Chapter Text
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It was meant to be a routine operation. Megatron dispatched the trio of seekers to ransack a derelict energon facility, with Soundwave handling navigation. Despite Starscream's insistence that it was a fruitless errand already scavenged by the wretched Autobots, Megatron ignored his second-in-command, determined to see it through.
Starscream had headed to the trine quarters to find Thundercracker and Skywarp, recounting how Megatron had dismissed his objections as "for the cause." Thundercracker, however, begged to differ.
"Are you slaggin' me?" Thundercracker bellowed. "We're burning two thousand miles worth of fuel reserves... to raid a plant that's probably been picked clean by the Autobutts already?"
Starscream, who had been buffing his talons to a flawless sheen, looked to the blue seeker. He set his buffer down with a loud clang and got up off his heel struts.
"That's exactly what I told Megatron. But that feeble-minded fool thinks otherwise," the red seeker retorted, his denta grinding together.
"I agree. But Screamer. Stop doing that. You're gonna chip a denta," Thundercracker reminded him casually, as if he weren't freaking out nano-kliks ago.
Starscream stopped, horrified at the thought of chipping his perfect enamel.
"Lord Megatron's gotta be fraggin' with us. He's gotta be doing this because I accidentally teleported the rec room into space last deca-cycle," Skywarp giggled childishly, high and sharp, but Starscream's glare instantly silenced him. "Oh c'mon, Screamer. Don't look at me like that…"
"Do not call me Screamer!" Starscream snapped, his vents whistling nasally, high-pitched, as he jabbed a claw at the purple seeker. "And I'll have you know that rec room incident was a complete disaster!"
"It was one time!"
"One time doesn't matter!" Starscream screeched. "I had to take cosmic dust out of my turbine intakes for a whole solar-cycle. Cosmic dust, Skywarp! Do you know how hard that is to remove??"
"Oh, you'll live," Thundercracker chimed in.
Starscream rolled his optics. "Whatever. Let's just get this tedious mission over and done with, shall we? Before that oversized rust-bucket Megatron decides to throw me out the Nemesis airlock again."
Starscream marched to the launch bay, his heels slamming against the deck hard enough to spiderweb the plating. Thundercracker and Skywarp shared a knowing glance—a silent agreement to endure the red seeker's melodrama—before trailing behind.
The Nemesis creaked around them, its ancient structure settling into the vacuum like a corpse in the void. Starscream shifted first, his form collapsing into a sleek jet with expert speed, turbines screeching to a whine that made Thundercracker's audials ring. The others followed, falling into formation instantly, a thousand stellar cycles of forced unity hardwired into their systems.
"Coordinates received," Soundwave's monotone crackled across their comms, and Starscream didn't bother suppressing the snarl he sent back.
The flight was uneven, which should have been their first warning. And then the processing plant. It hung in orbit around an already dead star, like a skeletal thing of rusted gantries and collapsed storage silos. There were no energon signatures on preliminary scan. No life signs and no Autobot patrols. There was absolutely nothing here, but the hollow breath of decompression where seals had failed vorns ago and the sound of Skywarp's pop! each time he teleported in circles.
"Told you," Starscream snapped, transforming and landing hard enough to kick up particulate dust that settled on his pristine wings like ash. "This sector is picked clean and there isn't a single scrap of energon left to steal! We are wasting precious time. We should return immediately and inform Megatron that his precious intelligence is... grossly outdated."
Thundercracker and Skywarp landed near each other. They looked at each other and around the area for a moment before the blue seeker suddenly went still, picking up something strange.
"Thundercracker? Report."
Thundercracker shushed him.
"Did you just... shush me?!" Starscream hissed. "I asked you to repo—"
"Hold your thrusters." Thundercracker cut in, his optics narrowed, his helm tilting as his audials tuned up to the frequency again, clearly above standard range. "You hear that?"
"Hear what?" Skywarp asked, already poking at a collapsed conduit with one pede. "I don't hear anything except Screamer's endless complaining."
"I said—" Starscream began.
Thundercracker held up a servo, silencing him. "High frequency. Intermittent. Like... vent distress." He paused and heard it again. Small, but definitely there, and he was NOT going crazy. "What the…?"
