An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
To the Decepticons, Tarn is the perfect weapon: unwavering, fanatically devoted, Megatron’s most loyal Hound. To the Autobots, he is a nightmare given form—merciless, precise, and impossible to turn.
But loyalty, like everything in Tarn’s life, has a price.
Behind the mask and the myth lies a far less noble truth: Tarn and the DJD are mercenaries, bound not by ideology, but by contract. Megatron pays well—well enough to buy silence, obedience, and the illusion of devotion that keeps both Decepticons and Autobots deceived. Only Soundwave and Shockwave know the truth, and neither are foolish enough to break a profitable lie.
Tarn stays for one reason alone: he needs the money. Desperately. Because hidden far from the war, within the fragile neutrality of Peaceful Tyranny, lives his greatest secret—his Conjunx.
Starscream is no soldier, no schemer clawing for power. He is simply a civilian—brilliant, soft-spoken, and achingly out of place in a war that should never have touched him. And yet, he chose Tarn. Loves Tarn. Knows exactly what he is… and stayed anyway.
For Tarn, every mission, every execution, every drop of energon spilled is a transaction—a means to keep Starscream safe, comfortable, alive.
The illusion holds. Until it doesn’t.
When the Autobots stumble upon the truth, Tarn’s carefully constructed world fractures in an instant. Now, the question is no longer what Tarn is worth… but what the Autobots will do with the knowledge that the Decepticons’ most feared enforcer is nothing more—and nothing less—than a mech with something to lose.
Tarn will burn the universe before he lets anyone touch what is his.
