Small Masterpiece drabble...
It was a quiet day. Patrols went on without interruption of the Decepticon nature, friendly matches between the soldiers came off with neither party needing to come to the med-bay, and the humans-Sector Seven agents, military personnel, and others-were actually being quiet and calm for once.
The quiet made him more nervous than anyone could know. It was the calm before the storm. The tension hung thickly in the air, and while his comrades tried to ignore it or to laugh it off, he was coping by compulsively arranging and rearranging his tools in his med-bay.
When that was complete, he cleaned his workspace from top to bottom, ignoring the one too many memories of energon and blood and worse spilling on the now-gleaming floors. These four walls had seen much, just as he did.
Perhaps that was one of the reasons why he liked to sequester himself in there.
That, and because some defective son-of-a-glitch would come staggering to the medbay in the oddest of hours, and it was best if the CMO was actually there.
Both humans and Cybertronians liked to think that they were immortal.
Nobody was immortal.
He knew how breakable everyone-Autobot or human-was. He was a healer, but more often than not, the bodies that ended up on his table were beyond repair.
Decepticon, Autobot, human, femme, mech, cassette, male, female-they were all the same, a fact that could be seen clearly once they were dead.
He cleaned and arranged and rearranged, but the tension would not leave him alone. It was a heavy feeling, constantly looking over his shoulder, whispering fears of the future and tears of the past into his processor.
Part of the tension was, of course, Witwicky and Banes, the only two beings who knew the location of the Allspark.
They had been off of the Autobot radar for weeks now.
Granted, there had been times that the Autobots simply lost track of them. But after they disappeared into Sector Seven, only to be found (however twisted and changed) years later, the Autobots had been vigilant about their surveillance. It was rare now that they were simply gone.
It made everyone nervous, made the tension in the air heavier.
Bumblebee had always been worried about those two. Now it bordered on obsession.
And Sunstreaker…Sunstreaker had been acting…not oddly, but…well, he couldn’t fathom what the Pit Sunstreaker was thinking. There were some things he didn’t want to know. Though Sunstreaker’s new ‘hobby’ was now well-known among the Autobots (and no one dared tease him for it), he reserved the luxury of ignorance of the particulars.
Witwicky and Banes…they were the eye of the storm, bringing chaos all around them while remaining smiling and calm themselves.
No wonder the twins seemed to regard them a little higher than they regarded most humans.
He had thought that the Allspark was never meant for organic life. He had been enraged to find out that there was strong evidence that human trials were done.
They didn’t know much about what happened to Witwicky and Banes inside Sector Seven. They just knew that there used to be more. Sector Seven’s goal, it seemed, was to create a generation of soldiers able to withstand the incoming onslaught. Driven by anger and by fear, they had done these things to their children.
The human race, like their own race, was full of kindness, and was also full of cruelty. Perhaps that was the price of sentience, the price of choice-Perceptor might want to investigate whether or not this was a common factor of all sentient beings, but seeing the effects was enough for him.
One by one the subjects had all died, succumbing to the drastic changes and harsh training conditions, until only Witwicky and Banes remained.
He wondered what it was about those two. Did they not understand the danger that they were in? The danger that all of them were in? Why did they continue to prolong this chase? Why did they continue to torment both Autobot and Decepticon, dangling the Allspark in front of their optics before snatching it away again?
They acted as though the world was their playground, the creatures within it their toys, and that annoyed the medic to no end. It scared him too, sometimes, realising that a lot of the time, Witwicky and Banes, and the human race in general, acted more Decepticon than Autobot.
To be fair, a lot of Autobots acted more Decepticon than Autobot too. Many of the original Autobot ideals-chivalry, bravery, protect the innocent and the weak, even at the cost of victory-were thrown out the window when it wasn’t convenient. Those ideals were for old models, like himself and Ironhide, and for dreamers like Bumblebee and Optimus.
He wished that things could be different, but the reality was that it was not a pretty world-not a pretty universe-they lived in.
The dreams and the ideals, at least, kept them sane. And in that respect, they-both humans and Autobot-would never be Decepticon.
And there was hope for Witwicky and Banes yet. None of the original five-Optimus, Jazz, Ironhide, Bumblebee, and himself-had yet given up on the two children, and he wasn’t going to be the first.
There was still something in them of Sam and Mikaela, he knew that for certain.
It was a fact that he tried to keep in mind when the Autobots came across a drone's body, mutilated beyond recognition, and the only way that he knew the identity of the being was through Barricade's anguished howls.