The Scout had seen the results of battle before. The sharp tang of spilled and burnt energon, smoking metal and expended blaster energy laced the air. Bodies scattered in various positions, shot, stabbed, ripped apart. But this, this was by far the worst Bumblebee had seen, made all the worse by his having known these Autobots. Even if he didn't get along with them or particularly like them... he still knew them. It stunned him how quickly he'd bonded with these Autobots who were practically strangers.
Bumblebee forced his tremors to subside and stepped into the battlefield. The ground was ripped and torn, flora and fauna alike had been blasted to pieces in the skirmish. This area was dead. The war of Cybertron had come to Earth. Would Earth die too for this bloody war?
Stop thinking. Just do your job.
Bumblebee tried not to think of the names to go with the faces and various body parts he found, tried to only do a headcount. He knew how many had been on the ground.
Just count them and move on. Don't think, don't feel, just go from one to the next.
For all the disadvantage they'd suffered due to surprise, the Autobots had given as good as they got. It was somewhat difficult to do a headcount, because the fighting had been close. Decepticon bodies mingled with Autobots, and in death all looked similar at a first glance. That was especially true now their paint had been scratched and scorched, their chassis cracked and broken. Without light and life, without color or form, it was hard to identify a shell.
Identification had to be done. Bumblebee had to know that there was no one left. He had to be sure everyone here was dead, as much as he had to make sure that everyone was here. It would later be his duty to report on the death toll, but right now it was very personal.
He moved cautiously at first, aware that there might well be survivors, Decepticons lying in wait just in case more Autobots showed up. But it gradually became evident to him that, if there were any Decepticons left, they were not waiting around. Either they assumed they'd gotten all the Autobots based here, or else they were too badly damaged from the fight to risk another. Either was believable. If Bumblebee had not been conducting repairs back at base, he would have been here. And self preservation being the first law of nearly all Decepticons, it would not be at all surprising if they'd gone off to lick their wounds after a battle such as this.
From up close, the damage to the ship was obvious and extensive. The Autobots to whom this ship had belonged had not given her up without a fight. In fact, it looked like they'd tried to destroy their own ship rather than let it fall into the hands of the Decepticons. They had known what it would be used for, and had given their lives to try and stop that from happening. But somehow the Decepticons had managed to salvage the wreck, and patch it back together enough that a look at it from a distance made it appear that the damage was environmental, rather than the results of a pitched battle.
The ship would never fly again. In fact, she'd plowed into the side of the canyon, and seemed to be creaking on the last of her frame supports, on the verge of collapsing into a pile of twisted metal, all but unrecognizable as what she had once been. Small wonder that no survivors, if indeed there were any, had taken refuge within the ship. The ship was done for, there was no shelter there.
Looking across the former field of battle as the dust slowly settled on it, Bumblebee knew that this was to be the first Cybertronian mass grave on Earth, a place where so many had fallen so quickly that it was simply impossible to pay proper respect to each individual. There were many such sites on Cybertron. Too many. In fact, there had been times Cybertron had felt like a single mass grave. The silence that hung over such places was as pervasive as it was oppressive.
Bumblebee shook his head fiercely. This battle was over. But the war wasn't. These Autobots were dead. But what they had lived for, fought for, and died for... it was still worth fighting for.
At least, that's what Bumblebee told himself. He'd told himself that a thousand times. But somehow, he just couldn't bring himself to believe it this time. He was tired. He might be a machine, but he was also a living being. And the living part of him had had enough.
Defeated without having even fought, Bumblebee turned to go back to the empty camp. He didn't have a reason for doing so. Nobody was there. Nobody was going to be there. He'd forgotten about the voice on the radio, and even if he had remembered, he didn't know it came from a ship that was even now heading for Earth. Even if he had known, he might not have cared.
Bumblebee had defied orders, pushed the limits of his speed to get here, and all of it was for nothing. There was nobody left to save, nothing left here to fight for. All that remained was Death, stalking like a vulture among the corpses, recalling the sparks of the dead to the place from whence they'd come.
A terrible weight descended on him as he realized that he was once again alone. Worse, even if no Decepticons had escaped, there would be more coming. For the moment, he was the last of his kind, the only Autobot stationed on this farthest flung planet who yet lived. There was no one else to prevent the Decepticons from coming here and ransacking Earth for their own purposes. Earth was defenseless.
Bumblebee had sworn an oath to serve, and that meant protecting what he'd been sent to guard. But could he truly be expected to do that alone? It didn't even seem real. It was the sort of thing Primes could do, but a mere Scout, defend Earth all by himself? Impossible.
