Note: This chapter was updated 1/5/10, mostly as part of the effort to fix this story's overall narrative voice to make it consistently third-person throughout. There may be other minor changes from the original, as well, but nothing plot-significant.

9: Ties That Bind

"She's not exactly a parent of which to be proud, is she?"

Swoop's back had been to the doors of the archives, and she hadn't heard them open, hadn't heard Mirage come in and move to stand a few paces behind her. His quiet and sorrow-tinged voice from unexpectedly close-by made her jump nearly to the ceiling, startling not only her but also the infant sparks within her; they jolted about rather painfully. Fighting to suppress a yelp, Swoop laid one hand on her chest and began to gently tap out a repetitive rhythm against it with her fingertips. She'd only recently discovered that doing so would sometimes calm the new lives inside of her, and this time, although it took a few long moments to have an effect, it worked. She used those moments to gather her thoughts before she turned to face Mirage.

She'd been completely engrossed in reading about her…family. Even in her thoughts, she hesitated and stumbled over the word, as if it was an unseen boulder in her path. The concept still wasn't real to her. In the couple of weeks that had passed since she'd awakened to find herself in a new body and with an entirely new life, Swoop hadn't taken the time to sit and reflect about…everything. She hadn't had the opportunity to absorb all of it. Or rather, she had had the opportunity, but she had been deliberately burying herself in work or whatever else she could think of so that she didn't have to think about or deal with all of it. She had put off doing so for as long as possible, but she had known even as she'd delayed that she couldn't put off dealing with these issues forever. And now, it was all catching up to her.

For a few days after she'd awakened, Swoop had been convinced that she was merely dreaming, but it was clear to her now that this was no dream. Or nightmare, as the case may be. This, all of this, was her reality now, and reality wasn't going to change no matter how much she tried to ignore it, no matter how much she tried to go on with her life as if nothing had changed. So, with that realization, disturbing thoughts had begun to trickle into her mind at odd times, the tendency strangely worsening with Starscream's arrival, as if his sudden and unexpected appearance was a message from Primus that she needed to start dealing with everything that had happened to her. And, once summarily dismissed from the medbay, she suddenly found herself with time to ponder and no handy excuses not to do so. She suddenly had time to do some of the research that she'd been avoiding, time to allow some facts that she'd been doing her best to ignore to sink fully into her consciousness, her very being, instead.

Like the fact that she was part of a family, for instance. It was a fractured and mostly-decimated family now, to be sure, but it wasn't completely gone. She had a traitorous uncle in the Decepticon ranks, apparently, which was fabulous news. She also had a brother, besides her Dinobot brothers, who was now standing in the very same room with her, just behind her. He was a brother who had, ironically, always been thoughtlessly unkind to her, dismissive at best, regarding her as a primitive whom he thought – so she had always felt, anyway – was completely unworthy of existence. That history made things more difficult between them now, to say the least.

And on a wider scale, having spent her evening sipping highest-quality energon – a perk of her condition – and consulting historical databases, it dawned on Swoop as it hadn't really dawned on her before that she was part of a dynasty that had existed, blissfully uninterrupted, from the dawn of time up until the initiation of Megatron's revolt just a few thousand years ago. If she wanted to, she could easily trace her direct ancestry back hundreds of thousands of years and even farther, until recorded history faded with the eons.

Now, as Swoop stroked a hand absently over her chest, she realized that it was her duty not only to produce new sparks but particularly to continue the dynasty itself. As overwhelming as the very thought was, it further occurred to her that it would be very wise to start doing so as soon as possible. Entrenched in an on-going civil war as she was, there was no guarantee that she would be alive in a week or even that she would see the sunrise tomorrow. And if she were to die with no successor, then her species would be right back where it had been before it was known who and what she was: Doomed to eventual and certain extinction. Whether or not her entire species continued to exist into the future, after her own death, was completely her responsibility now, and it was a responsibility that was suddenly crushing her, so overwhelming on so many different levels that she didn't want to think about it at all, didn't know where, really, to begin.

In fact, her entire existence was suddenly overwhelming. The only family she'd thought she had were Wheeljack, Ratchet, and the other Dinobots, with all of whom she was extremely close, certainly closer than she was with this newly-discovered family of hers. And she'd thought that the only important thing that she'd ever do in her life would be to heal those who needed healing, to save lives.

How wrong she had been, on all fronts.

