Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s a rare and covetous thing, to find even a single moment of peace in the midst of an intergalactic war.

The gap from one of those precious moments to the next seems to grow wider and wider every time, until their frequency is so negligible, it becomes hard to recognise them for what they are anymore.

For everything Earth could have offered Optimus Prime, he hadn’t been expecting it to relinquish the gift of peace so willingly. But he’s glad – more than glad – to accept them when they come, even if he’s only stealing glimpses of tranquillity on the sand-swept road leading out of Jasper.

Low-beam headlights lazily trace over the faded tarmac ahead of Optimus’s tyres as he trundles along Highway 49, one of only two roads that surround the small, sleepy city of Jasper. It’s a very routine patrol, one he obligingly excused Bumblebee from taking after his poor scout all but begged Optimus to give it to someone else, beeping out promises that he’ll take double shift tomorrow night, if need be.

All this on the back of Miko announcing another of her ‘slumber parties’ at the base, much to Ratchet’s noisy chagrin and Optimus’s private amusement. And, of course, when Bumblebee found out that Rafael would be staying the night too… Well…

‘You’re too indulging,’ their old medic had admonished from his workstation, the broad expanse of his back turned to the Prime, ‘He ought to learn he can’t always have his way.’

But it was a harmless indulgence, and Prime was more than happy to take over the patrol in this instance.

Besides, he had an arguably selfish reason for doing so.

If he’d admitted as much out loud, Ratchet would have scoffed and sent a pulse of chiding dismissal crashing into Optimus’s EM field. ‘You don’t have a selfish component in your body,’ he might say.

But this… Optimus muses, gazing skyward as he trundles down the highway in vehicle mode, letting the crisp, night air slide through his grill and cool his powerful engine… This is the appeal of a solo patrol.

Every now and then, there are times when the Decepticon activity goes quiet, Fowler has nothing to report, and Optimus can almost pretend that he’s just another Cybertronian enjoying a long, quiet drive through the Mojave wilderness. And while he remains ever vigilant, keeping every sensor poised outwardly in a constant surveillance of his surroundings, the old bot still permits at least one sense to wander.

Somehow, it’s always his sight.

Oftentimes he catches himself doing it. Other times, on nights that are quiet and still and clear like this one, there’s a wire-deep longing that overrides his logic gates, and the Prime won’t notice that he isn’t keeping his processor and his optics on the dusty road ahead of him. He’s too busy stealing long, pensive looks at the stars above him, scattered like a-hundred-billion souls sprawling across a curtain of crushed velvet.

It’s out there… somewhere… riding a lonely orbit on the furthest reaches of the galaxy’s Centaurus arm.

Cybertron.

Home.

Their first home, he amends gently, depressing his accelerator to speed up when he realises he’s starting to crawl. Earth is as much their home now as Cybertron ever was.

Sagging on his suspension with a low hiss, Optimus drags his hidden optics back to the road ahead, and all at once, he nearly lurches to a halt, his exhaust pipes sputtering out a hollow sound to betray his surprise.

There, parked several feet from the road a few hundred yards ahead of him, is a vehicle.

Prime’s senses sharpen to a startling focus.

Pumping his brakes, he slows down again, and the roar of his engine fades to a fluctuating hum.

A Decepticon…?

He doesn’t feel anything trying to breach his EM field, nor does he pick up on any resistance when his scanners hone in on the vehicle – ‘Ford. F250. A Pickup truck.’ Year….? Optimus’s focus narrows to a pinprick… ‘Eighty-seven.’

It’s red - a faded, dusky red like some of the sun-baked sandstone at Red Rock Canyon. As Prime’s massive form rumbles on through the night, looming closer and closer to the mysterious truck, his lights reflect off something situated above its rear bumper, the presence of which quells his flaring codes and eases his rigid frame.

A number plate.

Thick, black numbers and letters stand out against the white rectangle, though it isn’t the sequence that alleviates Optimus’s suspicion, it’s their mere presence.

No Decepticon he knows would ever suffer the ‘indignity’ of having a human number plate stapled to their bumpers.

Primus, even the Autobots have foregone the accessory after Fowler gave up trying to keep Bumblebee from losing his, Ratchet from ‘misplacing’ his, and Bulkhead from bending his irreparably whenever he transformed. Optimus had given it a go, for a time… mainly because he was growing worried that their overworked liaison would quite simply combust if he had to intercept one more phone call from ‘concerned civilians’ who were reporting a semi-truck driving through Jasper without its registration.

The Prime’s number plate came to its own crumpled end when he sat down on his berth one evening without removing it first.

One genuine, slightly sheepish apology to a very fed-up liaison later, and Optimus was informed that he and his team no longer needed to wear the plates.

So, the presence of one on this truck is a good sign. It’s less likely to transform and cause an incident.

That does, however, open up an entirely new avenue for concern to creep in.

A crash, perhaps?

Several dark skid marks indicate that it must have veered off the road after a hard, panicked brake.

He can’t pick up any biological signatures either. Even when he casts a wider net, all his sensors catch are the heat signatures of a few tiny, Earthen mammals scurrying about over the sand before they dart into various rock formations when he rolls by. But just because he isn’t picking up the presence of a living human, it doesn’t negate the possibility of a human being inside…

Frame suddenly taut, Optimus trundles to a cautious halt on the road alongside the truck, his engine idling like some great, murmuring beast in the quiet of the desert.

A throaty hum seems to escape his smokestacks as he peers down at the smaller truck, contemplative… considering… Then finally, relieved. There doesn’t appear to be anyone inside, judging by what his headlights illuminate through the cab windows.

What is it doing out here?

It definitely wasn’t here yesterday when he made the drive into Jasper. It isn’t a vehicle he recognises either, and he’s been doubly vigilant of late regarding all the civilian cars, bikes, trucks, vans, and even agricultural vehicles in and around the town.

Privately, he’s been compiling a catalogue of them all, for his own reference.

If there’s a threat to his human charges lurking about in their hometown, Optimus needs to know about it. A Decepticon disguised as a civilian vehicle would be an effective method of infiltration.

Casting one more, cursory ping out into the night to check that he’s definitely alone, he at last begins to unfurl himself into his bipedal mode. Metal plating slides away from his grill, pulling back and rolling along the body of the semi as he rises onto newly revealed pedes. The mechanical whines, whirrs and buzzes are terribly loud and alien amongst the desert’s natural ambiance, but soon enough, the air falls still once again, and a monolithic Cybertronian stands in the place where a Peterbilt used to be.

Soft, cerulean light spills over the abandoned truck as Optimus settles his optics upon it, easing his enormous frame down into a crouch and draping one arm across his knee with a ‘clunk.’

At first glance, he hadn’t noticed anything especially odd about the truck save for its unexpected presence. Leaning sideways, he casts an optic over the front bumper and finds nothing out of place, no damage to indicate a crash, no broken headlights or crushed bonnet.

It’s the same story with the truck’s bed. Only when Optimus hauls himself upright and treads carefully around it to inspect the other side does he notices the glaring problem.

The whole vehicle is canting onto its offside front tyre, a tyre that sports a rather sizeable puncture, considering how flat it is. And from the looks of it, this one was only ever meant to be used as a temporary spare. A quick glance into the truck’s bed reveals what he assumes must be the original tyre, flat as well, with the silver head of a nail jutting from the centre tread block.

Optimus clicks his glossa softly for the owner’s run of bad luck.

Right away, he sends a ping to his team, advising them to be wary of stray nails along this stretch…

He receives several pings in return. Immediately comes Bumblebee’s frustration, buzzed over the airwaves like a sulking sparkling who’s been told his toy was broken. Given the Scout’s inclination to race at top speed all over these roads, Optimus doesn’t doubt he’s just vexed at the shuddersome notion of having to slow down.

Arcee and Bulkhead respond in kind as their leader absently moves his attention to something strange obscuring part of driver’s window, letting their concern wash over his field.

‘Popped a tyre, Boss?’ Bulkhead’s message hits his comm, informal and probing, but with the warmth of care behind it.

Optimus is quick to send a pulse of reassurance back through their shared channel. He’s fine. If one little nail was all it took to take a Prime out of commission, they’d all be in serious, serious trouble.

The channels go quiet after Arcee and Ratchet send their short, concise responses, and once again, Optimus is alone on the road, peering down at a small sheet of paper that’s been taped to the inside of the truck’s front window.

Gradually, he furrows his optical ridges until they almost click together into one, solid line, the apertures inside each optic whirring and shrinking as he reads the words scribbled on the paper.

He recalls the first time he encountered the languages of Earth as they were written. The looping letters, graceful and elegant, chasing one another across the front of the letter Agent Fowler gave him as part of an unofficial welcome to the United States.

Optimus had held the paper so delicately between two of his digits, blinking down at the dark ink soaked into repurposed cellulose fibre. It was beautiful.

When he remarked as such, Fowler made a noncommittal comment that you could tell a lot about humans from their handwriting.

Optimus would sometimes find himself glancing over the children’s homework when they left their books out unattended on the table in their recreational area.

Jack’s neat and sensible cursive. Miko’s chaotic, glittery script that rose and fell and ventured outside the lines because she was usually paying more attention to her music than the words she wrote in her textbook. And Rafael, of course, with his quick, almost frantic stokes of the pen as he tried to scribble his thoughts down as fast as his brain could make them, only to end up losing his confidence halfway through a sentence, doubled back, drew a single line through the words, and started again on a fresh page.

This handwriting though… written in blue, splotchy ink and stuck with a piece of scotch tape to the truck’s window, makes Fowler’s words ring true in Optimus’s processor.

He can tell a lot about the human who wrote it.

‘Please don’t steal/break into my truck,’ it reads. The word ‘please’ has been underlined several times. ‘Not worth much, it’s all I’ve got. Tyre is flat, spare tyre too, so can’t get far anyway. Walking to town to find help bcos phone died and I don’t have a charger. Be back soon. Thanks.’

The ink has run in several places and rendered some of the letters illegible, as if water has been dropped on them from above.

Optimus isn’t naïve. He’s seen the children cry, more times than he can bear.

Then underneath all that, in much smaller writing stuffed underneath the first message like an afterthought they forgot to leave enough space for…

‘P.s, if the truck is still here in 3 days, assume I’m dead.’

With a sudden groan of his metal frame, Optimus braces a servo on his knee and hurriedly pushes himself to his pedes once again, helm swivelling sideways to stare down the length of the road.

The truck’s nose is pointed in the direction of Jasper, but the town itself is still about a fifteen-mile drive…

Surely they wouldn’t make the journey on foot…

But if the note is any indication, then…

His processor flashes again to the children; Miko in particular, and the alarming disregard she has for her own safety. The boys are guilty of that as well, though to a lesser degree.

Suddenly, there’s a very high likelihood that there might be a human wondering through the vast Mojave, alone. Worse still, Bumblebee had reported just last week that there’s been an increase in Decepticon patrols in the area around Jasper. No doubt Megatron has been ramping up his efforts to locate the Autobot base. Their growing presence in the vicinity of town makes these roads particularly treacherous…

Optimus ex-vents roughly, more troubled than frustrated.

Blue optics narrow at the road ahead, and once again, the peace of the desert night is filled by the sounds of living metal collapsing back in on itself.

A powerful engine roars to life. Somewhere nearby, a startled jackrabbit darts beneath the safety of a sagebrush, hiding herself amongst its silvery leaves.

Unblinking, her wild eyes stare after the great, thrumming beast as it moves on down the road.

—————-

You’ve had a lot of ideas in your life.

Some good. Some bad. Some that have paid off, but most that have gone nowhere at all.

Perhaps you were growing tired of going nowhere…

What else would have possessed you to up and move all the way to the middle of Nevada state on the back of a job offer that came from a man your uncle purported to know?

‘Oh yeah, Terry? Did a job with him a few years back for some cattle baron out in the sticks. ‘Course, Terry always wanted his own dairy… Want me to tell him you’re lookin’ for work?’

Turns out, Terry did end up getting that dairy he always wanted. And as it happened, he was looking for a farm hand.

Does it count as nepotism if you’re fairly sure your uncle had only met your future employer once?

Beyond a certain point, you simply couldn’t care less.

A job is a job, even if it is out here in the desert near a town you’d never heard of a month ago.

Dust-caked trainers trudge to a weary halt in front of a large, green road sign.

The moon, thankfully, hangs fat and luminous in the cloudless sky. So at least you don’t need a torch to see, not now that your eyes have had time to adjust the darkness cloaked over the desert.

With your run of bad luck, you half assumed the heavens would have opened by now and given the Mojave a nice, little dose of rain.

“Well,” you mutter aloud to yourself, peering up at the green sign with a grimace, “Could be worse…”

‘Jasper – 10 miles,’ reads like a slap to the face.

Still… It’s better than the fifteen miles.

You must have walked at least five already, dragging your legs behind you like extra baggage that doesn’t want to cooperate.

It has to be beyond midnight now. Well beyond, you suppose.

You’ve been walking for the better part of two hours, slow and sluggish and exhausted. The journey getting to Nevada had been tiring enough, then as soon as you crossed state lines, your tyre caught a puncture going over a particularly nasty pothole that had snuck up on you.

After an hour spent in the blazing sun jacking up the truck and changing to the spare, you set off again for another several hours of travel. Then, twenty miles out of Jasper, just as you dared to celebrate being home-free, the unthinkable had happened.

Who hits a pothole and drives over a nail in the same, damn day? Apparently, the same person who forgot to buy a charger adaptor for the truck.

No charger? No phone.

No phone…? No calling for help…

Your chest expands and deflates with a bone-tired sigh, turning your gaze back onto the long, dark road ahead of you. Tears sting at the inside of your eyelids, and for a moment, you consider letting them fall, if only to ease some of the pressure building up behind your temples. But crying hysterically about the unfairness of the world hadn’t un-punctured your spare tyre, so why would it help the situation now.

“Come on,” you coax yourself, hauling one leg out in front of the other. Rinse. Repeat. “Not far now.”

Just a few more hours…

The going is slow, tough, draining. Even the dark shapes of rocks start to look enticing as you pass them, letting your eyes slide over to them as you wonder just how safe it would be to fall asleep in the desert by the side of a road.

Ever since you broke down a few hours ago, you haven’t seen one, single vehicle out here.

‘Which,’ you hum, pursing your lips and tipping your head back to peer up at the bleary sky far above you, ‘Isn’t so bad…’

The stars are numerous, and startlingly clear out in the wilderness. The moon as well seems brighter here, unobscured by clouds. She makes for a quiet companion on your journey towards Jasper, her starry brethren endlessly stretching out to each corner of the horizon.

Suddenly, you feel very small. A hopeless traveller trying to find port in a sea of sand and rock.

Swallowing roughly, you hike your tattered rucksack high onto your shoulder and tear your gaze from the stars.

It’s quiet out here, save for the rustle of sage bushes disturbed by the warm breeze, and the skittering of rocks as night-time animals go about their hunts.

Perhaps that natural silence is why the sudden introduction of an entirely new sound unnerves you so much.

You jerk to a halt, ears straining to hear something approaching from the distance. Underneath the thin, worn soles of your shoes, you start to feel it; the road thrumming with gentle vibrations, growing stronger every second.

Lighting quick, you whirl around to face the way you’d come, hands flying up to grip anxiously at the straps of your rucksack.

You’d have thought you’d be excited to see those headlights rise up above the horizon line. At last! A stroke of luck! A potential ride! Potential help.

Instead, it’s as though the sudden appearance of two, dazzling lights blooming into view as they crest over the hill finally jar some sense back into your dizzy head.

The haze of fatigue lifts slightly, pushed away by little bursts of adrenaline as your brain fights to wake you up to an unconscious threat.

You’re alone out here. Defenceless, phoneless. You don’t know the area. Nobody knows you’ve broken down… You try so hard to think the best of people, but now that you’ve had one doubt, a hundred others start to scurry around in your brain, demanding attention.

You can see the vehicle, or their lights at least, but you doubt they can see you yet, this far down the road. You wonder what it is. Car? Truck?

… Alien spacecraft? Despite yourself, you let out a snort at that. Isn’t that infamous military base supposed to be in Nevada? The one hiding alien activity?

Right. Sure.

Despite your scepticism however, a thrill of fear rushes down the length of your spine as if to say, ‘Oh? But are you sure sure?’

 Gulping audibly, you take a few steps sideways off the road, stealing a glance at a cluster of large rocks that sit conveniently just several yards to your rear.

You have a decision to make.

Maybe you’ve been alone on the road for too long, and isolation has bred a paranoia in you that’s so deeply rooted, you can’t shift it at a moment’s notice. If the sun was out, perhaps you’d be less apprehensive, but the night, no matter where you are, makes everything seem so much more… treacherous. It hides things. People, motivations, monsters.

And though it pains you to do so, you swiftly decide to err on the side of personal safety.

The vehicle is closer now, and your blood trembles as the roar of a loud, formidable engine thunders over the tarmac. Yet you’re still certain it isn’t close enough to have caught you in its high-beams.

On sluggish legs, you haul yourself about and make a clumsy dash for the rocks, clenching a fist around one strap of the rucksack and using your other hand to grab the closest rock and swing yourself behind it. Dropping to your backside, you flatten your spine against the cool, solid surface, eyes wide, heart beating hard against the cage of ribs keeping it from leaping up into your throat.

‘Coward,’ a voice in the back of your head scoffs, sounding suspiciously like your father. You shake it loose. Now is not the time to be bothered by old ghosts.

The thundering engine draws nearer, rumbling in your chest as it seems to creep towards your hiding spot at a pace even a glacier would be impressed by.

Around the corner of the rock, you can finally see the glow of its headlights smoothing over the tarmac, illuminating the sand and brush all around you. Hurriedly, you tuck your toes right into the shadow cast by your rock, keeping a breath held hostage behind clenched teeth.

“Come on… Come on,” you urge it frustratedly, aware that every second you spend not moving is another second towards sunrise. If you’re not on the dairy ready for work by then…

The vehicle rolls to a stop.

It stops.

The temptation to let out a frustrated scream is only held in check by your tongue getting stuck to the roof of bone-dry mouth.

They saw you. They must have seen you. There’s no way they could have known you were here otherwise.

Idiot!

Wasting time on the decision has only taken it right out of your hands in the end.

A bead of sweat escapes your hairline and rolls down the side of your face, following the curve of your cheek. Should you run? Keep hiding? Did they stop by coincidence? If they meant no harm, they’d have seen you hide and kept on driving, wouldn’t they? Stopping is suspicious. It conveys a desire to engage.

And then something really strange happens.

“Excuse me?”

And… Well, you’re… not entirely proud of the choked gasp that jumps out of you, nor the way you flinch as if you’d been struck.

When did they – He? It’s a low voice, deeper than anything you’ve heard in a long while, full of bass but soft like distant brontide.

When did he get out of the vehicle? You didn’t hear a door open, nor close.

You nearly jump out of your skin when he speaks again.

“I’ve frightened you…” Despite how gentle the timbre is, his voice is loud, like he’s speaking all around you, not just behind you. “I apologise,” the stranger continues, “That is the last thing I meant to do.”

What the Hell is he talking about?

There’s a long, unpleasant stretch of time until he speaks again.

“Was that your… Ford?” he asks, like he’s testing the word on his tongue, “Up the road?”

Shit. You’re starting to regret leaving that note. He must have read it and knew someone would be walking into town, alone and vulnerable.

The vehicle's powerful engine is still idling, strong and steady, buzzing along the ground and up through the soles of your feet.

It goes against your nature to ignore someone when they’re talking to you, but there’s still a part of you clinging to the hope that he’ll just give up and move on if you don’t respond or show yourself. Perhaps he’ll think you were just a figment of an overtired imagination…

Of course, instead, he persists. “Please.”

Jesus, he almost squeezes the word out, oozing dejection.

“You have nothing to fear from me… I’m a friend.”

A friend indeed. You huff quietly to yourself. You don’t even know him. He doesn’t know you. He’s trying to coax you out of hiding after watching you flee from his vehicle. Hardly the foundation for a good friendship. Still, you have to wonder why he doesn’t just come around the rock to stand over you if he’s so keen.

After another few seconds of stubborn silence on your part, the voice speaks again.

“Will you at least step back from the rock?”

What?

“There are scorpions on it, and I fear you’ll get-“

You don’t think you’ve moved so fast in quite some time. One moment you’re pressing yourself to the rock, and the next, you’re scrabbling to your feet with gusto, lurching away from your prior hiding space and spinning around, skin already crawling.

Sure enough, a pair of giant scorpions are scuttling around on the flat top, their tails held aloft, proud and large in the moonlight.

“-Hurt,” the stranger finishes.

Snatching your head up, you find yourself staring right into the vehicle’s headlights, and you instantly grunt with discomfort, raising a hand to shield your eyes from the light.

“Oh.” There’s a pause, the vehicle’s engine skips, and the lights suddenly dim, plunging you into almost darkness save for the dim glow of residual light. “Forgive me. Is that better?”

“Much. Thanks,” you respond automatically, only to turn rigid once you realise you’ve spoken aloud.

Well. He’s already seen you. No point pretending you can’t talk either…

Again, the stranger’s vehicle makes an odd noise, it’s engine hums gently, and as you lower your arm to seek out the man you’ve just opened a line of conversation with, you finally see what you’d been hiding from.

A monstrous Peterbilt sits squarely across the width of the road, entirely alien in the barren, rocky landscape. Smokestacks on either side of its cab reach towards the sky, glinting silver in the moonlight. It looks red under the meagre glow, with lighter panelling on the main body and dark, blue accents on the wheel trims and storage compartment. The grill is, in a word, massive, standing taller than you are, sporting a logo you don’t recognise on the front.

All in all, it’s a hell of a truck. Powerful, you imagine. Expensive too.

You try not to let your mouth hang ajar.

“Where-” Your voice cracks, still dry. “Ahem…! Where are you?”

