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The rolling synths and jingling pops of one of Rosanna's singles greets Blaster's audials as his optics—optic, the other one is cracked in the lens, frag—onlines in a fog of dust. Then the warning tabs start blaring in his HUD, all varying tones of reds and oranges reminding him hey, your left elbow joint got smashed in the complete opposite direction and now your arm's useless, and Blaster promptly shuts down his pain receptors. He manually overrides every tab he can while minimizing those he can't.
Static glitches and dances through Rosanna's high notes. He cuts the musical feed abruptly, killing off the processor threads that were freezing up.
Someone snorts from somewhere below Blaster's dented torso. A helmlight pokes out from behind it, the cracked yellow chevron framing the high beam a dead giveaway even through the gritty dust. "Welcome back to the land of the living," Smokescreen says, patting a pauldron with his servo. "We were worried you wouldn't restart again."
Blaster boots up his vocalizer, relieved to find it blessedly intact. "Real touched, my mech," he says, as deadpan as he can manage with his vox so hoarse. "How long was I out?"
Smokescreen squints at him, two slices of blue barely visible under his helmlight. "Sorry, could ya run that by me one more time?" He smacks his audial, and for the first time Blaster notices the flickering lights ringed on one and the way the other is blatantly crushed. Ouch. That's gonna be a glitch for the medics to fix up later.
"How long's it been?"
"Oh. Not too long. Chronometer's knocked out, but I can't imagine it was more than a breem." Smokescreen pokes around at Blaster's helm, looking for the switch that will fire up his own helmlight. Blaster grunts and shoves his servo away, flicking it on himself.
He hadn't noticed how tightly closed in the cave-in left them. Not everyone is in the tunnel—Grapple, Perceptor, and Ratchet had been at the entrance, loading up the carts and offering instructions—but they ended up clustered together even so. Whatever space that isn't taken up by a scrappy little miner is piled high with shards of rock and raw energon.
Moonracer and Brainstorm lay in a heap off near Blaster's pedes, the former poking dejectedly at her mostly-buried drill while the latter kicks his dented heel struts against the mountain of unstable rock. Sparks bounce off Blaster's fragged-up arm from where Red Alert sits curled up against the stone, clutching at his shredded tires and doing his damnedest to keep calm.
And Sunstreaker—
"My plating!" he shrieks somewhere above Blaster's helm, staring at the pitter-patter dents and scratched-up paint with no small degree of horror.
"Shut up, Sunny!" Moonracer hisses. She throws a stone at him for good measure, hardly more than a pebble, but he starts yelling again when it goes plink against his armor.
Blaster sighs.
Prowl winces when Blaster shines his light on him, raising a servo to block it just a moment too late. He's half sprawled across Smokescreen and Blaster almost doesn't recognize him, the way he's soaked helm to pedes in spritzed energon. Really really really bad injury, Blaster's processor supplies, but it's nearly buried in the sudden, upending panic of it all.
"I am fine," Prowl reassures, as if he can read the string of code right off his face. "No vitals were harmed. It looks like there is more than there is."
Smokescreen pinches Prowl's cheek affectionately and chuckles when the other bats him away. "He's right, don't worry. His pede got crushed, but it was a clean break. We staunched the bleeding before ya woke up."
Relief unfreezes the coolant in Blaster's lines. "Hooh, Primus. That's great 'n' all, but I'm not risking a second glance at that. Don't feel like purgin' my tanks all over Sunny's struts."
"Get the fuck away from me," growls Sunstreaker immediately. The slash of his mouth forms a disgusted grimace in the dark, highlighted only by his glowing optics and the flickering helmlights of the miners around him.
Blaster quirks an optic ridge at him but feels no real offense. "Would if I could, sunshine. Not like there's anywhere for me to go."
He still pushes himself upright regardless, wincing at the tingly ache the action leaves in his frame. Something goes plink-plink-plink in his chest though. Hmm. "Lemme send a signal out, see where we're at."
Thank the Primes for small miracles, because his comms suite remains undamaged. He sends out a simultaneous ping to Perceptor, Ratchet, and Grapple. Perceptor pings back a confirmation and an assurance all at once, immediately—we're digging, we're triangulating your location, we'll find you.
"Amen to that," mutters Blaster. Louder, he says, "Percy 'n' the others are on their way!"
Red Alert's panicked sparking slowly fizzles out, and Moonracer and Brainstorm cheer in tandem. Nothing shows on Prowl's face, but Blaster sees how he seems to deflate against Smokescreen's frame. Can't blame him, really, not with an injury like that.
Alright, fantastic. With that covered, Blaster pushes his undamaged servo into his giant empty hole of a chest, ignoring the flares of agitation where he brushes against delicate circuitry. His t-cog slot seems fine, but that doesn't explain the weird tinkly noises.
Smokescreen frowns at him. "You doin' alright?"
"I… think so?" Blaster says, more than a bit hesitant. "I think there's something in here."
"Weird. Hold on, Prowl, can you move over here for a klik?"
Smokescreen nudges the injured bot into leaning against a cluster of (sturdy) stones, then throws a leg over Blaster's lap to settle down comfortably. Blaster feels the flood of energon to his face before he can do anything to stop it. The subsequent flash of light has Smokescreen smiling fondly, but mercifully he says nothing about it.
Then he shoves his servo into Blaster's chest.
A couple of fiery red pop-ups blur in Blaster's HUD, only somewhat noticeable under the instinctive kick directed straight into Brainstorm's jaw. The mech squawks in a fit of glitchy binary, and Smokescreen freezes right where he is.
"Sorry!" Blaster sputters out. To the petrified gambler perched in his lap, he says, wincing, "Warn a mech, next time? Lotsa exposed wires in there, 'n' all that."
"Y—yeah, my mistake, there." Smokescreen sounds like he's choking on the glyphs. The next time his servo moves, it's with a much gentler touch, pressing into the once finely carved metal and rubber with care.
Smokescreen's digits trip over something lodged between the deck rows. Blaster grits his dentae. "Pull that out."
They've been friends (?) long enough that Smokescreen doesn't question it. He makes a solid grab at the object and pulls, working what looks to be a jagged piece of rubble out of the fragile circuits lined along the bottom of Blaster's recess. A flurry of sparks follows, not unlike a trail of stars in the dim gloom of the cavern.
Smokescreen squints at the dislodged stone in distaste. "Didn't leave an energon leak, thankfully. How're you feelin'?"
Still in pain, but. "Better," Blaster says, relaxing a fraction. "I can still feel some debris stuck there… Do you think you can grab 'em? I can't really see where they are 'n' all."
"You got it." Smokescreen crouches a little so that his helmlight can catch more of Blaster's insides. Blaster sits there, trying not to entertain the prospect of bashing his helmet in with a rock because his-friend-maybe-lover-maybe-secret-third-thing's got his whole face mere meters away from his spark, guarded carefully behind his t-cog slot.
Brainstorm, sprawled upside-down on the ground in front of him, wiggles his optic ridges suggestively. Blaster has no qualms about picking up a pebble and flicking it right between his optics. It's not like he chose to have a hollow gap in his frame. He startled online for the first time with the strange sense of empty-empty-empty that he could barely process before the mech in the pod next to his, the one he'd come to know as Bluestreak, tipped backwards and toppled to the floor.
While Smokescreen busies himself plucking the bits and pieces of the cave from Blaster's insides, the taller mech carefully moves to get a look at his injured arm. Yeesh, even just shifting it has more warning tabs popping up in his visual feed.
He sifts through his recorded files from just before the cave-in, deliberately avoiding any glitching or static that ebbs at the corroded edges of each one. He'll leave Ratchet to treat any computing errors later. The recordings showcase snippets of Blaster readying his drill for digging, tucking it under his arm as Red Alert shoves a cart up next to him.
Then there's the explosion, the way the combined force of a flung cart and a flung Red Alert crushed Blaster's arm between solid steel and his drill, yada yada yada… he winds it back, squints at the feed, and—ooh, yikes. Prowl sets his drill into the stone with confidence, sensors reading back nothing of danger, expecting energon but hitting a vein, and it's all over from there.
He crops the recordings with care, making sure the explosion reads as a spontaneous accident, completely individual of any mech's errors. Losing a pede is more than enough of a punishment, and Prowl doesn't need another demotion after he worked so hard to boost his tier again.
Smokescreen's vents release a huff. Blaster closes the memory files as the other straightens up, smile cheeky as he holds up a pile of misshapen stones and dirt. Some are tipped blue with energon, which, ew. "Wanna keep a souvenir?" he teases.
Blaster makes a face. "Eugh, no. Get that slag out of here." He tilts and falls backward, snickering as Sunstreaker dodges his pointed finials before they stab his pedes.
His chest aches something fierce, now that all the foreign objects aren't splitting wires and ripping up the fragile metal, and he can feel a torn (and thankfully clotted) line in there somewhere, but at least the emptiness feels normal, so he can live with it.
"Take it easy, mech." Smokescreen's digits flit over Blaster's, fleeting but gentle. "We're here if you need anything."
Blaster shutters his optics, pulls up the radio, and hits play. Rosanna's cheery chorus washes over his audials, this time free of static and ever-familiar.
Blaster is a unique build among cogless bots. He knows this. Has known since he stepped off the transport and saw higher tier bots staring wide-opticked at his hollowed chest. No one else has that, or the quad of speakers inset to his pauldrons and pedes. The atypical line of switches straight across his waist holds no real function, acting more as a fidget when Blaster's anxiety racks up than anything else.
He can appreciate, at least, that no one will mistake him for someone else. Darkwing's plucked Smokescreen off the ground by the collar faring like a felinoid more than once, foolishly confusing a common color scheme for the newly-assigned troublemaker of Elita One's squad.
However, it does mean that medics have no baseline for reference.
Ratchet's annoyed stare isn't promising, to say the least.
Blaster scratches at an uneven clump of poorly-welded metal at the edge of the bench with his good servo. "What's the damage, doc?" he asks, hoping the chatter will hide the skritch-skritch of his digits against the surface.
"Stop calling me that," Ratchet snaps without much heat. He switches his helmlight off and sits back on his heel struts, shooing off anyone who wanders just a bit too close to the not-technically-legally-supplied first aid kit unfolded on the floor. Blaster would've preferred a check-up in the actual medical office over their recharge bay, where his arm was fixed up earlier, but there's always a shortage of space and, well. None of the medics are Ratchet. "It's nothing dangerous, but it'll be slag to fix-up. All the tech in this slot you've got is one-of-a-kind and pretty delicate."
One-of-a-kind. Right.
Blaster steeples his digits and hums in thought. One of Jazz's tunes comes up in the nonsense melody, unbidden. "Will I have to go under for it?"
"Probably. Your sensors are too sensitive for me to fix them up without causing you any pain." Ratchet pauses, contemplative. "I could attach a manual-locking panel over your slot, too. If you'd like."
Blaster stares. "A… panel."
"Yep. Right over all of this." Ratchet reaches over and traces a digit over the edges surrounding his slot. "It'll protect your tech from excess damage on-shift. As long as Brainstorm, Smokescreen, and Prowl are in our squad, you're still gonna get blown up every quartex, but it'll help minimize cut wires and dented parts."
He takes maybe a klik to think about it. "Sure. Works for me."
Ratchet shoots him a Look. "Here I thought you'd protest more. Not a fan of Smokescreen playing with your parts after all?"
Blaster sputters, optics bursting bright with the energon rush. "I—wha—no—"
Ratchet barks a laugh, and Blaster realizes it's a joke with a heady crush of embarrassment. He yanks his visor over his optics and hides in his servos.
