Title: Those Compelled to Stay
Author: Tiamat's Child
Rating: G
Warnings: None.
Word count: 5,788
Summary: Groove has an adventure. And then he has an After the Adventure, which isn't much easier.
A/N: This takes place in the late 1990s. I did my best with the geography, but if I've screwed something up, please do tell me about it!
Those Compelled to Stay
The day was hot, and hazy, although Groove knew if he mentioned that to First Aid, First Aid would only tell him that the haze was mostly in his processors. "You need to take more care," he'd tell him, "Streetwise isn't the only one who can overheat."
So Groove didn't mention it, just lay next to First Aid, warm on the bank of the dike. Somewhere on the other side there were seals calling. It sounded like thousands of seals. Thousands upon thousands of seals.
"They sound happy," First Aid said, and his easy, sympathetic amusement was absolutely right, was the best thing in Groove's world just now, only –
There was no storm. There were no bombs. Nothing here was broken. No one here was in pain. And First Aid, now that Groove turned his head to look (it was hard to move, he felt so lazy and warm and good in the grass), didn't have an ounce of nervous tension in him.
"I must be dreaming," he told First Aid.
"Mmm?"
Groove laughed. "We're on vacation."
"You take breaks all the time," First Aid said, and Groove frowned. Because it wasn't true, and First Aid never said things like that. He never did. Certainly not that way, dismissive, with just the slightest edge of a promise of possible scorn. (Well, that wasn't entirely true. Groove had heard just that tone from First Aid before, but he was talking to a confidence artist who'd just tried to sell him a supply of stolen and most likely contaminated morphine, so there had been provocation. There was no provocation here.)
Something wasn't right.
He listened to the seals. There must be hundreds of hundreds of thousands of them. But this was the Netherlands, it couldn't be anywhere else, and there shouldn't be thousands of seals, no, not any more. "Thirty years too late," Groove said, and sat up, warmth and comfort fading because something was wrong, this didn't feel right.
Things changed.
The garage had always been one of his favorite places, all the shadowed coolness of it, the patches of sunlight from the windows in the roof, the instruments, the work spread out, and Groove lay with his head at Hot Spot's feet and listened to the hum purr click of machinery around him.
His head at Hot Spot's feet, just so, the old ready thrill of trust. Concrete solid and strong – the pressure of his body against the floor, resisting or conforming to the line the plane of the floor wanted to make of him.
He could stay here forever, almost. Certainly he could stay here for now.
But something had been wrong. "This is a good dream," he told Hot Spot, not expecting an answer, "But the last one turned bad."
"You're not dreaming," Hot Spot told him, "You're still talking to me."
"Of course you'd say that," Groove pointed out, "You're a dream." He listened.
He couldn't hear. He turned off his optical feed and listened. The sound was wrong here, too, and he could feel himself sinking, as if he could sink into the floor, which he couldn't, of course. But if I could, he thought, and heard the generator, heard it off rhythm, not quite right. And he was sinking, and it was horrible, suddenly, it wasn't good at all, and he fought –
And turned, and Blades caught him. "Whoa!" Blades said, "Watch it! This isn't good rock!"
Groove grinned as Blades deftly turned him back the other way, so he was against the height of the ledge, Blades in front of him, next to the drop. Blades' hands were distinct and firm on his shoulder and side – strong, steady hands. "Not solid gneiss, is it?" he asked.
"It's limestone," Blades said, and the way his optics caught and blended with the sky's tone like they were pools of it, removed a little distance, was amazing, made Groove feel like laughing and catching Blades' face in his hands so he could look longer. "And old, heavily eroded limestone at that, which you know perfectly well, because I told you, when we stopped at that look out and you wouldn't read the signs because you said the signs were unnecessary."
"I'm sure they were," Groove said, on principle, although he could not, in fact, remember stopping.
Blades made a soft, annoyed noise, and pressed Groove closer to the cliff face at his back. "You can feel it, if you touch it," he said. Groove could. It was chalky and almost soft – certainly soft by the usual scale of rocks, nearly soft by any measure – and he felt sure that if he pressed his hands into it it would crumble enough to leave fingerholds, which he could surely turn to toeholds if he pleased to.
Blades was almost chilly against him, the exertion of hiking evidently not enough to offset the bite of the cold in the air, and Groove wanted to pull him even closer, keep him warmer, spin a thousand yarns and philosophical castles – no, for Blades they'd better stay cottages, Blades had no trouble understanding castles, but he disliked them, unless they were playing host to many people all at the same time, and Groove didn't see how he could manage that on a mountainside, lacking the charisma and prior following to attract the audience for a proper sermon – so the work his processors did would be enough to keep them cozy.
