In a messed up and totally unfair twist of fate, Will is back early, meaning he drags Rex out of bed before sunup every morning now, demands he put on his uniform, and then makes him run laps around the base.
It's in the upper 30's, windy and foggy, and there are holes in both of Rex's sweaters, which is why he's layered them. He's even put the NEST issued one on top, so he doesn't know why Will is complaining. His shorts are entirely too tight across his thighs, and the face Will makes when he notices is entirely too offensive.
"How am I looking?" Rex asks over the comms.
"Like you pay more for protein shakes than most people pay for monthly rent," Epps says.
He looks slightly flushed from starting his run nearly a quarter of an hour early, but he doesn't have the decency to look even vaguely winded from all this running. He's shirtless and glistening – actually glistening – while he follows Rex, a little behind and to the side.
And, really, Rex doesn't think that's entirely fair. He's got a set of thighs on him, yeah, but so does everyone around here, and they're all matched by a pair of shoulders. And then there are Epps' abs to consider, which don't leave anything to the imagination. The point is: he's not the only one putting on muscle lately.
"It's not my fault you skip leg day at every possible opportunity," Rex says.
And everyone else must have woken up on the same side of the bed as him, because there's a guy who keeps hip-checking him that Rex never bothered to remember the name of. Aside from the baseball hat he's wearing backwards like somebody's lost frat boy at a football game, he's got hair the indistinguishable shade of light brown you see on everyone's head, tall, but probably not over six feet, wearing the typical jacket/pants/worn-out combat boots combo that everyone around here considers a uniform.
"Will?"
"Are you asking for a comment on your gymnastic form, or my opinion if you're spending too much money on protein shakes?" Will asks.
"Fuck off," Rex says, willing to run as long as he can complain about shit the entire time. "I'm not the one with my goddamn shirt off. Do we have an HR? I wanna file a complaint."
"Just 'cause you have the hairless body of a preeteen girl -"
"Kinda sounds like you spend a long time staring at my body, Epps."
"You're not really that sexy."
"C'mon. It's me , Epps."
"Guys," Will's voice cuts in, effectively bringing their conversation to a swift halt. "Might I remind you that not only are you on an open frequency, but that NEST will be appraised of all your training transmissions at the end of the week? So maybe you want to keep your idiocy to a minimum - I'm mostly talking to you, Rex."
"Yes, sir," he says, before this can become a group exercise where they all offer up their opinions on Rex's physical attractiveness. He has no idea how their newest team members feel about the subject, but he knows damn well that he doesn't want anyone else to disclose their own views in front of an audience.
Epps's laugh in his ears is indistinguishable from Declan's asthmatic wheezing on the comms. The guy's got some kind of deep, instinctive respect for authority and has yet to actually say something. It's supposed to be a team building exercise, everyone pitching in with sarcastic barbs, friendly teasing, and the occasional team effort of making Will's life downright miserable over the comms. It hasn't taken quite yet, but Rex has hope for the future. Even the Autobots, who don't understand slang or social customs - although they've been doing their best to catch up - are able to hear their bickering.
Well, bickering feels like a bit of an overstatement. Rex has enough self-respect to acknowledge that much.
' In the interest of establishing a solid foundation for this team ,' Will said earlier, when he dragged Rex outside and made him wear the earpiece, ' I need you to put on your charming face, help smooth things over a bit. Declan's having more trouble with the transition than any of us. '
Rex wonders quite a bit about that, across that stretch of days when the rest of the team slowly moves into the base and the Autobots become a permanent fixture in their daily lives.
He's noticed how Ratchet's entry into the world of human socialization follows a predictable advance, retreat, advance again pattern. Or how he looks down at every human he meets and then frowns like they're a variable that just turned up a sudden series of question marks. He's noticed that Bumblebee, who apparently is as faithful as a pound-rescued puppy, could also kick your ass in pretty much any martial art known to man. And everyone's kind of terrified of Ironhide, who's built like a tank, and is basically a cross between a literal tank and Duke Nukem, and Rex has no idea how Will manages to not feel the same way about him. Apparently he's already lost his daughter to the 'Ironhide Fan Club'.
