by K.A. Rose
Transformers and all related characters and indica © and TM Hasbro and Takara, 1984-2007. Used without permission for non-profit fan appreciation.
Whatever I'm doing with this, it's not worse than Kiss Players, okay?
-----
Moon Base 1, Orbit of Cybertron, Human Year 2000
It had been two decacycles since the recovery of DC-Theta in the Antarctic. But apart from the initial rush and upheaval of routine, Ratchet was amazed how quickly things had returned to normal, even reaching a new sort of peace.
There had been some initial controversy, not of the registration of Theta --now Chassis-- as an Autobot by spark and construct, but the disappearance of Metroplex's chief architect, Grapple. Ratchet and Prowl had readily admitted in their report to arranging and communicating a rendezvous between the architect and two currently-renegade Constructicons, Scrapper and Hook. More than a decacycle had gone without word from either side: no ransom notices or deaths, not even an official political statement from the Decepticons, who had descended into a brief stint of anarchy following Scrapper's wilful release of the prototype.
But then, one cycle, the Autobots' Southern Hemisphere Installation on Earth had received an untraceable transmission coded with Grapple's signature, addressed to his close companion and probable mate Hoist. The message begged him not to worry, and promised that he, Grapple, would be home as soon as he was able, but he didn't wish to leave things here unresolved, as that struck him as impolite. Hoist, knowing Grapple's demeanour quite well, was distinctly more satisfied with this notice than were most of the Autobot high command.
After testifying adamantly in defence of their actions, Ratchet and Wheeljack and, to some surprise, Omega Supreme had been able to convince the executive council that they believed the Constructicon captain and his lieutenant to be acting in good faith. By the tone of Grapple's letter, they were even being quite gentlemanly.
Ratchet envied them, because for those three the war had effectively stopped, indeed, the war did not exist. Reality was sure to catch up with them, but until that time, the two Decepticons' attraction to Grapple, as gloriously inexplicable and unhelpable as it was, granted all three solace.
On Moon Base 1, the war looked Ratchet right in the optic and refused to break its gaze. Even so, while unrest shook the Decepticons' internal politics, even this military outpost had grown a little calmer and more hospitable. It was to such an extent Ratchet even felt relatively comfortable to bring his daughter here.
Prime was a little leery of Chassis's assignment to Ratchet's medical unit, believing the parent to be acting out of attachment rather than prudence, but it so far had proven to work quite well. Wheeljack had set upon Chassis's new body immediately after his reawakening in Autobot City and had the derivative outfitted with the best hardware that science and the mech's imagination could provide. She was now not only able to outwit certain species of toadstool, but could take signatures and measure temperatures as well.
It was thus employed that Ratchet's daughter encountered Prowl again in the medbay, the latter wide-eyed and moderately terrified of the small robot, as he always seemed to be these days. He shouted urgently for Ratchet when she came at him with a pressure gauge.
"Thank Primus!" Prowl exclaimed, all but clawing up the walls when Ratchet arrived. "Call her off! Call her off!"
His and Ratchet's relationship had also taken an unforeseen turn, as a result of their mission. Ratchet wasn't sure whether he was entirely comfortable for this new warmth Prowl had for him, which didn't so much mean he was less authoritative and stiff, just that he was awkwardly needy now as well.
Ratchet knelt down next to his daughter. "Dear, what did I tell you about scaring patients?"
Chassis rubbed her nose with the back of a hand. "It throws off th' readings..." she muttered.
"That's right. How about we leave Uncle Prowl alone for a little while and go check on those centrifuges?"
"Okaaaaay..."
"'Uncle'?" Prowl repeated, in a slightly high voice, after the child had gone.
"She does adore you, you know," said Ratchet, as though apologising for some genetic defect. He took a seat next to his examination table.
Prowl was not precisely making a habit of these unscheduled visits, but since historically the little the two saw of each other consisted of raised voices in Prowl's office, it marked a distinct change. He'd never have even taken his superior officer as knowing the meaning of the words "just here to chat".
"I've been meaning to ask you," Prowl began awkwardly, scrutinising a random wall. "Er, your opinion on something."
Ratchet had a sense even before he began that it was going to do with the medic's relationship with Wheeljack. Since confirming that the two of them had an Understanding, Prowl had been overcome with an embarrassed, desperate fascination. Particularly since he had now bedded their "son", First Aid, and that fact seemed to be weighing on him heavier each cycle now that he was back with his detachment.
"Listen," Ratchet said, soothingly as he could. "If you're feeling guilty about it, it was the wrong thing to do. Simple."
"--But I had your permission--"
"No, I said First Aid could make his own decisions. But what you did was down to your own discretion. Do you regret it?"
"No! It's just... Well, Jazz..."
In the past, Ratchet had presumed Prowl and Jazz's relationship to be mostly on the electrical end, since they certainly didn't seem to have much emotional investment in each other. But the more Prowl fidgeted and refused to accept the doctor's solutions, the more Ratchet had come to suspect the situation was indeed different, at least on Prowl's end. Which, since Ratchet couldn't imagine Prowl falling in love with anything short of a clone of himself, was a fairly uncomfortable thought.
But Ratchet had a lot of experience staying straight-faced with patients and their situations, and his job was to cure, not to grapple with where their thought processes might be. He stood up, patting the knee Prowl had injured in Antarctica.
"Tell him. You'll recharge better at night."
"That's your prescription, is it?" said the major, looking ill.
"I can't imagine a guilty conscience doing anyone's networking any good," Ratchet remarked, as forward as it was of him. "Now, are you going to rush out of here like you did your last visit, or actually let me look at you this time?"
Prowl glanced around for some excuse. "Er. I'm due for patrol in a centicycle..."
"You've skipped your check-ups once too often, major, and I think you more than owe me now," Ratchet lectured. He called to the rear of the lab. "Chassis! Bring the needles!"
"Aye!" the child squealed.
Prowl was somehow even more pathetic to look at the next time he was in Ratchet's medbay, two cycles later. There was a crack in his helmet plating, and he claimed to have hit his head on something.
For his credits, Ratchet would subscribe to the rumour circling the base, that Jazz and Prowl had gone off on their lunar patrol as usual and vanished off the base frequency for two centicycles. Prime had dispatched a separate unit to track them down, and found them two klicks off their route, braked near a processing tower, with something like a small electrical storm churning in their back seat.
