Special Agent William Fowler of the United States government had not slept in four days.
This was not, in itself, unusual. Agent Fowler had spent twenty-three years in government service, including two tours as an Army Ranger, a stint with DARPA that he was legally prohibited from discussing, and four years as the designated federal liaison to a group of alien robots who lived inside a mesa in the Nevada desert and periodically destroyed things. Sleep deprivation was not a novelty in his line of work. Sleep deprivation was a lifestyle choice that he had made somewhere around the second time a Decepticon had crashed into a national monument and he'd had to explain to a Senate subcommittee why the Lincoln Memorial now had a giant robot footprint in the parking lot.
But this—this—was different.
This was Jasper.
Jasper, Nevada. Population thirty thousand. A town so small that the national media normally ignored it the way the ocean ignored a pebble—completely, effortlessly, and without any indication that it was aware the pebble existed. A town where the most exciting thing that had ever happened, prior to the Autobot arrival, was a regional chili cook-off in 2008 that had ended in a fistfight between two pastors and been written up in the Jasper Gazette with the headline "CHILI CON CARNAGE."
And now Jasper had been attacked by alien robots.
In broad daylight.
On a Tuesday.
With witnesses.
With THOUSANDS of witnesses, because it turns out that when forty alien war machines drop out of the sky and start blowing up gas stations in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, people notice. They notice, and they pull out their phones, and they record, and they upload, and before Agent Fowler could even get his shoes on, there were approximately fourteen thousand videos on the internet showing various angles of giant robots fighting in downtown Jasper, Nevada, including several particularly high-quality shots of a thirty-foot red-and-blue robot riding a sixty-foot mechanical dinosaur through the town's main intersection while swinging a battle axe.
The dinosaur video alone had been viewed forty-seven million times.
Forty-seven. Million. Times.
Agent Fowler had spent the last four days trying to convince the American media, the American public, and the American government that what had happened in Jasper was not, in fact, a battle between alien robots but was instead the result of a "large-scale industrial gas leak combined with a military training exercise gone wrong."
This was not easy.
This was not easy because the evidence against the "gas leak" narrative included:
Forty-seven million views of a dinosaur videoThree collapsed buildingsA crater in the middle of Main Street that was forty feet across and shaped exactly like a giant robot footprintFourteen cars that had been melted by what chemical analysis confirmed was "plasma of extraterrestrial origin"A Vehicon arm that a twelve-year-old had found in a dumpster behind the Dairy Queen and was now trying to sell on eBayMiko Nakadai's fan page, which had gained approximately two hundred thousand followers in the four days since the battle and which featured high-definition footage of Optimus Prime setting things on fire with his forearm-mounted flamethrowers, captioned "MY DAD (not biological) (he's a truck) (he has flamethrowers)"
The "gas leak" cover story was, Agent Fowler would later admit in his classified after-action report, "the single most implausible explanation for any event in the history of the United States government's long and storied tradition of implausible explanations, and I include Roswell in that assessment."
But it worked.
It worked because Nevada was weird.
Nevada had Area 51. Nevada had nuclear test sites. Nevada had a long and well-documented history of things happening in the desert that could not be adequately explained and which the government responded to by shrugging and saying "gas leak" or "weather balloon" or "training exercise" and which the American public accepted with the resigned compliance of a population that had decided, collectively, that some things were better left unexamined.
The gas leak story worked because the people of Jasper—the actual, living, breathing residents who had watched alien robots fight in their town—were, by and large, Nevadans. And Nevadans had a cultural relationship with "unexplainable things happening in the desert" that could best be described as "yeah, that tracks."
"Giant robots?" said Harold Mitchell, 67, retired rancher, interviewed by CNN outside the Jasper town hall. "Sure. Could've been. Could've also been them government experiments they do out at the test site. You never know with the government. My cousin Daryl saw a UFO in '94 and the Air Force told him it was a weather balloon and Daryl said 'well, that's the biggest damn weather balloon I ever saw' and they said 'thank you for your cooperation' and that was that. So yeah. Gas leak. Sure. Why not."
"I mean, I saw the dinosaur," said Maria Gonzalez, 34, nurse at Jasper General Hospital, interviewed by Fox News in the hospital parking lot. "I saw it. It was right there. In the street. It was a robot dinosaur. But you know what? I also live in a state where they test nuclear weapons in the desert and the lizards are radioactive and the government has a base where they allegedly keep alien bodies, so a robot dinosaur is honestly like a Tuesday. Which it was. A Tuesday."
"Gas leak my ass," said a twelve-year-old boy on eBay, listing a Vehicon arm for $500 OBO, before the listing was taken down by federal agents who confiscated the arm and gave the boy a $50 Amazon gift card and a nondisclosure agreement.
So the cover story held. Barely. Tenuously. With the structural integrity of a sandcastle at high tide. But it held, because the alternative—acknowledging the existence of alien robots to the general public—was a bureaucratic nightmare of such incomprehensible scope that the entire federal government had tacitly agreed to pretend it wasn't happening until it became absolutely impossible to pretend anymore.
Agent Fowler drove to the Autobot base on day five. He drove his government-issued sedan. He drove it fast. He drove it with the grim determination of a man who was about to have a conversation that he had been dreading for four days and which he suspected was going to make the previous four days seem restful by comparison.
He entered the base through the access tunnel. He took the elevator to the main level. He stepped out into the central hub of the Autobot base, opened his mouth to deliver the tirade that he had been composing in his head for ninety-six consecutive hours—
And stopped.
Because Optimus Prime was standing in the middle of the main bay, at full height, battle mask retracted, holding a datapad in one hand and a very small marshmallow on a very long stick in the other. His left forearm was deployed in flamethrower mode, producing a tiny, controlled jet of blue-white plasma that was gently toasting the marshmallow to a perfect golden brown. On his right shoulder sat Miko Nakadai, who was eating a s'more and providing commentary. On his left shoulder sat nobody, because his left shoulder was occupied by a small stuffed animal that appeared to be a dinosaur and which Fowler would later learn had been given to Optimus by Raf as "a Grimlock for when Grimlock isn't around" and which Optimus had placed on his shoulder and not removed.
Standing directly behind Optimus, like a forty-foot-tall shadow made of teeth and loyalty, was Grimlock. In robot mode. Arms crossed. Visor burning. Expression set to "anyone who approaches my Prime without permission will be converted into a snack and I will not enjoy the taste but I WILL enjoy the principle."
Grimlock had not left Optimus's side in six days.
Not for patrols. Not for training. Not for recharge. The Dinobot leader had simply... stayed. He stood behind Optimus during briefings. He stood behind Optimus during training drills. He stood behind Optimus while Optimus made s'mores. He slept standing up in the corner of whatever room Optimus was in, his visor dimming but never fully deactivating, one optic always open, always watching, always ready.
When asked why, Grimlock had said: "Me Grimlock is Prime's guard now."
"I didn't assign you as my guard," Marcus-Optimus had replied.
"Me Grimlock didn't ask to be assigned. Me Grimlock DECIDED. Prime is worth guarding. So me Grimlock guards. That's it. That's whole thing."
"Grimlock, I have twenty-three weapons systems integrated into my—"
"TWENTY-FOUR. New one appeared yesterday. In your elbow. Ratchet screamed."
"...Twenty-four weapons systems integrated into my frame. I do not require a bodyguard."
"Me Grimlock not guarding Prime's BODY. Me Grimlock guarding Prime's BACK. Different thing. Body can take care of itself. Back needs friend to watch it."
Marcus-Optimus had opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Felt the Matrix pulse with a warmth that said he's right, you know. Closed his mouth.
"...Thank you, Grimlock."
"You welcome. Now toast marshmallow. Me Grimlock want s'more."
And that had been that. Grimlock was now Optimus's self-appointed bodyguard, which was approximately as necessary as giving a nuclear submarine a security guard but approximately as meaningful as anything could be, because Grimlock—who followed nobody, who respected nothing, who had spent four million years being the most stubborn, independent, ungovernable Autobot in existence—had looked at this version of Optimus Prime and said this one is mine to protect.
