Chapter Text
“Infiltrate. Extract. Claim.”
That’s all the message from Ultra Magnus had said, and Captain Redline , ever the composed field commander, received it with a flat nod.
A Decepticon research outpost, assumed to be abandoned but possibly boobytrapped, was buried deep in a ravine on an uninhabited stretch of terrain.
According to recently retrieved, half-corrupted, Decepticon datapads, it had once been a gathering spot for most of their scientists and engineers. As to what they worked on, no one was sure. The data had long since been erased.
Maybe it was for bioweapons or some barbarous spark research.
No one knew for sure, the data files were far beyond comprehension, glitching all the way to the all spark and back.
High command demanded they infiltrate it.
Perhaps in doing so they would uncover something to finally give them the upper servo in this endless war.
It was a gamble, but one that could pay off or could lead them down just another dead end.
Either way, if Optimus wanted something, that meant Redline was going to get it.
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Waiting at the end of a launch pad Mirage leaned against a support beam, his stance lax, almost coy as he watched the towering femme ready her gear.
He had heard late last cycle that she was being deployed, and just like every time before he had to be there to send her off.
“Captain,” Drawing out the ‘n’ with half shuttered optics, he called out, tired of being ignored a single klik more.
The tone of teasing within his voice always had a way of making her internal cooling system spike just a fraction of a degree, and the smug bot knew it.
Even so, the backfacing command finned helm he stared up to did not bother turning to reciprocate his greeting.
“Mirage.” Redline’s reply came neutral, collected, almost hinting at boredom .
He knew this game, it's the same one they played each time.
“daw common, don't act so happy to see me captain!”
For a mere astro-second, deep blue optics flickering off the gear before them over to the intruding bot however, as quickly as Mirage felt the tingles of her gaze, they returned to their post.
But even in that split moment of attention, her gaze lingered on him an instant longer than necessary. Sweeping like lightning from the ridge of his helm down to the prominent curve of his hip rotators, had he not been looking for this exact detail he surely would have missed it.
But he caught it.
Of course he did.
He always did.
Game set in motion.
“So I heard you’re getting deployed yet again?” It was less of a question, moreso a statement.
“Yes.”
“And you’re sure you don’t want backup? From what I heard there could be traps. All kinds of weird Decepticon science stuff. Just saying, some company might come in handy…”
Redline’s helm tilted a fraction of an inch, however her optics still did not return to him.
“You think my team can’t handle it?”
“Oh I know they can,” He paused, a grin oozing with playful smugness etched itself into his faceplates as he pushed off the wall and slowly approached. “Just thought you’d appreciate a little something, something, like me amongst all that-.”
“Mirage, you’re not coming.”
At last she turned away from the workbench of ammunition, arms folded, and helm downcasted towards the shorter bot, cutting his begging short.
The iconic Redline stoic look of silent disapproval mentally would’ve squashed any other bot as if they were no more than a pesky insecticon.
But not this steel helmed amorist.
In fact, he was right where he wanted to be.
Letting out a massive sigh, his frame slumped as he pittily pouted up to the femme, optics wide, and bottom derma puffed in faked sadness.
“Common Red , you’re really gonna deny me a creepy lab infiltration date?”
Primus, he could practically hear her denta clench the moment he murmured that nickname. It never failed to get her motor running just a little hotter.
All he needed to do was push a little harder.
“This is not a date .”
“It most certainly could be. You, me, some haunted old scrap heaps, sounds pretty romantic to me.”
As quickly as it occurred, a ghost of amusement twitched across her derma before vanishing back into vaguely annoyed apathy.
Almost there just had to secure the win .
“You’ll hold position here. I’ll be back within the cycle.”
Time for the finisher .
In a complete one eighty to his limp beseeched act, he shot up. Standing so stiff that his back strut and helm aligned, pedes flat together, and servos astutely clasped; he gave her an overly embellished salute.
“Yes ma’am!”
She stilled for a moment to take in the bipolar frivolous image before her, optical ridge creasing, and processor running through different retorts to fire back before a deadly roll of her optics dropped the conversation and she turned back around.
However, his keen optics did not miss the twitch of her derma mid turn into that darling smirk he had come to crave .
At ease he offered one last sigh before turning on his pedes to leave.
“Alright, alright, fine, you win but try not to miss me too much.”
She said nothing as his footfalls echoed back up the launch pad .
She didn’t have to.
Because at that moment he knew, he had truly won this round.
