Gay Autobots And Decepticons Holding Hands

“We’ve found you a partner,” Springer says as Hot Rod walks into his office. 

Hot Rod isn’t surprised. No one’s supposed to know that a Second House cav, a Sixth House cav, and a Third House dignitary with no battle skills to speak of were, more or less willingly, recovered from Canaan House and supposedly recruited, but everyone knows anyway. Most of the base doesn’t like this plan - of course survivors of whatever Lyctor-murderfest was going on there would join up when they don’t have anywhere else to go, and of course they’re going to ditch BoE the second they see a way home. 

BoE needs them, though. Or at least, Hot Rod does. Everyone knows that he wouldn’t last ten minutes on a battlefield without someone watching his back, and no one trains for that job in BoE. House necromancers, the only necromancers out here, have to be paired with House cavaliers. 

He’d assumed that Arcee would be his cavalier forever when they’d first been matched after Hot Rod arrived, but she and her wife have a baby now and Hot Rod’s been all but grounded ever since she quit going out in the field. They would send him out alone if there was an emergency, of course. Hot Rod suspects he’s only alive because there hasn’t been an emergency. 

Arcee had been hoping he’d quit too, he thinks. She’d understood his drive to fight, but she’d also seen the way they look at him - like he’s a weapon, like he’s a thing. She’d probably thought that if he walked away, he could find family again like she had.

But he’s still alive for one reason only, and that’s to fight back. His only skill to speak of is destruction, and even though it makes him monstrous in BoE’s eyes, they’re willing to send him on missions because no one else here can do what he does. He could do without them being just as willing to laugh at him for the way he passes out if he doesn’t have dirt to siphon thanergy from as they leave a planet and the disciplinary marks he gets for having to sleep through most of his first forty-eight hours on any space station, but none of that is enough to make him give up. 

“Which one is it?” Hot Rod asks. Surely Springer knows that he knows about the recruits - he’s at least as tapped into the gossip as Hot Rod. 

“His name is Deadlock,” says Springer. 

That’s quite possibly the least Sixth House name Hot Rod has ever heard, so Second House it is. Dread curdles in his gut. He’d heard that the Second House cav had only stopped fighting back when he’d been stabbed and nearly killed. He’s probably a soldier, and more likely than the rest to still be loyal to the Houses. How is he going to react to Hot Rod, who betrayed them so explosively?

But he can’t say any of that to Springer. Whatever goes wrong is certainly no more than he deserves. “Understood.” 

**

“I’m Rodimus. It looks like we’re going to be working together,” Rodimus says, forcing a smile. He’d been considering the switch for years, with the way his old name sometimes feels like a secure thread connecting him to his past but more and more often like the weight of it yoked over his shoulders. He’d submitted the official name change request as soon as he’d left Springer’s office and sent a memo to his closest associates, of which there aren’t many. The name change isn’t guaranteed to keep Deadlock from figuring out who he is, but it’s certainly worth trying. 

Deadlock looks like he’s around Rodimus’s age, wary and obviously still injured as he looks at him from across the table. There’s a stretch of silence before he speaks, and Rodimus braces himself for Deadlock to have figured out his secret already. 

“I’m Drift,” he says, finally. Rodimus takes note of the change, hopes it was the reason for the pause instead of anything to do with Rodimus. 

It feels like it means something, that he’s chosen to change his name now. It feels like it means he won’t kill Rodimus in his sleep, at least.

**

Rodimus and Drift are largely left alone to train together; no one in BoE wants to supervise a partnership that goes against everything they stand for, even though they’re willing to keep whatever necros and cavs they get their hands on for their undeniable effectiveness. Springer is the closest thing to a real supporter, but even he insists on just letting them train how they like, with the polite excuse that he has nothing to contribute. Rodimus tries to keep himself from feeling slighted or abandoned and it never really works. 

It slips his mind easily enough when his and Drift’s shuttle lands on a quiet corner of one of BoE’s sanctuary planets, and he has thanergy at his fingertips for the first time in months. 

There are no humans buried nearby, so Rodimus is limited to the corpses of small animals. It’s plenty of thanergy to channel into a region far from the shuttle and free of live animals and tweak it into a massive fireball that sends flames and smoke high into the air. 

Drift steps up beside him, one hand on his sheathed rapier. “Wow. That was just...wow.”

Rodimus glances at him, looking for irony or a flat-out lie, but he’s still staring at the blacked dirt where the fireball was, eyes wide in seemingly genuine awe. “You were Cohort, right? Haven’t you seen a Fourth House necro work before?”

Drift looks at Rodimus, in that intense way he has that makes Rodimus want to take a step back. “I only joined a few years ago,” he says. What he doesn’t say, after all the Fourth House necromancers died, sits thick in the air between them. 

