A/N: When I started this story, I had only planned about a six chapter arc. I had no idea that it would ever grow to this size, or that anyone would even like it. I am floored by the fact that two hundred+ reviews have been offered for this expanding work. No, I'm not floored, I'm completely blown away and so very thankful that people are enjoying this story. I love writing it, and the fact that people love reading it is a joy beyond measure. Thank you all who read and review. It truly makes my day. :D

Again, some people aren't going to be happy with this chapter, and again I apologize. However, I PROMISE this is the last chapter of the battle story arc. I promise that things are not as dark as they seem and that bright moments are ahead for Ratchet and Lydia and all our favorites. I have a plan for this story, and I promise that if you bear with me, you'll love it in the end. At least I hope you will. ::looks hopeful as she peers out from behind Optimus Prime and Ultra Magnus:: Please don't lynch the author. ::Looks up at Optimus Prime and Ultra Magnus:: Please don't step on the author, either. I promise things will get better! ::whimpers::

My disclaimer remains the same: I do not own Transformers or anything connected to them. I only own my OCs and am not making any money from this in any way. Please don't sue.

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His timing had been perfect.

Ratbat chortled to himself once again, his amused sound predictably misinterpreted as an insult to the fight the twins were dishing out. They thought he was laughing at them, and Ratbat wasn't about to correct them. Their misguided attempts to understand his actions only served to further his purpose. Let the imbeciles think he was laughing at them. Let that fuel their anger and blind their processors to what was about to happen. It was only moments before the cacophony of chaos would begin, mere astroseconds away from the symphony of completion. The angrier they were, the more spectacular the finale.

He could hardly contain his glee.

The nimble little Decepticon dodged another round of cannon fire from the moronic twins behind him, and his truetarget came into view. Ratchet was bent down on hands and knees, reaching inside the hold for Primus only knew what. The Autobot certainly wasn't reaching for the piece of the All-Spark, of that he was positive. His jamming was almost fool-proof, knocking out sensors and programs alike until every bot present had to rely on optics alone. Even he, himself, was rendered sensor-blind by the device.

It was a small annoyance to deal with in the wake of what he was going to gain. Sometimes one had to schedule a loss in order to procure a larger gain.

He dove as hard and fast as he could at the prone medic, whipping through a hair-pin turn around the aft wreckage of the plane. The little 'Con flew high in an arc, clawed mandibles scratching hideous lines across the back of the medic as he did. The effect was as expected, and Ratchet twisted in surprise, his optics focusing on bat-like creature—

—and away from the incoming twins.

There was no way to avoid the collision. Every processor in Mudflap's being screamed that the impact was going to happen. It was a simple and unwavering fact. There was no escaping it short of the ground opening up and swallowing them whole, or Ratchet suddenly spouting wings and jetpacks. Part of him wouldn't put it past the crafty medic to have something like that held in reserve. It was Ratchet after all.

Still, the Autobot dug his feet into the soil, turning away from his friend as much as he could, looking almost like a baseball player sliding towards home plate. Only this time his hands weren't outstretched towards the base. Instead they were splayed out behind him, plowing up field and crop and debris alike from the airplane in his effort to stop. Behind him, Skids did much the same.

It did nothing to stop the impact.

"LOOK OUT!"

Ratchet had enough time to turn towards that bellowed sound, his optics widening. His processors spat out all kinds of alternatives to the coming collision, and each one was discarded almost as fast as it appeared. There wasn't enough time for him to brace himself for impact, not being caught flat-footed as the humans would say. All he could do was pull his hand from the cargo hold rapidly, praying that it cleared the tiny metal box before the twins struck him. If not, the already fragile and injured humans were in for another wild ride. One that the survivors may not, themselves, survive again.

Mudflap collided first with the taller yellow and green mech, the impact knocking the elder hard enough to dislodge him from his perch. Skids's added collision sent all three of them somersaulting backward, slamming into the wreckage and knocking them back a good twenty to thirty feet. Ratchet cursed, trying as hard as he could to stop his momentum or at least reverse it. Because a horrible thought had occurred to him, one that turned his blue optics to red in a flash.

The cargo hold was now open, cut and torn wide by his own tools. The humans within were now exposed and undefended… and the Decepticons were closer to Lydia than he was.

~*~*~*~*~*~

"RATCHET!"

Ironhide roared the name, watching helplessly as the twins smacked hard into the mech. All three flew back in a ball of tangled limbs and Cybertronian curses. It would have been absolutely hysterical under other circumstances, for it wasn't every day that Ratchet was knocked head over aft across a field of any kind. Had this been a normal day at the base, he would have glued his optics to the situation, recording every delicious moment, and laughed until he felt his vocal processor pop and fizzle at the retaliation the medic would certainly inflict for the insult.