Glancing around, your hackles start to rise. You can’t see the speaker anywhere. Which is why you let out an embarrassingly shrill yelp when his voice rumbles directly from the semi.

“I’m right here,” he assures you, polite enough not to show his amusement whilst you flap your mouth open and closed.

No, you shake your head. No, that is too weird. “What, are there like… speakers on the outside of your truck or something?”

There’s the tiniest of pauses, followed by a simple, concise, “There are.”

Oh. Well, then. That answers that burning question.

“Okay? So, um… Can I… help you?” you ask awkwardly, screwing one side of your face up.

The man seems to hesitate, allowing a pregnant pause to hang in the air between you before he replies, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

Somehow, your expression twists even further south, and you begin casting your eyes over the semi, squinting through its dark windshield to try and catch a glimpse of what’s on the other side.

“I saw your truck on the side of the road,” the unseen man continues, “I feared you might have been hurt in a crash, so, I stopped to check that you weren’t still inside the vehicle. Then I found your note.”

He falls silent, and the air is dominated once again by the purring of his semi’s engine.

“Okay?” you prompt, still unsure of his motivations.

“It said you need help.”

He trails off, waiting. You’re promptly struck by the idea that he’s trying to guide you to some conclusion he hasn’t yet revealed. Finally, just as you start to grow restless, he forges ahead, “These roads can be hazardous for a lone hu-“

Suddenly, the truck’s engine revs, drowning out his voice for a second and sending you leaping backwards, startled.

“- A lone traveller…” he clears his throat just after the roar of its exhaust cuts out. Then, “Ah, If I may be so bold...”

All of a sudden, the passenger side door unlatches and swings open, and you’re presented with a clear invitation into the darkened cab. “May I offer you a ride into town?”

You wonder if he can see you turn stiff at his suggestion. Your body all but pleads on hands and knees for you to accept. What’s the worst that could happen, after all?

Well. You’ve watched several documentaries and movies that give you a pretty good indication of what ‘the Worst’ entails, thank you very much. You don’t like that he’s inviting you into his truck without showing his face to you yet. You’d like to gauge the person you’re speaking to. Get a bead on him. Is he big? Strong? Tall? Could you overpower him if it came down to it? Does he look like he’s hiding a weapon on him?

All these questions only serve to dry the moisture in your throat.

“I… That’s… very kind of you,” you admit, wringing your hands together as you take a small step away from the semi, “But I’m sure it’ll be okay, it isn’t that far.”

“At an average speed of three miles per hour, you will reach the outskirts of town in just under three and a half hours.”

You blink, caught off guard. ‘And they said we’d never need to use equations after we graduated.’

“Maths guy, huh?” you cock a hip, laying a hand across it and shooting the truck’s windshield a tentative smile, “Maybe I walk at four miles an hour.”

“Two and a half then,” he quips back just as smoothly, the door to his semi still hanging open. When he continues, you can’t help but notice that the cadence of his baritone voice rumbling through the speakers has turned to something a little more sombre, quieter, like he’s trying to impress upon you the gravity of a situation you don’t yet know about. “But time and distance aside, I do not wish to leave you to walk into Jasper by yourself, particularly at this time of night.”

He speaks like he’s been to elocution lessons. Every word seems to be carefully selected, every vowel and consonant articulate and refined.

It’s disarming. He’s disarming. But you’re still not convinced.

“Listen… Thank you, again. But…” It feels rude, like you’re committing some kind of faux pas in turning your back on the semi, yet you can’t shake the nagging voice at the back of your head, telling you that there’s something not quite right about the man in the truck. Not bad, just… off.

“It’s a kind offer,” you tell him again lamely, turning on your heel. And so, you recommence your weary march for Jasper, tossing one last sentiment over your shoulder, “But I’m sure I can make it on my own. Take care, okay?”

You almost expect him to argue, but all you can hear is the now familiar drone of the semi’s almighty engine. For several paces, you can feel a pair of eyes watching you, scrutinising and pensive, if a little baffled by your short yet polite dismissal.

When you make it another ten feet, heaving your tired legs after you over the tarmac, your ears perk up to the sound of an engine revving.

Smokestacks chugging, the massive truck pulls out of its standstill, unseen behind you.

Chewing on the inside of your lip, you keep your gaze fixed to the ground ahead and raise a hand, flapping it about in an apologetic farewell as you meander further off the road and onto the sand, giving him plenty of space to get past.

You start to frown when you make it twenty paces without being overtaken by the truck.

That frown only grows deeper when the engine keeps churring away behind you, rubber tyres crunching tiny particles of sand under their treads as it crawls along in your wake.

Is he…?

Tearing your eyes off the toes of your shoes, you send a fleeting glance over your shoulder, surprised – but not much – to find the nose of the Peterbilt creeping slowly along in your peripheral vision, keeping pace with you.

Your frown eases back, and you quirk a brow at him instead, calmly asking, “What are you doing?”

And just as easily, the voice returns, “If you will not allow me to drive you, I will happily escort you to your destination.”

You can’t help yourself.

“Ha! ‘Escort.’” The snicker jumps out of you faster than you can raise your hands to press your fingertips against an unbidden grin. “Sorry,” you immediately try to amend, “You just sounded so serious.”

“… I… am serious?”

Letting your hand flop back to your side, you give your head a shake, still grinning. You really do meet all sorts on the road.

“Regardless, I’m sure you have far better things to be doing with your time.”

How the truck matches your walking speed without his engine faltering or sputtering, you’ll never know.

A strange noise gurgles from its exhaust, almost perfectly reminiscent of a troubled hum.

“On the contrary,” the driver responds, pulling forwards a little until only the grill overtakes you, and for a moment, you worry he’s about to drive across your path, “There is nothing at the moment that concerns me more than getting you safely where you need to go.”

Huh. Of all the genuine, stubborn…

“Look.” Your shoes scuff up a cloud of sand as you draw to an abrupt and decisive halt, turning bodily towards the truck. Hands splayed on your hips, you glare at the windscreen, aiming approximately for the driver. A second later, he must have hit the brakes because the semi lurches to a stop as well, hissing noisily.

Still, he doesn’t step out.

“You seem like a nice guy,” you start, trying to keep your chin raised and your tone stern. You fail, of course. Your voice cracks nervously, but at least you try. Taking a deep, steadying breath, you finally elect to stop beating around the bush and just address the elephant in the room – or desert, as it were.

“But I don’t make it a habit to get into random trucks with strangers.” You make it a point not to directly accuse him of having ulterior motives, but you hope you’ve at least driven home your main concern. At best, he’ll grow offended that you’d think him capable of such a thing and – hopefully – move on. At worst… Well. You brace yourself for that, teeth grit so tightly, your jaw starts to ache as you flick your eyes over towards the truck’s driver-side door, waiting.

The truck in question does something odd then. It… sinks? At least you think it does, lowering on its axles by a few inches like the wheels have just deflated. It’s difficult to tell in the dim moonlight though, and it’s over so quickly, you can’t be sure you saw anything at all that wasn’t just a trick of the desert.

How long have you been awake?

You’re busy calculating the hours you were driving when the stranger’s voice is kicked out over the speakers again.

“You assume I mean you harm…” he utters.

And just like that, the stern, rigid scowl is instantly wiped off your face.

He sounds…

…sad.

Not offended. Not angered by your thinly-veiled implication.

Just sad. Dispirited, even. As if it’s only just occurred to him that you might have perceived him as a threat.

It’s almost painful when the pair of you dissolve into an uncomfortable silence that lasts for several beats of your rapid-fire heart.

Biting down on the inside of your cheek, your brows drift apart whilst you try to think of something to say. Trouble is, you’re afraid that speaking again will only make things worse.

You have no idea what’s going through his head. What if his dejected tone is followed by something worse?

“I’m sorry,” you backtrack, pressing your lips together and chiding yourself for faltering, “It’s nothing personal, just… I-I should probably get going before I fall asleep standing up.” You give a stilted laugh, but it soon turns into an awkward sound made at the back of your throat, lips pulled over your teeth in a grimace.

Dipping your head, you swallow thickly and grip the straps of your rucksack again. But just as you make to turn away, the semi’s wheels abruptly twist towards you. It’s ever so slight, just enough that the truck rolls a few paces in your direction before it stops again, its grill pointed straight at you.

With an audible gulp, you go to take another step back, staring at the metal in anticipation. Your retreat is soon halted by the mellow rumble of his voice.

“I understand your hesitation. And I know that the word of a stranger may not hold much weight,” he begins slowly. The Peterbilt inches forwards again. “But I can assure you, you have nothing to fear from me…”

Shifting on your feet, you let go of your bag and clutch instead at your elbows, brows tipped up indecisively. He’s persistent, you’ll give him that. He also speaks with a candour you’ve never encountered outside of a film or a storybook. Frank and forthright in a way you’ve never been privy to. Is that why you’re hesitating? Is that why he seems ‘off?’ Because his level of sincerity doesn’t have a place in your world?

Perhaps you’ve been spending so much time by yourself, it’s turned you distrustful. Maybe you’re just getting cynical. Looking back on your journey here, you realise that only other person who you’ve spoken to was a disinterested server who took your order at a drive-thru… That was four days ago. How long before that did you listen to someone who wasn’t the people on your truck’s radio?

Why is it so suspicious that this trucker wants to help? Hell, you’d be concerned as well if you saw some poor bastard hiking alone through the desert at night without a friend in the world.

Christ, you need some perspective.

The driver must see the conflict painted like a brand across your expression.

“Would it reassure you to know that this vehicle is operated entirely remotely?” he pipes up.

You blink once. Then again to wake yourself up a little more, pulled from your inner turmoil. “What?”

“This vehicle,” he tells you, “It is an unmanned vehicle.”

Curiosity overtakes suspicion faster than you can uncross your arms and stare at the grill dumbly, face opening up in surprise. “Wait. You mean it’s one of those self-driving things?”

“In a sense.” The semi’s engine rumbles softly, and the not-driver adds, “I am what you might call… the safety driver.”

Now that is curious.

You don’t even realise you’ve taken a step closer. “Really? But I thought that sort of tech was still in testing?”

“It is,” he replies, “We are, however, attempting to advance to field-tests, to see if these vehicles can autonomously haul freight in areas with sparser populations, to minimise the risk of collision.”

“Hence why you’re driving it out here in the middle of the night,” you realise aloud, raising an inquisitive brow at the windscreen, “So you’re really not in there? You’re driving it from somewhere else?”

“Would you care to see for yourself?” he asks kindly.

Your wide eyes flit to the passenger door when it eases open once again, though this time, it seems far less foreboding than before.

Tugging a loose piece of skin between your teeth, you give the silver steps leading to the door a scrutinising glance.

That does reassure you…

Slowly, still at least a little wary, you coax your legs to move, and they begrudgingly carry you onto the road. You approach the semi-truck with all the caution of a doe crossing an open meadow.

As you venture closer, its engine kicks up a notch, emitting a steady, gentle purr as if the vehicle itself is pleased with your acquiescence.

Suddenly, as you move along to the open door, you’re dazzled by a light flickering on inside the cab, bathing what you can see from this angle in a calm, golden hue.

From down here, it looks… just like an ordinary interior.

And lo and behold, as you stand on your tiptoes to see in, you find the driver’s seat is eerily devoid of its occupant.

You let out a breath that emerges shakier than you would have liked it to.

“Wow,” you laugh, impressed.

Maybe just a quick peek…

A vast chunk of apprehension breaks away from your chest and vanishes into the ether as you shuffle towards the steps, raising an arm and stretching your fingers across the space to the grab handle that sits invitingly just beside the open door.

This side of the truck is bathed in silver moonlight, and it’s only now that you’re this close that you happen to notice something you hadn’t before.

You almost wince when you spot them.

Although shiny and speckled with only the lightest dusting of desert sand, the metal panelling on the semi is covered in signs of wear and tear.

Enough to give you pause, at least.

For a moment, you’re taken aback, turning bodily away from the open door and cocking your head at the myriad of scratches that criss-cross their way up towards the semi’s roof.

All the paint in the world couldn’t hide some of those shallow nicks and lines that have been scraped out of the metal. In any case, something big must have scuffed it. Perhaps another driver in their own Peterbilt? Or perhaps it’s all damage sustained in testing the vehicle’s automated capabilities.

Clicking your tongue, you absently raise a hand to stroke your fingertips gingerly along the length of a particularly prominent scratch by the door.

“Oh dear,” you tut softly at the side of the truck, “You’ve been in the wars, haven’t you?”

Without warning, the engine that had been buzzing so gently suddenly ramps up and starts to vibrate firmly beneath your fingers, so strong you can even feel it judder the ground through the soles of your feet.

Recoiling like you’ve been zapped, you whip your head around to peer through the open door, half expecting the driver to admonish you for touching his vehicle.

As swiftly as it started however, the thrumming engine dies down, and the truck returns to its soft, benign idling. “My apologies,” comes that gentle voice again through the speakers, “Just an overactive combustion chamber.”

“Is it... safe to ride in?” you retort, giving the back of the truck a sidelong glance.

“You will find very few vehicles safer than this one,” he tells you patiently, “I will not allow any harm to befall you, as I would not allow it to befall any of my passengers.”

Your shoulders jump with a silent laugh. “Befall,” you parrot, fighting a smile, “I love the way you talk.”

“… You do?” His speakers buzz with a pleasant hum.

Fingers flexing anxiously, you reach out once again and slide them around the grab handle beside the door, finding that it’s unexpectedly warm under your palm.

“So, I just… get in?” you ask, only to cringe immediately, realising you probably sound like a fool who’s forgotten how to get into a truck.

Before you can rebuke yourself harshly though, the absent stranger offers his response. “Do you require assistance?”

“No, no,” you rush out, placing one foot on the first, silver step and hoisting yourself up off the ground, bringing yourself level with the cab’s seats.

Your eyes grow wide with wonder as you take in the interior.

“Oh, wow,” you breathe, suddenly hesitant to pull yourself up those last few feet.

“Is there something wrong?”

“It’s just… It’s so clean!”

Laid out before you is a perfectly ordinary truck cabin. Soft, grey leather covers the seats, with the same dark colouration on the roof, doors and most of the glovebox, interspersed by a rich, black steering wheel. The soft light, you discover, is emitted by multiple strips of blue neon LEDs that the driver must have fitted underneath the radio dials and dashboard, casting the truck’s interior in a cool, soothing glow.

But most astonishingly, for as much as you search, you can’t spot a single thing out of place. It’s absolutely immaculate. There isn’t one receipt stuffed in the door pockets, no traces of sand or gravel dirtying the footwells, no loose change tossed into the centre console…

Dumbfounded, you glance into the back, but all you find it a dark, grey panel and a shelf set back into the semi’s rear wall, meant for use as a bed, you surmise. It’s empty, unsurprisingly. Not a blanket or a pillow in sight.

Finally, your suspicions are put to rest. This truck doesn’t look lived in at all. He really is operating it remotely.

“God, it looks brand new in here,” you marvel aloud, suddenly hyper-conscious of the abysmal state of your old pickup. The scratches on this semi’s exterior play briefly on your mind but you brush your musings aside, too fatigued to consider the contradictions of a worn exterior but an immaculate interior.

Instead, you feel a frown crease the skin between your brows.

It really is immaculate in here…

Glancing down, you scowl disdainfully at your filthy shoes, the tank-top that’s stained irreparably by dropped food and greasy finger-smears, and trousers that are tattered and worn at their hems.

“Is everything all right?” the ‘driver’ asks again. His voice must emerge from the speakers on each door, low and warm, filling up the cabin.

“My shoes are dirty,” you admit out loud, your grip on the handle turning slack until you sink a few inches back to the first step, “I’m dirty. I-I don’t want to get sand and crap all over your truck.”

“I don’t mind.”

Spoken with more consideration than you’ve heard in a long, long time.

You pause at once, brows tipping up in the centre of your forehead.

A deep inhale through your nose brings with it the unobtrusive scent of leather, with the faintest undertone of adhesive sealers, giving the interior that ‘new truck smell’ that so many drivers try to replicate artificially.

Comparatively, it’s been several days since you passed a rest stop that had showering facilities. Those that did asked for a hefty charge. You’d glanced down at the handful of coppers in your centre console and decided you could go without. Now, you’re starting to regret that decision. Every now and then, whenever you raised your arms to stretch or flip the visor down in your pickup, you’d catch an unpleasant whiff of yourself wafting out from under your light, cotton shirt.

Embarrassed as you are to confess that you’ve been severely neglecting your personal hygiene, you swallow past a lump in your throat and croak, “I… haven’t exactly washed for a couple of days… I wouldn’t want to make your truck smell…”

And in a tone so kind it threatens to brings a tear to your eye, the stranger answers consolingly, “I think your scent is perfectly fine.”

It’s so damnably genuine, you can’t even find it in yourself to point out that he isn’t here to smell you, so his point is moot.

“I…” One more cop-out strikes you. “I don’t have any money,” you murmur truthfully, ashamed, “I can’t pay you for the fuel, or-“

“-I ask for nothing in return but your company,” is all he says, cutting you off as gently as his profound voice will allow.

And just like that, you’re out of viable excuses. Or perhaps your body has noticed the comfortable seats right in front of it and you don’t have enough fight left in you to deny it a sit down. Besides, any reasons you come up with to dip are likely to be met with a counterpoint.

Even so, you can’t help but hesitate for one more question, hand clasping and unclasping around the grab handle. “Are you sure it’s okay? I’m not going to get you in trouble or anything am I?”

The next sound that hums through his speakers is so soft and rich, you think it’s the truck’s engine playing up again, at least until the stranger cuts the noise off by saying, “You do not look like trouble to me.”

If he only knew.

The sound prior, you realise, was a chuckle, the first one you’ve heard out of him yet. Something in the measure of it settles the last of your nerves, only slightly, just long enough to have you throwing caution to the wind. With a final heave, you pull yourself the rest of the way inside, sliding gingerly into the comfortable passenger seat. You never notice how the metal below your foot shifts microscopically, lifting you closer to the cab.

It takes a lot of restraint not to let your eyes drift closed, nor to slump backwards into the wondrously giving material on your spine.

Instead, you sit stiffly with your rucksack keeping you upright, legs pressed together, hands folded neatly in your lap. If you make any kind of mess in here, you’ll be mortified.

After a moment, you remember to close the door, but just as you turn and peel a hand off your thigh, you jolt, staring agog at the door as it swings slowly shut with a dull ‘click.’ All of its own accord.

“Full remote access,” the voice pipes up as the engine below you roars to life, and then you’re moving, and all you can do is stare through the window at the desert drifting by whilst trying to ignore the uninvited ache in your chest.

“Seatbelt.”

His gentle prompt spurs you to reach over and grab the fabric near your shoulder, tugging it across your body and fumbling a little to slot it into place. Suddenly, you feel an invisible pull on the belt, and the metal buckle finds its way into the socket on your next pass.

‘Must be magnetic,’ you muse distractedly.

“Are you comfortable?”

Blinking back the moisture in your eyes, you turn to glance at the empty driver’s seat. It’s bizarre, and more than a little unsettling to see the steering wheel turn itself around as the truck pulls back onto the road, driven by unseen hands.

When you don’t immediately respond to his query, the man continues just as patiently as before. “If it is too cold, I can turn up the heater. Or… perhaps you are too warm…” He hums to himself, thoughtful. “You have been exerting yourself.”

You instantly become aware of the light sheen of sweat that hasn’t quite dried on your forehead. Puckering your face up into a solemn smile, you shake your head and at last respond. “Not to worry. It’s very comfortable in here.”

What follows is a poignant moment of hesitation before the voice speaks again. “Forgive me if I’m overstepping, but… You do not seem comfortable…”

The open-ended statement fades into silence, and you’re left casting nervous glances around the cabin again. “How do you-?” you start, tugging your shirt further down your arms, “Can you see me? Like… in here?”

Again, there’s a pause, barely longer than a second, yet long enough for you to notice it.

“Cameras,” comes his measured response, “Both external and internal. They’re how I spotted you on the road.”

“Oh, I hadn’t even considered that… Of course.”

Suddenly self-conscious, you reach up and begin to paw uselessly at your dishevelled hair, humming though a thin-lipped smile. “I must look a sight,” you half joke.

“You look tired…” he replies diplomatically, and there’s nothing in it for you to be offended by.

Rubbing a thumb over the wrinkle slowly carving a home between your brows, you heave a dreary sigh. “It’s been a long journey.”

“I can only imagine… And… Where does it culminate, if I may?”

“Terry’s Dairy?” you offer, “Uh, it’s this little farm just on the outskirts of Jasper.”

The truck beneath you gives a reverberating thrum. “I know the pastures, but I’m afraid you will find they lay beyond the ‘outskirts’ of the city.”

Letting out a groan, you knock your head back against the seat behind you, staring bleakly up at the ceiling. “Of course… How far?”

“Only a few miles, to the East of Jasper. We’re coming in from the Northwest highway. I can get you there in twenty-five minutes.”

“Twenty- Oh, no, no. You really don’t have to do that,” you protest, shifting in the seat to frown at the empty driver’s seat in lieu of anywhere else to look, “Just drop me off in town and I’ll walk the rest. You’re already going out of your way for a stranger.”

“I am dropping you off at your destination and not a mile before,” he tells you steadily.

His uncompromising tone brooks no argument.

You stare at the spot a person should be for several, long moments, debating how much you could push an argument. He’s already coaxed you into his truck, his powers of persuasion are rather good. What chance do you have, sleep-deprived as you are?

Conceding sullenly, yet appreciatively, you let your back touch the seat, settling into it a little less hesitantly. “You won’t be taking no for an answer, I assume?”

He only lapses into a stubborn silence, an answer in and of itself.

That quiet is broken, however, when you suddenly let out all the air from your lungs, a smile growing across the width of your face as the breath escapes your nostrils in a sigh. “Thank you for this… Really. You’re saving me a lot of grief.”

