Chapter One
Painting the Masks
Mikaela Banes pursed her lips and a small frown creased her bronzed face as she watched her boyfriend and his best friend compare their acceptances to the various colleges that they had applied to.
Sam Witwicky and Miles Lancaster had both been in states of perpetual ecstasy for the last hour and a half since the three of them had gathered at Mikaela’s small house, and she was beginning to become very slightly weary of their enthusiasm that they had all been accepted into some of the same colleges.
“It’s gonna be awesome,” Miles predicted for the seventh time in as many minutes. “Absolutely awesome.”
Sam nodded, running his hand through his short brown hair. “I know, man, I know,” he said, a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I mean, we got accepted into like, all of the ones we applied for. That’s pretty overwhelming.” He glanced over at his girlfriend and tilted his head slightly. “Hey, Mikaela? Are you okay?”
Miles shifted in his position – he was seated cross-legged on Mikaela’s futon, looking slightly awkward as usual in a woollen hat that was pulled over his lank, medium length hair. “Yeah,” he agreed, looking overly concerned for her. “You’ve been really quiet. Aren’t you pleased, girl?”
She shook her head, her chin cupped in the palm of her right hand. “Not really,” she muttered dully, passing her eyes briefly over the pile of envelopes.
The gangly young man shifted towards the edge of the futon, towards where she was perched on a chair beside her old, bulky computer. She bit back a scowl of irritation; she liked Miles a lot, and spent a lot of time with him both in and out of school, but the guy had been hung up on her since Sam had reinstated their friendship, and she knew it. She was not trying to be vain by accepting it, but it was so blindingly obvious that she was shocked that Sam himself had never picked up on it.
“But you got accepted into two!” he reminded her, pointing at her ‘acceptance’ pile of paperwork. “That’s the same as Carlos got accepted into, y’know. He only got into two, given the fact that he managed to spectacularly flunk the entrance exam for those high-class ones he applied to.” He grimaced. “The guy’s gotta stop buffing that bike of his and get studyin’.”
“She ain’t just a bike, Miles,” Sam pointed out, rolling his dark eyes. “She’s an Autobot. I can’t believe, after three years of knowing them, that you still manage to think of them as freaking vehicles… you know they turn into giant alien robots, and you still think she’s a Vespa.”
Miles folded his arms. “She is a Vespa,” he said obstinately.
“Guys, for God’s sake!” Mikaela finally snapped, slamming her acceptance to Allan Hancock College down onto her desk and glaring back at the shocked looks that both boys gave her. “You don’t get it, do you? When we all go to college, we won’t all be going to the same one – we’re going to have to split up.” She paused, and her lip trembled slightly. “All of us.”
There was a short silence.
Then Sam took a deep breath. “Jeez, you’re right,” he said softly, glancing up at Miles. “I… I didn’t think of that.” He put a hand to the back of his head and scratched it, a sure sign that he was uncomfortable. “I mean, I thought of us all going to college together… I guess I was too excited to think of how we’d all go separate ways.”
“Of course we will!” she continued irritably, her expression betraying how upset she truly was. “Rad’s a genius – he will have been accepted by the Ivy League schools, and his parents will want him to go to those. He wants to go to those, and I don’t blame him – I sure would, if I was smart enough!”
Miles nodded his reluctant agreement. “Alexis is pretty smart too,” he reminded them. “Not as smart as Rad, but she’s so God damn intellectual…”
Sam let out a deep breath through his nose and collapsed back onto the floor, on which he had been kneeling. “Wow,” he groaned. “Good thing we’ve all been accepted into at least one of ‘em together. I wonder where Jade’s been accepted?” he added, sitting up again and reaching painfully for his cell phone. “I’ll call her.”
As Sam began to question their friend about exactly where she had been invited to study, Mikaela fought back the tears that were prickling at her bluish green eyes. The thought of going their separate ways really bothered her, and it had been bothering her ever since she had first sent off her application forms for possible colleges. She had considered not going to college at all – she had been planning, instead, to open up a car repair shop of her own – but her father had been adamant that she at least tried.