“Right.” It makes sense, now that Rodimus thinks about it. Most houses don’t start shipping adepts into the field until they’ve turned 18. And after...well, after Rodimus, technically, the Fourth House hadn't had anyone left to spare. 

He wonders who Fourth House sent to the First at the Emperor’s call. He hopes it wasn’t Flamewar, but he doesn’t bother to hope very hard. 

Drift is still looking at him, and when he notices again he does take a step away, shaking his head and clapping his hands. “Okay. Training. I have complete control over the blast radius, but that only helps me avoid hitting you if I know where you are,” he says. “My last cav and I worked a lot on positioning for different types of fights. I can walk you through what we did, and we’ll adapt what we need to.” 

“Your last cav...” Drift trails off instead of finishing his question, but it’s obvious what he wants to ask. 

“She’s alive! She’s fine, she just has a family now and wanted to retire from active duty.” 

“Oh.” Drift tries to smile, but it’s thin and troubled. 

“You were paired with a necro before you were picked up, right?” 

Drift’s smile disappears. He nods. 

Rodimus waits. They’re going to have to talk about it if they’re going to work together at all, so it might as well be now, when the loss isn’t a schism between them yet. 

“His name was Wing,” Drift says, sounding...unlike himself. Angry, bitter. More like Rodimus had expected Deadlock to sound, before they’d actually been introduced. “He died at Canaan House.” 

“I’m sorry,” Rodimus said. 

Drift smiles at him, softer and more real this time, then looks off into the distance. “I know who you are, you know,” he says. “There’s only been one Fourth House defector in decades.”

Rodimus’s whole body tenses. “Who am I, then?” he asks. 

“Ugh. You’re not prepared at all.”

“Starscream’s making you bring an Autobot as a date to repay an old favor, right? To take the attention off of how he’s also bringing an Autobot as his date?” 

Deadlock grunts in the way Hot Rod has learned to tell is an affirmative answer. 

“When has Starscream ever succeeded at not being the center of attention? That’s such a terrible plan. I’ll get a free meal, we’ll both keep straight faces while internally cracking up at whatever kind of scene Starscream makes, and it’ll be great.” 

“The food won’t even be good. Megatron doesn’t believe in energon additives.” 

I’m doing it for you, not the food, Hot Rod wants to say. He forces the urge down. Fake date, he reminds himself. Fake. 

Date. 

That thought leads his mind to a perfectly acceptable thing to say. “We should practice kissing!” 

Deadlock’s optics are bright and intense when he turns toward Hot Rod, and there’s a moment where Hot Rod is torn between speeding away or kissing him senseless. 

“Okay,” Deadlock says. Kissing him senseless is definitely the verdict, and maybe this was a bad idea, actually. 

Hot Rod waits for Deadlock to lean forward a little, and then leans in to kiss him. He keeps it gentle even though the urge to tackle Deadlock and twine all his limbs around him has not gone away. It’s nice enough that he feels lost when Deadlock finally, after more time than a practice kiss probably warranted, pulls away. 

Something settles inside him, though, when he sees Deadlock’s face, and...“I’ve never seen you smile like that.”

“I’m just so excited to see what kind of scene Starscream makes,” Deadlock says. 

Hot Rod tries not to look disappointed and feels himself failing, which he can’t really be blamed for considering that Deadlock basically just threw a bucket of liquid nitrogen at his internals. 

Not every battle smells like Nyon. 

Some of them are hand-fought, with gushes of MTOs hacking at each other and both sides depleted of heavy artillery. Those battles smell like curdled energon and the other essences of quick deaths. Other battles are fought in space, or on planets with no atmosphere. 

Every other battle smells like Nyon.

This one has smelled like Nyon for weeks and it’s been nearly unbearable the whole time. The particular scents of bombs and burned-out internals from too much strain on too little energon must cover half the planet by now. When the Autobots’ forces are bolstered and suddenly they’re winning the battle, it’s barely a relief. 

Hot Rod is scouting territory that the Decepticons have just retreated from when he sees Deadlock. More accurately, he almost trips over him. Normally, upon seeing what looks like the corpse of a Decepticon that dangerous, he would sound an alarm and summon a team to make sure of his corpse-hood and take him into custody if there’s still life in his spark. 

But he doesn’t, because there’s a familiar scent coming from Deadlock. He smells like Nyon. 

