Only Human

Chapter Seven

Ironhide's silhouette backed Prowl's at they came out of the frosty light into the freezing hanger, their movements turning stiff and sluggish as battle protocols wound down and returned priority to the myriad of system warnings crowding their processors. The weapons specialist knelt with a grunt next to Bumblebee, making a vague coaxing gesture towards the doctors inside.

"Come on – show's over," he rumbled, optics narrowed and dimming incrementally. "Ratchet needs you in the hanger, and we need to drop the temperature in here."

At Bumblebee's affirming whistle, Foreman followed the motion of the opening Camero door and found his footing on the slippery floor. The seat popped forward and clear in a way not possible in an ordinary car, allowing Kutner to ease out with one of Taub's arms already around his shoulders. Foreman got under the injured doctor's other arm and helped him to swing his leg out.

Once House's team had left and Prowl had slammed the frosted hanger door behind them, Ironhide began to chuckle. There had been no levity since it was confirmed that the disease was fatal, and now the weapon's specialist was laughing as though he'd just watched a Con botch their transformation sequence and come out a Prius.

Bumblebee's body shifted with whines and clicks edged with wetness into bipedal mode. He sat back heavily against the walls, vents wheezing in the frozen air. "What's so funny?" The young mech was too exhausted to sound perturbed.

"Got Screamer," Ironhide grunted through gritted teeth, his laugher quickly deteriorating into thick gasps as clots of energon were dislodged. He heaved himself to sit against one of the main freezer vents. "Just dumped a load of contaminated energon into his chassis. 'should have seen his face." His voiced turned quieter, but the grim satisfaction was clear. "Optimus got Megatron just as good. Pit, if the Decepticons get infected, it's almost worth it."

"Where is Prime?" Bumblebee asked, optics widening when he realized that he hadn't seen the Autobot Commander since he'd run at Megatron, despite the crippling sickness.

"Sunstreaker and Sideswipe took him into the Medbay," Prowl replied, hand coming to rest across his visor. That skirmish had been the last thing they'd needed, and if the Decepticons hadn't so abruptly retreated, it would likely have killed them. " Prime's condition has deteriorated to the point of needing external aid."

Ironhide shuttered his optics, tipping his helm back until it rested against the icy metal. "Frag. It can't end this way."

A beat of silence, as toxic and cloying as the viscous fluids threatening to suffocate them. Bumblebee broke it before it could become oppressive, his voice certain and absolute. "It wont. Doctor House is just like Ratchet – he won't give up. He wouldn't be here if he wasn't the best."

"You, Doctor, are a fragging idiot."

Slick up to his elbows in tacky energon, Ratchet was connecting the external pumps, lines and filters with a confident speed and proficiency cultivated through immeasurable experience of dire necessity. Optimus was offline, systems flickering on the verge of stasis lock, but the medic was expert enough to continue his blistering tirade regardless.

"Staying out of sight does not mean for you to go into a fragging battle zone and gawp."

Sitting in one of the rolling chairs on the upper level of the platform, House's eyes were lowered and distant. He had yet to speak, and hadn't moved since struggling up the metal steps since the Decepticons had left.

Ratchet was far from finished. "Not only did you endanger your own life – you risked the only possible chance I have of saving our Prime and the others, which I now realize was a nanite's chance in the Pit's hottest smelter because you're just as moronic as any child I could have taken off a schoolbus."

"Lay off, Ratchet," Foreman broke in flatly, looking up from where he was cutting away the bloodied material from Taub's trouser leg. The older doctor was led back on a cot, waiting for the morphine to kick in.

The metal spines exposed, Foreman took up a pair of large tweezers. "Yelling at him isn't going to help anyone."

Thirteen returned from the cabinet of human medical supplies with her arms full of gauze. She placed them at Taub's feet, looking up at the platform. "I think he's in shock."

Standing back and out of the way, Kutner tipped his head thoughtfully. "I think he's having an epiphany."

"I think he's useless," Ratchet snarled, snapping the last regulating line into place beneath Optimus's jaw. One final check over the tubes that would take any leaked energon into storage container, and he was finally satisfied enough to stop for a moment. With a loud vent, he pressed his hands against the top of the berth and flicked a scan over Taub. "Those are safe to just pull out. There're no toxins, and they're magnetised, not barbed."

"Thanks for that," Taub murmured, squinting as he tracked the beams overhead to their joins and cross-sections. He hissed as Foreman tugged out the first sliver of metal. "How's Optimus doing?"

