now? Grimlock is not going to go and break rocks for a pittance now that he’s used to having the finest engex they make and getting professions of love from complete strangers. Who’s going to hire someone like Lugnut?”

First Aid nodded. “But most of them just retire…right?”

Glit shook his head. “Aid,” he said. “You’ve been to the games and I haven’t. How do you not know that most of them die?”

They were both silent for a while after that.

“I shouldn’t have let Hook talk me into it. He told me, after I broke up with you, that I might be able to find what I wanted down there. But I didn’t. It was horrible.”

Glit didn’t pry. Not least because he wasn’t sure he wanted to. “Hook is a good medic, even though he’s no more likely to be properly licenced for private practise or academic medicine than I am, given that he’s in a manual labour gestalt, but…”

First Aid made a face. “But what?”

Glit sighed. There were very few nice ways to say what he needed to say. He did not want to be judgemental, but somehow he always managed to, anyway. “But I don’t think you should be taking advice on your interface life from someone who’s in a gestalt with Scrapper. And Bonecrusher.”