"You're gonna let him babysit her?" Rex had asked that morning in the mess hall, while making covetous eyes at a burbling coffee pot.
"I don't want to have to trade off on babysitting duty. But if things are ever particularly cataclysmic, I'd rather have someone who understands the importance of the job."
"Yeah, Ironhide's just a regular Mary Poppins." Rex rolled his eyes. "You want to raise a kid or train a soldier? You hand her off to Ironhide, and she'll be active duty by the time she can walk."
There was an unsteady sort of laughter and Rex started to grin while he sipped his coffee.
He's noticed that Prime is just a goddamn puzzle. A conundrum that's growing downright paradoxical in nature. Rex can't shake the idea that there's something he'll miss if he blinks too long. He pays arguably too much attention to it. From a distance, and always when he thinks no one is looking. Prime has a quiet, calm authority to him, where he gets calm and stoic while he's showing that he cares. Rex is familiar with his type: hell, he grew up around it.
So for Rex, it's not really about 'getting used to' than it is about figuring out how to not piss anyone off before he can officially make the team.
After their run, they are lined up along the mats and partnered together at random. Graham and Declan, and Rex -because he's never had any luck in his life - is partnered with Baseball Hat, and he knows from prior experience that his sparring partners have every intention of actually hitting him.
They stand there for a too-long moment, before Rex's eyes flicker over Baseball Hat's shoulder.
"Looking for your opportunity to back out?" Baseball Hat asks, with a frankly offensive roll of his eyes.
"Jesus," Rex says. The laugh is startled right out of him. "You come by that arrogance honestly, or did someone teach it to you?"
"You know what they say, it's not really arrogance if you're actually that good," Baseball Hat replies with a shrug.
Rex smiles, trying to think of how exactly he's going to tell the guy to fuck off in a NEST-appropriate, family-friendly manner, but then he opens his mouth and just says, "Yeah. Okay, Asshole."
Will and Epps are lounging against the wall, seemingly unaware of the fact that this casual spar might legitimately break into a non-HR approved fight. Baseball Cap starts casually enough, throwing out punches Rex could've probably dodged pre-middle school. And then, signaled either by the lazy way Rex circles around him or the frankly disrespectful right hook he puts right into the guy's stomach, they suddenly go from 'normal team exercise' to 'deathmatch' in under three seconds.
The fight is brutal, and fast, and possibly hard to watch. Rex's never fought with anybody like that. His spars with Epps and Will are rough but mostly playful. He's never gotten seriously hurt, never eaten that many punches, or gotten slammed to the ground hard enough to rattle his teeth in his mouth.
"What are they doing?" Ironhide asks, frowning at them.
"They're trying to kill each other," Epps says. "Think that's obvious."
Will just looks like he can't at that exact moment think of a professional way to say, This is Johnny Diaz and Rex Prola beating the absolute shit out of each other in some kind of interpretation of a team bonding exercise .
Ironhide's eyes are wide as they dart between the two of them. Usually, when the team huddles over anything like this, they're deciphering bad news, assessing threat levels, and organizing a response.
After a particularly painful-looking maneuver that starts when Diaz winds an arm around Rex's neck and ends with him getting head-thrown onto the ground, Ironhide and the rest of the Autobots start to analyze the human's fight patterns. They watch in silence while the data starts filtering in.
Baseball Hat's a good fighter, but he fights like someone who learned it behind a school with someone to hold the arms of the kid he was beating up behind his back. He goes for weak points, mainly. It seems to have served him pretty well so far.
Rex never had any formal fighting lessons until he joined the army, but he grew up being the kid guys like Baseball Hat beat up after school, and the result of that is a fighting style Will had once told him would probably help their medic earn himself a pay raise.
"They're learning from each other," Ironhide says with a reluctantly impressed eyebrow. He's never seen anyone who takes so many punches to the face without taking a single one personally. "So this is a bonding exercise?"
"Absolutely," Will agrees. "Definitely."
"Humans are fast learners," Ironhide says.
"Adaptive," Ratchet counters. "They have only learned if it sticks."
When the fight finally winds down, ten full minutes later, Rex just looks about as winded as he had this morning at breakfast, except he's considerably more bloody now.