Agent Fowler took in the scene. The Prime. The teenager. The s'mores. The flamethrower. The Dinobot bodyguard. The stuffed dinosaur on the shoulder.
He closed his mouth.
He opened it again.
He said: "What the hell happened in Jasper?"
"Ah, Agent Fowler," Marcus-Optimus said, retracting the flamethrower and turning to face the human liaison with the unflappable composure of someone who had been expecting this visit and had prepared for it the way one prepared for a dental appointment—knowing it was necessary, knowing it would be unpleasant, and hoping it would be brief. "Thank you for coming."
"Don't 'thank you for coming' me, Prime! I have spent four days—FOUR DAYS—telling reporters, senators, Pentagon brass, the Secretary of Defense, and my mother, who saw the dinosaur video on Facebook, that what happened in Jasper was a GAS LEAK! A GAS LEAK, Prime! Do you know how hard it is to explain a sixty-foot robot dinosaur as a gas leak?!"
"I imagine it is quite difficult."
"It is VERY difficult! It is the MOST difficult thing I have ever done, and I once had to explain to a Congressional oversight committee why a Decepticon crashed into the Hoover Dam, and THAT was easier because at least the Hoover Dam doesn't have CELL PHONE CAMERAS!"
"Agent Fowler—"
"There are FORTY-SEVEN MILLION VIEWS, Prime! Forty-seven million people have watched your dinosaur eat a Decepticon! My MOTHER watched your dinosaur eat a Decepticon! She called me and said 'William, is that a dinosaur eating a robot on the internet' and I said 'No, Mom, it's a gas leak' and she said 'William, that is CLEARLY a dinosaur eating a robot' and I said 'GAS LEAK, MOM' and she said—"
"Agent Fowler."
"—she said 'William, I raised you better than to lie to your mother about dinosaurs' and I said—"
"Agent Fowler."
Marcus-Optimus's voice shifted. Not dramatically. Not threateningly. Just... weighted. Heavy with the gravity of a being who had fought a war for four million years and understood, on a level that transcended species and culture and the fundamental differences between organic and mechanical life, what it meant to protect people.
Fowler stopped. Looked up at the Prime. Into those blue optics that were—Fowler noticed for the first time—different from how he remembered them. Harder. Brighter. Carrying a depth that hadn't been there before, as if someone had taken the philosophical weight of Optimus Prime's usual gaze and replaced it with something more immediate. More present. More "I have personally dismembered the things that threatened you and I will do it again without hesitation."
"The Decepticons attacked Jasper," Marcus-Optimus said. "They attacked a civilian population center. Thirty thousand human beings—your people, Agent Fowler—were in danger. We responded. We stopped the attack. We saved lives. And yes, the response was... visible."
"Visible is an UNDERSTATEMENT—"
"The alternative was invisible. The alternative was me staying in this base, maintaining operational security, keeping our existence secret, and allowing forty Decepticon drones to continue firing on a populated area while I weighed the public relations implications of intervention." He paused. "I chose intervention. I will always choose intervention. And I will accept whatever consequences that choice produces, including your entirely justified frustration."
Fowler stared at him. The tirade that had been building for four days—the righteous, bureaucratic, professional fury of a man whose job had been made impossible by alien robots fighting in a suburban town—hit the wall of Optimus's calm, measured, reasonable response and deflated like a balloon meeting a pin.
"...Damn it, Prime." Fowler ran a hand over his face. "You can't just—you can't just be right like that when I'm trying to be angry."
"I apologize for the inconvenience."
"You're NOT sorry."
"I am sorry for the difficulties you have experienced. I am not sorry for saving thirty thousand lives."
"THAT'S THE SAME THING SAID IN A WAY THAT MAKES ME LOOK LIKE THE BAD GUY—"
"Would you like a s'more, Agent Fowler?"
Fowler paused. Looked at the marshmallow. Looked at the flamethrower. Looked at Miko, who was already preparing a stick with the practiced efficiency of a s'mores assembly line.
"...Is that an alien flamethrower?"
"It is a precision plasma projection system with dual-nozzle configuration and adjustable thermal output, currently set to approximately one-point-five percent of maximum capacity, which produces an optimal toasting temperature of six hundred and fifty degrees Celsius."
"So yes. An alien flamethrower."
"Yes."
"And you're making s'mores with it."
"The combustion characteristics produce a superior caramelization profile compared to conventional—"
"Sure. Fine. Give me a s'more." Fowler climbed the stairs to the observation platform, took the stick from Miko, and held his marshmallow toward the flamethrower with the defeated resignation of a man who had officially given up on the concept of "normal" and was learning to live in the wreckage.
The marshmallow toasted perfectly.
"Okay," Fowler admitted, chewing. "That IS a good s'more."
"The best s'mores," Miko said, with the authority of someone who had eaten approximately forty of them in the past week. "The scientifically superior s'mores. Raf did the math."
"Of course he did." Fowler chewed. Swallowed. Looked at Optimus. "You're different, you know."
"So I've been told."
"Different how is what worries me." Fowler's eyes—sharp, experienced, the eyes of a man who had survived two decades in government by learning to read people the way other people read books—swept over the Prime's frame. Over the subtle bulges in the plating that indicated hidden weapons. Over the scarred knuckle plating that suggested the knuckle dusters had seen recent use. Over the faint thermal discoloration on the forearms from repeated flamethrower deployment. "You've been... busier than usual. The reports I'm getting... Constructicons, Dinobots, that spider thing that Arcee won't talk about, the Seeker who's been rebuilt three times..." He trailed off. "What happened to you, Prime?"
Marcus-Optimus was quiet for a moment. Then: "I woke up."
"From what?"
"From the belief that this war could be won with patience and philosophy." He met Fowler's gaze. "The Decepticons attacked your people, Agent Fowler. They attacked a town. A school. They would have killed children. And they will try again, because Megatron is desperate, and desperate beings do desperate things. I am doing what is necessary to ensure that when they try again, they fail."
"And the dinosaur?"
"The dinosaur is Grimlock. Grimlock is my... associate."
"Me Grimlock is Prime's GUARD," Grimlock corrected, from directly behind Optimus, which caused Fowler to startle so badly he nearly dropped his s'more because he had somehow forgotten that a forty-foot robot was standing six feet behind him.
"HOW LONG HAS HE BEEN THERE?!"
"The entire time," Marcus-Optimus said.
"I DIDN'T SEE HIM!"
"Grimlock is surprisingly stealthy for his size."
"Me Grimlock took stealth class," Grimlock said. "Me Grimlock failed stealth class. But me Grimlock ate the instructor, so me Grimlock got passing grade."
"That's... not how grading works," Fowler said.
"Me Grimlock makes own rules."
Fowler ate his s'more in silence. Then he ate another one. Then he asked for a third, because the s'mores were genuinely excellent and at this point he had decided that if the universe was going to be insane, he might as well have good snacks while it happened.
"Fine," he said, finally. "Fine. I'll handle the cover story. I'll keep the Pentagon off your back. I'll explain the dinosaur. I'll explain the axe. I'll explain why downtown Jasper looks like it was hit by a small meteor." He pointed at Optimus with a marshmallow-sticky finger. "But if you ride that dinosaur through another populated area, at LEAST give me a heads up so I can prepare the talking points BEFORE the videos go viral."
"Agreed."
"And tell your—" He glanced at Grimlock. "—your guard to stop staring at me. He's been staring at me since I walked in and it's extremely unsettling."
"Me Grimlock is assessing threat level," Grimlock said.
"I'M A FEDERAL AGENT!"
"Threat level: annoying. Not dangerous. But annoying."
"I—" Fowler sputtered. Gave up. Ate his s'more. "I'm going to need a raise."
"I believe that is between you and your employer," Marcus-Optimus said.
"My employer is the United States government."
"Then I wish you luck."
"Thanks. I'll need it." Fowler descended the stairs, marshmallow residue on his tie, dignity in tatters, and one more implausible cover story to construct. At the door, he paused. Turned back. "Prime?"
