Young

Character(s)/Pairing(s): Soundwave, Blaster, Ravage
Timeline: Pre-war, pre-2007 movie

This prompt was from Lucy Sumeragui! I'm not sure this is quite what you were looking for, but I've written this drabble about five times, and when I saw the prompt, it fit so perfectly and I finally knew how to make it work!
This drabble flips between past and present a bit. I hope you can still understand it.

PS: I've been having some technical trouble with this fic recently. Chapters keep disappearing and reappearing, if anyone knows how to fix this, please help!

He was young when his spark first split.

Far too young to carry, far too young to be a creator, Soundwave collapsed in the middle of a busy road. The medics extinguished his first creation before he had even come back online. He was never given a choice.

"Please," begs the young red mech. "Please, help me."

The navy satellite's creators were bitterly disappointed in him. Unfitting of their high status. Taught him better than to sparkbond so recklessly. If Soundwave wouldn't admit who had done this to him, fine - they would just have to move him to another city. He never bothered to correct them, nor tell them that there was no other mech.

"You can help me," the smaller, crimson satellite pleads. "I know you can. I can hear them, inside you."

The second split came a hundred stellar cycles later, and this time, he was ready. Ravage was young and tiny, and easy to keep hidden beneath his plating. He chose a feline form for his little daughter; and when she became too big for him to carry, he would tell his creators that he found her, pretending she was an adopted pet.

"I dunno who else to go to," Blaster sobs quietly.

In the dead of night, Soundwave looks down at the distraught mech on his doorstep, two very distinct spark pulses beating softly under scruffy, red plating. Like a ghost of the past come to haunt him, in the same alt-mode, with the same problem, the same age. His creations stir inside him, thrumming with sympathy for the red satellite, and that settles it. He won't allow this splitspark to have their first born taken away from them. He won't allow the medics to touch this one.

Soundwave stands aside, a sweeping gesture with one claw welcoming Blaster inside his home. "Come in."