Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Nothing about the first time he’d crossed paths with Onslaught had been particularly unusual, or garnered more from Blast Off than indifference.

He hadn’t liked him. He hadn’t trusted him.

They had been two mechs meeting on neutral ground for the sake of business back then—cold, impersonal business and nothing more.

Onslaught had sought a sniper, Blast Off had sought an employer, and so when an offer from an unknown number dropped into the inbox of his latest comm frequency when he was between jobs yet again, Blast Off took it. Since the offer had been for long-term employment and not merely an one-off assignment, they had arranged a private meeting in a safehouse. A mech with dark plating and motorcycle kibble had arrived to take him up a long flight of stairs and down a stretch of corridors and corners to an office’s door.

Blast Off had waved them off dismissively, not needing to be herded over the threshold like a newspark. He’d gone inside with his helm high and sat himself down in the chair that had been provided, a desk set between him and his potential new boss, whom he eyed skeptically.

He had known the truck was sizing him up too, visor glowing a bright yellow in the shadow of his helm. Onslaught held himself like a mech certain of his own authority.

The meeting took hours as they hammered out the framework for their association and Onslaught spent all of it with his back straight as if his spinal strut had been surgically replaced with an unyielding iron rod, not slouching, his attention sharp and unwavering, strength solid in his build.

In the end, Blast Off got the concessions he insisted on being written in for any long-term job. And Onslaught had won his employment terms and with them, Blast Off’s contract. Blast Off signed his name on the dotted line at the bottom of the datapad Onslaught briskly slid across the desk to him, Onslaught put his own name under it, and that was that.

He was hired.

The negotiations complete, Onslaught arose from his seat and escorted him back to the door. He pressed a hand to a control panel and it opened with a soft whoosh. He turned to Blast Off.

“As I said in my offer, I have no interest in employing anything but mechs who are the best in their area of expertise. I believe we can reach a mutual arrangement where we can be quite useful to each other,” Onslaught told him and held out his hand, palm turned up and open, black fingers uncurled. Blast Off could pick out from where the fluorescent overhead lighting caught on some of them the tiny, barely visible nicks and scuffs lacing the plating that every Cybertronian acquired through the process of daily living, and the outlines of the roughened friction pads on Onslaught’s fingertips, allowing for a better hold on the grip of a gun. “I’m looking forward to working with you.”

Blast Off looked at it, cold and untrusting.

His visor was flat and his masked face gave away nothing.

He took Onslaught’s hand in a brief shake. “I believe the same, sir.”

////

Blast Off couldn’t profess to be terribly impressed by his new teammates in the short time he’d known them so far. And he was decidedly even less impressed by the grimy state of their feet as they walked towards him and right before they could clamber on board his alt mode, Blast Off slammed the cargo hold door shut in Brawl’s face, nearly shearing off the outer jut of his faceplate. Brawl stumbled backwards, arms windmilling, and swore. “What the frag was that for, you stupid boltheaded glitch!”

Blast Off’s speakers dripped disgust.

“Do not refer to me as stupid. Your current state of hygiene is lacking. You want me to permit you to board? Clean yourself up.”

Brawl replied immediately with an explosively foul suggestion that Blast Off go and do something moderately disturbing on top of being highly anatomically inadvisable with a rusted trash compactor, a screwdriver, and a Dead End leaker. Vortex, who had also clearly been wallowing in the same filth that caked the grooves in the tank treads attached to Brawl’s lower legs from the storm that had hit the city earlier that day and left the air thick and humid after it passed over, whistled through his vents jeeringly from behind him. Blast Off mentally marked him down a notch for encouraging the vulgarity.

“If you think crude insults like that will convince me to change my mind, you are sadly mistaken,” Blast Off sneered.

“It’s just a bit of Primus-damned dirt, the frag you gettin’ all prickly over it for!” said Brawl, armor plating flaring out. “Boss said you already agreed to give us a ride there! So, you gotta’ let us on cuz’ we have a mission to do. Right, Vortex?”

“Yup,” said Vortex.

Blast Off didn’t budge. “No.”

Brawl banged a fist on Blast Off’s armor despite the increasingly loud warning rumble emitting from the shuttle’s engines at the action and shouted. “HEY, ONSLAUGHT! The new shuttle is acting up!”

“Acting up? Why, I’ll give you acting up, you lunkheaded—” Blast Off growled.

At the computer terminal on the other side of the hangar with its high vaulted ceiling and a ship bay that Blast Off was docked inside, running through the last of the pre-mission supply checks and double-checks he hadn’t deigned to fill the rest of them in on the details of, Onslaught didn’t look away from the holomap that he had floating up in front of him. Their target’s destination was highlighted in glowing orange and encircled by smaller red squares and circles. “Blast Off’s contract gives him the right to set conditions on who he’ll give a ride to. He’s permitted to determine one of those conditions is a certain level of cleanliness, if he wants, provided it doesn’t interfere with the job. We’re not on a time-sensitive mission.”

“But can’t you just order ‘im to—” Brawl complained.

Blast Off hated the wheedling note in the tank’s rough voice just as much as he hated Vortex encouraging the vulgarity and cut in. “I was hired for my ability as a long range assault specialist, not for the uses of my alt mod. That I am willing to provide transportation for this team is an additional service I can withdraw.”

“There’s a hose right there,” Onslaught called over to them.

And he was correct—one of the hangar’s furnishings was a washing station set by the wall, and that included a set of adjustable nozzles for the high-pressure hoses coiled up on their hooks.

“Fragger,” Brawl spat, flipping Blast Off a rude gesture, and went to use one.

“Mm,” Blast Off hissed air through his vents before going silent.

Vortex didn’t follow right away. He slinked closer and rapped his knuckles on the door to the cargo hold, testing his boundaries. When Blast Off’s field remained unwelcoming and blank, and the door refused to open up even an inch in an obvious message of yes, that means you too Vortex, you’re not a special exception to my standards, go take a minute to use a hose if you want to board only then did Vortex step back and go for the washing station.

