The genesis of this was an observation by a good friend of mine and all around Transformers guru on Tumblr - his name is Nabulos if you're interested - following him reblogging a picture of Grimlock telling stories to the Technobots about Grimlock like a proper robo-daddy; this got me intrigued so I wrote this in a reblog for sweetness and fun. It was particularly influenced by, after doing some research on the Technobots, that they were strikingly like Wheeljack in many ways.

Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers or make any claim to any likenesses thereof; this is a work of entertainment without profit.

The first thing Grimlock sees, is a face.

It is a face of qualities he might later scorn; it is totally open, vulnerable, almost childlike. It is a silly face, a nakedly curious one alive with wonder, like being struck by lightning from the core of all creation; alive with the power of it, in the flow and move of all that is, one that saw the possibilities in all things and knew the compulsion to make them so.

It is a nice face, a good face. The first thing he ever sees is good. A good thing, a smaller thing, a weaker thing that is nevertheless an equal. Maybe that colors his thinking in later eons.

He remembers reaching out, for a hand to help him up. And that his maker is so much smaller than him, and not afraid at all. Under his faceplace, a mouth of fangs and knife-teeth opens with a warbling beep, and Wheeljack, his maker and designer, bids him welcome to life.

Grimlock has been around humans the whole of his existence. He understands their terms more closely than his kind normally would. He doesn't consider that his kind have parents all the same, but he still thinks of Wheeljack as his father.

When he scorns intelligence, he makes an internal exception for Wheeljack, appoint him to the ranks of honorary toughness.

When he chooses ultimately to follow Optimus Prime (even though Grimlcok thinks him so soft), he thinks that Wheeljack follows him so maybe he's right about some things after all if Wheeljack trusts him so much.

—

Grimlock doesn't have nightmares. That's what he says, anyway.

He pretends he doesn't think about Autobot City anymore.

The other Dinobots understand. They were there, and they were with him after.

When anyone asks what happened when Grimlock found Wheeljack's shell, broken and beaten beyond repair at last, the Dinobots say a bit too quickly that Grimlock didn't cry.

Grimlock is the toughest. He is the strongest one there is. Grimlock doesn't ever cry.

So he couldn't have been crying.

He couldn't have screamed and wept like a little sparkling, and there for hours with what was left until they had to drag him away.

It couldn't have been Grimlock who cried.

It was Grimlock, though, who carried his father's shell to the ceremonial tube and pressed that button that launched him to the stars. From the stars they had lived without Cybertron, and in the stars so many had died.

His father was already gone. His Spark returned to Primus.

It felt important, though.

—

And one day, long after Wheeljack's death but not so long that it still doesn't hurt, a new voice asks Grimlock as he finishes building their bodies, he is asked, "Are you my father?"

And he understands a little why humans value family lines when they can.

—-

Now. Here and now, as the humans might think (and it is a curious thing that Transformers do not, for though they live so very long they think about the future so seldom, and it occurs to Grimlock while he still has his big brain that they don't worry about the future too much because they know they have so much more time left).

The Technobots gather around him, like little chicks around a fussy papa eagle; they are young, and they are so smart, and so very antsy and impatient and active as humans, and the other Dinobots cluster around them almost protectively, like little nephews not quite tough enough to handle themselves.

And Grimlock lays down, and they all look up into the sky of Cybertron, the home of their ancestors and the living body of Primus, and they all cluster together, and he tells them stories about their grand-maker.

They're so very much like him. In the Technobots, Grimlock sees Wheeljack.

Grimlock doesn't cry, of course.

He just insists he gets things stuck in his optics.