A/N: Apologies to those who've reviewed and not had an answer from me. I'm afraid between business travel and the inevitable back log when I got back, I've been snowed under. Please be assured I read and appreciate every review, and each one brightens my world even when I'm drowning in real life.
And now on with the story...
Part Ten
Med-bay was locked, Ratchet refusing comms and apparently uninterested in the scrapes and dents of the returning battle group.
That was never a good sign.
Optimus Prime waited an hour before letting himself into the room. It was another hour before he came out again, his faceplates sanguine and showing no sign of the dressing down they could probably have heard at the perimeter gates – in its volume and intensity if not in detail.
"Optimus?"
The entire garrison seemed to be gathered in the main hangar, Autobots accompanied by more than a few of their human comrades. It was Ironhide who stepped forward. His low rumble was level but there was an unaccustomed anxiety visible in his hunched shoulders and the whirring of his arm-cannons. Prime surveyed his lieutenant and then the impromptu gathering with a certain amount of surprise and a much-needed warmth swelling in his spark. The tangible concern for one of their own – even one scarcely known by their human contingent – underlined just how much of a community NEST had become.
Raising his voice just a fraction, Optimus Prime spoke first to the old friend in front of him.
"It would appear that our Second should brace himself for rather a strenuous rebuke when he reboots."
Relief spread outwards in a wave of laughter and murmured agreement. Prime allowed the Autobots a moment to enjoy the emotion.
"Emergencies excepted, medical bay will be sealed until the morning. Sideswipe's condition continues to be serious, and locating Sunstreaker is an urgent priority. Prowl will remain off duty for at least the next week, and will be on limited duties thereafter." He paused for a spark-beat. "Ratchet tells me he will ensure that term is clearly defined."
There was another ripple of amusement, easing the renewed tension that came with the strict medical requirements. Prime let it subside.
"Autobots, I suggest those of you without other duties take some rest while you can. Soldiers of NEST, all of you, my thanks for your service today."
There was another rumble, this time of acknowledgement. The crowd started to dissipate, not without frequent glances at the closed medbay door but reassured by their Prime and his stoic calm.
Ironhide lingered, and Bumblebee – kicked out of medbay on Ratchet's return – hovered nearby. A few of the humans seemed inclined to stay too. Major Lennox leaned from side to side, sending most of his men on their way, but Sergeant Epps and the major himself looked up at Prime with worried eyes.
Prime leaned down, offering the major his hand without comment, and holding steady as the human climbed aboard. Ironhide followed his example, scooping up Epps, and the two officers moved off, Prime nodding acceptance to Bumblebee when the scout revved uncertainly before joining them.
The small group remained silent until Prime had led them out of the hangar and into the evening light. Warm sunlight beat down on Prime's armour, warming it after a jet-lagged day that, even by Cybertronian standards, had been far too long.
"Prime?" Ironhide voiced his name a second time, the question still there in it and no less concerned.
Optimus Prime gauged his words carefully, glancing at the humans still standing on their outstretched palms. He vented a sigh.
"Ratchet is concerned, but believes Prowl will be online sometime tomorrow evening. He forced his systems hard, and suffered a severe processor crash and other systems failures as a result."
"Slag it, Prime." The Cybertronian profanity fell naturally from Lennox's lips. "If doing this is so dangerous, why…?"
Bumblebee's warble cut across him. "Prowl's tactical processor isn't dangerous!"
"He's a slagging tactician." Ironhide rumbled, his cannons rumbling.
Prime sighed. "Under normal conditions Prowl's physical condition is no more endangered by his regular duties than Ironhide's is."
The human major looked up sharply at the weapons officer. Ironhide gave his Prime a hard look for singling him out, his cannons whirring as if in demonstration. Prime met Ironhide's optics without flinching and without apology.
"The tactical abilities Prowl demonstrated today arise from an unusual combination of spark-born ability, intense training and an advanced tactical processor that is as intrinsic to his physical integrity as Ironhide's cannons are to him." He tilted his helm, his optics dimming slightly. "Like Ironhide's cannons, they are also a significant drain, drawing from a mech's power systems and ultimately from his spark."