They followed it, or they followed Thundercracker, since it seemed like only he heard it and honestly? They shouldn't have. None of them would admit, later, that this was a foolish idea, but they moved together anyway, through the ruptured facility, past processing vats long dried to crystallized residue, past scavenger nests and the remains of maintenance drones that would have swept the sectors of this plant.
The sound grew louder, more desperate and more distressful. This whole thing was ticking Thundercracker off, badly. They found a collapsed storage sub-level, half-buried under a collapsed coolant tower, long since dried up. It was way too dusty and dark to see anything properly. Starscream adjusted his optics to pierce the gloom, and—
"Oh," said Skywarp, the word small and strange in his vocaliser. There was a terrifying lucidity to his words, reverberating in Thundercracker and Starscream's audio receptors.
Because what they found wasn't energon. Or an Autobot. Or a corpse for that matter, though they had passed several on their way here. What lay in the choking darkness was a stasis pod, or what was left of one.
The top casing was cracked, the emergency seals were blown, and if Starscream hadn't known any better—which he did—the internal regulators were flickering red where they had failed entirely and miserably. And what was curled inside the little cushioned cabin, tight in a defensive ball, no larger than Starscream's own thorax, was a sparkling.
Even from this distance, they recognized the signs of a premature spark-spawn; its armor was merely malleable alloy, lacking definition, with nascent optics and stubby extremities tucked against a soft chassis.
The barest nubs of what might one day become wing struts protruded from its back. Its plating was pale, translucent silver-blue, like the color of raw energon still in the refinery, shot through with biolights that pulsed erratically with its vent cycle. Those lights shifted as they watched—faintly crimson one moment, pale gold the next, as if the little thing couldn't decide what colour it wanted to be.
"Is it... alive?" was the first thing Thundercracker said. Of course it was. His voice dropped into a low, resonant rumble, like the same frequency he favoured when electrical storms made regular communication painful.
Starscream, to his surprise, was already running scanner reports, his processor spitting data he couldn't interpret. Spark signature: unstable. Present. Energon levels: critically low. Core temperature: fluctuating outside safe parameters. Estimated time since pod failure: approximately three solar cycles.
It all bombarded his HUD, and he couldn't clear it.
"It won't last another orn... maybe two, if we're lucky," Starscream spoke, his voice unnervingly even and stripped of its usual theatrical flair. "Its regulator is falling apart and without a proper nursery interface or proper medic-grade stabilizers."
"So we leave it." Skywarp's words were quick, too quick, and he took a step back, his pede knocking against debris. No one had seen a sparkling in vorns. "Right? We leave it and we tell Megatron we found something other than energon... maybe he sends some other poor drone to get it."
"Forget it, Warp. There's no retrieval unit." Thundercracker creased his cranial plating, looking at the other seeker. "You know there's no retrieval unit. It's the war effort—resources, you fool. You really think Megatron is gonna spare a transport and a medic... for one sparkling?"
They all knew that answer, unfortunately. They'd had enough casualties and abandoned post after post for vorns and seen enough "accepted losses" written off in after-action reports to know exactly what command, and especially Megatron, would say.
Starscream should agree with Thundercracker on this. It was right for the Decepticon cause, and he didn't have time to…include a sparkling who couldn't even hold up its own helm with his ambitions. He was Air Commander, second to Megatron. He was the seeker of the skies. Yet, as the sparkling's biolights flickered, he heard a sound emerge from it, something raw and frequency-broken that scraped across Starscream's audio receptors like damaged gear mesh.
It was desperate for connection, reaching toward him, toward them—anyone nearby. A soft, stubby limb pressed against the pod's interior, straining toward a light it had likely never known.
"Starscream." Thundercracker's voice was careful, the way one spoke to a mech with a live plasma charge in his servos. "What are you doing?"
He hadn't realized he'd moved. His talons were on the pod casing, prying at the emergency release with movements his processor hadn't authorized. The seal broke with a hiss of equalizing pressure, and the smell hit him—hot metal, ozone, the sweet-sharp tang of young energon that had never been cycled through weapons systems or the discipline of command protocols.
Warmth. That was his first coherent thought as his servos closed around the protoform, lifting it with a gentleness that made his own subroutines recoil in confusion. It was also lighter than it should be, and its biolights were strobing now in patterns that his processor identified, belatedly, as recognition.
