Sam returned to classes the next day, where he learned he was on academic probation in almost all of them. He'd missed so much school -- not even three weeks in -- that he was alread in danger of being flunked out.
It was very tempting to quit.
"Sam," Bee said, when he called him to vent, "we don't anticipate any Decepticon attacks that we can't handle without you -- there's no reason for it. Focus on your school. You only have to survive until winter break, right?"
His mom threatened to disown him and make him pay back his first semester's tuition if he quit.
Grudgingly, he stayed in school.
Mikaela reopened the shop one full week after the funeral, after hiring someone the police recommended to scrub her father's ... well, whatever that was, that was stuck to the wall. Scrub it off. And paint. She now had nothing left in savings. And thank God she had a lease, because the landlord had not only refused to help he had threatened to kick her out if there was any more trouble. He was not a fan of giant alien robots, it turned out, and couple that with a murder on the premises, and she was definitely not his favoriteclient.
She wanted to quit, but she had to eat, and it was pretty damn hard to quit when you owned the business. Anyway, there were two customers who had cars that needed repairs and she felt bad they'd waited a week.
That day brought in four more cars -- including a little yellow Camaro that she nearly addressed with a, "Hi, Bee!" when the owner pulled into the parking lot. The Camaro just needed an oil change. It felt weird to put him -- it -- up on a rack, and she kept expecting it to talk to her, and she did pat it on the fender when she was done and say, "There you go."
Work was a good thing, it turned out. She made it through the whole day without thinking too much. The only rough spot was when she started to call out, "Dad?" meaning to ask him if he'd run out for lunch, and then realized he wasn't there anymore.
The funny part of arranging permission to leave the immediate area of the base was figuring out who to ask for it. To say that the chain of command had been shaken up was an understatement. However, while he certainly had leave, the general expectation on 'leave' was that they wouldn't get more than an hour or two from base. If they got recalled in an emergency, they needed to be able to get back.
The easy answer would be to simply ask Optimus, but Optimus had gone missing. He'd left a note that he had some business to attend to, and had made very firm orders that nobody was to follow him. This pretty much meant that he was going to go talk to Fangface -- and Bee and rest of the circle had unhappily concluded that either they would be rescuing him, conducting a funeral, or celebrating a truce.
Sunstreaker was taking bets. The odds currently favored 'rescue' by a heavy margin, with 'truce' second and 'funeral' a very distant third. (Grimlock had bet 'funeral' and Bee figured Grimlock was being a smartass.) Optimus was canny, and Magnus had pointed out that a truce with the Autobots would likely also mean a truce with the human governments for the Decepticons. Fang was certainly smart enoug to figure that out. Bee, himself, expected Optimus to return with a truce in hand. He assumed the reason that Optimus had slipped out and left them behind without discussing the matter was that the entire population of Autobots would have mutinied and sat on him, if necessary, to prevent him from such a foolish idea.
Bee, after rolling his optics a bit, had bet five human dollars on 'truce.' Personally, he knew Fangface well enough to realize Fang hated fighting a battle on multiple fronts. Fang might well agree to a temporary truce (and keep it) simply to avoid fighting both the Autobots and trying to maintain command of the Decepticons. Soundwave, at least, was not going to be happy about Fangface's coup, and he could name any dozen other Decepticons who'd love to usurp Fang. Not one of them (including Soundwave) had a prayer of leading for long, however.
Personally, Bee was hoping that the Decepticon's command structure simply imploded. He was not particularly worried about Optimus. Optimus knew what he was doing, and had been negotiating treaties for longer than Bee had been alive. He'd be fine.
Sunstreaker was taking bets on that, as well. The odds were ten to one against it. Too many mechs at the base had known Fang, either as an enemy on the battlefield or during the brief few years he'd called himself an Autobot.
But hey, hope was good, right?
Their own command structure was a bit ... shaky ... at the moment. However, there was no real chance of implosion on the Autobot side. They were simply confused about who ranked whom now.
A few days ago, Magnus would have been the commanding officer, followed by -- in order off their military rank -- Ironhide, Elita, Ratchet, and on down the line. Bee was somewhere in the middle, and Hot Rod had been dead last.
Magnus now cheerfully called Hot Rod 'boss' -- and had left Bee blinking in confusion and looking around for Optimus when he'd bestowed the same title on Bee. (Magnus had then said, "No, you. The short boss." -- And Bee had laughed. He wasn't sensitive about his height.)
However, that meant that he couldn't turn to Magnus for permission.
Bee had finally settled on asking Ratchet (because Ironhide was likely to say no on general principles) and approached him in the repair bay. Ratchet appeared to be machining a strut in Elita's size -- one of her legs had actually been bent."Is that steel?" Bee said, curiously.
