Work Text:
Something was off.
Not just fatigue. Not just work stress. The weight of an entire faction's tactical calculus was nothing new.
It had started a few cycles ago — off-kilter tanks, sluggish charge regeneration, a persistent ache in his knee joints and shoulder servos. Glitches he could write off. Delay reporting. Continue ignoring.
Ratchet would have his audials if he knew — but after last time, Prowl’s datapads were permanently banned from medbay. He’d been avoiding it. Avoiding him.
He had work to get done.
And there was so much of it.
Inventory audits. Transfer approvals. Crew rotation schedules. Field resupply manifests. At least a dozen active field reports queued for review, and three pending diplomatic follow-ups from the human delegation. Hundreds of tactical models spun quietly in the background, updating probability metrics in real time as intel reports flickered through.
He should have been focused. Should have been efficient.
Now? Now it was getting harder to ignore.
Today he was restless. Anxious. Nauseous.
Unsettled tanks. EM field twitching. Charge efficiency down 14.2% despite a full cycle of recharge.
And he still couldn’t vent right.
Prime was halfway around the globe on a counter-raid, deep in hostile territory. Most of the main forces had gone with him. Jazz had taken the up-and-coming Spec Ops team on a recon training op out near Seattle — off-grid. No live feed. Prowl had been left behind to deal with the diplomatic delegation — energy policy, territory assurance, human formalities. The kind of quiet PR landmine that demanded someone who wouldn’t lose patience or start a war.
He’d gotten through it. Nodded in the right places. Smiled exactly once, forced.
He’d even wrapped the meeting early — overclocked the tacnet a little, pushed a few reports ahead of schedule.
More time for logistics. And inventory. And control.
He regretted it now.
Back in his office, the walls seemed too close. The Ark's recycled atmosphere too thick. His field kept fluttering and spitting in directions he couldn’t parse.
The tacnet spun.
Diagnostics: inconclusive.
Vitals: elevated stress signatures, abnormal tank pressure, tremors in secondary actuators.
Poisoning?
Prank?
Malware?
Frame virus?
Or maybe… stress. Finally fragging catching up.
Ratchet would end him for hiding it this long.
He purged twice. Didn’t help. His tanks clenched again.
Sharp this time — a deep, curling ache low in his frame.
For one terrifying moment, the polarity of his field inverted.
What in Primus' name was that?
Hunched behind his desk, his digits spasmed involuntarily over the datapad interface. Approval requests queued up, blinking, waiting for his input. The inventory manifest for hangar C-2 flashed red. A minor scheduling conflict with the comms team pinged twice and disappeared beneath a new report from sub-level surveillance.
He didn’t read it.
Couldn’t.
He sent a quick comm to Wheeljack:
“ : Is any crewmember reporting strange symptoms?”
The answer came back quick:
“ : Nah, everyone’s clear. Nothing from the field team or reserve on base. What’s up?”
That didn’t help. That didn’t help.
If it was poisoning, it was targeted. An assassination attempt? It wouldn’t be the first time. The Autobots had been on a roll lately — tactical gains across two fronts, several high-value counter-offenses. Morale was up. Intel flow was steady. Which meant now would be the time for the Decepticons to change tactics. Go quiet. Go internal.
Maybe they were trying subtle again.
Prowl’s tacnet kicked in without needing a manual prompt — already pulling datapackets from counter-intel archives.
Simulations generated: 302
Branch paths calculated: 14,671
Filtering…
Top Likely Outcomes:
1 - Systemic Stress Cascade (Outcome likelihood: 34.6% +/- 7.2%)
— Chronic overload; unprocessed physiological faults.
— Projected: collapse, spark destabilization, forced shutdown.
2 - Localized Malware (12.1% +/- 4.1%)
— Possible injection via off-base comms or field packet residue.
— Projected: control override, involuntary system activations.
3 - Frame-Specific Neurotoxin (8.7% +/- 3.9%)
— Vectors: recycled air or contaminated energon.