Imprinting. The word surfaced from some archived datafile he'd never bothered to access or acknowledge properly. Sparklings in distress could imprint on the first compatible energy signature they encountered, forming a parental bond that was—
"Oh, slag," Skywarp breathed, his wings hiking up. "Screamer! It…it's glowing at you."
It was. The pale biolights had shifted, settling into a steady pulse of deep crimson that matched the frequency of Starscream's own spark. He could feel it now. It was like a faint harmonic resonance in his chest cavity that made his vents hitch with something he had never felt before.
"Put it back," Thundercracker said, but there was no force behind it. "Starscream. Stuff it back in the pod. Let's send a flare and let someone else—or Megatron—handle this disaster."
"There's…no one else." The words were broken, submerged in static. Starscream gazed at the soft, silver-blue thing in his grip, watching its lights dim and its breathing grow tranquil, and felt a profound, unnerving ache in his frame that wasn't caused by any mechanical malfunction.
"We're taking it with us," he heard himself say.
"What?" Two voices perfectly synchronised in their horror.
"Are you glitched, or just totally offline?!" Skywarp demanded. "We cannot bring a sparkling back to the Nemesis! Megatron will—I don't even know what he'll do, but it'll involve disassembly! Lots of it! And do you even know how to—what do they even eat? Do they even eat?"
"I said we're taking it." The old authority crept back into his vocaliser, the command tone that brooked no argument. It was a defence, and they all knew it, but none of them called him on it. "As for the rest... we'll figure it out. We have the resources and more importantly... you have me. I am the smartest mech on the Nemesis, and I will devise a solution."
"You? Smartest…You're the mech who once tried to upgrade his own targeting systems with a welding torch," Thundercracker pointed out, ruining the moment. Always him.
Starscream's wings flicked. "That… that was one time—"
"Guys," Skywarp interrupted, his vocaliser, typically a chaotic mess, now carrying something else. He held his gaze fixed on the sparkling with an expression totally impenetrable to Starscream. "Guys, I think it's... I think it's falling into stasis. Look at its lights."
The crimson biolights guttered to a weak amber, the harmonic resonance in Starscream's chassis fading to a hollow echo. The seeker's talons tightened reflexively around the sparkling, cradling it against his chest plating as if proximity alone could force its spark to stabilise.
You are aware, in a distant, fractured way, that you are dying. The cold had been everything for so long, like an endless, crushing nothing that wore away at the edges of your spark. But now there is heat. A fierce, crimson frequency that hums against your chassis like a lullaby shouted through a storm. You don't know words and you don't know names.
But you know this—the vibration of a chassis that smells like ozone and indignation, the press of talons that hold you with a gentleness that confuses even the one wielding them.
"Move," the red and white seeker snarls, already transforming.
You hiccup inside the space you do not have a name for. Your tiny, plump limb instinctively reaches out, pressing small digits against the glass as you hear the words: rest easy and you are safe. The promise echoes around you. Wrapped in this newly named haven, you watch the station recede, while the stars burn brighter and draw closer.
The other two seekers kept pace, their thrusters screaming to life in a reckless burst, skipping safety protocols entirely. And before they knew it, the Nemesis loomed ahead. Usually, Starscream would throttle back, savouring the anticipation, but not today. He acted on instinct alone, flying blindly with a sudden, suffocating awareness of mortality.
"Hush, now. Go to sleep, young one," the one that burns bright says, and it trembles as he hears your ominous trill. "There is no need to worry about later."
His frequency stutters, something sharp and sorrowful bleeding into the hum, and you don't understand why your distress makes him ache. You are scarcely past your first few deca-cycles, too young to comprehend the weight of grief in a soldier's spark.
You listen to him and rest, nestled in the belly of a starfighter reeking of conflict and despair, lulled by a rhythm you've claimed as your own. Ignorant of the Nemesis, of Megatron and politics, and of the countless ways your existence has just sealed the fate of three soldiers. You are aware only of the crimson pulse, the thunder following in its wake, and the staccato rhythm of chaos nipping at your heels.
And in your slumber, the choice is already made: these three are yours.