For the second time since the silver 'bot had been promoted, Optimus Prime saw Sideswipe smile. The first had been on meeting again the twin he thought lost.
Now, though, the security camera footage from med bay had just faded out on an image of Sunstreaker cootchy-cooing "his" hatchling.
Or more accurately, the hatchling which now held full title to Sunstreaker, frame, spark, and processor.
Prowl wiped his optics, as did Red Alert, Wheeljack, Silverbolt, and Perceptor; they still had wide grins on their faceplates. Sunny's Dance of Revulsion, Hatchling Version (Commentary by Hatchling), was quite possibly going to be #1 permanently on the collective jukebox, narrowly beating out his own Nap in Rocking Chair with Hatchling Triumphant.
Ratchet was grinning too. "He's been back to med bay three times since, for every feeding when he isn't on duty, and he stays long enough to spend some time with the hatchling. He's even spent a little time with the others."
"So that leaves only Skyfire?" Optimus said. "And me."
"Yeah. There's a bit of a problem with Skyfire. If I have him come sit in the med bay, I literally have no space to work on patients. The hatchlings aren't really big enough yet to go outside med bay."
Grapple said, "There's a very large storage space right next to the bay. What if we have it fitted out as a single-berth emergency area? First Aid can treat the day's mishaps there, while Skyfire spends some time with you and the hatchlings."
Ratchet smiled. "Barricade just calls them the 'lings.' He'll say, 'C'mon, 'lings, time to eat,' and they all come streaming toward him."
Chuckles all around. But then Ratchet sobered. "It's a good idea, though maybe First Aid and I will split that duty - I want him to have some time with the 'lings too. If you'll get the area cleaned out, I'll get the specs to Grapple and Hoist. – And I have the results of the MNA analyses."
"Ah," said Optimus. "Sideswipe, if you please?"
"Yes, sir," said Sideswipe, and left the room.
Ratchet put up a list of pairs of names. No hatchling descriptions were attached.
Starscream, whatever his other proclivities, had spoken truth about one thing: Megatron's name was absent.
Every fully-flighted mech in either faction, though, was represented at least once. Starscream, after all, had been a flier.
Prowl knit his brows. "I assume you have a reason for not showing us the parentage directly?"
"Yeah, I've archived that information, along with the memory of reading it, and Red did the same at my request. We can't access it without a lot of deliberate effort. I've done that because, if all of us knew each hatchling's parentage, it's inevitable that we would come to our interactions with them with expectations of their behavior based on their ancestry. That would make it quite difficult for them to be themselves. There would be a disproportionate reward in our reactions for behavior that confirmed our expectations of their ancestry, and a lack of reward for contravening our expectations."
They absorbed that quietly for a few moments.
"Do we have any idea why Starscream chose these particular mecha?" Optimus asked. "Fliers, including Seekers, seem somewhat ... over-represented."
"Spark compatibility, most likely," Ratchet said. "And if you're thinking in two more generations, we'll all be Seekers, I wouldn't worry about that. Seeker genes are recessive, so both parents have to have a Seeker gene to pass on for the match to produce a Seeker. Even then, each offspring of two Seekers has only a one-in-four chance of being a Seeker, though any offspring of two fliers has a three-in-four chance of being a flyer. If one genitor is flighted and one's a grounder, one hatchling in four will be flighted, two will carry the gene for it, and the last will be a grounder and the genitor of grounders. If one's a Seeker and one's a grounder, the offspring will be Seekers only if the grounder had Seeker genes somewhere in the background. I'd say one or two of our little flighted mecha - I thought there were three, but yesterday another popped wings - are probably Seekers."
Flighted hatchling number four had decided on second acquaintance that Skyfire was hers (the gender of that pronoun a fact as yet unknown to any but herself). The shuttle's knee was at just the right height for her to scale and glide from, although she disdained other forms of interaction.
That was about to change. She paused atop his knee armor, turned toward Skyfire, spread her wings, and squawked.
"Really?" he said in surprise, lowering his datapad. "Well, okay." He put his very large servo down for her to step onto, which she did; he raised her to eye level, and said, "Now what is it that you would like?"
She spread her wings and squawked.
He offered her his collarbone.
She spread her wings and squawked.
He stroked her tiny helm.
She spread her wings and squawked.
He bounced her on his palm.
She spread her wings and squawked.
"Here," said Barricade, giving Skyfire a bottle, "it's lunchtime. Probably, he's hungry."