The drive out to the battlefield had seemed long, even though it wasn't. Though it was the same length to get back, it now felt like an interminable distance. Every inch traveled felt like a betrayal. It was wrong that he was returning to base alone. It was wrong he did not avenge the dead. It was wrong he'd simply left the corpses where they'd fallen. It was wrong he hadn't buried them. It was wrong that the Autobots lay with Decepticons in death. It was wrong that they were dead. It was wrong that Bumblebee had not died with them. It was wrong, all of it, and he couldn't do a damned thing about it.
Nothing except what he'd always done. Move on, and not look back. His body moved on, his mind told it that it must, but his spark was torn, and could not do the same so easily.
It had been bad enough to walk through the graves of Cybertron, to know that brave Warriors had fallen, and with them the hopes of the Autobots had sunk lower, the fate of Cybertron darkening with each death until it was black all through. But it was still something else to walk among dead whom he had known. Whose faces he had recognized, whose voices he had answered to.
Bumblebee had liked Axle, had tolerated Throttle, had been aware of all the rest. But Jax... he knew now, too late, that the powerful fear of and anger towards Jax he had felt had been because of something deeper than a realization of what Jax was becoming. It had come from who Jax had been to him. It was hard for him to believe, though once he realized it he knew it to be true, that Jax had been his friend. And so it was that the death of the Autobot he had been prepared to obliterate to protect what he had been sent to guard was the one that hit the hardest, most painful blow to his spark.
The death of a stranger, however great a hero, is as nothing to the death of a friend, however poor a coward.
However, in the cruel way of war and life, there was no time now for Bumblebee to grieve. As he arrived at the base camp, he realized fully that not all of the Decepticons had been destroyed. Drawn by the signal of the LDT, the Decepticons who had survived the battle had cut a straight course for the base. They had raided it of everything of value, most particularly any energon they were able to find. Everything else they had destroyed beyond repair, including the LDT.
Much as he would have denied it had anyone asked, Bumblebee had begun to feel that this camp was home. But more than that, he realized something else: Axle and the others had headed Northeast first, then angled back towards the South, where the cruiser had crashed. Bumblebee had followed the same course. That was because the river and human settlements were on a direct line between the two. By habit almost as much as anything, they had avoided the humans. But the Decepticons would not have done that.
Bumblebee knew the humans would have tried to defend themselves, defend their young, rather than flee, even in the face of something like the Decepticons. It had happened before. The one human he'd had direct contact with had attempted to drive him away.
For once, Bumblebee had no regard for the living things in his way. For so long, he'd practiced moving from place to place without disturbing plants and barely upsetting the wildlife. But it was forgotten in an instant. Speed was paramount. The fact was, Bumblebee wasn't really thinking at all.
He'd let himself fall into old habits the moment he realized what had happened. What he had allowed to happen. He put everything that defined him as living in a box, and let the machine take over. He couldn't afford the emotions of a moment before. He couldn't.
Though the objective of a Scout was to go unnoticed, there were times when it was wholly unavoidable. And, if you found yourself in the situation of having been discovered, you were usually outnumbered. Close combat tactics needed to be fast, efficient. No messing around. Scouts were notoriously "uncivilized" when it came to battle.
A chink in the armor was an opening for a hand to reach in and grab some circuitry, vulnerable joints were the perfect place for a well placed close range shot or the insertion of a blade. Optics, though desirable targets, were often deep set in the head, too protected. The spark chamber was the ideal attack point. Weak armor could be pried off, loose armor could be circumvented. Being small and lightweight, Bumblebee lacked the power to simply rip off limbs as a rule, though a proper twist at the joining point between head and body would do the job even without monstrous power behind it.
Bumblebee didn't think these things out. His mind flashed with images, memory and imagined, each clear-cut and well defined. He knew what he was going to do. And too, he knew that anger lay just beneath the cold surface. He had to keep it in check, had to push it down. Anger would make him reckless, and he would make mistakes. In this profession, you didn't get more than one of those. And too, he knew that releasing all that anger would be the biggest mistake of all. Once the genie was released, it would never fit back in the bottle. Bumblebee knew too well how Rogues were made.
When he came to the river, he saw that his worst fears had been realized. Both settlements had been obliterated, every human trampled like scrap beneath the feet of the Decepticons. Killed without care or effort, murdered simply for being a minor inconvenience that got in the way. Any control he had over his rage slipped in that moment. He would kill them for what they'd done. Kill them all.