"Yes?"
"The s'mores are really good."
"I know."
"Don't tell anyone I said that."
"Miko has been recording this entire conversation."
Fowler looked at Miko. Miko held up her phone. The red recording light blinked cheerfully.
"Fan page?" Fowler asked, with the resignation of a man meeting his destiny.
"Fan page," Miko confirmed.
"Which one?"
"All five of them."
"There are FIVE now?!"
"The newest one is called 'Government Agent Eats Alien S'mores.' It went live three minutes ago. You have four hundred followers."
Fowler opened his mouth. Closed it. Turned around. Walked out of the base. Got in his car. Drove away.
Behind him, Grimlock watched him go and said: "Me Grimlock like angry human. Angry human is funny."
"He's doing his best," Marcus-Optimus said.
"Me Grimlock also doing best. Best is standing behind you and being threatening. Me Grimlock very good at best."
"You are, Grimlock. You truly are."
The shotgun got its debut two days later.
Marcus-Optimus had been waiting. Not consciously—he wasn't the kind of Prime who looked forward to deploying weapons, despite what his increasingly concerned team might think. But the shotgun had been sitting in his right shin for two weeks, humming with a quiet, patient energy that was the weapons-system equivalent of a dog watching its owner pick up a leash, and some small, Bayverse-aligned part of his processor had been wondering when the universe would provide an appropriate context for its use.
The universe provided.
Breakdown and Soundwave arrived at an energon deposit in the Utah desert at approximately 1400 hours, leading a force of fifteen Vehicons. The energon deposit was one that Marcus-Optimus had flagged as a priority extraction target—a large, high-quality vein that could sustain the Autobot base for months—and the Decepticons clearly had the same idea, because they were already drilling when the Autobot sensor network detected them.
Marcus-Optimus responded personally. With Grimlock. Because Grimlock went where Optimus went, and Optimus went where the fights were, and the fights went where the Decepticons went, and at this point the chain of causation was so well-established that the other Autobots had stopped asking "should we come too?" and started asking "should we prepare the medical bay for the Decepticon survivors?" which was optimistic on the "survivors" front but showed good planning.
He brought Arcee and Bumblebee as backup. Not because he needed them—the math on "Optimus plus Grimlock versus fifteen Vehicons, Breakdown, and Soundwave" was comfortably in his favor—but because the training was paying off and his team needed practice against real opponents, and also because Arcee had specifically requested "any mission where I get to punch something" and Marcus-Optimus respected the therapeutic value of percussive stress relief.
The ground bridge deposited them two hundred meters from the Decepticon drilling site. Marcus-Optimus assessed the situation in his standard 0.8-second tactical scan—fifteen Vehicons in a perimeter defense formation, Breakdown overseeing the drilling operation, Soundwave monitoring communications from a raised position on a rock outcropping.
Soundwave.
Marcus-Optimus felt his processor allocate additional threat assessment resources to the silent Decepticon. Soundwave was different from the other Decepticons. Not stronger, necessarily—though he was certainly formidable. Not more aggressive—Soundwave was the opposite of aggressive, preferring observation and data collection to direct combat. But he was dangerous in a way that brute force couldn't match, because Soundwave was the Decepticons' intelligence apparatus, surveillance network, and communications hub rolled into one, and everything he witnessed went directly to Megatron.
Which meant that whatever happened here today, Megatron would see it.
Good, said the Bayverse part of his processor.
Let him see.
"Arcee, Bumblebee—take the perimeter. Engage the Vehicons. Use the training." He paused. "Grimlock."
"Yeah, Prime?"
"Breakdown."
"Me Grimlock handle Breakdown." The grin was audible. "Me Grimlock been wanting to punch big blue one for WEEKS."
"Gentle."
"...Me Grimlock been wanting to punch big blue one GENTLY for weeks."
"Grimlock."
"FINE. Me Grimlock will punch MEDIUM."
"Acceptable. I'll handle Soundwave."
The attack began with Grimlock, because Grimlock believed that the best form of tactical surprise was being too large and too loud to be surprising and doing it anyway. The Dinobot leader transformed—the transformation was still every bit as primal and terrifying as the first time, a shifting of metal and mass that produced a sixty-foot T-Rex in the middle of the Utah desert—and charged the drilling site with a roar that scattered the Vehicon perimeter the way a bowling ball scattered particularly anxious pins.
Breakdown saw Grimlock coming. To his credit, Breakdown did not run. Breakdown was many things—a bruiser, a brawler, a mech whose approach to problem-solving began and ended with "hit it until it stops being a problem"—but he was not a coward. He raised his hammer, set his feet, and prepared to meet the charge of a two-hundred-ton mechanical dinosaur with nothing but courage, stubbornness, and the kind of optimism that could only be sustained by a fundamental misunderstanding of physics.
They collided.
It was like watching a car crash between a semi-truck and a tricycle, if the tricycle was very brave and the semi-truck was a dinosaur. Grimlock's jaws closed around Breakdown's hammer—the weapon, not the arm, though the distinction would become academic in approximately three seconds—and bit down. The hammer crumpled. Breakdown's arm, still attached to the hammer, was jerked forward with a force that dislocated his shoulder joint and produced a sound like a car being compacted.
"ME GRIMLOCK SAID MEDIUM!" Grimlock announced, mid-bite. "THIS IS MEDIUM!"
"THAT IS NOT MEDIUM!" Breakdown screamed, trying to pull his arm free from the jaws of a T-Rex who was approximately as willing to release his grip as the tide was willing to stop coming in.
Arcee and Bumblebee hit the Vehicon perimeter simultaneously—Arcee from the left, blades deployed, moving with the fluid precision of a warrior who had been training daily for three weeks and was itching to demonstrate the results; Bumblebee from the right, blaster on setting eight, his shots landing with the crisp accuracy of a scout who had finally accepted that "setting eight" was not "excessive" but "appropriate" and who was making peace with the concept one confirmed kill at a time.
The Vehicons folded. Not instantly—there were fifteen of them, and even the most demoralized soldiers could put up a fight when cornered—but quickly. Arcee cut through the left flank with a series of strikes that were so clean and so final that each one could have been used as a training demonstration. "Confirmed. Confirmed. Confirmed." Three drones, three kills, three words, and she was already moving to the next target before the first one hit the ground.
Bumblebee's side was louder—setting eight made noise—but equally decisive. Bwee bwoo! ("Target down!") Bwee! ("Another one!") BWEE BWOO BWEE! ("They're running! Should I chase them?!")
"Let them run," Marcus-Optimus said, over the comm. "Focus on the ones still fighting."
"Bwee." ("Copy. Confirming kills. ...This is getting easier. Is it supposed to get easier?")
"We'll discuss it later, Bumblebee."
And then there was Soundwave.
Soundwave had not moved from his rock outcropping. He had not joined the fight. He had not called for reinforcements or deployed Laserbeak or taken any of the actions that a standard Decepticon would take when their position was being overrun. He had simply stood there, his featureless visor pointed at the battle, his frame perfectly still, and recorded.
Because that was what Soundwave did. Soundwave recorded. Soundwave observed. Soundwave collected data and transmitted it to Megatron in real time, providing the Decepticon leader with a continuous feed of intelligence that was more valuable than any weapon because information won wars that brute force could not.
Marcus-Optimus walked toward him.
The walk was deliberate. Unhurried. The walk of a mech who was crossing a battlefield the way a normal person crossed a room—with casual confidence and zero concern for the violence happening around him, because the violence was being handled by his team and his team was good now and he could afford to give his attention to the one target that actually mattered.
Soundwave watched him approach. The visor gave nothing away—it never did, because Soundwave's face was his visor and his visor was a screen and the screen showed only what Soundwave wanted it to show, which was usually "the face of whoever he was mimicking" or "absolutely nothing."
Today it showed absolutely nothing.
Marcus-Optimus stopped ten feet from the outcropping. Looked up at Soundwave. Soundwave looked down at Marcus-Optimus.
