Chapter Text
“Alright,” Sari said, pulling her phone from her pocket and tapping away at the buttons. “I told Optimus that we’re doing group therapy here, and that he can’t bother us no matter what. Prowl is out on a nature walk, and Ratchet is off being a grouch somewhere. We’ve got all the time we need.”
Bumblebee’s processor was already thumping irritably, jagged flashes of purple and grey and crimson stabbing him in the back of the optics. “Sari, no offense, but you have the world’s tiniest phone,” he said, reaching up to rub his temples. “I don’t think pictures smaller than my pinky finger are gonna be any—”
“Well, duh—why do you think I made sure we had privacy?” Sari interrupted with the kind of smugness that only an eight year old could manage. “For an idiot made of technology, you’re really not up to date on the newest gadgets, are you?”
She proudly pressed a final button on her phone, and the television that Bumblebee had “borrowed” a few months back—apparently—illuminated with a widescreen snapshot of Prowl hanging upside down in a tree. Bits of grass and leaves blurred the edges of the photo, and Bumblebee snickered, putting two and two together in an instant.
“Tried to sneak a meditation photo, didja?” he said amusedly.
Sari giggled. “I took this way back when I first met you guys, cut me a break! I was really excited to meet you guys!”
“Oh, is this the day I broke the swingset in the park?” Bulkhead said, dropping heavily to the floor with a loud thump. Then he glanced nervously at Bumblebee, who sprawled on the couch with a quiet groan. “You remember that, don’t you?”
“Of course I do, iron-head,” Bumblebee said. “That was, like, two years ago.”
“Just making sure.”
“I’m an amnesiac, not an idiot.”
“I was just making sure!”
“Guys!” Sari interrupted. “Bee, you clearly have a headache, so maybe don’t yell? I think that’s the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do, actually.”
Bumblebee snorted, trying to shake his attention away from Blitzwing. Thinking about the triple changer had done very little to restore his memories, but based on how sharply his helm was pounding, his processor was full of information about the face-swapping Decepticon.
The collage of photos that Blitzwing had sent were still on his datapad—oddly enough, Bumblebee couldn’t bring himself to delete them. Sure, they brought about the sensation of a hot knife stabbing him between the eyes, but looking at them made Bumblebee feel oddly warm. Safe, comforted, as though a significant piece of his spark was truly residing in the collection of pixels.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Bulkhead said, his voice hushed as he leaned toward Bumblebee. “These headaches you’re having seem way worse than before. Did something—”
“I found a couple of pictures on my datapad and I started remembering some chunks of stuff,” Bumblebee said quickly, figuring that a half-truth was still better than a full-lie. “But there, uh, there weren’t a ton of them, so I figured I’d ask around.”
“You kicked my door down,” Bulkhead said.
“Gee, I’m sorry. It’s almost like I want my memories back or something! I—”
“Bee!” Sari interrupted once again. “Stop getting worked up or I’m gonna tell Ratchet that you don’t feel good. Now, February, right? The… fifth or something, that’s when you go blank, right?”
“The third, sometime in the afternoon,” Bumblebee said, wincing as he forced himself to sit more upright, keeping the television in clear view. “But you can skip ahead to, like, March if you want to. Primus knows Optimus has already drilled the first half of February into me.”
Sari clicked her tongue and swiped through a few images, settling on one timestamped for March 9th. Bulkhead laughed, covering his mouth when Bumblebee winced and grabbed his helm.
“I was here for this,” Bumblebee said through gritted dentae, the image swimming somewhere between the television and his thoughts.
“You remember?” Sari said excitedly.
“No,” Bumblebee sighed. “But… I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like, it feels like I’m trying to remember a dream that I forgot or something. I get some chunks of it, then it all fizzles into static. Way more headaches, though.”
Bumblebee cracked his optics open to look at the picture—a shaky shot of Ratchet, apparently shouting at a young, bored-looking human. Sari was obviously laughing as she took the photo, given how out of focus it was, but Bumblebee could just barely piece together a few pieces of corrupted data.