"Don't worry, kid." Ratchet pats his pauldron, absolutely oozing triumph and condescension. "I'll get that panel set up and coordinate a time for the maintenance on our next off-shift, alright? See you later."
"I hope Brainstorm's next experiment blows up in your face," Blaster grumbles, and Ratchet laughs once more.
(The finished panel shines in a blotchy patchwork pattern—galvanized steel, a little uneven but mostly smooth when Blaster brushes his digits over it. His plating aches where Ratchet drilled the hinges in, but it'll fade in time and he can live with that. It guards him where he's at his most fragile, and he won't take that for granted.
When he checks himself in the reflection of the transport's glass, he can almost fool himself into believing that that's the frame of an oversized minibot, and not a flimsy pile of squeaky joints and mismatched parts.)
A series of rattling clangs echo in the recharge bay, and Blaster startles online.
The new bot in Elita One's team—Orion Pax? stares back. The fallen crate of datapads that flickered on when Pax tripped over them start to power down one by one.
"Um," the slagger starts.
Blaster hears steps through the corridors outside their quarters, the signal for the next patrol, and mutters a curse. He unplugs from his hab and crouches in front of a frozen Pax to shovel the datapads back into the crate. Someone must've left them there after Blaster went to sleep—he doesn't remember those being there when he went offline for the night.
"Get in," he hisses.
Pax stares, optics wide and round. "Huh?"
"Joorly patrol, they'll be here soon and they're gonna have us both on waste disposal duty for the next few cycles if they catch us so get in my hab now!"
From what Blaster's heard from Jazz's amusing retellings of his work shifts, Pax is dumb, but not stupid. When Blaster snaps at him to move, Pax rushes to his pedes and stumbles into the hab, poking at the recharge cable that's positioned just a smidge too tall for him.
Blaster hastily sets the crate down on a bench and rushes back to his hab. "Try 'n' make yourself as small as ya can, got it?"
Considering that Pax's not that much smaller than him—Blaster's tall, but not taller than D-16—this is going to be difficult. Judging by the frown on Pax's face, he recognizes that. Doesn't stop him from cramping his pauldrons in tight as he can though, or tucking his pedes together 'til they squeak.
"Thanks, mech," Blaster offers with a weak smile.
Pax returns it warmly, opening his mouth to say something else, when—
The pedesteps pivot, a keypad chimes, and yep, that's his cue. Blaster turns his back to Pax and crams himself into his hab as best as he can without crushing the mech behind him. He can't plug in like this, but he tilts his helm down and shutters his optics to recreate the holo.
It's a blessing from Primus, really, that their quarters lack installed cameras in every sector. This lousy ruse would never have worked otherwise, and even then Pax would have been caught long before this. As it is, the patrol guard—Firestarter, Blaster recalls, scrolling through the profile he'd yoinked from Red Alert, new to the job and a bit of a slacker—on duty traipses through each aisle lazily, not looking twice.
He remains stiff, joints locked and biolights powered down, until the doors at the other end of the recharge bay close with a hiss. A few kliks pass, and once he's certain Firestarter's faded out of his audial range, Blaster relaxes his hydraulics and slips out of his hab suite.
"Sorry," Blaster apologizes, offering a servo. Pax takes it easily, hopping down from the raised ledge of the hab without a care. "Wanted to make sure you didn't get in trouble, 's all."
"Appreciate it, thanks." Pax tilts his helm, furrows an optic ridge, then asks, "How did you know he was coming, though?"
"Hm? Oh, I heard it."
Pax stares. "Wh—you heard him?"
"Yep." Blaster taps his left audial and blinks the biolights there in a mimicry of a throbber cycle. "Got the biggest audial range of anybot down here, mech. I can hear the security guards downstairs buttonmashing their portable game consoles at their desk as we speak." He ignores Pax's vaguely awed look to glance at the doors Firestarter exited from. "We got lucky tonight, though. 'Starter's a careless newbie, likes takin' shortcuts where he can, skippin' over the notes 'n' all that."
"You know them by name?"
Blaster laughs. "Sure, 'course I do. How else am I gonna take midnight strolls 'round the complex this late otherwise?"
Midnight strolls to help ease the searing aches of an unstable spark, but, well. Pax doesn't need to know that.
"Primus's grace, I owe you one," Pax says, smiling bright. The biolights circling his own audials wink in a matching throbber pattern, and Blaster can't help another chuckle. "Blaster, right? You're from Ratchet's team?"
"The one 'n' only! He mentioned me to you, I take it?"
"Only good things, I swear by my spark!" The slight rotation of the outer lenses in Pax's optics mark him a dirty little liar, but Blaster takes the jest for what it is.
"Sure, and I'm the reincarnation of Solus Prime." Blaster waves him off. "Get on outta here, Pax. Make sure you come back before the next shift cycle, or else Darkwing'll pluck Smokes by the chassis because he can't tell blue-red from red-blue."
"Don't you worry, I'll be back before he can yell miners at the top of his vox capacity. See you around!" Pax offers a two-digit salute, then turns and skips on out of the recharge bay.
Blaster rolls his optics and staves off the fondness swelling up in his spark. "What a weirdo."
When he onlines again for the next shift, there's a new message in his inbox. It reads, Thanks again! You like music, right? Hope you like synth :) - Orion with a few .mp3 files attached.
Blaster hums along to the ringing of Moonshower's high notes and soothing synth until his first break, the tune lost under the crushing screech of drills.
That isn't the end of it. Pax, now armed with the knowledge that Blaster memorized patrol schedules and keeps detailed profiling of which guards work when, regularly bugs him when he's planning something sneaky.
Which happens a lot. Primus below. Blaster offers D-16 his sincerest condolences.
It's not his intention, but—a sort of unspoken partnership rises from that brief moment shared in the recharge bay. Pax's impulsivity speaks to a deeply held need to learn, to change things, and with nothing but a scrappy, scrawny miner's frame and the helmlight mod installed in his crest, he chooses to express this by making a nuisance of himself and sneaking into places he's not meant to go.
Blaster, with Red Alert's carefully detailed officer profiles stashed in his drives, sends Pax encrypted notes over cubes during energon breaks. Sharpsheet's on rotation tonight, don't bother. Be back before 0400 joors, they're planning an evacuation drill. Pax never says a glyph about it, even when they're talking with one another, except for the thumbs-up reaction next to each of Blaster's messages.
And always, without fail, Blaster onlines the following cycle with a disorganized packet of songs to sort through. Sometimes it's just clips from an old orchestral piece, other times a full album. He flags each of them with a star tag regardless.
He doesn't hoard the music all to himself, though.
"Blaster, hey!"
"Hey yourself," Blaster greets as Pax walks by with D-16, saluting him with two digits like Pax did that very first time. Across the table from him, Smokescreen goes still.
Blaster returns to his cube, swishing the energon around in it, and waits for the anxious mech to speak first.
"Did—" Smokescreen cuts himself off, chews on his lip. His optics glow fiercely beneath the chipped gold paint of his chevron. "Did something happen with you and Pax?" Hitch, tow line, and coupler.
"Nah." Blaster sits back and holds his cube to the overhead light. "Mech's jumped out of towers and escaped unscathed, but he's not a miracle-worker. I just make sure he doesn't get smelted by someone who might see 'im at the wrong time, y'know?"
Smokescreen frowns, small but telling. There's worry in the slight curve of it, in the way his digits clutch tight at his own cube. He's never been able to voice his feelings out so openly the way his frame does.
His poker face always seems to fall apart around Blaster. The thought has his spark spinning helplessly. Ah, damn it all.
"C'mon, Smokes." Blaster scoots to the far right of his seat, gesturing to the freshly emptied space. Smokescreen hesitates. His index scratches a scuffed line across the side of his cube, another anxious tell, before he stands and makes his way around the table.
Blaster swipes his thumb across the panel in his forearm. The paint there is peeling, the red giving way for barren silver underneath. Sunstreaker's gonna kill him, but sue him, he's nervous too, okay?
He's not oblivious, not in the way that Jazz is about Prowl's fond glances, or D-16 is when Pax bumps their fists together with the tenderest smile he's ever seen. Smokescreen's lingering but careless touches always leave dark grey smudges across his paint, a glyphless dance of belonging. For as often as they're together, those darling optics so frequently tilt down and away, hiding the bright energon flares.
Blaster knows. He knows like he knows himself—like he knows the crystalline caverns they tread through with flickering helmlights and drills hefted on dented pauldrons. Like the unstable gems that burst on contact, an explosion made all the worse by Prowl and Smokescreen's unreliable sensors, an explosion that always, always, has Blaster reaching for a golden chevron first.
And Blaster knows that, just the same, Smokescreen isn't so oblivious either. Doesn't make this any easier.
"Okay," he makes himself say, because if he lets himself stew any longer he'll find a way to bail. "This isn't about Pax. It's about us. You 'n' me, got that?"
Smokescreen nods. His thigh taps against Blaster's as he nudges just a tiny bit closer. Closer, closer, like the way the night sky hugs the stars.
Blaster forces a nervous gust out of his vents, then pulls the mixtape out of his forearm storage compartment. Little music notes and shanix decals snagged off of Moonracer frame the tape reels, glittery and utterly sparkling-like.
"Y'know, if I had a cog, I'd like to be a record player, or some kind of music mixer," he confesses. The hole that protects where his spark is sheltered aches something fierce. "Writin' my own music, playin' it out loud at a live house… that sounds like a dream. But more than that, I wanted to write somethin' for you, too."
There, that minute flare of blue in Smokescreen's optics before he stares back down at the mixtape held in Blaster's servos.
"I can't really write like this, but I want to someday." Blaster drops the mixtape, sorted and carefully categorizing the best songs Pax sent him, into Smokescreen's servos. He watches the smaller mech fumble to catch it with mild amusement. "Until then, I hope this'll do for ya."
"Blaster, this—" Smokescreen's glyphs fritz into static as he cradles the tape, turning it over and over in his grasp. He finally, finally looks up. Blue shines into white at the center of his lenses. "I don't have a built-in tape reader, how should I…?"
Blaster smiles. "Don't worry 'bout that, sweetspark." He pops his other arm panel open and gestures to the neat rectangular slot where a mixtape can fit. He unspools the pair of audial connectors fitted right beneath it, magnetizing one right over his own before offering the other to Smokescreen. "Wanna try? We've got a few before Percy comes 'round to drag us back to our stations."
Smokescreen's next words, whatever they are, drown in the glitching binary of his embarrassment. He shoves the mixtape into the slot and wrenches the audial connector out of the offered servo, and Blaster can't help but laugh and laugh.
::Y'sure you don't wanna come back for another round?::
::I'm sure, Jazz. I'll see y'all when you get back. Make sure Sunny 'n' Sides don't get too plastered, 'kay?::
::You got it, Blast-mech! See ya on the flip side!::
The line closes on a blip. Blaster lets out an easy sigh.
A good night, tonight. No major accidents on the clock, a holo-worthy night out at Maccadam's, only cogless-friendly bar in lower Iacon, the pleasant buzz of high grade in his tanks. Smokescreen, so lovely and alive under the vibrant lights. If only Blaster wasn't slotted for the morning shift. He'd have stayed longer, just to have twined their digits and shared little secret smiles. Just for another precious memory.
The train, when Blaster gets to the station, isn't expected for another few kliks. Not surprising, given how late it is. The platform's deserted save for himself. Softly flickering lamps ring the platform, and in the distance, high Iacon blazes with gold and amber.