////

The original metallic bedrock of the site Tarn had been constructed atop of had been long ago buried under layers upon layers of city blocks, fuel depots, storage facilities, foundries, transit mono-lines, roadways, flightlanes, factories, sewer systems, and smelting pits. The Combaticon headquarters was an imposing multiple-story hunk of concrete and reinforced iron built into one of the upper levels of the city. Hemmed in on the front by a stream of air traffic that ebbed and surged endlessly and industrial smog hanging low and heavy in the atmosphere, the complex’s harsh angles blended it in with the juts and cubical shapes of the surrounding structures that were crammed up against it on both sides.

The slot in the city block that the large complex occupied wasn’t on Tarn’s top crust but it was sufficiently close that the sky could be seen through ragged gaps in the platforms crowded together above.

The hangar for flightframes and non-sentient transport ships to dock inside was located on the fifth floor of the complex, and the landing pad for rotaries was spread out across the roof.

On clear days when the sun was a white hot blot shimmering above, one could go out onto the roof and bask for hours in the rippling heat beating down in angry rays on the darkened metal. Machinery purred and thumped away in the depths of the facility.

There were private berthrooms stocked with furnishings and a few kitchens to prepare energon in scattered around in the floors where no visitors were permitted without permission, but none of the Combaticons stayed in them with any regularity, not even Onslaught. They all lived in their own apartments close by, preferring to keep their own spaces. The berthrooms on the base were kept for times when they were too injured or too drunk to stagger back to their apartments, or for the sake of guests, of both the willing and unwilling variety.

Blast Off found the medbay—brightly lit, well-ventilated and windowless—tucked away in the west wing on the ninth floor six weeks into his new routine, staffed mainly by a fleet of drones and two or three of the medics in Onslaught’s employment. The medics had hard optics and unsympathetic berthside manners, and the restraining clamps on the repair slabs looked like they saw regular use.

By the nature of their livelihood, mercenary forces racked up battle damage frequently. Blast Off could appreciate the logic of sidestepping any awkward questions a hospital might start asking by simply cutting it out of the equation altogether and keeping the medics who re-attached your missing limbs and welded up the bullet holes in your midsection on your payroll.

The ranks of the other mechs on the same payroll as the medics included Blast Off himself, Brawl the run-of-the-factory thug whose tendency towards loud bluster was only matched by his tendency towards forgetting common decorum, and Vortex the… was there a word for Vortex? Blast Off suspected a deep coding malfunction, but that alone couldn’t explain Vortex. The interrogator was unnerving. He was often lurking in places Blast Off didn’t expect to find him in. On the surface there was nothing Blast Off would label as objectionable enough to file a complaint over. It was only small things. Such as when Vortex stood just a little closer than he had to during briefings, sometimes, and the triumphant glint across his visor when Blast Off was the one who stepped away to avoid getting jabbed in the side by his rotors made Blast Off convinced the helicopter was invading his personal space to make him uncomfortable on purpose. Brawl might annoy him, but Blast Off was wary of Vortex.

There were other support staff, but that was the core team’s current roster.

The Combaticons had a sniper before Blast Off. A grounder with fancy targeting systems named Blight. A freelancer on contract, not a permanent member of the team. They had another aerial soldier once too, a sleek fighter jet from Vos called Stormcloud who had been banned for life from setting foot on the grounds of the aerial academy he’d been trained in.

Blight had sickened from a fatal case of static spark syndrome he had come down with in Carpessa, and Stormcloud had been killed on an off-planet mission.

Blast Off was under the impression Brawl had already forgotten their names and Vortex only remembered them to rub it in that he had outlived them. Onslaught said nothing about them, besides a passing remark that Blight’s deactivation had led him to correct an oversight and require all Combaticons to keep their vaccines up to date as a rule.

Blast Off figured he knew what to make of Onslaught. Brawl was annoying and aggressive, Vortex was erratic and sly, and Onslaught was stoic on the surface, but not emotionless. It was just none of the rare flickers of emotion Blast Off glimpsed from the truck were particularly pleasant ones. Onslaught, as far as Blast Off could tell, possessed an emotional spectrum composed entirely of two feelings, arrogance and contempt. These emotions might have an assortment of facets to them, like arrogant entitlement or contemptuous rage with the failings of others but they were still the same two emotions at the core. Their leader had no sense of humor. None of Brawl’s wise-cracking got a laugh out of him, though admittedly Brawl wasn’t half as funny as the tank fancied himself to be.

Onslaught was uptight and ruthless, and cared only about getting results. Blast Off had flown over ore glaciers in the polar regions that seemed less hard than him.

Onslaught struck Blast Off as a thoroughly pitiless mech.

But he had been nothing but forward in dealing with Blast Off. He had made it clear what Blast Off was signing on for.

An open hand and a promise of payment.

There had been no pretenses, no beating around the point.

Blast Off couldn’t imagine being friends with him but that was fine. He didn’t require his newest employer to be his friend. He simply required competence and Onslaught had that in spades.

Onslaught ran the whole operation like a military base, the chain of command firmly adhered to and the corridors of the headquarters always kept swept clean, and business was conducted with uninterrupted efficiency. What more could be asked for in a leader? Blast Off respected that. A capable but remote one who dubbed himself much too good to lower himself to socialize with the rank-and-file on a casual basis was far preferable to a friendly but ultimately useless one who joked and went drinking with his mecha, but couldn’t make a critical call when it came down to the wire. While Blast Off doubted he would work with Onslaught as his boss for terribly long, he saw nothing that indicated his enlistment under the grounder wouldn’t be a satisfactory period while it lasted.

////

Several missions in, Blast Off could grudgingly concede through gritted teeth (to himself and absolutely not aloud) that, however aggravating the idiots were off-duty, on the job Vortex and Brawl were good at what they did.

