I don't normally post just one chapter at the start of a fic, especially when I'm not completely satisfied with the second, but I'm testing the waters here.

Not only does this fic not have a big juicy hook in the first chapter, but it's also my attempt at flexing my creative writing wings and trying to make myself (and hopefully the reader) care about some characters I'm used to treating as a means to an end at best.

Also, OC warning. It's not a femme! Plot device. Bear with me.

How long is a decade in Cybertronian years …

It felt ridiculous. Actually, it felt insane, Miko thought. After all those tours of duty, her request to be stationed in Japan had been granted. Fowler probably could have gotten her Japanese citizenship back if she'd wanted, but it hadn't felt right. She'd dedicated too much of her life to it with little to show for everything she'd given up.

She'd been as restless and bored as ever. Miko thought she missed that feeling of Smalltown, USA. So, they'd shipped her back to the States to keep her happy. Now, she was here and she didn't feel any happier or content. She'd even thought about jumping on the next carrier out of here and back in the air for another eighteen months. Insane.

Sure, it felt like Jasper – right down to how you could drive to town and never stop hearing the same radio station filled with more commercials than moldy oldies in every store and from all the cars parked and passing you. But, it still wasn't Jasper. What had she been hoping for? Giant robots and intergalactic war?

Well … yeah, she thought as she as she pulled into her driveway.

Out of habit, Miko checked the number on her porch before putting her bike's kickstand down. It had been over a month since she'd come home and found that her key didn't work in the front door before realizing that she was at one of her neighbors' identical base houses, but it had been embarrassing enough to ingrain the habit of double and triple checking.

She might have still made mistakes if Megatron didn't stand guard in the bay window and she hadn't been able to hear Starscream going apeshit-bananas behind the front door already.

Home sweet home – for now.

As she approached the porch, she could see that Megatron's ratty ears were laid back and his eyes were shut as if he was trying to pretend for a moment that he wasn't forced to cohabitate with his shrieking, squalling insubordinate. Starscream's cacophony crescendoed to and epic climax at the sound of the key in the lock, then silenced instantly as soon as the door cracked open.

Miko threw her keys in the bowl and her helmet on the couch. The enormous gray tabby spared her a condescending glare for disturbing his perch ever so slightly then returned his attention to watching the yard for any unfortunate bird, cat, dog, raccoon, or grizzly bear that dared to wander into his domain.

The worlds ugliest dog currently pirouetting around her feet in zealous, drooling adoration was the only creature – besides the woman that fed him and brushed him – that Megatron would allow to live. Every day it surprised her when she didn't come home to silence and a mutilated chihuahua in the foyer.

Screamer jumped up on their recliner and groveled in anticipation, but belly rubs and cartoons would have to be delayed today. Miko had lost her phone and had felt disconnected from society all day without it.

It wasn't in her bedroom. Not in her backpack. Not on the counter. She checked the chargers by the door and in her office. She even violated his Lordship's throne, but she never sat on the couch, so why would it be under the cushions?

"Help me find it, Screamer," she said with patronizing excitement. "Good boy!"

He only looked at her with that blissful, walleyed ignorance she loved about him. No man could beat Starscream's adoration and loyalty. It didn't help their odds when the last guy you'd had a meaningful relationship with had been a thirty foot robot that could bench press a house. She might have been a little desensitized to the human concept of 'masculine.'

Screamer shadowed her to the laundry room on auto pilot and watched her dig through the pants in the hamper.

"Where the fuck is it?!" she growled, glaring around the room at shelves and cubbies.

Her eyes fell on him, and his tail wagged so hard it wiggled his entire body. This convinced her the dog would lie if he could talk just to see her happy. Miko sighed, already knowing it must have fallen out on the road or at the store. She had insurance. No sense getting pissed about it. It wasn't fair to Starscream besides. He'd already spent the day with Megatron. He didn't deserve to have to endure an evening with two hateful creatures in his midst.

