Work Text:
It had been…difficult to adjust after Bumblebee left for his “secret mission.”
Thundercracker, for all that he’d spent countless millennia griping about not having a klik to himself, had grown used to having other mechs around. Private space was a premium saved for select commanders during the war, and his position as an elite trine member only usually afforded him less co-habitants than the rest of the barracks. And even before Cybertron ripped itself spectacularly apart, the places he’d frequented - the academy, Vos - he was rarely far from other students or fliers, and never for long.
But the physical privacy was nothing compared to the long cycles of endless quiet.
Being part of an army and, even more so, being trined with two insufferably chatty other seekers, Thundercracker had long since grown accustomed to a constant stream of comms, pings, and messages. There was always a briefing to attend, a rant to tune out, or an incredibly stupid plan to try and talk Skywarp out of. More than he’d like to admit, there were also dressing downs to follow the backfire of said stupid plan, which he’d told her was stupid.
Then, after defecting, it was an endless loop of updates, encrypted transmissions, and clandestine meetings. He wasn’t officially on the G.H.O.S.T radar, was fairly certain his files listed him as AWOL, but he’d spent more joors than he cared to count relaying information and chatter to Megatron and Lieutenant Malto in the last pitiful cycles of the war. The war that only truly began to wind down after Starscream had been apprehended and locked away someplace.
Thundercracker didn’t like thinking too hard about how much of a hand he had in that. Or the way it twisted his spark to betray his trine more than turning his back on the rest of the Decepticon army. Thankfully, he’d spent a long time without an opportunity to dwell too hard on it.
And at the end of it all, he’d been dropped into hiding with an Autobot who decided very quickly that if they were going to be forced to hab together, Thundercracker was going to be bullied into at least the bare minimum level of camaraderie. He had, of course, been opposed, loudly and vehemently to being friendly with an Autobot at first. And Bumblebee no less. Sure it could have been worse – he learned at one point that Prowl’s name had been thrown around once or twice in the “what to do with Thundercracker” conversation, and he was fairly certain one of them would be dead by now if that had come to pass. Probably him. But that didn’t mean he’d been happy to be saddled with the overeager, overly chatty “hero.”
But enough cycles and a fluffy dog later, and Thundercracker had, as always, adjusted. Seekers were meant to be in trines, after all, even if this one was a bit unusual. Honestly, it hadn’t been much different from rooming with Skywarp.
Bumblebee hated it when he pointed that out, but he had lived with them both – he was right.
And then Bumblebee had finally gotten the call he’d been waiting for: Optimus Prime needed him back in the field.
Genuinely, Thundercracker had been happy for him. Bumblebee had been gunning for a mission that wasn’t laying low and taking Buster out for drives for as long as they’d been in hiding together. And while Thundercracker himself had no desire to go pede to pede with his old comrades, he knew how badly it had grated on Bee to sit around and watch television while his teammates and friends were still working and fighting.
And after a few cycles of peace and quiet and no yellow Autobot underpede, Thundercracker had started going well and fully out of his processor.
In embarrassingly short order, the low spinning of his own turbines in the otherwise silent mill had begun to grate against his audials. The blank spot on his HUD where notifications usually appeared seemed to mock him. And when he tabbed through his comms list, the sheer number of blocked and blacklisted frequencies made something churn in his tanks and ping upsettingly in his emotional subroutines.
He learned the hard way that there were only so many times Buster would tolerate being woken out of a nap to be talked at before she found a spot too small for him to reach her through for some privacy. And his editor had gently but firmly informed him, after the fourth or fifth call in two cycles, that they would extend his deadline and no, no need to reach back out until he was ready to submit, they could go over everything together then.
After how many millions of years, he’d finally gotten the peace and quiet he’d always complained about missing.
And he hated it.
But nobody else needed to know that.
“Do any of you ever spend any time at home anymore? Because it certainly feels like you’re always here,” he groused, looking up from the script he was supposed to be working on but had, in fact, simply been staring at for the last several joors.
The Maltos, letting themselves into the mill, were unrepentant and Bumblebee had the sort of knowing smirk on his faceplates that Thundercracker simply chose to ignore.
