Chapter Text
The battle had chosen a cruel place to unfold.
The ground beneath their pedes was not truly ground anymore. It was a soaked, trembling skin of mud and cracked stone stretched over the bones of the canyon. Days of rain had turned the cliffside unstable, the soil soft enough to swallow a pede and loose enough to betray any bot who trusted it.
Below, far beneath the broken edge, a river did not flow.
It raged.
A violent current of mud, stormwater, shattered trees, rocks, and debris tore through the canyon like a living thing. It slammed against the walls with enough force to make the earth shiver. Every few moments, something large vanished beneath the brown surface and reappeared only as splinters.
Optimus Prime saw the danger immediately.
“Autobots, keep away from the edge!” he ordered, his voice cutting through the thunder, weapons fire, and the roar of the river below.
But the Decepticons had heard the same warning.
And Megatron smiled.
He descended upon the battlefield like a falling warship, cannon roaring, blade flashing through the rain. Each strike forced Optimus closer to the cracked earth, each blast carving more weakness into the cliffside.
“Careful, Prime!” Megatron called, his laughter rolling across the canyon. “This planet seems eager to finish your war for me.”
Optimus braced himself, mud splashing beneath his pedes. “Hold formation! Do not let them push you toward the ravine!”
The Autobots tried.
Bulkhead met Breakdown with a collision that shook the ground, his wrecking ball smashing against the Decepticon’s shield. Arcee moved like a flash of blue steel through the rain, sliding beneath Vehicon fire and cutting one drone down before driving another back with both blades drawn. Bumblebee fired from behind a fallen slab of stone, his shots sharp and precise despite the mud dragging at his wheels.
Ratchet was never meant for a battlefield like this.
He fought anyway.
The Autobot medic moved through the chaos with grim determination, blaster in one servo and his medical kit locked against his hip. His hands had been made to heal, to repair, to drag life back from the edge when war tried to steal it. Yet here he was, armor streaked with mud, optics narrowed against the rain, shouting orders over explosions.
“Bumblebee, get behind cover!” Ratchet barked.
“I can still fight!” Bumblebee shouted back, firing at a Vehicon trying to flank Arcee.
“You can fight better when your leg is not half-compromised!”
A blast struck too close.
The earth exploded beside them, showering both Autobots in mud and shards of rock. Ratchet threw himself over Bumblebee without hesitation, shielding the younger mech with his own frame as fragments struck his plating.
Bumblebee looked up at him, optics wide. “Ratchet—”
“Move!” Ratchet snapped, pulling him upright. “This terrain is failing!”
Across the field, Optimus heard him.
Then he heard the crack.
It was low at first, almost hidden beneath the storm and the river. A deep, ugly sound that seemed to rise from inside the earth itself.
Stone groaned.
Mud shifted.
The battlefield split open.
A jagged seam tore through the ground between Autobots and Decepticons alike. Soil dropped away in chunks. Roots snapped. Rocks tumbled over the canyon’s edge and disappeared into the furious brown water below.
“Fall back!” Optimus shouted. “Everyone, fall back now!”
For one rare second, even the Decepticons hesitated.
Then the cliffside collapsed.
Vehicons screamed as the ground beneath them vanished. One fell, then another, dragged down with the sliding mud and broken stone. The river swallowed them with brutal indifference, its current churning once before erasing them completely.
“Move!” Arcee yelled. “Move, move!”
Bulkhead grabbed Bumblebee by the arm and hauled him away from the widening fracture, but the mud betrayed them both. Bumblebee’s damaged leg slipped. His pede sank deep, caught beneath a mass of sliding earth, and the ground began to pull him backward toward the ravine.
“Bulkhead!” Bumblebee shouted.
“I’ve got you!” Bulkhead roared, reaching for him.
A Decepticon blast struck between them.
Bulkhead was thrown sideways.
Bumblebee slid.
His fingers clawed through mud, finding nothing solid. The canyon yawned behind him, the roar of the river rising louder, closer, hungry.
“Bumblebee!” Arcee screamed.
Ratchet moved before fear could stop him.
He lunged through the rain, dropped hard to one knee, and caught Bumblebee by the wrist just as the young Autobot’s lower frame slipped over the broken edge.
“I have you!” Ratchet snarled.
Bumblebee’s optics burned with panic. “Ratchet, let go! The ground—”
“Do not argue with your medic!”
Ratchet dug his pedes into the mud. His joints strained. His old frame trembled under the pull of Bumblebee’s weight and the sucking drag of the collapsing earth. Mud slid beneath him in waves. The canyon pulled at them both.
Optimus saw them from across the battlefield.
“Ratchet!”
The medic did not look at him.
He had Bumblebee.
That was all that mattered.
With a sound of raw effort, Ratchet dragged Bumblebee upward inch by inch. His fingers tightened around the scout’s wrist so hard his plating creaked. Bumblebee kicked, fought, tried to find purchase against the crumbling wall.
“Come on!” Bumblebee gasped. “Come on, come on—”
Ratchet’s optics flashed.
With one final, desperate heave, he threw Bumblebee forward.
The scout crashed onto safer ground, rolling hard through the mud before Arcee and Bulkhead caught him.
Ratchet did not follow.
The ground beneath the medic broke loose.
For one terrible instant, Ratchet stood alone on a slab of earth already separated from the cliff. His arms lifted slightly, not in surrender, but in shock. Rain ran down his faceplates. His optics widened, startled and bright, as if he had spent the entire war denying death and had only now heard it call his name clearly.
“Ratchet!” Bumblebee screamed.
Optimus ran.
He forgot Megatron.
He forgot the battle.
He forgot everything except the old medic standing at the edge of oblivion.
The slab dropped.
Ratchet fell backward into open air.
Optimus threw himself toward the canyon, servo outstretched, but he was too far. Much too far. Their optics met for the briefest sparkbeat, and in that moment Optimus saw no fear in Ratchet’s face.
Only regret.
Only apology.
Only the terrible, quiet acceptance of a bot who had saved one life and lost his own in the same motion.
Then Ratchet struck the canyon wall.
Once.
Twice.
His red and white frame vanished into the violent brown river below.
The water swallowed him whole.
For a moment, the battlefield died with him.
No one moved.
No one fired.
Bumblebee stood frozen between Arcee and Bulkhead, mud running from his armor, his mouth slightly open as if the scream had torn something out of him and left nothing behind.
“No,” he whispered. “No, no, no…”
Optimus reached the broken edge and dropped to one knee.
“Ratchet!” he shouted.
The river answered with thunder.
A tree trunk spun through the current, smashed against a boulder, and shattered. Mud and foam churned wildly where Ratchet had disappeared. There was no flash of white armor. No raised servo. No emergency signal. No voice.
“Ratchet!” Optimus called again, louder, rawer.
Still nothing.
Bumblebee stumbled toward the edge, but Bulkhead caught him from behind.
“Let me go!” Bumblebee shouted, twisting against him. “Let me go, I can get down there!”
“You’ll die too!” Bulkhead growled, though his own voice was breaking.
“We can’t just leave him!”
Arcee’s blades lowered slowly. Her optics never left the river. “Bee…”
“He saved me,” Bumblebee said, and his voice cracked. “He saved me.”
Optimus remained on his knees at the canyon’s edge.
The rain struck his armor. Mud streaked his hands. The Prime of the Autobots, the last of the Primes, the commander who had carried centuries of war upon his shoulders, stared into the river like a mech who had forgotten how to stand.
Then a shadow fell over him.
Megatron.
For once, the Decepticon warlord did not strike.
He looked down into the canyon. Then he looked at Optimus kneeling in the mud, and slowly, cruelly, his mouth curved into a smile.
“Well,” Megatron said, voice rich with satisfaction, “it seems this miserable planet has finally done something useful.”
Optimus rose.
Slowly.
His optics burned with grief so deep it became something dangerous.
“Megatron.”
The name was not spoken like a warning.
It was spoken like a wound.
Megatron laughed.
Low at first. Then louder. The sound rolled over the battlefield, over the broken ground, over the Autobots standing in stunned silence.
“The Autobots have lost their medic,” Megatron declared, raising his cannon arm as the surviving Decepticons gathered behind him. “Their healer. Their old friend.”
His red optics gleamed as he looked directly at Optimus.
“And Prime has lost one more piece of his precious family.”
Bumblebee stepped forward, fists shaking. “You don’t get to say that.”
Megatron turned his gaze toward him, amused.
Bumblebee’s voice trembled, but he did not lower his optics. “You don’t get to stand there and laugh about him.”
“Brave words,” Megatron said. “From the life he died saving.”
Bumblebee flinched as if struck.
Bulkhead growled, deep and furious, his wrecking ball tightening. Arcee’s face hardened into something cold enough to kill. Optimus took one step forward, and for a moment the air itself seemed to change around him.
But the ground beneath them cracked again.
The canyon groaned.
The river roared.
And Ratchet was gone.
Megatron knew it.
His smile widened.
“Decepticons,” he commanded, “we leave. Let the Autobots mourn in the mud.”
A ground bridge opened behind them, green light spilling across the battlefield like poison. One by one, the Decepticons withdrew. Some looked triumphant. Some relieved. Some still shaken by the collapse that had nearly taken them as well.
Megatron was the last to go.
He paused at the edge of the light and looked back at Optimus.
“Do not grieve too long, Prime,” he said. “The war will not wait for your broken spark.”
Then he vanished.
The ground bridge closed.
Silence fell.
Only the river remained.
Bumblebee sank to his knees.
“He saved me,” he whispered again, smaller this time. Younger. “He saved me, and I couldn’t—”
Arcee knelt beside him and placed a servo on his shoulder. Bulkhead stood behind them, head bowed, his massive frame trembling with helpless rage.
Optimus turned back toward the canyon.
He stood tall, because he had to. Because he was Prime. Because the others were looking at him, waiting for strength, waiting for command, waiting for him to be what the war demanded.
But his optics stayed fixed on the water.
The muddy river carried away debris, stone, broken trees, and every visible trace of the medic who had held them together through more battles than any of them could count.
“Ratchet,” Optimus whispered.
