Chapter Text
Thundercracker lives in a shack in the wilderness.
And, yeah, sure, it’s a sturdy, well-insulated metal shack with a three-ton blast door, built to cybertronian scale and fully wired for the zillion monitors he has going all the time, but still a shack. It’s made of old shipping containers packed full of who-knows-what. It sits in the middle of nowhere and nothing.
That’s not dangerous. Not like it would be back home, but it feels wrong. People—seekers—aren’t meant to be solitary. Then again, it’s not like Thundercracker has much choice. The humans don’t want him any closer than he has to be. Skywarp doesn’t want to be closer to them than he has to.
Skywarp doesn’t know what he’s doing here.
Thundercracker gives Skywarp the tour. “—And here’s the energon distiller, and over there is where I keep my scripts, and there’s Buster—hi, Buster. Buster, this is Skywarp. Don’t bite him.”
That won’t be a problem. The little organic animal looks about as dangerous as a rock. Less dangerous, probably. Thundercracker seems expectant, though, and Skywarp allows the thing to rub its chemoreceptors all over the back of his hand.
It’s… Wet. He shudders.
“I don’t know why you keep that thing,” Skywarp says.
“Don’t be mean to Buster.” Thundercracker looks at the dog. “You shouldn’t listen to him, girl. He’ll come around.”
Yeah, sure. Whatever.
Thundercracker sits on the couch he built. When he notices Skywarp looking at it, Thundercracker pats the couch and says, “I tried my hand at sculpture, for a while. It didn’t work out.”
The couch is made of crushed, non-sentient human cars, compacted into layers. That’s… Morbid. Skywarp doesn’t want to think about it very hard, which, fortunately, is something he’s good at.
He can’t think of anything to say. This is getting awkward. He shouldn’t have come. Skywarp’s not sure why he agreed in the first place, except that he does know, and admitting it feels pathetic.
No matter what either of them may or may not have hypothetically done to ruin their relationship, they’re both stuck on this stupid planet. Every day, sunup to sundown, it’s humans, humans, humans. The organics have even got Skywarp counting time like they do. When he’s not fighting off aliens, or wraiths, or other, evil humans—which, compared to the war, is a vacation—there’s not much to do for entertainment.
Flying by yourself gets lonely. Human media doesn’t make any sense. Cybertronian media is thin on the ground, for obvious reasons. He can’t go out for a drink. Skywarp has the choice between talking to the same humans he’s stuck around all day or looking for a fellow cybertronian, but every other non-organic on this dirtball planet is an autobot or pit-damned Soundwave. Which, no. Obviously. Skywarp spends most nights bored out of his mind in a hangar full of non-sentient planes, and if he doesn’t do something, he’ll end up talking to them. Sometimes he just wants to hang out with somebody who isn’t so fragging small.
So, he and Thundercracker had started talking again.
It began as tentative, meaningless conversation over the comms. Complaints about whatever ridiculous thing the humans, Optimus Prime or Starscream has done now. Ol’ Screamer, emperor of the etcetera etcetera and so on. Who’d have ever thought, right?
They don’t talk about Starscream much. That one still hurts.
Before either of them knew it, he and Thundercracker were falling into old patterns. Skywarp sends Thundercracker snapshots of things he sees—the scenery is about all this planet has going for it—and Thundercracker sends him terrible screenplays to critique. Skywarp’s critique is mostly, what are you even doing, TC, human media sucks, but Thundercracker keeps telling him that if he’d just sit down and watch Nurse Whitney with him he’d understand. Skywarp has doubts.
They’ve known each other a long time. It’s natural to fall back into one another’s orbit. It’s not that weird.
It’s totally weird.
“I guess that’s all,” Thundercracker says. “Sorry my place isn’t very big. Uh… Do you want to watch a movie, or… Oh! I could show you my new script. I finished it last night.”
Thundercracker pushes a sheaf of wood-pulp pages into Skywarp’s hands. Skywarp has no choice but to take them. Thundercracker sits back on the couch and Skywarp isn’t sure what to do.
