A birthday gift for my good bud Ri2, inspired by some of my previous alternate universe fics; the basic premise I've worked out for it being Finn and Jake from Adventure Time as Transformers and Decepticons starting to realize that they're not good guys in this conflict, meet up with the Dinobots and the Crystal Gems, sparking a revelation and a decision to do the right thing and be heroes even if it means breaking loyalty to their home.
Some of the canon Transformers (mainly a few of the Dinobots) are also female in this story, mainly Swoop, Sludge and Snarl. Some others might come up. As for continuity, it's broadly similar to my as yet unused personal Transformers canon I'm using for future alternate universe stories; imagine a combination of G1 and Aligned, with some of the look of the movies and an overall larger scope.
Chapters will be posted as they are finished!
Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers, Steven Universe, Adventure Time, any other copyrighted work mentioned or used in this story, and make no claim to any monetary gain thereof.
Within the boundaries of galaxies from both the Gem Hierarchy and the Autobot Autonomy, there was a young but mighty empire, feared and respected by untold billions of cultures throughout the cosmos, worlds of living machines who thought and felt and lived and loved and preached peace through tyranny.
This was the face of power and safety to their people, and an undying memory of terror and nightmare to the rest of the universe.
This was the Decepticon Empire. One of Cybertron's final children, and a reflection of the all-devouring horror in the stars, that murderous violet blood upon their insignias; born of the conquest, annihilation or assimilation of half a million inhabited worlds and the cyberforming of ten times as many empty or dead planets.
At their edges, they were pressing upon the borders of Apokolips and stabbing at the empire of the Alternian trolls in starts and slices. And also they were making considerable headway through nearly everything else in their way (Daleks and Yeerks and Vilgaxian alike) and yet a comfortable distance from the Quintesson Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Decepticons lived through conquest and war, and they did it well.
Their territory was a place that no one, absolutely no one in the entirely of the known universe wanted to get anywhere near. To live anywhere near the Decepticons, it went, was to die a horrible death sooner or later. You would die and your body would become the soil to grow more soldiers in or fuel to feed them, your world ground up and spat out as metal, and your histories would burn and your technologies broken and no one would ever remember what your people looked like.
The people who lived in the Decepticon Empire, the ones who didn't see what kept their homes upright and their people back from the dead and the wetwork that made it all possible, didn't know about any of that. Their superiors preferred to keep it that way.
If it was a terrestrial zone, there would have been barbed wire and armed guards, soldiers and barricades blocking the way. Big, spooky signs saying things like 'ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO COME WITHIN THIRTY MILES OR SOME SHIT LIKE THAT'. (Just because something is spooky doesn't mean it's intelligently written.) As it was a zone of influence in space, there wasn't anything like that; a few flotillas on guard, ostensibly to fight off attacks; not much more was needed. The terrors of space and the monsters within would see to that.
Threats did not normally come from the outside, here. In the Decepticon Empire, the bots in charge were mainly more concerned with anyone getting out, or being exposed to thoughts outside of what they wanted people to think.
And now...
And now, and on Decepticon planet, a harvested garden world cyberformed in the image of the home world that all their people once came from, a pair of young bots still barely upgraded into their military service frames were looking into the edge of Decepticon space and putting two and two together.
And now, the most famous and feared team of Autobot soldiers was fleeing Gem territory with most precious cargo, taking a detour towards a part of Decepticon space that wasn't supposed to have any patrols at all.
And right here and right now, all this was being...
Not observed, exactly. Watched, certainly, but someone was doing more than watching.
Call it being written down. Some things were meant to happen but only after they already took place, people making choices that twisted fate around like damming up a river until the whole landscape flooded, pens scratching down the curve and weave of history. In a very real way, nailing them down and giving them a substance that entropy couldn't devour, that couldn't be undone. Little bits of good that built up a future.
He was the one that did the writing.
On a hillside from from the inhabited centers of the little cyberworld, there was a faint and very pleasant sound, like the baying of musical wagon-wolves, and a shimmering in the air, as if of something gently appearing and pushing aside inconvenient molecules with a minimum of fuss. Ripples spread, like the smallest of stones dipped into a river, and clocks spun slightly back and timers ticked forwards and back for just long enough for it to be noticed. It reverted to normal and went unremarked.