— Projected: total system failure in <36 joors untreated.
The HUD dimmed around the warnings, triage overlays stacking faster than he could parse.
His vents rasped. The ache twisted deep again.
The system was grasping. Guessing. It didn’t know what was happening — and neither did he.
He forced a secondary refinement. The tacnet looped through four additional conservative models at low grain, then returned a drastically different set of similarly poor results.
No good. Systemic solutions were unstable, near-divergent. Not helpful.
He hesitated. One servo hovered over his comm. He could call Ratchet.
He should.
But Ratchet was seven time zones and a mission away. Engaged. Busy. And the thought of that voice, that glare, that “you slagging what?!” across a live channel made his tanks churn worse.
Wouldn’t make it back in a reasonable amount of time. Would leave the field team with no medic.
Instead, he stayed frozen — analyzing symptoms like datapoints, letting his systems choke while his logic matrix spun in circles, still hoping the next klik would bring answers he could work with.
The tacnet pinged him again.
Internal temperature rising.
Cooling fans active.
Electromagnetic field output destabilized
Something inside his frame twisted brutally. Prowl stood reflexively— or tried to. His stabilizer motors buckled. The desk chair armrests clipped his doorwings as he slid gracelessly to the floor with a clang, clutching his midsection as internal warnings blared like klaxons. He barely made it to his knee joints, bracing against the Ark’s orange wall, vents wheezing ragged through choked manifolds.
He pressed his crimson chevron against the wall — the cool plating of the Ark blessedly solid against the rising heat of his systems. When had his cooling fans clicked on? He braced there, one arm above his helm, servos spasming in open-close pulses.
His tacnet, for once, screamed HELP. Internal temps were climbing. Abdominal pressure spiking.
Override privacy protocols.
Recommendation: summon on-base science team.
Request immediate assistance.
Prowl ex-vented shakily and finally, miserably, relented. A concise distress ping shot across base frequencies, bundled with his frame vitals.
His frame gave another violent shudder.
This was something else entirely.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Half both an eternity and a breem later:
Muffled voices spilled through the wall — fast, half-frantic, overlapping.
The door chimed.
Then clicked.
Then, with a bang the panel slid open with a protesting shriek of an override.
“Prowl?” Wheeljack’s voice was almost hopeful.
“Where is he?” Perceptor muttered behind him.
Prowl didn’t speak. He let out a strangled hum from behind the desk, curled and hidden on the floor. Fragile in a way no Second-in-Command should ever be.
Pedesteps. Two fields — nervous, curious, teeking around the edges of his inflamed flickering one — crept around the desk. The chair squealed as it was shoved aside. Wheeljack sucked in a harsh vent.
“Oh, Prowl. What the frag did you do?”
Perceptor scanned him immediately. Bright blue beam gliding down his frame—
“You think— I planned this—!? I didn’t— do this—!” Prowl snapped hoarsely, curling tighter.
Except that wasn’t true. And something was happening.
His frame shuddered again, door wings hiked high in distress. Microtransformations sparked along his sides, plating lifting and shifting without conscious command. A fluttering, twitching whine through his internals, and horribly, his T-cog activated. His entire middle spasmed. Not sharp pain — not yet — but wrong. New.
“Oh no. Nonononono.”
Perceptor’s scanner beeped cherrily, almost mockingly.
“Fascinating,” Perceptor muttered. “Localized substructure metamorphosis… internal reformatting.”
Prowl feels something give inside of him, low - a spiraling snap. Did he just blow a fuel line?
“WHAT!?”
Before Wheeljack could explode further, an aggravated voice rang from the open door.
“What’re you two fraggin’ nerds doin’ in Prowl’s— oh.”
Prowl’s panels chose that exact moment to betray him.
With a stuttering whirr and a final override screech from some internal system he hadn't authorized, they disengaged — and a sudden gush of hot fluid hit the floor with a wet slap.
