Arcee was floating weightlessly in the black-blue-red light. She was feeling safe and calm. Her body was relieved and light, as if all tension was gone and the only sensation she felt was this soft pleasant weakness in her limbs and head. Her fingertips were melting with the darkness around her. She could move her hands freely and it seemed as if energon was moving back and forth inside her and there was no real physical boundary between her and the reality. She felt no pain and it was warm and hypnotising. She slowly opened her eyes wider and the darkness gained purple-bluish patterns and the light concentrated slowly as she was trying to focus her vision.

The floating and weightlessness persisted as if she were in a vacuum, while the shadows she saw were gaining structures bit by bit, first blurry then more and more becoming into shapes… A black armoured glass mask and the strong built chest were leaning over her, as well as the long long wings and thin waist with visible bioglow lines. Two red dots of his eyes shone through the black glass of his visor while he was looking at her.

She smiled to him and slowly reached out to touch his visor but it seemed that her hand went right through. She felt a little soft weight pressing against her chest, arm and cheek. Warmth spread from there but she could not see anything. There was nothing, only the vision of him floating in the vacuum above her shoulder. So she looked at him feeling the warmth spreading across her body from the pleasant heaviness resting on her. The vision floated with her and she felt more and more cozy. Once more she failed to reach him and suddenly she started to fall with some rocks that appeared from nowhere. They were passing by her and through her but she did not feel the hits, as if she was immaterial.

Then some hands grabbed her, and the world went round, she felt very heavy and still falling while the vision of Soundwave started to water down into the distance. There was suddenly pain and a numbing feeling of cold that bit her metal body. Her head started to explode with pain and she now felt all the falling rocks hit her in a nasty, cold way like frost bites. Everything was freezing and wet and she could not move anymore. She heard voices approaching closer and closer.

"Arcee, Arcee, wake up Arcee" - she felt large amounts of snow falling on her like an avalanche, covering and uncovering her on its way down, taking all the heat away and numbing her to any external signals.

"Arcee, do you hear me?" - in the blur of her headache she recognised the voice of Optimus approaching her from the frost-biting darkness spreading around her. Then the snow was gone and she felt being lifted slowly and put on something. - "We will take you home" - she heard the bossbot's soothing voice. - "Thank Primus we received your rescue call" - he added partly to her, partly to himself. - "Where have you been all these days?" - he muttered.

She opened one eye just to see his worried face above her. He smiled from ear to ear seeing her onlining. - "That's my girl! Autobots, Arcee is waking up!" - he called at the others. - "You are lying in Ratchet's trailer, he will take you home. You have suffered from supercooling. You were lying here in the snow for quite some time, but now it is all right". - He smiled to her again with the warmest of smiles a serious bot like him could have at stock.

She smiled back weakly and tried to raise her head and look around but it did not work too well. - "Oh, Optimus! Where am I? What happened to Soundwave?" she asked in a very silent voice.

"Lie down Arcee, you are not in the best condition. Soundwave? What about Soundwave?" - Optimus expression changed to surprise. - "He seems not to be here. No sign of any Decepticon when we arrived. You fought Soundwave? When we are back at base you will tell us what happened. You are quite injured and exhausted now. Rest a little. There will be plenty of time to talk" - he said putting his hand on her arm. - "You are safe now".

::To talk:: she considered the concept and it echoed in her processor that talking is not really a right thing to do. It was not her own thought, she would bet, but she was too weak to analyse.

He closed the door. She heard him transforming and everybody rolled out. The soft swinging of Ratchet's emergency car made her sleepy and she fell into recharge again before they even reached the groundbridge location only to wake up much later already at the medbay. She dreamt another dream with Soundwave lying hurt on the ground bleeding energon all over his body. She tried to restitute him and stop the bleeding but again her hand passed through him like through the air and she could do nothing.


Something crashed heavily against the landing deck of Nemesis. KnockOut felt the ship shake a little as his medbay was located close the landing field entrance hatch. Luckily the emergency alert systems did not turn on. So it must have been one of the Vehicon troopers crash-landing after some failed endeavour, he thought, and turned back to his work.

