“Going steady!? Are you crazy!?”
TC peppered an encroaching Unmade with rapid-fire slugs handily, with minimal attention.
“You’re a ten ton colossus! You’ve got metal where your lips should be! You’ve got a literal heart of iron!” he exclaimed, throwing a hand to the side in emphasis, which handily batted away an insectoid aggressor.
“So?” demanded Skywarp, sounding surly.
“So!? So, haven’t you ever seen King Kong? Where the giant monkey goes on a rampage, damsel in hand, and it’s a disaster for everyone? Do you want to end up like King Kong?”
Warp made a sound like a haughty sniff while grabbing two Eldritch abominations by their tentacled maws and smashing them together with a ‘squelch’. He dropped them.
“I haven’t even seen that one. Besides, he’s handsome. I’m handsome. We’re both handsome. It’s not the way you think it is. If you’d seen us before, he’d had this wit to him, and this…courtly mannerism. An air of leadership. It was impressive. You would’ve thought so, if you’d seen it. We both know you buckle like a seatbelt in front of a charismatic leader. It’s like…part of your entire thing.”
During Skywarp’s monologue, three black beetle monsters with enormous horns attempted to flank Thundercracker, who clapped a stomp against the deck of the ship like a cannonball. The resounding shockwave sent the beetle-strosities flopping onto their backs, and he rewarded them each with a liberal peppering of machine gun fire. Their soft underbellies swelled and burst.
“That is not my entire thing,” he snapped, face plates shifting in irritation. His optics narrowed. “My entire thing is way more complicated than that. I have a dog, you know. An entire dog. I’m trying to put him through college - that’s why I’m writing a screenplay, and why I’ve got the entire thing going with the unethically sourced tuna scheme. I’ve been watching a load of shows, and I’ve been learning a ton about schemes. By the time I’m done, I’ll have schemed Buster halfway through college! And where will you be? Masquerading as some purple haired floozy on the arm of a fleshbag whose helmet looks like a beak?”
A rhinoceros, or something like one, plowed into Thundercracker’s open grip; he wrapped one servo around its neck, pivoted his hips, and threw the thing over his shoulder into some kind of mutant spider-monkey of considerable size and bulk. They both spilled overboard with a cacophony of shrieks and snorts.
“That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” demanded Warp, popping a shot over TC’s shoulder that burst the entirety of a dark slime like a balloon. Black ink spattered ‘Cracker’s back. “You know, we’ve been through a lot together. I thought you’d support me in this. Can’t you just support me in this? I’d support you, if it were you.”
Thundercracker considered this with a ‘hmm’.
“...would you?”
Skywarp nodded, seizing an odd looking bat-thing out of the air and crushing its head like an overripe tomato.
“You bet I would.”
“Well, maybe I’m overreacting,” Thundercracker admitted, relenting. His shoulders loosened a little, just in time for a spider with a fifteen foot circumference to leap onto his back, tightening six legs around his chassis, and rearing back the other two to punch into his gorget. “IT’S- JUST- THAT-”
Skywarp surged forward, grabbing the thing by its two reared limbs and whip-thwacking forward. It rattled the beast right off of TC, which freed it up for an overhand lasso-swing to shotput throw. A dissipating screech sailed away into the distance as the monster traced through its parabolic arc.
“...thanks. It’s just that, it all seemed a little ridiculous. We were just fighting our way through an Autobot mess-around, I’m adopting a dog, and then the next thing I know, you’re out on a date?”
“TC,” stated Warp. “I’m ancient. I can date if I want to. I think you’re overcomplicating this.”
“Maybe I am,” he admitted.
Something erupted out of the deck between them: an octopus whose skin was an oozing black chased with crimson lines that seemed to move and shift. It began to spider crawl towards Skywarp, whose optics locked on Thundercracker’s, similar to the way one might look at their friend over the shoulder of a rather unpleasant conversational partner at a party when they’re looking for a way out. TC nodded. They both lurched forward, launched from their pedes, and body checked the octopus into a Cybertronian sandwich. It flattened out into a sort of mollusk naan bread, but didn’t pop.
They each stepped back, extended a servo into the Unmade, and loosed a burst.
It erupted like a water balloon, splashing ichor about like a sprinkler whose lines had cleared.
The Decepticons flashed each other an expression of triumph - whatever their differences, they’d been fighting together so long that it was impossible to ignore their synergy. It just felt, well, good. …and oh, so satisfying to fight shoulder to shoulder again, wing-brothers, just doing what they do.
“We’ll table this,” Thundercracker said, looking around. “I think we’re surrounded.”
They looked around at a gathering throng of beastlings, whose irate presence was reminiscent of the crowd at a restaurant whose meals had been delayed well past the point of patience.
“Do you wonder,” pondered ‘Cracker aloud, whipping back his arms to prepare for a Sonic Boom. “-if this is the right thing to do? What if these things can be cured? What if they’re just, like, animals…just animals, man. Their fuel pumps the same way ours does. What if they’re just sick?”
Warp snorted derisively.
“Who cares? We’ve done worse than this. It’s war. We’ve been at war for longer than these things have been alive. It’s what we do, TC. You know that.”
“Yeah…” he admitted. “I guess…”
He threw his hands together, rupturing the sound barrier.
Unmade staggered like the crowd of a rave when the lights come on. Some brought arms, things like arms, or legs up towards their heads, or things like heads. Some simply fell over. Some wore the dazed look that sometimes accompanies a jarring event.
Warp lifted up both of his arms, ready to finish the job. They’d done this a thousand times before, and this was just a different flavor of the week. His machine-gun servos spurred into war, bringing with them death, chaos, and dark blood. The veteran of more combat encounters than he could count, Skywarp did not balk at the task. He cleaned house.
When the smoke cleared, they were surrounded by bodies that oozed, seeped, and spread their gore across a carrier whose surface was now much quieter than it had been moments earlier.
“...messy,” stated Skywarp, lowering his mechanical arms. “These things are messy.”
Thundercracker looked down at an Eldritch dog, rib skinny, right in front of his pedes. It whimpered, shuddered, and breathed its last.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “...really messy.”
He thought of Buster, his dog, and sighed.