"Elita's light enough that it will work until we can get proper parts," Ratchet said, mildly. "She's not likely to do anything that would exceed the design tolerances. I don't know what we're going to do for Sunshine Boy, though stasis is sounding more and more like a wonderful possibility."
Bee snorted. "You know that Optimus would never let you offline him without his permission."
"Optimus isn't here."
He sounded ominously annoyed, and Bee decided he didn't want to know what Sunstreaker had been doing, or complaining about, that had Ratchet quite that peeved. There was a difference between 'aggravated Ratchet' and 'really angry Ratchet' and that sounded suspiciously like the latter. Bee was a bit relieved to be able to easily change the subject to, "Listen, Ratchet -- would there be any problem if I take a bit of a road trip with the kids? I won't be more than a day away."
Ratchet lifted one optic ridge up. "You know, you don't actually need to ask anyone's permission, Bumblebee."
"Errm ... well, I am asking." The idea of just going sat wrong with him.
"You're a Prime. We're not fighting anything, and unless Soundwave decides to come back and leak energon all over us in the next hour, we're not likely to do so any time in the next few weeks. Just go."
"You still outrank me. And so does Ironhide."
"So ask Ironhide."
"He'll say no."
"So just go." Ratchet turned his back on Bee, and ran a grinder noisily over a rough patch on the strut for a moment. Bee waited, knowing that wasn't a dismissal -- that was just Ratchet being, well, Ratchet. Finally, Ratchet shut the piece of equipment off and said, "Wish I could go with you, Bee, honestly."
Bee suddenly felt terribly, terribly guilty. "Maybe I should stay ..."
"You're on leave anyway, and judging by the display you put on yesterday night, it's well past time for it. I have Wheeljack, First Aid, Elita, and Inferno helping -- Elita's machining joints for her own legs right now. Any more mechs in the repair bay and there won't be room for me! And we don't need you to patrol the base -- we have two 'bots scheduled every six hours, plus they just assigned us two hundred more humans. Ironhide and Sideswipe are training the humans, inasmuch as they need it -- they're pretty well trained anyway. Special forces, I understand. Mostly they're just familiarizing them with our weapons, and our procedures. And that's all we're really doing right now: patrols and fixing people that need fixing and training. And you had a huge outburst in a meeting and so clearly need the time off, you might as well have it printed on your forehead."
Now he felt like a bit of a failure. "I am sorry, Ratchet."
Ratchet had snapped, "You need someone's permission? Fine, you have my orders as your chief medical officer: Go. And I don't want to see your aft back on this base until Monday at nine hundred for the morning briefing."
Bee winced at Ratchet's tone. It was deserved, but still, it stung. During the meeting last night, Grimlock had expressed the rather typically Grimlockian sentiment of, "Go back. Smash Decepticons. Decepticons in chaos. Good time. Not expecting attack. Take lots of humans, too. Coordinate human help."
Tactically it was a reasonably sound idea, and for a bit it had appeared like the Autobots might be considering it, even though most of their fighters were walking wounded. Ironhide had concurred with Grimlock's suggestion, as had Elita, particularly the "take lots of humans to back us up" idea. Elita had pointed out that the Russians were now chafing at the bit to get the Decepticons out of their territory, and were practically begging for help to do it.
And Bee had seen, in a rather vivid burst of imagination, tens of thousands of young human soldiers, each of them looking like Sam, dead on a battlefield. Blood soaking the ground. Dead mechs ... a thousand Wheelies, a hundred Optimuses. He had seen fire and death and destruction, grief and loss and sorrow, without end.
Because yes, they might win that battle, but did it matter? The Decepticons might defeat them at the next one. Probably, they would. For each victory that the Autobots achieved, they lost twice as much. He could prove that statistically. And yes, there was always hope that they would turn the tide, but even he had trouble believing in that these days. Even with Starscream and Megatron gone, they were outnumbered and outgunned.
And Grimlock wanted to go kill some Decepticons, and lose a few more Autobot lives (and probably a lot of human lives) in the process. And Bee just didn't want to lose anyone else.
In desperation, Bee had truly turned to his Matrix for the first time since receiving it. He had sent a query to it, asking for a solution -- any solution -- what he saw as a horrible losing situation. He was so tired of fighting. He was so tired of losing.
He found an answer in the memories of the earliest Primes -- along with the cold and chilling realization that Cybertronians had been designed for war. Whoever had created their race and deliberately made them machines of death and destructions. This was anathema to everything he had been taught, and believed. And yet there was a way to peace ... it could be done.
