Chapter Text
For the longest time, Rodimus hasn’t slept.
Nightmares are nothing new to him. Pit, by this point, they’re old friends. Rodimus came into the world trailing half-remembered visions of combat and bombs and searing radiation behind him like flames. If he hadn’t learned to thumb his nose at the monsters and stubbornly curl up to recharge right under their malevolent gazes, he’d have gone insane long ago.
(Well. Jury’s out on whether that happened anyway.)
It wouldn’t even be accurate to say that he’s never known nightmares like this. In the scant few years - as huge as those years loom in his memory, even now - that Rodimus was captain of the Lost Light, he explored alternate universes, fought monsters, met gods. The spectres of the dead rising from their graves to speak to the living? That’s just a typical Tuesday.
Except -
This time it isn’t the Dead Universe, or an errant time pocket. It’s not a comforting vision conjured by an euthanasia planet or a living version of a dead person from another dimension. There are ghosts walking the corridors of the Exitus at night, bending low over Rodimus’s waking form, whispering to him.
(Maybe he is going crazy.)
And he can’t sleep.
Not with Trailcutter’s reproachful optics boring holes into his plating. Not with Megatron murmuring poetry, interspersed with whispering, almost lovingly, the verdict from his trial. Not with Getaway hissing in his audial, “Just like me, after all, little Prime - maybe if you weren’t so concerned about your own glory, you could’ve saved more of them - maybe you could bring your squad home alive for once in your pathetic function - maybe if you weren’t just. Like. Me. ” And Rodimus flails, tries to claw at them, and ends up going right through their illusory frames and tumbling from his recharge slab onto the floor. But that isn’t the worst of it.
The worst is that last night, Rodimus could swear that he felt - for the briefest second - his fingertips connect with Getaway’s arm.
Sometimes, there’s another figure, too; an orange mech Rodimus doesn’t recognise. A soldier, maybe? Someone he met in the back of a troop transport, about to be dropped on a Decepticon base from orbit, and whose back he slapped with a cheerful smile while silently refusing to learn the mech’s name, because that way lay pain? The guy doesn’t really look like a soldier: he’s little and gangly, and his spark is almost obscenely vulnerable, on display through a thin panel of glass. Maybe he died early on. Maybe Rodimus was right not to learn who he was.
The mech stands with his arms outstretched, like a sacrifice, like he’s waiting for something.
***
Nautica used to dream in numbers.
Living numbers, shivering under her hands and arcing away from her in all directions; magnificent sweeps of numbers describing strange vistas under alien skies. Things she’d never seen, rendered realer than real by the web of numbers pulsating around her.
Nowadays, the only numbers are the ones whispered by Nightbeat’s ghost as it hovers above her in the dark.
“Eighty-nine,” the thing that is not Nightbeat murmurs. “One hundred and one. One hundred and ninety.”
She wishes he’d talk to her properly. She misses him.
She doesn’t quite miss Skids - who hovers silently in the corner, just out of reach - but she wishes she could, and maybe that’s close to the same.
There’s a little orange mech as well, who stands behind Skids and Nightbeat and mouths words that Nautica can’t hear. (There’s an ache, there, every time she can’t make out what he’s saying, almost like there is with Skids - like missing the sense of missing someone.) He carries a book, and from time to time he’ll take it out from under his arm and push it towards her, as if she might recognise it.
The glyphs on the cover could almost - almost! - read, “Towards Peace”.
***
Whirl’s dreams are jumbled, jagged things.
Bodies jostle him, strike at him, pile high on top of him; the world is full of fragmented colours that cut and burn, and the light itself is letting out a high-pitched, constant shriek like a blaster in the split-second before it fires. In the past few years, though, there is an eye to the storm of those dreams. A presence in the centre takes hold of him and grounds him. When he is there, cool blue optics and warm orange plating fill his world, and block out everything else. And the dream falls blessedly silent, for a time.
He’s pretty sure he used to remember where the presence came from, what it was called. But Whirl’s mind chews things up and spits them out, and he doesn’t know, anymore, what he doesn’t know anymore.
***
Chromedome and Rewind tend to share dreams, these days. Between the bygone years of casual injection and their new, occasional practice of Rewind plugging directly into Chromedome’s processor, they’ve been in and out of each other’s heads so often that it’s only natural by now.
It means they also share the vision of an orange mech with a sad smile, leaning close, and the phantom touch on their linked hands.
“Domey?” Rewind asks groggily, searching the shadows; it felt like a dream, but it hasn’t faded like a dream, the memory of that touch still vivid. “Did you that? It sounded like someone called us -”
Chromedome finishes for him: “‘Lucky’?”