“Ratchet was flooring it down the street since someone had just called an ambulance a few minutes ago,” Bulkhead reminisced with a small grin. “Then this one crossed the street right in front of him, and Ratchet nearly ran the poor guy over.”
“It was his own fault, not looking both ways,” Sari said knowingly.
“Ratchet complained about pedestrian laws for hours after that,” Bulkhead chuckled. “Remember how he said he was going to host that presentation at town hall about it?”
“I totally forgot about that!” Sari said. “Bee, I’m pretty sure he was actually trying to get you to look all that stuff up for him, since he said he had other things to do.”
“Of course he did,” Bumblebee said, rolling his optics. “As if I’d ever do that.”
“Well, since he never had the presentation, clearly you didn’t research anything,” Bulkhead said.
Despite the deepening ache in his processor, Bumblebee felt his face lift into a thin smile. It was a strange feeling, seeing Sari and Bulkhead take a trip down memory lane while Bumblebee watched from the outside. But strangely enough, it was comforting, and for a moment, Bumblebee felt a little bit less out of the loop.
“Are you remembering anything?” Sari asked gently, resting a tiny hand on one of Bumblebee’s tires.
He shrugged, closing his optics for a moment. “Like I said, it’s like trying to remember a dream,” he said. “But there’s something there. The colors and feelings—I feel like they’re a little more familiar.”
“That’s amazing!” Bulkhead said ecstatically. “Sari, show him that basketball game we played downtown, remember the one? With—”
“Optimus, yeah!” Sari said brightly, swiping rapidly through more pictures. “I got some great shots of that one!”
“Aw, come on, I missed Prime playing basketball?” Bumblebee whined, opening his optics once again.
Against all odds, this seemed to at least be doing a littlebit of good. He had no recollection of any such game, but he could almost recall the sensation of asphalt scraping under his pedes, the sound of Bulkhead shouting at him to pass the ball. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Bumblebee doubted Sari had the memories he was truly curious about—none of the Autobots seemed aware of his apparent relationship with Blitzwing, and Bumblebee intended to keep it that way. But at least he wouldn’t be completely in the dark anymore.
“And this one was taken right after,” Sari said excitedly, swiping to an image of Bumblebee in mid-transformation, just inches away from running face-first into a lamppost. “You swore that you were never going to race another guy in a supercar again after that.”
“Did I win, at least?” Bumblebee said.
“Barely,” Bulkhead laughed. “By an inch or two at most. You didn’t stop bragging for a month.”
“Well, get ready for me to brag about that again, because that is awesome!” Bumblebee said, admiring the body lines of the Ferrari he’d apparently taken on head-to-head. “Look at that thing! I beat that! Those have 550 horsepower minimum!”
“Here we go again,” Bulkhead groaned.
“I earned my right to gloat, thank you very much,” Bumblebee huffed, his processor pounding as fragments of pride washed over him, the exhilaration of a race he couldn’t remember brushing against the edge of his spark. “I’m getting a lot from that picture, actually. I’m all jazzed up just thinking about it.”
“It was a big moment for you,” Bulkhead said. “Maybe important memories are easier for you to remember?”
“Ugh, you sound like Prowl.”
“It’s possible! His weird meditation thing worked a little bit too, didn’t it?”
“Whatever,” Bumblebee said, dancing away from that subject as eloquently as possible.
“The only bummer about that race is that Prime totally banned you from street racing after that,” Sari said glumly. “But maybe if you don’t tell him that you remember being banned, we can—”
“Sari, no,” Bulkhead said firmly. “Street racing is dangerous! And the last thing Bumblebee needs is more head trauma.”
“But—!”
“No.”
“Buzzkill,” Sari muttered, though her grin didn’t falter.
Bumblebee was nearing his limit for the day, his processor fuzzy and dumb from constantly trying to dredge up missing memories. They had made it all the way through June, and while Bumblebee’s helm still felt empty as ever, his spark felt warmer, more secure. Emotions from these forgotten moments still clung firmly to his spark, and in Bumblebee’s view, that was a victory.