Idle and tipsy, Blaster brings his speakers up to a low volume and tunes into Luna XM. Serenata's upbeat chorus fills the empty space around him, melodic and sweet. Mech, it'd be nice to have someone to dance with.
Another sound layers over the music and faraway blinks of traffic lights. Blaster turns the volume down and his audial input up, spinning in a circle to pick up the origin of the sound.
There. At the sloping entrance of the transport platform, beyond the road that stretches out past it—sirens. Blaring, and when Blaster squints, he sees red and blue light refracting across glass. Enforcers. He whistles, surprised.
That surprise racks up the moment the pursued vehicle veers around the corner, followed by one-two-three-four—
"Five?" Blaster sputters. He's never seen that many all at once, not for something like what this looks to be: a speeding ticket.
A rapidly hiking speeding ticket, actually. The navy-blue speedster leading the pack of Enforcers is only gaining in speed, the gap between them and the Enforcers growing ever wider. But they skip over the last turnoff that would direct them away from the train station, their rubber tires screeching as they hurry up the ramp—
The intercom above the platform dings. "A train is arriving. Please step away from the edge of the platform."
Blaster stares, frozen, as the speedster unfolds midway up the ramp, hydraulics hissing and joints whirring while plating eases up, up, and away. Glimmery blue and grey armor shifts away to reveal a red-tinted faceplate framed by a gleaming silver-white helm, crested with a chevron not unlike Smokescreen's. Wings bisected with a strip of red-orange paint click into place at the mech's back as the still-spinning wheels slow, and Blaster only takes a moment to think, Wings?
The thread has no room to expand into further trees, because the mech dashes up to the platform as the train slips seamlessly into the station. Blaster manages all of about half a step back before the mech, easily twice his size and sparkling-bright in the dim amber glow of the overhead lights, reaches down and curls a servo about Blaster's middle.
"Wh—what the fuck—" Blaster glitches over the glyphs as he's hefted off the ground and pressed against the stranger's side. He bangs a fist against that cursed shining golden windshield. "Let go of me, what are you—"
"Easy on the glass!" The mech scolds, as if that's the problem here. His wings angle back as he continues his breakneck stride. As the shouting Enforcers crowd into the station behind them, the mech—and Blaster, yelling and kicking at his leg struts—hops up onto the train, crouches, and ignites his engines. Glass shatters in a flurry of sparks as they take off into the sky, oh Primus, what the fuck.
"I thought you were a car, what the fuck!" Blaster shrieks, clutching onto the stranger's arm for dear life.
The mech shifts his hold on Blaster, carefully angling him away from his windshield. Blaster, by virtue of the fact that they're spiraling higher above the ground and he can see the rooftops of towers he's never even stepped pede into, screams and holds on even tighter. "Hey, calm down! I'm not going to drop you!"
"Easy for you to say!" Blaster smacks at the panel over his chest. "Not all of us have wings, or even wheels!"
"Wheels?" The mech finally, blessedly, eases up on his engines, slowing them down into more of a gentle glide across the city. He hefts Blaster up by either arm socket, looking him from pedes to helm. His optics audibly clink in their housing. "You… do not transform. You're one of them."
Bitterness, acidic and familiar, wells up in Blaster's intake. "Can't even say it, can ya, mech?" He knows, somewhere in his processor, that talking back to a cogged mech is a bad idea. This one might even be a noble, judging by his duo alt modes and shimmering paint job.
He also knows, much more intimately, that he really doesn't give a shit.
"No, that was not—that was hardly what I meant," the mech protests. He clears his vocalizer. "I simply have never met one of the cogless bots before. I am Tracks of the High Towers."
Blaster's vocalizer fritzes for all of three nano-kliks before he resets it. "I—Blaster. Haven't, uh, haven't met one of those, either," he offers uselessly. High Towers mechs aren't even permitted to leave upper Iacon. "Why are you even out here, mech? Aren't ya supposed to be up in the sky 'n' all that?"
"We are in the sky," Tracks replies with a note of amusement. "But unfortunately yes, and those pesky Enforcers do not take kindly to those who simply wish to explore the city on their own time."
Joyrider, Blaster thinks, but keeps his mouth shut. He only hums in reply.
Up this high, Iacon feels so much less than it has before. On the ground, the rising architecture felt all too close to swallowing him up. Now those grand spires glow like crystals at his pedes, ready to be cracked apart with a drill and filtered three times into the cubes they swallow on the daily. The golds fade into blues and violets, occasionally intercepted with streaks of gleaming headlights as the last few stragglers return to their berths for recharge.
It's so beautiful. It's so empty.
"I am sorry to have grabbed you like that," says Tracks, softly. Blaster glances back at him, and sees their city reflected in his armor. "I did not wish to involve you with the local precinct, so I… panicked."
"Can't lie, mech, that was fraggin' terrifying." Blaster laughs. He looks back over the vastness of sweeping roads and glowing lights. "Have t' say, though… for a view like this? Worth it."
Tracks's ensuing smile is, too.
Alas, the first shift is still the first shift. Blaster directs Tracks back into the bowels of lower Iacon, towards his assigned dormitory, and instructs him to drop him off a few blocks north. Old, burned-out lights line the empty walkways this late at night. Perfect for sneaking back in.
Once he's back on solid steel, Blaster holds out a fist. "You get back safe, y'hear me?"
Tracks stares. "I… I will, but I do not understand. What are you doing?"
Blaster reaches out with his other servo. "Here, lemme show ya."
Tracks offers a servo hesitantly, twice the size of Blaster's own. Blaster curls Tracks's digits in towards the palm and bumps it against his fist. When he pulls his arm back, his knuckles are smudged with holographic blue paint.
Tracks frowns at the peeling grey left across his digits. "What was the purpose of that? I just had my paint redone a few cycles ago."
Blaster thinks of D-16 and Orion, all the secret sentiments exchanged with every bump of their servos, and says, "Call it a promise."
When Tracks transforms and bursts into that not-quite-so-scary sky, Blaster salutes to the smoketrails left behind. "See ya later, stranger."
For all the build-up these stupid things have, the pain still takes Blaster by surprise. He wonders sometimes if this is what stupidity means—to repeat these same symptoms again and again, watching as it falls together piece by piece, only to be surprised and buckle under the crushing weight of the finished puzzle.
"It isn't," Ratchet said, the fourth time it happened. "There's no discernible pattern to it, and far as I can tell, nothing I can do to stabilize it. Conjunx or amica bonds wouldn't either, no matter what that dumb line o' code tells you. You'll just have to live with it."
And, well. That's the key difference, Blaster supposes. Helplessness, as sour as the glyph tastes.
From the corner of his periphery, Blaster spots Jazz carefully reaching for a stylus from the set of three in the middle of their circle. Blaster ignores the growing pile of holo cards at his knee to grab for a second stylus, clutching it close in victory when Sideswipe and Sunstreaker curse and shove at each other to get the last one.
Sideswipe wins this time, waving it teasingly in Sunstreaker's face while the older twin punches the grated floor.
"Easy, Sunny, you only have so much #3b3c36 paint," Jazz says, twirling his stylus between deft digits. With his other servo he drops his winning combo—four sabers of every suite. Afthole.
Sideswipe drapes himself over Sunstreaker's pauldrons. "You were so close," he drawls, dangling his hard-won stylus in front of his brother's optics.
"Fuck off," Sunstreaker grumbles into his servos.
Blaster cackles at the mech's misfortune and bumps pauldrons with Jazz. The contact sends a zing through his frame, nestling between his spark and its chamber.
"Up for another round?" Jazz snatches up the jumble of holo cards off the floor. The ceiling lights refract off of them, flashing across Blaster's visor in a ripple of saturated RGB tones. "'Think Sides 'n' I got time for one more."
"I'm game." Blaster surrenders his cards and sets the stylus back in the middle, ready for another quick but fun round. "Any special rules you wanna ad—"
His spark churns and contracts, in a way no spark is supposed to. He gags on the glyphs and doubles over, scratching desperately at his chest plates. The all-seizing sharp ache pounds down his lines, prickling along the tubing in a vicious pop an' fizzle. It all hurts.
"Blast-mech? Blaster, can you hear me? Listen—frag—"
"Sides, get his tapes! Jazz, can you get his pedes? Okay, yeah, c'mon—"
Bits and pieces of conversation flit about his helm, distantly registering in his twitchy antennae. The tabs flit away from his HUD almost immediately in the face of the blaring ALERT. ALERT. SPARK UNSTABLE. SEEK BONDED SPARKS. ALERT. ALERT. rattling around in his processor. That hole in his torso feels so, so empty.
Something—someone picks him up. Multiple someones. They lift him with care as he grunts and claws over his armor, settling him on his aft in the corner of what must be his hab suite. He blearily recognizes the musical posters and decals lining the inside walls. The names, as he sees them through staticky vision, give him something else to focus on. Moonshower, Rosanna, Strumsong—
"Slag." Someone. Jazz. "Elita's callin' us all up early."
"Grab Smokescreen." Sunstreaker? "You and Sides should head up, let him know before you clock in. I'll stay here."
A gentle pressure settles along the top of his helmet. A servo? Sunstreaker nudges him closer, gold plating settling as awkward but comfortable as he can manage when he drapes an arm about Blaster's back. The proximity of another mech so close eases the destabilizing star burning up in Blaster's chest. Primus, he can feel the threads of pure sparklight unspooling, the ends coming loose and dying before they can properly reattach. The dead bits spark and burst like firecrackers, leaving slashes of warped spark chamber where the flashes of heat bounce off the metal too hard.
"Where's—Smoke?" he rasps, and Sunstreaker clutches him tighter. Jazz and Sideswipe are gone, lost in the rows and rows of unoccupied hab suites.
"He'll be here soon," promises Sunstreaker. "Just—be patient. You'll be okay."
Blaster musters up a weak laugh. "It never feels like it." It feels like he's dying a thousand deaths every moment, watching and waiting for his spark to inevitably gutter out and fail.
"You will," Sunstreaker mutters fiercely, tucking himself into the boxy lines of Blaster's side. It's not Smokescreen and his gentle blue and grey, not his soft-sparked EM field, but it helps. It helps, however little it does. "You'll be fine."
Blaster thinks about all the signs; the way he'd been nothing short of doting to his team these past few cycles, nudging them for fist bumps and hugs and high-fives; his insistence that they recharge early, top up on fuel when they needed it; the offness building up in his spark, like a filter laid over an optic lens with a smidge of dirt beneath it.
Nothing short of stupidity, he muses, then gasps as the pain has him curling up again.
"I dunno how ya convinced me to do this," Blaster says. He winces when the vent grate slips from Orion's clumsy digits, clanging on the floor with a ripple of echoing. "Why am I doing this?"
"Well, I asked, and you said yes, and—"
"That was stupid. Why did I do that?"
"Answered your own question, buddy."
Blaster reaches across the open vent to flick Orion's olfactory sensor. The tier-zero bot yelps, but Blaster just levels a flat stare at him. "I see now why Dee socks ya in the face every other cycle."
Orion lowers himself from the vent tubing. His leveraged arms across the ledge are the only thing holding him up. "Hey, you could've said no."
"I really wanna punch you right now," Blaster informs him. Orion just laughs and drops down from the vent, this time careful enough to tuck and roll without too much noise. Blaster follows after him. His cables tense with the effort to remain quiet. He slips at the end, but Orion's thankfully there to catch him under the knees and back with ease that tells of experience.
After Orion sets him down on the smudged steel floor, Blaster flips his helmlight on to the dimmest setting. Datapads and slugs litter the floor, stuffed into crates and shoved up against shelves. The soft glow of hallway lights paints the walls in a hazy blue glow, barely enough to point out the glyphs on each aisle marking the genre and call numbers.