***
Ratchet’s dreams are prophetic.
The only thing he hates more than this (staggeringly unlikely, but unfortunately proven time and again) fact is the amount of glee his husband takes in it.
So when Ratchet startles awake for the third time in as many nights, Drift sits him down at the kitchen table, sets a cup of piping hot energon in front of him, and gives him The Look.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ratchet says.
Drift looks at him.
“It probably doesn’t even mean anything,” Ratchet says.
Drift looks at him.
“Frag you, kid,” Ratchet says.
Drift grins.
Ratchet folds his arms, sighs dramatically, and begins.
It is - though he does not know this yet - an echo of the dreams so many of the former Lost Light crew have shared since they returned from their quest. An orange slip of a mech, with bright optics and a brighter spark. Fragments of words or gestures that aren’t understood; an urgency that doesn’t make sense. But there is one difference.
Ratchet’s optics are grim as he meets Drift’s gaze. “And then he looked me right in the optic, and he said, ‘Don’t forget me.’”
Drift takes one of Ratchet’s hands, still warm from the mug, and cradles it in his own. “And you think…?”
“I think we did.”
***
“So!” Brainstorm rubs his hands together, reveling in the rows of attentive optics arrayed before him - every surviving member of the Rod Squad, plus a few additions. “Judging by what Ratchet says and the visitations we’ve all been experiencing, it turns out that -”
“That is to say, our current hypothesis, pending actual testing, is,” Perceptor interjects smoothly, without looking up from his calibrations.
Brainstorm gives a magnanimous wave. “As my assistant says -” he ignores the indignant snort behind him - “it’s our hypothesis that we’re all suffering from the effects of a collective memory-whammy.”
“Like mnemosurgery on a mass scale,” Nautica puts in. She’s hanging upside-down from Brainstorm’s ceiling sling, tightening one of the connectors behind the device that’s taking up most of the floor space in the trio’s shared lab. It’s covered, rather imperfectly, in a sheet, bits of wires sticking out here and there like organic hair.
“Correct, my other assistant!” Brainstorm ducks automatically as Nautica takes a playful swing at him with her wrench. “We’ve all been induced to forget something, or, more likely, someone. The question is, who? And why?
“Now, as you’re all aware, mnemosurgeons are a little thin on the ground these days; Chromedome here has turned his back on science to become a therapist or some bullslag -”
“Hey,” Chromedome interjects, sounding a little bit genuinely hurt.
“- which is all very noble and fulfilling and we’re proud of you, okay, but my point is that it limits our options for reversing whatever was done to us. Or it would, were it not for one simple fact!”
Brainstorm pauses, as if he’s waiting for something.
There’s an uncomfortable silence, until Riptide ventures, “You’re a genius?”
“I,” Brainstorm intones, “am a genius,” and he whips away the sheet.
The device is - daunting, to say the least. A half-dome of metal towers over a vertical slab, with some ominous-looking restraints attached. Above the slab hover perhaps two dozen needles, poised like the hands of a whole squad of mnemosurgeons, ready to descend on their subject.
Brainstorm ignores the gasps, the muttered curses, and the way First Aid immediately runs over to examine the thing up close. “I call this the Memory Restoration Device! It should be able to reverse the removal of our memories in seconds. Any questions?”
“Have you tested it?” asks Velocity warily.
“Great question! I am a scientist and my first duty is always to the advancement of science. Next!”
Ratchet speaks up for the first time. “Hasn’t anyone thought that maybe those memories got hidden for a reason? ”
There are murmurs in the crowd. Whirl says, “I’ve had just about enough of people screwing with my processor without my say-so, Doc.”
“Then aren’t you all forgetting what can happen when someone’s memories get restored unexpectedly, without giving them any chance to prepare? Say, like what happened to Skids?” Ratchet levels a glare at his former shipmates.
This time, they all fall silent.
“Use it on me.”
The crowd parts as Rodimus strides through.
Ultra Magnus moves as if to intercept him just as Rodimus goes to strap himself into the device. Brainstorm grins, and starts flipping switches. “ Captain, ” Magnus whispers, and the inaccuracy (Rodimus hasn’t been captain for years now) is almost more unnerving than his strained tone.
Rodimus’s smile is dazzling, and tired. “I’ll be fine, Magnus. Always am.” His expression grows sober, and he murmurs, “Besides, what kind of captain would I be if I forgot one of my crew, right?”
Magnus looks like he’s about to argue further, but at that moment, Brainstorm flips the switch.
Rodimus’s frame jerks in its bindings. Blue lightning plays over his plating, arcing from his optics to his spark and back; a muffled groan escapes from behind his clenched teeth.
