Well, here's chapter one. Oh, and FFV, many of your questions are answered in this chapter, though not all. I hope it's not a let down for any of you. I got this one out as quickly as I did because it was practically finished already, and I'm eager to know what people think on the direction I plan on taking this story in.


Chapter One: Whispers of Yesterday

"Aren't you coming, Daddy?"

A brief silence; a flash of agony in the blue-grey eyes that look down on her as the sounds of endless destruction echo above them. A shaky breath from the one who holds her. A clump of dirt falling between them from the ceiling of the subway tunnel.

"I can't sweetheart."

"Why not?"

His answer is not directed towards her.

"I'll make sure the Decepticons can't follow. Keep her safe, all of you; for me and for Miko."

"Daddy?"

"We will."

A kiss on her forehead, a mumbled "be good for your uncles" and "I love you so much" and then suddenly he's running out of her life, back towards the death and the dying, and her little voice screams for him as loud as it can.

"DADDY!"

But, for the first time in her life, it doesn't bring him running back.


She woke with a scream dying in her throat, digging its claws into her vocals as she held it in only through sheer will, so that, instead of the bloodcurdling screech it was meant to be, it came out as a croaking gasp. Behind her still closed eye-lids, the rest of the nightmare played out; screaming for her father even as Uncle Raf shoved the both of them into Uncle Bee's alt-mode, screaming at them hysterically that they were driving the wrong way and please go back, I want my Daddy, please go back, go back, go back—

Titania Darby sat up sharply, cradling her head in her hands and trying not to think about the day the Decepticons discovered the exact location of the Resistance headquarters, the day her stupid, stupid father went and died like the noble glitch he was, blowing up the tunnels behind them so they couldn't be followed, and blowing up himself and Primus-only-knows how many Decepticons in the process.

Every time she thought about it, even eight years later at the hardened age of sixteen, she just wanted to cry and scream and scream until she brought the sky down on top of them and simply ended everything.

Wrapping her arms around her knees, Titania took a shuddering breath in an attempt to calm her nerves, even as her hand went up to grasp the dogtag around her neck, embossed with the Autobot symbol on its front. She fingered it for a moment, then turned it over in her hand and squinted down at the words that were inscribed there; words that she didn't need to be able to see in the darkness, because she had known them by heart since she was seven years old.

To prove your
Honour

To uphold your
Duty

To protect your
Family

Her eyes stung with tears she would never let fall; she had been given the dogtag by her mother as a gift for her seventh birthday. Her mother had told her that it had originally been a gift from Bulkhead, the Wrecker that Titania had been deprived of the opportunity to meet long before she'd even been born. The words had quickly become her mantra, and she repeated it to herself again and again and always somehow felt like she was borrowing a bit of her mother's strength, and the strength of the Wrecker who had made it.

Taking another deep, calming breath, Titania let the dogtag drop back against her chest, and then proceeded to stare at her hands, calloused and scarred from years spent pitching and taking down tents, cutting herself on debris as she moved it in search of supplies, and firing massive guns with nasty recoils.

She sat there for a long while, knowing she wouldn't get anymore sleep, and simply listened to the silence of the night.

Sometime later, somewhere in the near-darkness of her tent, her communicator began to vibrate, and Titania tiredly rolled over, reaching for the blinking light beside her sleeping bag that indicated its presence. Flipping it open, she lifted it to her ear and spoke with as much authority as she could muster in her tired state.

"Titania Darby; what's the situation?"

There was a moment of static before a familiar voice spoke.

"Situation? I'll tell you my situation; Uncle Sam's got his star-spangled knickers in a knot 'cuz you're not here yet. Where are you, Wreckin' Gal?"

Titania felt her brow furrow, trying to think of where it was she was supposed to be right now; she didn't have any missions until later in the evening, and the briefing wasn't until later in the afternoon. But then her eyebrows immediately shot up into her hairline in realization and she scrambled out of her sleeping bag in a panic.

"Well, scrap; what time is it?" She asked of her favourite uncle, though, truthfully, he was more like a grandfather to her.

William "Bill" Fowler responded promptly as she began to dress herself; "Oh-five-thirty, Wreckin' Gal. Now get your aft over here before Ratchet blows a gasket and finally keels over."