Only one more thing to try, he thought nervously, shuffling upright.
“Do you have any pictures of fights with the Cons?” he asked, trying to sound as casual as possible.
Bulkhead turned around, cocking his helm. “Why?”
“I—they’re really tense, you know?” Bumblebee said, scrambling for any explanation that wasn’t ‘I want to see Blitzwing.’ “Emotional stuff seems to be doing the trick, and what’s more emotional than kicking Con tailpipe? Plus, what if I learned some awesome new fighting move and now I forgot it? I won’t stand for that!”
“Alright, alright, hold on,” Sari said, waving her free hand dismissively as the other scrolled through her image gallery. “I think there’s a few, just give me a second—pulling out my phone during fights isn’t usually my top priority, you know.”
“I would hope not,” Bulkhead said.
“A-ha!” Sari said, tapping triumphantly on her phone and casting a large, very blurry photo to the television. “This was back in August. Lugnut and Blitzwing were skulking in the woods, and Prowl accidentally bumped into them on one of his nature walks.”
“I’ve never seen Prime respond to a distress signal that quickly,” Bulkhead said.
Bumblebee let out a low whistle. “What were they doing?”
“Prowl tried to eavesdrop on them, but all he heard was them whining about being overworked,” Sari said with a small giggle. “Then Lugnut started stomping around and knocked over a bird’s nest, and Prowl went bananas. Of course.”
“We got there just in time,” Bulkhead said. “It was crazy. Leaves everywhere, tree trunks getting uprooted and thrown around, things were on fire, all that fun stuff.”
“I hid in Prime’s trailer when you all left,” Sari said proudly. “But then he made me hide behind a tree. Got some great shots, though!”
Bumblebee couldn’t have agreed more. His spark was racing just looking at the photos. Most of them were out of focus and obscured by falling branches, but the blurs of color alone were enough to send adrenaline pumping through Bumblebee’s cabling.
“Look at this one—that’s Prowl, right on top of Lugnut, stabbing him in the eye!” Sari said. “Oh, he was mad. Lugnut, I mean. He didn’t go blind, but his aim was way off after that.”
“Bummer that he got it fixed,” Bulkhead sighed.
“This one, too—Bee, you’ll love this!” Sari opened the next picture, and Bumblebee’s spark did a backflip, a thousand invisible hammers pummeling his processor.
Photo-Bumblebee was merely a yellow smudge, partially out of frame, but Blitzwing was standing at his full height with flames bursting from his cannons. Bumblebee’s spark squeezed as he sat up straighter, peering at the image in awe.
He attacked me, he thought. That’s not very boyfriend-ly, is it?
“What happened in this one?” he asked, trying to ignore the thick crack in his voice.
“It was awesome,” Sari said before Bulkhead could speak. “I was so close to it, my eyebrows burned off a bit! You and Blitzwing were going at it, punching and scratching and running around like crazy—”
“I tried to help you out, but Blitzwing, um, hit me kinda hard,” Bulkhead chimed in.
“Ha! You mean he knocked you unconscious.”
“Sari!”
“I got this picture at the perfect moment,” Sari continued, disregarding Bulkhead’s indignance. “Three-face here turned away from Bulkhead, cannons down, and fired this huge sheet of fire at you. And I don’t know how you did it, but you did this awesome backflippy dodge move, and he completely flubbed his aim! You didn’t even get a scratch on you!”
Bumblebee’s spark drummed in his chest so violently that he feared it may pop out at any second. His processor spasmed painfully, a hiss of crimson static morphing and solidifying into a memory.
Bumblebee looked toward Sari nervously. Blitzwing’s gaze met his own, visor flashing with understanding, and his cannons clicked a few degrees to the left, directly away from Bumblebee.
Flames arched dangerously through the air, and Bumblebee faked a dodge, evading an attack that hadn’t been fired in his direction.
“Holy slag,” Bumblebee said aloud without thinking.