“There’s a dog here! Why would we wanna be at home?” Mo said, already kneeling down to pet Buster when she ran up to greet them.
Thundercracker had to admit she had a point.
“Besides, you write for work! You can do that anytime!” Thrash pointed out.
Thundercracker agreed less with that point. He did, however, turn away from his desk – a messily cobbled together arrangement of scrap metal that he and Bumblebee had spent more cycles than he cared to admit constructing. That it was still standing and still doing the job they’d built it for was something of a miracle.
And with all the tact of the sparkling she was, Twitch looked up from where she’d been cooing over Buster and said, “What’s that on your face?”
Thundercracker cycled his optics.
“What?”
“Yeah, what is that on your face?” Bumblebee echoed, optic ridges raised high towards his helm and amusement pulling at his expression.
Thundercracker frowned, confused, and automatically lifted a hand towards his face. When he realized what they were staring at, however, he rolled his optics. It only took a small tug to break the magnetic field keeping them secured to the ridge of his olfactory sensor, and he reached up to let them magnetize to the top of his helm instead.
Robby snickered. “Are those glasses?”
“Don’t the majority of humans require visual correction?” Thundercracker pointed out. He glanced around at the gathered sparklings when more of them laughed, eventually looking towards Bumblebee. “I don’t understand what’s so funny…”
Bumblebee, unsurprisingly, looked to be on the side of the younglings. “Yeah, plenty of humans wear glasses, but…”
“But you’re a giant robot!” Mo said, throwing her arms out for emphasis. “Don’t you guys have, like, super vision or something?”
“Yeah! And even if you couldn’t see that great, can’t you fix it?” Robby asked, clearly trying to tap down on his own amusement, but Thundercracker saw his stare drift up towards the top of his helm, and the human was snickering again.
Thundercracker ex-vented in a huff. “I strained my optics and shorted something a bit ago that my self-repair hasn’t been able to fix. No serious damage, but it’s been impacting my focal length adjustments. Which I need to work,” pointed out, waving a hand at his desk for emphasis of his own.
Bumblebee stepped carefully around the gathered humans and sparklings and leaned in to get a better look at the glasses magnetized to his helm. “And Ratchet gave you glasses for that?”
This time, Thundercracker laughed and the bass sent a little tremor through the floor and his desk. “You think I left hiding to go see the Hatchet over some optic strain? I got these from Megatron.”
“Who’s the Hatchet?” Jawbreaker asked, optics spinning wide and round.
“And who is Ratchet?” Nightshade piped up, turning away from their curious perusal of his framed, alternate comic covers.
Bumblebee waved both of their questions off before Thundercacker could answer. “No, wait, wait, wait!” he said, clapping his hands on Thundercracker’s shoulder pauldrons. “What do you mean you got them from Megatron?”
Thundercracker squinted at him. “...I mean he brought them to me? I mentioned the strain in a check-in, and the next time he came by, he had them. I figured he’d been to see Screamer and brought me one of his ‘I feel guilty’ gifts. He does that sometimes.”
One of the humans echoed the name “Screamer” between themselves, but Bumblebee shook him by the shoulders, and Thundercracker’s wings hitched up in surprise.
“That…that’s a lot, but that’s not what I meant!” Bumblebee said, and he was visibly fighting back a grin. “Why does Megatron have glasses for you?”
Thundercracker cycled his optics. “Because he wears them, too. He said they helped…ah, you’re laughing again.”
And it wasn’t just Bumblebee. Apparently the thought of Megatron in vision correcting glass was enough to amuse most of the gathered Maltos as well. And, unwilling to be left out, Buster barked a few times and ran around the group until Hashtag obligingly knelt to give her some dedicated attention.
“Oh, come on, TC! It’s funny!” Bumblebee insisted. “Have you seen him in them?”
“No. But I’m sure it’s not nearly as amusing as you all think it is.”
“No, I think Bee is right about this,” Robby said, and he grinned when Thundercracker fitted him with an unconvinced stare. “Seriously! Just think about it! Especially the Megatron in your comics?”
Mo giggled. “Yeah! Big bad Decepticon leader pulling out his teeny tiny lil reading glasses when you show him a text!”
