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May 3

Freedom?

Final chapter now! Read the rest under the cut 🔽

The door doesn't give so much as come apart, colorful lights splitting the metal as the blast leaves her hands. Uncontrolled and bigger than she meant it to be, more powerful than she's let it be in vorns. Then suddenly the barrier is gone, scattered across the corridor floor in pieces still glowing at the edges, crackling with residual heat, and Supernova stands in the gap with her palms open and something in her chassis that isn't quite triumph or terror.

Supernova stares at her servos. Danger, Sentinel's voice says, somewhere in her helm.

She's distracted from the voice when Deadlock lets out a low whistle. "Okay, that was…" A beat, almost reverent, "you should definitely do that more often."

The tension in her chassis cracks, just slightly. She doesn’t laugh, she can’t quite get there, but the sound that comes out is similar, "Maybe I should."

She is… standing in the corridor. The door that has held her since she was small, that she has sat behind, pressed her back against and counted endless joors inside of, is now in pieces on the floor around her pedes, she did that, in mere kliks, it was-

It was that easy. It was always that easy.

That’s- Okay then. She files that revelation away with the rest of others that she’ll have to deal with later. She arranges her posture into something that looks composed. Her shoulders pull back, her wings high on her back. “Let’s go."

Deadlock falls into step beside her, hurrying to keep up with her longer strides. She fights the urge to reach over and pick him up, she needs her servos free in case of... Well in case something happened.

The corridor beyond is empty, that's the first wrong thing. The tower has never once in her entire life been devoid of someone, even if they were just drones. There’s always guards on rotation, attendants cycling through, the constant noise of a place that runs on order. The silence that replaces all of that has weight to it, feels oppressing.

"Not like I come here much," Deadlock lies, he sneaks his way in constantly, "but even I can tell this place feels off."

"It’s… never this quiet." She whispers back.

He gives a low hum, "Well, it sounded like there was something going on in the main chamber before, maybe everyone’s there?"

She nods, "It’s our best bet. Let’s go there first."

They hurry there in silence.

The main chamber opens up ahead, she stops abruptly at its entrance.

Supernova has walked through this room a thousand times, explored every corner as a child, she knows every line, every angle, every place the light falls just so. But now she barely recognizes what she is looking at.

The chamber is destroyed. Scorch marks clawing up every wall, debris across the floor in pieces too large to step around and too many to count, small fires still going in scattered places. The cold grandeur this place once held is gone, what's left is just wreckage and the smell of smoke.

Most shockingly, running straight through the middle of it, side to side, there’s a train.

She stares at it for a long moment. "You weren't joking about a train crashing here."

Deadlock scoffs. "Like I would lie about that." He's already turned away, crouching down to inspect a blaster dropped haphazardly on the ground that's almost as big as he is.

She hums, noncommittal. With Deadlock, you genuinely never know. She doesn't say anything, keeps moving her gaze around the room instead, cataloguing the damage. Same as the rest of the tower, there’s no one present, just grey frames, scattered across the floor in pieces or slumped against the walls. Thankfully, they’re only Sentinel's creepy security drones, those were never alive in any way that counted.

All the destruction tells a story, there was a fight, a big one with multiple people involved.

She mutters under her breath, "But where did they-?"

There’s a sudden bright light in the corner of her optic that almost blinds her. It comes from outside, flooding through the balcony, it flashes the entire chamber white for one suspended klik. She moves before she fully registers the decision, drawn toward the light.

The moment she clears the doorway onto the balcony, it feels like the air shifted, like it’s charged, humming faintly with energy at the edges of her field. She quickly glances back behind her to see Deadlock struggling to keep up, weighed down by a stolen blaster from one of the drones.

She turns back just as she reaches the railing, Iacon stretches out beneath her.

The chamber wasn't the only place destroyed. Scorch marks streak across buildings, blackened lines cutting through otherwise gleaming metal. Windows are shattered. Sections of structures are dented or blown out in jagged patches. Statues that once stood pristine now bear fresh damage, half destroyed.

The streets below are far too crowded. Bots fill the place in dense clusters, movement tangled and disorganized. Some are still arguing, others shoving, a few raising weapons. But most helms are tilted upward, optics fixed in the same direction, the light.

The streak of white slams down with enough force to rattle the ground beneath it, flaring outward on impact in a wide arc of dust and debris. At the center of it a figure rises. Even from this distance, she can see it, recognizes it. The glow coming from his chassis is unmistakable.

The Matrix of Leadership.

"No fragging way." Deadlock lets out a disbelieving breath beside her, "Orion?!"