Skywarp reads the first couple of paragraphs. Susan Journeyer arrives at work. Josh Boyfriend wears an attractive set of organic coverings that she admires. There’s a patient not responding to treatment, and a new character introduced: a psychologist, transferred in from another hospital. Skywarp can already tell the psychologist will be the villain. There’s not much room for setup in these stories, and Thundercracker might be many things, but subtle isn’t one of them.
Thundercracker fidgets after a minute of silence. “I guess that’ll take you a while to read. Can I get you anything?”
Skywarp waves Thundercracker off and sits down against the wall. The couch is unsettling. Skywarp doesn’t want to make this more awkward than it already is, though he doesn’t know how it could be. Somewhere in the background, Thundercracker moves around, doing something. Skywarp’s stuck reading… This.
He has to pay attention, too, because Thundercracker will want to hear what he thinks when he’s done.
“You know, I don’t think Boyfriend is a normal human name,” Skywarp says.
Thundercracker doesn’t turn around. “Yeah, I realized that later. But by then I’d already named him, and I’d have to go back and change it. English is hard to get right.”
“It’s phonetic. How hard can it be?”
“That’s why it’s hard, though! You have to say exactly what you mean. There’s no tone. No modifier glyphs. You have to write down what people are thinking and feeling all the time, or it doesn’t make sense. Look at this.”
He pings Skywarp the glyph for {joy}, tagged with self/insincere/deceptive[deliberate].
“It’s obvious, right?” Thundercracker asks, “but, if I want to write it down, it’s a whole paragraph. ‘Of course I’m happy,’ Josh lied, blatantly, and Susan knew that he was lying and he knew that she knew…” He waves a hand. “It’s complicated.”
Skywarp might venture that, maybe, people don’t need to know everything all the time. But he’s never written a story in his life. What does he know?
The thing about Thundercracker’s scripts is that they’re… Well, they’re not horrible, exactly. What they are is clumsy and stilted. No sane living creature would say a word of his dialog. There are good ideas, scattered around. Striking ones, even, that make Skywarp pause and reread to be sure he caught what he thought he did. But every bit is buried ten layers deep under the impenetrable strata of alien media clichés, filtered through a second language, and printed onto dried plant pulp.
If Thundercracker wanted to, he could write in Neocybex instead of messing around with symbols meant to approximate chirps and grunts. He could copy his work onto a datapad or into someone else’s processor. He could strip away the conventions of human television, but he doesn’t.
Skywarp doesn’t get why.
Thundercracker isn’t even writing about humans, not really. Sure, he sort of is, but with the depth of a nanite pattern laid over a warbuild’s anti-tank armour. It’s not like Skywarp is any kind of expert on human culture, but there are patches where Thundercracker obviously didn’t care about getting things right. There’s the way he mis-estimates distance and time; there are the sanded-over places where he forgot for a second that Josh Boyfriend is only handsome like an F-22 fighter jet and can’t become one. Susan gets her makeup touched up at the detailing shop once a week. It’s the little things like that.
Thundercracker’s talking to someone. For a klik, Skywarp thinks it’s the dog. When he peers over the top of the script, though, Thundercracker’s human friend has shown up. What’s her name? Marsha? Melissa?
Marissa. Marissa Faireborn, right. That’s the one. Buster dances around her ankles and Skywarp is glad to leave her to it. Better her than him.
Then Marissa looks up and catches him watching. Skywarp goes back to reading, quickly, and pretends she’s not there. He hopes he won’t have to talk to her.
Thundercracker and Marissa is a relationship Skywarp can’t get a handle on. On the surface it’s straightforward enough: just like the humans Skywarp hangs around with, they’re half soldiers and half handlers, there to point him at targets, keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t go getting any big ideas.
Thundercracker seems to like her, though.
It’s obvious that, if Thundercracker’s patterned Josh Boyfriend on himself, Marissa is Susan. They have the same long, brown mane, the same muscular build—Skywarp assumes that’s muscular for a human, anyway—and a handful of specific mannerisms that Skywarp sees on her now. The way she pushes her hair back over her shoulder. The way she sits. Skywarp isn’t sure what to do with the realization and keeps half an eye on her, surreptitiously.