Ironhide scowled. He shook his helm, glaring at the setting sun and forcing Epps to adjust his balance as large fingers flexed under him. "Prowl's spark is fragging weak."
"He knew it was a bad idea," Bumblebee offered, voice tentative. "He was watching pretty much from when he woke up. He waited… waited until, ah…"
"Until we were up shit creek without a paddle," Epps finished for him.
"Indeed." Prime let his own optics drift away, joining Ironhide in his study of the sunset. "Prowl offered his assistance when he determined that the risk to those of us in the field outweighed the risk to himself." He hesitated. "Major Lennox, I am asking for your patience. Even in a debilitated state, Prowl is still a vital part of this army, and one of the most dangerous mechs on this planet. If it hadn't been for his tactical insight, we would now be faced with an entrenched Decepticon position in Europe. If he hadn't intervened in the battle, I believe both elements of NEST would have suffered significant losses."
"Yeah," Lennox rubbed his neck, the human clearly weary. "I got that."
"I will not risk my Second in Command's health any further." Optimus Prime allowed a small sigh to spill from his vents. "Even if Ratchet would allow it. However, nor will I side-line him or reject the very real contributions he can still make to our battle and our ultimate victory." He leaned forward, his optics dilating as he loomed over his human counterpart. "Such abandonment would not just be folly, it would destroy Prowl, and be poor repayment for his bond-mate's sacrifice."
"Optimus." Lennox raised his hands, holding Prime's gaze in a way few, on this planet or any other, could. "You're talking as if I'm going to kick him out. As if I could. As if I would!"
Prime held his pose for several long spark-beats before straightening, a sigh flushing air through his vents. He considered the human in front of him, weariness dragging at his frame.
"This world is a young one, Lennox, a fragile one. My people brought a war to your soil that was not of your making, and fight battles that are terrifying in their destruction and intensity. Your government seized upon our offer of protection. They have supported our partnership, provided resources and facilities for our use. I wonder though if they'll be so accommodating in offering resources to an Autobot who I will not place in front-line of battle."
Lennox swore, pacing a few steps before scowling up at the mech towering above him.
"I don't know about your world, Prime, but in mine, an injured veteran is taken care of, and the family of a soldier killed in service has rights. In my book, Prowl's both, and I'll be fragged before I let any paper-pusher in Washington say otherwise. Hell, I don't even know what you're worried about. I play them the tape of Poland, and the Pentagon will be screaming for him to process their databases."
"Which is why we won't release the tape," Ironhide scowled. The hulking black mech folded his arms, finger servos drumming against his cannons in a gesture he'd picked up from the human in front of him. "Prowl isn't a machine, Lennox. He's not going to be exploited."
"No," Lennox made the word a promise, unflinching. "He's not."
Prime nodded, glancing back at the repair bay and thinking of his second, of Sideswipe and the medic still fighting for them both.
"Good."
There was probably a circle of that Pit the 'bots talked about reserved just for whoever had invented paperwork.
Rubbing his neck, flexing it to loosen the tired muscles, Lennox scrawled his signature at the bottom of a page. He'd read maybe three quarters of it, and that was gonna have to be enough. Even after the night to rest, his concentration was still far from good. Okay, so the pencil pushers in Washington wanted details. He could understand that. It would be tough enough to explain away a full-scale battle on American soil. Explaining it to a sovereign nation half-hearted at best about military involvement, deep in the heart of over-populated Europe must be challenging even the Pentagon's diplomacy. Well, that was why the generals got the big money. Even on Lennox's pay grade, there were far more of the endless report forms than any sane man could take.
Did his forces trash two wooden carts in the act of saving human civilisation, or three? Who the frag cared? When Decepticon plasma fire was raining down from every direction, cover was cover, and that was the end of the story. Apparently though, his was a minority opinion.
Grimacing, Lennox shuffled through the pile of accounts that littered his desk. If anything Epps' report was less coherent than Lennox's own, but there was a certain vindictive schadenfreude to be had from its mere existence. The major gave himself a few seconds to enjoy it before hunching forward once again, trying to reconcile the conflicting statements from his squad leaders.
