Astrotrain woke up, hugging the tarmac. It took a moment for him to realise he was in shuttle mode which was at least a relief to his dignity. Processing anything was particularly painful—how much had he drunk last night? They had only had the credits for two rounds… but there had been that guy… He had started buying them drinks and talking at them. And then Dead End had appeared with a bunch of credits suddenly, and there had been more drinking. He supposed it had been a good night. At the very least, the day had ended better than it had started.

He was in a town square of some sort, tipped slightly against a fountain, on the other side of which was an alien who was possibly unconscious, possibly dead. He could not tell the difference with organics. The only definite sign of life was some sort of maintenance worker, putting up posters on walls and lampposts. It paid no attention to the night's remnants, which Astrotrain found reassuring.

Tentatively, he checked his interior for passengers. Only two, but at least they were both from his Decepticon group: Blitzwing and Dead End. Both were stretched out, uninjured but offline. Like him, they must have overloaded on energon. He could not transform while they were in his hold, but he did not want to move until his processor had defragged anyway.

Idly, Astrotrain read the nearest poster. Then he re-read it and double-checked his facial recognition to be sure. It was a Wanted poster, announcing a bounty on Drag Strip's head.

"Uhh, guys…" he said over his internal speakers. Nobody moved.

"Where the slag is Octane?" Vortex suddenly came pounding across the square, and Astrotrain winced at having to switch focus to his exterior again. "You siphoning coward, where's my winnings?"

He was charging straight for the airlock, and in panic, Astrotrain opened it to avoid collision. This was followed by instant regret that he now had a rampaging Vortex in his interior.

Thankfully, Vortex seemed more interested in kicking Blitzwing and Dead End than Astrotrain's hardware. "Where is he? What's he done?"

His actions had more effect than Astrotrain's words had done. The two Decepticons' defence systems immediately reactivated them, and they groaned, their optics flickering.

"What the… cut it out!" Blitzwing flailed at Vortex, sending him staggering backwards. Only now did Astrotrain focus on the Combaticon enough to notice that he was badly damaged: two of his rotor blades were snapped, he had deep lacerations all over him, and sparks were visible in the wounds.

Dead End hauled himself outside to get away from the fighting. "Ugh, mornings."

Vortex boiled after him. "I'll show you what's wrong with mornings!"

"What's all the ruckus about?" Ramjet had appeared, but unlike the others, he looked to be fully calibrated and had even managed to get the damage from yesterday's battle repaired.

"Where have you been?" Astrotrain asked curiously, transforming now that Blitzwing had also stumbled out of his hold.

Ramjet's expression made it clear that was a stupid question. "A hotel. Where did you spend the night?"

Astrotrain was saved from having to answer because Vortex wanted the conversation to be about him. "Yeah, the hotel thing. That's what Octane and I did. I cleaned out the Pit last night. Trashed four of their Animalien whatsits."

Ramjet looked him up and down. "You do know you have to pay for your own repairs now? We've not got medics anymore."

"But Octane's got my money! I was gonna open a galactic credit account today, and I wake up and that gas guzzler's gone! He didn't even pay the hotel bill!"

Blitzwing stared at him. "You've spent twenty years on a team with Swindle. How were you that careless?"

Astrotrain agreed with him. "Octane's deserted the Decepticons about a dozen times already. He's never gonna stay where you leave him."

"He will when I'm done with him!"

Ramjet was already bored enough to read the posters. "Never mind Octane, how did Drag Strip run up a gambling debt of two million galactic credits? He didn't have any money to start gambling with!"

"He had a foolproof strategy of stealing chips from the other casino patrons," Dead End explained. "Tragically, he was thwarted by a run of good luck, when he built up enough winnings to get into the big leagues." He shook his head dolefully. "You can mug somebody for one hundred energon chips, but not for two million credits."

Blitzwing placed a hand over his optics and groaned. "Well, now we've established the moral of that story, was anybody keeping track of the Seekers?"

"Oh, I expect they're on Lanarq by now," Ramjet said, smugly.

"That was the guy who bought the third round of drinks," Astrotrain remembered. "He was from Lanarq."

Blitzwing rubbed his head, plainly having as much difficulty with his recall as Astrotrain. "Wasn't he hiring soldiers for their war?"