She smiled as she heard the Autobot medic's indignant sputtering in the background, laced with various Cybertronian expletives directed none too favourably at her Uncle Bill.

"All right, I'm on my way," she informed him, clipping the pieces of her black armour into place over her skin-tight, rubber-like body suit, "I'll be there in a minute. Titania out."

She shut off her communicator without waiting for a reply, and reached down to pick up her weapons. Titania strapped a hulking, twenty-pound gun to her back, it's wide barrel—wide enough for her to stick an arm in—facing downwards. It was a Cybertronian cannon, scaled down and slightly altered for human use, courtesy of Ratchet, and was more than capable of bringing the hurt to any Decepticon she laid eyes on. So was the pistol she then proceeded to strap to her right thigh, it's unassuming, distinctly human-like design disguising the very real danger of the armour-piercing rounds within that would release a burst of explosive energon on contact—once more, courtesy of Ratchet. The pistol wasn't liable to kill a Decepticon—she'd need a direct bead on an exposed spark chamber or their main fuel line for that—but it was useful in frying circuits, shooting out optics, and just generally wrecking enough havoc to potentially disable them for a short time—or a long time, depending on which of their systems failed. It was most useful when you were trying to make an escape or provide a distraction.

After strapping her combat knife to her other thigh, Titania reached up and loosely plaited her hair together, flicking it back over her shoulder once she was finished.

Satisfied that she was presentable for the day, Titania subconsciously held her chin slightly higher, and then marched out of the darkness of her tent and into the dim grey light of the dawn.

The whole world seemed grey, whichever way she looked. The ground she walked on was covered in soot and ash, what little grass there was looked sickly and poisoned, and crunched beneath her feet like old, fragile bones. Even the very tents the resistance camp was using were grey, sewn together from old, washed out clothes so that they would blend into the terrain when viewed by any Decepticons that may be flying in the sky far above the shadows of the canyon.

And even though she couldn't see it—not with the grey canyon walls stretching up all around her—she knew that, on the horizon, the rising sun was a vague blotch of muted colour, hidden behind layers upon layers of polluted clouds that swallowed the whole sky.

Titania stopped several feet from the entrance of her tent and simply watched life—what was left of life, at least—go on around her. Some of her fellow Resisters milled about, most going to their tents to catch some sleep as they came off night duty, while others were just waking with the sun. A few were carrying buckets of water here, pushing a cart of spare parts there, delivering rations to this tent and that tent, and just generally getting by in the same way they had for as long as the sixteen year-old could remember. All of them wore armour almost identical to hers, melted down, ironically, from the scraps of deceased Decepticons, and then reforged into something a human could wear. They all liked to think it was a way of spitting in the Decepticons' faces, and reminding them that they had killed Decepticons in the past, and would likely do so again. Not a single individual walked without a weapon either; everyone preferred the idea of going to the grave with a gun, rather than because they didn't have one.

Titania felt her eyes light up as she spotted one Resister in particular, only for her brow to furrow curiously as she saw him staring out at nothing with a focused look on his face. The man was younger than most of those in the camp, in fact, she knew he was only twenty-two, being just six years her senior. He wore the same armour they all did—her own was simply more form-fitting—and favoured two pistols and an energon-powered sniper rifle that was almost as long as he was tall.

"Kicker?" she called as she approached him, and he seemed to snap out of whatever trance he had fallen into.

"Oh, hey," he rubbed a hand through thick, unruly, dirt-brown hair, and focused his hazel eyes on her grey-blue before relaxing against a nearby barrel and folding his arms across his chest, "How are you?"

She folded her own arms in a subconscious mimic of his stance, "Fine, you?"

"I'm good," he remarked, and then quickly changed the topic, as though his own well-being bored him, "Did you know Ratchet brought in a huge haul of energon last night? I can still feel it from here."

"Did he?" Titania inquired rhetorically, glancing off into the general direction of Ratchet's lab, and narrowing her eyes as though that would allow her to feel the energon's presence from this distance as well, but all she felt was the beat of Ratchet's spark, made faint by the space between them.

