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Chapter Text

As Scrapper predicted, all this song and dance around handing the Crystal City over to its new officials was even more tiring than building the blasted place. Good thing that Hook was handling all the PR stuff… The question remained when had he managed to get himself all buffed and shiny while the rest of them had barely found time to dust themselves, but at least Scrapper had something nice to look at. Not like he wouldn’t find his prized engineer attractive when covered with dust, paint, grease, tar, mud, crystal residue or glowing radioactive particles, or after pulling another all-nighter in the office (which he wouldn’t ever admit to him, of course) but, well, getting all shiny for a special occasion had quite a different weight to it. He kept reminding himself to keep his head upward to make it seem that he was looking at the city, the people, or something, and not shamelessly gawking at Hook’s crane shaft.

With his number two being all serious, proper and professional to boot, the crane shaft’s little shifts, jerks and sways were the only indication of its owner’s emotions. After knowing him for so long, Scrapper could decipher it effortlessly: Hook wasn’t just heroically shielding his dear foremech and remaining teammates from all those prying optics and invasive questions. It wasn’t a selfless sacrifice on his part to deal with politicians, sponsors, your typical stuck-up dignitaries and rich aftholes, some wanna-be experts, some well-meaning idiots, and the media, the dreaded media – no, far from it. He wasn’t even a bit nervous yet determined to carry on for his friends’ sake, quite the opposite: he was as pleased as ever. Basking in all the attention Cybertron could throw their way, the egomaniac he was. Well, great. Let him take it all. Scrapper could think of some creative ways how he could repay his foremech for getting the spotlight no other Constructicon wanted.

Always loyal, Hook never left room for doubt about who was their actual leader and at the same time, no one stood a chance to reach Scrapper over his overwhelming subordinate. The Constructicon leader only got to shake some hands, sign some scrap, pass over some scrap, accept some scrap in exchange, nod, thank, say they’re welcome, turn to the crowd, nod, thank, say they’re welcome, murder them all in his head, thank for the mask hiding his sneer, resume standing with the rest of his crew and being exposed to the public eye like some criminals during trial… Vector Sigma, how he hated such moments! His creations should speak for themselves, couldn’t the world leave him alone and let him work in peace?

Rightfully fragged off or not, he tried to keep his irritation to himself. They hadn’t been a gestalt even for a vorn and keeping strong emotions, thoughts, and feelings from each other could still pose a challenge sometimes but, self-conscious as he was, Scrapper tried his best not to broadcast his foul humour too much. He could feel through the gestalt bond that the others weren’t exactly sharing his sentiments. Bored and tired for sure, wanting nothing more than to grab the remaining credits and get themselves overcharged somewhere nice and far away – but they also felt pleased and proud, and Scavenger was positively ecstatic seeing how everybody loved their work. They were allowing the grateful officials and passionate crowds to praise and applaud them, up to a certain point at least, perfectly aware that they had earned each and every one of kind words, and more. Why, of course; let them have it then, they deserved it. All of them. Still, Hook seemed to focus mainly on their leader and his numerous talents and oh, didn’t he need a reprimand for that. Scrapper finally relaxed and smirked. Yes, he really should have taken care of it afterwards.

Eventually, all the official slag was over, credit was given, credits were handed, and they found themselves no longer needed at the official function. They sneaked through the back door at the first opportunity – they had built this city hall, of course they knew about all the back doors – to hurry to the most remote warehouse that had served them during construction (shouting in the passing to Omega Supreme that he didn’t see them). There, concealed, sheltered, in private, in the world yet not for the world, they could acknowledge that their long and hard labour had been finished.

“Urgh,” Long Haul rested his arms and head on the table. “Shove a crystal in my face and I’ll fraggin’ scream!”

Helpful as always, Scavenger produced a small sulphur crystal from his arm compartment and shoved it into his teammate’s field of vision. Then Long Haul, being a mech true to his word, screamed and nearly fell from his chair. This cathartic performance (which wasn’t actually a performance) was nearly as applauded as the Crystal City itself.

Laughing with others, Scrapper took out his datapad and skimmed its contents, ignoring the following crass crystal-related jokes.

“Alright, everyone,” he announced. “Our next gig-”

Expressions the remaining Constructicons gave him ranged from surprised to shocked; except for Hook who was simply annoyed.

“No, you’re not.” He sounded as firm as if talking to an imbecile patient who wanted to run away before having their legs reattached. This in turn annoyed Scrapper.

“Yes, I am! After the crystals and all this public posing and aft-kissing we finally have a moment to sit and think of our next step.”

“But we already have!” Scavenger started and then withered a little under Hook’s glare. “S-sorry…”

“Yes, indeed,” Hook returned to their foremech, softening his gaze. “We already have.”

“What?” Scrapper’s visor brightened in surprise. “You decided what we do next?… Why, alright, just tell me what it is.”

If they really wanted to do something particular after the Crystal City he wasn’t the mech to stop them. Hook exchanged knowing smiles with the others and replied:

“Simple: we stay behind and clean the mess and you’re going to Altihex for the Grand Symposium on Modern Architecture.”

“Beg your pardon?” Dammit, all this slaving around had finally gotten into his systems; it wasn’t possible that he had heard what he thought he had.

His team only got more smiley.

“Tomorrow you’re going to the Grand Symposium in Altihex,” Hook smoothly repeated the loathsome words. “We’ve booked your transport, your hotel, all the events, everything; you don’t need to wor-”

“NO!!!”

His five subordinates flinched, and it felt like the building they were hiding in flinched as well.

“Fraag!” Long Haul collapsed on the table all over again, holding his helm. “I knew yer louder than workin’ equipment but mech, you just killed my audios!”

“You’ll see, they’re gonna find us now,” Mixmaster ostensibly looked around and made a seemingly unrelated remark.

“Now am gonna be deaf dump track…”

“Find us an’ drag us back to them festivities,” Bonecrusher murmured, not daring to say it louder. Terrified, Scavenger crouched behind his chair.

“Don’t let them take me!” he whispered dramatically, knowing that he would make an easy prey.

Bonecrusher turned from unpleasant events happening before him and patted his shoulder reassuringly.

“In times like this we shall stick together,” he said sagely. To add insult to injury, he was most probably quoting Scrapper.

“Why not claw my optics out when yer on it?… An’ my vocaliser’s quite close too…”

Hook in-vented and exvented deeply and approached Scrapper with caution.

“Was that really necessary?”

“An’ cut off my fingers, who needs ‘em any-”

“Of course it was!” Scrapper effectively silenced them all and even the building ceased howling with the wind. “What the frag do you think you’re doing?!”

“It’s… Our gift,” Hook clarified. “You’ve been working the hardest and you deserve-”

“Going to that Pit-spawned city for this blasted conference?” Scrapper was seething. “No, thank you, I’d rather work some more.”

“You need rest!” Hook started losing his patience. “As your medic, I strongly recommend you to go.”

“And as your foremech, I tell you that you don’t know slag!”

Seeing him like this, the surgical engineer remained quiet. None of them was courageous enough to speak to him right now as he angrily gathered his datapad and himself and seemed ready to leave. Well, almost none of them.

“Scrapper, please…” Scavenger slowly emerged from behind slumped Bonecrusher. “You deserve some vacation; something for your mind and your frame… We were sure that you’ll like it.”

“Vacation?” Normally aware that Scavenger should be handled with much more caution than your average mech, Scrapper spat it out with almost no consideration for who he was speaking to. “You call it ‘vacation’? Sending me to the poshest mechs in business and all those blabbering theorists to update them on our work? Give a lecture, or seven, or seventy, and answer their stupid questions? And you want me to have everything ready for tomorrow? Or maybe improvise? I’d sooner build this entire fragging city again than speak about it… Punch me in the tank and I’ll purge little crystal buildings!”

After this final confession, he calmed down as if it took this one outburst to burn off his long-built stress and frustration. Starting to consider that, perhaps, this time he came too far, Scrapper regarded his mechs who seemed shaken and shocked by these words.

And suddenly they burst into laughter – even Hook couldn’t stop himself from a delicate chuckle.

“Oh, Sigma, you’re just priceless!” Mixmaster wasn’t even trying to stop himself. “Just promise to… to… to never change!”

“What?” Scrapper stood awkwardly holding the datapad, completely clueless. Was his rage that funny? He almost backed up when gleeful Hook covered the small distance between them and put his hands on Scrapper’s shoulders.

“And they said that there are no misunderstandings between gestaltmates,” he reminisced, visibly relieved. “Scrapper, we know. We know it all. We would never make you do this. You’re going there as an external guest – you’ll have access to everything but nothing can be demanded from you. No lectures, no readings, no answers, no press; I promise. You’re going to look at some specimens, and hear some delusional simpletons striving to follow in your steps and failing pathetically; feel free to mock them mercilessly for all of us.”

The information proved almost too much for Scrapper to process, but when he finally did he didn’t like it.

“You mean I’m not a Guest of Honour but a normal attendee?” he finally put his datapad down and gently freed himself from Hook’s grip. “It’ll cost tens, no, hundreds of thousands… I can’t accept this.”

“Well, too late!” Bonecrusher shattered his hopes cheerfully.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Hook agreed with their overwhelmed leader. “But now you have no choice – everything is already booked. Tomorrow morning you’re having a flight to Polyhex and from there to Altihex and I won’t hear anything about it. This is your plan; and today you should go to berth early and have a good rest.”

“Yeah, like you’ll let him,” in spite of his visor Long Haul winked knowingly. Yes, Scrapper’s sentiments exactly.

“Of course I will,” Hook stated firmly. Too firmly. “He needs to be in good shape in the morning.”

As often with the Constructicons, this perfectly reasonable plan failed.

* * * * *

With all their initial misunderstandings resolved, Scrapper gladly took his righteous place among his crew and had no intention of leaving them. Drinking through their high grade stash they’d gathered for the occasion, trading jokes and most embarrassing anecdotes from their latest site, once again making fun of idiots who wanted their city built entirely of crystal – this was what he should be doing, this was where he belonged. This night was theirs and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Almost…

“Scrapper…”

Much like Scavenger, Hook was considered a lightweight amongst the Constructicons. With clear obligation in mind, he wasn’t drinking much and, in lieu of being fun to be around, he resolved to hanging on Scrapper’s arm in fruitless attempts to move him from his preferred place.

“Come on, you need to wake up early…”

Breems and joors were passing, their horribly potent fuel turning more and more palatable, jokes turning increasingly crude and anecdotes becoming repetitive. It was getting harder for him to remember why exactly he hated dealing with laymechs but he tried to explain it to his team again nevertheless. Emboldened by high grade, Scavenger heroically declared that from now on he was going to deal with laymechs for him. The four of them couldn’t stop laughing, while Hook was shaking his head.

“Scraaappeeer…”

Finally, after he downed his fourth cube and listened to Long Haul’s another bitching-riddled anecdote to the end, Hook managed to pull him to his feet and drag him to a narrow side corridor connecting all the main rooms in the hangar.

“Sleep tight!” Bonecrusher called after them as a way to bid them good night. The door slid shut, cutting off the remaining four Constructicons sniggering knowingly.

Not deigning to acknowledge them, Hook continued dragging Scrapper’ seemingly intoxicated self to the other end of the building with their on-site living quarters. The quarters weren’t anything fancy, of course – with their busy schedule for, oh, too many stellar cycles to admit now, the Constructicons were using them only for recharging. Well, recharging and recharging-related things. Scrapper was smirking. Unbeknownst to him, so was Hook as he was punching in the code to open the door to Scrapper’s room. As soon as it opened, all the rules were off.

For Scrapper, it was the end of a long, long day of keeping his hands to himself. And so, Hook found himself backed into a corner, his foremech all over him.

“Scrapper, weren’t you supposed… O-oh… Never mind.”

He didn’t mind indeed, grabbing him firmer and pulling into a passionate kiss. Possessive. Long. Breathtaking. Angry.

“You fragging bastards,” Scrapper snarled when finally breaking from him. “How dare you pull something like that behind my back?!”

Hook onlined his optics and reset his vocalizer, so submissive to his advances and yet so, so defiant.

“We just do.”

“Then. Don’t!”

“N-no, I don’t think so.”

Scrapper pulled him to himself by means of grabbing Hook’s crane shaft. Hard.

“Do it again, matrix-fraggers, and I’ll let you have it!”

Hook smirked and whispered, neither innocent nor altruistic:

“Good. Then take it all out on me, foremech, and leave my poor teammates out of it…”

Needless to say, he obliged.

Ultimately, Scrapper got to spend the rest of the night in his berth. Not alone, and doing much less in terms of recharging than he was supposed to, but to Pit with it. Precise plans and schedules were reserved for construction, and he was done with it for now.

Chapter Text

Inside Scrapper’s mind, everything was warm, dark, and calm. That was until Long Haul’s distant hollering cut through this dreamscape like an energy sword through a sheet of scrap.

“Holy fraggin’ Pit!…” Followed by a tortured sound of doors which weren’t really meant to be yanked open getting yanked open, and somebody’s quick steps in the side corridor. He slowly onlined his optics. Whatever warranted such a reaction? Did the city collapse during the night? Well… Even if it did, right now he wasn’t feeling like doing anything about it. Maybe in a breem or two, but definitely not now.

Hook shifted next to him, throwing his arm across Scrapper’s torso as if in an attempt to pin him down and prevent him from leaving. Groaning, he buried his face in the side of Scrapper’s head and his scoop, with no intention to get up anytime soon. It was truly amazing how he’d changed ever since they became a gestalt, Scrapper reminisced and couldn’t suppress a tender smile.

Without telling anyone, he’d been cataloguing all the little things and watching them escalate. The times when Hook had finally lowered his guard and dared to turn his back to his teammates and they didn’t end up stabbing him or something. The time when he left an empty cube on the table instead of rushing to wash it immediately. The first time when he didn’t show up on the site all shiny and buffed only to get dirty and scuffed all over. The first time when he uttered “It’s done when it’s done, I’m on a break now!” The time when he arrived at the site with only one backup datapad containing all the important details and, instead of freaking out, he figured out that, perhaps, they would manage with only two copies (while they normally needed one) and somebody from the crew could go and fetch the spare one if need be, whatever.

The sudden insight into his gestaltmates’ minds and lives showed Hook that, shockingly, it was possible to live like that without deactivating after the first mistake. More importantly, they weren’t going to judge him for every tiny slight and disorganized behaviour, they really, really didn’t care. Mind-bogglingly, his construction buddies were nothing like his previous co-workers in Iacon’s most prestigious clinic. They weren’t pretending to be friendly with him and actually waiting for his next misstep to rip his throat out and throw his carcass to the turbofoxes. Amazingly, they didn’t actually hate him – to his absolute puzzlement, after many vorns working together, they seemed to actually like him for some unfathomable reasons. Seeing for himself that the Constructicons considered him a part of their team – a very standoffish and keeping to himself part, but still a part, always a part – the lifetime loner finally accepted it as true and slowly learnt to act like one. It hadn’t even been a vorn and he’d made such amazing progress that his foremech’s spark was swelling with joy and pride.

Previously, Hook wouldn’t be caught dead in Scrapper’s quarters by any of his remaining teammates (warranting unorthodox use of closets, windows, roofs, air ducts and lockers) and now, sensing the incoming company, he didn’t even bother to leave his berth. He had to see the insides of other Constructicons’ minds a good couple of times to register that one, they knew, and two, they didn’t care. Like, really, honestly didn’t care. Well… Even if they really weren’t aware of his and Scrapper’s rather unprofessional relationship, the gestalt bond tended to make things known. Which was useful, all things considered, because – others privy to their affair or not – there were still times they really didn’t want their privacy disturbed without warning. Currently, after nearly a vorn of practice, they managed to make it simmer down to a subtle but clear “Do not disturb. Unless the world’s on fire, the dead have risen and our banker’s at the door, do. Not. Disturb!” signal reverberating through the bond. Every Constructicon taught himself to employ such discretion, leaving the general idea of what he was engaged in at the moment but sparing his teammates any details, thank Primus. The trial and error period was really something they didn’t want to discuss, ever.

Maybe in ten or hundred vorns to look back to their turbulent beginnings and have a laugh, but definitely not now.

Outside, Long Haul had gotten to the door, fortunately not trying to yank it open, and frantically punched in the code before barging inside. His foremech’s state and company didn’t surprise him in the least – actually, he would be concerned if he didn’t find them exactly like that.

“Scrapper, you overslept!” Long Haul announced angrily to both of them. “Yer shuttle’s leavin' in half a joor!”

“Huh?” Now he was partially awakened. His frame jerked, ready to get up, but he didn’t get to get up.

“Stay,” Hook’s arm was resting firmly in place, keeping him down. He obeyed.

“Then looks like I’m not going,” he shrugged with his free shoulder. “Oops…”

“No fraggin’…” Long Haul in-vented and exvented, trying really hard not to take his anger and frustration out on Scrapper. Luckily, he wasn’t the only person in the room. “Hook! You were s’pposed to keep an optic on him, an’ yer doin’ what instead?!”

“‘T was planned,” Hook mumbled into Scrapper’s neck cables and waved at Long Haul dismissively.

Their procurement specialist gasped and then pointedly balled his hands into fists with creaking of his finger joints, the sound nobody who knew him wanted to hear in their close vicinity. Now, Scrapper woke up completely seeing how things in his private quarters started getting interesting.

“What was planned, Hook? You sabotagin’ everything an’ sending it to the Pit? ‘S that what yer sayin’, pal?”

Too sleepy, too haughty and too egocentric to explain things to others properly, Hook sighed into Scrapper’s neck and gave another dismissive wave, his hand falling back on Scrapper’s chest with a hollow cling.

“‘M not sabotagin’ anything, Haul,” he moved his head minutely and sounded slightly less muffled but it was all he was ready to do for this conversation. “Y’all just lack vision to fully appreciate the whole picture, you know? That’s your problem…”

“Dafrag yer talkin’ about?! Explain yourself this astrosecond, or Primus help me…”

“You know, I’m sure that if we tried we could find a common ground,” Scrapper couldn’t stop himself from being unhelpful in this heated situation. As his perfectionist number two and his unofficial number three responsible for logistics, Hook and Long Haul were often at odds with each other. Scrapper had learnt long ago that the safest (and the most entertaining) tactic was to let them resolve their conflicts by themselves, maybe observing them from a safe distance and committing to memory the creative insults and colourful expressions he especially liked. If they hadn’t killed each other so far, they probably wouldn’t do it now.

Hook huffed, Scrapper’s peaceful appeal irritating him into talking.

“‘T was a ploy, Haul, my mech,” he murmured condescendingly. “Scrapper’s actual shuttle leaves in four joors or so.”

“It does?” Scrapper’s curiosity was piqued. It seemed that his teammates were conspiring not only against him but also against each other… Or it was just Hook taking things and improving them without asking for anybody’s input.

“Explain,” Long Haul demanded, crossing his large arms over his large chest in a very unfriendly manner, not like Hook would care to even look at him.

“‘S easy: the earlier flights were booked for Scrapper; he’s not taking them. He’s taking the later flights as… What’s his face…” Hook’s fingers drummed on Scrapper’s chest impotently. “As someone else,” he gave a precise response. “Nobody’s expecting him there, they won’t get… Prepared to harass him, as they would. ‘S that easy, Long Haul… But thanks for waking us up, pal, good job.”

Scrapper could see Long Haul straightening himself, his visor brightening with fury. Obviously, learning that they had paid for two sets of very expensive tickets while needing only one couldn’t sit right with any logistician.

“‘Ve always admired how practical and useful you can make yourself. Now, if you could just go an’ make yourself useful somewhere else…”

Sensing trouble, Scrapper put a protective arm over Hook’s insolent frame.

“Why, thank you,” he said cheerfully. “I’d really hate all the attention, how thoughtful of you!” He tilted his head in Long Haul’s direction. “And, as Hook said, thank you for waking us up! Everybody’s looking out for me today, I really don’t know what to say… Thank you all, I really appreciate that!”

“You can start packing his scrap,” Hook waved at Long Haul again, which looked as if he was shooing him out of the room. “At least what isn’t here. I’ll get him nice and ready for the takeoff… Remember to pack his polish and grease.”

“Will do,” still seething but unwilling to argue, Long Haul turned on his heelstrut and left the room, doors hissing shut behind his broad back.

“You better,” Hook very wisely waited with this remark until the larger Constructicon was out. Scrapper chuckled.

“You really need to work on your berthside manner…”

“Pfft,” was Hook’s sophisticated reply. His communication skills were excellent, it wasn’t his fault that most of the time everybody else was an idiot. Then, he in-vented and gave out another deep sigh, warming Scrapper’s neck cables. At this point, Scrapper started to get worried with his apathy. It was possible that Hook had gotten somebody’s second-hand hangover and wasn’t feeling his best this late morning. Scrapper gently stroked his purple side.

“Do you need to see Mixmaster?”

Wedged between Scrapper’s head and scoop and reluctant to scratch his faceplates, Hook resolved to swinging his crane shaft instead of shaking his head.

“I need sleep,” he murmured. “And Primus knows when I’m going to get any…”

“Then maybe you should have thought about it last night instead of fragging my processor inside-out,” Scrapper suggested helpfully. He could feel Hook smirking against his neck cables.

“It was a sacrifice I was willing to make.”

Ah… Figures. Such a commendable dedication. Scrapper squeezed his shoulder-tire affectionately.

“You know… It’s actually really nice. We should stay like this. I could catch some sleep as well…”

“Frag no!” Hook stirred and gingerly lifted himself to sitting and then standing position, onlining his weary optics and resetting them several times while taking careful steps towards cabinets with Scrapper’s more personal belongings. “You’re not missing this flight, I haven’t booked another.”

“We can always do that, it doesn’t need to be this flight.” Without his lovely burden, Scrapper took an opportunity to move his joints and stretch his backstruts. “There’s no need to fret over it-”

“With such short notice, there’s no chance for any spots available. I’d have to bribe them to kick someone out. And there are no ordinary people on these flights. You have any idea how much it would cost?” Hook shook his head and gave him a crooked smile. “Don’t get me wrong, Scrapper – we love you, but not this much.”

“Oh…”

“Unless you want to go as you,” he took a cube of slightly discoloured fuel from Scrapper’s desk and gave it an experimental swish. “Then sure, you’ll have dozens of mechs lined up to give you their seats… But then you can kiss your privacy goodbye. Maybe even get roped into some favours or acquaintances… As they say, you’re hot slag now, my dearest foremech – everybody’s gonna want a piece.”

“Eww… I’ll pass!”

“Thought so.”

Hook took a sip and grimaced.

“What is that supposed to be?” He looked over a half-full cube of oxidised high grade Scrapper left open five cycles ago, or ten, and promptly forgot. “I’m not letting you drink this.”

Through the gestalt link, Scrapper could sense Hook comming Scavenger and ordering him to bring two cubes of proper fuel to their foremech’s quarters in two breems, or five. Scrapper felt Scavenger’s end of the bond brightening with eagerness to help and be of any use. During this brief exchange, Hook unceremoniously downed the rest of the cube and tossed it aside.

Scrapper wasn’t sure if it was just an ex-clinician thing but for someone cultivating such an impeccable public persona, in his private life Hook harboured an impressive number of bad habits. Treating expiration dates, safety precautions and hazard warnings as mere suggestions, his living spaces getting messy even with apparent lack of anything to make a mess with, his long and close friendship with Mixmaster where both of them tended to taste things to test them and traded recipes for Cybertron’s worst “swipe your workshop and mix it all together” types of drinks, scratching glyphs on his datapads instead of putting labels on them, adding burnt copper to his energon, stabbing used styluses into a wall instead of putting them in a bin, using his berth as storage space and clearing it every now and then by means of shoving stuff on the floor, putting empty cubes into a crate and then smashing them to take up less room and take the trash out less frequently…

Seeing him imperfect like this, when not life-threatening, was absolutely endearing and, naturally, Scrapper would never acknowledge this – he was quite sure that then Hook would quickly get rid of those quirks.

“It can give you tank poisoning,” he warned instead.

