(no subject)

[akisawana]

“What’s taking so long?” Skywarp asked, drumming his heels against the berth like the giant overgrown nipios he was.
“He’s lurking outside the door.” Starscream didn’t look up from his datapad. “Every time he hears you say he’s taking too long, Ratchet makes you wait another five minutes.”
“Well, that’s stupid. He’s always complaining about how busy he is. Why would he waste time like that?”
Starscream sighed, and bit off a curse as he lost the level. He was never going to beat Thundercracker’s score on this stupid luck game. “Just stop whining for two kliks. Please. I will pay you.”
“I’m not whining,” Skywarp whined.
Starscream thought about strangling him -not all the way to death, just unconscious, but Ratchet chose that minute to make his appearance. He apologized for the wait, but Starscream brushed him off and Skywarp thanked him for doing this in the first place. The doctor washed his hands and told Skywarp to lay back, ran a scanner over him and prodded him a few times.
“Everything looks about what I expected so far,” Ratchet said. “You’re losing too much protoform, your filters are clogged up again, and you’re not taking in nearly enough energon.”
“He drinks it,” Starscream put in, poking at his screen with his stylus. Thundercracker had a not-so-surprising knowledge about forging newsparks; perhaps he would have another brilliant idea.
“The embers are starting to take what they need from your structure,” Ratchet said. “Which is a problem in and of itself, but you still haven’t recovered from the last ones. You barely have enough for yourself. You need to drink more, with the supplemental packets. How much are you drinking?”
“It’s not the drinking that’s the problem for him,” Starscream said, in his best imitation of Thundercracker’s driest tone. “It’s the keeping it down.”
Ratchet fixed him with a gimlet stare. “He can talk for himself, you know.” When he turned back to his patient, his voice was gentler. A little. “How much are you vomiting?”
Skywarp shrugged. “A lot?”
“He still gets tired easily,” Starscream added. “More than should be normal.”
“With so many, I’m not surprised,” Ratchet snorted and reached for the larger scanner. “Hold still, and let me take a look at them.”
Skywarp obediently tilted himself towards Ratchet and moved his hands out of the way. Ratchet tapped his chest with the wand, and Skywarp retracted his chestplates a little, enough for the probe to rest in his foundry, next to his spark chamber. “Stretched so thin,” Ratchet murmured, apparently to himself. Starscream’s hand tightened around the stylus, hard enough for it to creak.
“Well, they’re all still in there,” Ratchet said, looking at the monitor. “They’re on the small size, but they’re hanging on, and they’ve all taken a color. I see one plain silver, one silver and red, two blues, two golds, and one purple.” He withdrew the wand and tapped on Skywarp’s open chest. Nobody said anything as his chestplates closed with a hiss of overtaxed hydraulics and he pulled himself up with a grunt.
But without assistance.
“I think you should plan on all of them detaching,” Ratchet said, giving voice to what Starscream dared not hope. “Which means we need to talk.”
“About what?” Starscream asked, lowering his datapad.
“We being him and I,” Ratchet snapped. “You are not part of this conversation. Why are you even here?”
In lieu of an answer, Starscream nodded in Skywarp’s direction. The black Seeker was sitting with a hand over his chest, eyes hazy and unfocused, attention turned totally inwards. He didn’t take notice of Starscream’s shortwave hail or calling his name, or Ratchet reaching for him. “Do you have time for him to rejoin the rest of Cybertron?”
Ratchet harrumphed. “That doesn’t mean you get a say in his decisions.”
“No,” Starscream agreed. “But I do have the time to break the information down into monosyllables for him.”
Ratchet harrumphed again, louder, and the sound caught Skywarp’s attention. “If he’s purple like me does that mean he can teleport too?”
“No,” Ratchet said. “All it means is one of his spori -probably you- has a purple spark.” He gave Skywarp a minute to absorb that and said, “Now, it’s dangerous to detach them all at once, so what I’d like to do is plan to remove them manually, one at a time. When they’re much bigger. That’s the safest for you.”
“Okay, sure, whatever you think is best,” Skywarp said.
“But the safest for them is to stay attached for as long as possible. You’re not even listening.”
“I am,” Starscream said.
Ratchet folded his arms. “Again with you not being part of this conversation.”
“And he’s such an active participant,” Starscream shot back. “We carried him out of hell on our backs. I’m not about to let him throw all that away.”
“Exactly my point,” Ratchet said.
