Back To You

Chapter 10: Hiding

It'd been 5 months since they were discharged from the hospital. Two since a group of 'spies' began tailing her, and one since she heard Heatwave's voice again.

As soon as she was discharged, she left for another city. Fortunately, she had several safehouses scattered throughout Cybertron, so housing wouldn't be an issue. The real challenge was adapting to being a carrier and figuring out how to properly care for a sparkling. She wasn't exactly given a manual, and she didn't have any experience with sparklings unless you counted the few months she spent enduring Blurr's constant complaints about his training exercises.

Thankfully, Hotshot didn't complain in so many words. He was a calm sparkling and didn't really make much of a fuss, though His cries did keep her up sometimes, but as the weeks went by, she found a routine and was starting to get her life back under control. Being a carrier wasn't as hard as she imagined it would be.

Once they were settled for the time being, she decided it was time to contact Optimus but noticed she had misplaced her datapad. Rewinding her memories, she realized she'd left it in her room at the base. Another thing to worry about. There were terabytes of classified data entrusted to her by the Prime, as well as sensitive personal information on the device. How could she be so careless? She feared what Eclipse would do if he found out about Heatwave and the others. She didn't want to jeopardize their safety too.

The only thing that kept her from spiraling was knowing the device was heavily encrypted. It would take months to hack, so she tried not to worry too much. In the meantime, she used her build-in-monitor, sent the Prime a vague distress signal, and hoped he wouldn't take too long to respond.

As time went on, she developed a system of moving from safe house to safe house to throw Eclipse off her trail, and so far, to her knowledge, it was working. Aside from constantly moving, she never left the building unless it was to restock on supplies or fuel. At three months old, Hotshot had a growth spurt, and supplies started running out faster than Quickshadow anticipated. She decided to restock before they were completely out of fuel and left once Hotshot fell into stasis.

Refraining from transforming into her vehicle mode, she merged with a crowd of other bots to blend in, but as she went about her task, the burning feeling of being watched suddenly struck her, and she kept her guard up. Disconcerted, she chose to take a different route home and was glad she did because she caught 3 bots following her midway back. However, what really unsettled her were their insignias, or rather lack of insignias. But she didn't give it much thought. Fearing they may have gotten to Hotshot, she wasted no time and ran just slow enough for them to chase after her and led them through a dark alley where she seemingly disappeared without a trace.

Finally making it back, she practically kicked down the door and bolted to her room. Relief washed over her as soon as she heard the sparkling's hungry cries and no signs of any unwanted visitors. She picked him up and rocked him back and forth. "Shh, I'm here..I'm here," she held him close, taking a second to catch her breath. Hotshot eventually settled down and fell asleep to the rhythm of her racing sparkbeat.

After that experience, she had a few other similar encounters with the same insignia-less bots, but they kept their distance and only watched from afar. Initially, she suspected Eclipse sent them to spy on her but wasn't too convinced. As bad as he was at sneaking around, Eclipse wouldn't send someone else to spy on her for him. This was too personal. Furthermore, aside from the fact that she didn't recognize any of them, something felt off about those bots. On a more recent encounter, she got a better look at them and realized their insignias were painted over, leading her to believe they weren't Autobots at all.

Above everything else, she feared for her son's safety. If those bots were who she thought they were, she really needed to speak with Optimus.

One particular day, she found herself scrolling through her inbox, hoping to find a response from Optimus, but it was completely empty, save for a few voice messages from Heatwave sent in the span of the past seven months.