“It won’t. There’s no time for that,” Hook disagreed matter-of-factly. “Alright, you’ll fuel later, now we’re taking you to the washracks.” He was rummaging through Scrapper’s lockers in search of heavy-duty detergents and brushes. “We need to finally get you clean from all the…” The dreaded c-word was lingering at the back of his vocalizer. “Sparkling mineral residue. And other things.”

“You’re the medic, you know best,” Scrapper put his hands between his neck and scoop, watching him lazily. “But there’s still time before Scavvy brings the fuel. Why won’t you come over here really quickly, and then we can hit the washracks?”

“Absolutely out of the question. I don’t think that we have a breem to spare. Scrapper, I can’t stress it enough – you built a city. You really need scrubbing. A lot of scrubbing.” Hook glanced at him sideways and added, his tone softening with a promise: “We need to get you to Altihex on schedule. When you’re back… Everything will be different.”

* * * * *

After three joors in washracks Scrapper had to admit that Hook wasn’t exaggerating. It was almost mystical – after their relationship, them working together, even combining and the gestalt link, Scrapper felt that Hook had never gotten as deeply under his plating as he was doing it now, using actual medical tools to remove crystal gunk from cracks and joints Scrapper didn’t even remember having. He was getting so deep that, frankly, a mechanoinch deeper would turn it into vivisection. The entire process felt quite invasive and a bit painful at times but also deeply refreshing and really satisfying. As if all those dull stellar cycles of working on one thing were going down the drain and Scrapper was finally allowed to move on to other things.

After the deep cleaning and returning to his quarters, he needed all layers of his paint reapplied – and they were being reapplied with utmost precision, leaving him flashy and immaculate like a custom-made newbuilt right off the assembly line. Scrapper wasn’t a vain mech but getting doted on by someone whose care he actually appreciated and, as a result, getting prettier than he could remember being felt so good.

“I know that ‘you can’t rush perfection’ and all that scrap,” he looked down at Hook kneeling between his legs and doing a detailing job on his left foot. “But really, it doesn’t have to be perfect. I’m going to Altihex to make fun of them, not to seduce them! We still need to make it to the airport, right?… Also, it tickles.”

“You can’t rush perfection,” was Hook’s half-mocking answer.

Seeing that there was no use trying to be reasonable here, Scrapper lay back on his chair, resigned to his fate.

“You know… After all that scrap we should all go to an art exhibition, it’s more of my scene,” he suggested. Hook huffed, probably the paint smell being too strong for his liking. “Maybe even meet someone meaningful… Like master Slog,” Scrapper mused. Hook gagged. Blasted paint… “Ah! Maybe I should make a new sculpture to show him. Maybe that’s what I need the most right now – making art. With the right inspiration, I could do anything…”

“Oh yes, we should all go together,” Hook said quickly, his tone sounding suspiciously like ‘Don’t even think about it!’ He stood up and gestured for Scrapper to slide his facemask back on so he could put the last layer of paint on it. “Even if to keep an optic on you. There’s clearly something not right with you.”

Oh… That was going to be entertaining.

“Like, for example, what?”

Seemingly leaning closer to better inspect his work Hook smirked, his face mere mechanoinches from Scrapper’s.

“Your taste in romantic partners.”

That facemask… Now Scrapper had to keep the blasted thing on for the paint to dry. Damn… They both knew that if Hook started kissing him right now, he wouldn’t be able to stop.

“If this is wrong, I never want to be right,” he declared.

Visibly pleased but determined not to show it too much, Hook started circling him to give his foremech one final appraising look. Not seeing him for a moment, Scrapper grew bold:

“After some changes in your dreadful behaviour, you could become my muse…”

He could hear an exasperated sigh. Aaand you ruined it, came unspoken yet clear.

“I’m not changing to become your fragging muse! If anything, I’m the exact opposite – I make your projects less artsy and bring them down to Cybertron.” Hook started bitching, now busying himself with collecting all the tools scattered in front of Scrapper.

“That’s true,” he nodded, thoughtful. “If master Slog ever had a muse, he either… Sacrificed them or, hopefully, they were killed by something else.” Scrapper smiled dreamily. “The most impactful art is about suffering, after all.”

“Of course it is,” Hook rolled his optics. “About suffering of all the people forced to suffer through it.”

Scrapper chuckled at this remark.

“You are so right! So right… If I were into Slogism, maybe I’d do with you exactly that.” He in-vented and said raspily: “The living creature you were, now into a masterpiece you’re turned!”

Putting the paint and tools aside and reaching into a small security box, Hook spared him a glare.

“Next time you’ll want to compliment me using Slog-talk, warn me beforehand so I could leave the room,” he grumbled, emptying the opened box onto Scrapper’s desk. “Oh, your boarding pass...”

He produced a chip, stared at it for an astrosecond and then put it into a small datapad to review its contents.

“Ah! Payload,” Hook skimmed the information displayed before taking the chip out and handing it to Scrapper. “You’re supposed to be named Payload. Now, take it and try not to lose it… Sounds like an absolute nobody, no wonder I couldn’t remember.”

“But you rarely remember any names,” Scrapper pointed out. He put the chip into a slot over his left wrist, careful not to scratch any paint while Hook was picking through his remaining cards and chips.

“Maybe my definition of a 'nobody’ is slightly broader than yours.” He handed him what he deemed useful. “Here. Don’t blow it all on overpriced shuttle shots,” he blinked behind his visor.

“I won’t! Shots ain’t fuel,” he promised, slotting his IDs into various discreet compartments. “I remember everybody we worked for and all the contractors. You remember them only when they fragged you off.”

Putting the remaining cards and chips into their respective pockets before shutting the security box, Hook shrugged.

“Can you imagine operating on up to thirty patients per cycle and remembering them all?” He knelt to push the security box into a bigger security box and code it close. “My memory banks are wired for storing important information. People just happen not to be it.” Done with the code, he stood up and turned to Scrapper. “Alright, you’ve got everything. You can double-check if you want, but I know that you’ve got everything. There’s no time for it anyway. We grab your baggage and we’re out.”

“Must be that perfection that can’t be rushed,” Scrapper murmured sarcastically, passing him and exiting his room – the room that, most probably, would cease to exist by the time he would be back.

“But people I do remember…” Hook followed him out of the door. Scrapper moved to the side, making room for him.

“Yes?”

After code-locking the door, Hook looked at him with that treacherous smirk that tended to make Scrapper feel weak in the knees.

“These are very special.”

* * * * *

The shuttle Scrapper was supposed to take was filling up slowly while the remaining people were waiting, wandering, taking in the views and socializing around it. No one was going to remain in the city – except for Omega Supreme and the Constructicons – because, while they finished everything on schedule, the remaining infrastructure connecting Crystal City with other places on Cybertron was far from ready. The means to get to the city, to leave it and to deliver there anything were too limited for anyone to take permanent residence. But their work was finished, they handed the place over and were no longer responsible for it.

He turned to his faithful crew before making his way to the shuttle. He was relieved to notice that Long Haul and Hook seemed to present a unified front. Good; otherwise Mixmaster, Scavenger and Bonecrusher, being themselves, would exploit every weakness in their temporary leadership to get into trouble. But also… Their rushed walk to the airport and the five of them talking over each other offering him advice didn’t leave much room for him to say something. Well, something that wouldn’t be “It’s the last time you’re doing something like that to me, you slaggers!” and “Primus, you’re the best crew that ever existed – I don’t deserve you!”

He didn’t even have time to realize right away that, while doting on him all morning, Hook didn’t even take a moment to do anything for his own worn-down appearance, and now he was keeping others around him to hide from the public eye the telltale signs, especially green and purple paint transfers on his white thighs. Mixmaster, with Scavenger’s frantic assistance, practically made for him enough meds (freshest and best quality available) to fill several fancy first aid kits, so he didn’t need to fear anything when away. Bonecrusher and Long Haul gathered his modest belongings and cleaned, polished and repaired them, and put it all into a really fancy crate, so their foremech would look in Altihex like those wealthy people travelling with their costly scrap to do wealthy-people things. All of them appeared tired and self-neglected, and happy to be there for him. Seeing how much they were willing to do for his sake at the expense of their own well-being was touching him so hard that he was on the verge of collapsing.

“I…” He started and got stuck. He really had no words. Fortunately, there was the bond. He was reluctant to open it completely and unleash the torrent of feelings on his teammates, but just a suggestion of its extent was enough to have them all beaming at him. He wanted to hug them all, tight, but such behaviour would be unbecoming in a public place, and since they seemed to be famous now, bringing attention to any unbecoming things would be inadvisable. He was fighting to get some words out because, goddamit, he should be boarding the shuttle right now, when Scavenger stepped up and put a coarse piece of a reddish rock – *Jasper,* he informed over the bond – in Scrapper’s hand.

“Whenever thinking about…” Scavenger hesitated over the triggering word. “About shiny transparent minerals we used as building materials will become too much for you, hold onto this – it should be as far from those minerals as we can get.”

It was true. The barely polished piece of jasper looked nothing like a crystal. It was so wonderful and comforting. It was… This time he managed to find words.

“Thank you.”

* * * * *

Five pairs of optics saw their foremech enter the shuttle and disappear inside. They dutifully remained outside till the takeoff, no matter how awkward it felt. Of course, there were whispers and fingers pointing at their direction. Six, and then five green-and-purple mechs in Crystal City could be only one thing. After Scrapper suddenly appeared and unceremoniously departed, the onlookers – and even worse, media – were probably looking for the second best thing they could have coming: Hook. The one who did all the talking the day before and made an Impression. The one who surrounded himself with his colleagues-subordinates, because the only impression he could make today would be the one of a busy night and not enough sleep and maintenance. Oh, wouldn’t they want to get to him – he warned his gestaltmates over the bond that if they let it happen, he was definitely going to say: “Scrapper? We decided to fire him. He’s probably on the way to throw himself into a smelting pool.”

Bonecrusher and Mixmaster liked the idea and wanted to see it happen but got outvoted. So, people kept looking. And looking. And whispering and pointing. After an in-bond deliberation, the Constructicons came to a conclusion that they clearly couldn’t tell them apart and weren’t even sure how many of them were there. Long Haul and Bonecrusher’s unfriendly aura and build impressive even among industrial frames, but absolutely intimidating for all the intellectuals, politicians, and socialites teeming around them, had to make an impact as well.

Finally, after a slight delay (hopefully not caused by someone harassing Scrapper onboard) the shuttle launched and went on its happy journey to Polyhex. Watching it take off felt like a weight being gradually lifted off their chests. Their role ended here. From now on, their foremech was on his own.

“I already miss him…” Scavenger’s shoulders slumped noticeably and his tail hung unhappily. Bonecrusher patted his arm in a reassuring gesture.

“It’s only five cycles, Scavvy. We’ll be fine!”

“Alright, Constructicons,” Hook waited no time to exert his authority over them. “We’re leaving. Keep the formation. There are two more flights today and after that, no one will be staying in the city, save for Omega and us. We must be ready for some… Unsavoury characters’ last-ditch efforts to get to us.” To get to me, came unsaid. And no one can see me like that.

He gave them directions without words and, alerted into obeying, they swiftly moved towards an almost deserted alley leading out of the airport, snaking into an intended commercial district and going mostly parallel to the route to their hangar. They couldn’t transform in the city, which was the pain in the aft, therefore there was a good walk awaiting them. They kept the formation, watching out for all the possible predators.

“So, what are we doing now?” Scavenger was eyeing dozens of people walking crystal streets and he tried to imagine how the place would look like with thousands of them.

“Isn’t it obv-” Hook started.

“Cleanin’,” Long Haul informed at the same moment.

The two locked optics and after an astrosecond of tension nodded in polite agreement.

“Really, can’t we catch a bre-” Bonecrusher tried to protest.

“Nope,” Long Haul cut him off firmly, manoeuvring him to move to the back and taking his position at the front. “We gotta clean an’ pack all our scrap. A’ soon as Scrapper’s back, we’re getting outta this crystal-hole.”

“Exactly,” Hook confirmed. “The sooner we start, the sooner we’re done. Then, we may find time for a little celebration…”

“An’ then am gonna go inta washracks fer seven joors, scrape all the paint outta me, put a new one on, an’ sleep fer three decacycles,” Long Haul murmured. Hook sighed audibly.

“In a soundproof room.”

“With blinds down,” Bonecrusher joined in.

“I’m sooo disappointed with you, mechs,” Mixmaster shook his head. “I was hoping that, after this long and monotonous job, we’re all gonna explore new possibilities with fresh energy! How else are we going to know our next project? Do some spark-searching? Know what we desire right now? Hook, wouldn’t you like to open someone up and see what makes them sick?”

“Believe me, Mixmaster, but no.”

“Bonecrusher, after all this building don’t you want to tear something down?”

“No, Mixie, I just wanna do nothin’.”

“Long Haul, wouldn’t you just love to pack some volatile materials and transport them from city A to city B on a very tight schedule?”

“Nope, wouldn’t, no. Hard pass.”

“Scavvy, wouldn’t you like to go treasure-hunting?”

“Sure I would!”

“Why, great! Just give me location and terrain structure an’ we’ll make something out of it. I still should have some unspent explosives lying around…”

The three killjoys tensed. Scavenger and Mixmaster shouldn’t be left to their own devices. Not individually, and especially not together.

“Yer not goin’ anywhere, Scavvy,” Bonecrusher put his arm around the smaller Constructicon and pulled him close. “Am really tired and I really need to rest – an’ can’t do it properly without you!”

“Oh… Alright!” Scavenger leaned into his strong frame and embraced his back.

“You two, stop it!” Long Haul hissed. “We’re still in the public space. Don’t give ‘em reasons to talk.”

“What reasons?” Scavenger whined but obediently regained his little distance. Long Haul laughed without joy.

“Why, doncha know? We’re famous now. They’re gonna gossip like crazy. All that stellar cycles, an’ only the six of us in that city. Maybe we just, y’know, did our fraggin’ job like professionals we are an’ got bored ta death in the process… Orrr there was all sorta wild slag an’ drama goin’ around.”

“An’ Omega Supreme, don’t forget about the big guy!” Bonecrusher added cheerfully. Long Haul groaned.

“Thanks, pal, you’d jus’ made it ten times worse… An’ even without addin’ Big Dev inta the equation, ‘cause with ‘im… Hooolyyy slag.”

“What… Are they going to gossip about us and him… Or about the big guy and him?” Scavenger’s world started spinning around him. “Whatever’d poor Omega done to deserve it?”

“Course they will. People are fraggin’ stupid like that,” Long Haul grumbled.

“Unfortunately, they are,” Hook shrugged, hopefully ending the topic. “Mixmaster, can you be a good mech and give me something for a headache, and maybe a mild stimulant?”

“Why, sure. Have you run out of your own stash?”

“Scrapper threw it all into the incinerator. He saw these stupid little dates on them, you know which ones, and freaked out, as they do…” Hook explained with a tired annoyance mixed with fondness. “I told him that all of these were still as good as five vorns ago, only requiring a double dosage, and it’s not like I would be giving it to anybody else, but he wouldn’t listen. We really need to re-discuss his clearance around my stuff, I’m afraid.”

Mixmaster giggled.

“Laymechs!”

“Laymechs…”

The three laymechs accompanying them shuddered internally.

“Tough luck. You usually use Arsinin, right? I lack the ingredients to recreate it, but I can whip up something similar, no worries. And stimulant to that, yes? Any interactions you’re interested in?”

“If you may… But remember, something mild. I want something to prevent me from tripping and falling into recharge, not something to make me trip my cogs. And no interactions, please, just intended effects.”

“You know that with your tolerance it’ll be almost my level of mild?”

“Well… Then be it. As long as it doesn’t make me put solder guns into wire brushes and drill bits into dissolvent… Or Scavenger into twenty incandescent lamp boxes.”

“I can just make two portions for both of us and leave one without neural jumpers. Unless you’d like some?”

“I’d have to think about it. I’ll tell you in the base…”

//We absolutely need ta clean all the trash before they’ll notice,// Long Haul discreetly commed Scavenger and Bonecrusher. //Keep ‘em distracted or somethin’… Can’t let ‘em work themselves into mania an’ end up puttin’ most disgustin’ scrap inta their fuel.//

//We can’t!// Scavenger agreed. //They’re so scary when it happens…//

//They’ll jus’ tear the walls down an’ pull out insulation,// Bonecrusher was pessimistic.//We’ll gotta disassemble an’ bag away the whole-aft hangar to stop ‘em.//

//Frag, yer right… These freaks will always find somethin’! Anyhow, I got energon stash in my room. Double locked, double sealed. Reg-grade fer now an’ high grade fer later. That’s gonna be our fuel from now. Ya heard me, Scavvy? Nothin’ else is safe, even sealed. An’ specially anything ‘medical’…//

Due to the bond, Mixmaster and Hook were well aware of this conversation. They glanced at each other and grinned. Hook put an arm around Mixmaster’s shoulders and atop his mixing drum and whispered into his audio:

“You know what? I think that I want those neural jumpers in my drink.”

“You do?” Mixmaster tittered and answered in a similar way: “Great! Shall I make it half a dose, or the whole deal?”

Hook waited for several astroseconds, probably wanting to give their three friends time for some hope to develop before smashing it:

“Give me the whole deal, Mixie. The same what you’re having.”

“Ow, that’s the spirit!”

“Don’ try getting’ high, ya morons, we’ve got fraggin’ work to do!” Long Haul snapped, having had enough.

Mixmaster and Hook separated, still grinning knowingly. Primus, their teammates really didn’t like seeing them like that.

“Nobody’s getting ‘high’, Long Haul,” Hook assured him, his tone too good-natured to be honest. “What we’re talking about is self-medicating. Some mechs are just wired in more… Sophisticated ways than others and occasionally require some subtle external stimulation. Nothing to see here, absolutely normal… Personal maintenance.”

Somehow, Long Haul managed to suppress every curse, groan and gesture Hook’s explanation evoked in him and he just kept going, leading them outside the city and towards the safety (safety?) of their current shelter.

The shelter they were going to completely dismantle before leaving the place, allowing the city to remain without any traces of the living, functioning people who had built it. In ten or hundred vorns it was very likely to happen – the populace might remember the mech who commissioned Crystal City, since he would probably still be holding his office, while the ones who designed it and made it possible to happen… Well. They never wanted fame. Recognition, yes. Prestige, yes. Commissions and credits – why, sure. But after each of their projects was finished, they were happy to leave it behind and move to the next one. It was no longer theirs – never had been, legally speaking. They would remember it, of course… And, unless it was a total frag-up they never wanted to be associated with, they would feel occasional warmth tugging at their sparks at the thought that, somewhere, their creation was a reminder of what they had accomplished and what they were capable of. And how far they had gotten since their first project done together which consisted of painting pink prisms on a hotel’s walls and putting a tilted gazebo on its roof.

Scavenger turned around to look at Crystal City – probably one of many last looks he would be casting during their final cycles at the location – and caught sight of a giant robot’s head and wings visible above lower crystal buildings of a future library.

“…and we can dissolve some scrap in acid instead of carrying it out,” Mixmaster was busy sharing his unsettling ideas with the rest. “If we find a natural air well that’s deep enough and dump everything dow-” Scavenger leaned over Hook (careful not to touch the crane shaft) and tapped his shoulder. “Huh? What is that, Scavvy?”

Having their attention, he nervously reset his vocalizer, unsure whether he was going to point out the obvious and make an idiot out of himself or remind them about something vital they had forgotten about.

“After all is done, we’re going to tell goodbye to Omega Supreme, right?”

“Yeah! Let’s not forget the ol’ Omega,” Bonecrusher agreed. After twelve… Or rather twenty stellar cycles spent building together – even though he wasn’t really fit to help them and it wasn’t his job anyway – and unwinding after building, they couldn’t leave him behind like some stranger. “We totally should have a drink together before we’re gone. He, us, and the big mech,” he added cryptically. The public had yet to know about Devastator and they preferred it this way.

“Absolutely!” Long Haul agreed, pretty much deciding that they would do exactly that.

“But we’re going to be legless?” Hook raised his optical ridge, unsure what to think about this arrangement.

“Sure we are,” Mixmaster clasped a hand on his arm which didn’t feel the least reassuring. “And how!”

Chapter Text

With every step taken ascending the shuttle’s small folding staircase, Scrapper felt lighter. While Hook, Long Haul, and Mixmaster would leave the city occasionally to get supplies, he remained in this place. From the cycle they entered the building site till their project’s completion.

And now, he was breaking free.

With every step taken, his systems protested. He registered a light tugging inside his spark and at the back of his mind, as if a delicate thread connecting him with the others was becoming too taut for comfort. Being alone felt like the strangest of strangest concepts… If minerals were sentient – would they feel exactly this after getting chipped off their deposit?

Leaving his crew felt wrong. Leaving Crystal City felt so, so right.

Feeling a tad conflicted, Scrapper managed to get inside the shuttle without looking behind. He managed to ignore a stifled wave of “Ooh”s, “Aah”s and “Master Scrapper!”s that exploded upon his arrival and, finally, he managed to calmly hand his boarding chip to a stunned flight attendant guarding the entrance.

“You’ll want that, I guess,” he gave an encouraging half-shrug to the flimsy red ‘bot with his air lines’ flimsy symbol painted on his chest and with three rectangular “wings” growing from his left elbow, right wrist, and from under his hood in the middle of his back. The small fly-bot took his chip and, in spite of his hand shaking visibly, he managed to slot the thing into a small reader apparatus which was mounted on his left wrist and wired into his CPU after only five attempts. The mech's blue visor flashed brightly, the boarding information apparently displayed before his very optics, and he flinched.

“P-payload? B-but, sir...”

“Shhh...” Clearly not overwhelming enough, Scrapper leaned over the poor air lines’ worker and reassuringly patted his flimsy shoulder, making him freeze. “It's alright. What's on the chip, goes.”

Shocked, the mech looked into his optics underneath his red visor, as if Scrapper has been telling him that there’d been a major tragedy, yes, but at least all the bodies had been accounted for and the reason for the catastrophe would be known soon.

“It does?” He asked weakly, more a squeak than a speech.

“It does,” Scrapper nodded and leaned even closer, his voice soft and pleasant, his optics’ edges crinkled in a friendly smile. “For now, I'm Payload. For my next flight to Altihex, I'm Payload. As simple as that. If you as much as pass my information to my next flying crew with one different glyph than what's on the chip, I’ll rip your malfunctioning vocalizer off and claw your optics out with it. Understood?”

“Y-yes, sir!” Shuddering, the flight attendant raised his spindly limb and saluted.

“From now on until the end of flight, none of you will refer to me differently than stays on the chip, or I’ll go after y’all. Understood?”

For emphasis, Scrapper poked the ‘bot’s flimsy chest. The red flight attendant gasped and low-key moaned, as if Scrapper’s finger had a little taser built into its tip. Then he shuddered even more and little wheels mounted on his shoulders and hips gave squeaky spins, the emphasis clearly sinking in.

“Y-yes, sir, Payload, sir, we’re here to cater for your every wish!” He gave him another shivering salute. “The satisfaction of our passengers is our utmost… Utmost… It’s very important for us, sir!” His shaking hand took Scrapper’s boarding chip out of his reader apparatus and handed it back to him with deliberation. “Just, p-please, tell me what we can do for you, sir, Payload, sir!”

“Why, of course,” satisfied with the service so far, Scrapper straightened up and lightly patted the ‘bot’s spindly arm. The ‘bot shivered in response. “It’s all very simple, I’m sure you’ll be able to do that. First: show me my seat. Second: bring me a small cube of reg-grade. Third: I’m going to pop a pill and nod off – anyone disturbing me before the touchdown in Polyhex is going to have their arm ripped off and shoved up their tailpipe. Understood?”

“Yes, master Scra- Yes, sir, Payload, sir!” the flight attendant hastily corrected himself, giving another half-crazy salute. “Right away! Just…” He moved on his spindly legs to the far side and glanced at the stairs behind Scrapper. Seeing that nobody else was waiting to board the shuttle, he quickly hit several buttons twinkling in the wall next to the entrance. The shuttle’s doors hissed closed and Scrapper could hear a whirring and clanking noise indicating that the unfolded staircase was being folded back to be tucked away. “Yes, sir, right away, sir! P-please, follow me to your seat…”

“Now we’re talking,” pleased, Scrapper nodded and followed the red mech to his booked seat. Since it was a luxurious trip, one of the rows had only single seats, and this was the one Hook had chosen for him. Content, Scrapper put his smallish luggage under his seat, sat down and reached into his discreet arm compartment where Mixmaster made him stash assorted medicaments he was sure to need, while the ‘bot chased after another flight attendant who was moving from passenger to passenger with her squeaking cart. He was back with a small cube of regular grade before Scrapper had his pills ready.

