AN: Really short chapter, written for this pic http :/jazzthetiger. deviantart. com/art /Petting-A-KittyBee-283765462 (mines the spaces) I don't know if I'll go very far with this fic. I have such a short attention span DX

It had been six months since Bumblebee had disappeared.

He had gone out for a drive one night after a particularly heated argument with Prowl to cool off, and hadn't been seen since.

When morning came and found the minibot still missing from the base, the Earth team began to worry.

By late evening, the remaining four autobots had searched half of Detroit between them.

After 2 months, they stopped scanning for his spark signature, and began searching creeks and ditches for his body instead.

None searched harder than Prowl, the ninja bot felt guilty for Bumblebee's disappearance. If he had simply walked away from the argument, it would not have escalated into a screaming match, and Bee would never have left the base that night.

As it was, Bumblebee had been gone for six months, and they had all accepted in their own ways that Bumblebee was as good as offline. Except for Prowl, he stubbornly refused to give up hope and give into that line of thinking. As long as there was no evidence of his offlining, there was still hope he was still alive somewhere.

What Prowl found next changed the way he felt about that.

Prowl was glumly walking out from the base, about to start a patrol when a glimmer of a familiar shade of yellow caught his optic. It was outside the base's gates, under the shade of a tree, low hanging branches obscured it from view.

Curious, and with no small amount of hope, Prowl approached. He started a little when it moved, it was definitely alive. With swift but silent steps, Prowl closed the distance to the gates. His spark leapt in joy as he was able to distinguish Bumblebee's silhouette under the shade of the tree. He excitedly commed the team leader, Optimus Prime to tell him the good news. They'd finally found Bumblebee, and he was alive, Prowl could apologize and make things right.

"Prime! I've found Bumblebee-" Prowl suddenly cut off his sentence.

Something was wrong.

Bumblebee was crouched low to the ground.

Then he noticed the gleaming chain wrapped around the tree, trailing up to Bumblebee and linked to a collar around his neck.

A long yellow tail curled around Bumblebee's pedes, twitching restlessly amongst the leaves.

Cat-like ears where bumblebee's stubby little horns used to be were flattened against his helm.

Bumblebee was watching him with wide, alarmed optics.

He was the picture of a cornered animal.

"Prowl? Is he…" Prime's concerned voice crackled through his comm link

"He's online" Prowl hastily replied "… but there's something wrong, something's been done to him" Prowl was pacing now, Bumblebee's wary optics tracked his every movement.

"What is it? Is he injured?"

"No. He's been… modified, not just physically, but in the processor I think, you just have to see him to know what I mean."

"Where are you? I'll help you bring him back home"

"I'm at the gates"

"… What!" Prime, thoroughly surprised, walked out to the front entrance to see Prowl across their expansive industrial yard, crouched out near the gates, seemingly observing a tree. He called Ratchet and Bulkhead out from their activities and together the three of them joined Prowl at the gates.

Prowl had crouched under the shade of the tree with Bumblebee in an attempt to coax him out, but the minibot would have none of it, backing away as far as the chain would allow. Upon seeing the rest of the team approach, Bumblebee began to hiss and snarl, occasionally lashing out with clawed fingers, leaving Prowl no choice but to back away. He didn't want to stress Bumblebee out any more than he had to.

Prowl sighed in defeat, shoulders slumping, there was no sign of recognition in Bee's faceplates, it was as though Bumblebee's processor had been replaced with the relatively primitive mind of a cat.

Prime and Ratchet knelt down beside him, gazing into the shadows, Bulkhead peered anxiously over their shoulders and spotted Bumblebee's yellow plating.

"Bumblebee!" He shouted happily, the sudden noise causing Bumblebee to yowl in terror and thrash against his bindings.

That's when the kneeling bots saw his modifications and his strange behaviour. Prime gasped in shock and Ratchet cursed.

Ratchet looked at Bumblebee again and swore some more "When I find out who reprogrammed him, I'm going to reconfigure them into a toaster!"

Prowl looked at the medic expectantly, hoping the other would be able to explain the minibot's situation better, he wasn't disappointed.

"Someone has reprogrammed him into a pet drone" Ratchet began, addressing the younger bots surrounding him "Normally drones are manufactured specifically for being pets, and some are occasionally reprogrammed, but never have I heard of a mech being reprogrammed into one… I would have thought our processors are too complex for this sort of thing to work… I don't know how extensive his reprogramming is, or if his memory banks have been wiped… and Primus... I... I don't know if I can reverse it either" Ratchet finished sombrely.

"Poor Bumblebee" Bulkhead murmured sadly "Even if doc-bot managed to fix him, I don't think he could live with knowing what he was. He would never be the same bot again"

The others silently agreed with him, this was a punishment worse than death for Bumblebee. It was as though whoever planned this wanted the yellow minibot to suffer as much as possible.

"We need to get him back to the med-bay so I can be sure he's not injured, and find out what's been done to him" Ratchet said breaking the thick silence.

The rest nodded and watched as Prowl once again tried to get a hold of Bumblebee.

The cat-bot yowled and darted away, breath hissing out as he hyperventilated, being surrounded by so many large and imposing bots had his electro-magnetic field flaring with terror. The ninja recoiled as he felt Bumblebee's oppressive presence brush against his own.

"Ratchet, you need to knock him out with your EMP generator, he's too frightened to be cooperative" He told the medic as he moved out of range.

The old red and white ambulance did just that, Bumblebee collapsed limply to the ground in stasis as soon as the EMP blast hit him. Prime was quick to move forward and pick the limp mech up bridal style, whilst Bulkhead easily snapped the chain that had bound him to the tree.

They took him back to the base in a heavy silence, they had found their comrade's body, but the rest of him seemed to have been lost.

Much to Ratchet's relief, Bumblebee was unharmed physically, and his memory banks were relatively untouched, save for a small bit of complex encrypted coding which prevented Bumblebee from accessing them. He didn't have the expertise to decode and remove it. He needed help and the only way to get that would be to contact Cybertron, there was a chance Cybertron's top scientists Perceptor and Wheeljack could help.