Earthspark soundwave post season 1 au because season 4 broke me mentally. Literally i hoped it would fix something but no it MADE IT WORSE. Anyways. Here is my soundwave human integration au. The design was inspired in part by the lovely works of @dailymothanon and @lintufriikki (the designs and art of em activate my neurons brrrrrr)
Story:
After Mandroids defeat, the Autobots and Decepticons temporarily work together to gather the emberstone shards. While some like Swindle thought it best to try and bargain with the shards that idea was shut down pretty quickly by the rest of the Decepticons since the Autobots had found a way to call for help to Cybertron and they'd rather not stay stranded on this rock. The Autobots work to get their distress call out and before the Decepticons can get their promised turn Bumblebee and some other Autobots start discussing whether that's the right call behind the Decepticosn back- which catches the audials of Starscream and later the rest of the Decepticons. After finding this out, upset about the obvious betrayal, Starscream sneaks into the communications devices building and manages to get a distress call out to the Decepticons on Cybertron, getting a reply that with the current situation getting to Earth may take two years. He is unsurprisingly caught after the fact by the Autobots who see his actions as a betrayal of trust. A conflict breaks out in which Starscream is injured and the rest of the Decepticons, deciding to take their chances on their own, scatter.
For the ex second in comand(sorry Screamer you were 3rd at best), escaping imprisonment meant hiding amongst humans, in plain sight per se. Though transformers cant quite adapt human disguises(Tarantulas isnt sharing the devices, honestly noone knows where he is) they can change their appearences slightly. Shrinked forms, smaller pauldrons, sleeker servos and stabilizers hidden by clothing for example can give a pretty bulky but convincing human shape which is what soundwave capitalised on. Pretending to be a biker, he integrates as best he can into human society with Ravage and Lazerbeak. Frenzy however is seemingly living their best life playing shows. The energon requirements in this smaller form is also smaller which means that they can easily make a stash of some stolen energon every once in a while and get by.
If you made it this far I humbly thank you
Sidenotes:
I wanted to just give Soundwave a cozy ark since I headcannon him as not having had a break in millenia except for that imprisonment interval at G.H.O.S.T. So what will he do while disguising as a human? Why, work at a coffeeshop while living with a rommate that just doesn't catch onto the fact that his roommate isn't quite human of course!
Sometime later i'll do Starscreams ark but just know he became an adopted guardian. That bot is getting the redemption ark he DESERVES
Please do not judge me and my mid ahh art. I did the best i can with the amount of content we had on soundwave(literally i found no images of him from the back so i improvised)
