Chapter Text
For Anode, the worst part about cryogenic stasis was waking up.
A shrill, four part melody, registering on the cusp of her audial range, played its shrieking tune. Hearing was always the first sense to return. This staggered reactivation of bodily functions left Anode feeling alien within her own frame; a ghost lingering on the edge of the corporeal. She inwardly recoiled at the siren, her processor still groggy, unsure if her body mirrored her mind.
Pockmarks of vision slowly began to appear as sight returned. Anode blinked instinctively. Even in the dark of the cryopod chamber, there was enough light to warrant her optics to draw back. She could now make out the source of the noise: a blinking alarm, which had once cast a red glare until its bulb had died years prior. The remaining light sources were mounted in the ceiling, dimmed by age and providing an unpleasant and almost nonexistent green glow.
Next, sensation returned. The oppressive weight of the cryogenic liquid that filled the pod became suffocatingly clear to Anode, bringing a horrid sense of claustrophobia. It did not last long, as the liquid sluiced down into the drainage grate at the pod's base. On her own two feet, Anode’s entire frame was numb, everything felt weak, and an empty void reigned supreme within her gut.
As always, stasis had hit her like a truck. Cybertronians were never meant for prolonged periods of dormancy, and Anode found herself in the particularly unlucky minority that suffered the most. Her malady materialised itself in numbness, fatigue, migraines or disorientation, each of the symptoms picking and choosing when to strike on every painful awakening.
The wincing groan of the cryopod door opening assailed Anode’s audials. Now, she physically recoiled as waves of jagged pain ripped through her processor. She wasted no time in ducking beneath the slow moving door and out into the small cryogenics chamber. Her legs struggled to keep her standing as she clattered against the opposing wall.
Optics now functioning at a decent level, she looked towards the other pod beside her own. Lying within should have been her wife, Lug, whom she loved dearly, however it was empty. She quickly pieced together what must have happened. As per design, both cryopods were supposed to open simultaneously so that both occupants awoke at the same time. But, like everything on her junk heap of a ship, nothing worked as intended, and so Anode’s pod had fallen out of sync.
She went to curse the faulty machinery, but all she could muster was a gravelly crackle. Another unwanted side effect: her vocal component acting up from disuse. She hauled herself up from her slumped position. Using the wall to stabilise herself, she began to trudge out of the cryo-chamber.
-
Eventually, as her senses wholly returned and her processor caught up with itself, Anode reached the vessel’s flight deck. The ship they resided in was, in all regards, a piece of scrap metal. It was cobbled together from the stripped down husk of a larger vessel, something obvious from the crude weld lines and the occasional rattling groan the structure made. Cybertronians were not built for traversing the cosmos. And whilst the average frame could survive the inky vacuum, it was not a desired option.
In the time of Nova Prime and his Great Expansion, he had experimented with the concept of spacecraft in order to cross the vastness of space. But his unending ambition only brought failure after failure, each attempt at constructing a void-worthy craft unsuccessful. All except for two vessels — dubbed the Ark and Lost Light — thought to be the combined toil of Nova Prime and a long forgotten artificer. But they were never destined for the stars, instead languishing within the halls of the Iacon Museum, deemed far too dangerous due to the plasma energy at their core. Nova Prime found another way to traverse the stellar seas, and the need for spacecraft was removed entirely thanks to space bridges.
The vessels should have been left to rot. Fate had other plans, however, and they were both called into service, launching as the last salvation for a losing war. One had returned, the other lost.
Anode coughed static, her vocal component still failing her. She jabbed the green rune labelled beside the flight deck door. It divided down the middle and slid open Anode crossed over the threshold.
The flight deck was incredibly small, similar in size to that of a commercial transport shuttle. The two seats were parallel to one another, with little room between them, partly occupied by the main console. Above and besides the sloping seats were more consoles lined with buttons and computer monitors, each displaying a dizzying amount of data pertaining to everything from energy levels to temperature. If the reactor was the beating spark of the ship, this was the brain module. Even more so, given who was present.
Anode slid into the left seat, careful to avoid snagging on any dangling cables with her wings. Lug sat across from her, regarding her with a patient smile.
“Hey,” Anode began. Her voice was still coarse. Maybe that was the part she hated most about cryostasis. She coughed again. “How long have you been awake?”
“About three hours,” Lug replied. “How are you feeling?”
