Part 14

Disclaimers in Part 1

The next morning, Diarwen tried to wash away her hangover in the shower. Her effort was without success, but at least she no longer smelled like a brewery. She fixed a cup of willow bark tea, liberally laced with honey to cut the bitterness, and sipped it slowly, head pounding and stomach roiling, then she dressed in her usual BDUs and pulled on a pair of gloves before going over to the commons.

Lennox had asked her, two days before, to help him train new troops: take the part of a Pretender. She did not feel up to leading twenty eager recruits a merry chase through the badlands around the base, but since no one had made her drink in the first place, she kept her complaints to herself. Her ability to disappear behind her glamours, as well as her general skills at stealth, stalking, and hand-to-hand combat, came close to duplicating the abilities of the small 'Cons. Like the recruits, she was armed with a paintball gun.

These were not green troops just out of boot camp; NEST recruited from the US Army Rangers. She had nothing but respect for them. They might not be able to see through her cloak, but they could and did track her. The exercise called for all her skill and concentration. By the time Lennox called a halt a few hours later, her headache, never really having gone away, had returned full force. She dropped her glamour and joined Lennox, forcing herself to pay attention as he and Ironhide critiqued the exercise.

She had never been so glad of anything as she was when they went back to base, even if it did mean a five mile run—the NEST troops' second of the day.

The very thought of food turned her stomach, but she had not eaten anything yet. The mess had pizza and pasta today; she got some spaghetti and put very little sauce on it. She barely had time after that to take yet another shower before she went to medbay to take her shift watching the sparklings.

Sideswipe had somehow managed to zig when he should have zagged while sparring with Prime, and ended up being carried back to the hangar with his knee and ankle bent at wrong angles. When Ratchet yelled at him for general stupidity, Sunstreaker's reflexively flared field and bristled armor threatened retaliation for any attack on his injured twin, thrown wrench or otherwise.

Prime's stronger fields poured oil on the waters, and Ratchet went to work on Sideswipe's leg. Diarwen took the Tiny Trine outside to play in the shade between the two large hangars. They soon learned for themselves that the afternoon sun made their thin armor unpleasantly hot, but that if they stayed in the shade, zooming through the air cooled them nicely. The Little Twins had attached a cargo net to a pole for them to climb. They could be happy for hours climbing to the top and jumping off to glide back to the sand.

Barricade woke from his Ratchet-ordered midday recharge, and came out to help her with them. Instantly he was swarmed by little seekers.

They were honored to hear Skysong's first word: a joyously squealed "Cade!"

Diarwen would never betray to anyone what the warrior's aura revealed at that moment.

Even if they were confined by the desert heat to the shady spot where they played, the sparklings could never get enough of flying in the open air. When Jolt came out to tell them Ratchet had finished up with Sideswipe and the Big Twins had gone back to their quarters, it took quite a bit of doing to round them up. Jolt proved how precise and gentle he could be with his magnetics, when he wrapped an energy whip very carefully around Skysong and reeled her down from the roof. He was surprised when she flew to the back of his helm, energy whip and all, and magnalocked herself there, giggling.

All three had collected sand under their armor. Barricade got out their washtub and filled it with gentle solvent.

Unlike the humans, who used that to clean just about anything, Diarwen got a rash if she got it on her skin. Staying dry was fairly unlikely, with the sparklings happily splashing in their bath. While Barricade and Jolt bathed them she put on rubber gloves and busied herself fixing their snacks. They had started to fuss and whine about the supplement-laced energon. They would, however, cheerfully nibble rust sticks with those same supplements in them.

After the three of them had finished their snacks and gone down for a nap, Barricade was allowed to go out in the commons for a while, with Jolt and Bumblebee guarding him. Chromia joined them as they left medbay. Barricade's care for the sparklings had won over the eldest of the Sisters; Diarwen knew that meant the rest of the Autobots would not be far behind in accepting the former Decepticon.

They had watched Avatar a few days ago; if Optimus was their little clan's Olo'eyktan, Chromia was its wise Tsahik. And Diarwen? She must be some storm-blown Dreamwalker, taken into this odd hometree in the middle of the desert.

Ratchet interrupted that flight of whimsy. "Diarwen, if you have a moment, could you join me in my office?"

"Of a certainty," she replied.

Ratchet gave her a lift to his desk; on it lay a datapad. He activated the pad. She crossed to look down at it.

On it was a 17th-century woodcut illustration of Diarwen herself, standing over a sleeping monk with her sword in hand.

"The text that accompanies this states that in late May of 1631, a female known only as die Teufelin Weiss entered a camp of the Army of the Holy Roman Empire and killed twenty men in their sleep. Were you that female?"

She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "I was. Will that be all?"

"I suppose it will be, yes."

"Good afternoon, then, Ratchet."

She walked to the edge of his desk, and before he could move to assist her, jumped lightly to the concrete floor, and walked out of the office with her head high and her aura tightly controlled.

As if nothing at all in the world were wrong, she stopped for a moment to look in on the little ones, then she left the medbay by way of the human's door.

Ratchet looked down at the floor where she had landed. A spiderweb of cracks extended out from her landing point, mute testimony to the amount of energy that she had just grounded there.

Suddenly Ratchet was very glad he had phrased his question in the way he had, quoting someone else's accusation rather than making one in his own right.

Diarwen paid little attention to where she was going until she was well away from the hangars, up in the canyons. The hot sun beat down on her but she barely felt it. Her skin burned from a different heat, eyes stung from smoke which had risen from a burning city nigh on four hundred years ago.

Numbed by a horror she had thought long past, she stood at the edge of a cliff, her hair and clothing whipping in the hot desert wind.

