The Hunt

Spoilers for the Prime Season Two finale.  
Transformers Prime belongs to Hasbro.

The giant robot moved stealthily through the trees. It stuck to the shadows, but every once in a while, sunlight would escape the leaf canopy and reflect off blue and grey metal.  Weapons were undrawn, but the body was tense, as if expecting a struggle.

There.  The target was spotted.  Fifteen meters to the north, huddled at the base of a spruce.  The robot approached as quietly as she could, but as soon as metal feet hit the Earth, the bag of flesh darted off.

Abandoning all semblance of stealth, the robot lunged for it, trying to catch the prey before it made off.  Unfortunately, the prey was too quick, too small, and when the robot lifted her hands to gaze triumphant, the prey was not there.

"Scrap."

Arcee rose to her feet, brushing the mud from her joints.  She looked around worriedly, not sure what to do next.  Arcee was an expert tracker, using her smaller size to sneak around and sneak up on other Cybertronians in battle, but when it came to hunting the small, fleshy creatures of this planet, she may as well have been Bulkhead.

But all was not lost.  The creature she had been hunting apparently decided it had lost all will to live, for it slowly reappeared from the trees and cautiously approached her foot.  It was a twitchy little thing, and small—even by her standards—but it would have to do.

She slowly reached down—careful to not alert the creature that death was coming from above—and in just a few moments one of her hands had completely engulfed the poor thing in darkness while the other hand slid beneath to scoop it up.  Arcee raised her hands to eye-level and opened them, just a bit.  The hairy mass blinked at her in confusion.  She smirked.

"Gotcha."

Still, deep down in her spark, her victory seemed hollow.   A bit disgusting, even.  Still, she did many things she did not like during the war, because they had to be done.  This was no exception.  She turned around and returned to base camp.

At base camp, she encountered another fleshy creature from this planet.  This one was a bit larger, bipedal like herself, and had a comparatively less amount of fur.  It was also much less twitchy.  The creature in her hands was almost amusing, the way it darted to and fro on her palm with nowhere to go, and if she were any other 'Bot she would have laughed at the sensation of fur against her metal, but that feeling just made her task more difficult, so she pushed it away.

The bipedal creature was slouched against a large rock, furiously attempting combustion by rubbing two sticks together.  This is what the creature had been doing when she left, and this is what the creature was still doing as she returned.  Arcee looked to the sun in concern. It was headed towards the western horizon.  Soon it would be dark, and soon it would be cold.

But she said nothing to discourage the boy, who rose to his feet as he heard the familiar sounds of her approach.  "Find anything?" he asked eagerly, looking at her closed hands.

Arcee smiled.  "Yep," she said, kneeling down before him and opening her hands.  "Enjoy."

The boy's face fell.  "Arcee...it's a bunny rabbit," he said flatly.

The robot cocked an optic ridge.  "Yeah. So?"

He looked at her in exasperation.  "I can't kill a bunny!" he exclaimed, wide-eyed.

"Seriously, Jack?" Arcee titled her hand so the "bunny" tumbled towards Jack.  He caught it, holding the struggling thing to his chest.  Arcee rose to full height, if only so she could gaze down reproachfully.  "You wouldn't eat the deer I caught because of someone named 'Bammy'—"

"Bambi."

"—And now you won't eat this? You need to eat, Jack."

"Yeah, well, that was Bambi, this is Thumper," he muttered, more to himself than to her. Still, she heard it.

"What?"

He looked up at her with apologetic—and almost pleading—eyes.  He knew how absurd he was acting, but still. "I just can't."

Arcee made a sound of annoyance, and glared down at him.  But eventually, those eyes got to her, and she relented. "Fine, let it go," she said, flicking her wrist towards the trees.

Jack bent down and placed the rabbit on the ground.  "Here you go, little fella."  It stood there, just twitching.  Jack nudged it with his foot.  "Go on.  You're free!" He motioned to the woods.  

Twitch.

"Obviously, it wants to be eaten," Arcee joked.  Jack looked up at her in annoyance.

"Go on!  Live life while you can!" he nudged the rabbit again and it finally darted off into the woods.  The two partners watched it leave. "Before you're killed by 'Cons," he muttered.  This time, she did not hear.

"It's just going to be eaten by another animal," Arcee said.  "Why not you? You eat cows and pigs."

Jack sighed.  "Eat, not kill."

Arcee crouched down once more.  "What are you going to do for food?"

"The same thing you're doing for energon," he replied. "Go without for a little while longer."

A brief glimmer of pain flashed across her face, but it was gone in an instant.  "No," she said firmly.

"Arcee—"

"No, Jack."  Her voice had an edge to it. Having caught on to him, she was very much annoyed. "My job is to keep you safe.  And that means keeping you fed.  You need to eat, Jack.  I can go without energon longer than you can go without food."

