XL-2M99 defrosts ever so slightly and tries out an archaic mourning ritual despite reservations. Arcee takes Jack and June home and does her best to let them sleep easy without the fear of Airachnid or M.E.C.H. looming
When they'd bridged right into the garage, Arcee stayed in a crouch to fit. June took both a deep breath in and one step away from the ground she'd left the bridge onto.
"Home sweet home, right?" she asked in the same voice she'd use to joke. Or an attempt at that voice that wavered in exhausted stress. Normally, Jack would respond to such 'joking' manner with embarrassed protest.
Normally.
"You'll have to get a new car," Arcee noted at the empty garage. "Or I'll have to get used to being lonely out here."
Ten minutes later and they'd all taken her attempt at lightheartedness completely seriously and misinterpreted it fully.
June was asleep on the pullout couch, wrapped up in two pairs of blankets despite the spring warmth. Jack was laying on three chair cushions right at the bottom of the couch, eyelids still open despite his exhaustion. While before it was worry keeping him awake, now it was shere tired relief that made sleep evade him.
And the uncanny feeling that the spider-bot would try to crawl back into the house to get his mom again.
Laying uncomfortably on the ground of the human living room, Arcee was also far from recharge. She wouldn't let her open optics land on her junior partner's though; no need to tempt him to speak or something. Not when June was trying to sleep.
They'd asked her to wheel in through the side door in alt mode and, after securing all blinds and curtains, she'd carefully transformed into a crouch. The carpets would just have to be washed and vacuumed another day. For now, her active blasters let both humans feel safe enough to rest as much as they could all things considered.
If Airachnid tried to come back (not that any of them knew how she'd gotten into Jasper in the first place yet- the team had many questions but no desire to pressure June when it was so clear the nurse needed rest), she'd find the Darby family and co ready to beat her spindly aft.
The medbay was quiet now. No injured vehicons from the airborne attack on the two autobot invaders. The only one injured was also dead, having been hit by a lucky shot thrown by the immobilizer and killed upon impacting the ground in stasis. XL-2M99 did not see the dead in the medbay. There was no use for them here.
The vehicon, who he learned from a friend was named XL-4U1L, was not even retrieved from the planet's surface. Why should he have been?
It was just the way of things. They all were disposable, both to the decepticons and the autobots (who would slide their blade home as soon as they got what they wanted, wouldn't they? Hadn't he?)
He shouldn't be noticing it at all. But he did. He picked it up now. A gesture, a brush off. The exact mistreatment offered to this army had only become noticeable when he'd been offered an alternative.
It should've been ironic. Sappy officers were supposed to be a hallmark of the autobots. That's what the cons always made fun of them for.
But XL-2M99's exposure to autobot officers was limited to just their-
Their...med-
That one. And he'd been anything but sappy. He'd bantered darkly at the start, right before dropping that welder-
No. He couldn't think about that. All that mattered was that it proved his point. The rec room jokes about those weak little autobots seemed at odds with reality for him. Instead of one of them picking him up from tripping to shower all sorts of care and stupid sappy gestures, it was a decepticon officer. A forged mech working directly under Lord Megatron himself.
"It is the innermost energon of my twin," Dreadwing had shown him one of the luminescent vials. XL-2M99 had never seen anything like it. So different from the fluids he saw here in the medbay.
"Do you have any from him?" the seeker had asked and the vehicon had looked away from the vial to the ground where both were kneeling. It was proper, apparently. XL-2M99 wouldn't know. He'd never had ceremony to stand on when it came to those dead companions strewn over his history.
"No."
The officer seemed to deflate at that. What could he have expected though? Vehicons didn't go around having 'brothers' and sharing innermost energon or any of that slag. That was restricted to a different world. The world of real mechs. The world of the sentient.
Vehicons had always considered themselves as self aware and intelligent. But XL-2M99 had never realized how much he separated himself from those mech's he considered genuine until those barriers had dropped away.
One single glyph. One odd officer.
All from one burn.