"You have a very good hook," Baseball Hat says. "Not much killer instinct though."
The blood smudged on Rex's chin makes the white of his teeth look even brighter when he says, "That's why you look worse than I do."
He waits, like this really is just a friendly training exercise between friends, until Baseball Hat's own hands are up again before he throws a mean uppercut directly to his throat.
"I'm calling it," Will says. "You two are done. Prola! Diaz!"
There's some yelling after that, and the fight ends seconds later when Epps hooks an arm around Rex's throat and Will gets a decent grip on the back of Diaz's shirt. Diaz throws one last parting shot, and Rex headbutts him, just because he can.
"Aw, Goddamn it," Will says, wrinkling up his face. "What did I say about blood on the floor of the new base?"
Rex scoffs at him, rolling his eyes so hard it's a wonder they don't get stuck staring straight through the back of his skull. "We're not doing low-impact yoga. You asked us to fight," he says, getting louder as he climbs to his feet, although he's not in a hurry.
"You're not bad," Baseball Hat - Diaz, apparently - says. There's a cut splitting his lip and blood steadily trickles from his nose.
"You're not so bad yourself," Rex says.
Will hooks a hand around Diaz's elbow and hauls him towards the doors, probably to get cleaned up, and there's a second, just a moment, where Diaz doesn't move a single centimeter, opening his mouth like he's got more opinions to share. And then he moves forward, and that's when Rex realizes, whoever this guy is, he's more dangerous than he looks.
"Hey, Danger," Ironhide says, as Rex sprawls out on the pile of mats again. "How about you leave your teammates alone and come practice punches with me."
Rex laughs. He doesn't know how to read that, except as either a threat or a joke. The way Ironhide is looking at him, he thinks Rex scares easy.
He doesn't say anything, just shoves himself up on his elbows long enough to flash Ironhide a grin, eyebrows set at a combative angle.
And why not? They're a team now, right? Will won't give him the NEST Initiative files yet, but Rex suspects he's actually made the roster, even though it hasn't been confirmed to him. Not officially. He could probably check it out, if he really wanted to know, but the problem is that everything here requires reading skills of some kind, and he cannot be bothered to deal with the check-in process every time he wants to use the gym or go anywhere.
"If I might interject, he's in no condition to fight you, Ironhide."
"Yes he is," Rex says.
"He says he is."
"Rex," Will says, hand covering his face. "No."
"Optimus," Ratchet says, sounding somewhere between exasperated and annoyed, "say something before this can get truly out of hand."
Rex sighs, scrubbing at his hair one-handed and then yawning into his elbow, like he's not particularly worried about the point Ratchet is making. He bounces on the balls of his feet and raises his eyebrows at Prime, and he thinks that'll be the end of it, but he knows well enough by now that the little frown on Prime's face is not good news.
"Alexander is still injured from our last battle," Prime says, tone kind of sharp but not angry like he means it, "he should take more time to recover."
Rex doesn't even try not to take that personally.
"Such a mother hen," he says, under his breath.
Prime raises an eyebrow at him. Will, for his part, raises his hands in a vague, hapless gesture that somehow manages to convey, you see what I'm dealing with here ?
"Your name is Alexander?" Ironhide asks, frowning over at Rex.
Rex blinks at him. "No."
"Rex," Will says, and Rex makes that dismissive face he probably should've grown out of already, "Shower. Now."
"I'll find a mop," Epps offers.
Rex holds his hand up in a mock salute as Will frogmarches him in the direction of the showers.
/
/
/
/
He startles awake at some ungodly hour in the morning to the sound of a loud, rattling knock on his door.
"Rex! Hey!" someone is yelling, and Rex makes an annoyed sound in response. "Get up, kid. Wheels up in ten, c'mon!"
"Fuck," Rex says with his face pressed directly into his pillow. "Never shoulda signed up for this."
There's more knocking. It doesn't stop. Rex rolls himself out of bed, to his feet, and half-stumbles to the door, walking into at least two separate pieces of furniture on his way.
He yanks the door open. "We under attack?" he asks.
"Not yet" Will says, which has a certain foreboding ring to it that Rex doesn't like at all. "We're going to Siberia. Get ready."