“Good ‘bot,” Scrapper praised, attempting to open the cube without spilling his meds. “Now, get lost and nobody will get harmed.”

“Y-yes, sir, absolutely, sir!” The small red flying ‘bot saluted eagerly and promptly got lost, leaving him with another flight attendant and the remaining passengers. Luckily, none of those tried to bother him while he was popping his pills one by one. Aside from intended side effects, Mixmaster wasn’t big on multi-purpose drugs, which was why Scrapper had to take three separate ones for recharging, hangover and motion sickness. He could still sense his gestalt’s presence at the airport (he felt a pang in his spark, only for five other sparks to rush to his and fill it with reassurance) and he was doing fine, but it was better not to think what unpleasant ailments would catch up with him without other Constructicons’ mitigating proximity. Honestly, being a lone individual sucked on so many levels, how come he’d lived as such for so long…

As Scrapper, determined no one on this blasted flight could see his face, was busy opening and closing his facemask and slowly flushing his meds (while trying not to think about how much he was going to miss his crew), the remaining flight attendant finished her round with the passengers and the cart followed her to the front. She stopped right before the enclosed crew-only part, turned to the forty or so very important passengers, flashed them a professional smile, straightened herself and waited. And waited. Her smile wavered. Sitting near the front, Scrapper was almost sure that she mouthed a silent “Frag!” before pushing the cart with her heel to knock at the door to the crew-only segment of the shuttle. This knocking awarded her an announcement through the shuttle’s comm.:

»Dear passengers, this is your captain speaking. The door at the front of the shuttle is for the employees only. Please, don’t try to get in, or we’ll have you physically restrained and removed, no matter the altitude. Just press a button near your right armrest and our amazing crew will attend to your every wish, or fine you accordingly. Stop knocking! Thank you.«

Defiant, the cart knocked angrily a couple of times more, while the blue three-winged fembot seemed to be busy contacting someone, only to lightly shrug and smile again. Several passengers chuckled. Seeing essential workers struggling to do their essential work was always so funny, right…

“Ladies and gentlemechs, welcome on flight 00008 from Crystal City to Polyhex,” she greeted, trying to speak over the rich and famous passengers who were too busy eating, drinking and chatting to pay attention – unless something would go wrong again, of course. “Before we’ll take off, let me quickly present to you a quick set of rules… Very easy rules… Which are very important for you to follow. First,” she spread her long and thin arms. “On your outside side, you have windows. Please, refrain from using them for anything else than looking. We know that some of you, especially the ones with flier alt-modes, might feel like leaving in the middle of the flight. If you attempt it, and you somehow survive, our legal team will be happy to show you why it wasn’t a good idea. On your inside side,” she pointed ahead. “There’s an aisle. Please, refrain from using it for anything else than walking to your seat at the beginning of the flight and for leaving at the flight’s end. We know that some of you, especially the ones who had too much to drink, might feel like leaving your seats in the middle of the flight. If you attempt it, and you somehow survive, our legal team will be happy to take care of you and your nearest future. On your low side,” she pointed at the floor. “There’s the floor and a space under your seat intended for your carry-on luggage. Please, refrain from using it for anything else than…”

Bored, Scrapper looked out his sizeable window. Luckily, he was sitting on the wrong side of the shuttle and all he could see were some crystal buildings and some people who weren’t green and purple. Therefore, he didn’t feel compelled to open the window and escape, probably to the sadistic joy of the airlines’ legal team.

Gosh, I hate travelling first class, he thought, taking another sneaky sip from his cube. Sometimes it couldn’t be helped, but they’d always tried to avoid it if possible. Everything was better, even flying in a cargo bay. Actually, they had gotten to the site of future Crystal City exactly like that – travelling together with their supplies. They preferred so much common transportation, even though it was often crammed and not that clean, but at least they were amongst people like them and treated like, well, normal people. While it wasn’t entirely Scrapper’s scene – after he’d spent his formative vorns at university and in art galleries instead of work stations and construction sites – he felt a deep kinship with industrial frames, the one he didn’t share with other artists and, definitely, would never feel with the higher-class mechs. He absolutely didn’t belong with his posh fellow passengers on this posh flight, and it made him feel even lonelier than he already was.

His crew knew all too well that mechs looking like them weren’t welcome in spacious, expensive transports like this shuttle. On many occasions they were double checked, sometimes initially denied boarding, and at times accused of being dirty and disgusting – with them trying to argue with posh flight crews that those were simply scuffs from construction work, and barely succeeding. He didn’t miss being treated like that, flight attendants’ disdainful looks and flight security all but getting their weapons drawn out and pointing at them, all the lawyer talk be damned… Even after the Constructicons became a household name, it would still happen to them. This thought made Scrapper look around. There were no security mechs on this flight. How, were the small and spindly flight attendants expected to deal with every possible trouble on their own? Or were the security ‘bots hidden from view? No, he doubted this was the case – they were usually huge and in groups of at least four, and there was no additional space in the shuttle to store them. Such a high-profile flight and no security? It simply made no sense for Scrapper.

And then it dawned on him.

There were no ordinary mechs at the Crystal City’s opening ceremony. This was a sad fact. There were no undesirable kinds of mechs on the passenger list, it simply wasn’t possible, so no security was needed. Large security mechs weren’t supposed to keep everyone safe – their basic role was keeping the right kind of mechs safe from, well, Scrapper’s kind. The wrong kind of mechs who were allowed to buy a ticket, yes, as long as they could afford it, but not to get any funny ideas – or any ideas, for that matter – lest they would be out, no matter the altitude. Of course, there were no problems with Scrapper anymore – the right kind was ready to accept him as one of their own, maybe after some adjustments to his alt-mode to make him look more… Elegant.

Swallowing the last of his energon and settling for a slumber, he felt miserable. He was nothing like those people. They had nothing in common. He shouldn’t be on this flight. He belonged with his teammates, cleaning the site like professionals should. And it was only the beginning. He was going to spend full five cycles with people like them – maybe slightly more professional, but as lofty and insufferable. Nothing less to be expected. As they say: when you go to Altihex, the only way is up.

Maybe he should have taken something for altitude sickness as well.

* * * * *

“Flightfright, you’re in biiig trouble!”

The blue fembot entered the staff-only room, the cart rolling in behind her and the sound-proofed doors sliding shut. Even though this stuff room was bigger than some, it still wasn’t big enough for a medium-height mech – no matter how spindly – to hide.

“Flightfright…?”

The cart rattled the remaining goods their passengers hadn’t bought during their pre-takeoff round.

“Unpack me and we’ll search together,” he suggested. “And next time’s your turn, starshine.”

“Where did that glitch go?” The blue flight attendant wondered while quickly taking all the high grade, mid grade, energon goodies, energon additives, chips, datapads and souvenirs from the cart and putting them on a nearby table to wait for another round. She peeked under it and, predictably, found nothing.

“Frag knows,” the emptied cart grumbled while his metal frame separated, with three shelves compressing into three “wings” attached to his right wrist, left elbow and the base of his hood, his four thin limbs rotating into place, his head rotating to face the floor and, finally, the green flight attendant got up from his hip and shoulder wheels and stretched his flimsy frame. “Did he even come on board?”

“He closed the door, so, I guess?” The blue fembot rearranged the souvenirs on the table, clearly in need to busy her hands with something. “Leaving us like that… Fragger. Why does he always have to live up to his name?”

After quickly sizing up the room, the green mech sighed and came over to his colleague.

“Look, there’s almost no high grade left, and it’s only the beginning!” She pointed out to him, momentarily regaining her good humour. “You think they’ll get slagfaced? I hope they will. Maybe we’ll get to use emergency claws on them,” she wondered dreamily. “I’ve seen it once, nearly everybody restrained. It was beautiful…”

“Who knows,” the green mech took from the table a tiny crystal model of a building. “What’s that scrap supposed to be?”

“A Crystal City city hall,” she informed him. “Isn’t that pretty?”

“It… Doesn’t look like the actual city hall?” He looked it over carefully before putting it down.

“Details; who cares,” the blue flight attendant took two cubes of mid grade and handed one to him. She opened hers with a gentle hiss. She inclined her head in the direction of the door. “Surely not them. And you know what’s best? We can keep all that’s left, or, y’know, resell it…”

“Where did it even come from?”

“Out of the loop, aren’t we? Well, there’s this mech, Swindle… Ever heard about him?”

“Everybody knows Swindle,” The green flight attendant rolled his optics behind his blue visor and cracked open the cube.

“So, Swindle knew from the very beginning that Crystal City is gonna be a big hit, and he prepared in advance – crystal scrap, fake pictures of the Constructicons at work, some waaay too good to be true paintings, whatever you’d like, sweetspark, he has it… Or, rather, had it, because he’s run out of stock. Which is weird.”

“Isn’t he restocking?” He gave the crystal miniatures a thoughtful glance. They were appealing, in a way…

“Nope. That’s the weird thing. I asked him if he’s gonna do it, and he said he might consider it, if the demand will remain… Like, excuse me? The city’s barely opened, it’s going to be the hottest topic for at least a stellar cycle, even an idiot would see that there’s still money to make! And not just Crystal City,” she smirked knowingly.

“Is that possibly something else than Crystal City?” The green mech pointedly looked around, since they were still in Crystal City.

“You see, Swindle knows some really skilled fakers, and recently he started selling really cool miniatures of Scrapper’s works… And he told me to buy it quickly because after the big reveal they’re gonna get ten times as pricey, which, it’s pretty typical for him to say, but I don’t believe it could rise this much…” The fembot took a sip of her mid grade, deep in thought. “It looks that Swindle’s making weird business decisions lately, as if he knew something nobody else knows…”

“Isn’t that typical for him?” Her colleague shrugged. “So, what did you buy?”

“Event Horizon! It looks really nice in my place, together with Torture Porn, Slog’s Valediction and Buzzsaw’s Hole in the Wall. All miniatures of course.”

“Wait… You’ve got a miniature of something called Hole in the Wall?”

“You didn’t see this hole. It’s awesome!” She took one of the crystal souvenirs and lifted it to her yellow visor. “But, so far, Scrapper’s my favourite.”

“I don’t know… You ain’t repulsed by the whole corpse thing?”

“Oh, come on, his works with corpses are the best! They’re so… Real…”

“But… Event Horizon and Torture Porn don’t contain any corpses?” The green mech binned his emptied cube before looking at her again. The fembot snorted.

“You can’t really buy a corpse as, you know, a private person,” she carefully put the miniature back. “Maybe someone rich, to keep it in a special spot away from the public optic, but me? Nope, no room! And miniatures ain’t exactly the same.”

“Have you found Flightfright?” The first pilot, a sleek flier with the air lines’ symbol painted on his chest, slipped from the pilot’s cockpit, hyper-sensitive doors swooshing closed behind him.

“No, we’re afraid we haven’t,” the green flight attendant reported while his blue colleague hastily finished her cube. The pilot sighed.

“Fraggit, we’re already a breem late. There’s no time to go looking for him in this blasted city!”

“Correction: he’s never left the shuttle,” the fembot stated dramatically. “Whatever happened to that fragger, it happened here… I hope that he fell into a thruster and died.”

Then, they could hear a commotion in a tall and narrow closet, and a weak “Am here…” The door opened, revealing the curled-up figure of the red flight attendant. Right, they should have assumed he was able to fit there.

“Wha… What the frag do you think you’re doing?” the fembot growled. “Stuffing yourself here and leaving us to do your job?!”

“I c-couldn’t do my job,” the red ‘bot explained, uncurling his limbs and leaving the closet. “I had to… collect myself.” He stood up slowly, his arms around himself. “Because…”

“Because?” The remaining three crew members were looking at him expectantly with varying degrees of anger.

Not looking at anyone in particular, Flightfright smiled dreamily.

“Because master Scrapper is on board.”

“What?” They managed after a moment of stunned silence. “That’s impossible, the boarding list…”

“He’s under an alias,” the red ‘bot explained. “Seat 12…”

They turned to the small monitoring centre and zoomed in on the right spot. There, they could see Scrapper recharging with a cloth on his face, still perfectly recognizable thanks to his scoop, purple torso, light green arms and, generally, industrial size. They all watched him sleep for a moment.

“Sooo shiny!” The blue fembot swooned.

“He looks so peaceful,” the green mech commented.

“He’s designed and built a whole-aft city, and finished only yesterday,” the pilot reminded them. “He could probably use some rest…”

“He’s…” The fembot displayed the boarding list in her CPU and skimmed it quickly. “Payload. Of course! It’s an industrial name. What an interesting development…”

“We can’t tell anyone,” Flightfright warned, still smiling, still embracing himself. “Or he’s gonna do unspeakable things to us…”

“Heh?” The pilot looked at the ‘bot, and then at the surveillance image of Scrapper. “The fun kind or the missing persons kind?”

“Wanna find out?” The fembot elbowed him, smiling mischievously.

“So, you talked to him?” His green colleague assumed. “What is he like?”

Flightfright shook his head and shivered.

“A-awesome… And he didn’t just talk.”

“He didn’t?” In an astrosecond they were all around him. “What else did he do?”

“He touched me…” The red flight attendant shivered some more. His co-workers gasped.

“Inappropriately?!”

Flightfright gave them a sad look.

“No…”

“Where did he touch you?”

“Here, here, and here…” He pointed at his left shoulder, right arm and the central point of his chest.

“O-ow!” Soon enough, three other sets of hands were touching him. “You lucky bastard…”

Half a breem later, the hyper-sensitive door parted and the second pilot peeked outside.

“What the…” He tried to make sense of the scene in the middle of the storage room. “Soo, I can see that you found Flightfright… Why are you all over him?”

The dazed red ‘bot smiled at him.

“Master Scrapper is on board,” he said dreamily and then lowered his voice to a whisper: “He touched me.”

The second pilot frantically pushed the door open.

“Inappropriately?!”

Flightfright pouted.

“No…”

“Where did he touch you?”

“Here, here, and here,” his co-workers kindly showed him the spots.

“How does it feel?”

“Awesome…”

“He was so reasonable, and yet so menacing…” Flightfright sighed.

“Aww!”

– – – – –

“BS-40-4, come on in! BS-40-4, can you hear me? BS-40-4, do you read?!”

After numerous attempts, an angry mech from the control tower was finally awarded a response:

»Um, yeah? I read, I read… What’s the problem?«

The mech tried to lower his volume to more professional levels.

“It’s Polyhex to BS-40-4. You should’ve taken off over ten breems ago, and we still have y’all at the Crystal City airport. What causes the delay?”

»Um, well… You see… No, no, never mind.«

“Never mind?!… Are you having an orgy in the cockpit, or fragging what?”

»No, no, we’re not… Really, we’re not… Of course not!«

“Then take your afts off the ground, or we’ll get you grounded!”

»Um, yes, sure, yes, right away...«

* * * * *

There were nearly two joors left for his flight to Altihex. Having left his crate in the luggage room, Scrapper frantically exited the terminal – no way he was going to wait there with all those people and risk one of them recognizing him! Pity he’d been so groggy this morning, he should have told Hook to paint him a different colour… Too late now.

Hook probably wouldn’t have listened anyway. He was their prized foremech and they wanted to show him off. Leaving the airport and turning the corner, Scrapper slowed down, a tad ashamed. He reached into the proper compartment and took out the jasper Scavenger had gifted him. Looking at the piece of rock and touching its uneven surface, he came to a halt. They really wanted to be proud of him, not like he’d done anything noteworthy or something, but they had set this trip up for him and all… He straightened himself up and started walking with confidence. Alright. He would do it – but only for his teammates.

Parts of Polyhex that weren’t shady were quite boring. Still, he felt like looking at the city’s inter-polity department, he still remembered fondly their time spent on designing and building the thing. A joor later, he was at a high-storey restaurant that offered the view of said department, sitting at the table with his weak cocktail in one hand, a datapad containing local news in the other hand (predictably, there was nothing interesting going on), with his back turned to the restaurant’s big window and the city’s slightly messy panorama it presented.

An article on the datapad and the drink in his glass finished, he pressed a small button in the middle of his table to call for a waiter. And the poor mech couldn’t have gotten to him faster if Scrapper had a million credits to give away.

“Yes, master Scrapper?” hands clasped together near his spark, optics hopelessly celebrity-stricken, he leaned over him, eagerly awaiting orders. Scrapper sighed internally. Let’s make it quick… He pointed at his emptied glass.

“Bring me another one, please. Also, I’d like to pay – now. If you don’t mind.”

“No, sir, absolutely no, sir!” The waiter produced a terminal, where Scrapper slid his card and typed in a number of credits to be transferred. After a ping, the waiter returned his card to him and glanced at the terminal’s tiny screen.

“Whoa… Thank you, sir!”

“No need to thank me,” Scrapper carefully put his card into its designated compartment. “It’s not a tip, actually, more a compensation,” he looked at the waiter with a friendly glint in his visor. “I want to talk to the manager.”

The poor ‘bot jumped, clutching the terminal to his chest like something dear he was about to lose.

“Yes, sir, right away, sir!” And he was gone.

Now, Scrapper moved his chair so it was facing the window and the inter-polity department. The manager was probably busy with something important, since it took him full twenty astroseconds to arrive at Scrapper’s side.

“H-how can I help you, master Scrapper?”

“Well, there’s this one thing I have a terrible problem with,” his guest started, and the light in the ‘bot’s optics instantly dimmed. “Could you help me with that, my good mech?”

“Y-yes, master Scrapper, absolutely! What seems to be the problem?”

“This,” Scrapper said and pointed at the window. The manager moved behind him to have a better idea of what he was referring to.

“Yes, sir?”

“You may not remember, or not even know, but approximately six vorns ago we designed and constructed the building for the inter-polity department… Right there.”

“Oh…”

“See?”

“Yes,” the manager nodded. “I think that I can see what’s the problem.”

“Great,” Scrapper nodded as well. “Explain it to me then, good mech: what is this yellow optic-sore doing in the place of our creation?… It’s probably well over your pay grade, but, seeing what a good vantage point you’ve got here, maybe you happen to know something?”

“Yes, sir, I know a little bit…”

“Whatever happened to my building?”

“It got… Replaced, sir.”

“Replaced,” Scrapper repeated, waving to the newly arrived waiter to place a new cocktail on his table and nodded a ‘Thank you’. “By this kitschy piece of so-called architecture.”

“Maybe ‘remodelled’ would be a better word, sir, but yes, basically, yes.”

“And how in the name of Primus did it happen?”

“Someone in the city council, somehow, knew someone who knew someone who, somehow, was calling himself an architect, and so, somehow… This happened.”

“Of course,” Scrapper retracted his mask, took a gulp from his drink, and closed it again. “Just like that. Well… Hopefully, they won’t want anything from us in the future, because sure as slag they’re not getting anything. Pardon my Kaonian.”

“It’s absolutely understandable, sir. We were all quite upset with this… Development.”

“For real… I’m so glad that my mechs can’t see that.”

“They’re not here with you, sir?”

“Well…” Scrapper hesitated, completely taken aback. “They’re busy cleaning our site in Crystal City… I would be cleaning too, but they really wanted me to go to Altihex, you see, my mech…”

“They are right about that, sir.”

“Um, maybe…” Scrapper looked out the window and grimaced. “At least, we have nothing designed and built in Altihex.”

“Fortunately, sir.”

“Yes, fortunately! Every time I go to this city, I’m surprised it still stands…”

* * * * *

In spite of a smaller distance to cover, his flight to Altihex was going to be considerably longer due to the overtly strict speed limit. It seemed reasonable – the airspace surrounding Altihex was crazy busy even outside prestigious events like the one Scrapper was heading to, and the locals always had priority. Of course, some mechs claimed that the Althexians were doing it on purpose to show the lesser mechs who were boss here. And having long practice in denying discrimination, the Althexians obviously denied such allegations. Just wonderful…

His pills ready (this time he definitely was taking the one for altitude sickness as well), Scrapper was awaiting the moment he could ask a flight attendant for a cube of regular grade. This shuttle wasn’t as luxurious as his previous one, with two rows of double seats and, of-fragging-course, the security. Which made sense. There was a lot of common mechs on board. Unlike the Crystal City opening, where the Constructicons had set everything up neatly and elegantly, somebody had to organize the symposium. Surely, the hosts wouldn’t deign to do that, and all those the best of the best architect attendees (or, as Scrapper liked referring to them, the “best” of the “best”) weren’t going to move around carrying their scrap themselves. Many of them had whole teams to do their bidding. So, definitely better company than those posh mechs returning from Crystal City. Maybe he would be able to meet someone normal…

His cube handed to him, he looked up to catch sight of a big military build security mech. For a moment he felt tempted to cause trouble and see how they would react upon learning his true identity. Would they treat him like the right kind of person, or the wrong kind? And speaking of the true identity…

“Excuse me, sir?” A yellow and green construction mech – judging from his kibble, probably with a tracked paver alt-mode – came over, obscuring the mean-looking security officer from Scrapper’s view.

“Ah, sorry,” he stopped leaning out and moved further into his window-side seat. “Please, sit down. I thought that I wanted something, but don’t need it anymore.”

He cracked the cube open and turned away to retract his mask and take a swig. They’d never had a permanent paver in their team. Usually, it was for him and Bonecrusher to put on necessary equipment and go into reverse until all surfaces in need of smoothing up were left as smooth as they could make them. On several occasions (and long before the gestalt, obviously) Hook had suggested adding a paver to their team to help them out, to which they both had protested. For Bonecrusher, it was a fun change of pace, and the inadequate amount of demolishing needed would often leave him bored. Scrapper felt that he wasn’t doing enough on the site and every little thing he was able to do together with his team was precious – he couldn’t, wouldn’t let it go to someone else, especially a stranger.

Lost in his thoughts, he’d nearly forgotten the mech sitting next to him.

“Um… E-excuse me, sir…?”

“Huh?” He shut his facemask and turned to him. “What is that, my mech? You wanted to change seats or something?”

“No, no, no! I just… Don’t want to be rude, but… Are you master Scrapper, the leader of the Constructicons? Going to Altihex to talk about Crystal City?”

But of course…

“Oh, no!” He laughed almost-genuinely. “I’m Payload, my boss is sendin’ me ‘cause he didn’t feel bothered enough to go.”

“Oh…” The mech’s excitement deflated completely.

“Yeah! Ever since I’ve changed my colours, people keep takin’ me for one of those… Constructitrons? You must be the third today, I swear… Sorry to disappoint. An’ what’s your name, kid?”

“Um, I’m Flat Rate of Protihex,” the tracked paver mech introduced himself and excitement was right back in his voice: “I’m in the same situation as you, sir!”

“Please, stop with that ‘sir’, we’re all buddies here…”

“Right! You see, I’m, too, sent to Altihex to represent my company because my boss, Steam Head, didn’t feel like going.”

“Ow?” Something menacing awakened in Scrapper’s tone. “You work for Steam Head? Weird, I thought that good mechs ran him out of business… Better get out, kid, he ain’t a nice person.”

“He ain’t?” Flat Rate hesitated. “I saw him being mean sometimes, but I don’t know him that long…”

“Yeah. He really hurt one of friends of mine, an’ he couldn’t be the only one… Honestly, ditch him. The mech’s in for a big nasty surprise one cycle…”

“Okay, if you say so… Maybe I’ll start looking after getting back from Altihex… Don’t think I could think of it now.” The smile returned on his visored face. “I’ve never been in Altihex before, it’s so exciting!”

“Indeed,” Scrapper turned away from him to take another gulp of energon. “Going there should teach you how not to build things.”

“And I was hoping…” Flat Rate continued, Scrapper’s last remark dismissed.

“Yeah? What were you hopin’ for, my mech? Don’t get your hopes too high or you can get disappointed…”

“I know that he’d been so busy recently…” Flat Rate opened his arm compartment and produced a tiny model of a crystal building (what the frag?!). “But I was really hoping to see master Scrapper there.”