Swoop sighed heavily and turned her chair to face Mirage then. He was indeed standing there, his posture thoughtlessly perfect but his expression troubled, a few paces behind her. As usual, his blue and white armor gleamed in the archives' pale lighting. Even when he was covered with dirt, Mirage always managed, somehow, to gleam, to look utterly dignified. It was an intimidating ability, to say the least. He was intimidating in general, actually, or at least he had always been so to Swoop. He still was.

Swoop didn't know how long Mirage had been standing there, but she was certain that he'd realized what she was doing here. If nothing else, he could see what she had been looking at, and now he was giving her a look that she couldn't quite interpret, since she didn't know him very well, but that might have been approving. Maybe. He'd never looked at her in approval before, so she wasn't at all sure what approval from him looked like.

In any case, Mirage had been avoiding Swoop as much as she'd been avoiding him in the couple of weeks since she'd gotten the new body that she was wearing, since he had been, so Ratchet had told her, instrumental in saving her life. Neither of them seemed to know quite what to make of the other now, but Swoop was very aware that it would be wise to establish a détente between them sooner rather than later. In order for that to happen, they needed to find some common ground upon which to build, and she was keenly aware that, for the moment, the only common ground that they had was…her. Their mother.

And when it came to her…Well, what Mirage had said was true. Swoop had heard vague stories and whisperings about her here and there over the course of her life so far. She had never paid much attention to the stories because she'd always thought that for her, "born" long after her death, the assassinated queen was irrelevant. She belonged to an era that had been brought to an abrupt end long before Swoop had existed. She was just a bit of interesting but ultimately meaningless trivia. As it turned out, this wasn't so at all, was another way in which Swoop was completely wrong. About practically everything.

And she'd learned only just this evening that she who had birthed her had indeed done reprehensible things. She'd learned that her mother had not been a "good person," as the humans would term it. She had been relentlessly imperialistic and had had a ruling council that had agreed with her. Whether they really did agree with her or were merely cowed into doing so, Swoop didn't know, and the records weren't entirely clear on that point, either, often conflicting with each other depending on the chronicler's bias. Whatever the case, her tendencies had been much to the misfortune of surrounding systems, which suffered under her. Cybertron's "Golden Age" had come and had been maintained at a massively heavy price, its resource demands becoming positively enormous during the millennia of her mother's rule. An ever-widening circle of neighboring planets and systems found themselves feeding the demand whether they wanted to or not, much to their own devastation. Some of them had ended up drained of resources to the point that they were no longer habitable. Indeed, one had been reduced to a field of rubble, a lonely and forbidding asteroid belt eternally circling its star.

And of course her mother had been positively horrid to the warriors. She threw away their lives needlessly, sometimes for mere entertainment spectacles, and she shamelessly used their inborn reverence of her to compel them to obey her whims, even when those whims had nothing to do with their function.

"Tyrant" was a good word to describe her mother, Swoop decided; she put Megatron to shame in many ways. And because of that, she had most certainly brought about her own spectacularly bloody downfall, to the point that certain chronicles painted Megatron, the instrument of that downfall, as a savior. Of course, these were chronicles that had been recorded well before Megatron had started to become much like her mother in many ways.

Although Swoop had never known her mother, had no memory whatsoever of her or of anything at all about her very brief "previous life," she was discovering that it was still a surprisingly staggering blow to know that one of the individuals responsible for her existence had been so rightfully hated. At least Mirage carried the same burden, and Swoop just then realized that that shared burden was the logical place to lay the first few planks of a bridge between her and her brother.

"I'm sorry that I startled you," Mirage was quietly apologizing, meanwhile. "I thought that you had heard me but that…that you were ignoring me," he explained. At the quizzical look Swoop gave him, he hastily added, "Not that you don't have legitimate reasons for wanting to ignore me, of course. I have been…less than kind to you."

"You didn't know," Swoop answered quietly after a moment spent staring at him, wondering what he was up to. "You couldn't have known."

"That's not a valid excuse," Mirage insisted firmly. "If I've learned anything from…from all of this with you…it's that I should never assume anything about anyone. So, I'm…I'm sorry for the things I've said to you and about you in the past, and I'm sorry for the way that I've treated you. And I…I beg your forgiveness."

