A power-down was necessary after the grossly frivolous expenditure of energy that had been Bumblebee's high speed frolic in the desert. Without the ability to replace his energon, Bumblebee had to be careful about burning it, to conserve energy wherever he could, and a romp in the sand did not fit those parameters.
Bumblebee did not regret the jaunt, and could easily have excused it. As part of his power conservation, Bumblebee avoided transforming whenever possible. Learning to drive a new terrain well would, in the long run, spare him both the energy of having to transform, and whatever energy he might otherwise have to spend if he got into trouble on such terrain. It would also provide useful intel that could be added to his report on the sandy deserts of Earth.
Those were perfectly valid reasons, but Bumblebee couldn't lie to himself. He had run because he wanted to, for the sheer joy of it. Any other reason he put forth was only a false excuse.
A lot of Bots he'd known over the years were in the habit of lying to themselves. They pretended they weren't afraid, put on a show of knowing what to do when they didn't, and called something courage when it was just instinct. Bumblebee knew why, but it was a practice he had learned not to indulge in.
The Scout who fooled himself into thinking his destination was just over that next rise in an effort to prod himself on and make his task seem smaller than it was poured everything he had into getting there, and wound up dying on the other side, a thousand miles from his true destination. The honest Scout, who knew he had miles to go, protected his reserves of strength jealously, and more often than not reached his goal... or at the least died within sight of it.
And too, in the direction of self-deceit lay descent into the Pit. It was the Decepticon way to not only tell untruths to others, but even to themselves. They convinced themselves of their own superiority, the inarguable rightness of their actions, and the justifiable nature of their deplorable means. Their greatest deceit was perhaps to themselves, for none of them saw himself as evil or his morals as corrupt. They not only saw their own way as being better than that of the Autobots, but themselves as being superior to such a degree that they believed there was no type of killing and no level of torture that was unacceptable. No act was too vile, no behavior too cruel, no thought too despicable because -in his own mind- each Decepticon thought himself a god. And that was the biggest deception of all.
So Bumblebee had learned never to pretend his motives were more noble than they were, and did not lie to himself about why he had raced around the desert. He had done it because he felt like it.
He regained awareness to a kind of ticking sound, and the feel of something tapping its way across his roof. It wasn't the first time a bird had landed on him and pecked around curiously, and he knew that if he just stayed still it would eventually go away.
It hopped down onto his hood. It was a big (for a bird), black bird with dark eyes that revealed a surprising intelligence. It ruffled its feathers by shaking itself, and then began to make a noise that sounded surprisingly like a blaster attempting to fire but not having enough power, with a strange popping at the end. The sound seemed to require considerable puffing of the chest feathers.
After a little bit, a second bird came flapping out of the scrub and landed on Bumblebee's roof. It clucked as the first bird had, and the first bird seemed to reply. They did this back and forth a couple of times, and then the second bird flew off, returning with a twig it had either found or pried off a tree. He wondered that something so small was able to fly far enough to find such an item. He was soon to discover that the birds were going to do this over and over, flying however far they had to in order to find the tree bits that they needed in order to construct a nest.
Bumblebee had no concept of what they were doing, of course, but he didn't feel he should move until the birds had gone away. Though they were not the species he had been warned the planet belonged to, as living things they still deserved an amount of courtesy, specifically Bumblebee's not harming them.
Bumblebee had parked himself on a high rocky outcrop overlooking the desert, and the birds seemed to have mistaken him for a part of the cliff, or perhaps a tree. In any case, they spent days building up their nest, and then the female bird sat in it for awhile. Eventually, she laid a clutch of eggs.
Bumblebee couldn't really see them in the nest, but he could still detect their presence. He didn't know they were a kind of pale teal-green color with darker spots and stripes. But he did know that there were five of them. And he knew, though he had never before encountered reproduction in this manner, that they were somehow alive. At first he wasn't sure, but as the days passed, he became certain.
Somehow, from one bird had come... what? Other birds? They didn't seem to be. There were no wings, no flapping, no singing in the morning like birds did. Still with only vague categories, Bumblebee couldn't fathom the reality that a little oval shell filled with goo could one day become a big (relatively speaking) black bird.
In fact, he was so startled when the peeping began that he almost gunned his engine, which would probably have been the death of the baby birds as it would've scared the parents -who had never heard such a noise in their entire lives- away. Fortunately, Bumblebee maintained his self-discipline and remained both silent and motionless.
Not long after the peeping started, Bumblebee was aware of a lot of motion in the nest that wasn't one of the adult birds stomping around. In fact, after the peeping started, sometimes the adults would both leave the nest, though one was always somewhere nearby. But at first Bumblebee didn't see what had started doing all that moving around, just felt little bodies flopping around awkwardly via the shift of twig on his hood.
He saw the adult birds bringing food in before he ever saw the chicks. Already he had grasped that organics ate other organics, and he'd developed a notion that there was a division between plant life and animal life, though he still made no distinction in his mind between herbivores and carnivores. It neither disgusted nor surprised him what the birds brought in to feed their young.
These were ravens, and they were primarily carnivorous. The chicks were voracious little eating machines, who from dawn to dusk seemed to ceaselessly make an "Ah-ah-ha-ha-ah" sound that meant the adults needed to find some organic matter to stick into the shrieking mouth in order to make the sound stop for even a moment. Yet they no sooner got one chick quieted down than another took up the cry, and that was when all five weren't doing it together (which they usually were).
