19: Repercussions

Ratchet stormed into the conference room, where the room's current occupants were in deep but quiet discussion, trying to figure out what to do in the wake of recent dramatic but very unexpected events. Glancing around himself, Ratchet saw that everyone that he needed to address – even Starscream, busily trying and failing to be inconspicuous, alone in a corner – was already, conveniently, in the room.

"Oh, good," Ratchet announced sourly when the room went suddenly quiet and all eyes turned to him curiously. "The gang's all here."

And then he summarily dismissed everyone who didn't yet need to know the information that he was going to divulge. All of them, seeing the thundering look on Ratchet's face, left without a murmur of protest, leaving only Optimus Prime, Mirage, Thundercracker, Starscream, and Ratchet in the room. Once the last of the extraneous individuals had departed, Ratchet turned back to Optimus Prime.

Optimus judged the look on Ratchet's face to be off-putting. Very off-putting. He had learned over the years to interpret even the subtlest nuances of the medic's expressions, and he knew well the difference between his habitual but harmless grumpiness, his often-feigned anger, and his very rare bouts of genuine fury. It was blazingly obvious to Prime that Ratchet was genuinely furious now, perhaps more angry than he had ever seen him. He was holding his fury carefully in check for the moment – barely – but Optimus knew that he would have to tread very, very carefully or otherwise risk setting him off.

"How is Swoop?" Optimus asked quietly and then watched as Ratchet's jaw clenched more tightly than it had been, even though he wouldn't have thought that physically possible. Optimus flinched inwardly. It was bad news about Swoop, then, which explained the fury; Ratchet was ridiculously protective of her. He always had been, from the moment of her "birth," and now her status only gave him extra impetus for protective zeal. So, a feeling of utter dread settled over Prime.

"Is she—?" Thundercracker ventured hesitantly before Prime could say anything.

"Wheeljack finished purging the altered programming from her systems and restored the original," Ratchet icily interrupted the Seeker, grinding out the words from around his clenched jaw.

Even if he hadn't been enraged, Ratchet still didn't know what to make of Thundercracker and his relationship to Swoop. He still couldn't quite believe that such a relationship existed, even though he himself had been the one who had confirmed it. Accepting the information would take time, and perhaps a lot of it.

"There doesn't appear to be any permanent damage," Ratchet added, "She'll be…fine."

Optimus, although relieved, squinted at Ratchet then, perplexed. It wasn't the answer that he had expected, given Ratchet's emotional state. The pause in his words was telling, decidedly pained,and his voice was deeply roughened. There was strong emotion there, and it was something other than rage.

"Then why—?" Prime started to ask, but Ratchet was already whirling away, zeroing in like a guided missile on Starscream, who appeared first startled at the sudden focused attention and then more than a little intimidated in the face of the medic's obvious fury.

"How long can you go without her before you have to be locked up somewhere?" Ratchet asked brutally of Starscream, point-blank.

Starscream's mouth opened, but no sound came out, even after several attempts. Embarrassed anger crept into his processors, but the look on Ratchet's face held it in check. Starscream hadn't been amongst the Autobots long and wasn't at all sure of what he was going to do with the rest of his life now, but he already knew well not to irritate Ratchet, especially if he was already angry and particularly if his anger was stemming from something having to do with Swoop.

"It…It hasn't been an…an issue long enough," Starscream stammered uncertainly, "for me to know for su—"

"How. Long?" Ratchet pointedly interrupted, taking a few meaningful and menacing steps toward the Seeker. His voice was dangerously low, demanding, and it brooked no argument.

Starscream suppressed the urge to shrink back against the wall behind him in the face of Ratchet's simmering fury.

"Six or eight weeks, maybe," he said quietly, with an uncertain shrug, swallowing his own anger almost painfully. "But…preferably not that long."

"Then you," Ratchet snarled with a terrifying scowl, "might have a very serious problem on your hands."

Starscream opened his mouth to reply, but Mirage, behind the two of them, suddenly spoke over him, his voice raised demandingly. He had been sitting at the conference table, but he had risen from his seat and was glaring prodigiously at the medic's back, his arms folded over his chest, his posture both regal and stiff.

"Enough, Ratchet!" he commanded in quiet but deeply imperious tones, the kind that had been emanating from him more often of late, ever since the revelation of Swoop's status. "Leave him alone, and tell us what's wrong."

