Disclaimers in Part 1

Sideswipe was bored. It was a lovely afternoon, a balmy 87 degrees—practically sweater weather for the humans, after the triple digits of the last few days—and he was still on light duty. Which meant, he was stuck on the monitors.

Optimus was in his office with the door closed, in a teleconference with General Morshower and the SecDef. Sides figured it was probably about their lack of results in finding the rest of the Decepticons. Well, Sides figured, the FBI and the combined police and state patrol forces of the United States had a lot more boots on the ground than NEST did, and Jazz wasn't the only one monitoring the Internet—no one else had spotted them either!

He sighed. They probably weren't the only ones having a bonfire built under their afts, either. The President wanted results before there was another disaster. He'd be pressuring everyone.

A yellow flag on one of the perimeter alarms riveted his attention, but when he checked the monitor, it was just Brains and Wheelie checking the fence. They had to get right up on top of one of the alarms before it started to register at all.

Sides ex-vented. He had volunteered to check the fence, but Ratchet had nixed that. He'd said if Sides got out there, he'd get distracted, have an "Oh, look, a chicken!" moment, and do something stupid like climb another rock stack. By the time Sides had looked up the chicken reference and figured out he'd just been insulted, Ratchet had escaped into medbay and Optimus had already put him on monitor duty.

Maybe it would be a good idea to let his helm self-heal a while longer, if he got pwned that easily by the medic.

He slouched in his chair, flipping through the monitors. Sand...sand...more sand...a lizard! Sand...sand...sand... If he had been human, he would have yawned. The leg he had twisted up hurt, and so did the back of his helm. He fidgeted, trying to find a more comfortable position to sit.

Complaining about it would necessitate a trip to medbay, and another lecture from Ratchet. He'd listened to enough of those to last the rest of the vorn. He wasn't leaking or anything like that, so Ratchet wouldn't have an excuse to yell at him for not coming back to medbay. He hoped if he toughed it out, it would stop hurting on its own. Anyhow, when this fraggin' shift was over, he could go back to his berth, and maybe his brother had a little high-grade. That would take the edge off so he could recharge.

He got to the cameras that were set up around the base itself. Those were a little more interesting—there was always the possibility that someone might be doing something funny or embarrassing. Maybe even blackmail material. After all, he'd once caught Flareup … no, best not to think about that. And now, the cameras showed nothing that amounted to anything, either.

Prime's office door slid open and he came out, still settling his fields after whatever argument that meeting had included. Sides doubted he would ever find out what had been said. Discussions among the high command often got heated, but whatever decisions were reached, they would present a united front when it was over.

Obama ran a tight ship. The difference between that, and the Council during the last days of Cybertron, was like night and day. Sides decided he had better enjoy it while it lasted, though, since American presidents only held the office for four to eight years—less than a tenth of a vorn at most. Who would lead after that was anyone's guess, and the one after that? A complete mystery.

Optimus told him, "If you need a break, I can watch the monitors for a while."

"Thanks, it might help to move around a little. Do you want anything while I'm up?"

"Not right now, thanks."

Sideswipe logged off, and started to get up.

Something gave way in his leg with a loud "ping"—one of the welds broke, letting the wheel turn sideways in his foot. He lost his balance and would have fallen with all his weight on the bad leg if Optimus hadn't caught him.

Sides muted his vocalizer to keep from screaming out loud.

Optimus carefully straightened his knee, assessing the damage. ::Ratchet, could you come to Admin, please? Sideswipe has a problem with his injured leg.::

::Fraggit, I was afraid of that. I'll be right there. Don't let him put any weight on it until I get a chance to look at it. If you can straighten the wheel assembly without causing any more damage, it will relieve the pain.::

Optimus saw that the whole wheel assembly had slipped sideways, along a transformation path. The only damage seemed to be the failed weld. He curled his servos around the ankle, supporting it as he carefully rotated the assembly back into place.

The relief was immediate. Sides onlined his vocalizer. "How bad did I frag it up this time?"

