Chapter Text
No mech ever valiantly withstood torture with little more than the gumption and heroic drive in their sorry sparks— save for rare scenarios in which the Autobots could successfully extract them from their prisons a day or so after their arrival. Life wasn’t like the movies. Wheeljack knew that from experience; this wasn’t exactly his first rodeo dealing with Decepticon interrogators.
Pit, he’d been tortured in this exact room at least three times before— which really ticked Wheeljack off, if he was being honest. He didn’t want to visit Commander Starscream at roughly the same rate as his own Wreckers… the ugly fragger just kept finding him! It defied logic.
That wasn’t the point: Wheeljack’s point was that he knew he stood no chance of concealing what little intel he did have from the Decepticons. It wasn’t a matter of “if” but “when,” because everyone broke with time. Just like any other machine, Cybertronians had hardline physical limitations which could not be pushed up against without risking total and irreversible systems failure.
Wheeljack only bothered to resist because there was very little in his life that could get worse at this point, and he was just spiteful enough to hope that he could make Starscream suffer along with him— regardless of who was meant to be torturing who.
“I wasn’t as surprised to dig you up as I should have been. It’s always you, isn’t it, Wheeljack? You have remarkable luck. Or perhaps it’s my misfortune— I’m sick and tired of seeing your rusting mug in my inquisition chamber. The only logical conclusion to draw is that Primus hates you, personally.” Starscream snarks, as he inspects his toolkit. He runs a claw along one of the blades of the sharp metal instruments at his disposal. “Or perhaps the issue lies with your ‘team.’ It’s extremely easy to capture a mech on his own— and worst of all, I can’t even ransom you off… because they wouldn’t want you back!”
Wheeljack rolls his optics. Did Starscream seriously think that he cared about what he had to say about Autobot team dynamics, of all things? The Decepticon’s opinion was less than worthless by virtue of being a Decepticon, and Wheeljack’s ego was inflated enough to take the absolutely infinitesimal blow that had been.
“I don’t believe in Primus, and I don’t have a team, either.” Wheeljack grins, though he doesn’t feel much more than dread, right now. “This torture business really wouldn’t be so bad, if I didn’t have to talk to you the whole time. I mean, Pit, you’re annoying. I might be able to offline my optics and enjoy it a little… if your screechy voice wasn’t in my audials the whole time reminding me I’m being eviscerated by a diseased scraplet on stilts.”
Starscream plunges the scalpel straight through the softer plating at Wheeljack’s collar that connects his neck-cabling to his chassis’s thicker armor.
“Charming. You’re really not half as funny as you think you are. I don’t appreciate you lying this early into the interrogation, you know… these questions are meant to be soft. If you ‘don’t have a team,’ I wonder what you think this is meant to be.” Starscream taps the Autobot insignia on Wheeljack’s chassis.
Wheeljack grits his dentae.
“I’m a very loyal independent c—” Wheeljack’s vocalizer cuts out, with a high-pitched hiss when Starscream tears the blade out of his chassis. “—independent… contractor. I don’t take open commissions from just anyone, now, so don’t get any funny ideas.”
Starscream smiles, and wipes the blade on the back of his wrist-plating. Wheeljack decides that this is about the point where he’s lost any leverage he had over the inquisitor. Riling the mech up was easy enough, but it wasn’t a viable strategy when he couldn’t talk.
Wheeljack was an expert at this, after all. If you wanted to last longer than a few megacycles into an inquisition, you had to numb your senses and give yourself something to ground your processor in. Outlasting Starscream’s torture (for the solar cycle, at least) would piss him off far more than a few snide jokes ever could.
Wheeljack checks out, mentally. Starscream bashes him around, howls at him to respond, hisses and screams and stabs him (several times)— but Wheeljack doesn’t speak. He doesn’t let himself laugh at how stupid Starscream looks, because that would only distract him. He tries his best not to cry.
In doing so, Wheeljack’s bought himself the ability to think, or rather, to have enough mental quiet to think. It’s done very little at all to numb the pain. Wheeljack cuts his processor’s access to his medical HUD. His digits thrum with static, as battle protocols activate again and again — begging him to take action, to fight back.
There wasn’t anything he could do. In another corner of his processor, much older mechanisms fire up with a vengeance: urging him to take another course of action.
[ CENTRAL HEATING SYSTEM DETECTED: Upper half of rightmost wall. Systems access facing north. Possible Obstruction: wall paneling? Common HEATING COIL types utilized in model: GAMMA 856B, SPTSX 009, 434 TANGO. Action: is suggested.]
Wheeljack shakes his helm, frustrated. When was it going to give up? Wheeljack hadn’t manually constructed a gun in centuries, and he wasn’t going to start again while strung up on a Decepticon warship.
Starscream takes Wheeljack’s sudden reaction as a sign that he was breaking, and preens proudly. Unfortunately, the flight commander’s burgeoning excitement doesn’t ‘distract’ so much as it encourages him. He resumes attempting to pry the gauntlets right off of Wheeljack’s frame less than a klik later.
He can’t stop screaming. He stops trying— it’s taking up too much mental energy, energy that he needs to maintain his state of mental quiet. Wheeljack dims the input of his audials and reassures himself that the retreat into familiar protocols doesn’t have to mean anything.
It’s just a change in tactics to keep himself alive longer. His optics shift around the room, assessing for resources that might be concealed within. He looks up at the magnetic stasis cuffs, almost completely foreign technology to him, and begins to piece together certainties and uncertainties in his helm in a chaotic jumble as Starscream continues to rage like an acid storm somewhere in the back of his processor.
Wheeljack tells himself that he is not his frame. He doesn’t need to worry about what’s happening outside; it doesn’t matter.
If he took out the energy coil and some [indeterminable] amount of Energon from the fuel cell in the chamber of the heating unit, and he also had access to the plexiglass sheet out of the back of the Decepticon monitor that controlled the stasis cuffs— he had everything to power a laser-actuating gun, be it a basic pistol or even something with as much kick as a fusion cannon. (Depending on the leeway he could get… well. Wheeljack would push his luck, if he could. ‘Go big or go home’ may be a human saying, but it would have been the official slogan of the Wreckers if they’d known it then.)