“An’ why would you hope for that? It’s already gonna be full of big an’ famous, why add another one?”

The young construction mech shook his head.

“Master Scrapper is special.”

“Why? Because of all that Crystal City scrap?” Scrapper asked, trying not to sound too condescending. “I don’t know the mech, but I heard that he’s really freaky an’ difficult to work with. He had to assemble his own consturctin’ team, ‘cause normal mechs couldn’t put up with his weirdness.”

“It’s not weirdness!” Flat Rate disagreed, clearly hell-bent on defending his honour. “Master Scrapper is a genius, a visionary, a mech ahead of his times… And an artist!”

“Ah, yeah, right, he’s the one puttin’ together those creepy pieces with corpses in ‘em…”

“It’s… It’s not creepy!” Flat Rate hesitated. “His art is very… Poignant and cautionary.”

There was no way he could have come up with it himself. He was probably quoting an art review. Truth be told, sometimes Scrapper preferred people just calling his pieces creepy than coming up with weird explanations he surely hadn’t had in mind when creating them. Yes, it was deep. Sooo deep… As deep as his satisfaction after getting his hands dirty and offering the world another work of art to try to make sense of.

“You think so? How do you know he didn’t just kill a bunch of people he didn’t like, put ‘em in his things an’ called it ‘art’?”

Flat Rate in-vented, exasperated.

“M-master Scrapper would never…! He’s an artist… A sensitive spark… He wouldn’t hurt a glitchmouse, not to mention people!” A bit shaky, he lifted the tiny crystal miniature to his optics and passionately shook his head. “Never!…”

His hero worship was really getting under Scrapper’s plating.

”Aah, don’t give me that scrap! You can’t really know what kinda guy he is in private…”

“He’s a wonderful person, I’m sure of it!”

“Yeah, right… Don’t be so sure, kid, or you’ll be gettin’ lotsa disappointment in life.”

“Never…”

Scrapper could see that, agitated, Flat Rate was clenching his fists, the tiny crystal model be damned. No, no, he’d already decided that he didn’t want any problems with the security!

“Now, now,” he raised his hands in an appeasing gesture. “Don’t get all worked up, am just messin’ with you… Maybe that Scrapper guy really is somethin’, dunno, he’s just not my type of somethin’, I guess. Don’t get us chucked from the shuttle,” he added jokingly, his visor glistening with a smile.

“Oh… Sorry, Mr Payload,” Flat Rate deflated yet again, embarrassed.

“Don’t let people get to you like that,” Scrapper patted his arm reassuringly. “When free in Altihex, maybe we’ll get together for a drink or two. If you’d like, of course, and not too busy chasin’ after your idol, who’s probably not there anyway.”

“Um… Yeah, that would be great!”

“Great! Now, I had too much to drink last night and ain’t feelin’ that good right now.”

“Oh…”

“Just popped some pills an’ I’m getting’ into recharge. So, be a good kid an’ wake me up when we’re landin’, okay?”

“Sure! You can count on me.”

“Good. Just don’t forget,” Scrapper turned away from him, finished his cube, offlined his optics, and made himself as comfortable as possible given the circumstances. He was quite lucky in this regard, with his scoop doubling as a cushion.

His travel companion kept his word and Scrapper was awakened by him shaking his arm and calling excitedly:

“Mr Payload, Mr Payload, we’re almost there! I can see the city!”

“Ah,” he turned from the window and stretched his struts as much as he could. “Good.”

“Shuttles just keep going in and out! I wonder where we’re gonna land…”

Scrapper smiled maliciously under his facemask.

“Not there, kid,” he merrily crushed his hopes.

Altihex – the City Wonder, the City in Clouds, the Sky City – consisted of five successive rings built around a very high and very thin spire-like Mount Althexia, and of the space station above. It had numerous landing pads, all main buildings and most of the private buildings having at least one. It also had a sizeable airport at the bottom of Mount Althexia. The official reason why commercial (or, simply put, non-sentient) shuttles weren’t allowed to land in the city itself seemed reasonable enough – there was simply no room in its airspace. A mean rumour had it, though, that the Althexians tended to get freaked out by the inanimate versions of themselves and wanted those abominations nowhere in their proximity. Therefore, Scrapper and Flat Rate got off at their designated airport and, while the fliers were simply transforming and getting to the city “on foot”, the two of them got into a queue to the city’s marvellous (and a little bit condescending) elevator designed to take lowly grounders like them to the city’s bottom level gloriously spreading hundreds of mechanometres above them.

“Primus, it looks amazing!” Flat Rate was in awe. Scrapper was a tad surprised that he didn’t summon his name instead of Primus. “It’s unbelievable that such construction can be so long and so stable!”

“They off-sourced the project and completion, of course it’s stable,” Scrapper grumbled, as they were waiting for their turn. They missed several lifts, allowing others to get in front of them so various work teams could go up together. Scrapper considered popping another pill for altitude sickness.

After the initial longest lift, they were directed to two other less spacious and more queue-generating elevators, until they found themselves at the third level, to which their symposium and all things connected were confined. Of course, they could try travelling to other levels – risking losing credits they didn’t have either on extravagant shopping sprees or trespassing fines – but they needed to pass the customs first. There were two mechs at customs awaiting them: a huge shuttleformer with the paperwork and a massive military mech with weapons, hard to tell which of them more off-putting. Okay, that was new… Usually, there was only one mech, and not a military one. When had the Althexians grown so soft to need external security?

“Don’t worry, kid, it’s just a formality,” he reassured Flat Rate. “Wanna go first?”

“Af-fter you!” Came the nervous response. Scrapper shrugged.

“If you so wish…” He came to the shuttleformer who, in spite of being fully visored and masked, managed to display a condescending grimace, and handed him his attendee’s ID.

“A lot of you here lately,” the shuttleformer looked at the two of them like at something nasty that fell off his thruster. “I thought we were supposed to host architects, not every last ‘bot in business.”

“Sorry for disappointing you, sir,” Scrapper replied cheerfully. “Would rather go an’ build something, but alas, we’re here instead. Can’t be helped.”

“I wish it could,” the Althexian looked at his list, and then at Scrapper’s ID. Suddenly, his visor brightened like bleached. He looked at Scrapper, his hand holding the ID shaking.

“M-master Scrapper!”

The military mech gasped and harder clutched his assault rifle. Indeed, it was a dangerous development.

“Yep,” Scrapper expectantly held his hand out and wiggled his fingers. “As I said, I’d rather be somewhere else and build something, and yet here we are. My card, please.”

“Y-yes, of course!” Shakily, the large mech gave him his ID. "That’s… An honour. We weren’t expecting you here this time…”

“Matter-of-factly, neither did I,” Scrapper confessed. “Now, you have some brochures and information for me, right?”

“O-of course, master Scrapper, sir!” The shuttleformer reached to a table next to him containing datapads and handed him one. Scrapper thanked him, putting the ‘pad atop his crate, and was ready to go,

Only then he remembered his fellow traveller who had to hear the entire exchange very clearly. He turned to see Flat Rate – his face frozen in shock, mouth hanging open, arms twitching, vocalizer stuttering.

“Um, yeah… Sorry for deception, kid, but I really hate being famous,” he explained. “We can still grab a drink sometime, if you like… Guess you don’t like anymore… But, really, change the employer, because I fully intend to run this matrix-fragger to the ground.”

Having said that, he turned around, crate in his arms, and left to check in into his room.

* * * * *

Unsurprisingly, he was put in a shuttle-sized suite. In Altihex, hotel rooms generally came in two sizes: “average” – meaning way too small for most industrial or military frames, not like they were the types the city was eager to cater for – or “shuttle”, suitable for shuttleformers and other comparatively large frames, and a bit too large for Scrapper and his kind. Better too large than too small, obviously, but still…

After rushing to check if they hadn’t mistakenly left shuttle-grade fuel in the energon storage (and getting sorely disappointed), hitting the washroom (careful not to scratch his new paint and dutifully reapplying polish and grease), and checking the available holovids (funny, they made sure to remove shuttle-grade energon but neglected to hide shuttle porn), he settled down with a cube of high-grade. He tried to watch some pre-Golden Age period shuttle drama and after less than a joor decided that he wasn’t overcharged enough to find it funny, and getting slagfaced right before his very first cycle of the Grand Symposium on Modern Architecture didn’t seem a good idea. He would need to be at his sharpest to be able to face all the, ugh, people and not end up gotten advantage of, in any shape, in any form. He turned the movie off and lay down, Slog’s autobiography in hand, intrusive thoughts about having for once a berth big enough for more than one person and lying in it alone plaguing his processor.

Primus, he missed his team.

He briefly considered comming them, but quickly changed his mind. With their foremech away, they were probably enjoying themselves. He would never, ever want to become their party killer (didn’t matter that he would have so much preferred being there with them instead of his current high location). He kept on reading then, laughing at usual parts and getting emotional at others (granted, with Slog’s idiolect the former was much more frequent than the latter), until he decided that it was time to get into recharge. Only then did he risk a sneak peek through the gestalt bond.

He could sense Long Haul and Mixmaster passed over on the rec room’s table which was full of empty cubes, having “It wasn’t supposed to happen but happened anyway” written all over it. Great! That was the kind of formech-less behaviour Scrapper could get behind.

Then, there were Bonecrusher and Scavenger slumped in the corner of their smaller workshop, deep in recharge – embracing each other tightly, Scavenger’s facemask retracted and his mouth pressed to Bonecrusher’s neck cables. Someone’d been busy this evening… Perfect! Scrapper approved.

Finally, there was Hook at Scrapper’s desk (probably because his own was too messy) with a pile of datapads, meticulously checking and correcting a column of numbers on his current 'pad. Ooh no… Of this way of conduct, Scrapper definitely didn’t approve. That incorrigible teammate of his… He needed a reprimand. Now.

Putting his Slog datapad away, Scrapper lay down, offlined his optics, and focused. Hopefully, the distance wouldn’t muffle the gestalt connection too much. Just in case, he decided to give it his all.

*IS THAT HOW YOU’RE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF YOUR FOREMECH’S ABSENCE? FOR REAL?! SHAME ON YOU!*

Shocked, Hook jumped and fell from his chair.

Giggling, he immediately closed his end of the bond to avoid potential repercussions, or embarrassments.

Well done, Scrapper. You’re so mature, he thought, finally settling down to sleep.

* * * * *

His first cycle of the Grand Symposium on Modern Architecture was both remarkable and unremarkable. Unremarkable because many events were crystal-themed, all those fakes and posers clearly chasing clout. They hadn’t been in Crystal City – the Constructicons and Omega Supreme had seen to that – they didn’t know slag about how things were done there, but it surely didn’t stop them. It was so cringy to witness sometimes. But he survived all of that, clutching his lucky jasper to make the crystal sickness go away. He was doing alright. His team would be proud of him!

And it was really remarkable because, in short, he didn’t need to hide and shake people off. Normally, an architect and constructor freshly from a commission this big would be bothered with questions and demands every given astrosecond, and yet, it wasn’t happening to him. He really had no idea who the rest of his team had bribed or threatened to keep it this way.

During a lecture about some novelty posh building techniques, a mech giving it discussed a certain method of fusing crystals and timidly asked Scrapper if it was correct. Scrapper replied that it was some scrap and smugly refused to elaborate. The lecturer and the audience alike were nearly jumping out of their metallic skin to press him on the matter but did nothing further. Aww, slaggit, wasn’t he having fun!

Save for the moments when he wasn’t having fun. Walking from event to event or just sitting through them, with all the “Ooh!”s, “Aah!”s and “Master Scrapper!”s accompanying him, usually with him responding “Yeah, yeah, nothing to see here, people, just move on.” The unprecedented presence of various military mechs he’d never noticed here before, who seemed to be watching everything, made him all the more uneasy. He felt exposed. Sought for. Desired. Wanted. Scrutinized. Misunderstood. And so, so alone. Look at him, a singular combiner component trying to make it in a big world, how pathetic.

Caught in his pathetic mood, he was searching for the next event to attend, when a plaque near another auditorium’s entrance caught his optic.

“I can’t believe it,” he murmured to himself, smiling behind his mask. He checked his chronometer – the lecture had already begun, but he couldn’t care less. Scanning his attendee’s ID to open the door, he happily entered, feeling less lonely for a change.

Chapter Text

The auditorium was typical, with descending rows of benches in a more or less universal size, a giant screen for displays and a podium with a console and a smaller screen to control the display. Two exits at two sides of the highest row and one additional at the back of the stage. And the feeling of being absolutely exposed and somehow encircled. The unfortunate lecturer was all too aware of it as, alone on the podium, he had trouble with navigating his materials – trouble that was only contributing to his already serious case of performance jitters.

“Please, give me a moment and I’ll find the right picture, th-thank you for your patience, ladies and gentlemechs,” he asked, searching between his data slug plugged into the console and several datapads. He wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on amongst his bored audience. He didn’t notice the door sliding open and shut, didn’t hear footsteps slowly nearing the podium, wasn’t aware of a new arrival that both shushed his listeners and sent them into a chittering frenzy.

“Frag me with a chainsaw! Grapple… Long time not see!”

Grapple jumped and dropped one datapad. He knew this voice all too well, after nearly seven vorns of sharing the room with its owner in the North Iaconian Student Halls. He dove behind the console to retrieve the fallen ‘pad, did retrieve it and slowly rose to his feet, peeking downwards and still disbelieving. But here he was – the green and purple mech standing in front of the platform in the middle of the deserted first row. The troubled lecturer’s face lit up, overjoyed with the sight.

“Scrapper! I heard rumours that you’ve been seen but couldn’t believe it… The Crystal City has barely been opened!” He pointed out. “Also, I didn’t see your name in the programme…”

“Hah!” Pleased with himself, Scrapper plopped down and stretched pleasantly in a manner unbecoming a guest on a lecture given in the most snobbish place on an above Cybertron during the most prestigious event in the industry. “That’s because I’m a nor-mal a-tten-dee!”

The audience gasped, and Grapple together with them.

“No way… Somebody like you – a normal attendee?… How did it even happen?”

Was that even… Allowed?

The non-guest of honour shrugged, his voice noticeably less smug than earlier.

“Ah, see, my mechs sent me here – as a gift. They thought that I needed rest or some slag… I checked how much they had to pay and, frag! I’ll have to take ‘em all to Monacus or something to get even,” he declared, regaining his high spirits.

Grapple snorted.

“No, don’t take them to this den of sin!”

“My dear Grapple,” Scrapper wiggled a finger at him. “If I’m going to take my mechs someplace for a good time, I sure as frag hope it’s a den of sin, and a good one!”

“Well, you’re the foremech, you know what’s best for them… And they clearly know what’s best for you… But really – you, a normal attendee?” Grapple shook his head, still disbelieving. And since he was the one on the platform who was supposed to share his knowledge with the audience, he decided to try to at least explain this one absolutely crucial question. “You would be the biggest guest of honour this vorn, if not decavorn!”

“Yeah, tell me that! At first, I was sure that they were gonna do me dirty like this!”

“Do you dirty?”

“Precisely!” Scrapper sat up straight and clasped his hands together as if making an announcement to somebody: “Alright, my mechs, we’re done in this crystal pit, what are we doin’ next?” He waved flamboyantly and said in a higher pitch: “‘Oh, that’s easy, foremech! We’ll stay here and clean, and you’ll go to Altihex tomorrow morning.’ Altihex? Like, giving lectures and talking to people? And here I was thinking that I’ve done everything right and you guys actually like me…”

He sighed dramatically.

“And what am I supposed to do there? Just show them the pictures of crystal buildings or something?” He pointed at non-existing objects in front of him. “Here’s a picture of a crystal building. Here’s a picture of another crystal building. And here’s a picture of the same crystal building, but from a slightly different angle. And now, a joke to lighten the mood, courtesy of my friend Bonecrusher: What are you gonna get after mixing equal amounts of crystals and slag? – Twice as much slag!”

“That’s a good one, Scrapper!” Grapple was leaning heavily on the console to see him better, the picture on the large screen behind him flickering. Not like he – or anyone else – cared. “Everyone would love it.”

Scrapper shook his head, horrified by the prospect.

“No, thanks. I’d rather do something actually productive, like watching crystals gro- Ugh, no, maybe not that.”

“You know, even if you were simply showing pictures and commenting ‘This is Crystal City. This is also Crystal City. This, again, is Crystal City,’ people would be still rioting to be there…”

“Pfft!” Scrapper was clearly meaning to say that people were stupid, but stopped himself in time. “I could, but I won’t. That’s the beauty of this, Grapple – as a normal attendee, I don’t have to do anything,” he bragged instead. “Not one thing!… Okay, I guess that I should still behave like a civilised being, but didn’t get any backlash so far… Hm. I should probably let them learn the hard way that enabling me like that is a veeery bad idea… Amirite, Grapps?”

“Enabling you like that is a cosmically bad idea,” Grapple confirmed.

“Yes, indeed! I’ll show those suck-ups, I’ll show them good… Buuut, it seems that you were actually doing something before I interrupted you? What were you doing here with all these people, Grapps?…” He looked around the not even half-full auditorium. Mmm… Could that moderate popularity mean that no crystals were involved? “I guess it was mentioned somewhere in the programme, but I kinda…”

“Didn’t care to check?” Grapple smirked knowingly, old memories resurfacing in his processor.

“I was very busy with…”

“Not caring who’s here and what they’re up to?”

“Yeah! How did you know?”

“No idea. It just came to me out of nowhere, I swear.”

“But now I care!” Scrapper ensured. “See? This is my caring face. What are you up to right now, my mech?”

And that was it. With the pleasant intermission over, Grapple found himself back in the hostile environment of public presentations where nothing seemed to go according to plan.

“Um, oh, well… I was trying to give a lecture, I guess-”

“Oh, frag, sorry, I didn’t mean to ruin your moment in the spotlight!” Ashamed, Scrapper sat himself properly at last, with a perfectly straight back and hands resting on his knees, looking so much unlike himself. It didn’t sit well with Grapple.

“Ah, you didn’t ruin anything! It barely started, if at all…”

“Oh, shoot!” Scrapper jumped, excited. “Can I stay and listen, or is that ‘pre-registered mechs only’?”

Well, great. Because the pressure to impress everyone with his unimpressive performance hadn’t been already suffocating.

“No, you can stay, but you’re gonna get really bored, I’m afraid…” Grapple murmured, desperately trying to find his way in his datapads and on the screen. “And I can’t even seem to find the beginning…”

“Oh? No, I’m sure it’s awesome!” Scrapper innocently put even more pressure on him. “What is that actually about?”

“Um… About lithotermic cylinders,” Grapple explained, congratulating himself that he remembered at least this much.

“Oh… Cool! And what are they?”

“They’re cylinders you put into engines to make them run…”

“Ah, right! And what do they look like?”

This was the moment when Grapple gave up. There wasn’t going to be a lecture, he couldn’t piece it up together for the life of his and his head felt empty… Unless asked a question. So, no lecture. He could just chat with the most famous non-guest of honour in the room, hoping that at least this one person would learn something useful. He shrugged, finally calm.

“Eh, you can just come over here and see for yourself, if you manage to find them here… I personally can’t…”

“Yeah, sure!” Unconcerned with an alleged lecture, Scrapper happily jolted upward and stopped right before the chest-high podium. “A helping hand, Grapple?… You know, you can use your hook if your hands are tied!”

“No need for hook!” Grapple half-knelt over him, grabbed his hand and hoisted him onto the scene. “Huh… You’re a big machine, Scrapper, you know that?”

“Kinda necessary when you want to throw your weight around,” Scrapper remarked smugly and he was already standing next to Grapple and scrolling the screen’s contents. “Ah! Is that it? Very nice, very nice indeed!… So, what is that?”

“Wait, let me check…” Grapple picked up the nearest datapad and did his own scrolling. “Ah, a hard fusion engine with lithotermic cylinders in it.”

“Ooh, so shiny!”

“How about sharing it with the audience?” Grapple half-joked, half-improvised. His new lecture partner shrugged.

“Nah, they don’t deserve it.”

“Wha… Scrapper, that’s this presentation’s intended purpose!”

“What, you didn’t make it all just for me?” Scrapper turned to him, pretend hurt in his voice. “And I thought that we were friends!”

The audience gave away a weird sound resembling a collective cooing.

Grapple elbowed him to regain access to the console.

“Ugh, move!… So, here it is – um, a hard fusion engine with lithotermic cylinders,” he informed nobody in particular, and neither did he look at anyone from the audience. This lecture had already been a failure, there was no need to pretend that it was salvageable. It was going to be his first and last solo presentation in Altihex, that was for sure!

“And what can they be used for?” Scrapper was still determined to learn more about the cylinders… Maybe he even decided to be generous and share with the audience this time.

“Em, great for automated doors, gates or bridges, for one thing… Y’know, everywhere where you need engines.”

“Ooh! The principle of ‘active architecture’ in practice?”

Hearing Scrapper talking about architecture – even in the passing – the audience sighed, elated.

“You can put it that way, yes.”

“Awesome! Can people use them?”

“It’s still tested…”

“And I bet that they’re too robust to attach any crystal structures to them?”

“Wha- What type of crystal structures?”

“You know… Crystal gates, bridges…”

“No, don’t be ridiculous… These engines are supposed to support actual, honest structures, not some trinkets pretending to be something functional…”

More wonderful words hadn’t been uttered to him ever since he’d arrived to the Symposium.

“I love you, you beautiful matrix-fragger,” Scrapper whispered with a shiver, overcome by emotions.

“Um… Okay?” Grapple offlined and onlined his optics, having no idea what had he possibly done to be awarded with such affection.

“Oh my god, I want a whole bunch!… Can I buy some? Where does one go to get them?”

“There’s still only a couple of prototypes, Scrapper, they’ve yet to enter normal distribution… Or any distribution for that matter…” Grapple smiled. Scrapper’s enthusiasm had always been infectious. “But I’ll let you know as soon as they’re available, so you could use them for… Whatever you like. Okay?”

“Great! I’m sure that Hook will love to take them apart and…” Scrapper realized that he’d just screwed up big time. “Um, ehem…” Not knowing where to look, he accidentally looked at the audience who were mesmerized by his discussion with Grapple, and decided to use them as a distraction. “See, people? These cylinders are neat, really, really neat… If you know what’s good for you and your taste in technology isn’t absolute trash, then you’ll use those engines as soon as they’re available, right? Right,” he jabbed a finger at the console screen. “This thing of beauty is what you really want. Not those other engines with normal, boring cylinders that are not made of lithium and termite, but this specimen right here! That’s what everyone should be doing, right, Grapple?…” Grapple frantically hijacked the console and scrolled its contents down, and then up. “Grapple?”

“Oh… Oh, dear… Actually, I made a mistake – this was a normal engine, the one with lithotermic cylinders is…” His mad scrolling finally had come to an end. “Here.”

Scrapper stared at another engine, a little taken aback.

“Oh… One unassuming little bastard, eh?”

“That’s the thing with them,” Grapple explained hastily. “Lithotermic cylinders are so efficient that you’ll need smaller engines, and you can use freed up space for something else…”

That was enough for Scrapper to anchor himself back in the discourse.

“Did you hear that, people? That previous engine was some flashy piece of junk taking up all the space, but this thing…” He jabbed the screen in front of him. “This thing is future. You know you want it over that stupid trash from earlier.”

“Um, yes…” Grapple nodded in agreement, even though he wouldn’t choose such wording in the first place. “Hm. Why do I feel that something’s horribly wrong?” He turned around and froze in horror. “O my god, Scrapper! The picture is upside-down!… But the console is alright – see? I don’t understand…”

Seeing for himself, Scrapper started laughing right next to despairing Grapple, the absurdity of the situation getting to him.

“Whoa! No… I can’t believe it!… Why ain’t you just sayin’ anything, people?”

People shrugged. The presentation not being upside-down clearly wasn’t their priority right now.

“We’re done, we’re done, we’re done…” Grapple tried correcting the error but to no avail. “Primus clearly hates me today!”