“Like the Pit warmed up.” Anode ran her hands down across her face.
Lug gave her a sympathetic look and passed her a ration cube. Anode murmured her thanks and bit into it in an uncivilised manner. Like all ration energon, it carried a slight coppery tang and chalk-like texture. Yet, it was still enough to quell the void in her stomach.
Deciding against trying her vocal component again, she opted to simply point at Lug, offering a thumbs-up and thumbs-down as a question. Lug played along, giving a thumbs-up, which she reciprocated.
Anode turned her gaze to the ball of vibrant greens and blues and browns and crimson behind the cockpit glass. She swallowed and asked, “What planet is this?”
“Some organic world. It’s got a stable atmosphere, two moons. A little like home, just mushy,” Lug replied. This wasn’t the first world they had been to that had sustained organic life, although those prior had been far less visually appealing. None of them had been of interest, and none could compare to Cybertron. “This one’s on the edge of the energy trail, but it’s still worth checking out.”
Anode nodded. She already dreaded the long journey down, the ensuing hours of excavation, finding nothing more than a lost cargo container or discarded sheet of metal — little more than junk. She sighed. Lug knew how she felt, and Anode didn’t want to subject her to her ranting again.
“So we go down, find whatever’s there, and maybe do some sightseeing? This one looks to be more interesting than the last dozen.” She stretched dramatically, her joints popping as stiffness cleared. “Just gimme a bit longer, and then I’ll be ready to drop.”
Lug rose from her seat. “Alright, just don’t go back to recharge. I need you to be ready in ten, okay?”
Anode gave a noise of agreement.
-
The two reconvened in the airlock. Now fully awakened, Anode felt the usual sense of ennui wash over her. For a planet to be at the edge of the energy trail all but ensured it held nothing of value.
Plasma energy had a certain signature to it, so much so that it could be tracked down somewhat easily. After the Ark had disappeared, Jetfire, one of the few Autobots capable of space travel, had attempted to track down the lost vessel, following the energy signature. He had failed, the trail extending too far for him to follow by himself.
Despite this, Jetfire used the data he had gathered to create a projected path, a series of planets that had been impacted by some level of plasma energy. It was Anode and Lug’s job to voyage between each of those locations, in the misplaced hope that they would stumble across the vessel. It would have been so much simpler if Jetfire’s calculations had illustrated which planet held the Ark, but his scans provided insufficient data for such detail.
Lug entered the airlock, the interior door sealing behind her. Though Anode hefted a pair of cases containing mining equipment, Lug was saddled with the vast majority of equipment, from smaller trowels to explosive charges. It did not burden Lug all too much; her alt mode was a backpack, after all. The two had repeated this dance dozens of times, so much so that the process was second nature.
“Alright then,” Anode began. “The ship is parked in orbit, and we should be roughly above the site. Ready?” Lug nodded and transformed, securing herself onto Anode’s back.
The pneumatic hiss of the airlock door sounded out as the exterior door began to crawl open with a disconcerting moan. It was one of the many things on their ship that needed repairs; which would likely never come, as the scarce resources they had were only for the most dire of damages.
The second the airlock finished opening, Anode sprang over the threshold, descending planetward. This was Anode’s favourite part: the rush of wind around her, the strange comfort she found in falling with the knowledge she was her own parachute. Though, she knew Lug did not share her feelings, so she cut her revelry short, transforming as she pierced through the first layer of clouds.
They descended further. The blanket of clouds cleared, giving way to the verdant sprawl below. Trees with leaves a mix of maroon and emerald overlaid the spanning landscape, covering the majority of the mauve grass beneath their canopy. The forest grew over pits and crags and slopes, and some form of quadrupeds grazed beside a great, crystal river that stretched its way through the forest and beyond.
Further still, as the forest began to wane away, rocky crowns of sloping stone emerged. But beyond them, towering even above the mountains, a tree of impossible height and size rose above them all. It was monolithic: stretching so far into the sky that its own viridescent leaves touched the clouds. Those leaves glimmered in the sunlight, casting traces of light that danced across the jungle sprawl. The tree could have been tens of millennia old, Anode believed, though she couldn’t be sure.
An anxious warning from Lug broke Anode from her trance. She levelled out, ending her freefall descent, and made a leisurely banking turn away from the great tree.