It’d be very dependent on the type of energy coil concealed within, as well as the fuel capacity he could scrape up. Even then: a battery wasn’t a gun itself. There were so many more pieces— the slide, the magazine, the sight, the barrel and trigger of the gun, the mechanisms responsible for controlling the output of the battery. Not that it would be a problem— if his servos were free — because if you knew how to craft the individual mechanisms of a gun, you could build a gun out of anything.
Anything, anywhere. Seaspray used to say that you could send Wheeljack into any bar on Cybertron with little more than a welder, a spool of copper thread, and an empty shotglass, and he’d have an absolute monstrosity of a gun at servo within thirty cycles. (Breakdown often shouted back that it wasn’t very nice to call Bulkhead a monstrosity, prompting a minor brawl, if he was present.)
Wheeljack’s response was always the same: “I’d be done with the Primus-forsaken thing quicker if you stopped sending me in with a shotglass… and if any one of you could do a decent job at distracting the barkeep!”
Seaspray wasn’t around to bet on Wheeljack’s odds now… and he was no inventor. Pit— he was hardly even a Wrecker. Wheeljack’s processor’s gotten away from him, now, and he’s far too certain of a plan he’ll never even have a shot at taking. It was in his nature to call bad bets.
Wheeljack catches himself wriggling around in his restraints, trying to gauge by his shifting weight whether or not his stasis cuffs are being held together by regular model A5B bearings or by some kind of magnetic clasp— and wouldn’t that make for an absolute wonder of a cannon, with how it’d kick up the heating coil’s power… even if he’d have to reinforce the barrel four times over to withstand it — when Starscream laughs at him.
Wheeljack’s frame forces him back into the present, sensory-nets screaming at him to stop chasing after nothing. These comet-tails of thought led nowhere. He was dying— he had to be, it’d never been quite so bad— and the worst part is that he didn’t even know what was wrong. The instrument was buried deep in his chassis, bizarrely hot, like Starscream had jammed some kind of fragged up cauterizer into his mesh. The smell of it was the worst part.
Wheeljack swears that he wouldn’t purge his tanks. He wanted the high ground (still), he wanted to win so badly it stung fiercer than the torture ever could. Wheelajck forces himself to sneer at Starscream, to make it obvious just how little he respected this charade of intimidation.
“I bet… I could still beat you in a fight. One-on-one, even as… torn up as I am.” Wheeljack taunts, aimlessly. He decides the stasis cuffs must be held together with magnetic clasps.
“Then, it’s a shame we’ll never know… not that you have the shanix to bet.” Starscream twists the instrument, tearing at Wheeljack’s internals in the process. Energon pools in his mouth and runs down his face, as his fuel-lines back up and runs the wrong way, scattering like confused soldiers when the front line breaks and all goes to slag. “I have nothing to prove, unlike you. Just give it up. Do you think your self-imposed suffering makes you look tough, Wheeljack? Do you think it makes you any more of a mech? It doesn’t. You look old, and pathetic.”
Wheeljack purges. Starscream steps back, suddenly squeamish. What a joke.
“You’re going to offline him before he makes himself useful, if you keep at it.” A familiar voice drawls, making his disgust clear. “I don’t think Megatron would be pleased to hear you broke our only hostage for little more than your own gratification, after I gave you my professional opinion on the matter. You’ll have another shot at him, tomorrow… and the day after that, and the day after that, if it comes to it. Which I doubt.”
Wheeljack hadn’t even known that Knock Out was in the room— the mech was leaning against the far wall, partially obscured in shadow. Perhaps the doctor had stepped in while he was hallucinating about plexiglass pressure tolerances , of all things.
Starscream scowls.
“Fine.”
Knock Out approaches, balancing a steel tray with one servo.
“... and if you would be so kind as to return my tools, I would appreciate it.” Knock Out yanks the welder out of Starscream’s hand, when offered, and slams it onto the tray with excess force. “Thank you.”
Starscream slinks away without another word. Wheeljack stares blankly at the wall for a few moments, unsure of what to say.
“It’s like he doesn’t even realize that I have well over three hundred mechs to attend to on this ship!” Knock Out grouses, to break the silence. He begins dabbing at the purged energon on Wheeljack’s chassis, unwilling to begin work until he was somewhat clean. “What am I meant to do if any one of them gets blown up, and now I don’t even have a decent welder! Tell them: ‘ oh, I’m terribly sorry, I can’t help you… but at least as you lie here dying, you can take solace in the fact that the Flight Commander had his chance at playing around with some other mech’s internals like fragging thermal paste.’”
Wheeljack laughs, unable to contain his disbelief— what kind of mech complains to his own prisoner of war? A sharp, stabbing pain shudders its way through his frame, at the same time.
“Don’t laugh!” Knock Out snaps, beginning to methodically organize his tools in preparation for surgery.
“You never carry less than three of a given tool, Doc. Just… use the ones you don’t like as much. I won’t even mention that the welder’s not gold-plated.”
The medic selects one of the less-dented scalpels on his tray and begins to cut away at Wheeljack’s damaged plating, his irritation only seeming to grow fiercer.
“You’re thinking of… a long time before, when I still sourced my own materials. This is it, I’m afraid.” Knock Out responds, with a defeated sigh.
Wheeljack hadn’t spoken to Knock Out in well over a century, but that was an exception to the rule. He tried not to live in anyone’s subspace, so to speak, but he’d encountered the two of them more often than most other mechs. Breakdown had been a Wrecker, once, and after everyone split— Wheeljack, Knock Out, and Breakdown were the only three to refuse to rejoin the war effort formally. There were only so many rest stops in the galaxy, so it wasn’t uncommon for the three of them to run into each other and spend a night running up a bar tab and telling bawdy and wildly exaggerated war stories.
Why they’d gone and settled for the Decepticons… well, Wheeljack couldn’t claim to understand that. He supposed the galaxy was getting smaller; it wasn’t as easy to stay alive out there as it had been a few millennia ago. ( Wheeljack had noticed.)
“The good old days,” Wheeljack mutters, a small smile pulling at his face, though it hurt to hold it there.
Knock Out flinches, as if he’d been slapped.
Wheeljack doesn’t push any further. Regardless of what most others thought: he was used to being quiet out in space, and knew if he said the wrong thing he might shatter the doctor’s nerves. He’d wanted to wreck Starscream— send him into a frenzy— but for now, Knock Out was helping him.
