I don't own Transformers.
Lennox stares at the young woman in front of him, dressed professionally under her lab coat with a tablet in hand. She doesn't pay much notice to the group of civilians and soldiers being led into the cavern holding Megatron, and she just maneuvers around them smoothly, eyes not lifting once from the screen.
"Miss Richmond!" Agent Simmons calls upon seeing her. With a sigh, and barely concealed roll of her eyes, she turns to him with a clearly false smile.
"Yes, Agent Simmons?" she asks a little too sweetly. The soldiers all notice the slight signs of the gun under her arm, and the knife hidden under her pants, tucked into black combat boots.
He waves her over, and rests an arm over her shoulders. "Everyone, this is one of our newest and best interns, Charlotte Richmond. She's taken the lead on studying the effects of radiation from another project and this one."
Her eyebrow twitches once, then again with a slight twitch of her nose. "Remove your arm or I'll do it for you," she growls, and the arm moves away as though burnt. With a much kinder smile, she regards the unexpected guests. "Hello, Secretary Keller," she greets him first, before looking over the state of the tired soldiers. "I'm gonna hazard a guess that these men are the Qatar survivors?"
"Yes," he answers quickly, before clearing his throat. "What exactly is this… thing?"
She lightens slightly, and turns around. "This guy was found in the Arctic Circle by Captain Archibald Witwicky in the late 1890's, buried in the ice. The leading theory as to why he crashed is because of the Earth's magnetic field screwing with his calculations as he was entering the atmosphere." She gestures for them to follow her closer to the platform Megatron is held on. "He was moved here in 1934, and held in cryostasis since 1935. Studying him has led to most of our modern day life, with space flight, microchips, cars, and whatnot. What everyone else seems to thing is human tinkering is what led us to this point, but it is really a lot of reverse engineering over the past seventy years."
"Uh, that's Megatron," Sam calls to her carefully.
She turns to give him a small smile. "Thanks, now I don't have to just call him 'Big Guy' anymore."
"It's name is NBE-1," Simmons growls from the back of the group.
Her welcoming demeanor shifts to warning in an instant. "Call him that if you wanna get squished a limb at a time when he wakes up, I'll show some respect so he'll just squish me all at once." She then turns her attention onto Sam. "So, what else can you tell us about this guy?"
"Well," Sam starts nervously. "He's the leader of the Decepticons, is pretty much the harbinger of death. He came here looking for something, called the All-Spark, an energy source for his kind."
Mikaela clears her throat. "He wants to use it to turn Earth technology into his own robot army and enslave humans, essentially."
"Wow," she breathes, moving slightly away from the frozen robot, before giving Simmons and Banachek the stink eye. "I told I had a bad feeling about this whole operation."
"Forgive us if we don't take you seriously," Simmons drawls.
"Dude, I swear this guy watches me sometimes, okay? How many times do I have to tell you that? I've got a stalker back home who would love to watch me to the point I knew when he wasn't there, I've got my younger twin sisters who couldn't prank me cuz I knew when they were planning something with a single twitch, and I've got an agent about to grab me from behind," she growls, kicking backwards and shattering the kneecap of said agent. "How many times do I have to tell you people its impossible to sneak up on me?!" she growls, kicking the same agent in the groin to get her point across.
"I think I'm in love," Epps whispers to Lennox.
He earns a funny look in return. "I think that's terror, not love," he drawls just as quietly. "But damn, she has to be beyond paranoid to be like that."
Eye twitching, she glares at Banachek. "I quit," she growls, before walking calmly over to the computers on the other side of the room, dropping the tablet and collecting a couple of items before stepping up to the Secretary of Defense. "Sir, may I join your group?"
"Go ahead, Miss Richmond," he answers lowly, hiding his grin at the furious agents.
She turns to the teens near the back of the group. "I hope you don't mind, but I messed up the wiring when I found out they were planning to experiment on the yellow guy they brought in."
"Bee? Where is he?" Sam asks in shock.
She turns around, crooking a finger. "Right this way, gentlemen." Leading them out, she whispers to Keller, "This next group we're about to meet has been begging for an ass-whoopin' since I got here last month."
Even Bumblebee was wary of the questionable sanity of the girl who make it so the electrical experiments only tickled, rather than hurt, only just enough to them to make him twitch with every shock. Nevertheless, he was grateful to her, and answered her questions to the best of his ability as she guided them towards the All-Spark.
He offered her the Cube before shifting into his alt-form, and allowed her to sit in the driver's seat to lead them to Mission City. She showed her caring for him and his friends when the fight started on the highway, and when his legs were so painfully ripped from his knee-joints. She forced Sam to listen to the soldiers before running to another fight, with only a small hand-gun and a knife nearly as long as her forearm, from elbow to fingertips.