If you believed Huffer, the two had had most of their casings off and Prowl's knees were up past his shoulders, with enough endorphins flooding his circuitry that he didn't even realise someone had opened the door on them. Once he did notice, he thrashed like a terrified animal and fell off the seat, hitting his head on the gear shaft as he went.
Jazz had apparently remained amused throughout most of what ensued.
So now Prowl was in Ratchet's medbay with a cracked helmet plate, and Ratchet could only assume he didn't come about this earlier because he was embarrassed. Among the other things Huffer had been sure to circulate was that Prowl had been exceptionally vocal prior to being discovered. Apparently Jazz and he hadn't done this in a while.
"It worked, then?" Ratchet asked innocently, bringing out his mini-welder. He had Prowl sit on a low chair as he stood over him to begin the repairs.
Prowl stiffened, agitated. But as inevitably as the interspatial winds, Ratchet knew he was going to answer. They had earned each other's honesty now, or at least Prowl felt they did.
"He didn't like the sound of it, when I said it," he admitted. "But when we started to interface, he asked to describe it, while he... It really overclocked his quadcores, hearing about it while we..." Prowl's cheek panels were overheating. He finished in a smaller voice, "It's never been like that before."
By the time the last syllable landed, it had hit Ratchet suddenly and irrevocably that he had, one way or another, taken this mech into his chestplate. Metaphorically speaking, anyway. Prowl was one of few to know of Ratchet's Understanding with Wheeljack, and knew the exact process that had led to Chassis's creation. In Prowl's databanks, Ratchet was the authority on this sort of thing, and the only one who would both listen and understand. And who he could trust not to spread the thing even further than it needed to be.
Yet, with this knowledge, it didn't shock Ratchet any less to hear what he did.
"Ratchet?"
"Yes?"
"...I think I want to make a nextgen with him."
Ratchet may have dropped his welder, if it weren't part of his wrist.
That was as far as the conversation went that cycle. It was another decacycle before he saw him again, returning from an energon run on the planet surface, which had cost him half an arm and a great deal of Megatron's ire. They kept off discussing anything except business until his arm was back on, but once it was...
Ratchet hoped that the thought had proved some little fancy and nothing else. He discovered, to his horror, that Prowl was if anything more serious than he'd been before.
This talk out of Bumblebee, Ratchet could understand. Bumblebee had a humanlike tendency to his outlook in virtually everything these days and there was, after all, a nasty little rumour that he'd sooner bed a human woman than a fembot, if only she had the right cabling. But out of Major 'This Kid Of Yours Better Be Worth All This Sentimentality' Prowl? Who still wouldn't let Chassis within three metres of him, much less Inferno's dirty pack of offspring, the Firestarters? What in source would he ever want with a child of his own?
Ratchet theorised it had to be the mystique of the thing. Prowl must be convincing himself that he could understand what would compel a Transformer to cross-manufacture, if he did it himself. But that in itself didn't match Prowl's scientific method, unless he also had unresolved issues within himself. If there was one thing Ratchet knew Prowl didn't like, it was not being master of his own body and mind.
The medic did what he could to talk sense into the mech. "Consider the burden for a moment. Or the risks involved in manufacture. Think of a lot of it-- there are more drawbacks than advantages."
"You had one."
"Yes, because we had a gun to our heads! We'd never have thought to conceive a cross-manufacture during wartime. Mind you, we're grateful that we've been able to develop Chassis to be as helpful as she is..."
Prowl had several badly-patched puncture wounds in his adrenal cables that would beg to differ on the last point, but for some reason he wasn't detered. "If we had the tanks they have on Cybertron--"
"That'd be the answer to most of our problems, yes, but I can't imagine Megatron would just allow you to walk right in to borrow one. They might not even be operational still."
But Prowl seemed bonded to the thought. "If we had a tank, incubation at least wouldn't be a problem. Size, for instance. Jazz and I have similar schematics anyway, so we wouldn't have to look too hard for parts..."
Ratchet hated to do this, but he felt himself left with no choice. "Prowl," he said. "Can you really see Prime approving a mission like this?"
The senior chief of security fell silent.
Ratchet nodded. He did his best to console, after that painful but necessary sting. "Wheeljack and I always planned to make more, after the war," he said kindly. "There'll be plenty of time someday for you and Jazz to..."
He faltered, seeing Prowl's expression.
Incredible. This wasn't some transient fantasy of Prowl's: he'd devoted a great deal of thought to it, and had probably shared much of his feelings with Jazz. They were serious about this. And just as Wheeljack and Ratchet had discovered when trying to get their daughter back, the mighty imperviousness of the great wall called The War stood defiantly in their path. There was no way to escape it. They couldn't all run off like Grapple.
"What do I do?" Prowl murmured, disheartened. "I can't move without Prime's directive..."
Ratchet's spark broke. Metaphorically, at least. And it really shouldn't have, but it did. There was something uncharacteristic and thoroughly tragic in seeing Prowl stalled by the same rules he put so much stock in.
He sat up on the exam table. Ratchet objected: "Now look, I'm not done reassembling the receptor linkages--"
"Later," Prowl muttered, and left without another word.
Ratchet and the others had to hand it to him. When Prowl was focused on something, he really devoted 100%.
After realising that Prime would refuse to go ahead with any plan to raid the Cybertronian nurseries, Prowl immediately drafted a report to prove just why such a mission would mean life or death to the Autobot cause. He called upon long-forgotten statutes and analyses, compiled ten-point presentations and elaborate graphs which he then presented to the other members of the executive council.
Prowl stood in front of the board with his charts and pointer and demonstrated exactly why the recovery of a protoform incubator was of crucial strategic import for militaristic, socioeconomic and moral reasons. He gave the board his detailed analysis of four ideal plans of attack, representing the best balance of fuel expenditure, mechpower, and chance of retrieval. In his closing remarks, Prowl announced that it was his considered opinion that the Moon Base 1 detachment owed it to their fellow troops to move on this mission as soon as robotically possible.
In two decicycles, Prowl was given fuel, funding, and a five 'bot covert strike team. Everyone seemed impressed, including him.