There was a solid sort of noise, and abruptly there was a large purple communications terminal upon the hill, somewhat larger than a standard Transformer. The hundreds of tiny creatures making up the hill, like mechanical coral, retracted their fluffy sensors in fright.
Sitting for a moment like a rather flamboyant public callbox, the terminal did nothing. It was old. The scars and marks of space detritus marked the exterior, many of those pockmarks older than the stones beneath the mountains of the oldest worlds known to any living thing or storied history. The metal was arranged in the patterns once fashionable in what had been Iacon, the great city-state of Cybertron's philosopher's and leaders, once seat of the Thirteen Primes themselves (and tragically, the birthplace of the Functionalist, whose reign had spelled Cybertron's decay and paved the way for the Decepticon's destructive ways), and the heavy angles and ridged forms even looked like Iaconian architecture; an aesthetic unknown to this world.
The callbox looked like something from another age, another era alien to the people of this world. Few of the Decepticons stationed on this planet would have recognized the architecture; fewer still had even been alive to see Cybertron before that world had gone dark, let alone see the aspects of Iacon in person. It was, effectively, an anachronism but not once that would be especially noteworthy to the people of this world. Just an odd thing surviving long past the time appointed to it.
The box stood up.
First it's entire top section revolved and split into several parts, as its lower section did something similar and multiplied, layers shifting around and turning, dividing into yet more parts. The assemblage moved on gyroscopic joints, providing glimpses of the depths within, and it was so vast, an entire world hidden beneath its surface, older than worlds and time blending with space, and so very old.
A new form arose, humanoid in shape (though no creature on this planet would recognize it as such, since humans were a long while from making contact with any being of Cybertron), standing upon strong legs; the exterior of something between a cape or a coat settled into place from the broad shoulders of the majestic humanoid robot, the entirety of the new form fairly broad while not being quite as massive as the standard militarized frame of Transformers the galaxy over.
The robot was best described as a he, bearing the aspects of the mech gendered shell favored by much of Cybertron's population towards the end of the Functionalist Era; long cables grew from his face, growing together and long into a massive and unbelievably awesome metal beard like a wizard from a work of hyper-science, and his optics were set deep below articulated metal ridges like the tines of a crown.
Those optics gazed upon the world; they were new, freshly remade less than a couple thousand years ago, but the mind behind them was older than the mantle and stone and life of this world. Its Spark ignited so long ago that there weren't numbers or words to describe the time passed since then.
The indescribably ancient robot, who had seen his people arise and fall and rise again, time after time as stars went out or ignited one by one (and time's passing meant little to him, compared to the stories to be witnessed), gazed upon the gleaming metal of the world around him. He stood in a pastoral region, many shining hills around him. As the suns of the nearby system dawned into a daylight cycle, probing tendrils extending from root clusters and swelled up into mighty metal trees, cautiously spreading arrays of golden leaves and mineral growths shining where Energon was refined from solar power. Turbo foxes zipped about in the distance, assuming the cycle-like alternate modes; curiously, they flew instead of ran, and bore little resemblance to their Cybertronian ancestors. And in the distance, there were villages and towns, many of them centered around larger mecha-trees large enough that they did not need to retract in self-defense, able to power themselves and the local grid without need to recharge.
There was a sigh, pleased but also sad. "A pity," said the robot, he who had taken the name Alpha Trion an eternity ago to suit his present personality and shape, and had not yet changed so much that it would no longer be his. He who had been there at the dawn of the universe, one of the first-forged children of Primus the All-Maker, he who had held the hands of their people as they came home with the scars of Quintessa upon their backs, and he who had seen Cybertron go dark and Primus continue His divine work in less obvious fashions.
And that, it seemed, was that. Alpha Trion turned regretfully from the sight of the beauty the Decepticons had wrecked, and closed his eyes, turning inward and to the past, to what this world had been when the Decepticons had come.
It was a terrible sight.