"Come on," she surrendered, snapping her fingers. "Cartoon time."

He bolted past her to the living room, but just as she was about to touch down on the recliner, she heard her phone go off, playing the riff from the Slash Monkey song "No ID." Now she remembered. Bathroom; back of the toilet.

It had just about vibrated itself off between the tank and the wall by the time she'd snatched it up.

Four messages? Holy crap.

'Unknown' showed in the ID panel as the ringtone suggested, but she nearly dropped it in the bowl when she saw the numbers all marked out with asterisks.

"Hello!" she almost yelled, her voice on the verge of shaking with excitement. There was a tense pause that felt like it lasted another ten years. She swallowed. "Hello? Is anyone there?"

Had she just imagined it?

"Is this Miko?" a deep voice finally asked. She didn't recognize it. If this was a salesman, she swore she would hunt them down.

"Yes. This is Miko Nakadai," she said levelly. "Who's this?"

"Oxbow."

Her mind raced. The encounter had been brief.

"North Dakota?" he reminded. "Your friends fell into a trap and …"

"You helped me save them." She remembered. "You saved the energon."

"Yes." He sounded relieved. "You told me if I ever needed anything …"

He'd saved Wheeljack and Arcee. She'd owed him a big favor, but Oxbow had dismissed it.

"Yeah. What do you need? What's wrong?"

"The boy," he said, sounding pained. "He's sick. Randy's sick."

The drawl she'd thought was so hilarious coming from a bot at the time now made her think of something off of a dusty, broken-hearted country record.

"The doctors can't fix him. They said there's metal in his blood – too much metal. I … I think it has something to do with me. Are the Autobots gone? Like I've heard?"

"Ratchet's still here. He's the medic," she tried to assure.

He didn't need to know Fowler and the government had been keeping Ratchet separate from Miko and Jack after they joined the service. It was for security purposes, they'd been told. Miko didn't even know how the old mech had taken the sudden change of plans.

The few times she'd spoken to Raf, he'd refused to talk about the medic, and she'd been too ferociously jealous to seek out the little dweeb's company again. For all she knew, the bots had been coming and going without her or Jack knowing, but she just couldn't believe it. Miko had made it a point to not change her cell phone number. If Bulkhead came back, he'd call her first. She knew it.

"Can you get him?" she asked.

"I think so. When it gets dark."

She was already back out in the living room, using one hand to throw on her jacket. Screamer whined at her feet. Miko went back into the laundry room.

"Okay, that's good. I'm heading out now," she said, beginning to scoop food into Megatron and Starscream's bowls. Then, giving up, she just dumped the whole bag on the floor. "Meet me in Boise with Randy. I know a guy."

"Okay. I'll text you where to meet."

She hung up and hastily wrote out a note for her neighbor and taped her key to it.

"Sorry, guys," she said, looking at the dog that was hoping against all hope that she wasn't going back out the door. There was an agonized yip when it shut, but she didn't let herself feel bad. She'd be back.

Miko practically threw the note and key at her neighbor's porch on her way to her bike.

There was someone else she knew who wouldn't have changed his phone number.

His room smelled sour. Even when he fell asleep and breathed it all night, it still smelled sour. Long ago, he'd just accepted it as what human smelled like. He didn't let food sit out. He didn't have a full basket of dirty clothes to his name. He shared a bathroom with all of the other tenants on the floor. It wasn't smoke. He knew what that smell was because that followed him everywhere he went. He hated the smell of human, and it was the first thing to greet him when he woke and the last thing on his mind when he fell into bed.

But, this evening, it leaped back into his olfactory sense before he'd finished hating it for the day, and his phone ringing dredged him back up and out of nonsensical half-dreams and nightmares. He grumbled but rolled over and untangled an arm from the wool army blanket so his hand could fumble across the objects on the floor.