The name fell into the canyon.
No answer came back.
Ratchet came back to himself violently.
His optics snapped online, and his body moved before his processor could finish reconnecting to reality. He sat up too fast.
Pain answered him.
It tore through his frame in bright, savage lines—across his ribs, down his spinal struts, along one arm, through both legs, everywhere at once. His vents hitched. A harsh sound escaped his vocalizer, half growl, half gasp, and his servos clawed into whatever lay beneath him.
Not a berth.
Not metal.
Leaves.
Branches.
Stone.
For one disoriented sparkbeat, Ratchet could not understand where he was.
Then memory struck him harder than any Decepticon blast.
The battle.
The rain.
The mud.
Bumblebee slipping toward the edge.
Ratchet’s servo closing around the young scout’s wrist.
Optimus shouting his name.
The ground breaking beneath him.
The canyon opening like a mouth.
Optimus reaching for him, arm outstretched, optics wide with the kind of terror Ratchet had never wanted to see on his friend’s face.
Then the fall.
He remembered air rushing past him. Stone striking his frame. The sickening twist of his body as he hit the canyon wall once, twice, maybe more. He remembered the river below rising up, not like water, but like a beast.
Cold.
Crushing.
Merciless.
The muddy current had swallowed him whole.
Ratchet remembered being dragged under, thrown from side to side with such force that his processor could barely separate pain from motion. Something had struck his helm. Something else had torn across his plating. His world had become brown water, roaring pressure, debris scraping over his armor, and the terrible knowledge that he could not tell which way was up.
He had tried to reach for the surface.
He had failed.
Then there had been something else.
A shape in the water.
Or perhaps above it.
A shadow.
Claws closing around him.
Strong arms pulling him out of the current as though the river itself had been forced to surrender its prey.
Ratchet remembered being carried. Lifted. Dragged away from the cold. He remembered a voice, low and strange, murmuring words he had not understood. He remembered something being pressed to his mouth.
Drink.
That was what the voice had commanded.
Or perhaps pleaded.
Ratchet had swallowed because his body had been too broken to refuse.
Now he was awake.
And he was not in the canyon.
He was inside a cave.
The first thing he heard was the river.
It was close. Too close. Its roar echoed through the stone around him, deep and constant, like the growl of some ancient machine still running beneath the earth. The air was damp and cold, carrying the scent of mud, wet rock, minerals, crushed vegetation, and old metal.
Light entered through cracks in the stone, thin and pale, catching on crystals embedded in the cave walls. They glimmered faintly in blues and whites, their glow soft enough to make the darkness feel alive rather than empty.
Ratchet forced himself to look down.
He was lying in something that could only be called a nest.
The thought was absurd enough that, even injured, even half-drowned, even terrified, Ratchet’s medic mind tried to reject it.
Cybertronians did not make nests.
Not like this.
Beneath him lay a thick bedding of clean crystalline leaves, broad and silver-veined, layered carefully to keep his frame away from the cold stone. Under those were branches, stripped smooth and bent into a shallow curve, creating something like a wild berth. Around the edges, stones of various sizes had been arranged in a protective barrier, not random rubble, but placed with intention. Larger rocks formed the outer ring. Smaller ones filled the gaps. Mud had been packed between them in places to hold them steady.
Primitive.
Natural.
Deliberate.
A shelter built by hands that understood survival, not architecture.
Ratchet stared at it, stunned despite himself.
Then he looked at his own body.
His plating was cracked in several places. One side of his torso had been braced with splints made from polished branches and flat stones. Strips of dried vine bound them tight. His left arm had been set against a length of pale wood and secured with mud that had dried hard as ceramic. Over open wounds and torn seams, someone had packed crushed Cybertronian plants—dark green, blue-black, and faintly glowing in the cracks where their sap had leaked out.
Ratchet recognized some of them.
Not by name, not immediately. His memory was still too fogged with pain. But their scent, their texture, the way they clung to damaged metal—yes. They were medicinal. Wild strains. Ancient strains, perhaps. Plants once used before proper field kits, synthetic sealants, or surgical foam became common.
Basic medicine.
Crude, by modern standards.
But effective.
Infuriatingly effective.
Whoever had done this had not known Autobot medical procedure. They had not used standard compounds, proper clamps, or refined energon patches. Yet the splints were correctly placed. The pressure around his wounds was firm without cutting circulation. The herbs were holding infection at bay. The dried mud had sealed exposed lines well enough to keep river filth from reaching deeper systems.
Ratchet’s optics narrowed.
This was not ignorance.
This was old knowledge.
Wild knowledge.
He shifted, trying to examine the binding around his torso, and immediately regretted it. Pain stabbed through his side. His vision blurred white around the edges.
“Do not move.”
Ratchet froze.
The voice came from deeper inside the cave.
It was not loud. It did not need to be.
It slid through the dimness, low and rough, carrying an accent Ratchet could not place. The words were Cybertronian, yes, but shaped strangely, as if the speaker had learned them long ago and then spent countless centuries speaking mostly to stone, river, and silence.
“Wounds are still open,” the voice continued. “Move too much, they open wider. Then you leak again.”
Ratchet slowly turned his helm.
His medic instincts screamed at him to remain still.
His survival instincts screamed louder.
At first, he saw only shadow.
Then the shadow moved.
A Cybertronian stepped into the pale crystal light, and Ratchet forgot, for a single impossible moment, how to breathe.
Primus.
He was tall.
Not merely tall in the way Megatron was tall. Not massive in the way Bulkhead was massive. This mech was height shaped into elegance, long and lean and unnervingly balanced. He would have stood a few inches taller than Ultra Magnus, perhaps more if he straightened fully, but there was nothing heavy or military about his frame. He moved with too much silence for that.
His legs were long. His waist narrow. His chassis thin but not fragile, every line of him drawn sharp and deliberate. His arms hung at his sides, relaxed, but his servos were impossible to ignore.
They were long.
Too long, Ratchet thought.
The fingers were slender, jointed with unsettling grace, ending in curved claws sharp enough to cut into stone. Not decorative talons. Not combat modifications. They looked natural. As though his frame had been forged for climbing, tearing, catching prey, and holding on in places where no ordinary Cybertronian could survive.
Ratchet’s optics rose.
Wings.
The stranger had wings, but not like any aerial frame Ratchet knew.
At first glance, yes, they could have belonged to an aircraft. That was what his processor tried to tell him. A flyer. A Seeker variant, perhaps. Some ancient offshoot. But the longer Ratchet looked, the less sense they made.
They sat too close to the back.
Folded too tightly.
Not arranged with the open, proud symmetry of a jetformer’s wings, but pressed against his spine as though they were meant to tuck, shield, and flare only when necessary. Their edges were narrow and severe, their joints subtle beneath old plating marked by scratches, mineral stains, and scars so old they had softened with time.
He wore no insignia.
No Autobot brand.
No Decepticon mark.
No visible faction at all.
His armor had once been bright, perhaps silver, red, and pale gold, but cave dust, river damp, and age had muted the colors. Not neglect exactly. Ratchet could see that he was clean enough, maintained enough to survive. But he looked like something that had lived outside civilization so long that civilization had become irrelevant to him.
A Cybertronian shaped by wilderness.
Or something pretending to be Cybertronian.
Ratchet’s servo twitched toward a weapon that was no longer there.
The stranger’s optics followed the movement.
“Gone,” he said.
Ratchet stiffened. “What?”
“Your blaster.” The tall mech tilted his helm slightly. His optics were bright in the dimness, watchful and sharp. “River took it. River takes much.”
Ratchet swallowed against the dryness in his throat. “Who are you?”
The stranger did not answer immediately.
Instead, he crouched near the edge of the stone barrier.
Even crouching, he was imposing. Too tall. Too graceful. Too quiet.
His claws touched one of the stones, adjusting it back into place after Ratchet’s sudden movement had disturbed it. The gesture was careful. Almost fussy. Then he looked at Ratchet again, and there was something in his expression that Ratchet could not name.
Caution.
Curiosity.
Concern, perhaps.
“Safe,” the stranger said at last.
“That is not an answer.”
“No.” One corner of the mech’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “But it is important.”
Ratchet stared at him.
The stranger stared back.
Outside, the river roared on, furious and hungry, as if angered that its stolen victim had been taken from it.
Ratchet forced his processor to work through the pain. “You pulled me out.”
“Yes.”
“From the river.”
“Yes.”
Ratchet glanced toward the cave mouth, though he could not see it from where he lay. “That current should have crushed me.”
“It tried.”
“And you went into it?”
The stranger’s wings shifted slightly against his back. A small movement. Almost instinctive.
“You were dying,” he said, as though that explained everything.
Ratchet’s spark gave an uncomfortable pulse.
For a moment, he thought of Bumblebee’s wrist in his hand. Of Optimus reaching for him. Of the water closing over his optics.
He looked away first.
“My team,” he said. The words came out harsher than he intended. “The Autobots. Did you see them? Were they nearby? Did anyone follow the river?”
The stranger’s expression changed.
Only a little.
But Ratchet was a doctor. Doctors noticed small changes.
The tall mech’s optics dimmed by a fraction. His claws curled inward, scraping softly against stone.
“Others were above,” he said slowly. “Loud. Fighting. Then gone.”
“Gone where?”
The stranger tilted his helm, as though the question itself was strange.
“Away.”
Ratchet’s chest tightened.
Of course.
The Autobots would have searched. Optimus would search until his frame failed. But the river was violent, the canyon enormous, the terrain unstable. If Ratchet had been carried into some hidden cave system, into a place concealed by stone and mud and water—
They might believe he was dead.
Optimus might believe he was dead.
The thought struck harder than the pain.
Ratchet closed his optics for one moment, fighting the sudden tremor in his vents.
“No,” he muttered. “No, they will search. They will keep searching.”
The stranger watched him with unnerving stillness.
“Pack?” he asked.
Ratchet opened his optics. “What?”
“Yours.” The stranger pointed one claw toward him. “Pack. The ones who call. The ones who grieve.”
Ratchet stared.
The word was not wrong.
But it was not how Cybertronians spoke.
Not anymore.