She and Kicker were both what Ratchet had, rather unimaginatively, dubbed "Energon Sensitive." Their rather extreme sensitivity to energon, however, had come about as a result of nothing less than attempted genocide. It had been just before her eighth birthday, and the Decepticons had managed to poison the Resistance's natural water supply by lacing it with such minute traces of energon that it was undetectable. Humans, ever susceptible to such biological attacks, almost immediately became violently ill after drinking it.

Her hands clenched into fists at the memory; most of the adults whom had been poisoned died within forty-eight hours, and her mother had been among the victims. Nearly every other young child that had fallen ill had died within an hour, the undetectable amounts of energon being far too much for their small bodies to handle. Titania however, had lived. It had felt like she was being burned from the inside out, that acid was in her veins, that something was tearing at her insides and making her bleed white hot agony. She had coughed up blood, been delusional with fever, screamed until she couldn't scream anymore, cried in her father's arms as he watched helplessly, but, after days and days of struggling and begging her father to make it stop, her body had finally, miraculously, purged it from her systems.

But now, she, Kicker, and every other survivor of the poisoning—there were only about five all together, everyone else had died—could feel the energy thrumming in the air whenever energon was present, they could feel the rhythm of beating sparks before they ever even saw the Cybertronian to whom it belonged, and, unfortunately, it meant their bodies were even more susceptible to energon's devastating affects than anyone else on Earth.

Kicker was the most sensitive out of all of them, able to sense energon from greater distances, and better able to tell different sparks apart. It was what made him such a great sniper and scout on the battlefield; he didn't have to see the Decepticons to know where they were. She had once told him that she wished she had that kind of precision with her ability, but then he had rather bluntly reminded her that his skin was constantly itching because of the proximity of his own weapons, and being within twenty-feet of any Cybertronian, even Ratchet, caused him physical pain that it took no small amount of will-power to ignore. It was just another reason why he preferred fighting from a distance.

"Any idea what they're doing with it?" Kicker asked suddenly, breaking her out of her chain of thoughts. She frowned thoughtfully as she considered the question, thinking back on her last briefing with her Uncle Bill several days ago. She shook her head, nothing in particular seeming to stick out.

"I don't know; it must be something big."

Kicker snorted, straightening his posture and reaching up to scratch at the back of his neck. His next statement came out bitterly; "Probably another one of their 'turn-the-tide' schemes."

Titania's gaze narrowed into a glare, and one glance at her expression had the twenty-two year old wishing he'd kept his mouth shut.

After her father's death, the Resistance had all but fallen apart. Fowler was considered its leader now, and Ratchet and Rafael were the advisors, but the fight had gone out of almost everyone else. Now, it wasn't about trying to reclaim their planet or fight back, it was about trying to survive. Often, said survival required excursions to the abandoned cities in search of supplies, which were regularly patrolled by Decepticon forces, thus making the "missions" incredibly dangerous. Fowler, Ratchet, and Rafael, however, had continued to try waging the war that the others had already decided was lost, and a rift had been growing between the leaders and the followers for years now. It was the opinion of many that their location was a safe one; and, that as long as they didn't go out on anything but supply runs, and didn't attempt to strike back like Jackson Darby had all those years ago, then the Decepticons were unlikely to ever find them, or even care to try finding them. So, in their eyes, the few were pointlessly jeopardizing the safety of the many.

Kicker thought they were right. Titania thought they were cowards. It had always been a point of contention between them, and it was unlikely to ever be resolved.

"Look, Titania," Kicker began as he reached a hand out to her, his voice apologetic, though she knew his thoughts were anything but. She stepped out of his reach, still glaring at him.

"You owe it to my father," she reminded him coldly, then abruptly turned on her heels and marched away, not needing to look back to know that Kicker probably looked like she'd slapped him. In a way, she had.

Kicker had been only ten months old when the fortress of New Kaon appeared in Nevada, and the Decepticons began their campaign to conquer Earth in earnest. The then-sixteen year-old Jack Darby had found him wrapped in the arms of his dead mother as he and Arcee made their way through New York City as it was torn apart around them. Jack had taken him without a second thought, named him, and, with his own mother's help, had raised him. Everything Kicker had—what little it was—he had because of Titania's father and grandmother, and she would never let him forget that.