“The readings track to about there, at the foot of that mountain,” Lug directed. This new mountain, the first of a much smaller mountain range, was carved from dark auburn rock. The forest below Anode began to thin out, opening up to grasslands covered in cyan, wisp-like flowers.
The beauty of it all had Anode transfixed. She was sure Lug shared the sentiment. It had been so long since they had been to a world that wasn’t barren rock, and longer since a world unmarred by the hammer of war. But, their revelry had to end. Angling in for a landing, they set down at the foot of the mountain, kicking up a suitable amount of dust.
The ground was silty and weak beneath her. As she scaled further up the slope, it became more solid, but lacked the hard-wearing nature of Cybertron. Very few planets did.
Lug detached from Anode’s back and helped to offload the mining equipment from her frame. Their task needed no discussion; the bulk of this slope would be excavated, the chunk of the Ark collected, removed, and returned to the storage of their vessel, as per regulation. This dig site was smaller than most before it, but would still be an arduous process. Anode sighed, hefted a mining drill, and set to work.
-
Lug’s mining saw carved through another chunk of rock. Then another. Then another. Then another.
Tedious did not begin to describe her work. Whilst she had the patience for both Anode and herself, even this was a major test of strength. She hated the pointlessness of their task. The chance that they would stumble across the Ark was immeasurably low — practically nonexistent. Was this a punishment? For what crime Lug did not know, but it felt so. Anode and herself had been selected especially for the mission, given their fields of work, personal bonds, and more criteria she wasn’t privy to. She had felt so proud when they first set out, but now, she felt hollow.
There was nothing. Less than nothing. All there was was the same manual labour, the same chunks of scrap to be taken to the larger chunk of scrap that was their ship. It was a slow and horrible death, where they were waiting for something to break so badly that it couldn’t be repaired.
In the first months, Anode and her had discussed their shared dissatisfaction, but the same discussions quickly wore thin. So Lug internalised her frustration, tried her hardest not to let it out. She longed to be back home, continuing her research. But instead of studying rocks, all she did was grind them up. She knew Anode felt the same way; she had worked so hard to become an archaeologist, and here she was, digging up scrap.
This wasn’t helping her. They had made significant progress, excavating a large rectangle into the slope. Anode was at the other end, focused on the task at hand. The two didn’t speak when working, preferring focused silence, but it hurt Lug to see her wife so quiet, so empty.
She turned away, stealing a look at the vista behind them, the sweeping plains, the tree of awesome size that shone as if it were the sun. She returned with a different drill, with three oscillating heads instead of saw blades, meant to grind rock rather than cut through. It would accelerate her work, and the quicker they were in finding the scrap, the faster they could explore.
The drill tore through the rock, pulverising the auburn stone into powder. Lug angled her head away, trying her best to keep her face away. The drudgery was getting to her, and she didn’t know for how much longer she could cope. It felt as if there was a hole inside her chest, and though she tried her hardest to keep a brave face, she felt her mask slipping.
The horrid shriek of metal grinding metal shredded her audials. She had struck her quarry.
She did not need to call Anode; the dreadful noise had alerted her, and she was making her way towards Lug. She looked down, and it was as she expected. A flat sheet of amber metal, dulled and corroded by the passing of time. How many of these pieces had they found? She thought back to the more exciting discoveries, if empty cargo containers were considered such. This piece, however, stood out at least a little bit more, because it was an airlock door.
Anode gave the door a nonchalant look. “This is it?”
Her lack of enthusiasm was mutual. It did not matter that it was a door because it was still another slab of discarded scrap. The vacuum feeling in Lug’s gut hardened.
“Yep.” She sighed, stepping down to the flat panel. “Just another—“ Her foot connected with the metal with a hollow sound.
She paused, her gaze meeting Anode in shared confusion. This was unusual. Tentatively, she lowered herself so her head was pressed against the plate and knocked again. The same resonant tone. Could it mean there was something below it?
“It can’t be. Can it?” Lug questioned. The vacuum within her writhed. She wouldn’t let herself fall victim to false hope again, but it was too alluring, especially now.
“Only one way to find out.” Anode replied. She moved to open the hatch. It was circular, with two long handles designed to butterfly outwards when pulled. She wrapped her hands around the handles and heaved, but to no avail.
She tried again and her effort had no effect, save for one of the rusted handles beginning to bend from the strain. If Lug was not so concerned over the contents that may have laid behind the hatch, she would have joked at Anode’s failure. Instead, she reached into her sub-space and offered a different solution.