Ratchet tittered when he saw the thing. It was twice the size of the tanks they'd used for Chassis and the Firestarters and had a full stock of bonding fluids in its base injectors. Ratchet sent pictures of it to Wheeljack along with Chassis's latest development log.
"Oh, Primus, lookit that beaut!" Wheeljack exclaimed over their silent channel, after receiving the data transmission. "I want it ta have my children!"
Ratchet wasn't quite sure in which way Wheeljack meant. He debated feeling jealous.
Prowl, rather than looking smug with his accomplishment, paced about the medbay as though caught in some anxious train of thought. Chassis parroted his movements, head tucked and nibbling her thumb just as he did, until Ratchet barked at her to go restock the cabinets.
"We'll need the right start-up protocols," Prowl announced eventually, somewhat to Ratchet but more to the air around them. "They can be derived from Streetwise's command line; he's similar enough. We'll just adjust the compressor allocation settings..."
"If you want him to spontaneously combust," Ratchet remarked warily. "I'd suggest leaving his firmware to us. It's difficult to say which combinations will work."
"Of course; he won't stay here. I was hoping to move him to Earth for complete assembly. Do you think Wheeljack would benefit from some rough schematics for the frame? Just as a suggestion."
The rate at which Prowl was planning out his future son's life before he'd been conceived was making Ratchet a little dizzy. He'd be hearing about the kid's academy itinerary next.
"Prowl," Ratchet said mindfully. "You do have Jazz on board for all of this, don't you?"
"Of course!"
"Do you?" Ratchet asked Jazz pointedly.
"Slag, brother," the 'bot drawled. He might have shrugged if Ratchet weren't currently doing a check-up on his backstrut cabling. "He's comin' on a little strong with it, but I can't say I really mind."
"Even he has to know it'd be better for the pair of you to wait till the war's over."
"Sure, but Ratchet, my main mech, you know ol' Prowl. He figures he's gonna die first."
The medic paused in his diagnostic run. "You mean that?" he asked, quietly alarmed. His past psych exams with Prowl had never yielded that kind of anxiety.
"He's terrified. Straight down to the frame," Jazz said sadly. "He never says nothin', but it's how he... Well, that's a him-an'-me thing, I 'spose. But he's scared, all right. And I can't fix that... All I can do is be there, and that's hardly anythin'."
Ratchet wanted very badly to disagree. He wanted to insist to the captain that that was as far from "hardly anything" as was possible to get. But it would have set off more of a conversation than he'd like to have. Because where did that opinion come from except painful, miserable nights and reassuring arms, and over five megacycles on the verge of soul death, only held back from the brink because that other person was there to remind him that it's not all slagged? It wasn't something that explained itself in a few sentences.
But then, would it matter? Jazz was good about taking his word for things, even if he didn't understand what he was on about.
"Be any more pathetic and I'll throw you out without reconnecting your suspension cables," Ratchet teased. "You don't see him cross-manufacturing with anyone else around here, do you?"
"Well, no, but... Trust me, brah, you couldn't if you wanted. The boy goes all night," Jazz confided wearily. "If you wanna hear a secret, that's why my backstruts're all slagged up ta start with."
Ratchet, actually, didn't need to know that.
The Next Step was very clear, but the harder Prowl tried the more problems he seemed to encounter. And because of this, he was at Ratchet's door even more than usual.
He seemed depressed, the doctor thought. His interludes with Jazz had become more frustration than reward and the insecurity Jazz had fought so long to wipe away from him had begun to creep back in. He worried. He fretted over details. He blamed himself.
"It's a defect in my networking permissions. It has to be," he decided, staring hard at the medbay's ceiling. He was ostensibly here at this hour because his power cells were shutting down out of anxiety: he was tired all the time, but couldn't get a proper recharge either, frequently breaking out of standby, like tonight.
None of this was particularly foreign to Ratchet. Until a megacycle ago when he'd had some time to sort himself out, Ratchet had also been under a force of depression so strong it almost crippled his work. He blamed himself for everything that had happened to his daughter: for losing her, for being unable to rescue her, for not making her stronger, for not being stronger himself. Only Wheeljack's intervention had finally gotten him to realise how foolish he was being about it all.
But Ratchet didn't want to share anecdotes with Prowl, and he was sure Prowl didn't want to hear them anyway. Prowl wanted to wallow in his misery and nerves, and gigacycles of dedicated medical practise told Ratchet there were other ways to remove some thorns from a given paw.
"How exactly are you going about it?" he asked Prowl, with the same tone he'd adopted when tactfully asking Perceptor about his case of rust.
Prowl appeared confused at the question. "The normal way?"
It was almost endearing. Ratchet would have liked to laugh.
"Neither of you are input models. There's nothing 'normal' about this," said Ratchet. "You two are using the universal adapter to create a loopback circuit between your power cores, right?"
Prowl wore the caught look of every currentgen that has forgotten 90% of his physiology reference databank.
Ratchet heaved a sigh and set down his datapad. There was a beat that hung overlong in the air in which he silently debated whether he was actually going to teach Interface Ed to a grown mech and superior officer, and then decided, yes, he really was.
He rose from his chair and went to Prowl's side next to the examination table. Prowl made to sit up, but Ratchet guided him back down by the shoulder.
"First," Ratchet said. "You need to have each other listed as part of your tier-one permissions."
Prowl started, immediately trying to lurch back up again. Ratchet kept him down with his palm pressed against his chestplate. "Even you don't have those over patients!" Prowl objected.
"Yes. That's the point. It's where we get the idea of sparkbonding-- two 'bots who are as much in ownership of each other's systems as their own. A tier-one permission level is the only kind of signal that will get past your power core firewalls," Ratchet explained.
"But those can't be rolled back! It's part of the firmware."
"Of course," said the medic, not exactly looking at anything, in particular Prowl's alarmed optics. "That's why to do it is the ultimate gesture of trust. It isn't something you do capriciously. Even a lot of partners don't exchange permissions past the second tier."
"How long have you been tier-one with 'Jack?" Prowl asked, clawing for some sort of plateau with this rush of information.
"Oh. If you want to get technical, a little under five teracycles."
"...You mean..."
"Yes."
"...All the way back on Cybertron? Before the crash?"
