As Mark Twain once said, "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Wow, how's it been guys? Miss me? No? Bah, you're no fun… anyhow, I'm officially done with my senior project! I've been waiting on passing my portfolio and I got my certificate of completion just the other day, so I'm basically back in business on the fanfiction front. I was also just informed that I definitely will be graduating come the eighteenth of this month. Unfortunately, real life has not been treating me nice otherwise. My stepfather is a whiny brat child and is plotting to kick me out of the house on my birthday. Also, I'm still looking for a new job. Aside from the crippling IRL drama, I have about a million uploads itching to be posted too. Be ready for an updating spree coming soon! In the meantime, allow me to entertain you with another fanfic about my surly Decepticon sedan, Shockshell. Concrit is loved as always and highly appreciated, granted my intended major is going to be creative writing. I do not own Transformers and only own my own OCs.

The [2006] Chevrolet Impala performs well in safety testing, and is equipped with standard antilock brakes, traction control, stability control… In government crash testing, the Impala earned the highest possible five-star rating in frontal and side-impact crash tests. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety awarded the Impala its top ranking of "Good" in both its frontal-offset and side impact tests.

~emunds, official Chevy Impala safety review

i

"Oh fuck, MOOSE!"

Within the narrow span of approximately two seconds, Shockshell became painfully aware of three very important things.

Firstly, they had not seen another car on the highway for the past hour… and as far as the Decepticon was concerned, they would not be seeing another again anytime soon. It was eleven thirty-two on a Saturday night in August as well, and most humans functioned only during the daylight portions of Earth's short solar cycles. The only reason Shockshell and his human charge were even out this late to begin with was because they were returning home toNew Hampshirefrom a wedding inMaine. While Meghan's family was staying for the rest of the weekend at the York Beach hotel where the reception had been held, Meghan specifically opted to go back home to their property in Salisbury in order to take care of the animals. Besides, Shockshell was desperately itching to stretch his legs in the backyard anyways. He couldn't exactly transform out of his alternate form with Meghan's parents and siblings at home to potentially see him, and he was sick of always hitting his head on the ceiling of the cramped barn.

Secondly, Shockshell realized that he was going well over the speed limit. This was unintentional, but it wasn't exactly like he had to pay too much attention to the road to begin with. There had been no one on his radar for him to concern over since they last saw another car ─ civilian vehicles, police cruisers, or even Autobots otherwise. It was just him and Meghan with the air conditioning on full throttle and Skillet blasting through the speakers while they cruised along at eighty-five miles per hour on a sixty-five route. Despite their slightly less than legal speed, Shockshell was a significantly more competent driver than any measly human could have been. After all, he was the car. Nothing could have gone wrong. Nothing should have gone wrong.

Thirdly and lastly, Meghan was screaming and Shockshell became aware of the fact that there was a huge animal standing in the middle of the fucking road.

The moose turned its stupid head to look at them with dumb eyes reflecting neon green in his headlights. The Chevrolet Impala was absolutely staggered by the size of the animal as it suddenly appeared in his sights. It had to have stood well above the height of his alternate mode with the span of its massive antlers doubling its perceived size with intimidating efficiency. In robot mode, the moose's height would have reached up to the top of his leg ─ Meghan was scarcely as tall as his shin. Shockshell realized that his high beams were not on either, and perhaps if they had they been on, the Decepticon would have surely been able to spot the dark hulk of the moose well before they were this close. Too close. Way too close. Shockshell might have even had a chance to slow down, too. The huge bull moose startled at the sight of them with a ripple coursing through its heavily muscled body and turned on its split hooves toward them. Shockshell's first presumption was that the animal was going to swing around and bolt back into the forest to the right of the highway, but his hope for averting disaster was immediately dashed. His spark skipped a pulsation and turned nitrogen cold when the brute of a mammal charged straight at them.

"FUCK!" The human swear word came out far too naturally for Shockshell to have not cared, but the situation had already proved itself too dire for him to sufficiently mull over it. He knew that avoiding a collision was no longer possible. He was going too fast to avoid the moose or swerve out of the way without flipping over with the force of inertia and taking on even more damage. Shockshell had never actually gotten himself into an accident before ─ plenty of close calls with the occasional drunk or incompetent fleshlings who simply should have never been given a license to begin with ─ and the Decepticon briefly had to wonder exactly how bad the impact was going to be. He was traveling at exactly eighty-five point seven miles an hour. There was no time to for him to even estimate how fast the moose was going, but the 'Con was smart enough to know the force of the impact would be significantly raised because of it. The laws of physics sucked, Shockshell bitterly decided. The Decepticon knew he had a better chance for being able to endure the brunt force of the impact because his alloys were Cybertronian and much more resistant than any Earth metals used primarily in cars, but that didn't mean that the impact would be anywhere near comfortable. The moose would die most definitely, but Shockshell could have honestly cared less. If the moose was stupid enough to run toward him while he was going eighty-fucking-five miles per hour, then the animal did not deserve to live. He would hit the moose head on so his reinforced chassis could take the majority of the blow, pull over, recuperate for an hour or two until his self-repair systems fixed the damage, and then he and Meghan could─

Meghan. Meghan was in the passenger seat. Meghan wasn't wearing a seatbelt.

They stopped at a gas station two hours earlier so she could fill his tank. She had been the one driving up until that point and Shockshell had offered to drive himself once it became apparent that she was getting tired. As much as he used to despite his fleshbag attendant, she unintentionally managed to burrow her way into a soft section of his spark. She sympathized with the Decepticon mission and treated him better than any of his fellow 'Cons ever had. It was both surprising and slightly unnerving to Shockshell how easily she was able to breathe around him, and he was in turn surprised to realized that he enjoyed her company. The easy access to gas was one thing, but having someone to vacuum out and steam clean his interior every other weekend was another. Then there were the car washes and buffing. And having his tires rotated every six months and having his oil changed and just having someone to talk to. He was the only Decepticon stationed in the New England area for hundreds of miles and the closest allies he had were Barricade and Frenzy in New York City. Shockshell had been a very fucking lonely mech up until he unintentionally blew his cover and exposed himself as being a Transformer to Meghan, although it was an accident that proved itself well worth the frustration and mayhem it initially caused. Meghan gave him something to look forward to everyday when his superior officers simply stopped contacting him. Meghan always patiently listened to him rant whenever he was feeling particularly vicious about his hate for the Autobots and Earth's unpredictable weather. Meghan always did things for him at a drop of a hat, like check his tire pressure and clean bugs out of his grill and say goodnight to him every single night after she took care of the animals in the barn and went inside for the evening.

It didn't matter that he was a Decepticon. Shockshell would sooner turn himself into NEST than let anything happen to her.

The Chevrolet Impala instantly did the first and only thing that came to mind ─ he engaged the emergency breaks and cranked his steering wheel all the way to the left. His front tires locked instantly and his rear end swung around, fishtailing violently. The offensive odor of burning rubber rose into the cabin and scorched the late August evening with angry vengeance. So long as the brunt of the impact was absorbed the driver's side rather than the full front of his alternate mode, Meghan had a better chance of getting out of this whole mess alive and hopefully unharmed. He would have been stupid to presume his human companion could have survived a head on collision. She would hit the dash and snap her neck from the brunt of the crash. Humans were weak with their poorly reinforced bodies, but Shockshell was putting himself into an incredibly dangerous situation as well. The corners of his chassis were not as armored as his full front which meant that he would be taking on even more damage than if he decided to hit the moose head on. He sparingly wondered how badly this was going to hurt. Probably very.

The impact was mind numbing and Shockshell heard the collision before he even felt it. There was the piercing sound of smashing glass and crushing metal that scraped at his audio sensors like a feral scraplet's death trills. The was the sharp clunk as his driver side mirror was knocked clean off, followed by the smashing crunch as one of the moose's huge antlers surged through the windshield and completely tore through the refurbished shatterproof glass like it was newspaper. The animal's head was snapped sideways with a sharp crack as its neck broke, and the resonantly wet sound of tearing flesh and splattering blood followed. Meghan was screaming. She may have even called his name, but he was too dazed to pay attention.