Without paying too much attention the Decepticon medic sunk in his usual stuff, experimenting with phaseshifter, a new relic recovered by the Cons that allowed passing through solid objects, trying to figure out how the tool worked and potentially be able to copy it in the future. Focused he did not hear the door open and the silent steps approaching. Only a nasty screech of metal behind him finally drog his attention to the visitor.

"Ah, Soundwave, the big man was looking for you…" - he started automatically but then he realised what he was in fact seeing in front of him.

"Oh scrap! Soundwave! What the hell happened to you?" - his jaw dropped down to the floor, but he defroze as quickly as he got shocked. He rushed to Soundwave and supported him from falling down.

KnockOut has never seen Soundwave in such a condition. He looked as if fresh from a battle. He hardly stood on his legs, his armour was damaged and his wing was in the strangest shape, stuck half-way in transformation in the form of a bulky glitch of metal scrapheap trembling freakishly as if it still tried to regain the proper form over and over again spilling energon all over the place.

KnockOut helped him across the room and he had to almost lift the silent visitor in his arms onto the medberth where he placed the suddenly very heavy mech for examination. It was clear to him that the guilty factor was a faulty transformation that stuck halfway on some tissues that were obviously injured before causing the overall blocking of the whole process somewhere in the middle, stuck from progressing one way or the other which resulted in an overall pitiful and painful effect.

With a visible effort Soundwave turned his visor to him and a disrupted list of failures and injuries displayed across from his internal healing systems, which now seemed to be failing dramatically.

"Ok, ok" - KnockOut stopped him with a hand gesture - "I get it, you're injured, but first we need to disentangle this bundle over here" - he showed the closer undefined shape of the half transformed wing. - "Man, it looks like you were chewed up by a dinobot" - he said while examining the pitiful thing that once was Soundwave's wing. Loads of bits were displaced and a large wound was open with signs of unskilled welding attempts up on it.

While working KnockOut babbled his usual chatter commenting everything he saw and recounting the current situation on the ship and Megatron's irritation over the missing of Soundwave over the last few days. Things obviously waited to be fixed, stuff to be done, the usual crap that he typically just took on and went ahead with.

Now lying in the medbay, half subdued with KnockOuts anesthetics, he heard all this from a distance and could not even afford a slight irritation. Instead, despite the immense risk of KnockOut being here and working on his body, he couldn't stop frantically replaying for himself the scenes and thoughts from the last days, struggling with a decision what to do next.

Then, after a good number of blurry hours, a comment reached him from the distance:

"Almost done. Your self-repair is back on and the wing is fixed. You should stay and recharge here a bit under my observation before this heals at least basically. How on Cybertron did you get yourself beaten up so badly? It takes a monster just to scratch you usually".

Soundwave did not manage more than just to look at him floating in his anesthetic bubble, while KnockOut continued chuckling and teasing him:

"Man, it must have been a romantic weekend out, not to give any sign of life this way. Good you haven't eloped altogether, Megatron would be pissed as hell. You have such a hell of a cocktail of chemistry floating around in you. I do not want to know what happened to you but it doesn't look like the good old Soundwave I know."

Normally Soundwave would shrug at this kind of comment, but now he only lay silently not reacting at all. But it woke him up somewhat.

Surprisingly enough KnockOut's face became serious. With some unusual certainty he put his hand on the shoulder of the silent communications chief - "I never suspected you could become one of us." - he said totally out of sudden and looked at his diagnostics thoughtfully - "I do not know what happened but I will keep what I saw for myself, no need for anyone to know unless you want to say something yourself. But be aware, this is as wonderful as dangerous. I wish I could live it myself again with this intensity I can see in you…"

KnockOut did not make it clear what he had in mind but it ringed a whole orchestra of warnings. Soundwave raised his head up and looked KnockOut deep in the eye. Despite the faceless expression on his visor, something must have hanged in the air as KnockOut nodded silently looking a bit shy after being so direct to the normally alien-cold communications chief. He wished Soundwave answered something but the slenderbot remained silent as usual. His gaze slipped along his wing to the place now almost perfectly fixed by KnockOut revealing just a minor scar. Soundwave touched it slowly and remembered the scar on Arcee's face when she was still in stasis after the explosion. He lead his finger slowly along it and a shiver crossed his body. KnockOut saw it and understood more than words would say. - "I cannot heal you better than that. Some stuff cannot be really healed, that is a part of being one of us. But now it will transform all right".