Thundercracker pressed his lips together to keep a smile off of them, but he knew he wasn’t successful when Thrash crowed at his siblings’ side. “See! You get it!”
“I…see your point,” he admitted, chuckling despite himself. “But we’re definitely having a lesson on chronic wear and code degradation soon.”
Having gotten himself more or less back together after his amused fit, Bumblebee cocked his head, engine humming curiously. “What I don’t get is why Megatron would still be using them. Did he permanently fry something? ”
Thundercracker shrugged his wings. “I think it’s just chronic overtaxing. He used to get regular tune ups for them,” he said before letting out a small, amused huff. “Starscream would start resizing the glyphs in all our reports when he realized he was overdue for one.”
He certainly didn’t approve of his trinemates purposefully making a nuisance of themselves, and more often than not he tried to at least discourage it if he couldn’t outright stop them. But the glyph resizing, while it always led to a shouting match between Megatron and their trine leader, it also always led to Megatron getting the tune up, so…
He still wondered how much of that was purposeful manipulation and how much of it was simply Starscream taking advantage of a recurring opportunity to get under Megatron’s plating.
“Did he really?” Bumblebee asked, laughing when Thundercracker nodded. “That’s amazing! Still…I guess I get why you wouldn’t wanna risk coming out of hiding for something like that, but Megatron is way closer to Ratchet. Seems like it would be easy enough to get the tune ups, right?”
Thundercracker, knowing well enough that Megatron wouldn’t let the Autobot medic anywhere near his optics for as long as he could avoid it, made a very casual, incredibly noncommittal sound and turned back to his unfinished script with a loose shrug.
He had, unfortunately, forgotten what it was like to live with Bumblebee and his slagging stealth mods, so he startled when the scout was suddenly at his wing with nary a noise or curious EM field to announce him. He was, however, all but visibly vibrating, optics glowing.
“TC….TC why hasn’t Megatron gotten it fixed?”
“I am certain I wouldn’t know,” he said slowly, pulling his wings in closer to his backstruts.
“Yes you do. Come on, you can say it!”
Behind the buzzing scout, the sparklings were watching with equal parts amusement and confusion.
“Did they explain who Ratchet is?” Jawbreaker asked.
“He was in the comics, right?” Twitch said, glancing down at Robby and Mo, who nodded.
“He’s a medic!” Mo explained, to some soft “oooh”-ing from the sparklings. It was the same kind of noise Skywarp made when someone finished explaining something she hadn’t been paying a byte of attention to, and it was usually followed by him having to re-explain all the same information. It was 50/50 on if he got the same “oooh” in response.
Thundercracker lifted an optic ridge. “Bumblebee. Have the sparklings not met Ratchet?”
Bumblebee paused, glancing automatically back at the younglings – Terrans, Thundercracker reminded himself. “Uh….no.”
Thundercracker leaned in a little, stretching his wings again. “Does he know about them?”
“That,” Bumblebee said, rocking back on the heels of his pedes and, subsequently, a bit further out of Thundercracker’s space. And the growing amusement in his EM field. “Is between Optimus and Megatron. I’m still technically in hiding too, you know! No idea who’s getting what info.”
“Right,” Thundercracker agreed, nodding along. “You think that line of defense is going to work when he finds out, or…?”
Bumblebee groaned and his doorwings twitched. “It might…if he was more focused on yelling at someone else?”
“Sure. Keep telling yourself that.”
Bumblebee scoffed and readjusted his form into something less obviously stressed by that thought, crossing his arms over his chassis. “Okay, fine, we’re all kinda scared of Ratchet, you got me there. But you’ve been hanging out with Knock Out! Why not ask him to do it?”
Thundercracker shuddered straight out to his wing tips. “Because I don’t want to come back online to unauthorized mods and a new paint job?” he said before waving a hand. “Besides, I haven’t actually seen Knock Out. We’ve just commed a few times.”
“Wait, Knock Out? As in the Decepticon you guys were talking about the night Buster went missing?” Robby cut in, frowning.
Jawbreaker raised his hand. “Is Hatchet also a Decepitcon? That sounds like a Decepticon name.”