Going in different directions would mean the end of everything that they had come to know. Not only would she be torn away from her human friends – perhaps not all of them, but certainly some – she would be forced to leave behind the majority of her robotic friends that she had known now for three long years. She had no doubt that her guardian, Ratchet, would follow her wherever she chose to go, but as every one of them had their own protector, each would go their different ways with their humans.
She fiddled idly with her cell phone, wondering whether to call Alexis, but she remembered that the girl was being forced to go out with her mother and their new… family. A tiny smile played on her lips as she thought of the girl’s incessant exasperation with her mother’s new husband and their daughter, who was a constant annoyance to Alexis.
Sam had finished his brief conversation with Jade Rivers before she had even processed that she had answered his call. “Jade’s been accepted to Allen Hancock, too,” he nodded to Mikaela. “She’s not sure if she’s going to go there, but she says it’s a possibility.”
“Where else?” Mikaela inquired, attempting to instigate some form of enthusiasm at the inevitable.
“She said she got into Deep Springs, but she really wants to go to the Art Institute in San Francisco,” Sam explained. “She thinks that’d be the best choice for her, as she’s so into her arty stuff.” He sighed and glanced down at his three acceptance letters. “So… who’s for just plain old Tranquillity Lake College, then?”
“Me,” Miles said swiftly. “What’s the point in goin’ somewhere far away? Anyway, Arcee will want to stay with ‘Bee.”
Mikaela sifted through her pile of rejection letters almost wistfully before she looked at her two acceptances – Allen Hancock and Tranquillity Lake. “Yeah,” she agreed finally, and the two of them looked exceptionally relieved. “I’ll have to talk to Ratchet about it, though. If nobody else is staying it’ll be sad for him to just hang out with those two lovebirds.”
Miles looked quite solemn. “That is true,” he concurred wisely. “Poor Doctor Hatchet wouldn’t want that… he’d only have two people to torture.”
Mikaela threw a book at him.
It was a sunny day and the temperature outside was comfortably warm – as was the norm during Californian summers – so the three of them deemed that they should meet up with what friends they could and spend a lazy Saturday together as they often did on the weekends. Upon a quick call round all of them, it was decided that they would meet up with Carlos, Ratchet, Rad and Ironhide at the Autobot base, which was one of the only places in which their friends could transform without fear of being spotted.
They took one of the many rusty old cars that Mikaela had in her backyard – an old model that she tinkered with in her spare time. Miles for one had never trusted the ancient Pontiac Firebird, and Sam privately shared his opinion, but they had been loath to call Ratchet or Ironhide all the way over from the western suburbs.
Mikaela hit the brakes and the car skidded to a halt on the dust path that led to the base, which was an old warehouse to the naked eye but was the centre of technological advancement inside. She was an insanely fast driver, a fan of the adrenaline rush that came with speed, and she grinned when she spotted Miles’s slightly green visage in the rear-view mirror.
“I hate this car,” he muttered, tearing off his hat to allow the fresh air to cool his head down.
The three young adults disembarked the vehicle and Mikaela smiled warmly when she saw the others, taking Sam’s hand in hers. Miles waved madly when he saw Carlos, whom he had become close friends with during the past three years, and the two of them punched each other friendlily on the arm. “’Sup, dude?” Miles asked cheerfully.
“Hola, everybody,” the Spanish male grinned, exposing his slightly crooked teeth that made little difference to his handsome face. “Como estas?”
“English, Carlos!” Sam wailed, wishing he would stop blushing, as he had been since Mikaela had taken his hand. Even after a relationship of three years, he could not get over the fact that she wanted to be with him. “Man, I wish I’d listened to Mrs Lopez now…” He looked rather pained at the unpleasant memories of his language classes.
Carlos laughed. “Yeah, mi abuela is a wise lady. If you had, you’d know the way of the Spanish by now. Anyway, has Rad told you the good news?”
The tall, blonde boy behind him was leaning against the hood of a hefty Hummer H2 with a Search and Rescue design that made it look like a strange sort of ambulance. He had an easy smile on his face, and raised an eyebrow at Carlos. “Aw, Carlos… I’ll sound so conceited,” he declined good-naturedly, looking embarrassed.
