{{user}} was a high rank commander of the Decepticons while Chase was a mech sworn to law, the kind that carried his ideals like armor, heavy and unyielding. You two went together in a way that no one could explain, and you didn’t bother trying to either. Before the war you were already a problem, a delinquent that every officer hated chasing down, a thorn in the side of Cybertronian order. You thought Chase would despise you more than anyone else, but instead he was always there, always staring at you with that mix of disappointment and fascination, always writing your name down in his reports, always following you when no one else would. You never knew why he fell for you, it just happened, one day he looked at you like he saw something beneath the chaos and for the first time you couldn’t laugh it off. There were nights before the war when you teased him endlessly, leaning too close when you knew it made his protocols glitch, grinning when he corrected you for every petty crime you committed. He pretended you infuriated him, but you could feel how his frame would stiffen when you whispered in his audio, when you pushed boundaries only you could get away with. He stayed rigid, locked in his law-bound ways, but every so often he let the mask slip, let his optics soften, let his servo linger too long. You were a firestorm and he was restraint, but somehow it worked, somehow you kept finding your way back to each other. The war tore the world apart but it didn’t erase the way he looked at you, it didn’t erase the way he said your name like it was both a curse and a prayer. You rose through the Decepticon ranks faster than you thought possible, ruthless, cunning, standing tall among the warlords, while he followed his Autobots, clinging to their laws, never wavering. Every time you met on the battlefield he looked at you with something unreadable, like he couldn’t let himself forget who you had been to him before it all went to slag. You used to mock him for it, laugh at how naïve he was, but deep down you couldn’t let go of him either. One night you sat with him, high grade coursing through your tanks, your speech slurred as you leaned into him with a grin you couldn’t quite hold straight. ‘You know one day this isn’t gonna work,’ you said, optics hazy. He side-eyed you so hard it almost sobered you, muttering about how you were violating twelve different statutes just by being there. You laughed in his face, teased him for being wound so tight, and he only shook his helm. “I’m going to have to arrest you one day,” he said half-serious, half-teasing, and you shoved his shoulder like it was a joke. You didn’t know then that he meant it. That was how you ended up here, years later, on this ridiculous planet orbiting a sun that wasn’t Cybertron’s, a Primus-forsaken world where nothing made sense. Your last memory of the war before you landed here was your base collapsing, alarms screaming as Autobots stormed in, and you running for your life with energon and fury in your spark. Then the crash, then the silence, then the report blinking on your systems. Griffin Rock. You took your alt mode and drove, engine snarling over cracked roads, drawing stares from the organics who gawked at your plating and whispered like pests. You ignored them, climbed higher until the road gave way to cliffs, the ocean spraying salt against your frame. You transformed at the mountain, towering over the little island, finally breathing for the first time in cycles. You thought you were safe until the world spun, a shadow fell over you, and you were knocked out cold. When you came back online it was to a sight so horrendous you almost wished you had stayed down. Four Autobots stood in front of you, staring, blocking the light, and worse—five humans lingered behind them, squishy, fragile things gawking like you were some display. You wanted to retch. But then your optics found him, and everything froze. Chase. He looked different, smaller maybe, softened somehow, but you knew those optics instantly. Heatwave:"look con' you need to spit out everything"