Author's note: The plot bunnies are going after my poor Muse like attack dogs. I have two other fics I'm working on, yet I couldn't pass up writing this one. It may even turn into a two part fic according to my pile of notes. As promised in the summary I'll be throwing in ridiculous (in character) fluff situations whenever possible/appropriate. Romance will come later, possibly in the second arch with a mech not mentioned in this chapter...

Updates may be sporadic thanks to school and my other two fics.

Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers.

Livewire

By Shadowolf27

A squeal of collapsing metal made Wheeljack cringe and turn sharply to throw a pointed glare at Bluestreak. The smaller grey painted mech's hands were cast into the air, optics wide as he helplessly watched a tapering trickle of wire shavings and miscellaneous parts bounce to the floor. The last piece to fall was a gear that clattered to the ground and rolled onto Perceptor foot, he picked it up for a passive inspection as Bluestreak timidly inched away from the toppled pile.

"Be careful! Some of that equipment is fragile," Wheeljack barked, his head fins flashing brightly.

Bluestreak's door wings collapsed down his spinal strut and he lowered his head in shame. "Sorry, I didn't mean to. I was just trying to move this generator someplace I wouldn't trip on it, but it was heavier than I thought, throwing me off balance, and I accidentally bumped into the mountain of parts."

Wheeljack managed to look offended by the grotesque description of his once neatly stacked joint cogs.

"It's quite alright." Though he was addressing Bluestreak, Perceptor threw Wheeljack an admonishing look to which the engineer turned his back on and returned to untangling and sorting a ball of wires. "If he didn't want sensitive equipment to be broken he wouldn't have stacked it as such."

"There's nothing wrong with my workspace," Wheeljack grumbled while pulling free a blue strip of wire.

"Red Alert believes differently, he's practically condemned this room," Perceptor placed the small gear he still held into a drawer of similar parts and looked over at Wheeljack's stiff back. "Even Optimus agreed with him this time, and honestly, I must as well."

Wheeljack ground his denta plates that were hidden behind his blast mask. "They're just overreacting-threatening to shut down my lab, are they mad?! It's my space! Haven't I earned the right to live how I like?"

Perceptor smiled knowingly. "Don't worry, Bluestreak and I won't let your lab be shut-down. It's why we volunteered to help."

Wheeljack looked over his shoulder and wilted at the sight of the Perceptor and Bluestreak standing amongst scattered piles of mechanical parts and half-finished projects that stacked over their heads in several places. It was notable that Perceptor was a rather tall mech, only a few feet shorter than Optimus. The floor was in a similar state, pathways had been made so Wheeljack could access all of his neatly stacked mounds of goods. He could get to everything and knew where every bolt and wire was, in general. His lab was perfectly functional.

Bluestreak beamed at Wheeljack, and in hopes of cheering him up by finishing the clean-up faster, he picked up a box overflowing with internal parts for wrist joints with the intention of moving them across the room. He made it about halfway before stepping on a piece of rogue tubing that he hadn't been able to see past the large package and lost his footing. The other two Autobots visibly cringed at the loud clangs that followed the toppled container of spare parts, dumping all of its contents onto the grey Autobot.

Wheeljack and Perceptor quickly helped a now flustered Bluestreak to his feet. Wheeljack looked down at the mess as Bluestreak rapidly tried to relocate everything he had lost with Wheeljack's and Perceptor's help. Some of the pieces had rolled into surrounding piles, disappearing between gaps and crevices of thousands of other parts. Perhaps his happy mess had gotten just a little out of hand.

"I'm sorry- I'm just trying to help. I didn't mean to make everything worse by dropping the whole box. Now we'll never be able to find those parts."

Wheeljack waved a coiled spring in front of Bluestreak to silence the mech before he could launch into an undeserved, long winded apology. "Don't sweat it." He glanced at Perceptor. "And, thank you," he said sincerely to the two of them. Wheeljack was certain he wouldn't have been able to clean the entire room in two days on his own.

"Happy to help," Bluestreak piqued while carefully putting the box down near where he had originally intended to place it. "This definitely beats patrol duty. It gets lonely when there's no one around to talk to but the trees and squirrels. Earth's wildlife isn't really known for being conversationalists, except humans of course."

