Authors Note: Part 3 of the Adjustments series, sequel to 'The Golden Hour.' Transformers is not my own, but the character Phage is. Also, I'd like to apologize for everyone that stuck through the horrible mess that was the orginal piece of this. I think I more than tripped up on my own feet on that one, but somehow twisted my body into a horrible shape as well. So, here is the fanfic again, redone, edited, and hopefully a million times better than the last. P.S. -Cellandra is not mentioned or brought up in this! (Guess I just lied though hmm?) My brother already thoroughly smacked me silly for that crackpot idea among other things.

Rated Mature for explicit violence, coarse language, and adult-oriented themes.


Chapter 1

'What is my age?'

The self-posed question was driving her up the fucking wall. Phage wracked her synthetic brain, or her CPU, or whatever the hell it was now. The human-turned-femme was twenty when she met Jazz for the first time, all the way back when she was going to college up in Washington, right before the Insecticon Massacre of Klickitat County. Afterwards, she'd spent nearly a year with the Autobots trying to recuperate, or had it only been a few months? Damn it. She couldn't remember. Time blurred together for her indefinitely. Hell, something she had done just two days ago she could have thought she did a week before. The Insecticon Massacre seemed a whole other lifetime ago, and in a way it was.

Twenty-one. Yes. That was it. She was certain. 'I was still twenty-one when I went on that world cruise. Then twenty-four when…'

Phage's whole memory drive glazed over. There was nothing but a huge gaping hole in her memory banks conveniently placed in the timeframe during her sightseeing in Africa and ending when she woke up in The Ark's Medbay– as a synthetic Transformer no less. Ratchet said that it was some sort of selective amnesia or something like that. Bottom line of it was that her own mind had wiped the memory of her metamorphosis from her brain just to keep her sane.

Not that she was sane right now. Artistic types were never sane.

But that didn't tell her her age.

Twenty-four? Twenty-six?

Shit. What'd it even matter anyway? Age didn't matter to metal gods like the Autobots or Decepticons.

A shiver raced up and down her spine.

Phage hugged herself into a tighter little ball as she sought comfort and protection as she tried to cycle down into recharge in the Medbay. Her side panels twitched now and again as she tried to relax, unwind from the tedious ordeal that left her in a state of shock. Despite her ability to compartmentalize, Phage kept finding it difficult to shuffle the incident in the Labs into a little back room. Not even trying to focus on ultimately pointless self-banter and arguments -like her age- was helping her to distance herself any. She could still see Wheeljack's mangled corpse in her mind's eye as he lay sprawled out across the floor of the Labs like a broken toy as he drowned in a pool of his own vibrant lifeblood. The numb mass of metal and wires that had been his body prior to the accident was scorched as if some disturbed child had sought to set ablaze his own playthings just for the kick of it.

She could still smell the burnt metal, the smoke, taste the electricity in the air…

…the urgency that gripped her fuel pump –

-the fear.

And then she heard it, like distant thunder. Ghost figments sent to torment her. The snapping of the cable, the screaming of the falling girder…

Phage's body shook again as she tried to cycle down into recharge, desperately tried to cull her mind and drift off into a visionless sleep, the one place where she could escape the pressures of reality, but her ordeal kept her awake despite the pull of her systems to send her into recharge. Through her own form of stubbornness or some perverse need to prove herself strong to her Autobot comrades, she refused to man up to the shock that she was grappling with. She refused to tell Ratchet what she was going through because she felt that she needed to wrestle with it herself without any assistance.

After all, how often had they done the same? How often had they been locked down in battle, or far away from any assistance and had to deal with this same thing by themselves? She refused to admit and was determined to prove herself. What she wanted most though, if only for reassurance, was for somebody to take hold of her and tell her that everything was alright now, that everything would be okay, but she wasn't that delusional. She couldn't see any of them –the Autobots – helping to sooth her shock with hugs and cuddles and sweet nothing-words. Jazz, Brawn, Sideswipe, Bumblebee, Optimus, Prowl, Wheeljack, Ratchet, even Sparkplug – they were war veterans. With respects to Sparkplug, they had lived through five million years of war. Cuddles and hugs to sooth the shock of battle and stress was long past them. She couldn't look to them for it for that reason, because of what they were – how old they were. For her, a human-turned-femme, nine million years was the span of the high powers that be. To live that long, to have the knowledge of millennia, was unthinkable to her tiny mind. To ask something from an entity that had lived that long, to ask them to feel for something that was new and a baby by comparison was unreasonable to her because they, in all their great age, must have forgotten what it was like or view it as weakness, even forgotten how to feel at some point in time.

