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“Slag.” Wheeljack mutters, when he’s caught.
Just goes to show what happens when you overstretch your luck. So what if he wanted to do a little light scouting? Those Vehicons should have maybe double-checked their carts and looked over their shoulders when they’d gone through that spacebridge if they hadn’t wanted him to tag along.
Luna was peaceful and Bulk was happily hip-plating-deep in city layouts (and seemingly, with less and less time for his slag, (Wheeljack hated the thought nearly the nanoklik that he had it, and then hated himself a little (more))).
Anyway it had been three whole Earth months and nothing had happened beyond having good fuel again and maybe the quiet fizzling end of the war and this old Wrecker was bored down to his bearings. He’d been messing with some kind of crystal growth grenade that had almost lifted the funk off his motivational subsystem, just a little, but he felt like a heel asking Ratchet or the Big O for fresh samples. All they had left was the ragged ends of their own personal collections after they’d bugged out from Iacon. And asking for chunks of that to blow up felt kinda... sacrilegious.
Probably was, in Prime’s case.
So why not get some from the source? Cybertron was looking mighty lush and overgrown these days, he was just gonna sight see and take a couple clippings. Stretch his legs a little.
It’s not like he’d ever been to Kaon before. And hey, it looked like getting lightly bombed and then abandoned for a couple thousand human years was the best thing that ever happened to the place.
Though, okay, the bismuth forest was pretty cool.
Over the rubble-choked roads, the wild iridescent hedges and the cut-down skyscrapers the Arena stood tall. Already looking restored(or maybe less broken than its surroundings) it was a bleached silver lattice, brooding over the landscape, forbidding as frag.
At least you had to give him that, ol’ Megs was consistent. He’d remembered the place that had built him.
And then of course that’s how Wheeljack gets spotted, gawping with his headfins out. Lazerbeak swoops over him, chirping menacingly like she hasn’t forgotten the whole Grenade Turducken Incident, not even a little bit. And pretty soon mean-dark-and-spindly’s mama was gonna come along and he was probably going to be pissed.
There’s nothing else to do, nowhere to run. Wheeljack leans back against an old streetlight and throws up some finger guns when the other mech lands.
“Eeeeeey ‘sup, Sounders! I’m just, you know, here for the tourist visa. Nice place you’ve got here.”
Then he waves, because he’s cheeky like that.
Soundwave does that helm-tilt thing and then he raises his creepy wing arms (that elbow joint is waaay in the wrong place, bud) and deploys his two extra-creepy data tentacles and waves back at Wheeljack with all four limbs while his visor flashes a
(°▽°)/
emoji.
In rainbow. Because he’s a goddamn troll.
“Hello: Wheeljack~”
Wheeljack yelps. There’s no way around it, no way to dress it up: he bleeps static, his leg hydraulics seize up and he and just about shorts something and falls over. I mean, talk about a jump scare!
“Holy-frag-you-can-talk?!”
“Wheeljack’s audials: malfunctioning?“
“Damn! You and your BFF got matching lifetime subscriptions to the creepy vocoder club huh?”
“Wheeljack: rude~ Also: trespassing.”
The voice may be a soft hissing nightmare but his tentacles are still wriggling, kind of playful-like? Also the visor cycles through a series of cutesy gifs: mostly kittens falling down stairs, skateboarding wipeouts, stuff exploding.
Yeah, yeah. ‘EPIC FAIL’ he gets it.
In his defense the Wreckers were not an infiltration unit. Kinda there in the name.
Wait, if he can talk does that mean Soundwave actually has a face under his visor? The squad had bets on that. So many bets. Magnus said there were a bunch more of them alive back on the Ark with General Elita. He could get SO MUCH totally worthless cash! (Yannow, if he makes it out of this.)
“OK, ya got me there. Know anyplace I could get my passport stamped? Or being cons and all, do y’all take bribes?”
“Kaon: always accepts blood-price.”
Oh okay. Not creepy at all.
“Umm… you wanna spar?”
٩(◕‿◕)۶ Goes the visor.
“Condition: acceptable.”
Groovy. Whispers Wheeljack’s hopelessly glitched danger-evaluation function.
I mean he could still die. But ‘locked in single combat with his latest and greatest opponent from the war’ sounded way cooler than ‘Cause of death: Trespassing on Lord Buckethead’s lawn.’
Soundwave pings him a data packet with a path straight to the Arena. And then just kinda clip-clomps along beside him without even giving him a chance to make a run for it. Damn spindly fragger was TIC for a reason. He’s thorough like that. Also down on the ground like this it’s all too clear that he’s still way bigger n’ taller than Wheeljack, because when had the Autobots ever had anything besides long odds.
“Query: Wheeljack’s mission?”