The appearance of a Cybertronian data pad, lying atop nearly half of the strewn paper, rather took him aback.
Lennox looked up from the blurring black-on-white text to blink at Optimus Prime in bewilderment. Prime towered over the open-ceilinged and thin-walled booth that served as the NEST commander's office. It was a surprise to see him there. The Prime had been on the other side of the hangar, doing his standing still thing, all morning, trying to reassure his pensive Autobots. Behind medbay's locked doors, Prowl was still unconscious, or in recharge, or at the very least in Ratchet's care. The twins were once again at death's door, the brief island of stability their medic had won for them reaching its limit.
The holding pattern that had fallen over NEST, the necessity of regathering, recouping, and yes, even catching up on the damn paperwork, did nothing to take away from the desperate urgency of their situation.
So, all in all, Lennox couldn't blame Prime for focussing on keeping his troops calm. He wasn't expecting the Autobot leader to come in search of his human counterpart and certainly not to offer more paperwork, 'bot-style, as a greeting.
Prime's optics dilated and then refocused, just a hint of a smile appearing on his weary faceplates.
"I believe you will find that document of some assistance in your current task."
For a wild moment, Lennox wondered if Prime was stepping in for his stricken front-liners as unit prankster. Then reality reasserted itself. Intrigued, he pushed himself up, first to stand behind his seldom-used desk and then to clamber onto the chair he'd vacated in doing so, in search of a better view. The data pad was perhaps eight inches thick, its surface three feet wide and as long as Lennox's outstretched arms. His angle on the surface wasn't perfect, but he could see enough to interest him. A column of Cybertronian glyphs was mirrored by notations in a more readable, roman text.
"01:46:20 Human vehicle perforated by Decepticon fire – registration XXY 261S; 01:46:48 Prime engaged by three drone elements; 01:46:55 Human vehicle XXY 261S now classified as destroyed…"
Lennox's voice trailed off, in relief as much as disbelief.
"Someone was keeping notes?"
"Necessary tactical simulation input. Rather beyond the level of detail I generally require. In usual circumstances Prowl would produce an executive summary for me when time allowed." Prime's small smile faded. "However, he was able to execute several incremental data dumps before falling offline. Having de-encrypted some part of those, it occurred to me that you might have a use for these minutiae."
"Not me!" Lennox snorted, looking up at his co-commander with a grin. "But thanks."
Well, give or take a little creative editing, that was the formal report taken care of. Figuring out how to download the information would be fun. Optimus Prime would certainly do it for him if asked, but if there was one thing he'd learned about Cybertronians, it was that everything was a test at one level or another. He'd work it out himself, and, quite honestly, welcome the distraction.
"Chinatown!"
The shout was perhaps one distraction too far. Above him, Optimus turned to look to his right. At ground level, Lennox jumped down from his chair and dodged around the partition that defined his office.
NEST had several layers of technical support, from a division embedded in the Pentagon itself, down to the front-line techs who worked in their own corner of the communal command hangar. It was from that latter section that the shout had come, and it was on that area that attention – both Autobot and human – was focussing.
Lennox jogged forward, ignoring the server boxes that lined the wall in that direction and the three banks of computer-laden benches. The man who'd shouted – one of the senior support staff he should probably know by name – had snatched his tablet out of its dock and was already moving out, towards the towering Autobot commander and the human major currently somewhere around his ankle level.
"Corporal Speelman, you have news?"
Trust Optimus to know the man's name. Lennox saved his breath for keeping up with the Autobot's long strides, letting Prime's question stand for them both.
"Sir, the photos… the ones, ah, Commander Prowl identified? We've got a match! The fringes of Chinatown, Eighth block, maybe Ninth, and somewhere around Sixteen south."
Lennox was close enough now to snatch the tablet out of Speelman's hand, inspecting it for himself, before holding it up for Prime to see. Optimus crouched, his focus shifting, the human-scale tablet as unwieldy for him as his data pad had been for Lennox.