Then he felt it ─ the wind being knocked out of him, metal caving, parts smashing, things breaking. His armor caved drastically where the moose hit him, crushing down against vital internal workings like his engine and fuselage. Hot blood was surging all around and staining everywhere ─ on his hide, on his seats ─ and scorched with a sticky hot reminder of death. There was pain too, and Shockshell desperately reached out with all of his still functioning sensors to make sure that Meghan was alright. It was a task easier said than done with all the error messages exploding across his data board and blocking access to his other utilities. Dozens of warning memos burst across his visual readings and blinded him in yellow, orange, and red flashing lights. He had lost traction control. Tire pressure had dropped to zero in both front tires. A major fuel line was ruptured underneath his hood. He was leaking oil profusely from underneath his carriage. His breaks were locked as the hydraulics completely failed. Stunned, the 'Con lost control of his own sense of direction and swerved to the right. He faintly heard his human charge scream once before the sound completely cut off beneath the shriek of scraping metal.

Shockshell hit the guardrail on the right-hand side of the highway at approximately sixty-two miles per hour. Both of his headlights shorted out from the blow in an explosion of feeble light. The corpse of the moose was torn in half from the force of the brunt impact and guts sprayed everywhere. Shockshell hardly cared for the gore. All he knew that that he was suddenly airborne and then bam ─ he was landing sideways on the passenger side and violently flipping down the steep incline of the rocky hill leading deep into the forest. He landed on his passenger side and lost the mirror on that flank too. Metal crunched ominously. The windows on all four doors shattered. The back window was ravaged by spider web fractures. One of his back tires was shredded with a harsh pop, but he could not tell which one. He could hardly care. He could feel Meghan being jostled around in his interior, and unless he somehow managed to get her out, she was going to either get seriously hurt or worse. Timing himself as best he could through the haze of disorientation clouding his usually keen sensors, he opened the passenger door and let the momentum of his fall eject her. She rolled through the open door and out of the cabin just before that side lifted up and he flipped again. He was too late to close the door when he landed and crunch ─ the door was completely ripped free of its hinges. Shockshell howled but steadied his pain. Meghan was out of harms way.

The Decepticon finally allowed himself to transform in order to stabilize himself on the incline. He lashed both hands out to grab something, anything, but the rocks and dry foliage snapped under the pressure of his claws like they were nothing. He had gone over the railing too fast. The hill was too steep and he had gained too much momentum to stop his own tumble. Warning lights were flashing in his sights and he struggled to see past them so he could fucking stop falling… then there was the sharp crack of metal hitting stone as he cracked his head against a boulder. He blacked out for half a click, totally helpless, and fell the rest of the way down the treacherously steep slope in half-consciousness. He was never quite sure when exactly he came to the bottom of the sharp hill, but he faintly felt as he bounced off a ledge and landed unceremoniously in a limp heap at the bottom of a narrow ravine with a slight stream. Water splashed up around him and he struck his forehead particularly hard against bedrock. He landed on something sharp… and the offending knife edge forced itself up deep into his body with a foreign shriek.

Then there was the pain.

Oh the pain.

Into his spark, up his chest, down his limbs, up and down and back into his spark again. Just below his chest a little to the left. Throbbing. Pulsating. Pain pain pain pain pain. White hot agony assaulted his sensory net with tendrils of acidic hurt, and Shockshell was completely paralyzed by the brutal force it struck his already frazzled senses with. His neural feedback receptor faltered and his pain management processor crashed from over stimulation. Other systems suddenly began to fail as well ─ his internal heater stalled, stasis lock was disabled, self-repair was knocked totally offline ─ and his body shuddered involuntarily from the shock of it all. The sharp tang of processed energon rose into his mouth like bile and he nearly choked on it. He was internally bleeding, although he could not be sure as to how serious the damage was altogether. All he knew was the pain ─ how it held him in its deathly grip and refused to let go.

Another wave of agony washed over him. Shockshell screamed, long and hard, until his vocalization unit emitted nothing but choked static. Coyotes in the distant woods answered him.

ii

"You want me to drive?" Shockshell asked.

It was nine-thirty, two hours before the accident. The gas station lot was completely abandoned under the glow of the nearby street lamp as Meghan came walking back from the convenience store. One hand held her mangy leather wallet while the other sported a small bottle of one percent milk. Caught between her teeth by the edge of its plastic wrapping was a Hershey's chocolate bar, much to the Decepticon's amusement. Her hair was slightly windswept from driving with the windows down and her Merrimack Valley High School band jacket was hanging slightly off kilter on one shoulder.

"Still can't believe they didn't have hot chocolate," the girl was muttering through her teeth. "What do they expect me to do, get real coffee?"

"It's seventy-five degrees and you want a hot drink? You're stupid."

"And you're kind of an asshole."

"Hn." Shockshell automatically unlocked his doors when she was close enough. It was a gesture done strictly out of habit, although nowadays it was getting increasingly harder for the Decepticon scout to convince himself that that was the case. It was hard not to fall into routine around his human charge after being with her for more than two years, but the line between habit and courtesy was becoming palpably thin. "I stand to repeat myself. You want me to drive?"

"Did I do something wrong?" Meghan asked. There was a hint of nervousness in her voice as she set her things on his roof and crossed over to the other side.

"No, I was just offering. Humans need to recharge longer than Transformers do."

"Says the mech who sleeps like a rock whenever he gets the chance," Meghan chuckled good naturedly. She hitched the fuel nozzle back to the main machine and untangled herself from the rubber hose before printing the receipt. "How long were you napping in parking lot during the entire wedding fiasco? Twelve hours?"

"There's only so much a mech can do stuck in alt-form," Shockshell grumbled darkly. He shifted on his tires impatiently as she printed the receipt for the seven gallons of unleaded fuel she had gotten him. "I've beaten online solitaire approximately three thousand times, by the way. Five thousand people have also inconveniently lost three years worth of Farmville data. I was rather proud of that one."

"Wow… that's impressive. I didn't know you could count so high."

Shockshell swung his passenger door open. "Shut the fuck up and get in, fleshwad."

Meghan hesitated briefly, looking between the still closed driver's door and back down at the front of the Chevy Impala again. Shockshell was tempted to verbally reprimand his human charge when Meghan finally brought it upon herself to move. She cautiously walked around his front ─ her fingers trailed across his shining hood as she did so ─ and walked around the waiting passenger door before sitting down in the seat. "Are you sure you don't want me to drive?"

"Relax meatbag, I just thought you might need a break," Shockshell jeered. He started his engine and four hundred horses springing to life, and the mech flicked through several radio channels distractedly. "Any requests?"

"Oh God, he's giving me an option. What do you want this time?"

The grey 'Con scoffed and revved his engine. The motor thrummed like an impressive beast beneath the glistening hood, making the cabin sway. "What? A Decepticon can't be friendly once in awhile? My feelings are hurt."

"That's the thing, Shell. The words Decepticon and friendly were never intended to be used in the same sentence. It's, like, grammatical taboo."

Shockshell cackled wholesomely. "You and your obsession with writing. Whatever the slag am I going to do with you?"

"You can start by blasting Skillet for starters," Meghan grinned. She leaned her head back in the seat and smoothed her hand across the center island between the driver and passenger sides. "Try not to get us pulled over. It might be a bit awkward trying to explain to my parents why I got a ticket when no one was even driving."

The Chevy Impala rumbled with low laughter again. "You might want to get your things off my roof before we get going. I doubt you want to misplace your wallet, never mind your stupid drink or chocolate fix."

