Loose Ends

"All the individual bomb codes," Prowl mused aloud, looking sidelong at the dataslug on his desk. "I trust you left the deterrence chip in Impactor's head, as agreed."

Prowl said it as if his very words rewrote reality to be in accordance with that he was saying. Something about them made a sleepy, buried part of Perceptor want to rebel. Perceptor was just out of repairs, though some introspection told him that there was some damage that would take a very long time to heal, even after he was physically well. He had plenty of time for introspection, after Overlord curbstomped him for being a mere gun-fondling battle stat. So with the benefit of that aforethought, Perceptor replied, "No. I did not." Truth be told, he deeply regretted waiting until the mission was over to remove the blasted chip. Following Prowl's directives even that much had greatly complicated matters. If Perceptor had treated Impactor like a fellow Autobot, not a felon, and removed the chip up front, they could have easily and efficiently ended their enemies. Pyro might still be alive.

Prowl arched an optical ridge, tilting his head just to shade his optics and darken them slightly. His lips barely moved as he asked, "Is that so?"

"I just said so," Perceptor replied, a touch annoyed, jutting his chin out and crossing his arms defensively. He would not explain himself to Prowl unbidden, not to Prowl who insisted on being inscrutable.

"Impactor is a dangerous element," Prowl commented softly.

"Impactor is an Autobot. A pardoned Autobot," Perceptor replied, feeling tired. Even if he hadn't said as much as Prowl wanted, he knew he'd said too much.

"Then he should have had nothing to worry about from the deterrence chip," Prowl noted, ever so reasonably.

"Just like a soldier should have nothing to worry about from the diplomats, I suppose," Perceptor replied, more sourly than he'd intended. "Surely, the diplomats would never broker a deal behind the backs of the working troops of the Autobot army, rendering their mission mandate of capture impossible to complete." Perceptor had been doing a great deal of thinking, and now he was thinking that he should have thought about choosing his words more carefully, but they came to him all the same. "Surely such an exercise was not contrived to force a dangerous element into a regretable choice and thereby remove him from command, so that a more easily manipulated player could replace him."

"Surely not," Prowl agreed, posture relaxed, just the barest curl of a smile on his lips, as if he approved of the twisted turns of the science sniper's implications.

Perceptor felt dirty. He stared at Prowl for a long moment, suddenly thinking he understood Springer's unhealthy fascination with uppercutting the fellow, at long last. He pursed his lips and asked, "If there's nothing else?"

"No, there's nothing else," Prowl assured, if is making a prediction for the future. "Take care, Perceptor."

Perceptor didn't need Prowl to tell him to take care. Prowl was the one Perceptor wished he'd handled with more care from the start.

The End

Author's Notes

In Last Stand, Perceptor does not take the bomb out of Impactor's head, even though he knows it is there. The bomb in Impactor's head later becomes a problem for Perceptor down the road. So why didn't he? Here. I speculate that Prowl gave Perceptor orders that, if he were to run into Impactor, he was supposed to leave the bomb in there, so that Prowl would have leverage over Impactor if Impactor survived.

There is also the issue of that the Autobots knows that the Wreckers were on Pova, hunting down Squadron X, who were murderers. Why did they broker a treaty with the Povans saying that Autobots could not take Decepticons prisoner on Pova, if they knew they had a capture team on Pova? Why didn't they at least filibuster and delay the passage of the treaty until after the Wreckers were off Pova? As it was, Impactor had a very tough choice – break the treaty and kill Squadron X himself or let a bunch of Decepticon murderers go free and have every murder they made afterwards on his hands. I'm not saying Impactor made the right choice (or the wrong one), but it was an unnessecarily hard choice to make, if the Autobot diplomats had only delayed things a bit.

Also, Springer expected Impactor to go to rehab or an open prison, not Garrus-9, worst of the worst. So Impactor was punished a lot more harshly than Springer expected, given the crime.

Given that Prowl was willing to use Perceptor to reprogram Kup to toe Prowl's party line and that Prowl was willing to send Ironfist, a dying Autobot, on a mission where he might have to give up his spark, Prowl is willing to do some pretty horrible things to get the job done.

So it is entirely possible that Prowl, seeing how obsessed Impactor was, rigged up a no-win situation for Impactor, where Impactor would be forced into making a horrible choice, so that Springer, who is a more stable leader, would replace Impactor. So, basically, this fic plays with the idea that Prowl arranged for the Pova treaty to go through early, so that Impactor would be forced to either kill prisoners and break the treaty or let murderers walk. As Prowl hoped, Impactor did something terrible, so Prowl arranged for Impactor to rot in prison in Garrus-9, and the more-stable Springer took over the Wreckers, just like Prowl wanted.

Meanwhile, Perceptor seems to be like he was acting a bit nicer than he usually does in IDW by the end of Last Stand, so I figured him stopping to think about some of these things was a natural fit.