After enough time had passed for the shadows to lengthen, she heard wheels on gravel, then the sound of transformation. "Diarwen?"

"Optimus," she replied.

"What's wrong?" He closed the distance between them, but stopped in time enough not to crowd her.

Diarwen turned to face him, and he saw that her silver-gray eyes brimmed with tears. He knelt and offered his servo.

She stepped onto his palm and he lifted her to his chest, held her so very gently to him. She leaned into him, and asked, her voice muffled against his chest plates, "What...do you know of the Siege of Magdeburg, Germany, in 1630 and 1631?"

After a brief pause, he replied, "Only what I just now read on Wikipedia," he admitted. "The...Thirty Years' War?"

"A conflict between the Calvinist Protestants in the north of Europe, and the Catholic nations in the south," she replied. "You recall that I mentioned to you the Wars of the Reformation, and that I was involved in it, on the side of the Protestants."

"Yes."

"This was a part of that larger conflict. I was there to avenge my people. Neither side was in the right in that war. If either side had found out what I really was, they would all cheerfully have cast me to the flames, one side as quickly as the other. But von Falkenberg and von Brandenburg, two Calvinists, were quick to accept the services of a spy. The highborn contested for land and power, with the commonfolk caught between. Whether they were Catholic or Protestant depended for the most part on who controlled the area where they lived. Magdeburg was Protestant. They held out bravely through a months-long siege, but in the end, the city fell to a massive bombardment. This was on the twentieth of May.

"There were thirty thousand people in Magdeburg, Optimus. I was one of the last to escape, one of only five thousand. They put the garrison to the sword, then they set fire to the city and embarked upon a merciless rampage of looting, and rape, and torture, and slaughter. They threw the burned bodies of twenty-five thousand of the people of Magdeburg into the Elbe River for two weeks. For two weeks the river floated thick with the corpses of men, women, children. It was...all that we saw in Chicago, and...and worse. The Decepticons at least killed quickly and cleanly, for the most part.

"Five thousand escaped into the countryside—which was itself scoured by the months of war. I was among the last to leave. There was no food, no shelter, no help for the survivors. That would have been bad enough, but those bastards hunted them like animals. I have no idea how many of those mad dogs I put down. They came to call me 'die Teufelin Weiss'—the White Shedevil. And by the Gods, they feared me. They feared me enough to call the Inquisition from Rome to put a stop to this woman who dared spoil their sport.

"I put a stop to them. And I left a note on the body of the Inquisitor telling Pope Urban that I was coming to Rome for him. I'd no intention of any such thing, of course, I was not fool enough to think I could take on Rome singlehandedly—but I had to lead the Inquisition away from Magdeburg. The people had suffered enough, I would not bring that scourge down on them as well.

"I returned to Ireland, and then a few years later I came to America and made a new start here. But, by the Mother, Optimus, I still hear the people of Magdeburg screaming.

"Today, Ratchet asked me if I was die Teufelin Weiss, and he wanted to know if I had killed those men. Well, I did. Tell me, Optimus, am I guilty of twenty counts of murder for my actions that night?"

"No more so than any of my spies who took covert action to kill the enemy," Optimus told her. "You did your duty."

"I failed in my duty, and thousands of innocents paid the price."

He surrounded Diarwen in his fields, knowing she would read his honesty in them, and take comfort from his presence. "There are always going to be those you cannot save." Iacon City. "You don't bear the responsibility for every defeat." Praxus. "You were one sword against an army, Diarwen. You have to think about the five thousand that you did help save." Magdeburg.

"You...are wise, my friend. There are times that I realize how alone I am...and it all closes in on me. Today was such a time."

"You are not alone. Not while I live."

Her tears finally spilled, and she let herself sink into the cocoon of his fields. No one had comforted her in that way in so very long.

Optimus said, "I'm going to have a little talk with Ratchet, about passing judgment before he has all the facts."

Diarwen scrubbed her sleeve across her eyes. "Ach...the least said, the soonest mended. Ratchet is a soldier. I hope he will figure out what I did, and why I did it, eventually, after he thinks about it for a while."

Optimus rumbled agreement. "As you wish, but I won't tolerate a repeat of this kind of accusation, any more than I would if it were leveled against anyone else here."

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"Letting me cry all over you. I am not usually some weepy maiden in need of rescue."

"I don't see you that way. No one can stand alone, as you've had to for too long. Diarwen, you said that Ratchet is a warrior, and he is a very brave one when he has to be. But he is better at saving lives than taking them, Primus bless him for it. He is no covert operative, nor has he commanded them. He doesn't understand the demands and realities of that life. He is in no place to criticize you for killing those sent to kill you, those who took pride in those twenty-five thousand beatings, and rapes, and tortures, and deaths—and that before they could start rounding up scores of innocents they suspected might know your whereabouts. You do know that you had no choice but take the fight to them?"

"I know," she replied. "Still, it is not easy to hear 'murderer' implied, or to be accused of it for standing in defense of those who could not defend themselves."

"No. That isn't easy. Nor, I imagine, was it easy to walk away from the accusation. Thank you for doing that."

"Ach, there were babies sleeping in the next room, what else was I to do?" Her tears had stopped, leaving her feeling little besides old and bone-weary. She wished she had saved the drinking for tonight, a few pints would have done her good—but she wasn't so far gone as to drink herself half blind two nights in a row.

Optimus decided it was time he gave Barricade and the sparklings permanent quarters of their own. As long as Cade passed the Chromia test, few others would object. That would help separate Diarwen from Ratchet, if she could sparkling-sit somewhere other than medbay. And the sparklings clearly needed better accommodations.

That could wait. For now, they went back to base together, as another day drew to its quiet close.

The End