And he never would repeat it. He would still return to that oblivious state if it meant undoing the memory of the burn.
"I..." the medic had started up again, unsure. "...guess we all have the same energon though. We're all just the same protoform made alive by fractions of a once living spark Shockwave manipulated. I could-"
He'd never even seen anything like it.
It was a darker blue than common energon.
"-use mine. Couldn't I?"
They had. Dreadwing instructed him on how to collect a vial of his own. The seeker waited where he was kneeling, staring only at the far wall, while the vehicon had retreated towards the door to bare his spark chamber in privacy.
It was a smaller spark chamber than forged mechs had. XL-2M99 had noticed that from the scans of patients he'd looked over.
But they had smaller sparks. Why not save space? Shockwave was nothing if not practical.
He'd returned with the vial and even less energy than he'd had before. It was not a high bar. Since reawakening his leader and commander Starscream, XL-2M99 had already felt tired. Getting the subtle order to retrieve commander Dreadwing and drag the seeker into the medbay had only served to irritate him and exponentiate his exhaustion.
Yet he stayed. He weakened his own reserves and left an empty ache in his spark chamber just to retrieve something he'd never wanted to know existed.
For a ceremony.
What was the point of a ceremony? It would not bring back the dead.
The lights in Dreadwing's quarters were off. The room was large. Larger than his new one. And his new one was larger still than any berth a vehicon was offered in the group commune or mines.
Why would a vehicon complain of small living space? It wasn't like they would live that much longer anyways.
They all died sometime.
So perhaps learning a ceremony to honor those dead, the multitude of expendables left behind by war and remembered only by their faceless brethren, was...
Perhaps it had a point. What that point was, XL-2M99 wasn't sure. But perhaps it had one regardless.
It seemed to calm Dreadwing down at least.
They'd set the vial on the ground and its slight glow, along with those of Dreadwing's deceased twin, was the only light in the room besides their own optics. Red and blue, revealing their kneeling shapes and the unforgiving floor they sat on; red and blue like the autobot Prime. Like the mech who'd once grabbed his short blade and given XL-2M99 the break needed to run.
To run and run until he'd collapsed in the dry canyon, body distracted by pain and mind distracted in praising his good fortune.
For he had lived and that, to a vehicon, was the most unlikely and blessed of gifts.
So that corner of the room was lit by vibrant colors of life while the purple of the warship was far too dim to see. The seeker moved to grab a tool off his narrow bench of energon vials and let its tip slide off to reveal the heat beyond.
The heat to burn. XL-2M99 flinched back away but Dreadwing did not seem to notice the movement. He let his tool slip into the vial and left the thin wand remaining protruded from there.
The energon, his energon, had burned. Innermost or not, all their life fluid was flammable.
His vents had been cycling hard by then. That finally caught Dreadwing's attention and the mech had looked at him in concern. But the reactions were misred; the officer thought his overheating frame was a sign of grief.
Perhaps it was, in part.
"We let it burn like their departed sparks did," the seeker had tried to explain. "Like we must believe they continue to burn, in the allspark. This is XL-8K9C. XL-1SN1. XL-S33Y. Every one those humans took."
-like we must believe they continue to burn. That, out of everything, cut into XL-2M99 the hardest. The protocol was built in longing, in desperate hope. Somehow, its less than certain basis (so very different from everything Shockwave did) seemed fitting for the old seeker.
It was not a guarantee. It was a long held assumption that all sparks returned to the allspark, hence the name, but vehicons did not have sparks that came from the well. Assumptions, even those about the allspark taken for granted, were not facts. Facts were comforting.
like we must believe- Dreadwing had said. Not 'like they continue to burn'. Not 'as we know they burn on'.
"I did not get the chance to know them," the officer went on, staring into the flaming vial. "So this is your ceremony to lead. To remember the lost and honor them. Out loud, in silence; the ancients did both. I leave it up to you."
XL-2M99 had not said anything out loud. But he did remember.
His chronometer warned how much time had passed before he had broken from the depressing spiral of memories- of those happy people he would never see again.