Optimus found the bleeding girl soon after Megatron's death, barely conscious and a gun at her side, the clip empty of the few bullets it had once carried. She gave him a small smile before her eyes slipped closed.
Fearing the worst, he lifts the femme and limps to Ratchet, begging him to do something to save the femme who was injured to prevent Megatron from ripping Jazz in two. The medic later informed them she would be alright, and Optimus told himself he would protect her as long as his spark remained online.
Three months later, trainee techs ran from the room in fear, with her hot on their tails, pixie cut chocolate hair standing on end as her icy green eyes spark in fury and hidden mirth.
"Come back here, ye cowards!" she screams, pale skin going red as she begins to chase them.
Optimus, having been about to enter the room she had commandeered two months ago, picks her up carefully, holding her close to his chassis. "Charlotte," he scolds her teasingly.
She smiles up at him. "Hi Optimus!" she almost chirps.
With a sigh, he turns around and carries her towards his office. "Ratchet wanted a word with you, but you weren't answering your device."
She rolls her eyes at that. "You know I turn the phone off whenever I'm torturing- training the techs."
He rolls his optics. He silently admits, while she is strange and slightly insane, he wouldn't want her any other way. Maybe, he would have to also ask Ratchet if he could employ the holoform yet.
Jazz found her staring at a small picture one night on the anniversary of the Autobot arrival on Earth.
"Somethin' a matta' femme?" he asks gently, his holoform sitting down in the grass on the edge of the cliff next to her.
She offers him a weak smile. "It's stupid, Jazz."
He shrugs. "Ain't stupid if its botherin' ya so much."
She shakes her head. "My family thought I was still doing that internship, and called me again this afternoon," she whispers after a moment of silence in the gently wind, bathed in moonlight. "My sisters wanted to go to the same school as me, at Marymount, but I finally told them that I finished school online last month, and that I've been employed since Sector Seven was shut down right after Mission City."
"They neva' knew?" he asks in shock.
"I never called, just sent them emails and texts that I was fine, and not much else, just to keep them from freaking out." She then sighs. "They didn't exactly keep me informed of everything either… one of the twins, Isabelle… she's eighteen as of a couple of months ago, she's pregnant now, and her boyfriend dumped her when she told him. My dad got into a car crash three months ago, and just got out of physical therapy. My mom is on the verge of a meltdown, and was threatening to force me to come home and work to pay some of the bills if my sisters didn't get jobs six months ago."
They remain there in silence, and he eventually drives her back to base, passing her sleeping form off to Optimus with a shake of his head.
Six months later, Ratchet has no other choice but to tell the human superiors about her health. She's immediately let go, and set up with a nice property in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by forests, but still near enough to a military base to justify the Autobot visits to her home.
Her family cast her out soon after, having finally learned about her involvement in the 'terrorist attack' at Mission City, and were killed soon after by Decepticons in what was covered up as a house fire, leaving her the only remaining member of her family.
The National Security Liaison, Galloway, ordered that the Autobots remain on base, and began to destroy human-Autobot relations.
She was in the hospital recovering from a surgery for an aneurism when Lennox and Epps came to see her after returning from Egypt, and were thus blocked from entering again by the nurses when they threatened to call the police.
Simmons attempted to track her down soon after this, but found that the government had hidden her well enough that even the Autobots could no longer track Charlotte Richmond down. He wondered for years afterwards what had happened to her.
They found her in Chicago, formerly pale but healthy complexion a shade over unhealthy pasty, dark circles under her eyes with thin hair still cut in that pixie style she favored.
She was armed with only a handgun and a knife, just like when they first met her, but now so weak it was a miracle she could carry away the injured child from the cab containing the corpse of what could only be the little boy's mother.
Her jeans were baggy and ripped, white tank top nearly rags, and combat boots scuffed and caked in dirt. Her once lively eyes were haunted, almost lifeless, as her hands shake uncontrollably. She falls into Optimus's hand in a dead faint when she reaches the safety the Autobots and former NEST personnel provide, pulse weak and barely alive.
They later learn she had been missing from the government files because they had changed her surname to Marshall, and changed the address on her file to the next lot over.
After the fight, she had disappeared once more.
Optimus, injured and alone but for Bumblebee's less injured company, found the sorry looking house he knew she had lived in a decade before. It wasn't as welcoming as it had once been before his temporary offlining, but it still had that touch that reminded him of her.
Painfully, he and Bee activate their holoforms and enter the house, finding a window to the living room open. He hurries to the side of the half-dead woman lying on the couch, barely breathing with a weaker pulse than he remembered.