Meghan snapped to attention and cursed softly, opening the door herself and snatching the items off the roof before dodging back inside the Decepticon. He closed the door robotically behind her as she fiddled with her things in her lap. "Thanks, Shell. You're a lifesaver."

"You'd misplace me if I wasn't around to keep track of myself. I'm amazed your species has survived as long as it has. You humans are as forgetful as you're also ugly. And stupid. Did I mention that you're also ugly?"

Meghan smiled faintly and reached over to pat the rim of the steering wheel. "I love you too, buddy."

Shockshell did not answer. He had pulled out of the lot and flashed his blinker when they pulled out onto the empty road and drove into the night. He remembered coming through this same area during the day on their way to the wedding and he knew the way home already, except two hours later, getting home was the least of his problems. It had gone from being seventy-five degrees at the gas station to being just barely above forty in the sheltered forest, and that wasn't including the wind chill factor as a cold breeze blew over his body from a river somewhere deeper in the woods. He was faintly aware that he had dragged himself quite some distance away from the freeway ─ maybe he managed to haul himself to his feet too ─ but he barely remembered having moved at all. All he knew was that he was wished Meghan was there, because in his own silent way, he loved her too.

iii

Meghan woke up.

The first thing she realized was that she was freezing. She was about to sit up and ask Shockshell to turn down the air conditioning when she realized that she was uncomfortably sprawled out on her stomach with her face planted in moist dirt. An owl hooted somewhere in the tall pine trees looming overhead, and the steady drone of peepers and crickets sang along with the nighttime choir. Her hair clung to the side of her face and gingerly touching her shaking fingers to her scalp revealed that it was sticky. Meghan strained to sit up in order to better assess her situation but the dull ache of pain in her limbs made it hard to do so. Sitting on a steep slope hardly helped. Meghan looked down at her fingers and saw the dark shade of blood in the silver glow of the moonlight. What happened? Where was she? Where was Shock─?

Then it hit her.

"Oh… Jesus," Meghan groaned and blearily looked around. About thirty feet above and behind her was the familiar shape of the guardrail beside the highway, along with the crooked hulk of the torn railing where Shockshell had slammed through it. She swiveled her head around and waited for her vision to adjust to the darkness. Trees were smashed all down the incline, twisted at strange angles and sometimes completely snapped clear in half from the force of something heavy falling down the slope. Shockshell must have somehow managed to eject her before falling the rest of the way down. "Shell?"

Aside from another hoot of the owl and the low bass of an animal's lonely call, everything was quiet. There was no surprisingly comfortable hum of her friend's V3 engine, no coarse swearing that could make even a sailor cringe, nothing. Meghan felt her heart quicken in her chest as cold sweat broke out all over her flesh. The hair on the back of her neck rose and her skin prickled. Numbness crept into her hands and spread through her entire body ominously. It was the worst feeling in the world ─ rivaled by the first time she realized her car was actually an alien robot trying to kill her. Being pinned underneath his intimidating talons and caught under his bloody gaze, she had been terrified. That same kind of terror was pulsing through her veins now, but this time she was scared for a whole different reason. Shockshell was missing. Shockshell was not here with her. Shockshell…

"Oh shit," she breathed. She could feel her breathing pick up when she saw something glint not too far down the slope. It was twisted horribly and reflecting the palest silver in the moonlight filtering through the treetops. The car door was mangled completely beyond repair, twisted and smashed like it was made of tin rather than Cybertronian alloys. She remembered how he once mentioned the sensitivity of his door wings ─ a topic he frequently brought up when she gave his car washes with the power hose and had the setting too high ─ but she could not imagine how painful it would have been to actually loose one. Glass from the smashed pane glittered in the low light like shards from a mirror, reflecting silver and white up toward the starry sky.

Meghan found herself slowly straining to get to her feet. It hurt too much for her to stand up, so she settled for half crab walking down the steep slope into the darkness. The brunette squinted her eyes looking for Shockshell, but the familiar bulk of the grey Transformer was nowhere to be found in the obscure bleakness. Even when she finally made it to the bottommost part of the hill that lead into slight ravine with a babbling stream, there was still nothing. Shockshell was nowhere to be seen. Cautiously, Meghan touched her feet down into the water and put all her strength into standing. Her bad knee creaked with protest and her legs sang with acute soreness, but thankfully nothing was broken and it was not impossible to support her whole weight. The water was cold and seeped into her black converse sneakers uncomfortably, although her main concern remained with finding her friend.

"Shockshell!" She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted as loud as she could. Nothing. "Shockshell!"

The force of the crash probably ripped him apart.

"No," she muttered tearfully. Anger was seeping into her scrambling brain as she squinted into the darkness for any sign of the churlish Decepticon. If she hadn't been aching so bad, she might have had the urge to punch herself right in the mouth. Shockshell might have been the "wimpy" Impala that her friends accused him of being, but the Decepticon was built like a tank and had the rebounding capability rivaling that of a feral cat ─ a two ton, fourteen foot tall, very feral cat. There was absolutely no denying that the accident with the moose had been a bad one, but it was over and done with now and there was absolutely no way that─

He's probably dead, you know.

"Fuck you, he's fine," Meghan hissed to herself bitterly, except she did not feel reassured like she supposed she should have been. She gripped her head and distractedly knotted her fingers in her messy hair in frustration. The grainy feel of dirt and crushed leaves stuck to her short tresses, and the stickiness of the blood remained as well ─ a painful reminder to what they had gotten themselves into. The blood was not her own, thank God. The moose had practically exploded blood all over the place once it went partially through the windshield, so there was no surprise that she was covered with it. Meghan spared a quick glance down at her ruined shirt to see that it was soaked straight through the fabric. It would stain her skin, too.

And it was because of that downward glance that she noticed something glinting on the ground not too far away ─ something that wasn't broken glass or water from the stream beneath her.

At first Meghan couldn't even tell what it was. It was a liquid, that much was for sure, but it definitely was not water. Cautiously, the brunette girl knelt to get a better look at it. It was opaque and shiny with a dull, fluorescent pink tint that looked hardly like anything she had seen before. It smelled too, faintly reminding her of spray-paint and gasoline mixed into one overpoweringly noxious odor. The plants around the place where the goop had fallen were blackened and dead as though they had been scorched, and simply just brushing her fingertips against the puddle made her fingers tingle warningly.

Then it dawned on her. It was energon.

She snapped her gaze up and was met with the sight of another splotch of energon, this time larger. There was another one beyond it. Then another. Meghan found herself getting back on her feet staggering from splotch to pink stained splotch, moving further and further into the woods as she followed the obvious trail. It was pitch black underneath the cover of the pine forest canopy, but she could still faintly distinguish the darkened silhouettes of smashed foliage around her. Something large had come through here ─ something that definitely wasn't the car that came crashing through the guardrail off the highway she was leaving behind. Despite the obvious reassurance that Shockshell was certainly not dead and still able to transform, Meghan found herself becoming increasingly more and more disturbed with each passing second. The path of broken trees and smashed landscape was not straight ─ it was crooked as if the individual responsible for making it was teetering through this area rather than charging through. That in itself was a whole new disturbing revelation altogether. Shockshell was not the kind of mech who went around leaving obvious traces of destruction. He was nimble and quick on his feet, and for him to have left behind so much demolition would have been the immediate indication that something was seriously wrong. Except the increasingly large stains of energon marring the ground and up against certain trees made that point far too clear already. Far, far too clear.

It was not long before Meghan came out of the stretch of dense woods and came upon a slight clearing. The distance from the highway couldn't have been more than a few dozen yards, although navigating that dark path certainly felt like forever. The scorching light of the moon touched the tall meadow grass and turned the entire field into a blaze of off white and silver. Clusters of wildflowers were sectioned off in bunches all around, their petals screwed shut in wait for morning. The blinking glow of fireflies lit the air like miniature golden stars. The meadow was absolutely breathtaking, although the twisted wreck of metal limbs and motionless mechanical body lying in the center of it scarred the pristine image.