Bumblebee's first sighting of the chicks was just an ugly little pink head with gray fuzz looking as if it had been glued on haphazardly reaching up out of the mighty tower of twigs that was the raven's nest. Bumblebee had seen a lot of ugly things, but he decided that these were perhaps the ugliest. Of course, he was somewhat biased because by that time he was bored out of his mind, and had begun to suffer cramps from having remained motionless for so long. He was also sick to death of hearing the chicks' constant refrain of "Ah-ah-ha-ha-ah."
This was an annoyance he had not been warned about. His training did not cover serving as a nest site for a heap of raven chicks. In fact, his training did not cover ravens -or indeed birds of any sort- at all. The simple fact of the matter when you got right down to it was that Autobots did not -for the most part- fly. They were almost exclusively ground-based as vehicles, and Bumblebee had developed an unconscious antipathy for almost anything airborne.
The birds were also unconscionably messy. Not only did they excrete frequently an unpleasant substance that stuck to and marred the paint-job, they were just as messy with their food, and it seemed to Bumblebee that more of it must wind up on his hood than it did in the mouths of the chicks.
The only thing that staved off any attempt to harm the birds or simply knock them off was his interpretation of his standing orders.
Earth was not his world. It was not his to own. Not his to control. Not his to conquer. Not even really his to live on, though of course live he must. He had inquired in his latest report what precisely he was to do in situations such as this one, but he didn't expect an answer. He had yet to receive anything from Cybertron, even something so minor as confirmation that his messages were getting through.
But one thing the ravens and their nesting did was give him a lot of time to think, a lot of time to go over everything he'd recorded on his travels so far, a lot of time to mine his memory for details and planetary intel that had escaped his notice at the time. That is, when he could even hear himself think over the constant "Ah-ah-ha-ha-ah" of the raven chicks. He did most of his thinking at night, because that was when the chicks were quietest, apparently sleeping.
As annoying as they were however, Bumblebee felt a pang one morning when a chick failed to sound off. He had learned to recognize their voices intimately, and he knew one of the chicks was silent. Though he was sure its body was still in the nest, he sensed keenly its absence, and knew it was dead.
He did not understand what had happened. Nothing had come to kill the chick. He couldn't imagine that it had died from lack of fuel, since the parents were diligent in their feeding, somehow finding enough organic foodstuffs in the desert for one to be flying in with fresh food about the time the other finished giving the chicks all the food it had. It seemed unlikely that the chick had died of exposure, especially since the others were all vibrantly alive and gasping their demands for breakfast as if nothing had changed. Yet still the fact remained that there was one less chick alive in the nest.
The death of the chick hit him harder than he would have expected, and he wished there was something he could do to help the remaining chicks stay alive. But he knew there was not. He also knew that any direct interference on his part would go against his instructions.
Little as he knew about Earth, he had already become keenly aware of the fact that Cybertronians were much too powerful for the life on this planet. Too easily could they become dictators. Too easily could they destroy the planet in a quest to make it the way they wanted it to be. Too easily could even the most well-meaning Autobot become a Decepticon without recognizing the change in himself. And, unlike the Autobots, the creatures of Earth would have no defense against the Decepticons.
So painful as it was, Bumblebee did nothing the day both raven parents were absent and an eagle began to circle. The eagle quickly swooped in, apparently knowing the ravens would return any instant. It landed on Bumblebee's hood, and peered almost quizzically into the nest. The raven chicks were unusually quiet, flattening as they recognized that this bird was not one of their parents.
When the eagle stretched down its head and reached into the nest, one of the chicks peeped and pecked it defiantly. The eagle pulled its head back briefly, but the chick had nothing but attitude with which to defend itself, and the eagle apparently saw this, and again reached into the nest.
Bumblebee shuddered internally with horror as one chick squealed. The eagle had picked up the chick in its beak, and dropped the chick on the roof. The eagle pinned the chick with one of its talons, but then looked up sharply, its keen eyes detecting the approach of the parent ravens.
With an angry-sounding hissing noise, the eagle took off, the chick gripped in its talons. The ravens quickly closed in, flying higher than the eagle and then diving in for a surprisingly coordinated strafing run. One raven swooped in first, pecking with its beak and grabbing at the eagle with its feet.
The eagle twisted its head around, but had no way of fighting back against something above it. It folded its wings briefly, dropping lower in the air, then flapped them desperately to alter its course, making a sharp turn to the right. The second raven now dove in, repeating the attack of the first, who climbed in the air, and swung in a wide arc, positioning for another attack.
In this way, the ravens chased the eagle across the desert, out of sight.
Much later, the two ravens returned, but neither was carrying the stolen chick. Each parent was carrying food which they gave to their greedy remaining offspring, who had been calling for food the entire time the adults were gone, as if they had totally forgotten the terror that had just occurred. It was evident the young had no concept of death, and no real feeling of object permanence, which meant that -in their minds- the eagle ceased to exist the moment they could no longer see or hear it, and so too did their missing sibling.
If the parents were sad about their lost chicks, they did not show this to their remaining young, whom they continued to feed without pause. However, in future they were more careful, and always there was at least one parent on or near the nest. The eagle returned many times, but always the ravens were there waiting for it, and it did not succeed in taking another chick.
Sad as it seemed, Bumblebee actually understood. You couldn't just stop when somebody died. You couldn't give up when one of your own was lost. You had to keep going. You had to, for the ones who remained, and those still to come. With a start, Bumblebee realized that he understood the ravens better than he had thought, and that perhaps he had more in common with organic lifeforms than he'd believed. In truth, he understood the eagle as well. He'd seen the ravens feeding their young. To the eagle, the raven chicks were just food, probably for its own young. It wasn't evil. It was just survival.
Bumblebee understood that too.