It was probably nothing – his mother calling to scold him for being shitfaced on a Tuesday or the foreman calling to see if he wanted a few extra hours. He hoped it was his mother. For one, he'd be happy to report he was sober as a judge. Two, he had a reputation for never turning down overtime. Not that he needed the money. He just had nothing better to do. No. His manager had been the one to tell him he needed to go home. That left his mom.

Wallet. Headphones. Ashtray. Notebook. Something wet … eww. Phone.

He reeled it back in under the blanket, but it went to voicemail before he could answer. He knew it wasn't work, so he tried to go back to sleep and not care about what she wanted. But, like always, guilt gnawed at him. She worried.

She nagged too.

Rolling onto his back, he tried to force it out of his mind which only made him feel even more guilty. It was a matter of pride now. He threw the phone back on the floor and picked up the crumpled Pall Mall pack instead.

Insult on top of insult; Jackson Darby was smoking, and he was smoking in bed.

He stretched out, propping his feet back up on the foot board, and looked up at the dark ceiling. There wasn't a curtain or blind, so the streetlight outside cast wavy shadows through the rain all over the small room. It made it look like the papers on the opposite wall were melting.

They'd confiscated his phone and computer and everything else that had had anything to do with the bots, but over the past decade, he'd committed the pen strokes to memory that it took to breath a spark into any scrap of paper.

There was Bumblebee watching him from an envelope. Somehow, the drawing managed to portray amusement in the bot's usually unreadable expression. Ratchet scolding him over the rail, the flair of anger in his optics. He'd captured Optimus musing over what he now understood to be an overpowering feeling of uselessness in such perfect detail on the back of a paycheck that he'd not had the heart to cash it. The matrix … doodled on a cocktail napkin.

His mom had gotten him an artist's pad of fine, heavy, cream-colored paper once. He'd drawn such a perfect picture of Arcee looking down at him as she shielded him from vehicon fire that he could practically feel he heat radiating off of her chassis.

And, he burned it.

It felt wrong. It made him feel vulnerable and exposed, drawing her on blank paper. It was like, putting her image on something solely intended for it officially meant she was just a memory now. The rest of the pad had gathered dust until he'd abandoned that squalid SRO for an even cheaper one.

The phone beeped, announcing a new voicemail. Took a while. He wondered what she could possibly have to gripe about for so long to an answering machine.

Maybe it wasn't her. It might have been Bill.

He took a long drawl at the thought.

He didn't talk to Bill anymore. Bill still left voicemails, and he didn't listen to those either. He had nothing to say to Bill.

It rang again, and Jack looked at it over the edge of the bed. The phone lay face down on the linoleum, buzzing in a slow circle towards a small memorial of crumpled receipts that had gotten wet from the leaky window. He studied the wet paper and the blurring images he'd inked on them until the ringing stopped again.

Sighing, he rolled onto his stomach and curled his legs up so he'd fit on the too-short bed again. He ground his cigarette out in the ashtray and closed his eyes.

His room stunk, he thought again miserably. He'd clean it again tomorrow.

The phone began to ring again. Who the Hell …?

Curiosity overrode stubborn pride, and he flipped it over. It was a Nevada area code like his and his Mom's and Bills', but the ID said unknown. The possibility that it was something important finally crossed his mind, and he picked it up before the last ring.

"What," he demanded of the receiver.

"Captain Darby?" It was a woman's voice.

"No. This is a civilian line. Don't …"

"Jack." His automated response was cut short. "It's Miko."

He held his breath. It might be a trick. He hadn't heard from Miko Nakadai in six years, maybe seven. Not since he'd still been in the service at least. She'd been trying to talk him out of leaving.

"I've got our ticket back in. How soon can you get to Boise?"

He sat up, making the bed squeak and rattle.

"They came back?" he finally found the voice to ask.

"I don't know. Can you meet me?"

She couldn't tell him much over the phone. Someone was undoubtedly listening.

"How are you so sure?" he asked cryptically.

"Trust me, Bro." He heard her smile. How had he not recognized her voice? "I've got a friend that'll get us VIP access."