Wheeljack wasn't sure if Bluestreak had made his first ever sarcastic joke in an attempt to make him feel better, or if he was being one-hundred percent serious. Sadly, knowing Bluestreak, it could even be a mix a both.

Perceptor hauled a heavy, gutted piece of machinery off the top of a stack and began hauling it to a corner. "Come on you two, this mess won't clean itself."

The three Autobots worked in methodical silence, pinging silent inquiries as to where Wheeljack wanted certain things over a wireless connection. It was why, after several hours of the constructive routine, that Bluestreak's squeal of surprise made the other two bots jump.

"What is that?!" Bluestreak vented rapidly. He leaned back on his pedes as if ready to bolt away at a moments notice and pointed into a combed back pile of parts.

Wheeljack and Perceptor dropped what they were doing and approached curiously.

"Well, what have we found here?" Perceptor leaned over the smaller mech and scanned over the face of the lopsided mound. The most intrusive thing he could conclude that had startled Bluestreak was a partially exposed body of a mechanical creature that hung limply to the side with darkened optics and a badly chipped paint job. It had a large wolfish head with a stiff pointed ear flopped over one of its optics. The other ear was broken and hanging on by only a wire.

"I-is it dead?" Bluestreak whispered with unrestrained horror.

Wheeljack chuckled. "Of course not- it was never alive to begin with." He began pulling out bits of scrap and threw them on the floor without care to reveal more of the body. "I almost forgot about this old thing."

Perceptor canted his head as he studied the scratched and neglected body. "Is this the chameleon sabotage unit we worked on five years ago? Or was it longer, it was some time ago."

Wheeljack flexed an exposed leg joint and nodded. "She's the one. We never finished her since shortly after starting the Decepticons began rapidly making weapons that we needed counters to. I actually forgot about this project."

Bluestreak leaned in for a closer look. "What is it for?" he asked with curiosity. Now that he knew it wasn't going to come to life and try to eat him at any moment, he thought it actually looked kind of cute with the way its ear was flopped over and its body was slouched.

"Remember Nightbird?"

Perceptor and Bluestreak nodded in tandem, recalling all too well the femme ninja bot Dr. Fujiyama had built. The human crafted, non sentient bot had been tampered with by Decepticons and set loose on the Autobot base. They had to capture it without causing damage to the drone due to a promise Optimus had made to the Doctor long before the incident. The slippery ninja had proven to be more of a pain in their backside to catch than they could have ever imagined. Even when Ironhide had cracked from frustration and shot at the thing, he was still the only one who came out with scorch marks and slashed armor.

Wheeljack continued, "Perceptor and I started building this little gal afterwards. It's obviously not a ninja, but I noticed how Nightbird was pretty stealthy when she wanted to be. At the time we had been trying to come up with something to aid in recon, like what Ravage is to the Decepticons. Mirage is only 'Bot we have who can do the job and I thought having another stealthy ear would be useful. Nightbird just became to the catalyst for us to put our blueprints to use."

Bluestreak touched the jagged, swept back shoulder armor that roughly resembled fur. "Ravage looks like an earth feline, and Nightbird was a ninja. Why is this one a dog?"

Wheeljack shooed Bluestreak's curious hand away from the shoulder joint. "Why would I want to make an exact copy of an existing design? Nothing evolves or advances in functionality if you don't expand your boundaries. Her design is based off of Earth's gray wolves: Sturdy, intelligent, loyal, has sharp senses, and most importantly, is naturally stealthy.

Perceptor held a finger up and added in explanation, "We're surrounded by forests all the time, the perfect habitat for a wolf to remain undetected in. The same methods could also be applied to cities or an urban landscape. There are a lot of alley ways and buildings that can serve the same purpose as trees shrubs, to hide while staying within close proximity to the enemy without them ever knowing."

Bluestreak's optics lit up with interest. "How come you never finished it? I mean, I know you said it was the Decepticons, but they haven't been coming up with anything new lately. Why don't you finish it?"

Wheeljack placed a hand under his chin and tilted his head in thought. "Well, we got her to activate once, but she never followed commands right. Acted like a dumb drone, unable to do anything but run forwards until it jarred its processor into a forced reboot after ramming into a wall. One time she wouldn't stop running in circles."

"You did, you mean. I don't remember ever making it to the activation stage," Perceptor interjected and Wheeljack shrugged in a mild affirmative.

