#masterlist updated

You hadn't meant to be cornered by a ‘Con in the last half of a gunfight, just far enough from neutral ground that an ambush wouldn’t have been impossible to predict, but so close that your patrol had been caught up in the fray regardless, staring down the barrel of a mook’s laser rifle, gunmetal gray paint polished over with brown and green stripes.

None of your squad, you least of all, had seen it coming, not until the ‘Con bastard sitting trigger-end pulled the lever and tore through the metal alloy of your shoulder like it had been forged from tissue paper.

Someone screams with you, one of the Autobots (you remember sitting with him in the cafeteria. you and him would trade rations. he didn't laugh when you told him you were being tracked) flanking the frontline, his paint matte-yellow, his innards oozing pink. What was a vocalizer had been shot through, stray sparks scattering worthlessly against the sludgy soil under his peds.

You crumple at that mech’s side, only the first two down in the starting round of a full-blown Deception assault, once-pristine plating now crumpled and mucked over with white-hot scorch marks. It only dawns on you that a second bullet has hit once your optics land on that streak of blackened primer, the scent of smoking paint rising in the air.

It wasn't enough to have ambushed you less than a mile from neutral ground, but the slagheaps running a ring of metal death around your squad were packing laser weaponry.

Bastards.

Each and every last one, a bastard.

"It wasn't enough" rings in your head, an echo from mere seconds prior. Aside from a list of insults nearly a mile long, it's the preeminent perspective of all Decepticon (it feels strange, not counting yourself in their ranks anymore. it feels good, too.) "soldiers" that circles the circuits of your processor.

Nothing had ever been enough for them. It wasn't enough that they had started a species-wide divide in the first place, not enough that they had severed your kind in half in the name of a vicious forever-war, not enough that they had first dragged a new planet into the fight and then doubled down by involving the dominant species of said planet afterwards.

It's hard to imagine that any one of these monsters could ever truly be satiated, ever be so full-to-the-top of conquest and glory that they'd be in the running to be called "content".

And; of course, because no amount of revulsion or distaste for their cause could prevent it- innocent Cybertronians had to suffer for it.

Another 'Bot (you knew this one as well as the last. she use to help you buff out dents. she kept your pursuer a secret when you drunkenly confessed their name) hits the soil, spraying purple from the core of her chassis. She twitches, then gasps out a spatter of gibberish, and goes gray in the optics.

If there is some small, bitter satisfaction to be drawn from this pocket of Pit-Spawned 'Cons, it's that they start dying with you. Particularly harsh (you'd toast the soldier who landed the shot if you both survived this) and tremendously satisfying is the rusted bucket of bolts who opened fire going down with a sharp-ended Energon bolt buried into the plating of his throat, gagging on his rising liquid innards.

You're down an arm and your chassis is blazing to cinders, flattened laser-round burning into the metal near your t-cog chamber. Given his likely lack of need for the thing in days near-certain not to come, you pry a plate free from the writhing mech, and crawl behind the closest cover available- a moss-crusted rock, standing just tall enough to hide you from sight.

Another Autobot slides in beside you. He pries the shard of dead ‘Con from your grip and wedges the sharp of it to your chassis, prying out the burning round so it can be smothered in the dirt. His hand folds in and out slides a laser-welder (lucky. you fold into a rectangle, and this guy has a laser-hand. anyone who says Primus doesn’t play favorites is a liar.) to patch the fractured plating of both bullet wounds.

“My comms are out,” you inform, one servo tapping the rim of your ear. “HUD is spitting static and error signs. Someone’s got a signal dampener.”yx

(A flare of alarm ignites in your processor. Hope is dangerous, but you dare to believe it might be the doing of someone else.)

“That’ll only matter if we need backup,” the medbot pitches in, his blue-glass visor turned to fix your gaze. Even underneath it, his optics- his posture- his voice- are calm. “My count is- was- twelve enemies. Two down and two dead over there, one down and one dead here. That means we’re at six and they’re probably at eight.”

“Probably,” you repeat, trying to twist your lips into something of a grin, “is not the sort of math I like to hear on the battlefield. Especially because it’s very possible for “probably” to be wrong.”

“Bad news- if I’m wrong, we’re going to be slag.”

“Is there good news to go with that?”

“The good news is that we’ll be slag very quickly.”

He slaps your shoulder twice, and to his credit, the weld holds, even thought the banging makes your receptors squeal in protest.

“Best you’re gonna get out here. Base’ll need to strip the plating and clean micro-shrapnel from your circuits, but you’ll be fine. Fire up your comms and we’ll hold the enemy back- and, for what it's worth? Don't move. If that shrapnel spreads, you're gonna pop the circuit tubing and lose an arm.”

He stands, brushes the crusted Energon ooze from his servos, and bolts back out to the firefight, (how many drill sergeants wept for the fact that this bot was built for hospice care, you could only imagine) leaving you all alone as a blood-red optic is blasted over the rock to land beside your foot.