"The inboard plate split along that weld, and that let the wheel assembly turn exactly as if you were transforming. The only damage seems to be to the plate. I'm sure Ratchet can fix this without much trouble."

"He wanted to replace that armor plate, but we're short on the supplies. I wanted him to try to repair the old one first. Maybe he'll be able to salvage the two broken pieces for someone's youngling frame," Sides replied.

But then Optimus felt the same flash of energy that had occurred when he was examining Ironhide after his fall. This time, though, it was much stronger.

Sides yelped as energy arced between them, not just re-welding the split plate, but reworking it: when the arc died, there was no sign of a weld.

A strong smell of ozone drifted through the monitor room, and the plate began to radiate the heat of that energy. It was not quite hot enough to cause damage to lines and components beneath itself, and not quite hot enough to be painful.

Sideswipe probed at the ankle. "Optimus, what did you just do? My sensors aren't reporting any damage any more. Even that processor-ache is gone."

"I have no idea, Sideswipe."

Ratchet came in. "Let me see."

Both of them still staring at the fully repaired injury, they moved to give Ratchet some room.

The medic stared, probed (which should have had Sides singing several octaves above his usual range, but didn't hurt at all), rotated a–thing–out of one index finger, and performed the Mysterious Rites of the Medic for a solid two minutes before he gently set the leg down, and glared at both his patient and his Prime.

"I don't appreciate being summoned over here for a practical joke. Nor do I know how you've managed to replace that leg, Sideswipe, but I am Seriously Not Amused."

Both his patient and his Prime heard those capitals, and gaped at him. "It wasn't a joke, Ratchet," Optimus said finally. "Sideswipe stood up and he and I both heard the noise that weld to his inline plate made when it gave. His wheel pivoted as it does when he transforms, and he almost fell."

"It hurt like slag, too," Sideswipe offered.

Ratchet's optics stopped smoldering. "Okay. Tell me exactly what happened. Prime, will you take the monitors again? Sideswipe, your side first, please."

Sideswipe recounted exactly what had occurred, down to and including his own muting of his vocalizer.

At the end of his recitation, Ratchet sighed. "All right. Take the monitors, please. Optimus?"

"Yes, Ratchet?"

"How long have you known you could heal?"

Optimus, stunned, gaped at him again. Ratchet thought that the Prime was a fine-looking mech, even with his mouth hanging open, as did Sideswipe (who was of course watching them in the reflective surface of the monitors), but what he said was, "I take it you didn't know?"

"I–no, I didn't. I think the first time it happened, though, I was with Ironhide. He took a fall that put that rickety ankle of his out of joint again, as well as having an energon leak. I felt the energy arc between us, just as it did with Sideswipe. The leak stopped. I tried to persuade him to see you, but he had plans that night with Chromia, and he was not willing to risk compromising them."

Ratchet ex-vented heavily. "I won't waste my time with remonstrating with you, or with him, over that. You never took the battery of tests which will show you what your specific gifts as Prime are, did you?"

Optimus might have smiled. "Not only did I not take them, Ratchet, this is the first time I've heard of their existence."

"I should have known. But after the disaster that was Altihex, I just figured that healing wasn't among your constellation of talents. I could have used your presence then, and I thought that if you could heal, you'd have helped out."

"And if I had known, I would have doubtless been able to save a number of lives through the vorns." Optimus sighed. "I'm sorry, Ratchet. Do we have access to the tests? I'd rather not have any more surprises that cost lives."

"No, we don't. Its administration and the discussion of its results with the Primes was a function of the priests."

"Slag it. That can't be allowed to happen again. Not with us, and not with whatever, and whoever, is left on Cybertron."

"I'm not going to disagree with you there." The healer thumped Sideswipe on the back of the helm, quite gently for himself. "I'm glad you're okay, you glitch."

"Um, thanks."

"Welcome." The healer huffed himself into readiness to go.

But Optimus couldn't let that happen yet. "Ratchet, would you have some time to speak with me after my shift is over today?"

"Always, Optimus. But I've already told you everything I know about the Primes' abilities to heal."

"Could Ultra Magnus do so?"

