Disclaimer: do not own Transformers.

Summary: Oneshot, G1. Thundercracker is haunted by the ghosts of the humans he's killed. They don't know that they're dead, and they want him to let them go home.

Author note: silvane91's bunny on tfbunnyfarm. Written for the tfbunnyfarm August contest. Also, according to Teletraan-1, Thundercracker is "not entirely committed to the Decepticon cause," and has some "sympathy for the humans they terrorize." I didn't really see this in the cartoons, but this aspect of his personality worked into the bunny. Hope you enjoy!

Haunted

If anyone asked Thundercracker (no one did, and even if they did, they'd never believe him), he would say that it all started with, of all things, a curse.

A human female had lost her all of offspring in one of the Decepticon attacks. She had cursed the Decepticons in front of several news cameras. Then, not heeding the other humans around her who begged her to stop what she was doing, she joined her children.

The curse meant nothing to the Decepticons, save to emphasize the humans' sheer helplessness. They cursed them because, really, they could do little else. You might get the occasional human who was just plain lucky, but, generally, if the Autobots weren't there to save them, chances were that they were going to get squished.

The Decepticons had watched the newscast with vague amusement. Some had warranted the event enough attention to mock the woman and humans in general.

Thundercracker walked out of the room…not perturbed, exactly, but feeling just a tad bit strange.

He wasn't the most zealous of Decepticons, but he regarded the grounded squishies with the proper amount of contempt. So he was sure that it wasn't sympathy that he was feeling.

The humans were weak and helpless…If the Autobots were not also on Earth, the Decepticons would have already wiped out the human race…

Then he thought that, when humans walked the earth they squished ants underneath their feet without noticing, let alone without a second thought. Earth was flattened and pummelled to make way for factories and homes, disregarding the life that was there before.

How were the Decepticons any different? On this planet, they were no less than gods.

With this in mind, he dismissed the strange feeling.

X x X

It was the middle of the night. Thundercracker had awoken for no apparent reason, and could not fall back into recharge. So he was idly walking down the corridors of the Decepticon base, scowling at the shadows. Their recent raids had been less than successful as of late, and the constant darkness was one of the higher-up's plans to conserve energy.

He was thinking about how the underwater base was more of an energy guzzler than anything that the humans came up with when he was distracted by a small sound. He stopped walking.

He was standing in the intersection of three corridors. The sound had come from the pathway to his left, leading into the storage rooms. It was enshrouded in shadow.

Another small sound reverberated through the corridors. It sounded like…crying.

He gaped. A tiny figure emerged from the shadows. It didn't seem to notice him, and its eyes were focused on the ground. It wasn't until that it was at Thundercracker's feet that it registered his presence, and stopped.

Its face turned up to look at him, and Thundercracker instantly felt something inside him chill, as if someone had stuck ice in his spark chamber.

The human was tiny, and looked young. A doll was clutched in its arms. Judging from the clothing, it looked to be female. But it was the eyes that immediately got his attention. They were like no human eyes he had seen before, eyes that no living being, human or otherwise, should possess. It was like looking into pure darkness, swirling with innumerable shadows, a glimpse of the abyss.

"Please," it said, clutching onto its toy, whole body trembling and voice high and wavering. Thundercracker felt himself start shaking slightly. Its eyes never left his optics. "Please…I want to go home."

Then it vanished.

"What the Pit—?" Thundercracker managed to say. Then he scoffed. "Nice try, 'Warp. What a new idea—usually you just push people down the stairs and go warp somewhere. You can come out now."

But the prankster did not answer. That was odd. Usually, Skywarp would be leaping gleefully at a successful prank.

Thundercracker strained his audios, listening for the distinctive noise that Skywarp made when using his 'special powers' inside the Decepticon base. It was a program authorized by Megatron and installed by some mech who was tired of the seeker's constant prank-and-warp and decided to put it in so that the victim could find the seeker and then pummel him to the ground. It didn't stop Skywarp, but still, it was useful.