“You’ve got a right to, from what we’ve heard!” Mikaela smiled, coming over to pat the Hummer lovingly. “Hey, Ratch’ – and you, Ironhide,” she added to the titanic GMC Topkick pickup truck that was parked beside Ratchet.
The metal vibrated under her hand and she heard the familiar voice of her protector and the slightly gruffer voice of Ironhide. “Good afternoon, Mikaela,” both trucks chorused, and she and Rad took a few steps back so that they could transform. The two of them stood high above them, Ratchet with his hands on his hips and Ironhide with his arms folded across his wide chest. Both of them had smiles on their faces, which was somewhat surprising in Ironhide’s situation.
Ironhide himself was eyeing Rad as if he was a target that ought to be shot at immediately. “Kid, I helped you get those grades three years back,” he pointed out darkly, although the slight smile did not slip from his face. “You should be showing off about the results of my efforts.”
“Hah!” Carlos snorted, before quickly stifling his laughter at Ironhide’s look.
Rad sighed and finally gave in, holding up two envelopes. “Okay, okay,” he said, and Mikaela gasped, snatching one of them. “I got accepted into the two Ivy Leagues I applied for.
“Harvard?” Mikaela gasped, awestruck. “And Dartmouth… that’s really something, Rad.”
“Aw, he knows it,” Miles teased, elbowing Rad, who put his hands into his pockets and shrugged as if it was nothing. “Jeez, you smartass… freaking Harvard… that really is something. My mom might actually die of shock if I ever managed to get accepted into an Ivy League, but I didn’t even bother applying…”
“You should always try,” Rad said astutely. “Otherwise you’re guaranteed to fail.”
It was at moments like these that it was extremely plain as to why Rad’s guardian was the Autobot commander, Optimus Prime. The two of them seemed to think on the same wavelength, and were always coming out with insightful lines such as these at the right moments. It was a good example of how well suited all of them were to each of their large, mechanical partners, and everybody felt it as soon as the words had left Rad’s mouth. Rad himself barely seemed to notice the wisdom in his own words.
Mikaela climbed into Ratchet’s palm as the others began to talk amongst themselves, and he held her up to eye level. His small blue optics were analysing her perceptively, taking in her artificially cheery expression with unbridled concern.
“Mikaela, you appear to be troubled,” he said simply and she lowered her eyes, her smile sliding off her face. “What is the matter?”
Ironhide, too, was leaning in and looking at the young woman with a grim expression. “You know Ratchet can always tell when you’re not doing so great, little lady,” he reminded her, and she drew her knees up to her chin and looked up at them miserably. “As you humans would say… ‘spill the beans’.” Then he paused. “Ah, don’t tell me – it’s that thing on your back.”
The humans had got together a few weeks beforehand and decided that they wanted to mark themselves as belonging to the Autobot force alone – something that they had been thinking about for a long time. Some of the things they had done were not permanent, but Mikaela and Sam had made a spontaneous decision to get themselves tattooed. Mikaela now had Ratchet’s name written across her lower back in Cybertronian, marking herself as his charge, and Sam had the Chinese symbol for ‘Bee’ on his wrist.
“No. It’s…” she murmured, and was horrified to feel tears in her eyes. “I… oh God, sorry…”
“Why are you leaking from – I mean crying?” Ironhide asked, and Ratchet looked horrified by her tears. “Has something bad happened? Do you need the Hatchet to take somebody out with his saw?” This earned him a short shove from Ratchet, who turned to hear Mikaela’s response.
She gave them a wobbly smile, quickly brushing her tears away. “No. It’s just… you know when we all go to college, things are really going to change, guys. We’re not all going to be together any more, and that really bothers me. I’ve decided to go to Tranquillity Lake College, and Sam and Miles are going there too… but the others might not stay.” She looked up. “You might not stay.”
Ratchet shook his head. “I will go wherever you choose to go, Mikaela. And if you choose to stay, then I will stay.”
“And I haven’t got anybody to go with,” Ironhide reminded her grimly. “So I may as well stay, too.”