Prowl froze.
So did Wheeljack.
So did Perceptor.
For exactly 0.2 kliks, there was silence. And then:
“OH FRAG,” Wheeljack blurted, servo braced against the desk. “That’s—okay, that’s not in any of the med charts I’ve read.”
Perceptor made a noise like a datatrack crashing mid-equation and scrambled to recalibrate his scanner like it might explain away whatever horrifying anatomical event just occurred.
Prowl?
Prowl absolutely lost it.
His EM field flared violently, wild and humiliated and blaring, pinging static across the room as he scrambled backward on the floor, helm ducked and limbs flailing as if sheer movement might reverse the last thirty kliks of reality. His intakes caught, vents wheezed — his systems blared SHAME, EXPOSURE, FATAL ERROR like a slagging parade float.
“Don’t— don’t look at me!”
His plating was still shifting. Still leaking. And they were staring.
Rather irrationally, some sane part of him thought, he didn’t want help. He didn’t want optics on him. He didn’t want to exist.
All he wanted was to crawl under the nearest floor panel, wedge himself into the Ark’s wiring like a faulty relay, and offline dramatically — preferably before Ratchet could ever find out.
Prowl shivers then tenses up as another pang of horrible washes through his chassis. The tacnet frets.
Wheeljack took a cautious step forward and instantly earned an oscillating warble of warning from Prowl’s field that could have fried a lesser mech’s comms.
Perceptor, still clutching his scanner like a lifeline, looked half-convinced Prowl was about to detonate.
Neither of them knew what to do.
And Prowl — cornered and leaking and absolutely mortified — didn’t have the processor capacity left to tell them.
Cliffjumper froze peering around the desk at Prowl’s convulsing frame, at the fluids pooling below his paneling, at the pale fragging terror in his field. Just for a second. Then the pieces clicked, and Cliffjumper reacted the only way he knew how.
“Move,” he growled, already shoving them both aside. “Get off his aft before you two crowd him into an early deactivation.”
He knelt, carefully laying a servo on Prowl’s pauldron. Firm. Grounded. Prowl flinched — but didn’t pull away.
“Hey. I know what this is,” Cliff said resolutely. “You’re not gunna like it.”
“No,” Prowl whispered, “no, no, no no no—”
“Yeah? Well it’s still happening, right now.” Cliffjumper’s voice didn’t waver. “Emergence. This is labor, Prowl.”
Even the tacnet hesitated — a full three klicks of lag before it updated with a sudden and untoward convergence of 98.4% certainty and a helpfully projected timeline.
“That’s not—” Prowl gasped, “That’s outside protocol—”
Another clench. This one dragged a keening cry out of his vocalizer — raw and involuntary. His plating shifted again, splaying open at the seams against his will.
Wheeljack made a noise like a glitching modem.
Perceptor physically recoiled. “Oh, dear Primus.”
Cliff, bless his spark, remained unfazed.
“Sissies,” he muttered, already pulling mesh and cleaning pads from Wheeljack’s bag. “Wheeljack—get him coolant, fresh energon. Perceptor—stop jabberin’. Start doing. Something, anything.”
Neither argued, scattering into motion like startled seekers. Perceptor knelt with a scanner already humming. Wheeljack cursed again, diving for the medkit, digging through supplies with grease-smudged servos.
A pause.
“Wait,” Wheeljack said slowly, optics wide. “This is emergence. As in—this means Prowl—Prowl—”
“I… am still attempting to reconcile the data pathways that could allow for carrier activation without detectable precursors,” Perceptor murmured, brows furrowed. “But statistically, this is still impossible without—”
He trailed off, optics flicking briefly to Wheeljack, then back to Prowl.
“—a contributing origin source. Spark energy, coding samples…nanites.”
“I’m just saying,” Wheeljack muttered, still rifling through the medkit. “Unless ‘disdain’ counts as foreplay, this is not the mech I’d put on a relationship pool bracket.”
