Transformers belongs to Hasbro/ Takara.
The Dark Horizon
Chapter 29: Part of Me
Time passes differently when you've got stuff to do. I realized that after I had been on the Nemesis for two full years. It might as well have been six months. By now, I knew the ship's engines better than the insides of my own subspace pockets, knew every single latch, transistor and relay, every fuel line.
And, even if Barricade called me crazy for it, I had started to write some kind of repair manual, adding spec sheets and annotations as I went. Yes, it was additional work for me at the moment, but at least that meant that the fate of the entire ship didn't necessarily depend on the two of us anymore. As it was now, should something happen to me or Barricade, the other would struggle greatly to keep up with the work and if both of us were to become unable to continue…
Boom, ultimate catastrophe.
Anyway, I liked working down there with Barricade, even when there was a technical emergency or a long, tiresome repair job. I felt like we made a good team. Long explanations as to what should be done or which tools or replacement parts we would need were never necessary and most of the time we just worked side by side in comfortable silence.
Also, I had given birth to Motormaster's son, Torque, roughly two months ago. Motormaster had been… difficult. Not nearly as young or inexperienced as Rapiron when it came to these matters, but just as unwilling to do the actual thing. In the end, Megatron himself had taken him aside to "talk some sense into him".
Mostly, he had been opposed to interfacing with a bot my age and size, but he also insisted he wouldn't bed a femme who didn't actually want him to. Apparently, he wasn't much into, well, organized mating. In the end, he begrudgingly did his duty.
Somehow, every single bot I was paired with made me feel like absolutely no one actually wanted to interface with me. Maybe it was my attitude towards it, maybe it was the situation, but I assumed none of it made me appear overly attractive to the mechs. Which was, in a way, a relief- the Autobots wouldn't have hesitated to brutalize me even when I had already been an injured, miserable and crying heap on the floor.
The Decepticons all shared a history of having been oppressed, and severely so, by the former Cybertronian rulers. Maybe that was the reason- each and every single one of them knew what it meant to be abused. Motormaster had been a slave to a cruel master before the war. And Starscream, despite his origins of vosian nobility, had been taken hostage at a young age by the Iaconians, for "political reasons". He never spoke about what happened to him during that time, and Skywarp had advised me not to ask him about it. A golden cage was still a cage, I thought.
Starscream. Another bot I was supposed to breed with, another one absolutely refusing to do it. Not only did he simply not want to, he also didn't want a sparkling with a grounder. Being a pure- blooded elite seeker, he was so opposed to the idea of mingling my coding with his own, it took a full nine months until he finally complied, his wings faced with the unfriendly end of a fusion cannon I might add.
Wings were a very peculiar matter when it came to seekers, I had learned. Starscream in a way expressed much of his emotions via his wings whenever the snarky remarks grew silent and it seemed like he couldn't even bear to look at my wingless back, like it was repulsive to him even. Even after Megatron had convinced him to do what he was now doing, he tried to avoid me the best he could, tried to determine the exact minimum amount of interfacing he had to invest just so Shockwave and Megatron would leave him be. Of course, as the whole procedure was taking very, very long, Starscream found himself on the receiving end of quite a bit of mockery from the other Decepticons, which didn't exactly lighten his mood either.
According to Shockwave, the plan was to have me breed with more of the Decepticon seekers in the future, pairing up the resulting sparklings in turn to establish a new line of seekers over a few generations. I wasn't sure how I felt about the plans for my sparklings to breed being made, but from an objective point of view, Shockwave's reasoning was impeccable.
Another year went by and Starscream still hadn't sired a sparkling.
Then, one day, something unexpected happened.
It had been a day just like any other: getting up, going through one or two battle simulations, practicing my driving, getting some energon and working in the engine room. Then I heard something- and looked up from my work.
"Did you hear that?" I asked Barricade, who was sitting next to me, repairing a different part.
"Hear what?" He didn't even look up. But I was sure I'd heard something. There it was again. A high pitched sound, barely audible, but definitely there. Something stirred inside me. Whatever it was, it was coming from one of the upper decks. Acting impulsively wasn't usually my cube of energon, but I had to find out what this sound was, now. I got up and started running up the next set of stairs. Barricade called my name in surprise, but I didn't let that stop me. Something was calling me, drawing me in.
I followed the sound through half of the ship, running past confused Decepticons, all the way up to the hall below the command center. The sound was growing louder with every step I took and soon I could identify what it was. Someone was crying.
I didn't see much when I arrived, only a group of fellow Decepticons standing in a circle around the source of the noise. I pushed some of them aside roughly to get to it- and froze.