The maelstrom of dust and rock erupted skyward as the demolition charges detonated. Small storms were flung in every direction, clanging off of Anode as she shielded Lug from the blast. A small group of flying reptiles that had previously watched their progress intently startled and fled.
Demolition charges solved most problems, Lug had found, though they only had a handful of them left. She had opted to keep them on her at all times, too fearful of them going off while on their ship, stranding them in whatever world they were on, or when they were onboard. Their vessel was too temperamental to take such risks.
Once the dust cleared, the two inspected their handiwork. Lug tried to ignore the pang of hope in her chest. Nothing would come of this. She would look down into the pit and nothing but rock, nothing again, as there always had been and always would be.
But there wasn’t just rock. The hatch had been blown to pieces, and the thin layer of earth that had surrounded it uncovered more of the same amber steel. Beneath where the hatch once stood was a small chamber — an airlock. The room was small, the curved rungs of a ladder running down one wall, cut off by an interior airlock door on the floor.
Lug opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t. The words escaped her. “This can’t be real,” She finally murmured. Hope resurged in her chest, her doubt struggling to find purchase.
Anode did not reply. She leapt down into the hole, landing on the interior hatch with an aged groan. She stomped hard onto the metal, which flexed and let out another moan. Another stomp and it gave way, and Anode fell down into the pit below.
-
Anode landed into a crouch. Her visibility was almost nothing, except for the single shaft of light coming from above, illuminating the dull bronze of the walls beside her. The air tasted stale. She stood and surveyed where she had landed. A corridor extended in front and behind her, leading into darkness.
Anode didn’t know what to say. They had found the Ark, after so long of searching, they had found it! She called up to Lug, who was already making her way down using the ladder.
“Holy Primus.” Lug gasped. They took a shared moment to process the weight of their discovery, and then their next actions. They did have orders on what to do once they found the ship, but Anode had never thought she would ever have to act upon them.
“Alright then,” Anode began. “We need to find the bridge, don’t we?”
Lug nodded. She passed her a flashlight, which cut a disappointingly short beam through the darkness. “I’m not sure which way it is from here, but if we just walk in a straight line, we should wind up there eventually.”
Lug knew the layout of the Ark far better than Anode, and explained it to her again as they walked: the ship had two levels, the lower one a storage bay spanning the entirety of the level, and the upper deck housing everything else — the reactor, medbay, crew compartments, and the bridge. A looping corridor surrounded the bridge at the centre of the ship, with the individual rooms at various points along said corridor. They had entered on the upper level, and now travelled that corridor until they, hopefully, stumbled across the bridge.
Anode felt restless, anticipation creeping in her spark. The walls portrayed scars of battle, laser burns and gouges from maces and blades. They passed by the medbay and later a few of the crew compartments, but their doors were sealed shut. There likely wouldn’t be anyone locked within, there were so few aboard the Ark when it launched. But why did they have to be so important? If the crew wasn’t lost, if he wasn’t lost, would Cybertron be in a better position? If it even still stood.
They finally reached a corner, Anode rounding it first. It was not a particularly large vessel, but it felt like an eternity before they had found any sort of break in the long straightaway of the corridor. Without paying proper attention, Anode pivoted and tripped over some debris.
She stumbled into a wall of rock, steadying herself into a rough position, at perfect eye level with the corpse beneath the rubble. Anode screamed, scrabbling back into another outstretched arm, before separating herself from the grizzly tomb and scrambling backwards into Lug.
“What the frag is that?!” She jabbed her flashlight at it, its weak beam illuminating the bodies. It seemed that the ship's wall had caved in, crushing the group of Decepticons beneath a tide of earth. And they were Decepticons: Anode would recognise that hideous neon green anywhere.
Lug helped Anode back onto her feet. “Are you alright?” She replied with a nod. “Looks like… Scrapper? I can never tell. Poor guy, I almost feel sorry for him.”
“I don’t,” Anode sniped. “Bastard scared the spark outta me.”
“Well, we can’t carry on this way.” Lug mused. “We should double back and try the other way.” She moved forward to tap against the rock. “There is no way I’m digging through this.”
Anode agreed, and the two set off back into the darkness. They walked again in uneasy silence, passing the airlock again, and down the other stretching corridor. Success came much faster. No sooner had they turned another corner and did they come face to face with the entrance to the bridge. After so long of searching, it felt surreal to have finally found it. To have finally found him.