"Charlotte?" he whispers, ignoring his own pain as a feeble scan shows her to be in worse state than before, and the weakening progressing right before his optics.
Her glittering emerald eyes open, and she gives a weak smile. "Hey," she whispers, blinking slowly.
"What's happened to you?" he asks almost brokenly, spark aching for the human woman he had loved for so long.
"I got sick with somethin', O.P." she weakly takes his hand. "I never told you why I was with S-7, did I?" she asks whimsically. Without waiting for an answer, she begins. "I was exposed to high levels of radiation when I was little, visiting Hoover Dam, and they noticed. When I was ten, I was diagnosed with progeria, an aging disease, that was triggered by the radiation. They gave me a treatment to slow the effects, but couldn't stop it." Her eyes slip closed. "We hid it with makeup and hair dye for a long time, but Ratchet was forced to tell about it when I got sick and took so long to get better. The government, since they were at fault, put me out here and kept you all away so I wouldn't get worse after my family died."
Tears fall from the holoform's eyes. "Why didn't you ever say?"
She opens her eyes, and smiles sadly. "I didn't know how to say it," she whispers, a tear falling down her wrinkled cheek. "I'm dying, O.P., and nothing's gonna stop it."
Bee comes to stand by them, draping a blanket over her frail form on the couch. "We'll stay with you," he whispers, his vocals fixed just before the betrayal of humans.
A week later, she passes with a smile on her lips, wrapped up in the arms of Optimus Prime, Bumblebee lying there with them in her king-sized bed.
They bury her in the woods, and the next day, find a letter in her desk, unsigned, thus clearly unfinished.
To Optimus Prime and Bumblebee,
Thank you for being there with me as I lay there dying in front of you. I had thought I might never see either of you again, not after leaving Chicago. I would have stayed, but the government had interfered, and taken me away before I could say anything to either of you.
Years ago, when we first met, I put up the façade of mental imbalance… but I was just trying to keep from getting too close to anyone, in all honesty. I knew then what I had, and knew I wouldn't want to see my friends suffer as I aged faster than anyone right before their eyes. Ratchet wasn't forced to tell the superiors just because of my illness and slow recovery… I asked that he tell, because I was too weak, to afraid to say it myself. I will never understand why he never said exactly what I was suffering with, but I am glad that he didn't say it. I had enough to deal with without having everyone looking at me with pity.
That said, I am so deeply ashamed of what has befallen you, our Autobot protectors, brothers, friends… family. I wrote a letter to the president months before it happened to beg that America stand by you no matter what, begging that they listen to reason. I am ashamed that I am a member of the species that has murdered our allies in cold blood, and I hope that you can remember the goodness of the few as you leave our world.
You must live on, even if you go to another world, or remain on this property the remainder of your lives. I've willed this place to a man and his adopted son, Orion and Brandon 'Bee' Pax, in the hope that they will take care of this place, and themselves with the resources I've accumulated.
The code to get into said resources is the date of the day I woke after Mission City, to find the both of you standing there waiting for me to wake up. I hope it will last long enough for you to plan your next course of action.
I love you both so much, Optimus as someone I could have lived with all my life, and Bee as a little brother I wish I had. Take care of each other, and remember the good you've found on this planet, when it seems like there is nothing good left of humanity.
Goodbye, my family,
Charlotte Richmond
The two Autobots stare at one another with dimmed optics, as they find the Energon she had stored for them, enough to last them for the next two thousand years if they ration it just right. And they wonder how she had done it, until discovering the notes beside the sample she had been given by Ratchet when NEST had only just been activated, and the small refinery she had hidden in the bunker in the woods.
"Thank you, Charlotte," they whisper, hoping Primus and her God were taking care of her.
Three thousand years later, Earth is but a barren wasteland, the humans who had once inhabited this land extinct by their own hands.
Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, from Mars, offer a prayer to their one remaining human friend, before turning to the sparkling they had found one thousand years after leaving Earth. It had been a tiny femme, the Creator and Carrier long dead in front of the door to the nursery on what had been a neutral ship. The tiny sparkling was on the verge of offlining, when they had given the Sparkling Grade Energon that had found hidden to the weak sparkling.
Two thousand Earth years later, they finally showed her the planet that had both hurt and healed them long before she had come into existence.
"That is the home of the human we named you for, Stargazer," Optimus informs the youngling.
She looks up from her adoptive Creator's arms. "I thought her name was Charlotte?"
Bumblebee chuckles, and takes her from Optimus's arms. "But she was always looking to the stars, with her head in the clouds," he informs her. "She would have been so proud of you."
Vote if you want me to emphasize on specifics of any one of these memories.