This is more or less a side-story. It takes place after part 5, although I'm not exactly sure when. Some time before part 6 probably.


If there was one bad thing about choosing a faction in this war, it was the Sigil. Etched or burned into external plates, and sometimes covered with dye, every mech who joined the Autobot cause wore the symbol of that Face somewhere on his person in some form or another, the mark forever present as a scar on their metal bodies.

This was nothing surprising. The tradition of marking oneself to express allegiance, status, or employment was an old one, going as far back in Cybertronian cultural history as could be found, and most mechs bore at least a handful of small glyphs explaining their designation. The quickest glance at the symbols could tell almost the entirety of a mech's life story.

Ratchet's series of glyphs spoke of his position as the Chief Medical Officer of the Autobots; the older markings told of his previous employment at a prestigious hospital in Iacon, and of his involvement with the Council of Elders.

Sunstreaker's roughly-carved glyphs showed a hard life in Kaon's vicious gladiatorial rings, the high status he had held within that shadowy world, and the bond he shared with his twin Sideswipe.

Bluestreak, being a young mech, bore only two symbols: the Autobot insignia, and a small design accentuated with a mark indicating it was the name of a town.

Wheeljack was, in this arena, the odd mech out. He bore exactly zero glyphs.

Not that he hadn't had any chances to get one. He had just never done so. He could have had the the symbol that declared him as Chief Mechanical Engineer burned into his armor. But he had felt he had no need for it. Everyone in Etraum knew who he was and where to find him, and if they didn't it wasn't hard to find someone who did. Wearing the symbol seemed redundant to him.

And there was the little problem of actually having said symbol imprinted on one's body.

It wasn't that Wheeljack feared pain. He didn't. He had dealt with it enough times to just shrug it off and keep moving, even when it wasn't always the smart thing to do. He purposely dove into dangerous projects without a second thought to his safety, and often came out of them a little worse for the wear. He had gotten almost every part of his body blown off at some point or another. He had created and installed his guns himself. That had been a complete learning experience for him. He found out the hard way exactly what he shouldn't do when installing new components on a mech. The pain alone that had resulted from that had kept him berth-ridden for three whole cycles. But he had lived, he had learned, and when he later made his cannon, the installation had been nearly painless.

But for some reason, the idea of having to endure the pain of getting a glyph set into his body did not sit well with him at all. Just thinking about having a blade or brand cut through sensitive dermal layering, enough to damage the self-healing function but not so far as to completely slice through the plate, was enough to make him cringe in terror.

So when Ratchet called him to the medbay one day, and he found the medic waiting there with one hand transformed into a white-hot carving tool, asking "Where do you want it?", Wheeljack backed out of that room as if he had just caught a glimpse of the damned Pits themselves, so fast that he slammed into the wall of the corridor behind him.

He knew he'd have to face this sooner or later--every single Autobot had the Sigil, just as every Decepticon had theirs. To not have it was as good as committing a major faux pas in your faction. He had, however, been hoping he could deal with this later. As in, much, much later.

He shook his head, resonators flashing bright yellow as he spoke. "Nowhere. Get that thing away from me!"

Ratchet looked at him as if he was insane. "Get back here."

"No way. You are not touching me with that piece of slag!"

"You can come back inside and we can do this the easy way, or you can frag me off and we can do this the hard way. Your choice."

Wheeljack was backing down the hall to his lab. "How about let's not, and say we did?"

Ratchet stepped out of the medbay to watch him. "Stop acting like a sparkling. You're just making it harder for yourself, you know."

"I don't care." His hand fumbled at the control panel for the lab doors.

"You're worse than Bluestreak was," the medic grumbled. "You take on an entire wing of Seekers all by your lonesome, and you have no problem with blowing yourself up in order to stop Soundwave, but you're scared of a little brand?"

His fingers finally hit the right button, and the lab doors, which he had been leaning against, slid open. He tumbled backwards onto the floor, groaning as his head spun from the impact. When he opened his optics again, Ratchet was standing over him.

"Hold still, would you?"

With a yelp, Wheeljack scooted himself back across the floor, swatting Ratchet's brand-bearing hand away from him.

And with that, the CMO had had enough. "All right then. The hard way it is."

"What? Gonna take me out with one of those sedative pellets you gave Mirage?"

Ratchet shook his head. "Not worth it. This is a war, no telling when I might be able to restock supplies again."

Wheeljack could feel his spark quivering in its casing. "Then what, exactly, is the 'hard way'?"

Still keeping an eye on the engineer, Ratchet moved to the comm console on the wall and pressed a button. "Sideswipe. Sunstreaker. Meet me down in the lab."

He stared at the medic, mouth agape. "Not those two pit-slagging brutes!"

Ratchet cocked an optic ridge. "Hmm. You're right." He touched the panel again. "Ironhide, I need you too."

"What?!"

"Well, you made it quite clear back in Etraum that the Twins alone can't keep you down."

He could hear the dull thudding of the Twins' footsteps coming from the hallway outside the lab.

He jumped up and ran.

The Twins were having far too much fun with this game. They were toying with him as he dodged their swipes, jeering at him, harassing him as they chasing him through the base. They gathered quite a crowd of onlookers as they raced down the hallways. Ironhide was in no mood to be running about and was simply waiting for a chance to strike.

Wheeljack evaded them quite well until his lack of familiarity with the base's layout caught up with him. He turned the wrong way, found himself blocked...

And was promptly pounced upon by a small contingent of Autobots.

Sideswipe got him from behind, his clawed fingers latching onto the edges of his armor. The red twin twisted, attempting to drag Wheeljack to the floor, but the engineer would have none of that. He jerked out of Sideswipe's grasp, only to find that Jazz had grabbed onto his left wing-blade, engaging the electromagnet in his right hand to prevent himself from being shaken off. Wheeljack spun around, trying to get at the small silver mech, to no avail. Sideswipe got back up and gripped his other wing-blade, preventing him from turning around any more.