Thundercracker looked back over the group of Terrans and humans and ex-vented as he climbed onto his pedes. “Okay, into the rec room. Might as well make a personnel class out of this.”
The “rec room” was just a section of the mill a bit away from his makeshift office area, but it boasted a few televisions, more than one dog bed, and several couches of Cybertronian size that he and Bumblebee had constructed out of an assortment of reclaimed mattresses, rubber wheels, and bits from nearby junkyards. He thought they did a better job with them than the desk, to be honest.
And, after it became apparent the Maltos would be visiting with enough frequency to warrant it, they’d added some human and Terran sized pieces of furniture as well. Thundercracker hadn’t missed the extra bits that kept turning up in his home, either – human sized pillows, tiny fabric blankets, even a bundle of soft plastic he’d been informed was full of “beans.”
Overall, the look was garish. None of the furniture matched, half of it had been shoddily self-constructed, and the space itself showed all of the wear of metals and stone composite left unattended for too long on an organic planet.
Even so, there was a part of Thundercracker that looked at the varying sized furniture and watched the humans and Terrans settle into their favorite spots - or bicker over favorite spots - and it made his spark pulse warmly. His processor helpfully unpacked several old memory files to support the emotional relay.
–sharing a corner in the crowded academy library with the only other seeker he’d seen in the city, tucked wing to wing and helm to helm over a data pad, and feeling the first, tentative whisper of trine in his spark–
–snagging a table at a tourist-heavy bar on Vos where an overcharged grounder who barely came up to his cockpit spilled engex on his pedes and tried to tempt him into her berth, his trinemates cackling somewhere just behind him–
–nursing a cube of ration grade energon in the rec room and barely keeping his optics online despite the general din of off-duty Cons trying to make the most of a few joors of downtime. He wasn’t going to slip into recharge with Starscream and Skywarp jostling him from either side while they bickered with Swindle, but he was tired enough that he didn’t really mind the shifting and rocking. He should speak up before they got talked into an extra shift or out of a handful of shanix, but he wasn’t even sure what they were talking about.
On his left, Starscream screeched in protest to…something. And on his right, Skywarp scoffed and shook him by the thigh.
“-way that’s true! Right, TC?”
He looked up from his cube, glancing dumbly between his trinemates. What was he agreeing to?
Starscream’s turbines whined in annoyance. “Are you even listening, Thundercracker–”
“Thundercracker?”
He reset his optics, and it took a moment for him to shake off the memory relay and refocus on his visual feed. Bumblebee was waving a hand from one of the larger couches, and he focused on the movement until the rest of his processor caught up.
“Sorry, what?” he asked, resetting his vocalizer when it nearly tripped.
“I said you okay? Looked like you spaced out for a second there.”
Buster was pawing at his pede, so he gratefully took the excuse to kneel down and focus on picking her up, letting her climb onto his shoulder. “I’m fine,” he insisted, smiling in the face of Bumblebee’s clearly unconvinced expression and dismissing the scout’s ping to his comms. “So, we were starting with Ratchet?”
“He is an Autobot doctor, right?” Mo said.
Thundercracker nodded. “He is.”
“Then who is this fearsome Hatchet?” Nightshade asked, perched next to Jawbreaker with their knees folded close to their chassis and their arms looped around them. They were clearly comfortable, but it made Thundercracker’s considerably older joints ache to consider holding a position like that for long. Primus, what he wouldn’t give for a soak in an oil bath. Or even just access to a properly hot solvent spray.
He never thought he’d miss the shared washracks on the Nemesis, but here they were.
“That’s…just a nickname for Ratchet,” Bumblebee supplied. “Probably not one you’d wanna use in front of him, though.”
Robby frowned from the plastic bag full of beans. “Because it’s a mean one?”
“Because Chief Medical Officer Ratchet has a temper,” Thundercracker said. “Didn’t matter if you were an Autobot or Decepticon, everyone knew that.”
“Is he a bad guy…?” Jawbreaker asked, optics wide and voice small.
“He’s just an intense mech,” Thundercracker said.
Bumblebee made a considering sound before turning to the gathered younglings with a triumphant rev. “You know when you do something you know you probably shouldn’t be doing and your mom catches you?”