… if only so that Starscream could torture him again. That was little to be grateful for, if Wheeljack thought too hard about it. He didn’t want to think about it. He was hurt, and mostly all he wanted was to feel sorry for himself.
“You were in your ship, when we found you.” Knock Out says, finally. His tone is accusatory.
“It’s not like that,” Wheeljack groans. “It really wasn’t. We’d all had orders to scatter— and I don’t know where he is, if that’s what you’re pushing for.”
Knock Out scrapes away at the inside of Wheeljack’s chassis, with his scalpel, peeling away scrapped internals and dropping the dead matter in a callously smoldering pile to the side. Wheeljack grits his dentae, ventilations coming out shallow, until the medic is finally finished.
He rinses off his servos before preparing to continue, never one to slack on hygiene protocol.
“You weren’t going to follow orders, though. You were going to leave, and never come back.” Knock Out shakes his helm, like Wheeljack’s disappointed him, somehow. “You’ll be glad someday that you didn’t succeed. Glad you weren’t given the chance. At least you’ll get to die honest.”
“You’re glitched in the processor, if you think that’s actually true!”
“I’m the last sane mech alive, it seems, which is a terrible shame for the rest of the world— as I am not a particularly good one. You can’t imagine how it would feel, to learn that he had died decacycles after the fact, because you were off on your own doing Primus knows what. To know that he might have lived, if you’d been there, if you’d defended him. Aren’t Wreckers supposed to stick together? Are you defective or something, after all these years? You’d regret it, like every other screw-up in your long slapstick joke of a life, Wheeljack.”
It clicks.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
Knock Out stops taking him apart, and finally begins to put him back together again. If Wheeljack didn’t know the other mech, he’d accuse him of being unnecessarily cruel— but that wasn’t the kind of doctor Knock Out was. It was an extension of his own pride, to do his job precisely the way it was meant to be done.
“I know where he is,” Wheeljack admits, very quietly. “That’s why I need you to botch the job, Knock Out. I don’t want to go out, having given away the last living Wrecker in the galaxy. If I couldn’t save any of the rest of ‘em, maybe this is the best I can hope for. Not killing him. I’ll break, eventually, and then I'd die either way.”
Silence.
“I have orders to follow, and I’m not going to risk my mesh for someone I barely know.” Knock Out follows this statement up with a wink, to Wheeljack’s immediate consternation. “I’m actually sort of disappointed. I’d heard that you were the kind of mech that could build a way out of anything, and yet… here you are. Surrounded by technology, and still wasting away in your refuse. Like a sick mechanimal.”
“It’s a bit hard to build much of anything with my servos tied, genius. ” Wheeljack snaps back, nerves raw.
Knock Out flicks on his crumpled welder and begins closing the open wounds littered across Wheeljack’s frame, moving far more quickly than he had been before— almost rushed. He hums a short tune to himself.
“Oh, I didn’t mean today. I meant… for the last thousand stellar cycles. What have you honestly made since the Wreckers split? A new model of the same cheap, low-quality explosives every hundred stellar cycles ? Don’t even get me started on that hideous ship of yours.”
“Watch it!” Wheeljack hisses. “There’s nothing wrong with The Jackhammer. He’s a work of art, and you’d do well to be nice to him.”
“He’s a POS, Wheeljack. He’s tiny, he’s cramped, his artillery is literally archaic. You r hideous, borderline unlivable hovel of a ship emits actual clouds of dust when it takes off, because it’s that tired and old. ‘ The Jackhammer’ is the Cybertronian equivalent of an ancient double-wide trailer. Not only that , but it simultaneously possesses all the verve and personality of the average half-blind, mothball-eaten, TV dinner consuming, shit-stained xenophobe retiree that inhabits the average double-wide.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Wheeljack promises.
“With what? Your awful taste?”” Knock Out scoffs. “My point is: the Wheeljack I knew could build the Nemesis four times over, in half the time it took us, with garbage off the side of the road. The Jackhammer’s complete and undeniable failure isn’t for lack of skill— unless you’ve been lobotomized recently. It’s fear. You’ve given up on your team, on yourself… and even on your craft. It’s pathetic.”
“I’m the same mech I always was! You don’t know me.”
Knock Out smiles. A challenge glitters, in his optics. He wipes the spilled energon off of Wheeljack and tosses aside the rag with a haughty sigh.
“Please. I know everything about you, Wheeljack. You’re me… if I was ugly, socially awkward, and a moron.” Knock Out turns, a practiced move. He can’t stop himself from smiling.
“Frag you, Knock Out!” Wheeljack calls back, spark spinning fast in its chamber.
Something was changing. He could feel it, even if he didn’t know what it was. Knock Out turns back to face him and hurls the wrench in his servos as hard as he can a t Wheeljack. It thwacks heavily against still-hot and bruised plating, and he nearly kicks it away in shock— before remembering himself.
Wheeljack fumbles, clumsily pinning the wrench up between the joint that connected his left leg to his hip-plating, keeping his knee pinned to his chassis to conceal and secure the weapon to him . No. This couldn’t… could it be?
Knock Out sets down his silver tray of medical instruments atop the oversized monitor to the side of the room. He doesn’t look at Wheeljack, or say another word. As he prepares to leave, the medic hesitates at the door.
<< Will it be enough? >>
The comm message echoes down a line so old Wheeljack hadn’t thought it was still active.
<< It’ll have to be. Where are you going? >>
Knock Out disappears down the darkened hallway. His pedesteps echo.
<< To incite a riot. Hopefully, I’ll buy you a couple more cycles to work. Soundwave can only watch so many lines at once. >> A pause. << I’m not risking my mesh for you to throw yet another ‘second’ chance away— I’ll gut you and sell you for parts , if you do. He’s too good for you. >>
Wheeljack smiles.
In order to get ahold of the wrench, he has to swing his right leg up and over his own gauntlet, in order to get enough momentum and tilt to get the wrench to slide down his chassis and into his mouth. He bites down, hard.
That was a stupid idea. Wheeljack couldn’t believe it actually worked— maybe his luck wasn’t as bad as everyone said it was. He leans hard, to the left, having to nearly crush his wrist joint out of its socket in order to get at the stasis cuffs keeping him hanging from the ceiling.
It takes him less than sixty kliks to administer percussive maintenance on the stasis cuff. (That is, to say that he whacked its battery with the wrench repeatedly until it lost power and cracked open.) It wasn’t his most dignified escape, but it was swift— and that’s what he needed.
