When Thundercracker returned to his ship, he did not expect Skywarp to follow him back there. His trinemate gave feasible excuses and made himself comfortable and settled before TC could think of any objections.

He was certain that Skywarp was sent to watch over him. The first couple of days, all Warp did was get TC's squadron into some trouble, an activity he had always been proficient at. Feeling he had unwound them enough, he moved directly across from Thundercracker's own quarters, yet spent most of his time with Thundercracker.

He complained, moaned and watched Thundercracker with humorous interest.

"Yes, leave the Decepticons so you can take up relentless monotony." Skywarp stretched on Thundercracker's berth, already reclined and comfortable. "I have been here two weeks and the most interesting thing you have done is teach that pet of yours how to successfully venture through the obstacle course the doctor created. And about the medic..." Warp droned on, his conversation drifting into unimportant things that he had observed but felt the need to voice.

"You haven't even left the ship since I got here, yet I sense that you want to." Skywarp stood up, wandered across the expanse of TC's quarters, spitefully shrugged his shoulder panels at the tablet Thundercracker was reading before taking it out of his hands and looking at it. Putting the device down on his worktable, Skywarp continued to peruse the blue Seeker's quarters.

But there wasn't much to see. Thundercracker had always been a minimalist. He had his berth, his workstation and a couple of other pieces of equipment that was tidily kept in their rightful places on large paneled shelfs along the left side of the wall.

"Even your quarters haven't changed," Skywarp observed, heaving out an impatient vent of air that shifted loudly through the room. "Boring. Boring, boring," Skywarp spouted off as he looked and observed each article or device that rested on the expanse of shelves. "Well, this is interesting. Nope, I'm wrong."

"I come here to spend some time with you, and all you do is work, work, work," Skywarp groused, still shifting through the items. Warp tilted his head to the side, his wings lifting along his back panel. Something caught his attention. Thundercracker figured that out with the way he stopped speaking.

Suddenly uncomfortable and not understanding why, he turned his attention to his wingmate. Warp picked up a small cylinder, flat and smooth, ridged along the sides and simple in appearance. Smiling wide, Skywarp returned to TC's side.

"I haven't seen this in a while. Do you do your drawings anymore?"

"They aren't drawings," TC spoke up with a valid argument. "They are 3D representations of objects that I have rendered into viable interpretations of what..."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever."

Warp sat down on the side of his workstation. He activated the small object and set it down between them. A thin tunnel of light grew from the middle of the device and then spread and settled into a shape. It was the planet Tid, a purple and orange orb of fire that seemed to burn with the natural gases that permeated its atmosphere.

"Hey, I remember that place!" Warp spoke up with renewed enthusiasm. "Where Megatron sent us to dismantle the transmitter that the Roiptels set up to contact the Autobots for assistance." He brought his hand down, pushing the light back, then drew his hand back up, causing the 3D rendering to stretch and grow in size.

Skywarp swiped his hand, shifting through Thundercracker's work. He leisurely looked through each and every one. That was when he knew how bored Warp was. Mega-cycles Thundercracker had been creating the things, and suddenly now he had the time to look and go through them all.

He reached the end of Thundercracker's work, but continued to swipe over the cylinder repeatedly, his hand breaking apart the light of the first thing he had ever rendered. It wasn't his best work, but it was his most detailed. TC remembered the time he had put into it, remembered how hard it had been to create. It was a vision of the vast Decepticon army, his first true view of it from the side of Megatron. It wasn't as realistic as he was now capable of, but its subtle shadows and sharp objects made for a memory that would always stay with him.

"There is more here," Skywarp said, now aggravated from his attempts that didn't do anything. "What are you trying to hide? What have you made that you don't want others to know about?"

"You are mistaken," Thundercracker told him, making an evident mistake when he tried to grab the cylinder away. Skywarp had always managed to get responses out of him that others would have never seen, and as he grappled for the module and lost it to the deft reflexes of his wingmate, he also knew that Warp knew him better than anyone else.