They’d been hired on as guards for an illegal smuggling operation that spanned three city-states and they had pulled their weight when the transport was ambushed along the last leg of the nighttime journey down the northern waterways. Thick as he was, Brawl was a bot-smashing menace in a fight and Vortex proved himself just as effective. Driving back the attackers from the cargo was a swift affair.

Brawl chunked a smoke bomb down into the deck of the smaller boat crewed by mechs trying to renew their attempts to board their transport and ducked to avoid getting a laser to the face. Leaving Vortex to provide cover fire, Blast Off palmed a welder and set about torching the ladder the attackers had magnetized to the side of the transport. Molten gobs dribbled onto the deck. Each drip hissed and steamed when it impacted wet metal.

“Got ‘em!” Brawl boomed.

Smoke exploded up from below. Outraged shouting followed. A fresh wave of laserfire poured up at them, noticeably worse in terms of aiming than before due to the haze.

A mech’s helm and shoulders rose out of the smoke as they tried to scale the ladder. Vortex shot them in the shoulder, and clutching at it with a yelp, the mech reeled and tumbled back into the smoke. Going by the sudden kerfuffle from below, their landing had been unwillingly cushioned by another one of the attackers.

“Keep them busy, I’m nearly done,” Blast Off said flatly, concentrating on his task. Once they’d cut off all the ladders latched onto the transport, the attackers would be confined to their small boat and they could sink it in one go with Brawl’s missiles. Let them swim back to the shoreline, if they hadn’t had the wits to stock their ambush with mechs who had alt modes built for sailing the waterways.

////

Blast Off visited the headquarter’s indoor shooting range on the eleventh floor for the first time several months into his new routine. It rapidly turned into one of his favorite places on the base.

He couldn’t use it whenever he pleased; Onslaught’s military approach to management leaked into this as well. Everybody who used the shooting range had to schedule their session in advance by at least one day, along with noting how long they intended the session to last, which guns would be used, difficulty level settings, and whether or not they wanted to permit an audience from the observation deck. All weapons had to be cleaned after usage and put away. Scheduling conflicts were settled on a first come, first serve basis. If they were not punctual in arriving to claim their session, the shooting range would automatically lock them out and then the unlucky employee had to reschedule for another time. Attempts to get around this were logged too and punished. (Onslaught believed in enforcing consequences for lateness.) All details were also logged into the database after a session was finished, including the accuracy scores and ammunition usage.

Usage of alt-mode weaponry was prohibited. If an employee wished to train in their alt mode, they were expected to use the holosim center on the twelfth floor.

(The shuttle had a feeling Brawl had to do with why that rule was set in bold text and underlined twice in the instructions download pack.)

Blast Off’s sessions were solitary ones by choice.

Him, the gun in his hands, and the targets in his sight, circles outlined in bright red. Since he was indoors, he didn’t have to mark the direction of the wind as interference. Here, he didn’t have to deal with other people and the targets only did what they were programmed to do.

It calmed him.

Years ago Blast Off had first picked up a blaster because it annoyed him to be shot at by gangs of ruffians back when he was flying through the deep space routes without a means of returning fire. A preemptive measure. Its motives had lacked bloodlust. Any fatal damage done to his attackers back then had been a side-effect of the main intention—stay away from me.

He had enrolled in one of the shooting courses that were available to mechs with the right status and cash to spare. It had been a lark for quite a few of the trainees, a means to burn time that wasn’t attending the high-end social events and luncheons hosted by the local Senator and his entourage. They hadn’t taken the weapon in their hands seriously because they didn’t picture themselves in situations where it might be the one barrier between them and returning to Vector Sigma. Danger had been exciting to them, not threatening.

But Blast Off had taken it seriously.

It had been amusing to watch the other trainees in the course flail and miss their marks.

He hadn’t missed.

The teacher was once full of praise for him. Consistently hitting the target from longer and longer distances had been easy from the start for Blast Off. It still was. His aim had improved with time.

It wasn’t so different from calculating flight trajectories, he had told a fellow trainee once. It took trusting yourself to land the mark. To hit the bullseye each time. To stop thinking about where the bullet was right then and commit yourself to knowing where you wanted it to be.

////

A three-year job once had them crammed together in a small space while they staked out the client’s business rival’s house and by the end of it Blast Off was fantasizing about killing them all in their sleep.

If Onslaught wasn’t commandeering the single computer terminal in the hide-out, it was Brawl’s banging and clanging and stomping around and demanding to know when they were gonna slip in through the hole in the extensive security they were waiting for and maim the glitch. Brawl had trouble grasping he was supposed to remember they were on a stealth mission. And when Blast Off took a perfectly reasonable amount of time in the washracks, Brawl complained at top volume there was no hot solvent left for them and to make matters worse, Onslaught and Vortex had agreed and Onslaught decreed Blast Off’s vanity didn’t take priority over the rest of the team’s right to a hot shower. So Blast Off suffered through a subpar cleaning job and a time limit to how long he was allowed to use the washracks.

Tarn was on the other side of the planet: Blast Off missed their headquarters. The complex’s chief virtue had morphed in his mind from its shooting range to its abundance of room.

There were three rooms in the hide-out, one for the washracks, one for the berths, and one for the stake-out work.

It left an inadequate amount of elbow room for its temporary residents.

In the enclosed space, tensions rose like the temperature in a cooking pot that wasn’t quite set to boiling. Onslaught and Brawl edged towards coming to blows twice. On the sidelines Vortex acted if this was free entertainment. Blast Off debated distracting him from rooting them on, but it occurred to him that doing so would turn Vortex’s attention from them to him. If there had been another teammate to keep Vortex from getting bored, Blast Off might have anyway and diverted the problem to them, but there were only the four of them.

So Blast Off saved himself the headache and didn’t. Brawl had a fist-sized dent on his chest later. Onslaught continued to hog the hide-out’s bandwidth, denying Brawl the chance to watch the latest insipid holodrama series he had gotten into.