"You're woolgathering," Blades accused, and the note of briskly practical exasperation was just about right, being utterly Blades, and Groove waited for him to add, 'Tell me what you're thinking,' in the softer tone he took when they had the time and privacy for talking, except he didn't. Groove listened for it, but he didn't, and Groove remembered, abruptly, what he had half forgotten, in the haze of blue and rock path and Blades' hands.
"Let me go," he said, trying to tug away, but he couldn't move back, so he had to duck sideways, but Blades didn't let go, which set every mental bell Groove had to ringing. This was wrong. This was very, very, very wrong, and Groove wasn't sure, when he said again, "Let me go!" whether he was addressing Blades or his dream.
He tugged, broke away from Blades' horribly confining hold, stumbled, fell –
And found himself staring at Streetwise, who held out a hand. "Nasty tumble," Streetwise said.
Groove scrambled to his feet without touching Streetwise, strikes of searing cold cutting through him as self protection programs engaged and heightened activity in areas of his processors that were, at rest, not much called upon. His teammates were not his teammates, and if this was a dream, which it must be, of some sort, because no one could take a person across thousands of miles at a blink and conjure the images of their dearest friends without showing some evidence of their presence, then it was without a doubt the worst sort of dream he'd ever had, and he wanted out. He didn't want to talk to Streetwise only for Streetwise to be wrong and strange the way Blades and Hot Spot and First Aid had been.
"Groove? What's wrong?" Streetwise asked.
Groove stepped further away from him, moving backward so he could keep the illusion of his friend in sight. They were in a dockside industrial district, a smallish one. He thought, looking at it, that it looked like it might be any one of a number of towns in the Malay Archipelago, but without a better sense of the place he had no way of telling which island, or even if he was wrong, off by thousands of miles. There was no way to find out, he realized as he looked around, quick and darting, always bringing Streetwise's doppleganger back into sight, the distinctive tells were gone – there wasn't even any writing, and no people at all, though there should have been people. There was only the ocean and the warehouses and the sense, looking outward, past Streetwise's shoulder to the sea, that he had seen exactly this view in Padangbai, a few years before.
This is Padangbai, he thought to himself, But Padangbai empty, a cartoon sketch of Padangbai, without the details that would make anyone who had lived here know it. I only know it because it's inside my head.
"Groove?" Streetwise asked again, as he stepped towards him. Groove backed away again. He didn't want this Streetwise to trap him the way the dream of Blades had. But Streetwise moved, faster than he should have been able to, and caught Groove's hand. "Groove, please, tell me what's wrong."
Groove tugged away from him. "You're not Streetwise," he said, irritated, "And this isn't Padangbai, except for how it is – there aren't even any billboards!"
"Maybe it's Padangbai from a few decades back," Streetwise said, and grabbed at him again, his wrist this time, "It could be, after all."
Which was such a ridiculous suggestion it nearly did sound like Streetwise making one of his jokes, and something inside Groove twisted just that little bit too far and broke, like a wire pressed past its stress point. He made a wordless noise and turned and yanked his hand so hard he came loose faster than he was expecting, and overbalanced.
He landed on his back in sand, rather than on tarmac.
Groove hastily got to his feet and looked about. There was nobody, and nothing but a remarkably featureless stretch of sand, absent rolls and ripples and, as far as he could tell, varying degrees of compaction and stability. There was only the sand, and he was alone.
In the main and on the whole, as Streetwise – the real Streetwise – would put it, Groove was fine with being alone. He enjoyed it. He needed the space. Too much time around people, talking to people, being with people, sapped him, made him feel shut in and trapped, until he absolutely had to get away, find somewhere where no one expected communication from him, where conflicts didn't need mediating, and the only connection he had to tend was the one between the earth and sky.
At this particular moment, however, it terrified him. He didn't know where he was, none of this was real, and he couldn't call for help. He had no back up. He'd never in his life been unable to turn to his team before. Never.
But it was, he knew, inside his head. It was, in one way or another, responding to him. He had desperately wanted to get away from everyone, and away from everyone he was. He was a prisoner, but being a prisoner and being helpless were never the same thing.
