Red Alert sounded the general alarm at exactly 5:27 AM, rousing the Autobots to the fact that the Decepticons had just attacked a power plant to gain energon to fuel their latest superweapon, a gigantic cannon-like thing of some sort with its sights fixed on Portland.
In summary, it was an ordinary Tuesday.
Perceptor snapped fully awake when Jazz's comm., telling him to report to the Spec Ops group, startled him out of his chair. He'd fallen into recharge in the labs again, and from the dull-opticed look that Skyfire was now giving him, the shuttle hadn't slept at all. I spent nine million years asleep, I'm fine, he'd say whenever someone reminded him that recharge was something one should get a few times a month lest Ratchet bludgeon you into it with a lead pipe or a table.
"What d'they want with you?" Skyfire asked, extending a hand to help Perceptor up onto his feet. Perceptor shrugged, wincing as the movement stretched his stiffened neck cables in ways they did not want to stretch.
"Probably help figure out what the latest Decepticon invention is supposed to be," he answered, making his way to the door. That process entailed dancing around a few questionable blobs of molten… something, and trying not to step on the pieces of Wheeljack's latest project, which was probably responsible for the blobs of something. The fact that Wheeljack's project had not been in pieces and that the something had not existed at all last night reminded Perceptor that falling asleep in the labs was a dangerous gamble. He was lucky to be functional to answer Jazz's summons.
"Be careful," Skyfire said, and his optics were a little more focused now, alight with worry.
Perceptor cast one last glance down at the Wheeljack's-monsters-occupied floor. "You too."
Jazz briefed him and Bumblebee on the situation as they headed out to the "…well, I'm thinking 'death ray' might be the best term for it." Jazz chuckled and Perceptor wondered how he could find such a thing humorous. The Decepticons were trying to blow up Portland (again). That wasn't funny. But Jazz was laughing.
Then again, more worrisome would be Jazz not laughing. "Most of the 'Cons are out at the power plant, so Prime figured I could get a team in here and shut this thing down while it's relatively unguarded. 'Course, we had to get someone in who actually knows tech, and I figured you could do stealth best, Percy."
Skyfire was too big and tended to freeze up when he saw Starscream, and Wheeljack and his predisposition for explosions did not fit the definition of stealth. "A reasonable conclusion," Perceptor said. "Though you couldn't just cut some wires and hope for the best?"
"It would probably explode," Bumblebee said. "A lot of the 'Cons' stuff self-destructs if you don't shut it down right. Carly's pretty sure that's not intentional, just a lot of faulty engineering."
Perceptor wouldn't be surprised. Starscream was unhinged, Shockwave was on Cybertron, and while the Constructions could probably create working schematics for things, they didn't seem to want to put in the effort and so just built the stupid things Megatron mapped out, flaws and all.
"So my job is to diffuse the death ray."
"Yup," Jazz said. "And we sneak you in, keep you from getting caught, and sneak you back out."
The supposed "death ray" looked more like a small military outpost with a cannon mounted on top. They pulled up into a nearby ditch, peering out at the possibly-unoccupied building. "Mirage, Bluestreak, see anything?" Jazz asked. He frowned when he received negatives from both snipers. "They can't be so stupid to leave this unguarded."
A strange noise, akin to a human cough, emerged from Bumblebee, followed by a burst of words that Perceptor didn't quite catch.
"All right, snipers stand by, we're moving in."
It didn't take long for them to find the room that appeared to hold the controls. Jazz planted Bumblebee, mostly out-of-sight, in a nook across from the door in the hallway outside and took off on his own, calling Mirage down from his position and leaving Perceptor alone in the huge room filled with switches, buttons and blinking lights that didn't seem to be connected to anything. Typical Decepticon engineering.
He had just figured out how to aim the cannon when the barrel of a gun pressed against the back of his head. "Jazz," he commed before he realized that the best way to not get shot would probably be to not alert the other Autobots to the fact that he was not alone.
"If I were anyone else," a familiar voice purred, "you would be in pieces."
"Yeah, Percy?"