Meghan felt her heart drop and mouth go completely dry.

Shockshell was a mess. The Chevy Impala was lying on his side in a crippled heap of twisted metal, vents hissing with struggling effort as he circulated air through his broken body. The Decepticon's breathing came out in loud, hoarse cycles that made the fallen foliage in front of his face rattle like old bones. His mouth was ajar with the sharp teeth glistening from the energon dribbling out of the corner of his mouth, and there was a very obvious dent in the side of his head from where he must have struck it on the way down the hill. His optics were dull and foggy, staring off into space without seeing. There was darkened blood and shredded bits of gore on his front chassis where the remains of the moose clung to his armor, but that was hardly the problem. His entire chest was smashed, caved in further than what should have been normal, and there was oh my God a huge piece of guardrail sticking out just below that. The pink glow of processed energon dribbled past the impalement wound and the viscous fluid seeped into the soil. The smell of burning rubber and overheated oil scorched the air with enough intensity to make Meghan's eyes water, or at least that was what she tried to convince herself. Seeing Shockshell the way he was just about broke her heart.

Meghan was already up beside the Decepticon before she even knew she had moved. Her entire body felt numb and cold, and she briefly watched from outside her own body as she brought herself close to the tangled mess of broken mech whom she had been having full conversations with to just under an hour ago. Shockshell's breathing was coming out of his intake vents in laborious bursts of air as well as through his open mouth with rasping effort. His breath smelled very strongly of the energon he was bleeding ─ noxious and sickly. Tentatively, she reached out and touched his sharp shoulder. He was ice cold to the touch ─ too cold. "Shockshell?"

At first, the Decepticon did not react at all. He continued to breathe with difficulty and stare unresponsively into the dark forest with unseeing optics. Meghan was about to try again when the scarlet glow of his eyes rekindled and he seemed to come back to his senses. Slowly, tortuously, the mech angled his head and looked at her foggily. "…M-Meg?"

"Hey buddy," she said as evenly as she could. She was trying her best to ignore his injuries, but the horrible metallic smell of energon coupled with the faint odor of moose gore and was making her stomach churn painfully. She had seen him after the minor scuffles he had with the Autobots who occasionally wandered to close to Salisbury before, but the worst injury he ever received from those particular scenarios was a slight limp and a twisted wrist from flipping around his gyro flail the wrong way. This was a whole new ball game. Shockshell looked like he could barely stay conscious let alone do anything else. There was murkiness in his optics that worried her too, as if he wasn't completely there or something. "How do you feel?"

Shockshell shuttered his optics at her in a slow blink. It was not the initial reaction she expected from the usually snappy 'Con, but she would have readily preferred it over his painful silence. He stayed quiet for a long time before snorting indifferently and gingerly turning his head away from her. His jaw tensed and the cables his neck began to weakly spasm from obvious stress. No one else may have noticed the weedy tremble in his shoulders as he set his head back down, maybe not even Shockshell himself, but she certainly did. Meghan had been around the Decepticon for too long not to. Shockshell may have been arrogant and conceited to his own over-inflated ego, but in all the two years she had known him, he was no weakling. For him to be like this ─ lying in a crippled heap and almost completely unresponsive to her probing ─ was not like him at all. At most she would have expected him to snap at her for being overbearing like she usually did whenever he hurt himself, but not this time. Not at all.

When it became obvious that he was not going to immediately answer her original question, she tried again. She stepped forward and lightly touched his face. He was still freezing underneath her fingertips. "Shockshell? Shockshell."

"Huh?" He twitched and jerked his head up a little as her hand made contact with his metallic skin. The light of his optics flickered in intensity, wearing between coherent and totally unsound. "I… wha…?"

"How do you feel?"

Shockshell screwed his optics shutters shut, remaining door wing shuddering as if a sudden chill had overcome him. The cables in his taut neck gave a visibly sharp contraction and his jaw flexed. His voice had an almost dreamy quality to it. "I… you're real. You're not dead."

"Did you think I was?"

Shockshell did not answer. The way his jaw went rigid indicated to her that he had no intention to, and Meghan did not feel inclined to inconvenience him by prying.

Meghan tentatively touched him on the forearm. "Are you in pain?"

There was that distinct tensing in the fallen Decepticon's neck again, followed by another low shudder in his one remaining door wing. A low whine rolled out from the far back of his throat. It was not quite a whimper but rather something very close to it ─ strangled and subdued. "No."

A lie. A very horribly concealed lie at that, but at least it showed that Shockshell had to have been marginally okay. As tough as he was, the 'Con was also incredibly stubborn. Meghan muttered a swear and looked down at the guardrail protruding from his lower torso. It was embedded very deeply and twisted upward at a slight angle. Her immediate concern was that it was too close to his spark chamber, and she nervously reached out a hand to touch it and see how badly rooted it was.

Shockshell wheezed with difficulty as soon as her hand brushed against it. His voice was scratchy and his optics flashed an intense ruby. "Don't touch it."

Meghan snatched her hands back. The sudden surge of uncharacteristic agony in his voice had set her further on edge than she already was. The brunette seventeen year old girl could feel her heart rate picking up inside her chest, beating faster than it had when she saw the moose charging for them. Shockshell was hurt. Shockshell was hurt. She didn't know the first thing about Cybertronian first aid, but she knew damn well that Shockshell was in a very bad position. He was the kind of mech who shrugged off the countless injuries she had seen him sustain before, but now? "What the hell are we supposed to do, then? Just sit around and wait for something to happen?"

Aside from the heavy rise and fall of his chest as he struggled to breathe, Shockshell became silent. Neither one of them said anything for a long time.

iv

Finding one another had happened simply by several convenient strokes of coincidence.

Firstly, Shockshell's spark had been one of the last to be forged under the Allspark before public access to the Well had been completely shut down by the Council. What would soon be known as the Great War had been reasonably contained to only minor scuffles here and there across Cybertron's smaller provinces, although it was no surprise that the Council was becoming more and more nervous about the whole mess. Civil war would be heinously disastrous to the economy, not to mention how it would put unnecessary strain on the wealthier castes. Accessible energon deposits were also becoming uncomfortably uncommon ─ fighting a war was the last thing they needed to worry about. They had reputations to maintain in the public eye, after all. In spite of this, the fact remained that Shockshell was one of the last free sparklings made under the Allspark, and he had eventually joined the Decepticons at that. Had the Well decided to purge his spark any later, he would have most certainly ended up an Autobot and never been taken in by his lower caste, Decepticon allied caretakers. He would have been another nameless casualty on the Autobot side, dead on the battlefield in some very violent way, destined to never set foot on Earth.

His adoptive father was named Shockpoint. His mother was named Artshell. Whereas Shockpoint had lived in Kaon working in the factories his entire life, Artshell had come from the high caste backdrop of CrystalCity. How she managed to become as fearless of a gladiator as she did, few mechs knew… and even fewer lived. She was an artsy femme who lived up to her name in the field of sculpture, but Artshell was also ready to use those same techniques to dismantle enemies in the gladiator pits beneath the smelting refineries ofSlaughterCity. She had only ever been bested by two mechs in her entire career ─ Barricade, who had barely won and spared her life simply out of a warrior's respect, and Shockpoint. The two of them bonded shortly after that fateful match ─ a match made in hell, as the human saying went.

