Shatter

'How… how could this happen to us? A mistake… I must have made a mistake...'

That line of thought echoed endlessly through my main processor as I hobbled aimlessly across the sandy expanse at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay; a symphony of tactile impulses signaling damage all over my battered frame, most particularly in my left pede – twisted, broken, but fortunately still in one piece. Experience told me it could be fixed, but not until I was safe and free from the distraction of avoiding humans.

In between having a container ship ram into me and nearly being blown to bits by my own faulty missile, I was in no shape to continue my fight with Bumblebee. In fact I barely had enough functionality in my systems to dig my way out of the accursed sea vessel, the siren call of stasis lock had been pulling at my circuits ever since I regained my senses after I literally crashed and burned.

Though it was excruciating, I had held off on immediately returning to shore. Sector Seven would be reinforcing the immediate area of last contact, if they found me like this, they would subdue me and dismember my frame for their brutish science experiments; I already had a gist of what Powell was going to do with Bumblebee after we finished with him – I will permanentlyoffline myself before it comes to that.

The weight of the sea was pressing upon my shoulders, the spinning screws of a dozen ocean bound vessels resounded through my acoustic senses. My battlemask was still fastened shut over my faceplate, the left lens had a crack running through it from shrapnel, but blessedly the optic behind it was unharmed.

'I am defeated… how can this be… what have I done? What failure have I allowed? Dropkick… Blitzwing… brothers… forgive me...'

The going got progressively harder as I left the deepest part of the bay and trekked up an incline towards the shallows closer to the city. I was far enough away from Brighton Falls that I could finally afford to leave this damnable salt water. From there, I could find shelter and try to come up with another plan to ensure my continued survival and perhaps a chance at redemptionlater down the line.

Thoughts of vengeance bolstered my resolve. My processor generated image after image of Bumblebee's puny spark being torn out, of Charlie Watson's crushed bones and torn flesh, of this planet burned from orbit until nothing remained but an ash choked sphere of blackened glass. The end of the Resistance, the death of Mankind, my retribution fulfilled.

My helm and shoulders cleared the water and I was greeted with the sight of the San Francisco skyline stretched to either side of the horizon. The darkness of night was just beginning to break, as a small slip of orange light was rising from the east, heralding the coming dawn of a new day. I didn't have much time left. In front of my was a low wall of stone, rising five feet above the water and ten feet beneath it, and beyond that was a small stretch of parkland sitting between the urban blight of the city, the Bay, and a nearby marina filled mainly with small sailing craft. At this early hour, the park was completely deserted.

Perfect.

My shoulder actuators groaned in protest as they bore my weight over the lip of the sea wall and onto the manicured grass lawn. I doubted my leg could bear my weight outside of the water, so I crawled the rest of the way inland. I paused to let the seawater drain out of my vents and the tears in my chassis before setting my mind onto the next task.

Transforming with a damaged frame was never an easy experience. In an ideal scenario, I should have been extracted to a safe location and consigned to a medical berth for a long and thorough repair by a medic I trusted, and barred from even attempting a transformation until my specs were all in the green. But seeing as I was all alone on a hostile, alien world with no hope of rescue in the immediate future… it was a risk I had to take.

My current primary alt-mode was too recognizable, meaning that on top of transforming I also had to switch to a completely different disguise. Fortunately, I have scanned down a small number of human ground vehicles over the course of my stay with Sector Seven, my most recent acquisition was foremost in my processor. It was similar enough to the Plymouth in shape, so that the stress of reconfiguration should be reduced compared to what would happen if I tried to transform into a truck or a tank. Mentally I counted down from a thousand picoklicks before I engaged my primary T-cog.

My spinal assembly was the first thing to complain. The gyro-linked vertebrae that were so vital to my sense of balance had been peppered with shrapnel from the explosion, I winced in pain as the warped discs separated and awkwardly folded together into subspace as my torso unfolded and my outer mesh plating reshaped itself to properly reflect my chosen disguise. My shoulder struts separated down the middle as my helm folded down into the main body of the alt-mode, my body smacked into the ground before my front wheels snapped into position, pushing my frame away from the dirt and grass. All the while, my tactile receptors sent shocks of discomfort and pain to my main processor, causing me to unconsciously slow down the transformation process. But the worst had yet to come.

