* looks around shyly * Hi again everyone… I wrote a little. It's short, but I did it as a sign of good faith. I have a question for any readers who care… Do you like the turn Bravura took? She's a little whiney baby if you ask me, I don't like her much anymore… So there are two options, as I see it… Either I go back and cut out the entire Red was a rapist memory stuff, or she gets stronger as a character and gets over it remarkably quickly, probably by having irrational feelings for a robot. Opinions and comments are welcome :) If you wanna flame at least throw in some constructive criticism! Love ya'll.

Riding with Prowl was certainly giving me some time to think. My outrage at the men who'd kidnapped me in Texas had boiled down, and I was able to look at things more rationally. My dream had featured Hotrod and Skywarp, both pulling me down different moral paths… If I sided with Skywarp, I would get the revenge I believed I craved. But… What if the death of those men didn't help me feel more at peace with it? What if it only made things worse?

I was also afraid that the report on the radio, the one about finding my 'murderers,' involved the wrong people. What if they hadn't captured Red, but some other poor jerk in the wrong place at the wrong time? I hoped the officials had taken all of the five men in the trailer that night.

Hotrod from my dreams flooded my mind, his compassionate blue eyes looking down at me…

I sighed and looked out the passenger window. It wasn't as if I had a choice. I couldn't control my future, it seemed, since I'd already been passed around with very little effort on my part as it was. I missed Hotrod's innocent affection and Mirage's brotherly comfort. Well… maybe not so brotherly, but lacking Hotrod's enthusiasm. Both were certainly far from Skywarp's obsessive and seemingly pointless interest in me. I couldn't imagine why he wanted to keep me.

Thinking that, why he would keep me, brought back a flicker of imagery from the trailer in Texas. They'd kept me all right… But I knew why they'd done it. Skywarp was a mystery. I didn't want to put human motives in that alien mind, but if he were a man, I'd think he was either desperately alone and suffering from a loss, or he wanted to control something that had defied it's own race. He seemed to have taken to leadership quickly. Maybe I was a source of courage, a pitiful sort of role model? But no… He wasn't human. I couldn't know.

Another mystery was why the Autobots had failed to mention my existence to anyone. You'd think hiding a supposed murder victim would be negative in their book… But then, maybe I just wasn't a high priority. I didn't mean that much to Ratchet or Optimus Prime. They'd probably get around to it, if they found out people were being charged with my death when I was clearly alive and kicking. I hoped they didn't find out, or if they did, that they didn't act on their knowledge. I didn't want to be forced to join the world of the living. I felt safe in my small sphere of robot companions.

Was I safe? I'd been thrown from mech to mech in a game of human hot potato, and it was a wonder I was still alive. Hotrod and Bumblebee and Mirage would fight to help me, but what about Thundercracker and Frenzy? What did they care?

I rubbed my arms, goose bumps from the chill making me feel distinctly crocodilian. "When are we stopping, Prowl?"

"When we reach Ironhide."

"You mean we aren't stopping for the night?"

"No-o-o." He dragged it out, sounding like a good-natured teacher correcting the slow kid.

"Well… can we hit the rest stop? Please? I need to do some human things… Bodily functions and all that fun stuff."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that almost every time you stop somewhere besides Autobot City itself, you get attacked by the enemy?"

I thought about that, and finally nodded unwillingly. "They're tracking credit cards or something. Hotrod and Mirage used-"

"I think it's you. I think there's a low grade tracking device on you somewhere, and until I have backup we aren't stopping. The natural Autobot output probably weakens or disrupts the tracking signal, which is why nobody came looking for you in Autobot City; all those combined system outputs plus being underground masked the tracking signal." Prowl sounded serious. He'd said he could handle a lot of information, but how could he have decided on some kind of tracking bug with what little information Optimus could have given him?

"Why would you think that? Everything points to the credit cards, and besides, I would know if they stuck a chip in me!"

"Not if you were recharging."

I fell silent. I had been in that log cabin with Frenzy and Barricade for days… Could Frenzy have done something to me? I wriggled uncomfortably. They say that when you microchip your pet, they never even know it's there.

I felt deflated, vulnerable to a whole new degree. I even resented myself a little, for believing for a moment that Skywarp cared about me like a person. If he had me microchipped like a dog, I really was just a pet. Maybe the favorite pet, but little more than an animal in his eyes, or optics, or whatever those glowing things on their faces were.

"What time should we meet Ironhide tomorrow, Prowl?"

He didn't respond, but his digital clock flashed 10:00 am until I grunted an acknowledgment. The sun was only just going down.

I buckled down for a long, long night.