The Bridge was an open room, with a large raised stage taking up the rear end. Its walls were lined with computer terminals and consoles, with a few command stations at regular intervals across the floor. At the centre was the command throne, and above it was a large glass dome that spanned nearly the whole length of the ceiling, a sizeable hole smashed through the glass.
That was to say nothing of the bodies strewn across the floor. It was a macabre sight: there were maybe a dozen, if that, but it was difficult to tell how many bodies there were because none of them were in one piece. Anode took a moment to make sure her fuel didn’t resurface.
Lug spoke breathlessly. “This is it. We’ve done it. We’ve actually done it!”
Lug’s joy was infectious, and Anode couldn’t help but grin. “Not quite.” She said, “We need to fix them first.”
They began to tiptoe across the floor, careful to avoid treading on any wayward limbs. She tried not to focus on any of the wrecked bodies. Lug carried on up to the back of the room whilst Anode moved towards the body laid at the foot of the captain’s chair. His damage was extensive: his left leg cut off at the knee, one arm mangled and plating sheared off across his body. One optic had been gouged out, leaving a cruddy blue stain around the empty socket. Regardless, Anode could still discern who he was. She hooked her arms around his shoulders and began to haul him to where Lug was standing.
Her conjunx was explaining her actions all the while, but Anode struggled to pay attention, too caught up in the gravity of where she was and what she was doing. It felt as if it were happening to someone else.
She tuned back into Lug’s words: she had rebooted the main computer as much as was currently possible, drawing on as much plasma energy from the Ark’s reactor as was safe. The volatile power would be channeled through the console to regenerate broken bodies and revive sparks in stasis. It was a strange, theoretical and dangerous science that bordered on the supernatural, something neither Anode or Lug or anyone else truly understood.
Anode gingerly lowered the body against the back wall before moving back to a safe distance. What they were doing was incredibly dangerous, and they had no way of actually knowing it would work. But they had come so far not to try.
Lug threw the lever and rushed clear of the console. There was a moment of silence, and doubt began to take root in Anode’s mind. All it would have taken was a snapped wire for it all to go wrong. She thought about checking the console for damage, but no sooner had she finished the thought did energy erupt in a blinding vortex and coalesce around the slumped body. It became too bright to look at directly, and Anode covered her optics as the regeneration began.
-
Burning.
He could only smell burning, only taste burning, only feel burning. It was a terrible agony; every fibre of his being ignited in a furnace of pain. His optics were blinded, but he couldn’t tell by what, or if he even had any. He could only feel burning.
Though it felt like it lasted an agonizing eternity, the burning sensation began to lift. Feeling began to return to his fingertips that had plunged into something that might have been floor. Where was he? What had —
Burning. Destruction. Battle. Invasion. An uproar of devastation, of fire and death.
The memories rushed back into his head. They had been boarded. They had been boarded. They were coming. He was coming.
He could not protect them all. Snapshots of struggle spun in his head; his friends overwhelmed, losing, dying, and that monster, whose face contorted into a grin too large to be natural, too cruel to be genuine, was on top of him, beating, crushing, choking him.
“No!” He yelled. He didn’t know how long he had been unconscious for, he couldn’t feel his axe or his rifle, but he knew he had to fight. His friends were in danger and he would not let them be harmed. His vision still failed him so he would fight blind, he would take them all on to protect those he cared about.
He forced through the burning, the numbness and the blindness, scrambling to his feet, using the wall at his back to pull himself upwards onto unstable legs. “You will not hurt them!” His voice was garbled by static, but he still roared with all the power he could manifest.
He stumbled forwards clumsily, and could now hear something, someone, more than one, and they were getting closer. He felt something grab onto his arm, and he struggled to wrestle it off. He began to discern the noise. They were saying his name. They sounded scared, but unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. He focused on one, listening to the voice.
“Lug?” He recognised it. Why was she here? How was she here? He knew the manifest of the crew aboard the Ark, and she was not one of them. He felt confused, dizzy, pain still lingering in the corners of his senses as his optics revealed the two panicked cybertronians before him.
“Anode? Lug? How are you here?” He strained to pierce through the dark and saw the broken bodies. His spark shivered. “What has happened?”