A moment later, the device in Lennox's hand chirped and the side-by-side comparison was suddenly mirrored on the monitors of the main command gantry. It wasn't perfect by any means. The photographs Prowl uncovered had been distorted and streaked with light trails. Even after so long to work on them, the composite was still dominated by fuzzy blobs of light and colour. Lennox fixed the image in his mind, and then screwed up his eyes, squinting at the neon-lit, night darkened cityscape projected beside it.
The angle wasn't quite right, and the roads were never going to be an exact match – their procession of headlamps and taillights varying from moment to moment – but the neon lights of that diner, this club, these – ah – adult entertainment centres, cast a very distinctive pattern of colour and shape in the darkness. Not perfect, but close enough.
Glancing up at the gantry, Lennox could already see orders to the scouts rolling up the comm readout screen. The familiar music of transformation dragged his eyes to the far side of the hangar in time to see Bumblebee peeling out to re-join the search.
Slapping Speelman on the shoulder, shoving the man's tablet back towards his chest, Lennox found time to bark out a curt "Good work" before turning to jog for the gantry himself.
He waited until he was there, his eyes scanning the various resources, both human and Autobot, that NEST could put into play, before reaching for his cell phone.
Of all the dives Sunny could have found for himself – or, indeed, allowed his brother to point him towards – this was one of the roughest, and not one that NEST was equipped for. Good thing he knew someone who was.
"Detective Frye? Yeah, I know what you said. You said you couldn't do sweet eff-ay without a lead. Well, I've got one, and my guy's running out of time. So if you don't want to help, you'd better have a fragging good reason."
"I know you're awake, you know."
The slow climb out of recharge – or stasis lock maybe, Prowl's memory core seemed rather alarmingly hazy on the matter – was perhaps a little easier than it had been before. He could feel another presence in his processor, guiding him away from the painful thoughts that were always the first to greet him when he woke. Someone was processing his reboot commands for him, correcting his physical status coding as each problem arose, flagging and prioritising those that couldn't be dismissed entirely.
Ratchet could do that much for him, could deal with the fallout of a catastrophic processor crash and the complaints of a frame pushed to the limits of endurance. He could do nothing to still the familiar agony in Prowl's spark.
The medic's touch faltered when he was caught in the bombardment of imagery that engulfed Prowl along with Jazz's missing spark resonance. He had to be seeing the views of Mission City that Prowl had no business carrying in his processor, feeling the second hand terror and the heavy, inescapable realisation that there was no way out. With Ratchet stealing away his distractions, there was nothing to shake Prowl from the memory. A hated voice growled above him, speaking a language that registered as unfamiliar. He struggled, muscle cables straining, and felt his limbs gripped in an unshakeable hold. And then there was nothing but searing pain.
"Prowl!"
Ratchet's presence reeled under the onslaught, and distantly Prowl registered the roar of the medic's cooling fans. The sound helped, giving Prowl something to focus on beyond the agony that flooded his circuits. He cut off the memory with a grunt of effort, forcing his processor to flush its RAM and struggling to find something to overwrite the images. Even so, the agony Jazz once felt tore through his systems, sending ghost signals through his sensory network. This was familiar pain, pain he'd had to learn to deal with alone. He felt Ratchet trying to disengage, the medic a little disoriented himself as Prowl's processor reasserted itself and firewalls came back up to full strength. The tactician refused the disconnect commands instinctively, knowing he couldn't leave his friend like this. Ratchet had tried to help him, to ease his awakening, he didn't deserve to suffer such a memory as his only thanks.
Slowly, painfully, Prowl pulled another image sequence from the depths of his memory core. Jazz's visor glinted in the constantly moving lights, a broad grin on his faceplates as he danced through the party, pausing here and there to pat a friend's back, exchange a few words, or just swipe their cube of high grade. Laughing aloud in the face of Ratchet's indignation, the saboteur spun back through the celebration, his slender silver frame flowing from light to shadow with instinctive grace and one target in mind. Jazz looked up, meeting his bondmate's eyes, and all the joy and love expressed in his dance was there in his spark too, flooding the link between them and returned in full measure.