Then Cliffjumper attacked. His balance now off, Wheeljack fell to the floor. But it took the addition of Inferno, Ironhide, and Sunstreaker to keep the frantic inventor down. He struggled wildly beneath the pile of mechs. Being squished was making him even more terrified than simply seeing Ratchet with the brand had.

"Slag, can anyone reach the comm console?" Ironhide grumbled.

-I've got it,- Blaster said through the intercom.

"Heh. Been watching?"

-Of course. Damn, that was entertaining.-

Wheeljack managed to kick Cliffjumper away. For a moment.

"Ratchet," Ironhide said. "We've got him down."

-Good, now get him back up here.-

"Why don't you come down here?" the weapons specialist growled.

-Because if he's going to be flailing around as much as I think he is, I want to be near my equipment in case I end up damaging something.-

"Well that's just great!" Wheeljack shouted, hoping the intercom system could pick him up through the pile of Autobots on top of him. "You accidentally take out mechs' optics much when you do this?"

"Shut up," Ironhide said. "All right then, Autobots. Here's how we're going to do this." He proceeded to lay out a plan as to how they would get Wheeljack to the medbay without losing him again.

The plan involved him being carried, one limb held by each of the larger mechs, with Jazz and Cliffjumper holding onto his wing-blades to ensure that he wouldn't wriggle around so much that they would drop him.

Embarassing, perhaps. But he was more concerned with where they were taking him than how.

Every step of the way, he struggled, jerking and twisting and giving the Autobots another demonstration of his amazing swearing skills. Though he couldn't break free of the iron grasps of four of the Autobots' strongest soldiers, his flailings still caused them to stumble every so often, turning their trek to the medbay into a horrifically slow crawl. He wasn't even sure exactly where they were in the base, and that was frightening to him. His view, what parts of it weren't blocked by the others, was of the ceiling, which looked pretty much the same throughout the base.

But he did notice when they passed through a set of doors. 'Oh Primus...Primus...no...'

"Put him on the table there," Ratchet ordered.

They did. But in doing so, they also momentarily relaxed their hold on the engineer.

He wasted no time. He made it halfway off the table, one foot on the floor, before the Autobots could react. They spent a few more breems wrestling with him, some unfortunate medical equipment getting knocked around (much to Ratchet's dismay), until Wheeljack was on the table once more, this time restrained firmly.

"All this fuss over a stupid sigil," Sunstreaker said, grinning insanely. "I can't believe this."

Wheeljack glared at him. "You're the first one on my hit list when I get out of here, gold boy."

"Oooooh, I'm so scared."

"Out of my way," Ratchet commanded.

It was only because he had trained himself to hear such sounds that he noticed the soft hiss of hot metal nearby, a sound similar to the noise his own welder made. He jerked against his captors. "Oh, slag no!"

"Calm down, Wheeljack," Jazz said, his smooth tones floating through the room. "It's not like this is going to kill you."

"No, but it--EEAAAAAAAAAAHH!"


He was back in 'his' corner of the rec room, moodily working on his third cube of high-grade.

'Just when things were starting to look up, too.'

He realized the cube in his hands was empty. 'Oh, slag. Did I drink it all already?' He tilted the cube. 'Yup. Damn. Not even feeling it in the slightest, either.

'This is going to be a long night.'

He stood to get himself another cube, and was surprised when one was thrust in his face. Blinking, he looked up to see Ratchet standing in front of him. He stared at the medic for a while.

"Take it and sit down," Ratchet said in a low voice.

Wheeljack did so, hunching over the table in an effort to ignore the other mech. When it became obvious that Ratchet would have none of that, he gave a slight nod to the chair in front of him. "What's the occasion?" he growled.

"Does there have to be one?" The CMO slouched back in the indicated chair. "Your official acceptance as an Autobot, if you desire."

"Joy." He downed half of the cube in one go.

Ratchet watched him, his face expressionless. "Drink much back in Etraum?"

Wheeljack hissed as he slammed down his cube onto the table. "Do we have to talk about Etraum?"

The medic shrugged. "If you don't want to, fine."

They sat in silence for a while. Wheeljack absentmindedly ran a finger over the front edge of his helm; at the fore of the middle crest was an indented section that had not been present even the previous cycle. Though the pain from the brand that had seared into him was long gone, the Autobot insignia was not.

'There's really no turning back now, is there?'

"No, I didn't," the engineer finally admitted, in answer to Ratchet's earlier question.

"I wouldn't recommend going too far with it."

Wheeljack snorted. "Going to give me a lecture now, doctor?"

"No, just warning you to not make yourself pass out. We've got a few pranksters around here who just love to mess with overcharged mechs." The medic frowned. "I really don't like dealing with the messes they make of their victims." The threat in that statement was very clear.

"I'll keep that in mind." He finished the cube.

"If you'll stop downing that high-grade like it was the last cube on Cybertron, I just might have something constructive for you to be doing instead. If you're not already too drunk to be around dangerous tools, that is."

He had to admit that sounded better than sitting here. "Unfortunately, I'm still as sober as can be. What do you have in mind?"

"I have a portable energon generator that I take out into the field in case someone needs an emergency transfusion and I don't have any extra energon left to give myself. It's a bit old though, probably doesn't run as efficiently as it should or could. Would you mind taking a look at it?"

Wheeljack eyed him suspiciously. "So the whole coming down to the rec room to grab a high-grade thing was a ruse to drag me off into doing small favors, huh?"

"You could say that." Ratchet smiled mysteriously.

"Can't say I've ever dealt with an energon generator before. Sounds interesting enough. I'll see what I can do."