Shockshell and his parents lived in Praxus for quite sometime, but the only reason they were able to obtain housing there to begin with was because of Artshell's background as a high caste member. The housing department almost refused them service after they learned Shockpoint was of a lower caste than Artshell, but a compromise was made and they were given an apartment in a medium caste section of the city. It was not as high quality as CrystalCity, but it was certainly much less violent than Kaon and remained to be a good environment for rearing sparklings. The theme park Six Lasers wasn't that far away either, and Shockpoint promised Shockshell that they would go someday. They never did, though. It had been bombed by the mysterious Decepticon terrorist organization that was supposedly headed by the famous gladiator Megatron himself, although Shockshell's understanding of politics were thin at best during those earlier stellar cycles of his existence. So he hardly paid attention to it when his father came home with a strange sigil branded on his chest plate one day, nor did he ever pay much attention to how Barricade and a few of Shockpoint's other gladiator friends came over to occasionally discuss the evils of the higher caste and the newly fledged Autobot faction. All Shockshell was ever able to understand from his mother's explanations was that the caste system was wrong, that Cybertron was slowly turning into a dictatorship under the whim of the Council, and that the Decepticon rebellion was their only hope of a free Cybertron.

Shockshell's most prominent memory of his abruptly shortened childhood was the bombing of Praxus. No one was ever sure who started the whole exchange first ─ Autobot or Decepticon ─ but it cost him his entire family. Shockpoint and Shockshell were able to escape to the outer city without loosing their lives as so many others did, but Shockshell never saw Artshell again. Her death at the hands of flying debris sealed Shockpoint's own fate, and the distraught gladiator left Shockshell on the doorstep of the recently opened Decepticon War Academy of Kaon. Shockpoint was never heard from again, although a report brought in from scouts revealed that he had ventured back to the ruins of Praxus and was found dead the bottom of a dugout. He had shot himself in the temple. The death of his beloved Artshell had taken its toll, and Shockpoint took his life out of grief for his lost bondmate. As far as Shockshell was concerned, the body of his father was still lying at the bottom of the ditch he killed himself in… or then again, maybe he wasn't. Maybe some neutral scavenger had cannibalized him for spare parts. Maybe scraplets had made a meal out of his empty shell. Maybe Autobots confiscated his corpse and dismantled his remains in the most demeaning way possible. Whichever the case, it hardly mattered to Shockshell. Life with the Decepticons turned him into a killer ─ the sparkling that Shockpoint and Artshell had raised straight out of the Well was long dead himself. Only the vicious and notoriously crafty soldier that Shockshell had been trained to become remained. He was with his mother's nimbleness and his father's brutality. He was the shadow that they had left behind.

The match made in hell had spawned the perfect monster.

He was a scout, but unlike the Autobot scouts, Decepticon scouts were far more dangerous. Whereas Autobot scouts were trained lightly with a high focus on agility and escaping from 'Cons if needed, Decepticon scouts were trained like hunting dogs. When they planned to either attack Autobot encampments or seize their enemy's territory, it was the scouts who were sent in first. Their job would be similar as the Autobots by going in and reporting back what they found, but there was one particularly drastic difference ─ if they were engaged by Autobots, they would sooner kill them with their own bare hands than run away. If the enemy so much as even vaguely detected them, a Decepticon scout was trained to do everything in his or her power to maim that Autobot as sadistically as possible. They were an acknowledgeable class of soldier that could be deemed very easily disposable due to their line of hazardous work, but even if it cost them their very lives in the process, a Decepticon scout would sooner snap an Autobot's neck in their own jaws than turn down a fight. They were their own class of shock troopers in this way ─ the calm before the real storm showed up and thrashed the Autobots ─ and Shockshell was deemed to be perhaps one of the most fierce of his particular squadron. His breeding was outstandingly good ─ a younger spark that was forged with natural talent ─ and being the son of two very successful gladiators exercised his potential and overall productivity tenfold. He really had snapped an Autobot's neck in his jaw amongst other things, including having a notably long list of kills. So noteworthy, in fact, that Shockshell heard rumors that they were going to draft him into the Stunticon gestalt program that Shockwave had organized on Trypticon Station. The call never came and they found some other mech for the position instead, but the fact that they had even considered him was an honor all the same.

In spite of his violent streak and his indisputable usefulness however, it still remained to be a surprise when Barricade apparently sent out for him to come to Earth. Scouts were handy after all, but the kind of mission that Earth had become associated with one potentially out of his league. Shockshell had heard the horror story that, despite how Megatron had been found by Starscream's elite Nemesis crew, all of the Decepticons with the exception of Barricade and Starscream had been killed by Optimus Prime's team and the planet natives. Megatron himself ─ only recently found and revived ─ was also violently defeated and left to rust at the bottom of Earth's deepest oceanic trench. Even the Allspark had been destroyed, although Barricade had apparently caught wind that a shard of the artifact still remained and passed the news on to the remaining Decepticon forces scattered across the cosmos. It was for this purpose that Starscream was having Soundwave organize several dozen recovery teams to be sent to Earth, and by some stroke of expediency, Barricade remembered that Shockshell was the son of one of his long dead allies and sent for him as well.

Fate did not intend to let Shockshell's over inflated pride go unclipped, however. As soon as Shockshell's core group arrived in Earth's atmosphere, Soundwave was already waiting for them with their orders. The Decepticon communications officer even brought it upon himself to pre-scan vehicle modes for the new arrivals to use, and Shockshell just so happened to get himself stuck with the only available civilian one ─ a 2006, LS Chevy Impala. It was a punch to the gut to Shockshell's conceit and none of the other 'Cons would let him live it down. Not only that, but Shockshell was forced to "adopt" a human in order to maintain his cover. Cars simply could not go around driving themselves without having a home and trying to maintain a holoform constantly was unpractical. He very briefly ended up in the possession of a human businessman working for the government, although that particular arrangement lasted less than a full Earth year. Humans startled far too easily when they realized their car was actually a giant alien robot. They squished just as easily too. Houses were also very easy to set on fire and tended to explode very violently when having hyper concentrated tesla rounds fired at them.

Barricade had not been happy. Not at all.

A dozen or so fire trucks and a thorough police investigation later, Shockshell found himself being towed off to an auction house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The family of the deceased human whom Shockshell had oh so kindly introduced to his boot wanted nothing to do with him ─ the stupid fleshwads thought he was haunted of all things ─ but the disgruntled Decepticon hardly gave a slag. He wanted nothing to do with humans anyways. That wasn't without saying that he was glad to finally be sold again, though. The auction warehouse had been packed, and to make matters worse, the humans shoved him into a small cubicle packed between an ugly teal Chevy Malibu and hideously dingy white Dodge Stratus. Shockshell barely had enough room to stand up and stretch as it was, and being locked in a cage did not bode well with him. The whole three weeks that he spent in there could not have gone any slower, but when they finally took him outside onto the auction courtyard that warm May afternoon he was finally sold again, he couldn't have been more relieved. It didn't matter that he went for less than the stupid ugly Malibu and Stratus ─ he was out. Seven thousand dollars paid by some stupid human male and his same-sex mate later, Shockshell was back on the roads and out of his proverbial limbo.

He had to admit, it was oddly nice having these two new humans fretting over him. It was suspicious too. As soon as he was "home" at the dwelling of the two humans ─ some place in New Hampshire ─ he was steam cleaned, vacuumed, washed, waxed, and steam cleaned again. Shockshell should have known better that they were up to something even after they drove him back into Massachusetts at some other house and left him there for an entire three very guarded days. They had the bow with them when they came back. That Primus forsaken, frilly, purple and silver bow. Shockshell had not been in a better mood for human soccer ever. Both men pulled him out of the garage, parked him in the driveway with the bow and a video camcorder on his hood, and frolicked away into the backyard of the house where it sounded like there was a party being had. Every fiber in Shockshell's body was screaming for him to back out of the driveway and leave, but his spark stubbornly refused to let him move. Barricade would have had his head, too.

That was when she came around the corner.

Meghan's life had been very simple up until that point ─ a whole lot less complicated than Shockshell's, for sure. She was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, and was still fifteen years old when she received Shockshell for her sweet sixteen. She was still going through the pains and sufferings and driver's education, but classes were almost over and her real birthday was coming up on June fourth. She would be eligible to get her driver's license then, but her father Paul and his boyfriend Bill thought it would be great to get her first car a little earlier and give it to her on her sweet sixteen her grandparents threw instead.

