“Come on. That the best you got, femme?” Her commanding officer, Skywarp, asked as he circled around her. Starlit Meadow knew better than to answer. Sure, he asked her a question, but not all of them required a response. This one sure didn’t.

His servos were raised into the air, primed and ready to attack her if she didn’t defend, so she did. Block, block, punch. Block, block, punch. He had her practicing the same routine against him for so long that her stabilising servos were trembling from the pressure of keeping her upright.

Before training, Skywarp had forbidden her from taking any energon without so much as a reason. She had thought about sneaking some away from the rec room and downing it like there was tomorrow, but Dirge had been placed in charge of keeping an optic on the supplies, and of course the younger brother of Skywarp wasn’t going to go around disobeying his superior’s order, even if the two could barely stand each other on a good cycle.

Dirge had given her the opportunity to sip from his ration if she provided something in return for it. She had politely declined by grabbing his arm strut, forcing it behind his back plating and twisting it around until she heard a satisfying click beneath the mech’s screaming.

As expected, Dirge hadn’t bothered to keep his mouth shut over her defending her honour and stealing his ration. It had barely been a few nano cycles before the incident was reported to Megatron and then taken out on Starscream, who was to be her original trainer. In turn, Starscream had taken it out on his assigned lackey, Skywarp, and thus she ended up where she was now, balancing on a steel beam barely wide enough for one stabilising servo, never mind two, trying to defend herself from her commander’s training, and her tanks churning from lack of sufficient rations to keep her upright.

Skywarp had made it all too clear that she was to starve herself until she could please his optics with sufficient defence training. He had given her a simulation of trying to defend herself against the Autobots with barely any energon to sustain herself.

She had never regretted a decision as much as she had back then. Perhaps if she had just followed Skywarp’s original order, she would have been allowed to get some energon in between the sessions, or at least enough that her tanks didn’t feel like they were going to evict something that wasn’t even there.

Even Shockwave was forbidden by Megatron himself from interfering. Despite being a ‘precious research subject’, Megatron had deemed starving her a worthy punishment for disobeying his son’s order, as well as trying to play an unsuccessful thief in the process. A disappointment on both fronts. Gritting her dentals, Starlit made a silent vow to find Dirge as soon as she could and do far worse to him than breaking his damned arm strut.

Every cycle that passed by, she could feel her frame growing weaker. Her tanks were all too happy to remind her that she hadn’t refuelled in a long time. The occasional warning flashing on the inside of her visor didn’t help that fact either.

Living on Cybertron with a lack of energon resources had provided its difficulties, so she was used to going longer than she should without refuelling, but Skywarp was pushing her past her frame’s natural limit, and he knew it. If she didn’t understand the reasoning behind her current training so well, she would have labelled him nothing less than a sadist. She was close to doing so regardless.

She hated him for keeping at least two energon cubes in the room the whole time. ‘As encouragement to do well’. Slag. He was doing it to taunt her. She could see it all too clearly in those damned crimson optics of his, and that overly confident permanent smirk, when it wasn’t replaced with a scowl the mech didn’t just reserve for his brothers. Needless to say, she tried her best to try and avoid being on the receiving end of it. She didn’t always succeed in that, especially not lately.

Looking to the cubes, she knew he was keeping them in the room as a way to taunt her, to see how long it would take for her to snap and try to grab one of them. She wanted nothing more. She didn’t care about the punishment she would receive either.

Her frame had never given her much of an advantage over the mechs. Sure, they kept her more in reserve, and made sure she refuelled on a regular basis because she was the only femme on base, but that didn’t mean that they gave her any special treatment. She went through the same training, same chores, and same difficulties as the mechs. In fact, she’d wager that she went through more with Shockwave’s experiments. That at least provided some form of comfort.

A mech under Megatron’s command would be left to starve if he didn’t complete Skywarp’s task, but she… she would be allowed to get enough energon to keep her online. In a way, it felt like a worse fate. A mech would be allowed to go offline in peace, but not her. She was one of the rare femmes to have joined the Decepticons. Megatron had made it quite clear that if it came to it, certain things would be expected of her, ‘for the sake of their survival’. That was why she let Skywarp push her as far as he could.

