There's a smile that Trailcutter can't see, but it's conveyed in the way the hug tightens for a moment. His arrival here wasn't anything he could have planned or foreseen, but now that he is he intends on making the most of it. For however long it lasts.

"I would have then, too. If I could have."

For a moment he tries to think about it logically, with no emotion. They all had talents that made them equally likely to survive as well as hunted down - the could survive if left on their own, and therefore it would make sense to leave them be rather than gather them up again. But it occurs to Shockwave that he would never have even given them a second thought when there were other things that were infinitely more pressing. So he lost them because a few lives paled in significance to the survival of Cybertron and the species as a whole.

The thought is so repulsive he can barely stand it. How dare they?