**

There had always been some disagreement, in Nyon, over whether or not the empties were dead. That their sparks had stopped once was irrefutable; the question was whether what powered their frames after was a spark at all. It was difficult to kill them again, which would have been an advantage if it wasn’t paired with a severe vulnerability: empties could no longer activate energon on their own, making regular energon useless to them, and forcing them to depend on energon that had already cycled through a frame with a living spark to survive. They’d been common in Nyon - an empty became an empty when their frame was depleted of energon so quickly that their spark shorted out, rather than gradually cycling the frame’s energy levels down until the frame went into forced stasis. All the empties Hot Rod had known in Nyon had died there, and he hasn’t noticed any since - they’re indistinguishable from other Cybertronians most of the time, except when they’ve used up all the energy in the energon they’ve been transferred and fall into their own version of stasis. They go very still, in a way more reminiscent of stasis than death, but the deactivated energon sitting in their lines has a unique scent, one that somehow reminds Hot Rod of both life and death.

He knows that not all the empties who have ever existed were in Nyon; the Autobot medical corps have a section of handbook about them, and it stands to reason that energon thieves or a particular kind of injury could have essentially the same effect as Zeta’s experiments. But Hot Rod hasn’t, to his knowledge, encountered one since Nyon. Until Deadlock. 

All at once, he decides that he’s sick of this. He’s sick of this planet and this battle and this war and everything, everything that led him here. He isn’t going to call a team. 

He uses his foot to flip Deadlock over so that he can see his face and whether or not he’s holding a gun. From the scent, he can tell that Deadlock doesn’t have enough energy to do anything like walk, but there’s a strong chance he’s perfectly capable of pulling a trigger. 

He’s unarmed, though, and instead of a gun, Hot Rod finds himself staring into barely-lit but perfectly conscious optics. 

He secures his own weapon to his side and kneels next to Deadlock. Deadlock follows the motion with his optics, moving his neck just enough to track Hot Rod. He doesn’t speak, and more interestingly, doesn’t snarl at him. His frame is littered with dents and scrapes and cracks, but it’s clean of energon; Deadlock had probably made it this far in a battle like this one by licking the energon splattered onto his frame from the Autobots he cut down. 

Hot Rod takes a careful look around, knowing full well that if anyone sees what’s about to happen he’ll be rightfully accused of treason. But even Deadlock doesn’t deserve to be left like this, helpless and paralyzed in enemy territory. Maybe it’s Deadlock’s fault for becoming a Decepticon in the first place - most of Hot Rod’s teammates would say so, at least. But Hot Rod’s teammates aren’t here right now, and Hot Rod remembers seeing lines of empties on the street, crowds of them at the Acroplex, and not having enough energon running through his own frame to help even one of them. But now, he has enough. It’s more for those long-dead than for Deadlock that Hot Rod positions his wrist over Deadlock’s intake and says, “Drink.” 

“I’m not joining the Autobots.” Deadlock’s voice is a raspy whisper barely loud enough for Hot Rod to hear. 

“I don’t expect you to join the Autobots.” 

“Then why?” 

“Because you need energon, and I have plenty.”

Hot Rod can’t tell if Deadlock has run out of arguments or if he’s used up too much energy to be able to speak anymore. Deadlock’s motions are slow as he takes Hot Rod’s wrist between his teeth and uses his fangs to make two small punctures in the energon vein that runs through it. 

“Plenty is big talk for someone with this kind of fuel pressure,” Deadlock says, his voice already sounding better, after a few seconds. 

“You complaining?” Hot Rod asks. As he says it he realizes with a pang that that’s exactly what he said to empties in Nyon, all the dozens of times they said something similar to him. 

Hot Rod glances around again to make sure no Autobots are nearby and then lets himself relax a little at having successfully gotten Deadlock to accept his help. Relaxing is a horrible idea, as it turns out, because the next motion from Deadlock is a startled twitch that Hot Rod feels both in his opened wrist, and in the hand that he’s placed on Deadlock’s finial. 

He yanks that hand away as if Deadlock’s finial had been on fire. “Sorry!” 

“You don’t have to stop,” Deadlock says, not looking anywhere near Hot Rod.

It probably can’t make things worse, Hot Rod reasons, and it feels good to stroke along Deadlock’s finial, one of the only parts of him unmarred by the battle. He keeps up the motion until Deadlock stops drinking, licking at the wounds in the vein to seal them. 

Then it’s Hot Rod’s turn to startle, because the next thing Deadlock does is kiss the inside of his wrist. It’s less intimate than drinking his energon, obviously, but it doesn’t feel that way, and Hot Rod’s spark whirs in a way that distracts him almost enough to forget where he is for a moment. It’s the best gift Deadlock could have given him. 

Deadlock steps away from Hot Rod as they both stand up.

“I hope we see each other again someday,” Hot Rod says, keeping his promise.

“You shouldn’t,” says Deadlock. He looks away, toward where the Decepticons have retreated.