Dreadwing stood up and tried to help him to his pedes. The medic had not allowed the touch. He did not want to be touched by any of those mechs with faces so expressive, so very different from a drone's. Faces that could twist into anger or grit dentae as they held his flailing form down to the unrelenting dirt to melt his face away.
But he did not want to shy away either. And that surprised him more than his acceptance to attempt this odd, archaic twist at comfort.
He'd almost thanked Dreadwing before leaving. The words still did not come, but he considered them so hard that he froze in his departure.
XL-2M99 finished folding the cortical psychic patch cables into their compartment and sat down to rest.
All these silly thoughts going round in his head. XL-3T09 should never have spread the rumors of independence in his head. They had him seeing things in different lights.
No, there was no such thing as the sappy autobot stereotype the decepticon officers laughed about. And there was no way for the others, those without the medic glyph on their shoulder, to be anything but disposable.
Even if one of their forged officers saw them that way. Dreadwing was just one, just as Breakdown had been one. Megatron would never care. Soundwave was an enigma. And now Starscream had returned; and that mech had used the energon harvester on a vehicon ally not that long ago. XL-Y475. He'd been a shy mech. Wanted to see the well of allsparks alive again. Said it was on his bucket list. Damn fool, making a bucket list like that. Hadn't he realized who he was? What he was? He had to have once Starscream had turned that weapon on him. The delusions and hopes sucked away along with all the energon.
Oh yes. None of them had missed their former commander.
Here XL-2M99 was really starting to grow used to a different dynamic on the Nemesis. A new environment that noticed them, that offered grieving rites and pretty words and fool comforts.
Breakdown had once cared and then had left them all. Dreadwing filled his spot but held a position that all those on the Nemesis knew Starscream would want. If the smaller seeker couldn't be the leader of the decepticons, he could at least be expected to only be second to that leader.
XL-2M99 stood up again and turned off the still alit screen used during the cortical psychic patch.
He'd been at the screen all along.
He'd seen Skyquake through its lens and it was the only time he'd ever seen his new commander's 'brother'.
And he did not think Dreadwing should know exactly what he'd seen on that screen.
If watching vehicons he did not know have humans reanimate and use their corpses had given him a melt down this cycle, what more would he do at the news Starscream had reanimated his dead twin?
Nothing good, XL-2M99 figured, and so the medic stayed silent on the matter.
He planned to preserve this newfound peace.
By any means he had available to him.
Commander Kurtzman was currently pleased enough with M.E.C.H.'s progress of late.
Yes, they had lost the 'transformation' plant.
But they still had those chimeras that had not been at the plant when the titans had struck.
Some were underground, protecting M.E.C.H. labs and bunkers.
Some were underground for a different reason and at a very different type of location.
And some were above; floating among the clouds along with every other faceless ghost in the army that called themselves decepticons.
While some models- the modified models, the original biochimeras, the occasional failed and salvaged neurochimera- could not pass as a living 'vehicon', others could. The neurochimera could pass through any cybertronian scan and be called alive as can be. After all, those still had their sparks beating and energon flowing; it was only the processor that had been lobotomized and controlled by human interface.
The Nemesis had yet to uncover any of these agents.
Kurtzman was sure that their good luck was sure to fail one day. For now, though?
They could cut their losses in Masaya, Sinaloa, and Pima. From the shadows, they could continue to gather intel on the technology of the warship; technology that would benefit humankind, and no doubt sell to them. Perhaps the aliens themselves would come to buy improved weaponry off their markets.
Let these titans fight each other. Let them tear each other apart.
Each scrap they left behind, M.E.C.H. would retrieve. Every limb torn away would go to better use.
So let them think M.E.C.H.'s main operations had been in Pima, Arizona.
It was better that the aliens return to ignoring the humans and fight each other instead.
Losses were just another path to victory.
And Kurtzman still believed that M.E.C.H. would be the victors in the end.
AN- Thus ends the Airachid/MECH arc. One of those enemies will rear up again later, but this arc officially closes and the omega key arc begins.