"Yes. He was called in a few times while I was in training. Guardian Prime didn't have the gift, and I don't believe Zeta Prime did either." Ratchet sorted through those old memory files. "Ultra Magnus was always exhausted. Granted, neither Ironhide nor Sideswipe here had extensive damage—though in your case, Sideswipe, you had a small helm injury in exactly the wrong place. But doing this doesn't seem to have affected you much at all, Prime. I remember Magnus telling the Masterhealer that he wasn't calling him in often enough, and the Masterhealer told him that he needed to recover."

"And then he was assassinated."

"Yes."

And Diarwen chose that moment to rap on the door of the monitor room.

"Optimus, did you – oh, excuse me. I can come back at another time."

Prime smiled at her, and Ratchet glowered. She, for her part, simply nodded at him.

Optimus said, "No need. What did you wish?"

"I will need to reschedule the discussion of energetic healing we were going to have. It seems that Barricade wishes me to watch the hatchlings during that time, and I am rather in need of that treat at the moment."

"Of course."

Ratchet said, using a tone that made both Optimus and Sideswipe blink, "I'll take that shift, if you don't mind, Diarwen."

The Sidhe turned to face the medic. "In fact, Ratchet, I was rather looking forward to it, so I'll not trouble you."

"It's no trouble."

"Nor for me. And if their guardian trusts me with them, you need not worry about it, aye?"

The medic glowered at her, and said, "Would you excuse me? One of Killstrike's boys has done himself some damage."

Prime nodded. "See you later."

The medic responded only with a nod, and left.

Sideswipe craned his neck backward, and said, "Thanks, Optimus, if I didn't say that before."

"Welcome. Just what I needed..."

"To be thanked? I know we don't say it often enough."

"Oh, I didn't mean that, though you're welcome, of course. No, I meant that now there's yet another thing on base that only I can do."

Diarwen blinked at him. "What did I miss?"

"Apparently," Optimus said, "I can heal bots by touching them."

Diarwen said, "I had better ask Ratchet to take the shift, then. That healing circle is more urgent than I had thought."

Optimus blinked at her. "It's only happened twice so far, and I've done no damage that I know of."

"Not to the recipients, no, but it is important to learn how to channel that energy rather than using up your own. That could badly endanger you. I shall see if I can get Flareup to take the hatchlings."

Sideswipe startled them both by saying, "Can I do that instead?"

-Sidhe Chronicles-

At the end of his own shift, Optimus found Ratchet.

"Prime," the medic said formally, from his seat in front of his own desk. "Come in. Have a cube of high-grade with me?"

"Certainly." Optimus said, and waited patiently through the Ceremony of Pouring. Touching his own cube to Ratchet's, he said, "To old friends, and new," and Ratchet nodded before applying the high-grade internally.

"You, Ironhide, and Chromia are the oldest among us. I'll be asking this of them as well. What do you know of the duties of a Prime, besides being a war leader?"

Ratchet paused, and twirled his cube in his fingers. "Besides the Temple rites? You already have my memories of the rituals that I saw. I know that there were some things involving the All-Spark. I was never in the Temple when any of that was going on. Once, when I was very young, the Primes were asked to intervene in a dispute between two Great Houses of Vos, because one of the Vosian priests told them it could only be resolved by the hand of Primus. That's how the leader of Starscream's parental trine became Winglord. Sometimes, the Primes would teach as well, when Primus ordained a code update and they would give it to the craftmasters, and make sure they understood it, so that it could be passed on to the rest of us. That only happened twice in my memory, and both times, it was Guardian Prime who disseminated the updates. Like healing talent, that may have been one of the talents that young Primes were tested for, and trained in if they had the talent for it. All that was part of the Temple education that you should have gotten, and only the priests knew what they would have taught you."

The two mecha shared a troubled silence, as once again they were confronted by the knowledge of just how much they, all of the surviving Cybertronians, had lost.

The silence was broken by Diarwen's arrival. Once again, Optimus noticed Ratchet stiffen and close off his fields. Diarwen bowed respectfully to both of them. "Prime, as you requested, I am here to advise."