Wheeljack’s spark is still whirring in his chassis, simultaneously frenetic and weak. He tries to forget it all— to tell himself he is the same mech he always was, but…
Everything Wheeljack assembled broke down and died spectacularly. It didn’t matter if it took decacycles, or even stellar cycles— this was an inalienable fact of life. (It even applied to the Wreckers. Pit, it especially applied to the Wreckers.) Somehow, some way, the mechanics would outright fail… often in ways that were so unbelievably improbable that no one believed it. Wheeljack was a genius that couldn’t do even the simplest of tasks correctly, no matter what happened.
He was bad luck.
A loud crash sounds outside. A high performance model’s engine roars with delight.
Wheeljack kicks himself. He lets go— allows the protocols to chug along steadily in his processor, as he rushes to the monitor and tears the screen straight off of it with a victorious hiss. It comes off in one clean sheet under his careful, precise servos. Wheeljack grabs the wrench and begins to unbolt plating right out of the wall of the ship… he’d need plenty of raw material in order to shape out the barrel and stock, if he couldn’t find suitable plumbing in the walls.
The heating unit is a beauty to look at— massive, even if it couldn’t possibly be the main temperature controlling unit for the ship. Perhaps it belonged to the floor.
Yes, yes, yes! Wheeljack catches himself humming. He begins to unfasten the casing of the unit, saving the bolts for his cannon. (For the bolt action, and the fasteners that’d control how much of the battery was expended at once.)
Oh, he was going to be beautiful. Still, Wheeljack feels a small pang of sorrow as he removes the energy coil (still hot) from its rightful home at the center of the unit.
“... someday you will live as yourself again, gentle spark. ” He promises the coil, even as he begins to heat the monitor’s screen to bend it into a chamber for the gun. “ You were forged for kindness. You were forged to make someone’s home warm. You were forged to be loved, not feared.”
He has to carve the backing for the coil to sit in manually with Knock Out’s scalpel. It was a slow process, as it needed to match the custom size of the glass chamber within a fine set of tolerances.
“Today, though… you will kill.” Wheeljack nods, solemnly, as he locks the chamber into place. “You will excel, not in spite of your goodness, but because of it.”
Wheeljack hated the Primus narrative: the stupid idea that inventing was like ‘ playing Prime’ … for one, it was self-aggrandizing and pretentious. Inventions were only your creations in the simplest sense. You assembled them— but they were parts, first, and before they were parts they were steel. No mech created matter, no mech owned the universe. Steel lived.
If you were any good at all, you had to respect that. You had to have some core awareness of the life in your materials, in order to understand that you needed to seduce them to your side. You had to yield to them if you were ever going to persuade them (with forge and knife and curse-laden prayers that this'll work ) to let you steal them away from their true lives.
Schematics— Wheeljack supposed he could take credit for those. It was only math, only thought and datafilm beneath his digits. He did not have time for schematics, but he was decent enough at mental math for this to not provoke concern, save for in the back of his processor.
The stock and the trigger are easy work, though the wreck Starscream had made of the welder gives Wheeljack undue trouble. His digits are scorched black, but it’s no worse than any of the rest of him… and he knew he only had so many cycles left.
Finally, he begins to build the main bulk of the cannon, to protect its battery and operate the release function that he had hastily wired to the trigger. Wheeljack tears another panel from the wall, to reveal a section of PVC piping— as he’d hoped.
He takes the opportunity to build in a little surprise for later. Nothing special— it was only a matter of setting the gun’s outer chamber on hinges, so that he could conceal simple mechanisms within.
He tears up the now-stained neoprene tarp that Knock Out kept with his medical supplies for the sake of cleaning up spilled energon, swiftly welding the material to the innermost tubing of the gun and tucking it neatly inside before finishing up the rest of the structure.
The battery, the slide, the magazine, the sight, the barrel, the trigger, the mechanisms responsible for controlling the output of the battery… and the ‘surprise.’ Wheeljack cuts up another strip of neoprene tarp, folding it over itself four times over, to make a strap to carry the thing with.
It was going to hurt like a glitch to haul around— he’d had to scale it up a touch bigger than he’d expected, on account of the size of the coil. Wheeljack’s preferences did run a bit to the side of ‘siege weaponry’ than it did ‘itty-bitty pistol’ but… this was something else. He whistles, and heaves the strap over his pauldrons, lifting the gun with momentous effort.
“Oh, you’ll do just fine. Just fine.” Wheeljack bends down, once, to pick up Knock Out’s scalpel. His spark does a nervous flip in its casing.
In a moment of fanciful, foolish nostalgia— he carves a numerical symbol into the right side of the gun, followed by the digits ‘28.’ Wheeljack’s still finishing the final curve of the heart engraving when he hears the distinctive sound of soldiers rushing down the narrow hallway outside. He drops the scalpel, which clatters to the ground with a tinny shriek.
“Well,” He pats the side of the cannon, affectionately. “You’ll get your name soon, I imagine. An invention’s never complete without a proper story to accompany it.”
The doors slide open, and Wheeljack pulls the trigger. The blast is stronger than calculated, strong enough that the kickback of it knocks Wheeljack so far off his pedes that his frame collides with one of the walls of the interrogation room.
Blinding light fills the room, and a heat like the surface of a star. He smells the distinct acrid tang of burning mesh in the air, as the Vehicons unfortunate enough to get in his way scream in agony.
Those magnets… added more of a kick than he had anticipated. Or was it the coil? It had to be— he’d done the math, for the magnets!
It’s hard even to get his bearings for a moment, though Wheeljack is thankfully faring better than his opponents. He finds that he’s lying on the ground in a crumpled heap. The back of his helm is weeping small amounts of energon, from where it struck the wall. He looks down at #28, and grins.
“You’re even better than I thought you would be.” He tells the gun. “Look at that. Your big, stupid spark came in handy!”
Referring, of course, to the power coil. Like a newborn fawn, Wheeljack stumbles to his pedes, cannon listing to the side and nearly taking him out with it. The Vehicons are still screaming and rolling on the ground, attempting to put out the flames consuming their bodies— Wheeljack breaks out into a dead sprint, to try to outpace it all.