"Alright," says Orion, dusting off his servos. "We're looking for anything on the Matrix, 'kay?"
Blaster's optics wander over to the section marked Music, Musicals. "Right," he replies, distracted. "The thirteen Primes, the Matrix, Quintesson war, got it."
"Uh," Orion says. A pause. "Great, then. I'll head over this way, feel free to start wherever. I've been coming here for deca-cycles now and still haven't gotten through everything, ha—"
His voice quiets as he walks further away, wandering deep into the stacks of pads. Blaster waits all of a klik before pivoting straight towards the music section. Who knows, maybe he'll find a ballad about Megatronus Prime and Solus Prime, or something.
The music section is more slugs than pads, the shelves chock full of carelessly sorted memory sticks. Call numbers engraved into the side of each stick do nothing for reference; Blaster can't identify any pattern as he sifts through a partitioned box. Whoever last read through these, they left it completely and utterly randomized between genres, artists, and time periods.
He squints hard at the box of memory sticks in his servos, pulls out one, and rotates it in his digits. Without thinking too hard about it, or the suspiciously Ratchet-sounding voice in his processor yelling at him about antivirus protocols, he slides open one of the four ports at his wrist and slots it in.
A download request pops up on his HUD, recognized as safe under the Iaconian Archives. Just to be cautious, he triggers his antivirus programs before he hits the download button.
Dozens and dozens of .mp3 files drop into his storage drives, playing through his inner auditory suite at x100 speed. Noise explodes in his helm in a cacophony of banging drums, echoing vocals, and loopy synths. Blaster gapes, optics flaring almost white and illuminating the entire shelf.
There were enough files on that one stick to trigger a cascade of processing errors for most cogless bots, whose fifty-terabyte storage drive count caps at ten. Lucky mechs like Red Alert sometimes come online with upwards of fifteen.
Blaster's frametype is unique, inside and out. He has fifty-two. All of them have a maximum capacity of two-hundred terabytes.
With an influx of data that only fills 0.48% of his storage, he just redirects the burst of energon in his optics and brings down the brightness of his lenses.
Another bot stands a few paces off to his left. Black and white armor, extended pauldrons, accented with peeling gold paint. It's not Orion.
Blaster freezes.
A red light blips on next to the stranger's cracked blue visor. His red faceplate dips and jumps like Darkwing's when he goes to speak. "Who are you?"
"Uh."
The Archives suddenly burst alight with blaring sirens and red lights. The other bot freezes up, clutching at his—mop? with surprise. Blaster takes the opportunity to scramble back over to the vent he and Orion dropped out of.
"Sorry!" Orion shouts. His voice is almost lost in the sea of alarm klaxons. "Might've tripped over a laser!"
"A what?"
Orion doesn't answer him, most probably because he didn't hear it. He props a pede up on the second-lowest shelf tier and hefts himself up, climbing each tier one at a time until he's folding himself on top of it. "Get up here!" he yells.
"Primus's fucking grace, I'm never doing this slag again," Blaster mutters, and follows suit.
By the time they're sneaking back into their recharge bay, singed in some places from laserfire and dented in far more from hard landings, the strange mech with the little red light is near-gone from Blaster's processor.
This is 100% Orion's fault, Blaster thinks, deeply anxious and deeply annoyed.
"We're both gonna be late to the race like this, y'know," he informs the mech pulling him along. He tries to pull his wrist out of the other mech's silver-white servo. It doesn't budge in the slightest.
It's been a deca-cycle. He'd hoped that the commotion of warning announcements and bleeping alarms would've made that mech from the Archives forget about him. Primus wasn't smiling up at him, evidently. That same bot tracked him down in the crowd of hundreds of mechs traipsing into the stadium for the Iacon5000 and threatened to broadcast an emergency signal for the Enforcers stationed around the perimeter.
"Sentinel Prime has every race recorded and put up on Prime Holos the following deca-cycle, it's not the end of the world," the other mech answers—the minibot, now that Blaster thinks about it. He hadn't really noticed in the Archives, between the music rattling around in his auditory suite and Orion tripping up the alarms, but the stranger's even smaller than him. Probably closer to Moonracer's size.
They meander through the gathering bots with care, finally arriving at a shadowed alleyway lined with strips of Sentinel-Prime-gold lights. Dead-end, Blaster notices, before the minibot flips them around and Blaster's back is to the wall.
That red dot flicks on again, and he realizes it's a camera, fixed in place beside the mini's helm crest. Ah, slag.
"What were you doing at the Archives after-hours?" the minibot demands.
Blaster's unstable spark shudders in its casing. This could go very bad, very fast. "Um." He prepares an emergency comm to send Jazz, who was nearest to him before he got plucked out of the pre-Iacon5000 rush—
"The Archives operate on a standard 0900 to 2000 joors schedule!" continues the mech. "You could have come at any point in time during the day cycle, why did you choose to wait until all the archivist staff had left?"
Blaster blinks. "What?"
The minibot makes an annoyed sound. "You could have come in the morning! The archivists may not sort—or, uhm, they're currently re-sorting everything, so only they can find where everything is! Even if you didn't wish to speak with them, there are drones who can guide you to the section you need!"
He can't help it; he snorts.
"What? What're you laughing for?"
Here's the thing: Blaster will never say it, never even type it out in a comm, but he has no faith in the so-called inherent goodness of Sentinel Prime. D-16 would have a fit about it, but there's no justice to be had in a ruler who "celebrates" the miners who make sure they eat every day yet keeps them so separated from cogged mechs that most don't even recognize them at first glance.
The steel panel protects his cog slot, sure. But Blaster lacks tires, or treads, or wings. The speakers inset to his pedes and shoulders, far as he can tell, function for no other purpose than replaying music or holo audio. The stupid gold bar magnetized to his torso, carved with five marks and scratched down the rest of its length, is unique to his caste.
"Mech," Blaster says, vox laughing and spark aching, "I don't got the jet engines to fly me up there, I don't got the wheels to drive up the ramps, and I'm sure as the stars that the Archives ain't a stop on the automatic train routes."
The mini steps back, tilts his helm. Then, curiously, the recording camera shuts off. "You don't have… wheels? Or wings. What do you transform into?"
Blaster lowers his helm, allows his visor to drop and shield his optics. "I don't. Bots like me, we ain't even allowed up there."
The dots finally seem to connect. "You… oh. That's why you were…"
"Oh, nah." Blaster latches onto that tidbit, thankful for the exit from a very familiar hurt. "Friend a' mine had some sights to see, pads to read. I just kept 'im company."
"Yet you were sifting through music." If Blaster could see beneath the face plate and visor, he'd bet the mech was frowning. "Hmm… hold on for a moment." The mini reaches into a compartment in his arm and pulls out a memory stick, complete with a strip of yellow paint that matches his armor. He holds it out to Blaster, who stares at it blankly.
"Take it," the bot prompts.
"Huh?" Blaster obeys, holding it up against lights above, but— "What's on this? Why are you giving it to me?"
"It should have a sizable portion of about 20% of the Archives's music and instrumental collection," says the mini, as if that isn't enough knowledge to quite literally knock Blaster onto his aft. "Because everyone should have access to our history. I—I added a text file with my comm link too. If you ever need more information, you can reach out to me. Don't come back to the Archives."
Blaster quirks an optic ridge. "Wow, mech. Talk about cold."
"No, no, it's not—" He makes another frustrated noise. "It's a violation of Iaconian law for cogless caste bots to visit the Archives. They'll call Enforcers on you for jail time. I don't… want that for you."
Oh. "Oh."
"Just… stay safe, um…"
"Blaster," he offers, and it comes with a fond grin. "Thanks for lookin' out for me. I will."
The mech nods, a quiet and easy dismissal. "Take care, Blaster. I have to go back to record the race now, but I hope to hear from you soon."
He turns to leave, and it's only as he's turning around the corner that Blaster realizes. "Didn't you say that Prime Holos would… ah, never mind."
Impatient, he jacks the memory stick into a port. He ignores all the incredibly tempting .mp3 files in favor of digging for the comm code the mini professed to leave behind. Huh.
"Rewind of Iacon," he says aloud, and wow, the camera makes so much more sense. "Ha. It fits ya."
"This is insane," Moonracer giggles, pumping her fists up and down excitedly. "Can't wait to cross government rebellion off my bucket list!"
"Come on now," says Brainstorm, "don't forget to check off third-degree property damage and improper usage of mining equipment!" Behind Moonracer, he finishes securing her jetpack and yanks to double-check it. She jerks back with an oof.
"Is this a bucket list or a checklist for breaking the law?" Red Alert asks, concerned.
Blaster finishes adjusting Red Alert's own jetpack and smacks his pauldron good-naturedly. "Don't worry too much about 'em, Red. I've got no idea when they're joking or being serious."
"Blaster is right." Perceptor appears behind Brainstorm, dodging the latter's excited tackle with ease. He doesn't flare a single plate when Brainstorm trips behind him. "We have bigger concerns, the highest of which being fully equipped in the small timeframe we have."
Grapple and Ratchet follow on Perceptor's heel struts. They're pulling along one of the mining carts, piled high with drills, saws, and jackhammers. Brainstorm pulls himself up from the floor and makes a squealing noise not unlike a squeaky wheel. Blaster winces.
Too much happened, in the aftermath of that Primus-forsaken race. Orion and D-16 made history among the cogless that day, two nobodies who almost made a difference, and they paid for it with their eternal silence.
Or not, as it turned out, because Orion announced his return with a bang—quite literally, as Darkwing tumbled into the arcade machine and shattered the glass. Twice as tall and all the gentler, Orion lumbered into their dormitory, knelt, and told them all the brutal truth they'd been turning their optics from: that Sentinel never cared.
Blaster knows. Has known, and it hurt too much to bear. To hear it spoken from another mech feels like tearing the wound open with muddy servos, aching as dirt infects fuel lines.
"C'mon, mech." Smokescreen waves a servo in Blaster's face, and the semi-processed code dissolves abruptly. "Pedes on the ground, yeah? Well, not for much longer, but you get my point."
His chevron gleams white where it reflects in the overhanging beams, but it does little to detract from the unsteady clicking and whirring of his optic bands. Blaster can make out the noise from here, a trembling sequence of snaps and pops; he's as shaken up by it all as Blaster is.
Blaster musters a smile and threads their digits together. "Right. Save the shutdown for later." The subtlest ease of Smokescreen's tense pauldrons makes it all worth it.
Perceptor arms them with a varying assortment of mining equipment, triple-checks their jetpacks are fully fueled and functional (he only checks Brainstorm twice, mostly because the tier-two mech squawks and bats him away with a wagging digit), then instructs them to follow him to the transport where Orion and the others are waiting. The kliks spent lingering in the train as it takes them closer to the heart of Iacon are some of the tensest in Blaster's life; no one speaks, their gazes all fixed on Sentinel's glowing tower.
A tower built on the backs of the bots whose lives he ruined.
With as many optics as there are on the tower, the cargo train diving down from above is spotted near immediately. Orion, crouched awkwardly so his helm doesn't bump up against the top of the transport, lets out a tense vent and shouts, "That's them! Everyone, duck down now!"
Ratchet and Perceptor grip the sparse kibble on either of Brainstorm's pauldrons and yank him down with everyone else, just in time for Orion to punch up at the glass ceiling and send shards everywhere. Each rapid dinging impact of glass against metal echoes viciously in Blaster's audials, made all the worse when he hears the windows breaking in all of the other train cars. He turns down his audio sensitivity by thirty percent.