"So much for your theory on the 'human condition'," Ratchet said, smiling down at the major. "If it helps you, we didn't install the silent channel transistors until about ten megacycles ago."
It was useless information for him to have, but it seemed to calm him slightly to hear about Ratchet's own background. It was weirdly embarrassing: he wasn't that much older than Prowl and certainly not more experienced, but he supposed everything came down to the spheres of one's familiarity. And being 'familiar' with someone was still a fairly new thing to Prowl.
When he detected Prowl was relaxed enough for him to continue, he keyed open the main seam to his chestplate. Prowl squirmed, mouth falling open in a squawk of protest, but that was as far as such things went.
"This is your endorphin servo," Ratchet explained, pointing. He let Prowl lean forward enough to see. "This is your central pain negotiation board. Here is the block containing your power supply and laser core. This is the cable you should be using." He held up the twelve-pin output head, attached by a short band of cable to his power block. "I understand it's not as imaginative as you're used to, but it ensures the fastest and most stable current, and you'll need that."
"Affirmative," Prowl said weakly.
"You will need to manually key through every line of firewall surrounding the spark core. This is important," the medic stressed. "Going in hard and fast will hurt, and the spark's not meant for that kind of abuse."
Prowl emitted a small murmur in his throat.
"It's vital you do this on both sides, simultaneously. That way the circuit that's created is entirely spark energy, and fusion is more likely."
"That's... dangerous, isn't it?"
"The word you're looking for is 'life-threatening'," Ratchet corrected. "That's why you should interface through other sectors first, to build up momentum and arousal. The spark core should only be breached for about two milicycles at most."
Prowl's quadcores pounded just below his power block. The pulse ran through Ratchet's fingertips, far too fast for an at-rest system. The medic pretended not to notice.
"The current's very powerful," he continued quietly. "A few passes is all it usually takes to overload if you've been sufficiently charged. When you crash, the momentum is cut and the entire feed is slingshot over the cable, which usually breaks. Don't let that worry you. It's better than exploding someone's power supply."
"And then what?" Prowl's voice was uncomfortably small.
"And then... instinct."
His processors were thumping as though he was running at a full gallop. The terror took over in his optics and he turned away from Ratchet. He rolled over onto his side with his back to him, as though trying to hide himself, something that had just become shameful.
"This is absurd," he said, thickly and deliberately flat to control his tone. "Who on Cybertron would do something like that willingly?"
Ratchet frowned. He'd make it worse if he tried to urge Prowl back down, so he just stood there. "The circuit's expanse through the internal systems compared to the interface cable is very small," he said gently. "It's almost unheard-of to die from it, especially with today's technology."
"No-one's worth tier-one access permissions," Prowl said stubbornly. "Who would just give himself up like that? Who would make himself that vulnerable?"
He meant it tactically. Even in the dead of night and in the thick of his misery, he was thinking of the entire thing strategically. It was a coping mechanism.
Ratchet saw this and did his best to keep his tone polite. "Some may consider it a symbol of trust," he suggested.
"It's a symbol of ownership. You said so yourself. I'm not interested in having a headmaster," Prowl returned bitterly.
The medic flinched. "This is not even remotely like that," he told the 'bot. "What are you saying here?"
"To do all that, for a whole lot of pain and possible death-- What in Primus's name would make someone choose that?" Prowl demanded, growing angry now. "It's insanity!"
He sat up and snapped his chestplate back together. He made to leave, but stopped when Ratchet spoke again.
"You're right to be scared."
Prowl didn't say a word. He didn't look at him. But he didn't move either.
A dull heat was rising in Ratchet's chest. He had no idea why he was saying this, but he couldn't bring himself to stop. "You're right, it's absurd. No-one should ever have to do it to themselves if they don't want to. But it... when it's someone that means something..." He coughed and tried again. "It transcends... everything, really. I wouldn't know how else to describe it."
The air buzzed in silence for milicycles. Ratchet half expected Prowl to get up and leave without another word, but he stayed where he was.
Finally, Prowl said, "You and Wheeljack have an understanding, because of that?"
"In part because of that, yes."
"And that's... the one, I suppose? You'd never interface with someone else?"
Ratchet was taken aback for a moment.
"No," he said. "Probably not. I can't imagine it, anyway."
Prowl looked back at him, and the gaze Ratchet saw was meaningful and conflicted and had no idea what it was thinking.
"No," Ratchet told him. If he really needed to hear it said, so be it. "I won't let you make another stupid decision. Quit running, Prowl."
It happened all at once, like his suspension cables suddenly going lax. The major looked away. He sank miserably onto the medical bed, his back to him, unable to meet his gaze any more.
Ratchet regretted what he had said at once. "Look, Prowl--"
It was too late. Prowl drew into himself, curling pathetically into a ball, clutching at his arms. Ratchet vaguely suspected that if he were a lesser mech, his optics might have started leaking, or maybe not. This weary and this beyond himself, this confused and distraught and in need of answers that he wouldn't accept didn't exist, it was humiliation enough to him to even be in this room.
Ratchet had failed. A 'bot had come to him asking to be cured and all Ratchet had done was compound his agony. Maybe it would have been better for him to have stayed by the book with this one after all.
He went to the medicine cabinets and procured a sedative and syringe, for use on the adrenal cabling. He loathed himself for it even as he did it. This wasn't fixing. This was covering it up and hoping it would fix itself.
After Prowl was out, Ratchet fixed the recharger cables to his backstruts and let him sleep, though he didn't imagine it would be a very fun rest. For either of them.
The latest supply shipment from Earth came four cycles later, carrying with it 2000 megalitres of energon, raw materials for improving the rear bunkers, and another surprise.
"Papa!" Chassis squealed, bounding into Wheeljack's arms.
He scooped her up and swung her around. "Heeeey! How's my little kitbash, huh?"
All of the anxiety Ratchet had built up in the past cycles burned away at the sight of his old friend. He couldn't even stay upset that Wheeljack had deliberately been vague on the silent channel so to not give himself away.
He did make a face when Wheeljack, after the initial pleasantries and scooting Chassis away to go make her rounds, inquired in a lecherous voice: "So... that tank?"
"...You're incorrigible, aren't you."