The blue neons on his dashboard seem to flare a bit brighter for all of a second before they dim again. “I am glad to be of service,” he replies warmly.

“Oh my god,” you blurt without warning, leaning forwards in the seat and staring through the windscreen with wide eyes, “I’m so sorry, you’re being so nice and I’m so rude – I never asked your name.”

“Nor did I yours,” he points out, “You may call me Op-“

Suddenly, a burst of static buzzes through the radio. You shoot it a funny look.

“Optimus,” the stranger admits over the static with a hesitance you pick up on right away, drawing your gaze from the dash, “My name is Optimus.”

“Optimus?” you repeat incredulously, a small smile quirking at the edges of your mouth, “Wow… You must have had creative parents.”

“I appreciate that it might seem… an unusual name…”

“It is,” you agree pleasantly, “I like it. Makes you sound cool. Unique. My parents just stuck me with Y/n.”

At once, Optimus echoes your name, and you’re jarred by the sound of it coming from someone else’s lips, reverberating around the truck. It’s been a while since anyone used it.

“Y/n,” he says again in his velvety timbre, “It’s a fine name. I like yours too.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

It’s often said that shock is superseded by anger.

You’ve read as much in dozens of books; Books on grief, on bettering yourself, dealing with remorse and the cyclical nature of loss. There was a time when you thought that if you just read the right words, something important might 'click,' and you'd find you could overcome the aching cold that gnawed at the lining of your stomach.

You're older now, sadder and wiser.

Grief aside, you find that the theory of anger following shock rings true in this instance, because as soon as the surprise of seeing ten thousand dollars in your otherwise barren account faded, you tumbled right over some invisible ledge and landed chest-first in an indignation so fierce, you barely slept a wink that night, tossing and turning and glaring hard into the pitch black room. 

As the inky darkness gradually shrank away from the grey light spilling in through the curtains, you stayed awake puzzling over who could have done such an altruistic but intrusive thing…

And how.

The details next to the figure on your phone’s screen are nothing more than a random jumble of numbers and letters, granting you no insight into the identity of your mysterious benefactor.

You had a suspicion… but the likelihood of him being the culprit is just so low as to be outlandish. How would he have even gotten your bank details anyway?

‘Perhaps,’ you mused, glowering at the ceiling of your new accommodations, ‘It could all be chalked up to an honest mistake…’

So, exhaling gruffly and tugging the too-scratchy blankets up to your chest, you resolved to do some digging before you leapt to any concrete conclusions.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The very next morning saw you all but dead on your feet.

It had taken a monumental effort to convince both your body and your boss that you were raring to go for your first day at a new job.

You don’t think either of them were very convinced.

Turns out, it would just be Terry and yourself working on the farm, on account of, ‘No other bastard’s managed to last a month. Probably spooked by the shit that goes on around here after dark.’

“That’s too bad,” you’d commiserated, recalling the rather vivid image of a wild-eyed farmer charging towards you last night with his shotgun raised.

“Bunch’a pussies,” Terry spat crudely, yanking open a metal gate and somehow ignoring the awful screech of its rusted hinges as he led you inside the first cattle barn.

You just hummed in response, bobbing your head and tilting it away from him lest he catch the bemused smile you were failing to repress.

You’d been polite when you asked him about the strange payment as he walked you through the barns, giving you a brief rundown of a typical day’s expectations.

“Just trying to suss out where it came from,” you’d said conversationally, keeping the corner of your eye on one of the heifers staring you down from a few yards away, likely wondering why you’re blocking her path to the broken water trough, “Thought maybe it was a… a generous advance from you or something.”

All Terry did was grunt as he gave the pipe jutting from the wall a rough kick. Seconds later, its service box gurgled and sputtered, and water finally started flowing back into the tank.

“Don’t believe in no ‘advances,” he scowled disdainfully, turning a beady eye onto you, “Show me you can work, then I’ll show you your paycheque.”

You figured as much, but you had to be sure.

“Sounds reasonable to me,” you acquiesced, diplomatic, and again bemused that the man who believes in extra-terrestrials doesn’t believe in something so outlandish as an advance.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The money remains untouched, of course.

You’re tempted by it, certainly, the way a hungry child might be tempted by a large, unattended slice of chocolate cake.

But you’re not a child. And ten thousand is no mere slice of cake.

It isn’t yours. You didn’t earn it, and you don’t want it.

You don’t.

You still have to remind yourself of that every other hour though, because it would certainly make retrieving your truck a whole hell of a lot easier.

Thankfully, the work Terry puts you to provides ample distraction from temptation.

Getting your head down, you shadow him around the dairy, listening in on his telephone conversations with the milk hauliers as he simultaneously shows you where the parlour is.

It’s a relatively small farm. Difficult to manage alone, but just fine enough for two people to handle.

After demonstrating how to fit the milking machine onto a rather unimpressed cow, Terry sends you off to do some of the simpler tasks to break you in for your first day.

‘Grunt work,’ he calls it.

You call it ‘jobs Terry doesn’t want to do.’

No matter. You willingly fall into the mundanity and repetition of simpler tasks, glad to be busying your hands, not your head.

Pliers in tow, you go about tightening the barbed wire around each paddock to stop the cows getting their heads under the fence if they feel like making break for the open desert. Following that, you take a can of oil to all the rusty gate hinges, scrub down each stall in the parlour, familiarise yourself with the layout of the dairy and even introduce yourself to the cantankerous rooster strutting circles around a flock of hens in the front yard.

“If he runs at’chya, don’t you dare kick ‘im,” Terry warns as he skulks past you with a bucket of rat poison under one arm, “He’s protectin’ his girls.”

You peer down at the rooster, who eyeballs you in return, his wings lowered and his feathery chest puffed out.

Wordlessly, you both agree to stay out of each other’s way.

-----

It isn’t until Terry calls you in for an early supper that you finally pluck up the courage to inquire about your truck.

“Just get it towed,” Terry tells you as he shovels a forkful of bacon into his mouth, “S’a couple of places in Jasper who’ll drop it off here.”

“I can’t afford a tow,” you sigh around your own mouthful.

Screwing an eye shut, the old farmer squints across the table at you with a sceptical hum. “Thought you said you got a lot of money on you…”

“Money that isn’t mine to spend,” you remind him, “It only dropped into my account last night. And whoever did it, I’m not convinced they meant to.”

You certainly hope they didn’t mean to.

“Besides,” you add, chasing a potato around your plate with a fork, “I have every intention of giving it back.”

Very gradually, Terry’s bushy, grey eyebrows creep closer and closer together, wrinkling a forehead that’s already been harshly creased by time and age. For several, awkward moments, he scowls at you with the exasperation of a man who’s never heard such tripe in all his life.

“Jeezus,” he scoffs at last, laying his cutlery down on the plate with a ‘clink’, “Well… Least I know I didn’t hire some fancy entrepreneur.”

He doesn’t stop staring at you though. If anything, he seems to be taking an even closer look. The deep, brooding frown on his face is set like dried cement as he roves his glare down to your hands, to the scrapes and nicks dug from skin not yet callused by a life of hard, physical labour.

Proof, in his eyes, that you’ve put in the work he asked you to do. And not a complaint out of you all day…

“Mmph…” Chewing on his mouthful for a moment longer, he at last swallows it down, smacking his lips and exhaling roughly through his nose as he tosses his soiled napkin onto the plate. “Fine.”

Lifting your head, you hesitantly echo, “Fine?”

“I got a tractor and a tow rope,” he elaborates, pushing his chair out and rising to his feet, “I’ll go get your truck.”

Shocked by his unexpected generosity, you scramble to follow him away from the table, feeling far too much like a broken record as you self-consciously raise your hands, palms tipped towards the ceiling “I… can’t pay you…” you admit, ashamed.

Gruffly, he retorts, “Don’t recall askin’ you to."

“Well, at least deduct the cost of the fuel from this month’s wages,” you offer as a compromise.

At that, as if you’d said something entirely ludicrous, Terry promptly stops in his tracks and whips his head around towards you so quickly, it’s a wonder his flat cap doesn’t come flying off.

Exuding the air of a man who’s wholly unimpressed, he glares you down until you physically wither beneath his scrutiny, shrinking in on yourself, head retreating backwards to try and hide between your rising shoulders.

“Goddamn, Kid. No wonder you ended up here,” he at last grumbles disparagingly, “You ain’t exactly goin’ places with that kind of credo.”

And to say that didn’t sting would be a bold-faced lie.

You didn’t even consider the possibility that you were saying something foolish until Terry drew specific attention to it. Now you just feel ashamed because you know you ought to be.

“Sorry,” you concede, cupping your elbows and avoiding his stare, “...Look, will you at least let me come and help you fetch it?”

The truck is yours after all. Your responsibility. Your burden to retrieve, not his.

At the suggestion of assistance, however, Terry’s boots falter again on the threshold between the front door and the porch, and he cocks his head to one side in clear contemplation.

Trailing to a stop behind him, you wait, shifting on your feet and chewing a welt onto the inside of your cheek.

You’ve almost drawn blood by the time he shakes his head and announces, “Nah,” much to your dismay, though the disappointment is fleeting as he’s quick to start marching off again, beckoning over a shoulder for you to follow him out into the yard. “I been hitchin’ up to tractors since before you were born… Got somethin’ else you can help with though…”

Curiosity - always the more potent force - sweeps in to readily take the place of your discouragement. “Oh?” you ask, perking up and trotting obediently after the old farmer.

“Yup,” he says, “Got some stuff needs pickin’ up from the store in town. Hate goin’ in myself. Too noisy. Kids always runnin’ around, eyein’ up my wallet.”

Doubtless they’re just kids being kids and he’s seeing behaviour that isn’t there, but you don’t dispute his claim. You’re just glad to feel like you’re finally about to do something useful, nodding eagerly as you chirp, “Sure! I can go into town for you, no problem. Is there another car I can take or…?”

His retort comes as a sharp bark of laughter, which doesn’t bode well for you at all.

“Not a chance in Hell,” he guffaws, “Ain’t usin’ two tanks of gas…”

Gradually, your heart sinks down towards your shoes, but before you can start entertaining the gruelling prospect that he’s about to make you walk all the way into Jasper, Terry rounds the corner of his house and adds, “C’mon. Reckon it’s time I introduced you to Tom…”

----------------------------------------------------------

Tom, you soon discover, is in fact not derived from the longer name ‘Thomas.’ At least not in this instance. Here, Terry seems only too gleeful as he tells you that it’s the short form of ‘Tom Thumb,’ something that brings him no end of amusement when he leads you to a paddock attached to the back of the farmhouse and you find yourself staring agog at an absolute titan grazing behind the little, wooden fence.

Now, you can appreciate the irony of a good misnomer as much as the next person, but the implications of what you’re looking at are not lost on you, considering what Terry has just asked you to do.

Standing beyond a little, wooden fence that hardly seems adequate to keep such an animal contained, is a colossal, ebony Shire horse, munching lazily at a pile of hay left out to grow dry and brittle under the afternoon sun.

Pursing his lips, the farmer whistles loud and shrill, calling out, “Tom! C’mon!”

With apparent effort, the horse raises its massive head and turns to blink down at you through long, sweeping lashes, still chewing idly on his mouthful of hay.

“Terry,” you deadpan, turning to send the man an incredulous look, brows arched high on your head.

Shrugging his shoulders brusquely, he retorts, “What?”

“Terry!”

“Oh, quitch’yer whinin’. Tom’s a damn-sight cheaper’n insuring a tractor for a year, I’ll tell you that right now. Saves a fortune on gas. Hay’s cheap around here.”

Floundering in the air with one hand as if you’re trying to fish through it for a lick of sense, you exclaim, “Terry, that is completely beside the point!” At last gesturing wildly at the apathetic gelding – who has already lost interest and turned back to his fodder – you add, “I can’t ride a horse into Jasper!”

Puffing out a dismissive grunt, Terry simply brushes past you and makes for a tumbledown tack room built flush against the rear of his house. “Oh, sure you can,” he tells you as he goes, “Tom’s as cold-blooded as they come. Means he don’t spook easily. Had him shipped over from England in the nineties – poor old boy was towin’ barges. So, I got my hands on him and made him tow a plough instead, hah!”

“Hah,” you wheeze half-heartedly, stumbling after him in a daze and casting a sympathetic glance at the Shire, “… Does he make a good work horse?”

Striking his shoulder against the door a few times to arduously inch it open, Terry lets out a scoff between two breaths before he replies, “Hell yeah, he did. Damn good draughter in his day. Course, that was before I stopped arable and started focusing on the dairy. Now, Tom’s retired.”

Heaving an aggrieved sigh, he finally manages to get the door open wide enough to step into the gloom, fumbling for a pull-string. It creaks when he yanks it, and a dusty lightbulb splutters to life, dangling from the ceiling and illuminating the cluttered space within. “He’s just gettin’ fat and lazy in his paddock. I can’t ride him no more, so I need you to start. It’ll do him some good to make the shopping trips again.”

The notion, apparently, is non-negotiable.

Terry wastes no time showing you how to tack the massive gelding, who endures both your inexperience and the man’s incessant rambling with a stoic sort of resignation that better befits a grizzled, old soldier than a nag.

Despite your constant flow of objections, Terry won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, and when he points out, ‘You said you wanted to help,’ you can only hang your head dolefully and acquiesce, knowing you’re as good as beat.

You do, however, adamantly insist that you aren’t going anywhere without a riding hat, refusing to back down even as Terry seems to grow more and more vexed by your persistence until he finally caves and digs an old, black helmet from a barrel deep inside the tack room, muttering about ‘health and safety gone mad,’ under his breath.

Happy to let him be unimpressed, you shake a disgruntled spider out of the hat before sitting it on your head and pulling a face at how tight it is.

Still, you reason, too tight is better than a fractured skull.

And so, with the saddlebags slung across Tom’s hindquarters and your boots stuck awkwardly into too-large stirrups, you’re sent out through the gate with Terry’s paper shopping list stuffed into your shirt pocket, crumpled up beneath the weight of your (freshly-charged) phone.

“I’m givin’ you one-twenty,” Terry barks, reaching up and slapping a wad of notes into your outstretched palm, “I don’t wanna see a cent of it goin’ to anythin’ other than what’s on that list. You hear?”

“Loud and clear,” you quip, sliding the money into the pocket of your work trousers and giving Tom’s sides a nudge with your heels.

The horse’s barrel-stomach expands and contracts around a massive sigh as he begrudgingly picks up his hooves.

“Remember; Highway forty-nine,” you call back to the old farmer as you plod through the open gates, “A couple of miles North of Jasper. The truck’s right on the side of the road, you can’t miss it!”

Terry’s hand waves your words away dismissively as if he’s trying to swat away a fly, but you know he heard you.

Twisting forwards in the saddle, you squeeze Tom’s leathery reins between your palms and lift your eyes to the horizon, and the long, straight road that’ll take you right into town.

If you’re going to be travelling back out into the desert, you suppose it would be prudent to keep your eyes peeled for a certain Good Samaritan who purportedly patrols these parts. Because with Terry’s name cleared off your list of suspects, there’s only one other person you’ve met in recent days who might be guilty of dumping a suspicious lump-sum into your bank account.

And by God, do you have a bone to pick with him.

--------------------------------------------

The ride into Jasper is about as dull as you expected it would be.

While the sun begins its steady decline towards the Western sky, Tom ambles along unhurriedly beneath you, his hooves clopping a rhythmic beat into the sand-dusted tarmac.

As a show of deference, you’ve given him all but the last few inches of his reins, allowing his bowed head to sway unimpeded from side to side with each step, ears flopped languidly against his skull, whereas in contrast, you sit rigid and unnatural upon his too-wide back.

The leather saddlebags squeak gently as the tack rubs together, mingling well with the buzz and hum of insects orchestrating this evening’s ambiance.

Breathing out a measured exhale, you try to sit back in the saddle and relax, counting your blessings that Terry hadn’t told you to go into town on foot.

“But what if I get lost!?” you’d argued as the farmer clambered up into his tractor, a towing strap coiled around one sinewy shoulder.

“Y’aint gonna get lost,” he admonished with a roll of his eyes, “If you do, just ask for directions, Christ! ‘Sides, Tom knows his way home. All you gotta do is mount up, and he’ll do the rest.”

When you took this job, you didn’t have any inkling that you’d be deferring to a horse, but then again, you’re not exactly in a position to complain.

“At least one of us knows what they’re doing,” you comment aloud, reaching forwards to scratch at his withers, half obscured under the saddle-horn. As your fingernails scrape back and forth across his hard-to-reach spot, the horse stretches his neck out and wiggles his upper lip in the air, a clear enough indication to you that he either appreciates the scratch or the praise, though you have a sneaking suspicion it’s the former.

Before long, the open desert skyline falls away behind you, replaced by rows of quaint little homes that perch on the outskirts of Jasper. At one point, you even pluck up the courage to click your tongue and ease Tom into a slow, loping trot along the roadside, daring to let yourself enjoy the wind against your face as you raise your hand to thank the occasional driver who slows down when they pass you by, eyes on stalks.

Tom seems more than content to follow the line of the main road at a heavy trot with all the confidence of a horse that’s travelled this path a hundred times before.

Houses and gardens tentatively give way to a park, several run-down shopfronts, and then a library. And even further up the road, Tom slows to a walk and takes you past what must be Jasper’s school, judging by the tumultuous throng of children and teenagers lounging around on the stone steps or waving down their parents’ cars.

“Must be home-time,” you murmur aloud, doing a convincing job of pretending not to notice the plentiful stares and giggles you’re drawing from various clusters of students.

Unnoticed by you, lost among the myriad of youthful faces, a girl sits slumped against the brick wall that runs along the outer perimeter of the school. Her back is arched, a wiry frame hunched possessively over the sketch book she has propped against her bent knees, a pen dancing furiously across the page. 

You don’t notice her at all – why would you when she’s just one of many lost in the crowd of whispering, tittering teens that you’re trying desperately to ignore?

Below you, Tom bobs his head and snorts loudly just as he draws parallel with the student, and all at once, her pale face shoots up from the book, a glittery pen clutched tightly between her fingers falling still against the page.

You very nearly jump out of your skin when a loud, strident voice all but explodes from the comparatively tiny girl on your left.

“WOAH! Hey, I love your horse!”

Even Tom seems mildly taken aback by the exclamation, turning his nose towards the source and flicking his ears up as the girl springs to her feet, pink-tipped bunches bobbing up and down on a head of otherwise black hair.

“Oh!” you bumble, glancing over at her before remembering yourself and flashing a sheepish smile, “Er, I – thanks. He’s, uh, not mine though.”

Apparently undeterred, the girl simply snaps her sketchbook closed, stuffs it under her arm and bounds towards you with the gumption of a crow discovering something shiny, her eyes sharp and sparkling. “Cool!” she announces, keeping pace with the horse’s gait and dropping her voice to a conspiratorial – and far less obtrusive – volume, “You rustle him, or what?”

At once, your face falls, and Tom’s hooves come to a stop on the side of the road as if he can sense that his rider isn’t paying attention and decides to use the opportunity to be idle, but before you can stammer out that ‘No, you did not, in fact, steal a horse,’ another voice pipes up from nearby, scolding and scandalised.

“Miko!”

Glancing sideways along the path, your gaze lands on a pair of boys approaching 'Miko' with varying expressions of concern. The oldest – though not yet old enough to grow a shadow under his chin – has his face pulled into a frown that doesn’t suit his adolescent features, dark brows furrowed over equally dark eyes. Bemused, you can tell he’s trying very hard to level the girl with a look that would give even the most disapproving parent a run for their money.

“You can’t just accuse someone of stealing a horse,” he admonishes, earning an exasperated groan from your newest acquaintance who meets your gaze and jerks her head at the boy as if to say, ‘Can you believe what I have to put up with?’

“Ugh, just ignore him,” she complains aloud, “Jack’s a total fun sponge.”

Noted. 

Sticking like a burr to the older student’s side is another boy – this one far younger than his companion, you deduce. Shorter too. He looks utterly tiny from your position up on Tom’s back, barely standing half as tall as the dark-haired boy, and even then, a lot of his height is lent to him by the wild, flyaway spikes of brown hair that sweep up from his skull. His clothes seem to hang off his frame, giving him bulk where you imagine there isn’t any. Jeans that are far too long have been rolled up several times at the cuffs and crammed into the tops of his trainers, likely to keep him from tripping over their hems every time he takes a step.

You can’t help but notice how nervous he looks, his round face tilted down towards the ground but his eyes wide and upturned behind a pair of thick, black spectacles, eyeing Tom and yourself with dubious curiosity, as if he’s reluctant to venture any closer, yet inquisitive enough to keep his feet shuffling along after his friend anyway.

Of its own accord, your mouth lifts into a friendly smile, aiming it at the youngster, who spots it, blinks in surprise for a moment, and finally offers you a shy, fleeting grin in return.

“Uh, hi! Sorry about her,” the aforementioned Jack pipes up, drawing your attention down to him as he stops beside Miko and gives her a companionable bump with his elbow, “She doesn’t actually think you stole a horse.”

He barely manages to finish his sentence before Miko butts in, her eyes still fixed eagerly on said horse, paying little mind now to the boys at her side. “Can I pet him?” she rushes out, bouncing on the balls of her feet.

“Um…” Sparing a glance down at Tom’s floppy ears, you spend a brief moment mulling over the prospect of letting little fingers venture too close to the mouth of a horse you… really don’t know very well. He looks nonplussed though, and even apathetic to the whole situation, hardly paying more than a lazy glance at the girl inching closer and closer to his neck.

“I think that’s okay,” you give in, “I mean… he hasn’t bitten me yet, so…”

Evidently, even hesitant permission is good enough for her.

Bounding across the remaining distance, Miko wastes next to no time in reaching up and boldly thrusting her hand underneath Tom’s shaggy mane, running it down the length of his strong, muscled neck and gasping in unmitigated delight. 

