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He pulls himself onto his pedes, he always does. He’s young, supposed to be, but he can’t feel youth flowing through him like his own energon. His frame is new, remodelled and remodelled and remodelled like squishy earth soil; he feels like he did before.
He still feels as if he’s a mechling clinging to his mentor as she brings him around his home-planet of Caminus.
He should have been brought up on Cybertron, with all of the rest of the mechs. His protoform should have blessed him with the sprouting and shaping of mech limbs and the internals for a real Cybertronian, instead of bright optics and small shoulders. It isn’t his protoform, not really. It’s someone else’s, could it even be a protoform? He was constructed for one purpose only, and that was to give, and to save, and to never feel.
Now, he isn’t on Cybertron, he can never go back to Cybertron. It’s gone and he is still here. He’s here, on a unfamiliar planet, with nobody but his team who knows he’s alive; that he’s real.
Acting like a robot, acting like someone who isn’t himself, isn’t hard for him to do. He hates it, hates feeling lesser, hates feeling like he did when he was watching the world through a panel of rose-coloured glass inside his own processor—like his visor is tinted so much he needs to reset his optics to see ahead of him—He earned the ability to act as he pleased, free of the chains of his own mind, body, home. He was back there, back because of his mission, back because he was unable to save his team from a myth, from a monster.
He is no leader; not that he ever wanted to be one. They told him with proud optics that he would be team leader, even Optimus Prime assigned him higher than the others. He isn’t ready for the role, one looming above his head like the flaming star overlooks Earth.
He takes control because he has too, because his team has their faults and he fears that they would die and he would be responsible because he wasn’t looking after them, that he wasn’t doing his job assigned by Primus’ unfair hand.
Chase is stuck on rules. Rules don’t count when he’s stuck between a raging flame—flickering with Heatwave’s own cowardice—and a wall.
Blades is scared, he quick to adapt, slow to bravery. He’s close with the humans in their care, even after being found out as something more than a mindless machine.
Boulder is what Heatwave should have been, what he was expected to be. Soft, gentle, wide optics and comforting smiles. Boulder is too trusting, too sensitive, like Blades, but not as bad.
Heatwave knows he’s worse than them all. He doesn’t think, he acts, temper like a ticking bomb ready to explode. Outbursts are small, but in multiples. He can’t control himself. He hates himself, his actions, his personality.
Around him are faces that he can’t begin to comprehend. Humans are so much different from himself. They lie and they hide behind false niceties, and if he says he is like them he would be nothing.
He hates his new partner. He hates him so much. Hate is a big word, Blades says, but he doesn’t want to pull a mask over his emotions. He doesn’t want to go back to feeling like he did so long ago, despite everything.
Kade is arrogant, self-centred and he makes Heatwave’s steering wheel creak under his rough hands, pulling him like a pet on a leash, gravity to a hanging mech; noose tightened; holding and ripping wires and cords and things that would make a him bot real instead of a mech without a mind.
Kade revels in attention, in the prying unnatural optics of humans. He takes the credit; of course he does, Heatwave is nothing but a machine, after all.