Cut off from his terrible taste in holovids, Brawl sulked.

After their mark was dealt with, Blast Off didn’t pretend the emotion that licked his spark when he touched down in Tarn was anything but strut-melting relief that he could lock himself in his apartment flat and bury himself in a novel he’d been meaning to catch up on and take a break from the team.

////

“You’re really one hell of a shot!” Vortex said, venting heavily and crouching low as Blast Off crawled after him into the shade under the low-hanging bridge.

Energon streaking down the side of his helm, Blast Off narrowed his visor at him and wiped the energon off so it wouldn’t drip into his optics. His fingers came away bright pink. Minor alerts scrolled down his HUD. He scoffed. “Tell me. What, precisely, did you think I was hired onto this team for, Vortex? My juggling skills?”

They had gotten bad information for this job and things had gone south in a hurry. He’d bailed Vortex out of a tough spot by sniping out the target and while it had been a magnificent shot that few others had the skill for in Blast Off’s humble opinion, especially when he hadn’t used a stable resting position for the rifle—it had blown Blast Off’s cover and both he and Vortex had been forced to flee the scene in a hurry. With the air traffic lanes swarming with the enforcers, transformation was out of the question. They would have to walk on foot through the district, dodging through back alleys and the underlevels to get out of the city and to the rendezvous point where they could make a getaway. It was slow going. Tedious. Blast Off didn’t know how grounders put up with it. Wheels could make up for only so much. But right now, the enforcers were close. So they were stuck under the bridge until they went away.

If Vortex tried to stab him in the optic again or something similarly unexpected and unpleasant, Onslaught’s displeasure be damned, Blast Off would leave him for the enforcers. He would.

Vortex flapped a hand (his remaining one) at him. “Don’t be a smartaft. Nobody likes smartafts, Blasters.”

That was just outrageous, coming out of the vocalizer of one of the biggest smartafts Blast Off had the misfortune to meet. “My accuracy scores on the range are available to mechs with your clearance level,” Blast Off reminded him. “I refuse to believe for a moment you haven’t already checked them before this.”

Vortex said. “Scores from a nice controlled environment like the range are different from firing under live conditions.”

The purple light shining in Blast Off’s visor thinned at him, “I’d feel better about your compliment then if you weren’t the reason why I had to blow my cover.”

Vortex sniggered loudly, leaning back against the bridge’s metal abutment and regarding him with hooded optics. He could stand to be more serious about the danger of the situation they were in. Blast Off shuffled to the edge of the bridge’s cover and leaned out of its shadow to scan the area for approaching enforcers.

Energon dribbled down Vortex’s arm.

“It wasn’t on purpose,” Vortex said from where he was crouched. “I gave you kudos for being a good shot, give me credit for not having the power to read minds ‘cuz that’s the only way somebody in my spot would’ve avoided that mistake!”

“... Fine. Thanks.”

Vortex wasn’t to blame for the bad information. He wasn’t the one who had failed to properly vet the intel before dispatching them.

“We got the job done, but Onslaught’s gonna be mad at us when we get back.”

Blast Off snorted.

“He’s the one who formulated a plan based off poor intel, not us. He can’t blame us for his error.”

“Like that would stop an ars—”

Blast Off sharply held up a hand.

Vortex’s words cut off. On the bridge above them, frenzied footsteps and snarling engines stampeded past. Blast Off shrank away from the edge of the bridge and further out of view, air filtration vents clamping shut. The two Combaticons kept still in their hiding place until the area was quiet again, save for the drip of acidic solvent leaking onto rusted metal from a broken pipeline.

Plink. Plink. Plink.

“Let’s keep moving,” Vortex said.

They crawled out from the bridge and climbed into the underlevels.

Running from the sewer nest of mutated retrorats they proceeded to stumble headlong into was not the most undignified end to a day Blast Off ever had. It was however, one he had no desire to ever repeat. Coated in gutter grime and bits of dead retrorats, and wheezing through his ventilation systems from sprinting by the time they reached the rendezvous point, Vortex jabbed him in the side and called it a bonding experience. Similarly disheveled and one of his legs bearing bite marks from sharp teeth gnawing on it, Blast Off couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

But a week and half later marked the first time Vortex invited Blast Off out for a night in the city with him and Brawl.

And Blast Off said yes.

Even waking up with confetti in odd places the next morning didn’t dampen his spirits.

////

Tarn was a city of activity at all hours. It never slept. Up in the wealthy districts, spires glowing with synthetic neon lights arched out of the city blocks to scratch at the darkening dusk. Their height was sufficient to grant them the privilege of life above the thickest of the smog and extreme light pollution. The canopy of stars were theirs to view at any time. Down in the city’s innards, down in the industrial districts, stood the factories, and below them the great smelting pools, their old girths so wide a Titan could have braved the barely-ventable air quality and wedged both feet into one to soak, roiling and burbling with metal sludge tinted the iridescent rainbow of colors born from metal heated until it ran like liquid. Thanks to the wind, the hot musk of burning waste disposed of in those pools was heavy in today’s Tarnian weather forecast.

Wide avenues between the towering hefts of buildings opened into a plaza. Corrosion stained the walls. Vendors and shops lined the edge. Merchants hawked their wares from booths in its center. Traffic was clogging up several arteries of the roadway more often than not. Blast Off had flown down most of the way, but seventeen street levels below the city’s top crust, he had switched to walking.

Tarn was awake and active. But that included—

“Blast Off!”

Blast Off strongly contemplated pretending he didn’t know the mech waving and calling out to him yet again over the din.

“Blast Off. HEY. ARE YOU DEAF. BLAST OFF!”

A black cannon barrel bobbed in the throng.

Brawl was shouting, pushing through the plaza’s crowds.

Blast Off heaved a sigh.