She could just imagine herself asking Ratchet for a hug and his response would be to sedate her to calm her nerves. Wheeljack…she didn't know to be honest. Wheeljack was always chirpy, easy-go-lucky, never say die. Perhaps, despite his god-like age, he would offer her a hug, understand her need for it though he himself couldn't remember why.

Sparkplug though, wizened in his human ways, still had emotions. He was still new and understanding to life, unlike the Autobots, or at least in the way she viewed them. Well, some of them. She could ask a hug from Sparkplug and he would understand and give it freely. No questions asked. He would give it and not judge because he still remembered what it was like to be in her position.

Because he was human.

He wasn't one of the metal gods.

Another jolt. Her body shook as if from a cold chill. She cradled herself for comfort and affection but the result was self-afflicting numbness. The emerald green femme felt as though her entire body was shaking apart, and yet she knew that she wasn't moving at all. She could feel a familiar pressure building up in her throat, disguised as a haggard sigh, but she knew better. It would begin there and swiftly grow unchecked from that if she released it. She would break down into tears right there in Medbay, right in front of Ratchet, Wheeljack, and Sparkplug –but she refused to allow herself too. She swallowed back the lump in her throat, hugged herself tighter – afraid to let Ratchet catch on that she was shaking.

She couldn't afford to. She couldn't afford to look weak in front of timeless metal gods. They already looked down on her for her youth, because she was a femme, because she had been human. She didn't need them to know that they were right. That she was all that they expected from somebody of her ilk.

She would prove them all wrong.

It had to begin with conquering her current physical predicament. And the key to that was her ability to compartmentalize. Only she had a difficult time of doing that if another situation didn't call for her to act normal, to appear normal, or to be stronger than what she felt like back in the Labs. Otherwise she was just prone to let her mind devour itself. It was something that she had been allowing it to do for years now, especially since her reformate from human to a Trans-Sync, a derogatory term coined by Sunstreaker to further remind her of her lower status than them. The bastard.

Abruptly, an idea hit her with a force similar to Ironhide clothes-lining her in training. The grizzled old 'bot had learned straight away that one way for her to immediately bypass any awkward situation and draw her into putting out her full potential was by playing on her stubborn streak and getting her angry. She'd already known it for years, but it had been such a relief for him to discover it sometime into their training together. She had always thought that anger was part of the training for soldiers. Make them hate their teachers so that it created a disliking for them, and thus the want on the soldier's part to strike them. Ironhide needed her to strike at him to teach her, and for awhile she had just been shy about it because he was her friend…or acquaintance rather. More of an awkwardness given her prior civ life. When they first began training, it was like he didn't know that old school rule, but then she supposed that maybe it was that she was femme and he didn't know how to train femmes. Maybe he thought there was some other way.

Boy was he relieved when he found out it wasn't all that different after all.

Just like now. Thinking of how much she hated Sunstreaker just made her pain all the more bearable. It placed the events in the Labs just a bit more into the past, making it easier for her to slid back into the present and carry on with her life. If she just concentrated on how often Sunstreaker had made some snide comment about her, how many times he had called her a Trans-Sync, how often he tore her down behind her back and to her face, the more she got angry at him, focused on that golden fucker, the easier it was for her to regain control of herself and disentangle the horrible memories of the Lab and Wheeljack into a dusty, cob-webbed cabinet in a gloom drenched corner of her mind.

She wanted to smile, but the tear on her cheek prevented her from doing just that. So she settled for a mental one, proud of herself and her cleverness as she began to accomplish gaining some bit of recharge in five minutes in what had taken her over an hour to do while she had been depressed and attempting to ignore her problem with meaningless self-posed questions.

Guess she owed Sunstreaker a bit of thanks too. The self-absorbed fragger was good for something after all.

Phage started to settle down into a more comfortable state, permitting a half-smile on the side of her flexi-metal face that wasn't damaged. She entertained ideas of kicking Sunstreaker's ass from here to Eris and back, even though she was aware that if she ever did try to do that in real life she'd probably have her arm ripped off in round one. Still, it was nice to entertain her own fantasies even if they were delusional from time to time.

