Diagnosis

[stainless]

Title: Diagnosis
Characters/Pairing: Knock Out, Breakdown
Verse: TF: Prime
Wordcount: 1,500
Rating: T for mentions of character death, mentions of war, etc.
Warnings: Mentions of character death, war, etc.
Summary:  For the prompt "Medical Expertise" at tf_prime on LJ. Knock Out examines the offline and severely damaged Megatron, struggling to puzzle out both what has happened and how to repair him.

Thanks to femme4jack for beta.

Knock Out stared into the charred and blackened hole in his patient's chest. His partner was silent. That was good. Breakdown was a handy assistant to have, but he had no head for diagnostics. He was far better at smashing things than fixing them.

In fact, anything he couldn't smash frightened him. Left to his own thoughts, he'd quickly convince himself that anything he couldn't destroy with his fists or his guns held some lurking and terrible danger.

And when he did that, Knock Out lost valuable time calming his assistant down instead of tending to the one he was supposed to be repairing. Knock Out had thanked Primus profusely when his partner had finally learned that it was best to keep quiet and let someone with a fast processor do the thinking.

Knock Out chuckled. He had told those who'd summoned him that he wasn't the best at repair work. It wasn't true. It wasn't true at all.

Oh, in the old days, he would have been considered little more than a tinkerer. He certainly wasn't a Constructicon. But that hardly mattered now that they were dead.

The Constructicons had been a team of geniuses. Back then, whether you'd needed something built, or needed something repaired, or needed someone's injuries tended to, you'd gone to them. They'd done it all, and better than any Autobot ever could. At least if one believed the rumors.

But they had also been warriors, combining their forms to become a titanic beast that everyone had called unstoppable. It hadn't been.

The Autobots, who would otherwise have been squeamish to attack an enemy medical team, had concentrated their efforts on bringing it down. It had finally met a spectacular end in a battle that Knock Out and his assistant had been wise enough to avoid.

It wasn't too much of a tragedy, though, at least not for anyone who needed repairs. Knock Out had honed his skills over the many long years since then, both because he wanted to and because anyone important who needed fixing seemed to find his way to Knock Out eventually anyway.

But Knock Out had never seen anything like this.

And, he'd guess, neither had any Constructicon.

Despite the readings saying that the patient's vitals were deeply depressed but stable, Knock Out hadn't been able to see any spark in his chest. Only when he'd increased the magnification on his optics had he been able to make out the thin wisps of red moving like tattered ghosts through the great one's damaged spark chamber.

So this was what had become of Megatron, Emperor of Destruction, exalted leader of all Decepticons.

"Do we want to -?" Breakdown rumbled, his discomfort clear.

"Quiet!" Knock Out snapped, tossing his head, irritated with his partner's breach of the rules. "I really don't think this will be that easy."

Usually with cases like this, the first thing to do would be infusions of energy, intended to reignite the dying spark. But the Decepticons here, whether or not they had a decent medic, would surely know to try that first.

Which would mean either that they already had, or that their acting leader hadn't wanted them to.

Knock Out frowned. He wouldn't put that past Starscream at all. Still, if Starscream had decided to keep Megatron comatose to better pursue his own ends, why bother calling in a medic at all? It would surely embarrass him to summon Knock Out just to have him pass a bit of current through Megatron and wake him up again.

And once a conscious Megatron found out that Starscream had failed to do the bare minimum to restore him... Knock Out shuddered.

Frustrated, he increased the magnification of his optics again. Then he gasped.

"Force field generator," he hissed over one shoulder.

Breakdown's engines roared again.

"Oh, I don't like it either," Knock Out muttered, snatching up the tool that his assistant handed to him, pressing it to a crack in his patient's spark chamber, and hastily turning it on.

The tool flared with purple light as a sphere formed around its tip. Knock Out carefully lifted it, examining the fragment now caught in the center of the small force field.

"What did you -?"

Knock Out huffed, agitated. "Stop talking and I'll show you."

"Right. Slag it. Sorry. Just don't like it in here, is all. What if his optics come on all of a sudden and -?"

Knock Out sighed dramatically. Breakdown took the hint and fell silent.

The medic's delicate fingers danced along the console of one of the many machines surrounding his patient, and an image of the force field filled one of the screens, slowly increasing in magnification.

"I don't - what is that?" the big Decepticon stammered, fear thrilling through his voice.

"I don't know," Knock Out admitted, frowning. "But I think it might be a piece of a dark energon crystal."

Wisely, Breakdown didn't speak, but his engines rumbled with such terror that Knock Out could feel the floor vibrating beneath his feet.

Oh, Primus. Stop doing that. I thought you were over getting frightened of every little thing, Knock Out thought. He didn't say it aloud, though. He wasn't a nice mech by any stretch of the imagination, but Breakdown had finally shut up.

And dark energon was the sort of thing that would frighten anyone, even someone who wasn't still a bit prone to paranoia.

Dark energon. Knock Out wasn't even sure why he'd thought of it. He didn't yet know what the mysterious substance was, and the last thing he needed was an assistant who was petrified of a tiny piece of rock that glowed like something from a legend.

But it would explain why someone could survive an explosion like the one that Megatron had unfortunately found himself right in the middle of. It would explain how standard medical machinery could manage to keep the tiny wisps of spark-energy he'd seen from guttering out long before he'd arrived here.

And it would explain why normally spark-igniting infusions of energy would fail to rekindle them, as well. If Megatron's spark had already established a dependence on dark energon to survive... well, then...

Well, then what exactly? Knock Out wasn't sure. Dark energon was a substance for stories, not a fuel one could look up in medical texts or records. Perhaps Megatron's spark could be rekindled without more of it. Perhaps it never would be unless the Decepticon leader could be given more dark energon.

But if he needed more of it now, that implied he'd had more of it before. And dark energon, if the legends were true, wasn't something you could destroy. You could break it, yes, splintering its crystals into ever-smaller pieces... but you couldn't melt it, or vaporize it, or transform it.

Or make it explode in a space-bridge accident.

"There was more dark energon," Knock Out whispered, a smile creeping over his faceplates. "He had more, here next to his spark. Or in it."

Breakdown snorted, a great puff of air expelling from his vents.

Knock Out didn't blame him. The thought made him cringe too. "He had more, and someone took it away from him."

Knock Out was sure he knew who. Apparently Starscream really had decided it was best to keep Megatron around and unthreatening and strut around playing regent. Apparently Starscream had decided that was a better thing to do than simply let their true Emperor die.

Perhaps the others had forced him to play the loyal second in command. Perhaps he'd wanted to play both ends against the middle.

Perhaps he simply hadn't been able to do it, once he'd finally discovered he could.

Whichever of those was the truth, it was an interesting thing to know.

Perhaps Megatron could be revived without dark energon, once Knock Out puzzled out how to reignite a spark deep in withdrawal from its loss. Perhaps he'd have to find the shard that Starscream was hiding and restore Megatron that way.

Either way, he had the capacity, and the knowledge, to reawaken their leader when the time came.

He grinned again. Then he pulled the tool free from his patient's chest, careful to dispose of the dark energon fragment and the force field around it together to keep it from infecting anyone else.

Then he turned to his partner, pressing a claw to one great trembling shoulder and smiling steadily until the bigger Decepticon's shaking stopped.

Everything was going to be just fine.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Lovely and creepy and very, very close to how I can see the show playing out. :) - Zuzeca

[stainless]

Thank you! XD

[thousanth]

Interesting! I like this dynamic between the pair of them.