Chapter 147: Chapter 147

NOTE: I am answering the notes to all who wrote because I love ya and I believe in kindness for kindness. :D I would like to say to all who post without return addies and those who post as Guest, thank you all so much. You are dear to my heart. :D:D:D:D:D:D:D At TF wiki, there is a great picture of G1 Prowl sitting on the ground next to Ironhide drinking something. The caption indicates getting loaded so there it is. Canon. Truly. They are lamenting being too old and useless. :D :D :D Apparently, Kremzeek is a brand of hooch in canon. I love the internet

-0-Let's Roll OUT!

The Diego Diaries: Moving On 3

-0-At the gate of the prison

They stood with the Officer of the Orn suggesting a number of reasons why they both needed inside. The Officer of the Orn was a member of the Home Guard doing civic duty as part of their role in protecting the city. He was joined by three Home Guard younglings who listened to the pair, distrusted their condition but were too uncertain to say no to such high ranking officers. The bars dropped and the two walked in heading for the barracks where Sentinel and his confreres lived.

Watching them go, the Officer of the Orn swallowed hard.

Metaphorically.

Then he dropped the bars again to follow. No one else came. They did what he told them to do. Go on station and await his call if necessary. They did so reluctantly.

Ratchet and Prowl walked to the courtyard portion of the barracks where the politicians lived. He stood in the pool of light thrown down by a tall pole, itself giving illumination to the entire space. "Sentinel!"

His voice sounded angry. It was. All the way to the prison a slow burn fueled by eons of unfinished business made its way into his processor. All of the humiliations he had endured, the slights, off hand treatment and lack of respect for him as a professional wormed its way out of the files where it had been under lock and key since literally the fall of Cybertron.

They were back, the undiminished flames of his past and they demanded their due. All that he had so carefully crafted to hold back the insults and defeats of his life since joining the Army fell before the inexorable march of untreated outrage. He had never expected to do anything about it. He had buried it deep. The fulfilling life he had now had more than compensated for the loneliness, painful social ineptitude and sad self defeating calculations he had made for himself as a mech supposedly without needs. Or it did for a long time. Now it came crashing down under the lubrication of Old Maccaddam's mighty fine brew and his own unease over the proximity of someone he thought he might be able to love once upon a long lost time.

What a load of crap that was.

He stood seething with rage behind his calm inscrutable facade as beside him Ratchet watched with a facade of his own. He was three sheets to the wind but he also knew he was more sober than Prowl. That didn't mean that he had figured out what a bad idea this was. He didn't know that he should. They stood side-by-side and waited.

Then Sentinel came walking out onto the porch.

-0-At a place in Nevada

Jim Johnson nodded. "Prime is so big it can give you vertigo just to look upward at him. He's at least 30 feet tall. He's massive. Just as huge as anything you can believe. He stands about as tall as a three story building. He's red, white and blue and has orange or red flames on his paint design. He transforms into a Peterbilt truck, one of the best years … 1986 I think. He's got a lot of friends and can do just about anything you can name. I asked an officer once for specs on what he could do.

"He has a grip that can tear steel like paper. He can lift five hundred thousand pounds easily. I am still trying to figure out that one. Two-hundred fifty tons. He can lift it. They all have some capacity to fly and Prime's good at it when he does. Its just not very often because Autobots are grounders and Decepticons are airborne. He parachutes like the rest of them. He has his own chute like the others.

"He has three stages to his body. One is the brain center, the next is a small car that can act independently up to 1200 miles away and an artillery deck. If you hurt one, all three feel it. He's among the smartest of them and they're all smart. He's tough and can endure a lot of abuse. He's got guts. He's gone hand-to-hand with Megatron every time they seem to meet and that bot is a death sentence. He's some kind of moral figure in his group and everyone respects him. They all totally respect and love him. The human soldiers who work with him do too."

Sam Hedges nodded. "It would be foolish to underestimate them. Prime is dedicated to helping people in trouble even if it hurts their side of things. That appeals to everyone who already is afraid of the aliens in and around our system. There's reasons why they all have good reputations in the public.

"His command cadre is topnotch. Even if I hate them and I do, I don't think its wise to underestimate these guys. Prowl may be a calculator but he's damned near invincible. Megatron had a 'capture not kill' order on him and Ratchet. Wheeljack and Perceptor too. If you were high quality brains, you were hunted. Prowl can identify a thousand men on a battle field, plot every possible direction they can go and have multiple ways to neutralize them by his own forces calculated in under a second. He's no one's fool."

It was silent a moment. "Who are the senior bots that have to be researched and understood?" a concealed men asked.

"Prime, Prowl and Ironhide. That mech is a weapons expert and he's afraid of nothing. He's smart too. Prime looks at him like a brother.

Wheeljack and Perceptor are the scientists and can make impossible things happen. Mirage can become invisible and Jazz leads the special ops faction. They are the head of the serpent but no one else should be under counted including the special teams like the Aerialbots, the Wreckers and the femme groups. All of them, really.

"Ratchet is dangerous because he's the public face of the Autobots. The twins are no one I would want to run into anywhere. You won't survive. Springer is tough and smart. He's also a Wrecker, their suicide mission special ops group. That old mech, Kup, he's forgotten more about being a soldier than most of us will ever know. None of them is a slacker. None of them are going to be easy. All of them know how to fight and do. They have air assets as well as ground. Hound can follow you across water. Don't ever think that opposing them will be easy. It's going to be the hardest most dangerous thing you will ever do." Hedges sat back and sipped his beer.