In amusing her vicious thoughts her cranial surge reemerged after it's near hour and a half disappearance from its first manifestation during the incident in the Labs. It was dull but apparent and the minor affliction that it caused her, mingled with the burning pain in her cheek and the subsiding searing pain in her chest, only fueled her brutal dreams of vengeance against the Golden Terror.

Even that lump she had felt in her throat that had threatened her to break down and cry had transformed. She wanted to scream in frustration and anger at Sunstreaker, she wanted to scream at the horrible memories she had gained of Soundwave as he tried to mentally devour her mind and her uncertainty of how much damage he'd actually caused. She wanted to scream at the terrifying memory of Starscream hunting her down through The Ark, cooing and whispering sweetly to her like a good friend, his crimson optics aglow in the dead sections of the ship as she fled before him. She wanted to scream at the unfairness of her exile from her former species and for the loss of everything that she had been. She wanted to vent her frustration and anguish and bitterness to the heavens, to let Ratchet know just how bad she was, to let all the Autobots realize just how badly she was faring, how much she was tearing herself apart mentally to fit in amongst them…

Too Adjust.

"ARAAAG!"

That was not her.

KLAAANG!

And neither was that.

Fuel pump escalating in her chest, adrenaline kicking in, Phage executed a neat roll off the medberth and onto the other side, away from the roar and the sharp clanging of metal on metal that she recognized only to be as a metallic fist meeting metal body. No sooner had she landed on her feet than she had her duel laser pistols pulled from subspace. She generally preferred the bigger, larger, more powerful weapons herself like her rifle, only she reserved that for long range and open spaces. The small and personal pistol, though generally weak, served its point in close quarters with a precise precession shot and speed.

Just as soon as she had her pistols out and the safety off, she chanced a peek around the corner to figure out what was going on. No sooner then she had couple things seemed to happen at once. The first thing that happened was that she noticed Autobot X (currently in the possession of Wheeljack's spark) following up through the motion of slugging Ratchet a good right hook across the face. The CMO hit the floor, knocking over a trolley of replacement parts and medical tools that she figured they'd been using to repair Wheeljack's damaged body with. The last thing she noticed, or the first thing she heard, or however or whatever order anyone preferred to register the simultaneous events in, was Sparkplug. The graying haired man had a haunted look tainting his face, making him look drawn and closer to his actual age. He was waving his hands in the air trying to get Autobot X/Wheeljack's attention as he stood on the medberth that occupied the mad scientist's body. He was shouting at the roaring mismatched Frankenstein of a Transformer.

Phage flinched when she saw him. He was recalling the last time Autobot X went on a rampage, she was sure of it. And that look on Sparkplug's face, was that how she looked now? Ghostly pale, wide-eyed, slack-jawed as if she'd suddenly been struck dumb. She was damn sure that there was some military term for it, but she couldn't recall it in her current state of mind – and especially not when her headache decided to magnify itself upon registering the racket until she was sure that it had a black heart all of its own.

"Wheeljack! No! 'Jack!"

Fuck. Could the cosmos leave her and her private fears alone and just stop making anything that she said or predicted come true? Damn it all. She'd known this would happen, she knew but had hoped against it. What was she supposed to do now? How was she supposed to stop a mech built from the parts of every member of The Ark's original crew when it had taken Prime's own laser cannon rifle to just 'knock' Spike back to his senses the first time? How was she supposed to stop it and not kill or threaten Wheeljack's spark?

Damn her soul to the lower levels of hell. This was all her fault.

"Wheeljack! Please!" Sparkplug went on. "Get a hold of yourself! Remember what happened with Spike?"

The raging Autobot X's guttural roar died off, remembered only as it echoed off against the distant Medbay walls and rebounded back on them. The mix-matched mechaniod turned on Sparkplug, blue optics wild with madness as he growled at the small, offensive organic life form. Sparkplug took half a step back, his hands dropping halfway back to his sides. He suddenly seemed uncertain now as if he just realized where he was and his own frailty around mechanized sentients.

Autobot X saw him (because Wheeljack was truly lost to them at that point in time) and It's lip components curled up into a sneer, bearing Its steel teeth. Its optics darkened, portraying the evident hatred It felt as It reached for him with Its only purple hand.

"Wheeljack! Don't! It's me! Sparkplug, remember!?"