His legs buckled beneath him, but he was caught and leant against the wall for support. He tried to eke out a small smile, aware of how his violent awakening must have frightened them. “I am sorry for my outburst. I am disorientated.”
Anode spoke up. “It’s no problem, really. Are you alright? Do you need anything?”
“No, I will be alright. What happened? I can’t quite remember…” He rubbed the bridge of his nose: his processor ached.
“The Ark was attacked. The Decepticons took the bait, and then…” Anode trailed off. “Both ships were gone. Something broke on the Decepticon’s ship and you were thrown through space.”
“And ended up here. Wherever here is.” Thoughts sleeted through his mind, but enough found their homes for him to piece together his memories. The distraction, the second ship, the relic within his chest and how it pumped the lifeblood of Cybertron, but only when it had a bearer.
“How long have we been lost? What of our home?” He did not mean to burden them with too many questions, but he needed to know.
He had died, temporarily, but died all the same. If the Matrix had no living body to inhabit, and that it was still interred within his frame… The outcome would be too horrible to bear. Cybertron had been without free-flowing energon once before, a time so horrible it was the catalyst for the war that had sent his homeworld into flames.
“It’s been about five hundred years since you disappeared,” Lug answered solemnly. He tried his hardest to meet her gaze, struggling to keep the sorrow from his optics. “And Cybertron…”
Her lack of reply assured his worst fears. All the faces of those he had left behind rose in his mind, and the grief and guilt were almost too much to bear. If only he hadn’t left, if only he had listened and stayed…
He straightened up, placing his full weight onto his now regenerated pair of legs. Now was not the time to mourn what could have been — it was the time to act. He needed to be strong for those here and on Cybertron.
“Then there is no time to waste.” Optimus Prime spoke. “Thank you, Anode, Lug. Thanks to your efforts, there is still hope yet.” He looked over the myriad bodies scattered across the bridge. “First, we must revive the rest of us.”
The two acted accordingly, already moving to collect their fellow Autobots from the wreckage.
“What about these guys?” Anode asked. She held a dark blue arm, wiggling it in a mock wave.
He had neglected to notice the few Decepticon bodies tangled amongst his own. It was strange to see them linked together, still faces contorted. He could leave them in stasis, leave them in their death. Perhaps it would be a mercy, but Optimus did not think so. They were his enemies, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave them in their current state. It would go against everything he stood for.
His answer was accepted as well as expected: with dubious expressions and a prevailing sense of doubt. Optimus understood completely. It was a drastic, and somewhat naive, decision. But they had been given a chance to change something, and it would be foolish not to take it.
-
She could feel something. A tingling that bordered on discomfort. She felt strange, weightless, but strangely aware of herself. It was as if she was waking up from a dream within a dream.
Proper cognitive functions began to return, her optics and audials recalibrating with slow precision. Skywarp couldn’t quite perceive her surroundings, they remained fuzzy outlines set into darkness.
“Who’s there?” She tried to say, but her voice was a croak of static.
She blinked, and her blindness mostly cleared, and her veins turned to ice. Autobots, three of them, watching her. She didn’t recognise two of them, but the largest could only be one.
“Autobots! Stay back!” She spat. Panicked, she swung her left arm up to fire, but it felt lighter, and saw her shoulder rifle was gone. The tallest figure was almost on top of her now. She tried to teleport, green sparks sputtering from her fingertips. She was too low on energon, she had no escape.
Optimus Prime loomed over her now. This was her end, at the hands of the Autobots. Fear overwhelmed and she yelled, “No, no, no, no! Get away from me!”
Optimus Prime stopped. Kneeling down, he met Skywarp at optic level.
“Easy now, my friend. You are safe.” His voice lacked any malice or contempt. “I expect you to be disoriented, so I will give you a moment.”
Skywarp couldn’t speak. Mercy was the last outcome she had expected. She simply stared at him. She finally managed to murmur a simple, “What?”
Optimus gave her a patient smile. “I will explain everything soon. But first, we must revive the rest of us. Can you help?”
As her vision improved, the shapes of other Decepticons and Autobots came into view, each in various states of disrepair, her own kin amongst the mass of broken parts. A slow deluge of memory flowed back into her mind, recalling the boarding action, the ensuing conflict and disaster. Tentatively, she nodded.
Somehow, Optimus’ smile widened. He offered her an outstretched hand, and cautiously, Skywarp took it.