Wheeljack was even more indecently amorous with the incubation tank in person, taking it upon himself to examine every inch of it from the glass down to the widgets in the base compartments that regulated bonding fluid. His fingers itched to start dismantling things to see how they worked, but Ratchet held him back.
"This'll teach those students a' mine back on Earth a thing or two about derivatives," Wheeljack declared eagerly, settling for standing back and admiring the thing from a safe distance. "A 'bot's only as good as his components, I've always said."
He was here to move it, Ratchet learned. Prowl had transmitted the orders two cycles ago. It seemed he had given up-- Ratchet hadn't heard a byte out of him since that late night in the lab.
Wheeljack, who only suspected Prowl's intentions behind this acquisition if that at all, continued on obliviously: "Damn, how I wish you an' me could give it a test run."
"You're not serious?" Ratchet said wearily. "Don't you think we have our hands full as it is?"
"I know, I know. Still..." he trailed off slyly.
It went sort of without saying. The shuttle would not be refuelled to disembark until the morning, and they hadn't seen each other in decacycles. And they certainly hadn't been in any shape to mess around while still coming off their Antarctica injuries.
So, they sent Chassis into standby early that night.
On his back on one of his own examination tables, for a brief, suspended bracket of time, Ratchet was able to forget about Prowl, and children, and the war, and everything else that had made a clutter of his overworked mind. Reassured by the stillness of the medbay and the blastproof doors, Ratchet's back arched and his voice box uttered uncommon noises, that sounded a lot like letting go.
In the warm darkness that followed, Ratchet waited until his adrenal hydraulics had managed to clock down to nearly-normal, then said, "How did I ever find you?"
"I melted half my face off as a student and you were the only guy who took my warranty," Wheeljack answered, a little too dizzy to move off him just yet.
"That's right. I remember that." Pause. "You know, I could probably repair that for you still."
"Nah. I like this. It's how I know y'don't just go with me for my looks."
Ratchet's face broke into a goofy and undignified grin. One which he was so relieved Wheeljack couldn't see, still limp against his shoulder.
It was the first bit of true peace in a while, and it didn't last long. As their position grew uncomfortable, things Ratchet had been putting off thinking about came to the fore, and he shifted.
"How's First Aid?"
"Eh? Oh, he's over it. Last I heard he's got real busy with work. He's had to take over lead maintenance on Metroplex now that Grapple's AWOL."
"No news from him, then."
"And I heard from Hoist you're treating a bad case up here?" Wheeljack made a small noise in the back of his voice box. "Ch. Maybe Scavenger was right. Maybe we do rust everything we touch."
It may have been true, at that. Ratchet thought of his "bad case" in particular-- now there was one 'bot whose new turn of closeness Ratchet wished he could just undo. He wasn't sure Prowl and he could salvage anything of their relationship now, such as it had been.
"I'd like to think we're only seein' the next evolution," Wheeljack continued. "Hell. Maybe we've only been at this war as long as we have 'cause no-one's had it in 'em to change."
"Megatron and Optimus just need to lay down arms and have a little spark-to-spark?" Ratchet suggested, well aware it was obscene.
Wheeljack didn't see it that way. "Dunno; might do a world a' good, at this point."
Ratchet laughed, vaguely disgusted. He made a half-sparked effort to shove Wheeljack off him and sit up.
He didn't get too far, as in the next moment the exam table and the floor it was bolted to shook violently. Ratchet's hand slipped, and he half fell. Wheeljack slipped with him.
"--What in the Matrix--"
And then the sirens sounded.
Prowl bore the most unreadable expression Ratchet had ever seen. And Ratchet's best friend was a mech with only half a face, so that said something.
The devastation had not been absolute, or even precise. But what the Decepticon raiding party had hit, they'd hit hard. What the destruction amounted to were several stretches of corridors, a quarter of the crew compartments, and most of Ratchet's medbay.
Wheeljack and Ratchet had gotten Chassis out of her recharger bay before the outer wall was breached, but the rest was gone. The two exam tables, the privacy shields, the lamps, the vials and decanters and receptacles. His spare tools. All so much debris in low orbit now.
The incubator as well. Mostly glass as it was, it didn't really stand a chance against the shelling.
Prowl stared at it, what remained anyway. And Ratchet couldn't tell at all what he was thinking.
Wheeljack's expression was easier. He looked about to cry. The fact that Chassis was already sobbing her traumatised little optics out onto his shoulder didn't help things.
"It's a priceless design," he moaned. "The schematics... I just... Aw, geez..."
There were quite a few standing around the wreckage now. Thanks to Prowl's impassioned 10-point presentation, most of the base had developed some level of emotional investment in the tank, for one reason or another. Even Huffer lamented it was a damn shame, between fits of whining that this was bound to happen, wasn't it, plain inevitable...
And still Prowl stared at it.
It had been a battle to get the adrenal fluid up. One for the good old days. No thought, just violence, and in plentiful supply. Ironhide had faced off against Starscream and come out the better of it; Brawn had headbutted Blitzwing's leg and didn't have quite the same story to tell. And there was the moment Ratchet had seen for himself, scaling the communications tower in pursuit of Laserbeak: he looked down at the east ramparts and witnessed the heavy fire start to rain with Prowl and Jazz in the thick of it, and the ground they'd been running on had suddenly not been there any more.
The force had been enough to kick Jazz up in the air, and the low gravity and his inertia sent him spiralling straight out into lunar orbit-- but Prowl reached him at the last possible moment, and hand in hand, pulled him back down.
Now Jazz stood silently behind the Major, and when Prowl rose from his squatting position, Jazz backed off a foot or so to give him room. He heeled him responsibly when he started inspecting other areas of damage.
Prowl crumbled a piece of wall between his fingers. No-one was saying anything yet. The only noise was Chassis's bawling.
Ratchet had no idea what to read into this, not even now. His superior looked injured, but all his wounds were superficial. Nothing to explain the hollowness he seemed to have taken on, as though pierced straight through the central compressors.
But he had as little right to ask as anyone else, and so they stood there and watched him, and Chassis's crying did all the speaking for them.
Finally, Prowl's voice rose up, violent as shrapnel. "Will you shut that thing up?" Prowl yelled at Wheeljack, looking over his shoulder.
