Summary: A former Autobot looks back on the past that brought him into the Beast Wars.
Disclaimer: Transformers and all related material is owned by Hasbro.

"An Eye for An Eye"
By J.T. Magnus, "Turbo"

I take out the small piece of metal with the red faction symbol on it and look at it again as I've looked at it many times before. Back then I was a space warrior, orbital combatant and communications relay along with Cosmos... and Astrotrain and Blast-Off on the other side. But something happened, somewhere during that time I lost what kept me going as an Autobot, so I left Cybertron. For a time I wandered, taking odd jobs here and there until a guy at Grand Central Space Station talked me into taking down a big Nucleon-runner which started the career I became infamous at: Bounty hunting. Even then I kept the Autobrand for two reasons, to keep back the wrong kind of customer and for sentimental reasons, same as now.

Then I met this femme, see? A real... interesting girl. Turned out she used to be a transector before some all-powerful-but-not-as-all-powerful-as-Unicron dark god named Devil Z did something to her and several others. Made me wonder which 'gender' was the real 'weaker sex' when she finally got me to settle down and marry.

Then came those Primus-forsaken scientists... Skyfire and his brother Jetfire. Chose Omicron as the site for their lab. Seems a friend of theirs had died, been rebuilt, then had his body crushed by a black hole while floating in space. Can't say I cared, guy was a Decepticon, didn't see why two Autobots wanted to revive him. Had this plan about making sparks immortal, even had a volunteer from one of the original Predacon subgroup, I'd been out of the loop a while, but I'd heard about the whole Micromaster War, us standards didn't get involved with it, just the Autobot Micros or Maximals against the Decepticons or rather Predacons. The Maximals were the ones who actually funded and provided equipment for what they called Project X. By that time I WAS the security for Omicron, still had my reputation from my fringe days. They succeeded in making the Decepticon-Predacon, Rampage, I think his name was, into Protoform X, only problem was he lost what little mind he had. One of the two had retrieved their friend's spark from deep space and they began modifying it not long before I left for Starbase Rugby on the outer edge of the system to visit a couple old friends from Cybertron who were living there.

While I was there, as the Humans used to say, "All hell broke loose."

X broke loose.

I hear that Starscream's newly immortal spark survived.

Minerva, Skyfire and Jetfire, and everyone else didn't.

I was the colony's security force, I should have been there, but I wasn't. I was goofing off with friends. I returned home to find the life I had built shattered, my love killed, and a shuttle missing... Then I heard the distress signal from Rugby, a seemingly-indestructible Predacon was destroying the Starbase. For the second time that cycle, I arrived to a ruined colony. On the remains of Starbase Rugby I vowed to bring X not to the law, but to justice, the oldest kind, that which humans called "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life."

I took my old ship and gear out of storage and reviewed the scientists' notes to find the flaw in Project X: Introduce enough semi-processed energon, what the former Micromasters call 'raw' energon into the core of an X-Spark and no more immortal. I fashioned a dagger from energon while waiting for the monster to strike again, but what I first heard was the same Maximals who created him caught him and sent him in stasis on an exploration ship named Axalon.

The Axalon went missing.

For three megacycles I hunted for it, then found it by following a transwarp trail from the Pred ship they sent Axalon after. Wound up in Earth's past where X was free and a Pred. He destroyed my ship leaving me stranded here. Guess it's literally gonna end before it began.