Prowl blinked, the memory fading as his awareness of the world around him returned. Ratchet severed the last link between them and then pulled the hard line connection clear of Prowl's wrist-port, recoiling it with one economical gesture. The medic spun, putting his back to the prone tactician. Through newly recalibrated optics, Prowl watched Ratchet's shoulders tremble. The older mech's vents hitched, powerful fans still roaring in an attempt to calm his systems.
"Ratchet… I'm sorry."
That got a response. Ratchet turned back to face him, a look of open disbelief on his face. Prowl had a glimpse of lubricant pooling in blue optics and then Ratchet ducked his head, running his finger servos down his face. When the medic looked up again the familiar scowl was back, albeit tighter around the edges than normal.
"Don't you dare! Don't you slagging dare apologise for what you're going through." Ratchet vented hard. His optics slid away from Prowl's unable to hold his gaze for long. There was a long pause before Ratchet spoke again. "Thank you," he grated with obvious reluctance.
Prowl's nod of acknowledgement was more of a brief jerk. His spark ached, his systems struggling to regain their own equilibrium. He'd grown accustomed to awakening to the sensory memory of Jazz's death. Memories of better times were the only defence he had, and those were hardly enough to keep him from shutting down on the spot. The one he'd gifted to Ratchet wasn't the most intimate or joyful or precious, not by a long way, but it was as much as he was willing to share – a single memory of smiles and laughter and love, to offset the experience of a death that the medic already grieved and now understood too well.
Then the sparklet stirred inside Prowl's chest and summoned another memory file, one he wasn't ready to share with anyone – one moment of joy and grief and love and pain all twisted into a single, terrifying knot.
"Primus, Prowl…"
Ratchet still wasn't looking at him, didn't see the new wave of pain wash across his patient's faceplates, or the anxiety that followed as Prowl turned his attention inwards, checking his nascent offspring for harm. The medic's voice trailed off and Ratchet shook himself, literally, armour plates rattling. He looked up to see Prowl's hand resting on his chest-plates and instantly the tactician felt the tingle of another scan play across his sensor net. His door-wings twitched, his face returning to a carefully blank mask as fury built in Ratchet's optics.
"The sparkling is fine." Whatever anger Ratchet carried, the reassurance came first. Only then did yellow-green fists clench and rage let rip. "But it might not have been! You were slagging lucky, Prowl, and you know it. It was touch and go. If Bumblebee hadn't been with you…. What in Primus' name were you thinking? How dare you risk your spark – both your sparks! – like that?"
The tirade was strangely reassuring. Prowl felt as if he were on firmer ground, the sheer familiarity of the moment comforting, despite its trigger. He let his hand fall away from his chest, settling back onto the med berth as Ratchet ranted.
His frame felt uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and it took Prowl a few moments to page back through a new suite of maintenance reports, this time fragmented by his processor crash. The extent and complexity of the repair work took him somewhat aback.
"…Prowl? Are you even listening to me?"
"You overhauled my fuel system?"
Ratchet blinked at him, optics cycling and air spilling through his vents in a huff.
"No."
Frowning, Prowl ran his internal scans again, fidgeting as he tried to settle the new components.
"But…"
"No. I didn't overhaul your fuel system. I replaced the slagging thing!"
Prowl flinched, hearing the frustrated anger in his medic's voice.
"Intervention was necessary." He didn't mean it as self-justification but it came out that way. "There was an unacceptable probability of severe losses." Verbalising the fact brought the reality of it back to the fore of Prowl's processor. It had been almost possible to forget the cause of all this in the shock of his awakening. He searched back through his data files, looking back past the corrupted horizon left by his crash. "Optimus? The Autobots and humans?"
"Minor scrapes and damages, nothing more." Again, Ratchet's reassurance came fast and without reservation. Again, it was too much to expect the irate mech to leave it there.
The medic's finger-servo stabbed out accusingly, his glare never leaving his patient.
"They're fine. Only one person came close to expiring in this mess." Ratchet sagged, his tone a chagrined mix of rage and resignation. "I just wish to Primus it didn't have to be you."