Ratchet looked up from the still form on the berth, his expression softening. For a moment he debated just how much to tell them, and how much of it was going to be useless 'techno-babble' to their ears. Finally, he simply said, "Stabilised."

Silence dragged out for several minutes as Ratchet focussed on making small calibrations to the equipment, and the cluster of human doctors focussed on treating Taub's leg.

Then, from atop the platform, with all the suddenness of an explosion:

"That was fantastic."

A slow grin spread across House's mouth. "Better than a stress test, inside an MRI whilst Anne Hathaway performs a lumbar puncture in one of the PVC nurses uniforms that I had delivered to Cuddy's house last Christmas."

No one spoke. Ratchet rolled his optics with an irritated engine grumble and picked up the suction pump, manoeuvring it to clear out the unconscious Prime's side-chassis cooling vents. Thirteen finished bandaging Taub's leg and gave him a reassuring, though tight smile. Foreman rubbed his eyes. Kutner folded his arms and watched Ratchet work in silence.

At the complete lack of response from his team or the alien robot doctor, House heaved himself to his feet and limped to stand against the railings. From the platform he had a clear view of what Ratchet was doing as well as the doctors on ground-level. He looked between them with a frown. "Were any of you even watching the fight?"

"No," Foreman replied testily, finally looking up the platform. "We were trying not to get killed."

"And that's why I'm head of diagnostics and you're not," House snapped back with more venom than he'd intended. He took the pot of Vicodin from his pocket, sliding three into his hand as he spoke. "Okay, first of all, a stress test isn't really a 'stress' test. It's a 'run your fat ass on this treadmill' test. A stress test would be Kutner chasing them in warpaint with a blow torch whilst Taub tries to have an honest conversation with his wife about their marriage."

"What, are you getting at?" The question came from between Taub's gritted teeth.

Ratchet leaned in closer, optics narrowing and plates tightening. "Yes, Doctor House, because I've reached my capacity for acerbically moronic witticisms in place of actual medical doctrine."

Unperturbed by Ratchet's thinly veiled threat, House leaned his weight harder into the cane and off his throbbing leg, gesturing with his other hand. "Stress, for you guys, is really stress. Ongoing war –constant threat of attacks and, more significantly, actual surprise attacks. You were keeping them in the chiller because the cold slowed the progress of this disease in their day to day activities. The real stress, when the Decepticons showed up, didn't re-accelerate the disease."

"It certainly looks like it did," Thirteen muttered from the floor, clearing away the used supplies from around Taub's cot.

Before House could make a retort, the door embedded like a cat-flap into the main hanger doors opened to admit Lennox, weapon still in hand and sweat glistening on his forehead. The soldier looked to Ratchet and indicated outside with his thumb. "I've got some pressure hoses coming down to clear off the Yard. There's a hell of a lot of contaminated stuff out there."

"Three hundred and forty-one litres by my scans - contact with which would be just as inadvisable to humans as it is for us," Ratchet added with firm conviction, sending a reminder to the unaffected Autobots to stay far away during the clean-up.

"Hazmat suits and being careful. We should be fine." Lennox's brow furrowed a little, his mouth turning downwards. "How's the boss-bot doing? You guys getting anywhere with finding a cure?"

Ratchet's already troubled expression turned into an outright glower, optics flashing heat, which Lennox took to be a less-than-positive indicator. One look to Doctor House's team confirmed that theory, and he started to back towards the door. "Okay – well, good luck with it. Just radio if you need anything. Should take about an hour to clean the Yard, and then we'll be off-site disposing of it."

"According to my instructions." The reminder was a fraction too sharp to be interpreted as friendly. However the soldier simply nodded and shut the door behind him.

It was Kutner who finally broke the silence that followed after the metallic reverberation of the hanger door closing peeled off. "Three hundred and forty-one litres… Wow. That's, like, the gas tanks of two and a bit Toyota Padros." At Thirteen's frown, he shrugged. "What? I know car stuff."

"From watching Top Gear on the Internet," Taub drawled from the bed, rubbing a hand across his partially-numbed face. The pain in his leg was a distant memory, now.

"Is losing that much going to have an adverse effect on them?" Thirteen asked Foreman, not wanting to attract Ratchet's ire with a potentially stupid question.