The data-cables are still wiggling even as the ends transform into a wicked hook-probe-thing. Was that new? Was he getting upgrades from that creepy-aft lunatic the cons kept in the basement?
The hook drags, almost flirty-like, across the tip of Wheeljack’s left helmfin.
“Truth: encouraged.”
Actually up close Soundwave’s whole frame seems… glossier, less ragged. Makes Wheeljack wish he’d wheedled Doc into a wax-n-wipe before his stupid secret walkabout.
“Quit it with that!” Looking braver than he feels he bats the tentacle away. “Nah, Prime didn’t send me. In fact he’s going to be pretty fragged off that I snuck back here so if you’re gonna deactivate me, might as well. He’s a good CO, but I really hate it when he gives me ‘disappointed creator face.’ Yannow?”
“Pax: once employed similar tactics.”
Oh right, they all knew each other, way back in the day. Lord Murderbucket, Sounders, and the Prime. Frag, that’s weird to think about.
“I dunno what to tell ya, mech. Just felt restless, I guess. I’ve never even been to Kaon! Actually I was putting together a little something new, like a plant grenade but with a crystal and a growth accelerant. LIke, presto boom - hedge! You’d probably think it was boring. And we’re kinda low on authentic Cybertronian crystal samples while we’re crashing on the humans’ couch so…”
Slag, that was probably too much intel. Starscream and Makeshift had tried to torture him that one time he’d gotten nabbed back on Earth, but it had been a total hack job. Screamer’s dirty daydreams to the contrary, he wasn’t even close to good at it and it’d been easy to just wait them out - toss some wisecracks, turn ‘em against each other. Apparently now, with Soundwave’s undivided attention (and the sharp-tipped data cable hovering just behind his vulnerable doorwings) he’s feeling downright chatty.
It was weird that they were just, like, taking a stroll through sunny Bad Guy Central. But that home galaxy sunshine just hit different somehow. Good ol’ Hadeen.
For an astrosecond Wheeljack even forgets that he’s probably at the end of the road. At least until they turn a corner and suddenly they’ve got company. A bunch of Vehicons are milling around, sitting on the cracked rim of a fountain filled with solvent, sticking their pedes in the stuff.
“Errr.. Do you have a prisoner, sir?”
Soundwave shakes his helm. “Visit: supervised. Suggestion: return to your leisure-shift.”
The Vehicon gives a differential bob and scuttles away.
Up ahead he can see the Nemesis. Parked out front like an ugly purple caddy outside of a strip club. Ugh, he’s been watching too much human TV.
They walk past deserted ticket boxes and betting booths. Another group of Vehicons are cooking something inside what had once been a snack counter. Imagine that, snacks for watching mechs rip each other to pieces. Actually, it smelled pretty good.
Then, a long dark tunnel. Old and creepy enough that he almost asks his guard to turn around, grab a last meal or something-
“Appropriate entrance fee: Determined.“ Soundwave whispers in the dark.
“Have ya now.”
“One bout: five rounds. Wheeljack’s decision module: still compromised?”
Wheeljack rolls his shoulders. “Oh, you know it.”
They were out of the tunnel, in front of him is a sea of sharp grass growing out of black sand, beyond that, a huge border wall five times as tall as he was, then railings, seats, more seats, the bleachers stretching up away into the sky, cold steel columns crowning the edges like lace, like a circular brand on Primus’ protoform.
His fuel pump skips a rotation. Magnificent ain’t a word a jaded old Wrecker’d toss around for any old thing, but the Arena deserves it. Fragged up as the place is.
The wind cuts, whistling around the angles of his frame, sounding like long-dead gladiators’ triumphant screams.
Okay, so he was still maybe dying on Lord Buckethead’s lawn.
But in the coolest and most stylish way possible.
Wasn’t it kinda funny how the cons had blown up everything, just to end up back at the start?
Home’s home, I guess.
There was no one in the stands now. No one in the sponsor boxes. The pitspawn were free at last.
“Hey, is it true you fought ol’ fangface to a draw once?” he asks.
Soundwave bends over a little, data cables curling in close. His vents make a creepy hissing whisper, but on an EDM beat. Laughing. He must be laughing. Giggling? Chuckling? Villains totally chuckled.
Then he straightens up. The top of his ‘wing’ edges separate. His long digits pull two glossy black swords out of the tips of his arms.
“Demonstration: forthcoming.”
By some miracle Wheeljack sees the first blow coming, dodges the second, parries the third, the impact of it ringing off the edges of his spark. It feels pointless to be doing this when it’s like ‘That’s it, dumbass! They won! They got the fragging planet!’ Pointless and terrible and just what he wanted. His own last dance with the war. Here, at the start of it. Pointless and terrible and a little sacred.