A moment of silence followed, then a blank reading on Soundwave's face changed into something KnockOut never saw before. It said:

Thank you

And despite the unspoken opposition from the medic, the slenderbot stood up slowly from the berth, and with a heaviness that KnockOut had never seen in him, he left the med bay.

"Hwee, hwoo" - KnockOut whistled to himself thoughtfully a few moments after the door closed. "So the slenderbot has crashed himself against real life" he murmured with both compassion and satisfaction. "Good there are still doctors like me around to patch up the broken sparks. I would give a million to see him there, and another one to know who the unlucky victim was. And what happens next…" - with this thought, a slight scary shiver crossed his backstrut.


Optimus was worried. Arcee was recovering well over the past two days, but she would not speak almost at all. She was mostly recharging connected to a complex machinery in Ratchet's medbay, while he was fixing her wounds and murmuring some curses over the her broken self repair system that did some weird welding jobs on her.

Optimus noticed also that she seemed very distant and sad when she was awake and thought nobody was looking. He knew that her laugher at Bumblebee's and Bulkhead's jokes was different than usual and not from deep inside. When she hugged Jack, Raff and Miko overjoyed by her comeback, she smiled genuinely but soon she drifted away in some awkward numbness all the same. He was wondering seriously what had happened in the span of around one week when she was gone, and listening to Ratchet's grumble about some weird chemistry detected in her during first tests as well as some light but inexplicable burns on and within her body did not make him more optimistic.

The following day when everybody else was on patrol and Ratchet was busy with his scientific research he sat next to her in the medbay and finally dared to ask about the events of the past days.

"We were worried about you, you were gone for over an Earth week." - he said with an honest voice. "What happened? I understood you were looking for something in those old mines, and it went very wrong."

Arcee looked at Optimus, aware that this moment would had to come sooner or later. She never lied to him. She respected him probably most of all bots she had ever known. Not for his seniority and rank, but for the person that he was. Wise, strong, caring and selfless.

"I was after organicon" - she said finally in a low voice. "I did not expect it would turn out like this".

A moment of silence filled the medbay. "I did not find it but now I am nearly sure it exists. I am sorry I did not tell you on beforehand. I should have, but I did not think you would ever allow this kind of a quest. I am sorry Optimus, I did not mean it…"

He nodded.

"I know it is a female thing. Only femmes can find and master organicon" - he looked at her with a mix of understanding and anxiety "And there is not so many femmes left around, is there" - he sighed - "But something happened. Something strange and not safe. You mentioned Soundwave. Was he following you?"

She did not know what to say. "Quite likely but not sure. I did not know he was there until the old mine caved in after those very old explosives went off. Someone must have guarded it really well back in a day. Very old type of security that I did not expect and I did not detect. I lost my communications and was pretty badly injured and trapped down there."

Optimus nodded thoughtfully. "Are you sure it was not a Decepticon trap? Anyway, good you managed to send the rescue signal when you got out of the caves in the end."

"I did not" - she replied to his astonishment. - "I couldn't. Only now Ratchet has fixed my comms… I was offline with all emergency and alerting systems down".

He looked at her without understanding. - "What do you mean? We received your signal..."

She looked at the wall and only after some silence she said - "He saved me at least twice. We did not fight each other. We worked together to get out. We spent all this time down there trying to dig us out, with our bare hands".

Optimus looked closer at her not fully understanding what she was trying to say.

"It looks like Soundwave saved my life" - she repeated - "He caught me from falling deep down with the stones when it exploded and then he fixed me up because my self repair went down. I was leaking badly" - she paused for a moment still without looking in his eyes. - "He could have killed me but he saved me."

The story matched with results of Ratchet's obduction when they brought her to the base. There were some fixes on her that looked different than what any Autobot self-repair was programmed to do.

"And you are sure that was THE Soundwave? Megatron's communications chief? So he must have had a really good reason. He does not do anything without a reason".