Thundercracker watched with no small amount of amusement when both humans and all of the Terrans shuddered and nodded.
“That’s what Ratchet can be like.”
“I think I get why Megatron wouldn’t wanna go see him,” Thrash murmured to Twitch, who nodded emphatically in agreement. Thundercracker certainly wasn’t as close to Ranger Malto – Dorothy, she’d asked to be called Dorothy – as Megatron or even Bumblebee, but he could see the similarities.
“Is Knock Out also a medic?” Hashtag asked from her place on the floor between couches, looking curiously up at Thundercracker through her visor.
“He is. Or, well, he was during the war. I doubt he’s treating many mechs outside of himself and Breakdown right now.”
“Breakdown?” Robby repeated, sitting up in his bean filled seat. “Another Decepticon?”
Thundercracker ex-vented, but he was good at maintaining his patience and managing his irritation. He had endless practice on that front. “Knock Out and Breakdown aren’t Decepticons anymore. They deserted like I did.”
“You’re sure about that, TC?” Bumblebee asked, frowning.
“We found out about Megatron defecting and they were gone before the next cycle. Frankly, I think they’d just been looking for the right excuse to do it. Or at least Breakdown was.”
“Did they help catch other Decepticons like you did?” Twitch asked, and Thundercracker didn’t wince, but it was a near thing. He couldn’t quite keep his ailerons from twitching though, and on his shoulder, Buster lifted her head to lick the side of his helm.
He assumed Dorothy had told them some of the work they did together at the end of the war to explain how they knew each other, but hearing it still made the spot behind his cockpit itch. “...No. Or at least, not that I know of. I think they both just wanted to be done with it and rebuild a life with their conjunx.”
Confusion rippled over the room.
“What’s Con Junk?” Thrash asked. “Is that like…their stuff? That they took with them?”
Despite himself, Thundercracker laughed, and Bumblebee followed suit. It was still hard to properly comprehend that these were honest to Primus sparklings, and not fully Cybertronian ones at that. That for all their similarities, they only knew what they did of Cybertron and their culture from second hand accounts. It was a strange, bittersweet thing, like mixing too much dolomite powder into good engex.
“Conjunx,” he corrected once he’d stopped laughing. “Conjunx Endura are similar to human, ah,” he hesitated, trying to align the glyph to the right word in his English vocabulary banks. Honestly, for as much time as he spent writing about them, he should be better about remembering human rituals like this.
“Like Dorothy and Alex!” Bumblebee supplied.
“Wait, like they’re married?” Robby said, eyes going wide. “You can do that?”
“Decepticons can do that?” Mo added, looking equally astonished.
Thundercracker rolled his optics. “Yes, shocking as it is, Decepticons were just as capable of caring about other mechs as Autobots are. We weren’t war drones, you know.”
A quiet filtered over the room that was distinctly guilty in tone – Thundercracker had a lot of experience with that type of quiet as well – and he ex-vented again. Pushing aside his temper, he walked over and sat down next to Bumblebee, joining the group rather than lecturing to it. Getting defensive to a group of children and sparklings who had no way of knowing what things were like in the early days was hardly fair when he himself struggled to recall them half the time.
“I know that especially by the time we reached Earth, it seemed to be just…good mechs versus bad mechs. And I don’t think that’s an entirely unfair reading on things, either,” he added, reaching up to help Buster down off his shoulder and onto the ground so she could make her rounds between the Terrans and humans for pets.
Bumblebee shifted beside him and Thundercracker felt his EM field reach out against his, a light brush of support and trust, a reminder that he didn’t see him in that hard binary. Not anymore at least. He smiled and nudged back calm and reassurance of his own.
“It’s a lot more complicated than that, though. How things started, why they started, how we got here…it’s a very long story, and everybody remembers it differently. A lot of us lived it differently,” he explained, staring down at his own hands for a moment before lifting his optics again and hiking his wings.
“But it’s important to me that you understand that all of us, Decepticons and Autobots, are just as capable of loving someone as we are of hurting someone. Nobody comes out the other side of a war as long as ours without energon on their hands. We all have friends, we all have mechs we can’t stand to be in the same room with, and some of us have conjunxes. Your badge didn’t change any of that.”