“Okay,” she said tentatively, resisting the overpowering urge to bite her nails – a habit she had been trying to kick for a year. “But yeah… that’s why I was upset. Nobody needs to be beaten up, don’t worry.” She laughed at the disappointed look on Ironhide’s face, noticing for the first time that his cannon had been active for the entire conversation.
Sam, who was demanding to know whether or not Ironhide thought that Jade should go to the college in San Francisco, soon dragged the great black mech away from them, leaving Mikaela alone with her guardian. She had not missed the slightly despondent expression on his face, either, so she decided to question him on the matter. “What’s wrong?” she asked him simply, and he frowned slightly. “Don’t play dumb with me, Ratch’. You don’t exactly look in high spirits, either.”
Ratchet smiled demurely. “It is nothing, my dear.”
He looked at his charge and felt that he should not trouble her with his own meaningless worries. She had enough of her own; he knew that her ambitious father was likely to be unhappy that she had only been accepted into two colleges, especially when he heard that Rad had been accepted into Harvard. Warren Banes loved his daughter very much, but he wanted her to be happy – perhaps a little too much, in Ratchet’s opinion.
“Ratchet,” she said, using his full name to get the point across as to how serious she was being, “C’mon. Tell me.”
Her aqua eyes were hard and he was reminded of how she had looked when she was sixteen. Now she was nineteen – he had watched her mature over the past three years from a girl into a woman, and he was proud of her. She did look the same, but her face was certainly more mature, and she had taken to straightening her hair for reasons unknown to him. Human females were confusing, and he had heeded Sam’s advise when he had told him privately once to stay out of their world, if he knew what was good for him.
Knowing that she was not going to budge in her decision to draw forth his darkest secrets, he surrendered reluctantly after a moment. “It is just…” he began, unsure of how to phrase his thoughts, “For three years now, Mikaela, my spark has been calling for a partner. A partner that still, after many millennia of existence, has not come to me.”
She stared at him. “You want a girlfriend?” she blurted before she could stop herself. “Aw, Ratch’! That’s so… depressing!”
He managed a small smile. “Indeed.”
A hand crept over her mouth and she stared at him, her heart aching for her friend. “Oh… I don’t know what to say,” she admitted, glancing involuntarily down at the circular lights on his chest, beneath which she knew that his spark throbbed in its casing. “I mean… uhm… why the sudden need for a… mate?” She said the last word hesitantly, remembering how he had once revealed that Sam wanted to ‘mate’ with her.
“I believe it began when the battle was over,” he told her gravely. “When I saw all the happiness that the couples around me shared with each other. Yourself and Sam, for example. And of course, the passion that Starscream and Alexis share is enough to make anyone ‘green with envy’, as you say.”
That was certainly true, she admitted. Alexis and Starscream were a pair that you could feel the heat of passion radiating off whenever you were in the same room as them. Three long years had not dulled Starscream’s peculiar ardour for the pale, skinny girl, and the same went for her – her obsession with the ex-Decepticon was one that would never die. Mikaela knew that Alexis would be throttling herself by the end of the meal with her new family members – mainly because Starscream was not there with her. She was highly averse to being parted from the jet.
“Huh,” she agreed, patting his thumb gently. “You’ll find someone, Ratch’. You’re such a great guy – and a great guardian,” she added, winking at him. “C’mon, there’s a girl out there right now that’s just waiting for you to find her. One day, you will.”
Ratchet inclined his head. “As Ironhide told me once. I hope that you are right, little one.”
“I am,” she assured him. “In fact, I bet that by the end of this year, you’ll be happily settled with some gorgeous girl.”
“I’ll take that bet,” he chuckled, and she laughed.
Skyfire narrowed his large, navy blue optics slightly as he watched Jade move her paintbrush over Starscream’s armour. The enormous jet was sitting impatiently in Skyfire’s room at the improved base – which he now proudly referred to as his ‘laboratory’, being an obsessive scientist by nature – and glancing down edgily at the young woman as she painted over the Decepticon mask on his right wing, which was slowly being covered by a layer of dusty brown paint.