Skyfire took a moment to appreciate that when he was handing around bottles, at least, Barricade no longer frightened him. He watched the hatchlings' guardian weave a complex web of delivery while the Seekerlet flopped onto her back on his servo, and dealt enthusiastically with her own received goods.
Silverbolt, bearing his own hatchling, came to sit beside him. "Hey," he said.
"Oh, hi," Skyfire said, glancing at him, then back to the project at servo. "How are you? Haven't seen you since ..."
"The big battle, yeah. Been okay. You?"
"Fine." The shuttle, a shy mech at heart, smiled at him. "I see you've been adopted too."
"Yeah." Silverbolt, as usual, hid his own shyness, and grinned down at the small blue-and-silver person in the crook of his elbow, who was also making short work of a bottle of energon. "You heard about Sunny, right?"
"The frontliner who screams like a human femme-sparkling when cornered by a hatchling? They showed the vid feed in the rec room. He got up and stomped out. –Was he here today?"
"No, the little one is making do with Barricade. Or maybe Ratchet, I don't know which."
"Ah. I hear that two more of your gestalt have mentoring abilities, as well."
"Fireflight and Slingshot, yeah. Kinda surprised me too."
"Are they all fliers?"
"No, Fireflight's is a ground model. He doesn't care. He thinks the little mech is utter perfection."
"Ratchet was surprised when this little one sprouted wings," Skyfire said, nodding toward her.
"Oh, this one's the fourth? Ratchet said in a meeting the other day that there was another one. Good deal." The jet shifted. "Look, when they're a bit older, let's go flying together with them, shall we?"
"How about a walk first?" Skyfire's owner, bottle emptied, had gone to sleep. He placed her gently over his shoulder and revved a few times to burp her.
"Sure. When they're bigger."
"Or we could just, you know, go for a walk or a flight by ourselves," said Skyfire, surprising himself considerably.
"Yeah, we could," said Silverbolt, surprising his own self considerably. "I'd like that."
Trailbreaker brought Gears, who had managed (yet again) to fall from a cliff, into the med bay.
"I don't need to see Ratchet!" Gears shouted, struggling in Trailbreaker's arms. He caught sight of Barricade, gathering up the hatchlings, and snarled, "Especially not with that 'con and his creepy little spawn here!"
Ratchet snatched him up by the collar fairing and said, "I will decide whether you need treatment, not you! And you will sit on this berth" - Ratchet placed him gently, Trailbreaker thought, considering the anger that was roiling off the medic, on the berth - and snarled, "where you will stay until I decide to treat you! Because if I had to do it right now, I'd part you out, and stasis-lock your processor!"
Every faceplate in med bay, except for a few of the hatchlings', was open-mouthed.
Gears shut his first, and whined, "But my leg hurts!"
"Good! Let it be a reminder to you that in med bay, you are required to be polite to anyone else who is here!"
Ratchet stamped off, muttering, "Spawn! I'll show him who's spawn!" under his breath.
Barricade smirked at Sunstreaker, sitting beside him to feed hatchlings, then dropped his head to hide the expression as Ratchet glared at both of them, then slammed the door into his office.
It was seventeen point four six breem later when Gears muttered something under his breath.
"What?" said Sunstreaker.
"I said, 'I'm sorry.'" Gears was looking down at the floor.
"We knew that already," Sunstreaker said.
Gears glared at him. Sunstreaker shrugged. "It isn't news that you're a jerk, Gears."
Gears snapped, "I was talking to the 'con!"
"His designation is Barricade! Use it!" Sunstreaker snapped right back.
A poisonous silence reigned in med bay for another three breem, while the hatchlings mobbed Barricade and cheeped, needing reassurance in the face of the flaring anger in the adults' EM fields.
And also, possibly, remembering that Gears was a mech on whom not one of them would sit. Ever. They got up on, then immediately down from, him, and shunned him thereafter. Hatchlings 14, Gears 0.
Gears cleared his throat. "Barricade, I'm sorry I said that about the hatchlings."
"Thank you," Barricade said politely. "I'm sure they appreciate that." The tone of his voice would have adequately chilled a room-temperature martini in three or four kliks.
Gears said miserably, "And I'm sorry I insulted you about being a 'con."
"I'm not a 'con anymore," Barricade said. "Or if I am, I'm just about the only one left. I'm lamed, I'm sick, I'm the parent of fourteen hatchlings, none of whom, so far as I know, are my own. I'm not a threat, Gears, until you make me into one."
Sunstreaker commed Ratchet: You can come out now, they kissed and made up.