But he didn't hear the sound. Skywarp still had to be around.

Thundercracker, muttering every curse word he knew, traversed the corridors, looking for the culprit. His search revealed nothing, save for a couple of lurking cassettes.

There was no one around who could have cast the hologram.

He felt his spark chill again.

Maybe…maybe he just needed to recharge.

X x X

"Please…I want to go home."

Thundercracker came out of his recharge with a start. Not again, he thought, getting up slightly.

How long had it been? Days, weeks? He didn't know.

He had first thought it was a trick. After that night…how long was it ago? He didn't know…After that night, he had cornered Skywarp, accusing him of the trick. Words were exchanged, and it came to blows, and they had been forced apart.

"What's the matter, TC?" Skywarp had asked mockingly. "You seein' humans in the middle of the night? What, your conscience catching up to ya? Always knew you were a human-loving glitch."

Thundercracker took another swing at him…then the rest of his memory got fuzzy from there.

For nights afterwards, as things escalated and more humans joined in, Thundercracker had clung to the belief that it was a trick. But for a prank of this magnitude, the whole earthen Decepticon army would have to be working together against him, and that was unlikely to the point of impossible. Still, he had watched the other Decepticons. Watched them carefully. Because if it wasn't some sort of trick, then…then…

He felt something cold touch his armour, so cold that it hurt, and he knew that the humans had surrounded him.

This was no trick.

He opened his optics. He had to. The…the imagesand the soundswere worse if he tried to ignore them. Better to face them up front.

The little girl was there, touching his elbow with one hand, and clutching her doll with the other.

"Please…" she said, voice quavering. She looked up at him, her eyes wide in fear. The shadows in her eyes swirled even more quickly. "Please…I want my mommy. I just want to go home. Please, please, please…"

"Go home," Thundercracker said tiredly, knowing that what he said wouldn't matter. "I ain't keeping you here, kid. Just go home."

But it was as though he hadn't said anything. The little girl continued her plea. Then…then like a lead-in to a song, a prelude to a chorus…the rest joined her.

They were everywhere. They surrounded him, they were touching him. Some, like the little girl, were whole, and save for the coldness of their flesh and the wrongness in their eyes, they looked like any other living humans. Others…others weren't. Others were missing limbs, slashed viciously, bleeding profusely and smearing their blood against his armour as they begged him to let them go.

They were humans; humans that he hadn't remembered at first but remembered now, and cursed himself for forgetting.

He had killed them.

"Please. I want to go home."

He told them to go home, but they couldn't hear him. They just surrounded him, begging.

"My children…please, someone's got to take care of my children…"

"Why are you doing this?"

"You monster!"

"You'll never get away with this!"

But they did. They did get away with it.

"The Autobots will come! They'll save us," one human assured the rest.

The Autobots did come, but they came too late.

The sounds and the cries escalated. They railed against him, beat against him as though they were chained to him, and he could only look at them angrily and desperately.

"Please…please."

"Don't hurt us."

"Why are you doing this?"

"Let us go."

"I want my parents."

He didn't tell the other Decepticons. He couldn't tell them. They already thought that he was a weak-minded 'Con. He didn't want to be known as weak-minded and crazy.

X x X

He wasn't crazy. It was everyone else who was crazy.

Why couldn't they see them?!

They appeared everywhere. They were in the dimly-lit corridors, in the large mech-filled rooms, and even in the ravaged battlegrounds, looking up at him as he took to the skies, lips moving with their pleas for release, saying words that drilled into his very core.

Some were whole; others were injured and cut and bleeding, limping along as they followed him and begged for their release.

No one noticed the bodies. No one noticed the eyes. How could they not notice?!

And even if they did not appear directly in front of him, they were always with him. They were the shadows at the corner of his view screens, those tiny errant sounds that his audios picked up, the unreasonable moments of deathly chill.

He didn't recharge. He couldn't recharge, because it was then that the humans' cries reached deafening proportions.