“Oh, don’t say that… I know!” Scrapper typed in some quick commands. The screens flickered and the pixels moved all over the chart. “All’s just scrambled. What was held here before you came along? I bet it was about crystal magnetism or some stupid scrap like that… No wonder you couldn’t find anything – it’s all over the place! Now all the guests should get a refund, and they should pay you damages for forcing you to give your lecture in such slagged conditions!”

The audience murmured at the mention of a refund. Grapple reset his vocalizer.

“R-really? And I thought it was just me…”

Scrapper rolled his optics.

“You? Oh, please… Believe in yourself more, my mech! Your notes had always the weirdest, most elaborate system to them and you’d never get lost in them! What’s some straightforward lecture and presentation compared to the Blue Furnace Principle?”

The audience collectively moaned, hearing Scrapper mention architecture in the passing yet again.

Grapple raised his optical ridges, surprised.

“I thought that you were the one with the most sophisticated jotting system?”

Scrapper’s shoulders visibly sunk in shame.

“Em, no, my notes were always a mess – my memory was good and more often than not I wouldn’t even read them again… I was just lying to you this entire time.”

“Huh! What a shocker. That explains why you never shared them. Anyway…” Grapple turned to the audience. “Ladies and gentlemechs, my deepest apologies for this lecture’s mediocre execution-”

“Don’t apologize for something that’s not your fault!” Scrapper protested, his tone firm as if he was Grapple’s foremech.

“Oh, but it’s really unfair for all these people who paid their fees and made time to attend something they expected to be carried out professionally, and I definitely let them down-”

“No, you didn’t. Stop apologizing.”

“But it should be expected-”

“No, it shouldn’t! Stop apologizing. It’s forbidden.”

“But… Really?”

“Really!” Arms akimbo, Scrapper looked bigger and meaner than moments before. “If someone has a problem with that, they’ll have to deal with me.”

The audience went silent, clearly no one having a problem with that.

Grapple didn’t feel like arguing with him.

“Alright… Well… Thank you very much for attending! The presentation and additional materials are available for free at the Symposium’s page, right between materials about crystal doorknobs and metaphors with windows, if anyone’s interested-”

“Hey!” Scrapper was done dealing with the audience having problems with Grapple. Now he was dealing with him specifically. “Don’t hand your scrap out for free, it’s not a charity function!”

“B-but they already paid for it, in a way…”

“No, they paid for the possibility to see and hear you,” Scrapper argued. “And they got it. Don’t give them things for free! Set a price or they won’t treat it like something of value… Am I right, people? You’re not gonna treat somethin’ as valuable unless you gotta pay for it, ain’t you?”

The audience confirmed happily.

“O-okay, it’s available for fifty credits if someone is interested… Thank you all for attending, it was my pleasure to lecture you, ladies and gentlemechs,” Grapple hastily bid his listeners goodbye.

“See?” Satisfied, Scrapper patted his arm. “Sounds much better now!”

“Yeah…” Grapple shrugged. “Now I should give you half of it for giving me such brilliant advice…”

“Ah, there’s no need! Just buy me a drink and we’ll be even.”

“A drink? In Altihex? You want me to go bankrupt, Scrapper?”

“If you’re going to go bankrupt, there’s no better reason than going bankrupt for a friend!… Now, give me a sec, let’s set you up with a nice little paywall… Ah, done!”

Grapple was looking at the contents of his returned datapad, horrified.

“O-one hundred credits?”

“Shhh, if they’ll want it, they’ll pay… And I’m sure they would want it, it’s just the future in the making!… Amirite, people?”

The people happily confirmed. Grapple sighed, feeling defeated.

“Alright, you’re the one in business, not me…”

“Yeah!” Scrapper moved to the audience who, frustratingly, still weren’t showing any signs of getting up and going away. “And you people know what these shuttles are like when it comes to money. Y’all better hurry before they tell you that the refund fund’s been exhausted!”

With his tone half-persuasive and half-ordering, people had no choice but to hurry out, leaving the two of them at long last alone.

* * * * *

Scrapper was sure that the next move would be his.

He was watching intently until the automated door closed behind the lecture’s last hapless (but not unhappy) listeners. For a moment he considered possible surveillance as an obstacle for what he was planning to do, only to decide that it was worth it anyway. Let the scandalous materials leak out, let the idiots gossip, let lots of people get busy setting facts straight for the thrill-seeking public.

But the next move wasn’t his.

He managed to turn to Grapple – who was surely still dazed after the recent developments and thinking mostly about his data slug and datapads, right? – and open his arms, only to himself get violently pulled into a passionate hug and almost get knocked down in the process.

“Oh, Scrapps… It’s so fraggin’ good to see you again!”

“Heeey, you old fragger!” Responding in kind to this demonstration of strength, Scrapper tightly embraced Grapple’s back (or rather tried to). “You have no idea how happy I was to accidentally notice your name on the door – I wasn’t expecting you here at all!”

“Then guess what, I wasn’t expecting you here even more!”

“Huh! I’ve been saying this to people since yesterday, but so wasn’t I…”

“Oh, Scrapps!” Grapple hugged him tighter, as if Scrapper needed any more evidence that he’d gotten some major upgrades since leaving university. “It’s been so, so long since the last time we met… I had no idea what’s going to happen when we meet again – if we meet again…”

“And how could we not meet again?”

“Dunno… You have your team now, you’re accomplished, practically the hottest mech on Cybertron right now – I thought that you changed… But then you came here and acted all the same, like the graduation never happened, and… We’re still friends, right?”

“Sure we are! The bestest friends in this stupid flying city!”

“Oh, god… I missed you so much!”

“Heh, give me a joor and you’ll be fed up with me!”

“That… Sounds absolutely like you, yeah…”

Something clicked under the ceiling. Grapple jumped away from Scrapper, startled. Ah, so there was surveillance in the lecture room! Not bothering to turn around, Scrapper gave the clicking thing the finger and said loudly to the world in general:

“And we were roommates!”

“Not… That kind of roommates,” Grapple protested weakly.

“Of course not,” Scrapper agreed. “We were even closer! I want this detail down – if you’ll omit it, you spying fraggers, I will sue! I fragged my entire department and several others, but how many of them can call themselves my best friends? Huh?”

Grapple sighed and started:

“Me, because I put up with your bullslag, Mixmaster, because he provided you with drugs, and Hook, because you really wanted him, but he didn’t really want you, so you had to play the long game… Is that correct?”

Surprised, Scrapper reset his vocaliser.

“Um… Yeah, that checks out! I thought it would be more people, but it looks like all the others are dead or something…”

“It’s… Too soon to talk about the campus killer, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh… Yeah, probably,” Scrapper agreed, always appreciating a normal mech’s perspective in that matter.

He kept forgetting that what served for him as an exhilarating way to self-discovery and his first artistic manifesto, for others was a traumatic period of “Who’s the killer? Why are they doing it? Who’s gonna die next?” and “Those killed will always remain in our sparks… We were the ones to find their horribly mangled bodies and no amount of therapy is going to make us forget!” So, yeah, remembering it fondly probably wasn’t a socially accepted way of dealing with this “traumatic event from his formative vorns”…

“Also… I think that it was just air conditioning,” Grapple added.

“Oh… Really?”

“And even if there were cameras somewhere, there wouldn’t be any sound recorded, no matter how loud you can get.”

That sounded even more ludicrous.

“N-no?”

“No. If the Althexians were both filming and recording conferences or lectures, they could be accused of stealing other people’s intellectual property, and no one would want to use their facilities anymore… I thought that you were the one business-savvy, Scrapper.”

“Ah, well… You know how it is – something is too beautiful to be true, but you really want it to be true and you act accordingly… I never paid much attention to those things anyway. As long as the patents were in our names, everything was alright.”

Smiling, Grapple crouched behind the console and turned it off.

“Ooh, looks like someone’s lost contact with his academic side! Better watch out, or it’s gonna return with vengeance…”

“Say what? I’ve never had any academic side!” Scrapper protested. “I have a designing side, a constructing side, and a performing side,” he disambiguated. “Maybe Mixmaster and Hook used to have it in them, and maybe they even have some left, but it was never me.”

“And this ‘performing side’ is you making scrap up while you go and then telling people that it was your performance art?”

“Ah, well, you got me… Since no one’s ever caught up, maybe we should consider this my sweet little secret we should both take to our graves… If you get my drift, my beloved friend…” Scrapper punctuated the word “friend” with a strangling gesture.

“Out of all your secrets I should be keeping this one must be the lamest, but if it makes you feel better… Just, if you want to ‘perform’ anything freaky, don’t rely on video surveillance in secluded places.”

“You’re right, now I’ll know better.”

“Hopefully,” Grapple shrugged. “If you really want to make embarrassing confessions, you’ll need to first find some people you can confess to.”

“Um, too much work, I think I’ll reconsider.”

“Be my guest.”

“But we’ll totally do something embarrassing in public, right?”

“Of course not – we have reputations to uphold!”

“Eh, if you insist…” Scrapper looked around the deserted auditorium. “Maybe we’d better get going before our systems get scrambled as well…”

“Good idea!” Grapple retrieved his data slug and grabbed all three datapads. “Be a nice mech and open the door, will ya?”

“And where are you going?”

“To my room, to leave all the materials behind. I still have almost two joors to the next event.”

“Hm… Me too!” Scrapper started going towards the stairs at the podium’s end to then start climbing the stairs leading to one of the two main entrances, his attendee’s ID ready in his hand to set them both free. Grapple was right behind him, happy to leave the blasted room.

“If you wanna hang out, I’ll be happy to have you. We could catch up and stuff…”

Just, don’t embarrass me in public, came unsaid.

Truly, Grapple was a little perplexed with how quickly had they fallen into their old roles. It was only a question of time when Scrapper would suggest that they skip lectures, hide somewhere in the premises and get drunk, or take illicit substances, or both. Then, Grapple would have to use all his limited charisma, power of persuasion and Scrapper’s sleepy conscience to convince him to stay, instead of going and taking Grapple with him. In the end, they would probably compromise, and that would lead to some unforeseen consequences.

“You want to show me where’s your room?” Scrapper chuckled darkly. “Ain’t you afraid that I’ll come later and murder you in your sleep?”

“You’d rather murder my mini-bar and leave me with the bill.”

“Yeah, that’s more likely!… Also, we have to file a complaint about your slagged conditions for this lecture – no worries, Grapps, just let me handle everything! They’re going to apologize to you on their knees, slaggers…”

He was quite sure that Grapple wouldn’t take any action and he’d even find a way to blame himself and ask the organizers for forgiveness, which couldn’t fly with Scrapper. He knew how Grapple was with performing in public – witnessing his unnecessary distress resulting from faulty conditions, Scrapper was out for blood.

“Well, if you’re so sure… Thanks,” Grapple smiled, remembering how Scrapper would both shamelessly exploit his help and fearlessly advocate for him back in their university days. He could probably live with that mini-bar bill. “And, where were you supposed to be, if not here, and where are you going next?”

Scrapper scanned his ID and the swoosh of opening doors gave him a jolt of joy. Yaay, freedom of movement! Until his next event, at least…

“I had ‘Satellites through history’ as strongly suggested,” he shrugged and started following Grapple in the large Althexian hall, blessedly deserted at this eventful time of the day. “It’s not like I had specific things booked, I can go wherever I like, maybe just risking sitting on the floor…”

Yeah, like anyone in the Symposium would be irritated with his last-klik appearance and make him sit on the floor or even get out! Grapple snorted, clearly doubtful.

“Hook and Mixmaster mostly chose for me more, um, sophisticated events, because there’s always a greater chance to spot some buffoon’s grave mistake and mock it, they care about my entertainment like that… But sometimes I’m not sure… With those satellites, I suspect that they wanted me to learn or relearn some relevant stuff they think I’m lacking… Oh, well, too bad, I’ve learned about some fantastic engines instead!” He felt like adding, so Grapple wouldn’t feel guilty for preventing him from gaining some useful knowledge somewhere else. “And the next is ‘Future of Concentric Urban Planning’, and it’s, thankfully, the last for today; I think that I can get away with skipping the Praxian Crystal Garden Society’s banquet and go somewhere get slagfaced instead,” he winked at Grapple, making it clear who was he hoping to get slagfaced with. “What are ya havin’?”

* * * * *

Standing in front of an elevator and contemplating its display, Grapple finally pressed the button marked as “commercial & transit area”. The doors slid open and he waved at Scrapper to get in.

“Um, the ‘Big Mortar Smash’ with Crushdance and Wreckball-”

“The big what?!” Scrapper immediately decided that future of Concentric Urban Planning wasn’t his concern anymore. He even forgot to joke about how courageous Grapple was for getting with him into a small enclosed space with no exit at will.

“You know, the thing where Crushdance and Wreckball test different mortars on different bricks, to see which are best, which are worst, and how they crumble,” Grapple explained. “They… Do things like that all the time, you know,” he reminded him.

“No… I had no idea!… I didn’t even know they’re here,” Scrapper admitted; not like he could brag an intimate knowledge of the Symposium’s programme, of course.

Since the elevator was shuttle-sized, they could both enter it and fit into it comfortably. Luckily, they were alone. There was probably at least one camera there but – again, luckily – Scrapper settled to not doing anything embarrassing there. So far.

“I think that it’s a last-moment thing, where something else was scheduled but didn’t come through…”

“Well, then I’m really happy that it didn’t come through!” Scrapper declared, nice as ever. “Heeey… Have you planned to witness this beautiful spectacle alone, or can I tag along?”

“Course not! Wreckball and Crushdance’s displays are social events, after all,” Grapple pointed out. “This one is packed, obviously, but we’ll manage; you can sit on my lap or something.”

Scrapper snorted.

“If you want your lap crushed, then sure, why not”

“Say what?” Grapple looked at him with mock anger before the doors hissing open prompted them to leave the elevator. “In case you didn’t notice, I got some major upgrades after graduation. Rest assured that I can comfortably take your weight – and I mean it in a mechanical way, don’t you dare make it a double entendre, Scrapper.”

Scrapper shrugged, smiling sheepishly behind his mask. Somehow, he felt like being crass and juvenile, but not like that. Maybe those vorns passed had made him more mature at least in some aspects. Or, more probably, such jokes weren’t appropriate anymore ever since he’d found himself a taken mech (and he’d worked long and hard to become this taken mech so, no, thanks, he was absolutely over acting as if he were still single).

“Ah… Well, I did in fact notice – it was hard not to,” he admitted as they walked through a spacious lobby/commercial area at the top of the Conference Centre to wait for a small bullet train designed to take them to the hotel part of the Conference Complex – calling it “a shuttle” would probably be perceived as very rude, thus Scrapper was feeling more and more tempted to naturally work it into conversation. “You’re definitely bigger and tougher than ever… I had some upgrades myself and here we are again, almost the same size!”

“Sure you had,” Grapple nonchalantly sized him up. Too nonchalantly. Scrapper felt self-conscious. “I lifted you with my own hands and I can confirm: your upgrades were massive… Almost as massive as your feet,” he added with a giggle.

Scrapper shrugged. He wasn’t going to tell Grapple that after their… Final upgrades his entire team got bigger feet – mass-shifting or not, they still needed some additional mass and material to form Devastator, and enlarging their feet seemed like a safe bet without compromising their balance and all the functions. They all had their tastes but, fortunately, none of them had a thing for petit pedes, both in others and in himself.

“They’re quite handy if you like stomp walking,” he said instead.

“And you got a bigger scoop too,” Grapple continued with a grin. “You know what they say about a payloader with a big scoop.”

“That he has a lot of slag to move around?” Scrapper made an educated guess.

Grapple laughed.

“That he’s there to sweep you off your feet!”

“Huh,” Scrapper thought about it. “Isn’t that… A porn cliché?”

“Oh… Maybe it is,” Grapple thought about it as well, deeply. Scrapper wasn’t disturbing him. “Huh… Yeah… Dammit!” His conclusions made him angry. “Everything about us is somehow associated with those flicks. You can’t be an industrial frame and say something funny about another industrial frame and not come across as a porn addict!” Agitated, he shook his head. “Professor Softcore was right – we’ll have to rise and either change or reclaim certain words and phrases, or people would never take us seriously!”

“And that’s what the backhoe said,” Scrapper commented. Grapple groaned.

“It really is exactly as she put it: by controlling the discourse, they’re restraining us with just words and stereotypes, and have us exactly where they wanted. Nothing happens by accident, even…” He calmed his indignation and finished quietly: “Even porn cliches.”

“What… Softcore was talking about porn?” Scrapper absolutely wasn’t going to lower his volume for the occasion. “How come I don’t remember about it?”

“Not about porn, about contemporary social discourse in modern linguistics!” Grapple rolled his optics.

“Ah, now I remember why I don’t remember most of her slag,” Scrapper murmured to himself. “Primuuus…”

“Well… I remember it mostly because it was the same lecture when she asked you if you didn’t need a pillow.”

“Sh-she did?”

“And you answered that your scoop makes a great pillow…”

“Aah, right, now I remember!” Scrapper chortled.

“And you were kind enough to ensure her that you were neither ill nor tired and you were dosing off in her evening lecture because of a massive hangover.”

“But I apologized to her! And I gave her my final project from Perspective classes.”

“Yeah, and she really liked it until she learned that you named it What a Titan Purged,” Grapple chuckled. “I heard that she sold it five or ten vorns ago to buy a loft in the Towers.”

“Eh… Really? I thought that those are expensive like frag…”

“No one knew about that figurine, so there were no replicas. Your unique works usually go for crazy amounts of money.”

“Huh,” Scrapper summed up. “People are weird. Sooo, getting back to your impressive upgrades… You grew tired with other people carrying out your projects and flunking them? No one’s gonna build them as well as yourself?”

“I simply like designing, and then building what I designed,” came Grapple’s very proper response. Scrapper deduced from it that he, indeed, had problems with careless builders.

“Well, that’s great! You got yourself a team?… Why are you here alone?”

“No, I don’t have a team,” Grapple confessed, blue undertones in his voice. “I’m not that good at directing people, but I don’t like working for others either… Some people can do that, but not me.”

“My poor little friend… I’d gladly work with you, but it wouldn’t end pretty,” Scrapper murmured. “Namely, there would be no way to keep you safe from Hook. Oh, he would tear your spark out with his teeth if left alone with you!” He sounded half-amused and half-apologetic. “He can really sense a weakness in anybody, and with your good nature in general and, well, kindness… Oh, look! Our shuttle’s arrived!” He nearly shouted, glad that an external occurrence saved him from saying more uncomfortable things.

“Bullet train! It’s bullet train!” Grapple noticed several local vendors and customers giving them dirty looks and hastily proceeded to do some damage control. “I know they’re called differently in Iacon, Scrapper…”

Hearing the offender’s name, the nearest shuttleformers gasped and then tried to look busy. Of course, no one was going to chew out the most prominent attendee of the current major event; the entire Cybertron would watch and judge them for doing that.

“No, they’re not,” Scrapper corrected smugly and they boarded a small train car. When they were comfortably sitting opposite each other, the door closing and the engines of their little driverless transport activating again, Grapple quietly named Scrapper a stupid glitch. Definitely guilty, Scrapper simply shrugged and braced himself for the ride.

Their short journey was designed to be both quick and efficient and as picturesque as Altihex required. Their track got them into a glass tube as they left the conference part and were heading towards the hotel building. Those two were the tallest buildings on the third level of Altihex, which was also known as the Commercial Level. The views were breathtaking – the sunset setting the visible western part of the sky on fire, the first stars blinking in the evening sky, the first lights turning on in the city below them, the large ring’s borders glowing for security reasons, and the proper land below – so far, far below. The train, mercifully, slowed down to give them time to take the landscape in before, both metaphorically and literally, sending them to their rooms. Scrapper felt a bit ill, remembering about his altitude sickness. Today’s morning, he’d taken the normal ground-level passage and now he decided that, crowded or not, he was going to stick to it from now on… Unless Grapple would insist. If he was going to make himself sick, he might as well do it in the name of friendship.

“Oh, how beautiful!” Grapple commented on the view.

“Uh-huh…”

“Would be really impressive if you didn’t know how stupidly fragile it all is.”

“Uh-huh…”

“See? All’s good, no works in sight – I heard that they did their best to have all their conservation works either finished or rescheduled after the Symposium so, y’know, all those architects and engineers wouldn’t see that! Hard to disagree, I’d say…”

“Uh-huh…”

“And it all looks the same. Not unified, but you can see the same style – flashy and impractical – even though every building tries to look unique. And those colours! You could go blind just looking at them…”

“Mmm-hmm…”

“And just by looks, you can’t guess what kinds of buildings they even are! Unlike your designs… Even that Conference Centre – I heard it’s just a copy of old Iaconian Minor City Hall, but bigger and better, of course…”

“Grapps,” Scrapper grunted. “Why did you have to choose the possibly worst moment to have possibly the best conversation to be had?”

“Oh?” Grapple stopped looking out the windows and focused on his fellow passenger. “You alright, my mech?”

They arrived into the hotel’s terminal with a bump. Scrapper offlined his optics and moaned through his vents.

“Me: too fraggin’ high, ground… Too fraggin’ low!”

He exvented and onlined back his optics. Grapple’s hands were full, it was inconsiderate to make him worried while he couldn’t even reassuringly pat his arm, not to mention offer him a hand.

“Um, sorry…” All that was left for Grapple to do was watch his knees and datapads resting on them. “Let’s just say that we had this discussion, it was great and we agreed on most of the things…”

And an almost airborne, rather surveillance-free bullet train was probably the only place in Altihex for safe Altihex-bashing.

“Wanna sit here for a bit longer?… It’s okay, the next train’s arriving in a joor… I’ll explain it to people if they’ll have problem with it – but I don’t think they would…” Not with you.

“Ah, now’s…” Scrapper looked around the hotel’s top level which appeared to be all windows and no walls. “A bit better, I guess. I think I’ll manage. Let’s get movin’!”

* * * * *

“Let’s,” Grapple lightly bumped their feet and left the bullet train, Scrapper following suit. They crossed the spacious and luxurious terminal and moved to the side corridor leading to the elevators. Being surrounded by walls helped tremendously with Scrapper’s symptoms.

“So…” He broke an awkward silence, trying to move their attention from his ailment. “Explain it to me again, Grapps: how did it happen that I found you here today, alone, and talking about new technologies – are you inventing new engines by mixing lithium and termite?”

This last remark earned him a glare.

“Scrapper, lithotermic engines are not made of termite!”

“No? Weird, they sound like they were… So! Have you invented them?”

“Um, no,” Grapple shook his head, not really happy with the new topic. “I was just tired of working alone, and I don’t really like working for other people… I’ve recently gotten into a partnership with Rotor Crash and Speedroller, because their inventions seemed interesting… We were supposed to do our promotion stint here, almost last-klik after someone else was, I think, suddenly arrested for tax evasion and their event fell through… But literally the night before our departure here they got into talks with a big, big investor, so I was the only one able to make it… So, here I am,” he turned to Scrapper and gave him an awkward smile and a shrug.

“Ow… But I still don’t remember seeing you anywhere in the programme!”

“I’m there as ‘Rotor-Roller Inc.’ Only, the actual Inc. hasn’t made it, and that’s just me, an associate!” He eagerly approached the right elevator and chose his floor, suddenly shy about his official presence.

“Ah, that explains it!” Scrapper laughed, seeing how many happy (or not that happy) coincidences had led to their meeting. “See, if your name was anywhere there, Hook could reconsider sending me here in the first place…”

“Oh?” Grapple quirked his optical ridge. “Is he… Still jealous?… Was he ever?”

“Looks like that,” Scrapper shrugged and moved to the side so Grapple could easily enter their elevator. “I’ve known you longer than him, after all.”

“But not actively known,” Grapple pointed out all the vorns they hadn’t heard from each other. “Really, he has nothing to worry, I don’t walk around stealing people’s bondmates!”

“We’re not bonded,” Scrapper admitted sheepishly – lying, but only partially. “He’s just that – possessive… Mixmaster too, but to a lesser degree, of course; they… Don’t really like when I see people from the old times, and probably wouldn’t be happy with you. We’re… Quite close, all of us, and I guess that they don’t like to remember that I used to be close with other people as well.”

The elevator abruptly stopped and pinged open. Scrapper’s tanks churned a little.

