Future Tense - Chapter Six

Disclaimer: As ever, author neither claims nor intentionally implies ownership of the 'Transformers' brand, or any canon character or concept herein, who are copyright 1984-present Hasbro/etc and used with much love and respect to their creators.

This was the real reason he toed the line with Megatron, back in the day, Skywarp mused, for the umpteenth time, conducting an in-depth study of the floor tiles, just for something to do. Because hospitals? Really sucked. He had no idea how Screamer had managed to spend even half the time in those various infirmaries without going completely psychotic, after getting himself slagged a million and one times. (Frag, maybe it did explain all the wing commander's neuroses.)

"Skywarp?"

A hesitant voice prodded him out of his gloom, and Skywarp glanced around to watch a familiar little blue and white figure slip through the privacy screen, with a tall flask of faintly-glowing purple fluid clutched firmly in her small hands. "Hey, Pulse," he greeted, gloomily.

She looked a little different to how he remembered – not quite so pointy-headed, and hey, someone had convinced her to get her arm reattached, at last – but she was still wearing one of those silly gauzy little scarves, looped lightly around her thin neck. He snorted to himself; all those countless solar rotations later, and she was still wearing the stupid things.

"I heard from TC that you'd been found," she volunteered, to break the silence, fidgeting with the flask.

"And you wanted to check it out for yourself, huh?" He wrinkled his lip, unenthusiastically. "See if you believe I'm who I say I am, too." He managed a sort of sneery half-smile for her, before letting his gaze drop back to his lap. "You'd think that after a guy's been gone for nearly forty vorns, his best friends would be more pleased to see him," he joked, grimly.

This small, sad, unfamiliar Skywarp worried her. "I doubt they mean to hurt your feelings. They're just… cautious." she apologised, quietly. She closed the gap between them, set the flask down on the instrument trolley, and tucked herself against him, trying to avoid the worst areas of damage.

He sighed warm exhaust, and folded his arms around her, resting his chin on top of her head. "Cautious," he echoed, and snorted, quietly. "In case I'm not who I say I am, you mean."

She remained quiet, for a moment. "…you heard about that?"

"Course I heard about it. Just figure I wasn't meant to. Screamer and his theatrical whispers outside my friggin' doorway." He curled his lip in a tired sneer. "He keeps forgetting stupid doesn't mean deaf."

Pulsar let her cheek rest against his chassis, briefly, listened to his internals clicking. "They're just scared-"

"Big deal. You think I'm not? With this whole… welcome to the future, attack of the clones load of slag?"

"No, I mean… not scared of you. Scared of what it means if you're not you, again." She drew back, so she could meet his gaze. "They took it really hard, Warp. Bad enough to have lost you, but to think they'd found you again, only for you-… for it… to be… something else?" The cycle weighed her choice of words for a moment or two. "This is the third time you've come back, and we weren't sure they were going to get over it the second time."

Keep him at arm's length, in case he turns out to be just another replica. The memory of Starscream's words left him feeling hollow. I don't know that I haven't been… fiddled with.

"I probably didn't ought to tell you much." Pulsar shifted on the spot, glanced back at the doorway. "It'll tip them off, if they know we know there's a chance you're not you, again. Does that make sense?"

"Not really." Skywarp pouted and shook his head.

"I meant-… If you were another replica, we should pretend we don't suspect you, even if we do. Did? Even though you know, now, which means so do they?" She grimaced. "I'm confusing myself. A lot's happened. I don't even know where to start."

"Well, I guess Lou's forgiven me for jumping ship on her, seeing as she's already come to maul me." ...must go apologise to the wee brat as soon as they let me out.

"You're the reason she decided to be a paramedic, you know." Pulsar managed a thin smile. "Because she wasn't able to help you, and didn't want to be put in that position any more."

Guilt weighed on his wings like something physical; you put the pair of you into that situation, you giant moron. A noisy little brat with a predisposition to tantrums Footloose may be, but she had a good spark, and it didn't take the greatest brain on Cybertron to imaging she'd probably taken losing her sire pretty hard. "She got out okay, then?"

The policebike nodded. "It took her a couple of orns to find her way up to the surface, but she was just a bit dirty when she got out. Said you told her not to teleport. We dug down to where her triangulations said you were pretty much as soon as she appeared. You can still see the borehole. No-one's had the heart to fill it in, yet." She forced a smile. "Took about five orns to dig down through the bedrock, altogether. Found all kinds of little caverns and antiques on the way."