It wasn't his fault.

Why didn't they go haunt someone else? Megatron, for ordering their execution, or Prime, for failing to do what he promised to do…or…or…or so many others.

But no; they were stuck with him. They were chained to him.

Because it was he who had pulled the trigger.

"Please…please, let us go home."

They were still crying, still pleading with him to do what he could not do. But now their cries had no words. Their united pleas were the epitome of sorrow, of fear, of anger. It was the chorus of the dead, the endless noise that stayed in his processor long after the humans gave him some peace. One little voice sliced through the cacophony.

"Please, I want to go home…"

"Then go home!" he yelled at them. "Go home! Go home!" he yelled, taking whatever was nearby and throwing it at the ghosts.

He didn't notice how Skywarp and Starscream came in, restraining him and demanding what the Pit he was doing. He didn't notice how he was being forced into stasis. He just noticed that the humans were gone.

But he knew that they would be back.

X x X

They were there. They were always there.

X x X

Another day, another raid.

And still, they were there.

When he heard Megatron's signal to retreat, he did not heed it. Instead, he was looking at the cluster of pale, bloodied, cut and mutilated faces on the ground, all upturned to look at him. Their lips moved with their pleas and cries, and though he should have been too high up for their words to reach him, their chorus drilled into his very frame.

"I'm sorry," he said softly. "I'm sorry. I'll take you home."

He couldn't feel anything. He didn't feel himself activate his blaster and proceed to shoot the other Decepticons. He didn't feel himself get shot at in turn.

As he plummeted from the skies, the chorus ended.

The humans were silent.

When he came to, seconds or hours after impacting the ground, he didn't really care, he found that they were in his arms, clothed in white, and felt warm against his armour. They didn't look injured anymore, and they weren't bleeding. All of them were whole again. Their eyes were closed, and they looked to be sleeping.

He didn't say anything. He didn't even move.

He didn't want to wake them.

X x X

It was the middle of the night, and Prowl went to the holding cells to check on Thundercracker. The Decepticon was being held there until they figured out exactly what to do with him. When it came to the subject of Thundercracker, Red Alert was on the verge of crashing and Prowl's logic processors felt strained.

Thundercracker wasn't the brightest of Decepticons, nor was he the most loyal, but they still had expected some sort of fight out of him. The relatively docile nature of their Decepticon prisoner made everyone wary, to say the least. The fact that the Decepticons showed no inclination of recovering their captured soldier made them even more so.

Was it all a ploy? A trick to get inside the Autobot base? Red Alert was certain that there was something sinister going on behind the seeker's easy surrender, but some of the other Autobots, including Prowl, were not as sure.

Prowl didn't know exactly what was going on, but he did know that Thundercracker had been behaving erratically for months, and though the Decepticons stooped down to some dirty acts in the name of conquest, Prowl didn't think they would let one Decepticon open fire on and damageall the others just to bring down the Autobots' guard.

Thundercracker had…had shot at the other Decepticons like a mech possessed. They, in turn, had shot him down.

After they had chased off the other Decepticons, the Autobots had surrounded the grounded seeker and ordered his surrender. He had gotten up very slowly and held his arms against himself, as though he was cradling something. There was no jeering, no sarcasm, nothing. In fact, he had not said anything until they had repeated their order of surrender.

Until the day he returned to the Matrix, Prowl was certain that he would never forget the look in Thundercracker's optics when he shushed them, saying, "They're sleeping." He had kept his arms in that position all the way to the Ark.

The whole situation…didn't make sense.

Maybe it was a Decepticon trick.

So even though Red Alert had a constant video feed on the seeker, Prowl went down to the prisoner cells precisely every two hours in order to reassure himself that Thundercracker was actually there.

Prowl looked in the cell. Thundercracker was lying on the berth, his optics half-dimmed and staring at the ceiling. He gave no indication that he knew that Prowl was there. Prowl started to leave.