Shockshell was mortified to realize that he was being shoved into the care of an adolescent human femme ─ horror stories of rampant female drivers ran clear in his head from when he surfed through the internet during his first few days on Earth ─ although being stuck with Meghan was not quite the torture that Shockshell first expected it to be. While he heard that most human teenagers were very unorganized and tended to crash vehicles more often than the failed Autobot Seekers, Meghan was actually very careful around him. She vacuumed out his interior once a week and left him absolutely spotless. She was a considerate driver too, despite how she was still having to drive with her parents and theNew Hampshire permit. It was not a bad existence, overall. She never drove him to ridiculous lengths or handled the inside of his cabin too roughly like the last human had. Meghan was… kind. She treated him like a treasure rather than a simple blunt object. It was oddly pleasant.

And then Meghan failed the driver's test.

It had hardly been her fault, though. While Meghan was legally in the custody of her mother in Salisbury, New Hampshire, her father Paul lived just three towns over in Manchester. She had been over his house for one last night of practice before waking up early and heading down to the DMV. Meghan was absolutely ecstatic about getting her license, but Shockshell's first clue that something was wrong was when they waited a full twenty minutes longer for the driving test examiner to show up when they had parked. When he finally did appear out of the DMV building, Shockshell's heat scans immediately indicated that the burly human was in a foul mood. He ushered Paul away and heavily sat down in the passenger seat beside Meghan. He roughly adjusted the seat back to make room for his bulk ─ Shockshell was nothing more to an object to this man, just as he had been nothing more than an object to his previous human owner. The 'Con immediately decided that he did not like this man one bit. He really started to hate him as the awkward drive continued out of the DMV parking lot and out onto the Concord streets. Meghan's heart rate was three times faster than normal and her palms were sweaty on his steering wheel. The Decepticon pitied her ─ something he hardly did for anyone.

He failed her right away when she couldn't perform a back-in park. It was a silly thing to fail someone for, especially when they had obviously worked so hard to get to where they were now. Shockshell could practically feel Meghan's heart drop when they pulled back into the DMV and she saw the examiner's failing grade on his clipboard. He said nothing to her as he got out and handed her the paper. She sat there for a full minute staring at the mean yellow sheet before getting up and leaving the car to go inside and schedule another drive. Shockshell had never felt more sick to his fuel tank in his entire life.

Meghan was not able to drive home ─ crying while driving was not a good combination. Paul drove. Instantly, Shockshell felt a combination of several things all at the same time as they took the half an hour drive back to Manchesterwhere Bill and Meghan's two other siblings were having breakfast by now. For one, he preferred it when Meghan drove. He wasn't just a machine to her. In her eyes, he had to have been something special. He was reminded of his preference for the human femme whenever Paul braked too hard or flicked the directional too roughly or shifted gears more firmly than what was comfortable. Even when they drove into Boston to watch the Gay Pride Parade later that same day, Shockshell found himself feeling sorry for Meghan. In spite of how she was an ugly meat sack who was a stupid organic thing further below him than slag, he felt genuinely bad.

So at the next driving test, he intervened.

It was June twenty-third on an early Tuesday morning ─ the first day of summer vacation. As soon as the examiner stepped into the cabin, Shockshell kept all his sensors trained on Meghan while also maintaining keen attention on the road. They had a different instructor this time, one who was in a significantly better mood than their first one, but Meghan was incredibly nervy with the memory of her last failed drive. Whenever it seemed like his female human charge wasn't turning the wheel far enough or braking as much as she needed to, he applied some minor assistance. His adjustments were very discreet and the Decepticon intended to keep it that way, but maintaining his cover proved useless when they came to the last leg of the test. They pulled back into the parking lot of the DMV and the instructor asked Meghan to perform a parallel park. She did so without a problem. Then he asked her to pull out and perform a back-in park.

Meghan froze. Her heart rate escalated. Her hands were soaked.

Shockshell did the only thing he could do. He put himself into drive and pulled out of the parallel park without his driver's consent. Barricade would have torn open his chassis and strangled him with his own vital fuel lines for it. Meghan said nothing about the phantom car moving on its own ─ her hands were so tight on the wheel that it would have looked as though she was the one turning out by herself ─ although Shockshell could feel the young woman's pulse skyrocket. Gently, he pulled forward out of the parallel parking space and stopped, giving Meghan just enough time to gingerly touch his gearshift before he put himself back in reverse. Meghan said nothing about his taking control and she turned around in her seat to watch, dazed, as he pulled himself professionally into the parking space without a hitch. The examiner gave her a passing score with a sympathetic smile and stepped out of the car with a fleeting congratulation.

Meghan did not seem frightened of him after the experience, however, In fact, she was more curious than she was afraid of him. She never liked driving by herself, but she still did not shrink away from him whenever she got in and out of his interior. It was only a few days later when Meghan finally got the nerves to finally examine him for herself. They were at theSalisburyhouse and her parents weren't home. None of the neighbors were around either ─ almost everyone had gone to the early Fourth of July celebration they had in Boscawen every year. As soon as he heard Meghan opt to stay home as her family left in their stupid little yellow car, Shockshell knew he was in trouble. Maybe she thought he was remote controlled, maybe she thought something else altogether ─ either way, she tried to get under his hood to explore his engine when her fingers tripped over something sensitive. Shockshell could not help crying out in pain.

Meghan ran in terror. Shockshell gave chase. Ten minutes of proverbial cat and mouse later, Shockshell cornered her in a junkyard and had her pinned underneath his talons at the foot of a trash compactor, faces inches apart, roaring at her to keep the fuck still and stop fucking running away.

To say it was the start of a beautiful friendship was a severe overstatement.

Not only had he managed to expose his actual identity to a human, but now he was forced with the dilemma of having to kill her. Logically he would have too ─ there was simply no way for him to safely remain with her with the threat of the Autobots and NEST finding him ─ but Meghan quickly saved herself by offering to strike a deal. In exchange for her life, she offered to keep his identity secret and supply him with fuel and shelter. Without much else to go by, Shockshell grudgingly agreed. The Decepticon tried to pass it off as a purely symbiotic arrangement, although the truth remained that he could not afford to relocate himself again. His last screw up nearly landed him court marshalling while the Decepticons were trying to keep out of the prying sights of Earth's government as well as their sworn Autobot enemies. The threat of NEST was also impeccably high ─ many of their Decepticon allies had already fallen victim to the brutal slayings they carried out ─ and any further incidents regarding their secrecy around humans meant that Barricade really might have to kill him. A friend of his parents or not, the Decepticon mission was more important than family ties. In spite of the bitterness of that particular truth, Shockshell could not bring himself to blame the police interceptor for it. That was simply the way things were. It was the way things had to be.

Barricade still managed to find out though, and Shockshell remained entirely convinced that the elder shock trooper blew a gasket from it. Barricade had opened a channel to talk to Shockshell on a personal line and picked up on a conversation he was having with Meghan. Barricade really did threaten to kill him too ─ revealing himself to a human was an extreme security risk, Barricade scolded with menace ─ but Meghan's reaction was not one either Decepticon had expected.

"If it's all the same to you, Barricade sir, I would like to stay with Shockshell."

It was a curveball. A smack in the face. The coup de grace to his initial understanding of the human known as Meghan. Despite how badly he had scared her after revealing that he was a Transformer ─ an alien who had the right mind to punt her over the Salisburyfarm house barn of all things ─ she was now willingly accepting to remain with him. It confused the scout Chevy Impala more than he cared to admit, and then he remembered how he was always associated as being something special to her. He was never just a machine when he was nothing more than her first car, and now he was no longer just a frightening robot with seeping spikes and bloody optics either. Barricade consented to her offer in the end, although not without threatening to kill her entire family if something wary were to conspire. Meghan fully acknowledged the concept and that was that. Shockshell's mind remained boggled.