There, on the cold and dark floor, cowering and wailing, was a sparkling. This took a moment for me to compute. There was a sparkling, not newly hatched but still comparatively tiny, on the floor.
"What the…" it was all I could say to that. Thundercracker, who was standing across from me, looked up at me, then pointed at the little bot on the floor.
"Yours, I presume? Found him during reconnaissance on earth near the Autobot base. He's not damaged, just scared out of his mind."
I just stood there, staring. This… was my sparkling? But… yes, it had been about six years since I'd given birth to my eldest. I knelt. Was it really possible that this- it had stopped crying. I held my breath. He slowly turned around and looked at me. I inhaled sharply as I saw my son's face for the very first time.
His facial features were of course still very childlike, but a disturbing resemblance to the Autobot leader was undeniable. It hurt to see a little sparkling looking so much like his father whom I hated and feared.
I quickly got up. Memories resurfaced. I couldn't stand to look at him any further, so I turned around and walked away quickly. I wanted nothing to do with this… this miniature Optimus. Thundercracker called after me, but I paid him no heed.
The following cycles were… challenging. I found myself becoming outright aggressive when spoken to. Several bots, including Megatron himself, approached me about the subject. I heard someone had been able to actually calm the sparkling down, but they told me he still wasn't doing so well. Trying to change my mind about him seemed pointless though. I was outright scared to even consider looking at Prime's offspring, I sure as fuck wouldn't suddenly turn into a babysitting drone.
I hadn't intended to, but I actually got into something of a fight with Megatron when he tried to use that "but you're his mother" argument and I turned his words against him because, frankly put, he was the sparkling's uncle. He didn't take it very well. I guess I was lucky I didn't go to the brig for that one.
Barricade, on the other hand, didn't even try to talk me into anything. He knew me too well. We just kept working as usual. Until Lugnut showed up.
"What do you want?" I snapped at him before he could even say anything. Barricade stopped what he was currently doing and looked up as well.
"Now, is that a way to greet your friend?" Lugnut replied, then gave Barricade a nod. "Barricade. May I borrow your apprentice for a moment?" I turned to Barricade and formed "no" with my mouth. He just shrugged.
"Whatever."
"Traitor."
"Come on then. Let's take a walk." The old mech said. I couldn't just tell Lugnut to frag off, so I sighed and went with him, muttering a curse below my breath. We went two levels up and started walking along the gallery leading to the middle set of side turrets. He said nothing for a while, but finally broke the silence.
"You… probably know why I came to talk to you." He said, looking at me from the corner of his optic. He was walking very slowly, but I still had to take several steps for every one of his due to the sheer size difference.
"Listen, Lugnut, I just can't. I can't take care of this sparkling."
"It's because of his looks, isn't it. Oh yes", he continued, "I do recognize those features. And I can't say it doesn't creep me out as well. I can only imagine what it's like for you given your… previous experiences." That was putting it mildly. What this sparkling's father had done to me was nothing I was sure I could ever forgive.
"Don't remind me." We walked on in silence for another few minutes before he started talking again.
"Did I ever tell you about my father?"
"You had a father? I thought you were sparked by the big bang."
"Ah, come on, I may be old, but I'm not that old." He chuckled. "My father was a very… ambitious mech. He was a pilot, and a damn good one at that. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps, put me behind my first steering console before I could even walk. But trying to teach me how to fly was like trying to teach a seeker how to be a good miner. It was an absolute disaster and I have to admit that even today, I still couldn't properly fly a shuttle if my life depended on it."
He paused and looked out of a window we were currently passing. The Nemesis was maneuvering around a set of giant nebulae, glowing faintly in the distance as new stars were slowly being formed in the huge accumulation of matter.
"I wanted to make him proud, but no matter how hard I tried, I never got better at piloting. He loved me, but he couldn't hide his disappointment. In the evenings, I started staying out late as I got older, telling him I was meeting some friends, but he started suspecting that wasn't entirely true. One night he followed me and discovered I had actually been rummaging through scrapyards and building stuff with the things I found there."
Lugnut chuckled good- naturedly. "I thought he'd be mad when he found out. But you know what? He wasn't. He was happier than he'd ever been because he could see that, although I was nothing like him, there was something I enjoyed doing and was really good at. After he found out what I'd been doing all the time, he encouraged me to learn more about craftsmechship and to get better at it. What I'm trying to say is", he stopped to look at me,
"that we don't get to choose what our sparklings will be like. We have all those ways to analyze, calculate and simulate the possible outcomes of all sorts of things, but predicting what a new life will really be like is beyond us. Ignoring that will only lead to sorrow and disappointment, just like imagining the partner of our dreams and being upset when no one meets our expectations. We need to acknowledge them as independent personalities and meet them with an open processor. And if we do that and try to get to know them for who they really are, they may even surprise us in a very positive way."
