Author's Note: The bulk of this story is written as a prequel to Transformers: Prime, with only the prologue and epilogue taking place at the beginning of Robots in Disguise. I therefore decline to think of it as a crossover story and have instead categorized it as a Transformers: Prime story.
This story is completely written. I will be uploading one chapter per day, with the exceptions of the prologue and chapter one, and the final chapter and epilogue, which will be posted the same day as each other. Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy the story.
"I'M ON PROBATION! I'M ON PROBATION! I'M ON PROBATION!"
It seemed to Strongarm like the overgrown Decepticon should have gotten tired of trundling around the junkyard, yelling that particular declaration to whoever would listen to him. In point of fact, she wasn't convinced the big lummox even knew what that word meant.
Truth be told, Strongarm herself wasn't so sure. The Lieutenant had clearly decided that Grimlock was not to be locked away as the other Decepticons they'd captured would be, but surely Bumblebee didn't really intend for Grimlock to shamble around unsupervised or, even worse, actually work with the team. It was bad enough they had Sideswipe, but a Decepticon too?
She couldn't believe it.
While the clumsy metal facsimile of a dinosaur crashed through the junkyard to the immense dismay of Denny, sing-yelling his triumph well past the point of endurance, Strongarm looked around and realized that Bumblebee seemed to have disappeared from the scene after helping Fixit get some equipment in order. Sideswipe, on the other hand…
"Be careful with that!" Fixit admonished frantically as Sideswipe dropped an armload of equipment on the orange minicon. "Use a delph-ELF-" Fixit banged on his chest, "Shelf!"
Oh yeah. Sideswipe was going to be a monumental help. Strongarm rolled her eyes and sighed. She figured she should probably go try and ride herd on the criminal, but truthfully she was more worried at the moment about the ongoing liberty of Grimlock, and what that implied.
A quick look around said that the Lieutenant had left the junkyard, but Strongarm didn't expect he would go far, and she was right. Just a few yards beyond what passed for a fence, she found the Lieutenant on a hill with a view of Crown City on the other side of the river.
Strongarm started to speak, but then she noticed a rather faraway look in Bumblebee's eyes as he stood with his left hand raised and tucked under his chin while he gripped that forearm absently with the right. She'd seen that look on him a couple of times before, and found it to be rather incongruous with the way he normally acted. The expression, and the behavior that accompanied it, seemed to come from another time and place, maybe another bot altogether.
"I like that they still have cities like that one," Bumblebee mused, indicating he had heard Strongarm join him, even though she hadn't said anything and he hadn't looked her way. "Straight, tall buildings, clean streets. It's good."
Strongarm glanced sidelong at Crown City. It looked like any other city to her, but on a tiny scale because it had been built for humans instead of Cybertronians. She decided to say as much.
"Why wouldn't that? There's hundreds just like it on Cybertron."
"Yeah," Bumblebee acknowledged, seeming to realize he was holding his arm strangely and consciously letting both hands drop to his sides. "But it's still good."
"Okay..." Strongarm agreed, deciding this was one of the times her Lieutenant was going to be quirky for reasons known only to himself, and that she'd be best of just leaving that where it lay.
They were silent for a bit, with Strongarm not knowing what else to say, or how to broach the subject that troubled her. The Lieutenant picked up on it and addressed it himself.
"You wanted me for something?" Bumblebee asked, briefly tearing his gaze from the city to look at Strongarm, before looking back as if he couldn't get enough of the sight for reasons completely lost on Strongarm.
"Oh. Yes. Yes, sir," Strongarm straightened up. "Lieutenant… I'm sure you know what you're doing, with Grimlock, I mean. But… well, I'm just not sure I could ever fully trust a former Decepticon and work alongside them every day."
Bumblebee didn't appear at all surprised by this, but Strongarm was certainly startled to see a smile cross his features that looked like she'd said something he found very funny. He was too polite to laugh about whatever it was, but the thought definitely came to mind.
Instead, he sighed, "I'm afraid you already do."
"What?" Strongarm was brought up short, then she believed she had it. "You mean Sideswipe? But you said-"
"No," Bumblebee replied turning from the city to face Strongarm directly. "Me."
"You?" Strongarm exclaimed, then laughed. "Oh, you had me there for a minute."
But Bumblebee didn't laugh, just tilted his head slightly, in that way he did when he was being patient when it was obviously against his base nature to be so.