“My team,” Ratchet corrected, voice rough. “My friends.”
The stranger considered that.
“Friends,” he repeated, as though testing the shape of the word. Then, softer, “Good. Friends search longer than soldiers.”
Ratchet did not know what to say to that.
The stranger rose again, smooth and silent, and crossed the cave toward a hollow in the stone. Ratchet watched him move. There were signs everywhere now that the cave was not temporary shelter. Scratches along the walls at shoulder height. Polished places in the stone where pedes had walked the same path for years. Bundles of dried plants hung from cracks overhead. Stones arranged by size. Pieces of metal salvaged from Primus knew where. A pool of clean water collected beneath a mineral drip. Old energon containers, mismatched and worn, stacked neatly in one corner.
This cave had been lived in.
Not for days.
Not for months.
For years.
No.
Longer.
Much longer.
The stranger returned with a shallow stone bowl held carefully between his claws. Inside was a dark, faintly glowing liquid that smelled bitter enough to offend every one of Ratchet’s medical sensibilities.
Ratchet recoiled on instinct. “Absolutely not.”
The stranger paused.
Then blinked.
“Not?”
“I am a doctor,” Ratchet snapped, because pain made him irritable and fear made him worse. “I do not drink unidentified substances handed to me by strangers in caves.”
The tall mech looked at the bowl.
Then at Ratchet.
Then, with grave seriousness, he said, “You drank before.”
Ratchet’s plating heated with indignation. “I was unconscious.”
“Less arguing then.”
Despite everything—despite pain, fear, confusion, and the horrible memory of Optimus’s outstretched hand—Ratchet almost laughed.
Almost.
Instead, he glared.
The stranger crouched beside him again and held out the bowl.
“Bitter,” he warned. “Helps pain. Helps leaks close. Helps bad water leave fuel lines.”
Ratchet looked at the liquid. Then at the dried mud binding his wounds. Then at the plants packed with surprising competence against his injuries.
He hated that he recognized enough of the treatment to know the stranger might be right.
Slowly, carefully, Ratchet accepted the bowl.
The stranger watched him with the intense focus of a wild creature deciding whether a rescued animal would bite.
Ratchet took one sip.
His entire face twisted.
“That,” he rasped, “is vile.”
The stranger’s mouth moved again.
This time, it was definitely a smile.
“Good medicine often is.”
Ratchet lowered the bowl, studying him more sharply now.
The phrasing had been awkward.
Old.
But the meaning was clear.
“Who taught you this?” Ratchet asked.
The smile faded.
The cave seemed to grow quieter, though the river still roared outside.
The stranger looked away, toward the dark passages behind him.
“No one now,” he said.
Ratchet waited.
For a long moment, the tall mech said nothing more.
Then his claws touched the stone beside the nest, tracing some invisible mark worn smooth by time.
“Before,” he murmured. “Long before.”
A chill moved through Ratchet that had nothing to do with the river.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
The stranger’s wings pressed tighter to his back.
“Long.”
“That is not an answer either.”
“No,” the mech said again.
This time, there was no almost-smile.
Only something old and quiet behind his optics.
“Still important.”
Ratchet looked around the cave again—the arranged stones, the old bedding, the dried plants, the scratched walls, the salvaged containers, the signs of a life carved into secrecy and survival.
Whoever this mech was, he had not simply hidden here.
He had endured here.
Long enough for his speech to break away from modern Cybertronian patterns. Long enough for wilderness to become habit. Long enough that he treated wounds with plants and mud, built berths from leaves and branches, and called friends a pack without embarrassment.
Ratchet felt his spark tighten.
“Are you alone here?” he asked before he could stop himself.
The stranger went very still.
Too still.
His optics shifted toward the cave mouth, toward the river, toward something far beyond both.
Then he answered, voice lower than before.
“Waiting.”
Ratchet’s brow furrowed. “Waiting for what?”
The tall mech looked back at him.
For the first time, the sharpness in his expression softened into something so raw, so painfully patient, that Ratchet forgot the claws. Forgot the strange wings. Forgot the impossible height and the wildness wrapped around him like a second armor.
The stranger looked, suddenly, like someone who had spent too many ages listening for footsteps that never came.
“My cubs,” he said.
Ratchet stared at him.
The words settled uneasily between them.
Not sparklings.
Not students.
Not troops.
Cubs.
The stranger said it with absolute certainty. With grief. With devotion. With the fragile stubbornness of a spark that had survived on that belief alone.
“They come home,” he murmured. “One day.”
Ratchet’s pain seemed very far away for a moment.
Outside the cave, the river continued to roar, violent and endless.
Inside, beneath the pale glow of ancient crystals, the mysterious mech sat beside Ratchet’s wild-made berth, claws folded carefully over his knees, wings pressed close to his back, and watched the darkness as if he still expected someone beloved to emerge from it.
Ratchet did not know who had saved him.
He did not know what this strange Cybertronian truly was.
But he knew, with a doctor’s certainty and an old soldier’s grief, that he had not been rescued by a monster.
He had been rescued by someone who had been alone for far too long.
Ratchet had very little choice in the matter.
He could glare at the bowl all he wanted. He could distrust the smell, the color, the thick texture of crushed leaves and mineral dust suspended in liquid energon. He could argue, and he did, because Ratchet had never met an unknown medical treatment he did not first insult on principle.
But his body was in no condition to win arguments.
So, eventually, with great reluctance and even greater irritation, he drank.
The medicine was warm.
That surprised him.
It slid across his glossa with a sweetness he had not expected, buried beneath the bitterness of the herbs. There was energon mixed into it, that much he could tell, but not the usual kind. It was not red energon; the taste lacked that sharp, volatile bite. It was not standard blue either, almost flavorless beneath normal conditions. This was sweeter. Thicker. Older, somehow, though Ratchet knew that was impossible to taste with any real certainty.
The herbs made identification worse. They coated his sensors in layers of bitterness, sap, mineral tang, and something almost floral. Ratchet grimaced so hard his facial plating ached.
Starscream watched him from across the nest with grave attention.
Ratchet lowered the bowl. “That is possibly the worst thing I have ever willingly consumed.”
Starscream tilted his helm, claws folded neatly over his knees. “You kept it inside.”
“That is not a compliment to your cooking.”
“Medicine,” Starscream corrected.
“It tastes like punishment.”
Starscream blinked once.
Then, faintly, almost shyly, his mouth curved.
“Punishment that keeps you alive.”
Ratchet had no response for that.
So he drank the rest.
Hours passed strangely inside the cave.
There was no proper clock. No console. No monitor. No clear division between day and night except for the weak light that filtered through cracks in the stone and the changing voice of the river outside. Sometimes it roared like a beast still enraged by Ratchet’s escape. Sometimes it softened to a heavy rush, thick with mud and broken branches.
Starscream moved through the cave as if he had memorized every stone in it.
He checked Ratchet’s bindings. Replaced the crushed plants over his wounds. Adjusted splints with long, careful claws that looked made for violence and yet touched injured seams with startling precision. He never moved quickly unless he needed to. Never wasted energy. Never turned his back fully for long.
A wild mech, Ratchet thought.
Not savage.
Not stupid.
Wild.
There was a difference.
By the end of the first day, Ratchet knew the stranger’s name.
Starscream.
It did not fit the cave.
The name sounded too bright for the damp stone, too sharp and elegant for mud-packed splints and a nest of crystal leaves. It sounded like old skies, high places, pride, and polished metal under sunlight. Yet Starscream said it plainly, without ceremony, as if names had become things one carried only because there was no one left to speak them.
“Starscream,” Ratchet repeated, testing the syllables.
The tall mech glanced toward him.
“Yes.”
“No faction mark,” Ratchet said.
Starscream looked at him blankly.
“Autobot. Decepticon.” Ratchet gestured weakly to his own scratched insignia. “Faction.”
Starscream’s wings pressed a fraction tighter to his back. “No.”
“No?”
“No faction.” His claws scraped lightly against stone. “Only cave. River. Waiting.”
That word again.
Waiting.
Ratchet had learned quickly that Starscream returned to it often. Sometimes directly. Sometimes in the way his optics shifted toward the cave entrance whenever stones fell outside, or when the wind moved strangely through the canyon, or when some distant rumble rolled through the earth.
Waiting had shaped him.
Carved him.
Left grooves in his spark deeper than the scratches worn into the cave walls.
At first, Ratchet assumed he meant rescue. Perhaps a lost unit. Perhaps a settlement long gone. Perhaps old companions who had abandoned him when the war spread too far.
Then Starscream spoke of the cubs.
“They went to play,” Starscream said that evening, sitting near the mouth of the cave where the fading light touched the edges of his strange wings. “Little ones liked the open stone. Warm place. Good for claws.”
Ratchet remained very still.
The medicine had made his frame heavy. Pain lingered in the background, but softer now, less vicious. He should have been resting. Instead, he listened.
Starscream’s optics were fixed somewhere beyond the river.
“They ran. Made noise. Always noise.” His expression softened with a memory so old it should have turned to dust. “One climbed too high. Another bit his tail. Smallest fell, cried, then angry because others saw.”
Ratchet’s spark tightened.
Sparklings.
Starscream was speaking of sparklings.
Or something close enough that the difference did not matter.
“What happened?” Ratchet asked quietly.
Starscream’s claws curled against the stone beneath him.
“Sky broke.”
Ratchet frowned. “The sky?”
“Big noise.” Starscream lifted one clawed hand and pointed upward. “There. Above. Bright fire. Ground shook. Stone fell. Air hurt. Cubs ran.” His voice thinned around the words. “I called. Called and called. Others said leave. Said bad sky coming again. Said new region safer.”
He looked down at his own claws.
“I did not leave.”
Ratchet said nothing.
He did not need to.
The shape of the story was becoming clear in the worst possible way.
Some ancient disaster. A bombardment. A meteor strike. A weapon. A collapse. Something large enough to shake the earth, frighten a colony, scatter children, and drive survivors away from the region.
The others had left.
Starscream had stayed.
Because his cubs had gone out to play and had not come home.