Assuming none of your friend had required their optics in the middle of a fire-fight, make it two down, three dead. Six of you to seven of them.

You prep a distress signal, firing into empty channel after empty channel, just on the off case that either the dampener isn’t strong enough to block everything, or that the bot carrying it gets an early visit to the Pit.

Static chews into every attempted broadcast, corrupting your would-be messages into white noise.

You delete, recompose, and fire off, each message shorter and more desperate.

“Field Patrol Comms Manager requesting backup,” becomes glitchy gibberish, necessitating a file wipe.

Again. “This is your field squad, encountering hostiles-“ but it dies off halfway to broadcast, and the line collapses again.

Third attempt has you scream out your name and rank, met only by toxic feedback bleeding straight into your audials.

That noise- the terrible, biting noise- it takes you to the ground, a pain far worse than your shoulder or chassis endured- having electric poison fed to your most sensitive receptors.

It burns like acid, eating away at your mind and instilling an imagined pain- an audial booby trap for any message that broke past the initial dampener to find air.

It fades, but only after you’ve hit the ground to squirm and kick and scream like a sparkling, venting out the agony of such a custom-catered attack.

There, in sheer desperation, you beg out the one word you haven’t spoken (your 'boss' had wanted to hear it dearly. you don't recall ever giving him the satisfaction. so, on the off-hand that this was...) since the last of your protoform finishing plating over- “Carrier.”

It’s downright pleading, a far cry from your usual behavior on the field, but the thought of having someone to protect and care as pain blooms under your circuits and spreads from audial receptor to spark is agonizingly tempting, so much that dignity leaves you as you make the request.

Something on the other side of your line pings back, and all goes quiet.

The field is still. Bodies everywhere- Autobot red, Decepticon purple, all mixed in the same black sludge of burnt energon and soil.

You see only the faintest sign of movement, the gleam of shifting armor. Not the hum of a laser core spooling up, not the whir of an Energon-Gatling, ready to pepper the landscape with hellish fury. The foe is dead, and your crew- whatever is left of it- either died with them or retreated without you, which means that you were- now, at least, you were actually alone.

(Had your desperate attempts to access base comms eaten up so many minutes of this fire-fight? Surely, just a second ago you were being welded together?)

Someone speaks from the other end of the line, low and steady. It is not the voice of a friend.

“Request: received.”

Oh.

Oh, dear Primus.

Primus, please, no.

You shutter the comms channel bridging your feed out to the world.

It flickers back on.

“Request for communication array termination: denied."

Staggering to your feet seems impossible, but you do it anyways, steadying your arm as you go.

"Suggestion: assume cassette form. Autobot territory ridges this terrain. Retrieval must be expedited. Report from Lazerbeak: enemy forces: doubling back."

Panic rides down your spinal ridge, an electrical lash of anxiety that swells to a crackling current localized entirely around your Spark.

"Those are your enemies," you howl, static gnawing your vocalizations into raggedy half-sobs. "Not mine! Not anymore! Not ever again! And I am done following unkind orders!"

Above, a dark silhouette on sable wings- and with it, the near-negligable weight of a sensor sweep brushing across your plating. You remember that sensation, from another lifetime: his scanners mapping your shape, frame, internals, heartbeat of a spark. A twofold reminder- not only that he- him and his cassettes and his troops- could always find you, no matter how far you ran, but that you were, in spite of your spark-breaking absence, wanted.

"Disobedience: illogical. This does not need to be difficult. Activating: direct alt-mode link."

The instantaneous update- in big red lettering, because everything had to be pointlessly ominous with Decepticons- glares in your HUD, providing a laconic read:

HOST CONNECTION ESTABLISHED. SYNCING: CARRIER/CASSETTE PROTOCOL.

"Command: assume cassette form."

Your armor folds in on itself, joints locking, servos retracting, a thousand micro-motors grinding in protest as he pulls the transformation sequence out of you piece by piece- “No,” you rasp, the word shredding itself across panic-strung vocal wires. “No, no, no-” but even that stutters into silence as your T-Cog chugs away.

You- flat and folded and helpless- hit the ground.

As you do, the air warps with the telltale boom of a sonic pulse. The trees around the ridge bend, bowing under the dread weight of his presence. And then- the sound. A low, seismic hum. The kind that shakes through your spark chamber before you even register it with your receptors.

Soundwave- not that you didn’t know, but seeing him drives the final nail into your coffin.

He reaches for you, and the one last thing you do- because it is the only thing you can do- is to send a message on your conjoined signal:

“I hate you,” it says, righteously angry but sloppy and poorly stated. “I’m not your cassette anymore.”

"Emotional status: accepted. Affection for cassette: intact."

Your hope runs dry.

"Soundwave: will not lose cassette again."

Somewhere, deep inside, your Spark wonders if it wouldn't be nice for Cybertronians to die a little easier.