But this wasn't an average day. And he had to promise himself that he would indeed witness Ratchet's retribution when they got out of this mess.

Because they would survive it, by Primus, even if he had to weld everyone back together himself.

"Epps!" he shouted, taking aim at the little bat-like bot that rose in a high, tight arc in the air. "Get rid of that jamming! I can't fight when I don't know the distances. Too much power could fry everyone in the area. I need that jamming gone!"

"We can shoot, sir!" answered a hard-faced bald marine Ironhide's processors recognized as Sergeant Daniel Longworth. The man turned to the remaining troops. "Everyone, take down the bat. That's an order, all fire on the bat now!"

The air around them exploded with the sound of automatic weapons fire, the sky around the bat-like shape shattering with ricochets like golden sparks. To their credit, the bat lost its velocity and control, wavering in the air before falling into what had once been the aft of the plane with a loud and painful sounding crunch. Cheers broke out around Ironhide, and the mech growled in frustration.

"He's not down," The weapon's expert snarled. "Ratbat hasn't lived as long as he has by being easy to knock out of a fight."

"You call that easy?" a marine screamed exasperatedly.

"Stow the attitude," Longworth snapped, eye staring hard through the scope on his rifle. "It's not moving, but I'm not about to argue with Ironhide. We proceed at all caution. Two man teams in intervals. We surround and finish the job, got it? Pair up and move out."

"Epps!" Ironhide called again, watching as the humans scattered according to orders.

"On it!" Robert shouted back, slapping closed the toolkit and slipping it into one of his millions of pockets. He held the augmented binoculars up to his eyes, the lenses flipping through different shades of color as he ran through the light spectrum. "Figured that since you all had access to your optics, this jammer was designed to at least leave the visible spectrum active."

"So I've noticed," Ironhide put in dryly, the frustration so deep in his voice that it almost drown out the words. "You know where it is?"

"Working on it," the man answered. "Reconfigured these binoc's to the most basic levels, using lenses instead of electronic scans. I'm assuming that the Decepticons would have built the jammer out of their own tech and metals, right?"

"Correct," he answered. Some of the anger died in Ironhide's vocals, the mech catching on to what Epps had in mind. "So we look for anything not native to this planet."

"Right," Epps answered… and stopped. The target blossomed before his eyes, a dark patch of black against the spectrum of color projected through the lenses in his hands. "There! Five clicks north by north east. That mound of rock."

"On it," Ironhide primed his cannons with an evil smile, letting loose a blast that carved a furrow in the earth almost as massive as the crash site of the plane.

And just like that, the static noise inside his processors vanished. Targeting systems ceased their pinwheeling, battle programming rushing to life with a vengeance. The world opened up to him again, sensors reading both the battle with Starscream and the impending fight between the humans and Ratbat. It took him nanoseconds to decide where he was needed the most, and what was the best option for ending this battle with the least amount of causalities.

Ironhide grinned a grin that would have put the Grim Reaper to shame… and made his choice.

~*~*~*~*~*~

The tiny hold of what was once part of the aircraft named Freedom Flight of the United States Air Force, the twin of Air Force One, nearly rocked up onto its side. Ratchet's fingers had barely cleared the hole, the tips still within the circular cut when the twins smacked into him, hard. People screamed. It was hard to imagine that any one of them had vocal cords enough left to still scream after all that had happened. But scream they did, finding some depthless well of terror inside their souls and giving vent to that unholy sound.

Lydia was no exception. Though her scream wasn't out of fear for her own life, but that of the mech that had tried to save her.

"Ratchet!" she wailed, shoving at Joshua's arms and scrambling to her feet, desperate to get to the outside. Please, don't let it be over like this, she prayed. Don't let me see him again just to loose him. Don't let him die trying to save me. Please, not like this. Don't take him and not me, too. Please, no. No no no no no no no nonononooo…

"No, Lydia!" Josh snarled, grabbing her leg and pulling her off her feet. "Don't! We don't know what's out there. If it's strong enough to take down that thing, then it's no help to us!"

"Get off me!" she screeched, the sobs ripping from her throat as she flipped around on her back, trying to crab-walk backward away from him. "Don't you dare touch me again, you son of a bitch. Don't you dare ever touch me again! So help me if he dies and you stop me from helping, I swear I'll make you pay."

The look in her bi-colored eyes froze him, the outrage and repulsion in that stare pinning him on the spot. Confusion danced in those grey-white eyes, sorrow mingling a grey thread of color through them. And then they darkened, realization spiraling within his gaze until the grey eclipsed the white, turning them dark and smoky with rage.

"So he's the one, huh?" he jerked his head towards the hole in the wall. "He's the one you 'should have told' something to before this mess. I can't believe it. I simply can't believe that you would share yourself with that… that alien."