His heart suddenly felt like it was straining to pump syrup. That last smoke hadn't helped.

"I'll be there. Tomorrow morning."

They hung up.

Jack got up and pulled on the black tank top he'd discarded at the door less than an hour earlier, his work boots, and his old green army jacket. Most everything he owned fit into the pockets except for the Glock that he stuffed in the back of his belt.

Then, he proceeded to pull down his mural and throw it in the trash, the same as he did every time he abandoned a location, and set them on fire in the trash can. He opened the window to let the smoke out and watched for the few minutes it took for it all to turn to ashes.

After setting the can on the fire escape in the rain, he left the door open in case anyone wanted the clothes or the bed, and he left with as much sentiment as a hermit crab.

Out on the street, he waved down the only yellow cab brave or lost enough to be in this part of town and got in.

"Where to, Bud?"

"Boise," Jack said, digging his beat up wallet out of his breast pocket.

"Boise Street?"

"Boise, Idaho."

The driver turned to look at him with a half-grin at the joke, but his passenger dug out a dozen bills from the wallet and offered them, folded neatly in half. The man blinked.

"You got GPS?" he asked, putting the car in gear and taking the cash.

When they coined the term 'greasy spoon,' this place must have thought they meant axle grease. The only thing green on the menu was the jello, and she wouldn't have ordered that for fear it might have a cockroach suspended in it. But, like Oxbow had requested, it was an out-of-the-way, twenty-four hour truck stop off the interstate.

She'd texted him twenty minutes ago with the address, but he was still a ways out.

The waitress returned to top off her coffee. "Have we decided?"

Miko folded up the menu, tactfully avoiding the looks she was bound to get at a truck stop from graveyard shift truck drivers.

"Just bacon. Double order. Extra crispy, verging on black."

"Sure thing, Darlin.'"

She wasn't hungry. She was too excited, but she'd make herself eat something. Food and a few more cups of the diesel oil this place passed for coffee would keep her awake. That and the cloying feeling at the back of her mind telling her she was crazy.

The sun rose as she ate, and at about 5:30, a Portland cab pulled up to one of the pumps. A scarecrow that shopped at the army surplus store's dumpster unfolded himself out of the backseat, handed the cabbie something over the roof of the car, then shambled toward the door.

At first she thought he'd hit a post-puberty growth spurt, but realized it was just an illusion. He'd lost more weight not gained height. Jackson Darby, ladies and gentleman: a man so all-or-nothing, he couldn't even half-ass letting himself go to shit.

The bell over the door jangled when he entered, and he looked over the patrons. Miko toasted him with her coffee mug, and his brow rose. It looked almost comical on his hollow, stubbled face.

"Didn't recognize you," he stated, sliding into the booth across from her.

"Yeah, sorry. I tried, but I couldn't get my pigtails to grow out in six hours."

Her hair was cut shorter than his, but that wasn't saying much.

"You look … different … too." She pulled a menu out from behind the condiments and pushed it across the table. "What have you been up to? I mean … besides bringing back grunge and living off tic tacs and nicotine."

He glanced over the top of the menu at her, nonplussed.

"Steel mill."

The waitress returned, setting down a paper coaster and another placemat. Jack's attention immediately shifted from Miko and the menu.

"What are ya drinkin'?"

He looked up at the woman again as if she'd materialized out of thin air and he might bolt. She gave him a friendly smile that blatantly said she thought he was a lunatic. Miko might have to agree with her.

"Ah …" he looked over the menu again and folded it back up. "Beer. And eggs – over hard."

Miko felt her stomach lurch and didn't bother to wait until the lady had walked away to give him a look of pure revulsion. He tucked it back behind the bottles and began evaluating the coaster and mat again.

"Who is it?" he asked, looking up again. Miko considered him for a moment. "Bulkhead?"

Her heart stung, and it must have showed on her face. Jack relaxed and sat back.