Wheeljack grins and kicks it up a gear.
Time splinters and breaks like a black mirror into a thousand shards on the sand.
----
And then it’s later.
Wheeljack looks up at the sky, outlined by the grass he’s lying on. It’s got a warm sunset gradient: orange-to-yellow. The clouds are purple like it’s just to spite him, just to drive the point home. Kaon was supposed to be this polluted slagheap covered in sick, desperate, and evil mechs but now it’s kind of pretty. I guess that’s the point. Everything reset. Everything spiraling back to some better version of how things coulda been.
Everything on his frame hurts like the Pit.
He’s… He’s maybe kind of over the war.
But also still mourning it? It was all fragged up. Who would he be if he wasn’t a Wrecker? That weak little scientist again? The one who was always botching things and getting laughed at and getting rejected for publication because half of his shit was always exploding and his ideas were ‘too much’? Who hadn’t mattered?
Primus, I really hope this isn’t it. I’ve still got slag to do.
Probably oughta see somebody. Funny how the second things went quiet I went looking for the worst trouble I could find. Maybe Doc’s right and I do have a death wish.
And I gotta go talk to Bulk about-
His flinchy, jackrabbity, commitment-phobic wreck of an emotional subsystem hits 0-60 in 2.5, drives full-speed away from saying it.
-well, about a buncha things.
Meanwhile, completely heedless of the mid-life crisis in full swing in front of his pedes, Soundwave’s tentacle wraps itself around Wheeljack ankle and he starts dragging his limp frame pretty decisively out of the Arena and off to the shadowed, energon-darkened arches of the exit. The ones that look like they lead right to the losers’ smelter.
“Hey, I was entertaining at least? Right?!” Wheeljack tries to quip, spittling blue-laced oral lubricant out onto his chin. “Lemme go, mech! I gotta get back-”
He vents in stutters, trying to dig his pedes into the grass, clawing at the black sand.
Actually, come to think of it, he doesn't feel like dying today. Not ever-so-coolly in the Arena choking out a one-liner. Not on a slab with Shockwave staring down at him. Not right now. Not at all. Not for a long time.
“Look, you eightsix me and Prime’s gonna be really pissed, OK!? I thought we were over this whole thing? I’m just some frag-up of a lab tech! I’m really not important enough to muck up the ceasefire-“
“Wheeljack’s swordsmanship: needs improvement.” A noodly digit flicks him playful-painfully on the helmfin. “Continued functioning: condition for continued improvement.”
The tentacles pull him upright. Something flickers overhead. Light? Oh. He’s in a shower now? Some kinda long, empty pit fighter locker room. When did that happen? Yeah, he probably shouldn’t have headbutted a pro right in the pointy chest connector. For maybe half a second it had felt good, like payback, and then the impact scrambled his chrono a little.
At least he’s pretty sure he’d lasted the whole five rounds.
Soundwave putters around poking at crude buttons in the wall and then Wheeljack is choking on solvent. Waterboarding? I mean, it’s a classic. The theory holds up until Soundwave elbows him lightly to make room.
“Solvent: not unlimited.” he explains patiently, like Wheeljack’s a five-vorn-old newbuild.
Then he pulls a long foam-tipped brush out of his subspace and starts scrubbing up. Cheery Earth car-wash music plays out of his recessed speakers and echoes creepily in the vast, empty washracks.
Wheeljack mostly goggles and tries not to get the wet stuff into his optics or intake. What did cons wash with anyway? Sparkling tears? Still, he’s got enough motor control to kind of awkwardly tilt into the spray a little, to try and get most of the energon off.
Slag me. I think I blocked that last punch with my CPU-
And then, from far away there comes a weighty, significant THUD - THUD - THUD
Soundwave snaps up to attention, quickly lifts and pushes Wheeljack into an empty storage closet like he’s some kind of naughty toy. He makes a little wiggly gesture of ‘hey, be sssh now’ but he doesn’t need to.
For once in his functioning, Wheeljack listens and obeys.
In fact he mutes his vocalizer and locks his joints in downright genuine concern (read: wire-stripping terror) as Megatron’s vast, sharp and liberally dust covered frame lurches around a corner. Heck, he even tries to remember every single lecture Jazz had ever given them about suppressing your EM field and acts the hell out of being a corpse, or a pile of spare parts, or any other non-Autobot thing.
The old warlord thunders past, punches a big upper knob on the shower with a knuckle and lets out an ‘oh frag me’ sort of growl as warm solvent begins to flow out of a different, larger grate in the ceiling. Soundwave hisses sympathetically.