Titania broke into a jog, her anger causing her usual brisk walk to be too dissatisfactory as she made her way to the edge of the camp where Ratchet had set up his lab in a cave, with a grey tarp draped over the entrance and pinned to the surrounding ground and stone so that it wouldn't flutter in the wind and draw attention to itself.

She slowed back to a walk as she entered, the rage gone out of her, and felt slightly guilty for using Kicker's debt to her father against him once again, but she pushed it aside as she entered. Garbled voices echoed in the cavern, and shadows danced on the distant stone wall as the cave's current occupants and visitor moved about from around the natural bend.

"…are we sure we should even be thinking about trying this?" Fowler's warped voice reached her, and she paused curiously, laying a hand against the rough stone wall and tilting her head as she listened. "I'm not against it," he went on, "but we have to consider exactly what it is we're trying to accomplish here, and whether or not it's really the best option we have."

"Agent Fowler, it is the only option we have left to us. Or would you rather live to see your own species' extinction?"

That was Ratchet's voice, and a pause followed it as she felt her heart clench at his words. She knew it was the unspoken truth, now voiced and unable to be taken back; unlike the other Resisters who just wanted to try starting over, hiding for the rest of their lives, her uncles knew they couldn't, this world was dying and they were going to die with it. She, personally, would rather die fighting than with her head in the sand.

After another moment, Fowler spoke again.

"Are we sure it will even work? What if we make it worse like those eggheads in all those bad sci-fi movies?"

A new voice joined the fray; "Ratchet and I have run countless simulations, Fowler; we're eighty-seven percent sure it will work. As for making things worse, well…I don't think it can get any worse."

Titania frowned at Rafael's words, wondering what it was her uncles were talking about.

"But that's not a one-hundred percent certainty. Are you telling me it's do or die time now?"

"It has been for the past twenty years, Agent Fowler," Ratchet reminded the ex-army ranger with a heavy gust from his vents, "And Titania, if you're quite done eavesdropping, get your aft in here. Your medical exam is already overdue enough as it is."

The sixteen year-old wasn't too surprised that Ratchet knew she was there; he always did, and she half-suspected he had set up some kind of motion sensor at the cave entrance to inform him of visitors.

Stepping around the corner, Titania found herself looking at an old, worn out Cybertronian that was nearly as grey as the surrounding rocks, were it not for the few areas of faded paint that remained on his armour. His blue optics were tired, ancient, as they had always been so long as she had known him, but, for the first time in her life, she thought she saw a grim determination in them, and a flicker of hope he was trying desperately to suppress for fear of disappointment and crushing failure.

From his position standing beside her Uncle Ratchet, a brown-haired man with a goatee and glasses offered her a small smile of greeting, but said nothing as he closed the computer balancing on his hand. His brown eyes were sad and dull, but she saw Ratchet's determination—or perhaps it was desperation—reflected in them.

Her beloved Uncle Raf had never been quite the same since Bumblebee died a mere two years ago, saving his life no less. Afterwards, he had spent more time in Ratchet's company than any human's, so much so that he had become the second permanent resident of the lab.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a thick arm threw itself around Titania's shoulders, pulling her close to a thick-set chest where once there had been more than a bit of a pot-belly; well, according to Ratchet anyway. Titania had only ever known her Uncle Bill as the way he currently was; grey-haired, agelines etched into his face, but eyes lively and determined, and body made tough and fit from years spent running and fighting.

"Well there you are, Wreckin' Gal," Fowler exclaimed, grinning down at her; it seemed a little forced to her, "You sure were taking your sweet time; now get over there and let the Doc' do his thing." He lightly shoved Titania in the last Autobot's direction, and she stumbled slightly, sending her favourite uncle a glare over her shoulder, even as she ignored Ratchet's grumbling about being called "Doc'" by nearly every human being in the camp.

That, in itself, however, was mildly surprising; everyone thought he had stopped grumbling about it long ago. It had been assumed that it was because he just didn't have the strength to care anymore.

"All right, you know the routine," Ratchet stated, readying his scanner, Titania instantly went stock still as the beam of blue light washed over her.