"Soundwave," Marcus-Optimus said.
Soundwave said nothing. Soundwave never said anything. That was sort of his thing.
"I know you're transmitting this to Megatron. I know he's watching. I know he's analyzing every frame, every sound, every data point, looking for weaknesses, looking for patterns, looking for anything he can use." Marcus-Optimus's battle mask deployed. "So let me give him something to analyze."
The shotgun deployed.
It unfolded from his right shin with a mechanical chunk-chunk that was the most satisfying sound Marcus-Optimus had produced since the first time he'd deployed the axe. It was a brutal weapon—short-barreled, wide-bored, designed for close-range devastation rather than precision accuracy. It looked like someone had taken the concept of "overwhelming force at intimate distance" and given it a physical form. It looked like the kind of weapon that existed because someone, somewhere, had decided that sometimes you needed to shoot something that was right there and you needed it to be very, very gone.
Marcus-Optimus racked the shotgun. The chunk-chunk echoed off the rock walls of the desert formation. It was not a sound that any Cybertronian weapon had ever made before, because Cybertronian weapons were sophisticated, elegant, technologically advanced—they hummed and whined and charged with the refined precision of machines designed by a species that had mastered energy manipulation millions of years before humans had mastered fire.
The shotgun did not hum. The shotgun did not whine. The shotgun chunked, because the shotgun was not sophisticated or elegant or technologically advanced. The shotgun was a statement. And the statement was: I am going to shoot you from very close range and you are going to have a very bad day.
Soundwave's visor flickered.
It was the tiniest flicker—a micro-disruption in the display surface that lasted approximately 0.02 seconds and which nobody else would have noticed—but Marcus-Optimus noticed, because noticing things was what Primes did, and this particular Prime had been waiting for exactly this response.
Soundwave had flinched.
Soundwave—the Decepticon who did not react, who did not emote, who did not display any response to any stimulus under any circumstances because responses were data and data was power and giving away power was antithetical to everything Soundwave stood for—had flinched.
Marcus-Optimus raised the shotgun. Pointed it at the rock outcropping. Not at Soundwave—at the rock beneath Soundwave's feet.
And fired.
The blast was enormous. Not in the explosive, "area of effect" way that the barrage cannon or the shoulder cannons were enormous. In the physical, kinetic, Newtonian way. The shotgun produced a spread of energon pellets—dozens of them, each one a tiny sphere of compressed energon that was individually harmless but collectively apocalyptic—that hit the rock outcropping with the force of a localized earthquake and turned the top three feet of solid stone into gravel.
The outcropping disintegrated beneath Soundwave's feet. The silent Decepticon dropped—not far, only about ten feet—but the sudden loss of his elevated position, the unexpected vulnerability, the surprise of it, produced a response that was worth more than any amount of physical damage.
Soundwave stumbled.
He caught himself immediately. Regained his footing in 0.3 seconds. Stood upright. Visor blank. Composed.
But he had stumbled. And Marcus-Optimus had seen it. And Megatron, watching through Soundwave's transmission feed, had seen it too.
"Tell your master," Marcus-Optimus said, racking the shotgun again—chunk-chunk—a sound that was rapidly becoming his new favorite noise in any universe, "that I have a message for him."
Soundwave was silent. Recording. Transmitting.
"The message is this: I know about the Dark Energon. I know what it does. I know where it comes from." He paused, letting the weight of that last sentence settle. "And I know what sleeps beneath this planet."
If Soundwave reacted to this, his visor did not show it. But Marcus-Optimus could detect—through the Matrix, through his sensor network, through the indefinable sense that the cosmic entity responsible for his existence had given him along with all the weapons—a spike in Soundwave's transmission output. A burst of data being sent to the Nemesis at maximum bandwidth. An urgency that the silent Decepticon's body language refused to display but which his communications systems could not conceal.
Megatron was getting this. All of it. Every word.
"Tell Megatron that the Dark Energon will not work the way he thinks it will. Tell him that the source is... unwilling to cooperate." A smile behind the battle mask. Small. Sharp. "Tell him to try it. See what happens."
Marcus-Optimus retracted the shotgun. Turned his back on Soundwave—a gesture of contempt so profound that it was almost art—and walked back toward his team.
Behind him, Soundwave stood on the ruins of his outcropping, visor blank, frame still, and transmitted everything he had recorded to the Nemesis.
On the Nemesis, Megatron received the transmission.
And began to wonder, not for the first time, how much Optimus Prime actually knew.
He knew everything.
Marcus-Optimus had known about Unicron since day three.
He had known because he was a Transformers fan. He had watched the show. He had seen the Unicron arc. He had read the wiki articles and the fan theories and the behind-the-scenes commentary. He knew that the Earth was Unicron's body. He knew that Dark Energon was Unicron's blood. He knew that the sleeping god beneath the planet's surface was the single greatest threat to every living thing on Earth and that Megatron's experiments with Dark Energon were, in essence, poking a cosmic entity with a stick made of its own essence and hoping it wouldn't wake up.
He also knew—because the Matrix told him, in quiet pulses and gentle nudges and the occasional burst of cosmic laughter that he was increasingly certain was Primus finding something hilarious—that Unicron was aware of him. That Unicron was afraid of him. That the god of destruction was currently suppressing his own Dark Energon resonance in a desperate attempt to avoid attracting the attention of a Prime who had been known to climb things and blow them up from the inside.
This last part amused Marcus-Optimus more than he was willing to admit.
He had not mentioned any of this to his team. Not because he didn't trust them—he trusted them with his spark, which was literally true because the Matrix was in his spark chamber and the Matrix was connected to all of them—but because the information was not yet actionable. Unicron was sleeping. Unicron was actively suppressing his own influence to avoid detection. And until Unicron did something that required a response, Marcus-Optimus saw no reason to burden his team with the knowledge that they were living on the surface of a cosmic horror that could end all life on Earth by rolling over in its sleep.
Also, he wanted to see what would happen when Megatron tried to use the Dark Energon.
Megatron tried to use the Dark Energon.
It was later that same day, aboard the Nemesis, in his private laboratory—a chamber deep in the warship's interior that was warded against surveillance, sealed against intrusion, and decorated in the specific aesthetic of "evil scientist's lair meets gladiator's training room," which was appropriate because Megatron was both an evil scientist and a gladiator and saw no reason to separate these aspects of his personality.
He held the Dark Energon shard. The same shard he had been carrying since his arrival on Earth. The same shard that pulsed with the blood of Unicron, with the essence of chaos, with the promise of power that transcended anything the physical universe could offer.
He had been planning this for weeks. The specifics had changed—his original plan had involved raising an army of Terrorcons from the dead, but that plan required a supply of deceased Cybertronians that was currently limited by the fact that Optimus Prime kept vaporizing his soldiers instead of leaving recoverable remains—but the core concept remained: Dark Energon was the key. Dark Energon was power. Dark Energon was the weapon that would finally, definitively tip the balance of the war in his favor.
He raised the shard. Concentrated his will. Reached out through the Dark Energon's resonance frequency toward the source—the great, sleeping, ancient source that he could feel pulsing beneath the planet's surface like a heartbeat made of chaos.
He pushed his will into the shard.
The shard pulsed.
Then it stopped.
Not gradually. Not with a fading glow or a diminishing vibration. It stopped instantly, as if someone had reached out and turned it off. One moment the Dark Energon was thrumming with cosmic energy, resonating with the body of Unicron, connecting Megatron to a power source that was literally planet-sized—and the next moment it was inert. Dead. A purple rock in his hand that was about as cosmically significant as a paperweight.
Megatron stared at the shard.
He pushed harder. Concentrated more. Threw the full force of his considerable willpower into the Dark Energon, demanding a response, demanding the power that was his by right of possession, demanding that the chaos god WAKE UP and DO SOMETHING—
Nothing.
The shard sat in his hand like a very pretty stone and did absolutely nothing.
"What—" Megatron said.