“N-not now,” Prowl said faintly, feeling rather detached from his frame. “This…irrrelevant… and irreverent,”
Wheeljack knelt beside Perceptor, wiping a servo across his helm like he was trying to reboot common sense.
“Respectfully, sir,” Wheeljack said without missing a beat, “this is wild. Like, top-tier gossip wild. You dropped a whole fragging life event on us mid-duty cycle.”
“Didn’t… intend… for this,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t’ve let you see this,” he huffed out. “If I’d—known.”
“Oh, we’re the ones traumatized?” Cliff snapped. “You’re the one split open and leaking energon from your equipment like a ruptured mainline.”
“It was… manageable,” he said lowly, as if reciting a report he no longer believed.
“Yeah?” Wheeljack barked a half-laugh. “You purged for two cycles, lost structural integrity in your office, and still tried to finish your shift. That’s not ‘handling it,’ that’s a death wish wrapped in command complex.”
Prowl wheezed.
“He does have a record of self-destructive work patterns,” Perceptor added mildly. “This is rather consistent with prior behaviors.”
Prowl let out a long, strangled noise that sounded suspiciously like regret incarnate.
“Anyway,” Cliff muttered, already yanking open a fresh mesh sheet, “if one of you nerds doesn’t stop talking about his love life while he’s leaking dignity all over the floor, I’m gon’ pull a Ratchet and start throwing tools.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
It hurt. Primus, it hurt. Prowl was barely lucid, braced back on his knee joints helm against the Ark’s orange wall, keening with each brutal contraction. Cliff talked him through it like a soldier through a minefield.
“Breathe. Deep vent in. Don’t lock your frame — push when you need to.”
“Can’t—can’t do this—”
“Yes you fraggin’ can. You are.”
His valve felt like it was being pulled apart from the inside. Something moved through him — cords and cables sliding, enormous pressure making him groan and pant.
Cliff plied him to widen his stance, servos shifting his pedes apart delicately, like Prowl was a bomb primed to explode. Prowl couldn’t see anything but the vividly orange wall and the blur of heat warnings. He was too hot, too tight — like his entire frame was trying to turn inside out. Each contraction rattled his struts, dragged his plating apart, yanked at internal cables with vicious insistence. He could feel tensor motors firing involuntarily along his pelvic joints.
Cliffjumper was all steel and motion beside him, gruffly speaking above the sound of Prowl’s own pained venting.
Prowl groaned, folding forward, white servos braced against the wall, helm hanging. He was trembling. Every clench now a surge of liquid heat, a press of something heavy, sharp and relentless pressing downward. It was coming too fast. Too hard. Too much.
And then—
A moment.
One breathless, burning klik where everything peaked.
The pressure sharpened to a blade of agony through him with a full-body convulsion. He shrieked — or maybe he didn’t — sound might have been lost to the static and screaming error codes filling his HUD. Cliff’s scarred, broad red servos are there between his legs, pulling and guiding—
“Almost there, I got you, c’mon now, easy—easy—”
And suddenly, a release.
The weight left him in a rush — a wet, horrible slide as his internals sagged, spent, aching. His spark flared sharp, like something important had been ripped away.
Prowl’s EM field reeled. It wavered violently, then collapsed inward, like part of him had been carved out and pulled free. It felt wrong. Empty. Somehow irrevocably different.
But—
A new signature blipped onto his HUD. Small. Steady. Somehow familiar.
Weak. Flickering. But there.
Prowl shuddered. Slumped strutlessly to the wall, shoulder striking plating with a dull metallic clunk. He turned his helm slowly — optics struggling to focus through the pain and coolant haze.
Cliffjumper let out a vent.
“Well, ain’t you a lil’ wriggly thing.”
Prowl turned his helm, barely able to process it — and saw, in Cliff’s energon coated servos, a silver bundle of wet plating.
A sparkling.
