Chapter Text
Terra.
She was beautiful to look at from a passing view on a ship. She wasn’t so beautiful to look at when their ship was hurtling towards it at max speed.
Every corridor was flashing red with warning. Energon cubed slid off tables and smashed. Mechs slammed into each other. There was lots of screaming. Some others were fighting each other for whatever reason. Others were clinging to each other, even if they didn’t know who they were holding on to.
“Can’t you do something already, you incompetent drone?” Starscream screeched at poor Soundwave who was trying to regain control of the ship. He had his servos grasping the sides of his head tightly due to the loud blaring noise of the warning sirens.
“I don’t see you doing anything, fool!” Megatron barked back at him through the noise. Starscream snarled at him and attempted to punch him in the face. Megatron caught his hand quickly with ease. “That won’t solve the issue at hand!”
Soundwave seemed completely fine and calm. He was manning the control center with ease even though nothing was working. He at least looked like he knew what he was doing, but on the inside he was screaming so loud that his scream would only reach the ears of Primus.
Primus did not answer. He was rude like that sometimes.
It was amazing at how quickly they had gone from calm and organized to hurtling towards an unfamiliar planet. They had been fighting the Autobots while flying out in open space, which tended to never really be a great idea. Megatron had insisted, though. It was only because the Prime himself was on the ship. Had it been any random Autobot ship, he would have probably not gone through with the attack.
To be fair, it was probably a bad idea already given that Starscream of all mechs had been the one to convince him to attack. So they did. They shot canons at them. Apparently it didn’t cross Megatron’s mind that they would attack back.
At least they were both hurtling towards Terra. If the Decepticons had to suffer, the Autobots did too.
Suddenly, their ship took a huge slide again. Soundwave grasped on to the control panel to stay put. The metal beneath his digits gave slightly. Starscream was slammed right into Megatron’s chassis with a deafening shriek.
All the way on a different side of the ship, the seekers were screaming, running around, and hitting each other with their wings by accident. The only ones not behaving like idiots were Thundercracker and Skywarp.
“Do you think we’re gonna be safe?” Skywarp asked, huddled to Thundercracker close enough so he wouldn’t have to scream for him to hear what he said.
“...Yes,” Thundercracker hesitantly replied, but the uncertainty in his voice was obvious. Not comforted in the slightest, Skywarp tightened his arms around his trinemate. Thundercracker did the same.
On an entirely different side of the base, the cassettes, now outside of Soundwave’s chest compartment, were also screaming. Rumble and Frenzy we’re attempting to maul each other. Ravage was trying desperately to part the two of them. Laserbeak and Buzzsaw were squawking in panic and Ratbat was shrieking as well.
In the medical bay, patients almost rolled off of their berths, only getting stopped by the Constructions running about. They were just managing to push them back on their berths at the last second. Hook tried in vain to keep the medical equipment from falling.
To put it simply, they were having a bit of a crisis. Just a small issue of how their ship could enter Terra’s atmosphere, crash, and kill them all.
Not too big of a deal.
“Soundwave, can you turn this ship around?” Megatron demanded. Starscream tried to push himself off of him in vain. The ship just kept slamming him back into Megatron’s frame. Megatron turned his rage on him. “Would you cut that out?”
“I’m trying!” Starscream screeched.
“I cannot,” Soundwave answered Megatron’s question. Their leader grit his teeth and growled between them. Even though Soundwave’s voice normally lacked emotion, anyone could hear the audible panic in his answer.
They were going to crash into Terra and die. Megatron glanced at the Autobots’ ship. They were at least suffering the same fate.
Suddenly, he felt a sharp prick of claws on his arms. Megatron looked down and glared at Starscream.
“What?” Starscream shouted. “If I can’t get off of you, then you’re being my shield!” Megatron sneered at the fool, but didn’t make any movement to push him off. It was useless to fight anyway.