An unlucky ambulance narrowly avoided getting flattened to the pavement by Brawl knocking him over and angrily wailed his sirens after Brawl as he lumbered away. Another passing mech took note of this and referred to Brawl by a word that would have offended even the most mild-natured bot. Predictably, not being remotely mild-natured, Brawl took offense and made a swing at him, but the other mech dodged and melted away into the crowds. Brawl made a rude hand gesture at where the other mech had vanished.

Since Blast Off had started accompanying him and Vortex on a few of their outings, for reasons Blast Off wasn’t entirely clear on, Brawl seemed to have proven himself dim enough to take this as a cue to consider him a friend, or at a minimum somebody to slap on the back and talk too loudly at. Blast Off was rather leery of that. He wasn’t here to befriend his latest crew. But it was too much trouble to tell Brawl he was overstepping himself when he could just humor him until his attention wandered and the tank went away. Brawl was so easily distracted. It wasn’t as if they shared many common interests outside of the workplace.

And it wasn’t like Blast Off wanted company.

It was simply too much trouble to pick up his pace and ignore Brawl when the oaf wanted to be noticed in public. That was all. Obviously.

“My audials are functioning fine,” Blast Off’s vocalizer emitted a click. “You have my frequency, you could have commed me instead of making a scene.”

“Eh, yeah, I guess so,” said Brawl, catching up with him. Due to how little of a frag he gave about Blast Off’s complaints, the implied criticism bounced off him like a rubber bullet.

Blast Off shook his helm.

“Idiot.”

‘“And ya’ can blow it out your sprocket too, Blast Off. Slagging cross-wired skidplate,” Brawl retorted. Brawl’s crassness was old news to Blast Off; he continued to not approve of it. “What are you doin’ down here?”

“I could ask the same of you.”

Brawl shrugged, not having anything to hide. “I was hungry. There’s this really great goodie stand that sells oil cakes in this plaza, by the eastern junction. Nobody else can make ‘em like they can.” At Blast Off’s visor dulling, Brawl produced with gusto three wrapped-up oil cakes in his hands, the dark crust congealing like cooling tar, sprinkled with curls of steel shavings and stinking of petroleum under the clear plastic. “Still nice and hot!”

Blast Off’s back tailfin flicked as they walked.

“Then we have similar reasons for coming here,” Blast Off stated. “There’s a detailer’s facility for private clients down here which I frequented when I visited Tarn before.” He might not be able to peruse the upscale shops as easily anymore, but there were dens even in the underlevels, reserved for those with an eye for luxury and the credits to shell out to enjoy it. There was an oil bath with Blast Off’s name on it awaiting, and he was going to lay back and soak long and happily in it while letting the attendants tighten up the cables in his joints and buff and scrub the dirt off his plating and heat shields and have all his day’s minor troubles float away. “I booked a maintenance appointment.”

Plastic crinkled.

Unwrapping one of the oil cakes, Brawl cracked the treat in half, crumbling it under his fingers, its dense and dark blue gelled center oozing out.

“Ya’ trust the medics at HQ to patch you up after getting shot to pieces, but not to handle a few loose wires?”

Coming from Onslaught or Vortex, there would have been a flinty calculation behind that question. (And with Onslaught, Blast Off could not shake the recent feeling the mech was testing him, watching him, some scheme of his that Blast Off was not privy to lurking under the surface of their interactions.) Not Brawl. His question was just what it appeared to be. It was simple. No judgement, no prodding evaluation.

So Blast Off’s answer was equally straightforward.

“HQ’s medics aren’t here to pamper us, just keep us alive,” Blast Off said, “I can afford to treat myself to a little luxury.”

“Can I come along?”

Blast Off flapped a hand, “You are drastically overestimating how much I’m willing to put up with from you.”

Brawl whined.

“C’mon! It’s not like you’re gettin’ reformatted or nothin’!”

“I’m not paying for you to get an appointment, just me. You’ll be like a bull in a microchip factory.”

“No, I won’t!” Brawl objected.

“And it will bore you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Trust me, I do.”

“Do not, fragger.”

“Insults don’t help your argument, Brawl.”

////

“That gun looks like a custom job. If you may, could I take a look?” A smarmy and well-greased smile at the ready on his lips, Swindle sat himself down next to Blast Off one of the couches in the common room. Mask locked across his face, Blast Off set his gun down in his lap and met faux-guileless optics tinted the same purple as his own visor, just illuminated a few shades brighter on the spectrum.

“Just a look?”

“Nothing else!” Swindle chirped. Blast Off passed the gun over to him.

“Give it back once you’re done,” he instructed.

“You bet.” Swindle turned the gun over in his hands, and knifed the red line of a scan over it. “Ionic blaster, model… E62-Mark B-17, if I’m not mistaken. In pretty condition! I haven’t seen one of these suckers for awhile. The series isn’t in production anymore, after the manufacturers switched from armaments to the electronics industry.”

“Correct.”

“And say, were you the one behind the customizations or did you pay somebody else to handle that?” Swindle expertly clicked open the barrel to take a look at the power cells wired into the inner mechanisms.

“I did it myself. Before you get any ideas, it’s not for sale,” Blast Off said, cold.

“Selling off a custom job like this?” Swindle said smoothly. “I would never presume you’d part with a weapon like it unless you had to.”

As he watched Swindle fiddle with the gun, Blast Off acknowledged the jeep was skilled. Swindle knew his way around a gun like he had been sparked for the function and his immediate recollection of an incident that had occurred centuries ago spoke to a mech who devoted a sizable portion of his well-maintained memory banks to anything and everything that might impact his sales or impress a customer into not questioning his credentials.

Blast Off could see why Onslaught had taken him on.

Onslaught and Vortex had known each other before the team had formed. Brawl had been brought to Onslaught’s attention and on board by Vortex, according to Brawl anyway. When Swindle joined the team, their new munitions specialist’s name had shown up on the core roster one day and Onslaught had simply informed them that was how it was going to be.