“Query: condition?” “Dreadful.” The Slagmaker, Unicron’s almost-Champion, and future Lord of the Ever-burning Pit snarls, as he swipes dust out of his optics, “As usual. I swear if I spend another orn down there I am going to drag my old overseer’s spark out of the Well just so I can rip him in half again. But the reopened tunnels are sound, and most of the borers have been repaired. We have come to the end of the fuel issue, for now.”
Wheeljack knows he ought to be doing something useful: recording intel, processing, analyzing and instead he’s standing there like a post, catching some kind of requisite adrenaline charge in spite of himself and just absolutely sure that he’s going to have a recharge flux about the way that wet solvent sluices its way down Megatron’s interlocking backplates.
Pile of slag that ol’ Bucketface is, it’s still hotter than the inside of a smelter.
Meanwhile Soundwave darts in with digits and cables, prying flakes of stone here and there out of the gaps. Like one of those long abyssal eels cleaning off a sharkticon’s underbelly in exchange for scraps. Megatron never relaxes exactly, but the physical weight of agitation in his EM field dials back to a smolder.
“Soundwave: has requisition request.”
“Oh? Speak.”
It’s weird, they communicate half aloud, half on internal comms, half with a shift of EM field against EM field. The way only really old friends do. Like Wheeljack and Seaspray used to.
“Crystal samples? Is it for Shockwave? Cunning as it is of him to filter requests through you, he really ought to leave the lab more often.”
“Megatron: was the one who assigned Shockwave solitary outpost duty.” (Whoa, was that sass? Gutsy of you, Sounders.)“Adjustment: gradual by necessity. Correction: samples are for a personal project.”
“Hmph. So I did.” Megatron scratches a clump of grit out of his collar faring and then casually flips up part of an abdominal vent to get into his subspace. “These are fresh, take them.”
Soundwave steps away with a spindly digit cat’s cradle full of glowing, glittering shards. Wheeljack squints. Was that opal-chromium? He’d only seen samples in museums before the war.
Megatron turns his jets full blast, making a deafening roar and almost blowing the door to Wheeljack’s hiding place right off its rusted hinges.
Well, that’s one way to get yourself dry. Points for style, anyway.
The big mech turns, menacingly, for lack of a better word, but there’s something tired in it.
“The orbital grid update is tomorrow, isn’t it? Make sure Knockout attends, I didn’t promote him to fix shin splints. Also if Starscream decides to wake from his little fainting spell today, by all means beat him back into it.”
Soundwave nods.
“Noted. Mining duty: suggested alternative for demoted staff.”
Megatron snorts. “That’ll be the day.” and stomps away to wherever tyrants sleep.
Wheeljack exhales.
---
Like the end of a bad dream, Soundwave steers him out of the closet and down a different creepy purple-lit corridor and into a nearly pitch-black control room. As he types at the console, his cables tap-tap-tap against the glass of Wheeljack’s doorwings, skitter creepily around his shoulders. Almost the way a zookeeper would pet a spooked turbofox. Wheeljack’s too tired to stop him.
“Request: open subspace.”
Might as well.
Soundwave dumps his haul of crystals in.
“Wheeljack: lucky.” He hisses, the creepy susurration of it hitting an almost mystical note. “Wheeljack: should allow his luck to rest~”
The space bridge irises open. Soundwave’s tentacle gives him a patronizing pat on the aft before it pushes him through.
And then, just like that, he’s home.
Ratchet gives him a very suspicious ‘Oh we’ll be talking later’ look over his console but he’s distracted by some gently floating human types in their little spacesuits and Wheeljack gladly takes the out. He transforms and books it home.
Bulk is on the roof of their little repurposed spaceship house, a hot ration cube of something with copper flakes slowly getting cold in his servo. Pretty blue blueprints are floating over the workbench in front of him, the light of them liming the curve of his jaw. Back in the heyday some bots’d say how Bulk was built plain and ugly and even now, in the barely-standing shape he’s in, Wheeljack would still try to fight them.
“Sooo, um, yeah... Went out. Got some crystal samples.” he stammers out, swaying.
“Jackie!” Bulk drops the cube to hug him. Like any good sergeant he knows at a glance the severity of the frag up, if not the particulars. “Jackie, you moron!”
He’s hurt and slightly wet and wobbling on his shocks and kind of overwhelmed, actually. Like, did that just happen? Does he have a small fortune of crystals in his subspace? Crystals that Lord Megatron probably fragging mined himself that morning.
Where is he? What sky is he under? Had Soundwave just played around with him and shown him mercy?! Mercy? What?!
But Bulk is still holding him, at arm’s length now, looking down at him with soft optics and the first thing that comes out of Wheeljack’s fool vocalizer is:
“Hey babe, sorry I’ve been such an aft lately. I’ve been- I’ve been thinking… War’s over. I love you. Wanna get hitched?”
~