"Orion Pax," she echoes, quieter.

The cogless miner who kept getting into trouble because he wanted more than the life he'd been assigned, so he kept pushing against limits, even snuck his way into the Iacon 5000 just to prove he could. The one Sentinel had wanted buried before anyone followed after him. The one she had sought out herself, had trusted with Alpha Trion’s distress signal, had sent him in search of the Matrix.

Her optics fix on the glowing shape in his chest, it’s just as she remembers it. “He was chosen by the Matrix. By Primus.”

“I don’t- why him, though?” Deadlock cuts in, still staring. “It’s not like the guy’s unlikeable. Maybe a bit too optimistic, sickenly positive really, but a Prime?” He huffs, disbelieving. “How could he possibly be a Prime?”

She didn’t have an answer for that, no one does.

The ancient artifact was more like an entity than a mere object, it was a mystery, even to the Primes that once held it. But it was clear it had chosen Orion Pax to follow in their legacy. She could understand this decision, he seemingly had every quality she'd been taught was befitting of a Prime. He inspired others whether he meant it to or not, he had an inability to look at something broken and simply walk away, possessed the conviction that things could be better and the recklessness to act on it.

Sentinel had seemed that way too, once.

She needs to find the Prime (does the title even fit him anymore?). Although she’s still not sure what she’ll do to him once she does.

She glances around, trying to make sense of the situation, cataloguing the scene below with the careful habit Airachnid trained into her. There- something catches in the corner of her vision, the familiar shape of a wing.

Her helm turns sharply. For a moment her processor refuses to make sense of what she’s seeing.

His frame is wrong. Still and broken, laid out in a way no living mech could be, upper and lower halves separated, severed violently, bundles of cables spill out from the split, snapped and frayed, their ends sparking weakly as if the current hasn't stopped. Energon pools beneath him, bright pink still spreading slowly. The pristine finish he always maintained, polished blue, gleaming silver, gold accents without a single flaw, is gone. His plating is flat grey, the unmistakable color of a mech who is no longer.

Sentinel Prime is offline.

Her world narrows until there is nothing left but him, what's left of him. Everything else falls away muffled, indistinct, like something happening very far away. The clash of the city below. Deadlock calling her designation. Even the hum of her own systems.

She loves him.

The thought surfaces without warning, uninvited. But it's true, she loved Sentinel the way you love the only solid thing in the world, loved him because he was her last remaining hero, loved him with the particular desperation of a sparkling who needed someone, anyone, to comfort them.

She knows what he did, watched him do it, heard him confess his crimes. Not that long ago, she wanted to kill him, desperately. Take revenge for Megatronus, Starscream, the Primes, the miners, everyone.

But she still loves him. Yet she hates him. And both of those things are true at the same time, tangled so completely she can't find where one ends and the other begins.

Every rule placed on her. All the expectations she didn’t dare disappoint. The scraps of affection she worked herself raw for. What did any of it mean?

Did Sentinel ever love her?

There was no possible way to get an answer to that now. Even so, what would it change, if he had? Would it make any of this better? Worse? The lies are still there, threaded through every memory she has of him, woven so tightly there’s no way to tell where the truth ends and his deception begins. Whatever he felt for her, if he felt anything at all, he still chose this. Chose to use and control her for his own gain.

The realization settles cold and heavy in her spark.

Because it means there is nothing left to hold onto. Her sire, the Primes, her family, are all gone. Alpha Trion was the only exception, and she stood by and watched as he was murdered. Her carrier and the High Guard vanished as well. Sentinel, the last one she had, the one she built herself around, was never who she thought he was, and now he is grey on the ground below and she is-

"-ova?" Deadlock's voice is distant. It sounds like it's coming through static.

"Nova!" She can feel a grip on her servo, pressure, something that has grounded her more than once in the past, but now slides off.

Supernova is alone.

She has always been. Every person who was supposed to be here, wasn’t. It was only a matter of time before Deadlock was gone too. The only truth she can really trust is that she is alone.

And now she is standing on the balcony of a building whose residents have all been killed, looking down on a city that’s coming apart, no idea of what comes next, how she could possibly fix this. She doesn't even know who she is outside of everything that just turned out to be a lie-

The sound of distinct thrusters split the air, her thoughts come to an abrupt stop.

Sharp and controlled, the steady powerful roar of flight, cuts across the chaos with a precision nothing else has had since everything began to fall apart. She knows that sound. Knows it from a time where it meant safety, warmth, love, before she even had the language to name those.

The world starts to snap back in pieces. Shapes, movement, sound, Deadlock's solid grip around her servo, his posture gone rigid and his optics fixed on something behind her.