He didn't like the answer he found.
Then Grimlock had said, again, in the midst of the war meeting, "Smash Decepticons!"
The thing was, Grim had a Matrix too. Couldn't he see it? Hadn't he yet set up some queries and asked for answers? Didn't he know?
Bee had lunged to his feet, knocking over the metal work table he had been using as a seat. "I'm so slagging tired of fighting! By the pit, Grim! Primus! If I never see another battle in my life it will be too soon! I just want this war over, and at this point, I don't even care how we do it!"
It would have been more accurate to say that he did care -- he hated the answer he had seen, hated it with a vicious passion. But 'I don't care!' had been what had come from his processor, and as soon as it was uttered, he had wished he were mute again. He did care. He cared very much. But the anger, and the denial, and the grief of what had already been lost, and what would yet come to pass, it was utterly overwhelming.
And so he had said he didn't care.
Because he didn't want to care.
"Slag!" He had continued, despite all sorts of internal warnings telling him that now would be a good time to shut up and sit down like a good little soldier. "Are you trying to get some more of us dead? The Decepticons aren't doing anything at the moment but sitting there. Is it too much to ask to have a week or two of peace? Our ancestors used to have lifetimes of peace! I didn't ask to be created at the beginning of a war, and I'm sick to death of it, and I just want it to be over! I want to know what it would be like to not be either planning a battle, or recovering from one! Primus, I've had enough!"
And, yeah, Optimus and Ratchet were right to tell him to take some time off. In retrospect, he still felt the same sentiment, but throwing a screaming fit in front of the people he was supposed to be leading was just not the way to gain their respect -- particularly when most of them were a hell of a lot older than he was, and most of them were willing and ready to fight this war until they died.
Bee realized, abruptly, that Ratchet was staring at him. He'd been standing motionless for a couple of minutes, locked in a memory of that outburst, and analysis of it. He looked up and met Ratchet's gaze. Ratchet said, softly, in a tone that was queerly gentle for the normally sharp-tongued medic, "You see it too, don't you?"
Bee folded his arms and said, "There has to be another way. There has to be something we're missing."
"Hnnh. Well, when you figure out what data, precisely, we are missing, let me know."
Silverbolt touched down on a somewhat rough runway, a day after departing the base. One of the advantages to Autobot aircraft was that they did not need to stop for fuel and servicing. Silver was also faster than any C-130 ever made.
"Stay transformed," Optimus said, "and stay alert. Keep your doors shut tight and tell me if anyone comes within a hundred yards of you. Fang's issued an order that you are not to be touched, but even if he is being honest with us this does not mean that all the Decepticons on this base will obey him."
Silverbolt said, sounding clearly nervous, "I won't leave you behind."
"If I order you to take off, you will," Optimus said, firmly. "You are every bit as important as I am, Silverbolt. We have one flier and six Primes."
"I would beg to differ," Silverbolt objected. "The humans have ample aircraft that you may borrow, and you have in the past. I suspect that some of the smaller mechs could even pilot them. I do not see that you were ever stranded. At worst, you were inconvenienced by the need to repeatedly refuel. There is, however, only one Optimus Prime. Losing you would be a disaster, not an inconvenience."
Optimus sighed, not wanting to argue the point.
Fangface clearly was unlike any Decepticon leader he'd ever dealt with before. One hour after they'd departed the Decepticon base, Fang had sent him a brief e-mail: "Optimus. Thought you might need my address, and my cell phone number. So, here it is."
And Fang had then given him the phone number. Optimus presumed that the reply-to address of the e-mail was Fang's address. Arranging permission for Silverbolt to transport Wheelie to Fang had been as simple as picking up the phone, back in America.
Fang had answered that first call with a cheery, "Hey, Optimus. Ready to surrender yet?"
He'd very nearly hung up. Instead, he had said, "I was not planning on it, no, but I do require your assistance."
"Oooh, now that's going to cost you big."
"Hopefully you will not charge too high of a price, as it is for Wheelie," Optimus had said, a little annoyed by Fang's attitude -- but then, when was he not annoyed by Decepticons? "He was badly injured, and we do not have the motherboard in stock required to bring him back online."
"Oh, fuck." Fang has said, in English. "Yeah, no charge for things that concern my buddy. Send someone over with him and I'll see he's fixed. I have enough spare parts, thanks to your raid, to last Wheelie a lifetime."
Now, as Silverbolt taxi'd towards the runway, he called Fang's cell phone again. "Yo, Optimus!" Fang had said, cheerfully. "I see you sent Silver-boy. I'll be out in a minute with the parts you need and he can head straight home."