“Easy, Kid,” you tell her gently as the Shire tosses his head back, snorting at the suddenness of her approach, “He might like a bit of warning next time.”

“Sorry!” she chirrups, her mouth stretched into a toothy grin, entirely preoccupied by the horse.

You get the sense she’s used to apologising on autopilot.

“Just wait’ll Bulk hears about this! He’s gonna freak!” Twisting her neck over a shoulder, she beams eagerly at the boys behind her and barks, “Jack! Raf! Get over here! He’s so soft!”

Jack’s thick eyebrows flinch apart and he quickly raises his hands, shaking them out in front of himself. “Uh, no thanks,” he chuckles awkwardly, trying to play off apprehension as cool indifference, “I’m good. He’s all yours.”

The girl scoffs something under her breath that she’d definitely take flack for if she was overheard by anybody other than yourself. Jack, however, seems nonplussed by the jab, offering you a small shrug when he briefly catches your eye before pulling a phone from his pocket and busying himself with the screen.

Meanwhile, the youngster – Raf, was it? – has taken a hesitant step forwards, leaving his taller friend’s shadow and sidling up to Miko’s flank, his bespectacled eyes flicking back and forth between your face and Tom’s.

“W-what’s his name?” he manages, clenching and unclenching his fists as he gazes at the giant of a horse towering over him.

Relaxing forwards against the saddle horn, you keep an eye on the Shire’s lips when he bends around to snuffle curiously at the hand Miko offers up to his velvety muzzle.

“Tom,” you supply, jerking your chin encouragingly towards the horse’s shoulder and flashing Raf a reassuring grin, “Short for Tom Thumb.”

The smile that’s been playing at the younger boy’s lips finally stretches into something material as he reaches up and brushes the very tips of his fingers over the Shire’s foreleg, quietly uttering, “Hi, Tom.”

Beside him, Miko’s face screws up comically and she scoffs, “Tom Thumb? That’s a dumb name. Should’a called him… er… Oh! Titan! Or – or Thunderhoof!”

Jack flashes her another exasperated glower whilst you nod ponderously at the suggestions, pursing your lips. “Mm. Those are pretty cool names….”

While she tosses a triumphant smirk over her shoulder, you pausing to scratch at the back of your neck, regarding the kids for a few more moments with one eye screwed shut in contemplation. “Say,” you pipe up at last, earning three curious looks, “You guys think you could help me with something?”

“You want us to help you think up a better name!?” Miko suggests hopefully, ducking beneath Tom’s head when he swings it around to nudge at Raf’s arm, doubtless aware of something edible in the boy’s backpack. At first, he lets out a tiny gasp of alarm, but quickly settles, even laughs quietly under his breath when the horse's soft, rubbery lips snuffle the sleeve of his shirt.

“Ah, no,” you huff, amused, “Nothing so exciting.”

Still standing at a respectable – and safe – distance from the Shire, Jack subconsciously mirrors you, lifting an arm to rub at the base of his neck as he says, “Sure, we can um… We can help. What’d you need?”

“You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find… Oh, hang on…” The three of them exchange glances as you delve into the pocket of your shirt and tug out Terry’s scrap of paper, unfolding it and holding it up in front of your face. “Uh…” Squinting at the unsteady scrawl, you read, “Ham’s Home and Hardware?”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are very few things more endearing than teenagers who clearly want to prove they can be helpful.

Miko’s incorrect yet very enthusiastic directions were cautiously disputed by Raf, and then corrected by Jack, who was only too happy to point you towards the right street, even thanking you on behalf of his friends for allowing them to indulge in their curiosity of Tom.

“My pleasure,” you’d returned, throwing a wave over your shoulder as you nudged the horse into a walk, “And thanks again. You guys make sure to get home safely, okay?”

You didn’t understand why Miko snorted, nor why Raf told you rather emphatically not to worry, and why Jack’s soft chuckle and subsequent, ‘Oh, we will,’ seemed a little too knowing, but you didn’t give it much regard.

You were a teenager once too, cryptic and peculiar.

There’s still a very jovial grin perched across your lips by the time you stagger out of the hardware shop with your arms bogged down by plastic bags filled to the brim with Terry’s essentials. As promised, you used almost exactly what he gave you, plus a bit of spare change that jingles around in your pocket, and you made certain to nab the receipt too just in case he’s inclined to check you’ve been honest.

It’s a game to get two new hammers, a box of nails, batteries, and several foodstuffs into Tom’s saddlebags, but you manage somehow, even with an audience of amused shoppers who stop to snicker at your attempts to remount the Shire horse using nothing but a stray traffic cone and sheer force of will.

The sun has dipped considerably lower on the skyline as you ride out of Jasper at a brisk trot, leaving the houses, cul-de-sacs and all the traffic behind you.

After several minutes spent enjoying the barren stillness of the desert and passing by a scorpion that's pre-emptively ventured out into the dying light, your mind wanders to thoughts of your mysterious benefactor, and consequentially, the kind truck driver who picked you up last night…

It’s a coincidence that you can’t rightly ignore.

Optimus…. What was it Terry had called him? The Angel of Highway 49? Insinuating you’re likely to find him on the same stretch of road you came in on last night. And if what Optimus said was true about testing the truck's automated systems when there’s less traffic on the road, your best bet is to venture out after dark…

… Figures.

But, as of this moment, you’re far too tired and far too close to the end of a long, arduous day to go chasing after ‘angels.’

Leaning your weight back in the saddle, you resolve to track down the Peterbilt another time, when you’re not quite so exhausted.

It’s nearly silent on the road. Peaceful, even, and although you’d initially been reluctant to complete this task for your new employer, you have to admit, there’s something very restful about being out here alone…

And as if to rudely remind you that you are not, in fact, alone, the horse below you jerks to a sudden halt.

“Shit!” you yelp, startled, planting your hand on his saddle horn just to keep yourself from being launched out of the stirrups and onto his neck as Tom throws his head up, ears pinned back against his skull.

“What the Hell, Tom?” you gripe, “What’s got you so spooked?” 

Agitation in a horse his size in never subtle.

Nostrils flared towards the sky, Tom’s hooves shift and prance underneath you, and he hauls his sturdy bulk around to stand sideways, aiming a single, rolling eye down the road, back in the direction you’ve just ridden from.

Heart thumping a bruise against the inside of your ribcage, you whip your head about, following his line of sight and clenching the reins between white-knuckled fists. “What!?” you blurt aloud, wholly undeterred by the fact that the horse can’t respond in any comprehendible way, “What is it!?”

And that’s when you hear it.

It starts out faint like distant brontide, the mere threat of a storm approaching on an otherwise peaceful horizon.

Squinting against the dying light, you peer down the road, and at once, your eyes land on a bright, cherry red blob that wavers in the air above the sun-baked tarmac as if it’s nothing more than a mirage, growing bigger and more defined as it hurtles out of Jasper and charges towards you at a breakneck speed.

A sound like thunder given voice rolls across the desert, swelling louder and more obtrusive with every second that flits by, festering in your eardrums until you can almost feel the vibrations thrumming through your chest.

It’s the powerful bellow of a car’s engine.

And it’s coming on fast.

Too fast.

Already, the indiscernible blob has grown into the very vivid shape of a sports car. Part of you hopes the driver will see you in time, and with a sudden burst of urgency, you throw an arm out and swing it up and down as Tom tosses his mane and leans his weight back onto his haunches, forelegs dancing off the ground.

To your quickly mounting horror, the car doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. An impressive cloud of sand and dust flies along in its wake like contrails tailing a jumbo jet, and you realise with a sudden lurch of your gut that you’re miles too late to try and get Tom off the road.

The vehicle is upon you in a matter of seconds.

Before you can even cry out, a blur of angry, scarlet hellfire scorches past you and the horse at a blistering pace, not bothering to swerve around you to put even a modicum of space between itself and Tom.

You almost feel as if the air itself has been ripped out of your lungs at the speed of its passing. Suddenly, your hair is whipped up into a frenzy beneath the riding hat, and Tom’s mane and tail are simultaneously blasted to the side as the atmosphere around you both is sucked along in the wake of the car.

Poor Tom – whose life has only ever known a cavalcade of steady, slow-moving tractors, boats, and even slower humans – finally meets his match in the form of modern automation.

Rearing up onto his hind legs, the Shire belts out a deep, resonant whinny, striking furiously at the air with his hooves. It’s too sudden, too jarring of a movement for you to remember to clamp your knees around the saddle and throw your weight forwards.

With the roar of an engine still buzzing at the inside of your skull, you let out a garbled string of noises and tumble over the back the saddle, your feet slipping from the too-wide stirrups.

Gravity takes you by the throat and pulls. Hard.

You topple, hands outstretched and clasping madly for anything that might prevent the inevitable – reins, mane, saddle… But then the sky is suddenly all you can see, a blur of bleeding hues that flash by as fast as the car had.

It all spins above you, around you, a maelstrom of confusion and alarm until, just as abruptly as it had begun, everything comes to a painful halt.

The hard, sickening ‘thud!’ hits your ears before the pain does.

Your shoulders are the first to strike tarmac, bearing the brunt of a significant fall that knocks the air out of your lungs and leaves them empty and shrivelled, unable to swell enough to produce even a tiny wheeze of pain.

The riding hat bounces off the road next, absorbing the impact on behalf of your cranium, and for one moment, you simply lay there gasping on your back, eyes blown wide as saucers and your mouth hanging open in shock as you listen to the drum of hoofbeats galloping away across the sand, and the equally disheartening drone of a car’s engine receding into the distance.

You blink once…

And then you blink again.

Somehow - you determine with no small amount of trepidation - you’re still conscious.

Good!

You also realise that you can no longer hear Tom’s hoofbeats.

Less good.

Gritting your teeth to stop them from rattling, you screw your face up into a tight ball and push yourself up onto your elbows, squinting at the rear bumper of a car that’s swiftly disappearing down the road.

You suck down a breath, instantly relieved to find your lungs still work, and gasp out a hoarse, incredulous, “Oh-!”

Pausing, you have to swallow down another breath before you have enough air to finish, “My GOD!?”

They could have killed you! Actually, more to the point, they could have killed Tom!

Shock, then anger? Isn't that how it goes?

A pulse pounds aggressively at your eardrums, urging you to scrabble awkwardly but furiously to your feet, blind to the searing twinge in your right shoulder. Once you’re upright, you start to sway as the sudden movement jostles your skull and sends your brain swimming for a few, awful seconds before you clench your eyes shut and take in a steadying breath through your nose.

Shaking, you let it out again in a rush, eyes bursting open and zeroing in on the flash of red, not unlike a bull locking on to a matador’s muleta.

“HEY! SHIT-FOR-BRAINS!” you howl after the retreating car and reach up to fumble agitatedly with your chin strap, all the while snarling like some wild, uncivilised beast as you rip off the helmet and launch it at the ground in a fit of rage, “MAYBE IF YOU PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ARSE, YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO SEE WHERE YOU’RE GOING!”

And as if the desert wind had carried your words down that same road, as if somehow, inexplicably, the driver had heard you, that little dot of cherry red on the horizon suddenly screeches to a stop.

The abrupt switch from thunderous engine to the squeal of rubber tyres on tarmac is shocking enough to wipe the scowl right off your face.

Lungs chugging out breaths like a runaway train, you suddenly find each inhale and exhale far too loud, exacerbated by the jarring silence that’s descended over the desert, leaving you far more conscious of the incessant, high-pitched ringing in your ears.

Far in the distance, that shiny red car– once more warped by the sun’s heat rising from the tarmac – starts to slowly turn itself about.

The breath in your throat catches on spittle.

Swallowing, you straighten up, mildly surprised that the driver has bothered to turn back. You suppose they must have noticed the horseless rider in their rear-view mirror and grew a timely conscience.

Well! Planting your hands squarely on each hip, you give a decisive nod. At least they have the common decency to return and check that they hadn’t, in fact, killed you!

You’re still going to give them a piece of your mind, of course.

Heaving an almighty sigh, you card your hands through your flattened hair and grimace at the sweat that still sticks to your scalp, buried underneath the warm helmet for so many hours. What you wouldn’t give to be in a shower right now, instead of dealing with this catastrophe.

As the car comes pealing back up the road in your direction, its engine roaring like a sea at storm, you lift your hands and hook them behind your head, twisting sideways to grimace helplessly out at the open desert, and the tiny, black dot rapidly galloping off into the distance, running parallel with the road.

“Cold-blooded’ my foot,” you scoff, though not too unkindly. You can’t imagine the old nag has had a lot of experience with flashy, irresponsible speedsters who have a horsepower that far exceeds his own.

… At least he looks to have turned his nose in the direction of Terry’s Dairy…

You’re busy praying to whatever god you think might listen that Tom will make it home in one piece when the particularly aggressive bellow of an engine rips your focus back towards the highway.

You balk violently at the sight of a cherry-red Aston gunning towards you. 

‘What the… Are they…?’

Just moments ago, there’d been a considerable distance standing between you and the car, but in the few short seconds where you took your eyes off it, that distance has been more than halved, and the gap is growing narrower and narrower with every beat of your quavering heart.

The driver must have their foot to the floor.

All the blood drains from your face in a blink. Your muscles go taut of their own accord, some long-buried instinct rears its sleepy head as every ounce of tension flows down to your legs.

A dark, steel grill of the car is aimed directly at you, glinting in the meagre sunlight like a mouthful of bared teeth, threatening and furious.

Twenty yards….

There’s no way they’d really…?

Ten yards…

Shit, it’s right on top of you-

Just as you think you’re about to become a smear across its blood-red bonnet, your body suddenly seizes control away from your brain and you all but launch yourself sideways in a graceless, desperate leap.

You hit the ground hard, landing harshly on your already-bruised shoulder with an ‘oof!’ right as the driver ploughs across the space you’d just been standing not a second earlier.

The wind buffets against you on his pass, and the force of it is strong enough to roll you over onto your side. Following the momentum, you allow yourself to twist all the way around onto your opposite side, gaping in astonishment at the taillights of your would-be murderer.

“What the HELL!?” you can’t help but shriek, heart striking the base of your throat with every, agitated thump.

A flood of crimson light sears your retinas as the car’s brakes engage and it fishtails to a halt nearly one hundred yards up the road, its engine revving so loudly, you can feel the vibrations humming through the palms of your hands when you shove yourself up onto your knees.

“HEY!” you shout, your voice shrill, yet lost and small in comparison to the growling car, “Are you completely insane!?”

You’ve heard it said that it’s never a good idea to call a crazy person crazy.

Once, you believed the notion was a nod to how unmannerly it is to comment on anyone’s state of mind. Now, however, you wonder if the notion exists because asking as much isn’t unlike poking at a sleeping bear.

Risky and altogether ill-advised.

And true to your theory, the driver’s rear wheels start to spin madly before they gather purchase on the tarmac, catching and whipping the vehicle’s nose around to face you.

The wintery bite of ice-water in your veins freezes you in place, stuck on your knees and staring through wide, incredulous eyes at the grill of a rampaging car.

Now, the distance between you and it is meagre. And you’ve already seen the speed at which it can eat up space.

Your palms start to burn where they’re braced against the hard, simmering road, but you keep them splayed there, sweat beading above your lips as you listen to the idle thrum of the engine.

You don’t rightly know what you did to warrant this hostility, but you suppose it hardly matters.

You really do meet all sorts out on the road.

The sun is dipping lower and lower behind the Aston, casting a long, dark shadow that creeps towards you over the tarmac, and almost – almost – ghosts the tips of your fingers. Swallowing thickly, you curl them inwards as if your body knows instinctively that even that intangible part of the car shouldn’t be touching you.

Eyes screwed halfway shut against the light, you set your jaw into a hard, rigid line, braced to react.

It’s a standoff. One you really didn’t see coming.

A hapless farmhand, and an irate driver hidden behind an illegally dark window tint…

The latter observation tugs at something in the back of your mind, and the word ‘shit’ flashes briefly through your skull, soon followed by the more emphatic, ‘Fuck!’

Just whose toes have you managed to step on?

The flashy car, the blacked-out windows, the reckless driving, and blatant disregard for human life....? 

When you were reading up on the state before moving here, didn't you learn that Nevada is a high-intensity drug trafficking area?

…

……. Oh no.

“Oh no,” you reiterate aloud, eyebrows creeping up towards your hairline as a heavy ball of lead drops straight into your gut.

The driver must have been waiting for some realisation to dawn on you because no sooner have you uttered the words than the Aston’s grumbling engine suddenly lets out another deafening roar.

Rubber tyres squeal on the tarmac, spinning in place for a second and kicking up sand like a mustang scraping its hooves before charging.

By the time you’ve flinched at the sound, the car has already lurched forwards, haring towards you once more.

Terror steals the strength from your limbs.

You’re still on your knees, disadvantaged and slow. Too slow to do anything other than throw your arms over your head and bleat out a wild, faltering cry.

“Wait! PLEASE-!”

The plea hasn’t even finished leaving your tongue when the world around you is rocked by an absolutely cacophonous din.

The blast of a horn - apoplectic with rage given its volume - drowns out the engine of your assailant, and before you can register the source of God’s Seventh trumpet, a monstrous titan of blue and contrasting red comes crashing across your field of view.

From out of nowhere, a familiar semi-truck barrels sideways into the path of the oncoming Aston, its massive wheels locking it into place and bringing it to a lurching halt right across the road like a blockade of shining metal and billowing smokestacks.

Mouth agape, you drop your arms and fling your eyes up to the driver’s side door, bowled over onto your back by the unexpected yet timely arrival of the very person you’ve been meaning to find.

“Optimus!?” you blurt squeakily.

Where the Hell did he come from!?

Suddenly, above the truck's rumbling growl, you hear a far less impressive set of tyres squeal sharply on the road as the rampaging driver slams on their brakes.

But they were already far too close to you, and travelling at such a speed, you know without seeing that there’s going to be a collision.

And sure enough….

‘C R U N C H!’

The body of Optimus’s truck doesn’t even budge an inch.

Unstoppable force, meet Immoveable object…

Metal screeches against metal, and the stomach-churning sound of something crumpling splits the air asunder.

Horrified, you watch on whilst the Peterbilt quakes on its struts, rocked by the sheer force of the crash, but here, in this battle of automobiles, size easily trumps speed, and the truck remains unmoved, a steadfast road block standing triumphant between you and the lunatic in the Aston Martin…

Another scream of metal, something pulling loose and clanging to the ground, and then…

“My… My bonnet! MY PAINT JOB!”

Male, you deduce, snobbish and categorically livid.

“Just who in the PIT do you think you-…? Ah…”

To your astonishment, his voice trails off, and there’s the distinct sound of a car peeling itself further out from the truck's side, its engine much more subdued.

“Prime?” the voice hisses to itself, all prior traces of rage gone. You wonder if he’s leaning out of the window to speak.

When he continues, you note the tone has shifted to something far more apprehensive. “Why! What a… a surprise to see you on this stretch of road!”

Optimus’s speakers remain ominously silent whilst his truck’s engine still hums like guard dog growling in its throat, prompting the other driver to sputter over his words.

“I-I was only messing around with the fleshy, you know that! Just a bit of sport!”

‘Fleshy?’ You pull a face. Good god, this guy must be using the drugs he’s smuggling. Every word that comes out of his mouth sounds like the ramblings of a maniac.

“Is it one of yours?”

'Case in point...' you muse. 

“If I’d known, I’d have never-! You know I wouldn’t really want that under my tyres! Far too messy!”

Cloying, saccharine despite the drivel, his tone smacks of a classic schmoozer, but why does it sound as though he and Optimus are acquainted?

Grunting at the pain in your shoulder, you start to bully yourself up off your backside, emboldened by Optimus’s ‘presence.’ Does the Aston driver know there’s little more than a voice behind the wheel of that imposing truck?

He’s saying something else now, his voice growing fainter as the tyres of his car carry him further away from the solid wall of a Peterbilt.

“I’m no fool. I know not to bite off more than I can chew. No need for this to go any further than it already has.”

As if he wasn’t the one who started it.

You nearly feel a pinch of guilt at the schadenfreude of hearing the nervousness on his tongue, but then you remind yourself of what he did to Tom, what he almost did to you, and the grim satisfaction curling in your gut is permitted a place to stay.

“You understand, I’m su-“

All of a sudden, he’s cut off by the low, chillingly dangerous pitch of Optimus’s voice, rumbling out of the hidden speakers. The sound is so clear and sharp, it’s as though the truck itself has been given a tongue.

One word is all he utters. One word that’s packed with the authority of a King. It isn’t shouted. It isn’t even loud. But it is strong. Deep and dark, so much so that it raises the hairs on the nape of your neck and sends a shiver lancing up your spine.

“L E A V E."

The breath catches in your throat, and at the same time, the Aston’s engine goes quiet as if it had just stalled. But soon enough, you hear the driver mutter a cold, “With pleasure,” followed quickly by another screech of rubber burning a hasty retreat down the highway, and at long last, that once intimidating engine fades away into the distance.

In an instant, your whole body sags and you let out a whooshing breath, one you hadn’t even realised you’ve been keeping hostage inside your lungs.

Ahead of you, even the Peterbilt appears to deflate, its hydraulics hissing noisily as it sinks on its tyres, though you’re too busy hobbling around it to pay any real attention.

Staggering unevenly, still reeling from the shock of it all, you venture to the nose of the truck, peeking around its grill to see the shiny, red bumper crest a gentle slope before vanishing below the horizon line.

“…Who-” you begin, gulping down a trembling breath, “-the Hell… was that?”

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

The pounding of hurried footsteps echoes between the barn walls.

Panting, you dart around the side of Terry’s old house just in time to see the last rays of sunlight sink over the cliffs beyond the pastures.

You sprint by a tractor parked up outside the tool shed and briefly cast a glance over at the vehicle sitting directly behind it. Your old truck, a sorry sight to see but nonetheless a tiny droplet of good news in an ocean of bad.