His sparkling.
The bitlet gave a shrill, crackling beep and squirmed, kicking with wobbly stubby limbs. Cliff grunted softly, adjusting his grip to cradle the newly sparked form.
Prowl just stared.
His whole frame spasmed in the aftershocks, energon and other fluids still spilling down his thighs and puddling underneath him. The mess stuck to everything — to his normally pristine white and black plating, to the floor, to the wall he now sagged against like a drone with cut relays. The tip of his chevron dragged silver grooves through the Ark’s orange paneling as he slid further down.
Cliff passed the sparkling off behind him.
“Keep his vents open . Keep ‘im warm. Careful. Don’t drop ‘em,”
It was all muffled. Fuzzy. Like his audials were glitching.
His HUD was a battlefield. Vital flashes, data scrolls, system bleed logs — and overtop it all, a new blip:
Spark signature detected: Dependent.
Relation: Primary Guardian.
Status: Online.
Designation: [UNASSIGNED]
The system waited for him to enter a designation. He couldn’t even vent right, couldn’t move. Couldn't think past the static in his processor.
Still leaking. Warnings flashed red — critical fluid loss, system strain, multiple subroutines cycling offline. He’d already purged everything in his tanks — today, and the cycle before. Now he was running on vapor, grit, and the brittle thread of stubbornness holding his frame together.
Cliff's presence shifted closer again, red armor a blur in the corner of his vision. He was talking. Prowl couldn’t make out the words. Just the steady cadence. Grounding. Real.
Then — finally — clarity broke through the storm.
A name. A need. No point hiding it now.
Prowl's vocalizer barely worked, but he forced the word out anyway, soft and cracked like breaking glass.
“...Jazz.”
Cliff looked up immediately. Wheeljack didn’t hesitate — he was already hitting the comm line.
Prowl didn’t hear the reply. Didn’t stick around to confirm the signal.
The moment he felt the name leave him, the last thread of alertness snapped.
His optics dimmed.
The tacnet finally, finally, allowed the critical logic fault it couldn't resolve through into the main partition — and Prowl collapsed fully sideways into the mess with a clang of plating, crashing unceremoniously into blissful, complete dark.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Time passed.
When Prowl next onlined, it was quiet. His frame ached in ways he didn’t know it could. His limbs felt distant, disconnected. He was propped up sitting against the wall, helm lolled to the side.
Cooling pads were wrapped around his main fuel lines. Somebot had draped his lower half in a mesh sheet. His spark rate was still too fast, and his vents were barely responsive, but somebot — probably Wheeljack — had hooked up emergency coolant and energon.
Someone, Cliffjumper must be, was speaking lowly:
“That’s the ‘I’ve read your file and I’m disappointed’ look. Seen it before little bitty. Don’t scare me one byte. Usually I get that from your carrier though.”
Prowl shifted weakly, groaning.
They’d pushed his desk toward the door to clear space — now Cliffjumper sat there like a grumpy red gargoyle, perched sideways on the edge of his desk with one pede braced on a drawer, the other resting on a stack of hastily relocated datapads. His helm looked up from something in Perceptor’s arms and stared down the door like he was waiting for the next idiot to try and walk through.
“Welcome back, Commander.” Wheeljack said respectfully from his side.
Prowl rasped, “...still here?”
Cliff snorted. “Until Ratchet gets here or you kick us out, yeah.”
An amicable field nudged his tired one.
Perceptor moved back behind the desk, crouched down and leaned over. “Your sparkling is stable. Little mech, strong.”
A beat.
Prowl cycled his optics slowly. Your sparkling?
His processor lagged—tactical recall offline, memory scroll jittering.
“Would you like to see them?”
A tiny flutter at the edge of his field. Familiar, flickering, and new. He didn’t nod, but his EM pulsed faintly. Yes.
The sparkling was placed gently in his arms. Small. Silver-grey-plated where color would soon bloom, soft vent sounds, a small burbling chirp.