Foreman quirked a smile, understanding her discretion given Ratchet's body language. The old mech seemed to have reached the limit of his patience with House. It had taken longer than he'd expected. "From the looks of it, better that it's out than in. I'm sure Ratchet-"

The ringing sound of a cane striking metal with significant force cut off the exchange before it could continue. Cane still against the platform's handrail, House's voice matched the sharp resonance of the sound. "As I was saying: medicine is all about increments of change and fractions of difference."

He pushed himself away from the railing to move further along the platform, now directly overlooking Optimus with his team down to the side. The whiteboard had toppled over from some vibration in the fight, and he used the hook of his cane to pull it up and right it. "A small inconsistency can point to a result forty books away in the Penguin Collection of Medicine to the disease you were first chasing."

At the continuation of the silent, largely blank expressions he was receiving in place of a healthy differential, House rolled his eyes with an agitated sound. He slammed the head of the cane against the railing again, though this time only Thirteen jumped.

"The pleural effusions came out of Prowl and Bumblebee at an increased rate to when they're just walking around in a reasonable temperature, because they were standing back and just shooting. Ironhide and particularly Optimus had this gunk pouring out of them. It increased dramatically in volume, not just in rate of effusion. A train instead of a hotdog being thrown down a corridor. Andre the Giant instead of Kenny Barker violating-"

"Three hundred and forty-one litres is a lot of slime," Kutner shouted in grimaced agreement, vocalising the collective want to cut off that metaphor. When House smirked victoriously, the young doctor felt his ears warm with a blush.

Stepping away from the occupied berth, Ratchet took two steps to meet House's gaze directly and folded his arms. As inane as the route was, it did hold promise. "A significant amount," he concurred, his very tone forcing professionalism back into the hanger. "I ran a basic scan over all four of them before Ironhide and Prowl went back into the cold hanger, and they've lost mass. Optimus and Ironhide are lighter by ten and six percent, against Bumblebee and Prowl's three, respectively."

"When we're running scared, the human body releases more adrenalin into the bloodstream to make it run faster for a short time. It doesn't make new adrenalin – once the reserves are gone, it's gone until it makes more."

House paused to grab one of the booklets from the table – a photocopied and bound manual of the physical characteristics of the Autobots. It was as heavy as a housebrick, and rather than consult the index to find the correct pages, he flicked through the booklet demonstrably.

"You guys, on the other hand, are built on a system of not just reservoirs of material, but on the ability to transform materials. You're like a termite colony inside of an engine, systems operating within systems. When you're fighting, you release platelet patches from reservoirs that then swarm and open on small wounds. But you don't run out – your systems draw on energon and the very metal of your being to make more. It's why Ironhide and Optimus are notably *lighter* after a fifteen minute brawl. He didn't have liposuction – he lost mass directly through his vents."

Breaking down fat for energy, but not, Foreman concluded. More like breaking down lungs and liver for energy – causing more problems than it solved. He looked to Ratchet. "Breaking down from your own bodies - is that normal?"

Ratchet shook his head. "Not to this extent. Good energon holds everything we need in suspension, and that is what is extracted and processed at a greater speed in a combat situation." He motioned to the thick cables sealed tight against the Prime's vents to capture the toxic leaks and keep them away from the humans. "However, the energon that they've lost is still unprocessed, and it's the material of their bodies that is being broken down to use exclusively instead. But, as the process is backwards, the materials are just being lost, anyway."

"Like eggs coming back out of a baked and iced Victoria sponge cake," House concluded lightly, taking a step back to sit on the edge of the conference table. He spun his cane in a wave between his fingers, thoughtful.

An optic brow rising marginally, Ratchet's reply was dry. "Near enough."

Walking quickly to the bottom tier of the platform, Thirteen reached through the bars to grab one of the booklets that had been left there. She began searching through the pages and pages of diagrams, tables and text, not looking up as she returned to Foreman's side. "What does the extracting?"

"It's a secondary role of the CLAs," Ratchet supplied, returning his attention to the berth when a silent alarm flagged in his sensors. There was a breach somewhere in Optimus's coolant system, and energon was beginning to seep in and coagulate with it. It would have to be isolated, completely siphoned and then repaired.

Thirteen nodded, finally finding the page she wanted and folding the booklet back on itself. Foreman and Kutner stepped in close to see as she spoke. "So it's the CLAs that are being affected by the disease, and all these other symptoms are cascade reactions to that."

Though his optics were flickering scans over the larger mech's chassis in search of the tiny breach, Ratchet's voice was engaged with them. "The samples I took from the asphalt showed a marked increase in deactivated CLAs as compared to what he was losing before, which indicates that the problem is with them."

