It had been quite some time after he and Kup had raided his lab and got it out of Shockwave’s cold and uncaring servos. He had started a new routine since then. Get in his ship, look for any of the many other scattered Autobots around the planet of cybertron and get them someplace safe, pummel some cons, then hunker down for a few nights to get his gear and vessel in tiptop shape before starting again.

And as much as some things changed, others remained the same. Such as the sting of Bulkhead having left him to be someplace far away on Prime’s allstar team, and the war still completely engulfing the world in piles of rubble, shrapnel, and thick smoke that could still be seen from high in the skies above the platform he had landed The Jackhammer onto. Stupid high command. Stupid smiles of bots who decided to move on from the glory days of the unit he once called family. He hated all of it.

His one saving grace was that Sargent Kup remained the same, a stabilizing rock in the rapidly expanding and twisting tides of newness in life that he’d found himself in. Wheeljack was grateful for it, even if it meant having to interact with the younger new Wrecker replacements that followed the grizzled wardog like a gaggle of ducklings.

“What’s with all the new faces old timer?” Wheeljack called out the utterly ancient teal mech who was smoking a cy-gar as he always did whenever he waited for him to come down the ramp of his visiting ship.

There was an odd looking bot next to Kup that he didn’t recognize. Whoever they were, they had a certain presence to them that he couldn’t quite place…