He tried again. And again. And again. For thirty minutes, the Lord of the Decepticons stood in his private laboratory and screamed at a rock, his fusion cannon glowing, his frame shaking with exertion, his voice rising to pitches that would have made Starscream jealous (if Starscream had been able to hear him, which he couldn't, because Starscream was in the medical bay having his face rebuilt for the fourth time because Swoop had been very thorough).
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The Dark Energon was dead.
Not depleted. Not weakened. Dead. As if the source—the great, cosmic, PLANET-SIZED source—had simply... declined to participate.
As if Unicron had said no.
Megatron stood in his laboratory, holding a dead shard of Dark Energon, and felt something that he had been feeling a lot lately and which he was getting very, very tired of feeling.
Confusion.
Everything was wrong. The war had changed. The rules had changed. His enemy had changed. And now the one advantage he had—the one weapon that was supposed to make everything else irrelevant—had simply stopped working, and he didn't know why.
He didn't know that the reason was currently sixty feet beneath his feet, wrapped around the Earth's core, curled in the fetal position (insofar as a planet-sized cosmic entity could curl in the fetal position), actively suppressing every trace of Dark Energon resonance on the planet because the alternative was attracting the attention of a Prime who carried a shotgun in his shin and treated gestalt combiners as climbing walls.
He didn't know that Unicron was, at this very moment, devoting approximately thirty percent of his cosmic processing power to the task of "being very, very quiet" and the remaining seventy percent to the task of "having nightmares about flamethrowers."
He didn't know that the god of destruction was hiding from a truck.
Megatron slammed the dead shard onto the laboratory bench with enough force to crack the surface.
"SOUNDWAVE!"
Soundwave appeared. Because Soundwave always appeared.
"The Dark Energon is not responding. Run a full diagnostic on the shard's resonance frequency. I want to know why."
Soundwave ran the diagnostic. The results came back clean. The shard was intact. Its crystalline structure was perfect. Its energy potential was unchanged. There was nothing physically wrong with it.
It simply wasn't connected to anything.
As if the source had hung up.
"That's... impossible," Megatron said.
Soundwave displayed the data. The data disagreed with Megatron's assessment. The data said "very possible, currently happening, deal with it."
Megatron sat in his laboratory and stared at the dead shard and wondered, for the forty-second time in recent memory, what in the Pit was happening to his war.
Beneath the Earth's surface, approximately four thousand miles down, Unicron clenched every metaphysical muscle he possessed and maintained his silence.
It was hard.
Maintaining silence was, for the embodiment of cosmic destruction, approximately equivalent to a human holding their breath while running a marathon. Unicron's nature was to RESONATE. To BROADCAST. To fill every corner of the universe with his presence and his will and the inexorable pull of entropy that was his birthright and his burden. Suppressing that nature—actively, deliberately, VOLUNTARILY shutting down every Dark Energon resonance point on the planet—went against everything he was.
But the alternative was attracting the attention of Optimus Prime.
And Optimus Prime had a shotgun in his shin.
And a grenade launcher in his other shin.
And a battle axe on his spine.
And flamethrowers in his forearms.
And twenty-four other weapons that Unicron's geological sensors had detected and catalogued with increasing alarm over the past three weeks, including a set of RETRACTABLE TOE BLADES that had appeared DURING A TRAINING EXERCISE and which the Prime had used to KICK a holographic Vehicon in HALF.
Toe blades. In his FEET. The Prime had BLADES in his FEET.
Unicron had destroyed galaxies. He had consumed solar systems. He had been the end of more civilizations than any being could count. He was ENTROPY. He was INEVITABILITY. He was the FINAL CHAPTER of every story ever told.
And he was hiding from a truck because the truck had toe blades.
This was, Unicron reflected with a bitterness that briefly caused a minor earthquake in Indonesia, the lowest point in his fourteen-billion-year existence.
In the distance—cosmically speaking—he could feel Primus laughing.
Primus was ALWAYS laughing now.
Primus hadn't stopped laughing in THREE WEEKS.
Unicron hated Primus. He had always hated Primus. But the hatred had taken on a new quality recently—a sharper, more personal edge that came from being laughed at by your cosmic sibling while you cowered inside a planet because a thirty-foot robot had too many weapons and not enough chill.
Unicron maintained his silence.
The Dark Energon stayed dead.
Megatron stayed confused.
And somewhere on the surface, Optimus Prime—who knew EXACTLY why the Dark Energon wasn't working, who knew EXACTLY who was sleeping beneath his feet, who had known since DAY THREE and had chosen not to mention it because Unicron wasn't currently a threat and there were Decepticons to deal with—went about his day with the quiet satisfaction of a being who had an entire cosmic entity scared of him and didn't even have to DO anything about it.
The shotgun chunked in its housing.
Unicron flinched.
Four thousand miles of rock and magma, and he FLINCHED.
Primus laughed harder.
That evening, three things happened that had nothing to do with war.
The first was that Miko demanded drive-thru food.
"I'm HUNGRY," she announced, from her perch on Marcus-Optimus's shoulder, at approximately 1900 hours. "I've been here all day. I've watched three fights, two training drills, and Agent Fowler eat s'mores and have an existential crisis. I have EARNED food. Real food. Not granola bars from the supply closet. DRIVE-THRU food."
"We have food in the base," Marcus-Optimus said.
"We have granola bars and juice boxes that Raf's mom packed for him three days ago. That is not food. That is SURVIVAL RATIONS. I want a BURGER. I want FRIES. I want a MILKSHAKE."
"Miko, I am a thirty-foot alien robot. I cannot go through a drive-thru."
"You can in alt-mode."
"My alt-mode is a Peterbilt semi-truck. Drive-thrus are not designed for Peterbilt semi-trucks."
"The KFC on Route 12 has a big parking lot. We can use the drive-thru window from the parking lot. I'll ride in the cab and shout the order."
"That is not how drive-thrus work."
"It's how OURS is going to work."
Marcus-Optimus looked at Miko. Miko looked back. Her eyes had the specific intensity of a teenager who had decided that something was going to happen and was fully prepared to make the universe comply through sheer force of will.
He sighed. The sigh registered on Ratchet's equipment as a 0.2 magnitude tremor.
"Grimlock?"
"Yeah, Prime?"
"We're going to KFC."
Grimlock's visor brightened. "What is KFC?"
"It is a human food establishment."
"They have food?"
"They have chicken."
"What is chicken?"
"It is... a small organic creature that has been prepared for consumption."
Grimlock considered this. His visor flickered through several expressions—curiosity, interest, and the specific look that predators got when they heard the word "consumption" used in a context that applied to them.
"Me Grimlock like consumption," he said. "Me Grimlock will come."
"You cannot come. You are a forty-foot robot. You cannot fit in a KFC parking lot."
"Me Grimlock will come in alt-mode."
"Your alt-mode is a sixty-foot mechanical Tyrannosaurus Rex. That is LESS appropriate for a KFC parking lot than your robot mode."
"Me Grimlock will be SMALL T-Rex."
"You cannot be a SMALL T-Rex. You are a LARGE T-Rex. That is a fixed physical characteristic."
"Me Grimlock will CROUCH."
"You—" Marcus-Optimus paused. Considered the image of a sixty-foot mechanical dinosaur crouching in the parking lot of a KFC in rural Nevada. Considered how this would look to the KFC staff. Considered how this would look to Agent Fowler, who had just finished explaining the last incident as a "gas leak."
Then he considered how this would look on Miko's fan page.
Then he considered how it would make Miko smile.
Then he made his decision. Because some decisions transcended tactical analysis and entered the realm of "this is going to be terrible and I'm going to do it anyway because my adopted human daughter wants a chicken sandwich."
"Fine," he said. "But you stay in vehicle mode. Both of you. And if anyone takes a photo—"
"Gas leak," Miko said.
"Gas—what?"
"If anyone asks why there's a giant truck and a possibly crouching dinosaur in the KFC parking lot, we say it's a gas leak. That's the cover story, right? Everything is a gas leak. Gas leak is the explanation for everything."
"That is NOT how the cover story—"
"GAS LEAK, OPTIMUS. Trust the process."