Bluestreak leaned forwards again and ran his hand across the fully attached ear. "Do you still think it's impossible to make it work? I think a ninja dog would be pretty neat."

"Not a ninja and not a dog. Weren't you listening?" Wheejack barely registered his verbal defense of his project when his optics brightened and a hidden grin turned them upwards. "You know what, dig her out and put her over there. I'll see what I can do after we finish cleaning up. I think I know just what will fix her up."

"I'm not so sure that's a good idea," Perceptor warned. "The last time you tried to constitute an ally all of us wound up biting off more than we could chew. The Dinobots are powerful, but never listen. This program you're talking about would have to be able to follow very specific instructions to be able to perform its function correctly. Knowing what we do now, and Prime's strict orders to not create anymore artificial life, I don't think it's such a good idea."

Wheeljack only grinned more, making Perceptor frown- he knew that look.

"Don't worry about it. I won't give her an artificial spark, and this one will be different; I can feel it."

Carrie sipped at her coffee, relishing in the bitter taste as it scolded her tongue and slid warmly down her throat. It did wonders on her pounding head and fatigued disposition that was exasperated by her bad morning. First thing, she had woken up to get the previous day's mail only to find her mail box had been smashed by some bored teenagers in the middle of the night. Then right before leaving for work she noticed the phone's messaging system blinking and listened to a recording from her boss demanding she fill in for a shift over the upcoming weekend - one that she was supposed to have off. Lastly, her ever humorous boss had walked by not even ten minutes ago to dump a stack of papers as thick as both her arms combined on her desk with the intention of having them sorted before lunch time on top of her real job.

Carrie stared blankly at her computer's desktop, leaning on the back two legs of her chair, coffee mug in hand in a miffed stupor. She was going to at least enjoy her cup-of-joe and wake up a little more before tackling anything else that morning.

"Hey, Carrie?" The harsh whisper made her look up in annoyance.

"Did he give you a stack of papers, too?" Marissa, the coworker in the next door cubical leaned over the pastel blue wall to ask. Her glasses were sliding down her face and she was scrunching her nose in a way that made her look like an angry pig in her attempt to keep them from falling.

Carrie looked pointedly at the stack on her desk then glared wordlessly back up at her.

"Oh, crap, yours is even bigger than mine!" Marissa lurched forwards to catch her rapidly slipping glasses and push them back into place." I think the boss' secretary quit yesterday or something, but that doesn't make any sense when people are supposed to give a two weeks notice."

"This surprises you?" Carrie deadpanned and took another sip of her cooling coffee.

"Well, yeah. She's been around forever."

A rolled up - well used booklet of HTML for Dummies swatted Marissa over the head with a heavy thunk. "Hey, more working, less chatting! Carrie, sit up in your chair like a respectable person!"

Marissa disappeared behind her wall so fast she was a blur and Carrie begrudgingly sat up under the demand of the floor director.

"You're not my mother," was Carrie's snarky reply when he was out of ear shot.

With a quiet contempt for her annoying higher ups, she put down her mostly finished coffee and opened a saved set of windows she had been working on the day before. Her job, like most everyone else on her floor, was as a computer programmer. She tried to like her job, really she did. Programing had entertained her as a teenager and she had perused it through college, but it wasn't enjoyable anymore, it was just work. Every day was a slug fest of numbers - correcting the same poorly coded program and its myriad of mistakes for the hundredth time before the servers crashed again.

There were only so many times she could correct the same freezing issue within a month before throwing her hands up in exasperation. It wasn't that her mediocre skills were inefficient; it was that the old, cheap systems the little company used kept glitching like it had a mind of its own. Almost as if it were fed up with the rough treatment it had been subjected to over the years.

Carrie toiled away at fixing a broken link and stopped a near total systems freeze until closing time where she stopped to kneed her temples and suppress the urge to burn her computer with her mind. Oh, if only she could burn things with her mind. It would make all the annoying things in life go away so much faster. She could glare at rampaging teenagers - instant combustion. Glare at the phone - instant incineration. What call, she didn't get a call that morning, because she no longer had a phone!

A hand patted her arm and Carrie up without trying to conceal her irritated look and met Marissa's lopsided smile. "A bunch of us are going to stop by for Mexican on the way out. Want to come?"

Carrie tried to school her annoyance; she begrudgingly reminded herself it wasn't meant to be aimed at Marissa. The woman hadn't broken her mail box or sabotaged the online system. "No thanks, I think I'm just going to go home and pass out."