"Yeah, but did you get a load of the contract?" Fortunately for their strained memories, Ramjet came prepared with a copy of the relevant document. "Look at this… you supply your own weapons, they provide minimum fuel and shelter, no medical aid, and deserters will be executed. There's a cushy payout after twelve weeks, but you know what that's code for? Kamikaze mission at eleven weeks!"

"But… didn't the seekers sign this contract?" Astrotrain asked.

"Yeah, we're never seeing them again."

Astrotrain sat down on the side of the fountain with a sigh. When Blitzwing gave him a quizzical look, he shook his head. "Just missing those drones of Shockwave's. They were… predictable."

"Wait here," Blitzwing told him, and he walked off.

In view of current trends, Astrotrain would have preferred that they not split up, but he obeyed Blitzwing's request because apathy was easier.

Vortex was studying Drag Strip's poster. "So… if I catch Drag Strip, this guy is gonna give me twenty thousand credits?"

"If you catch Drag Strip, he's gonna tear you apart," Dead End told him. "You're a wreck."

"How come Ramjet got repairs?"

Ramjet preened beneath Vortex' resentful gaze. "Found myself a mob-boss wanting hired muscle for short-term work. Good pay, minimal commitment."

"Oh, a mob boss," sniffed Dead End. "That definitely won't come back to bite you."

"Let's see who has the last laugh, Dead End." Ramjet certainly knew how to pick a wager he couldn't lose. "Maybe I'll go looking for Drag Strip myself. He's stuck on this rock and he's bright yellow… Easy pickings."

"I saw those easy pickings first!"

"I'll see you in the skies, Vortex. Oh, wait… that's right. You're too beat up to transform even."

"I'll show you who's beat—" but Ramjet was already in jet mode, circling over their heads just to savour Vortex' impotence before he flew away. Vortex followed him in robot mode, but he could not hope to match the jet's pace.

Astrotrain and Dead End watched them go, then Dead End looked at the poster again. "I suppose I'll end up being tarred by association. In a matter of hours, a bounty hunter will most likely be torturing me for information I don't have."

Astrotrain said nothing.

"I guess I'll go into hiding for all the good it will do." Dead End sent Astrotrain a mournful look, but the triple-changer did not react. With a heavy sigh, the Stunticon plodded off.

On the other side of the fountain, the alien snuffled and then made a moaning sound. It had not been dead then. As Astrotrain watched, it got shakily onto its three feet and blinked around, tentacles wiggling in possible distress. Bulbous eyes turned to Astrotrain, and some gurgling sounds were emitted from an orifice in its head.

Astrotrain pointed his gun at it. "Don't. Just don't."

It got the message, and Astrotrain was blessed with seven minutes of solitude.

"Oh, good, you're still here." It was Blitzwing who ended the peace, but he was quiet and slow enough that Astrotrain could feel pleased to see him. "Come on."

Astrotrain obediently got up. "Where are we going?"

"A refueling station." Blitzwing set off through the streets of Sheol, leading them carefully around some puddles of unknown composition. "Octane was right about you being a taxi service… I found a guy who needs to get to the Orgenon Cluster fast, and he'll cover all fuel costs on top of our fee if we don't ask questions."

As Astrotrain did not want the answers, that seemed a fair deal to him. "What about the others?"

"Do you want to listen to Ramjet or Dead End anymore? Or be liable for Vortex' medical bills?"

"Good point." They continued walking, passing bodies being cleared out of gutters as Sheol began a new day. "So, we're civilians now, huh?"

"Guess so. You'll still have my back, right?"

"Yeah. You'll have mine?"

"Sure."

"Thanks, Blitzwing."

Author's Note:

I am overdue for a Decepticon story. Except what were the Decepticons doing? We know they end up all but starving to death on Chaar, but how did they get to that point after evacuating Cybertron during Unicron's battle? I spent a long time trying to figure out the more competent Decepticons (e.g. Cyclonus or Soundwave) in the interim… how they reacted, what schemes may have failed them along the way… And I completely failed to come up with anything.

Ultimately, I decided "bugger this," and assembled a ragtag band of failures. I kind of wanted to do Blitzwing and Astrotrain anyway, and I added in Octane because he's a character I've used before in my stories without ever really getting into his head. With the other Decepticons, I was playing with how individuals functioned outside of their subteam, but I went with all three of the Decepticon triple-changers. For whatever reason, I've always had a soft spot for them.

