"Thundercracker! Hey, Thundercracker!"

Skywarp revved his engines, but it was no use. There was no way his noise could compete with the roar his wingmate's engines made. When Thundercracker felt like drowning you out, he'd never hear you.

Which didn't mean his wingmate hadn't seen Skywarp trying to get his attention. Hell, Skywarp had warped over to him and done everything short of grabbing him to knock him out of his reverie.

But no. Skywarp was Being Ignored today. Thundercracker was already turning the corner, scowling, his wings flared out, clearly communicating that the blue seeker wanted to be Left Alone.

Skywarp kicked at a little piece of scrap on the ground, his optics flaring crimson.

If any of the other Decepticons saw him now, they'd think he was just being petulant because his wingmate had walked off in the middle of a conversation or spurned his request for an interface. And that wasn't it. That wasn't it at all.

Everybody in the Nemesis knew that Thundercracker got like this sometimes. That sometimes he went so quiet he would go a whole day without saying a word, moving as stiffly as a drone. He'd obey his commanders, doing as Megatron or even Starscream bid him, but he'd say nothing to anyone.

Everybody had seen Thundercracker do that at least once, but only Skywarp knew why.

He and Starscream were the only ones close enough to Thundercracker to piece it together. And Starscream didn't care, not like Skywarp did.

Oh, he wasn't totally sparkless, not toward his trine anyway. And he was smart, too, smart enough to piece together how their wingmate's spells always came on after he'd done more complaining than usual about this dirtball of a planet - gotten mud in his engines, say, or collided with one of the organic fliers and had to scrub its mess off his plating in the washracks, shivering with disgust.

But it wouldn't matter to him. Didn't. As far as he was concerned, Thundercracker just needed to get over it.

Skywarp was the one who knew he wouldn't get over it. Couldn't. The one who knew that every time this planet got too deep into him he'd just shut down, again and again and again.

And Skywarp could usually pull him out of it. Most of the time, it just took a little distraction. Some pratfall to annoy him into forgetting the serious stuff. Or maybe, if Skywarp was lucky, to make him laugh too, the corners of his silver face turning up in a smile he thought he'd perfectly concealed.

Or interfacing. There was always interfacing. Frown as he might at Skywarp's brazenness, Thundercracker could rarely resist it.

But "rarely" was becoming less rare these days.

And far too often, what happened when Skywarp did something distracting looked less like Thundercracker gratefully switching his attention to his "annoying" wingmate and more like... this.

Like walking, or flying, away.

Skywarp's wings twitched. He didn't know much about processors, or emotion arrays, or affect centers. He didn't know how they worked, not really, or what you did when they began a slow, steady slide into malfunction.

But he knew that, sooner or later, he'd have to do something.

Something big.