TITLE: Sequence One
Based on events in Broken
Crossover with Iron Man
SERIES: Imperfection Deviation
AUTHOR: Macx
RATING: PG13
DISCLAIMER: None of the characters belong to me, sadly. They are owned by people with a lot more money :)
Author's Voice of Warning (aka Author's Note):
The spell-checker said everything's okay, but you know how trustworthy those thingies are....
FEEDBACK: Loved
GENERAL BETA: Sapphire
GRAMMAR BETA: okami_myrrhibis

Seeing Tony Stark at the Autobot base wasn't a novelty any more. He was almost a regular, dropping by once in a while, with or without Hot Rod, Rhodey or Pepper, and he usually bustled around for a few hours, then was off again. Those soldiers from Nellis or Edwards Airforce base who knew him and had maybe even flown him once or twice in their career, had only briefly been interested in his presence here. Stark wasn't any more of an interesting topic than the presence of alien life on Earth. Everyone working at the Autobot base had quickly grown accustomed to mechanoid life. So Stark wasn't a novelty.

That he had once appeared as Iron Man had only gotten two or three raised eyebrows and no shock either. Lennox had selected everyone carefully in the past years. Whoever arrived at the base had gone through rigorous screening and wasn't easily shocked any more.

This time, when he had arrived in the wee hours of morning, Tony had stayed over night.
Hot Rod had accompanied him and neither Rhodey nor Pepper had been seen. After a meeting with Ironhide, Ratchet, Jazz, Sam and Lennox, Tony had disappeared in Sam's office/lab area.

He hadn't been seen since, but the steady supply of coffee spoke volumes.

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Sam sat on one of Cybertronian-sized lab tables, eyes on what looked like a plain silver replica of Tony's Iron Man armor. His eyes were focused only on the armor and suddenly an alarm went off. A curse followed and Tony's fingers flew over his keyboard.

"I knew there was a glitch!" the billionaire industrialist genius growled.

"Not a glitch," Sam told him after a second. He blinked and pulled his technopathic brain out of the depths of the armor. "I gave it a harder push, it caved, the alarm went off."

"It shouldn't cave!"

"Did you test it with the Extremis?"

Dark eyes gave him a hard look. "Yes, I did. It worked."

Sam shrugged. "Must be me then."

Tony glowered more, then went on typing.

"It shouldn't be you. It shouldn't be you at all. I warped all code to fit you."

Sam listened to the man muttering to himself, took in the frown, the hard concentration in Tony's eyes, and he caught a little sliver of the Extremis running in the background, supplying data.

After a moment Stark stopped, got up, and circled around the armor. It had no helmet and the design was different from the Iron Man one, but it was clearly based on it. Tony's armor was lightweight, constructed of a pliable crystalline material with a molecular structure that could collimate into super-hard planes upon the application of an electrical field. It wasn't as complex as the first models, which had housed their own AI response servers, as well as miscellaneous interfaces for neutral control. Now the armor interfaced directly to Stark's brain via the Extremis-modified cybernetic connections, and it had a much faster response time since it effectively functioned like Stark's second skin.

All that was impossible to achieve for anyone without the Extremis enhancements, which was the rest of the world's population. But Tony loved a challenge and the challenge was to create a personal armor for Sam Witwicky, and then maybe the rest of the human soldiers.

He fiddled with something, applying a power-tool to it, then stepped back.

"Try again."

And Sam did. The whole design felt smooth to his mind, all curves and soft programs, but there was no mistake how well-defended the core programming was. Tony had used a hybrid version of Cybertronian and human computer programming to install the necessary components in the armor. He was as fluent with them as Sam and he loved playing with the possibilities Cybertronian tech presented.

This time no alarm went off and Sam grinned. "Perfect."

"Want to test it?" Tony asked, grinning, too.

Sam's eyes lit up.

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Developing personal body armor had been high on the military's list for a very long time. Kevlar vests only helped so much against enemy fire, and even though new tech was pumped into the military, nothing like Tony's Iron Man armor had ever been developed. And Stark had no intention of letting the military grab his invention. The armor was something personal and could only be used with the help of an AI. Tony had equally no intention of developing sentient armors.

Because when it all came down to it, the Iron Man armor was just another extension of Jarvis, his computer system. Of course the human component was the most important one, and he could move the heavy piece of sophisticated equipment with manual power, but the intricacies of the whole system required Jarvis' help.

No, he had no intention of mass production.

What he had an intention to do was to work in conjunction with the Autobots and help their immediate allies defend themselves in case of a Decepticon attack. The body armors he was trying to create were still too heavy and still required too much computer interference. Everything that was based on an electronic mind could be jammed or worse by another electronic mind. Tony had a safeguard in form of Extremis when it came to his own creation. Anyone else was fair game.

So he started with the two humans who weren't completely human any more: Sam and Will.

Sam's technopathic mind was rather adept at interfacing with the armor's components and throughout their frequent meetings over design plans, implementation of each step, field testing the first alloys and the like, Sam had found that he could actually program and store patterns, like a machine. The brain was a machine, an organic one, and his functioned on a completely different level. He could recognize the mechs by sparks, so he learned to recognize the armor.

It worked.