"I fixed him too… he broke his wing badly. It was like none of us could be really selfish there. Something stronger took over… This is what they say organicon does to bots" - she explained and a thought struck her that at the same time - it might have not been true, no organicon was there outside the mountain and still he must have called for the Autobots to fetch her using her frequency. How else would they got the rescue signal, while she was completely out… And she was not sure how organicon could affect her this way but she clearly remembered all that she felt with Soundwave down in the cave. She shivered.

"He was nothing of what I would have ever thought of him before" she said looking at Optimus, who shook his head in disbelief.

"So you say it is not just a legend. Organicon must be a powerful weapon then" he considered. "If it changed someone like Soundwave even for a minute it must be able to do much more of which we do not even realize. But how did you get so badly offlined in the end? Ratchet suspected some very peculiar infrasound exposure that triggered some strange reactions in you".

She looked up to the ceiling wondering how to put it and not to mess it up.

"That was later. I…ehm... being locked up together a bit long, when it turned out what the situation was, we started sort of communicating… Technically he is not much of a talker, but well, there are workarounds. And down there in the organicon radiation we changed... somehow. All this saving and helping…" - she sighed - "This is what I heard it can do" - ::but:: , she thought to herself, ::it wasn't supposed to do everything that happened after:: And she realized that it was more than a thought, it was a *hope* ...

She decided to make it short. - "For some reason I was very stubborn insisting to see his face. I teased him it did not exist. Well, that is what everybot thinks anyway. Finally he agreed that I could not see it but at least touch it to prove it was real, but I was supposed not to open my eyes. I didn't fully get why, until, ehm, I cheated out of curiosity and peeped when I thought he wasn't looking. It smashed me out of my circuits" - she spoke even quieter than before.

"You mean you looked despite that he asked you not to? What exactly smashed you?" - Optimus now seemed really curious.

After a dragged moment of silence she replied:

"I think I saw his eyes"


As Soundwave went into his minimalistic quarters the door closed behind him with a slam and he opened a little power shield that allowed him some privacy, a rare asset on Nemesis, especially, ironically, with such Cons as himself around. But he was the comms chief and he knew all the others' secrets so he could afford some of his own.

He sat down on his berth and inhaled the air into his ventilation system with a hiss. Now he could not drag it for much longer. Anyway it was a mistake to show up at the medbay in the state that he was. KnockOut obviously knew too much now, and it must have been more evident than he would have even thought. So, if he doesn't erase the newly acquired self, it was logical that something unexpected would happen with more than a high probability. This was because, fledged with his new feelings, he lost control and predictability of his own actions. He could no more trust himself, and sooner or later it meant a disaster. He knew well KnockOut was right and gave him a fair warning, in his own way. And Soundwave felt uncomfortable with it.

He remembered himself cuddling to her when she went offline, he remembered how he literally melted under the touch of her hand on his face wiring. He thought of how fascinating the experience of desire was, together with the gentleness that he developed for her in a matter of just a few orn since the emotions must have unblocked. It was like if he had his hands tied in a way he could set them free anytime but did not just do it out of some perverse pleasure.

Even now as he was sitting alone in his cold and impersonal cabin of Nemesis, he could recall all the feelings, and he could sense his own energon going madly around him at these memories. It fascinated him how everything in him changed on its own depending on what his thoughts would bring him. It was in his processor, in his RAM, it cashed everywhere around his memory structures, it occupied his registries and it was surging in his peripherals, and it was at the same time physically generating his body chemistry, affecting his hydraulics and even micro-osmosis. He just couldn't contain it.

At the same time he felt like crying, jumping, laughing and dying in turns for no reason. But most of all, he wanted to go a couple of orn back, to the same situation with her down in the caves, to finish what has begun, to get some warmth and relief. He wanted to connect with her again, tell her how to be safe with him. Oh, he would let her touch him as much as she wanted, just for the sake of the burning sensation on his spark that now wanted to be released out even at the cost of losing its amazing powers. Throughout all this torment he remained sitting motionless and silent with his optics staring blindly at his little bird-shaped symbiont, Laserbeak seated next to him on the berth.

