Fic: Homecoming
Title: Homecoming
Characters: Crosshairs, Ratchet, Hound
Verse: Bayverse, Pre AoE,
Genres: Action, adventure, angst
Disclaimer: Not mine as usual.
Summary: Different but familiar all the same, Crosshairs has walked on thousands of planets just like this one. This is only going to be a temporary stop.
It's wet.
Crosshairs's first impression of the planet. Wet, wet, wet.
Yuck.
Between the trees, his shape is sleek and narrow. Still folded up in his cometary mode, the paratrooper is hot from atmospheric re-entry. Wispy steam curls round his alien form as his plating slowly cooled. Crosshairs does not move as he waits. Transforming too soon after a planetary jump is a good way to shove heated metal near your more delicate internals and cook 'em. Besides, he'd picked a good spot. He isn't about to bothered...any time soon.
He'd arrived in the local solar system a couple of cycles ago, following a long range transmission from Optimus Prime he'd received out in deep space. Crosshairs had been bored enough that he'd actually bothered to read the missive. Apparently, the esteemed Autobot leader, Lord Freedom himself was summoning the remaining Autobot forces to some backwater planet out in the middle of nowhere to defend it.
Oh and the Allspark was gone, so, you know. Quest over and all that. We're doomed to extinction. But that's cool, cuz we have these new fleshy pals, so everyone should come chill on this planet we found and stop the fragged off Decepticons from murdering it.
After a lot of contemplation, "Pffffft, Prime?" and thought, "Pffffffffffft, Prime!" Crosshairs set his course. He had nothing better going on right now for him, -he had been in a rare lull of no combat for about a vorn- so, sure. Yeah. Whatever.
(Plus, there had been some nagging from his damn coding but Crosshairs was kinda all meeeeh with his life at that particular point in time.)
There might have also been Hound with his obscenely large gun pressed against Crosshairs's head to assist with the decision making.
Crosshairs had found the old bot way past some place he can't be fragged remembering, murdering a Con patrol. Or maybe the purple badges were murdering Hound. It was really unclear. End point: Crosshairs killed the Decepticons (not rescue, because both Crosshairs and Hound would rather eat a bullet than admit that, though for different reasons. Hound because of his pride, Crosshairs because he doesn't know what altruism even means) and the two Autobts had been sorta drifting through the 'verse ever since. Crosshairs quite frankly would have preferred to abandon the loud, rusty pile of gears he'd acquired but he could also see the value of having back-up, rather than toughing it alone.
So yeah, Hound had been all upset over the glow cube. Crosshairs wasn't. Weapons had been drawn, mostly Hound's. Crosshairs had shut the frag up and folded pretty quickly after that.
He might have cared more at the loss of the Very Important Sacred Relic of Sacredness if you know, Crosshairs had ever had a life outside war. He's never known their species to be out of conflict with something and had privately assumed that this was the end point everyone was aiming for. Otherwise, why else had they kept on fighting to the point of no recovery? His fellow Autobots might say for peace and freedom or loyalty to Prime (in Hound's case) but Crosshairs fights because he's never known any other reality and doesn't know what he'd do with himself if he stopped.
The only thing Cybertron had ever really done for him was give him spark...then shipped him off to fight on some colony in Primus knows where. The paratrooper hadn't even been brought online on Cybertron. The first step he took on his home planet was when his unit had been recalled to fight in the growing civil war. So Cybertron and he? Not exactly on speaking terms or seeing optic to optic.
Which is why, when they gets close enough to the third planet to start exchanging messages with the Earth team and someone lets slip that oh, hey we kinda just murdered Cybertron to save this planet, Crosshairs simply rolls with it and accepts this news with little fanfare. Well, took 'em damn well long enough. Quite frankly, he's surprised it didn't happen sooner. He's spent more of his life off it and feels no strong ties to a home he was supposed to be fighting for. Nor does he care much about the planet that Prime seems to believe is their new one.