“I know, right?” Sari said excitedly. “He totally missed! Whatever you did there, you gotta figure out how you did it, because it was so cool. They ran right after that—I think Megatron called them or something, I don’t know. You said that they got scared of your ‘wicked moves,’ but none of us bought that.”
Bumblebee stared at the television for a few more long moments, jaw slightly slack with disbelief. He remembered something. Blitzwing had protected him in the heat of battle, quite literally, and they had both escaped unscathed.
“Listen,” Bumblebee said slowly, swallowing hard. “Um—I think that’s all I can do for one day, if that’s okay.”
Bulkhead turned around immediately, staring at Bumblebee with concern. “You alright, little buddy?” he said anxiously.
“Yeah! Yeah, I’m fine,” Bumblebee said, becoming acutely aware of how intense his headache had become. “Note to self—high-stress situations are good for memories but bad for my processor. Kinda feels like someone’s been splitting logs with my brain.”
“Did you remember something?” Sari said, her eyes going wide.
“Sorta,” Bumblebee mumbled, closing his optics as scarlet fireworks exploded behind them. “This was great, guys, really. I wanna do this again. I just… I need a break, if that’s okay.”
“That’s fine,” Bulkhead said quickly, scooping Sari from her perch on the berth and shutting off the television. “Just rest up, okay? Let us know if you need anything. Do you want some oil?”
“No, I’m good,” Bumblebee breathed, his thoughts focused entirely on his datapad. “Thanks, though. See you later?”
“See you later,” Sari confirmed, waving as she emerged from the crook of Bulkhead’s elbow. “Don’t die!”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Bumblebee chuckled. “Thanks again, really. This has been super helpful—you have no idea.”
Bulkhead smiled warmly, turning off the overhead light as he left the room, the door shutting behind him with a quiet snick.
Bumblebee stared at the door, waiting impatiently for Bulkhead’s heavy footfalls to vanish.
The very moment silence overtook the room, he threw his pillow across the room, practically falling on top of his hidden datapad as he rushed to unlock it.
Ping.
Blitzwing lifted his helm, narrowing his optics at his datapad as the screen lit up, casting a soft glow upon the room.
He hardly dared to believe it. But as he picked up his datapad and unlocked it, the message filled his spark with hope and immeasurable relief.
It was Bumblebee. The little Autobot, against all odds, had decided not to block him, instead sending a single message to Blitzwing’s public inbox:
teach me how 2 encrypt messages
Blitzwing didn’t intend to laugh, but he did anyway, chuckling quietly to himself as he deleted the message and opened an encrypted chat.
You’re going to get me in trouble if you keep sending public messages.
then teach me how to encrypt them, stupid
A weight seemed to lift from Blitzwing’s chest, and he took a moment to hold his datapad to his chest, breathing deeply for the first time in what felt like ages. He’d been tormenting himself for hours now, worried that his overreaction to Bumblebee’s request for photos had been a catastrophic mistake.
Instead, it seemed that Bumblebee believed him—even if only a little bit. Blitzwing drew another cool breath before lifting his datapad once again, trying not to type too frantically.
Strangely, this felt a lot like the beginning of their relationship. Blitzwing didn’t want to seem too eager.
When and where?
Bumblebee took a few minutes to respond, and Blitzwing vaguely wondered if he was having the same feelings—the insistent butterflies in his tanks, the indescribable nervousness of falling in love. It may be the second time for Blitzwing, but it was the first for Bumblebee, and Blitzwing was determined to do it properly.
Bumblebee deserved it.
same place, 1 am tonite. dont be late or im tattling, lol
I’ll be five minutes early, then.
Blitzwing waited for Bumblebee to read the message before deleting the conversation, quietly mourning its loss as he had so many times before. But finally, the sadness of hiding their conversations was laced with comfort, a soft excitement at the prospect of seeing Bumblebee in person. Hearing him talk, watching him move, touching his smooth plating, admiring his ability to chatter about absolutely nothing.
Blitzwing shut off his datapad, biting his glossa to fight down a smile.
He had his Bumblebee back—even if only a small part of him. And he was ready to earn the rest.