In the first few weeks of his and Meghan's forced partnership, things had been rather unfriendly. Meghan's patience in dealing with his snarks and scornful remarks was a godsend, although Shockshell would not come to appreciate it until later when they actually started to be on friendly terms with one another. Shockshell frequently insulted her for her species and how he only stayed with her because of their deal, but things gradually began to settle. Meghan surprised him immensely when she actually agreed with his explanation for how the Autobots were wrongdoers themselves in the Great War, and more and more frequently they were having actual conversations about Cybertron and who the Transformers were. Their relationship was… nice. It was very nice.

Finding one another had happened simply by several convenient strokes of coincidence. Lying in a building pool of his own energon, gasping for breath, and freezing cold, the Decepticon was very thankful that fate allowed them to find each other. At least he wasn't alone.

v

It was half an hour later when Meghan realized that they were in some very serious trouble ─ more so than she initially realized.

Meghan checked the time on her cell phone for what felt like the millionth time. The screen was terribly smashed after being crushed in her pocket during the unfortunate descent down the hill, but at least the time was legible on the cracked display. It was approximately twelve 'o clock in the morning. Had the drive from Maineback to New Hampshiregone without having the disastrous crash with the moose, they would have been home by now. She would be upstairs in her room sleeping or e-mailing her friend Jeremy in Britainwhile Shockshell recharged in driveway. Then again, maybe they would have stayed up a little longer and hung out in the barn for a bit just talking. The pony had recently taken a liking to Shockshell too ─ maybe they would have let Spirit meander out of his stall and nuzzle Shockshell's armor for a bit. The Decepticon usually acted disgusted whenever the Arabian Shetland mix fawned over him, although the brunette eighteen year old had gotten the impression that maybe Shockshell was starting to warm up to the little horse. She might have even been able to get the grey Decepticon to hold one of her guinea pigs this time around, too. He claimed to dislike them because their squeaking would always wake him up in the middle of the night regardless as to whether actually sleeping inside the barn or not, but Meghan suspected that he was actually more intrigued by them than actually disliking.

None of that obviously was not going to happen now, though. Not anytime soon.

Shockshell shuddered again. The sound of his rattling armor brought Meghan out of her stupor and she turned her head to regard him carefully. He had been shivering profusely for the past twenty plus minutes, and although even she doubted he was aware of it, it drastically worried her. It did not take her long to realize that his engine had rolled over and his internal heating system was completely shot to hell. She asked him openly if he was getting cold sometime earlier, but he denied the accusation rigidly and went go back to resting immediately afterward. Meghan could tell he was lying right away but did not press him further. The forest was damp and chilled in the late evening air ─ being so close to the river with the wind blowing off the water aided the drop in temperature ─ but if anything, Meghan was even less prepared to deal with the cold. Shockshell's body was at least able to tolerate subzero temperatures and the vacuum of space ─ by a huge long shot, hers was not. She was still in shorts and all she had to keep warm was her band jacket and the sleeping bag that she kept in Shockshell's truck in case of an emergency. Despite how she was still cold herself, Meghan absolutely refused to wait by the highway where it was significantly warmer. Going back to the highway meant leaving Shockshell alone, never mind how it would draw unwanted attention from other humans if they just so happened to see her in passing. They would ask if she crashed through the gaping hole in the guardrail. They would find Shockshell. According to the unspoken rule of how humans generally acted about finding aliens, potentially bleeding to death would be the last of Shockshell's problems.

That last thought made her shudder herself. It was with that final revelation that Meghan realized that they needed to do not for another six hours ─ she was not going to be resigned to sitting there helpless the entire time.

"We need to call for help," Meghan stated simply. Her voice rasped as she said it.

"Nuh…" Shockshell's answering groan was borderline pathetic and he twitched stiffly. Meghan might have even thought he was unconscious and talking in his recharge, but the way his optics brightened by a fraction indicated that he was still awake. He was motionless otherwise. "No."

"Jesus fuck, Shell. Let's look the big picture here," Meghan bit angrily. She could barely help herself when she snapped at him. It was in his personality to be unreasonably obstinate, but she was not going to back down on this. Not on her life. Not while his was at stake. "Your self-repair systems aren't going to fix this. You're a wreck and we need to call in help."

Shockshell tried to lift his head to glare at her, or at least he tried to. The cables in his neck gave a harsh jolt and his one remaining door wing trembled with tense effort before he gave up and settled his full weight back down on the ground. "Barricade and Frenzy are inNew York. They would not get here in time."

In time for what? Meghan thought with sudden skin abrupt crawling apprehension. He must have let his wording slip, she decided. There was something that he was hiding from her, that perhaps he was more seriously injured than he was letting on. She had been concerned about the rate at which he was bleeding out ─ the smell of energon was becoming stronger ─ but at most, Shockshell did not strike her as the kind of mech to willingly acknowledge the severity of things happening around him. He was a laid back and very dismissive personality in his own right, and for him to say something as ominous as he had instantly put Meghan on edge. "What about a Decepticon medic? There has to be one nearby."

"Even if there were," Shockshell started out slowly, "then they would kill you on sight."

"Autobots?"

"Don't make me laugh. It hurts too much."

vi

Comforting darkness. Warm sinking. More darkness. More sinking.

It was one 'o clock in the morning. With a mental flail, Shockshell forced his optics online and resurfaced from the thick fog clouding his core processor, or at least he tried to. Darkness clung to the corners of his vision like warning clouds of smoke. Recharge did not feel like this. It was not supposed to feel like this. There was something wrong with him, obviously ─ something that was going to put him to sleep and not allow him to wake up.

He could not go into stasis lock. The mechanism that would have allowed him to do so was jarred completely offline, probably when he smashed his head tumbling down the steep hill. He specifically remembered hitting his head twice, although the first crack at his head had been the worst one. Maybe that had been the cause, although it hardly mattered to guess or mull over it now. Without the ability to go into stasis, his self-repair system would not be able to come online. No self-repair, no recovery. No recovery… Shockshell did not want to think about it. Pitt, he could barely think at all.

Comforting darkness. Warm sinking. More darkness. More sinking. Sinking, darkness, sinking, darkness, sinking.

I'm dying.

It was not a good feeling to have. He always expected he would go out kicking and screaming and flailing the gyro flails Barricade taught him how to use so well ─ not crippled and bleeding in the middle of some Primus forsaken forest crawling with organic things. There would be no swift end or blaze of glory ─ just freezing and hungry and Primus damn it I'm going to cough up energon again. Shockshell sputtered with unintentional meekness as the thick fluid was forced up into his throat and out of his mouth. It tasted disgusting, but he could already feel his taste receptors getting used to his own gross flavor. It was not a comforting realization in the slightest. He knew was bleeding internally but could not even begin to fathom how much he had already lost. How long would it take him to completely bleed out? Would he even last long enough to bleed out? The darkness was closing in around his vision again and warmth seeped into his spark chamber, The Decepticon fought with hard valiance to shake himself back to awareness. He was becoming less and less successful.

Meghan was sitting not too far away, wrapped up in the sleeping bag that she managed to scrounge out of his subspace pocket. Her legs were crossed as she sat on a moss covered stump no more than five feet away, but he could barely see her. She was simply a mush of color in his cracked vision. After he finally managed to stifle his screaming from running himself through with the guardrail shard, the 'Con was absolutely certain that she had been killed during the crash. His howls would have woken her even if she was unconscious, which it didn't. He could barely bear the thought of her having actually died, so he resigned himself to stagger to his feet and stumble deeper in the woods to avoid the eyes of any motorists who might potentially stop and peer over the incline. He forced himself to keep moving until memory evaded him and he regained awareness lying collapsed in a meadow. He could not get up. His strength had failed him, although he did not put much effort into trying to get up again anyways.

