There was this one AU I made, where Smokescreen used to be a Decepticon spy (this was based on a really old crack theory when he was first revealed in the show) but when he was in the Archives, he started learning more about Cybertron as a whole and has a realization that "hey, maybe the Autobots have a Point™ and I don't know which side of this war I really want to be on" but he knows he already dug his grave and couldn't get out of it. That was until he crashed landed on Earth and no one knew who he was. He could actually be on the side he truly believed in, and help win the war. Now, he just has to hope no one on the Decepticon side will recognize him. (Plot twist: someone does)
I hope you don’t mind if I add onto this because my brain grabbed it in a choke hold and went ZOOM
So we have Smokescreen doing Spy Things for the Cons. What if instead of having gone through the whole Elita Guard training which would’ve been incredibly risky, they just set him up to intercept the actual Guardsmen who’d been assigned to Trion so he can replace them. For most, guarding essentially a glorified librarian would be boring at best, but to a spy? Alpha Trion is the head of THE Iacon Archives, a complete foundation of useful, difficult to access information
And what if this would be Smokescreen’s first proper undercover mission. He’d done intelligence before, and he was really good at it, but this would be the first time he’d be going behind enemy lines for a long stretch of time. He thinks he’s got this completely in the bag
He does not have this completely in the bag
Unfortunately for Smokescreen, Alpha Trion keeps all KINDS of records in the Archives. He’s got stuff in there from everybody, Autobot, Decepticon and Neutral, from news clippings to videos to all manner of propaganda. He’s even got a whole secret section dedicated to banned media.
And when Smokescreen’s doing his spy investigations….. he ends up finding a couple things he either didn’t know or didn’t really think about, and the datapads he finds offer a large amount of view points. Many of them are biased, but there’s enough different view points that he’s able to piece together a picture.
And it’s….. not great, if he’s being honest. Sure the Autobots aren’t saints, but they’re not the monsters Megatron and the Decepticons had painted them to be. Not the monsters Smokescreen had them as. And to make things even worse, the Decepticons aren’t nearly as good as he’s been made to believe. He learns of Shockwave and his experiments, the Decepticon Justice Division, Praxus, so many things he’d heard in passing but never got all the context for and even more things he’d never even heard of
Smokescreen didn’t like not knowing things. He was an intelligence agent, knowing things was his job….. or at least, he thought it was.
So he’s faced with a crisis. He knows he can’t go back to the Decepticons knowing what he knows now, but at the same time the Decepticons won’t take his defection well and there’s no guarantee that the Autobots will take him in. Right now Alpha Trion is his best and really only option for safety and honestly….. he really does trust the guy. His friendship made with him wasn’t all faked, and he genuinely likes him.
So he decides he’s going to tell Alpha Trion the truth and go from there. He can figure out the specifics of his maybe(?) defection after that.
……only he doesn’t get the chance because then the Fall of Iacon happens and Smokescreen gets knocked out
He does wake up on the ship like in canon, only this time he isn’t a prisoner because they knew who he was. Instead he wakes up in the med bay and is told they found him unconscious in the Archives. They say he’s to wait for his next assignment and then he’ll be off
Only now the full force of what he’s doing comes crashing down and he realizes just how badly he’s fucked up. Alpha Trion is now dead and it’s all thanks to what he’s done. Because he was too afraid and too unwilling and too slow to accept everything, now he’s lost his best friend and mentor who showed him more kindness than he felt he deserved
And what if in that moment Smokescreen decides once and for all that he’s going to defect and nothings going to stop him. And if he gets caught, at least he’s going to go out with a bang. So he uploads every virus he can onto that ship and causes as much chaos and havoc as possible before jettisoning himself off via an escape pod
……only then it turns out one of his viruses had messed with the pods as well at set the one he got into into a long distance pod
And as much as it sucks, he decides to use the new anonymity to its fullest. He doesn’t trust them completely, since even with all he’s learned it’s still a little difficult to fully trust them so he doesn’t come out with the full truth, most importantly his now ex-Decepticon spy status
as for the reveal, what if it happens during Inside Job. Megatron’s poking around in his head and finds some things Smokescreen had wanted ti keep secret, and now he has some blackmail that he could use to fracture the Autobots a bit…… like say during the Children-Omega Key Exchange when they fight for the Onega Lock
but yeah those are what I could come up with :D
