PPPersistant Echoesss
BBBy Jennifer Ulmmm
At first, the nightmare was the same as every other time she had it.
She was on the bridge of a small Autobot shuttle, and the air was filled with the noise of fighting and the haze of smoke from destroyed electrical systems. Her team, the Stellarbots, the fellow Autobots who she considered like a family, were under attack from a group of seekers. She had recently found names to fit to their Decepticon attackers, and the knowledge of the current world imposed itself on her flashback dream. For instance, she now knew it was the one called Fuse standing behind her, holding her against him with a gun stabbing into her back. And the one in front of her, kneeling gleefully with a very large gun over the struggling form of her fellow Stellarbot Moonstone, was named Winter. The one on the other side of the bridge delivering a final, deadly blow to Novaflare was Shotlock. And at the front, almost out of sight in the smoke, their leader Starshot was locked in a losing struggle with the one she now knew to be the Striker leader, Soviet.
The knowledge did nothing to lessen the terror she felt as the events played themselves out exactly as they had several months ago. Every time she had this dream it seemed like she could change things, if only she could wrench herself away from this seeker's grasp, and that tiny glimmer of hope only served to make her pain more acute. But he always held her tight, turned so that she could see Winter taunting Moonstone as he prepared to fire the blast that would extinguish her brother's spark, forcing her to watch him die along with the rest of them before finally delivering the shots to her own body that would send her spiraling down into unconsciousness, that were meant to kill her but somehow miraculsouly failed. This time was no different; all the struggling the small Autobot could muster didn't even begin to budge the much larger seeker's arm, and the attempt, just as it had happened before, only served to exacerbate the wounds she had recieved earlier in the battle.
But this time, several months after the murder of her teammates, the dream changed.
There was no transition to speak of, no fuzziness or wavering of her perceptions. One moment the white and blue seeker was standing with a foot on Moonstone's battered, broken chest, gun pointing at his head, and the next it wasn't Moonstone at all. Suddenly it was Thrashmane. She looked up, her terror sharpened at this change. Now Slipstream was being torn into by the blast from Shotlock's weapon, now Waitstate was struggling with Soviet. Not the old friends she had finally accepted the loss of, but her new friends, her new family. And as Winter fired, his blast tearing through Thrashmane's body, the sheer horror of it all overtook her and she screamed...
...and the scream jolted her into reality.