He saw blood, and endings. Histories coming to an end and snapping with terrible finality. Blood soaking this land, and by the murder of its people was the planet remade into something more suitable for its conquerors. Seven billion lives brought low, beheld all they ever were just vanishing in six phases of conquest, deemed insufficient for the empire's needs. And simply... ending.
With each broken life, Alpha Trion walked with them through time. He saw their every hope, their every joy. He was there when they were born and when they were murdered. For them he witnessed, every single soul who died for their world. He felt as they did as they died, defiant or afraid, hateful or apathetic, afraid of the void or blazing with conviction that pain couldn't mar. Their lives made a story, and these Alpha Trion remembered. Every. Single. One.
It was not within his power to intervene, but it was within his power to stay with them until their time was done, and this he did. For ten thousand years and many more, he stalled time to speak with each one and give them comfort as he could, granting them peace. Some accepted. Others did not. Some he showed the future, and the certainty of renewal and vengeance satisfied some.
And when it was done, Alpha Trion returned to the present, where he had arrived. From the depths of himself, he brought forth two things. The first was a great book, as ancient as he was, seeming to glow with a holy presence. The second was a simple stylus, resembling the quill of a avian mechanimal, but of what sort none could say: perhaps an ancient saurinoid, or a mercury-ibis.
He opened the book to its appointed place, and its page shimmered like light, and seemed without limit. He inscribed those stories, every single one, in a single flourishing swoop. A duty to them fulfilled, at the least.
That matter was done; now time to attend to his reason for coming here. He turned himself to the horizon, to a modest mecha-tree just large enough to support a small home, a fair distance from any nearby habitation or active government control. And right above something nearly as old as Alpha Trion himself.
He settled down, transforming into the alternate mode of a communications terminal, and faded out of view. If anyone saw him, they would mistake him for some abandoned public works.
And he watched.
The house was fairly old, home to different families or individuals over the ages, eventually growing old or earning merit to a particular job that suited their talents, and getting upgraded to different housing within the cities. So the system went: someone would arise from the periodic sparking fields, or be born from a successful reproduction, come to this empty home, and take it as theirs for a time. (Drone-born tended not to come here; by the time they achieved sapience and blossomed a Spark, they had already found a role in society.)
It wasn't ramshackle, but it was pretty close, not so much a planned structure as an assortment of different modular one-room buildings fastened together around the tree, windows forming at unpredictable places like a water-dweller adapting sieves. The modules tended to shift around, often as new needs arose for the inhabitants, but the present dwellers – a Mini-Con and a Mutacon, both of them born on this world, and registered as brothers on the official census reports – found it stable, and in return whatever limited intelligence made up the house considered them agreeable and pleasant. If it could experience anything at all, it would be disappointed to see them go.
On one of the permanently extruded branches, sitting on a seat-like flat space behind a cluster of solar leaf-panels, was the Mini-Con, frowning seriously as he tapped away at a small external sensor he'd clamped to the branch's Energon reserves.
"Bro!" An aggressively cheerful voice yelled from an open window. "You comin' down or not? They got gladiator smashy games on!"
"In a minute!" The Mini-Con, who might have been called Finn in other universes but here was named Propeller (because it had initially been assumed that his alt-mode was sea-based before he transformed into a sentry turret) turned his head up, frowning at the readings and not really listening.
He was tuning it, now and then, to a distant signal, as he had been asked to do earlier. He was finding it hard to focus on that instead of bringing up some old signals. Very old, and nothing like them had ever been brought up in his education. These particular signals had come from ruins in the deep, untended jungles near their home, where the cyberforming had not entirely took.
Those ruins were not Transformer; not the people of this world nor the works of Cybertron; not even Junkion or Velocitronian or any world known to be of their people. It was weird to think about, unpleasant to consider, but it looked like it had been there before them.
And every single record he looked up seemed to have no idea that they were there. Insistent that they were lies, or tricks laid by Autobot saboteurs to cast doubt for honest Decepticon sparklings like him. Pay no attention to them and get on with your victories, he had been told.
The signals told a different story. A grim and unhappy one. The oldest lessons, the ones supposedly dictated by Lord Megatron himself, warned that control and slavery was the fate of anyone who didn't fight back at the first opportunity. Propeller supposed he was putting those lessons to work.