"Thank you, Diarwen."

He had seen enough nobles enter a rival's territory offering a glyph of truce to know what he was seeing now. Both of them were icily professional. Diarwen maintained a proper spacing, taking a seat on a counter-top far enough from both of them that her fields could not casually affect either of theirs.

Ratchet asked, "What do you know about how Prime was able to heal Ironhide and Sideswipe?"

She replied, "It sounds like magical healing to me, at least from the description that I have of what happened."

Optimus asked, "What can you tell me about magical healing?"

"Usually, it facilitates natural healing, so that wounds heal, or patients recover from illnesses, in less time and with fewer complications that would otherwise have been expected. Much of that involves the use of magical herbs or crystals, and many humans who are not at all magical themselves have preserved the knowledge of using these gifts of the gods. What has happened here, though, seems to be the use of magical energy to heal instantaneously. That requires the ability to channel and control a great deal of mana―magical power," she said, seeing Ratchet's brow-plates wrinkle.

"Among our people, the ability has been confined to the Primes."

Diarwen said, "I am not surprised that Primus has chosen to bestow His gifts in that way."

Optimus nodded. "You mentioned a possible danger."

"Yes. Healing, like many high-level magical functions, can use a tremendous amount of energy. Trying to power a healing with your own life-force, as most beginners do, can be extremely dangerous if you do not know what you are about. It would be very possible to burn yourself out, as I did, or even to expend so much energy that none is left to power one's own body. As you may imagine, that is fatal. You must learn to channel the energy around you to heal severe injuries. Also, in organics, there is also a danger of healing a contaminated wound, which can lead to a severe infection a few days later. Knowing when to stop can be important for many reasons."

"Can you teach me?"

"Yes, at least up to the point where my disability interferes. I can teach you to work safely."

Ratchet asked, "Is there anyone who can teach him everything he needs to know?"

"My friend Moonsilver could, and I am sure that she would be happy to do so, should you wish to go and study with her for a while. I would encourage that. Alternatively, perhaps Adele Hempstead either can, or knows someone who can."

Optimus said, "I would prefer to learn from you until you no longer feel qualified to teach me. You are here; it would be the least disruptive to my duties."

"As you will," Diarwen agreed, as respectfully as she would have done when speaking to her queen in days of old.

That was logic that Ratchet could not counter. He quietly fumed, and bit his glossa. Their discussion complete, Diarwen absented herself.

Optimus didn't try to hide his troubled field from the old medic, but he knew that interfering would likely have untoward results. He wished there was a way to help resolve the tension between the two without making things worse.

He wondered wistfully if Ironhide's cure of banging their helms together would be useful, but on the whole, given the size difference, he thought not.

-Sidhe Chronicles-

Skysong was quite happy to stand on the ground, or with her pedal digits wrapped around a climbing frame, and flap as much as her internal fixators allowed—this was, in her view, a reasonable substitute for flying when she could not be in her aircraft. Currently, she was watching her brothers as they did aerial stunts for her pleasure, and doing her very best to get the entire climbing/perching/sunning/shading structure for hatchlings to take flight with her.

Her brothers were close by, if usually at higher altitude.

Stormwing folded his wings close to his body, and circled the clothesline Sara Lennox had just left on the long walk back to quarters, empty clothes basket on her hip. She paid no attention; Barricade was currently on hatchling-watch, and Stormy was a couple of hundred feet up.

Clotheslines are usually not permitted on military bases. But running dryers made the humans' quarters into ovens which not even the heavy-duty air-conditioning could ameliorate. Not only were the humans unable to sleep if laundry had been dried, the next day the heat had not dissipated.

Something had to be done. Two nights without sleep was more than enough for Will Lennox; after talking with Optimus, he'd phoned Mearing, explained the situation, and she'd run the paperwork up the line.

Therefore, the day after Will's phone call, the playground, the quarters, and the area between them were made off-limits to vehicles of any kind, partially to reassure Skysong, and partially to keep them un-entangled with the newly-permitted (and very swiftly erected) clothes lines.