"He's a neutral," she explained. "Oxbow – the guy that …"

"Saved Arcee," Jack finished for her.

"And Wheeljack. His human is sick. I don't know how he thinks the Autobots can help, but I honestly don't care if it means we can see Ratchet again."

Jack clicked a pen that had magically appeared in his fingers on the table, thinking as he clicked it down and caught it when it sprang up over and over again.

"She would've called me if she came back," he finally concluded softly, the disappointment obvious in his voice.

"I know she would've," Miko assured.

"You taking him to Bill," he almost growled.

"Bill? Oh … yeah." She'd forgotten about that whole crazy business. "That's the plan. You still in?"

The clicking stopped, and he lifted the pen to glare at the nub. Then he looked at her with so much lucidity, she almost rocked back from the shock.

"Yes."

She saw the waitress returning and drummed her fingers on the table nervously under Jack's scrutiny.

"Eggs. Over hard," she said, placing the plate before him. Jack slid the mat out of her way. She didn't comment on the least weird idiosyncrasy she'd seen thus far. "Hair of the dog?" He wasn't quick enough to save the coaster from a water mark when she placed the bottle of MGD on it.

"Thank you," Jack said pleasantly, smiling up at her.

He ceremoniously added salt to the drink, watched it foam, then picked up his pen again and began to draw from the center of the placemat, spiraling out in a circle.

"So, he's meeting us here?" he asked.

"Yup."

"Is he bringing the kid with him? Or are we hoping we'll be able to take a groundbridge back to the hospital?"

She hadn't thought about that. Oh well, having Randy with him would make Oxbow more desperate to make a deal.

"Randy's with him. I'm guessing he's stable enough to make it to Nevada."

"So, we show up with a hospital escapee and a mech and tell them to let us in or else?" he asked before taking a pull of his beer.

"You got a better plan? I'm all ears."

He only shrugged, not looking up from his drawing.

"It's just Ratchet," she thought out loud. "But Hell. It's Ratchet! I'd be satisfied if I could see a vehicon again."

He hummed noncommittally.

A few quiet minutes passed and he sat the empty bottle back on the coaster, now completely engrossed in his work.

"You know, you're not making me feel any less crazy, Jack," she sighed.

He only smiled at the drawing.

"We'd be driving halfway to Mexico for a what? A chance?"

He still didn't say anything.

"You gonna eat that? Or is a long neck all the balanced breakfast you need?"

He rolled up one of the eggs with his fingers and stuffed it in his mouth. Yeah, she was crazy. Maybe she should just go back home to Screamer now and save herself the heartbreak.

"Why did you stay?" Jack asked, startling her from her thoughts. She shrugged.

"Why not?" She pushed some black bacon crumbs into a straight line on her plate absently. "I guess, I thought there was always the chance they'd come back and they'd need me. I wanted to be ready. But then … it sort of turned into me not really having anything better to do."

He hummed again and rolled up another egg.

"They won't let us see them again," she finally admitted to herself. "Even with Oxbow."

"They have to. He'll make them."

"Then what?" she scoffed. "We might get to see Ratchet, but we'll be back at the top of their shit list again. The chance of you seeing Arcee again is … slim to none. You know that right?"

"I'll take it."

Fuck. She should've slept on it. She shouldn't have dragged him out here in the middle of the night.

"I'm sorry, Jack."

He looked up at her slowly.

"Why?"

"I got your hopes up."

"Miko …" He reached across the table and engulfed her hands beneath his. They were rough and thin. The knuckles looked like he was as obsessive about cracking them as he was about clicking pens. But, it relaxed her for some reason. "Let's be honest. I needed my hopes up."

She smiled, and he returned it. Then, he moved his plate out of the way and turned his work around and pushed it across the table to her. She felt tears in her eyes and her throat burned at the perfect rendering of her with her guitar, sitting in Bulkhead's servo as he smiled – no, he was laughing at her. It was drawn so beautifully, she could almost hear his voice.

"What will we lose if we don't try?"