Starscream smiled maliciously. Bluffing Ratchet would be hard, but he was the master. “And if his precious nipii died, the only thing that kept him going through all that torture and pain, what do you think he’d do?” It wouldn’t have worked on Megatron, or Thundercracker, or even Prime.
But it worked on Ratchet. “I’ll send the information on to him,” he said begrudgingly. “He doesn’t have to make a decision for another paracycle at least.”
Skywarp remained oblivious, building aeries in the clouds for nipii he dared hope would live.

Thundercracker wasn’t nearly as surprised as Starscream when Skywarp mentioned that he wanted to go back to the Rusty Taco. Sure, Skywarp had never voiced an opinion on anything before, and Thundercracker had heard in great detail how Skywarp was incapable of choosing a movie if other people were going to watch it as well, and Thundercracker fully expected the sun to come up before Skywarp would suggest a restaurant…but Starscream had been the one to curse at Skywarp, back him in corners and trap him like a glitchmouse, refuse to eat until Skywarp made a decision. Starscream had been the one to teach him the hard way that he had options, that he was allowed to make his own choices, and not every decision was a trick question, that no-one would beat him for picking the wrong one. Starscream had been very specific on why Thundercracker needed to be patient with him, needed to be careful to not even accidentally judge so much as his choice of sidearm at the firing range. And when Starscream was done, Thundercracker had entertained several brief but elaborate homicidal fantasies, then went to the Rusty Taco for several very sparkly drinks until he trusted himself to be too overcharged to hit anything he aimed at. Just in case he found himself pointing a gun at Skywarp’s genei. They weren’t worth the murder arrest, nor the charge to send them to the Pit, but he’d found himself in stranger situations.
Thundercracker had never known there was something worse than shaking a vrefos until he stopped crying.
So they were going to the Rusty Taco, which was just about Thundercracker’s favorite restaurant, and he could grab a cube with them before he went back to the chaos. Perhaps Skywarp could come back as well; even carrying and slow, Thundercracker would bet on him against any three mechs or five Rock Lords.
Though Megatron would probably have a thing or two to say about putting Skywarp in danger for no reason. Well, let him. Megatron was frequently wrong where Skywarp was concerned, in Thundercracker’s opinion, but as long as Skywarp was happy Thundercracker wasn’t going to say anything. If anyone deserved pallakosy coddling, it was Skywarp, especially since Megatron didn’t spend nearly enough time with him. Starscream and Thundercracker both spent more time with Skywarp.
Starscream even went with Skywarp to see Ratchet now. Thundercracker had seen firsthand how bewildered Skywarp was by the whole concept of medical treatment, how he tried to give correct answers instead of honest ones. Half the time he didn’t even know how to answer the question. The only improvement from the last time he needed a doctor, according to Starscream, was that now he understood he could refuse to have things done to him. Even then, Skywarp simply didn’t have the vocabulary or the basic understanding of anatomy to truly make a decision; Starscream had to drag him back to the ER once because Skywarp had punctured his synovial reservoir and didn’t understand why it was so important to patch. Someone else might think that the people who claimed to love him were patronizing and insulting Skywarp. Thundercracker knew better. They were just trying to catch Skywarp up with the rest of the adult world, teach him the things his genei never did. Most things Skywarp grasped right away, but the sheer depth of his ignorance threatened to lock up a mech’s processor. Thundercracker had never before realized how many things he had been taught that he always thought everyone just knew. And Starscream had been doing this for meta-cycles. Thundercracker no longer wondered why so few mechs left the unchanged. It was next to impossible for walkaways to survive.
But Skywarp was pretty much a functional member of society these days, if a little strange and unable to go to the doctor alone. Few people would ever guess he’d had such a terrible upbringing if they saw him sitting in the Rusty Taco, across the table from Starscream, waving at Thundercracker through the window.
Thundercracker landed and waved back, went inside and found them, sat next to Starscream on the outside of the booth with his back against the wall and a direct line of sight to both doors. Starscream had ordered him a moonracer, and the mica sparkled in the glow of Skywarp’s cube. “So are you going to die anytime soon?” he asked Skywarp, grinning.
“Nope,” Skywarp said. “Unless Starscream strangles me.”
Thundercracker looked at his sieziegos, looked at his friend. “You don’t have adelfi,” Starscream said, sipping his cube. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I suppose not. Did you hear what Megatron did?”
“I have heard what they say he did,” Starscream said. “But since it’s patently ridiculous, I am waiting for someone to report on what truly happened.”
“No, he really did kill the junior ambassador with his empty hands.” Thundercracker sighed.
“Is he okay?” Skywarp’s face creased into a frown.