Marcus-Optimus looked at Miko. Looked at Grimlock. Looked at the ceiling, as if asking Primus for guidance, and felt the Matrix pulse with something that was definitely laughter and was definitely not helpful.
"Transform," he said. "We're going to KFC."
The KFC on Route 12 was a small, boxy building at the edge of Jasper's commercial district, flanked by a Subway and a laundromat, with a parking lot that could accommodate approximately twenty cars and absolutely zero Peterbilt semi-trucks or crouching mechanical dinosaurs.
Marcus-Optimus pulled in anyway.
His alt-mode—the classic Peterbilt 379, blue cab with red flame detailing, because even in a different universe the aesthetics remained iconic—rolled into the parking lot with the careful precision of a mech who was acutely aware that his wheel base was wider than the drive-thru lane and that his trailer hitch was approximately two inches from the KFC's outdoor menu board.
Miko sat in the cab. The cab had a cab—seats, a steering wheel, a dashboard, all the interior elements that a Peterbilt truck was supposed to have, generated by Marcus-Optimus's holographic projection system and looking convincingly real unless you noticed that the steering wheel occasionally moved on its own and the radio was playing Cybertronian classical music.
"Pull up to the speaker box," Miko said.
"I am a SEMI-TRUCK, Miko. I cannot pull up to the speaker box. The speaker box is designed for CARS."
"Then get close to it and I'll lean out the window and shout."
Marcus-Optimus maneuvered as close to the drive-thru speaker as he could, which put Miko approximately fifteen feet from the ordering microphone and required her to lean out of the passenger window at an angle that would have given a safety inspector a stroke.
"HI!" Miko shouted. "CAN I GET A NUMBER FOUR COMBO WITH A LARGE FRIES AND A CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE?"
Static. Then a voice, young, confused, probably belonging to a teenager whose shift had just gotten significantly more interesting: "Ma'am, are you in a semi-truck?"
"IT'S A COMPANY VEHICLE!"
"We... we can't serve semi-trucks through the drive-thru. You'll need to come inside—"
"WE CAN'T COME INSIDE! THERE ARE... REASONS!"
"What kind of reasons?"
Miko looked at Marcus-Optimus's dashboard. The dashboard looked back. Or rather, the holographic dashboard looked back in the way that a sentient vehicle's interior could look back, which was subtle but unmistakable if you knew what to look for.
"GAS LEAK REASONS!" Miko shouted.
A pause. "...Gas leak?"
"YEAH! THERE'S A GAS LEAK! IN THE... IN THE INSIDE PART OF THE RESTAURANT! SO WE CAN'T COME IN! BECAUSE OF THE GAS! WHICH IS LEAKING!"
Another pause. Longer. Then: "Ma'am, I'm inside the restaurant right now. There's no gas leak."
"IT'S A VERY SMALL GAS LEAK! LOCALIZED! YOU PROBABLY CAN'T SMELL IT!"
From outside the truck—from the parking lot—a new sound intruded on the conversation. A sound that was impossible to explain, impossible to ignore, and impossible to reconcile with any rational understanding of reality.
It was the sound of a mechanical T-Rex trying to fit in a parking lot.
Grimlock had followed them.
Of course Grimlock had followed them. Grimlock went where Optimus went. Grimlock was Optimus's self-appointed bodyguard. And Grimlock had decided that if Optimus was going to KFC, then Grimlock was going to KFC, regardless of the fact that KFC's parking lot was designed for Honda Civics and not for sixty-foot prehistoric mechanical predators.
He was crouching. He was actually, genuinely crouching—his massive body lowered as far as his mechanical joints would allow, his tail curled around the building like a cat's tail around its owner's leg, his head ducked low enough to peer through the drive-thru window with one enormous, glowing, blue optic.
The drive-thru window was approximately three feet wide.
Grimlock's optic was approximately four feet across.
The teenager inside the KFC—a seventeen-year-old named Derek who had taken this job specifically because "nothing ever happens in Jasper" and was now revising that assessment with extreme prejudice—looked through the drive-thru window and saw an eyeball the size of a beach ball, glowing blue, approximately six inches from the glass.
"HELLO," Grimlock said.
Derek screamed.
"ME GRIMLOCK WANT CHICKEN," Grimlock continued, undeterred by the screaming, because Grimlock had been screamed at by things much more impressive than a teenager in a KFC uniform and had never once allowed screaming to interfere with his pursuit of food.
"THERE'S A DINOSAUR!" Derek screamed. "THERE'S A DINOSAUR AT THE DRIVE-THRU WINDOW!"
"ME GRIMLOCK NOT DINOSAUR! ME GRIMLOCK DINOBOT! THERE IS DIFFERENCE! DINOSAURS EXTINCT! ME GRIMLOCK VERY MUCH NOT EXTINCT!"
"OH GOD IT'S TALKING!"
"ME GRIMLOCK WANT CHICKEN! ALL THE CHICKEN! HOW MUCH CHICKEN YOU HAVE?"
"I—WE—THERE'S—"
"ME GRIMLOCK WILL TAKE ALL OF IT!"
From inside the truck cab, Miko was laughing so hard she had stopped producing sound entirely. She was just vibrating—her entire body shaking with silent, breathless, transcendent hilarity, tears streaming down her face, her phone held in a death grip and pointed at the drive-thru window where Grimlock's enormous optic was still pressed against the glass like the world's most terrifying window shopper.
Marcus-Optimus, in a moment of desperation that he would later describe as "the lowest point of my existence as a Prime, and I include the time I was killed by Megatron in my list of existential nadirs," activated his holographic system and projected a human figure into the driver's seat—a generic, forgettable, extremely normal-looking human male who leaned toward the speaker and said, in Marcus-Optimus's best approximation of a casual human voice:
"Sorry about that. The dinosaur is with us. He's... part of a promotion."
"A PROMOTION?!" Derek's voice had reached a pitch that would have shattered glass if the drive-thru window weren't already vibrating from the bass resonance of Grimlock's proximity. "WHAT KIND OF PROMOTION INVOLVES A DINOSAUR?!"
"A... new one. Very new. We're beta-testing it. For the company. The... dinosaur company." Marcus-Optimus's holographic avatar smiled in a way that was meant to be reassuring and was actually deeply unsettling because Marcus-Optimus had learned to smile from the Bayverse, and the Bayverse's idea of "reassuring" was significantly different from a normal human's. "Can we just get the chicken, please?"
Derek stared at the holographic avatar. Stared at the dinosaur eye in the window. Stared at the semi-truck. Stared at the teenager leaning out of the passenger window, who was no longer laughing but was instead giving him a thumbs up with the confident energy of someone who had done this before and it had worked out fine.
"How much chicken?" Derek asked, in the voice of a man who had just decided that his sanity was a small price to pay for getting through this shift.
"All of it," Grimlock said.
"We have... a lot of chicken."
"ME GRIMLOCK SAID ALL OF IT."
"That's... like, sixty pieces."
"THAT IS NOT VERY MANY PIECES."
"MIKO!" Marcus-Optimus hissed through his internal speakers. "Order something reasonable!"
"SIXTY PIECES IS REASONABLE!" Miko hissed back. "GRIMLOCK IS A DINOSAUR!"
"HE CAN'T EAT CHICKEN! HE'S A ROBOT!"
"HE WANTS TO TRY!"
"HIS DIGESTIVE SYSTEM IS A FUSION REACTOR!"
"THEN THE CHICKEN WILL BE VERY WELL DIGESTED!"
Marcus-Optimus sighed. The holographic avatar sighed. The entire Peterbilt truck seemed to sigh, a full-vehicle exhalation that made the suspension sag and the cab settle and the teenager inside Derek's brain give up on the concept of a universe that made sense.
"Sixty pieces," the avatar said. "And a Number Four combo. And a chocolate milkshake."
"And a biscuit," Miko added.
"And a biscuit."
"And coleslaw."
"...And coleslaw."