Ratchet felt an old, familiar ache settle in his chassis. He had seen grief do terrible things to Cybertronians. He had watched soldiers keep empty berths untouched for vorns. Had seen mechs speak to the dead through broken comms, refusing to delete frequencies that would never answer again. He had known commanders who carried names like wounds and medics who remembered every patient they failed to save.
But this was different.
Starscream had not mourned and moved on.
He had waited.
Not for days. Not for years.
For ages.
Ratchet looked around the cave again and saw it with new optics. The nest. The arranged stones. The plants hung to dry in bundles. The pathways worn smooth. The marks carved into the walls at different heights, some small and low, others long and deep. Not random scratches.
Memories.
A home preserved for someone who never returned.
“They are not coming back,” Ratchet almost said.
The words rose to his vocalizer and died there.
He could not do it.
Not yet.
Perhaps not ever.
Starscream looked at him then, and there was such fierce certainty in his optics that Ratchet felt cruel for even thinking it.
“They come,” Starscream said, as if answering the thought. “Cubs know home.”
Ratchet looked away.
His vents trembled once, quietly.
“Yes,” he said, though the word scraped him from the inside. “Of course.”
Starscream seemed satisfied with that. He rose, tall enough that his shadow stretched over the cave wall, and went to stir something in another stone bowl.
Ratchet lay back against the crystalline leaves, staring up at the dim ceiling.
Optimus would still be searching.
That thought became a lifeline.
Optimus would not stop after one day. Bumblebee would not let him. Bulkhead would tear the canyon apart stone by stone if he had to. Arcee would search every riverbank, every mudslide, every broken tree caught in the current.
They would look for him.
Unless they had found debris.
Unless the river had carried away enough pieces of his armor to convince them.
Unless Optimus had stood at that cliff and decided, with the crushing responsibility of command, that he could not risk losing anyone else.
Ratchet closed his optics.
No.
He knew Optimus Prime.
His old friend would search until hope became cruelty.
For two days, Ratchet recovered beneath Starscream’s strange care.
The second morning, he managed to sit without nearly blacking out. By midday, he could move his arms without feeling as if his seams would split open. By evening, after another bowl of vile medicine and a long lecture from his mysterious rescuer about “leaking less,” Ratchet attempted to stand.
It was humiliating.
His legs shook beneath him. His vision blurred. He made it exactly one step before his knee buckled.
Starscream was there before he hit the ground.
Long claws caught his arm and side with impossible gentleness, steadying him without squeezing a single wound.
Ratchet stiffened on instinct.
Starscream froze as well, as if expecting to be struck.
For a moment, neither moved.
Then Ratchet exhaled.
“I am fine,” he muttered.
Starscream looked pointedly at his trembling legs.
Ratchet glared. “I am standing.”
“You are falling slowly.”
“I said I am fine.”
“No.”
Ratchet hated that, medically speaking, Starscream was correct.
Still, the progress mattered.
After two days, he could stand. Poorly. Angrily. With assistance he refused to call assistance. But he could stand. If his recovery continued, he might be able to leave the cave soon. He might reach higher ground. Might find a signal point. Might contact the Autobots before—
A voice echoed through the canyon.
“Ratchet!”
Ratchet went perfectly still.
So did Starscream.
For one sparkbeat, the river swallowed the sound, twisting it through stone and water until Ratchet feared his processor had invented it.
Then it came again.
Louder.
Hoarse.
Desperate.
“Ratchet!”
Optimus.
Ratchet’s spark slammed against his chassis.
He knew that voice. He would have known it through static, through battlefield smoke, through the end of the world itself. Command had roughened it, grief had strained it, but it was unmistakable.
Optimus Prime was calling his name.
Ratchet lurched toward the sound.
Pain punished him immediately. His side flared hot. His legs nearly gave out. Starscream reached for him.
“Do not move fast—”
“That is Optimus,” Ratchet rasped.
Starscream’s claws hovered near his arm. “Your pack?”
“My team.” Ratchet dragged in a ventilation. “My friends.”
Another voice cut through the canyon.
“Ratchet! Can you hear us?”
Bumblebee.
The name hit Ratchet almost as hard as the fall had.
Bumblebee’s voice cracked on the last word, raw with exhaustion. He sounded close. Close enough that the cave walls caught him and threw him back in fragments.
“Ratchet, please!” Bumblebee shouted. “Answer us!”
Then Bulkhead, deeper, rougher, nearly breaking beneath the force of it.
“Doc! Come on! Give us something!”
Arcee’s voice followed, sharp but trembling.
“Ratchet!”
Ratchet’s vision blurred, and this time it was not from pain.
They were here.
They had not stopped.
They had not left him in the river.
“Move,” he said.
Starscream did not.
The tall mech stood between him and the cave entrance, wings drawn tight, optics fixed toward the outside light. There was fear in him now—not cowardice, not exactly, but the wary stillness of a creature that had survived too long by staying hidden.
Ratchet understood then.
Starscream had avoided others for ages.
The Autobots were not rescue to him.
They were noise. Strangers. Danger. A pack that was not his own.
“Starscream,” Ratchet said, softer despite the urgency. “They will not harm you.”
Starscream’s claws flexed once.
“Many say.”
“I am not many.”
That made Starscream look at him.
Ratchet held his gaze. “You saved my life. Let me save myself the rest of the way.”
For a long moment, the only sound was the river and the distant calls of Autobots tearing their voices apart against the canyon.
Then Starscream stepped aside.
Ratchet moved.
Every step was agony.
He leaned against the cave wall, one servo braced on cold stone, his damaged frame protesting with every shift of weight. The dried mud around his splints cracked in places. Leaves rustled beneath his pedes. His vents came hard and uneven.
Behind him, Starscream followed at a distance, silent as shadow.
The cave entrance was narrower than Ratchet expected, half-hidden behind hanging roots, broken stone, and a sheet of water dripping from above. No wonder the Autobots had not seen it from the riverbank. From outside, it would look like nothing but darkness beneath an overhang.
Light struck Ratchet’s optics as he reached it.
The canyon opened before him.
The river raged below, swollen and brown, still carrying debris from the collapse. Across the broken terrain above the bank, the Autobots were scattered in search formation.
Optimus stood nearest the water, armor filthy with mud, faceplates drawn tight with exhaustion. He looked as if he had not powered down since the battle. Bulkhead was overturning stones with his bare servos. Arcee climbed along a narrow ledge, scanning every crack in the rock. Bumblebee stood near the river’s edge, fists clenched, optics bright with panic and guilt.
“Ratchet!” Bumblebee shouted again, voice breaking. “Ratchet, answer me!”
Ratchet pulled in as much air as his damaged systems allowed.
Then he shouted.
“I am here!”
The canyon seemed to stop.
Optimus turned first.
His entire frame froze.
For one impossible second, he stared at the hidden cave mouth as if he did not trust his optics. Then his expression shattered—not completely, not enough for anyone who did not know him to see, but Ratchet knew him. He saw the grief crack open into disbelief. Saw disbelief become hope so sudden it looked painful.
“Ratchet,” Optimus breathed.
Bumblebee spun around.
His optics widened.
“Ratchet!”
He ran.
“Bee, wait!” Arcee shouted, but Bumblebee was already scrambling across the muddy ground toward the cave, slipping, catching himself, moving with reckless desperation.
Ratchet tried to step forward.
His knees buckled.
Starscream caught him from behind.
Long claws closed carefully around his shoulders and side, holding him upright before he could fall. The movement brought Starscream fully into the cave mouth, out of shadow and into the pale canyon light.
The Autobots stopped.
Every weapon lifted on instinct.
Optimus’s blade formed halfway before he forced himself still. Arcee landed on the lower ledge with both blades drawn. Bulkhead raised his wrecking ball, optics narrowing. Bumblebee skidded to a halt, torn between relief and alarm.
Ratchet felt Starscream go rigid behind him.
The tall mech’s wings pressed flat against his back. His claws tightened only slightly, not enough to hurt, but enough for Ratchet to feel the tension in every line of him.
“No,” Ratchet said immediately, voice rough but firm. “Stand down!”
No one moved.
Ratchet glared with every ounce of authority he had left.
“I said stand down!”
Optimus lowered his blade first.
Slowly.
His optics did not leave Starscream, but his voice, when he spoke, was careful.
“Autobots. Weapons down.”
Arcee hesitated.
Bulkhead hesitated longer.
Bumblebee lowered his blaster with shaking hands.
Ratchet exhaled.
Starscream remained behind him, tall and silent, half-hidden by stone and shadow, looking at the Autobots like something ancient peering out at a world that had forgotten him.
Bumblebee took one step closer, optics locked on Ratchet.
“You’re alive,” he whispered.
Ratchet’s expression softened despite the pain. “So it would seem.”
Bumblebee’s face twisted. “You saved me.”
“Yes,” Ratchet said. “And I expect you to make that worth the effort by not throwing yourself into any more rivers.”
Bumblebee let out a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a sob.
Optimus approached more slowly.
Mud covered his armor. His optics were too bright. When he reached the cave mouth, he stopped just beyond the stone barrier, as if afraid that coming too close too fast would make Ratchet vanish again.
“My old friend,” Optimus said, voice low.
Ratchet swallowed.
“Optimus.”
For a moment, there was nothing else to say.
All the fear of the fall, the river, the search, the grief that had almost become truth, passed between them in silence.
Then Optimus looked past him.
At Starscream.
The mysterious mech did not bow. Did not speak. Did not step forward. He simply held Ratchet upright with those long, dangerous claws, his strange wings folded tight, his optics wary and sharp.
Ratchet drew a painful breath.
“This is Starscream,” he said. “He pulled me from the river.”
The Autobots stared.
Starscream’s helm tilted slightly, as if unused to being named before strangers.
Optimus’s expression shifted, grief and relief giving way to solemn gratitude.
“Then we owe you a debt beyond measure,” Optimus said.
Starscream watched him for a long, silent moment.
Then his gaze moved from Optimus to Bumblebee, to Arcee, to Bulkhead, and finally back to Ratchet.
“Your pack came,” he said quietly.
Ratchet looked up at him.