Everything stilled.
Their helm caught his attention first — a rounded shape with a faint rise in the center where a central ridge framed by a budding chevron heat sink sat, delicate but unmistakable. Just behind it, two tiny sensor nubs poked up from the sides.
His and Jazz’s, right there. Clear as day. Clear as transsteel.
His spark — so often contained, logical, controlled — pulsed sharp and open, sparking in time with the bitlet’s fluttering field.
The plating was pale silver with a glossy smooth finish, like Jazz’s armor, but the small stubs of doorwings beginning to form at the back were his — little angular panels that fluttered instinctively.
Their optics were wide, bright — lighter than his icy blues, than Jazz’s visor — almost glacier-like, unfiltered and raw. They blinked slowly, adjusting, and then focused on him.
Their field reached out — humming and hesitant.
Prowl’s spark stuttered. The bitlet let out a glitched little beep, followed by a hiccuping warble, and pressed one tiny servo to his chassis with all the certainty in the world.
There was no logic protocol for this.
----------------------------------------------------------
The door slammed open.
“Prowl!”
Jazz. Autobot TIC. Battle-ready. Visor glowing. Blaster out. Tactical field like a stormfront. His engine was still whining in the red, plating radiating pulsing heat — he must’ve pushed top speed all the way in from the training op.
Everyone froze.
Cliffjumper, impressively, didn’t flinch.
From behind, Prowl slowly cycled his optic relays and rasped, “...’m functional.”
Jazz leaned around Cliffjumper. Stopped dead in his tracks like he’d been sniped in the spark.
Saw him. Really saw him.
Half folded against the wall. Covered in mesh. Holding a small beeping bundle.
“Wha-.”
Silence.
Jazz stared. At him. At the sparkling. At the wreckage of medical gear and gathered mechs.
He stepped in, but hesitated halfway across the room.
The tactical haze in his visor dimmed.
His field wavered, fluttering like a breeze. Cliffjumper stepped aside without a word as Jazz approached, every movement deliberate—like one wrong step might wake him up and shatter the dream.
Then his entire stance and tone shifted. His gun lowered. His voice gentled.
“Hey there, Prowler,” Jazz murmured. “Is… is that bitty… ours?”
Prowl’s faceplates twitched, weak and overworn. “Wasn’t— I was—”
Jazz stepped in, crouched beside him, one servo hovering just beside Prowl’s helm.
“S’ok, Prowler.” He breathed out.
His visor flicked from the tiny chevron, to the stubby horns, to the delicate doorwings just beginning to flutter. The bitlet’s field fluttered, then resonated faintly — softly meshing against Jazz’s, instinctive and sure.
“I didn’t know,”
He leaned in, spark humming unsteadily. His field reached out, gently brushing the edge of Prowl’s own.
“We gun’ take care of everything from ‘ere, beautiful. Promise.”
------------------------------------------------------------
Ratchet arrived 3.2 joors after Jazz’s emergency ping.
With Prime’s uneasy approval, Skyfire flew him in personally — nothing but raw, weaponized urgency.
The big white shuttle had barely touched down before Ratchet launched out of the bay in alt-mode, cursing loud enough to rattle every rooftop panel on the Ark.
Skyfire didn’t even try to say goodbye. Just lifted off and went vertical, leaving Ratchet to burn rubber through the blast door ramp like a rolling car crash.
He didn't care. He had one job, and that was making sure his people stayed online without fragging lying to him about it.
The ping had been concise — Spec Ops wavelengths, emergency med-alert, embedded code red — but it wasn’t the ping that had made him curse out loud.
It was the attached datapacket. No designation, just raw data and systems logs - scrubbed clean of any identifying markers - Red Alert levels of paranoia.
A compressed vitals feed. Surface-level. Incomplete. But bad enough.
Elevated spark rate. Purge logs. Internal system irregularities. T-cog fluctuation. Fragging reformatting markers.
