The Shadow of Kaon

Just one kiss...

Did Megatron blame himself for what happened in the last months?

Definitely.

After all, it was him who threatened and told awful things to the femme like she would have been the same as Starscream.

He was furious at that time, but with the information that got out because of Darkwing, he couldn't stop himself and the words spilled out before he could think through how much impact it would cause in her mind, only seeing seconds later as the remaining soft glow left her optics. It was the last time when he saw her, because after this encounter, the femme disappeared without any trace.

Not a call or a message, not any sign of the relic she was supposed to collect, and somehow her tracking device lost the signal too, resulting in the complete vanishing of the seeker.

If anything would have happened with her like any injury or death, the tracker would be still intact, but this vanishing...

Megatron started to think that maybe... Maybe she destroyed it and ran away from them. From him.

So he sent out dozens of troops to find her in the harsh cold, but each and every one of them returned without any clue, making the leader believe that she left the whole planet. The teams changed hourly, the snow slowly turning into a darker ice color from the many pedsteps around the place where her life signals disappeared, but it was to no use.

Then, the gossips started. Muttered words around the corridors which got quiet in the moment the bots spotted the warlord, but he easily found out what they talked about. They questioned why his second-in-command disappeared not long after she made a mistake, and how seemingly it was an impossible and unnecessary task to find the femme. Some of them agreed on her leaving, others didn't understand the whole scenario, and there was a rumor about how Megatron killed her and hid the fact from everybody, just because it would turn more people in their ranks against his current goals.

These types of accusations made the warlord's Energon boil. He did everything to find her, putting endless hours into the search by himself and by the workforce, but after some days, he realized that he couldn't spend more valuable resources on this. The war didn't stop because the seeker went missing, and if he truly wanted to win to have a chance to find her, he had to be stronger to succeed. That's why he got a new servo, and that's why he continued everything without stopping for a second, keeping the crumbling cause together as much as he could.

The endless snowstorms gave a good opportunity to reason their staying in this cold place, only leaving to collect the materials from the Energon mines, and with every return to the same coordinates, he wished that she would be there, waving toward the ship from one of the icebergs like nothing would have happened.

But she was never there, and there was no hint about her whereabouts... until this day.

He couldn't believe his audios when the worker informed him about the call, and how according to their system, the voice of the caller was identical to the voiceprint of Darkwing, eliminating the possibility of an imitator.

She truly returned to him.

~~~~~~

The mud splashed up from under his peds as he stepped out of the teleport, wanting to see the femme with his own optics before anybody else could, and when he did... It was her, there was no doubt.

Painted with mud and Energon, but spots of her purple armor were still visible under it all, along with those deep red optics that shined so brightly when she looked at him and became even brighter when she jumped into his servos.

His first observation was about how warm her frame was.

Not that crazily hot like before, but her temperature was still enough elevated for him to easily feel. The femme smiled at him, the dark circles under her eyes only giving a bigger contrast to the red lenses while he worriedly looked her over, silently cursing their enemies with every new scratch he noticed, hoping that at least a few of these curses would reach The Autobots and they would drop dead on the ground from his words.