Everyone was quiet as they digested the information.

-0-At the prison

They stared at each other, two mechs who felt no pain and one who had no shame. "Prowl," Sentinel said nodding slightly. "You came to pay a call."

Prowl stared at the big mech who had never given him the respect he deserved. Sentinel had taken to dismissing him out of servo in front of others, criticizing and minimizing his work and taking him for granted at the end. When he had been 'killed' Prowl had gone to see the body for more than the usual legal reasons. He wanted to see if Sentinel was really dead.

"I wanted to see you, Sentinel. I wanted to tell you to your face how much I don't care about you, how much I am not sorry to see you in a cage," Prowl said.

"Is that so," Sentinel said stepping down from the porch. "You want revenge?"

Prowl shifted following the big mech as he began to circle around him. "Revenge means you matter and that I care. I don't."

"You always were cold, Prowl. I tried to warm you up. As you can see, Ratchet, I failed."

Prowl felt a molten flash roll through him, an unaccustomed feeling in the best of times. He contained himself because that was who he was. Prowl turned watching Sentinel as he stepped back into his old overbearing role again. Sentinel paused staring at the winger. "Are you drunk, Prowl?"

Ratchet feeling the cloud slowly lifting listened to the condescension in Sentinel's tone and wondered what it would mean to a mech like Prowl who had fewer social skills and less aptitude for biting glib repartee to battle another on that plane.

"I want to tell you something, Sentinel," Prowl said coldly, his voice breaking slightly.

Sentinel didn't seem to notice that tiny trace but Ratchet did. He stepped closer. "Prowl."

The winger didn't turn. He seemed to gather himself, a affect of extreme anger surging through his aura. "I wanted to tell you that you are the biggest coward, the biggest liar and the worst mech I ever met."

Sentinel stared at him a moment, then nodded. "Does it feel better telling me that? Do you feel better?"

"You're not controlling this, Sentinel. You are not in control," Prowl said as he turned again. Sentinel started to circle, pausing near Ratchet.

"Poor Prowl. Still socially inept. Still insecure about yourself," Sentinel purred. "Still thinking that you don't need someone to take you in servo, to help you relax and find your hidden potential."

Ratchet felt his ire rising as he watched. Behind him standing in the shadows, the Officer of the Day watched with dread. "Prowl," Ratchet said again.

"I'm fine, Ratchet. I'm more than fine. I have a family, an important job in the faction and the resurrection of our people … our people that you harmed, that you abandoned. We have half a million of them here and another quarter million are coming. We are going to overrun you and your turncoat friends. Then we're going after Cybertron. We're going to do it under Optimus Prime's command. You aren't even fit to be his foot stool, Sentinel. You are a coward and an abuser. You deserve to be put into punitive stasis for selling us out to Megatron."

Sentinel stared at Prowl dispassionately, then turned to walk back to the barracks. Prowl called out halting him. "Don't you walk away! Don't you pretend that nothing I said matters. You are a coward, Sentinel. You left us when we needed leadership but that turned out alright too. It meant the Matrix could choose the mech that was The Chosen One. The Prophecies were fulfilled with Optimus. For once, you did a good thing going away. It's just too sad that you didn't stay lost."

Sentinel turned and considered Prowl, a smaller mech but one coiled like a snake. He stepped closer and paused looking at Prowl with an expression approaching pity. "You came here to make a point. I am assuming you did. Why don't you go home, Prowl? Why don't you go home to that family you talk about all the time? To your Optimus," he said with an acid tone.

Prowl looked at him, at a face he had thrown into the back of his processor as deleted from his data files. Yet, Sentinel was back. Sentinel was still controlling him. It ended now. With that, Prowl of Praxus lifted off the ground and like an avenging bird of prey planted his ped into Sentinel Prime's smug face.

-0-At the Residence

He sat on the couch, all of his infants asleep in their berthrooms. Tomorrow, school would begin, the senior staff and community members would hold a meeting to discuss a number of things and life would move on following Christmas Surprise. Right now, The Hourly News played their end of the week wrap up when a message signaled him internally.

Prime sat up pausing to parse it, then rose sending one of his own. Turning and running for the door, he left and was in the elevator in moments. As he was going down, Tie Down was going up, Ravel in tow. Ravel and Tie stepped off at the Residence and entered turning to look at each other. The monitor was playing The Hourly News, the infants were asleep so they sat and took a turn at babysitting until Optimus came back.

-0-At the same time

Ironhide walked from the lobby and transformed moving swiftly through the diminished traffic of the night toward the Fortress. Making a hard left at the intersection he tore off down Airport Road to the prison nearby. Ironhide burned up the road behind Optimus as he sped toward the confrontation. Ahead of them, Drift, Kup and Springer had already reached the gates.

-0-TBC

2013 (1)

TF Factoids: The Autobrand is supposed to be the first Autobot but TF wiki says that the brand is based loosely on Prowl's head.

IDW makes Prowl a dodgy amoral schemer who will allow things to happen if they help the Cause. He has a lot of presentations, our Prowl.