Several mouths fell open, including Ratchet's.
The major proceeded more deliberately through the wreckage now, striding authoritatively and glaring challenges at the subordinate officers. Prime was not present. "Why are you all standing around gawking? We've wasted enough time," he barked. "I want two teams, one salvage and one repair. Anyone fit enough to stand around is fit enough to work."
The crowd shifted, but it was slow to take.
"Hey. Prowl," Jazz tried gently, still following in his wake.
"This happened because we've gotten too fanciful with ourselves," Prowl said with his jaw clenched, as he passed Wheeljack and Ratchet. Chassis had been hushed. "This is war, and we stand on the brink. Anything that poses a distraction or a detriment should be excised, permanently. You're to take that kid of yours to Earth and I should hope I never have to hear of it again."
"Prowl," Ratchet said, stepping forward, but Prowl just as promptly pushed him back.
"They're a burden, sergeant," he told him. "A cute little romantic burden, and they've got no place here, or anywhere if you want my opinion."
Now Ratchet saw what had been on Prowl's face earlier. It had been relief.
As sharply as a full system rollback, Prowl's old self had returned, and that former fierceness shone in his optics.
"Nice to have you back, major," Ratchet muttered, and let him pass.
Jazz gave the parents a brief grimace of apology, but left wordlessly behind Prowl. He'd made his choice as well.
There was nothing left to do now but what had been ordered of them. Wheeljack scooted Chassis off his shoulder onto her feet.
"C'mon, sprocket. Let's help the guys clean."
"But I didn't make it messy!" Chassis objected.
"Call it a favour."
Ratchet still watched the empty doorway, as though vaguely waiting for his superiors to reappear. They didn't, of course. There was a lot of work to be done.
Still, if experience had taught him anything though, it was that these things had a way of seeing themselves through.
Repairs went swiftly with Wheeljack on the job. They would need to make another run to Earth for materials, but the metal that the last shuttle had brought did quite a bit of good in the interim. So much for reinforcing the rear facility, though.
Owing to the damage and also the injuries several of the Moon Base 1 crew had incurred, Wheeljack stayed on for another decacycle, giving him time in the evenings to give Chassis some much-needed tune-ups. Ratchet debated the "much-needed" part, suspecting that Wheeljack would swap out every part in Chassis's chassis except her spark and learning matrices if he had half a chance. He kept saying she needed more missiles. Ratchet struggled to impress upon him that maybe better battery life came first.
Anyway, the work seemed to cheer him, and with Prowl back to his old self there was precious little to be nonchalant about lately. Prime seemed to be giving him a long leash these cycles, as Prowl stalked the corridors and barked at anything that seemed to be moving too slowly. Jazz, who seemed to have devolved into his shadow, could probably have stepped in at any time and successfully talked the mech down, but he didn't.
Routine, essentially.
Fourteen cycles after the raid, Ratchet's medbay was nearly back to operational, and his first patient was a captain with an exposed wire in his mouth.
"How long has it been like this?" Ratchet sighed, switching off the spot beam and straightening up. The wire was part of the underside of his upper lip component. A nasty place to have something sparking.
Jazz stretched a stiff jaw. "Nevermind that; just don't fix it, will you?"
Ratchet tilted his head slightly to one side. It wasn't often he was asked to leave something broken. There was something slightly cosmically wrong with that.
"I promised Prowl I'd get it looked at," Jazz confessed, spreading his arms. "But it's doin' us so much good I hate to part with it, yanno?"
"How exactly is a livewire in your mouth a good thing?"
"Well. That's between us, ain't it," said Jazz, grinning eagerly.
Ratchet slowed, having to think about that one for a milicycle. He recalled what humans often did with their mouths, especially around their mates. He made a face.
"How unhygienic," the doctor lectured. "I can't say I approve."
"He goes off like a bottle rocket. You should see it."
Ratchet held his head. He couldn't say he really wanted to see it, although his imagination did him no favours anyway. This had to be ranked even worse than Bumblebee's little flesh fetish. Mouths. They were using their mouths now...
"It's going well, then?" Ratchet asked, desperate, liking the conversation just to spare him from having to think about it any more.
"Oh yeah," Jazz bragged, reclining back on the make-shift examination table. "Tell you the truth, I think he was trying too much before. Doesn't like it when I tell 'im just to lay back and feel the groove, baby."
It was a wonder. Prowl hadn't had the greatest experience letting go with him, and Prowl was not a 'bot known to try things twice. But the way Jazz described it --and oh how he described it, no matter how Ratchet begged him for some decency-- Prowl had not only learned to let go, he was happily falling apart in someone's arms.
Well, at least someone's life was working out at the moment.
"I wouldn't mind a kid-- really, I wouldn't," said Jazz, shaking his head. "But he'd started seein' it as some sorta job, and well. He's the kinna guy who'd set a table so nice and then refuse to eat offa it, ya dig?"
And with those words, it suddenly made sense to him. He nodded. It was the same thing that had had him stick by Wheeljack, after they'd first lost Chassis. The child was important, but keeping hold of one another, even moreso.
Ultimately, all that really mattered to Prowl was to keep the mate he had, for the time that he had him.
"'Sides," Jazz continued sagely. "Compared to you dawgs, he's not so much parent material. No matter what he thinks."
That may have been the case, but even so, a parent was what Prowl turned out to be.
With so many of the recharging compartments devastated, the remaining cabins were horribly crowded, the floor taken up by displaced crew members who'd opted to pass out into standby to keep power levels stable while waiting for others to half-charge. Ratchet was always afforded a recharger bay due to his function priority, but consistently gave it up to someone else who needed the energy more, so in the dead of end-cycle when a frantic arm shook him and Wheeljack out of stasis, he was grumpier than usual.
He woke, sluggish, to a distinct sense that he had been in this exact situation before. Except Inferno and Firestar had been a little more talkative about it.
"There's a problem," Prowl said urgently.
Beside them on the floor, Ironhide grunted. "Hallway," Ratchet instructed.
By the light of the corridor, Ratchet could see Prowl and Jazz were not quite put together, as though they'd left whatever storage closet they'd commandeered in a hurry. Prowl's doors were off and Jazz's chest plate was still open, and were Wheeljack and Ratchet not so very used to naked frames thanks to their work, this might bother them even more than the situation did already, which would be something of a feat.