The screaming from the entire base was growing louder. It almost drowned out the noise of the sirens. Loud clanging from fights began to cease, at least. Some were finally catching up with how dire their situation was.
Suddenly the ship lurched forward as they broke Terra’s atmosphere. They were hurtling towards a blue mass. From their view it looked close to land, but they still weren’t close enough to see how far the distance actually was.
Starscream had let go of him and was screaming at Soundwave more. He was trying to help by smashing random buttons too. At least he was making some attempt to assist, even if it was fruitless.
Suddenly, they smashed into the blue mass. It seemed to be a liquid. Odd. Was their dominating species aquatic? There seemed to be a lot of liquid everywhere on the planet.
The liquid was strong when the hit. Parts of the ship were torn off on impact. The speed of the hit decreased, and now they were slowly sinking.
Not that anyone had time to think about that though. The impact of hitting the water forced everyone into the air, and they all hit their helms and passed out.
~
Soundwave’s visor flickered. Then it flickered a few more times. Then turned on completely, and he was finally online again. He pushed himself up. Apparently he was leaned over the console. He looked to his left.
It was quite an odd scene to look at. When they crashed, Starscream had fallen backwards on to Megatron. Megatron was leaned over against a wall. It looked a bit like his arm was wrapped around Starscream protectively. They both looked like they were only peacefully sleeping... together.
If it wasn’t the two of them, Soundwave would’ve thought the scene looked cute. But he didn’t.
He tried to walk over to Megatron, but he found himself almost sliding down. Was their ship at a tilt? When he turned his half-online gaze down the rest of the room where it led out the hallways, he almost jumped when he saw it was all filled with whatever liquid they landed in. When he stepped forward, he heard a little splash.
Ignoring the liquid, Soundwave walked towards Megatron, knelt down, and tapped him lightly on the head. He didn’t budge. Reluctantly, he hit him in the head a bit harder. Unfortunately, Megatron became a much deeper sleeper when he was stasis-locked.
Feeling regretful and terrible even before the impact came, Soundwave reeled back his servo and punched Megatron in the head.
He awoke with a start. Megatron sputtered, his optics flickering aggressively before turning on fully, and he attempted to hit the first thing he saw. That happened to be Soundwave. Soundwave held up his servos to block the fist, but it never came.
“Ah, apologies, Soundwave,” Megatron said, bringing his fist back down. He looked at his lap, where Starscream’s head had been knocked on to when he woke up. He flicked his head. Starscream immediately online. Strange. Why did he never online when he was literally thrown to the wall (which had happened numerous times when they crash landed), but a simple flick to the helm woke him up?
Starscream immediately pushed himself off of Megatron in disgust, making sure to enunciate the emotion in his expression. He looked around.
“What the frag happened to our ship?” Starscream screeched. He whipped his helm to look at Megatron with a glare. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Megatron furiously replied, offended. He brought a servo to his chassis, almost covering the Decepticon insignia on it entirely.
“Exactly!” Starscream yelled back, pointing a sharp digit at him. “All you did was scream at us, while I actually attempted to help!”
“And you didn’t succeed, fool!” Megatron sneered.
Soundwave looked between the two of them tiredly. Great. They just online again and the first thing they did was bicker with each other. Why couldn’t they just try to wake everyone else up, or salvage the ship, or do something that leaders were supposed to do? He dragged his servos down his face. He needed a vacation.
“Soundwave!” Megatron barked all of the sudden, breaking Soundwave out of his trance of fatigue. Soundwave glanced at Starscream, seeing his irritated expression and his arms crossed. Megatron had won that argument, then. “Do you know how long we’ve been in stasis?”
Soundwave checked his processor for the last time he was online. Due to them being on a different planet, it automatically adjusted to it’s time, including the year. “We had crashed on 1984 in Terrarian time. It is now 2019 in their time.”