Titania had once been told by the medic that he had learned everything he knew about the human body from her own grandmother, June, whom the teenager had never met, just like so many others she'd only ever heard about. When she was a child, though, her father had told her that it was June who held her first in this world, after having just delivered her, and that her grandmother had taken one look at her squirming form and chuckled, saying; "She's gonna have her mother's guts and her father's heart, I can see it already."

The thought always made Titania glow with pride, yet ache with longing to have met the woman whom had died the very next day, killed by Decepticons while trying to pull a wounded soldier to safety.

The blue beam flickered out of existence, and Ratchet hummed thoughtfully at the readings he was receiving; he looked up at her, and stated bluntly, "You have elevated stress levels, and appear to be suffering from exhaustion; nightmares again?"

Titania pursed her lips, gaze never wavering as she stared up at him; but she didn't answer, she never had to.

"Well, otherwise, you seem perfectly fine. No head-aches, dizziness, nausea, strange tingling?"

"I'm tingling right now," she informed him, clasping her hands behind her back and tilting slightly to try to see around Ratchet's large form, eyes narrowed suspiciously in the direction of the energon storage room. This close, she could feel the same invisible thrum of raw energy in the air that Kicker had been talking about, whispering to her from behind the pulsing presence that was Ratchet's spark. It was running through her body like a chill.

"Yes, well your sensitivity to the presence of energon is hardly what I was referring to."

"Oh, but there's an awful lot more energon in here than usual," she stated, and glanced over her shoulder to give Fowler a knowing look, "and I bet it has something to do with whatever crazy plan you guys were just talking about, right Uncle Bill?"

Fowler's mouth set in a grim line, and he glanced between Ratchet and Rafael. Silence reigned over them all.

"Oh, come on," Titania growled, folding her arms defiantly across her chest, "Seriously? Mankind is on its last leg and you guys are gonna do this?" she demanded, referring to their constant habit of trying to protect her when she clearly did not need protecting, not anymore; she'd helped kill too many Decepticons, she'd seen too many of her fellow Resisters incinerated, crushed, and blown up, to be seen as a fragile little girl any longer. And she would not stand for them thinking of her that way now. Not when it sounded like they had a plan to finally turn this war around. "Look, everyone else in this slagging camp has given up, they think the three of you are part of a dead legacy that needs to be buried and forgotten so they can focus on just getting by. I am the only one who wants to fight; I am the only Energon Sensitive willing to help you; besides yourselves, I am all you have."

Silence fell again, and she stood with her hands on her hips before them, waiting for them to make a choice, and knowing that she needed to be a part of whatever they were planning. She was sick of feeling helpless, she was sick with the knowledge that her world was nothing like what it once was, and she was absolutely sick of knowing that, if mankind died, if this war never turned around, then everything her father believed in, fought for, and died in the name of, was just as worthless and dead as the world she walked on every day.

Finally, Ratchet vented above her, the warm air from his systems gusting over her and rustling her hair.

"Very well; as we were telling Agent Fowler, if this succeeds, nothing else will matter," the old mech fixed her in his optics, the gravity in them causing her gut to do a painful flop as she realized this was going to be nothing like that failed attempt to call forth Autobot reinforcements from the depths of space so many years ago, or anything like the attempt to rig a shipment of energon to explode once inside the walls of New Kaon.

Rafael spoke; "After much discussion, we have come to the conclusion that, in order to save Earth's future," he looked up at her, and, for the first time since Bumblebee's death, she saw true life in his eyes, and a burning determination that made her feel like she could face down Unicron himself and know no fear.

"We must change its past."


Err, I get the feeling that those who aren't very fond of OCs might stop reading this now. I hope not. I'll admit I've never had much luck when introducing an OC to a story, but I hope this one is acceptable. Kicker himself (yes, based off of Kicker from Transformers: Energon) likely won't appear past the second chapter, except in flashbacks, and I hope that nobody plans on screaming at me for making Titania "Energon Sensitive" as it is, sort of, an actual ability from the Transformers universe. Furthermore, I've made certain that the ability is going to be just as much a drawback for her as it is an advantage. By no means will this OC be overpowered, and, in fact, she is going to make just as many mistakes and bad judgement calls as her parents did in their youth. So, I hope you all keep reading. For those who do plan on stop reading, please at least wait until the time-travel part to make your final decision, it should be either chapter two or three.