I didn't mean for the story to be quite as light-hearted as it ended up being. For both sides, I'd been considering the switch from military life to peace-time, thinking about a plot where a better-travelled transformer decides to take his more sheltered friends on an inter-galactic break / pub crawl. This seemed like a good place for the concept: an illustration of the Decepticons being a hot mess when they have no leader. It's still a long way to Chaar, but the downward spiral begins here.

That's why it's titled as a tragedy... I defy you to look at these Decepticons, and tell me they aren't a tragic bunch. Maybe not in a Hamlet way but tragic nonetheless. (On the other hand, that would have been a much better title for an Agatha Christie style murder mystery. Unfortunately for you, I can't do murder mystery. Sorry.)

For the record, the asteroid of Monacus featured in the season 2 episode, The Gambler. According to the script of that episode, Casino Row (a Vegas equivalent) is at one end and Sheol at the other. I've always wanted to do a Monacus story… Delighted I finally got round to it!

While Astrotrain and Blitzwing are the real protagonists of this story, Octane is the key to the plot. He always looks like he should have been part of a trio with Astrotrain and Blitzwing, just from his colour scheme, but his toy came out a year later and, crucially, on the other side of the Movie, which means that Octane's timeline is wildly different. The show never really addressed the difference that four-million-year gap would make in friendships, but it's something I've often wondered about. The way I see it, Octane and the others were probably tight once, but he's moved on and got used to watching his own back. He doesn't need them anymore.

While Octane is a civilian at heart by this point, the rest of the Decepticons are soldiers, and if we learned one thing from Triple Takeover, it's that Astrotrain and Blitzwing don't have a good grasp on the realities of self-direction. It should be noted that Blitzwing does attempt to take over leadership again in the Movie, but by Five Faces of Darkness he just seems depressed, and I've started that depression here. I wanted to explore a scenario where nobody steps up to leadership.

The other Decepticons are just filling in a spectrum from Octane's seasoned traveller to the innocence of some generic seekers who have never before left the planet. Ion Storm is the retroactive name for one of the Rainmakers in Divide and Conquer. Star Hopper is just me going back to my old tradition of stealing a name from a My Little Pony—her colour scheme sort of matches Onslaught's, so why not? For the record, the Onslaught-coloured seeker appears briefly in Five Faces of Darkness, so despite Ramjet's prediction, at least some of the seekers will survive their contract with Lanarq.

(More cartoon obscura: Lanarq and Xetaxxis are the two planets at war in The Quintesson Journal. In that episode, the Xetaxxans vaguely resemble Star Wars Sand People, with cloaks and protruding optics. In The Gambler, an alien working at Gyconi's Pit is wearing a hooded cloak with mechanical optics protruding from its shadowed face. I decided that this clearly makes it a retroactive Xetaxxan, and as it doesn't seem to suffer any fate in the episode, I have assumed it took over the arena after Gyconi fled and Slizardo ran off with Devcon.)

In the cartoon, Megatron always seemed to dispatch a couple of seekers or coneheads for whatever mission was going, so when I wanted somebody else with some inter-galactic experience as a bit of a foil for Octane, I looked at the coneheads (the main trio of seekers being dead) and picked Ramjet almost at random. I did consider using Swindle, but that seemed a little too on the nose. Ramjet featured in The Gambler and even recognised Devcon as a bounty hunter, so he's situated towards Octane's end of the spectrum, though he's not as savvy as he thinks he is—he gets through this story OK, but Dead End's comment about the mob boss is intended to show that he's going to bite off more than he can chew sooner or later.

Blitzwing and Astrotrain are middle of the spectrum, and the combiners fall between them and the seekers. I figured the Constructicons were probably too competent to get split up in the evacuation, while the Combaticons and Stunticons are much more dysfunctional as a team. I've never done Stunticons before, but Dead End is an easy (lazy) supporting cast choice, and then after dithering, I went with Drag Strip—an ego seemed like good fodder for the casinos. I have written Combaticons before, but I did the least with Vortex, so I played with him a little more here.

None of this made for profound insight, but it was fun. I think this is also the first time I've written an exclusively Decepticon story, so there's a milestone! It seems to have broken the ice anyway. I've now got thoughts for a couple more Decepticon post-movie plots, which will hopefully have more depth to them.