Hound, of course, had been furious and distraught. Fortunately, being tucked away in cometary mode made it hard for him to threaten Crosshairs with anything which is normally how he deals with his emotions. The paratrooper had been free to prod away at all the things that normally gave Hound a twitchy trigger finger without the fun of getting a weapon shoved in his face.
Once they were in comm range though, Crosshairs had started listening to the planet below. They'd been given a datapack with a few native languages, so he put that to good use. The internet is a confusing mess of conflicting information but one thing stood out clear.
Humans really don't like Cybertronians.
Not the Decepticons alone. All of 'em. The 'Bots were just as bad as 'em to the majority of the species. Crosshairs is fine with this, he doesn't like organics anyway (might have something to do with being brought online for the sole purpose to kill 'em) but what he doesn't understand is why Prime wants to stay here when the natives don't even want them there.
Oh. Right, Decepticons had a hard on of hate for the little things. The local languages interweave in his processor, and he lets them in, soaking it all up. His core programming rejects it because they built him slightly ethnocentric (well, they built him to go murder aliens, so yeah, slightly is the mildest word for it) but he's an old pro at giving his core programming the middle finger and pushing past it, doing the opposite of what it wants. (Later, his programming adjusts and mollifies itself that knowing how to speak alien will be important when he has to murder said aliens. Crosshairs doesn't doubt that they'll turn on the Bots but that's cuz Crosshairs doesn't really trust anyone who isn't himself).
So when the planetside Autobots direct them down, landing point picked and everything, welcome party all sorted, Crosshairs decides to land himself several states over in a swamp in Louisiana. Something about a group called NEST meeting them and blah, blah, blah, joint military operations between bots and humans and whatever. Humans don't want them here and he doesn't want to his first moments on their stupid planet to be sullied with their presence. Nor does he want them near him when he's vulnerable, folded up in cometary form and waiting to cool down.
So yeah, Crosshairs has a few disgruntled bots on the line, demanding to know where the frag he is and why the hell he overshot the flight path. Crosshairs internally shrugs.
::Looked boring:: he tells Ratchet, ignoring Hound's assurances that he will be losing his head next time the old soldier sees him. That channel is filled with slurs and insults at him, so Crosshairs just shuts it off.
::Boring-? So you decided to land in a swamp in the middle of nowhere?:: Ratchet demands. ::Get out of there before you rust. You will not be repaired if you do!::
Symmetric lines with exacting precision break up what had previously been whole and smooth silver metal as Crosshairs unfolds. The Autobot twists and transforms, internal gears rearranging themselves as he gains his root mode. The mech towers over the undergrowth, muddy water sloshing in to fill the open gaps in his feet. He ignores it as he takes stock of himself on this new alien world. He shakes himself, flexes. Works the kinks out of his frame from all that time spent in cometary form.
A brief pause. The wildlife holding its breath as it senses the presence of something that did not belong to their planet. Crosshairs crouches over, his 'coattails' dragging in the mud. The dirt doesn't bother him. War is never clean and he'd been fighting all his life. Alien air circulates through his intakes, heady with the scent of this new planet.
It is not home.
It's green and it smells and when Crosshairs places a foot down on firmer earth, it squelches beneath him. Mud clings to him and dirt, and he's barely even been on this planet but he's already filthy. Crosshairs reaches out and when he grabs a tree branch, testing his grip on it, it crumbles at his lightest touch. Something moves in the undergrowth, fleeing away from the big bad alien. The fragile earth beneath his feet compresses with his every step. It's nothing like the metal his kind was meant to walk on. Different but familiar all the same, Crosshairs has walked on thousands of planets just like this one, as the war had spread, before turning its focus on finding the Allspark. This is only a temporary stop, Crosshairs knows. Because there's always a battle somewhere, always more fighting to be found. The war -they say it's over but Crosshairs knowns its not- won't stay here forever. The only difference between this world and the others is that Prime seems to think that this is their new home.
And then there are voices on his comms, unfamiliar ones and they've got orders for him. A smirk curls at the edges of his lip plates as he ignores them.
It's not home.
Then again, it's not like Crosshairs even knows what home is.