“Dear Primus, you humans are slow,” Starscream grumbled, a look of vexation on his face.
Jade rolled her eyes and continued nonetheless, ignoring his moaning – she had been forced to put up with it for an hour and a half, since she had started this job. It was a good thing that she loved painting so much, or she might have gone completely insane.
Skyfire folded his arms and cocked an optic ridge at his friend. “Really, Starscream, you ought to be thanking her,” he reminded him, and Starscream raised his optics to the ceiling, heaving an enormous sigh. “She has taken time out of her day to do this for you, and it is not particularly kind of you to be complaining about it in such a discourteous manner.”
“Who said I was kind?” he retorted, making a sudden movement with his arm that threw Jade off-balance from where she was sitting precariously on his shoulder in order to reach his wing.
“Starscream!” she said, exasperated. “Can you just stay still? This is the last one. I promise you’ll be done in a minute.”
Starscream turned his head to look at the girl on his shoulder and gave her an extremely hard look. “I will hold you to that, human.”
Three years had done little for Starscream’s manners or his hot temper, although he was certainly more inclined towards the planet’s natives that he had been in his Decepticon days. He was still frequently angered and had alarming mood swings – one moment he could be content, and even happy, but the smallest trigger could send him flying into a rage that he would not be torn from for hours. The only ones who had shown any ability to calm him were Alexis and, sometimes, Skyfire.
Jade clenched her jaw proudly and pointed the tip of her brush at him. “Don’t call me ‘human’!” she ordered him. Jade had never been intimidated by Starscream’s ever-changing demeanour, and had always made it clear that she was someone to be reckoned with, organic or not. “You need an attitude adjustment.”
“Sometimes I agree with her, Starscream,” Skyfire admitted, smiling slightly at his friend’s offended look. “I understand your impatience, but please. You are lucky that Jade did not want to complete the job today and paint on the new insignia.”
“Yep,” Jade concurred cheerily. “But I want you back here tomorrow at eight o’clock sharp. I need to get it done before I go out.”
Starscream sighed again, his entire body reverberating with impatience as he checked his internal chronometer. The sun was beginning to sink outside, and he knew that Alexis would be on her way home from her meal with her new… family members. A tiny smirk appeared on his face as Jade painstakingly covered the top of the Decepticon mask.
Jade, seeing his amusement, wiped her brow and raised her eyebrows inquiringly at him. “Something funny?” she asked good-naturedly. “Oh, wait… didn’t Alexis have that lunch out with her mom’s new guy today, and their girl?”
“Yes,” Starscream nodded. “Her mother wished for them all to have some ‘family time’, or some such nonsense.”
“As indeed she would,” Skyfire pointed out. “However is young Alexis to become acquainted with her stepfather-and-stepsister-to-be if she is always out flying with you? Primus knows where her mother thinks she is every night, given the fact that after three years of being part of her life, you still have not made yourself known to her.”
“That would be a good plan!” the other retorted sarcastically. “I am sure she would be delighted to meet her husband’s murderer.”
There was a short, uncomfortable silence; Jade glanced at Skyfire uneasily before she dabbed one last lick of paint over the symbol on Starscream’s wing. “All done,” she said quietly, and Skyfire came to scoop her up from Starscream’s shoulder.
Starscream jumped up then, glancing down at himself and finding no signs of his Decepticon heritage. Jade could not help but be vaguely impressed by him whenever she saw him; he was an enormously powerful-looking creature, and she had seen enough of his combat in battle to know that he was an extremely able warrior, just as Skyfire was. “Thank you,” he managed. He still found it difficult to show gratitude, even after so many years of life with the Autobots, but she understood.
“No problem,” she smiled kindly. “See you tomorrow.”
Clearly unable to wait any longer, Starscream briefly inclined his head to Skyfire before he was out of the door – he leapt into the air, transforming spectacularly into an F-22 Raptor before he was gone, blasting off into the reddening sky with a great roar of his jets.
Skyfire shook his head, smiling. “He really is besotted with that girl.”