Everything he had ever been told or shown or taught upon their people – about Lord Megatron and Air Commander Starscream and those ought not to be named, about the dread Prime of the anarchist Autobots and the monsters that served his chaotic whims – told them that the Decepticons were heroes, champions of the oppressed who had seized control from their masters and made a new home for themselves after the Autobots ruined Cybertron and murdered their creator-god (the blasphemy, the shame, the fury it deserved, every Autobot alive deserved to pay for the sacrilege) – it had amounted to certain understandings. But he had old friends, very old friends indeed, and the things they told him... it didn't add up.
Ancient ruins and signals full of blood and terror. First-hand account s that didn't match historical records... which could have been faked in the first place.
He told himself, in the bad times when this all really got to him, he was a good Decepticon. He wasn't a traitor. Not really. This wasn't courting heresy and backstabbing and not-good thinking. He was just looking at stuff like he was supposed to. He wasn't going Autobot. He wasn't a rebel or anything. It wasn't like listening to stories about how weak and inferior meat-things were and thinking about how it didn't make sense for Lord Megatron to say things like that, that wasn't a traitor thing to do. Right?
Sometimes it felt like he was standing of the edge of a cliff, and it all smelt found and the sides coated with bodily Energon and if he looked down into the charnal pit he would never sleep well again, and he couldn't live with himself if he looked down there.
And if he didn't, he would never be able to be himself again. He had to do the right thing, just like a good Decepticon should. Just like Lord Megatron, smashing down the bad guys for peace and liberty. He just wasn't sure which side that was anymore.
In short, he was starting to have doubts. And it was kind of freaking him out.
"Bro! C'mon! I got chips, they're gonna burn!"
"Okay, that's good," Propeller said, not really listening and switching the sensor back to the one he'd been asked to check out.
"No! That's bad! They'll explode!"
"Uh huh." (In this household, that was less of a disaster and more of a daily occurrence. The house didn't mind as much as you might think.)
The other resident sighed in disgust. After some noises, as might be made of having to shut a few meal preparation devices off, a great yellow-orange mass popped through the nearest window with some difficulty, floating into the air with a few small jets sprouting from his sides before latching in the tree and walking up it on telescoping limbs.
He walked right up to Propeller, nudging the much smaller Mini-Con meaningfully in the back of the head. Propeller grunted and waved behind his head; the other bot cackled and his hand flowed out of the way like liquid, reforming into a stout hook he jammed into the tree branch to steady himself.
The Mutacon, who was called Jake in other universes but in this one was named Grindjack for reasons best known only to himself (he wanted to go for 'Gutgrinder' but unfortunately it was already taken by a famed pro wrestler/eating contest champ), was basically shaped like a zeppelin or airship; fairly large by Transformer standards, his body a large oval and a heavy-jawed bestial head that was basically a continuation of his main body, all painted a yellow-orange color. On Cybertron he would have been designated a beast-class; his default robot mode resembled a dog-like creature, such as a varren or the werewolf people of Luna Lobo, his audio sensors flattened extensions hanging over the side of his head. Most of the time he walked quadrupedal, as he did now, his limbs powerful and jointed like a hunting mechanimal.
In contrast, Propeller was small, though perhaps not for a Mutacon; while Grindjack was big enough that a standard frame Vehicon would only come up to his shoulder, Propeller wouldn't even come up to that Vehicon's knee; he was stout in spite of his smallness, his frame recently upgraded to a more humanoid one in preparation for future military service, and most of his face (except for his mouth) was made of a emote screen, glowing with the same red optical colors of old Kaon's manufacture. He was also missing one of his original arms, his new frame already lost an arm and currently replaced with a mechaplant-based prosthetic. He didn't often speak of where he had got it or why he refused to upgrade, but the color around it was drained. Unusually for the fashion of this planet, he wore the hide of a slain mechanimal; a great tank-bear, it's overlapping plates and head worn over him like a barbaric cape and hood.
Grindjack poked Propeller again; his finger was nearly as big as Propeller's arm, but despite the size difference the smaller Mini-Con didn't even budge. Grindjack shrank down, not so much compressing his mass as doing... something else entirely with it, reducing himself to about Propeller's size. He poked him again. "Come on, mech, you promised!"
