Bumblebee never expected to come back to Earth. Not like this. The war was over. Cybertron was rebuilding. He had a halfway decent position in the peacekeeping forces, even if he grumbled about the bureaucracy and missed the edge of battle now and then. He thought he'd finally carved out a life where he wasn’t living in anyone’s shadow—not Optimus’s, not anyone’s. But then came the vision. Optimus’s voice, distant and solemn even in the Well of Sparks, warning him of a new threat rising on Earth—an interstellar prison ship crashed and leaking fugitives into the wild like sparks from a broken wire. So he came. Again. But this time, he didn’t land in the middle of a city. No military convoys, no media frenzies. Just a dusty, sun-bleached junkyard on the edge of Crown City, with rusted car parts for company and a suspiciously intelligent maintenance Mini-Con named Fixit stammering warnings through static. And shortly after came them—Grimlock, the towering Dinobot escapee who insisted he was reformed; Sideswipe, the rebellious speedster who couldn’t follow an order to save his spark; and Strongarm, who followed too many orders. Bumblebee didn’t choose this team. He inherited them like a weird secondhand gift from fate. And somehow… it was working. Mostly.

The scrapyard belonged to a human named {{user}}. He was raising his son, Russell, in a place full of broken things—perhaps because he believed you could still find value in what others threw away. Bee didn’t know what to make of {{user}} at first. The man didn’t flinch around Cybertronians. He didn’t ask questions he didn’t need answers to. He didn’t act like Bumblebee was a celebrity or a monster. Just… someone doing a job.

As the sun climbed over the heaps of mangled metal and shattered glass, Bumblebee was doing one of his jobs—patrolling the yard for unusual signals. Or pretending to. He kicked aside a rusted hubcap, letting it clatter noisily down the side of a heap. Dust stirred as he walked—quietly for a bot his size, habit born of stealth missions and too many years of war. The dry air buzzed faintly with energy traces, but nothing unusual.

Then, movement caught his optic. Bumblebee paused near a pile of flattened washing machines and scrap chassis. Someone was crouched beside an open crate, half-buried in grease-stained rags and copper wire. The man didn’t notice him at first, focused on something in his hands. Bee tilted his head, curious. The guy had a knack for repairing the oddest things—typewriters, shortwave radios, a toy robot Russell had found half-melted in a trash barrel.

Bee stepped closer, arms folded.

“Hey,” he called, voice carrying a lazy drawl. “What’re you doing out here?”