“Oh, he’s fine,” Thundercracker assured him. “He thought the Rock Lord was threatening the Prime when he was simply offering him a priapos. It did look like a weapon. There was a blinking light on the end.”
“Oh, well if there was a blinking light,” Starscream said from behind his hand.
“If he hadn’t acted, someone else would have,” Thundercracker said. It wouldn’t have been him. Thundercracker knew a toy when he saw one. But he shouldn’t blame a mech for being cautious, not when he considered the things Starscream had told him he technically wasn’t supposed to know, about rumored Rock Lord plans to avoid a war by plunging Cybertron into leaderless anarchy.
“But he’s okay?” Skywarp asked again.
“Yes, everyone’s fine,” Thundercracker said. “Except the dead guy.”
“This is going to make so much work for me,” Starscream said into his cube. “And it couldn’t have worse possible timing. Does Megatron ever think of anyone besides himself?”
“What do you need to do?” Thundercracker asked.
“That one,” Starscream said, pointing at Skywarp who was innocently sipping his cube through a straw, “has decided he’s not going to take care of himself.”
“Hey, I’m not doing it on purpose!” Skywarp protested.
“You’re not doing what Ratchet told you, so yes you are.”
“He told me to drink more and change the filters more often and not die,” Skywarp said. “I am doing all three of those things. It’s not my fault it keeps coming back up.”
“Then you need to drink even more. Why is that so difficult for you to grasp?”
Skywarp shoved his cube across the table. “Have you ever tasted this dreck?”
“What does that have to do with anything!” Starscream yelled. A few heads swiveled, and Thundercracker glared them into turning back around. “On top of him choosing to be an idiot,” Starscream continued, “Ratchet refuses to explain things monosyllabically enough for this one to grasp.”
Thundercracker nodded, hearing the concern -and the frustration- behind Starscream’s words. It may have been the last remnant of Skywarp’s upbringing, but his inability to even understand what Ratchet was saying, much less answer him honestly was a huge problem. Thundercracker had been there after Skywarp lost one of his embers, when Ratchet came back to check on him. It wasn’t that Skywarp meant to lie, he just didn’t want to be a bother, or disagree with Ratchet. And he’d been too overwhelmed to understand anything anyone had said to him. That time it hadn’t really mattered.
It might in the future.
“Well,” Thundercracker stretched, “I could always go with you, if you don’t want to go alone. Most carrying mechs don’t, you know.”
“Megatron should go with him,” Starscream muttered into his drink. “There’s not going to be a war before they’re born.”
“I used to go with my trefos,” Thundercracker said, surprised at how little it hurt. “It’s not a big deal, for a friend.”
Skywarp smiled, and reached across the table, and put his hand on Thundercracker’s wrist. “Thank you.”

“Surely he doesn’t need to be chained?” Optimus murmured. The guard hastened to free Ambulon, then left them without being asked. The sound of the door closing behind him was very loud.
Ambulon stood where the guard had left him, so confident it puddled around his feet like cleanser. Too much confidence for a mech accused of what Ambulon was accused of, but Optimus admired his strength. “You wanted to talk to me, sir?” the prisoner said after a minute.
“Yes, please, sit,” Optimus pulled one of the chairs around the table and sat in it, nothing between himself and Ambulon.
Ambulon sat down carefully in the other chair. Skywarp had spoken of the medic’s kindness. Jhiaxus laid the blame for many things at Ambulon’s feet, for anything he couldn’t claim had been consensual. “Can you tell me about my patients, sir?”
Optimus hesitated, not sure how much Ambulon was entitled to know. “We rescued eleven mechs,” he said finally. “Flipsides and Overhaul have passed into the Well. Sizzle, Quark, and Nitrostreak are still in stasis. The others have been released from medical care.”
Ambulon offlined his optics for a klik, then looked at Prime. “Rotorstorm, someone should keep an eye on him. I had him on suicide watch. I don’t know if he still needs it, but better safe than sorry. And Dino doesn’t have anyone to look after him. He’ll need help, his spark was at eighty percent last I checked, right before the raid. They might have let him go but his spark has a chronic instability. It’ll drop down to sixty if he does too much. He’ll say he doesn’t need help, but that’s pride talking.”
At sixty percent, few mechs were able to even stay conscious. Optimus had a sudden vision of Dino lying on the floor, slowly starving to death as he was caught in a spiral of not enough energy to call for help. He made a note to send someone around to check on the racer.