It was quiet again for a moment but felt, at least, less fraught. They were all so young that Thundercracker couldn’t fault any of them for not fully understanding. And frankly, he hoped they never would. Not the way he and Bumblebee did. Eventually, it was Nightshade who reached over and laid their hand over his.
“We understand,” they insisted, and a series of murmurs and nods made it clear they were speaking for the group. “And we’re sorry for implying otherwise.”
Thundercracker turned his hand over and squeezed theirs lightly. As far as he could tell, the Terrans didn’t have the same sort of EM field the rest of them did, instead using whatever emotional connection that had been hardcoded between themselves and the human Malto children. Even so, he stretched his own out, pressing out forgiveness and understanding in case some part of them might sense it.
“I know, it’s all right,” he added verbally, and the tension bleeding out of the group was all but a physical thing.
“When you said Screamer before,” Mo said, speaking carefully, clearly afraid to offend him again. Thundercracker forced his wings into a more relaxed position and nodded, encouraging her to finish. “You meant Starscream, right?”
“I did.”
“Did you know him before the war?”
Thundercracker cycled his optics, surprised. “...I did. He, Skywarp and I were trined before the war.”
Twitch leaned closer. “What’s a trine?”
“You know, I’m interested in this one, too,” Bumblebee said, leaning back on the couch with a grin. “It’s a Seeker thing, right?”
“It is a Seeker thing,” he agreed, smiling despite himself. “There are…a lot of different kinds of bonds between Cybertronians. We talked about conjunxes, but there’s also amica bonds and gestalt bonds, for example. Seekers form trines, which are their own kind of bond.”
“Really? That’s so cool! I want a bond!” Hashtag said to enthusiastic agreement from her siblings.
“Me too! I can fly, does that mean I can have a trine?” Twitch asked, flicking her wings for emphasis.
Thrash’s engine turned over with an unhappy thrum. “What? No fair if Twitch gets one! What about us?!”
“Is Seeker a vehicle mode we can choose to adapt?” Nightshade asked, looking over when Jawbreaker groaned.
“I’m probably too big to fly..”
“Jawbreaker,” Robby laughed, “Megatron can fly and he’s way bigger than you! I don’t think that has anything to do with it.”
“Hey, relax!” Bumblebee said, laughing himself as he leaned over obligingly to pet Buster when she sat firmly against the side of his leg. “Just because there are a lot of different kinds of bonds doesn’t mean everybody has one. I don’t, for example!”
Mo clicked her tongue sadly. “Sorry, Bumblebee. I’ll trine with you if you want!”
Thundercracker reset his vocalizer to hide a laugh of his own before waving the sparklings’ attention back. “I think the seven of you already have a bond,” he said, pointing to the sleeves Mo and Robby wore.
“Whoa…yeah, you’re right!” Robby agreed, holding his up and grinning when it flashed.
“Yes! We have a bond!” Twitch cheered, shooting off the ground a few feet in her excitement before hovering there and looking curiously back to Thundercracker. “Is your trine bond like ours?”
He considered the question, turbines humming softly. “Yes and no. I only know as much about yours as you all have told me, so I’m sure it’s not exactly the same. Seekers…gravitate to groups of three, it’s part of our basic coding. We balance each other out. And you can feel your trinemates here,” he said, lifting a hand to the glass on his chest.
“In your cockpit?” Mo asked incredulously.
“In his spark,” Bumblebee corrected gently. “Right?”
Thundercracker nodded. And even with all three points of the bond squeezed shut, over the narrow, brittle lines of it, if he reached for them he could still just make out the two balancing points he was tethered between. They were dim, hardly recognizable in the dark, but they were there, still lit, and that was…enough. More than he deserved.
“We don’t relay emotions as clearly over it as you all do with each other. But it’s more like…knowing someone is there when you need them,” he said, ex-venting softly. “Well, usually.”
He could feel Bumblebee’s field nudging carefully against his, wanting to offer comfort but uncertain if it was welcome. And a few years ago, it wouldn’t have been. But regardless of how he’d felt at the start of this, he could admit now that he was happy, grateful even, to have Bumblebee around. He brushed back, thankful, but knowing it meant sharing the melancholy and guilt underneath.