My right pede shakily folded into my frame, but my left… warning signals blared in my consciousness, desperately advising me not to carry through with the transformation. Steeling myself, I overrode my damage control system's inhibitor locks, forcing my motive units to complete the alt-form. White hot agony ripped through my super-conductive fiber circuitry. My other six senses seemed to offline in that very moment, my processor tasked too heavily simply trying to perceive the amount of pain I was in to pay anything else further mind.

'Keep going… keep going… I did not survive just to give up now!'

Relief flooded my processor as my internal systems check confirmed a full and stable transformation; helping me to banish some of the pain from my awareness. I felt my tires roll backwards as my new alt-mode shifted in reverse down the incline; remembering that the Bay was behind me, I immediately engaged my breaks. Nothing happened. A little worried now, I tried to turn my front wheels into a hard left to swerve parallel to the sea wall, to my growing horror I found my steering controls unresponsive.

Warning! Critical System Error #909/Neural Locomotor Control Interface: Not Responding. Report to assigned medical officer for emergency assistance.

It took me a full nanoklick to register the automated message. But when my processor caught up, my horror turned into complete terror. Desperately I attempted to reengage my T-cog to revert back to my standard form, it stirred only briefly before it went dormant again, my body was too weak right now to even begin the process.

My rear axle cleared the ledge of the sea wall, the undercarriage of my frame scraped against the weathered concrete with a grating shriek, stalling the momentum; for a moment I dared hope that the friction would arrest my momentum and so save me from a watery grave.

It didn't.

My tailplate struck the water with the finality of a gong strike, my frame submerging vertically halfway down it's length before righting itself into the horizontal, floating by the grace of a dwindling airpocket inside my cab.

I was sinking. Worse, I was slipping into stasis lock.

Perhaps this was a just fate. I failed to stop Blitzwing from leaving Cybertron, I failed to protect Dropkick, I failed to destroy Bumblebee, and I have failed to end the war that has consumed everything that I have ever cared about. By Primus, this was it.

Impotent fury rushed through my circuits one last time as I committed my last active runtimes to cursing the designations of Bumblebee, Charlie Watson, Starscream, and even Lord Megatron. May they all rust in the Pit!

As the waters once again fully enveloped me, I at long last yielded to the darkness.

Stasis lock: engaged. System shutdown commencing in: 3… 2… 1…

Donald

The disc grinder left a trail of pitted shiny steel as it weaved back and forth across the Firebird's despoiled undercarriage, sparks and tiny flecks of rust jetted off the point of contact, striking into the heavy leather welding gloves encasing his hands and half of his forearms or pelting the mostly transparent screen of his plastic face shield. He had been at it for over an hour now, his palms were numb from the constant vibrations and his feet were getting sore from standing for too long, but his focus on the task at hand kept his mind from lingering on these discomforts for too long.

The rust hadn't set in all that deep, it gave way easily to the disc of steel wires as if it was little more than a layer of dirt. He was nearly finished, then he could apply rust protection at home or some other shop (he didn't want to risk doing this again), and then he could go about rebuilding the interior.

He worked the grinder over a particularly stubborn patch with slightly more force, a dense shower of sparks flared out of the guard. To his shock, a green arc of static electricity leaped from the undercarriage and struck the tool, forcing Donny to drop it in panic for fear of getting burned.

An expletive loosed from Donny's lips as he jumped back to avoid being injured by the still cycling grinder, staring at it like it was some feral creature. Getting over himself, he moved to retrieve the tool but before he could touch it the Firebird shifted over his head. Terrified, Donny looked up expecting to see the muscle car falling down upon him, but the vehicle had apparently settled.

Then, he heard a sharp report of something big and heavy striking cement behind him.

Donny looked over his shoulder to behold something that caused his brain to stop and start for a long moment.

Hanging down from the other side of the Firebird was a long metal appendage; and at the end of it was a giant hand, the first few segments of it's long skeletal-like fingers brushing against the floor slowly in motion with the limb it was attached to.