Anyone who does laundry knows that dryers are hell on constructed underwear. Sara was intelligent, and so she pinned her sheets to the outside lines, and her towels to the inside ones, with the bras spaced between the towels. The towels pulled the line, and the bras, below the sheets. That way her 32Cs weren't on display to half the base.

Had she known that the mechlings considered this a challenge, it's very likely she would have hung them to dry in the bathroom, even though Will hated that. Mostly because, when he saw the blasted torture devices there, he wanted to go take her out of the one she was currently wearing. For comfort reasons, of course, although Close Encounters of the Discomfort-Removal Kind usually morphed into something else rather quickly.

Stormwing had been planning this for a week. He was pretty sure he had thought it through correctly; he had no way of knowing, or telling anyone else (including Ratchet, who would have been fascinated), that the funny tickle inside his helm while he did this was the result of new neural connections being forged.

And of course, he had no way to know that it was these new connections which allowed him to solve this 32C-sized problem.

Once Sara was out of grab range, he stooped on the clothesline. Sara hung her bras up by the straps, which meant that the straps formed an incomplete "H" shape, and the bottom bar of the H, the cups, hung nearest the ground.

At the ends of his wings, his claws were the perfect size to catch the drying line, his speed sufficient to power him around the line in a three-sixty and through the void between straps, and his wingwork swift enough to snap those wings through the straps by briefly joining them over his head, which allowed him to make one fierce downstroke and clear the line containing the sheets.

Wearing Sarah's best black underwire, he swooped into the sky. He had a little trouble making height; he'd flown through the lingerie with the cups facing out from his body, and so they acted not so much as airfoils as airborne sea anchors.

Skysong squawked at him when he paused overhead, and pointed her wings at him. He returned the gesture, and Sara's brassiere dropped neatly from him to her.

It smelled like her friend Sara, so Sara must use one; whatever it was, it made Skysong feel like an adult-frame, not a hatchling, to wear it. She preened.

Skimmer, meanwhile, had figured out how his brother did what he did. He wasn't to know that his processor was a few neural connections, and his frame a day of hatching and therefore of physical development behind; he got 90% of the bra-raid planning correct.

Physically, though, his downstroke wasn't enough to lift the ends of his peds past the sheet hung on the line away from his approach vector, and his momentum flung him, decked in Sarah's red lacy bra (Will's favorite), around in a half-circle, face-first into a fitted sheet, near the edge but not close enough to free him of it.

He slid down it, squawking, the pocket caught him, and the line the sheet hung from rebounded (slightly), which both flung him free and gave him just enough momentum to clear the ground on the first down-stroke of his wings. He, too, delivered his prize to Sky.

With a toddler in the house, Sara did her laundry twice weekly. She had only one other bra on the line. Two hatchlings squabbling over the air rights to make the last bra-raid run create quite the racket; Sara picked up her head from a sink-based task, and watched them for a moment. When Skimmer landed on the line containing her best linen sheets, she determined that interference was in order, before he snapped the line and dragged her wet laundry in the sand.

The "boys" were still there after her long walk back to the clothesline.

"Hey, you two," she said, which was the beginning of a quite reasonable request that they stay clear of the laundry. Then she noticed the voids in the inner rank of drying items, and she went … not exactly ballistic. More nuclear, with a side order of toxic sludge. "What have you done with my bras? Barricade!"

Barricade had been reading a datapad on the playground, most of his attention, as usual, on Sky. When Sara snarled his name, he dropped the pad, checked out Sky, found her new decorations, and tucked her onto his hip. He'd get the finery back to its owner later.

"Sara, what is it?"

This was the moment when Will, intent on a cold beer after work and accompanied by Alastair Graham (whose tipple had to be room-temperature, but that was pretty easily accomplished with a bottle opener and thirty seconds on "Reheat" in the microwave if they didn't have any bottles in the pantry), walked into the back yard.

Barricade pulled the lingerie lei from Skysong's neck and said, "Sara, do you think we could find out who these belong to?"