“Brainstorm,” Chromedome begins, “careful, you don’t want to go too deep -”
Rodimus screams.
In the chaos of the next few seconds - Ratchet and Velocity shouting, Brainstorm shouting back, Perceptor and Nautica firing questions at each other as Magnus shows every sign of being about to charge the machine and turn it off by force - it’s easy to miss the moment when the electricity actually does switch off on its own, its work complete, leaving Rodimus slumping in the restraints. But no one misses what happens next.
Rodimus raises his head, and - in a new and terrible voice like the rumble of a planet about to implode - says four words.
“ His name is Rung. ”
Brainstorm lets out a yell as blue light bursts from the supposedly dormant machine, and runs in a crackling daisy chain around the room, from spark to spark to spark - and then the world falls away -
- “It’s all right. We’re done. No more for today.”
- spilled rust sticks across a cell floor, and a pair of warm, knowing optics watching -
- “Friend?”
- the flash of deep blue optics revealed as glasses were removed, and the small private smile that went with them -
- “bloody hell, he just punched the moon!”
- a hand cradling a tiny Lost Light, like a god holding the crew in the palm of their hand -
- “It’s Rung. Forever.”
Gradually, the flood of memories starts to abate, and the room around the crew comes back into focus. Nautica’s optics are streaming light at the edges. Whirl has his back turned, shoulders shaking, with a concerned Cyclonus talking low in his audial. Rodimus’s uneven ventilations are loud in the sudden silence.
It’s broken by Swerve abruptly yelling, “ Did I shoot God in the head and forget about it?”
***
“So,” Rodimus begins, several days later, “I’ve gathered you all here, because Ultra Magnus informs me that spamming the group chat with, ‘WHO’S UP FOR A HEIST??’ doesn’t technically qualify as a ‘briefing’.”
“Speak for yourself, big guy!” Anode calls from where she and Lug are perched atop a nearby shuttle.
They’re crowded in close, all of them - the survivors of the quest for the Knights of Cybertron, now reassembled in this nondescript spacedock, waiting on tenterhooks. Waiting for Rodimus to say the word, and they’ll follow. Rodimus can feel light welling up in his optics as he looks out over them. He clears his ventilator, choking the feeling down, and smiles.
“Like the energy!” he says, shooting a quick fingergun at Anode. “For those who need a little more, though: when we all recovered our memories of Rung , I imagine most of you thought, as I did, that the visions of him would stop. That we could…” His voice thickens. “Mourn him, and remember him, and move on. But instead…”
Still, he hasn’t slept.
His ghosts - because that’s the best he can think of to call them - have only increased their haunting. They walk during the day, now, appearing in the corner of his optic and making him jump a mile; they’ve become more insistent at night, grabbing at him and shaking him. Cryptic whispers have been turning into accusations, pleas, cries of Rodimus’s name. And in the midst of it all is Rung, begging with his optics, trying desperately to make himself understood.
“Instead, it’s just intensified. And Perceptor here has used his magic box -”
“Rodimus, I am begging you,” Perceptor says wearily.
“- his magic box to see what’s going on, aaaaaand -”
Rodimus grins for real, savouring the moment.
“These visitations? They’re real. ”
“What, like - another alternate universe?” That’s Rewind, of course it is, looking shaken where he’s standing in the circle of his husband’s arm.
“Kiiiiind of, but not an alternate Rung. Our Rung.” Their everyone-else too, as a matter of fact, but Rodimus isn’t about to get into that right now. “Our Rung, contacting us from a real dimension beyond death.”
The pandemonium that follows is worth every second he’s spent leading up to this.
“Are you saying,” Swerve gasps once things have died down enough to make out individual voices, “are you actually saying - ”
“The Afterspark is real,” Cyclonus cuts in. The faint upwards lilt barely makes it a question, but for Cyclonus, that’s a level of uncertainty that would set anyone else’s voice trembling.
“Call it what you will.” Rodimus waves a hand, as if he didn’t have exactly the same reaction to what Perceptor told him. “It’s real - and it’s in trouble. It’s - distorting. The boundary between there and here is getting thin, which accounts for the visions we’ve all been having. And Percy thinks Rung may be the reason why.”
Perceptor nods. “It’s true. Whether it’s the curious concentration of power around Rung as the generator of the Matrixes, or the sheer chrono-spatial distortion of -”
“ Percy.”
The scientist makes a face, as if he’s forcing himself to drink spoiled energon. “In layman’s terms… you cannot trap Primus in one dimension. Even the - and I remind you that this is still unproven - afterlife. ”
“And you know what that means.” Rodimus strikes a pose. “Let’s go to the Underworld and steal God!”