“That’s a lot of people to consider,” Grapple remarked as he exited the elevator cabin and started leading the way. Scrapper couldn’t determine whether he said it innocently or as a jab. He knew, after all; he’d been there. “You were bound to bump here into some of them.”

“I remember very distinctly not seeing anyone interesting when I skimmed the programme. I guess it was good enough for them.”

“So, what, they sent you here – alone – and expected that you’re gonna have a grand time and all – alone?” Grapple took a turn into a side corridor right before a lounging area with a large table and chairs, two smaller benches, two energon dispensers – a bigger one, with shuttle-grade fuel, currently out of order – and windows. Big, bright windows with cool sunset glow bleeding through them. Even though it was only the fifth floor, they surely offered a great view! Scrapper hastily followed his friend, not even stealing a glance.

“Well… I was supposed to rest, and Mixmaster and Hook generally find other people irritating, so, I guess it made perfect sense for them? And maybe to see what’s happening, do some networking, possibly land us some future gigs, learn something useful… The rest of my mechs probably had more realistic expectations considering my stay here, and look, they were right!”

“Weren’t they,” Grapple gave him the datapads and opened the door with his magnetic key. He took the ‘pads back and stepped aside. “Come in, come in, don’t stay for too long!” He welcomed him jokingly.

“Nice place,” Scrapper commented, as if his suite wasn’t almost the same – down to magenta shades on three rectangular windows and little turbofox-shaped ornaments hanging from their strings. The only difference was that the interior was a mirror of his – the washroom was right from the entrance and the berth and a locked balcony (you shouldn’t trust those pesky groundpounders with balconies, right?) were on the left, while the walls were painted pale blue instead of vibrant green. Actually, he liked his room better, but he wasn’t telling this to Grapple.

“Dunno, I haven’t felt so small…” Grapple shook his head and marched to the table to dump his intellectual property on it. Clearly, after all his upgrades he wasn’t appreciating the feeling at all. “Ah, Pit. This entire place makes me feel that way. Outside of the Conference Centre, they rarely remember that people smaller than them exist. The mini-bar is over there,” he waved at Scrapper, guiding him to the place that was, seemingly, the most interesting for him in Grapple’s room.

“Aw, thanks!” Scrapper made a beeline to something rather full-sized than miniature, quickly punched in the code listed on the door and took a small cube out to wash down his pill. Grapple was watching him with something that, vorns ago, might have been a concern, but time and experience had transformed it into mere curiosity.

“You’re taking your medicine with mid-grade?” He asked, just to be sure. Scrapper had an actual medic and a pharmacist working for him, after all – he surely knew how to be safe?…

Scrapper nodded and swallowed the remainder of his energon. Feeling at ease, he didn’t shut his facemask right away.

“It adds a bit of nice buzz to Mixmaster’s homemade remedies,” he winked to Grapple who sighed, clearly seeing that Scrapper purposefully worded it in as shady a way as possible.

“What are you even taking? You’re feeling unwell?… Or is that just drugs?” He tried not to make his last remark sound like “Have you brought enough for the rest of the group, young mech?”

“No, no!” Scrapper binned the empty cube and mercifully closed the mini-bar. “It’s not drugs! Well… Am no longer hangover or sleep-deprived, but the altitude sickness is still gettin’ to me whenever I remember where I am.”

Actually, Mixmaster had given him some drugs as well – probably in case the Symposium was really boring, and probably in secret from Hook – but he didn’t have to come clear right now.

“You poor thing,” Grapple inserted his data slug into an empty datapad to check if it was scrambled to the Pit. It was. “Were you having it when you were working in Vos on the Revolutionary Palace’s west wing?”

Slowly making his way to him while taking in the slightly messy surroundings and trying to guess what Grapple’s life was like based on this evidence, Scrapper shook his head.

“You know that Vos is different,” he observed. “They move in the air and have their high entrances and, dunno, perches and suspension bridges – but there’s still whole infrastructure for us grounders; and it all isn’t even that high. But this… Takes some getting used to.”

He was about to complain yet again about his general surroundings but decided not to. There was no use, especially after their chance meeting had made things for him significantly better. He instead looked over the TV set and pressed the recording station open to see what holovid was inside.

“You watched Shuttles Gone Wild?”

“Not yet,” Grapple shrugged, only traces of shame in his voice – they were both adult now, right? “Is that any good?”

He had probably already mourned his data slug and now was wondering about the proper way to dispose of it. Pity, good data slugs came a long way…

“Shuttle wings all the way, if that’s your thing.”

“Yeah… No,” Grapple disconnected and opened the slug, seeing if there were any salvageable parts. “Y’know, I really wouldn’t want to fetishize my own class, all things considered, but what remains… If you don’t have a military fetish, you’re pretty screwed in this regard.”

“No, it’s okay!” Scrapper disagreed cheerfully, climbing on an armchair and making himself comfortable. “It’s like Long Haul complaining about Kalis pretty much every time he mentions it, but if someone else does it, he gets defensive. It’s okay when he does it, because he’s from there – get it? Or when professor Perish Point would say that all architects are uneducated glory hounds and drama addicts, but almost nailed to the wall this one Information Systems adjunct for making similar generalizations… It’s okay for you to like industrial frames, being one yourself, that’s what I mean.”

“Huh! That’s the thought,” Grapple raked through the disembowelled slug with tweezers and sighed, deciding to discard it altogether.

“Or you can just watch The Postmech Always Rings Twice, if you’re feeling fancy,” Scrapper kept encouraging him.

Grapple stopped doing whatever he was doing (at this point, probably nothing) and glared at him.

“First: it absolutely surely isn’t here, anywhere, to watch,” he declared. “Frankly, if it is anywhere, I don’t believe this place would want it known. Second: if I’m feeling fancy, I’d rather get trashed and watch a shuttle period drama or some slag I got to choose from – not… Not this piece of, hopefully, lost media. I… Don’t want to remember it exists, and that we all wanted to see it so badly…” He shook his head, overcome by cringe. “Gah! Why do you remember that?”

Scrapper shrugged.

“I guess it holds a special place in my memory banks for… Reasons.”

“W-what reasons?” Grapple appeared worried.

“Huh… Remember how we watched it over and over because we thought that Long Haul was in it?”

“Oh…” Now Grapple cringed even more over his old and erroneous ways. All those joors of rewatching and meticulous nitpicking, the joors they weren’t getting back, Primus have mercy on their sparks! “Oh. Yeah… But it really wasn’t him, right?”

“Of course not!” Scrapper spoke with confidence and no intention to explain that this confidence arose from being Long Haul’s gestalt leader. So, Grapple was probably still doubtful but Scrapper had to live with that. “Also, well… Back in the day, Hook tried using it to, um, ‘educate himself’ a bit… Yeah.”

Shocked, Grapple had to reset his vocalizer.

“He… Really?”

“Really… And then he was quite surprised that things in real life don’t really work that way.”

“I guess he was!”

“Uh-huh…” Scrapper quirked a corner of his mouth. “At least, he saw it after we already started ‘facing – otherwise, it’d probably scare him from doing anything with his cables.”

Exasperated, Grapple finally disposed of the slug’s remains and moved to his datapads – thankfully, non-scrambled.

“But… Didn’t they teach him how it works?”

“Um… Not really?” Scrapper pondered this question. “They don’t really teach medics how to be freaks in berth, just like they don’t teach us how to kill people with bricks, I guess. It doesn’t… Really have anything to do with their function.”

He managed not to sound wistful that nobody had taught him how to kill people with bricks and he had to figure it out himself.

“Oh…” Grapple appeared ashamed. “Right”

“I know, I know, the stereotype says otherwise,” Scrapper raised a hand in an appeasing gesture, probably also asking his friend not to prod further. “Nobody knows their way around your frame type like your doctor, an’ so on, an’ so forth. Anyway… What I said is extremely confidential and no one else can ever hear about it… Or someone will die. Hopefully, it won’t be me,” he added.

“Sure!” Grapple agreed, scrolling the contents of one of the ‘pads and mulling over a potentially dangerous question. “Good thing that you were so thoroughly experienced to make up for that!”

“Um… Yeah,” Scrapper wasn’t at all enthusiastic to admit this.

“Absolutely,” Grapple made an emphasis for him and finally his curiosity took the better of him: “So… You and him are still going strong, I gather?”

“Strong as ever,” Scrapper gave him a bright and honest smile.

Chapter Text

Not answering to this smile in kind was impossible, and then Grapple did exactly that.

“You really were made for each other…”

“You think so?” Scrapper leaned back against the large armchair’s backrest, pleased with what he heard.

“Sure! To think that it took someone like him to make an honest mech out of you…” Grapple glanced at him and shook his head. “You, the most popular of them all, and someone as good as non-existent… You could have everyone. Literally everyone… If someone had told me this during our third or even fifth vorn, I’d never believe it!”

“Yeeaah…” Scrapper stretched his backstruts pleasantly, his arms raised. “Neither would I.” His hands plopped back onto his knees. “Now, if only there were someone out there who could make an honest mech out of Hook…”

Grapple put down his datapad and looked at Scrapper, taken off guard.

“As opposed to…?”

“As opposed to the sadistic, egomaniacal control freak he is,” he sighed, his hands dangling from the armrests and his entire frame slumped as if he felt so resigned that he wanted to bury himself inside the armchair. “Truly, I can have no rest from his constant demands and unrealistic expectations. And his punishments… The punishments! Just thinking about it makes me shiver…”

“Primus!” His friend gasped. “I- I had no idea… I’m so sorry, Scrapper! Is… Is there anything I can do to help?”

Morose, Scrapper shook his head.

“There’s no use, buddy, there’s no use… It’s better for things to stay the way they are. Less people will get hurt this way, not to mention killed…”

“Oh?” Grapple was this close to running over and giving him a hug. “Is he really this bad?”

“Bad? Who said anything about him being bad? He’s perfect!” Scrapper sat up straight, beaming at Grapple.

“Perfect? But didn’t you say-”

Scrapper laughed.

“Yeah, no contradiction here! This is Hook for you: he’s my greatest asset, greatest joy, greatest weakness, and greatest pain in the aft,” he informed Grapple joyfully. “My greatest everything, you can say. With him by my side, I’m prepared for everything this cruel world can throw my way, and more!”

Grapple glared at him.

“So you were joking,” he pointed out.

“Ah… Yeah. Maybe a tiny little bit,” Scrapper shrugged.

“So… You find him scary,” Grapple deadpanned.

“Oh yes, I do!”

“And you like it.”

“That’s a wee bit understatement, Grapple – I absolutely love it!”

“And his punishments.”

“I told you that the mere thought gives me shivers, right?”

“Yes… You did.” An all-too familiar sense of weariness came over Grapple, like during those long dark evenings when he tried to convince suspiciously smug Scrapper to reveal to him where he’d been and whether it had anything to do with the campus’ newest, wildest gossip. For a moment, he couldn’t convince himself that it was his hotel room in Altihex, and – both of them, supposedly, adult and mature now – they weren’t bound by the university rules and expectations anymore and he wasn’t responsible for Scrapper. This last thing proved to be the hardest to dismiss. He sighed and brought himself to ask, just in case:

“So… There’s everything alright between you two, or do you need help?”

“I need help with getting trashed tonight, so after I return I can tell him how wonderful his gift for me was, and how I appreciate it – and him!” Scrapper revealed. “Or, actually, scrap it – I should call him tonight right after getting trashed enough to dare! Don’t worry, I’ll try to keep our conversation safe for work,” he blinked mischievously.

Of course he would try. The gestalt bond was for things not safe for work, after all. He really would try, Grapple better believed him.

“Looks like I’m really buying you this drink then… Hook should be really pleased hearing all about it,” Grapple smirked, obviously meaning the opposite.

“Ooh yes, he should!” Scrapper tittered. “He will be delighted!”

“Yeah…” Grapple looked at a painting on the wall depicting a purple and orange space shuttle during a takeoff on a sunny day with some mountains as the background, deep in thought. “That’s funny, Scrapper. Of all the possibilities, I would’ve never thought that he would turn out like that.”

Scrapper’s smile rapidly vanished, like a paint stain washed off by a mop held by an experienced caretaker.

“N-neither would I,” he murmured, staring at his immobile hands. It was clear as day that there was something dark and painful looking through his optics right now.

“I mean… Not like there’s anything wrong with him, right,” Grapple blabbered, deeply ashamed after touching something he shouldn’t have until he managed to change the topic. “Wouldn’t you like anything more to drink?… Any more meds to take?”

“No, all’s taken,” Scrapper assured him, the sudden shadow of sorrow seemingly leaving him. “I might be partial to… Something, but don’t know what yet,” he shrugged. “Wouldn’t you like to sit down and have a drink?”

Grapple shook his head.

“There’s no need, I’ll get to sit during the Mortar Smash and have a drink afterwards.”

“Ah, okay…” Scrapper nodded. He hoped that Grapple knew how much fuel he needed after his upgrades and wouldn’t allow himself to suddenly de-energize. There was no fuel readily available in this blasted Commercial Level, after all. Scrapper sat up straight to better see his friend engrossed in the datapad he held. “An’ now you’re doing what?”

“I just checked the page and… You’re not gonna believe it…”

“What’s that?” Scrapper jumped from the armchair, ready to see for himself.

“My lecture… That thing that never was… People keep giving it ten-star reviews!”

Scrapper laughed. It was absurd but, well, it was great too.

“And they describe it as the most informative and impactful event so far in the entire Symposium…” Grapple was clearly disbelieving, and then he grew suspicious and irritated. “And already forty-six people bought access to my presentation materials on the site.”

“Wow, that’s awesome!” Scrapper had his suspicions as well, and couldn’t help but laugh harder.

“Yeah… Finally: they keep pinging me, asking what you’re like, how we got to know each other and if I couldn’t introduce you to them, y’know, all that insidious stuff…”

“Oof!” Scrapper leaned over the desk next to Grapple and started lazily moving the two remaining datapads from place to place. This was, indeed, insidious. “Tell them what I’m like, why don’t you. That will show them!”

Grapple disabled notifications on the page and turned the ‘pad off with a sigh.

“Like, what?” He put it down on the table and looked at him.

Scrapper pondered this very important question, and then his visor brightened with an idea.

“You can tell them about this one time when I thought that I was hooking up with those two hot sisters, and then woke up with our building’s caretaker,” he suggested. “Huh… Actually, he was a pretty cool mech, going far beyond his job description – don’t you think?”

“Sure he was,” Grapple agreed, leaning against the other end of the desk. “If he hadn’t put a word for you, you probably wouldn’t get reinstated after they kicked you out for flooding the main staircase with pink goo…”

“It was boiled sculpting plaster, Grapps,” Scrapper corrected him, always pedantic about his pranks. “Yeah, he had no problem with tracking it back to me and got me to clean it all but he had a good laugh too, seeing all these people! And they didn’t kick me out, only threatened to do that-”

“No, Scrapper, they did. I was doing your paperwork, I know what was there. For a cycle or two, you were legitimately kicked out.”

“Huh! The more you know,” Scrapper commented. “Hm… Oh! You can tell those idiots about it. Dunno how it’s now but back then it was near impossible to get kicked out from the North Halls; they’re going to either hate me for that or respect me even more, the idiots.”

“If you insist.”

“Actually…”

Scrapper leaned his back against the desk and looked out the nearest window at the darkening evening sky and a huge dark shadow which was the next, fourth level of Altihex. Their hotel was located closer to the third level’s edge, allowing them to see more sky through their windows, but the higher level was still visible. Far from ideal for Scrapper’s grounder sensitivities but, thanks to all things he didn’t actually hold sacred, it looked that his altitude sickness was finally gone.

“Hm… Going back to my university days now… I think that, in order to better fit into the artist’s way to self-discovery, I definitely should have done less people and more drugs…”

“What?” Grapple tilted his head, hearing this very bold and very freakish confession. Why in the world would Scrapper need even more drugs?! “Didn’t Hook disapprove of people abusing drugs they didn’t actually need? You’d have even more hoops to go through to get to him!”

“H-how do you know that?” Scrapper was staring at him surprised, obviously not denying that what Grapple said was true. Of course Hook would make exception for drugs somebody needed, seeing how medical students like him typically wouldn’t survive without help from an illegal substance, or twelve.

“Because you wouldn’t shut up about every little thing you learnt about him,” Grapple shrugged. “And so I just remembered a thing or two… He wouldn’t want you if you abused drugs, now would he?”

Long ago, one of the few ways of forcing Scrapper to straighten up his act which actually worked was taking the “Hook would disapprove” route. And he was clearly struggling under its spell even now.

“Em… But I wouldn’t abuse them!” He argued. “I would need them!”

“For what, Scrapper, for what?”

“To… Discover my art! And it would look better in my biography.”

“No, it wouldn’t! Keeping quiet about your whoring around is much better than parading your drug habit…”

Grapple sighed. When had Scrapper become so self-conscious about the contents of his possible biography? Had the completion of Crystal City prompted him to look at his life and start evaluating it? Not like there weren’t several of them published already, and so far Grapple had been asked about their university friendship and his opinion about Scrapper’s work around ten times more often than about his own accomplishments – he wasn’t bitter about it, no, of course he wasn’t… He had always strived to praise him and paint as flattering a picture as possible, but now Grapple started to doubt that he and Scrapper had the same idea of what “flattering” entailed.

“The only thing that was an actual discovery for you was Slogism,” he reminded him. “And not thanks to drugs. While you could have had fewer flings, or more, it wouldn’t really change that. You were just studying like the rest of us; but you were more gifted than the rest of us.”

Scrapper was vehemently shaking his head even before Grapple got to the last, unacceptable part about him being more gifted than any of his peers.

“But you don’t get it,” he started patiently, as if his friend failed to grasp something absolutely mundane and obvious. “What are you going to learn about yourself from chasing tail?”

Grapple raised an optical ridge. Was he really expected to answer this question? Well, be it. He braced himself and opened his mouth…

“Nothing,” Scrapper enlightened him. “You’re just gonna discover what’s under people’s panels – which is cables… Under normal circumstances, anyway.” He shrugged, quashing a digression before it could take him away from his clou. “Being a slut is very easy, everyone can do that. A lot of artists do that too, but is that what makes them great?”

“As opposed to being a druggie?” Grapple took out the hotel chair and climbed it to sit by the hotel desk, still comically large for him, but somehow functional. He stacked the datapads for the night, sceptical but mildly curious and ready to see where this conversation was going to take them – even though there was a substantial chance that in the end he would regret engaging in it. With Scrapper’s charisma, people really couldn’t help themselves.

Scrapper bit his lip, deep in thought.

“When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound that hot either… But you’re simplifying the problem!”

Scrapper’s idea was gradually losing to reason, but he liked it too much to be reasonable.

“And this is, indeed, a problem we’re talking about,” Grapple commented lazily.

“It isn’t about social taboos and categorisation,” Scrapper insisted. “It’s about… Broadening your mind. Learning about new things… The things inside you…”

“And you needed drugs for that? You could always ask Hook what’s typically inside a mech.”

“Grapps, you’re so rigid! I’m talking about… A mystical experience opening you up to new possibilities! Like it’s just you, your mind and… And the whole universe!”

“Yeah, right,” Grapple shrugged. “But you were far from being a junkie virgin, you know. So… Has that ever happened to you?”

Scrapper’s enthusiasm visibly deflated.

“Um… No,” he admitted, only to continue: “And this was one of my mistakes! I should have had such an experience… Or even better, the whole series! That would allow me a glimpse into the very essence of the universe, and then reflect it in my art!”

“Sure it would, Scrapps,” Grapple was nodding and smiling. Even with vorns passed, it was still as entertaining as ever. “Sure it would…”

“I have absolutely no doubt about it!”

“Or it would just end as usual: with the campus slapping you down with property damage and public indecency.”

“Every great artist was accused of public indecency at least once,” Scrapper murmured defensively. “Even master Slog with his first exhibition-”

“Sure, Scrapps, sure; whatever makes you feel better,” Grapple stretched his back and limbs. He found it a bit funny and a bit tone deaf that Scrapper, already the most famous student of the Iaconian University during his time, wished to have been even more notorious. “But you always drunk more than enough. Don’t great artists drink as well?”

“Dunno… Master Slog doesn’t touch high grade. Also, everybody drinks when at university!” Scrapper stroked his chin in thought before turning back to Grapple, triumph in his voice: “Heh! You can tell these idiots pinging you about me this spark-warming little story how I got wasted and threw up all over Copper Heart’s seminar project.”

“Ah, yes!” Grapple laughed, overcome by memories. “And he had to present it right away!”

“He ended up changing his idea behind making it to reflect, well, the new appearance,” Scrapper added. “The commission grilled him till he admitted what really happened – he was ready to get kicked out, and they passed him with flying colours!”

“Oh god, yes! They started saying after that that your touch makes everything superior, doesn’t matter what kind of touch!”

“Uh, yeah,” Scrapper’s smile was a bit embarrassed, but he was still happy with the memory.

“And the commission told Copper Heart to buy you a drink, but he was smarter than that and bought you a box of candy…”

“Yes, Urayan red chewers!” Scrapper clasped his hands with joy at remembering it again.

“Huh… I always wondered why they were called ‘chewers’ while ‘gluers’ would be more appropriate… Maybe not that appetizing,” Grapple contemplated.

“But then I mixed them with high grade, and purged all over your final sketch for Fire Dial,” Scrapper continued reminiscing happily. Grapple grimaced.

“I wasn’t going to mention this but yes, this indeed happened.” He sighed. “I got you to do it all over and this sketch got me the most points I’ve ever scored… Which is both the most wholesome and the most depressing thing to ever happen to me there,” he admitted.

“Sure you did!” Scrapper laughed. “I spent the whole night over it, never even sobering – I was just slagfaced at first, and then it slowly, slowly morphed into a mighty hangover…”

“See? You had your mystical experience after all,” Grapple pointed out, smirking triumphantly.

“Hm… Maybe?” Scrapper considered his words before letting go. Something more promising caught his attention. “Grapple?”

“Yes?” Grapple asked warily. He knew better than to trust this glint behind Scrapper’s visor.

“You know what I really, really wanna do right now?”

“Get some fuel?”

“No!” Scrapper first raised his finger in an “I got an idea!” gesture to then point it at him in an “It’s going to be our idea now!” way. “We’re going to find a confectionery shop in this blasted hotel, because I really, really need some Urayan red chewers right now!”

Grapple gasped.

“But, Scrapper… They were already seriously overpriced in Iacon, but here they’re gonna cost you ten times more than they should!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Scrapper declared valiantly. “Nothing will stop me from getting them now, because I really want some!”

Defeated by this noble cause, Grapple sighed.

“At least have some fuel before,” he advised.

Obedient, Scrapper marched to the minibar and returned with a huge smile, two cubes of high grade in his hand. Grapple watched him crack his cube open with horror.

“No worries, Grapps – no mixing!” He reassured his friend. “I’m a responsible adult now – I’ll have my drink first and then will stuff myself with candy!”

His tolerance and sheer size were also bigger than all those vorns ago, but he didn’t feel the need to mention that – Grapple’s face was too priceless to ruin it with comforting facts.

*****

One not-that-extensive search and one even-not-that-embarrassing purchase later they were walking the halls on the seventh floor, their mouths almost glued shut by sticky candy – Scrapper had faced Grapple with a dilemma of whether he really wanted to leave all the chewers for him and risk things, and Grapple obviously couldn’t risk things of any kind. It almost felt like one of their late escapades a night before an important exam. Grapple was half expecting them to start singing; thank Primus those chewers really were actual gluers.

“I can’t have more!” He protested when Scrapper, ever vigilant, noticed him finally ceasing to chew and swallowing the sticky mass to immediately shake an open candy tin before his face.

“Eat!” Scrapper ordered, similarly to others ordering people to drink. Every vice craves company, after all.

Grapple sighed and had another helping.

Satisfied, Scrapper closed the tin and moved to thinking about their next step.

“Alright, Grapps, gotta get going – we still have that complaint to make!” Grapple’s face sank. “What? You thought that I forgot? No such luck, buddy – it enraged me so badly that there’s no way in Pit I’d forgotten, not to mention let it go. So…” Scrapper looked around, slightly worried. “Wherever was that blasted terminal?… You think that stupid bullet shuttle will take us back on time, or do we have to go all the way down and walk to the Centre on the street level?”