With a heaving chest, you rip your gaze from the truck and continue to pull down uneven breaths as you careen down the dirt path that winds towards the paddock, hoping against hope that you’ll find who you’re looking for.

Your boots catch on a rock when the wooden gate rounds into view, and you very nearly trip over straight onto your face, righting yourself with a lurch and limping to a clumsy halt, your eyes squinting through the murky, evening light.

“Tom?” you half cry, half choke, staggering forwards to catch yourself on the top beam of the gate, “Tom! Oh, thank God!”

You needn’t have worried at all.

It appears as though Terry was correct; his horse does know the way home.

Still burdened by his saddlebags and tack, the colossal Shire’s ear twitches towards the sound of your voice, and his head raises from a pile of dried hay, swinging lazily around to offer you little more than a slow blink in greeting.

You’ve never been so damn happy to see a nag in your whole life.

In contrast to his lacklustre greeting, you’re nearly reduced to tears for the sheer relief of finding him back in his paddock, a relief that’s swiftly knocked aside and replaced with alarm when the tack room door is promptly kicked open with a cacophony of noise.

“KID! THE HELL’VE YOU BEEN!?”

Despite the fatigue dragging your limbs towards the Earth with every passing second, your body manages to leap about a foot into the air as you spin towards the jarringly familiar sight of a livid farmer storming towards you, at least this time without a shotgun propped on his shoulder.

Terry, in all his glory, comes charging from the tack room in your direction, Tom’s bridle swinging wildly from his elbow.

It’s somewhat terrifying to witness – and upon some ingrained instinct, you find yourself cowering back a step and throwing your hands out in front of you, a thousand placating thoughts running through your head.

“Terry!” you gasp, “I-I am so sorry, I can explain-!”

But you aren’t given the chance.

Before you can retreat any further, the farmer is upon you.

Large, calloused hands lash out quick as a whip and snag you by your upper arms, and suddenly, Terry’s grizzled face is thrusting into yours, his eyes wide and his brows stitched together into a long, bushy line.

“F’ckin Christ, Kid!” he shouts, a dot of spittle flying from his mouth and hitting you on the cheek, “Think it’s funny to scare the shit out of me, huh!?”

The pads of his fingers give a squeeze, sending sharp pulses of discomfort shooting up your arm and into your shoulder.

Stiffening in his grip until your spine is ramrod straight, you immediately drop your eyes from his face in deference, jaw working open and closed helplessly until something of substance tumbles out. “I’m sorry,” you stammer again, “I know. I should have been holding onto him properly. It wasn’t his fault! I-is he okay?”

You’re so busy fretting in the direction of his chest that you miss the way his brows spring apart and shoot up towards his thinning hairline.

It’s dawned on you, suddenly, that anything might have happened to Tom on his way back home. He could have lost a shoe, he could have twisted his foot, he could still collapse from the stress of his flight!

“S-Should we call a vet?” you blurt out, risking a glance at the farmer’s face, “Get someone to check him over to see if he’s hurt?”

You’re almost shocked to find Terry staring down at you like you’ve grown a second head, his jaw hanging slack as he squints, brows screwed up into an incredulous glare. “Tom?” he stresses, shaking you slightly, “The Hell’re you talking ab-? Tom’s fine!”

His grasp on your arms is still strong, iron-clad from years of working his hands into sturdy, unbreakable tools, but you don’t dare try to pull yourself free, resigned to hanging limply from his grip as you blink up at him and utter a bewildered, “What?”

“Bout damn near had a heart attack when he came gallopin’ up to the house without you on his back,” the farmer declares just as fiercely, “Did you come off him? What happened?”

Still caught in a moment of uncertainty where you haven’t quite decided if you’re in trouble or not, you stammer out, “We… we were on our way back. Some guy in a sports car raced by, and it spooked Tom. He threw me, but it wasn’t that bad.”

‘Wasn’t that bad?’ an indignant voice scoffs in the back of your head, ‘Could have died. But no big deal.’

You almost consider telling Terry about the aftermath that followed your fall, but then… Terry doesn’t need to know the details of your encounter, does he? If he were to ever discover that you might bring trouble crashing down on his head because of your unwitting involvement with some of Jasper's shady characters, he’s likely to hound you out of the farm lest he too get swept up in the business of remote-accessed trucks and flashy Aston Martins with tinted windscreens.

You wouldn’t wish that upon him, and the less it’s dwelt on, the sooner you can forget the entire thing ever happened at all. A quiet mouth constitutes a quiet life.

You’re pulled from your thoughts by Terry’s brusque harrumph. The hands that had been anchoring you in place finally go slack on your arms, falling away gradually as the old farmer gives you another once-over. “Sport cars,” he spits, oozing poisonous intent from his lips, “Used to see ‘em once in a blue moon. Now, they’re everywhere. Bastards.”

Sparing you another searching look, he folds his arms over his chest and juts his chin at you, grunting, “You sure you’re alright? Nothin’ broken?”

Setting aside the fact that you probably wouldn’t have made it here so quickly if anything was broken, you offer him a shake of your head and a thin-lipped smile. “Nah,” you dismiss, “Just bruised.”

And that, it seems, is reassurance enough for him.

Briskly shrugging off his prior concern as if he’s just realised how much of it he’s shown, the old curmudgeon promptly eases back into his usual demeanour; cantankerous and brusque.

“Well, bruises ain’t gonna be enough to get you out of work,” he informs you with a hearty clap on your shoulder, completely missing the way your eyes burst open and start to water from the impact, “Now c’mon, help me get Tom’s tack off. Did you get everythin’ on my list?”

Oblivious, he sets about dragging you towards the paddock gate whilst you stiffly reach into your shirt pocket and, with two shaking fingers, extract a folded piece of paper and present it to him obediently.

“Your receipt,” you wheeze, using your spare hand to fish out several, crumpled notes from your pocket a moment later, “And… your change.”

-------

It’s been three days since your last run-in with Optimus. But that isn’t to say you haven’t caught glimpses of his truck skulking up and down the road running alongside the farm.

The instances occur most late afternoons, or very early in the morning, when you’re turning the cattle out to pasture. Several times you’ve found yourself peering over the backs of the heifers as they trundle through the gates, and you’ve happened to spot the tell-tale shimmer of tall, gleaming smokestacks lumbering along on the road that stretches into Jasper from the East.

Once the dust settles and the last of the cows are in their respective fields, you always catch a flash of red and blue, standing out proudly against the arid, desert landscape.

And every time you see those contrasting colours, your heart leaps straight into your throat, and you wonder if this is the moment the truck will turn left onto Terry’s farm.

But every time, it rolls on by without incident.

It’s on the third evening that you find Terry standing at parade rest on his back porch, his eyes narrowed against the sun sinking down behind the cliffs far beyond Tom’s paddock.

The sky is red as blood, oozing into softer oranges and ambers with proximity to the sun, lending the impression that the whole horizon is ablaze with empyreal fire. ‘Shepherd’s delight,’ the farmer once told you with a contented, knowing smile.

“Terry?” you call, elbowing the screen door open and giving your boss a once-over, “Hens are all in, and the barns are locked up. Might have a shower before supper. If that’s okay?”

He doesn’t offer much of a response, just stares out at the cliffs and tips his head slightly to the side, grunting out the vaguest hint of acknowledgement.

“Terry?” you ask again, moving further into the porch and letting the door creak shut in your wake.

“You hear it?”

An eyebrow slides inquisitively up your forehead. Sparing a glance back into the house, you rack your head gently from side to side, torn between humouring him, and slipping away quietly before you can get caught up in… whatever this is.

Heaving a bone-deep sigh, you begrudgingly sidle onto the porch beside him, leaning your elbows on the wooden beam and following his gaze out towards the procession of towering, red rock in the distance.

“What am I listening for?” you ask patiently, lamenting the blissful shower you could be enjoying right now were it not for your guilty conscience.

Terry, in a way you’re sure is deliberately cryptic, doesn’t take his eyes off the view as he sticks his chin out at the cliff face and responds, “Ground’s singin’.”

And, well. That clears that up.

Still, you can’t deny yourself a brief spell of curiosity… Falling silent, you furrow your brow and concentrate, straining your ears to hear anything out of the ordinary.

A resounding moo drifts gradually across the dairy, echoing out into the desert until everything goes still and quiet once more.

But beyond that…

… Nothing.

Then again, you’ve only been here for three days.

Terry has lived out here, according to the man himself, for as long as he can remember. He inherited the land from his late father and grew up working in the shadows of these rocky mesas, knowing them all as well as he knows dirt under his fingernails.

If the ground is doing something strange, you wager he’d be the expert.

“Oh-kay,” you sigh, weary, “Enlighten me, Ter. What does that mean?”

“Means them damn teens’re messing around in the old mine shafts again, s’what!” he declares abruptly, tossing an arm out towards the distant cliffs looming a few hundred yards from the farm’s border. “I see their headlights sometimes at night! Drivin’ over there, going down underground, and playin’ their punk music so loud it shakes the Earth! I can feel the vibrations in my bones when I sleep!”

… Perhaps ‘expert’ is a stretch.

You manage to hold onto a snort at the farmer’s expense. Not even a week has gone by, and you’ve already come to accept that if Terry believes there’s something unusual afoot, the culprits are either the Government, aliens, or most nefarious of all, teenagers.

“Mine shafts?” you huff sceptically, “Out here?”

“Oh sure, s’no end of caves under the cliffs,” he tells you, scratching at the underside of his stubbled chin, “This is the silver state, Kid. Back in the eighteen-sixties, bunch’a Mormon settlers thought they’d struck a vein down there. Sunk their mines right under the rock.”

Hacking up a globule of saliva, he spits it between his teeth and watches it sail across the yard, landing a fair distance away near the paddock’s fence.

Impressive, you decide as you pull a face, if a little disgusting.

“Course, all they found down there was some kind’a quartz,” he continues, working his jaw, “Worthless when you’re on the hunt for gold and silver.”

Your lips twitch with a subtle wince as you shift the weight off one arm and onto the other. You’d been right about the bruising. This morning, you’d twisted around to inspect yourself in the dusty, bathroom mirror and found a dark bloom growing underneath the skin on your shoulder blade. Damn thing is stiff as a board, rendering your right arm far more feeble than you’d like.

“No kidding,” you say distractedly, rolling your shoulder, “You ever been down them?”

Harrumphing loudly, he twists his head around to shoot you a bewildered glare and scoffs, “Hell no! You ain’t gettin’ me down no hole in the ground! Roof could collapse at any moment!”

“But you think teenagers are going down there to… what? Throw parties?” you posit, trying not to let incredulity seep into your tone.

Terry’s expression somehow manages to sour even further, drawing into a scowl that cuts deep, chasmic wrinkles across his forehead and turns the lines around his eyes sharp as papercuts. “Oh, I’d bet they’re doin’ more than that,” he mutters darkly, turning back to the bleeding sky.

“Oh, scandalous!” you gasp and slink closer to him along the beam, willingly putting yourself within range, “You think they’re down there…. making out?”

The anticipated noise of sheer, unbridled revulsion that falls out of Terry’s mouth is lost under your own startled laughter as he rips the flat-cap off his head and swats you with it until you retreat from the porch, your arms thrown up to protect your face.

“I meant they’re drinkin’! Get your head out’a the gutter! Damn reprobate…”

You’d gone to bed that night in a far better mood than you had since the day you arrived at the dairy, thoughts of strange, mysterious vehicles and dangerous drug dealers far from your mind.

-----------------------------

The analogue clock on your wall has just ticked over the twelve o’clock mark when there’s an almighty ruckus at your bedroom door.

Knocking. Furious knocking, accompanied by a muffled shout of your name.

Jarred awake, you lurch upright in the bed so fast that your head starts to swim dangerously, tilting the whole world to one side and making it very difficult to fumble with the lamp on your bedside table.

“Ach, shit!” you hiss through your teeth, slamming your eyes shut against the searing light when it spews to life and chases the darkness into the furthest corners of the room, “M’up… I’m up!”

The knocks haven’t diminished. They’ve barely even paused. And through the rapidly receding haze of your sleepy fugue, you manage to register Terry’s voice hollering at you through the thin wooden door, a manic excitement in his tone when he tells you to, ‘Get up! Get up n’ get’chyer ass out here!’

The first coherent thought that crosses your mind is that you’ve overslept.

In a mad bustle of sheets and frantic curses, you throw yourself off the bed and stumble drunkenly towards the door with your eyes squeezed halfway shut.

It takes you a few seconds to grab the handle, and another to remember to fumble with the bolt before you succeed in yanking it open.

The door barely has time to clear out of the way when a hand lashes over the threshold and grabs you by the wrist, and without any pomp or ceremony, you’re rudely hauled outside into the yard by a very agitated farmer.

“The Hell took you so long?” Terry demands breathlessly.

With a grumble, you rub at your smarting shoulder, though you aren’t given a moment to gather your bearings any further before you raise your head and register a glint of metal hanging off the farmer’s arm.

“Jeezus, Terry!” you exclaim, lurching backwards and tearing yourself out of his grasp, “Again with the gun?”

"Ah, quit whinin'. I told you, it ain't loaded." 

Sure enough, there he stands, back straight under the moonlight with his faithful shotgun broken safely to hang over his elbow, and wearing nothing but his long johns, wellington boots and an oil-smeared, chequered shirt that hangs open around his wiry gut.

You snatch your eyes away from the pale flash of skin with a huff.

Not that you’re faring much better in the decency department yourself.

Bare feet hold you unsteadily on the chilly sand. The flannel pyjama bottoms at least provide you with a little protection against the nightly breeze that hisses across the desert, but your tank top admittedly doesn’t do much to prevent goosebumps from springing up along your arms and the ample flesh that’s exposed on your chest.

Shivering by the doorstep, you primly fold your arms over one another and demand, “What the Hell is going on?” Then, shooting a glance up at the moon hanging bright in the sky overhead, you add, “What time is it?”

You aren’t graced with a comprehendible response from Terry, who merely kicks at your own wellingtons that you’d left by the door-scraper last night.

“Get your boots on,” he tells you, scowling ominously into the distance, “We’ve got company.”

“What?” Pinching a thumb and forefinger around the bridge of your nose, you do little to stop your jaws from parting into a wide, toothy yawn. “Company? What are you talking about?”

Even still, you awkwardly balance on one leg and feed the toes of your foot into the first boot, cringing unhappily at the feeling of bare skin on the cold, carbon lining.

“I knew they were up to somethin’,” Terry gripes, turning to shoot you an impatient glance as you struggle with your second boot, “Cows’re spooked to hell. Damn teens.”

Uttering a grunt, you finally stamp your feet properly into the wellingtons and straighten up, returning Terry’s glare with a tilt of your head. You open your mouth, ready to ask him what in the world he thinks is so important that you’ve been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, when you finally hear it.

Lowing.

Your head swings around towards the barns, a chill prickling up your spine when you realise you’re listening to the deep, hollow lows of the cattle inside, calling to one another, a great mass of animals awake and mooing at an hour where they should be asleep.

Terry only spares you a grunt before he takes off at a brisk stride, leading the charge around the side of his house.

You gape after him in a stupor for a second before hurriedly shaking yourself out of it and kicking up your heels, breaking into a jog as you follow after the old farmer, your ears ringing with the mournful calls of the herd at your back.

-------------------------------

It’s with a creeping acceptance that you start to believe Terry when he told you the ground was singing.

Though in your private opinion, you’re a little more inclined to say that it isn’t so much singing as it is buzzing.

Side by side, both you and your employer stand with varying degrees of apprehension in front of the entrance to a long, unfathomably pitch-dark cave. The torch you’d been handed halfway to the cliffs rattles between your cold fingers, and its pitiable beam barely even cuts a slice out of the blackness ahead, illuminating brief glimpses of rugged walls and an arched ceiling that’s only being held aloft by rickety, wooden beams.

A mine shaft, just as Terry had described. It slopes at a jarring angle, gulped down by the earth beneath the cliffs like the gullet of some gigantic, dormant monster.

You swallow. Hard. The lump in your throat doesn’t budge.

Even through the thick, rubber soles of your boots, you can feel incessant vibrations humming up into your feet from somewhere far below the sand, a low, rhythmic pulse that reminds you of the times you’d lie awake at night, listening to the neighbours throw a party down the street. The music was indiscernible, but the bass would thump in your heart and between your ears until you rolled over and stuffed a pillow on top of your head.

That never did block it out entirely.

And although you can’t hear anything at the moment, you’re not so proud as to deny that there’s something tangible there. Something that feels a lot like –

“Music,” you breathe.

Terry pulls a face beside you, half smug that he’d been proven right and half incensed that he had to be right in the first place.

“They’re down there,” he knows grimly, “Stupid kids, don’t know what the Hell they’re gettin’ themselves into.”

You have to agree with him on that front. With steadily rising trepidation, you watch on as the occasional sprinkling of dust is shaken loose from the wooden beams, trickling down into the light cast by your torch.

If there are kids down there, you’ve no doubt that they’re in far graver danger than they probably realise.

“Okay,” you whisper shakily, readjusting your grip on the torch and bobbing your head towards the yawning maw of the shaft, “So, what do we do?”

Terry harrumphs, shooting you a sideways glance. “What’d you think? You gotta get down there and flush ‘em out!”

Stunned, your jaw just about hits the ground. Whirling to face him, you sputter out a few nonsensical sounds before finding your tongue and exclaiming, “Excuse me!? No!”

Terry actually has the gumption to cock an eyebrow at you, looking for all the world like a man who can’t fathom why you wouldn’t think he’s just presented a good idea. “Why not?” he asks, “S’what I hired you for.”

“You hired me to help you look after the farm!” you shrilly point out, voice cracking around frayed nerves.

“What’d you think this is?” Throwing up an arm, he jabs it at the tunnel entrance indicatively and adds, “Those hooligans down there’re scarin’ my cattle! And scared cattle don’t make milk. Without the milk, this farm’s sunk-” He pauses briefly to inhale, eyeing you with a sombre frown. “-And you’ll be out of a job!”          

“So, call the police!” you insist, “They can solve this safely, and they’d make sure the mines are closed off, so it doesn’t happen again.”

At that suggestion, Terry rounds on you with all the abruptness of a rabid dog, his lips drawn back to expose whiskey-yellowed teeth. “You outta yer goddamn mind!?” he barks venomously, “This is a dairy farm! Ain’t no place here for pigs.”

Oh of course. Why are you not surprised?

Like a bewildered goldfish, your mouth pops open and closed for several seconds whilst you try to come up with an argument that might get through his ornery skull, a hesitation which Terry takes full advantage of by planting his palm on your back and giving you an encouraging shove towards the mouth of the cave.

“You’ll be fine,” he declares, “All you gotta do is get in there, spook ‘em a little, and they’ll go runnin’. Now go on, get!”

Ah, the dichotomy of Terry, who will kick up an almighty fuss if you fall off a horse but would send you down into a structurally-questionable mine to flush out an unknown enemy.

“Wait, I mean a-are you sure about this?” you quibble, clutching the torch between your sweating hands and gulping loudly into the darkness.

“Sure I’m sure,” he responds, “Get goin’ before those kids cause any more damage.”

Right… Yes. Whether you like it or not, there are people down there. Kids, supposedly. And so far as you’re aware, you and Terry are the only people who know about their little rendezvous under the earth.

If something does happen and you didn’t do anything to stop it…

What an inconvenient predicament, to grow a conscience right at this very second.

Heaving out an almighty groan, you take your first tentative step towards the entrance, only to freeze on the spot, swivelling your head over one shoulder and giving Terry an imploring look. “Hang on… Aren’t you coming too?”

“Not a hope in Hell, Kid,” he says, backing away from the tunnel with his hands held out in front of him, “Got that claustrophobia in me, n’such.”

“I thought you said you were worried because the roof might cave in?”

“Ah, that ain’t important,” he quickly deflects, “Besides, someone’s gotta stay up here to nab ‘em when they come scurryin’ out of their hole like rats.”

“Terry.” You flash him an admonishing scowl before turning back to the mine shaft. “They’re teenagers, not rodents.”

Behind you, the farmer grumbles something you can’t hear, though you doubt it’s very polite.

Drawing in a deep, burning lungful of air, you lift your boot and step neatly beneath the lip of the tunnel, replacing a ceiling of stars with a palate of black, glistening rock.

At your back, you hear Terry call out one final reassurance.

“If you’re not back in an hour, I’ll send Tom in after ya! Ha!”

The trouble is, you’re not entirely sure he’s joking.

----------------------------

Down and down, further and further under the Earth’s crust, you trek.

The soles of your boots thud dully in the narrow passage with each unsteady step, echoing out ahead of you and disappearing around the bend.

You hate this.

It’s colder here than it was up on the surface, and you find yourself wishing you’d asked Terry if you could grab a jumper before venturing forth. Then again, you also find yourself wishing you’d simply told him to go to Hell. It certainly feels as though that’s where you’re headed, after all.

The darkness is pressing in around you on all fronts, and only the paltry beam from your torch keeps you pushing onwards, carving a perfect cone of light out of an ink-black mire for your eyes to follow.

With each passing minute, the vibrations seem to grow ever stronger, and it isn’t long before you can actually hear something audible that differs from the bassy rumble in your chest. You can’t put your finger on what you’re hearing, the sound is too faint, but at a push, you’d liken it to something you’d hear in a dentist’s office. Like the whir of a drill.

Machinery…

It sounds like machinery.

Stumbling over a loose rock, you clench your teeth and press on, griping miserably to yourself about your circumstances.

You’re going to die down here. You’re going to die, and it’s going to be all Terry’s fault, and you can only hope that when you do die, he’s the sorry bastard who has to drag your body out of this accursed mine.

Morbidly, you wonder what your epitaph will say.

‘Here lies Y/n. ‘Caved’ under the pressure.’

Ha.