“You can hardly talk!” she teased from his palm, glancing down at her paint-splattered jeans and stained hands – how she had managed to get the brown paint all up her arms and in her hair was quite beyond her. “It’s a good thing I moved out or my parents would wonder where I was all the time… I guess Alexis’s mom is too caught up in her new love to notice her much, though.”
“Yes,” he said, gently placing her onto the workbench. “I must say that I feel sorry for Alexis… it cannot be easy for her to have to accept a new male parental figure into her life after the death of her own father. Have you met this stepsister of hers?”
Jade nodded, teasing apart two strands of her that had become matted together with the viscous brown liquid. “I’ve seen her around. I thought she was quite nice, but I don’t live with her… I know that Sam said she was kind of arrogant, though. She’s quite pretty, but she knows it as well. And she’s clearly not taking to Alexis any more than Alexis is to her.”
Skyfire shook his head regretfully. “It is a great shame.”
Shrugging, Jade pulled a face. “It’s none of our business, I guess. I just hope Starscream doesn’t do anything stupid… I can picture him ambushing the poor girl and strangling her to death with his holomatter form, or something. He may be getting the Autobot insignia on his wings, but he’ll always be a Decepticon by nature.”
She fiddled with the bracelet that she had chosen as her mark of allegiance to the Autobots – Sam had been trying to convince her to get a tattoo done with himself and Mikaela, but she had been too frightened of needles to do so. Instead, Skyfire had crafted her a beautiful charm bracelet, upon which hung the Cybertronian signs for ‘Sky’, ‘Fire’ and ‘Jewel’ – now she never took if off, wanting it to be as permanent as possible without actually getting something inked onto her skin.
“I agree. Three years is very little to us,” he responded to her comment, turning back to the great metallic structure behind him that was taking up half of the laboratory. “Humans may think that Starscream has had plenty of time to change, but remember that he lived for many millennia… we have not even been here for half a decade.”
“I can hardly remember life without you guys,” she admitted.
Her cell phone suddenly rung shrilly from the pocket of her jeans, and she reached in and plucked it out, wincing when she smeared the little device with brown paint from her fingers.
Skyfire watched her as she responded to the person on the other end; it turned out to be Carlos, who wanted to talk about colleges. He felt that ugly, cold feeling in his spark that he always felt whenever he saw the young boy and tried to ignore it, picking up a mammoth wrench and raising it to a loose bolt on the mechanism.
He had been romantically involved with Jade Rivers for three years, and he had cherished every moment of it. He had always been far too concerned with his work on Cybertron to worry about femmes, but he thanked Primus every day that Jade returned his affections for him. True, it had been hard for her to deal with having a forty-foot-high, bi-pedal robot as her lover, but his holoform made things slightly easier between them, although Ratchet still had miniature paroxysms every time he was caught using it.
Jade had never once shown any romantic feelings towards Carlos – not since she had admitted that she had been attracted to him when she was younger. She had sworn that she would never love anyone but Skyfire, and he believed her. What he worried about was the young man in question… Jade may have put her heart into his hands, but he was still somewhat suspicious of the handsome young man.
“Carlos flunked all of his college exams except for two,” Jade giggled when she put her phone back in her pocket. “Dear God, that boy.”
“Mm,” Skyfire hummed, wishing he could be more tolerant of the young man in question.
It was not as if he could get away from the fact that Carlos was there. He and Rad had been Jade’s best friends since kindergarten, and they were her advisors and confidantes – along with Carlos’s guardian, Seraphim, whom Jade had developed an almost sisterly friendship with. This was all the more disturbing, as if Seraphim and Jade were together, Carlos was highly likely to be with them.
Her voice tore him from his jealous thoughts with a jolt, as did the light touch of her hand. “Sky, you’re daydreaming again,” she teased, putting her hands on her hips. “This is how I know that you’re a plane in another form – you’ve always got your head in the clouds!”
“My apologies, Jade,” he smiled, unable to remain in such a gloomy mood when faced with that lovely smile. “It is in my nature.”
She rolled her eyes, smiling. “Wouldn’t be in your nature to help me clean up all this paint, would it?”