He then retrieved something from his subspace pocket. It was a small sheet of metal, dull and scratched. He handed it to me, I took it slowly and turned it over. My spark skipped a beat. There was a little drawing on the back. It looked like a butterfly, mismatched colors and quite flat, but it was definitely recognizable. For human children, drawing pictures like this one was nothing out of the ordinary. For cybertronian sparklings, whose processors were so fundamentally different from organic infant brains, it was.
"Your son made this. It's the only thing that seems to calm him down a little. If you ask me, I don't think he's anything like his father. But there's someone else he really, really reminds me of." I just kept staring at the picture. I didn't know what to say. I vented sharply.
"Thundercracker is keeping an optic on him. In case you're wondering." I nodded. Lugnut turned and walked away quietly then, leaving me standing there by the window, still holding the drawing in my hands.
XXXXXXXXXX
Finding Thundercracker's quarters wasn't that hard. All of the seekers had their rooms near the flight deck, where they could be quickly deployed. Also, they would run at a lower risk of contracting some chronic diseases they seemed to be vulnerable to when constantly lingering in confined spaces. Seekers really were a strange bunch of cybertronians.
I hesitated before knocking, but my knuckles met the door's surface anyway after a moment. Thundercracker said nothing as he opened, merely stepping aside so I could enter before he walked out and took off through the force field separating the flyers' living complex from open space. He'd never been a mech of many words.
I inspected my surroundings quickly. There were a few old pictures on the walls, two or three items of apparent cybertronian origin on a shelf, a crate and a berth. One of the pictures showed a young Thundercracker amongst a large group of other seekers. There had been so many of them. Once. Now, they were almost extinct. Seekers were outnumbered by grounders fifteen to one- and that was when one already counted in the crossbreeds. In a way, it was painful to see this proof of happier times for this subspecies. But shuffling through Thundercracker's stuff wasn't exactly what I was here for.
I closed my optics for a moment and took a deep vent. Looks could be, no, were deceiving. When I felt ready, I opened my optics again and looked ahead.
On the berth, the actual reason for my visit was sitting cross- legged, apparently deep in thought over another unfinished, scribbly depiction of earth fauna. I watched quietly him for a while. The colored, thick crayon he was using wasn't actually meant for drawing, but rather for marking crates and ammunition on the go. Not that there were a lot of art supplies aboard the ship, at least not up here.
Watching him was… fascinating. That frown, the way he braced his elbows on his knees leaning forward, how he almost, almost brought the crayon to the sheet of metal before him, but halting, obviously changing his mind about it and going back to wondering what was still missing.
The back of my throat felt itchy. His behavior was so very familiar.
Slowly, I walked up to him. He finally noticed me, looking up. The sparkling in front of me looked very confused, but that in itself was little surprising.
He was in a strange, scary place, far away from home or anyone he knew. And now he was seeing a bot with blue optics, but that bot looked unlike anyone he had ever encountered. His own optics weren't the light, ice blue of his father's I observed. They were like mine, with that same, slightly green tint.
He scooted back a bit when I came to sit at the edge of the berth, his movements showing that typical clumsiness of a toddler, but he didn't let me out of his sight even for a second.
I took a look at his picture. It seemed to be… a horse? It made me wonder whether he had ever seen the real thing or just pictures and videos. I cleared my throat.
"It's the tail." I then said quietly. He frowned at me and cocked his head. I pointed at the backside of the unfinished animal. "Right here, see? If you add a tail, it will be perfect."
Cautiously, he came closer and, with slow but surprisingly precise movements, he drew something that looked roughly like a tail. He then put the crayon down on the berth next to him. His face lit up.
I had been so very wrong. This little mech was not a younger version of his father, far from it.
A considerable amount of concentration was necessary for me to find the dormant remains of a bond that had been so alive once, when his spark had still lived within my body, when I had been on earth. When I found it, I nudged it gently.
Surprise, shock even, found its way onto his youthful face. The bond reactivated a bit more, then blossomed open completely. My venting hitched, as did his. He recognized me for who I really was now, remembered me.
But he didn't understand. He didn't understand where I had been all this time, why I hadn't been with him, why the bond had grown so distant to begin with. Yet he didn't judge. The little mech flung himself forward into my arms and started crying. I was powerless to stop my own sobs, too, just holding the sparkling close.