"They're not here anymore," Thundercracker said suddenly. If Prowl had not been as disciplined as he was, he would have jumped.

He turned to Thundercracker, who was still staring at the ceiling. "They're not here anymore," Thundercracker repeated quietly, as if he were speaking to himself. His tone was flat and unemotional.

It was the first time since he was brought to the Ark that the seeker had spoken.

"Who are you speaking of?" Prowl asked finally.

"The humans," Thundercracker answered, shifting position so that he rested on his chassis, looking at the wall opposite to Prowl. "They're not here anymore."

Prowl was surprised. The prison's walls were impenetrable to scans, so how would he know if humans were there or not? Which humans were he speaking of? And since when did a Decepticon think about humans?

So many questions, and the haunted look that surrounded Thundercracker's frame answered none of them.

"Well," Prowl said finally. "Maybe they went home."

"Yes," Thundercracker said, something that sounded almost like hope edging into his voice. "Maybe."

X x X

It was the middle of the night. Skywarp had awoken for no apparent reason, and could not fall back into recharge. So he was idly walking down the corridors of the Decepticon base, absently thinking that at least his insomnia would interrupt another's recharge cycle.

It had been a few weeks since Thundercracker's betrayal and capture by the Autobots, and things had been kind of dull. The seeker had been acting funny for months. He had been yelling at the air, throwing things around, muttering to no one in particular, and recoiling at the slightest shift of shadows. At first Skywarp had had a grudging admiration for whoever was making him see things, but then all the Decepticons quickly found out that this was no prank.

Soundwave told Megatron that the seeker's frequency was fine, and even the Constructicons, complete with their obsessive "We're builders, not medics!" credo, had given Thundercracker a clean bill of health.

They couldn't figure out what was wrong with him.

Ah, well. The seeker might as well stay glitched. Even if Thundercracker hadn't opened fire on the surrounding Decepticons, owing to the severity of his glitch, and owing to the fact that he wasn't that useful of a fighter anymore, Megatron would probably not order his recovery anytime soon. Starscream had a few choice words to say to that, but that was more to annoy Megatron than any real attempt at getting the seeker back. In the Decepticon base, it was a unanimous sentiment that even though they lost a soldier, at least they managed to pass off the burden to someone else.

But now with Thundercracker gone, Skywarp needed a new victim for his upcoming prank. Maybe he could figure out a way to push Starscream down an elevator shaft…the Air Commander probably wouldn't sustain that many injuries…

As Skywarp idly planned how to get Starscream to unwittingly walk into his little trap, he was distracted by a small sound. He stopped walking.

He was standing in the intersection of three corridors. The sound had come from the pathway to his left, leading into the storage rooms. It was enshrouded in shadow.

Another small sound reverberated through the corridors.

Then a small rubber ball emerged from the shadows, bouncing lightly once in the light and rolling to a stop just inches from Skywarp's feet.

Skywarp grinned. One of Soundwave's glitches had probably picked up the thing—they had a bad habit of doing that. Maybe he could use it as bait for a future prank...

He bent down to pick it up.

Then there was a movement at the edges of the view-screens. He straightened quickly, and gaped.

A tiny human walked calmly from the shadows. It didn't seem to notice him, and its eyes were focused on the ball at his feet. It just walked to the ball, and picked it up.

"What the Pit—?" Skywarp said. That got the human's attention. Its face turned up to look at him, and Skywarp instantly felt something inside him chill, as if someone had stuck ice in his spark chamber.

The human was tiny, and looked young. Judging from the clothing, it looked to be male. But it was the eyes that immediately got Skywarp's attention. They were like no human eyes he had seen before, eyes that no living being, human or otherwise, should possess. It was like looking into pure darkness, swirling with innumerable shadows, a glimpse of the abyss.

"Please," it said, clutching onto its toy, whole body trembling and voice high and wavering. Skywarp felt himself start shaking slightly. Its eyes never left his optics. "Please…I want to go home."