—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Helms kept on a swivel, servos morphed into armaments, Redline’s reconnaissance team swept through the long since abandoned, rusted, halls of the outpost.
True to their initial suspicion this base had long since been decommissioned. Dataports they had hoped to offer information had corroded over the decades, their data synthesizers unable to properly gather a single scrap of intel and energon tubing once embedded into the walls had shattered to pieces in crunched piles beneath their pedes.
It was strange, to say the least, completely unlike the Decepticons to desert anything, especially a post that appeared to once house great progress.
As they scouted deeper the captains ire suspicion grew greater.
There were no traps.
No resistance.
No signs of life.
It was too quiet.
“Weird, you’d think there’d be some kind of automated defenses left behind.” Muttered one of her soldiers, a younger mech who'd been recently assigned to her.
“Stay sharp, just because we’re not bleeding doesn’t mean we’re safe.” Redline’s cannon arm never lowered, her optics double checked corners, the darkened ceilings, the floor vents. Surely there had to be some sort of hidden ambush, some devious device waiting for them to uncover.
Yet each room yielded nothing but scrap.
That was until she reached the last sector
A smaller lab chamber, partially collapsed but mostly intact. Littered with scattered datapads on the counters, there was a strange hum in the air, low and almost organic, like the building itself was holding its breath.
As she signaled for the rest of her squad to hold, she entered.
The moment Redline stepped through the threshold of the entryway, she paused.
There was a creak from above.
She turned fast—
But not fast enough.
Old metal bent of a ventilation shaft gave way,
Pfffffffsh—
A faint puff of powdery air erupted from the ceiling vent. Pale and shimmering like star dust. Her instincts kicked in immediately as her battle mask snapped down across her face plates, engaging emergency ventilation systems —
But it was already too late.
The powder had entered her intakes.
She froze, her internal HUD flashing pop-ups as an internal scan completed.
UNKNOWN SUBSTANCE DETECTED
NO IMMEDIATE THREAT PRESENT
PHEROMONIC-REACTIVE COMPOUND.
She waited an astro-second, venting deeply, waiting for the fallout.
Yet nothing happened.
It did not hurt. Her internals did not feel as though they had begun smelting from the inside out.
It wasn’t panic-inducing. Her sparkbeat had not even increased to indicate psychological affliction.
The only indications of the substance’s presence was within her olfactory sensors, whatever it was, it smelled sweet.
Unrealistically sweet.
Like high-grade energon spiked with something impossibly decadent.
Like warm cables and static-slick armor.
Like...
Her stabilizers staggered slightly, a single servo gripped the wall to keep from stumbling.
“Captain?” One of the bots behind her took a step forward. “You okay?”
She lifted a hand. “Hold. Stay outside the door.”
The room began to shimmer faintly now in her optics, as if the corroded steel had been polished.
She could feel her vents cycling just a thread quicker and her energon pumps pushing the liquids beneath their casing just a fraction harder.
Nothing of utmost urgency, something that could be brushed off as slight panic. However what she could not understand was why her thoughts, which were usually always composed, had immediately gone to him .
Mirage.
Not just memories, but visceral impressions .
His voice, his frame pressed against hers, his cocky grin, and the way he always murmured her name when she had him strung out on the edge of overload—
No. No, no.
She forced herself upright, locking her mandible and turning back to her team. They all looked at her with concerned optics. The substance had not affected them, only her, thank Primus.
Given that so far the only adverse side effects were somewhat easy to conceal, she decided to press on.
Taking a deep intake she quailed the growing heat within her systems, for now.
‘Pull yourself together, finish the mission then deal with whatever the frag that was.’
“Continue the sweep. Mark each datapad for retrieval. Minimal interference. Anything unstable, tag for the science corps.” Her tone came out a bit more clipped than usual, a smidge more forced, yet she gave the order and her soldiers followed.
“Yes, Captain.”
The squadron resumed formation without pause, not one of them noticing the faint tension in her shoulders or the slight tremor in her frame.
Only she knew.
Only she could feel it.
The controlled slow-burning heat within her steadily evolved into a creeping, out of control, fire. It set in inside her actuators before radiating out and over her limbs, they now felt almost itchy .
Her spark was beginning to pound against her chassis and energon lines pumped harder with every step she took. Her coolant system hummed and fans clicked on, attempting to compensate, yet failing.
She was overheating.
But not from exertion.
From want .
