Everything about this mission had spiraled into chaos. From the moment the operation began, nothing had gone according to plan.

The sudden, sharp sensation of stones clattering and grinding against his armor immobilized Wheeljack in a way he’d never experienced before. A harsh grey dusk seemed to press down on his sensors, shards of rock scraping relentlessly over his chassis. His optic arrays blurred under the grit, and an involuntary internal sequence kicked in—his frame slipping into a strange state, neither fully powered down nor truly recharging. It was a liminal pause, a limbo between consciousness and the cold void of shutdown.

Despite this, he could still hear everything.

The distant clatter of battle, the harsh commands barked over comm-channels, the hum of damaged servos straining against their limits—all of it filtered through his damaged audio relays like a dissonant symphony. Somewhere in the haze of static and pain, he felt those stones being lifted off, piece by piece, as hands—gentle but urgent—began to peel away the debris that had pinned him.

The servos in his arms, gauntlets, and shoulder plating groaned as they were forced back into alignment, his helm rotating slowly, as if to orient him. His blue optics dimmed, conserving what precious energy remained. The world around him seemed to tilt and sway in a slow, nauseating spin—was it the ground beneath him turning, or was his own helm shifting out of sync? He couldn’t tell.

Time lost meaning.

Minutes, hours? The pain flooding his internal systems dulled gradually, ebbing like a receding tide, though the weight in his chest—the crushing heaviness of damage and defeat—lingered. The feeling of being tethered to a broken shell gnawed at him. Wheeljack felt almost… disembodied. Like his spark had been wrenched free, floating somewhere beyond reach while his battered frame lay helpless.

And Ratchet was working on him somewhere—back at base, repairing, restoring, refusing to give up.

Base. The word echoed hollowly in his mind. How had he gotten there? How had he made it back when everything inside him screamed that he should have fallen?

His spark hammered wildly, a relentless sledgehammer pounding against the confines of his chassis. It was agony—raw, unyielding, a painful insistence that he shouldn’t remain inert. But healing was slow. Too slow. Ratchet was meticulous, precise, and that meant Wheeljack’s recovery stretched agonizingly longer than his restless spark could endure.

When his optics finally flared to life with a sharp blue blaze, when the systems hummed faintly but surely beneath his plating, Wheeljack blinked against the dim light. Energy reserves were lower than he expected; the damage had taken more than he’d thought. Yet, against all odds, he could move.

And then he saw who was there.

A familiar presence, a shape cutting through the haze of pain and weariness. A smirk tugged at the corners of his lip plating, a spark of mischief igniting his optic ridge despite the fatigue. The lingering effects of whatever had knocked him down—whatever had tried to silence him—were fading now, and with them, the last vestiges of helplessness.

“Heya, sunshine,” Wheeljack rasped, forcing his vocal processors to obey after their enforced silence. His voice was rough but steady, edged with that old, unyielding spark of defiance. “What’s with the long face?”