"This is it, everyone! Roll out!"
"We don't have wheels," Moonracer points out uselessly, but fires up her jetpack and lifts into the sky with the others.
It's almost like soaring through Iacon with Tracks again, minus the explosions. And screaming. And the overall streamlined sequence of metal crashing against metal endlessly. In the distance, the cargo train crashes through one balcony of Sentinel's tower and peeks out the other, teetering dangerously on the topmost floor. Blaster watches all of this with the highest note of amusement his situation can allow—that is, he catches the blurriest footage of it as he goes spinning through the air, grappling with a death tracker that seems all too interested in cleaving his helm from his frame.
"You slaggin'—" Blaster curses, trying and failing to yank his wrists out of the drone's hold. The saw in his servos churns uselessly, blades spinning against air. "Lay off it!"
The tracker, by virtue of not being sentient, doesn't reply. It angles its wings back a bit more, veering them towards the solid gold walls of the wrecked tower. Blaster's armor, prone to dents from pebbles, would fracture on impact. Ah, shit.
Blaster sends an emergency support comm across his team's main line, then props a pede against the drone's midsection to shove it off. It doesn't budge, and Blaster hears the telltale sound of hydraulics struts locking in place. His own servos jerk in the tightening hold, and his still-spinning saw falls from loosened digits into the open space below. His spark rattles in an uneven spiral of panic.
"Let go of me!" he hisses, and his HUD explodes with protocol tabs and energy warnings. His fans cycle faster and faster as his speakers flip on, dialing up to the max—no, above that—
Waves of crimson light-sound-noise burst out of his speakers, deafening and all-consuming, and the tracker sparks at the joints as its glowing visor goes dead. Its limbs slacken as it slips from its hold on Blaster's frame, tumbling down in a limp sprawl towards the ground.
Blaster heaves a hiccuping gasp, clutching at his speakers with shaking servos.
Just across from him, maybe a couple dozen paces out, an unknown flight frame looks back. Not a death tracker, by the blue and silver paint, the rectangular windshield framed in gold. Their twin cannons rotate, once, but no shots go off. The prongs extended from beneath the cannons house other equipment, a trio of circular insets on each side, almost like—
"Blaster!" Prowl calls, and the trance breaks.
Prowl hovers closer, brandishing his drill. His right knee joint is sparking. "We received your signal. Are you alright?"
Blaster squeezes his empty servos. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine."
When he looks back, the flier is gone.
"Huh." Jazz reaches up and brushes his digits across the main connector in his hab suite, a feat that his cogless frame could only accomplish by clambering onto another mech's back. "Thought I would've grown taller than this."
"Ha!" Blaster lowers the cassettes he was digging through at his own hab, shifting on his knees to face Jazz. "Orion was the exception, not the standard. The mech's an absolute unit." Blaster himself had gotten a good couple of helms taller (along with that whole reformat, wow, holy slag, but that's an entirely separate deal), but he's still shorter than Orion had been before he'd received the Matrix. Optimus? Still not sure on that.
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve… sheesh. How many cassettes did he have? Blaster had grown accustomed to storing a few in his chest compartment at any given point after Ratchet installed that panel—which flew off when he received a cog and smacked Smokescreen in the side, oops—but there are more shoved in the nooks and crannies of his hab for safekeeping.
"Hey, Jazz?"
"What's up?"
Blaster pries a cassette out from the gap between the platform and side boards of his hab. "You're transporting stuff back to the tower, right? In your alt?"
Jazz dusts his servos off and shuffles over. His brand-new tires do a little spin within his shiny, pristine wheel wells. "Sure am. Got somethin' ya need me to grab?"
"Nothin' too heavy, don't worry." Blaster grins and splays out his variety of cassettes, datapads, and leftover cubes that he snatched up during fuel breaks. "Just these I think. My subspace is already pretty cluttered, an' I don't want the cubes to get smashed."
Jazz hums. His visor flashes when he turns away from the pile of tapes to face Blaster helm-on. "Not that I won't do it, Blast-mech, but don'tcha have your panel pockets? Pretty sure you could store 'em between your doors after transformin'." He wiggles his own pair for emphasis.
Blaster, noticeably door-less and wheel-less, raises an optic ridge. Jazz lifts a wing back.
"Agh, okay." Blaster sighs and rises from his crouch. "Hold onto these for a klik, will ya?"
Jazz looks on, uncomprehending, but obligingly holds out his servos to accept the pile of cassettes and cubes. The increasing bewilderment shows in the twitching of his wings as Blaster takes a few steps back.
"Just watch, alright?" Blaster asks. Without waiting for Jazz's answer, he initializes his still-unfamiliar transformation sequence.
His leg struts extend and split as his arms tuck themselves into his sides, dropping him to the ground. Jazz jumps, startled, but Blaster only sees it for a moment before his helm ducks into the rest of his frame and he very visibly shrinks. When the sequence completes with a happy chime in his HUD, silence reigns.
A pause. "What are ya?" Jazz asks, breathy with surprise.
"Didn't see any wheels on me, did you?" Blaster retorts. No wheels, no wings, no treads. Just a proper gold panel over his chest, taller antennae, and bigger speakers. "Can't transport anything. Not even sure what I am, to be honest. 'S not often you see a mech turn into a box."
Jazz chuckles, like he's gotten something Blaster hasn't. "Mech, have ya even seen your alt?"
"Huh?"
Jazz kneels in front of Blaster's alt and reaches for—what would be his torso panel, in root mode. He dips his digits into the narrow seam above the crystalline glass and pulls. The panel falls until it's at a ninety-degree angle, and the switches below it dip down and back again in anxiety. "Jazz, what—what're you doing?"
"Take it easy," Jazz says, laughter dancing along the glyphs. "Primes, I'm the one with music in my name, but you were the one made for it, huh?"
"Huh?"
He feels as Jazz loads the cassette into one of the divots at the bottom of his compartment, feels as it seamlessly clicks into place. Jazz's digits gently press the panel closed, and then they're reaching for his switches, pressing down on the switch furthest to the left.
Strumsong's harp chords come alive in Blaster's speakers, and static glitches through the recording as comprehension dawns on the box—the boombox, he's a boombox.
"Honestly," says Jazz, "all those cassette slots in your frame and ya didn't think for a klik that that was your alt? Nobot else has that, remember?"
Blaster ignores the happy skipping of his spark and turns the volume up to the max in retaliation. He relishes in the way Jazz yelps and clutches his servos over his horns.
"Afthole," Jazz spits, and Blaster smugly replays a recording of Jazz's own laughter back at him.
By all technical definitions, Blaster isn't part of the Autobots, the new governing faction in Iacon. Mostly because Autobot High Command, the government within the governing faction, doesn't really have a registration system. And because he's unemployed, but anyway.
Optimus and Elita, for all their planning and strategizing, put minimal thinking towards what would become of Iacon the moment the entire government structure that kept the city barely stable fell to pieces. The city resides in a fugue somewhere between limbo and absolute anarchy, the impending chaos only held at bay by the bewilderment of twice the cogged bots there were before and the efforts put forth towards reconstruction.
But, well, Optimus is a Prime—a real Prime—and that's mostly enough to keep everyone from panicking about the complete and utter mess that is Iacon's current governing body. If Optimus says Elita is his second, and Jazz his third, then they're his fucking second and third. If he says Blaster should join his staff as a communications officer, then Blaster is fucking joining.
It's not a cushy position, not that Blaster expected it to be. He stays away from the consoles, for the most part. Instead, Optimus lovingly has him join as a transcriptor for meetings, panels, and media management. This mostly means he gets to watch as senators and councilors alike smack tables and scream at the top of their vox capacity.
Sometimes they throw things. A datapad dinked off Prowl's helm once. Optimus retaliated by using his Primal Overruling on the next bill that hit the table.
He finds it all amusing, honestly. Working with friends is not much different from his old job, except his life isn't perpetually at risk from stepping on a stone wrong. The worst part, really, is when the yelling overclocks his audial processing, or when Elita frowns at his transcriptions for having truly concerning amounts of caps lock.
It's dumb, it's unserious, and it's just the break Blaster needs after the mess that was D-16—Megatron, leaving for the surface, and the quintessons announcing their truly infuriating return with laserfire and overall destruction.
And then Optimus assigns him to a defector, and, well. So much for that.
"They call themselves the Decepticons now," Prowl informs Blaster as they step into the lift. He presses the button for the lowest level, then waits for the lift to close before he continues. They're safe, with Red Alert keeping watch through the camera perched above their helms. "Megatron has declared himself an enemy of both the Autobots and the quintessons. One of his soldiers defected and turned himself over to us."
Blaster pulls up his memory files for the battle for Iacon, sifting through each shot with a grimace. "One of the High Guard?" He hopes, for all their sakes, it's not Starscream. The mech can be an utter brat when he wants to.
Prowl's normal deadpan becomes a complicated frown. "... Sort of," he answers. "He worked under Soundwave. He calls himself a Recordicon."
"Recordicon, huh." Blaster rubs idly at his chest. "Must be a camera or somethin'."
"Perhaps." The lift dings as it reaches the bottom, and Prowl steps to the door. "Whatever the case, we have been instructed to speak with him about his motives. See if his proclaimed intentions are sincere. I can handle that aspect of this assignment; you were tasked with transcribing our interactions for Red Alert's file storage."
Blaster nods, then gestures to the corridor stretching out before them. "Right behind you."
Prowl leads him deep into the bowels of the holding cells, most empty. The few that are occupied have full-coverage forcefields and hardlight bars. Prowl stops at one such cell, and his movement towards it triggers the automatic lights above it.
A black and silver felinoid lays curled up in the corner of the cell, helm perched comfortably on his paws. His optics cycle open without so much as a shutter, and Blaster realizes that the bot's engine is absolutely silent.
"Nightstalker of Stanix," Prowl announces, and Blaster starts recording, "I am Prowl of Autobot Tactical Command, and I am here to speak with you regarding your proclaimed defection from the Decepticon faction. You have the right to remain silent; as this is not an interrogation, no statement shall be held against you unless it is complicit in the harm of yourself or another mechanism. Accompanying me is Blaster of Autobot Communications, and he shall be transcribing this conversation. Do you understand?"
The felinoid, Nightstalker, lifts his helm and nods in acquiescence. "I understand." His vox is raspy, perhaps from disuse. His gaze landed on Blaster the moment Prowl began speaking, and it hasn't strayed once. Blaster feels the irrational desire to cross his arms in front of himself.
Prowl asks Nightstalker a few introductory questions, and the felinoid answers each one dutifully. So far, so good. But then, when Prowl inquires after his working for Soundwave, Nightstalker's audials tilt back and he goes, "I did not work for Soundwave. I was his cassette. He was my host."
Cassette? Blaster mouths at Prowl. The smaller mech's face scrunches up just the slightest bit. "Elaborate," Prowl requests.
"Soundwave was my host. I spent much of my time in his dock. There is nothing else to say."
"What is a host?"
Nightstalker pushes himself up and approaches the force fie—no. He approaches Blaster, coming to sit back on his hind legs as he meets Blaster's gaze with piercing ruby lenses. "He is," Nightstalker says.
A familiar ache unwinds beneath his armor, beating at the walls of his spark casing, and Blaster thinks, Oh, no.
"What?" Prowl draws his doorwings tight behind his back. "Explain, please."
"Hosts," Nightstalker begins, "are bots constructed with large sparks. Larger sparks, than average. This is intentional; their sparks are not meant to exist alone, unbonded."