“Yes,” he said, voice thick. “They did.”
Starscream’s optics dimmed by a fraction.
Not with anger.
With something sadder.
Something older.
For one brief instant, Ratchet thought of cubs who had gone out to play and never returned. Of a cave kept ready for ages. Of a mech who had waited so long that hope had become indistinguishable from grief.
Starscream released him carefully into Optimus’s support.
And as Optimus caught Ratchet, holding him with a gentleness war had never managed to kill, Starscream looked toward the river, toward the canyon, toward the sky above the broken earth.
His voice was almost too quiet to hear.
“Good,” he murmured. “Friends search longer than soldiers.”
Ratchet did not try to stand alone a second time.
Pride had limits.
Pain, unfortunately, did not.
Optimus supported him with one arm beneath his shoulders, steady and careful, holding him as if Ratchet were something precious rather than an old medic covered in dried mud, splints, crushed herbs, and stubbornness. Ratchet hated needing the help. He also hated that his frame sagged with relief the moment Optimus took some of his weight.
“Easy,” Optimus murmured.
“I am perfectly capable of walking,” Ratchet grumbled.
“You nearly collapsed three steps ago.”
“That was a tactical adjustment.”
Bumblebee made a small, wet sound that might have been a laugh. It died quickly, but Ratchet still counted it as progress.
The Autobots had lowered their weapons, but not their guard. Arcee watched the cave mouth with sharp optics. Bulkhead stood half a step in front of Bumblebee, broad frame tense, ready to move if the strange mech made one wrong motion. Even Optimus, gentle as he was with Ratchet, kept his shoulders squared and his optics steady.
Starscream noticed all of it.
Of course he did.
The tall mech stood just inside the cave, where shadow still clung to his frame like a second skin. He had retreated a pace after releasing Ratchet to Optimus, not far enough to seem afraid, but far enough to keep stone at his back and an escape path near his claws. His wings remained pressed tight, folded so closely against him that Ratchet wondered if the gesture was instinctive.
Defensive.
Old.
Starscream’s optics moved from Autobot to Autobot, measuring them with the wary patience of something that had survived too long by trusting nothing too quickly.
Ratchet’s spark ached at the sight.
The cave behind Starscream looked different now that rescue had arrived. Before, it had been shelter. Strange, wild, unsettling, but shelter nonetheless. Now Ratchet saw it for what it truly was.
A tomb that still believed itself a home.
The nest of crystalline leaves waited behind him. The carefully arranged stones. The dried plants. The old pathways polished by endless solitary movement. The scratches on the walls—some small, some deep, some clustered together like marks made by young claws long, long ago.
Starscream had kept this place ready.
For his cubs.
For little ones who had gone out to play and never returned.
Ratchet swallowed.
Some wounds did not bleed through armor. Some wounds simply made a mech stay in the same cave for millennia, listening to the river and waiting for footsteps that would never come.
“Starscream,” Ratchet said.
The tall mech’s attention returned to him immediately.
Ratchet took a breath. His side hurt. His legs trembled. His spark hurt worse.
“You should come with us.”
Starscream went very still.
Behind Ratchet, Bumblebee looked up sharply. Arcee’s optics narrowed, not in protest, but in surprise. Bulkhead shifted his weight. Optimus said nothing. He simply held Ratchet steady and allowed him to speak.
Starscream tilted his helm. “Go?”
“Yes,” Ratchet said. “With us.”
The cave seemed to hold its breath.
Starscream looked past him toward the canyon, toward the river, toward the world outside. The light fell across his face, revealing scars half-hidden beneath old dust and mineral stains. He looked ancient in that moment. Not old in the way Ratchet was old, shaped by war and duty and too many sleepless cycles.
Ancient as stone.
Ancient as loss.
“Cubs come home,” Starscream said quietly.
Ratchet closed his optics for one painful second.
When he opened them, his voice was softer.
“No, Starscream.”
The tall mech’s claws twitched.
Ratchet felt Optimus’s grip tighten almost imperceptibly, not stopping him, only grounding him.
Ratchet continued. “I think some part of you already knows that.”
Starscream stared at him.
There was no anger at first.
Only confusion.
Then something worse.
Something small and wounded moved behind his optics, something so raw that Bumblebee looked away and Bulkhead’s expression tightened.
Starscream’s wings drew closer to his back.
“No.”
Ratchet’s own voice nearly failed him.
“I am sorry.”
“No,” Starscream said again, sharper this time. His claws scraped against the cave floor. “They know home. Cubs know home. They were playing. Sky broke. Others left. I stayed.”
“I know.”
“I stayed,” Starscream repeated, as if the words themselves could hold the past together. “I waited. Good carrier waits. Good—”
His voice broke off.
Ratchet did not understand the word fully. Not in the way Starscream meant it. But he understood enough.
He understood devotion.
He understood grief.
He understood what it meant to stand in one place long after hope had become a cruelty.
“You did wait,” Ratchet said. “For longer than anyone should have had to.”
Starscream’s optics burned bright in the shadow.
Ratchet slowly lifted one servo toward him.
Not too fast.
Not a command.
Not a demand.
An invitation.
“But you do not have to wait alone anymore.”
The canyon wind moved between them, cold and damp from the river below.
Starscream looked at Ratchet’s extended hand.
Then at Optimus.
Then at the Autobots gathered behind him.
He studied them the way a wild thing studied the edge of a forest before stepping into open ground. Bumblebee, still trembling with relief and guilt. Bulkhead, massive and protective. Arcee, tense but no longer threatening. Optimus, standing tall even while supporting the medic Starscream had saved.
Starscream’s optics settled on Optimus for a long moment.
Then he asked, “You are Alpha of pack?”
Optimus blinked.
The question struck the Autobots into silence.
Bumblebee’s mouth parted. Bulkhead looked confused. Arcee’s brows drew together. Even Optimus seemed, for one rare moment, uncertain how to answer.
Ratchet recovered first.
“He means leader,” he said quickly, though his optics remained on Starscream. “He has been alone in the wilderness for a very long time. Long enough that his language, his customs, his frame of reference… they are not modern Cybertronian anymore.”
Optimus looked from Ratchet to Starscream, understanding dawning in his optics.
Ratchet continued, voice low, careful. “Historical records speak of ancient wild clans. Pre-war, pre-city in some regions. Packs, Alphas, territory, kinship terms that disappeared from civilized use. Starscream speaks like them.”
Arcee’s expression shifted, her suspicion giving way to something quieter.
Bumblebee whispered, “He really has been alone that long?”
Ratchet did not answer.
He did not need to.
The cave answered for him.
Optimus slowly straightened, though he kept one steady arm around Ratchet. He did not step closer. Did not reach for his weapon. Did not make any sudden motion that might frighten or insult the strange mech watching him from the shadows.
“Yes,” Optimus said at last, his voice deep and gentle. “I am Optimus Prime. Leader of the Autobots.”
Starscream’s wings gave the smallest flicker.
“Alpha,” he said.
Optimus inclined his helm.
“Yes. Alpha, if that is the word you understand.”
The word settled through the air with unexpected gravity.
Starscream studied him, sharp and silent.
Optimus continued, carefully choosing each word. “You saved Ratchet’s life. For that, you have my gratitude and the gratitude of my pack.”
Ratchet saw Starscream react to that.
Not visibly enough for most to notice. But Ratchet noticed the slight lift of his helm. The tiny widening of his optics. The way his claws stopped scraping stone.
My pack.
Optimus had used the word for him.
Not mockingly.
Not awkwardly.
With respect.
“If you wish to come with us,” Optimus said, “you will be welcome among the Autobots. You will not be forced. You will not be caged. And you will not be alone unless you choose to be.”
Starscream looked away.
Toward the cave.
Toward the nest.
For a moment, Ratchet thought he would refuse.
Starscream turned slowly and looked back into the place that had held him for longer than any living mech should have endured. The stone walls glowed faintly with crystal light. Bundles of dried plants hung from cracks overhead. The wild berth waited in the center, still shaped for an injured body. Around it, the small natural barrier stood like a protective ring.
A home.
A den.
A grave.
Starscream took one step back into the cave.
Bumblebee’s face fell.
But Starscream did not retreat.
He crossed to the nest and crouched beside it. His long claws brushed over the crystalline leaves with almost reverent care. He adjusted one stone that had shifted out of place. Then another. Movements small, habitual, impossibly tender.
Ratchet’s spark twisted.
Starscream touched the wall next.
There, carved low into the stone, were three deep marks.
Not random scratches.
Names, perhaps.
Or heights.
Or the last place where three little bodies had pressed claws against home before running out beneath a broken sky.
Starscream rested his palm against them.
For a long time, he did not move.
No Autobot spoke.
Even the river seemed quieter.
At last, Starscream bowed his helm.
“Cubs know home,” he whispered.
Ratchet’s throat tightened.
Then Starscream rose.
He turned away from the nest.
Every step back toward the cave entrance looked like it hurt him more than any visible wound. His wings trembled once, then steadied. His claws opened and closed at his sides, as if resisting the urge to grab the stone and anchor himself there forever.
When he reached Ratchet, he stopped.
Ratchet still held out his hand.
Starscream stared at it.
The medic did not push.
He simply waited.
Slowly—so slowly that even the rain outside seemed to pause around the motion—Starscream lifted his own servo.
His claws were long enough to frighten a soldier. Sharp enough to tear armor. Strong enough, Ratchet knew, to drag a dying mech out of a murderous river.
But when Starscream placed his hand in Ratchet’s, he did it with all the care in the world.
As if Ratchet were fragile.
As if the gesture itself were fragile.
As if trust were a living thing that might die if held too tightly.
Ratchet closed his fingers around Starscream’s hand.
The tall mech flinched.
Only slightly.
Then he held on.
Bumblebee exhaled shakily. Bulkhead lowered his shoulders. Arcee’s blades vanished completely. Optimus watched them both with something solemn and warm in his optics.
Ratchet gave Starscream’s hand one gentle squeeze.
“Come on,” he said. “Let us get you out of this cave.”
Starscream looked past him, toward the canyon light.
Fear moved across his face.
So did longing.