She could quit her training at any time and still stay on as a Decepticon. At most she would be moved to a different section, her unusual ability allowing her to be used for recon and such, but there was also the chance that she would be degraded even further to the point where she would rarely be allowed to leave a single room for more than a cycle.

That was why she trained, to prove to Megatron and her so-called brothers-in-arms that she was just as capable of fighting as they were. If she proved herself enough, she could go out in the field and fight alongside them without a constant optic tracking her every movement.

She wouldn’t admit it, but in a way she was thankful that her room was as close to Shockwave’s room as it was. Most of the mechs already feared the scientist because of the experiments he was rumoured to perform on failing soldiers, so having him act as her guardian of sorts helped to keep most of the mechs off her back all with one, simple sentence: ‘Shockwave wouldn’t like that’.

There was no allegiance, or thankfulness, towards the mech, but she did appreciate the fact that he was one of the few mechs on base that treated her the same as he treated all the others. Megatron himself barely got any special treatment either. She had once overheard Shockwave lecturing the great and powerful Megatron about how he could have gone offline if a blast to his chassis had hit a bit more towards his centre. She’d nearly been caught giggling to herself that day. Luckily she was fast enough on her peds to escape discovery.

“Come on, pick up the pace.”

‘How about you pick up the pace and let me refuel for once,’ Starlit snarled in return, to herself of course. There was no way that she was going to purposefully tempt him to keep those cubes away from her longer than he could. She was a valuable asset for her frame. He didn’t need to train her to defend herself, but he did. She did take some pleasure in the fact that he never expected her to use those same movements he taught her to beat up one of his brothers because they couldn’t mind their manners, so to speak.

Fights happening on base, especially the Decepticon base, wasn’t all that unheard of. After all, the mechs did need to let off some steam at one point or another before they went into battle and messed up somehow because they were fuelled by rage for their fellow mech than the opponent they were up against.

That didn’t mean those fights went unpunished though. That was something both Megatron and Skywarp made certain she understood fully. She supposed having to go through Skywarp’s defensive training was better than being left at Dirge’s mercy. That didn’t mean she was happy about him being let off with barely a lecture for the remarks he made about her. She could have simply ignored it, but then he would have kept at it until it advanced to the point where she would need to defend herself physically. If her punishment was to train her frame to become stronger, then so be it. It could only work to her advantage in the future.

He lost track of how long he had been flying through the white, fluffy things the inhabitants of the planet called clouds. A strange word, yet one that oddly put him at ease. Naturally he had been on other planets that contained the same thing, but the clear difference between Earth and Cybertron clouds was that Earth clouds didn’t contain acid.

When it first rained since his awakening on the planet, Skywarp had been almost terrified to step a ped out from beneath cover, but that had been before he saw a human getting out of a truck and the truck being perfectly fine, showing absolutely no hint of melting in on itself. He had been hesitant, but after testing the safety of the rain with a servo, he found that it was perfectly safe for him and his kind, if they avoided the lightning that sometimes dwelled within those clouds. It had taken some time, but he had eventually learned how to tell which clouds to avoid when lightning was deemed to appear.

He had never needed a reason to take to the skies, but today had been a special exception. Megatron had put them through a rather rough raid, and frankly, he needed to relax before he blew a gasket. Back on Cybertron, he would have taken out his frustration in the rec room by claiming an extra ration from his subordinates or teaching that femme that had been placed under his command how to fight back properly.

He found it strange though. Ever since awakening, both Autobots and Decepticons had found their lost allies without much trouble, but there was one bot that no one could get a fixture on, the only femme that had been aboard that day they crashed into the planet.

Soundwave had reasoned that she must have burned out during their descent into the planet’s atmosphere and now was possibly nothing more than debris circling with whatever else the humans shot up into space under the guise of whatever reason they chose to justify polluting another layer of their planet.