The spark in Prowl's cupped hand was also fresh. They'd come here immediately, not arguing over their options like Inferno and Firestar had done, something that had nearly cost their eldest son his life. But Ratchet was in no mood to congratulate the pair.
"Some planned parenthood," he said dryly.
Prowl ducked his head, unable to look him in the optics.
"Can we look past that just now?" he muttered, his gaze on the small shard in his palm. Ratchet saw his fingers shaking.
He wanted to say so much. He also felt quite a bit like hitting him, and he hadn't felt that urge before or since that incident in Antarctica. The sheer audacity of it all. The bearings this 'bot had, to come to him like this, not apologetic, all of them knowing full well he'd be just the same tomorrow. The only thing he loved was logic with a side of rules and seeing that people followed them. He liked seeing his idealism made mandate, no matter if he himself lived up to any of it. Having a kid or not wouldn't phase him in the slightest. Why did he even deserve parenthood?
"Even if you had any right," Ratchet said cruelly, "there's nothing we can do, now is there?"
Prowl snapped his head up. In all his uptime, Ratchet had never seen so much terror in the 'bot's face.
"Please," he begged. "Please. Something. Anything. There has to be something..."
Did he think they worked miracles?!
"I'm sorry," Ratchet said, every syllable as malevolent as Prowl's voice had been in the wake of the attack. "There's nothing. No materials, and no facilities we can use within two cycles' travel of here. It's going to die."
Prowl sank. He fell to his knees, as though his leg had been injured all over again. He made a dull thud on the floor plating.
Ratchet was waiting for Wheeljack to raise a counterpoint, to offer some wild suggestion. He didn't.
Jazz crouched beside Prowl and drew an arm around him. It wasn't a romantic gesture. It was two soldiers huddling in the presence of a fallen comrade. He said nothing. A strange sound filled the silent hallway. It was crying, but not like Chassis's high-pitched wails or Inferno's ridiculous blustering sobs. It was broken and quiet, withered, as though coming from a long way off. Some shattered, raw core at the centre of a person's being.
Jazz pulled Prowl into a full embrace and held him, the sound muffled into his arm.
A sick feeling rose up through Ratchet's circuitry. He remembered being pulled from the water off the coast of Australia, waterlogged and badly wounded and heaving, strangled nonsentient noises as the horror gripped him. The knowledge he'd left Chassis behind. That he was here, but his daughter was not. Wheeljack had preferred his life to hers.
At that time in the boat, Ratchet had struggled against Prowl's grip, shrieking, beating him in a vain effort to break free, to jump back into the water and somehow get back to her. He needed to get back to her. It was the one thing in the universe that mattered. He couldn't even feel pain right then. He just felt Prowl's arms like lashes dug through his casing, holding him back, telling him no, let it go, damn you, let it go.
You're killing her! he'd told Prowl. Let me go! You're killing her!
And now Prowl knelt at his feet, a flickering little spark in his trembling hands, and no sound left in his throat.
"I'm sorry," Ratchet said again. His voice was different now.
The spark's weak light shone in streaks through his joints, as he held it close to his chest, like he could protect it from the wind.
When he spoke, his voice was scratchy, as though he'd injured the emitters in his voice box.
"Could I see Chassis?"
Ratchet stood in stunned silence. Of all the requests to make...
"Of course," Wheeljack said beside him.
She was still sleeping in her sealed capsule when they came to see her, so peaceful in her stasis that it seemed almost ethereal. Ratchet dutifully lifted the glass casing --it had survived the assault, though cracked-- but did not wake her, allowing Prowl to kneel next to her and witness her up-close. He still held the fading spark in his hands.
They kept this silent vigil over the derivative for many milicycles, the four of them. Eventually, Prowl said:
"Thank Primus, she doesn't take after you, Wheeljack."
A nervous, brief laugh passed over their little group. It vanished quickly.
"Yeah, we worried 'bout that too," Wheeljack said faintly.
"She still came up to me even after I yelled at her," Prowl went on, down some other line of thought now. "Still going on with that 'uncle' business. She's pretty stupid, isn't she."
Ratchet and Wheeljack reluctantly conceded this.
"...She's a good kid, I guess."
Without another word, Prowl took the tiny spark in his palm and eased it between Chassis's fingers, clasped over her little chestplate. It still shone, briefly, and then the last of the Prowl's heat signature that had just barely kept it sustained faded away, and the light flickered and vanished.
After a long time spent staring at the blank space where the light had radiated, Jazz laid a hand on Prowl's shoulder. No quips at this point, just a silent presence to provide. He probably felt miserable that this was all he could do for him. But Ratchet could see it was the only thing that kept Prowl intact.
Ratchet knew it was his place to collect them and send them back to their compartments, but he didn't want to move anyone. It felt as though nothing could move, right then, without breaking apart.
But something did move. In her open charger bay, Chassis's fans whirred as her CPU powered up, and her optics flickered, alternating between light and dark blue.
"0101000001100001011100000110000100111111?" she murmured.
Prowl emitted something like a laugh. "Still doing that, huh. I thought you had an OS now..."
"Er," Wheeljack said slowly. "She shouldn't be doing that."
"And that's not her voice," Ratchet said, optics widening.
"Say what?" Jazz asked.
Wheeljack and Ratchet exchanged a glance. Just one.
They stepped forward, Ratchet moving Jazz bodily aside and drawing his scanner from a forearm compartment, while Wheeljack pried Chassis's hands apart.
"--It's gone!" Wheeljack exclaimed.
"Move," Ratchet said quickly, shifting Wheeljack's arms away from her body. He activated the scanner and pressed it firmly against his daughter's unresisting chestplate. The readout screen came alive with numbers that should have been impossible.
"Primus," the medic whispered.
"What?" Prowl demanded, climbing to his feet. He all but hung off Ratchet's arm. "What is it?"
"We shoulda seen this," Wheeljack rambled, as taken aback as Ratchet was. "A derivative's spark is smaller, but you can't just build laser cores to scale. There's all that extra space..."
"It went inside her?" Prowl said, disbelieving. "But it was solid matter--"
"Sparks are pure energy. They can expand or contract in response to elemental conditions," Ratchet corrected. "But..."