For several, stomach churning minutes, you continue to traipse down the unchanging tunnel, humming nervously to yourself, a wordless tune that only really serves to fill the shaft with some noise other than the faraway drone of machines or music or whatever on Earth it is that’s going on down here.

All of a sudden, you come upon a sharp curve.

Your boots scrape to a halt just shy of it, and you find yourself peering down at the path ahead, eyebrows knitting together as you study the stones and grit right in front of the turn.

They’re… visible.

They’re visible without your torch pointing at them.

The longer you focus, the more you start to notice that there’s an ethereal blue glow emanating from somewhere around the corner, faint but undeniably there, and just to reassure yourself that your eyes haven’t started to play tricks on you in the dark, you hover a thumb over the switch on your torch.

Bracing yourself, you take a deep breath, and flick it off, plunging the tunnel into darkness.

All at once, your heartrate skyrockets. Instincts that usually remain dormant are very frantically reminding you that being without your eyesight in an unknown place is both alarming and ill-advised.

But then, your vision starts to adjust, and you cast your gaze to the ground again, determining that, yes, there’s definitely light creeping up the mine shaft from somewhere around the next bend.

But how?

Well… There’s only one way to find out.

Exhaling shakily through pursed lips, you urge your legs to carry you beyond the corner…

… and into the final stetch of the mine shaft.

It’s with a confusing blend of relief and dread that you see the tunnel’s end laying just a few metres ahead.

Hesitant steps bring you clear beneath the last rickety, wooden beam, and you tilt your head back to gawk as the tunnel opens up into a vast cavern, its ceiling curved in a magnificent arch that looks to stand twice the height of Terry’s farmhouse.

Mouth agape, eyes on stalks, you venture, mystified into the subterrane with slow, shuffling footfalls.

You can’t take your eyes off the ceiling.

Embedded in the rock overhead – and indeed in the walls all around you – are deposits of the quartz Terry mentioned.

Hundreds of them.

And all of them, every single cluster and shard, is aglow with that same ghostly, blue light.

Rivets of it run along the walls like veins, and you allow your eyes to trace their path as you move towards the centre of the cavern, head tipped back as you spin slowly on the spot, taking in the ethereal sight with no small measure of awe.

It’s… beautiful.

You’re almost glad Terry woke you up in the middle of the night and sent you down an abandoned mine shaft wearing nothing but your pyjamas…

… Bastard.

Still, at least now you know where the light was coming from. It’s bright enough in here that the torch dangling from your grasp is rendered temporarily unnecessary.

But what in the world is making the quartz glow like this? And why would the miners of old just leave all these untapped deposits untouched?

… One probability occurs to you quite suddenly… It’s not a very reassuring probability either, and it certainly puts a dampener on your exhilarating discovery.

While you’re no expert on geology, even a layman like you has heard of the radioactive properties of Uranium. But even raw Uranium, as potent as it is, doesn’t glow like these crystals. Doesn’t glow at all, in fact.

So what exactly are you looking at here…?

As the trepidation starts to seep back into the spaces between your bones, you become dimly aware that the omnipresent resonance has grown unmistakably stronger.

Louder too. That strange whirring is caught in the dome of the ceiling and echoes back down towards you, buzzing behind your gritted teeth. It reminds you why you ended up down here in the first place.

Tearing your gaze off the quartz overhead, you cast an eye about to take in the rest of the cavern, at last noticing that there are several more off-shooting tunnels hewn from the walls.

And there’s one in particular that seems to funnel the whirring sound straight to you when you turn an ear towards it.

But the mystery of the droning thrum falls well to the bottom of your priority list when your eyes land on a large rock sitting just to the side of the tunnel entrance. Quick as a flash, your gaze is drawn to something crouched behind it on the near-side.

Three somethings, in fact.

Three familiar somethings…

… Oh God.

You recognise that sweep of jet-black hair, those pink-tipped pigtails, and the flyaway, brunette spikes.

You recognise them even with their backs to you, heads craned up to peek over the flat top of the rock and into the dark tunnel beyond.

Without warning, you suck down a loud, startled gasp, only to choke on a fleck of spit that hits the back of your throat at the wrong angle.

Beating a fist roughly against your chest, you can’t stop yourself from hoarsely blurting, “YOU three!?”

Apparently, they hadn’t noticed you either until now. 

You’ve never seen a more damning admission of guilt than two teenagers and one pre-teen jumping out of their skins and unleashing variously-pitched shrieks of alarm, knocking into each other in their haste to whirl around and see who has managed to sneak up on them unnoticed.

Sure enough, three startled faces blink owlishly back at you; The students you met during your ride into Jasper.

“You!?” the girl parrots, her own echo chasing yours several times over around the cavern.

You don’t quite know how to react for a moment or two, bowled over by an awful burst of horror as you register that not only are these children well outside the safety of Jasper, but they’re down here in the middle of the night without any sign of an adult accompanying them.

And therein lays the true horror; Somehow, you’ve ended up with the mantle of ‘responsible adult.’

Shit.

Finding your voice again, you take several, rapid steps in their direction, flicking a searching eye over Jack, Miko and Raf respectively.

“What are you guys doing down here!?” you stress, fisting a hand into your hair and tugging at the strands. And then, after noting the looks of abject panic flashing across their faces, you hurriedly ask, “Are you okay!? Anyone hurt?”

“Uh, thankfully not,” Jack speaks up, shooting Miko a highly accusing glare who returns the look with a petulant roll of her eyes.

Relieved by that much at least, you heave out a sigh, fixing the older boy with your sternest frown that’s woefully offset by the fact that you’re quivering with nervous energy.

“Okay, but my question still stands!” you exclaim, “What the f-…! Heck are you three doing in a mine!?”

“Um…”

Three pairs of eyes frantically dart between one another, gleaning… something from the glances that you can’t even hope to decipher.

Miko is the first to pipe up, stabbing her forefinger in the air triumphantly and declaring, “Homework!” which wouldn’t be half as suspicious if Raf hadn’t, at the same time, offered, “Geological survey?”

Quick as a whip, the girl amends, “-A geological survey for… for school! Ergo, homework!”

Then she plasters on a grin that’s too wide and entirely too sunny to be any kind of convincing.

Jack, for his part, looks as though he would rather be anywhere else at all right now, given how tightly he's pinching the bridge of his nose.

Wordlessly, you level Miko with a measured look that you hold for several, long seconds until even her bravado seems to droop and she shrinks back, cowed by the weight of your stare.

However, it isn't in your nature to hold a glare for too long, and eventually, you let your eyes slip shut and draw in a noisy breath through flared nostrils.

“Look,” you start, eyes peeling open to flick between each of them in turn, “It really doesn’t matter why you’re here. That’s not my business. What is my business is getting you guys out. These tunnels aren’t safe.”

You garner three differing reactions to that statement.

Miko throws her brows up and snorts. Jack elbows her soundly in the ribs, and Raf presses his lips together and throws a frightened glance over the rock, humming anxiously.

"Is there anyone else down here?" you ask. 

All too quickly, both Jack and Miko lurch towards you and cry out, "NO!"

Startled, you lean away from them slightly, raising a brow.

"Uh, no... No, it's... it's just us," Jack amends, smoothing a hand across the base of his neck.

“Um, guys,” Raf croaks, still peering over the rock, “Maybe we should-“

“-Wait a second, hang on.” Miko bulldozes over his timidity, puffing out her chest and trying her utmost to draw herself up to your height. Her gaze turns critical when she demands, “What’s with the third degree? You gonna rat us out? What are you doing down here?”

You blink.

Jack does as well, though he seems mildly less surprised and more exasperated by the sudden tone shift.

Raf just gulps.

“I am here,” you enunciate tersely, “Because my boss sent me in to find the teenagers he thinks are throwing a party at the bottom of a mine that could collapse at any moment!”

“Party?” Jack repeats, screwing his face up incredulously.

Not one of you notices the ground shuddering beneath your feet.

Once, twice… A quaking pulse runs through the rock, mingling with the drone of distant machinery.

“I’ve found the teens,” you continue, oblivious, “And I’d really, really like to get them out of here before anyone gets hurt.”

Turning his attention back to you, Raf lets out a soft sound of surprise when he finds your hand held out in front of his face, fingers loose and relaxed, inviting.

You catch his gaze, ducking your head to flash him what you hope is a reassuring smile that softens the worried lines between your brows.

“You’re not in trouble,” you address them all gently, “I’m not gonna rat you guys out to your parents, if you come topside with me right now. Deal?”

You elect to tackle the issue of Terry once they’re out of the mines. But for now…

You aren’t looking at Jack and Miko, so you don’t see the way they suddenly turn rigid and tilt their heads back to gape at the roof of the cave.

Raf is still regarding your hand as if it might dart out and scratch him. But as you hold still, deaf to the heavy thumps making their way towards you, he quietly adjusts his glasses and starts to stretch his own hand out towards yours, enormous brown eyes flitting up to peek at your face.

They only linger on you for a second longer before they promptly shoot straight up over your head, widening to the size of dinner plates behind his thick, black glasses.

Without warning, the boy flinches backwards and lets out a yelp, and it’s only then you register that Jack and Miko have done the same, plastering themselves to the rock at their backs.

A sudden and resounding ‘thump!’ hits the ground right behind you, exceedingly loud and alarming close.

Spooking like a flighty mare, you drop your torch with a clatter and spin your head over one shoulder, shooting a quick, hasty glance out at the cavern to see….

… pillars?

Your brain skips a beat as it attempts to define what your eyes are seeing.

Two pillars have appeared side by side not ten feet from you, wider than you are and taller to boot, pillars that you’re almost entirely certain weren’t there when you arrived.

“Well, well, well~!”

Your stomach takes a nose-dive off a cliff at the slimy drawl of an unseen voice filling the chamber like a claxon.

“Now, isn’t this a serendipitous surprise…”

All the moisture dries up in your mouth, a rising bubble of dread bursts open in your guts, and it’s with a great reluctance that you let your eyes travel up the length of the silver pillars, finding where they meet at their apex and continuing on, up over interlocking sheets of metal, both black and gunmetal grey.

A machine? The machine that’s been causing all the ruckus?

With the breath caught in your throat, you brave the last few feet, lifting your gaze higher and higher, past a torso that tapers into a broad, silver chest until at last, you land on -

“-Starscream,” Miko snarls poisonously.

Unblinking, your eyes bulge from their sockets, trying to process what you’re seeing with the desperation of a human attempting to comprehend an eldritch God.

Twin circles of hellish red light sear down at you from twenty-something feet in the air, set side by side on an angular countenance like a pair of…

‘…. Eyes,’ you fathom silently to yourself, cold liquid trickling into your veins at the comprehending of it all, ‘That’s a face…’

You unleash a sharp gasp when the face unexpectedly moves, metallic plates shifting apart and coming together seamlessly until you realise you’re staring up at a mouth. A mouth that’s… stretching, opening gradually as it quirks up at the corners to resemble a very nasty smirk.

It looks… as insane as the notion is… like a robot. But its movements are too fluid, and its size is too substantial to have been made by just anyone. In fact, it looks as though it could have stepped off the pages of a science-fiction novel. All sharp angles and gleaming battle armour.

It’s only then that you register its… arm? You suppose that’s the best equivalent – is held out in front of it and tipped down at you, and something sits atop the silver stretch of metal. Something sleek and long, tapering down to a red, domed tip.

A missile.

You can’t speak. A nerve in your throat locks up tight and refuses to be dislodged.

The cold water in your veins turns to ice.

The air in your lungs goes stale.

The kids-

Oh, Jesus, shit. The Kids!

You can hear their shoes scuffing the dirt as they try to press themselves backwards into the rock. You can hear Raf’s chest hitch and Jack’s teeth click together.

By your own admission, you’re not an especially brave person. Then again, you’ve never truly been in a situation that called for a bout of selfless courage to rear its head. You used to wonder, when the chips are down, would your body choose fight or flight? Personally, you always leaned towards it being the latter. After all, the bravest thing you’ve ever done is to pack up what little you possess, flee your home and travel to the middle of nowhere on the back of a flimsy job offer. And even that was arguably the most cowardly thing you’ve ever done.

Which is why it comes as such a visceral shock – even to yourself - when you bodily whirl around to face the giant, mechanical… thing, and throw your arms out wide, shielding the children behind you.

With your eyes locked unwaveringly on those blood-red circles of light, you crowd the kids backwards, drawing a grunt of protest from Miko as you pin them all firmly to the rock and press them as close to your comparatively broad backside as you possibly can.

Raf’s tiny fingers clasp fistfuls of your pyjama bottoms, pinching at the skin on your leg with the fervour of his grip, yet you barely notice the pain.

Every single one of your senses has been blindsided by the appearance of the monster looming above you.

You don’t have the first idea what’s going on.

All you know - all your brain can fathom - is that there’s a recognisable weapon aimed point-blank at you and the kids, and that its wielder stands almost as tall as the cavern ceiling and wears an expression that shouldn’t be possible on a face made of metal.

Silver wings like those you’ve seen on aeroplanes protrude upright from behind its shoulders as it continues to observe you with all the regard of someone who’s just picked a speck of dirt from under their fingernails.

That strange slat for a mouth creeps down in one corner, giving you a flash of white sheet metal that lies inside the cavity like teeth.

They part, and you flinch violently when the gargantuan robot speaks, eradicating any doubts that this is the owner of the sly, oily voice you heard before.

“Any last words?” it posits menacingly, cocking its head to one side and raising a sleek, slender panel on its forehead that you only later realise serves the same purpose as an eyebrow.

Maybe it was expecting a coherent response. Hell, maybe it wasn’t expecting a response at all.  

But you’re almost sure what it hadn’t been expecting was for the nerve to suddenly come untangled from your throat, nor for you to drop your mouth open, suck down an entire lungful of air…

… And scream.

Chapter Text

On paper, the mission brief had seemed quite straightforward.

Investigate the substantial Energon signature that Ratchet's scans had turned up, get in, gather as much as they could carry, and get out again.

Optimus knew the likelihood of beating the Decepticons to the punch was minimal, at best. No doubt the only reason Ratchet's scanners had picked up anything was because raw Energon had been exposed where it wasn't before, say, by a mining operation that drilled straight into a fresh deposit laying deep beneath the Earth's crust.

The coordinates had been of immediate concern to the Prime, and as soon as the team was debriefed, he and Bulkhead drove straight out to the reference point with their pedals almost to the floor, though the latter couldn't fathom his Leader's sudden sense of urgency, and when prodded, Optimus only told him that the location was 'concerningly close to a human settlement.'

It was a mine, long-abandoned, sunk beneath the cliffs near a large agricultural unit.

They were to evaluate the subterranean passages, determine the level of Decepticon activity, preferably without engaging, and look for any opportunity to seize Energon from the enemy forces. Underhanded, perhaps, but if it secures his Autobots a few more months of precious fuel, Optimus isn't above resorting to clandestine tactics.

Of course, as it's been said before, even the best laid plans often go awry...

----------

The sturdy cables of Optimus’s neck buck and strain against their tubing as he wrenches his helm towards the Southern tunnel, his optical apertures spinning wide, blazing with a fierce, cyan light.

Hidden parallel to his leader, ducked down behind a stack of energon crates on the other side of the cavern, Bulkhead does the same, his colossal chin piece falling open with a dull ‘thunk,’ and his entire frame turning rigid with alarm.

Unfortunately for them both, so too do the frames of all four Vehicon Miners.

One by one, each of the energon drills wind down to sputtering halts as their wielders disengage from the deposits in the cave walls, pausing to turn their inexpressive masks towards the disruption.

And what a disruption it is.

A haunting, spinal-strut-chilling shriek is ringing out through the mine like an air-raid siren, more piercing than the drills and far shriller than the clanking of heavy machinery. The sound goes on and on, even when the source runs out of steam, and only the echo of a scream passes through the labyrinthian tunnels until that too falls silent, leaving every Cybertronian who heard it caught in a moment of temporary bewilderment.

Optimus is the first to recover.

Denta grit tightly behind his mask, he draws his slate-dark brow plates together and begins gauging the distance between his hiding spot and the tunnel.

Speed will be essential here… Because it’s to his utmost distress that he’s matched the vocal patterns of the distant scream to that of a human.

In the next instant, his private com-link scratches to life, and Bulkhead’s hushed, bassy voice is whispering into the Prime’s audials.

“That wasn’t Miko, Boss,” he defends his charge without hesitation.

Admirable, of course. But in this instance, unnecessary.

Optimus is well aware that the cadence of the scream doesn’t belong to any one of their charges. He has them logged, after all – though he often wishes he didn’t, if only because those audio logs serve as constant reminders that there have been times where the three younglings – whilst under his care- were in states of distress severe enough to cry out at all.

That aside however, Optimus is also confident that right now, the children are safe and sound back at the Autobot base with Ratchet, doubtless waiting anxiously for Arcee and Bumblebee to return from a routine scouting mission around Jasper’s outskirts.

But that begs the question; why would a human be down here in a defunct mine during the middle of the night?

It’s a question he doesn’t give much processing power to, not when there is a far more urgent matter at hand that needs addressing.

Loathe to wait even another second for something bad to happen to the unfortunate, wayward human, the Prime heaves himself out of his crouch and vaults gracefully over the energon stacks he’d been using as cover, barking a single, concise order to his comrade-in-arms.

“Engage!”

He’s barely cleared cover when he hears Bulkhead’s response.

“So much for the element of surprise!”

A necessary sacrifice.

If there’s a human down here in danger, they no longer have the luxury of scoping out the mine’s multiple chambers and trying to take things slow.

No matter.

What matters is getting to them before whatever – or whoever - frightened them can do any harm.

Optimus’s explosive arrival sends the Vehicons scrambling about to face him, and no less than two of the four manage to drop their handheld drills in shock.

“Prime’s here!?” one bellows, tripping over his own pedes in his haste to retreat towards the far wall.

“And he brought company!” his fellow growls.

No sooner has he spoken than an eruption of noise rocks the cavern as Bulkhead comes careening around the side of his hiding spot with all the unstoppable brutality of a runaway freight train.

“Head’s up!” he bellows, raising his hefty arm high into the air and charging for the first, unfortunate Miner.

Only one seems to have recovered in time to aim his plasma cannon at Optimus, who ducks smoothly beneath the first shot and skids along the ground on his knees for several metres, drawing up close enough to the Con to negate any space between them.

Before a second round can even charge in its chamber, one of the Prime’s enormous metal servos curls into a devastating fist, and with the struts of his forearm tensed and locked in preparation, he launches himself off his knees and –

‘CRUNCH!’

The knuckles of his servo connect with the Vehicon’s chin-guard with terrifying precision.

An uppercut, the power behind which is enough to send the dark, purple visor snapping backwards with an audible crack. Its wearer is quick to follow suit, crumpling over onto his back before Optimus’s fist has even finished its upswing.

One down…

Bulkhead has also reached his own Con, and Optimus is glad to see that he seems to have taken the Prime’s briefing to spark.

Incapacitate only, where possible.

These are miners, not warriors.

The wrecking ball perched on the end of Bulkhead’s arm is already swinging by the time the Con has his own weapon readied, and it’s promptly knocked aside by the Wrecker’s weaponised name-sake, who is quick to follow up with a single punch to the Vehicon’s helm.

One, hard wallop, and he’s down like a sack of bricks.

Two down, two to go…

The remaining pair, those clumsy enough to have dropped their drills, at least seem wise enough to recognise when they’re outmatched.

Bulkhead wheels about, shaking scraps of the miner’s visor from his fist as he glowers at the retreating taillights of two, purple vehicles fleeing as fast as their tyres can carry them down one of the adjoining tunnels.

“Aw, where’re you going!?” he taunts them as they vanish around a corner like jettisoned scrap, “I didn’t even break a sweat!”

Yet another turn of phrase he’s picked up from Miko, Optimus notes, thankfully one of her more palatable expressions. Primus knows that girl could be an honorary Wrecker through vocabulary alone…

“Leave them!” the Prime commands urgently, breaking into a loping run for the opposite passage and shifting the plates on his dominant arm to reveal his colossal, devastating barrage cannon, hoping against hope that it won’t be seeing any action beyond warding off a potential threat.

Setting off a detonative blast in this place could cause the whole subterranean structure to collapse in on itself, another reason he’d stressed the importance of melee before this mission.

Clunking footsteps soon fall into pace behind his own, rattling the shards of energon still wedged into the cave walls.

There’s little point in maintaining stealth now, not with time swiftly trickling away beneath their pedes and the deafening silence the drills have left behind.

Whoever remains in this cavern is bound to know of their presence by now.

There’s a sudden blip on his radar - an energon signature far more significant than the deposits in the walls. It’s large, and active, and at this distance, uncloaked.

With coolant pumping fervidly through his pipes, Optimus kicks himself into gear and swings around the curve of the tunnel, bringing into view a sight so gruesome, it nearly freezes his spark inside its chamber.

A surge of alarm - his very own - hits the airwaves before he can suppress it, and although he reels it back in microseconds, he knows Bulkhead has already felt it, even from several paces behind him. An answering jolt of panic crashes into Optimus’s field as the Wrecker stumbles, his armour flaring nervously.

Because if the Prime is worried, then…

Optimus doesn’t have time to reassure his teammate.

Starscream is looming up ahead, silhouetted at the tunnel’s end by an unearthly blue light.

Megatron’s second in command cuts an intimidating figure. A frame as sharp as his tongue is angled towards the oncoming Autobots, but his attention – and more horrifyingly – his missile arm is aimed near the ground at a comparatively small rock, behind which Optimus has already locked onto four human signatures.

Another surge, this time of unshackled indignation rattles the plating across his shoulders and sends his protective protocols careening into furious overdrive.

Taking point, the Prime charges from the tunnel and into the cavern first, cannon raised and whirring as he digs in his heels and slides to a halt, drawing up his colossal frame to stand tall beneath the rock ceiling, his optics narrowed to thin slits.