"Go fuck yourself, Joshua Eddard," she hissed, tendrils of pain worming through the anger those words. Years of wasted longing for a man she hadn't ever really known, a mourning for the memory of a man that only existed in her imagination taking the sharpness from her voice. Leaving it cold and flat and utterly devoid of forgiveness. "Take your prejudiced, unforgiving ass and keep it far, far away from me."

"You're screwing an alien!" he nearly exploded, lip curling in revulsion.

A hush fell over the hold, making it as silent as a tomb, the sounds of the battle outside somehow muted in the wake of his words. Lydia shook her head slowly, shaking her ankle once, watching his hands jerk away from her as if she were something dirty, something contaminated with a hot, burning and deadly disease. She waited for him to do something stupid like wipe his hands on his ruined shirt or stare at them as if they were as dirty for touching her as he was making her out to be. If he did, she wasn't certain what she would do. Something in her would snap, she knew that much at least.

And then it was anyone's guess whether she would run for the outside, or actually attempt to beat her former Captain to death. Both were in the realm of possibility. And both would end with her dying in the attempt. She knew damn well that one more smack upside the head, or one more bleeding wound and she was done for.

To his credit, Joshua only continued to stare at her, as did the rest of the survivors of the doomed Freedom flight.

"That's none of your business," she said softly, voice carrying over the hush like a thunderclap all the same.

"It is when you're sleeping with me, too," he threw back.

"Guess I'm not anymore, now am I?"

He flinched back, the words like a physical slap. "So you admit it?"

"I'm admitting nothing. What goes on between Ratchet and I is our business. So butt out."

"No."

She stared at him incredulously. "Not your decision," Lydia turned away, painfully climbing to her feet. Her ankle—the one he had twisted in trying to prevent her exit—throbbed and burned. Another ache to add to the list of injuries pounding on her nervous system like a drummer on crack. She limped a few steps towards the door. "Now please get the hell out of my life."

"You are my life, Phoenix," Joshua called, the softness of his tone chilled by the cold steel in it. "Just because you are fucking this machine doesn't change what I feel for you. When we get out of this, we'll get you some help. We'll get through this rough patch together."

She ignored him, pushing down the creeping dread that filled her at his words. More than anything she wanted to be home in Diego Garcia. She wanted to be surrounded by Autobots and military fences. She wanted to be safe on her island with its remote desert sands, with its absolutely, bordering-on-paranoia controlled access points. Though she was a capable warrior in her own right, every woman—from the young girl to the most seasoned of professional fighters—instinctively feared those words uttered in that tone.

It was the sound of obsession.

Lydia pressed forward towards the exit, and then dove to the side on reflex as the tiny black Decepticon flew through the opening and into the hold.

~*~*~*~*~*~

It was fate, as the humans would say. The chances that Starscream's human would have survived the crash had been slim to none, or so his processors told him. By his calculations, only two or three of the humans should have been online at all, nevertheless one as badly damaged as this femme. And yet there he was, face to face with the human he now knew as Lydia. It was hard to not know her name, what with all the males and that frustrating mech screaming her name with every chance they had, apparently.

And the chances of him running into her as the first human in the hold were even less than that. It was either a sign of great fortune, or a sign of great disaster.

"What is it about you, human, that drives males and mechs crazy?" he spared the time to ask, voice dripping with thinly veiled disgust. "Is there something in your makeup that infects humans and Cybertronians alike with this obsessive desire?"

It was clear on the femme's face that she had no idea what he was talking about. Perhaps her intelligence was grossly overestimated. Perhaps she was ignorant, incapable of understanding. It was something he would contemplate later, when he had her contained for study and had the shard of the All-Spark in hand. If he took her alive, he would have a costly prize indeed to dangle over Starscream's head.

Profit, profit and more profit. Words that he truly loved. A sign of great fortune, indeed.

A flash of light was her only warning, a white so blinding that it nearly knocked her unconscious. She tried to dive away, but her injured ankle refused to cooperate. The blast took her across the back, the concussive force knocking the breath from her body, the energy of it sparking across her nervous system. She collapsed to the floor without a sound, body convulsing lightly as the electricity of his stunbolt short-circuited her muscle control.

"Lydia!" another female human screamed, this one shorter, slimmer, and probably just as stupid as this Lydia. Ratbat sized her up in moments, discarding her as beyond useless as either a threat or as part of his plans.

Satisfied, Ratbat turned the weapon on the other survivors, intending to capture them all and let Starscream sort through them at his leisure. If he had interest in this one flesh creature, perhaps he would have interest in them all. If anything, the sorting process would keep the Seeker out of his wires and would allow him to concentrate on the next phase of his plan. Again, it was a win-win situation for him.