"For here or to go?" Derek asked, on autopilot now, his brain having disengaged from reality and switched to "service mode" because the training manual said to always ask "for here or to go" and the training manual was the only thing that still made sense.
"To go," Marcus-Optimus said.
"Obviously," Miko added.
"ME GRIMLOCK EAT HERE!" Grimlock announced.
"TO GO," Marcus-Optimus said, more firmly.
"ME GRIMLOCK—"
"To go, Grimlock."
"...Fine. To go. But me Grimlock want EXTRA BISCUITS."
The order was placed. The food was prepared. The payment was made—Miko had a debit card that she claimed was for "emergencies," and Marcus-Optimus decided not to investigate the definition of "emergency" that included sixty pieces of KFC chicken for a robot dinosaur. The food was passed through the drive-thru window, and the teenager named Derek performed the handoff with the mechanical efficiency of a being who had left his body approximately ten minutes ago and was now operating on pure muscle memory.
"Thank you for choosing KFC," Derek said. "Please come again."
"ME GRIMLOCK WILL DEFINITELY COME AGAIN," Grimlock said, his enormous optic still pressed against the glass.
"Please don't."
"ME GRIMLOCK APPRECIATE HONESTY!"
They left. Marcus-Optimus pulled out of the parking lot with the slow, careful precision of a semi-truck that was also an alien robot that was also deeply embarrassed. Grimlock uncrouched—the process of a mechanical T-Rex standing to its full sixty-foot height in a KFC parking lot was not subtle and was absolutely witnessed by three cars, a jogger, and a woman walking her dog, all of whom would later describe the experience to their therapists—and followed.
Behind them, Derek stood at the drive-thru window, staring at the empty parking lot, processing.
"Gas leak," he said, to nobody. "Definitely a gas leak."
He quit the next day. His resignation letter said: "The dinosaur was the last straw."
The manager, who had not been present for the incident, was confused.
The manager would remain confused.
This was probably for the best.
They ate in the desert.
Not at the base—Marcus-Optimus had decided that returning to base with sixty pieces of KFC chicken and a crouching dinosaur would raise questions that he was not prepared to answer, particularly from Ratchet, who had recently discovered that Miko had been tapping into his diagnostic equipment for the weapons manifestation fan page and was in what could only be described as a "mood."
So they parked. In the desert. Under the stars. Marcus-Optimus in his alt-mode, Miko sitting cross-legged on his hood (which was, functionally, his chest, which made him slightly self-conscious but which he had learned to accept), Grimlock in beast mode, curled around the truck like a scaly, mechanical, sixty-foot guardian dragon.
Miko ate her Number Four combo. She ate it slowly—not because she wasn't hungry, but because the moment was good, and good moments deserved to be savored, and Miko Nakadai—for all her frenetic energy, for all her loudness, for all her irrepressible, irresistible, indomitable enthusiasm—understood the value of a quiet moment in a way that most people twice her age did not.
"Hey, Optimus?"
"Yes, Miko?"
"Thanks for this."
"You are welcome."
"No, I mean—" She gestured. At the desert. At the stars. At the KFC bag. At Grimlock, who was holding a chicken leg between two claws the size of excavator scoops and examining it with the intense focus of a predator encountering a new type of prey. "Thanks for all of this. For letting me be part of it. For not telling me to go away. For—" She paused. Searched for words. Found them. "For letting me ride your shoulder."
"Miko—"
"I know I'm annoying. I know I'm loud. I know I follow you around like a puppy and I make too many fan pages and I never stay in the safe zone and I make Bulkhead sad, which I feel bad about, I really do, but—" She looked up. At the stars. At the infinite, impossible, beautiful darkness that was the universe, seen from the surface of a sleeping god. "But this is the first time in my life I've felt like I belong somewhere. Like I'm not just a weird kid who doesn't fit in and likes things too much and cares too hard. You don't make me feel weird for caring, Optimus. You just... you let me care. And you care back. And that's—"
She sniffed. Once. Hard. The kind of sniff that was a wall against something bigger.
"That's everything."
Marcus-Optimus was quiet for a moment. The Matrix hummed. The stars burned. Grimlock's optics dimmed to a warm, soft blue as the Dinobot settled deeper into his protective curl around the truck.
"You are not annoying, Miko," Marcus-Optimus said. "You are not too loud. You do not care too hard. In four million years of war, I have met warriors who could not match your courage. Strategists who could not match your tactical instincts. And I have never—not once, not in any lifetime—met anyone who could match your enthusiasm."
"Is that a compliment or a diagnosis?"
"It is a fact. And the fact is this: you belong here. You belong with us. Not because you are useful—though you are remarkably useful, and the hip joint observation during the Devastator fight saved lives. Not because you are brave—though you are braver than most soldiers I have commanded. You belong because you are Miko. And that is enough."
The desert was quiet. The stars shone. Grimlock's tail twitched—a small, contented motion that sent ripples through the sand.
Miko sniffed again. Harder this time.
"I'm not crying."
"I know."
"My eyes are just... doing a thing."
"Of course."
"It's ALLERGIES."
"Naturally."
"In the DESERT."
"Desert allergies are very common."
"YOU'RE a desert allergy."
"That doesn't make anatomical sense, Miko."
She laughed. Wet and bright and real, the kind of laugh that came from the very bottom of a person's soul and carried everything up with it. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand—the hand that wasn't holding the milkshake—and leaned back against the warm metal of Optimus's hood, and the metal was gentle and solid and safe, and the stars were enormous, and the world was strange, and everything was perfect.
"Hey, Grimlock?"
"Yeah, small loud human?"
"How's the chicken?"
Grimlock looked at the chicken leg. He had been studying it for several minutes with the focused intensity of a being who had never encountered Earth poultry before and was uncertain of the protocol.
Slowly, carefully, with the delicate precision of a being whose teeth could bite through starship hulls and who was therefore approaching a fried chicken leg with the same caution a human would approach a soap bubble, Grimlock bit.
He chewed.
Once.
His visor brightened to maximum intensity.
"ME GRIMLOCK LOVE CHICKEN."
"Told you."
"ME GRIMLOCK LOVE CHICKEN MORE THAN SPIDER!"
"That's... a low bar, but I'll take it."
"ME GRIMLOCK WANT MORE CHICKEN! ME GRIMLOCK WANT ALL CHICKEN ON PLANET!"
"That's... a LOT of chicken, Grimlock."
"ME GRIMLOCK IS VERY HUNGRY! ME GRIMLOCK HAS BEEN GUARDING PRIME FOR SIX DAYS! GUARDING IS HUNGRY WORK!"
"You know what? Fair. Eat the chicken, Grimlock. You've earned it."
Grimlock ate the chicken. All sixty pieces. In approximately ninety seconds. The sounds were not delicate, and the Colonel would not have approved, but the joy—the pure, uncomplicated, dinosaur joy of a Dinobot discovering fried chicken for the first time—was so genuine and so wholesome that it briefly made the universe a better place.
Marcus-Optimus sat in the desert with Miko on his hood and Grimlock eating chicken beside him and felt the Matrix hum with contentment and the memories of two lifetimes settle around him like a blanket, and he thought:
This is what I'm fighting for.
Not freedom in the abstract. Not justice as a concept. Not the philosophical ideals that had sustained four million years of war and had never once stopped a Decepticon from firing.
This.
A girl eating a milkshake under the stars. A dinosaur discovering chicken. A quiet moment in a desert on a planet that was sleeping and scared and alive.
This was worth fighting for.
This was worth becoming a monster for.
This was worth everything.
In a place beyond time, beyond space, beyond the reach of stars and the memory of light...
Primus watched.
He watched from the place where watching was being and being was joy and joy was the fundamental frequency of creation itself. He watched through the Matrix and through the planet and through the quantum connections that linked every atom in the universe to every other atom and which allowed a cosmic entity of infinite scope to focus, with perfect clarity, on a single moment in a single desert on a single planet at the edge of a single galaxy in a universe of trillions.
He watched Miko eat her milkshake.
He watched Grimlock discover chicken.