“Starscream,” he thunders, authoritative and unyielding. His voice booms around the cavern, drawing another short scream from one of the humans below, yet he doesn’t dare take his optics off the threat to assess their condition, not while Starscream still has his weapon aimed unwaveringly at them.

It seems his arrival was anticipated after all.

The Decepticon doesn’t balk at their presence, doesn’t raise a weapon to defend himself… Gradually, wholly aware that he has the advantage here, Starscream raises his helm and tips his chin back to flash the Prime a haughty smirk.

“Ah, ah, ah~” he singsongs airily, just as Bulkhead lumbers to a halt at Optimus’s side, “That’s close enough, Autobot scum.”

Letting out a choked sound of rage, the wrecker lifts an arm, and his ion blaster whirls to life, though Starscream is quick to nod at the rock near his pedes and add, “Surely you wouldn’t risk any collateral damage now, would you?”

The Prime’s optics flare brightly.

Collateral… A Decepticon’s preferred synonym for the children under the Autobots’ care.

As Starscream speaks, he bobs his missile tauntingly up and down, never letting it stray from the humans locked in his crosshairs.

Behind the battle mask, Optimus peels back his dermas by a fraction of an inch – the only show of frustration he allows himself.

He’s almost relieved that Bulkhead is, by contrast, able to express himself so freely.

A low, thrumming growl shakes its way out from between the Wrecker’s clenched dentas. “Bullying humans now, Screamer?” he fumes, chomping at the proverbial bit but held in check by the seeker’s threat, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size for a change? Or are you afraid you might lose?”

Starscream’s smirk twists down at the corners into a sneer, yet before he can offer some cutting retort, another voice pipes up from below, shattering his concentration.

“Bulk!?”

Two of the three Cybertronians present feel their sparks drop heavily into their tanks.

Bulkhead’s jaw hits his sternum with a ‘clunk!’ whilst Optimus’s only outward display of shock is the slight jump of his optical ridges.

“Miko!?” the former exclaims in a voice so shrill that it might have been comical in any other situation.

At last, unable to resist tearing their optics from the Con, both Optimus and Bulkhead shoot twin glances down over the top of the rock.

The Prime only needs a nanosecond to process the faces of each human below him.

And it’s just as he’d feared.

There’s Jack, a tired face gone slack with relief at seeing Optimus tower above him. And Rafael, with his youthful features pulled taut in fright, yet those wide, brown eyes are still so full of trust as they silently implore the Prime for help. Miko in the meantime is gazing adoringly up at her guardian with a gleeful smile stretching the edges of her mouth.

But it’s the fourth human that Optimus finds his optics drawn to and struck by, locking onto a face not quite as familiar as the children’s but known and inexplicably fond to him all the same.

“Y/n?” he murmurs far too softly to be heard over Bulkhead’s sputtered sounds of dismay and increasing panic.

His last parting from you was... regrettable, and still weighs heavily on his spark and processor when he finds himself alone with his thoughts.

For the first time, your eyes meet his optics, and there’s not an ounce of recognition flickering in their glossy depths as they stare up at him in unmitigated terror.

No… not terror…. Horror.

You’re horrified by his presence, his appearance, his incomprehensible existence.

In your eyes, he and Bulkhead are no different from Starscream – the true and only threat. In your eyes, what is he? Not a protector, but an aggressor. An unknown you have no hope of overcoming.

It doesn’t escape his notice; the stance you’ve taken in front of the children. With your back to them, arms flung out wide, you’re a trembling bulwark of fear and confusion and bravery, and the only thing standing between them and the Decepticon’s missile.

An unanticipated curl of pride warms the spark in his chamber, though it immediately bucks when his optics register the discolouration on your back. From his elevated angle, he has a clear and uninterrupted view of your shoulder blades… and the distressing gradient of a deep purple shadow sweeping across them, hemmed in by a frame of diffusing yellow.

It’s a bruise - he distantly recalls the term – and it’s swallowing up a vast swathe of your fragile skin, disappearing beneath your shirt. He’s seen bruises on humans before, small ones on the children’s knees and elbows after a tumble, or underneath Agent Fowler’s eyes after one too many sleepless nights. And while those instances are disquieting enough to witness, none have quite matched the extent of this one.

He knew you’d been hurt but this looks…

The lights in his optics flicker.

… He should have put his pede down… He should have just driven you straight to the medical clinic in Jasper regardless of your protests - no ‘ifs,’ ‘ands’ or ‘buts.’

Of all the humans who could have ended up down here, it would be the one who implied quite categorically that they never wanted anything to do with him again. He supposes there’s something divinely poetic about that. Divinely comedic too. Perhaps right now, Primus is looking down on his creation with a knowing smile.

Optimus, however, finds himself wishing that you were anywhere else at all, that fate had not led you down here. That it hadn’t led any of you down here, where your life and that of the children’s hang treacherously in the balance.

The nanosecond ends when you blink – and Optimus’s intake stalls to see a shimmering tear break free of your lash line and trickle down your cheek.

It strikes him that not only do you believe you’re supposed to protect Jack, Miko and Rafael from Starscream, but now that the Prime has unwittingly added himself and Bulkhead into the mix, you think you have two more perils to contend with.

Optimus flicks his optics up to the Decepticon once more as a dozen differing strategies spin around inside his processor. He’s getting you out of here. You and the children. ‘Whatever happens,’ he sends a silent promise down to the humans under his charge, his solicitous field spilling all the words he can’t verbalise, ‘I will keep you safe.’

Bulkhead feels it – Optimus’s EM field is a powerful thing, like everything else about the Prime. And right now, the noble intent of his leader hits the wrecker’s chassis like there’s real force behind it, tangible and physical.

Starscream feels it as well, though he isn’t bolstered by it like Bulkhead is. In fact, judging from the sudden wipe of his smug expression, the Seeker may have just come to the realisation that he’s currently threatening the very young, very vulnerable wards of a Prime and his powerhouse of a soldier.

Optimus wonders, between flitting through tactics, what you might think of him if you could feel it too.

-----

This has got to be one of – if not the - most vivid and dramatic nightmares you’ve ever had.

Either that, or…. or there’s a buildup of… of gasses in this mine or something, causing you to hallucinate. Hell, maybe that’s why this place was abandoned to begin with. If those old miners found coal seams or shale deposits down here, you could be standing in a pit filled with methane right now. And those beams and timber that were rotting away over your head as you made your way down…? How long have they been decomposing? Long enough for the carbon dioxide to seep out and gather at the bottom of the mine, you’ll bet!

That has to be it.

Gasses. Hallucinations. A nightmare.

Because you couldn’t possibly consider the third option, could you? That this might actually be happening. That there really are three unfathomably colossal titans surrounding you and the kids on all sides.

It certainly feels real enough. The sweat slicking your palms and hairline, the blood roaring in your ears, and the heart in your chest trying to make a jailbreak are all about as vivid as it gets.

Rationale is telling you that this isn’t happening. Your body is telling you otherwise. And it’s very hard to try and listen to both at the same time.

When the tallest of them – the one that had shouted something in a voice that sent a ping straight to your brain – lowers its ‘eyes’ to lock you in its sights, you freeze in place, helpless as a butterfly pinned to a corkboard.

Awful, cerulean light cuts like frostbite through the dimness of the mine and sends a chill sweeping up the length of your spine.

You’re stuck fast by its stare, the light cold and calculating as it burns down at you from an otherwise expressionless face.

Your own eyes sting with the effort of keeping them open, too afraid to blink, too afraid to take your gaze away lest it decide to strike the moment it thinks you aren’t looking, like a predator, a hungry wolf with designs on the back of your neck.

It’s hard to believe that the giant is the first to look away, pulling those twin beams of light from your face and turning them onto the comparatively smaller monster, the one with a blood-red stare.

Battling down the temptation to collapse onto your knees, you instead suck in a deep, noisy breath through your nostrils and clamp your lips firmly together as your gaze flits across to the third and final titan, shorter yet somehow so much larger than the others.

It’s as broad as a barn. Broader, perhaps. Military-green from head to toe, and it too sports a gaze that’s just as blue as the strange quartz that surrounds you. It cocks its colossal head at you, what passes for a head on that behemoth anyway, and the lights set in its face blink off, then on again. Once, twice… until something in your brain clicks into place.

It’s blinking.

You’d almost begun to entertain the notion that you’ve unwittingly stumbled upon some kind of Government-built superweapon, and that Terry might not be the crazy bastard you thought he was. But when it blinks at you, when it tips its head to the side as if it’s curious… in some uncanny way, you recognise it for what it is.

That’s something humans do.

That’s something living things do.

… What the Hell have you found down here?

Or perhaps the better question is, what the Hell has just found you?

“I see you’ve added another little pet to your menagerie,” the first robot suddenly drawls, breaking the silent stalemate that’s been brewing between you all for the past few seconds and sending your attention snapping back towards its slender face, chest rising and falling as you remind yourself to keep breathing, “I’m beginning to think you don’t care much for humans at all, if this is where you bring them to play.”

‘Humans?’

Your racing mind latches onto the word and sticks fast.

Humans… It called you humans. Implying that the speaker isn’t one…

The revelation doesn’t help you much, you’re still very much in trouble here, regardless of whether there’s another person operating these things or if they’re powered by something else entirely.

The longer you stand there without a shift or a waver in the makeup of the figure ahead of you, the less confident you are in your hallucination theory.

“Who’re you calling pets!?” Miko’s voice abruptly blasts past your ear, reminding you quite starkly of the three children pressed to your back, “If anyone’s the pet, it’s you! Megatron’s little groupie!”

You don’t have a chance to wonder what in the world she’s talking about.

The robot’s red glare snaps to her and zeroes in with murderous intent, its strange, malleable lip curling with hostility. Somewhere below your elbow, you hear Raf hiss “Miko!”

Just like that, you realise with a start that it doesn’t matter if you’re hallucinating or not.

If you are, and the children are too, it just means that you have to get them into fresh air as soon as possible. And if you’re not…

If this is real, if this is happening to you, then there truly are lives on the line, more than just your own.

And if this turns out to all be some incredibly vivid nightmare, well… you can nervously laugh about it once you’re awake. But for now…

“You dare address your betters, pest!?” the robot seethes, tilting its arm by a fraction, just enough to indicate that it’s aiming its missile point-blank at the girl. Behind you, there’s a mechanical whir, like a machine is being charged up.

Your stomach lurches. Somebody needs to do something….

….

………. Shit. Fine.

“Don’t!” you blurt out before you can put too much thought into your actions, taking a fumbling step forward and drawing the silver juggernaut’s furious glare, “Don’t point that at her! She’s just a kid!”

There are several intakes of breath from behind you, and one from somewhere high above your head, but your attention remains fixed steadfastly on the red-eyed robot, goosebumps springing up along your arms when it lets out a deriding chuckle and flashes you a glimpse of stark-white metal sitting just beyond its ‘lips,’ like a set of teeth.

“Oh? What have we here? Trying to play the hero,” it sneers the word with about as much sincerity as it might afford a dead fly, scoffing somehow through its gap for a mouth, “Pathetic. Ah-! Not so fast, Prime!” Quick as a flash, the robot lifts it gaze to the ones behind you, sharp red lights flashing dangerously, “Unless you want to be picking up the pieces of your little friend here for the next deca-cycle.”

You haven’t forgotten about the threats behind you, snatching a glance over your shoulder to see if the other robots are keeping their distance. To your horror, the green one is still subjecting you to its stare, blue lights brighter than ever as it observes you. The slab of grey metal stretching like a chin-guard across its face has fallen slightly to hang open, revealing a sliver of darkness behind it – its own mouth, you realise with a shudder.

Even more perturbingly, the tallest of the trio has definitely taken a step closer. You can see the indentation in the dust where its foot had rested only seconds ago, several metres back.

Your tongue sits like a lead weight in your mouth, dry as a bone.

At the silver robot’s words, it stills entirely, one of its gargantuan hands held up placatingly. Its compliance demonstrates that there must be some sort of hierarchy here. Despite the apparent size advantage, the taller robot had deferred to the one with red eyes.

That at least clues you in on which danger to prioritise, so you turn back to the first giant, your own hands unconsciously mirroring the same, appeasing gesture.

It’s an absolutely uncontested fact that you’re outmatched in size, numbers, speed, strength, and more than likely intelligence too.

So, what do you have in your arsenal?

What could you possibly have?

Think!

The toe of your boot slides forwards an inch, just an inch, just enough to bump gently into an obstruction that rolls slightly under the force.

A rapid glance down reveals the object; the torch you’d dropped earlier, sitting innocuously by your boot, dim and harmless…

… In a split second, you make a decision.

It could very well prove to be your last decision, but it’s better than staying paralyzed by indecision and fear. One option guarantees that you won’t be leaving here alive. The other… might at least buy you some time…

In one, darting motion, you dip down and swipe the torch off the ground, straightening back up just as hastily and holding it out in front of you with both hands, aiming the glass face up towards the scarlet ‘eyes’ leering down from above you.

“Back off!” is all you can think to yelp, arms and voice quaking, “O-or I’ll shoot!”

....

The silence that falls over the cavern couldn’t be any heavier.

It makes the rattling plastic of the torch that much louder in your ringing ears.

For several heartbeats, nobody moves, not the kids, not the robots, only you with your knocking knees and trembling, outstretched arms.

Then suddenly, sound floods back into the chamber, all in the form of a scratching, obnoxious cackle.

The silver robot peels the plating around its lips back and laughs at you, the missile jerking wildly with the effort to stay trained on you despite the wielder’s convulsing frame.

“Oh~! Oh, that is rich!” it chortles, smirking maniacally down at you from twenty-something feet, “You’ll shoot, will you? You’ll shoot me with that little toy of yours?” You can see the guard dropping, there’s more movement behind you. You have to act now, before the other two monstrosities get the chance to intervene.

“This toy-!” you blunder, cutting shakily through the mocking laughter, “I-is an… um, a military… tactical… laser! It’ll blind you from fifty feet!” You have no idea if robots can be blinded. You have no idea why you’re bluffing like a gambler losing at poker. The torch, if anything, is about as bog-standard as it could possibly get. You know that.

But you’re hoping the robot doesn’t.

Apparently though, it does, judging by the fresh peal of laughter tumbling out of it and ricocheting around the mine chamber.

There’s a nervous hum of uncertainty from one of the kids - Jack, if you had to guess.

“Do you really think, human, that I don’t know a bluff when I hear one?” it remarks snidely, sweeping a slender claw beneath one of the red lights in a mocking rendition of someone wiping away a tear.

“You… you don’t believe me?!” you shout up at it, wedging your thumb underneath the switch and bracing every muscle in your body, praying that this works.

Splaying its free hand across what serves as a chest, it retorts, “Do you take me for a fool? Of course I don’t believe you!”

“Good!” you exclaim as a fresh cascade of adrenaline surges through your blood, shoulders aching with the effort of keeping them aimed up at the robot’s face which contorts from a smirk to a frown at your unexpected turnaround. “Then you won’t try to defend yourself when I do this-!”

On the final word, your thumb jams the switch into position, and a stalwart beam of light flies straight and true, crashing into the robot’s pale face and dousing those ominous red lights faster than you can blink.

The effect is as immediate as it is melodramatic.

The relatively quiet air of the cavern is suddenly ripped asunder by the robot’s jarring and unexpected screech of alarm. Reeling backwards, it wrenches its gangly arms up and flings them over its face, shielding itself from the little beam of your torch.

“MY OPTICS!”

You don’t stick around to see what happens next, all too aware that the same bluff never works twice.

The very instant that missile’s trajectory changes, you’re moving, aggressively stamping down on the instinct screaming at you to haul yourself to the far passage as fast as your legs can carry you.

There are three people who need to reach it first.

The front of Jack’s shirt is the first thing your fingers latch onto when you spin around and make a wild grab for one of the kids. His eyes are on stalks, bugging out of their sockets when you unceremoniously hurl him out in front of you and shove his back for good measure, shrieking at the top of your lungs, “RUN!”

He’s still getting his feet under him properly by the time you’ve snatched up Rafael’s wrist in one hand and Miko’s in the other, all the while chaos erupts around you when several-hundred tonnes of metal begins to move.

You almost wrench the poor kids out of their shoes as you take off, haring at breakneck speed towards the tunnel you’d come down like a fire has been lit under your heels.

----

Optimus has to admit, it isn’t very often that he can be surprised anymore, though he has noticed that the instances seem to be occurring with more and more frequency of late. That they happen to correlate with his arrival upon Earth is hardly coincidental, he’s sure.

Humans, as it stands, are just about the most pleasant surprise he’s come across in his extensive travels throughout the Galaxy, and there’s always something so refreshing about their ability to deliver.

Refreshing, yes. But somehow at the same time, spark-wrenchingly, tank-churningly alarming.

Even the Prime couldn’t predict that you’d resort to bluffing with a Decepticon, let alone that the bluff had actually worked, however briefly.

The only blessing he can latch onto is ‘thank Primus Starscream has never taken an interest in human electrical devices.’

Optimus had been waiting on the tips of his pedes for the opportunity to put himself between you and the Seeker, all he needed was an opening where he could be sure that missile wouldn’t be going off anywhere near you and the children… Easier said than done, of course.

Then, in a matter of moments, as Starscream lurches away from your ‘blinding’ beam of light and throws his arms up to defend his optics, the Prime finds himself mirroring Bulkhead’s astonishment. The pair of them gawk down at you as you take their youngest charges by the hands, drive Jack ahead of you and bolt for a tunnel across the cavern whilst your weapon of choice flickers weakly in the dust you leave behind.

However, Optimus doesn’t linger for long to marvel over your quick-thinking.

“I’m BLIND!” Starscream is shrieking, tearing his servos away from his optics and blinking down at them, faceplates screwed up in anguish, “YOU’VE BLINDED ME! YOU-!...”

Just like that, he goes utterly still, giving another series of rapid blinks as he flips his very-much-still-visible servos back and forth, wings slumping at the realisation. “Oh.”

Whatever relief he might have felt, accompanied by the swelling fury that he’d been a victim of blatant skulduggery is short-lived.

Motion from the corner of his optic alerts him just in the nick of time to Optimus Prime’s fist, hurtling on a collision course with his helm. Letting out a squawk, the Seeker barely manages to duck the first strike, feeling the air rush past his faceplates as he launches himself backwards, vying for some much-needed distance between himself and his adversaries, only for his efforts to fall flat when an even more devastating force catches him unawares.

With all the driving power of a siege engine, the Wrecker’s signature weapon buries itself into Starscream’s tanks. Hard.

“ACK-!” The garbled sound jumps unwillingly off his glossa, and he doubles over at once, yet still forces his pedes to scramble backwards, curling one arm around his stomach plating while the other flies up to aim his missile at the Prime, sweeping it back and forth in wild motions to ward them back.

To his shock, both of them fall still at once, glaring murderously down at him with their own weapons raised and cocked, but otherwise motionless. And there they stand, side by side; two bridling Autobots planted stoutly between himself and their fleeing pets.

Starscream’s denta grind together audibly, and he lets out a strangled growl, tanks roiling from the force of the hit.

He’s lost the upper-hand. Without the human meat-shields, he’s only too aware that he’s just lost any and all chance at getting something out of this. And to think, he’d been mere milliseconds away from calling in Megatron to inform him that his loyal and devoted Second In Command was holding Prime at gunpoint.

Bullet quite literally dodged, he concedes. Minor blessings.

It doesn’t escape his notice how the Autobots’ optics are locked onto his raised weapon, nor how they’d turned rigid at his flaunting of it.

And then, in a sudden moment of clarity, he realises why.

It isn’t the notion of his weapon firing at them that’s paused their advance.

It’s his weapon firing at all.

‘Of course,’ he comprehends with building anticipation, his processor firing rapidly as ideas cluster around inside it, ‘The mine…’

Structurally, Decepticon scouts had deemed it sound for the finer precision of their mining drills… but the impact blast from an uncontrolled detonation that targets one of the fundamental tunnels….?

Oh-ho! Now who has the upper hand?

A flash of movement between the Prime’s legs catches his attention, and he dares a glance through them to see the little pests making their escape. And there, leading the pack is the duplicitous human who cost him his advantage.

Starscream’s optics narrow as he tracks the humans’ path, noting their trajectory.

Perfect.

Whilst the Prime and his loyal hound are bodily blocking Starscream from taking aim at their humans, neither of them have apparently thought to cover the entrance to the tunnel those humans are currently sprinting towards…

He’ll have to be quick, so it’s a good thing he already knows which tunnel will lead him out of this doomed mine, and a jet’s speed is leagues ahead of the ground-crawling Autobots and their vastly inferior vehicle modes.

“Give it up, Screamer,” Bulkhead grinds out, shifting his weight restlessly from one pede to the other, “We have you outnumbered. And outgunned."

"So I see," the Seeker wheezes, painstakingly drawing himself to his full height once again and fixing his sights on the Autobot leader, “And there’s something else you have that I don’t.”

The line is cast, and to his unmitigated delight, Bulkhead takes the bait.

“Oh yeah?” the Wrecker grunts warily, glaring down the length of his poised weapon, “And what’s that?”

With a smirk plastered across his faceplate, Starscream angles his missile to Bulkhead’s left, relishing the twin looks of shock and realisation that spark in his adversaries' optics.

He grins, a fever coursing through his wires.

“Collateral,” he says, and fires.

Chapter Text

Perhaps if you had made the effort to run this fast as a child, you’d have been granted that scholarship your parents were always wittering on about.

Then again, until today, you had no idea that it was even possible to heave your body onwards so quickly, and if it weren’t for the cumbersome wellies weighing you down, and the drag of two children being wrenched along in your wake, you’re half convinced you could break some sort of speed record.

The threat of death, evidently, is one Hell of a motivator.