Until the metal bar slammed into his head hard enough to knock him into the nearest wall. Programs fizzled inside his processors, realigning moments later. Red optics blazed all the brighter, rage pumping through his circuits. Not even the idiotic twins had struck him that hard, and the insult of being caught unaware by an organic embarrassed him more than damaged him. He started to push himself upwards when the bar came down on him again with impressive strength. And again. And again. And again.

"You. Won't. Touch. Her. Again!" Josh roared, working the broke piece of pipe like a baseball bat. The force of his swings punctuated each word, tiny bits of metal flying free with each impact. "Never. Again. She. Is. Not. YOURS! Do. You. Understand!"

"Josh!" the other femme screamed. "Josh, she's not breathing. Lydia's not breathing!"

Josh, Ratbat memorized, throwing that name and the image of the male into his processors and relishing the immediate thoughts of pain he would inflict on this human. Perhaps he had been infected by this disease after all. For he wanted nothing more in that moment than to have this Josh pinned down to a berth and at his mercy. Or lack of mercy, he corrected. What he had in mind was, in all probability, the furthest thing from mercy that existed.

The pathetic human turned at the cry of the femme, and that was all the opening that Ratbat needed.

"She has a pace-maker," Josh cried, eyes wide. "The blast must have shorted it—"

The stunbolt took him in the back, knocking him flat without a sound. The humans remaining, six in total, screamed and wailed with their insipid fear, scrambling away from him like the prey they were. He paid them no mind, not caring that they spewed from the opening in the hold, still screaming as they ran. His ultimate goal sat not five feet away, secured in its little box labeled "medical supplies." Only it hadn't been opened by the humans, what with the industrial lock securing it closed. Scrapings on the lock told him that they had tried to open it.

He chuckled, slicing through the steel like it was dust.

Only three humans remained in the hold when he turned around, the chip of the All-Spark in hand. It barely registered in his thought processes that his sensors were alive with the power of the All-Spark, that his precious jamming was no longer registering as active. It all mattered little now that the prize was in his clawed hands. And those two fleshlings Josh and Lydia were both unconscious and ready for collection. A sign of great, great fortune indeed!

The only other organic in the hold was the femme that had cried out their names. He tilted his head to the side, reading the fear that spiked through her systems as his optics bored into her. "What is your designation, human?" he asked.

It took the femme three times to stutter it out, and he watched her curl around Lydia and sob. "Song-Ming," she said at last.

He smiled, gliding over to her, the chip of All-Spark glowing faintly as he approached. He felt the power washing over him, healing his injuries and fueling him with strength. It was almost heady, this wash of power. It made him want to use the chip for himself, and the idea refused to leave his processors. Little arcs of blue-white lightning skipped along his frame, bouncing into walls and the human bodies.

"Song-Ming," he echoed. "You will come with me now. I need a shield against the Autobots. They will not fire if I have a human hostage, and I do not care about your life at this time. Now, help me bind Josh and Lydia together for transport. Their lives are of use to me. Serve well, and maybe your life will, too. If you survive."

He reached for her with his free claw, the All-Spark lightning splashing down his arm and into Song-Ming… and into Lydia where the other femme had touched her. Lydia's eyes snapped open, the lightning arcing between the blue and green orbs, her mouth working in a soundless scream. Ratbat watched in morbid fascination, the readings of energy in that frail human body registering as off the chart for her kind. But it wasn't the spike of energy in her that alarmed him. It was when her arm--the one she had cradled as if useless--flashed out and locked onto his claw. Impossibly strong fingers dug in until they left grooves in his frame. Blue-white lightning arced over her limb, the metallic portions under her skin nearly glowing with the power.

He screamed. Lydia screamed. Song-Ming screamed, the latter's courage finally giving out and she ran for her life from the hold.

And Ratbat did the only thing he could. In his panic, he stabbed the shard of the All-Spark into Lydia's chest, taking joy as the black heart's blood fountained past her lips. The one blue eye sizzled with All-Spark energy, glowing until he thought it would explode out of her head. The pupil was lost to the whirlwind of lightning. He feared the worst, that the human had somehow animated herself. He was not in a position to fight her and escape at the same time. Not with the pressing energies of Autobots beginning to surround him. No doubt those thrice-damned twins and that medic were up and moving in his direction.

But the human simply collapsed, a toy with its batteries removed. She continued to quake and convulse, though he ignored that. All his research proved that humans could not restore themselves once their heart was punctured. She was dead. He had his prize. And he had the name of the human he wanted to destroy the most. He could find the male again. That wouldn't be hard. He had seen enough.

Shaking off her limp grasp, he leaped through the hole—

And into the waiting jaws of one very pissed off Cybertronian-shaped Tyrannosaurs Rex.