"Fangface," Optimus replied, "I'm with Silverbolt."
"Wait -- what -- you're here? You better not be here with a raiding party again, or I am going to wipe you off the face of this backwards planet."
Fang appeared, in protoform, from between two buildings. There were plenty of Decepticons in evidence now, as well, but most appeared to be going about routine business: if anyone found the appearance of a C-130 with an Autobot emblem on the runway unusual, they were not showing it. Optimus assumed that Fang had issued a few choice orders to them to ignore the Autobot plane. He headed for the plane at an easy jog, and Optimus assured him, "I came alone."
"You are insane," Fang had said. "I could kill you right now."
"Will you?" Optimus already suspected the answer to that.
"Well, no, because I've had my fill this week of pissed off Autobots." Fang had sounded like he was laughing. "Mind, I could clean the planet of the whole lot of you, but I fail to see the point. Twenty Autobots, half of them broken, are just not worth my time."
He refused to rise to the bait, and it was purely an attempt to goad, so he said instead, "I came because I wished to speak to you, in private, Fang."
"Well, I'm not coming aboard Silverbolt with you there." Silver stopped twenty feet from the plane, arms folded. "You pin me down, Silverbolt takes off, I'm screwed."
Optimus said, "Meeting in another secure location is fine."
"I could kill you."
"Will you give me your word of honor that you won't?" Optimus said this aloud, as he ducked down the C-130's ramp at a crouch, then unfolded himself to stand upright.
Fang regarded him with a very human scowl on his face. "I'm trying to get control over the Decepticons who don't support me. Seeing me talking to you won't help matters. They think I'm soft anyway."
:So,: Optimus said, via Autobot com channels, using a very old and long-retired encryption key that Fangface would have, :Tell them you're negotiating a surrender. Tell them you have Prowl in a secured location somewhere and you're trying to use him as a bargaining chip for something. Be creative. I do not care how you justify it to your mechs, personally, Fang. But you must acknowledge we need to talk.:Fang snorted and said aloud, eyes widening in mock surprise, "The great Optimus Prime would suggest that I lie? To my own troops? Oh, I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you. And we do have Prowl, I just haven't figured out where, and I will be bargaining like hell when I resolve that mystery."
"Lying is a skill you seem quite talented at," Optimus snapped, needled at last into responding with less than complete dignity and grace. He didn't respond to the 'Prowl' comment. He honestly was not sure what had happened to his second in command; the mech had disappeared while on leave on a distant planet several millenia ago. That was an old pain, still felt keenly, but not something he could do anything about. They'd tried, then, to trace Prowl's tracks and had failed. He wasn't even sure if Fang's comment now was the truth or if it was just more verbal jousting. However, he personally doubted that the Decepticons had Prowl simply because they would have done something more creative with him than hide him away for seven thousand years.
And, yes, if Fang did turn Prowl up he trusted he'd hear about it, likely with a demand for concessions of some sort to get him back. He'd be obliged to either bargain or attack to rescue his second. But that was a fight for another day, if it actually came to that.
Fang chuckled. "And yet you would trust my word of honor not to blast you into oblivion? Really?"
"I don't trust your word," Optimus advised Fang, "given that you've broken an oath to not one, but two, commanding officers. However, speaking to me in private would suit your purposes. Killng me won't."
Fang regarded Optimus over folded arms for a moment. "Fine. Get the runt, and we can talk. We can use Starscream's lab. It has a privacy shield on it, and I know it's not bugged, because I never managed to do so. I'll fix Wheelie while we talk. The faster I get you out of here, the less likely someone is to take a shot at you. You are correct that I prefer to keep you alive -- there's nothing like a martyr to inspire the losing side to victory, and your ranks are pretty deep with good leadership. Too bad you don't have the troops to back those leaders up."
Optimus snorted. "I don't think they need any more inspiration to rise up and fight, Silver. My death would be redundant. I was thinking more along the lines that if you would like to arrange a temporary truce to allow you to deal with solidifying your coup, you probably do not wish to kill me."
"Hnnh. That, too."
"And it's to my benefit to see you in power. I'd much prefer to have you as the leader of my enemies than Soundwave."
"Yeah?" Fang said suspiciously, "Why's that?"
Optimus ducked back into Silverbolt's hold and retrieved Wheelie's small body. He held him carefully cradled in one hand and advised Fang, with one lifted eyebrow, "The insults are better."
Fang chortled in Cybertronian, and shook his head, and said, "And here I thought you were going to say I was prettier."
Using a rather more securely encrypted Autobot channel, Silverbolt said, behind him :Be careful, Optimus. I hope you know what you're doing.: :So do I, Silver. So do I.: