Raf remembered when it happened - seven years after he first met the Autobots, plus a few months. The war had become more intense; there'd be whole weeks when he wouldn't see Bumblebee at all, and when he returned Bee'd be dented and scratched and one of his headlights would be caved in.

Optimus kept moving them to different locations, but sometimes Raf would still see a shiny black car, windows tinted, skulking down his street during the night.

There were reports in the news of mysterious deaths, car wrecks where the other party seemed to have vanished off the map, and explosions out in the canyons that no one could explain.

And there was the black ship, dark and shambling and jagged, that people said you could see out above the hills on a clear night. Even his sisters had started to talk about it.

The black ship that landed outside the base that night, that had shot Bumblebee off his wheels from the air, and that had opened up in a black-green void and snatched him up from the road.

When Raf woke all he saw was a wash of white, painful to look at, shining directly in his eyes - no glasses, he noticed. He couldn't feel their familiar weight.

He tried to turn away from the light, but at the attempt something tightened and strained around his neck, pressing his Adam's apple into his throat until he gagged.

There was a metallic strap around his neck, woven like cloth, and as he started to move around again he felt the same tightness around his wrists and ankles and knees and stomach, sealing him tight in place. He pulled at both hands, trying again and again, but with every struggle the bindings cinched harder.

The pain in his head from his unfocused vision grew worse with the pounding of his pulse. Jack had told him about what the black ship really was, what Arcee had seen inside it before it was destroyed and rebuilt. He had to find a way out.

"Look who's up."

He froze. Somewhere a door hissed open, and a cascade of noise grew closer. He tried to control his breathing.

"You should feel flattered, you know." A tall, sharp face swung into view, close enough that he could make out her features, her bright yellow eyes and face framed in black. She was smiling, fangs bared, hungry. "There are just so many humans running around this planet. I could have had a whole collection if I wanted. But why would I want them when I could have someone like you?"

She caressed his face, her fingers sharp as needles, drawing white lines across his cheek as he squirmed away. "Only three like you on this whole planet. The rarest of them all. And you know there's fewer of you by the day. I was lucky to get you. Can't leave a bruise on you, though," she said, inspecting him; against his bonds he squirmed, trying futilely to shield his body from her unblinking gaze. "What kind of trophy would you be then?"

"Trophy?" He almost didn't believe it, the first time Jack told him; no matter how brutal and how violent the Decepticons had ever been he had never seen trophies, never seen them taking parts of their enemies off as reward. What sense did it even make when it could all be replaced?

A dark purple arc moved into his field of vision. There was a pinpoint pressure and a chill against his shoulder, and then - nothing.

And then Airachnid's indistinct body above him just walked away, her many legs clanking against the floor.

He searched around the room, squinting until his eyes stung, looking for an exit, a sharp object, a control panel, anything – if nothing else, something he could use to set off an electrical pulse that Bumblebee could find once Bee managed to locate him. He could make out a few glowing dots and a huge black screen across the room; maybe something that controlled the table? He still had to get to it, of course.

More struggle yielded nothing; even as the sweat of exertion began to slicken his skin the bindings wouldn't give an inch. He rocked back and forth as much as he could, trying at last to simply tip the table. It remained bolted firmly in place.

After what seemed like hours of straining he sank back, the ache in his shoulder spreading across his arm and chest from the activity. Chasing away the pain, however, was another cool pulse from where she had touched him.

For a moment, curiosity replaced fear. Had she given him painkillers? Why would she, if she only intended to kill him? He peeked at his shoulder, glancing out the corner of his eye to avoid the pressure from the neck strap. The discoloration wasn't nearly as bad as it he had thought it would be, from how badly he'd landed.

Of course, he thought, with horrible clarity. A trophy has to look good to be on display. What good is a prize if it's battered and worn before it's even on the wall?

His mind raced. He'd never seen trophies prepared before, but with the war in the past few years he'd come to know more than he ever wanted to about preparing a body for an open casket – the plastics under the skin to make the face whole again, the reset bones and the still-open wounds concealed beneath clothes, the jaws wired shut…

Nausea rose in his stomach. He took deep breaths, willing calm back into his nerves. That could even be his way out. If he could find a way to bruise or cut himself worse, he wouldn't be in any condition to preserve. She'd have to wait longer for him to heal again, and that would buy Bumblebee more time to find him, wherever he was.

Limbs bound too tightly to move with any force, and with nothing sharp or rough within reach, he took the only option he could think of. Raising his head as far as he could, he brought it down hard against the back of the table.

Even with the bright lights still in his eyes the impact made strange colors bloom across his vision, accompanied by a fresh stab of pain. He bit his lip to keep back a shout and hit his head again.

And again. And again. Three, four more times. He stopped trying to hold back the cries of pain after a while; maybe if he was loud enough someone would hear him.

By the time Airachnid responded to all the noise, catching his hair in one of her claws to keep him still, he had shut his eyes and did not notice her coming. He tried to pull out of her grasp, but dizziness wrenched at his stomach, making the walls spin even faster.

"It's no good throwing a fit about it, little boy," she scolded, turning his head to face her. All he could see of her anymore was a wavering patch of dark. "We're out in the upper atmosphere now. There's nobody out there to hear you."

He couldn't think clearly enough to answer her.

"Besides," she cooed, leaning in close until she filled what vision he had. "wounds like that, they're easy to fix on a cold, still body. Just a little metal to fill it in, a few re-arrangements…" Sharp, slim fingers touched at the back of his head, and he screamed as their cold filled him, wrenching away. "It's those little spots you get under the surface, those are what take the longest."

Her fingers came away bloody, the salty smell of it battering at him and making the dizziness worse. His stomach turned, and he turned away just in time to avoid getting sick all over the front of his shirt.

Airachnid didn't seem to notice, or care if she did. Another slot opened on the table, and another metal strap uncurled; she bound it around the top of his head, pinning him down next to the puddle on the table. The sour smell of digestion mingled with the salt of blood, and more bile rose to the surface. She was, at least, merciful enough to turn him as he gagged and spat out the vomit. Nothing could heal if he choked to death.

His head throbbed too intensely to know what happened after that, between the impact and the bright light he could no longer look away from. He squinted his eyes shut as tight as he could, until at last the dark overtook it.

He had no way of knowing how long he'd been unconscious, but when he awoke the first thing he felt was thirst. His mouth was parched and heavy and tasted of steel.

A drop of water landed on his lips, cool and smooth, easing the prickling fire on his mouth. He arched up faintly, not knowing or caring about the source but needing more. Another drop, then another, landed in his open mouth; they tasted strangely sweet against his tongue.

And then there was something hard and cool and wet in his mouth, pushing his lips apart and letting him lick off the water that beaded down its surface, grateful for some relief. Until the burn in his throat subsided he didn't notice the slick metal of the surface, didn't think to try to spit it out.

Airachnid giggled, opening his mouth further and (he imagined) smiling at his futile squirms of resistance. "I'd forgotten just how fragile your kind could be," she said, almost in a whisper. "Just how much you need to stay alive. Good thing I won't need to do that much longer."

He bent back as far as he could and tried to twist away from the cold intrusion of her fingers into his mouth. And yet, even if he could pull away – his throat burned so badly now that he'd tasted relief. Just another drop, just something to ease the burning, it wasn't like he could escape, anyway…

"The only problem," she went on, the rest of those needle fingers drawing lines down his face and neck, delicate and chill, "is that there's just not enough of you to make a decent trophy. Thin little bones and thin little skin. If I just took the head…" She turned his head to look at the wall, past the door to the operating theater, where he knew the grim, paralyzed faces of the galaxy grinned down at them. "I wouldn't be able to even see you up there, and what's the point of a trophy you can't admire?"

She withdrew her fingers, letting him gasp for air, and pulled at the edges of his collar to check his bruises. The fabric tore as she pulled.

"Maybe I should wait until I have all three of you, hmm? I could display you as a whole set then." There was a small white tray next to the table this time – still big enough to fit his whole body. On it indistinct silver lines gleamed in the light. If he squinted he could just make out, amongst the blur, a syringe as wide around as his arm.

He was still so thirsty. Still so cold.

The silver shapes moved indistinctly, connecting to others with clicks and rings that bounced off the faraway walls. There was the whirr of a vacuum.

It almost would have been better if she was – humming, or talking to herself, or something, something that might drown out the sound of all the metal, of her tools and of her body. Everything scraping and shining and grinding against his ears like it was inside his head.

She set down the tools (there were more of them now) and moved back to him, unfastening the strap round his left arm. He tried to raise his arm to push her away, to struggle, to do anything at all, but his muscles ached too much to move.

The stiff and ragged layers of his clothes ripped aside under her razor touch, baring his skin. The chill grew worse, pricked at him and raised goosebumps as she continued to peel his sweater and sleeves and jeans away. Something pressed against the top of his arm, squeezing tight until he could feel his pulse. Then the second arm, leaving his fingers tingling and numb. Why would she need to restrain him even further?

It wasn't until he felt the stinging against the skin of his right arm, and the louder and louder thrum of his heartbeat underneath his skin, and saw out of the very edge of his vision the deep arch of red tubing leading away from him, that he realized she wasn't restraining him.

She was isolating his veins. She was draining his blood. She was – another needle slid in deep, this one pumping in, thick and cold – she was preserving him…

From his left arm a terrible burning seized him, wrenching another cry from his throat; he writhed and squirmed in his bonds, balled up his fists, but nothing he did would ease the fire crawling up his skin. And still the numbness grew, colder and deeper, emptying him so the acid in the second tube could fill him again, rendering his skin tight and stiff. The straps seemed to grow tighter as he jerked against them, seeking relief more than escape.

Something else grabbed at his face, holding him, searing at his skin as the poison flowed in ever deeper, and he tried to stop screaming, tried to think of something, anything that wasn't that heat pressing out from inside him. A length of tubing, rough and thick and plastic, forced its way into his open mouth, down his burning throat, silencing him as something cold and clammy burst through it, and he choked and gagged and rocked up against it but it wouldn't come out –

And then, as quick as it had entered, the tube withdrew, and the sharp points in his arm dulled, and the pressure of his bindings eased, and there was someone calling his name, a familiar pattern of beeps and flickers telling him say something, please say something, please wake up…

He felt motion again, at last, but it made the burning worse, and he curled up in on himself to try to escape it – only he couldn't, because he'd gone numb and sluggish and hurt too much to move, hurt too much not to –

Through the fire he heard an engine howling, and voices to either side of him: What did she do – call 911 – get us to the hospital -

And he heard nothing after, because the next time he gasped for air nothing came in, and the burning consumed his lungs, pounding with the need to breathe as he opened his mouth and fought for it again and again.

He woke in a bright white room, mercifully unbound, too grateful to not be in pain anymore to feel anything else.

There was a noise like a cotton ball on glass. There was a face floating above him, mouthing silently; that was probably the source of it. The rubbing sound continued, grew louder and more inflected, until at last it settled on "Can you hear me?"

He nodded. His neck felt stiff.

"Good." The voice almost…sighed, like it had been holding its breath. His throat tightened, and he wasn't sure why. "Follow the light, please."

He complied. The face didn't say anything else after that, disappearing behind him instead. He felt himself being lifted by many arms, and then set down on something soft. There was another long hallway, and he drifted down it in an easy glide. He must have been in a hospital, which meant someone must have found him and got him out of Airachnid's spaceship, which meant –

"Bumblebee."

The doctors pushing his gurney didn't answer, and when he repeated it only gripped his hand and said "Your family's waiting, kid. You'll see them soon."

He was wheeled into a smaller white room, with no more explanations. A few hours more and his parents and brothers and sisters crowded in, pressing up against each other in their rush to reach him. Mom and Dad hugged him fiercely, ignoring the IVs and machinery surrounding him, crying that they thought he'd died. And he was relieved, and happy, but almost at a distance, as if it weren't happening to him at all.

Even being awake long enough to see them exhausted him, and he sank back into sleep almost as soon as they'd left.

He woke up in a tiny white room with dull fluorescent lights, lying in a bed tilted upwards with something stuck to his arm. He wasn't nearly as sore as he thought he should have been.

There was a crowd gathered across the room; his mother sat beside him, holding on to his hand. When had they gotten there? Had he been out that long?

"Mom? What's going on?"

His mother held his hand to her face, silent and shaking her head. He could feel tears.

"What's wrong?"

Everyone was just staring at him – even Jack and Miko, standing behind his sisters. There was a doctor, too, just as grim-faced, asking if his family could please give Raf a moment alone.

Jack and Miko had brought him to the hospital, the doctor told him. He had severe blood poisoning when he was found, to the point that there was no more oxygen getting to his brain. The doctors performed a blood transfusion, but not in time to prevent the brain damage from oxygen deprivation. They had feared that even if they had pulled him out of his suffocation he would be in a persistent vegetative state. That he could even move was a good sign.

He pulled up a picture on the room's whiteboard – a mass of blue that he recognized as a PET scan. Dark spots in the front.

"We're not sure if there's any permanent damage yet." The doctor's voice seemed to fade away, drowned out by the speech of his mother and his sisters outside and the image of his brain that he could barely see through the anesthetics.

And when next he woke he was back in the ship, and the IV tubes and needles in his arms became the restraints keeping him on the table. They had gone slack, not nearly as restricting as the cold steel that pumped preservative into his veins.

He could feel it throbbing up into him, stiffening in each inch of his skin. The muscle tensed and strained inside, swollen with the chemicals that would make him a fit trophy.

And through it all she was smiling, tugging at the tubes until she had pulled his body upright and every muscle fiber snapped like a pane of glass. He couldn't feel the cold of her hands anymore, as she sloughed away what was left of his clothing and traced slow lines down his body, admiring.

Beautiful, he heard her whisper.

He gasped for air and clung to his bedsheets just to know that he still could –

- and he shouldn't have been in his own bed. How had he gotten here? How had he gotten out of Airachnid's ship?

Raf looked around, but he was indeed in his own room, just as it had been before she'd captured him. Dusky light outside the window. No lights. No tables.

It was much too warm.

On the table beside his bed was a notebook, left open to the first page and propped up so it'd be the first thing he'd look at. The writing was small and shaky – his mother's.

You were in an accident, it said.

He almost smiled. Even after all this – however he'd gotten out of Airachnid's lab, however he'd been brought back to life since then, however he'd been rescued – he had still somehow managed not to tell her the truth. How could that be?

The doctors told us you may have amnesia, so you may not remember much about what happened afterwards.

You're safe now. We're taking care of you.

The note had been meant to reassure him. It didn't work very well. If his family was taking care of him, where were they? Why couldn't he hear anyone's voice outside?

Right. Amnesia. It might have been a week or a month since his 'accident', and he probably wouldn't have been able to tell.

It was normal after a head injury, he reminded himself. People got in car crashes and lost whole years. He was lucky he even remembered what had happened to him.

(No he wasn't, he thought, shivering at the memory of the needles and the cold and the hands like knives, but wouldn't it have been worse to ache all over like this and not even know why?)

Slowly, he maneuvered himself out of his bed, pausing every inch to wait for the throbbing in his body to subside. It must have been a while, he thought, if he could stand up at all.

He didn't have a chance to see if he could walk yet before his dad opened the bedroom door, telling him not to get out of bed, not to worry, if he needed anything at all they could get it for him, go back to bed, don't strain yourself – and Raf could tell by his rapid, insistent tone that something else was worrying him.

From outside the room he could hear the television, and what sounded like a news anchor: Everyone is advised to remain indoors.

Home was safe, and home was comfortable, but home was also so disconnected.

Amnesia was to be expected – he kept reminding himself, every time he woke up and read the journal by his bedside again, and recalled what little he could – but he would regain awareness at odd hours in odd places, and it was as though he was simply jumping from one fragment in time to another, with nothing in between.

Like now – he was in the back seat of the car now, his oldest sister's car by the looks of it. He could have been in Airachnid's ship minutes or hours or months ago and now there was this, here, like it was any other day, like nothing had happened at all. Maybe nothing had happened.

Then why was the ship the only thing that felt real?

His own body didn't feel like his own anymore, whole and well and mobile when he should have been unable even to move. Yes, he had probably had time to recover – no telling exactly how long it had been – but his mind kept insisting that it hadn't been long enough ago.

If he didn't make the effort to keep his mind in the present he could still the phantoms of the restraints around his wrists and neck and the fingertips against his skin; hurts that should still be fresh but had faded through all the time he had lost. And no matter how they frightened him there was something almost comforting about those sensations. He knew where they should have been, and when, and how. They were an anchor. They were real.

And after Airachnid loosed him from the operating table she made fresh marks for him to remember.

Not at first, of course. First she played with her puppet, pulling him forward on the now-empty tubing until he stood, stumbled, walked halting on stiff unbending legs. With every step he grew closer to the edge of the platform; vertigo stirred in his head but it was a relief from the stiffening and snapping in his limbs, from the cold burn of metal under his feet.

"Beautiful," she breathed again, as she guided him into her open palm, "but still so small. Not much to look at, compared with the rest of my collection." She lifted him up to her eye level as his strings slackened, letting him slump to his knees. "No, something so delicate needs a setting. Something to draw the optics."

He could see clearer up along the wall from here. The heads were massive, dwarfing not only him but her; bone protruded from one and slick, corded muscle from the other, arching outward as if to pluck him from Airachnid's hands.

Between them was a set of metal rings and pegs.

He was inside, in a dark room with no windows.

He was still in the ship, he thought, somehow escaped from his bonds, before he felt the battered journal in his hands and his sisters' arms around his shoulder. The corner of the journal had a small, faded red stain.

You were in an accident, the first line read. You may have amnesia. We are taking care of you.

The second page read, it has been one month since your accident. You have amnesia, but the doctor tells us your memory is improving. We are moving; we will be in the new place soon.

And the third; it has been thirty-three days since your accident.

It has been two months.

It has been eighty days.

The numbers kept going up.

He didn't read any more; everyone around him seemed so quiet and worried. About him? There were other people in here besides his family - who were they?

The dark of the room and the questions buzzing in his head exhausted him, even if he had just woken up (which he thought he had; he couldn't be sure), and instead he lowered his head and waited for sleep to come again -

The circles on Airachnid's wall were some sort of elaborate harness, clicking into place around him.

She displayed him with his arms spread wide and pinned up above his head, stretched out till his shoulders ached from the tension – incredible that he could still feel them, faint though they were.

He should have been dizzy, this high up on the wall, but the sickness was long gone by now, as far away as the hospital bed, as the dark room with no windows. Like this, suspended, untouched, his body cooled and his heartbeat stilled…oh, he could have been flying.

The next time he woke he was under a crumbling roof, curled in a corner, his skin thick with dust. He must have escaped from Airachnid, fled from her ship somehow.

Once the stiffness subsided in his back and legs he should try to find his way home. He could do that, right?

He got out, didn't he? Couldn't be that hard.

Underneath his arm there was a book – no, a journal; it was the right size and the pages were crinkled and ruled. Whose journal?

The handwriting inside was his own.

I don't know how much time it has been anymore. Last count: eight months.

You had an accident. The head trauma gave you amnesia.

There's been an attack.

Don't know where Mom and Dad are or anyone else – the writing grew shakier. If this was his journal – he didn't have a pen on him. How would he write down the rest?

How could it have been eight months when it only felt like minutes?

I haven't been able to find Bumblebee.

There was a creaking above his head, and drywall crumbled into his hair. He looked up just in time to see part of the roof above him break away. Raf scrambled back, out into the open; the journal fell from his grasp.

Before he could scoop it back up, the book disappeared under splintered wood and dust.

Once he could regain his feet – he was so stiff, and he ached so much – he stumbled to the pile that was his shelter seconds ago. The journal was somewhere at the bottom of all that dust and timber, and it was the only thing he had. It was the only path back, because everything before the roof and the journal was empty.

There was the ship, and the instruments, and the pressure on his throat and in his chest, and the feeling of weightlessness and then – this.

And the scraps left behind at the bottom of the collapsed house.

He pulled at every rotted beam and crumbled brick he could reach; splinters dug under his fingernails and split into his palms. The plaster degraded in his hands and turned to powder as he threw it away.

He lost track of the time it took to retrieve the journal, grabbing at a fistful of paper before he could see it. The sun was setting by then, and everything below his elbows stung; the red on his fingertips streaked the crumpled papers.

Keep moving.

There were no roads left to walk along. Night fell faster. And somewhere, slow between the clouds, was the black ship drifting, the only familiar thing.

Raf stumbled his way towards it, hands curled tight around the stained papers.

She used only her fingers to make the last cuts; his skin was delicate enough now for that, and he knew she wanted it to be intimate.

There was no bleeding as she rounded his collarbones, making a slow curve; the skin peeled away at its new edges. She drew a half-moon curve from shoulder to shoulder, with the lowest point skimming the hollow of his neck. At that center point, she pierced deeper.

He heard bone crack and tissue tear but all he felt was – was intensity, dark and hot. Not even pain anymore. And for the rest she was careful and measured and slow, splitting the ribs and cutting what was left of muscle away but leaving his heart, lungs, stomach untouched.

Not his heart. She lingered on that as she passed over it, studying its shape and tracing the vessels that served it. Her touch on its surface was another stab of sensation; if his heart could still beat it would have raced.

"You humans are so strange inside."

Ribs splintered and snapped away from his spine as she opened him up, pinning the skin behind him like spread wings.

"But such a perfect crown jewel of my collection."

He came to his senses again at the foot of her spaceship, somewhere among the rocks and dust. His hands were still stinging; he didn't know why.

The ship, open and inviting him in, was all that remained.