Skywarp had never been one to bother with the state a planet was in, but this one was rich in resources, a constant source of energon, so much so that even when the Autobots chased them away, the Decepticons always had enough energon at the end of the day to not have to ration to the point where they felt like they’d run out of fuel before the next mission. If it had been his planet, he would have taken better care of it than those lowly humans scourging around somewhere far on the ground below.

Thinking about the possible sight, he found himself wondering how the femme would have reacted if she saw the humans for the first time. If his memory banks served their purpose in remembering, he could have sworn that the day she boarded the Nemesis for their departure was the first time she had ever been off-planet.

It had originally been intended as a scouting mission to follow the Autobots to a new possible energon source, which inevitably they succeeded in, before Megatron had ordered that they attack the Ark instead. He hadn’t cared either way back then, but now knew that if things had turned out differently, they might have returned to Cybertron already, on their way to conquering their half of the planet.

Homesick wasn’t a word that existed in his vocabulary, but he did have to admit that he missed the routine that had been a self-spoken expectation back then. He would online his optics early in the mornings, do a couple of light stretches and go out for a morning flight, sometimes on his own, sometimes with his brothers, and sometimes with her, then he’d go to the rec room and grab his share of rations before heading to the washracks to clean himself off. Usually the morning routine had been without collecting his ration, unlike now.

Some of his brothers had taken to teasing him over the loss of the only femme that their team had since they left Cybertron, saying that they could have used something to relieve their stress on. He found himself often laughing at them for their whims. If the femme had been around, she would have used every move he had taught her to have those same mechs pinned to the floor, begging her forgiveness for their lustful thoughts.

Thinking of her, he often wondered if she would have accepted one or two invitations to share her berth with them. Considering that she would have been the only femme on planet, none of the mechs that possessed an interest in the opposite build would have been too picky about gunning for her. He had to admit that she did possess a pretty nice frame, the fact that she could shift into any alternate mode helped sweeten the thinking process.

Once when she had been in a particularly bad mood, he had tried playing his cards to see if he would fall into her favour for a one night stand. She had turned him down faster than a failed thruster boost in a free fall. Luckily for her, no bot else had been around when she did that. He couldn’t promise that she would have walked away unscathed if some bot had been witness to the act. Before and after that day, he had seen her turn down each attempt at courting her the same way, although some denials had been more forceful than others.

At first he had thought it was simply her preference to not choose a potential mate, or that she might have had an interest in those with a similar build to her own. It wasn’t until the day that his curiosity had won him over enough to ask her outright which ones she preferred; mechs, femmes or none.

Needless to say, she had been confused at first by his question, but shortly after informed him that she had an interest in mechs, but none of them had managed to capture her attention like she had captured theirs. He found himself easily accepting her answer, being a bot that preferred both the company of mechs and femmes in an intimate manner.

Considering that one was lucky to meet at least three femmes during his lifetime, Skywarp had often found himself sharing a berth with a mech or two. Most mechs did. With another mech it was simply easier. You didn’t have to worry about accidental impregnation, and if they went offline in the field, there was always another mech around the corner. Femmes were far too rare for that occurrence, though that didn’t mean that all mechs that became intimate with other mechs did it for only those reasons. He knew of quite a few mechs that had mated with other mechs because they genuinely cared about the mech they mated with.

He wasn’t one to believe in the conception of love, but when he sometimes listened to those around him speak of their mates back home, or how they had a particularly good relationship with another bot, he did feel an odd rise of emotion from his chassis. He wasn’t ashamed to admit that he envied them but starting a relationship during a war wasn’t at the top of his priority list either. That was something that could wait. He had lived for deca-cycles, he could wait a couple more.

A low rumbling in the cloud beside him drew Skywarp free from his thoughts, alerting him that if he didn’t find shelter soon, then the sky would force him to. Letting a rumble echo through his vents, Skywarp tilted his frame to the side, sweeping down over the highway as cars filled nearly to the brim with humans scurried about beneath him, each on their way to some or other destination, just like him, except they weren’t the ones that were being chased from the only place they could think.