Even as Sparkplug shouted it, his tone shrill, he started to make for some hiding hole where Autobot X couldn't reach him. Only wherever it was that Sparkplug had been planning on hiding out in he never got that far. In one fell swoop Autobot X scooped him up and into the air causing the little human to cry out in a fit of vertigo.

She didn't think it was possible, but her optics got even bigger. That wrenching feeling in the pit of her gut knotted up even fuller until it made her physically sick. Her fuel pump had lodged itself up somewhere in her throat and she was certain that prior shaking she had been feeling for an hour before had made itself manifest now in her trembling hands. Uncertain of what to do other than to wait for some heavier backup, she watched as Autobot X lifted Sparkplug up to his face, where It proceeded to glare at him as if It were trying to Will him to disappear, as if the metallic Frankenstein couldn't wrap Its demented mind around the existence of a creature – a sentient being – made out of carbon life.

Sparkplug's pleas grated on her audios like nails on a chalkboard. That look in his eyes, the shrill, reedy-tone of his voice, she didn't think that it would ever leave her. She had always known him to be so composed, level-headed, proud…seeing him like this, hearing him like this, it just pushed her a little more over the edge…if she hadn't already tripped over it anyway.

"Wheeljack, please!" Sparkplug practically begged of Autobot-X. "You don't want to do this! I know you don't! Remember Spike! Remember what happened last time?!"

A glimmer of recognition sparked across those alien optics, but it wasn't the type of recognition that Sparkplug was looking for. If at all possible, Autobot X remembered, and it was that distant memory that triggered a new wave of aggression. Phage thought that her fuel pump would quit when the beast of a mech got up close to Sparkplug. The faint image of him biting Sparkplug in half came to mind and it was enough of a shock to snap her back into action, mostly because the universe seemed to get its kicks out of making anything she thought of some sort of prophetic verse, and she really, really didn't need to live with the manic memories of Autobot X biting Sparkplug in half – she had enough of those from during the Insecticon massacre in Washington.

She didn't like having other people's lives placed on her shoulders. She was a carefree individual, simply letting life carry her down whatever path it chose. Perhaps she should had fought more against the currents, maybe she wouldn't have ended up where she was now, but there was no changing her fate currently. She had resurrected Autobot X; she had placed Wheeljack into it, granting it life once more and binding her friend and tutor's very psyche and soul in purgatory. If he killed Sparkplug, his life was on her hands.

And she didn't need that.

She grabbed gibbering, mad Phage and shoved her into some dark corner to whine and cry and panic because she really wasn't helping her to deal with any of this. The new Phage that stepped up to the plate she didn't exactly know anything about. Only that she was a fiery, bad-mannered smartass. She'd used her often in recent months, relying on her more and more as time went on. She had used her in the past as the tormentor of her mind, constantly whipping her to try harder, do better, prove her worth. Now, she was starting to become her, and she wasn't exactly sure what that meant or who she'd become.

She did know one thing though…

Anything was possible with her.

With a steadying breath, she whipped around the cover of the medberth and took a pop shot off at Autobot X, aiming low, away from Sparkplug. The laser blast hit its mark, searing into the giant mech's leg.

"Hey, dead weight! Over here!"

The trick worked. She drew Autobot X's attention to herself and away from Sparkplug. The mental image of it eating Sparkplug fled her mind, much to her relief. The only problem now was that she started to get images of the thing tearing her to bits, and she was suddenly filled with second thoughts but she roughly pushed those all aside. It was better her to get hurt than Sparkplug because Ratchet would be able to repair one of them and it sure as hell wasn't going to be squishy-fleshy Sparkplug after he'd been digested.

There was another problem she realized too. Her laser pistols, the ones that she had often condemned for their weak, though precise power…yeah, those ones, well she'd been right. The blast that she had just fired at Autobot X, It had shrugged off her shot like it was a mosquito bite.

Their optics locked, their bodies tense to spring and attack. The quiet before the storm. Hell, she could hear the thunder rolling in the distance. No, wait. That was just the hideous, mismatched metal monster growling at her like a wild beast, its optics flaring briefly to a crimson hue.

Before she could even register what that even meant, if anything, she suddenly found It pointing Its other arm –the one with the gun nozzle –in her direction. Down the length of the barrel she could see a light warming up, a bright, fiery glow that she knew wasn't good for her health. Not at all.