He transformed mid-run, medkit pulled from subspace, scanner already heating in one servo, his expression fierce enough to melt titanium. He stormed through the Ark’s corridors like a fire in a munitions depot, he knew the route. Knew the signature. Knew who Jazz had sent the damn ping about.
Prowl.
The idiot.
The door to Prowl’s office was propped open with a coolant pack. Jazz met him halfway across the threshold, both servos raised and visor bright.
"Ratch—wait, wait, before you—"
"Out the way—!"
Ratchet shouldered past him like a comet.
Jazz doubled down. “I should be there—he’s not—”
The scene inside stopped Ratchet short.
The floor was still half-covered in medical mesh and wiped-down energon stains. Wheeljack was on cleanup duty, muttering into his wristpad. Perceptor sat in the corner taking notes with the nervous energy of a data clerk witnessing a war crime. Cliffjumper nursed an energon cube like he’d just dragged himself through a trench.
And then there was Prowl.
Propped upright against the far wall, armor dulled, mesh covering draped over his lap. And in his arms—
A sparkling.
Tiny. Beeping. Real.
Ratchet froze.
Then rebooted.
With rightous fury.
Prowl’s optics flicked up when Ratchet entered.
They immediately widened.
“Ratchet,” he rasped desperately, “I can explain—”
"YOU ABSOLUTE FRAGGING DUMBAFT."
The bitlet startled.
Prowl flinched.
Everyone else cleared out like someone had pulled the pin on primed detonators.
Ratchet stormed forward, waving a scanner like a sword, already mid-rant.
“This is why you’ve been avoiding me?! You think any of this is normal? Internal restructuring?! Spark-pressure spasms? Code scrambling? You purged for two cycles and still didn’t call me?!”
“My initial hypothesis was cumulative stress and microfault cascade.” Prowl muttered weakly.
“You thought it was stress?!” Ratchet leaned in. “You are stress, you walking logic error! I’ve treated combustion engines with more fragging self-awareness!”
The bitlet gave a soft, wet beep.
Ratchet jolted.
Very, very slowly, his optics tracked down to the tiny, squirming form nestled against Prowl’s chassis. A soft-edged grey mechlet with impossibly small servos, blinking slowly with startlingly bright optics. Prowl was still half-venting from exhaustion, arms curled around the sparkling like the world might try to take it away.
Slowly, very slowly, Ratchet crouched closer. Not scanning now — just looking. The bitlet squirmed again in Prowl’s arms, doorwing stubs twitching. The faintest ridge of a central crest curled along their helm, framed by two tiny, barely-formed horn points.
The rant died on Ratchet’s vocalizer.
For a beat, he just stared. His processor cycled up memory files of newsparks born in the golden age. This one, impossibly real, impossibly here — the first in eons.
Then, without breaking optic contact with the bitlet, Ratchet muttered:
“...By the Pit’s rusted gates.”
Ratchet vented out. “You’re holding a whole-aft full-term sparkling. Tell me how that happened without me fragging noticing.”
Prowl winced. “It was… unforeseen.”
And those tiny glowing optics — bright, unfiltered, glacial-blue. Unmistakable.
Ratchet blinked.
He turned his helm slowly toward the doorway where Jazz had last stood.
“...Well, I’ll be slagged,” he muttered. “Guess Spec Ops isn’t the only thing he’s good at.”
Prowl didn’t respond. Just shifted the sparkling slightly, one servo curling instinctively around their back strut.
Ratchet grumbled, checking the vitals over the sparkling’s field. Stable. Weak, but strong enough. His plating twitched. “And Jazz didn't know?”
“No.”
A pause.
“He does now.”
Ratchet gave a short, bitter bark of a laugh. “Bet that was a fun reveal.”
Ratchet ran a fresh scan, letting out a string of Cybertronian curses loud enough to make Cliffjumper wince in the hallway, cycling through readings from Prowl’s spark chamber, pelvic struts, energon levels, and field stability. Not great, but he’d be fine.