Her field, the thing she normally kept locked down tighter than a war vault, was beginning to stretch thin against her will like a frayed cord.
She walked the corridor with practiced grace. Controlled, measured strides. Not a hitch. Not a stumble. She read datapads. She gave orders. She reviewed files that made her sick—old experiments, crude cyber-physiology attempts, horrors left behind by Decepticon science.
But nothing in the lab could hold her attention. Not when every passing klick made her internal temperature rise higher.
Not when her processor couldn’t stop looping the memory of his voice.
Mirage. Laughing in the common room, a sound that could easily fill any space.
Leaning too close in the hallway right after, their forehelm's almost touching, fields mingling in a silent exchange. That glint in his optics when he knew she wanted him but would not say it aloud.
Then it flickered to his servos on her chassis the last time they touched, when they'd slipped into her quarters after a particularly brutal mission.
The way he whispered “Just say the word, Captain…”
Her vents shuddered as servos curled into tight knit fists.
She couldn't stop it, subsequently, her array was beginning to throb just below her modest plating. The inferno of heat pulsing through her systems seemingly culminated there. T he pressure building in her frame was like a feedback loop of need, endlessly spiraling with nowhere to discharge.
"Keep it together..." Beneath her intake she struggled to uphold her word.
Still, no one noticed.
Because she was Redline . Captain. Commander. Stoic. Imperturbable.
But internally… she was melting .
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mirage was lounging again.
This time in his quarters, sprawled across a half-reassembled storage crate like a prince on a throne. He had a holopad flickering above him, some old pre-war broadcast he wasn’t paying attention to, and an energon cube barely touched on the floor beside him.
All his reports and daily training for the cycle had been completed voors ago.
Red had landed twenty klicks ago still no word of the missions progress beyond the initial sweep.
He was bored.
He had told himself not to check the mission feed every few klicks, but frag it, he missed her. Even if she would have scorned him half the time for “field incompetence” he still wished she would’ve let him at least tag along.
His optics blinked as the comm on his private line lit up.
::PRIVATE TRANSMISSION – REDLINE::
He sat up instantly and clicked it open.
“Mission stable. I’ll be back in approx. 40 klicks. Be waiting in my quarters when I return. I’ll need assistance with tension discharge.”
The pad fell out of his hand and clattered to the floor.
His entire frame went rigid . Vent systems kicked on high. Radial fans in his back whirred to life, trying to flush the sudden surge of heat in his plating.
“ What ,” he whispered.
Then read it again. Slowly.
Redline, Captain Redline, his stoic, restrained, flinty-eyed command unit of a bot, had just asked him to be waiting in her berth .
For “ tension discharge .”
Which, in Redline-code, was basically an all-out fragging invitation.
His shutters closed.
Once.
Twice.
Then he launched himself off the crate and bolted toward the washing station.
What followed was less preparation and more pre-battle ritual.
He scrubbed every plate. Polished his finish until his frame gleamed like new-forged steel. Even swapped out his shoulder plating for the sleeker set she once told him, albeit offhandedly, “didn’t look completely ridiculous.”
His reflection in the mirror smirked back at him. Nervous, but smug.
“You’ve been waiting for this moment your whole life. Don’t frag it up. Play it cool, you got this.”
He tried to walk.
He really did.
But by the time he had made it halfway down the central corridor, Mirage’s stride had morphed into something dangerously close to a skip .
There was a bounce in his step, a twinkle in his optics, and a smile so wide it made his faceplates ache.
Bots were starting to notice .
“Hey, Mirage,” Sideswipe said, half-suspicious as he passed him in the hall, “you glitchin’? Or did you just win the lottery?”
“I am the lottery,” Mirage winked, spinning on one pede before continuing toward the command wing.
B-127 peeked out of the rec room and tilted his helm. Mirage tossed him a lazy wave without slowing.
Ratchet raised a brow from the medbay doorway as he walked by. “Why are you polished?”
Mirage didn’t stop. “Routine maintenance. Very important, ya know how it is Doc.”
The older mech’s optical ridge furrowed downwards as he retreated back to his office, scorning Mirage’s name amidst a grumble of ‘don't call me doc’.
Mirage passed Jazz next, the first lieutenant optics immediately narrowing at the chipper sergeant.
“You’re up to somethin’, pretty boy.”
“Who, me ?”
“Mirage.”
He just shot him a look, one that said I’ll tell you later and kept going.