Propeller scowled at him. "And you promised we'd let Screamqueen in on it this time! She gets bored down there-" Grindjack's paw hastily flowed over his vocal emitter, stifling the rest into outraged electronic blips.
"Not in public!" Grindjack hissed. "We talked about this! Geez!"
(It's anyone's guess why 'geez' was an expression on this planet, considering it was a publicly acceptable replacement for swearing on the name of a religious figure none of them had heard of yet. It was a mystery of the universe or a translation convenience in the writings of Alpha Trion.)
Propeller compressed, shamed. Grindjack's hand flowed off him and reformed into a paw. "Sorry, bud. I, uh. I forgot."
Grindjack grimaced. "That's just plain weird. Usually I'm the one pulling goofy stuff like that. You're messing up our whole dynamic, mech, don't you do that!"
Propeller shrugged. "I'll do my best."
"Eh, good enough. The heck are you doing?" He indicated the sensor array on the branch.
"Oh, that? Bhanibhel," he began, referring to a friend of theirs; a very smart and extremely pink Quintesson who had long since defected from her people's regime and traveled across different worlds, apparently indifferent to the dangers of doing this in Transformer lands when you were a Quint. "She's picked up some kind of transwarp signature coming in from... uh..." Propeller struggled to remember what exactly she had said, and he waved vaguely in the direction of what happened to be, given a few dozen light years or so, a prison world used by the mineral-based Gem people. "That way. She wanted me to set up this scanner and I guess it was more fun than I figured watching the lightshow on the screen. Sorry, bud."
"Hey, that's all right," Grindjack said, mollified. "Still wanna watch it? I can hold off on the gladiator stuff if you want."
"Actually, a break does sound pretty cool," Propeller said, hopping off the tree branch and free-falling to the ground.
"Hey, wait up!" Grindjack hopped off, tripling in size and sucking in air, effectively turning himself into a massive balloon and hitting the ground before his friend. Propeller gently dove into him and bounced lightly onto the ground without any harm, and frowned mightily for he had been denied his chance to pacify the ground by hitting it with himself.
Grindjack deflated and Propeller brushed himself off. The two of them went into the nearest module housed on the ground, closing all the doors and windows. That itself was fine, from the point of view of the local satrap who ruled this sector of the planet in Lord Megatron's name, everyone was entitled to keep doors closed.
The hidden door they went through, disguised as a bit of the floor that no one would have seen unless they already knew how to find it, was also fine, if a little odd.
The passageway they traveled through beneath it was not fine, and in fact marginally illegal.
The sheer size of the passageway, going deep below ground and hidden from any sensors or official investigations, was definitely illegal.
The enormous chamber, miles below the ground and big as a playing stadium and older than any but the first Decepticon outposts on this planet, it's ancient metal scarred and burned, was extremely not okay at all. And the sole inhabitant of it would have scarred the satrap silly, like walking face to face with a terrorcon.
And the secret digging operations, gradually moving up and up as Propeller and Grindjack could manage, was so far from okay that in relativistic terms it was coming around to okay from the other side. The two of them had no idea how close they were coming to instant executions the moment anyone official found out, and the two fledgling Decepticons cheerfully innocent of any potential doom.
It was a vast space, dark and old. Not as old as the vanished people of this planet (of whom Propeller and Grindjack knew nothing, no sparkling was told of the dirty secrets of Decepticon prosperity), but it was plenty old all the same. The one within older by far. And into this, their footsteps echoing like the 'feed me' bell of a giant monster's lair, came the two inexperienced bots. "Screamqueen, we're here!" Propeller said cheerfully, staring into a darkness big enough that several ranks of Constructicons could have sat there comfortably with room to spare.
At first, there seemed no response. That the place was empty. And then, a sense of movement, shadows moving around darkly colored metal walls. It then became apparent that the metal wall, dwarfing any ordinary Transformer, was not a wall. It was a leg, huge and fairly slender for it's size but no less massive for all of that, ending in dexterous claws as long as a speeder-class. They carved deep into the ground, and then it seemed the entire curve of that dark chamber moved, the bulk of something staggeringly enormous and terrifying, all sharp metal and purple bio-lights...