The entire length of the arm was covered in thousands of nicks and scratches, from the bare metal to the red painted coverings; the hand was especially mutilated, the segments of the fingers looked ragged and torn – he doubted they would articulate properly with all the warping. The fingers, while long and slender in profile, were as thick around as his wrist, to the point where he could wrap his own hand around the pinkie without his thumb and index touching each other. Not that he was ballsy enough to actually touch the damn thing.

Not taking his eyes off it, he grabbed a socket wrench off a nearby metal box cart laden with tools and slowly stepped towards the oddity. Kneeling down as close as he dared to it, he slowly nudged the hand with the wrench. Nothing happened.

Stepping out from under the car and around the appendage, his eyes traveled up it's flacid length to where it joined the vehicle. At first he thought the car had been damaged in some way until he took in the rest of the picture.

The entire front left side of the Firebird appeared to have pulled itself apart, a section of the wheel well and the fender had been pulled down, fixed to where the arm's shoulder would be. The wheel itself had been pushed completely out of the well, canted at a forty-five degree angle to where the tire's inward facing wall was touching the hood. The entire left side of the square jawed bumper had folded in on itself like an accordion, the headlamps on the same side as well as part of the grill also appeared to have moved closer to the center, which had been pushed inwards, where the small Pontiac badge had been split cleanly down the middle.

This… this was beyond his experience.

There were no signs of stressed or torn metal, all the disjointed sections had parted cleanly from one another. It was almost as if the car was shifting… into something else.

No sooner than he had completed that thought, the 'Firebird' shifted on the lift bars once again. A loud reverberating whine rose up from the suspended muscle car, building up in pitch by the second. The pungent scent of ozone flooded his nose and soured on his tongue, he vaguely noted the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck were standing on end. Donny was instinctively backing away from the vehicle as the whine climbed into a high note.

Arcs or green tinted electrical discharge were racing up and down the length of the Firebird, with bands so bright that they were leaving afterimages in his eyes, forcing him to shield his face as the light grew with the noise. Then a loud crack shot through the air, made even louder from the confined space, that it sounded like someone had fired a large caliber rifle right next to his head. Donny collapsed to the ground, clutching his ears, for the moment unable to even hear himself scream. The lights had gone out, blanketing the entire shop in near pitch darkness, his muddled head was consumed by a piercing ringing noise that drowned out all other sounds.

He would have continued to lie there in agony were it not for him feeling the odd tremors coming up from the cement floor into his back. He could hear bizarre noises over the ringing which was slowly subsiding as his tortured eardrums gradually popped back into place. It was completely dark in the room, save for the small amounts of illumination coming from between the blinds covering the garage windows. It was barely enough to make out vague shapes of shop machinery placed between the five service lots, it was just enough to discern movement just in front of him.

For a moment, he thought his boss had come in to investigate the ruckus caused by his impossible car (though he was sure by now that calling it a car was somewhat inaccurate). That notion was quickly dispelled when he fathomed the massive size of the thing that was rising in the darkness in front of him, it's great silhouette towered over him by a huge margin. The darkness was suddenly broken by a pair of bright blue lights, which rose up lurchingly from the ground and loomed over his prone form. The floor reflected back just enough of the soft illumination to define the shape of the figure in front of him; it was at least thrice his height, two arms and two legs, huge shoulders and a narrow waist.

Is that my car?

In that moment, a sense of horrified clarity washed over him. All the anomalies, the inconsistencies he had noted over the past several days working on the Firebird, they all came back to him in that moment. His Firebird had somehow transformed into this strange, unfathomable giant; all this time, it had been some kind of robot in disguise.

For a moment nothing happened. It just stood there, it's eyes looking blankly towards the bay door behind him. He found himself drawn to the apparition's eyes, he had never seen such a hard and clear shade of luminous blue before. They were hypnotic, beautiful even. The shape of the head they were attached to canted downward, and their gazes met. Then, like a switch had been flipped, those large soulful eyes contracted into dots and flashed into a violent shade of red and a low brassy growl filled the shop then the shape lurched forward.