It’s the loneliness, Skywarp guesses. It has to be. They aren’t meant to exist alone, seekers especially; it’s not a surprise that, abandoned by his people, Thundercracker latched onto whatever he could get. The human. The dog. Skywarp can’t claim to be any better. He trusted Galvatron and the rest to wire him into a teleportation rig, like some kind of idiot. Look how that turned out.
The script in Skywarp’s hand is getting strange, but strange in a way he can’t put his finger on. The psychologist is evil, as predicted. Susan is trying to protect her patient from him as Josh runs interference. Skywarp can almost hear the tropes screaming as they’re forced into new and unfamiliar shapes. He feels like he should understand what Thundercracker is getting at, but he doesn’t. As far as he knows, a psychologist is a type of therapist. Cybertron has those, too; Thundercracker wouldn’t misunderstand that, so what in the world…?
Things click into place as Skywarp realizes that when Thundercracker writes psychologist, what he means is mnemosurgeon. The other hospital is a thinly disguised relinquishment clinic.
Yikes. Skywarp sets the script down in a hurry.
He’ll just pick out a different one to read, and hope Thundercracker won’t notice. Thundercracker will make him look at all these things eventually, after all. Skywarp grabs another sheaf of organic flimsies from the bottom of the stack and peels back a couple of pages.
It’s a war story about a soldier, betrayed by his comrades, shot in the back, and left for dead on a foreign battlefield. Nope. Nope. No.
Skywarp might be the dumb one, but he’s not an idiot.
Maybe there’s a reason that Thundercracker writes in English. Maybe there’s a reason he keeps the stories in wood pulp, chemical ink and his own head. It’s ephemeral. It doesn’t matter.
Maybe that’s the point.
If Thundercracker wrote in Neocybex, if he handed out scripts on datapads or in softcopy, versions would survive. For millions of years, until the heat death of the universe, they would survive. Primus knows there are enough copies of Megatron’s early poetry floating around, no matter how the functionists tried to obliterate them.
Copies that Megatron would probably rather not see the light of day, at this point.
But… Wood pulp. Humanity. Skywarp has guns older than human culture. In a hundred years the paper will be ash, the writing itself will be vaguely remembered at best, and everyone who’s read the scripts will be dead.
Except for Skywarp.
The realization sets up an unsteadiness somewhere in his spark.
When Thundercracker talks up his scripts, it’s to humans. He makes them sound worse than they are, coated in tropes like lacquer for all that they have something true underneath. Maybe the clumsiness is deliberate. Maybe he doesn’t want the stories to be remembered. The only other cybertronian that Skywarp knows has been offered a chance to read one in any seriousness is Soundwave, and both Skywarp and Thundercracker know Soundwave does not care about anything that has to do with humans, at all.
It’s self-sabotage. It’s deliberate. Why?
Why is he doing this?
Why show them to Skywarp, who will read them and remember?
By the time Thundercracker gets around to paying attention to Skywarp, Skywarp’s got a different script open in front of his face and is fully absorbed in pretending to read it.
“What do you think, Skywarp?” Thundercracker asks.
“I haven’t finished yet,” Skywarp says. “It’s really… Imaginative? Like, here, where you…”
Skywarp focuses on what’s on the page in front of him and freezes. He didn’t look at what he was grabbing. He figured that it couldn’t be any worse than the war story he probably wasn’t supposed to see.
It’s amazing how wrong he was.
This one is more like prose than script, and even more flowery than usual. It’s blatantly explicit. Susan Journeyer and the mysterious newcomer Ciel Weft have Josh Boyfriend pinned to a human berth. Soft music plays. Susan kisses Josh and tells him to behave while Ciel reaches down and—
Skywarp stares. He forces his vocalizer online in a burst of static.
“TC,” he says, “I’m, like, ninety percent sure that humans don’t have interface cables.”
Thundercracker squawks and almost knocks him over trying to get the script out of his hands.