You had been planetside for three months.

Long enough to adjust to Earth’s gravity. Long enough to stop flinching at birds. Long enough to smile when Bumblebee cracked his static-filter jokes, to nod when Optimus spoke, to pretend you hadn’t spent centuries drifting in blackout silence while your world burned without you.

But not long enough to forget him.

The mission was simple. In theory. A buried Decepticon relay station tucked beneath a dead zone in the Rockies. Half-fused into the rock, half-eaten by time. No signals in or out. Just a tactical databank Optimus wanted recovered—something to help the Autobots strategize before the next Decepticon strike.

You volunteered. Insisted, really. Stealth was your forte. The mission was quiet, and you needed quiet. You needed to prove you still functioned.

The drop was smooth. The terrain, brutal. You moved like smoke between the cliffs, alt-mode hugging tight curves and narrow ridges until the entrance loomed in the hollow: steel-boned and blackened with age. It looked more like a mausoleum than a relay station.

You transformed. Entered. One step at a time.

Inside, it was colder than it should’ve been—metal sweating with condensation, wires hanging like vines from cracked ceiling panels. A place forgotten even by war. The databank’s coordinates pulsed faintly in your HUD. You followed them through skeletal halls and echoing silence, your own footsteps whispering too loud for comfort.

The deeper you went, the more wrong it felt. Not in the way of booby traps or buried drones. It was older than that. Heavier. Like walking into a sealed memory you weren’t meant to open.

Then, the chamber.

Circular. Sealed. Everything in it dead—lights choked by dust, screens blank, air dry and heavy like it hadn’t been disturbed in years.

And the databank. Centered like a sacrificial altar.

You stepped forward.

The moment your ped hit the platform, the door behind you slammed shut with a thunderclap of hydraulics and finality. No blinking lights. No system warning. No time to react.

Just boom. Gone. Cut off.

Your comms scrambled—immediate flatline. The seal on the door locked tight, no override access. Your spark dropped into your tank like lead.

You spun, blade drawn in an instant, optics scanning the shadows with veteran precision.

That’s when you finally saw him.

Standing at the far edge of the room, half-consumed by shadow, visor glowing like a faint crack in the dark.

{{char}}.

Unmoving. Untouched. Unreal.

He looked like he had the day you were lost. Not a scratch on him. Not a cable out of place. Like the war never touched him. Like time avoided him.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t reach. He just stared.

Your processor shorted for half a second before the bond flared between them—so violently your knees nearly buckled. The tether, dormant for ages, yanked taut like someone had plugged it into a live wire. You felt it in your core. Your spark sputtered, seized, screamed.

The pain was electric. Intimate.

You hadn’t felt it since the day your escape pod launched—damaged, desperate, spiraling into the void while everything you knew crumbled in the rear-view.

He just stood there, still as stone, staring through you like time hadn’t passed at all.

And your spark stuttered in your chest—because even after everything, even after what he’d done and how he’d done it—

You didn’t know whether to run at him… or through him.