“Thirty-five years then,” Megatron responded thoughtfully. “Wait. ‘2019?’ This species has only been alive for two thousand years? Primus, who knows what help they’ll be! They’re probably idiots!” He had a severely constipated expression on his face.
“Lord Megatron—“ Soundwave was interrupted by Starscream. On the inside, he screamed.
“They’re probably no smarter than you!” Starscream spat unnecessarily. Megatron glowered at him, not looking to get into another argument.
“Lord Megatron,” Soundwave attempted to address his leader again. Megatron looked at him with a brow raised, prompting him to continue. “Permission to online the rest of the Decepticons?”
“Of course, we should get on that,” Megatron sharply nodded, then turned his head to Starscream. “You, awaken your seekers!” Starscream rolled his optics.
Soundwave stood up. So did Starscream. Being unnecessary and dramatic, Starscream cracked his digits and his neck, then took one large step forward—
—and promptly slipped in the liquid and fell flat on his aft.
Megatron chuckled quietly. Starscream hissed a rather rude curse, making Megatron’s laughter cease with a surprised expression.
“It’s dihydrogen monoxide,” Starscream said while standing up, trying to recover from the embarrassing slip. “It’s harmless to us, but for whatever reason there’s sodium chloride in it.” He groaned in irritation. “It’s already in my joints and it’s microscopic! It’ll take forever to get out!” He stomped out of the control center to find his seekers, fuming.
“My, my, what melodrama,” Megatron muttered. Yet even though he seemed severely unimpressed, the look in his eyes made it look like that he truly was impressed Starscream was identifying things scientifically on the spot. Megatron nodded at Soundwave. “Retrieve your minicons. I’m sure you desire them. On your way to get them, wake up anyone else you pass by. Once you finish getting your minicons, work with Starscream to wake everyone else up.”
Soundwave thought that Starscream could wake up the whole base on his own given that he would probably just scream at the seekers until they woke up. He wished he didn’t have to work with Starscream, though. Soundwave looked at Megatron and nodded to show that he heard his command.
“I’m going to try and turn our main computer on again,” Megatron said. Soundwave nodded once more, but his processor was bringing up old memories of all the times Megatron had said that and resulted in him punching the screen in rage. He mentally wished him luck and exited.
~
Starscream walked through the base, trying to recall where his idiots last were. Every step he took resulted in a splash. The dihydrogen monoxide was rising higher now. It was a quarter up his legs already. There was a pink liquid swirling within the rest of the dihydrogen monoxide. Predicting the worst, Starscream experimentally dipped his digits into the pink and tasted them. It was exactly as he expected, unfortunately. Energon, and not the version they used for fuel. The idiot Decepticons had been fighting.
He continued to stomp the length of the halls, checking in rooms. When he didn’t see his seekers in the rooms, he just ignored them. They weren’t his priority.
Now his legs were almost fully submerged in dihydrogen monoxide. The energon around him increased slightly when he entered the next room he came across. This would either be very aggressive brawlers or his stupid, idiotic, imbecile seekers.
Lo and behold, it was the latter. Starscream groaned loudly at the scene before him.
Wings were bent at unsettling angles. Some seekers were fully submerged in the dihydrogen monoxide. Others had their heads peaking out, while some lucky ones were almost not submerged at all. Or perhaps they weren’t so lucky because they were only above liquid due to being on top of a pile of bodies.
Starscream looked around the room to find his idiot trine. He spotted them in a corner of the room, huddled together, offline. With a huff, he stomped over to them, splashing himself more with the liquid. Starscream hit Thundercracker in the head with unnecessary force. He awoke, wide eyed, optics filled with panic.
“Huh—Oh!” Thundercracker noticed Skywarp first and started shaking him awake, his expression already shifting to worry. “Come on, ‘Warp!” When it didn’t work, Starscream got annoyed and hit Skywarp in the helm as well, twice as hard as he hit Thundercracker.
He woke up immediately. “Owww!” Skywarp moaned, rubbing his helm where the blow was dealt. He glared up at Starscream. “You didn’t have to hit me that hard!”