As it is, there isn’t a thought in your head except for ‘run.’ There isn’t a sound in your ears beyond your own ragged, desperate gasps for breath and the tinnitus screaming to a staggering crescendo between them. Everything else is muffled, deemed unimportant by the rest of your biological functions that are urging you to focus on nothing except for keeping one foot flying out ahead of the other.

A muddled cacophony of noise is buzzing against your eardrums like furious wasps. Voices, indiscernible in your confusion, all clamouring over each other. You think one of them must be Miko’s, high and startled, but with her skinny wrist still trapped in your vice-like grip, she has no choice but to hurtle along in your footsteps.

You haven’t even noticed that she’s trying to put up a feeble resistance, scuffing her boots in the dust in an attempt to slow you down. But her effort pales beneath the strength you’ve been lent by your own adrenaline.

In your other hand, you’re towing Rafael behind you like a very disheartened kite, his sneakers flying over the ground as his vastly shorter legs pump furiously just to stay upright.

And finally, from the corner of your eye, you can see Jack’s mop of jet-black hair bobbing along on your right flank, barely keeping pace. His gaze is fixed forwards, jaw set nervously as you charge hell-for-leather at the entrance to the tunnel you’d come in by.

What had once seemed so reminiscent of a hungry, gaping maw stretched open to swallow you whole is now a shining beacon of hope, a pathway to salvation, even if that salvation leads to a crotchety old farmer on the other end of a shotgun.

Deep in the back of your head, there’s a mantra echoing over and over again, repeating its broken notion as your boots stir up clouds of dust from the cavern floor.

If you can just make it to the tunnel… If you can just clear that corner, it’ll be okay. You only have to keep going.

Keep running. Keep running. Running. Run. 

You don’t comprehend, at first, why the air is so suddenly rent asunder by a startling ‘hsssss!’ as of some, immense snake breaking through your muffled hearing and alerting you to a danger you haven’t yet seen.

It’s all the warning you get before a streak of silver screams over your head.

Eyes bulging, you sweep your gaze up just in time to spot the slender object as it hurtles towards the tunnel ahead, a fire blazing hotly under its tail.

You’d know the look of that missile anywhere. It’s the same one that had, until mere seconds ago, been sitting on the arm of the sleek, silvery giant.

There’s no time to think. There's barely enough to act.

Like a pair of lead weights, your heels suddenly come down on the path hard, burying themselves into the dust to fight back against your forward momentum.

Somewhere far behind you, yet not far enough at all, thunders a voice with enough power at its back to bring a mountain to its knees.

“NO!”

Fuelled by a concoction of privily untapped terror and the most baseline instinct to turn your back on impending doom, you let go of the children’s wrists in favour of whirling towards them instead, while at the same time throwing out an arm to catch Jack around his scrawny waist.

He hits your outstretched limb just as Miko and Rafael crash into your torso with two sickening crunches.

But any indignation they might have voiced about the rough treatment is forgotten the moment you wrench Jack in front of you, throw your arms around the trio and duck your head so violently that your chin knocks against someone’s-

B O O M !

You don’t even get the chance to scream.

As soundly as a slug to your gut, all the air is torn from your lungs in the time it takes to blink an eye. The world around you, above you, below you, and beside you is rocked violently on its axis as the missile makes contact with the wall just inside the tunnel entrance.

Agony punches out your eardrums as you’re launched forwards off your feet.

The explosion sends you crashing to the ground over the children, and a blast of suffocating heat sweeps across your body from toe to skull, singeing the fine hairs on the base of your neck and licking at your bare shoulders. Along with the wave of hot air comes a hailstorm of tiny, hard projectiles, rock that’s been blasted apart by the impact and drums at your body like a thousand stinging insects.

For a split second, you couldn’t say with any confidence whether you’re dead or alive. Then the hot, burning pain on your shoulder registers, and your wonderings are put to rest.

If you’d been any closer, you might’ve…

You think you scream then, though most of the sound beyond your own head is muffled and suppressed, and your vision swims as if you’ve been plunged underwater, making it very hard to keep your eyes open. But somebody certainly shouts, in a low yet booming voice that’s almost loud enough to cut straight above the discordant rumbling of a mine’s structure falling to pieces around you,

“-BRIDGE!” it hollers, “RIGHT NOW, DOC!”

You didn’t catch the preceding words.

Things have started to move, like you’re sitting right above the epicentre of an earthquake, but it’s the bodies squirming below you that coax you from your daze.

“Guh! Sh-… unf!” Sluggish and senseless, you brace your forearms against the ground and use what little strength you still have to shove yourself awkwardly onto your side, rolling your weight off the kids and wrenching your eyes open.

It’s darker than it was. Much darker. Dust chokes the air around you, blotting out the light cast by those strange crystals. It’s sucked into your lungs when you take a shallow breath only to near-enough suffocate on the fine particles of grit that try to come down with it.

Sputtering, you feel your stomach clench. Each hacking cough jolts your diaphragm, but at least the noise of your own struggle grows clearer and clearer as the ringing in your ears begins to recede, leaving an uncomfortable ache between them.

As if in a drunken stupor, you blink one eye first, then the other, squinting through the mire to see that Jack, Miko and Rafael are already helping one another to their feet, their motions blurred surreally, but even as addled as you are, you know that if they’re moving, they’re still alive.

Good.

If there is relief to be found however, it doesn’t last nearly as long as it should, because from out of the gloom, a pair of dazzling lights sear into existence, and a monstrous shape moves through the murk towards the kids like a shark through silt, swelling larger as it nears.

And then, the lights turn, veering sharply to the left and out of your eyes as the hair-raising squeal of rubber tyres brings the silhouette to a halt just beside Miko, flinging up dust and stones in its wake.

You have to blink several times to dispel the negative blots seared in your retinas.  

It’s… a truck. A juggernaut on four, heavy-duty wheels. Painted a shade of familiar… military-green.

A pair of neurons connect in your brain with a ‘zap’ and -“No way,” you croak.

Helplessly, you watch the vehicle’s back door pop open, and as you peer inside to catch the hand that must have pushed it open, your blood freezes solid, like hoarfrost forming along your veins.

Empty.

The truck houses no visible person, no face that might debunk the impossible conclusion you’re beginning to draw. Nothing but leather seats and a dark interior that sits devoid of another human being.

‘Would it reassure you to know that this vehicle is operated remotely?’

You clench your teeth, shrinking away from Optimus’s voice as it rises uninvited in the back of your mind.

The residual heat from the explosion is forgotten entirely to make room for the chill that sweeps up your spine instead.

And yet, with a fearlessness you’ll come to envy, Miko is already leaping through the open door and into the truck proper before twisting about to grab Rafael’s shirt, yanking the boy inside after her. They fall in a tangle of limbs across the back seats just as a rock the size of your fist comes crashing to the ground where they’d stood.

“W-wai-“ Reedy, weak, you can’t be heard over a resounding ‘crack’ that splits the cavern’s atmosphere in two.

Jack though, you soon surmise, had either heard you, or spotted you because he’s suddenly crouched down in front of your face, his pupils shrunk tiny in palpable alarm.

“C’mon! We gotta move!” he urges as he grabs at your arm and heaves your torso off the ground in a way that strains the bruise on your shoulder and leaves you gasping deliriously, “Get up! This whole place is coming down!”

And as if to punctuate his point, another rock, this one larger than your head, slams into the dirt just inches to your left. The suddenness plucks at your red-raw nerves and propels you up onto your feet with a shriek, finding clarity in panic.

“You two! Get in! NOW!” a raucous voice urges, belonging neither to the children, nor to yourself, and originating entirely from the grill of the vast, green truck.

Your tongue sticks fast to your palette. Every muscle in your body solidifies when Jack’s grasp on your forearm goes taut and, to your absolute horror, he begins trying to drag you towards the still open door of the vehicle, his trainers skidding awkwardly over the ground.

He may as well be trying to move a brick wall.

So potent is the ice in your blood and the terror dulling your senses that something deep inside you has weighed up the risk of approaching these titans against the risk of staying in a collapsing mine, and whatever it is finds that you’d rather face the latter.

Better the Devil you know, and all that…

“Jack! Hurry!” Miko urges him from the open door, slapping her palm on the headrest in front of her.

Grunting with effort, he screws up his face and promptly throws his weight backwards, nearly yanking your arm out of its socket.

The sudden jolt is enough to give you a start.

It’s safe to say you aren’t exactly thinking clearly, perhaps that’s why you wrench your arm from Jack’s sweaty palms so viciously, his blunted nails leave long, angry stripes down the length of your skin.

But the scuffs are barely a blip on your radar.

You’re too busy staggering backwards with your eyes fixed blearily on the massive truck, as if it’s a predator poised to pounce on you should you find the nerve to blink. It’s wrong, that truck. You just can’t fathom why the children have jumped inside it so readily, despite the cavern collapsing to ruin all around you.

“Get…” you start, croaking on the first syllable and swallowing dryly to try again, “Get out of there!”

Shaking his head in bewilderment, Jack takes a hurried step towards you.

“Jack.”

A monstrous rumble fills the mine, almost as deep as the reverberations themselves as the walls begin to split and the ceiling bows ever inwards.

“Go with the others, through the Ground bridge. Now.”

Urgent without being loud. Authoritative.

Horribly, awfully familiar…

Without warning, a monumental leg comes sweeping over the truck and lands next to the boy, nearly staggering him when it comes crashing to the ground at his side.

For a split second, you’re convinced that a particularly strange stalactite has fallen from the roof.

Tossing a rapid glance between you and the green truck, Jack shouts to be heard over the cacophony of noise, “But, what about-!?”

“Go.”

The boy’s jaw snaps shut as though he’s been scolded, and he spares you one last look, his mouth little more than a tight, reluctant line. Then at last, he blurts out a sound of frustration and spins on his heel, diving straight into the truck and almost landing squarely on Miko.

The heavy, green door has barely slammed shut behind the soles of his trainers before its tyres start to spin, madly gaining traction and peeling away from you as another half-dozen rocks plummet down to bounce off the metal roof with a series of ‘dings’ and ‘clangs.’

Grit and dust and stone is churned up into an even thicker cloud when the truck hares off across the disintegrating cavern, leaving you to face what’s to come by yourself, without even the children here to display your backbone for.

Paralysed, you stare through your tears after the blood-red lights as they fade away into the vapour, distantly aware that one of your arms is reaching out, whether to call them back or beg to be taken with them, you couldn’t rightly say.

The tunnel behind you that had promised escape is now choked with rock, the first route to fail after the missile’s impact.

And ahead of you stands a titanic leg – two legs, now that you look again - obscuring half of your vision, and you don’t dare raise your head to meet the very gaze you can feel boring into your skull like a drill.

There’s nowhere to run.

There’s nowhere to hide.

You’re out of ideas, options, and hope.

Trapped.

It’s a sickening feeling.

Evidently, the giant isn’t content to wait for you to look up.

The infinite pillars of metal bend outwards like knees, two towers of grey and black metal, interspaced by panels of cobalt blue that gleam too brightly in the darkness.

All around you, the Earth heaves a thunderous groan which is followed closely by another ‘crack!’ that rattles the teeth in your gums.

But through it all, through the roar of a cave-in and the shifting of several thousand tonnes of rock, you can still hear a voice from on high as it speaks to you, enveloping your chest in the force of its timbre.

“Do not be afraid…”

A spectacular idea in theory. In practice however…

For one insane, petrifying moment, you wonder if you’re about to see the face of God.

Stumbling another few steps away, you let out a sudden yelp when the heel of your boot catches on a large rock and you’re sent toppling over onto your backside, catching yourself on your palms and inadvertently looking up.

But it couldn't be God. Because you know that voice, the gentle resonance that hums through you from the tips of your fingers to the soles of your feet, as powerful as it is contrastingly placid, not unlike a tranquil brook that hides the most turbulent, treacherous vortexes under its surface.

Bent in half like the joint of a human’s leg, the metal limb hits the ground just a few feet away from where you fell, yet the shudder that rolls through the earth goes unnoticed. You’re too transfixed by the cerulean lights hovering over you in the darkness, twin stars standing side by side in a silver sky.

Your tongue tears itself from the roof of your mouth like stripped Velcro, and a single breath sneaks in past your quivering lips, filling each lung with just enough air that you can utter one, pivotal word.

“…. Optimus?”

The name leaves you in a strained whisper, but it couldn’t ring more loudly in the space between you and the metallic titan, whose strange, blue lights seem to grow inexplicably brighter at your utterance.

No sooner has the word left your mouth however than your brain immediately and vehemently tries to reject the very idea, deeming it far too absurd to possibly be true. It can’t be true. Optimus is just a disembodied voice who drives a truck, which is far more plausible than… whatever this thing is.

The cavern above you suddenly lets out another furious roar as the crack in the ceiling lances several metres straight across its width.

And still you remain stuck fast, gaping uselessly up into the lights that have you pinned like a wolf pins a lamb by its neck.

Leaden arms tremble and threaten to buckle under your own weight, yet they stay locked in place, even when you give them an unenthusiastic twitch. Belatedly, you start to wonder what’ll kill you first; The cave-in, the robot, or a goddamn heart-attack.

Motion. Too close for comfort.

Your eyes wrench themselves from the silvery face and snap down to a massive object near your left flank...

You almost swallow your tongue when you let out a sharp gasp, realising what it is.

A hand. A hulking, obsidian hand – half obscured by the dust – had been inching towards you, still is in fact. Five segments of welded metal stretch from a solid palm, each almost as long as you are tall. ‘Fingers!’ you realise with an awful lurch in your stomach.

It means to grab you.

That thought alone is enough to unlock each of your limbs, and you lurch away from the reaching appendage, belting out a howl of terror -

Which lasts for all of a second before the giant opens its ‘mouth’ and speaks.

“Y/n.”

It hits you like a punch to the chest, far rougher than the knock you received after taking a tumble from Tom’s back. In an instant, you stop trying to get your legs underneath you, falling completely, deathly still, staring hard at the hand that hovers just in front of you, its fingers outstretched imploringly.

With the simple call of your name, your proclivity for rationalising away the coincidences flies straight out of the proverbial window.

There’s no pretending anymore. You’ve heard your name enough times now, spoken in that deep, dulcet voice that you doubt you’ll ever scrub it out of your head.

And then, as if it couldn’t get any worse….

“It’s me.”

The robot’s mouth moulds eerily around the words in its borrowed voice. Two ‘eyes’ like dazzling headlights remain adhered to you, azure burning so brightly through the gloom that they’re growing ever more difficult to look at, yet to turn away feels so much like presenting your spine to a loaded gun.

Your world tilts sideways as something in your brain is thrown off-kilter. A faint spell.

Thankfully, it only lasts for a second before your head snaps upright again and your surroundings find their anchor once more.

Perhaps, you think, it would have been better if you had fainted.

“Forgive me,” the robot continues, hushed but quick and orotund, “I am afraid that explanations will have to wait.”

He – ‘It, it, it,’ you chant – doesn’t give you another second to catch your breath.

In the next blink, the hands surge forwards. One cascades past you at breakneck speed, curving behind your back to keep you from retreating whereas the other moves to cover you like a suffocating roof.

You don’t see the stalactite crash into its knuckles just in the nick of time, glancing harmlessly off the metal instead of your own head.

“No, no! NO!” you bleat, maddened with terror, scrabbling at the ground to drag yourself backwards, but there’s a hand hitting your spine before you can make it a couple of feet, slipping easily under your backside and scooping you off the ground whilst its twin closes in on top of you.

A memory springs up, jarring and unbidden, of the cattle you put through the crush a few days ago, their bulging eyes and helpless lows, how frantically they fought against the metal keeping their heaving heads pinned so Terry could vaccinate them.

They looked scared to death.

You wish you never left that fateful day with your tail between your legs, cowed out by a family who were better off seeing the back of you than they were to live around all of your failures and inertia.

One last broken howl shakes out of your chest as the appendages come together, sealing you in a dark, cramped space between a pair of solid palms.

You just hope that when death comes, it'll be over so quickly, you don't even realise it's happening. 

-------------------------------

Safety.

Optimus’s EM field sings with that one, crucial note, pulsing outwards in steady beats as it tries in vain to seek out and soothe your own.

He can feel you struggling, limbs fluttering against the insides of his palms as of some small avian creature beating its wings to try and take flight, and his spark creaks mournfully at the understanding that his servos are the cage you’re trying so desperately to escape.  

And yet in spite of his contrition, a wave of unabashed relief still floods the Prime’s circuitry like a balm to overheated plating, and something gentle clicks into place the very moment he has you secured in his hold, something that’s been niggling at his protocols since the night he found you alone on the road into Jasper.

If he had even a nano-second to spare, he might be inclined to selfishly savour the solace of having you close after almost losing you to Starscream’s malice.

The seeker fled before his missile even impacted the tunnel walls, leaping into a seamless transformation and vanishing with the blast of a jet engine, all while the Autobots were distracted by the sudden and horrifying sight of death barrelling towards their charges.

… Optimus hopes the Con realises how lucky he is to have turned tail rather than stick around to see the destruction unfurl. Prime isn’t sure he could have convinced Bulkhead not to rip the spark from Starscream’s chest if the seeker hadn’t removed himself from the equation in such a timely manner.

Primus, Optimus isn’t entirely sure he could have convinced himself either.

But even with Starscream gone, even with all of his focus honing in on you and the children, Optimus still hadn’t been fast enough, nor strong enough to stop harm from befalling you. Despite what his fellow Autobots and the children might think, he isn't omnipotent. He's lost far too many good mechs to ever consider calling himself as such. 

Primes shouldn’t dwell… but this latest failing will haunt him, of that he has no doubt.

He will not soon forget, however, the sight of you turning and shielding the children with your own body at the last possible moment before impact. He makes a note to thank you for that just as soon as he gets you out of here. But for as grateful and proud as he is, he only wishes you didn't have to be in that position at all. He should have been the one bearing the brunt of that explosion. Not you. Never you. 

He can almost hear Ratchet now, scolding him for trying to be a martyr. 

However, Optimus doesn’t have the luxury of penitence, certainly not now, when he has yet to ensure your safety in full.

He’s only traded one danger for another, but even without a Decepticon looming over you, you’re not much safer now than you were when Starscream’s weapon was drawn on you.

So long as you remain in this collapsing mine, your life still hangs in the balance.

And he will not have that.

Sending a wordless, apologetic thrum through the airwaves, Optimus heaves himself to his feet and whirls about, hurtling right into a steady charge across the cavern, following Bulkhead’s quickly fading tyre tracks.

Ahead of him, almost invisible through the tumbling ceiling, shines a vast, verdant swirl of familiar light.

Thank Primus the Wrecker had thought to call in a Ground bridge so hastily. He and the children are long-gone, safe on the other side where they should have been all this time. 

Now, Optimus just has to do the same.

Apertures narrowed to pinpricks, mouth set firmly behind his battle-mask, he launches his actuators into ferocious overdrive and storms towards the Ground Bridge, tucking his servos low against his chassis to further shield his precious cargo.

All of a sudden, a voice crackles to life in his audial. Ratchet’s.

“Optimu-!” But whatever his old friend might have said is cut promptly off with a squeal of static when a sizeable boulder strikes the Prime on his finial, knocking his head sharply to one side.

He shakes off the impact seamlessly, pushing his frame to the limit and never once letting his stride falter. He can hear the cavern swallowing itself behind him, thousands of tonnes of rock plummeting to the ground just where his pedes had last trodden, chasing him across what remains of the space and closing in fast.

Lower and lower, he has to duck as his shoulders are buffeted by the weight of an entire mountain hellbent on making him yield.

The Ground bridge’s light envelopes him like an outstretched hand as he hurdles a collapsed stalactite and reaches the edge of that empyreal glow. He can’t take his optics off it, not even when something whallops him on the back of his neck struts with the force of a thunderclap, not even when his legs buckle and his knees start to dip, and the tiny being in his palms lets out a muffled scream.

Out of time, straddling the precarious ledge between salvation and destruction, Optimus calls upon every vestige of strength he has left in his motors and funnels all power to his legs for one final, critical push.

With a tremendous kick, he hurls himself forwards through the bridge, twisting in the air as he flies over the threshold of the portal. For just a moment, he’s floating on his back, optics wide open to watch the writhing colours dance and spark over his head.

Then, not a moment too soon, the ceiling of light is replaced by a ceiling of familiar, rust-red rock.

When Optimus hits the ground, he hits it hard, nearly jarring his tanks up into his spark-chamber from the colossal force of the collision. Metal screams shrilly over concrete as he slides across the base’s floor for several metres on his back, scraping up his paint and leaving dark scuffs along the ground in his wake.

Yet throughout it all, by the will of Primus or his own self-regulated strength, Optimus’s hands remain steady, neither flexing closed not springing open, rigid and unmoving around your body in a way he prays will cushion you from the worst of the impact.

And finally, everything - the noise, the peril, the spark-stopping alarm he’s been warding off since the start of this whole, horrible affair – it all comes skidding to an abrupt halt when he does.

The momentum of his leap wears off at last, and leaves the mighty Prime laying supine in the middle of the Autobot base, blinking in stunned silence at the fluorescent lights hanging far overhead and listening to the wheels on his pedes spin slower and slower until they come to a stop.

There’s blessed movement in his servos, minute and delicate, and even with the ache in his shoulder struts and the frantic roar of his spark, he can’t resist taking a moment to twitch his thumb inwards with an infinite gentleness, eager to reassure himself of the presence of the human held inside.

Even when he registers the very clear jolt of you pulling away from his encroaching appendage, his relief doesn't waver.

He’s got you.

Of course, as it is so often wont to do, Optimus’s brief second of respite doesn’t last for very long at all.

“What-!?” the clipped, apoplectically incensed voice of his medic begins from somewhere nearby, easing Optimus’s flared nerves as a barrage of ‘outrage,’ ‘frustration’ and ‘concern’ all smack into his field at once, “-In Primus’s good name took you so fragging long!?”