“What were Starscream and Skywarp like before the war?” Bumblebee asked.
Thundercracker cycled his optics in surprise and looked over at him. It wasn’t a new conversation for them, after all. They’d traded plenty of stories in their time as reluctant and eventually comfortable roommates. He pinged a questioning glyph and made a face when it was summarily dismissed. Probably for ignoring his hail earlier.
He didn’t have a chance to ping him again.
“Oh, yeah! How did you guys meet?” Mo asked, tugging a large-by-human-standards pillow into her lap.
“Has Skywarp always been able to do that cool teleporting thing she does?” Hashtag asked, a dreamy quality to her voice that almost made Thundercracker laugh.
“What about Nova Storm?” Thrash asked, scooting closer. “Is she part of your trine?”
Bumblebee’s field radiated a level of smugness that Thundercracker could do without. But he had picked Buster up into his lap, and they were all watching him with eager optics.
He smiled lightly. “Well…I met Skywarp first,” he started.
He told them about the good things. About Starscream’s background as a scientist and meeting Skywarp at the academy. He told them about Vos with its gleaming spires and his favorite energon confectionery. He told them about Starscream’s sharp wit and Skywarp’s most elaborate pranks – Bumblebee even jumped in to share a few he remembered, though it did make Thundercracker trip his bass and rattle the mill involuntarily.
“She took what from Wheeljack’s lab!?”
“Wheeljack? Dad Two?!” Twitch asked, grinning.
“Dad Two?” Thundercracker repeated, wings hitched higher up on his backstruts than was strictly comfortable.
“It was fine!” Bumblebee insisted, laughing and waving his hands as if that would somehow lower Thundercracker’s wings from their very tense position. “It was just a piece of equipment but she kept waving it in front of the security cameras at Red claiming she had his latest experiment. And, well, you know Red…and Wheeljack’s experiments.”
Thundercracker groaned and rubbed a palm over his face. “Why am I just now hearing about this?”
“Probably because if it had been Wheeljack’s latest experiment she’d have lost an arm and knew you’d make that face at her?”
“...Shut up.”
Bumblebee chuckled. “Oh, yeah, and Twitch scanned one of Wheeljack’s drones and is calling him Dad Two now.”
Thundercracker lifted his head out of his hand at that, wings relaxing a bit. “I’m sure he loved that.”
“It grew on him eventually!” Twitch stated matter-of-factly, and he chuckled despite himself.
“I still can’t believe you’ve met all these ‘Bots and ‘Cons, and apparently Wheeljack, but they haven’t brought a medic around to run diagnostics on any of you,” he said, considering the group for a moment before looking over at Bumblebee. “...I probably shouldn’t suggest this, but–”
“No way,” Bumblebee said immediately, flicking his own doorwings.
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“You were going to suggest asking Knock Out to do it.”
Thundercracker flicked his ailerons. “All right, maybe you do know what I was going to say.”
“You didn’t even want to let him fix your optics, TC!”
“Not by myself! And we’re not asking for anyone to do surgery or make upgrades here. Just hardline in for medical diagnostics.”
The sparklings were watching them, various levels of trepidation and eagerness on their faces, so Thundercracker ex-vented and switched to comms.
::What about Breakdown? He worked as Knock Out’s assistant long enough that he can run basic diagnostics.::
Bumblebee made an unimpressed face at him from the other end of the couch. ::You said yourself that they deserted, TC, there’s no guarantee they’d even agree to. And nobody here needs a medic.::
::Nobody needs a medic right now. But if you don’t even have preliminary diagnostics with someone, how are they supposed to help if something does go wrong? Skywarp and Nova Storm attacked you, Bee. You know they’re bound to come back if not that Mandroid guy you told me about.::
Bumblebee’s engine revved, agitated, and he crossed his arms. ::I’ll…think about it. Maybe I’ll call Optimus and suggest they send a medic out. First Aid might be around…::
“Umm hellooo? Earth to transformers?”