The outside world waited beyond the stone: loud, bright, dangerous, changed beyond recognition. A world that had gone on without him. A world that had forgotten what he was, who he had loved, and what he had lost.
Starscream stepped forward.
The first step carried him out of shadow.
The second brought sunlight across his wings.
The third took him beyond the cave mouth.
For the first time in longer than Ratchet could imagine, Starscream stood beneath the open sky.
He froze.
His helm tilted upward.
The wind touched his faceplates and moved along the edges of his strange, tightly folded wings. Light caught the old colors beneath the dust—red, silver, pale gold, muted but still there, like embers hidden beneath ash.
Starscream stared at the sky as if it were both beloved and terrible.
Ratchet stood beside him, supported by Optimus, still holding his hand.
Behind them, the cave waited.
Empty.
Starscream did not look back immediately.
When he finally did, his optics lingered on the entrance, on the shadows, on the place where he had waited for cubs who would never return.
Then he looked at Ratchet.
“Pack goes now?” he asked quietly.
Ratchet’s expression softened.
“Yes,” he said. “Pack goes now.”
Optimus stepped closer, careful and respectful.
“And you may walk with us, Starscream.”
Starscream looked once more at the cave.
Then, slowly, he nodded.
Together, they began the difficult climb away from the river.
The Autobots moved around Ratchet and Starscream in a loose protective formation, not trapping, not crowding, but guarding. Bumblebee stayed close, glancing back every few steps as if afraid Ratchet might vanish again. Bulkhead took the lead through the unstable rocks. Arcee watched the canyon walls. Optimus remained at Ratchet’s side.
And Starscream walked among them like a ghost from a forgotten age, taller than all but the legends, claws careful, wings tight, optics fixed on the path ahead.
Behind him, the cave grew smaller.
The river roared on.
But Starscream did not return to it.
Not this time.
Starscream stopped the first time they opened the ground bridge.
It was not hesitation.
It was not simple fear.
He froze as if the world itself had split open in front of him.
Green light tore through the air with a roar of energy, widening into a circular portal that shimmered and twisted like liquid fire. The canyon walls glowed with it. The wet stone reflected it. Even the muddy river below seemed to catch the color and drag it downstream in poisonous streaks.
The Autobots moved as if this was ordinary.
Starscream did not.
His entire frame locked.
His wings snapped tight against his back, so flat they almost vanished into his silhouette. His claws spread wide, digging into the mud with a sharp scrape of metal against stone. His helm lowered. A low, dangerous sound rolled out of his chest.
Not a growl, exactly.
Not the kind Ratchet had heard from Cybertronians.
It was deeper. Older. A warning sound pulled from some instinctive place beneath language.
Bumblebee stopped immediately. “Whoa. Easy.”
Starscream’s optics narrowed on the portal. His vents quickened. A hiss slipped between his denta, sharp enough to make Arcee’s hand twitch toward her blade before she forced herself still.
“It is all right,” Optimus said carefully.
Starscream did not look at him.
The green light reflected in his optics, turning them strange and feral.
“No,” Starscream rasped. “Bad light. Sky broke with light.”
Ratchet, leaning heavily against Optimus, felt the words strike him with painful understanding.
To the Autobots, a ground bridge was transportation.
To Starscream, it was a wound in the world.
A flash in the sky.
A noise before loss.
Ratchet lifted one unsteady hand. “Starscream.”
The tall mech’s optics flicked to him at once.
Ratchet kept his voice firm, but gentle. “It is not a weapon. It is a bridge.”
Starscream’s claws flexed. “Bridge?”
“A portal,” Ratchet explained. “A means of transport. We step through here, and we arrive somewhere else. Safely.”
Starscream stared at him.
Then at the portal.
Then at Optimus.
“Alpha goes?”
“Yes,” Optimus said. “I will go with you.”
Ratchet added, “And I will be there when you come out the other side.”
Starscream’s expression tightened, caught between distrust and the fragile thread of faith he had decided, for reasons Ratchet still did not understand, to give them.
Bumblebee stepped closer, slowly enough not to startle him.
“It feels weird the first time,” he said, trying for a reassuring smile. “But it will not hurt you. I promise.”
Starscream studied him.
“You are young.”
Bumblebee blinked. “Uh… compared to you? Probably.”
“You promise strongly for young one.”
Bumblebee’s smile softened. “Ratchet saved my life. You saved his. So yes. I promise strongly.”
For a long moment, Starscream said nothing.
The portal hummed.
The canyon wind dragged rain through the green light.
Then Starscream looked at Ratchet one more time.
“Doctor goes first?”
Ratchet gave him the driest look he could manage while barely standing. “I would prefer not to be used as portal-testing equipment.”
Despite the tension, Bumblebee gave a quiet laugh.
Starscream did not seem to understand the joke, but the sound made him relax by the smallest degree.
Optimus adjusted his hold on Ratchet and stepped toward the bridge.
“I will go first,” he said.
“No,” Ratchet snapped. “You are supporting me.”
“Then we go together.”
Ratchet huffed. “Stubborn Prime.”
Optimus’s optics warmed. “Stubborn medic.”
Together, they stepped into the light.
Starscream lurched forward half a step before he could stop himself, as if expecting the portal to devour them. His claws carved lines in the mud.
Then Optimus and Ratchet vanished.
Starscream hissed.
Bumblebee held out his hand. “They are safe. We go through, and they will be right there.”
Starscream stared at the smaller Autobot’s hand.
His claws hovered over it, uncertain.
Bumblebee did not move.
Slowly, Starscream took his hand.
Carefully.
So carefully Bumblebee’s spark hurt.
Then, with his wings held tight and every cable in his frame tense, Starscream stepped into the green light.
The world folded.
For one terrible instant, Starscream felt nothing beneath his pedes.
No stone.
No mud.
No cave.
No river.
Only light, motion, and the impossible sensation of being pulled apart and put back together before fear could become a scream.
He came out the other side with a snarl.
The Ark rose around him.
Starscream staggered one step and slammed a clawed servo against the nearest wall, leaving shallow scratches in the metal before he realized what he had done. His optics flared wide.
He had never seen anything like it.
The canyon had been stone, water, mud, and sky. The cave had been crystal leaves and old shadows. Even Cybertron, in the fractured memories that still lived somewhere deep within him, had been open heights, wild regions, nests in cliffs, hunting grounds, and ancient cities that breathed with light.
But this—
This was a world inside a world.
The Ark was warm.
That was the first thing Starscream noticed.
Warm air moved through the halls in steady currents, not the cold breath of caves or the damp wind of the river. The floor beneath his pedes was smooth, solid, and humming faintly with life. Lights glowed overhead in ordered lines. Consoles blinked along the walls. Distant engines pulsed like a giant spark buried deep within the ship.
Voices filled the space.
So many voices.
Autobots turned as the ground bridge closed behind them. For a moment, relief drowned out everything else.
“Ratchet!”
“He’s alive!”
“By Primus, they found him!”
Several mechs surged forward at once, but stopped short when Pharma and First Aid pushed through the gathering crowd with medical gear already in hand.
Pharma’s optics widened at the sight of Ratchet’s condition. “What in the AllSpark happened to you?”
Ratchet attempted dignity.
It was difficult while leaning against Optimus, covered in dried mud, wild splints, crushed plant matter, and river stains.
“I fell,” he said curtly.
First Aid stared at the branch-and-stone braces around his arm. “You fell into a river and came back wrapped in botany?”
“Less commentary. More medical care.”
Pharma moved to Ratchet’s other side, scanning quickly. His expression sharpened with professional concern. “Multiple fractures. Deep plating damage. Contamination risk. Whoever packed these wounds kept the river filth out.”
First Aid leaned closer, fascinated despite himself. “These herbs are actually reducing inflammation.”
“I am aware,” Ratchet said. “And I will be more impressed after I am lying down.”
Optimus looked toward the medics. “Take him to Medbay.”
“I can walk,” Ratchet protested.
Pharma and First Aid exchanged one look.
Then First Aid said, “Of course you can.”
They took his arms anyway.
Ratchet grumbled the entire time, but he did not pull away.
Starscream watched him go.
His frame shifted forward instinctively, claws flexing as if to follow. The crowd of Autobots between them made him stop. Too many bodies. Too many optics. Too much metal, warmth, movement, scent, and sound.
Every Autobot was looking at him now.
Curiosity.
Suspicion.
Awe.
Concern.
Starscream’s wings pressed tight to his back again. He turned his helm slowly, taking in the number of them.
“Pack is large,” he murmured.
Bumblebee heard him.
He had stayed at Starscream’s side after the bridge, mostly because letting the mysterious giant stand alone in the middle of a crowd seemed like a terrible idea.
“Yeah,” Bumblebee said gently. “There are a lot of us.”
Starscream’s optics moved from one Autobot to another. “Feeding all is difficult.”
Bumblebee blinked.
“What?”
“Large pack eats much.” Starscream said it as though it were obvious. His gaze moved toward a pair of minibots whispering near a doorway. “Small ones. Young ones. Injured ones. Hunters must be strong.”
Bumblebee stared for a moment, then softened.
Oh.
He did not mean supply lines.
Not really.
He meant survival.
He meant caves and scarcity and making sure little mouths ate before adults did. He meant a world where a pack lived or died by what its hunters could bring home.
“We have enough energon,” Bumblebee said carefully. “We are okay.”
Starscream looked doubtful.
Bumblebee gave his hand a small tug. “Come on. Let me show you the washracks.”
Starscream looked down at him.
“Wash… racks?”
“Where we clean ourselves.”
Starscream’s gaze dropped briefly to his own frame, to the mud on his legs, the mineral dust on his armor, the river streaks still dried along his claws. Then he looked toward the hall where Ratchet had vanished.
“Doctor?”
“He is going to Medbay,” Bumblebee said. “Pharma and First Aid will take care of him. Ratchet will probably yell at them, which means he is feeling better.”
Starscream considered that with solemn seriousness.
“Yelling means alive.”
Bumblebee’s mouth twisted. “With Ratchet? Yeah. Pretty much.”
Starscream accepted this.