He dashes out into the corridor, ducking under one of the incoming Vehicons and smashing the broadside of the gun into the other. He keeps pushing, despite the screaming pain in his chassis telling him to stop— until he reaches the end of a long corridor.
The Nemesis’s design schematics (if the ship was still the same as it had been since the last time he stole them) suggested that there was about a 50% chance that this was an outer edge of the hull.
Wheeljack scrabbles at the wall to brace himself for impact, and blows a giant hole in the exterior of the ship. The kickback is more manageable this time, with something to keep him balanced, but it’s still disconcerting. He supposes that’s what the revision process was for.
Alarms start blaring and red lights flash, leaving discordant streaks in his vision like a meteor shower, as the air pressure in the ship begins to change. Wheeljack doesn’t let himself stop to think; more Decepticons would be upon him, and soon. He adjusts the barrel so that the sight is pointing directly away from him and slightly upward, toward the ceiling… and fires, the kickback of the cannon knocking him straight out of the hole he’d blown in the Nemesis and through the cloudline.
This was a stupid, stupid plan. Wheeljack stares up at the inappropriately beautiful blue sky in mute terror as he plummets rapidly toward the ground, clutching desperately at the gun.
Now was a time for prayers. Wheeljack didn’t know any. He knew— he’d not accounted for the power of the heating coil, when he came up with this plan. It likely would’ve been more convenient and safe if he could better control the power of the cannon’s output, but that would take some tricky mechanical work that you can’t slap together in fifteen cycles.
Wheeljack steadies his servos, and fires the gun again. He was still falling, but frag it if he wasn’t going to go out in style. His spiral downward had begun to level out into a more relaxed arc. The gun had knocked him far enough off course that he was traveling further to the west than he was actually falling.
Landing was going to hurt like a glitch, even if all went as planned and Wheeljack didn’t turn himself into a Wheeljack-shaped skid mark in the middle of the desert. He turns around to watch the steady approach of the flat, sandy ground typical in a dive like Nevada. He remembers that he despises Nevada.
Wheeljack knew that one was supposed to open a parachute at an altitude of 5,000 feet, which would be helpful information to know if he knew what 5,000 feet looked like based off of visual input alone… or if he had a parachute.
Frag this. Wheeljack reminds himself, sternly, that this wasn’t his first time jumping out of a warship, so he’d better act like the professional he is, for Primus’s sake! Wheeljack waits a moment longer to engage the slide on the cannon, judging distance by optic. The outer plates of the barrel crack open and reveal a long, flat set of wings. Lightly constructed, and cheaply, too.
“… always wanted to try this out. It looks like so much fun, when the humans do it,” Wheeljack tells #28, cheerfully, even as he fights the urge to purge once again.
His descent was slowing, as the neoprene tarp wings began to fill with air and generate a considerable amount of drag on his plummeting frame. Unfortunately for Wheeljack, he had been going extremely fast before this point, so even “slowed” descent felt a lot like being a cube of high grade pitched toward the ground by a very angry and exceedingly drunk god.
Wheeljack begins to shout and brace for impact shortly before it happens, as it really starts to set in that he’s an unforgivable idiot— in one insane moment, right before impact, he attempts to wrap his frame around the gun to protect it, unsure of why or how it had become so important.
Of course, his attempt fails, as the wings of his contraption were designed to lie one way (flat), and did not appreciate Wheeljack’s efforts to flip the gun over. He barrels into the nearest sand-dune, landing atop the cannon so heavily that a loud metallic shriek echoes throughout the desert.
Wheeljack’s audials ring, his frame jerks on impact— and then, worst of all, the battery of the gun catches fire while he’s still lying on top of it.
Wheeljack rolls on instinct, dousing the flames crawling down his frame. His ventilations come out in panicked bursts as he begins to shovel sand over the gun, to put out the fire.
“Please… please… ” Wheeljack begs, as he digs through the smoldering remains of the gun, molten steel scorching his servos and gauntlets as the search stretches for precious kliks.
He sweeps away broken plexiglass from the core of the battery and plucks the red-hot energy coil out of the wreckage. Intact.
Wheeljack drops the coil, embarrassed to find that he’s crying in earnest, now. He wipes away the coolant streaking his face and stands, though his internal HUD severely advises against it. #28’s heating coil is tucked neatly away into his subspace.
He figures out swiftly that he isn’t able to transform on account of his frame’s scrapped plating, but luckily… that wasn’t a first for Wheeljack, either. He found that there were extremely few scenarios he hadn’t dealt with once or twice, by now— novelty died, as you got older. Particularly with the kind of life Wheeljack lived.
He pushes his crushed plating back into place, meticulously, all-too-aware of the fact that the ‘Cons would be after him the second they sealed the breach in the ship. His digits leave ugly dents in his mesh, from how hard he has to push… but after all that’s happened today, Wheeljack can’t feel much of anything. He pushes it down. He tells himself it’s okay, because there were about a thousand worse problems facing them than a little pain.
(… and another scrapped invention.) With a rattling crash, Wheeljack transforms into his alt and speeds off through the desert. He didn’t know where he was right now, but he’d figure it out soon enough— Wheeljack’s best guess was that he was somewhere outside Jasper, but not across state lines.
******
A megacycle later, the Decepticons catch up. Wheeljack’s surprised it took them so long, if he’s being entirely honest. He’s… doubly surprised, when he clocks the engine as one belonging to a car, instead of a jet.
That made this easier. Wheeljack knew he couldn’t outpace a jet— but a Vehicon was nothing. He shifts gears, ignoring the tinny rattle in his engine. If he could get out of this, he’d handle it afterward, like always. Wreckers didn’t worry about problems that weren’t actually standing in front of them; they handled what needed to be done as it came to them, and cleaned up the mess after the fact.
Unfortunately, he can’t seem to lose the car, even pushing well over a hundred on the empty desert road. Wheeljack groans, and pushes down on the accelerator until the rattle turns into something more akin to a hailstorm. He tells himself he isn’t worried, though he’s painfully aware of the fact that he’s unarmed.
He catches a flash of red in his rearview mirror, and nearly screeches to a halt. Why on Cybertron would Knock Out help him escape, only to try to run him down less than two megacycles later? It didn’t make any sense! Yet, the Decepticon didn’t send any further messages and continued to advance steadily, speedometer clocking in well over one hundred and thirty miles per hour.