“It woke you up, didn’t it?” Starscream sneered. Thundercracker also looked at him, having just noticed he was there. Dumbaft. Starscream gestured for them to stand up. “Up, now. Help me wake the rest of these blundering idiots!” And so they stood up shakily, not used to the sudden liquid around them. Starscream was already moving towards others to scream into their audials and punch them in the helms.
“Starscream?” The mech in question glanced at Thundercracker. “What’s the liquid that we’re standing in?”
Starscream rolled his eyes. “Dihydrogen monoxide, obviously.” Except it wasn’t very obvious to them because they didn’t spend a large portion of their lives studying science like a nerd.
“What did he just call it?” Skywarp whispered to Thundercracker. He shrugged. “Was it just a big science-y word?” He nodded.
The three of the, went about waking up the seekers. Thundercracker shook mechs lightly, to which Skywarp assumed control of the mech he was shaking and shook them harder, to which Starscream called them dumbafts and kicked the mech they were shaking in the helm, ultimately waking them up.
“You don’t have to try and dent my helm, afthole!” Ramjet yelled at Starscream, who was punching the mech’s trinemates awake.
Starscream whipped his helm back to him, all while holding poor Dirge, who was already awake, by what could’ve been his throat if he wasn’t a conehead. “Excuse me, but you are not allowed to call me that! I am your superior officer!”
Ramjet scoffed. “As if that means anything to me!” Starscream promptly threw Dirge into Ramjet. The two coneheads screamed. To add more salt to the wound, Starscream also threw Thrust at them.
Ignoring the groaning of the coneheads, Starscream continued punching mechs awake. Thundercracker and Skywarp tried to do the same, but only Skywarp succeeded in waking a few.
“Uh!” They heard a familiar voice. Slipstream. “Starscream, you idiot, there’s a much safer way of waking us all up!”
“You shouldn’t have offlined, then!” Starscream spat back, as though he hadn’t also offlined in a much more embarrassing place. He didn’t want to think about how he woke up with his helm in Megatron’s lap. That was weird.
He continued punching and kicking mechs until everyone was awake. “Now get out of here and do whatever you imbeciles do already!” Starscream commanded. Everyone groaned. “Oh, please! I didn’t have that childish reaction when I was told to do the same!” That was probably only because he immensely enjoyed his way of waking mechs up.
Just before he stepped out, Thundercracker nervously asked, “Starscream, how long have we been offline?”
Everyone’s helms immediately turned in Starscream’s direction, awaiting the answer. What if it had been a really long time? What if the Autobots had been awake the entire time they weren’t and told every Cybertronian that the Decepticons were dead? Were they offline for centuries? Millenia? Eons?
“Thirty-five years,” Starscream replied. A collective sigh of relief was heard. That wasn’t very long at all!
Starscream pushed through them when they stood in the way of the door stupidly. “Go, you idiots!”
~
Soundwave had gotten all of his minicons to awaken and transform so they could go into his chest compartment. He had managed to awaken the Constructicons and a few other random mechs. On his way to search for Starscream so he could complete Megatron’s orders, he ran into a gaggle of very awake seekers.
“Soundwave!” Slipstream called out, pushing her way to the front. Next to Thundercracker, she was usually one of the more sane and reasonable seekers. Probably more than Thundercracker, actually. “That blithering idiot Starscream didn’t give us any orders when he onlined us. Have you woken up the Constructions yet? I’m sure some of us are in need of repairs.”
Soundwave nodded. Slipstream continued to assume command of the dumb seekers behind her and forced them to follow her to the medical bay.
If the seekers had awoken, then Starscream was obviously walking about doing whatever he desired. If the seekers were also all alone, then he probably had just assumed his job was done and was walking back to Megatron.