Bumblebee led him through the corridor, still holding his hand.
The sight was strange enough to make several Autobots fall silent as they passed.
Bumblebee was not small, not truly, but beside Starscream he looked young in a way that had nothing to do with age. Starscream towered over him by so much that every doorway seemed to question whether it would allow him through. His long legs moved with careful precision. His claws stayed curled inward, as if he feared damaging the ship by accident. His strange wings remained folded tightly, but the tips twitched whenever a new sound echoed from the walls.
He stared at everything.
The ceiling lights.
The doors sliding open.
The datapads in passing servos.
The heating vents.
A cleaning drone that rolled across the floor and nearly caused Starscream to bare his denta until Bumblebee quickly said, “Not alive. Not a threat. Just cleans the floor.”
Starscream watched the drone disappear around a corner.
“Small metal bug.”
“Sure,” Bumblebee said. “Small metal bug.”
They reached the washracks.
The doors opened with a soft hiss.
Starscream stopped again.
Inside, warm vapor drifted through the tiled space. Water systems lined the wall. Polished metal fixtures gleamed under soft lighting. Towels were stacked neatly on shelves. The air smelled faintly of cleaning solvent, heated water, and fresh energon-grade soap.
Starscream stared as though Bumblebee had brought him into a palace.
“Inside is warm,” Starscream said slowly.
“Yeah. The Ark has heating.”
Starscream’s optics shifted toward him. “All places warm?”
“Most of them.”
“For whole pack?”
Bumblebee nodded. “For everyone.”
Starscream looked back at the washracks.
Something quiet moved across his face.
Not envy.
Not exactly.
Wonder, perhaps.
Or grief for every cold night that could have been warm if the world had been kinder.
“Come on,” Bumblebee said softly. “We will get you cleaned up.”
Starscream entered the washracks with cautious steps, his claws clicking faintly against the floor.
As the door closed behind them, the corridor outside erupted.
Not in panic.
In questions.
Autobots gathered around Optimus before he had even fully turned from watching Bumblebee disappear with their strange guest. Prowl was the first to reach him, optics sharp and posture controlled. Jazz came behind him, expression open with curiosity. Ironhide crossed his arms, looking toward the hallway with obvious distrust. Wheeljack leaned against the wall, trying very hard to look casual and failing because his optics were bright with interest.
“What in the Pit was that?” Ironhide demanded.
“Tall drink of ancient nightmare, if we’re naming things,” Jazz said.
Wheeljack’s mouthplates quirked. “I kinda like him.”
“Of course you do,” Arcee muttered.
Prowl ignored them all. “Optimus, identify the unknown mech.”
Optimus remained silent for a moment.
His optics lingered on the corridor where Ratchet had been taken, then shifted toward the washracks. Relief still sat heavily in his frame, battling exhaustion, grief, and the strange new concern Starscream had brought with him.
“He is called Starscream,” Optimus said at last.
Several Autobots reacted at once.
“Starscream?” Jazz repeated.
“Never heard of him,” Ironhide said.
Prowl’s optics narrowed. “No faction marker. Unknown frame classification. Unusual wing structure. Possible aerial variant.”
“Possible?” Wheeljack said. “Those wings didn’t look like any flyer I’ve seen.”
Optimus inclined his helm. “Ratchet believes he has lived in the wilderness for a very long time.”
“How long is very long?” Arcee asked.
Optimus’s expression darkened with thought.
“Long enough to speak in archaic patterns. Long enough to treat severe injuries with wild medicine. Long enough to see the Autobots as a pack, and me as its Alpha.”
Jazz let out a low whistle. “That’s old.”
“Or damaged,” Ironhide said bluntly.
Arcee’s optics flicked toward him.
Optimus did not rebuke him, but his voice became quieter. Firmer.
“Perhaps both.”
That settled over them.
Some of the curiosity faded.
Starscream was no longer only strange.
He was tragic.
Prowl glanced toward Medbay. “He saved Ratchet?”
Optimus’s optics softened.
“Yes. He pulled him from the river. According to Ratchet, the current should have killed him. Starscream entered the water, recovered him, carried him to a hidden cave, treated his injuries, and kept him alive until we found them.”
Ironhide’s posture shifted, some of the suspicion giving way to reluctant respect.
“That river nearly took two Vehicons apart on impact,” Bulkhead said from behind them, voice rough. “And he went in after Ratchet?”
Optimus nodded.
Wheeljack pushed off the wall. “That takes guts.”
“That takes strength,” Prowl corrected. “And knowledge of the terrain.”
Jazz looked down the hall. “And a reason to care.”
No one answered that immediately.
Optimus remembered Starscream’s hand resting against the low marks carved into the cave wall. Ratchet’s quiet explanation. Cubs gone out to play. Sky broke. Others left. I stayed.
His spark grew heavy.
“He was waiting for someone,” Optimus said.
Prowl’s attention sharpened. “Who?”
Optimus looked toward the closed washrack doors.
“His cubs.”
Silence fell.
Even Wheeljack stopped fidgeting.
Arcee’s expression shifted, grief touching the edges of her optics. Bumblebee had told them enough on the way back for the word to carry weight.
Ironhide looked uncomfortable. “Sparklings?”
“Ratchet believes so,” Optimus said. “Or something close enough that correcting the word would be cruelty.”
Jazz’s voice dropped. “And they never came back.”
“No,” Optimus said. “They did not.”
The Ark seemed quieter for a moment, as if the ship itself understood it was sheltering something wounded and ancient inside its walls.
Prowl recovered first because Prowl always recovered first.
“What precautions should we take?”
Optimus looked at him.
Prowl continued, calm but not cold. “He is unknown. Strong enough to retrieve Ratchet from lethal terrain. Clawed. Possible aerial. Unfamiliar with modern technology. Socially adapted to pack hierarchy. Potentially unstable under stress.”
“Prowl,” Arcee warned.
“No,” Optimus said gently. “He is correct to ask.”
He looked at each of them in turn.
“We do not crowd him. We do not threaten him. We do not touch him without permission. We do not mock the way he speaks or the customs he understands.”
Ironhide shifted, then nodded once.
Optimus continued. “He trusted Ratchet first. Then Bumblebee. He accepted my authority because Ratchet explained that I lead this pack. For now, we honor that framework. It may be the only thing that feels familiar to him.”
Jazz nodded slowly. “So we treat him like a rescued wild mech with trauma older than our maps.”
“That is one way to phrase it,” Prowl said.
Wheeljack looked toward the washracks again. “What do we do with him after he’s cleaned up?”
Optimus’s optics turned toward Medbay.
“First, Ratchet receives proper care. Then, when he is able, we ask him what he learned.”
“And Starscream?” Arcee asked.
Optimus was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, “Starscream saved one of ours. Until he gives us reason to believe otherwise, he is under our protection.”
The words carried through the corridor with the weight of command.
Not a suggestion.
Not a temporary mercy.
A decision.
The gathered Autobots accepted it in their own ways: Prowl with a sharp nod, Jazz with a softer expression, Bulkhead with a relieved exhale, Arcee with wary compassion, Ironhide with reluctant silence, Wheeljack with curiosity still burning behind his optics.
From somewhere beyond the washrack doors, there came a sudden metallic crash.
Then Bumblebee’s voice, quick and alarmed.
“No, no, that is just the solvent dispenser! You do not have to hiss at it!”
A low, offended growl answered him.
Several Autobots stared.
Wheeljack grinned.
Optimus closed his optics for one brief, exhausted second.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, the Prime almost smiled.
For the first time since Ratchet had fallen into the river, the sound that moved through the Ark was not grief.
It was life returning.
The wait outside Medbay stretched longer than any of them liked.
Optimus stood near the sealed doors, silent and immovable, but every Autobot who knew him could see the tension in his frame. His hands remained folded behind his back, yet his fingers flexed once every few minutes, as though some part of him still expected the river to take Ratchet away again.
Bulkhead paced until Prowl told him, very calmly, that if he continued scraping the floor, he would be assigned to repair it.
Bulkhead stopped.
Then started pacing again in a smaller line.
Arcee leaned against the wall with her arms crossed, optics fixed on the Medbay doors. Jazz sat on a crate nearby, quieter than usual. Ironhide pretended not to worry and failed so completely that even Wheeljack did not tease him for it.
The Ark hummed around them, warm and alive.
But the corridor felt colder than it should have.
Then the Medbay doors opened.
Every helm turned.
Pharma stepped out first, wiping energon residue from his servos. First Aid stood just behind him, holding a datapad filled with scan results, his optics wide with the stunned fascination of a medic who had seen something impossible and was still deciding whether to be horrified or impressed.
Optimus moved immediately.
“Ratchet?”
Pharma lifted one hand before the Prime could ask more. “He will live.”
The relief that passed through the corridor was almost physical.
Bulkhead’s shoulders dropped. Arcee’s optics shuttered for a long second. Jazz bowed his helm with a soft exhale. Even Prowl’s posture loosened by a fraction, which, from Prowl, was practically an emotional collapse.
Optimus closed his optics.
For one brief moment, he looked less like a Prime and more like a mech who had been given back a piece of his spark he had already begun mourning.
“Thank Primus,” he said quietly.
Pharma’s expression, however, did not soften.
“Do not thank Primus yet,” he said. “Thank whoever treated him before we reached him.”
That made the corridor still again.
Optimus looked up. “Starscream.”
Pharma nodded, though the motion carried more disbelief than certainty. “If that is the name of the mech who dragged him from the river, then yes. Ratchet’s injuries were severe. Multiple fractures, torn armor, deep lacerations, contamination from mud and river debris, coolant loss, energon depletion, impact trauma. By all reasonable expectations, he should have either drowned, bled out, gone into system collapse, or developed a catastrophic infection before we ever found him.”
Bulkhead’s face twisted.
“But he didn’t,” Arcee said.
“No.” Pharma glanced down at the datapad. “He did not. Because someone kept his wounds sealed, his limbs stabilized, and his nanites active long enough for proper medical intervention.”
First Aid stepped forward, unable to contain himself. “The method was archaic. Extremely archaic. Branch splints, stone braces, dried mud seals, plant poultices—”
Ironhide stared. “Mud?”