Strongarm began to suspect he was being serious, but she could not reconcile such a bizarre notion with what she knew of his history. And she was sure she knew all of it, at least all the major events. The Great War was a required course, and Bumblebee had been one of its key participants on numerous occasions. He had been the youngest Autobot in the army, but his long and exemplary service was much more than a mere footnote in history… or at least it was for anyone who'd really been paying attention. Strongarm had shared classes with bots who thought of that war as something in the past, which belonged in the dustbin of history to be best left forgotten, as it could have no bearing on the present. Fighting over a dying world? It was an incomprehensible idea, when Cybertron was very much alive all around them, with the scars of the war already paved over and deeply buried. Bumblebee himself was a relic from that time, according to them, but Strongarm had always known better.
If they didn't learn about the past, how were they supposed to ensure that it never happened again? And, if they didn't know who the survivors of that war were and which side they had fought on and how they had conducted themselves, how were any of them to know who to follow now?
But she'd never read anything about Bumblebee as a former 'Con. In fact, allegiance shifts had been rare in the records, and were usually a byproduct of shifting winds more than anything. Some bots seemed to lack any real convictions of their own and just joined whichever side was winning at the time. Bumblebee had never been one of them. She knew that much.
"You were never a Decepticon," Strongarm declared firmly.
"Was," Bumblebee replied impassively.
"I don't believe it," Strongarm insisted.
"Are you accusing me of lying, Strongarm?" Bumblebee asked with mock indignation.
Realizing that would be a mistake, Strongarm quickly backpedaled, "No, sir. I'm not. It's just that… well… how?"
"That," Bumblebee informed her slowly, "is a long story."
"Well, unless we get an alert from Fixit or Grimlock burns down that scrapheap the humans are living in, I think we have some time," Strongarm ventured hopefully.
A lot of bots had made documentaries, or tried to, of the Great War for Cybertron. But its survivors were very often reticent to discuss it. Some were just plain grumpy or close-mouthed. Others clearly found it painful. Many more simply and clearly just wanted to put the horrors of that war behind them. Unfortunately, in the absence of those raw, firsthand accounts, it was impossible to even begin drawing a clear picture about how the war had come to be, and what it had been like to be in it.
Without that vital insight, the war became easy to dismiss as irrelevant. If even those who'd been there didn't want to talk about it, why should anyone else? But Strongarm wanted to know. She wanted to understand. She hadn't been there, but she felt that it mattered, very much, where she had come from. She, and all those of her generation, had come from that war, because they had come online after it.
If not for those who had sacrificed so much and fought so hard, Cybertron would still be a dead husk, and she would not even be alive now. The soldiers of that war were, well, not parents in the way the humans seemed to have it, but they were nonetheless responsible for her creation. Responsible because of the war they'd fought, and finally won. She needed to understand it, to know where she'd come from, and to have any idea as to where she was going. And not just herself as an individual, but also as part of the Cybertronian species.
Bumblebee, it seemed, understood this. After a minute or so of quiet deliberation, he began, somewhat haltingly at first, but gaining momentum as he went on.
"I don't remember much about my first conscious moments, but I do remember that I loved to go fast. It was all I knew how to do, all I ever wanted to do, it was… who I was. Back then, I didn't know what a Decepticon or an Autobot was. Not really. All I knew was that a lot of Cybertronians seemed to spend a lot of time fighting, and being upset with anyone who wasn't doing that. That didn't seem like much fun. Not to me, or any of the last Cybertronians to be brought online before our planet died. We didn't know anything, and as long as nobody was bothering us, we didn't really want to either. We paid a heavy price for our willful ignorance."
He stopped, letting out a weary sigh which made him sound much older than his years.
"We?" Strongarm prompted, when it seemed the Lieutenant had stalled out.
Bumblebee jerked slightly. "Right. Well, in those days, if you weren't an Autobot or a Decepticon, you were probably a scavenger. That's what I was, even if I didn't have a name for it at first. Me and a lot of others, most of whom didn't survive very long. But there was one bot… he had what it took to survive, even then. His name was Knock Out, and we ran together-"
"Knock Out?" Strongarm interrupted, now certain Bumblebee was pulling her leg. "You can't mean the Knock Out. The Decepticon surgeon Knock Out."
"That's exactly who I mean," Bumblebee replied. "We were friends once. Or… well, as close to that as either of us understood the concept. Mostly… we shared a love for speed. It was all we knew, all we wanted to know… until one day…"