“Boss-mech’s preferred arms dealer,” had been the first mention of Swindle by name Blast Off had heard, on a day clouded over with smog ages before the con-mech formally joined the team: Vortex had hovered his hand flat in the air to indicate a mech that just barely came up to Vortex’s chest in height. “That’s who he’s talking to. Greedy little shortie. Yellow, got these biiiig purple optics. He’s got his fingers in a slice of the pie with pretty much every dirty dealing in Tarn and half of Cybertron to boot too.”

Leaning on the walkway’s railing with his arms crossed at the wrists, Blast Off had looked down at the top of Onslaught’s helm as the truck gestured severely with his free hand to accompany what he was saying to the mech on the other end of the commlink.

“Swindle, hmm?” Blast Off said idly. “What about the other half of Cybertron?”

“The dealings on the other half could be legal,” Vortex mused.

“I’m sensing from your tone the probability of that is very low.”

“Legal, illegal, I doubt our pal Swindle cares which as long it makes him credits.”

“Ah. That sort.”

Below them, Onslaught paced.

The circular control center was housed in the upper floors of the base, consoles and tall viewscreens lining the curved walls. An electronic hum permeated the air. The holographic globe rotating silently in its terminal in the center of the room had limned the ridges of Onslaught’s armor in glowing orange. Yellow dots marched in clusters across its transparent surface. One of the upper landings Blast Off and Vortex were standing on harbored the door that led to an anteroom and Onslaught’s work office.

“It’s cute, if you like your ‘bots small and capable of shipping a proton bomb to your doorstep within 24 hours after your order for the right price.” Vortex tipped his helm in the way that Blast Off had learned indicated the helicopter was grinning. “Onslaught likes him because he’s useful like that. The best there is at getting his hands on high quality weaponry.”

Blast Off rubbed the base of his heel on the floor. “Is he an ally or just a useful convenience?”

“Swindle’s scams have earned him a list of enemies as long as Metroplex, but the Combaticons ain’t one of ‘em.” Vortex had replied. “Yet, anyway.”

Now, Swindle sat on the couch next to Blast Off, asking him an endless stream of professional, clever questions about his blaster and tried to sell him on a dozen of snappy-sounding but unreasonably priced ‘upgrades’ for it that Blast Off just as endlessly turned down.

Swindle called himself a Combaticon these days and took his new teammates along with him to his arms deals and aided in negotiations and submitted reports to Onslaught like they all had to sometimes after a mission.

Blast Off pondered how honest those reports Swindle typed up were.

How genuine was Swindle about giving his allegiance to the team?

Vortex hadn’t been exaggerating when he summed up Swindle as driven by a core-deep desire for profit. What did Swindle get out of this, besides now having teammates who would be obliged to protect him from dissatisfied past customers who might come calling at his door? Onslaught didn’t seem to care how many enterprises and embezzlement schemes Swindle ran on the side, so long as Swindle didn’t get caught and so long as Swindle listened to orders when Onslaught gave them. Was Swindle scamming them too? It wasn’t likely, but it also wasn’t impossible. Blast Off didn’t always know what was going through Onslaught’s processor in terms of risk being weighed against benefits. He couldn’t pin down what their leader’s angle was when it came to Blast Off himself sometimes, let alone what Onslaught thought of Swindle.

But Blast Off supposed it wasn’t his place to question Onslaught’s hiring practices.

////

It was pleasant, to transform into his alt mode and nestle down into the ship bay he was docked into. His cables and pitted plating still ached from the meteorite shower he’d been caught in but that would go away soon. Self-repair would take care of it. He had started shutting down non-essential subsystems and queuing up a list of the ones to put on standby, all the easier to re-calibrate them for his preferred sensitivity to planetside conditions, preparing to cycle down into recharge when there was a quiet sound.

One of the hangar’s side doors slid open. A switch clicked. The lights turned on. A mech walked in and stopped just a short distance from the door. He then changed his course and headed towards where Blast Off was docked. Footsteps rang hollowly off the ceiling: the mech didn’t hurry.

Reluctant and groggy, Blast Off powered back up his optical sensors to track his approach.

“Onslaught, sir.”

Onslaught’s small form came to a halt where Blast Off’s boarding ramp would be lowered if they were going on a mission.

“It’s late. Shouldn’t you have left for the night by now?”

“I’m aware of the time,” Blast Off replied haughtily. “Which is why I was trying to recharge when you interrupted me.”

The truck circled around to the front of the ship bay. Blast Off remained immobile in his alt mode and kept his sensors locked onto him. Onslaught leaned up and tapped the rounded expanse of his nosecone. “My apologies. I thought Brawl was the one with the habit of recharging in alt mode, not you. And to do it in the hangar?”

Blast Off huffed through his speakers, not bothering to fully stir himself. “I simply felt like a change of pace, and my own quarters are too small to house my alt mode. I don’t recall there being a rule against it.”

“There isn’t,” Onslaught said.

“Then why ask, sir?”

Onslaught’s voice was dry. “Perhaps I was curious about your reasons, not about a chance to reprimand you.”

“Oh.” The shuttle paused and the field Blast Off was usually more careful to keep blank fluctuated, a little unsure. “Well. Uhm. I… You see...”

Onslaught pulled his hand away from the brief contact and glanced downward. “Does it have anything to do with why the floor’s littered with rubbish that shouldn’t be there, by chance?” He scooped a rock up and under the bright lights, the pits and grooves pockmarking its iron surface showed well.

“There was a meteorite shower. I wasn’t paying attention like I ought to,” Blast Off admitted begrudgingly. And it had resulted in him having to sit down and shuffle pieces of those damned meteorites and space dust out of his internal structure. By the end of it, he just hadn’t wanted to exert the energy for flying all the way back to his apartment tonight when he was already at the base and it harbored a ship bay in his alt mode’s size that he could rest in. “It’s uncomfortable to have debris lodged in places it shouldn’t be.” He added, “I would have called in a drone to clean up after I woke up in the morning, of course.”