Perceptor turned to see where the Decepticon had come from; his optics settled on a large wall panel that hadn't quite been closed properly. "It looks like this room connects to another one. Should I investigate further?"
The gun lifted away from his head.
"Better make sure no one's in there, yeah."
Perceptor cut the comm. and a low chuckle came from behind him. "A little late for that now, isn't it?" Slipstream asked, a smirk dancing across her lips as she stepped out in front of Perceptor. She pulled open the hidden door the rest of the way. "That's the generator room. No worries, I was the only one in there." She leaned back, carelessly, on one of the control panels.
"I'm glad," Perceptor said, looking back to his work before casting a quick glance back at the door. If Bumblebee decided to enter at any point…
"Now why do they have you playing at spies?" Slipstream asked, standing up and sauntering over, leaning against Perceptor's back as he opened up the controls and stared at the mess of wires underneath.
"They wanted a scientist to shut this down, to make sure it doesn't blow up."
"You could just bomb it from the air."
Perceptor frowned. "The Aerialbots are out stopping the rest of your air force from flattening another human facility."
"Slipstream!" Starscream's harsh voice crackled across her comms, and Perceptor jumped, knocking her away. "Any activity at the site?"
Slipstream rolled her optics at Perceptor. "Deader than dead, and I'm starting to think you post me on missions like this out of spite."
"Me? Spite? Never. Surely you have me confused for someone else."
"Oh, it would be impossible to confuse you with someone nice." Slipstream shut off her comm. and watched Perceptor, in silence, for about a minute before she said, "They'll all be dead in a hundred years away, you know."
Perceptor's hands slipped from the wires. "What?"
"The humans. The ones you're trying to protect. Why bother?"
It wasn't the harsh, arrogant cackling of Starscream; it wasn't Megatron's laughter as he spat out the word "fool". Slipstream was genuine – she didn't understand – and that, to Perceptor, hurt more.
"Objectively," he said after a moment, fighting to keep his voice level, to not let the hurt and betrayal escape, "I protest the meaningless destruction and alteration of a planet's natural ecosystem."
"And if you shut down the objective scientist for a moment…" Slipstream trailed her fingers around Perceptor's head and he tried to shake her off because Primus she was so distracting and he would probably blow them both up if he wasn't concentrating.
"Who are we to decide that someone else's time is insignificant?"
"You would stop us even if this energon we wanted wasn't going towards a… a whatever this is, I don't know the point of it, some days I swear Megatron gets bored." Slipstream circled around to another control panel, popped it open, and carelessly ripped loose a handful of wires. Perceptor flinched. "But if we wanted energon to take back to Cybertron, to rebuild it, you would still fight us for the sake of these little organics. Do you care about Cybertron at all?" Another fistful of torn wires shot sparks into the air. "You'll just let it waste away for humanity?"
"Our war has already destroyed our planet. We don't want Earth to be another casualty."
"We could fix Cybertron! We could use Earth's resources to rebuild Cybertron and the net – the net loss is still just one dead planet – Perceptor – " Slipstream wrenched open another panel.
"Slipstream, this entire structure is unstable in its construction, what you are doing could result in –"
"—Killing us? I look forward to it." She laughed, her forearms buried deep in the mechanics of the cannon controls. Perceptor dropped whatever he was doing, all of the thoughts of engineering and careful and mission dissolving from his processor, and ran over to Slipstream, pulling her away. She spun, orange optics glinting wildly, and Perceptor flinched.
She wilted instantly at his fear and stepped up to him, throwing her arms around his neck, burying her face against his shoulder. "I am so tired of this, I am sick of worrying that you're going to get killed or that they're going to find out. Wouldn't it be easier for us to just go up in smoke, right here, right now, together, just like that? Wouldn't it?"
Perceptor wrapped his arms around her waist. "That's not an answer," he said, and even as the words left his mouth he looked at the door that Bumblebee stood guard on the other side of, and some deep part of him had to accept that blowing up would be much less painful than having the yellow scout walk in at this instant. "Factions aren't permanent," he added, moving one hand up to cover up the purple sigil on her left wing, picturing what the Autobot symbol would look like emblazoned against her silver wings.
