This is intended as a companion fic to Promise, but it's not necessary to read that first in order to understand this.

I decided to write this when an interesting plot point came up in planning Promise, but I was unsure if I'd be able to wedge it into the main story. So, I decided to make it into its own fic (and also because I wanted to explore into Elita One's background before she bonded with Optimus). It is set before the war, specifically during the Golden Age, and like with Promise I'm taking a few elements from the IDW comics (namely Ratbat's character and the state of Cybertron before the war). Some other things though are of my own imagining.

The main timeline is also that of Transformers Prime, so the Soundwave in this fic will be following his design in that show.

xx

Unit Seven Zero One. Right there in those slat straight letters and hooked curves of numbers, Ariel saw her designation on the event list. She hadn't seen those numbers in a long time, only once when she was placed into her Academy set. But she'd heard them often enough; bellowed through vocalisers, whispered in strained audios and once she imagined that a medic drone would have recited it at her birth. And from that, she supposed it meant something. 'One' was a special number if you were a femme. What it signified was a curious little mystery that Cybertron's best bio-analysists still hadn't cracked; the phenomena of femmes rarely being born on their own. They were always with a brother or two, one spark split into several and one of them just so happening to be female. Something to do with CNA and base code duplication and mutation... Ariel never really paid much mind to the lessons during her time in the Academy. Not that there was any point, after she received her 'worker' role. Her function.

She didn't know a lot about what exactly the whole 'Functionist' movement around Cybertron was, but she knew enough from her place within it to safely make the assumption that it sucked more than a cleaning drone's vacuum nozzles.

But nowadays she didn't have much time to complain about it. Not when her processor was being picked apart, vocaliser endlessly tweaked and oiled, her circuits and wires flexed onto the verge of snapping from the torsion she forced on them every day.

The joys of life in the Iacon art caste.

Ariel wasn't the only one who suffered, of course. They all did. Even now she saw a poor Mini-Con femme being carried off down a dim corridor with dimmer optics, legs twisted and vocaliser shaking the air with wails. If she survived the first night in what shackles they all called 'the med-bay' then the supervisors wouldn't let her live for long afterwards. A femme without legs wasn't much use other than as a frag-

"Elita! Get your aft in gear, you're gonna be late!"

Right, she kept forgetting. She wasn't Ariel any more. She was Elita One. And her shoulders were about to come out of their sockets if Chromia shook them any harder.

"You know how pissed Beta gets when we miss our cues!" the blue femme said as she dragged Elita past sallow groups of other femmes gathered under flickering lights, half-heartedly flashing over their immaculate armour and holsters hidden beneath skirt plating. A mech marched past here and there as well, but they weren't in any better state.

"Well maybe if she didn't expect us to clean up in less than a breem, she wouldn't blow out her vocaliser every day," Elita muttered just loud enough to make Chromia smirk. "What's this mech's name again, anyway?"

"Primus, you'd forget your own if I wasn't yelling it in your face every day," Chromia huffed in irritation as they stopped before a wide set of doors, but her frown gave way to another smirk half-way through. "Starscream. Senator Starscream. One of the big ones, I heard, in charge of Vos affairs-"

"Is that the Seeker city?"

"Frag if I know," she shrugged. "He's next in line to be something called 'Winglord', so I guess that translates into 'Seeker piece of slag'." Elita's mouth and eyeridges furrowed into frowns.

"Come on, 'Mia, just because he has wings-"

"Means that he'll already think he's better than you 'cause you can't flap away from him." Her olfactories wrinkled and her servos crossed over her chest. "And anyway, he's a Senator. You know how tricky they are to deal with. They can get away with a hell lot more than other mechs can. So now you gotta remember-" Again she seized Elita by the shoulders, and started reciting the honoured code of all courtesans. "When he takes your hand, keep your other on your blaster holster, don't piss him off, don't let him take you away from crowds or down 'shortcuts'-" She punctuated it with air quotes. "- and never go back to his hab suite. Got it?"

"I've heard it enough times from Beta, I'm sure it's all but engraved on my processor," Elita said with a scowl, rolling her shoulder joints back into place.

"I just want you to be careful, 'Lita," Chromia went on. "The first job's always the hardest. And that armour sure as hell ain't hiding your shivers."

"I am not shiver-" Elita stopped herself when the blue femme reached for a pink servo and brought it up, letting it shake and quiver in her grip. She looked at it as if it was rusting before her optics.

"Just a... motor glitch," Elita muttered, pulling her incriminating servo away and rubbing at her wrist. Chromia made a skeptical noise, just as her friend remembered one crucial detail.

"Wait a minute, Mia... if we're going out of the city, what if he wants to see my... alt mode?" Chromia had the grace to let her faceplate soften with a small sympathetic smile.

"I wouldn't worry 'bout that, Elita. Mechs like him hardly bother with letting their legs walk, let alone using their modes to get anywhere. You'll be fine. But good luck anyway. And keep your audios sharp, I want a lot of gossip when you get back!"

'If I get back, you mean...'

Just then the doors slid open, and chaos erupted in femmes trying to get through and keeping their armour pristine at the same time. Elita felt a final farewell thud on her back before she was carried out the doors by a tide of frantic femmes, her spark in her mouth and threatening to roll off her glossa if she opened it.