There’s a heavy thud. Someone landing on the other side of the balcony. She turns slowly, her frame hasn't quite caught up.

The figure standing at the far end of the balcony isn't real.

That's the only explanation. None of this happened. Deadlock never found her, and she never left the room. Her mind finally snapped, and she’s just suffering through a very realistic and painful hallucination.

"Winglet?"

No. No, that’s- Her thoughts stutter, trying to reject it, it’s just another trick. Another fragment of her processor finally giving out under too much strain.

But he sounds real, achingly so.

There’s a roughness to his voice that wasn’t there before, scraped raw by time or damage or both, but beneath it, the cadence is the same. Not soft, he was never soft, but with something underneath filled with affection.

She searches frantically for the flaw that will prove this is wrong. Red armor matching her own. White wings flared slightly behind him, stark and unmistakable. The shape of his helm, her own almost an identical copy of it.

He looks exactly like he did the last time she saw him. When he left her.

She doesn't move. Any motion feels like it might shatter whatever is keeping this moment intact. She doesn't know which outcome frightens her more, that he disappears, or that he doesn't.

Deadlock moves for her instead. He puts himself squarely between her and the seeker, blaster up before she even registers he's moved, stance firm and confident despite the fact he’s never shot somebody before.

"Who the frag are you?" He growls.

The wings twitch outward. Sharp with offense. "...Excuse you?" Cold and cutting, every syllable precise. "Watch your tone, you insolent little pest."

Panels along his forearms shift. Twin null-rays deploy, already aimed straight at Deadlock.

That snaps her out of it.

"Wait!" She moves fast, stepping between them, servos raised, optics tracking both at once. "Just- wait. It's fine." She glances pleadingly at Deadlock. "Deadlock, this is my-"

The word catches. She turns back. Her optics meet the seeker's.

"...He's Starscream. Head of the High Guard." A pause, smaller. "My carrier."

"The High Guard?" That didn’t calm him down, if anything, just fired him up more, "Aren't they supposed to be offline?"

Starscream breaks her gaze to glare at the miner, "Do I look offline to you?" he replies, perfectly dry.

"Unfortunately, no. Which is worse." Deadlock's stance doesn't falter. "The almighty, prestigious defenders of Iacon aren’t offline. Big whoop. You just- what, bailed? Left the rest of us under Sentinel's rule while you went and did something more important?"

Something moves across Starscream's expression. There and gone, too fast to identify. His wings flare behind him. "You have no understanding of the reality of things, mechling."

"Then explain it, your high and mightiness." There isn’t a trace of fear in Deadlock. She’d be impressed at him holding his ground against someone he clearly couldn’t win a fight against, if it wasn’t her carrier he was pointing a weapon at.

"I suggest," Starscream says, his servos shifting minutely, null-rays angling with deadly precision. “That you consider your words very carefully before you continue speaking.” The low hum of charging energy rises threateningly.

"Enough!"

The yell comes out before she consciously decides on it, and so does the energy. Smaller than before, more controlled this time, twin bursts explode from her raised servos. Deadlock stumbles back a couple steps. Starscream's wings flare wide, null-rays knocked off target.

She takes a moment to check them both. No damage. No burn marks. She lets out a slow ex-vent.

"Stop." She orders, voice tight but steady now, something firm settling beneath it. She turns her helm sharply toward Deadlock. "Drop the weapon."

He hesitates exactly long enough to make it clear he's choosing to comply, not obeying. The blaster lowers, but he keeps a tight grip on it.

She turns to Starscream. "Carrier. Put those away." A beat. "Please."

He doesn't, not immediately. He looks at her instead, stares more like, his optics moving across her face like he’s running calculations, cataloguing. Taking her apart feature by feature and putting her back together into something he can understand, he lingers a moment at her servos, she balls them in fists self-consciously.

Then the null-rays fold away, panels sliding shut with a soft click, his arms lower. He is still watching her, something in his expression she doesn't have a name for yet, too complicated.

"You are just like your sire." Quiet. Almost to himself, like the words escaped before he decided to say them.

The question forms before she can stop it, slips through all the careful control she has left, because she has been not-asking it since the moment she saw Alpha Trion, since she saw him. "Is he-" The word catches in her voicebox. Alive feels too final. She tries again. "Is my sire actually offline?"

Starscream is quiet for a klik, like he’s bracing himself, and that says enough.

"...Yes." His tone isn’t soft or gentle like one might expect from someone else delivering this kind of news. It’s careful, controlled in a way that has nothing to do with indifference and everything to do with how long he has been carrying this particular weight. "I saw it myself."