She laughed, a strangled sound. "Peceptor, I want to go home, and the Autobots are what's standing in the way of that. I could never be one of you." She lifted her head and rested her helm against Perceptor's. "And I know where you stand about being a Decepticon."
"Never," Perceptor said, and that one word carried a thousand names behind it, cities like Praxus and Iacon and friends long buried in the ashes and rusted away.
Slipstream smiled and whispered, "I'm sorry," pressed a kiss to his lips before slipping free and disappearing through the door to the generator room. "Finish shutting this thing down, save your humans. See you around."
And that hurt, cut like a dagger through his chassis, because she was on the battlefield so much more often than he was and there was always that chance that she would be killed before he emerged from the labs again –
"Slipstream?"
She didn't come back and Perceptor threw himself into science, rewiring everything he could get his hands on as a kind of balm against the pain, and he wondered if that was why Skyfire always had something to work on, to stop the hurt. He wondered if Wheeljack was the sanest among them three and wasn't that a scary thought?
He commed Jazz when he finished working, once he rigged everything so that it should hopefully turn on the Decepticons and explode when they tried to activate it. He should warn Slipstream, he should tell her to stay away when Megatron comes back to test his latest technology, he should –
"Good job, team," Jazz said once they were out and far enough away from the building-cum-superweapon-cum-bomb that they didn't have to worry about being found. "No one was caught, don't even think there was a spark in there." Perceptor knew otherwise, of course. "Let's roll back to base and let Megsy have some fun with our alterations." He clapped Perceptor on the shoulder and grinned, and Perceptor forced a smile back.
They were back at the Ark for half an hour when Sky-Spy picked up the fact that Megatron's death ray was a smoking shell of its former self.
It'd be easier if we were dead, and Perceptor found himself sulking at his desk, staring blankly at the wall, hoping that if she ever decided that was the only option left she wouldn't make that choice on her own.
Skyfire set a cube of energon down in front of him and retreated to his own workspace without trying to make conversation. He always seemed to know what Perceptor needed and sometimes he wondered if he knew. "What would happen, do you think, if one of us tried to run away from the war?" he asked, realizing that was something he and Slipstream had never discussed, the possibility of leaving both sides behind. "Or – or a few of us."
Skyfire was silent for a long time. "You've been doing this war thing for a lot longer than I have, Perceptor," he said. "I think you would have a better idea."
"I'm asking you."
"It'd be like that thing Carly had to read for school," Skyfire mused. "The one with the families and – the one where they all died. It'd be like that. If you got caught."
"The penalty for desertion in the Autobot code isn't death," Perceptor said. Skyfire didn't answer and finally he looked away from the wall to his friend. Skyfire stared back at him with warm but sad blue optics. He still said nothing. Like he knew. Like he'd figured it out, read between the lines.
"If it were just Autobots involved your hypothetical plan it wouldn't exist," Skyfire said, and he turned back to his work.
The next day Perceptor found a data pad sitting on his desk, loaded with a copy of the story Skyfire had mentioned. The characters, he found, were idiots; he knew Slipstream prided herself on not being an idiot and said so in a note he wrote to preface the human story. Then he let the data pad, during a brief skirmish two weeks later, find its way into Slipstream's hands.
Some nights he wandered far from the Ark to go stargazing. It wasn't something that anyone would question of a scientist and they didn't need to know that his favorite hilltop was a location where a certain Seeker was known to go joyflying.
"I hate that you're a scientist." Slipstream landed next to him, and while her greetings were never something normal, this one Perceptor couldn't quite figure out.
"Why?" he asked, moving to take her hand, but he found a data pad slapped down into it. He set it aside and Slipstream glowered for a moment before her face relaxed and she leaned over and kissed him, snuggling into his side and entwining her fingers with his.
"Because you have to be smart to be a scientist, and you're smart, so that means you like challenges, you like challenges and death is easy."