"But they shouldn't be able to just transmute, 'specially not into incompatible components!" Wheeljack held the back of his head. "Then again, I guess I was workin' wit' those unstable alloys for her chest casing--"
"You built unstable alloys into our daughter's frame?!" Ratchet cried, momentarily distracted.
"It was just a little!"
"But..." Prowl was looking down at her now, only her optics active, their colours alternating at intervals as though cycling an unmixed current. "But it's Chassis's mind in there, isn't it? She's not-- absorbing it or--"
"No. Not according to the scanner." Ratchet backed away from her, standing up straight amid the others. "They're in binary. It can't possibly be stable, but the centripedal force is weak enough that she could easily last until we could fly her to Earth and separate them. No, she..." He could have laughed. "Prowl, Jazz-- meet your son."
As expected, nothing really changed. Chassis was flown to Earth in Wheeljack's care and under the knife of the Autobots' top surgeons the sparks were successfully separated. Chassis returned to normal functionality of drawing on the floors in chalk, and the new child was incubated in Autobot City's weaker but at least safe and functional tanks. Prowl had a slag of a time choosing a name.
"Beat," Jazz said.
"No, Nightbeat would complain."
"Riot."
"Good Primus, what sort of message do we want to send people?"
"Streetwi-- Aw, slaggit."
In the end, they decided to be functional and traditional and called him Prowl 2. The humans didn't get it.
Prowl 2 proved sickly and prone to CLI shell crashes in his first few weeks of uptime, but Wheeljack and Ratchet had played nursemaid to more than a few children by this stage of their lives. The boy spent more time than not in his tank, as his caretakers brainstormed what the problem with his components could be. His parents worried, but it was in the nature of parents to worry.
War being what it was, it was a short-lived interlude. Prowl agonised about leaving his son behind, but his mate reassured him.
"Man, he won't like it up there on that ol' tin can. It's all last week's Top Forty."
"But how will he learn how to be a soldier, a proper one?" Prowl complained.
"Hey, hey. He's got time for that mumbo-jumbo," Jazz said dismissively, waving away the thought. "A mech's music education starts early! And Blaster's got all the stations," he added, a shade enviously.
"But discipline--"
"'Discipline'? Who's talkin' discipline? Some self-control you showed," Jazz teased, throwing an arm over Prowl's neck. "Heh! Always knew ya had a bit a' improvisation in ya!"
Prowl was starting to look thoroughly miserable. "I suppose if Ultra Magnus looks after him..." he said slowly.
"Whatev, whatev. Just so long as I get you all to myself for a while." Jazz leaned even closer to Prowl's audio receptors. "Fatherhood's made you one sexy thang."
Prowl's cheekplates heated to a bright red so quickly his optics stung.
Jazz smirked. He knew Prowl loved it when he talked human to him.
The night before his departure back to Moon Base 1 with the others, Ratchet went up to the ridge of Lookout Mountain with Wheeljack. They parked and watched the city lights, seeing them twinkle with the wind current just as much as the stars above.
"Deja vu, huh," Wheeljack reflected at length, after they'd transformed and now sat with their legs dangling over the edge of the high cliff.
"I'm sure Chassis will enjoy having more space to run around in," said Ratchet. "And playmates. She was making friends with the centrifuges, poor thing."
"The Firestarters'll love her. She's flame-retardant," the mechanic remarked. "Prowl 2, I dunno if he should really be out yet. Part a' me thinks he should just stay incubated till we've got the right equipment for him..."
They'd done this for another derivative, Hazard: Inferno and Firestar's youngest, who had also nearly expired before getting treatment. Several tests had proven he was just too frail to be up and about yet, not without better machines at their disposal. And certainly Prowl 2 had had a close call.
"Try a few more combinations with the hardware," Ratchet decided. "If it's looking like a tough bond, we'll ask the parents what they'd like to do... Listen at us," he exclaimed suddenly. "You'd think we were professionals."
"'Bout as close as anyone," Wheeljack said sagely. "But we started this source-foresaken meme, didn't we?"
"Mm... no," Ratchet reflected. Beyond the far side of the valley, the opposing ridge of mountains, the moon was just rising. "Maybe we just set in motion what everybody was thinking."
Wheeljack seemed happy to play with this thought, as with any good trinket. "Yeah, but..." he said, deliberating. "I still wonder. What would Megs and Optimus's kid look like..?"
"...I could throw a clod of dirt at you," Ratchet said sourly.
"But think of the firepower!"
"'Jack."
"Okay, okay..."
They had no way of knowing right then what their daughter was up to at that moment, that she had all but barreled into the Firestarters in a dusty alleyway and soon found herself in the company of six fast friends. Chassis accompanied the other children as they raced through the half-finished back alleys and naked structures, led by the hunt and chased by the moonlight, their laughter echoing across the endless horizon of metal that gleamed rich and dark under the starlight.
The leader among them, Smokesignal, brought them to a halt at the mouth of a warehouse, and exploring within, they found the quarry for that night's little hunt.
Firebrand held the fistful of sparklers out at arm's length and Smokesignal invited Chassis to light the fuse. She took a wary glance at the crates around them, but arrived ultimately at the one viable conclusion.
The sparklers swelled to life with a radiance like infant stars, violent and hot and spitting streaks in all directions. The crates around them did not fail to take notice.
Up on their mountain top, Ratchet had just about plied Wheeljack with enough Grade-A energon to slip off his faceplate unencumbered, when beyond them in the valley the sky suddenly exploded, a miniature supernova of pinks and greens and golds, shrieking and cracking and spiralling through the hot night air.
They both grinned, in one way or another.
Down in the city, in the very nice compartments they'd rented (far, far away from where the Protectobots lived), Prowl was having a slightly different reaction.
"This whole town's gone lawless!" he shouted, pulling on his casing and extricating his leg from Jazz's dissuading arms. He located his sidearm. "Those damn kids! I'll teach 'em a thing or two!"
"Aw, hey, c'mon," Jazz urged. "Someday it's gonna be ours out there..."
"Hey you kids!" Prowl shouted out of their window, at the derivatives running amok many stories below. "Get off of my lawn!"
Nothing ever changed, really.
end