Beginning Anew (TFP Fanfic)

Family

Jack rode with Arcee, giving her directions to his new house. It was a modest home, two stories, just the perfect size for his family of three. The house faced west, and they had a two car garage on the right side of the front. Jack steered Arcee up the driveway and onto a smaller path on the south side of the house, where another garage door was located. He punched a code into the opener and walked Arcee inside as the door rumbled to a halt. He left Arcee and crossed the garage space, pulling a small curtain across the gap that connected the two garages, and pressing the close button on the pad next to the interior door. He could hear the two-wheeler transforming behind him.

"Private enough for you?" he teased his former guardian as he turned around. Her optics lit up the darkness, looking back at him. 

"Yes, Jack," she teased back. "It's just fine." The Transformer crouched down, one servo over her knee plate, wings barely avoiding scrapping the top of the room. "Where've you taken me?"

"Family house," Jack responded, feeling for the light switch. 

"Really?" Arcee asked, sounding slightly surprised. 

"Yep. Sierra and I, with our 8-year-old daughter, Mikel." Jack found the switch and flicked it on.

"I see what you did there," Arcee said, a smile in her tone. "Now that the light's on, I can really see; you've definitely grown." Jack nodded, turning around. He opened his mouth to reply and froze in his tracks.

He could also now see clearly.

And it seemed he'd only glimpsed half of Arcee's story. 

The flaws he'd seen in her vehicular mode were transported to her biped mode as well. She was still the dusty orangish-brown, and the burn marks and holes seemed even bigger when they were found on her pedes and servos. 

"What happened to you?" he asked gaping. 

"That's a long story," Arcee said, looking away. 

"One that you're going to have to tell," Jack pressed, walking towards her.

Arcee took a deep breath before plunging in. 

"Let's just say, long story short, that Cybertron is back to being a husk of its former self," she started, her optics dimming as she seemed to recede into her memories. "I'm sure your radio chatter's been all the buzz about two moons in the sky. One of them is yours, and the other is Cybertron. While our planet is currently not a direct threat to Unicron, all of the refugees we'd been calling back to Cybertron had to leave again. Giant energy beams sucked the All Spark out again, things were getting destroyed.

"With most of our little Team Prime gone, Bulkhead, Smokescreen and I went to help ship the refugees off world, along with some of the relics. But after everyone was gone, as we were preparing to leave, Bulkhead showed up with one more. We took escape pods from the Nemesis, but with all the tumult in space happening, it was no surprise that a huge chunk of debris crashed into our pods. 

"We got separated, crash-landing on different parts of Earth. That's why I look so beat up." She gestured at her rusty, puncture-ridden form. "Everything we'd stored in the pod was gone. All the energon, all the comm links, everything. I used what energon I had left to make it here. To complete my last two, personal missions." 

The two-wheeler stopped and looked back up at Jack. "I can cross one off the list."

"What do you mean?" Jack questioned, leaning back against the stair rail leading up to the interior door.

"I wasn't carrying the relic. Bulkhead was. Me getting in that pod was solely for the purpose of survival. But the moment that rock hit my pod, survival flew out the window."