"Really now?" Now Jack was getting annoyed.  "So why haven't you—"

"This isn't a discussion, Jack!" Now she was very irritated, and she stood to glower again. "You find something to eat. Now."

There was no arguing.  He glared back, but he knew the battle was lost.  "Fine!" He turned around and stalked off.  He picked up a discarded stick, one that was long and had been sharpened by fruitless friction.  "Let's go fishing."

She couldn't help it.  Her hands went to her hips.  "Wait, 'bunny rabbits' are off the table, but fish are fair game?"

"Look, do you want me to eat or not?" he asked irritably.

"I do."  Arcee insisted.  The argument was almost comical.  "Look, the whole concept of consuming another living being for nourishment is disgusting to me, but apparently I should only be concerned when it's creatures named Bambi and Thumper?"

"You would be too if you saw that movie when you were only three," Jack muttered.  He headed into the wood.

"What?" she asked after him.

"Never mind!" he snapped.  Arcee stood there, watching, wounded.  Jack did not even look back.

When she finally decided to approach him again, the sky had darkened to just pinks and purples.  He wasn't even trying.  He was just sitting at the edge of the stream, one hand on makeshift spear beside him, the other resting on his knee.  He turned his head slightly as he heard her.

"Arcee, I'm sorry."  He really was.

She smiled and sat down beside him. "I know, kiddo." Her position mirrored his, sans spear.


They were quiet again, until the sun finally sank and the only light was the reflection off the moon and the bioluminescence of fireflies.  Jack had made a few halfhearted attempts to snag a fish, but a hunter he was not.

"You know, my dad used to take me fishing," Jack finally said.

Arcee looked at him kindly. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." Jack smiled. "Every summer we'd pack up the car, just me and him, and drive to California.  We'd camp and fish."

Arcee hugged her knees and rested her head on them. "Sounds nice."

"It was."  He mirrored her this time, whether he was aware of it or not.  "He's the one who taught me how to use the survival kit."  The survival kit he didn't have, that he couldn't have because he couldn't take it to school with him so he couldn't have it on him when everything changed.

"When he left, when it was just Mom," he continued, staring at Arcee.  "She tried.  She took me camping that year, but she just wasn't the same.  She kept talking through the whole trip.  We didn't catch a thing.  We didn't go camping any more after that."  Jack finally broke.  "Arcee, I don't know where she is!  I never got a chance to tell her about anything that was going on!"

Arcee unfolded herself and beckoned Jack over.  He stood up and walked to her hand, and she picked him up, the other hand keeping him steady.  "Agent Fowler said that he evacuated the town, your mom is probably—"

"And what happened before he could sound the alarm?  He couldn't have ordered an evacuation the exact moment Megatron started attacking!  And Mom—" his voice choked, and Arcee could do nothing more than to hold him to her.  "As soon as Mom realized something was up, and she couldn't get a hold of me, she would have immediately driven to the base. She could've walked right into Megatron!" Jack was crying now, had been crying.

"Jack, it's okay.  Everything is going to be okay." Her voice was steady, matter-of-fact.  It had to be steady, even though she had been thinking the exact same thing in the days since they ran away.  With the running and the starving and only thought being of finding their friends, of finding someplace safe, she kept quiet.

"You don't know that," Jack muttered, sitting down against her hand, defeated.

"I do." She didn't. "Okay?  We're going to find Optimus and your mom and Bulkhead and Miko and Raf and Bee and Ratchet."

"And Smokescreen and Wheeljack."

Her lips twitched.  "And Smokescreen and Wheeljack. And Agent Fowler.  We're going to find them, Jack.  And we're going to beat the 'Cons."

Jack smiled ruefully at her. "You're just saying that to make me feel better."

Arcee smiled back.  "I wouldn't say it if I didn't believe it." She would, in fact.

He nestled against her, and she covered him with her hand.  The air was still but the night was cool, and she would do everything to keep him warm, to keep him safe.  They would both go hungry that night.

Jack didn't care.  He believed her lies.  He believed that as long as he had his partner, they would, in fact, survive this.  That thought alone made it so he could sleep that night.

Arcee couldn't believe her lies. She couldn't see past the night, past keeping him safe just one more night. She couldn't think about tomorrow.  Come tomorrow, he would be hungry and she would be starving.  She didn't have enough energy to fire her weapons, she knew Jack suspected this. What Jack didn't know is that she was fairly certain she couldn't transform, wouldn't be able to transform until she—somehow—came across energon.  Come tomorrow, she wouldn't be able to drive him to civilization to find food.

Come tomorrow, she would be nothing more than an attention-grabber, leading the Decepticons right to Jack.

Come tomorrow, the only hope would be that the others found them, that Optimus found them.

Come tomorrow, she would have no hope, but she would continue on.  For Jack.

But it was still the night.