Swoop could tell from Mirage's posture and from the expression on his face, that he was completely serious, utterly sincere. She frowned at him thoughtfully, never dreaming that she'd see the day when haughty Mirage would humbly beg for anything, least of all from the likes of her. A gloating and less-than-kind part of her informed Swoop that she should be enjoying this, that she should be savoring the sheer irony of it, and that she should be making her enjoyment of the moment very clear to Mirage. That part of Swoop informed her that she should be viewing Mirage's humbling as some hard-won victory. But she ignored that part of herself. This was no victory at all. At best, Mirage had been the victim of the worst kind of sneak attack, and there was no honor in that at all. So…

"I'll forgive you," Swoop told Mirage levelly after she'd spent a few long moments staring at him, during which he'd actually started to fidget nervously. "On one condition," she added.

Mirage gazed at her seriously, golden eyes wide and glowing in the dim lighting.

"Anything," he said, utterly sincere.

At that, Swoop inclined her head slightly backward, toward the small screen sitting on the desk that was now behind her since she'd turned to face Mirage. An image of their mother was frozen on the screen.

"Tell me something about her," Swoop requested. "Something that isn't horrible. I know that there had to be some good in her somewhere that the chroniclers just…forgot."

At that, Mirage smiled a sad little half-smile, and he pulled over the chair from the desk next to the one that Swoop was using, so that he could sit down with her.

"Chroniclers are brutal," he agreed quietly as he settled himself, as he stared at the image frozen on the screen. "Particularly so when they've been…encouraged…by Megatron," he added absently.

"Mmmm," Swoop murmured. "I imagine so."

Mirage sat back in his chair then for a few moments, obviously gathering his thoughts.

"You know," he finally admitted, studiously not looking at Swoop, "I avoid thinking about her at all. I avoid thinking about anything having to do with…that time. To think about any of it is painful."

Swoop could understand that. Mirage's life had been destroyed overnight and his – their – mother had been a large part of that life that was suddenly gone as if it had never been. Remembering her, thinking about her, telling Swoop about her meant remembering that the destruction had happened, as well. It meant facing the reality of the present. It meant accepting the fact that he would likely never again be what he once had been, that even though Swoop was there now, fulfilling her function, their society was still in tatters, likely never to recover or at least never to return to exactly what it had been. That the so-called "Golden Age" was well and truly gone, in all probability never to return, was what Mirage really didn't want to face, much less to accept.

"But," Mirage was softly continuing meanwhile, "you're right that you of all people should know about her. Maybe more people should know about her, actually, beyond the…the…"

"Horrible," Swoop supplied softly as his voice trailed off.

"Yes, that," he answered, equally softly, with a soft and unhappy smile. He was quiet again for a long moment after that, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Then, sighing, he turned his head to look at Swoop, his gaze locking with hers. "There were twenty-two of us when it…when she died. I was the eldest, and you, obviously, were the youngest. Your name was—"

"Eclipse," Swoop said. "I know. I saw images of me," she added, gesturing vaguely at the screen.

Mirage quirked a small, sad smile at her.

"That must have been weird," he commented.

"Maybe not as weird as you'd think," she answered with a half-shrug and a sad half-smile. "At least, not right now, when none of this seems real to me and all of it seems weird. I mean, I look at her, and I look at you and…and…"

"I know," Mirage assured her quietly, nodding sympathetically as her voice trailed off helplessly. "I feel the same way about you."

"At least in your case," Swoop answered with a snort that bordered on bitter, "you have something to work from. Memories. Knowledge of exactly who and what you are because you've never been someone else for your entire life as you've known it. I have none of that, Mirage. I have nothing, now. I can't really be the same person that I have been until now, and I have no idea how to be this other person, this Eclipse person."

Mirage was silent for a long moment after that, staring at Swoop contemplatively and with obvious – and, to her, startling – sympathy. He eventually answered, his voice low, "Then be a new person, Swoop." She just stared at him, blinking, so he continued, "You're right that you can't entirely be who you were just a few weeks ago. You aren't just Swoop the Dinobot, the medic, anymore. You are infinitely more important than that, and you have…responsibilities."

"I know," she answered miserably.

"But," Mirage added, "you're also in a position to bring about change. Change for the better, for all of us, even for the Decepticons. You can do things the right way, Swoop. The way that my…our mother apparently couldn't do them."

Swoop gaped at Mirage for a long while after that, words not coming to her.

"I have no idea how to do that," she said bluntly and frankly, once she could speak at all.

Mirage shrugged slightly as he gave her an appraising look.