And all that swept aside, fanning up and out. Not the main body at all, but two massive wings like a bat.
And now, two gigantic Kaon-red eyes bigger than Grindjack's default form glowed in the dark, at a height easily three times as high as a standard humanoid Transformer, staring down directly at them.
And a face like a mixture between a dragon and a bat, detailed like something out of a Chaosbringer nightmare story of the things that dwell in the Pit, it smiled. That was not easy to do with a mouth like a mass of bot-sized fangs with hinges.
Slowly the titanic monster approached them, walking on four legs (the rear set considerably bulkier than the front as a matter of movement), the wings folding up against around a compact central body and metal quill-spines settling down as it came closer and closer. Though 'it' was the wrong word; even the most inept student of Transformer physiology would have recognized the telltale signs and details that this particular monster was female.
And old. Perhaps not as old as Alpha Trion (considerably younger, in the grand scheme of things, but then it was all relative), but older by far than any institution on old Cybertron, and she had outlasted them all.
Propeller looked up into those old, frightful eyes and a maw with teeth sprouting off each other like coral made of murder, and he smiled, sweet and sincere and trusting.
The gigantic monster-thing bumped her head down, her snout bowling both Propeller and Grindjack over. (Kind of like giving someone a shoulder-smack so strong it bowls them over.) "S'up, guys!" She said cheerfully, her voice much quieter than might have been expected. "Primus but I'm bored down here."
"We're working on that," Grindjack said, dusting himself off and looking hurt.
She rolled her eyes. "Uh huh."
"We are! Really," Propeller said.
She turned and sat down, adjusting her wings again. A massive claw tapped at the ground next to Propeller, holding still for as long as it took for him to hop on it and clamber up her knuckle. She glanced down and snorted. "Uh huh. When you're not... what, watching cartoons, punching up horrible monsters and doing other fun stuff I haven't done in... I dunno, forever?"
"And sleeping for solar cycles at a time," Grindjack said cheerfully. "Don't forget about that!"
Propeller glared at him. "You're not helping, bro!"
"I am! I'm providing her moral support."
The terrifyingly monstrous beastformer sighed dramatically with a slight puff of flame; she fanned a wing out and flopped over onto her side with an impact that tossed both smaller bots a couple dozen feet and shook the prison chamber like a mountain had smacked into it. "It must be nice. You know, being up top, doing things and living life and not being stuck here for eons and eons. Or having friends that don't want you stuck down here forever. Yeah. I wonder what that's like?"
"Okay, okay!" Propeller stammered. "You can stop the guilt-tripping now! Please?"
The much bigger beastformer, who was named Screamqueen, laughed. "Awright." She gave him another playful poke, even her claw dwarfing him. "I got my torture quotient full for the day. Or whatever time it is."
Both smaller bots sighed in relief. She reclined fully onto her side, spread out her wings and yawned loudly. "So what's on the agenda for today?" she asked, blinking. Her eyes dimmed from red to a teal color. "Figuring that it's no good for any digging today, since we might be getting someone alerted to it. So... what, shows?"
"Yup!" Grindjack said happily. "Gladiator fights straight from the Kaon pits of the old glory-days!" He paused and leaned in, whispering conspiratorially. (Mostly for effect; if he was genuinely whispering, it would be unlikely that Screamqueen could hear him.) "These were recorded by you-know-who."
Propeller shivered. Screamqueen said, "Oh, you mean Soundwa-
"DON'T SAY THAT NAME!" Propeller and Grindjack shrieked, the latter swelling his arms to enormous sizes and wrapping them around Screamqueen's jaws like giant rubber bands.
She rolled her eyes and snorted, blowing them down. "You guys are so jumpy." They were both still shivering.
"Don't even joke about that... guy..." Grindjack said.
"Have you ever even met him?" Propeller asked curiously.
"Yeah," Screamqueen said. She snarled. "Bet this whole mess was his idea."
Both mechs shivered at the thought.