Because you know you're dying, an angry little voice hissed in his head. It was right in his audio receptor, buzzing annoyingly and making his processor itch with hot irritation. He would have tried to swipe the obnoxious noise away from his audial sensor if he still had the strength to shift his arm. Besides, the voice made it hard to go into recharge.

Shockshell snapped himself out of the descending darkness once more. Specks of black danced in the corners of his vision, taunting him, mocking him. He tried to focus his attention on Meghan again, but her shape was becoming noticeably more and more distorted with every passing click. He was thankful she survived. He could barely believe it when she suddenly spoke up beside him and asked him if he was alright. Shockshell that he had been hallucinating and would have swiped the vision out of existence if he could move his hands to take the apparition with his talons. It was only after she put her hand on his face that he realized she was real. Her flesh was warm against his metallic hide, making realize exactly how cold he was, and then he found himself appreciating the soft texture of her body. It was something real ─ something he could hang onto while he lay crumpled like the damn weakling he was. He wondered what his caretakers would have thought of him. Shockpoint and Artshell might have been disappointed. Here he was, in the prime of his youth, dying because of a stupid fucking moose.

He wondered what Barricade would think when he realized he died. Shockshell doubted he would grieve for too long. They worked together, but were never nearly as close as Barricade was to his parents or Frenzy. By all means, Shockshell was hardly the best student Barricade ever trained after coming to Earth. That particular role would probably gone to Sideways and he was a dead mech, too. Silverwind and Stormwatch, the Autobots who had been sent to "guard" Shockshell after the whole fiasco with the Fallen was over and done with, would be glad to see him gone. Sonicboom ─ the Autobot who became the guardian of one of Meghan's friend Sarah ─ would definitely grieve, but Shockshell knew that the young Autobot officer would ultimately move on and find himself a more decent lover from within his own faction this time. Decepticons made horrible mates anyways. Maybe they could have been bondmates, but that would have been in a lifetime where Shockshell was not slumped in a messy heap of broken metal.

Then there was Meghan.

She would be heartbroken. There was no doubt that she would missed him the most ─ that ten years from now, she would be the only one who would still vividly remember him. Dying did not bother Shockshell so much as the thought of being completely forgotten and having the memory of his existence lost forever in time, but as long as Meghan kept him in mind, he would never truly be lost. He wondered how long it would take for her to cope. She would be a wreck herself for sure. He had seen her cry profusely over stupid little things already ─ nearly getting into a car accident with those arrogant bikers two summers previously, sideswiping and accidentally killing a little raccoon back in September, realizing her mother spilled hot coffee on the passenger seat so that it stained his interior ─ but he could hardly imagine how bad off she would be once he was gone. It bothered him immensely. He hoped she would not do anything stupid. He loved her too much for that.

Yes. Yes, he did love her.

It was not the kind of love he felt for Sonicboom or the kind of love he felt for the Decepticon cause. It was… discerning, how he felt about her. Shockshell could not place a talon on exactly what the feeling or emotion was. He knew that Meghan felt the same way for him too, always referring to their relationship as a friendship or whatever the slag that was. Regardless, Shockshell found himself actually caring for her even long before she started calling them friends. His reaction hunting down and killing those bikers that nearly forced him off the road and made Meghan cry was the beginning. He held up his end of conversations, helped her finally learn how to back-in park, occasionally attempted to harmonize with her whenever she broke out singing to a certain song on the radio… she gave him something that no other member of his own species had ever bothered to give him before. She gave him the first wholesome relationship he had ever had since his parents were lost to him. Someone to interact with without the fear of being stabbed in the back or betrayed. Someone who he could trust with anything. Someone… someone…

He could not remember the last time he cried, save for right that very instant. Moisture stung his optical lenses and he blinked them back furiously in an attempt to make them flow back into his cleansing ducts. He prayed he could force them down before Meghan noticed, but his hopes were instantly dashed when he felt the familiar warmth of her hands suddenly touching the base of his throat. Then the tears did fall. They rolled sideways down his face like streaks of smoldering acid that scarred him more severely than any laser or plasma burn could. Meghan said nothing. Her hands were moving to his face past where the tears were still scalding him, fingers probing the sharp edges of his bear trap jaw and then hollow of his cheek, and despite how she was standing right in front of him, he could not see her. His vision was too blurred and it was too dark for him to make out her shape in his muddled sights. Her little fingers were trembling very lightly, making his neural feedback loop flicker with electricity, and Shockshell barely managed to keep his resolve in check.

"You're tired," she said. "Go to sleep."

Bless her for not acknowledging his momentary weakness. He bit back a choked sob. Primus, what the frag was wrong with him? He was not supposed to be weak like this. Autobots were the weak link in their species ─ certainly not Decepticons, and most definitely not him. His parents really would have been disappointed.

Meghan's hand tapped his jaw, slightly lower. She was kneeling in front of him. "Lift your head."

Shockshell was hardly a trained pet like one of her guinea pigs either, but he moved his head anyways. He trusted Meghan in the same way that she trusted him. His head spun and shots of pain surged down his spine as he arched his neck and hoisted his head up for whatever his human companion needed, but he kept as still as he possibly could while he felt her work. She was maneuvering something underneath his face and over where he was resting his helm.

Her voice chimed back in, snapping him out of his daze. "Lie back down."

He did. In spite of how badly his circuits were scrambled, his sensory net faintly detected that there was something plush and indistinctly warm separating his head from the hard ground of the meadow. Shockshell's lagging logic center struggled to understand what it was what Meghan had done before it finally occurred to him ─ her sleeping bag. It was the sleeping bag she was using as a blanket to keep warm up until then, and she just gave it to him. No questions asked. Nothing said in return.

"Will you please let me call for help now?"

Shockshell was tempted to tell her no again. Regardless as to which faction showed up, one of them was going to be in some very serious trouble. A Decepticon? Meghan would be killed without question and there would be absolutely nothing Shockshell to do to stop it. An Autobot? They would either kill him on the spot, take him prisoner, or call NEST up and have them execute him as brutally as possible. Neither prospect looked good, but the hope in Meghan's voice made him reconsider. They had to try. It would be better to at least try something than sit here and guarantee his death either way.

He trusted her. He trusted her.

Conceding, Shockshell shifted his arm as best he could and allowed himself to expose his wrist her. The hatch concealing his emergency radio console exposed itself and he shifted his arm close to her torso where she would not have to move far to reach it.

Her hand was on his face again, tailing over one of his sharp spikes and moving down in a soothing pattern across his metallic skin. Her palm smoothed across where moisture was still streaming from his fading optical sensors, comforting. Loving. "I'm right here, bud. Hang in there."

Shockshell felt himself continue to slip down the muddy slope into the black abyss, but the sight of Meghan's silhouette at the top of his own personal Pitt at least gave him a reason to try struggling back up.

vii

This is an automated message.

To anyone who can hear me ─ my name is Meghan Burrows, and my friend is a Transformer who has been very badly hurt.

We hit a moose and crashed into a guardrail on Route 93 off exit 88 before going over a steep hill. I made it out okay, but Shockshell messed himself up pretty bad and needs a medic or doctor right away. A piece of guardrail is impaled in his chest. He can't get up and he's in a lot of pain. I think he might be dying.

If you're getting this message, please come help us. I've included our GPS location, and the huge hole in the guardrail is hard to miss. If you find it, pull over and honk three times. I'll be nearby. Please hurry.

This message repeats.

To anyone who can hear me ─ my name is Meghan Burrows, and my friend is a Transformer who has been hurt very badly.

viii

Mikaela Banes blinked. Once, twice, and then she looked back at the empty driver's seat next to her. "Ratchet?"

"I heard," he said. The Autobot medic immediately turned off their original route onto the next exit and pulled up a GPS on his dashboard computer screen. They were inAndover,Massachusetts. The ambulance sirens came on and red strobe lights flashed red and white like twin colored beacons.