"You'll figure it out, and you'll learn as you go," he said with far more confidence than she felt. "Probably quickly, too, just as you've always learned everything else that you've set your mind to learning." Swoop smiled at that, surprised not to mention flattered that he'd noticed. Meanwhile, Mirage continued, "You just have to want it. And if you do, you have people who care deeply about you to help you. You have four Dinobot brothers who will protect you with their very lives, if necessary with their dying breaths, just as they always have. And you are surrounded by wise people who will help you and guide you, if you but let them do so. All you have to do is…Listen to them."

"Are you one of these 'wise people,' then?" she teased gently.

Mirage shrugged again, but this time he was smiling.

"Oh, absolutely," he asserted. Then he chuckled quietly, and she chuckled back, feeling more relaxed with him than she ever had.

A stretch of silence fell between them after that, but it wasn't an uncomfortable silence at all. Swoop could tell that Mirage was thinking as he stared at the far wall, and she felt no need to interrupt his contemplations, content just to sit with him and do some contemplating of her own. Eventually, though, Mirage spoke up.

"It's funny," he quietly murmured.

"What's funny?" I asked.

Mirage sighed, turning to look at her again.

"From the moment you were born, Mother insisted that you would be her successor. She said that she knew that you would follow her. It made our sisters more than a little upset, and there was much drama about it, sometimes. The Earth term is 'cat-fighting,' I believe."

He chuckled fondly, and Swoop smiled wistfully at what was apparently for him a happy memory, for all that she didn't share it.

"She also insisted," Mirage continued, "that you would be a flier, despite the fact that none of the rest of us were." He paused, giving Swoop a speculative look. "It turns out," he concluded, "that she was right. On both counts."

"Maybe she was psychic," Swoop said sadly.

"If she was," Mirage responded bitterly, with a quiet snort, "she must have had a huge blind spot in her abilities because she completely missed what was looming on the horizon."

"Maybe she just didn't want to see it," Swoop answered quietly.

Mirage sighed. It was a long sigh, mournful.

"I think," he said, "that it was more a case of over-confidence, of thinking herself invulnerable. She thought that she had the warriors completely under her thumb, and she couldn't imagine them…turning on her like they did."

"Like dogs," Swoop whispered.

"What?" Mirage asked, regarding her in confusion, blinking at her.

"Some humans teach dogs to be vicious. They train them to fight by abusing them," she explained. "But they've been known to snap and turn on their trainers. And sometimes the trainers die as a result."

Mirage nodded thoughtfully.

"You might have something there," he whispered. He was quiet again for a long time after that. And then, rather unexpectedly, he leaned toward Swoop, his expression suddenly intense and his tone of voice quietly urgent as he said, "Look, Swoop… Whatever else you read about her and no matter what anyone else tells you about her, no matter how horrible it is…Never doubt that my – our mother loved you. And never doubt that, had it been within her power to do so, she would have protected you. Especially you."

Swoop stared at him, not knowing quite what to say.

And then Mirage added, "And never doubt that, now, if it's within my power to do so, I will protect you. I won't…I won't fail you again."

"Again?" she questioned, confused. "Mirage, you've never failed me. You've practically never known that I existed."

"Oh, but I did fail you, Swoop," he answered. "Before you were you. Do you know why I was half-way around Cybertron when the uprising happened?"

Swoop blinked at him, taken aback by what seemed to be an abrupt change of subject.

"No," she answered simply.

"It's so very cliché, but…Mother and I had an argument. What it was about really isn't important anymore. It was trivial, but you see we had a special talent for turning trivial disagreements into gigantic arguments, she and I. So…I left. Stormed out. Went hunting, actually, with some inappropriate but very close friends of mine. I was having a grand time, completely oblivious, while the rest of you were…were…hunted. And then…slaughtered. If I had been there—"

"You would have been one more lamb for the slaughter," Swoop assured him quietly, sympathetically. "That's all."

"Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Sometimes…" Mirage almost whispered, his head bowing as if in shame, his body shaking slightly as memory flooded him. "I often thought that death would have been preferable. When I came back, saw what was left, saw the bodies, made arrangements for them, it… Yes, death would have been preferable."

"Death is never preferable, Mirage," Swoop insisted quietly, and before she fully realized what she was doing, she found herself reaching out to him, softly and comfortingly stroking the back of his head. She couldn't help it; she'd always been tactile that way, seeking to comfort with touch. In response, Mirage shuddered and then raised his head to stare at Swoop, eye-to-eye, his expression questioning, and she pulled her hand away from him as if she'd been burned. "Everything happens for a reason," she said quietly, simply to him.