Having experienced getting a rock or two jammed in his axle while driving down lousy roadways, Onslaught could accept that confession. “Even somewhere as empty as space has its hazards,” he said. “See to it that this gets cleaned up in a timely manner and I’ll let this slide.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Setting aside your mishap on the return voyage… How was Monacus?”

“It hasn’t changed,” Blast Off remarked, graciously permitting the attempt at small talk. “As much of a cesspit as ever. I swear to Primus, it’s like the place popped out of Swindle’s fever dreams. All anybody wants to talk about is fiance and fleshy organics and how to rip them off. Ugh.” His tailfin wagged. “If I wanted to waste my time on a horde like that, I’d just visit the Senate hall. I wouldn’t need to take a shower afterwards, which gives it a leg up on Monacus.”

“Haha!”

If he had been less tired and groggy and had he been in root mode, Blast Off would have drawn back, resetting his visor in surprise. He couldn’t recall having heard Onslaught so much as chuckle aloud before.

Or guessed that the perpetually stern mech had anything approaching a sense of humor installed.

“You could have taken a page out of Brawl’s book and squished a few fleshlings to make yourself feel better, if you were that bored.”

“And get their gunk all over my foot? No thanks. Don’t put me and Brawl on the same level.”

“Finicky.”

“You’re describing yourself. I just have standards.”

“I prefer to think of it as fastidious, not finicky.”

“If you say so.”

Onslaught shook his helm at him, but it was a gesture without anger. Their conversation meandered onward without purpose for another half hour before Onslaught excused himself. “I’ll let you get back to recharging, Blast Off. After all, at this hour, I should be preparing for it myself.”

“Thank you. Recharge well,” Blast Off was polite.

“Have a good dream,” Onslaught said. He turned off the lights in the hangar and closed the door behind him as he went away, and left Blast Off alone in the darkness.

Blast Off didn’t bother to keep his optical sensors online to watch him go.

////

With Brawl playing the role of bodyguard to the security consultant Swindle was posing as, Swindle was two days into phony negotiations when Blast Off reported that he, Onslaught, and Vortex had located where the mob was keeping their hostage at last. Vortex had volunteered to act out the bodyguard role during the planning stages: Onslaught had ignored him and handed the job off to Brawl, since Vortex had spent the preceding hours of the briefing deliberately antagonizing Swindle and Onslaught didn’t want the job jeopardized by them having it at each other and trying to rip each other’s fuel pumps out at a bad time, especially when success hinged on getting the hostage out alive. This was a recuse, not an assassination gig.

The Engineering guild wasn’t going to pay up for a greyed out body.

The first problem they ran into after Vortex ghosted through security and left a guard’s corpse stapled to the floor with a knife to the processor wasn’t that the hostage was chained to the wall in his corner nor that his vocalizer was turned off. Not a big deal, Onslaught had anticipated that and Vortex had brought along disablers for the handcuffs. And Vortex didn’t need the mech babbling. The problem was that one of the hostage’s legs was leaking oil and sitting on the opposite side of the room from his upper frame and the hostage was drugged out of his processor. Meaning the useless lump couldn’t walk anywhere fast.

Awesome.

Just great.

Ugh.

Vortex was not going to carry the lump around like a sparkling, no sir.

The second problem was that the signal disruptors in the room meant Vortex couldn’t tell the rest of the Combaticons this.

So when Vortex had to stop to jam the leg back on and didn’t report back with the hostage as quickly as he should have, Onslaught started telegraphing frustration with being behind his painstakingly constructed schedule. Swindle’s negotiations would last as a distraction from the rest of the team snooping around behind the scenes for only so long. Blast Off pinged Vortex’s comm through the private team channel to tell him to stop dawdling.

Vortex didn’t respond.

After a short discussion, Blast Off and Onslaught split up, Blast Off to drag Vortex away from what had stopped him from answering his comm, and Onslaught to fetch Swindle and Brawl.

“Is that Skipjack?” Blast Off stared at the minibot staggering along behind Vortex in the corridor. Fear and confusion radiated off him and one leg of his dragged awkwardly. His optics were pale with the effects of energon starvation.

“Yeah,” Vortex wiped oily hands off on his hip. “I checked, it’s not a decoy bot painted up like him.”

“Very well. We’re professionals and we’re here to rescue you,” Blast Off briskly informed Skipjack. Who was probably too drugged up to register his words, just standing there, swaying in place. “Don’t put up a fight.” He shot a glance at Vortex. “And explain to me why my comm was online until it stopped working six minutes ago.”

“Bot in charge of rigging up the alarms likes him some signal disrupters.”

“Hmph. I see.”

“Ughmm,” was Skipjack’s dazed comment.

Their comms buzzed to life the moment they were out of the disrupters’ range.

<There’s been a change in plans.> Onslaught’s voice was smooth. In the background, Swindle was hissing something garbled at somebody. <If you’ve found that thrice-damned Vortex, Blast Off, move it. Brawl and I require back-up.>

<Vortex —>

<Hahah! Did you miss me after just five measly hours, o’ fearless leader? Sorry we can’t all live life according to your precious scheduling! Slag comes up!>

<—Vortex is unfortunately accounted for. We’re on our way.>

Cutting the comm before he had to listen to Onslaught giving Vortex a dressing down for his insubordinate tone and constant backtalking, Blast Off stained his audials and somewhere nearby, over the sizzle of sudden laserfire, he swore he heard Brawl’s guns rattling off rounds into the air and a smoke bomb exploding upon impact with a target.

“Sounds like a lot of somebodies found out Swindle was pulling one over ‘em,” Vortex drawled.