Wheeljack knew he couldn’t match Knock Out’s speed— not for any significant amount of time. His only chance would lie in pulling off some kind of cheap trick. (Not that he could think of one, right now.) Wheeljack pushes harder, vents roaring, a sharp whine of (he would not call it fear) emitting from his engine.
Knock Out cruises up behind him, keeping pace like it’s nothing. Like it’s boring him.
“I can hear your scrapped engine rattling all the way back here, Autobot.” Knock Out laughs. “You might as well turn around now, instead of forcing me to run you off the road for no good reason. We already know how it’s going to end.”
“You just—” Wheeljack’s vocalizer fritzes, and a plume of blake smoke curls its way through the dented seams of his hood. “— want to avoid scratchin’ your paint.”
Knock Out accelerates, suddenly, smashing his bumper into Wheeljack’s left car door and nearly causing him to spin out.
<< You have to let me win. Trust me. >>
Wheeljack doesn’t respond to the comm. He steps on the gas, hauling as much aft as he can in his given state. Knock Out falls behind, but only by a few yards. He’s taking his time— pacing himself, like he could do this all day.
Fragging Velocitronians. Wheeljack wouldn’t have stood a chance, even if he was a real high-performance racer.
<< Or… I suppose you could fight back with all the remaining life left in your puny frame, but that’s only going to piss me off. >> Knock Out amends his statement, before giving chase in earnest.
They’re approaching a curve in the road, a sharp one at that, which was really starting to freak Wheeljack out. He knew he wasn’t the most nimble of mechs, even notwithstanding his injuries. There was a non-zero chance that he was going to crash into the guardrails and break his spinal strut if he didn’t slow down.
(Yet… if he slowed down, even for a moment, Knock Out would catch him.)
Wheeljack guns it, not sparing a moment for panic as he steadies his resolve. At the last moment he transforms back into root mode and throws himself clumsily around the corner, performing a neat flip in the process, joints creaking and snapping painfully as he cracks his frame against the pavement. He’ll have scrapes down his gauntlets for days, but anything was better than totaling.
Within the span of a klik, Wheeljack shifts back into his alt and slams on the accelerator, screeching down the new stretch of winding road. Knock Out was still hot on his tail, having executed the turn perfectly.
Wheeljack was losing ground. No matter how hard he pushed his frame, the speedometer was clicking slowly down, and the flash of red in his rearview mirrors was growing.
Frag this. Wheeljack braces for impact moments before Knock Out rams into his passenger side, again, this time driving him all the way into the guardrail and pinning him there. Steel shrieks upon steel as Wheeljack’s frame buckles under the pressure, but he keeps accelerating, lagging desperately down the dusty road.
“PARK!” Knock Out roars, sounding genuinely furious for the first time in several millennia. Wheeljack rolls to a stop, partially in acquiescence, partially because his frame was giving out.
Knock Out transforms and storms over to Wheeljack, energon prod twirling aimlessly in his servos.
“Transform. Now . Are we fighting? Are you giving up?” He snaps, impatiently. “Are you a Wrecker, or are you a coward?”
Wheeljack transforms and lunges clumsily at the racer. He didn’t have a weapon, but he still had his fists. That… had to count for something.
Knock Out slams the energon prod into Wheeljack’s neck-cabling, though he doesn’t judge it necessary to activate the electric current. (Thank Primus.) He uses the metal prongs to pin Wheeljack flat to the ground and steps on his chassis, as if to ensure he won’t run away.
The medic then proceeds to wrench back Wheeljack’s left gauntlet as hard as he can, like he’s trying to tear it off, and slams it into the ground repeatedly. Wheeljack thrashes around, but there isn’t much he can do but watch.
What was going on?
After reducing his wrist joint to literal scrap, Knock Out smiles, pleased, and peels open the crumpled plating with a sharp claw, fishing out a tiny microchip.
Knock Out crushes the mechanical piece into little bits of mechanical dust under sharp claws, and that seems to be the end of it.
“You can get up, now.” He steps back, folding his servos in front of himself politely. “For someone who prides himself on his independence and fighting spirit… you act an awful lot like a helpless sparkling.”
Wheeljack scowls.
“Frag off.” He has to hold onto the traffic barrier to get up, which is somewhat humiliating. “What was that? Why did you kick the scrap out of me, if you just wanted to take that thing out?”
“... or a damsel… Primus save your sorry spark. Get it together, and walk. That’s not going to fool them for long.” Knock Out sneers, as he hooks a leg over the guardrail and sets out into the open desert. Wheeljack has to admit that it makes sense— it’d be slower going through the desert on account of their negligible off-roading capabilities, but they’d have better cover.
The ‘Cons would be watching the roads.
“Hold on, do you know where we are?” Wheeljack asks, hoping that Knock Out might have the coordinates he bridged in with. He’d been intending to check for himself when he reached the first town, but there was almost nothing around them.
Knock Out sends the coordinates to him in a neat datapacket. They were still in Nevada— but further East, far from Jasper. Wheeljack consults a map through his HUD, using his internal compass to gauge the direction that they were walking in. He holds up a servo to stop Knock Out.
“We need to go the other way. Bulk’s headed for northern Colorado.” Wheeljack sighs. “Though, I doubt he will be for long. It’s already been a full solar cycle, and the mech can only wait so long once he gets there. I’ll be able to track him down once we get to the rendezvous, either way.”
Knock Out doesn’t complain. They trek for a few cycles in silence, save for the sound of Wheeljack’s cracked vents wheezing. Finally, the medic sees fit to answer a few of Wheeljack’s questions.
“I installed the tracker when you arrived— it wasn’t anything fancy. Just enough to give them access to your location and some limited vitals, as well as a limited audio feed. Cheap thing wasn’t sophisticated enough to provide a proper visual, though, so I had some leeway with what I could do. The sounds they heard should’ve indicated a fight. They’ll come looking for us, soon, suspecting that the deactivation means I’ve either killed you… or ripped your arm off and continued the chase.” Knock Out explains, patiently.
“Are you sure you’re not bugged?”
Knock Out scoffs.
“I can run a simple self-diagnostic, for Primus’s sake. They’re going to become suspicious quickly, though. I had to beg them for the chance to attempt to recapture you, so that I could “redeem” myself for the horrible oversight that led to your escape.” Knock Out shakes his helm. “... if I’m not answering comms or returning to the ship, the facts are going to become self-explanatory soon enough.”