Mirage snorted at that, straightening up abruptly and then leaning back in his seat.

"If that's the case," he said bitterly, "then Primus is a sadistic bastard."

Swoop shrugged at that.

"Maybe," she said. "Or maybe it's just that sometimes drastic change is necessary so that lessons can be learned."

Mirage snorted again.

"Well," he said, "I learned what it's like to be alone and to fend for myself, that's for sure. It wasn't a pleasant lesson."

"I'm sure it wasn't," Swoop answered. "But you aren't alone anymore, Mirage," she told him seriously, reaching over to lay a hand over one of his. "I may not be completely up to speed yet. In fact, I don't know that I'll ever be completely up to speed, but…I'm here."

He smiled at that, a small smile that was sad and hopeful at the same time.

"Indeed you are," he said softly. "It is truly a miracle," he whispered. Then he turned his hand over under hers, entwined their fingers, and then gave her hand an encouraging squeeze. "So!" he said, changing the subject. "Why don't you show me what you've been looking at, and I'll tell you what really happened?"

Swoop gave Mirage a sidelong look, understanding that he'd decided that he'd done enough soul-baring for one evening, and she had no desire to push him farther. She still didn't know quite what to make of him, but she had gained a few insights that she hadn't had before, and he had actually given her a bit of good advice.

They had a long road ahead of them, she and Mirage, but at least it seemed that they were actually on a road now instead of blindly thrashing around in the wilderness searching for one. It was, Swoop reflected, a start. Now they just needed to see where the road led.

I want to offer my apologies to anyone who might have an OC named Eclipse. I'm sure I've seen the name bopping around the fandom more than a few times, but I assure you that no "stealing" is intended. I suck mightily at inventing TF names, but I needed a previous name for Swoop, something that evoked the heavens, and it was just the first thing that popped into my head. So, that's what went down on "paper." The name is more or less a throw-away, so don't let it worry you too much if it's a name that you use. I've changed basically everything else about Swoop in this story, but I'm not changing her name! *laughs*

Review replies!

Ayngel: Hey, you, you corrupting-me-with-Mirageness-person. ;) Yes! Thundercracker is awesomeness. And Megs is pissed. And I'm not done with either of them yet. But they're just a bit waterlogged, at the moment. ;) Starscream is indeed very creatively destructive, and he seems to prefer large-scale destructiveness. He's not a person to do anything by halves, methinks…

But yeah, Swoop will make good mum material, I think. She's had excellent role models in that department. But that's if I can ever get her to that point. *rolls eyes* Hey, if nothing else, she has four built-in babysitters. (Yeah, Dinobots as baby-sitters. The world as we know it might not survive… ;) ) But seriously, she is growing in awesome directions in my head. She's…mutable without being malleable, I guess is a good way to put it. Her thinking is flexible, but she's stubborn enough that she's not easily manipulated or swayed when she has her mind set on a certain course of action. And she can adapt well to just about any situation and generally keep her head without freaking out. These are qualities which will definitely serve her well, in the future…

Carmilla: Well, "tomorrow afternoon" is next, so you won't have too long to wait. I'm slowing down the rate at which I'm posting chapters a bit because I decided on a completely different ending – I have two different possibilities, actually – for this story, and now I need more time to finish it. *laughs* First I have to decide which possibility to use, though…

Starfire: Swoop's no dummy, no. In my mind, none of the Dinobots is a complete moron. It's pretty obvious if you read my stories about them, I guess. *laughs* But I've always portrayed Swoop as the smartest Dinobot. I tend to see him/her as quite intuitive, but accurately so, able to deduce what turns out to be truth from little supporting evidence. So, she/he makes intuitive leaps, but they often turn out to be right. Should I ever toss the two of them together in a situation, I'm thinking this tendency would drive Prowl completely insane. XD As for whether or not her and Ratchet's theory is right…Well, they have pieces of the truth. Just not all of it yet. :)

Shadir: Yeah, I really do see Ratchet more as a father figure, not just of the Dinobots but of all the Autobots, in a way. I think too many people portray him as just a little too crazy. He's a doctor, so really, he's not going to go around beating people with wrenches. To me, he's grumpy from time to time and very cynical, but he's not mean. And, yes, I see him as very much the protective father, especially toward Swoop, since she's his protégé.

Annnnnnd, of course, thanks to those people who are watching and faving this story. It's most gratifying. :)

Next time: Awakenings, reunions, and…oh dear. Also? N00bs! ;)