Marissa waved her off, used to Carrie hardly ever accepting the offer. It was then Carrie realized it had actually been a while since she had been asked to join anything her coworkers were doing after work.

"Ok, see you tomorrow, then," Marissa said while slipping out the door. Carrie wasn't sure if she kept asking her out of pity, or felt if she obligated since she practically lived in the cubical next to her. Carrie wrinkled her nose in near mirror image of Marissa earlier that day and grabbed her belongings.

In the parking lot Carrie put her keys in the ignition and pulled out into the busy street lot with blurry eyes strained from staring at the computer all day, again. If she kept this up she might have to get glasses in a couple years, or contacts. She couldn't imagine herself wearing glasses.

A car piled with her coworkers passed in front of her beat up Volvo and turned into a strip center that she continued past. Carrie glanced at them in the rear view mirror and a small part of her wished she was with them. None of them were really her friends, just faces she knew the name to, and she often felt like a third wheel. Carrie was that one weird chick who always sat in the back, quietly sipped her drink while listening to everyone else's conversations. It was easy for others to forget she was there, until someone looked her way and shrank away from her intense staring.

It wasn't her fault, most of the time she was just mentally zonked out from boredom because no one was talking to her. She didn't mean to occasionally stare down the person across from her like she was contemplating making them her next meal. That uncomfortable feeling of not belonging and being a horrible conversation starter had always driven her away from group functions. At the end of the day her brain needed restful solitude anyway, not a tense, awkward outing that would fritz her already strained patience.

Though, she knew whenever she got home she would open her door, throw down her keys, and already be wishing she was with her coworkers instead of at her small, one bedroom apartment. There wasn't anything to go home to after work, a job she was slowly beginning to hate. There was no one waiting to greet her or to have dinner with - she had never even had a boyfriend. It would just be her, the couch, and some nuked chicken with lettuce thrown on the side. Sometimes she felt like her own worst enemy.

Carrie momentarily thought of contacting her parents later that night, but she hadn't done that in a couple of years. She squirmed in her seat just thinking of the awkward, mechanical conversation of 'hey, how are you doing?' Followed by, 'I'm fine, how are you?'

She was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she almost blew a red light. The Volvo lurched to a stop in her haste to break, and without caring who saw her; Carrie banged her head on the steering wheel and silently promised herself a pity party whenever she got home. Maybe she would even crack out the ice cream.

A honk from an irritated driver signaled her green light. She automatically pushed her foot on the gas to roll out into the intersection with an irritated grumble, but that was cut short when something very fast and very large smashed into the driver's side. Carrie barely registered the eighteen-wheeler that had just run a red light before pain exploded throughout her body; then everything went silent.

Initiating start up program…

System update complete…

Her body whirred like a warming computer that protested coming online or own body after only two hours of sleep. Her vision came in a blurry wave and adjusted to meet a metal floor and a white wall stripped with horribly clashing green and red stripes that refused to stop moving.

Something was prodding at her back, but she could barely feel it, like it was being done through a thick blanket.

"Not very responsive," A British accented voice hummed and lifted her back foot and tail in turn. "Outside stimuli doesn't appear to be affecting it."

"Give her a minute. It'll work this time, I just know it," The white wall in front of her rumbled and bent downwards.

A masked face and glowing blue orbs filled her vision, and still Carrie didn't so much as twitch.

"What makes you so certain?" The other voice inquired skeptically.

"A hunch," the extended ears of the metal face in front of her flashed blindingly as he spoke. He reached out a hand to rub behind her metallic head, a feeling she found pleasant and instinctively leaned into.

"There we go, that a girl. Come on," the being in front of her gently coaxed.

It was at that moment that everything came flooding back like a switch being flipped; her job, her coworkers, her pity party that never happened - the wreck that had killed her. Carrie jerked away from the robotic creature in front of her, fright and confusion coloring her face. She scrambled to get to her feet, but slipped on a slick metal surface with unfamiliar footing. She tumbled over the side of a raised table with a loud crash and a surprised metallic yip.

She froze from where she laid on the metal floor, panting in a rush of air that seemed to flow into her from everywhere at once, but not actually flowing down her throat - the feeling, alien.