Transformers Generation One, Megatron, Skywarp, Soundwave, Cybertron, Autobots, Decepticons, Energon, Ark and Nemesis © Hasbro

“Foolish Autobots,” Megatron, leader of the Decepticons, cackled to himself, his servos tightening on the arm rests of the throne his ship carried. Rumble, one of Soundwave’s many cassettes, muttered that he thought the throne to be an overkill. Starlit Meadow felt inclined to agree.

“We’re approaching the Autobots’ ship. Shall I prepare the troops, my liege?” Megatron’s eldest and Wing Leader, Starscream, offered in his high octave of a voice. That, at least, was one reason for the femme to feel relieved over being reassigned to Starscream’s Lieutenant instead of the mech himself. None of them failed to notice the sarcasm the Wing Leader used when addressing the mech posing as his leader. A pair of narrowed crimson optics from the high seat confirmed as much.

Megatron lifted a onyx servo in silent confirmation that sent a sense of purpose rushing down numerous metallic spines. They all moved to where ship’s door, waiting for the signal that locked the Nemesis to the Ark by force. The doors swung open and they charged as one.

Starlit Meadow rushed in just as the Autobots’ weapon specialist, Iron Hide, swung himself around from his spot at the command deck, aiming his cannon right for them. For a moment, she froze, rooted to the floor beneath her peds. It was only because of a strong nudge from Soundwave that she stumbled out of range of the blast that followed a nano click later.

She would have turned to thank the mech if it weren’t for he fact that he was already rushing towards his arch enemy, Blaster. What the deal was between the two of them, she didn’t know. Now wasn’t the time to enquire either. Straightening herself, she caught a glimpse of a frown from her superior, and with an intent of goodwill, found herself sticking her glossa out at him. The glare she received was enough of a warning of what would follow once they finished their assault and won the Ark for their cause.

With every bot peeling off to a pre-determined enemy, Starlit Meadow scanned the deck, trying to find a match for herself. Megatron went up against his younger brother, Optimus Prime. Starscream took his cousin, Bumblebee – an oddly suiting name for such a small, and seemingly energetic, minibot. They all seemed to have someone that filled their sparks with the need for some form of vengeance.

Her option was Hound. She didn’t have anything against the green coloured mech, in fact, some part of her felt the need to express some form of admiration. Why that was though, she didn’t know. She couldn’t afford to care either.

Rushing up behind him once he tossed one of Reflector’s three components to the side, giving her the chance she needed to hop onto his back plating, twirling her arm around his throat, earning a surprised squawk as her legs wrapped around his middle, procuring her vantage point.

A pair of blue optics looked back to her with far more alarm than she had thought possible by the mech, but she paid it no mind and only tightened her hold, giving Reflector the time they needed to get a few punches in before the Autobot scientist, Wheeljack, interfered by hauling them to the side. For a moment their optics met. The look he gave her was unsettling enough for her to loosen her hold on the other’s throat.

That had been all Hound needed to grab onto her arm and toss her over himself, straight into the Seeker’s third-in-command, Thundercracker. How he had caught her, she wasn’t sure, and neither was she going to ask. His optics asked a silent status report, but she didn’t answer as she hopped out of his arms and raced back to the off-road Autobot, intent on gaining some form of revenge.

At least, she would have gotten her revenge if Astrotrain didn’t haul himself into Hound’s side, sending the both of them rolling across the floor as the ship tilted out of nowhere, sending nearly half of the inhabitants sprawling with them.

“Asteroid field!” Iron Hide announced, pushing himself up from his spot where he fell against the ship’s side. A nano second later, the asteroids came into view from the row of windows decorating the side.

Like a colony, the Decepticons turned to rush back to the safety of their own ship before another asteroid hit, jostling the two ships apart by breaking the docking bridge clean in half, sending each ship in its own direction.

All she could make out within that moment was servos frantically searching for anything to grab onto, bots being yanked from the command deck like scraplets caught in an energon storm, and screaming. So, so much screaming.