The gray sky opened and water fell.
It amazed him sometimes how easily he'd become accustomed to rain. Looking up into the downpour, he remembered the acid baths that periodically bathed the silver surface of his homeworld, imagining the cool liquid trickling down his face as the melting rivulets of his own blue paint.
But while the acid rain of Cybertron fell close to the processing plants in industrial sectors, condensed from toxic plumes of smoke cast off in manufacturing, here, rain fell everywhere. Even here, where the dry land blew with scarring winds and dust nearly every hour of everyday, over rocks and crags and depthless valleys, even here, occasionally, a driving rain could fall.
Looking out across the broken, shattered land, made this way by time and something the inhabitants deemed nature, which was just another name for time and happenstance and luck, he felt the world creeping up to claim him, noting his interest, willing to show him something to keep his attention.
Wind swept at him, lifting dirt and whirling leaves traveled from some far off forest, and through the heavy clouds, a crack of kinetic electricity lit the heavens and the earth, making him grin slightly to himself as its strike echoed out across the rain-swept landscape.
The violence of the storm struck at him with endless vigor, but standing out within the tempest, he knew that the ire of the squall would die away, leaving the land washed clean, leaving behind a hundred million drops of dewy resin that would sparkle in the reborn light of Sol, reflecting the blue of the sky, the golden tan of the broken desert hills, and even the movement of the occasional passerby, unconcerned as to whether that bystander might be a soggy hiker continuing on his trek, or a slightly damp alien warrior walking through the motions of war.
Rain did not care who it fell upon, and shone as brightly on the petals of a lily as on the sightless optics of a dying soldier far from home.
A cold wind struck a sensor panel directly, sending a shiver of data down into his processors, which quickly calculated that temperature drop. It seemed sudden, chaotic, and indicative of the new world. The drops of rain began to congeal, stopped plummeting to the ground in righteous races toward the unknown, and began to float, to drift, to wander through the skies as if lost amongst each other.
The raindrops had moved in a chorus, a drove of like-minded water hurling itself at the same objective, down to the same fate. But as the wind blew arctic and the world grew wintry, snowflakes were given life, where they roamed the world, wandering from one another, created and driven by harsh airstreams, falling without purpose in unforeseeable patterns, but as when the rainstorm died, so too would be born a vista of unexpected magnificence, cold and stark and white from horizon to horizon, reflecting the light of the star in a blanket of harsh, perfect, chilled uniformity.
And here, in the strange formations of weather patterns, was the eternal truth behind the conflict that set the people of his world at each others' throats.
Rain fell together as one, a thousand drops that made up the downpour, none more interesting nor individual nor important than any other, and at the storm's end, they created a beauty that was mutable and chaotic.
Snow fell in a whirl of a thousand flakes, in every direction, wondrous, lethal, individual, and when the clouds moved away, a wonderland of endless sameness awaited, blanking out the mars that lie beneath the surface.
This was the divergence that forever set him on the edges of the conflict. He knew the wonder that awaited the end of the hurricane, at the end of the constraint of falling water; a thousand differing, twinkling specks of light and life.
But throughout the blizzard, a snowflake is free.
Here, in the blizzard, he chose to be the snowflake.
Thundercracker looked down from his position on the hilltop, brushing the white powder from his face and optics. Transforming, he took to the air, losing himself in the flurry, into the colorless void, standing out against the world, individual, choosing, free.