Skywarp snorted. "Bet that pleased Screamer. Didn't waste all that time on a loser like me with nothing to show for it, after all."

Pulsar gave him a little reproachful look. "He was just as worried as TC. He was the one that insisted we got to work digging down to you as soon as Lou appeared, co-ordinated everything..." She quirked one side of her mouth into a half-smile. "We have photographic evidence of him wielding a shovel, if you wanted to see it."

Skywarp snorted an involuntary laugh. "He actually got his hands dirty? Didn't just stand on the edge and yell instructions at everyone?"

"Well, he knows you don't do so good with small spaces." Pulsar covered his hand with hers. "He wanted to get you out before you burned out too many of your fuses. Never imagined you'd have already vanished." She studied the scratches and rock fragments still trapped in the enamel of his dirty fingers, and recalled that no-one had been that surprised to find the remains of a leg and nothing more. Skywarp's claustrophobia was not a particularly well guarded secret, any more. "Everyone figured you'd got out all right when you weren't there, but then we couldn't actually find you."

"Yeah." Skywarp studied the clashing colours of their fingers, to avoid meeting her gaze, and watched as she picked a long crystal of dried energon from one of the softer joint spaces. "Shoulda known I'd freak out, down there." He sighed, and offered an ironic smile. "So much for just getting a look."

"It's not your fault. Accidents happen. You didn't know it was going to blow up."

"I didn't have to go underground, either. Screamer tried to warn me it'd go to the smelter, and I just… figured I knew best."

Annoyingly, he was probably right. She squeezed his fingers, hoping to be reassuring. "It doesn't matter whose fault it was. No-one's holding it against you. We all pitched in with looking for you. For Vorns, everyone was still hopeful they'd find you – find something… Seem and Lucy very nearly took up residence at the geology monitoring station by the rift."

"Screamer didn't immediately evict them?"

They shared a sad smile and strained chuckle; as infants, both twins had turned it into a game, seeing how long they could spend in his laboratory before Starscream invariably finally spotted their hiding place and booted them out. It exasperated the red Seeker, but it was only when they started helping themselves to his experiments that he put a subspace lock on the room.

"A hemisphere with a radius of two miles is an awful lot of rock to scan through. He needed the help," Pulsar reminded, quietly. "After we'd not been able to find you above ground, it seemed like the only other possible alternative was that you'd entangled yourself with the rocks, somewhere. It took the best part of half a vorn just to do the first sweep."

"If I'd done that, I'd have been dead, Pulse," Skywarp reminded, quietly, unable to completely swallow the way his pumps fluttered nauseatingly at the idea.

"I know. We needed… closure." She forced a sad little smile. "Even if it was just digging out a body. So we could grieve properly, and try to move on." She shuffled her feet, dropped her gaze to examine the floor. "The not knowing was the worst. When were we supposed to decide to stop looking? That 'one more orn' might have been what made all the difference. If we'd kept looking for one more orn, we may have found you."

"So where do these... clones come in?"

"I'm just getting to that," she soothed. "It was a few orbits shy of a vorn after this all started. We were just gearing up to start a second geological sweep – in case we'd missed anything – when a little group of Empties came across from Rustig, on the other side of the rift." She gave him a knowing, slightly chastising look. "They said they'd have come quicker, but someone made the nearest bridge unsafe."

Skywarp muttered something defensively apologetic, knowing she meant the bridge he had destroyed to stop fleeing Codustral loyalists escaping from the district.

"They brought a Seeker with them. Your colours in all the right places, scorched wings, damaged leg, barely mobile without help, the works. He was delirious, rambling about 'creatures' – not that he was easy to understand, with a scorched vocaliser. It took… maybe fifteen, twenty orns – most of it spent in hospital, with nurses in the way of getting to talk to him – to work out it wasn't actually you."

Skywarp watched a transient flash of hurt pass through her muted optics, and rotated his hand slightly so he could close his fingers on hers.

The little touch bolstered her mood a fraction. "It was just... some poor broken Seeker someone had dug up out the ruins of Vos," she went on. "Repainted, fed up just enough to keep out of stasis, and let loose among the Empties, because they knew word would eventually get back to us. Starscream reckons it was done with the hope we'd be fooled into thinking you'd been there the whole time, be more inclined to trust that it was you."