They had seen too much together, been in too many battles and faced the never-ending Cybertronian war together. They knew each other well. They had always been closer than with Starscream. At first, being put in the Trine with the two, and most especially the sparky Warp, he felt that Megatron had made an obvious mistake. But through the many passing mega-cycles that followed, he realized that the Decepticon lord knew and understood exactly what he was doing.

They complimented each other well. Warp's gregarious, buoyant nature, and his strict, rigid outlook. The two, after Warp got rid of some of more annoying sparkling qualities, had somehow grown close. Closer than Starscream, closer than trinemate's had too. Yes, being bonded trinemate's forced a sense of closeness on those individuals involved, but the intimacy of friendship the two now shared had nothing to do with that.

Still, as Skywarp pushed TC away and started to hit the cylinder against his worktable like some sort of mallet, he wondered, not for the first time, how that had managed to come about.

Skywarp was loud and filled with energy, crass and blunt. He didn't know the least about subtlety or the art of logic, the value of tactics. He thought. He acted. He felt. He responded. With those who knew him well, he was as open as he appeared. And while Skywarp knew the workings of mechanisms and had an untapped genius for tinkering and building, he never felt the need to bother with it, or even show others that his capricious nature hid an undeniable intellect.

Thundercracker left the workstation and sat on his berth. He watched Skywarp continue. Nobody would ever be able to crack the code he had put on the storage device. It was unlockable. The algorithm he used to create the code was hidden in a layer of circuitry on his middle digit and encoded to the point that he didn't even know the full sequence.

Placing the cylinder on the table, Skywarp sat down on the abandoned chair. No longer pounding it, Warp leaned down and stared at the device.

"You might as well give up, Warp."

His wingmate didn't hear him. And despite his words, TC knew Skywarp would never give up. He was one tenacious individual when he decided to be.

"Go ahead, go on with your duties, by the time you return, I swear to you that I will have cracked the code," Warp vowed.

He did have duties to perform. Skywarp had unsettled his schedule and his plans and watching his wingmate finally relent to defeat, as gratifying as it would have been, was a waste of his valuable time.

Returning to his quarters many hours later, he was to find it empty. Terra ran into his quarters, done with her training, she was eager for her recharge cycle. Bounding to a corner of the room, she dug and shifted under a bundle of blankets, disappearing under the cloth only to peak her small head back out.

Just a quick glance at her was enough for the canine to abandon her blankets and run to him, her tail wagging eagerly. He stretched down and petted her. She licked his digit and her tail motion increased by 33 percent.

He heard the familiar sound of his quarter's doors sliding open. Skywarp stood in the middle of them with a grin planted on his face. He moved his hand away from behind his back, the memory module alight and displaying TC's last work.

"I see why you didn't want me to see this one." Skywarp's grin grew large, his face positively distorted by the expression of satisfaction. "But it was worth it!"

In the middle of the cylinder rotating slowly around was the small but easily identifiable rendering of Alexis.

Slag.

"She isn't all that bad to look at," Skywarp spoke with too identifiable glee. "Doesn't have much going on as far as coloring scheme, but her follicles and optics do give her a little there. And..."

A week, three days, four hours and thirty-three minutes had passed since Skywarp had somehow cracked his unbreakable coding and unlocked his hidden renderings. Since then, Warp continually dug and probed, trying to get details out of TC.

He knew that TC had used him to help create the holo-generator for his human counterpart, knew in part why. But seeing his holographic rendering on the female, had reminded his wingmate how many questions he had. And they were unrelenting.

"She must have made quite the impression that you take the time to draw her. I thought she was a passing interest. I should have known different when Starscream made me take her to you. And I must admit, there is something about how the female looks at one that makes them... consider. Do you know that Starscream speaks about her sometimes? He doesn't mention her by name, but now I know it was her. He has resentment toward her. And you know what he does when he resents a femme."

The two were no longer on board his cruiser. Taking Skywarp away, especially when his loud vocals were picking up far too much interest among his crew, they ended up on the space port Prin. He thought it had enough amenities to keep even Skywarp preoccupied. He was wrong.