Ratchet bustled (Barricade wondered sometimes if that was his only gait) past them, saying, "Thanks for the heads-up, Sunny," on the way by.
Barricade said, "You commed him? Didn't know you had that much mercy under your plating."
Sunstreaker shrugged. "Me, either. Thought I burned it all up by not shooting you."
Ratchet said to Prowl one day after the senior staff meeting, "Got five kliks?"
"For you, even ten," Prowl said, and led the way to his office.
Unlike Ratchet's cubby, there were not datapads on every available surface, nor anatomical and program-tree charts on the wall. However, it did share with the medic's office the characteristic of having That drawer.
Prowl made use of it.
"Holy crap," Ratchet observed.
"Might be holy. Isn't crap," said Prowl, pouring out the second glass.
"I have never known you to drink on duty."
"The war," said Prowl, "is officially over. Well, not officially; we still have some 'cons unaccounted for. But it's safe enough. And if it turns out not to be, I'll put myself on report. There. Satisfied?"
"You have such good solutions to all our problems," Ratchet said, and made inroads on his drink.
"Not all of them."
"Well, no, and there's one I've come to speak to you about, confidentially."
Prowl's servos did something to the underside of his desk. "Go on."
"According to our records, Barricade is your brother, but he seems to have no knowledge of that."
Prowl sighed, and refilled their drinks. "No. He doesn't."
"Is it something I need to know about?"
"I don't know." The Praxian stared down at his desktop. "At his sparking, he was immediately sent to foster care in another, smaller city. I don't know why; I'm only two vorn older than he is. The foster parents were instructed to allow him to believe that they were his family. He seemed happy there the few times I was allowed to visit as a family friend, so I think they were kind to him. He wasn't yet adult when the war broke out, and I joined the faction. I lost touch after his city was bombed, could never find him. It wasn't until I was 2IC here, going over surveillance of the Nemesis, that I realized that Barricade was ... the name he uses now."
Ratchet sighed. "I'm sorry."
"Me too. Mostly I'm sorry that our genitors were such afts."
"Yeah. Look, he has no friends here, and the others don't trust him yet. How about stepping up to the plate?"
"Stepping up ... to a plate?"
"Human term. I've been hanging around Lennox too much. It means I want you to fill a need. I don't say you have to tell Barricade all this, though it would probably be a good idea down the line, but how about spending some time mentoring him, as well as the hatchlings?"
Prowl looked at with his mandible agape. "All right," he said finally.
"Good! You're coming to see the hatchlings tomorrow; you can start then." The medic finished his drink and rose. "Thanks for the high-grade."
"You drop this bomb and now you're leaving?"
"Oh yes. Mecha to see, lives to derail, you know how it is. I'll be in Optimus' office if you need me."
"Oh dear Primus," Prowl said, as the door slid shut behind Ratchet.
Optimus poured Ratchet yet another drink.
"No thanks," the medic said.
Optimus stopped dead, stared at him, then took the cube himself. "Who are you and what have you done with my CMO?" he said, and drank.
"Very funny. I had two drinks with Prowl not ten kliks ago. I don't need to reel back into med bay and breathe high-grade all over the hatchlings."
"I can't argue with you there. What's on your mind, my friend?"
Ratchet pinched the bridge of his nose, a gesture he'd actually picked up from Optimus. "The two dead hatchlings were killed by spark-compatibility issues. That leaves a particular look to the spark chamber, unmistakable once you've seen it, and a particular set of chemicals in the energon stream. They were present in abundance. I've drained those bodies of fluids, and put them into storage. Spark incompatibility doesn't damage or cause dysfunction in the frame. The next time somebody here gets sparked, we'll have download frames. Or."
"Or?"
Ratchet hesitated, looked at Optimus, looked away, looked back. "We have MNA analysis of both Jazz and Ironhide on record. We have their living MNA in four of the sparklings. I could recreate their genetic material, grow the protoforms in the lab, put them in adult frames, download Ironhide's and Jazz' last backups into the new processors, and -"
Optimus stood up suddenly and went to his office window, his back to Ratchet. "No."
Ratchet hadn't expected that answer, that firmly, that fast. "May I know why not?"
"If we do what you suggest, we would be creating mecha of whom we had crippling expectations. You masked the parentage of the sparklings among us now for precisely this reason. No mech so conceived and programmed could be remotely normal." Optimus' servos clenched into fists. "And they would not, in truth, be Ironhide, or Jazz. No, we must grieve and go on. I'm truly sorry, Ratchet."
He didn't turn around. Ratchet rose, left his office, and got on with grieving.