"It's an acquired immunodeficiency," Kutner determined, his expression serious and assured.

"More like an acquired immuno-forgotten-what-the-hell-we-were-supposed-to-be-doing-cy. The CLAs are broken," House corrected, though his attention was turned to the whiteboard. He produced a marker from his jacket pocket and began updating the tabulation.

Decepticon bioweapon

Cold raises viscosity "Stickiness"

Heat – stress aggravates?

Frequent flyers.

Domestic virus(Sasser?)/bacteria/fungus

Protoform - sepsis

Human Truckasaurus

Lungs Intake Manifolds / Vents

Brain CPU

Blood Energon / Type O

Neurons Circuits

Lymph CLAs * (Circulating Leukocyte Analogues)

Spark Consciousness / ''''''Soul''''''

Platelets Clotting / minor-patch nanites

(Two Tiered consciousness = spark/processor)

STRESS*

Foreman rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, taking the booklet when Thirteen gave it to him and handing it straight to Taub. "Okay, so what brought that on? Acquired immunodeficiency is caused by other drugs or it's the result of another disease. It doesn't occur spontaneously. It's either there from birth and lies dormant, or it's generated."

"We need to step backwards," House announced, only just loud enough to be heard as he stared at the whiteboard. "We need samples from this Base."

"I scanned the Base." Disconnecting a side panel, Ratchet began feeding slender tools into the big chassis to calm either side of the beach in the line. There was only patience in his tone because he was concentrating intently on the procedure. "There is nothing that could contaminate us adversely, and none of the Autobots have been on anything like what you would define as 'drugs'."

House scoffed. "You're an alien. You don't know the meaning of 'foreign' on this planet."

Kutner looked around the Medbay with a sigh, seeing all over again that even the equipment that had a parallel in their hospital was still completely unrecognizable. "House is right – so much of this place is alien tech, I don't think we'd be able to identify something that could be behind these symptoms."

There was a long pause. House broke it with the sound of his cane ringing across the platform as he began moving towards the stairs at the other end. "Fine, I'll do it."

No pause followed the statement.

"What? You can't be-"

"Oh let him go, Foreman," Thirteen appeased, touching one hand to his shoulder even as she watched House limp arduously down the stairs. "It can't hurt, and it's not like we're rolling in answers, here.

Estimating that it would take a while for House to get down from the top level without Ratchet's help, Kutner looked to the working medic. "Your LCUs are working fine, right doc?"

The clamps in place around the breach, far enough away on both sides to contain all the tainted coolant, Ratchet extended the siphoning part from the back of his hand and began guiding it inside. "So far as I am aware, yes."

Kutner dipped his head once in a nod, one hand coming up to rub against his throbbing temple. It had been a very long, very strange day. "Okay – so we take a control sample from you and compare it with what's on the asphalt out there, and what Optimus has active in his systems now."

Thirteen's mouth pulled a little, her arms moving to fold across her chest. "That won't necessarily show how to treat it."

"No, but it's a good start," Foreman replied, his posture tightening with the intensity of purpose. Finally they had a diagnostic direction to go in, no longer reaching in the dark and feeling misplaced as well as sorely out of their depth. It gave him a fresh burst of energy after the ordeal of the attack. "Get on it. House?"

Kutner looked to see the door at the far end of the Medbay ajar, the doctor having slipped away through the quickest exit from the platform. "He's gone."

Foreman jerked to look as well, having been wholly expecting House to pass them and go out the main hanger door. "What? How? Where?"

From the cot, and warm with morphine, Taub's chest twitched with suppressed laughter. "Don't you want to know 'why' and 'when', as well?"

"Shut up, Taub."

Ignoring the exchange, Thirteen scanned over the equipment on the bottom level and found her suspicion confirmed. "He's taken the sampling case."

Foreman rolled his eyes. House didn't take samples. They, highly qualified and sought-after medical professionals, were his lackeys in that department. He was supposed to stay with the whiteboard and have his epiphany from what they reported back. That was the point in him having a team. "Fine. We'll work better without his metaphors and rants, anyway."

The floor trembled with Ratchet's steps as he approached without warning to kneel behind them. He extended his hand, a silver canister the size of a large thermos resting in his palm. "Here's your sample. Now that Optimus is stable, I need to see to the others."

Hope you enjoyed this even after such a long wait!