Groove stopped, and carefully smoothed his hands down his legs to his knees. He looked closely at the sand, which was soft and white and looked more like coral sand than anything else. He looked up at the sky, which was wide and blue, a perfectly normal blue, really, even if it was so vivid that it looked like it was almost too real. It wasn't, he knew, the sky was often blue that way, but generally people didn't spend a lot of time looking to it, it being too bright and too much to gaze on long.
Coral sand. Coral sand didn't belong in a desert. Coral sand didn't belong far enough away from the ocean that all you could see was land to every (flat) horizon. Groove knew this landscape too – it was one of the ones from his dreams, with a few minor modifications.
"This is my dream," he said, firm and solid like he didn't feel, even and warm though he really wanted to run, to roll for it, to take off in a spray of pulverized coral. He had practice. He could sound in control of just about any situation, if he had to. It was a knack and a skill developed through long practice, both, at the same time.
"This is my dream," he said again, "And I don't appreciate it being turned into a trap."
Nothing happened.
Well, that wasn't such a surprise. It was the thing about negotiating. You pretty much never got what you wanted just by stating your position. Besides, Groove had to admit that he didn't even know if there was another intelligence out there, interfering with his dreams and his memories of his team. It might, after all, be nothing. First Aid might have him under for some major procedure, and his processors, idled, might have decided to gift him with a nightmare.
But if that was the case, it was probably for the best that he handle it in his own way. At least, if he was trying for some kind of control, he wasn't quite as scared.
"I don't know what you want," Groove said, as rational and sensible and smooth as he could manage, "Why don't you tell me what you want? It'll make things easier for everyone. You don't have to try to trick me or trap me. It won't work besides, because I know my mind better than you do. How did you get in? What's your name?"
Nothing, nothing, nothing, but you got a feel for when you were being listened to, when someone was hovering, unseen, but soaking in everything you said. He had that feeling now. He kept talking.
"It'd be fine if you came out," he said, "Showed yourself, talked to me. We could talk. I'm good at talking – good at a lot of things, really, but particularly good at talking."
He'd never talked through a hostage situation where he was the hostage before. It was new, and different, and more than a little uncomfortable. He wasn't sure if he was doing it all well, he didn't know anything about whoever was in his head with him, but just as he was beginning to feel that whatever he was currently saying was heading heavily downhill into the realm of the inane, the sand rippled, and instead of featureless coral sand in every direction, there was featureless coral sand in every direction with, and this was the important part, a road running through it. It wasn't much of a road, but it was a road, and Groove figured it was as good a set of directions as he was going to get.
He followed it.
Onward he went, through the bright white bright blue of his mental landscape, and he found, as he went, that there was an incline after all. Whether there'd been one when he was standing still was a matter he personally felt was up for debate, but there was certainly one now. He noted it. Something to be cautious of, that. Waking, Groove was unafraid of heights. He took them as easily as First Aid did – and considering that everywhere he went that had anything resembling hills First Aid rapidly acquired a reputation as entirely the wrong person to go on supply trips with if you preferred your nerves unfrayed, that was saying something. But dreaming…
In Groove's dreams heights became dangerous. They materialized where they hadn't been. Hills crumbled open, mountain roads slid, systems of nappes that had been still for millions of years decided to move again and ground themselves together faster than any real nappe ever could, catching him in their folds and crushing him. In the real world heights were heights. In the enclosed world of his subconscious mind, they could stand for something else, and that something else might well prove to be deadly.
"This is still my dream," Groove said, feeling that this was something that continued to bear pointing out, "I'd still like to discuss the matter."
For a while he got no response, only the road under his feet and the slow upward swell of the ground. But eventually the slope steepened, and the road came to an abrupt halt.
He nearly stepped off the edge.
It was like someone had drawn a line in the landscape with a knife. A knife and a straight edge. On the one side was that expanse of coral sand and the road, on the other, sharp and clear, a drop of a thousand feet, two thousand, he couldn't tell, the equipment that would give him a way to know didn't seem to work here, inside himself. There was a drop, and beyond that the water, deep deep green, as deep a green as the water was deep, and cold. Groove jerked back, feeling his systems kick back up to levels his talking and walk (and why hadn't he thought to drive? He didn't know, it just hadn't crossed his mind, it hadn't been an appropriate action) had brought them down from.
He could feel the cold off the ocean even up on the height, and when he looked, he saw that the whole cliff was sand, nothing but that coral sand, even though that made no sense. True, in the Sahara ergs there were dunes that might very well be this high, but none of them bordered an ocean, with the waves beating away at the base.
Groove dropped to his knees and then further, so he was spread out on his front across the sand, and could work his way up to lean out over the edge of the bay, or the cliff, or the dune, whichever it was.