"How did you figure out it wasn't me?"

"It wasn't that good a copy." She smiled, painfully, and laughed. "I mean, once they'd fixed 'his' vocaliser? It turned out he was actually a femme, called Upswing. We think someone had tried to patch over her ident with something like yours, so we'd be fooled into thinking she was you, but they didn't really know enough about how we work for it to take. All the patch did was muddle up what came up on her autonomic identifier."

An involuntary shudder made Skywarp's wings tremble. Not only was someone dabbling their fingers around in his life, they were trying to reprogram folk, too? "What happened to her?" he asked, not really wanting to know. What if he had been abducted and loaded up with alien coding in all those Vorns he was gone? He hastily keyed up a diagnostic, just to check himself over. "How's, uh… how's her coding now?"

"Tricky to be sure." Pulsar sighed. "Upswing had problems before she was 'patched'. So far as we've been able to tell, she was carrying her trine's sparkling, and only had a few dozen orns left to go when war was officially declared."

Apparently adding two and two and (for a change) making four, something like understanding was dawning in Skywarp's expression. "…she couldn't eclose?"

Pulsar nodded agreement. "When Vos was attacked, she ended up trapped under debris, like so many. The newspark just… fused back into hers. It probably saved her life, in a morbid sort of way - pushed her into stasis, which probably explained why she got through the war more or less intact."

The teleport narrowed his gaze, suspiciously. "...and that's why they're not sure if she has alien programming in her cortex?" he challenged.

He's right; I'm still a useless liar. Pulsar fidgeted and averted her gaze. "Winn 'autopsied' her old body, once they'd finished the refit," she explained, feebly. "And, uh, see… There were… well, Winnower found a, a… camera, of some kind."

Skywarp's optics brightened, alarmed. "…the frag?"

Judging by the way his gaze went blank and wandered away, he was running another diagnostic, Pulsar figured. "We don't know how long it was there," she lied, hastily. "It-... could have been there a long time."

Skywarp sighed and let her climb up to sit next to him. He knew he wasn't going to get anything more out of her just yet – dorky Policebot obviously thought she was trying to save him from worrying too much by making unlikely alternate hypotheses for why Upswing was full of alien junk. "That's only one," he pointed out, softly, finally satisfied that there were no exogenous cameras on his person. "You said I'm Skywarp number Three."

Pulsar studied her feet. "The second one wasn't really alive. Certainly not like Upswing. More of a… a puppet? A remote-controlled bunch of dead spares."

Something about her tone of voice made Skywarp immediately leery of asking for the answer. "...so, uh, what happened to that one, then?" he asked, anyway.

Pulsar kept her gaze downcast, for a moment. "I've never seen your brothers quite so psychotic," she admitted. "Not when they worked out they'd been fooled. They, um… dismantled it."

Skywarp knew an euphemism when he heard one. He cringed, involuntarily.

"They haven't talked to anyone about it," she explained, quietly, swinging her legs and nudging the tip of her foot against his. "And nobody's wanted to ask. I mean... seemed imprudent, you know?"

"No."

Pulsar gave him a sidelong glance; he was watching their feet, as though to avoid meeting her gaze. "It seemed unfair to go asking questions when they were still hurting," she explained, carefully, watching for a reaction, but his features were studiously unemotional. "And it took them – took everyone, to be honest – so long to get over it, we just... didn't want to open all those wounds straight back up. Didn't seem worth it, when we all knew neither would talk about it. And not when we all could, uhm... probably guess what had happened."

"Maybe I should go stick my head in the mill now, then," Skywarp commented, glumly. "Save them the job when they get suspicious."

"It wasn't that simple, Warp." She gave him a gentle elbow in the side, which at least roused him partway out of his gloom and got his gaze back on her. "It was a good eighteen, almost nineteen vorns after you'd vanished, and we were all so relieved to have you back, we probably didn't look as closely as we should have. It took... well, just over a hundred orns to work out you weren't you."

"And it wasn't even a good copy. Fantastic." He folded his arms around himself and mantled his wings forwards, almost scooting Pulsar off her perch in the process. "I feel so loved."