He was still my son. And even if he looked so much like Optimus Prime, I knew what really mattered was his spark- and his spark hadn't changed.
It was so strange. I had spent years in Autobot imprisonment, had suffered horribly at the hands of their leader and yet… something good had come out of it. Being close to my child, being able to hold him while our sparks rejoiced in our newfound bond was exhilarating. And I wouldn't have traded it for anything the universe had to offer.
XXXXXXXXXX
I had been more than surprised to learn my son could already speak. Well, truth be told, I had no idea at what age sparklings normally would start speaking, but even Lugnut later confirmed he was startlingly eloquent for his age. He was still having trouble pronouncing difficult words or get the gist of more abstract notions, but he was fully capable of talking about the things that mattered to him.
His initial timidity was soon forgotten, so when I cautiously asked him about his life on earth, he was happy to tell me all sorts of things. Which bots usually watched over him, who was the most fun to play with, how his father had often been away doing boring adult stuff and how he hadn't liked that.
And, apparently, he was a trouble maker, although he himself didn't see it that way. Practical jokes, as well as the tendency to slip the attention of the Autobots' watchful optics so he could play somewhere he had been told not to seemed to be amongst his favorite activities. Which was, I assumed, the reason why Thundercracker had come across him in the first place.
I was relieved to hear not a single thing suggesting he might have been abused in any way though.
His father had named him 'Diloculus', he told me. 'Dilo' for short. I vaguely remembered that being ancient Iaconian for 'sunrise' or 'beginning'. He could have had it worse, really.
When he asked me why I was here and not on earth however, I didn't know what to tell him and I took care to mask my respective emotions well. I didn't have the heart to tell him the truth, so I tried to avoid that topic if possible.
As I didn't know what else to do with him, I simply took him with me when I went back down to the engine rooms. But that of course was no place for a sparkling, which was why I couldn't actually get any work done as I had to watch him constantly. It was just too easy to get hurt down there.
Barricade wasn't all that helpful either, having about the same amount of experience as to how to handle a sparkling as I did.
Also, when it was getting late, the thought struck me that he would need a place to recharge, as well as energon suitable for sparklings. Shockwave had thankfully prepared the latter in the meantime, but I would need to adapt my room's furnishing to suit my child's needs. It made me wonder how I was supposed to manage once the other sparklings currently in gestation hatched.
In the end, I set up a makeshift bed opposite to my own. Dilo had been a bit cold earlier, as he still wasn't used to the lower temperatures aboard the Nemesis, so I made sure to get him a rather copious supply of blankets.
However, he was fidgeting when I finally tucked him in, although I couldn't quite tell why. He had refueled, he was tired, he had a comfortable place to rest. What else could he possibly need?
"Mom?" Dilo finally asked, rubbing his optics.
"Hm?"
"Is this… is this really our home? Are we staying here?"
I sat down at the edge of his berth slowly. "We are staying here. This is home."
He turned his head to look out of the window, where the stars were slowly passing by. "But can we go visit earth sometime? I'm sure everybody would be really happy to see us."
I frowned. Oh, the Autobots would be happy to have me back, there was no doubt about it. Just not in a way he thought.
"Someday… maybe." I answered instead, stroking the smooth metal of his cheek with the back of my finger. "Recharge now. It was a long day."
Indeed, the day had been long, even for me. So much had changed in so little time.
I turned off the lights and went to lay down on my own berth. By the window, a chair was still in the same place it had been in for years. But now, there was nobody occupying it anymore, nobody watching over me while I recharged. I didn't need anyone protecting me.
Although being in that whole new situation with Dilo recharging here, I found myself longing for… no, this was silly. I was perfectly capable of defending myself or calling for help in case anything happened. In here, the others knew better than to bother me.
I lowered my head onto the relatively hard surface.
Only minutes later, when I had already started drifting off to recharge, I heard a small rustle before something touched my arm. It startled me a bit, but I quickly calmed when I saw it was merely my son, looking up at me with his big, blue optics.
"Dilo? What is it?"
Through the bond, I noted how he was feeling restless, anxious. It must have been hard for him to find any rest that way… and I had an idea as to what he wanted. Slowly, I lifted my blanket up for him and he crawled up onto the berth, snuggling up to me.
I held him, laying on my side, his little helm beneath my chin, his tiny hands grabbing on to my armor. I could feel him starting to relax as I rocked him gently and started humming an earth lullaby. Soon, he was fast asleep.