Thundercracker disconnected the comm and looked down to see Robby waving a hand at them. “Were you doing that telepathy thing again?”
“Telepathy?”
“Ooh, I know this one! It’s secret mind talk!” Thrash said, pressing a digit to either side of his helm and squinting across the room at Buster as if he could magically relay his thoughts to her.
“It’s not telepathy,” Bumblebee protested, some of his irritation easing with amusement.
“Whatever,” Mo said. “We were trying to ask you about Knock Out!”
“I thought we already talked about Knock Out?” Thundercracker said, raising an optic ridge at her.
Nightshade made a small noise of dissent. “We established he was a medic and then discussed the concept of conjunxes.”
“Right,” Robby agreed. “You didn’t tell us how you found him. Or why you told Bumblebee he was at our school the other night!”
Thundercracker glanced to Bumblebee, but the scout simply whistled and looked to an empty corner of the mill. Traitor.
“I…didn’t find Knock Out. Breakdown found me,” he explained. “They were looking for new living arrangements and he came across the mill thinking it was empty.”
“To be fair, it’s a really nice mill,” Jawbreaker said.
“It is a nice mill,” Thundercracker agreed, smiling. “We startled each other. But Breakdown is a pretty reasonable mech as far as Decepticons go.”
“Ex-Decepticons!” Hashtag interjected.
He chuckled and nodded. “Right. I didn’t ask a lot of questions and he didn’t stay long. But I did comm Knock Out after that to..” he hesitated. To what? Have a medic on hand if he needed one? Reassure himself he wasn’t out of his processor for choosing to live this way?
Have someone to talk to who reminded him of his trinemates?
“Well, it felt like the polite thing to do after startling his conjunx,” he finished lamely.
“And the school?” Mo asked.
“He was nearby and saw Bumblebee leaving the parking lot,” Thundercracker said.
::We should tell them.:: Bumblebee shifted on the couch but didn’t verbally correct him.
His wings twitched. ::We can’t tell them their teacher is a Cybertronian holomatter!::
::Why not?! It seems like it would be pretty important for them to know.::
Thundercracker huffed. ::Aside from the fact that it would most definitely distract them from their studies, Knock Out and Breakdown are actual deserters, Bee. They don’t have Optimus or Megatron covering for their afts if G.H.O.S.T catches them like we do. It’s bad enough I opened my mouth and now all of you know they’re in the area.::
Bumblebee made a face, but they were still close enough on the couch that Thundercracker could feel the reluctant acceptance ebbing off his field. Just as much as he knew Bumblebee could feel the tightly spun anxiety in his own. At least he could point to logical justification for stabbing Starscream in the back the way he had. But if he was responsible for Knock Out or Breakdown ending up in the hands of G.H.O.S.T when they were just trying to move on with their lives?
“Yeah, knowing Knock Out he was probably jealous of the paint job and polish,” Bumblebee said, grinning easily at the sparklings. “I ever tell you guys about the time I definitely beat him in a street race?”
Thundercracker slowly relaxed back onto his side of the couch while Bumblebee embellished the Pit out of some old racing encounter. The younglings were, of course, delighted by some high octane storytelling. And when Bumblebee finished that one, they easily wheedled him into several more. They’d been at war for a very, very long time, after all. For every violent, spark stopping shoot out, there was the story of Jazz getting stuck in a retrofitted vent courtesy of an outdated map file, or Mixmaster very lightly and very accidentally poisoning the rest of his patrol group who did not have the same unnaturally high tolerance for dioptase he and Scavenger apparently did.
Thundercracker smiled softly and let his CPU de-prioritize the conversation to a light hum around him. Bumblebee waved his hands and doorwings too much when he told stories, so there was no shortage of jostling on the couch. And the humans and Terrans alike were easily excitable and high volume for it. He wasn’t likely to slip into recharge while they were all still here, and he did still have a script to get back to when he had a klik of quiet to work on it again.
But Hashtag leaned against his leg while they chattered, a warm presence against his plating to balance Bumblebee on his other side, and a message pinged his HUD from Breakdown, likely another building they were double checking against known residents before visiting. The spot behind his cockpit still itched, but it was easier to ignore than it had been for a long while.