Ratchet spun on Mirage, eyes flaring angrily. When Mirage didn't back down in the slightest, when he in fact took a few determined steps toward the enraged medic, Ratchet thrust a datapad at him, the one that he'd been clutching in one hand.

"This is wrong!" Ratchet growled. "This is the most wrong thing ever in the history of the universe!"

Mirage took the pad from Ratchet, frowning…and then he realized just what the image on the pad's small screen was.

"Primus!" Mirage responded, awestruck, almost dropping the device in shock. "Is…is that what I think it is?"

Mirage looked up then to meet Ratchet's gaze. Some of the more intense anger seemed to have bled from the medic, replaced with worry and a distinct and, for Ratchet, very rare helplessness.

"If you think that it's a developing protoform," Ratchet answered bitterly, "then yes, it is."

"What?" Starscream responded, shocked, while Mirage gaped at the medic. He stomped over to Mirage, peering over his shoulder intently. He squinted at the image on the screen for a long moment, then raised his gaze to lock it with Ratchet's. "I swear to you, Ratchet," he assured the medic fervently, "we've never—"

"I know," Ratchet assured Starscream, waving at him dismissively. Then a haunted air settled over him as he added, "But apparently she and Megatron did. That altered programming makes all kinds of sense now. It put her into cycle again. Only they…he…" He couldn't finish the sentence, could only gesture weakly at the datapad that Mirage still held.

Unexpected rage flooded Starscream. He didn't bother trying to understand why the emotion was there; he just let himself feel it. He did succeed in shoving away his first impulse – to shoot something or someone – so as not to end up in the Autobots' brig for the rest of his possibly immortal life, but otherwise he let the rage burn its way through him. And then, numbly, he sat himself in the chair next to the one that Mirage, similarly bewildered, had just claimed. He tried, and largely failed, to assimilate Ratchet's revelation, and he hardly noticed when Thundercracker settled himself in the seat on his other side, not until his wingmate spoke up.

"I want to resurrect him," Thundercracker suddenly announced with quiet and surreal calm, "so that I can kill him again."

"Get in line," Ratchet ferociously snarled at him. "Behind Wheeljack and then me and then the other Dinobots."

Angry and bewildered silence settled over the room, broken only when Optimus asked quietly from the head of the table, "How is she taking the news?"

In response, Ratchet finally collapsed into a chair, too, across the table from where Mirage was sitting.

"She doesn't know yet," he answered bleakly, suddenly exhausted. He slumped down into his chair and stared at the ceiling as he listlessly added, "We had to take her offline so that Wheeljack could get her sorted out. Afterward, after she stabilized, First Aid was running a routine scan and…and found…"

His voice trailed off in distress and a long moment passed while he collected himself. Sympathetically, silently, Optimus reached over and laid a hand on the medic's forearm, giving it a comforting squeeze.

Ratchet gave him a surprised but grateful look, and added, "The poor kid was afraid to tell me what he'd found for a few hours, but when he did finally tell me and then showed me that…" he said, waving at the datapad that was still clutched in Mirage's hand. Sighing, he finished, "I haven't brought her back online yet. I need time to deal with it myself before…before I have to tell her."

Mirage just stared at the datapad in his hand, entirely tuning out whatever else was said after that. He knew that Ratchet would have to tell Swoop nothing, that if she didn't already know that she carried a child, she would be aware of it the moment that she awoke. It was simply the way that it was, with queens like his mother. And his sister. They just…knew.

Mirage could only hope that, for Swoop, the knowledge would not be devastating. She had dealt with a brutal barrage of sudden changes in her life over the past several months, and she had done so with occasional wry humor and with far more grace than Mirage would ever have given her credit for. The fact that he wouldn't have thought her capable of doing so shamed him deeply. He had always looked down upon her simply because she was a Dinobot, because Dinobots were – had to be – lesser beings. Or so Mirage had always thought…and he'd always been wrong. Now, he could only hope that Swoop could bear just one more thing, this one huge thing, without completely shattering under the strain.

Next time: In the penultimate – and longest – chapter of the story, Swoop waxes philosophical. Starscream's bouncing around all over the map. …And some decisions need to be made.