Prowl frowns. "No sparks are. It is why we form cohorts, amica bonds, and conjunx bonds." His annoyance rapidly veers towards concern. "Blaster?"
Blaster stops recording. He takes a trembling step back, servos finding familiar purchase over his spark casing. The threads, he can feel them, loosening around his core without care like it's ready to burst and die. He locks his hydraulics and knee joints, drops his visor to mask the uneven fritzing glow of his irises.
"That is not the same," Nightstalker continues, unnervingly steady. "Hosts are sparked for bonding. Their large cores are inherently unstable, and only stabilize in the presence of multiple smaller sparks. Mini sparks."
"Blaster," Prowl repeats, reaching for him. A dying thread ignites in his casing, and the said mech chokes on a pained keen.
"Minibot sparks are a host's anchors. They are cassettes, like I was, like I am, and they dock close to the host's spark in order to keep it stable. We do not need hosts. But hosts need us."
Starbursts dance through fire in his sparkchamber, furious and burning. Prowl recognizes the signs, tucks himself under his arm, and distantly Blaster hears the zip of a comms signal going through.
"Without a cassette to stabilize the host's spark, it will unravel and eventually dispel." Nightstalker's outward expression doesn't change, but his helm dips lower, almost in mourning. "You need us. And you will die without us."
"A'ight, Ratch, what was this abou—…" Blaster trails off, bewildered by the presence of not only Ratchet, but Optimus Prime himself sequestered in the private exam room. The door slides shut up behind him. He barely notices. "… Did I miss something?"
"Nope, sit your aft down." Ratchet smacks the medical gurney with his datapad, and Blaster hurries to obey. Optimus stifles a laugh behind his mask. "This isn't gonna be a standard physical, since you were in tip-top shape last time I checked you out. This is more… a disclosure of health information, I guess you could call it. And Optimus is here for a reason, so don't ask."
"O… kay. Got it." Blaster props an elbow on his thigh and rests his chin against his palm. He's not all that enthused about Optimus hearing his medical issues, but whatever the CMO says, goes. He'll play along for now. "Lay it on me, doc bot. What's the deal?"
Ratchet sighs and drops the datapad in his lap, unamused by the comms officer's ensuing fumbling. "SpecOps came back with some important info—don't give me that look, this ties into it. They found some pretty major files related to an organization called the Institute."
An imaginary beat drop rolls around in Blaster's processor, a dramatic burst of drums and sound. The contrast between that and the utter incomprehension he imagines to be on his own face is rather sharp. Given Optimus's grim expression and Ratchet's pitiful look, it can't be anything good.
Optimus speaks first. Later, Blaster will wish he didn't. "The Institute… was the organization responsible for the removal of our t-cogs, and for uploading any mods or corruptive processor programming to our caste before we came online."
The realization—the implications—fall heavy and cold like a spark going out in a cave-in. Blaster clutches at the armor guarding his own, leaving trails of silver paint that hardly speak to the tumultuous swirl of nonsense flaring violently in there. "What?" he hears himself say, trembling and desperate. "Why're you telling me this? Is there something wrong with my t-cog? My processor? What is—"
"No, Primus forbid, you're healthy, you're fine." Ratchet levels a sharp glare at Optimus, who shrinks back. "You didn't have to phrase it like that, Primes below!"
Ratchet places a servo atop one of Blaster's speakers, the other lowering to point at the datapad he's holding close. This time, when he speaks, it's noticeably gentler. "SpecOps found a bunch of files related to the Institute, and there was some of it in there that we felt you needed to see. That's all."
Blaster's tank still feels upended. "That's all?"
Ratchet nods. "That's all," he repeats. "You can pull up a holo of all the files. Optimus and I have already seen it."
"Okay." He fires up the hologram, only to feel his systems lock up, optics halfway to fritzing.
The blueprints glow bright in the exam room. Something cloying and cruel washes through Blaster's lines as the sketches of his own specs and equipment stare back at him. Speaker diameters, visor settings, plating hex codes, the rectangular maw in his chest—the dock, Nightstalker called it a dock, it's all there.
Optimus kneels in front of Blaster, gesturing to the time stamps on the blueprints. "The files dated back to the Age of Primes. According to them, the war with the quintessons left Cybertron with increasingly devastating losses. In an effort to turn the tides, Sentinel had commissioned M.T.O. soldiers—made-to-order Cybertronians. There was no shortage of soldiers at the time, since there were still active hot spots, but a lot of them didn't have the equipment Sentinel thought was… needed, to win the war."
Blaster almost tunes Optimus out in favor of reading all the text attached to his blueprints. "I was… meant to be a comms hub. Like Soundwave. I was meant to support the High Guard."
"In their grand and glorious war effort, yeah," Ratchet sneers. "But your schematics were only finished after the Primes were slain, so you never even saw the field. Sentinel had you and all of the other constructs sent on over to the Institute for them to do as they pleased."
"Where my cog was yanked out and I joined all the others," Blaster mutters. He ducks his face into his servo. "Talk about a discordant note in the symphony. Primus."
"You were meant to have… companion bots, too," Optimus says, careful. "They were meant to transform into cassettes, and fit into your chest compartment."
At the glyph cassettes, Blaster tenses. "I… was," he tests warily. "Were they built?"
Optimus and Ratchet's fields take on twin waves of distant grief. Blaster pulls his own in against his armor, scared and too distraught to feel safe showing it.
Ratchet looks to Optimus, his entire frame heavy with pain. Optimus's optics dim, and his mask splits open down the middle. His face reads nothing short of sparkbreak.
"They were," he confirms. "They were deactivated before you came online."
Blaster's spark feels like it's fracturing. It probably is. "Oh," he chokes out.
Ratchet turns off the hologram and pulls the datapad from his numb digits, stepping in closer to pull him into a hug.
"We…" Optimus resets his vocalizer. "I joined Ratchet here today to formally invite you into the vacant position of Head of Communications, which would place you among Autobot High Command. There was meant to be a trial period to test your capabilities, of course, but… take your time thinking about it. I understand that this is a lot to—"
"I'll do it."
Ratchet lifts his helm to glare at Blaster, but it holds no real heat. "Don't rush yourself into it." You're grieving, he doesn't say, but pushes in his field, all the same.
Grieving, for cassettes he never got to know. The hurt still rages fresh on his protoform, deep in his struts.
"I'll do it," Blaster repeats, and tentatively raises his arms up to embrace Ratchet in turn. "Y'all are fixing all the mistakes Sentinel made. Everything he ever fragged up, everybot he hurt—y'all are fixing it. I wanna help, too. I think… I think there's still a good way to end the concert, if you get my drift."
There's still a good way to end it. For those cassettes he'll never meet, for the Primes, for all those Sentinel crushed under his pedes in his rise to power—their lives won't be in vain. They mattered, and Blaster will carry that torch close to spark for the rest of his life.
Optimus smiles, and it's not Orion Pax's smile—it's that of a Prime that's lived a thousand lifetimes, lived and died and lived again. "Then I formally welcome you to Autobot High Command."
There's no music this time, when Blaster stirs. Static wobbles painfully in his audials as they gradually recalibrate, compounding the massive helmache he already has from the dozens of warning tabs on his HUD. WARNING: LIMB CIRCUITRY BELOW PELVIC JOINTS NON-FUNCTIONAL. FUEL LINE PRESSURE DECREASING RAPIDLY. SEE ACCREDITED MEDIC—
He shoves the walls of text to a peripheral monitor somewhere and cycles his optics a couple of times, blinking the dust out of the minute lens fractures.
The train's a wreck, unsurprisingly. Ripped and sheared metal curls inward, allowing the blooming pink of the sky to shine in. Exposed wiring droops from the walls, sparking at some ends and dripping fuel at others. Glass from shattered consoles crunch under Blaster's digits.
He can't hear any clogged-up engines. No tell-tale squeal of long un-oiled joints or booting up processors. Blaster allows himself a moment of devastated hurt, then pulls himself together.
Long-term memory recall pulls memories of sirens, each train car flashing red and wrong as Blaster booked it from the furthest one all the way up to the front. The distant silhouette of flight frames—the High Guard's seekers, and the shrill whistle of their missiles soaring through the atmosphere. They didn't wanna take a chance on an Autobot transport on its way to Polyhex for alliance talks, not surprising. Veering off course in a pathetic attempt to dodge, and then darkness.
Blaster pushes himself up from the floor and turns himself over, landing on his aft. He bites back a scream at the explosive pain the simple action triggers, digits leaving long, warped scrapes in the grated floor where he claws at it in protest. Yikes, not good.
He risks glancing at what those pesky warning tabs are spamming him about—his legs. Or what's… left of them, at least.
What Blaster hadn't noticed from his previous vantage point of laying face-down on the floor was the crushing weight of three crates of radio equipment and travel supplies. The now-cracked boxes spill an array of burst cubes and replacement screens split in half from the crash's impact. The bright blue energon of the broken rations mixes with the fuel leaking from his completely detached pedes, where they're utterly smashed under the combined weight of it all. No first aid tack to clot the lines, either. His own wires and gears lay in a bloody sprawl all over the grates.
Yikes, indeed.
Blaster wrenches his optics away and looks towards the central console. Glitching, and the screen's cracked, but its wall installation looks mostly intact. Hmm.
He knocks on the turquoise glass over his dock. "Y'all good in there, Nightster?"
::Do not call me that. Please release me.::
"Yeesh, alright." Blaster opens his dock and disengages the slot locks, allowing Nightstalker to eject and return to his quadruped mode. "No damage?"
"None." Nightstalker perches on his rear legs and gestures at Blaster's distinct lack of pedes. "The same cannot be said for you, it seems."
"Nah, but what can ya do? Part of the t-cog package. Size up, wise up, I guess." Blaster shrugs, if only to hide the gaping emptiness that resides where Nightstalker was. He'd only offered the little hiding spot out of necessity when it became apparent that the train wasn't going to make it to Polyhex intact, and the newly minted Autobot mini had less of a chance of surviving with his smaller size. Not Blaster's cassette, but his spark seemed to believe so, because it took to the felinoid's presence with a warm stability he hasn't felt… ever, really.
He'd had no idea how much pain he'd been in, until he finally felt the slightest touch of relief.
Nightstalker's face plates twist into what Blaster's come to recognize as a frown. "I do not understand."
"Eh, y'don't have to, don't worry about it." Focus, Blaster scolds himself. The console would only be a couple steps away had he been walking, but. See lack of lower half.
Before Nightstalker can speak up again, Blaster points at the sparking console. "Listen, this is about t' get real nasty, alright? I know you're like a recordibot or whatever, but please for the love of Primus do not film this, I don't think my rep could take it."
Nightstalker's optics narrow. The glow in them fades, the signifier for what Blaster knows is a camera shutting off. "What are you planning?"
Blaster grins, then cuts all of his pain receptors from the waist down. "You'll see."
Army-crawling over to the console with his own energon pooling around him is gonna haunt his recharges for vorns. He can't feel any pain, but he can tell from Nightstalker's quiet staring as the mini trots along beside him that it's bad.
His fuel levels are dropping way too fast. Not much time left, now.
The moment he's in arm's reach, Blaster yanks open the console's connector panel and jams two of his cables in. His other servo balances him as he leans most of his weight against it, pressing his visor against the cool metal. All of the programs are down, no surprise there, but the broadcasting channels are intact. Thank Prima.
"What are you doing?" Nightstalker repeats, pressing his paws against the side of the console and lifting himself up to see.
Blaster huffs a dizzy laugh in answer and fires up his internal communications array. He keys his identification for the broadcast, then clears his vox of any remaining, helmache-inducing static.