Wheeljack frowns.
“What’s your game plan, Knock Out? I don’t get why you’d switch sides while the Decepticons are winning… that’s not you. No offense.”
“No one’s winning the war, Wheeljack. Cybertron is gone, and Earth is well on its way. We’re all going to die, one way or the other, and— I’ve realized that I don’t want to spend my last decacycles alive on the Nemesis.” Knock Out laughs, bitterly. “They don’t treat me well, to put it neatly. If there’s good company to be found anywhere in the galaxy, I’ve found in the past that it’s usually with the Wreckers.”
Wheeljack doesn’t doubt Knock Out’s sincerity for a moment. He wasn’t much of a liar in the first place, and Wheeljack had seen firsthand what it was like. Everyone who wasn’t Megatron suffered— and Wheeljack wouldn’t want to work with Starscream, either, if he was a Decepticon. The mech had somehow become increasingly miserable and cruel over time. At least, during the beginning of the war, the Seeker had once possessed some sense of pride and style.
“The Wreckers don’t exist anymore, Knock Out. It’s just… me, Bulkhead, and the kid. Three mechs don’t make a squadron of mercenaries.”
“Well…” Knock Out ducks his helm. “Do four mechs stand a better chance?”
Wheeljack stops in his tracks.
“You don’t mean it,” He says, almost reflexively. “You can’t. You don’t even like to fight! When you traveled with us, before— you weren’t a Wrecker, even in the days when our numbers were far greater!”
Knock Out looks up at the sky. Night was beginning to fall. When the stars were out, Wheeljack could almost forget that they were on Earth; the night sky looked similar enough, on most planets— the stars were always the same, after all, part of the same universe, filtered through different atmospheres.
“I don’t have much of a choice anymore. I can fight with the ‘Cons, or I can fight with you. Either choice yields the same results, and I remember…. that things weren’t so bad, back then. Breakdown loved being a Wrecker— even after all this time, those were the happiest stellar cycles of our lives.”
Wheeljack feels a pang of sorrow. It’d been the happiest stellar cycles of his life, too— traveling across Cybertron with Bulkhead, living hard and partying harder. Not to mention all the Wreckers that weren’t around any more: cheerful Seaspray, brash Moonracer, ornery Ironhide, ambitious Impactor, over-confident and perpetually calm Springer… even hard-helmed Chromia. (He missed arguing with her just about every day. Stupid, brave, patriotic Chromia, who’d stayed with the team even after Ultra Magnus took over… and died less than a decacycle later.)
“I miss him,” Wheeljack says. There wasn’t anything else to say. “All of them, really. I wish he was still around, that he could’ve come back with you. He should be here.”
Knock Out’s vocalizer hisses.
“Is that a yes?” He begins to walk again, far faster than was comfortable for Wheeljack to keep up with. “We have to keep moving, Wheeljack.”
“I’m not authorized to let you into the Autobots. If any of the rest of ‘em are even still alive. The truth is, I’m barely part of it…. I show up, sometimes, but I don’t exactly have sway with high command.”
“That’s okay,” Knock Out insists. “I don’t want to be an Autobot. I want to be a Wrecker— and the difference between those two things used to be like night and day. I’m sure you remember… from what I remember, their leader used to bear a terrible resemblance to you. The poor fragger.”
Wheeljack laughs, and in doing so, decides that Knock Out’s got a solid helm on his pauldrons after all— if the world really was ending, one had to make the most of it. Why shouldn’t they shrug their pauldrons and get together with a few friends to try and catch sight of the mushroom cloud before it wiped them out?
It was a quintessentially ‘Wrecker’ way to live, and proof that regardless of his size and disposition… Knock Out stood a fairly good chance of fitting in just fine.
******
Wheeljack’s spark is in his neck-cabling, by the time they begin climbing the mountain. He’d triple-checked his coordinates to be absolutely certain he had the right place (all the while Knock Out mocked him mercilessly.) Wheeljack didn’t know why he was so nervous. Bulkhead would either be here, or not, and if he wasn’t… he’d just have to go find him.
Wherever he was. Alive. Wheeljack knew Bulkhead had gotten out of the base first, and that he had Miko with him— Bulkhead would kickbox the Well of Allsparks itself, before he’d leave one of the kids without a proper guardian, he couldn’t be dead if he had Miko with him, he just couldn’t—
“Stop that!” Knock Out veers towards Wheeljack on the road, as if he might ‘check’ his passenger side again, but he pulls back before making contact. “You only ever seem to think when it’s unhelpful! Take a chill pill, Doctor Doom. ”
Wheeljack had no idea what that meant. He assumes it's one of Knock Out’s dreadful pop culture references and shrugs it off.
“I am… not a Doctor.” He thinks about it, for a bit longer, and adds on: “Technically, I’m not even a scientist. If there was a state to regulate things… I’m pretty sure they still wouldn’t recognize ‘school of life’ as an acceptable certifier.”
Knock Out snorts, and pulls to the side of the road.
“Psh. Typical Autobot functionists… letting the law tell you who you are. Who cares if you’ve got a degree, if you’re performing science in real life? I suppose I’ll wait here. You’ll need to give them fair warning about my presence, I imagine.”
“Yeah, well,” Wheeljack scoffs. “Stay close, alright? He won’t be around. There’s no sense in staying in one place for this long— obviously, something’s gone wrong. Hopefully, he’s left us a sign of where he went.”
Knock Out laughs.
“Oh, absolutely. It’s very Bulkhead to do the sensible, safe thing… and to not waste his time waiting around for your sorry aft. Classic. I’d expect nothing else from him.”
"Watch it,” Wheeljack snaps, before speeding off.
He pulls off into a clearing at the top of the mountain and transforms into his root-mode, shading his optics with his good servo as he surveys the area. Technically, the boundary of the given coordinates extended further out than just this clearing, but Wheeljack had a feeling Bulkhead would’ve stopped here.
The view was nicer.
Wheeljack turns around just in time to see the Wrecker pounce, alerted by the uproarious racket he tended to make whenever he walked any faster than a crawl.
“Bulk—” The rest of Wheeljack’s statement is immediately cut off, as Bulkhead picks him up and spins him around in a bear-hug that makes his bruised plating creak. Wheeljack shoves him, lightly, finally finding the strength to wheeze out the rest of his sentence. “What are you still doing here, Bulkhead?”