This all did not go in line with anything. It was so powerful and he understood dangerous it was. Anyway he knew these fantasies wouldn't ever happen. They were enemies with no option of consolation, on the opposite side of the war front. And by now she should have already been found by the fellow Autobots where he left her and called for help using her frequency. Maybe she was waking up from stasis, maybe she did not even remember anything. He looked at his hands and stroke softly the head of Laserbeak, who stared back at Soundwave surprised at this unexpected generous treatment from his typically extremely restraint carrier.

With sadness in magnitude he did not realize he was capable of, Soundwave slowly sought up in his archival drives and compiled the old ancient script that had made him once what he was. He prepped the modification launcher to induce the reset and deletion sequence. It was the oldest and scariest mental surgery protocol that even Megatron would not dare to run, and of known bots, Shockwave only experimented with. And Soundwave. At the time. Long ago. And he had never really regretted that before. But now he hesitated and could not force himself to execute the command.

One last time Soundwave replayed what he remembered from the abandoned mine. Clinging to the memory he rewound some moments again and again, each time painfully feeling the loss he was just about to inflict on himself. He looked at the little mechanical head of Laserbeak and his small chest with a tiny spark in it, and he made a decision.

Carefully he reconnected with the little symbiont and made an extended sensory memory dump into his hidden secret backup site, uploading an exact copy of his own current modified CNA together with a full sensory configuration image, well coded. He leaned above the bird and whispered to him with his flat rusty voice that nobody else was allowed to hear: "Don't you ever lose this, my spark ". He stroke Laserbeak's head again and hugged him for a moment like he was his secret treasure box, then let him disconnect from his chest making sure the avian cannot dock back until it was done.

And the he lay down on his berth, touched the scar on the wing, offlined his eyes and ran the deletion script.


"His optics… Is that why he hides them?" - Ratchet asked entering the room. He must have heard at least a part of their conversation, as he looked like understanding what they were talking about.

"Quite likely" - Arcee said, turning her head - "They trigger some sort of effect that blasts you when you look at it only. But not when you keep your eyes closed. Anyway it did not affect me before I opened my optics".

"Strange… I don't know" - Ratchet wondered looking at Optimus. Then he turned to her - "I will see what we can figure out. Rest now, and don't worry sweetspark" - he said much softer than anyone could ever expect of Ratchet.

"Ratchet is right" - Optimus said - "You need to rest and recover now. We will worry about Soundwave's secrets later".

They left the room, and Arcee closed her eyes. The nervous slummer caught her again, and she dreamt of Soundwave flying in his aircraft mode surging joyfully across the clouds, bathing in the sun, swirling in the sky - like a living bird creature from the Earth, with no pragmatic purpose at all.


KnockOut, a little curious, a little worried, knocked to Soundwaves quarters for the third time with no reply before he decided to enter. When he finally did, he saw Soundwave on his bed, looking like in a deep stasis. The medic's eye caught a glimpse of a few little drops of energon leaking from under his mask.

"Hmm" - he wondered. - "What happened over there" - he has never examined Soundwave under the visor and once when the mask was cracked Soundwave allowed only some external intervention and then disappeared from the medbay together with the spare mask and some utensils and materials prepared by KnockOut for the surgery and did not show up throughout the following two days until he fixed himself and recovered hidden from everybody. It was irritating as KnockOut knew the deepest wirings of Megatron while he knew close to nothing of this creepy slenderbot here. Actually, he realized, it was the first time he saw him fully unconscious.

KnockOut touched the leaked energon with his finger and smelled it. Structural analysis of its particles seemed normal but something did not fully match with, let's say, KnockOuts gut feeling. He ran a quick scan over the motionless Soundwave and to his anxiety he found out totally nothing. The reading was empty, blank, clear. He reset the sensor tool but it did not help. He measured his own reading for comparison, and everything was normal. Then it arrived at him that the leaking energon was too fresh, too perfect, like the one still circulating in a living system and not one dried out and oxygenated outside from the body for some time.

He looked at him in disbelief and with some reluctance he touched Soundwaves neck wiring with his hand seeking out the main pipe connector running between the head and the spark chamber. It was a little warm and pulsing with a peaceful flow of energon through Soundwaves vascular system.