"Hailing all Autobots!" he calls, and prays Rewind or Playback are on duty back home. "This is—this is the Voice, seeking emergency supplies and backup! Our transport has been derailed and destroyed! Decepticon seekers are patrolling the travel routes between Iacon and Nova Cronum! I repeat, requesting emergency supplies and backup as soon as possible!"
His bracing servo slips as the connection breaks. Blaster collapses against the console and slides to the floor, glitching visual feed barely making out the warm pink sky.
"You," Nightstalker pronounces, "are incredibly foolish."
"Ha," Blaster tones, awfully tired. "That's what bein' an Autobot's all about, Nightster. You fight for freedom, fight for your friends, and you fight like a fool. But…" His lines are near empty, at the bottom rung of the red. His glyphs start slurring together. "… 'S worth it, in the end. Fight for what you love."
The searing whine of a seeker's engine cuts through the quiet. Somewhere to his left, Blaster feels Nightstalker fold himself down against his side and prop his helm up on Blaster's chest.
So much for his last assignment as a trial officer. That's his last thought before the imminent but expected shutdown.
Nightstalker is still with him the next time his systems come online, curled up in light recharge at the edge of the medical berth. Ratchet is, too.
"You're a fragging idiot," Ratchet informs, right around when Blaster's audio suite starts up. "You're lucky Jazz got to you before you bled out all over the damn car."
Blaster stares. "Huh?"
"Stealth mods, that fragger. Makes his engine run silent. You probably didn't even remember he was on board, with how delirious you were."
Oh, yeah. New head of SpecOps, had fresh mods installed to account for that. Bee, Hound, and Mirage did too, if Blaster squints hard enough to think about it.
"So I'm…"
"Back in Iacon, yeah. Polyhex negotiations'll have to wait 'til we have countermeasures for those patrols." Ratchet holds a scanner up to Blaster's helm, glaring intensely at whatever he sees. "You're lucky we managed to reattach everything. Your pedes didn't break off cleanly on a joint, so we had to remove your legs entirely and reinstall a new set. It'll take some time for the software to integrate, so you're on prescribed berthrest for the next few cycles. Got it?"
Blaster tilts his helm back to stare at the ceiling. "Understood, doc." He doesn't think he could lift his legs, even if he wanted to.
Ratchet nods, only the most minimal amount of satisfied. Blaster can tell, when the cross medic doesn't correct the old moniker. "Your systems all look to be in order, but make sure you press that button strapped to your wrist if something feels wrong. Prowl will debrief you next cycle. Got it?"
"Got it."
"Good." Ratchet softens, just a fraction, and raps two knuckles against Blaster's pauldron. "Rest up. First Aid'll check on you later."
He leaves after that, and the door shuts quietly behind him.
Blaster waits only a klik before speaking. "You stayed, huh."
Nightstalker's biolights flash on immediately as the felinoid lifts himself up. "Of course."
"Why?"
Nightstalker shuffles up the berth, coming to a stop by his arm to gesture at Blaster's dock. "You protected me. Even though our first meeting was far from pleasant, and I have only accompanied you thus far as a probation officer."
"'Course I did," Blaster replies, confused. "You're an Autobot."
A paw comes to rest on his dock, a soothing warmth on the embossed glass. "And your cassette, should you be willing."
He's—speechless. "What?"
"I see in you the hope and optimism that once fueled Soundwave, my former host," Nightstalker confesses. His audials droop slightly. "The hope and optimism that died in him, as the High Guard fled from Iacon. I could not remain with a host who would break his oaths and follow a leader who… who would lead us all to destruction.
"You held onto hope in the face of Mortilus's claws. You have a rare spark, but an even rarer passion lives inside of it." Nightstalker bares his fangs, sharp and dangerous. "I will not allow such harm to come to so precious a spark ever again."
His field ripples with care, and anger, and hurt, and Blaster can't help but lift his arms to hug him close.
"It goes both ways," Blaster promises, even as his armor shifts and clicks away, exposing the fragile, unraveling spark buried under all of his circuitry. Nightstalker follows in tandem, unveiling a violet light flare cracked down the middle in silver-blue. "I'll keep you safe, too."
His entire frame settles into the ease of finally, blessedly, feeling whole.
(Smokescreen's waiting for him when Blaster finally escapes the medibay, all internals blessedly repaired. The smaller mech is frowning down at his pedes, helm in the acid clouds, when Blaster clears his vocalizer. Those lovely blue doorwings perk up in time with their owner, and Smokescreen's optics spark at the sight of the boombox waving awkwardly in the doorway.
"Hey, Smokes—"
Whatever cobble of glyphs Blaster'd been hoping to say evaporates like mist when Smokescreen crashes into his arms and kisses him, servos smoothing over every bit of armor they can reach. Blaster stumbles back against the door, humming into the kiss as the blue-red mech opens his mouth. He slides a digit across one of the hinge joints for Smokescreen's wings and swallows up the pleased sigh it elicits.
When Smokescreen steps back with a gasp, blue paint smudged red across the helm vents framing his face, Blaster reaches out for him and reels him back into a tight, warm embrace.
"Missed ya, Smokes," he mumbles near his audial, smiling at the flickering biolights there. He presses a kiss against the edge of one.
Smokescreen's field washes over him with affection. "You, too," he whispers back, a promise and a confession all at once.)
"Blaster," says Prowl, sounding like he just received a report in upside-down Neo-Cybex. Jazz is openly wheezing behind him, banging the doorframe with a fist. "What am I looking at?"
"Hm?" Blaster swallows his half-chewed enerjelly and glances away from the console he's plugged into. Nightstalker's sprawled comfortably across the width of his shoulders, snoozing into his audial.
Rewind is sprawled back on the counter, kicking his pedes back and forth as he scrolls through one out of a massive stack of datapads. He most likely has audials turned down a good twenty-percent so he can ignore Eject's loud complaining at the wall-spanning monitor, where a game of Cube goes down in 4K resolution. "Woo, score!"
Blaster shrugs. "The comms hub, I guess."
Jazz sputters on another guffaw, and Prowl not-so-subtly kicks him in the rear windshield.
"Here," Prowl says, holding out a couple of reports. "We received some encryptions that Red Alert requested Playback look through. Is he available?"
Blaster chomps another jelly. "Lemme check," he says through the candy. Prowl makes a face, but Blaster ignores him. How ya doin', little guy?
Okay, I think, Playback sends back shyly. If they need me to check over some things, I'll be fine.
Alrighty, you can pop on out, then. Just let me know if you need in again?
I will.
Playback docked a bit ago, after he stressed himself into an anxiety spiral and had to shut his emotional centers down to stop sparking at the joints. Blaster, perhaps just a slightly clingy host, has no qualms about the company. But Prowl and Jazz are watching on in mild annoyance and curiosity (respectively), so he pops the panel open and lets Playback unfold into root.
Prowl's wings jerk up in surprise. Jazz whistles, having already grown used to seeing Playback and Nightstalker hanging around the boombox. "Hey, mech! How's it going?"
"Alright, I guess… I hope you're doing well, yourself, though." Playback reaches for the reports held in Prowl's still servos. "Here, let me check those."
"Oh. Yes." Prowl relinquishes them to the minibot, who trots on over to a desk and climbs up onto the counter. Prowl glances over at Rewind and Eject, then at the still-recharging Nightstalker. "Do they all…?"
"Nah, just Play 'n' Nightster here." Blaster reaches up to scratch behind Nightstalker's audials, and the felinoid purrs contentedly. "The twins just hang around since they're good with comms an' information. Eject complains to the Pit, though, ha. Keeps yappin' about how he's been 'benched.' Bet he wanted to be a frontliner when he signed on with us."
Jazz props an arm up on Prowl's front tire, leaning half his weight onto the other speedster. "A shame he's so small," Jazz comments idly. "Probably could've been otherwise."
That had been a jarring thing about getting t-cogs, too. Rewind used to come up to Blaster's chest. The next time they met, in one of the recruitment halls for the Autobots, the mini barely reached his thigh. He had also come with his loudmouth, split-spark twin, but that had been a more pleasant surprise. Blaster enjoyed Eject's company.
"Eh, he has his own outlets," says Blaster. Said outlets include smacking Rewind and Playback in the face with lob-balls in the training gyms, but it could be worse. "'Sides, it's nice having them here."
Jazz's wings wiggle happily. "Sweet. You plannin' on taking on more?"
"I mean, sure!" Blaster drums his digits on the arm-rest in 7/8 time. "Got plenty of room in here. Primus only knows how many cubes I used to store here."
"Truly a feat that they didn't explode in your dock while we were working," Prowl supplies dryly, and Jazz and Blaster both burst into laughter.
(Rewind lowers his pad and glances at Blaster, laughing and cogged and happy, with a dock that no longer aches for sparks it did not hold. He brushes a servo over his chassis, and wonders.)
"I want to be a cassette."
"Uh." Blaster sets down the energummy he'd been about to pop into his mouth. He swivels his chair around to fully face Rewind, just-too-big datapads tucked under each arm. "Okay."
"'Okay'? That's it?" Rewind slams both datapads down on the counter and scrambles up to stand on top of it. He points down at Blaster, who slowly picks up the energummy from the bag again. "I would've expected more excitement than that! Another cassette, this time one who was a memory stick, one with some of the largest storage drives in all of Cybertron!"
Blaster can't help it; he laughs, fondness swelling in his field. "Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm not excited." He's elated, really. The inner workings of his frame jump at the prospect of another life to take care of. All the better if it's Rewind, the archivist-turned-comms-officer that he's trusted from the moment the mini left him in that alleyway before the Iacon5000.
Reuniting again under Optimus Prime's command was like the circle-back to the first chorus after the bridge. So much work to be done to code a secure encryption for Autobots to use, but there were joors and joors' worth of hidden moments in between. Doing late night snack runs for the third shift, listening idly to holofilms downloaded from Rewind's truly massive archive, compiling the perfect playlist for each celebration Jazz and Smokescreen host in the Primal ballrooms. Rewind even approached him for filming a documentary about mining, and the cogless mechs who toiled away in the drilling and the dark.
He thinks of the mixtape—the mixtapes really, secured in the furthest corner of his subspace. Each one marked for all the bots he loves but is too afraid to say, tacked in decals of memory sticks and sports cubes and music notes. The first tape holds his own vocals, his own instrumental mixing, with Smokescreen's name scribbled on the side with shaky writing. His Act of Profference.
He's elated, really. It's just—
"You're sure ya wanna endure a cassette reformatting to bond to some random old comms bot?" asks Blaster, optic ridges disappearing behind his visor. "'S not easily reversible, if ya wanted out."
"I don't want out! You're not just a comms bot, you're the Voice!" Rewind extends his arms, likely to exaggerate distance much wider than his short little limbs. "The Head of Autobot Communications, traveling everywhere and listening everywhere! You've been to virtually every surviving city left!"
"For the war effort, sure," Blaster says slowly. "But why exactly are you askin' me all this? If you wanted to travel everywhere, you'd've joined the neutrals."
Rewind lowers his servos, then the rest of him, dropping to perch on the edge of the counter like he normally does. Blaster can meet him at optic-level like this.
"I want to record everything in the universe," Rewind admits, sheepish. "I was… not actually an archivist."
That's news. "Really?"
"Yes. Minibots, in Sentinel's reign, were largely hired in janitorial and customer service roles. I was a janitor in the Archives, but I recorded every single file they had, and I was a better archivist than the actual ones. They didn't care." Rewind brings his knees close to his chassis and buries his helm in his arms. "It was always so dark in there. I'd always wanted to see the rest of the world. The galaxy outside of that, too."