She briefly considers asking what state Megatronus was in when Starscream found him. It was the kind of question she would normally ask, she needs complete information, because incomplete pictures make her processor work in circles trying to fill the gaps. She knows that about herself. She’s aware that the not-knowing will haunt her the rest of her life.

She lets the question go anyway.

She simply nods. The motion is mechanical, the polite acknowledgment of information received. Her field doesn't shift. Her expression doesn't move. Something in her spark chamber twists, but that's internal, and that’ll stay where it is.

Starscream doesn't speak immediately. She can see him almost deciding something, the small shift in his weight, a motion that starts and doesn't finish, like he'd begun to step forward and thought better of it halfway through. His wings settle, then resettle, the microadjustments of someone managing themselves carefully. She recognizes it because she does it too, has done it her entire life, the constant internal negotiation between what the frame wants to do and what the mind decides is appropriate.

He's looking at her face. Not the analysis from before, but searching for something. Looking for permission, she realizes, for some indication that closing the distance would be welcome, that she wouldn't pull away, that somewhere underneath everything, she is still the sparkling who used to press her face against his cockpit when the rest of the world felt like more than she could handle.

She almost gives it, she wants, so badly, to close the distance and be small again, hide in his arms where it’s safe. She is bigger than him now, but it doesn't matter. Some part of her that never had the chance to grow up is looking at him and thinking her carrier will make the bad things go away. She hates how much she means that, and hates that she can't let herself believe it, because she already gave all of her trust away to the wrong person.

"Deadlock's right." The words come out even, surprisingly. She had expected them to shake. "If you've been alive this whole time," alive, the word she couldn't say a moment ago, landing now as something that isn't quite an accusation but holds the same weight, "then where were you?"

Why didn’t you come for me? Goes unsaid.

Something moves across Starscream’s expression. Like before, it goes away before she can identify it.

"The surface." His voice is careful in a way she doesn't think she was meant to notice. Precise, choosing each word the way you choose footing on uncertain ground. "I've been on the surface since the High Guard was deployed for the last time. We knew what really happened to the Primes, we knew Sentinel was responsible. And since he wasn’t able to kill us outright, he made sure we couldn't get back."

"Iacon was unreachable, he had every access point monitored. If we'd tried to breach the city he'd have known immediately, and he had enough security to-" a fractional pause, "it would have gotten people killed. More people. People I am responsible for."

Starscream holds her gaze, if he was anyone else, she would say his look is pleading.

"So we've been fighting him from the outside, disrupting his supply to the Quints. Hitting him whenever and wherever we could. It wasn't-" another pause, smaller this time, "It was the only thing I could do."

Supernova looks at Starscream, really looks, spots the wear on his armor she hadn't let herself catalogue before, the places where the finish isn’t quite as pristine as he always kept it, an old scar along his left wing that looked like it never healed quite right, she carefully catalogues every small tell of a frame that hasn't had proper maintenance in a long time and has learned to function anyway.

She looks at his face, understands that expression. Not because she's seen it on him before, but because she's made it herself, in every reflective surface, in the moments she had to be composed more than she could afford to be seen. It's the look of someone desperately holding themselves together.

But she finally catches what’s underneath, hidden well enough that she would've missed it if she wasn't as familiar with it as she is. She recognizes the hurt, the longing. He missed her. It was present in every carefully chosen word, every checked motion, in his optics. He wants his creation back. As much as she wants her carrier back.

And that, more than anything else, is what tells her that her carrier is telling the truth. He couldn’t come back for her.

But that doesn’t make it right.

Because the vorns are still there. The first time her outlier activated, Sentinel telling her what she was before she'd stopped shaking. The first time she won a sparring match against a mech twice her size, she looked up for someone to share her excitement with and found only Airachnid, who nodded once and told her to go again. Her final upgrades completed quietly, the frame of an adult staring back at her in the mirror, she felt nothing in particular about it because there was no one to feel it with.

Starscream was far away on the surface during all of it. He had reasons to be, real reasons. He still wasn't here.

Her intake opens, pauses there, then closes. She is one misstep away from saying something she can't take back. She can feel herself start to come apart at the seams. Carefully, she makes sure her expression doesn't shift. But her field does, just slightly, but it’s enough to notice. A small servo closes around hers.

She looks down. Deadlock isn't looking at her the way people look at someone they're worried about. He's not doing the thing where the optics go soft and the expression asks are you okay in a way that would absolutely destroy her right now. He's just there, holding her servo tight, not planning on letting go. His expression is steady. Whatever happens, it says. I'm here.