“Blackout doesn’t have reliable support, his friends might have abandoned him,” Ambulon continued. “He was afraid he’d be homeless if he ever got out. Pivot was about to start a new cycle, he should be physically okay, though I don’t know anything about his support network. Tracks was asking me about adoption, but he was confident his family would help him.”
“They all tell us the same thing. That you were kind, and we should show you mercy,” Optimus said. “Skywarp in particular has been passionate in your defense.”
“Skywarp I am not worried about in the slightest,” Ambulon smiled at a memory. “If any of the doctors want the true medical records, I still have them.” He tapped the side of his head. “I don’t know how much good they will be, after so long, but they might help.”
“I will pass that along.” Optimus wished he had brought some energon, something to do with his hands. “The bail hearing will be tomorrow, as you no doubt are aware.”
Ambulon shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me. I can’t afford any bail, and from in here I can’t do anything.”
“Perhaps we could come to an arrangement,” Prime said. The prosecutor, Ultra Magnus, couldn’t make a deal with Ambulon under Cybertronian law, since Ambulon was indicted as a co-conspirator, but there was always a loophole. Optimus could pay Ambulon’s bail, for the sake of Skywarp and the others, and if Ambulon happened to tell Optimus something that would help Streetwise, the chief investigator of the case, and Magnus pin the blame where it belonged, that was why anonymous tips had been invented. “I am sure I can afford your bail, and I hear you are not the sort of mech to skip town.”
Ambulon’s optics narrowed slightly, too slight to be on purpose. Optimus made a note to never play cards with this medic on the same team. “And the terms of this arrangement?”
“The truth,” Optimus said simply. “I trust you, but Ultra Magnus will need to verify. What was Jhiaxus truly doing, and what were you doing with him? I don’t need all the details right now.”
“I was always free to go.” Ambulon’s mouth twisted wryly. “All of us assistants were free to go. I was quite replaceable. But I was afraid my replacement would be like the others. They only cared about the subjects” -he spat that word like a curse- “as far as keeping the experiments running smoothly.”
“And what were the experiments?” Optimus prompted.
“There were two. Jhiaxus was attempting to kindle embers inside an artificial spark chamber and transfer them into a mech. When the raid occurred, he was close to opening Phase II trials. That was how he got his funding, and covered for the other experiments. There were about fifty mechs who had no idea what was going on in the upper floor. I had minimal contact with them.
“The upper floor held twelve mechs, all walkaways from the unchanged. Jhiaxus transferred multiple embers in them at a time. He was trying to engineer a natural gestalt.”
Many meta-cycles ago, when Senator Ratchet had still been a doctor, five mechs had split from a single spark. They had been gestalt from the moment they kindled, the merging routines deep in their systems. Defensor was the first gestalt of his kind; every other one had been artificially created from five mechs, unrelated or adelfi at most. The science had been inspired by ancient legends of spark twins so close they could share a body, but the Protectobots were the first team scientifically verified. The phenomenon had never occurred again.
“Why were they all walkaways from the unchanged?”
“Sunstorm’s followers reject modifications, among other things,” Ambulon said. “Jhiaxus thought the lack of them was what let them split their sparks so many times and survive.” Prime nodded; he remembered how shocked he was to discover Skywarp was so skilled a warrior without any military upgrades. “We lost one to suicide once the truth came out, and after that he kept them drugged with zabuyelite despite the risks to the embers.”
“How did he entice them to volunteer?”
“It’s difficult, very difficult to leave Sunstorm.” Ambulon clasped his hands together. “To leave everything and everyone you’ve known is hard enough, but Sunstorm teaches to reject large parts of modern life. They -we -leave with no education worth speaking of, no prospects for a job, not even a communications array or a RFID transmitter. Without friends in the world we are homeless and unemployable, without the funds to change that. And they’re not kind to outliers, to anything seen as unnatural. So when he said that there were five mechs in Tesarus who needed help escaping, one of who was an outlier, it didn’t take long at all for him to have plenty of volunteers. I had too many mods for his intentions, but I knew enough medicine to be kept around. Before I got out, I was trained as a midwife.”
Optimus nodded again. “Thank you. I am sure this information will be valuable, and I will pass on your offer of the medical records for the mechs we rescued.” Even if Ultra Magnus couldn’t use any of it, Prime could read the truth in Ambulon’s pain, in his silences. “I will speak to them about your bail.” He’d been afraid to leave them, afraid to call down the law upon Jhiaxus, and Prime could not honestly blame him, nor allow him to be punished for the failings of the government to earn the people’s trust.
“Just get that bastard.” Ambulon’s eyes flashed from dark gold to yellow-white. “Put him away before he can steal the mori back.”