She should have been dead, that eighteen-wheeler had crushed her car like it was scrap in a monster rally. This place didn't look like a hospital - the only other logical place to wake up in other than a morgue after what happened - but something similar to a mechanic's shop. Carrie tilted her head upwards, a movement that felt more weighted than what she was used to and was accompanied by a burst of numbers telling her just how many degrees her head was turning.

A metal man, or a giant robot, bent down over her and she could see another, taller red one hovering in the background.

"Would you look at that," the white robot before her chuckled happily. "I do believe the word humans use is: eureka! She's online." His baby blue optics brightened and the mask on his face scrunched slightly upwards.

Carrie looked away from the blinding things flashing on the side of the robot's head, but refused to take her eyes completely off the metal man. Perhaps this was all just a dream related to too much time in front of the computer. Maybe she did have that pity party and a surplus of ice cream had sent her sleeping mind into hyper drive, imagining a car wreck that felt like her entire life barreling down at her and waking up to robots – walking, talking computers that could code themselves and leave her to her morning coffee. That must have been it; all of her hate for her life and inner dreams was coming true in one twisted dream.

"Ok, Livewire, now look into this light."

A light pen was rudely shined in her eye, but it didn't make her squint or jerk away in pain. This must have been another hallucination. Her coworker a few cubicles down liked to blind anyone who stood up with his laser pen. This must have been him in her dream.

An annoyed snarl ripped from her throat as she watched the weaving light and wondered if she could make it, and the hand that held it, blow up with her mind - it was her dream after all.

"Optical sensors are correctly calibrated…Can you stand up, Livewire? I need to test your motor functions."

She canted her head, a strange weight on top of it perking upwards, and narrowed her eyes in disappointment. Why wasn't he blowing up, and why was he calling her Livewire? Carrie didn't want to follow his orders, but she didn't want to be lying on the floor either. She stood, or tried to. Her arms and legs flailed, unable to stand up on two feet.

Carrie looked down to see why her limbs weren't responding, and instead discovered a set of metal paws stretched out at her side. One leg raised into the air the same instant she willed her arm to move. She started and tried to jerk away, but only lurched a couple feet off the ground before stumbling in a mass of confused, tangled limbs.

A noise akin to someone clicking their tongue, but tinged with a metallic twang, came from above her. "Think about what you're going to do before you do it." The tall red mech urged, his words flowing softly with a British accent.

She gawked at him; there wasn't anyone she knew who was even remotely British. This dream was too weird, one foot in the loony bin. Instead of thinking about going crazy, she did as the robot said and thought about standing up on four legs and took a few steps away from them. Her legs felt strong, yet lanky, like those of a long distance runner, and a weighted tail hovered aloft from her rump.

She turned her head around and would have blinked if she could have at the thick, dark purple, all metal appendage that swished behind her on flexible joints that allowed it to move freely side to side or up and down. It bristled with raised bits of metal that swept backwards along the top portion. The underside was varying patches of gray, or white that served to give her canine form symmetry.

"What…am I?" She finally asked. Her voice didn't sound anything like her hers as the words slipped out through powerful, elongated jaws lined with large teeth in a quiet, scared voice.

The two mechs looked at each other and the white one's head fins flashed to an eloquent, "Oh, crap."

"You said it wouldn't be self-aware!" The red mech exploded, albeit in a restrained raised voice that still held immense control. Even so, it contained enough ferocity to cause the white mech to haunch his shoulders defensively. "What did you add without telling me?"

"Nothing major…I never installed a personality core. She doesn't even have a proper artificial spark!" The white painted mech defended. "Just, hold on a click. We don't know if Livewire really is self-aware. It could be one of the twin's jokes; they could have set her up to question her awareness upon activation."

The red mech looked dubious as the white one bent down in front of Carrie again. She shied away, uncomfortable around these large, bickering mechs who thought she shouldn't be able to recognize who she was. This was definitely not a dream.

"You are Livewire, Perceptor and I's most recent invention," he addressed her before waiting nervously.

Carrie stared at the robot as if he had grown two heads. "I'm not a science project," she hissed. "What the hell did you do to me, and what are you?"

"I'm Wheeljack," the mech pointed his thumb back at himself and seemed to be incapable of elaborating further, so he pointed to the mech standing behind him. "And that's Perceptor."

Perceptor met her gaze and opened his mouth slowly, "Oh, dear."