The pressure stings a bit more than usual on account of all his extensive injuries, and Wheeljack feels a bit like he’s being put under a hydraulic press… but he can’t bring himself to be annoyed. Wheeljack rarely could, regardless of the fuss he tends to kick up.
In part because he knew that the crushing sensation was a message in code (the only way Bulkhead knew to write it) that meant: “ Please don’t go.” Or, perhaps the better phrasing might be “Not yet,” or “Never again?”
Maybe the real meaning was different every time.
What Wheeljack cared about was that it always meant that Bulkhead missed him ( almost as much as Wheeljack had missed Bulkhead, in turn), that he was irrationally terrified that Wheeljack might dissolve and float away like smoke, if he didn’t hold him steady.
In the moment, Wheeljack agrees with him. There wasn’t a strut in his frame that didn’t ache, and he was frightened in a way he hadn’t been since they were both very young. He wanted to be held. He had to repress the urge to tuck his face into Bulkhead’s neck, to hide from the world… with many of the same mental protocols and subroutines otherwise reserved for keeping his servos steady while he defused explosives.
Bulkhead was otherwise so painfully considerate— Pit, he’d likely be more conscientious with his servos if he could remember to, in the moment. Wheeljack luxuriated in the fact that sometimes, he cared so much he forgot .
“Just waitin’ for you to show.” Bulkhead frowns. He remembers not to hold on so tightly, and loosens his grasp out of concern that he might leave dents in his friend’s mesh. Wheeljack curses his presence of mind. “What held you up, Jackie?”
Wheeljack notices Miko’s scrambled approach, as she struggles to catch up with Bulkhead. Wheeljack grins. Conscientious of the human’s presence… and hoping to spare Bulkhead the details, if to a much lesser extent… he thinks for a moment about how he wanted to phrase it:
“I ran into some mechs that insisted I stay on the Nemesis to play a few rounds of cards. Well— I won, obviously, ‘cause I cheat like nomech else at cards. You don’t need to worry; I’m pretty confident that I’ve lost them by now.” Wheeljack pushes at Bulkhead’s gauntlets until he sets him down. “It’s good to see you, kid. Is it— just us three Wreckers, hanging around? I know it must’ve been terribly hard for you, protecting the big guy all by yourself… and I appreciate it. I really do.”
He has to take a knee and lean down, in order to give the kid a fist-bump. Bulkhead laughs, and Miko scrunches up her nose at him.
“Obviously! Well, mostly it was just boring. We didn’t see any Decepticons at all, so Bulkhead made me do my homework for most of it. Which I don’t really get, ‘cause I’m pretty sure the whole Darkmount thing has officially canceled school for the rest of the year.” Miko yawns, completely assured of the fact that they would save the world, as one might rely on the Saturday night news coming on at the right time. “It’s a good thing you came when you did, because we needed to leave to go get supplies again, anyway— I ‘wrecked’ the cache of emergency snacks we keep in Bulkhead’s dash.”
Wheeljack grins. Now that, he could believe… back during the heyday of the Wreckers, Bulkhead was often a sought-after partner for patrols or guard duty because he was a mech you could always rely on to keep a metric-ton of slag in his subspace.
Not life-saving stuff, like bombs or medical supplies— but superfluous slag that “saved” a boring watch. Drawing pads and styluses, decks of cards, snacks, extra blankets, cheaply-produced burner datapads crammed with serialized novels about cheesy action heroes. Occasionally, and best of all , he’d pack high-grade… but Bulkhead was serious enough that he would rarely risk it, save for in situations where he knew it was safe. Which was probably for the best.
Still– it was nice to know that some mechs never changed. He’d packed snacks. (For humans!) (During a Decepticon takeover, for Primus’s sake!) Wheeljack shakes his helm, fond.
“School isn’t about grades, Miko. Grades are just numbers , at the end of the day. School’s supposed to be about learning, which you use in real life— it actually matters whether you know scrap or not. That’s still going to be true, even if you don’t have a teacher breathing down your neck to check.” Wheeljack responds, gaze flickering up briefly to meet Bulkhead’s optics.
He’s relieved to see Bulkhead nod, appreciatively, because a lot of the time Wheeljack didn’t know whether or not he was saying the right stuff to the kid. He wasn’t exactly a great role model for ‘responsibility’ or ‘achievement,’ so it was hard to gauge between right and wrong at times.
“... I guess…” Miko sighs. “You don’t look too good, Wheeljack. I was going to ask if you were ready to kick some Decepticon can, but—”
“I’m alright!” Wheeljack cuts in, a bit too early. Bulkhead’s staring at him now, a frown pulling at his face. “I’m all good, kid, don’t worry about it. I’ll… stop by an auto shop, when we go into town, and then we’ll be back in business. This is nothing. I might have been in a lot more trouble, had I not had some help getting here.”
“Help?” Bulkhead repeats, optics narrowing. The tone of Wheeljack’s voice had given him away.
“By that, I mean that I may or may not have inducted a Decepticon into the Wreckers.” Wheeljack holds his servos up, defensively. “ Woah , now! Hear me out before you flip your lid, Primus, Bulk… the mech’s saved my life three times since the base exploded alone, and we know him. Didn’t we always say that Knock Out was practically one of us, before the split?”
Miko and Bulkhead adopt nearly identical expressions of horror and shock. It’s very cute. Wheeljack forces himself to focus on the matter at servo.
“It’s too late to turn back now because he’s already here!” Wheeljack forces confidence into his voice, though he doesn’t feel it one bit. “I know it’s not ideal, but he’s not exactly got anywhere else to go, and he hasn’t murdered me while I slept yet. Knock Out needs us, and there’s no chance of him going back to the ‘Cons after all the trouble he gave them.”
Bulkhead and Miko turn to stare at each other, silently deliberating. Finally, Miko raises a tiny servo in front of her face, turning away from Wheeljack in order to stage-whisper as loudly and conspicuously as a tiny human can.
“... stupid plan or not, I think we need a doctor. Look at him!” Miko points at Wheeljack’s thoroughly scratched, dented, charred, and otherwise fragged-up frame, defeating the purpose of stage-whispering entirely.
Bulkhead, never one to stand up to peer pressure for longer than ten kliks, nods reluctantly. For better, or for worse.