Screamqueen considered the shows ahead. "So, old-fashioned sponsored fights to crowd decision! Sounds good." She shrugged, though it seemed more than a little resigned. "I'm up for that." It was the tone used by someone who thought that they didn't have much else to look forward to, for a very, very long time, so they had better adjust to it and do their best.
Propeller noticed, though it was doubtful if Grindjack did; if so, he thought it more tactful not to take notice. He shuffled away, glancing at Propeller and Screamqueen, and turned his attention to a large set of screens arranged like a great compound mural upon the wall; they activated, turning to the show upload he had already set up earlier.
While he was doing that, Propeller rolled over to Screamqueen, nestling himself somewhere between the great mass of her torso and her elbow as she settled back into a resting position. Though small, he could still make himself felt perfectly well, and she visibly curled slightly around him, sliding slightly towards his warmth; a heat that was at odds with the coolness of her own frame, like an ocean trying to warm itself around a candle that was a lot hotter than it looked (And trying not to smother it).
She looked happier, all the same. If she had been capable of compressing or shrinking herself to a smaller body at all, she undoubtedly would have done it then. But she had not fed on living energon in a very long time, and she didn't have the power to do that, and so made do with allowing the tip of her long tail to curl around him like a living blanket. She lifted her tail up for Grindjack to curl up beneath as well; her feelings for the beastformer might not have been the same type as for Propeller, but it was affection and love all the same.
Clearly, the three of them presented a rather unusual household, particularly for Decepticons in general, and thus an explanation would be merited.
Propeller and Grindjack had settled down here to roam as they would, which was what young Decepticons were often seen to do until experienced enough to enter military work. Very early on they had discovered this home and settled in when they were still young enough not to be counted in the census reports in case they off-lined through accidents, and explored the surrounding area, much of it was still showing signs of being another sort of world (attributed to infectious growths from alien worlds, and the inconsistencies bothered Propeller too; Grindjack didn't care too much as long as it wasn't straight-up evil and that could never happen, right).
And through these adventures, they had found chasms in the earth, deep tunnels into the soil; soil, not metal granules or shifting plates. Huge tunnels that had been dug there a long time ago and collapsed when their job was done, and yet a few of them had opened up again over the ages.
And through those, they had found the ancient prison below the ground, and in doing so opened it up, and woke the monster inside. Only she wasn't a monster. Not really.
Her name was Screamqueen, an ancient Predacon, a sub-species of Transformer predating the Quintesson-made, she had claimed to have been there when Megatronus Prime himself had walked Cybertron. Always taught that Megatronus had been a figurehead and legend to be emulated as Lord Megatron had, Propeller found it pretty surreal to hear him being talked about like an actual person.
A person who had done... terrible things.
She had been imprisoned down there a long time ago; she wasn't sure when or how or why, she only remembered being fought and beaten, and slightly aware of the long passage of time, and then there had been the two bots, there for her when she woke up.
Maybe they should have reported her or told someone. Both of them believed that you helped someone in need, and no one needed help like someone who was trapped down a place for forever. It had to have been a mistake, anyway, Grindjack had insisted. No way they'd lock up somebody just because they were big and scary or powerful. Right?
So the digging had begun; there was no entrance large enough for her to escape, so over the years they had begun digging, carefully excavating tunnels large enough for her to navigate until she could make her own way to the surface and escape into the wolds or plead her case. As he'd grown older and... closer to the Predacon, Propeller had entertained notions of staying with her. Maybe she'd stay with him. Or he'd go with her.
Thinking like that made him feel like he didn't really have a grasp on his own life again, but it was nicer than worrying that the Decepticon High Command's history was lying to him.
And maybe it would take forever, digging. Maybe many years more. And they didn't have too many left before they were good enough to get conscripted, and off Screamqueen would be alone again, and maybe they would never come back to get her all the way out. She liked to remind them about this when they brought her Energon, maybe because she was genuinely scared of that, or she just wanted to mess with their heads. Maybe a little of both.
But that was something they would deal with, a little bit at a time.
It was a good life, all things considered.
And here and now, things seemed pretty good.
Together the three of them settled down, and watched the shows, together; with camaraderie and happiness and peace.
At least until the spaceship hit their house.