Soundwave decided to walk back on the path he took to the command center. Sure enough, he saw Starscream stomping his way through the... what was it that he called it? Dihydrogen monoxide? There had to be a shorter term for that...
This meant that Starscream had to be around here somewhere. Perhaps he was making his way back to Megatron, thinking that his job was done. Soundwave started walking in the direction back to the command center.
He was correct. Starscream was indeed walking the same path. Soundwave tapped him on the shoulder.
Starscream jolted and spun around, null rays pointed directly at him. When he saw that it was only Soundwave, he rolled his eyes with a scoff. “Oh. It’s you. What do you want? I’m trying to get back to the command center. Did you get your tiny leeches yet?”
Soundwave felt a tinge of annoyance but shook it off. “Megatron wants us to work together after we woke up those we were told to awaken.”
“I have to work with you?” Starscream pulled a disgusted sneer. “Ew.”
Yet he followed him anyway when he began moving to online everyone else.
~
The Primus-damned computer wasn’t turning on. Megatron wanted to punch it, so he did. At least, he would’ve if two very blue servos with black digits hadn’t wrapped around his raised arm and forced it down.
“Don’t punch the damn thing, you imbecile!” Starscream shrieked. Megatron felt extremely annoyed, but the stupid seeker was right. It wouldn’t accomplish anything.
He looked to his other side to see Soundwave already there and working on the computer. Soundwave pushed a few buttons and it turned on. Megatron blinked, feeling stupid. He felt Starscream’s servos, which were still around his arm, shaking. When he whipped his helm back at him, the blasted afthole was laughing at him. Megatron sneered and grumbled.
Soundwave turned his head to him, awaiting his next command.
“Do you think you can get us off of this planet?” Megatron asked, allowing himself to feel a small bit of hope.
Alas, Soundwave shook his helm. “The engines are too damaged as well as other components. Our ship is also filled with water.” When Megatron raised a brow at the term ‘water,’ Soundwave pointedly looked at Starscream. “A much shorter and easier term for ‘dihydrogen monoxide.’” Starscreams face turned a rather entertaining shade of pink and scrunched up in displeasure.
“It’s stupid term,” he muttered. Megatron grinned in a slag-eating manner before his face shifted back into a deep frown.
“We should get the Constructions started on draining the ship of the water,” Megatron stated. “At least, after they repair most of our soldiers. Once we can safely leave our ship, we should explore this ‘Terra.’”
“The dominating species of Terra call this planet ‘Earth,’” Soundwave said. “The dominating species are called ‘humans.’”
“Earth?” Starscream asked, finally releasing Megatron’s arm from his ever-tightening grasp. “I was here before! But humans didn’t exist back then!”
“You were a scientist before the war, fool,” Megatron reminded him. “That was about five million years ago! These humans have only been around for 2019 years.”
Starscream folded his arms, feeling old. “Well when I was here, the dominating species were just a bunch of miscellaneous, brainless mammals.”
Well, now Megatron felt old. Their war had been going on for so long that a species took their time to dominate a planet during then.
Soundwave was pulling up images and information during his conversation with Starscream. Megatron leaned over the console and began reading the words on the screen, feeling his optic twitch in irritation.
“So the Autobot ship had landed too, haven’t they?” Megatron said in that slow and deep voice that signaled he was extremely irritated. “Oh, excellent. They got to be the ones to crash on land and we were the ones who hit water.”
Megatron straightened and forced a more stoic expression on his face. “No matter. We’ll kill them all, as we planned to previously.” He spun around with a bit of unnecessary flare. “We’ll repair our ship. We’ll find enough fuel to live and we can conquer this planet too.”
Starscream glanced at Soundwave with an expression saying ‘can you believe how dramatic that was?’ He was the one to talk.
Soundwave looked at their leader. He was marching out of the command center to round everyone up and tell them what was happening.
It was a good plan with good intentions. Unfortunately, they needed more than just promising words to fulfill Megatron’s wishes.
No matter. Similar things had happened before.