Rex groans, tries to express through the sound alone exactly how unenthused he is about this.
"Ten minutes," Will says, like the noise Rex just made somehow could be interpreted as anything other than absolute misery.
"Okay," Rex says, "Jesus, just stop talking at me."
He runs his hand through his hair, scrubs at his face. He wavers on his feet for a moment, looking at the gear piled at the foot of his bed. He isn't sure what his employment status is, but if he indicated in any way to be unperturbed by brushes with near death, Will will have cleared every obstacle to get him in the field.
A few minutes later, with all his weapons tucked safely back into their holsters and sheaths, Rex steps onto the plane with four minutes to spare. Will is already there, engaged in a quiet back-and-forth with Epps.
Diaz shoulders his way past Rex a full minute later and takes a seat next to Graham and Declan. The sharp fluorescent light casts over his badly split lip, making him look even more dangerous than he probably is. His eyes are narrowed and wary, looking at Rex. his mouth screws up into a small, irritated grimace.
"Isn't it a school night?" he says conversationally, voice slightly raised so Rex can make out the words over the sounds of the plane. "You're what, sixteen?"
"Jesus, you're an asshole," Rex says, just to offer up his own personal character assessment. "But I've been told honesty is critical to trust, so in the interest of establishing a solid foundation for our teamwork, I'd like to clarify that I'm twenty three."
He is tucked neatly between the Topkick and Peterbilt that are tolerating the shakiness of the flight with surprising dignity, and there's a knife in his hand, and he's flipping it, over and over.
Ironhide's voice speaks up over the sound of the plane, "That's a lot of guns, Danger."
Rex shrugs. "I can't carry more."
It's just three Sig's now. Two knives, three if you count the tactical knife he's flipping that he stole from Will at some point and that he and Epps pass back and forth like a good luck charm.
"Do you know what you're doing?" Ironhide asks.
He doesn't sound skeptical, more like curious. His eyes are on the knife in Rex's hand.
And Rex knows all the Autobot's have watched the footage from Will's team on other missions. They've read all of the reports, all of their personal files. So Ironhide knows that Rex is incredibly dangerous even without any weapons at all.
Maybe it's because Rex looks tired and comfortable and not especially threatening right now.
Rex shrugs again. "I'm fucking excellent at my job."
He doesn't know what the Decepticons will throw at them for round number two, but he's already not looking forward to a rematch just a few kilometers north of the Siberian border.
"I have noticed," Prime says next to him, surprising Rex enough to slip up, "that the reports of you claim your shots are 98 percent non-lethal. You were chosen for this team, however."
Rex recovers quickly: there's a practiced, easy motion to his throws again when he says, "Wow, Prime, I took you more for a pragmatist."
"The cost of war is only ever going to be death, and grief," Prime says. "It is a high cost, and hard to pay. Many might lose their stomach for war when they understand the true cost of it. It's something our race and yours both share."
He knows Prime believes that this is a good world with good people. He's been on this planet for god knows how long, and instead of reducing them to their worst aspects, he sees good and evil in equal measure, seems to understand humans as functional wholes rather than a specific character trait.
Rex kind of hopes he never starts to question whether there are any good ones in the world at all.
He knows what that's like.
His eyes darken, shuttering closed. "Some people just can't help what they are," he says, low and careful. "And asking them to be something they can't is only going to make them worse."
He remembers how it felt when he was willing to sell how well he could shoot because it was the only part of him that anyone wanted anyway. Like he would've set himself on fire if someone had just handed him a match. He would've said yes to pretty much anything then, when he was angry and thinking that there's no place in the world for him.
He was a kid, still. Seventeen. And he's learned a lot from Will. From the army.
Prime is quiet for a moment. "I would not ask for something you would not willingly give."
Willingly, Rex thinks. Jesus, there's a laugh.
He bites briefly into the inside of his cheek. It's jarring, what Prime is saying, and how he's saying it. Rex's face goes empty for a second, all of his focus completely directed elsewhere.
"I never miss a target. I hit every single one, every time," he says, to his ankles. "If my aim's off by an occasional quarter-inch or a full half inch, that's not enough space to matter in the general theme of things."