"Hey, come on, don't be a wart." The smaller machine wriggled carefully backwards so her seat was more secure, then gathered his hand into her lap again. "The fact it was a puppet doesn't mean it was a bad copy. It fooled all of us." She used her thumb to smooth dust away from the back of his hand. "That was probably what was so... crushing, about it. I've not seen your wingmates so depressed since..." Siphon. "...leaving Earth."

"You mean, they were embarrassed at being tricked."

"There was probably at least an element of that," she admitted, softly. "It was more... I guess anger, that someone had the audacity to use your death to their advantage. We were all trying to grieve, and someone had the cheek to try and use our loss to pry their way into our lives – using the thing that made them most vulnerable to try and intrude on what was left of your trine."

Skywarp watched the little yellow fingers carefully picking his hand clean of grit. Hard to imagine what it must have been like, he recognised – bad enough when the guys had been scattered to the winds on Earth, but to be unable to find them? Forced to conclude they were dead? With no outlet to bludgeon until it gave up its secrets? That would have been bad enough, without some impostor coming along and getting him excited that he'd finally got his missing brother back.

"Frag it." Pulsar made her decision. "I believe you. TC's right. There's too much you in there for you to just be another copy." She relaxed into the corner formed by his wings and chassis. "I don't know if I'm grabbing at straws, or spent too long hoping, or just caught your own personal brand of stupid, but there's something about you feels… right." She smiled, lopsidedly. "Your field's prickly in the right places."

Skywarp managed a little snort and bumped his cheek against the top of her helm. Her static envelope was close enough to intersect with his own; it felt familiarly discordant, which always amused him. Even their harmonics tended to fight. "Nice to know the criteria you're basing your judgement on."

"Trust you to narrow it all down to just the one comment. I just... want to believe it's you. I mean, really you." She sighed, softly, and he felt her relax ever so slightly against him. "If only so I can fragging kill you for abandoning us to Screamer's mercy for so long." She emphasised the words with a little thump to the least-injured part of his chassis. "You know how grouchy he's been without you around? You're like... his pressure-valve, or something. Without you around, he just... builds up in temper and volume until he explodes at the closest unsuspecting spark."

Skywarp couldn't help a little impolite snicker. "At least he's keeping 'em alert, huh?"

"I think the recruiting officer might have something to say about that. It's getting hard to recruit replacements."

For a while, they just sat quietly, enjoying each other's company.

"It'll be all right," Pulsar nudged, gently. "Now you're back."

"I guess." Another little sigh. "If I can ever get my brain around all this. This whole... future-thing."

"You'll get used to it. It's not so different-"

"I don't want to get used to it, Squeaky. I want to go home! Even just this, it's weird. You know?" the dark jet admitted, strumming his fingers over her antennae and listening to her hum, appreciatively. "You still barely let me touch you, yesterday."

"I've had over three thousand orbits to get over everything that treacherous bunch of pipes did to me," she reminded.

"And you're still wearing these stupid things." He gave her scarf a little tug. "Don't you get tired of having to wash 'em?"

"...I know. It's silly. Sentimental. They just… reminded me of you," she admitted, with an embarrassed little noise. "Because you were always being so rude about them."

He didn't respond audibly, but she felt his large fingers carefully smooth out the crease he'd left.

"You've been gone a long time," she reminded, softly. "And I missed you, you dopy air-head."

"We only knew each other for what, a few solar orbits?" he reminded. "Not even a whole vorn, yet. I've been missing for way longer than we were together."

She remained quiet, for a few moments. "…that was what hurt to think about."

"Coulda found someone else. It's not like relationships are forever, huh? I wouldn't have been that offended." Pause. "Well, not after I beat the bolts out of them for helping themselves to my squeaky Policebot while I was out of commission."

Pulsar snorted a quiet laugh. "You got under here," she pointed out, pressing her hand to her chassis. "Didn't matter to me that we'd only known each other such a short time."

A little smile played across his lips. "That does probably count as a record for the both of us, though, huh?"

"Primus only knows what part of you my subconscious fell in love with, you antagonistic fragger, because it sure wasn't your intellect," she growled, affectionately. Her gaze fell upon the tall flask still sitting unattended on the instrument trolley. "Come on; better drink up before Starscream gets on at me for distracting you. He'll probably yell at me regardless, I was only supposed to bring you this and then leave you in peace, to defragment."