It wasn't until the light of those beady – now red – eyes illuminated a familiar mangled metal hand reaching out towards him that Donny's limbs finally started responding to the commands his freaked out brain was sending them. He lunged out of the way before it could grab him and pushed himself to his feet. He needed to get out of here and away from Phoenix, unfortunately he still couldn't see a damn thing in the darkness. Looking over his shoulder, he could see those eyes moving closer and could hear the heavy reports of giant metal feet on cement, one louder than the other. Judging by it's lurching motion, the hand wasn't the only thing that was damaged.

The garage had two exits, one was at the back of the garage on the left side, but the killer robot was standing between him and the door; the other was on the right wall and was the furthest away and lead to the service desk and the reception area.

Through his years of working here, Donny had a solid mental map of the garage floor. There was a clearance space running six feet in front of the doors that spanned from end to end. It was a straight run from here to the wall, then a left to the door. The lurching mechanical monstrosity was hot on his heels however.

Making a turn where he judged the wall to be, he caught sight of the creature's blazing eyes in his peripheral vision – hot on his heels. His heart seizing in his chest, Donny lunged towards where he guessed the door to be.

Only for his foot to snag a loose air hose on the floor.

"No!" He cried, before hitting the smooth cement. On his knees, he cast a frightened look back… oh no. The machine was right on top of him!

He scrambled forwards, trying to regain his footing as he did so only to run face first into the lobby door. Elation mixed with pain and desperation as he quickly grasped the handle, but it was suddenly torn from his grasp as the door swung outward and a blinding light burned into his eyes. His heart skipped a beat as he registered the sight before him.

Julius stood before him, flashlight in hand and a look of confusion on his face.

"Davis? Are you alright?" He asked, concerned, then his gaze shifted over Donny's shoulder and his brows jumped up. "Why is your car parked so close to the door?"

Donny turned his eyes back behind him, and his brain almost shut down in disbelief. The Firebird was sitting steady right behind him. It's bumper no more than a foot from the back of his knees. Breathless, Donny gaped back at his employer; feeling as if he had just come out of a fevered dream. Heart hammering he struggled to articulate himself.

"Th-the car! It- it was-" he struggled before a thought struck him.

He couldn't tell Julius the truth – he wouldn't believe him – and the Firebird would almost certainly kill them both if he tried. He had to make something up, and fast.

"I needed to switch spots," He began, "But then there was that noise and the lights went out, it freaked me out and I lost control for a bit." He didn't like taking advantage of Sawyer's general gullibility and tendency to take things at face value, traits that his employees took constant advantage of to his and the establishment's detriment, but damn it if that thing thought he was a threat… this was for the best.

Julius stared at him for a long moment before sighing, "Must have been a bad transformer."

Donny let out a nervous chuckle at the unintended double meaning to that statement. He was simply glad that the Firebird seemed content to let them both live – for now.

"It's probably best that you be heading home, Donny," he continued absently, probably still in shock of the disturbance, "Get in your car, I'll get the door open."

Go home. In the car. The one that barely half a minute ago was trying to turn him into roadkill.

Naturally, Donny's first instinct was to get the Hell out of the shop and run for the hills; it was the smart thing to do. But that would mean leaving Sawyer to the mercy of the 'Firebird', and as much as the idea of dying petrified him, Donny knew he would be ashamed of himself later for it.

While Sawyer was using the pull chain to manually raise the bay door, Donny stepped to the side of the Firebird and set his hand on the hood, he could feel the vehicle vibrate aggressively under his palm, "I don't know what you are..." he whispered, casting a glance back to his boss to check that he wasn't paying attention, "Or what you were planning to do to me, but if you want to get out of here without causing a scene I can help you… but only if you promise not to kill anyone, deal?"

'Please don't kill me, please don't kill me, please don't kill me...'

The robot in disguise stopped vibrating. Donny held his breath, frightfully aware that his life – and that of his employer – was now on the table; a moment later the driver's side door swung open seemingly of it's own accord. Donny released his breath.

"Thanks."

Sorry for the wait. This is the latter (and most relevant) part of the next chapter that I have been stumbling through writers block over for almost a year now. The other part will come in time as I work on the succeeding chapters to get this story moving again. The Next chapter will formally introduce our protagonists.