"But it could mean the difference between life and death," Prime says. He almost sounds like he understands. Maybe he does. A human heart is only three and a half inches wide.
Rex finally looks up, searching, but of course he can't read Prime's face, because there's not a damn thing to read.
"It's not a theme," he says. "And if someone takes shots at me or my teammates, I make sure they never do it again."
"Alexander," Prime says, and Rex makes a soft, frustrated noise in the back of his throat. It's the way he usually sounds when he's been trapped into revealing some kind of vulnerability. His hand tightens around the knife, and his eyes dart to the cargo hold like he's about to go jump out just to escape this conversation.
There's not a lot of ways to stop a bullet once it's fired. And if he's going to put a bullet in someone's head, he'd like to know he did what he could to avoid it.
"When you are fighting them," Prime says, "you cannot allow for such thoughts to direct your aim. You must always aim for their weak spots."
Rex laughs.
"You givin' me advice on killing Cons?" he asks, smiling wide and crooked at the thought of Prime apparently deciding to increase the number of lives he's responsible for by one more. Or maybe six.
Rex tips his head, catches his bottom lip between his teeth like he's trying to smother his next expression.
"Your team, your mission, your care, huh?" he says, like he's not looking for some kind of validation. He sidesteps the rest of the conversation by spinning the knife in his hand, twirling it idly around his ring and index fingers.
"Thanks, Big Guy, but you don't have to look out for me," he says, patting the nose of the truck affectionately. It's warm, noticeably so. It feels like he's just put his hand on something alive. There's a strange sensation traveling from his hand up his arm, a kind of low-level vibration that is almost a hum.
He doesn't know how to interpret Prime's silence. If it's related to disappointment, but it's still a touch too soft to make Rex's skin crawl with shame.
"Alright everyone, gear up!" Will says as he starts winding his way over. "We've got Energon Signatures huddled up in an abandoned factory ten miles outside the city. We're in the clear out here in the open, but just in case, try not to set off any fireworks. We don't want this to get scooped up by half the major news outlets here."
Rex stretches his arms over his head, strains some of those knots that've been making themselves at home in his back. Across from him Declan mouths the words 'fireworks' and looks faintly nauseated.
"We've got the element of surprise," Will says, "No one's been able to track them so far."
"Apparently we are," Declan says, with the kind of resigned, gritted-teeth exasperation that he always brings to their missions. Beside him, Diaz is fighting his way into a parachute harness.
"Don't worry," Diaz says, with a smile that would probably be reassuring if it didn't flash so many teeth. "Your survival rate is probably higher than Prola's."
Rex gives him a confused look that goes increasingly offended the longer he stares at him. He's not sure if he's more worried about Diaz or the Decepticons, but the shifting, skittering feeling in his chest suggests an upcoming disaster.
" Hey ," Will says, slipping right into his 'authoritative' voice, which does nothing to disrupt the fighting.
"Just saying, this guy needs special handling on every mission he's on."
"Really," Rex says, feigning amazement. "Declan's the one who looks like he should be drinking chamomile tea with his favorite blanket in a low-stress environment."
"I'm just having trouble adjusting to… this ," Declan says, and Rex thinks that's fair. The guy looks miserable, white-faced and tousled, with his hands gripping the straps of his parachute like a lifeline. He looks like a civilian who didn't want to be here and showed up anyway.
It's a Dream Team.
Rex doesn't say that, prioritizes safety and starts strapping himself into his parachute instead.
"The pickup site's a mile away from the drop point," Will says as he reaches over, presses a few buttons on the wall, and the hatch at the plane immediately starts opening. "Rex -"
"I'll be good. Scouts honor."
"Doesn't work if I know you're lying," Will says.
"I'm not," Rex says, innocently.
"I hate jumping out of a perfectly good plane," Declan says, just loud enough to be heard over the howling wind.
Rex laughs. He steps up next to him. The sun isn't set to rise for another four hours. It's pitch black, like they're all about to jump into a black hole instead of a Siberian forest in the middle of winter.
"I'm glad you're taking this so well."
He shrugs. "I'm sure Ironhide will give you a ride if you ask nicely," he says as he steps toward the ramp.
And then, without a single second of hesitation, he throws himself off the plane.