With Skipjack tucked under Blast Off’s arm, they took off for where Onslaught was. By the end of the shootout, they’d stuffed Skipjack into Swindle’s alt mode for ease of transportation (and to free up both of Blast Off’s hands for aiming) and Brawl was pumped up enough on berserker rage that he almost turned around and went back to finish off the stragglers that were shooting wildly in their direction before Onslaught stopped him by whacking him in the helm and telling him to follow fragging instructions and not run in the wrong direction, or getting shot by gangsters would be the least painful thing Brawl had to look forward to in his immediate future. They kept going. Of course, right when the Combaticons thought they had made a clean getaway, that’s when the hidden device welded inside Skipjack’s backplating started beeping mid-escape.

Ever the one to state the obvious, Brawl yelled. “Bomb!”

Swindle slammed on his brakes. His headlights flared.

“And that, mechs, is my cue. Getting blown up is at the bottom of my to-do list for today. In fact, it’s not on my to-do list at all.” Swindle couldn’t transform and chunk Skipjack out of his passenger seat in the process fast enough; Blast Off caught Skipjack before the minibot fell over. Swindle put a healthy distance between himself and where Blast Off was standing, and then put a tank between them too, for good measure.

“Wha… What’s goin-g ‘n?” Skipjack slurred. “Where am I? Why are ya’ rescuin… Where’s that noise comin’ from?”

Blast Off turned his frame over, triangulating the beeping to its source. The other Combaticons watched the dim light blinking in time with the beeping through the near invisible gaps of Skipjack’s transformation seams.

“Why is something beeping?” Skipjack grumbled.

“It would be better if you’re not conscious for this,” Blast Off said firmly and knocked him out.

The red light continued to blink.

“We’re not getting paid to return him to the client as a corpse,” Onslaught declared. He twitched a finger at Vortex. “Get to work.”

“Why do I gotta put my hands inside a mech’s wiring twice in a day if I’m not gonna’ get to kill ‘im afterwards? So unfair,” Vortex complained, already stepping forward despite his pouting. “It blows. Brawl, c’mere. You got experience with defusing explosives. Blast Off, hold the body still while I cut. Onslaught, Swindle, frag off and don’t get in the way.”

Scuttling behind Onslaught as his new blast shield when Brawl moved away, Swindle said, “Frag you too, Tex.”

“You wish!”

Skipjack was spared being unceremoniously exploded from the inside out in the end, though he wouldn’t have been reassured by the casual way the Combaticons discussed his odds had he been awake to hear them.

At the arranged rendezvous five days later, a cohort of guildmechs were waiting.

At the front of the group, a brawny grounder with thick arms and a large chin-guard stood anxiously. Weld marks crisscrossed in a silvery coat over his back for his nanite colonies to handle, Skipjack ignored the rest of the cohort and threw himself at Bulkhead with a relieved shout. Bulkhead swept his amica off the ground for a hug.

Onslaught, Swindle tagging at his heels now that they were handling the matters of payment for services rendered, closed in.

While he didn’t mind the reunion himself, Blast Off could guess from the flexing of his rotors Vortex had to put in a truly heroic effort to not pantomime gagging at the sappy scene. Brawl was plain bored. Blast Off didn’t say anything. He did, however, discreetly step on Vortex’s foot when the connvining little helicopter looked to be fixing to open his mouth and say something that Bulkhead and Skipjack would not appreciate being in audio range thereof.

The pay the Combaticons received for their work was nothing to sniff at, but it was still lower than the hefty ransom the mob had demanded from Bulkhead in return for them not mailing Skipjack back to him—piece by piece, starting with his fingers and ending with his spark chamber and T-cog—and less humiliating than letting it become public knowledge the guild head’s amica had been kidnapped and used for blackmail.

Back at the base, Onslaught pulled Blast Off aside.

“You performed well,” Onslaught said.

“During the job or today?”

“Both. And the last three jobs that preceded this. I approve. Consider this my commendation of your work ethic as an employee and the results you produce.”

“I’m good at this. No offense, sir, but the day I require your approval is the day Cybertron falls into the nearest black hole. I didn’t do it for your praise.” Blast Off sniffed, then the expression in his visor changed and he relented slightly. With two troublemakers in the ranks, Onslaught’s tone suggested he was probably just attempting to communicate his gratitude for a subordinate who didn’t require that he bail them out of their latest visit to jail on a semi-yearly basis. And Blast Off was rather hoping for a raise. Soon. “However, I accept the compliment. Thank you.”

Onslaught crossed his arms.

“There are professionals I hired who are good at what they do, but found themselves,” Onslaught chose his words carefully, “... Floundering when it came to cooperating with Vortex in the workplace. Or perhaps, you might call it failing to take him in stride.” Onslaught said. “It was irritating, as you can imagine, to find replacement staff. It’s gratifying you don’t share their incompetence.”

Blast Off’s engine gave a loud throttle.

Light gleamed off the angles of Blast Off’s mask.

“Try as he might, Vortex doesn’t top my roster of the most aggravating mechanisms I have had the displeasure of working with.” He ground his teeth, the memories of having to endure incompetent leadership from past employers surfacing before he banished them. “Vortex knows what he’s doing. He’s not a fool, even if he’s glitched in the helm and it amuses him to act like one.”

Blast Off didn’t understand it. Why subject oneself to that, no matter how helpful it was to have others underestimate you?

The truck shrugged.

“Vortex enjoys weaseling a reaction out of ‘bots.”

“So I have learned. How perverse.” Blast Off said. “I don’t think Bulkhead would have appreciated that.”

“Not in the slightest.”

The shrug and the tacitly resigned look in Onslaught’s visor told Blast Off that sentence was uttered from a place of what Blast Off labelled long-suffering familiarity with the matters that came with the bulk of a functioning being lived in proximity to a mech like Vortex. That look reminded Blast Off of the bite marks bestowed by a nest of mutant retrorats and the smell emanated from an oil cake after one cracked it open and the snap of a blaster’s barrel sliding aside. Blast Off didn’t waste more than a flicker of processor power as to why his mind made the link, thin and small as it was, before ignoring it altogether but—it was there.

It was... something.

Hardly undying loyalty, no, not yet, but—something.

Something more than indifference.