The next few shifts were dull but restful. Mirage showed Tempest around the bunker to the sparkling's chattering delight. There was a surprising lack of hissing though with the symbionts not much larger than the seekerling possibly he didn't class them as threats. Laserbeak and Buzzsaw were favourites. Their presence prompting much flapping.

Thundercracker emerged with optics half-lit, sitting in the kitchen like a pile of plating. In the interim, Mirage had commed Knock Out to request a copy of the Seeker's treatment plan. Thus he was prepared with a cube of energon cloudy with supplements. He put it in front of his conjunx along with a spoon; drink or eat, the jet was going to ingest the mixture.

"You volunteered for Nag Duty, then?" Thundercracker grumbled, glaring at the cube. He didn't feel great. He was trying to pretend he appreciated someone taking an interest in his health, which didn't work when it was the wrong someone. Someones. The thought stuck like flak in a turbine.

"I found it embarrassing to have to explain myself to underqualified nursing staff that I had not poisoned you." Mirage said wryly, doubting sympathy would help. "Or wounded you in some subtle, undetectable way that caused you to surreptitiously expire by means unknown to medical science."

"I don't have life insurance. Deactivate me and you get nothing." He smirked. It wasn't hard to imagine Mirage as a femme fatale, all matte in mourning paint and ephemeral as smoke. "Did they give you a hard time at the clinic? Do I need to make a statement for parole?"

"Once Hook arrived and started complaining about your non-compliance, the interrogation stopped. I've had worse questioning from Prowl over surprise parties." He flicked a glance pointedly at the untouched energon. He would nag if he had to.

Thundercracker drank half the cube with a series of expressive grimaces. Tempest, tucked up in the sling, mimicked his carrier then laughed. A slow smile brightened the Seeker's mien. He made another face and the sparkling shrieked with delight, kicking against Mirage's chest in his enthusiasm.

"It's probably safe here to put him on the floor. It's clean and no one's going to step on him." Thundercracker covered his uncertainty with another pull of the cube. He'd gone on at the 'Bot to mind the bitlet every moment. Would he think this was a set up? A test for him to fail so there could be some reprisal? Mind games like that weren't unknown in the ranks. You had to keep fighting for position.

"I would prefer if he had a playmat or tarp, something to cue he has a boundary." Mirage eased into the topic of an outing. "I don't know what you've already bought but there are a few things that would be useful."

"You want to go to the market again?" Thundercracker would rather eat his own ailerons than face other mecha right now. Mirage needed an escort but it didn't have to be him. Or Soundwave, who would make any excursion an inquisition. "Would you mind going with one of the symbionts? Or a proxy?"

"I have no objection." Depending on the proxy, of course. "Would you be comfortable with me going out with Tempest without you?"

"Well, no." He had to be frank. "But I can't bolt you to the floor. And you drove with what's-his-bumper."

"Hoist." The noble supplied coolly.

"Hoist." Thundercracker took the unspoken rebuke. "I need to get my channels clear. A quick trip to the market for bitty stuff should be reasonable to anyone." He would probably have to repeat that mantra. "But no side quests." His mouth quirked. "No lollygagging."

Mirage blinked; a courteous social prompt for more information. He presumed the Decepticon was not malfunctioning.

"You didn't play that game, I guess." He'd loved wandering around picking flowers. Not even the best ones for potions. Just sightseeing. The dragons had been a pain in the aft because the bones were so heavy and his horses kept dying.

"I avoided nearly all human media. Especially anything popular." He had once incautiously asked Bumblebee about the red and white plastic ball on his dashboard then had been subjected to a data-dump of Pokemon trivia.

"Some of the stuff was weird." Thundercracker conceded, feeling able to chat because liking aliens was an Autobot safe topic. Maybe Mirage wasn't a fan of squishies but he wasn't going to mock. And if he did, the Seeker could hit back. Everyone knew Prime played basketball. That was probably a heresy. "But a lot of that's just cultural. There's like one 'Con xenoscientist and he doesn't waste his time writing contact protocols for any sapients we can step on."

"Where were you educated? If you will excuse a personal question." Mirage inquired, struck by the variance of Thundercracker's diction. He usually spoke the cleaned up version of Kaonite vernacular that was the Decepticon baseline but glyphs like 'sapients' had definitional markers used in scientific fields. The jet meant 'sapient' not 'sentient' or 'self-aware', and knew the difference.

"Private tutors then the Vosian Military Academy. My sires insisted I do my required combat training and state service before I pursued any personal interests." None of his preferences or arguments had mattered in the face of tradition. "I was going to go to Protihex. The university there had a creative writing course that had been sanctioned twice by the Senate. I thought it had to be more innovative than a conventional literature degree."

"Creative writing in a second-rate polity?" He tried not to sound dismissive, audibly failed, then reversed gear. "Unconventional."

"They accepted admissions from Seekers." Thundercracker put weight on that point. Even high caste, he had been expected to keep to his flight path. "I'd put my application in but then the riots started. The faculty joined the protests. Most of the professors were vanished." He vented. Against all expectation and sense, the disappointment lingered. "We looked but they didn't have priority skill sets. Not worth empurata."

"There were networks to smuggle politicals off planet." Mirage had donated to a fund to evacuate controversial artists to the colonies. He'd believed the localised violence would be confined to vandalism and civil disorder. He had wanted to help preserve their culture before some ignorant labourer smashed it. "Unlikely that any records survived."

"Oh, we have records." The jet cycled his optics. He really wanted to roll them. That gesture was so evocative. Actors must practise. Mirage's field rippled with confusion. "Soundwave has no hobbies and he's not the only Host who could decipher the glyphs of ill omen. They started caching data before the 'Cons took Tarn. Ask Rewind. He's on the project."

"The archives survived?" One of the great laments among the survivors, at least the Autobot survivors, had been the loss of their history. So much had been purged in the fall of the Functionists then scattered or left unmaintained during the period of discord before the civil war began in earnest. Mirage had hoped Neutrals had conserved the libraries but as the conflict dragged on and the refuges were overrun, that hope seemed wan.

"Probably not the way you think." Thundercracker had had to temper his own expectations. "It's raw data. They pared the framework to almost nothing to save storage space. No corruption, or at least very very little. Crystal banks, nearly indestructible. But not searchable."

"It can be reconstructed though?" The noble asked, trying to moderate the surge of his spark so he didn't alarm Tempest but the wellspring of hope filled him like the light of Primus.

"Eventually. The Archive Retrieval Project is networking processor time, so if you have any spare brain to volunteer, sign on." The Seeker fished around for a datapad among the many in his subspace. "Here. It's dull work and anonymised but worth doing."

Mirage read the information, most particularly the requirements to assist. No mention of parolees being disallowed. There would be little security risk. Most of the data would be older than the population average. Tedious, background sorting but, as Thundercracker had said, worth doing. He filled in the application.

"Are you in this too?"

"Hook cleared it as 'suitable resting activity'." Thundercracker smiled wryly. His conjunx wasn't the only one on Nag Duty. With Tempest recovering, there was actually a point in complying with the medical protocols. Not an instant fix of course. "I'm going to do as I'm told. He needs me and you need me and crash restarts are not fun."

"Make a list of what we have for the sparkling and then we can agree on extras so I'm not a spendthrift with your shanix." Mirage suggested, half because it would be useful and half to see how much energy the Decepticon had. If idle stocktaking caused him to flag, he'd cajole Thundercracker into a nap. He would like to believe his conjunx's word. However, trust was hard won. Any resistance and he would unleash Soundwave on him.