Ratchet sighed and rubbed a servo down his faceplate.
“I should chew you out ‘til your processor reboots. I should write you up, ground you, revoke your access codes. But instead…” He sighed again, deeper this time. “I’m going to stabilize you, check over your bitty, fix whatever damage we’ve gotta deal with, then give you a stern lecture while you’re too weak to argue.”
Prowl’s expression didn’t change much, but his field fluttered — a faint flicker of relief.
Ratchet crouched down with a medic’s grace that belied his age. His scanner swept once more over the sparkling, now blinking up at him with curious, fluttering pings.
“...You’re lucky, you know,” Ratchet muttered.
Prowl looked up. “I am?”
“Yeah.” Ratchet didn’t look at him. Just adjusted a few connections on the energon drip and muttered, “You survived it. Bitlet’s healthy. Frame’s mostly intact.”
A beat.
Then softer:
“And you got someone who came runnin’ the instant he knew ya needed him.”
Prowl went quiet.
He looked over the scene again: a drained commanding officer still curled against a wall, hooked to field-grade energon, cradling a newspark. Ratchet stood, unplugging the scanner and shutting down his datapad.
“Still,” Ratchet muttered, tone softening just a touch, “I’m not dragging you through the halls like this.”
Prowl blinked up at him, confused. “Where—?”
“I’m heading to medbay. Gonna grab some proper supplies, and a cleaner that doesn’t smell like someone purged on a chem lab floor.” He pointed a finger at Prowl, firm. “You’re not spending your first joors of creatorhood leaking coolant on an office floor while wrapped in an emergency tarp. Not on my watch.”
He paused at the door, glancing back once more. His field — still stormy, but more centered now — swept over both mech and sparkling with quiet calculation.
“And no getting clever like your other half while I’m gone. You try to move, and you’ll frag up your internals worse than they already are. Wait. For. Me.”
With that, Ratchet turned toward the hallway.
“…Still writing you up though,” he added.
“You can try,” Prowl murmured.
Behind him, Ratchet raised a servo and flipped him the mech equivalent of a rude gesture. Jazz was waiting outside the door, visor dim, pacing tight little circles.
“How bad?” he asked without looking up.
Ratchet gave him a once-over, then patted his collar fairing.
“He’s functional. You got a bitlet. And I need a drink.”
A pause.
“…Bring me a good one later and I might show you how to change a sparkling fuel filter.”
Jazz’s visor blinked off and on, “…That’s a thing?”
Ratchet smirked darkly. “It is now.”
He only made it three steps before pausing again with a groan and turning back, servo already massaging his temple like the oncoming migraine had filed a requisition form.
“Oh, and one more thing—” Ratchet muttered, aiming a pointed look at Jazz. “When exactly were either of you planning to tell your medic you two were involved?”
Jazz blinked, visor flickering again.
“Because I got forms, Jazz. Protocols. Subroutines. The kind that prevent things like, oh I don’t know—fragging surprise emergences in the middle of an office full of idiot mechs.”
Jazz opened his intake.
Ratchet raised a servo. “Don’t. Just—don’t.”
Jazz shrugged helplessly, optics crinkling behind his visor. “I’m stealth spec.”
Ratchet made a strangled sound in his throat and slapped the datapad against his helm like a blunt weapon.
“You sneaked a sparkling into existence, you glorified grappling hook! Even fooled the carrier protocols!”
Jazz spread his servos slightly, contrite. “That’s kinda the job description, doc.”
Ratchet gave him one last look, a mixture of disbelief, admiration, and deep, existential exhaustion.
He turned to leave, then turned back to Jazz.
“Oh, and Jazz - congrats kid - both of you.”
And with that, he ambled down the hallway, already drafting a medical memo titled:
“Things You Should Tell Your Medic Before Spontaneous Sparkling Emergence: A Case Study”