And now he was forced to recall what had happened on the last space sport: seeing Alexis, nearly killing the Autobot through his defensive programming and a strange pain in his tank from her being touched and saved by the Autobot and not by him. Her voice stopped him though, pulling him out of the illogical haze that had overtaken him. All he could do was fight the aggressive impulse that still wanted to end the Autobot despite Alexis' pleas. He wasn't made to be conflicted and doubting his own motives, nor doubting himself when he had left Alexis behind. Such emotional complexities were dangerous and neutralized his logic, forcing him to react instead of act.

Skywarp was hardly deterred by Thundercracker's impassive manner. Instead, he focused more heavily on his trinemate, ready to give it another try. "You could have taken her off the port, but you didn't, which means something. Something that I hope it doesn't mean. You know how Megatron feels about attachments that he himself did not orchestrate, you know what he does to those that dabble where they shouldn't dabble. And if I have to..."

"Skywarp."

His wingmate turned to him, his attention having easily strayed. They were sitting at a table with two mugs of high-grade between them, neither touched.

"Yeah?"

"Shut. Up."

Skywarp angled his head and then had the courage to chuckle now that he had gotten a response. "Uh, slag no. Look, you even use human phrasing. What was it like being among them? What was it like interfacing with a human?" Warp stretched across the table and watched him with overdone attentiveness until his wings dropped in disappointment.

"Oh, I see. It didn't go that far. Well, probably for the best. Although you having a fetish for human flesh would have taken a couple of points off your boredom meter... What sort of things do you have planned for her? And are you going to..."

Thundercracker cut him off, "She isn't here, is she, Skywarp?"

"What?"

"If I wanted her, she would be here with me."

"But..."

"I have forgotten all about her."

"It takes you that long to tell me that? Why not say that before? Why not..."

"Yes, I went to the trouble of becoming human. Yes, I used that form to manipulate and be near one. But now that she knows who and what I am... it is... it is done." He said his words slowly, filling them with careful disregard even as he withdrew the more relevant emotions. Thundercracker didn't want to talk about her, thinking about her was enough of a quandary. But he couldn't say that to Skywarp, he couldn't even hint. He had to wait it out and hope his wingmate lost interest, that, or TC was going to seal his mouthpiece shut. Something that had actually been done before, and the memory and recalling the image was enough for Thundercracker to have more tolerance where he was sure he had none.

Skywarp managed to lean across the table further, one of the high-grades tipped over and spilled out. He chuckled with unfortunate understanding.

"And that is why you draw her... because you have forgotten?" Warp asked smugly.

"I didn't draw her," he said defensively. Why his wingmate had to place such a title on his renderings was annoying.

"No, you didn't draw her. Only created and formed the female, shaped and put together a version of the girl. I know how much focus you put into those drawings... renderings of yours, I know what they mean to you. You don't make them to forget. You make them to remember."

"Starscream has some spies on the Autobot ship," Skywarp spoke up. Away from the space port, they had landed on an abandoned planet. They had created a firing range of sorts, and the two were seeing which one could do the most damage.

"That doesn't surprise me."

"Human spies," Skywarp elaborated between firing off a Lix grenade. The silver ball met its object and exploded with impressive impact.

"Human?"

"You know how impressive he can be when he puts his processor to it. He has garnered a following, a group that worships him, a group that will do anything for him."

"Until their usefulness wears out and he kills them."

"Yes, there is always that, but they never know that, not until it's too late."

"And the reason you tell me this?"

"Because he has one on board your human's ship. Did you hear about Ripshot? They found him on the planet Eltw, with his head missing and his spark chamber burned out."

So like Skywarp to intermingle two totally unrelated events. His processor was always reacting, his thoughts always tumbling together. Bypassing what TC really wanted to know, he forced himself to ask what he really didn't care about.

"And who killed him?"

"I don't know... Why should I know? I didn't do it. But if I did do it, I certainly wouldn't leave..."

Skywarp continued to talk and Thundercracker forced himself to listen, all the while thinking of what he hadn't dared inquire about.