"Pssh." Skywarp accepted the tall brushed silver container, and stared down at the volatile fuel. "It's not like I've got a lot to defrag." Sip. "...I do feel like I just did six rounds with Menasor, though." He picked at the silver brace protecting his injured knee.

"I can leave you in peace if you want to get some rest," she offered, watching him sip uninterestedly at the lilac fuel.

"Small hope of that. Can't get comfortable," he snorted, bleakly. "Wings hurt. Chassis hurts. Can't even recharge standing up. Maybe if you hold me upright, I'll manage to go dormant sitting up."

Pulsar hauled a foam cushion down off the top shelf of the storage unit built into the wall. "How about if I prop your wings up, so your weight isn't on your chassis?"

He swigged back the last dregs of energon and eyed the foam pad. "I guess that could work," he accepted, suspiciously. "The front of my wings aren't so bad."

It took a little awkward juggling of cushions and body parts before Skywarp was even halfway back on his berth. His wings accidentally-on-purpose got in the way, so as he slumped to the berth he caught against Pulsar and dragged her with him. Instead of two cushions, his wings were now supported on one foam and one bike.

She snorted and gave him a little shove. "Glitch."

His arm snugged up her back, tucking her against his chassis. "I know. But you're better than a cushion."

"Now I'm stuck," she pointed out, nevertheless not trying to escape. "So much for leaving you in peace."

He arched his brows, smiling. "I know. You're not claustrophobic, are you?"

"Ha ha. No comment."

"So who bullied you into getting your missing bits reattached, anyway?" he wondered, eyeing her right arm. "Obviously someone more important than me."

A transient little flicker of pain creased her face, before she hastily buried it with a forced smile and touched a finger to his lips. "I'll tell you another time, eh?"

"I didn't mean it like that."

"I know. It's just… it's complicated."

He poked his tongue out. "Why do people always say that when they just mean it's embarrassing to talk about?"

Her smile quirked over into a lopsided grimace. "Semantics. Sounds better." She leaned her forehead against his. "Let's just say some of your former associates had a hand in persuading me, while they were looking for you."

He sighed and bumped noses; her field had gone even more prickly than normal against his own, and he guessed it was painful to think about. "I didn't m-"

"Shush. I know." She brushed a kiss against his nose, and snerked as his optics brightened.

"Well, I'm glad you're back in one piece." He stroked his fingers down her back, amusedly, and added; "Wasn't so much fun, picking on a cripple."

She stuttered a funny involuntary little purr before getting her vocaliser back under conscious control.

His smile took on a lascivious edge. "Anyone would think you've not been touched since I vanished."

"Are you insinuating I have loose coverings?" she sniped back, before letting her voice soften to a whisper. "Didn't feel right. I missed you."

"…missed you too, Squeakbot."

"I haven't been anywhere…?"

"Sure you have. There's been some fraidy little glitch-mouse hiding in your plating ever since I went back to Earth, that first time." His lips curved into a little smile. "Tch, look. You've turned me into a sap."

"Yeah, it's scaring me a bit."

He snerked and jabbed a finger at a seam he knew was ticklish. "Get you back for that."

"I was counting on it..."

0o0o0o0o0

The sun was just edging its way up over the horizon when Thundercracker touched down in the little yard behind the emergency department. He hoped it was a good sign that he'd not had any reports of Skywarp causing a ruckus, and not just that he'd slipped away again when everyone's attention had been elsewhere.

Slipping unobtrusively through the double doors at the side of A&E, he spotted Fine-tune's name still up on the board as the on-call doctor. Primus, was she still at work? A little mint-green flicker in the periphery of his vision attracted his attention, and sure enough, there she was. The little medic caught his gaze as she emerged from one of the cubicles, vainly attempting to wipe splashed fuel off her chassis with one hand and straighten her antennae with the other. "Superintendent!" She waved a grimy hand, acknowledging him. "Are you here to see Skywarp?"

"I'll allow you three guesses at the answer," the Seeker replied, dryly, following her to the main desk. "If you need to use more than one of them, then you need to go defragment your stacks a bit."

The small femme ha!-ed nervously, and snatched up a databoard, to hastily re-acquaint herself with her unwilling patient.

"So?" Thundercracker prompted. "How is he?"