The distance to the bottom made him dizzy. Heights always made him dizzy. Awake, it was generally a good kind of dizzy, thrilling and quick, if a good reminder that it wasn't a good plan to look too closely over an edge, because you could lose your head that way. Dreaming, it tended to be a bad dizzy. This was a bad dizzy, and he flattened himself further against the sand and reminded himself that he couldn't trip, he was already securely spread out. He wasn't going anywhere.
Carefully, he looked down again.
This time, he noticed the plant.
It wasn't much of a plant. It was sort of scraggly, not a species he was sufficiently familiar with to identify on sight, although it shared a certain saw toothed tenacity of leaf edge with a dandelion. The sight of it disturbed him, though he didn't know why. That shouldn't be there, he thought to himself, and the more he looked at it, the more he felt absolutely certain that it had to come out. It didn't belong there, it wasn't local, it was an invasive plant. He knew it without being entirely sure how he knew it, but since the absolute wrongness of the plant being there was consuming most of his processing power, he didn't stop to consider where he was getting the information.
He reached down to the plant.
It took a bit of wriggling, but he managed to get his fingers firmly clamped about the thing, right at the base of its stalk. Hopefully, pulling it with a grip there would get the roots out too. Invasive plants had to be yanked out, dug out, or otherwise destroyed, he knew. It was a basic fact – invasive species caused too much havoc. They couldn't be allowed to stay in the places they colonized.
He pulled. The plant came free, trailing long roots attached to still more roots within the bank. The wind pulled at them, and at Groove. Groove shifted, and pulled more, ripping out more roots, which came loose with a strange ripping sound, not quite what he'd expect from an uprooted plant. He shifted again, and pulled further.
The last tendril tugged from the cliff of sand, Groove made a small, triumphant noise, and whatever strange meeting of physical properties had been holding the sand cliff up gave way.
Groove fell, plant still tucked in his hand, sliding and tumbling in a wave of coral sand. There was no room for anything but sheer, blind panic – he was going to hit that water, and he would hit hard, and at the very least it was going to hurt, he was going to die, he knew better than to trust heights in his dreams –
He came back online with a jerk, systems rebooting haphazardly, most of them still off, caught in various little loops as they attempted to sort through damage done and route around it.
Groove didn't wait for them to finish their checks. Whatever he was lying on was spongey and disturbingly organic, and he wanted away from it, so he scrambled backwards and up as his short term memory cache brought back his last few conscious memories. A crash, and a strange plant, and something on his neck –
He managed to get his optical feed back online and looked. It was, indeed, a strange plant. In the brief glance he'd had before it had brought a tendril down on his neck and pinned him to the surface of one of its leaves, it had waved gently against the current of the breeze, bright green and glossy. Now it was dull and deflated, most of its various vines and leaves limp on the ground. It looked as if it hadn't had water for a month.
There was a haze over his vision. He shook his head in an attempt to clear it, even though First Aid had told him repeatedly that this did not help. It didn't help this time either.
The plant, previously so mobile, didn't move.
Groove stayed frozen where he was. It looked like it was dead. Was it dead? He hadn't meant to kill it. He didn't even know where it had come from, or if it was sapient, if it was native to Earth or a transplant like the people who had built him.
He hadn't meant to kill it. He couldn't regulate his air compressors properly, they weren't behaving, and he thought maybe he had meant to kill it, only he'd no notion how he'd done so, and he hadn't wanted to, he'd wanted to talk, that was all he ever wanted –
Warnings brought themselves firmly to his attention. Half his systems weren't functioning properly, and now that he stopped to consider it, he supposed it wasn't surprising. He hurt all over, and almost none of it was from his crash. He knew it couldn't be. He'd had crashes before, at much higher speeds, and they hadn't done this kind of damage. The plant had done something to him.
But he'd been trying to talk to it, he thought. Had he been trying to talk to it? He couldn't remember. He'd dreamed, and some of the dream had been a nightmare, and he thought he remembered trying to negotiate with… something. But he couldn't really recall, any more. It had been so vivid a moment before, but now, with the shock of waking, it was mostly gone.
Pain took this moment to break through the supportive cocoon of self-preservation protocols and bring him forcefully back to the land he stood on. He winced, and sat down, still watching the plant. Did his radio work? /Hey, First Aid?/
/Hey, Groove/ First Aid answered, sounding abstracted and distant but still warm. His radio worked.