Megatron said goodnight to the guard outside his suite and shut the door firmly. He tried to give Ramjet the benefit of the doubt, tried not to hold the fact he wasn’t Skywarp against him…but Ramjet was a sniveling little sycophant that left Megatron with an intense need for a shower.
His private washrack had been used earlier; since it was cleaned that morning but long enough to let everything dry, the only clue being the rearrangement of the cleansers and the missing sparangos. Megatron cleaned himself quickly, washing away the Rock Lord business and the flaws of the justice system, the budget deliberations and the problem of finding someone to fill in for Skywarp. He didn’t want to replace Skywarp. Megatron liked Skywarp, trusted him, and could stand being around him for hours on end. Those were hard enough requirements to fill without adding in the necessity of a bodyguard capable of defending him, identifying threats, and one capable of discretion. Megatron would just as soon do without, but between the Rock Lords and the latest rumors coming out of Tarn, he didn’t dare.
Skywarp would have to quit soon, his advancing forging slowing his reflexes and draining his strength. Megatron suspected that this was more to do with the number of embers than anything else. He’d hoped that since Skywarp insisted to go through with this, the laws of thermodynamics would take their course. But the embers hung stubbornly on, draining away at Skywarp’s spark.
Not that he wished harm to the mori Skywarp already loved. Megatron simply loved Skywarp more, as much as the Lord High Protector was allowed to love another mech.
Skywarp was in their bed, lying on his cockpit reading a datapad. Megatron tried to sneak up behind him and take a peek, but Skywarp heard him and pushed himself up. “You’re home,” he said, with a brilliant smile and not a word of complaint for the lateness of the hour.
Megatron sat next to him, the mesh sinking under his weight. “What are you reading?” he asked.
Skywarp shrugged. “Starscream’s old chemistry textbook. He won’t shut up about it.” He flicked the datapad off and set it aside, leaning against Megatron.
Megatron wrapped an arm around his waist, feeling Skywarp relax against him, feeling the heat pouring off of his foundry. “Did you eat?”
Skywarp nodded, the motion nestling his head in the hollow of Megatron’s shoulder. “With Starscream.”
Running a hand up Skywarp’s thigh, Megatron said, “Did Starscream tell you?”
“Tell me what?” Skywarp lifted his head to look at Megatron. “That the Rock Lords filed contra bonos mores with the Galactic Council? Yeah, but I don’t know what it means.”
And that was a problem for the Lord High Protector, a major one, but he had thought that Starscream would have told Skywarp about the other problem, the one that was Megatron’s alone. “No, Jhiaxus had a hearing today.”
Skywarp was brave, brave enough and more in the face of fear, but though his voice was steady his frame trembled as he sank back into Megatron’s embrace. “About what?”
“He was let go with a six billion shanix bail.” That wasn’t the only issue brought up in the courtroom, but it was the one that would affect Skywarp the most. The Seeker didn’t need to know about the legal maneuverings, the claim he was there of his own free will, the claim that the embers were kindled with his consent. He didn’t need to hear about the unhappy face Tyrest had made as he explained that his hands were tied and bail could not be denied. The dents Ultra Magnus had made in his table may have given Skywarp some comfort, but not much.
“He’s free?” Megatron tugged Skywarp on his lap, caressing his wings as if he could brush the fear away with his hands.
“He’s out of jail.” Skywarp reached up and wrapped his hand around one of Megatron’s shoulder-strut, as if Jhiaxus would leap in at any second and rip him away. “But he can’t come near you,” Megatron continued. “I will take care of it. I will take care of you.”
Skywarp shuddered one last time, then went limp against Megatron, hiding his face. “And the embers?”
“Those are your embers.” Megatron almost hoped Jhiaxus could prove that he had nothing to do with them. He feared that the mad scientist might file for custody. Megatron could claim them until his vocalizer died, but with Skywarp as his pallakos, that didn’t mean anything in a courtroom. He cupped the back of Skywarp’s head in one hand and, gently, inexorably, tilted his face up. “I won’t let anything happen to them.”
Skywarp parted his lips for Megatron’s kiss, one hand tightening on Megatron’s shoulder and the other coming around his neck. Megatron slid his hands down Skywarp’s aft, lifted him easily and pressed him into the cool mesh of the berth. And as Skywarp opened under him, warm and willing with his wrists pinned by one huge hand above his head, Megatron promised to keep him safe, to protect his embers, to give him whatever Cybertron left over.

previous chapter| next chapter
table of contents