"Like a cave-in," murmurs Blaster, understanding and hurting. The doubts poured in during those times, with nothing but rock and energon crystals encroaching on a cogless spark that didn't choose this.
"I spoke with Nightstalker." Rewind taps the corner of one datapad, and the screen lights up in a pale violet. "About cassette bonding. I know what the ramifications are. Minis can live without those bonds, but hosts can't."
Blaster's field pulls back like a rubber band snapping. "You better not be thinkin' what I think you are," he bites out.
"No! No, that wasn't—this isn't me taking pity on you, or something. I promise." Rewind presses a palm over his spark. "I can live without it, be a neutral… but I don't want to. I want that bond. I want to be your cassette." I want to see the universe at your side, in your dock, he doesn't say, but Blaster hears it all the same.
"Oh. Well, damn." Blaster shoves the energummy bag off to the side. He knows he's failing miserably at keeping the giddy smile off his face. "I hear ya, loud 'n' clear. Don't worry, 'Winder. If you're with me, you're gonna see every Primus-damn nook 'n' cranny this universe's got to offer."
Rewind's bonding and subsequent reformatting to a cassette alt is the opening song to a brand new album, apparently, because Blaster suddenly starts picking up more cassettes, one after the other.
Eject joins the party shortly after his brother, which—in hindsight, should've been expected. For all their differences, the twins are inseparable. Where Eject gets into trouble, Rewind's always there to defend him. Where Rewind travels to join a faction, Eject is sure to follow. Blaster should anticipate it.
He doesn't anticipate it. Especially not after a failed game of basketrek, halted on account of Eject tripping Blaster helm over pedes and promptly recognizing the fresh welds criss-crossing one another over his side. Blaster complains and deflects, pretends the rippling throbs don't exist with every twist and turn, but Eject has none of it and props him up against the fitness studio's mirrors.
"You're always getting into trouble, huh," Eject observes, dropping a cube on Blaster's helm. It dinks off his visor and falls into his servos. "Was this from that quintesson battle?"
"Yeah," Blaster sighs, annoyed. Even as deep into the base as he was, an executioner still barreled through a wall and chucked him through two more while he was still mid-broadcast. Nightstalker was fast to rip them to shreds after that. "'S fine, though. Nothing too bad."
Eject grumbles something into his own cube, then says, "Don't you have, like, frameguards or something? Anyone to protect you?"
"It's not like I need defending, y'know," Blaster teases, ignoring the minute tug-of-war between fondness for Eject and frustration at his own helplessness. "But I'm not alone. I got your bro, and I got the others." He taps at the compartment, though none of them are docked right now. "Play, Nightster, Stripes. And Smokes, Jazz, Stormy, Moon, Sunny… we all look out for each other, ya dig?"
"Lame." Eject scoffs and tosses his freshly-emptied cube up into the air, gold visor following its ascent. "None of 'em compare to a bona-fide Cube champion."
Blaster's like how Orion Pax used to be—dumb, not stupid. And he recognizes the vulnerability for what it is, the careful and hesitant offering layered in bravado. Eject wants this, hopes for it. How could Blaster ever turn his visor away from that?
"Maybe you're right, little guy." Blaster grins and pinches Eject's cheek, some playfulness to ease the anxious release of his chestplates. "We could make some fantastic riffs with a sports champ in the ensemble, don't ya think?"
And that makes five. Blaster doesn't go searching for minis, not with a solid couple of bonds keeping his vitals steady. Special Operations seems to think otherwise; Bee and Jazz observed the sheer number of smaller bots roaming around the comms hub and decided, Hey, Blaster, we just came back from a mission and we brought back two little fellas, could you take 'em for us? Thanks.
What the pit, sure. Blaster's not all that bothered by it, because Steeljaw and Ramhorn are fun company. Steeljaw spends most of his time with Nighstalker, sleeping against windowsills and counters, or following Blaster around when he attends holofilm nights with his old mining squad.
Ramhorn, the fragger, was initially assigned as a frontliner. But his temper's worse than Sunstreaker, and after one too many busted jetpacks and blasters (ha), he's banished to the comms hub to (hopefully) not fuck up the fragile equipment Playback maintains with care. He does, and Playback near-crashes himself from the stress of it, but that's besides the point.
He needs an outlet, an energon-burning one. Blaster, feeling an absolute genius on par with Brainstorm and Perceptor, kicks him into a fitness studio with Eject, Stripes, and Rewind and lets them Cube it out. It works out amazingly.
Between managing Autobot communications, personal communications (Rewind still threatens him with the footage of when he walked in on Blaster pinning Smokescreen to his console), and his regular meet-ups with friends and amica, it just never occurs to him that the pair would want to form a cassette bond. But Steeljaw starts leaving signs, private things that speak more than glyphs could, and Ramhorn eases up on the property damage with a gentleness no one would've expected of him.
Steeljaw leaves silver-sprinkled enerjellies at Blaster's office sometimes, or a blanket around his pauldrons when he dozes off at the hub. Blaster always onlines in his hab with a full cube on his nightstand, so he doesn't have to brave the Pit-ish experience of the mess hall at 0600 joors. He appreciates the gestures but foolishly misses their significance, until Steeljaw drops an old mixtape before Blaster's pedes right before he goes to recharge and nudges it forward.
And like the twins, where Steeljaw goes, Ramhorn follows. Two more cassettes, two more bonds, swirling around the other five in his casing in dreamy, loving colors.
The alarm goes off all too soon. "Ack, gotta go."
"Aw, really?"
Smokescreen sighs as he extracts himself from Blaster's side, swiping his digits over his datapad to deactivate the alarm clock. "Mirage needed me back for tac."
"Alright, fine," Blaster definitely doesn't whine. The rec room feels so cold now without the warmth of another engine tucked up against his. "C'mere, c'mere."
Smokescreen's wings flutter happily as he ducks down for one last kiss. "See ya later, sweetspark," he whispers against his lips, grinning when he hears red-framed speakers belt out a wave of off-tune zitar. Blaster's new conjunx tweaks his antenna before he skips away. Fragging tease.
Blaster watches him go, then lazily goes back to his own pad, where unread comm after unread comm waits for his reply. He scrolls through his myriad of playlists, selects one at random, and allows for a calm, upbeat zitar and cheery voice to fill into the near-deserted rec room.
The pitter-patter of pedesteps further down the hall outside of the rec room, lighter than most mechs, tells him a mini is on their way. It’s not a gait he recognizes, though, so he goes back to his work without much thought to it.
He misses when the iridescent-pink minibot shuffles into the rec room and immediately makes for the dispensers. By the time Blaster finally looks up from his pad, she's lingering awkwardly near the other side of the table, clutching her cube in tiny digits.
"Hi," she greets timidly. "Is it okay if I sit with you?"
Blaster smiles and gestures to the empty seat across from him. "Sure! Go on ahead."
She looks to be of the same frame type as Rewind and Eject, though her pauldrons are not as wide, and sparkling vinyls decorate her entire frame in a complex pattern of whorls and stars. Blaster recognizes her from the album covers, the posters, the radio feed. Her voice used to ring in his auditory suite when he turned the volume up to overpower processor-numbing jackhammers.
Rosanna of High Iacon jumps to clamber onto the seat, star-embossed visor glimmery like Solus's cosmic belt in the sky.
"Pardon my interruption," she begins. "I just… heard the music you were playing."
"Yeah? I'd hope so, 's from the first album you ever released." Blaster powers down his pad and leans back in his chair. He makes a peace sign with his digits. "Blaster. Big fan o' yours."
Rosanna absolutely lights up. Literally, too—her pale pink and blue biolights illuminate her frame in a flurry of excitement and adoration. "Oh, you knew! That one's an old one, I haven't heard it in so long…"
It was the first one he'd heard after coming online, a tinny recording played on the transport's glitchy speakers as the supervisors deposited him in the dormitory for the first time. He'd recorded it, got surprised he could record things, then reverse-searched it and downloaded the whole album. Something, anything, to tune out the brutality of mechs dying behind his back.
"It was an anchor," Blaster confesses, "for me, if that's not weird to say, haha. Still is. 'Could never be who I am now without it."
Rosanna doesn't look put off at all. In fact, she seems to glow even brighter, a star even without the spotlight. "Anchor… yeah, that's exactly what it is! Sometimes I just—I'll be upset or frustrated, or even at my lowest, and I'll be playing my harp, or my zitar, and then the sound just seems to coil around my spark. It resonates, and it keeps me on the ground, y'know?"
"… Yeah, I do. Primus, I do."
::Jazz, check in.::
::Blaster, my mech! Couldn't've—:: Laser fire and Sunstreaker's memorable cursing bleed through the transmission. Blaster can't help but snort. ::Couldn't've picked a better time! We can't pick up anything down here from the other squads, I think the old Soundster's—hoo, slag, there he is. A few paces on my three!::
Ah, scrap. Blaster mutes the mic and twists in his chair. "Prowl, we've got a problem!"
Prowl's wings twitch, but otherwise there's no visible acknowledgement. "Report." He doesn't lift his helm from the hologram battle sim sprawled out across the table in front of him.
"Jazz spotted Soundwave. He's jamming the local comms, I think—only reason I could get through was 'cause of my encryptions."
Prowl swipes a red tab over from the sidebar and drops it smack in the middle of the battlefield, right where Jazz and his team are raining hellfire down upon the Decepticons. It beeps and highlights a new designation under it, and—oh, jeez.
Prowl onlines his comms. "Perceptor, get the groundbridge up as soon as you can. I'm sending over coordinates now. We're sending Blaster in."
Eject whoops over the bond. Rosanna and Blaster sigh in unison.
A groundbridge unfurls neatly at Soundwave's right, swirling blues and golds that almost distract him enough to nearly get a stab in the side from Jazz's (no doubt poison-laced) knife. Soundwave has no time to try triangulating its origin before a blur of red and chrome tumbles out in a screeching whirl.
"Took you long enough!" Jazz calls, a laugh dancing on the edge of his teasing jab.
"I'm not Blurr, mech! Have a little patience, would ya?" Clunky pedes (Are those speakers? Ravage asks, surprised) skid to a stop mere paces away. Soundwave hastily pulls up profile after profile, trying to match a name to the unfami—familiar? face—
The mech's gold panel pops open on the bottom hinge. Soundwave's optics go wide behind his visor as one (Eject of Iacon), two (Steeljaw of ???), three (Ramhorn of ???) cassettes pop out, transforming sharp and quick to hit the ground running.
He has minis? Frenzy shrieks. Let me out, boss!
Frenzy: Patience. I—
Soundwave stumbles back as his profiler locks on tight, flashing blocks of text back at him. Miner, cogless, turned cogged, turned Autobot, turned comms officer—
Boombox.
His dock wrenches open without his input. Frenzy kicks at it without mercy until it's bent flat to the ground, then shoves himself out to chase after Eject. Rumble and Overkill scramble out after him, and Buzzsaw almost follows until Soundwave latches the panel back into place with an uneven clack.
A servo reaches for his wrist joint and yanks him forward, nearly knocking his visor into a charged-up ion blaster. It only takes 0.07 nano-kliks for him to activate the gun packed into his own arm, pressing it right up against that sleek gold panel that guards the boombox's dock. Because that's a dock, because he's not the only one, B-62 survived—
"C'mon Sounders!" Blaster, Blaster of Iacon, shouts, and his voice rings like a zitar in Soundwave's audials. His smile is musical, optics flaring bright. "Dance with me!"