Supernova forces herself to believe that for now, holds onto it. She raises her helm, vents out once, slow and controlled. She can hold this together a little longer. She opens her intake again-

And then she hears them. The High Guard.

Supernova turns to see them rising in the air in perfect formation, moving through the sky like a single organism that happens to be made of many parts, the kind of coordination that takes vorns of shared experiences to build.

She notices Starscream receiving a comm out of the corner of her optic. His expression shifts, a flicker of displeasure across his features, whatever he’s listening to, he doesn't like it.

"Understood." He cuts the comm.

She turns back to him just in time for his optics to lock onto hers, she almost flinches at the intensity of his look.

"We have to move." His voice has changed, hardened. The Head of the High Guard, giving an order. "Optimus Prime has ordered the High Guard to stand down and leave the city." He stops. Starts again, quieter, the professional cadence dropping just slightly at the edges. "I need you to come with us."

She can’t contain the flinch this time, wings flicking in alarm.

Deadlock takes half a step in front of her, still not dropping her servo. "What?" The question has an edge to it, sharp and incredulous, "You can’t just suddenly come back into her life and take her from her home."

Starscream doesn't even look at him. "Supernova. Listen, I have spent every vorn since I was last deployed trying to find a way back to you. You don’t understand how many attempts there were, all of the failed plans, how every time we got close-" he cuts himself off up abruptly. Closes the distance between them by half, servos twitching, almost reaching for her, but held stubbornly at his sides. "I cannot leave this city without you. I won't."

He says it like an order. Almost. It’s direct, the tone of a commander, but there’s something in it that doesn’t come out like he wants it to. His voice almost trembling. Too much weight on certain words, a fraction too long on you.

What is she supposed to say to that? What is she supposed to do? She looks at Deadlock, hoping for answers.

His optics are locked onto Starscream with the kind of attention earned through painful experience, he has learned to watch authority figures very carefully. Today has been its own kind of brutal for Deadlock, he didn’t come through unscathed. He has spent his entire life under a system that saw him as a tool, that took his cog, his choices, and dared to call it order. He has earned every ounce of that distrust.

Starscream is not Sentinel Prime. She knows that, Deadlock does as well. But Sentinel is offline, and all of that has to land somewhere, and Starscream is right there.

Then, like he felt her looking, his optics slide to hers, edge softening instantly. He doesn't let go of her servo. But his grip loosens slightly, the difference between holding her in place and simply being there for her. He’s a steady presence, one with no expectation, no direction. Just a nod, small but certain. Whatever you choose.

She gives the tiniest shake of her helm. She doesn't know what to choose.

Her entire life has been spent being told what she was, her purpose, where she belonged, and only now she noticed she’s never once been asked. But now there’s a genuine choice, one with weight, sitting right in front of her.

She digs in her processor, scrambles to come up with something. Iacon is her home, it's people her responsability, now more than ever. But this was her carrier. How many nights had she cried herself to recharge, begging, praying, to have him back? It's a miracle that he's standing right in front of her now, within her reach.

She feels like she's being torn in two, and there’s nothing in her that knows what the correct decision is.

Starscream moves. His servos come up slowly, telegraphed, giving her every opportunity to pull away, she doesn't. Can’t. He cups her helm, tilting her face toward his. The grip is careful, and it reaches straight through every wall she has built since the last time he held her like this. She leans into the contact without any conscious thought.

"Stay with me," he says. “Please,” so quiet that she almost doesn’t catch it.

And just like that, the choice is made. She cannot lose him. Cannot watch him rise into the sky with the rest of them and disappear again. She is so tired of losing people.

Her free servo comes up, finds his, and holds on. Her other servo tightens around Deadlock's, he squeezes back in response.

She stands there for one moment holding both of them. The only two solid anchors in a world that has stopped making sense, and ex-vents.

"Okay," is all she can say.

———

:D there it is, the happy (?) reunion! Honestly, at first it was suppossed to be way fluffier than this, carrier and creation finally back together, yipee! But then I thought about it again, and it didn't make sense for either of them to let their walls down and be vulnerable with who is now practically a stranger. Yes they love each other, but they don't know each other, too much has changed.

But! luckily now that they're reunited they can spend more time together! Surely this will develop into a very healthy child-parent relationship, their collective trauma won't have any lasting consequences. Ha ha. Hm.

Also I sort of lied, this is the last chapter, yes. But I do have a small epilogue planned. It’ll explain how and why she ends up joining the decepticons.

#transformers #class jezter art #tfo supernova #transformers one #transformers au #transformers oc #tf deadlock #tf starscream

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