"What the heck?" - the doc murmured to himself.

"Yes, KnockOut, what the heck?" - an ironic low voice reached him just from behind his shoulder.

"Lord Megatron" - KnockOut turned around stunned for a nanosecond but instantly put himself together and acted as if nothing ever surprised him. - "Soundwave got sick, I'm checking on him and my scanner seems to have a bug. Gotta give it a check."

"What do you mean he got sick?" - Megatron raised his optic ridge and flashed suspiciously with the red of his eye.

"He was on some mission and got into some kind of fight and got beaten up and exposed to unknown radiation. I patched him up a little." - He tried to stay as close to the truth as it got. - "He is not precisely the one who would recount in details what happened" - he added excusing himself a little.

"Indeed" - Megatron nodded and then KnockOut realized a shadow was standing behind him.

"Soundwave, are you better?" - Megatron addressed the shadow while KnockOut turned around to see the big chest and the black visor of the communications officer just behind him. Soundwave nodded.

"Good" - Megatron seemed content - "Come, I need to show you something. The storage systems are glitching again on the dark energon stocks deck".

"Soundwave, are you sure you do not want still to rest a little?" - KnockOut sounded uncertain mapping at the same time the disappearance of the energon drop from the Comms Chief's armour where he investigated it a moment ago. Soundwave looked slowly at KnockOut through his faceless visor and though the Doc saw nothing, he could bet his spark that the slenderbot winked at him from somewhere deep behind his mask.

"Okay, don't forget the checkup tonight" - he said in Soundwave's general direction with the most light and blase tone he could afford at the moment out of his rich repertoire.

The two mecha went away leaving him at the doorstep of Soundwaves quarter. KnockOut did not move for a moment or two and then in a silence he heard something from inside of Soundwaves room. He felt at the door and it was not locked. KnockOut made sure that those two were gone and carefully entered the communications chief's quarters again. As he went in he saw Laserbeak in the middle of the room throwing vigorously some little colourful stones against a bigger one and cawing joyfully at them for no apparent reason. The stones fell apart in disorder, but this did not discourage Soundwave's symbiont from the activity.

KnockOut looked at this for a moment motionlessly understanding better and better with every moment that Laserbeak was… *playing*. Having *fun*. Jumping a little and flying up with the stones, admiring them bouncing down at the floor, tilting his head to left and right looking at the rocklets that he was trying to place together. He behaved the way young Earth ravens would do when they thought no-one was watching and they had their time off from hunting. KnockOut observed that once on a patrol and wondered long what kind of sense it made for the little creatures. But those there were irrational organics and this here was Soundwave's Laserbeak.

For some reason at this point KnockOut decided not to be so curious anymore. Whatever the slenderbot did or where he went for the last week was safer to leave to his business. He saw enough already back in the medbay witnessing Soundwave's spark in such an unrest as if it was shock-raised from the dead almost killing its owner in turn with overcharge. He never saw such a lively, bright and pusing spark, and he would never expect it in the coldest of bots.

Silently he stepped out from the room. Laserbeak must have noticed it and he squeezed through the gap in the closing door in the last second, made a circle or two around the astonished medic blinking at him with a shiny bird-eye, and off he went right out of the open hatch between a group of Vehicons coming back from a patrol.

KnockOut ran a few steps after him and looked out through the still open door to the landing deck. The last he saw of Laserbeak was how the mechanical bird flew out right into the sky with a series of light dance-like movements, diving down and surging up, spiralling in a joyful acrobacy before he became really really small, a little dark spot on the sky among Earth birds on the horizon.


Arcee woke up from a restless dream in the middle of the day after another very long recharge. She was alone as everybody went on patrol. The sadness kept to her and she did not feel like getting up or doing anything. But she went to the window, to see the sunny day, and leaned her head in her hands on the windowsill, nestling her hard metal scarred cheeks in her palms, and she looked at the little dots of some distant birds playing high in the sky. They were going up and down, swirling in the wind without an apparent reason, feeling the air caressing their wings, across the sunshine, clouds and the sky.

For that moment, she wished most of all that she could fly.