Fine-tune's features evened into an exhausted smile. "He's actually been getting some rest," she confirmed, sagging onto a stool behind the nurses' station. "Some company and some painkillers did a wonder."

Thundercracker nodded to himself; Starscream had mentioned Pulsar appeared out of nowhere and offered to take some fuel to the teleport, just as he himself was leaving.

"Speaking of rest," a deep, chastising voice rolled out, behind, "didn't I tell you to get your scrawny aft into a stasis pod for a few breems, if I couldn't bully you into going home, Patches?"

Fine-tune glanced back over her shoulder to find a pinstriped navy-blue giant looming over her. "Yes, matron. I-I was just-"

"If you append anything other than 'going right now' to the end of that sentence, I'll carry you down there myself," the nurse interrupted, demonstrating a stasis mantle.

Fine-tune cast a semi-pleading look at her visitor; Thundercracker put up his hands. "Far be it for me to interfere with the ward manager's decision, she might take a swing at me."

The nurse lifted her chin, satisfied. "Now, do I have to count to three again...?"

Fine-tune muttered something semi-embarrassed, semi-defensive. "Just let me do handover, then I'll go, all right?" She slunk away before the nurse could catch her.

"Now what did you want, flatterer?" The golden gaze landed on Thundercracker. "You here to see your friend, right?" At the nod she got in response, she waved an arm at the privacy screen. "Same cubicle, go right on in."

Even before he passed through the forcefield, Thundercracker sensed Skywarp was comfortable – he could hear the faint, snoring buzz of a pinched vocaliser, and couldn't help smiling to himself. At least he'd had company, if the little white blob tucked in close to his dark shoulder was anything to go by. He'd already figured something like this might have happened, when Skyshout reported the gravity-cycle didn't turn up for her shift, and it really wasn't a surprise to find the sergeant tucked up under her Seeker's broad wings. He figured the occasional 'sickie' after countless orbits of faithful service was forgivable.

Thundercracker strummed his fingers over Pulsar's antennae, just hard enough to make them vibrate. "Hey, Pulse. Wakey wakey."

Her optics flickered and she stared muggily up at him for a moment or two until her memory kicked in. "Oh. Hi, TC," she greeted, sleepily. After a long hesitation, she added, somewhat sheepishly; "I missed my shift, didn't I?"

"By about half an orn, yeah. Skyshout signed you off as 'sick', just this once." Thundercracker held out his hands to help her up, with a knowing smile. "So long as you make the time up later."

Pulsar wriggled her way carefully out from under the dark wings wings; Skywarp's arm slithered easily to one side, its motors slack in recharge. The teleport himself hadn't even stirred; a light buzz came up from his vocaliser, and his lips were open in a slack little oh of sleep.

"You're satisfied he's genuinely him?" the blue jet prompted, as the smaller machine wobbled and recalibrated her gyros.

She nodded. "Genuinely scared, too," she confirmed. "Although he'd never outright say as much." She glanced up at him. "He wants to go home."

Thundercracker nodded, glumly. "I know. I don't know if we can. Certainly not unless Starscream can work out how he got here in the first place."

"...does he have any ideas?"

"None he's elected to share with me. I do believe Warp has actually accidentally given him his first genuine scientific challenge in the last few vorns."

"Well, you know Warp. He tests everything else to destruction, why not the barriers between time and space too?" Pulsar snorted, wearily. "Are you going to get him refit?"

Thundercracker nodded. "Well, we're going to offer it," he corrected. "And I'd like to be able to get him fixed up, but I've avoided broaching the subject so far, if I'm honest. Hard enough to get him to come back in the first place, I don't think I'd have ever got him off that roof short of sedating him if he thought we were going to give him a 'silly plastic body' into the bargain."

"I guess it's as good as saying 'you can't go home'," she acknowledged, quietly.

Thundercracker let his hand rest on her shoulder. The intervening vorns since Skywarp had vanished had pulled the small family together – anything to erase the hole in their lives. "How are you holding up?"

"About as well as you guys." Sigh. "I... don't really know how I feel. Like... I'm just waiting for it to fall apart." She smiled, painfully. "I don't know about you guys, but if it happens again-..."

He tightened his fingers, just enough to be felt. "It won't. We'll get to the bottom of it before we let history repeat itself."