Will had declined work on his own personal suit with the argument that if he changed into a Protoform, the whole idea would literally come apart

Sam flexed his fingers, feeling his muscles easily move the gauntlet's metal fingers. Tony watched him curiously.

"So? How do you feel?" the engineer finally asked.

"Like I'm wearing armor," Sam replied.

It got him a smirk. "Good. Move around, give me some input."

Sam did just that. He caught Bumblebee's arrival out of the corner of his mind and turned to his partner. Bumblebee's scan was easy to feel for him and he smiled.

"Looks good," Tony commented. "Let's put it under some stress. Go for a run, kid."

Sam grimaced. Great.

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The first test sequence had been completed after nightfall, but before midnight. Sam was tired, sweaty and simply wanted to fall asleep. When Tony had wanted to run the second sequence, Sam declined. He had left the armor in the lab, taken a shower and then crawled into his bed. Stark was probably still working. The man never slept!

Bumblebee had accompanied him and settled down next to the bed, one finger gently rubbing over Sam's back in a soothing caress.

"It's working," Sam murmured, eyes half closed. "It's working as predicted."

But final development would take a lot longer still. It wasn't supposed to fly like the Iron Man model. It had no AI to run systems. It would have only rudimentary electronics to aide in its operation. Sam's interface would do the rest. His mind would be the catalyst, the firewall and the buffer against intrusion.

"It is," Bumblebee agreed.

"Now we only need to work on the size. I'm not going to lug this around all the time."

"Neither am I."

Sam smiled tiredly. "Don't worry. I'm not going to ask you to store it in your trunk. It'll be a while until I can really work with it in a battle situation. I'm not really keen on getting blasted even with the armor."

::Neither am I::

Sam gazed into the worried blue optics. ::Not planning to::

He yawned and let his eyes slide shut. Bumblebee was like a security blanket around his mind and in his home.

Bumblebee required no downtime. His systems were in perfect working order. Everything was free of clots, bugs and echoes from prior storage. He simply kept in touch with the general comm lines, ready to respond should he be needed. The rest of his attention was in the sleeping human in the bed.

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Hot Rod walked into the lab and suppressed a very human sigh. Tony was tinkering with his latest project, a personal armor that would be developed for individuals and not to be mass-produced. Stark had taken the prototype apart and was currently welding something to a part of it, the back armor it seemed. There was a battery of disposable cups, all extra large size, to one side, and someone had had the bad idea to bring Tony a coffee machine. Probably the poor soul Stark had bugged for caffeine in the last twenty-four hours.

Since the sight of Tony clutching a cup of coffee like it was the Holy Grail was rather common, everyone at the base knew to feed the man his caffeine when he demanded it. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was a powerful industrialist, but more with the general opinion that a caffeinated Tony was a more peaceful Tony.

Hot Rod knew only too well how quickly that turned to the worse when the caffeine was overdosed and Stark's body started to go into hyper-drive. It was never a pretty picture, but preferable to the man drunk off his ass. Tony hadn't consumed more than a glass of alcohol at a fundraiser or some official reception ever since Afghanistan. Caffeine was his replacement drug.

"I don't really have to ask if you know what time it is, right?" the Autobot asked rhetorically.

"Three-twenty-five."

"In the morning."

"Yes, in the morning." Tony wasn't even looking up from what he was doing.

"You should get some sleep, Tony."

"And you should mind your own business."

"You are my business."

Dark eyes behind safety goggles looked up. "Right. Baby-sitter."

"Guardian."

"Same difference."

"Tony, please…"

"You're not my mother, Roddy. I'm also old enough to make my own decisions." Tony put the tool he had been using down and walked over to a human-sized workstation. "I'm working."

Hot Rod sat down, out of Tony's immediate work area, back against the wall. "Okay."

The move got him a frown. "You're staying?"

"Yes."

"What for?"

"Baby-sitting."

That had a glare directed at him. "I'm not a kid!"

Hot Rod smirked. "Right now? Behaving like one, Stark."

"You being here won't change that!"

"Nope."

Tony stared at him hard, then laughed. "You're only here to get on my nerves, right? Bug me till I give in. News flash, big guy, it takes more than a stubborn mech to get me to bed."

Hot Rod just shrugged, not commenting.

Tony frowned and went back to work. An hour later he growled something under his breath and threw down a towel.

"You win!"

"Pardon?" Hot Rod asked.

"Don't go all Jarvis on me! You win! I'm taking a break."

The mech shrugged. "Okay."

"And the innocent comment doesn't work on me either," Stark snarled.

"Tony…"

The tired human met the blue optics with a wavering glare.

"You know I won't force you to do anything you don't want to, unless it's for your own health. If you want to work, work."

"Uh-huh."

The computers started to shut down, which was Tony showing off his Extremis powers.

"I've worked longer stretches," the engineer kept arguing while he secured the armor.

"I know."

"Before your time."

"I know."

"And I never keeled over."

"Jarvis told me a different story."

"Jarvis is a treacherous bag of chips and wires."

Hot Rod gave his friend a tolerant smile. Tony snarled again, but he left the lab and went to the guest quarters.

The mech followed.

Hot Rod only nodded to himself as Tony literally crashed onto the bed and was out like a light a minute later. He transformed and settled into the spacious quarters that easily accommodated an Autobot of his size, then powered down to find some rest himself.