“Sterilized mud,” First Aid corrected automatically. Then paused. “Somehow.”
Wheeljack’s optics brightened. “That’s a thing?”
“It was a thing,” Pharma said. “Before modern field sealants. Before synthetic regenerative mesh. Before half the medical procedures Ratchet complains we no longer teach correctly.”
Jazz raised a brow. “Ratchet complains about every medical procedure.”
“And sometimes,” Pharma said, “the miserable old glitch has a point.”
No one argued.
Pharma turned the datapad so the others could see the scan lines and chemical readings scrolling across it. “The plants used on Ratchet’s wounds are the part I cannot explain.”
Prowl stepped closer. “Identify them.”
“I can identify some of them.” Pharma’s expression tightened. “But only from archived medical texts. These strains of Cybertronian flora were believed extinct long before the war reached Earth.”
The silence that followed was sharper this time.
Arcee looked toward the direction of the washracks. “Extinct?”
“Yes,” First Aid said, voice quieter now. “Not rare. Not hard to cultivate. Extinct. Lost in planetary damage, energon poisoning, and the collapse of old wild regions.”
Wheeljack let out a low whistle. “So our cave mech has access to dead plants.”
“Apparently,” Pharma said. “And knows how to use them.”
Optimus’s optics darkened with thought. “Ratchet said Starscream had lived there a very long time.”
“Then Ratchet may have been understating the matter.” Pharma tapped one line on the datapad. “But the plants are not the only anomaly.”
Prowl’s attention sharpened. “Continue.”
Pharma looked up at them all.
“Ratchet was fed Pure Energon.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then the corridor erupted.
“What?”
“Pure Energon?”
“That’s impossible.”
“On Earth?”
“Are you certain?”
Pharma’s optics narrowed. “I am a medic, not a rumor generator. Yes, I am certain.”
First Aid held the datapad tighter, as if the numbers might run away from him. “Not processed. Not diluted. Not synthetic. Not standard blue. Not red. No contamination markers. No stabilizing additives. The sample traces in Ratchet’s system were clean, liquid, energy-rich Pure Energon.”
Ironhide looked genuinely disturbed. “Where would a bot living in a cave get Pure Energon?”
“That,” Pharma said, “is an excellent question.”
Optimus grew very still.
Ratchet’s words returned to him: cave, river, waiting, cubs, sky broke.
Prowl’s optics narrowed into calculation. “Could Starscream have hidden reserves?”
“Perhaps,” Pharma said. “But not like any storage method we recognize. Ratchet said that before Starscream gave him the medicine in the hollowed stone cup, he made him drink something directly from his hands.”
Bulkhead blinked. “From his hands?”
Pharma nodded. “Ratchet was half-conscious. He remembers being pulled from the river, carried, and forced to drink. The later doses came mixed with herbs in a carved stone vessel. Whatever Starscream gave him, it was so pure and so energy-dense that Ratchet’s repair nanites activated at full capacity without sending him into depletion shock.”
First Aid looked both thrilled and terrified. “It kept his systems from crashing. His nanites had enough fuel to respond to the injuries before the contamination spread. Without that…”
He did not finish.
He did not have to.
Optimus lowered his gaze.
Starscream had not simply pulled Ratchet from the river.
He had fought death for him with claws, extinct medicine, and impossible energon.
The Autobots exchanged looks, and all of them carried the same unspoken thought.
Who was Starscream?
Not what he claimed to be.
Not what Ratchet had first assumed.
A lost wild Cybertronian, yes.
But a lost wild Cybertronian with extinct flora, ancient medical knowledge, strange wings, claws too natural to be modifications, and access to Pure Energon?
That was something else.
Something much older than their first fears.
Before anyone could speak, a door hissed open down the corridor.
Bumblebee emerged from the washracks first.
He was soaked.
Completely soaked.
Water dripped from his helm, ran down his faceplates, streamed off his shoulders, and pooled beneath his pedes. His expression was the exhausted, wide-opticked look of a mech who had survived a battle no one had warned him about.
Jazz stared at him.
“Bee.”
Bumblebee lifted one finger. “Before anyone asks, I had the situation mostly under control.”
Behind him, Starscream stepped into the corridor.
Every Autobot forgot how to speak.
Clean, he looked entirely different.
The cave dust was gone. The river mud had been washed from his legs. The mineral stains had been cleared from the seams of his armor. Without grime dulling him, without shadow hiding half his frame, Starscream no longer looked gray.
He was silver.
Not the flat gray of old plating, not the faded color of neglect, but true silver—bright, cool, and luminous beneath the Ark’s lights. His armor caught the glow and held it, shimmering faintly with each careful movement. Across that silver were accents of deep crimson red, rich and elegant, tracing the lines of his frame like old fire beneath polished metal.
Even the scars seemed different now.
Not gone.
Never gone.
But revealed as history rather than filth.
His wings, still unusual and folded too tightly against his back, carried the same silver sheen, edged in crimson so dark it looked almost regal. His claws, now clean, were pale and sharp, curved with a precision that made them seem less like weapons and more like the natural ending of his hands.
He looked less like a castaway dragged from the wilderness.
He looked like something ancient that had been mistaken for ruin because no one had thought to wash the dust of centuries away.
Starscream, for his part, looked profoundly pleased.
His wings gave a small, contained flick. His optics were brighter. He stood a little taller, long neck arched with cautious pride as warm vapor still curled faintly from his armor.
Bumblebee pointed back at him with both hands.
“He liked the hot water.”
Starscream’s helm tilted. “Warm rain inside walls.”
“Shower,” Bumblebee corrected automatically.
“Warm rain,” Starscream repeated, with absolute certainty.
Wheeljack grinned. “I’m with him. That sounds better.”
Bumblebee wiped water from his face. “He liked it so much he refused to leave for ten minutes.”
Starscream’s expression sharpened. “Warm cave good.”
“The washracks are not a cave.”
“Small warm cave.”
Bumblebee opened his mouth, considered arguing, then visibly gave up. “Fine. Small warm cave.”
A few Autobots chuckled softly.
The sound died when Starscream’s optics flicked toward them, wary again, but not frightened this time. More confused. As if laughter was something he remembered but did not fully trust in a room full of strangers.
Optimus stepped forward slowly.
Starscream watched him.
“You look well,” Optimus said.
Starscream considered this, then glanced toward Bumblebee.
“Young one poured warm rain,” he said, as if reporting successful medical treatment.
Bumblebee looked proud despite being drenched. “I helped.”
“You got soaked,” Arcee said.
“I helped while getting soaked.”
Pharma, still holding the datapad, stared at Starscream with new intensity.
Starscream noticed.
His claws curled slightly.
Ratchet would have snapped at them all for staring.
Since Ratchet was in Medbay, Optimus did it for him.
“Give him space.”
The Autobots shifted back at once.
Starscream’s posture eased by a fraction.
Then Bumblebee coughed.
“Oh, also.” He looked at Pharma. “He tried to eat the solvent.”
The entire corridor went silent.
Pharma blinked.
“The solvent,” he repeated.
Bumblebee nodded. “The cleaning solvent. Because it smelled good.”
Starscream lifted his chin with quiet dignity. “Sweet.”
“It is not food,” Bumblebee said.
“Smelled like food.”
“It smelled like industrial-grade polish.”
“Sweet polish.”
First Aid made a strangled sound that might have been horror.
Pharma pinched the bridge of his nose. “Did he ingest any?”
“No,” Bumblebee said quickly. “I stopped him.”
Starscream looked faintly offended. “Young one took sweet bottle.”
“Because sweet bottle would have poisoned you.”
Starscream’s optics narrowed. “You do not know.”
“I do know.”
“Did not taste.”
“I did not need to taste it!”
Wheeljack leaned toward Jazz. “I like him more every minute.”
Jazz murmured, “Same, but I’m concerned about what that says about us.”
Optimus’s mouth softened almost into a smile before his gaze returned to Starscream. There was still too much unknown. Too many impossible details. Pure Energon. Extinct plants. A cave made into a den. A mech who called friends pack and waited for cubs beneath a broken sky.
But Starscream stood there clean and warm, holding his claws carefully away from the walls so he would not damage them, looking at the Ark as if every light and every heated corridor was a miracle.
And behind Medbay doors, Ratchet was alive.
That mattered most.
Pharma stepped closer, but stopped at a respectful distance. “Starscream.”
Starscream’s optics fixed on him at once.
Pharma paused, visibly recalculating his approach. “Ratchet is stable.”
The change was immediate.
Starscream’s wings loosened slightly. His claws uncurled.
“Doctor lives?”
“Yes,” Pharma said. “Doctor lives.”
Starscream nodded once, solemn and satisfied.
“Good.”
First Aid’s expression softened despite himself.
Optimus watched the ancient, silver mech absorb that news like it was the only payment he had ever wanted.
Then Starscream looked toward the Medbay doors.
“Can see?”
Pharma hesitated.
Every medic instinct in him wanted to say no. Ratchet needed quiet. Ratchet needed controlled care. Ratchet needed to stop collecting impossible cave strangers who fed him mythical energon and wrapped him in extinct leaves.
But Ratchet had also lived because of this mech.
And Starscream looked at the Medbay door with the tense focus of someone checking whether a rescued member of the pack had survived the night.
Pharma exhaled.
“Briefly,” he said. “And you touch nothing without permission.”
Starscream’s claws folded against his palms.
“Touch nothing.”
Bumblebee leaned closer and whispered, “That includes the medicine cabinets.”
Starscream frowned. “Cabinets smell bad.”
“Good. Keep thinking that.”
Optimus stepped aside, letting Pharma lead Starscream toward Medbay.
As the silver mech passed, the Autobots watched him with new eyes.
Not merely curious now.
Not merely suspicious.
A little awed.
Because the stranger Ratchet had brought home from the river was not just wild.
He was old.
He was impossible.
And somewhere beneath his silver armor, crimson markings, strange wings, and careful claws, he carried secrets that might change everything they thought they knew about Cybertron, Predacons, and the lost things that were never truly gone.