“Neither,” Grapple announced after swallowing his candy, happy that he could put his friend at ease. “There’s a pedestrian passage almost exactly two levels above us. Getting there and then to the right room in the Centre won’t take us more than half a joor… And it’s going to be too dark for you to see how high we are,” he added quickly. “If that’s okay with you, of course.”

“This sounds absolutely fragging lovely,” Scrapper decided, to Grapple’s immense joy.

They took the nearest elevator and soon found the spacious (and popular) passage. After a bit of waiting to avoid tagging along with someone else, they entered the steel and glass suspension corridor, stars blinking at them behind the glass on their right side and the sky-obscuring fourth level stretching out on their left side. Stars aside, the light inside wasn’t bright. Scrapper described it even as “hangover friendly.”

“It’s called the Starlight Passage,” Grapple felt inclined to set the facts straight for him.

“Nothing better than get slagfaced and then wake up with only stars for company,” of course, Scrapper couldn’t not provide his own interpretation of the charming name.

“Master Scrapper!” People walking from the opposite direction kept discovering him, but due to the dim lights they would often recognize him at the last moment, his dark scoop, unreadable masked face and crimson visor right in front of them.

“Wrong, wrong, I don’t even know the guy,” Scrapper kept dismissing them to their hurt puzzlement while Grapple attempted to stifle his giggling.

“So,” Grapple said after they were guaranteed a long solitary moment. “Do you like it? Obviously, this construction has been… Outsourced,” he whispered, outsourced being their code for “not Althexian design.”

“Yeah, it’s really cool. We did something similar in Crystal City but, honestly, don’t ask me how – some things are better left and never mentioned again… We really had to do a lot of cheating in that blasted place to make it stand!” Scrapper took another appreciative look around. “But this is nice. Solid… I’m sure that my mechs would love it as well!”

“They’re the kind to appreciate it?”

Only after asking it, Grapple thought that, hopefully, Scrapper wouldn’t take it the wrong way.

And he didn’t. He laughed instead.

“Grapps, you know the answer – they’re working for me, after all, they have to have a thing for the unusual!”

“That’s true…” Grapple chuckled. “They really are your mechs… So, Scrapper – have you really managed to find such an extraordinary team in less than a vorn?” He suddenly remembered some trivia he’d learnt about the Constructicons because, with lost contact, Scrapper surely hadn’t informed him himself… Or so it looked like because, in spite of his mask on, he looked offended and hurt by Grapple’s ignorance; with certain underlying disappointment,

“Find? Less than a vorn? Grapps, we both had known them long before then!” He enlightened his friend. “Save for Scavenger, of course – he was my newest acquisition, hahah…”

Grapple almost stopped his relaxed stride, absolutely taken aback. Was Scrapper implying something that should have been obvious for him this entire time, but hadn’t for some reason? They had both known them long before they became Constructicons… Save for Scavenger…

“Really?” He felt lost. “We knew all the rest?”

“Sure!” Scrapper’s reassuring smile glinting in his optics and reverberating through his voice was all Grapple needed to resume walking. “Mixmaster and Hook are obvious, even though they came after Long Haul and Scavenger, and Bonecrusher was the last to join.”

Alright, let’s untangle this conundrum one strand at a time… Grapple started by asking the safest question:

“So, who did you hire first?”

“Oh, Long Haul was first. He was hired by my boss Powerhouse even before me.”

Indeed. They both had undoubtedly known Long Haul. Everyone had known him, most of the people probably not as well as they would love to… Was Scrapper…? No, I’m not asking him about that, Grapple decided firmly.

“As a courier?… Or did he ditch it at some point?”

Scrapper shrugged, indicating with this simple gesture that the truth was a tad more complicated.

“As transport, not necessarily a courier. He didn’t like it too much, but not much could be done about it… Save for treating him nicely, of course, he can survive hauling things, but mechs being nasty to him – no, absolutely!” Scrapper emphasized with a dreamy smile, probably remembering an instance when someone wasn’t treating Long Haul nicely and what followed. “Also, he was Powerhouse’s logistician, and later became mine. He really knows how to find things, and organize them. A constructing company won’t go far without a logistician!”

“You’re so right!” Grapple agreed readily. “No one ever remembers about logistics, but I personally witnessed some enterprises failing miserably because of that.”

“Yeah! He knows what it’s all about… He often gets impatient with my ideas because he’s seen and done pretty much everything and can recognize when the thing is going somewhere, and when it doesn’t. But he usually does what he’s told anyway, keeping his opinions for himself, or at least not protesting too much…”

“Why? Wouldn’t he want to warn you and avoid trouble and loss?”

“Well… That’s what he used to tell me: ‘I gotta teach you well to be my foremech, but some things you can learn only from your mistakes’. No way around it, I guess… But he’s always waiting nearby, ready to help and save my sorry aft. I don’t know what I’d do without him, he’s the most reliable mech in existence! And I get to give him positive disappointment from time to time, so he has a bit more faith in me than I probably deserve… But, somehow, we haven’t failed so far – see? That’s why!”

“Well, I guess it isn’t only because of that – I mean, there are several aspects of keeping things unfailed, and you seem to have all of them covered.”

“Well, probably,” Scrapper acknowledged without elaborating.

“So… Long Haul was first, you were second…”

“Yes! Powerhouse didn’t care much about art, but I think that he tried to understand… He was really open-minded for a guy who’d been building factories, warehouses, industrial plants and engine rooms his whole life. He wanted to branch out to ‘nicer’ buildings, so he hired me. He already had business and money, all of it, but wanted prestige and recognition, so he told his secretary to find him the best of them frigging architects, but within budget. And so, he ended up getting me, right after I’d gotten kicked from my previous job for leaving offensive graffiti on my former supervisor’s house… I told them that it was simply a last-ditch effort on my part after all other communication had failed, you see, but they didn’t want to believe it and booted me instead… The projects from my resume didn’t tell Powerhouse much about me – not his kind of scrap – but when he saw the picture of that graffiti he, apparently, really liked the colours and the fact that I hadn’t misspelled anything there, and told the secretary to hire me.”

“He had to be in for a surprise!” Grapple laughed. He couldn’t imagine the young Scrapper acting as a neat and proper office worker or the site supervisor, a perfect little cog in the machine. At the very least, he should have shocked his boss and co-workers with a new lurid paintjob every decacycle, or a new tiny sculpture depicting something horrid he would put on his desk “to brighten things up in the office”. He wasn’t probably very wrong since Scrapper laughed as well.

“Sure he was! Poor guy had no idea what he was getting into… But he tried to get me, he really tried, and in the end, he had a pretty good idea of how to handle me – and this lesson in work culture was actually really valuable for me, let me tell you. But the poor secretary had to be transferred right away, he really didn’t have it in him to put up with my slag…”

“Very few people had it in them. Sometimes entire departments weren’t strong enough to put up with your slag, graduate trainees included.”

“True! But Powerhouse had it in him. And Long Haul, to a lesser extent – he was assigned my unofficial handler, and as you can imagine, wasn’t very pleased about it. He didn’t know much about architecture, but all about messes, and didn’t appreciate how messy I was… But he put up with me because boss liked me, and Haul trusted his judgement – we didn’t even notice when we became friends, hanging out together during work hours and staying after hours with boss to help him, or going out for drinks. By the time when Scavvy came along, we were all like a happy little crew, the higher echelon of the company but, like, in a good way… Good times, Grapps, good times. Idiots always flaunt art critics, sponsors, auction houses, my colleagues and professors, but the truth is, Grapps, that no single mech has ever done as much for me as Powerhouse.”

“Because he taught you how to sit still at your desk?”

“No!… I mean, yes, but it was just the beginning. See, the mech liked me, he really did for some reason, and it surely wasn’t the usual reason why people ‘like’ me… And when he grew tired of Iacon and wanted to move permanently to his office in Kalis, he decided to leave the Iaconian branch to me.”

“He wasn’t scared to make you his regional representative?”

“No, he wasn’t and not just that! He knew which people were perfect for which jobs, and so – somehow – he allowed me to stay under his protection as a semi-independent representative handling all his ‘fancier’ commissions until I’d feel confident enough to branch off and create my own company. If it hadn’t been for Powerhouse, there would be no Constructicons!”

“Oh… Oh, wow. Amazing! He really was a great guy.”

“He was!… Unfortunately, he was fatally crushed on the site around twenty thousand vorns ago.”

“Frag, I’m so sorry, Scrapper…”

“Don’t be! I’ve always felt that this was exactly how he wanted to go – building useful scrap for people. And he got to see us succeed. No unfinished business had he left behind!”

“Okay, I’m glad that you’re at peace with that… So, you were the second hired, and Scavenger was third?” Grapple reminded, uncertain whether he remembered it right.

“Yeah, exactly! Scavvy came in as an intern – the most nervous and clumsy intern I’ve ever seen, and I was one myself! After his internship was nearing the end, Powerhouse told me that he personally didn’t have the energy to deal with newbies anymore, but if I wanted I could keep him. Which I, obviously, did.”

“Because he was, obviously, the right choice?”

“Abso-fragging-lutely!” Scrapper declared. “See, Scavvy was a new kind of mech, not like us old-timers, and a very limited edition: he doesn’t have just one, but two basic functions! I think they tried to call them dual functioners, but they’re more often called multitaskers or ‘two in one’ mechs – just to tell them apart from triple-changers, I think. And so, he’s not only a power shovel in his alt-mode, he’s also a geologist! He has sensors in his scoop – it allows him to detect minerals and then dig them out, and he recognizes them nearly as precisely as Mixmaster!”

This last remark made Grapple doubt Scrapper’s revelations.

“But… Was he really the first? Isn’t Mixmaster the same, a mixer and a chemist?”

“No,” Scrapper refuted. “Every industrial mixer starts off fitted with chemical sensors, it’s necessary for them to do their job. Mixmaster simply kept having his upgraded, until he could qualify to become a med tech and a pharmacist. But not every power shovel doubles as a geologist.”

“Ah! I see. Okay,” Grapple nodded accepting this reasoning. He had heard a thing or two about the multitaskers and how controversial they were due to not fitting neatly into just one frame class, as if their social-climbing potential was somehow offensive, but had never met one he knew about. It was really nice to hear that Scrapper had been fortunate enough to snag one for himself. “And then you hired-”

He got stuck there. He knew very well what Hook and Mixmaster had been set on doing, starting from their gruelling work at university – working somewhere else than for a construction company. And then they ended up working in Scrapper’s construction company. He had heard rumours of how had it happened, different ones, most wild, all of them unbelievable – and he knew that the truth had to be at least as unbelievable.

“No, Grapps, I didn’t actually hire any of them!” Scrapper happily cleared the misconception. “But. Following my advice, Powerhouse hired Mixmaster and then Hook, after their…” For a moment his optics became distant, as if staring into a not-so-pleasant past. “After their last internship fell through. We kept in contact, of course, because, well…”

Grapple could sense that this time his abashment was of a safe kind and it was alright to prod.

“Before you separated at the end of his studies, Hook made you swear that you’ll wait for him, right?” He asked gently, ready both to be corrected and lied to.

“Oh, yes!” Scrapper still appeared somehow ashamed. “Only…”

“Yes?”

“You know how it was, the first love and all that silly stuff…”

“So… You didn’t wait for him?” Grapple prodded, not like he was surprised.

“Um, no,” Scrapper admitted. “We both… Independently decided that it was very touching, of course, and romantic and stuff… But not something that should be actually taken seriously.”

“So… You had flings with other people.”

“Um, yeah, exactly… And then he contacted me, right before he was moving to his next internship, from Luna 1 to Iacon. Thanks frag I didn’t change my comm. frequency due to all those people contacting me about my art…”

“He decided that, being in the same city, he might as well try with you again instead of looking for someone new?”

“Grapps!” Scrapper gave him an exaggerated appalled reaction. “He had several cities he could go to, and chose Iacon precisely because of me!”

Of course, Hook hadn’t told him about it – he would have never admitted such weakness and stupid sentimentality – and Scrapper had learnt the truth only after becoming his gestaltmate.

“But you decided to not wait for each other…?”

“You see, Grapple… That stereotype about medics knowing their way around your frame?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Well, Hook told me that either it was totally untrue or he was exceptionally unlucky… Either way, after around two hundred vorns he decided that I was still the best he could get, and decided to go for it.” Scrapper was looking up, at the stars, his gaze soft and dreamy. “I didn’t object, of course. Not in the slightest!”

“You, too, thought that he was the best you could get?” Grapple prompted.

“Oh, absolutely!” Scrapper sighed. “You know? Back then he was wearing white and dark blue, the Luna colours, no visor, and facemask only for medical operations… He looked dashing.”

“And now he wears the colours of a mech who isn’t searching anymore?” Grapple commented, not meaning to be rude… Well, not obviously rude.

“Yes!” Predictably, Scrapper didn’t take offence, because Grapple’s jab at Hook was a hidden compliment for him. “Back then I didn’t believe we would get back together… That he wouldn’t find anyone better, more suiting his lifestyle and ambitions… But after he messaged me, it was like the university all over again – I was ready to do everything for him, asked or not.”

“But you didn’t do anything stupid, right?”

“Well…”

One look told Grapple that Scrapper had done at least several stupid things. As always, Scrapper’s knee-jerk reaction to this question wasn’t “Of course not!” but “Define stupid.”

“Oh, you don’t get me, mech! We were talking a bit before his arrival, about normal stuff, but under the surface we were going crazy… Sooo, we made a bit of a scene at the Iacon-Luna 1 terminal.”

“Oh? How much of a scene was this ‘a bit of a scene’?”

Scrapper was unable to meet his gaze.

“Um… A few astroseconds longer and we should be fined for public indecency. Also…”

“What, there’s more?” Grapple reacted with a joking exasperation. Scrapper nodded.

“You know there are those motels around the Iacon Airport, costly as slag? Well… I didn’t live that far, and Hook had a studio waiting for him that was even closer, and we both lived alone… But I still booked a motel room, and we were hurting for each other so badly that we just rushed there… Without room, it would have to be a locker or a closet, so it was better, and, also, I absolutely didn’t tell you that, understood?”

Grapple stared at him, a little bit taken aback.

“You came to a motel, like…?”

“Yeah, like I was a piece of shareware and he was my client,” Scrapper giggled. “He even took me for a dinner – paying from his allocation fund. It was money well spent, let me tell you… Then we finally got to my place, and didn’t leave till the next mid-cycle because he had to get ready for his first shift, and I absolutely didn’t tell you this either. Fortunately, Mixmaster was kind enough to take care of his luggage.”

“What…” Grapple’s face and mind went blank. “Mixmaster was there?”

“Of course! They did all their internships at the same place to look out for each other, just like at the uni… When one was offered a transfer, he would vouch for the other to move as well, and when… When Mixmaster started working for us, Hook followed.” Scrapper swallowed heavily before regaining his cheery demeanour. “You know, just a buddy system they had in place.”

“I see,” Grapple nodded. “So they always started and finished their internships at the same time?”

“N-no, Grapps, they weren’t finishing them.” Scrapper’s voice, again, showed sad undertones. “They actually hadn’t finished a single one which is, well, why they ended up working with me at the end, and not on their chosen fields…”

“Oh?” Grapple wondered how to approach it in the least personal way possible. “How can you have multiple internships without finishing your first one at least? I interned in several places and no one would even consider taking me in without a recommendation and evaluation from the previous place, I guess that with you it was the same – famous or not, you weren’t allowed… Internship-hopping because you found yourself a new one and wanted to transfer immediately!”

“Yes, but with them medics it’s different – when you prove yourself on your first internship, or even during your studies, you get internship offers from better places, and your current place is obligated to allow you to transfer. They’re really big on getting the best professionals they could. The best ones, like that fragger Ratchet, have internships in all the best places collected in their resume, while at the end they’re free to work wherever they want, and wherever they’d have them, of course.”

There was a sharpness in Scrapper’s voice, like the teeth of an old and vicious saw.

“Um… You have something against Ratchet?” Grapple wasn’t expecting that of all things. “I’ve never met him, but everyone says that he’s at least as selfless and heroic as he’s cross-tempered. The things he does for the Iaconian-”

“We don’t like Ratchet,” Scrapper explained harshly with no plans on elaborating. “And, you see, while those periods typically last twenty vorns before the final qualification exam and receiving the final part of medical programming, with internship-hopping, as you were kind enough to put it, they get shorter and shorter – it’s assumed that the intern has learnt all the basic stuff already, and can really focus on their specialisation. So, their last internship was set to last one vorn, but…” Scrapper in-vented deeply. “But Mixmaster pulled them both out of it, so we could work together!” He finished, forced joy in his voice. “He’s always had Hook’s best interests in his spark, after all.”

“Yes, he has!” Grapple agreed quickly, not even thinking about questioning him further.

“He actually convinced Hook to renew contact with me instead of, you know, just arriving to Iacon and hoping to bump into me – he really had no problems with me, at least this time around.”

“Mixmaster really was a good friend then…”

“Oh, you have no idea!”

“I might have, just a bit,” Grapple smiled. After all, Mixmaster had done whatever he could to protect Hook as soon as Scrapper had shown interest. He really hadn’t seen Scrapper as a relationship material, to Scrapper’s dismay and many a complaint said out loud in their shared room. “So, you two started dating again?”

“Again?” Scrapper laughed. “We rather started doing it properly. Hook still insists that whatever we were doing at the uni wasn’t actually dating because he absolutely didn’t have time for that.”

“Then… What was that whatever you were doing?”

“Well, I asked Hook if that makes us frag buddies or something cute like that, and he said: ‘No, it makes you my occasional hookup’. Because, of course he would say that, what else? And as someone who previously had tonnes of occasional hookups… Oof! Didn’t it sting, Grapps, didn’t it…”

“Yeah, I can believe that!”

There were two groups of people approaching from both directions – the one they were about to collide with and the one behind them that had set off later than Scrapper and Grapple but was quickly gaining at them. Not willing to deal with an inevitable crowd, they sat down on one of many benches on the left – a larger one because the smaller one was too small – their feet dangling happily in the air while they were looking at the stars, like two minibots on an excursion.

“Even with his very important and prestigious internship, Hook indeed had more time for me than when we were students,” Scrapper continued with a hushed voice. “Which still wasn’t awfully lot, of course, but I could see him at least every decacycle, and we didn’t need to hide this time, so it was great. And, you know… No one asked him how it is like to date, dunno, the controversial artist, the new promising architect or whatever the scrap people were thinking of me back then – not even that, probably… No. Instead, I was asked all the time how it feels – dating Iacon’s hottest young surgeon.”

There was obvious pride and joy in Scrapper’s voice, with ugly undertones of sadness. Grapple knew better than to grill him for details since, well, Hook hadn’t gotten to be Iacon’s hottest surgeon for long, this much he knew for sure.

“Yeah…” Scrapper waited for both groups to go past them – luckily, no one paid them any mind – and then he continued unprompted: “So, to wrap things up, let me emphasize it once more: we’d been dating, not to mention fragging, for quite a long time before Hook started first working with me, and then under… I mean, for me. And while all my mechs are really, really dear friends to me, I keep our working relationship professional, without any indecent conduct… Save for Hook, where, of course, a substantial amount of indecent conduct takes place all the time, but our pre-existing romantic relationship takes precedence over our work relationship, I hope that I’m making myself clear with this one – am I, Grapps?”

He wasn’t telling the whole truth, of course. With gestalt, any professional work relationships had disappeared like a foolish dream, but his point still stood – he was sleeping with one of his subordinates, yes, but it was okay, and he’d just explained why. He would rather set this straight before Grapple would ask (which was highly unlikely actually). He didn’t even want to imagine the proper course of action if other people dared inquire about his private life with his team, with his questionable relationship with one of them probably slowly becoming public knowledge.

“Oh… Of course it takes!” Grapple agreed, meaning the precedence. “I would’ve never thought about it as improper conduct on your part! You were dating, and now he works for you and you’re still dating, only an idiot would see it as you abusing your power or breaking safety regulations! Lots of couples in business, bonded or not,” he added emphatically.

Well, we’re both, Scrapper thought with mischievous satisfaction.

“So… Four Constructicons covered, one more to go,” he announced pleasantly before dropping the bomb: “Bonecrusher.”

“I don’t remember Bonecrusher,” Grapple claimed.

“Remember when the Expression’s Corner was being renovated? Bonecrusher was one of the mechs doing it, only dark red and yellow back then, and a bit smaller than he is today…”

“Well, if you expect me to remember every frame that’s ever shown on our campus, for however briefly-”

“And that was when I noticed him,” Scrapper continued. “It was kinda inevitable because he had a very, very nice build without lots of kibble and I was looking for… Inspiration.”

“By ‘looking for inspiration’ you mean that you were just hanging around the Expression’s Corner and leering at people?”

“I was just being appreciative of natural Cybertronian beauty, okay? I really needed that inspiration, get it?”

“Inspiration for what?”

“Oh, well…” Scraper continued, pleased with the suspense he created. “I approached him after work, said that I was an art student and I wanted to sculpt him, blah, blah, blah, scrap like that… Guess he thought I just wanted to pick him up for a night… Guess he had it happen to him before… Many times…” Actually, at this point Scrapper didn’t have to guess anymore; he knew. “So he was quite surprised when I just took his full-frame scan and promised to remove all the identifying features and to show him the sculpture when it’s ready… He wasn’t really happy when he saw it though, because it was Mark Of Chaos…”

Grapple gasped. Of course Bonecrusher wasn’t; if he himself learnt the hard way that the poor tortured mech was modelled on him, he would feel horribly as well. Only, Grapple thought self-consciously, it could never be modelled on him – the mech needed to be in horrible agony and hot for Mark Of Chaos to work.

“Oh-my-god… He was your model for that?”

“Yep,” Scrapper confirmed, pleased as ever. “I just didn’t put treads on his legs, because they were his most identifying feature, and flattened his chest, but all the rest is legit… Okay, the face he’s making is imaginary, I didn’t force Bonecrusher to actually make it. I can’t even imagine how this conversation would go…”

“Oww, Scrapps… It was so controversial! Even more obscene than your works with actual corpses!”

“Of course it was! You can’t sculpt corpses very well, believe me…”

“Everyone either loved it or hated it,” Grapple reminisced. “You had pretty much the entire campus divided! Only the Provost refused to take any side, very wisely of her…”

“Indeed!” Scrapper was smiling thinking of those past days of his student glory, it was perfectly visible in the crinkling of his optics. “Perish Point told me how he was gushing over it together with Softcore, only for Fire Dial to scold them for indulging in torture porn. So… Good ol’ Fire Dial was the one I dedicated my next work to, and only the four of us know why.”

“Whaaat?!” Grapple looked like he was about to get a spark attack. “This is where Torture Porn came from?!”

Scrapper shrugged, smug.

“It was kinda obvious that it was a joke, now wasn’t it? Cause it’s neither torture nor porn to be found there…”

“Is… Is that the real truth, Scrapper? There’s at least a dozen books with theories about why you named it like that!”

“See? If you get these three’s permission, you can write your own – and become rich!”

“I could use some money,” Grapple sighed. “But as you’ve probably noticed, I’m not awfully good with words.”

“Don’t let it stop you – neither am I!”

He looked at him in utter disbelief.

“What? B-but I read your publications, Scrapper, and they’re all brilliant!”

“Ah… They’re not really mine,” Scrapper waved his hand dismissively, to Grapple’s shock. “Hook and Mix insist that I should publish, to stay relevant or something… So they interrogate me to know my thoughts on this and that scrap, and then write about it and slap my name on it. That’s… Clearly important for them, and who am I to deny them?”

“Really?” Grapple was astonished.

“And it’s always full of sources, half of them I didn’t even know existed…”

“Really?”

“You know I always preferred drawing, right?”

“Well, yeah… So did I!” Grapple joined in, laughing.

“Yeaaay, one of us!” Scrapper appeared to want to high-five him but ended up just nudging his round golden flank.

“So, you sculpted Bonecrusher, and then what happened with you two?”

“He forgot about the entire ordeal… With some difficulty, I suppose, but he succeeded – he didn’t recognize me when we met the next time.”

