G-d, I love this fic. It was one of the first that I read in the transformers fandom, and definitely the most memorable - I keep coming back to it time and again. Even when I haven't read any other Transformers fic for months at a time, there will always be mornings when I wake up and think to myself, Today is a day for reading After Atlantis. It's got just the right mix of everything good - the angst, the hurt/comfort, the smut, the awkwardness, the fun times, the romance, and the delightful way that you've spotted it all neatly into the spaces between canon.

Happy almost 9th anniversary of finishing this brilliant monster! I can't say how glad I am that you started writing this and sharing it with us all a decade ago, and I know I'll still be reading it another decade from now.

Primus, that dream sequence... frag me... that’s some freaky slag...

This is an old fic, and I don't know if you keep tabs on this anymore. But I wanted to tell you, I absolutely love this fic. It's well-written, well thought out, Wheeljack's reactions are believable, it's just a very good story. So thank you for writing this. Hope life is treating you well.

Dunno if you are still active on this site (even if just as a reader), so you might not get this review/message.
But... Jesus Christ, wtf is up with that Fox person? Sorry to bring up an old flamer. I just have never seen anything like it in my life. I was just looking to see if anyone else had any comments on that scene made of pure gold with Sunstreaker in Chapter 31 ("dirt? On my chassis? I didn't come here to be insulted!" Amazing, fav scene by far), but found that instead. So sorry they said all that to you. Such violent verbiage... Clearly they just want to be an ass for no reason at all.
As you have posted anything in some time, I hope your life is going well and your writing has stayed strong. Even if the rest of us don't get to see it, I hope it has continued to being you happiness :)

I started reading this fic on AO3 last year and only found this version yesterday...
...I kinda choked on my water on my rush to keep reading from the point it was left on over there...
;)
Really good story, totally worth the 3 hours I just spend on the laptop: You just made me ship a new pairing
Oh, and about the raging bitch on the previous comments, just ignore her: Everyone is free to think whatever the hell they want, but some should just shove their venom up their assholes.

I remember reading this fic years ago and liking it. A couple days ago, I thought it deserved a reread and I wasn't wrong. This fic is incredible and I'm glad you put in the work and care to make it that way. I also enjoy rare pairings. So well done.

Happy ending!

Awwwwww...poor Wheeljack.

ad Hominem fox familiar ad hominem infinitive.

Attacking the author rather than the story itself is ad hominem

I love long chapters!

Powerful.

Good stuff!

Oh, darn. Now what?

Wow, that was painful!

Chapters 27 – 33

-

More shower scenes. Will we have Healing Sexxors? You get another 5 points fail for including any mention of washracks.

“It was utterly humiliating” – Drink.

Uh-oh. Trailbreaker is breaking up with Wheeljack. But by Wheeljack’s own admission, it was just a fling, nothing more. Yet I expect a huge emotional fallout.

“The last thing he needed was more guilt” – Drink.

“Think, Wheeljack, think!” – Yeah, do it for once! Instead of complaining!

“He wasn’t a human or fragile sparkling, too weak to defend for himself” – HAHAHAHA OH WOW.

Throughout the entire story this is all he’s ever been. Maybe your beta should have caught that, but she didn’t, which shows how useless she is. See? Sometimes having a beta isn’t always useful, especially if they don’t do their job.

“Why are you doing this to yourself, Wheeljack?” – In which a character asks one of the biggest questions begging to be asked in the entire story.

“Igniting nodes of pleasure” – Drink.

Healing Sexxors. Add five more points of fail.

“Had Ratchet loved him even then?” – Not at all a cliché.

“His circuits burning with humiliation” – Drink. 10 points.

“He’d been so stupid” – Yes, yes he is.

I skimmed the rest of the chapters until the end because all I could get from them was lines and lines of emotional dialogue and them patting Wheeljack on the back. But now that we are at the end, let’s give a proper review and analysis of the entire thing.

It’s usually said that women, when they’re not writing rape fantasies, have such a strange obsession with rape that they talk about it more than men do. In this case, it was prevalent throughout the entire work, along with everyone behaving wildly OOC – which is a thing that you claim to despise. Wheeljack keeps his secret from everyone, and gets into an affair with Trailbreaker, who breaks up with him because Wheeljack wasn’t being entirely honest. Let’s start off with the fact that Wheeljack, not even days after his abuse from Starscream, started the come-ons with Trailbreaker, as well as denying his ‘true love’ for Ratchet or some shit. Ratchet, sensing that something is off, also gets an unwanted come-on from Wheeljack, says no, to which Wheeljack says: ‘HOW DARE YOU RESIST ME! YOU DON’T KNOW HOW I FEEL!’ What a creep. Then, after that, Ratchet gets angry – yes, angry! – that Wheeljack doesn’t sleep with him.

Talk about a lack of respect. Wheeljack obviously wasn’t affected by the assault at all. He keeps telling himself how he’s useless and whatnot, but he doesn’t do anything to change it. He cries and turns to sex as a way to fix himself. In an original character this /might/ work, but for Wheeljack, absolutely the fuck no. He was so wildly OOC that I am amazed that no one pointed this out. If you were trying to make this a PTSD rape-angst fic, it just ended up being a mess of contradictions and unintentional funny moments. These mostly occurred when there were Healing Sexxors between Wheeljack and Trailbreaker. Their dialogue screamed female centrism to me, and didn’t at all give the intention that Wheeljack was someone struggling with trust issues. Someone doesn’t understand how people work. If you have trust issues, you’re not going to jump into bed with the first person you meet, especially after enduring a sexual assault. Wheeljack does. He gets angry, is easily driven to emotion, and even after all the battle scenes (which are simply lifted off from the show) he wonders why no one understands him. When characters are not being outright sluts – yes, I am using that word – they don’t even act like three-dimensional characters. Mirage was too busy thinking about screwing his love du jour, and among the useless scenes involving salmon and the humans, I am left wondering: What the fuck was this even about?

Your forte is obviously sex, which is a paradox. Your sex scenes are laughably juvenile, smack-dab in the middle of Sue territory. If Wheeljack wasn’t Wheeljack I would have thought he was a female OC that couldn’t help but get raped by everyone, enjoy the sex, and then get raped some more. Some inspiration he is. When no one is talking about stuff...things they’re talking about nothing. No one was in character, but I don’t need to tell you that. People came for the sex, and that is what they got. Your Seekersmut fics are even worse than this, ending up having worse sex scenes than 50 Shades of Grey. Wheeljack was BOTH Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele, in which he has that deep, dark past and Ana is just a fucking idiot with everyone and everything. Add on the sex talk, the talk about feelings, the oodles and noodles of female centrism, and we get this!

So, how about that hypocrisy? I found that you engage in all the sins that you hate other writers for doing. It’s an inevitable thing, isn’t it? Falling into the circle you are trying to break. I’ve read quite a few of these stories and eventually they all fall in this circle, and in doing so, end up being predictable. This work was edited and betaed, and it still sucked. It is a tantamount to your skill and the skills of your editors, which, frankly, suck ass.

BTW – you’re still a sick fuck. If you had any dignity, you’d delete your entire roster of works, look at your hypocrisy, admit that you are shit at what you do and that you could be a better person. But this is asking for too much. You are what you are. Parasites will be parasites, and the only way to destroy them is to burn them. It’s clear you don’t understand canon; your head-canon is based on zero evidence at all, and even with help, you cannot improve.

Enjoy your flames. You deserved them. Too bad we can’t have Rick Grimes shoot the zombies of this fic.