/You with a patient?/
/Not unless an incubator counts. Did you need me?/
/Um/ Groove said. He really didn't feel well. Looking at the plant wasn't helping, it just made him feel dizzy and weak and horrified. /I crashed, and there was this plant. I think maybe it wanted to eat me?/
/One of the weaponized lichens?/ First Aid asked, and he didn't sound distant any more. He sounded alert and firm and even, which meant he thought that whatever Groove was saying deserved concern. /Something else? I'm coming, where are you?/
/I…/ He wasn't sure. He'd known, but now he was dizzy and couldn't think. Things weren't resolving properly, and he couldn't tell if it was worse than it had been when he woke, or better. He thought worse, but maybe it would get better. /I don't think – I knew where I was. I think…/ He looked about. The landscape looked familiar, but helpful road signs were not visible from his current spot. /Northeast of Sabbah?/
/You were in Sabbah this morning/ First Aid told him, /So that'd make sense. Just hang on, I'll find you, I'm going to - / Groove's radio failed. He didn't know what First Aid was going to say, although he could guess what he'd do. He'd call Hot Spot and Hot Spot would call Blades and send him out to look and maybe Streetwise would too…
It was getting harder to focus. He thought maybe the plant twitched and he leaned forward to look, but it was only an illusion, caused by the heat of the day. It was getting hotter, as the world turned to bring the sun nearer the center of the sky. Groove couldn't quite remember where it'd been when he ran into the plant, but he thought it was morning, and the sun was still barely over the horizon. Now it was nearly at its height.
Almost noon, he thought, and tilted his head to get a better look at the plant. Possibly he should name it.
No, he decided, that was just macabre. Too much like trying to claim the thing. He'd killed it, he didn't want to make it his. It wasn't something to claim, and naming it would skirt that edge closer than he wanted to go, even addled as he was.
Had he killed it? It might just have died. But he didn't think so. He had an obscure conviction that its death had been, somehow, the result of his actions.
It was, he reflected, a very large plant. At least twenty feet across and roughly circular. That wasn't so big for a plant, except that it didn't look like it was a woody plant, and it obviously wasn't in the water, and usually for a plant to get that big one of the two needed to be involved. One of a kind, all on its own, a lonely, isolated being, and it was dead.
Groove really didn't feel well.
"Groove?" A hand was on his shoulder, shaking him gently. "Groove?"
Groove looked up as Blades slid sideways so he was crouching in front of him, his hands on Groove's shoulders. Groove shook his head a little.
"Hey," Blades said, small and kind, the way he could be when he wasn't blustering instead, "How're you? Nuh-uh, forget I said that. No talking back, just relax. I've got your weight, you're not gonna fall." Groove took him at his word and leaned into him, into the comforting familiarity of his compact strength. "Man, that thing sure did do a number on you," Blades told him, "I can't remember the last time I saw you this cooperative."
Groove chuckled. He could feel Blades smile against his shoulder. "Yeah, you'll be fine," Blades said, "I told First Aid where we are, and he'll be here quick. Y'know how he is, he'll probably scare the daylights out of some poor farmer on the way to market with his eggs or something and still not crack a one. Do they have egg farms around here? I'll have to ask Streetwise."
"Nobody farms eggs," Groove found his voice enough to say.
Blades grinned. "Pedant. Fine then – poultry farms that sell eggs. That's sure one big plant," he added, turning back to serious, "It's a good thing it hasn't got a mouth. It might have had no trouble swallowing a Groove sized morsel and then – " He paused uncomfortably, and continued with determined good humor, "Where would we be?"
Groove reached up to pat Blades' leg reassuringly, which was about all the comfort he could manage at the moment. It was still hard to think. "Yeah, well," Blades said, "Forget it. Not like that happened anyway. You just rest."
So he did.
"Hey," First Aid said, when he woke again. First Aid's hand was still on his neck, and Groove carefully turned his head to brush his cheek against First Aid's wrist. "Well, that answers the 'Feeling better?' question," First Aid said with a soft laugh, and slipped his hand up to cup Groove's cheek briefly before pulling away. "I'm glad – I'm not the best programmer in the world."
Groove smiled at him. "You get the job done. What's the news, doc?"
"Don't call me that," First Aid told him without rancor, automatic response to longstanding tease, "What order do you want your news in?"
