A small black and white mech greeted them on the other side of an airlock-style security door. It took Mirage a moment to recognise Rewind. He'd seen him on the news alongside Soundwave but hadn't expected the cassette to be living with the Decepticon Host. This room and the ones visible through open doors down a hallway were clearly domestic.
A large squashy sofa dominated the floor space, strewn with loose cushions and blankets and gaming paraphernalia. And several small bots of various frame-types who had been arguing over audio-visual entertainment devices. They were still now, staring assessingly at the new arrivals. Mirage counted heads as the limb-to-person ratio was hopelessly convoluted.
"How many symbionts are yours?" The spy asked Soundwave, wondering where all of them had come from. Ravage was there stretched over an entire cushion in the expandable manner of felines. Laserbeak and Buzzsaw perched on the back of the couch where headrests had been bent back to form ledges. Their talons dug into the upholstery; sharp points of tension at his presence. And then there was Ratbat, a couple of mecha, miscellaneous beast-formers, and more avians.
"All." Soundwave announced, giving the menagerie a nod before shepherding Mirage down the hall. As soon as they were out of sight, the noise resumed. Something about a cheap hack throwing him off the stage?
The third door on the right opened to a berthroom in soft grey and white, with a padded recliner, sparkling berth, and a large berth with a thick pad upon which Thundercracker lay. His engine rumbled deeply with the slow cadence of recharge, hook-ups on cords plugged neatly into his shoulders. He was out. Whether he had been assisted out by coding or medical intervention, Mirage could only guess.
"Does he know we're staying with you?" The noble wanted to know where they stood. Would his conjunx be angry when he powered on? Mirage liked a quiet life and needed to be prepared if Decepticons were going to be brawling. Soundwave ran cold but he was still a war-build. Was he safe?
"Thundercracker was told." The Host didn't shrug. Mirage arched a brow ridge at him. It had no effect.
"Do Starscream and Skywarp know?"
During the course of the war, he had been present for two interrogations of the 'Con Third-in-Command. He had watched Jazz attempt to force download anything they could get. Soundwave had crashed his own drives rather than give a byte. Any mech would do that once. The trigger was easy when you didn't know how much it would scour you. It wasn't even pain. Mirage had done it once and wished it had been pain. He had lost part of his self. Waiting out torture with gritted denta was preferable to feeling that deletion again.
Soundwave's flat, level stare and his silence gave nothing away. Mirage understood that he would get exactly what the Host wanted to give him and no more. No wheedling, no banter, no lapses in judgement he himself had to refuse for the sake of their collective safety. Soundwave would be aware of Thundercracker's database access.
"Am I staying here with him?" Mirage diverted to a question to which he might get an answer.
"Negative. Quarters opposite." Soundwave pointed out the door to another. The racer took the gesture as a cue and went to see his room. The door opened at his proximity.
Mirage's favourite colour was ash green; a restful genteel colour that complimented his own paint without competing. His quarters on the Ark had been that hue, fortunately a soothing counterpoint to the ubiquitous orange.
Now here the walls were the same grey as Thundercracker's. But the berth cover and the throw blanket on the padded chair and the curtains over the false window were all a pale neutralised green. The soft furnishings were thankfully not those he'd left behind on Earth. These were new. Just a very, very similar colour to his own.
The spy sought frantically for something commonplace to say.
He was standing next to a telepath.
"How much of the delay at the clinic was you shopping for haberdashery?" Mirage asked, because if he ran he wouldn't make it to the airlock.
"None." Soundwave answered. He shifted half a pace away, giving a clear route in either direction.
"Am I to think the choice of colour was a happy coincidence?" The noble inquired, buying himself time with chatter to think of something rational to do rather than walk into the room. The aesthetically curated personally for him room.
"Negative." The 3IC took another step back, opening the door to Thundercracker's room. "Accommodations identical, excepting sparkling berth."
Mirage had to accede this was so. He did not have to concede this arrangement was not creepy. He crossed his arms, more for the stance than to protect Tempest. The sparkling was in recharge. With the 'Con's visor, he couldn't tell where the Host was looking. Maybe this was more about the bitlet than mind-frag power games.
"What am I supposed to think about this, Soundwave?" Mirage used his designation purposefully. What in Primus's holy light was happening here? Was a Decepticon trying to put him at his ease? Was this just an odd thing he was overreacting about after a long stressful day? Did he need to shut himself in a cupboard and vent slowly until his fuel pressure regulated?
Soundwave didn't answer. However, Rewind appeared in the hallway sharpish, which was an answer in itself. The Host went back to the games room, leaving the two Autobots to talk 'privately'. Mirage invited the cassette into his room and shut the door for the look of the thing. The comms mech could absolutely surveil them regardless.
"I told him you liked green. Ravage had images of your quarters. When Thundercracker and Soundwave were discussing who to ask to help with Tempest, your name came up pretty early." Rewind ejected the information at speed as was his wont.
"Where's Blaster?" Mirage leaned against the door, steadying his field by increments. He didn't want to wake the sparkling.
"I don't know. On Earth still, I think." The cassette paced around the room, fluffing pillows and straightening datapads. There was a shelf of them, the spy belatedly noticed, a mix of new and scavenged. The Decepticons must have been hoarding 'civilian' comforts in caches as he'd never seen much of them on the Nemesis.
"He didn't come with you?" That had been a lingering question since he had seen Rewind on the news with a blue Host not red. Mirage had worried all sorts of wild, implausible, panicky possibilities while stuck in his cell. Had there been reprisals? Private vengeances? There was no love between Soundwave and Blaster. Whatever had been between them was intensely personal.
"We took a vote." Rewind sat on the berth, folding himself cross-legged like some humans did. "I wanted to come back to Cybertron to document the beginning of the reconstruction. To see if it was real." Unspoken was the assertion that history was his function far more than intelligence gathering. "Blaster voted to stay because he thought it was a trick, that the 'Cons would be back to pillage Earth."
"We're Cybertronians." Mirage said, unintentionally. The glyphs slipped out to refute an Autobot's prioritisation of a alien planet over their own, again.
"I said that too." There was a pause. The spy could fill in the blank of what the symbiont didn't say; many of their comrades didn't like to be reminded they had fled their world. "I don't think that tack helped. Steelie and Ram didn't want to reformat. There's some history there. Their current forms were the first ones they got to pick for themselves."
"Eject loves Earth." Mirage added. He'd found the blue cassette's sports obsession to be tiresome at best and distasteful at worst.
"The stasis made our memories feel like stored data. Archival, not ours." Cassettes were Disposable class. What they learned was never supposed to be theirs. They were utensils. "When Blaster realised how long it had been, he said 'frag it' and let us wipe our protocols. We could record what we liked, keep what we wanted, not what was considered useful at our construction."
Mirage did not comment. What could he say? He'd been created able to express an opinion. He had been encouraged to do so. No one had code stripped that urge as though it was a glitch. Before his final upgrades, his creators held veto over any permanent modifications and there was the cost of course but otherwise he could have done as he liked on a whim. He rebelled against his House's livery by being morbidly pink for a vorn. His carrier's carrier had complained and refused to invite him to parties.
"So it was just me." Rewind shrugged. "I spoke with Optimus. He was an archivist. He understood. I contacted Soundwave and explained the situation. I asked him not to be on the ship that collected me. Hosts are possessive. I didn't want to pour acid in the wound." He'd left and that meant leaving Blaster but that didn't have to mean leaving him. "Here I am. There was some adjustment. I'd been with Blaster for a long time. But I need a Host and Soundwave really does support the armistice."