The closer he got to Redline’s quarters, the more serious his systems became. The smile was still there, but his spark was now pulsing fast, loud in his audials.
For the first time in a long while, he felt nervous .
He hadn’t gotten a message like that, ever .
Not from her.
Not the cool, clipped, steel-eyed Captain Redline who gave orders like iron and commanded like she was forged for it. The same bot who only let herself be vulnerable in the moments just after battle, when her plating was dented and she allowed herself to lean into him ever so slightly.
This? This was new .
This was her coming to him .
And not because she was hurt.
Not because she was spiraling.
But because she wanted him.
And she said it.
Bluntly.
Mirage had always been the flirt in their ‘relationship’. Always the one initiating those darling moments of intimacy, always the one starting fire in their sparks, but now…
“Frag,” he muttered to himself, rubbing his servos together, a small sheen of coolant had developed between the digits and within the center of his metallic palms. Trying to keep a cap on the rush of exhilaration shooting through his systems he took harshly exvented.
Then he nearly tripped over his own pede’s as he reached her door.
Regaining his bearings he looked around the halls, nobody else was here, nobody saw him.
“Keep it together man.”
Reaching for the keypad he did not need to knock.
He never did.
She had given him the code a long time ago.
Never explained it.
Never explicitly said why.
Because she didn’t need to.
If Mirage had learned one thing from her stoicism it was how to pick up a hint or two.
It was late one cycle when they had just returned from a mission gone haywire. Mirage was shaken, his servos leaking energon unsure of which splotches where his and which belonged to Primus knows who.
He remembers the way her field quietly pressed into his in light comfort, she’d tilted her helm, those deep blue optics melting into his.
“ Go get washed up.” She paused, leaning down a smidge, her helm dangerously close to his. “My door code is 28237. Don’t forget it. ”
It took him a moment to absorb what she had said, his drooping frame immediately felt ten times lighter as a smile replaced his deepend frown.
The femme of his dreams, the one he had been laying it on thick for the last millenia, had just given him direct access to her personal space.
A space no other bot in all of Cybertron has the privilege of invading.
How could he ever forget it?
He hastily typed in the code, his digit punching the keypad perhaps a bit too hard but with a light click, the door hissed open.
He debated a minute about laying on her berth or waiting against the wall—classic, casual. He opted for leaning , arms crossed, one foot propped, optics half-lidded like some dramatic datapad cover model.
Every vent in his body was on high .
She said 40 klicks.
He set a timer.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sitting in the far side of the shuttle, away from the rest of the expedition crew, Redline’s systems flushed from the everlasting effects of whatever powder had hotwired itself into her. Her soldiers were compartmentalized in the rear hold, unaware of the chaos humming through her circuits.
She had held herself together just enough to finish out their reconnaissance, make a final statement up to central command and regroup back at the return point.
But Primus was it difficult .
She felt buzzed , like she had drunk a couple cubes of high proof energex. Her spark was fizzling within her chassis, the normally slowish thump now a hammering drive under her plating. Readings show that her internal temp was far higher than normal, teetering the line of being too high. Internal fans did little to ease the sweltering as a thin layer of coolant had developed overtop gunmetal gray plating and small trills of steam evaporated off of her.
However these symptoms were far from the worst of it.
The most annoying and persistent of it all to the Captain was stemming from her processor.
Rather than recaps of the mission, it kept redirecting her focus to rather inappropriate memories.
Memories she only ever revisited within the privacy of her own berthroom, certainly not in a convoy mere pede steps away from her squadron.
Yet even with eons of self-restraint she could not stop them from polluting her sultry mind space.
Mirage pinned beneath her, his servos digging into her thick armored shoulder pauldrons, legs wrapped so tight around her that his silver plated panels began creaking as her spike drove into him. Those beautiful moans of his ringing in her audials. Calling out to her, begging for her to-
“ Primus …”
Huffing she tries and fails once more to rid herself of this evocation.
Opening her com channels the logical side of her processor hovers over Ratchet’s medical link, she really should see him about whatever has infected her. Yet the otherside, the one she's never allowed freerain of decision making, not amidst this war, glances over to Mirage’s private channel.
She needed to make a decision.
A few klicks pass by, Redline is left staring at her internal hud for a long time, her recent message history open.
‘Did I really just do that?’
Had she really sent that ?
The corner of her derma twitched upward in a shadow of a smirk.
Yes. Yes , she had.
And she was very curious to see what state she would find Mirage in when she arrived.