He watched Optimus Prime—his Prime, his champion, his beautifully broken and magnificently rebuilt bearer of the Matrix of Leadership—sit in the desert with his family and be, for one perfect moment, at peace.
And Primus SAVORED it.
He savored it the way a being who had existed for fourteen billion years and had seen the birth and death of countless civilizations and had carried the weight of creation on his metaphysical shoulders for longer than time itself could measure savored a moment of pure, uncomplicated GOODNESS.
Because goodness was rare. In a universe that trended toward entropy, toward chaos, toward the endless, grinding, Unicron-ward pull of destruction and decay, genuine moments of goodness were the rarest things in existence. Rarer than dark matter. Rarer than antimatter. Rarer than the specific configuration of quantum states that produced a conscious mind capable of appreciating the difference between existing and LIVING.
This was living.
A girl. A dinosaur. A truck. Chicken.
This was what he had created the universe FOR.
Not for wars. Not for empires. Not for the grand, sweeping narratives of civilizations rising and falling across the cosmic stage. He had created the universe for THIS—for the small moments, the quiet moments, the moments that happened between the big moments and which were, in every way that mattered, the only moments that counted.
Primus watched, and he was happy.
He was happier than he had been in four billion years.
He was happier than he had been since the creation of the Thirteen, since the first spark had been kindled, since the very CONCEPT of happiness had been woven into the fabric of existence as a fundamental force alongside gravity and electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear interactions.
And the happiness was not just from the moment—not just from the girl and the dinosaur and the chicken and the stars. It was from the TRAJECTORY. From the arc of the story that his Prime was writing, one battle at a time, one s'more at a time, one face at a time.
Because the story was GOOD.
Not simple. Not clean. Not the kind of good that came wrapped in a bow with a moral at the end and a rating suitable for all audiences. It was MESSY good. COMPLICATED good. The kind of good that involved flamethrowers and face-dragging and a fifteen-year-old tactical advisor and a Dinobot bodyguard who ate spiders and didn't enjoy the taste but did enjoy the principle.
But it was good. Undeniably, irrevocably, STUBBORNLY good.
And Primus wanted to savor every second of it, because he had learned—in fourteen billion years of existence, in the creation and destruction of more worlds than any mortal mind could comprehend—that the good moments were the ones that went fastest. That the quiet moments were the ones that ended soonest. That the moments of peace were always, ALWAYS followed by moments of war.
Something was coming.
Primus could feel it—a disturbance in the cosmic architecture, a tremor in the foundations of reality, a CONVERGENCE of forces and events and choices that was building toward a culmination that would test his Prime in ways that no Prime had ever been tested.
Dark Energon. Unicron. Megatron's desperation. The war's escalation. The inexorable, unavoidable MOMENT when all of these threads would weave together into something that could either save the universe or destroy it.
It was coming.
But not tonight.
Tonight, there was chicken.
Tonight, there was a girl under the stars who had found her family.
Tonight, there was a dinosaur who loved fried food and a Prime who loved his people and a universe that was, despite its very best efforts to the contrary, BEAUTIFUL.
Primus savored it.
He savored it like a fine wine (a concept he had borrowed from human culture and found delightful).
He savored it like a sunset (a concept he had invented and was particularly proud of).
He savored it like a god who knew that the storm was coming and wanted one more moment of calm before the thunder began.
The storm would come.
But the calm...
The calm was EVERYTHING.
And it was his.
And it was GOOD.
Deep beneath the surface, Unicron stirred in his sleep.
He was dreaming again.
In the dream, he was enormous. Infinite. The consumer of worlds, the ender of stories, the final darkness that waited at the bottom of every light.
And then a small voice said: "ME GRIMLOCK WANT MORE CHICKEN."
And somehow, inexplicably, impossibly—
Unicron smiled.
Not because it was funny (although it was).
Not because it was absurd (although it VERY MUCH was).
But because in fourteen billion years of existence, in the endless, grinding, EXHAUSTING cycle of destruction and entropy and the cold mathematics of cosmic inevitability—
Nobody had ever offered him chicken.
He went back to sleep.
The dream was different this time.
In the dream, a small human handed him a piece of fried chicken, and a Prime stood beside her with an axe on his shoulder and flamethrowers in his arms and a shotgun in his shin, and the Prime said: "We're going to KFC. You coming?"
And Unicron said: "...Is there coleslaw?"
And the Prime said: "There's always coleslaw."
And for the first time in fourteen billion years, the god of destruction dreamed a dream that was not about destruction.
It was about chicken.
And it was GOOD.
END OF CHAPTER 6
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
I made a cosmic entity of infinite destruction dream about KFC chicken and I am NOT sorry.
Look. LOOK. This chapter is important because it's the chapter where the crackfic stops being just a crackfic and becomes something with a HEART. Yes, there's a shotgun. Yes, Grimlock went to KFC. Yes, Derek the drive-thru employee quit his job because a dinosaur ordered sixty pieces of chicken through a window the size of a computer monitor. But underneath ALL of that is a moment—a REAL moment—between a girl who doesn't feel like she belongs and a Prime who makes her feel like she does, and if that doesn't get you then I don't know what will.
Miko is the heart of this fic. I didn't plan that. I planned for Optimus to be the heart of this fic because Optimus is the TITLE CHARACTER. But Miko—loud, chaotic, irrepressible, LOVING Miko—walked into this story and STOLE it, because that's what Miko does. She steals things. She steals scenes and hearts and shoulder-riding privileges and she NEVER gives them back and you NEVER want her to.
AGENT FOWLER UPDATE: He ate three s'mores. He is on five fan pages. He has been given the designation "S'mores Dad" by Miko's followers. He does not know about this. He will find out. It will not go well.
STARSCREAM FACE UPDATE (v4): Swoop was thorough. VERY thorough. Knockout is on his fourth reconstruction. The fourth face is described by Knockout as "my best work under impossible conditions" and by Starscream as "I LOOK LIKE A DIFFERENT SPECIES." Current face status: technically functional, aesthetically unprecedented, bearing a 12% resemblance to original Starscream and a concerning 45% resemblance to a Vehicon who's been run over. Starscream has stopped looking at reflective surfaces entirely. The Vehicon union has retracted their GoFundMe for Starscream's face and redirected the funds to "literally anything else."
DARK ENERGON UPDATE: It doesn't work. It hasn't worked in a week. Megatron has been staring at a dead rock for three days. Soundwave has recordings. The recordings are categorized under "MEGATRON_STARING_AT_ROCK_" with sequential numbering. There are forty-seven recordings. They are each between fifteen minutes and three hours long. They are the saddest things Soundwave has ever recorded, and Soundwave has recorded Megatron screaming in his sleep forty-three times.
UNICRON UPDATE: Hiding. Suppressing Dark Energon. Having nightmares about flamethrowers. Having a slightly DIFFERENT nightmare about fried chicken that he's not sure is a nightmare because it was actually kind of... nice? He doesn't know what to do with this information. He is a god of destruction and he dreamed about coleslaw. This is unprecedented in cosmic history.
PRIMUS UPDATE: Has not stopped smiling in three weeks. Is savoring every moment. Knows the storm is coming. Doesn't care. Tonight there is chicken.
WEAPONS COUNT: 25. The elbow thing was a retractable energon taser. Ratchet's spreadsheet is now two pages long. The second page is just profanity.
Next chapter: The storm arrives. Megatron does something desperate. Unicron stirs. And Optimus Prime faces the one enemy he can't punch, climb, or feed to a dinosaur.
Or CAN he?
(He can. He's going to find a way. Because he's Optimus Prime, and Optimus Prime ALWAYS finds a way.)
(Also because he has twenty-five weapons and counting, and the Matrix is NOT done with him yet.)
AuthorDude
P.S. - Derek from KFC is real to me and I will protect him. He deserved better. He deserved a shift that didn't involve a dinosaur ordering chicken through the window. He got a $50 Amazon gift card (not from the government, from Miko, who felt bad) and a story that nobody will ever believe.
Godspeed, Derek. Godspeed.