Groove blinked at him. He didn't even know what categories of news there were. How could he know what order he wanted it in? First Aid smiled ruefully. "All right, all right!" he said, "Sorry. I still don't know how it did it, but the plant you encountered got into your programming somehow. There are chunks missing. Nothing's gone from anything governs your mind, as far as I can tell, but some of the systems for regulating autonomic movement and functions are compromised. I've halted the decay, I think, but I want to take you back to base and get Ratchet's help with repair and with checking over your higher functions."
"Because you're not a programmer," Groove said.
"Naw," First Aid said, "Not so much. Besides, the hospital's garage isn't really the best place to work on you. Doctor Najim's been wonderful, but they need this space."
"What about," Groove paused uncomfortably, "What about the plant?"
First Aid rubbed a thumb over the upper edge of his helm. "Yes. The plant. I don't know everything, I've been busy with you, but Streetwise set up barriers to run an investigation, and is working on getting it back so I can look at it. It… You weren't its first victim, Groove."
Groove went still, watching his friend carefully. "Two teenagers went missing from Sabbah a few days ago," First Aid said, "Streetwise found their bodies a few yards from where we found you. There's no way you could have seen them, particularly not since you weren't at your best – "
"I wasn't," Groove said, "I know that." He felt worse. He wanted to curl up around himself, around the sickly cold feeling that made his arms and legs feel weak. He hadn't known about the kids. He hadn't known, and he'd killed the plant, and it hadn't helped them.
First Aid nodded and continued, in that firm, brisk way he had that meant that he knew that this was unpleasant, and considered it best to just get it over with. "We don't have a time and cause of death yet. You've only been out for a few hours. The autopsies are scheduled for tomorrow. I may need to stay to work on the plant, so it'll just be Ratchet with you for a while – we're getting you back home this afternoon."
Groove looked past him to the ceiling. It was a fairly standard garage – it had been state of the art once, about a decade ago. Now it was shabby, time and economic embargo having taken their toll on it. "What about the kids' families?"
"Family. They were brothers. And they're at their home," First Aid said, "Streetwise talked to them. They want to talk to you. I told him I wasn't sure you'd be coherent when you woke up. Are you?"
Groove considered. "No, I don't think I'm coherent. Can I talk to them when Ratchet's done with me?"
"Yes," First Aid said, with an assurance he always had when he spoke with the force of Hot Spot's firm instructions, "Of course. Whatever you need."
"I'm sorry," Groove said to the children's parents, when he met them, "I wish I had come early enough to help your children. I am so sorry for your loss." He said it with every ounce and inch of his being, meaning it this time, as he meant it very time he had to say such a thing. It was true, it was always true, and it remained true as he drank tea, even though tea wasn't very good for his filters, and assured Shadi and Yusra (it was kind of them to give him use of their given names, in consideration of his own lack of more than that – they were kind people) that their children had almost certainly died warm, at peace, in no pain.
He could not say, to whoever the plant was important to, if it was enough of a person itself to be important to anyone, "I'm sorry. Your friend was a murderer, and I killed it. I'm sorry. I am so sorry for your loss," but he felt it nonetheless, that cold twist of remorse, of pity.
"You know," Hot Spot said, later, after Groove had told him the story of the visit, "It may not seem too useful, but I'd rather have you with the remorse than without."
Groove shrugged. "Did you get the report in?" It was the sort of question where the answer was so obvious it couldn't be anything more than a change of topic.
"And a note back from Prowl saying he'd sent it on to Prime," Hot Spot said, "Why? Did you remember something more?"
"No," Groove had to say, because it was true. He hadn't remembered anything more. "Ratchet says it's unlikely I will, and First Aid says unlikely doesn't mean impossible."
"Mmm," Hot Spot said, "They do say Ratchet used to have a real reputation as a programmer."
"First Aid says that too," Groove said, and grinned, "But you know him. Has to argue the fine points."
Hot Spot shook his head. "Yes," he said, "You need to talk to Streetwise."
"Yes," said Groove, who had given Streetwise his testimony as soon as he was well enough, but that was not what Hot Spot meant, and they both knew it. Streetwise was bent on unraveling the mystery of the plant, and what it had been doing there, and how it could have possibly come so close to killing Groove. He was fixating on it, to the detriment of his own well being. It wouldn't be much longer before his body gave out on him and forced him to stop, at least for a little. "I'll talk to him," he said.
"Good. He was worried about you. Groove," Hot Spot said, and paused, "It may be a little selfish, I know, and I suppose I am sorry you couldn't talk it through this time, but still, I'm glad you're alive."
Groove looked up, far past Hot Spot to where a small scrap of distinctly gauzy cloud was floating. "Yes," he said, "Yes. I am too."