She took them, folded them in half, and stuck them into the pocket of her shorts. "I'm sure I'll be able to locate the owner, yes. Thank you."

Will realized what he just seen, and cocked an eyebrow at his wife. Who turned bright red, and said, "Hello, Will, Al," just as her husband and Graham grinned at one another. "Dinner's in the oven, Al, you're welcome to join us, you know where the beer is, and I think I am going to go hide in the cellar for the next two days."

Head up and back straight, she marched into the house, and very carefully closed the door, did not slam it, behind her.

Barricade said, "Did I do something wrong?"

"No," Will said, "not at all, Barricade. Think you could persuade the boys to stay out of the laundry?"

"Certainly." He fetched his errant sparklings, and strode back to the play area.

"Will," his 2iC said very carefully, accent becoming more British by the moment, "this housing doesn't have cellars."

-Sidhe Chronicles-

"Good morning," Diarwen said, as Optimus rolled up a bit early for their morning Circle. "How are you today, dear one?"

It was a beautiful late-summer morning; the sky promised heat later, intense heat, but they were in the desert. In late summer, you might as well call it yards and yards of freakin' nothing, though both Diarwen and Optimus, in their various ways, were aware of the spurts of life around them.

He transformed and sat beside her, taking her hand in his servo. "I am fine, though a bit perplexed. Yourself?"

"Fine as well. What perplexes you?"

He ex-vented. "Twice now, I have healed another 'bot with my touch. I didn't intend to, in fact didn't know it was possible."

"What happened?"

"Both times, I was touching the injured bot, trying to determine the exact nature of the damage. There was an energy arc. I did nothing to initiate it."

"I wonder if Gaia did?" Diarwen asked.

"That is a very good question," Optimus said.

"We are going to have to go somewhere that we won't be disturbed by other people's auras. I have the day free, and I would have said Buzzard Rock, but everyone knows to look for us there now."

He suggested, "There is that place up by Lake Mead. Let me tell Colonel Lennox that I will be off base."

Once he had done so, he said, "Perhaps I should begin by asking how magical healing works. It is possible that this works according to the same principle."

Diarwen said, "I know what magical energy does during a healing, Optimus, but that is not the same thing as knowing how it works in all respects. I know how to alter energy flows to prevent pain signals from reaching the brain, for instance. But magic can repair a wound, as if it had been healing for days or sometimes even as if it never happened at all. I cannot tell you how that works. There are physical changes—damaged cells completely rebuilt—and I cannot explain how that is done, either. I only know that it works, and how to make it happen."

Optimus rumbled thoughtfully. "Somehow I completely reforged one of Sideswipe's armor plates. Wheeljack had no idea how that was possible without thermal energy which should have seriously damaged his leg, as the plate was not removed from it, and my servo - I was supporting his ankle at the time - as well. The plate grew uncomfortably hot, but nothing more. Both Sideswipe and I have analyzed our memory files. None of our sensors detected anything that could have caused the heat, other than that flash of energy."

"You have not had the training or experience with methods of energy transfer to know whether it was the same sort of energy flow as magical that which occurs in the casting of a healing spell," she said thoughtfully. "Do you have the sense that this would work for any patient, or only to heal another Cybertronian?"

"I have no idea," he replied.

"Perhaps first, we should speak to Gaia. Although" – she unbuttoned the cuff, and pulled up her shirt sleeve to reveal a cut on her forearm about an inch long. "I acquired this yesterday in a moment of carelessness with a novice using a blade. Care to try to heal it?"

"Very well." He put his large servo under her arm, and waited.

And waited and waited. And waited some more.

"I don't think it's going to work," Optimus said, frowning. "I don't know how to initiate it. It just–happens."

And then it did. The flow of energy didn't last long, but the cut shrunk in size, swiftly vanishing. The flow of energy terminated a moment later, just as Optimus noted that there was again heat.

"Well," Diarwen said, folding the shirt cuff back into place, "that felt precisely like magical healing that both other Sidhe and humans have performed on me. I still think we should ask Gaia for some more information, though."

He transformed, and opened his door for her. "Let's go," he said.

End Part 11