“And where did you meet? In Powerhouse’s office?”

“Oh, no!” Scrapper snickered at the absurdity of Grapple’s guess. “In jail.”

* * * * *

“Say what?”

“Heheh, I knew that you’ll be impressed!”

Grapple tried to find a logical explanation other than the obvious before bullying Scrapper into answering, and failed.

“Scrapper, could you explain to me what were you doing in frigging jail?… It was renovation, right? Or construction?”

Scrapper laughed.

“Close! It was homicide.”

Grapple’s mouth hung open.

“And he was there for the same,” his friend added. “Tell me it wasn’t destiny, Grapps!”

“What… Wait,” Grapple squashed the sudden, persistent idea to move a little bit further from Scrapper. “Who did you kill, and who did Bonecrusher kill?… Or was that just a misunderstanding?”

“Of course it was a misunderstanding!” Scrapper answered him jovially after five torturous astroseconds. “See, there was someone else in Bonecrusher’s current company who did the killing, they just framed him because stereotypes, frag them to the Pit. Also, because he already had a record but it wasn’t really his fault! They kept framing him, you know? The fraggers. If I remember it correctly, the actual killer was a minibot… Or a mini-drillbot? Someone inconspicuous anyway, save for the fact that the murder victim had a hole drilled right through his spark, and ‘Crusher didn’t have no drills on his person, or anywhere in the vicinity… It was in the office, by the way. Tenth floor, far from any construction site. Very interesting story, and very fragging stupid – in the way that they tried to pin it all on him, and the judge was buying it because he was a lazy bastard.”

“Oh,” Grapple commented.

“Yeah! So, naturally, I asked ‘Crusher if he needed a new job and he was like ‘Sure, mech! Maybe in thirty vorns, if they’ll agree it was an accident and then release me earlier for being good’. And since Powerhouse was visiting, and he’d always been such a swell guy, I told him to get an attorney for ‘Crusher and we’ll get ourselves a fragging demolition expert, how fragging awesome would that be right after our previous guy got himself blown up? And, also, it was going to be very entertaining because his case was so fragging stupid… We were sure to be on the trial and cheer on our mech, and that lazy fragger the judge simply had to release him, and those fraggers trying to frame him had to reimburse him for the loss of thirty work cycles, not a lot but still good, and he already had a job lined up for him!”

“Ah,” Grapple reacted stiffly.

“Yeah! All was awesome, to say the least… At least up to the point when we were about to sign the contract – his first contract, Grapps, before all the renewals! I think he still keeps it somewhere, I sure as frag have my copy – when he actually remembered who I was and how had we met before… Never seen him that scared, Grapple, and we’ve done plenty of scary stuff together! I was sure that he was going to just up and run away but…” Scrapper snorted. “But our intern caught his optic, y’know how it happens sometimes, and so he decided to be brave and stay. He’s really brave, that ‘Crusher, when it comes to those things. Really brave…”

“That’s all very nice, Scrapper,” Grapple admitted. “I have no doubts that Bonecrusher is very brave, at least as brave as he is…” Hot. “Good with demolition, but please… Please, Scrapper – could you just tell me what in the name of Primus you were accused of?”

“Didn’t I already tell you that it was homicide?”

“Yes, but-”

“Same as ‘Crusher’s!”

Grapple silently asked Primus to not give him strength but patience.

“It was also someone killed with a drill, in an office building…?”

“Well, no. It was totally different from his homicide.”

“Then could you tell me what it was exactly about?”

“Morbid curiosity getting the better of you?” Scrapper winked at him as if they were discussing his very pleasant but also very naughty hobby (which they were).

“Um, well, maybe; if you could just tell me…”

“Why, sure!” He happily obliged. “I had this series of PSAs in sculpted form, you know which ones…” He made a pause to let this fact sink in.

“Sure I do. Everyone knows them. And what was about them?”

“Well, if you have to ask, quite a lot actually – given that they were actual corpses themselves.” He made a pause for a dramatic effect.

“Yes, and your homicide charges…?”

“Well, it all started from this guy named Two-Bitter… Or maybe it was just his nickname because, you know, he had only two bits for his brain module. Guess that this was what had finally gotten him killed.”

“And how did he die?”

“He operated the pipe bending machine, something was wrong on the conveyor belt, he tried to clean it without turning the machine off before, got pulled inside and emerged at the other end, wrung out pretty good, that twisted terrified expression forever staying on what was left from his face… So, I obtained permission from the city and used him as a cautionary sculpture to show all the apprentices – ‘Always remember to stop the machine running first, kids’ – and that was what the plaque said… Or at least, it seemed this way.”

Pleased with his little introduction, Scrapper turned to Grapple and made a pregnant pause.

“Why did it only seem this way?”

“Ah, see… The sculpture was standing where it was standing for vorns, if not decivorns, happily taken care of and not bothering anyone – save for those it was supposed to bother, in the right way – until this very obnoxious, nitpicky criminal investigator (I think that his name was Prowler or another Stalker, very unfunny guy, let me tell you) decided to come over and have a look. Not to investigate, mind you, but those fraggers can never really separate from their work, as if spending a relaxing evening looking at sculpted corpses just to appreciate art was too much to ask of them. So…”

“So…?”

“So he came, and looked around, and got to the poor idiot Two-Bitter, looked at him, moved on, started thinking, returned, looked closer this time, then fragged off on his merry way to do some snooping… And bam! He came to conclusions.”

“What were his conclusions?”

“That Two-Bitter’s injuries actually weren’t consistent with being pulled through an industrial pipe bender. He – Prowler, not Two-Bitter, of course, cause Two-Bitter was still dead – found some authentic corpses pulled through the bender and made comparisons… They had perfect corpses for a fragging policemech to poke at, but when I needed some for the greater good they, of course, didn’t even make a peep about having them! Fragging hypocrites… Don’t you feel they were hypocrites, Grapps? Giving their corpses to him, but not to me…”

“Yes, yes, of course, they were, yes, absolutely! So, this policemech…?”

“Well, this fragger then investigated Two-Bitter himself… And decided that no one of this designation was ever employed in any pipe manufacturing facility. Well, duh! I told you it was just a nickname, right? Nobody knew that idiot’s name, he wasn’t that well-liked and stuff. So, the cop demanded to see my papers. There was the permission from the city, but very generic, and nobody remembered any details, including me… He was one of at least fifteen sculptures I had erected back then… The things really weren’t going anywhere, but the cop clearly wanted them to go somewhere – let me tell you, the fragger really wanted to put someone in jail! And because he very obviously didn’t like my face, he accused me of killing the guy and putting him in my sculpture.”

Grapple gasped. With Scrapper’s chosen working materials, it really seemed kinda inevitable for such an accusation to appear, but still, hearing about his friend being formally accused of murder… It was a bit too much to bear.

“But you didn’t do it!”

“Why, of course, Grapple, of course I didn’t do it – but the cop roped the judge and the prosecutor in – the judge was a lazy bastard, I told you already, and the prosecutor was this fragging cop’s old buddy and, apparently, ‘trusted his judgement’, what a pile of scrap! Luckily, Powerhouse didn’t trust the fragger one bit, not to mention two bits, and his attorney slapped them both all the way to Kaon and back due to the lack of evidence. The lazy fragger of my judge seemed quite entertained, actually, and so was the audience – my art got some free publicity that day, and it’s always a good thing – and so the case ended up dismissed, and I walked a free mech.” Scrapper looked at Grapple, triumphant.

“Oh… Wow.”

“Did you like my little homicide story, Grapple?”

“Y-yeah,” he drawled. “It surely was… A tale. And what a tale it was!”

Then, Scrapper took him by surprise:

“But, hey, why is it just about me? How about things with you, Grapps? Is there anyone…?”

He wasn’t prepared to give an answer. Then again, it wasn’t fair for Scrapper to do all the talking and entertain Grapple with his… Stories… Without any reciprocation.

“Well… Actually… Just, don’t laugh that I’m mimicking you or something, okay?”

“And why would I…?”

“He’s really nice, don’t get me wrong; a very nice mech, but… His name is Hoist and he’s a medical doctor. He’s also green!”

Scrapper snorted.

“Okay… Now I know what you were talking about mimicking me. He’s not a crane by any means?

“I am a crane here, there’s no need for two of us… And he’s not a payloader either! He’s a tower instead.”

“Huh?”

“A tower! He tows people.”

“Oh, I see!” Scrapper laughed, amused by his own dim-wittedness.

“He can help them get to safety after accidents made them stuck in their alt-modes, unlike those ambulance medics – unless their alt-modes have no wheels, that is.”

“Yeah, that would make towing them harder.”

“Near impossible!”

“Are you two dating or…?”

Grapple made a troubled pause before simply shrugging.

“No, nothing like that yet. Right now, I’m trying to decide if he’s better to have as a friend, or as a flame. It’s not like I’m in a hurry or something…”

“Sure, take your time! You really should decide wisely…”

“Yes, exactly! Especially after, um… After Wideload.”

The two friends slumped a little, crushed by memories of Grapple’s narcissistic ex.

“Um, yeah. I didn’t want to mention him, but it’s sooo true…”

“I saw him once, twenty vorns ago or something like that.”

Scrapper yelped, actually scared.

“No, really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Did he try to overpower you and drag you into his cave?”

Grapple chortled.

“No, he simply pretended he didn’t know me.”

“And so should you, every time. Freakin’ good riddance!”

“Yeah, good riddance… I’m really not sure if I’d ever want to get that close with someone again.”

Scrapper patted his shoulder in a comforting gesture.

“Oh, Grapps, I understand it so well! After someone like that, it’s really better to stay single… But at some point you might reconsider, when you decide that you’re ready…”

“Yeah, thanks for understanding! Maybe someday…” He inclined his head, thoughtful, before deciding that it was enough about him; really, there was nothing more to discuss. “And you and Hook… And, also, you and your team… Everything’s alright with you? You get those gigs and fame and scrap but, you know, as actual people, not just professionals – is everything good?”

It was clear that Scrapper gave him a really big smile under his facemask.

“Oh, yes! Last half a vorn was rough, obviously… We did nothing but work and sleep to finish things up on schedule… But apart from that things couldn’t be better! We all, together and each of us, have things going for us, and things to look forward to! I, obviously, have my art-”

“Are you planning to open an exhibition soon?”

“Oh, I wish! But first, I’m gonna need something I could put in there… Guess I’ll have to think about it now.”

“It takes time to gather enough corpses for you to work with?”

“You bet! Not nearly enough homicides and fatal accidents for my needs… Maybe I’ll just sculpt them for a change.”

“Yes, that would be wonderful!”

“The public will be quick to turn on me and name me the greatest degenerate since that one guy with the four-way guillotine…”

“And all tickets will be sold out a vorn ahead, obviously.”

“Obviously!” Scrapper embraced Grapple’s cowl affectionately. “People love their degenerates, after all… Right?”

“Right!” Grapple embraced Scrapper’s waist, this talk about corpses having a curiously reverse effect on him.

He felt relaxed, happy and wanting for nothing, as if Scrapper’s enthusiasm for his art had actively made the universe a better place to live. Just like the times when they would sneak on their student hall’s roof and gaze into the night sky while discussing enthusiastically all the vast potential their future seemed to hold (“We should become astronomers!” “Because they get to sleep in?” “Because they do this , Scrapper – but they get paid!” “I’m pretty sure they have automated telescopes for that… We should become voyagers instead.” “Like, going through space?” “You can bet it! We would get to see all places, Grapps, and all the planets – and get paid!” “Dunno… Shouldn’t we start by seeing all the cities? We’ve only been to Iacon and Polyhex so far…” “I know! Public safety inspectors. We’ll get to see all the cities, and get paid for it! Everybody hates public safety inspectors – we’ll have so much fun!”). It had been a long time since Grapple had felt this alive, even partially. It had been a long time.

“Hey, weren’t we going somewhere?” Scrapper’s sudden movement up startled him.

“Yes, the Mortar Smash!” Grapple jumped upright, thanking his lucky stars that Scrapper still remembered about those things, because he had apparently failed to keep tabs on their only remaining event today.

“And your complaint,” Scrapper added in a horribly pleased sing-songy way. Grapple groaned. “Yes, that’s right! Get mad – we’ve got some shuttles to scream at!”

“I don’t want to get mad,” Grapple caught up with Scrapper’s invigorated pace. “I’d rather… Hear about your teammates now.”

“You want me to spill my entrails?” Scrapper asked pleasantly.

“N-not necessarily…”

Grapple didn’t even know right away what was happening to him. The moment had passed – the two of them had used to be friends like nobody else, but now it was far from nobody else being present in the equation. Scrapper was still generous and giving to the world, and had lots of affection to spare to his old pal – to any old pal he would encounter, Grapple suspected – but he was so obviously taken to never be given back. Not just by Hook – by his entire team. And this was okay, Grapple had to accept it. They would never share this special bond again, with so many other bonds bounding Scrapper – all that was left for his old pal was to listen about his teammates and about the unique understanding between him and them to vicariously feel what they used to share.

“You said that all of them have things going for them, and that they’re happy…”

“Oh, yes!” His interest in the Constructicons as people clearly pleased Scrapper. “Well…” The first point seemed to be the hardest to make but Scrapper breezed through it with almost no issue. “Hook has never been too fond of patients, you know. He doesn’t like people as a general rule. But he actually really likes being a surgical engineer – so, he has his own workshop where he, well, engineers surgical things. Lots of pretty little things for nasty hidden problems. He’s quite known in the field…”

“Oh wow, really?”

“Yes – he even hired two other, well, engineers for help, but had them locked out while we were away building Crystal City. He can’t stand the mere thought of someone being in his workshop without his supervision. His thingies are quite popular, you know – there’s even a special brand of government subsidies to help hospitals obtain them. Not because Hook gives them predatory pricing because frag saving lives, but these shiny toys are just so costly and difficult to make. The best quality, you know… That being said, he obviously has places where he doesn’t sell, naturally not prohibiting others from reselling to them with extra charge… ‘He’s so petty but too good to call him out about it’, that’s what people in the know always say about it.”

“Frag, Scrapps, it suits him so much better than medicine!” Grapple thought back to the Hook he used to know from the university… Well, he’d seen him all five times before the campus killings, but Scrapper’s incessant ramblings and confessions had left him with an impression of an intimate knowledge of the elusive prospective surgeon. “Let me guess: he doesn’t sell to Ratchet?”

“You’re smart, Grapple, I’ve always known that,” Scrapper praised him with slightly too much affection. He paused briefly, noticing a large portal of dark glass in the distance. It had to be the end of their Starlight Passage. “Moving on: Mixmaster. Believe it or not, but his interests actually go far beyond construction compounds and drugs.”

“I believe you, Scrapps, I believe you…”

“Yeah! He actually did a bit of scientific research in Protihex and at the University of Iacon-”

“He… Works at university?… For the enemy?” Grapple jokingly pointed out that it wasn’t their parent Iaconian University but the rival institution.

“Worked, Grapps, worked. Hook had some business with the Uni of Iacon as well – I guess that they don’t have too many fond memories about the old house of pain… Mixie liked doing some science on the side, but the trouble was that all his patents and discoveries were automatically transferred to the uni, and he didn’t like that very much. It was a lot of money, much more than whatever they were paying him, and he didn’t like that. So, he stepped off and only published sometimes, all under his name this time, and simply started his own thing… But he likes academia, I guess, because he would still appear here and there as a visiting professor and give lectures and do demonstrations – he couldn’t teach for slag but his students loved him! But it all came to an end when we had to go on an exile to build that blasted city.”

“I… Can imagine that he makes for a funny lecturer! But what do you mean by him starting his own thing?”

“Simple: by now, he has two laboratories – one adjacent to our… Our headquarters you can say, where he does all the work stuff, and one at the city outskirts for, as he puts it, ‘all fun stuff’. His assistants can be there when he’s gone, you know – he doesn’t care as much as Hook cause, with or without him, the thing gets blown up on a regular basis anyway.

“And what is this ‘fun stuff’ he does there?”

“Various, various things, but a lot of them pharmaceuticals… No way to escape it, I guess, he’s just too good with it.”

“He is?”

“Yeah! I guess he owes this great sensitivity mostly to…” Scrapper reset his vocalizer. “S-self-study… He has exclusive contracts with several distributors, and they pay him a ton to be exclusive, and then he comes up with something brand new and sells it for cheap, just for slag and giggles. Things like that! He has a million ideas per klik and when Long Haul comes over to haul things for him, he’s really tired with him sometimes. Mind you, it’s even worse than with me – unlike me, Mixmaster doesn’t learn from his mistakes. He simply… Doesn’t see them this way. He wouldn’t explode so much if he did, now would he?”

“Does making medicine regularly blow him up?”

“No! Must be those other, ‘fun’ things… Or at least I hope so, I’m using his meds even now – well, not exactly now, but…” Scrapper thought about it and remarked fondly: “I guess that Mixmaster simply likes making things explode… You’d think that would make him and Bonecrusher the best ‘splosion buddies, but nope! ‘Crusher is actually very pedantic with his destruction, nearly as much as Hook with his engineering, and never accepts anything from Mixie – he has to get it himself!”

Grapple pondered it.

“But Bonecrusher likes explosions as well?”

“Sure! He loves a good explosion – so much so that he, actually, hires himself to do demolition elsewhere when we have nothing for him to do; it typically happens when all that’s left to do is paperwork… He also makes really sick copper-stuffed shells, they’re a huge hit on our every gathering, let me tell you! And his steamed cream of energon, Primus on a cracker!”

“Your gatherings,” Grapple repeated.

“Yes, Grapps, that’s where we gather to socialize – on gatherings.”

“You work together all day and then gather to socialize, while normal people would be sick of seeing their co-workers all damn time… It’s really great that you’re different.”

“Oh, yes, Grapps, we can’t live without each other!” Scrapper chuckled. Literally.

“I can believe it!” Grapple chuckled as well. “I had no idea that Bonecrusher is Praxian; I thought that not much industrial work was done there…” Not to mention the fact that he appeared to have an extensive record which was about the most un-Praxian thing imaginable.

“No! He’s from Protihex, just like you-”

“Ow!”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Best things come from Protihex.”

“That’s what I always say!”

“Really, I love my city-state,” Grapple declared. “But, somehow, prefer loving it from a distance.”

“Same for Bonecrusher – he was moving between Kaon, Praxus and Kalis before he settled down with us in Iacon, and brought Gravedigger with him.”

“Who?”

“His younger brother. He always tries to look after him, you see…”

“Did he work with you as well?”

“Um, briefly, but it didn’t work out.

“Ow…”

“But they’re still in contact, and see each other regularly, don’t you worry.”

‘It’s good to know! So, Bonecrusher learnt how to make those Praxian dishes when he was living in Praxus?”

“No, he learnt it in Prothexian prison.”

Grapple burrowed his optical ridges. Why all Scrapper’s dramatic reveals of lately had to include jail, and why were they all so freaky?

“Say what.”

“Well… You know how there are only two kinds of criminals in Praxus: small scale criminals who get arrested all the time and slapped with absurdly harsh sentences, and big bosses who never get bothered? Well, when ‘Crusher landed himself in a cosy cell, it turned out that his cellmate was actually one of the biggest ones who was just unlucky enough to get arrested outside his dominion. A very stupid mistake that cost him a vorn or two.”

“And who was that?”

“Sob Rain, maybe you’ve heard about him.”

“Oof! He was a nasty matrix-fragger.”

“Sure he was! Everyone was keeping their distance, of course, and ‘Crusher didn’t know why; he never followed celebrities. But he had a rule to always be nice to other inmates, to make his life easier and stuff. So, he was about the only person to act friendly towards that monstrous piece of slag, and our gentle mech really appreciated it – so much that he got ‘Crusher under his protection and used his contacts to get him out earlier, and even threatened several of his employers to treat him right. It was a very peaceful time in Bonecrusher’s life, but also very stressful for some reason.”

“I guess!” Grapple shook his head, bewildered. “ But you said that he somehow learnt in prison how to cook?”

“Ow, yes! You know how Praxians are with their food, and Praxian mafia in particular… But Sob Rain was more than that – he owned a restaurant chain for money laundering and was an amateur chief himself. The Prothexian prison actually provided him with a high-end kitchen to relax there and let off steam – the alternative would be much worse, I guess… And Bonecrusher was often, well, encouraged to hang out there with him, and possibly help… No one ever ate this food later, I heard that Sob Rain had a physically poisonous personality or some slag, but ‘Crusher got schooled pretty thoroughly. Maybe even too thoroughly; I swear that Scavenger has desserts of all sorts more often than his regular fuel which, you know, isn’t healthy at all – especially when they don’t share!”

Grapple smiled hearing this perfectly predictable remark.

“What a perfect match: Bonecrusher cooks and Scavenger eats,” he noticed.

“And they’re not sharing!” Scrapper repeated with a joking anger. “Course they’re perfect for each other. They’re both surprisingly dumb in some ways, but they somehow make it work beautifully.”

“Dumb?” Grapple was surprised with the wording. “What do you mean by that?”

“They don’t know a single thing about being in a serious relationship, and yet they’re in one, and it somehow works for them… Maybe they’re really a perfect match,” Scrapper shrugged. “They regularly take off on their ‘expeditions’… If they spend so much time alone and haven’t killed each other yet, they must be really happy together.”

“Expeditions?”

“You see, Scavvy really likes, well… Scavenging. He loves finding stuff. They like to go to ruins and other forgotten places and search for artefacts of past civilisations or some scrap… It’s more often just scrap than anything valuable, but sometimes they find a real ‘treasure’ and sell it for a handsome price. Really, I think that if this archaeology thing got popular when Scavvy was still in his formative vorns, he wouldn’t be in Crystal City with me, at all!”

“Sounds about right, with his sensors and love for scavenging…”

“Sure! But I don’t think he ever regrets it – after all, he wouldn’t get Bonecrusher, and Bonecrusher is probably his greatest find so far, and not because of his size…”

“Maybe even of all the time!” Grapple laughed.

“Yep! They surely can’t get enough of each other… When they’re not out and about scavenging for ancient scrap, they run away to their little vacation house near Sonic Canyons.”

“Uh? Why would they get a vacation house near Sonic Canyons?”

“Ah, well… ‘Crusher claims that he can’t recharge properly when it’s quiet… Probably reminds him of prison or something… So it’s either near a work site or near Sonic Canyons!”

“And Scavenger endures this racket?”

“There’s probably no such a thing Scavenger wouldn’t do for ‘Crusher. And you didn’t see this house! They just gathered some scrap and put it together, no plans, no measurements… Of course, we finally had it refitted and enforced because otherwise, Hook would never set foot inside… But it still looks like a pile of scrap assembled just for fun – it’s a work of art! Sadly, it’s strictly a Constructicon-only area, ‘cause I would love to show it to you. Maybe one day, from the distance…”

“Yeah,” Grapple smiled, not hoping for anything but grateful anyway. “That would be lovely…”

It would be really lovely to get to hang out with Scrapper again after the Symposium.

They got into an elevator to go five levels down.

“What about Long Haul?” Grapple reminded his friend. “You forgot to tell me about him.”

Scrapper hesitated. It was hardly anything safe for work and not confidential to tell about Long Haul.

“Well… You know how all the good logisticians are…”

“Um, not really?”

“Long Haul knows people, lots and lots of people. He needs to know where to get the scrap we need, and how, and for reasonable prices. He does his work well, really, but there’s not such a thing as unpaid overtime for him – as soon as he’s done, he disappears. He socializes whenever he can, and it’s quite handy sometimes, because he also learns stuff.”

“Well, that’s good for him!”

“He often gets us gigs, or at least starts negotiations… I know that he also brokers information to other people, and gets probably paid really well for his trouble because it had been a while since he asked me for a rise…”

He slowly congratulated himself. From what he said, nothing sounded unprofessional or scandalous.

Walking alongside him through a spacious shuttle-sized corridor, Grapple was smiling at Scrapper’s words.

“Damn, it sounds so much better than him just being a courier… Or a transport… He really deserves all the best for his hard work with you.”

“He does! He really gets along with everybody when he wants to, you better believe it, Grapps,” Scrapper emphasized.

“He really does?”

“He really does!” Scrapper nodded happily. “And then he gets around.”